ABSTRACT

Charlotte Yonge's domestic fiction sensationalizes a two-way flow of transatlantic and transpacific emigration and repatriation. Throughout her writing, she promotes a missionary agenda through offstage depictions of Africa, Asia, and Australasia, yet the novel that engages most extensively with migration across and beyond the British Empire, The Trial, questions the transportability of domesticity that is vital to successful settlement abroad. In The Trial she further complicates this transatlantic sensationalism by contrasting the Ward family's failure to settle down in the New World with the May family's missionary ties in New Zealand. Transpacific migration successfully exports domestic ideals influenced by a religious doctrine that is in many ways concentrated on everyday living. This downplaying of the Mori Wars may strike readers now as one of the incongruities of Victorian domestic fiction's representation of imperial expansion, but here it specifically prepares for Yonge's subsequent demystification of the reputed ease of settling in abroad.