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’.