ABSTRACT
One way of telling the life story is to make it a story of assimilation into Englishness. After all, Palgrave Macmillan's Golden Treasury represents a certain kind of Victorian English sensibility not least because of Palgrave's close friendship with Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson and his work as a Private Secretary for William Ewart Gladstone. This was a time, in other words, when the history and place of migrants in Britain was being understood from a positive perspective and other options, rather than mere assimilation or disappearance, were being voiced. It is the story of someone who found a home in English literature and in so doing changed its conventions and expanded its subject matter like many migrants do. Migrants start with nothing; after all they are considered to be mere observers of a national history that began long before they arrived on these shores.
