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 (1864), questions the transportability of domesticity that is vital to successful settlement abroad. It is also Yonge’s most extensive venture into literary sensationalism, a phenomenon she continued to regard with suspicion. It is no coincidence that the same novel contains her most intricate and far-reaching exploration of foreign spaces. Failed emigration expresses a sense of being unsettled, an extreme version of similar uncertainties back at home in England. What may at first seem an easily typecast projection of current anxieties onto the “other” place registers a tension in the representation of home as an exportable ideal. Not surprisingly, this tension becomes particularly pressing when it is played out in settler colonies that are meant to operate as an extension of English domesticity. But if Yonge simultaneously draws on the narrative potential of failed emigration that, in Victorian culture generally, had come to be associated specifically with fraudulent American land speculation, 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. At the mid-nineteenth century, New Zealand was in many ways thought of as a relatively new, potential model settler colony, whereas the United States had become typified as the lost or renegade colony that had broken away from the empire. For Yonge, moreover, New Zealand was of particular significance due to her own family’s missionary interests. It therefore lent itself as a pointed contrast to more established narratives of both settlement and return, creating a central juxtaposition between opposing movements of emigration. While this contrast addresses the difficulties of transporting English domesticity, it also literalizes genre crossings within the novel. New Zealand qualifies as a domesticated part of the British Empire, eschewing any exoticizing fantasies; America figures as a sensational space.
