ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses several aspects of Homes Abroad that reveal England's anxieties over its sense of superiority and privilege within the domestic space, the family home as well as the space of the nation, or homeland. Harriet Martineau's opening scene challenges the purity and legitimacy of England's perceived order by conflating criminality, poverty and the domestic space. Anxieties over origin are also manifested through the positioning of women in the text, for the next generation of English children issues from the woman's body. The colonial woman in Martineau's text both embodies the empire, and disrupts it by non-conformity. Martineau's opening scene challenges the purity and legitimacy of England's perceived order by conflating criminality, poverty and the domestic space. The chapter examines Martineau's refusal to ignore the dangers of poverty and social disorder at home; instead Martineau envisages Englishness in the colonies as an uncomfortable disruption of the English domestic space.
