Crossing Borders in Victorian Travel : Spaces, Nations and Empires [1 ed.] 9781527509634, 9781527503724

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Crossing Borders in Victorian Travel

Crossing Borders in Victorian Travel: Spaces, Nations and Empires Edited by

Barbara Franchi and Elvan Mutlu

Crossing Borders in Victorian Travel: Spaces, Nations and Empires Edited by Barbara Franchi and Elvan Mutlu This book first published 2018 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2018 by Barbara Franchi, Elvan Mutlu and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-0372-0 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0372-4

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii List of Illustrations ................................................................................... viii List of Contributors .................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Barbara Franchi and Elvan Mutlu Section A: Performing Gender, Ethnicity and Empire: Orientalism and Queerness Chapter One ............................................................................................... 14 Portrait of a Victorian Explorer: Richard F. Burton on Myths and Exoticism Silvia Antosa Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 40 Explorers, Doctors and Butlers: Queer Masculinity and Empire in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone Barbara Franchi Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 65 Dislocating Orientalism in Julia Pardoe’s The City of the Sultan; and the Domestic Manners of the Turks, in 1836 Aslı Kutluk Section B: Re-reading African Space: British Imperialism and Resistance Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 86 ‘Conceive of a London which a Negro, Fresh from Central Africa, Would Take Back to his Tribe!’: Exploration and Time/Travel in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine Lara Atkin

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Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 106 ‘That far-off Southern tomb’: Visions and Versions of South Africa in British Newspaper Poetry of the 1899-1902 South African War Elizabeth Rawlinson-Mills Section C: Encountering Other Empires: Viewing Europe through British Eyes Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 132 ‘The Sheepish Fear of Deserting the Common Track is upon us’: The (Emotional) Assessment of Space and Time in Victorian Guidebooks Heidi Liedke Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 150 German Nature: Jerome K. Jerome and Reading National Character into Landscape Rebecka Klette Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 172 Carmen Sylva, Postcards, and the Commercialisation of Travel Laura Nixon Section D: Circling the Globe: 'Empire Boys' at Home and in the World Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 196 H. Rider Haggard, Englishness and ‘Rural England’: A Cosmopolitan Voice from the Countryside Elvan Mutlu Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 219 Kipling the Oriental Tourist: Rudyard Kipling’s Travel Letters of 1889 John Anders Index ........................................................................................................ 236

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This collection is the outcome of Victorian Travel and Imperial Spaces, an international and interdisciplinary conference that we co-organised in May 2015 at the University of Kent. This conference gathered early-career scholars and established academics working around questions of space, travel, mobility and imperialism. The fruitful conversations of the event encouraged us to collect papers presented and new contributions in the format of a book, interrogating the notions of border, contact and imagination in the context of Victorian travel and mobility. In this respect, we are very grateful to the following bodies, all based at the University of Kent for having sponsored the initial event: Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, the School of English, the Centre for Victorian Literature and Culture, and Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. Our most heartfelt thanks go to Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah, Professor Wendy Parkins, Professor Cathy Waters, Professor David Herd and Professor Silvia Antosa, for their precious support and keen critical suggestions. Huge thanks go to our committed peer-reviewers, whose attentive reading and help was instrumental for the positive outcome of this book. Last but not least, our most substantial debt is to the contributors of the volume whose passion, hard work and belief in this project have made this book possible.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

All images listed below have been adapted from the original by the contributors of Chapters 1 and 8, and the editors. Fig. 1.1. ‘The highly civilised man’ – by Antoine Claudet, London (1861). Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Cartes et plans, Société de Géographie, SG PORTRAIT – 317. ......................... 32 Fig. 1.2. Ernest Edwards, Sir Richard Francis Burton, in Portraits Of Men Of Eminence In Literature, Science, And Art With Biographical Memoirs, vol. 3, (London: Alfred William Bennett, April 1865). 3 3/8 in. x 2 5/8 in. (87 mm x 68 mm) image size (National Portrait Gallery, London)................................................................................................ 33 Fig. 1.3. Frederic Leighton, Sir Richard Francis Burton, oil on canvas, 1872-1875, 24 in. x 20 1/8 in. (610 mm x 510 mm) overall NPG 1070 (National Portrait Gallery, London) ..................................................... 34 Fig. 1.4. Punch caricature: Caption: ‘Our Un-Commercial Traveller’. Burton Depicted in Turkish dress with two figures in background labelled Baedeker’ and ‘Murray's Guide’; a speech bubble says ‘A bit ahead of us my boy’ ............................................................................. 35 Fig. 1.5. (Caricature) by Carlo Pellegrini; watercolour on blue paper, published in Vanity Fair 24 October 1885 (National Portrait Gallery, London) http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitExtended /mw07154/Sir-Richard-Francis-Burton ............................................... 36 Fig. 8.1. Carmen Sylva, 1909. A Tribute to Charles Dickens [postcard]. Portsmouth: W.H. Barrell, Ltd. .......................................................... 177 Fig. 8.2. Carmen Sylva, 1909. A Tribute to Charles Dickens [postcard]. Portsmouth: W.H. Barrell, Ltd. .......................................................... 178 Fig. 8.3. Anonymous, Königin von Rumänien (Carmen Sylva) an der Schreibmaschine [postcard], Germany, G.L Co. (Gustav Liersch and Co.) Image no. 2472, no date ...................................................... 184 Fig. 8.4. Ruby to Mrs Cox, 1899, Carmen Sylvas Königreich [postcard]. Berlin: H. Wagshund Kunst-Anstalt .................................................. 186

CONTRIBUTORS

John Anders, doctoral candidate, School of English, University of Kent. His thesis investigates the strange properties of Rudyard Kipling’s Jest, a condition that is characterised by unruliness and chaotic disruption, and often becomes an entry point into a world that seemingly opposes the ordered colonial world that he is commonly associated with. Although this thesis stems from a recent interest in his material, John commenced his academic career way back in the 1970s with an engineering degree from the former Woolwich Polytechnic which has morphed through a long and complicated path into an interest in literature and postcolonial theory. Dr Silvia Antosa, Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Enna-Kore (Italy). She is the author of Richard Francis Burton: Victorian Explorer and Translator (Bern, Oxford and New York, Peter Lang, 2012) and Crossing Boundaries: Bodily Paradigms in Jeanette Winterson’s Fiction 1985-2000 (Rome, Aracne, 2008). She has edited several interdisciplinary volumes on queer theories and practices. Queer Crossings: Theories, Bodies, Texts (Milan and Udine, Mimesis 2012), Gender and Sexuality: Rights, Language and Performativity (Rome, Aracne 2012) and Omosapiens II: Spazi e identità queer (Roma, Carocci 2007). She has published extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature; her research interests are Victorian fiction; nineteenth-century travel writing, postmodern fiction and queer theories. She has recently coedited a special issue of Textus: English Studies in Italy (1, 2015) on the construction of gender and sexuality in modern and contemporary British fiction with Joseph Bristow. Dr Lara Atkin, ERC Postdoctoral Fellow, University College Dublin on the SouthHem project. This is a five-year project examining settler and indigenous writing in the British-Controlled Southern Hemisphere, 17801870. She completed her PhD in English at Queen Mary, University of London in 2017. Her thesis, entitled ‘“The Truest Native of South Africa: The ‘Bushman’ in Early Nineteenth-Century British and Settler Culture’ looks at representations of the southern African ‘Bushman’ in Anglophone literature between 1795 and 1850. Her research interests are in Romantic and Victorian literature; missionary writing; ethnography and displayed

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peoples; and the literatures and institutions of colonial South Africa. Her work has appeared in Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies. She has also reviewed various works on Victorian anthropology and exhibition culture for the Journal of Victorian Culture. Dr Barbara Franchi, Associate Lecturer in English, University of Kent and Canterbury Christ Church University. She obtained her PhD at the University of Kent in 2017, where she wrote a thesis titled ‘Ideas that Matter: Strategies of Intertextuality in A. S. Byatt’s Fiction’. Her further research interests are Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction, contemporary literature in English, feminism, postcolonialism and posthumanism. Her publications include ‘Travelling across Worlds and Texts in A. S. Byatt’s Sea Narratives,’ in Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600present (edited by Charlotte Mathieson, 2016), and a co-edited special issue on Modernity and Women Travellers in Victorian and neo-Victorian literature for Partial Answers: the Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas (2018). Rebecka Klette, Mphil/PhD student in History, Birkbeck College, University of London. Her PhD thesis, funded by a Wellcome Trust Doctoral Studentship, is entitled ‘Nordic Decay: The reception and application of degeneration theory and the concept of atavism in Scandinavian cultural debate, criminal anthropology, medicine, and eugenics, 1880-1922.’ Her MA dissertation (2015) focused on representations of German national character in British satire 1870-1914, combining literary sources (primarily Jerome K. Jerome’s “Three Men on the Bummel”) and visual sources such as political cartoons. Asli Kutluk, tenured research assistant at the Department of English Language and Literature, Selçuk University (Turkey) and a doctoral candidate in English Literature at the Middle East Technical University (Turkey). She got her MA degree at Hacettepe University (Turkey) with a thesis entitled The Self and the Other: Representations of Turkey and the Turks in the Travel Writings of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Richard Chandler in 2006. She spent a year (April 2011-April 2012) as a visiting scholar at the University of Kent (UK), School of English, Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. She presented papers on Wole Soyinka, Olaudah Equiano, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill at conferences. One of her papers, entitled “The Position of Women in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day” was published in Gender Studies, 2012.

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She was also on the editorial board of the Proceedings of the 18th and 20th METU British Novelists conferences on Jane Austen (2011) and Salman Rushdie (2013). Her major research interests include travel writing, postcolonial drama and Wole Soyinka. Dr Heidi Liedke, research assistant and postdoctoral candidate at the English Department at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Campus Landau (Germany). She obtained her PhD in 2016 at the University of Freiburg/Collaborative Research Centre SFB 1015 ‘Muße’ (idleness/ leisure/otium) with a dissertation that explored the experience of idleness in Victorian travel writing and idling as a mode of travel in its own right. Heidi’s research interests are travel texts from the 19th century, idling in literature, literary urban studies, the history of the ‘event’ and contemporary British theatre. She is founder and co-editor of the e-journal Muße. Ein Magazin which publishes academic and feuilleton style articles on the topics of leisure and idleness in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Recently, two of her articles on W. H. Hudson and Bruce Chatwin have been published in Recherches & Travaux and Textus. Dr Elvan Mutlu, Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at Mehmet Akif Ersoy University, (Turkey). She received her PhD from the University of Kent, where she wrote a thesis on H. Rider Haggard and his travel texts, and her MA in Victorian Literature from the University of Leeds in 2011. Her research interests cover several aspects of Victorian literature, especially the Victorian Supernatural and late-Victorian romance fiction, British imperial and colonial literature, postcolonial theory, travel writing, landscape and identity, the works of agricultural writers, and the Contemporary South African Novel. She is on the editorial board of International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies and is regularly peer reviewing for Victorian Network and Readings: A Journal for Scholars and Readers. Dr Laura Nixon, early career researcher, Faculty of Arts, University of Nottingham. Her work is focused on Carmen Sylva and her significance to British literary culture in the nineteenth century. More broadly, she is also interested in women’s writing, short stories, and Anglo-German cultural relations in the nineteenth century. Elizabeth Rawlinson-Mills, University Lecturer in Education, University of Cambridge, and doctoral candidate and Wolfson Scholar, English Department, UCL. Her PhD project is entitled “Poetry, politics and

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popular cultures: newspaper poems of the South African War (18991902)”. She particularly loves working with archives, and her research interests include Victorian newspapers and print cultures, women’s writing, war literature and the place of poetry in popular culture and education.

INTRODUCTION BARBARA FRANCHI AND ELVAN MUTLU

A minute, then another minute, as we steamed past Seraglio Point […] I glimpse a vast space filled with light and colour […] We’ve passed the Point […] and there is the city of Constantinople. Endless, sublime, superb! The glory of creation and of the human race! So much beauty had not been a dream after all! (De Amicis [1877] 2010, 12)1

Upon his arrival in the capital of the Ottoman Empire in 1874, nineteenthcentury Italian journalist and novelist Edmondo De Amicis (1846-1908), describes Constantinople with a mix of awe, admiration and incredulity.2 The city is beautiful and glorious, it represents at one time the history of the East and the West, Europe with its Roman, Christian (and Byzantine) pasts, Islam, and, indeed, the whole of humankind. As a concentration of global and historical connections, nineteenth-century Constantinople exercises an appeal to De Amicis not so much because of what he sees with his eyes, but because of how he perceives the actual appearance of the city before his eyes. As a cultivated, relatively young, European intellectual De Amicis sets off to find in his vision of the city what he expected to find, what he had glimpsed at through his readings of previous travel writers,3 and what he has come to see for himself. Experiencing another place for real, travelling to a new destination and negotiating one’s movement in an unknown space is an act which 1 Edmondo De Amicis, Constantinople, [1877] trans. Stephen Parkin (London: Alma Classics, 2010), 12. 2 Throughout this introduction, Constantinople and Istanbul are used interchangeably. 3 On the same page, De Amicis mentions his readings of Chateaubriand, Lamartine and Gautier, the very French authors that Said uses as emblematic examples of Orientalist views of Eastern Mediterranean spaces. See Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1985).

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challenges one’s comfort zone, and places one in a condition questioning one’s perception of oneself and one’s identity. Indeed, if travel is always a profoundly transforming experience, one that ‘requires us to negotiate a complex and sometimes unsettling interplay between alterity and identity, difference and similarity,’4 it inevitably requires taking into account the relationship between self and other (place, reality, culture, people). Encountering the other is also a way to see the extraneousness, the distance between one and the other party, and considering the role (and effect) of existing power structures in that relationship. Indeed, facing the unknown, or interacting with the stranger, is an act dense with political and ontological meaning, one which entails the crossing and potential friction between gazes and voices. In cases where the encounter is mediated, or filtered through racial, religious, class or gender differences, the stranger is no more another being with whom to exchange a glance or a word, but, as Sara Ahmed powerfully highlights, ‘an effect of processes of inclusion and exclusion, or incorporation and expulsion, that constitute the boundaries of bodies and communities, including communities of living (dwelling and travel), as well as epistemic communities’.5 The stranger becomes one, then, in the eye of the beholder, in the eyes of those who see one as strange, as other, those who turn their gaze towards the unknown that attracts their attention and curiosity. To return to the example mentioned above, De Amicis sights the city of Istanbul in a similar way: as an object of fascination and curiosity, and a place to turn into the subject of his writing. Constantinople then emblematises the viewpoint of the gazer, the observer, into the form of the travel report, written and published as a guidebook to future (Italian and Western or, to put it better, the travellers from all corners of the world) travellers going in De Amicis’s footsteps to discover their own version of the Ottoman capital. The personal is always political, and the global has implications on the local when it comes to travel writing. Because of its investment in the experiences of encounter occurring at a personal level, travel writing is never fully objective, nor is it necessarily a faithful reproduction of ‘the truth’.6 Indeed, when guidebooks, newspapers and other types of text which appear as reliable and objective come to include travel poetry and fictional accounts, the idea of relating a journey, and reflecting on the impact of that experience of encounter in the written form comes to intersect with the arts of fiction. At the same time, fiction has made of 4

Carl Thompson, Travel Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 10. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 6. 6 See Thompson, Travel Writing, 10-12. 5

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travel, mobility and the tensions generated by cross-cultural encounters a key theme that allows for the exploration of questions of identity, the construction of the self, and the very idea of place, locale and empire. The time in which De Amicis writes his highly personal - and fictionalized - account of his journey to Istanbul is important, in that it corresponded to the height of the British Empire, and the beginning of the decline of the Ottoman Empire. This element is relevant, in that accounts like De Amicis’s are crucial examples of how nineteenth-century culture has shaped the notions and spaces of empire. Indeed, if travel to a new, unknown, unfamiliar place always entails an encounter with the Other (be it welcomed, mediated through one’s expectations or not), a more complex dynamic occurs whenever travel is embedded in the hierarchies of empire. According to Sara Ahmed, [c]olonialism as an encounter involves not only the territorial domination of one culture by another, but also forms of discursive appropriation: other cultures become appropriated into the imaginary globality of the colonising nation.’7 De Amicis, who, from his Italian perspective, experienced European imperialism from a liminal position, travelled to Constantinople to find his vision of the city confirmed; the city is encompassed in his perspective so as to suit his imagination. Similarly, the chapters in this book look at how the age of empires has created the tension between imaginary versions of places and the gaze of the Western travellers immersing themselves in colonized territories, or foreign countries. Visions of empire shaped travel practices and define empire as a space of clash, encounter and tension, by taking into account both fictional and non-fictional forms of writing. As Mary Louise Pratt has argued, despite the clear predominance of one cultural approach that tends to superimpose its views on every other one, however, the boundary is always more unstable than that, and indeed has always an aspect of contact and exchange about it: the ‘contact zone’. Pratt describes this ‘contact zone’ as a social space where cultures meet and clash, and where the constructions of subordinate others is the result of the processes of ‘transculturation’ and domination on the part of the European colonising power.8 In the context of African travel literature, the viewer’s eyes always coincide with the viewer’s identity (the ‘I’) – an element which has highly contentious issues in the context of shaping colonial identities through travel, in that it reinforces the hierarchy between observer’s gaze and the observed culture’s incorporation that Ahmed points out. Following Pratt’s 7

Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 11. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge: 1992), 4.

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observation, Lindy Stiebel has suggested that ‘Empire was about information gathering, laying secrets bare by mapping, naming, classifying: yet, on the other [hand], the attraction of the colonies lay in their ultimate unknowability, their secrecy’.9 Indeed, the process of unearthing the unknown space through travel is the primary result of the curious, inquisitive and self-identifying eye that the colonial gaze has produced. Equally, the contrast between desire of knowledge and dark secrecy attached to (especially African) travel also witnessed strange encounters between the European travellers and explorers, and urged Henry Morton Stanley to ask his famous question in his book, How I Found Livingstone (1872): ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’10 Following the Berlin Conference of 1884-5, which is regarded as the starting point of the so-called Scramble for Africa, a popular image of Africa as the centre of darkness, fear and evil emerged in the British psychology.11 This was also the period when ‘Empire Boys’ built upon the notion of uncharted territories to explore their ‘Hearts of Darkness,’ and produced most of their significant works of travel literature.12 While Robert Louis Stevenson celebrated the South Pacific in his travel writing, H. Rider Haggard set his well-known romances in Africa, and India was always at the centre of Rudyard Kipling’ stories. In this context, how was the notion of Empire defined and challenged by Victorian travellers? How did the multiple forms of Victorian travel literature (fiction, travel accounts, newspapers, and poetry) shape perceptions of imperial and national spaces, in the British context and beyond? This collection examines how, in the Victorian era, imperial space has been shaped and defined by travel narratives and practices, from a variety of methodological and critical perspectives. From the travel writings of artists and polymaths such as Carmen Sylva and Jerome K. Jerome, to a reassessment of Rudyard Kipling’s and Richard Burton’s cross-cultural and cross-gender travels, this collection examines a broad 9

Lindy Stiebel, “Imagining Empire’s Margins: Land in Rider Haggard’s African Romances,” in Being/s in transit: Travelling, Migration, Dislocation, ed. Liselotte Glage (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 130. See also Jessica Howell’s Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Disease, Race and Climate (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). 10 Henry M. Stanley, How I Found Livingstone: Travels, Adventures and Discoveries in Central Africa (London: S. Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1872). 11 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 18301914 ( London and New York: Cornell University Press, 1990), 179. 12 Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: Unwin Hyman, 1991).

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range of canonical and lesser-studied Victorian travel texts and genres, and evaluates the representation of empires, nations, and individual identity in travel accounts (real and fictional) covering areas such as Europe, Asia, Africa and Britain. Travel writing in this book, therefore, blurs the boundaries between spaces, viewpoints and genres, while retaining its focus on the problematic specificity that the traveller’s gaze intrinsically carries. Born as a way to connect readers in the comfort of their armchair, more often than not located in the West, in Europe and in the centre of imperial, political and financial power, to the distant, exotic lands that they imagine themselves visiting, travel writing is always the representation of a specific viewpoint and perspective. Charlotte Mathieson suggests that [t]he idea of the nation as a community imaginatively unified through networks of print was thus accompanied by the production of the nation as a unified space, in which regulated, systematised networks of mobility re-ordered the nation-place into a conceptually homogenous unit.’13 The notion of empire works in similar terms: if, as Mathieson highlights, the existence of the national mail and a more regulated travel system (e.g. via the railway and an improved road system) contributed to shaping Victorian Britain, as a nation and as a space, so did global trade and travel networks define the idea of empire. Throughout the nineteenth century, travel writing was as instrumental as the infrastructures in constructing that space: as this book explores, as diverse types of writing as guidebooks, biographies, diaries, letters, novels and poems played a crucial contribution in this respect. The connection between individual identity and the construction of a sense of empire is exemplified by the three essays comprising the first section of this collection, titled Performing Gender, Ethnicity and Empire: Orientalism and Queerness. This part examines the intersection between the imperial enterprise, travel practices, gender and sexuality: by taking into account the travel writings of Sir Richard Burton and Julia Pardoe, and the mobility depicted by Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, these three essays analyse how travel texts engage in performative strategies to represent, or oppose discourses of imperial hegemony and cross-cultural encounter. Chapter 1, by Silvia Antosa, investigates Burton’s queerness and his wide array of hybrid cultural identities as a fluid, mobile perspective which opposes the imperial allegiances of his year-long experiences in the diplomatic service. By focusing on Burton’s travel accounts, his biographies and portraits, Antosa argues that the Victorian 13 Charlotte Mathieson, Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 5.

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polymath embraces an unstable identity that determined his success at challenging the imperial dynamics from within. His cross-dressing practices and his cultural shifts in the spaces between places and languages become then a primary location of empire in itself, albeit one which resists the dual divisions of gendered spaces and spheres. Similarly, Barbara Franchi’s chapter (Chapter 2) considers the relationship between queerness, masculinity and empire in Wilkie Collins’s detective novel The Moonstone (1868). By analysing the movement of goods and characters in the text, Franchi assesses the relationship between centre and periphery at stake in the novel, emphasised by the presence of imperial merchandise such as diamonds and opium, and highlights how Collins uses tropes of imperial travel to produce a critique of imperial domination. The crucial relationship between the European appropriation of the Orient under a western, Eurocentric gaze and gender is central to Asli Kutluk’s assessment of Orientalism in Julia Pardoe’s The City of Sultan and the Domestic Manners of Turks (1836). Kutluk’s analysis on this relatively understudied author of travel accounts and her travel practices, which include cross-dressing, adds layers of complexity to the notion of female domesticity by placing it alongside the self-emancipatory dimension of travel. At the same time, by getting access to spaces traditionally precluded to men in Istanbul (both local and foreign), such as harems, Pardoe adds an important voice to the travel accounts by western individuals to the Ottoman capital, one which goes beyond the awe-struck, fantasised impressions De Amicis et al communicate. Part two is titled Re-reading African Space: British Imperialism and Resistance, and it examines the theme of anxiety and resistance to empire in Victorian travel texts about Africa. Since Patrick Brantlinger’s Rule of Darkness was published in 1988, many scholars have discussed the representation of the ‘Dark Continent’ and how it is interpreted, and reinterpreted by European travellers. While Lara Atkin’s essay on H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine contributes to these debates, it brings together Johannes Fabian’s concept of space/time distancing,14 chronological progression and cultural regression in Well’s novella. Atkin argues that one factor which gives the book advantage is the analogy that could be made between the Time-Traveller and the African explorer, suggesting that this similarity urges Wells to question and criticise the presence of imperial rules on African topography. Conversely, Elizabeth RawlinsonMills’s essay depends on an extensive archival research in which she 14 See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

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engages with the importance of popular newspaper poems about the Boer War, and considers how poets reveal their own anxieties developed as a consequence of the British administrative system in South Africa. Rawlinson-Mills analyses the several defeats British troops had and how this complicated British national psychology, given that these newspapers were publishing both patriotic poems and poems that raised controversial questions. The authors of this section show how, in the texts they examine, the very practice of empire is questioned in the contexts of ‘Dark Continent’ explorations. Poetry about travel and commodities is central also to the collection’s third section, titled Encountering Other Empires: Viewing Europe through British Eyes. This part focuses on British travellers in Europe, European travellers in Britain, and how modern travel practices operate in the construction of national identity. In Chapter 6 Heidi Liedke examines how Victorian guidebooks and new publications encouraging travel and tourism shaped the experience of tourism as deeply embedded in the (capitalist) idea of productive time, busy time and an experience of the reassuring, the known. Liedke argues that these guidebooks create new dimensions of the concept of time and space for Victorian travellers, as they seek to reassure travellers about modernity by providing a safe space of the known, a connection between the known home and the unknown of the places that are not home traversed by individuals’ travels. Feeling reassured about home while looking for glimpses of it abroad becomes central also in Chapter 7. Here, Rebecka Klette provides an insightful discussion of how, in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men on the Bummel, stereotypical perceptions of the German and British national characters are represented, and ridiculed, through natural and environmental tropes. By highlighting how the local and national character in British travel literature is inextricably linked to imperial practices abroad, Klette also sets the tone for necessary future research into travel literature’s representations of empire in the context of environmental sustainability. Laura Nixon further expands the iconic notion of popular travel writings in Chapter 8, where she analyses the tourist culture and celebrity developed in late-Victorian Britain around the figure of Carmen Sylva, novelist, travel writer, Queen of Romania and icon. Enormously popular in 1890s Britain, this noncanonical figure in late-Victorian culture produced insightful accounts of her British travels which, Nixon argues, destabilise British hegemonic discourses in imperial and European contexts, and contribute to defining Britain as a location for tourists who come in search for the thrill and novelty that Britons were trying to seek beyond the channel.

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The fourth and final part of this book brings two writers of lateVictorian romance fiction together, who, besides being contemporaries, enjoyed a life-long friendship: H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling. Both writers reached the peak of fame during late-Victorian culture: Kipling for his Jungle Books (1894) and Haggard for his King Solomon’s Mines (1885). This section, which is titled Circling the Globe: ‘Empire Boys’ at Home and in the World revisits these two Empire boys and their work, and brings a new, unexpected, approach to their travel texts by reading them as local yet global writing. Elvan Mutlu examines Haggard’s travels across rural England, and how they informed his perception and redefinition of the English national identity. Mostly well-known for his romances written on African landscape, this chapter suggests, Haggard’s substantial work on the depiction of the English agriculture and landscape has been ignored. Mutlu’s chapter brings a new angle to Haggardian studies by focusing on the historic representation of the English landscape, and how Haggard connects the local to the global through celebrating the multiplicity of ancestral roots. Mutlu’s essay argues that Haggard’s engagement with English national identity could not be explained in a homogeneous and pure context; but in a rather cosmopolitan angle instead. In this respect, Mutlu suggests that Haggard’s characters do not have to cross borders to have cosmopolitan identities: by linking English national identity to ancestral sites and rural roots in Haggard’s texts, cosmopolitanism is placed at the heart of Englishness. Although Rudyard Kipling’s name has been extensively linked to the Anglo-Indian community, John Anders moves to a consideration of a larger geographical travel conducted by the writer. The final chapter focuses on Kipling’s observations and reactions to the strangeness of the people he encountered during his journey across borders. Anders suggests that this long journey was essential in the sense that it changed the way Kipling perceived different cultures and nations. Kipling’s writing found more freedom as he journeyed away from the British Raj and he could question the practices of empire more openly. Anders concentrates on Kipling’s travel through China, Japan and the USA, and concludes that the writer’s previous thoughts on the British superiority are challenged throughout his travels. In the contemporary digital era, with online travel and augmented reality, the risks and fears that emerged in travel writing in the Victorian era are emphasized. The ways in which mobility in the age of empire created areas of friction and encounter, and the tensions between gendered and racialized spaces which allowed empires to thrived while challenging them from within, are the more important in the current context of global

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networks that reinforce but at the same time defy boundaries between nations. Global tourism allows more individuals to travel than ever before, but how accessible is travel to ‘exotic’ Easts to the disenfranchised, exploited citizens of the global south? How can social media, ideally placed in the role of mediators connecting the world, cope with the censorship perpetrated by antidemocratic regimes? And, importantly, to what extent do social media contribute to reinforcing perceptions of travel as a predominantly privileged, able-bodied, white or Western practice that stems from the same ideas of privilege that made empire possible in the first place? This book is therefore placed in a postcolonial and poststructural framework, and, while looking back at how travel shaped empires and challenged the notion of imperial spaces through the continuous crossing of borders between places, genders, genres, cultures, and ideologies, it also opens important questions on whether the discrepancies of the past are reflected in the contradictions of the present. Rosi Braidotti offers an important answer to similar queries, in the form of nomadism, constructed not as the postmodern, privileged, jet-setter or globe trotter (figures not too dissimilar to their Victorian antecedents the likes of Burton, Pardoe, Sylva and Kipling), but as the epistemological position which challenges the Eurocentric viewpoint that Victorian imperialism has cemented: ‘[t]he decline of Eurocentrism questions the philosophical mind-set based on universalism as disembedded and disembodied subject position. Nomadism is about critical relocation, it is about becoming situated, speaking from somewhere specific and hence well aware of and accountable for particular locations.’15 The question of empire becomes central in light of these considerations and, we argue, nomadism is the essential counterpoint to the imperial system of divisions and separations. Indeed, this book continues in the wake of Braidotti’s work, by providing a number of case studies, from fictional as well as autobiographical writing, guidebooks and other travel texts, to analyse how travel culture and practice has shaped past empires. The crucial question that we ask ourselves is whether that empire does not have relevance on the ways space and travel are determined, here and now. According to Braidotti, nomadism is a way to read the self, and travel as a practice for the individual (with all its cultural implications) occurs at the intersection between identity, subjectivity and power.16 Indeed, mobility as a practice, and the writing about it, involve necessarily a reflection on the power of the gazer, of the viewpoint, expressed through the writing, the 15

Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 15. 16 See Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 64.

Introduction

10

subjective experience of travel, the questions of identity and displacement, the feeling of home and away, that the history of empire has emphasised. To be a nomad is to have ‘an acute awareness of the nonfixity of boundaries’.17 The texts, authors and subjects analysed here challenge this lack of clear-cut boundaries and look, from their viewpoint as Victorian travellers – be they fictional or not – the fixity of boundaries, by inventing and challenging the imperial spaces they contribute to shaping. While Braidotti views nomadism as located in the late-twentieth-century context, travel authors and texts in the nineteenth century have constructed the notion of space as that place of encounter where borders exist, but only to be crossed and challenged. This border to be crossed is, we argue, the root of the instability and non-fixity that characterize the experience of the nomad. Travel writing is by its nature personal, intimate, and political at the same time: the essays that follow show how Victorian travellers and authors have embraced this duality in order to redefine the imperial dynamics they experienced and paved the way for new relations in the contested zone of empire, before it became postcoloniality.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 . London and New York: Cornell University Press, 1990. Bristow, Joseph. Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World. London: Unwin Hyman, 1991. De Amicis, Edmondo. Constantinople. Translated by Stephen Parkin. London: Alma Classics, 2010. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Howell Jessica. Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Disease, Race and Climate. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Mathieson, Charlotte. Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. 17

Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 66.

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Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. Second edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Stanley, Henry M. How I Found Livingstone: Travels, Adventures and Discoveries in Central Africa. London: S. Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1872. Stiebel, Lindy. "Imagining Empire’s Margins: Land in Rider Haggard’s African Romances." In Being/s in transit: Travelling, Migration, Dislocation, edited by Liselotte Glage, 125-140. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Thompson, Carl. Travel Writing. London and New York: Routledge, 2011.

