In Victorian Britain, the antipodes’ image became newly invested with hope and excitement, fear of dubious transactions overseas and also an eager interest in narratives of disappointment and failure. Unsuccessful adventurers or would-be settlers not only disrupted colonial settlement processes and disproved emigration propaganda; they came back to upset the domestic structures they had left behind. The popular press regularly held them up as warnings against badly planned gold-digging forays as well as against overeager expectations of a ‘Better Britain’ attained simply through relocation. Cautionary tales had the twofold function of counteracting overly enthusiastic belief in marvellous success stories, of reassuring those staying safely behind that they were not missing out, while simultaneously entertaining them with descriptions of exotic adventure. These narratives made up a substantial part of an emergent ‘counter-current of anti-emigration literature, the “Taken In” sub-genre’, at a time when ‘booster literature’ or ‘emigration literature’ ‘almost monopolized published information about emigration destinations’.