This brief exchange in Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) between Martin and General Choke encapsulates many of the central concerns of emigration literature. The General's answer to Martin that he has been to England ‘in print’ highlights the ways in which places travel through texts as they become caught up in intersecting and overlapping networks of circulation. The General knows all too well that as places circulate through print, they open up a contested space as things shift and change. It does not occur to the unsuspecting Martin, however, that the information he comes across in emigration literature might ‘surprise’ him because it is in fact dubious misinformation.

As this book has demonstrated so far, the circulation of emigration literature produced certain affective regimes. It enabled readers who had yet to experience colonial life first-hand to familiarise themselves with places through text and at a distance. At the same time, this means of knowing was troubled and ambiguous, as the editors and emigrants alike sought to prove to a suspicious public that the text's geographical mobility had not compromised its authenticity. Different kinds of authenticity are at stake here: fears that the text might be compromised in terms of its accurate portrayal of colonial life sat alongside fears that the mobile text no longer authentically mediated kinship ties between emigrants and their families in Britain. Negotiating the distance between Britain and her colonies is thus a key preoccupation of emigration literature. In this chapter, I argue that this preoccupation with how to narrate distance shaped the aesthetics of certain significant mid-century novels. I focus on Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and David Copperfield (1850), Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and Catherine Helen Spence's Clara Morison (1854). In these novels, emigration literature acquires a particular representational force: the places of settlement are more than a mere passing reference to somewhere that exists in the shadows of the novel, and instead are shown to impact upon the lives of the central characters in formative ways.