SECTION A: PERFORMING GENDER, ETHNICITY AND EMPIRE: ORIENTALISM AND QUEERNESS

CHAPTER ONE PORTRAIT OF A VICTORIAN EXPLORER: RICHARD F. BURTON ON MYTHS AND EXOTICISM SILVIA ANTOSA

The individuality of Burton was so unique, so singular, so many-sided, so extremely startling to all commonplace people, so utterly confounding and unintelligible to all ordinary persons, that the idea of anyone presuming to know it when he was himself unknown is amazing and almost comical in its audacity.1

Rereading Burton, once again Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) was a Victorian explorer, an incredibly prolific travel writer, an expert linguist and translator and a pioneer in the field of psychology and anthropology. He was a complex and controversial figure, who has inspired a wide variety of responses that – far from depicting a univocal character – reveal a many-sided, provocative and highly-debated personality. Contemporary readers, former friends, and biographers from the 1890s up to today have given diverse and, sometimes even opposing readings of Burton’s life and work. One of the most controversial fields of debate is Burton’s relationship with British colonialism and his productive, although ambivalent, contribution to the construction of Victorian discourses on race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. On the one hand, he supported the colonial project; but, on the other, he was an outsider who contested imperial authorities. In so doing, 1

Ouida, ‘Richard Burton,’ Fortnightly Review 85 (1906): 1039.

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he defied the normative sociocultural rules of his country by exploring, appropriating and importing the rituals and the languages of other cultures. In addition, his travels enabled him to develop a unique relationship with the country of his birth, which was marked by a sense of cultural, geographical and ontological displacement from British society. Burton did not always assume a consistent perspective, and the arguments he used to support his ideas tended to change both synchronically and diachronically according to context. In this sense, Burton’s controversial ideological assumptions also revealed the epistemic instabilities and the contradictions of his own age. In the nineteenth century, with the conquests of India (1798-1804), the British programme of colonial expansion seemed to have reached its highest point. The profits coming from India – given the success of the British Raj after 1813 and above all after the so-called Indian Mutiny in 1857 – were even sufficient to compensate for the losses of the American colonies and the former West Indian colonies.2 Queen Victoria became the Empress of India in 1876, and her coronation marked the primacy of England over all the other nations in the world.3 However, alongside this growing colonial success, which seemed to mark the apex of British domination and control of the colonised other, England was in the grip of axiological uncertainty, which gave rise to anxieties and tensions. As the cultural and moral stability of the Victorian system gradually unravelled, a growing awareness emerged of the new sociocultural paradigms coming from the colonies – countries which were generally perceived as dangerous but which also held the promise of renewal. Contact with ‘other’ cultures, languages and people caused a reassessment of British identity. The relationship between the countless British travellers, members of the Empire, anthropologists and explorers and the ‘other’, colonised populations cannot be easily subsumed under the hierarchical dichotomy Self vs Other, as theorised by Edward Said. In his discussion of ‘Orientalism’, Said defined it as ‘a Western style for dominating,

2

See Robert Johnson, British Imperialism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 13-14. 3 Francesco Marroni, ‘Introduction: the Victorian Ethos and the Disharmony of the World’, in Victorian Disharmonies: A Reconsideration of Nineteenth-century English Fiction (Rome: The John Cabot University Press, University of Delaware Press, 2010), 11-50.

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restructuring, and having authority over the Other’.4 Later in the text, Said specified that: Orientalism is the discipline by which the Orient was (and is) approached systematically, as a topic of learning, discovery, and practice. But in addition […] the word […] designate[s] that collection of dreams, images, and vocabularies available to anyone who has tried to talk about what lies east of the dividing line. […] [B]y use of them both Europe could advance securely and unmetaphorically upon the Orient.5

Said’s analysis of Orientalism has been criticised in particular for failing to take into account any alternatives to its dichotomic analytical model. Yet alongside the colonial process of appropriation and control of the Oriental Other, British colonisers were forging spaces of mutual interaction with the colonised, thus generating a process of hybridisation6. In order to understand this transition from a binary to a more hybrid critical approach to the colonial encounter, it is worth citing the work of Timothy Powell, who has aptly observed that: It has become clear in recent years [...] that a binary form of analysis that collapses a myriad of distinct culture voices into the overly simplistic category of “Other” defined in relationship to a European “Self” is theoretically problematic. The time has come, therefore, to initiate a new critical epoch, a period of cultural reconstruction in which “identity” is reconfigured in the midst of a multiplicity of cultural influences that more closely resembles what Homi Bhabha has called the “lived perplexity” of people’s lives.7

In addition, while acknowledging that ‘this initial phase of binary analysis’ was important and necessary, Powell advocates new ways of thinking and theorising identities by building up complex critical paradigms able to take into account ‘the fluidity, multiplicity, and intricate contradictions that

4

Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Representations of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 3 5 Said, Orientalism, 73. 6 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 4. 7 Timothy B. Powell, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Cultural Identity,’ in Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context, ed. Timothy B. Powell (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 1, emphasis in the original text.

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characterise all forms of cultural identity’.8 These might include a fresh approach to the so-called “Orientalist question” and the colonial encounter, as the British approach to colonised cultures could not help taking into account the existence of multiple voices and of countless crosscultural influences.9 Burton’s complex and ungraspable personality reflects such a breakdown of identitarian boundaries, as can be found in the shifting discourses that he wove together in his books, from his earliest work up to the translations that he undertook and published in the last years of his life. Similarly, the numerous portraits and biographies that have been written about him both during his life and after his death in 1890 reflect such an ambivalence, and oscillate between contrasting, disharmonious representations of the explorer’s life and thought. Moreover, both Burton’s contemporaries and his earliest and later biographers have focused on his achievements and failures by deploying a number of stereotypes that, in turn, have ambiguously assimilated him to, or distanced him from the construction of the colonised “others” he encountered in his many travels. As most of his work was motivated by his awareness and first-hand experience of the various modalities of contact between the British and other cultures, languages and societies, Burton has been celebrated or criticised alternatively as a representative of British colonisation and as an antiimperial subversive rebel. In the first case, critics have accused Burton of adopting Orientalist, colonial discursive tropes in his accounts of his explorations and travels in the British colonies. In so doing, they have appropriated and interpreted some of his discourses to re-create a colonial figure that, notwithstanding his weaknesses and faults, can be considered as representative of the British Empire in its highest phase of expansion. Read in this way, Burton’s work could be defined as reinforcing and perpetuating colonial discourse. Said has discussed the origin of colonial discourse theory, which deals with the critical study of literary and non-literary texts which were written and circulated in the period of British imperialism. Said has convincingly shown that the recurring models which can be found in these works stem from systems of thought that are structured by discursive frameworks that, in turn, are given strength by the power relations created 8

Powell, ‘Rethinking Cultural Identity,’ 2. On the complex processes of hybrid cross-cultural contact between the British and colonised cultures, see also Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).

9

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Chapter One

by the Empire. In other words, what emerges is a circular discourse that produces and is in turn produced by the hierarchical, symmetrical power structure on which the Empire built its axiological and economic foundations.10 Peter Hulme has further developed this issue and has pointed out that colonial discourse is: […] an ensemble of linguistically-based practises unified in their common deployment in the management of colonial relationships […]. Underlying the idea of colonial discourse […] is the presumption that during the colonial period large parts of the non-European world were produced for Europe through a discourse that imbricated sets of questions and assumptions, methods of procedure and analysis, and kinds of writing and imagery, normally separated out into the discrete areas of military strategy, political order, social reform, imaginative literature, personal memoir and so on.11

In his accounts of his travels in India, Arabia, and especially Africa and South America, Burton seems to construct and produce for his British readers several colonial ‘imbricated sets’ of assertions, descriptions and ‘assumptions’ about the non-European populations he met, thus almost literally reproducing the idea of colonial discourse discussed by Said and Hulme. On the face of it, his narratives and descriptions largely conformed to the expectations that readers at home had about such an imperial explorer and travel writer. However, as other critics have foregrounded, his production is more complex and multi-layered than it seems: whole passages and entire paragraphs are dense with criticism, contestation and anti-establishment statements that were not particularly accepted by his superiors and which also caused him trouble with the imperial authorities that – in most cases – funded his journeys and expeditions (such as the East India Company and the Royal Geographical Society). Therefore, accounts and counter-accounts by and about the Victorian explorer have contributed to the mythicisation of the figure of Burton and have revealed the gaps and the undecipherable aspects of his life and work, especially in relation to the British consolidation of imperial power and its discursive production of the system of rules and behaviours superimposed on non-European countries in the process of colonial 10

See Said, Orientalism. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 14921797 (London: Methuen, 1986), 2, italics in the text); on this issue, see also Pratt; and Sara Mills, Discourse (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). 11

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domination. In this article I argue that both discourses for and against Burton have gradually turned him into a polysemic vessel through which contrasting views and opinions have been conveyed both in the years in which he lived and after his death, thus revealing the variety of critical dialogues that dominated different historical periods. After a brief contextualising account of his life and work provided in the next section, I analyse a series of verbal and visual portraits of Burton, and reveal how the complexities and contradictions of colonialist discourses are imposed upon and channelled through Burton’s physical form and mythicised presence.

Challenging the British Empire Burton’s personality and his writing were shaped in significant ways by his different, varied experiences both within and outside Britain and Europe from an early age. Born in Devon in 1821, he spent his childhood moving between France and Italy. He received a fragmented education across these countries; moreover, it is during these early wandering years that he developed a strong interest in learning national languages and local dialects. He later became a self-taught scholar who devoted himself to the learning of a high number of foreign languages. Being able to speak and write different languages was an activity that he undertook his entire life and which was very useful, especially in his travels. Nonetheless, the sense of geographical and national displacement that he experienced in his early years reinforced Burton’s lack of belonging to any nation or culture, which would accompany him in his whole life. Rusticated from Trinity College in Oxford, in 1842 he began his career as a captain in the army of the East India Company, serving in India and later in the Crimean War. During this time he engaged with numerous languages and habits, and dressed in indigenous costumes as a means of interacting more freely with the local populations. Burton’s impersonations of local types and his confidence with the natives were criticised by his peers in the army, who considered him an odd, controversial figure. For this reason, he was accused of ‘going native’ and ‘aping Asiatics’, and was eventually nicknamed ‘the white nigger’.12 As this oxymoron indicates, Burton ended up occupying a liminal position within the British colonial settlement and was discriminated against because he seemed to blur the power line separating 12

Richard F. Burton, Sind Revisited: With Notices of the Anglo-Indian Army; Railroads; Past, Present, and Future (London: Richard Bentley, 1877), vol. 2, 2627.

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the English colonisers from the Indian populations. In addition, Burton criticised his British peers, accusing them of indulging in physical inactivity and casual sexual encounters.13 Disappointed with the ‘indolence’ of most British officials in India, in his work about his Indian years Burton undermines the figure of the ‘superior’ British gentleman by reversing the stereotypes of laziness and sensuousness through which local populations were usually portrayed in the British travelogues.14 Burton’s skills were noticed by General Charles Napier, who employed him as an investigator in disguise and a spy. For this purpose, Burton devised the character of a half-Arab, half-Iranian merchant called Mirza Abdullah the Bushiri. In this way, he could easily report on local criminality and could investigate several private cases, such as the one which involved some British soldiers attending male brothels. His detailed report caused the closure of the brothels and was filed in secret by Napier. However, the document was disclosed a few years later by other members of the Government and became the apparent reason for Burton’s resignation from the military service. Ostensibly, he was accused of personal involvement in the events he reported, or so he claimed many decades later at the beginning of his ‘Terminal Essay on Pederasty’, attached to the tenth volume of his 1885 translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night.15 In 1853, Burton set off on a pilgrimage to El-Medina and Mecca disguised in indigenous dress. The success of his two-volume account of

13

Isabel Burton, The Life of Sir Richard F. Burton (London: Chapman and Hall, 1893), vol. 1, 104; Richard F. Burton, Scinde, or, The Unhappy Valley (London: Richard Bentley, 1851), vol. 1, 40. 14 On the construction of stereotypes in British travel diaries and narratives see Elleke Boehmer, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); for an extended discussion on gender stereotypes, see the seminal work by Rana Kabbani, Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myths of Orient (London, San Francisco and Beirut: Saqi, 2008). 15 Richard Francis Burton, ‘Terminal Essay on Pederasty’, in The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, with Introduction and Explanatory Notes on the Manners and Customs of Moslem Men and a Terminal Essay upon the History of the Nights, (London and Benares: Kama Shastra Society, 1885), vol. 10. Whether these events really occurred or not is still a subject of debate. Biographers and historians have searched for the sources and the documents mentioned by Burton but no documents have been found so far (at least, no existing documents that have survived up to today).

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his two-year experience16 turned him into one of the best-known travel writers of his generation. The Holy cities of El-Medina and Mecca were forbidden to non-Muslims under the penalty of death. His main objective was to give a description of Arabic people and lands from an insider’s perspective. In order to achieve this, he decided to travel in disguise as a Muslim pilgrim rather than being open about his European identity and converting – or pretending to convert – to Islam to safely undertake the journey as previous Europeans had done.17 Burton’s skilful practice of impersonating local subjects was a successful strategy and worked as a powerful narrative element, as performing the persona of a Muslim pilgrim involved risking his life. He thus undertook the pilgrimage while putting his own safety on the line, as he often reminded his readers in his text, which became an instant editorial success. He was later engaged by the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) to explore the east coast of Africa, and led an expedition which discovered Lake Tanganyika. Thanks to this and other journeys of exploration in several regions and states of Africa, he acquired a reputation as one of the leading explorers of his generation. However, in the 1860s the public controversy between him and one of his exploring partners, John Hanning Speke, over the source of the Nile marked the beginning of the end of his own career as an explorer.18 Burton developed his scientific interest in the subject of race, which he has begun to study as an explorer of the Royal Geographical Society. In his accounts of his explorations to Africa, Burton embraced a radically different perspective to the one he had espoused in his work on India, and ended up giving voice to contemporary theories on 16 Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah (London: Longmans, 1855-1856). 17 These include: Ludovico de Varthema, an Italian traveller who in 1503 had temporarily converted to Islam to visit Mecca; the Englishman Joseph Pitts, who was captured and forced to convert; Giovanni Fanati of Ferrar; Domingo Badia y Leblich, and the Swiss Johann L. Burckhardt in 1817. 18 Several works have been written on the chain of events culminating with Speke’s mysterious death in 1864, on the day before the scheduled public debate between the two explorers which had been organised by the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Bath. These include: William Harrison, Burton and Speke (New York: St. Martins, 1992); W.B. Carnochan, The Sad Story of Burton, Speke, and the Nile; or, was John Hanning Speke a Cad? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Adrian S. Wisnicki, ‘Cartographical Quandaries: The Limits of Knowledge Production in Burton’s and Speke’s Search for the Source of the Nile’, History in Africa 35 (2008), 455-479, and Tim Jeal, Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (London: Faber & Faber, 2011).

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racial and cultural supremacy of the Europeans over black populations. His travel accounts of this period thus insist on the necessity of the colonial mission and sustain imperialist views.19 These understandings were also at the core of the Anthropological Society, which he co-founded with James Hunt in London in 1864.20 However, even if the Anthropological Society was fundamentally misogynistic, supported racist views and relied upon the monogenetic theory, Burton himself eventually shifted his theoretical views to more nuanced perspectives which, once again, seemed to question rather than reinforce his previous views. This is partially confirmed by the bulk of work he undertook in the final years he spent in Trieste, where he produced several unabridged translations of non-Western erotic works, such as The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (1883), The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui (1884), the Ananga-Ranga (Stage of the Bodiless One); or, The Hindu Art of Love (1885) and The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1885-1886). Burton’s translations were filled with comments, notes and essays in which he explored some of the issues that had interested him his entire life, especially race, gender and 22; . At the time of his death, he was working on a controversial and ground-breaking new translation of The Perfumed Garden, which was meant to include an up-to-date long dissertation on male-male desire.

Portraits of the Victorian Explorer as a (Young) Man Early biographers of Burton portrayed him as an unconventional personality, in both a positive and a negative light. In 1906, Thomas Wright published an account entitled The Life of Sir Richard Burton in two volumes. In his version of the life and work of the Victorian traveller, Wright accused him of plagiarising his unabridged version of the original The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, which had been an instant hit. In the same year, the writer Maria Louise Ramé, who published under 19 Burton’s more racist views on the ‘Negroes’ are clearly expressed in his works on Western Africa rather than other parts of the same continent. Among them, it is worth mentioning Wanderings in West Africa (1863) and A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome (1864). 20 On Burton’s changing views on race and his central role within the Anthropological Society and its enclosed circle, the Cannibal Club, see Silvia Antosa, ‘Cannibal London: Racial Discourses, Pornography and Male-Male Desire in Late-Victorian Britain’, in Sex, Time and Place: Queer Histories of London, c.1850 to the Present, ed. Simon Avery and Katherine M. Graham (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 149-165.

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the pseudonym of Ouida (1839-1908), defended her friend Burton from such an accusation by writing a long article on the Fortnightly Review. In so doing, she also made a more general point on English biographers, who, in her view, were faulty for lacking narrative skills, and for collecting too much material and not being able to use it in a balanced way. As a consequence, Ouida suggested, by providing too many detailed descriptions, or by not giving any, biographers created washed-out and unfaithful portraits of their heroes, which were neither accurate nor realistic.21 Ouida’s article thus invited contemporary readers to go beyond simplified accounts of Burton’s life such as the one provided by Wright. In addition, she provided her own brief description of the popular explorer, inspired by her own personal acquaintance with him. Her brief portrait demonstrates that she was among the first intellectuals who recognised Burton’s undecipherable complexity, as is shown in the epigraph to this article. Ouida’s reflection thus still provides an excellent starting point for whoever embarks on the study of Burton, as she points out the impossibility of providing a univocal and definitive interpretation of such a controversial figure. However, even though she managed to capture the ineffable aspects of the Victorian explorer and translator’s multifaceted personality, she also fell prey to those faults that she had identified in the writing style of the ‘English biographers’ that she so harshly criticised. Her description of the famous hero does not convey an entirely realistic portrayal of her former friend, but rather sketches a compelling literary figure who would be at home in an adventure novel. The first striking element of her portrait is Burton’s Oriental, exotic aspect, which – in the wake of the principles of the Victorian pseudo-science of phrenology – seems to be revealing of his inner personality: I have often wondered where Burton got his Oriental physiognomy, his unEnglish accent, his wonderfully picturesque and Asiatic appearance, for which there was nothing in his descent and education to account. Apparently, by all inheritance, he was a commonplace Englishman of the middle classes; actually, he was a man who looked like Othello and lived like the Three Mousquetaires blended into one.22

The narrative tone and the abundance of literary references enabled Ouida to describe a personality which utterly defied normative sociocultural conventions and belonged to the realm of the literary imagination. 21 22

Ouida, ‘Richard Burton,’ 1040. Ouida, ‘Richard Burton,’ 1040.

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Alternatively, it could be said that he was so challenging that he could only belong to the realm of fiction. In other words, Ouida’s portrait is not so much about Burton as a real man as an attempt to turn him into the exotic protagonist of an adventure novel, a genre which was very successful in fin-de-siècle England.23 At the same time, Ouida’s skilled narrative description also conveys another deeper literary reference which might have appealed to her readers: that of a man with a secret double identity, or a real version of the well-known thrilling literary figure of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The obscure, darker side of the successful explorer, to whom Queen Victoria awarded a knighthood in 1886, became a narrative ingredient upon which twentieth-century critics and commentators heavily relied, from Said’s emphasis on his being both a (gentle)man of his time and a rebellious outsider,24 to Frank McLynn’s 1991 account, in which he describes Burton as having a controversial dual nature.25 In addition, Burton emerges as a man with an exotic, Oriental double whose life is so full of dark and strange mysteries that nobody – not even the most skilled biographer – will ever be able to fully investigate. In a similar vein, other contemporary writers, commentators, journalists and friends provided descriptions of the Victorian explorer and translator by emphasising the fact that he conveyed a sense of foreignness and exoticism. For instance, poet, essayist and adventurer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, writing in 1921, portrayed him as a man who manages to impose himself on his listeners. Nonetheless, Blunt outlines the fact that Burton pretends to be the person he is not – in other words, he is a man who has always been in disguise on his journeys, and continues to be so in his everyday life by exaggerating the dangerous aspects of his travel experiences.26 Moreover, Blunt considers him a second-rate writer and not

23 On the close connection between the tenets of imperialism, adventure fiction and its pivotal role in the formation of new generations of British children, see Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: Harper Collins Academic, 1991), 20. 24 Edward Said has pointed out that ‘Burton thought of himself as a rebel against the authority […] and as a potential agent of authority in the East. It is the manner of that coexistence, between two antagonistic roles for himself, that is of interest.’ Said, Orientalism, 195, emphasis in the text. 25 Frank McLynn wrote that Burton was ‘a “dual man” at every level’, Of No Country: An Anthology of the Works of Sir Richard Francis Burton (London: Scribners, 1990), 2. 26 Wilfrid S. Blunt, My Diaries (London: Martin Secker, 1921), Vol. 2, 130-131.

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an extraordinary person: he argues that Burton’s most valuable skills seem to be his narrative abilities and his dramatic performative talent. In dedicating one of his well-known portraits to Burton in the early 1920s, Frank Harris describes him as an Oriental, un-English figure who has the power to evoke irrational terror in his beholders: [t]here was an untamed air about him. He was tall, about six feet in height […] [h]is face was bronze and scarred, and when he wore a heavy moustache and no beard he looked like a prize-fighter; the naked, dark eyes – imperious, aggressive eyes, by no means friendly; the heavy jaws and prominent hard chin gave him a desperate air […] ‘untamed’ – that is the word which always recurs when I think of Burton27.

Like Ouida, Harris’s description seems to be informed by the late Victorian pseudo-science of phrenology, which attached psychological characteristics to physical features. The tall, imposing figure of the British explorer, his scarred and frightening face, his ‘imperious, aggressive’ eyes together with his ‘heavy jaws’ and ‘prominent chin’, convey the image of a solitary, dangerous warrior who transcends normative models and cannot be subjugated by anyone. ‘Untamed’ by civilisation, Burton’s description recalls many a portrait of those Oriental tribesmen and fighters whom he extensively investigated in his own travel accounts. As these few descriptions demonstrate, Burton was seen by his contemporaries as a compelling, challenging and contradictory figure who did not exactly fit into the stereotype of the Victorian gentleman. Rather than emphasising moral and manly virtues such as ‘gentleness’, ‘sympathy’, ‘fine imagination and kind disposition’ as famously theorised by John Ruskin,28 he was depicted as an imposing, unfriendly and potentially aggressive figure whose apparently Oriental physiognomy seemed to put him closer to that ‘other”, distant world to which he was assimilated.

27

Frank Harris, Contemporary Portraits: Third Series (New York: The Author, 1920), 180, my emphasis. 28 John Ruskin summarised the Victorian notion of the gentleman in his wellknown definition provided in his letter to Constance Oldham: ‘The essence of a gentleman is what the word says, that he comes from a pure gens, or is perfectly bred. After that, [there are] gentleness and sympathy, or kind disposition and fine imagination. […] Gentlemen have to learn that it is no part of their duty of privilege to live on other people’s toil’. John Ruskin, ‘Letter to Constance Oldman’, 1876, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), vol. 37, 197.

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Constructing the Myth: Representing Burton Such a foreignising, idiosyncratic representation of the figure and the personality of the Victorian traveller and translator is also confirmed by the numerous portraits and photographs of him. Burton’s Oriental and exotic appeal inspired the work of many artists and photographers, who produced a conspicuous number of portraits and studio photographs. I will discuss here a few examples. In Figure 1 he was photographed in Oriental clothing by Antoine Claudet in London in 1861. The caption ‘The highly civilised man’ sounds like a challenging antiphrasis, as it juxtaposes the colonial notion of civilisation with the image of a European who exhibits performative strategies of assimilation and integration into what has been constructed as ‘other’ by his contemporaries. In the early 1860s, at the time when this photograph was taken, Burton was at the height of his career as an explorer and a travel writer: his Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Mecca with its narration of a dangerous journey undertaken in disguise had granted him fame and success. Moreover, Burton’s disguises in native garb had turned him into a famous figure who managed to master understanding of and involvement with new cultures from within, thus subverting and annihilating the dualistic paradigm of civilised self vs uncivilised other. His successful experiences as a ‘performer’ in local attire, however, caused also concern among his contemporaries. To what extent was Burton performing and constructing a native identity for himself? What were the risks of such a strategy? The ‘white nigger’ Burton seemed to be aware of the entrenched prejudice that affected his British contemporaries from early on in his career, as emerges from his own notes written in India: ‘The European official in India seldom, if ever, sees anything in its real light, so dense is the veil which the fearfulness, the duplicity, the prejudice, and the superstitions of the natives hang before his eyes’.29 Clearly, by dressing in Oriental clothes and agreeing to pose in this attire for portraits, he posed a powerful challenge to his peers by undermining the perceived sharp distinction between colonial power and Oriental ‘other’. In so doing he also reinforcing widespread views of him as an ‘untamed’ outsider who refuses to conform to Victorian sociocultural rules, as discussed above.30

29 Richard F. Burton, Falconry in the Valley of the Indus (London: John Van Voorst, 1852), 99. 30 On Burton as a performer see Parama Roy, ‘Oriental Exhibits: Englishmen and Natives in Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah’, boundary 2 22.1, (1995): 185-210, and by the same author, Indian Traffic:

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His challenging attitude seems to be strengthened by the fact that he looks straight into the camera, thus forcing the viewer to confront his unflinching gaze. Similarly, another well-known photograph, taken for Portraits of Men of Eminence by Ernest Edwards and published in London by Alfred William Bennett in April 1865, portrays Burton posing in Arab clothes (Fig. 2). Like the previous portrait, this photo reminded readers and audiences of Burton’s detailed descriptions of his disguises in his enterprises in India and Arabia. In a sense, the image not only conveys what might be called a factual representation – i.e. what the explorer had looked like in one of his carefully constructed Oriental identities – but is also performative and subversive. It shows Burton performing his rather stereotypical Oriental persona, aligning himself with the ‘other’, and revealing cultural identity as a construction. He seems to be complicit in the orchestration of an image that combines a slightly threatening foreignness with a fascinating exoticism, common to many other descriptions of Burton. However, other more authoritative and conventional portraits communicated a sense of ineffable fear and irrational threat, even without making explicit reference to the explorer’s exotic disguises. A case in point is the portrait by Frederic Leighton in 1872 (Fig. 3). Ostensibly, the painting does not make any visual reference to the Eastern lands or the Oriental culture that Burton embodied so prominently for the Victorians. At first sight, this is a portrait of a Victorian gentleman, and does not include any explicit Oriental material object or piece of clothing. However, such as absence might be revealing rather than concealing. In her influential essay ‘The Imaginary Orient’, Linda Nochlin has discussed the centrality of absence in Oriental art. In the critic’s view, once we are aware of the absences, ‘they begin to function as presences, in fact, as signs of a certain kind of conceptual deprivation’.31 Drawing on her work, Jongwoo Jeremy Kim has further argued that ‘[t]he portrait of Burton […] denies the presence and power of the Orient from the most physical level: it lacks materials of any kind to stand for the sitter’s identity as an explorer of the Orient’. Indeed, in Kim’s view, the portrait achieves a sense of aesthetic mystery through its lack of the symbols and signifiers that had come to be closely associated with Burton.32 Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998). 31 Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient”, in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 35. 32 Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, Painted Men in Britain, 1868-1918: Royal Academicians and Masculinities (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 50.

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This is, therefore, a portrait that is made up of absences. Burton is depicted at half-length slightly from below; his profile is to the left and his left arm is along the lower edge of the canvas. The dark background emphasises Burton’s stern profile, and in particular his brow, eye and the scar on his left cheek. His contemporaries knew that that scar came from an attack that Burton and other explorers had suffered in Berbera, Somaliland, in 1855. Burton was wounded by a spear from cheek to cheek, while another explorer tragically lost his life.33 Burton’s fierce and determined gaze conveys a sense of imposing austerity and an ‘imperious’ personality, recalling Harris’ previously mentioned description, while the scar bears the traces of a ‘untamed’ past and is the visible sign of an adventurous spirit and an underlying violence which might potentially resurface at any moment. The scar thus becomes the iconic signifier of a darker double identity that fills the scene with a sinister, mysterious atmosphere. The scar is a powerful cipher for Burton’s ever-present exotic and dangerous performative alter-ego. It becomes a presence, in Nochlin’s words, signalling the hidden, underlying tensions between Burton the gentleman and his infamous embodiment of the ‘white nigger’. Such a contrast is brilliantly emphasised by Leighton’s adoption of colours, as discussed by Stephen Jones, who noticed that ‘The brutal depth of the gouge has an almost geological character. It offered Leighton a bizarre but vivid opportunity to provide a bravura note of red against the flesh tones, literally making Burton a man of action’.34 The tension between the static pose and the implicit dynamism of Burton as a figure speaks volumes about the strength of this picture and its underlying but powerful symbolic references. Burton’s highly charged exoticism also inspired caricatures and satirical portraits. For example, the drawing published in the magazine Punch in 1883 (Fig. 4) depicts Burton in Turkish dress with two figures in background labelled ‘Baedeker’ and ‘Murray’s Guide’. A speech bubble says: ‘A bit ahead of us my boy’.35 The two most famous travel guides in

33

Many critical works have discussed the attack. These include: W.B. Carnochan; Tim Jeal; James L. Newman, Paths Without Glory: Richard Francis Burton in Africa (Dulles, Virginia: Potomac Books, 2010); Martin Dugard, The Explorers. A Story of Fearless Outcasts, Blundering Geniuses, and Impossible Success (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2014). 34 Stephen Jones, “Captain Sir Richard Burton”, in Stephen Jones et al., Frederic, Lord Leighton. Eminent Victorian Artist (New York and London: Harry N. Abrams with the Royal Academy of Arts, 1996), 175. 35 Punch, Vol. 82, 13 May 1882, 226 PFP 83. Accessed 15 December, 2016.

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nineteenth-century Britain are ironically personified and placed literally behind Burton, acknowledging that he is ‘ahead’ of them. This seems to confirm that Burton’s success and achievements as a traveller were generally perceived as unmatched. At the same time, his serious, obscure and darkened gaze is directed outside the frame of the image, ostensibly towards new lands to be explored. However, it is significant that the personified guides seem to be afraid of Burton’s Oriental persona. Their attitude thus somehow visually reproduces the ambivalence conveyed by some of the commentators that I have discussed above. In addition, the caption ‘Our Un-Commercial Traveller’ is a clear quotation from the series of eponymous semi-autobiographical essays on travel written by Charles Dickens in the 1860s and published in his journal All the Year Round. In Dickens’s own words, his articles enquired whether ‘anything could be done with the word Travellers; and [...] whether any fanciful analogy could be drawn between those travellers who diffuse the luxuries and necessities of existence […] and those who carry into desert places the waters of life, such as Doctor Livingstone, or Captain McClintock’.36 Undoubtedly, Burton travelled for a variety of reasons: from the military stations in India to the pilgrimage in Arabia, from the explorations funded by the Royal Geographical Society to the posts that he was assigned as a British Consul, which usually were starting points for further travels inland. He was definitely an ‘un-commercial traveller,’ which, in this case, might also indicate an autonomous individual who refused to be subsumed by the ‘commercial’ nature of the British colonial enterprise. Another caricature was published in Vanity Fair on 24 October 1885 by Carlo Pellegrini, just before the publication of Burton’s unabridged translation of The Arabian Nights. Pellegrini knew the Burtons, and in order to draw Richard he went to see them in London. However, as Isabel reports in her The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, ‘Carlo Pellegrini came several times to lunch with us, in reality wishing to caricature Richard in Vanity Fair, which he did – but it was one of his few great failures’.37 She does not give the reasons for her negative judgement on Pellegrini’s work, and goes on to talk about the publication of the Arabian Nights. Pellegrini’s portrait depicts a middle-aged Burton wearing a big coat and with his hands in his pockets, from one of which a leather strap or http://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/154-punchs-fancy-portraits-ahandlist. 36 ‘The Uncommercial Traveller,’ The Dickens Journal Online. Accessed 15 December, 2016. http://www.djo.org.uk/indexes/authors/charles-dickens/the-unco mmercial-traveller.html. 37 Isabel Burton, The Life of Sir Richard Francis Burton, vol. 2, 294, my emphasis.

