Literature and Imperialism

LITERATURE AND IMPERIALISM
Literature and
ImperialisDl
Edited by
ROBERT GIDDINGS
Senior Lecturer, Department of Communication and Media
Dorset Institute
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-0-333-47525-6 ISBN 978-1-349-21431-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21431-0
©Robert Giddings 1991
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1991 978-0-333-47524-9
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1991
ISBN 978-0-312-05312-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Literature and imperialism I edited by Robert Giddings.
p. em.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-312-05312-3
1. English literature -20th century-History and criticism.
2. Great Britain-Colonies-History. 3. Imperialism in literature.
4. Colonies in literature. I. Giddings, Robert.
PR478.153L58 1991
820.9'0091-dc20 90-42643
CIP
Contents
Notes on the Contributors vi
1 Introduction 1
Robert Giddings
2 The Cross of St George: The Burden of Contemporary

Irish Literature 25
Daphne B. Watson
3 Race and Empire in the Stories of R. M. Ballantyne 44

Christopher Parker
4 From Newbury to Salman Rushdie: Teaching the Litera-
ture of Imperialism in Higher Education 64
Dennis Butts
5 Ironies of Progress: Joseph Conrad and Imperialism in

Africa 75
D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke
6 Imperial Integration on Wheels: The Car, the British and

the Cape-to-Cairo Route 112
James B. Wolf
7 The Intransigent Internal Colony: Narrative Strategies in
Modem South African Popular Fiction 128
John A. Stotesbury
8 T. E. Lawrence: The Myth and the Message 150

John M. MacKenzie
9 Cry God for Harry, England and Lord Kitchener: A Tale

of Tel-el-Kebir, Suakin, Wadi Halfa and Omdurman 182
Robert Giddings
Select Bibliography 220
Index 223
v
Notes on the Contributors
Robert Giddings, the editor of this volume, is a Senior Lecturer in

the Department of Communication and Media at the Dorset
Institute. He is a journalist and broadcaster and has contributed to
The Listener, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, and New Statesman
and Society, and BBC programmes such as Kaleidoscope and Bookshelf.
He is the author of The War Poets 1914-1918, co-author (with Keith
Selby and Chris Wensley) of Screening the Novel, and editor of
critical volumes on Dickens, Tolkien, Mark Twain and Matthew
Arnold.
Dennis Butts is Senior Lecturer in English at Bulmershe College

of Higher Education, Reading.
D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke is Professor of English and Head of the

Department at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka.
John M. MacKenzie is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History

at the University of Lancaster.
Christopher Parker is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History

at Edge Hill College of Higher Education, Ormskirk.
John A. Stotesbury is Senior Lecturer in English at the University

of Joensuu, North Karelia, Finland.
Daphne B. Watson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of

Communication and Media at the Dorset Institute.
James B. Wolf is Professor of History at the University of Colorado

at Denver.
vi
1
Introduction
ROBERT GIDDINGS
Conrad saw the world-wide extension of capital-

ism, the antagonism between imperial and colonial
lands, the radical upheaval of primitive communit-
ies, their introduction into the political and
economic context of the twentieth century, the
intrusion of machines into the jungles, the exploit-
ation of the peasants, the extraction of wealth and
its expropriation by foreigners and colonial rulers.
It is a world in which progress drinks nectar from
the skulls of the slain, a world of directorates and
monopolies, ofwars and revolutions for the control
of wealth and power.
(Jonah Raskin, 1971 1)
Winston Churchill once remarked that, although it was difficult to

define a rhinoceros, we would all recognise one if it should come
into the room. Imperialism has much in common with that large
hoofed mammal, one of the species of the family Rhinocerotidae.
Imperialism is difficult to define, but we all recognise it. The subject
of this volume is not so much imperialism itself as literature and
imperialism, for imperialism has inspired a considerable literature.
It might almost be said that imperialism has its own literature.
Nevertheless, it is useful to begin with a few basic principles in
mind.
At its most elemental level, imperialism refers to the economic
and consequent political relationships that have developed between
the advanced industrial nations and the undeveloped societies
with whom they have come in contact. The race for colonies, to
possess in the name of the nation state territories discovered and
1
2 Literature and Imperialism
explored overseas, began as soon as European travellers and

voyagers were able to cross land and sea. The initial tendency was
to ransack the new areas and take plunder back to the homeland.
A more advanced stage was reached when trading began, bringing
either useful raw materials or attractive foreign goods back to
the home market. Settled colonisation was a more sophisticated
development. This was followed and accompanied by the deliberate
searching-out of new areas, competing with rival European nations
who were similarly looking for useful and profitable additions to
their overseas possessions. This involved international friction, as
well as frequent conflict with resisting native populations.
It scarcely needs stressing that there are considerable economic
imperatives at work here. The mainspring of the mechanism is
industrialisation. A nation experiences an industrial revolution. Its
economy changes, it may well be very rapidly, from supporting
the country by means of what it can grow, breed and dig up,
selling whatever surplus it produces, to the manufacture in factories
of goods which are sold at home and abroad to generate income.
The investment of capital for profit is an essential part of the
process of industrialisation. People invest in order to benefit from
a share in profits. Profits are made out of the difference between
the cost of a product (which must include raw materials, labour,
machinery, power and other overheads) and its market price.
Usually, in the early stages of industrialisation, profit is quite
easily achieved, but as labour is required to become more sophisti-
cated it begins collectively to bargain for better pay and conditions,
raw materials often increase in cost, rivals compete in the market
and gradually profits face serious decline. Capital invested at this
stage will obviously yield a lower dividend. The owners of capital
attempt to limit the impact of this development by monopolies
which attempt to contain raw material and labour costs and
minimise (if not destroy) market rivals. If this fails, the problem
then is to shift capital out of domestic industries where profits are
declining and into areas abroad where labour, raw materials and
the rest of it cost less and so afford higher profits. The political
consequences of these fairly unremitting economic imperatives are
the formation of nation states, international rivalries, colonial
conquests, frequent wars, and the dividing-up of the world into
spheres of influence. These developments bring in their wake
certain social consequences, including educational and training
systems to produce administrative and military personnel, banking
Introduction 3
and financial systems, arms-spending and the maintenance of

a large army and navy, as well as a considerable ideological
infrastructure to legitimise and morally to justify the entire
enterprise - in the name of progress, of spreading the word of
God, of bringing law, order and good government to less fortunate
parts of the world, and so on. 2
Although this description may be applied to any modem nation
state that has sought to build an empire with an eye to profit, this
volume is particularly concerned with British imperialism, and
takes as its subject some of the various ways in which imperialism
has had an impact on the literary imagination, with particular
emphasis on literature in English. To what extent has literature
examined or presented the social and economic realities of
imperialism? How has literature responded to the moral questions
posed by imperialism? What kind of myths and legends has
imperialism invoked? What kind of heroes and heroines has
imperialism required? What difference has Britain's imperial experi-
ence made to what gets taught in British schools and colleges?
These are very large and wide-ranging questions, and such a
collection of critical essays as this can only attempt briefly to deal
with a few of them.
Slightly to adjust Karl von Clausewitz's celebrated dictum,
imperialism is nothing more or less than the furthering of commerce
by other means. Looking backwards, a perspective splendidly
encouraged by historiography, the stages in the development of
the British economy, from self-sufficient agriculture, through trade,
commerce and colonisation to imperialism, seem almost a natural
progression. When the changes begin to happen they seem to
happen very quickly, and almost as if preordained. As Ferdinand
Braude! writes,
In about 1500, England was a 'backward' country, without a

powerful navy, with a predominantly rural population and only
two sources of wealth: huge wool production and a strong
cloth industry.... This largely rural industry produced stout
broadcloth in the eastern and south-western counties, and fine
soft kerseys in the West Riding of Yorkshire. This England, with
its capital city of 75,000 inhabitants, not yet a monster but on
the way there, its strong monarchy now that the Wars of the
Roses were over, its powerful guilds and active fairs, remained
a country with a traditional economy. But commerce was begin-

ning to be distinguished from craftworking . . . .3
By the end of the seventeenth century British commerce was

growing faster than agriculture. Between 1690 and 1760 imports of
merchandise rose from 16s. to £1 12s. per head of population, and
exports rose from 18s. to £2 2s. per capita - having grown at an
annual rate of 1.5 per cent throughout this period. Trade with
Europe almost stagnated; imports fell from 53 per cent at the
beginning of the century to 44 per cent by 1750 and to 31 per cent
by the end of the century. The vital point here is the contrast with
colonial trade - the trade with the North American colonies, the
West Indies, Africa, India and the East Indies- which increased
by leaps and bounds. 4 Trade in overseas commodities and produce
was increasing at such a rate that at this period independent
planters and traders in sugar, tobacco, and so on, could get
wealthier than the directors of the overseas trading companies,
such as the African Company, Hudson's Bay Company and the
East India Company. 5
In essence the system was simple, as one example will suffice to
illustrate. The North American colonies might supply Britain with
some necessities, such as naval stores, iron, timber, in the normal
way of trade. Much of this would be carried in American ships.
The rest of the trade was lucrative, developed under the Navigation
Acts, which protected British trading from Dutch rivalry. 6 In effect,
trade with British colonies was barred to other countries; all goods
to or from the colonies had to be carried by colonial or by British
vessels. 7 The gain went to British mercantile interests. Much of
what was imported from the colonies was re-exported to Europe.
In terms of value, re-exports ran to just under a third of total exports
throughout this period, giving British shippers and merchants a
profit of some 15 per cent of the trade. This also encouraged
new industries such as tobacco-curing and sugar-refining. British
commerce was engaged in making goods to exchange for slaves,
as well as involved in the slave trade itself. 8 In A Plan of the English
Commerce (1728) Daniel Defoe wrote, 'As slaves are the produce of
the British Commerce in their African Factories . . . they are so far
a branch of the British Exportation, just as if they were first brought
to England, landed there, and sent Abroad again .... ' 9 In other
words, the plantation economy in the West Indies and parts of the
American colonies was ultimately financed from Britain and gave
Introduction 5
its profits to Britain.

This was also the case with other triangular trade patterns. Much
of the wealth created in the East Indies trade reappeared in Britain
in the pockets of returned nabobs. A great deal may be learned by
pondering this word semantically. In Urdu, the language of its
origin, it means a deputy governor, and when first current in
English- around 1612- it was used in this sense. But by the mid
eighteenth century it also carried the meaning of a fortune-hunter
or a very rich person, someone who had fleeced the Indian
economy. Horace Walpole referred to 'Nabob Pitt and Moghul
Bute.'
The wealth these hucksters brought back with them was invested
in titles, in land or further commercial ventures. This trade in
turn created banks, insurance companies and other financial
institutions, which, in turn, brought further invisible earnings from
abroad. The city of Bath, for example, benefited singularly well
from Indian and West Indian trade, and was the scene of the gross
and vulgar ostentation of the wealth so derived. The novelist
Tobias Smollett, who knew Bath very well, brilliantly castigated
the objectionable colonial behaviour of clerks, plantation-managers,
negro-drivers, contractors, agents and other hucksters in this
Georgian spa in Humphry Clinker (1771). 1°Consequently the colon-
ies, even at this rather primitive stage of imperial development,
acted in the manner of a massive transfusion into the British
economy, which increased trade internally as well as externally:
shopkeeping expanded, assisted by improved transport and the
increase of goods to sell, and there was a pronounced interest in
fancy and exotic goods. The development of the canals and
turnpike trusts in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries not only assisted the transport of goods internally, but
encouraged overseas trade as well. Goods from Europe, Asia,
Africa and the Americas could be distributed throughout the length
and breadth of the country; coal from the Black Country and the
Pennines and the pottery goods of Staffordshire were shipped out
of London, Liverpool, Hull, Bristol. This brought in exchange
necessities and luxuries for all classes. Trade was democratic. In
the Middle Ages Britain's trade overseas had been in wines, spices,
silks - luxury goods for the upper classes. By the Stuart period
bigger tonnage meant that more goods were carried and 'luxury'
goods began to spread down the class scale to the merchant classes
and just below. But it was only in the eighteenth century that
articles of general consumption were brought in to satisfy the

appetites of a really wide market.
To be specific, during Charles II's time the well-to-do drank
coffee in the London coffee houses. They enjoyed fashionable
consumables from the trade in the East India Company's sphere
of influence. By the opening years of George III's reign the British
were drinking tea in their own homes. Sir Frederick Eden in The
State of the Poor or an History of the Labouring Classes in England from
the Conquest to the Present Period (1797) wrote that 'Any person who
will give himself the trouble of stepping in to the cottages of
Middlesex and Surrey at mealtimes, will find that even in poor
families tea is not only the usual beverage in the morning and
evening, but is generally drunk in large quantities at dinner .... '
Large quantities of sugar were therefore needed to sweeten it,
as it was a bitter drink. West Indian sugar was found on every
table. In Shakespeare's day there was only a limited supply from
a few Mediterranean ports. As late as 1700 the British consumed
only 10,000 tons of sugar a year, although by this period they had
sugar plantations of their own. But by 1800 consumption had
reached 150,000 tons. 11 Reactionaries thought that tea and coffee
were weakening the native stock: Jonas Hannaway wrote that
'Your very Chambermaids have lost their bloom .... I suppose by
sipping tea!' 12 The vast increase in British naval tonnage is evidence
of the boom in trade. In 1702 total tonnage was 323,000, but by
1763 it was 496,000, and the tonnage engaged in trade rose from
123,000 in 1702 to 304,000 by 1773. Entries and clearances in British
ports totalled 827,000 tons in 1686 and 1,451,000 tons in 1765. 13
The political foundations were laid by ministers such as Robert
Walpole, who set himself the task of promoting the nation's
prosperity by trade and industry. In the King's Speech of October
1721 he asserted that the aim of his policy was 'to make the
exportation of our own manufactures, and the importation of the
commodities used in manufacturing of them, as practicable and as
easy as may be; by this means, the balance of trade may be
preserved in our favour, our navigation increased, and the greater
number of our poor employed'. 14
Walpole was as good as his word. Duties on the export of
agricultural produce and a hundred or more manufactured goods
were abolished; bounties were awarded for exports of grain, refined
sugar, sailcloth, spirits; import duties were scrapped on raw
materials such as dyes, flax and raw silk to encourage domestic
Introduction 7
industry. Quality was regulated by a government marking-system

on goods and materials for export such as broadcloth, serge, linen,
sailcloth, bricks and tiles. To keep wages low and maximise profits,
wages were regulated by justices of the peace and the combination
of working people to bargain for improved wages and conditions
was prohibited.
The success of Britain's overseas trade is reflected in the literature
of the period. Alexander Pope's irresistible heroine, the beautiful
Belinda, with the assistance of her maid, is rendered more seductive
when decked in goods and finery plundered from the four corners
of the earth:
Unnumber' d treasures ope at once, and here

The various offerings of the world appear;
From each she nicely culls with curious toil,
And decks the goddess with the glitt'ring spoil.
This casket India's glowing gems unlocks,
And all Arabia breathes from yonder box.
The tortoise here and elephant unite,
Transform'd to combs, the speckled and the white.
(The Rape of the Lock [1712], 1)
'Luxury' became one of the buzz words of the mid-18th century,

and a leading topic of discussion amongst the sophisticated. Some
said luxury was a curse which was destroying the very fabric of
British society; others claimed that it was a sign of the progress of
British culture. There is a celebrated discussion of the matter in
Boswell's Life ofJohnson, which records the vigorous debate between
General James Oglethorpe, the colonist of Georgia (who was
opposed to luxury) and Samuel Johnson, who was all in favour of
it. The theme of Oliver Goldsmith's magnificent poem The Deserted
Village (1770) is the social decay which accompanies the pursuit of
trade in luxury and opulence:
Around the world each needful product flies,

For all the luxuries the world supplies:
While thus the land adorned for pleasure, all
In barren splendour feebly waits the fall.
The question Goldsinith poses is how we should judge between a

'splendid' and a 'happy' society. The country he describes is both
a garden and a grave.

In fact the social changes wrought at home were enormous. The
new wealth pouring into the country brought an expansion
in housing and stimulated city life. House-building in London
increased, and by 1760 the city's population exceeded a million.
The death rate was higher than the birth rate until the Act of 1751
regulated gin-drinking; 15 some idea of the seriousness of the
problem may be gauged from the fact that in 1736 English distillers
were producing 5.4 million gallons of gin a year - enough for a
gallon each for every man, woman and child in the country.
For ordinary working people, wages in towns were higher and
opportunities for enterprise were better. This attracted vast migra-
tion from country districts, especially to London. Falling food
prices were an additional inducement, as were the higher wages
to be earned working for the merchant and trading classes, who
now began that characteristic move to the outer, plusher suburbs.
This tendency became particularly noticeable during the mid-1750s
and the period of the Seven Years War. 16
Obvious signs of the new affluence were the increase in tea-,
coffee- and chocolate-drinking, sugar consumption, and the use of
china, lacquer and Chinese wallpaper; the fashion for delicately
crafted furniture, which depended to a considerable extent on
imported timbers such as mahogany (Chippendale's Gentleman and
Cabinet-maker's Director was published in 1754); and the vogue for
painting - Hogarth, Joseph Highmore, Arthur Devis, Francis
Hayman and Zoffany all flourished. This was an age of vast
stately homes, decorated with exotic marble and timber work, and
elaborate gardens, stocked with plants and flowers from overseas. 17
Trade increased at the end of every war, 18 and some industries
thrived in war: the smelting of iron and other metals, coal-
mining, animal-breeding, leather trades, 19 shipbuilding, and the
manufacture of canvas, woollens and chemicals. During the eight-
eenth century there were only twenty-three years of peace. The
wars with the Dutch in the seventeenth century left Britain
triumphant over a power more conscious of its maritime base than
Spain20 and with major influence in the East Indies and on the
Hudson River. The defeat of the Dutch was the key to British
expansion in America, as the French were now held in check in
this area by involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession
(1701-13), waged mainly to determine the control of Spanish
trading concerns. The peace which concluded the war (the Treaty
Introduction 9
of Utrecht) was highly advantageous to British trading interests.

England, in union with Scotland since 1707, was now in a position
to establish naval superiority over all its rivals in Western Europe.
Utrecht gave Britain a network of naval bases all over the world:
Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, Acadia21 (excluding Cape Breton
Island), St Kitts in the West Indies, and two vital bases in the
Mediterranean, Gibraltar and Minorca. The Asiento granted Britain
the sole right to trade in slaves with Spanish America, laying the
foundation for British leadership in this hideous trade.
By the mid-eighteenth century there were two giants among the
sugar-exporting islands, supplying an ever-increasing European
commodity market. They were British Jamaica and French St
Dominique (Dominica). The entire trade was based on slavery.
Typical of the plantocracy as the absentee landlord who lived in
England and left the running of his estate to attorneys and
overseers. He spent his income from slaves and sugar at home in
England. It was slaves who made it possible to replace former
crops such as coffee, tobacco, indigo or fruit - all of which could
be grown on small acreages for modest or uncertain profits - with
sugar. The sugar business was a vast monoculture, a rich man's
crop. It needed huge estates and a massive labour force, based on
very big investment sunk in the purchase of estate and slaves.
Slaves were not cheap, as so many died during the dreadful
voyages to which they were subjected. For example, the British
slaver Hannibal, 450 tons, with thirty-six guns, sailed from Guinea
to Barbados in October 1693 under the command of Thomas
Philips. 700 negroes were packed below decks. The 375 survivors
of flux and pox were sold at the end of the voyage for £19 a head.
The slaves worked in the fields, planting canes or cutting them,
or else in the boiling- and curing-houses, where the heat was truly
hellish. The wealth created by this system bought privilege and
position in Britain. For example, Christopher Codrington (1668-
1710), son of the governor of the Leeward Islands, was sent home
to be educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and was elected a Fellow
of All Souls in 1690. He became a soldier and served with distinction
in Flanders and was made governor of the Leeward Islands. He
was a benefactor of All Souls and left a fortune to found Codrington
College, Barbados. He was a zealous supporter of the Society for
the Propagation of the Gospel, but unfortunately the earliest
manifestation of Christian zeal to impress itself upon the slave
population was the brand-mark 'SPG' on their chests. The fortunes
of the Pinney family in Bristol were founded on sugar and slaves.

The most famous member of this family was Charles Pinney (179~
1867), who became Lord Mayor of Bristol. William Beckford (1709-
70) was the son of the governor of Jamaica. He was educated at
Westminster, became a brilliantly successful merchant, and served
as Lord Mayor of London and several times as a member of
Parliament. He was a supporter of John Wilkes when he was
charged with libel during the North Briton affair, but laid the first
stone of Newgate Prison in 1770. His son William, the author of
Vathek built the Beckford Tower in Bath and the Fonthill mansion
in Wiltshire. The fortune of the Lascelles family was made from
sugar and slaves in the West Indies, and eventually earned them
the earldom of Harewood. They achieved distinction as colonial
administrators, private secretaries to royalty, keepers of royal
archives, directors of leading banks, and patrons of music and
opera. The present earl of Harewood (the seventh) has his own
entry in the Oxford Companion to Music. 22 Clearly the rewards of
the trade were very considerable. These families trace the roots of
their wealth and position to the blood and toil of British imperialism.
We move ironically close to the heart of the matter with the
Gladstone family of Liverpool.
It is very interesting to see how tact and diplomacy have
contrived modestly to conceal the origins of the Gladstone family's
immense fortunes. The Encyclopaedia Britannica in its comment on
the great William Ewart Gladstone's forebears records that the
family were
an ancient Border stock who held lands in the Douglas country.

William Gledstanes, of the branch from whom Gladstone descen-
ded, was laird of Arthurshiel in Lanarkshire in 1551, but the
lands were lost and the 18th century found the Gledstanes
masters in the town of Biggar. One of them, Thomas, became a
com merchant at Leith. His son, John Gladstone, became a
merchant prince at Liverpool, a member of parliament, a friend
of Canning, a baronet and a Scottish landlord . . . .23
Even this glowing resume scarcely does credit to the enterprising

John Gladstone (1764-1851). He was a partner in the firm of Corrie
and Company and eventually became sole proprietor of this
enterprise with extensive trading associations in the East and West
Indies. By 1820 he was worth £333,000, and a third of this fortune
Introduction 11
was the result of investments in Demerara in the West Indies. As

Richard Shannon recorded recently, his Evangelism was here
rather compromised, not so much on the Christian principles of
love for one's fellow man, but on account of the fact that the anti-
slavery movement was powered by the Evangelicals themselves.
While John Gladstone was coining it from the toil of black men in
West Indies plantations, James Cropper, of the Liverpool mercantile
house of Cropper, Benson and Company, was vociferously cam-
paigning for the abolition of the slave trade and calling for support
from fellow Evangelical Christians. The devout, God-fearing John
Gladstone demonstrated how one could keep one's hands on the
goods of the world and salvage something of one's soul at the
same time in his Statement of Facts Connected with the Present State of
Slavery in 1830. He was created a baronet, of course. 24
The sugar industry of the eighteenth century, which brought
such wealth to Britain was made possible by the series of wars
against the French and Spanish fought during this century. The
War of Jenkins' Ear, which began in October 1739, gradually
merged into the War of the Austrian Succession (also known as
King George's War). This was mainly a Central European conflict,
but included some fairly important engagements in the West Indies
and North America. It was concluded by the Treaty of Aix-la-
Chapelle in 1748, which in fact settled very little but insulted the
American colonists by restoring Louisbourg (Cape Breton Island)
to the French in exchange for Madras. In fact, the one really
significant achievement of this long conflict was to intensify the
rivalry between the British and French in India. The Seven Years
War (1756-63), fought in Europe, North America and India,
demonstrated the vital importance of sea power, firmly established
the British empire in India and North America, wrecked the
imperial pretensions of France, and left Spain Britain's only possible
imperial rival. France ceded to Britain her territories in Canada,
Grenada in the West Indies and Senegal in Africa. Spain lost
Minorca and Florida to Britain. The sugar industry benefited from
the acquisition of Dominica and St Vincent. British domination in
India was of the utmost significance. The East India Company,
granted a charter in 1601, had been making huge profits from its
earliest days. In 1609 a new charter was granted and factories were
built at Surat, Ahmadabad and at other places around the Gulf of
Cambay. In the 1640s began the development of the Coromandel
coast, on which stands Madras. In 1755 the area of Bengal under
the Company's control amounted to just 3 square miles. The

governor was a commercial agent and the revenue was about
£12,000. Clive's victory at Plassey on 23 June 1757 made the British
masters of Upper Bengal. Under an imperial edict of 1765 the
Company became receivers of the revenue in Bengal, Bihar and
Orissa. Warren Hastings was appointed the first governor-general
of India in 1773. Between 1780 and 1799 the British were engaged
in a struggle against native resistance led by Tippoo Sultan, which
resulted in a further extension of British control (in spite of French
support for Tippoo). Defeat of the Mahrattas (a confederation of
western states) brought Poona into British hands, and war with
Nepal in 1814-16 secured the northern frontier. The First Burma
War (1824-26), the Afghan Wars (183&--42), the Sind and Gwalior
campaigns (1843), the Sikh War (1844-9, by which Britain annexed
the Punjab), the Second Burma War (1851-3), the annexation of
Nagpur, Berar and Oudh (1854-6), and the suppression of the
great military mutiny in Bengal (1857) all helped extend and
consolidate British power and influence, with constant increases
in revenue throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. 25
In the West Indies the roots of British imperialism are very deep.
By the mid-eighteenth century the European sugar trade was of
tremendous economic importance. London monopolised the East
Indian trade in saltpetre, spices, silks from China and India. Tea,
porcelain, woven goods came within the reach of the common
people for the first time. The American trade was shared by Bristol
and Liverpool, especially the slave trade, which had very close
connections with the cotton trade in Lancashire. In 1771 as many
as fifty-eight slavers sailed from London, twenty-three from Bristol
and 107 from Liverpool. In that year they transported 50,000 slaves.
Liverpool slavers carried cargoes of finished cotton goods to Africa,
which were then exchanged for captive negroes. The slaves were
then taken across the Atlantic, where they were marketed. The
slave ships then returned with cargoes of cotton, tobacco and
sugar. The planters of the West Indian islands and the American
mainland bought Lancashire cotton goods to clothe their slaves
and the raw material from black labour supplied the Lancashire
cotton industry. The whole thing had a dreadful logistical reason-
ableness. The entire operation was made possible and rendered
secure by naval and military might.
After 1815 Britain was fully established as the unassailable great
power, the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum, and Britain
Introduction 13
entered the final stage of imperialism- the search for new markets,
cheap raw materials, and new territories to control.
II
Trade, commerce, colonisation and imperialism rapidly made an

impact on the Western creative imagination. The Moorish influence
in Europe predates the beginnings of the great age of international
trade and conquest, but this had aroused a fascination with the
exotic which was never to diminish. Between 1704 and 1717
Antoine Galland published his twelve-volume French translation
of the Arabian Nights. Interestingly enough Galland's was not a
very strict translation, but one which was carefully constructed so
as to appeal to an already well-established fashion for oriental
tales, and this work served as the great prototype for a vast
literature of pseudo-oriental tales and drawing-room literature.
Galland's version was translated into English, the first volumes
appearing in 1707, and it was frequently imitated and revamped
by various hands. Addison published some oriental pieces in the
Spectator. Once the craze was launched, fuller and more elaborate
versions proliferated. Serial versions appeared in newspapers and
journals. 26 The Arabian Nights was adapted for children as early as
1790 and 'Aladdin' has been a favourite story for extravaganza,
burlesque and pantomime since the end of the eighteenth century.
It was first performed at Covent Garden in 1788. Oriental tales
flourished; Johnson's Rasselas (1759) and Beckford's Vathek (1786)
are still read, but many similar far-fetched fictions set in far-away
places have sunk without trace. Eastern tales and exotic Middle
Eastern locations had a considerable fascination during the Roman-
tic period- there is copious evidence in Byron, Moore and Shelley-
and the influence was considerable on clothes, furniture and
architecture also. 27 Mozart's Die Entfiihrung aus dem Serail (1782),
Boi:eldieu's Le Calife de Bagdad (1800) and Weber's Abu Hassan (1811)
further testify to the continuing interest in oriental colour.
Long before Rudyard Kipling began to mine the riches of British
India, British colonial experience in the vast subcontinent had
made its presence felt in English literature. Philip Meadows Taylor
appealed to a vast readership with Confessions of a Thug, published
in 1839. He was an administrator in the house of a Bombay
merchant and was later in the military and civil service of the
Nizam. He was a local correspondent for The Times in London from

1840 to 1853, and was in north Berar during the Mutiny. When
he retired he devoted his energies to writing about his Indian
experiences: Tara: A Mahratta Tale (1863), Ralph Darnell (1865) and
Seeta (1873) colourfully evoke various stages in the history of the
British in India. They were very popular in Britain, though largely
forgotten now. Alexander Kinglake's Eothen, the story of his travels
in the Near East published in 1844, thrilled Victorian readers.
William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta, where his
father and grandfather had been Indian civil servants. When we
meet Joseph Sedley at the beginning of Vanity Fair (1847), we learn
that he has just come back from India, where he has done extremely
well as collector at Boggley Wallah. Becky Sharp, who ensnares
his heart, has had her imagination tuned up by her reading of the
Arabian Nights. The exotic colour of Boggley Wallah is stressed by
Thackeray:
Boggley Wallah is situated in a fine, lonely, marshy, jungly

district, famous for snipe-shooting, and where not unfrequently
you may flush a tiger. Ramgunge, where there is a magistrate,
is only forty miles off, and there is a cavalry station about thirty
miles farther . . . . (Ch. 3)
Joseph half kills Becky with raging hot curry, but she hooks him
in the end, after the collapse of her marriage to Rawdon Crawley.
The Sedleys' house is stuffed with chintz and richly decorated
Indian materials. Jos's conversation is peppered with references to
brandy-cutcherry, brandy-pawnee, tiffin, punkahs, Government
House, tiger hunts, elephants. George Osborne and William
Dobbin, other leading male characters of the novel, have recently
returned from service with their regiment in the West Indies.
Chapter 43 of Vanity Fair actually transports 'the astonished reader'
10,000 miles, to 'the military station of Bundlegunge, in the Madras
division of our Indian Empire'. Because so many of his readers,
through friends and family, if not from personal experience, would
have had a very good idea of life in the service of the East India
Company, Thackeray went to great pains to get the details
absolutely right. Rawdon Crawley is preferred to the position of
governor of Coventry Island, clearly intended to be one of the
West Indian sugar plantation islands, with a terrible climate. From
here he sends his family shells, cayenne pepper, hot pickles, guava
Introduction 15
jelly and copies of the Swamp Town Journal. When Jos Sedley
returns from India he brings with him: 'chests of mangoes, chutney
and currie-powders' (Vanity Fair, ch. 59). His native servant, Loll
Jewab, teaches his fellow half-European cooks how to prepare
curries and pilaus. It is assumed that Jos made a very good living
fleecing the wealthy of Boggley Wallah, although he dissipates this
fortune in reckless speculation. Joseph Sedley is emblematic of
Britain's practice of siphoning riches from the territories that it
affected to govern, as well as the manner in which the exotic was
worked into the stuff of everyday British life. The drunks who,
turned out of British pubs at closing time, flock to Indian restaurants
demanding vindaloo, passanda, biryani, dhansak, bhoona and
keema before they will go home to bed are involved in a curiously
British social ritual which may ultimately be traced back to John
Lancaster's first expedition for the East India Company, which left
London on 13 February 1601. 28
Colonial and imperial themes weave themselves into the texture
of Dickens's novels, and are often used as a means of bailing out
characters and resolving problems in the mother country in a
manner where the symbolism is hard to misread. In The Old
Curiosity Shop (1841) Grandfather Trent's brother returns to rescue
him and Little Nell by means of the wealth he has made in the
colonies. Joe Willet, the son of the landlord of the Maypole Inn in
Barnaby Rudge (1841), serves in the colonial wars in America and
loses his arm. The imperial interests of Africa, India and the West
Indies are very strong in Dombey and Son (1847). The relationship
between exotic places and money is presented very early in the
novel:
Though the offices of Dombey and Son were within the City of
London, and within hearing of Bow Bells . . . yet were there
hints of adventurous and romantic story to be observed in some
adjacent objects .... The Royal Exchange was close at hand; the
Bank of England, with its vaults of gold and silver . . . was their
magnificent neighbour. Just round the corner stood the rich East
India House, teeming with suggestions of precious stuffs and
stones, tigers, elephants, howdahs, hookahs, umbrellas, palm
trees, palanquins, and gorgeous princes of a brown complexion
sitting on carpets, with their slippers very much turned up at
the toes. Anywhere in the immediate vicinity there might be
pictures of ships speeding away full sail to all parts of the

world . . . . (Ch. 4)
The young hero, Walter Gay, is presumed lost when one of

Dombey's ships goes down on the way to the West Indies. Mr
Dombey is a symbolic figure of homo economicus in his imperial
phase, of the stage when Europeans regarded the world as an
object to be conquered, ransacked and consumed. This was a new
way of looking at the world, and Dombey, in his greed, his
materialism and his ambition, stands as a representative figure of
Victorian capitalism and bodies forth its relationship with the
environment:
The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the
sun and moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas
were formed to float their ships; rainbows gave them promise
of fair weather; winds blew for or against their enterprises; stars
and planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system
of which they were the centre. Common abbreviations took new
meanings in his eyes, and had sole reference to them: A.D. had
no concern with anno Domini, but stood for anno Dombei - and
Son. (Ch. 1)
It is no accident that chapter 51 is called 'Mr Dombey and the

World'. At the moment of crisis for his business, Mr Dombey 'let
the world go from him freely'.
Arthur Clennam, the hero of Little Dorrit (1855), returns to
London after twenty years trading in the East. He is completely
estranged from his own culture and society - this is the price
business has exacted. He tells his friend Mr Meagles that he is
the only child of parents who weighed, measured and priced
everything, for whom what could not be weighed, measured and
priced had no value.
Until quite late in the nineteenth century, war, the basic means
by which imperialism made its advances, was scarcely a subject
for literature, even though it was true to say that there was hardly
a year between the accession of Victoria and the outbreak of the
South African War in 1899 when the British were not engaged in
war overseas - in India, China, Africa, the Far East, the Near East,
the Antipodes. 29
As the century developed, Britain approached the critical stage
Introduction 17
when laissez-faire capitalism merged into monopoly capitalism, and

investment overseas was seen as the answer to the problem of
capital accumulation. Rising living standards and wages, the
strengthening of the trade-union movement (unions were given
legal status in June 1871) and competition from European industrial
rivals made it difficult for domestic investment to yield a good
return. In 1870 the United Kingdom produced half the world's
steel, 280,000 tons of it, and of the 436,000 tons of shipping that
used the Suez Canal 71 per cent was British. By 1875 Germany
was producing 370,000 tons of steel annually; Britain had an army
of 113,650, and Germany had one of 2.8 million. In 1854 British
investment overseas totalled £210 million. It would be true to say
that after the mid-1850s Britain exported capital. It has been estimated
that between 1865 and 1914 Britain raised £4,882 million through
the issue of foreign securities. Imperial borrowing reached a peak
of 67 per cent in 1885 and by 1903 was still running at 40 per cent
of the total sum raised in London for lending abroad. Overseas
investment grew because capital increased as a result of industrialis-
ation, and the funds were concentrated amongst a few people.
The major areas in the domestic economy which had yielded good
dividends, such as the railways, were much less profitable by the
1860s. House-building, consolidated annuities, limited companies
and the retail trade were not attractive to investors. Insurance
companies and banks invested huge sums overseas. By 1895
overseas investment had reached £1,600 million. 30 The Empire
needed constantly to extend itself ('I would annexe the stars if I
could', said Cecil Rhodes). The exploitation of territory abroad
required an army and a navy to conquer and to police the Empire.
The legislative and ideological effects were considerable and far-
reaching.
Edward Cardwell, who in 1864, as Secretary of State for the
Colonies, had reformed the system of colonial defence, refusing
to keep troops in the colonies during peacetime unless the expense
was defrayed by the colonists, became Secretary for War in 1868
and introduced the series of army reforms with which his name is
associated. The governing classes in Britain were shocked and
astounded by the defeat of France by Prussia in 1870. France had
previously been regarded as the military power of Europe. If she
had fallen so easily to Prussian might, how might Britain fare? One
consequence of the panic was the prize of £100 offered by the
second Duke of Wellington for an essay on the subject of 'The
System of Field Manoeuvres Best Adapted for Enabling our Troops

to Meet a Continental Army'. Sir Garnet Wolseley sent in an entry,
but the winner was Major-General Sir John Frederick Maurice (who
was to serve the Empire so heroically in Ashanti, South Africa,
Egypt and the Sudan). The main result of this panic was the
Army Regulation Act of 1871, which abolished the purchase of
commissions; regulated periods of service with the colours and on
reserve, making an army career more attractive; provided for a
reserve of trained and experienced men and for organisation and
enlistment on a territorial basis, to ensure systematic mobilisation
for war; gave the government power, in time of emergency, to
take possession of the railways; and instituted reforms in training
and regular Army manoeuvres. 31
Newspapers, popular entertainment, postcards, comics and
other ephemera constantly marinated the Victorian consciousness
in the idea of war as something irresistibly glamorous and fascina-
ting which happened a long way away. 32 The public were treated to
a range of military displays: field days, parades and demonstrations
with bands, mock battles and mass troop movements (sketched by
Rowlandson and Gillray, and satirised by Dickens in Pickwick
Papers). 33 In 1880 the Royal Tournament was inaugurated. The
element of 'show' was vital, and soldiers continued to wear their
red coats right up to the end of the century. As late as the summer
of 1899 the British soldier was being trained at home in scarlet, but
he was sent off to fight the Boer War in khaki. 34
The Boy's Own Paper used to talk to its correspondents in the
reproving tones of a schoolmaster ('Eyelashes: Leave your eyelashes
alone. Cut them indeed! One would think you were a silly girl!').
But elsewhere the magazine pushed the idea that the outside world
was an exciting adventure playground (as in 'The Fetish Hole: A
Story of East Africa', and 'Up the Essequibo: The Story of a Boy's
Adventures in British Guiana') and projected the armed forces as
an almost inevitable career for its readers. It carried articles about
the practicalities of military life ('The Barrack Bugler and his Calls',
for example) and played up the glamour and excitement of the
services ('Campaigning as it is Today: A Young Officer's Experience
in the Sudan'). It was a poetic and a glorious thing to die for one's
country ('The Powder Monkey's Last Message Home'). Lower
down the social scale, the penny-dreadful market adapted itself to
the ideological needs of the day. There were thrilling yarns of
campaigning abroad, slaying millions of coons and escaping from
Introduction 19
dagoes in the four comers of the globe. Characters in comics were

depicted as taking part in real campaigns ('Timmy, my noble
friend,' said Lord Roberts, 'I appoint you Governor of Pretoria at
thirty bob a week').
Serious, or 'high', art found itself easily able to engage with
military subjects, and the end of the century was particularly
productive of battle and 'historical' paintings which either com-
memorate battles or celebrate heroic deeds. The chief artists
involved were Denis Dighton, Edward Armitage, Charles Fripp,
Richard Caton Woodville, Simeon Fort and - above all - Lady
Elizabeth Southerden Butler, who is justly famed for such canvases
as those depicting the charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo and
the Guards saving the colours at Inkerman. 35 The poets, too, found
their inspiration rewarded when they turned to the battlefield.
Often they treated historical subjects, but Macaulay, Tennyson,
Newbolt and a host of lesser scribblers really stressed Victorian
manly and military virtues, which, it was hoped, were also being
inculcated in the public schools. 36
Two of England's greatest creative artists seem to have arrived
on cue at the moment of Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1897- Kipling
and Elgar. Never were imagination and ideology better matched
to the moment. Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay and educated
in Britain. After his return to India he worked as a journalist in
Lahore and quickly found his calling, producing an impressive
series of stories, novels and poems which seem dazzlingly to
enshrine the spirit of Empire - Plain Tales from the Hills, Soldiers
Three, Wee Willie Winkie, Barrack Room Ballads and The Seven Seas-
the last published in the year that Horatio Kitchener began his
awesome reconquest of the Sudan. 37 Edward Elgar was then forty
years old and in London, living near the bread line while he tried
to make it into the big time. He had earned quite a solid reputation
at several provincial festivals for choral works, but yearned for
some metropolitan success. He had written some very charming
salon pieces which still sound sweet and charming today, such as
Salut d' Amour, Chanson de Matin, Chanson de Nuit and the Organ
Sonata. But success eluded him. He was ignored. Then suddenly
he struck gold: he wrote his Imperial March and audiences went
wild. In its piano arrangement it sold and sold. It was played by
massed bands at the Crystal Palace in April of Jubilee year and in
the Albert Hall that October. 38
It was Kipling who gave us, probably for the first time in
English poetry, the authentic voice of the hired labourer of British

imperialism - not a bardic commentary, but the accents of the
ordinary soldier:
I went into a public 'ouse to get a pinto' beer,

The publican 'e up an' sez, 'We serve no red-coats here'.
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:
0 it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' Tommy, go away;
But it's 'Thank you, Mister Atkins,' when the band begins to
play-
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
0 it's 'Thank you, Mister Atkins,' when the band begins to
play.
And it was Kipling who, in the poem he composed as the crowned

heads, dignitaries and heads of state who had come to Britain for
the Jubilee departed, sounded that note of warning which tolls
throughout 'Recessional' (1897) like a sonorous bell: 'Lest we
forget'.
God of our fathers, known of old,

Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine -
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies;

The Captains and the Kings depart;
Still stands thine ancient sacrifice,
A humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!
Far-called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget! . . .
Introduction 21
At the end of the century, Thomas Hardy cycled fifty miles to

Southampton to see the British troops embark for the Boer War.
His poem 'Embarcation' (1899) is a moving evocation of that
moment, and its insight into the failure of diplomacy to avert war
a dismal harbinger of the woes and catastrophes of the twentieth
century:
Here, where Vespasian's legions struck the sands,

And Cerdic with his Saxons entered in,
And Henry's army leapt afloat to win
Convincing triumphs over neighbouring lands,
Vaster battalions press for further strands,

To argue in the selfsame bloody mode
Which this late age of thought, and pact, and code,
Still fails to mend.- Now deckward tramp the bands,
Yellow as autumn leaves, alive as spring;

And as each host draws out upon the sea
Beyond which lies the tragical To-be,
None dubious of the cause, none murmuring,
Wives, sisters, parents, wave white hands and smile,

As if they knew not that they weep the while.
The whole chilling subject cried out for the irony and detachment
of Joseph Conrad and E. M. Forster.
Notes
1. Jonah Raskin, The Mythology of Imperialism: Rudyard Kipling, Joseph

Conrad, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence and Joyce Cary (New York: Dell,
1971) p. 15.
2. This is of course a huge subject and this brief analysis is obviously
grossly simplified. The reader is recommended to consult Peter
Worsley, Marx and Marxism (London: Tavistock, 1982) pp. 80-3; E. J.
Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969);
R. A. Huttenbach: Racism and Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1976); R. Palme Dutt, The Crisis in Britain and the British Empire
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1953); Richard Shannon, The Crisis
in Imperialism (London: Paladin, 1973); and J. A. Hobson, Imperialism:
A Study (1902), rev. edn (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961).
3. Ferdinand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, tr. Sian Reynolds (London:
Collins, 1983) p. 448.
4. See Sidney Pollard and David W. Crossley, The Wealth of Britain 1085-
1966 (London: Cassell, 1968) pp. 163-9; T. S. Ashton, An Economic
History of England: The Eighteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1955)
p. 154.
5. See W. E. Minchinton, 'The Merchants in England in the 18th Century',
in The Entrepreneur, papers read at the Economic History Society
Conference, 1957.
6. See Godfrey Davies, The Early Stuarts 1603-1660 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1985) pp. 220ff.
7. Dorothy Marshall, Eighteenth Century England (London: Longman,
1962) pp. 16--18.
8. See Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, pp. 272ff., and The Perspective of
the World, tr. Sian Reynolds (London: Collins, 1984) pp. 438-40.
9. Daniel Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce (1728), in Collected Works
of Daniel Defoe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927) x, 183.
10. See Robert Giddings, 'Matthew Bramble's Bath - Smollett and the
Westlndian Connection', in Alan Bold (ed.) Smollett: Author of the First
Distinction (London: Vision Press, 1982) pp. 47-63.
11. J. C. Drummond, The Englishman's Food (London: Jonathan Cape,
1967) pp. 242-4.
12. Quoted in Philippa Pullar, Consuming Passions: A History of Food and
Appetite (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970) p. 154.
13. Ralph Davies, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1962) pp. 26--7.
14. Basil Williams, The Whig Supremacy 1714-1760 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1985) p. 191.
15. See ibid., pp. 133--5.
16. See T. S. Ashton, Economic Fluctuations in England 1700-1800 (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959); A. H. John, 'War and the English
Economy 1700-1763', Economic History Review, n, no. 7 (1955) 17-24;
and R. Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies (London: Heinemann,
1936).
17. See G. D. Ramsay, English Overseas Trade during the Centuries of
Emergence (London: Edward Arnold, 1957) esp. ch. 6.
18. Pollard and Crossley, The Wealth of Britain, p. 168.
19. James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos (1673--1744), who was Paymaster
of the Forces Abroad from 1707 to 1712, made a fortune supplying
Marlborough's armies with footwear. He spent much of it building his
stately home, Canons, near Edgware, Middlesex, and in patronising
Handel.
20. George Clark, The Later Stuarts 1660-1714 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1985) pp. 61-8 and 78-83.
21. A former French colony in eastern Canada, centred on Nova Scotia.
It was eventually taken by the British in 1763. The Acadians were
resettled in Louisiana, where they are now known as 'Cajuns' - a
corruption of 'Acadians'. The area is justly celebrated for its exquisite
Introduction 23
cuisine. The story of the Acadians provided the backdrop for Longfel-
low's poem Evangeline: A Tale of Acadia (1847).
22. George Henry Hubert Lascelles, seventh Earl of Harewood, born in
1923, was a founding associate of the English Opera Group and has
at various times been on the board of governors of the Royal Opera
House, Covent Garden, artistic director of the Edinburgh Festival,
and managing director of Sadlers Well's Opera.
23. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th edn (1929) x, 385. The entry is by Sir
Charles Edward Mallet.
24. See Richard Shannon, Gladstone 1809-1855 (London: Hamish Hamilton,
1983) pp. 4--5. For further discussion of the exploitation of the West
Indies, see Harold Kurtz, 'Europe in the Caribbean', History Today,
XXI (May 1971) 305-15, to which I am much indebted for my discussion
of the sugar trade and slave labour.
25. John Pemble, The Raj, The Indian Mutiny, and the Kingdom ofOudh 1801-
1859 (Hassocks: Harvester, 1977).
26. Muhsin Jassim Ali, Scheherazade in England: A Study of Nineteenth-
Century English Criticism of the 'Arabian Nights' (Washington, DC: Three
Continents, 1981) pp. 9--33; and Christopher Knipp, 'The Arabian
Nights in England: Galland's Translation and its Successors', Journal
of Arabian Literature v (1974) 44--54.
27. See A. J. Weizman, 'The Oriental Tale in the Eighteenth Century',
Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, LVIII (1967) 1839--55; Guy
Chapman, Beckford: Life and Letters (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1940);
G. M. Wickens, 'Lallah Rookh and the Romantic Tradition of Islamic
Literature in English', Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, xx
(1971) 61-6; H. S. L. Wiener, 'Byron and the East', in Herbert Davis
(ed.), Nineteenth Century Studies (New York: Greenwood, 1968), and
'Drawbacks to the Egyptian Style: Thomas Hope Warns against the
Exotic in Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1807)', in Bernard
Denvir (ed.), The Early Nineteenth Century: Art, Design and Society 1789-
1852 (London: Longman, 1984) pp. 54--8.
28. Neville Williams, Chronology of the Expanding World 1492-1762 (London:
Barrie and Rockcliffe, 1969) p. 224; and D. K. Fieldhouse, Economics
and Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976).
29. See Byron Farwell, Queen Victoria's Little Wars (London: Allen Lane,
1973); Frank Emery, The Red Soldier (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1977); Donald R. Morris, The Washing of the Spears (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1966); Evelyn Wood, British Battles by Land and Sea (London:
Cassell, 1915); Joseph Lehman, The First Boer War (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1972); Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1979).
30. See E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1987) esp. pp. 34--55; and P. L. Cottrell, British Overseas
Investment in the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1975) pp. 27-
34.
31. See Frederick Maurice and George Arthur, The Life of Lord Wolseley
(London: Heinemann, 1924) pp. 54-60.
32. See Penny Summerfield, 'Patriotism and Empire: Music Hall Entertain-
ment 1870--1914', in John M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular
Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986) pp. 17-48;
Robert Giddings, 'Something about a Soldier', New Society, 27 Sep
1979, pp. 686-7; John Carghill Thompson, G. A. Henty (Cheadle,
Cheshire: Carcanet, 1975); and Guy Arnold, Held Fast for England:
G. A. Henty, Imperialist Boys' Writer (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980).
33. See Jack Cassin-Scott and John Fabb, Military Bands and their Uniforms
(Poole: Blandford Press, 1978) pp. 11-24; Michael Gow, Trooping the
Colour: A History of the Sovereign's Birthday Parade (London: Souvenir
Press, 1988) pp. 17-48; and Jeffrey L. Lant, Insubstantial Pageant:
Ceremony and Confusion at Queen Victoria's Court (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1979) pp. 201-14.
34. See James Moncrieff Grierson, Scarlet into Khaki (1899; London:
Greenhill, 1988).
35. See John 0. Springhall, 'Up Guards and at Them!: British Imperialism
and Popular Art 1880--1914', in MacKenzie, Imperialism and Popular
Culture, pp. 49-72; and Paul Usherwood and Jeremy Spencer-Smith,
Lady Butler: Battle Artist 1846-1933 (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1987).
36. See J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); V. E. Chancellor,
History for their Masters: Opinion in the English History Textbook 1800--
1914 (Bath: Adams and Dart, 1970); Mark Girouard, Return to Camelot:
Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1981); and Brian Simon and Ian Bradley (eds), The Victorian
Public School (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975).
37. See Raskin, The Mythology of Imperialism, pp. 46-125; and G. A.
Bodelson, Aspects of Kipling's Art (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1964).
38. See Jeremy Crump, 'The Identity of English Music: The Reception of
Elgar 1898-1935', in Robert Coils and Philip Dodd (eds), Englishness:
Politics and Culture 1880--1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1987) pp. 164-
90, and Meirion Hughes, 'The Due D'Elgar - Making a Composer
Gentleman', in Christopher Norris (ed. ), Music and the Politics of Culture
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989) pp. 44ff.
2
The Cross of St George: The Burden of
Contemporary Irish Literature
DAPHNE B. WATSON
Out of every corner of the woods and glens they come creeping
forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; they
looked like anatomies of death; they spake like ghosts crying
out of their graves; they did eat the dead carrions, happy where
they could find them; and if they found a plot of watercresses
or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet
not able long to continue there withal; that in a short space there
were none almost left. (Spenser, 15951)
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder

That you would neither cajole nor ignore.
Conquest is a lie. I grow older
Conceding your half-independent shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.
II
And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with the pain,
The rending process in the colony . . . .
(Heaney, 19752)
Embedded in these two quotations are a number of assumptions

and perceptions which have informed contemporary discourses
about Ireland. Notable among them, though currently much
disparaged by critics such as Seamus Deane and Declan Kiberd, is
the sense of history: the dire effects and consequences of England's
long imperial relationship with Ireland. The reason for disparage-
25
ment is simple and understandable: essentially Deane and Kiberd

are concerned that Irish literature defines itself by an excessive
absorption with Ireland's past, and they blame Yeats, Synge and
other luminaries of the so-called Irish Literary Renaissance for a
situation described by Deane thus: 'We historicize in order to
poeticize, and Ireland, in consequence, begins to cease to be an
actuality and begins increasingly to become a metaphor of the self.
It is a strange and vicious circle.'3 Yet, as his fellow poet Seamus
Heaney says, 'Poetry is a restoration of the culture to itself ... an
attempt to define and interpret the present by bringing it into a
significant relationship with the past.' 4 And, as David Cairns and
Shaun Richards point out, 'The productions of the Field Day
Theatre Company [directed by Heaney and Brian Friel] express the
complementary views that those who look only backwards become
the victims of history, while those who abandon the past become
the victims of cultural collapse.' 5
Heaney's poem 'Act of Union', quoted in part at the beginning
of this essay, indicates an essential truth: Ireland's present -
whether we do or do not accept Cairns and Richards' hypothesis
that, like India, Ireland has had a relationship with England in
which it has been constructed, in Lacanian terms, as a female and
therefore 'Other' subject - is intimately, and I use that word
intentionally, bound up with its past. 6 Contemporary writing about
Ireland, therefore, whether by English writers whose experience
has included Ireland, as in the definition of 'lrishness' offered by
Conor Cruise O'Brien - 'Irishness is not primarily a question of
birth or blood or language; it is the condition of being involved in
the Irish situation and usually of being mauled by it' 7 - or by
writers born in the Republic, or by those from what the Southern
Irish call 'the Six Counties', Northern Ireland, cannot deny this
reality. Further, it is not only the past which, as the Spenser
quotation shows, offers appalling images of 'man's inhumanity to
man'; 8 the present does too. How writers should or can confront
this reality is again a topic which has engaged critical attention:
Maurice Leitch has said, 'If [writers] are to be honest to themselves
and to their work, the situation must be folded away into the brain
for some sort of ripening process to take place' ;9 and Patrick
Rafroidi says, in the same volume, 10 'History in the making is too
full of sound and fury to signify anything. ' 10
Yet Bernard MacLaverty's Cal (1983) and Jennifer Johnston's
Shadows on our Skin (1977), both novels which have achieved critical
The Cross of St George 27
and popular acclaim to the extent of being filmed (for cinema in

the case of Cal, and for television in the case of Shadows on our
Skin), have ignored these warnings.
II
There are two issues involved here, one of which could be said to be
a purely literary-critical problem: can literature which is concerned
primarily with either Ireland's appalling past or its violent present
be properly regarded as literature, or is it merely parochial and to
be judged only as 'Irish' and not European? The other is a much
more serious issue: what is the function of the artist at a time of
political crisis? Should she or he take refuge in the ivory tower of
creativity or engage with the issues? It is a not unfamiliar problem;
the English poet Andrew Marvell, writing at the time of England's
Civil War (1642-52), expresses clearly the temptation of the poet:
Mean while the mind, from pleasure less,

Withdraws into its happiness:
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
For other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade. 11
The poet's desire to 'annihilate all that's made' is particularly

relevant if we compare this recognition of the possibility of artistic
transcendence with Marvell's acute perception of the nature of
contemporary reality, into which he was to go, beyond the garden's
'best retreat':
'Tis not what once it was, the world

But a rude heap together hurled,
All negligently overthrown . . . .12
In the same vein, W. B. Yeats, a poet similarly aware of the

potential and temptation of the poetic dream world, writes at the
time of Ireland's Civil War (1918-22),
An affable Irregular . . .
Comes cracking jokes of civil war
As though to die by gunshot were
The finest play under the sun . . .
I ... turn towards my chamber, caught

In the cold snows of a dream. 13
In his poems 'The Fisherman' (1919) and 'The Circus Animals'

Desertion' (1936), Yeats sums up the failures of the artist:
All day I'd looked in the face

What I had hoped 'twould be
To write for my own race
And the reality . . . . 14
When all is said

It was the dream itself enchanted me: . . .
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of 15
and his desire and need:
Maybe a twelvemonth since

Suddenly I began . . .
Imagining a man ...
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream;
And cried, 'Before I am old
I shall have written him one
Poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.'
('The Fisherman')
Now that my ladder's gone,

I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
('The Circus Animals' Desertion')
Yeats saw very clearly what was happening and what would
happen in consequence:
I write it out in a verse -

MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born. 16
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. 17
No waiting for a 'ripening process' for him. The artist, as both

Marvell and Yeats recognised, is the product of his time, and his
time includes the past and the present. Art for them could not
allow of remaining in Ariosto's, II Penseroso's tower of the spirit;
artistic expression involved confrontation with all realities:
We had fed the heart on fantasies,

