Fashioning Women, Fastening Empire: Domestic Dress and Savage Skin in Mr. Meeson's Will

This article examines Henry Rider Haggard's novel Mr. Meeson's Will in the context of Victorian discourses concerning fashion and progress. I argue that the practice of fashionable tattooing in Victorian England engendered a crisis regarding the cultural meaning of tattoos. No longer marking only sailors, criminals, or colonial subjects, tattoos also graced the bodies of the fashionable elite. Read in this light, Haggard's novel challenges the limits of an imperial power predicated on clear demarcations between civilized and savage practices. By instead situating Augusta's ink within colonial women's tattooing practices, I understand the tattoo as illegible to dominant narratives of cultural legitimacy, highlighting its challenge to imperial definitions of civilization.