Self-making

Self-making is the goldfields’ ideal of remaking oneself through choice and labor, in contrast to an identity secured by birth and inheritance. In Walter Moody’s story, the idea offers a possible response to family betrayal; in Thomas Balfour’s account of Hokitika, it becomes a defining feature of a society being made from the ground up. The novel also complicates Balfour’s enthusiasm: his praise of reinvention reveals as much about his own values as it does about Moody’s predicament.

Moody’s decision to begin again

After learning that his father and brother had jointly arranged his abandonment, Walter Moody could not bear to meet them both. He escaped his father’s attempt to detain him and chose to travel south rather than return directly to London, though he had money enough to do so. He hoped the hard labor of the diggings might help him through his grief, and rejected the prospect of becoming a lawyer. His intention to make a new life is therefore not an abstract celebration of opportunity: it follows a rupture with his family and the inheritance and future he had expected.

Balfour’s goldfields ideal

Thomas Balfour recognizes Moody’s resolve as characteristic of the goldfields, describing the possibility of making oneself anew as a kind of revolution. He contrasts this frontier ideal with Moody’s former world of lost inheritance, marital falseness, and a highborn woman put to work—betrayals he regards as tragedies belonging to drawing rooms, calling cards, and gowns. To Balfour, such upheavals belong to an old social order in which a person’s station seems settled from birth.

His alternative is Hokitika, a rapidly growing settlement that the papers reportedly said was growing faster than San Francisco. Balfour imagines it emerging from jungle, tidal marshes, shifting gullies, fog, and ore-rich waters. In that unsettled landscape, people are not simply self-made, as if arriving at a finished identity; they are self-making, working in the dirt to wash it clean. The distinction gives the expression its force: reinvention is a continuing process, shaped by labor and a place whose wealth and social order are still taking form.

The limits of the ideal

Balfour’s admiration is generous but not disinterested. Moody’s story awakens an indulgent, almost fatherly feeling in him, and lets him see himself as modern, entrepreneurial, and free of restrictive connections. The narration undercuts the apparent sympathy by observing that Balfour’s verdict says less about Moody than about the man judging him. Balfour can celebrate self-making while treating Moody’s despair as narrow and difficult to comprehend; his liberality does not extend easily to suffering that calls for sympathy.

The expression thus holds both promise and irony. For Moody, starting anew means trying to live beyond a future imposed by family and inheritance. For Balfour, it also confirms the frontier’s appeal and his preferred self-image. The goldfields’ ideal makes identity open to change, but Balfour’s response shows that belief in reinvention does not by itself ensure understanding of the people forced to begin again.