The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love . . . .18
As to the problem of whether 'Irish' literature has merely

parochial appeal, this seems to me to be essentially a parochial
issue, in that it is a topic which engrosses Irish critics, and we can
safely leave it to one of them to outline the charge and the defence:
It may be said that Irish fiction in the last 25 years, enjoying

better opportunities and conditions than in the preceding 25, is
significant for achievements in 4 main areas. First of all, it
concentrates on the intricacies of human nature itself and
deals frankly and honestly with emotional matters, rather than
considering the nature and effects of society. Secondly, there is
a more sceptical view of the past based on the belief that human
nature itself remains the same no matter what the period.
Thirdly, the writers have a livelier approach to the form and the
conventions of the novel: structural fragmentation, chronological
discontinuity, fantasy, hallucination - all the freedoms of the

post-Joycean novel- are readily used. Finally, and most impor-
tantly, they have escaped from parochialism in setting, character-
isation, theme and allusion. A prominent characteristic of their
work, as one follows it from book to book, is a movement back
and forth between the Irish and the non-Irish. 19
III
Woodbrook (1974) represents in and through itself a way of confron-

ting the reality of Ireland's past and present, and the nature of a
possible English relationship with Ireland and the Irish. David
Thomson, an Englishman, represents in himself the imperial
attitude to Ireland:
The story [of Ireland's history] was glossed over or distorted in

my school days, as were other disreputable aspects of English
Colonial policy.
The result of my ignorance was that when I first heard the
Maxwells speak bitterly of England I was shocked and thought
them unjust. The most that I could remember was that Ireland
had always been 'a thorn in England's side' . . . . The only books
I had then seen implied that Irish acts of violence were unique
in savagery and that the series of rebellions from the 16th century
onwards, and all the individual agrarian crimes that ended in a
sort of guerilla warfare in Victorian times, were committed
without provocation by a despicable race. 20
It is indicative of Thomson's narrative structure in Woodbrook,

characterised by Penguin as autobiography, that this relevation
appears in part 2. This underlines the impression we have that it
is through his love for Phoebe, whom he tutors, for the Anglo-
Irish estate of Woodbrook, which he first visited at the age of
eighteen, and for the countryside around it that he comes to desire
knowledge, and to develop an understanding, of Ireland and the
Irish. Thomson's right to write about Ireland is an issue he himself
is undoubtedly aware of. He approaches the topic with the kind
of self-deprecating diffidence revealed in the above quotation.
Ireland's past is not imparted to us as a whole; Thomson's
knowledge came piecemeal - through oral tradition from people
who remembered the famine, as well as from historical evidence -

and he makes no attempt to present the information in a chronolog-
ical manner: evidence about the famine occurs throughout; infor-
mation about folklore is interspersed with the Statutes of Kilkenny
and the rising of 1798. The book has been criticised for its treatment
of history: 'Thomson's book is a description of himself in Ireland.
There is a kind of peaceful acceptance of things Irish . . . the reader
can relax and let the book flow over him. ' 21 Equally it has been
praised as 'a brilliantly original mix of love-story, memoir and
history'. 22 Brian Moore certainly seems to recognise the peculiar
fascination of the book: at first and towards the end it is the love
story which preoccupies Thomson and us, but the love story
extends beyond Phoebe to the Woodbrook estate and so to Ireland
itself, and in the central part of the book it is with history and its
legacy that Thomson is primarily concerned. His presentation,
which succeeds in being informative and charged with appalled
realisation, is anything but 'relaxing'. Most effective of all, however,
and most relevant to the present context is his discussion of the
imperial relationship, from 1366:
Irish people living among the English - that is to say within the
Pale - whose status was something like that of the 'coloureds'
in South Africa, were forbidden to speak their own language or
keep their Irish names. The penalty for these offences was
forfeiture of property or, if the offender had none, imprisonment
until security was found, which might well be for life23
to 1592:
It is surprising to know that soldiers working by hand with steel

and fire could devastate a country and starve civilians to death
as efficiently as they do nowadays by spraying defoliants from
the air.... The much-publicized photographs of 1969 showing
American soldiers burning Vietnam villages or throwing the
villagers' stores of grain onto a fire shows clearly the methods
used in the depopulation of Munster24
and on to 1848 and the famine. Citing a contemporary document

reporting the wrongful giving of aid by an administrator of the
Poor Law-
Unless a strict supervision is exercised over the conduct of the

officers ... the relief of distress will be inadequately provided
for. Successful fraud will lead to the demoralization of the people;
unprincipled prodigality will dry up the sources of industry.
These remarks, true in all countries, apply to Ireland with
peculiar force
- he goes on comment,
the most remarkable feature of that heart-rending report is to

me that during its twenty-eight foolscap pages of documents
and transcripts of cross-examination no mention is made of
famine. The omission of that dreaded word tells another truth.
It is the key to government policy enacted by Lord John Russell,
the Prime Minister, who in spite of plentiful evidence to the
contrary stuck to the theory that Ireland should look after itself-
a policy which was the cause of millions of unnecessary deaths.
It was his government that refused to treat the famine as a
unique emergency that could only be relieved from Treasury
funds. The destitute had increased in numbers, that was all; and
incredible though it seems, even the normal financial support
from Westminster was suddenly withdrawn. 25
This kind of evidence, which Thomson pointedly makes politically

relevant, underlies and justifies his perception of, first, the nature
of the gulf which existed in the 1930s between the Irish and the
Anglo-Irish-
Like Africans under European rule, the Irish people had lived
apart for generations. In some ways they were more detached
from their rulers than the people of Africa were. Their social
customs, dances, games, the stories they enjoyed, their food,
furniture, sex-life did not even arouse the curiosity of anthropol-
ogists. Only their music was noticed. By nature, they lack the
spontaneity of African people, the free expression of emotion,
and centuries of poverty and subjection have made them
cautious26
- and, finally, the inevitability of the (then, in 1968, when the

Epilogue is set) 'new' Troubles in Northern Ireland:
The situation in the North-East remains the old one- segregation,

the inability of natives and settlers to live together as one society,
the settlers' fear and their determination to hold exclusive power.
This is now the cause of violence as it was in 1798.
It is as though the whole of Anglo-Irish history has been
boiled down and its dregs thrown out, leaving their poisonous
concentrate on these six counties. 27
Thomson, like J. G. Farrell in Troubles (1970), explicitly correlates

Ireland's past and present with England's treatment of other parts
of the Empire. Farrell, for example, juxtaposes, in the course of
his narrative, newspaper cuttings concerning contemporary acts
of violence in Ireland and items on the Amritsar massacre. Brendan
Archer, Farrell's shell-shocked English major, through whose
astonished and often uncomprehending eyes the narrative is
mediated, is similar to Thomson in status and in the way he reacts:
i.e. he is English and therefore able to view the Irish and the Anglo-
Irish objectively, but he is also affected by events psychological and
physical which he cannot control. By their very inadequacy Farrell's
major and Thomson's personal narrator convince us of their
reliability as narrators and, at the same time, embody a possible
English perception of Ireland and Ireland's history. However the
inevitable detachment, which is an effective device as much as a
reality, is, it seems, impossible for Irish-born writers. 'History in
the making' is, perhaps, as Rafroidi says, 'too full of sound and
fury to signify anything'. What, then, can be the response of the
Irish writer? One response is to use history, or at any rate an
historical perspective, embedding a story of the possible present
in a reality which is documented. This is the approach, although
the resulting novels are very different, of William Trevor in Fools
of Fortune (1983) and of John Banville in Birchwood (1973).
IV
Both Banville and Trevor are, by Maurice Harmon's standards,

more than merely parochial, using innovative narrative techniques
and creating work which has a claim to be critically valued for its
intrinsic merit. For both of them the past is violently present - in
Trevor's words, Ireland is a place where 'the battlefield has never
quietened' 28 - and certainly their aim is to confront the reader with
the randomness and horror of violence as personally experienced,

not simply part of acquired knowledge, as it is for Thomson and,
until his near-drowning at the end of Troubles, for Farrell's major.
William Trevor, possibly better known for his short stories, has
made a point, in those that treat of Ireland, of emphasising how
Ireland's violent past continues to inform the present. 'Attracta'
and 'The Distant Past' (in The Stories of William Trevor, 1983) both
in their very different ways reinforce this point.
'Attracta' is a story apparently about the possibility of regener-
ation and hope, but its initial, central and final image is a recounting
of the horrific story of a twenty-three-year-old woman whose
soldier husband's severed head is sent to her home in Haslemere;
she joins the Peace Movement in Belfast, is raped by the seven
men who killed her husband, and commits suicide. Attracta sees
herself as the survivor of an act of violence in which her parents
were mistakenly murdered when she was three, but her emotional
survival remains unclear: she has rejected all close emotional ties
and lives alone in a clean cold house, a house, as she says, full of
light, but, to us, not warm, not full of life.
In 'The Distant Past' an elderly couple, Protestant remnants of
the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, who have both privately and publicly
retained their loyalty to the Queen and flag whilst living in the
Republic, find the peaceful tenor of their lives and their acceptance
by the local populace vitiated and finally destroyed by the resur-
gence of violence in the North. As they look forward to an isolated
old age they share the thought, 'Because of the distant past they
would die friendless. It was worse than being murdered in their
beds.' 29 'Being murdered in their beds' is not a phrase Trevor uses
lightly: it is a real threat to the couple in 'The Distant Past' and it
forms the pivotal experience of his novel Fools of Fortune (1983).
In this novel Trevor, using a cleverly deceiving polyphonic
narrative structure, renders even more powerfully his motif of
endlessly recurring violence. The story spans sixty years and
demonstrates most effectively the resonance of the random act.
Willie's disrupted life becomes itself disruptive; despite his care to
remove himself from lover and child, Imelda has inherited her
father's memory and is rendered insane by the discovery of the
true reason for his apparent heroic status:
It is considered that a butcher's knife was most likely to have

been the type of weapon employed . . . .
The head was partially hacked from the neck, the body stabbed
in seventeen places. 30
As Imelda reads this, we remember the child narrator Willie, and

the juxtaposition of the two personae, appealing victim and
alienating avenger, vivifies for us Trevor's pessimistic vision of
Ireland and her doomed and doom-laden relationship with
England:
Her mother said something strange: that when you looked at

the map Ireland and England seemed like lovers. 'Don't you
think so, Mr Lanigan? Does the map remind you curiously of
an embrace? A most extraordinary embrace to throw up all
this.' 31
English intervention in Willie's life, whether personified by the

Black and Tan Rudkin who kills his father and sisters, or by the
vicar's daughter Marianne, who loves him, is equally the cause of
disruption and ultimately grief.
Grief, as many critics have observed, is the primary emotion
communicated by John Banville in Birchwood (1973), but it is
significant that the grief is rarely if ever expressed by his narrator,
Gabriel. Gabriel, as his 'mother' says, is a child who never cries;
in the face of sudden and violent death - of his grandparents, his
mother, his friends - he tends rather to 'wicked laughter', the
laughter possibly of the hysteric. Until he weeps, significantly for
Birchwood itself, at the end of the novel, actual tears are left to
others - most interestingly perhaps, to the enigmatic and possibly
symbolically named Sybil:
She fell to her knees and threw her arms around my hips, and
with her head against my stomach she wept, such bitter tears,
such black sorrow . . .
What brought forth that grief? ... I hardly dare to voice the
notion which, if it did not come to me then comes to me now,
the insane notion that perhaps it was on her, on Sybil, our bright
bitch, that the sorrow of the country, of those baffled people in
the rotting fields, of the stricken eyes staring out of hovels, was
visited against her will and even without her knowledge so that
tears might be shed, and the inexpressible expressed. 32
Banville's technique here, using the particular to discuss the general

and voicing understanding through his often-uncomprehending
narrative persona, is his way, one very different from that of
Trevor, of confronting and engaging with Ireland's violent past.
Birchwood has been criticised and praised for its innovative
narrative technique, for its happy eclecticism, which draws on
sources as diverse as Donne and Dostoevsky, Wittgenstein and
Dickens; it certainly embodies Harmon's claim that the Irish novel
now uses 'all the freedoms of the post-Joycean novel'. Birchwood
has been described as a 'Gothic', a 'baroque' novel, 33 but its Gothic
elements, of madness, incest and fire, are subsumed increasingly
into a presentation of the external realities of Ireland past and
present - the famine, the Molly Maguires, the Troubles, the casual
brutality of the soldiery. Its hero expresses throughout a kind of
existential horror at his lack of identity, and the narrative, whilst
apparently about his search for a 'lost sister', is actually concerned
with his search for that identity. Cocooned as he is from the
meaning of the portents of incipient violence by his absorption in
his family's internecine strife (book 1) and by the ultimately
transitory magic of the circus which moves through, and is not of,
famine-stricken Ireland (book 2), Gabriel's final recognition of his
essentially isolated position- 'Outside is destruction and decay. I
do not speak the language of this wild country, I shall stay here,
alone, and live a life different from any the house has ever
known' 33 - expresses in a painful and poignant way how limited
must be the relationship between the son of a Protestant Anglo-
Irish family and Ireland and the Irish.
Banville's obsession with division and duality reinforces the
inevitably transient nature of his hero's occasional glimpses of
harmony and order:
He began to juggle. At first it went clumsily, he dropped the

ball, hit himself on the nose with the block, but then all abruptly
changed, a rhythm appeared, one could almost hear it, like the
airy beat of a bird' s wing, and in his hands he spun a trembling
pale blue hoop of light. His uplifted face gleamed from the effort
of concentration as he leaned this way and that, following a
sudden dip of the block, the wayward flight of the ball, and I
found myself thinking of air and angels, of silence, of translucent
planes of pale blue glass in space gliding through illusory,
gleaming and perfect combinations. 34
His narrator occasionally presents facts as starkly as ever Thomson,

Farrell and Trevor do -
As news of the blight spread, only marginally swifter than the

blight itself, the fields were stripped, and what was left, the
great meadows of corn, the cattle, these were reserved for export
to another land, and trade would not be disrupted or even
interrupted because of a mere famine. The first deaths were
reported as the grainships sailed35
- but Birchwood's cumulative effect is perhaps best conveyed

through its recurrent imagery of splintering glass as one by one
the windows which distort Gabriel's perception of reality are
broken and he is brought face to face with a world in which
suffering and death are merely casual ('The world is full of people,
and how many of them know from where they come? A crack
opens, a creature falls in, the crack closes' 36), but whose causes are
embodied in himself:
God knows what they thought I was, this crazed filthy creature
perched on a starved nag. Perhaps they saw in me a celestial
messenger of hope, anything is possible. I was not grateful
for their kindness. I despised and loathed their misery, their
helplessness. My accent impressed them. Some even called me
sir. Sir! What a people! 37
v
The tragic nature of Ireland's colonial relationship with England
is, however, perhaps more painfully realised in those novels which
treat not of the famine and 1916 - historical events which we
can view with a proper detachment and appropriate, because
undemanding, sympathy- but of today and of England's present
relationship with Northern Ireland. Cal (1983) by Bernard MacLa-
verty and Shadows on our Skin (1977) by Jennifer Johnston are two
effective and representative fictions which try to engage with the
problems of that relationship.
Neither presents an optimistic view of either the present or the
future; as Marcella says in Cal, 'Ireland. It's like a child. It's only
concerned with the past and the present. The future has ceased to
exist for it.'38 Northern Ireland is an occupied territory. British

soldiers man checkpoints and roadblocks, effect brutal raids, get
shot. Both novels present as a 'given' an image of a 'subject'
country; as Menna Gaillie in You're Welcome to Ulster (1970) says,
We know our place, us Catholics, that's why we've the mark on
us, the humility you are baptised into. . . . If you are an RC over
here, that makes you political. ' 39 Here the 'otherness' of Catholicism
and its usual concomitant, an affinity for the South - the free land
beyond the border - is effectively and sympathetically portrayed.
However, as Noel Debeer notes,
It is remarkable that the upsurge of Nationalist feeling is never

ascribed to conviction of the righteousness of the rebels' cause
or to an uncompromising acceptance of the Republican ideals,
but to a renewed awareness of past grievances and of ancient
ways of reacting to the colonial situation. 40
Cal is not a Fenian hero; he is a passive protagonist. Unlike Joe,

the child hero of Shadows on our Skin, Cal does not easily attract
sympathy, although it is significant that the alienating violent act
in which Cal has been involved is not revealed to us until halfway
through the book, lest possibly, as with Trevor's hero Willie, we
lose all interest in him. Like Johnston in Shadows on our Skin,
MacLaverty foregrounds a possible escape from the given reality
in a romantic relationship. That this is the correct description for
the Cal-Marcella and Joe-Kathleen relationships is evident from
their similarity to the archetypes of romantic love: both are doomed,
and in this the protagonists are as much to blame as the surrounding
situation. Love is presented as an isolating experience. Cal and
Marcella, like Joe and Kathleen, entertain, for a consoling moment,
the illusion that their own emotional baggage and the depressing
reality of life in Northern Ireland are unimportant, that the
love-created world can exclude familial opposition and both the
Republican and British armies. It cannot.
MacLaverty's use of Christian and courtly imagery places Cal
for us as victim at once of Northern Irish political strife and of his
own self-destructive fantasies:
He was trying to get close to the one person he should be

continents away from . . . .41
The Cross of St George 39-
He wanted to lie down here . . . and never get up until she

came with her pale decorated hands and raised him to life
again.... 42
He thought of himself as a menial at the gate-lodge to the house
of his mistress. 43
He does not identify with the heroic aspirations of Crilly and

Skeffington, as his thoughts reveal:
To suffer for something which didn't exist, that was like Ireland.
People were dying every day, men and women were being
crippled and turned into vegetables in the name of Ireland. An
Ireland which never was and never would be. It was the people
of Ulster who were heroic, caught between the jaws of two
opposing ideals trying to grind each other out of existence. 44
But neither does he succeed in gaining the kind of unreserved

sympathy we give to Joe in Shadows on our Skin. Perhaps intention-
ally, MacLaverty has made Cal too self-indulgent a victim: 'He felt
that he had a brand stamped in blood in the middle of his forehead
which would take him the rest of his life to purge'. 45
Cal is in fact a rather weak boy who cannot say no to an ex-
schoolfriend who is an IRA bully, and he has what sounds like a
severe adolescent crush on their victim's widow; he is neither
Christ-like nor Cain-like. It is to Marcella that MacLaverty gives
the most balanced and humane comments on Ireland, and it is for
Marcella and what she will feel after the denouement of the book
that we feel real sympathy.
In contrast, Joe in Shadows on our Skin has all our sympathy and
Kathleen little. Joe has two means of escape: the friendship
with Kathleen and his poetry; the parting with Kathleen is thus
tempered. The story is, as in Cal, mediated through the hero's
point of view, but because Joe is a child we are given few
philosophical generalisations about the political situation and much
more precisely focused observation: of how the British army raids
Catholic houses, of going through checkpoints, of living with real
and rubber bullets -
Crack. The sound was near and easily identifiable. The boys
walked a little faster.
'It's getting cold,' said Peter. He pulled up the hood of his
anorak.
'It is/ agreed Joe.
'That wasn't a rubber bullet.'
'It was not.' 46
But far more intensely real than anything Cal suffers in his menial
lodge is the misery of Joe's home, where an equally bitter war
rages between his parents, and where Joe learns to hate the
selfishness and false heroics of his father, while resenting both
what has made his mother so despairing and the protectiveness of
her love for him. Through his love for Kathleen he learns its pains;
his growing-up is evident in this passage near the end of the novel:
The real world. Perhaps it was all the same. Perhaps everywhere
you went people were lost, searching with desperation for
something they would never find. Mutilating themselves and
each other in their desperation. There was no safety. 47
For Kathleen, ultimately the victim of a particularly humiliating

kind of IRA punishment, we feel little sympathy; she has offered
Joe tantalising glimpses of freedom both literal (the trip to Grianan)
and metaphorical (the picnics and teas that form the ground of the
relationship). But she burdens Joe with knowledge he is too young
to bear; for a teacher she is extraordinarily and gravely nai:ve and
irresponsible. And at the end it is Joe who is left to get on with his
grim life in Derry whilst she can escape: 'He looked down the
street but the taxi had truly gone. Carefully, he put the book into
his pocket and started off home to get his father a cup of tea.' 48
Ultimately the image of Northern Ireland which remains with
us is a depressing one, and the most depressing aspect of it is that
the violence is always a 'given'; no writer ever offers a solution.
Perhaps it is true that 'history in the making' offers nothing except
hopelessness.
VI
To return to a point made earlier in this essay: England's past and

present relationship with Ireland has been consistent with a
subconscious defining of Ireland as a feminine 'Other' subject to
an imperious male. Irish writers refer to Ireland as female -
O'Brien's 'Mother Ireland', 49 Yeats's 'Cathleen Ni Houlihan', 50

Shaun Herron's 'old sow'51 - and England's behaviour in the past
has been an abjection in Lacanian terms of the essential Otherness
of Ireland: hence the banning of all things Irish- art, law, language,
literature, naming, games. England's relationship with Northern
Ireland today is sadly similar: wanting a United Ireland is identified
with the IRA and Sinn Fein; it therefore involves identifying
Catholicism with violence, and politicising what need not necess-
arily be political.
Every night on our TV screens, it seems, we see the familiar
shape of Ireland - a tricolour of green, white and orange topped
by a Union flag. This particular manifestation of the flag, like its
appearance at National Front marches in England itself, has made
it a signifier of fear, an intimation of horrors. Flags, as Barthes
perceptively noted, denote far more than simple nationality. The
Union flag, with the cross of St George at its centre, may fly only
over six counties of Ireland now, but so long as it flies, one feels,
so long will Irish literature, whether of the North or the South,
continue to dwell on the tragic past and present relationship
between England and its 'other' island. 52
Notes
1. Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland (1595}, in Henry Marley

(ed.), Ireland under Elizabeth and James I (London, 1890) pp. 143-4.
2. Seamus Heaney, 'Act of Union', Selected Poems 1965-75 (London: Faber
and Faber, 1980) p. 125.
3. Seamus Deane, 'The Literary Myths of the Revival: A Case for their
Abandonment', Cahiers Irlandais, 1979, p. 140.
4. Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (London:
Faber and Faber, 1980) p. 60.
5. David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, National-
ism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988)
p. 146.
6. Poems by Heaney such as 'Traditions' (Selected Poems, p. 68}, 'A
New Song' (p. 70}, 'Bog Queen' (p. 111}, 'Punishment' (p. 116) and
'Kinship' (p. 119) construct through their imagery an insistent and
effective idea of this male-female relationship, in which Ireland plays
an unwilling partner.
7. Conor Cruise O'Brien, quoted by Alan Warner in A Guide to Anglo-
Irish Literature (New York: StMartin's Press, 1982) p. 35.
8. Robert Burns, 'Man Was Made to Mourn', in Poems and Songs of Robert
Burns, ed. James Barke (London: Collins, 1955) p. 123.
9. Maurice Leitch, cited by Richard Deutsch in 'Within Two Shadows:
The Troubles in Northern Ireland', in Patrick Rafroidi and Maurice
Harmon (eds), The Irish Novel in our Time (CERIUL, 1976) p. 151.
10. Patrick Rafroidi, 'A Question of Inheritance: The Anglo-Irish Tradi-
tion', ibid., p. 20.
11. Andrew Marvell, 'The Garden', in Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems,
ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981) p. 100.
12. Andrew Marvell, 'Upon Appleton House', ibid., p. 99. Marvell in fact
gave up lyric poetry and the temptations of the imagination in favour
of active participation in politics.
13. W. B. Yeats, 'Meditations in Time of Civil War', in W. B. Yeats: Selected
Poetry, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Macmillan, 1962) p. 117.
14. W. B. Yeats, 'The Fisherman', ibid., p. 71.
15. W. B. Yeats, 'The Circus Animals' Desertion', ibid., p. 202.
16. W. B. Yeats, 'Easter 1916', ibid., p. 95.
17. W. B. Yeats, 'The Second Coming', ibid., p. 99.
18. Yeats, 'Meditations in Time of Civil War', ibid., p. 118.
19. Maurice Harmon, 'Generations Apart: 1925-1975', in Rafroidi and
Harmon, The Irish Novel in our Time, p. 65.
20. David Thomson, Woodbrook (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) p. 102.
21. Andrew Carpenter, 'Double Vision in Anglo-Irish Literature', in
Carpenter (ed.), Place, Personality and the Irish Writer (Gerrards Cross,
Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1977) p. 175.
22. Brian Moore, quoted on cover of Penguin edition of Woodbrook.
23. Thomson, Woodbrook, p. 104.
24. Ibid., p. 106.
25. Ibid., p. 171.
26. Ibid., p. 126.
27. Ibid., pp. 323-4.
28. William Trevor, Fools of Fortune (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983)
p. 169.
29. William Trevor, The Stories ofWilliam Trevor (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1983), p. 351.
30. Trevor, Fools of Fortune, p. 172.
31. Ibid., p. 162.
32. John Banville, Birchwood (London: Panther, 1973) p. 143.
33. Ibid., p. 174.
34. Ibid., p. 43.
35. Ibid., p. 140.
36. Ibid., p. 139.
37. Ibid., p. 157.
38. Bernard MacLaverty, Cal (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) p. 118.
39. Quoted by Richard Deutsch in Rafroidi and Harmon, The Irish Novel
in our Time, p. 138.
40. Noel Debeer, 'The Irish Novel Looks Backward', ibid., p. 118.
41. MacLaverty, Cal, p. 50.
42. Ibid., p. 73.
43. Ibid., p. 83.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., p. 89.

46. Jennifer Johnston, Shadows on our Skin (London: Hamish Hamilton,
1977) pp. 133-4.
47. Ibid., p. 184.
48. Ibid., p. 191.
49. Edna O'Brien, Mother Ireland (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).
50. W. B. Yeats, Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), in W. B. Yeats. Selected Plays,
ed. N. Jeffares (London: Macmillan, 1964) pp. 245-56.
51. Shaun Herron, The Whore-Mother (1973), quoted by Richard Deutsch
in Rafroidi and Harmon, The Irish Novel in our Time, p. 144.
52. Bernard Shaw, John Bull's Other Island (1907; Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1965).
3
Race and Empire in the Stories of
R. M. Ballantyne 1
CHRISTOPHER PARKER
At the start of Ballantyne's The Fugitives (1887) three men are

running for their lives through the rugged terrain of Madagascar.
In order of flight they are 'a tall agile youth', 'a true-blue tar',
and a young negro. The first two are immediately recognisable
Ballantyne characters. But initial interest focuses on Ebony, the
black cook: when his companions incline to defeatism, he per-
emptorily rebukes them; it is he who decides on flight rather than
face hopeless odds, and he who spies an escape route when the
others think they are cornered. The youth, Mark Breezy, has had
to flee, along with the others, in order to retain the leadership of
the group. 2 But this initially tenuous hold on the leadership
becomes increasingly evident in the course of the book. In contrast,
the resourceful Ebony suffers a sad decline into a stereotyped
figure of fun, now also recognisable to experienced readers of
Ballantyne. His decline is evident in several ways. His dialect is
rendered into comic form. Though courageous, he makes stupid
mistakes, as when, during a hunt, he nearly spears the sailor,
Hockins, or when he and Hockins blow themselves up after Mark
and ordered them to mix some explosive chemicals; Hockins has
forgotten to extinguish his pipe, and the two miscreants are told
to work all night as a 'punishment for disobeying orders'. Their
relationship, symbolised by their running order, is now definitely
that of master and men, and is unquestioned. Ebony's lowly status
is evident in other ways. He is the most superstitious of the three.
When he crosses a river by balancing along a fallen tree, Hockins,
in somewhat unsailorly fashion, claims to lack the agility to follow-
'not bein' a black monkey'. And, when they are overrun by rats,
Ebony alone is unperturbed, being in sympathy with 'the whole
brute creation'. Additionally, an important way of assessing the
Malagasy characters is the degree of their blackness. Thus Hockins:
44
Race and Empire in Ballantyne 45
'But they ain't all savages, sir ... some o' the naked black fellows
look savage enough, no doubt, but there's a lot of 'em lightish
brown in the skin, an' clothed in fine though queer garments. They
carry themselves, too, like gentlemen.' One of them, Ravonino, is
handsome, light-coloured, and has European features; later we
learn that he had an English father, and that his 'English blood'
would not endure slavery. 3 Thus Ebony, by virtue of his blackness,
is located way down the social ladder.
But the other victim in all this is Hockins. He disparages
Ebony, but this in itself demeans him, because the two engage in
knockabout exchanges of supposedly good-natured insults. From
a brave and resourceful partner in adventure he too becomes a
figure of fun, a recognisable Ballantyne stereotype- usually a 'tar'
or a servant. Hockins and Ebony's comic relationship repeats that
of La Roche (a French Canadian servant and cook) and Bryan (an
Irish blacksmith) in Ungava (1857); 4 the earlier pair's misadventures
were paralleled again and again in the intervening thirty years,
French Canadians and Irish to the fore. The idea of portraying
servants as French Canadians came from Ballantyne's days with
the Hudson's Bay Company; his comic lower-class Irishmen were
a product of contemporary stereotyping.
His hierarchical view of society is hardly surprising. His youthful
experience in the Hudson's Bay Company was of a society with
seven grades, 'labourer' to 'bourgeois'. He outlined these divisions
precisely. At the bottom were the labourers and voyageurs, mainly
'Scotch Highlanders, and Orkneymen', with a number of French
Canadians and 'half-breeds'. Then came the 'interpreters', promo-
ted 'intelligent' labourers, as were the postmasters, the next grade
up, who were on 'a footing with the gentlemen of the service, in
the same manner that a private soldier in the army is sometimes
raised to the rank of a commissioned officer'; the postmaster was
'generally the most useful and active man' at any station. Above
these came the apprentice clerks, such as he, lads pretending to
be men for five years, before becoming clerks (as Ballantyne did),
who could then aspire, after many years' service, to become chief
traders or half-shareholders, and then in turn to being chief factors
or shareholders. 5 The basic division was between gentlemen and
servants, the bulk of the former being young men and a high
proportion of the latter being in some way foreign or of mixed
race. Ballantyne's fictional characters can be classified in this way.
Though comic, his servants and sailors are big, bold and good-
hearted. Perhaps he had depended too often upon the dose

company and resourcefulness of his voyageurs for them to be
portrayed otherwise. He certainly wrote of them as rough diamonds
and wild, romantic figures, 6 spurred on by the needs of his own
romantic image.
Ballantyne's view of society appears benign and paternalist,
albeit hierarchical and implicitly racist - though without venom.
His racism was part of a view of mankind which saw a natural
hierarchy of gentlemen leaders and humble followers, which
embraced the concept of class as well as race. As D. A. Lorimer
has said, 'The question, "does a black man equal a white man?"
had little meaning in an age when few thought all white men
deserved equality.' 7 In Ballantyne's case, this was reinforced by
service with the Hudson's Bay Company. In more sophisticated
non-European societies there could be some overlap between race
and class. Thus, in The Fugitives, Hockins and Ebony are thoroughly
unnerved when asked to dine with Mark and one of the court
dignitaries:' "We ain't used, you see, doctor," observed the seaman
in a low tone, "to feed wi' the quality." "Das so, massa," chimed
in Ebony in the same tone; "wittles nebber taste so pleasant in de
cabin as in de fo' c' s'l." ' 8 They are told to copy Mark and keep
mum.
The lower classes and the lower races, like children, needed
guidance. In one sense, Ballantyne's best-known story, The Coral
Island (1857), is atypical. His heroes are younger than usual: Jack,
the leader, is eighteen; Ralph is fifteen; and Peterkin, the comic
relief, only fourteen. Thus, even Jack is located in boyhood, unlike
most of Ballantyne's young heroes, who are nineteen and upwards.
Jack's character is still unformed: though he performs prodigiously
in battle against gigantic dub-wielding savages, his mettlesome
courage can tum into rash, aggressive pride, which has to be
transformed into a more mature, Christian staunchness and
humility- by hard knocks, privations and sermonising. (This is
closer to the Amoldian ideal than G. Avery has allowed. 9 ). The
father figure who helps to convert Jack is a native missionary; and
Jack's maturation, from a 'presumptuous boy' to a Christian
gentleman, is paralleled by the islanders' conversion to Christian-
1·ty . 10
Generally, it is the native people alone who exhibit childish or
child-like characteristics. This association of ideas was common at
the time, and some held that the evolution of human societies
paralleled the growth of the individual from childhood to matu-

rityY In Ballantyne's imperial allegories and fictionalised accounts
of actual imperial ventures, primitive peoples, like children, need
guardians. One of his clearest imperial allegories is in The World of
Ice (1860): the purpose of the expedition is to hunt whales and find
the long-lost father of one of the young heroes; there is no
imperial mission. Yet, on encountering Esquimaux, the Europeans
immediately assume authority over them. And the Esquimaux go
into child-like paroxysms of hilarity at the idea of having found
new friends. Presents are received with 'extravagant joy', especially
a symbolic Union Jack for their leader. When bartering gives way
to theft the Captain first declares, 'These poor fellows do not regard
theft in the same light that we do', but eventually decides on firm,
but bloodless, retributive action, leading an armed party in pursuit
of the Esquimaux. Their chief is effortlessly captured, a volley is
fired over their heads, and a dog is shot to demonstrate European
fire-power. 'His object was to impress the Esquimaux with a
salutary sense of the power, promptitude, and courage of Euro-
peans, and to check at the outset their propensity for thieving ....
He explained to them the utter hopelessness of their attempting
to deceive or impose upon the white men', and that, if they
behaved well and brought trade goods, they could have European
goods in return. The Esquimaux are duly repentant. 'Strength of
muscle and promptitude in action are qualities which all nations in
a savage state understand and respect'; and the sailors' 'seemingly
endless resources and contrivances impressed the simple natives
with the belief that white men could accomplish anything they
chose to attempt.' What could be a neater encapsulation of the
imperial story from a European point of view! But we are not
allowed to forget that it is effective leadership that ensures white
superiority: juxtaposed with the efficiency of the Captain's punitive
expedition is a great deal of comic business with the crew, which
presents the sailors (O'Riley especially!) in a buffoonish light. 12
these simple souls need their leaders. As one of Ballantyne's rough-
diamond frontiersmen remarks, in a short story written for the
fact-cum-fiction series Ballantyne's Miscellany, 'It don't do ... to go
for to interfere wi' them as leads. Be they wise or be they foolish it
on'y makes matters wus to interfere wi' leaders, my lad; therefore
it's best always to hold your tongue an' do yer dooty. 113 Conversely,
in Blue Lights (1888), Miles, a young gentleman who has enlisted
as a common soldier, is constantly taken for an officer, and in
extremis does indeed assume command. 14 People do know their

place.
Unlike The World of Ice, Ungava was based on an actual imperial
venture. It was the fictionalised account of an attempt by the
Hudson's Bay Company to establish a fur-trading post, Fort Chimo,
at Ungava Bay on the inhospitable Hudson Strait; Ballantyne used
an unpublished version of these events passed to him by a
survivor. 15 This gave his story, if not realism or artistic truth, at
least a badly needed touch of authenticity, which his limited
powers of creativity, strained by his treadmill of two major stories
a year, usually failed to provide. Ungava was an unsuccessful
imperial venture, but the advantages of bringing his adventurers
home at the end of the story outweighed any sense of failure;
coming home, or perhaps waking up, 16 seems to be a sine qua non
of the adventure story for boys. Apart for fur-trading with the
Esquimaux, George Stanley, the leader of the expedition, is to treat
for peace between the warring Esquimaux and Muskigon Indians,
and sell guns to the former to balance the possession of firearms
by the latter - an early example of the arms trade justified by the
deterrence theory. 'Chimo' being a friendly greeting in Inuit, the
fort is symbolic of the enterprise; and the Esquimaux are willing
subjects of this imperial trading venture, dancing and shouting
with joy: 'they danced and jumped, and whooped and yelled,
tossed up their arms and legs, and lay down on the sand and
rolled in ecstasy'. Gifts of beads produce 'the most childish
demonstrations of joy. There was something irresistibly comic in
the child-like simplicity of these poor natives', these fat and' greasy'
overgrown children. Stanley simply assumes command, ordering
them to be silent and instructing them where to camp. In their
trusting innocence, 'their gleesome rotundity' and joyful gambols,
they look 'like the infant progeny of a race of giants'. They could
be easily duped or swindled, but Stanley does not exploit their
innocence. Unfortunately, the traders communicate 'flu to the
Esquimaux and a number die - a truly comprehensive imperial
experience! But Stanley and his wife plan to communicate
something better- the Word of God. 17
When little Edith Stanley is lost in the snow, and rescued by
another band of Esquimaux, she does not go native, but queens it
over them, in a specially constructed ice palace, teaching the
children proper hygiene: 'Words cannot convey an adequate
impression of the unutterable amazement of these poor creatures
as they beheld the fair child, so unlike anything they had ever
seen or imagined.' When Chimo is abandoned as an economic
failure, the Esquimaux are inconsolable, and with 'child-like simpli-
city' hang about the bay hoping for the white man's return.
Maximus, the Esquimaux's leader, takes his people to James Bay
to be within the Company's orbit; he has been converted to both
Christianity and European trade. Occasionally he revisits the
romantic solitude of Ungava to remember his white friends. 18 There
is an almost touching simplicity about Ungava itself, worthy of its
child-like Esquimaux.
Other primitive peoples are equally child-like: for example, the
negro Chimbolo, a rescued slave in Black Ivory (1873), was a child
'in everything except years'. 19 And Stanley's (and Edith's) easy
assumption of command is frequently paralleled. In The Gorilla
Hunters (1861), Jack (of The Coral Island, fully grown and reunited
with old chums), persuades an African king to appoint him
commander-in-chief, with suitable posts for Peterkin and Ralph.
His leadership is accepted unquestioningly and he teaches simple
drill with English command words. He becomes quite tyrannical
over his 'niggers', their superstitious natures and uncomprehen-
ding minds being suited to his style of leadership. They fail him
in only one respect: they cannot manage that most potent war cry,
the 'British cheer'. Despite the absence of this incantation, a
typically bloodless victory over a band of slave-raiders is contrived;
so Jack's methods are vindicated in a good cause. 20
These imperial themes, allegorical or historical, with their condes-
cending, albeit benign, racism, were replicated many times in
Ballantyne's stories. Through them he appears as the more accept-
able face of Victorian boys' literature- preferable at least to Henty,
Mayne Reid or Kingston - yet still with an easy assumption of
European superiority. But the full range of his texts reveals
changing and more complex, not to say confused, attitudes - at
times seemingly innocent of racism, at others far from benevolent
in his racist language.
In his first work of fiction, The Young Fur Traders (1855), the
young hero, Charley Kennedy, and his sister Kate (who marries
Charley's best friend, Harry Somerville), have a 'half-breed'
mother. We are told this quite casually and baldly, with no
reflections on the fact. 21 Mrs Kennedy, after breeding a large family,
soon drops from sight; Kate is the mistress of the house. But Mrs
Kennedy is not being hidden; she is only an embarrassment in the
sense that all mothers were surplus to requirements in Victorian

stories of juvenile derring-do. In the real world she is exactly what
Ballantyne would have expected as the wife of an old Hudson's
Bay Company man in Red River Colony; but she did not need to
be of mixed blood. Ballantyne seems unaware of the race issue,
except perhaps as something rather romantic, for in Hudson's Bay
he had waxed lyrical about the 'wild, demi-savage colonist' leading
'the blushing half-breed girl to the altar' and praised the looks of
the latter. 22 Though Mrs Kennedy has had her day, Kate fulfils the
role of the blushing bride.
In Hudson's Bay, a factual account of his life with the company,
Ballantyne shows a perceptive and remarkably mature interest in
Indian life (he was only sixteen at the start of his six-year tour).
He never suggests that cultural differences are to be explained in
racial terms; and he finds much to praise. He spends a chapter
describing the lifestyle of the Crees: it is neither a panegyric on
the noble savage nor a racist assault. The Cree men have 'active-
looking figures, fine intelligent countenances' and bright alert
eyes, ever on the watch in the wilds. His general theme is the
appropriateness of their behaviour and their artefacts to their
lifestyle and environment; and he appreciates the dose relationship
between aesthetic appeal and utility in such things as their 'light
and graceful' canoes and their 'elegant and useful' snowshoes. (In
Ungava and The World of Ice he also refers to the technical ingenuity
of the Inuit. 23) Though the Cree are 'primitive children of the forest'
(the childhood motif making an early appearance), the emphasis
is upon skilful adaptation to environment rather than technological
backwardness. More remarkable is his moral relativism, explaining
aspects of their lives that challenged some of the strongest taboos
of Victorian society. Even rumours of that most awful of crimes,
cannibalism, which was to figure so prominently as a demonic
feature of native ritual in The Coral Island, was excused as a
desperate last resort. (Similarly, another Victorian fixation, the
eating of raw meat, regarded with horror even by the hunting and
shooting classes, was defended on grounds of nutritional necessity
in Inuit society. 24) Occasional polygamy was explained in terms of
a good hunter's capacity to provide for more than one wife; and,
as the custom of leaving the old to die was explained in terms of
harsh economic necessity, so apparent gluttony was seen as a
product of sudden plenty in the midst of scarcity. There is no hint
of moral condemnation. 25
Only in one respect does Ballantyne depart from this tolerant

and perceptive cultural relativism. Indians, he tells us, have no
religion worthy of the name, only 'the unmeaning mummery of
the medicine tent'. Suddenly their lives were 'unenlightened',
'morally degraded' and in need of the Gospel. However, he does
not doubt their capacity to receive the Gospel and to effect a moral
improvement therefrom: theological imperialism implied non-
racism. The white man had failed the red man, he averred: 'For at
least a century these North American Indians have hunted for the
white man, and poured annually into Britain a copious stream of
wealth. Surely it is the duty of Christian Britain, in return, to send
out faithful servants of God to preach the gospel. . . .' 26 His model
for a Christianised Indian society, and indeed for all his subsequent
depictions of the effect of missions, in The Coral Island and Gascoyne
(1863) for example, was clearly the Red River settlement, where
the spiritual and material needs of a prosperous Indian community
were looked after by a minister, who had its 'entire management'
and was looked upon 'by the poor natives as a father'. 27 Of course
this patronises the 'poor natives'; but individuals were capable of
nobility. A model for some of Ballantyne's later noble savages was
sketched in Hudson's Bay with the supposedly true story of
Wapewian, an Indian of noble presence and character8 - the
precursor of Redfeather in The Young Fur Traders, Maximus in
Ungava, Kambira in Black Ivory, and many more. Crucial to their
character is that they are receptive to Christian values.
Redfeather is the noblest of all Ballantyne's savages, a man of
action and resource, but also of a Christian disposition. He is much
admired by the young fur-traders. His speech is rendered into
perfect, stately English, quite unlike the comic malformations of
most foreigners. True, his best feelings are more 'white' than 'red'
(such as respect for his wife, pity for his enemy), but this is because
he intuitively acknowledges the Christian moral code and seeks
missionary guidance. Twice he saves Charley's life; on the second
occasion, "'God bless you, Redfeather," said Charley, taking the
Indian's hand in both of his and kissing it.' Such is his character
that it conquers colour prejudice in a white man, a conquest aided
and abetted by a pastor: 'An Indian cannot help being a redman
any more than you can help being a white one .... Besides, God
made him what he is, and to despise the work of God, or to
undervalue it, is to despise God Himself.' There will be Indians in
heaven, Jacques is assured; Jacques promptly accepts the pastor's
argument and a Bible, and the pastor goes off to convert the
Indians to both Christianity and civilisation. 29 Christianity and
prosperity always go hand in hand in Ballantyne's world. 30
Maximus, the Inuit hero, is first seen, a statuesque figure, alone
in a romantic wilderness; his search for his bride, carried off by
raiding Indians, is likened to a knightly quest; he performs heroic
acts, and has ingenuity as well as courage. He, too, is converted
to Christianity. 31 Kambira, like Maximus, first appears carefully
posed against an exotic background, every inch a chief and 'a fine,
stately, well-developed specimen of African manhood'. Admittedly
there is more emphasis on his physique than on his character, in
line with Victorians' sensibilities about African nakedness - which
both fascinated and shocked them. But this underlines his heroic
status: 'If an enthusiastic member of the Royal Academy were in
search of a model which should combine the strength of Hercules,
with the grace of Apollo, he could not find a better.... ' Black
Ivory, however, is a later creation, and Kambira's fate is instructive:
the proud native chief ends his days as head gardener to a
Portuguese colonial - an apparently happy ending. 32 Most of
Ballantyne's later non-European heroes end as servants of their
white friends. 33 However, as a commentary upon the initial
description of Kambira, there is an interesting passage in which
Ballantyne addresses the subject of the 'savage' stereotype:
Of course, being capable of reading this book, you are too old
to require to be told that there is nothing of our nursery savage
about him. That peculiar abortion was born and bred in the
nursery, and dwells only there, and was never heard of beyond
civilized lands .... No; our savage chief does not roar, or glare,
or chatter, or devour his food in its blood .... He carries himself
like a man, and a remarkably handsome man too. 34
Perhaps Ballantyne was repenting of his own contribution to

the stereotype with his bloodthirsty, cannibalistic, dub-wielding
nightmares in the much-reprinted The Coral Island.
In general, Ballantyne went out of his way to stress that human
nature and human society were much the same the world over;35
behind this presumption was a belief that all human souls could
be saved. Yet he was not consistent: often he also attributed
particular characteristics to particular peoples, after the manner of
the time; and also assumed that miscegenation involved mixing
these characteristics- though to advantage, for he did not subscribe

to the fashionable view of the impoverishment of the species
through miscegenation, and frequently gave half-castes heroic
roles. 36 Also, although his hostility to Arab slave-trading made him
regard Arabs, 'as a race', as cruel (albeit because their religion
made them immune to Christian influences}, 37 he never fell victim
to conventional anti-semitism: the Jew Bacri in The Pirate City
(1874}, is a morally and physically impressive character, and anti-
semitism is explicitly condemned; 38 and in The Hot Swamp (1893),
set in pre-Christian Britain, the Hebrew Beniah acts the usual role
of Christian moraliser and spiritual counsellor, a sort of proto-
Christian. 39 Ballantyne avoided some of the worst racial prejudices.
He was also aware of the dangers of stereotyping. In Black Ivory,
an Arab stereotype of the negro is explained in terms of the
frightening and brutalising effects of captivity; and the differences
in physical appearance of black and white are addressed in an
explicitly non-Eurocentric way. Disco and Harold (another example
of a stout-hearted seaman and an adventurous young gentleman
cast away on the African shore) are aware that, as Europeans, they
may look ugly to the same people who look outlandish to them40 -
a contrast to the earlier naivete of Ungava, where the fairEdith is
naturally regarded as a superior being by the 'poor natives'. By
the time we get to Black Ivory naive imperialism and racial innocence
have disappeared.
Ballantyne's career can be divided into three phases. From 1855
(The Young Fur Traders) to 1863 (Gascoyne) he wrote tales of exotic
overseas adventure, sometimes based on his own North American
experiences or wish fulfilments, sometimes on less realistic accounts
of lands as strange to him as to his adventurers and his readers. 41
For the moment, campaigning zeal was limited to a naive belief in
the social and moral efficacy of religious conversion. Then, from
1864 (The Lifeboat) to 1873 (Life in the Red Brigade), after he switched
publishers to James Nisbet, he concentrated on British-based
adventures, the settings reconnoitred at Nisbet's expense, the
themes centred on the philanthropic issues, social concerns and
technological wonders of the mid-Victorian age- progress in all
its aspects. He had a strong sense of social purpose. 42 1873,
however, was also the year of Black Ivory, which marked a return
to exotic locales, but with an eye now to specific campaigning,
progressive issues. Ballantyne still tried to visit the locations -
Switzerland (where he lived for a while), North Africa, and the
Cape - and he maintained some of his domestic themes, but he

now used sources from recent imperial and missionary history.
His didactic purpose acquired a new dimension. 43 He was against
war, slavery and the slave trade, for missionaries, temperance
and colonial settlement, making an uneasy transition from the
Evangelical tradition to imperialism. His dislike of war and his
expansionist imperialism got him into all sorts of inconsistencies,
but this was not his biggest problem.
All souls could be saved; and miraculous material as well as
spiritual improvements were wrought by conversion. These are
consistent themes: in The Coral Island it is the very manner of his
heroes' deliverance; in The Lonely Island it is the making of Pitcairn;
it is as true for the roughest of Europeans - the common soldiery
(in Blue Lights44 ) - as for the most savage of South Sea islanders.
Ballantyne remained committed to the missionary cause at home
and abroad; important in retaining that commitment was his
involvement in the missionaries' anti-slavery movement. An early
concern (in The Red Eric, for example) turned into a full-blooded
campaign in Black Ivory, involving him in extensive research into
missionary activity; he hoped his book would be 'a tooth in the
file which shall eventually cut the chain of slavery and set the
black man free'. 45 A whole chapter was devoted to a 'lay sermon'
on the remedy. 46 He returned to the theme, breathing new life into
the old standby of the Barbary corsairs, in The Pirate City in the
following year, and in The Middy and the Moors. His use of
missionary sources, especially of evidence furnished by the London
Missionary Society, led to the expression of apparently anti-
imperialist sentiments in The Fugitives, because by 1887 the French
were the better bet to take Madagascar, and the British missionaries
hoped to avoid this. Madagascar was a 'progressive' island;
ignoring the clear association of missionary work and imperialism,
not only in reality but in his own early imperial allegories,
Ballantyne sharply distinguished between proselytising and
colonising - though not between Christianity and progress. Both
Mark and his powerful Malagasy friend, the royal secretary, argue
for Malagasy independence; the Gospel, we are told, has taken
root, and the powers of Europe will be unable to prevent the
progress that will follow. Thus the Gospel is presented as a means
of avoiding colonial rule. The island is supposedly rich in resources,
comparable to Britain or France; but, as the climate is unsuitable
for white men, it is destined by God for the Malagasy. Europeans
had brought the Bible and that was enough; just as the savage
Anglo-Saxons had once been civilised by Christianity, so a new
island people would be won. 47
This may have been a special case because of the rivalry with
France, but Ballantyne often expressed dislike of colonial wars.
Perhaps this was a mere gesture, to avoid being classed with the
penny dreadfuls, 48 but it contrasted with the fashion for regarding
war as the true test of a nation's moral fibre and its right to survive.
In Blue Lights the Sudanese battlefields are grim affairs, stewn with
the dead and dying, orphan- and widow-makers; tears are shed
for both sides. There is a trace of humbug here, of course, for
Ballantyne remained convinced of the 'purity' of British motives
and regretted that this could not be appreciated by the Sudanese.
But he did achieve a new realism in his descriptions of confused
large-scale slaughter, far removed from Jack's play-acting in The
Gorilla Hunters. In his final battle, Miles, the young hero, is badly
wounded; coming to, he sees 'hundreds of upturned faces - the
bloodless grey of the black men contrasting strangely with the
deadly pallor of the white, all quiet and passionless enough now-
here and there the head of a warrior resting peacefully on the
bosom or shoulder of the foe who had killed him!' Miles has a
hand amputated and is invalided out of the army. 49 This being
Ballantyne, all ends with a modest degree of prosperity, good
fortune, and married bliss; but the general tone is low-key and
anything but jingoist.
Does this mean that Ballantyne, through the missionary ideal,
had come to recognise the harsh realities of imperialism and the
common humanity of men? Unfortunately, the picture is clouded
by an incongruous, but growing, use of racist language and an
inconsistency of purpose, which suggests a mind unable to recon-
cile the new aggressive racism of the 1870s and 1880s with the idea
of men as equal in the sight of God. The confusion was most
evident in The Settler and the Savage (1877) and in Six Months at the
Cape (1879), both products of a fact-finding mission to Southern
Africa in 1875. The new racism was supposedly more virulent
because of changing attitudes to the lower classes at home rather
than because of colonial experiences;50 Ballantyne, no doubt,
was not immune to these harsher influences, despite continued
commitment to moral regeneration; but his visit to the Cape, like,
in its own way, his Hudson's Bay Company experience, was
formative. His visit was intended to provide background infor-
mation for his books, in a by-now established pattern; naturally,

he was susceptible to his hosts' ideas. Perhaps he was atypical;
but maybe there is room for more study of the interchange of racist
attitudes between colonists and Britain51 - a relationship for which
there is a prima facie case.
The Settler and the Savage was set in and after 1820, in Cape
Colony. Its protagonists include British settlers, Boer farmers,
'Kafirs', a Hottentot (Ruyter, by name) and a Bushman (Booby) -
the full racial range. Some of them are the subject of the crudest
racial stereotyping, with the symbolically named Booby as the butt
of the most offensive remarks. At the beginning of the book, the
young English hero, Charlie Considine, encounters Booby- 'one
of the lowest of the human race, a Bushman. The diminutive,
black-skinned and monkey-faced creature was nearly naked.' The
Bushman, to Charlie's exasperation ('Can't you speak, you dried
up essence of stupidity!'), can neither speak nor understand
English, but merely looks 'vacant' and replies with 'klicks, klucks,
and gurgles'. Indeed he has acquired his name because of 'his
inveterate stupidity', and conducts himself like 'a monkey' - 'to
which animal he seemed closely related'. This association of
ideas is re-emphasised later when settlers open fire on baboons,
mistaking them for Bushmen. 52 The pathetic Booby is the most
disturbing of all Ballantyne's creations.
Ruyter, the Hottentot, is a more central figure, and not so low
on the racial scale; but then he has 'a more intellectual head and
countenance than is common to his race'. Indeed: 'The Hotentot
race is a very inferior one, both mentally and physically, but there
are among them individuals who rise much above the ordinary
level. Ruyter was one of these.' Badly used as a slave, Ruyter plots
revenge, hoping to drive the white man into the sea: he is capable
of more sophisticated ideas than Booby, but is misguided and
ignorant. 'Listen Ruyter,' exhorts a Methodist missionary,' you are
like a child. You know nothing. The land from which the white
man comes will never suffer him to be driven out of Africa. England
is rich in everything, and will send men to fill the places of those
who fall. Besides, I think God is on the white man's side, because
the white man in the main intends and tries to do good.' Eventually
Ruyter does reform, in part through the missionary's influence. 53
As for the Kafirs, the Boer Hans Marais opines, 'I have no faith
in Kafirs. It is their pride to lie, their business to make war, and
their delight to plunder.' They have the characteristics of savages,
and cannot be trusted till they become civilised. Alongside constant

comparisons to 'baboons' and 'monkeys' comes the recurring
theme of beautiful, half-naked bodies and facial ugliness; thus,
black women are 'straight and graceful as Venus in body, ugly as
baboons in visage' and there is 'a young Hottentot Venus of
indescribable ugliness'. 54 Ballantyne had forgotten Disco's and
Harold's musings, in Black Ivory, on the relativity of beauty.
Yet in general Ballantyne felt an irresistible imperial impulse at
the Cape; despite the wrongs and the mistakes of the past, God
was at work, for British motives were pure: foreshadowing Blue
Lights, a battlefield strewn with Kafrr dead is the occasion for regret
that they had mistaken the white men for their enemies, rather
than benefactors! Cant was followed by the inartistic: trade figures
and other statistics on the cost of the Kafrr wars, all properly
footnoted, are presented to the juvenile reader. The conclusion is
that those blacks who accepted hard work, and the Word of
the Lord as 'the high road to prosperity', became profitable to
themselves and the community. Those who did not 'continued
slaves to themselves and a nuisance to everybody', feeding white
racial prejudice, fostering black delusions about driving the whites
'into the sea' and making difficulties for missionaries. The Boers,
who had suffered many injustices, including the emancipation of
their slaves without compensation (and this from the author of
Black Ivory!), should recognise that 'truth, justice, fair-play, and
freedom' were yet commoner under British rule than any other.
And the Boer trek had brought good out of evil, reclaiming 'vast
tracts of the most beautiful and fertile regions of the earth from
the domination of darkness and cruelty'. For South Africa as a
whole there was a future of prosperity, godliness and racial
harmony, eventually to extend 'in one grand sweep of unbroken
fertility from the Cape of Good Hope to the Equator'. 55 His ideal
of racial harmony in Southern Africa, Ballantyne's insistence on
the purity of the imperial motive contrasts absurdly with his racist
language and opinions: his confusion of purpose was total.
In The Settler and the Savage Ballantyne had sometimes spoken
through his heroes; sometimes directly, with little artistry, to his
readers. Though embodied in fiction, the views thus expressed do
represent his own opinions, as Six Months at the Cape, a travelogue
and homily, shortly testified; here he repeated or amplified the
views expressed in the earlier book. We learn that the Kafirs had
no right of possession at the Cape, because they were not only
immigrants (like the whites), but unworthy ones, thievish and

treacherous. The true natives, the Hottentots, were simply inca-
pable: his attitude is summed up in a passage where he stumbled
upon a 'Tottie' hut - 'Close beside it stood a little black creature
which resembled a fat and hairless monkey. It might have been a
baboon' but for its lack of a tail. The passage is accompanied by a
drawing by S. E. Waller, made from a sketch by Ballantyne,
showing a little black boy of vaguely negro appearance running
into a hut, and captioned 'An "owner" of the land.' The beauty
of the surroundings is then contrasted with the 'filth' and poverty
of the hut. This account is disturbingly like one in Hudson's Bay
where Ballantyne happened upon a wigwam - though on that
occasion he did not philosophise on the rights of native peoples.
Here he does. Forgetting his earlier rejection of the 'nursery' vision
of a savage, he scorns the 'noble savage' concept and assures his
readers that 'savagery' does indeed mean what it usually implies.
Yet, and here his confusion of purpose shows most clearly, he
then immediately attacks 'those who regard "niggers" as an inferior
race of ignoble men' incapable of understanding the Gospel. But
he did not think the Kafir had proved himself; his message was,
be good to the Kafir, try to convert him, but do not trust him, for
he is still a 'thief', a 'liar' and a 'murderer', 'an intellectual child-
and a very bad child too', who needed to be disarmed to prevent
his bloody, if futile, efforts to 'drive the white man into the sea'.
These passages are very close to the corresponding ones in The
Settler and the Savage. The Kafir needed careful watching and
training, for he was 'a very infant in everything except physical
force and wickedness. To put him on an equality with civilised
whites is equivalent to granting, in England, the franchise to
boys.' 56 We are back with a vengeance to the childhood motif, but
now the child is bad, and the parent intolerant.
The idea of the savage as a child allowed Ballantyne to ascribe
this savagery to racial characteristics, whilst holding out hope for
the future. The agent of change would be the churches, but his
hope was tenuous and his attitude ambivalent. At one Kafir and
Hottentot church he thought that mission work was bearing fruit,
but at another, though patronising the congregation's 'childlike
good-humour' he found the spectacle of hymn-singing blacks
quaint, even 'ludicrous' - whilst denying that he mocked. As for
their own ceremonies, gone was the tolerance of savage custom
evident in Hudson's Bay. A Kafir wedding produced this comment:
'Many a time have I read of the debased condition of savages, and

