Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914 1107066077, 9781107066076

Table of contents :
Cover
Half title
Series title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: better men
Chapter
1 Gunga Din and other better men: the burden of imperial manhood in Kipling's verse
Other men
Better men
The burdens of manhood
Chapter 2 Cultural cross-dressing and the politics of masculine performance
Visibility, scrutiny, and shame
The imperial politics of adaptability
Beating them at their own game
Chapter 3 Piracy, play, and the boys who wouldn't
grow up
Piracy, boyhood, and empire before Stevenson
Treasure Island: a furlough from the moral law
Lord Jim: the problem of shame
The pirate empire
Chapter 4 In statu pupillari: schoolboys, savages, and colonial authority
Tom Brown's
School Days: taming the savage boy
Stalky and Co.: the savage boy in harness
The Harrovians and other lessons in bushido
Chapter 5 Barbarism and the lost worlds of masculinity
Onward to barbarism
Primal men and New Imperialists
Anthropology and Atlantis
Chapter 6 Mummies, marriage, and the occupation of Egypt
The love story of Egyptology
An empire of veils
The horror behind the veil
Chapter 7 Fitter men: H. G. Wells and the impossible future of masculinity
Horrors of the epicene future
Empire, evolution, and the guiding intellect
The violent resurgence of manhood
Notes
Introduction: better men
1 Gunga Din and other better men: the burden of imperial manhood in Kipling's
verse
2 Cultural cross-dressing and the politics of masculine performance
3 Piracy, play, and the boys who wouldn't
grow up
4 In statu pupillari: schoolboys, savages, and colonial authority
5 Barbarism and the lost worlds of masculinity
6 Mummies, marriage, and the occupation of Egypt
7 Fitter men: H. G. Wells and the impossible future of masculinity
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

MASCULINITY AND THE NEW IMPERIALISM

At the end of the nineteenth century, the zenith of its imperial chauvinism and jingoistic fervor, Britain’s empire was bolstered by a surprising new ideal of manliness, one that seemed less English than foreign, less concerned with moral development than perpetual competition, less civilized than savage. This study examines the revision of manly ideals in relation to an ideological upheaval whereby the liberal imperialism of Gladstone was eclipsed by the New Imperialism of Disraeli and his successors. Analyzing such popular genres as lost-world novels, school stories, and early science fiction, it charts the decline of mid-century ideals of manly self-control and the rise of new dreams of gamesmanship and frank brutality. It reveals, moreover, the dependence of imperial masculinity on real and imagined exchanges between men of different nations and races, so that visions of hybrid masculinities and honorable rivalries energized Britain’s sense of its New Imperialist destiny. b r a d l e y de a n e is Associate Professor of English and MorseAlumi Distinguished University Teaching Professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He is author of The Making of the Victorian Novelist (2003). Work for this book was supported by a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities.

cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture General editor Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge Editorial board Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck, University of London Kate Flint, Rutgers University Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley D. A. Miller, University of California, Berkeley J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine Daniel Pick, Birkbeck, University of London Mary Poovey, New York University Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia Nineteenth-century British literature and culture have been rich fields for interdisciplinary studies. Since the turn of the twentieth century, scholars and critics have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature and the visual arts, politics, social organization, economic life, technical innovations, scientific thought – in short, culture in its broadest sense. In recent years, theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts have unsettled the assumptions of previous scholarly synthesis and called into question the terms of older debates. Whereas the tendency in much past literary critical interpretation was to use the metaphor of culture as ‘background’, feminist, Foucauldian, and other analyses have employed more dynamic models that raise questions of power and of circulation. Such developments have reanimated the field. This series aims to accommodate and promote the most interesting work being undertaken on the frontiers of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies: work which intersects fruitfully with other fields of study such as history, or literary theory, or the history of science. Comparative as well as interdisciplinary approaches are welcomed. A complete list of titles published will be found at the end of the book.

MASCULINITY AND THE NEW IMPERIALISM Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914

BRADLEY DEANE

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107066076 © Bradley Deane 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2014 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Deane, Bradley, 1971– Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914 / Bradley Deane. pages cm – (Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 91) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-06607-6 (Hardback) 1. English literature–19th century–History and criticism. 2. English literature–20th century– History and criticism. 3. Masculinity in literature. 4. Imperialism in literature. I. Title. pr468.m38d43 2014 820.90 3521–dc23 2014002056 isbn 978-1-107-06607-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgments

page vi vii

Introduction: better men

1

1 Gunga Din and other better men: the burden of imperial manhood in Kipling’s verse

19

2 Cultural cross-dressing and the politics of masculine performance 51 3 Piracy, play, and the boys who wouldn’t grow up

85

4 In statu pupillari: schoolboys, savages, and colonial authority

115

5 Barbarism and the lost worlds of masculinity

147

Mummies, marriage, and the occupation of Egypt

171

7 Fitter men: H. G. Wells and the impossible future of masculinity

200

Notes Bibliography Index

232 255 270

6

v

Illustrations

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

“The Great African Lion-Tamer.” Punch 105 (18 November 1893): 230 Illustration of Robert Baden-Powell from Illustrated London News. Mafeking Supplement (19 May 1900): 1 Illustration from G. A. Henty’s The Dash for Khartoum (London: Blackie & Son, 1892), 356 “New Crowns for Old Ones!” Punch 70 (15 April 1876): 147 Illustration from Rudyard Kipling’s Soldier Stories (New York and London: Macmillan, 1896), 187 “A Lesson.” Punch 76 (1 March 1879): 91 “A Lesson in Patriotism.” Punch 127 (6 July 1904): 3 “Turk the Sublime!” Punch 110 (7 March 1896): 110 “Cleopatra before Caesar.” Punch 83 (7 October 1882): 163 Illustration from Rider Haggard’s “Smith and the Pharaohs.” Strand Magazine 45 (February 1913): 122 Illustration from Rider Haggard’s She (Longman’s, Green and Co., 1888), 152 Illustration from Rider Haggard’s She (Longman’s, Green and Co., 1888), 276 Illustration from A. C. Doyle’s “Lot No. 249.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 85 (September 1892): 541

52 55 72 75 81 142 143 172 173 180 184 189 194

All these images are reproduced from the holdings of the University of Minnesota, except Figure 5 (from the holdings of Concordia College) and Figures 11 and 12 (from the holdings of the University of South Dakota).

vi

Acknowledgments

This book is indebted to more institutions, colleagues, and friends than I can ever repay. They include the National Endowment for the Humanities, whose summer stipend came at a particularly welcome moment, and the University of Minnesota – both the statewide system and our own liberal arts campus at Morris – for generously funding research travel and providing time to write. Morris has also offered a wonderfully collegial and interdisciplinary atmosphere in which to develop this book’s arguments. I want to thank my current and former colleagues who were especially helpful and encouraging: Dan Demetriou, Roland Guyotte, Rich Heyman, Michael Lackey, Brook Miller, Gretchen Murphy, and Dwight Purdy. The book has also benefited from a long series of conversations with Morris’s smart and earnest undergraduates (especially Jake Grussing, who helped research Chapter 5), and from the assistance of our dedicated library staff (especially Sandy Kill’s help with inter-library loans). I am also deeply grateful for the scholarly advice and friendly support of many Victorianists who have read early drafts of this work and discussed it with me at conferences, especially James Eli Adams, Nicholas Daly, Andrew Elfenbein, Christopher Herbert, Jen Hill, Neil Hultgren, Deanna Kreisel, John Kucich, Jules Law, Muireann O’Cinneide, and Dan Novak. Earlier versions of parts of this book have appeared before in Victorian Studies (Chapter 3), Victorian Literature and Culture (Chapter 5), and English Literature in Transition (Chapter 6); all have since been revised and expanded. Thanks are due to the readers and editors of those journals, and to Cambridge University Press for the invaluable assistance provided by both its anonymous readers and its wonderfully helpful editors, Linda Bree and Anna Bond. Above all, I wish to thank my family for their limitless patience and unflagging support. In particular I thank my daughters, Lucy and Tess, vii

viii

Acknowledgments

for putting up with my schedule so graciously, and my father-in-law, Ivan Cole, for enlightening and provocative chats about Conrad and Stevenson. Most of all, I am grateful to Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, always my first editor, sharpest reader, and best friend. This book would not exist without her, and I dedicate it to her with affection and admiration.

Introduction: better men

Men made the Empire, according to countless stories consumed by late Victorian and Edwardian readers, and, according to other stories just as numerous, the Empire made men. The divergent emphases of these two propositions suggest a muddled reaction to the range of doubts that stories of men and Empire were called upon to relieve: could the strained and far-flung Empire, increasingly beset by powerful economic and military rivals, be preserved by Britain’s stout, manly spirit? Or was it that the men of a degenerate metropole required a stiff dose of the frontier to scour off the accumulated weaknesses of an over-civilized life? The confusion of the causal priority of manliness and Empire, however, does not diminish the significance of a broader cultural conviction that the two were mutually constitutive, that they made and reaffirmed each other. This book examines a wide range of accounts of the exploits of British heroes across real and imagined frontiers, but it is ultimately concerned with a broader story of ideological change. Its real subject, in other words, is not men and Empire but the ideas of masculinity and imperialism, and the cultural synthesis they achieved between 1870 and 1914. The historical specificity of this frame is crucial, not only because the connections between masculinity and imperialism were more pronounced at this time than ever before, but also because new understandings of each of these ideologies were consolidated during the same period. By the late nineteenth century, the standard of manliness was carried by new champions; paragons of midcentury manliness, such as the entrepreneur, the missionary, and the affectionate family man, had been elbowed aside by the untamed frontiersman, the impetuous boy, and the unapologetically violent soldier. Imperialism, meanwhile, rose to the center of popular consciousness just as its political justifications were fundamentally transformed. Emerging arguments about the meaning of manhood and the purpose of Empire turned to each other for cultural authority, and popular literature, which was undergoing changes of its own, mediated 1

2

Masculinity and the New Imperialism

the combination and disseminated to a wide and enthusiastic audience new fantasies of an imperialist masculinity. Reflecting ruefully on these cultural transformations, Charles Masterman, Liberal journalist and soon to be MP for West Ham North, blamed the work of popular writers. These “Apostles of the New Imperialism” had successfully contrived a great betrayal of the literary mission: “Literature, after its long alliance with the party of reform, had deliberately deserted to the enemy.”1 Midcentury literature, Masterman argues, had been cosmopolitan, humanitarian, progressive – in a word, liberal. The new literature, by contrast, was above all imperialist, and imperialist in a “frankly Tory” way, one which “branded Liberalism as but a gigantic fraud by which the weak deluded the strong.”2 Not long ago, sanguine liberals had imagined an end to war, a brotherhood of nations united by trade, and the radiation of the “sweet reasonableness of the English character” across the globe. Now, bloodthirsty reactionaries “clamoured for the ancient Barbarism; and delighted in war; and would spread English civilization, not by a diffusion of its ideas but by the destruction of its enemies.”3 It was not even clear, Masterman goes on, that the values literature had come to embrace were English at all. If at some moments the New Imperialists crowed about English supremacy, at others they “neglected and despised the ancient pieties of an older England, the little isle set in its silver sea. Greatness became bigness; specific national feeling parochial.”4 Masterman writes with the hyperbole of a frustrated partisan, but there is considerable substance behind his generalization about literature’s turn to the aggressive, illiberal politics of the New Imperialism. The popular genres examined in this book, including pirate stories, military adventures, mummy tales, and lost-world fiction, all captured the imagination of enormous readerships and asked them to identify with heroes transformed by encounters with a vast, exotic, and savage world. Civilized England, as many of their protagonists thought, seemed narrow and dull by comparison. And though the point is only hinted at in Masterman’s critique, much of this literature was also explicitly and self-consciously masculine. Aimed at a readership of men and boys, these stories centered on interactions between male characters; women – especially British women – were driven to the narrative margins, leaving questions of masculine identity to be decided by relations between and within male groups rather than by reference to feminine virtues. The new conventions of popular literature, moreover, emerged in the context of the romance revival of the 1880s, itself a highly gendered rejection of what were thought to be enervating feminine themes of contemporary realism and its delicate,

Introduction: better men

3

over-refined studies of character. In place of these, masculine romance would offer imaginative and exhilarating yarns that would speak to what Andrew Lang called “the savage within us,” and “the old barbarian under our clothes.”5 Lang’s claim that popular romances spoke to an abiding savagery in male nature corroborates Masterman’s point that literature had abandoned progressive themes and “clamoured for the ancient Barbarism,” but it also raises one of the most intriguing and overlooked dimensions of the New Imperialist masculinity: the extent to which it was articulated around images of foreign men – even non-white, uncivilized colonial subjects – as exemplars of proper manliness.6 Restlessly searching for aspirational models of better men, the New Imperialists often turned their eyes abroad, even to the enemies they confronted and the peoples they had conquered. If we are surprised by the diversity of places in which they claimed to discover such men, it may be because our expectations have been conditioned by the axioms of postcolonial cultural criticism. One of the most central of these, after all, has been the thesis that the Western imperial imagination is founded on the imperative to differentiate unconditionally between colonizers and their subjects, and thus to produce justificatory stereotypes about colonized peoples – their violent barbarism, their irresponsible childishness, their superstitious ignorance – that emphasized their distance from the civilized nations who were thereby entitled to rule them. In light of this thesis, the many counterexamples examined in this book pose a fascinating conundrum: at the very moment of Britain’s greatest colonial power, the zenith of its cultural arrogance and racial chauvinism, the Empire was bolstered by fantasies of a manhood that transcends the distinctions of border and breed. Why is it that relationships between men, even if only imaginary, could function as an exception to the imperial rule? Through an analysis of popular literature aimed at men and boys, I show that the same stereotypes that had been used to denigrate the colonial Other were adapted by late Victorian and Edwardian men to crystallize new masculine ideals and give form to emerging cultural desires that were unrepresentable in the images of manhood they inherited from their fathers. The exotic barbarian was held up to male audiences as a figure with whom they had much in common, and who might therefore hold the keys to both a reinvigorated individual life and an empire made fierce enough to withstand the pressures of late nineteenth-century geopolitics. The phrase “better men” reverberates through the wide range of popular texts considered in this book, appearing so frequently, I will suggest, because it promised an answer to urgent questions about the ideals of

4

Masculinity and the New Imperialism

masculinity and the global networks of power that shaped it. The note was struck most famously by Rudyard Kipling, Masterman’s chief example of the literary “Apostles of the New Imperialism.” Kipling’s memorable line “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din,” provocatively recognizes superior masculine qualities in a foreigner who would once have been easily derided. The following chapters will explore many variations on this theme, beginning with an explication of “Gunga Din.” I will argue that the force of Kipling’s line for his contemporaries depends on a profound reorientation of the very notion of better manhood, one promoted by changing imperial politics: where early and mid-Victorian ideals of masculinity emphasized narratives of personal development (I am a better man than I was), later imperialist stories stressed continual competition (I am a better man than he is). This agonistic model could imagine putatively savage peoples as important players in a perpetual masculine contest, and not only as the opponents of British men but also as their counterparts or guides. At the same time, the dream of unceasing competition between men could naturalize and support the increasingly aggressive values that characterized the politics of imperialism from the 1870s to the First World War. Asked to describe the Victorian ideal of manhood, most of us would probably conjure an image from the middle of the nineteenth century, say, 1860 or so: an earnest, mature, hard-working, morally upright paterfamilias, frock-coated and (in that decade) full-bearded. The prominence of this type represents the triumph of decades of ideological work through which middle-class values, drawing on liberal economics and evangelical seriousness, supplanted the older and increasingly disreputable image of gentry masculinity while appropriating and reworking some of its terms of approbation, such as gentlemanliness and chivalry.7 The middle-class hero of midcentury, unlike his gentry predecessor, could make a virtue of trade and commerce, and – especially after the exhortations of muscular Christianity8 – join in the strenuous crusade of social transformation. But his chief struggle was moral and internal. As both Herbert Sussman and James Eli Adams have shown, the master value of midcentury manliness was self-discipline, the ability to resist temptation and channel the springs of male energy to laudable ends. This inward drama was popularly staged as a narrative of moral maturation (as in David Copperfield’s eventual mastery of his “undisciplined heart”)9 whereby a liberal developmental ideal of self-culture steered the natural impulses of boyhood into a carefully regulated manliness. No other challenge a man faced mattered more than this primary struggle for moral self-discipline: “the highest virtue,”

Introduction: better men

5

as Samuel Smiles advised, was “the victory over ourselves.”10 Charles Kingsley’s similar point suggests how the manliness of self-discipline could be used in an imperial context to differentiate English virtue from the behavior of unmanly savages: “To be bold against the enemy is common to the brutes; but the prerogative of a man is to be bold against himself.”11 The same quality of self-discipline used by Malthus to distinguish civilization from barbarity had become a means of defining manliness against the primal competitiveness of the savage. Self-mastery was the close corollary of another key masculine ideal, autonomy, which was itself an affirmation of liberal individualism over the old aristocracy’s hierarchical network of obligations, patronage, and deference. Yet for all his isolating independence, the manly struggler against himself was at least allowed the support of his domestic circle. The importance of family relationships to masculine identity has long been obscured by the inertia behind the stereotype of separate spheres, the starkly gendered division between masculine public activity and the feminine sanctuary of the household. But as we have been reminded by such influential histories as Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes and John Tosh’s A Man’s Place, domestic life in its real and idealized forms was a central pillar of middle-class masculine identity. As Tosh puts it, “The Victorian ideal of domesticity was in all respects the creation of men as much as women. ‘Woman’s sphere’ was a convenient shorthand, not a call to exclusivity.”12 The comfortable household signified not only a man’s success as a breadwinner, but also a haven in which his manly character could be bolstered by the moral influence of his wife or expressed through his divinely sanctioned authority, as when he led the household in prayer. Domesticity thus offered men profound pleasures of its own: “only at home could a man be truly and authentically himself. While the workplace and the city crippled his moral sense and disturbed his human relationships, home gave play to feelings of nurture, love and companionship, as well as ‘natural’ forms of authority and deference; it nourished the whole man.”13 The domestic ideal framed interpretations of the Empire as well, so that the civilizing mission was often represented as an effort to reproduce its gender norms overseas. Thus British outrage over the Sepoy “Mutiny” in 1857 was fanned by accounts that emphasized its assault on domesticity. The Indian rebels who had violated British homes and murdered women and children were unmanly, but Henry Havelock, the great masculine hero of the Mutiny’s suppression, was celebrated as a man of “warm domestic sympathies.”14

6

Masculinity and the New Imperialism

What became of our ideal man of 1860? Scholarly investigations of gender and sexuality during the later Victorian and Edwardian periods have been engrossed by rebellions against the norm: aesthetes and decadents, sexual dissidents of all sorts, the New Woman and, more recently, her counterpart, the New Man. The powerful insights of this scholarship, however, have overshadowed another vital part of the story, which is that masculine norms were themselves in flux. Several independent lines of evidence point to an erosion of the midcentury ideal. David Newsome, for instance, notes the decline of the principle of moral maturity in the late nineteenth century: the sense that boys could hardly be hurried into adulthood quickly enough gave way to a version of manliness that hardly cared “to make boys into men at all.”15 J. A. Mangan’s work on the games ethic, meanwhile, shows that while athleticism rose rapidly to cultural prominence, it also departed from its earlier goals, enshrining a manliness that had less to do with moral character than aggressive competition.16 John Mackenzie charts the rise of new popular exemplars of masculinity during the same period; where Smiles had celebrated the engineer, entrepreneur, and missionary, later generations were enthralled by the hunter and, especially from the 1870s on, by the imperial soldier.17 Tosh, meanwhile, argues that the 1870s were the beginning of an even more telling transformation, which he calls “the flight from domesticity”: wearied of domestic pleasures and worried by emerging forms of women’s authority, increasing numbers of men rejected or postponed marriage, finding their satisfactions instead within groups of male peers in homosocial institutions such as the club, the athletic organization, or the military.18 All of these developments, along with others described later in this book, converge during the late nineteenth century in the consolidation of what we might call – with some caution – a new hegemonic masculinity. The analytic frame of hegemonic masculinity that informs this study derives from the work of the sociologist Raewyn Connell, who uses the term to distinguish a society’s most authoritative construction of masculinity from other subordinated or marginalized models with which it coexists: “At any given time,” she argues, “one form of masculinity rather than others is culturally exalted.”19 Connell’s approach is not without its critics, who point out that to select one cluster of masculine values as hegemonic can oversimplify the diverse range of other contemporary ideals as well as the even more intricate interactions between possible gender configurations in the experience of individual lives.20 Yet Connell’s framework remains valuable at the level of cultural analysis because it challenges us to understand how some masculine models enjoy a privileged

Introduction: better men

7

relationship to institutional power, and thus exercise enormous influence over the lives of men and women whether they accept those models or not. At the same time, Connell’s concept implies the fragility and contingency of a dominant model – any hegemonic masculinity stands uneasily at a moment between the configuration it has displaced and that which will displace it – and so spurs us toward a more historically nuanced analysis than, say, the uncomplicated alignment of masculine identities with social class. Connell’s framework is helpful for the purposes of this book, moreover, because it highlights the power of an idealized masculinity, even when the kinds of activity promoted by the ideal are unavailable to the men who consent to it. Before the First World War, only a fraction of Victorian and Edwardian men had any direct experience of military or colonial life, much less of the rowdy voyages of colonial adventure fiction, but popular audiences found the dream of imperial masculinity no less compelling. Outside the relatively few studies that have taken it as their particular focus, the conventional scholarly wisdom about imperial manliness has been content to point to a few of its most conspicuous traits – its militarism, its hostility to feminine influence, and its fascination with the powerful male body – and declare the period to be an age of “hypermasculinity.” Yet that term misleadingly implies that the effect of the Empire was merely to intensify and exaggerate masculine values that already existed (or, more misleadingly still, that exist always and everywhere). In fact, just as the New Imperialism was not merely an escalation of earlier political commitments but a seismic revision of the Empire’s purpose, so too was imperial masculinity marked by its readiness to reject earlier masculine values. The record of popular literature allows us to trace the displacement of these older forms and follow the ideological ramifications of imperialist masculinity to important new insights. It can show us, for instance, that fantasies of all-male communities subordinated not only the mid-Victorians’ cherished domesticity, but also their belief that a man’s most important struggle was against the standards of his own conscience. Judgments of the male group superseded the self-scrutiny of moral improvement, and shame surpassed guilt as the paramount mode of male anxiety. Discipline turned outward, too, from the internal struggle for self-mastery to a collective mode of discipline epitomized by the military, or to the individual resistance to external hardships prized by the growing emphasis on masculine endurance. At the same time, instinct and spontaneity could be valued over painstaking deliberation, and impulse and irrationality taken for passionate male authenticity. Transcendent principles or universal laws came to be less appealing than

8

Masculinity and the New Imperialism

malleable rules that enabled ludic, amoral contests of cleverness and guile. Above all, popular literature can show us that transvalued stereotypes of savagery became potent symbols of masculine possibilities, so that atavism could be imagined as a sign of strength rather than weakness, exoticism as one of virility rather than effeminacy, and the relapse into barbarism as an empowering fantasy rather than a paralyzing anxiety. “Hypermasculinity” scarcely does justice to these richly complicated and often contradictory aspects of manliness, nor does it help us to see how thoroughly consistent they were with the new demands of imperial politics. By the 1870s, England was already the center of a vast Empire, but in the four decades preceding the First World War it set its bounds wider still and wider. Among the many new protectorates, colonies, and annexations during this period we might list the Gold Coast (1874), Cyprus (1878), Egypt (1882), North Borneo (1882), Upper Burma (1888), British East Africa (1888), Southern Rhodesia (1889), Kuwait (1899), Sudan (1899), and the several colonies and conquered regions that were ultimately federated as South Africa in 1910. All told, the territory added to the Empire in these decades amounted to some forty times the area of today’s United Kingdom. Even as the Empire expanded, however, it faced new challenges from other empires that were consolidating and widening their own spheres of economic, political, and military influence. The alarmingly swift defeat of the French in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) marked not only the rise of a powerful German Empire but also the beginning of intense imperial rivalries, European contests for resources and prestige that were decided in distant terrains of Africa and the Pacific. The many little wars, diplomatic negotiations, and innovations in legislation and colonial administration that refashioned the British Empire during this period cannot be adequately sketched in this book, which provides only enough background to allow readers to follow specific arguments as they relate to particular instances of colonial domination and imperial rivalry; readers who wish to learn more about the events discussed in this book – such as the Sepoy Rebellion, the Royal Titles Act, the occupation of Egypt and campaigns in the Sudan, or the Second Boer War – can, I hope, readily find overviews in widely available sources. In the following few pages, I want to emphasize a different kind of context, a background essential for the broader arguments of this study, but one that is possibly less familiar and certainly less accessible than the lists of battles and bills. The context that requires elaboration is the momentous turn in British attitudes about the import and mission of the Empire.

Introduction: better men

9

The 1870s, pivotal years in the history of masculinity, also saw the birth of what would later be called the New Imperialism. Historians have disagreed about the precise definition of this term, its explanatory value, and even the boundaries of the period to which it should be applied, so it is necessary to clarify how the term will be used here.21 By the “New Imperialism” I mean the cultural conviction, rooted in political discourse but broadly diffused through the media of popular culture, that the Empire was the source and proof of Britain’s glory. In a period of intensifying rivalry with other emerging imperial powers, the Empire would be the bulwark of British prestige and global influence, so that close bonds with the colonies of white settlement required careful fostering, while control over non-white colonial dependencies had to be jealously maintained. It is in relation to these core beliefs – rather than to any coherent set of colonial policies or fits of territorial acquisition – that we can plausibly speak of the New Imperialism as the culturally ascendant ideology of empire from its emergence during the great political debates of the 1870s until its collapse on the battlefields of the First World War. To analyze its impact on Victorian and Edwardian popular culture, however, we must attend not only to the central convictions of the New Imperialism, but also to the nimbus of qualities and attitudes with which it became associated. These included, first of all, a frankly competitive spirit, demonstrated by an aggressive assertion of national prestige against threats from rivals and a militant readiness to defend or expand its influence (from the late 1870s, the more feverish demotic eruptions of this spirit would be called jingoism). Moreover, in its fixation on prestige, the New Imperialist ethos was attentive to appearances, attracted to the performative and even theatrical dimensions of power, enamored by spectacle, ceremonial pomp, and the bold symbolic stroke. Where the gesture failed, it was prepared to turn to naked force, and it intensely appreciated the military virtues. It was deeply concerned with honor, but less patient with the prohibitions of law, religion, and morality; to its proponents, this emphasis could be read as a pragmatic and realistic defense of British interests within the complex game of imperial powers, but to its enemies it seemed opportunistic, unprincipled, and Machiavellian. All these attitudes, as I shall argue over the course of this book, became attached in various degrees and combinations to popular representations of manhood. To clarify these broad strokes, we ought to begin with an individual man with whom all of these qualities were associated, Benjamin Disraeli, whose persona and policies were the chief inspiration for the New Imperialism, and who was enshrined in the years after his death as its symbolic champion. To appreciate the novelty of Disraeli’s influence, however, we must take a step further back to his great rival, William

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Masculinity and the New Imperialism

Gladstone, who became just as potent a symbol of liberal imperialism as Disraeli became of the ideology that eclipsed it. In the most important midcentury statement of his position on the Empire, “Our Colonies” (1855), Gladstone argues that the global extension of European power since the seventeenth century had been undertaken for all the wrong reasons. The colonization of the Americas, for example, had been driven by an irrational “love of gold” despite the claims of some colonists to have been motivated by the impulse to spread the word of God: “the history of the European civilisation in the West is a history of anything other than the propagation of the gospel.”22 Other material justifications for colonization had been similarly misguided. Those who sought to enhance the revenue of their mother countries, especially by establishing exclusive trading relationships, were blind to the truth later revealed by liberal political economists that only free, open, and mutually beneficial trading partnerships could effectively create wealth. Those who wanted to seize new lands had yielded to an even more pernicious impulse, since the “lust and love of territory have been among the greatest curses of mankind.” Gladstone also attacks the motive of prestige: though he allows that the reputation of an imperial state might usefully augment its “moral influence, power and grandeur,” it ought only to follow incidentally from an otherwise admirable colonial program rather than from a vain desire to “make a show in the world.”23 Having repudiated this array of imperial motives as unsound and unsavory, Gladstone asks, “Why then are colonies desirable?”24 He offers two answers. The first is material: colonization can open previously untapped resources and develop new markets, and so increase global trade. Yet because he does not believe that a colonial market should be fettered by any protected relationship with its metropole, it is ultimately valuable only as another market, not as a colonial market per se. Colonization is economically beneficial because it produces trade, not because it produces colonies. More interesting is Gladstone’s other reason for expansion: “the moral and social results which a wise system of colonisation is calculated to produce.”25 The English state should be moved to establish colonies, he argues, only by the same beneficent urge that prompts English people to have children. The increase of population augments the power and stability of a nation, and is a universal moral blessing insofar as it multiplies the number of people living under conditions of decency and justice: We think that our country is a country blessed with laws and a constitution that are eminently beneficial to mankind, and if so, what can be more to be desired than that we should have the means of reproducing in different portions of the globe something as like as may be to that country which we

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honour and revere? I think it is in a work by Mr. Roebuck that the expression is used, “that the object of colonisation is the creation of so many happy Englands.” It is the reproduction of the image and likeness of England – the reproduction of a country in which liberty is reconciled with order, in which ancient institutions stand in harmony with popular freedom, and a full recognition of popular rights, and in which religion and law have found one of their most favoured homes.26

Gladstone’s claim that the reproduction of Englishness throughout the world would morally profit humanity places him – just as much as his advocacy of free trade – squarely within a liberal tradition of imperialism. The seeds of this philosophical tradition, according to Uday Singh Mehta, can be found in Locke, and its fruition in the later work of Bentham, Macaulay, and the Mills. In its pursuit of universal truths and its understanding of human progress as a general movement toward those truths, Mehta contends, British liberalism ironically sought to reproduce what was already familiar. Foreign peoples, like unfamiliar territories, were to be remodeled along English lines, transformed into so many happy Englishmen through a process justified by paternalistic metaphors of tutelage and kinship.27 This civilizing mission, as it came to be known, would yield its full moral harvest when colonies could assume their own governance and deal with other states as free and rational agents in their own right. Gladstone emphasizes that self-governance is the only defensible terminus in the colonial journey, that the best relationships between states – even former colonies – must be free and voluntary, and that sympathy, rather than formal political ties, was the only desirable basis for such relationships. The story of progress toward autonomy promised by the liberal narrative of the civilizing mission was later so hypocritically mouthed in colonial discourse that it is easy to forget the extent to which some liberals took it seriously; it was Gladstone’s dogged support for Irish Home Rule, for instance, that fractured the Liberal party and cemented the dominance of the New Imperialism.28 For Disraeli, by contrast, the imperial project implied no narrative of dissolution; the paramount duty conferred on the British by their Empire was to keep it. In his Crystal Palace speech of 1872 – venerated by the end of the century as the talismanic proclamation by which Conservatives had claimed the imperial mantle – Disraeli warned his audience against the Liberal threat: “If you look to the history of this country since the advent of Liberalism – forty years ago – you will find that there has been no effort so continuous, so subtle, supported by so much energy, and carried on with so much ability and acumen, as the attempts of Liberalism to effect the disintegration of the Empire of England.”29

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Masculinity and the New Imperialism

In response to this menace, Disraeli announces that the Conservatives are dedicated to “the maintenance of the Empire.” The possession of colonies is an end in itself, the “great object of the Tory party,” rather than a font of wealth or an instrument of human progress. The colonies are not to be preserved for their own benefit – except perhaps incidentally – but as a “source of incalculable strength and happiness to this land.”30 But Disraeli’s most insistent argument, the one to which he returns in his peroration, is his appeal to English pride. He frames the diverging paths of Liberal and Conservative principles as a choice between meekly accepting mediocrity within a pack of European states, on the one hand, or, on the other, asserting English greatness for all the world to see: The issue is not a mean one. It is whether you will be content to be a comfortable England, modelled and moulded upon Continental principles and meeting in due course an inevitable fate, or whether you will be a great country, – an Imperial country – a country where your sons, when they rise, rise to paramount positions, and obtain not merely the esteem of their countrymen, but command the respect of the world.31

The motive force behind Disraeli’s imperial vision, in other words, is the competitive pursuit of prestige that Gladstone had denounced. National greatness becomes contingent on the maintenance of the Empire, which allows not only for strength and happiness but also for the agonistic pleasures of a rise, individually and nationally, to “paramount positions,” for the gratification of commanding “esteem” and “respect.” Under this banner of imperial prestige, Disraeli offers all men of the recently enlarged electorate a chance to rally in a contest for lasting glory, both collectively in the ongoing rivalry of European powers and individually in a domestic political battle that is already underway. “Upon you depends the issue,” he warns. “You must act as if everything depended on your individual efforts.”32 These two levels of struggle are fused together by an explicit appeal to competitive manliness. The “sons” of his auditors will be the beneficiaries of an empire maintained, while, more immediately, the threat of Liberal and continental principles represents a test of their manly resolve: “Yes, I tell all who are here present that there is a responsibility which you have incurred to-day, and which you must meet like men.” Part of this responsibility, he goes on, is to recruit others to answer the masculine challenge: “Make each man feel how much rests on his own exertions.”33 The ongoing masculinization of the imperial mission, already hinted at in Disraeli’s famous exhortation, will be explored through the remainder of this book. Before moving forward, however, I want to emphasize two

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related developments that will reappear in later chapters. The first is the marginalization of morality – often, but not exclusively, Christian morality – in New Imperialist discourse. The personal contrast between the dour Gladstone and the flamboyant Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield after 1876) promoted the view that the latter’s vision had more to do with seeming great than doing right. So too did the perceptions of Disraeli’s second administration, especially during the crisis surrounding the Eastern Question (1876–78). His apparent nonchalance toward the slaughter of Bulgarian Christians by the Turks, and his subsequent policy of supporting the Ottoman Empire as a buffer against Russian expansion, looked like proof that morality did not enter into Disraeli’s calculations of British interests. So, at any rate, argued Gladstone repeatedly during the righteous barnstorming of his Midlothian campaign. Gladstone’s towering moral dudgeon – coming as it did from a figure conspicuous for his pious rectitude – contributed to the sense that this new “imperialism” (or “Beaconsfieldism,” as he called it) was defined by its contrast to a Liberal foreign policy grounded in moral principle. Gladstone’s attack may have helped him back to power in the short run, but over time his principles were associated with what imperialists regarded as proof of his weakness, especially after the ignominious end of the First Boer War in 1881 and the martyrdom of Gordon at Khartoum in 1885. His belief that colonies should be preserved only for the right reasons could be interpreted as readiness to abandon the Empire altogether, just as Disraeli had warned. As The Times put it, “‘Imperialism’ was a word invented to stamp Lord Beaconsfield’s supposed designs with popular reprobation. But the weapon wounded the hand that wielded it, and a suspicion was engendered, which seriously injured the Liberal cause, that Liberalism was in some sort an antithesis of Imperialism.”34 But if Gladstone’s crusade had linked Liberalism with anti-imperialism in public opinion, other prominent Liberals, such as Edward Dicey and James Fitzjames Stephen, had already joined the New Imperialist consensus that England’s greatness depended on the maintenance of the Empire, and that this political fact required no moral defense. Dicey, defending expediency over principle, frankly admitted “the difficulty of reconciling the existence of our Empire, or of any Empire supported by force, with the doctrines of the Sermon on the Mount.”35 The second pertinent development is the declining appeal of the civilizing mission, which had been the narrative corollary to the Empire’s moral duty. The belief that colonization was a story of progress had been crucial to liberal imperialism, both as an expression of its ultimate humanitarian purpose and as a justification for the inapplicability of

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universal principles to those peoples who were not yet prepared to enter into the sisterhood of nations. Yet faith in the possibility of civilizing subject races was broadly eroding by the later decades of the nineteenth century, and not only in Britain. As Andrew Porter summarizes, “There is no doubt at all that from mid-century the general outlook of Europeans rapidly became more critically dismissive of other societies, doubtful of non-European capacity for change and progress, and far more readily insistent on their own objectives and inclinations.”36 Porter suggests that the shift was abetted primarily by the rise of scientific racism, which implied that non-Europeans were naturally unable to adapt to European cultural models: “Once superiority of culture was linked to that of race, a different morality began to influence the practice of European expansion. Assimilation of European and non-European came to seem less desirable and perhaps impossible.”37 In the case of Britain, the waning appeal of the civilizing mission was punctuated by a series of crises – the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865, the Ilbert Bill controversy of 1883 – that convinced many Britons that the elevation of their subject races, at least within any foreseeable future, was sentimental nonsense and unsound policy. By the end of the century, invocations of the old rhetoric of the civilizing mission tended to describe the extension or consolidation of British authority rather than the transformation of natives; it meant the effort to supply order, health, and infrastructural improvements to peoples who could not, and could probably never be trusted to, provide for themselves. In this way the relatively static ideal of maintenance displaced the liberal telos of progress, leaving the story of the Empire as a picaresque tale in which adventures multiplied without ever concluding. As the colonial secretary, Lord Crewe, explained to the House of Lords in 1909, “What will be the future of India fifty, sixty, or a hundred years hence need not, I think, trouble us.”38 It was not only as though (as John Seeley had famously joked) the Empire had been acquired in a fit of absence of mind, but also that it was to be retained in an absence of purpose. Still, we should not assume, as did many anti-imperialists, that the drift away from the rhetoric of high moral purpose or the grand narrative of the civilizing mission led to an intoxicated anarchy of principles. Instead, the culture of the New Imperialism produced its own range of images, idioms, and ethical frameworks that could make sense of Britain’s global relationships and articulate new narratives of its history and destiny. This, as I shall argue, is why emerging constructions of masculinity played so vital a role. An emphasis on the competitive dimensions of manliness – as

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derived, for instance, from discourses of honor, gamesmanship, or military codes – provided conceptual templates through which the aggressive ideologies of the New Imperialism could be understood and valued. Moreover, insofar as competitive impulses could be represented as inherently male, masculinity could naturalize international rivalries and conflicts, and also challenge the manhood of dissenters. This emphasis on a naturally competitive manliness, rather than on the developmental ideals of midcentury manhood, also underwrote a sense of history in which struggle was constant and never-ending. Pressed into the service of a New Imperialist vision of global order, representations of the nature of manhood betray signs of new anxieties that became characteristic of this period: the worry, for instance, about the debilitating influence of civilization on manly character, and the heightened sense of vulnerability to shame – both national and individual – in the eyes of male competitors. Yet they also reveal ironies that considerably complicate the ramifications of New Imperialist identities. For example, even though Disraeli had painted Gladstone’s platform as cosmopolitan and his own as national, in many ways Gladstone’s liberal imperialism had depended more on notions of Englishness than its successor. Gladstone had contended that English greatness was rooted in England itself, which is why the independence of the colonies posed no threat. But for the New Imperialists, the Empire was integral to English identity and to its status relative to other nations; the Empire, and the men who made it, were therefore necessarily defined in comparative and adversarial terms, and the standards of comparison had to be transnational rather than insular. Hence the masculinity that undergirded the Empire was less self-sufficiently English or even civilized, and more intent on looking abroad for standards of a global manliness. Thus we arrive at a second remarkable irony: just as imperial discourse was increasingly authorized by hardening taxonomies of racial difference, it could look to other races for symbols of masculine virtue. The very simplicity of stereotypes that reduced whole races to a few essential qualities made men of those races imaginatively available as emblems of character, in some cases as the epitomes of manly traits worth admiring or emulating. Though some races were routinely regarded as effeminate or weak, others were represented as naturally warlike (e.g., Zulus, Sikhs, and Pathans), fearless (Sudanese Dervishes), loyal (Gurkhas), or honorable (Arabs and Japanese).39 Amid the uncertainties left by the decline of developmental models of masculine virtue, such racial stereotypes stood in as benchmarks of manliness by which British men might measure themselves. And to the

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extent that racial qualities were understood as essential and unchanging, foreign men could signify masculine standards undiminished by the decadence of modern civilization. They represented a purer masculinity of the past, one linked to the nation’s glorious history or to the uncorrupted impulses of boyhood. This association of boys, foreigners, and the men of Britain’s past was noted with alarm by Gladstone, who objected to the rising emphasis on honor in imperialist discourse as a disturbing anachronism: Men talk as if we were free to fight, as a Scotch lord would fight in Edinburgh three centuries ago for the centre of the causeway; or as a boy fought at Eton in my time to determine whether he could or could not ‘lick’ another boy; or as in Ireland, at a fair, shillelahs were flourished, and heads cruelly mauled and broken, for the simple preference of one name to another, or for the pleasure of that excitement which fighting brings. If we are to revive, in the present daylight, the levities of childhood, the manners of a semi-barbarous age, or the excesses pardonable in an overdriven people, it is high time to take heed and to make some inquiry concerning the paths of honour and of shame.40

For champions of progress like Gladstone, the celebration of competitive and potentially violent styles of honor was a horrifying atavism, a derangement of the narratives on which masculine maturity and English civilization were predicated. Yet New Imperialists traced precisely these connections between boyhood, history, and the colonies to construct normative models of manliness, concurring with Gladstone’s premise but reversing his conclusion. Hence a final irony in the debates over imperial ideals that simmered through the popular press from the 1870s on: while critics of the New Imperialism charged their opponents with embracing a resurgence of barbarous attitudes, accusing them of thinking like savages on the frontier, the advocates of the emerging imperial masculinity – especially in the fantasies of popular literature – were strikingly inclined to agree. The ironies I have sketched here are examined more closely in the first two chapters, which together introduce the broad themes of New Imperialist notions of manliness and their complicated relationship to stereotypes of non-European masculinities. Chapter 1 concerns the reconstitution of better manhood, showing that the thrust of normative masculinity was reoriented from the midcentury priority of personal development to its late-century preoccupation with international competition. The key texts here are Kipling’s patriotic poems – the genre to which he turned when he wanted to influence popular opinion most directly – which

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demonstrate how conceptions of honor (including Kipling’s own twist on masculine abjection) reframed male experience in the service of a global struggle for prestige. The second chapter complements this analysis by turning to the increasingly common examples of English men whose heroic glamour was expressed through cultural cross-dressing; that is, through their assumption of foreign clothing as a means of appropriating signs of exotic manliness. Investigating stories by A. E. W. Mason, G. A. Henty, and Kipling, I argue that the frequency of the trope in this period indicates the acute awareness of the performative dimensions of masculinity demanded by the pursuit of prestige, and that it expressed fantasies of an unusual form of hybridity that bolstered new strategies of colonial authority. Chapters 3 and 4 consider representations of boyhood that overturned mid-Victorian conceptions of masculine development. Chapter 3 explores one of the favorite figures of the New Imperialist imagination – the boy who never grows up – in light of the turn from liberal, progressive narratives toward the principle of imperial maintenance. Focusing particularly on fiction that pairs boys with pirates, I argue that together these figures naturalize an ethos of competitive play, which operated outside structures of conventional morality and international law but which offered in their place new sets of rules by which imperialism could be appreciated as a satisfying game of global adventure. Continuing to analyze changing ideas of maturation, Chapter 4 discusses the quasi-scientific discovery of a natural affinity between boys and savages. I chart the emergence of new attitudes about this connection in stories about public schools, the most celebrated incubators of manly character. Reading Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days and Kipling’s Stalky & Co. as allegories of distinct models of colonial authority, I show how the New Imperialism recognized the usefulness of the savage boy, and how the Empire, once the would-be schoolmaster to the world, now conceded that it had much to learn from other men. In the final three chapters, I turn from disrupted narratives of individual development to the grander scale of historical change, showing that the fall of the liberal telos of global progress encouraged the wild anachronisms of late Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction. Chapter 5 describes the astonishing proliferation of stories of exotic lost worlds, focusing particularly on contributions by Kipling, Rider Haggard, and Conan Doyle, to show how Britons began to understand barbarism as an aspect of manly character worth rediscovering. Chapter 6 investigates popular mummy stories in relation to Britain’s occupation of Egypt, arguing that the themes and narrative structure of these stories reproduce the politics

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of the “veiled Protectorate” and, more generally, Disraeli’s ideal of maintenance. The mummy tale rewrites the political “Egyptian Question” as a love story through which the Empire might wed itself to the timeless endurance of Pharaonic splendor. The final chapter turns to the futures imagined in the scientific romances of H. G. Wells, whose politics were decidedly opposed to most of the writers considered here. Nevertheless, Wells’s attempts to imagine evolutionary progress toward a more rational future repeatedly collapse into scenes of savage, two-fisted masculine violence. Meanwhile, the epitomes of rationalism, including those liberals who advocated restraint of bodily pleasure, are transformed in his fiction into sexless, macrocephalic monsters. I argue that the failure even of a progressive like Wells to imagine a future for masculinity demonstrates the hegemonic force of contemporary assumptions about imperial manhood. Together, these three chapters exhibit the fantastic timescapes of New Imperialist masculinity: its alluring past, its static present, and its impossible future. All of these chapters focus on popular literature, poems and stories that were themselves widely read by contemporaries (as were the works of Kipling, Stevenson, and Haggard) or that belonged to genres (such as school stories, pirate tales, or lost-world adventures) that were enthusiastically received. Yet in this study, popularity itself is not an object of analysis in the ways that imperialism and masculinity are. Rather, popular literature constitutes the domain from which I have chosen my examples, the group of texts that collectively offer us the best chance to discern broad patterns of cultural assumptions about imperial masculinity. Whatever the aesthetic merits of these works, their reception offers us some measure – inescapably limited though it may be – of the common aspirations and desires of the many readers who responded to them so eagerly. These works shaped, and were shaped by, the fantasies of an age, and they express those dreams more freely and more intimately than do the discourses of politics or science, and far more than the dispassionate record of actual events. Though influenced by such discourses and events, popular literature is also the product of the imagination – as are, in their different ways, masculinity and the Empire itself – and so it is with popular literature that we can begin to understand what it meant to be a better man in the age of the New Imperialism.

chapter 1

Gunga Din and other better men: the burden of imperial manhood in Kipling’s verse

Among the many bracing stories the Victorians told themselves about manly heroism on the frontier, there are two, told fifty years apart, that hint at transformations in both Britain’s imperial mission and qualities of the men who served it. The first story takes place during the Sixth Frontier War (1835–36) in southern Africa’s Eastern Cape Colony, when the newly constructed village of Salem was raided by Xhosa warriors. A carpenter named Richard Gush, a devout Quaker who had recently emigrated from Devon, rode out unarmed to confront the three hundred Xhosa men who had just attacked the town and made off with its cattle. According to an account given by the Quaker missionary James Backhouse, as Gush approached, the “Caffers” sent two of their men, a captain and an interpreter who could speak Dutch, to explain that they intended “to drive the English into the sea.” Undaunted, Gush replied that the settlers had done them no harm, and that the English were in fact their spiritual benefactors. Gesturing to the wooden church that he himself had built, he added “There the inhabitants of Salem pray for you, that you may become better men.”1 Remarkably, this assurance was enough to persuade the Xhosa, who immediately regretted the raid and sheepishly admitted that the new English presence in their territory was not their real concern. The captain and his translator “stood like men ashamed of their conduct, but said, it was hunger that drove them out to steal.” In response, Gush gave them food along with a stern remonstrance, telling them that he and the other settlers “had always been the best friends of the Caffers, and should not cease to pray, that God would make them better men; he also expostulated with them on their great wickedness.”2 The conflict settled, the story concludes with the lesson that Gush, having proven himself a worthy instrument of God, had won the colony a divine imprimatur: “The parties then shook hands, and the Caffers went away, and were no more seen in the vicinity of Salem, which might justly be regarded as given of the Lord, 19

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into the hand of one who dared to trust in Him.” The story of Richard Gush, in other words, is one in which the liberal imperialist dream of the civilizing mission meets the evangelical project of enlightening the heathen. Both ideologies are interwoven in an appealing narrative of masculine development: the poor carpenter from Devon has become a great man in the African colony, where, leading by faith and moral example, he and his fellow settlers will make better men of the natives. The second story of better manhood became far more famous than that of Richard Gush. It begins twenty years later during the great imperial trauma of the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, when a celebrated cavalry regiment, the Ninth Lancers, joined the effort to rescue the besieged British at Lucknow. Though greatly outnumbered, the troops successfully relieved the residency, and several of the Lancers were awarded the Army’s most prestigious decoration, the Victoria Cross, for valor under enemy fire. One of the men present during the campaign was Lt. Frederick Roberts (later Lord Roberts, commander-in-chief of the British Army), who recalled that the Lancers had their own opinion about who deserved commendation: the followers belonging to European regiments, such as cook-boys, saices and bhisties (water-carriers), as a rule, behaved in the most praiseworthy manner, faithful and brave to a degree. So much was this the case, that when the troopers of the 9th Lancers were called upon to name the man they considered most worthy of the Victoria Cross, an honour which Sir Colin Campbell purposed to confer upon the regiment to mark his appreciation of the gallantry displayed by all ranks during the campaign, they unanimously chose the head bhistie!3

The name of the courageous water-carrier has been lost to history, and as an Indian, he was ineligible to receive the award for which he had been nominated. Yet his story remained significant because, like Richard Gush’s, it answers the need of empire to justify its relationship to its subject peoples. For Roberts, the anecdote offers a comforting illustration of steadfast native loyalty amid the terror of rebellion, and it also reflects well on the British soldiers who recognized the Indian’s valor: “It speaks as well, I think, for the masters as the servants, and proves (what I have sometimes heard denied) that Native servants are, as a rule, kindly and considerately treated by their European masters.”4 And the story would become even more prominent after Roberts shared it with his young journalist friend, Rudyard Kipling, who reworked the idea of the heroic water-carrier, called him “Gunga Din,” and made him into the most famous “better man” in British literature.5

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The ideological work that Kipling’s bhisti performs differs from Roberts’s: there is no Victoria Cross in “Gunga Din,” and Din’s superiors are hardly models of kindness and consideration. But it differs still more profoundly from the story of Richard Gush and the evangelical fantasy of making the Xhosa “better men” through prayer. Kipling’s poem, aligning better manhood with the heathen Other, turns Gush’s narrative on its head. In a provocation designed to shake the self-assurance of the British civilizing mission, Kipling appealed instead to what Martin Green has called “the strain of Victorian feeling opposite to the missionary, the liberal, and the man of conscience.”6 This is not to say, however, that Kipling’s poem is any way anti-imperialist or racially enlightened. The stories of Gush and Gunga Din are both products of their imperial moments, and the chasm between the two indicates the depth of the changes wrought by fifty years upon Britain’s imperial dreams and the ideals of manliness that fed them. This chapter will argue that the construction of better manhood that emerges in Kipling’s verse can illuminate the distinctive preoccupations of New Imperialist ideology as it was popularized in literature and illustrate the uses of normative masculinity in winning support for a new vision of Britain’s global role. “Gunga Din” was first published in W. E. Henley’s Scots Observer in 1890, less than a year after Kipling had moved from India to London, where he took two small rooms on Villiers Street across from Gatti’s Music Hall. From this modest beachhead, he launched his ambitious poetic campaign to reform Britain’s understanding of its imperial identity, to teach his readers, as he later put it, “of the whole sweep and meaning of things and effort and origins throughout the Empire.”7 Asking, soon after, “What should they know of England who only England know?”8 Kipling wrote as a missionary in reverse, bearing the virtues of the colonies to a benighted metropole. The volume that collected the poems of those early years in London, Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (1892), testifies to Kipling’s urge to startle his readers out of complacency; so many of the poems are calculated to surprise and scandalize that, as Ann Parry has observed, if it were not for the inclusion of some more conventionally patriotic verses, the book might have been condemned as seditious.9 And even though Barrack-Room Ballads was enthusiastically received, Kipling’s verse became increasingly critical of British readers for failing to grasp the true demands of empire, veering in tone between the cautionary and the admonitory. His antagonistic posture reminds us that Kipling’s ideology of empire, though largely in the ascendant through the 1890s, was not the only imperialism on

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offer; it was challenged by the lingering values of a residual liberal model, and by changeable waves of public opinion that might ebb into irresponsible apathy or swell into feverish enthusiasm. In keeping with the political discourse of the New Imperialism, Kipling’s verse often appealed to his audience’s pride in British greatness, its position relative to other nations in an ongoing competition for global prestige. Evangelical notions of morally improving natives, by contrast, receive scant attention in the verse; the liberal telos toward universal rights and self-government gets even less, except when it is derided. Instead, the central themes of the patriotic poems are gratification in the Empire’s accomplishments and the perpetual duty of sustaining them. Yet the sheer scale of these themes threatens to become too grandly abstract or remote from the lives of his readers, and Kipling often translates them into the more personal and immediately compelling terms of manliness. Masculinity becomes the most reliable lever of persuasion, so that the duty of imperial maintenance is gendered as the manly struggle against adversaries or circumstances, a duty not to historical destinies but, more intimately, to fathers from their sons. Competition between nations becomes competition between men, and to fail is to expose a shameful effeminacy. It is because Kipling’s poems frame the New Imperialist rhetoric of prestige in masculine terms that comparisons between men, the drive to determine who is the better man, become so pressing. And because Kipling uses masculine rivalries to illustrate what he takes to be the deficiencies of his compatriots, sometimes the better man turns out not to be English at all. In awarding Kipling the Nobel prize for literature in 1907, the Swedish Academy declared that “he has always, in all places, had a manly ideal before him.”10 It is also the case, to modify this description slightly, that for him the manly ideal was something that could be discovered in all places. Sometimes the sheltered sons of the metropole needed to be instructed by colonial examples of masculinity, so that even an Indian water-carrier might prove to be the better man. Yet the formulation of better manhood as a cosmopolitan fraternity raises a thorny question: how can we reconcile the image of the Other as a better man with the racism that many critics have pointed to as the fundamental premise of his imperial vision?11 This apparent contradiction has been noted by Tricia Lootens, who observes that “paradoxical assumptions structure Kipling’s poetry, two of whose most famous lines have become ‘Take up the White Man’s burden’ and ‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.’”12 Lootens resolves this paradox by concluding that in the choice between manliness and whiteness, Kipling

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settles on the latter: “for all Kipling’s internationalist identification with ‘strong men,’ to do one’s patriotic duty to Greater Britain was to glorify the mastery of British ‘white men.’”13 Instead of disentangling masculinity and race in the poems, however, we might explore their complex interaction, so that we can understand, for instance, how the poems that purport to transcend racial difference actually displace it into gendered categories. From this perspective, we can not only recognize the deep ideological consistency of “Gunga Din” and “The White Man’s Burden,” but also begin to appreciate how New Imperialist ideologies were served by obscuring the structural racism of empire behind the pageantry of masculine competition. The effect of downplaying race in Kipling’s poems is to allow asymmetries of power to be naturalized and justified, not according to narratives of divine dispensation or progressive civilization, but as the outcome of a fair contest between men. This logic reorients the British audience’s understanding of itself as well as its subject peoples. To British men, it promises a meaningful and emotionally satisfying sense of purpose, but also erodes the confident sense that their superiority has been inherited, and exposes them to the goad of masculine shame. Simultaneously, racial systems of difference between the British and foreign Others are reinscribed as taxonomies of masculine groups. Others who could be subsumed within a militarist code of competition, such as Pathans or Sikhs, could be admired as manly, whether they fought with or against the British. But those who posed a more serious political threat, such as educated Bengalis, would be mocked for effeminacy. Kipling’s portrayal of the Empire as an arena in which East met West in a homosocial contest that ignored border, breed, and birth should be understood as an attempt to rearticulate such divisions in terms that appealed to the late nineteenth-century politics of nation and gender. It invited foreign men to engage in an ostensibly fair contest in which they might be judged better, but which they could ultimately never win.

Other men The reorientation of masculine heroism in “Gunga Din” might best be appreciated in contrast to the work of Kipling’s most celebrated predecessor in the patriotic poetry line, Alfred Tennyson. In the late 1870s, The Nineteenth Century published a series of articles that debated the direction of British imperial policy, and it was to this journal that Tennyson contributed his poem “The Defence of Lucknow” (1879), which praised

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the great endurance of the Empire by commemorating the British troops who put down the Sepoy Rebellion.14 As in Roberts’s account of the brave bhisti, Tennyson’s poem commends the Indians who remained loyal to the British in the midst of rebellion: Praise to our Indian brothers, and let the dark face have his due! Thanks to the kindly dark faces who fought with us, faithful and few, Fought with the bravest among us, and drove them, and smote them, and slew, That ever upon the topmost roof our banner in India blew. (lines 69–72)

Yet these brief words of gratitude come as an aside in a poem that devotes more than a hundred lines to praising the Englishmen who, along with their wives and children, defended Lucknow. And, in the end, the assistance of those “kindly dark faces” is far outweighed by the relief of the garrison by Henry Havelock’s troops with their “wholesome white faces” (line 101). In the stark division the poem draws between the English (“we”) and the rebels (“they”), the loyal Indians cannot quite be made to fit into either camp. Certainly, the praiseworthy Indians are not “them” (whom the “kindly dark faces” drive, smite, and slay), but neither are they “us.” Although they are “with us” and “among us,” they never partake in the collective identity indicated by the English banner that tenaciously blows overhead. Tennyson cannot so admit them, because the poem depends upon racial feeling to link the heroic defenders of Lucknow and his audience in Britain. The men who defend Lucknow constitute a “we” that broadens, through race, into a definitively English heroism: “Handful of men as we were, we were English in heart and in limb, / Strong with the strength of the race to command, to obey, to endure” (lines 46–47). The Englishness of Tennyson’s readers allows them to participate vicariously in the heroism of Lucknow’s defenders, and affirms a racial solidarity behind the endurance of the Empire; it is much the same appeal as Tennyson had made twenty years earlier when he had first written of Havelock’s death in 1857: “every man in Britain / Says ‘I am of Havelock’s blood!’”15 But Kipling’s poem, as we will see, frustrates any easy identification between English readers at home and the heroism of colonial battles, and it does so by baffling the racial assumptions upon which Tennyson’s poems rely. Of course, “Gunga Din” is clearly racist – even the backhanded compliment that calls Din “white, clear white inside” is steeped in chauvinism – but the poem narrates an education about empire in which expectations of race are upended by initiation into codes of manly honor.

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The story “Gunga Din” unfolds about the changing balance of race and masculinity is structured in five stanzas whose pattern of formal repetition amplifies a growing mood of urgency. The poem begins with the speaker, an unnamed veteran, describing his regiment’s bhisti to illustrate the hardships of army life in India and the vital importance of the water Gunga Din carries. As the description progresses, however, his attention fixes increasingly on the bravery and self-sacrifice of Din himself, culminating in the revelation that Din was shot while saving the wounded Tommy’s life on the battlefield. The story is broken up by a series of quotations at the end of each stanza, introduced by the refrain “Din! Din! Din!,” that reflect the regiment’s growing recognition of his importance. The most racially abusive language occurs early on, corresponding to the portrayal of the soldiers idly sweating on their troop-train. As the story’s scene switches to the battlefield in the next two stanzas, however, the abuse gives way to their increasingly desperate calls for Din’s help: “For Gawd’s sake git the water, Gunga Din!” (line 68). The final refrain breaks the pattern of reporting the regiment’s speech and gives instead the speaker’s own apostrophe to the dead bhisti. This double movement within the poem’s structure – the gradual disclosure of Din’s importance to the speaker and changes in the way he is addressed – reinforces the transformation of Din’s stature: he may begin the poem as a figure of ridicule, but he becomes a hero. Within the ballad’s narrative framework lies an elegant pattern of three ironic reversals that collectively teach us to appreciate Din’s shifting meaning. The first occurs in the poem’s opening sestet: You may talk o’ gin and beer When you’re quartered safe out ’ere, An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it; But when it comes to slaughter You will do your work on water, An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it. (lines 1–6)

The point here is to announce the importance of water, which will lead to Gunga Din’s duties in the following sestet. But, significantly, Kipling introduces the water through an ironic contrast with gin and beer, the drinks we expect to find more highly valued. Preference for alcohol is associated with an ignorance born of the idleness and luxury of safety, while the seemingly humble virtues of water are exalted by the experience of warfare. This reversal of expectations is echoed and extended in the fourth stanza, when the Tommy describes how, after he has fallen on the battlefield, Din brings him

26

Masculinity and the New Imperialism ’arf-a-pint o’ water green. It was crawlin’ and it stunk, But of all the drinks I’ve drunk, I’m gratefullest to one from Gunga Din. (lines 60–63)

This second instance of reversal intensifies the theme of the first: the overlooked virtue of water disrupts not only the hierarchical distinction between the pleasurable and the serviceable, but also that between the pure and the filthy. Experience of war on the frontier refines the base into the sublime, the detestable into the indispensable. These transvaluations of water lead to the final reversal in the poem’s conclusion, the transvaluation of the water-carrier himself: Though I’ve belted you and flayed you, By the Livin’ Gawd who made you, You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din! (lines 83–85)

Following the poem’s pattern, we know how to read this reversal: the experience of the colonial world is a crucible in which comfortable assumptions have been burned away. Just as the crucial value of water is disguised by easy luxuries of safety, so too is Gunga Din’s virtue obscured by the untried soldiers’ assumptions of his racial inferiority, of the baseness that sanctioned those casual beltings and flayings. Race acts as a foil, playing on expectations that ultimately cast the manliness of Din’s heroism into sharp relief. Kipling lures in his readers with familiar assumptions before springing his vision of better manhood like a trap. This is not to say, however, that the poem has done anything to dismantle the violent racial hierarchy it describes. Gunga Din is not held up as a representative of Indianness whose example is meant to abolish racial stereotypes. Rather, he represents a kind of masculinity, one in which his racial Otherness functions alongside the humbleness of his station as a water-carrier to make his manliness all the more compelling. In this sense, the poem continues to rely on the racist logic that it purports to transcend. Although the poem leaves racial categories largely unchallenged, however, it radically redraws the lines of identification we saw in Tennyson’s poem, remapping the inside and outside of imperial identity, so that Englishness is no longer a sufficient guarantee of virtue. Thus, instead of Tennyson’s racial opposition of us and them, Kipling aligns his readers with the “you” who have no understanding of the demands of the frontier (“You may talk o’ gin and beer / When you’re quartered

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safe out ’ere”), as opposed to the “we” of the battle-tested soldiers who do. The thrust of the poem is to reveal that Din, for all his humility, belongs in the latter group. He is not only the “finest man” among the “blackfaced crew” (lines 10–11), as he is initially introduced, but falls more properly into the peer group that includes English soldiers. The basis for inclusion among the insiders will not be race, as in Tennyson’s poem, but the shared understanding of those who have been initiated into the uncomfortable truths of the Empire, a criterion that Kipling codes as manhood. The tendency in all these poems to shock readers with the esoteric wisdom of colonial experience underscores Kipling’s abiding fascination with the theme of initiation. We should not overlook the importance, for example, of the rhetorical context in “Gunga Din,” where the speaker’s story is addressed to an audience of raw recruits at the army’s training grounds at Aldershot. His perspective, therefore, is presented not as a personal and idiosyncratic opinion about race and masculinity, but as the authoritative outlook of one who has experienced the Empire directly. Kipling’s poems return to such scenes of initiation obsessively, partly because he views them as masculine rites, but also because they mirror the situation of a metropolitan audience that needed to be instructed in the imperial virtues. In the many poems recounting the training of recruits or detailing the brutal lessons necessary to turn Johnny Raw into Tommy Atkins (e.g., “Danny Deever,” “The Young British Soldier,” or, later, “The ’Eathen” and “The Men That Fought at Minden”), the imaginary rookies learning of the Empire are proxies for English readers. In poem after poem he challenges his audience to rethink their understanding of the military and its imperial struggle, and he offers boldly innovative images of the soldier’s life. He provokes his readers with unsentimental pictures of the hardship and slaughter of war (“Ford o’ Kabul River,” “The Widow’s Party”), he scandalizes them with unapologetic portraits of the soldiers’ drunkenness and unrestrained violence (“Belts,” “Loot”), and he blasts them for their hypocritical disrespect for these same soldiers, for “makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep” (“Tommy,” line 17). The accusation in this last line suggests another dimension of the rhetorical force these poems generate: if the carrot of vicarious initiation into the mysteries of imperial manliness is not enough to entice his readers, Kipling can apply the stick of masculine shame. Still, the speakers in Barrack-Room Ballads, as in “Gunga Din,” are almost entirely working class, and it might be argued that the kind of masculine values they instantiate, or that they admire in Other men like the bhisti, are only properly expressed in the barracks – they have no place in the officers’ mess, much less the respectable drawing rooms of the

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middle class. Certainly, the ventriloquized cockney voices of these poems give Kipling license to express his themes with more violence, brutality, and dark humor than he otherwise allows himself in the patriotic verse. But to conclude from this distinction that the soldiers’ attitudes are meant to be unsympathetically coarse is to dismiss Kipling’s sustained effort to elevate the private soldier as a figure of imperial pride, to overlook the immense success with which this effort was rewarded,16 and to ignore the extent to which he imagined these masculine values might cross class lines. In fact, class hierarchies can dissolve just as readily as racial distinctions in the esoteric alchemy of masculine initiation. One of the epitaphs Kipling composed during the First World War, for instance, turns on a parallel revelation, albeit a pithier one: “We were together since the War began. / He was my servant – and the better man.”17 The epitaph follows the same pattern of ironic reversal that structures “Gunga Din”: the conventional implications of the opening premise (the water is filthy; the man is of an inferior race or class) lend greater force to the unexpected conclusion (the true virtue of the drink; the superiority of the men). Kipling repeatedly returns to this device in those poems that establish the Empire as a field of cross-cultural masculine comparison and competition. In the clearest case, “The Ballad of East and West” (1889), the poem begins and ends with the same gesture. First, the opening couplet supplies an insufficient premise: Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat; (lines 1–2)

The lines are well remembered today, in part because they so musically express the Manichean worldview of imperial chauvinism. And indeed, Kipling presents this view as self-evident conventional wisdom; the very guilelessness of the tautology – “East is East and West is West” – suggests that this perception of a rigidly divided world is glaringly commonsensical, perhaps even naively simpleminded. When he supplies the second couplet, then, we are made to understand the inadequacy of the first: But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth! (lines 3–4)

As in “Gunga Din,” the poem redraws lines of affiliation, so that the us/ them opposition of East and West is eclipsed by the distinction between those who have or have not been initiated into the frontier code of

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cross-cultural manliness. The ballad’s narrative itself turns on the surprising revelation that two likely enemies – the sons of an English officer and an Afghan outlaw – should end up celebrating their mutual manliness and swearing an “Oath of the Brother-in-Blood” (line 80). The common ground is marked by reciprocal gestures of manly honor between the outlaw Kamal, who has daringly stolen the horse of the colonel of the Corps of Guides, and the colonel’s son, who takes an equally great risk by pursuing the thief into his own territory. “We be two strong men” (line 62), Kamal says, and with this recognition, cemented by the exchange of gifts and oaths, Kamal sends his own son to join the Guides. Kipling was not unusual in investing the illustrious Corps of Guides with the dangerous glamour of frontier banditry; even the relatively priggish Boy’s Own Paper admired outlaws who joined the Guides.18 But Kipling’s tale of the cross-cultural code of masculine valor indicates how such a story could be used to rewrite the justification of empire so that the frontier is neither a destination of civilizing missions nor a field for exploitation, but an arena in which proper men meet as equals in laudable contests of honor, contests in which alien men freely consent. Still, the story’s reciprocal gestures of masculine recognition cannot quite mask the real asymmetries in this colonial relationship: in the end, Kamal gives up both the horse and his son, and, though he relishes the idea of his boy rising in rank among the famous Guides, the son will be barred by his race from ever ranking among the English officers. Nevertheless, the fragile illusion of parity between men of different nations remains central to Kipling’s vision. In “Fuzzy-Wuzzy” (1890), racist characterizations of the Sudanese Mahdists clash with the speaker’s concern that the real qualities of their manhood will not be properly recognized. The Tommy speaker recounts the success of the “big black boundin’ beggar[s]” who, though poorly armed in comparison to the British soldiers with their Martini-Henry rifles, managed to collapse the formidable British infantry formation called the square. Rather than worry that the Mahdists’ success indicates British weakness, however, the speaker is anxious to see his adversaries get their due. The press in Britain, he points out, has underrated them: “We ’eld our bloomin’ own, the papers say, / But man for man the Fuzzies knocked us ’oller” (lines 19–20). So it falls to the British soldiers who understand what happened to right the record: ’E ’asn’t got no papers of ’is own, ’E ’asn’t got no medals nor rewards, So we must certify the skill ’e’s shown In usin’ of ’is long two-’anded swords. (lines 25–28)

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This seemingly magnanimous gesture of recognition is also self-serving: the speaker credits both the Sudanese and, implicitly, the British soldiers who, unlike the civilian press, appreciate skill and valor when they see it. But even after establishing that the soldiers of both sides are initiates in the same martial truths, the poem remains concerned that the contest between them was unequal. “We sloshed you with Martinis an’ it wasn’t ’ardly fair” (line 23), the Tommy admits, but he quickly decides that the symbolic victory of breaking the square suffices to offset the actual devastation of the Sudan campaign: “we’ll call the bargain fair” (line 35). The actual Mahdists, one imagines, would probably have found little comfort in being assured of the fairness of the campaign, but, for Kipling, imperial honor depends on the construction of the foe as a manly competitor, and of the competition as necessarily one in which both sides have a sporting chance. Whereas other Victorians characterized the Mahdists as insuperably Other because of their Islamic zeal, Kipling minimizes religious difference in favor of a shared masculinity in the repeated line “You’re a pore benighted ’eathen but a first-class fightin’ man” (lines 10, 46). The manliness that cuts across national and racial boundaries produces its own set of outsiders: women and uninitiated or effeminate men. In “The Ballad of Boh Da Thone” (1888), Kipling imagines a Burmese outlaw guilty of grisly atrocities, who nevertheless comes to command the respect and even affection of the Irish officer, Captain O’Neil, assigned to kill him. The bond between these two men is underscored by the exclusion of two figures who cannot appreciate manly rivalry. One is a conventionally effeminate Bengali Babu, Harendra Muckerji, an obese coward who accidentally kills the outlaw by falling on him. The other is O’Neil’s wife, who is prostrated with horror when confronted with her husband’s deep affinity for his savage rival. Ruling out such characters from the circle of manly understanding, Kipling supports a militarist ethos that encouraged respect between worthy adversaries. Of course, the honorable enemies need not be non-white. Kipling shows sympathy for the Boer commandos in “Piet” (1903), and in “General Joubert” (1900), he vows that this fallen leader of the Boers will receive the tribute of British guns sounding “o’er his grave – his grave that holds a Man” (line 11). As in “Hymn Before Action” (1896), which piously honors both “True comrade and true foeman” (line 39), these poems extol a military code that saw soldiers of different nations as more like each other than their own civilian compatriots. Kipling popularized this sentiment, but it was not his alone. John French, commander of the British Expeditionary Force at the outbreak of the First World War, put the argument in chivalric terms: “soldiers should

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have no politics, but cultivate a freemasonry of their own and, emulating the knights of old, should honour a brave enemy only second to a comrade.”19 Likewise, in “Clifton Chapel” (1898), Henry Newbolt hoped that British boys would learn To count the life of battle good, And dear the land that gave you birth, And dearer yet the brotherhood That binds the brave of all the earth. (lines 13–16)

But the militaristic ethos illuminates only one facet of the broader international fraternity Kipling imagined, and the integrating qualities of manhood are shared not only between soldiers. Other forms of work across the Empire, such as administration or engineering, could also be valued in masculine terms, and they too could contribute to what Kipling calls “the lore of men that ha’ dealt with men / In the new and naked lands.”20 And there remains the example of Gunga Din, who, though killed on the battlefield, is an unarmed servant. He, too, can be included within the group of masculine insiders. To investigate more fully the criteria by which Kipling includes Gunga Din in the privileged circle of manliness, and, more importantly, to grasp the implications of calling him a better man, we must step back from the poetry and consider the broader patterns of change in both masculinity and imperial ideologies.

