“I Wish I Could See You as Often as I Could See Your Letter”: Imperial anxieties and working class family life in the Raj

This article draws on the letters of three British working class families who lived in India between the 1860s and 1890s to show how the class system that undergirded British understandings of self was upended in empire. This rupture was communicated through letter-writing practices that were the product of the British educational system and the contingencies of working-class life and were developed and honed in empire. As a result, the intersecting phenomena of imperial separation and class instability generated imperial anxieties specific to working class families.