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possibly a whip protrudes, and coils around his back.38 The Oriental traits are gone, the exotic and fascinating exotic alterity has given way to a more sombre and ‘Western’ dressing style, that almost contrasts with the rich and dense biography of the explorer described in the short accompanying text: As a bold, astute traveller, courting danger, despising hardship and compelling Fortune, Captain Burton has few equals; as a master of Oriental language, manners, customs, he has none. […] [W]hat is remarkable in a linguist, he has not disdained even his own mother tongue, which he handles with a power and precision that few can approach. He has recently crowned his labours by the most complete, laborious, uncompromising and perfect translation of that collection of stories known to us as ‘The Arabian Nights’ [...] He is a wonderful man.39

The image of a middle-aged man in a thoughtful attitude does not seem to correspond to such an exciting textual portrayal: despite the implied underlying hint of danger connoted by the whip, the figure portrayed in Vanity Fair is no longer the adventurous, challenging and threatening fictional character that Burton himself had contributed to popularising – especially by posing in the different London studios in Arab clothing for well-known photographers of his time (see Figs 1 and 2). What emerges – and this might perhaps be the perceived ‘failure’ to which Isabel refers – is precisely the lack of exoticism embodied by the ‘real’ persona behind so many performative (self-)representations. However, like in Leighton’s portrait, what is striking here is precisely the absence of Eastern paraphernalia: the recurring emphasis on the scar on his left cheek, together with the ‘whip’ in his pocket, might be indirect but powerful references to Burton’s adventurous past and his role in the construction of the Empire as well as a reference to his present powerful – and ‘untamed’ – position. To conclude, Burton’s portraits and photos are highly revealing of a number of tensions characterising his life and work: past and present; absence and presence; his multiple, performative identities; Imperial and rebellious positions. As we have seen, Burton’s work and his textual presence were part of a larger colonial discourse that was itself deeply 38

Jan Marsh suggests that the deep pocket seem to contain ‘something that resembles a whip’. The National Portrait Gallery Online, Portrait of Sir Richard Francis Burton. Accessed 15 December 2016. http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitExtended/mw07154/Sir-RichardFrancis-Burton. 39 Vanity Fair (24 October 1885), 233.

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ambiguous. His work – written over more than 4 decades spanning from the early 1840s to the late 1880s – contributed to the spread of that ‘myriad of distinct culture voices’ evoked by Powell, that have historically framed the complex relationship between colonisers and colonised and their evolving cultural construction in a crucial historical moment for British Imperialism. The selection of verbal and visual portraits that I have discussed function on several levels: they simultaneously created, reinforced and began to interrogate the complex, shifting and often contradictory attitudes towards an Oriental ‘otherness’, thus showing that British Orientalism is a multifaceted, nondualistic paradigm. Burton was arguably a skilled and self-aware manipulator of his own image, who deliberately cultivated a challenging series of personas. He was a man who could not be easily encapsulated within predefined interpretative schemes and, as such, Burton inspired many accounts which embraced different, even opposing readings of his life and personality. Critical approaches have also changed according to context and time and, more than likely, might still evolve and possibly give us more, different insights into the explorer’s life and work.

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Fig. 1.1: ‘The highly civilised man’ – by Antoine Claudet, London (1861). Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Cartes et plans, Société de Géographie, SG PORTRAIT – 317.

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Fig. 1.2. Ernnest Edwards, Sir S Richard Frrancis Burton, in Portraits Of O Men Of Eminence In Literature, Sccience, And Arrt With Biograp aphical Memoirrs, vol. 3, (London: Alffred William Bennett, April 1865). 3 3/8 in. x 2 5/8 in. (87 7 mm x 68 mm) image siize. (National Portrait P Gallery,, London)

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Fig. 1.3 Frederic Leighton, Sir Richard Francis Burton, oil on canvas, 1872-1875 24 in. x 20 1/8 in. (610 mm x 510 mm) overall NPG 1070 (National Portrait Gallery, London)

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Fig. 1.4 Punch caricature: Caption: ‘Our Un-Commercial Traveller’. Burton Depicted in Turkish dress with two figures in background labelled Baedeker’ and ‘Murray's Guide’; a speech bubble says ‘A bit ahead of us my boy’.

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Fig. 1.5 (Caricature) by Carlo Pellegrini; watercolour on blue paper, published in Vanity Fair 24 October 1885 (National Portrait Gallery, London) http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitExtended/mw07154/Sir-RichardFrancis-Burton

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Bibliography Antosa, Silvia. ‘Cannibal London: Racial Discourses, Pornography and Male-Male Desire in Late-Victorian Britain.’ In Sex, Time and Place: Queer Histories of London, c.1850 to the Present, edited by Simon Avery and Katherine M. Graham, 149-165. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Blunt, Wilfrid S. My Diaries. London: Martin Secker, 1921. Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial & Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Bristow, Joseph. Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World. London: Harper Collins Academic, 1991. Burton, Isabel. The Life of Sir Richard Francis Burton. London: Chapman and Hall, 1893. Burton, Richard F. Scinde, or, The Unhappy Valley. London: Richard Bentley, 1851. —. Falconry in the Valley of the Indus. London: John Van Voorst, 1852. —. Wanderings in West Africa From Liverpool to Fernando Po. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1863. —. A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome. With Notices of the Socalled “Amazons”, the Grand Customs, the Yearly Customs, the Human Sacrifices, the Present State of the Slave Trade, and the Negro’s Place in Nature. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1864. —. Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah. London: Longmans, 1855-1856. —. Sind Revisited: With Notices of the Anglo-Indian Army; Railroads; Past, Present, and Future. London: Richard Bentley, 1877. —. ‘Terminal Essay on Pederasty.’ In The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, with Introduction and Explanatory Notes on the Manners and Customs of Moslem Men and a Terminal Essay upon the History of the Nights, vol. 10. London and Benares: Kama Shastra Society, 1885. Carnochan, W.B. The Sad Story of Burton, Speke, and the Nile; or, was John Hanning Speke a Cad? Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Dugard, Martin. The Explorers. A Story of Fearless Outcasts, Blundering Geniuses, and Impossible Success. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2014.

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Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797. London: Methuen, 1986. Kabbani, Rana. Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myths of Orient. London, San Francisco and Beirut: Saqi, 2008. Harris, Frank. Contemporary Portraits: Third Series. New York: The Author, 1920. Harrison, William. Burton and Speke. New York: St. Martins, 1992. Jeal, Tim. Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure. London: Faber & Faber, 2011. Johnson, Robert. British Imperialism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Jones, Stephen. ‘Captain Sir Richard Burton’, in Jones, Stephen et al., Frederic, Lord Leighton. Eminent Victorian Artist. New York and London: Harry N. Abrams with the Royal Academy of Arts, 1996. Kim, Jongwoo Jeremy. Painted Men in Britain, 1868-1918: Royal Academicians and Masculinities. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2012. Marroni, Francesco. ‘Introduction: the Victorian Ethos and the Disharmony of the World’. In Victorian Disharmonies: A Reconsideration of Nineteenth-century English Fiction, 11-50. Rome: The John Cabot University Press, University of Delaware Press, 2010. Marsh, Jan. ‘Portrait of Sir Richard Francis Burton.’ National Portrait Gallery. Accessed 15 December 2016. http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitExtended/mw07154/ Sir-Richard-Francis-Burton. McLynn, Frank. Of No Country: An Anthology of the Works of Sir Richard Francis Burton. London: Scribners, 1990. Mills, Sara. Discourse. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Newman, James L. Paths Without Glory: Richard Francis Burton in Africa. Dulles, Virginia: Potomac Books, 2010. Nochlin, Linda. ‘The Imaginary Orient.’ In The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society, 33-59. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Ouida. ‘Richard Burton.’ Fortnightly Review 85 (1906): 1039-1045. Powell, Timothy B. ‘Introduction: Rethinking Cultural Identity’. In Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context, edited by Timothy B. Powell. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Punch, Vol. 82.13 (May 1882): 226 PFP 83 Accessed 15 December 2016. http://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/154-punchs-fancyportraits-a-handlist.

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Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Roy, Parama. ‘Oriental Exhibits: Englishmen and Natives in Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah.’ boundary 2 22.1 (1995): 185-210. —. Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998. Ruskin, John. ‘Letter to Constance Oldman’ (1876). In The Works of John Ruskin, edited by Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Said, Edward. Orientalism: Western Representations of the Orient Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Vanity Fair, 24 October 1885. Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Wisnicki, Adrian S. ‘Cartographical Quandaries: The Limits of Knowledge Production in Burton’s and Speke’s Search for the Source of the Nile,’ History in Africa 35 (2008): 455-479.

CHAPTER TWO EXPLORERS, DOCTORS AND BUTLERS: QUEER MASCULINITY AND EMPIRE IN WILKIE COLLINS’S THE MOONSTONE BARBARA FRANCHI

Introduction A novel about home, travel, drugs and other forms of addiction, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) is a narrative of subversion in several respects: while securing its author’s central position in the Victorian sensational canon, it inaugurates the modern detective story with its melodramatic elements. Considered ‘the first and greatest of English detective novels’,1 The Moonstone takes the Gothic canon, and social critique typical of the Victorian realist novel, to modernity: set between 1799 and the 1840s, it crosses England and its global imperial networks, while questioning the connections between such different spaces. In particular, Collins’s is a novel about Empire, where forms of mobility between goods, people, citizens, colonial subjects, created by the imperial enterprise, become crucial narrative drives. The ways in which travel occurs across landscapes, households, cities, sacred temples and battlefields in England and India shape the novel’s geographies, in that they effectively establish a system of connections and oppositions between here and there, home and abroad, self and Other, that underlies and eventually solves the sensational plot. The story of how an Indian diamond becomes the curse and salvation of an aristocratic family, the Verinders, a metonymy for the British ruling class, The Moonstone depicts the mobility of humans and objects in a network of queer desires. Predominantly set in England (the Yorkshire 1 T. S. Eliot, “Wilkie Collins and Dickens”, in Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932), 377.

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village of Frizinghall, and London), but with both Preface and Epilogue placed in colonial India and on ships travelling to the subcontinent, the novel’s spaces are ‘not an incidental embellishment,’2 nor merely an excuse to add an exotic touch to the sensational plot. The novel opens with the theft of an ancient diamond from the palace of Tipu Sultan, during the British siege of Seringapatam (1799),3 while it ends with the diamond being returned to the statue that it was initially seized from. In between, the gem is taken to England, inherited, coveted, stolen and, after many adventures, found again and sent back to India. The diamond, with its ‘fanciful story’,4 is more than a travelling object: almost like a character in its own right, it is a driving narrative force, an object that seems to have a will of its own, and clearly a powerful signifier throughout the novel. It is also tightly linked to the mysterious powers of opium, another good coming to Britain from India, through imperial networks, trades and crimes: as I will argue in this chapter, these two elements are the crucial motives that encourage men to travel, and that consequently allow for the forging of male friendships and homoerotic relationships. Therefore, my analysis of human relationships will give weight to the role of these travelling objects that have significant power within the narrative, almost as if they were characters in their own right. Defining bodies, places and identities in the novel, mobility is common to both people and objects; it is portrayed not just in terms of geographical, physical and intellectual movement, but also as the key definer of genders, sexualities and the forms of sociability that these movements determine. Moreover, mobility in The Moonstone follows queer patterns and occurs where linear and regular paths of people and objects meets non-linear, non-binary, unexpected and unconventional journeys. As Sara Ahmed states, queerness is ‘a sexual as well as political orientation’;5 the link between travel and the realms of possibilities occurring at the intersection 2

Savi Munjal, “Imagined Geographies: Mapping the Oriental Habitus in Three Nineteenth-Century Novels.” Postcolonial Text 4.1 (2008): 9. 3 A significant event in the history of India under British rule and of British imperialism, as it effectively marked the end of the East India Company supremacy and the beginning of Britain’s direct rule over the subcontinent. Tipu Sultan (1750-1799), ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore at the time of the siege, had long been an opponent to British presence in the subcontinent. See Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 71. 4 Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, ed. Sandra Kemp (London: Penguin, 1998), 13. 5 Sara Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12.4 (2006): 567.

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between sex and gender is central to my engagement with queerness in this piece. In particular, Ahmed sees queerness as the irregular deviation, the nonalignment to the straightness of the heteronormative line of progress: ‘sex, gender, and sexual orientation can get out of line, which they certainly can and do, but […] they are kept in line, often through force, such that any nonalignment produces a queer effect.’6 Conversely, conforming to the heteronormative by refusing the variation of queerness ‘might be a way to become straight, by not deviating at any point’.7 Viewing regular progress, or lack thereof, through the images of lines of movement, as Ahmed does, strongly resonates with the networks of mobility established in The Moonstone, especially since it is precisely in its queer element that travel acquires a subversive essence and becomes an anti-imperialist strategy. As I will argue, travel and queerness are articulated mainly in the webs of the cross-cultural global encounters that the mobile characters of the novel establish. In this respect, I will examine the mobile categories of home and empire by focussing on the four masculine characters and the friendships they forge which, while not openly allowing for same sex relationships, challenge Victorian norms of male sociability in public and private spaces. These two relationships are located where the networks of imperial connections meet middle-class and upper-class Victorian masculinity, and therefore, while not conforming to traditional gender boundaries and binaries, nevertheless move from the masculine into the feminine direction; the opposite movement, from the feminine to the masculine space, is a pattern that, in my understanding, is silenced in the novel. The novel presents a clear difference between the ways in which men and women move across domestic, rural, urban and imperial spaces: from the preface of the novel to its closure, economic and social movements in The Moonstone are in the hands of men. The initial theft of the diamond is described by a nameless soldier, present at the siege, who witnesses his cousin Colonel Herncastle’s appropriation of the gem. Decades later, the moonstone is inherited by Herncastle’s niece, Rachel Verinder upon turning eighteen. The arrival of the diamond in the Verinder household and its sudden disappearance drive a trio of Indian Brahmins, the custodians of the diamond seeking to restore it to its original temple, while the butler of the household, Gabriel Betteredge, embarks on managing and shaping the enquiry. His is the role of an active observer and interpreter of

6 7

Ahmed, “Orientations,” 557. Ahmed, “Orientations,” 554.

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facts, and through the narrative he aptly constructs, he brings together the positions of a number of other (mostly male) characters. Betteredge, as the representative of the rising middle class, moves across layers of texts, narrative voices and stories. His alter-ego, and an equally central figure in the novel, is represented by aristocrat Franklin Blake, Rachel’s cousin and her intended: the active traveller with deep knowledge of European languages and cultures, at ease in town as he is in the countryside, he embodies the leisured upper-class benefiting from Britain’s imperial enterprise without being actively involved in it. The friendship of these two characters is important in its gendering of the cross-class dynamics involved in the pursuit of the diamond, while it stands for the most evident example of male sociability in relation to mobility. Male friendships become queer, however, when the detective work intersects with travel, and an embracing of some of the traditionally feminine traits that the novel associates with men in the novel. In particular, I will examine the friendship and mutual appreciation that Betteredge forges with Scotland Yard detective Sergeant Cuff, and the complex, interracial relationship that upper-class traveller Franklin Blake establishes with doctor Ezra Jennings as the key locations of masculine queerness in the novel. Such relationships refuse the paradigm of heteronormativity by favouring male networks instead, be these shaped directly by the imperial interconnections between home and periphery, or be they domestic reproductions and smallscale reinterpretations of such global links. If travel for men is queer, unstable and irregular, it is because it operates as an ambiguous factor in relation to empire and colonialism: travel across Britain and the Empire occurs not only in strict, factual, geographical terms, but also between the outer world and the domestic sphere, which have heavily gendered connotations. Men who, like Betteredge and Cuff, move across the rural sphere of life in the English countryside, traverse and shape the empire from their standpoint at the centre. At the same time, however, their ease with domesticity is a source of queerness, as it disrupts the received gendered division between what is inside the home and what is outside of it. As Anne McClintock explains: Imperialism suffused the Victorian cult of domesticity and the historic separation of the private and the public, which took shape around

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Chapter Two colonialism and the idea of race. At the same time, colonialism took shape around the Victorian invention of domesticity and the idea of the home.8

This clear-cut division between the world of work, profit, financial gain and exploitation of (natural and human) resources from distant countries, and the welcoming, cosy, soothing, and meticulously kept domain of the home is problematized in the novel, particularly by men like Betteredge and Cuff, who adopt some aspects of queerness, especially the parody of traditional masculine values and the refusal of the heteronormative paradigm of work and futurity, achieved (primarily) through their embrace of the domestic sphere. In the first section of this chapter, therefore, I will argue how their queerness questions the juxtaposition McClintock identifies and adds a subversive layer to The Moonstone’s stance towards Victorian culture of empire and the home. Equally, travellers who, like Blake and Jennings, interact with countries other than home and who have to come to terms with the plurality of their appearance, their identity, their desires to belong (n)either here (n)or there, are queer, because they are ill at ease with the imperatives of the stability of home and the dualities that imperial rule from a centre over a number of peripheries imply. The second section will analyse how their relationship represents the novel’s strongest challenge of imperial dichotomies through queer networks of mobility. Queerness in The Moonstone is by no means limited to the networks of masculinity and empire identified here. In fact, the character of the charity worker and Christian preacher Miss Clack, and, most of all, the relationship between two working-class women, Limping Lucy and Rosanna Spearman, have clear homoerotic undertones.9 For the purpose of this chapter, however, they will not be discussed here as, in my understanding, their social standing precludes them from the privileges of movement within and across the empire that the middle-class and aristocratic men discussed in the following two sections all enjoy. If men 8 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 36. 9 Miss Clack’s possible homosexuality have been mentioned by Haefele-Thomas, Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012), 12; for a fascinating analysis of the relationship between queerness and disability in relation to Lucy and Rosanna, see Clare Walker-Gore, “The Love that Dare not Speak its Name?: Queer Desire in the mid-Victorian Novel.” The Victorianist: Bavs Postgraduates' Research Blog. 1 February 2016, https://victorianist.wordpress.com/2016/02/01/the-love-that-dare-not-speak-itsname-queer-desire-in-the-mid-victorian-novel/.

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disrupt the male-female juxtaposition between separate spheres typical of Victorian society, women have much more limited opportunities for mobility. So, when women travel, they do not create the networks of sociability that the men are able to establish through their movements. In the novel, women who work and travel are not viewed with the same sympathy as men who work and travel, as the examples of Drusilla Clack, the Verinder family’s poor relation and a social missionary, and the servant Rosanna Spearman, permanently tainted by her past as a thief and her unrequited love for aristocratic hero Franklin Blake, show. Indeed, while Miss Clack is mocked for her lower social status to the Verinders and her exaggerated piousness, she does not have the financial and cultural means to engage in the imperial movements that the privileged, middleclass and aristocratic male characters occupy themselves with. Similarly, the working-class Rosanna and her friend, possibly her lover, Limping Lucy move across domestic and natural spaces in Britain, but their roles are functional to the solving of the mystery, and exhaust themselves before the final resolution of the diamond’s disappearance and reappearance. The reason for this difference between genders is that the mobility of women who enter the economic and social sphere is determined by the centrality that empire and domesticity occupy in Victorian culture, to which the women are subjected, with little say, while the men have greater freedom to actually shape (and subvert) their own (and the novel’s) movements. It is in this major difference that this chapter inscribes the networks of queer desires as pertaining to masculinity only; in this framework, the friendships between men create communities of empire, and are implicated in the construction, definition and questioning of the British imperial enterprise. McClintock underlines how, while white Victorian women were certainly in a much better position than their non-white, non-British counterparts, they nonetheless had little agency in defining their role in society: colonial women made none of the direct economic or military decisions of empire and very few reaped its vast profits. […] The vast, fissured architecture of imperialism was gendered throughout by the fact that it was white men who made and enforced laws and policies in their own interests.10

The key concepts in this passage are the white men’s interest, as the parameter behind which the whole architecture of imperialism is 10

McClintock, Imperial Leather, 6.

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constructed. Men, and men only, retain economic and social power; as a consequence, women are placed into a lower position and, by virtue of their gender, are excluded from access to the gains and privileges that the ruling group represents. Therefore, it is the more interesting that the same British, white, male and middle-class category that Betteredge and Sergeant Cuff embody, recurs to parodic cross-cultural, cross-gender mobility in its ambiguously complex relationship to empire exemplified by the Indian diamond.

The Empire at Home: Forms of Mobility and Masculinity According to Melissa Free, The Moonstone ‘depicts family history as world history, and world history as family history’.11 Indeed, Herncastle’s theft of the diamond, the ‘crime that brings its own fatality’ in India,12 is the original sin that threatens the family from the moment his niece Rachel wears it on her eighteenth birthday, throughout the many and convoluted adventures that the Verinders are dragged into after the gem is mysteriously lost, until Rachel, upon the stone’s return, gives it away to be restored to its rightful location. If the diamond is a direct metaphor for India and the imperial control that Britain exercises there, then Collins appears to imply that Britain should end its heinous behaviour overseas and abandon the subcontinent. In my understanding, however, the novel is subtler than that, since it deploys the image of the diamond (and of opium) to underline how Britain’s financial and political position in global terms is determined by the types of colonial exploitation and plundering that Herncastle’s theft is an example of. If a diamond, bequeathed by an uncle to his niece, has the power to wreak havoc to a family, it is also able to redefine social hierarchies, gendered dynamics and domestic spaces, in particular in relation to the family’s attempts to escape the curse by recurring to their wider social networks of employees working in their service. The key character who acts as an extension of the family, although with a clearly middle-class viewpoint is Gabriel Betteredge, the Verinder’s faithful butler. As Charlotte Mathieson notes, his initials are ‘GB’, a detail which places him at the centre of the image of Britain that the family’s (and, by extension, the country’s) engagement with empire represents and is meant to

11

Melissa Free, “'Dirty Linen': Legacies of Empire in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48.4 (2006): 346. 12 Collins, The Moonstone, 16.

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perpetuate.13 Gabriel Betteredge is the first storyteller of the action taking place in England in 1848, and revolving around the diamond’s adventures in (and away from) the Verinder household. Betteredge is also the man in charge of collecting the other characters’ contributions to the central story and inserting them in the recollections he writes in 1850. As the main narrator, he is the symbolic leader of the story, the one with the most authoritative voice in reconstructing and shaping the narrative, and the viewpoint that the readers will come to see as the most reliable. The ultimate guardian of the domestic sphere, Betteredge’s authority over the English home and its history has strong national and imperial connotations, since it derives, in his views, from his guiding light, namely Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Indeed, while devoting significant space to gossip about his masters, Lady Verinder, Franklin Blake and Rachel, the butler gives an insight into his world and personality through a depiction of his relationship with Defoe’s novel: I am not superstitious; I have read a heap of books in my time; I am a scholar in my own way. Though turned seventy, I possess an active memory, and legs to correspond. You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as Robinson Crusoe never was written, and never will be written again. I have tried that book for years – generally in combination with a pipe of tobacco – and I have found it my friend in need in all the necessities of this mortal life. When my spirits are bad – Robinson Crusoe. When I want advice – Robinson Crusoe. […] I have worn out six stout Robinson Crusoes with hard work in my service.14

This passage is significant, because it marks Betteredge’s role in the novel in various respects: primarily, it shows how his irony is the main trait of his voice as a narrator, and it sets the butler’s (and the diamond’s) story in webs of geographical and intertextual travel. When it comes to the irony of Betteredge’s tone, while he might not see himself as superstitious, nonetheless he believes that Crusoe is always right. By choosing Crusoe over, say, religious belief, he also places himself in a perspective of rational, empirical thought rooted in the Enlightenment ideas that Defoe symbolises, values which guide Betteredge in the search for evidence in the situation concerning the diamond. At the same time, Crusoe is one of the earliest English novels and a novel about travel and problematic cross13

See Charlotte Mathieson, “Conclusion: The Mobile Nation of The Moonstone”, in Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation (Houndmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 155. 14 Collins, The Moonstone, 22.

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cultural encounters at that. As Mathieson underlines, by looking up to Defoe’s hero, Betteredge aspires to the role of ‘national steward’ of England,15 just like Robinson is the undisputed ruler of his island. By extension, though, Collins’s butler becomes also the steward of the world, just like Britain, by establishing its rule over India - and, by the time of the publication of the novel, the settler dominions in the Antipodes, Canada, and the British colonies in the Caribbean - is the world’s leading naval, political and commercial power. Robinson’s story then becomes an emblem of the empire in which Betteredge lives, and a primary way in which the history of Britain as the head of the empire is told and reinforced through foundational images in the nation’s shared culture and memory. So, while ‘[t]he choice of Defoe’s work […] serves as an effective reminder in gesturing towards the spaces of Englishness,’16 it is also the means through which Betteredge becomes part of the history of settlement that see their consequences in the British expansion and imperial policies occurring in the 1840s and 1850s evoked in the novel. Robinson Crusoe’s story is then an intertextual antecedent, one that places Betteredge into a very specific tradition, a lineage of British encounters and clashes with foreign individuals and cultures. Case in point is the butler’s first meeting with the Indian Brahmins, custodians of the diamond, who come to the Verinder household to seize it, perhaps not in the most orthodox manner, from its (unlawful) possessors. The Brahmins are described as ‘mahoganycoloured Indians, in white linen frocks and trousers,’ appearing like ‘strolling conjurors’ who ‘meant some mischief’ by loitering about the house, and who engage in strange illusionist tricks, revealing an alleged knowledge on the diamond’s whereabouts.17 The narrator’s description of the trio is interesting, in that it is founded on stereotypical views on India and its culture(s): the Brahmins’ skin colour, so different from the generic British white that is quite likely the only skin colour Betteredge has ever seen, is the first element characterising them. They stand out for their uncommon clothing, and, being foreigners, they are conveniently pigeonholed into the category of tricksters, street vendors and petty criminals that a large body of nineteenth-century literature associates with non-Britons, non-white individuals.18 The 15

Mathieson, “The Mobile Nation”, 155. Mathieson, “The Mobile Nation,” 156. 17 Collins, The Moonstone, 29-30. 18 Key examples of the foreign criminal in nineteenth-century literature are of course Dickens’s Fagin, the Jewish thief with devilish traits, in Oliver Twist (1838); the Italian, scheming Count Fosco in Collins’s earlier novel, the 16

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Brahmins are seen as dangerous individuals because they are foreigners, and they are therefore reduced to typified images. As Ahmed remarks, ‘the stranger is always a figure, stalking the streets: there are some-bodies who simply are strangers, and who pose danger in their very co-presence in a given street’.19 While Betteredge’s attitude is a form of ‘discursive appropriation’ of another culture for the purposes of his own comfort,20 as an individual and as an emblem of Britishness on the imperial scene, it can also be seen as bordering on xenophobia, the fear of the Other that Tromp, Bachman and Kaufman describe as ‘a response to the anxiety induced by the fear of foreign contamination from outside the self or even from within.’21 The butler, while genuinely concerned about the presence of unknown and uninvited individuals on the premises of the home he manages, equally appears preoccupied by their appearance and identifies in it a source of unease. Nonetheless, such cross-cultural encounters marked by xenophobia and stereotypical views, allow Betteredge to become a traveller in his own right: a reader of the adventure novel par excellence, he is able to experience the distant places and take part in exploration endeavours through the mediation of the book that guides him every step of the way. As an armchair traveller, he engages with mobility in an unconventional way, as he supervises and tries to bring order with his outward-looking, carefully observing viewpoint. He directs movement, he makes it happen around and about himself, as in the case of the Indian Brahmins. Instead of actively travelling, he is travelled ‘to,’ and he is travelled ‘by’ the stories and texts intersecting in his character, and represents the important centre of the empire around which all the peripheral connections converge. He therefore engages in imperialistic discourses when the empire reaches his sensational masterpiece The Woman in White (1860) and the ambiguous roles of gypsy fortune-tellers and tricksters in as diverse novels as Jane Austen’s Emma (1816) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). See also Abbie Bardi, “The Gypsy as a Trope in Victorian and Modern British Literature,” Romani Studies 16.1 (2006). 19 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 3. 20 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 11. 21 Marlene Tromp, Maria K. Bachman and Heidi Kaufman. “Coming to Terms with Xenophobia: Fear and Loathing in Nineteenth-century England,” in Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia, ed. Tromp, Bachman and Kaufman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 4. See also John Barrell’s illuminating discussion of cultural anxieties about the Orient and opium in The Infection of Thomas De Quincey:A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991).

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home, and, domestic and nationalistic as he may be, it is clear that he cannot escape the imperial connections that his quintessential British position is embedded in. If Gabriel Betteredge is the steward of England, he is able to bring order to ‘[t]he chaos that is home’ precisely through its remaining fixed and immobile in the limits of the household and garden that he supervises.22 At the same time, this very stance is also what positions Betteredge in a queer relation to travel and the empire that the three ‘real’ travellers, the pursuers of the diamond, come from: he might see, divide and command, but he remains a fanciful storyteller, prone to fantasy and the imagination. His views, potentially xenophobic and problematic as they may be, are nonetheless ambiguous. Betteredge brushes off the fear of the Indians’ presence by going back to sleep and appears surprised when finding out that his own daughter, a servant in the household, and Blake, feel worried by the Brahmins.23 So, he rejects fears of strangers and foreign presences as unfounded mostly because he refuses to be bothered by them. In other words, for him colonialism and imperialism are little more than the backdrop for the romance, the mystery plot, the sensational adventure that he finds himself in and that he luckily contributes to constructing from his standpoint as the narrator of the story. In this respect, his making a mockery of the seriousness of the imperial endeavour and the dismissal of potential threats that other characters identify becomes a form of parody of empire in itself. According to Linda Hutcheon, the tones of parody range ‘from respectful to playful to scathingly critical’,24 and Betteredge’s attitude appears to conform to them: he does not question the fact that the Indians’ arrival might be unusual and even threatening, therefore he appears to conform to the received notions of foreigners of his period; at the same time, his laziness and lack of action are a playful take on the very threat that the Brahmins might constitute. Finally, his decision to return to sleep and ignore the potential danger is a direct criticism towards the worried and xenophobic attitude of the rest of the household. Betteredge’s parodic attitude towards imperial values is subversive in its very lack of mobility, in his refusal to be involved in an enterprise that, by virtue of the very 22

Free, “Dirty Linen: Legacies of Empire,” 346. Collins, The Moonstone, 32-33. Betteredge later changes his mind and, upon discovering the Brahmin’s devotion for the diamond, sees them as thieves but he never translates such views in any direct action, as he remains an observer and storyteller throughout. 24 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), xii. 23

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historical context and profession that he finds himself in, he cannot escape. It is this conjuncture of the inevitability of having something to do with the British Empire and the refusal to play an active part in it that Betteredge’s stance becomes queer. He pursues, to return to Ahmed’s image of the irregular line, a non-conforming direction, while remaining focused on fulfilling his duties as a servant to the Verinder family and the principal narrator of the story, to establish the mystery’s solution. If the butler recuses himself from his position as the guardian of England by preferring to sleep over the arrival of potentially dangerous outsiders, his professional alter-ego, Sergeant Cuff, finds in domestic leisure and gardening, traditionally feminine occupations, his way out of the race for empire and the hard labour it implies. Since Collins’s is an unconventional novel with parodic intentions towards its historical and cultural context, the detective is very much a passive figure who, like his friend Betteredge, uncovers the unfolding of the mystery gradually from the comfort of his armchair in the quietness of his domesticity. Presented as an investigator of incomparable skill, he nonetheless disappears halfway through the novel, thus leaving the detective work to the goodwill of Betteredge (when he is not distracted by other incumbencies) and of Franklin Blake and his helpers. 25 Cuff’s retreating from the active detective work recalls Betteredge’s preference for reading, observing and interacting with the events from the imperial stage that is the home, an attitude which reflects certain aspects of queerness as well. The moment of his arrival to the Verinder household is significant in this respect: Not a word did he say about the business, however, for all that. He admired the grounds, and remarked that he felt the sea air very brisk and refreshing. […] ‘Ah, you’ve got the right exposure here to the south and sou’west,’ says the Sergeant, with a wag of his grizzled head, and a streak of pleasure in his melancholy voice. ‘This is the shape for a rosary – nothing like a circle set in a square!’ […] ‘You seem to be fond of roses, Sergeant?’ I remarked. ‘I haven’t much time to be fond of anything,’ says Sergeant Cuff. ‘But when I have a moment’s fondness to bestow, most times, Mr Betteredge, the roses get it.’ […] 25

For Cuff’s tangential role in the detective work, see Free, ‘“Dirty Linen: Legacies of Empire,”’ 342. A later dialogue between Franklin and Betteredge leads the younger man to take the onus of the investigation on himself, thus signifying how amateur travel experience and an attitude for experiment and sensation proves a much better strategy than professional training in the police for the solution of the case. See Collins, The Moonstone, 304.

