Dickens's concern with Britain's overseas colonies is evident in his earliest writings, where it frequently becomes entangled with anxieties about the need for social reform nearer to home. Although in his lifetime he only visited two of Britain's colonial holdings – Canada in 1842 and Ireland in 1858, 1867 and 1869 – Dickens became much more engaged with imperial issues from the 1850s onwards. This growing concern with the Empire may be attributed partially to growing public interest in Britain's overseas acquisitions and partly to the role that the colonies were beginning to play in Dickens's own life, as he dispatched his sons to different parts of the globe. In 1860 John Forster wrote of the Dickens boys: ‘Charley is in the Far East, Sydney is at sea, Walter in India, Alfred in Australia, whither he is planning to send another boy to join him’. Just as in his fiction Dickens often banished troublesome characters like Mr Micawber in David Copperfield to the colonies, so he sent his sons out into the Empire in the hope of teaching them to be autonomous and not to depend upon the reputation and generosity of their famous father.

Dickens, was not, however, unique in resorting to emigration to deal with troublesome dependants. The nineteenth century saw the rise of assisted emigration schemes to deal with the social problems ensuing from industrialisation and the migration of workers from the country to the city.