London

London is a decisive waystation in Walter Moody’s passage from a failing family search to the New Zealand goldfields. There, his effort to find his vanished father exhausts his money and prospects; the city becomes less a place of settlement than the point from which he abandons the legal career he dislikes and sails onward.

A base for the search

After his father disappeared and left his stepmother destitute in Edinburgh, Moody returned to assist her, arranging a modest means of employment. He then travelled to London to search for his father. The search failed: Moody exhausted the available methods of locating him and spent a great deal of money in the process. London thus holds the practical cost of Moody’s attempt to repair a family crisis, even as his elder brother, Frederick, remained away on the Otago goldfields and unanswered letters left Moody uncertain whether his brother had received any news.

Education without a profession

Moody had studied at the Inner Temple, and London offered the prospect of turning that education into an income. But his inheritance could no longer serve as reliable security, his credit in the city had become poor, and he had little affection for the law. He considered remaining in London until he could be called to the Bar, then rejected that course. The contrast is central to the place’s role in his story: the city contains a conventional professional future, but not one he can—or wishes to—make his own.

Departure and return in the telling

With his fortune gone and debts mounting, Moody booked passage for New Zealand, intending to tell Frederick how the family’s circumstances had changed and, if his brother was alive, perhaps join him on the diggings. London is therefore the hinge between an unsuccessful search and an uncertain departure. In recounting this history, Moody explains that after landing at Dunedin he hesitated over where to go next, only to encounter his father unexpectedly. The reunion gives retrospective weight to London’s failed search: the father Moody could not find there reappears after Moody has crossed the world.