Neo-Victorian Approaches to the Colonial Past in Ruth Park’s Playing Beatie Bow

The title of Ruth Park’s Playing Beatie Bow (1980) alludes to a game played by children in late twentieth-century Sydney. One child assumes the role of the ghost of Beatie Bow risen from the grave, who then chases the other children, until one child is caught who must become the next Beatie Bow. The game embodies the way in which the remaining traces of the inhabitants of the past haunt the present. For the children who play Beatie Bow, adopting the part of a girl who is long dead is an opportunity to take pleasure in the fear of ghosts. Protagonist Abigail Kirk’s time-slip journey, however, enables her to comprehend the real life of the girl who has become a mythical figure to all but handful of people. As a narrative largely set in a nascent colonial city, Playing Beatie Bow does not begin to acknowledge the ways in which that brutal past also continued to haunt Australia through gradual reckoning with the understanding of colonisation as invasion. Published eight years before Australia’s Bicentennial celebrations in 1988, which struggled to contain changing ideas about nationhood and the dispossession of First Nations people, the novel mobilises fantasy in the service of a national mythology that writes a connection between the Bows and Abigail across time, just as it does between pre-modern Britain and the modern city of Sydney in a predominantly white Australia.

In the late twentieth century, literature that engaged with the nineteenth century in ways that exceeded the genre of historical fiction emerged. In what has come to be termed the neo-Victorian, texts in a variety of genres and media, as Elizabeth Ho suggests, engage in ‘a deliberate misreading, reconstruction or staged return of the nineteenth century in and for the present’ (5). Like the appearance of Beatie in late twentieth-century Sydney, Ho conceptualises neo-Victorianism ‘as an expression of … colonial hauntings in which the international reappearance of the nineteenth century works as a kind of traumatic recall’ (11). Taking up the understanding of the neo-Victorian as intentionally misreading and reconstructing the nineteenth century in service of the present, in this essay I re-evaluate the classic Australian children’s fantasy novel Playing Beatie Bow as a narrative that utilises mythology to provide the contemporary protagonist with lived experiences that tie her to the country’s colonial past. Park’s novel provides a sympathetic depiction of white settler life informed by twentieth-century expectations, particularly those relating to gender and class, yet also seeks to rediscover the period as a means of making sense of contemporary Australian childhood. Playing Beatie Bow positioned young readers to understand their place in the country as containing historical and mythic connections to colonial settlers who endured harsh conditions, and to appreciate its links to Britain and Europe. Through a magical connection that is bound up in British and European mythology and belief, the late twentieth-century protagonist understands herself as a contemporary Australian and comes of age through romance. Specifically, protagonist Abigail’s time travel experience uncovers direct genealogical links between contemporary Australians and colonial settlers and the folkloric connections between Abigail and a family in the late nineteenth century counteract the absence of local mythical traditions (to the exclusion of First Nations beliefs and culture). In this way, Playing Beatie Bow is distinct from late twentieth-century neo-Victorian narratives¹ that are more explicitly concerned with ‘a need to recover and recover from the atrocities of empire in the past’ (Ho 9).

The novel has been discussed both as a work of historical fiction and as a time-slip novel. While historical fiction typically uses ‘the realist mode to suggest rational truthfulness of some kind’ in relation to knowing the past (De Groot 3), a time-slip is a common device in children’s fantasy literature by which a character moves between parallel timelines in the present and the past, ‘though not necessarily by design’ (‘Time-slip story’). Kim Wilson (2011), for example, frames it as living history fiction that ‘clearly demonstrates how historical narratives for children use the past as an interpretive frame for the present’ (10). While Claudia Marquis (2008) suggests Park’s novel is an Australian example of the ‘peculiarly English’ form of the time-slip that registers ‘local anxieties’ (58). Both approaches signal the ideological significance of the genre, which is echoed by Farah Mendlesohn’s explanation of the way in which portal fantasies such as Playing Beatie Bow constitute ‘fixed narrative[s] in which ‘history is inarguable, it is “the past”’ (14). The colonial past in Playing Beatie Bow is represented in negative terms, as is common in neo-Victorian fiction. As Ann Morey and Claudia Nelson (2012) observe of the tensions that neo-Victorian fiction creates, the genre fulfils a desire:

to insinuate a contemporary self into the very phenomenon that Western liberal discourse now recognises as often dysfunctional, horrifying, or cruel. The endless rehearsal of characters such as the abused or abandoned child or woman, the victim of the workhouse or the orphanage, or the despised prostitute represents both disavowal and longing for a moment that seems perversely impossible either to reject or to forget. (1)

