ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, we saw how two nineteenth-century women writers sought to negotiate the discursive rules of the public and private spheres to legitimize their respective performances of Englishness and colonial authority, and hence their position within the symbolic imaginary of the nation. Emily Eden and Harriet Martineau express in their writing a form of national identity forged through the nation’s colonial encounter and inflected by a mix of self-conscious irony and judicious guilt that serves paradoxically to temper as well as reinforce the assumption of racial and cultural superiority in imperialism. In their construction of Englishness, both writers insinuate a nostalgia for a supposedly less complicated imperial past, evoking a shared connection to history possible only because not subject to replication in the invariably diminished contemporary moment. In laying claim to nostalgia, it is perhaps no surprise that Emily Eden should in her letters from India name Charles Dickens, arguably the Victorian writer most closely identified with Englishness, as the one whose work best satisfied her desire for things familiar and related to ‘home’. In many of his novels, Dickens actively cultivated a sense of nostalgia, not so much perhaps for a more innocent or glorious imperial past, but for an England without the intrusive destabilizing consciousness of empire at all. The desire for such an England may be seen, for example, in Dombey and Son (1846) where narrative energies are harnessed to privilege the idea of family ties over the competing meaning of ‘Dombey and Son’ as merchant house or firm devoted to imperial trade-‘Wholesale, Retail, and for Exportation.’1 The emphasis on private feeling and relationships is enshrined in the novel’s ending-the family as an ahistorical unit of allegedly universal meaning safe from the buffeting by current, especially colonial, realities. Dickens’s appeal to the Victorian and even the modern popular imagination now lies in his association with a highly sentimentalized domestic and national space, the presence of dark, troubling elements especially in his later work, notwithstanding.