something of them I have seen among the "Red Men" of North
America, but never have I witnessed such regardless indecency as
was exhibited on this occasion by these human baboons .... The
men, who were absolutely stark-naked, were engaged in a slow
meaningless dance' and the women were nearly naked. 57 The
taboos of Ballantyne's own society had not always blinded him to
the mores of others. But the recurring themes in his Southern
African books are blackness, nakedness, simian features, and moral
childishness.
The ambivalence of his position was most marked with regard
to Bushmen:
The highest type of monkey suggests- thanks, or, rather, blame

to Darwin- the lowest type of man in Africa .... He is a branch
of the Hottentot race, and a very miserable, stunted branch;
neverthless he is very far removed from the baboon. He has no
tail, for certain; at least if he has, he conceals it effectually. He
wears garments, which no monkey does, and he speaks, which
no monkey ever did .... No thanks to the white man, however,
if the poor Bushman is not a baboon with the spirit of a tiger,
for he has been most shamefully treated in time past
- hunted and shot, like a wild animal, by the Boers. No thanks,

one might add, to writers who, whilst denying that Bushmen are
baboons, make sport with the concept and perpetuate the idea! A
similar ambivalence is evident in the way Ballantyne deals with an
incident at Algoa Bay. A delegation of Kafir chiefs, taking ship for
Capetown, was unceremoniously thrown into a basket that was
used for loading passengers, and then tipped out onto the deck
by some hearty but undiplomatic 'tars'. The chiefs maintained their
dignity, said Ballantyne, but, though the 'gentleman' in charge
and the governor and 'gentry' of Capetown tried to repair the
damage, he doubted if they would ever 'forget or forgive' their
humiliation. 58 Yet the frontispiece of the book and its caption, 'Kafir
Nobility', added to the insult.
Generally, however, Six Months at the Cape was bullish about the
Empire. The railway would revolutionise Africa: 'with missionaries,
merchants, and miners in its carriages, and bales, boxes and bibles
in its vans, not only South Africa but the whole continent, from
the Mediterranean to the Cape of Storms, shall feel the mighty
influence of truth and steam, and British stamina.' As for the rights
of Africans in this brave new world, Ballantyne had another
imperial fable. A stupid savage was wrecked on a desert island;
he hunted, gathered fruit, and practised primitive agriculture.
Then a large shipload of emigrants was wrecked, and they took
possession. The stupid savage lost his rights: 'If, when we arrived,
we had found you cultivating all its soil, working all its mines,
fencing in its fields, cutting down its timber - in other words,
utilising the island, we would have at once recognised your
ownership .... The civilised nations of the earth' could not be
cooped up in cities. Thus Ballantyne claimed Lebensraum. He had
one caveat: the shooting-estates of the English and Scottish landed
classes were not to be confused with the hunting-ranges of primitive
peoples, for the estates were efficiently managed. Thus the hunting-
rights of the landed classes were preserved whilst the backward
nations made way for successful exploiters. We can now see
that this doctrine of maximum utilisation of resources has been
ecologically disastrous; but it was a classic justifying ideology in
the heyday of imperialism- far removed as it was from Ballantyne's
youthful acceptance of the elegance and utility of Cree technology.
As for the potential of Christianity to improve the 'stupid' Kafir, a
sine qua non of Ballantyne since Hudson's Bay: Christianity could
save; it might save him; it had not yet done so. 59 A very low-key
view compared with previous, and indeed subsequent, optimism
about the missionary role in Africa - or in darkest Britain! 60
Ballantyne, in the course of a long, hard writing-career, deliberat-
ely seeking new experiences, was not consistent, and there is
nothing unusual in that. But his missionary enthusiasm peaked at
the same time as his imperialism- again, not surprisingly; however,
his African imperialism involved racist attitudes inconsistent with
the spiritual egalitarianism inherent in his missionary pre-
sumptions. Consequently his hidden meaning was often at odds
with his supposed message. One can only assume a similar
confusion in the minds of his young readers.
Notes
1. R. M. Ballantyne, 1825-94: between 1855 and 1893 the author of over

eighty stories for boys, mostly bestsellers, and often reprinted.
2. In the following notes, all books for which no author is specified are
by Ballantyne. The Fugitives: Or the Tyrant Queen ofMadagascar (London:
Nisbet, n.d.) pp. 1-5, 22-3. Victorian publishers did not always date
their publications. Where possible, quotations from Ballantyne are
from the original editions.
3. Ibid., pp. 132, 312-14, 16-17, 107, 46, 50-1, 75-80, 189.
4. Ungava (London: Nelson, n.d.) pp. 67-8, 73, 75-7, 189-92.
5. Hudson's Bay: Or Every-day Life in the Wilds of North America, during Six
Years' Residence in the Territories of the Honourable Hudson's Bay Company,
2nd edn (Edinburgh and London: 1848) pp. 102, 106-7.
6. Ibid., pp. 71-3. See also Ungava, p. 192.
7. D. A. Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the
Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University
Press, 1978) p. 15; see also pp. 22-3, 92.
8. The Fugitives, pp. 272-3.
9. G. Avery, Childhood's Pattern: A Study of the Heroes and Heroines of
Children's Fiction 1770-1950 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1975)
pp. 166, 172-4, 176. Bratton follows Avery in this: J. S. Bratton, The
Impact of Victorian Children's Fiction (London, 1981) pp. 111-12, 147.
10. The Coral Island (London: Readers' Library, n.d.) pp. 137-8, 231-4,
242-9.
11. Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians, p. 148.
12. The World of Ice: Or the Whaling Cruise of 'The Dolphin' (London: Blacl<ie
and Son, n.d.), pp. 130-56.
13. Hunting the Lions: The Land of the Negro. The Pioneers: A Tale of the
Western Wilderness, bound in one vol. (London: Nisbet, n.d.) p. 71.
14. Blue Lights, or Hot Work in the Soudan: A Tale of Soldier Life in Several of
its Phases (London: Nisbet, 1888) pp. 324-5, 331-4, 384, 389, 407.
15. Personal Reminiscences in Book-Making (London: Nisbet, n.d.) p. 12.
16. For the story as dream see E. Quayle, Ballantyne the Brave: A Victorian
Writer and his Family (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1967) pp. 146-55;
Bratton, The Impact ofVcitorian Children's Fiction, p. 145.
17. Ungava, pp. 29-33, 182, 197-205, 206, 208, 221, 226-34.
18. Ibid., pp. 296-8, 300-2, 331-2, 383-4.
19. Black Ivory: A Tale of Adventure among the Slavers of East Africa (London:
Nisbet, 1873) p. 162.
20. The Gorilla Hunters: A Tale of the Wilds of Africa (London: Nelson,
1892) pp. 328-33, 340-4, 349, 365. Elsewhere, the British cheer routs
unsuspecting natives: see for example the Prairie Chief(London: Nisbet,
n.d.) p. 97.
21. The Young Fur Traders (London: Juvenile Productions, n.d.) p. 7.
22. Hudson's Bay, pp. 102, 106-7.
23. Ungava, pp. 124, 304; The World of Ice, p. 107.
24. For example, The World of Ice, p. 112.
25. Hudson's Bay, pp. 15, 41-69, 116-19.
26. Ibid., pp. 56-7, 318.
27. Ibid., pp. 91-4. See also pp. 115-16, on another settlement.
28. Ibid., pp. 229-35.
29. The Young Fur Traders, pp. 76-90, 116, 121-2, 184-6.
30. See his descriptions of the Red River settlement and Norway House
settlement in Hudson's Bay, pp. 91-4, 115--16. Also The Coral Island,
pp. 216, 222-3, 227, 252; The Young Fur Traders, p. 182 (the work of
the pastor coming to fruition). For the most outrageously unhistorical
link between Christianity and material progress see The Norsemen in
the West: Or America before Columbus, a Tale (London: Nisbet, 1872)
pp. 372-3, 384-5.
31. Ungava, pp. 117, 137, 211-12, 345--69.
32. Black Ivory, pp. 165--6, 174-7, 239, 414.
33. For example, 'Peter the Great', the midshipman's black counsellor and
protector in The Middy and the Moors, becomes a 'flunky': 'My proper
speer is de kitchen.' The Middy and the Moors: An Algerine Story (London:
Nisbet, 1888), pp. 235--6.
34. Black Ivory, pp. 168-9, 176-7. On the 'savages' theme see also pp. 192-
6.
35. For example, Black Ivory, pp. 174-7; The Norsemen in the West, pp. 205--
6; The Red Eric: Or the Whaler's Last Cruise (London: George Newnes,
n.d.) p. 88; Ungava, pp. 123, 137.
36. For example, Erling the Bold, 16th edn (London: Nisbet, n.d.) p. 437;
The Prairie Chief, pp. 59, 82, 139, 151, 155, etc.; The Young Fur Traders,
p. 38; The Settler and the Savage: A tale of Peace and War in South Africa
(London: Nisbet, n.d.) p. 31; The Lonely Island: Or the Refuge of the
Mutineers (London: Nisbet, n.d.) pp. 91-2, 130, 144-5, 164-77, 193-4,
222-3, 312-13; Gascoyne, the Sandal-wood Trader: A Tale of the Pacific, 8th
edn (London: Nisbet, 1875) pp. 281-7.
37. Blue Lights, p. 311; The Pirate City: An Algerine Tale (London: Nisbet,
1874) pp. 86-7.
38. The Pirate City, pp. 5-6, 20, 54, 61-2.
39. The Hot Swamp: A RomanceofOldAlbion (London: Nisbet, n.d.) pp. 346,
395--6. In Six Months at the Cape, Ballantyne makes a point of a
friendship he struck up with a (Christianised) Jew: Six Months at the
Cape: Or Letters to Periwinkle from South Africa (London: Nisbet, 1879)
p. 13.
40. Black Ivory, pp. 162-3, 202-3.
41. This phase included The Young Fur Traders, Ungava, The Dog Crusoe
and The World of Ice; and, less realistic, The Coral Island, Martin Rattler,
The Gorilla Hunters, The Red Eric, and Gascoyne.
42. For example, The Lifeboat, The Lighthouse, Shifting Winds, Fighting the
Flames, Deep Down, The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands, The Iron
Horse, Life in the Red Brigade.
43. For example, Black Ivory, The Pirate City, Rivers of Ice, The Settler and
the Savage, The Lonely Island, The Fugitives, Blue Lights, The Middy and
the Moors, Blown to Bits; domestic themes were maintained in Under
the Waves, Post Haste and Dusty Diamonds.
44. Blue Lights, esp. pp. 256, 304-8 also Preface, and (ad nauseam) pp. 23,
27, 198-9, 282-94, 317-22, 422-5. 'Blue Lights' were the soldiers and
sailors who had given up licentious hostelries in favour of the tea and
sympathy dispensed by Miss Sarah Robinson, 'the soldier's friend'.
45. Quayle, Ballantyne the Brave; Black Ivory, Preface, and passim.
46. Black Ivory, pp. 387-91.
47. The Fugitives, pp. 380-1; see also Preface and pp. 378-9, 425.
48. For a contemporary distinction between Ballantyne (and Kingston)
and the penny dreadfuls see G. Salmon, 'What Boys Read', Fortnightly
Review, n.s. XXXIX (1886) 252-3, 255--6.
49. Blue Lights, pp. 16-17, 190, 203, 232, 245, 261-2, 392, 396, 400.
50. Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians, p. 81.
51. This is touched upon in J. M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire:
The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880-1960 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1984) pp. 207-8.
52. The Settler and the Savage, pp. 3, 13, 35, 65, 162.
53. Ibid., pp. 37, 65, 263--5, 352-4, 413--21.
54. Ibid., pp. 20, 24, 111-12, 120-1, 259, 331.
55. Ibid., pp. 385--6, 399-401, 405-8, 411-21. Also pp. 127, 240-5.
56. Six Months at the Cape, pp. 40, 42--6, 163--5. See also pp. 178-9.
57. Ibid., pp. 47-51, 93, 178-9.
58. Ibid., pp. 113--14, 190-5.
59. Ibid., pp. 187-8, 240-50, 252-3.
60. For the latter, see The World of Ice, pp. 43--6; Personal Reminiscences in
Book-Making, pp. 199-207, 223-8.
4
From Newbury to Salman Rushdie:
Teaching the Literature of Imperialism in
Higher Education
DENNIS BUTTS
I know that pedagogy is a depressing subject to

all persons of sensibility . . . .
(Lionel Trilling1 )
Bulmershe College of Higher Education, like most of the colleges

initially concerned with training schoolteachers, has been at the
sharp end of many radical educational and organisational changes,
even though it was only opened in the mid-1960s. During this
short period, we have expanded dramatically to meet a shortage
of primary teachers, launched our first four-year B.Ed. degree
under the aegis of the local university (Reading), developed new
courses to meet a shortage in secondary schools, amalgamated
with a sister institution, Easthampstead Park College, changed our
B.Ed. validators from the university to the Council for National
Academic Awards (CNAA), developed BA and other courses to
create a diversified institution of higher education, and are now
discussing the possibility of amalgamating with Reading University!
The years have not been uneventful, and undoubtedly many
colleagues feel that so many institutional changes have drained
energy away from educational initiatives; but one can also argue
that the ever-changing circumstances sometimes led to pedagogical
opportunities and developments which might not have taken place
without them. Thus the course which we now call 'Literature of
the Colonial and Post-Colonial Experience' might never have come
into existence but for a shortage of schoolteachers in the Newbury
area of Berkshire.
In the late 1960s Bulmershe was asked to open an annexe to the
college at the nearby market town of Newbury in order to train
some teachers, who, it was hoped, would then wish to settle and
64
From Newbury to Salman Rushdie 65
teach in the area. Classrooms were provided at the local College

of Further Education, and for logistical reasons it was decided to
offer the students a choice of three interdisciplinary (main subject)
courses, instead of the full range of twenty single-subject courses
available at the main site.
'Area Studies' was one of the courses nominated, a combination
of geography, history and literature, taught by a team of colleagues
from all three relevant departments, with Great Britain, Africa and
the United States the designated regions. The African-literature
teaching fell to me, and, though I approached it with enthusiasm,
for I had a deep admiration for the novels of Achebe and the
poetry of Senghor, I also had some misgivings. Wasn't the course
using literature for background rather than accepting it for the vital
stuff it was? Wouldn't it be too remote for the students? Would
they really get much out of one or two lectures on 'Imperialism
and Literature in the Nineteenth Century,' an introduction to some
Nigerian novelists, a handful of poems by Diop and Soyinka, and
the opportunity to write an essay on Joyce Cary, Alan Paton or
Amos Tutuola? My fears were largely unfounded. The students
responded well to the imaginative literature, and seminars on such
topics as 'Rural Economies within Nigeria' provided an invaluable
source for comparison with such novels as Cyprian Ekwensi' s tale
of the Fulani cattlemen, Burning Grass (1962). 2
So successful was the course, in fact, that, when the Newbury
Annexe was closed three or four years later, it was decided to
continue it at Bulmershe. By then more developments were in the
air. The college had designed a new unit-based B.Ed. degree to be
validated by the CNAA, and, along with the already successful
course on African Studies, the English Department had decided to
offer a new unit on 'The Literature of Imperialism and Socialism'.
This latter course, taught by two members of the English Depart-
ment and a historian, examined the ways in which serious and
popular culture reflected imperial and socialist ideas in Britain
during the period 1880-1950. The twenty-seven week course
divided into two halves, the first of which discussed imperialism
by examining some of Kipling's verse and prose, Conrad's Heart
of Darkness (1902) and Nostromo (1904), and then, in connection
with the fmal phases of imperialism, E. M. Forster's A Passage to
India (1924) and George Orwell's Burmese Days (1934). The second
half of the course introduced socialism by discussing the Communist
Manifesto of 1848, and then proceeded to examine Shaw's Major
Barbara (1907), such novels as Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered

Philanthropists (1914) and Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole
(1933), and some poetry of the 1930s, concluding with Orwell's
The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).
Both courses recruited students successfully for several years,
but, as tutors began to realise that the combination of imperialism
and socialism overloaded the students, and as enthusiasm con-
tinued to develop in the area of Commonwealth literature, interest
began to grow in the idea of a one-year course (within the BA
programme) which would concentrate exclusively on literature
dealing with the subject of colonial and post-colonial experiences.
The time seemed right. Between 1952 and 1969 Doris Lessing
had produced her famous novel-sequence Children of Violence, and
V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas (1961) made him famous too.
Heinemann had begun to publish their African Writers series in
1962, starting, appropriately enough, with Achebe's Things Fall
Apart of 1958, and following in 1970 with their Caribbean Writers
series, which opened with Michael Anthony's The Year in San
Fernando. Commonwealth poetry was also becoming available in
such anthologies as Modern Poetry from Africa, edited by Gerald
Moore and Ulli Beier for Penguin in 1963, and Howard Sergeant's
Commonwealth Poems ofToday (1967). 3
The growing availability of Commonwealth literature was
matched by a corresponding growth in knowledge and critical
appreciation of it. In collaboration with Leeds University, Heine-
mann began to publish the Journal of Commonwealth Literature
in September 1965; Jonah Raskin's The Mythology of Imperialism
appeared in 1971, William Walsh's Commonwealth Literature in 1973,
and M. M. Mahood's The Colonial Experience, dealing with such
writers as Achebe and Narayan, in 1977. 4
Added to this growing interest in Commonwealth literature in
general was the mounting recognition, in various government
reports, of the increase in the numbers of immigrant children in
British schools, and thus of the need for teachers in training to
acquire a knowledge of their culture and traditions. The 1963 report
of the Ministry of Education, Half our Future, had contained virtually
no discussion of the issues involved, and the 1966 report, Children
and their Primary Schools, had included only a few paragraphs; but
the most recent report, A Language for Life (1975), devoted a whole
chapter to the subject, emphasising how important it was for
teachers to expand their cultural awareness in our multi-racial
society. 5
Though the climate was sympathetic to such courses within the
context of teacher-training degrees, there were some anxieties
about the possibility of offering a course on 'Literature of the
Colonial and Post-Colonial Experience' as a unit within the newly
validated BA degree programme. For some time now the college's
degrees had been validated by the CNAA, and there was some
suspicion that, while it accepted teacher-training proposals without
too much difficulty, its visiting subject panels were not only
properly rigorous about colleges' BA proposals, but even on
occasions hostile to curriculum developments that differed from
the paths of the extremely conventional. Courses on modern
literature are inevitably vulnerable to uninformed criticism, for it
is always possible to argue that students should be required to
study the classical texts of the past, which do require help, rather
than modern or contemporary texts whose place in the canon has
not yet been established. There were, furthermore, some informed
and normally sympathetic teachers with doubts. For example,
Professor Arthur Pollard, in a controversial contribution to the
Newsletter published by the Association of Teachers of Caribbean
and African Literature, expressed the view that 'The fact remains
that, with the possible exception of Naipaul, there really is nothing
in African and Caribbean literature to match in quality those works
which are normally found within the substantive body of texts set
at Advanced level.'6
In the event our fears were groundless. Having scrutinised our
proposed course as rigorously as we could, and having satisfied
ourselves and our colleagues that it was comparable in complexity,
coherence and richness with other proposed courses, we went
ahead with the submission, and without any great difficulty
obtained permission to teach the course.
The other anxiety which we had had about the course related to
resources, for, if these had not been available, mounting the course
would have been impossible, as the CNAA would have told us!
Here we were fortunate. Two members of the English Department
were still keen to share most of the teaching, while new colleagues
from the Departments of History and of Religious Studies were
also available for various 'walk-on' parts as occasional lecturers.
Because the college had been involved in African Studies from the
1960s, the library had already formed the nucleus of a collection of
African literature, and this had been added to gradually. The
college had also to put aside contingency funds in order to develop

new courses, and on the (fairly pragmatic) basis that a year-long
course of fifty-four hours might recruit up to twenty students
needing approximately two books each, the course was allocated
£400 to build up library stock. (Students were required to buy their
own essential texts, of course.) In this way we were able to
purchase such secondary texts as J. A. V. Chapple's Documentary
and Imaginative Literature 1880-1920 (1970), A. J. Greenberger's The
British Image of India (1969) and A. Sandison's The Wheel of Empire
(1967), to give three examples. 7 There was also a limited amount
of funding available within the English Department for the hire of
films and to pay occasional visiting writers.
In order to give the students an experience of 'colonial literature'
that was both wide and deep, we had decided fairly early on to
concentrate on English-language novels from England, Nigeria and
Trinidad, but the novels had to satisfy the two criteria of being
worth reading in their own right as well as dealing with various
aspects of colonial and post-colonial experience in the last 150
years. Thus the course provided the opportunity to discuss such
issues as the interaction between contrasting cultures, the relation-
ship between colonisers and colonised, and the constructive and
destructive effects of imperialism, as well as enabling students to
examine such techniques of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
fiction as realism, naturalism and symbolism, and such themes as
are characteristic of the literature of the period generally. While
the major part of the course focused primarily on British interpret-
ations of the experience of imperialism, the latter part of the course
provided opportunities to engage with non-British reflections on
the experience.
The course began with introductory lectures on the growth of
empire and ideas of empire in the nineteenth century, with a
backward glance at Robinson Crusoe (1719) and other earlier works
reflecting the imperial idea. It was virtually inevitable that the first
work to be considered in detail was Kipling's Kim (1901), in order
to examine its use of the adventure-story formula to articulate
Kipling's expression of the imperial ideal. Almost as inevitably,
Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Nostromo were examined next: the
differing use of adventure-story techniques and more critical
accounts of colonialism provided fruitful sources of comparison
with Kipling. Following this, Forster's A Passage to India was
discussed, both for its changing attitude towards the issues of
colonialism and for its formal complexities. Orwell's Burmese Days,

Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson (1939) and Graham Greene's The
Heart of the Matter (1948) provided three contrasting treatments
of colonialism, primarily from the point of view of the British
administrator; and the course ended with a discussion of the
withdrawal from empire by many European powers and the rise
of indigenous literatures which have reflected upon this experience.
The texts considered here included Chinua Achebe's Things Fall
Apart and V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River (1979), which
also, incidentally, provoked interesting comparisons with Heart of
Darkness, as it was perhaps intended to do.
We did not stick rigidly to the syllabus for very long. Though
the course was well subscribed by students, it was clear that they
needed more help with the historical and cultural backgrounds
than we had anticipated, and here, in addition to the usual print
hand-outs, we made use of such BBC TV series as Third Eye, and
found that Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi (1982) also provided
a way of rehearsing some modem Indian history. Francis Coppola's
Apocalypse Now (1979) formed a basis for comparison with Heart of
Darkness, on which it is clearly based, but also enabled students to
consider imperialism in a non-British context. Perhaps the most
interesting film of all shown in relation to the course, however,
was Pontecorvo's little-known Queimada! (1979), an extraordinary
tale of colonialism which shows how the British help to liberate a
Caribbean island from Portuguese rule, but then impose their own
rule on the 'independent' island through the activities of a powerful
sugar company.
As the students' enthusiasm for non-British writing grew, we
also made various minor adjustments to the course, replacing Cary
and Greene with Narayan and Salman Rushdie, substituting A
House for Mr Biswas for A Bend in the River, and adding a second
Achebe novel, No Longer at Base (1960). Visiting speakers helped
to enrich the students' experience, too, and we were especially
fortunate to enjoy readings and talks from such distinguished
writers as Farrukh Dhondy, Salman Rushdie and Ngugi Wa
Thiong'o, as well as receiving invaluable help from our colleague
in the Department of Religious Studies who provided expert
lectures on Hinduism and Islam, and even helped to organise a
visit to a local mosque.
By 1985 the course was firmly established, and its twofold
strategy of studying novels as literary artefacts which also dealt
with British and non-British experiences of imperialism was work-

ing well. But the BA programme, of which it formed a single unit
within the major course on English literature, was due for revision,
and this provided opportunities for further developments. The
most striking of these was the identification of imperialism as a
major theme of English literature as a whole in the period 1850-
1914, and the resulting decision to place Kipling and Conrad on
the syllabus alongside Dickens and Tennyson, George Eliot and
Thomas Hardy. This period study is a course taken by all students
in their second year, so the move has the additional advantage of
introducing them to issues and themes which they might then
wish to explore further through the revised course on 'Literature
of the Colonial and Post-Colonial Experience', which is now placed
in the third year.
Thus the course, which now concentrates much more on
twentieth-century writing, as well as including more poetry, begins
with lectures on imperialism and changing notions of imperialism
in the twentieth century, and reconsiders the achievements of
Kipling and Conrad, whose work students will have already
encountered in their second year. Forster's A Passage to India and
Orwell's Burmese Days are discussed next, both for their changing
attitudes towards the issues of colonialism and for their contrasting
techniques, while R. K. Narayan's Bachelor of Arts (1937) provides
an opportunity to examine an indigenous view of the Indian
experience.
A lecture on the end of empire introduces Salman Rushdie's
Midnight's Children (1981), whose experimentalist post-modernist
techniques offer another focus of comparison with the novels
discussed earlier. Then a lecture on African literature introduces
varieties of African writing, including poetry, before Chinua Ach-
ebe's Nigerian novels Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God (1964) are
discussed, and his use of English and African techniques explored
in detail. Ngugi Wa Thiong' o' s Petals of Blood (1977) is also examined
as another example of African critiques of the colonial and post-
colonial experience, this time in Kenya. A lecture on Caribbean
literature introduces a more detailed study of V. S. Naipaul's The
Mimic Men (1967) as a work which allows both political and
psychological interpretations. And the course ends with a consider-
ation of how such writers as Edward Braithwaite, Linton Kwesi
Johnson and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o have developed non-European
forms of expression in even more radical directions. 8
The issue involved here is likely to grow in importance as the

study of the literature of once-colonised countries continues, for,
while early discussions tended to focus on forms of political and
then economic imperialism, writers such as Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
have forced us (and their fellow writers) to face the fact that the
use of standard English by non-British writers in order to explore
the issues of colonialism is itself in danger of reflecting a kind of
cultural imperialism. Arguing that to choose a language is to choose
a world, Ngugi suggests that the use of the English language to
write about African themes is likely to compromise the treatment
of those themes by ignoring the traditions of national culture
carried by the native languages, and to ignore the writer's native
readers too. 9 But proposals to write in Gikuyu or Swahili, though
appealing to one kind of audience, inevitably mean cutting the
indigenous writer off, at least initially, from a large and influential
readership in Europe and America.
Similar issues also arise when discussing Caribbean poetry.
Linton Kwesi Johnson's dub poetry, written in a vigorous, demotic
dialect, which is instantly accessible to many large audiences of
young people, can be compared with Derek Walcott's more elegant
but more private verse. Which is the more effective? Which is the
true voice of feeling? How can we know, and how should we
judge?10
Students' responses to this kind of literature are of vital import-
ance, of course, but it would be foolish to generalise too dogmati-
cally about them. There seems to be a fairly naive initial enthusiasm,
perhaps based upon a sense of liberation from the traditional texts,
and often a generous, if sometimes, simplistic, political inclination.
But both feelings soon wear off when confronted with the narrative
complexities of Salman Rushdie- 'Why doesn't he tell us clearly
who Saleem's father it?' - or the political subtleties of Naipaul.
One year I did ask the students at the end of the course to put the
novels in rank order of their enjoyment, and one could argue that
the students' essential conservatism was revealed by the fact that
A Passage to India came first, except that it was very closely followed
in order by Things Fall Apart, A House for Mr Biswas and Midnight's
Children.
There is no doubt that these novels are often extremely challeng-
ing, if ultimately rewarding. Salman Rushdie' s post-modernist
novel, for example, uses a variety of narrative discontinuities as
well as constantly alienating interruptions from the narrator's
friend Padma, and the magical realism of the Midnight's Children's

Conference, to build up its marvellous quasi-allegory of the tragi-
comedy of modern India in the story of Saleem the pickle-maker.
We work mainly through student seminar papers, selected to
identify the major themes as well as providing a kind of narrative
framework. The topics chosen usually include critical commentaries
on Saleem's birth, the meaning of the Midnight Children's Confer-
ence, the Roles of Shiva and Padma, Saleem at war, and the novel
as tragedy or comedy. It is the last that usually provokes the most
lively discussion, some students arguing passionately that the
comedy of the first half of the book- the sheet courtship, Evie's
cycling, Saleem's schooldays - is completely outbalanced by the
horrors of the war and the Emergency, while others argue that the
comedy has been bleak right from the beginning, and that at least
Saleem and Padma have survived, wiser though bruised, like
Candide, like India itself.
Even this makes the novel too pessimistic for some students,
who quote the anecdote about Trotsky retold in Tariq Ali's fine
review of Rushdie' s novel:
In a private letter to a friend who wrote complaining that she

was now utterly pessimistic, Trotsky replied: 'Indignation, anger,
revulsion? yes, even temporary weariness. All this is human,
only too human. But I will not believe that you have succumbed
to pessimism. This would be like passively and plaintively taking
umbrage at history. How can one do that? "History has to be
taken as it is"; and when she allows herself such extraordinary
and filthy outrages, one must fight back with one's fists.m
This kind of response illustrates another kind of problem involved

in teaching this kind of material. The reading of literature is a
private business, no doubt, and readers in the end find a book's
meaning in reference to their own lives, with or without a tutor-
critic's advice. But modern literature sometimes offers ideas with
a force that seems to make demands that go beyond literary study.
Teaching in a secondary school once, a colleague and I devised
a language-and-literature project on the theme of poverty, and
introduced a whole range of materials - poems, films, extracts
from novels, newspaper cuttings, statistics- to make the experience
more vivid in the classroom. Then we had the idea of inventing a
family, the 'Murphys', who were impoverished by the father's
accident on a building-site, and then threatened with eviction from

their council house because they got behind with their rent. The
project went beautifully. The children became very involved,
worked hard and produced some very impressive writing. Then
as the piece de resistance, we organised a simulation exercise with
each child playing a part in the fictitious drama - one boy a
bewildered Mr Murphy, another an angry housing officer, this girl
an angry ratepayer, that one a supportive neighbour, and so on.
It went off very well, and we made an excellent videotape of the
whole domestic crisis. But at the end, when we had finished, and
were congratulating the children on a good term's English work,
one of them turned to me and said, 'But what are we going to do
to help Mr Murphy now?'
Teaching the literature of imperialism in higher education does
very occasionally raise similar questions, because the literature is
powerful and challenging, and deals with the world and its
problems as they are now. The student who reads Salman Rushdie' s
Midnight's Children with enthusiasm may want to go on and read
his travel book The Jaguar Smile (1987), about a recent visit to a
Nicaragua threatened by American-backed guerrillas, 12 and the
student may then go on to ask, 'But what can I do about Nicaragua
now?' And here, it seems to me, the teacher of literature qua
teacher has no more authority to advise the undergraduate than
anyone else, and must leave him, as T. S. Eliot reminds us that
Virgil left Dante in The Divine Comedy, to find another guide .13
Notes
1. The complete sentence reads, 'I know that pedagogy is a depressing
subject to all persons of sensibility, and yet I shall not apologise for
touching upon it because the emphasis upon the teaching of literature
and especially of modern literature is in itself one of the most salient
and significant manifestations of the culture of our time.' Lionel
Trilling, 'On the Teaching of Modern Literature', Beyond Culture: Essays
on Literature and Learning (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1966) p. 3.
2. Cyprian Ekwensi, Burning Grasses: A Story of the Fulani of Northern
Nigeria (London: Heinemann, 1962).
3. Doris Lessing's five-volume sequence Children of Violence consists of
Martha Quest (London: Michael Joseph, 1952}, A Proper Marriage
(London: Michael Joseph, 1954), A Ripple from the Storm (London:
Michael Joseph, 1958), Landlocked (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1965)
and The Four-Gated City (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1969). V. S.
Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas (London: Andre Deutsch) was
published in 1961. See also Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier (eds), Modern
Poetry from Africa, Penguin African Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1963); and Howard Sergeant (ed.), Commonwealth Poems of Today
(London: John Murray for the English Association, 1967).
4. Jonah Raskin, The Mythology of Imperialism: Rudyard Kipling, Joseph
Conrad, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence and Joyce Cary (New York:
Dell, 1971); William Walsh, Commonwealth Literature (London: Oxford
University Press, 1973); and M. M. Mahood, The Colonial Encounter: A
Reading of Six Novels (London: Rex Collings, 1977).
5. Half our Future: A Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education
(England) (London: HMSO, 1963); Children and their Primary Schools: A
Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) (London:
HMSO, 1967); A Language for Life: Report of the Committee of Inquin;
appointed l!y the Secretary of State for Education and Science under the
Chairmanship of Sir Allan Bullock FBA (London: HMSO, 1975).
6. Arthur Pollard, ATCAL Newsletter, no. 8 (Dec 1982) 2-3.
7. Further important secondary sources include Martin Green, Dreams of
Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980);
Bruce King (ed.), West Indian Literature (London: Macmillan, 1979);
J. Meyers, Fiction and the Colonial Experience (Ipswich: Roydell Press,
1973); E. Palmer, The Growth of the African Novel (London: Heinemann,
1979); William Walsh (ed.), Reading in Commonwealth Literature (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1971). There are in addition many studies of
individual writers, such as G. D. Killam, The Writings of China Achebe: A
Commentary, rev. edn (London: Heinemann, 1979); and Paul Theroux,
V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to his Work (London: Andre Deutsch,
1972).
8. The full list of essential texts now consists of the following: Chinua
Achebe, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God; E. R. Braithwaite, Rights
of Passage; E. M. Forster, A Passage to India; L. K. Johnson, Inglan is a
Bitch; V. S. Naipual, The Mimic Men; R. K. Narayan, A Bachelor of Arts;
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood; George Orwell, Burmese Days;
J. Reed and Clive Wake (eds), A Book of African Verse; Salman Rushdie,
Midnight's Children. Wherever possible, paperback editions are recom-
mended.
9. See especially Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Writers in Politics (London: Heine-
mann, 1981) and Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African
Literature (London: Heinemann, 1986).
10. See Linton Kwesi Johnson, Inglan is a Bitch (London: Race Today
Publications, 1980); and Derek Walcott, The Star-Apple Kingdom (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979).
11. Tariq Ali, 'Midnight's Children', New Left Review, no. 96 (Nov-Dec 1982)
95.
12. Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (London:
Picador, 1987).
13. T. S. Eliot, 'Poetry and Drama', in Selected Prose ofT. S. Eliot, ed. with
an introduction by Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975)
p. 146.
5
Ironies of Progress: Joseph Conrad and
Imperialism in Africa
D. C. R. A. GOONETILLEKE
Unseemly deeds are usually accompanied by high-

sounding, even brilliant, justifications.
(Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 'On the Brink of a
Cataclysm', The Listener, 25 March 1976)
Imperial realities and alien cultures have had a tremendous impact

on writers who have come into contact with them, contributing
crucially to their maturation and the enlargement of their sensibility,
and stimulating them to creativity. E. M. Forster found India more
liberating and inspiring than Cambridge, Wiltshire and even Italy.
He rightly considered his experience of Dewas State Senior 'the
great opportunity of my life' .1 Conrad told Edward Garnett, 'Before
the Congo I was only a simple animal.' 2 It is true that the physical
disorders Conrad suffered during his Congo journey incapacitated
him so much that he was forced to curtail his career as a seaman
and to think more seriously of a career as a writer. 3 But obviously
the most important of the consequences, from a literary point of
view, was the impact of the Congo on his imagination, particularly
as it manifested itself in Heart of Darkness. It is a central text in any
discussion of 'Literature and Imperialism' and the central text in
regard to Africa. Conrad's is 'the dominant image of Africa in the
Western imagination'. 4
David Carroll argues, 'Conrad's Africa is "the dark continent"
of the European imagination, an extreme stereotype. Conrad
exploits the stereotype to the full. He is using Africa as a symbol,
a backcloth onto which his characters can project their inner doubts,
their sense of alienation.' 5 Benita Parry thinks, 'the landscape is
mythic, the scenery surreal, the circumstances grotesque'. 6 Conrad,
of course, does not set out to provide an accurate description of
Africa, and the Africa in the tale is the continent as seen through
75
European eyes, but even as objective description it strikes me as

true despite traces of imperialist distortion in Marlow's presentation
of it. One has to view it not from the standpoint of Africa today
but from that of the continent as it was a century ago; the
mysterious, demonic Africa of that time has been laid bare by
'development' and modernisation, though, even as late as the
1970s, V. S. Naipaul observed, 'The airplane that goes from
Kinshasa to Kisangani flies over eight hundred miles of what still
looks like virgin forest.T7 Norman Sherry has shown that the Congo
at the time of Conrad's journey was less undeveloped than as
portrayed in the tale:
Disentangling fact from fiction in the actual journey up-river,

we are left not with a mysterious and dangerous journey into
the unknown and the primitive during which the passengers
are beset by an ignorant greed for ivory, and the captain, Marlow,
is the isolated and dedicated workman intent on the immediate
difficulties of his job, but with a routine, highly organised
venture along a fairly frequented riverway linking quite numer-
ous settlements of trading posts and factories, and with a number
of competent and busy men on board, and with Conrad there
to learn the route under the guidance of a skilled captain. 8
But Conrad himself said, 'Heart of Darkness is ... experience

pushed a little (only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case.'9
He also said, 'As for the story itself it is true enough in its essentials.
The sustained invention of a really telling lie demands a talent
which I do not possess.' 10 The predating of his experience is
convincing on a realistic plane, and on a simple level the tale comes
across as a vivid and sensitive travelogue. It is significant that
when Albert J. Guerard introduced the tale to one of Roger
Casement's consular successors in the Congo in 1957, he 'remarked
at once that Conrad certainly had "a feel for the country"'. 11 The
predating facilitates, among other things, the introduction of the
idea of the jungle as symbolic of dark urges and enables Conrad
to incorporate Marlow's sensation that 'instead of going to the
centre of a continent, I [was] about to set off for the centre of the
earth'; 'going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest
beginnings of the world'- a remarkable intuition on Conrad's part
in the light of the current Noah's Ark theory:
Ironies of Progress: Conrad and Imperialism 77
Humans evolved recently, probably less than 200,000 years ago,

in sub-Saharan Africa and then migrated 100,000 years later to
take over the world .... humanity's ancestral home was in
Africa - for gene analysis shows African people have a longer
evolutionary history than other races and are probably the
fountainhead of mankind. 12
Heart of Darkness certainly possesses elements of realism. Conrad

uses the same narrator as in Lord Jim, but with a difference. In Lord
Jim, Marlow was relating the experiences of someone else; here (as
in 'Youth') he is recounting his own. Thus, Marlow is narrating
the story as if it were first-hand experience. Critics have speculated
as to how Conrad came to adopt the convention of the first-person
narrator. Several have ascribed this to the influence of Henry
James's use of a central observer. 13 Conrad's 'early Polish readings'
in the gaweda, the kind of Polish story 'told by some clearly defined
person', 14 may have influenced him too. But a more potent
influence would have been, probably, the yarns of seamen: every-
body knows how greatly Conrad's career in the Merchant Service
mattered to him as a man and as a writer; the narrators of 'The
Secret Sharer' and The Shadow Line are young captains; Marlow
himself is a seaman. Still, Marlow is 'a wanderer too'; and it seems
to me likely that the most powerful influence on the narrative
convention in Heart of Darkness would have been the mode of the
'sahib' recounting his colonial experiences. This mode had been
established in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine/ 5 to which Conrad
contributed 'Karain', 'Youth', Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness itsel£. 16
On one level, Heart of Darkness is a serious commentary on
imperialism, what Conrad called 'the vilest scramble for loot that
ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical
exploration'Y Marlow's portrayal is, from one aspect, a part of
this theme and his suitability as a narrative vehicle is crucial to its
presentation. It is Marlow who utters these words as he ruminates
on his experiences at the Central Station in the Congo:
You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am
straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me.
There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is
exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to
forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something
rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose.
Marlow's confession of his uprightness and his explanation for it

ring true; indeed, his tone always sounds honest. Our acceptance
of his probity is one reason why we accept his narrative as
authentic. It is true that Marlow lies four times in the course of the
tale. He intimidates the brickmaker by allowing him to imagine
that he has the power to harm his career through influence in
Europe and so obtains the rivets he needs to repair his steamboat
so as to get to Kurtz. Marlow appeases Kurtz's disciple, though
he disagrees with his views about Kurtz, and so the disciple re-
enters the wilderness with his sunny temperament intact. He lies
to Kurtz, who is on the verge of death, that his 'success in Europe
is assured' in order to persuade him to return to the steamer. On
Marlow's return to Europe, he lies to Kurtz's Intended so as not
to shatter her view of Kurtz. In all these instances, Marlow is
compelled to compromise with truth for a worthy purpose, and
we feel that he is, on the whole, as honest as possible in an
imperfect world. His integrity is fully convincing on a human
plane.
That Marlow is a certain type of Englishman is also important.
These are observations and reflections of his in the waiting-room
of the Belgian imperial company:
Deal table in the middle, plain chairs all round the walls, on one
end a large shining map, marked with all the colours of a
rainbow. There was a vast amount of red - good to see at any
time, because one knows that some real work is done in there,
a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on
the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers
of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I wasn't going
into any of these. I was going into the yellow.
Conrad takes care to see to it that Marlow takes into account all
the colonial countries; on the map, the red must stand for the
British, the blue for the French, the green for the Portuguese, the
orange for the Spanish, the purple for the Germans and the yellow
for the Belgians. The empire of his own country evokes a warm
response from Marlow which the other empires do not, and he
mentions one specific reason for it. But is he a conventional
imperial-minded Englishman? A little earlier, he had contemplated
imperialism in general:
I was thinking of very old times, when then the Romans first
came here, nineteen hundred years ago .... But darkness was
here yesterday. . . . Or think of a decent young citizen in a
toga- perhaps too much dice, you know- coming out here in
the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to
men his fortunes .... He has to live in the midst of the
incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascina-
tion, too ....
. . . Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this. What saves
us is efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really.
They were no colonists; their administration was merely a
squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors,
and for that you want only brute force - nothing to boast of,
when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising
from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get
for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with
violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at
it blind - as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The
conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away
from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter
noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it
too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back
of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish
belief in the idea- something you can set up, and bow down
before, and offer a sacrifice to ...
Conrad sees the interaction of imperalism and primitive life

historically. Marlow puts the imperialism of the British in line with
that of the Romans. It was a prominent and longstanding British
imperial tradition to admire the Roman Empire and emulate it: one
of Thomas Sprat's arguments in 1667 for 'a great Reformation in
the manner of our Speaking and Writing' was that 'purity of Speech
and greatness of Empire have in all Countries still met together'
and he cited the ancients/8 Cecil Rhodes 'liked to picture himself
as [Roman] emperor!' 19 But Marlow is humane: he condemns the
Romans in a way that reflects the minority critical attitudes towards
them of, say, D. H. Lawrence, who saw their 'brute force' (to use
Marlow's words) in wiping out 'the Etruscan existence as a nation
and a people'/0 Marlow trenchantly criticises 'the conquest of the
earth'. Still, he finds justification for British imperialism in its
'efficiency' and its 'idea'. Marlow's language carries suggestions of
which he is not aware. Terms such as 'saves' and 'redeems' imply

an uneasy consciousness in him of unsatisfactory features even in
British imperialism and in their attempted vindication an uncon-
scious hypocrisy. This is one of the traits which he betrayed in
Lord Jim; it is so deep-seated that it remains despite his maturing
Congo experience. It is a national trait of the British. Twenty years
later E. M. Forster wrote,
Hypocrisy is the prime charge that is always brought against us.

The Germans are called brutal, the Spanish cruel, the Americans
superficial, and so on; but we are perfide Albion, the island of
hypocrites, the people who have built up an Empire with a Bible
in one hand, a pistol in the other, and financial concessions in
both pockets. Is the charge true? I think it is; but while making
it we must be quite clear as to what we mean by hypocrisy. Do
we mean conscious deceit? Well the English are comparatively
guiltless of this: they have little of the Renaissance villain about
them. Do we mean unconscious deceit? muddle-headedness? Of
this I believe them to be guilty. 21
With fine insight, Conrad suggests through the ritual implications

of Marlow's concluding words that an idealisation of imperialism
is an attempt to justify an element of inhumanity which is common
to both civilised and primitive societies. The action which follows
implicates the British Empire in its exposure of the evils of imperial
entanglements. In this context, Conrad is critically projecting
Marlow; he is not the kind of 'self-dramatisation' on the part of
the author which Walter Allen takes him to be; 22 though more up-
to-date, Wayne C. Booth and Ian Watt make essentially the same
mistake in regarding Marlow as usually a 'reliable reflector of the
clarities and ambiguities of the implied author' ;23 Frederick R. Karl's
view is similar to theirs. 24 It seems to me wrong to quote Marlow's
remark 'There was a vast amount of red - good to see at any time
because one knows that some real work is done in there' as an
expression of an opinion of the author and take it as evidence of
Conrad's 'loyalty to the British Empire', as Arnold Kettle does, 25
or conclude that 'the red of the British Empire gets a patriotic pat',
as Ian Watt does/6 Karl is in agreement with them. 27 The elegantly
spoken and thoughtful side of Marlow, evident in the comparison
of Roman and British imperialism, seems to overlap somewhat
with Conrad himself; so do the touches of vague elevated language,
which from the very beginning enter the tale when Conrad tries
to render the deep reaches of the entanglement of cultures. But, if
we consider Marlow's personality as a whole, we see that Conrad
is essentially projecting a character. Indeed, the words that immedi-
ately follow those quoted by Kettle, Watt and Karl reinforce this
point: here Conrad is clearly and deliberately rendering the idiom
of a character, a rather extravert middle-class Englishman who is
Marlow - not his own idiom, which is that of an aristocratic
European deracine. Marlow's honesty and humanity qualify him to
be a suitable narrator. But is his usefulness limited by his imperial-
mindedness in respect of Britain? Conrad is able to treat this side
of Marlow critically just as he does other aspects. Marlow provides
one way by which he can bring Britain into his concerns. Moreover,
he sends Marlow 'into the yellow'. He can plausibly employ
Marlow to convey his themes as fully as he understands them
partly because Marlow's national sentiment would not be on the
defensive, as an hindrance to clear-sightedness and frankness, in
confronting the imperial entanglements of a foreign country,
Belgium.
Marlow is an excellent narrative vehicle partly because he is
British, and we can appreciate this all the more if we look at him
from another angle. All the imperial powers are guilty of atrocities.
The French, the Spanish and the Belgians chopped off the hands
of indigenous people as a punishment. In France, torture was a
legal instrument of justice until the Frist World War, and the
French were more callous towards subject people; it is not long
since they used torture on the Algerians. There was a shattering
drop in the African population of the Congo under the Belgians.
The early imperial activities of the British were not less inhuman
than those of other countries. Their trafficking in slaves and their
less cruel, later trade in coolies is too well known to need detailing.
William Knighton's 'sketches' bring in the brutal side of British
imperialism in mid-nineteenth century Ceylon:
' ... Every man is a magistrate on his own estate, you know,'
[Siggins] continued, 'and therefore, as long as the man is working
for you, you have a right to do what you like with him- that is,
anything short of killing'.
'A new doctrine, truly,' said Mouat, coming as near a laugh
as he ever permitted himself, 'but one very often acted upon, I
believe. ' 28
But generally by the tum of this century British imperialism had

become so experienced and so self-enriching that it was able to
rectify the worst features of imperialism. Thus, Marlow is a
spokesman from a country with this imperial tradition. With no
adequate sense of the past, the present state of the British Empire
tends to confirm his distorted view of it, his racial and cultural
prejudices. This is perfectly convincing and is also representative:
for instance, both T. S. Eliot and George Orwell thought along
such lines. 29 Marlow's national blindness is part of Conrad's
themes, and Conrad has selected a person from the right imperial
country, Britain, who could see clearly and humanely the imperial
involvements of a foreign country whose empire was comparitively
recent and whose excesses were uncorrected. Moreover, Conrad
had chosen a kind of imperial environment in which the essentials
of his themes would 'stand out' not merely with a particular force
and colouring', as when located on board ships in 'complete
isolation from all land entanglements', 30 but with horrifying naked-
ness.
Conrad's presentation of the imperial theme begins not in the
Congo or even in Brussels, but in London. Marlow talks of his
connection with the Belgian Congo because of 'his propensity to
spin yams'. The 'propensity' is released in a situation conducive
to it, which appropriately forms the opening of the tale - Marlow
on board a yawl in the Thames at dusk with four cronies joined
by 'the bond of the sea' who were 'tolerant of each other's yams-
and even convictions'. Marlow's tale does not spring from the
pressure of inner compulsion as, say, the 'Rime' of Coleridge's
Ancient Mariner. But the experiences in it do matter to him and
he relives them as he narrates them. The atmosphere and setting
are interwoven with meaning, and the dominant metaphorical
motif of darkness and light arises naturally, given the time and
the place. Writing in the heyday of empire, the age of Joseph
Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes, Conrad subverts majority imperial-
ist sentiments and opinion from the beginning. Suggestions of
darkness in Britain's past and present history are confirmed by
Marlow's opening words, 'And this has also ... been one of the
dark places of the earth.' The Romans were 'men enough to face
the darkness'; the tale provides the answer to the question of
whether modem Europeans are 'men enough' (an answer in the
negative in the case of ordinary Europeans, and both negative and
peculiarly positive in the case of Kurtz). Marlow proceeds to focus
specifically on the Congo:
True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got
filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had
ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery - a white patch
for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of
darkness.
Conrad suggests, with trenchant irony, that white men have turned
Africa into a dark continent, contrary to the usual view of them as
harbingers of light. Later in the tale, Kurtz's painting suggests the
same inversion of roles. It is significant that Marlow's cronies are
a Director of Companies, a Lawyer and an Accountant, pillars of
capitalism, and thereby implicated in his tale, while the anonymous
authorial narrator introduces readers to the nature of Marlow's
story in words often quoted yet indispensable:
The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning

of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was
not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to
him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but
outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow
brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos
that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of
moonshine.
The Buddha tableaux- the unusualness and sacrilege of the image

suggesting with force not merely Marlow's precise posture but his
role as an explorer of the self, of which the Buddha is the greatest
exemplar the world has yet known- enclose the tale, but it is really
open-ended, a characteristically modern innovation; Marlow's
'experience' is 'inconclusive' in a way deeper than his immediate
audience thinks but for which the reader is prepared Lord Jim and
'Youth' were not open-ended.
The action gathers momentum as the scene shifts to Brussels,
the headquarters of the Belgian Empire. The scene when Marlow
bids farewell to his aunt is by no means irrelevant:
In the course of these confidences it became quite plain to me I

had been represented to the wife of the high dignitary, and
goodness knows to how many more people besides, as an
exceptional and gifted creature - a piece of good fortune for the

Company- a man you don't get hold of every day. Good
heavens! and I was going to take charge of a two-penny-
half-penny river-steamboat with a penny whistle attached! It
appeared, however, I was also one of the Workers, with a capital-
you know. Something like an emissary of light, something like
a lower sort of apostle. There had been a lot of such rot let loose
in print and talk just about that time, and the excellent woman,
living right in the rush of all that humbug, got carried off her
feet. She talked about 'weaning those ignorant millions from
their horrid ways', till, upon my word, she made me quite
uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was run for
profit.
'You forget, dear Charlie, that the labourer is worthy of his
hire,' she said brightly.
Conrad introduces conventional Western notions of imperialism

