Remittance man

"Remittance man" is defined in The Canadian Encyclopedia as "a term once widely used, especially in the West before WWI, for an immigrant living in Canada on funds remitted by his family in England, usually to ensure that he would not return home and become a source of embarrassment.

One of the citations is of T. S. Eliot's 1958 play The Elder Statesman in which the son of the title figure resists his father's attempts to find him a job: "Some sort of place where everyone would sneer at the fellow from London.

"To the ordinary Western [Canadian] mind, a remittance man was a rich Englishman who had proven a failure in his homeland and had been shipped into the raw land to kill himself in quiet or work out his regeneration if possible."

In his profile of the Wet Mountain Valley surrounding Westcliffe, Colorado, the author Morris Cafky wrote in 1966 that after the initial wave of settlers, Other venturesome folk followed—Englishmen this time.

A few examples include Bertha E. Kyte Reynolds, who lived in a tent outside Banff in the Rocky Mountains in the early 1900s, until an Anglican clergyman persuaded her relatives to increase her allowance,[10] and Jessie de Prado MacMillan, a Scottish woman who homesteaded in New Mexico from about 1903.

[11] Ella Higginson, poet laureate of Washington State, applied some poetic licence to the story of royal scandal publicised by Edward Mylius.

The case that went to trial concerned an alleged secret marriage in 1890 between the young naval officer, who was to become George V, and a daughter of Admiral Sir Michael Culme-Seymour, 3rd Baronet.

"[12] The New Yorker in 1979 referred to Lady Blanche Hozier, the mother of Clementine Churchill, by this term: in "Dieppe, a traditional escape route for English who have been exiled for one reason or another, [...] she gracefully lived the life of a remittance woman, gambled obsessively at the casino, and established a little salon".

The 1892 novel The Wrecker, written by Robert Louis Stevenson and his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, is a "South Sea yarn" featuring a "remittance man".

[14] In the book, Tom Hadden (known to the bulk of Sydney folk as Tommy) was heir to a considerable property, which a prophetic father had placed in the hands of rigorous trustees.

The income supported Mr. Hadden in splendour for about three months out of twelve; the rest of the year he passed in retreat among the islands.Tommy is based on Jack Buckland (born 1864, Sydney; died 1897, Suwarrow Island), the handsome, happy-go-lucky, fellow cabin passenger on the 1890 Janet Nicholl voyage.

It was the remittance-man's custom to pay his month's board and lodging straightway—a duty which his landlord did not allow him to forget—then spree away the rest of his money in a single night, then brood and mope and grieve in idleness till the next remittance came.

It was published in the US as The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses): Far away, so faint and far, is flaming London, fevered Paris, That I fancy I have gained another star; Far away the din and hurry, far away the sin and worry, Far away—God knows they cannot be too far.

William Henry Pope Jarvis (1876–1944), who was described in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature as a journalist born in Prince Edward Island, wrote the epistolary novel The Letters of a Remittance Man to his Mother (1908, John Murray).

In Brideshead Revisited, Sebastian Flyte is thus referred to by the British Consul to Charles Ryder on the latter's visit to Morocco: This is no place for a remittance man.

It begins: The spendthrift, disinherited and graceless, accepted his pittance with an easy air, only surprised he could escape so simply from the pheasant-shooting and the aunts in the close One of Stephen Marlowe's recurring characters (c. 1960) is Andrea Hartshorn, who describes her situation thus: "Robbie is a remittance man.

Tom Wolfe, in The Bonfire of the Vanities, uses the term to refer to a wealthy Englishman's good-for-nothing daughters who spend their days on the New York City party circuit.