IN its own imagination, the modern British metropolis used exotic islands to represent both what it was not, and what it was, or might be. A throwaway reference to ‘the Otaheite’, in an exchange between man of the world Mr Dupeley and ideal Englishman Sir Harry Groveby in the Drury Lane comedy The Maid of the Oaks, interrupts patriotic pastoral with a topical joke. Tahiti (and the wider region of Oceania for which it often stood) had shimmered into the view of ordinary Londoners in the early 1770s and was still on the audience's minds when the play was first performed in 1774. While James Cook's Resolution remained in the South Seas, his expedition's second ship, the Adventure, had recently returned with stories of murder and cannibalism in New Zealand, as well as a celebrated ‘Otaheitean’ from Ra‘iatea, Mai. This had helped to regenerate what has been described as a ‘Pacific craze’ in the fashionable metropolis embodied onstage by Dupeley.

As a self-consciously urban and urbane figure, equally cynical and gullible, the cosmopolitan Dupeley recalls the much-satirised presentation of the botanist-libertine Joseph Banks in the notorious but popular account of Cook's first voyage to Oceania that had prompted the craze in the first place. As he admits, though, Dupeley has never actually been to Otaheite, even if he has travelled ‘half the world over’, nor does he actively plan to travel there. Oceania, for the vast majority of Britons in 1774, was a place not to be visited but to be experienced vicariously through figures like Banks and Cook, or imaginatively through the theatrical and popular culture of places like the Drury Lane Theatre. Over the next fifty years, as the nature of the metropolis's contact with Oceania changed, ideas about Oceania would be in many ways transformed but would remain broadly understood as material for self-reflexion.