This work examines Victorian conceptions of home and identity by looking at portrayals and accounts of middle-class emigration to Australia.

Focusing on everyday life in nineteenth-century Britain and its imperial possessions"from preparing tea to cleaning the kitchen, from packing for imperial adventures to arranging home decor"the essays in this collection share a common focus on materiality, the nitty-gritty elements that helped give shape and meaning to British self-definition during the period. Each essay demonstrates how preoccupations with common household goods and habits fueled contemporary debates about cultural institutions ranging from personal matters of marriage and family to more overtly political issues of empire building. While existing scholarship on material culture in the nineteenth century has centered on artifacts in museums and galleries, this collection brings together disparate fields"history of design, landscape history, childhood studies, and feminist and postcolonial literary studies"to focus on ordinary objects and practices, with specific attention to how Britons of all classes established the tenets of domesticity as central to individual happiness, national security, and imperial hegemony.

Focusing on everyday life in nineteenth-century Britain and its imperial possessions"from preparing tea to cleaning the kitchen, from packing for imperial adventures to arranging home decor"the essays in this collection share a common focus on materiality, the nitty-gritty elements that helped give shape and meaning to British self-definition during the period. Each essay demonstrates how preoccupations with common household goods and habits fueled contemporary debates about cultural institutions ranging from personal matters of marriage and family to more overtly political issues of empire building. While existing scholarship on material culture in the nineteenth century has centered on artifacts in museums and galleries, this collection brings together disparate fields"history of design, landscape history, childhood studies, and feminist and postcolonial literary studies"to focus on ordinary objects and practices, with specific attention to how Britons of all classes established the tenets of domesticity as central to individual happiness, national security, and imperial hegemony.

A common subplot in the Victorian novel involves fictional emigrants who disappear into or arrive from the colonies in ways that facilitate plot development but do little to represent the condition of colonial life. Yet the proliferation of emigrant guides and the enthusiastic debates that punctuate Victorian periodicals indicate that emigration was a vital topic that impinged on the lives of many, if not most, Victorians. Through chapters that pair Victorian novels with visual art, letters, memoirs, and emigrant guides, Antipodal England probes this seeming inconsistency, providing insight into how a wide range of authors used the colonies for strategic purposes and, in the process, often revealed the centrality of the empire to Victorian conceptions of home and national identity. Focusing particularly on middle-class emigration to Australia, Janet C. Myers explores how emigrants transplanted a range of material and ideological practices associated with English domesticity, and how this "portable domesticity" enabled emigrants to see themselves and their culture as capable of preservation and even reinvention despite such enormous geographical and cultural shifts. Indeed, Myers argues, portable domesticity both reinforced and subverted the values of British culture, since the domestic practices that enabled emigrants to transplant their national identity also initiated the process of settlement that gradually led to the formation of a new national identity for Australia and, ultimately, independence from Britain.