ABSTRACT
As we saw in the example of Sir Matthew Mite, the nabob represented a social threat that registered in a number of different areas, ranging from the sexual to the racial to the economic. Having traced in the preceding chapter the nabob’s eighteenth-century historical and cultural development, we can now more closely examine these different facets of the nabob’s destructive energies and investigate the ways in which the Victorian theatre worked not only to contain those energies but to direct them in more socially productive ways. In Chapter 7, I will differentiate between the nabob and other figures of colonial return, showing that the East Indian nabob’s wealth elicited a very different theatrical response from that of the Australian gold miners, whose providential prosperity was not considered morally tainted and was more readily aligned with Britain’s bourgeois domestic ideal. But before turning to that comparative character analysis, I want first—in this chapter—to examine the primary obstacle to the (re)incorporation of the nabob into British society: the racial and cultural hybridization of the Anglo-Indian. Indeed, the term “Anglo-Indian” is itself revelatory of the cultural blending that accompanied British rule in India (Procida 2002: 56–80; Baucom 1999: 75–100). But while the term denoted the heterogeneic animus of colonial authority, the cultural hybridity that it suggests is what made the nabob such a threat to British bourgeois society and so resistant to incorporation therein.