Indeed, Park’s novel focuses extensively on the precarity of life in the late nineteenth century and the barbarity of the colonial city through plot developments relating to child mortality and sex trafficking. While the scholarship on Playing Beatie Bow has concentrated on how the past is depicted and its centrality to protagonist Abigail Kirk’s maturation, in this article I consider how the mythical aspects of the novel – not simply the fantasy device of time travel – reconfigure understandings of white settlers and naturalise Abigail’s situation in late twentieth-century Australia.

Time-slip novels innately require an element of fantasy. Yet travels into the past do not necessarily involve further elements of fantasy, as fictional narratives may attempt to recreate the past with a perceived historical accuracy. Playing Beatie Bow’s plot rests on a supernatural connection between the Bow/Tallisker² family in colonial Sydney and Abigail in contemporary Sydney. Abigail’s real name is Lynette Kirk, but she adopts the name Abigail after her father leaves her and her mother to live with another woman. When Abigail learns that her mother wishes to reunite with father and that this decision will entail the trio moving to his country of birth, Norway, it prompts her quest to discover her own origins in the Australian past.³ After learning this information, angry Abigail goes for a walk to calm down. She encounters a mysterious girl whom she has seen previously watching the local children playing a game called ‘Beatie Bow’, unknowingly following the real Beatrice Bow back in time to the late nineteenth century. While it also facilitates a coming-of-age narrative for Abigail, the magical link between the colonial past and contemporary Australia performs significant ideological work in naturalising white settlement of Australia and filling the mythical and historical vacancy created by the erasure of First Nations people. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that the novel is not representative of Park’s depictions of, and attitudes towards, First Nations people in other novels and writings, such as her depiction of positive relationships between white and Aboriginal characters in The Harp in the South (1948) and her acknowledgement of the violence enacted on First Nations people during the colonial period in The Companion Guide to Sydney (1973).⁴

In several respects, the neo-Victorian genre resembles literary medievalism’s attempts to engage with the past. Children’s fantasy fiction, as Maria Sachiko Cecire (2009) has shown, is a common vehicle of medievalisms. Cecire primarily discusses the way in which the medievalisms in British children’s fantasy produce nationalisms through their suggestion of ‘continuity with the past and connections to history and tradition’ and indication of ‘a ‘natural’ order that needs no justification or explanation’ (397). Playing Beatie Bow replicates the nationalist models that Cecire describes in medieval children’s fantasy but relocates them within a British colonial context. Abigail’s experience with time travel establishes a direct connection between contemporary (late twentieth-century) white Australia and colonial settlers through her personal location of family-like figures in the past. For example, while Abigail’s own grandmother is cold and unloving in the present, she finds a truly nurturing figure in the past in Granny Tallisker.

Illustrating Cecire’s point about the way fantasy texts can produce nationalisms through their depiction of a natural order that requires no explanation, the most striking historical erasure in the novel for the twenty-first century reader is the lack of any meaningful reference to First Nations Australians who have been dispossessed and displaced to make way for the colonial city of Sydney. Monique Rooney (2014) observes that Park ‘brings to life a multicultural working-class community inhabiting The Rocks’ (n.p), particularly through her depiction of Chinese workers, but there are no First Nations people depicted in Playing Beatie Bow, ensuring that it evades acknowledgement of imperial atrocities in ways that are typical of late twentieth-century neo-Victorian fiction for adults.

The only potential reference to First Nations people occurs when Abigail is in discussion about aspects of the future, such as jets, the moon landing, and new countries that have since come into being. Beatie is confused about the fate of the British Empire and Abigail’s explanation proposes that it has gradually faded from prominence. Beatie’s main question in response is, ‘But who’s looking after the black men?’ to which Abigail informs Beatie that ‘They’re looking after themselves’ (Park 82). While this explanation situates modern ideas about race as indicative of progress such as Aboriginal self-determination attained in the years following the 1967 referendum, the overall exclusion of First Nations people from a narrative that largely takes place in colonial Australia is a conspicuous omission. For this reason, Marquis describes the novel as ‘an amnesiac text’ for the way in which it ‘seems to guard against recognition of a problematic colonial past’ (63). Indigenous erasure was nevertheless commonplace throughout Australian children’s literature from the late twentieth century with imported British and European fantasy figures such as fairies often invoked in children’s fiction via a process that Clare Bradford (2011) describes as a simultaneous emptying and filling of the landscape (117).⁵ In a similar fashion, Playing Beatie Bow turns to mythical connections between Australia and Britain/Europe to situate the contemporary protagonist within the nation and to facilitate her coming-of-age.