Better men As soon as we ask in what way Gunga Din is a better man than the veteran who tells his story, we have begun to think of masculinity in the terms favored by the late Victorian New Imperialists. It is a question that presupposes the value of ranking men through comparative and even competitive terms, a question well suited to an era that saw the emergence of a cult of competitive athleticism, of social Darwinism, and, in more narrowly imperial terms, of fierce international rivalries over power and prestige. Of course, the mid-Victorians were no strangers to the question of what made a man better, but their typical answers reveal a fundamentally different set of priorities. Under the sway of liberal ideals of progressive improvement and evangelical tenets of moral self-discipline and amendment, their conception of being better was chiefly diachronic and developmental, whereas the later Victorians were increasingly concerned with an emphasis on the synchronic and competitive. In other

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words, a midcentury man was encouraged to ask “Am I better than I was?” but a generation later the more pressing question became “Am I better than he is?” When Richard Gush exhorted the Xhosa warriors to become better men, he was measuring them not against himself, but against a standard of Christian morality toward which they might aspire. In “Gunga Din,” on the other hand, there is no sense of development – moral or otherwise – and the judgment of better manhood rests on the immediate comparison of the relative virtues of two men as they have been demonstrated on the battlefield. In theory, of course, a preference for the developmental view does not preclude attention to the competitive. It is possible to infer that Gush is implicitly viewed as better than the Xhosa, or that the Tommy has somehow developed into a better man since his experience with Din. Both of these interpretations are plausible, even though neither Backhouse’s report about Gush nor Kipling’s poem explicitly addresses them. The distinction between developmental and competitive is not so much a radical rupture in constructions of manhood as it is a shift in emphasis. Even so, the shift represents an important reorientation in the terms in which masculinity, especially imperial masculinity, was experienced and expressed. Popular midcentury fiction illustrates how differently better manhood had been conceived in the decades before “Gunga Din.” Consider, for instance, the story of another man who dies in a self-sacrificial attempt to fetch water: the eponymous hero of Frederick Marryat’s Masterman Ready (1841). Marooned on an island with a family called the Seagraves, the upright old sailor is stabbed by a savage’s spear as he tries to resupply the family’s makeshift stockade from a nearby well. Ready’s protracted death leaves the family much time to reflect on providence and Christian virtue, as captured in the speech given by the paterfamilias, Mr. Seagrave: It was his self-devotion which procured the water which saved our lives, and it was in this act that he sacrificed his own. What an example of Christian fortitude and humility did he ever show us; and indeed, I may truly say, that by his example, sinful as I must ever be, I have become, I trust, a better man.21

Seagrave’s idea of better manhood is founded on his commitment to spiritual development, a narrative of personal growth that can never conclude during his lifetime (“sinful as I ever must be”). Seagrave does not compare himself directly to Ready, since a rivalry between the two men would be at best beside the point and at worst a dangerous distraction from his more pressing obligation to subject himself to continuous

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introspection. What matters is only that he strive ceaselessly to become a better man than he was.22 Marryat’s treatment of the theme is, therefore, akin to that most iconic mid-Victorian statement of better manhood, the last words of Sydney Carton in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859): “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than ever I have done; it is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.”23 The once feckless Carton achieves an explicitly Christian redemption through an act of self-sacrifice and becomes better in soul than ever he has been. In place of the wild superlatives of revolutionary tumult that open the novel (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”), the modest comparatives that mark an individual man’s moral progress offer a more genuine hope for social reform. The religious view of better manhood as spiritual improvement coexisted with more secular and even worldly criteria of progress. A man could become better than he was by mastering his trade or profession, by increasing his earnings, by improving his physical health or mental selfdiscipline, and by establishing and providing for his family’s domestic happiness. In fact, as a playful passage in W. M. Thackeray’s Roundabout Papers suggests, there seemed no limit to the multiplying dimensions in which a mid-Victorian man might desire to improve himself. I hope, sir, you will be a “better man,” as they say, in ’62 than in this moribund ’61 . . . A better man in purse? in body? in soul’s health? Amen, good sir, in all. Who is there so good in mind, body, or estate, but bettering won’t still be good for him? O unknown Fate, presiding over next year, if you will give me better health, a better appetite, a better digestion, a better income, a better temper in ’62 than you have bestowed in ’61, I think your servant will be the better for the changes. For instance, I should be the better for a new coat.24

As Thackeray presents them, the potential avenues of self-improvement proliferate comically, but, for all their diversity, these possibilities share the premise that better manhood is developmental rather than competitive. They emphasize the narrative of individual change from one year to the next, not the comparison between two men at any given point. This focus, as the passage suggests, was how becoming a better man was broadly understood among mid-Victorians of the middle class (what “they say” it conventionally entails). Their model of masculinity perched on the pillars of liberal individualism – education, character-building, and rational self-cultivation – as they were enjoined by texts ranging from the lofty philosophies of John Stuart Mill to the practical encouragements of Samuel Smiles. Here, too, Dickens took an active part, illustrating the values of manly development, but also the dangers that would necessarily

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ensue if self-improvement were deranged into aggressive selfaggrandizement. When, in Our Mutual Friend (1865), Lizzie Hexam peers into the fire to foretell the progress of her brother’s education, she envisions an agreeable narrative of progress: “There are you, Charley, working your way, in secret from father, at the school; and you get prizes; and you go on better and better . . . You come to be a pupil-teacher, and you still go on better and better, and you rise to be a master full of learning and respect.”25 Charley’s rise will be all to the good unless, as Lizzie warns him, he allows it to warp his domestic relationships, which are the more genuine seat of virtue. And in the picture of Charley’s mentor, Bradley Headstone, we see the consequences of an alienating commitment to self-improvement, in which his efforts to become better than he was spill into competitive comparisons with other men. “You reproach me with my origin,” Headstone says to Eugene Wrayburn, “you cast insinuations at my bringing-up. But I tell you, sir, I have worked my way onward, out of both and in spite of both, and have a right to be considered a better man than you, with better reasons for being proud.”26 For Dickens, the kind of competitive rivalry to which Headstone succumbs is twisted and selfdestructive, a demented misunderstanding of what better manhood ought to mean. Headstone’s case is one of many in mid-Victorian literature in which male rivalries threaten to shred the fabric of a moral system woven by the affective relationships of the domestic, so that, as Nancy Armstrong has observed, competitive masculinity is treated as a sterile deviation from the normative heterosexual virtues that are allowed to propagate.27 The liberal suspicion of competitive rivalries between men extended, mutatis mutandis, to those between nations and empires. Thus when Disraeli’s Crystal Palace speech pledged Tory support to an imperialism that would preserve England’s greatness, respect, and prestige relative to its continental rivals, and when his subsequent administration appeared more concerned with cutting a dash before the eyes of the world (and the electorate) than with principles of justice and rational progress in international relations, Gladstone vigorously denounced this new competitive spirit. As he argued during his Midlothian campaign, the great duty of a Government, especially in foreign affairs, is to soothe and tranquillise the minds of the people, not to set up false phantoms of glory which are to delude them into calamity, not to flatter their infirmities by leading them to believe they are better than the rest of the world, and so to encourage the baleful spirit of domination; but to proceed upon a principle that recognises the sisterhood and equality of nations, the absolute equality of public right among them.28

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To Gladstone, the effort to promote the Empire on the grounds that it demonstrated England’s greatness was dangerous both abroad, where it could lead to unprincipled territorial aggrandizement, and at home, where it could excite base, irrational passions. Neither concern was unwarranted. Expansion of the Empire did begin to be valued as an end in itself (though not particularly by Disraeli), and popular opinion was indeed inflamed by a spirit of international competition. Even as Gladstone deplored it, Disraeli’s management of the Eastern Question gave rise to the national sentiment that came to be called jingoism, the competitive national chauvinism that J. A. Hobson, decades later, defined as the “inverted patriotism whereby the love of one’s own nation is transformed into hatred of another nation.”29 But Gladstone was also concerned, more fundamentally, that an approach to international relations predicated on demonstrating that England was “better than the rest of the world” was an assault on the philosophical foundations of liberalism. Gladstone’s insistence on the equality of nations follows from the contractual model of relationships at the heart of the liberal tradition, in which theoretically universal rights govern just exchanges between theoretically undifferentiated agents. For Disraeli’s administration to pursue an adversarial struggle for prestige and power with other nations, therefore, was to act without regard for principles of morality and justice. As Gladstone saw it, Disraeli had abandoned the “doctrines of national selfrestraint, of the equal obligations of States to public law, and of their rights to fair construction as to words and deeds” in favor of an “illegitimate source of power” that flowed from the worst impulses of a passionate and prideful electorate.30 The competition for national greatness was therefore irrational in its purposes and ruinously self-defeating in its effects: “to claim anything more than equality of rights in the moral and political intercourse of the world, is not the way to make England great, but to make it both morally and materially little.”31 From Gladstone’s liberal perspective, in short, Disraelian New Imperialism seemed corrupted by vainglory into an anarchic rejection of laws and principles. Yet Disraeli’s own appeals to the public suggest that rather than forsaking codes of international conduct he had instead turned to an alternative normative system through which a competitive pursuit of prestige might be glorified. Disraeli and Salisbury returned from the Congress of Berlin in 1878 proclaiming that they had achieved “peace with honour,” and this famous phrase indicates the context in which he wanted his policies to be understood. When, two years earlier, the alliance of Germany, Austria, and Russia (the Dreikaiserbund) asked for Disraeli’s endorsement of a

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memorandum demanding that the Ottomans reform the government of their Balkan provinces, he refused to sign it, largely on the grounds that Britain had not been asked to shape it. Over the objections of those who wished to maintain Britain’s noninterventionist policies in Europe, Disraeli instead made a show of force intended to demonstrate that he would defend the Turks from any Russian designs on expansion. By refusing to cooperate with other European powers, Disraeli’s ultimate success at the Congress of Berlin, by which Britain avoided war but bolstered the Turks and also acquired Cyprus, seemed to vindicate his aggressive assertion of British force. What Disraeli meant by “honour” in this context was that Britain had demonstrated in the eyes of Europe that it was not to be snubbed, and that in fact it could exert as much influence, and merit as much respect, as any nation in the world. Gladstone himself professed not to understand what Disraeli meant when he spoke of honor; to his way of thinking, Disraeli had violated international law by ignoring treaties, betrayed moral principles by supporting the Turks after the atrocities committed in Bulgaria, and risked war by refusing to cooperate with other nations.32 But by appealing to the national sense of honor, Disraeli had sidestepped such legal and moral concerns to establish Britain’s greatness in other terms. Scholarship on honor has suggested that, despite the slipperiness of the concept across times and cultures, it can be broadly understood to operate in two dimensions, the horizontal and the vertical.33 Horizontal honor concerns relationships of mutual respect among peers, and to claim it is to demand recognition within a prestigious group. One might be born into the group, as in some aristocracies, or be initiated into it after demonstrating a rigorous adherence to a code. The honor group is further defined by those it excludes: those whose circumstances or behavior mark them as ineligible, and those who are cast out in shame. There is in either case no spectrum of horizontal honor, only a bright line drawn to separate those who are entitled to it from those who are not, a contrast that is necessarily stark because it alone makes the possession of honor valuable. Those who feel a right to be included in the honor group but are not recognized must assert that right or suffer disgrace. Those who are included, on the other hand, may compete for status along the axis of vertical honor, the graduated ordering of prestige among otherwise equal members in which they might climb to greater heights of esteem and glory in the eyes of their peers. Indeed, a failure to compete for vertical honor may be grounds for shame and expulsion from the honor group.

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This, in essence, was the ethos within which Disraeli could claim to have safeguarded Britain’s honor. When the Dreikaiserbund failed to consult with him in preparing their response to the Ottomans, they had insultingly excluded Britain from the group of European powers; in a confidential letter to his cabinet, Disraeli called this failure to include Britain “a mockery.”34 Had Disraeli accepted this snub, either by endorsing their memorandum or by remaining neutral, his inaction could have been construed as a disgraceful derogation of the national honor, just as Britain’s neutrality during the Franco-Prussian War at the beginning of the decade was still regarded by many Britons as a shameful lapse. By asserting military strength in support of the Turks, however, Disraeli upheld Britain’s membership in the honor group of European powers, and, by his successful negotiation at the Congress of Berlin, he scaled the hierarchy of vertical honor as well, enhancing Britain’s prestige relative to other nations. His willingness to compete with Russia was proof of the national greatness he had promised to defend. All of this may seem to have led us away from “Gunga Din,” but the logic of Kipling’s construction of better manhood is homologous with Disraeli’s appeal to national honor, and in fact because of the traditional association of honor and manliness, the two ideals were reciprocally sanctioning in New Imperialist discourse. Kipling’s patriotic poetry persistently explores the contours of valorized masculine groups in which initiated men enjoy a relationship of respect, groups that are produced by the mutual recognition of proper manliness. As Pierre Bourdieu puts it, “Like honour – or shame, its reverse side, which we know, in contrast to guilt, is felt before others – manliness must be validated by other men, in its reality as actual or potential violence, and certified by recognition of membership of the group of ‘real men.’”35 Kipling’s efforts to draw British readers into an imperialist project reconceived as manly competition required, as a first step, the premise of a horizontal honor group that extended far beyond British shores. Valorized manliness (as opposed to biological maleness) necessitated the existence of manly competitors, so British manliness could be demonstrated only by engaging other men who were also recognized as properly manly. To defeat an unmanly opponent, or to defeat a manly opponent through means that did not allow genuine competition, added nothing to the victor’s prestige and provided no evidence of his better manhood. Thus we find, in poems such as “Fuzzy Wuzzy,” a pressing concern with the mutual recognition of manhood and with the fiction of an equal contest. In its own way, the logic of imperialist better manhood was built on a premise of international equality, just as liberalism was. In both cases, we must remember, the idea of cosmopolitan parity was as much a

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justificatory myth as a guide to actual practice. Liberals who demanded the universal right of self-governance, for instance, were obliged by their collusion in practices of domination to elaborate conditions under which that right could be deferred. Yet the two cosmopolitanisms were significantly different in extent: though liberalism implied a hypothetical universalism, manly competition in Kipling’s sense depended, like honor, on strict divisions between those who warranted inclusion and those who did not. While the fraternity of honorable men could extend across borders of nation, religion, or race, it nevertheless insisted on plotting borders of its own. The provocative force of Kipling’s patriotism stems not only from his inclusion of foreign men in the valorized group but also from his exclusion of those British men who had shamefully declined to enter the lists of global competition. Recognizing manliness in characters such as Gunga Din, Boh Da Thone, or Piet the Boer proved that the speakers of those poems (as well as their sympathetic readers) also belonged in the group of honorable men, and at the same time challenged those Britons who were too squeamish to appreciate their irregular virtues, insinuating that they might not be men at all. The turn in late Victorian imperial discourse to themes of competitive honor and manly rivalry could generate far more popular fervor than the abstractions of international law or the painstaking self-restraint of moral progress; no wonder that, in the era of a newly expanded male electorate, liberals from Gladstone to Hobson were alarmed by its power. But, from a New Imperialist perspective, it had other advantages as well. First, because of the longstanding distinction between codes of honor, on the one hand, and juridical or moral injunctions, on the other, the rhetoric of honor could be used to sanction behaviors that might not be defensible in the language of the courthouse or the church.36 The combination of honor and masculinity, moreover, naturalized the competitive spirit of the New Imperialism, not so much because all men were biologically attuned to honor but because of the normative proposition that all men ought to be. It was only natural and proper, then, that the Empire be defended and maintained against its rivals, and those who denied it, whether anti-imperialists at home or native nationalists in the dependencies, could be accused of shameful effeminacy. Furthermore, masculinity provided the path for a new democratization of honor. In the same way that mid-Victorian ruminations on the nature of gentlemanliness shaded into late-century preoccupations with manliness more generally, honor grounded in masculinity expanded from its earlier roots in the aristocracy while retaining something of its traditional glamour. Indeed, the

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historical shift I have described was effectively shrouded by a naturalized understanding of masculinity that held it to be unchanging, and by an ethos of honor that sought authority in an imagined continuity with the past. At the outset of the First World War, therefore, Rupert Brooke could write of the new emphasis on competitive honor as though it were simply the rightful restoration of past glory: Honour has come back, as a king, to earth, And paid his subjects with a royal wage; And Nobleness walks in our ways again; And we have come into our heritage.37

The burdens of manhood Brooke’s evocation of a heritage of aristocratic nobility was only one of the ways New Imperialist poets conveyed themes of masculine honor. Newbolt’s renowned “Vitaї Lampada” (1892) privileges the public school playing field as the site through which honor was transmitted, whereas Henley’s “Song of the Sword” (1892) focuses on the battlefield, and traces the heritage of male honor all the way back to Adam, to whom God bestows the first sword – “The War-Thing, the Comrade / Father of honour” (lines 44–45) – as a symbol of his violent destiny. Kipling’s poems, however, gravitate toward less exalted images, as in “The New Knighthood” (1907), which applies his technique of ironic reversal to honor’s old chivalric trappings. The new knights, foot soldiers of the Empire, are no longer initiated into the honor group with the gorgeous pomp of the traditional accolade, but through the grinding hardships and torments of life on the frontier: Who lays on the sword? “I,” said the Sun, “Before he has done, “I’ll lay on the sword.” Who fastens his belt? “I,” said Short-Rations, “I know all the fashions “Of tightening a belt!” (lines 9–16)

Ranging from “Rank Jungle-sweat” to the tremors of fever, the signs of the new knighthood depend on an understanding of honor that discovers prestige in the grossest indignities. The most characteristic representations of valorized masculinity in Kipling’s verse emphasize just this kind of

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thankless toil and abject submission to pain, so that what may look like humiliation to the uninitiated is, in fact, proof of proper manhood. Kipling’s favorite symbols of honor are not the sword or the cricket bat, but the harness and the yoke. This is the sense in which Gunga Din is a better man. The lowliness of his position as a water-carrier, the “piece o’ twisty rag” that serves as his uniform, and the abuse to which he submits are all tests of his manhood. Din exemplifies what John Kucich identifies as “a fundamentally masochistic ethos of British masculinity, in which the ability to absorb pain stoically – or even ecstatically – was greatly prized.”38 Though racially Other, the lowly bhisti not only fits into a masculine group that values suffering, but excels in it. Spiraling downward in apparent degradation, he simultaneously rises in the estimation of vertical honor, unflinchingly suffering even more than the Tommies he serves and thereby proving himself the better man. Servitude and suffering ironically become the basis of a competitive masculinity that rewards abjection with the esteem of other men. As Alexander Welsh has observed, the readiness to risk suffering and to tolerate pain is perhaps the most quintessential test through which masculine honor groups are constituted: “male members of a group explicitly or implicitly dare one another to take risk, the ultimate test of which is the willingness to endure harm. Whether in an aggressive or a passive mode, honor’s pledges typically put one’s body on the line.”39 The pursuit of honor through competitive endurance, scaled up to the level of national rivalry, transformed the sense of the Empire’s mission, so that the weight of the undertaking became valuable in its own right. In the 1870s, Gladstone repeatedly decried imperial expansion, arguing that “the shoulders, so to speak, of this nation have been loaded by a multitude of gratuitous, mischievous, and dangerous engagements,” and that to suffer this “enormous increase of difficulty and labour all over the world” was an obvious violation of “common sense.”40 Yet by the end of the century, this same burden could be offered as proof of British greatness. As Joseph Chamberlain put it in 1897, “it is a gigantic task that we have undertaken when we have determined to wield the sceptre of empire. Great is the task, great is the responsibility, but great is the honour.”41 The logic behind Kipling’s abject masculinist imperialism is most strikingly expressed in “The Galley-Slave,” first published in the fourth edition (1890) of Departmental Ditties. The speaker – the eponymous slave – describes his unthinkably ghastly life chained to the oars of an ancient slave ship. Though he unsparingly reveals the grim details of his

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work, he nevertheless identifies with the power of the ship that enslaves him – calling it “our galley” – so that he can think of himself as one of the “masters of the sea” (line 18). He is even disheartened by the prospect of his own freedom, and has to console himself with the mementos slavery has left on his body: By the brand upon my shoulder, by the gall of clinging steel, By the welts the whips have left me, by the scars that never heal; By eyes grown old with staring through the sunwash on the brine, I am paid in full for service. Would that service still were mine! (lines 29–32)

The speaker’s identity has been wholly formed by subjection to a collective pursuit of power, and his pride in his own physical disfigurement vividly illustrates Kucich’s point that masochism can generate narcissistic fantasies through an identification with a higher authority. But as the last lines make clear, the slave is equally fixated on the horizontal bonds of masculine community in which his abjection has bought him a place: But today I leave the galley. Shall I curse her service then? God be thanked! Whate’er comes after, I have lived and toiled with Men! (lines 47–48)

Doubtless the poem is intended to allegorize the work of the Indian Civil Service, the chief subject of Departmental Ditties and one of Kipling’s favorite models of a male group constituted by honorable drudgery, but his impulse to praise them by amplifying their degradation rather than their civilizing British influence is telling: it is the weight of the toil and not its purpose that valorizes manliness. Yet the boundaries of the honor group that stretch so far as to include slaves and foreign water-carriers also exclude many Englishmen. In “The Sons of Martha” (1907), Kipling adapts a familiar Biblical tale that had long been used to commend women’s domestic labor into a poem that defines men’s work, dividing the “Sons of Mary,” who lead charmed lives of comfort and easy faith, from the “Sons of Martha,” whose anxious toil, sacrifice, and willingness “to take the buffet and cushion the shock” (line 5) make the comforts of the former group possible. Raise ye the stone or cleave the wood to make a path more fair or flat – Lo, it is black already with blood some Son of Martha spilled for that! Not as a ladder from earth to Heaven, not as a witness to any creed, But simple service simply given to his own kind in their common need.

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Masculinity and the New Imperialism And the Sons of Mary smile and are blessèd – they know the Angels are on their side. They know in them is the Grace confessèd, and for them are the Mercies multiplied. They sit at the Feet – they hear the Word – they see how truly the Promise runs. They have cast their burden upon the Lord, and – the Lord He lays it on Martha’s Sons! (lines 25–32)

Kipling’s models for the burden-bearing sons of Martha are the men who build bridges, dams, and roads, and it is consistent with his gruesome fixation on suffering that when he wants to praise the manliness of engineers he imagines a wilderness saturated in their blood. Outside the honor group, the sons of Mary, “pleasantly sleeping and unaware” (line 12), are probably the over-civilized men of England; in Kipling’s terms, however, they might just as easily be shiftless natives supported by the exertion of imperial agents. Britishness is no guarantee of masculine virtue, nor is pious adherence “to any creed.” Arguing that the one thing needful for proper manliness is the burden of thankless work, Kipling dismissed other virtues around which a more specifically national identity was constructed, a tendency that prompted G. K. Chesterton’s pithy insight, “He loves England because she is strong, not because she is English.”42 Though Kipling may not have loved traditional English qualities enough to praise the nation for what it was, he was nevertheless absorbed with the problem of provoking England into becoming what it might be. By associating honor with a normative ideal of manliness rather than of national identity, Kipling could sway his audience with the powerful instrument of masculine shame. The pressure of shame, always latent in his accounts of better manhood as its menacing obverse, becomes particularly pronounced in his poems about soldiers, who, even more than colonial administrators or engineers, provided him examples of a rough, brutalized manhood that was insufficiently appreciated. “The AbsentMinded Beggar” (1899), which Kipling wrote to raise money for the families of soldiers sent to the Boer War, opens with a devastating jab at civilians who confuse patriotic slogans for the real work of empire: When you’ve shouted “Rule Britannia,” when you’ve sung “God save the Queen,” When you’ve finished killing Kruger with your mouth, Will you kindly drop a shilling in my little tambourine For a gentleman in khaki ordered South? (lines 1–4)

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Not content merely to shame his countrymen into supporting the military during the war, Kipling also sought to embarrass them into the better manhood of service themselves. Through his support for the National Service League, Kipling promoted the proposition that all Englishmen should receive military training in their teenage years, and when he was asked by Roberts to provide a poem in support of conscription, Kipling responded with one of his most withering denunciations of English lassitude, “The Islanders” (1902). Composed in the wake of the unexpectedly difficult victory over the Boers, the poem berates the self-satisfied British for allowing their army to deteriorate so badly that they could field only “Sons of the sheltered city – unmade, unhandled, unmeet” (line 21): Then were the judgments loosened; then was your shame revealed, At the hands of a little people, few but apt in the field. (lines 17–18)

The shameful lesson they have been taught by the Boers, Kipling reminds them, underscores the need for universal military training that will fit them for the ongoing struggle of nations. Their Empire, and their honor, demanded a restoration of manliness: Men, not gods, devised it. Men, not gods, must keep. Men, not children, servants, or kinsfolk called from afar, But each man born in the Island broke to the matter of war. (lines 42–44)

If in Kipling’s mind Britain had shamed itself in competition with the Boers, it had also failed to measure up to the memories of its own former masculine glory. Like Brooke, Kipling was inclined to understand masculine honor in a way that connected modern men with the past through a notion of heritage. But in Kipling’s version, the past is populated with fathers whose sacrifices mark them as better men than their sons. In “The Heritage” (1905), for example, Kipling exhorts the current generation to take up the “unadorned yoke” worn by their fathers: “Make we likewise their sacrifice, / Defrauding not our sons” (lines 39–40). Here masculine dishonor looms as an unrealized threat, but in “The Dykes” (1902), the same rhetoric explodes into condemnation: Now we can only wait till the day, wait and apportion our shame. These are the dykes our fathers left, but we would not look to the same. Time and again were we warned of the dykes, time and again we delayed: Now it may fall, we have slain our sons as our fathers we have betrayed. (lines 33–36)

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The legacy of British history is yet another challenge to the honor of modern manhood, and we can begin to see why Kipling would prefer to motivate his countrymen with this notion of heritage rather than with the related concept of race. Understood as an essential, biological identity, race was too fixed to exert the same persuasive pressure as a normative construction of honorable manliness. A racial Englishness, constituted through a stable ontological character, could produce feelings of racial pride, but also of complacency. On the other hand, an English heritage constituted through competition for masculine honor could produce pride, but only in a provisional fashion that demanded endless struggle and reaffirmation, and it could just as easily invoke the potent stimulus of shame. Masculinity thus complicates the poems’ invocations of race in ways overlooked even by sharp-eyed critics. Edward Said’s classic Orientalism, for instance, selects Kipling’s “A Song of the White Men” as the quintessential expression of the centrality of race to all of Europe’s imperialists, of the belief that “the color of their skins gave them superior ontological status plus great power over much of the inhabited world.”43 Said cites the following stanza to demonstrate his point: Now, this is the road that the White Men tread When they go to clean a land – Iron underfoot and the vine overhead And the deep on either hand. We have trod that road – and a wet and windy road – Our chosen star for a guide. Oh, well for the world when the White Men tread Their highway side by side! (lines 9–16)

Because Said’s reading dwells exclusively on the whiteness of Kipling’s white men rather than their manliness, he minimizes the struggle and pain that are inevitably crucial elements of Kipling’s masculine imperialism. The poem itself stresses not only that the road is a “wet and windy” one, but also that the cup from which the white men drink is a “bitter, bitter cup” (line 5), and that their faith is attested to only by the death of their comrades (lines 21–22). It is only by overlooking these gestures toward a manly stoicism in the face of degrading hardships that Said can interpret the poem as a confident assertion that imperial power is a racial birthright. Said concludes that “being a White Man, for Kipling and for those whose perceptions and rhetoric he influenced was a self-confirming business. One became a White Man because one was a White Man.”44

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Such an insouciant sense of destiny would hardly accord with the overarching mission of Kipling’s poems to challenge and admonish his readers at every turn, however, and we should not suppose, with Said, that Kipling’s use of whiteness would absolve his readers from “speculation on origins, causes, [and] historical logic.”45 In fact, “A Song of the White Men” is driven by particular historical crises that both threatened Britain’s imperial future and forcefully inflected the meaning of “whiteness.” Kipling first published the poem in 1899 in The Friend, a newspaper established to serve British troops in Bloemfontein, where he volunteered his services as editor and propagandist during the Boer War. The adversaries of the troops Kipling addressed were not, as Said suggests, nonEuropeans of different skin color, but the Boers, earlier colonists of Dutch descent. The poem’s claim that the white men are the target of “the old world’s hate” (line 4), moreover, implies that the Empire is defined primarily by its opposition to the traditional European powers. In this context, the poem uses whiteness less as an ontological or biological category than as a political one. It includes the men of Britain and its Dominions – Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia – whom Kipling gladly saw as joining together for the first time in the war’s common purpose. The poem marks Kipling’s dedication to the contemporary Imperial Federation movement, a contentious attempt among some politicians to fortify the Empire against its European rivals by consolidating the economic and military cohesion of these countries, which the title of Kipling’s next volume of poems would celebrate as The Five Nations.46 “Whiteness” in this case is not so much intended to divide the globe into white and non-white poles, but to unify certain white peoples into a coherent bloc, a masculine community made honorable by its shared struggle. The political background of “Song of the White Men” explains its emphasis on whiteness as the basis of unity rather than division, on men joining together and marching “side by side.” The point is not that the poem is untainted by racial assumptions, but that neither power nor honor follows as readily from skin color as Said suggests. Analyzing the interplay of race and masculinity in Kipling’s verse inevitably leads us to his most infamous poem, “The White Man’s Burden” (1899). Long held up as the ne plus ultra of imperialist sentiment, the poem has been cited as an exaltation of the civilizing mission buoyed by a supreme confidence in racial superiority. Thus for Peter Keating, the poem, “profoundly racist in sentiment,” shows us Kipling “at the highest point of imperial faith and confidence,” and for Patrick Brantlinger it “expresses [Kipling’s] racism and imperialist hubris at its worst,” proving

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that for Kipling, “all is race.”47 But if we attend to the poem’s concern with masculinity – to the Man and the Burden as well as the White – we soon encounter the limitations of imperialist confidence, the ways in which such exhortations to empire underscored the fragility of identity and exploited ambiguities of gendered experience through implicit themes of honor and shame. “The White Man’s Burden” was written to encourage the United States to take a more active role in global politics by annexing the Philippines. Published in the same year as “Song of the White Men,” the poem implies a similar understanding of whiteness as an identity that could unite the United States with Britain and the Dominions to form an unconquerable alliance. To Federationists, the United States was potentially a sixth nation, one that had foolishly been allowed to slip away from British hands. Thus when the poem calls on Americans in its hortatory trimeters to join the struggle of empires, it presses whiteness into double duty as both a historical connection and a political fantasy of a future alliance that has yet to be fulfilled.48 What is easily overlooked in reading the poem as a celebration of the civilizing mission, consequently, is the extent to which it is far more interested in transforming Americans than Filipinos. In fact, the old liberal ideal of the civilizing mission – the idea, in this case, that the Philippines might be raised by a process of tutelage into a national peer of the Western powers – is nearly antithetical to the terms in which the poem makes its appeal. There is a passing reference to the “hosts ye humor / (Ah slowly!) toward the light” (lines 37–38), but another that warns that Americans will see “Sloth and heathen Folly / Bring all your hopes to naught” (lines 23–24); in other words, we find one suggestion that the most salient quality of the civilizing mission is its sluggishness, and another that points to its outright impossibility. Distrusting the grand aims of the liberal telos of native transformation, Kipling offers instead the thankless task of the administrating mission: fighting famine and disease, building ports and roads (lines 19–20, 29–30). What remains after experience burns away any hope of civilizing colonial subjects is merely the tempered will of the colonizers “to wait” (line 5), “to abide” (line 10), and to endure, and it is precisely because of the futility of progress that endurance becomes most honorable. In one way, Kipling’s emphasis on the thanklessness of colonialism links him to other imperial apologists from across the ideological spectrum: the colonists’ claim “To seek another’s profit / And work another’s gain” (lines 15–16) is a common alibi with which to ward off anti-imperialist charges of greed or self-interest. But Kipling dwells so morbidly on

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thanklessness – painting a grim scene of ignominy and ceaseless suffering without hope for improvement – that empire nearly collapses into pointlessness. What redeems it is only the principle of manly honor buried in what Kipling calls “the old reward: / The blame of those ye better, / The hate of those ye guard” (lines 34–36). Blame and hatred may seem dubious prizes, but in Kipling’s view they are badges of esteem. If we take “those ye guard” as the Filipinos, and “those ye better” to refer to a different group – those nations who object to American imperialism – the reward is substantial: the burden would prove that the United States had successfully entered the global competition for prestige. The “better” qualities that the Americans would thus display before the eyes of the world are entirely consistent with the criteria of masculine honor we have already seen in Kipling’s other poems: the inglorious “toil of serf and sweeper” (line 27), the stoic submission to a “heavy harness” (line 5), the self-sacrifice that finds its ultimate expression in death (line 32). The litany of manly travails prepares the reader for the poem’s culminating challenge to its American readers, reminding them that what is really at stake in the imperial struggle is their manhood: Take up the White Man’s burden – Have done with childish days – The lightly proffered laurel, The easy, ungrudged praise. Comes now, to search your manhood Through all the thankless years, Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers! (lines 49–56)

In the end, the yardstick that Kipling brandishes before America’s reluctant imperialists is more explicitly one of normative masculinity than of essential racial identity. Rather than appeal to a confident superiority deriving from whiteness, the poem warns Americans that their identity is yet unformed – still “childish” – and very much in doubt. With one hand, Kipling holds out the promise of initiation into the honor group of imperial peers whose national manliness has already been demonstrated, but with the other he menaces them with masculine shame. Unlike Gunga Din, the Filipinos of “The White Man’s Burden” are never candidates for inclusion in the honor group; America’s potential peers are Britain and the Dominions, along with other rival imperial states. Yet, as in “Gunga Din,” the image of the colonial Other provides a model of abjection to which American men might aspire. In the racist

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characterization of the Filipinos as “Half devil and half child” (line 9), Kipling establishes a measure of lowliness from which he then invites Americans to descend still further by subjecting themselves to the humbling service of these ignoble masters. In the process, the colonists must cast off both their own civilized values and their distinctively American traits, presenting themselves instead in terms borrowed from the Other, as when they offer their “Gods” to the judgment of the heathens. Distinctions between colonists and colonized become blurrier still in the poem’s rhetoric of freedom and bondage. Through an analogy with the ancient Israelites (a comparison that itself smears the line of difference) the poem imagines the Filipinos embracing the shackles of backwardness: “Why brought ye us from bondage, / Our loved Egyptian night?” (lines 39–40). Yet in the act of liberating the Filipinos, the Americans must welcome a bondage of their own: they must “bind their sons to exile” and strap on the “heavy harness” of service (lines 3, 5). The bondage that the Americans take up is not the spiritual benightedness of the Filipinos, but a grinding physical enslavement that, in keeping with the complex masculine logic that equates willful abasement and honor, might be understood as a kind of freedom. But the principle of freedom itself, quintessentially American though it might be, must be cast aside the moment it threatens the greater cause of toil: Take up the White Man’s Burden – Ye dare not stoop to less – Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloak your weariness; (lines 41–44)

By the end, there are no high-minded abstractions left to distinguish the colonizers and colonized. Americans must even be prepared to become barbarous in order to wage, as one of the poem’s most memorable formulations puts it, the “savage wars of peace” (line 18). To his American readers, as to his British audience, Kipling recommends an imperialism that does not conform to conventional civilized virtues or to traditional liberal justifications, but in place of these he proposes an apparently coherent honor code through which competitive manliness can make the entire enterprise virtuous, meaningful, and satisfying. In order to imagine that contest as legitimate – to conform, in other words, with the Victorians’ beloved notion of fair play – he must allow that foreigners have at least occasionally the right to be included in the circle of worthy competitors. Thus, despite their racial alterity, figures such as Gunga Din, Kamal, or the soldiers of the Mahdi are crucial; they not only

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exemplify aspects of manly behavior but also justify the larger vision of imperialism as an honorable contest. Yet “The White Man’s Burden” makes especially clear that Kipling’s ideal rests upon a deeper, structural racism, one that assumes that native subjects can never rule themselves. If, as the poem suggests, governance is the greatest burden of all, the definitive stamp of national manliness, the Filipinos, like all of Britain’s subject races, will never really be permitted to compete. Gunga Din may limp onward honorably enough under the weight of the water bag on his back, but Kipling can imagine no future in which India might take up the burden of its own governance. Victories in the competition for better manhood that may be occasionally imagined in the isolated cases of individual men are effectively a feint that distracts self-congratulatory imperialists from the reality that on an international scale, riven by vast asymmetries of military power and industrial productivity, the game was rigged. It may seem superfluous, in the end, to complicate the conventional account of Kipling’s racism with an analysis of his poem’s construction of masculinity, since that, too, in its application to imperial struggle, was racist; the latter approach looks like a roundabout path to the same repugnant destination. Yet normative masculinity was Kipling’s primary tool to galvanize his imperialist admirers at the turn of the twentieth century, and it may be that this emphasis is what remains most persuasive to his neo-imperialist admirers at the turn of the twenty-first. Certainly the persistent popularity of poems like “If – ” (1910) suggests that Kipling’s portrait of the better man – driven by an iron will to assert himself through grappling with circumstance, but untroubled by worries about moral development or the goals or consequences of his own exertions – retains its ability to inspire (and just the same may be said of Henley’s “Invictus”). Few readers today are likely to know that “If – ” was written in praise of the notorious imperialist Leander Starr Jameson, and it is part of the power of Kipling’s poetry that he can reframe colonial struggle as an apparently apolitical celebration of manly courage and stoicism. We admire the virtues catalogued in “If – ” without stopping to wonder what purposes they may be made to serve. Still, the better man of these poems is emphatically of his imperial moment; he is the New Imperialism made flesh. He does not look forward to a future of progress, but struggles against rivals and adverse circumstances, and, in enduring, in maintaining, finds the greatness promised by Disraeli. The other reason to take seriously the poems’ preoccupation with manly competition has less to do with its power to persuade than with the lesson it teaches about the instability, permeability, and vulnerability

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of Britain’s changing imperial identity. The rise of popular imperial sentiment coincided with an anarchic upheaval in the meanings of masculinity and femininity, and many Victorians turned to the Empire as a structure within which gender identities might be renewed and stabilized. But a construction of masculinity founded on imperialism experienced tensions of its own. Caught up in a complex and shifting web of international relationships, constructions of British manliness had to account for mercurial patterns of affiliation and difference between Britain and its Western rivals, its increasingly independent Dominions, and its racially diverse colonial subjects. One consequence, which will be more fully developed in the next chapter, was that images of foreign men could be taken up in the popular imagination as models of imperial masculinity, so that the self-image of the center was reshaped by its own fantasies of the colonial periphery. Another was uncertainty about the nature of the competitions between British men and their foreign counterparts. Kipling’s verse frames this struggle in an ethos of honorable suffering, but there were several alternative models, many of which Kipling himself explored: athleticism, boyish play, combat, or frankly Darwinian struggle. Each of these offered its own interpretation of the rules under which the global encounters of men could become personally meaningful and nationally empowering. These are the subjects of the remainder of this book.

chapter 2

Cultural cross-dressing and the politics of masculine performance

Just after the outbreak of the First Matabele War in 1893, a cartoon in Punch insinuated that the prime mover behind the conflict, Cecil Rhodes, had gone native. Rhodes poses haughtily in the image as the “Great African Lion-Tamer,” wearing barbarous regalia and clutching a Zulu assegai (Figure 1). Rhodes’s costume is not merely a metonymic association with Africa; the cartoon shows us another man – Henry Loch, the Liberal governor of the Cape Colony – who was also in Africa but whose clothing suggests no exotic influence. In contrast to Rhodes, the figure of Loch looks feeble and priggish in his Inverness cape and umbrella, even though the actual Loch, unlike Rhodes, had a distinguished military record. The cartoonist’s contrast between the two figures is not meant to illustrate the men’s personal differences as much as to represent two opposed attitudes toward imperial policy through images of masculine spectacle. Rhodes, muscular and swollen with pride, embodies attitudes toward empire that seem not only manlier than Loch’s, but also more African than British: he is aggressive, uncivilized, fierce. The brief dialogue that accompanies the cartoon underscores the contrast, as Loch, hemming and hawing, urges caution and humanitarian restraint in confronting the Ndebele, and offers Rhodes a toy whip and a bottle of medicated rosewater with which to pacify them. In reply, Rhodes scornfully asks, “Was it with rose-water that ‘John Company’ tamed your Indian tiger for you?”1 The answer is meant to be obvious. Though Rhodes appears somewhat risible, readers are meant to admit his superiority to Loch as an imperial agent, or, following the cartoon’s logic, to agree that the best solution to a problem in the form of a ferocious lion is an equally ferocious lion tamer. But the image begs other questions that remain unresolved in our own interpretations of Victorian imperial culture. Does the image of Rhodes as an African warrior threaten the ideological foundations of imperialism? Does the thought of a culturally cross-dressed imperialist provoke in the imperialist mind the same vertiginous ambivalence that, as Homi Bhabha 51

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1 Cecil Rhodes as “The Great African Lion-Tamer” in Punch, 1893.

contends, attaches to colonial subjects’ mimicry of their rulers? Or is it the case, as Patrick Brantlinger has suggested, that the threat of an Englishman “going native” subverted the imperial enterprise even more radically than colonial hybridity?2 In the abstract, these questions resist any unqualified answer, largely because the act of cultural cross-dressing is, in itself, ideologically indeterminate. Its implications varied wildly from place to place on the imperial

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map, and within any given territory, from time to time. In India, for example, the comfortable assumption of Indian costume and custom depicted in many eighteenth-century portraits of East India Company officers became reprehensible under the early Victorian program of liberal reform and Anglicization, whereas after the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, policies were introduced to indigenize both the uniforms of British military officers and the rituals of state authority. Moreover, in late Victorian Britain cultural cross-dressing could signify a diverse range of cultural and political opinions. Feminists such as Janey Campbell and Ottoline Morrell, as Dianne Sachko Macleod explains, wore Turkish trousers “to distance themselves from the constricting norms of Victorian and Edwardian sexual stereotypes,” while male aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler “sought recourse in cultural ‘otherness’ to free themselves from stifling mainstream stereotypes of masculinity.”3 For the poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt, cultural cross-dressing was less a response to gender roles than to British foreign policy; wearing Arabic costume was a gesture of his hostility toward imperialism. On the other end of the political spectrum, however, the same clothing as worn by T. E. Lawrence was broadly understood as a sign of imperial mastery. Rather than offering a general theory of the ideologically elusive phenomenon of British cultural cross-dressing, this chapter approaches the problem at a particular intersection of sexual and political discourses, specifically the point at which they meet to produce representations of imperial masculinity such as the image of a savage Cecil Rhodes. As the Punch cartoon suggests, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, foreign garments could be used to signify a masculine style that was also a vision of colonial power. Such images of the cross-dressed imperial champion were not confined to lighthearted cartoons. Photographs of Lawrence in his keffiyeh and agal were essential elements in the imperial mythology that coalesced around him, as had been pictures of Richard Burton in Levantine robes and Charles Gordon in the tarbush he wore at Khartoum. In popular romances, moreover, protagonists began routinely to don local costumes of the imperial frontier, the better to penetrate mysteries of alien peoples or to emulate masculine qualities denied to them by the banality of civilized life in England. In short, the late Victorian and Edwardian popular imagination embraced as never before the image of an imperial hero draped in the garments of alterity. The intensity of this energizing fantasy reveals the confluence of two mutually supportive cultural trends: a growing acceptance, on one hand, of masculine performativity and spectacle, and, on the other, a shift in

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politics away from an early Victorian liberal model of empire toward the post-Disraelian mode of the New Imperialism. To approach cultural cross-dressing from this angle allows us not only to chart with greater precision the dreams of power that it represented, but also to appreciate the peculiar ambivalences and ironies to which it gave rise. First among these ironies is the considerable extent to which, by the turn of the twentieth century, English imperial manliness was hardly English at all. The masculine style of the New Imperialism was predicated less on some fixed and essential content of English character than on the very principle of cultural adaptability. We need not rely on the flamboyant examples of Lawrence or Burton to see how deeply cultural cross-dressing had come to infuse models of imperial manhood. Robert Baden-Powell, defender of Mafeking and founder of the Boy Scouts, was undoubtedly one of the great heroes of England, yet a sartorial close reading of the images through which he was popularized reveals a style of self-presentation cobbled together from a variety of foreign sources (Figure 2). His iconic hat, to begin with, was an import from the North American frontier – a Stetson campaign hat – which Baden-Powell began to fancy when he saw it modeled by the American scout Frederic Burnham in South Africa. The jodhpurs he favored were an Indian invention, and had only just been introduced to English circles in the 1890s by Pratap Singh, a distinguished Army officer and later Maharaja of Idar. When designing his own Boy Scout uniform, Baden-Powell traded jodhpurs for khaki shorts, and thus mimicked a recent innovation of Gurka troops, who cut off their trousers at the knee.4 Of course, the use of khaki uniforms is in itself a revolutionary development, eclipsing as it did the red coat that had signified British martial manliness since the seventeenth century. Khaki uniforms were introduced in 1846 by the Corps of Guides, an elite irregular regiment of the Indian Army that became famous for its daring, effectiveness, and disregard for drill and other military orthodoxies, all of which were qualities that would later contribute to the glamour of frontier scouts across the Empire. The inspiration of the Guides spread rapidly through the Indian Army, and then through the entire British Army, so that by the First World War, khaki stood synecdochically for patriotic manliness, and recruiting posters commanded civilian men to “Get into Khaki.” Baden-Powell’s famous image, in short, owes everything to the multicultural generation of sartorial signifiers of manhood, and to the circulation of those signifiers across an international network that included the United States, India, Afghanistan, Nepal, and all of the Dominions.

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2 Robert Baden-Powell as the hero of Mafeking in the Illustrated London News, 1900.

England itself contributed little more than the distinctive combination and fervent celebration of these diverse elements. We need not stop at Baden-Powell’s clothes. His moustache, no less important a sign of his martial masculinity, also owes a great deal to the example set by Indian men. In the late eighteenth century, as Linda Colley has shown, Tipu, the Sultan of Mysore, commemorated his victory over

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East India Company troops with a mural designed to emphasize, in Indian terms, the effeminacy of the British: “Without exception,” Colley writes, “Tipu and his turbaned armies are shown all sporting beards or moustaches,” but the British soldiers are depicted as “conspicuously and invariably clean-shaven. Neatly side-burned, with doe-like eyes, raised eyebrows, and pretty pink lips, they have been painted to look like girls, or at least creatures who are not fully male.”5 Whether British soldiers dreaded the contempt of Indian men or simply admired the masculine style, they were keen to appropriate this Indian sign of virility for themselves. In the 1850s, after years of prohibitions against them, moustaches were made compulsory for British soldiers in the Bombay Presidency, and were, according to Piers Brendon, “enthusiastically adopted elsewhere” in the subcontinent, and continued to grow in popularity over the following decades. Brendon argues that “the moustache became the emblem of empire, roughly coterminous with the Raj but largely derived from it,” and that we can see its apotheosis in the famous “Kitchener Wants You” recruiting poster of 1914.6 Fittingly, the poster puts the potential recruit in much the same position as the British soldier had once occupied in India, with the intimidatingly whiskered Kitchener now fixing the viewer with his finger and his stare, and thus taking the place of the Indians who had once scrutinized the manhood of the British. The previous chapter introduced the late nineteenth-century movement toward a notion of better manhood that was relentlessly comparative and competitive. The following analysis explores a correlative turn in which the British looked to foreign men not merely as competitors in the game of masculine prestige but also as signifiers of qualities that were worthy of emulation. The argument is presented in three parts: the first examines the heightened stakes of men’s visibility, the sense of being watched that made the image of Kitchener’s accusatory finger so menacing; the second explains how gestures of emulation and adaptation complemented new political strategies of colonial control; the last brings these together, suggesting that the pleasures with which men were imagined to shake themselves free of prosaic British identities could be turned to serve imperial interests in a global competition for power and prestige. The argument has been guided throughout by the premise, inspired by Marjorie Garber’s analysis of gender cross-dressing, that the phenomenon should not be dismissed as a means of concealment in which the actual operation of cultural power is merely cloaked beneath a disposable facade. What Garber writes of cinematic cross-dressing comedies might in this sense equally be said of the cartoon of Rhodes: “transvestism is an enabling

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fantasy, not merely a joke or parody.”7 As Garber suggests, we need to understand how power can inhere not only in the polarizing dichotomy of self and other, but also in the imaginative combination of those identities. Garber argues compellingly that the mimesis of cross-dressing opens a “third space,” which introduces a crisis in binary modes of conceiving identity, a disruptive combination analogous to what postcolonial critics have investigated under the name of hybridity. Yet the radical potential of cultural cross-dressing, like that of cultural hybridity more generally, cannot be presumed to challenge the actual imbalance of power between metropole and colonies, or to upset imperialist fantasies by blurring the lines of difference.8 Similarly, we cannot assume that hybridity is equally subversive of multiple and competing ideologies of empire, or that it meant the same to someone like Rhodes as it did to someone like Loch. The readings that follow concentrate on the collusion of hybridity and imperial power, describing how the cultural imagination of the New Imperialism drew strength from representations of masculine hybridity, and why Britons lined up so eagerly to watch their Empire parade in its new clothes.

Visibility, scrutiny, and shame Victorian manliness, like any gender identity more generally, was inescapably performative. As James Eli Adams shows, even the sternest Victorian critics of dandyism and display, or those who, like Carlyle, thundered loudest against the courting of public regard, could not conceive of a masculine style that was altogether free of an “intractable element of theatricality.”9 Against this useful general point, however, we must balance the recognition that some periods are in effect more ostentatiously performative than others – more hospitable to a multiplying range of visible masculine styles, more frankly solicitous of an audience felt to be sharp-eyed and keenly critical. Such shifting emphases on visibility help distinguish late Victorian and Edwardian representations of masculinity from those of the generations immediately before, when theatricality, though acknowledged to be a haunting complication of the social life of men, was nevertheless to be disavowed. Evangelical and economic moralists agreed that calculated display for the benefit of a worldly audience was a dangerous distraction from a man’s real duty to discipline and judge himself. By the late nineteenth century, on the other hand, men were more inclined to consider worldly prestige and honor as crucial and legitimate elements of their identities, and with those considerations came a

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heightened awareness of men’s appearance before audiences who might make or break them. Of course, few Victorians were prepared to go so far as to declare, with Max Beerbohm, that “a new epoch of artifice” was at hand, or to find, with Wilde, more truth in the wearing of masks than in the baring of faces.10 Yet a broadening consensus that a man’s outward appearance deserved painstaking consideration may be inferred from the transformation of men’s fashions, which, according to Christopher Breward, began to proliferate as “the stove-pipe severity of the 1850s and 1860s” yielded to “the ‘market choice’ of competing styles that marks the period after 1870.”11 Sartorial excess might still be condemned late in the century (as in cases of egregiously decadent dandies or brash, lower middle-class mashers), but mockery of the extremes need not disprove the general importance of masculine fashion; in fact, stereotypes of gaudy excess probably helped to deflect criticism from less flamboyant men as they, too, thought more about their wardrobes. As a West End tailor quoted by Breward put it, “It savours very much of cant and hypocrisy for any man to say that he does not study dress in one form or another. It is absolutely imperative for a man nowadays to study his appearance.”12 Popular fiction likewise registered increasing attention to men’s appearances, often in the imaginatively amplified form of disguise; Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories provide familiar examples, as do E. W. Hornung’s stories of Raffles the burglarious cricketer. Disguised protagonists also feature in many of the period’s most successful adventure novels, such as Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), and John Buchan’s The Thirty-nine Steps (1915). And it is no coincidence that the late nineteenth century produced in rapid succession the three great allegories of masculine visibility – The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and The Invisible Man (1897) – each of which reckons in its own way with the formidable pressure of public scrutiny on masculine identity, and imagines the deranged lengths to which men might go to manipulate or escape the force of that gaze. These last three stories remind us that the liberating possibilities of self-fashioning in this period were shadowed by a darker dread of public judgment. Against the backdrop of a broadly intensifying consciousness of masculine spectacle, we can begin to appreciate why cultural cross-dressing became so ubiquitous and so crucial to the male protagonists of imperial fiction. No single novel better captures the distinctively late Victorian combination of these themes than A. E. W. Mason’s bestseller The Four Feathers (1902), which is at once an exciting story of a disguised adventurer,

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Harry Feversham, on the war-torn Sudanese frontier and a sustained meditation on the subjects of manly performance, shame, and honor. Mason’s story begins in 1869 on Harry’s fourteenth birthday, when his father, General Feversham, has convened a gathering of former soldiers to commemorate their service during the Crimean War. The veterans swap “stories of death, of hazardous exploits,” of cold and privation, and of their calamitous assault on the Redan fourteen years earlier.13 But the only stories that unsettle them are those of the panicked officers who had disgraced themselves. These make the old officers shift “restlessly in their chairs with a sort of physical discomfort, because a man had sunk so far below humanity” (10). The veterans react with visceral repulsion to such stories – one of them even shudders “as though to shake the knowledge off as a dog shakes off water” (10) – because they represent what is to them the unthinkable horror, not of maiming or death but of unmanning shame. But young Harry, listening with “cheeks white as paper, his eyes burning and burning with ferocity” (11), is affected even more profoundly, as he worries that he, too, will someday be revealed to be a coward, unable to “play the man” (9). From this opening scene, Mason draws our attention to themes of scrutiny and visibility, underscored throughout the novel by both literal and figurative references to watchful eyes, vision and blindness, concealment and revelation. Only the General’s perceptive friend Lieutenant Sutch pays enough attention to the boy to read the terror written in his burning eyes, and amid the quiet exchanges of looks and glances that supplement the spoken conversation, Sutch asks the General with his own eyes, “Are you blind?” (11). But Harry feels his potential failure already emblazoned on him, and by the end of the first chapter, he imagines that even the portraits of his military ancestors can see his cowardice: “He stood before them in the attitude of a criminal before his judges, reading his condemnation in their cold unchanging eyes” (12). Though still a boy, Harry already understands that his identity will depend upon the scrutiny of other men. The opening chapter prefigures the crisis Harry experiences when, thirteen years later, he resigns from his regiment, which is soon to be dispatched to Egypt. Harry’s old fear of showing himself a coward in the imminent battle against the Egyptian nationalist Ahmed Urabi is now intensified by his recent engagement, because any dishonor he brings upon himself will also taint Ethne, his fiancée. When, therefore, Harry receives advance notice that his regiment will be sent abroad, he gives up his commission in the hope that he may blamelessly escape his Egyptian trial

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before the orders are generally known. But Mason does not allow the stern game of honor to be so easily eluded. Three of Harry’s fellow officers see through his scheme, and each sends him a white feather as a token of shame; Ethne, seeing these, adds a fourth feather and breaks off their engagement. So begins Harry’s great adventure, in which he travels to Egypt and the Sudan on his own and subjects himself to tests of bravery that will force his four accusers to retract the symbols of his disgrace. The problem that Harry spends the remainder of the novel attempting to resolve is, therefore, strictly concerned with his reputation in the eyes of others, and he experiences the moment of his crisis as one of acute public visibility: “He was known for a coward. The word which had long blazed upon the wall of his thoughts in letters of fire was now written large in the public places. He stood as he had once stood before the portraits of his fathers, mutely accepting condemnation” (34). The trouble with Harry, as Mason here frames it, follows entirely from the way others see him, and it is worth remembering that a midcentury novel might have concentrated on an entirely different failing. Harry, after all, has resigned his commission under false pretenses and then compounded his deceit by misleading Ethne, yet this morally shoddy behavior and the remorse of conscience it might have provoked in another character remain largely unexamined in the novel. Mason’s story is far less concerned with private guilt than public shame. Harry’s anxieties reveal the enormous weight given to shame as a normative control on manly character, a weight that, in comparison to the mid-Victorian emphasis on guilt, suggests a momentous shift in the balance of regulating masculine behavior. In the middle of the nineteenth century, by contrast, Samuel Smiles had warned his readers never to allow public expectation to override private virtue. As he writes in Self-Help (1859), “Truthfulness, integrity, and goodness – qualities that hang not on any man’s breath – form the essence of manly character.”14 For Smiles, the great masculine virtues are elevated by their very independence of public opinion; there is a hint of base servility, by contrast, in hanging on the breath of another man. In keeping with the theological and economic currents of midcentury middle-class thought, Smiles advocates an individualism in which each man, having internalized the precepts of virtue, becomes his own most peremptory judge. Character becomes synonymous with conscience, or “moral order embodied in the individual,”15 and manliness with the unswerving dedication to that private moral vision. Even at its best, therefore, the scrutinizing public gaze is superfluous, because the “true character acts rightly, whether in secret or in the sight

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of men.”16 At its worst – when it encourages competition for fame or glory – it threatens the mainsprings of masculine virtue with a poisonous theatricality. Smiles warns that “There is a constant struggle for front seats in the social amphitheater; in the midst of which all noble self-denying resolve is trodden down, and many fine natures are inevitably crushed to death.”17 In Smiles’s admonition about the struggle between private conscience and social pressure we hear echoes of one of midcentury literature’s favorite themes. Consider, for instance, Anthony Trollope’s The Warden (1855), in which the clergyman Septimus Harding resigns his post overseeing an almshouse because he worries that his salary is unjustly lucrative. Trollope underscores the sheer gratuitousness of Harding’s resignation, since by the climax of the novel the public pressure to resign has been lifted, and his friends and family urge him to keep his place, even going so far as to suggest that to give it up would be cowardly. Still, Harding finds his own position morally dubious, and his private doubt alone is reason enough to give up his wardenship: “I am thought in the wrong by all those whom I have consulted in the matter; I have very little but an inward and an unguided conviction of my own to bring me to this step.”18 In short, this triumphant story of an ordinarily timid clergyman who “manfully combatted against great odds” emphasizes a form of manliness measured by commitment to individual morality.19 Mason’s story, therefore, is a striking reversal of Trollope’s. Both novels imagine protagonists forced to confront their own cowardice, but whereas Trollope’s hero triumphs by defying public expectations, Mason’s can succeed only by living up to them. Of course, Mason’s Harry Feversham has no moral objection to military service, so he is never confronted with the choice between conscience and social compulsion. But the very difference that makes the comparison between Trollope’s and Mason’s protagonists inexact – the absence in Mason of a private alternative to collective expectations – is another sign of the extent to which the judgment of manliness has shifted from the individual agent to the public court. Because masculine character depends on public scrutiny in Mason’s novel, Harry’s redemption necessarily involves his growing ability to alter the ways in which others see him. On a thematic level, this means that he must salvage his reputation, but on the level of the adventure plot, the predicament of visibility emerges in Harry’s propensity for disguise. In part, the costumes he takes up during his adventures in the Sudan are necessitated by his vulnerability as a lone man in a hostile land, as when he infiltrates Berber in local costume, “Wearing the patched jibbeh of

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the Dervishes over his stained skin, his hair frizzed on the crown of his head and falling upon the nape of his neck in locks matted and gummed into the semblance of seaweed” (80). More than merely a means of protection, however, Harry’s costume signals a transformation in character whereby he can assume some of the qualities that late Victorians attributed to the Beja soldiers they called Dervishes. Predictably, contemporary British stereotypes of the Sudanese combined racial condescension towards men they regarded as black savages and religious hostility to what they saw as Islamic zealotry. But the demeaning British stereotype of the Dervish also emphasized his tremendous personal courage on the battlefield: the opening of Kipling’s “Fuzzy Wuzzy” claims that among the courageous warriors fought by the Empire’s soldiers, the Beja were the bravest, “the finest o’ the lot.” When Harry cross-dresses as a Dervish, therefore, Mason indicates to his readers that his cowardly protagonist has reinvented himself under a conventional sign of supreme courage. From Harry’s new costume there quickly follows a deeper understanding of the role he must play, a role that, like his disguise, follows the example of the foreign men who surround him: “Despair kept him company at times, and fear always. But from the sharp pangs of these emotions a sort of madness was begotten in him, a frenzy of obstinacy, a belief as fanatical as the dark religion of those amongst whom he moved, that he could not now fail and the world go on” (81). Harry’s success at this juncture of the novel depends on his having taken on the “fanatical” bravery of the Sudanese along with their costume. It is a fulfillment of masculine potential through the adoption of a foreign model of success, one foreshadowed earlier in the novel when Sutch observes, “I have seen men in the Crimea, tortured by their imaginations before the fight – once the fight had begun you must search amongst the Oriental fanatics for their match” (49). Though Harry proves able to match an “Oriental” standard of courage, the terms in which Mason records his transformation indicate a nagging ambivalence: Harry’s bravery is mad, frenzied, obstinate, and fanatical. These darker terms are traces of the otherwise derisive stereotypes out of which Mason has drawn his epitome of courage, and they suggest the tension that could attend the choice of an alien model as a test of excellence. On one hand, Harry’s success demonstrates that an Englishman can hold his own in the globally competitive theater of masculinity. On the other, it hints at the galling admission that contemporary England offered no sufficient models of its own. This same tension underlies the final stage of Harry’s adventure, when he faces imprisonment at the House

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of Stone at Omdurman: “His heart was beating very fast, but it was with a sort of excitement. He did not even think of Ethne at that moment; and certainly the great dread that his strong hope would never be fulfilled did not trouble him at all. He had his allotted part to play, and he just played it; and that was all” (172). Here Harry’s triumphant courage follows from his resignation, his realization that he cannot control his destiny, and need only live up to the role in which fate has cast him. Though less explicitly, Harry’s transformation here again reflects the influence of his surroundings, since it echoes the stereotype of Oriental fatalism, or, as Mason describes it a few chapters later, the Eastern “belief that life and death are written and will inevitably befall after the manner of the writing” (197). Although Harry’s brave trust in his allotted part represents a culmination of his heroism, however, the novel’s treatment of fatalism among Orientals repeats the Victorian tendency to deride it as a cultural failing; in the later passage Mason invokes the stereotype to register disgust at the locals who fail to tend to a dying man. In short, the novel’s attempt to valorize Harry according to an exotic masculine model is dogged throughout by persistent chauvinistic assumptions about that model. To the limited extent that Mason manages to reconcile these competing impulses, it is only by emphasizing the theatricality of Harry’s transformation. Where the courage of the Sudanese derives from fanatical belief, Harry’s flows from his acceptance of performativity, of “his allotted part to play.” It is precisely his lack of fixed convictions that allows him to appropriate exotic qualities as part of a heroic role, and that simultaneously allows Mason to distance his protagonist from the troubling connotations of those qualities. Masculine heroism in the Dervish style is ultimately licensed insofar as it is understood as a style, an outward show, a role that can be played to blot out the marks of shame on an Englishman in the eyes of his peers. The Four Feathers makes clear that the cultural cross-dressing Harry undertakes in his imperial adventure is only secondarily related to the Empire itself, so that the long redemptive detour Harry makes through the Sudan is launched by the gender politics of his home. Harry’s disguises are anomalous among the Mahdist army’s true believers, but entirely characteristic of British society, which Mason represents as an arena of an unrelenting “game of pretences” (278). The chapters set in England refer frequently to the elaborate care with which the English maintain honor through carefully guarded performances. After learning of Harry’s disgrace, for instance, Ethne nevertheless joins him in wearing “brave faces” and “masks of gaiety” (40), to limit his exposure and her own. Likewise, when

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Harry’s friend and rival for Ethne’s affections, Jack Durrance, returns to England after having been blinded by the North African sun, Ethne pretends to love him because she considers herself “bound to him in honour” (137). Durrance, for his part, feels obliged to act the happy lover even though he suspects Ethne cleaves to him out of duty rather than passion, so that the two of them suffer “under the tyranny of perpetual simulation” (177). Durrance is portrayed as a natural imperial agent, “by birth the inheritor of other places” (106), who is more at home among the “desolate tracts” of North Africa than the English “hedged fields and made roads” (98), and it is only after returning to England that he must learn to operate within a world of intricate pretenses and delicate reticence. For Mason, it is England, not the frontier, that is the home of masquerade. But even though he illustrates the extent to which the theater of honor and shame promotes dishonesty, Mason never questions the legitimacy of a social order policed by the public gaze. That the characters’ masks will chafe them, on the contrary, is offered as proof of their commendable self-sacrifice. Because The Four Feathers attends so closely to the game of honor as it is played on English soil, it offers a rare meditation on the roles women play in that game. Unlike many contemporary fictions of imperial adventure, Mason’s novel treats British women neither as symbols of prosaic domesticity, nor as passive bystanders who inspire men to acts of courage in which they themselves cannot partake. Though Harry sometimes imagines Ethne as an inspiration for his own redemption, Mason also envisions her as an active participant in the theater of reputation. Just like the novel’s men, she is capable of courage, of wearing masks in the service of honor, and of enforcing the penalties of shame; it is she, after all, who presents Harry with the crowning fourth white feather of disgrace. Still, Ethne’s own honor tends primarily to reflect that of the men around her – her father’s, Harry’s, and Durrance’s – to an extent that suggests Mason cannot imagine an alternative code of feminine honor. Ethne, in the end, is a figure produced by a particular kind of masculine fantasy, one designed to subserve a late Victorian construction of manliness by confirming its criteria of success. Though the novel’s women are projections of a masculine dream of honor, however, they can also be made to bear the blame when the effort of performance comes to seem a nightmarish burden. Sutch complains when he learns of Harry’s disgrace, “Brute courage? Women make a god of it” (48), as though the entire novel and every man in it do not venerate the same fetish. By imagining women’s complicity with the manly game of honor, in other words, Mason also allows them a potentially threatening power to shame men. The wide

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cultural currency of these ideas would be demonstrated a dozen years after the novel appeared with the formation of the Order of the White Feather, which mobilized women at the outset of the First World War to distribute those emblems of cowardice to able-bodied men who were not yet in khaki.20 The Order, like the novel whose fame inspired it, understood the powerful influence women might exercise over masculine shame in the service of the Empire. The Four Feathers exemplifies what had become by the turn of the century a culturally hegemonic assumption that the criteria of manly character were no longer sheltered in his heart so much as worn on his sleeve. Private conscience had become overshadowed by public honor, guilt by shame, and manhood was to be legible, performative, even spectacular. It is for these reasons that the novel concerns itself so intently with scrutiny and visibility, masks and costumes, and the manifest tokens of disgrace that Harry must force his detractors to take back. All of these concerns originate with the transformation of gender identities in Britain, yet Mason demonstrates the function that the imperial periphery might serve in imagining their resolution. In part, the Sudan is simply an exotic backdrop before which Harry can perform his new heroism; this is the function of the Orient that Said describes when he writes that the East was imagined as “a theatrical stage affixed to Europe.”21 Yet the frontier also widened the repertoire of possible masculine performances on that stage, as stereotypes of exotic men held them to epitomize certain qualities – whether of strength, endurance, loyalty, shrewdness, virility, or martial prowess – that British men might usefully emulate. In Harry’s case, the problem is courage, and his cross-dressing as a Dervish indicates his ability to live up to a standard of bravery that British convention deemed unsurpassed. His honor is dramatically redeemed not only by acting courageously, but by doing so among the world’s bravest men. Crossdressing is the visible form of the theatrical role-play that allows Harry to appropriate alien standards, though also the means of disavowing a more threateningly complete transformation. In the works of some of Mason’s more staunchly imperialist contemporaries we can follow the application of such performances of cultural cross-dressing to the shifting politics of global power.