(these were naturally more prominent in the metropolitan countries
than in the colonies) through the aunt; in 'An Outpost of Progress',
he did the same thing undramatically through 'some old copies of
a home paper' found by Kayerts and Carlier. Marlow's sensible
honesty becomes clearer as Conrad employs him to expose the
falsity of these views. Marlow can see the difference between the
exaggerated conception of his job and its real pettiness, between
the sentimental idealism centring around imperialism and the
economic basis of it. Conrad dramatises the actual working of the
head office of an imperial company. There are the memorable
figures of the two unconcerned women at the door knitting black
wool, who go with such an office and also seem like Fates. There
is Conrad's presentation of the medical examination with its
suggestions of callousness in the operations of the company, of
possible derangement and death of its employees. The whole city,
in fact, seems to Marlow 'a whited sepulchre'. Its death-like
attributes link up with the inhumanity in the Empire, and Conrad
suggests how the attributes of the metropolitan country are founded
on imperialism. In biblical language, 'whited sepulchre' is
employed as a figure for a hypocrite or for someone or somewhere
whose outward righteousness and pleasantness conceal an inner
corruption; thus it suggests aspects of the character of the colonial
countries. Despite Marlow's common sense and these disquieting
experiences, his vigour and enthusiasm for the Congo journey
remain. He has, in fact, as yet hardly experienced imperialism at

first-hand.
When Marlow leaves Brussels for the Congo, the realities en
route are as much an integral part of the portrayal of imperialism
as the realities in Belgium and in the Congo itself:
Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary
contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows .... They
had faces like grotesque masks- these chaps; but they had bone,
muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement, that was
as natural and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted
no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at.
For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightfor-
ward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would
turn up to scare it away. Once, I remember, we came upon a
man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed
there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had
one of their wars going on thereabouts ....
We gave her her letters (I heard the men in that lonely ship
were dying of fever at the rate of three a-day) and went on. We
called at some more places with farcical names, where the merry
dance of death and trade goes on in a still and earthy atmosphere
as of an overheated catacomb ....
That the faces of the 'black fellows' seem like 'grotesque masks' to
Marlow suggests that he is a racial-minded foreigner. His sense of
unreality stresses, by contrast, their oneness with their own
environment. The naturalness and reality of the Africans differ
strikingly from the alienness and frightening absurdity of the man-
of-war. The juxtaposition illuminates and accounts for Marlow's
grave inner disturbance and, at the same time, lights up and gives
substance to 'the merry dance of death and trade'. It is also
important to notice that realities outside Marlow are more in the
picture than his own reactions. This is typical of the opening
phases.
When the action moves on to the Congo, Conrad presents
the imperial entanglements of Western civilisation and primitive
culture in the colony itself. The physical details are made to typify
the whole system. Marlow observes this: 'I avoided a vast artificial
hole somebody had been digging on the slope, the purpose of
which I found it impossible to divine. It wasn't a quarry or a
sandpit, anyhow. It was just a hole .... 'Then this: 'I discovered
that a lot of imported drainage pipes for the settlement had been
tumbled in there. There wasn't one that was not broken. It was a
wanton smash-up .... 'After that:
Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against
the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced
within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment,
and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a
slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The work was going
on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers
had withdrawn to die.
Conrad powerfully suggests meaninglessness, costly disorder and

gross inhumanity, respectively, by the selection and juxtaposition
of these graphically presented realities, without further commen-
tary by Marlow. The outer realities matter more than Marlow's
inner state. Conrad's voice rises as he goes on to present the plight
of the labourers:
Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat with
their legs drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees,
stared at nothing, in an intolerable and appalling manner: his
brother phantom rested its forehead, as if overcome with a great
weariness; and all about others were scattered in every pose of
contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a
pestilence.
This dramatised section derives its power partly from the metapho-
rical suggestions of dehumanised beings and partly from the visual
exactness. Conrad's realism controls his compassion so that there
is no lapsing into sentimentality. This scene is characteristic of
Conrad's presentation of the Congolese. He does not go deep into
their lives and, from the external standpoint of a visitor, presents
them as victims of imperialism who remain anonymous to him.
After describing 'the grove of death', Marlow speaks of himself:
'I didn't want any more loitering in the shade, and I made haste
towards the station.' This is all he says solely about himself. He
quickly gets onto realities outside the Company's chief accountant.
The disorder and horror Marlow has met become more remarkable
by forming both a glaring contrast to the juxtaposed figure of the
spruce accountant and his books 'in apple-pie order', and a

telling complement to the 'muddle' elsewhere in the station. The
presentation of these realities is convincing partly because it is
made through a narrator who is describing first-hand experiences
with an air of casualness. Moreover, the proximity of such incongru-
ities is perfectly natural in a colonial context; Roger Casement
observes in 'The Congo Report' (11 December 1903),
When I visited the three mud huts which served the purpose of
the native hospital, all of them dilapidated, and 2 with the
thatched roofs almost gone, I found 17 sleeping sickness patients,
male and female, lying about in the utmost dirt....
In somewhat striking contrast to the neglected state of these
people, I found within a couple of 100 yards of them, the
Government workshop for repairing and fitting the steamers.
Here all was brightness, care, order, and activity, and it was
impossible not to admire and commend the industry which had
created and maintained in constant working order this useful
establishment. 31
Whereas the action of 'An Outpost of Progress' takes place in a

single setting, the structure of Heart of Darkness is provided by
Marlow's journey to and from the heart of Africa, a linear structure,
with an unifying centre, a pivotal concem, in Marlow himself and
his growth. Thus, Conrad can render his much more inclusive
themes in terms of a whole range of realities and integrate them.
As Marlow penetrates deeper into the Congo, he observes more
aspects of imperialism and its entaglements. He indignantly des-
cribes the Eldorado Exploring Expedition as a base private attempt
at plunder; Conrad ironically implies his criticism through the
euphemism of the designation itself. Through Marlow, he is
preoccupied with the key imperial agencies, the public companies
and governments, which are shown up as essentially no better;
the suggested difference is chiefly that they operate on a larger and
more organised scale. At the Central Station, Marlow encounters a
small exclusive society of European traders and agents:
However, they were waiting- all the sixteen or twenty pilgrims

of them - for something; and upon my word it did not seem an
uncongenial occupation, from the way they took it, though the
only thing that ever came to them was disease - as far as I could
see. They beguiled the time by backbiting and intriguing against

each other in a foolish kind of way. There was an air of plotting
about that station, but nothing came of it, of course. It was as
unreal as everything else - as the philanthropic pretence of the
whole concern, as their talk, as their government, as their show
of work. The only real feeling was a desire to get appointed to a
trading-post where ivory was to be had, so that they could earn
percentages. They intrigued and slandered and hated each other
only on that account, - but as to effectually lifting a little finger -
oh, no.
In his first 'Congo Diary' Conrad had noted, 'Prominent character-

istic of social life here; people speaking ill of each other.'32 The
term 'pilgrims', which Marlow uses consistently for them, is a
significant Leitmotiv; its idealistic associations ironcially sound,
among other things, their competitive greed. Their senseless
dilatoriness is shown as part of their sterile mentality. Amidst the
pretences, their desire for ivory is unmistakably real and prominent.
'Ivory' also becomes a Leitmotiv in the tale. Ivory is to the Congo
what silver is to Costaguana in Nostromo. It is the actual raw wealth
which private individuals, colonial companies and imperial powers
covet, as well as a symbolic centre for their self-aggrandising
motives. It has a wider symbolic application too. It is white and
shiny on the outside but is really dead matter, and thereby points
to a paradox at the heart of Western civilisation. This meaning
coheres with one of the significances of the accountant's role: he
keeps up appearances but his accounts are false and he is insensitive
and dried-up within. These observations of Marlow are acute, but
they are made from the outside and are general. He does not enter
as such into colonial society and does not talk in detail about any
particular individual. His own predicament figures in a minor way.
Marlow appears in several works of Conrad, but in all of them
he is not, to use Virginia Woolfs description, 'a subtle, refined,
and fastidious analyst'. 33 He was that in Lord Jim, but it seems to
me that in Heart of Darkness he is extraordinary in his powers of
observation, not in his attempts at analysis. What distinguishes
Marlow here is his openness to impressions (without fully laying
his psyche open to the experiences), whereas what distinguishes
the central consciousness characteristic of Henry James's fiction is
its fineness. In fact, as we shall notice, Conrad presents Marlow
as a narrator who partially understands his experiences. Thus, the
most fundamental irony of the tale is that Marlow is narrating

experiences of whose full import - as it emerges through prose
rich in implication, through the fine selection and arrangement of
scenes - he, and his immediate circle of listeners, are unaware.
This enhances his value as a narrative vehicle; to echo the Four
Quartets, he had the experience but (at least partially) missed the
meaning. Conrad secures the objectivity he needs partly with the
help of this ironic method, partly by employing a narrator, and
partly by making Marlow relate his tale in retrospect. Conrad's
detachment has to be particularly resolute in this tale, because he
is dealing with imperial realities which he found both profoundly
disturbing and enlightening. The ironic method is one of exposure
and also one of detachment. Its subtlety half-conceals or half-
blunts the tale's significances, which otherwise would have been
too shocking for the majority of his readers - certainly for the
readership of the pro-imperial Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine,
which originally published it, the first part appearing in the
thousandth number. In the heyday of empire, its critics, a tiny
minority, criticised particular ways of running an empire rather
than empire itself, but Conrad, in Heart of Darkness, does both and
more. It is significant that the tale works on a simple level too as a
story of exciting, even thrilling, adventure, full of suspense,
mystery and the 'exotic', which holds the reader's interest till the
end.
Marlow's journey in the Congo is strictly along the river. He
does not penetrate into less accessible areas. But, because the river
is the country's main highway, Conrad can present an impressive
range of imperial involvements and a wealth of more or less
fundamental insights into them. The continuing relevance of the
tale 34 is reinforced because the river remains not merely the great
highway of the country, as V. S. Naipaul observed in 1975, 35 but
at the heart of its culture. It is a local proverb that 'It is only the
river which works in Zaire.' 36 The part played by the river suggests
how centrally and intuitively Conrad was in touch with the African
world, the river functioning somewhat like the Grand Trunk Road
in Kipling's Kim. 37 Conrad does not systematically organise the
realities of the tale so as to bring out a thesis. They enter the
story as credible elements in the kind of journey which Marlow
undertakes. They fit in with each other to form a coherent,
profound impression of the entanglement of Western civilisation
and primitive culture. This impression, as we have seen, relates to
several aspects of imperialism - political (power and annexation),

economic (exploitation), social and psychological (the human cost,
the effects on the colonisers and the colonised) and historical
(civilisation as a brief passing phase; assessment of its nature and
value).
Douglas Hewitt argues that 'the story is primarily concerned
with the effect of the country [Africa] and of Kurtz on Marlow';
Albert J. Guerard thinks that 'the story is not primarily about Kurtz
or about the brutality of Belgian officials but about Marlow its
narrator'; Ian Watt argues that 'both the form and content of Heart
of Darkness are centred on the consciousness of Marlow', that
'Marlow has the double privilege of subject and object'; to Robert
0. Evans, 'Conrad's hero is Marlow and the story deals with
change in his character', while Benita Parry and H. M. Daleski
regard Marlow as 'the central protagonist' and as 'a protagonist-
narrator', respectively. 38 But it seems to me that Marlow's role as
a character in his own right is of secondary importance; he is not a
hero as, say, Fielding in Forster's A Passage to India is. He is mainly
a vehicle through which Conrad conveys the entanglements of
Western civilisation and primitive culture. We notice that Conrad's
approach is from the outside; he does pick out specific realities but
he does not go deep into any one of them; they are important not
so much in their own right as in their contribution to his general
theme. As in the phases already discussed, the realities outside
Marlow bulk much larger than his own role and are more important.
And, as we shall see later in more detail, in this tale he is not the
subtle psychologist critics have made him out to be.
Conrad contemplates the imperial entanglements of Belgium
and the Congo in a universal light. He does not mention Belgium,
Brussels and the Congo (the country and the river) by name; this
helps to give the imperial theme the widest possible application.
The man-of-war 'firing into a Continent', which Marlow sees on
his voyage to the Congo, is French. Kurtz is presented as a
representative of European civilisation as a whole ('His mother
was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed
to the making of Kurtz'). Conrad connects Britain, past and present,
to the theme. We have observed that he implicates the Romans,
too. But when we come to the Kurtz phase, - for, unlike the
generality of critics, I see Kurtz as the chief character- the imperial
theme expands to include an account of moral isolation, Kurtz's
story in the heart of Africa from one perspective, while the symbolic
level of the journey into the Congo becomes more pronounced, a

journey into the depths of man's unconscious, revealed in all its
darkness, though I do not think it is correct to interpret it in terms
too Jungian or too Freudian, as some critics have done. 39 The public
theme and the personal themes, both kinds of theme being equally
important in their respective ways, are linked. It is the public
theme that brings out the personal themes and leads to their
development. Heart of Darkness is more symbolic than realistic,
whereas in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (for example) the real
and the symbolic are equally important.
The direct presentation of Kurtz occupies few pages and he
speaks very little, but he is discussed before and afterwards. He is
presented mainly through the eyes of others as a great man,
and his greatness is convincing partly because it is linked with
completely ordinary facts: 'it was his impatience of comparative
poverty that drove him out there', a type of motivation common
among colonial employees; he concedes the obvious - 'Each station
should be a centre for trade of course.' But he is a painter, a poet,
a musician, a journalist, an orator - a man of varied talents, 'a
universal genius', as his cousin puts it with Marlow's agreement.
Kurtz came to the Congo 'equipped with moral ideas' and it is for
this reason, rather than for his oustanding success in gathering
ivory, which is what matters more to the other colonial employees,
that Marlow is curious, sometimes more than curious, about him
even before he meets him. Marlow feels this all the more keenly
by contrast with the ordinary Europeans to whom applies his
comment on the Eldorado Exploring Expedition: 'To tear treasure
out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral
purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a
safe.' A statement of policy of Kurtz was: 'Each station should be
like a beacon on the road towards better things, a centre for ...
humanizing, improving, instructing.' The brickmaker of the Central
Station calls him 'a prodigy, an emissary of pity, and science, and
progress'.
The tragedy is that a man of this sort and with lofty ideals
deteriorates to the lowest possible levels, and why this should
happen is a crucial question. Marlow comments,
You can't understand. How could you?- with solid pavement

under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer
you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher
and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and
lunatic asylum - how can you imagine what particular region of
the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by
the way of solitude - utter solitude without a policeman - by
the way of silence - utter silence, where no warning voice of a
kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion?
These little things make all the great difference. When they are
gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon
your own capacity for faithfulness.
Presumably the pressures of 'utter solitude' and 'utter silence' are

too much for Kurtz's 'inner strength' and 'capacity for faithfulness'.
Marlow's analysis is bare, general and slanted. It is of a piece with
the thinking of the sociologist Benjamin Kidd:
in climatic conditions which are a burden to him; in the midst of

races in a different and lower stage of development: divorced
from the influences which have produced him, from the moral
and political environment from which he sprang, the white man
does not in the end, in such circumstances, tend so much to
raise the level of the races amongst whom he has made his
unnatural home, as he tends himself to sink slowly to the level
around him. 40
Conrad's tale, in fact, intimates other causes too. Conrad empha-

sises Kurtz's superb eloquence. It enthralls his Russian disciple,
but his 'splendid monologues' were 'on love, justice, conduct of
life', all abstractions. His voice is the aspect of his personality that
impresses itself most deeply on Marlow's memory. Kurtz's report
for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs
('It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august
Benevolence') is sincere, but it is empty rhetoric. It is a deeper
sincerity that breaks through it and is expressed in the postscriptum:
'Exterminate all the brutes!' His rhetoric is a symbol of the humbug
and futility of his ideals when confronted with the heart of
darkness. As he could not stand the test Marlow concludes, 'the
wilderness . . . echoeds loudly within him because he was hollow
at the core'. The hollowness in effect applies to both Kurtz and his
ideals. The humanitarian pretences of imperialism in general are
exposed. At a related level, Kurtz's story is a moral discourse that
damns Christian hypocrisy and materialism. From one perspective,
in Stewart C. Wilcox's words, 'Conrad was a moralist who, like

Hawthorne, saw the irony of technological change and progress
without moral growth.' 41 The hollow man is a symbol of modern
civilised man.
Marlow thinks that Kurtz's problems are 'solid tude' and 'silence',
but Conrad's tale suggests that Kurtz's chief problem is freedom.
Deprived of the protective power of society, of civilised restraints,
he is faced with the terrible challenge of his own self, the knowledge
that he is free, with all the dangers that attend this awareness.
The discovery of the self is the discovery of one's freedom. The
strong drives in human nature then emerge in all their force. Kurtz
is unable to control his lust for women; Marlow spreaks of 'gratified
and monstrous passions', though these are not fully validated in
the tale. It is useful to remember that, when King Lear goes mad,
he thinks of sex. Kurtz is also unable to resist the lure of the alien.
The strain of living in the wilderness makes him ill twice and saps
his strength; he even hates it. But at times it compels him to forget
his European identity; he had once 'apparently intended to return'
to the station, but turned 'his back suddenly on the headquarters,
on relief, on thoughts of home- perhaps'; it is he who orders the
Africans to attack Marlow's steamer which was to rescue him. He
is also unable to restrain his lust for power and his avarice, of
which the human skulls on the stakes around his dwelling are a
symbol (they are a kind of reality found in colonies). Contrary to
his high ideals, in practice Kurtz betrays the native people, corrupts
and ruthlessly exploits them. He reduces them to poverty and
subservience. He employs African villagers to fight their fellow
men exclusively for his benefit, so that he can amass the maximum
possible quantity of ivory. He perverts 'pure, uncomplicated
savagery' into 'some lightless region of subtle horrors', including
'unspeakable rites offered up to him'. The civilised savage is far
worse than the plain barbarian. 'He had taken a high seat amongst
the devils of the land . . . literally.' The Africans as well as his
Russian disciple 'crawled before' him. The symbolic significance
of ivory in his case applies to his failure too:
The wilderness had patted him on the head, and, behold, it was
like a ball- an ivory ball; it had caressed him, and - lo! - he had
withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into
his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by
the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation.
Thus, Kurtz's role suggests meanings on political, economic,

social, religious, moral and psychological levels. It also intimates
meanings on archetypal and philosophical levels. As Douglas says
in the prologue to Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, 'The story
won't tell, not in any literal vulgar way.' 42 Cedric Watts argues that
'the supernatural covert plot of Heart of Darkness seems to me to
derive most strongly from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus'. 43 One can
discern a parallel between the Kurtz phase and Marlowe's play,
but it does not apply to the whole tale; the Kurtz phase is, certainly,
the most important of the episodes in the tale, yet only an episode.
Moreover, the parallel does not seem to me close. It is true that
the theme of power is common to both works, but then it is a
common and major theme in Western literature as a whole (it is
the theme of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, for instance). When Watts
hazards, 'just possibly the dramatist's name suggested the name
of Conrad's narrator and recurrent character, Charles Marlow', 44
he is being absurdly far-fetched. I also do not agree with Watts's
endorsement of Lillian Feder's thesis that, 'though Marlow's
journey recalls the epic descent in general, it is more specifically
related to the visit to Hades in the sixth book of the Aeneid', and
Robert 0. Evans's thesis that Conrad made 'extensive use of
[Dante's] Inferno in the general structure of the story'. 45 But Watts
seems to me right in asserting that behind Kurtz 'stands the
Christian legend of Lucifer'. 46 Kurtz is guilty of pride, the pride of
self, a sin which has something in common with the classical
concept of hubris. Kurtz rebels against the limitations and imperfec-
tions of the human condition. He sets himself up as a demigod
and partly as a consequence comes to grief.
Kurtz is remarkable in that he could win loyalties and appeal to
fellow human beings even during moments of darkest savagery.
The reasons for this throw light on his character and its significance.
He is admired by his Russian disciple, the Africans, indeed all
those who come to know him, even Marlow himself. At the
beginning of his journey into the interior, Marlow makes an
important distinction between, on the one hand, the 'strong, lusty,
red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men - men, I tell you',
and, on the other, 'a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a
rapacious and pitiless folly'; he preferred the former. Kurtz falls to
the first category, while the 'pilgrims', the Manager and brickmaker
belong to the despicable second category. In Marlow's view, Kurtz
is a genuine devil who can inspire horror, whereas the Manager
'was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even
respect. He inspired uneasiness.' He keeps up appearances and
maintains pretences continuously, whereas Kurtz totally commits
himself to evil and believes in action. The postscriptum to his report
has to be taken very seriously because it figures not merely as a
safety valve of an exhausted, defeated idealist but as a principle of
action. The Manager plots against Kurtz, plans to delay help to
the sick man until he perishes, but he is very cautious and even
his evil is negative, weak and mean. The brickmaker is his spy
and even more contemptible. Marlow calls him a 'papier-mckhe
Mephistopheles' and adds, 'it seems to me that if I tried I could
poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside
but a little loose dirt, maybe'. The ordinary unidentified 'pilgrims'
are the worst. All of them are essentially alike in that they suffer
from moral impotence and vacancy. They cannot do evil, for they
are not even alive, people who are never involved in making a
moral choice for good or evil, people who can never make the
journey to the very depths of self as Kurtz has done. Kurtz chose
evil, but he was man enough to make a choice and is peculiarly
honest in acting by it. It is to this humanity and honesty in Kurtz
that Marlow turns 'for relief'; this is why he prefers the 'nightmare'
of Kurtz to the 'nightmare' of the other colonial employees, though
the former is far more unsettling. Conrad's view here accords with
T. S. Eliot's:
So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good;

so far as we do evil or good, we are human; and it is better, in a
paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist.
It is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation;
it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity for damnation. 47
Kurtz was able to face the darkness; he was man enough to be

damned. The other colonial employees were not; they could be
neither saved nor damned. It is Kurtz's soul that goes mad,
whereas the others did not possess souls and so could not go mad
in this way; they were fools. In Marlow's words, 'you may be too
much of a fool to go wrong - too dull even to know you are being
assaulted by the powers of darkness. I take it, no fool ever made a
bargain for his soul with the devil.' Kurtz does remind the reader
of Lucifer. Even though he was committed to evil, he did achieve
something positive in the end. He had struggled with the forces
of evil and, though finally defeated, he had at least realised the

nature of evil.
The Kurtz phase is, certainly, the climax of Conrad's tale. It is
Kurtz who matters to the reader far more than Marlow. The episode
reaches its own climax with Kurtz's death. His final cry, 'The
horror! The horror!', is rich in meaning. It is interpreted by Marlow
as 'complete knowledge' and 'a moral victory', on one level, a
rejection of 'going native'. Critics usually follow this inference. In
J. I. M. Stewart's view, it signifies 'an act of contrition' .48 To Ian
Watt, 'the main object of Kurtz's condemnation is surely himself,
and what he has done; his dying whisper pronounces rejection of
the Faustian compact with the wilderness which had "sealed his
soul to its own". His final cry can only be judged as Marlow judges
it.' 49 To Lionel Trilling, Kurtz's cry 'refers to the approach of death
or to his experience of savage life'. 50 But it seems to me that it can
no less validly be understood as a recoil from the whole mess of
European rapacity and brutality in Africa into which he is being
taken back: it is necessary to remember, first, that Kurtz desires to
remain permanently in the heart of Africa and, secondly, that
certain aspects of civilised behaviour do, as presented, appear
horrorific. It also seems to me that Kurtz's insight into the public
theme deepens to philosophical insights in regard to the personal
themes. He sees the futility not only of imperial ideals, his
grandiose dreams, but of all things, what Lucretius suggests by
'omnis cum in tenebris praesertim vita laboret'Y Marlow also
remarks, 'Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand
better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the
candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe,
piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the
darkness.' Perhaps Kurtz also sees a vision of hell and the
damnation awaiting him. It recalls faintly the last hour of Marlowe's
Doctor Faustus; significantly, Faustus refers to Lucifer four times
during this hour, telescoped into a few minutes on the stage.
Kurtz's final illumination thus reveals the darkest depths that a
human soul could descend to. Kurtz is more than a representative
or symbol of imperialism and European civilisation; he acquires a
wider personal significance, as a human being, and ultimately as
a symbol of evil. The heart of darkness is the centre of Africa; the
unknown, the hidden self; and, above all, the evil in man. Marlow's
first-person narrative mode permits, indeed, lends itself to, sugges-
tiveness, extraordinarily and appropriately so at the climax, and
also to ambiguity, equivocalness and incertitude. There is ultimately

something inexplicable about Kurtz, a mystery, that suggests the
ultimate mystery of existence and human destiny.
As a character in his own right, Marlow is of secondary import-
ance. Yet he is the only character individualised, apart from Kurtz,
and he comes alive as a complex personality. He makes a crucial
contribution to the meaning of the tale, especially in articulating a
personal theme about growth and the moral scheme. Marlow is,
like the young captains in 'The Secret Sharer' and The Shadow-Line,
a seaman; ordinary, like other seamen; yet different, possessing
greater capabilities and higher potential. We have noticed his
chauvinistic blindness, his degree of conventionality, his honesty
and humanity. As he observes imperialism in practice, his under-
standing deepens. He is not unflinching: not long after his arrival
at the Central Station he says, 'I went to work the next day, turning
so to speak, my back on that station. In that way only it seems to
me I could keep my hold on the redeeming facts of life.' This kind
of action and this kind of attitude are characteristic of him. When
the steamer approaches Kurtz's outpost, he is disturbed by the
'suspicion' that the primitive Africans ashore are 'not inhuman',
but he 'didn't go ashore for a howl and dance'; he 'had to mess
about with white-lead and strips of woollen blanket helping to put
bandages on those leaky steam-pipes'. He is not the kind of person
whose psyche is liable to be affected in a deep and complex way
by his experiences; indeed, he guards against this. But he cannot
help but be disturbed and affected by what he observes; his
consequent growth is discomposing and painful, shown externally
in the wasting of his face and physique. After the Congo journey,
he remarks, 'It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was
my imagination that wanted soothing.' Marlow has got his priorities
right, though both his body and mind needed to recover.
In a sense, Marlow is a second self of Kurtz, and finds himself
striking up an enduring relationship with him. He is identified
with Kurtz by the other colonial employees and by himself. He
feels for what Kurtz was as well as for what became of him. But
Marlow does not undergo the same experiences as Kurtz: 'he had
made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had
been permitted to draw back my hesistating foot'.
Marlowe, the Accountant, the Russian and the Manager are able
to maintain sanity and restraint in spite of imperial realities and
the wilderness. Conrad wrote,
For the great mass of mankind the only saving grace that is
needed is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart in
the short moment of each human effort. In other and in greater
words, what is needed is a sense of immediate duty and a feeling
of impalpable constraint. Indeed, seamen and duty are all the
time inseperable companions. What awakens the seaman's sense
of duty ... is his ship. 52
It is partly this steady application to duty and work that preserves

Marlow's equilibrium and helps him maintain restraint. There was
'surface-truth' enough in these to save him from sinking into moral
degradation. But he is different from the other three, though they
too are helped by 'surface-truths'. The Accountant has some
commitment outside the self, but, in the processes of keeping up
appearances and maintaining books amidst 'the great demoraliza-
tion of the land', his humanity and sensitivity have been crushed.
He was insensitive to the distaste the African woman had for the
work of starching his shirts and getting up his shirt-fronts. He was
indifferent to suffering, of the sick European agent in his room
and of the dying Africans outside his window, and, in fact, became
aware of them only when they made noises which disturbed his
concentration on his books. The Russian is different. He responds
to Kurtz's cruelty and degradation with the steadfast conviction
that Kurtz is a great man. He is tragic in his blind devotion and
despite his utter futility and awareness of purposelessness. His
restraint arises from his devotion to something outside himself -
the assistance given by An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship,
precious to Marlow too, a symbol of 'the right way of going to
work' - and the kind of character he is: young, simple, innocent
and unaware of moral issues in his involvement with Kurtz. The
Manager's restraint is mere adherence to the superficialities of
civilised life and keeping up appearances while plotting against
Kurtz.
Illumination cannot come to such characters (all of them of minor
significance) as the Accountant, the Russian and the Manager-
only to Marlow, who is able to see the moral issues involved. As a
result, the values that he embodies - work, duty, restraint and
moral sensitivity- are enhanced, and it is these that Conrad affirms
as the positive values of his tale. He suggests that these values
transcend racial categories; indeed, his whole moral scheme does
so. Marlow observes that his African helmsman had 'no restraint-
just like Kurtz'; but in the face of hunger his African crew, who
are cannibals, display notable restraint: 'Why in the name of all
the gnawing devils of hunger they didn't go for us - they were
thirty to five- and have a good tuck in for once, amazes me now
when I think of it.' On the other hand, the white men on board
were all too ready to make 'a glorious slaughter' of the Africans in
the bush and, in fact, try to do so. Marlow's humanity is above
racial considerations: 'I can't forget him [Kurtz], though I am not
prepared to affirm the fellow was exactly worth the life we lost
[the African helmsman] in getting to him'.
It is common in Commonwealth literary criticism to condemn
works such as Heart of Darkness and Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson for
distorting cultural or political reality and so far lacking the 'truth'
considered essential to good literature; such critics perceive a
discrepancy between the real world and the world created by the
writer in his novel. I argued against David Carroll's view of Heart
of Darkness at the beginning of this essay. A more serious, wider
(and also impassioned) condemnation is levelled by the eminent
African writer in English, Chinua Achebe: 'Conrad was a bloody
racist .... And the question is whether a novel which celebrates
this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human
race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it
cannot.'53 Felix Mnthali argues, 'Conrad attacks Europe's scramble
for Africa .... This attack is all the same neutralized by Conrad's
acceptance of one of the cornerstones of modem imperialism,
namely, racism.' 54
It is Conrad's presentation of the entanglement of Western
civilisation and primitive culture in the interior of the Congo,
especially Kurtz's case, that is, and has been, most vulnerable to
criticism. Marlow sketches the approach to Kurtz's outpost thus:
But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a

glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a
whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping,
of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy
and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the
edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric
man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us - who
could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our
surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and
secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic

outbreak in a madhouse.
Conrad employs this kind of rhetoric whenever he deals with the

deep reaches of imperial entanglements - and most prominently
during the Kurtz phase, because it is then that this aspect is central.
The first half of the extract above is in lurid jingoistic prose: by
portraying the Africans as if they were constantly in a state of
'incomprehensible frenzy', it denies their normal activities; this
kind of distortion of indigenous life was commonly used as a
justification of annexation in the name of civilisation. These words
could come from Marlow. But the language soon shades into the
vague awe-creating literary prose of Conrad rather than the
conversational idiom of Marlow. Marlow confesses his
incomprehension and this is credible; but Conrad's kind of prose
does not convey this effectively. Marlow describes his surroundings
thus: 'And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace.
It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an
inscrutable intention.' This is the same kind of literary prose as
that in the earlier excerpt.
F. R. Leavis's criticism of the 'overworked vocabulary', 'the
adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible
mystery' as applied to the Congo and to 'the evocation of human
profundities and spiritual horrors' 55 is well known and has found
wide acceptance. On the other hand, many have attempted to
refute Leavis. For instance, Jeremy Hawthorne argues,
we should not assume that Conrad set himself the task of

arousing 'concrete particularities' of sensation in the reader. The
New Critical orthodoxy- now a little battered- is that literature
should use the precise word to evoke a precise and particular
response in the reader. . . . at certain times at any rate words
should be left out, or words should be used in such a way as to
draw attention to their own inadequacy. Just as we are to look at
Marlowe's experiences rather than to experience them, so too
there may be occasions where Conrad wants us to look at words,
rather than to experience sensations through them. 56
C. B. Cox thinks that

Uames] Guetti answers Leavis by showing that the concrete

particulars of language used by Marlowe in the early sections
are inadequate as a means of penetrating the reality, the wilder-
ness, the darkness, at the centre of man's consciousness. Lan-
guage itself is part of the exteriors of experience, giving an
illusion of order and coherence. 5 7
I do not agree with either party. Leavis's view is too simple. One
should not criticise Conrad's intention; the criticism is that he did
not find an effective language to express his intention or that his
language failed him.
At the beginning of the tale Marlow comments on his encounter
with Kurtz:
It was the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point

of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light
on everything about me - and into my thoughts. It was sombre
enough, too - and pitiful - not extraordinary in any way - not
very clear either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw
a kind of light.
Here Conrad conveys, through an idiom appropriate to Marlow, a

convincing impression of his narrator groping for the significance
of the Kurtz episode. Terms such as 'nightmare' recur in Marlow's
account. They suggest the disturbing unfamiliarity of his experi-
ences and his difficulty, even inability, to come to terms with them.
Marlow's experiences seem unreal to him and he says so openly
too, on and off. 58 With regard to Kurtz in particular, Marlow does
not quite understand him, but Conrad does and the reader is
meant to. Marlow's experiences themselves have to be satisfactorily
defined for us or suggested to us by Conrad. The objective realities
for the African side of these experiences enter the drama only
slightly. Kurtz's 'gratified and monstrous passions' are not quite
validated by the mere sketch of his African woman, 'barbarous
and superb' yet shrewish as his disciple found her to be, and by
highlighting these 'passions' in the tale's structure by contrasting
her, and balancing her against, Kurtz's Intended, who from one
perspective represents civilisation and conventional romance. To
refer to 'certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites' is
to offer meagre suggestions.
The element of weakness in Conrad's presentation of African
realities can be related to his attitudes towards and knowledge of

them. He has certain conventional attitudes towards negroes 59
(though not a racialist of the kind Achebe and Mnthali, for instance,
make him out to be) and knew little about them; consequently he
cannot portray negroes as Joyce Cary can. If we consider African
realities in particular, we see that neither in 'An Outpost of
Progress' nor in Heart of Darkness does he penetrate deep into
African culture as Cary does. The chief characters of three out of
Cary's four African novels are Nigerians: Aissa in Aissa Saved,
Louis Aladai in The African Witch, and Mister Johnson. Cary shows
a fine, open-minded interest in African culture, a culture very
different from European civilisation and at an earlier stage of
development; we feel a similar openness in Kipling's Kim, and in
E. M. Forster's account of the Hindu festivities in the last part of
A Passage to India. Cary is lucid, concrete and assured even when
presenting African realities most unfamiliar to civilised men, such
as the human sacrifices in Aissa Saved and Castle Corner or the ju-ju
in The African Witch.
Of course, Conrad did visit the Congo, and Richard Curle has
shown that the earlier phases of Heart of Darkness are based closely
on the author's own Congo joumey. 60 Conrad's first 'Congo Diary'
is sketchy and covers only the first two months of his six-month
stay in the Congo, but it is unlikely that a European of his character
would have got to know his carriers or other Africans, let alone
African culture. Jocelyn Baines points out that in the Congo during
Conrad's visit there was an agent named Georges Antoine Klein
who was reported to be sick, and 'in the manuscript of the story
Conrad starts by writing Klein and then changes to Kurtz'. 61 But
Norman Sherry thinks that Kurtz was modelled on Arthur Eugene
Constant Hodister more than on Klein. Hodister was in the Congo
during 1890 and Klein was working under him. Sherry says that
Hodister's 'character, charisma and success suggest that he was at
least in part the inspiration for Kurtz', yet adds, 'I do not believe
that Conrad ever met Hodister but I believe that he had heard of
him through gossip and hearsay.' 62 Ian Watt disagrees with Sherry:
There are at least two kinds of difficulty in seeing Hodister as

the person on whom Kurtz was based: the many important
differences between them; and many partial similarities between
Kurtz and numerous other people who were in the Congo during
the period . . . Emin Pasha, Major Barttelot and Charles Henry
Stokes. . . .Still none of them enacted the essential trajectory of

Kurtz's life, and we must surely see Klein as Conrad's only
definite, though very inadequate, biographical source. But the
essence of Kurtz's fate was of a very different kind; and in so
far as its origins were African at all, it was more likely to be a
distillation, not of these four careers, but of two other kinds
of human destiny which the Congo offered in much greater
abundance and variety. First and most obviously, ... that of
white men 'going native' .... But there was a second and even
more common kind . . . to create a character who revealed the
brutal discrepancy between the colonising ideal and the reality,
Conrad needed no other historical model than the two founders
of the Congo Free State, Leopold and Stanley. 63
The fact is that it is not certain how much personal experience and
information contributed to Conrad's portrait of Kurtz. As for the
factual basis of Kurtz's secrets, by 1899 there were available a
number of careful and substantial works by eminent anthropol-
ogists, such as Sir Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871)
and Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic
and Religion (1890), which dealt with, among other things, the kind
of realities which Conrad tries to handle in the tale. Indeed, a
critic, Stephen A. Reid, using Frazer's The Golden Bough, has
suggested that 'Kurtz's unspeakable rites and secrets concern
(with whatever attendant bestiality) human sacrifice and Kurtz's
consuming a portion of the sacrificial victim.'64 But this seems to
me speculation which is not sufficiently based on Conrad's type
of art. The realities of the Kurtz phase in the tale are not sufficiently
clear, and the main reason for this is probably that Conrad himself
had much less first-hand or even second-hand knowledge (though
the latter was abundantly available) than his kind of imagination
needed. In a letter toR. B. Cunninghame Graham, he confessed
that he knew much less than Roger Casement: 'He could tell you
things! Things I've tried to forget: things I never did know. He has
had as many years of Africa as I months - almost.' 65
The element of weakness in Conrad's presentation of African
realities is a blemish, but to make too much of it is to be carping.
Heart of Darkness is a masterpiece despite it. Conrad does employ

Marlow quite effectively as a mask for his limited knowledge and
insight. Though Africa is not a mere background, as in Ernest
Hemingway's stories 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber'

and The Snows of I<ilimanjaro', and 'white'-'black' relations matter
in the tale, where imperialism affects both the Europeans and the
Africans, Conrad clearly establishes that in his tale the perspective
is distinctively European; the Africans in their own right enter in
secondary dramatic terms and by implication. One is not right to
demand of a writer who sets his work abroad that the 'native'
people should occupy a central place in it; but, if they play a
secondary role or are unsatisfactorily portrayed in a whole range
of his works, this would indicate a boundary or limitation in his
vision. Moreover, Conrad and Joyce Cary are different kinds of
writers. Conrad apprehends reality like a poet; he advised H. G.
Wells, 'you must cultivate your poetic faculty'. 66 Conrad is poetic
and then gets beyond the poetic to the philosophic, whereas Cary
is a realist. Cary did not aspire to Conrad's levels and probably
could not, whereas Conrad could work at Cary's level but, when
in the grip of his daimon, did not.
Marlow's African journey ends at the key place from where he
set out - the headquarters of the Congo Empire, Brussels. The
final phase in Europe is pitched on a lower key than the African
episodes. This is appropriate, perhaps necesssary, not merely to a
tale drawing to its close, but to convey and underline its final
wisdom. When Marlow meets Kurtz's Intended, the presentation
is somewhat sentimental, but the conclusion as a whole is not
more spoilt than the Kurtz phase. Here is Marlow in Brussels:
I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of

people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from
each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their
unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams.
They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose
knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt
so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew.
Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace
individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect
safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of
folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend.
Conrad is directing irony at conventional ordinary living, treating

ironically his own positive values - work, duty and restraint - as
found in ordinary civilised life, and suggesting a preference for
the kind of awareness and exploration of self of Kurtz. Through

Marlow's account of his return to 'the sepulchral city', during
which he refers to physical details in the Intended's house such as
the fireplace with 'a cold and monumental whiteness', a piano like
a 'sarcophagus', even the woman's perfect yet pallid skin, Conrad
is able to suggest, without any forcing of the symbolism, that the
secure opulence of Europe is able to maintain itself intact only by
radical ignorance of, an unbridgeable distance from, the raw
savageries which ultimately pay for it. Here is Marlow talking to
Kurtz's Intended:
'And you admired him,' she said. 'It was impossible to know
him and not to admire him. Was it?'
'He was a remarkable man,' I said, unsteadily. Then before
the appealing fixity of her gaze, that seemed to watch for more
words on my lips, I went on, 'It was impossible not to-'
'Love him,' she finished eagerly, silencing me into an appalled
dumbness ....
'His last word - to live with,' she insisted. 'Don't you

understand I loved him - I loved him - I loved him!'
I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.
'The last word he pronounced was- your name.'
Marlow speaks a deliberately ambiguous language which he

mistakenly thinks adequately fits reality and, at the same time,
does not destroy what he thinks are the illusions of the woman.
The Intended speaks erroneously of Kurtz in Africa purely in terms
of her impression of him 'before the Congo'. Conrad's ironic
mode implies a criticism of both views and, at the same time,
accommodates both. Unlike during the preceding episodes, in this
final scene Marlow is more important as a character, as a person,
than as a narrative vehicle. The Intended is also important as a
person, not as a participant in the imperial theme (though she is
connected with it) - 'the woman at home in an imperialist society',
in Arnold Kettle's and Jeremy Hawthorne's view. 67 She has to be
taken differently from Marlow's aunt, who draws her significance
from the imperial theme, though Jeremy Hawthorne and Benita
Parry think otherwise. 68 The interaction of the Intended, who
knows only one side of Kurtz, and Marlow, who has observed
other sides, and the reader, whose knowledge is greater than
either's, generates a sense that nobody knows the totality of an

individual, a poignantly human sense with which to link the
episodes and conclude the tale. Marlow thought that the Kurtz
episode was 'the culminating point' of his experience, and it was,
certainly, the most disturbing of his experiences in the Congo, his
nerves being increasingly strained as he penetrates deeper, which
is reflected in the language Conrad gives him. But it seems to me
that his 'culminating point' is different from what he thinks: it
occurs not during the Kurtz phase, the climax of Conrad's tale,
but in this final scene with Kurtz's Intended. During the Congo
journey Marlow becomes more aware of things, but he now sees
that illusions are necessary for survival. Of course, the last words
Kurtz pronounced, contrary to what Marlow tells the Intended,
were not her name but 'The horror! The horror!' 69 Conrad himself
was aware of the importance of this scene, by no means an anti-
climax after the Kurtz episode:
[in] the last pages of Heart of Darkness . . . the interview of the

man and the girl locks in - as it were - the whole 30,000 words
of narrative description into one suggestive view of a whole
phase of life, and makes of that story something quite on another
plane than an anecdote of a man who went mad in the Centre
of Africa. 70
The tale ends with a shift of scene to the men on the yawl in the
Thames:
Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose
of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. 'We have
lost the first of the ebb,' said the Director, suddenly. I raised my
head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the
tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth
flowed sombre under an overcast sky - seemed to lead into the
heart of an immense darkness.
In this final vision, the Thames, a symbol of British imperial activity

and, by extension, of worldwide imperial activity, itself appears to
go in the same direction as the Congo and 'to lead into the heart
of an immense darkness', the suggested meanings being reinforced
by the atmosphere of gloom. Imperial entanglements are symbol-
ically implied to represent a black tendency in civilisation itself and
to foreshadow its death. T. S. Eliot originally adopted Kurtz's final

cry 'The horror! The horror! as an epigraph to The Waste Land and
was dissuaded by Ezra Pound from doing so, but three years later,
in 1925, he employed the announcement 'Mistah Kurtz- he dead'
as the epigraph for The Hollow Men. This poem sums up Eliot's
view of modern Western civilisation and repudiates even what is
valuable in Christianity. Kurtz represents Western civilisation in
Conrad's tale, and Eliot's view is that this civilisation is now dead.
In fact, Conrad has been prescient and by the end of his tale (1899)
has clearly caught the drift of Western civilisation, which seemed
to be leading to its collapse. This view is also shared by D. H.
Lawrence in his Mexican fiction (St Mawr, 1925; The Princess, 1925;
The Plumed Serpent, 1926; The Woman Who Rode Away, 1928), by
W. B. Yeats in his vein of exalting the past at the expense of the
present, by F. R. Lea vis in Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture
(1930), by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West (vol. 1, 1918;
vol. n, 1922), by James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time (1963) and by
Alexander Solzhenitsyn a piece published in The Listener in 1976. 71
Notes
As Heart of Darkness is available in numerous, equally good editions and

is well known, I have not given page references to the edition used by
me.
1. E. M. Forster, Preface to The Hill of Devi (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1953) p. 10.
2. G. Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad in the Congo (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1926) p. 73.
3. Conrad started his first novel, AltrUlyer's Folly, before his Congo
journey and had finished six chapters by the time he left Africa.
4. J. P. Clark, The Example of Shakespeare (1970), quoted in Michael Thorpe,
'Conrad and Caliban', Encounter, LXVI, no. 3 (1986) 49.
5. David Carroll, Chinua Achebe (London: Macmillan, 1980) p. 3.
6. Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary
Frontiers (London: Macmillan, 1983) p. 24.
7. V. S. Naipaul, 'A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism
of Africa' (1975), in The Return of Eva Peron with The Killings in Trinidad
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980) p. 179.
8. Norman Sherry, Conrad's Western World (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1971) p. 61,
9. Joseph Conrad, 'Author's Note' (1917) in Youth: A Narrative and Two
Other Stories (London: Dent, 1923) p. xi.
10. Joseph Conrad, 'Author's Note' to Tales of Unrest, p. vii, in A/mayer's

Folly and Tales of Unrest (London: Dent, 1923).
11. Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1958) p. 45.
12. Robin McKie, 'Out of Africa - Man's Route to Rule the World',
Observer, 20 Mar 1988, p. 4.
13. Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (London: Chatto and Wind us,
1980) p. 204.
14. Zdzislaw Najder, Conrad's Polish Background (London: Cassell, 1964)
pp. 16--17.
15. See for example Lieutenant-Colonel R. L. Kennion, 'A Country
Postman', and Lieutenant-Colonel F. M. Bailey, 'A Quiet Day in
Tibet', in 'Blackwood' Tales from the Outposts (Edinburgh and London:
William Blackwood, 1933) I; Sir Hugh Clifford, 'The Quest of the
Golden Fleece', ibid., vm; Lord Baden-Powell, 'Jokilobovu' and
J. A. G. Elliot, 'The Ngoloko', ibid., IX.
16. These works first appeared in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, CLXII
(1897), CLXIV (1898), CLXVI (1899) and CLXV (1899), respectively.
17. Joseph Conrad, 'Geography and Some Explorers', Last Essays, p. 17,
in Tales of Hearsay and Last Essays (London: Dent, 1928).
18. Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society (1667), in Critical Essays
of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1908) II, 112-13.
19. Rene Maunier, 'The Sociology of Colonies', in Robin W. Winks (ed.),
British Imperialism, (London: Heinemann, (1966) p. 69.
20. D. H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places, in Mornings in Mexico and Etruscan
Places (London: Heinemann 1956) p. 1.
21. E. M. Forster, 'Notes on the English Character' (1920), in Abinger
Harvest (London: Collins, 1967) p. 22.
22. Walter Allen, The English Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962)
p. 306.
23. Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, p. 103.
24. Frederick R. Karl, Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (London: Faber and
Faber, 1979) p. 298.
25. Arnold Kettle, An Introduction to the English Novel (London: Hutchinson,
1962) II, 81.
26. Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, p. 159.
27. Karl, Joseph Conrad, p. 298.
28. William Knighton, Forest Life in Ceylon (London, 1854) I, 281-3.
29. T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the definition of Culture (London: Faber and
Faber, 1959) pp. 90-1; George Orwell, 'Shooting an Elephant' (1936),
in Collected Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) p. 16.
30. Conrad, letter to Henry S. Canby, 7 April 1924, in G. Jean-Aubry,
Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters (London: Heinemann, 1927), II, 342.
31. Roger Casement, 'The Congo Report' (11 Dec 1903), in Roger Casement:
The Black Diaries, ed. P. Singleton-Gates and Maurice Girodias (London,
n.d.) pp. 98-100.
32. Joseph Conrad, 'The Congo Diary', in Tales of Hearsay and Last Essays,
1955 edn, p. 162.
33. Virginia Woolf, 'Joseph Conrad' (1924), in Collected Essays (London:

Hogarth Press, 1966) I, 304.
34. We can still say, with Conrad, 'the subject is of our time distinctly-
though not topically treated', - letter to William Blackwood, 31 Dec
1898, in Joseph Conrad: Letters to William Blackwood and DavidS. Meldrum,
ed. William Blackburn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1958)
p. 37.
35. Naipaul, 'A New King for the Congo', in The Return of Eva Peron,
p. 181.
36. Quoted in Michael Wood, 'Up the Congo in the Wake of Conrad', The
Listener, 20 Sept 1984, p. 13. Zaire is name taken by the Belgian Congo
after independence.
37. See D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke, Images of the Raj: South Asia in the
Literature of Empire (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's
Press, 1988) p. 52.
38. Douglas Hewitt, Conrad: A Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1952) p. 18; Guerard, Conrad the Novelist p. 37; Watt,
Conrad in the Nineteenth Century pp. 201, 209; Robert 0. Evans,
'Conrad's Underworld', in Robert Kimbrough (ed.), Joseph Conrad:
'Heart of Darkness', Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton,
1963) p. 190; Parry, Conrad and Imperialism, p. 26; H. M. Daleski, Joseph
Conrad: The Way of Dispossession (London: Faber and Faber, 1977) p. 52.
39. For instance, Guerard proposes a Jungian interpretation of Heart of
Darkness as 'the night journey into the unconscious and confrontation
of an entity within the self' (Conrad the Novelist, p. 39). C. B. Cox (ed.),
in his Introduction to Conrad: 'Heart of Darkness', 'Nostromo' and 'Under
Western Eyes'. A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1981) p. 17, notes that
'The adventure down the Congo has also been analysed as a Freudian
voyage into the wilderness of sex, a discovery of the Id. Marlow
penetrates down a narrow channel to find in the darkness an orgiastic
experience.'
40. Benjamin Kidd, The Control of the Tropics (New York and London,
1898) pp. 50-1.
41. Stewart C. Wilcox, 'Conrad's "Complicated Presentations" of Symbolic
Imagery', in Kimbrough, Joseph Conrad: 'Heart of Darkness', 1971 edn,
p. 197.
42. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Fiction (New York:
Bantam, 1981) p. 5.
43. Cedric Watts, The Deceptive Text: An Introduction to Covert Plots (Brigh-
ton: Harvester; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1984) p. 76.
44. Ibid., p. 75. Watts refers to the fact that 'the narrator of Youth is not
sure how Marlow spelt his name' (p. 191), but this seems to me
dubious evidence. This type of uncertainty about spelling is common
among those, such as Conrad, for whom English is not mother tongue.
45. Ibid., p. 76; Lillian Feder, 'Marlow's Descent into Hell' and Evans,
'Conrad's Underworld', in Kimbrough, Joseph Conrad: 'Heart of Dark-
ness', 1973 edn, pp. 187 and 190.
46. Watts, The Deceptive Text, pp. 77-8.
47. T. S. Eliot, 'Baudelaire', in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber,
1951) p. 429.
48. J. I. M. Stewart, Joseph Conrad (London, 1968) p. 79.
49. Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century; p. 236.
50. Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture (1965), quoted in Cox, Conrad: 'Heart of
Darkness', 'Nostromo' and 'Under Western Eyes', p. 64.
51. 'Above all when the whole of life is but a struggle in darkness' -
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, ed. Martin Ferguson, Loeb Classical
Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: Heine-
mann, 1975) p. 98 (n. 54).
52. Joseph Conrad, 'Well Done' (1918), in Notes on Life and Letters (London:
Dent, 1924) pp. 190-1.
53. Chinua Achebe, 'An Image of Africa', Massachusetts Review, 18 (1977)
788.
54. Felix Mnthali, 'Continuity and Change in Conrad and Ngugi', Kunapipi,
3, no. 1 (1981) 93.
55. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962)
pp. 196-7.
56. Jeremy Hawthorne, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-conscious-
ness (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1979) p. 31.
57. Cox, Introduction to Conrad: 'Heart of Darkness', 'Nostromo' and 'Under
Western Eyes', pp. 16-17. Cox includes in this anthology Guetti's essay
'Heart of Darkness and the Failure of the Imagination'.
58. Lillian Feder regards Heart of Darkness as, from one perspective, 'the
story of Marlow's attainment of self-knowledge'- 'Marlow's Descent
into Hell', in Kimbrough, Joseph Conrad: 'Heart of Darkness', p. 185.
59. For instance, see the horrifying description of James Wait in The Nigger
of the 'Narcissus': 'He held his head up in the glare of the lamp - a
head vigorously modelled into deep shadows and shining lights - a
head powerful and misshapen with a tormented and flattened face -
a face pathetic and brutal: the tragic, the mysterious, the repulsive
mask of a nigger's soul.'
60. See Richard Curle's notes to 'The Congo Diary' in Tales of Hearsay and
Last Essays, 1955 edn.
61. Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad (London, 1960) p. 117.
62. Sherry, Conrad's Western World, p. 95.
63. Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 142-6.
64. Stephen A. Reid, 'The "Unspeakable Rites" in Heart of Darkness', in
Marvin Mudrick (ed.), Conrad: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966) p. 45.
65. Conrad, letter toR. B. Cunninghame Graham, 26 Dec 1903, in Jean-
Aubry, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, 1, 326.
66. Quoted from V. S. Naipaul, 'Conrad's Darkness' (1974), in The Return
of Eva Peron, p. 202.
67. Arnold Kettle, 'Consensus on Conrad?', Literary Review, 32 (1981) 14;
Hawthorne, Joseph Conrad, pp. 33-5.
68. Hawthorne, Joseph Conrad, p. 33; Parry, Conrad and Imperialism, p. 37.
69. Ian Watt grossly oversimplifies the matter in regarding Marlow as
basically uttering a white lie here. See Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth
Century, pp. 243-4.
70. Conrad, letter to William Blackwood, 31 May 1902, in The Collected
Letters of Joseph Conrad, n: 1898-1902, ed. Frederick R. Karl and
Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
p. 417.
71. 'All of us are standing on the brink of a great historical cataclysm, a
flood that swallows up civilisation and changes whole epochs' -
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 'On the Brink of a Cataclysm', The Listener,
25 Mar 1976, p. 359.
6
Imperial Integration on Wheels: The Car,
the British and the Cape-to-Cairo Route
JAMES B. WOLF
Despite the late Sir William Keith Hancock's admonition that

'imperialism' is no word for scholars, scholars use the word with
great regularity. From early in the twentieth century, when John
Hobson tried to make sense of the British involvement in an
unprofitable and apparently counter-productive war in South
Africa, and Lenin predicted that European economic and political
overseas expansion was the final stage of capitalism, 'imperialism'
has been used to describe a process of increasing an industrial
nation's power and influence at the expense of generally non-
Western people's land and independence. When modified by
'cultural', 'imperialism' refers to an attitude of superiority held by
Westerners in relation to non-Western civilisations and the attempt
to transform those civilisations into something Western.
'Imperialism' - political, economic or cultural - is a word
that comes heavily laden with pejorative connotations; no one,
particularly in the non-Western world, writes about imperialism
in order to praise it. Nevertheless, during the first four decades of
the twentieth century, when the sun never set on British controlled
territory, few middle-class British visitors to the non-Western
empire found imperial rule unfair; it was just another reality of
their world. These people were not the movers and shakers of the
Empire. They were the tourists and the casual travellers, the second
and third generations of British 'adventurers'. They moved out
into parts of the Empire, observed, and actually participated in a
form of imperial integration. On returning home, each had been
changed by the experience, but few had changed their attitudes
about the necessity to continue British control and paternal rule in
the non-Western parts of the Empire.
When looking at the integration of the non-Western world into
the British Empire, it is easy to overlook the role of the casual
112
Imperial Integration on Wheels 113
traveller. More representative of British culture than those military

men, missionaries, and civil servants who took up what Kipling
called the 'white man's burden' and went out to serve, the travellers
went out to see and to experience. They were untrained observers,
but their impressions of the conditions and peoples they encoun-
tered have significance. They wrote their recollections of their
adventures not for scholars or government officials, but for people
like themselves. Most were rather ordinary people, writing for
other ordinary people. Their impressions provide the present-day
student of popular culture with glimpses of unofficial attitudes and
responses to the non-Western world.
The West has long admired the adventurer: that individual
who challenges the unknown, the new frontier, the personally
dangerous. Challenges could be strictly geographical, as for the
pioneers of Atlantic sailing, or they could be a combination of
physical and cultural, as for the early explorers of the African
interior. Less daring individuals who stayed home admired the
flare and courage of the pioneers. Later, when the danger seemed
to diminish, some ventured to the newly conquered frontier to
share in the thrill of experiencing the almost unknown. Their
participation was not part of British expansion; rather it was part
of the integration of newly acquired territory. The more British
nationals there were moving through the Empire, the greater were
the need for economic infrastructure, the extent of economic
development, and, of course, the number of tourists.
One of the least integrated parts of the Empire at the end of the
nineteenth century was British Africa. The colonies there had only
recently been acquired, and seemed particularly remote and strange
to the British at home. In the late Victorian period, Great Britain,
in competition with Germany and France for political control of
the non-European dominated land in Africa, laid claim to the
course of the Nile to its headquarters in Lake Victoria, to British
East Africa, and to British Central Africa. The empire-builder Cecil
Rhodes and his British South Africa Company guaranteed British
ties to the lands claimed beyond the Limpopo River, north to the
Congo Free State and British Central Africa.
Rhodes, a shrewd and calculating individual, dreamed imperial
schemes on a grand scale. He, in tandem with the governor of
British Central Africa, H. H. Johnston, conceived of an all-British
Cape-to-Cairo link north and south along the spine of the continent
as both possible and desirable. It was a romantic notion. Romantic
perhaps but impractical, decided the Salisbury government, disre-

garding the scheme in negotiations with the German government
in the Anglo-German Treaty of 1890. A symbolic north-south
corridor was, to the diplomats, a far less desirable goal to pursue
than British control of the headwaters of the Nile in Uganda,
secured by international agreement.
Still, the idea of a British Cape-to-Cairo route persisted well into
the twentieth century. It was one of those dreams that, making
little practical sense, struck a popular note. In 1900 Ewart Grogan
and Arthur Sharp published an account of their adventures entitled
From the Cape to Cairo. 1 The volume was the last in the genre of
swashbuckling adventures of Europeans in 'darkest Africa'. From
Mungo Park through Henry Stanley, the daring had gone beyond
the known frontiers and come back to write about it. By 1900 the
Cape-to-Cairo route had been travelled, but not all in one piece,
not as a unit. Grogan and Sharp did it, and, while their trip might
have ended the pioneering days, it did not end the romance of a
Cape-to-Cairo journey.
Those coming next had to have a different means to the same
goal. The competition to be first was a continuing one. If it was
impossible to pioneer the overland route from the Cape to Cairo,
then it might be feasible to be the first to make it in some different
way. Just as The Guinness Book of Records is made up of artificially
created competitions allowing someone to be the 'first' or a world-
record holder, so it was with the traverse of Africa from north to
south and south to north: there was room for several records.
The automobile, which was so successfully to knit rural to urban
society in Europe and the United States, was at the beginning of
the twentieth century a vehicle of adventure and exploration. In
Africa and other parts of the non-Western world it would become a
vehicle of imperial integration. It was not surprising that Europeans
who had missed being the first to a place should think of being
the first to reach it by a new means of transportation - the first to
introduce a revolutionary product of Western civilisation to non-
Western peoples and places. T. R. Nicholson's The Wild Roads, a
popular history, recounts the early adventures of motorists crossing
continents, breaking new ground, pioneering routes, challenging
themselves and their vehicles beyond established routes and roads.
Africa, a new world, was a natural focus for such competition.
And competition it was, not only between individuals but also
between European nationals: a continuation of the scramble for
Africa.
The first successful attempt to cross Africa by car was carried
out by a German driving from German East Africa to German
South West Africa. The trip was a saga of frustration, of mechanical
breakdowns and of interminable delays. By the time Lieutenant
Paul Graetz arrived in Swakopmund, South West Africa, on 1 May
1908, he had travelled 5,625 miles in a year and nine months, and
had averaged only nine miles a day. 2 Although close to half of the
journey had been though British territory, Graetz had done on
wheels for Germany what Livingstone had done on foot in
the 1850s for Great Britain. Graetz, like the motorless African
adventurers before him, returned home to write a book about his
adventure. 3
With an east-west crossing accomplished, the north-south route
was still open for individual and national glory. This time it was
the French who were first, in an expedition mounted after the
First World War, which had shown what internal-combustion
vehicles could achieve in the worst of road conditions. The success-
ful expedition was part of a complex project, generously sponsored
by Citroen, that had as its main objective a crossing of Africa from
one French-controlled territory to another; the journey south to
the Cape was not part of the original plan. A team equipped with
Citroen half-tracks crossed the Sahara from Oran to Fort Lamy,
and then went south through French Equatorial Africa, the Belgian
Congo, Uganda and Tanganyika. The main expedition went on by
ship to French Madagascar, but a smaller group under the com-
mand of Charles Brull re-entered the Belgian Congo and drove
south through the Rhodesias to the Union of South Africa, arriving
on 1 August 1925. 4 Unquestionably, it was a victory for the French,
although, as the British rapidly pointed out, a half-track was not
really a car.
The French Renault company, not to be outdone by its domestic
competition Citroen, also sponsored a motor-vehicle expedition
from Algeria to the Cape. The Renault team drove specially
designed vehicles featuring two rear axles. Having completed the
two-year adventure in 1925, the expedition leader, Commandant
Deligette, commented that he had merely been taking his car on
'a private stroll around Africa', 5 a statement that could stand as a
paradigm of future motor travel in Africa. While the French with
their specialised motor vehicles seemed by 1925 to have secured
the victory of the first Mediterranean to Capetown journey, the
British were challenging the route at exactly the same time.

