Remittance man

A remittance man is a historic term for an emigrant, often from Britain to a colony, supported by regular payments from home, on the expectation that he stay away.

Note that in this context, money is being sent in the opposite direction to today's usual usage of the term remittance, which means money that migrants send to their countries of origin.

"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."

The Oxford English Dictionary adds: "spec[ifically] one considered undesirable at home; also in extended use". "Remittance man" is first attested in 1874, as a colonial term. One of the citations is of T.S. Eliot's 1958 play The Elder Statesman, where 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. The limey remittance man for whom a job was made." The OED gives "remittancer" as another form; this stretches back to 1750.

Within Victorian British culture, a remittance man was usually the black sheep of an upper or middle-class family who was sent away (from the United Kingdom to the Empire), and paid to stay away. These men were generally of dissolute or drunken character, and may have been sent overseas after one or more disgraces at home.

Historian Monica Rico describes in Nature's Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West (2013) how the figure emerged in the 1880s: "Unable to succeed in Britain[...] the remittance man represented the utter failure of elite British masculinity to function in the modern world." Where he was to go was a wide-open question. The British Empire offered wide-open spaces and possibilities of redemption in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and colonial parts of Africa; some thought the American West was also an appropriate destination. Rico concludes that "the remittance man, in his weakness, symbolized his culture's fear that British masculinity was imperiled both in Britain and abroad."

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