The imperial politics of adaptability The appearance of late Victorian and Edwardian imperialists in the borrowed clothes of foreign men was both complex and overdetermined,

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and scholars have explained it in diverse ways. One of the most compelling explanations has been what we might call the redemption thesis, which runs something like this: there is a crisis of masculinity at the metropole, thanks to some alarming combination of aggressive New Women, effeminate decadents, sordid commercialism, debilitating urbanism, and national degeneracy. British manhood may still be restored, but only by turning to examples of foreign men whose manliness remains, in some important respect, admirably uncorrupted. Cultural cross-dressing is the visible index of an identification with the Other that proves that possibility of redemption. Such is the logic behind Graham Dawson’s reading of mythology surrounding Lawrence of Arabia. As he writes, “Valued masculine qualities felt to be marginalized, excluded or even lost to Britishness are projected onto the [Other]. The British hero who empathizes with them, takes their side and becomes identified with them functions to repossess imaginatively those qualities.”22 In this view, exotic clothing becomes the means through which the cross-dresser enacts for himself, or for an audience of anxious British men, a drama of masculine regeneration. There is an alternate explanation that does not require empathy with the Other, and that begins with a problem in the colonies rather than the metropole. This we may call the surveillance thesis, which emphasizes the ability of the cultural cross-dresser to move freely among mysterious colonial subjects and thus to learn how to master them. This is the view put forward, for instance, in Gail Ching-Liang Low’s analysis of Kipling’s stories of Strickland, the colonial policeman, and Kim, the young spy. “The fantasy of cross-cultural dressing,” Low writes, is a fantasy that is able to counter the potential dangers of the Other world . . . Cultural and racial difference can perhaps be disavowed and circumvented by a special figure who appears to be Indian but who is really white. That special figure could also better control Indian subjects for he would know them inside and out . . . The exercise of power and surveillance exists alongside the fascination and desire for alterity.23

The premise here is the Foucauldian alignment of knowledge and power, and the disguised imperial agent, skillfully taking up the semblance of the Other, effectively becomes as invisible as the watchman at the center of a panopticon. Taken together, the redemption and surveillance theses remind us that cultural cross-dressing, like other manifestations of imperial masculinity, was driven by the perception of crises both at home and abroad.24 Both theses are persuasive, and sometimes simultaneously valid in the same text. The story of Harry Feversham, for instance, clearly routes the hero’s personal redemption through the assumption of foreign masculine

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qualities, but his costume is also a tool of imperial agency that allows him to penetrate Mahdist territory. Rather than suggesting mutually exclusive alternatives, the two theses describe complementary impulses that were differently weighted according to the particular demands of a plot; adventure narratives typically stress cultural cross-dressing’s redemptive potential, while detective or espionage stories emphasize disguise and surveillance. But note that according to both theses, the intended audience of the cross-dressing performance is British: in the case of the redemption thesis, this is because it is the British spectator who needs to see the possibility of masculine appropriation; in the surveillance thesis, the native subject will be unaware, if all goes well, that any performance is taking place, though the British reader will be reassured by the performative skill of the imperial agent. I want to draw attention instead to the question of the native as audience, or, more precisely, the representation to British readers of how native audiences might take such performances, and how their reaction might be bound up with the meanings of British masculinity and imperial power. From this perspective, we discover a problem that is neither a crisis in Britain nor the unruliness of natives abroad, but one of the relationship between the center and the periphery, the challenge of developing gestures and techniques of rule through which Britain might command the assent of its subject peoples and thus secure for itself a more durable and potent empire. We have seen that the soldiers of the East India Company appropriated the moustache as a sign of virility originally intended for Indian eyes. By adopting this local sign, the British officer might make himself look more authoritatively masculine to the Indians he commanded and those he fought. This same strategy of winning assent by adapting to local conditions rather than enforcing a glorified standard of Britishness is likewise revealed in much popular fiction, which repeatedly stages a fantasy in which natives affirm the greatness of British men who have mastered the local grammar of dominance. Take, for instance, one of G. A. Henty’s colonial adventure stories for boys, The Dash for Khartoum (1892), which, like The Four Feathers, is set in the Sudan during the time of Britain’s campaign against the Mahdi. The story begins, however, sixteen years earlier at Agra, when two boys are born to a British regiment, one the son of the wealthy Captain Clinton, and the other of a noncommissioned officer called Humphreys. Thanks to the machinations of Humphreys’s greedy wife Jane, the two infants are confused in such a way that no one can tell the wealthy child from the poor one, and in the end, the Clintons decide to raise both as their own, thinking that eventually one of the boys

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will grow to resemble his parents and thus settle the question. No such resemblance emerges, but Jane reappears when the boys are teenagers at school, and, though she cannot tell them apart herself, convinces one of them that he is really her child rather than the Clintons’. But Edgar, the boy she approaches, wants no part of her scheme to swindle the Clintons, and feeling “keenly the dishonor of the fraud in which he had been an unconscious accomplice,”25 he runs off to join the Army under the name Ned Smith. In short, the story begins with a problem of the slipperiness of identity – here in the form of social class – and its relationship to honor. This problem will be rewritten on a much grander scale in the following chapters when Edgar goes to fight in the Sudan, where he will have “abundant opportunities for the display of courage and for gaining credit and honour” (148). Like Harry Feversham, Edgar learns that the Sudan is a theater of honor, where men contend with one another for respect and prestige. And like Mason’s novel, Henty’s combines racist depictions of the Mahdist soldiers with admiring passages about their courage: The idea that savages, however brave, could cope with British troops with breech-loaders had then seemed absurd; but the extraordinary bravery with which the Arabs had fought, the recklessness with which they threw away their lives, and the determination with which they had charged through a fire in which it seemed impossible that any human being could live, had created a feeling of respect. There was nothing contemptible about these foes. (134)

Although Edgar’s honor has been sullied by association with fraud, he has not come to the Sudan to learn about courage; like most of Henty’s boy heroes, Edgar has no masculine failings. The problem, in fact, is the failure of courage and will of Britain more generally, for it is as a state that the British have failed to live up to the standards of the Dervishes. The novel takes place during the attempt to save Gordon at Khartoum, an effort doomed to fail because Gladstone’s administration had waited too long to approve it. The failure to save the martyred Gordon became the most egregious disgrace of Gladstonian Liberalism in the eyes of Tory imperialists, and in Henty’s novel we watch this disgrace as it unfolds. When the relief expedition learns of Gordon’s death, they recognize the defeat as a humiliation to which the soldiers must respond: “The British people, roused to anger by the fate of Gordon would probably call loudly for the vindication of the national honour” (218). But when the troops subsequently receive news that they are to withdraw rather than pursue the Mahdists, they denounce the policy that at once undermines Britain’s international prestige

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and the manliness of its sons: “I call it a beastly shame. More than that, I call it a downright dishonourable action! . . . Our fathers used to be proud to call themselves Englishmen, but, by Jove, there is very little reason for us to be” (279). This stain on the national honor is not one that Henty’s novel can resolve, built as it is around an inflexible framework of historical events. After the withdrawal of the troops, however, Henty’s novel turns to the purely fictional exploits of his protagonist, which, on their smaller scale, offer some imaginative resolution to the national humiliation. Shortly before Gordon’s death, Edgar is separated from his regiment and captured by an Arab sheikh named Bakhat. Awaiting his chance to escape, Edgar plans a disguise: “I will get to speak the language like a native. I am already almost burnt to their colour, and shall ere long be able to pass as one of themselves” (218). During his time with Bakhat and his followers, however, Edgar comes to resemble his captors in a different way, one that allows him to control the Arabs instead of merely escaping them. Edgar proves so comfortable with the culture of his captors and so adept at what they regard as an Arab style of combat that they begin to praise him in their own terms. “Had you been bred in the desert,” Bakhat tells him, “you could not have better understood our warfare . . . You would have been a great sheik” (314). Bakhat’s admiration continues to mount, so that he begins to defer to the boy’s judgment, offers to adopt him, and, in the final confirmation of Edgar’s influence, asks him to wear Arab clothes: “I wish you to dress like us . . . You have done us great service, and though you will not change your religion, I regard you almost as one of the tribe, and do not wish you henceforth to consider yourself as a slave” (340). Henty’s novel predates the mythologizing accounts of Lawrence of Arabia by nearly thirty years, but it neatly anticipates the allure of those narratives: Edgar rises to mastery because he can perform acts of valor in an Arabic mode, and his power follows from Bakhat’s recognition of that performance, symbolized by a gesture of sartorial inclusion. As Henty imagines it, the code of masculine honor and greatness acts as a bridge between disparate cultural identities, one which can circumvent otherwise insuperable differences. When, for instance, Bakhat wants Edgar to convert to Islam, Edgar shrewdly skirts the problem of religious difference by explaining his adherence to Christianity as a matter of honor rather than theology: I am indeed grateful for your offer, sheik, which does me great honour, but were I to accept it I know that even in your eyes I should be viewed with contempt. Had our people captured Metemmeh when you were there, and carried you off a prisoner, I know well that you would have treated with

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To a degree that might have scandalized a midcentury evangelical missionary, Edgar’s argument minimizes the difference in content between Christianity and Islam; one is not more metaphysically true than the other. What matters instead to Edgar is that the preservation of religious difference should be justified by a higher unity between Bakhat and himself. Their shared understanding of a code of “honourable men” means that though they profess different faiths, they stand in an equivalent relationship to religion, so that Bakhat would behave just as Edgar does in the same circumstances. Likewise, when Bakhat regrets that Edgar is not Muslim, Edgar argues that a man can be an unbeliever and still achieve greatness. “Gordon Pasha was a Kaffir,” Edgar replied, “but he was greater than any sheik.” “He was a great man indeed,” the sheik said; “he was a very father to the people; there was no withstanding him. We fought against him, for our interest lay with the slavedealing, but he scattered us like sheep. Yes, Gordon was a great man though, as you say, he was a Kaffir;” and the sheik sat in silence, meditating upon what seemed to him an inscrutable problem. (314)

In Henty’s fantasy, Bakhat’s silence at the end of this exchange is the sound of colonial resistance eroding, a victory achieved by stripping away certain premises of cultural difference. In these passages, Henty is especially concerned with religious objections to British rule, doubtless because the Victorians liked to imagine that the Mahdist revolt was fueled purely by Islamic fanaticism. To imagine religious differences displaced by an internationally appealing code of masculine greatness is to reframe the relationship of center and periphery in which British imperial agents may claim the admiration and allegiance of the Sudanese. Yet significantly, this celebration of Gordon’s greatness translates him into terms that Henty imagines an Arab can appreciate: the same man who had been celebrated in England at the time of his death for his evangelical fervor and Christian martyrdom becomes in Henty’s account a secular, absolutist patriarch and an invincible warlord. No longer particularly Christian or English, Gordon Pasha can embody a colonial authority based on a masculine greatness that can cross borders, recapitulating on a national scale the logic of Edgar’s cultural cross-dressing. So invested is The Dash for Khartoum in the theme of cultural crossdressing that it provides a secondary plot in which Edgar’s brother, Rupert,

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also takes up local dress. Whereas Edgar wears Arab clothing as proof of Bakhat’s regard for him, however, Rupert’s path to cross-dressing follows more closely the lines of the surveillance trope: he learns to pass as a native so that he can travel unmolested through Mahdist territory in search of his brother. But here, too, Henty underscores the native reception of Rupert’s performance. The sheikh Rupert hires as a guide, for instance, first reacts to the boy’s disguise with admiring wonder: “The whites are great people . . . they can turn a white man into a black. They can put an Arab’s hair on to their heads, so that they can take it on and off like a turban” (285). This is a slight variation on the lesson of Edgar’s story. An Arab sheikh is still imagined to affirm the greatness of the British, but in this instance the foundation of white superiority is not masculinity but the very principle of mutability. This demonstration alone is enough to convince Rupert’s retainers that they can trust his leadership, or, as another British officer remarks, “I think, Clinton, you have won your fellows fairly over” (288). This kind of victory, the success at winning the esteem of the Sudanese by transforming the protagonists, is perhaps the only triumph Henty can imagine amid the disgraceful implications of Gordon’s death. Eventually Edgar’s and Rupert’s plotlines converge in a bizarre scene in which the two brothers, once indistinguishable, are now both so transformed by their imperial adventures that they cannot recognize one another (Figure 3), a conclusion that may strike us as a strange salve for the psychic wound of Khartoum. Insofar as Edgar and Rupert’s costumes stand for their ability to win over Sudanese opinion, however, their achievement is significant. Imperial power can thus be understood to flow from the transformation of imperialists rather than (as in the liberal model) the transformation of natives, and prestige flows from the affirmation of that power by native witnesses. It does not matter that recognizably English qualities have been erased from Edgar or Rupert (or Gordon, for that matter), any more than it matters to old Captain and Mrs Clinton that only one of those boys is biologically their son; identity and character depend more on outward appearance and performance than on some unalterable core of authenticity. Henty’s novel is unusual in its doubled presentation of cultural crossdressing, but its preoccupation with native responses to such performances typifies late Victorian fantasies of empire. They are animated by cultural narcissism, but not that of the midcentury imperialist who would be recognized as an emissary of superior virtues. Instead, it is a narcissism that dreams of British heroes competing for prestige among foreign men according to local rules and values, and that delights in the prospect of an

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3 Edgar and Rupert reunite in Henty’s Dash for Khartoum, 1892.

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Arab calling Edgar a “great sheik,” or Gordon a “great man,” or the British a “great people.” In each of these cases, the greatness of the British does not depend on standards that are particularly their own, but on the ability to compete on a global stage of masculine power, and to hear that success acknowledged by the Other. This same narcissism appears frequently in contemporary texts, as in Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), when the strapping Zulu warrior Umbopa tells the equally strapping Englishman Henry Curtis, “we are men, thou and I.”26 Such compliments are all the more gratifying when paid by a foreign judge, and in this case by a representative of a race with which Haggard associated ostentatious virility. The heroes of imperial adventure fiction regard these scenes of recognition as tributes to their manly honor, as they do the names bestowed upon them by admiring natives: Haggard’s Curtis is given the Zulu name Incubu (“elephant”) and Alan Quatermain is called Macumazahn (“he who keeps his eyes open”). So too did the real agents of the Empire: Theophilus Shepstone delighted in his Zulu name Somtseu (“great hunter”), as Baden-Powell did in the Ndebele name Impeesa (“hyena,” though he took it to mean “the wolf that never sleeps”). Rhodes, whom we saw at the beginning of this chapter wrapped in sartorial signs of exotic manliness, also enjoyed his African name, Lamula ‘m Kunzi (“separator of the fighting bulls”), which signified much the same virility as those clothes. In an era when masculine identity and honor depended on recognition by other men, such names were badges of manly success, but they also represented to British audiences an influence over the foreign men who were moved to offer these signs of recognition and respect. If cultural cross-dressing provided imperial agents with the material of an energizing narcissistic fantasy, it also gave imperial administrators an increasingly attractive tool of colonial authority, a method of staging power for native audiences that would secure their consent and collaboration by manipulating local vernaculars of prestige. It became, in other words, as much an instrument of political policy as of personal aggrandizement. As an important early example of this strategy, consider the grandest moment of imperial theater during Disraeli’s government, the Royal Titles Act of 1876, in which Victoria adopted a foreign honorific of her own: Kaiser-i-Hind (or Empress of India).27 As Bernard Cohn writes, the Queen’s new title and the ceremonies with which it was subsequently recognized at the Imperial Assemblage in Delhi expressed what was effectively a new theory of colonial rule dressed up in traditional Indian idioms, a strategy to transform the British from outsiders to insiders and thus consolidate their power.28

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British skeptics of this new mode of imperial theater, however, worried that the Assemblage was fundamentally un-English, and a similar concern underlies another Punch cartoon. In “New Crowns for Old Ones,” the Royal Titles Act becomes, in effect, another instance of cultural crossdressing, with Disraeli in the costume of a sly vizier conjured from the pages of the Arabian Nights (Figure 4). Of course, Disraeli had long had an air of the exotic about him – and not only because of his Jewish heritage – so it comes as no surprise that his support of the Royal Titles Act should lend substance to the popular perception of his Otherness. Yet in the 1870s, it was not only the content of the political display that marked him as foreign, but its very theatricality. The grand gestures for which Disraeli’s imperial policy became known, his fondness for bold, symbolic strokes meant to impress British voters or European competitors, were likewise taken to be signs of an un-English propensity for show; as his own foreign secretary grumbled in 1877, Disraeli “believes thoroughly in ‘prestige’ as all foreigners do.”29 Critics of Disraelian imperial theatricality overlooked another intended audience – Britain’s colonial subjects – for whom the un-Englishness of the spectacle was precisely the point. As Lord Lytton, the newly appointed viceroy in India, explained, the Assemblage would “place the Queen’s authority upon the ancient throne of the Moguls, with which the imagination and tradition of [our] Indian subjects associate the splendour of supreme power!”30 Translating the majesty of the monarch into terms and spectacles with which Indians were imagined to be familiar, the British would secure the assent of a vast audience, parts of which had, twenty years before, demonstrated the consequences of blithe disregard for indigenous traditions. And despite the initial doubts about the Assemblage, over time the government in India relied even more upon the manipulation and reinvention of local idioms, so that under the later rule of Curzon, as Cohn points out, imperial durbars were designed “to be more ‘Indian’ than the assemblage.”31 The pageantry of the Raj was only one of the ways that British imperialists sought to enhance their power by appropriating local idioms of domination and subordination, or by disguising their influence by working behind a curtain of traditional authorities. Terence Ranger describes, for instance, how administrators in colonial Africa developed ceremonies to promote an image of British monarchs vested with a mystical, paternalistic power that exaggerated their actual importance in a parliamentary democracy (thereby discounting the very institutions that liberal imperialism claimed to propagate). Such theatrical manipulations of local traditions in India and Africa can be understood alongside a number

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4 Disraeli and Victoria cross-dressing in “New Crowns for Old Ones!” from Punch, 1876.

of other methods of disguising British power: the veiled protectorate in Egypt, the influence of residents in Indian princely states, the development of methods of indirect rule in central Africa, and, later, the installation of puppet regimes in the Middle East mandates. Collectively, these trends suggest the growing sense in Britain that colonial authority worked most

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successfully when adapted to frameworks of local convention. The principle was best articulated by Frederick Lugard, the great architect of indirect rule: I have . . . continually emphasised the necessity of recognising, as a cardinal principle of British policy in dealing with native races, that institutions and methods, in order to command success and promote the happiness and welfare of the people, must be deep-rooted in their traditions and prejudices . . . [A] slavish adherence to any particular type, however successful it may have proved elsewhere, may, if un-adapted to the local environment, be as ill-suited and as foreign to its conceptions as direct British rule would be.32

In place of Gladstone’s ambition to create little Englands everywhere, Lugard offers a theory of the indigenization of colonial authority whereby British influence would be sustainable only to the extent that it was not conspicuously British. Sovereignty must be performed according to local scripts rather than universal principles; it must be emulative rather than tutelary, adaptable rather than essentialist. Cultural cross-dressing is the ideal trope through which this dream of power might be expressed and explored. The New Imperialist trend toward the indigenization of colonial authority shares much with Henty’s fantasy of culturally cross-dressed English heroes. Both the political strategy and the adventure tale emphasize an imperial power that flows not from transforming natives (as the liberal rhetoric of the civilizing mission would have it) but from transforming imperialists. And in both cases, prestige, honor, and power depend upon the affirmation of native audiences. Still, the difference in scale that distinguishes adventure fiction from the discourse of colonial policy is significant, because it is in the work of popular novelists that indirect rule becomes an exciting narrative of heroic cross-dressing, a story that promises not only individual satisfactions, but one that also offers to resolve fundamental questions of masculine identity by staging the pursuit of manliness as a global competition.

Beating them at their own game Mason’s Four Feathers teaches us that foreign costume was an important means of self-fashioning amid the performative imperatives of fin-de-siècle masculinity, and Henty’s Dash for Khartoum indicates that the same gestures resonated with contemporary trends of New Imperialist policy.

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These two aspects of cultural cross-dressing converged in a characteristic fantasy of this period, one in which an imperial hero was said to beat natives at their own game. To beat them at their own game (or as other variants had it, “at their own weapons” or “on their own ground”) was to give shape and meaning to colonial encounters by emphasizing a narrative of ludic competition, a story in which individual successes merged with national power. This is a common formula of New Imperialist commendation, as in the praise for General William Lockhart, who was congratulated for adopting the unorthodox tactics of his adversaries in the dangerous northwest frontier of India: “He showed exceptional skill in handling his force of regulars in an almost impracticable country, in a guerilla warfare, against native levies of sharpshooters, who were always trying to elude him, but he outmanœuvered them and beat them at their own tactics.”33 Lockhart’s ability to master these alien martial tactics is at once a sign of his exceptional skill and a confirmation of the imperial power he served. This adaptability could also be used to secure the admiration and consent of natives. Thus Alfred Ollivant, describing the same men Lockhart had fought, wrote of “the wild Afridis from over the Border, drawn from their mountain fastnesses to the service of the British Raj by their admiration for the white man who can beat them at their own games of sport and war.”34 In some cases, celebrations of a British man’s ability to defeat natives in their own terms was simply taken to be a confirmation of racial superiority, as in this description of the adventurer W. Parker Snow’s relationship to Australian aborigines: “He always made it a point to be friendly with them, but at the same time to maintain the ascendancy which he always held a white man ought to have over a black. This he asserted not by violence, but by showing them that he could beat them at their own sports and could outdo them in many other things.”35 Here Snow’s facility in local contests seems predictable; it is merely a demonstration intended to “maintain the ascendancy” of whiteness that the writer already assumes. But the competition could, in other cases, become more complicated and far more challenging. When, for instance, T. E. Lawrence described the strategy behind his own cross-dressing, he warned other British agents to follow his example only with extreme caution: If you wear Arab things at all, go the whole way. Leave your English friends and customs on the coast, and fall back on Arab habits entirely. It is possible, starting thus level with them, for the European to beat the Arabs at their own game, for we have stronger motives for our action, and put more heart into it than they. If you can surpass them, you have taken an

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Lawrence advises that the more completely Englishness is cast off, the more completely the colonial agent can exert his influence. At the same time, however, the difficulty he emphasizes in out-Arabing the Arabs enhances the potential gratification of success. The harder the game, the more glory to the victor. Thus Lawrence downplays the essentialist racial rhetoric by which an assumed superiority of white men would guarantee an easy victory. Instead, his account argues that a European man’s victory will depend upon “stronger motivation” and hard work, and imagines that the contest should begin with the European and the Arab on the same level, so that every unearned advantage of European civilization is ruled out. This sort of fair play will make the challenge more severe and the victory therefore more satisfying, even as the Empire is made more secure. The narcissism behind the fantasy of beating natives at their own game is not, in the end, its most troubling trait. Beside the English friends and English customs that Lawrence recommends leaving at the coast are English values and the kind of civilized moral restraint that Samuel Smiles had identified with manliness. Laws were to be replaced with the rules of a native game, rules that were often not derived from a careful understanding of local cultural conventions but on crude stereotypes of anarchic violence and casual barbarity. The phrase “beat them at their own game” was thus often applied to situations in which the British faced local guerilla resistance, as in the example of Lockhart, where it implies both the legitimacy of unorthodox military tactics and the relaxation of ethical prohibitions. To imagine colonial conflict as a kind of game in which the rules are set by savages, in other words, is both to license savagery and to wage war in the spirit of competitive play. During the Boer War, for instance, when the improvised guerilla tactics of local commandos repeatedly embarrassed British troops, a soldier published an anonymous letter in the conservative Spectator contending that “Our plan of work should have been guided by the motto ‘Beat them at their own game.’” Instead, he laments, the British have been guided by bloodless, rigid pedants, “scientific, strategic, full-of-technique commanders,” who timidly restrain their soldiers out of a misguided “over-anxiety to save life.”

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Unlike the Boers, the British soldiers are trapped by the old principles and habits of European warfare: The chains of custom and of antiquated, inflexible, inelastic formulas of war were forged around us too tightly, and instead of snapping them with a violent severance, we contented ourselves by a simple slackening of our bonds, placidly imagining that would produce the desired effect. We are still bound. Strike, in pity’s name, some lusty wielder of the axe, and set us free from deadening conventionalisms.37

The call for “some lusty wielder of the axe” suggests that the British need not only new tactics but a kind of man, primal and passionate rather than rational and restrained, capable of engaging with foes according to the rules of competition they themselves have set: “The manliest, hardiest, most go-ahead men with the keenest fighting instincts [are] required to prosecute the hardest physical fight falling to man’s lot. No smooth, insouciant 1899 British militarism will suffice for this deadly earnest game.”38 Possibly this soldier was heartened by the extent to which the British Army did eventually cast off the chains of convention and use the Boer guerilla tactics to justify farm-burnings and the new horror of concentration camps; liberals such as J. A. Hobson were aghast at the eagerness of Britons to support this notion of a “deadly earnest game” played by barbarous rules rather than civilized laws.39 More probably, the soldier was cheered to see the elevation on the national stage of the kind of imperial frontiersmen he called for: cunning, unconventional, and unorthodox men, men like Baden-Powell, whose tactics and masculine style both pointed to the innovative hybridity of manly qualities found in the contact zones of the frontier. Kipling’s fiction also repeatedly explored the relationship of cultural cross-dressing as an element in imperial power exercised in the spirit of play, as in the familiar example of Kim. In a lesser-known and far nastier story published more than a decade earlier, however, Kipling used an unusual form of cross-dressing to symbolize the strength Britain might wield if it were to cast off the restrictive fashions of civilized convention. “The Taking of Lungtungpen” (1887) is one of many stories narrated by Kipling’s Irish soldier, Terence Mulvaney, who in this case relates his experience in Burma with a small group of fresh British recruits – called “three-year-olds” in Army slang – and a young lieutenant named Brazenose. The officer and his two dozen young soldiers have been ordered to suppress local outlaws called dacoits, though whether the label means “bandit” or “insurgent” is unclear. As Mulvaney comments, the definition of dacoit is as elusive as the men to whom the term is applied: “such

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double-ended divils I niver knew! ’Tis only a dah an’ a Snider [i.e., a sword and a rifle] that makes a dacoit. Widout thim, he’s a paceful cultivator, an’ a felony for to shoot.”40 But the difficulty of identifying dacoits appears to be solved when Mulvaney, after thrashing a local man with his rifle’s cleaning-rod, learns that many are sheltering in the nearby town of Lungtungpen. The problem now becomes whether Brazenose (who had after all condoned Mulvaney’s torture of a civilian only tacitly) will allow the soldiers to storm the town immediately in defiance of regulations: “Accordin’ to the the-ouries av War,” Mulvaney recalls him saying, “we shud wait for reinforcemints” (113). Happily, from Mulvaney’s point of view, Brazenose decides that Lungtungpen is a “speshil case” (113), and they set off that night to attack. The soldiers soon find their path blocked by a wide stream, however, and it is at this point that they abandon regulations completely. At Mulvaney’s suggestion – and with Brazenose’s laughing approval – the men strip naked to swim across, only to discover that the current has carried them ashore directly below the walls of Lungtungpen. The troops have their rifles and Brazenose his sword, but otherwise they are still naked as, with a “divastatin’ howl” (115), they attack the town. In the end, the soldiers, “shriekin’ wid laughin’” (115), kill seventy-five Burmese men without suffering a single casualty. This is a story of triumph, in short, meant to illustrate Mulvaney’s point about the virtues of recruits who are too raw to appreciate the dangers of their position and too reckless to care if they did. But it is also meant to record the excellence of Brazenose, who turns out not to be the stickler for regulations Mulvaney had supposed, but a daring leader whose naked attack on the town has inspired the Irishman’s loyalty: “‘Sorr,’ sez I, for I loved the bhoy, ‘I wud waltz wid you in that condishin through Hell, an’ so wud the rest av the men!’” (117). The turning point of the story occurs at the crossing of the river: the story’s darkly ludic tone derives from the moment when the men strip naked, which becomes the outward sign of the wildness of the recruits and of the willingness of Brazenose to loosen the fetters of military regulation (Figure 5). On the most obvious level, then, this is a story of British imperial agents going native, crossing into savagery and seizing victory by doing so. But a closer look reveals still more layers of signification. The men’s nudity, for example, signifies not only simple savagery, but also the kind of cultural malleability we have seen in other instances of cultural cross-dressing. The very point of purest exposure – when we might expect identity to be fixed, laid bare, and revealed to its authentic core – turns out to be the moment of adaptability at its most protean.

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5 Naked soldiers attack in Kipling’s “Taking of Lungtungpen” in Soldier Stories.

When the attack begins, Mulvaney wonders whether the Burmese “tuk us, all white an’ wet, for a new breed av divil, or a new kind av dacoit” (115), which suggests that the Burmese regard the invaders according to their own experiences and superstitions. In fact, Mulvaney’s comment also

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aligns the British with the Burmese outlaws, because it reiterates his own definition of dacoits earlier in the story, when he explains that these “divils” can only be distinguished by their “dah an’ Snider.” Kipling provides us with a strikingly literal rendering of Mulvaney’s definition: appearing with nothing but a sword and their rifles, the British soldiers have indeed become a new kind of dacoit. In fact, they are in a sense more purely dacoits than the dacoits, more lawless than the outlaws they pursue. But Kipling offers yet another layer of meaning. During the melee, Mulvaney watches Brazenose flourishing his sword “like Diarmid av the Gowlden Collar – barring he hadn’t a stich av clothin’ on him” (115). The Irish servant of the Empire, in other words, perceives his officer as an avatar of the mythical Celtic hero Diarmuid, thus seeing Brazenose’s power through his own culture’s store of images just as the Burmese do through theirs. The nakedness of the white British body is in this sense less a racialized sign of essential superiority than a blank medium – stripped of any signifiers of Britishness – onto which culturally diverse images of power might be projected. Kipling’s story suggests that if the secret of the Empire’s new clothes was that it had no clothes – at least not any of its own – it could nevertheless be envisioned as stronger still for precisely that reason. “The Taking of Lungtungpen” follows the logic we have traced in representing imperial strength as a culturally flexible display of masculine power that is witnessed and affirmed by natives. Here the confirmation of British power can be found in the terror of the Burmese, and in the wondering words of the leader of the dacoits, who asks “Av the English fight like that wid their clo’es off, what int the wurruld do they do wid their clo’es on?” (116). Imperial power is likewise affirmed in the admiration of Mulvaney for Brazenose: “Sorr,” Mulvaney tells him at the end, “you’ve the makin’s of a great man” (117). Again, imperial strength and masculine greatness confirm one another. Kipling’s story goes further than most in fantasizing about an imperial agency untrammeled by law or restraint, about the kind of license granted by translating power into native terms. In doing so, the story frames the violent efficiency of Brazenose’s unorthodox methods in terms that contemporary readers would have understood as allusions to a widening political dimorphism – the same opposition captured in the cartoon of Rhodes and Loch with which we began. The dispute centered on different styles of colonial policy as they are typified in the careers of two generals. On the one hand was Garnet Wolseley, a reformer and favorite among Liberals, and on the other was Frederick Roberts, hero of Tory imperialists and eventually Wolseley’s

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successor as commander-in-chief. Mulvaney’s story is framed by his comments on the difference between Wolseley, described as a preening careerist, and Roberts, the great leader whom the troops in India celebrate as “Bobs Bahadur”: Wolseley be shot! Betune you an’ me an’ that butterfly net, he’s a ramblin’, incoherent sort av a divil, wid wan oi on the Quane an’ the Coort, an’ the other on his blessed silf – everlastin’ly playing Saysar an’ Alexandrier rowled into a lump. Now Bobs is a sensible little man. Wid Bobs an’ a few threeyear-olds, I’d swape any army av the earth into a towel an’ throw it away aftherwards. (112)

Thus introduced, the story of Brazenose’s success as a leader exemplifies a movement away from the Wolseleyan stereotype. The lieutenant’s early fondness for theories of war aligns him with Wolseley’s renowned intellectualism (the basis for Gilbert and Sullivan’s caricature of him as the “Modern Major General” in The Pirates of Penzance), whereas his later rejection of those theories, his disregard for pretensions and niceties, and his willingness to give the wild “three-year-olds” full rein, recast him in the mold of Roberts. This realignment gives Kipling’s story a sinister resonance, since the reason Liberals distrusted Roberts was his leadership during the Second Afghan War (1878–80), which gave rise to allegations that the general had, in reprisal for the guerilla tactics of the Afghans, burned entire towns and overseen (or at any rate overlooked) British atrocities. Prominent Liberals back in London singled out Roberts as a symbol for the moral bankruptcy of Tory imperial policy: the Earl of Granville charged Roberts with leadership “contrary to the laws of civilized warfare,” and the Duke of Argyll angrily added that “we have it in evidence that numbers [of Afghans] have been shot and hanged for no other crime whatever than that they defended their country, which they had a right to do.”41 Disraeli himself defended Roberts in the House of Lords on the grounds that the evidence of atrocities was insufficient, but Kipling’s later imaginative defense of him through the story of Brazenose seems rather to condone savage reprisals on recalcitrant towns, and to argue that becoming an outlaw is a sensible and effective means of dealing with outlaws. Justification is not to be sought in liberal appeals to law or universal rights, but to an international masculine competition in which turnabout is fair play. But Mulvaney goes further. Not only is Brazenose’s decision to unleash his savage young soldiers the correct response to dacoits, it is also the pattern by which the British could conquer their European rivals. As Kipling has Mulvaney exult in his gleeful stage-Irish, “by the honour av that great, little man Bobs, behind a good orficer ’tisn’t only dacoits

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they’d smash wid their clo’es off – ’tis Con-ti-nental Ar-r-r-mies! They tuk Lungtungpen nakid; an’ they’d take St. Pethersburg in their dhrawers!” (117). It is fitting that this story of soldiers who fight under the signs of their foreign opponents should have been inspired by “Bobs Bahadur,” whose very nickname marks him as a figure of hybrid power. In him, the exotic (“Bahadur” is Persian for “warrior”) is grafted onto the familiar (not just “Roberts,” but the more intimate “Bobs”). This linguistic hybridity marks a fantasy of manliness that sutures together self and Other into an articulation more powerful than either alone: the Briton loosed from British restraint, who confronts the Other in terms his adversary recognizes and admires. It is the verbal parallel to the spectacle of Rhodes – alias Lamula ‘m Kunzi – signifying the ferocity of colonial power through local costume. Rhodes, Roberts, and Baden-Powell, Burton and Lawrence, and any number of cross-dressed heroes of contemporary fiction: these are figures of a dream of masculine hybridity, but not the kind of hybridity that has most engaged cultural and postcolonial theorists. We are more familiar with the subversive potential of hybridity, whether in Bakhtin’s analysis of hybrid utterances that shake the univocal discourse of authority, or Bhabha’s argument that cultural hybridity disrupts a colonizing nation’s sense of its own authentic identity, and thereby undermines the ideological foundation of the civilizing mission. Yet as Robert Young has pointed out, “There is no single, or correct, concept of hybridity,” and he warns against assuming that hybridity is necessarily threatening to what was, after all, “the very culture that invented it in order to justify its divisive practices of slavery and colonial oppression.”42 Young refers primarily to discourses of racial identity, but his point bears directly on the construction of imperial manhood as well. We have seen that the kind of hybridity presented in popular stories of cultural cross-dressing served to signify manly virtue within spectacular contests of honor and shame, to reimagine the gestures of imperial authority over natives, and to license new forms of masculine power that were unconfined by liberal precepts of British civilization. The performance of cultural hybridity played other roles, too, some of which were opposed to this new imagery of power; like crossdressing itself, hybridity in practice is ideologically indeterminate. But, whatever else hybridity could signify in the late nineteenth century, it gave shape to the aspirations of New Imperialist politics and to the performances – real and imagined – of late Victorian masculinity.

chapter 3

Piracy, play, and the boys who wouldn’t grow up

All children, except imperialists, grow up. Such, at least, seems the lesson of late Victorian Britain, when an ideal of boyishness that never faded came to be as much admired as that of an empire on which the sun never set. Among the most venerable heroes of the Empire we find many ostentatiously boyish men: Robert Baden-Powell, who not only saw the Empire’s future in the hands of his Boy Scouts but was praised for having “always been a boy himself,”1 Alfred Milner in South Africa, who called his circle of disciples the “kindergarten,” and Horatio Kitchener in Egypt, who called his the “band of boys.” When, in his late forties, Cecil Rhodes exulted, “I am a boy! I am a boy! Of course I shall never get old!”,2 he anticipated by several years the first performance of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904). This remarkable rebellion against masculine maturity enlisted writers, too, such as Rudyard Kipling, whom E. M. Forster called the “Boy Who Never Grew Up,” and Joseph Conrad, who warned, “I am not going to discard the beliefs of my boyhood for anybody on earth.”3 Reimagined in the pages of imperial romance, the frontier became crowded with youthful men and heroic adolescents, while the novels themselves were increasingly aimed at a male audience whose age was explicitly blurred: after the success of Treasure Island (1883), as Harvey Darton has argued, previously distinct readerships of men and boys found common ground in adventure stories. H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) was dedicated “to all the big and little boys who read it,” just as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) addressed itself “To the boy who’s half a man / And the man who’s half a boy.”4 By the late Victorian period, it had long been the case that, as Joseph Bristow writes, “Empire and Boyhood . . . were mutually supportive,”5 but the rejection of masculine maturation represents a distinctive response to the period’s new imperial ideologies. For the mid-Victorians, by contrast, boys had to grow up in order to fulfill their ideological role in the grand narratives of empire. Stories of boys’ adventures abroad had 85

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been, as Jacqueline Rose has put it, “inheritors of a fully colonialist concept of development,”6 which is to say that their boy heroes learned in the school of empire how to master their instincts and – by externalizing this trajectory of self-discipline – how to control territories and subdue natives. The development of the child thus recapitulated and ratified the central metanarratives of liberal imperialism: the civilizing mission, the enlightenment of the heathen, and the march of progress. But how do we interpret the imperial politics of the boys who wouldn’t grow up? Scholars exploring this question have diagnosed persistent boyhood as a sign of cultural anxiety caused by ideological fault-lines widened by the political paradoxes of colonial experience; whether characterizing it as “atrophic adolescence” or “frozen youth,” scholars often regard it as an ideological crisis expressed through an aesthetic muddle.7 But perpetual boyhood also had an immense appeal as a fantasy that enabled and sustained the New Imperialist imagination. By the turn of the century, British boyhood was subject to the same intensity of revision as the British imperial mission. For instance, boys were increasingly represented as plucky and clever but also as largely amoral and often cruel, or as Barrie put it, “gay and innocent and heartless.”8 I will argue that an image of perpetual boyhood grounded in such qualities supported and naturalized the adventurous realpolitik of the New Imperialism. As liberal narratives of progress, civilization, and enlightenment gave way to militarism, prestige, and a vision of permanent dominion and endless competition, imperialists found in enduring boyishness a natural and suitably anti-developmental model of identity. An empire that had ceased to strive towards idealistic ends no longer required its heroes to grow up, and a non-developmental understanding of global politics welcomed a masculinity resistant to development. In its theory and its practice, the New Imperialism owed more to the opportunism of Disraeli and Salisbury than to the grand narratives of the liberal tradition that had animated Macaulay, the Mills, and Gladstone. One of the distinguishing characteristics of late nineteenth-century imperialism, as Hannah Arendt has argued, is that its “very essence is aimless process.”9 Having made expansion a goal of empire rather than just its means, the New Imperialists cast aside the liberal telos of universal progress through the diffusion of European principles and institutions. Once the professed proselytizer to the world, the British conqueror “became an administrator who no longer believed in the universal validity of law.”10 Consequently, Arendt argues, the “two key figures” of the new system were the bureaucrat and the secret agent11 – both aspects of the same

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character – who quietly effected their bluntly pragmatic ends without any higher motivation than the charm of purposeless mystery or, at most, the sense of serving inscrutable forces of history. But as Daniel Bivona reminds us in his extension of Arendt’s argument, the late Victorian bureaucratization of empire required compensatory images of individual heroism.12 To the same extent that the Empire needed anonymous functionaries, the imperial imagination demanded charismatic figures of unconquerable spirit. One of the most crucial characters with which popular fiction fed this desire, I argue, was the figure of the boy who wouldn’t grow up. Persistent boyishness put a more beguiling face on the New Imperialist ethos that Arendt and Bivona describe, transforming aimless process into endless adventure and the absence of universal law into a profusion of possibilities for exhilarating play. Play is a dauntingly complicated subject, one shaped and reshaped by collaborations and collisions between several disciplines (such as anthropology, biology, education, psychology, and aesthetics); as a result, Victorian discussions of play reveal a proliferating range of attitudes and assumptions.13 Still, it is possible to identify late nineteenth-century trends in the conceptualization of child’s play that suggest reasons for the appeal of perpetual boyhood among imperialists. As the end of the century approached, childhood play was liberated from the judgments of evangelical and utilitarian traditions that had regarded it as merely frivolous or even morally corrupting. Newer ideas, such as those championed by the growing Kindergarten movement or, later, the theories of Karl Groos and Caldwell Cook, dignified play as the free and healthy expression of the essence of childhood. Educational theory allowed that the impulses of play might be directed toward productive ends, but only insofar as this direction preserved pleasure and subordinated the ends of work to the spirit of play.14 But play was also increasingly valued for its own sake. “In the 1880s and 1890s,” writes Ira Bruce Nadel, we find a “change from a restricted, educationally focused view of play to the sheer enjoyment of it.”15 As the restraints of religious morality and civic duty slackened, play was also widely accepted as fundamentally competitive, especially for boys. Herbert Spencer thus claimed that “the sports of boys, chasing one another, wrestling, making prisoners, obviously gratify in a partial way the predatory instincts . . . No matter what the game, the satisfaction is in achieving victory, in getting the better of an antagonist.”16 Similarly, John Ruskin argued that war is a natural and desirable expression of masculinity, one that organizes the “natural restlessness and love of contest among men” into an immense game, “into modes of beautiful – though it may be

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fatal – play.”17 This valorization of play as a natural activity to be valued for its own pleasures and beauties rather than its subservience to external imperatives was easily reconcilable with an aggressive and ruthless New Imperialism that had largely abandoned the restrictive principles of its liberal predecessor. The self-justifying pursuit of perpetual empire could be naturalized and ennobled in a character like Kipling’s Kim, who “love[s] . . . the game for its own sake,” even as he comes to understand colonial domination as an extension of his boyish play.18 New Imperialist politics and the romance of endless boyhood combined in a distinctive set of interlocking values of male behavior that I will call the imperial play ethic. I have derived this model of play principally from patterns in the representation of masculine activity in late Victorian popular fiction, though, as the rhetoric of Rhodes and other imperial administrators hints, its assumptions were not confined to literature. Though widespread, this play ethic was only one of the ways that masculine games were understood at the end of the nineteenth century, and its logic overlaps and sometimes contradicts that of other contemporary models. The closest of these is the athletic “games ethic” explored in the work of J. A. Mangan. Though both models influenced late Victorian constructions of masculinity and its relationship to empire, they differ in critical ways. The games ethic Mangan describes was rooted in the muscular Christianity of the 1850s, and as it grew over the following decades it retained – at least in theory – a strong component of moral improvement. Fostered on the athletics pitches of the public schools, it held that the disciplined body was an outward expression of moral character, so that games were instruments in a process of development grounded in narratives of progress and maturation. The propagandists of the games ethic, according to Mangan, emphasized “the training of the young” and “the value of these games for the development of ethical behavior and the formation of sound social attitudes.”19 In other words, the public school games ethic treated boys as the raw material out of which manly qualities were to be painstakingly produced through a regimen of strenuous exercise and moral character-building. By contrast, the imperial play ethic I will describe placed no particular importance on physicality, and while it could include sport, it also encompassed other ludic forms, such as games of chance or imaginative role-play. Rather than the playing field, the locus of the play ethic was the playground, where boys could spontaneously invent any number of games. The distinction is plain in Kipling’s Stalky & Co. (1899), where the boy heroes sneer at their school’s compulsory football matches and prefer to sneak off to indulge their own elaborate games of

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honor, revenge, and humiliation. Yet the most important differences between the games ethic and the play ethic have less to do with the kinds of activities they promoted than with the attitudes they prized. The play ethic valued the ostensibly natural and unschooled impulses of boys, and sought to preserve them rather than force them to submit to the external order of moral maturity. It was concerned with questions of fairness that might guide the players in a game, but generally uninterested in questions of a universal justice that might guide us all. The imperial play ethic may be more fully defined as a distinctive combination of several elements. First, as I have suggested, it was nondevelopmental: it assumed that boys or boyish men were naturally equipped for struggle on the frontier, and that a boyish spirit was so well suited for the great game of empire that any deviation from it could be crippling. Second, it was situational: each imperial encounter was a new game to be played by locally adapted or generated rules rather than by deference to universal moral strictures or master narratives of civilization or progress. Third, it was self-consciously performative: play required great attention to one’s appearance to other players – friend and foe alike – and so emphasized role-playing and conduct over interiority, and the forms of competition over its transcendent meaning. Lastly, and correlatively, play was to be regulated primarily by shame: in its emphasis on external opinions, the play ethic depended less upon the inward sanctions of guilt than upon the dishonor that followed from failure in the eyes of others. The play ethic found particularly rich expression in stories that featured another key figure of the New Imperialist imagination: the pirate. Pirates were powerfully linked to boyhood in Victorian culture, not only because playing at pirates was a common boyhood game, but also because of piracy’s prominence in boys’ reading and, after Treasure Island, in the adventure fiction aimed at the synthesized man–boy readership. Frequently pairing pirates and boys, these stories allow us to trace new implications of boyhood in relation to the changing ethics of imperialism. Pirates who had in midcentury fiction clashed with the virtuous youth of England began to look less like the heroes’ foils than their doubles, their partners, or their secret sharers. By the end of the century pirates could be heroes themselves, and not simply in the mold of the misunderstood but noble corsairs of the romantic era, but as cynical, amoral, brutal adventurers. Cutcliffe Hyne, for instance, scored enormous popular success in the 1890s with his recurring character Captain Kettle, a self-proclaimed brute who sells his violent talents to whoever pays best. In 1915, Russell Thorndike published his first novel about Dr. Syn, a beloved English vicar

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and smuggler who had previously won notoriety as the vicious pirate Captain Clegg. The same year also saw the first of Rafael Sabatini’s bestselling historical swashbucklers, The Sea Hawk, in which an English knight becomes the Muslim leader of a crew of Arab pirates under the name of Sakr-el-Bahr. These colorful examples suggest the extent to which heroic piracy had seized the imagination of popular audiences, even at the expense of undermining the bulwarks of liberal imperialism, including free trade, Christianity, and Englishness. But this chapter will be concerned chiefly with two more familiar pirate stories. The first is Treasure Island, which marks a pivotal moment in the late Victorian representation of piracy and illustrates Stevenson’s use of the amoral pirate as a figure around which the fantasies of boyish play coalesce. The second is Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900), which, almost twenty years later, speaks to the enduring appeal of Stevenson’s dream even as it reveals the complications and anxieties produced by this construction of imperial masculinity.

Piracy, boyhood, and empire before Stevenson On 18 July 1879, the Daily News reported the discovery of a plot to set fire to the frigate Arethusa, a training ship for destitute boys moored on the Thames at Greenhithe. Having averted the plot, authorities discovered that the conspirators behind it were two of the ship’s own boys, a pair of sixteen-year-olds named Brider and Russell. Though the boys testified at their trial that they regarded the ship as a prison from which they hoped to escape, the News argued that the plot was more likely to be an instance of play: “Boys will be boys,” chided the News, “but there is no reason why they should be atrocious little savages.”20 Yet the News goes on to entertain reasons why boys are, in fact, prone to savagery. The instinctive play of boys, it points out, expresses “savage” and “diabolical” tendencies, symptoms of an “indifference to human suffering” and a “moral obtuseness” that does not reliably fade until boys reach their twentieth year.21 When Russell approached another shipmate with his plan to burn the ship, the response was the practical question “What with?”, which the News calls “a thoroughly boyish question. Before discussing the morality of the enterprise he wished to know how it could be done properly.” But having painted a picture of boyhood as naturally callous and amoral, the News backs away from the dark implications of its own musings and instead blames the familiar bogey of popular fiction:

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There can be little danger in guessing that the lads who conspired to burn the Arethusa had read too much about pirates . . . It is not odd that lads who have read “The Boy Pirate,” “Under the Black Flag,” “The Walkers of the Plank,” and other similar literature should steal matches and methylated spirits, and plot to fire the vessel that was their home. They were only imitating their favourite heroes of romance, and probably looked forward to having a good time after their escape in the seas vaguely known as “the Spanish Main.”22

That the pirates of the penny dreadfuls could be offered without evidence as the inspiration for Brider and Russell’s plot indicates the currency of mid-Victorian anxieties about pirate fiction and its effect upon impressionable boys. Pirates and boys had a dangerous affinity, allowing pirates to speak to the depraved impulses of young readers, encouraging them to seek adventures whose guiding principle was not “Is it right?” but “Can it be done?” It is not extraordinary, therefore, that the Daily News should worry about the continuity of piratical cruelty and boyish amorality. What is extraordinary is that the boom in pirate fiction just then beginning should come to celebrate pirates and boys together, and for precisely the reasons that worried the News. Every empire produces its own pirates, redefining the criminals of the sea in order to assert, by contrast, the legitimacy of its own overseas adventures. The Roman Empire called pirates hostes humani generis – enemies of all humanity – who lived entirely outside the laws of nations or of morality. As Marcus Rediker has observed, “the term pirate has been highly ideological from antiquity forward, functioning more or less as the maritime equivalent of barbarian – that is, anyone who was an enemy of the Romans. No matter who or what he actually was, the pirate was reduced to a criminal pure and simple, the very negation of imperial social order.”23 Rediker’s generalization captures the essential ideological function of pirate stories of the mid-Victorian period, but it applies less convincingly to the last decades of the century, the very time at which the proliferation of pirate fiction reveals the urgency of the cultural work the pirate was called upon to perform. In midcentury fiction, pirates serve as the foils of all that is decent, Christian, and British. When, for instance, Dickens responded to the “Indian Mutiny” with his chillingly propagandistic “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners” (1857), he recasts the Indian sepoys as an international gang of “barbarous Pirates,” whom he vigorously condemns as the “scum of all nations . . . the worst men in the world picked out from the worst, to do the cruelest and most atrocious deeds that ever stained it . . . [a]

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howling, murdering, black-flag waving, mad, and drunken crowd of devils.”24 Against these devils stand the brave and upright Englishmen of the Royal Navy, who, as they claim, “hold [their] commission by the allowance of God” and who intend to use it “to exterminate these people from the face of the earth.”25 Dickens represents pirates in so profound an opposition to English virtue that only aggressively Manichean distinctions can capture it. Other stories of the 1850s made a similar case, particularly those in the emerging group of respectable boys’ novels, such as William Kingston’s The Pirate of the Mediterranean (1851), Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1855), and R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857), which use piracy as the test with which an inherently moral British boyhood could be confirmed. The pirate–boy relationship in Ballantyne’s novel is particularly illustrative. The young protagonist, Ralph Rover, forms an unexpected friendship with a pirate called Bloody Bill, who, in his ominous resemblance to Ralph, foreshadows a less innocent future for the young adventurer. One of the pirates, admiring Ralph’s courage, tells him that “Bloody Bill, there, was just such a fellow as you are, and he’s now the biggest cut-throat of us all.”26 However, the superficial similarities between the boy and the pirate ultimately accentuate their differences, particularly Ralph’s Christian morality and Bill’s irreligiosity. Ralph manages to convert the repentant Bill as the pirate dies, thus emphasizing the ability of religious virtue to conquer the darker side of the English adventurous spirit, just as the novel’s missionaries tame and redeem the Pacific cannibals on whom the pirates have been preying. This overtly moralizing treatment of the boy–pirate relationship is repeated in Charles Stevens’s Jack Rushton; or, Alone in the Pirates’ Lair (1866–67), the serial story that opened the first number of Boys of England. Stevens’s story pits his hero Jack, a “handsome, manly lad about fourteen years old,” against an international gang of pirates, “a motley crew of most villainous-looking ruffians of every shade of colour – Malays, Chinese, Japanese, Javans, Papuans, Pintadoes and Mestizoes.”27 Jack is paired with a pirate called Ambrose, who recognizes in Jack his own youth and ultimately confesses at some length the story of his departure from his respectable beginnings. As Bristow has argued, Stevens’s story sets Jack against Ambrose as foils, insisting on their moral opposition even while acknowledging that the boy and the pirate will each in his own way appeal to impressionable readers: The respectable boy and the criminal male adult both have a part to play in shaping an ideal masculinity. But they do not fit easily together. Boys of

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England is asking its young male readers to accept two sets of ostensibly incompatible attitudes – where the law, Christianity, and heartfelt emotions are placed on one side, and merciless killing, crime, and treachery on the other – and see them as belonging to the same world view.28

To the extent that this tension is resolved in the story, it is through plotting the pirate’s recognition of his immorality and his final repentance, a narrative that attempts to contain the pirate’s dangerous energy and subordinate it to the moral authority of the British boy. As in The Coral Island, the boy hero’s maturing confidence and power depends on the pirate’s trajectory toward ethical reformation, which in turn mirrors the civilization of the savage. The three narrative threads interweave in a story that entwines the maturation of the moral British subject with the progressive and enlightening mission of empire. This is the kind of novel from which Stevenson’s Treasure Island would boldly depart, rending the barriers of law and piety that had stood between the boy and his piratical antagonist, and offering instead an integrative play ethic through which the two could, after all, easily fit together.

Treasure Island: a furlough from the moral law Treasure Island begins with the pirate Billy Bones taking up residence at the inn run by young Jim Hawkins’s family, an opening with which Stevenson brings piracy home – literally and figuratively – to England. While Jim’s father timidly worries that Billy’s domination of the barroom will scare away customers, Jim concludes that his presence did us good. People were frightened at the time, but on looking back they rather liked it; it was fine excitement in a quiet country life; and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to admire him, calling him a ‘true sea-dog,’ and a ‘real old salt,’ and such like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England terrible at sea.29

Jim’s sense that Billy’s admirers may be posturing is an early indication that masculinity in the novel is performative, and that the performance of piracy’s fearsome glamour is particularly appealing. But this passage also reveals that the appeal extends to the national self-image, so that the satisfaction the young men take in England’s “terrible” naval power is undiminished by its association with the lawless violence of piracy. The sentiment is reiterated a few chapters later, when Squire Trelawney applauds Billy’s former leader, the murderous Captain Flint: “He was the bloodthirstiest buccaneer that sailed . . . The Spaniards were so

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prodigiously afraid of him, that, I tell you, sir, I was sometimes proud he was an Englishman” (31). Even Jim’s own surname implies a convergence of piracy and patriotism in its allusion to the Elizabethan privateer John Hawkins. And, just as Englishness becomes implicated in piracy, the pirates cease to function as the wicked counterweights of all that is decent and Christian. The heroes are quick to behave piratically, while the pirates – particularly their leader, Long John Silver – act out a parody of conventional middle-class rectitude. From its outset, in short, Treasure Island blurs distinctions on which the ideological work of respectable pirate stories had depended. This turn was recognized by the novel’s first critics, such as the reviewer from The Dial, who wrote that the novel “will be relished by adventureloving boys, but whether it will be wholesome reading for them is more than doubtful.”30 Critics ever since have commented on the novel’s striking amorality, as we find in Diane Simmons’s argument that the story unfolds in a “moral duty-free zone” characterized by a “fruitful, and in the last analysis, non-judgmental coexistence between good and evil.”31 Kevin Carpenter goes further, identifying Stevenson’s work as a watershed that “helped to make children’s fiction without an underlying moral purpose widely acceptable.”32 Still, in place of the moral lessons that traditionally followed from the clash of Englishmen and pirates, Stevenson offers what amounts to an alternative ethical code, one that frames the characters’ incessant judgments of one another and of themselves, and that sets the terms in which masculinity can be defined. The alternative code depends on the novel’s erosion of yet another traditional distinction, the opposition of the boy and the pirate. For Stevenson, the figure of the pirate exemplifies the persistence of boyhood. In an essay in Virginibus Puerisque (1881), Stevenson reflects on a passage in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer in which Tom and Huck have taken to playing pirates and become absurdly confused about the morality of their roles, pledging that “so long as they remained in that business, their piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing.” But, for Stevenson, the would-be pirates’ comic moral confusion offers a glimpse into the quintessence of boyhood: “Here we recognise the thoughts of our boyhood; and our boyhood ceased – well, when? – not, I think, at twenty; nor, perhaps, altogether at twenty-five; nor yet at thirty; and possibly, to be quite frank, we are still in the thick of that arcadian period.”33 The piratical boy, morally dubious though he may be, represents to Stevenson an ideal of youth, an ideal so captivating that those who feel its appeal can hardly tell where boyhood ends and manhood begins. For

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those men who have outgrown the ideal, on the other hand, Stevenson reserves a special scorn. Thus, when William Monkhouse, author of A Dream of Idleness, expressed his fondness for repose, Stevenson privately rebuked him for indulging a self-satisfied bourgeois complacency: When a man, seemingly sane, tells me he has “fallen in love with stagnation,” I can only say to him, “You will never be a Pirate!” This may not cause any regret to Mrs. Monkhouse; but in your own soul it will clang hollow – think of it! Never! After all boyhood’s aspirations and youth’s immoral day-dreams, you are condemned to sit down, grossly draw in your chair to the fat board, and be a beastly Burgess till you die. Can it be? Is there not some escape, some furlough from the Moral Law, some holiday jaunt contrivable into a Better Land? Shall we never shed blood?34

In opposition to the hollow existence of middle-class respectability, Stevenson finds piracy and the “immoral day-dreams” of boyhood fundamentally aligned; both the boy and the pirate represent a kind of fulfillment that men should strive to preserve. The Victorian literary pairing of boys and pirates here assumes a new function: to naturalize the behavior of pirates as an expression of the essence of boyhood. Stevenson’s own attitudes toward imperialism are too complex to summarize neatly, but his cultural influence through Treasure Island was to remap the imperial frontier as a self-sufficient playground, not a place on which the moral laws of Britain are impressed, but as the kind of “Better Land” in which they can be escaped, a place better men might visit on a holiday jaunt enlivened by bloodshed. Stevenson’s essays on childhood and child’s play, published just before the completion of Treasure Island, represent childhood as an immoral or pre-moral time, and we can see how jarringly he breaks from the romantic notion of childhood purity when he describes children as “pretty like flowers and innocent like dogs.”35 But although they may be innocent only in the sense that dogs are – obliviously untouched by moral problems – Stevenson’s children are also shrewd, imaginative, and keenly perceptive. They differ from adults in absorbing the elements of the world they see into a detached model of that world, a reflected space in which the value of their actions is judged only by the internal rules of their closed system, and not by the moral consequences that they have left, as it were, on the distant shores of the mundane. This is the essence of what Stevenson calls “play”: Two children playing at soldiers are far more interesting to each other than one of the scarlet beings whom they are both busy imitating. This is

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Like the stereotypical aesthete, Stevenson’s callous children are less concerned with human sympathy and its moral corollaries than with elaborating their own rules, rules that might be spontaneously generated around even the most trivial pretext: “What wonderful fancies I have heard evolved out of the pattern upon tea-cups! – from which there followed a code of rules and a whole world of excitement, until tea-drinking began to take rank as a game.”37 This absorption with the rules of play replaces conventional moralizing in Treasure Island. The pirates themselves, while thoroughly immoral and lawless from the perspective of British authority, are in fact obsessed with their own set of rules. The most memorable token in their piratical game is the black spot; the one presented to Billy Bones early in the novel is a simple “round of paper,” colored black on one side and bearing on the other, “in a very good, clear hand, this short message: ‘You have till ten tonight’” (22). The formal ceremony with which Billy is presented with this warning and the evident care of its penmanship imply the importance of the code that governs piracy, to which the pirates adhere even at the expense of self-interest. When a black spot is later presented to Long John Silver during the scene of a pirate council, we are prepared to admire his cleverness at maneuvering within the code. The confrontation between Silver and his dissatisfied henchmen emphasizes the reliance of both sides on a rhetoric of rules: Silver’s underlings first demand the right to challenge his authority “according to rules” (156), and they then present him with a black spot signaling their intention to depose him. Silver responds by complimenting his chief challenger, George Merry, on his grasp of the system, saying, “You always was brisk for business, and has the rules by heart, George, as I’m pleased to see” (159). But when George assumes the matter is settled, Silver turns the tables with a masterful riposte: “‘I thought you said you knowed the rules,’ returned Silver, contemptuously. ‘Leastways if you don’t, I do; and I wait here – and I’m still your cap’n, mind – till you outs with your grievances, and I reply; in the meantime your black spot ain’t worth a biscuit’” (159). Silver’s ensuing defense of his authority is his finest hour, a pivotal moment that decides the fortunes of everyone on the island and supports his claim to be the best man in a sea-mile.

