WAKEFIELD, EDWARD GIBBON Brit ish colonial statesman, was born in London on March 20, 1796, of an originally Quaker family. His father, Edward Wakefield (1774– 1854), author of Ireland, Statistical and Political (1812), was a surveyor and land agent in extensive practice; his grandmother, Priscilla Wakefield (1751-1832), was a popular author for the young, and one of the introducers of savings banks. Wakefield was for a short time at Westminster school, and was brought up to his father's profession, but he eloped at 20 with Miss Pattie, the orphan daughter of an Indian civil servant. Her relatives became reconciled to the match, and procured him an appointment as attaché to the British legation at Turin. He resigned this post in 182o, upon the death of his wife, and then spent some years in Paris. In 1826 he decoyed Ellen Turner from school by means of a forged letter, by which she was induced to believe that she could only save her father from ruin by marrying Wakefield, whom she accordingly accompanied to Gretna Green. He was tried with his confederates at Lancaster assizes, March 1827, convicted, and sentenced to three years' imprisonment in Newgate. The mar riage, which had not been consummated, was dissolved by a special act of parliament.
Wakefield turned his attention while in prison to colonial sub jects, and acutely detected the main causes of the slow progress of the Australian colonies in the enormous size of the landed estates, and the reckless methods of allocation of land. He proposed the sale of land in small quantities at a sufficient price, and the em ployment of the proceeds as a fund for promoting immigration. These views were expressed with extraordinary vigour in his Let ter from Sydney (1829), published while he was still in prison, but composed with such graphic power that it has been continually quoted as if written on the spot. After his release Wakefield pro duced a tract on the Punishment of Death, with a terribly graphic picture of the condemned felons in Newgate, and another on incendiarism in the rural districts, with an equally powerful exhi bition of the degraded condition of the agricultural labourer.
He soon, however, became entirely engrossed with colonial affairs, and, having impressed John Stuart Mill, Colonel Torrens (q.v.) and other leading economists with the value of his ideas, became a manager of the South Australian Company, by which the colony of South Australia was ultimately founded. In 1833 he published anonymously England and America, a work primarily intended to develop his own colonial theory, which is done in the appendix entitled "The Art of Colonization." The body of the work, however, is fruitful in seminal ideas, though some state ments may be rash and some conclusions extravagant. It con tains the proposal that the transport of letters should be wholly gratuitous—the precursor of subsequent reform—and the proph ecy that, under given circumstances, "the Americans would raise cheaper corn than has ever been raised." In 1836 Wakefield pub
lished a volume of an uncompleted edition of Adam Smith.
The management of the company had meanwhile passed into the hands of others, whose sole object was to settle accounts with the Government, and wind up the undertaking. Wakefield seceded, and joined Lord Lyttelton and John Robert Godley in establishing the Canterbury settlement as a Church of England colony. A portion of his correspondence on this subject was published by his son as The Founders of Canterbury (Christ church, 1868). In 1854 he appeared in the first New Zealand parliament as extra-official adviser of the acting governor, a position which excited great jealousy, and as the mover of a resolution demanding the appointment of a responsible ministry. In that year Wakefield's health broke down. He spent the rest of his life in retirement, dying at Wellington on May 16, 1862.
Wakefield was a man of large views and lofty aims, and in private life displayed the warmth of heart which commonly accompanies these qualities. But he hesitated at nothing neces sary to accomplish an object, and the conviction of his untrust worthiness gradually alienated his associates, and left him politi cally powerless. Excluded from parliament by the fatal error of his youth, he was compelled to resort to indirect means of working out his plans by influencing public men. But for a tendency to paradox, his intellectual powers were of the highest order, and as a master of nervous English he rivals Cobbett.