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Chapter Two ‘It seems an odd taste, sir,’ I ventured to say, ‘for a man in your line of life.’ ‘If you will look about you (which most people won’t do),’ says Sergeant Cuff, ‘you will see that the nature of a man’s tastes is, most times, as opposite as possible to the nature of a man’s business.’26

For a sergeant with national reputation, Cuff is introduced as a busy man with a predilection for gardening, an occupation referred to as the opposite of serving in the police forces. His meticulousness in the tending of roses, however, might also be a clear effect of the precision necessary in his work, and thus a sign of how his preference drives him to use his skills for his private uses instead of in a professional domain. Moreover, the fact that his favourite flowers are roses is highly significant: the symbol of England and its history of royal dynasties from the Middle Ages onwards, roses were the object of botanical experiments throughout the nineteenth century. As new sorts were imported from China and the Indian Ocean, the trade in rose bulbs and seeds became a huge part in the establishment of trade routes and deals between Britain and its global networks.27 Cuff’s retirement from public life therefore shows how, like in Betteredge’s case, the empire and Britain’s enterprises overseas can be ignored, but not removed, since these are what, effectively, enable a society based on the juxtaposition between home and abroad to function. If colonialism and the birth of a capitalist society found in the cult of domesticity its foundation and its counterpart, in the case of Cuff the private dimension seems to become prevalent over the public one, thus redefining the gendered division between spheres of influence and action. This element, while not defining him as homosexual tout court, nonetheless associates him to a certain dimension of queerness, as he deviates, like Betteredge, from the drive towards the wide, outer world that a man with such competence and experience might suggest. In this respect, his being a policeman is an interesting take on a profession that appears as the quintessential embodiment of militarism, control and masculinity. Indeed, if gender is ‘a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame,’ 28 Cuff challenges the strict limits to the expression of masculinity and/or femininity, by actively retiring from the public sphere and by taking up as genteel and refined a hobby as the cultivation of roses. At the same 26

Collins, The Moonstone, 107-108. Emphasis in the original text. See Jenny Uglow, A Little History of British Gardening (Pimlico: London, 2005), 176-177. 28 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 43. 27

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time, the fact that he chooses roses over other types of flowers is significant, as it shows a different type of engagement with empire, while remaining in the peace of one’s home and garden. He therefore engages, like Betteredge, in indirect mobility through the roses, which reach him from their distant place of origin and establish his connection to the wider world. The fact that the best of British detectives is ambiguous towards given models of masculinity questions both the imperial ideals predominant in Victorian culture, and their predominance in society.29 By linking him to the more feminine realms of homeliness and leisure in the home, Collins constructs through Cuff an alternative model, a man who favours the tranquillity of his home and garden to the scramble for Britain’s control over imperial natural resources and subjects, and a form of masculinity which complicates the division between gendered spaces. At the same time, though, the fact that his roses can only be tended because of those very imperial networks that he escapes from in his daily life, points to British dependence on foreign resources in order for that very domestic idyll to exist. For him, a reluctant imperialist at home, the domestic becomes entangled in queerness because of the non-conventional aspect of his relationship to worktime and free time. In particular, as Tosh underlines, ‘gender identity for men involved forming a household, maintaining it, protecting it and controlling it.’30 For the unmarried Cuff who obtains excellent gardening results to the extent that ‘Mr Begbie the gardener is to go to Dorking, and own that the Sergeant has beaten him at last,’31 the transformation of the home in a source of pride is the symbol of how the replacement of professionalism with amateur skills questions the effectiveness of masculinity and femininity as divided identities. The fact that he visibly achieves happiness in his embracing of the domestic over the public dimension suggests that an odd hobby, (as Betterdge terms it), such as gardening for a policeman, becomes a potential form of deviation from the received paths of masculinity and a parody of the Victorian necessity for divided spheres of influence for men and women. As with Betteredge, the choice of home over the outer world becomes an emblem of Cuff’s tracing a different way, an irregular line for himself, and a way to state that his attitude towards the empire that he finds himself, perhaps 29

See Collins, The Moonstone, 106. John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2005) 66; see also McClintock, Imperial Leather, 154. 31 Collins, The Moonstone, 304. 30

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unwillingly, involved in, and the capitalistic, teleological system that it stands for, is ambiguous. The age of these two characters, both men who have clearly passed their prime, is instrumental in this respect. Betteredge, the father of a young woman, was only married for a short time before his wife died prematurely, while Cuff seems to have his only family in his roses. So, while they might be beyond the age in which, in the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel men and women get married and start constructing the future of their legacy (and their society) within the family, the two middle-aged men nonetheless appear to have refused the paradigm of futurity and family throughout their existences. True, Betteredge loves his daughter dearly, but he appears to see her as part of the household instead of seeing her as his issue.32 In this respect, the fact that the investigation and, therefore, the responsibility of the Verinder family’s future, is in the hands of the younger Franklin Blake is significant. It places the juxtaposition between domestic spaces and empire in tight connection to the frictions between queer deviations from the family’s need for its heteronormative perpetuation.

Hybrid Masculinities: Crossing Boundaries If the older generation of British men represents an interesting form of queerness because of its refusal to subscribe to the values of empire, capitalism and heteronormativity, while remaining ambiguously dependent on them, the younger men, Franklin Blake and Ezra Jennings, find in potentially homoerotic love a form of cross-cultural encounter and subversion of empire. In particular, Franklin Blake represents the connection between the celebration of queerness through men’s return to the domestic, and the most dynamic and mobile dimensions of empire. Franklin is presented as the epitome of the heir to the eighteenth-century aristocratic gentleman with continental connections, wide knowledge of different cultures and languages, and who feels at ease in the world because, through his privilege, he has been able to have the world at his feet. Blake has travelled in the footsteps of the Grand Tourists of previous centuries, he is English, but at the same time he encompasses elements also from German, 32 The link between individual legacy, progress and the perpetuation of societal models through the heteronormative family are central to the European Bildungsroman, as Franco Moretti masterfully explains in his The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, trans. Albert Sbragia (New York: Verso, 2000).

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Italian, French cultures and he has been East (although to Russia, not India).33 Indeed, the ever-ironic Betteredge describes him as a hybrid with various identities: ‘After he had learnt what the institutions of Germany could teach him, he gave the French a turn next, and the Italians a turn after that. They made him among them a sort of universal genius […].’34 Blake travels for leisure, not profit, nor is he driven by professional reasons; he has the liberty and the time to move across urban and rural spaces, in Britain and abroad, solely to pursue family and/or individual interests. Such privileged access to travel and this kind of expertise in other cultures is what places him in an ideal position with regard to the investigation: indeed, he is the character who is the most at ease in the world precisely because of his nonchalant, amateurish (and therefore, nonprofessional) knowledge of the places, people and cultures he traverses. In addition, while the definition ‘universal genius’ that Betteredge attributes to him sounds like an exaggeration, it actually describes Blake as a gentleman who has a basic knowledge of a very wide range of subjects, and who therefore has a universal, i.e. broad, worldly outlook. Where Betteredge, the middle-class professional, identifies as an Englishman who is very well aware of the imperial history of his nation and whose knowledge is limited to certain subjects, such as the household and its functioning, and Robinson Crusoe, Blake takes a holistic approach, informed with the ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment. His youth travels, therefore, have an educational purpose and impact the vast intelligence (which appears like the mind of a genius to the less mobile Betteredge) that allows him to pursue pure reasoning and logic, and have made him a true heir to the eighteenth-century culture of reason. The difference between the aristocrat’s choice of reason over the butler’s tendency to follow individual whims is made evident in this excerpt: “I see three very serious questions involved in the Colonel’s birthday gift to my cousin Rachel. […] Question the first: Was the Colonel’s Diamond the object of a conspiracy in India? Question the second: Has the conspiracy followed the Colonel’s Diamond to England? Question the third: Did the Colonel know the conspiracy followed the Diamond; and has he purposely left a legacy of trouble and danger to his sister, through the innocent medium of his sister’s child? That is what I am driving at, Betteredge. Don’t let me frighten you.” It was all very well to say that, but he had frightened me.

33 34

See Mathieson, “The Mobile Nation,” 159. Collins, The Moonstone, 29.

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Chapter Two If he was right, here was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond – […] Who ever heard the like of it – in the nineteenth century, mind; in an age of progress, and in a country which rejoices in the blessings of the British constitution?35

Where Betteredge is scared because of the dangers of the unknown and reacts by dismissing Blake’s conjectures as unheard of, Franklin searches for rational explanations and finds comfort in his questions, because he knows that, through empirical evidence and rational explanation, the truth can be revealed.36 The irony of the novel lies in the fact that, as facts and proofs are revealed, Blake is eventually found out as the thief himself, when in a state of unconsciousness induced by unconsented administration of opium. The aristocrat’s philosophical approach and international perspective places him in a peculiar position as to national identity; feeling at home wherever he is free to exercise rational thought, Blake embraces his international attitude and looks beyond the borders of Britain and its empire. Such a cross-cultural perspective, which Betteredge dismisses as ‘the foreign varnish,’ 37 will find an ally in the equally cultivated, middleclass, and ostracised doctor Ezra Jennings. Ezra Jennings, the assistant of the village doctor, is ostracised by the community of Frizinghall because of the alleged threat that his appearance constitutes. Described as ‘visually and hermeneutically striking,’38 Jennings is a conundrum throughout the novel: he looks old, but he is a doctor’s assistant; he is lonely and friendless, but generous in helping others; he suffers from opium addiction and an evident psychosomatic condition (perhaps depression?) ‘more or less calculated to produce an unfavourable impression of him on a stranger’s mind’.39 Most importantly, his ‘gipsy complexion’ and his colonial heritage place him in a condition of a mixed identity, the opposite situation to Blake’s cosmopolitan privilege, and a position which is at odds with an empire that he does not

35

Collins, The Moonstone, 46. Emphasis in the original text. Andrea Wulf provides a very clear introduction to the international dimension of the intellectual class born out of the ideas of the Enlightenment, its celebration of reason and how scientific progress is connected to European travel, exploration and technological advancement. See Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science (London: John Murray, 2015), 16-17; 34. 37 Collins, The Moonstone, 57. 38 Free, ‘“Dirty Linen: Legacies of Empire,”’ 359. 39 Collins, The Moonstone, 369. 36

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feel he belongs to.40 Where Franklin had the opportunity to travel and study in various parts of Europe, Jennings is forced to migrate from village to village because of an alleged scandal associated with him; Blake recurs to Jennings’s help in order to find the diamond and to restore peace between himself and his fiancée Rachel, while Jennings is destined to a premature and solitary death. According to Free, ‘t]o “be” English in the nineteenth century was to be of, and hence constituted by, (the British) empire, to claim the summary position not only of Britishness but of empire itself.’41 Ezra Jennings, a British subject but who does not feel at home in Britain, exemplifies the unease that such a definition creates. Unlike the cosmopolitan Blake, who has a number of real and ideal homes that he can return to – be they the actual houses he owns or he is always welcomed to, or the countries that he knows inside out, or yet again the intellectual communities he is familiar with – Jennings is stateless and haunted by his unnamed fear: ‘“Here, as elsewhere, […] I am no safer at Frizinghall than at other places from the cloud that follows me, go where I may.”’42 Hiding his sense of unsafety under the disguise of his professional aspect and his attempts at finding his place, through his interactions with Blake in the village community, recalls what Bhabha terms mimicry, namely the ambiguous attempts, defined as at once resemblance and menace,’43 at assimilating into white British society on the part of men of colonial origins. At least on a formal level, Jennings fulfils the expectations that are placed on men of foreign origins residing in Britain, to the extent where Blake is impressed by his ‘unsought self-possession, which is a sure sign of good breeding, not in England only, but everywhere else in the civilized world.’44 The situation, however, is further complicated by the fact that, as a medical man, he associates his illness with the alleged presence of some feminine traits, such as hysteria, in his persona: ‘Physiology says […] that some men are born with female constitutions – and I am one of them!’45 The doctor sees himself as a man with female characteristics, although it remains unclear whether these are restricted to the psychological level, or whether they include a biological and genital element as well. In my 40

Collins, The Moonstone, 369. Free, ‘“Dirty Linen: Legacies of Empire”’, 341. 42 Collins, The Moonstone, 380. 43 Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October 28 (1984), 127. 44 Collins, The Moonstone, 370. 45 Collins, The Moonstone, 414. 41

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understanding, given that Jennings is said to have been in love with a woman, with whom he might have been able to plan a future,46 it is likely that he sees his feminine side as a deviation from the norm of masculinity, in neurological and psychological terms. In other words, his excruciating interior struggles are very much the product of his own anxiety, which might induce him to see himself as feeble and prone to hysteria as women. At the same time, however, Jennings’s suffering finds temporary solace and a sense of purpose in discovering his homoerotic attraction for Blake. Indeed, his approaching Blake to help him solve the mystery of the diamond with his medical expertise and the information he has gathered, allows him to feel ‘a last gleam of sunshine, falling on the evening of a long and cloudy day’ which, for a sick man on the verge of dying, is a significant and positive change.47 The doctor is thus able to experience a new interest for someone, a new purpose in life which, while destined to remain unfulfilled, has nonetheless the ability to give a blink of happiness to an unjustly ostracised man. Significantly, the possibility of fulfilling Jennings’ wish for love is denied by Franklin’s embracing of heterosexuality and the heteronormative paradigm of domesticity, family and futurity. This exchange is never the more evident than when both Franklin’s lovers, Ezra and Rachel, watch him sleep after having repeated the theft of the diamond under their eyes: ‘Do me a last favour,’ she whispered. ‘Let me watch him with you. […] I can’t sleep; I can’t even sit still, in my own room,’ she said. ‘Oh, Mr Jennings, if you were me, only think how you would long to sit and look at him. Say, yes! Do!’ […] So we kept our watch together in silence. One of us absorbed in his writing; the other absorbed in her love. […] She was just touching his forehead with her lips. I shook my head as soberly as I could, and pointed to her chair. She looked back at me with a bright smile, and a charming colour in her face. ‘You would have done it,’ she whispered, ‘in my place!’48

This delicate love scene is interesting on a number of levels: primarily, while Ezra and Rachel are rivals, they actually encourage one another, suggesting that there is a possibility that Franklin might choose the other partner present. In particular, the homosexual kiss that the woman hints at opens an opportunity for homoeroticism to find expression, though 46

See Collins, The Moonstone, 379. Collins, The Moonstone, 396. 48 Collins, The Moonstone, 429-430. 47

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perhaps only by proxy (and through the proxy of a woman) in Victorian society, thus adding a layer of foreignness, otherness and alterity to the pure and simple drive towards heteronormativity that Jennings’ contribution to the solution of the crime appears to provide in the first place. In particular, the fact that in the novel Blake is able to reunite with his first love interest, Rachel, thanks to the intervention of the queer network of opium, a foreign doctor resolute enough to renounce his love for the possibility for the heterosexual couple to reunite, and thanks to a trick involving the use of opium, provides the ultimate connection between mobility and empire for the trio. As the ‘forbidden fruit exported by the English from India to China in exchange for Chinese treasure,’49 opium stands for the opposite image to the pure and beautiful roses that Sergeant Cuff cultivates in his well-earned leisure time and that Betteredge admires. Opium, the drug produced from an exotic plant, is less reassuring and more powerful because it is mysterious and less prone to the regulatory control that roses have in a garden. Moreover, the very presence of opium in England is the result of violent wars fought in the decades before The Moonstone’s writing, when in the name of the opium poppy and Britain’s alleged right to its trade in the Celestial Empire, forced its way into the Chinese market. Conversely, the arrival of rosebuds from China has a much less violent and painful history. Ronald R. Thomas maintains how ‘[t]hrough the potent […] rhetoric of opium […], the voices of the subaltern, colonized cultures speak, upsetting the directionality of British imperial power dynamics with a vengeance’.50 Indeed, Jennings is able to speak and be heard, both because he is himself a victim of the addictive and killing effects of opium –therefore when he exposes his own vulnerability, – and when he receives Blake’s permission to recreate the crime scene through the younger man’s taking of a dose of opium. Through his role as the administrator of opium and medical expert on the drug’s effect, Jennings highlights an ‘alien consciousness within the mundane English one, a foreign element whose links with opium render it a physiological-psychological parallel to the seductive and dangerous Indian admixture within English Culture’.51 Opium then has the transformative power to subvert the power structures and hierarchies of the empire, since it gives the middle-class, non-white man the ability to control the aristocratic, land-owning, white hero of the story. 49 Ronald R. Thomas, “Review: Pleasures and Pain: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture by Barry Milligan,” Modern Philology 95.2 (1997): 271. 50 Thomas, “Review: Pleasures and Pains,” 272. 51 Milligan, Pleasures and Pains, 13.

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Similarly, the restoration of the moonstone to its temple, at the novel’s closure, parallels the reiteration of the values of domestic England, based on heteronormativity, racial uniformity and class difference: even though the narrative does not sanction the homoerotic desire that Jennings feels for Franklin and the peculiar relationship developing between the two men, its function is specifically intended so as to bring Franklin and Rachel back together.52 At the same time, with Jennings’s disappearance from Franklin’s and Rachel’s lives, the solidity of imperial structures as indissolubly bound to the institution of the family is reinforced, thus signifying that, where the Indian epilogue is ‘preparing the way for later imaginings of resistance,’53 England still has a long way to go before realising that its empire is cutting its ties to the centre of power, and starting to reclaim its own cultural heritage back.

Conclusion If The Moonstone ‘serves to situate Indian concerns, and Indian space, as inextricably bound up with the place of the nation,’54 I contend that it is through social networks of queer movement that the novel’s imperial connection are exposed and challenged. Homoerotic desires chart the travel map of the diamond that, through its mysterious appearances, disappearances and curses, connects the history of the wrongdoings of Empire to the male sociability that created and supported it, and to the domestic domain of family respectability underlying Victorian society. A queer object for its foreign and exotic origins, the diamond becomes a cluster of queer connections because it connects queer identities and relations, and shapes webs of movement across domestic, global, intercontinental, urban and rural spaces. If the diamond brings the detective plot and the attempts of its uncovering to the domestic realm of the Verinder household in the first place, it is also the crucial means enabling the queer connections between the two middle-class ultraVictorian figures, Betteredge and Cuff, as discussed in the first section of this chapter. Furthermore, the queerness of the diamond emphasizes the connection to opium that shapes male sociability, especially with regards to the relationship between the English, ‘but not quite’,55 Franklin Blake and 52

See also Ardel Haefele-Thomas, Queer Others in Victorian Gothic, 8-14. Munjal, “Imagined Geographies,” 11. 54 Mathieson, “The Mobile Nation,” 154. 55 Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 126. 53

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Ezra Jennings. Imperial masculinities in The Moonstone are determined as queer specifically because of the queer element intrinsic in the empire itself, in the frictions between encounters, Otherness, clear-cut separations between self and other and the mocking element that mimicry is imbued with. So, although Jennings retrieves conveniently for Collins to offer his male hero a suitable solution to his trials in marriage to Rachel Verinder, the epitome of the Victorian heiress who, like the Queen, is the custodian of the exotic jewels embellishing the crown of the British supremacy over land and sea, the cross-cultural ambiguity of Franklin Blake’s multiple identities remains unfettered. Marriage might solve one’s addictions to opium and other exotica, but it does not stop one’s (desire for) mobility. Finally, the diamond, seeming to have a will of its own, establishes in its peculiar ontology the final metaphor of empire and the queer relations that it shapes, challenges and interrupts: if the diamond is the symbol of an empire unwilling to conform to British domestic rules, then it is quite successful in its return, and most of all in its overhauling the relations of respectability, consciousness, conformism in terms of class, race and sexual orientation that represents the core of Victorian society. On the other hand, if the diamond is simply the means to power and authority, then it equally seems to be successful: the diamond is restored to its place of origin in India, while peace prevails in the domestic centre of Victorian Britain. Nonetheless, the moonstone is also the metonymy and title image of the novel as a text: travelling across time and space, the jewel is the novel’s protagonist, and with its queer movements, back and forth, here and away, coming and going, returning, disappearing, and resurrecting, it is the symbol for a new form of representation of the relationships between home and empire, Europe and its peripheries. In its very ambiguity about the imperial relations that objects and people can forge, The Moonstone questions the immovable, fixed tenets of the dichotomies opposing north and south, home (in Britain) and its distant empire, prevalent in Victorian society. The cluster of all images of empire, desire and queer sociability, the travelling diamond therefore becomes the novel’s strongest symbol of anti-imperial discourse, and challenges the ideas of teleological order that the ending of the novel so ambiguously appears to confirm. The novel’s ending may restore the upper-class, rural and heterosexual paradigm to the Verinder household, but the diamond’s movements, which see its return to its Indian home, remain uncertain. Mr Murthwaite’s narrative closes with a question: ‘What will be the next

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adventures of the Moonstone? Who can tell!’56 Mobile and unwilling to adopt a fixed identity, the diamond is unable to remain in one place for ever and to be anything but the queer, unstable and shape-shifting object revealing the imperial project to be unstably based on very non-linear, non-binary and unconventional foundations.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 543-574. —. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Austen, Jane. Emma. Edited by Fiona Stafford. London: Penguin, 1996. Bardi, Abbie. “The Gypsy as a Trope in Victorian and Modern British Literature.” Romani Studies 16, no. 1 (2006): 31-42. Barrell, John. The Infection of Thomas De Quincey:A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991). Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October 28 (1984): 125-133. Brantlinger, Patrick. “Race and the Victorian Novel.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, 129-147. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Briefel, Aviva. “Tautological Crimes: Why Women Can't Steal Jewels.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 37, no. 1/2 (2003/2004): 135-157. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Edited by Stevie Davies. London: Penguin, 2006. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. London: Pocket Penguin Classics, 2010. —. The Moonstone. Edited by Sandra Kemp. London: Penguin, 1998. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Edited by Thomas Keymer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. Edited by Kathleen Tillotson with an introduction and notes by Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Eliot, T. S. “Wilkie Collins and Dickens.” In Selected Essays, 1917-1932, by T. S. Eliot, 373-382. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932. 56

Collins, The Moonstone, 472.

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Free, Melissa. “'Dirty Linen': Legacies of Empire in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48, no. 4 (2006): 340-371. Gooch, Joshua. “Narrative Labor in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone.” Literature Interpretation Theory 21, no. 2 (2010): 119-143. Haefele-Thomas, Ardel. Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Mathieson, Charlotte. “Conclusion: The Mobile Nation of The Moonstone.” In Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation, 153-168. Houndmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Milligan, Barry. Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1995. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. Translated by Albert Sbragia. New York: Verso, 2000. Munjal, Savi. “Imagined Geographies: Mapping the Oriental Habitus in Three Nineteenth-Century Novels.” Postcolonial Text 4, no. 1 (2008): 1-14. Roberts, Diane. “The Body of the Princess.” In Post Colonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire, edited by Alfred J. Lopez, 3152. Albany: State of New York University Press, 2005. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Thomas, Ronald R. “Review: Pleasures and Pain: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture by Barry Milligan.” Modern Philology 95, no. 2 (1997): 270-273. Tosh, John. Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2005. Tromp, Marlene, Maria K. Bachman, and Heidi Kaufman. “Coming to Terms with Xenophobia: Fear and Loathing in Nineteenth-century England.” In Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia, edited by Ibid., 1-24. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Uglow, Jenny. A Little History of British Gardening. London: Pimlico, 2005. Walker Gore, Clare. “The Love that Dare not Speak its Name?: Queer Desire in the mid-Victorian Novel.” The Victorianist: Bavs Postgraduates' Research Blog. 1 February 2016.

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https://victorianist.wordpress.com/2016/02/01/the-love-that-dare-notspeak-its-name-queer-desire-in-the-mid-victorian-novel/ (accessed May 10, 2017). Wulf, Andrea. The Invention of Nature: the Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science. London: John Murray, 2015.

CHAPTER THREE DISLOCATING ORIENTALISM IN JULIA PARDOE’S THE CITY OF THE SULTAN; AND THE DOMESTIC MANNERS OF THE TURKS, IN 1836 ASLI KUTLUK

And whose more rife with merriment than thine, Oh Stamboul! once the empress of their reign? Though turbans now pollute Sophia's shrine, And Greece her very altars eyes in vain: (Alas! her woes will still pervade my strain!) Gay were her minstrels once, for free her throng, All felt the common joy they now must feign, Nor oft I've seen such sight, nor heard such song, As woo'd the eye, and thrill'd the Bosphorus along.1 —Lord Byron

People have travelled throughout history for many reasons—sometimes in reality, sometimes in their imagination; and they have left behind accounts of travel in various forms such as guidebooks, diaries, letters, journals, ships’ logs, city plans, road maps, lists of antiquities, memoirs, poems, and even novels. These sources—most of them depending on their predecessors—have been handed down across generations by soldiers, pilgrims, merchants, diplomats, missionaries or mere adventurers. Regardless of its sources and bearers, travel writing is essentially ‘a desire to reach the most far-flung corners of the world, in order to meet and get to know Others.’2 1

George Gordon Lord Byron, “Canto II, LXXIX,” in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Cantos I. and II, ed. Edward E. Morris. (London: Macmillan, 1899), 65. 2 Ryszard KapuĞciĔski, The Other, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, ed. Neal Ascherson (London: Verso, 2008), 15.

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Unlike the previous centuries, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the improvement of European military, political and economic powers, which provoked an endless and restless desire for Europeans to travel to faraway lands. With the rise of Orientalism in the West, and as a presumable outcome of European imperialism at its peak during those ages, the Ottoman Empire3—a dynasty which ruled over three continents for six hundred years—was drawing attention of a great number of travellers with its cultural and social values as well as its political and military positions. Thus, European travellers recorded in their travel accounts their observations and impressions of social, political, cultural, economic and archaeological aspects of Oriental life in the Ottoman Empire both for themselves and their societies. Turkey has a huge archive of travel writing today, particularly about the Ottoman Empire, and there is still so much to discover. Among those works, Julia Pardoe’s The City of the Sultan; and Domestic Manners of the Turks, in 1836 (2 vols.) published in 1837 has been chosen as the main subject of this chapter. Julia Pardoe (1806-1862)—one of the few female travellers in the Ottoman Empire after Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)—travelled with her father, Major Thomas Pardoe, to østanbul in 1836.4 She collected her observations there in The City of the Sultan, and later in The Beauties of the Bosphorus (1839) in collaboration with an English artist, William Henry Bartlett (1809-1854), who contributed with his illustrations of østanbul. 3 The Ottoman Empire was founded by Turkish tribes (beyliks) who were the remnants of the Seljuk Sultanate in Anatolia—often called ‘Asia Minor’ in eighteenth and nineteenth century travel accounts—in the year 1299. The very first leader of the empire was a nomadic Turkmen chief, Osman I, who also founded the Ottoman Dynasty. So the term ‘Ottoman’ is “a dynastic appellation derived from Osman I” (Shaw and Yapp, Britannica). The Ottoman Empire officially came to an end when the Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923, with an Ottoman soldier, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, as the first president of the new republic. It was a multiethnic and multi-religious empire rather than a nation state, and all peoples on Ottoman lands were the sultans’ subjects. Most of the Ottoman sultans were not completely Turkish in blood since Ottoman sultans usually married foreigners, mostly for political reasons. Ottoman people were also coming from different backgrounds, including the people living in Anatolia. However, the words “Turk” and “Ottoman” have been used interchangeably in countless accounts by the Europeans for centuries, probably because of the power-oriented Western perception of the East. Pardoe’s account is no different than other examples. 4 Malcolm Edward Yapp and Stanford Jay Shaw, “Ottoman Empire,” in Encyclopædia Britannica, 2017. https://www.britannica.com/place/Ottoman-Empire.

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Beginning with a brief introduction to the main reasons behind the rise of Eurocentric travel narratives, this chapter gives a general overview of the Orientalist perceptions of the Ottoman, within the light of Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism. The rest of the chapter is devoted to The City of the Sultan by Pardoe, in which she brings to light various aspects of Ottoman life, including Islamic values, Ottoman harem culture, the status of women in society, the slavery system in the Ottoman Empire, and so forth. Pardoe’s The City of the Sultan is a remarkably Orientalist text although Pardoe intended to write an objective account of her observations in østanbul. The aim of this chapter is to uncover the Orientalist clichés of Eurocentric travel narratives as in the example of Pardoe’s The City of the Sultan.5

Eurocentrism and the Orient in Travel Writing Europeans have travelled for scientific explorations, conquest, colonisation, diplomacy, emigration, forced exile, trade, pilgrimage, anthropological inquiry, the Grand Tours held by the sons of eighteenth-century upper class families for educational purposes, the pursuit of ‘a bronzer body’ or ‘a bigger wave.’6 From the thirteenth century onwards especially, European traders, diplomats and missionaries began to travel ‘in lands once unknown, dark, too marvellous’7—namely, the Orient. Under the influence of Marco Polo’s Travels8, in which he romantically writes his 5

østanbul was named ‘Konstantinoupolis’ before the Ottoman invasion in 1453. The name was later converted into a more Turkish style, ‘Konstantiniyye’ by the Ottomans as part of the official language, which was Ottoman Turkish. Although the name ‘østanbul’ was also in use especially in the nineteenth century before the foundation of the Republic of Turkey, it became ‘østanbul’ in 1920. Indeed, østanbul has been given alternative names in various languages throughout history such as Byzantium, Constantinople, Istinpolin, Stanbulin or Stamboul. Eighteenth and nineteenth century British travellers in østanbul had an obvious tendency to call østanbul ‘Constantinople,’ as it was for centuries. 6 Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 10. 7 Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1983), 48. 8 A late thirteenth century document, Marco Polo’s travel memoirs entitled Il Milione—also known as The Travels of Marco Polo—, is regarded as a foundational text in Western Orientalism, for its mixing fantastic, realist, ethnographic and observational tones. Marco Polo’s narrative became a model for colonial travel narratives during the colonisation of the New World and set a precedent in travel writings in the following centuries. See Gabriele Schwab

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journey through the Middle East and Asia, and also in consequence of Christians’ age-old desire to reach the Holy Land, Europeans came to have a closer view of the Orient, which seemed to their eyes unlimited in curiosity and excitement, filled with fantasies, mysteries and marvels. 9 During the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, literary sources most frequently printed were the itineraries and local guides covering significant land and sea routes, and the cities along them, from east to west, ranging from Jerusalem to other Oriental places.10 But before that, despite being primarily a religious movement from the West to the East, the Crusades (1096-1271) gave rise to commercial, cultural and historical interactions between the East and the West. Indeed, the Crusades became ‘the first real, literally face-to-face, contact between Europe and the Orient.’11 Moreover, the invasion of Spain by Muslims between the years 715 and 1492 extended the awareness of Oriental cultures in Europe since the East was the centre of outstanding accomplishments and richer civilizations at the time.12 From the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards, stocking travel accounts in personal libraries increasingly became a matter of fashion among the English aristocracy as well as the French royalty since ‘the possession of a large library was a matter of social prestige.’13 Following the Grand Tours of Europe, travels increasingly began to be made outside Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Owing to scientific and technological developments as well as new philosophical perspectives, many Europeans were highly motivated to travel to have better cognition of the world—the world outside Europe, its plants, animals, and peoples14—which resulted in an intensity of ethnographic studies and world mapping.15 John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding Imaginary Ethnographies: Literature, Culture, and Subjectivity. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 9 Asl Kutluk, “The Self and the Other: Representations of Turkey and the Turks in the Travel Writings of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Richard Chandler,” (Master’s Thesis, Hacettepe University Ankara, 2006), 9. 10 Kutluk, “The Self and the Other,” 9. 11 Abdur Raheem Kidwai, Orientalism in Lord Byron’s ‘Turkish Tales’ (Lewiston: Mellen University Press, 1995), 1. 12 Kidwai, Orientalism in Lord Byron, 1. 13 Suraiya Faroqhi, Approaching Ottoman History: An Introduction to the Sources (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999), 122. 14 Casey Blanton, Travel Writing: The Self and the World (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), 12. 15 Steve Clark, ed. Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit. (London: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 1-3.