Encountering the Colonial City

The historic setting of colonial Sydney depicted in Playing Beatie Bow was not commonly represented in Australian children’s literature until Park’s novel was published, despite the colonial period’s comparative potential for shaping national mythologies akin to the medieval period in British children’s literature. This type of recourse to the past in children’s fantasy narratives does not necessarily entail a positive depiction of that time period, however. Like neo-Victorian novels more generally, the colonial city Park depicts is one that is disturbing to the contemporary protagonist and implied readership. As Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (2012) observe, neo-Victorian Gothic novels are often set within an ‘impenetrable sprawling labyrinthine cityscape’ in which ‘the city takes on a hallucinatory quality, itself becoming a monstrous living entity, a multitudinous other, a living phantasmagoria’ (26). When Abigail first arrives in 1873, she is confronted with an overwhelming combination of sights, smells, and sounds that render the city grotesque.

Abigail’s horrified reactions to many aspects of colonial Sydney – including the living conditions, level of violence, and trafficking of women for sex work – provide a clear interpretation of the colonial past as uncivilised and starkly inferior to the late twentieth century from which she has travelled. As Abigail chases Beatie after arriving in the past, one of her first encounters is with a beggar with an amputated leg and a wooden stump who ‘reared up and waved his crutch at her, shouting something out of a black toothless mouth’ (34). The man provokes an initial disturbing confrontation with the lack of health care and the level of poverty in the colonial city, such that following this encounter Abigail first thinks that a ‘monkey in a hussar’s uniform’ she encounters ‘was a deformed child’ (340). Streets she knows well in contemporary Sydney are rendered unfamiliar in the past. The Rocks of historical Sydney are chaotic, irregular, and wild: the smell of human faeces and horses is pervasive; the streets are narrow and crowded with stalls; while precarious structures like wooden bridges and ‘tottering stairways curled upon themselves, overhung with vines and dishevelled trees, and running amongst and even across the roofs of indescribable shanties like broken-down farm sheds’ (34). The pervasive imagery of the dwellings is of a lack of modernity, not only through the depictions of nature attempting to reclaim the developing city, but also through the description of the homes as ‘like wasps’ nests, or Tibetan houses’ (31). The comparison with the precariously stacked homes of insects and ethnic others that Abigail has seen in films situates these homes as defying Western expectations of civility, yet also imbues them with an Orientalised air of otherworldly fantasy.

Although she is younger, Beatie is something of a double for fourteen-year-old Abigail, given that both girls travel into the others’ respective eras. Yet Beatie bears the physical markers of the ruggedness of colonial life. She appears to be about eleven years old but has had her growth ‘stunted’ as the result of a serious bout of illness and her overall appearance affords her a ‘monkey look’ (25). The repeated descriptions of Beatie as somewhat inhuman (‘the furry girl’, her hair resembles ‘cat’s fur’), her faded clothing, and her feet with large flakes of peeling skin from lack of footwear, establishes that the lack of civilisation found on the streets among the beggars extends – albeit to a less confronting extent – to the family home and the conditions in which children are raised (25). When she arrives in colonial Sydney, Abigail injures herself and is taken in by the Bows, who care for her while she recovers. Child mortality was a very real concern in the late nineteenth century, with approximately 150–200 babies out of every 1,000 not surviving until their first birthday.⁶ Beatie’s infant brother Gibbie is in ill health after suffering from typhoid, which killed his mother, Amelia, and her newborn baby boy. The family holds grave concerns for his survival, convinced that he will be the one to fulfil the family Prophecy that one of the Bow children will die, although Abigail senses that he is malingering for attention.