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Stevenson’s fascination with the pirates’ rules is in no way diminished by their independence from any overarching morality, just as Silver’s charisma in this scene is not undercut by his plans to betray the very men whom he has just convinced to reaffirm his leadership. Rather, the allure of the rules lies in their freedom from any constraints beyond a bare scaffold of regulations that allow conflicts to be experienced as exciting contests of skill and imagination, precisely in the way that Stevenson conceives of the appeal of children’s play. It is in this sense that Jim, forced into a fragile alliance with a man he knows to be a murderer and traitor, can nevertheless admire Silver’s talent in playing a “remarkable game” (162–63). The play ethic pervades the novel, casting the protagonists and their adversaries as two teams competing for the same prize. Their game accommodates horror and brutality, and its score is kept by counting the lives of the remaining players. The ease and even pleasure with which Jim takes to the game may remind us of the moral handwringing provoked by the Arethusa plot’s suggestion that boys are by nature dangerously akin to pirates, but Stevenson makes the same connection without anxiety. When Jim is given the chance to score a kill of his own, the scene emphasizes both the continuity between pirates and boys and the subversion of Christian moralizing by the play ethic. The episode takes place when Jim slips aboard the Hispaniola and confronts the wounded pirate Israel Hands. Jim’s clash with Israel begins, just as Ballantyne might have written it, with Jim’s advice that the wounded pirate should look to the state of his immortal soul and fall to his prayers “like a Christian man” (138). But the exchange that follows is more parody of Ballantyne than homage: “Why?” said he. “Now, you tell me why.” “Why?” I cried. “You were asking me just now about the dead. You’ve broken your trust; you’ve lived in sin and lies and blood; there’s a man you killed lying at your feet this moment; and you ask me why! For God’s mercy, Mr. Hands, that’s why.” I spoke with a little heat, thinking of the bloody dirk he had hidden in his pocket, and designed, in his ill thoughts, to end me with. He, for his part, took a great draught of the wine, and spoke with the most unusual solemnity. “For thirty years,” he said, “I’ve sailed the seas, and seen good and bad, better and worse, fair weather and foul, provisions running out, knives going, and what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o’ goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don’t bite; them’s my views – amen, so be it.” (138)

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If we are initially puzzled by Jim’s sudden concern for the spiritual wellbeing of the pirates – which, after all, never troubles him before or after this moment – we quickly learn his real motives are his fear of that “bloody dirk” and his hope that he might persuade Israel to give it up. Jim, in other words, is as cynically pragmatic as his opponent, and when he manages to train a gun on the pirate, he leaves off moralizing and echoes the pirate’s blasphemous prayer: “‘one more step, Mr. Hands,’ said I, ‘and I’ll blow your brains out! Dead men don’t bite, you know,’ I added, with a chuckle” (142). The struggle between Jim and Israel exemplifies the novel’s representation of adventurous conflict, and it illustrates the tools required for success: cleverness, resourcefulness, skillful performance, trickery, bravery, panache, and luck. And all these virtues follow naturally from Jim’s undeveloped boyish instincts. In the end, his match against Israel is a familiar game: “It was such a game as I had often played at home about the rocks of Black Hill Cove; but never before, you may be sure, with such a wildly beating heart as now. Still, as I say, it was a boy’s game, and I thought I could hold my own at it” (141). Stevenson is less interested in differentiating the two characters than in emphasizing their mutual facility in this deadly game. Pirates play a “boy’s game” just as boys can play at a pirate’s, and on the level field of the play ethic there is no moral high ground, only a perch atop the ship’s mast from which Jim blows out Israel’s brains. In Treasure Island, the play ethic allows a struggle for life to be experienced also as a game of masculine self-fashioning. The characters offer running commentaries on which of the men have shown themselves truly to be manly, generally by measuring themselves against one another: Livesey calls Captain Smollett “a better man than I am” (102); Silver declares his right to command because he is “the best man by a long seamile” and a “better man” than George Merry (155, 162); Jim affirms that Silver is “twice the man” that the other pirates are while Silver himself has “never seen a better man” than Livesey (166, 167). Such judgments about better manhood can be fluid and inconsistent, but together they establish the novel’s view of manliness as both competitive and comparative. One does not so much grow into manhood as strive constantly for a better manhood than one’s rivals. In fact, one need not be a man in the developmental sense to be a man in the competitive sense. Young Jim, for instance, proves himself when he openly shames the pirates who have captured him, gloating over his victories against them: “The laugh’s on my side; I’ve had the top of this business from the first; I no more fear you than I fear a fly” (154). His performance is rewarded with Silver’s acclaim:

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“I’ve never seen a better boy than that. He’s more a man than any pair of rats of you” (155). If boys can be men – even better men – in Treasure Island, it is because the rules of play that Stevenson uses to measure manhood derive from the games for which he imagines boys are inherently suited. The kind of play that animates Stevenson’s novel falls into what the play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith classifies as a “rhetoric of power,” one in which play is valued primarily as a contest that shapes both individual and collective identities.38 According to Sutton-Smith, the most influential analyst of play in this tradition has been Johan Huizinga, and indeed Huizinga’s work usefully illuminates a view of play as an agonistic encounter set off from ordinary moral codes. Huizinga argues that “Play lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly, and equally outside those of truth and falsehood, good and evil. Although it is a non-material activity it has no moral function. The valuations of vice and virtue do not apply here.”39 Like Stevenson, Huizinga asserts that the void of conventional morality is filled by a new kind of order based on the rules that frame each game, so that the meaning of each is generated by its particular internal structure rather than by reference to the values of the world outside. This kind of rule-based orderliness, circumscribed as it is by the participation of a limited and knowable community, might in many ways appeal to its players far more powerfully than the relatively amorphous and confusing world of ineffable moralities they have escaped: “Inside the play-ground an absolute and peculiar order reigns . . . [Play] creates order, is order. Into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection.”40 Huizinga’s insight suggests the attraction of the play ethic to both men and boys. The playground offers intense feelings of freedom from the restrictions of convention, but maintains a rule-based orderliness that renders actions perfectly intelligible. But the playground is also a space of recognition, of the ostentatious performance of one’s own manliness before other men. It is a theater of character in which each boy is both actor and witness, as indicated in an anonymous Victorian book called Boys and Their Ways (1880): It is in the playground, I repeat, that the boy shows himself what he really is . . . There it is that a boy, if he has any genuine stuff in him, reveals it; and there it is that keen eyes detect it or the want of it. For boys are the shrewdest and most unsparing of critics, with an utter contempt for pretence and affectation, and a quick and generous recognition of all that is true and honest. They soon take the measure of their companions; soon learn to appraise them at their exact value; and it is specially in the playground that this critical faculty bears fruit.41

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Treasure Island is just such a playground, a place divorced from the ordinary world and its ordinary values, a place where male communities can regard and police themselves according to their own rules. It enables, as Huizinga writes, “the feeling of being ‘apart together’ in an exceptional situation, of sharing something important, of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world and rejecting the usual norms.”42 In this way Stevenson’s island would become the model of many other playgrounds that followed: Haggard’s Kukuanaland, Kipling’s Kaffiristan, Doyle’s Maple-White Land, and Barrie’s Neverland. In providing a map to such exotic new playgrounds, Treasure Island launched an armada of pirates who commanded the pages of popular fiction aimed at both boys and men, pirates whose bloodthirsty criminality is mitigated by their admirable audacity and cleverness: to the ranks of Captain Kettle, Dr. Syn, and Sakr-el-Bahr we can add, for instance, Max Pemberton’s Captain Black (1893) and Doyle’s Captain Sharkey (1900).43 As these imaginary pirates proliferated, the Victorians also grew increasingly willing to embrace Britain’s piratical heritage as the root of its modern imperial identity, especially by reclaiming the Elizabethan privateers as national icons. Of these, the vicious slaver Francis Drake fared particularly well, becoming the hero of the poet Alfred Noyes’s Drake: An English Epic (1908) – which celebrated him as “the boyish privateer”44 – and Louis Parker’s Drake: A Pageant Play (1912). Pirates also made their way into jingoist histories aimed at children, most tellingly in George Griffith’s Men Who Have Made the Empire (1897), which regarded even William the Conqueror as a pirate. Hoping to inspire his boy readers, Griffith draws on piracy to show that there “is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’” in international struggle: “If we have successfully cleared our minds of cant, we shall see plainly that, since all nations begin in piracy of some sort, it is natural to expect that the best pirates will be the best Empire-Makers. That old strain is, happily, not yet extinguished.”45 If the piratical strain is not yet vanished from the national character, it might also be preserved in the individual men who, steadfastly maintaining their boyish ability to play outside the bounds of moral cant, could fit themselves for (as Disraeli famously put it) the maintenance of empire. The piratical boy had changed spectacularly since the commentators on the Arethusa plot regarded him as a civic disaster. He could now be reconceived as a hero, one whose evergreen boyishness signaled the tenacious endurance of the Empire.

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Lord Jim: the problem of shame Cast loose on a playground, the boy of late Victorian imperial romance would be spared much of the grueling work of moral maturation that had beset his mid-Victorian counterparts from Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown to Dickens’s Pip. As the developmental narrative of the Bildungsroman was displaced by the episodic adventure tale, the decisive question of successful manliness was no longer moral growth but conduct in a limitless series of competitive trials. The agonistic shift clarified and simplified the meaning of success, but it also introduced psychic costs of its own. Because the struggle of identity had been externalized, for instance, the individual male was no longer the privileged reader of his own story. Stevenson hints at this anxiety when Dr. Livesey visits Jim after the boy has been captured by pirates. Jim finds himself “ashamed to look him in the face” (164), but what exactly is he ashamed of? Is it simply that he has caused trouble for his friends by being caught, or that, as Silver warned, he will appear to have betrayed them? Within the order of the play ethic, it hardly matters that Jim has done nothing morally blameworthy or that his intentions were heroic. It matters only that his position looks bad to Livesey, and it is the doctor’s opinion, not Jim’s own motives, that count. In Stevenson’s story, this moment of shame is little more than a passing moment of uneasiness, and Jim’s actions quickly redeem him. But in the following decades of imperial adventure stories, the play ethic’s emphasis on performance cast haunting shadows of potential failure in the eyes of others, a trend which finds its ne plus ultra in A. E. W. Mason’s extraordinary treatment of masculine shame among the soldiers of empire, The Four Feathers. Still, in relation to the boyish play ethic, the most illuminating analysis of the late Victorian anxiety about shame is not Mason’s novel but Conrad’s Lord Jim. Conrad had seen enough of popular adventure stories since Treasure Island to regard them suspiciously, even as he understood why boys and men might find them alluring. His ambivalent representation of youth and shame allows us to understand how the play ethic forces on its players an intense strain of performance as they submit their identities to the observation of other men, even though such games may be impractical and delusional. He shows us, in short, the price of a childishly ludic approach to the imperial world, but, measuring that price against the often shabby or hypocritical strictures of moral maturity, asks whether it might be worth paying. Conrad’s Jim, like Baden-Powell or Rhodes, is another of those late Victorian imperial adventurers who never grow up. Indeed, Jim represents

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the quintessence of preserved youth, as Marlow indicates when he calls him “the youngest human being now in existence.”46 Raised on a diet of adventure stories like Stevenson’s, Jim’s worldview is determined by the play ethic: “He was confident that, on the square, ‘on the square, mind!’ there was nothing he couldn’t meet. Ever since he had been ‘so high’ – ‘quite a little chap,’ he had been preparing himself for all the difficulties that could beset one on land and water” (112). Life, in this persistently boyish estimation, is an adventurous game in which, provided the universe can be relied upon to respect the rules of fair play, one can test and prove oneself. From the opening chapter of the novel, which leaves Jim “angry with the brutal tumult of earth and sky for taking him unawares” and thus cheating him out of a chance of heroically saving a drowning man before a crowd of admiring shipmates (42), Jim expects the world to conform to the possibilities of the playground. He remains undeterred by his first failure, trusting that he will have another chance to prove himself a better man: “He could affront greater perils. He would do so – better than anybody” (41). Thwarted by his subsequent experiences but never disillusioned by them, Jim carries his dreams with him to the rough edge of the imperial frontier where, “three hundred miles beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines, the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilisation wither and die, to be replaced by pure exercises of the imagination” (264). On the fringe of empire, Jim finds the circumscribed playground for his game, including an improbably appropriate confrontation with a piratical nemesis, Gentleman Brown, according to rules Jim proposes. There he achieves what Marlow describes as his ultimate victory in this youthful game: “Not in the wildest days of his boyish visions could he have seen the alluring shape of such an extraordinary success!” (372). Jim’s story, in Marlow’s eyes at least, is a triumph within, and also of, the play ethic. Yet Lord Jim also interrogates the adventure tradition in which Stevenson was so influential, and many critics have taken pains to distinguish it from the imperial romances that fascinate Jim by reading the novel as a rejection or even deconstruction of that tradition.47 Despite Conrad’s skepticism about Jim’s juvenile dreams, however, Marlow makes a serious appeal to the novel’s readers to try to understand Jim, to acknowledge the attraction of his persistent boyhood. As Andrew Roberts has argued, Conrad’s work generally reflects “a highly problematic sense of masculinity as fractured, insecure and repeatedly failing in its attempts to master the world,”48 but not all failures are equal for Conrad, and some problematic masculine styles, just like some problematic imperial projects, are better than others. Although we might assume that Jim’s childish naïveté may

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count for little in Conrad’s world of hard work and disillusionment, his novels, as Kenneth Simons’s Ludic Imagination demonstrates, are saturated with references to play and youth. If the stubbornly immature Jim begins as a figure of ridicule and pity, by the end of the novel Marlow has found much to affirm in the boyish code that guides him. Certainly Marlow finds something distasteful, something morally insufficient, in the gross immaturity of Jim’s reaction to his crime aboard the Patna: “You had to listen to him as you would listen to a small boy in trouble. He didn’t know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again” (126). There is a shade of mockery in Marlow’s description of Jim’s childish lack of moral reflection, his eagerness to imagine his next challenge rather than dwelling on the consequences of deserting his ship. Jim’s response to the Patna incident seems morally insufficient precisely because, like his predecessors in Treasure Island, he does not understand his actions within the discourses of guilt, self-criticism, and sin that had been more characteristic of midcentury fiction. Jim thinks instead in terms of shame, that is, of his failures as they appear to others. Thus, the problem of the Patna, for Jim, has nothing to do with the passengers his desertion endangered – a consideration to which he would have been driven by guilt or conscience – but with his own identity as constituted through the actions he performs for witnesses, and with the possible reconstitution of that identity, not by making amends but by performing once again. In this rough distinction between guilt and shame, the former represents the sanction of conscience according to internalized laws of right and wrong and the latter the external sanction of a group concerned primarily with behavior rather than motive.49 Admittedly, no ideological formation is wholly reliant upon either guilt or shame, since the two can coexist and since the division can under some circumstances appear unstable. Still, the distinction underscores a growing emphasis on shame in late Victorian constructions of male behavior. Earlier generations might have believed, with Coventry Patmore, that “guilt’s a game where losers fare / Better than those who seem to win,”50 but the games of the play ethic, unconcerned with guilt or moral reformation, allow no distinction between seeming to win and actual victory. Just as on the playground a boy must be constantly aware of other boys’ keen gazes, Conrad’s Jim must submit himself to the scrutiny of other men, to stand “elevated in the witness box, with burning cheeks,” suffering “the shame that made you burn, the attentive eyes whose glance stabbed” (58). Jim’s trial is important enough to dominate the first half of the novel, yet in its own juridical terms it is almost entirely superfluous; if anything,

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the trial dramatizes the relative meaninglessness of legal guilt (Jim’s more criminal shipmates simply refuse to stand before the tribunal) and of moral culpability (Jim callously believes that there is “not the thickness of a sheet of paper between the right and wrong of the affair” [140]). What matters to Jim, to Marlow, and to the thematic structure of the novel is Jim’s recognition that the collective interpretation of all the men who see his trial or hear his story will do more to define him than any of his private feelings. The play ethic demands that he be prepared to endure the public sanction of shame if he is to maintain his dream of glory. His worldview is determined by the horror of disgrace, and by the hope for a chance to perform the grand gesture that will bring him prestige. Shame, not conscience, will send Jim drifting from port to port each time he fears he is recognized, and shame will lead him to his stunning reinvention of himself in the character of Lord Jim, a role in which Marlow “can affirm he had achieved greatness” (217). Conrad’s novel is as much preoccupied with masculine conventions of shame and honor as are its protagonists, though Conrad is characteristically skeptical of these values even as his story helps sustain them. Marlow, for instance, is initially bothered that Jim “made so much of his disgrace while it is the guilt alone that matters” (178), though he, too, worries far more about Jim’s reputation than his morality. Although Marlow never ceases to grope after some transcendent principle with which masculine identity might be fixed – “its secret truth, its hidden reality” (52) – the comforts of metaphysics remain elusive, as do those of the old institutions: neither the church, nor the court, nor the family offers the characters in this novel any secure sense of masculine identity to which they can cling in defiance of the opinions of their peers. There are only the collective standards of masculine groups: temporary, mercurial, interpretable rules based on nothing absolute, but nevertheless necessary and authoritative.51 Marlow’s understanding of the simultaneous necessity and arbitrariness of the rules explains his ambivalence about Jim’s attempt to define himself: It was solemn, and a little ridiculous too, as they always are, those struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be, this precious notion of a convention, only one of the rules of the game, nothing more, but all the same so terribly effective by its assumption of unlimited power over natural instincts, by the awful penalties of its failure. (101, emphasis added)

Marlow is not unlike Jim in coming to see that identity must be acted out according to provisional rules and affected roles. But because his double

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view of those rules highlights their ridiculousness as well as their authority, Marlow gives us what few other characters in the tradition of imperial romance can: a clear expression of the frustrations and anxieties of experiencing manhood under this code. He can tell us, for instance, of the peremptory power of even the most absurd games of masculine honor, such as the misunderstanding that nearly drives him and Jim to blows outside the courthouse, a contest which, despite the vacuity of its cause and the lack of personal animosity on either side, grows inevitable because of the rules both men recognize (92–96). Without the liberal fantasy of self-validation, the players of this game are forced constantly to seek the affirmation of other men, and they live in fear of being misunderstood. Jim can never be self-sufficiently happy, and Marlow cannot rest without assurances that others understand and appreciate Jim, too. Marlow discusses Jim’s story so anxiously with nearly every man he meets – Brierly, Stein, the French Lieutenant, his audience – because he cannot assume a consensus about its meaning. Different men understand the rules differently, or emphasize different sets of rules, or merely choose not to respect them at all, with the result that play communities in this novel are necessarily tenuous, and may be threatened by other styles of masculine identity tied to different institutions or cultural ideals. For the purpose of understanding this dilemma in specifically imperial terms, the most important of those from whom Marlow seeks affirmation is the unnamed “privileged man,” the single member of Marlow’s audience who learns of Jim’s final days. The opening of Marlow’s long letter to him rewards careful attention: You alone have showed an interest in him that survived the telling of his story, though I remember well you would not admit he had mastered his fate. You prophesied for him the disaster of weariness and of disgust with acquired honour, with the self-appointed task, with the love sprung from pity and youth. You had said you knew so well “that kind of thing,” its illusory satisfaction, its unavoidable deception. You said also – I call to mind – that “giving your life up to them” (them meaning all of mankind with skins brown, yellow or black in colour) “was like selling your soul to a brute.” You contended that “that kind of thing” was only endurable and enduring when based on a firm conviction in the truth of ideas racially our own, in whose name are established the order, the morality of an ethical progress. “We want its strength at our backs,” you had said. “We want a belief in its necessity and its justice, to make a worthy and conscious sacrifice of our lives. Without it the sacrifice is only forgetfulness, the way of offering is no better than the way to perdition.” In other words, you maintained that we must fight in the ranks or our lives don’t count.

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The privileged man’s reluctance to concede Jim’s success is particularly instructive because of the combination of values Marlow attributes to him. The first is the man’s distaste for Jim’s lingering youthfulness, with its attendant emphases on illusory ideals of honor, passion, and the locally generated rules of play (through “the self-appointed task”); these are deceptions with which the mature man will grow disgusted. The second is his view of empire, which he thinks must be justified by transcendent truths of nature (especially racial difference) and of morality, truths that dictate both the order and the progress of international justice and power. In short, the privileged man represents the kind of liberal imperialism challenged by the play ethic. He demands a model of individual development that recapitulates and confirms the grand narratives of the mission of the race or the progress of civilization. Jim, by contrast, cleaves to his boyish fantasies and to his sense of Patusan as a playground that exists beyond the reach of modernity, a place outside both history and Whiggish imperial historiography. Marlow’s final challenge is to justify to the privileged man, and through him to the reader, the very different alignment of empire and masculine identity represented by the stubbornly youthful Jim. Shrewd readers of Conrad have refused to understand his attitudes toward imperialism in terms of unqualified acceptance or contempt, and have instead analyzed his preference for particular forms of imperial action, which he associates with particular masculine codes, against other forms he regards as base or unmanly. While critics have persuasively pointed to maritime professionalism as Conrad’s preferred code,52 their readings of Conrad’s oeuvre need to be qualified in the case of Lord Jim, which, with its fixation on Jim’s youthfulness and the romance tradition to which he is bound, challenges the ethos of professionalism by comparing it to the play ethic. Hence Conrad gives us Captain Brierly, who, before his surprising suicide, represents the pinnacle of professional success. Brierly, like the privileged man, is critical of the cluster of values Jim instantiates, and objects to Jim’s decision to stand trial as an affront to “dignity” and “professional decency” that will bring “infernal publicity” to the sailors: “We aren’t an organized body of men, and the only thing that holds us together is just the name for that kind of decency” (90–91). Brierly’s professionalism shares many features with the play ethic, especially its

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keen awareness of shame and reputation as well as its emphasis on maintaining a good name rather than a morally pure heart; like Jim, Brierly is unconcerned with the moral consequences of the Patna desertion for its pilgrim passengers (91). But, for Brierly, the salient unit of identity is the group rather than the individual, and he would rather see Jim abscond from the trial, as had his detestable shipmates, to preserve the honor of the profession. Jim’s courageous submission to the scrutiny of other men – a courage which Marlow, unlike Brierly, begins to appreciate as a “redeeming feature” (91) – claims a space for individual heroism within the shared order of the play-community. Brierly’s disdain for the individual performance at the expense of collective reputation leaves room only for lesser virtues such as reliability and uncomplaining efficiency, the mechanical virtues symbolized by his gold chronometer. The inability of these values to sustain a man is suggested by Brierly’s suicide, and by the pathetic postscript to his career, which reveals that he has vastly overestimated the esteem in which he was held by his corporate masters (86). The opposition of Brierly and Jim recalls the narrator’s distinction between two types of European sailors to be found in Asian ports. There are those – the majority – who prefer working in the Pacific because it is easy and secure and because their racial privilege gives them unearned authority. In these, the narrator explains, “could be detected the soft spot, the place of decay, the determination to lounge safely through existence” (45). But there are also those rare and mysterious men of the other type, who “live in a crazy maze of plans, hopes, dangers, enterprises, ahead of civilization, in the dark places of the sea” (45). It would be unfair to Brierly and his diligent professionalism to place him squarely in the former group, though he is clearly more of the former than the latter. Still, Conrad’s distinction emphasizes the weakness of the group of men whose work, maritime work though it may be, cannot in itself lift them out of hollowness and complacency. The contrast is a familiar one in imperial adventure fiction: the slack and complacent sailor is the same sort of man whom Haggard, Doyle, or Kipling might deride in a contemptuous portrait of a London clerk, or whom Stevenson might accuse of failing to maintain the piratical spirit of youth. And in fact Conrad’s narrator makes precisely this point when he adds that the second group “had preserved an undefaced energy with the temper of buccaneers and the eyes of dreamers” (45). These men have “preserved” both energy and ambition by refusing to mature. Marlow’s later description of the craft of the sea confirms that these sailors are exceptional not because of their romanticism, which is

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typical of young sailors, but because they have been unchanged by experience: “There is a magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven each of us to sea, such a glorious indefiniteness, such a beautiful greed of adventures that are their own and only reward! What we get – well, we won’t talk of that; but can one of us restrain a smile? In no other kind of life is the illusion more wide of reality . . . the disenchantment more swift” (139–40). What makes Jim so sympathetic is not exactly the fellowship of the craft, but the fellowship of the craft at the time of life before professional experience has worked its disenchantment, the “fellowship of these illusions you thought had gone out, extinct, cold, and which, as if rekindled at the approach of another flame, give a flutter deep, deep, down somewhere, give a flutter of light . . . of heat!” (139). The energizing fantasy of the imperial frontier is not that of the dignified, expert, developed professional, but of the boyish buccaneer whose career has not yet begun, not unlike the boys on the Arethusa with their absurd, piratical dreams. In Conrad’s greatest concession to the play ethic, the climax of his novel turns precisely on the rules of Jim’s own game: an agonistic struggle against a worthy adversary, the “latter day buccaneer” Gentleman Brown. Marlow’s presentation of Brown is vexed from the start. On one hand, he is quick to deflate the romantic associations of piracy, dismissing pirates generally as mere “ruffians” (320), and introducing Brown writhing on his ignominious deathbed, where he chokes out his story between fits of coughing. But Marlow also distinguishes between “merely vulgar and greedy brutes” and Brown, who is “moved by some complex intention” (320). The complexity of Brown’s motivation turns out to be a darker version of Jim’s own: Brown does not simply want to loot Patusan, but to “play havoc with that jungle town that had defied him” (337), and indeed all of his actions are driven by a desire for vengeance against foes whom he regards as having dishonored him. Like Jim, he is driven by shame and reputation, and he is just as eager to tell how he defeated Jim as Marlow has been to explain how Jim triumphed in the end. If Brown’s gloating reminds us of Jim Hawkins’s mockery of Israel, of Stalky’s ritualistic taunting, or of Peter Pan’s endless crowing, it is because Brown, too, is a child of the play ethic, in which victory counts only when performed and acknowledged. Of course, Brown is far from boyish vitality by the time Marlow meets him, but it is worth noting that Conrad sets Brown’s deathbed scene with a suggestively youthful presiding figure, “An ugly yellow child . . . lost in a profound and calm contemplation of the dying man” (314).

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Marlow is so invested in interpreting the clash of Jim and Brown as a game of honor that he treats it as “the deadliest kind of duel” (349), a form of competition that Huizinga regards as among the most quintessential expressions of play. Brown’s canny attempts to persuade Jim of their similarities – their shared race, their shared experiences and precepts – comprise the bulk of the confrontation. Once Jim recognizes Brown as a comparable sort of man, as the kind with whom he can deal according to the rules, he offers the pirate a choice dictated by the practice of fair play: “a clear road or else a clear fight” (351). True to form, he refuses to judge Brown on moral grounds, so that when Jewel asks whether the pirates are bad men, he answers, “Men act badly sometimes without being much worse than others” (356). Jim would give Brown exactly what he thinks he himself deserves, a chance to restore his prestige, and he thus fails to recognize that Brown’s egotism demands not redemption but revenge. Brown, enraged at the slight he perceives in Jim’s unwillingness to fight, takes out his anger by slaughtering Jim’s Bugis comrades, and it is at this point that Marlow interrupts with a surprisingly sympathetic apology for Brown’s attack: “Notice that even in this awful outbreak there is a superiority as of a man who carries right – the abstract thing – within the envelope of his common desires. It was not a massacre; it was a lesson, a retribution” (363). “Notice,” Marlow instructs his reader, anxious that the meaning of Brown’s gesture is not misinterpreted as mere viciousness. Marlow recognizes that Brown’s audacity exalts him beyond “common desires,” just as Jim’s elevates him, and he is willing to affirm that, according to the standards of play, this awful act constitutes a kind of victory. Just as Marlow approves Jim’s final, suicidal performance as an “extraordinary success,” he reports – and endorses – Brown’s deathbed scene as a “triumph in articulo mortis” (347): “I can testify that he had played his part to the last” (364). Marlow finishes by testifying for Jim, too, praising “his eternal constancy,” and reiterating, for the final time, that “He is one of us” (372). But the judgment is not for Marlow, or any individual man, to make: “Is he satisfied now – quite, now, I wonder? We ought to know” (372). The meaning and worth of Jim’s last gesture can be determined only by those like him, those in a position to appreciate his adherence to a “shadowy ideal of conduct” (372). He cannot be interpreted according to the usual codes; the law can make no sense of him, the professionals are embarrassed by him, and his lover is left feeling betrayed and bereft. Yet as is typical on the playground, the limited and esoteric qualities of the rules serve to strengthen the bonds of the players, to intensify the feeling of communal

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identity. As Huizinga writes, “Even in early childhood the charm of play is enhanced by making a ‘secret’ out of it. This is for us, not for the ‘others.’ What the ‘others’ do ‘outside’ is no concern of ours at the moment. Inside the circle of the game the laws and customs of ordinary life no longer count.”53 The final function of Marlow’s refrain – Jim is “one of us” – is not merely to allude to some existing group to which Jim belongs, but to constitute a collective “us” around the figure of Jim. The novel interpellates its readers, inviting us to think of ourselves as those who understand Jim and share the values that drive him. In asking its readers to appreciate the triumph of Jim’s boyish adventure, the novel does not demand support for the imperial project in any practical sense. Indeed, practicality is beside the point insofar as the consequence of thoroughgoing imperialism – especially according to the liberal, developmental model of the civilizing mission – would be to entangle places like Patusan in a modern web of telegraph lines and mail-boat routes, and thus spoil them as autonomous realms of play. Lord Jim’s imperialism is necessarily nostalgic. It looks back wistfully to a golden age of piratical traders who would “cut each other’s throats without hesitation” (219), and to adventurers like James Brooke, the White Rajah of Sarawak, whose rather piratical exploits in Jim’s Malaysian stomping grounds were the object of Conrad’s own “boyish admirations.”54 But though the days of these great men have slipped away, Conrad suggests, something of their greatness might still be felt by any man who recognizes their aspirations in the memories of his own youth. Lord Jim upholds an imperialism of the masculine spirit, and thus indirectly encourages men to accept the competitive, self-aggrandizing politics of the New Imperialism as congruent with the natural impulses of boyish dreams.

The pirate empire The examples of Treasure Island and Lord Jim suggest that the waning influence of the teleological imperatives of liberal imperialism were supplanted by new fantasies of power that were at once non-developmentally ludic (and thus forever boyish) and amorally competitive (and thus frankly piratical). The novels, though, express these fantasies within a literary tradition of pirate stories – a tradition which Stevenson subversively redirected and which Conrad examined with mingled concern and nostalgia – so that the representation of New Imperialist ideology is mediated by the accumulated tropes of the genre. We should not expect,

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therefore, that the terms in which these fantasies are couched in fiction should be identical to those in which they are expressed in formal political or legal discourse, any more than we should regard Long John Silver simply as Benjamin Disraeli with a peg leg. Nevertheless, history offers some moments of striking discursive alignment in which the architects of imperial policy, the instruments of imperial power, and the fabulists of imperial romance speak in roughly the same language, and at such moments we can infer not only their mutual influence, but also the underlying ideological pressures that shaped them all. Such a moment arose during the Second Boer War, the time of Britain’s most extensive military mobilization since Napoleon and of its most intense imperial fervor since the Sepoy Rebellion. It was also the moment at which Britain was accused of having become a pirate empire. The charge of imperial piracy was not altogether new with the Boer War; the liberal barrister Andrew Bisset, for example, had argued decades earlier that Disraeli had “tried to revive the pirate ages under the name of Imperialism.”55 Yet the accusation was most famously leveled by the Liberal leader John Morley, whose characterization of Britain’s “pirate empire” in an 1899 speech was widely reported: “What a farce, what an example for this country which has hitherto vaunted and boasted – and justly boasted – that it is the font of great moral, pacific, and progressive causes! . . . What a shadow cast upon the reign of the Queen! Yes, empire, they say – empire. Yes, but we do not want a pirate empire.”56 Morley invokes piracy not only to bemoan what he regards as the abandonment of the principles of morality and progress, but also to decry what he takes to be Britain’s violation of international law. By waging war against the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, Britain would be breaking its own treaties, specifically the Pretoria Convention of 1881 and the London Convention of 1884, both of which affirmed Boer control over the domestic policies of their nations. Morley’s accusation was echoed and amplified in the Westminster Review by W. J. Corbet, who argued that the “pirate empire” had launched “an unjust, immoral, unprovoked, and most sanguinary war” against states “whose independence was supposed to be forever safeguarded and secured by treaties solemnly entered into, signed, sealed, and delivered, under the sanction of her Majesty Queen Victoria.”57 Both Morley and Corbet, then, draw on the old juridical definition of pirates: hostes humani generis who operate outside the law of nations. Morley and Corbet’s liberal complaints about the Empire’s retrogressive amorality and piratical lawlessness represent what had become a minority

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position, and one which, at least during the war, did not sway either policy or popular sentiment. Indeed, other contemporary arguments were just as effectively piratical, and almost as openly so, as the liberals alleged. When, for instance, John Westlake, professor of international law at Cambridge, defended Britain’s entry into the war, he announced that in this case, the justification must be sought “outside the law”: “I think that the demand on our part was not founded on any legal right, but that it may have been justified, probably was justified, by one of those situations that occur in the mutual relations of nations, soluble by no canons of legal right but for which a higher justice must be appealed to.”58 One might wonder what sort of justice Westlake – a legal scholar, after all – might take as higher than international law, but he leaves the issue vague, much as Marlow does in attributing to Jim “a faith mightier than the laws of order and progress” (308). But, more importantly, Westlake regards the Boer problem as “one of those situations” that reveal the limitations of legality as a general principle in the conduct of imperial policy, contending that Salisbury’s government would be best served by avoiding legalities altogether, because attempts to justify intervention “on the grounds of the conventions, or of the conversation of 1881, has seriously damaged our case.”59 This is not so much a rebuttal to Morley’s charge of piratical disregard for the law of nations as an assurance that, in certain situations, piracy is the correct approach to empire. Like Westlake, though in a far less solemn mood, the writers of Punch rejected the moral implications of Morley’s argument without denying its central thrust. In a poem published on 13 September 1899, the week after Morley’s “Pirate Empire” speech, Punch parodied his complaint through the ironically ventriloquized voice of a timid liberal speaker: I would not emulate Paul Jones, With Blackbeard would not vie, The grinning skull and fell crossbones, My Empire should not fly. A Pirate’s life is not for me, Or aught that’s buccaneerial; I’d sail upon the world’s wide sea, With olive branch Imperial.60

Where we might expect to see Morley mocked for claiming that the Empire acted illegally, the poem instead embraces the idea of piracy and implicitly derides its speaker for his pusillanimous refusal to emulate pirates. While other European nations brandish weapons, he waves his olive branch and runs away:

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Oh! why then hoist the dreadful flag That gives me such affright? I much prefer the milk-white rag, And dogs that do not bite.

Where Morley himself might have said that Britain must choose between the Jolly Roger and the Union Jack, the Punch poem maintains that the only real alternative to the skull and crossbones is the “milk-white rag” of cowardice and dishonorable surrender. The answer to Morley’s charge of piracy, in short, is to defend the courage of the buccaneer and impugn the critic through the rhetoric of masculine shame. The appeal of an explicitly piratical play ethic can also be traced in the actual battlefields of the Transvaal, where it was expressed by scouts and irregular mounted troops from across the barely civilized colonial frontiers. As Robert MacDonald notes, “The Rough Riders from every corps enjoyed a piratical reputation in the press: they were buccaneers, wearing the skull and crossbones of their trade.”61 But the piratical glamour surrounding the scouts was not limited to the skull and crossbones badges some of them favored; they also disdained the usual imperatives of drill and other forms of collective discipline, bringing improvised guerilla tactics to bear against the insurgent Boer commandos, who were likewise associated with – and often admired for – wily ruses and individual skill. Together, the Boers and British scouts were celebrated for spontaneously constituting a play-community structured by its own rules rather than by traditional military regulations that had directed soldiers to stand in formation and fire volleys, or by an athletic games ethic that would emphasize their moral discipline and teach them to disdain the treacherous strategies that won them renown. Not long after, Baden-Powell turned to these same Boer War scouts for a model of masculinity that could appeal directly and powerfully to the boys of the Empire, a model that could be experienced through the spirit of competitive play with which Scouting for Boys (1908) is thoroughly infused. Playacting, dressing up in disguises, pretend manhunts, games of observation and memory: such are the diverse forms of boyish play that – even more than athleticism – form Baden-Powell’s project to guarantee the Empire’s future. Yet the future would look much like the present. The colonies were to be maintained rather than civilized, and so too were the agents who secured them. As Elleke Boehmer points out, Baden-Powell’s vision of play “aims to forestall for ever the process of growing up.”62

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Two years after the Boer War, the most famous of the boys who never grew up made his debut on the London stage. Barrie’s Peter Pan is born of late Victorian conceptions of competitive child’s play and of the adventure stories in which they were popularized. Peter Pan embodies these ideas so richly and convincingly that he has come to stand for a transcultural and transhistorical archetype: the puer aeternus. But Peter Pan, seductive and cruel, ludic and lawless, as ready to trade places with Captain Hook as to fight him, is entirely a figure of his time. He lives on a playground where the endless, circular struggle of lost boys, pirates, and redskins means nothing except the pleasure of play. The boyishness he epitomizes, linked as it is with a piratical disregard of legal or moral restraint, was neither frivolous nor harmless. It bears real responsibility, in Arendt’s words, “for crimes committed in the spirit of play, for the combination of horror and laughter.”63 It represents a crucial reformulation of the ethical order of imperialism and its intersection with masculine identity, an enlivening dream of manhood reconstituted as the exhilarating play of clever and heartless boys in empire’s great game.

chapter 4

In statu pupillari: schoolboys, savages, and colonial authority

In 1908, having just returned to England after a quarter century of consular rule in Egypt, Evelyn Baring, then the first Earl of Cromer, published his conclusions about “The Government of Subject Races” in the Edinburgh Review: in dealing with Indians or Egyptians, or Shilluks, or Zulus, the first question is to consider what course is most conducive to Indian, Egyptian, Shilluk, or Zulu interests. We need not always inquire too closely what these people, who are all, nationally speaking, more or less in statu pupillari, themselves think is best in their own interests, although this is a point which deserves serious consideration. But it is essential that each special issue should be decided mainly with reference to what, by the light of Western knowledge and experience tempered by local considerations, we conscientiously think is best for the subject race, without reference to any real or supposed advantage which may accrue to England as a nation.1

Cromer’s justification of a benevolently paternalistic empire is well crafted for the liberal audience of the Edinburgh Review, one anxious for an imperial policy that was, as Cromer puts it, “morally defensible.”2 Yet we find in Cromer’s moral defense a symptom of the ideological crisis that had by then beset the tradition of liberal imperialism to which he appeals, a crisis focused on the precise relationship of Britons and the peoples they governed. Were the British to be the servants of their subjects, cultivating the organic growth and flowering of their cultures and institutions? Or were they to be their subjects’ masters, imposing from without a social structure modeled on Western principles of which backward peoples had no conception? Cromer stumbles over the problem by contradicting himself in the space of a single sentence: the self-interests of subject races are to be given “serious consideration,” but at the same time they need not be too closely inquired about. Faced with the epistemologically recalcitrant problem of the subject races’ self-interest, he turns instead to Britain’s. If the Empire can at least convince its subjects that it acts on their behalf, 115

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they will be too grateful to join any threatening nationalist movements. “What is more,” he adds, “commerce will gain.”3 What begins as a proclamation of Britain’s high-minded and unselfish dedication to the subject races’ best interests, becomes, only a few lines later, a nakedly cynical appeal to materialism and the craving for perpetual dominion. The turn in this passage from lofty principles to pragmatism recapitulates the displacement over the previous decades of liberal imperial ideologies by conservative values of New Imperialism, as indeed it repeats the conservative trajectory of Cromer’s own career as an imperial administrator. Nevertheless, long after Cromer shed his Gladstonian convictions during his early years in Cairo, his account of colonial authority retains important tropes of liberal imperialist discourse even though they are largely undermined elsewhere in his essay, just as they had been in his policies in Egypt. On one page he piously invokes articles of liberal faith such as the progress of history and the civilizing mission, while on another he jokingly confides that “it will probably never be possible to make a Western silk purse out of an Eastern sow’s ear.”4 But the trope whose persistence is still more striking in Cromer’s essay is the one with which he begins: the educational metaphor by which he broadly characterizes all of Britain’s subject races as in statu pupillari – that is, having the status of pupils under guardianship. With this phrase, Cromer conjures one of the most potent metaphors in the discourse of nineteenth-century liberal imperialism. For liberals, education had of course been more than a metaphor. As Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education” (1835) makes clear, the pedagogical methods and curriculum that Britain would export to its colonies posed a vital question of political policy. Macaulay argued that funds set aside for Indian education should be used only to support a Western curriculum taught in English rather than, as his opponents contended, to support traditional subjects taught in Sanskrit and Arabic.5 Macaulay’s victory in this debate, as codified that same year in William Bentinck’s English Education Act, signaled the political ascendancy of the chief principles of liberal imperialism: civilization meant the progress toward universal truths of science, philosophy, and ethics, and as those truths happened to be understood far better by the English, it was the moral duty of the Empire to break the shackles of backward superstition and to remake India’s culture and institutions on the model of England’s own. But by the time that John Stuart Mill provided liberal imperialism with a more complete philosophical armature, education had taken on a metaphorical importance that transcended its application to

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colonial policy. Mill was faced with the formidable challenge of reconciling liberal commitments to unfettered self-development, to personal property, and to broad protections from state authority with a frankly authoritarian domination of Britain’s dependencies. In response, he equates the savage and the child, both of whom are properly “placed under an education of restraint, to fit them for future admission to the privileges of freedom.”6 Offering the education of children as a metaphor for the civilization of savage subjects, Mill explains the inapplicability of his principles to colonial peoples in terms that make the asymmetries of power at once familiar, benign, and morally obligatory. As Uday Singh Mehta points out, the use of this metaphor to confer legitimacy “has a distinguished pedigree and in the liberal tradition originates in Locke’s characterization of tutelage as a necessary stage through which children must be trained before they acquire the reason requisite for expressing contractual consent.” But as Mehta further stresses, in liberal discourse the educational metaphor depends crucially on the doctrine of progress. The imperial authority it envisions “can be conceived only as a longitudinal process and not as a succession of lateral encounters.”7 The absence of this belief in – or even genuine desire for – a sustained process of development is precisely what makes Cromer’s characterization of subject races as in statu pupillari so incongruous. In an essay so dedicated to the durability of the Empire, and so profoundly skeptical of the possibility that the “child-like Eastern” could be taught even the rudiments of sound political or economic theory,8 the educational metaphor is stripped of its earlier ideological function. In Cromer’s perverse school of empire, children never mature, and pupils never graduate. Though he allows that the institutions of liberal government might be established in the colonies as “a means of political education, through the agency of which the subject race will gradually acquire the qualities necessary to autonomy,” it becomes clear that by “gradually” he means to suggest something like “theoretically”: “The transformation, if it ever takes place at all, will probably be the work, not of generations, but of centuries.”9 In part, Cromer’s sense of the hopelessness of educational progress follows from his racism, since he understands cultural differences less as the product of historical contingency than as a “gulf ” that separates Westerns from Easterns. But his racist assessment is congruent with, and informed by, a broader conservative emphasis on the maintenance of imperial greatness that was fundamentally opposed to the Gladstonian tenets of England’s historical mission. In the context of such attitudes toward colonial reform, we might regard Cromer’s allusion to the old metaphor of students and teachers as a

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rhetorical ploy, a perfunctory gesture toward the husk of an old ideal of morally defensible rule for a liberal audience inclined to venerate it. Such would probably have been the assessment of J. A. Hobson, who had written six years earlier that “It cannot be too clearly recognised that the old Liberal notion of our educating lower races in the arts of popular government is discredited, and only survives for platform purposes when some new step of annexation is urged upon the country.”10 But an additional interpretation – one that I want to pursue here – is that Cromer’s use of the schoolchildren metaphor signals its continuing ideological potency, even in a conservative political environment bent on perpetual rule rather than on the principle of ultimate colonial selfdetermination. In other words, we might think of it – to borrow one of Raymond Williams’s terms – as a residual notion that, within the dynamic clash of competing discourses of empire, retained its value as a way of organizing responses to colonial relationships. But because, as Williams points out, residual cultural formulations acquire different inflections when assimilated into newly ascendant ideological systems, we cannot assume that the metaphor of education played the same role in imperial discourse at the turn of the twentieth century.11 This chapter examines the transformation of education and childhood as metaphors for imperial authority in the late Victorian and Edwardian years. In tracing this transformation, though, I turn from the political discourse of Mill and Cromer to popular representations of education in Britain itself, and more particularly to the genre of boys’ school stories. The success of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) established a genre that would be widely read well into the twentieth century, one in which competing ideals of education were disseminated to a wide readership. The schools in these stories, especially public schools, became a conventional backdrop for the staging of a range of contested cultural problems, such as the nature of childhood development, the appropriate methods of pedagogy, and the antagonism between social classes. Just as the actual public schools of England were increasingly perceived to be entwined with the greatness of its Empire, moreover, the fictional schools of this genre were explicitly invested with imperial consequences, so that the proper education of their schoolboy heroes was presented as the key to the imperial future. The history of this genre as it was revised and elaborated allows us to trace the changing imperial implications of the educational metaphor, and to understand more fully how it could be redeployed to organize British popular opinions about the Empire’s relationship with and obligations to its dependencies.

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Many critics have already illuminated the function of these stories to illustrate the proper formation of the kinds of male character that would eventually serve Britain’s imperial interests. I want to contribute to this scholarship an examination of the extent to which the stories also allegorize colonial power within the schools themselves. The schools, in other words, are not only training grounds for the men who would, in the heat of battle on the frontier, look back gratefully to the classrooms and playing fields that had instilled in them the pluck and discipline to survive. They are also places that, in the riotous behavior of boys who stole and cursed, cheated and bullied, rebelled against their teachers and mutinied against their headmasters, consistently foreground problems of tutelary control in ways that mirror dilemmas of colonial authority. By the turn of the century, I argue, these stories reversed the ambitions of the liberal education metaphor and popularized an image of natural boyish savagery which was not to be educated away but harnessed in the service of British power. Education no longer implied a process of reshaping the subject races, but a more subtle and adaptable mode of influence that translated the terms of authority into codes they already recognized. This shift, in turn, necessitated another reversal in the scheme of imperial education. Because stability depended more on the British understanding of the values of their colonial subjects than vice versa, the burden of learning fell more squarely on the agents of empire, who were to become, as it were, the pupils rather than the schoolmasters of the world. As Lord Curzon, Cromer’s counterpart in India, put it during a dinner for his fellow alumni of Eton, “the East is a University in which the scholar never takes his degree.”12 The ability of school stories to allegorize such changing models of colonial authority cannot be understood without recognizing that their representations of boyhood were changing at the same time. Since the 1850s, the genre had been a prominent platform for articulating and popularizing masculine ideals; according to Jeffrey Richards, the school story “was read at every level of society and provided the dominant image of manliness.”13 By the turn of the century, however, images of manhood – and boyhood – little resembled their midcentury predecessors. Late Victorian constructions of boyhood, as we saw in the previous chapter, came to value its amorally playful spirit, as well as the persistence of that spirit into adult life. During the same period, boyhood became increasingly associated with the primitive impulses of savagery, so that boys were, more than ever before, thought to be naturally aligned with the uncivilized peoples of the colonial periphery.14 Though the analogy between Western children and foreign savages was old even by the time Mill repeated it,

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the last decades of the century gave rise to pseudo-Darwinian theories of human development that stamped the idea with fresh scientific credibility. Armed with this scientific insight, educators began to agree that the savagery of boys had to be respected as a natural stage of development, one to which they should endeavor to appeal according to its own capacities and inclinations. Swayed by emerging educational theories, school stories dramatized the problem of manipulating the savage disposition without vainly attempting to civilize it away, a problem that also preoccupied colonial administrators. The first two sections of this chapter compare the most influential school stories of the 1850s – Hughes’s Tom Brown and Frederic Farrar’s Eric – to the provocative revision of the genre in Kipling’s Stalky & Co., showing how transvaluations of boyhood and maturation in these stories reinforced changing notions of the savage other and of the means of controlling him. The final section approaches the question of imperial education from the opposite direction, using Arnold Lunn’s The Harrovians and the Edwardian interest in Japan to illustrate the ways that the New Imperialism, characteristically adaptable and rivalrous, looked outward to the world for lessons in imperial power.

Tom Brown’s School Days: taming the savage boy The Franco-Prussian War found its most popular British commentator in the unlikely figure of Henry W. Pullen, a little-known Anglican vicar at Salisbury. In October 1870, Pullen anonymously published a pamphlet criticizing Gladstone’s decision not to intervene, arguing that Britain had shirked its duty as a global power and earned the derision of Europe. The pamphlet was initially printed in a run of 500 copies, but the demand proved astonishing, and by the beginning of the following February, the printers in Salisbury, who had then printed 29,000 copies, had to defer to the greater capacity of printers in London. By April, sales had reached nearly 200,000 copies, and the pamphlet had been adapted for performance on stage. The extraordinary success of Pullen’s pamphlet owed less to his political insight than to the inspiration of presenting the conflict as an allegorical school story. In Pullen’s pamphlet, The Fight at Dame Europa’s School, France appears as a boy called Louis, whose beautiful garden is attacked by the bully William, while Johnnie, whose garden is safely isolated by a stream, stands by indecisively. Pullen recasts these nations as school monitors, upper-form boys charged with keeping order, and political leaders as the younger boys bound to serve them, their fags: Otto von Bismarck

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becomes the cunning and cynical Mark, while Gladstone becomes Billy, who “twist[s] Johnnie round his finger” and convinces him that by breaking up the fight he would only make himself enemies and waste his money.15 The climax comes when Dame Europa arrives to scold Johnnie: “And pray, John, why did you not separate them?” demanded the Dame. “Please, ma’am,” answered Johnnie, “I was a neutral.” “A what, sir?” said she. “A neutral, ma’am.” “Just precisely what you had no business to be,” she returned. “You were placed in authority in order that you might act, not that you might stand aloof from acting. Any baby can do that . . . Neutral indeed! Neutral is just a fine name for Coward.”16

Pullen makes his point, in other words, by transforming complicated geopolitical strategy into a schoolboy scenario in which Gladstone’s policy is ridiculed as the kind of disgraceful behavior of which any plucky boy would be ashamed. To call Johnnie a baby or a coward is to deride his masculinity in terms that would register on any schoolyard; it is tantamount to calling him a sissy, or as Victorian boys might say, a muff or – yet more disastrously – a molly. Johnnie’s wound is salted by the response of the younger boys who giggle at the insult: “There was some more tittering and whispering and shuffling about on the forms, and then a chorus of voices said, “Please ’em, he sucked up to both of them.”17 The success of Pullen’s pamphlet indicates the surprising power of allegorical school stories to mobilize Victorian public opinion about Britain’s place in international politics, and also shows that such power depended on representations of proper manliness. The striking appeal of Pullen’s formula might be gauged not only by the enormous circulation of his story, but also by the fact that some eighty additional pamphlets were published in response, all of which used Dame Europa’s school as a backdrop for their own political arguments. It is not too gross an exaggeration to say that the liveliest public debate in Britain about the Franco-Prussian War took place in a flurry of allegorical school stories. The Salisbury vicar had touched a nerve. The Dame Europa allegories were doubtless encouraged by the example of that most venerated of public school stories, Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days, which ran through five printings in the year of its publication, 1857. Set in Rugby during the early years of Dr. Thomas Arnold’s reforming headmastership, the novel invites us to see the public school as a small, contained representation of the vast social struggles of

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Victorian public life. The epigraph, chosen from the Rugby Magazine, prepares readers for this story of boys who are not only boys: “As on the one hand it should ever be remembered that we are boys, and boys at school, so on the other hand we must bear in mind that we form a complete social body. . . a society, in which, by the nature of the case, we must not only learn, but act and live: and act and live not only as boys, but as boys who will be men.”18 Understood as a society in its own right, Hughes’s Rugby serves as a laboratory in which new pedagogical methods stand for emerging strategies of governance and the “boys who will be men” for potentially reformed subjects of the Queen.19 But the implications of Hughes’s allegory are not limited to the English state. The narrator introduces young Tom Brown as the scion of an imperial family, “the great army of Browns, who are scattered over the whole empire on which the sun never sets, and whose general diffusion I take to be the chief cause of the empire’s stability” (5). On Tom’s proper development hangs the future of England’s wide dominion, so the story must show how Rugby students are prepared for later service abroad. By the end of the novel, Tom’s friend East has become an officer in the Indian Army (where he will succeed, Tom guesses, because “no fellow could handle boys better, and I suppose soldiers are very like boys” [362]) and his friend Martin has taken to missionary work in the South Seas (where, Tom imagines, he will successfully convert “the Cherokees, Patagonians, or some such wild niggers” [310]). Yet on an allegorical level, Rugby must demonstrate an efficient strategy of colonial authority that is already in effect before its boys depart. “Perhaps,” one of the masters reflects about the school, “ours is the only little corner of the British Empire which is thoroughly, wisely, and strongly ruled just now” (355). Hughes offers a portrait of Dr. Arnold as a benevolent ruler who has installed at Rugby a model of discipline that simultaneously enacts a strategy of educational reform and a liberal theory of imperial progress, a model which deserves the emulation of authorities across the Empire.20 When Hughes’s Doctor had first arrived at Rugby, the narrator explains, he had “found it in a state of monstrous licence and misrule,” and after Tom arrives he is “still employed in the necessary but unpopular work of setting up order with a strong hand” (127). Tom learns that the Doctor is disliked by many of the boys, chiefly because he insists on eliminating or reforming those institutions and traditions of the school – the “old Rugby customs” (124) – that unsettle its order or interfere with their moral progress. These reforms, sometimes imposed by fiat and sometimes introduced only gradually, are initially the source of the boys’

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fiercest resistance to their headmaster, but by the end of the novel his success is marked by their complete trust in his authority over these same customs: even if the Doctor had abolished “fagging, and football, and the Saturday half-holiday, or all or any of the most cherished school institutions, Tom would have supported him with the blindest faith” (367). In addition to such cultural reforms, the Doctor leads the boys by moral precept and example, especially through the medium of his sermons: “by every word he spoke in the pulpit, and by his whole daily life [he showed them] how the battle was to be fought; and stood there before them their fellow soldier and the captain of their band. The true sort of captain, too, for a boy’s army, one who had no misgivings and gave no uncertain word of command” (143). The same military metaphors Hughes deploys to emphasize the Doctor’s heroic courage also win the boys’ support by enlisting them in a mutual struggle “against whatever was mean and unmanly and unrighteous in our little world” (142); their values can differ from his only insofar as they reject the universally true, divinely warranted path of manly righteousness. The Doctor’s religious influence turns out to be as effective as his institutional reforms. The narrator remarks that boys of Rugby have been successfully evangelized, and that “the old heathen state of things has gone out forever” (229). In these ways, Hughes’s representation of pedagogical discipline and reform correlates to the shift in imperial educational policy that took place in India at almost precisely the same time that Tom Brown attends the idealized Rugby. The mid-1830s marked the ascendance of Anglicists over Orientalists in India: the latter favored strategies of imperial influence that worked through existing native institutions and languages, whereas the former insisted on stamping out old traditions, which seemed to them committed to falsehood and superstition, and replacing them with transplanted versions of England’s own. Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education” and William Bentinck’s English Education Act of 1835 mark the decisive shift. As Gauri Viswanathan explains, the revolutionary effect of the new policy was to “endorse a new function and purpose for English instruction in the dissemination of moral and religious values,”21 a project in which Anglicists and evangelicals could find common cause. Hughes’s Doctor, eradicating the old, discreditable customs of his school while leading his pupils out of heathendom, would have flourished in the Indian administration of the time. Yet the circle within which the Doctor can wield his charismatic personal influence is limited, and reform requires a hierarchical apparatus of discipline. Immediately below the Doctor are his “lieutenants” (210),

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the other masters, who, although they appear only briefly in a story little concerned with classroom curriculum, embody the importance of the laws which will govern the students. Tom, like the other boys, initially regards the masters as his “natural enemies” (166, 329) whose job it is to enforce arbitrary rules: “It never occurred to [the boys] to consider why such and such rules were laid down: the reason was nothing to them, and they only looked upon rules as a sort of challenge from the rule-makers, which it would be rather bad pluck in them not to accept” (189). Consequently, the boys see their relationship with the masters as a mode of agonistic play, as “a fair trial of skill” like a “football match,” or, more darkly, as a “battle” or “state of war” (329, 330). It is only when the boys perceive that masters enforce not arbitrary rules of competitive play but laws that govern them all, “made for the sake of the whole School” (209), that the boys are willing to submit. Paralleling the logic of a universal “rule of law” which would become so pronounced in the rhetoric of liberal political reform, the last chapters of the novel imagine an improved state in which the boys’ trust in the masters’ benevolent intentions fosters “an easy friendly footing,” one that is “perfectly respectful” between the former antagonists: “Tom has clearly abandoned the theory of ‘natural enemies’” (352). The boys’ recognition of the masters’ legitimacy, however, would be impossible if not for the mediation of a still more important group: the praepostors. Just as the real Arnold had realized the value in granting authority to these sixth-form students to defend and enact his reforms, so Hughes emphasizes the praepostors’ influence to win the students’ consent and to manage the internecine squabbles that threaten the harmony of the school. It is one such praepostor, Old Brooke, who first explains to Tom the virtue and wisdom of the Doctor and his reforms, and the departure of Old Brooke without adequate successors threatens to sink the school into “darkness and chaos” and a dangerous state of “no-government” (166–67). The vacuum is filled by usurpation of control by the bully Flashman, Old Brooke’s foil, who, along with others of the “sporting and drinking set” (167), control the younger students through force and terror rather than through legitimately delegated authority. Tom and East’s subsequent rebellion against Flashman is celebrated by the narrator as a “war of independence” against “unlawful . . . tyrants who are responsible to nobody” (173, 170), but Flashman’s defeat is not sufficient to restore the school because it leaves no lawfully constituted authority in his place. Only the later elevation of Young Brooke, and ultimately of Tom himself, can secure the Doctor’s reforms. Thus, although the Doctor’s authority is shown to require the support of influential boys

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in maintaining good governance, they are allowed to be truly influential only insofar as they act as his deputies, interpreting and explaining his values to the larger group rather than exercising an agency of their own. The praepostors thus call to mind yet another parallel with emerging ideas of colonial governance in India: the “filtration theory,” which held that cultural reform might flow outward from a central imperial authority through native elites or notables, or, as Macaulay famously argued, through a newly formed “class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”22 Tom Brown’s depiction of Arnold’s strategic use of praepostors, which came to be widely known at other public schools as the prefectorial or monitorial system, follows the same logic as Macaulay’s interpretive class: a limited authority is entrusted to influential representatives of the governed group in order to secure consent and enable reforms directed from above, but the actions of these representatives are ultimately to be justified by the commands of the governors rather than by the consent of the governed. Despite the apparent compromise between rulers and ruled signaled by an intermediary class, the ideal remains in essence a top-down model of authority. While we cannot know whether Hughes – or Arnold, for that matter – was directly influenced by the filtration theory of Indian administrators, the parallel is strong enough that we can fairly infer a reciprocal affinity between the liberal and evangelical reforms of imperial policy and those of domestic public schools. Certainly, the resemblance was not lost on the Victorians themselves, and, even well into the twentieth century, a former colonial administrator remarked that “The theory of indirect rule in colonial administration, that is to say, the delegation of power and responsibility to traditional rulers and chiefs, instituted by Lord Lugard in Nigeria, was only the prefectorial system writ large, with, mutatis mutandis, the District Officers as masters, the chiefs as prefects and the tribesmen as boys.”23 In Hughes’s novel, the Doctor’s reform of Rugby is paralleled by, and indeed made possible by, his ability to impel Tom Brown toward an idealized manliness. Tom is presented to the reader as a representative boy, a specimen on whom the Doctor’s experimental scheme can be tested: “there is nothing whatever remarkable about [Tom] except excess of boyishness” (143), which is to say that he is distinguished as a boy only by the perfection with which he stands for the type. For Hughes, the natural state of “boyishness” is one of instincts and urges; it is “animal life in its fullest measure, good nature and honest impulses, hatred of

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injustice and meanness, and thoughtlessness enough to sink a three decker” (143). There are virtues in this natural condition – indeed, Hughes suggests a more romantic, optimistic view of youth than the real Arnold had24 – but its animal thoughtlessness allows for the growth of even more potent vices. Boys cannot arrive at proper morality by themselves, the narrator points out, because they “follow one another in herds like sheep for good or evil; they hate thinking, and have rarely any settled principles” (168). Thus, even though Tom’s own innate “hatred of injustice” leads him to unseat the tyrant Flashman, and with him the older style of gentry masculinity that he and his “drinking and sporting set” represent (167), his victory cannot guarantee his progress to manliness. In fact, Tom goes on to become more unruly after Flashman’s defeat, and at the end of the novel’s first half, the question of how he will turn out remains “a toss-up” (199). It is only after the Doctor takes notice of Tom – the “turning point of our hero’s school career” (215) – that the narrative of his growth toward manliness can unfold. Tom’s development into a Christian gentleman is the focus of the second half of the novel, and the plot shifts away from his competitions with other men (Flashman, the masters, or the groundskeeper Velveteens) toward his internal struggle to “get manliness and thoughtfulness” (365). The masculine style toward which Tom strives is that of muscular Christianity, an ideal which Hughes’s book did more than any other to define in the popular imagination. Muscular Christianity, in essence, aimed at the productive synthesis of two early Victorian sets of values. On one hand was an aristocratic style of masculinity: courageous, vigorous, and strong, but also amoral and potentially barbarous. On the other was an evangelical style of faith: morally exacting, decent, and spiritual, but also otherworldly and potentially impotent. Together, the two would rejuvenate Christian morality as an active, potent, transformative force in the world on this side of death. The Christian gentleman would be grown out of the vigorous boy during an arduous process in which the thoughtlessness of youth was replaced by the imperatives of faith. In the rhetoric of Tom Brown, this combination largely means making religious dedication viscerally appealing by dressing it in the old masculine language of war – hence the spiritual life is a “battlefield” and Tom’s moral development is a “perpetual hard battle against himself ” (143, 255) – and adding a generous dose of the gospel of work. In the novel’s plot, the combination requires the introduction of a new character, the feeble but pious Arthur, to contribute dialectically to Tom’s ultimate synthesis of desirable qualities. Tom’s influence on Arthur gives the younger boy “backbone” (312), sociability, and the physical strength that allows him to survive a dangerous

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illness: everything the pious Arthur needs to survive in this world. Arthur, in turn, gives Tom the chance to act as a chivalrous protector of the weak, and teaches him to say his prayers, read his Bible, and stop cheating on his homework. It is also through Arthur that Tom reconnects with feminine and domestic values he has come to disdain. Impressed by Arthur’s example, Tom is reminded of promises he made his mother, and he later metaphorically takes up the role himself, looking after Arthur “like a mother” (271). And near the beginning of the novel’s second half we are reminded through the character of Mrs. Arnold that mothers play a vital role in the formation of manliness and imperial progress: “many is the brave heart now doing its work and bearing its load in country curacies, London chambers, under the Indian sun, and in Australian towns and clearings, which looks back with fond and grateful memory to [Mrs. Arnold’s] School-house drawing room, and dates much of its highest and best training to the lessons learnt there” (220). Manliness, in the end, requires the assimilation of qualities that the novel codes as womanly.25 The novel closes with the injunction to combine “the love and tenderness and purity of mothers and sisters and wives” with “the strength and courage and wisdom of fathers and brothers and teachers,” a fusion that reaches an ideologically hermaphroditic perfection in Christ. Hughes’s emphasis on Tom’s progress towards responsible adulthood places his novel in the tradition of the Bildungsroman, but Hughes’s twist on the conventions of that genre again suggests his novel’s particular compatibility with midcentury liberal imperialism: Tom’s development, unlike David Copperfield’s or Jane Eyre’s, is directed all along from without by a superior moral agent in the person of the Doctor. Though Arthur teaches Tom much of what he learns about faith, Tom’s final lesson is that Arthur was effectively the instrument of his headmaster’s plan to instill “character and manliness” (211). Tom’s story is not about the spontaneous and organic growth of the autonomous self but the careful cultivation of a subject who does not understand his own best interests; it is the civilizing mission written as an English boy’s coming of age. The imperial implications of this narrative lend force to the metaphor with which Hughes describes the climactic moment when Tom, proud of himself and of his improving influence on his schoolmates, realizes that in fact the Doctor has been responsible for everything: the Doctor’s victory was complete from that moment over Tom Brown at any rate. He gave way at all points, and the enemy marched right over him, – cavalry, infantry, and artillery, and the land transport corps, and the

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Tom has become the foreign territory that welcomes its colonizer, and the Doctor, though he may be the boy’s “fellow-soldier,” is also his conqueror. Having been thus elevated to manliness, Tom becomes fit to become a conqueror himself, prepared to join the battle against injustice and immorality across the globe. The liberal midcentury narrative of manly progress follows the radical transformation of boy from thoughtless animal to colonized subject to imperial agent. As Hughes himself puts it in the sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), “a man’s body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes and the subduing of the earth.”26 Other public school stories after Tom Brown generally shared Hughes’s sense that the schools could take up Arnold’s mission of moral reform and transformative manliness, but not all shared his optimism. Frederic Farrar’s Eric, or Little by Little (1858), published the year after Tom Brown and just as popular in its early years, depicts a school called Roslyn as a fen of boyish depravity, a “Pandemonium of evil passions and despicable habits,” which only the spiritually strongest boys can resist.27 The stern evangelicalism of Farrar’s novel, unleavened by the active, good-humored sociability of Hughes’s manly ideal, tends to morbid reflections on boyish sin and the difficulty of transcending it. Its protagonist, Eric Williams, is sent to Roslyn by his parents from India, and his separation from their virtuous domestic influence begins his long slide into disobedience, vice, cruelty, and early death. Despite the guidance of his masters, especially the pious Mr. Rose, who prays with him and reminds him repeatedly of the peril of his soul, Eric cannot overcome his savage impulses: he attacks Rose when the master confronts him, and skulks off to his room where he angrily paces like a “caged wild beast” (236). Under the bad influence of other students he learns to defend his behavior under a false code of manliness, one which justifies baseness and defiance as “plucky” (221), and which derides diligence and honesty as “muffishness” (285). Eric is guiltily aware of the higher principles his actions violate, and he vows “I will be a better boy, I will indeed” (71), but his moral backsliding ends only when he receives a letter bearing the news of his mother’s imminent death. Stricken with the news, Eric dies himself, wracked by the fullness of guilt that alone provides redemption. In Farrar’s conclusion we see where he most pointedly differs from Hughes; where muscular Christianity

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demands active struggle on this side of the grave, Farrar’s piety is, in the end, steadily fixed on his protagonist’s fate in the afterlife. Given that boys are naturally wicked – often irredeemably so – the best a boy can hope for is to make his way through school swathed in a thick wadding of otherworldliness. Farrar, who was himself a headmaster, has to assure his readers that “It is quite possible to be in the little world of school life, and yet not of it” (197). In Eric’s gloomy view, the great bulk of boys are Calibans on whose nature the nurturing influence of schoolmasters will never stick: “I have often fancied that there must be in boyhood a pseudo-instinctive cruelty, a sort of ‘wild trick of the ancestral savage,’ which no amount of civilization can entirely repress” (27). Farrar’s formulation might seem to suggest at least the hope that the savage inheritance might be overcome through an individual development that recapitulates the march of civilization, but his other writings about savage races emphasize the impossibility of such progress: “By the Savage races,” he writes, “I mean those that are irreclaimably savage”: Among them generation hands on no torch to generation, but each century sees them in the same condition as the last, learning nothing, inventing nothing, improving nothing, living on in the same squalid misery and brutal ignorance; neither wiser nor better than their forefathers of immemorial epochs back, mechanically carrying on only a few rude mechanical operations as the bee continues to build her waxen hexagon, and the spider to spin his concentric web; but in all other respects as little progressive, and apparently as little perfectible, as the dogs which they domesticate, or the monkeys which chatter in their woods. They are without a past and without a future.28

Farrar’s savages represent the antithesis of progress; they have been unable to respond to attempts to civilize and Christianize them, and in the end they will simply have to fade into extinction as civilization extends its reach. In the meantime, though, Britain may still find an imperial mission in Farrar’s suggestion that the civilized have the duty to protect even the irreclaimably savage from stronger nations. As Joseph Bristow points out, the resonance of Farrar’s ethnological arguments to the plot of Eric is hard to miss: Eric “is a savage in the midst of a civilized institution, and it is his own preordained weakness that leads him into trouble. Farrar thought much the same about the exploited and hopeless Blacks.”29 The analogy, as Bristow allows, is only partial, but it underscores Farrar’s doubts about the chances of any human agency to effect progress in either savage races abroad or the savage sinfulness that festers in the hearts of

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boys. Development might be encouraged from enlightened men, but only God can accomplish it, and in the meantime the forces of civilization must be content to rule with a firm hand, as Mr. Rose learns when he regains his students’ respect by publicly flogging and humiliating an impudent boy: “his authority was established like a rock from that night forward” (257). Though utterly different in mood, Hughes and Farrar’s novels share the hope that public schools might be redeemed from the barbarous anarchy that characterized them in the early nineteenth century by inculcating the highest standards of moral character and thereby attempting to rescue boys from their latent savagery. Hughes thought that under the right guidance, any normally healthy boy might become a Christian gentleman. Farrar, working with vinegar rather than sugar, warned readers that even the most promising children might go horribly awry. In both novels, boyish savagery, in its innate thoughtlessness, lawlessness, and brutality, had to be eradicated. But both stories, popular though they were, began to fall into disfavor after only a few decades. Farrar’s book fared worse. Readers increasingly rejected its dour moralism, its earnest sentimentalism, and the effeminacy of its boys’ emotional relationships. Its decline followed the trajectory suggested by Claudia Nelson’s observation that “The mid-Victorian’s hero is the late-Victorian’s sissy.”30 Hughes’s book was sometimes similarly criticized – Arnold Lunn called it “the book all one’s sisters sob over”31 – but it survived better because some parts of it continued to be valued within later masculine styles. Tom and East’s boisterous adventures out of bounds, their defiance of schoolmasters and local landowners, their rowdy war against Flashman, their celebration of sport: all of these could still be embraced by the competitive, amoral, and philathletic masculinity of the late Victorians and Edwardians. Ironically, this meant devaluing exactly the aspects of the novel that Hughes himself thought most important. Later readers preferred the time in Tom’s life before his moral reformation begins, the undeveloped Tom rather than the boy climbing the difficult path to Christian manliness. P. G. Wodehouse jokingly suggested that the second half of the novel was not in fact written by Hughes, but by the Secret Society For Putting Wholesome Literature Within The Reach Of Every Boy, And Seeing That He Gets It. Such changes in taste represent the emergence of an ideal of manliness that was not only less moralistic and more competitive, but also rooted more firmly in the schoolboy savagery that mid-Victorians had deplored. By the end of the century, the equation of boys and savages had been given a new scientific respectability by Darwinian evolutionary models,

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especially through the theory of recapitulation, which held that each individual’s development follows a narrative determined by the social evolution of humanity. The adult Englishman may epitomize an ideal of civilization, but he will have experienced in his own life the primitive impulses of humanity’s early history, impulses which are in fact still characteristic of the undeveloped, savage races around the world.32 The relationship of boyhood and savagery is thus more than merely metaphorical. G. Stanley Hall’s great work on adolescence, for instance, argued that “the boy of ten or eleven . . . resembles the savage and . . . each furnishes the key for understanding both the good and bad points in the other’s character.”33 For contemporary educators, the recapitulation theory implied a new approach to boyhood, whereby a boy’s savage impulses were not to be hastily and punitively stamped out, but respected as an essential stage in the natural unfolding of manhood. As William Byron Forbush put it at the turn of the century, The trite analogy of the tadpole is the most forceful one we have. The tadpole has a tail, which disappears when he becomes a frog. Apparently we might as well amputate this useless and unsightly appendage, but if we do we shall never have a fully developed frog. [The] savage instincts have no place in mature manhood, but if we commit surgery upon them, instead of using hygiene, we shall never get real manhood. . . If a man is to retain a wholesome humanism it must emerge from the joyous savagery of his own childhood.34

Instead of the antithesis of manliness, savagery here becomes its foundation. It follows that in practical terms, educators need to appeal to the primitive impulses of boys in terms that are natural to them instead of authoritatively imposing alien standards that might warp their growth. As Forbush writes, “Because man has been a savage so much longer than he has been a Christian . . . his subconscious heritage needs to be recognized, and the work of habit-making, which is the analogue of that past, must, during childhood, be made the central endeavor of all nurture.”35 Boys, like savages, perceive the world through habits rather than principles, and rather than worry over their thoughtlessness and intolerable customs (as did Hughes) or their weakness of conscience (as did Farrar), educators should understand that they can make use of their untrained impulses. For Forbush, this meant that teachers need to “take advantage of [the] play-instinct.”36 It might also mean that other savage impulses, ones despised by midcentury liberals, could become the focus of a pedagogy retooled for the New Imperialism. So, at any rate, worried Hobson, who warned in 1902 that imperialists were attempting “to seize the school

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system . . . [t]o capture the childhood of the country . . . [and] to cultivate the savage survivals of combativeness.”37 British schools might now turn out young men who were fit for empire not because the savage within them had been conquered, but because it had flourished.

