ABSTRACT
In dealing with Household Words’ attitude to the colonies, I shall concentrate mainly on India, as it was not only the colony most frequently written about, but also makes for the most versatile and thus the most interesting case study. While Australia also featured relatively frequently, most articles tended to echo each other. Most articles were written by current or former emigrants, and most imagined Australia as an empty receptacle for British emigrants, gold-diggers, and opportunists. India, on the other hand, was so evidently populated that any attempts to imagine it as an empty source of material goods were doomed-its population had to be reckoned with. This became most evident during the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857, when the native population turned in open revolt against their colonial ‘masters’.