Nevertheless, death marks and shapes the family and its future, with Dovey Tallisker’s (a cousin betrothed to Beatie’s fourteen-year-old brother, Judah) mother dying during childbirth, leaving her to be raised by her fisherman father who subsequently died in a storm off Stromness, prompting Granny Tallisker’s (Beatie’s grandmother) emigration to Australia. As the matriarch of the family who assumes the role of mother for Dovey, Judah, and Beatie, Granny’s face has ‘the lines of hardship and grief written on it’ (40). The pervasiveness of death in the period has a visibly traumatising effect on the patriarch of the family, Trooper Samuel Bow, who is not only psychologically disturbed by his time as a soldier, but also because of the death of his wife and son on the same day, and three daughters from smallpox on earlier occasions. The suffering Abigail observes among the Bow family establishes the white settlers of the past as sympathetic figures who toil in various ways to survive the potential hazards inherent in colonial life:

These Victorians lived in a dangerous world, where a whole family could be wiped out with typhoid fever or smallpox, where a soldier could get a hole in his head that you could put your fist in, where there were no pensions or free hospitals or penicillin or proper education for girls, or even poor boys, probably. Yet, in a way, it was a more human world than the one Abigail called her own. (76–7)

Judah Bow is an example of the prevalence of child labour, as he works hard on a cargo ship alongside adult men. While Samuel Bow attempts to provide for the family through the operation of a sweet shop, his trauma-induced alcoholism leads to frequent violent incidents, culminating in him eventually burning the sweet shop to the ground. On her return to the present, Abigail has a vision in which she sees Mr Bow being institutionalised with ‘his legs and arms chained together, and the chain threaded through an iron ring on the wall’ (169), assigning him yet another tragic fate.

In addition to the inferior conditions of health and hygiene in colonial Sydney, Abigail discovers the dangers posed to young women in a relatively lawless city in formation. She is abducted from the street with a sack thrown over her head and awakens in a brothel that houses other young women. The madam, Hannah, whose business seemingly involves repeated abductions of girls, is a repulsive figure:

She was in a dark, evil-smelling room, and before her stood a mountainous woman holding a blood-spattered first to her hairy chin. She must have weighed nearly a hundred kilos; there seemed no end to her in her full skirts and vast blouse of gaudy striped silk. Out of the sleeves poked sausagey hands covered in rings. Ferret eyes gleamed at Abigail; the sausage hands filled themselves with her hair and jerked brutally. (87)

Hannah is large, lacking in feminine compassion, animalistic, violent, and excessive in her dress and adornment. While a girl that works with her, Effie, is similarly disturbing as she lacks front teeth, picks her nose, and lisps, and seems to Abigail to be ‘half imbecile’ (87). Hannah and Effie are indicative of the fates that might await unattractive women without family wealth, whereas a sex worker named Doll strikes terror into Abigail because she is a vision of what Abigail could become in twenty years: ‘all spirit beaten out of her, sodden, with booze and disease, not even fit for the life of degradation the gentleman with the husky voice evidently intended for her’ (90). The colonial city poses a real, although temporary, threat to Abigail, yet the description of her abduction and the other confronting sights of the city provide an insight into the risks to Beatie’s survival into the future.

Supernatural and Mythical Links Between Past and Present

Traces of the nineteenth-century colonial past are visible in the late twentieth-century urban Sydney in which Abigail lives. The very game of Beatie Bow – which provides the setting for the contemporary encounters between Abigail and the time-travelling Beatie – ensures that the historical figure exacts a folkloric presence in the contemporary world.⁷ Abigail’s mother’s vintage clothing business, Magpies, enables Victorian objects to find afterlives with new owners. Abigail refers to the common appearance of mourning jewellery in the shop, including jet brooches (a gemstone most obtained in the English coastal town of Whitby) with locks of hair. Nevertheless, Park alludes to the way in which contemporary Australians may have little appreciation of the lived experience of the past, nor a sense of connection with the people who inhabited it. Abigail refers to an ‘onyx-framed miniature … of a white-eyed gentleman with side-whiskers and carnation cheeks’ that is bought as a ‘conversation piece’ by a customer who took their purchase with ‘shrieks of laughter’ (66). Abigail recalls having found ‘the buyer’s mirth unbearably vulgar; because, after all, the man had once been real and someone had loved him and missed him when he died’ (66). Her reverence for the traces of historical people that may be carried in the material objects they have left behind is echoed by the fact that it is a decorative item of clothing from the Bow family that proves to be the conduit between the present and the past. Abigail has an attraction to vintage fabrics and selects Edwardian curtain material with which to make a dress, pairing it with ‘a strangely shaped piece of yellowed crochet’ for a yoke (13). Her mother explains that the crochet is Victorian, but cannot identify the pattern, which is revealed to be a ‘peat bog plant called Grass of Parnassus’ (15). While Abigail mistakenly thinks the flower relates to ancient Greece, it is commonly found in bloom in summer in grasslands and heathers in the Orkneys, where the Bow family originated. While the crocheted yoke connects Abigail to the women who fashioned it, the flower immortalised within it speaks to the ongoing link of the family to their Scottish homeland.

