ABSTRACT
The decade in which Household Words appeared has famously been termed the ‘Age of Equipoise’ by William Burns in his book of the same title. Although subsequent criticism has re-appropriated and (mis)understood the term as a synonym of peace and stability, Burns used this phrase to indicate a precarious and fragile balance of several confl icting factors. Nowhere are the underlying tensions of the period more evident than in Britain’s relationship with the European continent and its alternating selfdefi nition as European and as insular. This chapter aims not to fi nd out how Household Words depicts individual European countries-the mass of available material for such a project would justify making it the focus of a book in its own right, and there are a number of studies on Dickens and France or Italy already.1 Instead, it attempts to determine how Household Words envisages such a thing as ‘continentalness’, a common ground that these individual countries share, or-if not-what structures this heterogeneous collection of countries falls into.