Brull' s Citroen expedition had passed two British Crossley motor
cars heading north from the Cape. It was Major Chaplin Court
Treatt's group, which, with no government backing, was pushing
along an all-British overland route from south to north, from the
Cape to Cairo. For the major the journey was more than an
adventure; it was a patriotic duty, a challenge to Englishmen, an
Englishwoman and to British-made machines. While, as has been
stated, it made little practical sense, the journey was a tribute to
the spirit, or to the foolishness, of the British passion to overcome
the physical challenges presented in the non-Western world. After
the First World War it was possible to travel by a combination of
rail, car, steamship and foot the length of the continent, without
leaving British-controlled territory and international waterways,
but it had never been done completely by car. Major Court Treatt,
who had spent several years in Africa planning airfields for British
military and civilian airships, began the motor journey in September
1924. Before he and his entourage left Capetown, the Prime
Minister, General Jan Smuts, declared that in his opinion the
expedition would be of imperial value. 6
Stella Court Treatt kept a diary of the trip, publishing it as Cape
to Cairo: The Record of a Historic Motor Journey in 1927. It is
a testament to determination, if not bullheadedness, through
continuous hardship. The Cape-to-Cairo route could not have been
much fun; even if the participants' spirits were willing, the route,
the weather, and the cars were not. In Southern Rhodesia during
the rainy season they were bogged down in mud; as a result the
380 miles from Bulawayo to Victoria Falls took four months, an
average of two miles a day. 'It almost broke our hearts ... ,' she
wrote.
We ploughed through thick, slimy mud, and when it became

too heavy we had to stop and dig the wheels out. We would
then go on a few yards and sink again, as deep as, or deeper
than, before .... There were places where the road became a
river, with the water up to the axles of the cars .... We were
always wet. 7
What they found was that roads drivable during the dry season
returned to a natural impassable state during the rainy season.
Their convoy jettisoned excess gear, recruited Africans to pull and
push, and even on occasion to carry the cars. If it wasn't the wet
in the south, it was the sand in the north or the hills in between,
or the persistent invisibility of a track or trail through the bush.
Ignoring informed advice from officials on the spot that the route
through the Sudan was impassable, Major Court Treatt pushed
northward, through sand and sudd, relying upon peoples encoun-
tered on the road for help. He seemed driven, and was driving as
if he were on a mission. And he was, an imperial mission. His
wife, describing an incident in the Sudan, gives a hint of her
husband's commitment:
Today C. T. went out ten miles on the other side of the river to
see if it is possible to get the cars through. Anyhow, we are
going to try it. The officials all say that we ought to send the
cars up the river by boat that far, and that if we attempt it we
shall have to come back, or that if we get through at all it will
take at least three weeks. The natives are burning grass in the
swamps and that adds another danger. But we want to do the
thing by road to prove what we said, that the whole way from
Cape to Cairo could be done by car, and also, of course, we want
to do it for our own personal gratification. Heaven alone knows
how we shall get on, but try we shall. I trust C. T. to do it if
anybody can. 8
Asking for help to 'get on' sometimes proved a problem, as when

in the southern Sudan they could only communicate by telling
their black South African employee in English what they wanted;
he translated it into Kiswahili, from which it was translated into
Arabic and finally into Dinka.
At last, in mid-January 1925, Cairo was reached. Other than
the feeling of accomplishment, what was Stella Court Treatt's
overriding memory of the journey? 'There are many things in an
expedition, undramatic, unsung things, which yet are the backbone
of it, and the foremost of these are character and continuous
labour. 9 Not much fun, but the route from the Cape to Cairo by
motor car had been conquered. The automobile had crossed
another threshold. Despite adverse driving conditions, it was
coming of age in Africa.
In 1926 H. C. Hopkins published in the South African Railways
and Harbours Magazine, the journal of the official agency for
promoting South African tourism, the article 'From Cape to Cairo.
The Great North Road and Other Routes. A Highway of Romance

through Africa'. In it he argued that 'there is no more danger now
in traversing [the Cape to Cairo route] than there is in crossing
Piccadilly Circus during the hours of busy traffic'. 10 However, he
warned, it was not a journey for the weak, nervous or fastidious.
While the 'all red route' was an 'accomplished fact', drivers should
not imagine that 'well metalled and well surfaced roads run like
racing tracks' through Africa, but 'they enable the motorist and
the tramper alike to get over the ground in the period of the dry
season where previously such a feat was impossible' .11 Hopkins
noted that between Wankie and Victoria Falls, the place where
Major Court Treatt had such a dismal time a year or so before, a
new dry-weather road had been completed in August 1926.
Acknowledging the difficulties of driving north in inclement
weather, Hopkins suggested that an alternative to the full Cape-
to-Cairo run was to take the South African Railways service from
Capetown to Broken Hill, 2,000 miles. There one could take
possession of a car rented from Motor Tours Ltd of Nairobi for the
rest of the trip north. His estimate was that by car it was a five-
month journey to I<hartoum. 12 Writing in 1935, the Englishman
R. 0. Pearse noted that another firm, Gethin and Hulett's Motor
Tours Company of Nairobi, 'regularly organised motor tours run
by experienced European drivers, all over Africa - Cape to Cairo',
and would meet wealthy tourists wherever they wanted with car
and driverY Hopkins, however, looked down on passive tourists
being driven around Africa. After all, the adventure was driving
yourself; active not passive participation was the mark of a pioneer.
From the end of the First World War, Nairobi in Kenya had been
a centre of motor travel. As in any rural society the motor car had
become the essential means of transportation. While the Uganda
Railway linked the interior to Mombasa on the coast and Lake
Victoria and Uganda in the interior, the white settler farmers and
ranchers in Kenya found the motor car a convenience if not a
necessity. Visitors to Nairobi commented with regularity on the
numbers of cars on the streets. Rachel Humphrey described fleets
of cars owned by English in Nairobi and driven by ex-servicemen, 14
while Julie Morse commented on 'an Arab army of mechanics'
servicing vehicles in Kenya. 15
Not everyone was so impressed. Margery Perham complained
on her first trip to East Africa in 1929 that in all her travels she had
never seen 'such reckless driving as in Nairobi' .16 An American
movie-maker agreed, noting in his 1931 book that, 'if a hyena ever
stalked a side street [in Nairobi], he would be instantly cut down
by a charging automobile' .17 Another American tourist, Grace
Flandrau, said that Nairobi with its 'skies full of aeroplanes' and
its 'streets full of American-made automobiles ... was all just
about as bad as being home [in Chicago]'. 18 Despite her dislike of
Nairobi, Flandrau was convinced of the future of motor travel in
Africa: 'I advise all prospective African adventurers to buy not the
books of returning travellers but the latest automobile map he can
find.n 9
Flandrau's and Hopkins's optimism about the future for motor
travel north of South Africa was tempered by others, such as two
American observers. Richard Sutton, a Kansas City physician,
suggested that the struggles he had with his new Ford in 1923 in
Kenya 'added at least ten years to my age'. 20 The naturalist Stewart
Edward White wrote that, after driving several thousand miles in
Central Africa, he should adopt the motto that 'Life is Just One
Damn Donga [gully] After Another ... it is also one damn puncture
after another'; and that, if he could, he would have designed a car
with 'unbreakable springs, unpuncturable tires, positive air cooling'
and 'a grasshopper jumping arrangement for dongas'. 21
Driving was easy on neither the individual nor the automobile,
but it did shorten the time to move around the interior; it did allow
the traveller far greater freedom of movement; and it provided a
Western-invented and built cocoon which reduced the need of
carriers, provided shelter from the elements, and lessened the
strangeness of the continent for aliens. Sometimes the motor car
was too much of a protection, particularly for the wealthy class of
American tourists visiting East Africa between the wars. In Uganda,
an English resident was obviously unhappy as convoys of four or
five cars sped along the rural roads. 'They seem incongruous and
essentially transient. They are wealthy American tourists "doing"
central Africa. 22
The writer Dorothy Una Ratcliffe relates several anecdotes about
wealthy American tourists being driven through British East Africa.
One rather old Middle-Westerner following a list of all the places
in the world he should see visited Mount Kenya with his daughter:
At a bend on the Manyuki-Meru road the old gentleman stopped

the car and got out; for four minutes he looked solemnly at
cloud-haloed Kenya. Then he got back in the car saying, 'Well,

I've assimilated that, so now tick off Mount Kenya, Johanna.' 23
A group of American tourists rented a car with four seats in the

back, installed a card table, and played poker through their guided
tour of Kenya and Uganda:
Each night, for a quarter of an hour, they got out their diaries
and conscientiously wrote while Mr. Davidson [their driver]
dictated to them where they had been during the day. Later,
when some place was mentioned that they had seen and
forgotten one of them would ask: 'Now did we see that?' and
another would answer: 'Yep, don't you remember Lake Victoria-
that's where Joe got a flush of four aces [sic]!' Anyway, they
travelled 3,000 miles in a closed Studebaker and enjoyed them-
selves immensely. They all four kept their diaries going right up
to the last day. 24
By the early 1930s, pioneering the Cape-to-Cairo motor route

was no longer considered though enough for the likes of a Citroen
expedition or a Major Court Treatt; ordinary folk could manage it.
Richard St Barbe Baker, writing in the American magazine Travel,
best summed up the optimism about motoring in Africa at the
beginning of the decade:
Whatever the season of the year, whether in torrential rains or

glaring sun, in towns or trekking along the tropical tracks, one's
car is invaluable for travel and protection. The man without a
car in Africa today, whether he be a native or European, is
severely handicapped. 25
Perhaps Baker overstated his case about African needs at that

time for motor transportation, but his assessment indicated how
radically driving conditions had changed in the half-dozen years
since the Court Treatt expedition.
M. L. Belcher successfully drove the south-to-north route in 1931
and published his adventures in Cape to Cowley via Cairo in a Light
Car. In the Introduction, Sir John Foster Fraser suggested that
Belcher's trip heralded a new age of motoring in Africa: 'before
long the trip from Cape to Cairo will be considered no more
hazardous than a run from Paris to Rome is today'. 26 Like the
Court Treatt expedition before him, Belcher was concerned with

the British nature of his trip. However, whereas Major Court Treatt
was concerned not to stray from British-controlled territory, Belcher
wanted to prove the durability of the British motor car and its
accessories. He was upset, as were others in Great Britain, by the
dominance of the American motor car in East Africa and the Union
of South Africa. The car he chose was a standard-equipped Morris
Oxford; the company was persuaded to help defray the journey
costs.
By the time of this Cape-to-Cairo run, there had been consider-
able motor traffic in the African interior, and Belcher's record of
the six-month journey discusses some of the more mundane details
of such a journey in his appendix, 'Tips to Tenderfoots'. 27 Here
prospective Cape-to-Cairo drivers could find out about cost, equip-
ment, documentation, service facilities on the road, and road
conditions.
From his own experience Belcher had grave doubts about the
information one received on the road in Central Africa from other
travellers. While lorry-drivers, mostly British professionals, were
trustworthy informants, transient motorists were too boastful about
their own motoring accomplishments to give a trustworthy account.
'It is nearly impossible to get any accurate information simply
because those people who have gone through the remote parts
will not tell the truth on their return.' Belcher lamented that drivers
told taller stories than golfers, exaggerating the dangers of the
road. 'It is high time, that every one knew that the Cape-to-Cairo
route, at any rate, is no longer unknown.' 28
But there were real difficulties and dangers on the all-red route:
'don't be misled into thinking you can motor all the way across
Africa'. 29 From Juba in the Sudan to the Egyptian border was
impractical, if not impossible. Belcher cautioned that a road marked
on a map was no guarantee that the road existed in fact. His overall
advice to prospective motorists was that to survive the all-red route
by car and to stay sane a motorist must 'cultivate a philosophic
outlook on life and never be in a hurry'. 30 Belcher's assessment of
the difficulty of the southern Sudanese stretch of road was
confirmed two years later by another English traveller. Rachel
Humphrey noted that she had decided to drive the newly opened
'North Equatorial Road' linking Nairobi with Rejaf on the White
Nile. She cautioned in her book that 'the grand-sounding North
Equatorial Road is not yet an ideal journey. People who go must
be prepared to rough it considerably.' 31 She also noted that

driving in Kenya during the rainy season was something less than
pleasurable; the roads were 'bone shakers and nerve wrackers
too'. 32
In 1939, the year before war ended frivolous travel for the British,
H. H. Symons drove the length of the continent. His purpose was
to break the speed record from London to the Cape and to
demonstrate the durability and reliability of British motor cars.
With the co-operation of Wolseley Motors, which wanted to
promote a new model, Symons outfitted his car to stand the rigours
of the Cape-to-Cairo run. 33 The difference between Symons and
his predecessors was that, while they just were intent on reaching
their destination, Symons desperately wanted the speed record for
the journey. He feared that he would be challenged by Jack
Gleisner, a Czechoslovak living in South Africa, who also had
considerable experience racing the African roads. When Gleisner's
car crashed, Symons had the field to himself. 34
No stranger to racing the clock in Africa, Symons had previously
driven from England to Timbuktu in French Equatorial Africa, on
a second race to Kano in northern Nigeria, and on a third to
Nairobi. As the 1939 trip again was to be a race against time, and
going south through Egypt and the Sudan was just too arduous
and time-consuming, Symons aimed at repeating his Sahara-
crossing to Kano, going east to the southern Sudan and dropping
down through Uganda to Nairobi and on to the Cape.
As speed was the most important element in his journey,
Symons's account, contained in his Two Roads to Africa, shows
a particular interest in road conditions in the African interior
immediately prior to the war. Road maintenance was worst in the
Belgian Congo; other bad roads were 'insignificant' by comparison.
However, poor roads were of less concern than confusing infor-
mation as to the most efficient route to take. The question of which
route to take at the Rhodesian border to Broken Hill was a puzzle.
The Automobile Club had recommended the Livingstone-to-Bula-
wayo Nyasaland Trail, which ran east through parts of Portuguese
Mozambique; on the other hand the Asiatic Petroleum Company
advised the longer 'Great North Road' linking Abercorn to Broken
Hill. At the Rhodesian border Symons reported that he had to
make a decision between the apparently well-travelled, wide,
smooth Nyasaland Trail and to the right 'a couple of wagon-ruts
scarcely visible in the yard high grass'. The latter was the Great
North Road, and, since the Nyasaland Trail had an Automobile

Association notice stating it was closed, he was obliged to take the
'a slimy, treacherous road [the Great North Road]'; 35 it got him
there.
When Symons arrived at Capetown, he and his companion had
driven 10,300 miles in thirty-one days and twenty-two hours,
averaging 320 miles a day, including days when repairs were being
made, and 515 miles a day when he was actually on the road. 36
Driving-convenience and speed had certainly changed in the
African interior in the years since the Citroen, Renault and Court
Treatt expeditions.
A measure of this change can be seen in the work of Alexander
Freudenberg. As Joint General Secretary of the Automobile Associ-
ation of South Africa in 1939 he compiled a book, African Through-
ways, of detailed motor routes, which was updated as Trans-African
Highways: A Route Book of the Main Trunk Roads of Africa and reissued
in 1949. The guide gives enormous amounts of information about
road and weather conditions during specific periods of the year,
availability of petrol and mechanical service, and accommodation.
It not only provides short diagrammatic maps of specific portions
of the route but also gives specific road directions from both south
and north.
Freudenberg, in a talk given in 1939 and published as the booklet
Going North, referred to the Cape-to-Cairo motor route as the
'backbone of Africa'. 37 Of course, as an advocate of motor travel,
his purpose was not to dampen the enthusiasm of motorists
planning to go north, but rather to alert them to the 'realities' of
extended motor tours. He advised on the appropriate vehicle, its
fittings and accessories, how to deal with rain and other unexpected
driving conditions and how to estimate cost. Above all, Freuden-
berg cautioned his readers, 'The main trouble in the more remote
parts of Africa is that Europeans are few and far between, and one
is sometimes compelled to convey one's wishes to natives.' 38
This remark is reminiscent of the troubles that the Court Treatt
expedition had conveying their desires to the Dinka in the Sudan
back in 1925. The fact that, driving in Africa, one had sometimes
to deal with Africans seemed to be considered a nuisance. In fact,
without Africans European travellers in Africa would not have got
very far. Africans were available to smooth the travails of motoring.
They could be counted on to supply food and water, to push or
pull when necessary, to give directions and carry messages.
Just as in the days of caravans and carriers, the African was

indispensable for the success of the journey.
Not that the Europeans realised or appreciated this; for them,
Africans in Africa were a bother. It was not overt racial discrimi-
nation; rather, it was just the way it was. Africans were unimportant
to the process of driving across Africa. What was important was
the determination and fortitude of the driver and his fellows, the
durability and versatility of the vehicle, and the clemency or
severity of the weather. Africans were the same for motorists as
for any other Western tourists: to be photographed, to barter with,
and to be used when absolutely necessary.
Alexander Freudenberg's Africa, like that of motorists before
and after him, was the Africa of the road, with all the hazards that
had to be faced by Europeans. His advice in 1939 was not to shy
away from the adventure, but to begin it before Africa became
'civilised'. 39 It was a familiar refrain for tourists, motorists or not,
that the frontier between Western civilisation and non-Western
peoples, between the comforts of Western culture and the chal-
lenges of the unfamiliar, was fast disappearing. If one hurried
there was still time, but only a short time, for adventure. This had
been the theme of the steamship companies in their advertising
between the wars; it was the persistent theme of the South African
Bureau of Railways and Harbours as it solicited the tourist trade
in Europe and the United States. That Western civilisation would
inevitably drive out other civilisations in time was, and still is, a
perennial theme of tourism. The prospective visitor has to be
convinced that, if he or she does not hurry, it will be too late to
see the unique qualities of non-Western peoples. The power,
vitality and veracity of Western culture is too great; the rest of the
world's people are at risk, and their culture will inevitably be
subsumed. As Freudenberg wrote, 'So, if you want to enjoy
unspoilt Africa, you must not delay your trip too long. To-day
many African tracks are still rough, but the path of the pioneer is
seldom smooth. ' 40
Certainly, with the coming of the Second World War, 'going
north' by car ceased for a while to be possible for civilians. But, as
a direct result of the military and resource-development priorities
of the war, Africa had a more complete network of highways at
the end of it. The mood of the South African Minister of Transport
was confident when he wrote, in his preface to Trans-African
Highways in April 1949, of 'greater interest in travel in Africa' .41
Yet another page of history had turned. Just as the motor car had
replaced the caravan as the adventurous way to travel the spine
of Africa, the aeroplane was superseding the car.
There was irony in the fact that it was the experience he had
gained pioneering military airfields during the First World War
that prompted Major Court Treatt to undertake his Cape-to-Cairo
drive in 1924-5. In 1931, the year that Belcher made his Cape-to-
Cairo run, Imperial Airways began a scheduled service 'over
trackless jungleland', forging a giant aerial chain linking London
to Capetown. 42 The airline's advertised facilities for passengers
during the evening and night hours heralded post-1945 tourism:
Those who make use of the London-Cape route, besides travel-

ling in comfort during the day, will be provided with the
amenities of the modem hotel at the night-halts in Africa.
Bungalow hotels have sprung up. At Mbeya, in Tanganyika, to
give one instance, a bungalow hotel equipped with comfortable
lounge, restaurant and sleeping apartments has been erected.
When passengers disembark for the night and mechanics exam-
ine the airships, they will find the glistening napery, sparkling
glasses, good cheer and menus of a hotel that might nestle amid
the streets of a big city instead of the African wilds. 43
But the length of Africa by car had never been a trip for the
timid, pleasure-seeking tourist. During the inter-war period it had
been a romantic challenge taken up by a few. It was part of the
British tradition of challenges to the spirit, the individual and the
available technology. The backbone of the African continent was
merely another test of the British backbone. With the motor car,
one didn't need extraordinary wealth to make the trip; one didn't
need to rely on contracts with bearers and headmen. Indeed,
Africans were needed only in cases of emergency, and money and
being European would ease those contacts. To make the road safe,
especially for the British, and to integrate British territory from the
Mediterranean to the Cape: that was the goal, and the role, of
British motorists between the wars.
Each tourist to Africa, whether on a guided tour to the European-
ised urban areas or to the less Westemised rural areas, considered
him or herself to be on an adventure into culturally different, if
not alien, areas. The further the tourist pressed into the interior,
the more exciting the experience became. Yet, each time a visitor
ventured beyond the ordinary tourist destinations, those areas

became more accustomed to seeing and to servicing Europeans.
This process of pushing forward what I have elsewhere called
the 'tourist frontier' was a relatively minor factor in the overall
development of imperialism, but it none the less played a part in
the imperial integration of Africa.
For motorists the automobile provided a feeling of independence
and a sense of cultural security. The car was a Western invention;
while the road was in Africa, the mode of travel was European;
while the driver was European, the necessary logistical support
and labour was African. Driving was not a completely independent
activity.
Lastly, the motoring tourist who chose to drive the length of the
continent along the Sahara-to-Cape or Cape-to-Cairo route knew
of the imperial glamour associated with that activity. He, or she,
was a part of a great imperial dream, an all-red road, a British
highway, through an unknown continent. It was high adventure,
the stuff of cinema, sustaining imperialist attitudes and the pro-
cesses of imperialism well into the twentieth century.
Notes
1. Ewart S. Grogan and Arthur Sharp, From the Cape to Cairo: The First
Traverse of Africa from South to North (London: Thomas Nelson, [1900?].
2. T. R. Nicholson, The Wild Roads. The Story of Transcontinental Motoring
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1969) p. 58.
3. Lieutenant Paul Graetz, Im Auto quer durch Afrika (Berlin, 1910).
4. Georges-Marie Haardt and Louis Audouin-Dubreuil, The Black Journey:
Across Central Africa with the Citroen Expedition (New York: Cosmopoli-
tan Book Corporation, 1927) Appendix: 'Fourth Group: Charles Brull',
pp. 313--16.
5. Nicholson, The Wild Roads, p. 208.
6. Stella Court Treatt, Cape to Cairo: The Record of a Historic Motor Journey
(Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1927), p. 14.
7. Ibid., pp. 57-8.
8. Ibid., p. 173.
9. Ibid., p. 244.
10. H. C. Hopkins, 'From the Cape to Cairo. The Great North Road and
Other Routes. A Highway of Romance through Africa', South African
Railways and Harbours Magazine, 1926, p. 11.
11. Ibid., p. 12.
12. Ibid., pp. 13--14.
13. R. 0. Pearse, Empty Highways: Ten Thousand Miles by Road and Lake
through East and Central AfriCil (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1935)
pp. 148-9.
14. Ra<;hel Humphrey, World Wide Wanderings: Asia, AmeriCil, Africa, Europe
(London: Heath Cronton, 1934) p. 186.
15. Julie B. Morse, 'Safari in the Rain', in Ira H. and Julie B. Morse, Yankee
in Africa (Boston, Mass.: Stratford, 1936) p. 162.
16. Margery Perham, East AfriCiln Journey: Kenya and Tanganyika, 1929-30
(London: Faber and Faber, 1976) p. 30.
17. W. S. Van Dyke, Horning into AfriCil (Los Angeles: California Graphic
Press, 1931) p. 59.
18. Grace Flandrau, Then I Saw the Congo (London: George G. Harrap,
1929) p. 280.
19. Ibid., p. 261.
20. Richard L. Sutton, An African Holiday (StLouis: C. V. Mosby, 1924)
p. 52.
21. Stewart Edward White, Lions in the Path (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1926) pp. 17~5.
22. Adela Day, Sunshine and Rain in Uganda (London: East Africa, 1932)
p. 48.
23. Dorothy Una Ratcliffe, Equatorial Dawn. Travel Letters from North, East,
and Central AfriCil (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1936) p. 111.
24. Ibid., p. 112.
25. Richard St Barbe Baker, 'Motoring in Equatorial Africa', Travel, Nov
1931, p. 25.
26. M. L. Belcher, Cape to Cowley via Cairo in a Light Car (London: Methuen,
1939), p. vii.
27. Ibid., Appendix: 'Tips for Tenderfoots', pp. 225-37.
28. Ibid., p. 98.
29. Ibid., p. 230.
30. Ibid., p. 37.
31. Humphrey, World Wide Wanderings, p. 193.
32. Ibid., p. 189.
33. H. E. Symons, Two Roads to Africa (London: Travel Book Club, 1932)
p. 221.
34. Ibid., pp. 237 and 272.
35. Ibid., pp. 291 and 293.
36. Ibid., pp. 319-20.
37. Alexander Freudenberg, Going North (Johannesburg: Automobile
Association of South Africa, [1939?]) p. 10.
38. Ibid., p. 13.
39. Ibid., p. 14.
40. Ibid., p. 14.
41. Preface to Freudenberg, Alexander (compiler), Trans-AfriCiln Highways:
A Route Book of the Main Trunk Roads of Africa (Capetown: Automobile
Association of South Africa, 1949) p. v.
42. Benjamin Bennett, Down Africa's Skyways (London: Hutchinson, 1932)
p. 7.
43. Ibid., pp. 287-8.
7
The Intransigent Internal Colony:
Narrative Strategies in Modern South
African Vopular Fiction
JOHN A. STOTESBURY
'You black fucker!' he bawled, his mouth only

centimetres from the African's face. 'How many
of you cocksuckers were there, how many eh? You
sod!' Enraged by the lack of reaction and apparent
absence of fear showing in the impassive black
face, Bester smashed the prisoner in the mouth
with his fist whilst the section looked on fascinated.
This was their first glimpse of the enemy and they
felt the initial stirring of an almost sexual blood
lust growing within them with the realisation that
this man was dispensable, that they could kill or
at least torture him with impunity.
(Colin Ainsworth Sharp, Borderline, 19831)
The state of emergency has given extraordinarily

wide powers to the SADF. Any soldier, whatever
his rank, has the power to arrest anyone . . . ; to
interrogate anyone; to use such force as they deem
necessary. . . . They have been given a blanket
indemnity from civil or criminal prosecution for
any act they choose to carry out.
(Gavin Cawthra, 19882)
South Africa has produced a distinctive breed of adventure-thriller

and romantic-fiction writers during a period of the country's history
marked by an only too familiar series of mythopoeic events. Noting
a 'definitive' shift in the post-war economy 'from an urban to a
128
The Intransigent Internal Colony 129
rural base', J. M. Coetzee has succinctly described the environment

of this writing:
In 1948 a party of Afrikaner nationalists came to power and

began to sever political and cultural ties with Europe; as apartheid
began to be implemented, moral ties were severed too; and from
being the dubious colonial children of a far-off motherland, white
South Africans graduated to uneasy possession of their own,
less and less transigent internal colony. 3
The intransigence has grown, particularly since the 1960s, a period

which started not only with Sharpeville, departure from the
Commonwealth, and the declaration of the 'Republic', but also with
major economic expansion conterminous with the implementation
and entrenchment of apartheid.
Several of the most prolific South African popular novelists also
commenced or entrenched their careers during this phase: Joy
Packer (1905--77; first novel Valley of the Vines, 1955}, Antony Trew
(born 1906; first novel Two Hours to Darkness, 1961}, Geoffrey
Jenkins (born 1923; first novel A Twist of Sand, 1959) and Wilbur
Smith (born 1933; first novel When the Lion Feeds, 1964). Younger
writers, as yet less prolific, but achieving first publication with
major British publishers during the post-Soweto period, include
Colin Ainsworth Sharp, Peter Essex, Madge Swindells and Gloria
Keverne.
Although even this incomplete selection of writers can muster
in excess of sixty works of popular fiction between them, this essay
will examine briefly only a handful of texts typical of their individual
writers, and perhaps typical of their time, apartheid; the scope for
a very much more extensive examination will, I hope, become
apparent.
II
On intrinsic literary grounds the popular novel is easily dismissed.

Popular fiction relies to an overwhelming extent on formulaic
narrative structures: stock plots, stereotypical characterisation,
cliched sentiments. 4 A fairly typical example from South Africa,
Borderline, Colin Sharp's story of a European-centred attempt to
assassinate the President of South Africa, is, however, a novel
of reasonably complex psychological insights combined with a

considerable mastery of the formulaic techniques of the successful
adventure thriller. The violent crudity of the incident cited at the
beginning of this essay is not without its own subtleties, linking
the aggressive para-sexual vocabulary of the SADF officer with the
near-sexual excitement of the new recruits.
Another part of the subtlety of Borderline consists in its narrative
use of a key element in the formulaic make-up of the adventure-
thriller mode. Thrillers, according to Jerry Palmer's analysis, require
the reader to accept three basic narrative conditions:
1 Thriller suspense consists of experiencing everything from the

point of view of the hero.
2 The hero is distinguished from the other characters by his
professionalism and his success.
3 The hero undertakes to solve a heinous, mysterious crime
which is a major threat to the social order. 5
If the reader is unable or unwilling, for one reason or another, to

accept these conditions, then the pleasure factor basic to thriller-
reading will be spoilt.
But, confusingly, in the case of Borderline the dominant characters
all, despite guardedly 'sympathetic' features, eventually fall on the
'negative' side of the novel's ideological borders. It is only with
the climactic brutality of the near-success of the novel's conspiracy
that the reader is permitted to realise that the 'hero' of Borderline is
an intentionally low-key collective hero; the representatives of South
African law and order, the guardians of apartheid's outer borders-
the South African Defence Force (SADF) - and the paramilitary
guardians of its inner socio-political borders: the South African
Police (SAP).
In an earlier, major analysis of the thriller, Palmer identifies as
another important strategy in the structuring of the hero's point
of view and professional success the inclusion of what he terms
'justified' aggression, 6 where 'the end justifies the means'. 7 In the
tough, adventure-filled world of the typical thriller, aggression is
dual in nature: there is the destructive aggression involved in an
identifiable 'major threat to the social order', which must of
necessity be tackled by the hero in similar terms. The structuration
of the adventure-thriller story therefore 'justifies' the hero's
aggression.
If we apply this concept to my opening quotation it will be seen

that, given the identity of the SADF as the collective 'hero' of the
novel, the racist and sadistic fantasy is imposed on the reader, via
the 'hero's' experiential perspective, as fully justified, since what
is at stake is the integrity of the borders of the Republic of South
Africa. There is apparently no alternative for the reader: he (or
she?) must accept the ideological context of the plot, with its
inclusion of brutality in the defence of the apartheid state, since the
only ideological alternatives Borderline offers are chaos, barbarity,
mayhem. The only real alternatives are to be a non-reader (the case
for most liberal academics), or to recognise the challenge open to
the critical reader, of dialectical confrontation with the thriller's
text.
III
The South African critic Stephen Gray has written about the
essential changelessness of the Southern African colonial adventure
novel from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. 'Enumerating
the ramifications .... 'he suggests,
would be a tedious business, because these authors' works of

adventure fiction conform so rigidly to established patterns that
technical advances in ways of storytelling or of dramatization
are minimal. Invention, it seems, is no great necessity when
churning out the same old goods for an insatiable and constant
market that can maintain an illusion that things do not change. 8
These patterns have been authoritatively discussed elsewhere and

require no elaboration here, other than the citation of a random
example from my own reading of the genre, where the general
similarities of two recent adventure thrillers, one South African,
the other British, are remarkable, but purely coincidental: Fireprint
(1984) by Geoffrey Jenkins and The Plutonium Factor (1982) by
Michael Bagley. 9 The plots of both are concerned with nuclear
blackmail, and both employ the narrative device of a sexually
'deviant' female terrorist who, at the decisive moment, becomes a
renegade in defence of established law and order. To paraphrase
Stephen Gray: when you've read one, you've read 'em all.
If we must, at least temporarily, ignore the intrinsic demerits of
South African popular fiction, as of popular fiction in general, it is

still worthwhile considering the extrinsic qualities and functions
of the genre. One complicating factor is that the critical status of
popular fiction, unlike its limited range of internal structures, is in
constant flux. Queenie Leavis's fearful Fiction and the Reading Public
(1932) 10 is a classic analysis of popular literature from an elitist
standpoint, and just a few years ago John Sutherland, while highly
sympathetic to the genre, could still write that 'for some purposes,
the utility of bestsellers lies in the very fact that they often have
no literary merit to distract us', 11 where only his use of 'often'
redeems him from his failure to define his elitist charge that popular
fiction lacks 'literary merit'.
Subsequent commentators have shifted towards a more tolerant
perspective, suggesting that 'popular fictions need to be read and
analysed not as some kind of sugary-coated sociology, but as
narratives which negotiate, no less than the classic texts, the
connection between "writing, history and ideology"' Y To restate
in other terms, the totality of a popular novel, its narrative form
as much as its reception, requires serious examination for its links
with its historical and social context.
This is already virtually axiomatic: Ian Fleming's James Bond
novels (and their film adaptations) have attracted considerable
critical attention for their contribution to an understanding of the
post-1945 Cold War, 13 and it is self-evident that socio-literary
analysis of post-1948 South African popular fiction will contribute
to the debate over the causes and consequences of apartheid. These
two multifaceted constraints, therefore, the contextual-ideological
('acceptable' /'unacceptable', conservative/radical, reactionary/pro-
gressive) and the literary-formal (formulaidinnovative, mainstream/
substream [shallows?], literary/unliterary, canon/non-canon, 'ac-
ceptable' /'unacceptable'), supply the basic horizontal and vertical
axes of this brief study.
IV
It would be misleading to imply that the critical dialectic has not

already been engaged in the case of the South African bestseller.
The 'non-readerly' line has been taken up, as reported above, by
Stephen Gray, who, in tracing the literary descent of the South
African adventure story 'from Kendall through Captain Marryat
and R. M. Ballantyne, Haggard and Bertram Mitford and G. A.

Henty, through John Buchan to Stuart Cloete and Wilbur Smith', 14
condemns it variously for its manipulation of 'historical sense',
its predictability, its imperialism, its immaturity (though 'with
Quatermain, one feels, the genre itself has begun to grow up'), its
emphasis on 'inventiveness' rather than formal literary 'innova-
tion', its inherent and unselfconscious contradictoriness, and in
the twentieth century its inability formally to evolve: for being, in
sum, a hyper-conservative realist fictional mode. 15
Another South African critic, David Maughan-Brown, has pur-
sued the line advanced by John Sutherland, 16 and more recently
denigrated by others such as Humm, Stigant and Widdowson, by
arguing persuasively for the propagandistic influence of South
African border-war fiction on its immediate audience. He concludes
definitively,
an analysis of novels written in the popular fictional mode can

contribute to our understanding of the ideological currents which
direct the drift of public response to contemporary political
events. Popular fiction feeds on, and simultaneously reinforces,
the myths and stereotypes on which 'commonsense' depends
so heavily. The analysis of popular fiction can accordingly
enhance our understanding of the mindsets aleady prevalent in,
or being encouraged in, the different sectors of society. . . .
Popular fiction provides unique insights in the necessary process
of getting to know one's enemy. 17
V JOY PACKER
There's no twilight in Africa. There's day and

night, and a dark curtain falls between them
suddenly and theatrically. 18
The Blind Spot 19 appeared in 1967, midway through Packer's novel-

writing career, and immediately subsequent to a time of dramatic
political crisis in South Africa, the assassination of Verwoerd. Like
all of Packer's writing, its fundamental intention of defending and
promoting apartheid is crystal-dear. Though her works are now
largely out of print, especially in paperback, many are still widely
available from libraries, and her autobiographical (and pro-apart-
heid) The World is a Proud Place was recently republished on the

recommendation of the London and Home Counties Branch of the
Library Association of Great Britain. 20
Into the idyllic Cape setting of The Blind Spot, consisting of
terraced gardens surrounding a fourth-generation mansion, Joy
Packer inserts a formulaic plot which can be summarised in terms
of sexual rivalry and parental sentiments and responsibilities. The
idyll (of the setting, the family, and, metonymically, South Africa)
is broken by the symbol-laden scream of a stone curlew trapped
by its wing in the hedge and barbed wire surrounding the family
home. The bird is freed, and in the process the potential breakdown
of harmonious family relationships becomes apparent to one of
the protagonists, Claire, the daughter of Judge Charles Hammond
and the stepdaughter of Vale, a woman of twenty-five and only
six years Claire's senior. Much of the ensuing action is concerned
with the emotional tensions and strategies of this potential break-
down between the judge and his young wife, whose declining
relationship receives a pale but salutary counter-image in the
growing intimacy of his daughter, Claire, and her fiance, Guy
Steele.
Such a formula contrasting a failing love relationship with a
developing one would, of course, be largely incoherent if it were
not for the essential ingredient of sexual rivalry built into the plot.
The rivalry which acts as the prime mover in the romantic plot is
that between the old judge and a young American journalist named
Jefferson Broome, who has pre-existed in the story as the object of
Vale's affection and also of Claire's then-teenage crush.
The love relationship of the 'eternal triangle', comprising Jef,
Vale and the judge, is nicely complicated by a skiing accident
which confines the judge to a wheelchair and to an impotence very
reminiscent of Sir Clifford Chatterley's. For Joy Packer, however,
sexual impotence is no symbol of spiritual or emotional failing:
Judge Hammond sustains the reader's sympathy for the duration
of the novel. At the level of romance (and, by analogy, of ideology),
therefore, the main danger is that of the man, Jef, who intrudes
into the pre-existing love relationship (and, analogously, love of
country).
But Vale does not desert her husband (or South Africa): he, in a
way, deserts her. Tom by his wife's threat to abscond to America,
the judge drives his invalid car off a clifftop road at a hairpin bend,
one of the two 'blind spots' built into the fiction (the other, in the
novel's terms, is a blend of personal and political blindness). Vale's

lover, the intruder, is deported from the country, and the future
is faced brightly, with smiles reciprocated forgivingly between Vale
and Claire Hammond (now Steele), who is now bearing her own
infant contribution to the future of South Africa. Claire, at least,
fulfils her father's dreams of family continuity and stability.
On one level, the romance which I have outlined is transparently,
as Vale Hammond suggests, 'nothing new' (p. 113), with scarcely
any variation on the eternal-triangle mainstay of the pulp romance
industry. However, onanotherlevel, it can, I believe, be considered
a wolf in sheep's clothing, apartheid propaganda in a format that
has been marketed with ease on an international scale. How, then,
has Packer managed to 'sell' her message? How is the ideological
packaged to make it attractive to her consumers? How does she
nudge her readers towards making the 'correct' choices which
embody and convey her ideological standpoint?
Part of the answer lies in the nature of the novel as a whole. For
anyone who has read The Blind Spot it will be apparent that there
has been an omission from my account thus far: I have mentioned
none of the African characters. Their presence is not infrequent,
and their range is varied, but they exist within a stereotypical plot
which can be credibly summarised without their presence and still
survive. This 'invisibility'./1 this dispensability, is, I think, one of
a number of major structural anomalies which, together, make
their own contribution to the general message of the novel.
Another part of the answer lies in Packer's modes of characteris-
ation, which again reveal a dichotomy in their formulation. More
specifically, there are those characters who might be defined as
static stereotypes who are largely inarticulate, and there are those who
are active and articulate, whose articulacy is used for polemical
dialogue. Unsurprisingly, the inarticulate are black, the articulate
white.
Packer's black characters fall into two groups, the 'goodies' (to
use an appropriately simplistic label) and the 'baddies': the servants
of the white man, and the terrorists who threaten his security. The
most prominent goody black (one could almost, in Packer's terms,
label him a 'white' black, so frequently does she associate the
colour with his appearance) is Josiah, Judge Hammond's Xhosa
manservant of long standing, whose English is marked from his
first utterance as being non-standard, a borrowed language which
is not his mother tongue: 'Master want whisky?' (p. 19). The
narrative strategy consists of subtly permitting Josiah to articulate

only what has been previously formulated for him by one of the
white characters, Claire Hammond. Hence, on p. 132 we have
Claire meditating on 'the Bantu expression "this is a heavy thing"'.
The expression then re-emerges on p. 213 when Josiah says of his
master's death, 'Miss Claire, my heart is very sore. This is a heavy
thing.'
It is as if Claire were given the role of language mistress to the
black man. When Josiah continues by saying, 'My master sleeps
and will never wake again' (p. 213), we hear another clear echo of
Claire's previous analysis of Josiah's competence in English after
the judge's skiing accident;
'Master is still asleep. He does not talk.'

'Asleep?' asked Guy.
'Unconscious,' said Claire quickly. She knew that in his own
language Josiah would have used the word 'dead' instead of
'asleep'. Unconsciousness was, to him, a state of death. (p. 120)
A third example illustrates the domination of the white perspec-

tive, the perception that without the white interpreter and teacher
the black would have no role in this white anglophone South
African world. In this case, when Claire Hammond marries, she is
sorry that Josiah and Harmonia could not be at the service. She
had known them all her life and they were part of her family,
but they were needed at Silverglade to prepare the wedding
buffet luncheon which was served under the trees in the
garden. (pp. 165-6)
The 'correct' interpretation of the position and role of the black

man is more transparently conveyed through Josiah's later response
to his master:
'Miss Claire was very sorry you couldn't be at the church

today,' said the Judge.
'So was 1,' said Josiah. 'But there were many things to do
here.' (p. 173)
Beneath the guise of courteous intercourse between master and

man, Packer here presents us with a black servant who is verbally
castrated, a mere echo of his white 'masters', a mimic man who

has truly learnt his role in the drama of South African life.
Contrasting with Josiah are the baddy blacks, whose inarticulacy
in English is a detail of a sabotage trial conducted by Judge
Hammond:
They were young and shabby, their dark faces were impassive.
The ringleader was the last to give evidence and he elected to
speak in his own language with an interpreter. The white interpreter
was eloquent and sympathetic and Claire was sure that the young
Bantu's testimony lost nothing in the translation.
(p. 42, emphasis added)
But Joy Packer must be given her due. She does not say that the
black man is ultimately inarticulate: merely that he is inarticulate
in the white man's language and the white man's world. Given
his own language, she implies, the black man is more than
articulate, he is 'intensively expressive', highly persuasive, a
member of a 'vital, dominant race' of 'born orators, born actors,
and, yes, born warriors' (pp. 134-5). As Judge Hammond knows
and fears in his heart as he listens to the Xhosa announcers on the
early-morning radio, these are speakers who will sell the message
of 'Freedom, for instance, the paradise of Black Africa' (p. 134).
The only protection against such an eventuality, as Judge Ham-
mond also ·knows in his heart, is to hang those who demand
it, and this he does, though the message is softened, again
through Claire's interpretation: 'It was dreadful for Daddy. He
leans over backwards to find extenuating circumstances, and he
always tries to avoid cases that may require a death sentence. He
takes it hard [!]' (p. 44).
The 'articulate', as I have already indicated, are the white
characters, who range themselves on the two sides of the apartheid
debate: Judge Hammond and his intellectually clone-like daughter,
Claire, on one side, and the liberal American intruder, Jefferson
Broome, on the other. One extract will suffice to illustrate the level
of the polemics, where Jef argues with the judge about political
violence in South Africa:
'One has to seek the cause,' he'd said. 'Sabotage schools and
the crimes they engender are only effects. The cause is surely
your way of life in South Africa. If a people feel themselves to
be oppressed, they go for violent measures. They're wide open

to subversion.'
Hammond had said sharply, 'Our way of life is not intended
to be oppressive. It's a great experiment in ethnic development,
each race developing along its own cultural and traditional lines.
Left to itself, without outside interference, it might possibly
succeed.' (p. 31)
Packer's strategy for manipulating the reader's sympathies in the

liberal-versus-apartheid polemic is dualistic. On the one hand, the
American liberal is made to be an intruder who threatens the
harmony of a love relationship and a family unit, while at the same
time he is shown to sympathise with condemned black saboteurs
for whom, Claire asserts, 'nothing less than total victory and the
annihilation of the whites will do' (p. 42). Vale herself argues with
her liberal lover, 'Can't you see that African domination in this
century would tum our prosperous country into bedlam. Children-
even black political children - don't grow up overnight' (p. 70).
Most noticeable here, and elsewhere in the polemical dialogue
between white characters, is the emblematic lexis of apartheid:
'domination', 'bedlam', 'children', combined with the ambiguous
deixis of the possessive 'our'. 22
Packer's most complete condemnation of the black bid for
freedom is, however, based not on the blacks' political immaturity,
but on a more absolute dichotomy dividing white from black: the
psychological and the superstitious.
In 1966, the year prior to the first publication of The Blind Spot,
Hendrick Verwoerd was assassinated by a white (or near-white:
descriptions are various23) man, Dimitrio Tsafendas. This famous
incident and the subsequent trial seem to contain the germ of the
novel. As Judge Hammond explains to a friend of his daughter,
Tsafendas was spared from hanging on the psychological grounds
of schizophrenia, and he contrasts this with the death sentence
imposed on a 'tokoloshe' murderer, one who claimed to be
possessed by a magic spell placed on him by an enemy, which
had compelled him to commit sixteen killings. Judge Hammond's
remarks convey the dominant perspective of the novel:
The demon tapeworm [causing Tsafendas's schizophrenia] was

a pathological delusion while the tokoloshe was a deadly tool in
the paraphernalia of witchcraft. We don't encourage witchcraft.
We try to eradicate it .... Once, in medieval times, he [the

witchdoctor] would have been burned at the stake- condemned
by the Church. The Church has changed its methods since then.
But it is still the duty of the Church and the State to stamp out
witchcraft in its sinister forms. Sorcery is the scourge of Black
Africa. (p. 149)
The black African, Packer insinuates, is living 'in medieval times'

(though she fails to perceive the extension of her logic, that in
modem times the South African state has taken over the role of
medieval executioner), and the dichotomy between white and
black is widened further in the course of dialogue ringing with the
phraseology of apartheid: 'our black brethren' who are subject to
the 'superstitions and animalism of primitive tribalism', but who
face the task of 'emerging ... into the sophistication of the
twentieth century', though they are at present at 'varying stages
of evolution' (p. 146).
Elsewhere in the novel, the reader discovers details of the context
into which 'our black brethren' are emerging. At Jan Smuts Airport,
for example, 'there was a separate staircase for the non-Europeans,
of course' (p. 59, emphasis added); the 'squalid areas of the city'
are contrasted with the 'heart of the metropolis and the new
suburban shopping centres all steeped in their Sunday quiet'
(p. 61); there are 'Bantustans' to which even the judge's favourite
servants will be given their 'marching orders' when their presence
in white South Africa is no longer required (pp. 133, 234).
Packer's narrative splits into black and white, and her characters,
similarly, into white and black, the visible and the invisible, the
articulate and the inarticulate, the rooted and the uprooted. Only
one mode of closure is possible for this unwillingness and inability
to reconcile the love story with a story of love, rather than of hate
and fear; the story is filled throughout with the forcible expulsion
of characters from the paradise of white South Africa: 'Bantus' on
one-way tickets from Jan Smuts Airport who 'were not necessarily
issued with permits of re-entry' (p. 59), 'Bantus' on one-way
tickets to the gallows (p. 43), 'Bantus' on one-way tickets to the
'Bantustans' (p. 234), and 'Bantu' -sympathisers on one-way tickets
to the United States of America (p. 230).
Both unwittingly and wittingly, the whole structure of the novel
is symptomatic of a dichotomy, a literary schizophrenia, of the
same order as that which historically saved Dimitrio Tsafendas's
neck. The diagnoses may be similar, but the remedy to be prescribed

in the case of the novel is far from clear.
VI ANTONY TREW
One feature which all of these fictions have in common is a

demonstrable desire to 'explain' the South African dilemma. Each
in its own way echoes Nadine Gordimer's generalisation that 'all
that is and has been written by South Africans is profoundly
influenced, at the deepest and least controllable level of conscious-
ness, by the politics of race', 24 but there is a double echo, since
each is also self-consciously involved in the ideological debate.
Like my other examples, though to a different degree, Antony
Trew' s Smoke Islanf125 is a case in point. The desert-island story
opens with the gathering into a life-raft of the survivors of a plane
crash:
Below the black moustache a gash of mouth opened and gasped.

'Help me, man! For God's sake help me!' and the arms lifted out
towards the dinghy. . . .
The African hung over the side, reaching down. 'Hey! Grab!'
he called.
From the water the arms jerked upwards and the hands of
the two men locked, the black hands pulling and straining on
the white hands until the white arms were in over the side of
the dinghy. (p. 12)
Thus Trew establishes the theme of the novel with his description
of the metonymic interlocking of black hands with white. This
action is loaded with ponderous significance, for the white man is
an Afrikaner whose recovering consciousness soon provides lexical
reinforcement for the reader's interpretation:
When he was nearly dead black hands reached down and grasped
his. He knew they were black because they locked onto his white
hands and there was light, the moon or something, and he could
see the difference. (p. 16, emphasis added; cf. quotation below
from p. 317)
This incident could be defined as an instant of transition, the moment

at which the character, an Afrikaner, and by extension the white

South African reader of this fiction, perceives something
'different'- in this case, the physical (and emotional) possibility of
a black man saving the life of a white. It may be considered
melodramatic and simplistic, but it must also be considered as a
literary attempt at suggesting, at least temporarily, an ideological
shift.
Transitional instants in other novels are presented in technically
very different ways, and understandably so, since their general
narrative modes also differ considerably. Trew' s more recent novel
Running Wild 26 focuses on the escape by yacht from South Africa
to Britain of three white opponents of apartheid (accompanied by
the elder brother of one of them). Here the ideological shift has to
be experienced by the two naive members of the trio, and it occurs
in the textual gap (below marked II) between two pieces of
dialogue:
'We work on a cell basis,' he [Goddy, a Soviet 'mole' in the

anti-apartheid organisation] reminded Andre and Pippa ....
'Can you two pretend you feel safe? ... We work as a team in
the same cell. Share the same political philosophy and moral
values. Now, if ever, we need each others' support.' Silence
then but for the continuing patter of rain on the car, the sound
of an aircraft passing overhead and a dog barking somewhere
in the distance. 'I leave the decision to you,' he said quietly.ll
Pippa said, 'Tell us about the Southwind plan.' (pp. 13-14)
Again, the transitional passage experienced by the two characters,

Andre and Pippa, is one that is presented for the reader to share
in in two complementary ways: on a narrative emotive level, the
excitement of flight by sea to Britain; and on an ideological level,
the possibility of publicly, officially committing oneself to the fight
against apartheid South Africa.
Both of Trew' s narratives end successfully. The castaways on
Smoke Island return to civilisation, the circularity of events marked
lexically again in the farewell between the African and the Afrikan-
er:
Jos placed a huge hand on Ezekiel's shoulder and swung him

round.
'Hey, Zeke!' he cried. 'You can't push off like that without
saying goodbye, man!' He put out his hand and closed it on the
African's. 'Thanks helluva lot, hey?' (p. 317, emphasis added).
On an ideological level, though, no solution to the separation of

white and black is offered, either in Smoke Island or in Running Wild,
which ends equivocally with the three South African protagonists
arriving safely in Britain after foiling the plans of the Soviet 'mole':
That brought Andre into the conversation for the first time. 'I
won't be going back. Not until the whole rotten apparatus of
apartheid has been dismantled.'
'Me too,' said Pippa emphatically. 'I don't want to live in a
society with laws which make four-fifths of its people second-
class citizens because of the colour of their skins.'
Jan [Andre's elder brother] frowned with irritation at these
asides. 'Well, for my part I've had nothing to do with apartheid
politics. I'll certainly be going back. It's my country.' (p. 246)
VII PETER ESSEX
Trew's novels are those of a writer who has recognised the 'evils'
of apartheid but can envisage no literary alternative to the 'reality'
of separateness. In this he differs from Colin Sharp, whose fictions
acknowledge all of the arguments against apartheid but whose
logic eventually demands the violent maintenance by the military
of the apartheid status quo. Peter Essex, though less nihilistic than
Sharp, is no less favourable to a white South Africa whose security
is ensured by the activity of the military forces.
In writing his first novel, The Exile, 27 Essex had a clearly defined
purpose: 'My viewpoint is that South Africans - the boers if you
like - are not as bad as the media of the world would have it. I
believe in fairness, and to be fair to the white South Africans, I
wrote The Exile.' 28 The resulting novel does not, perhaps, achieve
its aim.
In The Exile Essex exploits the simplistic dichotomy of hero and
anti-hero to the full. His is a novel of Namibia, of white against
black, of man against man, pitted against each other for supremacy
in their struggle for each one's conception of society. If Essex had
managed to establish his hero and anti-hero as true representatives
of their societies, his novel might have explored more genuinely
the dilemma of the white man in Southern Africa. But he has not.
But he has not.

Instead, he resorts to what John Sutherland describes as 'a
reduction of incomprehensible political motivation (incomprehen-
sible, that is, in terms of the ideology of bestselling fiction) to
comprehensible human motives ... money, criminality, grudge
and madness'. 29 Essex's approach to the writing of his novel
coincides with much of Sutherland's critique of the formative
pressures on the bestseller:
I knew that in order to get such material published the book

would have to be highly commercial. No publisher on this earth
would be prepared to go to print with something that slightly
favoured the 'boers' unless it was thought that there was a good
chance of making a lot of money out of it. 30
The process involved in Essex's 'telling a good story' 31 while at the

same time participating in the ideological debate is a phenomenon
which has been described by Cedric Watts 32 in terms of
'Janiformity' - literally, looking in two directions. Watts is con-
cerned with the kind of novel whose surface narrative conceals a
hidden narrative, or, to phrase it differently, whose 'overt' plot
coexists with a 'covert' plot. 'When Janiformity is unintentional',
he adds, 'the text seems to ambush the author; but when it is
intentional, the text seems to ambush the reader', and he cites
Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a complex example of the latter. 33
In practice in popular fiction, there occurs a mixture of 'inten-
tional' and 'unintentional' Janiformity. Joy Packer, for example,
intends in The Blind Spot, as in the bulk of her writing, to insert an
intentional sub-narrative, a covert plot that tells the 'story' of
contemporary apartheid. But there is also an unintentional sub-
narrative. Stated boldly, Packer's overt romantic narrative depends
on the clear articulation of 'love'. In covert contrast, her intended
sub-narrative, to be felt rather than articulated, is 'hate'. But a
critical recovery and articulation of the same sub-narrative, a process
surely not desired by the author, yields something similar to the
cry of the bird with which the story opens: a scream of fear.
In the case of Peter Essex's adventure thriller, his method is
remarkably similar, though more crudely applied. He sets up a
pair of conflicting characters, an Ovambo, Mazambaan, and a
South African, Matthew McGee, whose fates are novelistically
doomed to coincide, intertwined as they have always been from
the separate moments of their births. Both suffer from maternal

rejection at birth- Mazambaan' s, naturally, involving 'superstition'
and 'witchcraft'. Mazambaan, born into a royal household, is
rejected under the taboo of twin birth but rescued from certain
death by a German missionary doctor, Heidi Mueller. McGee's
origins are somewhat similar, in that his mother (by novelistic
coincidence also Heidi Mueller) mysteriously disappeared soon
after his birth, leaving him to be raised by his immigrant Australian
father.
But Essex has chosen to create not equally balanced protagonists,
but one, McGee, who approaches the Western norm, and one,
Mazambaan, who deviates enormously. McGee suffers from- or,
rather, enjoys - personal moral flaws in a narrowly conventional
sense, but given the opportunity he rises to the occasion, becomes
a hero of the Republic of South Africa, and wins the admiral's
daughter. Mazambaan, on the other hand, conceives an early
taste for homicide (McGee's homicidal instincts are channelled by
civilisation into killing big game and blacks):
Moses [Mazambaan's 'Christian'/slave name] killed him. How it

happened, why he did it, never became clear to him or was of
interest to him. He was conscious that there had been a build-
up of a great storm of rage within him from the moment he had
seen the boy. It had seemed as though his head would burst
with it. . . . He felt no more remorse than does one who has
wrung the neck of a table fowl. . . . He did not see why he
should. (pp. 33-4, emphasis added)
Mazambaan does not even understand elementary Namibian

nationalism. Appealed to by a subversive schoolteacher, 'Mazam-
baan did not understand. It all sounded fine and brave .... It did
not concern him though, and he did not see why it should' (p. 42,
emphasis added). To fill the uncomprehending void in his head,
Mazambaan develops a simple fascination for a weapon: 'Power
was conferred by ownership. Let the others have the property, he
wanted the gun' (p. 44).
The narrative evidence is loaded even more heavily against the
anti-hero when the action of the novel is set against the background
of the black uprisings in Namibia in 1959:
White South West Africa stood back aghast, unable to believe

that such a monster could have been slumbering in the
woodshed .... Berserk with hunger, it tore down the door and
raged across the land .... It had to be stopped because now it
was a killer, now it had gone mad. (p. 46)
At this point the reader's only recourse is to identify the individual

homicide, Mazambaan, with his black nation. The scales have been
decisively weighted against both man and people, and the action
of this thriller can only consist in the attempts of the hero to stop
this 'monster', which constitutes such a major threat to the social
order.
Compared with Packer's novel, in The Exile story (or surface
narrative) and sub-narrative (denigration of the black protagonist
and the ideology he represents) approximate much more closely
to each other. Both novels also contrast strongly with Sharp's
Borderline, where the sub-narrative appears to expend almost all of
its creative energy on denigrating aspects of the white South African
status quo. The retrievable unintended sub-narratives, however, differ
little for all three texts: fear.
VIII
This present essay has attempted, piecemeal, through its emphasis

on the links between overt and covert narrative forms and the
intended and apparent messages of a small number of popular
novels, to illustrate the effectiveness of study of the South African
popular novel for its potential contribution to our understanding
of 'mind sets' (d. Maughan-Brown) which, given the international-
ism of publishing companies, are by no means restricted to South
African society.
The personal ideologies of writers obviously vary considerably,
but the range of narrative strategies at their disposal is perhaps
more observably restricted, especially if their 'creative' writing is
circumscribed by the formulaic expectations and techniques of the
popular novel. Nevertheless, popular fiction, the 'entertainment'
novel, is an unsuppressible, flamboyant, vital mode of prose
literature, which flourishes in spite of the attractiveness of other
entertainment media. At the same time, its ephemerality can be
witnessed in any second-hand bookstore: today's gaudy-covered
offerings are tomorrow's mouldering pulp.