It is through the mythic that the future is understood by the Bow family. The Australian present, despite the modernity of the city, is described with reference to the fantastic. Park refers to the ‘pearly cusps of the Opera House rising through the gauzy murk like Aladdin’s palace’ (5). Beatie’s experience of the present leads her to rationalise twentieth-century Sydney as the ‘Elfland’ she has learned about from her family’s folkloric beliefs. Abigail attempts to explain the future to her through its architecture such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Opera House, and high-rise buildings, but Beatie brands her a liar, as she struggles to rationalise the idea of the future: ‘Such things inna possible except in Elfland’ (59). While the experience of time travel is unsettling for both girls, the most frightening version of Australia is evident via Abigail’s direct experience of the colonial past. Beatie is perfectly aware that The Rocks of her time period is a lawless and dangerous place, with its ‘grog shops and crimp houses’ (dwellings in which men might be drugged and then then induced to join shipping crews) (79). Beatie, however, has spent little time in the future and is unaware of modern horrors such as nuclear weapons and chemical warfare: ‘The little girl thought of the late twentieth century as a sort of paradise, a place of marvels. … Let her go on believing there was no dark side, thought Abigail. She would not live to see it anyway’ (79). As Kim Wilson (2011) notes, the novel suggests ‘that a certain innocence and trust has been lost in the modern world and that loss is to be lamented’ (17). Nevertheless, the overarching message about the present that it delivers is that these flaws in the modern world ‘are forgiven or accepted because future times are inherently associated with positive progress’ (Wilson 17). Park utilises the past to establish Abigail’s place in contemporary Australia and to demonstrate the continuity of white settlement through her eventual relationship with one of the descendants of the Bow family, rather than to evoke nostalgic feelings or valorise the colonial period.

The Bows emigrated to Australia from Orkney and retain many folk beliefs from their homeland, including in the existence of prophetic gifts. Marquis describes Abigail’s contact with the colonial past as a ‘form of magic’, yet that colonial past harks back ‘in turn to a still earlier British society and culture, in the Orkneys, where the fey and the prophetic were vital factors in life’ (61). Though the Talliskers were well educated in their homeland, they believe in its magic stones, as much as they fondly recall the natural beauty of the heather and craigs. Dovey explains the origins of the stones prior to the islands being owned by Norway and later Scotland in equally factual terms: ‘Built by dwarfies, ye ken, and even giants so they say, long before the Northmen came; for Orkney folk is half Scots and half Norwegian, so ‘tis said’ (55). Elsewhere Dovey describes Orkney as ‘a queer old place, where dwarfies and painted men, Picts you might call them, live long ago’ (102). Dovey’s explanation brings historical figures, such as the Picts in pre-Viking times who lived in the north of Britain and likely in Orkney, and mythological figures including dwarfs, trolls, and ‘the children of the sea’ into the same world (102).

It is this ancient past and its intersection with folkloric belief that provides Abigail with connections to colonial Australians, overcoming the lack of white history and tradition through the way in which fantasy connects Abigail to Britain. The most significant way in which this connection is established is through the fantastic devices of the Prophecy and the Gift, which enable those who have inherited it to see the future, heal, and access secret wisdom. The Gift runs in the Tallisker family after an ancestor of Mrs Tallisker, Osla, ‘had been whisked away to Elfland for several years, and then reappeared as mysteriously as she had vanished’ (102). Osla’s child (who brings the Prophecy) was fathered in Elfland, which the reader is positioned to understand as the future given Beatie’s equation of the two. Whenever the Gift looks to be breeding out of the family line in every fifth generation, a Stranger arrives who has an object belonging to the family, just as Abigail is transported to the past via the yoke crocheted by Granny and Dovey. Abigail’s crucial role in helping the Bow family line to continue provides her with a readily identifiable connection with white colonial settlers. This link has implications in both the past and the present, as when Abigail returns to her own time she meets and falls in love with Robert Bow, who is revealed to be Gibbie’s descendent. If Abigail had not travelled to the past and likely contributed to ensuring the survival of Gibbie, then her own life would have been different – her place and future within Australia less assured.