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(1690), Isaac Newton’s revolutionary studies, or Carl Linné’s Systema Naturae (1735) as a popular work of its time in botany can be given as examples of such studies.16 As an outcome of scientific and ethnographic studies of the world and its peoples, and also with new technological developments especially in transportation,17 the world became much more ‘measurable, orderable and knowable’18 in the European mind—a mind which was predominantly white, bourgeois, and male. This was, indeed, the main reason behind the rise of Eurocentric travel narratives. In other words, Eurocentrism did not suddenly start out of nothing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On the contrary, it was the natural outcome of on-going cross-cultural encounters between the East and the West for centuries. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly with the rise of European colonialism, homogenous, ‘civilized’ societies where human beings were monotypes was very much desired by Europe. Europe increased their domination over non-European peoples with the rise of colonialism, and with a learned mission19—with ‘the White Man’s Burden’—to civilize ‘the uncivilized.’ Travellers from the West in the East took over the mission of a superior observer, and travel narratives became a medium of racist intolerance, a symbol of the power of the colonizer with a civilizing mission. That is why the travel accounts of especially the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries depict the East as an area of darkness and wilderness ruled by despotism and barbarity, unlike the ‘civilised’ West. When Europeans began to travel for conquest, the image of the Other in their minds was of ‘a naked savage, a cannibal and pagan, whose humiliation and oppression . . . [was] the sacred right and duty of the European.’20 However, with the rise of Humanism during the Enlightenment period, Europe also began to realise that ‘the non-white, 16

Scott Wilcox, “Eighteenth-century British Draftsmen Abroad,” Magazine Antiques, June 2001, accessed 15 April 2016, http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1026/is_6_159/ai_111453724/print. 17 As Korte highlights, “owing to modern means of transport such as the steamship and the railway,” distant countries were now more accessible “in less time and in greater comfort” during the nineteenth century (85). Furthermore, middle-class began to travel more and more, which gave rise to the emergence of “mass travel as a leisure-time activity” (85). People also began to need travel guides more and more. (85). See Barbara Korte, English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations, trans. Catherine Matthias (London: Macmillan, 2000). 18 Blanton, Travel Writing, 12. 19 See Korte, English Travel Writing, 90. 20 KapuĞciĔski, The Other, 22.

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non-Christian savage, that monstrous Other’21 was also a human being, ‘deserving respect and esteem.’22 The narrator’s experiences in a foreign environment began to be much more romanticised, glorified and sentimentalised in this period. Thus, the travel writings of the Romantic period were more subjective, emphasising self-discovery by means of the discovery of others.23 As KapuĞciĔski puts forth, ‘instead of fear of Others, there was more and more curiosity about them, and a desire to get to know them better. This came with an incredible development in reportage and all sorts of other travel literature.’24 From then on, the main reason for travelling was simply the desire to travel, to meet ‘the other,’ and so to please the reader by presenting an unknown, alien, exotic world. Edward Said discusses the power relations between the East and the West in his book Orientalism (1978), pointing out the connections between the concept of the Other and literature as well as other academic disciplines. Said’s Orientalism especially criticises Oriental Studies, which has been a scholarly pursuit for centuries. For Said, European Orientalist discourse has the power to construct and re-present its non-European others. Said has demonstrated that the image of the Orient is a Western construct, which is a result of Europe’s expansionist economic and political concerns. In Said’s own words: [T]the Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles.25

Although Said has sometimes been criticised for not including Western perceptions of Ottoman life and culture in Orientalism, the Ottoman Empire was the most popular destination during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The abundance of Orientalist travel accounts about

21

KapuĞciĔski, The Other, 23. KapuĞciĔski, The Other, 24. 23 Blanton, Travel Writing, 14-16. 24 KapuĞciĔski, The Other, 24. 25 Edward W. Said, Orientalism [1978] (London: Penguin, 2003), 1-2. 22

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the Ottoman Empire with all possible old stories, Orientalist clichés and stereotypes clearly proves this idea.

Image of the Turk in Nineteenth-Century Western Travel Writing Turkey has been an object of desire for travellers due to its geographical position for many centuries. Turkey’s location as a bridge between Europe and Asia through the Bosphorus in østanbul has widely enriched its historical background. Many European travellers have visited Turkey along with other countries such as Greece, Russia, Syria and Persia since the Middle Ages, ranging from Marco Polo to modern travellers, as a result of which a vast body of writings about the country has been accumulated. The sources related to the Turks include letters, journals, ambassadors’ reports, historical accounts and some other writings of pilgrimage or politics. The Turks have also represented Islam and the East in the European mind as they have been the largest as well as the closest Islamic power to the West. The Bosphorus as a link between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea has caused a complex history of political and military power relationships in this area.26 These relationships have enriched the land with numerous classical archaeological sites, early settlements of Christian societies and many other civilisations. Hence, for centuries, Western travellers have tended to think that just by crossing the Bosphorus, as Jeanne Dubino suggests, they would ‘cross over into what was regarded as the east, long regarded by the west as exotic, alluring, tantalizing, particularly since the publication of the Arabian Nights in 1707-1714.’27 The most significant reason behind the curiosity about Turkey and the Turks has been the recognition of the Ottoman Empire as a world power for centuries. Especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was an increase in the number of travel writings about Turkey due to the acknowledgement of the Ottoman Empire as a great military and economic power in Europe, imbricated with a growing romantic and academic interest in the East among the Europeans.

26 Kamil Aydn, Images of Turkey in Western Literature (Cambridgeshire: Eothen Press, 1999), 5. 27 Jeanne Dubino, “Travel Narrative as Autobiographical Literature: The SelfPortrayal of Victorian Women in Ottoman Turkey,” Proceedings from the 20th All-Turkey English Literature Conference. 28-30 April 1999 (2000): 34.

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The power balance between the East and the West, on the other hand, began to change in the eighteenth century. Europeans invaded the Americas, and scientific and technological developments came one after another in Europe, which meant that the Western world began to develop economically as well. In this period, unlike Europe, the Ottoman Empire was dealing with a decline in the quality of the sultans, the corruption in the army and the government. The Western-style reformations in the empire were not so successful as expected, either. Until that time, the trade routes to Asia and Africa were under the rule of the Ottoman Empire and Europe was very much dependant on the Ottomans. That is, ‘the Ottomans enjoyed a privilege in exporting manufactured commodities as well as raw materials, including textiles, silks, spices, aromatics, ceramics, timber, metals, gold and silver.’28 With the shift of power, Europe began to feel like the West was the centre of the universe. As a result, the image of Turkey and the Turks began to change as ‘a blend of fact, fantasy and fear in European imagination’ towards a stereotypical one with negative features as rude, cruel, corrupt, wild, oppressive, and so forth.29 For some critics, the distinction made between the East and the West in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries was not only related to the Orientalist discourse, but it was also the result of ‘historical thinking in the Renaissance that was obsessed with completeness and perfection’30 in order to categorize humankind ‘in terms of race, colour, origin, temperament and character.’31 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European scholars thought that ‘without a Greek revival in art, architecture, and philosophy, the rejuvenation of European civilization would never be complete’32; therefore, many eighteenth and nineteenth century European writers, archaeologists, travellers and adventurers travelled to the Ottoman lands, which gave birth to a great amount of travel writings.33 In those writings, Islam and the Ottoman Empire were placed in this ‘universal schema’ as ‘an alien intruder that had formed a 28

Asl Çrakman, From the “Terror of the World” to the “Sick Man of Europe”: European Images of Ottoman Empire and Society from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2002), 21. 29 Kutluk, “The Self and the Other,” 22. 30 Çrakman, European Images of Ottoman Empire, 16. 31 Çrakman, European Images of Ottoman Empire, 18. 32 Reúat Kasaba, “The Enlightenment, Greek Civilization and the Ottoman Empire: Reflections on Thomas Hope’s Anastasius,” Journal of Historical Sociology 16.1 (2003): 1. 33 See Erhan Afyoncu, Ottoman Empire Unveiled (østanbul: Yeditepe Yaynevi, 2007), 51.

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barrier between the Greek civilization and Europe and in so doing, stunted the full and continuous growth of the Greek civilization, gained currency over alternative perspectives.’34 When Julia Pardoe arrived in østanbul on 30 December 1835, she was carrying a heavy baggage of Western Orientalism. Indeed, Pardoe became a writer at a very young age: ‘She began writing at the age of 14 and was known in the literary world at this tender age as Miss Pardoe.’35 With such a background, she now had the absolute power as a Western traveller in the East, doubled with her female existence. Taking the opportunity of being a female traveller in the East, Pardoe produced new literary works based on her travel to østanbul. The City of the Sultan; and Domestic Manners of the Turks, in 1836 was one of those works.

Julia Pardoe’s The City of the Sultan; and Domestic Manners of the Turks, in 1836 Julia Pardoe (1806-1862) was one of the many nineteenth-century European female travellers such as Mary Kingsley, Ann Radcliffe, Gertrude Bell, and Isabella Bird,36 but she was among the few female travellers to the Ottoman Empire after Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762),37 who was in østanbul between 1717 and 1718. Pardoe was the daughter of Major Thomas Pardoe from the Royal Wagon Train, which was the logistics branch of the British Armed Forces. Miss Pardoe accompanied his father38 during his six-month visit to østanbul in 1835, at the time of the sultanate of Mahmud II (1808-1839). 34

Kasaba, “The Enlightenment, Greek Civilization,” 10. Sefa Kaplan, Istanbul in the Eyes of Western Travellers (østanbul: Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Culture Co. Publications, 2008), 111. 36 Isabella Bird was the first woman to be accepted into the Royal Geographical Society. See Korte, English Travel Writing, 110. 37 Lady Montagu collected her observations of Ottoman life and culture under the title Turkish Embassy Letters (1762). See Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Vol. 1, ed. Robert Halsband (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). 38 Despite physical travelling conditions and gender-based restrictions, women have often travelled “as tradeswomen, as companions to husbands and visitors of relatives, or as pilgrims . . . [as well as] for reasons of health” (Korte 111). British women accompanied their husbands and families during their travels throughout the British Empire in the Victorian Age. However, although it was not widespread, they were also able to travel “independently, as explorers, missionaries or simply for pleasure” (Korte 110). 35

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Although Miss Pardoe wrote novels and poems, her most popular work was a travel account, The City of the Sultan, followed by two more volumes regarding the Orient, which were The Romance of the Harem (1839) and The Beauties of the Bosphorus (1839), the latter also including engravings of østanbul and its environs by an artist, William Henry Bartlett (1809-1854). Pardoe and Bartlett together reflected their impressions of østanbul in their works for their followers back in England, deliberately concentrating on picturesque and scenic spots of the city. Their account mostly involved ‘human scenes breathing an air of Oriental leisure, play, indolence, in the open air, or else domestic, intimate scenes in interiors.’39 They had almost no interest in modern—or Europeanised—parts of the city; so their descriptions of østanbul did not involve much the Europeanstyle hotels, Christian churches, embassy buildings in the Pera or agricultural/industrial work in the Ottoman Empire. 40 Pardoe’s work, on the other hand, was not completely different from her European precursors; her writing was, indeed, no more than another attempt to involve clichés of Orientalist travel writing, whether consciously or unconsciously, with familiar Orientalist comparisons between østanbul and London. In other words, like many other European travellers’ to the Ottoman Empire, Pardoe’s writing of østanbul was a romanticised, sublimated and exoticised piece of writing in order to captivate and magnetise the readers sitting in their armchairs back in England. Therefore, very unsurprisingly, Pardoe was one of the female travellers who ‘inherited Montagu’s Turcophile attitudes,’41 similar to Mary Eliza Rogers in the 1850s or Mary Lucy Garnett in the 1900s. Pardoe was an enthusiastic and prolific writer. Like Lady Montagu, taking the advantage of her being a woman, Miss Pardoe was able to visit hamams42 and harems,43 places forbidden to male travellers. Pardoe also 39 Reinhold Schiffer, Oriental Panorama: British Travellers in 19th Century Turkey (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 176. 40 Schiffer, Oriental Panorama, 177. 41 Billie Melman, ‘The Middle East / Arabia: ‘the cradle of Islam,” in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 112. 42 ‘Hamam’ or ‘hammam’ is the common name of communal Turkish baths, which were sometimes part of one’s harem in the Ottoman Empire. Hamams are almost always separated for men and women. Western travellers have written a lot about Turkish baths while artists have produced paintings of Turkish baths, usually relying on those travellers’ observations. Female travellers have used the opportunity of joining Turkish baths for women freely unlike male travellers. Perhaps, the most famous painting of Turkish baths, The Turkish Bath (Le Bain Turc), was completed by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in 1863, and it was

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managed to sneak into mosques in disguise since mosques were forbidden to females during midnight prayers at that time. In doing so, as noted by Schiffer, Pardoe ‘proved to be an intrepid and insatiable observer.’44 On the other hand, writing about hamams, harems and other places unfamiliar to Europe by describing such places as dreamy, mystical, exotic, heavenly and sublime were rather Orientalist clichés of describing the Other. In this respect, Orientalism in travel writing did not necessarily reflect a negative attitude towards the Other as expected. On the contrary, as in the case of Miss Pardoe or Lady Montagu, a sympathetic, friendly, affectionate and romanticised view of the Other became a mode of Western Orientalism. To get back to Pardoe’s text; she begins her story of østanbul in The City of the Sultan by describing the city as ‘the Queen of Cities . . . throned on her peopled hills, with the silver Bosphorus, garlanded with palaces, flowing at her feet.’45 When the ship anchored in the Golden Horn on 30th December, 1835, on a snowy day, Pardoe feels like she is now on a ‘fairy-land’ in ‘Queenly Stamboul.’46 In fact, describing østanbul as ‘the Queen of Cities’ was another Orientalist cliché based on the city’s glorious past during the Byzantine Empire. So, right from the beginning, Pardoe gives her readers back in England a highly picturesque, romantic, exciting, and the most important of all, long-awaited view of østanbul. Elisabetta Marino explains Pardoe’s attitude as an Orientalist purpose of ‘feeding her readers’ imagination with the enchanting and titillating scenarios of the Arabian Nights.’47 The reason is, as Marino has noticed, Pardoe’s work is ‘rich in cherished pictures of physical and human landscapes, characterized by charm, magic, and unbounded opulence.’48 Pardoe does not only furnish her story of østanbul with charm, magic and based on Lady Montagu’s description of a Turkish bath with two hundred nude women in her Turkish Embassy Letters. The painting is exhibited at Louvre Museum today. Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Turkish Bath or Moorish Bath (1870) is another famous Orientalist painting, visible in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. 43 ‘Harem’ was the part of the house in the Ottoman culture where women would spend their time without having any contact with men. Harems were established during the Umayyad period (750-1258), and later acquired a parallel organization to the court’s rules. See Afyoncu, Ottoman Empire Unveiled, 101. 44 Schiffer, Oriental Panorama, 393. 45 Julia Pardoe, The City of the Sultan; and Domestic Manners of the Turks, in 1836. Vol. 1 (London: Henry Culburn, 1837), 1. 46 Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, 1. 47 Elisabetta Marino, “Staging the Orient in Constantinople: The City of the Sultan; and Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1836 (1837) by Julia Pardoe.” Writers Editors Critics 3.2 (September 2013): 12. 48 Marino, “Staging the Orient in Constantinople,” 13.

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other mystical, Eastern, Oriental features familiar to the European reader thanks to the Arabian Nights; but also gazing at the crowded streets of the city with unfamiliar and mostly dark faces, Pardoe describes ‘Bohemian gypsies’, Bulgarians with their ‘discordant instruments’, ‘Arabian tumblers’, ‘Persian rope-dancers . . . with large white turbans, and flowing robes’, ‘Bedouin jugglers . . . grouped in coffee shops and smoking booths’ and ‘the surrounding Turks’ with ‘sober brains’49 as if to prove her point and so to situate herself inside the crowd as an alien, European face. She goes on by stating that ‘[a]ltogether, Constantinople resembled a human kaleidoscope, whose forms and features varied at every turn; and even those who, like myself, had no immediate interest in the festival, caught a portion of the popular excitement, and became anxious for the period of its celebration.’50 østanbul looks like a kaleidoscope to her ‘European’ eyes; but in fact, this is unsurprising since Ottoman society was ‘a mosaic of different ethnic and religious groups, some of which included Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Greek, Arab, Tartar, Armenian, Serbian and Turkish peoples.’51 As Çrakman explains, ‘Among the European intellectuals the terms Ottomans and Turks were used interchangeably most of the time. Nonetheless, the latter was a much more popular term since it clearly designated the dominant and the conquering nation of the empire.’52 Watching the march of the Imperial band with Sultan Mahmoud during the Festival of Kourban Bairam, she keeps her othering attitude giving picturesque, astounding, colourful and exotic descriptions of her environs. Notable examples are the descriptions of the Sultan’s clothes and horses furnished in diamonds and peacock’s feathers, Ottoman men in the crowd with Eastern hats called fez and turbans, and Ottoman women with feridjhes and yashmacs.53 In doing so, Pardoe reflects her observations of the atmosphere in a similar manner to that of Lady Montagu frequently, situating the Turkish culture into a unique, idiosyncratic setting: ‘Probably in no other country upon earth can you encounter such groups as you do in Turkey; they always appear as though they had been arranged by an artist.’54

49

Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, 450. Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, 450-451. 51 Çrakman, From the “Terror of the World,” 1-2. 52 Çrakman, From the “Terror of the World,” 2. 53 Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, 173-193. 54 Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, 494. 50

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Following the footsteps of Lady Montagu once more, Pardoe uses selfconcealment—or ‘ethnomasquerade’ in Kader Konuk’s terms55—as a means of alienation as a Western traveller during her stay in østanbul. Pardoe gets dressed as a Turkish man to enter Hagia Sophia during High Prayer at night, accompanied by a few Turkish men to lead her: During a visit that I made to a Turkish family, . . . the conversation turned on the difficulty of obtaining a Firman to see the mosques . . . travellers were thus dependent on the uncertain chance of encountering, during their residence in Turkey, some distinguished person to whom the marble doors were permitted to fall back . . . there was one method of visiting the mosques, if I had nerve to attempt it . . . What European traveller, possessed of the least spirit of adventure, would refuse to encounter danger in order to stand beneath the dome of St. Sophia? And, above all, what wandering Giaour could resist the temptation of entering a mosque during High Prayer? . . . And this was St. Sophia! To me it seemed like a creation of enchantment—the light—the ringing voices—the mysterious extent, which baffled the earnestness of my gaze—the ten thousand turbaned Moslems, all kneeling with their faces turned towards Mecca . . . all conspired to form a scene of such unearthly magnificence, that I felt as though there could be no reality in what I looked on . . . I had forgotten every thing in the mere exercise of vision;—the danger of detection—the flight of time—almost my own identity—when my companion uttered the single word “Gel—Come”56

Thrilled at the strangeness and the mystic atmosphere of St. Sophia during the High Prayer that night, after the success of entering there, Pardoe cannot help but daring to see the Sultan Ahmed Mosque in disguise as well. Still cross-dressed, Pardoe enters the mosque, much impressed “with a feeling of awe” as she expresses; The chanting was wilder and shriller than that which I had just heard at St. Sophia; it sounded to me, in fact, more like the delirious outcry, which we may suppose to have been uttered by a band of Delphic Priestesses, than the voices of a choir of uninspired human beings . . . there was something strangely supernatural in the spectacle of several human beings moving along, without creating a single echo in the vast space they traversed . . . we lingered another, to take a last look at the kneeling thousands who were absorbed in their devotions . . . Knowing what I now know of the Turks, I would not run the same risk a second time . . . There are some 55

Kader Konuk, “Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters: Reenacting Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,” Criticism 46.3 (Summer 2004): 393- 414. 56 Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, 373-379.

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At other occasions, Pardoe is also seen wearing yashmac, a sort of veil worn by Muslim women. Thus, whether cross-dressed or dressed like a Turkish woman, ethnomasquerade provides Miss Pardoe with the privilege of reversing gender roles as well as contradicting her ethnic identity, unlike a great majority of especially male British travellers to the Ottoman Empire. Pardoe frequently explains her admiration towards Turkish life and culture; however, she always maintains her self-awareness as a proudly Victorian woman. Pardoe frequently talks about the compliments given to her during her stay in østanbul due to her white European beauty which, as she believes, would ‘turn the head of every True Believer in Stamboul.’58 She even mentions her wishes of becoming a Turk and become ‘the Light of the Harem’ instead of returning to England where there would not be a Pasha.59 However, at another instance, she maintains her Britishness—her Victorian values—when asked by a Turkish woman, Buyuk Hanoum, if she would become a Turk: ‘I requested to know in what my transgression consisted, when she exclaimed with great energy: — “Suppose a Turk passing under the window should look up, and love you, would you become a Musselmaun, and marry him?” “Certainly not.”’60 Similarly, at another occasion as a Victorian woman who sticks to her moral values, Pardoe refuses smoking chibouk, an ordinary habit of Turkish people: [Mustapha Pasha] received us very courteously, and ordered chairs for my friend and myself near his own seat, while he motioned the Buyuk Hanoum to be seated also; an intimation which she obeyed by placing herself on the extreme edge of the sofa. The next ceremony was to cause pipes to be presented to my companion and myself; the greatest honour that can be conferred on a female in Turkey being an invitation to smoke in the presence of the other sex. This was indeed a dilemma, for smoking had formed no part of my education; and I knew that, did I even raise the pipe to my lips, I should 61 infallibly be ill.

57

Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, 380-381. Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, 272. 59 Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, 276. 60 Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, 224. 61 Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, 250. 58

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Perhaps, one of the most important parts of Pardoe’s work is her description of Turkish baths, similar to the descriptions of Lady Montagu in her Turkish Embassy Letters. Pardoe undertakes the mission of the Western Orientalist in the East once more: The Turkish bath, which is supposed to be a source of carnivalesque amusement, turns out to be an Other, hellish, demonic, suffocating space: For the first few moments, I was bewildered; the heavy, dense, sulphureous vapour that filled the place, and almost suffocated me- the wild, shrill cries of the slaves pealing through the reverberating domes of the bathinghalls . . . the subdued laughter . . . the sight of nearly three hundred women only partially dressed, and that in fine linen so perfectly saturated with vapour, that it revealed the whole outline of the figure, the busy slaves passing and repassing, naked from the waist upwards, and with their arms folded upon their bosoms . . . groups of lovely girls laughing, chatting and refreshing themselves . . . and, to crown all, the sudden bursting forth of a chorus of voices into one of the wildest and shrillest of Turkish melodies, that was caught up and flung back by the echoes of the vast hall, making a din worthy of a saturnalia of demons –all combined to form a picture, like the illusory semblance of a phantasmagoria, almost leaving me in doubt whether that on which I looked were indeed reality, or the mere creation of a distempered brain.62

She also likens the Turkish women coming out of the bath to corpses with their pale white skins: ‘I hastily and imprudently traversed the cooling-room, now crowded with company, looking like a congregation of resuscitated corpses clad in their grave-clothes, and fevered into life.’ 63 Not only the appearance of the women and the bath, but also the echoes of Turkish melodies on the walls of the bath become a source of sublime fear for Pardoe. As a result, the perfect, joyful environment of the Turkish bath idealised and immortalised by Lady Montagu previously, suddenly metamorphoses into a wild, disturbing, unpleasant setting in Pardoe’s work. Another point which attracted Pardoe’s attention frequently was the state of Ottoman slaves in the society. Ottoman baths were the places where class distinctions were blurred since Ottoman slaves were allowed to spend their time together with their ladies in public baths.64 Since all women were naked in baths, a natural equality among them was being 62

Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, 133-134. Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, 135-136. 64 For the political implications of slavery and the purchase of female slaves, see Afyoncu, Ottoman Empire Unveiled, 102. 63

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formed as well. They were singing songs altogether, and bathing and feasting altogether. This situation is another sort of astonishment for Pardoe. Likewise, at another instance, Pardoe notices that black soldiers and officers are common in Turkey: And not the least conspicuous of the number was the Professor of Fortification, who, besides being a creole, had one of the most frightful and resolute squints I ever had the misfortune to meet with; and the Captain of the Guard, a very corpulent and consequential negro. Black officers and soldiers are, however, common in Turkey, where a man’s colour is never construed into an objection to profit by his services, nor an excuse for leaving them unrewarded.65

Frequently visiting harems as a privileged traveller because of her gender, Pardoe mostly describes those places as peaceful, monotonous and domestic spaces. She also finds Turkish women to be ‘the happiest, for they are certainly the freest individuals in the Empire’66 rather than ‘the Angel in the House’ of the Victorian England. However, although Pardoe realises that ‘it is the fashion in Europe to pity the women of the East; but it is ignorance of their real position,’67 as a proud English traveller, she sometimes cannot help but highlighting the differences both in appearance and habits between English and Ottoman women. In other words, from time to time, Turkish women are othered deeply and bitterly under Pardoe’s Orientalist gaze: The almost total absence of education among Turkish women, and the consequently limited range of their ideas, is another cause of that quiet, careless, indolent happiness that they enjoy; their sensibilities have never been awakened, and their feelings and habits are comparatively unexacting: they have no factitious wants, growing out of excessive mental refinement; and they do not, therefore, torment themselves with the myriad anxieties, and doubts, and chimeras, which would darken and depress the spirit of more highly-gifted females. Give her shawls, and diamonds, a spacious mansion in Stamboul, and a sunny palace on the Bosphorus, and a Turkish wife is the very type of happiness; amused with trifles, careless of all save the passing hour; a woman in person, but a child at heart.68

65

Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, 203. Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, 100. 67 Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, 100. 68 Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, 102-103. 66

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In conclusion, Pardoe sometimes rewrites in The City of the Sultan what was written about the Ottoman culture and its peoples before her by other European travellers; and at other times, she alters or subverts the second-hand clichés as is seen in the Turkish bath scene. Since Pardoe is a European traveller in the Ottoman Empire, Turkish culture and identity represent the Other for Pardoe, which needs to be paid attention today. Pardoe has written The City of the Sultan primarily with the aim of reintroducing the Ottoman Empire to the English and freeing her nineteenthcentury Victorian readers from a biased pre-knowledge of the East by familiarising with Ottoman culture; however, as seen in the examples above, she has been the holder of a huge Western-oriented baggage behind. In such a context, after all, Pardoe’s work is clearly another example of the Western Orientalist attitude towards the East, doubled with Victorian arrogance.

Bibliography Adams, Percy G. Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel. Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1983. Afyoncu, Erhan. Ottoman Empire Unveiled. østanbul: Yeditepe Yaynevi, 2007. Aydn, Kamil. Images of Turkey in Western Literature. Cambridgeshire: Eothen Press, 1999. Blanton, Casey. Travel Writing: The Self and the World. New York: Twayne, 1997. Byron, Lord George Gordon. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Cantos I. and II., 65. Edited by Edward E. Morris. London: Macmillan, 1899. Clark, Steve, ed. Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit. London: St. Martin's, 1999. Çrakman, Asl. From the “Terror of the World” to the “Sick Man of Europe”: European Images of Ottoman Empire and Society from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Dubino, Jeanne. “Travel Narrative as Autobiographical Literature: The Self-Portrayal of Victorian Women in Ottoman Turkey.” 20th AllTurkey English Literature Conference. 28-30 Apr. 1999. Proceedings. Ankara: Çankaya University and British Council, 2000. 33-40. Faroqhi, Suraiya. Approaching Ottoman History: An Introduction to the Sources. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999. Ebrary. Hacettepe University Library, Ankara, TR. 24 March 2006.

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Kaplan, Sefa. Istanbul in the Eyes of Western Travellers. østanbul: Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Culture Co. Publications, 2008. 109-20. KapuĞciĔski, Ryszard. The Other. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Introduction by Neal Ascherson. London: Verso, 2008. Kasaba, Reúat. “The Enlightenment, Greek Civilization and the Ottoman Empire: Reflections on Thomas Hope’s Anastasius.” Journal of Historical Sociology. 16.1(March2003):1-21. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Kidwai, Abdur Raheem. Orientalism in Lord Byron’s ‘Turkish Tales’. Lewiston: Mellen University Press, 1995. Konuk, Kader. “Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters: Reenacting Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.” Criticism. 46.3 (Summer 2004): 393- 414. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. Korte, Barbara. English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations. Translated by Catherine Matthias, 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 2000. Kutluk, Asl. The Self and the Other: Representations of Turkey and the Turks in the TravelWritings of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Richard Chandler, Master’s Thesis. Ankara: Hacettepe University, 2006. Marino, Elisabetta. “Staging the Orient in Constantinople: The City of the Sultan; and DomesticManners of the Turks in 1836 (1837) by Julia Pardoe.” Writers Editors Critics (WEC) 3.2(September 2013). pp. 1019. Melman, Billie. ‘The Middle East / Arabia: ‘the cradle of Islam”, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, 105- 121. Edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 3 vols. Edited byRobert Halsband. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Pardoe, Julia. The City of the Sultan; and Domestic Manners of the Turks, in 1836. 2 vols. London:Henry Culburn, 1837. Porter, Dennis. Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 1978. London: Penguin, 2003. Schiffer, Reinhold. Oriental Panorama: British Travellers in 19th Century Turkey. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Schwab, Gabriele. Imaginary Ethnographies: Literature, Culture, and Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

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Wilcox, Scott. “Eighteenth-century British Draftsmen Abroad.” Magazine Antiques. June, 2001. Look Smart: Find Articles. Gale Group. 2003. 15 Apr. 2006. . Yapp, Malcolm Edward and Stanford Jay Shaw, Ottoman Empire (2017) Encyclopædia Britannica. [accessed 15 July 2017].

