Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction: Victorian Domestic Fiction Down Under
- 1 Retracing Domestic Space: English National Identity in Harriet Martineau's Homes Abroad
- 2 ‘Hasten to the Land of Promise’: The Influence of Emigrant Letters on Dickens's Life and Literature
- 3 ‘Ever so Many Partings Welded Together’: Serial Settlement and Great Expectations
- 4 ‘The Heavens were on Fire’: Incendiarism and the Defence of the Settler Home
- 5 The ‘Australian Girl’ and the Domestic Ideal in Colonial Women's Fiction
- 6 Fugitive Homes: Multiple Migrations in Ethel Turner's Fiction
- 7 Devout Domesticity and Extreme Evangelicalism: The Unsettled Australian Domestic of Maud Jean Franc
- 8 ‘That's what Children are – Nought but Leg-Ropes’: Motherhood in Rosa Praed's Mrs Tregaskiss
- 9 The Antipodal House Beautiful: Louisa Alice Baker's Colonial Aesthetic
- 10 Antipodal Home Economics: International Debt and Settler Domesticity in Clara Cheeseman's A Rolling Stone
- 11 ‘What is in the Blood will Come Out’: Belonging, Expulsion and the New Zealand Settler Home in Jessie Weston's Ko Méri
- Notes
- Index
1 - Retracing Domestic Space: English National Identity in Harriet Martineau's Homes Abroad
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction: Victorian Domestic Fiction Down Under
- 1 Retracing Domestic Space: English National Identity in Harriet Martineau's Homes Abroad
- 2 ‘Hasten to the Land of Promise’: The Influence of Emigrant Letters on Dickens's Life and Literature
- 3 ‘Ever so Many Partings Welded Together’: Serial Settlement and Great Expectations
- 4 ‘The Heavens were on Fire’: Incendiarism and the Defence of the Settler Home
- 5 The ‘Australian Girl’ and the Domestic Ideal in Colonial Women's Fiction
- 6 Fugitive Homes: Multiple Migrations in Ethel Turner's Fiction
- 7 Devout Domesticity and Extreme Evangelicalism: The Unsettled Australian Domestic of Maud Jean Franc
- 8 ‘That's what Children are – Nought but Leg-Ropes’: Motherhood in Rosa Praed's Mrs Tregaskiss
- 9 The Antipodal House Beautiful: Louisa Alice Baker's Colonial Aesthetic
- 10 Antipodal Home Economics: International Debt and Settler Domesticity in Clara Cheeseman's A Rolling Stone
- 11 ‘What is in the Blood will Come Out’: Belonging, Expulsion and the New Zealand Settler Home in Jessie Weston's Ko Méri
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Wherever I have a dwelling and food, wherever I have comfort and safety within doors, and can step abroad among friends, there is my home … Set me down independent, with my family about me, in any part of the world, – in the middle of a forest or in the wildest sea-shore, and, be it north, south, east, or west, that place is a home to me.
For early nineteenth-century Britain, the concept of home was identified by the physical space of dwelling, but also ideologically by the freedoms and independence that such a space represented for the Englishman: the patriarchal family kingdom, the space of rule, a microcosm of the empire. The definition of ‘home’ could refer just as easily to the domestic hearth as to the Motherland, England; yet with the growth of colonization and the difficulties of returning ‘home’ from the colonies, the idea of the national home, and by extension the family home, was called into question. Linda Peterson observes that ‘home’ became ‘a doubly resonant term, referring both to the land of their birth and the land of settlement’. Janet Myers further points out that even within England ‘rented accommodation and mobility was common’, and as a result, ‘home’ was defined less by a physical place than ‘by ideological associations’. This idea of home, Myers argues, grew to be synonymous with middle-class values of the close-knit patriarchal family – ‘the heart of the domestic ideal’.
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- Information
- Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand , pp. 21 - 36Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014