Stalky & Co.: the savage boy in harness In Something of Myself, Kipling recalls his “idea of beginning some tracts or parables on the education of the young,”38 the fruit of which was Stalky & Co., a collection of short stories loosely based on his experiences at the United Services College in Devon, where colonial administrators and officers sent their sons for an English education. Kipling’s stories draw on what had become conventional themes of the school story – bullying, sport, disobedience, and discipline – but interrogate them all with an unusual insistence on their immediate and practical relevance to control of the colonies; “It is the only school story,” writes Isabel Quigly, “in which life at school is shown to be directly parallel to life in the Empire.”39 The frontier is never far from the thoughts of the two hundred boys at the school, who have relatives in the colonies and who are kept informed of the military exploits and deaths of recent alumni by news dispatches and visits from the old boys of the USC themselves. They understand that the purpose of the school is not to build them into gentlemen of character, but to prepare them for military or civil service exams. Still, the distinctiveness of Kipling’s educational parable lies only partly in the intensity of its focus on empire. Even more arresting is the specific ideology of empire that his lessons imply, an ideology enabled by a stark departure from earlier traditions of schoolboy masculinity and justified by a new vision of imperial authority. Like liberals before him, Kipling embraces the analogy of the child and the primitive, but he wrenches it free from the narrative of progress in which it had been merely a beginning. Instead, the savagery of the boy – undeveloped, unalloyed, and unmitigated – would be made to serve as the anchor of perpetual colonial dominion. The outrage aroused by Stalky & Co. among some of its early critics was as much a consequence of its New Imperialist ideology as of its attitudes toward schoolboys. In his memorably venomous review, for example, Robert Buchanan attacks the book not because it is imperialist, but because it champions “the wave of false Imperialism” characteristic of contemporary popular politics, the Tory imperialism of the “militant spirit, of the Primrose League, of aggression abroad, and indifference at home to all religious ideals.”40 It is thus antithetical to “true Imperialism,”

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which Buchanan defines by the civilizing mission: “its object is to diffuse light, not to darken the sunshine; to feed the toiling millions, not to immolate them; to free man, not to enslave him; to consecrate, and not to desecrate, the great temple of humanity.”41 Measured against this liberal narrative of progress, Kipling represents a dangerous throwback, “who in his single person adumbrates, I think, all that is most deplorable, all that is most retrograde and savage,” and who, because he can give voice and encouragement to the “militant savagery” of the contemporary mob, threatens to sweep English civilization “back into the vortex of barbarism altogether.”42 Twenty years later, H. G. Wells similarly held up Stalky & Co. as the quintessence of a certain phase of imperialism, writing that “it lights up the political psychology of the British Empire at the close of the nineteenth century very vividly . . . [It is] the key to the ugliest, most retrogressive, and finally fatal idea of modern imperialism; the idea of a tacit conspiracy between the law and illegal violence.”43 For Wells, in other words, the New Imperialism of the late nineteenth century had abandoned the crucial distinction between the civilization of law and the illegitimate violence of barbarism. To the progressive mind this represented the collapse of history; it was perversely anachronistic, “retrogressive.” This same revolting anachronicity colors the book’s schoolboys, too. Buchanan decries the absence of narratives of maturation among the boys, who are thus “not like boys at all, but like hideous little men,” whose “brutality [and] savagery reeks on every page.”44 Another critic also points to the lack of a developmental trajectory for the boys, so that they signify at the same time an excessive “youthful brutality” and an ability to accomplish their cynical ends that is precociously adult: “Now although the child is the father of the man, and all the rest of it, there is yet a vast difference between a boy’s ways and a man’s ways. Mr. Kipling seems to us to have overlooked that difference altogether.”45Absent a clear narrative of individual growth, the microcosmic corollary to the liberal view of imperial history, the distinction between manly and boyish qualities becomes as blurry as that between civilization and barbarism. To read Kipling’s British schoolboys as savages, however, is not necessarily to adopt the liberal critique of his imperialist ideology; on the contrary, the story itself invites the comparison and relishes it. In one of the first of the episodes to be published, “In Ambush,” the three boy protagonists – the semi-autobiographical “Beetle,” the Anglo-Irish M’Turk, and their leader, “Stalky” Corkran – disobediently prowl around the environs of their school “with the stealth of Red Indians,” in search of

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a new secret “lair” to replace their primitive hut, which Prout, their housemaster, has discovered.46 When M’Turk secures for them permission to use the nearby property of a retired Irish Colonel, they realize that they are in a position of apparent, but not technical, violation of the rules, which will allow them to trick Prout and King, their Latin teacher and chief nemesis, with impunity. Understood in terms of the play ethic I described in the previous chapter, this clever manipulation of the local rules to humiliate their teachers is a masterful stroke, and, in keeping with the play ethic, they perform their victory ostentatiously, “jodelling after the accepted manner of a ‘gloat,’ which is not unremotely allied to the primitive man’s song of triumph,” led by Stalky, who whirls “like a dancing dervish” (37). For their part, the two teachers confirm the narrator’s suggestions of the boys’ primitive character: Prout remarks that they are “brutal,” and King answers by calling them “little animals” (38). The two paired episodes that Kipling published first, “Slaves of the Lamp” Parts I and II, most clearly express the Otherness of the boys and indicate the ideological use Kipling makes of it. The first part opens with the three boys and a few of their friends rehearsing the popular pantomime Aladdin, which requires them to wear an approximation of Chinese and Arabic dress. The costumes foreshadow a cross-cultural fluidity that will later be further developed, but they serve the more immediate purpose in the plot of provoking King into mocking the boys, thus prompting the narrative of revenge that structures most of the episodes. Stalky, now “on the war-path,” uses a West-African drum to goad King into locking them out of their joint study, Number Five: Now that West-African war-drum had been made to signal across estuaries and deltas. Number Five was forbidden to wake the engine within earshot of the school. But a deep devastating drone filled the passages as M’Turk and Beetle scientifically rubbed its top. Anon it changed to the blare of trumpets – of savage pursuing trumpets. Then, as M’Turk slapped one side, smooth with the blood of ancient sacrifice, the roar broke into short coughing howls such as the wounded gorilla throws in his native forest. (64)

King, predictably, rushes in with a cry of “Brutes! Barbarians! Savages! Children!” (65), and turns them out of their study. The provocation, we learn, has been engineered so that the boys can take revenge by destroying King’s own study but, in their typical fashion, they do so indirectly, by tricking a drunken local carrier into throwing stones through King’s window. All of this – the games of guile, shame, and vengeance, the association of schoolboys and savagery, which is hurled in rebuke by a

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teacher but embraced in delight by the boys – is the pattern of much of the book. But in the second part of the story, the imperial meaning of this pattern becomes clear. Part II of “Slaves of the Lamp,” the final episode in the book, gives us our only glimpse of the protagonists’ life after school. Set ten years after graduation, the story reunites the pantomime players, who have since taken positions in the military or the colonial civil service. Stalky, still at large with his native troops in India, is the only absent member of the original cast, and he becomes the topic of their conversation. Stalky has become an admirably successful, though craftily insubordinate, captain in a Sikh regiment. The central anecdote relates Stalky’s victory when besieged in a fort on the northwest frontier. Outnumbered by a combined force of two uneasily allied local tribes, Stalky stealthily slips out alone at night to reconnoiter and improvises a scheme that, through some clever misdirection, ultimately provokes the enemy coalition into attacking one another, just as he had once provoked the carrier to attack King. As the reunited old boys admiringly note, “Practically he duplicated the trick over again” (296), and indeed, Kipling emphasizes the point with constant allusions to the schoolboy prank. We are made to see that Stalky succeeds on the frontier not because he has grown in wisdom or matured in responsibility, but because he has perfectly preserved his boyish qualities. One of the most important of these turns out to be the boyish association with Otherness. In place of his Oriental costume of the pantomime, Stalky now wears Afghan clothing, “a greasy, bloody old poshteen” (284), and he jokes and puns in fluent Pushtu and Punjabi just as he once had in English and schoolboy Latin: as one of the old boys puts it, “Stalky is a Sikh” (283). Stalky’s deep understanding of both enemy tribes and the native troops is vital to his success – this is of course a common theme in imperial literature and much insisted upon throughout Kipling’s stories47 – but Stalky’s knowledge follows from sympathetic identification with his soldiers. Unlike other British officers in the Indian Army, Stalky eats with his troops, “squatting on the ground” (284), and he “takes his men to pray at the Durbar Sahib at Amritzar, regularly as clockwork” (283). Such gestures, along with the same wiliness and tactical audacity that had endeared him to Beetle and M’Turk, make the Indian soldiers eager to identify with him: during the siege, his senior Sikh officer, Rutton Singh, claims Stalky as a Sikh, and nearly comes to blows with the Pathan troops, who swear that “Stalky ought to have been born a Pathan” (287). This fantasy of imperial power, in which the agent of empire is not only

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accepted but enthusiastically embraced, culminates in M’Turk’s anecdote of his last meeting with Stalky; it is the book’s final image: I was in camp in the Jullunder doab and stumbled slap on Stalky in a Sikh village; sitting on the one chair of state with half the population grovellin’ before him, a dozen Sikh babies on his knees, an old harridan clappin’ him on the shoulder, and a garland o’ flowers round his neck. ’Told me he was recruitin’. (296)

Here we see imperial hubris wrought up to a preposterous pitch, but it is not at all the narcissism of the liberal civilizing mission: Stalky is embraced as an honorary Sikh, not as representative of superior British values. Stalky’s relationship with his men is not purely cynical and strategic. In his camaraderie with Rutton Singh, in particular, we see glimpses of genuine affection and even intimacy, as in the scene after the siege when the soldiers collapse in exhaustion, “Stalky asleep with his head on old Rutton Singh’s chest” (291). This cross-cultural male intimacy is part of Kipling’s imperial fantasy, too, and it is impossible to imagine the same dream articulated by Macaulay, Mill, or any other spokesmen of the civilizing mission. At first glance, Stalky’s conclusion in a view of its protagonists’ later lives seems to conform to a narrative convention that treats public schools as places where rough boys are transformed into upstanding servants of the Empire; this is the trajectory suggested by Tom Brown’s School Days and later school stories such as Horace Vachell’s The Hill as well as poems such as Newbolt’s “Clifton Chapel.” Yet Stalky’s narrative mode is not developmental but repetitive, and its final episode serves primarily to confirm that its protagonists are as fully aligned with boyish savagery as ever. Given such stubbornly immature protagonists, boys who experience only rare and fleeting tremors of doubt before snapping back into the smooth grooves of self-assurance, Kipling’s claim to have written a parable about education begins to seem puzzling. What is it exactly that the boys have learned at school? Or, more broadly, what does education mean in an empire that does not change? Certainly Kipling’s USC has given his protagonists a chance to hone their strategic skills and to understand how male communities may be consolidated by contests of honor and shame, but such lessons are not part of the school’s ostensible curriculum and, as often as not, they are learned at the expense of the masters’ humiliation. A more intriguing solution is suggested by the school’s chaplain, Rev. John, who remarks of some troublesome new students who had been brought to heel that “they either educate the school, or the school, as in this case, educates them” (136). Education in

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this sense is less a matter of transforming students by inculcating knowledge than of vying for influence and authority within a potentially unstable social order. Thus, if we consider the boys of USC allegorically as uncivilized foreign subjects rather than as embryonic soldiers of the Queen, the force of Kipling’s parable becomes clearer. The problem of tutelage ceases to be teleological, and becomes instead a challenge to maintain stability over a recalcitrantly unruly group by winning their consent. As Kipling pointedly illustrates, this is a problem that the schoolmasters answer differently, with very different results. The least effective masters are those who seek to impose their own alien standards on the boys. Prout, the clumsiest of these would-be reformers, seems to have arrived at Kipling’s USC by way of Hughes’s Rugby or Farrar’s Roslyn, and he worries continually about development of the boys’ character, anxious that the “moral effect of their performances must pave the way for greater harm” (99). King, his more formidable colleague, is the boys’ harshest academic taskmaster. Though less naively concerned by their moral improvement, King also wants to civilize them, preventing them from playing their drum, chiding them about their hygiene, and berating them in colorful terms for their ignorance: “I pulverise the egregious Beetle daily for his soul’s good,” King boasts to the other masters, “and the others with him” (97). But Prout and King’s efforts to improve the boys repeatedly become the tools with which the boys teach the masters a humiliating lesson instead. Like Caliban, the boys profit from their instruction by learning to curse, mastering the discourse of their teachers in order to parrot it back for their own insurrectionary amusement. In fact, the boys present a remarkably apt example of the forms of colonial resistance described in the work of Homi Bhabha, especially the tactics he calls sly civility, mimicry, and misappropriation. As Bhabha puts it, “Between the Western sign and its colonial signification there emerges a map of misreading that embarrasses the righteousness of recordation and its certainty of good government. It opens up a space of interpretation and misappropriation that inscribes an ambivalence at the very origins of colonial authority.”48 In Bhabha’s classic example, the subversively misread text of the colonists is the Bible. In Stalky, it is Farrar’s Eric and its successor, St. Winifred’s. The boys find endless hilarity in these gloomy evangelical school stories, mockingly calling each other “High-minded, pure-souled boys [who] burn with remorse and regret” (87), and discovering in Farrar’s horrified depictions of wicked schoolboys further inspiration for enlivening their own school. Bhabha’s work helps us to recognize the patterns of subversion the boys bring to bear on the

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liberal and evangelical discourses of education, but Stalky shows us that by the late nineteenth century the kind of colonial authority from which Bhabha generalizes – the kind predicated on the civilizing mission – was already discredited by New Imperialists like Kipling, who imagined an altogether different approach to authority. In contrast to Prout and King, Kipling gives us two figures who, never the butt of the boys’ savage pranks, maintain order in the school far more effectively, if rather less conventionally. Chief of these is the school’s headmaster, “Prooshian” Bates, whom Kipling presents as a supreme authority on boys and their management. The boys revere him, largely because he appeals to their own playful disrespect of the college’s rules. The boys can trip up Prout or King by giving the impression that they have transgressed, but the Head never cares that they are technically innocent, and canes them anyway, saying “There’s a certain flagrant injustice about this that ought to appeal to your temperament” (117). No more concerned by the petty legalisms of justice than the boys are, Bates bases his authority on a thorough knowledge of the boys and their codes, and on his willingness to exert power in the terms of their own games. As he puts it after the “howling injustice” of another caning, “When you find a variation from the normal – this will be useful to you in later life – always meet him in an abnormal way” (52). The spirit of this dictum is also followed by the school’s other successful master, Rev. John, or, as the boys suggestively call him, “Padre Sahib.” The chaplain understands boys, though in a way that recalls not the discourse of moral improvement but of recapitulation theory: “You know I don’t talk about ethics and moral codes, because I don’t believe that the young of the human animal realises what they mean for some years to come” (114). Instead of attempting to transform the boys, the chaplain makes use of their barbarism. In an episode ironically called “The Moral Reformers,” he enlists them to confront a pair of bullies, telling them, “‘you can use your influence’ – a purely secular light flickered in the chaplain’s eye – ‘in any way you please to – to dissuade [them]. That’s all. I’ll leave it to you’” (124). What follows is the most notorious scene in the book, as the heroes hog-tie and gleefully torture the bullies over the course of several pages. Speaking with them afterward, the chaplain concludes “Boys educate each other . . . more than we can or dare. If I had used one half of the moral suasion you may or may not have employed . . . I suppose I should now be languishing in Bideford jail, shouldn’t I? Well, to quote the Head . . . that strikes me as a flagrant injustice” (137–38). This is the sort of passage that prompted Wells’s complaint about the tacit conspiracy of authority and illegal violence in turn-of-the-century

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imperialism, and Buchanan’s rebuke of Kipling’s boisterous savagery. It is little wonder that progressives should be distressed by this characteristically New Imperialist fantasy of an authority that does not scruple over the niceties of justice. Where the pedagogical regime of Hughes’s Doctor was legitimated only by his moral mission, Kipling’s Bates represents a pragmatic – even cynical – approach to stabilizing power. “I can connive at immorality,” the Head explains, “but I cannot stand impudence” (199). Apparently, the moral considerations of which the chaplain thinks the boys are incapable are not of much concern to their masters, either; the adult figures whom Kipling seems to admire most are not – as in Hughes and Farrar – beings who exist on a different plane of development. But Stalky himself is preeminently the boy who, by the end of these stories, has never grown up. He demonstrates the kind of power that might be wielded over native men by relating to them in their own terms rather than trying to transform them. Having inspired their enthusiastic loyalty he combines with two of them – Rutton Singh and an unnamed enemy who has defected to Stalky’s service – to form a new adventuresome trio, a new Stalky and Co., whose adventures will continue indefinitely along the Indian frontier. But Stalky’s success is not necessarily limited to colonial authority, since Kipling also hints at the power that the Empire might exercise over its rivals if it were willing to embrace Stalky’s unorthodox, savage tactics: “Just imagine Stalky let loose on the south side of Europe with a sufficiency of Sikhs and a reasonable prospect of loot. Consider it quietly” (296).

The Harrovians and other lessons in bushido As the dozens of Dame Europa pamphleteers understood, the public school offered an engagingly familiar framework in which to stage European politics as a rivalrous contest of masculine prestige. Similarly, among the great Victorian school stories we find public schools pressed into service as models of colonial authority. Understood in these allegorical terms, the gulf between Tom Brown’s School Days and Stalky & Co. closely parallels changing ideologies of imperial masculinity. In Hughes’s novel, the savagery of boyhood is to be tamed by the gentle hand of Christian authority, and genuine manliness can be achieved only after a boy struggles to remake himself in that moral image. Yet for Kipling, the barbarous energies of boyhood are valuable and ineradicable aspects of manliness; better to make use of them, as contemporary pedagogical theory suggested, than to condemn them. The sense of education thus changes, too, so that

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what was for Hughes a progressive implementation of moral order becomes in Stalky a field of competition for influence and prestige. This is not to say, however, that the discourse of education was limited to questions of Britain’s influence abroad. The same international rivalries that shaped the stories of Pullen and Kipling also opened the possibilities of an influence that traveled in the other direction. Especially after suffering a defeat – as at the hands of the Zulus or the Boers – the New Imperialists, no longer persuaded that their greatness was entirely rooted in England itself, were prepared to admit that they might have a lesson to learn from other peoples (Figure 6). Britain, too, was now in statu pupillari. For the Edwardians, still worried by their ignoble showing in South Africa and more threatened than ever by military and economic rivals, the most intriguing lessons in imperialism were taught by Japan. In a conversation with his school’s chaplain, Stalky’s M’Turk reveals the secret of the boys’ skill in embarrassing their masters: “Did you ever read a book about Japanese wrestlers? My uncle – he’s in the Navy – gave me a beauty once . . . These wrestler-chaps have got some sort of trick that lets the other chap do all the work. Then they give a little wriggle, and he upsets himself. It’s called shibbuwicher or tokonoma, or somethin’” (115). Though M’Turk mangles the terms of jujutsu, his explanation suggests that the central plot dynamic of the boys’ exploits, the recurring game of paying back insults in their own terms, has been inspired by – or is at least best articulated by – a tactical model borrowed from the samurai tradition of Japan. In the years immediately following Stalky, many other imperialists came to agree that Japan deserved closer study. This growing interest in Japan had to overcome the obstacle of derogatory stereotypes that had prevailed among the Victorians. As Ian Littlewood summarizes, for many nineteenth-century Britons, “The Japanese belong[ed] to an earlier stage of development – in evolutionary terms, in human terms, and in cultural terms. Their kinship [was] with the ape, the child, and the savage, all of them at a distance from the norm represented by the adult westerner.”49 Despite the lingering power of these stereotypes, however, Japan’s rapid emergence as an imperial power was widely admired by Edwardians, particularly after its victory over the Russian fleet in 1905 and its entry into a naval alliance with Britain in 1902; the renewal of the AngloJapanese treaty in 1905 was celebrated in Punch with a cartoon showing British and Japanese sailors clasping hands over a caption quoting Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West” to show that this manly alliance transcended distinctions of border, breed, and birth. As G. R. Searle has shown, Japan quickly became a favorite model for the Edwardian “national efficiency”

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movement, whose adherents, though drawn from across the political spectrum, could broadly agree that the Japanese state offered a better system than the tottering shambles left behind by Gladstonian Liberalism. Though seen as autocratic, ruthless, and harshly disciplinarian, the Japanese were nonetheless exalted as a profoundly patriotic people willing to sacrifice individual liberties for the good of the nation. “I shall turn Japanese,” wrote Philip Lyttelton Gell in 1904, “for at least they can think, and act and be reticent! . . . I fail to see any Western people in a position to set the Japs an example in their diplomacy . . . their organization, their strategy, their virile qualities, their devotion and self-control.”50 Far from setting an example for the Japanese, the British had much to learn from them (Figure 7). The Earl of Meath was similarly inspired by Japan’s example, so that in describing the aims of his new “Empire Day” movement – designed to stoke the imperial spirit of millions of children in tens of thousands of schools across the Empire – he singled out Japan as both the shrewdest student of other nations and the most promising teacher for a British people grown feckless and degenerate: There is one country, with which we are happily allied, which has set us an example by the thoroughness with which it has studied and sought out the best points in each nation; it has not been afraid to copy, and therefore it has much to teach us – Japan. The gallant little people of the Rising Sun are daily furnishing us with object lessons, which it is to be hoped we are not neglecting.51

The key to Japan’s recent victory over the Russians, he argues, was not simply martial, but pedagogical. For decades Japanese children had been instructed in loyalty, obedience, and, above all, a code of honor that esteems self-sacrifice, which have, “by order of the State, been daily taught in the schools of Japan, under the name of ‘Bushido.’”52 The samurai code of honor, Meath claims, is the foundation on which imperial Japan is built, and it provides the standard toward which Meath’s own educational movement will aspire: “The ‘Empire Day’ movement proposes to breathe into the souls of subjects of the King-Emperor a spirit conceived on lines which we hope shall be of equal and even of greater power to inspire to noble deeds – both in peace as well as war – than that of ‘Bushido.’”53 His eyes fixed squarely on the destiny of the nation, Meath tells us little about how bushido might be experienced in the personal terms of an individual life, but we can derive some hints from Arnold Lunn, who was a student at Harrow at the time Meath’s movement began and shortly thereafter published his controversial school story, The Harrovians (1913). Lunn’s novel, half narrative and half dissertation on the psychology and

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6 The Zulus teach John Bull “A Lesson” in Punch, 1879.

sociology of boys at public school, intends to present an unprecedentedly realistic portrait of school life. To that end, Lunn satirizes not only vestiges of the sentimentalism bequeathed by Tom Brown, but also the bluster surrounding the public school games ethic, which, aiming to turn out clean-living empire-builders, actually produces oafish bullies. In several

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7 Japan offers John Bull “A Lesson in Patriotism” in Punch, 1904.

ways Lunn’s book is the ideological successor to Kipling’s: there is the same commentary on the natural barbarism of boys; there is a clever but unathletic protagonist, Peter O’Neil, who repays insults by skillfully manipulating school rules; there is even a suggestion to masters to resort to “flagrant injustice” to keep boys in line.54 But The Harrovians is still more cynical, and Peter’s experience of school far more lonely and bitter

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than that of Kipling’s heroes. What makes Harrow endurable for Peter is a code of honor that shelters him from indignity and gives structure to his desires. “‘Bushido’ of a sort is an unconscious instinct in boyhood” (75), Lunn writes, and Harrow, with its elaborate gradations of status and privilege, its performances of honor and shame, and its ongoing contests for prestige, is an environment in which that boyish instinct can flourish. Lunn’s version of bushido, unlike Meath’s, is not primarily concerned with the honor of self-sacrifice, but it nevertheless regulates the relationship of the individual boy and the demands of his community. The code is first mentioned in an epigraph taken from the biography of the Japanese artist Yoshio Markino: “Now, being in the school for a day, I repented that I had entered into it, but recollecting that Samurai boy at the play, I never uttered a single complaint. My family, nurses, and neighbours asked me if I liked the school. I concealed my tears, and said ‘Yes.’ This was the very first lesson of bushido in my life” (66). In the sense that Lunn pursues, bushido implies a proud stoicism, a refusal to reveal weakness, which helps to maintain the social order but also, perhaps more importantly, armors a boy against the casual cruelties of his peers.55 By performing his dignity before other boys, Peter can limit his exposure to shame and hold his own against the swaggering athletes at the top of the hierarchy of honor. The lessons of bushido, he realizes in the end, are what ultimately redeem his suffering at Harrow: To face the coalition of hostile forces buoyed up by no active support; to maintain an imperturbable exterior in face of insult; never to forget the dignity due to his position in front of fags by showing that half-muttered insults had found their billet; to steel his upper lip as he marched into Hall; to stiffen the muscles of his face lest they should betray the involuntary shrinking of a nervous boy from hostile stares – these and similar lessons were not the least of many good things that he owed to the Hill. (239)

Neither Peter nor the narrator seems aware of the darker corollaries of this lesson, but the story implies some significant psychic and social costs. Bushido, after all, is not a rejection of the masculine community’s rivalrous games of humiliation, but a strategy for succeeding within them; when Peter himself becomes head boy of his house, he eagerly establishes the “frankest dictatorship” (284), and vindictively proceeds to settle old accounts against students who remind him of his earlier tormentors, congratulating himself afterward for having “learned the grammar of handling men” (293). His reflexive honor, cultivated from the same impulses as his proud stoicism, has structured his adolescence into a protracted drama of revenge against the boys who kicked, cursed, and

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snubbed him. For Peter, as for Meath or the proponents of national efficiency, bushido was a performance of self-sufficient strength born out of a dread of relative weakness. The Edwardian vogue for Japan was further encouraged by the popularity of another book, Inazo Nitobé’s Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900). Nitobé’s bestseller attempted to explain the principles of the Japanese honor code to Western audiences using recognizable examples, and one of the first he uses is a particularly familiar one: Fair play in fight! What fertile germs of morality lie in this primitive sense of savagery and childhood. Is it not the root of all military and civic virtue? We smile (as if we had outgrown it!) at the boyish desire of the small Britisher, Tom Brown, “to leave behind him the name of a fellow who never bullied a little boy or turned his back on a big one.” And yet, who does not know that this desire is the corner-stone on which moral structures of mighty dimensions can be reared?56

Here Nitobé reproduces a typical late nineteenth-century reading of Tom Brown, which remembers his fights with Flashman and Slogger Williams more than his nurturing care of Arthur or his surrender to the Christian influence of the Doctor. Fair play, reputation (“the name” Tom will leave behind), and the selection of worthy opponents: these are not the values of muscular Christianity but of bushido, or indeed of any code of competitive honor. Yet by choosing Tom Brown as an illustration, Nitobé plays on another contemporary assumption, which is that boys intuitively grasp this “primitive sense of savagery,” and so can effectively mediate cross-cultural comparisons and exchanges. Thus Lunn’s Peter O’Neil, like Nitobé’s version of Tom Brown, understands bushido as “an unconscious instinct in boyhood.” Because this instinct for competitive honor is instinctively boyish and primitive, it exists beyond and before national boundaries. In other words, from this perspective, it matters little that Tom Brown is not Japanese, or – and here we touch on a point at which Hughes would have balked – that he is English. Likewise, codes of honor are themselves dislodged from the specificity of their national origins. What Lunn calls bushido might easily have gone by the name of some other honor code, such as chivalry or sportsmanship. His choice of the Japanese term tells us less about Japanese culture than about the way that the points of reference in discourses of manliness had been scattered across a wide world of imperial rivalries. To locate such codes of masculine behavior in the primitive instincts, moreover, was to invest them with the legitimacy and normative force accorded to nature. A new range of illiberal, competitive,

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and even violent impulses could be confirmed as properly, naturally manful, while their troubling excesses might be mitigated by the old exculpatory appeal to nature: boys will be boys. As we shall see in the next chapter, though, the benefits of the boys’ own primitivism were not imagined to be restricted to children. In many popular novels, grown men could also experience a salutary contact with their own savagery, as long as they were willing to undertake a journey that would bring them outward in space and backward in time.

chapter 5

Barbarism and the lost worlds of masculinity

Cecil Rhodes, the “Colossus” of the late Victorian Empire, proudly proclaimed himself a barbarian. He spoke of his taste for things “big and simple, barbaric, if you like,” and boasted that he conducted himself “on the basis of a barbarian.”1 His famous scholarships, designed to turn out men fit for imperial mastery, required success in “manly outdoor sports,” a criterion Rhodes privately called the proof of “brutality.”2 Yet while Rhodes celebrated qualities he called barbaric or brutal, his adversaries seized upon the same terms to revile him. During the Boer War, for instance, the tactics by which Rhodes and his friends tightened their grip on South Africa were condemned by the Liberal leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman as “methods of barbarism.”3 Similarly, G. K. Chesterton denounced Rhodes as nothing more than a “Sultan” who conquered the “East” only to reinforce the backward “Oriental” values of fatalism and despotism.4 This strange consensus, in which Rhodes and his critics could agree about his barbarity, reflects a significant uncertainty about late Victorian imperial ambitions and their relationship to “barbarism.” The term was available to critics of the New Imperialism as a metaphor for unprincipled or indiscriminate violence and to liberal imperialists as a justification for their efforts to bring civilization to the Earth’s dark places, to spread the gospel, and to encourage the progress of history that the anthropologist E. B. Tylor called “the onward movement from barbarism.”5 But Rhodes’s cheerful assertion of his own barbarity represents something altogether different: the apparent paradox of an imperialism that openly embraces the primitive. Nor was Rhodes alone in sounding this particularly troubling version of the barbaric yawp. During the period of the New Imperialism, Victorian and Edwardian popular culture became engrossed as never before in charting vectors of convergence between Britons and those they regarded as primitive, and in imagining the ways in which barbarians might make the best imperialists 147

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of all. This transvaluation of savagery found its most striking expression in the emergence of a wildly popular genre of fiction: stories of lost worlds. Tales of forgotten cities, rediscovered races, civilizations and continents submerged beneath the sea or the ground, the hidden vestiges of ancient empires – over two hundred such stories were published in Britain between 1871 and the First World War, many times the number that had appeared in all the years before. While such figures alone reveal a widening fascination in the psychic terrain of the ancient, the rich breadth of subjects also deserves attention. These tales are set on every continent, and judge modern men against the imaginary remnants of almost every people of antiquity and legend, from Greeks and Romans to Vikings and Celts, Egyptians and Israelites, Phoenicians, Babylonians, Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas, and, more fancifully, Lemurians and Atlanteans. In nearly every case, the stories dramatize the rediscovery in apparently alien territories of some fundamental unity with modern manhood, thus refiguring the frontier as an uncanny space in which the grand narrative of progress collapses to reveal a timeless model of imperial character. Just as popular depictions of boyhood came to value the savage impulses of youth, stories of lost worlds brought Victorian and Edwardian men face to face with their primitive past and challenged them to measure up. What I call here the “lost world” narrative (in preference to the narrower category of the “lost race”)6 might be regarded as the perverse offspring of the imperial romance and the utopian novel, energizing the political fantasies of the present not with a dream of what might be, but of what has been. Such stories thus turn repeatedly to contemporary anthropology, vividly rendering the same exploration of the primitive (and of the kinship of primitive and civilized) that the fledgling discipline of Tylor, John Lubbock, and John McLennan was even then claiming as its province. But while evolutionary anthropologists sought to prove the beneficent inexorability of progress, lost-world romancers stress the value of barbaric qualities and maintain that modern adventurers may still live them by fighting both against and alongside their primitive role models. Accordingly, these stories demonstrate outright skepticism of the civilizing mission, and of civilization more broadly. “Ah! this civilisation,” asks the eponymous hero of Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain (1887), “what does it all come to? . . . [I]n all essentials the savage and the child of civilisation are identical.”7 Indeed, Quatermain goes on to claim, the savage energies concealed by civilization’s “veneer” are the real fount of strength: “It is on the nineteen rough serviceable savage portions [of ourselves] that we fall back in emergencies, not on the polished but unsubstantial twentieth.”8

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In Haggard’s novel, as in other lost-world romances, the representation of a fundamental human barbarism is not an indication of pessimistic relativism but an ideological bulwark of the New Imperialism’s aggressive militarism. While these stories have little use for the liberal justifications of empire, they offer instead a powerful reconceptualization of masculinity, one which promises to fulfill an even deeper psychic desire. Casting off midcentury constructions of middle-class Christian manliness, these romances emphasize new masculine qualities – raw strength, courage, instinctive violence, bodily size, and homosocial commitment to other men – that could become a bridge uniting the ancient and modern in ways that trump other cultural differences and even strategically blur boundaries of race. Conquering their civilized inhibitions and taking up swords, axes, and spears, the men of lost-world romances imitate the primal strength that has eroded in the degenerate metropole. Lost worlds, the timeless strongholds of primal masculinity, remake the location of colonial conflict into a kind of Eden, so much so that we might think of lost-world stories as the secular, imperial, late Victorian answer to Milton’s Paradise Lost. But it is an Eden that reveals the marks of its ideological production, an Eden where the Garden is strewn with gold and jewels to be looted, where Eve is relentlessly marginalized, and where an international cast of Adams proves its manhood again and again in bloody combat. Lost-world fiction thus illuminates an important facet of New Imperialist masculinity, revealing how manliness and imperial power reinforced and expressed one another through a celebration of impassioned barbaric might. Though the tendency to represent the colonial frontier as a scene of manly exploit was hardly new, the specific ways in which these stories stage heroic adventure challenge familiar assumptions about Victorian masculinities and British imperialism. The British men who travel to these lost worlds do not confirm their manliness by vanquishing the primitive, but by partaking of it, by immersing themselves in the struggles of the men they recognize as their primal counterparts. Many of the terms earlier Victorians roundly despised appear in this later context to articulate forms of desire for which we have scarcely begun to account: atavism becomes a sign of strength rather than of weakness or criminality; impulse and irrationality could be taken for passionate masculine authenticity; and regression – even the relapse into barbarism – could be an empowering fantasy rather than a paralyzing anxiety. Likewise, we can begin to refine the common assertion that imperial discourse imagines colonial spaces and native peoples as feminine, ready to be subdued and penetrated by the

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masculine British.9 Instead, lost-world novels generally depict modern men discovering that barbarians of any number of races may be as manly as themselves (or even more so), and that Victorians can best express their potential manhood by converging with the primitive. These stories require us to qualify one of postcolonial theory’s dominant tenets, that imperial ideology must be predicated on the construction of difference between the colonizing self and the colonized Other. As Edward Said has summarized, “‘they’ are not like ‘us,’ and for that reason deserve to be ruled.”10 Although postcolonial theory after Said’s work has challenged the potentially reductive simplicity of this binary view, the effect has been largely to multiply the forms of difference at work in imperial discourse to include gender, race, and class rather than to question the necessity of difference itself. What Partha Chatterjee has famously called “the rule of colonial difference,” which demands “the preservation of the alienness of the ruling group,”11 threatens to rule our own understanding of the Victorian imperial imagination. This is not to say that difference does not provide a powerful framework in imperialist discourse, but neither is it the only weapon in the ideological arsenal of empire. Lost-world fiction demonstrates that recognitions of the self in the Other, even the emulation of the Other, may also serve imperial interests. Beginning with stories by Rudyard Kipling, Rider Haggard, and Arthur Conan Doyle, I will argue that this genre minimizes difference to represent barbarians not as the objects of disgust, or even of intractably ambivalent envy, but as models of natural manliness that justified New Imperialist values.

Onward to barbarism Understanding barbarism as an energizing myth of the New Imperialism rather than as a haunting anxiety allows us to reconsider a number of puzzling inconsistencies in late Victorian popular literature. Take, for instance, a tale by one of Rhodes’s friends – Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888). For decades, this work by an ardent imperialist has been read, rather counterintuitively, as an allegorical indictment of empire.12 With Dravot and Carnehan, the rough and dodgy vagabonds who pose as gods to seize power over the uncharted territory of Kafiristan, Kipling seems to unmask the upright heroes of the Empire as con-men driven by an unabashed lust for power. After a Kafiristani woman exposes their vulnerability by drawing Dravot’s blood, the pair suffer a doom so grisly that imperial ambition itself seems to totter on the edge of madness and nightmare. Yet if we attend to the nature of the relationships the story

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establishes between the conquerors and their subjects, the lesson of Dravot and Carnehan begins to seem less a critique of imperialism than a warning against abandoning the masculine values that had made their conquest possible. For all their failings, after all, Dravot and Carnehan are treated with sympathy and even admiration by the unnamed journalist who narrates their story.13 “We are not little men,” they boast to him before setting off to conquer Kafiristan, and the tale bears out the remarkable extent to which they accomplish their outsized ambition despite the narrator’s chary pessimism: “no Englishman has been through it. The people are utter brutes, and even if you reached them you couldn’t do anything.”14 Brutish as the Kafiristanis turn out to be, the protagonists are equally so; they find a society, as Kipling imagines it, predicated on superstition and war, and they proceed to construct their rule in the same terms. Of these barbarous methods the story is not critical, and indeed, Kipling goes to surprising lengths to connect the protagonists and their primitive subjects. Dravot and Carnehan are both atavistic in appearance (both are big, hairy men, the former distinguished by his enormous beard and the latter by his exceptionally broad shoulders), and they recognize a racial kinship with the Kafiristanis; like the protagonists, the Kafiristanis are big – “Not a man of them under six feet” (249) – and white – “the Chiefs come round to shake hands, and they were so hairy and white and fair it was just shaking hands with old friends” (241). Kipling here draws on contemporary ethnographic accounts of Afghanistan to suggest that the natives might be descended from the last European to conquer the region, Alexander. After claiming his own descent from Alexander, Dravot learns that Kafiristani religion contains an eroded knowledge of Freemasonry, which Dravot and Carnehan, Masons themselves, exploit by establishing a political structure incorporating the priests and chiefs into a Lodge hierarchy with themselves at the head. Such points of connection intensify Dravot’s ambition, and at the same time lead him to identify even more closely with his subjects: “I won’t make a nation,” says he, “I’ll make an Empire! These men aren’t niggers; they’re English! Look at their eyes – look at their mouths. Look at the way they stand up. They sit on chairs in their own houses. They’re the Lost Tribes, or something like it, and they’ve grown to be English.” (243–44)

It hardly matters to Dravot whether the Kafiristanis are descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel or Alexander’s Macedonians, where they learned their ancient Masonic traditions, or why sitting in chairs should imply

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proto-Englishness. Nor does it seem to matter much to Kipling that his ethnography is muddled; while some observers reported that the Kafiristanis had ties to Alexander, it was their neighbors in Afghanistan, the Pathans, who were rumored to be descended from the Jewish lost tribes.15 What matters instead is the recognition of some forgotten bond between these primitive people and their would-be rulers, who may then feel at home in their new kingdom even as they exploit these primal relationships. The alien is revealed to be merely a lost, primitive version of the familiar, and imperial power flows less from civilizing the savage than from reviving the inner barbarian. Had Kipling wished to punish his protagonists for their imperial ambition or their often indiscriminate violence, he could easily have written an ending in which they pushed their kingdom’s boundaries too far, or in which the Kafiristanis revolted against their draconian authority. Tellingly, their doom is instead precipitated by Dravot’s decision to take a native wife, who exposes his vulnerability by biting him. Kipling’s choice to demolish them in this way emphasizes both the avenues and the limits of their primitive strength. Identifying with the savage in the service of power is well and good, but only insofar as it stays between men. Indeed, a particular construction of masculinity is the ethos through which Dravot and Carnehan come to identify with each other and with the Kafiristanis, first through a shared militarism and then through the exclusively masculine rites of Freemasonry. The Masonic tradition of brotherhood is in fact so central to the story that the narrator (yet another Mason) takes one of its principles as his epigraph, “Brother to a Prince and fellow to a beggar if he be found worthy.” This is immediately followed with the narrator’s closest approximation to a moral: “The Law, as quoted, lays down a fair conduct of life, and one not easy to follow” (217). In other words, the primary “Law” in this story is the Masonic law of a unifying brotherhood that transcends divisions of class, politics, or race. And it is this ostensibly ancient law that Dravot so disastrously violates, not only in fraudulently abusing Masonic ritual to establish himself as a god, but also in betraying brotherhood by seeking a wife, particularly since he thus violates the contract he has signed with Carnehan to swear off women. If we accept that the central value of this story is not civilization but a particular code of manliness, we find it no more anti-imperialist than “Gunga Din” or “The White Man’s Burden.” Of course, the meanings of both manhood and empire in “The Man Who Would Be King” clash against the standards of earlier Victorians, to whom civilization was a less dubious ideal. For them, the progress of the British Empire would be recorded as a glorious narrative, as Thomas

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Babington Macaulay had put it, “of prejudices overthrown, – of knowledge diffused, – taste purified, – of arts and sciences planted in countries which had recently been ignorant and barbarous.”16 Less obviously, the civilizing mission depended on exporting British domesticity, transplanting and then reproducing gender codes associated with the middle-class family. This emphasis was perhaps most strongly revealed in British reactions to the so-called Indian Mutiny, in which lurid depictions of the rebellious sepoys as housebreakers and rapists transformed a political challenge into an outrage against the domestic heart of civilization.17 Bleak Malthusian prognostications of population growth had established the foundation for this view by arguing that sexual restraint was the lynchpin of progress, the crucial distinction between civilized peoples and those condemned by war and famine to a life of Hobbesian savagery. If regulating the chaos of primitive energy had become a hallmark of empire’s civilizing mission, it had also become, as studies of masculinity have emphasized, the focus of mid-Victorian constructions of manhood. Herbert Sussman’s analysis of the ways in which “psychic discipline defines what the Victorians term manliness” contends that “the proper regulation of innate male energy” became “the central problematic in the Victorian practice of masculinity.”18 Likewise, in the persistent concern with self-discipline James Eli Adams has revealed traces of deep affinities between a wide range of models of the middle-class man, which “in their different ways embody masculinity as a virtuoso asceticism.”19 Defined in opposition to the raging and passionate savage abroad, and to the licentious and warlike aristocrat at home,20 the bourgeois Christian man of the mid-nineteenth century predicated his mastery of the colonies on his mastery of the household and of his own impulses. Barbarism therefore served a defining role as the antithesis of restraint. The double importance of restraint at the ideological nexus of empire and masculinity helps to explain the aversion of midcentury Victorians to the horrifyingly unregulated figure of the noble savage.21 The strenuous discipline required of men demanded that they reject the hypothesis of an instinctively moral and effortlessly manly native. Charles Dickens, in his essay on “The Noble Savage” (1853), took up this argument with genocidal zeal: I call a savage something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth . . . All the noble savage’s wars with his fellow-savages (and he takes no pleasure in anything else) are wars of extermination – which is the best thing I know of him, and the most comfortable to my mind when I look at him . . . My position is, that if we have anything to learn from the Noble Savage, it is what to avoid. His virtues are a fable; his happiness a delusion; his nobility nonsense.22

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Pointing chiefly here to the Zulus, whose lives, he imagines, are “passed chin deep in a lake of blood,”23 Dickens unwittingly projects upon them his own vicious fantasies; even as he delights in the prospect of their extermination, the violent impulses are represented as theirs rather than his own. Because of their own powerful prohibitions, in other words, the mid-Victorians needed to identify violent impulse and passion, rather than untutored virtues, as the central features of primitive man. As John Lubbock wrote in Pre-historic Times (1865), “the true savage is neither free nor noble; he is a slave to his own wants, his own passions.”24 When lost-world romancers affirm the violent impulses buried in Dickens’s desire to “civilise” the Zulus “off the face of the earth,” they defy the older value of restraint, both as a tenet of imperialism and as the underpinning of the forms of Victorian masculinity that Sussman and Adams describe. The heroic man of the New Imperialism could recognize the barbarous Other in himself and exalt his own untrammeled instinct as a tool of empire and the core of his manhood. Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), the most influential of the lost-world novels, makes this turn abundantly clear. Setting off to find a lost brother, a trio of English adventurers – the hunter Allan Quatermain, the aristocrat and armchair anthropologist Sir Henry Curtis, and the naval officer Captain John Good – discover instead a lost brotherhood with the inhabitants of the lost biblical city of Ophir. In this ancient setting, which is repeatedly described as “like Paradise,” the adventurers find a lost tribe of Zulus, called Kukuanas, “the most magnificent set of men I have ever seen.”25 These men are distinguished by their martial prowess (they boast “a magnificent system of military organization” [39] that mirrors Britain’s own regimental system) and by their physique (“not one of them was under six feet in height whilst many were six feet three or four” [120]). Fighting among the Kukuanas in support of their rightful King Ignosi, the Englishmen discover their affinities with these primitive warriors. This is especially true of Sir Henry, whose imposing stature and Nordic features immediately remind Quatermain of England’s violent heritage: he would be a perfect Viking “if one only let his hair grow a bit, put one of those chain shirts on to those great shoulders of his, and gave him a big battle-axe” (44). And when Ignosi later supplies Sir Henry with exactly this costume, Quatermain sees him not only as a Viking, but as a Kukuana, too: “The dress was, no doubt, a savage one, but I am bound to say I never saw a finer sight than Sir Henry Curtis presented in this guise. It showed off his magnificent physique to the greatest advantage, and when Ignosi arrived presently, arrayed in similar costume, I thought to myself that

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I never before saw two such splendid men” (167). Thus equipped, Curtis needs only to join the battle to regress triumphantly along his bloodline: “there he stood, the great Dane, for he was nothing else, his hands, his axe, his armour, all red with blood, and none could live before his stroke. Time after time I saw it come sweeping down, as some great warrior ventured to give him battle, and as he struck he shouted ‘O-hoy! O-hoy!’ like his Bersekir forefathers” (183). Finding his masculine ideal in a glorious atavism, Haggard turns Dickens’s rejection of warlike savagery on its head. The berserk impulses of primitive masculinity, so central to mid-Victorian constructions of difference, are here used to collapse the differences of time, space – even race: Vikings, Quatermain explains, are “a kind of white Zulus” (44). There are, however, two sorts of discipline maintained in Haggard’s novel. The first is martial discipline, though this is distinct from, and far older than, the nineteenth-century emphasis on prudential restraint; it implies the discipline necessary to respond to commands and to withstand external threats, but not the internal self-discipline of regulating desires on the path to moral improvement. The second form of discipline, more in keeping with Victorian tradition, is sexual. Women are largely banned from King Solomon’s Mines – Quatermain proclaims at the outset that “there is not a petticoat in the whole history” (42) – but the women who do appear challenge the story’s tactic of constructing primitive heroism through masculine identification. Gagool, the ageless witch, threatens to expose the sordidly material motives of the white presence in Africa (134), and thus to shatter the fantasy of interracial brotherhood in arms. Foulata, the loyal Kukuana ingenue with whom Good falls in love, raises the specter of miscegenation, at which Haggard’s shallow racial relativism balks. As in Kipling’s Kafiristan, women mark the boundary of acceptable primitive heroism. But with their marginality strictly enforced, manliness may be explored in terms that temporarily put racial difference under erasure. The questions with which Quatermain begins his narrative – “Am I a gentleman? What is a gentleman?” – should not be answered in terms of racial difference: “I don’t quite know, and yet I have had to do with niggers – no, I’ll scratch that word ‘niggers’ out, for I don’t like it. I’ve known natives who are . . . and I have known mean whites with lots of money and fresh out from home, too, who ain’t” (43). Haggard’s presentation of Quatermain’s opinions neatly illustrates the complications of his attempt to work around race to define manly virtue. “Nigger,” the term that Quatermain finds troublesome, has not in fact been scratched out, but remains stubbornly unrevised in the text as a sign of a racist attitude

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that the novel cannot quite abandon even as its protagonist conspicuously rejects it. Still, he ultimately reaches a more viscerally satisfying answer to his uncertainty about his own masculine identity and its relationship to African men after he replaces the problem of gentlemanliness with the more fundamental and inclusive question of manliness, which is finally answered through his experience of primal ferocity on the battlefield: for the first time in my life, I felt my bosom burn with martial ardour . . . [M]y blood, which hitherto had been half frozen in horror, went beating through my veins and their came upon me a savage desire to kill and spare not. I glanced round at the serried ranks of warriors behind us, and somehow, all in an instant, began to wonder if my face looked like theirs. (182)

Binding together Vikings, Zulus, and Britons – as well as the Israelites, Egyptians, and Phoenicians who have left their marks amid the ruins – the imperial heroism of Haggard’s tale ultimately depends on regressing toward an embodied, impulsive experience of primitive martial manliness.26 This same constellation of concerns persists in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), written at the latter end of the New Imperialist period. The quest again begins with a crisis of masculinity, as the narrator, the journalist and rugby player Edward Malone, is rejected by his love for failing to live up to the imperial heroism of the late Victorian explorers; she tells him to strive after the example of Stanley and Burton.27 Together with the simian Professor Challenger and the renowned sportsman Lord Roxton, Malone travels to the borders of British Guiana to prove his manhood. The primitive in Doyle’s adventure is more expressly Darwinian than those of his predecessors, since the lost world in this case is a plateau stalked by dinosaurs and malevolent ape-men, who approximate the fabled “missing link” (194). The British men also discover a tribe of Indians on the plateau, and they identify with these men as representatives of the human struggle against the beasts in evolutionary history. With these “savage allies” (254), the British conduct a war of extermination against the ape-men, thus decisively establishing the supremacy of man on the plateau (256–57). In this battle, Malone proves his heroism by unleashing his barbarous potential: There are strange red depths in the soul of the most commonplace man. I am tender-hearted by nature, and have found my eyes moist many a time over the scream of a wounded hare. Yet the blood lust was on me now. I found myself on my feet emptying one magazine, then the other . . . while cheering and yelling with pure ferocity and joy of slaughter as I did so. (233–34)

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His heroism established, Malone returns to London, only to find that his beloved has hypocritically married a fatuous “little man” (306), who works as a solicitor’s clerk. The rottenness of the metropole thus revealed, Malone decides to return with Roxton to the manly world of the “dear old plateau.” The masculine allure of the lost world on the Empire’s frontier is reiterated in the novel’s striking final image: “a brown hand was stretched out to me across the table” (309). As it turns out, the brown hand is in fact Roxton’s and not, as we might first expect, a South American native’s, but this momentary ambiguity is telling: the call of manliness disguises the distinction. Malone and Roxton will return to South America and Quatermain and his companions will return to Africa in the sequel to King Solomon’s Mines, just as Dravot and Carnehan, before their downfall, launched raid after raid in their unrelenting efforts to widen their domain and repeat their adventures. And why not? Short of death, the lost-world romance suggests no reason to abandon the unending satisfactions of primitive struggle, any more than the expansionist aspirations of New Imperialism recognized any necessary territorial limits, or than the ideal of imperial maintenance recognized any temporal ones. These stories escape the conventional restrictions of two commonplace mid-Victorian narratives. The first is the narrative of progress: understanding civilization as a veneer or even a degenerate delusion, the lost-world adventurer frees himself from the risk of ever accomplishing the civilizing mission; in the struggles of perpetual primitivism, there is no ultimate objective, only the immediate purposefulness of an interminable series of battles. The second is the narrative of manliness: as Sussman argues, “For the Victorians manhood is not an essence but a plot,” a condition to be arduously achieved and carefully maintained.28 But by experiencing manly behavior as an instinctive expression of his body, the barbaric hero finds his fulfillment suddenly, fitfully, in moments of stress. His masculine plot thus escapes the plodding linearity of the Bildungsroman and anticipates the self-realization of a Modernist epiphany. His manliness, like the setting of his stories, can be fundamentally unchanging; his adventures, like the expansion of empire in a jingoist’s dream, can be limitless.

Primal men and New Imperialists The sudden rise of this genre of fiction testifies to the new ways in which time itself emerged as an object of public fascination. The liberal notion of progress that had seemed for much of the century to map out a reassuring

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course of change was neither as self-evident nor as satisfying in an age vexed by national and imperial instability, radical challenges to gender identity, and Darwinian accounts of struggle and degeneration. The genres that originated in this period – lost-world stories, but also the mummy fiction and scientific romances we shall examine in subsequent chapters – swept into the void left by the declining faith in progress, and they proposed alternative visions of Britain’s relationship to the distant past and the hypothetical future. Of course, older genres were also retooled for similar purposes, as Patrick Brantlinger has shown in his analysis of the “imperial gothic.”29 Yet the new genres, relatively free from the freight of accumulated conventions and expectations, offer a sharper view of the cultural pressures behind the temporal reorientation of fantasy. Lost-world fiction marks the extent to which new attitudes toward time were shaped by the entangled ideologies of gender and global power that were characteristic of the New Imperialist period. Tales of homosocial male groups rejecting the company of women and setting off for adventures around the world were vivid extrapolations of what John Tosh has called the flight from domesticity. In the 1870s, Tosh argues, middle-class masculinity began to drift away from the domestic values that had anchored it for decades, as men grew less satisfied with the conventional pleasures of home life and more threatened by the cultural rise of women’s authority in and out of the household. The reaction against domesticity was particularly evident among the men who left Britain for the colonies, with the result that “the empire was run by bachelors.”30 Many of the great imperial heroes who were held up in the popular press as exemplary men – Gordon, Kitchener, and later T. E. Lawrence – were conspicuously unmarried, while Baden-Powell married only at the age of fifty-five, long after his adventuring days in Africa. Rhodes was so averse to women that he hired only male servants. And if British men felt pressured on one side by the social advances of women, they were worried on the other by the preservation of their own strength and honor in relation to the men beyond their borders. Confidence in the Empire’s power was shaken by a string of military defeats at the hands of Afghans, Zulus, Sudanese, and Boers, while Britain’s European rivals – France, Russia, and especially Germany – threatened to eclipse the Empire in both economic and military terms. England, meanwhile, seemed to be breeding a bloodless, degenerate crop of little men, who lacked the pluck and will of their forefathers, the poisoned fruits of a society that had grown too urban, too commercial, and altogether too civilized. The bogey of the hen-pecked, lower middle-class clerk was beginning to seem more of a danger to

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imperial character than the primitive, bloodthirsty Zulu.31 Lost-world stories thus charted a new course back to the distant past, where lost qualities of manliness might be rediscovered. In order to mediate between the modern and the primitive, these texts frequently promoted an understanding of manliness in which enduringly virile qualities were anchored in the powerful male body: its ostensibly natural impulses, long eroded by the march of civilization, could revitalize the strength and spirit of the Empire while at the same time advancing a definitively male authority. The Victorian transvaluation of primitive masculinity may be traced back to the popularization of muscular Christianity at the middle of the century in such novels as Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days, which idealizes, within limits, the rowdy expression of masculinity in the rough contests of boys. Charles Kingsley’s great historical novels of the 1850s – Hypatia (1853) and Westward Ho! (1855) – are even more apposite: these novels emphasize at once masculinity’s embodiment and its historicity, so that the appropriate experience of the male body becomes vital to the progress of civilization. While Kingsley accords a new respect for the fleshly impulses of manliness, he is reluctant to value them for their own sake, and he measures the unrestrained savage against other potential models of manhood. In Hypatia, fifth-century Alexandrian politics pit Christian monks, who signify moral rectitude but also an effeminate retreat from active struggle, against a group of gigantic Gothic barbarians, whose strength and warlike spirit Kingsley treats as admirable but insufficiently checked by conscience or principle. Kingsley holds out hope for some reconciliation between these opposed masculine types, most notably in the “Squire-Bishop,” Synesius, who writes devotional hymns when not hunting ostriches from horseback, and who “manfully” refused to give up his wife when he took holy office.32 Yet Hypatia’s clash of monks and barbarians, emblematic as it is of a confrontation between early and late Victorian symbols of masculinity, demonstrates that even though proper manhood was beginning to include valuable primal instincts, they were not yet to be trusted. Like Hughes, Kingsley maintained that masculine impulses needed to be controlled and channeled in accordance with Christian behavior, and neither would go so far as to accept a nonEuropean savage as a role model.33 As Bruce Haley shows, the healthy development of the body tended to be valued only insofar as it accompanied a healthy mental development; the corpus sanum was suspect without the mens sana. Haley points out that in The Egoist (1879), George Meredith rejects the aristocratic Willoughby Patterne as a masculine model because

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his prepossessing athletic body masks a brutal, primitive soul. Willoughby is a barbaric throwback in both body and spirit, whose anachronistic style of manhood must be superseded.34 By the last decades of the nineteenth century, representations of the powerful male body were not all as tempered by reservations about intellectual or spiritual growth. The Victorians began to attend more closely to the purely physical dimensions of manliness during the mania for sports that grew increasingly prominent after the 1850s, and new images of well-muscled and even massive manliness appeared regularly in the popular press. At the imperial training grounds of the public schools, as J. A. Mangan observes, the cult of competitive athleticism that began with the doctrines of muscular Christianity eventually privileged the muscular so much more than the Christian that their sporting events owed more to the values of social Darwinism.35 By the turn of the century, the masses of men outside the public schools could enjoy the spectacle of “physical culture,” which exalted the virtues of sheer brawn. Musclemen trod the stages of the music halls clad in the leopard skins that signified their primitive masculinity. The most famous of these strongmen, Eugen Sandow, promoted an ideal of health that could be measured by the inch on the biceps and chests of his followers, and thus popularized a bodily ideal to which any man, regardless of his background, might aspire. As Michael Anton Budd’s study of the fin-de-siècle physical culturists reveals, its appeal was “emphatically supra-class oriented and at times intent on transcending even the boundaries of race.”36 Just as religious virtues of restraint gave way to physical force and impulse among the athletic “bloods” on the public-school pitches, so too did Christian rectitude recede as a heroic quality in the imperial adventure stories the students read. British adventurers in lost-world fiction may sometimes refer to Christ, but they typically do little to promulgate Christianity, and indeed they are easily satisfied if the natives’ faith vaguely approximates a hopeful monotheism. More strongly held religious differences present an obstacle to the identification between the British and their counterparts, which is why these heroes so routinely find that their chief adversary is a malicious native priest, shaman, or witch-doctor, whose cruel superstitions are conventionally indicated by the threat of human sacrifice. But the same logic that necessitates the elimination of ostentatiously heretical natives also demands the absence of aggressively proselytizing Christians, since they too highlight the differences between the British and their counterparts. Missionaries, therefore, tend to come off badly in these stories. Andrew Lang’s “The End of Phaeacia” (1886), for instance, is narrated by a blustering missionary of “the Bungletonian communion,”

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who is washed ashore on the same Phaeacia described in The Odyssey.37 His zealous disdain for secular learning prevents him from recognizing the importance of his discovery or the grandeur of the Greek survival that Lang describes, and, by painting him as an imbecilic bully, Lang suggests a terrible distance between the Homeric hero and the modern man of God. In Allan Quatermain, Haggard describes the failed attempt of a peaceful missionary to create a British domestic space in Africa, an “oasis . . . of European civilization.”38 The missionary realizes that he must return his family to England, but not before an encounter with Masai kidnappers teaches him that the best way of interacting with heathens is with a carving-knife. On Haggard’s imperial frontier, a man is not ennobled by either his domestic ties or his Christian convictions, but by his bloodiest impulses. Shorn of its connections with civilization and religion, the emerging sense of a masculinity rooted in the powerful body became a fixation of late Victorian culture, and it is virtually ubiquitous in lost- world fiction. We have seen it already in the British protagonists of these stories (Dravot and Carnehan, Sir Henry Curtis, Roxton and Challenger), but also in their primitive counterparts (the Kafiristanis, Kukuanas, and Indians). Haggard repeats the formula of size and strength in Allan Quatermain to describe both the Masai (“none of the Masai that I saw were under six feet high”) and his great Zulu hero Umslopogaas (“a very tall, broad man, quite six foot three”).39 In R. M. Ballantyne’s The Giant of the North (1881), British explorers are led to the North Pole by a friendly Eskimo (“seven feet two . . . with a lithe, handsome figure [and an] immense chest and shoulders”).40 In Francis Atkins’s The Devil-Tree of El Dorado (1896), the British heroes go to war in the service of that lost city’s rightful king, Monella, a towering man over two thousand years old, but with a body as “supple and muscular as that of a young man’s.”41 Similar preoccupations also produce in these stories an abundance of dwarves, who, as in James MacLaren Cobban’s The Tyrants of Kool-Sim (1896), can be used to imply a stunted masculinity in opposition to their gigantic neighbors.42 Whether titanic or dwarfish, the anachronistic men of the lost worlds underscore the new emphasis on the physicality of manliness, which is closely linked to their martial prowess. The virile lost men, whose height is precisely recorded down to the nearest inch, present an obvious contrast to the dwindling martial masculinity of the metropole. The Boer War had raised a general alarm in Britain when it was revealed that recruiters were struggling to find men who met the Army’s height requirement. But the diminishing stature of British soldiers had already been a concern for years,

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the standard having dropped from five feet six inches in 1878 to five feet three in the 1880s. Even Lord Roberts – no giant himself – thought the standards “almost dwarfish.”43 As Victorians increasingly tied privileged properties of manliness to the male body, they bound it to contemporary discussions of evolution, so that in addition to presenting idealized individuals such as Umslopogaas or Monella, lost-world novelists described whole races as warlike or manly. In this way they added to the broadly influential discourse of martial race theory, which radically reformed the Indian Army during the New Imperialist period, and which, as David Omissi argues, “inverted negative colonial images of barbaric otherness.”44 The theory held that certain races, through heredity as much as cultural norms, reliably produced men of sound physique and warlike spirit. Lord Roberts, who championed martial race theory as commander-in-chief of India, remembered what he had seen as the exceptionally loyal and triumphant service of Sikhs and Gurkhas during the Sepoy Rebellion, and insisted that recruiting policies should aim to increase the proportion of these men and those of a few other northern Indian groups thought to be of excellent fighting stock, such as Dogras, Rajputs, and Pathans. These men were also to be recruited, whenever possible, from the remoter hinterlands of Nepal, the Punjab, and Rajputana, places where the men had been least exposed to the civilizing effects of cities. This initiative was underwritten by the premises of scientific racism, which described southern Indians as having been racially enervated by their hotter climate and northerners as the descendants of Aryan conquerors who shared old ties with Europeans. But the northern martial races also attracted more British attention and admiration because of their proximity to the northwest frontier, which, because of growing fears of a Russian invasion, was considered the Empire’s most dangerous territory. Martial race discourse, in other words, demonstrates the extent to which beliefs in a naturalized warlike manliness could bend British racist attitudes into self-serving forms that responded to pressures of colonial governance and European rivalry. Given the late nineteenth-century emphasis on the soldier as an exemplar of imperial masculinity, the appreciation for the military aptitude of these races slipped easily into an admiration of their manliness. As Heather Streets points out, “so intertwined were the qualities of these ‘martial races’ with Roberts’s idealized notions of hyper-masculinity that, in later years, he sometimes called them simply the ‘manly’ races.”45 This rhetoric of martial manliness provided an ostensibly natural bridge over the racial divide between Britain and its esteemed soldiers from the Punjab and

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Nepal, so that these native troops were consistently associated with Britain’s own most romantically primitive warriors, the highland Scots, whose flamboyantly exotic and archaic style had helped them capture the public imagination during the Crimean War and the Sepoy Rebellion. Reports from later frontier wars showed the Highlanders competing for glory with Sikhs and Gurkhas, and all three groups honoring each other in mutual confirmation of manly valor. “By the end of the nineteenth century,” Streets argues, “the connections between ‘martial’ Sikhs, Gurkhas and Highlanders had become naturalized as part of a public discourse that sought to convey the values of the ultimate male imperial subject.”46 India was the hotbed of martial race theory, and the territory in which it most powerfully influenced policies of imperial rule and defense. However, the conviction that less civilized races were more immediately in touch with the primal fonts of manly strength and warlike spirit was widely applied across the globe, both to the Empire’s subject races (including the northern Indian peoples, but also the Maori, Arabs, and sometimes the Irish) and to its opponents on the battlefield (such as the Sudanese, Zulus, and Matabele). At the same time as Roberts endorsed the manliness of Sikhs and Gurkhas, his rival, Garnet Wolseley, drew attention to the instinctively martial men of southern Africa: I do not think Europeans learn drill as quickly as the Basuto or the Zulu. It is astonishing to see the zeal, the undisguised interest and application these savages bring to bear upon all military lessons given to them . . . There seems to be something in the disposition and genius of the common stock from which they come, some hereditary bias in their brain, in their very blood, which fits them for the easy acquisition of a soldier’s duties.47

Racist as Wolseley’s assessment is – he is unwilling to admit any virtue of the Zulus other than an aptitude for fighting – the logic of his argument nevertheless drives a wedge between the qualities of military fitness and those of civilization. If this centrally important dimension of manliness were to be discovered in the bodies, in the “very blood,” of savages, primitive men could equal the British, or even serve as aspirational models for a reformed manhood and a manlier nation. Thus the high-ranking Indian administrator Alfred Lyall, criticizing Gladstone’s too civilized response to Irish unrest in 1882, wished to see Britain exercise force that was “adapted to the strength and savagery” of its subjects: “I should like a little more fierceness and honest brutality in the national temperament.”48 Lost-world stories dramatized encounters with such manly races, and popularized precisely the physical qualities of manliness prized in the militaristic strains of the New Imperialism. They transformed the imperial

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frontier into the great crucible of manhood, not only because the frontier was easily imagined as a space of combat, but also because the battles in that setting against and alongside other races were particularly suited to measure power in terms of bodily form and instinct untrammeled by civilized or religious constraint. The ability of British heroes to hold their own on the frontier could also assuage late Victorian anxieties about degeneration, even if their success required mimicking barbarians, since the real threat to manliness conceived in these terms was not savagery but civilization itself. “I suspect that in many ways [ours] has been a progress from strength to weakness,” wrote the influential colonial administrator James Fitzjames Stephen: “If this should be so, it appears to me that all other gains, whether in wealth, knowledge or humanity, afford no equivalent. Strength, in all its forms, is life and manhood. To be less strong is to be less of a man, whatever else you may be. This suspicion prevents me, for one, from feeling any enthusiasm about progress.”49 The hulking heroes of lost-world stories, whatever their race, bear out this simple equation of manliness and strength. Yet it is the flamboyant anachronism of this fiction that speaks to Stephen’s other concern: the problem of progress itself.