SECTION B: RE-READING AFRICAN SPACE: BRITISH IMPERIALISM AND RESISTANCE

CHAPTER FOUR ‘CONCEIVE OF A LONDON WHICH A NEGRO, FRESH FROM CENTRAL AFRICA, WOULD TAKE BACK TO HIS TRIBE!’: EXPLORATION AND TIME/TRAVEL IN H. G. WELLS’S THE TIME MACHINE LARA ATKIN

Introduction In his late essay Geography and Some Explorers (1924), Conrad reflects back on the era of British high imperialism in the late–nineteenth century. He recalls his youthful valorisation of the explorers of the age, the ‘worthy, adventurous and devoted men, nibbling at the edges, attacking from north and south and east and west, conquering a bit of truth here and a bit of truth there.’1 Having begun by praising what he termed the ‘militant geography’ of conquest that underpinned exploration in the age of high imperialism, Conrad's tone shifts abruptly towards the end of the essay. He goes on to register the disillusionment that he experienced after finally fulfilling his childhood fantasy of travelling to the heart of Africa, and realising that the British explorers of the fin de siècle were far from being the ‘worthy men’ of his childhood imagination. He describes how having travelled to ‘the last navigable reach of the Upper Congo’ ‘a great melancholy descended upon me’ as he realised there was ‘only the unholy recollection of a prosaic newspaper “stunt” and the distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration.’2 1

Joseph Conrad, “Geography and Some Explorers,” in Tales of Hearsay and Last Essays (London: J. M. Dent, 1955), 15. 2 Conrad, ‘Geography,’ 17.

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The man who was responsible for filling the imaginations of young men such as Conrad with romantic fantasies of voyages into central Africa was Henry Morton Stanley. As Matt Rubery has argued, ‘Stanley earned a reputation as one of the era’s most sensational journalists for his correspondence from Africa. These dispatches, appearing in newspapers from 1871 until the end of the century, gave Conrad enduring impressions with which to fill his childhood vision of the blank spaces on the African map.’3 Stanley made three trips to central Africa, firstly to rescue the missionary and explorer David Livingstone, who he famously met at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika in 1871.4 After being valorised on both sides of the Atlantic for this sensational ‘rescue’, Stanley’s subsequent journeys to central Africa were increasingly controversial. Between 1879 and 1884 he returned in partnership with Leopold II of Belgium to develop the Congo Independent State.5 The ‘scramble for loot’ referred to by Conrad refers to the exploitation of the natural resources and native population of Leopold’s Congo that had, by the late 1890s, opened Stanley increasingly to the criticism of the British press.6 As Felix Driver notes: ‘while Stanley was hailed by the propagandists of empire as a heroic man of actions, his motives and methods as an explorer attracted considerable criticism throughout his career.’7 Stanley evidently shaped the image of the ‘dark continent’ in Conrad’s imagination that was to lead him to undertake the journey up the river Congo that was to provide the basis for Heart of Darkness.8 Yet what has yet to be acknowledged is the direct influence that Stanley's representations of the Congo and its inhabitants had on the H.G. Wells. In this essay, I will use anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s concept of ‘space/time distancing’ to examine how Stanley represents African exploration as a form of time– travel. In Fabian’s formulation, narratives of exploration operate in a dual temporality: they represent African exploration as both chronological 3

Matt Rubery, “Joseph Conrad’s ‘Wild Story of a Journalist’,” ELH, 71: 3 (2004), 758. 4 Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (London: Blackwell, 2001), 121. 5 Rubery, 762. 6 Matt Rubery, ‘Joseph Conrad’s,’ 67; Felix Driver, ‘Henry Morton Stanley and His Critics: Geography, Exploration and Empire,’ Past and Present, 133 (1991), 134-66. 7 Driver, Geography Militant, 123. 8 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1995), 104. For more on the relationship between Stanley's accounts of Africa and Conrad's Heart of Darkness see Rubery, “Joseph Conrad’s”.

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progression and socio–evolutionary regression. By borrowing this motif of the explorer as time–traveller, Wells uses The Time-Machine (1894) to construct a sustained critique of the socio–evolutionary discourse that underpinned representations of Africa and Africans in the ‘militant geography’ of explorers such as Henry Stanley. Furthermore, Wells's representation of the two pygmy tribes the Time Traveller encounters in the year 802,701 — the Eloi and the Morlocks — draws directly on the tropes used by Stanley in In Darkest Africa (1890) to represent the two pygmy tribes he ‘discovered’ in the Congo: the Akka and the Wambutti.9 By examining Well's representation of the encounters between the Time Traveller and the pygmy tribes of the future, I will examine how he both appropriates and critiques the representation of these ‘primitive’ races in Stanley's In Darkest Africa. In so doing, I will demonstrate how The Time Machine articulates what Aaron Worth has termed Wells's 'principled opposition to contemporary imperialism.’10

‘Spatialised Time’ and the ‘Civilised’ subject In his early short-story ‘The Chronic Argonauts’ (1888), H.G. Wells first presented a model of what he termed ‘spatialised time.’ Although Wells did not represent an imagined future in this story, he did outline the theoretical basis on which his idea of time–travel was based. His Time Traveller figure, the eccentric Dr. Moses Nebogiel, explains to his companion Cook the mathematics of time–travel prior to their departure into the future. He claims it is based upon ‘a geometry of four dimensions’ — length, breadth, thickness and duration. To Nebogiel this opens up boundless possibilities for the expansion of human knowledge as ‘we find ourselves no longer limited by hopeless restriction to a certain beat of time — to our own generation. Locomotion along lines of duration — chronic navigation, comes within range, first of geometrical theory, and then of practical mechanics.’11 In the frame narrative of The Time-Machine, Wells’s Time Traveller 9

I am grateful to Dr. Brian Murray at King’s College London whose paper ‘“Stanley and his African Dwarfs”: Miniatures, Metaphors and Manikins in Darkest Africa’, given at the London Nineteenth-Century Seminar in November 2010, first drew my attention to the tropes Stanley uses to represent the pygmy tribes of the Ituri jungle in In Darkest Africa. 10 Aaron Worth, “Imperial Transmissions: H. G. Wells, 1897 – 1901,” Victorian Studies 53: 1 (2010), 86. 11 H.G. Wells, The Chronic Argonauts, Chapter 4, accessed February 12, 2016. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602911h.html#ch4.

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outlines to his interlocutors this notion of ‘spatialised time’, arguing that ‘there is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of space except that our consciousness moves along it.’12 Here we have the four dimensions of length, breadth, thickness and duration placed in the same frame. What is different is the Time Traveller’s integration of this concept of ‘spatialised time’ into a socio–evolutionary narrative in which Time Travel is represented as a signifier of civilisation, open only to Europeans. If I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instance of instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above ground. But a civilized man is better off than a savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the TimeDimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?13

In Wells’s formulation, time–travel is spatialised by being likened to movement through physical space. In the Time Traveller’s view, the free movement through time is posited as a possibility open to the ‘civilized’, European and implicitly male subject, but denied to the 'savage' nonEuropean. ‘Civilized’ and ‘savage’ are both spatial and temporal categories: the ‘savage’ exists in a geographically distant, implicitly extraEuropean space. Meanwhile, the ‘savage’s’ perceived inability to technologically progress locates him in a more primitive socioevolutionary phase than that of the European. This clear demarcation between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘savage’ immediately invites the reader to attend to the racial dimensions of The Time Machine. As I shall argue, Wells’s Time Traveller adopts the role of explorer/anthropologist in the far–future, mapping this civilised/savage binary onto the relations between himself and the ‘primitive’ people he encounters there.

12 13

H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (London: Penguin, 2005), 4. Wells, The Time Machine, 6.

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The Making of the Anthropological Object: Space/Time Distancing In The Time Machine, after the Time Traveller journeys out of the nineteenth century, the narrative operates simultaneously in two distinct temporal frames: the chronological and the typological. In order for Wells to represent the Time Traveller’s journey as simultaneously a chronological progression and a socio-evolutionary regression, he adapted the model of ‘space/time distancing’ deployed in the anthropological travel narrative. However, before I examine how Wells adapts this model in his representation of the London of the far–future in The Time Machine, it is necessary to examine in more detail both what is meant by ‘space/time distancing,’ and how this dual temporality operates in Stanley’s In Darkest Africa. The construction of the white, European subject’s journey through the ecology of Africa and other colonial spaces as a journey to a more primitive socio–evolutionary moment was a familiar trope of eighteenth and nineteenth-century travel narratives about the non–European world. Johannes Fabian has argued that in the travel writing that documents voyages of exploration into unknown spaces beyond Europe and North America, the explorer/narrator simultaneously deployed two temporal frames: the chronologically progressive movement through physical time – the movement of bodies through space14 – and the chronologically regressive movement through typological time – the time of evolutionary eras. This latter framework, derived from developmental biology, reflected ‘a taxonomic approach to socio-cultural reality’ in which ‘real, ecological space was replaced by classificatory, tabular space.’15 We can see this dual temporality at work in Stanley’s descriptions of the central African jungle in In Darkest Africa. 1887, July 12. Bandangi. […] It struck me on this dull dreary morning, while regarding the silent flowing waters of that dark river and the long unbroken forest frontage, that nature in this region seems to be waiting the long expected trumpet-call of civilization. […] But withal, the forest world remains restful [...] Nature, despite her immeasurable long ages of sleep, indicates no agedness, so old, incredibly old, she is still a virgin locked in innocent repose.16 14 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 31. 15 Fabian, 15. 16 Henry Stanley, In Darkest Africa; or the Quest, Rescue, And Retreat of Emin Governor of Equatoria (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1913), 155.

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The movement of the explorer through physical time is characterised by a progressive chronology demarked in the narrative by the use of dates and place names, foregrounding the forward motion of the journey, even at points when progress through the unfamiliar and often hostile terrain was slow or even static. Meanwhile, the space that the explorer moves through is represented typologically, bringing the explorer into a more primitive socio-evolutionary era before ‘the trumpet-call of civilisation.’ Stepping back through evolutionary time is an ambivalent experience for Stanley: the jungle is simultaneously figured as a sinister primeval world– the very heart of darkness that Conrad’s Marlowe was to travel to eight years later17 – and a pre-lapserian ‘virgin’ space, untouched and uncorrupted. One of the most sensational revelations of In Darkest Africa, was Stanley's claim to have discovered two pygmy tribes—the Akka and the Wambutti —in the Ituri jungle of the Congo Independent State. In Stanley's descriptions of these two peoples, we see how Fabian's concept of space/time distancing is mapped onto the peoples encountered by Stanley on his journey through what he viewed as the primitive ecology of the Ituri jungle. This aspect of the post–Enlightenment anthropological gaze is referred to by Fabian as the ‘denial of coevalness’: he defines this as ‘a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse’.18 Two points are worth highlighting here. Firstly, the European traveller is constructed as the subject and the non– European as the ‘object’ of his scrutiny. Secondly, this serves as a dehumanising strategy that emphasises the evolutionary distance between the European observer and the indigenous observee. Central to the way in which the ‘denial of coevalness’ operates at the level of discourse is the typologisation of the non-European as the embodiment of the ‘primitive’. As with Stanley’s representation of the jungle, his account of the pygmies also operates in two temporalities: the progressive movement of chronological time and the regressive movement of evolutionary time. The pygmies are made by Stanley to embody the ‘primitive’ through his representation of their bodies as deviations from Western anatomical norms.

17

Conrad borrows from Stanley this trope of the journey into the Congolese jungle as both chronologically progressive, and evolutionarily regressive. In Heart of Darkness he likens the jungle to ‘the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.’ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1995), 59. 18 Fabian, Time and the Other, 31.

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Chapter Four 4 April 1888 Indemwani. We had four women and a boy, and in them I saw two distinct types. One evidently belonged to that same race described as Akka, with small, cunning, monkey eyes, close, and deeply set. The four others possessed large, round eyes, full and prominent, broad round foreheads and round faces, small hands and feet, with slight prognathy of jaws, figures well formed, though diminutive, and of a bricky complexion. […] The monkey-eyed woman had a remarkable pair of mischievous orbs[…] sloping shoulders, long arms, feet turned greatly inwards and very short lower legs, as being fitly characteristic of the link long sought between the average modern humanity and its Darwinian progenitors […]19

The pygmies of the Iruri jungle are split into two opposing types. The Wambutti, whom he describes elsewhere as ‘mankin[s] from the solitudes of the vast central African forest’ are ‘well formed’ and ‘diminutive’, with finely formed limbs and delicate features. In contrast, the Akka woman is zoomorphised as a ‘monkey-eyed’, ‘almost bestial,’ ‘missing link’. In both cases, they are denied co-evalness with Stanley (and by extension his Western readers). The diminutive stature and child–like appearance of the Wambutti evidence their arrested physical and socio–cultural development, while the zoomorphised Akka woman is constructed as an embodiment of the Darwinian principle of reversion.

Reversion and regression: Exploring the urban jungle of the far-future A key principle in Darwin’s theories of biological development was the question of inheritance —how species received and passed on characteristics to one another. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin noted cases among men of ‘arrested development’ in which certain types of men maintained ‘muscles proper to various kinds of apes.’20 These anomalous survivals illustrated a previously unknown factor operating in human evolution, the possible of a ‘reversion to a former state of existence.’21 While both the Wambutti and the Akka are denied coevalness with Stanley, it is only the simian Akka who are represented as the atavistic remnant of a pre–human evolutionary era, a fact I shall return to later when considering Wells’s representation of the Morlocks in The Time Machine. 19

Stanley, In Darkest Africa, 374-375. William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 68. 21 Greenslade, Degeneration and the Novel, 68. 20

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Upon his arrival in the year 82,701, the Time Traveller constructs himself as the anthropologist/observer of the Eloi and the Morlocks. In the first half of the narrative, he attempts to impose and police the boundary between his ‘civilised’ self and the ‘primitive’ others he encounters by denying the Eloi and Morlocks coevalness with himself. Wells reinforces this point by borrowing the tropes used by Stanley to describe the Akka and Wambutti in his descriptions of these two 'pygmy' races. Like Stanley’s ‘mannikins of the jungle’, the Wambutti, the Eloi are frail, diminutive beings with ‘delicate limbs’ and a ‘dresdan doll-like prettiness’.22 The idea that the Eloi are not co–eval with the Time-Traveller is seen in his infantalisation of them — he feels himself ‘a school-master amongst children’.23 This impulse to interpret difference as superiority and the concurrent construction of the native as a child in need of instruction was at the core of imperial racial ideology. As Henry Stanley wrote of central Africans in his 1890 autobiography: ‘in order to rule them, and to keep one’s life amongst them, it is needful resolutely to regard them as children’.24 Yet in The Time Machine the double temporality of physical time and typological time functions differently from Fabian’s model of space–time distancing in one important way — the Time Traveller travels through chronological time but not through space. Wells draws on the tropes and metaphors of Stanley’s In Darkest Africa in order to articulate a fin de siècle anxiety about the resurfacing of the primitive within, an idea which is forcefully articulated through his representation of the Morlocks. In contrast to the Eloi, the Morlocks are depicted not as children or primitive men, but as the missing link in the evolutionary chain between man and monkey. In the description that follows the Time Traveller’s descent into their world, Wells’s depiction of the Morlocks has strong echoes of Henry Stanley’s account of the Akka in In Darkest Africa. Stanley’s anatomical descriptions locate the Akka on the boundary between man and monkey, living proof of Darwin’s principle of reversion. Similarly, when the Time Traveller first encounters the Morlocks he states that he ‘cannot tell whether it ran on all fours, or only with its forearms held very low’, giving the creature an ‘ape-like’ appearance.25 This use of the socio–evolutionary discourse that underpinned the discursive construction of non–European races in imperialist anthropological 22

Wells, The Time Machine, 24. Wells The Time Machine, 28. 24 The Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley ed. Dorothy Stanley (London: Simpson Low, Marston and Co., 1909), 377. 25 Wells, The Time-Machine, 44. 23

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writing to describe a devolved future race in Britain is significant when we consider the class dynamics of Wells’s representation of the Morlocks. Wells’s Time Traveller’s first encounter with the world of the Morlocks is depicted as a descent into a benighted world inhabited by the descendants of the nineteenth–century industrial working–class, whose quality of life had worsened until they had, in Wells’s future, degenerated into a separate ‘race’ which had ‘lost its birthright to the sky’.26 The Time Traveller remarks that the working-class had gone deeper and deeper into larger and ever larger underground factories, spending a still-increasing amount of its time therein, till, in the end - ! Even now, does not an East-End worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth? 27

In Wells’s elision of class and race we can detect a discourse in which, as Patrick Brantlinger has noted, ‘class and race terminology’ becomes ‘covertly interchangeable or at least analogous’.28 As Richard Altick has noted, the metaphor of the ‘savage’ had begun to be deployed in discussions about the urban poor in both literature and the popular press by the mid-nineteenth century.29 Joseph Mclaughlin has further argued that the popularity of narratives of African exploration led metaphors of exploration to be deployed by journalists writing about the urban poor in the late nineteenth century. He states: ‘because the daily lives of West Enders provided little or no contact with the urban poor, they could understand these people and their world only through the mediation of something familiar.’30 By the late–nineteenth century, discourses of class and race converged not only because the subordinate position of the indigenous African in the colonial order was analogous to the position of the working–classes in Britain, but because the popularity of narratives of African exploration meant that the distant jungles of Africa were more familiar to the middle–class, metropolitan reading public than the urban jungles on their doorsteps.

26

Wells, The Time Machine, 48. Wells, The Time Machine, 48. 28 Patrick Brantlinger, “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent,” Critical Enquiry, 12:1 (1985), 182. 29 Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 1978), 283. 30 Joseph Maclaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot (Charlottesville, London: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 80. 27

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In his use of the metaphors of Stanley’s In Darkest Africa to make an analogy between class and race, Wells had hit upon a strategy that had already been used four years earlier by William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army. Booth sought to capitalise on the immense popularity of Stanley’s In Darkest Africa in 1890 by mapping Stanley’s metaphors onto the British working classes in his polemic on the subject of the urban poor, In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890). By inviting the reader to read Stanley’s In Darkest Africa as a class allegory, Booth explicitly compares Stanley’s ‘pygmy races’ with the British working classes. Booth begins his book by dramatising Stanley’s account. This summer the attention of the civilised world had been arrested by the story which Mr. Stanley has told of “Darkest Africa” […] Nothing has so much impressed the imagination, as his description of the immense forest which offered an almost impenetrable barrier to his advance [….] May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone’s throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest? The two tribes of savage, the human baboon and the handsome dwarf [….] may be accepted as the two varieties who are continually present within us – the vicious, lazy lout, and the toiling slave.31

Booth’s introduction to In Darkest England presents the industrial working–class as a degenerate race whose moral and social conditions have already caused the beginnings of the degeneration that Wells presents as having taken hold of all of society in The Time Machine. The notion that the social conditions of contemporary Britain could lead to the physical degeneration of the racial stock was widespread in the 1890s, with the trope of the industrial worker as degenerate dwarf being commented upon with great alarm.32 Booth also elides the image of the ‘urban jungle’ that was popularised by narratives of social exploration in 31

William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London: William Burgess, 1890), 11-12. 32 As Brian Murray has pointed out, an article was written in the radical Reynolds’ Newspaper in February 1891 echoing Booth’s concerns in response to the admission by War Minister Edward Stanhope that the decreasing stature of army recruits was the inevitable result of the fact that “women are now shorter”. The report states: ‘There is terrible significance in this fact; it means that the conditions of modern industry having made our working women, the mothers of the people, a race of slaves, their stature has been arrested, and we are becoming a nation of commercial dwarfs.’ (Reference from Brian Murray, ‘“Stanley and his African Dwarfs”: Miniatures, Metaphors and Manikins in Darkest Africa’).

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the late–nineteenth century with Stanley’s African jungle in order to represent the nineteenth–century class hierarchy as an evolutionary taxonomy, effectively denying the urban poor coevalness with the middle– and–upper classes.

Reversing the Anthropological Gaze: The Time Traveller as Anthropological Subject In The Time Machine, Wells complicates this analogy by representing the Morlocks as the embodiments of the Darwinian principle of reversion — a race better adapted to the ‘primitive’ conditions of the far–future than the Time Traveller himself. In doing so, he destabilises the teleological narrative the Time Traveller attempted to create at the start of the novella by stressing the evolutionarily progressive nature of European society. Yet, even in the frame narrative at the start of the novel, this narrative is already implicitly called into question by the Time Traveller’s physical appearance upon his return from the far–future. The narrator notes the following. His coat was dusty and dirty, and smeared with green down the sleeves; his hair disordered, and as it seemed to me greyer – either with dust and dirt or because the colour had actually faded. His face was ghastly pale; his chin had a brown cut on it – a cut half healed; his expression was haggered and drawn, as by intense suffering […] He walked with just such a limp as I have seen in footsore tramps.33

Here, the signifiers of civilisation are gone: instead of clean, well-made clothes, they are ‘dusty and dirty’; his appearance is ‘disordered’ and he resembles a ‘footsore tramp’. In this proleptic moment, the narrative of socio–evolutionary progress posited by the Time Traveller in the previous chapter is immediately called into question. As the tale unfolds, it becomes clear that the Time Traveller’s journey through time has brought him to a moment in which society has degenerated rather than progressed. His encounters with this future society have fractured his psyche — uncoupling him from both the physical time of the nineteenth century and the typological classificatory systems that underpinned his self–definition as a ‘civilised’ inhabitant of nineteenth century Britain. This breakdown occurs during the Time Traveller’s descent into the world of the Morlocks — an episode that forms both the literal and figurative centre of the novella. The instinctive ‘repulsion’ that the Time 33

Wells, The Time Machine, 13-14.

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Traveller expressed towards the Morlocks when he first subjected them to his anthropological gaze in the world of the Eloi ‘Upperworlders’ increases as he descends into their subterranean world. It is significant that the lack of light in the Morlocks’ world causes a reversal of the anthropological gaze through which the Time Traveller had first sought to make sense of the world of 802,701. The Time Traveller realises he is no longer the autonomous subject of his own anthropology of the future, but the impotent object of the curiosity of the Morlocks. The sudden realization of my ignorance of their ways of thinking and doing came home to me very vividly in the darkness. I shouted at them as loudly as I could. They started away, and then I could feel them approaching me again. They clutched at me more boldly, whispering odd sounds to each other. I shivered violently, and shouted again – rather discordantly […] I shuddered with horror to think how they must already have examined me.34

The inversion of the temporal distancing effected by the explorer/ anthropologist to deny his coevalness with the races he encounters means that not only is the Time Traveller fixed as the object of the Morlock’s anthropological enquiries, but he becomes estranged from his sense of self. On ascending out from the Morlocks’ den, the Time Traveller acknowledges that: ‘Before, I had felt as a man might feel who had fallen into a pit: my concern was with the pit and how to get out of it. Now I felt like a beast in a trap, whose enemy would come upon him soon.’35 In contrast to his earlier zoomorphisation of the Morlocks, it is the Time Traveller who occupies the position of a hunted beast in the world of the future. The Time Traveller’s regression into the savage is completed when he explains how he battled the Morlocks with: ‘only the weapons and the powers that Nature had endowed me with – hands, feet, and teeth’.36 This dissolution is prefigured by a significant moment, after his first encounter with the Morlocks, when the Time Traveller steps out of his own narrative to reflect critically upon this reversal of the socio– evolutionary hierarchy. In a refutation of the visions of the future offered by socialist Utopian fiction such as William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1890)37 in which the time–traveller/explorer is equipped with the 34

Wells, The Time Machine, 55; 58. Wells, The Time Machine, 57. 36 Wells, The Time Machine, 58. 37 Patrick Parrinder, Shadows of the Future: H.G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), 42. 35

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knowledge to interpret the social relations of future societies, Wells’s Time Traveller makes the following observations. Conceive the tale of London which a negro, fresh from Central Africa, would take back to his tribe! What would he know of railway companies, of social movements, of telephone and telegraph wires, of the Parcels Delivery Company, and postal orders and the like? Yet we, at least, should be willing enough to explain these things to him! And even of what he knew, how much could he make his untravelled friend either apprehend or believe? Then, think how narrow the gap between a negro and a white man of our own times, and how wide the interval between myself and these of the Golden Age!38

This moment marks a rejection of the epistemology of anthropological travel writing in which the explorer/anthropologist assumes that he can position the societies he encounters within the established frameworks of anthropological discourse. In a conscious allusion to Stanley’s narrative, Wells uses the trope of the ‘negro from central Africa’ to construct the Time Traveller as occupying the temporal realm of the primitive in his dystopic future. Instead of the explorer casting his imperial eye over the inhabitants, interpreting their society for a metropolitan audience, he re– casts himself as a ‘negro fresh from Central Africa’ in London. His inability to interpret the society in which he finds himself represents a disintegration of the self/other, civilised/savage paradigm that structured anthropological accounts of non–European cultures, implicitly revealing the fallacy of such paradigms.

Curation and the Enlightenment Telos: Critiquing the European Progressive Socio–evolutionary Narrative A further example of the dissolution of Enlightenment epistemologies is when the Time Traveller reaches the ‘Palace of the Green Porcelain’, a gargantuan museum exhibiting material culture from the nineteenth century. Here he finds an immense variety of different objects representing the fields of palaeontology, literature, natural history, and finally a gallery displaying ‘huge bulks of machines, all greatly corroded and many broken down’.39 The Time Traveller refers to these as the ‘ancient monuments of an intellectual age’,40 and describes the building as ‘the ruins of some 38

Wells, The Time Machine, 40-41. Wells, The Time-Machine, 110-111. 40 Wells, The Time Machine, 111. 39

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latter day South Kensington’.41 This last remark alludes to the process of the collection, cataloguing and display of material culture that led to the creation of the South Kensington Museum in 1857, which was founded to display leftover items from The Great Exhibition of 1851. The Great Exhibition was the first world’s fair, and was designed to display Britain’s industrial and technological achievements. For Britain, the Great Exhibition became a means of projecting its self–image as a society at the zenith of social and technological progress to people from a vast array of different countries.42 As Raymond Corbey has suggested, the worlds' fair, like the museum, demonstrates an ‘unlimited trust in Enlightenment ideas and the rational constructability of the world’.43 This belief in the Western man’s ability to create order through classification can also be seen in the Colonial Exhibitions which presented to the public the material culture of recently colonised peoples. ‘The Stanley and African Exhibition’, which took place in London to celebrate Stanley’s return from the Congo in 1890, included a range of artefacts, including those belonging to the so–called ‘dwarf tribes’ of the Ituri forest which were collected by Stanley. These included a belt and loin cloth, a fighting axe, and a quiver of arrows. According to Annie Coombes, items such as these ‘functioned metonymically, to stand for various African societies’.44 The stated aim of such collections was to ‘bring the conditions 41

Wells, The Time Machine, 108. For more on The Great Exhibition and its influence on the colonial exhibitions that followed, see John Mackenzie, “The Imperial Exhibitions,” in Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984), 96-112. For more on the colonial exhibitions of the nineteenth century see, for example: Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and Worlds Fairs (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); Peter Hoffenburg An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2001); Corbey “Ethnographic Showcases, 1870-1930”; M. Armstrong “A Jumble of Foreignness”: The Sublime Musayums of Nineteenth-Century Fairs and Expositions”, Cultural Critique, 23 (1993), 199-250; Robert Rydell All The World’s A Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1870-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Paul Young, Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009). 43 Raymond Corbey, “Ethnographic Showcases, 1870-1930,” Cultural Anthropology, 8:3 (1993), 340. 44 Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Populat Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 4. 42

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of life in Africa more clearly before the visitor’s mind’.45 However, this was life in Africa as represented by travellers such as Henry Stanley, and therefore functioned as a means by which Western man, as symbolised by the figure of the explorer, could take ownership of the African. The ostentatious displays of African material culture in the museums and colonial exhibitions functioned less to educate the metropolitan public about the cultures of the Empire, than to reassure them that they had the right of ownership over the cultures and peoples that were being assimilated into the Empire. In Wells, however, the breakdown of the sense that the world can be known and classified is evident throughout the Time Traveller’s exploration of the Palace of Green Porcelain. Firstly, the systems designed to order and classify natural history and cultural artefacts which govern the display of the items in the museum no longer have any meaning to the inhabitants of the year 802,701, a fact which is reflected in Weena’s failure to interpret what she sees in the museum. In fact, her only interaction with the items on display is through an act of play, which emphasises her infantile understanding. The Time Traveller describes her in the act of ‘rolling a sea urchin down the sloping glass of a case’.46 Secondly, despite the fact that the Time Traveller takes a greater interest in the exhibits, pausing to reflect on the intellectual and cultural entropy that has occurred, and the futility of the endeavours of ‘civilised’ man, his mind quickly turns to more pressing matters when he spots the tiny footprints of the Morlocks. ‘I felt that I was wasting my time in this academic examination of machinery. I called to mind that it was already far advanced in the afternoon, and that I still had no weapon, no refuge, and no means of making a fire’.47 This immediate shift from intellectual concerns to the bare necessities of survival indicates a regression on the part of the Time Traveller from the position of intellectual and cultural superiority he adopted upon his arrival in the year 802,701. Upon his arrival, his main concerns are philosophical. Immediately before his first encounter with the Eloi, he speculates upon the condition of the men of the future. ‘What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness, and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful’, he wonders.48 This comment foreshadows the Time Traveller’s 45

The Stanley and African Exhibition Catalogue at The Victoria Gallery, Regent Street, 1890, John Johnson Collection, Exhibition Catalogues, box 24 (77047), 7. 46 Wells, The Time Machine, 109. 47 Wells, The Time Machine, 112. 48 Wells, The Time Machine, 34.

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reaction to the Morlocks, at which point the narrative begins to shift in emphasis. His speculations as to the structure of the society of the future and the characteristics of its people no longer dominate. Instead, the reader is presented with a tale in which the Time-Traveller’s visceral fear and repulsion at the Morlocks is foregrounded, which causes his focus to change from philosophical, cultural and scientific speculation, to the necessities of survival. The cultural entropy that has taken place during the millennia which separate his own time from the year 802,701 has left him in a position of evolutionary inferiority to the Morlocks, an anachronistic relic from a distant time whose ways are long forgotten. In the face of fear and disorientation he can no longer adopt a position of superiority, and is forced to attempt to adapt to circumstances that he is ill–equipped to deal with. His failure to adapt is evident as the story progresses, during which his inability to either protect Weena or escape the Morlocks is exposed. In the Time Traveller’s devolution we can trace a counter–argument against social–cultural evolutionism. Wells’s presentation of both the Eloi and Morlock ‘pygmy races’ drew on established discourses that were used in popular representations of African ‘pygmies’ in other popular cultural forms. In these representations, we can trace a direct link between the presentation of Wells’s ‘pygmy races’ and those recently discovered on the African continent by Henry Stanley. However, by using these tropes to describe the descendants of nineteenth–century Londoners, Wells presents the world of the future as one in which the barrier between the ‘primitive’ and the ‘civilised’ is no longer stable. Where the spectacle of primitive African customs evident in the ethnographic displays of the period served to reassure contemporary audiences that this barrier was clearly defined, an idea reinforced by popular anthropological travel writing, Wells presents an alternative perspective whereby regression back to the primitive state associated with the inhabitants of the non–European world is the likely future for ‘civilised’ man. The challenge this presents to contemporary readers is evident in the figure of the Time Traveller. His initial reaction to the society that he finds himself in is governed by what he defines as his ‘Occidental’ characteristics. Central to this, is his belief in what Raymond Corbey termed ‘the rational constructability of the world’.49 The Time Traveller articulates this explicitly in his initial reaction to the loss of the time machine. He states that he must: ‘Face this world, learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end, you will find

49

Corbey, “Ethnographic Showcases,” 340.

