Settler colonialism had a formative impact on the development of English literature. As narratives of emigration and settlement critically engaged with fiction produced ‘back home’, at the imperial centre, and increasingly also with each other, they added a crucial aspect to imperialism's complex influence on both colonial and ‘metropolitan’ culture. The expansion of the British Empire and all it stood for consequently shaped literary culture both in Victorian Britain and in its colonies. It extended the confines of the traditional English novel in its choice of location and thematic concerns as well as in terms of its production and consumption. The nineteenth century was a crucial time for fiction produced in Britain's colonial settler world, laying down the foundation for new national canons. It might even be seen as marking the beginning of a global spread of ‘Anglophone’ writing or a ‘literature in English’ that ‘the nineteenth-century literary world took for granted’. But it was precisely because Victorian settler narratives displayed an ambiguous slant in addressing a twofold reader-ship – located in Britain and in the colonial peripheries – that these narratives participated in what is now beginning to be referred to as ‘nineteenth-century “global formations”’ or ‘the rise of the Anglo-world’. In metropolitan fiction, meanwhile, recourse to shifting ‘other’ spaces continually redirected the empire's function in the popular imagination.