Anthropology and Atlantis Neither muscular Christianity nor social Darwinism can account for the tendency in lost-world fiction to stage the search for imperial masculinity as a transformative encounter between the modern and the primitive, nor do they quite answer the more pressing problem posed by these stories: how was “the primitive” modified into the psychically charged category of “the lost”? Like the opposition between primitive and modern, loss suggests distance, yet it orients an implied narrative of change backwards toward a traumatic moment of separation while simultaneously necessitating the recognition of an earlier time of unity or relative wholeness. Stories of lost Others require their readers to entertain the notion of a forgotten shared identity, so that differences between peoples could be regarded as circumstantial rather than ontological, and difference itself could be read as a sign of absence rather than as proof of progress. Lost worlds, after all, are not the same as discarded worlds; loss presupposes some value worth recovering, and even the hope of restoration, of paradise regained. In its propensity to grant the “primitive” an unprecedented psychic and sociological value, lost-world fiction shares a surprising number of assumptions with the contemporary discourse of evolutionary anthropology.

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At first glance, the dynamics of nostalgia and desire implicit in formulations of lost worlds seem markedly opposed to familiar condemnations of the primitive in the emerging discipline of anthropology. Edward Burnett Tylor’s landmark Primitive Culture (1871), for instance, attempts not only to scrutinize “primitive” peoples in other parts of the globe, but to reassure Victorians of a supremacy that follows from the peremptory logic of cultural development: The hypothetical primitive condition corresponds in a considerable degree to that of modern savage tribes, who, in spite of their difference and distance, have in common certain elements of civilization, which seem remains of an early state of the human race at large. If this hypothesis be true, then, notwithstanding the continual interference of degeneration, the main tendency of culture from primæval up to modern times has been from savagery to civilization.50

In Tylor’s comparative model, the function of “the primitive” is to inspire belief in a grand narrative of cultural progress quite counter to narratives of loss; the temporal poles of savagery and civilization can be used confidently to assert a European superiority guaranteed by scientific law. And by constructing a naturalized model of space-time that views non-European peoples as living relics of cultural obsolescence, as Johannes Fabian has emphasized, evolutionary anthropology is “founded on distancing and separation.”51 Tylor’s comparison of “modern savage tribes” to “the early state of the human race” implies a Victorian vision of global domination as an unfinished narrative, the ending of which will be written by imperial projects ranging from civilizing missions to genocidal violence. Primitive Culture may thus seem a supremely arrogant expression of Britain’s imperial chauvinism designed to bolster a flattering dogma of progress. But the taxonomies of cultural difference Tylor sketches are only one dimension of his project, which is in fact founded upon a complicated and unstable tension between past and present. Central to his work is a desire to learn of civilization’s distant origins, to “reconstruct lost history” (15), and these origins can be recaptured only by acknowledging that the foreign is necessary to understand the familiar, so that British identity is revealed to be partial, unfixed, and relative. Consequently, primitive Others relate to the modern man not merely as his foils, but as vital exemplars of his own heritage.52 Tylor announces that his work depends on “two great principles”: on one hand, he needs to show that civilization’s “various grades may be regarded as stages of development or evolution,” but equally important is “the uniformity which so largely pervades civilization” (1). His comparative method, at its heart, insists as rigorously on

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similarity, continuity, and analogy as it does on difference and contrast: “Progress, degradation, survival, revival, modification are all modes of the connexion that binds together the complex network of civilization. It needs but a glance into the trivial details of our own daily life to set us thinking how far we are really its originators, and how far but the transmitters and modifiers of the results of long past ages” (17). So important to Tylor are these “modes of connexion” that he expressly dismisses the divisive category of race as a necessary tool of cultural analysis; he points out, for instance, that there is “scarce a hand’s breadth of difference between an English ploughman and a negro of Central Africa” (7). While Primitive Culture may be dedicated to the principle of progress, its pages are crowded with examples of cultural “survivals,” the customs and superstitions of modern Europe that, as Tylor argues, are but the thinly disguised vestiges of primitive practices. Tylor regards survivals as evidence of the “direct and close connection . . . between modern culture and the condition of the rudest savage” (159), and he sees them everywhere: in the persistence of bonfire celebrations, in the seemingly innocent games of children, and even in the salutations evoked by a sneeze, which Tylor uses to link British courtesy with ancient Greek divination and modern Zulu animism (97–100). Primitive Culture’s long parade of survivals partly undermines Tylor’s own thesis of progress by challenging complacencies about a wholly distinct state of civilization. But Tylor is far more troubled by “revivals” – such as the late Victorian growth in spiritualism – through which ancient practices return, quite forcefully, to a modern world that should have superseded them. Revivals are not merely the harmless shadows of ancient barbarism, but strong evidence of “the directness with which antiquity and savagery bear upon modern life” (159), and are therefore more menacing to the narrative of progress. No doubt Tylor would condemn the barbaric values of lost-world fiction as yet another unfortunate revival, but he understood that not everyone shared his optimism about progress: “The onward movement from barbarism has dropped behind it more than one quality of barbaric character which cultivated modern men may look on with regret, and will even strive to regain by futile attempts to stop the course of history, and to restore the past in the midst of the present” (29). Ironically, Tylor’s own success in establishing the intimate and ubiquitous connection of the primitive and the modern nonetheless bolsters the central premises of the lost-world romancers, who collectively did more than anyone to imagine the past restored in the present. The genre shares Tylor’s fascination with psychic and cultural survivals along with his belief in the profound but hidden

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connections between civilized Europeans, modern savages abroad, and a universal condition from which both originated. In their fantastic anachronisms, these stories transfer the pure primitive state from the realm of anthropological conjecture to the stage of colonial adventure. Stories of loss differ sharply from progress narratives in their attitude toward time, orienting attention backward rather than to the future goals of change and reform. Lost-world stories mark their distrust of narratives of progress and civilization by imagining settings in which time is largely impotent. Free of the assumptions those grand narratives bring, lost worlds could be peopled with cultures whose feats rival or surpass those of modern Britain. The relative greatness of lost cultures became a recurring theme, which was encouraged not only by comparative anthropology but also by dazzling archaeological discoveries: John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood’s survey of Mayan ruins, Austen Henry Layard’s work on Nineveh and Babylon, Heinrich Schliemann’s excavation of Troy, Karl Mauch’s reports of Great Zimbabwe, and Flinders Petrie’s Egyptological explorations. Understanding these discoveries in light of their own concerns, the Victorians saw images of both the grandeur and the transience of forgotten empires. Stories of lost worlds develop this theme into a vision of imperial time in which encounters with the past serve less to illustrate theories of progress or decline than to imply a vast, cyclical chronology: empires come and empires go, but empire itself remains constant. Archaeology and comparative anthropology combined to revive and rewrite the greatest Western myth of a forgotten world, the lost continent of Atlantis, which now began to appear in its familiar modern form as both a lost paradise and a prehistoric empire of enormous reach. Of the many quasi-scientific projects to rediscover Atlantis in the late Victorian period, the most influential was the American Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882). Donnelly’s Atlantis, characteristically for this period, appeals to myths of primitive unity fortified by imperial desire. The Atlantis he describes was an empire that cast its colonies over five continents and shaped the culture of all ancient peoples. The Atlanteans, he writes, were the founders of nearly all our arts and sciences; they were the parents of our fundamental beliefs; they were the first civilizers, the first navigators, the first merchants, the first colonizers of the earth . . . This lost people were our ancestors, their blood flows in our veins; the words we use every day were heard, in their primitive form, in their cities, courts and temples. Every line of race and thought, of blood and belief, leads back to them.53

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His opinion, moreover, was not as marginal as we might expect. In the Westminster Review in 1895, Oliphant Smeaton cites the monuments of Easter Island as confirmation of Donnelly’s view, calling Atlantis a “great empire,” “an advanced civilization,” and “the cradle of the human race.”54 James Churchward, a British colonel serving in India, researched a lost continent called Mu, “an incalculably ancient civilization, which was in many respects, superior to our own.”55 These hypotheses often included the superior masculinity of those long-lost men. Donnelly, for instance, contended that the Greek myths of gods and giants were half-remembered stories of Atlanteans, whose “physical strength was extraordinary, the earth shaking sometimes under their tread.”56 An article in the Cornhill asserted the original inhabitants of the Canary Islands were “remnants of the ancient race” of Atlantis, and praised the greatness of their men: “So tall were they that the Spaniards speak of them as giants, and their strength and endurance were so great that they were conquered by stratagem but not by force. They ran as fast as horses . . . they could climb the highest mountains and jump the deepest ravines.”57 The fantasy of rediscovering Atlantis as a living culture inspired a flurry of lost-world stories at the end of the nineteenth century, and it has remained a familiar theme in popular culture ever since. C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s The Lost Continent (1899) and Atkins’s A Queen of Atlantis (1898) are both classics of the modern Atlantis tradition, and both Haggard and Doyle would eventually try their hands at Atlantis stories as well.58 The persistent association of these diverse themes – embodied masculinity, primitive imperial power, lost and rediscovered connections with the barbarous past, the flattening of imperial time – are nicely illustrated by Smeaton’s lost-world novel, A Mystery of the Pacific (1899). Set in the South Seas, the novel’s principal English characters represent imperial power in three of its most prominent aspects: the narrator, Bill Markham, works for the Australian Colonial Secretary, and he is joined by an officer of the Polynesian Labour Trade and an ethnologist named Professor Barlow. On the trail of Barlow’s lost brother-in-law, they happen upon an uncharted island and a mysterious city populated by the unaltered descendants of first-century Roman colonists. After overcoming some resistance from the local Pontifex, they praise the Romans as “a fine, noble, manly race,” and as representatives of “that mighty empire, the stateliest and the most imposing the world has ever known.”59 The Romans are perpetually at war with the island’s natives, the “negroid” Ariuta (177), whom they regard as barbarians. While Smeaton offers no Haggardesque scenes of epic bloodbaths, the Englishmen are given the chance to fight

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against and with both peoples. Eventually they discover that the Ariutas are not natives at all, but the descendants of colonists from Atlantis, and guardians of a civilization “even more complex and more advanced” than that of the Romans (279): their sacred underground city represents “the last surviving link uniting the world of to-day with the glories of the lost Atlantis” (275). In short, the novel juxtaposes modern English colonists with the greatest imperial powers of the past, both historical and mythical. The characters respect, and even revere, these ideological ancestors, and Markham happily minimizes the potential differences between them, as when he tells a Roman “that it is immaterial under what name we worship the great Father of all, whether as Jove, or God, or Siva, or whatever else” (221). At the novel’s conclusion, Markham decides to remain on the island: “Never have I regretted taking farewell of Old England, dear though it shall ever be to me, nor of severing all ties of race and kindred in the land of my fathers” (335). The search for a lost brother has led him to a land of still older fathers, and a more blissful and fulfilling life in the lost world. Smeaton’s story is a surreal assemblage of incongruities; surely there are few novels more bizarre than this yoking together of plucky modern British imperialists, magical Atlanteans, and Romans arrested in historical time. Its combination of wild anachronism, racial and religious relativism, primitive imperialism, and masculine militarism, may strike us as surpassingly idiosyncratic; and yet, within the conventions of the lost world genre, the blend is entirely predictable. The coherence of Smeaton’s novel lies not in the logic of the text itself, but in the range of psychic needs and imperial aspirations that intersect in the Victorian fantasy of the lost world. This cultural fantasy is not as easily traced outside the pages of popular fiction, nor are its influences as easily delineated as its origins. Certainly it promotes both an aggressive masculinity and the violent imperial tactics that contemporary Liberals condemned as “methods of barbarism.” For military strategists such as Wolseley, colonial problems demanded a kind of warfare suited to the conditions of savagery: “Almost all our colonial military misfortunes during the reign of Queen Victoria, are to be accounted for by the fact that we have attempted to fight great warlike native races with the same formal tactics as those which succeeded at Waterloo.”60 The approach to conflict that the British associated with the “warlike native races” might, at best, be justified by some greater goal, becoming what Kipling called “the savage wars of peace.” At worst, it could amount to a creeping realpolitik and the sort of brutality perpetrated by the British in South Africa or the Americans in the Philippines.61 And well before the publication of The Will to Power (1901), lost-world stories began

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to prepare a British popular audience for the coming century’s bloody international conflicts in the same terms as Nietzsche’s darkly celebratory prophecy: I am delighted at the military development of Europe . . . Personal and manly capacity, bodily capacity recovers its value, valuations are becoming more physical, nutrition consists ever more and more of flesh. Fine men have once more become possible . . . The savage in every one of us is acknowledged, even the wild animal.62

By portraying militarism as the primal expression of enduringly manly qualities, lost-world stories use war and strength to naturalize one another in a sinister tautology. “Man is born to kill,” says Haggard’s savage champion Umslopogaas in Allan Quatermain. “He who kills not when his blood is hot is a woman, and no man. The people who kill not are slaves.”63 Lost-world fiction dreams of a pre-historical mandate for empire articulated in the blood and sinews of the male body, and it is worth remembering that this mandate does not stand on the foundations of Enlightenment principles, Christian virtues, or even the qualities of Britishness or whiteness. These stories seize the familiar binarisms of Victorian imperialism and complicate, reverse, or even collapse them, and not merely in ways that indicate ambivalence or anxiety. Lost world fiction’s disruption of the progress narrative and its blurring of space, race, and time contributed to broader patterns of New Imperialist masculinity, so that the man reunited with the savage stood shoulder to shoulder with the boy who never grew up. And lost worlds bolstered in their way the celebration of strength and the tide of unchecked violence across the twentieth century that Eric Hobsbawm has called the “slide down the slope of barbarization.” Hobsbawm’s analysis reminds us, as lost-world writers do not, that barbaric violence is not merely the “reemergence of primordial forces too long suppressed.”64 But neither is it, as Hobsbawm contends, simply what remains when Enlightenment standards crumble, a Hobbesian pre-rational condition that drags us down the slope of its own terrible inertia. The history of lost-world fiction teaches us that modern barbarism is not some irresistible impulse to which we inevitably return when reason fades; it is an ideology with its own history, actively encouraged and sustained by a set of carefully elaborated fantasies that are presented to men as the psychic solution to their own sense of loss. Barbarism is made and remade – by popular culture no less than by governments – and it can be unmade.

chapter 6

Mummies, marriage, and the occupation of Egypt

A political cartoon published in Punch in 1896 illustrates the Victorian tendency to imagine the complicated politics of the “Egyptian Question” as a peculiar revision of the riddle of the Sphinx. Before that enduring and impassive monument stand the representatives of a very timely imperial dilemma. Egypt, depicted as the translucently shrouded woman of Orientalist fantasy, cowers for protection at the side of John Bull, dressed as a soldier with his rifle held casually over his shoulder. Confronting them stands the Turkish Sultan, asking England to consider whether the time had not come to restore Egypt to her loving uncle (Figure 8). Well might he ask, for Egypt was not at the time a place where Britain had any official business; nominally a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt was theoretically controlled by a Khedive answerable to Constantinople. Yet, as everyone knew, the real power in Egypt was held by the British Consul General, Lord Cromer, along with his administration of advisors and an army of occupation, which had no more official standing than the boatloads of tourists steaming up and down the Nile. What claim might the British make to prolong their presence in this unacknowledged but strategically vital corner of their empire? Or, in the gendered logic of the cartoon, what exactly is the relationship of John Bull to this distressed Oriental beauty? Clearly he is her protector in the melodramatic mode, but is he another relative? Perhaps a lover? The problem recalls a more explicitly erotic Punch cartoon published directly after General Garnet Wolseley seized the country in 1882. Here Egypt, as Cleopatra, presents herself alluringly to that unlikely Victorian Caesar, William Gladstone, who, flanked by Wolseley in Roman armor, looks up from his interrupted work in consternation (Figure 9). The temptation Egypt offers to this reluctant imperialist is presented even more aggressively to Punch’s readers: while she gazes down at Gladstone, she twists her body in three-quarter profile towards the spectator, having just stripped off the carpet in which she had concealed herself. 171

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8 John Bull protects Egypt from “Turk the Sublime!” in Punch, 1896.

At the cartoon’s focal point, toward which Wolseley gestures and Gladstone stares, the label “EGYPT” is printed across a thin strap just beneath her gauze-veiled breasts: it is the point at which political and sexual possibilities salaciously converge. In both cartoons, the riddle of imperial policy towards Egypt is allegorized for the public as a problem of sexuality staged against an equally problematic backdrop of anachronistic time. Egypt’s future would depend upon the uncertain outcome of this erotically charged encounter of its colonial present and its Pharaonic past. During the unofficial occupation of Egypt (1882–1914), British writers discovered a way to combine these two female characters – the contemporary veiled Arab woman and the majestic queen of classical antiquity – into a single fanciful figure that could embody the sexual and historical themes through which the “Egyptian Question” was popularly represented: the living mummy. Late Victorian Britain experienced a minor craze for this creature of imperial fantasy,1 and mummy stories continued to fascinate Edwardian readers and then became a staple of twentiethcentury cinema. We are now more accustomed to the extensive cinematic

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9 Gladstone and Wolseley regard Egypt in “Cleopatra before Caesar,” from Punch, 1882.

tradition of grotesquely desiccated male monsters relentlessly avenging the violation of their tombs, but Victorian and Edwardian mummies embody Egypt in terms strikingly like those of the prurient Punch cartoons. The typical mummy of Victorian and Edwardian fiction is a woman, and one who, perfectly preserved in her youthful beauty, strongly attracts the libidinous attention of modern British men. While their desire

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is certainly a cause of some ambivalence, it is nevertheless the case that the men in these stories are less inclined to flee from a mummy than to marry her, to see in her a chance to be kissed rather than cursed. In short, the Victorian mummy narrative is a love story, one as politically charged as the Punch cartoons. And like those cartoons, the strange romances of mummy fiction are warped by the problem of time itself. The perfect preservation of the seductive mummies renders even more uncanny the presence of the ancient world in the modern, and these stories find a host of ways to blur temporal distinctions or to bend the linear poles of history together into synthesis, including a recurring fantasy of marital union. The problem of time is encoded into the narrative structure of these stories, where repetition and doubling offer no advance, and where our expectations of closure are coyly forestalled. It is the fantastic corollary to the British occupation of Egypt. Among the calendar of celebrated creatures who were given their definitive expression by nineteenth-century novelists – vampires, werewolves, Martians, and ghosts of all sorts and conditions – the mummy stands out as most purely and unambiguously the product of imperial fantasy; that she should arise in this period as a figure of desire rather than the terrifying monster of later decades gives some measure of the passion for empire that had swept New Imperialist Britain. Still, just as the Egyptian occupation presented an anomaly in imperial politics, mummy fiction is significantly anomalous in relation to other late Victorian and Edwardian imperial romances. Whereas lost-world adventure stories – like other popular tales of pirates, schoolboys, or soldiers – were absorbed by the competitive dynamics of male homosocial communities, mummy fiction conceives of imperial masculinity in its relation to women, and, yet more intriguingly, to women who are at once foreign and powerful. The recurring prospect of marriage between East and West is generally treated sympathetically, moreover, despite popular fiction’s typical prohibitions against miscegenous attachments between the heroic British man and the native woman, and despite its wariness of marriage even to a woman of Britain. Though mummy fiction entertains the possibility of married imperial heroes, however, its marriage plots are peculiar in their own right because of the way they intersect with the problem of time, and not only because the lovers are impossibly anachronistic. Almost unfailingly, mummy stories raise the hope of marriage only to defer its consummation, so that the union of the lovers is not ruled out but indefinitely postponed, even to the extent that their plots dissolve without resolution. The male heroes remain locked in a

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perpetual quest, always striving but never changing, in a temporal logic that parallels that of the boys who never grow up. Mummy fiction offers a mature variant on the theme of a non-developmental New Imperialist masculinity, one that allows for the eroticization of an imperial present that does not fade. Mummies and their suitors remain suspended, like the figures in the cartoons, in a narrative fantasy that ultimately refuses to conclude its striptease of veils and mummy wrappings.2 It is precisely the eroticized suspense of mummy fiction that betrays its complicity with the dreams of the New Imperialism, and, more particularly, to the political riddle posed by Egypt, that unofficial but crucial corner of the Empire whose independence was forever retreating just over the horizon. The Egyptian Question is raised again and again through the sexual–political allegory of marriage, but it is never answered. Unlike liberal imperialists such as Gladstone, who worried that entanglement with Egypt could mire Britain in a pointless and interminable commitment to the region, New Imperialists saw an opportunity in Egypt’s strategically vital location (and especially in the Suez Canal) to maintain the Empire indefinitely, even if the political conditions of their rule required a degree of tactical ambiguity. The mummy stories considered in this chapter can help us to see how popular fiction underwrote Britain’s involvement in Egypt by transforming the quest for perpetual empire into a suspenseful and sexually charged love story, but also how the pressure of imperial politics could twist established narrative conventions such as the marriage plot into curious new shapes.

The love story of Egyptology Rider Haggard was drawn to Egyptian subjects repeatedly in his career, and he toured Egypt not long after the occupation began, just after the immense successes of King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Allan Quatermain, and She (both 1887) had established him as the premier popular novelist of empire. But I want to begin with a later, lesser-known short story, “Smith and the Pharaohs” (1913), which nicely summarizes many of the characteristic tropes and gestures that a generation of Victorian mummy tales had elaborated between the beginning of the occupation and the First World War. Haggard’s protagonist, James Ebenezer Smith, has suffered some unspecified catastrophe early in his life, which threw him “upon the rocky bosom of the world,”3 and has thus been forced to accept a job as a clerk, a position which, in the conventions of imperial romance, is the most degraded a man can hold. A confirmed bachelor, he drifts through a lonely

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and hollow life until he happens upon the sculpted mask of an enigmatic, beautiful Egyptian queen: “Smith looked at it once, twice, thrice, and at the third look he fell in love” (5). Suddenly his dreary life is infused with masculine purpose; he takes up the study of Egyptology and “tackle[s] those books like a man” (7). Traveling to Egypt in pursuit of the woman whose mask has inspired him, he at last discovers her unfinished tomb under the “virgin rock” of the Valley of Queens (10). Her mummy, however, has been mostly destroyed, leaving only “a mummied hand . . . a woman’s little hand, most delicately shaped,” which he reverently kisses (23–24). The queen’s name, Smith learns, was Ma-mee. One is tempted here to pursue the story’s glaring Oedipal leads, to note that the tomb’s “virgin rock” satisfies the desire left by the “rocky bosom” of Smith’s youth, or to emphasize the triple implication of the queen’s name, which can suggest the embalmed “mummy,” the maternal “mummy/mommy/mammy,” and, as a French Egyptologist in the story points out, “Ma mie – my darling!” (28). Smith finds the tomb, after all, in “the cemetery of old Thebes” (9), recalling the ancient haunts of Oedipus himself. But rather than dwell on Freud’s transhistorical account of individual development, it’s better to analyze the story in its local historical context or to read Smith’s desire as symptomatic of imperial Britain’s Oedipal construction of Egypt, which figures both as the timeless mother of Western civilization and the object of its modern desire. It is not a broadly human sexuality that gives Smith his definitively masculine purpose and drive, but sexuality experienced in and through the politically charged discipline of Egyptology.4 Again and again in mummy fiction, sexual and scholarly desires merge; no sooner does a man feel the intellectual attraction of Pharaonic culture than he finds a woman in whom his desire can be made flesh. Arthur Conan Doyle provides a wonderful example of this substitution in “The Ring of Thoth” (1890), where the protagonist – also named Smith – initially squanders his considerable intellect by “play[ing] the coquette with his subject”: The most fickle of wooers, however, is apt to be caught at last, and so it was with John Vansittart Smith. The more he burrowed his way into Egyptology the more impressed he became by the vast field which it opened to the inquirer, and by the extreme importance of a subject which promised to throw a light upon the first germs of human civilization and the origin of the greater part of the arts and sciences. So struck was Mr. Smith that he straightaway married an Egyptological young lady.5

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More often, these tales focus masculine Egyptological desire onto the mummies themselves. In H. D. Everett’s Iras: A Mystery (1896), for instance, the narrator begins by recounting how he had lived “aimlessly enough” until “I found at last the absorbing interest of my life in Egyptian exploration,”6 and proceeds to tell how he fell in love at first unwrapping with a mummy he had smuggled out of Egypt in 1882. The powerful allure of timeless female mummies represents an imaginative response to a particularly timely problem in late Victorian gender relations. As John Tosh argues, the mid-Victorian ideal of the middle-class family man had begun to lose its charm in the 1870s, and men turned away from the aspirational model of the domestic paterfamilias in their reading material even more than in their actual lives. Nevertheless, the older domestic ideal had offered a compelling pattern on which the trajectory of a man’s life might be plotted, and though that story no longer satisfied as it once had, its decline left behind few obvious alternative templates of masculine identity. The mummy stories of Haggard, Doyle, and Everett thus all begin with men drifting through a lonely and aimless bachelorhood. Uninterested in the goal of marriage in its conventional aspect, they find instead an absorbing and definitively manly ambition in an archaeological pursuit, one fueled by the energies of normative heterosexual desire towards a displaced form of the domestic that has been rerouted through the Empire. Women in these stories remain the objects that infuse men’s struggle with purpose, but, elevated by the glamour of exoticism and anachronicity, they are no longer the familiar women whom the protagonists avoided in Britain. The ancient queens of these stories may be powerful, but, unlike the increasingly empowered British women of the fin de siècle, the mummies do not challenge male authority in the ways that prompted the late Victorian flight from domesticity. The tendency of these stories to blur together archaeological scholarship and romantic passion, absurdly exaggerated though it may appear, in fact presents a plausible parallel to an emerging understanding of Egyptology popularized after the foundation of the Egypt Exploration Fund in the pivotal year of 1882. Blessed by the tireless leadership of Amelia Edwards and the inspired choice of the young Flinders Petrie as its agent, the EEF fanned the Victorian public’s enthusiasm over Pharaonic Egypt and doubtless contributed to the interest that would greet mummy stories in the decades to follow. At its outset, the EEF was to have a new kind of relationship with the relics it sought. It was intended to protect Egyptian antiquities from decay and from the depredations of tourists and collectors, including the European museums that had carted off as many monuments

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as they could seize. Untainted by the pursuit of spoils, the EEF would strive more purely for scientific knowledge. Such new ambitions were met by some established Orientalists with derision; Samuel Birch, the distinguished Keeper of Antiquities at the British Museum, mocked the notion that excavation should serve any purpose but the enrichment of English collections, dismissing the aims of the EEF as “emotional archaeology.”7 This “emotional” desire to protect Egypt’s antiquities might well have seemed naively sentimental to scholars more used to smuggling them away, but it was nevertheless entirely complicit with the brute fact of Britain’s imperial influence. The occupation after 1882 allowed British archaeologists in the region to flourish, even to surpass their French predecessors, who had dominated Egyptian excavation since Napoleon. And Egyptologists repaid the favor to the political system which enabled their work by colonizing Egypt’s history as the object of ever more precise scientific scrutiny, developing a form of knowledge which – emotionally motivated or not – buttressed Britain’s understanding of its own imperial power. “Smith and the Pharaohs” intensifies Egyptology’s emotional investment, translating the new scientific emphasis on disinterested research into the still more unimpeachable terms of a love story. With this substitution, Haggard forestalls the potential guilt of an archaeological enterprise that could never quite free itself of the subtle taints of imperial coercion or sordid tomb-robbing. When Smith first penetrates Ma-mee’s crypt, he discovers signs that it had been raided before, and he becomes uncomfortably aware that he is retracing the steps of an ancient thief, that he too is “violating a tomb” (15). The narrator again compares the protagonist to a thief when, in the story’s climactic episode, Smith finds himself locked overnight in the Egyptian Museum at Cairo. As though conjured by his half-realized guilt, a congregation of ghosts appears amid the relics, the ancient kings and queens of Egypt, including Ma-mee, “ten times more beautiful than he had ever pictured her” (47). The spirits challenge Smith, accusing him of being one of the “vile thieves” who have desecrated their graves. But Smith justifies himself by pointing out the purity of his motivation: “It is true that I have searched in your graves, because my heart has been drawn towards you, and I would learn all that I could concerning you” (58). He adds that his heart has had a more specific object in Ma-mee, who speaks in his defense. Placated, the ancients absolve him and leave him to speak briefly with the spirit of Ma-mee, who delivers the story’s most telling comment upon the license conferred by Smith’s love:

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what is mine has been, is, and shall be yours forever. Gods may change their kingdoms and their names; men may live and die, and live again once more to die; empires may fall and those who ruled them be turned to forgotten dust. Yet true love endures immortal as the souls in which it was conceived, and from it for you and me, the night of woe and separation done, at the daybreak which draws on, there shall be born the splendor and the peace of union. (64–65)

The woodenness of this passage’s central cliché – “true love endures immortal” – knocks us so bluntly in the head that we may miss its more delicate implications for Egyptology. Representing archaeology as an expression of eternal love, Haggard vindicates Smith’s intrusions and claims for him a property right that is just as unshakably eternal. More subtly, Ma-mee’s speech splits time into two superimposed chronologies. On one hand, there is the familiar timescape of historical conflict, of mortal flux and the rise and fall of empires. On the other, there is the promise of a union that exists beyond history’s strife, the chronological point at which what has been and what is consummate, conceiving and birthing a union of endlessly arrested time, a static present in which nothing need ever change. The eternal love that validates Smith’s explorations also promises to freeze history, to render permanent those relations of power and property that would otherwise be subject to decay and death. Yet the promised union never comes. As Smith reaches out for Ma-mee she eludes his grasp and vanishes (Figure 10). The narrative breaks off, then resumes with Smith wakening the next day, wondering whether his encounter had really happened: “was it all only a dream, or was it – something more – by day and by night he asks of Nothingness? But, be she near or far, no answer comes from the Queen Ma-mee . . . So, like the rest of us, Smith must wait to learn the truth concerning many things” (67). And so the story ends, not with closure but with an unanswered question, one which the narrator warns us at the outset that Smith is “still thinking over” (2). But the state of suspense in which Smith is left need not be understood as a symptom of anxiety. Quite the contrary: to achieve the peace of union would be, according to Ma-mee’s explanation, to put an end to history, to science, to empire itself, along with its handmaiden, archaeology. While the promise of some kind of transcendent goal – the life-defining search for the unattainable “queen of the mask” – must be held out to justify Smith’s explorations, its attainment would render them unnecessary. The actual Egyptologists on whom Smith was modeled, of course, were bound by a parallel constraint. Since the presence of British scholars in Egypt was authorized by the high-minded ideals of protecting

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10 The elusive Ma-mee in Haggard’s “Smith and the Pharaohs,” 1913.

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and studying vulnerable antiquities, the moment those relics were pronounced safe and well-catalogued would be the moment that the British would be forced to cede to the Egyptians the custody of their own history. Suspense, in effect, is productive. The unattained – or the practically or metaphysically unattainable goal – maintains and validates the New Imperialist dream of Empire without end, and at the same time charges it with the sustained pleasure of the ceaseless striptease, the drive to pursue the impalpable queen behind the mask or to unearth and unwrap an ongoing procession of mummies. The alluring Ma-mee joins this procession some three decades after it began. Grant Allen’s much earlier “My New Year’s Eve Among the Mummies” (1878) describes a man who casts off his British fiancée in favor of the revived mummy of the Princess Hatasou, “a lovely figure, tall, queenly, with smooth dark arms and a neck of polished bronze.”8 The image is echoed in the American Julian Hawthorne’s “The Unseen Man’s Story” (1893), in which a French Egyptologist tells how he met the resurrected Queen Amunuhet, “at the sight of whom my heart stood still and my breath failed me. She was dusky as the Nile at evening, and beautiful with a beauty that belongs to the morning of the world. Her eyes were long, black and brilliant; and their gaze was royal.”9 In Everett’s Iras, the titular mummy’s body is described less salaciously – perhaps because Everett was a woman – but the effect of her appearance is the same: “The face I looked on was beautiful, but it was a marvel the more that I did not regard it in the least as one looks on the beauty of a stranger. I knew my heart’s love when I saw her face to face . . . I recognized a need filled, an incompleteness suddenly made whole.”10 In a gesture that signifies at once her exotic appeal and her demure submission, Iras modestly continues to wear a veil after her unwrapping. The frequent appearance of veils and masks in mummy fiction was doubtless suggested by Orientalist images of Egyptian women and by their ready association with mummy wrappings. But masks, veils, and shrouds also had a long tradition in gothic fiction, which established them as conventional signposts of the intersection of dreadful mystery and compelling desire. Late Victorian writers took up these gothic accoutrements to depict imperial Britain’s relationship with inscrutably exotic Others, and to reconsider the putative progress of civilization in a world haunted by the uncanny survival of the primitive or ancient. But mummy fiction stands apart from other imperial romances by combining elements of the gothic tradition with familiar elements of domestic fiction, especially the marriage plot. Every one of the Egyptian women above – Ma-mee, Hatasou,

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Amunuhet, Iras – is presented as the ideal partner in an eternal union. The mummy’s cerement thus becomes both the veil of sexualized Orientalism and a bridal veil. In the densely overdetermined suggestiveness of this figure of masculine desire, the mummy challenges not only the Liberal reluctance to engage with Egypt, but, more broadly, a liberal imperialist conviction that Britain’s international influence was justified by, and should be exercised only in the service of, a progressive and rational telos of human history. To embrace the mummy, with all her magical potency and ancient authority, is to confess to a different style of imperialist fantasy, one in which disparate powers could be united, as in a marriage, to produce a harmoniously strengthened and enduring Empire. This goal, as we have already begun to see, is never reached. But we must still ask why mummy fiction should make its women as elusive as they are marriageable, why the unfulfilled promise of union should so persistently drive New Imperialist dreams of Egypt. The emerging discourse of Egyptology suggests one way to begin responding to this riddle, but more compelling answers emerge in the political context of the occupation itself.

An empire of veils The Victorians never intended Egypt to be just another imperial possession; the occupation was characterized from the outset by a marked hesitancy and tentativeness. Its immediate cause was the proto-nationalist uprising led by Egypt’s Minister of War, Ahmad Urabi (more commonly known to the Victorians as “Arabi Pasha”). To the French and British governments, Urabi’s anti-colonialism seemed a threat to European interests and to the strategically vital Suez Canal. After Wolseley’s expeditionary force routed the Egyptians in 1882 at Tel-el Kebir, the British seemed poised to seize Egypt not only from Urabi’s party, but also from the lingering influence of the French, and thereby to claim the country as their own protectorate. Instead, Britain declared its plans to withdraw its troops immediately, an intention announced again and again as the years and decades rolled by. The British presence would persist, in various forms, for seventy years, but it began in a manner almost unexampled in the Empire’s history. Gladstone did not simply annex Egypt nor formally declare it a protectorate, but established an informal administration of advisors, led by Lord Cromer, who were to be the guides of an Egypt that was still, in theory, a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. One of Cromer’s under-secretaries, Alfred Milner, who in Africa later became one of Britain’s most powerful colonial administrators, called the hybrid system

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in Egypt “the most absurd experiment in human government,” and he admitted that it puzzled even the British: Thus we did after all establish a Protectorate in Egypt, but not a complete or legitimate one. On the contrary, it was a Protectorate which we could not avow to ourselves, and therefore could not call upon others to recognize. It was a veiled Protectorate of uncertain extent and indefinite duration for the accomplishment of a difficult and distant object.11

Milner’s famous formulation of a “veiled Protectorate” implies a new image of British power that partakes, at least rhetorically, of the conventional exoticism, mystery, and even the femininity of the Orient. The phrase’s blurring of colonizers and colonized is not accidental, since the operation of imperial influence was imagined as a sort of partnership of Egyptians and their British advisors in the service of Egyptian interests rather than those of London. Cromer would work through the Khedive’s figurehead government to revitalize Egypt, to revive it from crushing debt and defeat the plagues of corruption and anti-European agitation. The ostensible partnership suggested by this political experiment was easily translatable into the familiar narrative trope of the marriage plot, one in which each partner receives as a dowry the most desirable traits of the other: Egypt receives British industry and protection, while Britain claims not only Egypt itself, but its associations with mystery and permanence, both of which would be particularly appealing in an occupation of “uncertain extent and indefinite duration.” Indeed, this logic helps to explain why fiction’s desirable Egyptians are Pharaonic rather than modern: the timelessness that imperial fantasies would bestow on Britain’s own global influence is less easily symbolized by the potential nationalist of modern Egypt than by the denizen of that world of unaging monuments and preserved bodies that cheated death. The political stakes of dramatizing the veiled Protectorate as a love story become clear in one of the period’s most celebrated imperial romances, Rider Haggard’s She, which appeared in book form just before Haggard realized his dream of visiting Egypt. Queen Ayesha, the immortal sorceress who ruthlessly rules the lost city of Kôr, is not literally a mummy, but she certainly dresses like one, making her entrance as a “swathed mummylike form,” wrapped head to foot in a “white gauzy material [like] a corpse in its grave-clothes.”12 She undresses like one, too, veiling and unveiling her impossibly beautiful body in an erotic dance that keeps her both endlessly fascinating and forever out of reach (Figure 11). Kôr is likewise not Egypt itself, but the hidden home of Egypt’s ancestors (180), and its

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11 Ayesha unveils in the first illustrated edition of Haggard’s She, 1888.

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affinity with Egypt is suggested both by the lingering presence of its perfectly embalmed dead and by the unspeakable antiquity of its relics, which include “a gigantic monument like the well-known Egyptian Sphinx” (62).13 Kôr is also an explicitly imperial civilization, which once “rule[d] the world, and [whose] navies [went] out to commerce with the world” (179). But Kôr has faded, and its descendants, the Amahagar, now mixed into a “bastard brood” by miscegenous contact with barbarous Africans, have degenerated into savage cannibals (182). The “magnificent build” of the Amahagar implies their preservation of a primeval vigor (78), though their bodies are also subject to historical change through Ayesha’s eugenic experiments. The environs of Kôr thus suggest the same competing chronologies we found in Ma-mee’s speech: the Amahagar live a version of imperial time in which glory is transient, riven by historical flux and the waves of evolution and degeneracy, but Ayesha, whose “perfect and imperial shape” (156) dwells in the timeless heart of Kôr, transcends the metanarratives of progress and decay. The anachronicity at the heart of Kôr should thus be understood as a particularly Egyptian timelessness rather than as an example of the primordial savagery Haggard usually associates with Africa, represented here by the Amahagar who ring Kôr round. Kôr may be ancient, but it is not primitive, and this crucial difference in the construction of time distinguishes the irresistibly alluring Ayesha from the hideously aged Gagool, the Zulu witch of King Solomon’s Mines. For many Victorians, sub-Saharan Africa was either perilously or invigoratingly primitive, while the Orient was charmingly but backwardly stagnant. Pharaonic Egypt, however, represented a greatness so permanent, so exempt from the usual standards of historical development, that it could be more properly regarded with a feeling of awe. Many critics have noted that Ayesha’s anachronicity represents a challenge to imperial ideology’s narrative of progress.14 Yet, as we have seen, by the time Haggard imagined her story, imperialist ideology had become far less strictly concerned with progress than with maintenance and consolidation, and the New Imperialism yearned for an Empire immune to history’s vicissitudes, a promise of power embodied in Ayesha. Haggard’s remarkable treatment of time in She escapes the simple binarism of modern/primitive not only because Kôr is temporally fractured, but because the English are, too. The two chief protagonists and representatives of imperial Britain literally embody two divergent chronologies of manliness. Leo Vincey, whose genealogy stretches back to ancient Egypt, is heir to the legacy of vengeance that began when Ayesha killed his ancestor, Kallikrates, a priest of Isis. The records of Leo’s ancestry reveal a path that

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coincides with the rise and fall of Europe’s great powers, flowing from Egypt through Greece to Rome, then to France and finally England. But if Leo is the culmination of two millennia of imperial history, he is also its negation. Leo’s classical beauty – his classmates at Cambridge call him “the Greek god” (4) – foreshadows the revelation to come: he is not merely the heir of Kallikrates, but his reincarnation. Nothing has changed in all of those uncounted generations; the vast sweep of history has turned back upon itself in a full circle, returning Leo to where he began. Yet while Leo embodies a vision of history that transcends change – “like a statue of Apollo come to life” (4) – his partner in adventure, Horace Holly, represents change in all of its evolutionary power. Holly’s body is so simian that his appearance, he admits, amounts to proof of the “monkey theory” (10). But Haggard compensates this walking reminder of Darwinism with gifts of his own. As we learn when Holly battles the Amahagar, he is endowed with an ape-like strength and the capacity to draw upon “that awful lust of battle which will creep into the hearts of the most civilized of us” (103). Moreover, while Leo is “no scholar” (23), Holly is a mathematician, which suggests that Haggard assigns science and knowledge to the world of human change. He is also the novel’s historian, who brings to Ayesha news of the world. Tellingly, the first questions she asks him are the ones that British politicians were just then trying to decide: “There is yet an Egypt? And what Pharaoh sits upon the throne?” (147). Leo and Holly amount to two models of the masculine grounded in divergent constructions of the temporal. On the one hand Haggard gives us a transcendent and timeless ideal of manly beauty, and on the other a plucky struggler amid the forces of change who draws upon both the vitality of atavism and the wisdom that follows from experience. Both masculinities appeal to Haggard, and much of the novel is devoted to depicting the two operating in a loving partnership. “Beauty and the Beast was what they called us,” Holly writes, “when we went out walking together, as we were wont to do every day” (22). But Haggard’s imperial fantasy suggests another step that the conventions of the novel will not allow him to stage without the scandal of homoeroticism: a union of these two principles, a synthesis of the continuing struggle for existence and its permanent, unassailable victory. Though Haggard cannot use the marriage plot to join this particular beauty and beast, he flirts with the slightly less scandalous alternative, their mutual desire to marry Ayesha. Holly looks forward to a time when “conditions alter, and a day comes at last when two men may love one woman, and all three be happy in the fact” (297). Barred from polyandry, however, the novel can at least propose

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the marriage of Ayesha and Leo, and fantasize about the degree of imperial power such a union would bring. The long critical tradition that regards Ayesha as a monstrous threat to British ideals – a femme fatale inspired by the New Woman’s subversive challenges or a specter of reverse colonization – gravely underestimates the degree to which the novel positions her as the perfect imperial bride.15 It is true that the Englishmen begin the story with an injunction to kill her, that she herself is capable of cold-blooded murder, and that her destruction at the end suggests a humiliating punishment for her hubris. But it is equally true that the characters quickly abandon their project of vengeance, that they forgive and forget her sins, and that her disappearance at the novel’s end leaves them profoundly bereft and unfulfilled rather than secure and triumphant. Her character is equivocal, encompassing both menace and promise. To read her merely as a monster to be eradicated is to ignore that ambivalence, and indeed to overlook the degree to which the English heroes ultimately lean more towards the other side of the balance: “Her wickedness had not detracted from her charm,” concludes Holly; “We both loved her now and for all time” (296, 297). Ayesha is likewise ambivalent as a symbol of imperial ambition. Holly predicts that “in the end she would . . . assume absolute rule over the British dominions, and probably over the whole earth, and, though I was sure that she would speedily make ours the most glorious and prosperous empire that the world has ever seen, it would be at the cost of a terrible sacrifice of life” (254). Yet in the following paragraph we learn that this cost is one that Holly and Leo are prepared to accept, and that Holly decides that this “marvelous creature . . . was now about to be used by the hand of Providence as a means to change the order of the world, and possibly, by the building up of a power that could no more be rebelled against or questioned than the decrees of Fate, to change it materially for the better” (254). There are shades of nightmare in this imperial dream, but they are no more pronounced than in Haggard’s other proto-fascist and notoriously bloody adventure tales, and in the end Holly sympathizes with Leo’s decision to accept the marriage bond Ayesha offers. In setting the stage for this wedding and the union it conventionally represents, the novel pushes the couple toward more conventional roles. Ayesha softens, becoming more traditionally feminine and submissive. With “infinite tenderness in her voice” (279), she tells him that his love is necessary for her redemption, and, as Holly explains, Leo eagerly responds to the chance to play a more dominant role in their relationship: “Hitherto he had been fascinated against his better judgment, somewhat as

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a bird is fascinated by a snake, but now I think that all this passed away, and he knew that he really loved this strange and glorious creature, as, alas! I loved her also” (280–81). Maurice Greiffenhagen’s illustration of this scene for the novel’s 1888 edition nicely captures Ayesha’s new submission to Leo’s loving protection (Figure 12), and it closely prefigures the representational logic of the political cartoon with which we began. Although Ayesha begins to weaken in this scene, the dowry she offers Leo remains rich in imperial power. “For a bridal gift I crown thee,” she tells him, “with my beauty’s crown, and enduring life, and wisdom without measure, and wealth that none can count. Behold! The great ones of the earth shall creep about thy feet . . . I give to thee dominion over sea and earth, over the peasant in his hovel, over the monarch in his palace halls, and cities crowned with towers, and all who breathe therein” (282). The promise of this marriage is the fusion of undying occult power with the noble manliness of the modern British hero, who, after all, has already one foot in the great empires of history. And fittingly, Ayesha offers a metaphor for Leo’s potential dominion derived not from fallen Kôr, but from the timeless mystery of Britain’s newest possession: “Like that old Sphinx of Egypt thou shalt sit aloft from age to age, and ever shall they cry to thee to solve the riddle of thy greatness, that doth not pass away, and ever shalt thou mock them with thy silence!” (282). The marriage represents the possibility of an imperial power so audaciously absolute as to be nearly unrepresentable; certainly it is unnarratable. It is a dream of the consummation of imperial history, but one that can drive imperial ideology only by remaining unrealized. The marriage plans must be, if not called off, at least indefinitely postponed. And so when Ayesha brings Leo to the pillar of magical fire that gave her immortality, he hesitates. She steps in herself to reassure him, and is violently thrust back into the brutal current of historical and evolutionary time. Her body ages immediately, first taking on the appearance of a “badly preserved Egyptian mummy” (291), then the devolutionary aspects of an ape, a monkey, and a tortoise. Still, with her last words, Ayesha claims another kind of immortality: “I die not. I shall come again, and shall once more be beautiful. I swear it – it is true!” (292). Haggard’s heroes take her at her word, and as the novel’s fictional “editor” informs us, the two of them have since set off for Tibet to seek her out (Haggard’s 1905 sequel, Ayesha, or the Return of She, rewards their constancy). Despite the elaborate fireworks of the ending, the questions raised by the narrative remain unanswered, and the desires unsatisfied. In effect, the novel ultimately chooses the unfulfilled prospect of marriage over marriage itself, the dream of pursuit over

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12 Ayesha submissively embraces Leo in Haggard’s She, 1888.

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the dream of completion, the veil over the bride. In death, Ayesha takes up the position foreshadowed by the huge statue of Truth they find in the ruins of Kôr, which Holly calls “the grandest allegorical work of Art” ever made (261). The statue represents a beautiful woman, naked but veiled, arms outstretched, forever beckoning but never reached. Yet Haggard also hints at the kind of Truth that is fundamentally at stake in this imperial adventure: his allegorical woman stands atop the globe. In their fervent longing to maintain the Empire, the New Imperialists may have cast aside any clear definition of their dominion’s ultimate goal. But the statue of Truth – like Haggard’s novel more generally – allegorizes an eternal pursuit that ennobles men’s lives with meaning and purpose even as it tantalizingly arouses and gratifyingly sustains the erotic energies of male desire. But for all its fatalistic mysticism and vague metaphysics, Haggard’s novel unmistakably reproduces, both structurally and ideologically, the very real politics of the occupation. Always conceived as temporary, the protracted British presence in Egypt depended on a careful political dance that constantly raised but never resolved the question of the occupation’s completion. After the twenty-five years of his unofficial reign, Cromer concluded that the job was not yet done: I make no pretension to the gift of political prophecy. I can only state my deliberate opinion, formed after many years of experience and in the face of decided predisposition to favour the policy of evacuation, that at present, and for a long time to come, the results of executing such a policy would be disastrous . . . It may be that at some future period the Egyptians may be rendered capable of taking care of themselves without the presence of a foreign army in their midst, and without guidance in civil and military affairs, but that period is far distant.16

In part, Cromer’s assessment illustrates a general tension within imperial ideology: the justifying project of improving subject peoples must always fall short of allowing that the civilizing mission has been accomplished. But the still greater murkiness surrounding the Egyptian Question had also to do with the problem it posed to the delicate balance of European powers. To claim an official relationship with Egypt would be to risk provoking war with France, so Cromer’s veiled Protectorate had to operate under an unusual degree of indeterminacy. The Entente Cordiale of 1904, in which Britain agreed to support French claims to Morocco in return for French acknowledgment of Britain’s claim to Egypt, lessened the need for the veil of mystery and euphemism, though Britain did not yet discard it.

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Cromer writes of the 1904 agreement that “the ‘Egyptian Question,’ in the sense in which that phrase had heretofore been used, was partially settled,” but he quickly adds that “a further Egyptian Question remains behind. It consists in gradually adapting the institutions of the country to the growing needs of the population. Possibly time will also solve that problem, but, unless disaster is to ensue, it must be a long time.”17 One of the more politically useful aspects of the Egyptian Question was that the question itself proved so protean. There need be no end to a question that keeps changing. Among the many duties of his role as consul general, Cromer describes one that stands out as an intriguing admission: “I had to keep the Egyptian question simmering, and to avoid any action which might tend to force on its premature consideration.”18 While we might expect him to have tried to resolve the question, to put an end to the occupation’s peculiar ambiguities and contradictions, Cromer’s comment acknowledges that his authority was in fact sustained by his ability to enshroud Britain’s power in a veil of indeterminacy. It is precisely this political need to forestall change and blur time that Victorian mummy fiction embodies in its alluring women, whose beauty is enhanced by its permanence, and whose erotic appeal depends on a striptease that defers consummation like an endlessly simmering question. The point is not that She and other mummy stories may be read as simple allegories whose plots correspond directly and sequentially to the history of the occupation, but that they are structured by the same narrative strategies of suspense and irresolution that were the fundamental conditions of British power in Egypt. Rather than reading Ayesha as a threat to British supremacy, then, we should recognize in her promise to Leo of a “greatness that doth not pass away” the fondest wish of the New Imperialism. In the context of the occupation, her (temporary) death reads less like a punishment than an irresolution calculated to hold open a space of adventure in which the protagonists experience the psychic pleasures typical of imperial masculinity, such as exploration, hunting, and fighting “like very men” (144).19 Ayesha has masculine qualities of her own, however, and Haggard does not treat her merely as an object of desire. If Ayesha is more complicated than Ma-mee or Iras – alternately self-effacing bride and figure of terrible power – it may be because her character is overdetermined, condensing multiple aspects of the Egyptian occupation. Enthroned amid the ruins of a city she did not build, ruling a people she regards as barbaric by means of mystery, intimidation, and “the wisdom that is power” (121), Ayesha sometimes appears less an image of Egypt than of Egypt’s occupiers.

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Swathed in her mummy wrappings, she resembles the wearer of the Protectorate’s metaphorical veil, the consul general himself. Like Ayesha, Cromer knew that his “vague and preponderant power” was all the more unassailable for remaining mysterious: “In the Egyptian body politic,” he writes, “the unseen is often more important than the seen.”20 As Timothy Mitchell observes, Cromer constructed colonial authority as a “metaphysical power,” a core of “meaning or truth” concealed behind the “visible, material apparatus” of control.21 Prefiguring the novel’s own metaphysics of veiled truth, Cromer established his ambiguous and enduring influence as a Sphinx-like riddle.

The horror behind the veil The marriage plots of mummy fiction articulate imperial identity through an unrealized ideal of complementarity, whereby the Egyptian bride holds out to the British groom the fulfilling prospect of eternal possession (as in “Smith and the Pharaohs”) or enduring power (as in She). As the example of Ayesha suggests, moreover, sometimes the Egyptians are not only complements of the British, but their doubles. In these cases, mummy fiction draws not only on the marriage conventions of domestic fiction, but also on the tendency of gothic novels to destabilize identity through the uncanny repetition of the familiar in apparently alien forms. In treatments of Egypt, these supernatural doublings are bound up in questions of time and permanence, and they find their greatest expression in one of mummy fiction’s most characteristic themes: reincarnation. The notion of an uncanny rebirth through which the present reiterates the ancient past is nearly ubiquitous in Victorian tales of Egypt, with or without mummies. Leo Vincey is a reincarnation, and so too, it turns out, is James Ebenezer Smith; the same theme appears in Hawthorne’s “Unseen Man’s Story,” Marie Corelli’s Ziska (1897), Guy Boothby’s “A Professor of Egyptology” (1904), and C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s “The Mummy of Thompson-Pratt” (1904). Where other fin-de-siècle romances concern themselves with dreams of progress and evolution – or their darker corollaries, decline and degeneracy – mummy fiction is fascinated by reincarnation’s immunity to historical change. Like the unfinished narratives of marriage, reincarnation disrupts the advance of time, and is thus suited to New Imperialist ideals and to the politics of the occupation in particular. Imperialism in Egypt was not served by the ideology of progress but by a dream of time arrested.

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Still, the gothic elements of mummy fiction bear traces of that genre’s supernatural horrors. Leo and Holly are terrified, for instance, when they confront the “uncanny” sight of the preserved body of Leo’s ancestral self (236). The modern British characters’ discovery that they are really ancient Egyptians, like the projection of imperial power onto immortal queens, threatens to dissolve many of the oppositions that typically structure British identity: science/magic, Christianity/paganism, rationality/superstition, modernity/antiquity, colonizer/colonized, and, at times, masculinity/ femininity. For the most part, Victorian mummy stories remain relatively untroubled by the blurring of these differences; the resulting ambiguities become wonders of imperial discovery. Occasionally, however, the collapse of distinctions suggests a darker fragmentation of identity and an emasculating reversal of the imperial hierarchy. In Conan Doyle’s “Lot No. 249” (1892), for instance, the mummy is a male, mindless but strong and swift, who threatens to defeat a young Oxford athlete in a terrifying footrace (Figure 13). In such moments we see the first steps of the mummy story’s later migration into the precincts of pure horror.22 The darkest mummy story of the occupation period is Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903). Stoker draws upon many of the conventions that had emerged over the previous two decades – a surpassingly beautiful reanimated mummy, an uncanny reincarnation, a marriage plot, and an unsettling of the distinctions between ancient powers and those of modernity – and he weaves the problems of time and change into the novel’s narrative structure. The book opens in the middle of a dream, and for much of its first half continues to drift along in a slow, hypnotic pace that reflects the characters’ tendency to fall into trances and surreal waking dreams. In the novel’s second half, however, the plot quickly gathers momentum and intensifies suspense until it finally hurtles into what may be the most startlingly abrupt and inconclusive ending in Victorian fiction. The mummy in this case is the perfectly preserved body of Queen Tera, a ruler of Egypt and a powerful sorceress who has been dead for five thousand years. Her modern adventures begin when a wealthy Egyptologist named Abel Trelawney leads an armed expedition to discover her tomb “soon after Arabi Pasha,”23 which is to say, in the immediate aftermath of Wolseley’s invasion. In the tomb, Trelawney falls into a mysterious trance for three days, and, during this episode of lost time, Trelawney’s wife back in England gives birth to a daughter, Margaret, who is eventually revealed to be a reincarnation of Tera. Margaret, in short, is a true daughter of the veiled Protectorate, the offspring of undying occult

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13 Footrace with a mummy in Doyle’s “Lot No. 249,” 1892.

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power and imperial archaeology. The novel’s plot opens eighteen years later, when the narrator, Malcolm Ross, falls deliriously in love with Margaret and seeks her hand in marriage. Combining feminine vulnerability and self-sacrifice with an ability “to rule all around her with a sort of high-bred dominance” (11), Margaret leads what Ross calls a “dual existence,” which “reconciled opposites” (208). She is a figure in whom all binarisms dissolve, and an object of desire who literally embodies the notion of time as static, locked in a present that is merely the indefinite repetition of the past. As in other mummy stories, a plot of courtship that winds through Egyptian mystery provides the protagonist with manly purpose he had hitherto lacked. In the dream that opens the novel, Ross is literally adrift, floating with Margaret in a skiff that he has stopped rowing, and doubting even his own agency as he responds to her as if “the individual ‘I’ had no say in the matter, but only just obeyed imperative orders” (8). Ross gets the chance to assert himself, however, when his sleep is interrupted by a messenger bearing the news from Margaret that her father has fallen into yet another trance. Suddenly Margaret needs Ross’s help, and in defending her from occult dangers he finds his manly resolve: the “very act or attitude of protection made me more resolute in my purpose, and seemed to clear my brain of idle, dreamy wandering in thought” (48). The thematic connection between male passivity and the dreamy idleness that accompanies lack of purpose is repeatedly literalized early in the novel as the inmates of Trelawney’s home slip unaccountably into slumber, an effect experienced most profoundly by the comatose Abel Trelawney himself, despite a physiognomy that bespeaks manly determination and “massive purpose” (47). Still, Ross finds the energy to combat this creeping listlessness in his role as Margaret’s protector. Contemplating the prostrate Trelawney, Ross explains, there began to steal over me again that phase of wandering thought which had last night heralded the approach of sleep. I resisted it, and held myself sternly to the present. This was easier to do when Miss Trelawney came close to me, and leaning her head upon my shoulder, began to cry silently. Then all the manhood in me woke, and to present purpose. (47)

As in the opening of the novel, the slumber of Ross’s manhood is broken by Margaret’s need for him, which she indicates in this passage by striking the same pose of submissive trust we have already seen adopted by Ayesha and the personified Egypt (Figs. 12 and 8). Stirred into manliness by feminine weakness, Ross staves off the enervating reverie that often

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threatens the men of this novel, and discovers the sharpened resolution and agency of what Ross here twice calls the “present.” The past is the domain of ineffectual memory and the future an inscrutable riddle, but the present is a moment of urgent clarity in which the needs of women present men with the chance to act. In Stoker’s horrific twist on this theme, however, it turns out that the eternal Tera does not require the protection that the men had expected, and has arranged events so that they have effectively obeyed her orders all along. In Tera’s story we see more clearly than in Margaret’s the imperial ideologies that sustain the men’s ambition, the resonance of the Protectorate with their desire to protect Tera. Trelawney has brought her mummy back to England, where he intends, according to her own ancient ambitions, to accomplish her resurrection in the flesh. This effort, in which he is assisted by all the other characters, is likewise characterized by a desire to restore to the modern world the wisdom of the Egyptians, who, they agree, possessed a “loftier intelligence and learning greater than our own” (186): “The whole possibility of the Great Experiment to which we were now pledged was based on the reality of the existence of the Old Forces which seemed to be coming into contact with the New Civilization” (185). Trelawney’s determination to restore Tera is less a matter of kindness or sympathy than an expression of a will to power in the form of omniscience: Oh what possibilities are there in the coming of such a being into our midst! One whose experience began before the concrete teaching of our Bible; whose experiences were antecedent to the formulation of the Gods of Greece; who can link together the Old and the New, Earth and Heaven, and yield to the known worlds of thought and physical existence the mystery of the Unknown. . . ! (213)

The unspecified “possibilities” about which Trelawney dreams are, like his own Egyptological research, linked in the novel to imperial power. This potential is emphasized by the history of Tera herself, the mighty and ruthless queen who was bent on “the conquering of unknown worlds” (214) and so driven by her desire for power that she had “waded to it through blood” (209). Tera’s own use of her unrivalled wisdom for violent and imperial ends highlights possible implications of Trelawney’s project. She is a figure of power as much as one of knowledge, and also, as Ross reports when they strip her of her cerements, a figure of mesmerizing desirability: We all stood awed at the beauty of the figure which, save for the face cloth, now lay completely nude before us. Mr. Trelawney bent over, and with

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hands that trembled slightly, raised this linen cloth . . . As he stood back and the whole glorious beauty of the Queen was revealed, I felt a rush of shame sweep over me. It was not right that we should be there, gazing with irreverent eyes on such unclad beauty: it was indecent; it was almost sacrilegious! And yet the white wonder of that beautiful form was something to dream of . . . This woman – I could not think of her as a mummy or a corpse – was the image of Margaret as my eyes had first lit on her. (235–36)

Like Margaret, Tera is represented as a potential bride: the Englishmen discover that her wrappings conceal a “marriage robe” (235). But betrothal to Tera proves to be a far more dangerous proposition, and at the moment of her resurrection – the consummation of the “Great Experiment” – things go abruptly and horribly awry. Though the ending is astonishingly inconclusive and vague, it would appear that Tera’s rebirth has killed all the characters except Ross, who, in the darkness and confusion of the fatal scene, carries her away under the impression that he is rescuing Margaret. The novel concludes – or at any rate ends – with the Queen vanished, Ross in hopeless despair, and nearly all of the story’s great metaphysical questions unanswered. The hopelessness of the story’s end might be understood as a vision of the veiled Protectorate twisted into nightmare, one in which an incarnate Egypt destroys those who have revived and protected her.24 While we should acknowledge the novel’s anxieties, however, we need not conclude that they entirely undermine the imperial fantasies that animate its plot. As a whole, the story is driven by a seductive synthesis of self and Other, the union of what the sixteenth chapter title calls “Powers – Old and New.” The characters’ desires are consistent with Egypt’s unusual place in the imperial imagination, and indeed they do not stray from the ideology of the veiled Protectorate until they complete their experiment and restore Tera to self-sufficiency; in effect, they have accomplished the result that Cromer worked so long to postpone. The finale of Tera’s long striptease is the moment at which she no longer finds them necessary, and the consummation that sets her free devastates them. This is not the horror of empire, but of empire’s end. Stoker’s final chapter was so disturbing that when the novel was republished in 1912 it was given an entirely different ending, which Stoker himself may not have written. In this later version, the experiment fails and Tera is never revived. Ross marries Margaret, who dresses in Tera’s marriage robe for the occasion. This happier version thus departs from the logic of the occupation: the space of adventure has been closed, and the

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profound allure of Egyptian power has been reduced to a curious detour on the way to a cheerful British wedding. But by that time, the veiled Protectorate had nearly reached its own conclusion. With the outbreak of war with the Ottomans in 1914, the fiction of Turkish suzerainty was discarded, and Egypt became officially and unambiguously a Protectorate. After the political veil dropped, popular culture grew less interested in portrayals of mummies as elusively seductive brides and in Pharaonic Egypt as a symbol of enduring power that could complement Britain’s own. In the 1920s, as Elliot Colla has shown, Egyptians themselves embraced Pharaonic history as the foundation of a new nationalist discourse, capable of “responding to, and even subverting, British claims of cultural superiority.”25 With the transformation of the occupation’s peculiar politics, and the emergence of Egyptian Pharaonism as a counterimperial discourse, British fiction about Egypt likewise changed, and mummies began more frequently to arise in the form that has since become so familiar: male competitors, irredeemably monstrous, vengefully bearing an implacable curse. Just as the precise causal connections underlying the structural parallel between the occupation of Egypt and narratives about mummies are impossible to substantiate, we cannot ultimately gauge the influence of the stories on popular British attitudes toward empire. Yet it seems probable that mummy fiction was not merely an inert reflection of existing sentiments about Egypt. British readers who supported the occupation, or who were simply intrigued by the relationship of Britain and Egypt, would find much in these tales to encourage them. In the same way that Orientalist assumptions about the Middle East cemented Britain’s sense of superiority (and hence its imperial mandate), the prolonged eroticism of mummy fiction helped to sustain popular interest in the particular mysteries of the veiled Protectorate. The psychoanalytic term for this kind of investment of libidinous fascination in an idea is “cathexis,” though in this case it is more illuminating to recall the German word Freud himself used: Besetzung, or “occupation.” Mummy fiction occupied Egypt in its way just as Cromer did in his, feeding the British public titillating images of adventure and power, teaching it to regard Egypt simultaneously as the beneficiary of its manly heroism and as an alluring object to be studied with the patient attention of the voyeur. Mummy stories thus engage with the temporality of gender relations in ways that depart significantly from those of lost-world fiction. Whereas the latter’s imaginary encounters with violent barbarians are meant to rediscover the admirable force of primitive masculinity, the seductive women of

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the former constitute a fantasy – expressed both in their everlastingly desirable forms and in the unfinished narratives to which they give rise – of a sustained relationship in which manly identity is stabilized and endlessly renewed. If the cultural challenge faced by lost-world stories is to construct an image of manly power born out of a negotiation with the distant past, the problem of mummy fiction is to imagine masculine purpose in relation to an unchanging present. Mummy stories rewrite the marriage plot so that it becomes less a story of growth and compromise than an energizing dream of perpetual adventure. It thus celebrates manly effort while it sublimates (if just barely) the erotic energies channeled into the purpose of men’s lives, a purpose which becomes explicitly imperial rather than domestic. The marriage of timeless Egypt with the Empire on which the sun never sets provides the fitting backdrop for a vision of manhood elevated by enduring romance. Though sometimes disturbing, these stories also suggest another comforting idea to conservatives like Haggard and antifeminist liberals like Stoker, which is that masculinity and femininity are themselves timelessly fixed. “Sex is not a matter of years! A woman is a woman, if she had been dead five thousand centuries,” says Stoker’s Margaret Trelawney (231), and her father’s response suggests why the belief in an unchanging essence of femininity might appeal to readers in a period of volatile gender identities: “They didn’t have women’s rights or lady doctors in ancient Egypt, my dear!” (231). In a culture troubled by the prospects of professional women, enervated men, and changing attitudes toward courtship and domesticity, mummy fiction was predicated on a reassuring vision of essential feminine and masculine identity that had always been written in stone, and might, despite the deviations of contemporary metropolitan life, therefore survive indefinitely, for ever and ever, world without end. As we shall see in the next chapter, however, the rise of lost-world stories and mummy fiction was accompanied by the explosion of another popular genre, the scientific romance, which was often expressly concerned with the end of the world. From imperial masculinity as it was shaped by notions of the past and the present, we turn to its reconstitution in these imaginary futures.

chapter 7

Fitter men: H. G. Wells and the impossible future of masculinity

Fin-de-siècle fictions of the future were fed by the confluence of two streams, both of which might be conveniently dated to 1871. The first was the tremendously popular tradition of the future war story, inaugurated in that year by a colonel of the Indian Army who had just returned to England, George Chesney. Chesney’s novella, The Battle of Dorking, depicted the humiliating invasion of an ill-prepared Britain by a disciplined and technologically savvy German army. This grim warning seized the attention of a public still alarmed by the speedy defeat of the French in the Franco-Prussian War, and the story, initially published in Blackwood’s, was reprinted in pamphlets that sold by the tens of thousands. In the sensation that followed, dozens of Chesney’s critics and imitators in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States replied with their own future war stories, and together they launched a new popular genre. Such stories of international battles in the immediate or distant future flourished especially in the two decades before the First World War, when they included such titles as George Griffith’s The Angel of the Revolution (1893) William Le Queux’s The Great War in England in 1897 (1894), R. W. Cole’s The Struggle for Empire: A Tale of 2236 (1900), Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Danger!” (1914). Some of these stories rely, as Chesney’s had, on the power of gloomy prophecy to stir their readers to action, while others more optimistically tell of nations rescued by the pluck of their citizens or the inborn strength of their race. But regardless of their different methods and national sympathies, all of them made use of Chesney’s discovery that fictional accounts of future conflicts were powerful political tools that could galvanize public opinion. Collectively, these stories raised visions of the future to a more prominent place in popular culture than ever before. Through this influence, they persuaded their readers to imagine the future as a theater of international conflict and imperial competition. The preoccupation with competition linked fictions of wars to come to the other key inspiration of late nineteenth-century futurism, Charles 200

Fitter men: H. G. Wells and the impossible future of masculinity 201 Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871). In fact, as I. F. Clarke points out, the proliferation of future war narratives after 1871 owed as much to evolutionary theory as to escalating tensions in global politics: “The period of 1870–1 represents a grand climacteric in international affairs and in the complex of the popular notions about progress and evolution that are behind the tale of the future as a major literary device.”1 Of course, Darwinian accounts of evolutionary struggle had long been in circulation by 1871, but it was not until the Descent that Darwin himself explained his view of humanity’s relationship to natural selection, and not until the end of his book that he offered his hope for humanity’s prospects: “Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future.”2 Here Darwin explicitly reveals an inevitable corollary of his evolutionary view of human history, which is that the record of humanity’s dynamic transformation implies an ongoing process of change. Humanity’s future may be as malleable as its past. That Darwin chooses to sound a tentatively optimistic note at this point is, on the other hand, less inevitable. Certainly the late Victorians were just as convinced by the likelihood of degeneration as by the prospect of a “higher destiny,” and even within the Descent Darwin worries about humanity’s continuing subjection to natural selection. What remains certain to Darwin, however, is that the future will be determined by competition: “Man, like every other animal, has no doubt advanced to his present high condition through a struggle for existence consequent on his rapid multiplication; and if he is to advance still higher, it is to be feared that he must remain subject to a severe struggle.”3 Darwin’s view of the future, in other words, was as predicated on competition as were the prophecies of the future war novelists. The greatest futurist of the age, H. G. Wells, claimed in his lecture The Discovery of the Future (1902) that it was Darwin who had breached the imaginative barriers that had previously obscured humanity’s potential. The scientific understanding of natural selection, he added, had exploded the belief that history moved toward some foreseeable conclusion. “We look back through countless millions of years,” Wells writes in a particularly eloquent passage, and see the will to live struggling out of the intertidal slime, struggling from shape to shape and from power to power . . . we watch it draw nearer and more akin to us, expanding, elaborating itself, pursuing its relentless,

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Darwin’s effect was to open the prospect of the future as an unwritten story, Wells suggests, but also to reveal that the invariable theme of that story would be struggle. And from narratives such as Chesney’s, Wells derives a sense that the form of that struggle is likely to be violent and martial, so that, as Patrick Parrinder notes, “Virtually every Wellsian future history is a prophecy of war.”5 The genius of Wells’s early scientific romances was to fuse the immensely popular literary tradition of future wars with extrapolations suggested by evolutionary biology. The fusion is most apparent in The War of the Worlds (1898), which became the greatest inheritor of Chesney’s Battle of Dorking by reconceiving the invasion of England as a struggle between species, but also it clearly informs the hypothetical futures in The Time Machine (1895) and When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), as well as the violent clashes of the modern with the futuristic in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The First Men in the Moon (1901). But Wells’s novels also reveal the ambivalences within these two methods of imagining the future, contradictions that surface all the more glaringly when Wells attempts to make them serve a progressive political vision. From these sources, for instance, he concluded that the future of warfare would make necessary as never before a rational and scientific spirit that would allow humanity to transcend its conflicts, but they also taught him that the future could never be free of such conflicts, that indeed it would depend upon them as the very condition of its becoming (the paradox is pithily captured in Wells’s optimistic prognosis in 1914 of “the war to end war”). This is just one of the contradictions in Wells’s vision. We find in his texts an attraction to rational pacifism mingled with a fascination with savage violence, a disdain for the methods of old Victorian liberalism combined with an affirmation of its dreams, a revulsion toward conservative imperialism that nevertheless embraced it as a necessary step toward a progressive World State.6 This chapter explores such contradictions, but not to characterize Wells as a crudely indecisive thinker. The point, rather, is to demonstrate that even a writer possessed of such imaginative gifts and progressive principles was nevertheless enmeshed in the political, cultural, and imperial debates

Fitter men: H. G. Wells and the impossible future of masculinity 203 of his time, so that his visions of the future were determined by the fractured ideologies of his late nineteenth-century present. It may be that science fiction, the genre that Wells is credited with establishing, makes his imaginative limits particularly visible. As Fredric Jameson has written, science fiction ultimately dramatizes our “incapacity to imagine the future,” so that its stories, in the end, “serve as unwitting and even unwilling vehicles for a meditation, which, setting forth for the unknown, finds itself irrevocably mired in the all-too-familiar, and thereby becomes transformed into a contemplation of our own absolute limits.”7 Such limits – not the idiosyncrasies of a single writer, but the broader inability of a culture to conceive a future beyond the horizon of its own assumptions – are responsible for the contradictions in Wells’s texts, and, from this point of view, his silences and inconsistencies offer valuable lessons about discourses of progress around the turn of the twentieth century. The thematic crisis through which his ambivalence is most forcefully expressed is one that has been relatively neglected by Wells’s critics: the meaning of manhood.8 The problem of masculinity was at the heart of both of the books of 1871 with which we began. Chesney’s story of future war opens with the narrator, now grown old, reflecting ruefully on the calamitous German invasion of his youth: “We English have only ourselves to blame for the humiliation which has been brought on the land. Venerable old age! Dishonourable old age, I say, when it follows on a manhood dishonoured as ours has been. I declare, even now, though fifty years have passed, I can hardly look a young man in the face when I think I am one of those in whose youth happened this degradation of Old England, one of those who betrayed the trust handed down to us unstained by our forefathers.”9 Of all the horrors Chesney conjures up to persuade his readers of the necessity for military preparedness – visions of the English countryside ravaged by war, of innocent lives lost, of the consequent stripping away of the colonies – it is the stigma of indelible masculine shame, legible still to the young men of later generations, on which he chiefly relies. Chesney thus dwells with special emphasis on the German mockery of Englishmen, as when the narrator tells how the invaders regarded the English resistance as a group of dogs who are unworthy even to be taken prisoner. “But why speak of this insult in particular?” the narrator asks. “Had not every man who lived then his tale to tell of humiliation and degradation? For it was the same story everywhere . . . the enemy laughed at us.”10 What is at stake above all else in Chesney’s prophecy is the manliness of England. The future of the nation and of the Empire would not depend on the adaptation of

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new masculinities for a new age, but on keeping faith with an imagined tradition of manliness handed down by England’s forefathers. It was an argument that would echo through the following decades of future war stories, and one taken up fervently in the more militarist strains of the New Imperialism. The stakes of masculinity were even higher in The Descent of Man, since it is here that Darwin turns from describing the natural selection of species in general to speculate on the processes of sexual selection that he believes produced the fundamental characteristics of human sexual identity. The qualities that he treats as distinctively manly – man is not only larger and stronger, but also “more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius”11 – are in his account partially inherited from semi-human ancestors, but then sustained and developed in human society by the unending rivalry between men, a peremptory competition he calls the “Law of Battle.”12 Rivalry drives the process of sexual selection, whereby victorious men win access to the most desirable women, and thus pass on their successfully manly qualities to their progeny. Manliness, then, is not only a biological birthright but a set of virtues that continue to be reinforced by each successful generation as long as men compete. It is the engine that drives both biological evolution and human history, though Darwin suggests that among civilized peoples the violent battles of sexual selection have been transformed into economic contests that reward hard work. Of course, Darwin’s foray into anthropology is influenced by midcentury ideologies of gender and liberal economics rather than by biological evidence (as is obvious, for instance, in the breezy confidence with which he concludes that “man has ultimately become superior to woman”),13 but it is nevertheless true that the Descent gave scientific credibility to a wide range of cultural and imperial arguments that would insist on male competition as the driving force of human progress and thus as the key to the future.14 Wells, like Chesney and Darwin, was fascinated by the problem of masculinity’s future, a question that pervaded his novels ever since his Time Traveller, thrust 800,000 years into the future, looks out upon an England he scarcely recognizes, and immediately worries, “What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness?”15 Yet Wells’s narratives are a more interesting case, since, unlike Chesney or Darwin, he was prepared to imagine futures that would require radically new conceptions of male identity. What biological changes might evolution eventually impose upon the sexes? What new social dispensations – in the household, in the workplace, on the imperial map – might redefine manliness in utopian

Fitter men: H. G. Wells and the impossible future of masculinity 205 or dystopian societies yet to come? What, ultimately, is the relationship of manliness and progress? And though he shares their sense that masculinity is best defined by competition, in his stories the contests extend beyond those of individual men or warring nations to include the struggle between different models of masculinity. The images of primitive, brutal manliness favored by Kipling, Haggard, or Doyle are often subjected in Wells’s stories to withering satire. Yet the alternatives he imagines are ambivalent at best, and when magnified by the extrapolative and analogical techniques of his scientific romances, the alternatives become viscerally abhorrent, even monstrous. The better men of Wells’s progressive politics are not necessarily better from the standpoint of his understanding of sex and gender, nor are they the fitter men for that evolutionary struggle on which he imagined progress must depend. The future of masculinity is precisely the problem upon which his hopes for the future foundered and his utopian bubbles burst.

