ABSTRACT
Imperialism is the unspoken source of English manor-house power in Mansfield Park, in the form of Sir Thomas Bertram’s Antigua estates; it is the plush provider of London social being for Jos Sedley in Vanity Fair and the civil and military protection for St. John Rivers’s missionary plans in Jane Eyre. Late eighteenth-century British looting of Indian cultural artifacts trig gers the Victorian domestic plot in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. Gabriel Betteredge, retelling the events that seem to have precipitated the disappear ance of the priceless moonstone from his mistress’s household, causing house maids to disappear, dinner guests to forget their table manners, and countryhouse life to unravel, confides to the reader, “ [HJere was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond-bringing after it a conspiracy of living rogues, set loose on us by the vengeance of a dead man.”3 Through his amazed description of a quiet English country house being “invaded” by an Indian diamond, Betteredge articulates, altogether
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unconsciously, an imaginative expression of Victorian imperialist process. The benefit to Britain’s domestic economy (“quiet” English country houses well staffed by loyal servants) that is the consequence of overseas imperial invasion and expansion is accompanied by a counterinvasion of the colonized (a “devilish” diamond accompanied everywhere by “roguish” natives) into the colonizer’s domestic space.
