In literature written in the latter half of the Nineteenth-Century, during the great age of the British Empire, savage antagonists crop up in unexpected places. The notion that savagery existed at a far remove was ironically counterbalanced by a suspicion that savagery lurked within the English state and subject.Outlandish English Subjects in the Victorian Domestic Novel traces the development of this suspicion in Nineteenth-Century Evangelicism and anthropology. Both disciplines promoted the idea of a universal human family, establishing a theoretical context in which estranged 'relatives', those beliefs and practises disparagingly associated with colonial otherness, might reappear within the English family homeVictorian writers such as Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and George Meredith enact the distressing return of colonial otherness by using ethnographic descriptions of Africa and India to satirize the social scene at home. In their domestic novels, varieties of colonial otherness ironically infiltrate figures, institutions, and ideas perceived as bulwarks of Englishness.