Horrors of the epicene future At the end of 1903, readers of the Strand Magazine were treated to one of the tantalizing glimpses of a possible future for which Wells had become celebrated. Called “The Land Ironclads,” Wells’s short story imagines a decisive moment in the evolution of modern combat, one that predicts not only the military stalemate of trench warfare but also the technological innovation that could break such a stalemate: the tank. Despite the lavish detail with which Wells describes the invention he imagines – something like a cross between a battleship and a heavily armed caterpillar – his narrative remains unusually reluctant to offer other particulars. Where War of the Worlds had followed Chesney’s proven formula of representing a shocking future war in a precisely drawn and familiar setting, here Wells provides almost no contextualizing detail. The parties to this international battle are never named, nor is the reason for their conflict. This thinly sketched context might indicate that Wells’s interest is limited to the technology and tactics of the land ironclads themselves, but the level of abstraction suggests another explanation: the introduction of the technological marvel becomes the occasion for an inevitable and mythic clash between opposed tendencies of mankind, or, more precisely, between divergent ideals of masculinity. On one side of this war is the defending army, which is made up of hearty outdoorsmen, bluff and strong, sentimentally patriotic and well used to hunting and fighting. They are, in other words, the sort of manly

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warriors who were just then celebrated on the battlefields of South Africa; they are Kipling’s men, or Haggard’s or Baden-Powell’s. The invading army is presented as the antithesis of this masculine style, an unlikely group of soldiers drawn from a modern urban society, and they seem to have no hope of dislodging the defenders from their trenches. “Their men aren’t brutes enough,” a young lieutenant of the defenders explains. “They’re a crowd of devitalized townsmen . . . They’re clerks, they’re factory hands, they’re students, they’re civilized men. They can write, they can talk, they can make and do all sorts of things, but they’re poor amateurs at war. They’ve got no physical staying power, and that’s the whole thing.”16 The stalemate at the opening of the story thus establishes a moment at which a hegemonic masculinity that values ostensibly timeless qualities of brutishness and physical strength has entrenched itself against any possible attack by versions of manliness more compatible with ideals of cultural and scientific progress. The story’s protagonist, an unnamed war correspondent embedded with the defenders, regrets that his countrymen so clearly have the upper hand. He believes in progress, and that “in the heart of civilization . . . there lay something that might be the hope of the world,” and he laments that the “game of war” will inevitably be won by “cunning, elementary louts” who can thereby “resist and break that great development to the end of time” (503). Wells poses the question of the future – will there be progress and development or merely a brutishness forever impervious to change? – as one to be answered on this battlefield, and the chance of breaking the historical stalemate depends upon whether the forces of progress can field better men. As the correspondent puts it, “If a decent civilization . . . cannot produce better men for war than — ” He stopped with belated politeness. “I mean — ” “Than our open-air life,” said the young lieutenant, politely. “Exactly,” said the war correspondent. “Then civilization will have to stop.” “It looks like it,” the young lieutenant admitted . . . “There never will be anything any more for ever.” (502)

Vague and elusive questions about the future of civilization are here resolved into a decisive contest to determine whether brutishness or progress produces better men. Shortly thereafter, the invaders reveal their land ironclads, huge impregnable machines bristling with rifle barrels, rolling across the battlefield like “vast cockroaches,” breaking the stalemate and routing the defenders

Fitter men: H. G. Wells and the impossible future of masculinity 207 in a matter of hours. The technological onslaught is no more resistible than that of Wells’s Martians in War of the Worlds, and, as in that story, Wells registers the shock of hierarchical displacement with an imperial analogy: the invaders, he writes, “regarded these big, healthy men they were shooting down precisely as these same big healthy men might regard some inferior kind of nigger” (512). The men within the ironclads epitomize Wells’s dream of the new technocratic, rational, intelligent manhood that the progress of science and engineering might produce. They are “calm and reasonable,” and wage war without emotion and without “that excessive strain upon the blood-vessels, that hysteria of effort which is so frequently regarded as the proper state of mind for heroic deeds” (512). Rejecting the primitive impulses rooted in the male body, they stand instead for the triumph of education, training, and the sober intellect. Invulnerable within their machines, they coldly calculate trajectories and tactics, waging war by twisting knobs and buttons “with the mechanical precision of a good clerk posting a ledger” (512). We might expect that the journalist would welcome this victory of the progressive mind over the brutish body, but during the rout his sympathies take a surprising turn. The “brutes” he had derided now begin to seem, especially in contrast with the scrawny townsmen who emerge from the ironclads, “hearty and noble-hearted soldiers of the old school,” and, even in defeat, “still a very fine show of men” (514). The civilized townsmen, on the other hand, he now regards as “smart degenerates,” and specimens of “anaemic cockneydom” (514). At the end of the story, he decides that a fitting headline for his report would be “Manhood versus Machinery” (514), suggesting an emasculating and dehumanizing view of the victors. But at this point the narrator intrudes to satirize the protagonist’s conclusion, pointing out what the correspondent had failed to observe: “the half-dozen comparatively slender young men in blue pyjamas who were standing about their victorious land ironclad, drinking coffee and eating biscuits, had also in their eyes and carriage something not altogether degraded below the level of a man” (514). Remarking on the correspondent’s change of heart, the narrator adds that he “was one of those inconsistent people who always want the beaten side to win” (513). Though the narrator dismisses the journalist’s change of heart as superficial sentimentality, his sympathies have realigned because of a deeper concern: the invaders are not manly. The townsmen do not compete as men in a fair contest of honor, but as unsympathetic intellects solving a merely mathematical problem. The correspondent begins to see that civilization exacts a price on manly character and the male body, so that, in masculine terms, progress

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comes to seem unnatural and unhealthy, a backsliding into enervated degeneracy rather than the hope for the world. And though the narrator disagrees, he articulates no reason to take a contrary position, noting only ironically the existence of “something not altogether degraded” in the manhood of the townsmen. That undefined “something” – which echoes the correspondent’s earlier progressive faith in “something that might be the hope of the world” – marks a limit in Wells’s imagination, an inability to represent a compelling alternative to the hegemonic manliness of the period. The same limit appears in many of Wells’s stories, and the change of heart experienced by the correspondent recurs so frequently that we can fairly infer that Wells himself is guilty of the same inconsistency as his fictional war correspondent. If the soldiers of the land ironclads are not altogether degraded below the level of a man, it is partly because their victory comes in a proximate, recognizable future. When their distinguishing characteristics are extrapolated to an evolutionary scale of time, however, their monstrous degradation emerges. Ten years earlier, for instance, Wells had published a playful essay on “The Man of the Year Million” (1893), which offers a striking portrait of the creature that will finally reward the victory of reason and science over the bestial body. “Man,” he writes, “is the creature of the brain; he will live by intelligence, and not by physical strength, if he live at all. So much that is purely ‘animal’ about him is being, and must be, beyond all question, suppressed in his ultimate development.”17 Given a million years to work with, Wells can hypothesize a caricature of reason triumphant through an image of humans reduced to mere bulbous, hairless heads. The essay’s exaggeration is made still more comic by attributing the prophecy to a fictional Professor Holzkopf, who describes the prospect as attractive: Eyes large, lustrous, beautiful, soulful; above them, no longer separated by rugged brow ridges, is the top of the head, a glistening, hairless dome, terete and beautiful; no craggy nose rises to disturb by its unmeaning shadows the symmetry of that calm face, no vestigial ears project; the mouth is a small, perfectly round aperture, toothless and gumless, jawless, unanimal, no futile emotions disturbing its roundness as it lies, like the harvest moon or the evening star, in the wide firmament of face.18

The family resemblance between these horrific heads and their distant ancestors in the land ironclads might not at first be apparent, but all the townsmen’s salient traits survive among these inheritors of the distant future. The intellectual has now entirely defeated the animal, and reason

Fitter men: H. G. Wells and the impossible future of masculinity 209 the primitive impulses of emotion: “the irrational fellowship of man will give place to an intellectual co-operation, and emotion fall within the scheme of reason.”19 Even the slighter build of the ironclad crews is exaggerated in these technologically advanced creatures, who, except for the sensitive hands with which they manipulate their machines and on which they hop about between their laboratories and their baths of nutritive fluid, no longer require any body at all: “Their whole muscular system, their legs, their abdomens, are shriveled to nothing, a dangling, degraded pendant to their minds.”20 In that image of the body reduced to a “degraded pendant” of the mind we find the degradation that the ironclad crews have not yet undergone, the loss of masculine identity that remains, for Wells, bound to the impulses and appetites of the body. Though Wells presents the grotesque brain-creatures in “Man of the Year Million” facetiously, he nevertheless returned to the image again and again, and indeed he may be credited with establishing one of the most enduring images of science fiction: the unemotional, sexless, macrocephalic alien, now the conventional signifier of extravagant intellectual and evolutionary advancement. Intriguingly, the creature that has since reared its hairless head in countless fantasies seems to have originated in Wells’s nagging mistrust of progressive cultural politics. Another article published shortly after, “Incidental Thoughts on a Bald Head” (1895), makes clear that Wells associated the physical degradation of the human body with the civilizing trends of what he calls “advanced Liberalism.”21 Here Wells reports on a visit to a Sunday afternoon scientific lecture, the sort of rational recreation that liberalism promoted, and one that we might expect would appeal to Wells’s own belief that a broadly available scientific education would be the salvation of humanity. But despite his sympathies with the philosophies promoted by the lecturers – evolutionary science, religious skepticism, and a rational approach to moral progress – Wells’s article nevertheless registers a dismal view of them. Some of his distaste doubtless follows from the lecture’s focus on the hazards of alcohol (an issue with which Wells was out of step with many liberal reformers), but his deepest doubts about the advanced liberals are triggered by the number of bald-headed men in attendance: I looked at the long rows of Sceptics, typical Advanced people, and marked their glistening crania. I recalled other losses. Here is Humanity, thought I, growing hairless, growing bald, growing toothless, unemotional, irreligious, losing the end joint of the little toe, dwindling in its osseous structures, its jawbone and brow ridges, losing all the full, rich curvatures of its primordial beauty.22

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The most advanced people, or at least the most advanced men, show signs of a progress that is also a kind of loss, a dwindling body that has given up its passions as it has given up its hair. The battle of the land ironclads had been going on for a decade in Wells’s mind, and, like the war correspondent in that story, he cannot, when confronted by a future of reason, help but find the loss of the animal regrettable. And when he returned to the macrocephalic men of the year million in War of the Worlds, he seems to have remembered that advanced liberal temperance lecture: a Martian fighting machine scoops up a crowd of drunks on the same spot that the lecture had taken place.23 The War of the Worlds describes the battle between unsexed creatures and modern men in the form of a Chesneyesque invasion narrative. As in his earlier vision, Wells’s Martians are “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic,” and, having used their intelligence to “dispense with muscular exertion,” they have become “heads, merely heads.”24 But this time, Wells’s imagery is calculated to induce maximum revulsion, as in the narrator’s first description of a Martian: It was rounded, and had, one might say, a face. There was a mouth under the eyes, the lipless brim of which quivered and panted, and dropped saliva. The body heaved and pulsated convulsively. A lank, tentacular appendage gripped the edge of the cylinder, another swayed in the air. Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedge-like lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth – above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes – culminated in an effect akin to nausea. (54–55)

This is the nightmarish victory of the mind over the body, of the “suppression of the animal side of the organism by the intelligence” (146). And part of the horror is that the Martians are not only a powerful enemy of humanity, but also the descendants of a progressive civilization of baldheaded liberals and scrawny clerks in tanks. “We men,” the narrator says, are “just in the beginning of the evolution that the Martians have worked out” (148). At the end of that evolutionary path, however, there are no longer men at all. The Martians are “absolutely without sex, and therefore without any of the tumultuous emotions that arise from that difference among men” (145).

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The unsexed future represented by the Martians can be averted only by seizing upon another prospect, one in which both sexual difference and a particular understanding of manliness will remain central. This alternative future can emerge only after the seeds of the epicene horror are destroyed. Like other invasion narratives, The War of the Worlds begins with a critique of British complacency. Even after astronomers notice a series of eruptions on the surface of Mars, people continue to “go about their petty concerns”: Punch uses the explosions as the basis for a political cartoon, while the narrator remains “busy upon a series of papers discussing the probable development of moral ideas as civilization progressed” (46). The Martian invasion will smash the serene self-satisfaction of the public and the optimism of the narrator’s philosophical speculations. The quintessentially liberal belief that the progress of civilization will lead to a developed morality is given the lie by the amoral ruthlessness of the invaders, who, acting under the environmental pressures of their cooling world, are merely heeding the necessities of survival. To ask about the moral blameworthiness of the Martian invaders, the narrator frequently reminds us, is to pose a question that has in the context of this struggle become meaningless. Still more misguided is the attempt to understand the invasion in terms of sin and punishment, as does the terrified curate who sees the Martians as “God’s ministers” come to usher in the end of days (97). The curate is one of the two men with whom the narrator spends time during the invasion, and in his case the failure to understand the true implications of the invasion is explicitly tied to a failure of manliness. Disgusted by the curate’s whimpering abjection before the Martians, his refusal to believe they can be fought, the narrator tells him to “Be a man” (97). Later the narrator will disparage him as a “silly woman,” a “spoilt child,” and “one of those weak creatures . . . void of pride, timorous, anaemic, hateful souls” (150). This vilification of the curate is not a wholesale rejection of the divine – the narrator will continue to pray and invoke the language of providence – but rather a repudiation of a kind of religion that would make a moral virtue of meekness and an unmanly refusal to fight. Ultimately, the narrator will be forced to kill the curate in an amoral act of self-preservation, purging unmanliness in a “flash of rage” that reconnects the narrator with his own impulses of “brutality” (150). After killing the curate and emerging from the ruined house in which they had hidden, the narrator steps out into a shattered landscape that provokes “a sense of dethronement,” a feeling that he is now merely “an animal among the animals” (160). As it turns out, this fortunate fall, the realization of the continuity of human and animal, is precisely what will

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enable him to rebuild his sense of self along new lines. Shortly thereafter, he comes upon “a busy swarm of little frogs in a swampy place among the trees. I stopped to look at them, drawing a lesson from their stout resolve to live” (165). Among the animals, that is, he finds the undaunted impulse to survive that the curate lacked. And it is precisely at this moment that Wells reintroduces the artilleryman, who shows the narrator how to apply this lesson to humanity. “Cities, nations, civilization, progress,” the artilleryman begins, “it’s all over. That game’s up. We’re beat” (168). Rather than recommending surrender, however, the artilleryman remains “grim set on living” (169), and describes a plan in which a strong band of “able-bodied and clean-minded” men and women could hide out in the tunnels under London until they discover some means of attacking the Martians. Not everyone will be fit enough to preserve the race: “it isn’t all of us that are made for wild beasts; and that’s what it’s got to be” (171). What the artilleryman proposes, in short, is a resolute struggle for existence grounded in an embrace of primitive, animal impulses, qualities that he especially associates with manliness: “all those damn little clerks that used to live down that way – they’d be no good. They haven’t any spirit in them – no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn’t one or the other – Lord! What is he but funk and precautions?” (169). The artilleryman’s version of masculinity thus chimes with that of the openair soldiers of “The Land Ironclads” and with the hegemonic ideal of the red-blooded, adventurous man promoted in popular fiction, and it strikes the narrator with revelatory force: “‘Great God!’ cried I. ‘But you are a man indeed!’” (169). The narrator’s admiration does not last long, however, since the artilleryman’s survivalist resolve turns out to be merely the bluster of an undisciplined drunk. Yet the problem may lie mainly with the messenger rather than the message, in the “gulf between his dreams and his powers” rather than with the dreams themselves. If his plans are impractical and inhumane, there is nevertheless no other practical course of action on offer, and the resolution that the novel ultimately provides is closely akin to his vision of a strength born out of struggle and the will to survive. The Martians are defeated suddenly and surprisingly by bacterial infection, a resolution that might strike us as a deus ex machina if we do not notice that the narrator has prepared us all along through a persistent rhetoric of natural selection. Mars, it seems, is free from bacteria, possibly because the march of Martian science has eradicated them (147), which means that the Martians are unprepared for the struggle for existence they will face on Earth. As the narrator tells it, the death of the

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Martians ends up proving the superiority of a human race that has never been free of such a struggle: These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things – taken toll of our pre-human ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resistingpower; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle . . . By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. (181–82)

There is an odd note of bravado in the narrator’s conclusion: resisting germs is framed as a kind of heroism, while the challenge against “all comers” derives from the discourse of athletic competition rather than biology. In the end, though, natural selection provides the framework in which the novel asks us to understand the meaning of the Martian invasion, and this narrative of selection displaces both a liberal idea of the progress of civilization and an eschatological story of religion. From this perspective, the war with Mars has been a boon for men. It has brought them new technology, united mankind against a common enemy, and perhaps most importantly, “it has robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence” (190). Humans have been shaken out of their torpor by interplanetary war, and have been reminded that the font of their strength is their participation in an ongoing struggle for existence. By refusing to suppress their animal side, humans can remain competitive and, as a happy byproduct, maintain the sexual difference that the narrator regards as rooted in the animal body. At the end, the narrator can return to his home to be reunited with his wife, and to catch her as she faints. In light of the narrator’s conclusion we must qualify the interpretations of this novel as a critique of imperialism.25 On one hand, Wells invites his readers to imagine themselves as colonized peoples rather than colonizers, as Tasmanians doomed to an extinction of their own, and suggests that one of the lessons of the war is that the British should find more “pity – pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion” (164). On the other, the story suggests that the engine of human change is a pitiless battle for survival, a war that cannot be comprehended in the terms of moral progress or of sin and redemption. When the narrator remarks that the war with Mars has had the beneficent effect of promoting “the commonweal of mankind” (190), he is not rejecting imperialism. Rather, the scale of imperial conflict has leapt from the international to the

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interplanetary, so that the narrator is left musing about a future conflict with Mars over the territory of Venus. “Should we conquer?” he asks, and immediately suggests an affirmative answer: “Dim and wonderful is the vision I have conjured up in my mind of life spreading slowly from this little seed-bed of the solar system throughout the inanimate vastness of sidereal space” (190). It is a vision more artfully expressed than – but not essentially different from – the well-known dream of Cecil Rhodes: “To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could.”26 The novel’s turn toward an inspiring vision of interplanetary empire suggests the strain between Wells’s dreams of progressive civilization and his sense of the necessity for struggle. Progress is undoubtedly desirable insofar as it offers the possibility of intellectual development, the amelioration of social inequities, moral enlightenment, and the commonweal of mankind. Yet progress is not to be assumed but fought for, and if ever that fight should cease, the fruits of progress will rot on the vine. Progress itself is inimical to the very conditions of its unfolding, which Wells associates with the primal impulses of struggle. The progressive future, which defines itself against the past, must never escape the past. This tension is intensified by Wells’s understanding of natural selection, which also helps to explain why his individual characters experience it as a problem of masculinity. As we have seen, Darwin argues that “Man, like every other animal, has no doubt advanced to his present high condition through a struggle for existence consequent to his rapid multiplication; and if he is to advance still higher, it is to be feared that he must remain subject to a severe struggle.”27 Here Darwin allows himself to use the language of progress – speaking of advancement and a higher position rather than, more objectively, of change and adaptation – the sort of conflation that would allow many Victorians to think of struggle as necessary for improvement. And it is also in the Descent that Darwin, in explaining the evolutionary function of human sexual dimorphism, suggests that the capacity for the struggle for existence has always been primarily and definitively male. “Man,” he writes, “is the rival to other men; he delights in competition.”28 For Wells, the erosion of manly competition leads inevitably to a repulsively neutered future, one in which the pursuit of intellect at the expense of primitive passions would wither away anything distinctively male. Such a trajectory produces the scrawny crews of the land ironclads and eventually the monstrous Martian heads, though the elimination of struggle might also produce The Time Machine’s Eloi. These diminutive androgynes, who all share “the same soft hairless visage, and the same

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girlish rotundity of limb,”29 offer a different illustration of the same concern that the progress of civilization is incompatible with the foundations of manliness: “Physical courage and the love of battle,” the Time Traveller explains, “are no great help – may even be hindrances – to a civilized man.”30 The same pugnacious qualities that are problematic among the civilized, however, are indispensable to Wells’s vision of manhood and evolutionary development. In Mankind in the Making (1903), Wells objects to Spencer’s notorious formulation of the “survival of the fittest,” not because it goes too far in elevating competition as the criterion of fitness, but because he thinks it should go even further. To say “fittest” is to imply the agency of some planning intelligence capable of making that judgment, as a husbandman might choose which stock to breed. Wells prefers “Survival of the Fitter,” a distinction meant to remind us of the inescapably competitive character of the struggle for existence.31 Wells’s better men must prove themselves fitter men in this sense, cleaving to agonistic instincts rather than submitting before some guiding intelligence, whether of advanced liberal moralists or their nightmarish heirs.

Empire, evolution, and the guiding intellect Wells’s science journalism of the 1890s records the frustrations and contradictions of his efforts to understand the relationship of progress and evolution. In an article called “Zoological Retrogression” (1891), for instance, he attacks the optimistic popular misconception, which he calls “Excelsior biology,” that biological evolution is inherently progressive, and that it will continue to improve life “with increasing velocity” under the supervision of humans.32 Wells counters with examples of degeneration and concludes that no one can predict whether the trajectory of human development will be upward or downward. Yet the following year he published “Ancient Experiments in Co-operation,” which draws a far happier lesson from nature. Perhaps, he argues, too much weight has been granted to competition as the law of survival and as a rule for individual behavior. Look at the ants: “In an anthill the rigour of competition has been softened, to the benefit and triumph of the species.”33 Two years later, in “The Province of Pain,” Wells admits that pain and suffering are ubiquitous in nature, but suggests that humans may ultimately transcend them. Just as a civilized man is less subject to passion than a savage is, it may be that civilization will liberate humans from the torments of the body: “May he not so grow morally and intellectually as to get at last beyond the need of corporal chastisement, and foresight take the place of pain, as

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science ousts instinct?”34 Yet in “Bio-Optimism” (1895), he ridicules the hope that humans would ever be free of the cruel laws of the struggle for existence. Neither cooperation, nor symbiosis, nor our own veneer of civilization should blind us to the grim reality of life: Because some species have abandoned fighting in open order, each family for itself, as some of the larger carnivora do, for a fight in masses after the fashion of the ants, because the fungus fighting its brother fungus has armed itself with an auxiliary alga, because man instead of killing his cattle at sight preserves them against his convenience, and fights with advertisements and legal process instead of with flint instruments, is life therefore any the less a battle-field? Has anything arisen to show that the seed of the unfit need not perish, that a species may wheel into line with new conditions without the generous assistance of Death, that where the life and breeding of every individual in a species is about equally secure, a degenerative process must not inevitably supervene? As a matter of fact Natural Selection grips us more grimly than it ever did.35

The passage is engagingly heated, and all the richer because Wells had himself argued many of the positions he now derides. At the end of his essay, he recognizes the “impasse” described above: a species must continue to evolve lest it become “mechanical” and “static,” but change can only follow from struggle and destruction: “The names of the sculptor who carves out the new forms are, and so far as human science goes at present they must ever be, Pain and Death.”36 Shortly after “Bio-Optimism,” Wells hit upon a path out of the impasse of that essay and of the perplexing relationship of biological and social progress. In “Human Evolution, An Artificial Process” (1896), he distinguishes the biological evolution of humans from “an evolution of suggestions and ideas,” in which there is reason for genuine optimism.37 His argument begins by conceding that biological evolution is a slow process, and has had little effect on the growth of civilization. He turns to males in particular to make his point: “the average man of our society is now intrinsically what he was in Palӕolithic times. Regard his psychology, and particularly his disposition to rages and controversy, his love of hunting and violent exercise, and his powerful sexual desires.” It is in fact because of the glacial slowness of biological evolution that qualities originally adapted for “a state of complete savagery” linger on: “the rapid physical concentration, the intense self-forgetfulness of the anger-burst, the urgency of sexual passion in the healthy male, the love of killing which has been for ages such a puzzle in his own nature to man.”38 The difference between the civilized man and the caveman, it follows, must be “an acquired factor,” a

Fitter men: H. G. Wells and the impossible future of masculinity 217 combination of learning, morality, and habitual restraints that allow the natural man to exist in a civilized state with all its comforts and securities. Since the artificial factor is malleable, it can be reshaped and improved by the guiding intellect to ensure progress: In the future, it is at least conceivable, that men with a trained reason and a sounder science [. . . may] work towards, and at last attain and preserve, a social organization so cunningly balanced against exterior necessities, on the one hand, and the artificial factor in the individual in the other, that the life of every human being, and, indeed, through man, of every sentient creature on earth, may be generally happy.39

Much of what Wells presents here as a novel reconciliation of natural selection and progress had already been argued by his former teacher, Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley makes the case most famously in Evolution and Ethics (1893), where he, too, points out that although humans once depended on savage qualities that they shared with apes or tigers, those qualities have no role in the development of civilization. Human progress depends on a process entirely distinct from the amoral forces of nature that he calls “cosmic evolution,” and the function of civilization is to emancipate people from the bloody necessities of the struggle for existence: “Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process.”40 What Huxley calls the cosmic process, in other words, is the evolutionary force that produces what Wells calls the “inherited factor” of human behavior, while Huxley’s ethical process is the result of Wells’s “acquired factor.” Understood in this light, evolutionary biology offers no practical lessons for the politician or the social reformer, whose challenge is to mitigate the inherited factor (as Wells sees it), or to eradicate its influence altogether (as Huxley hopes).41 In his “Prolegomena” to Evolution and Ethics, Huxley tries to clarify his argument, and his chief illustration of the ethical process indicates how it might apply to English colonialism: Suppose a shipload of English colonists sent to form a settlement, in such a country as Tasmania was in the middle of the last century. On landing, they find themselves in the midst of a state of nature, wildly different from that left behind them . . . They clear away the native vegetation, extirpate or drive out the animal population, and take measures to defend themselves from the reimmigration of either. In their place, they introduce English grain and fruit trees; English dogs, sheep, cattle, horses; and English men; in fact, they set up a new Flora and Fauna and a new variety of mankind, within the old state of

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Masculinity and the New Imperialism nature. Their farms and pastures represent a garden on a great scale, and themselves the gardeners who have to keep it up, in watchful antagonism to the old regime. Considered as a whole, the colony is a composite unit introduced into the old state of nature; and, thenceforward, a competitor in the struggle for existence, to conquer or be vanquished.42

Huxley’s choice of Tasmania as the setting for his example is chilling given that, as in War of the Worlds, its name served as shorthand for the extermination of an aboriginal population. Yet for Huxley, the point is to suggest a pure state of nature, one in which the cosmic process was unchecked. The project then becomes, as midcentury liberal imperialism would suggest, to stamp the impression of English civilization onto this savage landscape, to transform a jungle into a garden. At this point, however, Huxley’s hypothetical colonists are not yet safe; they are still locked in a struggle for existence, and therefore in danger of failing: “if they are slothful, stupid, and careless; or if they waste their energies in contests with one another, the chances are that the old state of nature will have the best of it.”43 They may still be attacked, or they may, along with their English plants, grow wild. The colonists require therefore an “administrative authority” not only to eliminate the threat of external competitors (“by thoroughly extirpating and excluding native rivals, whether men, beasts, or plants”),44 but also to prevent competition within. Under the guidance of the administrative authority, “Laws, sanctioned by the combined force of the colony, would restrain the self-assertion of each man within the limits required for the maintenance of peace. In other words, the cosmic struggle for existence, as between man and man, would be rigorously suppressed, and selection, by its means, would be as completely excluded as it is from the garden.”45 The elimination of the state of nature is complete: the guiding intellect has effected a cold-blooded holocaust of all aboriginal rivals, and exerted a rigorous control over the competitive instincts that might still lurk in the colonists themselves. Huxley articulated Wells’s hope that a purely artificial progress of civilization might alleviate the pain and cruelty of natural selection, but other prominent scientists were at the same time contending that evolutionary biology supplied an eminently practical model of human behavior and national strategy, a position that later became widely known as social Darwinism. Among these was another figure Wells respected, Karl Pearson, a mathematician and chief disciple of the eugenicist Francis Galton.46 In his lecture “National Life from the Standpoint of Science” (1900), Pearson asks his audience “to see selection as something which renders the inexorable law of heredity a source of progress which

Fitter men: H. G. Wells and the impossible future of masculinity 219 produces the good through suffering.”47 The struggle for existence, in other words, is the engine of human improvement, and those wellmeaning souls who might balk at the savage violence of that struggle should console themselves with the recognition that humanity is compelled to obey “the laws which rule all organic nature”: “We cannot escape from them; it serves no purpose to protest at what some term their cruelty and their bloodthirstiness.”48 Applied to national life, these rules dictate the necessity of global warfare and colonial conquest. “History shows me one way,” Pearson argues, “and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race.”49 Like Wells, Pearson prefers “fitter” to “fittest,” thus emphasizing the necessity for competition without a guiding intellect of the sort that Huxley envisions. For Pearson, there is no antithesis between the progress of civilization and amoral brutality, since the contest to determine the fitter race is “the fiery crucible out of which comes the finer metal.”50 Indeed, to attempt to subvert that competition, as Huxley proposes, is to put a halt to progress, for when “the struggle for existence between races is suspended, the solution of great problems may be unnaturally postponed.”51 Worst of all would be the advent of universal peace: “when that day comes, mankind will no longer progress.”52 Together, Huxley and Pearson indicate the wide range of possible appropriations of Darwinian themes as they molded opinions about imperial conflict and its role in shaping the future. Huxley’s view echoes the midcentury liberal model of imperialism insofar as he prizes the enlightened suppression of savagery and the diffusion of reason, ethics, and universal law. Pearson, though a socialist in national politics, endorses the conservative New Imperialist theme of perpetual aggression. Much of Wells’s ambivalence about the relationship between primitive violence and progressive civilization may be explained by his inability to choose between these antithetical positions. The result, in his fiction, is neither a middle road between the two nor an imaginative reconciliation of their conflict, but wild swings in the novels’ sympathies, fragmentation of their narrative mode, and plots that dramatize this ideological conflict through a series of clashes that never ultimately resolve the tensions they represent. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1901), his tale of how human imperialism might extend beyond the earth, is torn between the belief, like Pearson’s, that the future will continue to be driven by a primal but ineradicable impulse to struggle, and the hope, like Huxley’s, that

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some guiding intellect may allow such struggle to be transcended. As in the “Land Ironclads,” Wells divides these possibilities into two opposing male types, both of whom get their chance to narrate the story: Bedford, an adventurous and entrepreneurial young writer, and Cavor, an eccentric but high-minded scientist whose invention of a gravity-resistant substance, Cavorite, allows the two of them to visit the moon. Bedford, who narrates the bulk of the story, frames their experiences in imperial terms from the moment he learns of Cavor’s discovery. As he begins to grasp the practical applications of Cavorite, Bedford thinks first of war and then of a commercial empire: “My first natural impulse was to apply this principle to guns and ironclads and all the material and methods of war and from that to shipping, locomotion, building, every conceivable form of human industry . . . until one vast stupendous Cavorite Company ran and ruled the world.”53 When Cavor raises the possibility of interplanetary exploration, however, Bedford’s fantasy widens to other models of empire: “I recalled the old Spanish monopoly in American gold. It wasn’t as if it was just this planet or that – it was all of them . . . ‘But this is tremendous!’ I cried; ‘this is imperial!’” (30). Once on the moon, Bedford’s ambitions grow enthusiastically, especially after he eats an intoxicating mushroom. “What a home for our surplus population!” (77), he begins, and then explains how they might benefit the native Selenites: “We must annex this moon,” I said. “There must be no shilly-shally. This is part of the White Man’s Burden Cavor – we are – hic – Satap – mean Satraps! Nempire Caesar never dreamt. B’in all the newspapers. Cavorecia. Bedfordecia. Bedfordecia. Hic – Limited. Mean – unlimited! Practically.” Certainly I was intoxicated. I embarked upon an argument to show the infinite benefits our arrival would confer upon the moon. I involved myself in a rather difficult proof that the arrival of Columbus was, after all, beneficial to America. I found I had forgotten the line of argument I had intended to pursue, and continued to repeat “sim’lar to C’lumbus” to fill up time. (78–79)

Wells’s joke casts the improving mission of imperialism as the hypocritical ravings of a drunk, and even Bedford has enough self-knowledge to realize how ridiculous he sounds. However, when the two men discover that the caves of the Selenites are littered with gold, Bedford proposes that they retreat to earth, arm themselves, and return in force. Bedford’s portion of the novel reads like a popular adventure story: he arrives in a wondrous new land, encounters natives who capture him, fights his way free in a daring escape, and returns home with a fortune in gold. But Wells also gives us Cavor’s perspective, which presents the

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adventure in a different light. Cavor sees Bedford as impulsive, incurious, and needlessly violent. Horrified by the younger man’s scheme of an armed invasion, Cavor swears not to divulge the formula for Cavorite. In the last few chapters of the novel, which take the form of fragmentary messages Cavor transmits to earth after Bedford has escaped, the novel swerves from adventure romance to utopian satire. Cavor penetrates to the heart of the elaborate Selenite society, which he comes to regard as “colossally, in intelligence, morality and social wisdom, higher than man” (174). But after the model of More or Swift, Wells’s Selenite utopia is double edged. It stands for a model of rationality that exposes the shortcomings of Bedford and all he represents, but at the same time it mocks the solution of those problems through a rationalism hypertrophied into monstrosity. It forces us to ask whether Cavor’s ideals are, in the end, any better than Bedford’s. Cavor is impressed by the insectoid Selenites, doubtless because they might have been extrapolated from his own character (even Cavor’s habit of buzzing while he thinks prefigures their vast hive). Just as Cavor hopes, the Selenites are peaceful, scientifically advanced, and thoroughly rational. An exaggerated instance of Herbert Spencer’s claim that progress is measured by increasing complexity, the Selenites have adapted themselves through breeding, education, and surgery into hundreds of forms suited for their particular duties – so that a litter bearer is bred as a lopsided creature with a hypertrophied shoulder and a glass blower is mostly lungs – and have achieved absolute social organization: “each is a perfect unit in a world machine” (182). But the efficient harmony of the Selenites comes with a price. They may not suffer from political turbulence, for example, but only because they live under the dictatorial authority of a Grand Lunar, and while they are free of the emotional competition of romance, it is because “in this community a large majority of the members are of the neuter sex” (186). Whenever Cavor experiences misgivings about their society or horror at their grotesquely specialized bodies, he dismisses his doubts as unreasonable. Wells’s satire makes clear, however, that the Selenites have taken rationality too far. If the advanced harmony of the Selenites may be used to emphasize the “social savagery” of the Victorians (198), it also reveals the monstrous results of progress overseen by an unsympathetic guiding intellect. The crisis of Cavor’s belief in the rational Selenites follows from his audience with the Grand Lunar, who turns out to be another of Wells’s macrocephalic freaks, a “quintessential brain” of enormous proportions, that appears as a “featureless bladder with dim, undulating ghosts of

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convolutions writhing visibly within,” atop the withered vestiges of a disused body, “shriveled and white” (192). The Grand Lunar questions Cavor about human warfare, which gives Wells the opportunity to present it as absurdly destructive and wasteful, emphasizing its folly by referring to the recent humiliation of British troops by the Boers at the battle of Colenso. The Selenites are incredulous: They particularly doubted my description of the men cheering and rejoicing as they went into battle . . . I assured them men of my race considered battle the most glorious experience of life, at which the whole assembly was stricken with amazement. “But what good is this war?” asked the Grand Lunar, sticking to his theme. “Oh! As for good !” said I, “it thins the population!” “But why should there be a need – ?” (200)

Cavor is hardly an ideal apologist for war, and he does not share the belief in the glory of battle that he calls typical of “men of [his] race.” Yet here Wells’s satire on war takes a strange turn. The Selenites, now aware of the threat humanity represents, begin to interfere with Cavor’s transmissions, and his last fragmentary messages disclose that they have begun to interrogate him about the secret of his Cavorite. Bedford, back on earth, concludes that a conflict between the earth and moon is inevitable. Cavor had revealed “the strength and irrational violence of men, of their insatiable aggressions, their tireless futility of conflict . . . The line the cold, inhuman reason of the moon would take seems plain enough to me” (202). Even progressively rational societies will be drawn into violence, just as the progressively rational Cavor will himself come to accept warfare. His final, broken message to earth is an attempt to reveal the formula for Cavorite, a secret which he knows will lead to a war against the moon. No matter how advanced the guiding intellect, how rational and morally progressive the culture, the struggle for existence is inevitable. At the end, Bedford is left to imagine Cavor being dragged away from his transmitter, “struggling in the grip of a great multitude of those insect Selenites, struggling ever more desperately and hopelessly as they swarm around him, shouting, expostulating, perhaps even at last fighting” (203). The First Men in the Moon crystalizes Wells’s ambivalence over the interwoven themes of progress and empire. If the novel affirms Pearson’s sense that struggle is an ineluctable law of nature, it is nevertheless far less cavalier than Pearson about the terrible waste and destructiveness of war. Likewise, if the story supports the Huxleyan hope that a guiding intellect

Fitter men: H. G. Wells and the impossible future of masculinity 223 might achieve wonderful advances and a more harmonious social order, it still suggests that the apotheosis of rationality is no less absurd – and in the end no less violent – than the primitive instincts it seeks to dominate. We see in Bedford’s case that empire is the irrational product of an undisciplined (even drunken) mind, enflamed by avarice and a proclivity to fight, but in Cavor’s case that empire is a step toward the united brotherhood of the planet: “Our States and Empires,” he tells the Grand Lunar, “are still the rawest sketches of what order will some day be” (198). Whether a tool of venality or rationality, empire – the struggle for mastery raised to a global level – is as unavoidable as violence. If for Wells the savage proclivities epitomized by violence and warfare are fundamentally human, they are also specifically male. When Cavor tells the Selenites that “men of my race considered battle the most glorious experience of life,” he expresses a view of masculinity rather than humanity. In Wells’s early romances, manhood lies at the core of the problem of progress, particularly because the primitive violence of struggle is coded masculine just as surely as the progressive intellect is represented as sexless or androgynous. Masculinity is also, therefore, entangled in the same ambivalent double view. Masculinity may be competitive, destructive, and retrogressive, but it is nevertheless also deeply natural, authentic, and even admirable. In the scene of Bedford’s escape from the Selenites, for instance, he rejoices in his own primitive ferocity as he slaughters a group of them with a golden crowbar clutched in each fist: For a minute perhaps it was massacre. I was too fierce to discriminate, and the Selenites were probably too scared to fight. At any rate they made no sort of fight against me. I saw scarlet, as the saying is. I remember I seemed to be wading among these leathery thin things as a man wades through grass, mowing and hitting, first right, then left – smash, smash! Little drops of moisture flew about. I trod on things that crushed and piped and went slippery . . . I felt an enormous astonishment at the evaporation of the great fight into which I had hurled myself, and not a little exultation. It did not seem to me that the Selenites were unexpectedly flimsy, but that I was unexpectedly strong. (123)

The grisly excess of this passage might have been written by Haggard; certainly, the exultation Bedford experiences is the same as Haggard’s heroes feel in asserting their manliness on the blood-soaked battlefields of lost worlds. But where Haggard gives his characters equally masculine characters to fight against in order to show the continuity of manhood between past and present, Bedford is faced only with flimsy, repulsive insects. He is fighting a future in which manhood has been lost.

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The violent resurgence of manhood Bedford is not alone among Wells’s protagonists in seeing scarlet. The narrator of The War of the Worlds experiences a similar “flash of rage” before braining the unmanly curate, and the Time Traveller feels a bloodthirsty thrill very like Bedford’s when he thrashes a pack of Morlocks with an iron lever: “I could feel the succulent giving of flesh and bone beneath my blows, and for a moment I was free. The strange exultation that so often seems to accompany hard fighting came over me.”54 Indeed, the eruption of violence is virtually inevitable in Wells’s scientific romances; as V. S. Pritchett observes, “There are always fist-fights and fires in the early Wells.”55 Parrinder likewise notes that Wells’s visions of the future are always haunted by a reactionary spirit of violence, so that he “cannot portray a paradisal society without an ironic sub-plot asserting the perpetuity of aggression as it is realized in the violence and self-assertion of the contemporary world.”56A sub-plot at the very least, we might add, for such scenes of violence often stand at the culmination of his stories’ action as a limit beyond which the future cannot be imagined. These outbursts represent the collapse of the Huxleyan hope for an ethical progress that leaves nature behind, a return of repressed brutality that the protagonists experience as strange, unexpected, and involuntary. Yet because Wells worries that progress will erode manly identity, his protagonists also experience savage violence as a satisfying restoration – as an affirmation, an exultation, a delight. The appeal of violence to Wells’s men is particularly apparent in two of his visions of a similar future, “A Story of the Days to Come” (1897) and When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), in which he paints the middle distance between the near future of “The Land Ironclads” and the evolutionary horizon of Martians and Selenites. Both stories are set in a London two hundred years into the future, a mammoth city at the heart of a world state ruled by a collusion of corporate monopolies. Gone are the familiar institutions of Victorian middle-class identity, especially those in which gender was rooted; individual family homes have given way to enormous apartment complexes, children are no longer reared by parents but by crèches, and women have given up motherhood to join the workforce. Social classes have polarized between an elite group of plutocrats who entertain themselves in the city’s grand towers and a multitude of blueuniformed factory workers who dwell in subterranean warrens; they play the brutish, incipient Morlocks to the aristocracy’s hedonistic proto-Eloi. Despite this setting’s correspondence in many respects to the vision of

Fitter men: H. G. Wells and the impossible future of masculinity 225 progress Wells would soon present in Anticipations (1901), his first great work of speculative non-fiction, the pervading atmosphere in these stories is gloomily dystopian, emphasizing the dangers of this future London through the degradation of traditional gender identities among the oppressed workers as well as their effete overlords. In each of these narratives, Wells ultimately attempts to come to terms with the problems of progress through a reconstitution of womanly and manly virtues, especially in scenes of manly violence. “A Story of the Days to Come” follows the romance between Elizabeth, a young heiress, and Denton, a member of the dwindling middle class, who are drawn to one another through their eccentric love of the archaic, especially for the “quaint, adventurous, half-civilised days of the nineteenth century, when men were stout and women simple.”57 When Elizabeth’s disapproving father hires a hypnotist to erase her memories of Denton, the young man confronts the hypnotist and, driven by an instinctive violence he has never seen or experienced before, knocks the doctor to the ground. The hypnotist, shocked by this anachronistic aggression, calls Denton “only half civilised,” and a “savage” (197): “We might be in the Stone Age,” said the hypnotist. “Violence! Struggle!” “In the Stone Age no man dared to come between man and woman,” said Denton. (195)

Denton’s reply makes little sense if we take it to mean that Paleolithic men never fought over women; the hypnotist has to be understood here not as a romantic competitor, but as the representative of plutocratic and scientific forces that, in rationalizing human passions into mere inconveniences, have violated the primordial laws of sexuality. Denton, though without training or cultural example, becomes the conduit for the resurgence of natural masculinity that the twenty-second century has rejected, and thereby heroically rescues Elizabeth. With their romance restored by the return of manly violence, the couple offers hope to this future in which “courage, endurance, faith, all the noble virtues seem fading from mankind” (185). Denton’s simple act of muscular heroism is only the first intimation of the far more profound role Wells imagines for masculine violence. When, later in the story, Denton and Elizabeth have been forced by bankruptcy to join the laboring class beneath the metropolis, Denton is thrust into the rough society of men unconstrained by the laws of the overworld. His coworkers, reacting against his middle-class pretensions, beat the last

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of his civilized preconceptions out of him, and thus confront him with the timeless truth of manly struggle: Violence, that ocean in which the brutes live for ever, and from which a thousand dykes and contrivances have won our hazardous civilised life, had flowed in again upon the sinking underways and submerged them. The fist ruled. Denton had come right down at last to the elemental – fist and trick and the stubborn heart and fellowship – even as it was in the beginning. (276)

At first, Denton cannot bring himself to sympathize with a primitive community structured around “shame and violence” (277); the humiliation that follows his beating intensifies the disaffection he has felt throughout the story. But when one of the men, a “genial savage” (289), teaches him how to fight, Denton, “bruised and enlightened” (276), begins to rethink the meaning of his life in relation to this masculine fellowship. Instead of wrestling with the sociological questions posed by the progress of civilization, he will scrap with other men, and find a fulfilling identity within the codes of honor, shame, and struggle of the male group: “apart from any remoter view and quite sufficient for all his thought and energy, he had to stand up and fight among his fellows and quit himself like a man . . . The idea that he was a martyr in the civilisation machine had vanished from his mind. He was a man in a world of men” (290, 292). Denton’s epiphany should not be taken to mean that he has given up on trying to understand his place in the broader patterns of history. It is true that Denton rejects the unsatisfying narrative of the progress of civilization, since he now comes to think of civilization as a “monstrous fraud” and “as little concerned with men – save as victims – as a cyclone or a planetary collision” (247). Yet in place of the story of civilization, Denton turns toward an evolutionary narrative in which, through the persistence of violence, the competitions of men become immediately fulfilling in their own right and as part of an unending story focused less on progress than perseverance. He explains his newfound resolve to Elizabeth in Darwinian terms: To think of all who have gone through with it: all the generations – endless – endless. Little beasts that snapped and snarled, snapping and snarling, snapping and snarling, generation after generation . . . There were ninety thousand years of stone age. A Denton somewhere in all those years . . . And each fought, and was bruised, and shamed, and somehow held his own – going through with it – passing it on . . . And thousands more to come perhaps – thousands! (286)

Fitter men: H. G. Wells and the impossible future of masculinity 227 What Denton offers as an evolutionary rationalization for his newfound sense of purpose, however, has nothing to do with the mechanisms of natural selection; at this point of the story he is not struggling to stay alive, find a mate, or reproduce. Instead, his narrative of timeless manly conflict serves to shore up his own sense of self-worth in terms that naturalize and justify the hegemonically masculine themes of Wells’s own present, such as competition within male groups and the goad of shame. Denton’s redemption in primal violence, however, is unavailable to Elizabeth, as women have no role in his valorizing narrative of eternal struggle. He tries to convey his discovery to her, to “explain and justify my fighting,” but finds it useless: “these bruises, and all the pain of it. It’s the chisel – yes, the chisel of the Maker. If only I could make you feel as I feel, if I could make you!” (293). But Elizabeth, having herself suffered enormously through the story, has nevertheless not experienced the kind of pain that would chisel her into something better, and she understands that the possibility is precluded by her sex: “You are a man, you can fight, force your way. You do not mind bruises. You can be coarse and ugly, and still a man. Yes – it makes you. It makes you. You are right. Only a woman is not like that . . . What have I? What have I to save me? You can fight. Fighting is man’s work. But women – women are different” (294). Like many of the popular novelists of the New Imperialist period, Wells imagines that the experience of savage conflict that can ennoble a civilized man would only degrade a civilized woman. Only men can experience what the narrator calls “the strange delight of combat that slumbers still in the blood of even the most civilized man” (226). Similar themes reappear in When the Sleeper Wakes, which portrays much the same future society, but from a broader perspective that links savage manliness with issues of empire and race. The novel follows Graham, a frustrated socialist and writer of prophetic pamphlets, who, just before Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, falls asleep for two centuries. During this interval, Graham’s money is so cunningly managed by a council of trustees that when he awakes he finds himself “Master of the Earth” and “owner of half the world.”58 The plutocratic empire of which Graham has become the figurehead now extends over most of the planet (with the important exception of tropical and African territories), so that everywhere “the same cosmopolitan social organisation prevailed” and the “whole world was civilised” (166). This peaceful, mostly English-speaking empire seems like a step toward the kind of world state that Wells himself advocated, and Graham feels his own period to be a “queer, barbaric time” by comparison (186). In other respects, however, progress has exacerbated

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the predicaments of the late nineteenth century, particularly the division between rich and poor. Characteristically, Wells dramatizes this extrapolated economic problem in gender terms. Peace and the security of wealth have transformed the upper class into opulent voluptuaries, and its men have grown dainty, epicene, and “altogether too graceful” (179). The effeminacy of the wealthy contrasts with the dehumanized androgyny of the workers, whose men have lost their muscles and whose women have become flat-chested: “The latter-day labourer, male as well as female, was essentially a machine-minder and feeder” (270). Social progress has stalled in the absence of struggle, and Wells depicts the costs of stagnation through portraits of a distasteful androgyny. Happily for the promise of progress, Graham’s awakening catalyzes a rebirth of violence, as the workers rise up against the plutocrats and then their own treacherous leader, Ostrog. In the novel’s climax, Ostrog attempts to retain power by summoning regiments of black police from the administered territories of Africa; the story takes for granted that African men cannot be civilized, and that they are therefore the only formidable fighters left in the future. “These blacks are savages,” Graham comments, “ruled by force, used as force” (307). As the African troops are transported to London in giant airships, Graham observes that there is some cosmic justice in their invasion of their imperial masters’ home, but he still feels a clearly racist dread at the prospect of black warriors unleashed on white London. The city appears doomed until Graham is led by “the swift anger that was his nature” to a vital realization: “I am a savage” (308). Combining racist abhorrence of the Africans and a masculine identification with the savagery they represent, the novel presents Graham as the only person left in London who retains enough primal virility to meet this threat. He announces his resolution to fight with a renewed sense of manly honor that Kipling would have endorsed: “He who takes the greatest danger, he who bears the heaviest burthen, that man is King” (317).59 And so Graham takes to the skies in a plane of his own to ram the Africans’ airships, and finally feels a release of the frustration that has dogged him from the novel’s first page: “A glorious exhilaration possessed him now, a giant activity. His troubles about humanity, about his inadequacy, were gone for ever. He was a man in battle rejoicing in his power” (325). Graham’s fulfilling death in aerial combat with the Africans is a puzzling conclusion to a novel already riven by ambivalence about the nature of progress. London is saved, at least temporarily, but the workers’ future is uncertain, and they are left, as Ostrog had warned, without anyone “man

Fitter men: H. G. Wells and the impossible future of masculinity 229 enough for a central figure” (234). Wells’s final turn to an affirmation of masculine violence is strangely double-edged, at once a satisfying conclusion to the problems he has posed and an evasive retreat from them. Violence becomes a sign of change, but does not indicate the direction toward which change might lead. It validates the individual man but destroys him, too. Most importantly, it acts as a limit to imagining a progressive future that, according to the assumptions of the present, cannot be unshackled from the primitive past. For all of these complexities, however, Wells’s conclusion is fundamentally consistent with a range of New Imperialist fictions that had come to regard manliness and imperial struggle as mutually validating. Wells’s chief departure from them in his early novels was his turn to evolutionary biology in support of his case, his willingness to find some manly encouragement in Darwin’s humbling observation that “Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”60 But Wells’s trust in his own scientific objectivity obscured the degree to which his conclusions were determined by popular assumptions of his day, such as the belief that emotion is rooted in the gendered body but not in the brain, or that the love of battle follows from an inherently male proclivity that is suppressed rather than fostered by contemporary British civilization. In fact, as we have seen throughout this book, the culture of New Imperialism never tired of contending that manliness was not necessarily, as the mid-Victorians believed, an expression of civilized restraint, self-discipline, and moral improvement. Like other writers of his time, Wells imagined that proper manliness was entrenched in timeless, permanent qualities of aggression, competition, and irrational impulse. For this reason he could not imagine any radically altered future that was not also a deviation from these qualities, any giant leap for mankind that was not also a misstep for men. In the end, his stories offer sobering testimony to the susceptibility of even the most inventive and iconoclastic writers to the constraints of a hegemonic construction of better manhood. What, then, of the future unforeseen in the early works of Wells, the future of masculinity as it has actually been rewritten since his scientific romances? Historians conventionally point to the First World War as the climactic conclusion of the New Imperialist period and, not coincidentally, of the styles of masculinity that had sustained it. Ideals of warfare conducted in a playfully boyish spirit or of ennobling contests of manly honor could not survive the mechanized slaughter on the fields of Passchendaele or the Somme. After the war, we typically say, generations of men could

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invoke those ideals only ironically. Philip Larkin, contemplating the long lines of men eager to enlist in 1914, their hearts and minds filled with the promised glories of New Imperialist masculinity, pronounced its epitaph: “Never such innocence again.”61 The Great War, in short, makes for an appealing conclusion to our story, but not, I think, an entirely convincing one. An account of the complicated legacies of New Imperialist masculinity in the hundred years since that war is beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say, however, that despite vast realignments of geopolitical power, elements of the old fantasies of manliness have frequently reappeared: consider the atavistic masculinity of the Third Reich, the cynical gamesmanship of the Cold War, or the jingoistic chest-thumping that accompanied the start of neo-imperialist adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. In popular culture, too, we find the plots and characters of New Imperialist literature persisting with an inertia that outlasted the war. The work of such writers as Kipling and Haggard still had its readers, and its imitators, too. Stories of lost worlds, mummies and reincarnations, invasion scares, and interplanetary empires continued to be written, and not infrequently with protagonists who embraced a pugnaciously uncivilized style of manliness. Echoes of the old strains could still be heard in the stories of John Buchan, Edgar Wallace, and the younger Graham Greene. In the United States, meanwhile, they were trumpeted by the great pulp heroes: Zane Gray’s cowboys, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, and Robert E. Howard’s Conan. Even more recently, we sometimes encounter strikingly unadulterated revivals of the New Imperialism’s better men. The work of the American screenwriter John Milius offers rich examples: within a few years he gave us Apocalypse Now (which emphasized the savage, cross-cultural masculinity latent in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), Conan the Barbarian (which renewed interest in Howard’s hulking atavistic hero), and Red Dawn (a Chesneyesque invasion scare in which a communist attack is repulsed by schoolboys with machine guns). Though the New Imperialist fantasies of better manhood may not have died with the Great War, they have nevertheless become complicated in ways that Wells never anticipated. Like his contemporaries, Wells understood manly virtues to be founded upon an essential masculinity that was both fundamentally unchanging and deeply rooted in the past; Wells saw that essence in evolutionary biology, but others found it in the conjectures of anthropology or archaeology, or in the hypotheses of educationalists about the nature of boyhood. These premises, as we have seen, allowed them to imagine manliness as neither modern, progressive,

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nor distinctly English. They were prepared to find models of manliness across a wide range of foreign cultures and races, and to differentiate between them by the degree to which they deviated from some originary, primeval norm. What they could not predict, consequently, was an understanding of masculinity not anchored in the past but swept along by the cultural currents of the present: the meanings of manhood that are constantly generated and regenerated, the proliferating possibilities of identity that arise from the refusal to privilege any single, immutable truth. Yet a hundred years on, thanks chiefly to the victories of feminist scholarship and activism, this liberating conception of gender has done much to dislodge such formidably entrenched assumptions. To the extent that the old dream still speaks to men today, it is only as one among many others. And better yet, since we are less inclined than the Victorians to parcel out the catalog of virtues between the sexes, we are less troubled by the struggle to be better men or better women, and more free to confront the more rewarding challenge of becoming better people.

Notes

Introduction: better men Works are cited by author and short title throughout these notes. See the Bibliography for more complete information. 1 2 3 4 5

6

7 8 9

10 11 12 13

Masterman, In Peril, 5. Masterman, In Peril, 4. Masterman, In Peril, 5. Masterman, In Peril, 7. Lang, “Realism and Romance,” 690. On the gendering of the romance revival, see also Showalter’s Sexual Anarchy (chapter 5) and Arata’s Fictions of Loss (chapter 4). Critics have more typically read the gender dynamics of imperial romance as the assertion of white masculinity in opposition to the feminized lands and races of the frontier. Anne McClintock’s reading of Rider Haggard, for instance, argues that he imagines the reconstitution of white patriarchal power in an allegory of control of colonial women’s labor (Imperial Leather, 232–57). Similar interpretations have been reinforced by Mrinalini Sinha’s analysis of the feminization of Bengali men in Colonial Masculinity, though Sinha herself is more careful not to generalize from this example than are many scholars who cite her work. On the other hand, such books as Graham Dawson’s Soldier Heroes, Gail Ching-Liang Low’s White Skins, and Heather Streets’s Martial Races have, as we shall see, explored the importance of the manliness of other races in the imperial imagination. On chivalry and gentlemanliness, see Mark Girouard’s Return to Camelot and Robin Gilmour’s Idea of the Gentleman, respectively. On muscular Christianity, see in particular Norman Vance’s Sinews of the Spirit and Donald E. Hall’s Muscular Christianity. Dickens repeats the phrase “undisciplined heart” several times in the last quarter of David Copperfield, but see in particular the pivotal episode in which David, “left alone with my undisciplined heart,” tries “to get a better understanding of myself and be a better man” (748, 752). Smiles, Self-Help, 276. Kingsley, Westward Ho!, i: 15. Tosh, Man’s Place, 50. Tosh, Man’s Place, 33. 232

Notes to pages 5–13

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14 See Dawson, Soldier Heroes, 139–40. Dawson shows that later accounts of Havelock’s life deemphasize the Christian and domestic values with which he was first associated, a change which represents a larger pattern of transformation of manly heroism in the context of popular imperialism. 15 Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning, 238. 16 On athleticism and empire, see Mangan’s Games Ethic, and on the secularization of the athletic ideal, see his “Social Darwinism.” 17 On the hunter as manly paragon, see MacKenzie’s Empire of Nature, and on the rise of the soldier hero in the 1870s, see the introduction to his Popular Imperialism and the Military. 18 On the “flight from domesticity,” see chapter 8 of Tosh’s Man’s Place. 19 Connell, Masculinities, 77. 20 For critiques of Connell’s approach, see Tosh’s “Hegemonic Masculinity” and Mike Donaldson’s “What is Hegemonic Masculinity?”, both of which suggest that Connell is too focused on the patriarchal subordination of women and therefore does not sufficiently account for competitive relations between men within the hegemonic frame. Though sympathetic to their point, I believe that Connell’s framework is flexible enough to accommodate this additional dimension. 21 The problem of specifying the origins of the New Imperialism follows from the question of defining its chief features – whether one chooses to emphasize, for instance, territorial expansion, political rhetoric, or popular enthusiasm. For accessible overviews of historiographical debates on these issues, see C. C. Eldridge’s Victorian Imperialism (101–48) and Disraeli and the Rise of a New Imperialism. For a wider context, see Andrew Porter’s European Imperialism, 1860–1914. My decision to start with 1870 is influenced by J. A. Hobson’s definition, which identifies its “leading characteristic” as “the competition of rival Empires,” and thus dates it to the Franco-Prussian War (Imperialism, 19). 22 Gladstone, “Our Colonies,” 191, 192. 23 Gladstone, “Our Colonies,” 193, 194. 24 Gladstone, “Our Colonies,” 199. 25 Gladstone, “Our Colonies,” 199. 26 Gladstone, “Our Colonies,” 202. 27 For more on liberal imperialism, see Mehta’s Liberalism and Empire and Jennifer Pitts’s Turn to Empire. 28 On the decline of liberal imperialism, see Karuna Mantena’s “Crisis of Liberal Imperialism,” which also notes the displacement of moral arguments for imperial rule. 29 Disraeli, Selected Speeches, 530. 30 Disraeli, Selected Speeches, 531. 31 Disraeli, Selected Speeches, 534. 32 Disraeli, Selected Speeches, 534, 535. 33 Disraeli, Selected Speeches, 534, 535. 34 Times, 11 March 1880, quoted in Eldridge, Disraeli, 70. 35 Dicey, “Gladstone and Our Empire,” 301.

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Notes to pages 14–22

Porter, European Imperialism, 22. Porter, European Imperialism, 24. Hansard Parliamentary Debates H. L. 24 February 1909, 5th ser., vol. 1, col. 215. See Sinha’s Colonial Masculinity for an influential analysis of the effeminate Babu figure, and Streets’s Martial Races for a complementary study of races considered to be particularly masculine. 40 Gladstone, “Paths of Honour and Shame,” 593.