Abigail’s time travel makes visible the way in which the white population of contemporary Australia, as represented by Robert, can be traced through a lineage that leads back to colonial settlers who endured great suffering and survived challenging conditions. While Park does not discuss Abigail’s matrilineal heritage, her father’s emigration from Norway – a relatively uncommon source of European immigrants to Australia in the twentieth century, though Park’s own maternal grandfather was Scandinavian – establishes pre-modern connections between the Kirk family and the Talliskers. The Orkneys belonged to Norway until 1472, before coming under the control of Scotland. Abigail’s present is shown to originate in the lives and culture of British and European people. As this history extends far back in time as compared with the brief history of white settlement in Australia, it is framed as so old as to render the mythical as reality. Given Abigail’s actual experience of time travel as foretold by their stories of the Stranger and the Prophecy, the folk beliefs of the Talliskers are proven to be more than superstition. It is through the Tallisker’s alignment with mythologies located in their home country that Abigail discovers an origin story that explains and justifies her place in Australia. The Prophecy foretold that one family member would die and that another would not bear children, which plays out through the death of Beatie’s older brother, Judah, in a shipwreck and Dovey and her infant child dying due to disease. The Prophecy – derived from Scottish mythology – anticipated the future of the descendants of the Bow family, but also predicted the existence of Abigail who fulfills the role of the Stranger. Indirectly, then, these mythical elements, which are grounded in British tradition, suggest that Australian colonisation is not merely a natural historical progression, but that it was always a predestined outcome.

Nevertheless, the exact nature of the Prophecy and knowledge of who among the Bows lived into old age and who had children to continue the family line cannot be known until Abigail returns the present. Beatie’s future is revealed to involve a long life, in which she became a headmistress of a prominent school and a classics scholar. The physical trace of Beatie exists in the form of the family Bible that contains a handwritten family tree, and which has been passed through her hands and to the descendants of the Bow family. The ambiguity surrounding the fates of Beatie, Gibbie, Jonah, and Dovey in a time-travel narrative might gesture towards the possibilities of life unfolding in different ways depending on choices that change the course of events: might Gibbie have died if Abigail did not encourage him to stop wallowing in his sickbed, for example? The idea of predestination, and the Bow family’s gift of future sight, nevertheless reinforce the idea that the future is already determined and that it was always going to be Gibbie who survived to continue the Bow family line (even if it would require the foretold arrival of Abigail from the future to achieve). Indeed, Abigail’s own perception of time changes to one that reinforces the idea of preordained fates, shifting from the belief that it is a ‘great black vortex down which everything disappeared’ to the eventual realisation of its continuities in its figuration as ‘a great river … with the same water flowing between its banks from source to sea’ (195). Most significantly, the logic of the novel’s time-slip plot and the folk beliefs that originate in pre-modern Orkney bolster the idea that white settler colonial Australia was always destined to come into being.

Conclusion

If we understand neo-Victorian fiction as reconstructing the nineteenth century in service of the present, Playing Beatie Bow can be a read as a novel that is a remnant of colonial ideologies that cannot acknowledge the realities and trauma of the British Empire in ways that become more typical of the genre in the 1990s and 2000s. Nevertheless, as is definitive of neo-Victorian fiction, in this children’s novel, the past is recreated in the service of late twentieth-century perspectives specifically through the way in which it is shown to shape the present of protagonist Abigail. From her encounters with the Bows in the colonial past, who bravely emigrated from their homeland to Australia and struggled to survive in the face of disease, death, and danger, Abigail appreciates the resilience of colonial settlers in a way that enables her to overcome her own distress about temporarily relocating to the unfamiliar country of Norway to be with her father. While neo-Victorian fiction can adopt postcolonial perspectives that question the romanticisation and naturalisation of ‘narratives and structures of empire’ (Ho 11), Playing Beatie Bow predates this turn, and instead participates in this very romanticisation of white colonial settlement and its legacy.