The First Strawberries in India: Cultural Portability in Victorian Greater Britain

This article examines a deep-seated Victorian preoccupation with the ways that portable property becomes the vector for the transplantation of national culture and individual identity. It argues that England's empire, the territory Charles Dilke labeled "Greater Britain," was the forcing bed from which cultural portability emerged as a new way of imagining self, community, and nation. A range of Anglo-Indian texts—among them Julia Maitland's Letters from Madras, Emily Eden's Up the Country, and the anonymous 1873 Overland, Inland, and Upland—suggest that self-styled exiles from England cultivated a connection with their fellow expatriates through objects and practices transported to the colonies from England. These mobile containers of Britishness strengthened settlers' bond to their alma mater, even as they reminded them of their distance from home. The long-distance attachments thus reified by cultural portability allowed Anglo-Indians to draw a cordon of inattention that separated them from their Indian surroundings and to engage in the willful fiction that life in India was merely a continuation of the English experience. In this way, portable repositories of mobile memory in Victorian Britain served to unify an otherwise disparate global community.