What may be of importance, though, is precisely the 'instant
mix' it provides, with the simple instruction: add water (in the
form of a reader) and stir. The result may be a simple course of
emotional 'escapism'; the dish may also be something more heavily
flavoured.
The impact of the South African popular novel is hard to assess.
Often, I would suspect, both its practitioners and its readers have
little in common with the writers and readers of Turbott Wolfe,
Waiting for the Barbarians and July's People, and, perhaps, nothing
at all in common with the writers and readers of Mine Boy, Time of
the Butcherbird and Mating Birds. 34
More difficult to demonstrate is Maughan-Brown's contention
concerning the links between popular fiction and the 'ideological
currents' of the moment, though he rightly and cautiously makes
no claims for any immediate connection. More importantly, he
suggests that we can gain a fuller understanding of the components
of the constantly changing modes of public 'commonsense' through
an examination of the favoured reading matter of the day. At the
present moment it would seem, for instance, that taste for Joy
Packer lingers on, even among British readers.
It is particularly hard to define the non-South African readership
of South African popular fiction. Are Wilbur Smith's immensely
successful novels (all of his titles since 1964 remain available
in paperback) most frequently purchased for or despite their South
African milieu and ideological drift? Does his South African
readership differ significantly in this respect from its counterpart
abroad?
What is definable is a range of indigenous white South African
'mindsets' as they appear through the hero-dominated perspectives
of these novels: a craving for secure borders, a fear of the black
'barbarian', a Rambo-like self-image of the 'all-South African' man,
a yearning for impossibly outdated 'Victorian' virtues, a solipsistic
desire for racial survival and continuity - countered, in the rare
case of writers like Antony Trew, by a genuine sympathy for
individuals of other ethnic origins. (Wilbur Smith's much-vaunted
empathy with the black man extends only, at best, to the master-
servant relationship; at worst, he creates black 'monsters': Moses
Gama in Rage, 35 for example, is as potently destructive as any of
Sharp's or Essex's creations in this vein.)
Novel after novel contains, structurally and thematically, an
awareness of alternatives to the 'real' world of South Africa; there

are instants of transition, moments of change which open up the
possibility of passages to somewhere else, of ideological change,
but only too often it would seem that the intransigence of the
internal colony wins.
Notes
1. Colin Ainsworth Sharp, Borderline (London: Star Books, 1984) pp. 189-
90.
2. Gavin Cawthra, 'South Africa at War', in John Lonsdale (ed.), South
Africa in Question (Cambridge: University of Cambridge African Studies
Centre; London: James Currey, 1988) p. 75.
3. J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa
(New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1988) p. 11.
4. This has been nicely summed up by John Sutherland in 'Approaches
to the Novel', in Martin Seymour-Smith (ed.), Novels and Novelists: A
Guide to the World of Fiction (London: WHS Distributors, 1980): 'The
bulk of the story is supplied by an impersonal narrative machinery in
which the writer is a kind of joint-stock holder' (p. 65).
5. Jerry Palmer, 'Thrillers', in C. Pawling (ed.), Popular Fiction and Social
Change (London: Macmillan, 1984) pp. 80-1.
6. Jerry Palmer, Thrillers (London: Edward Arnold, 1978) pp. 20, 24.
7. Ibid., p. 28.
8. Stephen Gray, Southern African Literature: An Introduction (Cape Town:
David Philip, 1979) p. 111.
9. Geoffrey Jenkins, Fireprint (London: Collins, 1984; London: Fontana,
1985). Michael Bagley, The Plutonium Factor (London: Allison and
Busby, 1982; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983).
10. Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1932).
11. John Sutherland, Bestsellers: Popular Fiction of the 1970s (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981) pp. 4--5.
12. Peter Humm, Paul Stigant and Peter Widdowson (eds), Introduction
to Popular Fictions: Essays in Literature and History (London: Methuen,
1986) p. 2.
13. See for instance 0. Del Buono and Umberto Eco (eds), The Bond Affair
(London: Macdonald, 1966); T. Bennett and J. Woollacott, Bond and
Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (London: Macmillan, 1987).
14. Gray, Southern African Literature, p. 111.
15. Ibid., pp. 111-32.
16. 'In some socially controlled circumstances [the bestseller] may also
indoctrinate or control a population's ideas on politically sensitive
subjects', a view which Sutherland also counters with: 'In other
circumstances . . . it may play a subversive social role, introducing
new codes and licence ... , serving to domesticate alien, life-changing
social ideas for the masses', though with a tendency 'to be safely
behind the times' (Bestsellers, pp. 34, 246).
17. David Maughan-Brown, 'Images of War: Popular Fiction in English
and the War on South Africa's Borders', English Academy Review, 4
(1987). (Quoted from manuscript draft, pp. 23-4).
18. Joy Packer, The Dark Curtain (1977; Long Preston, Yorks: Magna Print
Books, 1981) p. 113.
19. Joy Packer, The Blind Spot (1967; London: Pan, 1970). Page references
are given parenthetically in the text.
20. Joy Packer, The World is a Proud Place (1966; Bath: Chivers Press, 1984).
21. Assessing the limitations of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century South African novel with regard to portrayals of African farm-
labourer characters, Coetzee suggests, 'Blindness to the colour black
is built into South African pastoral' (White Writing, p. 5). Packer's
'blindness', however, seems intentional.
22. I take as my source of apartheid .discourse such publications as the
booklet Why Apartheid? (Pretoria: Department of Information, n.d.), a
reworking of a speech made by the South African ambassador to
Britain, Hilgard Muller, in 1962.
23. W. A. de Klerk's description of Tsafendas (in his apologia for the
Afrikaner) underlines the irony inherent in the white/black dichotomy
intended by Packer: 'he had been engaged as a White, but was, in
fact, a Coloured. Neither was he born in South Africa. He had come
to the Republic from Mozambique in a rather doubtful way. He was
of mixed Greek and Mulatto descent' - the Puritans in Africa: A Story
of Afrikanerdom (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) p. 278.
24. Nadine Gordimer, 'English-Language Literature and Politics in South
Africa', in C. Heywood (ed. ), Aspects of South African Literature (London:
Heinemann, 1976) p. 100.
25. Antony Trew, Smoke Island (1964; London: Collins, 1986). Page refer-
ences are given parenthetically in the text.
26. Antony Trew, Running Wild (1982; London: Fontana, 1983) Page
references are given parenthetically in the text.
27. Peter Essex, The Exile (1984; London: Fontana, 1986) Page references
are given parenthetically in the text.
28. Peter Essex-Clark ('Peter Essex'), personal letter, 20 July 1986.
29. Sutherland, Bestsellers, p. 191.
30. Essex-Clark, personal letter.
31. Geoffrey Jenkins, personal letter, 4 Aug 1986.
32. Cedric Watts, The Deceptive Text: An Introduction to Covert Plots
(Brighton: Harvester, 1984).
33. Ibid., p. 21.
34. 'When it comes to reading, Mr Jenkins prefers heavy non-fiction,
especially related to the sea ... [and] books by Hammond Innes,
Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and C. S. Forester' - G. Dry, 'From
Newspapers to Books', South African Digest, 15 Feb 1980.
'I don't think there is any detectable parallel between the writing of
"serious" and "popular" authors - it is the old story of "literature"
(so-called) versus the good story. As far as I know, there is no
communication between the writers in these different genres- certainly

not as far as I am concerned' (Jenkins, personal letter).
'I have contact with a few other writers in South Africa. I don't read
their work much- there isn't much time for anything but research ....
There are several black "popular" writers who are published in South
Africa. I don't think they are widely read, as the black public demands
literature of a very "radical" nature, which would certainly not get
past the censor board' (Essex-Clark, personal letter).
35. Wilbur Smith, Rage (London: Heinemann, 1987).
8
T. E. Lawrence: The Myth and the
Message
JOHN M. MACKENZIE
If fame be judged by numbers of biographies, then T. E. Lawrence

is the most famous Briton of the twentieth century. Over thirty
biographies of him have been published, and more flooded from
the presses for the centenary of his birth. Few reputations have
swung so wildly from hero-worship to notoriety; few personalities
have so successfully eluded definition. But through it all Lawrence
continues to exercise an extraordinary hold on the imaginations of
Britons in the twentieth century. John Buchan wrote that he 'could
have followed Lawrence over the edge of the world' .1 He intrigued
figures as diverse as George Bernard Shaw (not to mention
Charlotte Shaw), E. M. Forster, Winston Churchill and Robert
Graves, while Michael Foot, not long before becoming leader of
the Labour Party, wrote, 'My guess is that The Mint will help to
restore the reputation of the Seven Pillars, which in turn will
restore the reputation of Lawrence.' 2 Sure enough, a television
documentary in 1986, repeated in 1988, largely re-created the
atmosphere of uncritical adulation. 3
What started as a Lawrence Bureau (as Richard Aldington called
the fan club) became a Lawrence industry, whose production fed
off the vast quantities of raw material left by Lawrence himself.
Each incident of his life is likely to have several different versions;
each viewpoint, letter or report several variants; each publication
several texts. As more and more evidence has been uncovered, it
has become hard to distinguish truth through a fog of dissimulation
or solve the riddle of the recluse who fled from the fame he
courted, the puritan obsessed with the sexuality he rejected, the
sensitive scholar who abhorred the brutalities of war while revelling
in them, the exalted intellect which sought to reduce mind and
body to the level of the automaton, or the gentle soul who
sought extremes of self-abasement and punishment. Some of these
150
T. E. Lawrence: Myth and Message 151
apparent dichotomies are not so unusual, but in Lawrence the

chemistry was particularly complex, and the harder he tried to
conceal the formulae the more traces he seems to have left.
Yet, although he grossly inflated his own achievements and
appropriated those of others, although the evidence of charlatanry
is extensive, his ideas were often proved wrong, and his great
Middle Eastern sandcastle lies in ruins, he refuses to go away.
This essay is concerned not with the life, but with the myth.
Where did it come from, why did it grow, and why has it survived
(at least in part) when so many other myths - such as those of
Livingstone, Gordon and Rhodes, apparently even more potent in
their day - have now dispersed? The myth needs to be explored
in terms of certain key aspects of the life, the background against
which it was formed, and the elite among whom it aggregated,
functioned and had instrumental power. Above all, it is necessary
to understand the media by which it was propagated: journalism,
the newly potent cinematograph, lecturing, popular writing for
adults and juveniles, school textbooks, 'serious' biography, and
the publications of Lawrence himself. To be fully understood, the
Lawrence myth need to be set into its proper tradition, that of the
nineteenth-century imperial hero.
I HEROIC MYTHS
A state at the height of its power seems to require legendary figures.

They explain and justify its rise, personify national greatness, offer
examples of self-sacrificing service to a current generation, provide
warnings for the future to an elite fearful of decline, and act as the
instrument of pressure groups and interests in the formulation of
policy. Once it became apparent that such figures had popular
potency on a considerable scale, they could be used to whip up
agitations to influence governments which were often as much
reactive as active. By the later nineteenth century Carlyle's dictum
that 'No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but
the biography of great men' had become, in effect, the guiding
principle of school texts and the countless works on heroes
published for juvenile reading. For an adult audience, biographical
'series' - for example of leading figures of British India - had
become the rage.
Leaving aside the occasional use of ancient and medieval
examples, heroic figures inhabited three main periods. The reign

of Elizabeth I produced a clutch of heroes who illustrated the
emergence, consolidation and early expansion of the Protestant
state; the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries produced
empire-builders and naval and military figures who confirmed
British superiority over the French; and, increasingly important,
the Victorian era spawned contemporary heroes of exploration,
missionary enterprise and empire. Heroism needed to pit itself
against an enemy, and through these periods the enemy changes
from Catholic Spain to Catholic France to 'heathen', Hindu or
Muslim inhabitants of Empire. Heroes not only offered historical
instruction embracing an understanding of politics, military tactics,
geography, religious precepts and even natural history, but acted
above all as moral exemplars.
Their moral power, image superimposing reality, was forged out
of a combination of indomitable will, almost superhuman physical
stamina, and religious (or quasi-religious) fervour in the attainment
of nearly miraculous objectives. Martyrdom was usually the essen-
tial qualification for promotion to the top rank of heroic myths,
which offered both moral touchstones and weapons to belabour
governments and stimulate public expenditure. Martyrdom often
produced the icon through which the message could be conveyed
in its most direct form: Nelson dying on Victory; Livingstone in
the heart of Central Africa, kneeling in prayer; Gordon at the top
of the flight of stairs in the palace at Khartoum facing the forces of
Dervish darkness.
The manufacture and use of heroes quickened in the late
nineteenth century: their appeal reflected a growing apprehension,
an awareness of an empire possibly ready for its recessional,
subject to growing jealousies and gathering foes, both European
and non-European. Moreover, this was a period of endemic warfare
in exotic localities, and exoticism was a necessary backdrop to
heroic stature. Clive and Wolfe would have been unknown without
it. Nelson's most famous victory before Trafalgar had been in the
East, incorporated the resonant name of the most mysterious of
rivers to the ancient as to the modern world, and crucially checked
Napoleon in his oriental ambitions. Gough and Napier, though
Peninsular veterans, were unknown before they approached heroic
stature (though of the second rank) through the Chinese, Sikh and
Sind wars of the 1840s. The Mutiny of 1857 produced heroes of
the distinctive Victorian stamp: Sir Henry Havelock, Sir John
Nicholson, Sir Colin Campbell, the Lawrence brothers - Christian

militarists and administrators who became cult figures of the
ensuing decades. 4
These military figures were catapulted into heroic fame by the
press, the new science of photography and engravings derived
therefrom, popular writings, texts and sometimes theatrical rep-
resentation. The Church and a whole range of national and
local intellectual and cultural societies played their part in the
dissemination of legend. There are two excellent examples of this
process.
Just before the Mutiny, in 1856, David Livingstone arrived home
from his first great African journey, his transcontinental crossing
from Angola to Mozambique, to find that he was already a celebrity.
The press, scenting a scoop, had laid the groundwork and he built
upon it by publishing the best-selling Missionary Travels and
lecturing indefatigably throughout the country. Such fame helped
unlock the coffers of the Treasury for the officially authorised
Zambesi expedition. Its failure, together with the emergence of
other celebrated explorers such as Burton and Speke, helped to
eclipse Livingstone for a period, but his final journey to discover
the sources of the Nile, his meeting with Stanley, and his death in
Central Africa re-created the myth on the grandest scale possible.
By any conventional standards Livingstone was a failure - as a
missionary, as an explorer (certainly in terms of his own objectives)
and as a husband and father. Yet he was the perfect vehicle for a
myth because he came to personify the Victorian fascination with
Africa, abhorrence of the Arab slave trade, yearning for heroic and
successful missionary endeavour, and the legitimate commerce of
free trade with or without colonisation.
But the myth was not self-generating. Initiated by the press,
fostered by Livingstone himself, it was given a tremendous fillip
by the Stanley 'scoop' of 1871 and all the publications that flowed
from it. Even the devotion of his African servants, Susi and Chuma,
in bringing the body out of Africa for burial in Westminster Abbey
was not enough to ensure the final canonisation. The careful
editing of Livingstone's Last Journals in order to slant his efforts
towards the slave trade, commerce and Christianity, and away
from the failed geographical objectives, the fabrication of the icon
of his death and the inauguration of a wave of Livingstone
publications all served to make Livingstone the patron saint of
imperial endeavour in Africa in the 1880s and 1890s. Whenever
this endeavour seemed likely to be checked, in Nyasaland in 1890

or in Uganda in 1892 for example, his name became a rallying cry. 5
Charles Gordon secured fame in the Taiping revolt in China
in the 1860s, then passed through a temporary eclipse before
burnishing his reputation once more as a scourge of the slave trade
when serving the Egyptian Knedive in the Sudan. Interestingly, it
was the press and popular agitation which trapped Gladstone,
against his better judgement, into using Gordon to evacuate the
European and Egyptian inhabitants of Khartoum in the face of the
developing conquest of the Mahdi. Gordon secured a self-imposed
martyrdom by failing to evacuate himself, and his death had
powerful repercussions in British politics as well as on imperial
policy in North-East Africa. The circumstances of his death were
carefully fabricated for iconographic purposes, and his reputation
was assiduously used to promote the reconquest of the Sudan. 6
The commitment to Kitchener' s campaign of 1896--8 was made by
Gladstone's successor, Lord Rosebery, though executed by the
Conservative and Unionist administration of Lord Salisbury. In
many ways Kitchener inherited the mantle of Gordon, and the
immense popularity of the Nile campaign was rooted in the belief
that it was waged to avenge Gordon. Khartoum became virtually
a memorial city, while the 'River War' helped to spawn another
legend, that of Winston Churchill, who was in tum to be important
in the development of the Lawrence myth. 7
Livingstone and Gordon were perhaps the two most potent
heroic myths of the late nineteenth century, although they were
underpinned by those of the Mutiny generals, Wolseley, I<itchener,
Rhodes and a few missionaries. Both Livingstone and Gordon
were flawed figures whose frailties were widely apparent and who
made many enemies, but legends once created have a capacity to
shout down criticism. Once engendered by the extraordinary
capacities of the subject, the events of his life, the propaganda of
the myth-making machine and public willingness to be caught up
in an emotional outburst, the myth becomes self-generating,
because to knock it down is to endanger the system on which it
feeds. By becoming structurally important it impinges on the vested
interests of many members of the elite; to sustain it was often to
sustain their own role. In the conditions of the late nineteenth
century the myths came to be bound up with patriotism and its
twin, xenophobia. It is only in the light of these two powerful
forces that one can explain the connivance of radicals such as
Labouchere in the efforts of Rhodes and Chamberlain to save each

other after the Jameson Raid of 1895-6, an event which, in spite of
all the evidence of both duplicity and incompetence, prepared the
way for another, albeit minor, legend, that of Dr Jameson.
Major myths cannot, however, be manufactured out of men of
straw. That is why Jameson, despite all the efforts of the Kaiser,
never really qualified. The myth needs substance to work upon,
and there can be no doubt that the subjects of heroic legends were
remarkable figures. The very complexities of their personalities,
which have left them open to the debunking process, have usually
been an essential, if often concealed, part of their extraordinary
characters. Courage, perseverence, manic energy, powers of obser-
vation, qualities of leadership, stubborn application, sexual prob-
lems, extremes of exaltation and depression - all developed to
such a pitch as to be (in Graham Greene's phrase) 'close to the
dangerous edge of things'- have, in varying combinations, marked
these individuals from the common run. That Lawrence, like his
nineteenth-century predecessors, achieved considerable feats and
endured severe physical privations - living for many months 'in
the stretch or sag of nerves' and winning the admiration of his
Arab associates - cannot be gainsaid. What the myth does is inflate
beyond belief, place one individual on a pinnacle far beyond others
who achieved not much less (and sometimes more), transforming
one person into a symbol for the people and policies of an entire
epoch.
This background is valuable for an understanding of the
Lawrence myth, for its generation can best be understood in the
context of these nineteenth-century heroic legends. He was in
many ways their victim and their last exemplar. Richard Aldington
is quite wrong to suggest that the Lawrence story was the triumph
of a propaganda that was uniquely American. His argument is that
the British are no good at this, and that the Lawrence 'hype'
was a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon imported from
across the Atlantic. 8 In fact, although the techniques may have
been different in some respects, anyone who has studied the cases
of Livingstone and Gordon knows that the British were in reality
past masters of both the 'hype' and its necessary concomitant, self-
deception. Lawrence, Richard Meinertzhagen tells us, wanted to
be a hero from his earliest days. 9 As he put it himself, he had a
craving for fame. Presumably that is why he not only invented a
twelfth-century crusading ancestor to feed to the gullible American
journalist Lowell Thomas, but also insisted that he was related to

the Lawrence brothers of Indian Mutiny fame. This was a ludicrous
deception, since Lawrence's father's name was Chapman and his
mother's Junner. Moreover, those who developed the Lawrence
legend tried to place him in the apostolic succession of heroes.
Thomas suggested that he combined the characteristics of Marco
Polo and Charles Gordon (and in passing also mentioned Drake,
Clive and others), 10 Sir Ronald Storrs that he displayed the attributes
of Sir Philip Sidney and General Gordon. 11 George Lloyd thought
he was an adventurer out of Rider Haggard. 12 These comparisons
were to be repeated in many popular representations of the legend.
II LAWRENCE THE IMPERIALIST
Not only was Lawrence related to the imperial myths of the past:
he was decidedly of his period rather than ahead of it. The myth
within the myth that he was an 'Arab nationalist' or a 'pan-Arabist'
is transparent nonsense. Lawrence was a member of a British
generation which travelled with overweening self-confidence,
using the badge of their Britishness as a passport to all kinds of
cultural feasts and voyages of self-discovery. The celebrated group
of Middle Eastern travellers were supremely of this sort. Most of
them had the leisure and the money (Lawrence was less endowed
with the second) to be participants in history as it was made, to be
observers of events in key areas of the world. To them contempor-
ary history was like a series of spectacular entertainments and they
were often theatrical people who filled the stage they found for
themselves. Gertrude Bell illustrates this dearly. She was present
at Victoria's funeral, the coronations of Edward VII and George V,
and travelled to India specially for Curzon' s great Delhi durbar.
Even at Bayreuth she mixed with Wagner's widow, Hans Richter,
Donald Francis Tovey and the Kaiser himself. As she journeyed
across the Middle East in great style she was the guest of
ambassadors, residents, consuls-general and high commissioners
from Constantinople to Baghdad, Cairo to Teheran. 13
George Lloyd, 14 Aubrey Herbert, 15 Mark Sykes, even the archae-
ologists D. G. Hogarth and Leonard Woolley, moved in similar
circles. Indeed, the fascination of all these people with archaeology
is symptomatic. It too was a spectacular entertainment, uncovering
past civilisations, often in ways that were seen as metaphors for
T. E. lAwrence: Myth and Message 157
contemporary life and as part of the Great Game of geo-politics

and diplomacy, overt and covert. That the archaeologists had a
role in intelligence-gathering and espionage is well known. They
could explore, survey and map under cover of finding sites; they
could observe the cracks in the increasingly ramshackle Ottoman
Empire; and they could furtively watch the Germans building their
railway to Baghdad.
At Carchemish Lawrence was mixed up in these activities with
all the glee of the Oxford undergraduate, as he was later when a
member of the Palestine Exploration Fund, inspired by Kitchener.
It was widely apparent that, war or no war, great changes of
historical significance were impending in the Middle East, and for
both personal and patriotic reasons it seemed proper to observe,
participate in and influence these events. Lawrence may have
decried the 'master race' theories of some of his associates; he may
have found that he could get on well with Arabs; but in this he
was no different from many on the more liberal and idealist wing
of imperialism. That he was none the less a cultural imperialist is
apparent from his archaeological activities. His Oxford thesis on
Crusader castles was concerned to demonstrate that in fortification
and castle-building techniques the Crusaders gave more to the
Middle East than they took away, a view which contradicted the
contemporary authority on the subject, Sir Charles Oman, and
which has since been largely repudiated. 16 Gertrude Bell criticised
the archaeological techniques prevalent at Carchemish and other
sites. 'Treasure-hunting' too often remained the prime objective,
the obsession with finds (which Lawrence signalled by the excited
firing of guns) predominating over the new scientific archaeology
or the drudgery of writing meticulous reports. Although Bell
thought him very clever and in effect adopted his Hashemite
policies, she clashed with Lawrence after the war when she wished
to retain for Iraq a proportion of the archaeological treasures
recovered in Mesopotamia, while Lawrence wanted to transfer
them all to the British Museum. 17
The espousal by Lawrence of the Hashemite family, Sherifs of
Mecca, also locates him within one imperial mould. The British
had a fascination with indigenous aristocracies which dated back
at least to the post-Mutiny settlement in India. The Indian 'princes'
ruled one-third of the sub-continent under the tutelage of British
residents. This indirect-rule system appeared in parts of West and
Southern Africa at various points in the nineteenth century, but it
received its fullest expression when introduced by Frederick Lugard

to northern Nigeria in the early twentieth century. By the inter-
war years it had become something of a dogma of British policy.
In order to secure its effective operation the British often 'invented'
ruling families or favoured one elite at the expense of another. To
seize upon the Sherifian family at Mecca and attempt to create
kingdoms for its various members was therefore new only in the
scale of its audacity. When Lawrence wrote about 'the Arabs', he
almost invariably meant the Hashemite family. When he argued
against 'colonial rule' and in favour of rule through 'native institu-
tions' with British advisers, he was merely espousing one form
of imperialism, and the 'native institutions' he envisaged were
aristocratic and autocratic. Moreover, in trying to carve out
kingdoms for Hussein (to be succeeded by his eldest son, Ali).
Abdulla and Feisal, he tacitly assumed that a pan-Arab state was
an exercise in unreality. He would have come close to concurring
with Gertrude Bell that 'the Arabs can't govern themselves- no
one is more convinced of that than I' .18
In a world in which Arab power seemed puny compared with
the naval, military and airborne might of the British, it was thought
that the Arab apprenticeship would probably last a long time
and would successfully create cultural, technical and economic
dependence. The British would dominate the coasts of Arabia (and
by implication control its trade), Lawrence thought, while the
Arabs did their best in the interior under British instruction. 19
Revolts against the regimes installed by the British could be put
down by air power. Feisal's attraction, which Lawrence repeatedly
harped upon, was that he was Anglophile. He sent his son to
school in Britain, while his younger brother Zeid went to Balliol.
And, while Lawrence sought to find or to create Anglophiles,
he also sought to disseminate his own pronounced xenophobia.
Here again he fitted into an enduring tradition. Despite the Entente,
for all the temporary alliances against Russian and German threats,
it was the French who were the traditional enemies of British
imperialism. The modern British Empire had been forged in a series
of eighteenth-century wars, reaching a climax in the settlement of
1815. Anglo-French rivalry had continued to break out in parts of
Asia and, notably, in the partition of Africa, culminating in the
Fashoda crisis of 1898. The French interest in the Middle East was
also of long standing. The Crusades were often mentioned; their
Levantine interests, economic and cultural, stretched back to the
reign of Louis XIV. Their threat to the Persian Gulf had led the
British to conclude a treaty with the Sultan of Muscat in 1798, and
the French had continued to be active in that region, gun-running
on a large scale (supplying, the British believed, the rebels on the
North-West Frontier of India) and seeking coaling stations for their
ships. Lawrence and many of his associates in the Arab Bureau -
Aubrey Herbert was a notable example - were fervently anti-
French. Often the more significant conflict seemed to be not that
against the Turks or the Germans, but the war of the peace against
the French. At all costs the French had to be 'biffed' out of Syria,
as Lawrence put it. Milner's verb, no more elegant but a good deal
more honest, was 'diddled'. No wonder the French obituaries were
distinctly hostile in 1935; not surprisingly, Aldington's debunking
biography was first published in Paris under the title Lawrence
l' imposteur.
There is a good deal of other evidence that Lawrence reflected
many of the imperial predilections of his period. In a letter to Lord
Winterton in April 1920 Lawrence wrote that Trenchard 'has, as
you say, "grown" beyond measure. Pre-1914 he'd have been
drowned for a little Englander: now I feel he is right in all points,
and after quite a lot of talk I feel inclined to back his scheme'. 20
'Drowned for a little Englander' is an imperialist's phrase: Trench-
ard's scheme was to hold Iraq with air power. Later Lawrence
wrote to Graves that
Mr Churchill was determined to find ways and means of avoiding

so complete a reversal of the traditional British attitude. I was at
one with him in this attitude: indeed I fancy I went beyond him
in my desire to see as many 'brown' dominions in the British
Empire as there are 'white'. It will be a sorry day when our
estate stops growing. 21
In a famous letter to The Times in 1920 Lawrence outlined his

proposals for indirect rule in Iraq:
These changes would take 12 months, and we should then hold

of Mesopotamia exactly as much (or as little) as we hold of South
Africa and Canada. I believe the Arabs in these conditions would
be as loyal as anyone in the Empire, and they would not cost us
a cent. 22
This was written before the direction of dominion nationalism was

clear, and the Statute of Westminster of 1931 could not then have
been predicted. Further, in a footnote to Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Lawrence asserted that
Mr Winston Churchill was entrusted by our harassed Cabinet

with the settlement of the Middle East; and in a few weeks, at
his conference in Cairo, he made straight all the tangle, finding
solutions fulfilling (I think) our promises in letter and spirit
(where humanly possible) without sacrificing any interest of our
Empire or any interest of the peoples concerned. 23
To underline the point yet further, John Buchan wrote that he

shared with Lawrence the same philosophy of Empire, the belief
(as expressed by Lawrence) that there was a great future for the
British Empire as a voluntary association, 'with treaty states on a
big scale attached to it', for 'we are so big a firm that we can offer
unique conditions to small businesses to associate with us'. 24
Confusions about Lawrence have arisen because writers with little
understanding of British imperial theory have read back modem
meanings of words such as 'nationalism' and 'dominions'.
Lawrence was an exponent of the imperialist view espoused by
the Round Table group, best represented by Lionel Curtis and
Geoffrey Dawson (who helped Lawrence to get his All Souls
fellowship), that dominion freedoms paradoxically led to greater
unity under the Crown in all respects that mattered, cultural,
strategic and economic.
The 'triumph' of the sub-title of Seven Pillars becomes not just
the military victory, but in effect the triumph of the 'dual mandate',
the capacity of the British to forward their own interests while
supposedly protecting those of dependent peoples. Lawrence was
well aware of the presence of oil in the Middle East, and his
developing fascination with speed and the mechanics of engines
from motor bikes to aircraft ensured that he was fully cognisant of
its significance for the modem world. No wonder he counselled
Lloyd George that a 'United States of Arabia' was out of the
question. Lawence cannot have been unaware of the fact that
Foreign Office officials were minuting that balkanisation would be
a more effective way of securing oil resources. 25 Distressed as he
was that the French secured their Syrian mandate, he must have
gleaned some satisfaction from the fact that Lloyd George extracted
the Mosul oil fields from the French in exchange for British
recognition of their predominance in Syria. 26 Far from being an
idealist who saw his idealism shattered by the old men in Versailles
and San Remo, 27 Lawrence was not the least of the active partici-
pants in what Woodrow Wilson called the 'disgusting scramble for
the Middle East'. In any case, it was the old men who produced
the mandates system, and the mandates under League supervision
more certainly preserved Arab independence (even if nominal)
than anything Lawrence devised.
III THE POST-WAR MYTH
Once Lawrence has been placed in the imperial tradition and

divested of the more forward-looking and radical 'myths within
the myth', his emergence to heroic status becomes more under-
standable, although the misunderstandings of the nationalist myth
may have helped to perpetuate it. So how did the myth develop
and why did it survive and grow? Some have tried to extend
Lawrence's popular fame backwards before 1919-20. A recent
writer in The Times (a newspaper long devoted to Lawrence) has
suggested that the first public image of him was vital to the war
effort. 28 This is unlikely: he had no public image during the war.
His exploits were largely secret and were known to only a small
group.
Winston Churchill, by his own account, had barely heard of
Lawrence in 1919, and, as Richard Aldington pointed out, Lawrence
did not secure an entry in Who's Who until 1920. 29 When John
Buchan sent Lowell Thomas, unable to find the stuff of romantic,
heroic propaganda on the Western Front, to the Middle East, he
was thinking of Allenby, not Lawrence, whom Buchan did not
meet until1920. Thomas himself had never heard of Lawrence, as
his famous account of seeing the strange unknown figure in the
streets of Jerusalem demonstrates. The fact that Lawrence was little
known as late as 1919 is borne out by two popular sources. The
1920 Ward Lock Wonder Book of Empire contains an extended article
on the new British possessions in the Middle East and on Allenby' s
campaign, but makes no mention whatsoever of Lawrence. 30 A
similar juvenile volume, Strang's Annual for 1920, likewise carried
articles on the Middle East and the Baghdad Railway, again without
any mention of Lawrence. 31 W. T. Massey's Allenby's Final Triumph,
published in 1920, was also silent about Lawrence, and, when this
work was summarised for a book of heroes published in 1938,
Lawrence was again (surprisingly for that period) absent. 32 In the
immediate aftermath of the war the new Crusader, the twentieth-
century Coeur de Lion, the incipient legend, was Allenby, not
Lawrence. Even Thomas called his lecture 'With Allenby in Pales-
tine' and only later added 'and Lawrence in Arabia'.
But Allenby was not the stuff of which legends are made.
Lawrence, though active in what was merely a side show of a side
show, had a number of advantages. One was youth, accentuated
by his boyish appearance. Thomas repeatedly described him as a
'youngster' and exaggerated his age downwards. The second was
his insistence on wearing Arab dress, even in Paris, which he
himself confessed was an 'affectation'. The third was of course
involvement in exploits of 'derring-do' - train-wrecking, bridge-
blowing, and a strange combination of guerrilla actions and frontal
assaults against the Turks - together with intelligence work which
fitted well into the Boy's Own Paper tradition of adventure current in
late-Victorian and Edwardian times. These exploits were achieved
against an oriental backdrop that was well established as a setting
for exotic, mysterious and thrilling events through pantomime and
other stage performances, and through the orientalist architecture
of exhibitions (the one in Glasgow in 1888 was known as 'Baghdad
by the Kelvin'), theatres and seaside piers. Lawrence had the great
advantage of being Feisal's 'minder', Feisal's 'resident'- military
adviser, liaison officer and unofficial chief of staff all rolled into
one. He worked with colourful desert fighters, mounted on camels
(another exotic touch) against a foe that played a vital role in the
orientalist stereotype, the lustful, voluptuous and cruel Turk.
These were almost the prefabricated elements for a legend, and
Lowell Thomas proceeded to exploit it to great financial advantage.
But the legend was as much created for Thomas as by him. In
New York, Thomas started off with five illustrated lectures on the
war, but it soon became apparent that the public was principally
interested in the Middle Eastern campaign. In London 'With
Allenby in Palestine' opened his remarkably successful six-month
run, but 'With Lawrence in Arabia' soon came to predominate, as
he responded to the public's orientalist fascinations. Thus the
legend emerged from an interaction between Thomas's material
and his discovery of public tastes. To this we can add the fact that
Thomas's tale was larger than life and stranger than truth.
If Lawrence was unknown until well into 1919, it is none the

less an exaggeration to suggest that he was somehow 'created' by
Lowell Thomas and a distinctively American publicity machine. A
number of conditions must be present for the making of a successful
myth. The public must be predisposed towards its background
circumstances and the figure at its heart. The message of the myth
needs to draw on a deep well of emotion. Moreoever, the elite
must find it convenient to adopt, manipulate and disseminate for
their own ends. Finally, those who write or publish works for
juveniles (including school textbooks) must find it a useful vehicle
for a variety of educational, socialising and moral messages. To
become a genuine heroic myth it must have a deep social,
generational and cultural penetration. All of these conditions were
satisfied in the case of Lawrence.
The emergence of the Lawrence myth casts a very curious light
on the idea that after the First World War the British were war-
weary and Empire-shy. On the contrary, they needed to find an
exhilarating, romantic and heroic corner of the war with recogni-
sable objectives that would make the carnage seem worthwhile.
Moreover, there was something Chaplinesque about Lawrence,
the 'little man' who had achieved great things when so many big
men had failed. For the elite Lawrence offered a justification for
the extension of imperial responsibilities in the modem age. He
legitimated new techniques and favoured the air force. He became
a mascot for at least one school of the Arabists, for archaeologists,
for the effectiveness of air power, and for the Round Table brand
of imperialism.
It is alleged that Thomas's lecture reached several million people
around the world. In Britain alone it ran for six months at Covent
Garden, the Royal Albert Hall, the Philharmonic Hall and the
Queen's Hall, and was seen by extraordinarily large audiences,
which included most people of influence, among them members of
the Cabinet. Lloyd George sent a message of approval, encouraging
Thomas to write up the Lawrence strory. Northcliffe, Buchan and
Astor, among others, extolled the lecture as a notable journalistic
success, and the London newspaper proprietors gave Thomas a
public reception. 33 Not surprisingly it received extensive press
coverage, and those who did not attend almost certainly read about
it in the papers. Lecturing on this scale had occurred in the
nineteenth century and had received equally extensive press
coverage. David Livingstone, Richard Burton and H. M. Stanley
had addressed vast audiences (and shown magic-lantern slides)

throughout the country. Thomas had the additional advantage of
the cinematograph, as well as more conventional slide techniques,
and increased the entertainment value by surrounding the lecture
with orientalist music and songs.
His book With Lawrence in Arabia was not published until several
years later (1925), and it offers, no doubt, some of the flavour of
the lecture. Its title was a conscious aping of a whole string of
G. A. Henty's works, as well as G. W. Steevens's hugely successful
With Kitchener to Khartum, 34 and it sold no fewer than 200,000 copies
in its first year. It contains nineteen carefully posed photographs
of Lawrence, although Thomas claims in the text that Lawrence
was so self-effacing that trickery had to be used in order to obtain
pictures of him. The captions are extraordinary: 'the mystery man
of Arabia'; 'the uncrowned king of the Arabs'; 'the archaeologist
and poet who turned soldier'; 'dressed in robes of spotless white';
'Sheree£ Lawrence'; 'the dreamer whose dreams came true'; 'from
archaeologist to world's champion train wrecker'; 'in his desert
robes he looked like the reincarnation of one of the prophets of
old'. 35 Pictures and captions are matched by the fabulous stories
in the book. Lawrence is described as 'serene, almost saintly'. He
frequently achieves the impossible; repeatedly 'passes through the
lines', usually dressed as a woman; understands camels, the desert
and nomadic warriors better than the Arabs themselves; flaunts
himself before the Turks and achieves military miracles through
unimaginable heroics. 36 The modem reader cannot fail to find it
risible. The gullibility of Lowell Thomas (and even more so of his
readers) would seem incredible but that his income from the whole
exploit provides him with the last laugh. Today we have Jeffrey
Archer to remind us of the absence of any correlation between
bestseller status, vast royalties and writing talent. Thomas's book
reveals, surely, that, during the brief period he was with Lawrence,
the 'Prince of Mecca' played a whole series of undergraduate japes
on him. Yams were spun, tall tales told in order to mock the
ingenuous American reporter.
Some at least of Lawrence's associates in the Arab Bureau seem
to have connived at, embroidered even, some of the deceptions.
Colonel R. Buxton, for example, told Thomas that Lawrence had a
touch of the Prophet about him. 37 They too enjoyed jolly japes,
but they had a more serious purpose: their Bureau was unpopular.
Full of articulate, energetic and well-connected people, it sometimes
seemed like an unconnected branch of the Foreign Office, largely

out of control. The India Office loathed it and Whitehall mandarins
generally disliked the manner in which its members secured direct
access to politicians and people of influence or promoted its cause
through overtly propagandist pieces in the press (usually in The
Times). Members of the Bureau were quite prepared to use the
Lawrence exploits, with Thomas as their mouthpiece, in order to
protect the reputation of their organisation and promote its policies.
The Bureau had its own freemasonry.
On the other hand, neither Lawrence nor the Bureau members
could have predicted Thomas's huge success. For all they knew,
Thomas might have published a series of obscure newspaper
articles in the United States and vanished into oblivion. The notion
of a conspiracy hatched by Lawrence, the Bureau and Thomas, so
sedulously promoted by Aldington, tends to break down on that
basic point. But Thomas did not vanish without trace. The japes
were dressed up as truth and shown to millions of admiring eyes.
Lawrence was trapped in his own deceptions, convenient though
they had become in promoting the Hashemite cause. Graves and
Liddell Hart, in close collaboration with Lawrence, produced what
were in effect up-market, more serious versions of Thomas, while
repudiating or ignoring their populist predecessor. 38 The partly
fictional Seven Pillars of Wisdom, abridged as Revolt in the Desert,
marked an attempt by Lawrence to trump the Thomas tales with a
work of genius.
Thomas's work certainly made popular theatre. His account
repeatedly refers to the Arabian Nights, to lands of imagination,
magic carpets, secrecy and fantastic tales. Lawrence and his
followers are portrayed as a sort of combination of Robin Hood,
Dick Turpin, Jesse James and Barbary corsairs. To strike a chord
in an American audience, much is made of Lawrence's reliance on
his frontier Colt, with which he is (predictably enough) an expert
shot and which has saved his life on several occasions. Lawrence
stalks his prey as a hunter stalks game. Thomas wrote that he and
his followers were 'splendid and barbaric', capable of pricking 'the
Kaiser's imperialistic bubble'. He was a member of a secret corps
who held material rewards in complete contempt, a swashbuckler
in an age much taken with swashbuckling, as the cinema was to
prove in the 1920s and 1930s. 39 At Petra, so Thomas believed,
ancient civilisation, Crusading, archaeology and war came together
in a mighty consummation. Leading figures among the enemy,
such as the Bey of Deraa, are treated as melodramatic villains. 40

Thomas succeeded, in short, in bringing together a whole series
of theatrical traditions - the spectacular, the melodramatic, the
orientalist and the swashbuckling. It was a winning formula.
IV LAWRENCE AND POLICY
Once Thomas's lectures and film shows had encountered- and

been influenced by - the remarkable public reactions and press
responses, Lawrence became a valuable property. Winston Church-
ill was not slow to recognise this. Himself a self-publicist whose
early political career had undoubtedly been helped by his high
public profile resulting from his exploits on the North-West Fron-
tier, in the Sudan campaign and in the Boer War, Churchill had
been a newspaper correspondent and a writer of successful books
such as The Malakand Field Force, The River War, My African Journey
and My Early Life. It is not surprising that he was susceptible
to Lawrence and half envied him. Meinertzhagen thought that
Churchill almost hero-worshipped Lawrence, who played on this
to ensure the success of the Hashemite policy. 41 For his part
Churchill naturally wanted a resounding success. When he inher-
ited the immense muddle of British Middle Eastern policy on taking
over the Colonial Office in 1921, he persuaded Lawrence to join
the department for one year, during which Abdulla was confirmed
as King of Transjordan and Feisal (having been thrown out of Syria
by the French) as King of Iraq. By putting into effect the remnants
of the Arab Bureau policy (which also coincided with the views of
Sir Percy Cox and Gertrude Bell in Baghdad) and adopting air
policing as an inexpensive means of 'pacifying' Iraq in the wake of
the 1920 revolt, 42 Churchill appeared to bring off a series of Middle
Eastern coups. Gertrude Bell was ecstatic at the masterful manner
in which Churchill handled the Cairo conference in March 1921,
and Lawrence was relieved that British honour, as he saw it, had
been saved. Sir Arnold Wilson, who had been civil commissioner
in Baghdad at the end of the war and was present in Cairo at the
time (though not in an official capacity, having become managing
director of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company), thought that Churchill
was using Lawrence's fame to his own ends. 43 This may well be
true.
Certainly Lawrence's concurrence with the Churchill settlement
and the press notice that Lawrence always brought in his wake
must have helped. Lawrence still had his enemies, but the strength
of the myth among the elite had grown as accounts of the war and
memoirs appeared over the years. Churchill himself produced
admiring references to Lawrence and made a prominent appear-
ance at his funeral. John Buchan was enthralled by the Lawrence
legend. 44 Sir Ronald Storrs, governor of Jerusalem at the time of
Thomas's conversion in the bazaar, devoted an entire chapter to
Lawrence in his memoirs. Lawrence's activities in Syria were 'little
short of miraculous'. Quoting Shelley, he described Lawrence as
'a pardlike spirit beautiful and swift'; as a man plagued by
photographers, for 'there is no close season for heroes'; as the
simple airman returning from India, a fellow passenger on the
Rajputana in 1929, spending his days 'flat on his berth translating
Homer'. 45 there are two illustrations of Lawrence in Storrs's book:
one from a drawing, the other from a bronze bust; both by Eric
Kennington, each a good deal more heroic than the real thing.
Despite the fact that Lawrence was less than generous to his Arab
Bureau colleagues in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, they presumably
basked in his reflected glory. When enemies did publish critical or
sceptical thoughts on Lawrence, they were generally muted. Sir
Arnold Wilson sniffily noted that he had done well for the profits
of publishers and film-producers, but had backed all the wrong
political horses. 46 Maybe, he conceded, he was a better writer than
statesman.
V LAWRENCE THE WRITER
No consideration of the Lawrence myth is complete without some

assessment of these literary achievements. Myths require a very
considerable suspension of disbelief, and the British seem to have
been prepared to go to extraordinary lengths in the case of
Lawrence's writings. To the cool and uncommitted eye, Seven Pillars
of Wisdom reads like a confession of megalomania masquerading as
a masterpiece. Starting with the dedicatory poem, which was
rewritten by Robert Graves, this is the work of a classically educated
imperialist obsessed with the grand gestures in human affairs that
are open to a 'heroic' figure from a dominant people:
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands

And wrote my will across the sky in stars . . . .
With its division into books and chapters and its antique summaries
at the head of each 'book', it is as self-conscious in its form as in
its style. No wonder George Bernard Shaw, according to his
secretary, shrank from dipping his toe into this ocean of words. 47
Book 1, which starts at chapter 8, is entitled 'The Discovery of
Feisal' .
. . . I went down to Arabia to see and consider its great men.

The first, the Sherif of Mecca, we knew to be aged. I found
Abdulla too clever, Ali too clean, Zeid too cool. Then I rode up-
country to Feisal, and found in him the leader with the necessary
fire, and yet with reason to give effect to our science. 48
The king-maker had chosen. Note too the implied cultural differ-
ence in the combination of fire and reason which could be harnessed
to our 'science'. From this point the reader is conveyed through
constant dream-like travels punctuated by incidents, musings and
conversations. It is a modern Odyssey with Lawrence as its
Odysseus; in its hopeless quest a desert Winterreise without the
music.
Whereas Shakespeare seems full of quotations, The Seven Pillars
seems full of extracts from Private Eye's 'Pseud' s Corner'. After one
action Lawrence professed to find young dead Turks, stripped for
booty by Lawrence's associates, 'wonderfully beautiful':
The night was shining gently down, softening them into new
ivory. Turks were white-skinned on their clothed parts, much
whiter than the Arabs; and these soldiers had been very young.
Close round them lapped the dark wormwood, now heavy with
dew, in which the ends of the moon-beams sparkled like sea-
spray. The corpses seemed flung so pitifully on the ground,
huddled anyhow in low heaps. Surely if straightened they would
be comfortable at last. So I put them all in order, one by one,
very wearied myself, and longing to be of these quiet ones, not
of the restless, noisy, aching mob up the valley, quarrelling over
plunder .... 49
It seems almost trite to use the tragedies of war for such romantic
affectations, too glib to wish to be one of the 'quiet ones' rather

than the 'restless, noisy ... mob'.
Damascus is depicted as the 'earthly paradise' (surely St Paul's
road is constantly in his all-too-allusive mind), long sought-after,
yet given up in the moment of heroic success. Soon after the
triumphal arrival in Damascus. Lawrence heard the muezzin
summoning the people to prayer. After the conventional call,
he dropped his voice two tones, almost to speaking level and

softly added: 'And He is very good to us this day, 0 people of
Damascus.' The clamour hushed, as everyone seemed to obey
this call to prayer on this their first night of perfect freedom.
While my fancy, in the overwhelming pause, showed me my
loneliness and lack of reason in their movement: since only for
me, of all the hearers was the event sorrowful and the phrase
meaningless. 50
The paragraph raises many questions in the mind of the reader.

Who really believed that this was their first night of perfect
freedom? Was not the hyperbole Lawrence's rather than the
muezzin's or the citizens'? And why did he presume that only for
him, of all the hearers, was the event sorrowful and the phrase
meaningless? Might not Damascus have been full of doubters
wondering which infidel yoke would replace the Turks? And what
did Feisal know of Damascus or Damascus of Feisal? Seven Pillars
is full of such dubious absolutes.
To the modem eye such sentiments seem almost self-mocking;
yet they are suffused with all the deadly earnest of romanticism.
There is at least some self-mockery in the contrasts Lawrence
draws between the British and the French, to the great detriment
of the latter, but even here his serious import cannot be avoided.
The British, says Lawrence, are sure of their absolute excellence,
and in answer to a question about Western ambitions he tells an
Arab chieftain that 'We want the world's end, Auda.' In his
dealings with the French senior officer, Bremond, Lawrence found
that
The Colonel, like his countrymen, was a realist in love, and war.
Even in situations of poetry the French remained incorrigible
prose-writers, seeing by the directly-thrown light of reason and
understanding, not through the half-closed eye, mistily, by
things' essential radiance, in the manner of the imaginative

British: so the two races worked ill together on a great undertak-
ing.
Because Englishmen considered themselves to be 'chosen beings,

inimitable', they encouraged other peoples 'to be good of their
type'. 'Consequently we admired native custom; studied the
language; wrote books about its architecture, folklore and dying
industries.' The French on the other hand, 'though they started
with a similar doctrine of the Frenchman as the perfection of
mankind (dogma amongst them, not secret instinct), went on,
contrarily, to encourage their subjects to imitate them; since, even
if they could never attain the true level, yet their virtue would be
greater as they approached it.' 51 There is a kernel of truth in some
of this, but the transparent prejudice destroys the wit.
The book reflects one of the obsessions of the British in the East,
an orientalist projection of the flight from urban industrialisation
in the search for the rural idyll. In India, Kipling and other Anglo-
Indian writers contrasted the soft 'effeminacy' of the peasants of
the hot plains with the sturdy 'masculinity' of the hillmen. 52 It was
a contrast between community and individual, 'society' and rugged
individualism, often between the vegetarian and the carnivorous. 53
In the Middle East the contrast was between 'the desert' and 'the
sown', the pastoral nomad and hunter and the settled cultivator
and townsman. 54 It was a tradition of Arabist writing to prefer the
former to the latter. Charles Doughty, Lawrence's hero, had
written, 'the town is uncivil compared with the desert'. 55 For
Lawrence the tribes of Arabia carried 'the mark of nomadism, that
most deep and biting social discipline'. The Sherif Hussein had an
'interest in natural history' which 'reinforced his sporting instincts'.
He sent his sons, fresh from their education in Constantinople,
out into the wilds of the desert to patrol the pilgrim roads:
The young men thought it might be an amusing trip, but were

dashed when their father forbade them special food, bedding or
soft-padded saddles. He would not let them back to Mecca, but
kept them out for months in all seasons guarding the roads by
day and by night, handling every variety of man and learning
fresh methods of riding and fighting. Soon they hardened and
became self-reliant, with that blend of native intelligence and

vigour which so often comes in a crossed stock.
They contrasted mightily with 'the cloying inactivity of Ottoman

rule'. The Hashemites were ready for Lawrence's transfers to Syria
and Iraq because 'they were natives of no country, lovers of no
private plot of ground'. Their nomadic status fitted them for
anything, anywhere. Even the contrast between vegetarian and
carnivore is there. Though Lawrence had flirted with vegetarianism
in his youth, in the desert he seems to link the carnivorous
character of his nomads with their war-like habits. Sheep are
repeatedly slaughtered for great feasts in which the participants
show little interest in the rice. They hunt oryx, ibex and ostrich
and shoot bustard, which Xenophon, Lawrence reminds us,
recommended for its white meat. 56
Yet, as Sir Arnold Wilson sourly noted in 1935, the future lay
not with Lawrence's desert bandits, but with the radio, the internal
combustion engine and the aeroplane. 57 Nor did it lie with the
Hashemites, but with Ibn Saud, much despised by Lawrence,
championed by StJohn Philby, who perhaps deserved rather more
the sobriquet 'of Arabia', since he became a Muslim and settled at
Ibn Saud's court. But Philby created no myth. Nor did he write a
prose as relentlessly lapidary as the desert it described. The
examples given above surely confirm Aldington' s view that in
Seven Pillars Lawrence used a 'style so mannered, so literary and
so inexact', that he had 'striven so painfully to write too well'. 58 It
comes as no surprise to learn from Storrs that Lawrence 'loved
discussing his own prose', that he was 'not given to self-depreci-
ation' (though he 'did underrate the superlative excellence of Seven
Pillars') and was a 'most conscious artist in words'. But even Storrs,
Lawrence-admirer as he was, felt that that conscious artistry was
'too conspicuous sometimes', as when he ended Seven Pillars with
the phrase 'I knew how much I was sorry', rather than the more
natural 'how sorry I was'. 59
Sympathetic critics have seen the power of Seven Pillars as lying
in its sense of betrayal, the great fraud perpetrated on the Arabs
which led Lawrence to request of Allenby permission to leave
almost as soon as he had entered Damascus. Yet after 'how much
I was sorry' the reader turns the page to the Lawrence self-
apotheosis: 'Damascus had not seemed a sheath for my sword
when I entered Arabia . . . but . . . when Damascus fell, the
Eastern war- probably the whole war- drew to an end.' And

then the final confession of the self-conscious hero:
I had dreamed, at the City School in Oxford, of hustling into

form, while I lived, the new Arabia which time was inexorably
bringing upon us. Mecca was to lead to Damascus; Damascus
to Anatolia, and afterwards to Baghdad; and then there was
Yemen. Fantasies, these will seem, to such as are able to call my
beginning an ordinary effort.
Moreover, the 'fraud' constitutes a curious case of 'now you see

it, now you don't'. Some of the changes made in Revolt in the
Desert, the version abbreviated by Lawrence himself and published
for popular consumption eight years before Seven Pillars (which
had originally been published in a lavish private edition), are
instructive. The passage about the beauty of the corpses quoted
above was removed altogether, while the paragraph on the muezzin
constitutes the final lines of the book. It ends at the words 'perfect
freedom', with all mention of Lawrence's loneliness and his
negative thoughts excised. 60 Thus Revolt in the Desert ends in a
great upbeat, while Seven Pillars has a lengthy falling cadence. In
1927 the public was served up with a great triumph of freedom
(though the sub-title was absent in Revolt); in 1935 they are allowed
access to the disillusion and sense of betrayal.
In any case, one needs to take a cool look at this 'fraud'
perpetrated on the Arabs which Lawrence used as part of his
process of self-flagellation, his personal Muharram. Jeremy Wilson,
Lawrence's official biographer, has argued that Lawrence had had
a severely moral upbringing, that it was his sense of honour and
integrity that made him so distraught that promises might be
broken. 61 This fits ill with the many falsifications, the almost
wilful disregard for truth - now generally acknowledged to be a
characteristic of Seven Pillars as well as his tales to Thomas, and
clearly part of his make-up. Perhaps all heroic figures, like dominant
states, are willing to subordinate means to ends. But the ends in
the case of Lawrence are never really clear. In social and political
terms, the Arabs were as 'unstable as water'. No Western statesman
or commentator really considered that a single Arab government
was a desirable or practical proposition. Nor did Lawrence, except
possibly as a theoretical device for frustrating the French. Lawrence
reconciled himself with - and was partly the architect of - the
Churchillian settlement, and with hindsight it is apparent that the

mandates system was less of a fraud than anything Lawrence
might have devised. The principal'fraud' upon the Arabs was the
Balfour Declaration, and Lawrence approved of that. Not the least
of his impracticalities was to attempt to bring the Zionists and
Feisal together into a common purpose. 62
Almost anything concerned with Lawrence seems like shifting
sands and this is confirmed by oddities in his style. In both Revolt
and Seven Pillars Lawrence refuses to accept standardisation of
spellings in transliteration from the Arabic. His copy-editor, as
copy-editors will, pleaded for some discipline in this respect,
but Lawrence insisted 'I spell my names anyhow' in order to
demonstrate the problems of transliteration. There are of course
any number of languages that present such problems, and some
consistency is surely both an aid to clarity and sensible from the
point of view of indexing. On two pages of Revolt the Sharif Abd
el Mayin becomes el Main, el Mayein, el Muein, el Mayin and le
Muyein. 63 Taxed with this, Lawrence wrote, 'Good egg. I call this
really ingenious.' 64 It all seems like a self-indulgent affectation, a
curious indiscipline for one who was even then trying to subject
himself to the rigours of RAF training.
From that experience came a quite different book, The Mint.
This reveals so much about Lawrence that, though it has little
relationship to the Middle East and little bearing on the popular
aspects of the myth, it deserves analysis. It is often said that it is a
scatological work exposing the mindless brutalities of forces life.
But in it Lawrence extols 'natural man', whom he would dearly
like to emulate. 'Contact with natural man leads me to deplore the
vanity in which we thinking people sub-infeudate ourselves.' 65 Yet
he kept a small library in his locker, including at least one work in
Danish, and, as everyone knows, throughout the experiment he
was in touch with Trenchard, the Chief of the Air Staff, and
corresponded with many of the leading literary and political figures
of the day. He sees a picture of himself on the wall of the canteen
and surreptitiously removes it. He sends for a notebook and when
it arrives he shakes out its pages and from it falls his parchment
patent as Minister Plenipotentiary - '"George" you know "to his
Trusty and Well-beloved" ... with a seal on it as red and nearly
as broad as my face. "What's that" asked Parker the inquisitive.
"My birth-certificate," I said glibly shovelling it out of sight.' 66
But it is perhaps his view of the RAF which is most significant:
'The thing is alluringly big'; 'We belong to a big thing, which will
exist for ever and ever in unnumbered generations of standard
airmen, like ourselves. Our outward sameness of dress and type
remind us of that.' Becoming part of this 'big thing' is to submerge
personality: 'Each of us is a little part of the rest - as all the rest of
us'; 'Does it not rather frighten the RAF to remake so many men
after its own desire'; 'my willingness . . . that the RAF should bray
me and remould me after its pattern'; 'We were being subdued to
the passivity of puppets, with something of their immediacy and
automatism when master jerked our string'; 'one is already a ghost
while still full of blood and breath'; 'We have grown to do only
what we're told.' Lawrence hammers on this theme relentlessly,
and his view of Trenchard is Nietzschean in the extreme. 'Trenchard
has designed the image he thinks most fitted to be an airman; and
we submit our nature to his will, trustingly'; 'the awe of him surely
encompasses us; and, when encountering a former batman of
Trenchard, 'we egged out of him yarns about his master'. 67 The
anarchic bandit of the desert, the flaunter of army conventions,
had become a cog in the RAF machine, one of Trenchard's puppets.
He had poured in the jagged base metal of his private existence
and emerged as a newly minted coin. That at least was the theory.
The Mint lacks humour and pathos despite situations full of
both. Its gritty realism becomes unreal in so powerfully serving
Lawrence's self-abasement. There are ugly moments too. A
Glaswegian blacksmith was 'simple-minded, like a child; but stiff-
minded, too, and dirty: very Scotch'. 68 This contains more than a
hint of racism.
In the Seven Pillars Lawrence is the puppet-master; in The Mint
he is the puppet offering himself limp, without personal will or
consciousness, to Trenchard. In the Seven Pillars he extols the free
nomadic life; in The Mint the submergence of the individual within
the organic whole. Though so different in form, the one is an
inversion of the other, deeply contrived and thoroughly unconvin-
cing.
VI CONTINUATION OF THE MYTH
By the 1930s some of Lawrence's associates were viewing him as

