Nineteenth-century British histories of the Indian ‘Mutiny’ have usually been seen as a moment of unequivocal imperial confidence. Little account has been taken of the large number of complex, non-historical texts that memorialized the ‘Mutiny’. Victorian Britain witnessed a wide and varied interest in the representation of events of the past. The representations spanned many genres and continually multiplied in form and medium under the impetus of an expanding commodity culture. Commoditized memorial texts—unlike professional histories—are read by an extremely diverse group of people. The wide dissemination and variety made the texts semantically unstable.
By concentrating on non-historical memorial texts of the ‘Mutiny’ and by attending to both their production and consumption, we can discern a far wider set of attitudes towards the ‘Mutiny’. Not only are many of these texts revealed to be ambivalent towards the imperial project, but also indeed they reveal a multiplicity of fissures within Victorian society.
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