Summary
As a result of the industrial revolution, there was widespread unemployment in Britain during the 1830s and 1840s, resulting in mass emigration to the British colonies and the United States. The theme of emigration appears in several paintings and novels of the mid 19th Century, not least Ford Madox Brown's The Last of England (1852-4, Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery), a watercolour replica of which is in the Tate collection (N03064).
A major incentive for the emigrants was the discovery of gold in Australia and North America; a fact referred to in these lines from Oliver Goldsmith's The Traveller (1764), which accompanied the picture when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1859:
Have we not seen, round Britain's people shore,
Her useful sons exchanged for useless ore?
Forced from their homes, a melancholy train,
To traverse climes beyond the western main… (read more)
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