Introduction

This chapter establishes evidence that the concept of the nomad was rhetorically employed in Victorian England and the British Empire, in legal, ethnological, and political discourse. It demonstrates how intellectual currents and economic, administrative, and political compulsions of the age reinforced sedentarization even as empire and its globalized economy demanded nomadic mobilities, so that, reflecting such tensions, the nomad in Victorian fiction and life writing may emerge as a traditional, accidental, or experimental identity in national and imperial contexts. It sets forth questions that address the implications of the nomadic for genre, reader relations, narrative, and ideology in the texts proposed for analysis, namely, Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, The Moonstone, 747 Being the Autobiography of a Gypsy, Ulu: An African Romance , “Habitual Criminals”, and “The Bridge Builders.”