the strong man who could save Britain. This is the theme of Liddell
Hart's biography of 1934. 69 John Buchan thought along similar
T. E. l.Jlwrence: Myth and Message 175
lines:
If he had come out of the War with a sound nervous system and
his vitality unimpaired, he might have led the nation to a new
way of life. For he had a magnetic power which made people
follow him blindly, and I have seen that in his eyes which could
have made, or quelled, a revolution.
In 1935, when Buchan saw him for the last time, he 'was happy
about him and believed that he might become again the great
man of action- might organise, perhaps, our imperfect national
defences'. Buchan's wife pricked such musings, and Buchan was
in truth ambivalent about Lawrence. He considered him 'the only
man of genius I have ever known', yet he thought that Seven Pillars
lacked 'the compulsion of the best narrative' and often lapsed into
'adjectival rhetoric'. The Mint lacked relief, half-tones and shape,
while he never cared for the translation of the Odyssey, despite the
fact that Lawrence had the ideal experience for a Homeric scholar. 70
The film industry might well have placed the imprimatur of the
greatest mass medium of the age on the Lawrence legend in the
1930s. Alexander Korda, that great admirer of the British Empire,
bought the film rights of Revolt in the Desert while Lawrence was
still alive. Lawrence approved the project, but insisted that it
should wait until his death, an event which occurred sooner than
expected, just as the nation, so it has been improbably alleged,
was preparing to call on Lawrence to reorganise its air defences. 71
It seemed an ideal subject for Korda, when imperial epics against
scenically grand backdrops were all the rage, as much in Hollywood
as in Britain. 72 For the next four years Korda tried to secure a script
which would meet with the approval of the censors. He appointed
an ex-governor of Jaffa, Lieutenant-Colonel Stirling, as the film's
consultant, and repeatedly announced the names of directors,
camera crews and stars (who included Leslie Howard and Walter
Hudd). On several occasions units prepared to travel to Palestine
or Egypt to start the filming. But the film was never made. The
censors were anxious about offending the Turks at a time when
the British Empire needed every friend it could get. There were
outbreaks of disturbances in Palestine, which caused fears of Arab
reactions to the filming. One Colonial Office official thought there
was a danger that battle scenes might be mistaken for the real
thing. 73 It is apparent that in the troubled conditions of the
Middle East an Arab revolt against the imperial Turk posed an

uncomfortable parallel to an Arab revolt against the imperial Briton.
With the outbreak of war the idea was dropped. Lawrence had to
wait for Lean.
But the Lawrence myth survived without the film, though in the
1950s its popular and elite forms began to diverge. The long-
delayed publication of The Mint gave it a surprising new lease of
life. Aldington's biography stimulated a number of confirmations
and rebuttals. Schoolchildren were taught Lawrence's story, one
of the few romantic and heroic tales of the twentieth century. B. I.
McGraw's The Thrill ofHistory was a school text which went through
many impressions in the 1950s. Published by Collins, it was
extensively used in both Scotland and England and was still in use
in at least one school in the 1970s. It contained a chapter on
Lawrence, who apparently 'cheered the Arabs up', convincing
them that 'the Turks would never re-take Mecca'. 'He went to their
tents, and told the Arabs that, if they came with him, they could
make themselves free. They came by hundreds and by thousands.
On swift-footed camels, they rode across a thousand miles of
desert sands, to Damascus in Syria.' Many of the stories swallowed
by Believing Thomas are retold. 'The Arabs made Lawrence a
Prince of Mecca'; he dressed up as an Arab woman and gossiped
with Turkish soldiers; when he entered Damascus, 'the people
crowded to welcome him, and shouted his name with joy all over
the city'. 74 The generation that was thus taught legend as history
was soon attending David Lean's film, released in 1962. Robert
Bolt based the screenplay on Seven Pillars, and Lawrence's dreamy
tales were treated to the Lean directorial style, which belies his
name. It contained all the lushness of the legend, even to the
extent that Lawrence grew nearly a foot in height.
But the elite went on reinterpreting Lawrence to their own ends,
as a statistical and qualitative analysis of the biographies reveals.
The Lawrence biographical industry began fairly slowly in the
1920s, accelerated in the 1930s (particularly after his death), passed
through a comparative lull in the 1940s, was drastically restructured
in the 1950s and underwent an extraordinary growth in the 1960s
and 1970s. There have been several attempts to analyse these
biographies in terms of contemporary needs: in the aftermath of
the First World War, Lawrence was a justificatory hero; in the
1930s, a strong man capable of saving Britain; in the 1950s a fraud;
in the 1960s and 1970s, a psychological case study; in the 1980s,
deserving of re-evaluation. Some sectors of the Right, interestingly,

came to reject him as both statesman and writer. Anthony Nutting
saw him as working against British interests; 75 Kingsley Amis
considered him a literary 'sonorous fake'. 76 Yet in 1988, Lawrence's
centenary year, Seven Pillars was compared with Don Quixote and
War and Peace; he was credited with the creation of both Jordan
and Iraq; there were major Lawrence exhibitions in Oxford and
London; and a television documentary, carefully controlled by his
brother, did its best to re-create the legend. 77
But Lawrence's reign as an instrumental myth, one that influ-
ences contemporary events, arouses popular emotions and con-
ditions elite attitudes, is long since over. Indeed, it barely survived
the Second World War. There were those who looked for a
Lawrence figure in that war, and some professed to find his
successor in Orde Wingate. The search for irregular heroism
prompted General Platt, the commanding officer of the British
troops in the Sudan, to remark that 'The curse of this war is
Lawrence in the last.' 78 But, although exotic backdrops helped
to promote the heroic stature of both Wingate and, perhaps,
Montgomery, truly mythic status, at least for statesmen and
soldiers, seems to have passed with the decline of empire. If it
survives at all, it is with sporting personalities and rock stars.
Since the Lean film Lawrence has had a comparatively slight
popular exposure, except perhaps through the sensational inci-
dents at Deraa and the masochistic beatings, explored in Knightly
and Simpson's Secret Lives, which, though intelligent and sym-
pathetic, was published in a popular imprint. 79 But the tabloid
press has now lost interest: all scandal has been wrung out of him
and he would not sell a single extra copy. The 'chattering classes'
remain intrigued by him, but only because he is the stuff of a good
argument, a literary man of action about whom there are extreme
views, a mystery man whose riddle any number of biographies
have failed to solve, a great writer who (in Buchan's words) never
wrote a great book.
Perhaps the Lawrence myth was ideal for a declining empire. In

its ambiguities it was as malleable as a bean bag, shaping itself to
any form. Lawrence could be admired by the Fabian Shaw and the
right-wing Tory Lloyd; he could be both flamboyant and retiring,
nationalist and imperialist, devoted to individualism and to a
community dominated by the strong man, naive yet masochistic,

innocent yet sexually fascinating. But biographies of Lawrence are
no longer the bestsellers they once were. By the 1980s books about
him were as likely to be remindered as to make their authors
fortunes. 80 Though the Iron Lady would wish it otherwise, belief
is less easily suspended. Iconoclasm is more fashionable than
iconography.
Notes
1. John Buchan. Memory Hold the Door (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1940) p. 229.
2. Quoted in J. M. Wilson, Introduction to T. E. Lawrence, The Mint
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) p. 24.
3. BBC2, 21 August.
4. C. I. Hamilton, 'Naval Hagiography and the Victorian Hero', Historical
Journal, XXIII (1980) 381-98; Olive Anderson. 'The Growth of Christian
Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain', English Historical Review, LXXXVI
(1971) 46-72.
5. Dorothy 0. Helly, Livingstone's Legacy: Horace Waller and Victorian
Mythmaking (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1987).
6. Douglas H. Johnson. 'The Death of Gordon, a Victorian Myth; Journal
of Imperial and Commonwealth History, x (1982) 285-310.
7. Winston S. Churchill. The River War (London: Longman, 1899).
8. Richard Aldington, l.Jlwrence of Arabia, a Biographical Enquiry (1955;
London: Collins 1969) p. 285.
9. Richard Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary, 1917-56 (London: Cresset,
1959) p. 30.
10. Lowell Thomas, With l.Jlwrence in Arabia (London: Hutchinson, 1925)
pp. 17, 317.
11. Ronald Storrs, Orientations (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1939)
p. 472.
12. John Charmley, Lord Lloyd and the Decline of the British Empire (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987) p. 65.
13. H. V. F. Winstone, Gertrude Bell (London: Quartet, 1980); The Letters
of Gertrude Bell, ed. Lady Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987).
14. Charmley, Lord Lloyd.
15. Margaret Fitzherbert, The Man who was Greenmantle: A Biography of Aubrey
Herbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
16. Aldington, l.Jlwrence of Arabia, pp. 68-9.
17. Winstone, Gertrude Bell, p. 243.
18. Ibid., p. 165; cf. Aldington, l.Jlwrence of Arabia pp. 259--60. Lawrence
considered 'self-determination' to be a foolish idea in the case of
Mesopotamia. See Briton Cooper Busch. Britain, India and the Arabs,
1914-1921 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1971) p. 282.
19. Robert Graves, l.Jlwrence and the Arabs (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927)
T. E. l.Jlwrence: Myth and Message 179
pp. 390, 395--8, 477.
20. Selected Letters ofT. E. lawrence, ed. David Garnett (1938; London:
Jonathan Cape, 1941) p. 120.
21. Graves, lawrence and the Arabs, p. 395.
22. Selected Letters ofT. E. lawrence, p. 123.
23. T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars ofWisdom (1935; Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin, 1962) p. 283.
24. Buchan, Memory Hold the Door, p. 223; Graves, lawrence and the Arabs,
p. 395.
25. Though Lawrence thought an Arab confederation might happen some
time in the future: Graves, lawrence and the Arabs, p. 390. For oil
balkanisation, see Philip Knightly and Colin Simpson, The Secret Lives
of lawrence of Arabia (London: Panther 1971) pp. 150-1. There is a large
scholarly literature on the European powers, the Middle East and oil,
much of which has been ignored by those who have written about
Lawrence. See for example Benjamin Shwadran, The Middle East, Oil
and the Great Powers (Jerusalem: 1973); Marian Kent, Oil and Empire
(London: Macmillan 1976); John Darwin, Britain, Egypt and the Middle
East. (London: Macmillan, 1981).
26. Aldington, lawrence of Arabia p. 260.
27. See Christopher Sykes, Introduction to Aldington, lawrence of Arabia,
Penguin edn.
28. George Hill, 'Seven Faces of Lawrence', The Times, 30 July 1988.
29. Aldington, lawrence of Arabia, p. 277.
30. The Wonder Book of Empire (London: Ward Lock, 1920).
31. Herbert Strang's Annual (London: Oxford University Press, 1920).
32. W. T. Massey, Allenby's Final Triumph (London: Constable, 1920); C.
Sheridan Jones and Alfred Miles, Famous Heroes (London: Raphael
Tuck, 1932) pp. 69-78.
33. Aldington, lawrence of Arabia, p. 286.
34. G. W. Steevens, With Kitchener to Khartum (London: William Black-
wood, 1898), was in its eleventh printing by the end of the year.
35. Thomas, With lawrence in Arabia, p. 290; cf. illustrations and captions.
36. Ibid., pp. 18, 38, 89, 92, 117, 121, 187, 205, 218, 255.
37. Ibid., p. 254.
38. Graves, lawrence and the Arabs; B. H. Liddell Hart, 'T. E. lawrence' in
Arabia and After (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934).
39. Thomas, With Lawrence in Arabia pp. 72, 76, 79, 132, 142, 145; Jeffrey
Richards, Swordsmen of the Screen (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
1977).
40. Thomas, With lawrence in Arabia, pp. 165-79, 183.
41. Quoted in Winstone, Gertrude Bell, p. 239.
42. For air policing, see David Omissi, The RAF and Air Policing
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming).
43. Sir Arnold Wilson, Thoughts and Talks, 193.>-7 (London: Longman,
1937) p. 34.
44. Buchan, Memory Hold the Door, pp. 222-9.
45. Storrs, Orientations, ch. 18, pp. 459-72.
46. Wilson, Thoughts and Talks, p. 33.
47. Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, p. 319.
48. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, p. 64.
49. Ibid., p. 315.
50. Ibid., p. 674.
51. Ibid., pp. 93, 136, 289, 355.
52. B. J. Moore-Gilbert, Kipling and 'Orientalism' (London: Croom Helm,
1986).
53. This vegetarian/carnivore dichotomy is well conveyed in Rudyard
Kipling's Jungle Book.
54. Gertrude Bell, The Desert and the Sown (London: Heinemann, 1907).
The title phrase, from Fitzgerald's Rubaiytit, is one frequently repeated
by Lawrence and others.
55. Charles Doughty, Passages from Arabia Deserta (1888; Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1956) p. 259.
56. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, pp. 35, 100-2, 259-60, 274, 335, 525.
57. Wilson, Thoughts and Talks, p. 34.
58. Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, p. 330.
59. Storrs, Orientations, pp. 464-5.
60. T. E. Lawrence, Revolt in the Desert (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927)
p. 435.
61. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, pp. 515, 568-9; Jeremy Wilson, BBC2 21 Aug
1988.
62. Michael Yardley, Backing into the Limelight: A Biography ofT. E. Lawrence
(New York: Stern and Day, 1985) pp. 134-5; Jukka Nevakivi, Britain,
France and the Arab Middle East, 1914-1920 (London: Athlone Press,
1969) pp. 86, 111-12. See also Elie Kedourie, In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) and England and the
Middle East (Hassocks: Harvester, 1978).
63. Lawrence, Revolt, pp. 293--5.
64. A. W. Lawrence included this correspondence in his foreword to the
popular edition of Seven Pillars.
65. Lawrence, The Mint, p. 171.
66. Ibid., p. 86.
67. Ibid., pp. 116-17, 127, 148, 175, 181, 183.
68. Ibid., p. 47.
69. Liddell Hart. 'T. E. Lawrence'.
70. Buchan, Memory Hold the Door, pp. 225, 228-9.
71. Knightly and Simpson, Secret Lives, p. 305.
72. Jeffrey Richards, Visions of Yesterday (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1973) p. 1.
73. Jeffrey Richards and Jeffrey Hulbert, 'Censorship in Action: The case
of Lawrence of Arabia', Journal of Contemporary History, 19 (1984) 153--
70.
74. B. I. Magraw, The Thrill of History (London: Collins, 1950) pp. 147-51.
75. Anthony Nutting, Lawrence of Arabia (London: Hollis, 1961).
76. Quoted on Kaleidoscope, BBC Radio 4, 9 Aug 1988.
77. Stephen E. Tabachnik and Christopher Matheson, Images of Lawrence
(London: J. M. Dent, 1988); Malcolm Brown and Julia Cave, A Touch
of Genius: The Life ofT. E. Lawrence (London, 1988).
78. Wilfred Thesiger, The Life of my Choice (London, 1988) p. 320.

79. The paperback reprint of Knightly and Simpson's Secret Lives (Panther)
was given the sub-title 'An Explosive Examination of a 20th Century
Legend'.
80. Yardley's biography, though (perhaps because) balanced and work-
manlike, was remaindered in 1987.
9
Cry God for Harry, England and Lord
Kitchener: A Tale of Tel-el-Kebir,
Suakin, Wadi Haifa and Omdurman
ROBERT GIDDINGS
They came very fast, and they came very straight;

and then presently they came no farther. With a
crash the bullets leaped out of the British rifles. It
began with the Guards and Warwicks- section
volleys at 2,000 yards; then, as the Dervishes
edged rightward, it ran along to the Highlanders,
the Lincolns, and to Maxwell's Brigade. The
British stood up in double rank behind their zariba;
the blacks lay down in their shelter trench; both
poured out death as fast as they could load and
press the trigger. Shrapnel whistled and Maxims
growled savagely. From all the line came perpetual
fire, fire, fire, and shrieked forth in great gusts of
destruction.
(G. W. Steevens on the Battle of Omdurman,
2 September 18981)
At the beginning of the twentieth century two public-school-and-

Oxbridge-educated young men in their thirties took holidays which
were to inspire two very different novels, both widely read and
both influential in shaping British ideology. One was Robert
Erskine Childers. He was born in London in 1870, the son of R. C.
Childers, the distinguished oriental scholar, and an Irish mother.
He was brought up in County Wicklow and sent to Haileybury
and later to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied law. He
served in the Honourable Artillery Company during the South
African War and was also a clerk in the House of Commons from
182
Cry God for Harry, England and Lord Kitchener 183
1895 to 1910. He became increasingly interested in Irish affairs and

was converted to the idea of Home Rule by 1908. He was in the
Royal Naval Air Service during the First World War, and after the
war he devoted himself entirely to the Irish cause. He went with
the Irish Republican envoys to Paris in 1919 and was a member
for County Wicklow of the self-constituted Dail Eireann in 1921.
During the treaty negotiations with the British government in 19212
Childers was principal secretary to the Irish delegation; but he was
unable to reconcile himself to the terms of the treaty, which
established the Irish Free State as a result of the partition in Ireland.
He was captured by Free State forces on 10 November 1922 and
was sentenced to death at his court martial. He was shot at Beggar's
Bush Barracks, Dublin, on 24 November 1922.
In more tranquil days Erskine Childers had enjoyed a yachting
holiday on the German coast. His novel The Riddle of the Sands
published in 1903 portrayed a German plot, hatched in times of
peace, to invade Britain by sea and take the country completely by
surprise. In his view, the Germans were dominated by two major
principles:
perfect organization: perfect secrecy . . . Germany is pre-

eminently fitted to undertake an invasion of Great Britain. She
has a great army ... in a state of high efficiency, but a useless
weapon, as against us, unless transported over seas. She has a
peculiar genius for organization .... She has a small navy, but
very effective for its purpose .... She has little to lose and much
to gain .... 3
The hero of the novel is privileged to see with his own startled
eyes the mounting of the invasion, in a great scene
to be enacted, perhaps, in the near future - a scene when

multitudes of sea-going lighters, carrying full loads of soldiers
... should issue simultaneously, in seven ordered fleets, from
seven shallow outlets, and, under escort of the Imperial Navy,
traverse the North Sea and throw themselves bodily upon
English shores. . . .4
Six years after this novel appeared, Guy du Maurier' s drama An

Englishman's Castle was premiered at Wyndham's Theatre. This put
before West End theatre-goers the spectacle of an invasion of the
homeland by foreigners. Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent

(1907), with its theme of the 'enemy within', had already been
launched successfully on the tide of national paranoia. Bomb-
carrying 'anarchists' were established figures in cartoons. The
Tottenham Affair of 1910 and the so-called 'Siege of Sidney Street'
the following year further fanned feelings of social unease. Childers'
fantasy harmonised all too easily with the growing tensions
in international relations, manifest in the Anglo-German naval
question, the Bosnian crisis, the interview Kaiser Wilhelm gave to
the Daily Telegraph in 1908, the naval alarm the following year, the
Agadir crisis, the Balkan wars and Germany's all-too-obvious war
preparations. 5 H. H. Munro's story When William Came, published
during the first year of the Great War, showed an England actually
invaded and occupied by the Kaiser, and from all accounts the
possibility of invasion was a matter frequently discussed at the
dinner and tea table. Claud Cockburn recalls in his memoirs that
middle-class families of the day expected the conspiracy to come
to a head at any time and that German troops would be seen in
the streets. Such talk quite spoiled his afternoon walks on the hills
with Nanny, as he thought Uhlans with lancers might come
charging over the hills at any moment, threatening their innocent
young lives: 'It was frightening ... since Nanny and my sister
had no notion of the danger. ' 6
Echoes of the same conspiracy theories inform the pages of John
Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, which turns on a German plot to
undermine national security. John Buchan wrote in the dedication
of this novel, which was published in 1915, 'The wildest fictions
are so much less improbable than the facts.'
The consequences of this climate of anxiety and apprehension,
which was popularly intensified by such novels to Childers' The
Riddle of the Sands, were well expressed by Bertrand Russell a
month after the Great War started:
It is the universal reign of Fear which has caused the system of

alliances, believed to be a guarantee of peace, but now proved
to be the cause of world-wide disaster.... And this universal
Fear has at last produced a cataclysm far greater than any of
those of which it was hoped to avert. 7
Peace brought no relaxation of the condition, as is shown by the

string of successful spy melodramas filmed between the wars and
throughout the Second World War, and by the numerous popular

novels in the same vein. Thus, when the seeds of Cold War
paranoia began to be broadcast after 1945, they fell on splendidly
fertile soil. 8 That this well-ploughed tillage continued fertile is
profitably demonstrated by the unceasing labours of John le Carre,
and by the popular success of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings
(1954--5), where elements of the espionage thriller help to breath
life into a ragbag of materials borrowed from chivalric romanticism,
Nordic epic and Christian mysticism. 9
In the autumn of 1900 Alfred Edward Woodley Mason, popular
historical novelist and provincial actor, was talking with friends in
the smoking-room of the Garrick Club about his need for a holiday
after work on his latest project, Clementina. William Stone, a fellow
thespian, advised him to have a real holiday, not something
humdrum such as a visit to Monte Carlo. Why not a really
hazardous adventure, such as a shooting-trip in the Sudan?
Mason had been born at Dulwich on 7 May 1865 and educated
at Dulwich College and at Trinity College, Oxford. From 1888 to
1894 he was an actor in Frank Benson's company. He then turned
his hand to historical fiction, publishing a series of fanciful, light
and attractive tales, usually set in a glamourised English past.
Mason was very much a man's man, a keen sportsman, moun-
taineer and yachtsman. He had developed an interest in acting
while at Oxford, and his histrionic abilities were to serve him well
while he was Liberal MP for Coventry (1906-10). Further clues as
to his interests and aptitudes may be gleaned from the fact that he
was a secret-service agent with Naval Intelligence during the Great
War. An adventure holiday in the Sudan was thus an ideal
restorative for such a sporting bachelor.
The Sudan had been reconquered during 1896-8 in a swift
campaign in which an efficient and modem British army, comman-
ded by the curious but charismatic figure of Horatio Kitchener,
had finally put paid to a bunch of troublesome Arabs, Dervishes,
fuzzy-wuzzies and other riff-raff, who had collectively been a thorn
in the side of imperial Britain for years. These brilliant exploits,
which incidentally provided the opportunity for the young Winston
Churchill to participate in the last major British cavalry charge,
culminated in the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898, in
which thousands of tribesmen were slaughtered by machine guns
and modem small arms, and 5,000 were taken prisoner. This
outcome was seen as fmally avenging the death of the Victorian
cult hero General Gordon. Anglo-Egyptian control was re-estab-

lished over the Nile watershed, and the dire effects of machine-
gun fire were amply demonstrated. Kitchener became a national
hero. Two important mythologies were born at Omdurman: the
almost god-like quality of Kitchener, and the invincible power of
machine-gun fire. Both were to have a profound effect on the
thinking of the young Haig and the conduct of the Great War. 10
When Mason set forth he was furnished not only with letters of
introduction but also with the contract for his next novel, which
was initially to be serialised in the Cornhill magazine from January
1902. He set out from London and crossed the Mediterranean from
Marseilles to Cairo, via Alexandria. He travelled to Suakin on the
Red Sea on an aged steamer of the Khedival Line. He stayed with
the governor at Suakin and hired camels and 'fuzzy-wuzzy'
servants for his trip across land to Berber. He was fascinated by
the idea that only a few years earlier these people had been at war
with the British.
I had half a dozen camels and three native servants, none of

whom could speak a word of English. This did not cause much
inconvenience, as one's wants are very simple in the desert, and
I soon picked up enough words to be able to get along.... The
route we took from Suakin to Berber used to be a regular
caravan route before Osman Digna and his people overran the
country ... Y
He soaked up the local colour, absorbing details of the climate,

wildlife, meals, life under canvas, the loneliness of the desert. He
eventually reached Khartoum, where he had a very hospitable
welcome from the governor of the Sudan, Sir Reginald Wingate.
No doubt Mason learned a great deal, too, from this distinguished
and experienced soldier. Wingate had been educated at the Royal
Military Academy, Woolwich, and had served with the Royal
Artillery in India, Aden and Egypt. He had been aide-de-camp to
Sir Evelyn Wood, Sirdar of the Egyptian army, from 1884, and had
been governor-general of the Sudan since 1899. He was an authority
on the recent military history of the area and published Mahdiism
and the Egyptian Sudan in 1891. Across the river from Khartoum
were the ruins of Omdurman, where Kitchener had destroyed the
Khalifa in the last battle of the Sudan campaign.
Mason was shown the House of Stone, the dreadful prison into
which the Khalifa had thrown his captives. He spoke at length to

Slatin Pasha, an Austrian, who had himself been a prisoner there.
This remarkable man, Rudolph Slatin, had been a prisoner of the
Mahdi at the time of the murder of General Gordon, and had been
shown Gordon's decapitated head. One of Mahdi' s bodyguard had
come to him with a blood-stained cloth wrapped round an object
about the size of a football. He gloatingly pulled the cloth off in
front of the prisoner, revealing Gordon's head: 'his blue eyes were
half open; the mouth was perfectly natural; the hair of his head
and his short whiskers were almost quite white'. 12
Slatin remained a prisoner of the Mahdi and of his successor,
the Khalifa Abdullah, until his escape in 1895. He recounted his
experiences in Fire and Sword in the Sudan (1896), translated by
Wingate, which became one of the two books that inflamed public
opinion in Britain to demand the reconquest of the Sudan. (The
other, by Father Ohrwalder, another prisoner at Omdurman, was
Ten Years' Captivity in the Mahdi's Camp, published in 1893.) Mason
was enraptured by the tales he heard of Slatin's escape.
It was Wingate who set up the scheme to free the white captives
in the House of Stone. Plans for the escape were communicated
by a brave tribesman named Onur Isa, a 'fuzzy-wuzzy' who
disguised himself as a Dervish and blended himself in with the
inhabitants of Omdurman. He revealed himself to the prisoners
by dropping four matches, marked 'Made in Birmingham', and
showing them four needles of unmistakably ordinary European
manufacture. This convinced them he was an emissary from their
side and set the plan in motion. Mason listened to all this with
eagerness. The details were not wasted on him, and indeed are
strongly echoed in the details of the plot hatched by Sutch to
rescue Harry Feversham and Colonel Trench from the House of
Stone in chapter 13 of The Four Feathers.
The next stage of Mason's journey was the truck ride to Wadi
Haifa. From there he travelled by steamer to Aswan and eventually
to Cairo. Everywhere he went, he received hospitable treatment at
the local officers' mess. From Egypt he sailed to Naples and then
went overland through the Brenner Pass to spend a few days at
Innsbruck. He was absorbing local colour for the final revisions to
his novel Clementina, currently being serialised in the Sphere.
A new novel was already putting itself together in his mind. To
some extent it was an elaboration of two earlier stories, 'The
Coward' and 'The Cruise of the Willing Mind', recast against the
background of recent military history in the Sudan. The main

ingredient in the story was hackeyed enough - the tale of the
coward who redeems himself by bravery in saving comrades who
had despised him- but mercifully for generations of readers (and,
indeed, cinema-goers) there were refinements. Mason's visit to the
House of Stone at Omdurman and the tale of Slatin Pasha's escape,
the very stuff of Boys' Own Paper, had given him the initial idea.
'The Coward' is set in the period of the Franco-Prussian War, and
has a hero, Geoffrey, much in the mould of Harry Feversham of
The Four Feathers. It also contains many of the ideas of the opening
chapters of the novel. Many of Mason's own rather vigorous man-
making-activities, such as mountaineering, sailing and hunting,
feature in these fictions, and one idea dominates: the fear of
fear. Mason pictured a young boy growing to manhood with a
personality crippled and deformed by his belief that he is that most
shameful creature all, the coward. All the pressures of his family
traditions and of his peer group compel him into a military career,
where he is continually terrified by the thought that his real nature
will be exposed. His is matured by experience and learns that he
does, after all, possess the finest kind of bravery, the kind which
can bear the burden of pain and danger and simultaneously permit
him to perform his duties to king, country and comrades.
Although quite complex in its plot, the essential story of The
Four Feathers is simple enough. Harry Feversham is the young son
of General Feversham, a distinguished veteran of the Crimean
War. The novel opens with the boy's fourteenth birthday. The
event coincides with the annual Crimean reunion enjoyed by his
father and his father's former companion in arms, who meet to
commemorate their role in the war with Russia by chewing over
old exploits and memories:
So that night Harry Feversham took a place at the dinner-table

and listened to the stories which his elders told. . . . The stories
were all of that dark winter in the Crimea, and a fresh story was
in the telling before its predecessor was ended. They were stories
of death, of hazardous exploits; of the pinch of famine and the
chill of snow . . . .13
Although descended from such a long line of distinguished

military heroes, Harry Feversham takes after his mother to a
considerable extent. She is dead when the story opens, but Mason
is careful to plant in the reader's mind the impression that she was
not only very beautiful, and much younger than her husband, but
also gifted with a refined intellect and sensitive imagination.
General Feversham, on the other hand, is remarkable only for
personal courage and an indomitable self-confidence. Much in the
opening sections of the book is seen through the eyes of Lieutenant
Sutch, a Crimean veteran, who is badly crippled from war injuries,
and has consequently had to develop from being an active partici-
pant in life to becoming an observer of human activities and - this
is the point- a fine judge of character. During his comrades' war
recollections Sutch keenly observes young Harry, trying to decide
whether his mother's or his father's qualities will dominate his
character. As these tales reach a crescendo of violence and destruc-
tion, Sutch is the first to notice that Harry is actually experiencing
the actions being narrated:
Harry Feversham sat listening as though the incidents thus

carelessly narrated were actually at that moment and within the
walls of that room. His dark eyes - the eyes of his mother -
turned with each story from speaker to speaker, and waited
wide-open and fixed until the last word was spoken. . . . And
so vividly did the changes of expression shoot and quiver across
his face that it seemed to Sutch the lad must actually hear the
drone of bullets in the air, actually resist the stunning shock of
a charge .... 14
Sutch notices that, as the terrible suspense endured by soldiers

between the parade before a battle and the first command to
advance is described in all its horrors, the boy exhibits all the signs
of fear common to young soldiery in those very circumstances -
signs very familiar to Sutch from his own observations as an officer
in the Crimea. He recalls the vivid memory of a soldier at Inkerman
who had wavered from fear and been killed by a blow through
the throat from a Russian lance. He looks hurriedly round the
dinner table, to see if any others have detected young Harry's
fears:
the boy was sitting with his elbows on the cloth . . . constructing
again out of the swift succession of anecdotes a world of cries
and wounds, and maddened riderless chargers and men writhing
in a fog of cannon smoke. The curtest, least graphic description
of the biting days and nights in the trenches set the lad
shivering . . . .15
As a special treat to Harry on his birthday, the General decides to

allow him to stay up an extra hour, to enjoy the conversation of
his elders. At this moment Mason introduces one of the leading
themes of the book:
Harry's eyes turned towards his father, and just for a moment
rested upon his face with a curious steady gaze. It seemed to
Sutch that they uttered a question, and, rightly or wrongly, he
interpreted the question into words:
'Are you blind?'
But General Feversham was already talking to his neigh-
bours .... 16
The blindness of those who can see, and the perceptions given to
the blind, are to be recurring ideas in the unfolding narrative of
The Four Feathers. A similar contrast is to be made between poetry
and prose, everyday common sense and the imagination, the
deeper realities of the inner world of the soul and the illusions and
mutabilities of the so-called 'real world' of the conscious and the
everyday. Mason gives us this tension in the struggle between the
father's and the mother's influence in the personality of young
Harry.
General Feversham asserts that Harry would find cowardice in
a soldier incomprehensible: 'Harry understand? ... How should
he? He's a Feversham' -leading Mason to comment,
The question, which Harry's glance had mutely put before, Sutch
in the same mute way repeated. 'Are you blind?' his eyes asked
of General Feversham. Never had he heard an untruth so
demonstrably untrue. A mere look at the father and the son
proved it so. Harry Feversham wore his father's name, but he
had his mother's imagination ... Y
This theme, interestingly enough, is taken up and developed even

more fully in the celebrated film version of this novel, for which
R. C. Sherriff wrote the screenplay. This film, directed by Zoltan
Korda and released in 1939, will be discussed later.
When Harry grows up he becomes an army officer, following
the career path inexorably indicated for him by his father, his
ancestors and his peers. After a few year's service, however, he
resigns his commission, offering by way of excuse his engagement
to an Irish beauty whose elderly father needs his help to run the
family estate. When he goes to visit his beloved's home in Ireland
he learns that his regiment has been ordered to Egypt on active
service. Ethne believes he has missed the opportunity of distinction
for her sake. Even if the worst had happened, she could have
endured it: 'I should have felt very lonely ... all my days, but I
should have known quite surely that when those days were over,
you and I would see much of each other. ' 18
She explains that she knows he is the only man for her; she
recognises in him the face in the crowd, the one you recognise at
once as a long-lost friend, even though you have never met him
before. Harry answers by saying that the face might be a mask;
she does not see him truly for the man he is. While staying with
Ethne, Harry receives a package containing three white feathers
sent by Trench, Castleton and Willoughby, three of his former
fellow officers. She can see him for what he is in the eyes of the
world. As Mason comm !nts, 'the three feathers lay before his eyes
upon the table ... he wore "coward" like a blind man's label'. 19
Ethne gives him back his ring when she learns that he resigned
on learning before his fellow officers that his regiment would be
ordered to Egypt; and she adds a fourth feather, taken from her
ivory fan. The significance of the white feathers is indeed powerful
and bloody, calling up associations with cockfighting. A white
feather in the tail of a fighting cock was supposed to signify that
its stock was degenerate, that it was not a true fighting cock and
therefore would not fight to the death. This popular, brutal and
well-patronised diversion, familiar to the Greeks and Romans and
actively supported by James I and Charles II, was made illegal in
1848. But its significance lingered in the folk memory for gener-
ations. The imputation of cowardice wounds Harry Feversham to
the heart, and he resolves to erase the implied disgrace in the only
way possible- by showing his real courage.
The remainder of The Four Feathers shows how he does this:
working his way in a variety of roles, including those of a tribesman
and a Greek musician, through a variety of extreme dangers, even
in the cannon's mouth, to rescue under fire those very companions
who had sent him the white feathers. These emblems of cowardice
are returned to their senders, with the exception of Castleton, who
has died. As Mason explained to the film critic C. A. Lejeune, he

wanted to show that 'nothing in this world ever comes off
absolutely. For all practical purposes, Feversham redeemed him-
self, but I deliberately meant that he should be cheated of the last
feather. ' 20
Feversham' s former colleague Durrance is blinded in the cam-
paign, and returns to the homeland. He loved Ethne and she
agrees to marry him, marvelling at his recovery and rehabilitation:
blind, yet perceptive and observant. The end of the novel strongly
implies that Harry and Ethne will be reunited, as Durrance does
the gentlemanly thing and leaves them together.
The Four Feathers was a bestseller. It struck a chord in readers,
embodying, as it so clearly does, such ideologically British mascu-
line qualities as bravery, loyalty, self-sacrifice, endurance and
playing the game. It sold a million copies in its first forty years in
Britain alone. Roald Amundsen took it with him on both his famous
expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic. He said it was 'bible' and
that he wouldn't be without it anywhere. The spirit of the book
passed even deeper into the British popular consciousness when
its leading idea was exploited by the Hungarian-hom writer
Emmunska Magdalena Rosalia Maria Josepha Barbara Orczy -
Baroness Orczy - who achieved fame with her historical romance
The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905). She founded the Active Service League
early in the Great War with the aim of putting psychological
pressure on women to get their menfolk to enlist. All women were
asked to sign this pledge:
At this hour of England's grave peril and desperate need I do

hereby pledge myself most solemnly in the name of my King
and Country to persuade every man I know to offer his services
to the country, and I also pledge myself never to be seen in
public with any man who, being in every way fit and free for
service, has refused to respond to his country's call. 21
The Baroness was technically an enemy, but, having studied art

in London, had her pictures hung at the Royal Academy, and
married an Englishman, Montague Barstow the illustrator, she
doubtless felt impelled to speak for England. Hundreds of women
signed the Hungarian aristocrat's pledge and doubtless many
Harry Fevershams shed their blood on the western front and
elsewhere as the result. Proud though she must have been at the
time, Baroness Orczy curiously makes no mention of this episode

in her life in her autobiography, Links in the Chain of Life (1947).
The custom of giving white feathers to reluctant recruits is
alleged to have been started by an admiral at a recruiting rally in
Folkestone. At Deal, two months after the Great War started, the
town crier shouted,
Oyez! Oyez! The White Feather Brigade. Ladies wanted to

present to young men of Deal and Walmer who have no one
dependent on them the Order of the White Feather for shirking
their duty in not offering their services to uphold the Union Jack
of Old England. God Save the King! 22
White feathers were actually handed out by ladies as a means of

urging recruitment by insult. Compton Mackenzie believed that
'idiotic young women were using white feathers to get rid of
boyfriends of whom they are tired'. Fenner Brockway said he had
a collection of them, which he used to spread out like a fan. 23
Daphne Fielding recalled in The Duchess o!Jermyn Street (1964), her
biography of Rosa Lewis of the Cavendish Hotel (original of Lottie
Crump in Evelyn's Waugh's Vile Bodies and of Mrs Trotter in the
BBC series The Duchess of Duke Street, 1976--7) that this formidable
hostess 'distributed white feathers indiscriminately, sometimes
making terrible gaffes, and ... her Aberdeen terrier was trained
to fly at the heels of any man not in uniform'. 24 Ethne' s sentiments
are clearly behind the words of the song Phyllis Dare made famous
at the time, 'We Don't Want to Lose You, But We Think You
Ought to Go', and the Seymour Hicks spectacular England Expects
at the London Opera House in September 1914, in which actors
declaimed Tennyson's 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'. At the
Grand Patriotic Rally staged at the Albert Hall in January 1915,
recruiting officers were in attendance and dealt with the rush of
men who wished to sign up to do their duty.
As Denis Winter argues in Death's Men (1978), the matter is a
complex one. Initially, few people in Britain thought that the war
being fought on the continent was all that important, and the
general opinion was that it would soon be over in any case. Yet
there was a vast rush of volunteers to join up, and the figures bear
out the striking fact that a minority of men hung back until
conscription in 1916. In the first year of the war 1,186,357 volun-
teered, and a further 1,280,000 joined up the following year. The
next year, after conscription was introduced, 1,190,000 joined up.

Only 16,000 were registered as consciousness objectors, and, of
this number, a mere 1,500 refused to do any work connected with
the war effort. The accepted image of the war was an honourable
one:
Henty, Marryat and the Boy's Own Paper reinforced the ideas of
Darwin to such an extent that, even after the great blood letting,
Watford Boys' Grammar School celebrated Empire Day in 1918
with three Rupert Brooke sonnets on war, Kipling's 'Fringes of
the Fleet', a recital of Seaman's Pro Patria and then presented
prizes for essays on Clive, Nelson, Cook and Gordon. In such a
society it needed very little to send a man to war . . . .25
Class pressure, as Mason so acutely presents it, was deeply

significant in recruitment in the Great War. It seems particularly
to have affected the upper classes and the working class. The
shopkeeping, commercial middle classes, with a stake in society
which they could only keep by constant effort, seem to have been
pretty reluctant. A long public-school tradition had instilled the
virtues of sacrifice for the home country into the gentry, as Mark
Girouard writes:
In thousands of nurseries and schoolrooms children had been

brought up on the exploits in battle of heroes new and old:
Hector and Achilles, Horatius holding the bridge, Arthur and
his knights, Roland blowing his hom, Richard Coeur de Lion
charging the Saracens, the Black Prince at Crecy, Henry V at
Agincourt, Sir Philip Sidney at Zutphen, Richard Grenville on
the Revenge, Prince Rupert charging with his cavaliers, Sir John
Moore at Corunna, Nicholson falling at the gates of Delhi,
Gordon proudly facing the screaming Dervishes, the heroes of
Rorke's Drift dying to the last man, the gallant little garrison at
Mafeking playing cricket in the jaws of the enemy. 26
Lady Diana Manners (later Lady Diana Cooper) recorded that the
deaths of the sons of Lord Desborough, Julian and William Grenfell,
in 1915 left the world 'all black now. When Billy was here there
was still one gallant knight left .... ' Lady Barrington wrote, 'I
never forget seeing Billy once at Westminster Abbey . . . a shaft of
sunlight came down on his head; and I thought what a beautiful
picture of manly youth. . . . He looked like a young Knight who

would ride into battle with joy.' 27
In war it is traditionally those at the top that lead and those at
the bottom of society that follow. A spot check in the National Roll
of Honour reveals that 70 per cent of enrolled males from the
working-class districts of the East End of London volunteered for
service before conscription made it obligatory. The motive was
usually patriotism. The upper and upper-middle classes were
fighting to preserve the kind of Englishness so well portrayed by
Mason: the world of Feversham's home in Surrey (based on J. M.
Barrie's house at Farnham), of Durrance's home on the Salcombe
estuary and Willoughby's home at Kingsbridge; the world of
boating on the Isis and bathing at Sandford Lasher - which would
be well known to the readers of the Cornhill magazine. Lieutenant
Carver, quoted by Winter in Death's Men, wrote, 'The grand
obstacle hun hunt is now open. There is no charge for entry. . . . I
always feel that I am fighting for England - English fields, lanes,
trees, good days in England, all that is synonymous with liberty.' 28
It might be Harry Feversham writing home to Ethne.
II
There is a moment that recurs in many films about British

imperialism. The setting might be North America, Zululand,
Matabeleland, the North-West Frontier, the Sudan, Egypt, the
Gold Coast or Burma. Brave British redcoats are quietly lining up
to face an enemy horde, whose wild and noisy approach grows
increasingly threatening. The officers move calmly amongst the
ranks of infantry, telling them to hold their fire until the last
moment. We cut back to the advancing tribesmen- Pathans, Zulus,
Indians, fuzzy-wuzzies, Arabs, or whatever- then back to British,
who are now in formation, rifles at the ready, the sweat beginning
to break as the sound of the advancing savages gets nearer and
nearer. We go into close-up as the camera pans along the lines of
plain, honest British faces, most of them surprisingly young. We
pause on the face of a very young soldier, who has been set up
for us earlier in the film as a foolish, green and simple fellow, but
a decent lad at bottom. He swallows in fear. He turns to the sergeant
(at such cinematic moments he is always near the sergeant), who
is usually played by a gnarled, burly, 'older' actor- Victor McLaglen
or one of his humerous imitators - and asks, 'Why us, Sergeant?'

That seasoned warrior always answers, 'Because we're 'ere.'
Unfortunately the young soldier is not given the leisure to ask
what would inevitably be the next question- 'Why are we here,
Sergeant?' - as before you can say 'Gunga Din' the screaming
savages are upon them and the air is thick with cordite and
whizzing spears. This is indeed a pity, as the question would be a
very interesting one to ponder, though it is in the nature of the
genre that the matter is never raised. It would be particularly
interesting in the case of the Sudan expedition which forms the
backdrop to The Four Feathers.
The economic, political and military elements of the situation
hardly ever interest the writers and film-makers of these tales of
empire. The far-flung bits of empire in which our heroes find
themselves compelled to work out their destinies are rarely more
than exotic locations in which there is some sort of 'trouble' caused
by restless natives, unruly tribesman, or the like, where the firm
hand of the white man is needed to restore order. To put no finer
point upon it, this is the mission to which the British are seen to
be called. As J. Fitzgerald Lee wrote in Imperial Military Geography
(published in 1908 and dedicated to His Excellency Lord Kitchener,
Commander-in-Chief in India),
It is not without some reason, beyond our ken, that the greatest
empire in the world, the greatest of the White Race, happens to
hold these lands on the other side of the globe, as well as the
temperate regions in North America and South Africa. The
wonderful growth of the British Empire, from pole to pole, has
been attributed to various sources: by our friends, to British
enterprise and statesmanship; by our enemies, to our alleged
qualities of greed and cunning; although recent world events
have proved that these latter characteristics are the monopoly of
no one people under the sun. And they cannot be reasonably
held to account for such geographical phenomena as the Gulf
Stream bearing warm breezes to the British Islands, or the
monsoons coming at the right time to water the parching plains
of British India. The same inscrutable causes which placed
England's geographical position in the centre of the land hemi-
sphere arranged that the great mass of habitable lands on the
earth should be in the temperate zone, where men can best
live .... 29
And yet we need to ask these questions. What were the British
doing in Egypt and the Sudan? We need to bear this question
constantly in mind as we consider the unfolding narrative of The
Four Feathers. The book opens with the gathering of the Crimean
veterans and their discussion of the attack upon the redan (central
fortification), which failed, but Sebastopol fell a year later. About
thirty years have passed and there is a condition of unrest in Egypt
and the Sudan. Within the wider context of imperial rivalries
between the major European powers, especially France and Britain,
the serious situation in Egypt and the Sudan which was to provide
such a theatre for the operations of Lord Kitchener - as well as
Harry Feversham, Durrance, Trench, Willoughby and the rest of
them - dates from the early 1860s and the break-up of Turkish
power in the Middle East.
Egypt was nominally a vassal state of the Sultan of Turkey. The
Khedive Ismail tried to modernise Egypt, but his main achievement
was to cripple his country with huge debts to European financiers.
The result was that, in order to stabilise its national finances, Egypt
had to endure dual control by Britain and France. Looking at this
complex of events now, in the light of subsequent developments,
is rather like looking carefully at the exposition of one of Shakes-
peare's mature tragedies. Failure to understand how these events
interlock is, as Ronald Hyam has pointed out, rather like beginning
Macbeth with the murder of Duncan. 30 British commitment was
increased by the purchase in 1869 of Ismail's shares in the Suez
Canal. With the assistance of British and American officers, Ismail
tried to conquer the Red Sea coast and the Sudan, warring mainly
against Arab slavers and various tribal chieftains. He also made
war on Abyssinia, whose ruler feared, after the Egyptian occupation
of Suakin, Massawa and Harar, that his country would be cut off
from the sea. Ismail was deposed and succeeded by Tewfik, his
son, in 1879. Two years later, in February 1881, occurred one of
the key events in Ango-Egyptian history: the revolt staged by the
Arab nationalist leader Ahmet Arabi against Turkish and foreign
control. It developed into an anti-Christian conflict, and it brought
on-stage in this theatre of colonial war the charismatic figure of Sir
Garnet Wolseley.
Civil order broke down in Alexandria during the summer of
1882, and about fifty Europeans were massacred. British and
French naval squadrons arrived, though the French would not act
in concert with the British admiral, Sir Frederick Beauchamp Paget
Seymour, commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean, who was all

for reprisal. As Colonel Arabi had reinforced the defences of
Alexandria and thus endangered the British and French fleets,
Alexandria was bombarded, and the Lords of the Admiralty were
elated. John Bright resigned from the Cabinet in protest. The
British landed 25,000 troops at Ismailia, with Wolseley, the Empire's
favourite trouble-shooter, in command. 31
Wolseley's expedition was brilliantly planned and equipped: he
took with him railway engineers and rolling-stock to facilitate the
most modem transport and communication. On 13 September 1882
the British launched a surprise attack at night. Egyptian losses
totalled 2,000 killed and 500 wounded, with British losses less than
60 killed and 379 wounded. This was the celebrated battle of Tel-
el-Kebir. Britain now dominated the government of Egypt and a
force of 10,000 men was stationed there. Wolseley admitted that
the occupation of Egypt was costly32 and unpopular at home, but
it seemed inevitable.
The Sudan was nominally under the rule of Egypt, but garrisons
were few and far between. The latent disorder of the area was
fertile ground for the brief, brilliant career of rebel-leader Mahomed
Achmed of Dongola, self-styled 'Mahdi' - the promised saviour of
his people. On a rising tide of popular support he appointed emirs
in various parts of the Sudan, and prophesied the uprising which
would free the tribesmen for ever. His followers were known as
Dervishes. The word originally referred to Muslims who had taken
vows of poverty, the mendicant friars of Islam, but the Mahdi's
Dervishes were anti-European fanatics. The Mahdi's aim was to
rid the Sudan of all Egyptian and European influence.
There was a conflict of interest between Egyptian and British
policy. The Egyptians wished to defend their territory, but
Gladstone was against committing Britain to war in the Sudan.
The Khedive sent an Anglo-Egyptian force of 10,000 men, under
General William Hicks, who had been an officer in the Bombay
Staff Corps and held the rank of major-general in the Egyptian
army. Hicks's army was wiped out at El Obeid on 3 November
1883. This victory raised the prestige of the Mahdi and put all
Egyptian garrisons in the Sudan at risk.
We now come to the Gordon controversy. British public opinion
back home was in favour of 'doing something', but there was some
doubt in high places as to what form that 'something' should take.
It is true that public opinion had originally been against British
involvement in Egypt, but that had changed now the British were
on the spot. ('Why us, Sergeant?'- 'Because we're 'ere, son'). The
version of events most widely in circulation, and which was given
additional credit by Khartoum, the film scripted by Robert Ardrey
and released in 1966, is that Gladstone dillied and dallied and
finally sent out General Gordon with instructions to evacuate the
Sudan, but that Gordon disobeyed his orders, stayed there under
siege, and was killed by the bad guys before a tardily sent British
force could arrive to save him. 33
The real story is a little more interestingly elaborate than that.
Gordon was already a household name. He had earned the
nickname 'Chinese' Gordon for his brilliant exploits in the Far East.
He was Wolseley's hero. Gordon had served gallantly in the
Crimean War and the Chinese war (1860-2), had put down the
Taiping Rebellion (1863) and had done excellent service as governor
of the Equatorial Provinces of Africa (1874-6); by 1878 he had
suppressed the Arab slave trade, and in 1883, after performing
various other colonial and imperial duties, he agreed to go to the
Congo for the King of Belgium.
The British government was reluctant to let him go to the Congo
while he was on the active list of the British army. Gordon was
seriously considering resigning his commission. In September 1883,
prior to his departure for West Africa, he sought the help of Sir
Garnet Wolseley in settling the pension due to his rank. Wolseley
contacted him and advised him to give up the Congo plan, telling
him that the government wanted him to take command of the
evacuation of the Sudan. It is worth stressing (a matter often
overlooked) that Wolseley's assistance in this matter was both
immediate and personal to the point of interfering. He wired
Gordon and met him in London, where he spent some time with
him discussing the Sudan problem. It was Gordon's idea at this
stage that it was better to evacuate the Sudan than to reconquer it,
if reconquering it actually meant handing it over to the Egyptians,
whose rotten administration and cruelties had been the root cause
of the Mahdi' s rebellion (or, at least, of its success). It was Gordon's
opinion, based on all his previous experience of colonial/imperial
administration, that, once the Sudanese tribesmen realised they
were going to be governed by British officers, then the Mahdi's
power would evaporate.
Gordon told Wolseley at this time that the government would
be well advised to send him to Suakin and allow him to assess the
situation. Evacuation might be the best policy - but there might be

other workable options, such as some form of local government.
In this case, he would consider putting himself forward as a
possible governor-general. 34 A few days later Gordon was at the
War Office, where the Sudan situation was discussed with several
leading members of the government35 and he asked point-blank,
'You will not guarantee future government of the Sudan and you
wish me to go up and evacuate now?' The ministers' answer was
'Yes.' But even here there is ambiguity. Frederick Maurice and
George Arthur in their biography of Wolseley comment at this
point,
There is no doubt that evacuation was in everybody's mind, in

Gordon's as much as in any other's; there is no doubt that the
Government wanted not only to evacuate the Sudan, but to
come away from Egypt; but there is equally no doubt that both
Gordon and Wolseley were agreed that the proper course was
that which any experienced soldier would have recommended,
namely, that Gordon should go and see the situation in the
Sudan before advising on any definite course of action. That is
what Gordon told Wolseley and what Wolseley told Hartington,
but most important of all it is what Gordon put into writing and
gave to Hartington, who passed it on to Gladstone . . . .36
Although this is not how matters are recounted in John Morley's

influential Life of Gladstone (1903), it seems that, whereas Gladstone
and the leading politicos believed they had dispatched Gordon to
the Sudan to supervise its evacuation, the soldiers - including
Gordon himself - perceived his mission as one of assessing the
situation, then taking action as recommended on the basis of his
findings. 37 Gordon sailed on 18 January 1884. The situation, in fact,
now deteriorated further, as Osman Digna, fellow warrior of the
Mahdi, annihilated an Anglo-Egyptian army at El Teb, near Suakin,
on 4 February 1884. There was popular demand that action be
taken against the Mahdists, and a British expeditionary force was
dispatched to Suakin, a port on the Red Sea in eastern Sudan.
This army of 4,000 under Major-General Graham defeated 6,000
tribesmen at Trinkitat a few weeks later. The Mahdists were driven
out of Tokar and Tarnai, but after this British force was withdrawn
to Suakin and the vast area of the Sudan was again exposed to the
threat of the Mahdist rebels.
Gordon reached Khartoum as the revolt spread down the Nile

to Berber, and he was besieged by the Mahdi's army for nearly a
year while in Britain there was popular agitation for an expedition
to be sent to relieve him. The telegraph wire from Cairo to
Khartoum had been cut by mid-April 1884. Lieutenant-Colonel
Frederick Burnaby, commander of the Third Household Cavalry
and destined to be killed during the attempt to relieve Khartoum,
wrote on 16 May 1884,
I think the Government will ultimately, but too late, send a

relieving force, not because Mr Gladstone wishes it, but because
public indignation will compel him nolens volens, to do so; and,
little as the Prime Minister may value Gordon, the Prime Minister
cares a great deal for Mr Gladstone. 38
Eventually the relief expedition was sent, commanded by Wolse-

ley, and striking out from Wadi Haifa (on the Egyptian-Sudanese
border) in October 1884. The press attention focused on the
expedition was intense and British popular opinion was stimulated
to fanatical levels. As John 0. Springhall has pointed out, the
1884-5 campaign in the Sudan assumed an almost crusade-like
quality, and the popular imagination furnished an imperishable
picture of the Christian martyr Gordon surrounded in Khartoum
by a sea of shrieking heathens. In Kipling's words, 'It was above
all things necessary that England at breakfast should be amused
and thrilled and interested, whether Gordon lived or died, or half
the British Army went to pieces in the sand.' 39
Wolseley was too late. Khartoum fell to the Mahdists on 26
January 1885, and Gordon was killed with the entire garrison.
Wolseley's forces arrived two days later and he was ordered to
withdraw. The Mahdi died on 21 June 1885 at Omdurman, his
new capital on the western bank of the Nile, opposite Khartoum,
but the Sudan was conquered by the Dervishes under his successor,
the Khalifa Abdullah el Taaisha. Stories of the Khalifa's barbarism,
of the cruelties practised in the prison at Omdurman, the House
of Stone, kept public opinion on the boil and there was often talk
of a punitive expedition to the Sudan, especially as news reached
Britain of the huge army the Khalifa was allegedly raising to
continue the Mahdi's conquest of the Sudan. Gladstone's repu-
tation suffered, as he was held responsible for the loss of General
Gordon, and there was a groundswell of popular sentiment that
Gordon's death should somehow be avenged.

