ABSTRACT
Just as she ponders the far-flung origin of pearl buttons or the remote destiny of nails, Harriet Martineau marvels at the extent to which ‘our English needles of to-day are spreading all over the known world, wherever exchange of commodities is going on.’1 Remarking the cosmopolitanism associated with global commodity culture, she imagines the illustrations on the ‘gay boxes’ containing the needles are ‘probably to be seen on the walls of many a log cabin in America, and chalet in Switzerland, and bungalow in India, and home of exiles in Siberia. It seems as if all the world of needlewomen, of every clime, were supplied by England.’2 Her comment not only draws attention to the growing importance of international trade to Britain’s economy throughout the nineteenth century, but suggests the cultural imperialism that may be associated with the transnational migration of commodities. While on the one hand serving to represent the national identity of their place of origin, on the other, these goods are seen by Martineau to unite the peoples of the world in a global society of consumers. Victorian novels are full of the spoils of international trade, deriving much of their realism from the cornucopia of consumer goods displayed in their fictional settings: furniture, clothing, utensils, and comestibles such as tea, coffee, and sugar. Indeed, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, first published serially in Household Words, has been widely acknowledged as an exemplary portrait of such material culture, illustrating the key role of consumer goods in the formation of domestic identities-from the oranges eaten by the Misses Jenkyns, to the ‘large, soft, white India shawl’ sent by Peter to his mother and the tea sold in Miss Matty’s front parlour.3 Just as Edward Said has described empire functioning ‘as a codified, if only marginally visible, presence in fiction, very much like the servants in grand households and in novels, whose work is taken for granted but scarcely ever more than named, rarely studied,’4 these sorts of goods form an almost imperceptible background to the narrative.5 They are there in the homes of the Misses Jenkyns, or
the Honourable Mrs Jamieson, without elaboration, without explanation of the way in which empire underwrites the domestic world of the novel. For this, we must turn to the non-fictional articles that surround Cranford and the other novels serialized in Household Words, such as North and South or Hard Times. The suppression of discussion about imperial and colonial issues in the journal’s fiction contrasts markedly with the detailed consideration of these matters elsewhere.