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clues to it all’.50 Yet as we have seen, the more he explores this new world, the less he is able to construct any meaning in what he finds, and the more disorientated he becomes. This process begins with his descent into the domain of the Morlocks, which is figured as a journey into a hinterland inhabited by the atavistic remnant of a previous evolutionary era. His exploration of the ‘Palace of the Green Porcelain’, with its once wellordered and carefully classified exhibits reverting, through a process of entropy, back into a state of physical decay and intellectual meaninglessness, marks the end of his attempts to construct a rational order out of what he sees. His focus after this point is entirely on his own survival in a hostile environment that confounds every attempt he makes to understand it.

Conclusion In The Time Machine Wells exploits the conflation between exploration and time–travel in order to challenge the ideological assumptions that underpinned European imperial adventuring. His strategic deployment of tropes associated with the representation of central Africa popularised by Henry Stanley allowed him to encode within the tale an implicit critique of the Eurocentric assumptions of socio–cultural superiority that were so central to British imperial self–imagining in the age of high imperialism. Thus, Wells’s The Time Machine does more than just present a dystopic vision of the degeneration of society; by presenting the Time Traveller as an explorer/anthropologist of the future whose every attempt to classify and categorise his observations collapse into fear and incomprehension, Wells is able to expose the myth of the rational constructability of the world which shaped the epistemology of colonial knowledge formation for the chimera that it was. Furthermore, by representing the disintegration of the Time Traveller’s occidental certainties and recasting him in the role of the primitive African, Wells implicitly critiques what Conrad termed the ‘militant geography’ of the explorers of the age of high imperialism and which, in the 1890s, was embodied in the figure of Henry Stanley. As Felix Driver explains: ‘Stanley’s geography was a science of action, dedicated to the subjugation of wild nature; its books and maps were weapons of conquest rather than objects of contemplation’.51 This opposition can also be seen in Wells’s more polemical criticisms of British imperialism his 1929 pamphlet “Imperialism and the Open Conspiracy”. In this pamphlet, he 50 51

Wells, The Time Machine, 64-65. Driver, Geography Militant, 126.

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reflects retrospectively on the manner in which the British Empire had been presented to its citizens during the closing decades of the nineteenth and the first three decades of the twentieth century. He states: a whole generation was persuaded that our imperial system, which in reality is based on opportunity, compromise, adaptability, the luck of the steamship, and the obsession of our European rivals with the Rhine, was really a system of high and swaggering conquest, to be sustained by the magic of prestige and developed further and higher in a mood of arrogant swagger. We had got our empire by luck and cunning, scarcely aware of what we did, and we were persuaded we had got it by superhuman strength and heroic resolution.52

In this remark, we discover an explicit critique of the presentation of British imperial expansion as what Wells terms ‘high and swaggering conquest’, resulting from the ‘superhuman strength and heroic resolution’ of a few men. In this context, The Time Machine can be read as a text which presents a counter-argument against this public mood of what Wells terms ‘arrogant swagger’, presenting a more critical view of both the rapid colonial expansion in Africa that was taking place in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the socio–evolutionary discourse that helped justify it.

Bibliography Archival Material ‘The Stanley and African Exhibition Catalogue, at The Victoria Gallery, Regent Street, 1890’, John Johnson Collection, Exhibition Catalogues, Box 24 (77047).

Printed Material Altick, Richard. The Shows of London. Cambridge Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 1978. Armstrong, M. “‘A Jumble of Foreignness’: The Sublime Musayums of Nineteenth–Century Fairs and Expositions.” Cultural Critique 23 (1993): 199–250.

52 H. G. Wells, Imperialism and the Open Conspiracy (London: Faber and Faber, 1929), 8-9.

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Booth, William. In Darkest England and the Way Out. London: William Burgess, 1890. Brantlinger, Patrick. “Victorians and Africans: The Geneology of the Myth of the Dark Continent.” Critical Enquiry 12:1 (1985): 166–203 Coombes, Annie. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. New Haven: Yale University Press,1994. Conrad, Joseph. Tales of Hearsay and Last Essays. London: J. M. Dent, 1955. —. Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin, 1995. Corbey, Raymond. “Ethnographic Showcases, 1870-1930.” Cultural Anthropology 8, 3 (1993): 338–369. Driver, Felix. “Henry Morton Stanley and His Critics: Geography, Exploration and Empire.” Past & Present 133 (1991): 134–166. —. Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire. London: Blackwell, 2001. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes It Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Greenhalgh, Paul. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and Worlds Fairs. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Greenslade, William. Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Hoffenburg, Peter. An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2001. Mackenzie, John. Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1860-1960. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Maclaughlin, Joseph. Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot. Charlottesville, London: University of Virginia Press, 2000. Murray, Brian. ‘“Stanley and his African Dwarfs’: Miniatures, Metaphors and Manikins in Darkest Africa.” Unpublished conference paper, London Nineteenth-Century Seminar, University of London, November 2010. Parrinder, Patrick. Shadows of the Future: H.G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995. Rubery, Matt. “Joseph Conrad’s ‘Wild Story of a Journalist’.” ELH, 71:3 (2004): 751–774

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Rydell, Robert. All The World’s A Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1870-1914. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Stanley, Henry. In Darkest Africa; or the Quest, Rescue, And Retreat of Emin Governor of Equatoria. New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1913. Stanley, Dorothy, ed. The Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley. London: Simpson Low, Marston and Co., 1909. Wells, H. G. The Chronic Argonauts, Accessed 12, 2016. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602911h.html#ch4. —. The Time Machine. London: Penguin, 2005. —. “Imperialism and the Open Conspiracy.” London: Faber and Faber, 1929. Worth, Aaron. “Imperial Transmissions: H. G. Wells, 1897-1901.” Victorian Studies 53:1 (2010): 65–89 Young, Paul. Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009.

CHAPTER FIVE ‘THAT FAR-OFF SOUTHERN TOMB’: VISIONS AND VERSIONS OF SOUTH AFRICA IN BRITISH NEWSPAPER POETRY OF THE 18991902 SOUTH AFRICAN WAR ELIZABETH RAWLINSON-MILLS

Introduction: “thrown into rhyme” Poetry has appeared in newspapers for as long as there have been newspapers, and by the late nineteenth century it featured in almost every issue of almost every local, regional and national newspaper published in Britain. For poets, the huge reach of large-circulation national publications provided income and exposure; for columnists and correspondents, poetry supplied pithy phrases, sententious examples, or cultural prestige. Whether new work or treasured favourites, whole poems or extracts and quotations, jingling or serious, popular or profound, poetry makes a claim on the attention of readers, taking its place alongside news, comment, advertising and argument. Stanza breaks and varied line-lengths make these poems, in an inviting margin of white space, stand out against the surrounding blocks of text. Newspaper poems are thus distinct from but read alongside other kinds of content, participating in the cacophony of the newspaper page, while the uncomfortable and surprising ways in which verse jostles against non-literary material draws attention to aspects of the poetry itself, and of the news with which it interacts. The poets represented in late Victorian newspapers include well-known figures like Kipling, Hardy, Swinburne, Henley and Austin, invited by editors to provide a splash of literary colour, or with something to say to readers beyond the reach of their books. Some newspapers, such as Massingham’s Daily Chronicle, had their own in-

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house poets, responding to the news of the day or providing comic relief.1 The vast majority of newspaper poetry, however, comes from ordinary readers and correspondents who have ‘thrown’ their contribution ‘into rhyme’ in the hope that ‘it may, in this dress, strike the eye of some who might otherwise have passed it over’, as a contributor to the Daily News wrote in December 1899.2 For similarly tactical reasons, perhaps, a contributor to the Black and White Budget ‘breaks into verse’ to express his or her protest against civilian criticism of army methods.3 These anonymous and untraceable figures, spurred by their responses to the issues of the day to articulate their opinions and objections in poetry, make up the majority of newspaper poets at the turn of the century, but since their work is generally not collected in anthologies or volumes, it is effectively lost to literary scholarship, which recoils from the apparently ephemeral newspaper publication context and is dismissive of, or frustrated by, anonymity.4 In recent years, a number of scholars have argued for the value of expanding the field of Victorian poetry to include poems published in serial forms, whether in annuals, monthlies, weeklies or daily newspapers.5 As Alison Chapman and Caley Ehnes explain, critical neglect of periodical poetry has largely been the result of ‘a continuing disciplinary bias against 1

Although the poet remains anonymous, the cockney speaker of the poems refers to him/herself by name in the title of “Tomkins Apologises,” Daily Chronicle, April 28, 1900. 2 J.F., “One Church for One Place,” Daily News, December 9, 1899. 3 “Notes O’ War,” Black and White Budget, December 30, 1899. 4 In their introduction to an anthology of newspaper poems of the American Civil War, R. J. Weir and Elizabeth Lorang write: “Literary and cultural scholars have tended to regard anonymous publication as … a mark of inconsequential or ephemeral literature, or as only a puzzle to be solved”, but argue that, since anonymity “was a fundamental characteristic of nineteenth-century American literary culture”, it is appropriate “to expose and problematize the unit of the author as the primary organizational model and as the requisite point of access” for poetry published in newspapers. R. J. Weir and Elizabeth Lorang, “‘Will Not These Days Be by Thy Poets Sung’: Poems of the Anglo-African and National AntiSlavery Standard, 1863-1864,” The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing 56 (2013), http://www.scholarlyediting.org/2013/editions/intro.cwnewspaperpoetry.html. Accessed 25 January 2017. 5 Natalie Houston, “Newspaper Poems: Material Texts in the Public Sphere,” Victorian Studies 50, 2 (2008): 233–42; Alison Chapman and Caley Ehnes, “Introduction,” Victorian Poetry 52, 1 (2014): 1–20; Linda K. Hughes, “What the ‘Wellesley Index’ Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies,” Victorian Periodicals Review 40, 2 (2007): 91–125, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20084182.

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popular ephemeral poetry judged to be poor work displaying qualities not usually seen as aesthetic virtues, such as sentimentality, nostalgia, patriotism, jokes and puns’.6 The perceived crimes against literary standards committed in and by this poetry are those of content (nostalgia, patriotism) as well as of style (sentimentality, jokes and puns). The general attitude which Chapman and Ehnes articulate is exacerbated when it comes to poems published in newspapers during the South African War, which are doubly damned: distaste for the popular politics and apparently ubiquitous imperial belligerence of fin-de-siècle Britain on the one hand, and a disciplinary bias against the anonymous and ephemeral on the other, combine to ensure the almost complete critical neglect of newspaper poems. In one of the only book-length studies to discuss the poetry of the 1899-1902 conflict at all, Malvern van Wyk Smith characterises material from newspapers as ‘more or less bovinely jingo’ and ‘partisan doggerel’.7 The present chapter is motivated in part by a desire to recover a more nuanced understanding of the material. For one thing, Victorian newspaper poets were interested in questions of literary quality, critiquing one another and being lambasted by newspaper editors for failures of imagery, metre or rhyme. The day after Austin’s ‘Inflexible as Fate’ was published in the Times, for instance, the Daily Chronicle gleefully prints a parody calling it ‘dismal twaddle’,8 while the writers at the Westminster Gazette were merciless to Jane H. Oakley, whenever she paid by the line to insert her latest poem into the advertising columns on the front page of the Times, as in the brilliantly backhanded assessment that ‘the stirring metrical effect’ of certain lines ‘is alone almost sufficient to give this poem a place beside the recent efforts of almost equally well-known poets’.9 Secondly, the value of these poems is not measurable simply in terms of the aesthetic criteria traditionally invoked in discussions of the canon. So-called ‘bad’ poetry can have ‘a socio-political, cultural, and literary function’, as Chapman and Ehnes argue.10 More importantly still, however, Andrew Hobbs and Claire Januszewski have recently shown that newspapers were ‘the type of publication in which most Victorian poetry was published and […] in which most Victorian poetry was read’.11 6

Chapman and Ehnes, “Introduction,” 9. Malvern van Wyk Smith, Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), 2nd edn (Menlo Park: Protea Book House, 1999), 42, 71. 8 G.H.P., “When for a Passing Hour’,” Daily Chronicle 9 November 3, 1899, 7; Westminster Gazette, October 21, 1899, 2. 10 Chapman and Ehnes, “Introduction,” 9. 11 Andrew Hobbs and Claire Januszewski, “How Local Newspapers Came to Dominate Victorian Poetry Publishing,” Victorian Poetry 52, 1 (2014): 65. Hobbs 7

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Newspaper poems remind us that poetry can be as much at home in the clamour of day-to-day political debate as in the slim volume, and that many of those poems now read with austere and hushed deference to canonical status began their public lives in a much noisier, more crowded and less respectful space. Finally, the assumption that these poems are mere ephemera is undermined by the fact that poems circulated nationally and globally, picked up and reprinted from one newspaper to another. Ryan Cordell’s characterization of antebellum US newspaper editing as ‘a system founded on textual borrowing’ is just as apposite for the British and colonial context, and the recent digitization of newspaper archives has made possible the large-scale computational analysis strategies through which Cordell and his colleagues on the Viral Texts project can identify precise networks of printing and reprinting, as a single poem makes its way through hundreds of publications.12 This essay is concerned with readers’ experiences of this textual circulation; rather than seeing poetry as the solution to an editor’s need to fill space in his next issue, my interest is in the evidence of readers’ responses to the poems that reached them, both in the production of new poems, and in the creation of scrapbooks of clippings, testifying to a sense of this poetry’s social and historical significance. Newspaper poems of the period also exist in extra-textual forms, turned into imperial memorabilia on posters, buttons, tea-sets and biscuit tins. The rich afterlives and global reach of poems which start out in local or national British newspapers renders doubtful their dismissive characterization as ‘ephemera’. This chapter makes a case for the value, variety and cultural significance of newspaper poems, drawing on archive material from Britain and South Africa.13 Drawing together newspaper poets’ perspectives on the and Januszewski’s argument is substantiated by focus particularly on local and regional newspapers, but the same principle is borne out by my study of poems in large-circulation British national papers. 12 Ryan Cordell and Abby Mullen, “‘Fugitive Verses’: The Circulation of Poems in Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers,” American Periodicals 27, 1 (2017): 29–52; Ryan Cordell, “Reprinting, Circulation, and the Network Author in Antebellum Newspapers,” American Literary History 27, 3 (2015): 417–45. 13 A particularly significant source is the Pera Muriel Button Collection: The South African War, Library of Parliament, Cape Town, 5 vols (hereafter cited as Pera Muriel Button). This archive consists of 5 scrapbooks of newspaper clippings relating to the conflict from English-language papers of Cape Colony and Natal, preserved by Pera Muriel Button, a British South African woman who was 23 when the war began. The scrapbooks are dated from Pietermaritzburg, in Natal. It is usually not possible to ascribe precise dates to the clippings in the scrapbooks, although material appears in chronological order; in the notes below, dates are

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South African landscape, this material illuminates the diverse ways poets and readers made sense of the war. Poets who describe the South African landscape participate in a tradition of English literary responses to the colonial terrain going back to the arrival of the earliest settlers, and a still longer tradition of international Euroimperialist travel writing. As J. M. Coetzee in White Writing and Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes point out, literature in English ‘produced “the rest of the world”’ for metropolitan readers, speaking back to the colonial urban centres about and for colonial margins, and circumscribing the terms of the discourse.14 In doing so, however, they are themselves circumscribed by a set of assumptions and expectations, able to see only what they are already looking for.15 In many respects, of course, this writing tells us more about the writers themselves, and their imagined readers, than it does about the landscapes they describe. This is particularly true of the civilian newspaper poets who left Britain only in their imaginations, and whose poems thus rely on weaving together familiar tropes drawn from first-hand accounts in journalists’ and soldiers’ correspondence, as well as from a century of literary representations of South Africa. While the echo chamber effect is certainly clear from the discussion that follows, however, the poems quoted here do more than rehearse predictable imperial blind spots.16 These poems might tell us little about the South African landscape, but they offer valuable insights into British and South African experiences of, and responses to the war, and illuminate the role and significance of newspaper poetry as a cultural form. given only when the poems are dated in the clipped text. Similarly, it is usually impossible to ascertain which newspaper they have been taken from, although internal references make it clear that the scrapbooks include material from the Times of Natal, Natal Witness, Cape Argus and Cape Times as well as references to the Transvaal Leader. Where a clipping indicates either the source paper or the fact that a poem is reprinted from another paper, whether South African or British, the name of the respective publication is recorded below. 14 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 5. 15 J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 22–25, 37–44. 16 For instance, it is striking that of the nineteen war poems I cite in this chapter, not one mentions the presence of black Africans in the landscape or as part of the war experience, although we know that more than 100,000 black Africans were part of the British war effort, thousands more involved in the Boer campaigns, and a further 100,000 caught up in the concentration camps. William Nasson, “Africans at War,” in The Boer War: Direction, Experience and Image, ed. John Gooch (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 127.

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I begin by arguing that the newspaper-reading public were persuaded to provide their support for the war through an intense focus on a precise location in South Africa, resonant with symbolic and historical significance, through poetry as well as in prose articles. My argument goes on to show that, once the war had begun, representations of the landscape in newspaper poetry evidence consternation and anxiety around three related themes: the strange apparent emptiness of veld and Karoo; the frightening way the landscape concealed enemies skilled at camouflage, as well as diseases which would enfeeble the British army; and the traumatic prospect of dying in an unknown location of a featureless country.

A name to conjure with Undoubtedly the most famous and commercially successful newspaper poem of the South African War is Kipling’s ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’.17 Notwithstanding Kipling’s own assessment of it (he is said to have joked, ‘I would shoot the man who wrote it if it would not be suicide’),18 it was reprinted in dozens of newspapers across the world, recited in theatres, set to music, copied and parodied, and translated into all manner of patriotic memorabilia, from handkerchiefs to match-strikers. The Daily Mail called it ‘the incarnation of the national spirit.’19 A cultural phenomenon, it both reflected and shaped public attitudes, touching on debates about the status and treatment of soldiers, the relationships between the military and civilian society, and the role of poets to effect real social change. It is also an instructive place to begin the present discussion of poetic representations of the South African landscape. When Kipling wrote of a ‘gentleman in kharki [sic]… wiping something off a slate’, readers were in no doubt about what he meant. By the time President Kruger’s ultimatum expired on October 11, 1899, it was generally understood that the approaching war was to be the second installment of a story begun two decades earlier, and an opportunity to avenge the humiliating British defeat by the Boers at Majuba Hill in 1881. The retreat of the Gordon Highlanders in that battle, the death of General Colley, and the appalling disparity in losses (92 British to one Boer death) had been followed by a British surrender which, in British minds, cast its 17

Rudyard Kipling, “The Absent-Minded Beggar,” Pall Mall Gazette, October 31, 1899. 18 Julian Ralph, War’s Brighter Side: The Story of “The Friend” Newspaper Edited by the Correspondents with Lord Roberts’s Forces, March-April 1900 (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1901), 113. 19 Daily Mail, 25 December 1899.

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dark shadow across the rest of the century. Queen Victoria herself is said to have objected: ‘I do not like peace before we have retrieved our honour.’20 The Boers’ annual celebrations of ‘Majuba Day’ on the anniversary of their victory were a source of ongoing resentment. In British newspapers, ‘Majuba’ itself – a barren, scrubby hill in a desolate plain – came to stand for the disgrace of defeat, and in photographs and text writers and editors circle around the place-name with obsessive repetition. In early October 1899, as the approaching war began to seem inevitable, the Black and White Budget pictured the British memorial to the disaster: ‘a few rough stones’ which ‘mark a sacred spot’: One of the rude boulders bears the simple words, “Colley Fell”—two words that carry remembrance back to a terrible day, when a brave man, at the head of brave men, died for his country. The Boers remember Majuba Hill: shall we forget it?21

The prospect of another military encounter between Boers and Brits transformed the 1881 debacle into the ‘First Boer War’, the earlier defeat reframed as a temporary setback which the forthcoming ‘Second Boer War’ would put right; little wonder Black and White predicted that it would be ‘the most important war of the century as far as the British Empire is concerned’.22 Kipling’s Tommy Atkins was to “wipe” the humiliating memory off the ‘slate’. Kipling’s fictional Tommy had real historical counterparts, drawing inspiration from the site of historical military disaster to nerve themselves for particularly daring attacks; historian Fransjohan Pretorius describes soldiers in 1899 yelling ‘Majuba!’ as they stormed particularly formidable Boer positions.23 But Majuba had saturated the discourse long before the first troopships departed from Southampton. Thomas Wrightson put Majuba at the centre of his successful campaign in the St Pancras East byelection in July 1899, describing the defeat as ‘a disgrace that brought the blush of shame to the face of every Englishman’, insisting ‘it has to be paid’.24 Notwithstanding the censure in some papers for his ‘red-hot 20

Bill Nasson, The Boer War: The Struggle for South Africa (Stroud: Spellmount, 2010), 43. 21 Black and White: Transvaal Special, October 6, 1899, 10-11. 22 Black and White., inside cover. 23 Fransjohan Pretorius, The A to Z of the Anglo-Boer War (Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 9. 24 “Mr T. Wrightson and East St. Pancras,”The North-Eastern Daily Gazette, July 7, 1899, 3.

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Jingoism’, Wrightson was duly elected.25 In the two decades since Britain’s bungled annexation of the Transvaal, Majuba Hill had become a name to conjure with; in 1899, it was put to work transforming public attitudes to the prospect of war. After the failure of the Bloemfontein Conference in April 1899, War Minister Lord Lansdowne was right to suspect that public opinion would be ‘lukewarm’ if the British government’s actions or rhetoric were seen to precipitate war.26 In a few short weeks, however, the generally ‘pacific’ mood towards the South African Republics had been entirely transformed. Partly this was because President Kruger’s ultimatum gave the British government the appearance of the moral high ground. But it would be hard to overestimate the significance of the cheerfully bloodthirsty way in which newspapers and their poets looked forward to the prospect of avenging Majuba over the summer of 1899, with a particular focus on the real physicality of the place. Many poets appealed to wounded imperial pride, reminding readers of those annual Majuba Day celebrations and the British dead they seemed to scorn. A poem in the Evening Standard responds furiously to the Daily Chronicle’s call for compromise in the name of peace, with an impassioned appeal to ‘The Memory of the Dead’: Shall the fruit of the Boers’ Majuba Be harking to words again? Shall they think of us, cowed and quaking At the sight of our roll of slain? Shall we treat with a foe that mock us? Shall we humble our country’s pride? God keep us from such foul treason To those who have fought and died!27

Elsewhere, Lionel Phillips echoes Luke 19:40 in his warning that “silence” in the face of ‘duty’ will cause ‘Our comrades’ bones on base Majuba Hill’ to ‘Proclaim aloud in accents reeking wild, / “Revenge our cause and fell Hate’s sullen child.”’28 Other poems revel in the gory and 25

“Mr T. Wrightson”. Quoted in Keith Surridge, “Lansdowne at the War Office,” in The Boer War: Direction, Experience and Image, ed. John Gooch (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 27–28. 27 “The Memory of the Dead”, reprinted from Evening News, Pera Muriel Button, vol. 1, 80. 28 Lionel Shiel Audley Phillips, “When Duty Calls”, dated January 12, 1900, Pera Muriel Button, vol. 3, 7. 26

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glorious prospect of righteous revenge, calling on ‘vengeance, enrob’d in her garments of war’ to ride ‘through the strife in her bloody splash’d car’, and encouraging ‘Ye heralds of glory’ to arouse men with anger, inspiring them to ‘Avenge those who sleep in unaveng’d graves’.29 In another poem, the ‘silent brigade’ of ‘dead on Majuba Height’ are urged to ‘Rise’ and ‘Wake’ to cheer on the new cohorts of ‘armed battalions’ who will ‘win for [Britain’s] dead their right’.30 The absolute conviction of the justice of the cause and the righteousness of Britain’s anger at the indignity of defeat is striking here; the conflict is presented as unequivocally justified. The same ideas of just vengeance, and the reestablishment of rightful imperial pride, can be found elsewhere, even when the tone is less bloodthirsty. At an evening of entertainment at the Cape Town Opera House, for instance, a new and specially-written version of the popular song ‘Tommy Atkins’ was sung, with lyrics that eagerly anticipate the arrival of British troops in South Africa: So it’s Tommy, Tommy Atkins, you must come to Afric’s shore, You’re a beauty, an’ a daisy, an’ we’ve seen you ’ere afore. There’s a Milner ’ere can face a Steyn, an’ any number more, But we wants you ’ere to back ’im up, an’ pay Majuba’s score.31

The influence of the ‘Absent-Minded Beggar’ on much of this poetry is clear, not least in the characteristic phonetic cockney spelling which is particularly striking in this example of a text written for Cape Town colonial society, rather than for metropolitan Britons. Kipling’s language, and the common use of the image of Majuba, unite British patriotic impulses across the empire, collapsing the significant differences in opinion about the justice of the coming conflict into the image of global imperial unity. Some poets go further in their use of Kipling’s model, taking Kipling’s words verbatim, as when ‘Nomolas’ insists ‘that Joseph C. must prop’ly / wipe the slate’.32 Others seem aware, like Kipling, that social criticism is more palatable when less strident, and use the familiar form and metre of ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’ to reiterate or expand on its message. ‘Tommy’s Appeal’ cautions that fine words and intentions need to 29

“The Avengers”, Pera Muriel Button, vol. 1, 79. “The Song of the Uitlander”, Pera Muriel Button, vol. 1, 44. 31 H. Rose-MacKenzie, “What Tommy’s Got To Do,” Pera Muriel Button, vol. 1, 76. 32 Nomolas, “The Transvaal up-to-date”, dated Maritzburg, February 5, 1900, Pera Muriel Button, vol. 3, 70. 30

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translate into real and sustained action in support of soldiers’ families. The poet objects to the idea, implicit in some other responses to ‘The AbsentMinded Beggar’, that Tommy ought to be grateful for the outpouring of patriotic enthusiasm and support, observing that ‘partin’ cheers’ not only failed to ‘fill kiddies’ bellies same as bread’ but were also unnecessary to motivate soldiers, ‘With Majuba sorta stickin’ in our gall’.33 The use of Kipling’s poetic form is not merely plagiaristic; the echoes in ‘Tommy’s Appeal’ of its famous forerunner help to emphasise the intensification of criticism in the later poem. ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’ opens with the gentle reminder that patriotic effusions (‘When you’ve shouted “Rule Britannia”—when you’ve sung “God Save the Queen”’) amount to little more than ‘killing Kruger with your mouth’.34 The poet of ‘Tommy’s Appeal’ rejects Kipling’s euphemistic style. Instead of allowing ‘Majuba’ to stand simply for the ideal of retribution, the poet contrasts the ‘cosy’ circumstances of the newspaper’s readers against the harsh reality of life in South Africa, forcing armchair critics and fair-weather supporters of the army’s progress to face up to the reality of the war for those who have to fight it: You chaps’ll read th’ papers, sittin’ cosy with yer wives, An’ you’ll maybe say our losses wus but slight; But we wants yer to remember that they’re British soldiers’ lives, Them same losses what occurs in ev’ry fight. That it aint no kind o’ novel, nor no fairy tale you read, But sober, bitter, bloody, deadly truth; An’ the chap what’s got his ticket, an’ leaves folks at ’ome in need, Reckons “hurrahs” aint much clarse ’longside of “oof.”35

The poet of ‘Tommy’s Reply’ invites readers to consider the human cost of ‘wiping something off a slate’. For the most part, however, ‘Majuba’ is an economical way to signal the inevitability and justice of the approaching war, such as when C.W.S. turns Kipling’s words indignantly back on themselves: Why, the very name of “beggar” is an insult to our race, That they’re “absent” is not shame, at any rate; And they’re “minded” just to save our dear old country from disgrace, And to wipe the word “Majuba” off the slate.36

33

“Tommy’s Appeal”, Pera Muriel Button, vol. 1, 73. Kipling, “The Absent-Minded Beggar.” 35 “Tommy’s Appeal”, Pera Muriel Button, vol. 1, 73. 34

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This use of Majuba to galvanise public support for the South African campaign was as successful as it was politically necessary. Britain was embarking on a war over the political rights of British immigrant workers in Johannesburg’s gold fields – the so-called Uitlanders. The problem for War Minister Lord Lansdowne and the British government was that the Uitlander was not a natural object of sympathy for the British public in 1899. Colonial adventurers had long been regarded with a mixture of suspicion and distaste; the Uitlanders were men of doubtful motives and unscrupulous methods who did not quite fit in with metropolitan society. Their position in far-flung corners of the empire was a physical manifestation of their status on the periphery of social acceptability. Moreover, their association with the gold hidden in the South African landscape threatened to distract public attention from the apparently democratic aims of Salisbury’s government, and to play into the hands of anti-war campaigners, who argued that the British government was in league with grasping capitalists, motivated by greed for gold rather than a commitment to international law or democratic principles. The narrative of revenge for Majuba was a much easier sell. It is precisely this conflation of motives that C.Q. gestures towards in ‘Compalwooky’, a parodic version of Jabberwocky in which the poet pictures an absurdist Wonderland of political obfuscation, pointing to the hidden influence of Cecil Rhodes and the South African mining syndicates, and connecting vengeful soldiers (‘Majubing Tommies’) with the discredited Jameson Raid of 1895: ’Twas Cecil and the Syndicate Did trek and kopje on the Rand; Majubing Tommies wiped the slate, And the Jimraids outspanned.37

In spite of such dissenting voices, however, the appeal to popular enthusiasm for imperial revenge seems to have been successful. As Edward Clarke, MP, pointed out in a speech to his constituents immediately before Kruger’s ultimatum was delivered: ‘For one man who was to-day in favour of war because of the interests of the Uitlanders there were a dozen ready to shout for war because they wanted to avenge Majuba Hill.’38 A ‘ditty’ printed in the Westminster Gazette, received with 36

C.W.S., “No Absent-Minded Beggar,” Cape Town Weekly, January 10, 1900, 11. 37 C.Q., “Compalwooky,” Westminster Gazette, November 29, 1899, 2. 38 “Sir Edward Clarke,” Westminster Gazette, September 29,1899, 8.

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‘tremendous enthusiasm’ at nightly music hall performances, corroborates the point: Then take the muzzle off the Lion, And let him have a go! Is Boer or Briton going to rule? That’s what we want to know! Whisper to him “Majuba Hill,” Then at his chain he’ll pull; There’s only room for one out there, And that’s John Bull.39

One important consequence of the prevalence of ‘Majuba’ in debates about the forthcoming war was that the landscape of South Africa felt familiar to newspaper-readers of 1899. Repeated invocations of the earlier war meant that South Africa’s place-names resounded in the popular cultural consciousness. Professional soldiers, and the volunteers who signed up in their thousands to accompany the regular troops to South Africa, knew they were going to the land of Majuba, and many of them were explicit about its part in their motivation. But familiarity with placenames could only go so far in preparing them, and their supporters at home, for the encounter with the South African landscape.

