ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the simultaneity of Trollope's critical reworking of sensational strategies and his satire of prevalent associations with the antipodes in John Caldigate and situates its satirical thrust within a literary history of Victorian narratives of colonial return. It outlines the growing popularity and shifting cultural meaning of returnee narratives, their redirection by such public spectacles as the Tichborne trials, and the intertextual interchanges that the resultant and often heavily sensationalized, impostor plots helped to engender. The extension of imperial panic to settler colonialism additionally foregrounded the twofold concern with domesticity in Victorian conceptions of empire: imperialism's impact at home and the presumed exportation of domestic values as part of the colonization process. Genre formation may be to consider fictional trends side by side with very different exponents of popular culture, these formative genre developments surely deserve more attention than being reduced to broad analyses in which 'fiction complements documentary sources'.