Behind this were the very powerful imperatives of imperial
policy. Avenging Gordon-the-Christian-martyr and punishing
naughty and cruel Dervishes were merely the public reasons for
the amazing developments of 1896--8. What pushed the British into
another expedition to the Sudan was the obvious interest in the
area being shown by the French and the Italians. In 1887 the
Italian-Abyssinian war began, and an Italian army was annihilated
on 26 January at Dongali. Serious hostilities between the Italians
and the Abyssinians would - in British perceptions - be a possible
advantage to the Khalifa and also to the French, who might
take the chance to extend their influence in the Red Sea area.
Consequently the government at home decided that the best
political move was to offer to mediate. It is interesting to record
that the Foreign Office officials brought the King of Tigre, the
northern kingdom of the Abyssinian Empire, presents which
included a telescope and a modem rifle. The aim of this embassy
was to persuade the king to give up his resistance to Italian
colonialism. He refused (though he almost certainly kept the
telescope and the rifle). At the same time British diplomacy was
attempting to keep its options open as far as Egypt was concerned.
On 22 May 1887 the Drummond-Wolff Convention was signed
with the Turkish government; under this the British promised to
evacuate Egypt within three years as long as things were favourable.
They retained the right to reoccupy Egypt if it was invaded or
there was severe internal disorder, as British interests (for instance,
the Suez Canal) would have to be protected. Khedive Tewfik
declined to ratify this convention.
Italy strengthened its position by supporting Menelek, King of
Shoa, the southern of the four principal provinces of the Abyssinian
Empire. The King of Tigre, who called himself Abyssinia's King of
Kings, was harassed by attacks from the Mahdists, and eventually
killed at the Battle of Metemma on 12 March 1889. He was
succeeded by the King of Shoa, who had the support of the Italians.
In January 1890 the King of Italy issued a decree by which Eritrea
became an Italian colony. (Around this time French and British
rivalries in Africa were temporarily contained by an agreement
that allotted the Gold Coast and the Gambia River to the British
sphere of influence, and the Ivory Coast and Senegal to the French.)
On 7 January 1892 Khedive Tewfik died and was succeeded by
Abbas II (who ruled Egypt until 1914). Tewfik was seen by many
leaders of the Egyptian governing class as a ruler who had allowed

the British more or less to establish a protectorate over their
country, and consequently Abbas II's attempts to reverse this trend
were strongly supported in some quarters. When Dahomey became
a French colony in 1892, French imperialists hoped to go on to
take over the southern part of the former Egyptian Sudan and
compel the British to leave Egypt by threatening to divert the Nile.
Menelek was now under French influence and gave up his former
Italian allies. The Italians thought that matters would be decided
by force of arms, as indeed they were - at Adowa on 1 March
1896, when the Italian army under General Baratieri was defeated
by a large Abyssinian army. The results of this defeat were
considerable: Italian prisoners were castrated, many died in capti-
vity, and of 18,000 men only 1,700 returned home, after payment
of an extortionate ransom. Baratieri was court-martialled, and a
peace treaty recognised Abyssinian independence, which lasted
for another forty years. 40
In March 1896 the British government learned that a French
expedition to claim the Sudan had set out for Fashoda under the
command of Jean-Baptiste Marchand. British interest in this part
of the world was, of course, pushed on by imperialist ambition,
but it was also as if the British were being drawn in by a vacuum
caused by the destruction of Italian power and French attempts to
take advantage of the situation. Menelek, who had defeated the
Italians, was supported by the French, and now Marchand was on
his way to Fashoda. 41 Lord Cromer, British consul-general in Egypt,
set out to persuade the British government to reoccupy Dongola
(in northern Sudan) in the name of the Khedive. The final act in
the Sudan drama was about to be played out, with a star cast
headed by Horatio Herbert Kitchener, CB, KCMG, KCB. The British
were going to reoccupy the Sudan.
Kitchener's army moved up the Nile with an escort of gunboats,
and as he progressed he constructed a railway so as to guarantee
logistical support throughout the campaign. He put this vital
construction under the command of the brilliant Montreal-born
lieutenant Edouard Percy Cranwill Girouard, commissioned in the
Royal Engineers in 1888. The railway was built across the Nubian
Desert, from Wadi Haifa to Abu Hamed, and eventually as far as
Atbara - a distance of 385 miles. Construction was carried out in
blazing summer heat, and despite freak storms and frequent enemy
resistance. Abu Hamed was captured on 7 August 1897 and
Dongola on 21 September, and at Atbara on 8 April1898 Kitchener' s

Anglo-Egyptian forces, 14,000 strong, utterly routed 18,000 Mah-
dists, killing 5,000 in the battle and many more in the pursuit, and
taking 1,000 prisoners. Abdullah and his lieutenant, Osman Digna,
now concentrated their forces at the fortress of Omdurman on the
Nile, north-west of Khartoum. Kitchener's army, reinforced with
troops from Britain in July, now numbered nearly 25,000, and with
a brigade of artillery was the most formidable Africa had ever seen.
The young Winston Churchill was there, serving with the 21st
Lancers. The army advanced down the west bank of the Nile
towards Omdurman, where the Khalifa had brought his 60,000
warriors.
Kitchener halted six miles from Omdurman. On 2 September
1898 the British infantry was arranged in a line, one rank kneeling,
one standing. In the distance they could hear the enemy shouting
as they advanced: then they saw banners. The British artillery
opened fire, then rifles and machine guns. As Keown-Boyd says,
To the student of tactics Omdurman is an uninteresting battle,

although understandably the participants did not find it so. On
the Mahdist side no generalship was displayed and on the other
little required. Reduced to basics the battle simply involved large
numbers of tribal warriors attempting, with great courage and
total lack of success, to fling themselves on serried ranks of
disciplined professional soldiers equipped with modern fire-
arms.42
The Daily Mail reported,
They could never get near and they refused to hold back. By
now the ground before us was all white with dead men's
drapery. Rifles grew red-hot; the soldiers seized them by the
slings and dragged them back to the reserve to change for cool
ones. It was not a battle but an execution.
After an hour the survivors withdrew, leaving 2,000 dead, with

many more wounded. 43 Kitchener decided to drive the enemy
before him into Omdurman and capture it. In the process the
Egyptian brigade under Major-General Sir Hector MacDonald was
isolated and subjected to frontal attack by the centre of the Dervish
army, and the flank and rear attacked by the Dervish left. The
attack was driven off and the Sudanese troops maintained their
exemplary calm. During the battle the 21st Lancers made their
celebrated charge, the last major British cavalry charge, in which
over 120 horses lost their lives. 44
The main body of Kitchener's troops entered Omdurman. The
Khalifa and a few of his followers fled to El Obeid, leaving over
10,000 Mahdists dead, 20,000 wounded and 5,000 prisoners.
Kitchener was elevated to the peerage and awarded £30,000 by a
grateful nation. His casualties scarcely totalled 500, dead and
wounded. The Mahdi's tomb was blown up on Kitchener's orders
and his bones tossed unceremoniously into the waters of the Nile.
He had intended to send the skull to the Royal College of Surgeons,
but Queen Victoria intervened and it was buried at Wadi Haifa.
On 4 September a memorial service for General Gordon was
held in the ruins of the governor-general's palace in Khartoum.
Kitchener wept during the rendition of 'Abide with Me'. The entire
campaign had cost less than £2.5 million. Anglo-Egyptian control
over the Nile watershed had been restored. Sir Garnet Wolseley
recorded in his diary, 'God be praised. We can once more hold up
our heads in the Sudan. Cromer can now bring peace and prosperity
to that country ... that will be Kitchener's best memorial. What
a fine fellow he is!' 45
On receiving the news from Kitchener, Queen Victoria noted in
her diary, 'Surely, he is now avenged.' 46 One would like to think
that she was right. After all, the human and material cost was not
what you could call negligible.
III
It is always instructive to examine the curiously vigorous life that

works of drama and fiction take on once they are well established
in a culture. This is just as important in the case of such seemingly
lightweight and 'popular' books as The Four Feathers as it is in the
case of established classics such as Henry V and Hamlet. Limiting
our inquiries to Mason's novel, we find that he kept the Egyptian
and Sudan campaigns very clearly in his mind as he put the
narrative of Feversham and Durrance together for the Cornhill
magazine. At the outbreak of trouble in Egypt, Harry's regiment
is dispatched there. He does not go with them. Durrance is present
during the conflict with Arabi and in the two Suakin expeditions.
The rest of the story is concerned with the situation after the British
withdraw! from the Sudan, when Osman Digna was on the
rampage, Suakin a solitary British outpost, and Wadi Haifa the
southernmost limit of civilisation and control. It is in Suakin that
Harry adopts his disguise, learns his new role, and embarks on
the enterprise to recover Gordon's dispatches from Berber (in the
hands of the enemy), and it is to Suakin that he returns when the
deed is accomplished.
Durrance goes out from Wadi Haifa to the desert on the mission
which blinds him, and Harry also wanders from Wadi Halfa into
the desert, re-emerging at Dongola and eventually, Omdurman,
where he appears as a prisoner in the dreaded House of Stone and
with the help of Sutch is able to effect the rescue of Colonel Trench.
But, when the book came to be filmed some very significant things
happened to it, especially in the celebrated 1939 version directed
by Zoltan Korda. The film is frequently seen on television and
video and therefore among currently consumed cultural products.
The novel was for generations fairly standard reading in secondary
schools and was a favourite pushed into the hands of literate
young boys by enthusiastic English teachers, recommended as a
rattling good yarn, an acceptable mixture of excitement, derring-
do, good clean fun and popular history. But in unpacking Korda's
film we need to be particularly aware of the historical moment
which gave it birth.
All historians, in reconstructing the past for the present, tell us-
often unwittingly- some significant things about their own times.
Few works produced in the mid nineteenth century tell us as much
about the Victorian world view as Macaulay's History of England,
whose ostensible subject is the seventeenth century. Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is one of the most Augustan
books of the age of Samuel Johnson. Now that the technology of
cinema has made the previously ephemeral art of acting permanent,
we can see, for example, how essentially, brilliantly and revealingly
of its moment is Olivier's 1944 film version of Shakespeare's late-
sixteenth-century version of events which happened in the opening
decades of the fifteenth century. 47 As Roger Bromley has extensively
demonstrated in Lost Narratives: Popular Fictions, Politics and Recent
History (1988), the 'dated' fiction of such writers as R. F. Delderfield,
recycled by the modern media, has been a useful element in
constructing conservative retrospects involving an organised for-
getting of genuine social experience. Popular selective narratives
of this kind played a significant part in dismantling the ideological

basis of consensus politics which survived from 1945 until the
advent of Thatcherism. 48
Properly read, Korda's version of Mason's immortal yarn is a
significant text of the closing moments of the uneasy peace
immediately before Hitler's invasion of Poland precipitated the
world into war. In the sphere of domestic politics, Britain had
recently witnessed the political crisis which brought on the series
of National Governments; the foundation in 1932 of Oswald
Mosley's British Union of Fascists (which by 1934 was holding
mass meetings at Olympia); a steep rise in unemployment to 2.8
million, leading to hunger marches and, in Parliament in 1933, to
a Labour Party motion censuring the government for compelling
thousands of the unemployed to seek Poor Law assistance; clashes
between Fascists and anti-Fascists in September 1934; George
Lansbury's campaign over the means test in 1935; the removal
from the Irish Constitution of the oath of allegiance to the British
Crown; anti-Catholic riots in Belfast; and the Abdication crisis
(1936). Imperial affairs were dominated by the agitation led by
Gandhi in India. In European politics the rise of Hitler dwarfed
almost everything except the Spanish Civil war, and Winston
Churchill constantly warned of the German threat. Looking back
now, it seems as if the reoccupation of the Rhineland, the
Czechoslovakian crisis, the Austrian Anschluss and the Munich
crisis were inevitable stepping-stones to the Second World War.
Internally and externally the structure of Britain's socio-political
realities was strained to breaking point from the foundations
upwards. The picture of the world projected in the 1939 film of
The Four Feathers - in which class relations harmoniously reflect
some innate and immutable world order, British imperialism is
just, moral and an inevitable part of some divinely impelled
process, and British force of arms all-conquering- was manifestly
but attractively untrue.
The Four Feathers has been filmed four times. The 1929 version
had a screenplay by Howard Estabrook and was directed by Lothar
Mendes, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Shoedsack. Ten years later
came the Korda version, scripted by R. C. Sherriff. This was
remade in 1955 as Storm Over The Nile, directed by Terence Young
and starring Anthony Steel, Laurence Harvey, Ronald Lewis, Ian
Carmichael and James Robertson Justice. Critics at the time felt
that the story was not so much dated as fossilised in its period,
but, given that Britain was then engaged in a wholesale dismantling

of its empire, the film must have struck a deep and resonant chord
in its mid-1950s audience. Curiously enough- bearing in mind
the work's apparent Britishness - it was considered suitable for
television-movie treatment in the United States in 1976 as that
nation began the long process of adjusting itself to its imperial
debacle in Indochina. This version was scripted by Gerald Di Pego
and directed by Don Sharp. Beau Bridges was Harry Feversham,
with splendid support from Robert Powell, Simon Ward, Richard
Johnson, David Robb, Jane Seymour and Harry Andrews. All three
of these later versions, those of 1939, 1955 and 1976, are very
interesting, not only for the manner in which they work up Mason's
material, but for what they have added to it. Korda's 1939 version
is a key text here, as it put into circulation some influential additions
and alterations. It is vitally important to be aware of these in
attempting to construe how an audience might piece meaning
together from the film on its first showings in the spring of 1939. 49
The alterations and additions to Mason's story do not merely affect
the narrative, but also carry a considerable ideological burden.
The Four Feathers was ideal material for a Korda production.
Alexander Korda came to Britain from Hungary in 1930, after
working in Berlin, Paris and Hollywood. He built Denham Studios,
founded London Films and established its success with The Private
Life of Henry VIII (1932). He produced a series of spectacular films
which, it has been claimed, saved the British film industry. His
younger brother, Zoltan directed, and another brother, Vincent,
was an art director. The brothers had a lifelong fascination for the
exotic and the adventurous. Michael Korda, Alexander's nephew,
records that
Alex the child looked behind the horizon. . . . His favourite

reading was the novels ofJules Verne .... Unlike most children,
however, he did not dream of living out such adventures
himself - he dreamed instead of creating them. . . . He read
insatiably.... What he read, he remembered. History interested
him, as did the biographies of great men, but he had a particular
love of adventure stories ... from the 'Western' novels of Karl
May . . . to the great stories of exploration. During the long
evenings he would read aloud to his younger brother, particularly
a Hungarian translation of the journals of Livingstone's dis-
coverer, Henry Morton Stanley, which no doubt explains why a
boy from Hungary should spend his life making movies like
Sanders of the River, Elephant Boy, The Four Feathers . ... 50
But there is more to it than this. The Korda brothers were not
attracted to this kind of material simply because it played out
adventure stories in exotic settings. As Jeffrey Richards has pointed
out, their films represent the 'aristo-military', qualities and it is
interesting to note how these virtues are stressed in the film of The
Four Feathers even more emphatically than in Mason's novel. There
may well be economic reasons for this - Korda's wish for financial
success, his desire to capture a share of the Empire market - but
there were also ideological motives:
He also sought deliberately to stress the virtues of the British

imperial system, the doctrines of fair play and moral authority
at a time when the rise of fascism was threatening those ideals
and offering a different sort of world government. 51
In this reworking for cinema audiences of the late 1930s of a

story written in the opening years of the century, an unmistakably
Churchillian flavour may be detected. It is appropriate, of course,
in that the young Winston Churchill served in the Sudan campaign;
but buried, if not obscured, in Korda version of The Four Feathers
is the Churchillian message that, in the face of cruel and barbarous
foes, one has a duty to reject appeasement and stand up for
goodness, order and justice. Churchill was, in fact, a close associate
of the Korda brothers and fully appreciated the propaganda value
of their films. 52 Tony Aldgate believes that The Four Feathers, of all
the Korda films, best expresses 'the Korda vision', 53 the nature of
which will repay a little study.
The alterations to Mason's story are not simple embellishments
to facilitate the transfer from page to screen. The film was made
with quite specific intentions. The film version of Mason's Indian
frontier novel The Drum was very well received in April 1938. It
has recognisable Mason-Korda character types - the treacherous
native ruler, Prince Ghul, played by Raymond Massey; the tough
but warm-hearted Sergeant, played by Edward Lexy; the career
officer and empire-builder, Captain Carruthers, played by Roger
Livesey- as well as exotic settings (though its location footage was
actually filmed in Wales). The spectacular success of The Drum was
the incentive for another Mason film, and work on The Four Feathers
commenced immediately.
It was scripted by R. C. Sherriff, already well known as the
author of the staggeringly successful play about the Great War,
Journey's End (1929), and as the script-writer for films of H. G.
Wells's The Invisible Man (1933), John Galsworthy's One More River
(1934) and Erich Maria von Remarque's The Road Back (1937). He
had recently been working on the screenplay for the film version
of James Hilton's novel Goodbye Mr Chips. His fingerprints are
unmistakable in the film version of The Four Feathers, but he turned
to Mason for help and handed the script over from time to time
for the novelist's approval. 54 Some alterations, such as the reduction
in the number of characters, were accepted as an inevitable part of
the process; characters were renamed and relationships slightly
readjusted, so that we finish up with Harry Feversham (John
Clements)55 engaged to Ethne Burroughs (June Duprez), daughter
of the irascible old blimp General Burroughs (C. Aubrey Smith).
General Burroughs is an English country squire (so much for
Ethne' s fey Irish qualities) and replaces Dermod Eustace in Mason's
novel. Mason added the moment, made famous in C. Aubrey
Smith's performance, where the General uses fruit and nuts to
represent the troops in the Crimean battle: 'The Russians were
here ... guns, guns, guns .... And here, the British infantry,
the thin red line . . . here was the Commander-in-Chief . . . and I
was here ... ', he explains, as he deploys the nuts, red wine,
peach and pineapple on the dining-table. This is developed from
a scene in Mason's story 'Green Stockings' where Colonel Smith
witters on about battles in Somaliland. It has become in irreplaceable
moment in our experience of The Four Feathers, and all subsequent
versions have retained it, each generation of film-makers trying to
muster their best replacement for the immortal C. Aubrey Smith -
James Robertson Justice in 1955 and Harry Andrews in 1976. 56 A
marked Sherriff addition is the class consciousness in relationships,
especially those between officers and men: the dialogue given to
Sergeant Brown and Colonel Durrance is obviously by the same
hand as the lines for Stanhope and Trotter in Journey's End, and,
later, for John Mills and his batman in the film version of Goodbye
Mr Chips. The contrast between Harry and Ethne' s parting, marked
by upper-class sentiment and the gentle expression of personal
feelings, and the rough, inarticulate, semi-comic boorishness of
Sergeant Brown's farewell to his wife and child as the troops sail
is contemptibly complacement in its portrayal of class-ridden
Britain. Finer emotions are shown only by the upper classes - it is

General Burroughs who has an attack of the quivering lip while
the crowds sing 'Auld Lang Syne'. The same agreed world order
is shown in the relationships between the white imperialists and
the dark-skinned races whose land they plunder and whose
populations they slaughter.
In Mason's novel the feathers are sent by Feversham' s fellow
officers Trench, Castleton and Willoughby. The fourth feather is
then added by Ethne, taken from her fan of ivory and white
feathers, as she returns his ring:
The thing which she had done was cruet no doubt. But she
wished to make an end- a complete, irreconcilable end; though
her voice was steady, and her face, despite its pallor, calm, she
was really tortured with humiliation and pain. All the details of
Harry Feversham's courtship, the interchange of looks, the
letters she had written and received, the words which had been
spoken, tingled and smarted unbearably in her recollections.
Their lips had touched - she recalled it with horror. She desired
never to see Harry Feversham after this night. Therefore she
added her fourth feather to the three. 57
In the film Harry takes Ethne's fan and breaks off the feather, thus
giving it to himself on her behalf. C. A. Lejeune asked Mason, in
an interview he gave to The Observer while the film was in its
preliminary stages, whether all four feathers were to be returned.
He answered, 'I wanted to show that nothing in this world
ever comes off absolutely. For all practical purposes, Feversham
redeemed himself, but I deliberately meant that he should be
cheated of that last feather.' 58
In the Korda film Harry explains to Ethne that he had resigned
his commission because he had important work to do at home,
restoring efficiency and profitability to estates which had long been
ruined by the neglect of their owners who had avoided their
responsibilities and sought glory overseas. One might be forgiven
for thinking that such an expressed desire to restore economic
well-being at home might have got a round of applause in the late
1930s. In the film all four feathers are returned. Harry rescues
Durrance when he is blinded by sunstroke in the desert, and,
having brought him safely to the river bank, he inserts the feather
in a letter in Durrance's pocket. Harry bravely gets himself thrown
into the House of Stone in Omdurman and rescues Burroughs and

Willoughby. At the celebration party back home in the Burroughs
family's plush country domicile he refutes General Burroughs'
version of the Crimean battle, with its guns, guns, guns, its thin
red line and all the rest of it, by asserting that General Burroughs'
horse was startled and moved off on its own accord, thus precipita-
ting the famous advance of the Old 68th, and that Burroughs never
actually gave his brave words of command. Taking on the Old
Tusker in his own backyard is his final act of bravery, and thus he
redeems the shame of the fourth feather.
The chronology of the story was considerably expanded as well.
The slaying of General Gordon is graphically presented and driven
home with a lingering close up of contemporary journalistic
coverage of the event. Harry's story begins at the Crimea-night
dinner gathering and extends right through to Kitchener' s invasion
of the Sudan - an interesting version of the Battle of Omdurman
forming the climax of the film. The shape and movement of
screenplay-writing certainly requires a major action sequence at
this stage, and Omdurman supplies it. Sherriff has so constructed
the narrative that it slowly builds up to this moment, and the closing
domestic scenes back home in England are calmly reconciling.
It is important to realise that this has not been achieved without
some serious manipulation and distortion of historic fact. One of
the most glaring distortions, which would be noticed immediately
by any military historian of the period, is the complete neglect of
Kitchener's great railway. The omission of this from the Kordas'
film doubtless has an irrefutable economic justification. But apart
from this there are some important areas which need comment.
Vengeance for the death of General Gordon is made the sole reason
for the expedition to the Sudan. The action of the story moves
immediately from Harry's fifteenth birthday on Crimea night in
1885, soon after General Feversham (Harry's father) and General
Burroughs have heard the news of Gordon's death, to the
announcement of the Sudan campaign. We are given to understand
the paramount importance of the campaign and its motivation back
home. Ethne says, 'We have Egypt for breakfast, lunch and tea
and the honour of the regiment for dinner.' Social pressure - from
peer group (the regiment), from the family ('First time for a
hundred years there hasn't been a Feversham in the army, and
look what happens!' is Harry's father's comment on hearing of the
death of Gordon) and from the past - is strongly brought out in
the film version of Mason's story. The sequence in which the

young Harry goes up to bed disturbed by what he has heard about
death and violence in war, and is made to feel the burden of his
cowardice by the reproval expressed in all the family portraits of
military heroes, is well known and was imitated in the remakes of
1955 and 1976. This is merely a pictorial reinforcement of the
arguments of General Burroughs to which he has just been
subjected: 'War was war in those days!' The theme is further
developed when the troops embark at Portsmouth: the crowds
who turn up to cheer contain not only women and children, but
also a prominent contingent of Chelsea Pensioners. What are they
doing in Portsmouth? They are there to represent the burden of
the past bearing down upon the present. Ancestral pressure, a
kind of Shinto militarism, is frequently found in the iconography
of war and soldiers. Indeed, another famous Harry, similarly
reluctant to fight, is compelled to do so by voices from the past.
The Archbishop of Canterbury impels Henry V to embark on war
with France with these words:
Gracious lord,
Stand for your own, unwind your bloody flag,
Look back into your might ancestors.
Go, my dread lord, to your great-grandsire's tomb,
From whom you claim; invoke his warlike spirit,
And your great-uncle's, Edward the Black Prince ....
He is supported by the Bishop of Ely:
Awake remembrance of these valiant dead,

And with your puissant arm renew their feats.
You are their heir; you sit upon their throne;
The blood and courage that renowned them
Runs in your veins; and my thrice-puissant liege
Is in the very May-mom of his youth,
Ripe for exploits and mighty enterprises.
(Henry V, 1. ii. 100-5, 115-21)
Extending the chronology well into the Sudan campaign gave

the film-makers the chance to introduce Kitchener in person. He
inspects the troops as the regimental band plays Handel's March
from Scipio (1726), music with suitably heroic associations from the
opera based on the life of Scipio Africanus, who drove the

Carthaginians out of Spain. Far from the aloof, indifferent and
unfriendly and friendless commander known to history, we are
here presented with a reasonably informal, warm, paternal and
concerned Sirdar, who stops and asks the men about their wives
and families. This is all part of the scheme to build up the legend
of the virtuous white man in conflict with the corrupt and wicked
tribesmen. This is reinforced by another impressive interpolation,
Harry's impersonation of a Sangali native. This is an ideal disguise,
we are given to understand, because all the Sangali were branded
on the face and had their tongues ripped out on the orders of the
Khalifa. Therefore Harry is absolved from the tedious business of
having to learn Arabic. But we register the example of the Khalifa's
barbarity. This gives us the entire Mahdist movement in terms of
wicked and cruel Dervishes opposed to tolerant, clean-living
colonials. This is a war of good against evil, and has nothing
whatever to do with money, or profits, or investment, or trade, or
anything as sordid as that. Korda's war in the Sudan is a very
high-minded affair. The most striking historical distortion is in the
portrayal of the Battle of Omdurman itself: putting aside the
derring do of Harry Feversham' s plucky rescue of Burroughs and
Willoughby from the House of Stone, their blowing-up of the
Khalifa's ammunition store and final raising of the Union Jack, we
have the suggestion that the fight was a fair one. If anything, the
advantage was on the Khalifa's side. This was not the slaughter
known to history. In Korda's film, after the first charge of the
Mahdists has been pluckily repulsed by the brave lines of British
infantry (not a machine-gun in sight!), Kitchener comments as the
Dervishes rally for a second go, 'There aren't so many of them
now.' 'Nor of us, sir', says a subaltern. Remember, the rifles at
Omdurman were red-hot from their work of slaughtering thou-
sands and thousands of natives.
Another addition to history is the story of the diversion led by
Durrance to draw the Khalifa' s attention away from Kitchener' s
main army. It is during this episode that Durrance foolishly loses
his pith helmet and is blinded by the sun. This is not how it
happens in the novel, where it is a routine case of sunstroke, but
this narrative is needed in order to provide Harry with an
opportunity to rescue him. But there is more to it than this: the
theme of blindness and perception is strongly developed in the
screenplay. When he has his sight Durrance cannot understand
why Ethne does not love him. When he is blind he can see she
loves Harry, and he lies in order to leave her gracefully. When
Harry hands in his resignation papers his commander tells him to
go and lie down in a darkened room. He will see the error of his
ways in the dark. There is likewise a constrast drawn between
poetry and prose. Poetry is the language of the imagination and is
despised in the harsh world of military and political life. General
Feversham is disgusted to learn that Harry has been reading
poetry, 'Shelley of all people!' When Durrance is blinded, he learns
to read poetry with braille. Poetry is not for active men, only for
women and those whose physical shortcomings render them
unsuitable for a life of real service. Now that Durrance is blind, he
may read Shakespeare. Interestingly enough, he reads some lines
from The Tempest with his fingertips, but then confesses he knew
them by heart before - in other words, he was secretly always
unfit for the real man's world, while Harry, who was initially
rejected from it as a coward and an emotional weakling, was ideally
suited for it.
It may well be asked if any of this, ultimately, is important. Does
it matter that popular films such as this distort history a bit (quite
a bit, actually); that they put before us models of maleness and
femaleness which are wholly inadequate; that they present an
unchanging social order; that they drum up an unthinking
patriotism? If we had not all lived through the Falklands escapade
so very recently we might be more easily dismissive, but such
feelings as were readily manifest in early 1982 have very deep
roots, which popular fiction and the entertainment industries
constantly nourish and water. The sailing of the Task Force for the
South Atlantic, as seen on television, was disconcertingly like the
troopships leaving for Egypt from Portsmouth in the Kordas' film.
When seeing this as a news item on British television, as the
crowds cheered, the bands played and Union Jacks waved, we all
might well have said to ourselves, 'This is where we came in.'
Notes
1. George Warrington Steevens, war correspondent of the Daily Mail,

quoted in Rupert Fumeaux, News ofWar: Stories and Adventures of the
Great War Correspondents (London: Max Parrish, 1963) p. 182. See also
Trevor Royle, War Report: The War Correspondent's View of Battle from
the Crimea to the Falklands (London: Grafton, 1989) pp. 40--77.
2. A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1965) pp. 153--61.
3. Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands (1903; Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1978) pp. 320-1.
4. Ibid., pp. 304-5.
5. SeeR. C. K. Ensor, England 1870-1914 (Oxford: Oarendon Press, 1985)
pp. 401-5, 410-13, 433-7 and 461-72.
6. Claud Cockburn, Cockburn Sums Up (London: Quarto, 1981) pp. 1-2.
7. Bertrand Russell, War the Offspring of Fear (London: Union of Demo-
cratic Control Publications, Sep 1914), quoted in E. D. Morel, Truth
and the War (London: National Labour Press, 1916) p. 161.
8. See Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of
McCarthyism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1975) esp. pp. 3-12; Gore
Vidal: At Home: Essays 1982-1988 (New York: Random House, 1988)
pp. 92-114; and Hugh Brogan, Longman History of the United States of
America (London: Longman, 1985) pp. 616-23.
9. See Robert Giddings and Elizabeth Holland, The Shores of Middle-Earth
(London: Junction Books, 1981) pp. 35-59.
10. See Tim Travers, The Killing Ground: The British Army, The Western
Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare 1900-1918 (London: Allen
and Unwin, 1987) esp. pp. 85-100.
11. Roger Lancelyn Green, A. E. W. Mason (London: Max Parrish, 1952)
p. 84.
12. Philip Ziegler, Omdurman (London: Collins, 1973) p. 10.
13. A. E. W. Mason, The Four Feathers (1902; London: John Murray, 1962)
pp. 9-10 (ch. 1).
14. Ibid., p. 10.
15. Ibid., p. 11.
16. Ibid., pp. 12-13.
17. Ibid., p. 16.
18. Ibid., p. 24 (ch. 2).
19. Ibid., p. 32.
20. Green, Mason, p. 225.
21. E. S. Turner, Dear Old Blighty (London: Michael Joseph, 1980) p. 68.
22. Ibid., pp. 68-9.
23. Hansard, 27 Feb 1915 and 1 Mar 1915; and cf. Robert Giddings, The
War Poets: The Lives and Writings of the 1914-18 War Poets (London:
Bloomsbury, 1988) pp. 43-5.
24. See Alan Bold and Robert Giddings, Who Was Really Who in Fiction
(London: Longman, 1987) pp. 81-82 and 333-4; and Turner, Dear Old
Blighty, p. 69.
25. Denis Winter, Death's Men (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) p. 31.
26. Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman
(New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1981) p. 281.
27. Ethel Priscilla Grenfell, Lady Desborough, Pages from a Family Journal
(1916), quoted in Girouard, The Return to Camelot, p. 281.
28. Winter, Death's Men, p. 32.
29. J. Fitzgerald Lee, Imperial Geography, 3rd edn (London: William Oowes,
1923) p. 16.
30. Ronald Hyam and Ged Martin, Reappraisals in British Imperial History
(London: Macmillan, 1975) pp. 156ff.
31. Frederick Maurice and George Arthur, The Life ofLord Wolseley (London:
Heinemann, 1924) pp. 143-4. The Ashanti campaign (1873-4), coupled
with Wolseley's brilliant mastery of all the tricks of public relations
and his ruthless control of war correspondents, had made him a
household name by this time. See Robert Giddings, 'General Glitter',
New Society, 4 Dec 1975. He was portrayed as Major-General Stanley,
the very model of a modem major-general, in Gilbert and Sullivan's
The Pirates of Penzance. When George Grossmith appeared in the role
at the premiere in 1879, he was made up unmistakably as Sir Gamet
Wolseley. See Bold and Giddings, Who Was Really Who in Fiction,
p. 313. Wolseley delighted to sing the famous patter song to family
and friends at his house.
32. James Moncrief£ Grierson, Scarlet into Khaki (London: Greenhill, 1988)
pp. 17, 36.
33. Films have undoubtedly served vigorously to nourish our national
historical legends and myths. Khartoum is a prime example. It is
depressing how seemingly educated critics pass over such inaccurate
re-creations of history without perceptive comment. That Herodotus
of the screen, Leslie Halliwell, wrote that this film was 'dullish history
book stuff' and others referred to its 'academic accuracy'; see Halliwell's
Film Guide, 5th edn (London: Grafton, 1986) p. 531.
34. This account of the conversation is taken from Maurice and Arthur,
The Life of Lord Wolsley, pp. 172-3.
35. Lord Hartington (Spencer Compton Cavendish, Marquess of Harting-
ton}, Secretary of State for War; Lord Granville (Granville George
Leveson-Gower, Earl Granville}, Secretary of State for the Colonies;
Lord Northbrook (Thomas George Baring, 1st Earl of Northbrook)
First Lord of the Admiralty; Sir Charles Dilke (Charles Wentworth
Dilke}, Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs.
36. Maurice and Arthur, The Life of Lord Wolseley, pp. 173-4.
37. Cf. Brian Gardner, The African Dream (London: Cassell, 1970) pp. 136ff;
Gerald Graham, A Concise History of the British Empire (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1970) pp. 179--81; Henry Keown-Boyd, A Good Dusting
(London: Seeker and Warburg, 1986) pp. 19ff; Douglas H. Johnson,
'The Death of Gordon: A Victorian Myth', Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History, x (1982) 285-310. For John Morley's account see
Life of Gladstone (London: 1903) III, 153££. To the end of his life
Gladstone convinced himself that Gordon had been sent out expressly
to evacuate the Sudan, and that the government in sending such an
eccentric genius 'had improvidently let the genie forth from the jar'.
38. Keown-Boyd, A Good Dusting, p. 37.
39. John 0. Springhall, 'Up Guards and at Them', in John M. MacKenzie
(ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester Univer-
sity Press, 1986) p. 56.
40. See Keown-Boyd, A Good Dusting, pp. 138-40; and G. F. H. Berkeley,
The Campaign of Adowa and the Rise of Menelek (London: Heinemann,
1902).
41. Edward Grierson, The Imperial Dream: British Commonwealth and Empire
1775-1969 (London: Collins, 1972) pp. 128-9.
42. Keown-Boyd, A Good Dusting, p. 224.
43. Gardner, The African Dream, pp. 184-5.
44. Ziegler, Omdurman, pp. 144-59.
45. Quoted in Maurice and Arthur, The Life of Lord Wolseley, p. 306.
46. Ziegler, Omdurman, p. 229.
47. See Graham Holderness, 'Agincourt 1944: Readings in the Shakespeare
Myth', in Peter Humm, Paul Stigant and Peter Widdowson (eds),
Popular Fictions: Essays in Literature and History (London: Methuen,
1986) pp. 173-95.
48. See Roger Bromley, Lost Narratives: Popular Fictions, Politics and Recent
History (London: Routledge, 1988).
49. See Graham Greene's review in the Spectator, 28 Apr 1939, repr. in
The Pleasure Dome: The Collected Film Criticism of Graham Greene 1935-
1940, ed. John Russell Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980)
pp. 218-19. He makes no comment on the manner in which the story
has been altered, but praises the colour, writing and acting.
50. Michael Korda, Charmed Lives (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979)
pp. 40-1. Karl May, who died in 1912, wrote extremely popular
Western romances, such as Winnitou (3 vols, 1893). For a discussion of
his influence on the development of the Western cult, see Christopher
Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to
Sergio Leone (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981) pp. 103-17.
Interestingly enough, May also wrote about the Sudan, Im Lande des
Mahdi (1896).
51. Jeffrey Richards, 'Boy's Own Empire', in John M. MacKenzie (ed.),
Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1986) p. 149.
52. Korda, Charmed Lives, pp. 138-9.
53. Tony Aldgate, 'Ideological Consensus in British Feature Films 1935-
1947', inK. R. M. Short (ed.), Feature Films as History (London: Croom
Helm, 1981) p. 102.
54. Green, Mason, pp. 225-6.
55. Mason wanted Laurence Olivier to play this role. The choice was
interesting: his performance in Sherriff's Journey's End was famous.
56. The first talkie version of Mason's novel was released in 1929. It was
written by Howard Estabrook and directed by Lothar Mendes, Merian
C. Cooper and Ernest Shoedsack. It was partly filmed on location in
Africa and starred Richard Arlen, Clive Brook, William Powell, George
Fawcett and Fay Wray. The 1939 version was produced by Alexander
Korda and directed by Zoltan Korda, with a cast including John
Oements, Ralph Richardson, AllanJeayes, Jack Allen, Donald Gray, C.
Aubrey Smith, and June Duprez. Miklos Rozsa wrote the wonderfully
'exotic' score (and certainly did his homework, being especially
indebted to Saint-Saens's opera Samson et Dalila). The film was very
largely shot on location. Zoltan Korda's footage for this film has
subsequently turned up in other African adventure fll.ms, notably
Zarak and East of Sudan- not to mention the 1955 remake of Mason's
novel, which was directed by Terence Young. This recycled the R. C.
Sherriff screenplay serene for scene, and starred Anthony Steel, with
Laurence Harvey and Ralph Richardson role, Ronald Lewis, Ian
Carmichael, and James Robertson Justice in the part immortalised by
C. Aubrey Smith. Zoltan Korda's battle scenes had to be stretched to
fit the big screen, and if one looks carefully the elongation of the
camels is clearly discernible. The 1976 version was filmed for television
by NBC, with Don Sharp directing. The script was written by Gerald
Di Pego, who retained most of the business interpolated by R. C.
Sherriff. One interesting addition is the thunderstorm which accom-
panies Harry Feversham's passage to bed past the ancestral portraits.
The Feversham family mansion is curiously reminiscent of the Deep
South we all know from riverboat gambler films and Gone with the
Wind. It starred Beau Bridges, Robert Powell, Simon Ward (fresh from
triumphs in Young Winston and soon to be typecast in Zulu Dawn,
1979), Richard Johnson and Jane Seymour. Harry Andrews made a
very good stab at the C. Aubrey Smith role. The interior scenes are
rather good, but, in comparison with the Kordas' version, the whole
performance is badly let down by its battle scenes, understandable as
this may be.
57. Mason, The Four Feathers, p. 36 (ch. 2).
58. Green, Mason, p. 225.
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(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1965).
Thomas, Lowell, With Lawrence in Arabia (London: Hutchinson, 1925).
Thompson, John Carghill, The Boys' Dumas: G. A. Henty, Aspects of Victorian
Publishing (Cheadle, Cheshire: Carcanet, 1975).
Thornton, A. P., The Imperial Idea and its Enemies: A Study in British Power
(London: Macmillan, 1959).
Tuathaigh, G. 0., Ireland before the Famine (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan,
1972).
Yardley, Michael, Backing into the Limelight: A Biography ofT. E. Lawrence
(New York: Stein and Day, 1985).
Index
Abbas II (King of Dahomey), 203 Boieldieu, Fran<;ois Adrien, 13
Abdulla (Khelifa of Sudan), 187, Booth, Wayne C., 80
204 Bowell, James, 7
Abdulla (King of Transjordan), 158, Braithwaite, Edward, 70
166 Braudel Ferdinard, 3
Achebe, Chinua, 66 Bridges, Beau, 208
works of, 69-70, 99, 102 Bright, John, 198
Aldgate, Tony, 209 Bromley, Roger, 206
Aldington, Richard, 150, 155, 159 Brooke, Rupert, 194
Ali, Tariq, 72 Briill, Charles, 115-16
Allen, Walter, 80 Buchan, John, 133, 150, 159, 161,
Allenby, Edmund Henry Hynman, 163, 167, 174-5, 184
161-2, 171 Burnaby, Lieutenant-Colonel,
Arnis, Kingsley, 177 Frederick, 201
Andrews, Harry, 208, 210 Burton, Sir Richard, 153, 163
Anthony, Michael, 66 Butler, Lady Elizabeth Southerdon,
Archilles, 194 19
Ardrey, Robert, 199 Buxton, Colonel R., 164
Armitage, Edward, 19 Byron, George, Lord, 13
Arthur, George, 200
Arthur (King of the Britons), 194 Cainas, David, 26
Astor, Nancy, 163 Campbell, Sir Colin, 153
Attenborough, Richard, 69 Cardwell, Edward, 17
Aubrey-Smith, C., 210 Carlyle, Thomas, 151
Avery, G., 46 Carmichael, Ian, 207
le Carre, John, 185
Bagley, Michael, 131 Carroll, David, 75, 99
Baines, Jocelyn, 102 Cary,Joyce,65, 104
Baker, Richard St Berber, 120 works of, 69, 99, 102
Baldwin, James, 107 Casement, Sir Roger, 76, 87, 103
Ballantyne, R. M., 44, 133 Cawthra, Gavin, 128
works of, 44-63 Chamberlain, Joseph, 82, 155
Banville, John, 33 Chapple, J. A. V., 68
works of, 35-7 Charles I (of England), 191
Baratieri, General, 203 Charles II (of England), 6
Barrie, J. M., 194 Childers, Robert Erskine, 182-7
Barrington, Lady, 194 Chippendale, Thomas, 8
Barstow, Montague, 192 Churchill, Winston, 1, 150, 154,
Barttelot, Major, 102 159-61,166-7,185,204,209
Beckford, William, 10 Clausewitz, Karl Von, 3
works of, 13 Clements, John, 210
Beier, Uli, 66 Clive, Robert, 12, 152, 156, 194
Belcher, M. L., 121, 125 Cloete, Stuart, 133
Bell,Genrude, 156-7,166 Cockburn, Claud, 184
Benson, Frank, 185 Codrington, Christopher, 9
223
224 Index
Coetzee, J. M., 129 Estabrook, Howard, 207

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 82 Evans,Robert0.,90,94
Conrad, Joseph, 1, 21, 70
works of, 68, 75-111, 184 Farrell, J. G., 33-4, 37
Cooke, Captain James, 194 Feder, Lillian, 94
Cooper, Merian C., 207 Feisel (of Saudi Arabia), 158, 162,
Coppola, Francis, 69 169
Cox, C. B., 100--1 Feisel, Prince Zeid, 158
Cromer, Lord Rowland Thomas Feversham, Harry, 208
Baring, 203, 205 Fielding, Daphne, 193
Cropper, James, 11 Fitzgerald, Lee J., 196
Curle, Richard, 102 Flaudiau, Grace, 119
Curtis, Lionel, 160 Fleming, Ian, 132
Foot, Michael, 150
Daleski, H. M., 90 Fore, Simeon, 19
Darwin, Charles, 59, 194 Forster, E. M., 21, 65, 75, 80, 150
Dave, Phyllis, 193 works of, 68, 70, 90, 102
Dawson, Geoffrey, 160 Frazer, Sir James George, 103
Deane,Shamus,25-6 Frendenberg, Alexander, 123-4
Defoe, Daniel, 4 Fried, Brian, 26
works of, 4, 68
Delderfield, R. F., 206 Galland, Antoine, 13
Derra, Bey of, 166 Galsworthy, John, 210
Desborough, Lord William Henry Garnett, Edward, 75
Grenfell, 194 George V (of England), 156
Devis, Arthur, 8 George, Lloyd, 160, 163, 177
Dhondy, Farrukh, 69 Gibbon, Edmund, 206
Dickens, Charles, 16, 36, 70 Gillray, James, 14
works of, 16, 18 Gladstone, John, 10, 11
Dighton, Denis, 19 Gladstone, William Ewart, 10, 198,
Digna, Osman, 186, 200, 206 200--1
Diop, David, 65 Gladstones (family history of), 10
Donne, John, 36 Gleisner, Jack, 122
Dostoevsky, Feodor, 36 Goldsmith, Oliver, 7
Doughty, Charles, 170 Gordon, Charles, 151-2, 154, 156,
Drake, Sir Francis, 156 186, 194, 199-201, 212
Duprez, June, 210 Gough, Sir Hugh, Field-Marshal,
first viscount, 152
Eden, Sir Frederick, 6 Graham, Major-General, 200
Edward VII (of England), 156 Graham, R. B. Cunninghome, 103
Edward (the Black Prince), 194 Graltz, Paul, 115
Ekwensi, Cyprian, 65 Graves, Robert, 150, 159, 165, 167
Elgar, Sir Edward, 19 Gray, Stephen, 131-2
Eliot, George, 70 Greenberger, A. J., 68
Eliot, T. S., 73, 82, 107 Greene, Graham, 69, 155
works of, 89, 95 Greenwood, Walter, 66
Elizabeth I (of England), 152 Grenfell, Julian, 194
Essex, Peter, 129, 146 Grenfell, William, 194
works of, 142-5 Grenville, Sir Richard, 194
Index 225
Grogan, Ewart, 114 Ismail (Khedive of Egypt), 197

Guerard, Albert J., 76
James I (of England), 191
Haggard, Henry Rider, 133, 156 James, Henry, 88, 94
Hamed, Abu, 203 James, Jesse, 165
Hancock, Sir William Keith, 112 Jenkins, Geoffrey, 129, 131
Handel, Frederick, 213 Johnson, Linton, Kwesi, 70
Hannaway, Jonas, 6 Johnson, Richard, 208
Hardy, Thomas, 21, 70 Johnson, Samuel, 13, 206
Harmon, Maurice, 33 Johnston, Jennifer, 26
Hart, Liddell, 165, 174 Johnstone, H. H., 113
Hartington, Lord, Spencer Justice, James Robertson, 207, 210
Compton Cavendish, eighth
Duke of Devonshire, 200 Karl, Frederick, R., 80
Harvey, Laurence, 207 Keown-Boyd, 204
Havelock, Sir Henry, 152 Kettle, Arnold, 80, 105
Hawthorne, Jeremy, 100, 105 Keverne, Gloria, 129
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 93 Kiberd, Declan, 25-6
Hayman, Francis, 8 Kidd, Benjamin, 92
Heaney, Shamus, 25-6 Kinglake, Alexander, 14
Heaty, G. A., 164, 194 Kipling, Rudyard, 13, 19, 65, 70,
Hector, 194 82, 170, 194, 201
Hemingway, Ernest, 104 works of, 20, 68
Henry V (King of England), 194 Kitchener, Herbert Horatio, 19, 154,
Henty, G. A., 133 157, 182-222, 203
Herbert, Aubrey, 156, 159 Klein, George Antoine, 102
Herron, Shaun, 41 Knightly, Philip, 177
Hewitt, Douglas, 90 Knighton, William, 81
Hicks, General William, 198 Korda, Alexander, 175, 208, 209,
Highmore, Joseph, 8 211, 214--15
Hilton, James, 210 Korda, Michael, 208
Hitler, Adolf, 207 Korda, Zoltan, 180, 206, 207-8
Hobson, John, 112
Hodister, Arthur Eugene Constant, Labouchere, Henri Dupre, 155
102 Lansbury, George, 207
Hogarth, D. J., 156 Lawrence, D. H., 79, 107
Hogarth, William, 8 Lawrence, T. E. (of Arabia), 150-81
Hood, Robin, 165 Lean, David, 176
Hopkins, H. C., 117-18 Leavis, F. R., 100--1, 107
Horatius, 194 Leavis, Queenie, 132
Howard, Leslie, 175 Leitch, Maurice, 26
Hudd, Walter, 175 Lejeune, C. A., 192, 211
Humm, Peter, 133 Leopold (of Belgium), 103
Humphrey, Rachel, 118, 121 Lessing, Doris, 66
Hussein (King of Jordan), 158 Lewis, Ronald, 207
Hussein, Ali (of Jordan), 158 Lewis, Rosa, 193
Hyams, Ronald, 197 Lexy, Edward, 209
Livesey, Roger, 209
Isa, Oniir, 187 Livingstone, David, 151, 163, 208
226 Index
lloyd, George, 156 Naipaul, V. S., 66-7, 70, 82

Louis XIV (of France), 159 works of, 69, 71
Lucretius, Carus Titus, 96 Napier, General Charles, 152
Lugard, Frederick, 158 Napoleon I (Emperor of France),
152
Narayan, Rasipuram
Macaulay, Lord Thomas Krishnaswami, 66, 69
Babington, 19, 206 Nelson, Horatio Lord, 152, 194
MacDonald, Major-General Sir Newbolt, Sir Henry, 19
Hector, 204 Nicholson, Sir John, 152-3
MacKenzie, Compton, 193 Nicholson, T. R., 114, 194
MacLaverty, Bernard, 26 Nisbet, James, 53
works of, 37-40 Northfield, Lord, 163
Mahdi (Mahomed Achmed of Nutting, Anthony, 177
Dongola), 198, 201, 205, 214
Mahood, M. M., 66 O'Brien, Conor Cruise, 26, ~1
Manghan, Brown, David, 133, 145 Oglethorpe, General James, 7
Manners, Lady Diana, 194 Ohrwalder, Father, 187
Marchand, Jean-Baptiste, 203 Olivier, Sir Lawrence, 206
Marlowe, Christopher, 94 Oman, Sir Charles, 157
Marogath, Captain, 132 Orczy, Baroness Emmonska, 192-3
Marryat, Captain Frederick, 132 Orwell, George, 65, 82
Marvell, Andrew, 27-9 works of, 69-70
Mason, Alfred Edward Woodley,
185 Packer, Joy, 129,145
works of, 205 works of, 133-40
Massey, Raymond, 209 Park, Mungo, 114
Massey, W. T., 161 Parry, Benita, 75, 90, 105
de Maurier, Guy, 183 Pasha, Colonel Arabi, 198
Maurice, Major-General Sir John Pasha, Emin, 102
Frederick, 18, 200 Pasha, Slattin, 187-8
May, Karl, 208 Paton, Alan, 65
Mayin, the Sherif Abn el, 173 Pearse, R. 0., 118
McGraw, B. 1., 176 Pego, Di Gerald, 208
Meinertzhagen, Richard, 155, 166 Pertham, Margery, 118
Mendes, Lothar, 207 Philby, StJohn, 171
Menelek, King of Shoa, 202 Philips, Thomas, 9
Mills, John, 210 Platt, General Sir William, 177
Milner, Lord Alfred, 159 Pollard,Arthur,67
Mitford, Bernard, 133 Polo, Marco, 156
Moore, Brian, 31 Pontecorvo, 69
Moore, George, 13 Pope, Alexander, 7
Moore, Gerald, 66 Powell, Robert, 208
Moore, Sir John, 194 Princy, Charles, 10
Morley, John, 200
Mosley, Oswald, 207 Raskin, Jonah, 1, 66
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 13 Ratcliffe, Dorothy Vera, 119
Murcro, H. H., 184 Reid, Stephen A., 103
Muthali,Felix,99-102 Remarque, Erich Maria Von, 210
Index 227
Rhodes, Cecil, 17, 82, 112, 151 Steward, J. I. M., 96

Richard I (of England), 194 Stigant, Paul, 133
Richards, Jeffrey, 209 Stirling, Lieutenant-Colonel, 175
Richards, Shaun, 26 Stokes, Charles Henry, 102-3
Richter, Haus, 154 Stone, VVilliam, 185
Robb, David, 208 Storrs, Sir Ronald, 156, 167, 171
Rosenberg, Carl, 154 Sutherland, John, 132
Rowlandson, Thomas, 18 Sutton, Richard, 119
Rupert (Prince of the Netherlands) Swindells, Madge, 129
194 ' Sykes, Mark, 156
Rushdie, Salman, 69-71, 73 Synge, John Millington, 26
Russell, Bertrand, 184 Symons, H. H., 121, 123
Salisbury, Lord, 154

Sandison, A., 68 Taaisha, Abdullah el, 201
Saud, Zbn, 171 Taylor, Philip Meadows, 13-14
Scipio, Africanus, 214 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 19, 70, 193
Sergeant, Howard, 66 Tewfik, Khedive, 202
Seymour, Sir Frederick Paget 197- Th?ckerey, VVilliam Makepeace, 14
8 ' Thiongo'o, Ngugi, VVa, 69-71
Thomas, Lowell, 156, 161-4
Seymour, Jane, 208
Shakespeare, VVilliam,6, 168 Thomson, David, 30
works of, 93-4, 197, 205, 213 works of, 30-2
Sharp, Arthur, 114 Tippoo, Sultan, 12
Sharp, Colin Ainsworth, 128--31 Tolkien, J. R. R., 185
145--6 ' Tovey, Donald, Francis, 156
Treath, Stella, Court, 116-18, 120-
works of, 129-31
Sharp, Don, 208 1, 123, 125
Shaw, Charlotte, 150 Trenchard, Lord, 159, 174
Shaw, George Bernard, 65, 150, Tressall, Robert, 66
Trevo~ VVilliam,33-4, 37
168, 177
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 13, 167, 215 Trew, Anthony, 129, 146
Sheriff, R. C., 190, 207, 210 works of, 140-2
Sherry, Norman, 102 Trilling, Lionel, 64, 96
Shoedsack, Ernest, 207 Trotsky, Leon, 72
Sidney, Sir Philip, 156 Tsafendas, Dimitno, 138--9
Sidney, Sir Richard, 194 Turpin, Dick, 165
Smith, VVilbur, 129, 133, 146 Tylor, Sir Edward Barnett, 103
Smollett, Tobias, 5 Tutvola, Amos, 65
Speke, 153
Springhall, John, 0., 201 Verwoerd, President Hendrick (of
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 75, 107 South Africa), 133, 138
Soyinka, VVole, 65 Victoria, Queen, 19, 205
Spenser, Edmond, 25
Spengler, Oswald, 107 VValcoff, Derek, 71
Sprat, Thomas, 79 VValler, S. E., 58
Stanley, Henry, 114, 153, 163, 208 VValpole, Horace, 5
Steevens, G. VV., 164, 182 VValpole, Robert, 6
Steel, Anthony, 207 VValsh, VVilliam, 66
228 Index
Ward, Simon, 208 Wingate, Reginald, 186

Watt, Ian, 102 Winter, Denis, 193
Watts, Cedric, 94 Winterton, Lord, 159
Waugh, Evelyn, 193 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 36
Wellington, Duke of, 17 Wolf, General Charles, 152
Wells, H. G., 104, 210 Wolseley, General Sir Garnet, 18,
White, Edward, 119 197-8,201
Widdowson, Peter, 132 Wood, Sir Evelyn, 186
Wilcox, Steward C., 93 Woodville, Richard Caton, 19
Wilhelm IT (Kaiser of Germany), Woolley, Leonard, 156
156, 184
Wilkes, John, 10 Xenophon, 171
Wilson, Sir Arnold, 166, 171
Wilson, Jeremy, 172 Young, Terence, 207
Wilson, Woodrow, 161
Wingate, Orde, 177 Zoffany, Johann, 8

Literature and Imperialism

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LITERATURE AND IMPERIALISM

First published in the United States of America in 1991

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Notes on the Contributors vi

2 The Cross of St George: The Burden of Contemporary

3 Race and Empire in the Stories of R. M. Ballantyne 44

5 Ironies of Progress: Joseph Conrad and Imperialism in

6 Imperial Integration on Wheels: The Car, the British and

8 T. E. Lawrence: The Myth and the Message 150

9 Cry God for Harry, England and Lord Kitchener: A Tale

Select Bibliography 220

Robert Giddings, the editor of this volume, is a Senior Lecturer in

Dennis Butts is Senior Lecturer in English at Bulmershe College

D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke is Professor of English and Head of the

John M. MacKenzie is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History

Christopher Parker is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History

John A. Stotesbury is Senior Lecturer in English at the University

Daphne B. Watson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of

James B. Wolf is Professor of History at the University of Colorado

Conrad saw the world-wide extension of capital-

Winston Churchill once remarked that, although it was difficult to

explored overseas, began as soon as European travellers and

and financial systems, arms-spending and the maintenance of

In about 1500, England was a 'backward' country, without a

a country with a traditional economy. But commerce was begin-

By the end of the seventeenth century British commerce was

its profits to Britain.

articles of general consumption were brought in to satisfy the

industry. Quality was regulated by a government marking-system

Unnumber' d treasures ope at once, and here

'Luxury' became one of the buzz words of the mid-18th century,

Around the world each needful product flies,

The question Goldsinith poses is how we should judge between a

a garden and a grave.

of Utrecht) was highly advantageous to British trading interests.

of the Pinney family in Bristol were founded on sugar and slaves.

an ancient Border stock who held lands in the Douglas country.

Even this glowing resume scarcely does credit to the enterprising

was the result of investments in Demerara in the West Indies. As

the Company's control amounted to just 3 square miles. The

Trade, commerce, colonisation and imperialism rapidly made an

Nizam. He was a local correspondent for The Times in London from

Boggley Wallah is situated in a fine, lonely, marshy, jungly

pictures of ships speeding away full sail to all parts of the

The young hero, Walter Gay, is presumed lost when one of

It is no accident that chapter 51 is called 'Mr Dombey and the

when laissez-faire capitalism merged into monopoly capitalism, and

System of Field Manoeuvres Best Adapted for Enabling our Troops

dagoes in the four comers of the globe. Characters in comics were

English poetry, the authentic voice of the hired labourer of British

I went into a public 'ouse to get a pinto' beer,

And it was Kipling who, in the poem he composed as the crowned

God of our fathers, known of old,

The tumult and the shouting dies;

Far-called, our navies melt away;

At the end of the century, Thomas Hardy cycled fifty miles to

Here, where Vespasian's legions struck the sands,

Vaster battalions press for further strands,

Yellow as autumn leaves, alive as spring;

Wives, sisters, parents, wave white hands and smile,

1. Jonah Raskin, The Mythology of Imperialism: Rudyard Kipling, Joseph

I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder

Embedded in these two quotations are a number of assumptions

ment is simple and understandable: essentially Deane and Kiberd