36 37 38 39

1 Gunga Din and other better men: the burden of imperial manhood in Kipling’s verse 1 Backhouse, Narrative, 299. Backhouse’s inspirational account of Gush, published in 1844, was subsequently circulated verbatim in Quaker journals including the British Friend 12 (1854): 285–87; and the Friend’s Intelligencer 11 (1855): 702–4. 2 Backhouse, Narrative, 300. 3 Frederick Sleigh Roberts, Forty-one Years, i: 190. 4 Frederick Sleigh Roberts, Forty-one Years, i: 190–91. 5 The probability that Kipling derived “Gunga Din” from Roberts was first suggested by Mukhtar Ali Isani’s “Origin.” It is possible, however, that many similar stories were in circulation. In 1908, George Younghusband pointed to a different model: Whether Mr. Kipling got that incident from the Guides or not his poem does not show, but there it actually occurred. The name of the bhisti was Juma, and so gallantly did he behave in action at Delhi, calmly carrying water to the wounded and dying under the most tremendous fire, that the soldiers themselves said: “This man is the bravest of the brave, for without arms or protection of any sort he is in the foremost line; if anyone deserves the star for valour this man does” (Story of the Guides, 53–54)

6 7 8

9 10 11

Pointing to Younghusband’s account, Ralph Durand, an early explicator of Kipling’s verse, added in 1914 that “The courage of the Indian ‘bhisti’ has become proverbial” (Handbook, 35). Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, 293. Kipling, Something of Myself, 91. The second line of “The English Flag,” first published in 1891. This and all further quotations of Kipling’s poems follow the text of Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition. Ann Parry, Poetry of Rudyard Kipling, 46–48. Nobel Lectures, 64. Benita Parry, for instance, claims that Kipling exemplifies the “projection of the white race as the natural rulers of a global sphere created and divided by imperialism” (“Contents and Discontents,” 62). Critics who have considered the relationship between race and masculinity in Kipling’s work also tend to privilege his racial attitudes as the more decisive elements in his worldview. Satya P. Mohanty notes the importance of virile masculinity in late Victorian

Notes to pages 22–29

12 13 14

15 16

17

18

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imperial discourse, but argues that its appeal was less powerful than a more abstract racial identity, which is “less vulnerable to attack, since it is less easy to track down and define” (“Drawing the Color Line,” 338). John McBratney offers a nuanced analysis of Kipling’s understanding of race, and notes that in Kipling’s work masculine virtues can be expressed across racial lines. Still, McBratney concludes that while non-whites may be celebrated as virile men in Kipling’s fiction, they can never be quite as manly as their white counterparts: “Among manly men, the English are primus inter pares” (Imperial Subjects, 27). I am broadly in sympathy with McBratney’s point, though in this chapter I have shown why exceptions to this rule – including the occasional better non-white man or the insistence on manly parity – are vital themes in Kipling’s argument. Lootens, “Victorian Poetry and Patriotism,” 271. Lootens, “Victorian Poetry and Patriotism,” 272. On the political context of the original appearance of “The Defence of Lucknow” in The Nineteenth Century, see Kathryn Ledbetter’s Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals, 127–35. Quotations from the poem follow the text of Poems of Tennyson. Tennyson, “Havelock,” lines 15–16. Of the many testimonies of Kipling’s influence on contemporary attitudes toward servicemen, none puts the case more plainly than Younghusband, who writes in his Soldier’s Memories that “Kipling made the modern soldier” (187). But for more on the influence of Kipling’s poetic portraits of “Tommy Atkins,” see M. van Wyk Smith’s Drummer Hodge, and for a rich account of class politics involved in the reception of Barrack-Room Ballads, see Steve Attridge’s Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity (especially chapter 3). Kipling, “Epitaphs of the War.” For a lengthier illustration of the power of the confrontational dynamic of better manhood to dissolve class hierarchies, see Kipling’s story “His Private Honor” (1891). In this story, the seasoned and decorated Private Ortheris is thoughtlessly insulted by a young lieutenant newly arrived in India. Barred by possible court-martial from seeking redress, Ortheris rankles in shame until the lieutenant, realizing his mistake, arranges for a private fistfight between them, thus breaking the tension by allowing them to meet as equal manly competitors. With the balance of masculine honor restored despite class disparities, one of Ortheris’s friends approvingly declares at the end, “You’re a pair, you two. An’, begad, I don’t know which was the better man” (Many Inventions, 179). The first issue of the Boy’s Own Paper included a sketch of a man called Dilawur Khan, who had been a notorious outlaw before being invited to join the Guides, though the BOP was at least as interested in his later conversion to Christianity as in his daring exploits. Younghusband’s regimental history devotes a full chapter to him (Story of the Guides, 51–64). This is the same regiment that Henry Newbolt later celebrated in his “The Guides at Cabul, 1879” (1898), which reminded the “Sons of the Island race” that they should not be ashamed to learn to fight from this “alien legion” (lines 1, 3).

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Notes to pages 31–36

19 Quoted in Farwell, Mr. Kipling’s Army, 110. Paula M. Krebs has analyzed a similar chivalric discourse in Arthur Conan Doyle’s imperialist defense of the Boer War, though her analysis concentrates on the ways the ideals of chivalry regulated relations between men and women: “The core nostalgic notion of Victorian medievalism, its central metaphor, was the notion of chivalry as the right conduct of men toward women” (Gender, Race, 80). I would add to her point that by the end of the nineteenth century the long Victorian fascination with chivalry had been largely absorbed into a much broader discourse of honor (of which chivalry was but one conventional model) and that this broader discourse played an even more peremptory role in calibrating new relations between men. 20 Kipling, “The Sea Wife,” lines 19–20. 21 Marryat, Masterman Ready, ii: 307. 22 Marryat’s depiction of better manhood as developmental but never complete supports Herbert Sussman’s analysis of the hegemonic masculinity consolidated by bourgeois writers in the early Victorian period. As opposed to maleness, manhood was “a condition not achieved by all males and that once reached is for the Victorians exceedingly difficult to maintain . . . For the Victorians manhood is not an essence but a plot” (Victorian Masculinities, 13). 23 Dickens, Tale of Two Cities, 404. 24 Thackeray, Roundabout Papers, 122. 25 Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 38. 26 Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 291. 27 As Armstrong puts it, “the Victorian novel demonstrates that the competitive masculinity required for economic success is not all that ‘agreeable’ to women. Nor does it foster the kind of affective bond necessary to sustain a home. The fact that such masculinity cannot therefore reproduce itself becomes explicit in the deaths of Heathcliff ’s and Dombey’s sons” (“Gender,” 106). 28 Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches, 37. 29 Hobson, Psychology, 1. 30 Gladstone, “England’s Mission,” 569. 31 Ibid. 32 Gladstone’s puzzlement – partly affected and partly genuine – over Disraeli’s emphasis on honor is captured in an essay published shortly after Disraeli returned from Berlin, grandly proclaiming the achievement of “peace with honour”: What is then this “honour,” the envelope of their “peace,” which they have flaunted in the face of the nation? Is it a figment, or is it something substantial? Justice requires the admission that it is very substantial indeed; but whether honour is the right name for it must depend upon what is held to constitute honour. The honour to which the recent British policy is entitled is this: that, from the beginning of the [Berlin] Congress to the end, the representatives of England, instead of taking the side of freedom, emancipation, and national progress, took, in every single point where a practical issue was raised, the side of servitude, of reaction, and of barbarism. (“England’s Mission,” 561–62)

Notes to pages 36–46

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Gladstone’s implication, here and elsewhere, that honor cannot be understood within the discourse of liberal political ideals tends to confirm the insight of political theorists who have suggested that classical liberalism rejected traditional honor codes. See, for example, Laurie M. Johnson Bagby, who traces this philosophical break back to Thomas Hobbes, whose contract theory provided the basis for the development of liberalism. “Hobbes’s thought can be seen as a ‘turning point,’” Bagby writes, “a pivot on which the mind of Western European society began to change. With the transformation of classical liberal politics into egalitarianism, we can trace the destruction of the ability to make distinctions among people, an ability crucial to a serious understanding of honor” (Thomas Hobbes, 8). I argue that honor enjoyed a significant resurgence in the anti-liberal heyday of the New Imperialism. 33 See Frank Henderson Stewart’s influential treatment of the subject in Honor (54–63), which provides the basis of my sketch. Other scholars have designated horizontal and vertical honor as, respectively, negative and positive honor (Charles Laurence Barber in Idea of Honor), or peer and competitive honor (Kwame Anthony Appiah in Honor Code). 34 See Disraeli’s “Memorandum on his Eastern Policy” of 16 May 1876, reprinted in Kenneth Bourne’s Foreign Policy, 405–7. 35 Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 52. 36 Studies of Western honor have long noted its apparent separation from both moral and legal codes. A classic example of this gap may be seen in the duel, one of the chief institutions of honor, but one which was increasingly condemned as both irreligious and illegal. On the decline of the duel, especially during the Enlightenment flowering of liberal philosophy, see chapter 1 of Appiah’s Honor Code. Some recent scholarship, including Appiah’s study and Alexander Welsh’s What is Honor?, has nevertheless tried to reclaim elements of honor as the basis for a morality grounded in respect. 37 Brooke, “The Dead,” lines 11–14. 38 Kucich, Imperial Masochism, 9. 39 Welsh, What Is Honor?, xvi. 40 Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches, 62–63. 41 Chamberlain, Foreign and Colonial, 246. 42 Chesterton, Heretics, 47. 43 Said, Orientalism, 226–27. 44 Said, Orientalism, 227. 45 Ibid. 46 On the politics of Imperial Federation and Kipling’s involvement with the movement, see David Gilmour’s Long Recessional, 178–93. 47 Keating, Kipling the Poet, 120; Brantlinger, Taming Cannibals, 213. 48 Ann Parry also reads Kipling’s reference to whiteness here as an allusion to an Anglo-Saxon bond which interested Federationists. As she writes, “To qualify as a White Man, you had to be of English descent” (Poetry of Rudyard Kipling, 86). Focusing on this racial qualification, however, Parry does not explain why and in what sense the Americans needed to be transformed,

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Notes to pages 51–57 why they had not yet taken their place in a political order that is also signified as a combination of whiteness and manliness. Gretchen Murphy’s study of the poem’s reception in the United States, on the other hand, argues that whiteness functions as a normative category as much as an ontological one: “whiteness and manhood are not stable and presumed qualities but ones that must be proven, made official through acts and deeds. Existing more as ideals than as physical traits, Whiteness differs from whiteness, being of the male sex does not make one a Man, and all white men are not necessarily White men” (Shadowing, 37). I agree, though I would add that the normative force of whiteness is not only parallel to that of manliness in the poem, but thoroughly bound up with it, as the emphasis on manhood in the poem’s concluding stanza suggests. Still, Murphy’s conclusion – that at the moment of the poem’s publication “the meaning of White was unstable and ambiguous” (38) – is a salutary reminder that no close reading of the poem can foreclose the multiple and inconsistent meanings its readers discovered in it. 2 Cultural cross-dressing and the politics of masculine performance

1 “Great African,” Punch 105 (1893): 231. 2 Brantlinger writes, “If the imperialist civilizing mission supposedly aimed to Westernize or Anglicize all ‘natives’ everywhere (even though they could only be civilized with a difference, or as Bhabha puts it, ‘almost but not quite’), the civilized could also regress, backslide, become ‘mimic men’ who emulated the natives. And in much imperialist discourse, that sort of reverse mimicry was far more menacing than the sort Bhabha has in mind” (Victorian Literature, 84). For Homi Bhabha’s discussion of mimicry, see Location of Culture, chapter 4. 3 Macleod, “Cross-Cultural,” 64, 66. 4 Longer, Red Coats, 117. 5 Colley, Captives, 270. 6 Brendon, Decline and Fall, 128. 7 Garber, Vested Interests, 6. 8 The locus classicus for postcolonial theory’s argument that hybridity subverts the imperial imagination is Bhabha’s “Signs Taken for Wonders” (Location 145–74). Bhabha’s thesis remains enormously influential, though several critics have cautioned against ascribing too much disruptive power to hybridity, or have called at least for greater specificity in analyses of the particular contexts in which hybridity occurs. As Diana Fuss has argued, for instance, “Keeping in mind the power relations involved, there may be little if anything subversive in cross-cultural impersonations that work in the service of colonial imperialism. When we take into account multiple axes of difference that cross-cut, interfere with, and mutually constitute each other, the dream of a playful mimesis cannot be so easily or immediately recuperated for a progressive politics” (Identification Papers, 148). Other scholars who have explored the continuity of imperial power and hybridity include Dawson, Low, and Robert J. C. Young, all of whom are further discussed in this chapter. Two additional works that have informed my argument are

Notes to pages 57–66

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McBratney’s Imperial Subjects and Kaja Silverman’s “White Skin,” though both argue that imperial hybridity operates in much narrower circumstances than I propose. McBratney’s analysis of Kipling limits the acceptability of hybridity to carefully circumscribed “felicitous spaces” and to the special prerogatives of the native-born white creole, whereas Silverman’s psychoanalytic interpretation of Lawrence’s cross-dressing depends in important ways on his homosexuality. I argue that late nineteenth-century revisions of masculinity make forms of hybridity more broadly appealing than these insightful studies suggest. 9 Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, 11. 10 See Beerbohm’s satirical “Defence of Cosmetics” (1894) for his observation that the “Victorian era comes to its end and the day of sancta simplicitas is quite ended” (48). Wilde’s famous mask paradox appeared in “The Critic as Artist” (1891): “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth” (Intentions, 167). 11 Breward, Hidden Consumer, 258. 12 Quoted in Breward, Hidden Consumer, 261. 13 Mason, Four Feathers, 7. Further page references to the novel are given parenthetically. 14 Smiles, Self-Help, 366. 15 Smiles, Self-Help, 364. 16 Smiles, Self-Help, 369. 17 Smiles, Self-Help, 285. 18 Trollope, Warden, 213. 19 Trollope, Warden, 215. 20 The extent of the Order of the White Feather’s influence on the home front has long been underestimated, in part because of Virginia Woolf ’s dismissive impressions of it. For a fuller account, see Will Ellsworth-Jones’s We Will Not Fight (46–53) and Nicoletta F. Gullace’s “White Feathers,” both of which point to Mason’s novel as a direct inspiration for the movement. 21 Said, Orientalism, 63. 22 Dawson, Soldier Heroes, 186. 23 Low, White Skins, 232–33. 24 Tosh has made this broader point when reviewing the two chief ways historians have considered the relationship of masculinity and the New Imperialism: The first or “weak” argument is that a heightened awareness of opportunities and threats overseas induced a harsher definition of masculinity at home; if the empire was in danger, men must be produced who were tough, realistic, unsqueamish and stoical . . . The second or “strong” argument reverses the relationship between imperialism and masculinity by locating the primary sense of crisis, not in the empire, but in the pattern of gender relations within Britain itself. According to this perspective, enthusiasm for the empire at the end of the century was a symptom of masculine insecurity within Britain. Anxieties which had their root at home could be displaced onto the empire as a site of unqualified masculinity, and both career choices

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Notes to pages 68–84

and ideological loyalties were influenced as a result. Tosh concludes that, “paradoxically, both of these dynamics were working at once” (Manliness and Masculinities, 193–94). 25 Henty, Dash for Khartoum, 109. Further page references to the novel are given parenthetically. 26 Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, 70. 27 The term Kaiser-i-Hind was invented for the occasion, but thought appropriate because it was “thoroughly familiar to the Oriental mind” (Cohn, “Representing Authority,” 201). Nevertheless, one contemporary critic of the term, Mir Aulad Ali, professor of Arabic and Urdu at Trinity College, Dublin, suggested it was a bungled case of cross-dressing because it implied “the picture of a European lady, attired partly in the Arab, partly in the Persian garment peculiar to men, and wearing upon her head an Indian turban” (Cohn, “Representing Authority,” 202). For an examination of the Royal Titles Act controversy as a watershed moment in Victorian political theatricality, see Lynn M. Voskuil’s Acting Naturally, chapter 4. 28 Cohn, “Representing Authority,” 165. 29 Quoted in Jenkins, Disraeli, 123. 30 Cohn, “Representing Authority,” 187–88. 31 Cohn, “Representing Authority,” 208. 32 Lugard, Dual Mandate, 211. 33 Vetch, “Lockhart,” 109. 34 Ollivant, “England’s Indian Army,” 28. 35 “Character Sketch,” 375. 36 Lawrence, “Twenty-Seven Articles,” 466. 37 “Did We Hit on the Right Method?” The Spectator 97 (July–December 1901): 657. 38 Ibid. 39 Hobson described this popular return to savagery during the Boer War as a characteristic manifestation of jingoism: When the policy of wholesale devastation carried out by British troops over large districts, the burning of farms, looting of cattle, cutting down of fruit trees, and breaking of dams is announced to the nation, it awakes in the mob-mind no other feeling than one of grim satisfaction, expressed by the usual comment, “Serve them right; they shouldn’t have begun the war!” No shame whatever is felt for the wanton and futile brutality of such a course, for the flagrant breaches of the very canons of “civilized warfare” which we as a nation had imposed upon the Conferences of the Powers – nothing but a chuckle of savage satisfaction in the common man, a brief irrelevant, “Yes, war is brutal!” in the more “civilized” Jingo! (Psychology, 36).

40 Kipling, “Taking of Lungtungpen,” in Plain Tales, 112. Further page references to the story are given parenthetically. 41 Hansard Parliamentary Debates H. L. 5 February 1880, 3rd ser., vol. 250, cols. 36, 49. 42 Young, Colonial Desire, 27, 25.

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3 Piracy, play, and the boys who wouldn’t grow up “B-P, Our Chief of Boys,” The Children’s Newspaper (16 June 1938): 8. Menpes and Menpes, War Impressions, 105. Forster, “Boy Who Never Grew Up,” 7; Conrad, Set of Six, ix. Darton, Children’s Books in England; Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, 37; Doyle, Lost World, ii. 5 Bristow, Empire Boys, 41. 6 Rose, Case of Peter Pan, 57. 7 Sarah Suleri contends that the “atrophic adolescence” of imperial discourse is symptomatic of a “temporal derangement dictated by [colonialism’s] abnegation of chronology” (Rhetoric, 113). Similarly, Jed Esty has suggested that the inability of late Victorian writers to produce a proper Bildungsroman instead of “colonial novels of frozen youth” follows from a structural contradiction in which a progressive imperial ethos of modernization was confronted by the facts of uneven development in the colonies (“Colonial Bildungsroman,” 423). Another tradition reads arrested boyhood in this era as a function of the psychosexual development or family histories of individual writers; I have not followed this tradition here because I believe the ubiquity of the trope demands a wider cultural and political explanation, but, for more, see Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, Jonathan Rutherford’s Forever England, and Diane Simmons’s Narcissism of Empire. 8 Barrie, Peter and Wendy, 226. 9 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 216. 10 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 221. 11 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 216. 12 Bivona, British Imperial Literature, 18. 13 For an overview of the many competing rhetorics of play, see Brian SuttonSmith’s The Ambiguity of Play. Matthew Kaiser’s “World in Play” helpfully adapts Sutton-Smith’s taxonomy to demonstrate the complexity of play in Victorian thought. 14 Even instrumentalist pedagogical theories valued play so highly that it becomes an end as well as a means. Karl Groos writes that “work [may] become like play when its real aim is superseded by enjoyment of the activity itself. And it can hardly be doubted that this is the highest end and noblest form of work” (Play of Man, 400). H. Caldwell Cook similarly blurs the line between work and play: “It is the core of my faith that the only work worth doing is really play. . .The Play Way is a means, but I cannot say what the end might be, except more play” (Play Way, 4). 15 Nadel, “Mansion of Bliss,” 32. 16 Spencer, Principles of Psychology, 631. 17 Ruskin, Crown of Wild Olive, 124. 18 Kipling, Kim, 51. 19 Mangan, Games Ethic, 43. 20 Daily News, 18 July 1879: 4. 1 2 3 4

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Notes to pages 90–104

Daily News, 18 July 1879: 5. Daily News, 18 July 1879: 4. Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 174. Dickens, “Perils,” 237. Dickens, “Perils,” 213. Ballantyne, Coral Island, 263. Later editions were published under the title Jack Rushton; or, Alone in the Pirates’ Lair. Stevens, Jack Rushton, 2–3. 28 Bristow, Empire Boys, 36–37. 29 Stevenson, Treasure Island, 5–6. Further page references to the novel are given parenthetically. 30 Quoted in Maixner, Robert Louis Stevenson, 142. 31 Simmons, Narcissism of Empire, 46, 47. 32 Carpenter, Desert Isles, 90. 33 Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque, 24. 34 Stevenson, Letters, 365. 35 Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque, 224. 36 Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque, 215. 37 Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque, 217–18. 38 Sutton-Smith, Ambiguity of Play, 74–76. 39 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 6. 40 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 10. 41 Boys and Their Ways, 89–90. 42 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 12. 43 Captain Black appears in Pemberton’s bestselling The Iron Pirate, and Doyle’s Captain Sharkey in a series of stories collected in The Green Flag. For more on Treasure Island’s influence on later pirate stories, see Carpenter, Desert Isles, 83–90. 44 Noyes, Drake, 12. 45 Griffith, Men Who Have Made, 4, 6. 46 Conrad, Lord Jim, 213. Further page references to the novel are given parenthetically. 47 On the relationship of Conrad to popular adventure fiction, see Andrea White’s Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition, Linda Dryden’s Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance, and Andrzej Gasiorek’s “To Season with a Pinch of Romance.” 48 Andrew Roberts, Conrad and Masculinity, 3. 49 Modern discussions of the contrast between guilt and shame as cultural phenomena were inaugurated by Ruth Benedict’s insightful but problematic study of Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, but there are similar distinctions evident in Victorian culture, as in Charles Darwin’s Expression of Emotions (chapter 13). 50 Patmore, Angel in the House, 133. 51 For a longer discussion of the importance of theatricality in Conrad’s representation of masculinity, see Thomas Strychacz’s Dangerous Masculinities. 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Notes to pages 106–22

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52 See for example Andrew Roberts’s Conrad and Masculinity and Kucich’s Imperial Masochism. 53 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 12. 54 Conrad, Letters, 210. 55 Bisset, Short History, 12. 56 Quoted in Harding, War in South Africa, 354. 57 Corbet, “A Pirate Empire,” 477. 58 Westlake, Transvaal War, 21, 6. 59 Westlake, Transvaal War, 20. 60 “The Pirate Empire,” Punch 117 (13 September 1899): 123. 61 MacDonald, Sons of the Empire, 80. 62 Boehmer, “Introduction,” in Baden-Powell, Scouting, xxvi. 63 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 190. 4 In statu pupillari: schoolboys, savages, and colonial authority 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

Cromer, Political and Literary, 12–13. Cromer, Political and Literary, 5. Cromer, Political and Literary, 13. Cromer, Political and Literary, 25. For an analysis of the political struggles over the curriculum of Indian education in the early nineteenth century, see Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, 23–44. Mill, On Liberty, 103. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 32, 199. Cromer, Political and Literary, 43. Cromer, Political and Literary, 26–27. Hobson, Imperialism, 122. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 122–23. Curzon, Lord Curzon, 6. Richards, “Introduction,” 7. Noting this intensifying association of boys and savages, especially in the late nineteenth-century discourse of adolescence, Don Randall argues that boyhood was used to negotiate concepts of cultural hybridity: “‘adolescence’ is a site of discourse where Western civilization meets savagery, where European nations discover their relation to more ‘primitive’ societies” (Kipling’s Imperial Boy, 11). Pullen, Fight at Dame Europa’s School, 17. Pullen, Fight at Dame Europa’s School, 23. Pullen, Fight at Dame Europa’s School, 24. Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days, xxxii. Further page references to the novel are given parenthetically. Jenny Holt has argued that school stories in general “tackled ideas of appropriate adolescent education in terms of training for citizenship and statesmanship” (Public School Literature, 4). In her reading of Tom Brown, the hero’s maturation is a movement toward appropriate male citizenship in a broader society that is

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Notes to pages 122–33

likewise changing. Jeffrey Richards’s reading, which suggests an imperial parallel rather than a domestic one, is a step closer to the one I offer here; he comments that the structure of the school mirrors imperial hierarchies, so that Rugby becomes “a model for future imperial rule, a model which was indeed followed, so that in looking back we can see that all relationships between officers and men, rulers and ruled, can be construed in the mould of teachers, prefects and fags, with the empire as Eton, Harrow and Rugby writ large” (Happiest Days, 50). 20 Hughes distorts the educational priorities of the actual Thomas Arnold in several significant ways, most notably in suggesting that Arnold cared for athletic games as much as intellectual rigor. But Hughes’s imperial allegory is not entirely absent from the real Arnold’s understanding of Rugby. In 1842, for instance, he preached to his students that “Whatever of striking good or evil that happens in any part of the wide range of English dominion, declares upon what important scenes some of you may be called upon to enter” (Arnold, Christian Life, 398). Arnold’s first biographer observed that “he governed the school precisely on the same principles as he would have governed a great empire” (Stanley, Life and Correspondence, 69). On the real Arnold’s understanding of masculinity, see Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, 61–75. 21 Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, 44. 22 Macaulay, Prose and Poetry, 729. 23 Quoted in Richards, Visions, 47. 24 See Holt, Public School Literature, 52–53. 25 For a wider consideration of the ways in which midcentury masculinity drew upon feminine qualities, see Nelson, Boys Will Be Girls. 26 Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford, 170. 27 Farrar, Eric, 202. Further page references to the novel are given parenthetically. 28 Farrar, “Aptitudes,” 116, 120. 29 Bristow, Empire Boys, 74. 30 Nelson, Boys Will Be Girls, 51. 31 Lunn, Harrovians, 48. 32 For more on recapitulation theory, see Randall, Kipling’s Imperial Boy, 9–11, MacDonald, Sons of the Empire, 132–35, Straley, “Of Beasts and Boys,” and Rader, “Recapitulation Theory.” 33 G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, i: 44. 34 Forbush, Boy Problem, 11–13. 35 Forbush, Boy Problem, 15. 36 Forbush, Boy Problem, 9. 37 Hobson, Imperialism, 217. 38 Kipling, Something of Myself, 134. 39 Quigly, Heirs of Tom Brown, 116. 40 Buchanan, “Voice,” 783, 778. 41 Buchanan, “Voice,” 789. 42 Buchanan, “Voice,” 777, 789. 43 Wells, Outline, 958.

Notes to pages 133–48

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44 Buchanan, “Voice,” 786. 45 Quoted in Roger Lancelyn Green, Critical Heritage, 230. Interestingly, a more positive review published on the same day begins by praising Kipling’s appeal to a masculine audience in which boyhood and adulthood are blurred together: “Most English boys – and most Englishmen who have anything of the boy still in them – will rejoice in Stalky & Co.” (Critical Heritage, 226). 46 Kipling, Stalky & Co., 39. Further page references to the novel are given parenthetically. 47 The importance of local knowledge is demonstrated in Kipling’s Indian tales through the recurring character Strickland, the effective colonial policeman, and obvious point of comparison with Stalky; in a later story, “A Deal in Cotton” (in Actions and Reactions) the two characters are shown to be friends. But the two differ in their degree of identification with Indians. For instance, both are occasional cultural cross-dressers, but Strickland wears native clothes only as a disguise, whereas Stalky does so by choice as an expression of affinity. Strickland inspires nothing like the kind of devotion and affection from Indians that Stalky enjoys. 48 Bhabha, Location, 135. 49 Littlewood, Idea of Japan, 17. 50 Quoted in Searle, Quest, 58. 51 Meath, Thoughts, 94. 52 Meath, Thoughts, 94. 53 Meath, Thoughts, 95. 54 Lunn, Harrovians, 216. Further page references to the novel are given parenthetically. 55 Quigly has made a similar point: “The ‘bushido’ which appears to fascinate Lunn seems, in Peter, a mixture of one-upmanship and pride, a determination not to let anyone get the better of him under any circumstances, or see that he is hurt, physically or in his feelings. It is concerned, above all, with ‘face’ in the oriental sense, face that he must not lose before others or before himself ” (Heirs of Tom Brown, 160). 56 Nitobé, Bushido, 8. 5 Barbarism and the lost worlds of masculinity 1 2 3 4 5 6

Millin, Cecil Rhodes, 165, 242. Stead, Last Will, 39. Quoted in Channing, “Sir Henry,” 968. Chesterton, Miscellany, 242–44. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 29. As I will suggest here, the “lost race” category places too limiting an emphasis on race as the governing concern of these stories, since race itself becomes so permeable a distinction. By substituting “world” for “race,” I want to draw attention to the geographical and temporal dimensions of the setting as more crucial characteristics. Little critical attention has been given to the genre; one

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exception is Carter F. Hanson’s “Lost Among White Others,” though he limits his discussion to novels produced primarily for a juvenile audience, and considers only those in which the rediscovered lost race is white. While I concur with his general point that these stories confront fears of degeneration with fantasies of imperial permanence, my account of the celebration of barbarous masculinity as a mechanism of imperial power differs markedly, as does the extent to which I argue that these stories accept non-white and non-British men as models. 7 Haggard, Allan Quatermain, 10. 8 Haggard, Allan Quatermain, 12. 9 See McClintock’s Imperial Leather for an influential statement of this case. 10 Said, Culture and Imperialism, xi. 11 Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, 10. 12 For early examples of this reading, see Jeffrey Myers’s “Idea of Moral Authority” and Paul Fussell’s “Irony, Freemasonry.” More recently, critics have been inclined to see, at the very least, a disillusioning ambivalence about empire. Christopher Lane, for instance, argues that Kipling’s story “clarifies how barbarism is central to every imperial project” (Ruling Passion, 27), and thereby destabilizes the distinctions necessary to colonialism. As I argue here, however, neither barbarism nor unstable distinctions are necessarily crippling to New Imperialist fantasy. 13 In fact, Dravot and Carnehan seem to be modeled on real men whom Kipling admired. Martin Green has suggested that Dravot and Carnehan might in fact be read as caricatures of Rhodes and Leander Starr Jameson (Dreams, 284), who would later lead the disastrous Jameson Raid. The historical figure on whom their conquest of Kafiristan is more explicitly modeled, though, is James Brooke, who ruled Sarawak under the title of Rajah from 1842 to 1868 and became a model of the imperial adventurer. 14 Kipling, “Man Who Would Be King,” 226. Further page references to this story are given parenthetically. 15 On Kipling’s use of ethnographical sources in this story, see Edward Marx’s “How We Lost Kafiristan.” 16 Macaulay, Prose and Poetry, 723. 17 On the gendered iconography of British reactions to the Sepoy Rebellion, see Brantlinger’s Rule of Darkness (199–224) and Sharpe’s Allegories of Empire (57–82). 18 Sussman, Victorian Masculinities, 3. 19 Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, 2. 20 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have clarified how “the Christian middle-class man” had to be distinguished from eighteenth-century models of masculinity associated with the gentry: “Many of the values associated with evangelical Christianity . . . ran counter to the worldly assumptions and pursuits of the gentry. Masculine nature, in gentry terms, was based on sport and codes of honour derived from military prowess” (Family Fortunes, 110). Many of these older masculine traits enjoy a resurgence in lost world fiction, where, in fact, it is not uncommon for aristocratic characters to take more readily to a manliness coded as “primitive.”

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21 George W. Stocking has argued that the growth of middle-class moral codes grounded in evangelism and utilitarianism led to the decline of idealized primitivism by the beginning of the Victorian period: “The Noble Savage, fantasy of a precapitalist mentality that saw labor as the curse of fallen man exiled from the Garden, found it ever harder to survive in the prospective Eden of a civilization produced by the gospel of work” (Victorian Anthropology, 36). Christopher Herbert’s Culture and Anomie adds that the threat of “ungoverned human desire” became a central concern of Victorian constructions of culture throughout a range of seemingly unrelated fields, including economics, religious missions, anthropology, and domestic fiction. Ter Ellingson’s Myth of the Noble Savage, meanwhile, claims that the notion only became popularly known after it was erected by racist ethnographers in the 1860s as a strawman against which they could make their own case for the horrors of savagery. 22 Dickens, “Noble Savage,” 467, 469, 472. 23 Dickens, “Noble Savage,” 469. 24 Lubbock, Pre-historic Times, 609. 25 Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, 108, 120. Further page references to this novel are given parenthetically. 26 Of all the writers discussed in this chapter, Haggard most obviously expresses the belief that imperial heroes could be modeled on barbarous Others, so it is in the study of Haggard that critics have most sensed aspects of the larger dynamic I describe. Wendy R. Katz, for instance, has described the primitivism of Haggard’s novels and the emphasis on “the sheer physical power” of his heroes (Rider Haggard, 59). Laura Chrisman has made similar observations, though with more attention to the context of imperial struggle in South Africa; she, too, notes his primitivism and his vision of the colonies as a site where the degenerate English could be restored by discovering their buried past, though she concludes that Haggard ultimately maintains a “strict racial and national differentiation” (Rereading, 62). In an argument still closer to my own, Low has noted that Haggard sees in the Zulus “an empowering world of masculinity and militarism” (White Skins 35), even though she maintains this fantasy can only be paradoxical and anxious given the “demarcating imperative” of colonialism. Lane, however, has examined the ways in which difference could be erased, or at least displaced. He argues that Haggard can “collapse or postpone racial oppositions by accentuating the consistency of sexual difference,” and that King Solomon’s Mines turns on a “premise of interracial brotherhood” (Ruling Passion, 65). I concur with Lane’s contention that imperial masculinity could be imagined to permit surprisingly diverse communities of men, and would add that this possibility extended far beyond Haggard’s work. 27 Doyle, Lost World, 7. Further page references to this novel are given parenthetically. 28 Sussman, Victorian Masculinities, 13. 29 Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 227–53. 30 Tosh, Man’s Place, 175.

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31 We have seen already in The Lost World the threat of disillusionment and effeminacy represented by the lower middle-class clerk. For more on the clerk as a symbol of emasculation and dangerous domesticity, see Tosh, Man’s Place, 181. Another fictional example, one that closely approximates the logic of lost world stories, is Kipling’s “The Finest Story in the World” (in Many Inventions). For a broader discussion of the rhetoric of loss and decline in late nineteenth-century literature, see Stephen Arata’s Fictions of Loss. 32 Kingsley, Hypatia, 319. 33 David Rosen points out that Hughes carefully distinguished muscular Christians from mere “musclemen” by explaining that the latter did not understand that the body had to be subjected to the discipline of Christian virtue (“Volcano,” 36–37). Adams emphasizes Kingsley’s unexpectedly “strenuous discipline,” and links Kingsley’s exacting demands for ascetic mastery over the body to the imperial rule over savages (Dandies and Desert Saints, 107–47). C. J. W.-L. Wee’s reading of Kingsley’s Westward Ho! shows that even though the novel courts the idealization of the savage as an exemplar of vital primitivism, “the possibly non-European source of that force must be suppressed” (“Christian Manliness,” 83). 34 As Bruce Haley puts it, the “barbarian Willoughby is Meredith’s caricature of sham ‘healthy’ gentility. His health, his athletics, and his gentlemanly manner are all superficial and counterfeit, all external, inherited, and therefore retrogressive” (250). Like Matthew Arnold, George Meredith is thus inclined to regard aristocrats as dormant barbarians, though Meredith goes farther, adding a physical dimension to this association that the lost-world writers will later reinforce. 35 Mangan, “Muscular,” 30–31. 36 Budd, Sculpture Machine, 92. 37 Lang, “End of Phaeacia,” 4. 38 Haggard, Allan Quatermain, 104. 39 Haggard, Allan Quatermain, 63, 22. 40 Ballantyne, Giant of the North, 2. 41 Atkins, Devil-Tree, 146. 42 The “Tyrants” of Cobban’s virulently anti-Semitic tale are the descendants of a Jewish lost tribe in north Africa, who have grown shorter and developed highly poisonous blood. In this novel, the British adventurers side with a group of Arabs to dethrone the Jews, and install as king an Arab who has distinguished himself in battle by wielding a giant spear modeled on Goliath’s. 43 Quoted in Streets, Martial Races, 106. On Roberts’s own stature, see Kipling’s poem “Bobs,” which describes him as a “Pocket-Wellin’ton” (line 57). 44 Omissi, Sepoy and the Raj, 25. 45 Streets, Martial Races, 138. 46 Streets, Martial Races, 118. 47 Wolseley, “Negro as Soldier,” 690. 48 Henry Mortimer Durand, Life of Lyall, 264. 49 Stephen, Liberty, 199.

Notes to pages 165–75

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50 Tylor, Primitive Culture, 21. Further page references to Tylor’s book are given parenthetically. 51 Fabian, Time and the Other, 26–27. 52 My sense of Tylor’s project inclines toward Herbert’s opinion that the complexities of late Victorian evolutionary anthropology have been too easily dismissed. As he writes, “Primitives, cannibals, mudcaked savages are not aliens, not irretrievably estranged from us, not the Other, Tylor declares: they are ourselves” (“Epilogue,” 491). 53 Donnelly, Atlantis, 479. 54 Smeaton, “The Mystery: Easter Island,” 31. 55 Churchward, Lost Continent, 8. 56 Donnelly, Atlantis, 286. 57 “ A Forgotten Race,” Cornhill 17 (1891): 41. 58 See Haggard’s When the World Shook (1919) and Doyle’s The Maracot Deep (1928). 59 Smeaton, Mystery, 92, 48. Further page references to the novel are given parenthetically. 60 Wolseley, “Negro as Soldier,” 702. 61 On contemporary American analogues to the developments I describe, see Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization, particularly her comments on Theodore Roosevelt (170–215) and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan stories (218–32). 62 Nietzsche, Will to Power, 104. 63 Haggard, Allan Quatermain, 52–53. 64 Hobsbawm, “Barbarism,” 256, 264. 6 Mummies, marriage, and the occupation of Egypt 1 Few notable mummy stories precede the British occupation of Egypt, and of the most memorable of these – Jane Loudon’s The Mummy! (1827), Edgar Allan Poe’s “Some Words with a Mummy” (1845), and Théophile Gautier’s “Le Pied de Momie” (1863) – only the last hints at the themes that would preoccupy the late Victorians. For a different analysis of late Victorian mummy fiction, see Nicholas Daly’s chapter on “the mummy story as commodity theory,” which reads the mummy as “a figure through which changes in the material culture of Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were articulated” (Modernism, Romance, 85). Susan Pearce’s “Bodies in Exile” offers a similar approach to the cultural meanings of mummies earlier in the nineteenth century, finding the mummy as a mirror of modern feelings of exile and alienation. 2 I emphasize the notion of striptease not only because it evokes mummy fiction’s obsession with the removal of veils and the unwrapping of cerements, but also because it suggests a particular kind of narrative desire. Roland Barthes has observed that “It is only the time taken in shedding clothes that makes voyeurs of the public,” and that the conclusion of a striptease, the moment of

250

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14

15

16 17 18

Notes to pages 175–91

complete nakedness, is in fact a frightening desexualization (Mythologies, 84). Although many of Barthes’s other points about striptease are less germane here, his notion of an erotics of deferral coupled with a fear of endings serves as a suggestive angle from which to approach the unusual narratives of mummy fiction. Haggard, “Smith and the Pharaohs,” 3. Further page references to the story are given parenthetically. Richard Pearson’s analysis of Haggard’s Egyptological fiction includes a helpful discussion of the many ways the Victorians linked archaeology – particularly Egyptian archaeology – with “love, romance, eroticism, sensationalism, and death” (“Archaeology,” 223). Doyle, “Ring of Thoth,” 46. Everett, Iras, 2. Drower, “Early Years,” 14. Allen, “New Year’s Eve,” 101. Hawthorne, “Unseen Man’s Story,” 244. Everett, Iras, 77. Milner, England in Egypt, 6, 28. Haggard, She, 142. Further page references to the novel are given parenthetically. The link between Kôr and Egypt has been noted previously, and She has been discussed in relation to mummy fiction in both Daly’s Modernism, Romance and Pearce’s “Bodies in Exile.” See for example Patricia Murphy’s “Gendering of History,” which argues that in She “the linear time of history associated with the masculine civilizing mission is valorized over the nonlinear time conventionally associated with female subjectivity through procreativity, natural rhythms, and infinitude” (747–48). For Murphy, then, Ayesha’s infinitude is a peril to be exterminated. Prominent proponents of the view of Ayesha as femme fatale – either as a terrifying sign of the eternal feminine or of the contemporary challenge of the New Woman – include Nina Auerbach (Woman and the Demon, 37), Patrick Brantlinger (Rule of Darkness, 234), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Sexchanges 3–46), Elaine Showalter (Sexual Anarchy, 76–89), and Stephen Arata (Fictions of Loss, 95–104). Both Richard Pearson’s “Archaeology” and Laura Chrisman’s “Imperial Unconscious” have offered more subtle readings of Haggard’s gender politics, the latter contending that “Ayesha/She functions not simply as imperialism’s other but as its double, antithesis, and supplement” (45). While I agree with a number of Chrisman’s shrewd deconstructive insights, I do not share her conclusion that “Through the figure of Ayesha we witness the ideological bankruptcy of the imperialist enterprise” (49); given the novel’s immense popularity and influence, it seems more useful to uncover the ways in which it became such an energizing myth of empire. Cromer, Modern Egypt, 567. Cromer, Modern Egypt, 391, 393. Cromer, Modern Egypt, 325.

Notes to pages 191–203

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19 The common interpretation of Ayesha’s death as aggressively punitive has been most vividly articulated by Gilbert and Gubar, who see the fiery “pillar of life” in which she dies as the “perpetually erect symbol of masculinity . . . whose eternal thundering return speaks the inexorability of the patriarchal law She has violated” (Sexchanges, 20). Yet at this stage of the story Ayesha is already submissive and hardly requires punishment from masculine authority. In the imperial context of the novel, Ayesha’s burning echoes a very different kind of death, the self-immolation of widows in the practice of sati. Ayesha’s act might thus be regarded as a premature self-sacrifice befitting the stereotype of an Eastern bride, an act of loyalty rather than arrogance. 20 Cromer, Modern Egypt, 321. 21 Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt, 159. 22 Doyle’s “Lot No. 249” is among the first stories to imagine the mummy as a masculine competitor. Both of the famous mummies of twentieth-century Hollywood – Boris Karloff ’s “Im-ho-tep” and Lon Chaney, Jr.’s “Kharis” – develop this competition by pursuing modern European reincarnations of ancient Egyptian women. Other darker tales with Egyptian themes in the 1890s include E. and H. Heron’s “The Story of Baelbrow” (1898) and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897). 23 Stoker, Jewel of Seven Stars, 123. Further page references to the novel are given parenthetically. 24 David Glover’s sophisticated reading of the novel makes a similar point, though without reference to the political situation of Egypt. He argues that in Tera’s story, “the aggression that is suppressed in the Victorian idealization of womanhood returns as an ungrateful feminine demand for power” (Vampires, Mummies, 91). Glover suggestively ties Stoker’s pessimism to his sense of a cultural crisis in liberal individualism and rationality, which may explain why Stoker’s version of the mummy story is darker than those of his more conservative contemporaries. 25 Colla, “Stuff of Egypt,” 74. 7 Fitter men: H. G. Wells and the impossible future of masculinity Clarke, Voices Prophesying War, 51. Darwin, Descent of Man, 689. Darwin, Descent of Man, 688. Wells, Discovery of the Future, 77–79. Parrinder, Shadows of the Future, 23. On Wells’s dream of a future political order, see W. Warren Wagar’s Wells and the World State and Partington’s Building Cosmopolis. 7 Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 289. 8 Studies of Wells’s treatment of gender have been sparse, but on his putative feminism, see Cliona Murphy’s “H. G. Wells: Educationalist,” and on his attitudes toward sexuality, see Peter Kemp’s Wells and the Culminating Ape (especially chapter 2). The few studies of Wells’s treatment of masculinity include 1 2 3 4 5 6

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Theresa Jamieson’s “Working for Empire,” which argues that Wells endorsed a typically middle-class emphasis on hard work and self-discipline, and Cyndy Hendershot’s “Animal Without,” which claims that Wells sought to preserve a masculine civilization against the threat of a feminized, imperial Other. Both of these differ markedly from my argument here. 9 Chesney, Battle of Dorking, 3. 10 Chesney, Battle of Dorking, 61. 11 Darwin, Descent of Man, 622. 12 Darwin, Descent of Man, 626. 13 Darwin, Descent of Man, 631. 14 On the influence of Darwin’s Descent on contemporary literature, see Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots, chapter 7. Beer emphasizes the Descent’s influence in terms of relationships between men and women through Darwin’s representation of sexual selection. Here, however, I address Darwin’s claims about competitive relationships between men. 15 Wells, Time Machine, 80. Here, as elsewhere in his scientific romances, it can be difficult to decide whether Wells’s use of terms such as “man” or even “manliness” is meant to indicate broadly human or specifically male qualities. Keeping this difficulty in mind, this chapter makes the case that certain characteristics – violent competitiveness, for instance – are regarded by Wells as definitively male, rather than, as some critics have assumed, comprehensively human. 16 Wells, “Land Ironclads,” 502. Further page references to the story are given parenthetically. 17 Wells, “Man of the Year Million” (reprinted as “Of a Book Unwritten”), in Certain Personal Matters, 163. 18 Wells, Certain Personal Matters, 166–67. 19 Wells, Certain Personal Matters, 170. 20 Wells, Certain Personal Matters, 169. 21 Wells, Certain Personal Matters, 160. 22 Wells, Certain Personal Matters, 159. 23 The “advanced Liberal” lecture on temperance takes place at St. George’s Hall (now the site of St. George’s Hotel), Langham Place, and the Martians snatch up their drunken prey just across the street at the Langham Hotel (War of the Worlds, 174). 24 Wells, War of the Worlds, 41, 64, 144. Further page references to the novel are given parenthetically. 25 The familiar interpretation of War of the Worlds as a critique of empire began with Bernard Bergonzi’s comment that the novel expresses “a certain guilty conscience about imperialism” (Early H. G. Wells, 134), a reading with which most later studies remain consistent. See, for example, Alexander C. Irvine’s “Disease of Imperialism” and John C. Hawley’s “Fallacy of Empire.” For a similar reading of The Time Machine that also usefully suggests Wells’s indebtedness to contemporary imperial romances, see Paul A. Cantor and Peter Hufnagel’s “Empire of the Future.” Closer to my own view is S. Craig Renfroe

Notes to pages 214–24

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Jr.’s conclusion that “Wells’s novel paradoxically criticizes imperialism while simultaneously supporting the need for empire” (“Wells’s Anti-Imperialist,” 50). 26 Stead, Last Will, 150. 27 Darwin, Descent of Man, 688. 28 Darwin, Descent of Man, 629. 29 Wells, Time Machine, 88.The hairless faces and girlish physique of the Eloi are only two indications that their androgyny leans toward what his readers would understand as femininity. The Time Traveller decides that Weena, the Eloi with whom he spends most of his time, is female, even though he admits he is only guessing at its sex (103). This feminization of the Eloi suggests that the gender problem of the future is not only a diminution of sexual difference, but more particularly the loss of manliness. 30 Wells, Time Machine, 92. 31 Wells, Mankind in the Making, 50–51, See also Wells’s statement to the Sociological Society, in which he reiterates this theme and adds, “Now really it is the better that survives, and not the best” (K. Pearson, “Discussion,” 60). 32 Wells, Early Writings, 158–59. 33 Wells, Early Writings, 188. 34 Wells, Early Writings, 197. 35 Wells, Early Writings, 208. 36 Wells, Early Writings, 209. 37 Wells, Early Writings, 211. 38 Wells, Early Writings, 215. 39 Wells, Early Writings, 218. 40 Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, 81. 41 On Wells’s complicated relationship to Huxley’s thesis concerning ethical evolution, compare Leon Stover’s “Applied Natural History,” which argues that Wells broke from it, with John S. Partington’s Building Cosmopolis, which insists that Wells supported it “throughout his career” (29). 42 Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, 16–17. 43 Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, 17. 44 Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, 18. 45 Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, 18. 46 Wells commended Pearson’s work in Mankind in the Making (70), and shared a stage with him at a meeting of the Sociological Society the following year. 47 K. Pearson, National Life, 23. 48 K. Pearson, National Life, 63. 49 K. Pearson, National Life, 21. 50 K. Pearson, National Life, 26. 51 K. Pearson, National Life, 22. 52 K. Pearson, National Life, 26–27. 53 Wells, First Men in the Moon, 17. Further page references to the novel are given parenthetically. 54 Wells, Time Machine, 137. 55 Pritchett, “Scientific Romances,” 32.

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Notes to pages 224–30

56 Parrinder, Shadows of the Future, 108. 57 Wells, “Story of Days to Come,” 177. Further references to the story are given parenthetically. 58 Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes, 96. Further page references to the novel are given parenthetically. 59 The novel is in fact haunted by echoes of Kipling. The terms in which Graham announces his resolution seem inspired by his earlier encounter with one of the few Victorian texts still available in the future, Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” (64), and the black police troops sing “songs written in praise of their ancestors by the poet Kipling” (251). 60 Darwin, Descent of Man, 689. 61 Larkin, “MCMXIV,” line 32.

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Index

Adams, James Eli, 4, 57, 153, 248n.33 Allen, Grant, 181 anthropology, 148, 165, 230 Arendt, Hannah, 86, 114 Arnold, Thomas, 121–22, 124, 126, 244n.19 athleticism, 87–88, 113, 130, 160 and games ethic, 6, 88, 142 see also body; muscular Christianity; public schools Atkins, Francis, 161, 168 Atlantis, 167–68

British Empire, 8 expansion, 8, 35, 40 as piratical, 111 Brooke, James, 110, 246n.13 Brooke, Rupert, 39 Buchan, John, 58, 230 Buchanan, Robert, 132, 139 Burton, Richard, 53, 84

Baden-Powell, Robert, 54–55, 73, 79, 84–85, 101, 113, 158, 206 Ballantyne, R. M., 97 Coral Island, 92–93 The Giant of the North, 161 Barrie, J. M., 86 Peter Pan, 85, 100, 108, 114 Bentinck, William, 116, 123 better manhood, 4, 20–21, 31–32, 229–31 as competitive standard, 22, 98, 102, 206, 215 as moral development, 32–34 Bhabha, Homi, 52, 84, 137–38, 238n.8 body, 170, 207, 229 evolution of, 186, 208–9 as seat of manliness, 157, 159, 209 size of, 151, 154, 160–62 Boothby, Guy, 192 boyhood, 98, 119, 125–26, 230 and amorality, 86, 90, 95 perpetual, 85–86, 94, 100, 102, 135, 139, 170, 175 and savagery, 90, 120, 129–32, 134, 145 Boys of England, 92 Boy’s Own Paper, 29, 235n.18 Brantlinger, Patrick, 45, 52, 158, 238n.2 Bristow, Joseph, 85, 92, 129

Campbell-Bannerman, Henry, 147 Carlyle, Thomas, 57 Chamberlain, Joseph, 40 Chatterjee, Partha, 150 Chesney, George, The Battle of Dorking, 200, 203–5 Chesterton, G. K., 42, 147 Childers, Erskine, 200 chivalry, 4, 30, 39, 127, 236n.19 civilizing mission, 11, 13–14, 46, 76, 110, 116, 127, 133, 136, 138, 148, 153, 157 see also liberal imperialism class, 27–28, 68, 160 Cobban, J. M., 161 Cole, R. W., 200 Colley, Linda, 55 colonial policy, 115–16 education, 116–17, 123 indirect rule, 76, 125 Connell, R. W., 6–7 Conrad, Joseph, 85 Lord Jim, 90, 101–10, 112 Conservative party, 11, 83 see also Disraeli, Benjamin Corelli, Marie, 192 Cromer, Earl of (Evelyn Baring), 115–17, 171, 182, 190–92 cultural cross-dressing, 52–53, 71, 76, 134 as disguise, 61, 66 as mode of authority, 67, 69, 73, 135

270

Index as redemption, 65–66 see also hybridity Curzon, George, 74, 119 Darwin, Charles, 130, 156, 186, 226, 229, 242n.49 The Descent of Man, 200–1, 204, 214 see also social Darwinism Dawson, Graham, 66 Dicey, Edward, 13 Dickens, Charles “The Noble Savage,” 153 “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners,” 91 David Copperfield, 4, 127 Great Expectations, 101 Our Mutual Friend, 34 A Tale of Two Cities, 33 Disraeli, Benjamin, 9, 11–13, 34–37, 74, 83, 86, 111 Donnelly, Ignatius, 167 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 58, 100, 168, 200, 205 “Lot No. 249,” 193 “The Ring of Thoth,” 176 The Lost World, 85, 100, 156–57 Edwards, Amelia, 177 effeminacy, 15, 23, 30, 38, 56, 121, 130, 214, 228 Egyptian occupation, 172, 174, 178, 182–83, 190, 198 Egyptology, 176–79 Englishness, 11, 15, 24, 26, 42, 54–55, 94, 145, 231 Everett, H. D., 177, 181 Farrar, Frederic, Eric, 128–30, 137 Forbush, William Byron, 131 future war fiction, 200 Garber, Marjorie, 56 gentleman, 4, 38, 126, 155 Gladstone, William Ewart, 9–11, 13, 16, 34–35, 40, 68, 76, 86, 120, 163, 171, 175, 182, 236n.32 Gordon, Charles, 13, 53, 68, 70, 158 Green, Martin, 21, 246n.13 Griffith, George, 100, 200 Haggard, H. Rider, 168, 199, 205–6, 223 “Smith and the Pharaohs,” 175–76, 178–81 Allan Quatermain, 148, 161, 170, 175 King Solomon’s Mines, 73, 85, 100, 154–56, 175, 185 She, 175, 183–92 Hall, G. Stanley, 131 Havelock, Henry, 5, 24 Hawthorne, Julian, 181, 192 Henley, W. E., 21, 39, 49 Henty, G. A., The Dash for Khartoum, 67–71, 76

271

Hobson, J. A., 35, 79, 118, 131, 233n.21, 240n.38 honor, 16, 36, 63, 89, 109, 141, 145 and manliness, 24, 29–30, 37–38, 46, 48, 68, 105, 145, 229 and national prestige, 35, 37, 47, 68, 158 Hope, Anthony, 58 Hornung, E. W., 58 Hughes, Thomas Tom Brown at Oxford, 128 Tom Brown’s School Days, 101, 118, 121–28, 130, 137, 139, 145, 159 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 217–18, 222 hybridity, 52, 57, 79 as imperialist fantasy, 57, 84 Hyne, C. J. Cutcliffe, 89, 168, 192 hypermasculinity, 7–8 imperialism: see liberal imperialism; New Imperialism Indian Mutiny: see Sepoy Rebellion Jameson, Leander Starr, 49, 246n.13 Japan, 140 and bushido, 141, 144–45 as imperial power, 140–41 Kingsley, Charles, 5, 159 Hypatia, 159 Westward Ho!, 92, 159 Kingston, William, 92 Kipling, Rudyard, 21–22, 85, 205–6, 228, 254n.59 “The Absent-Minded Beggar,” 42 “The Ballad of Boh Da Thone,” 30 “The Ballad of East and West,” 28–29, 140 “The Dykes,” 43 “Fuzzy Wuzzy,” 29–30, 37, 62 “The Galley Slave,” 40–41 “Gunga Din,” 4, 20–21, 23, 27, 31–32, 40, 152 “His Private Honor,” 235n.17 “If–,” 49 “The Islanders,” 43 “The Man Who Would Be King,” 100, 150–52 “The New Knighthood,” 39 “A Song of the White Men,” 45 “The Sons of Martha,” 41–42 “The Taking of Lungtungpen,” 79–84 “The White Man’s Burden,” 23, 45–48, 152, 169 Barrack-Room Ballads, 21, 27 Departmental Ditties, 40 Kim, 79, 88 Stalky & Co., 88, 108, 132–40, 143 Kitchener, Horatio, 56, 85, 158 Kucich, John, 40–41

272

Index

Lang, Andrew, 3 “The End of Phaeacia,” 160 Lawrence, T. E., 53, 66, 69, 77–78, 84, 158 Le Queux, William, 200 liberal imperialism, 11, 86, 90, 106, 115–16, 127, 218–19 and progress, 13, 86, 117, 122, 182 and trade, 10 see also civilizing mission Liberal party, 11, 13, 51, 83, 169 see also Gladstone, William Ewart liberalism, 2, 33, 35, 38, 86, 157, 209–11, 215 Lockhart, William, 77–78 lost-world fiction, 148–50, 157–58 Lubbock, John, 148, 154 Lugard, Frederick, 76, 125 Lunn, Arnold, 130 The Harrovians, 141–45 Lyall, Alfred, 163 Macaulay, Thomas, 11, 86, 116, 123, 125, 136, 153 Mangan, J. A., 6, 88, 160 Marryat, Frederick, 32 masculinity and barbarism, 3, 16, 48, 148, 150, 152, 155–56, 170, 206, 225, 228 and competition, 12, 23, 30, 34, 76, 83, 204, 214–15, 229 and degeneracy, 149, 158, 164, 207–8 and domesticity, 5, 34, 127, 158, 177 foreign models of, 3, 15, 47, 56, 62, 65, 145, 148, 163, 228, 231 gentry model of, 4, 126, 246 and imperialism, 1–2, 14, 22, 49–50, 149, 229 mid-Victorian model of, 4, 153, 229 and performance, 53, 57–58, 63, 65, 89, 93, 99, 144 and self-discipline, 4–5, 57, 153, 155 and violence, 154–56, 169, 211, 223–24, 226, 229 see also better manhood; body; boyhood; gentleman; muscular Christianity Mason, A. E. W., The Four Feathers, 58–65, 76, 101 Masterman, Charles, 2 Meath, Earl of (Reginald Brabazon), 141, 144 Mehta, Uday Singh, 11, 117 Meredith, George, 159 militarism, 27, 30, 43, 149, 163, 170 Mill, John Stuart, 11, 33, 86, 116, 136 Milner, Alfred, 85, 182 Morley, John, 111–12 mummy fiction, 172–75, 191–93, 198–99 muscular Christianity, 4, 88, 126, 159–60, 164

Nelson, Claudia, 130 New Imperialism, 2, 9, 38, 49, 54, 76, 86–87, 110, 131–33, 138, 147, 150, 170, 192, 219, 229–30 and Imperial Federation, 45–46 and jingoism, 9, 35 and maintenance of Empire, 12, 14, 100, 157, 175, 185 and rivalry, 12, 34, 140, 158 Newbolt, Henry, 31, 39, 136, 235n.18 Nitobé, Inazo, 145 noble savage, 153–54 Orczy, Emma, 58 Patmore, Coventry, 103 Pearson, Karl, 218–19, 222 Pemberton, Max, 100 Petrie, Flinders, 167, 177 piracy, 91, 100, 107–8, 111 pirate fiction, 89–91, 100, 110 play, 78–79, 87–88, 95, 99, 110, 124 and rules, 96–97, 99, 104 play ethic, 88–89, 97, 101, 113, 134 popular literature, 2, 7, 18, 58, 90, 230 professionalism, 106–7 public schools, 39, 88, 118, 125, 130, 160 Pullen, Henry W., The Fight at Dame Europa’s School, 120–21 Quigly, Isabel, 132, 245n.53 race, 23, 26, 44, 149, 155, 160, 166, 219 martial race theory, 162–63 whiteness, 22, 44–46, 77, 82 racial stereotypes, 15, 62 of Arabs, 15, 68, 163 of Bengalis, 23, 30 of Dervishes, 15, 29, 62, 163 of Gurkhas, 15, 163 of Irish, 163 of Japanese, 15, 140 of Maori, 163 of Matabele, 163 of Pathans, 15, 23 of Sikhs, 15, 23, 163 of Zulus, 15, 73, 154, 163 racism, 14, 22, 24, 26, 45, 49, 77, 117, 156, 162, 228 religion, 13, 19–20, 69, 97, 123, 160, 211 and missionaries, 92, 122, 160–61 see also muscular Christianity Rhodes, Cecil, 51, 73, 84–85, 101, 147, 158, 214, 246n.13 Richards, Jeffrey, 119, 243n.18 Roberts, Frederick, 20, 82, 84, 162–63

Index Rose, Jacqueline, 85 Royal Titles Act, 73–74 Ruskin, John, 87 Sabatini, Rafael, 90 Said, Edward, 44–45, 65, 150 Salisbury, Marquis of (Robert Cecil), 35, 86, 112 Sandow, Eugen, 160 school stories, 118–19 Seeley, J. R., 14 Sepoy Rebellion, 5, 20, 24, 53, 91, 111, 153, 162–63 shame, 15, 27, 42, 47, 59, 101, 104, 108, 113, 203, 226 contrasted with guilt, 60, 89, 103 Shepstone, Theophilus, 73 Smeaton, Oliphant, 168–69 A Mystery of the Pacific, 168 Smiles, Samuel, 5–6, 33, 60–61, 78 social Darwinism, 160, 164, 218 Spencer, Herbert, 87, 215, 221 Stephen, James Fitzjames, 13, 164 Stevens, Charles, 92 Stevenson, Robert Louis The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 58 Treasure Island, 85, 89–90, 93–94, 96–99, 101, 103, 108 Stoker, Bram, 199 The Jewel of Seven Stars, 193–99 Streets, Heather, 162 Sussman, Herbert, 4, 153, 157, 236n.22 Tennyson, Alfred, 23–24, 26 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 33 Thorndike, Russell, 89 Tosh, John, 5, 158, 177, 239n.24 Trollope, Anthony, 61 Tylor, E. B., 147–48, 165–67 Vachell, Horace, 136 Viswanathan, Gauri, 123

273

warfare and military convention, 79 Crimean War, 59, 163 First Boer War, 13 First Matabele War, 51 First World War, 229–30 Franco-Prussian War, 8, 37, 120, 200 Second Afghan War, 83 Second Boer War, 30, 42, 45, 78, 111, 147, 161, 222 Sixth Frontier War, 19 Sudan campaign, 29, 61, 67 see also Egyptian occupation, Sepoy Rebellion Wells, H. G., 133, 138, 201–5, 215–17, 230 “The Land Ironclads,” 205–8, 212, 220 “A Story of the Days to Come,” 224–27 The First Men in the Moon, 202, 219–23 The Invisible Man, 58 The Island of Doctor Moreau, 202 The Time Machine, 202, 204, 215, 224 The War of the Worlds, 202, 205, 207, 210–14, 224 When the Sleeper Wakes, 202, 224, 227–29 Westlake, John, 112 Wilde, Oscar, 53, 58 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 58 Wolseley, Garnet, 82, 163, 169, 171, 182 women and cultural cross-dressing, 53 and honor, 64 and mid-Victorian manliness, 127 New Woman, 6, 187 as objects of imperial desire, 172, 174, 182, 196 as outsiders, 30, 227 as threat to manliness, 152, 155, 177 Young, Robert, 84

cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture General editor: Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge

Titles published 1. The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill miriam bailin, Washington University 2. Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age edited by donald e. hall, California State University, Northridge 3. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art herbert sussman, Northeastern University, Boston 4. Byron and the Victorians andrew elfenbein, University of Minnesota 5. Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and the Circulation of Books edited by john o. jordan, University of California, Santa Cruz and robert l. patten, Rice University, Houston 6. Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry lindsay smith, University of Sussex 7. Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology sally shuttleworth, University of Sheffield 8. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle kelly hurley, University of Colorado at Boulder 9. Rereading Walter Pater william f. shuter, Eastern Michigan University 10. Remaking Queen Victoria edited by margaret homans, Yale University and adrienne munich, State University of New York, Stony Brook 11. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels pamela k. gilbert, University of Florida 12. Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature alison byerly, Middlebury College, Vermont 13. Literary Culture and the Pacific vanessa smith, University of Sydney

14. Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home monica f. cohen 15. Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation suzanne keen, Washington and Lee University, Virginia 16. Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth gail marshall, University of Leeds 17. Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origin carolyn dever, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee 18. Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy sophie gilmartin, Royal Holloway, University of London 19. Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre deborah vlock 20. After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance john glavin, Georgetown University, Washington D C 21. Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question edited by nicola diane thompson, Kingston University, London 22. Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry matthew campbell, University of Sheffield 23. Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War paula m. krebs, Wheaton College, Massachusetts 24. Ruskin’s God michael wheeler, University of Southampton 25. Dickens and the Daughter of the House hilary m. schor, University of Southern California 26. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science ronald r. thomas, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut 27. Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology jan-melissa schramm, Trinity Hall, Cambridge 28. Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World elaine freedgood, University of Pennsylvania

29. Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture lucy hartley, University of Southampton 30. The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study thad logan, Rice University, Houston 31. Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840–1940 dennis denisoff, Ryerson University, Toronto 32. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 pamela thurschwell, University College London 33. Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature nicola bown, Birkbeck, University of London 34. George Eliot and the British Empire nancy henry, The State University of New York, Binghamton 35. Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture cynthia scheinberg, Mills College, California 36. Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body anna krugovoy silver, Mercer University, Georgia 37. Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust ann gaylin, Yale University 38. Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 anna johnston, University of Tasmania 39. London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 matt cook, Keele University 40. Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland gordon bigelow, Rhodes College, Tennessee 41. Gender and the Victorian Periodical hilary fraser, Birkbeck, University of London judith johnston and stephanie green, University of Western Australia 42. The Victorian Supernatural edited by nicola bown, Birkbeck College, London carolyn burdett, London Metropolitan University and pamela thurschwell, University College London 43. The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination gautam chakravarty, University of Delhi 44. The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People ian haywood, Roehampton University of Surrey

45. Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature geoffrey cantor, University of Leeds gowan dawson, University of Leicester graeme gooday, University of Leeds richard noakes, University of Cambridge sally shuttleworth, University of Sheffield and jonathan r. topham, University of Leeds 46. Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain from Mary Shelley to George Eliot janis mclarren caldwell, Wake Forest University 47. The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf edited by christine alexander, University of New South Wales and juliet mcmaster, University of Alberta 48. From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction gail turley houston, University of New Mexico 49. Voice and the Victorian Storyteller ivan kreilkamp, University of Indiana 50. Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture jonathan smith, University of Michigan-Dearborn 51. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture patrick r. o’malley, Georgetown University 52. Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain simon dentith, University of Gloucestershire 53. Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal helena michie, Rice University 54. The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture nadia valman, University of Southampton 55. Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature julia wright, Dalhousie University 56. Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination sally ledger, Birkbeck, University of London 57. Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability gowan dawson, University of Leicester 58. ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle marion thain, University of Birmingham 59. Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in NineteenthCentury Writing david amigoni, Keele University

60. Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction daniel a. novak, Lousiana State University 61. Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 tim watson, University of Miami 62. The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History michael sanders, University of Manchester 63. Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Jane Austen to the New Woman cheryl wilson, Indiana University 64. Shakespeare and Victorian Women gail marshall, Oxford Brookes University 65. The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood valerie sanders, University of Hull 66. Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America cannon schmitt, University of Toronto 67. From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction amanpal garcha, Ohio State University 68. The Crimean War and the British Imagination stefanie markovits, Yale University 69. Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction jill l. matus, University of Toronto 70. Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s nicholas daly, University College Dublin 71. Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists:Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science srdjan smajic´ , Furman University 72. Satire in an Age of Realism aaron matz, Scripps College, California 73. Thinking About Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing adela pinch, University of Michigan 74. Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination katherine byrne, University of Ulster, Coleraine 75. Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World tanya agathocleous, Hunter College, City University of New York

76. Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870 judith w. page, University of Florida and elise l. smith, Millsaps College, Mississippi 77. Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society sue zemka, University of Colorado 78. Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century anne stiles, Washington State University 79. Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain janice carlisle, Yale University 80. Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative jan-melissa schramm, University of Cambridge 81. The Silver Fork Novel: Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform edward copeland, Pomona College, California 82. Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece iain ross, Colchester Royal Grammar School 83. The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense daniel brown, University of Southampton 84. Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel anne dewitt, Princeton Writing Program 85. China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined ross g. forman, University of Warwick 86. Dickens’s Style daniel tyler, University of Oxford 87. The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession richard salmon, University of Leeds 88. Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press fionnuala dillane, University College Dublin 89. The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art: Fictional Form on Display dehn gilmore, California Institute of Technology 90. George Eliot and Money: Economics, Ethics and Literature dermot coleman, Independent Scholar 91. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914 bradley deane, University of Minnesota