We begin not where Dickens invites us to begin--that is, on page one of The Pickwick Papers, where a ray of light illumines fiction's gloom--but in the adventure stories of the eighteenth century that paved the way for Dickens's first novel. (1) We begin with Lovelace declaring himself an emperor and Clarissa "his conquest"; we begin along Tom Jones's pilgrimage toward "home" and a sense of domestic stability. And we begin with travelers who defy the boundaries of fair Britannia: with Robinson Crusoe, whose original sin was in leaving home in the first place, and his appropriation of an island in a masterstroke of homemaking and empire-building; and Gulliver, whose travelogues relate a number of imaginative journeys into imperial recesses--ranging from make-believe Laputa to make-believe Japan. Though what are considered the true fictions of empire are over a century in the making at this point--G. A. Henty's youthful exploratory parties have yet to tame the wilds of brutish South Africa, Rider Haggard's Holly and Leo are years from uncovering the erotic mysteries of Ayesha and the Amahaggar, and even Wilkie Collins's moonstone is yet safe and sound in the bosom of a Hindu moon shrine--the romances and travel writing of the eighteenth century prepare the way for Dickens's own tale of travel, exploration and movement toward some better understanding of what it means to be "at home." Amidst their excursions, pursuits, human and archival discoveries, and persistent use of imperial rhetoric and imaging, these novels introduce what will be the nineteenth-century fetishization of home and its other. As G. K. Chesterton has said of Pickwick, "He has set out walking to the end of the world, but he knows he will find an inn there" (67). (2) In other words, traveling away from home ultimately leads back to it, whether necessitating or being in and of itself a return.