‘Rough country’ ‘Private 1281’ left his London desk-job and joined the Imperial Volunteers soon after war broke out, leaving for South Africa at the beginning of 1900. His journal-memoir records the shift from bellicose enthusiasm to shocked disillusionment. The writer begins enthusiastically: ‘Rumour hath it that we are off to the front to-morrow, probably to Naauw Poort near where there is heavy fighting going on:—hooray! what fun.’40 When he and a small team are posted to sentry duty at a pumping station on March 3, 1900, he writes: ‘we don’t want to be relieved until the Regiment is ready to join a Brigade and take the field.’ 41 A week later, he is ‘getting

39

“Music Halls and the War,” Westminster Gazette, October 14, 1899, 8. Pte. 1281 [Rawlings-Venning], With the Infantry Batallion [sic] of the C.I.V. MS diary/memoir. Private collection (hereafter cited as With the Infantry Batallion). February 19, 1900. 41 With the Infantry Batallion, March 3, 1900. 40

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rather tired of inaction: Prospect of fighting rather remote’,42 and by the end of the month he is positively mutinous: It is quite time we were relieved of this outlying picket duty; according to all the laws of war and nature no troops should be kept on continuous outpost duty for more than 14 days as the nervous system will not stand it without a big strain.43

The results of such ‘strain’ are unsettling, as he shows: A quiet day followed by a night of alarms. Whether it was the hot depressing weather or the very bright and weird night lightning that got on ones [sic] nerves is neither here nor there, but at 7.15 p.m. the sentry under the South end of the bridge got a bad attack of jumps and fired at a phantom Boer, rousing the whole camp: we searched the thick scrub up and down the river banks thoroughly and then turned in without having seen anything.44

This sense of the sheer strangeness of the country is reiterated later, when the Company emerges out onto a new landscape: At daybreak we entered some very rough country, passing through two ugly gorges and at 9 A.M. got through the hills and opened out on to an immense, wide grassy plain, nothing but monotonous rolling undulating veldt with some rugged bristling mountains, sticking up miles away ahead.45

The veld is both fascinating and alienating; it is ‘ugly’ and ‘monotonous’ and ‘bristling’, but also ‘immense’. The volunteer’s language is mirrored in the poetry. Daily News poet H. D. Rawnsley writes of ‘The grim veldt-side’; E.E.J., in the Westminster Gazette, of its ‘dreary hills’.46 For these and many other poets, the alien landscape forms a suitable backdrop to an increasingly depressing conflict. In spite of being drastically outnumbered, the Boers made key gains in the early stage of the war. Within a month of the ultimatum, an alarming proportion of the British forces in South Africa was locked up in the sieges 42

With the Infantry Batallion, March 3, 1900. With the Infantry Batallion, March 26, 1900. 44 With the Infantry., March 22, 1900. 45 With the Infantry, May 1, 1900. 46 H. D. Rawnsley, “After the Battle,” Daily News, December 7, 1899, 3; E.E.J., “In War Time,” Westminster Gazette, February 16, 1900, 2. 43

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of Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley, and early December 1899 brought news of three more calamitous defeats at Magersfontein, Stormberg and Colenso: the press called it ‘Black Week’. The strangeness of South Africa is a common trope in the newspapers’ poetic responses to these disasters, as it had been for poets since the arrival of British settlers at the Cape.47 Coetzee notes that part of the problem is that, ‘as a literary medium, English carries echoes of a very different natural world’, but there is more than a simple contrast between veld or Karoo and the British countryside in these haunted landscapes.48 One key is in the ‘bristling mountains’ hiding ‘phantom Boers’ which the volunteer’s diary describes. For soldiers and officers alike, one of the most unsettling features of the war was the invisibility of the enemy; as one soldier lamented, ‘the Boers will not play the game fairly’.49 New smokeless, long-range magazine rifles, combined with the Boers’ genius for camouflage, meant that, in Thomas Pakenham’s words, ‘the enemy were an army of ghosts’.50 After the Battle of Colenso in December 1899, where British losses came to 1,138 men killed, wounded or missing, Commander-in-Chief General Buller cabled the War Office to report the catastrophe, confessing: ‘I do not think either a Boer or a gun was seen by us all day’.51 Newspaper poets were quick to respond to the British failure to predict or match the Boer skill in capitalizing on the natural features of the countryside. A Westminster Gazette poem from December 1899 describes a battle scene as a conflict between British soldiers and the landscape, rather than with an enemy: When we rush the bush an’ the artful trench, Or ford the river’s chilly drench…52

W.H.H.’s image is prescient: two days after the poem’s appearance, at the Battle of Magersfontein, it was precisely the ‘artful trenches’ which took the British by surprise and precipitated another catastrophe. Anticipating British strategy, the Boers had dug trenches at the foot of the hills, rather than on their flanks, from where they watched while the British fired all their artillery into the empty slopes and then proceeded 47

See Coetzee, White Writing, Chapter 2. Coetzee, White Writing, 8. 49 Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War, rev. ed. (London: Abacus, 2013), 179. 50 Pakenham. 51 Pakenham., 239–40. 52 W.H.H., “The Girl I Lef’ Be’ind Me,” Westminster Gazette, December 8, 1899, 3. 48

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over the open plain towards their waiting guns.53 At the end of the day, the Boers has lost 87 killed and 184 wounded; British casualties numbered over 1000.54 The battle, and the failures it exposed in British understanding of Boer tactics, is the subject of a poem which appeared in the London Morning Leader in February 1900. The poet signs himself Private Smith of the Black Watch, his rank designation elevating this verse narrative of the battle to the status of an eyewitness account of the day on which ‘Nine hundred went to the slaughter, and / Nearly four hundred fell’: Dearly we paid for the blunder— A drawing-room General’s mistake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Why weren’t we told of the trenches? Why weren’t we told of the wire? Why were we marched up in column May Tommy Atkins enquire… 55

Propaganda in the months before the war had repeatedly emphasised the ‘backwards’ Boers’ sleepily agricultural life. These ‘Boer farmers’, as they were repeatedly called in British newspapers, could hardly be expected to present much of a challenge to the might of the imperial army. As disaster after disaster befell the British forces, however, the relationship of the Boers to their land came to appear more and more dangerously symbiotic; nature itself seemed to be conspiring with the Boers.

The ‘burning veld’ William Watson reminds Westminster Gazette readers of the English triumph over the Spanish Armada, when ‘The winds of heaven’ were ‘our auxiliaries’, to draw a stark contrast with the present military situation: Ah, not to-day is Nature on our side! The mountains and the rivers are our foe. And Nature with the heart of man allied Is hard to overthrow.56

53

Pretorius, A to Z, 259. Pretorius, 261. 55 Pte. Smith, “The Battle of Magersfontein,” Morning Leader, February 10, 1900. Quoted in Pakenham, The Boer War, 201. 56 William Watson, “Past and Present,” Westminster Gazette, February 19, 1900, 2. 54

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The editor whose comment appears immediately below Watson’s poem seems keen to diminish its grave implications, calling it a ‘charming poetical fancy’. 57 While acknowledging that ‘Nature … has helped the Boer’ in the encounters so far, the editor remarks that ‘the period in which Nature will be his ally seems rapidly drawing to a close’, 58 as the fighting moved from British lands, with their mountains, up to the plains of the Transvaal. The breezy optimism of this comment is strangely undercut, however, by the fact that it begins with the observation that Watson’s ‘theory’ receives ‘curious confirmation’ in the day’s Daily News, which reports a Boer escape ‘owing to the serpentine bend in the river’.59 Moreover, the Boer army was not the only enemy concealed within the South African landscape; what one poet calls ‘the burning veldt’ was burning in more ways than one. In their movements across a landscape that was rugged, vast, and frequently boiling hot during the day, one of the biggest challenges facing the British forces was drinking water.60 Private Rawlings-Venning writes obsessively about water, recording the precise quantities available on day-long marches and the cruel experience of finally reaching a long-anticipated river to find that ‘the water … was absolutely unfit to drink, the river being nothing more than a chain of pools, in which wallowed mules and other live stock and also much dead stock’.61 Elsewhere he writes of a camp where ‘but ½ pint’ of the available water ‘will procure a free ticket for the nearest hospital’.62 Waterborne diseases were so rife that he records increasingly serious punishments ‘threatened for anyone found drinking river water’63 – an unappealing prospect, in his account, until ‘a small cupful of water apiece’ is the only relief the marching volunteers can hope for, when ‘our throats were … thick with dust and our tongues sticking to the roofs of our mouths.’ 64 Advice and threats notwithstanding, by the end of the war, two thirds of the total British deaths had happened away from the battlefield, as a result of preventable and treatable illnesses like dysentery and enteric fever brought on by drinking contaminated water.65

57

Westminster Gazette, February 19, 1900, 2. Westminster Gazette, February 19, 1900, 2. 59 Westminster Gazette, February 19, 1900, 2. 60 X, “The Women Who Wait,” Westminster Gazette, May 16, 1900, 2. 61 With the Infantry Batallion, April 25, 1900. 62 With the Infantry, March 3, 1900. 63 With the Infantry, March 16, 1900. 64 With the Infantry, April 25, 1900. 65 Nasson, The Boer War: The Struggle for South Africa, 306. 58

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The chronic under-resourcing of army medical services, and slapdash planning from generals who assumed that the conflict was going to be a short one, and who failed to make arrangements for getting fresh water to thirsty troops, grew into ‘the war hospital scandal’ in the London newspapers by the summer of 1900. But while editorials focused on the political implications of the British army’s struggle with South Africa’s hidden poison, newspaper poets like clergyman H. D. Rawnsley provided a more intimate perspective. ‘Dead for Joy’ is subtitled ‘A true incident on a Returning Transport’ when it appears in the Westminster Gazette in July 1900.66 It tells of ‘a gunner of Battery A’ who ‘drank of the donga’s pool accurst’.67 The Afrikaans word (a donga is a gully) emphasises the mystical foreignness of the landscape, but Rawnsley insists on the deadly familiarity of the gunner’s fate: he ‘Sickened slowly the usual way— / Taste in the mouth and a terrible thirst.’ In his feverish ‘drowse’ he wanders between South African and more familiar landscapes: ‘He babbled of woods in the old home-land’ and the ‘rose’ in the ‘bosom’ of ‘a girl he had left in a Hampshire lane’, but as his fever intensifies, the imagery changes: Then he moaned and muttered of waterless ways, Of thorns in the scrub, of the earth’s hot crust, Of hills ever looming in burning haze, Of leaves like tinder and flowers like dust.68

Burning up like the metaphorical landscape he pictures, he summons his courage ‘For Battery A and “Bob”’ and the Queen’ by focusing on his ‘Hampshire village where leaves are green’; but the ‘rose’ he wants to ‘offer the nurse’ is ‘dewy and cool’, quite unlike the ‘flowers like dust’ of the South African landscape in his ‘long wild dream’.69 Rawnsley’s juxtaposition of a feverish impression of South Africa with the reassuringly familiar British landscape is a recurrent motif in the newspaper poems of the war. An anonymous lyric published in the Pall Mall Gazette in February 1900 explores the uncomfortable contrast between the ‘expectant joy’ of the coming British springtime with the knowledge of death on the veld: Yet, England, for thy sake our hearts are sad … 66

H. D. Rawnsley, “Dead for Joy,” Westminster Gazette, July 3, 1900, 2. Rawnsley, “Dead for Joy”. 68 Rawnsley, “Dead for Joy”. 69 Rawnsley, “Dead for Joy”. 67

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Mourning the sons who, nourished at thy breast, Have rendered up the gift of life to thee, And quickly gone to their abhorréd rest, Where Briton never wish’d his grave to be.70

The poem ends by looking forward to ‘that day / So long’d for … When those who lust for slaughter cease to slay’. 71 The horror of the alien landscape turns a soldier’s glorious death into ‘abhorred rest’, and the strangeness of the veld is invoked in the service of a pacifist political message. In another Pall Mall Gazette poem from later the same year, which similarly asks how Spring’s ‘radiant mirth’ can be allowed ‘to call the slowly waking earth’72 to life at a time when lovers are separated by war, South Africa is: … that too envious land That fain would hold in alien chill embrace The youth and valour of a conquering race.73

Although the soldier’s grave is both ‘alien’ and ‘chill’, there are no pleas for peace here; the rights of the ‘conquering race’ are assumed. The parallels between these two poems from the same newspaper highlight a remarkable feature of the lyrics which invokes the strangeness of the South African landscape: they come from right across the political spectrum.

Immemorial sand In the photograph of the British memorial to the Battle of Majuba, Black and White introduces another theme central to representations of the South African landscape. Soldiers and their sacrifices live on in the monuments and memories of their deaths, but the ‘sacred spot’ where ‘Colley fell’ in 1881 is marked by nothing more than ‘a pile of rough stones’; the emptiness of the ‘barren veld’ is a threat to commemoration.74 Poets of all political colours offer their poems as the monuments to fallen soldiers that 70 “Anciently Thrilled and Saturate for Life,” Pall Mall Gazette, February 24, 1900, 2. 71 “Anciently Thrilled and Saturate for Life,” Pall Mall Gazette, February 24, 1900, 2. 72 “When You Return...,” Pall Mall Gazette, April 28, 1900, 2. 73 “When You Return...,” Pall Mall Gazette, April 28, 1900, 2. 74 Black and White: Transvaal Special, October 6, 1899, 10-11.

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South Africa’s apparently empty landscape cannot provide. William Haig Brown, headmaster at Charterhouse, expresses the traditional, euphemistic public-school attitude when he calls upon Pall Mall Gazette readers to witness those whom duty called to die In the front ranks of Britain’s chivalry; Tho’ in the barren veldt their bodies claim Only a soldier’s grave, their deathless fame Lives in our hearts…75

An anonymous poet writing in the same newspaper a month later considers the featurelessness of the landscape as imbuing the South African ‘soldier’s grave’ with a peculiar horror. He calls on readers to ‘honour all the brave’ who must claim A lonely grave, ’midst immemorial sand, Or parching deserts of the vast Karroo.76

However, when Smedley Norton describes South Africa as ‘that far-off Southern tomb’, he does so with much less certainty about the cause for which young men were dying.77 The Pall Mall’s poet writes of the ‘eager lad’ and ‘veteran tried and true’ heeding the call of ‘Honour … and this dear land’, with no question of the justice or propriety of their response. In contrast, Norton asks: ‘Show us the price of victory’, seeming to connect the emptiness of ‘immemorial sand’ (in the Pall Mall poem) with the frustrating lack of information or political honesty about setbacks. There is a pre-echo of Wilfred Owen in his lament: For those who strew our battlefields No passing bell shall toll; Report the living and the dead, Sergeant, call the roll! Show us the price of victory, Just tell us what it’s cost Say what the Motherland has gained And also what she’s lost.78

75

William Haig Brown, “Charterhouse Boys at the Front,” Pall Mall Gazette, February 1, 1900, 8. 76 “English Dead in South Africa,” Pall Mall Gazette, March 28, 1900, 2. 77 Smedley Norton, “Sergeant, Call the Roll!,” Black and White Budget, January 13, 1900, 32. 78 Norton, “Sergeant”.

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In ‘the hush-tide of the gloaming’ of ‘that far-off Southern tomb’, ‘our loved ones’ are reduced to ‘shadows’ ‘amidst the gloom’, their places of death unmarked and their sacrifices uncelebrated. Norton’s concern with ‘the price of victory’ for individuals mirrors a much more famous poem which had appeared in Literature six weeks earlier. ‘Drummer Hodge’ is too ‘fresh’ from ‘his Wessex home’ to be able to read the landscape: he cannot make any ‘meaning’ out of ‘the broad Karoo, / The bush, the dusty loam’.79 Similarly, although his body will ‘Grow to some Southern tree’, his ‘landmark’ is an impersonal ‘kopjecrest / That breaks the veldt around’. His loved ones will not be able to read the landscape, either, for any hint of his final resting place. He may ‘forever be’ a ‘portion’ of the place, but it remains an ‘unknown plain’, unknown and unknowable, to Hodge himself and to his loved ones. The veld will not give up the secret of his ‘uncoffined’ grave; his ‘landmark’ is an unreadable sign. Transformed by the alien landscape which receives him, and lost in the frighteningly featureless veld, Drummer Hodge is watched over by the triply-strange ‘foreign constellations’, ‘strange stars’, ‘strange-eyed constellations’. The unreadability of the South African landscape is a common trope in English poetic responses to the country across the nineteenth century. In White Writing, Coetzee points out that writers from Thomas Pringle onwards struggle with a sense that the South African landscape resists the hermeneutic gaze of the English-language poet, refusing to ‘speak’ in terms of the aesthetic schema familiar to European literary and visual art.80 Without the mountains that might inspire a familiar sense of the sublime; with empty blue skies, free of the clouds which in Europe provide what Constable called ‘nature’s chiaroscuro’ – the ceaseless movement of light and shade across a landscape – and without large bodies of still water to evoke metaphors of contemplation and self-awareness, the landscape is characterised as empty, silent, or asleep.81 Coetzee summarises: This landscape remains alien, impenetrable, until a language is found in which to win it, speak it, represent it. It is no oversimplification to say that landscape art and landscape writing in South Africa from the beginning of

79 Thomas Hardy, “Drummer Hodge,” Literature, November 28, 1899. In Thomas Hardy, Selected Poetry, ed. Samuel Hynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 14–15. 80 Coetzee, White Writing, 8. 81 Coetzee, White Writing, 43.

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The writers and artists Coetzee discusses are British settlers; ‘no longer European, not yet African’, and as such this sense of the failure of their language is bound up with ‘colonial-imperial doubts about cultural identity’.83 Although, in contrast, the newspaper poets discussed here are almost all temporary visitors to South Africa (either travellers in their imagination, like Hardy, or those who arrived in person, as soldiers, volunteers or medics), the sense that English lacks the vocabulary to articulate the realities of the veld is similarly prevalent. In this poetry by and for metropolitan readers, however, the failure is registered both as a source of cultural anxiety, and as a poetic tool: the reader of ‘Drummer Hodge’ is invited to share in the drummer boy’s disorienting experience, as the Dutch/Afrikaans words trip up and defamiliarise Hardy’s iambic pentameter. The practice of registering the alienating experience of the South African landscape through the use of Dutch or Afrikaans words became so prevalent that, a year into the war, it was parodied by the anti-British South African Times, in a ‘recipe’ for newspaper verse: Do not forget to mention the word “veldt” at least once and do not on any consideration leave out the “t”. It is an absurd affectation on the part of the Dutch to spell it otherwise, and if you were to do so your readers might think you knew another language than your own, and might even doubt your loyalty.84

In their ironic conflation of ignorance with jingoistic patriotism, The South African Times ridicules the kinds of poems that van Wyk Smith dismisses as ‘jingo jingles’.85 But as the poems above indicate, the adoption of Afrikaans words was not limited to poets signaling their unqualified (‘jingo’) support for the British government or the military. In early October 1899 the Black and White Budget needed to define these terms when they printed photographs of ‘The Veld – the dreary stretches of hummocky plain that form the great Transvaal plateau’ and ‘The low-lying stone plains … known as the “Karroo”’.86 A few weeks later, as British

82

Coetzee, White Writing, 7. Coetzee, White Writing, 11, 8. 84 South African News, October 13, 1900. 85 van Wyk Smith, Drummer Hodge, 71. 86 Black and White Transvaal Special, October 6, 1899, 30. 83

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newspaper readers became all too accustomed to bad news from South Africa, the words needed no explanation. In poems which offer patriotic commonplaces and in poems which raise more controversial questions about the motives for and progress of the war, the familiar foreignness of these Afrikaans words stands for the peculiar horrors faced by soldiers in the South: a strange landscape hiding both deadly enemies and deadly disease, and the prospect of an unknowable grave in a barren emptiness.

Conclusion: beyond “jingo jingles” During the first two years of the South African War, the pro-government, pro-war stance was powerfully hegemonic. Newspaper editors like W. T. Stead who took a stand against the government’s policies were labelled ‘pro-Boers’ and suffered personally and financially.87 But as the material quoted here indicates, the poetry that newspaper editors printed often articulates a more troubled assessment of Britain’s imperial activity. Even poets who do not make use of the freedom of anonymity have other kinds of freedom not granted to editorial writers and columnists: the freedom to dissent in a voice which may or may not be their own, and the freedom to sustain a complex, uncomfortably equivocal position. Herbert Cadett’s ‘War’ is one such poem; I quote it in conclusion as a representative example of the many poems which refute the traditional scholarly assessment of newspaper poetry expressed in van Wyk Smith’s description of the press as one of the main ‘purveyors of sub-literary appeals to patriotism’ (along with the music halls).88 Appearing within a month of Kruger’s ultimatum – at a time of overwhelming popular enthusiasm for the South African War – Cadett’s poem acknowledges the horror of wartime violence in a way that has come to be seen as uniquely characteristic of First World War poets. His dying soldier is marked with ‘the brand of Cain’, referring to pacifist campaigners’ horror at an imperial war against a white Christian enemy (Stead’s anti-war pamphlet was called ‘Shall I slay my brother Boer?’).89 Moreover, uniquely among the newspaper 87

Stead had been called “the most powerful journalist in the island” during the 1880s, but he encountered severe financial difficulties because of his outspoken opposition to the South African War. James Stuart Olson and Robert Shadle, eds., Historical Dictionary of the British Empire (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1996), 1062; J. O. Baylen, “Stead, William Thomas (1849-1912),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/36258. 88 van Wyk Smith, Drummer Hodge, 71. 89 W. T. Stead, Shall I Slay My Brother Boer? An Appeal to the Conscience of Britain (London: Review of Reviews Office, 1899).

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poets, he describes gentleness, beauty and redemption, as well as harshness and horror, in the South African veld. The doubts and hesitations his poem thus implies would have no place in the prose material surrounding the poem in the Daily Chronicle, but the crowded newspaper page collapses such generic distinctions; poetry introduces an antithetical voice into a discourse otherwise dominated by the powerful. Cadett’s poem, like many others, requires readers to engage directly with the physicality of an individual soldier’s death, denying the euphemistic narrative of glorious and willing sacrifice, as well as with the reality of the South African landscape, which makes the vision of hope with which it ends profoundly equivocal. Private Smith of the Royals; the veldt and a slate-black sky, Hillocks of mud, brick-red with blood, and a prayer—half curse—to die. A lung and a Mauser bullet; pink froth and a half-choked cry. Private Smith of the Royals; a torrent of freezing rain; A hail of frost on a life half lost; despair and a grinding pain. And the drip-drip-drip of the Heavens to wash out the brand of Cain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Private Smith of the Royals; the blush of a dawning day; The fading mist that the sun had kissed—and over the hills away The blest Red Cross like an angel in the trail of the men who slay. But Private Smith of the Royals gazed up at the soft blue sky— The rose-tinged morn like a babe new born and the sweet-songed birds on high— With a fleck of red on his pallid lip and a film of white on his eye.90

90

Herbert Cadett, “War,” Daily Chronicle, October 26, 1899, 6.

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Bibliography Newspapers Black and White Budget Cape Town Weekly Daily Chronicle Daily News Morning Leader Pall Mall Gazette Westminster Gazette

Manuscripts Pera Muriel Button Collection: The South African War, Library of Parliament, Cape Town, 5 vols. With the Infantry Batallion of the C.I.V., Private Collection.

Secondary Reading Baylen, J. O. “Stead, William Thomas (1849-1912).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004. Chapman, Alison, and Caley Ehnes. “Introduction.” Victorian Poetry 52, no. 1 (2014): 1–20. Coetzee, J. M. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Cordell, Ryan. “Reprinting, Circulation, and the Network Author in Antebellum Newspapers.” American Literary History 27, no. 3 (2015): 417–45. Cordell, Ryan, and Abby Mullen. “‘Fugitive Verses’: The Circulation of Poems in Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers.” American Periodicals 27, 1 (2017): 29–52. Hardy, Thomas. Selected Poetry. Edited by Samuel Hynes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Hobbs, Andrew, and Claire Januszewski. “How Local Newspapers Came to Dominate Victorian Poetry Publishing.” Victorian Poetry 52, 1 (2014): 65–87. Houston, Natalie. “Newspaper Poems: Material Texts in the Public Sphere.” Victorian Studies 50, 2 (2008): 233–42. Hughes, Linda K. “What the ‘Wellesley Index’ Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies.” Victorian Periodicals Review 40, 2

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(2007): 91–125. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20084182. Kipling, Rudyard. “The Absent-Minded Beggar.” Pall Mall Gazette, October 31, 1899. Nasson, Bill. The Boer War: The Struggle for South Africa. Stroud: Spellmount, 2010. Nasson, William. “Africans at War.” In The Boer War: Direction, Experience and Image, edited by John Gooch, 126–40. London: Frank Cass, 2000. Olson, James Stuart, and Robert Shadle, eds. Historical Dictionary of the British Empire. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Pakenham, Thomas. The Boer War. Rev. ed. London: Abacus, 2013. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Pretorius, Fransjohan. The A to Z of the Anglo-Boer War. Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2010. Ralph, Julian. War’s Brighter Side: The Story of “The Friend” Newspaper Edited by the Correspondents with Lord Roberts’s Forces, MarchApril 1900. London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1901. Stead, W. T. Shall I Slay My Brother Boer? An Appeal to the Conscience of Britain. London: Review of Reviews Office, 1899. Surridge, Keith. “Lansdowne at the War Office.” In The Boer War: Direction, Experience and Image, edited by John Gooch, 21–40. London: Frank Cass, 2000. van Wyk Smith, Malvern. Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). 2nd edn. Menlo Park: Protea Book House, 1999. Weir, R. J., and Elizabeth Lorang. “‘Will Not These Days Be by Thy Poets Sung’: Poems of the Anglo-African and National Anti-Slavery Standard, 1863-1864.” The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing 56 (2013). http://www.scholarlyediting.org/2013/editions/intro.cwnewspaperpoetr y.html. Accessed 25 January 2017.

SECTION C: ENCOUNTERING OTHER EMPIRES: VIEWING EUROPE THROUGH BRITISH EYES

CHAPTER SIX ‘THE SHEEPISH FEAR OF DESERTING THE COMMON TRACK IS UPON US’: THE (EMOTIONAL) ASSESSMENT OF SPACE AND TIME IN VICTORIAN GUIDEBOOKS1 HEIDI LIEDKE

Apart from accelerating the industrial and imperial project, new forms of travel were an emotional challenge for the Victorians. They brought about feelings of joy, anxiety, but also an increased occupation with space and time (management). Discussing selected passages from Victorian guidebooks, this chapter reflects upon the ambivalences inherent in the Victorians’ engagement with modern travel (both as mode of transport and leisure activity) and the concepts of time and space. Texts analysed include the Railroad Eclogues2 and – in a detailed analysis – the guidebook The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book of Hints, Suggestions, and Advice.3 The chapter will show that guidebooks provided their readers with methods on how to eliminate the uncertainties (either actual or perceived) of travel and tackle the dangers of unoccupied time. These findings will be complemented with the emotional assessment of travel, space and time in articles from Victorian periodicals. The examined corpus will show that the Victorians articulated complex responses to ‘modernity’ and related phenomena such as idle time, uneconomic time management and the emotional conquering and mapping of space. The 1

The author thanks the manuscript’s anonymous reviewer for his/her constructive criticism and suggestions and Maria Helmling for her help in the formatting of this article. 2 Basil Montagu, Railroad Eclogues (Pickering: London, 1846). 3 Anonymous, The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book of Hints, Suggestions, and Advice, Before the Journey, On the Journey, and After the Journey (London: Lockwood, 1862).

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geographical map of that time must thus be considered side-by-side with the complex emotional map of the traveling subjects. While the railway is usually presented as the symbol of industrialization as such, this chapter will focus on why it is also a symbol for the industrialization of the faculty of perception.4

The Railway and the ‘Here and Now’ From the 1820s onwards, many people ‘saw the magnitude of railway earth and masonry works as comparable to the constructions of ancient Egypt’ and ‘a hammer blow to Creation.’5 In the years that followed, most passengers in the Victorian age travelled for work purposes, but the tradition of travelling to take a holiday also developed during that time. First, excursions were run to important events, such as the Manchester Art Exhibition in 1857 and the 1862 International Exhibition in London, but then ‘[h]oliday resorts for richer people, who before then were the only ones taking such breaks, developed as soon as the railways reached the sea.’6 Dover, Brighton and Southampton were the most popular sea resort destinations, and, in as early as 1837, thousands visited the Scottish coast. When a new port opened at Fleetwood, the Preston & Wyre Railway opened a line.7 Most of these new pleasures were available to members of all classes. After all, the first organized ‘all inclusive’ group excursions that were offered by Thomas Cook were specifically aimed at working class people and indeed stimulated their mobility. Despite its great popularity, this new form of spending one’s leisure time, while undoubtedly 4

In Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999), Michael J. Freeman sets a similar focus arguing that while ‘the history of the English railway is probably among the most prolifically researched of all facets of the nineteenth century’ (18), the emphasis has usually been on a social scientific analysis and statistics. Freeman’s study, however, continuing the tradition of Wolfgang Schivelbusch, sets out to ‘re-engage the railway with the age of which it was a part’ and examine it ‘as cultural metaphor’ with all its various psychological and intellectual dimensions such as ‘a perpetual fascination with a sense of becoming, of living in an age of transition, in anxious and sometimes fearful contemplation of what the future held’ (ibid., 19). Freeman also points to the fact that contemporary media such as newspapers, periodicals and poetry are an invaluable source to capture the way the railway was a (sensual) experience rather than merely a technological innovation. 5 Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination, 15. 6 David Turner, Victorian and Edwardian Railway Travel, (Oxford: Shire, 2013), 47. 7 See Turner, Victorian and Edwardian Railway Travel, 47.

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opening up new horizons to the lower middle and working classes, was soon met with scorn. The terms ‘excursionists’ as well as ‘trippers’ were used with contempt.8 On a more abstract level, the railway system changed the way people perceived space and time since bigger distances could be crossed in less time without any additional physical effort. Already in the subtitle of his study The Railway Journey Wolfgang Schivelbusch speaks of ‘The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century’, that is, the industrialization of time and space brought about by new technologies, such as the railway. Schivelbusch then adds a very interesting nuance to the usual discussion of a perceived ‘time-space compression’, to use David Harvey’s term9: what the speed of the railway led to was not only a process of a compression of time and space but rather ‘a dual one: space was both diminished and expanded.’10 What is described here is a dialectical process: on the one hand, transport time shrinks, and on the other hand – because of that – an expansion of transport space occurs. The space-time-continuum is no longer perceived as constituting an organic whole. The argument Schivelbusch makes is a very illuminating one: referring to Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura, he outlines that since the space in between individual destinations – the actual ‘in-between-space’, which is the site where the passage of the traveller traditionally takes place – disappears, these destinations appear to be closer together. As a consequence, they lose their ‘inherited place, their traditional spatialtemporal presence’.11 Yet in order to have their own individuality, that is, a Here and Now, those destinations are in need of in-between-spaces because these cause their location in isolation. Schivelbusch, therefore, constructs a plausible analogy between Benjamin’s argument that the aura of an artwork consists of ‘its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’ and is conditioned both spatially and temporarily, and the effects of the railway on the aura of individual destinations.12 What Vadillo and Plunkett rightly find fault with is that Schivelbusch’s argument presents ‘a one-way causal relationship’, that is, the idea that it 8

Ian Ousby, The Englishman’s England: Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), 18. 9 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 10 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 35. 11 Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 41. 12 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 220.

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was the railways that created a panoramization of the world.13 While this is certainly true, a precision is called for: the (visual) exchange between the landscape ‘presented’ by the railway and the passenger/viewer was a dynamic one, it went both ways – in my view, it is necessary to add here that the railways, precisely because they quite simply presented their passengers with much more to see also demanded a greater engagement from the bearers of the gaze. This element ties in with my argument that the railway had an influence on people’s perceptions in the nineteenth century: they were forced to invest more energy into the viewing experience in order to process the panoramization they were facing and it also constituted an invasion into their private thoughts by altering their mental maps. What followed from this was a feeling of having been unsettled, both physically and psychologically. Stating that the train ‘made unprecedented physical and perceptual demands on its travellers’14, Beaumont and Freeman sensibly take up Michel Foucault’s evocation of the train as ‘an extraordinary bundle of relations’ in its threefold realization of the notion of passing: one can pass through it; being on it, one can pass from point A to B; and it passes by15. When experienced for the first time, this ‘bundle’ could have an extraordinary effect on the individual: he or she, and with that his or her selfhood, was no longer stationary; it was (forced to be) mobile, which in all the exhilaration that free agency brings about was a new challenge that one had to come to terms with. While the former observations focus on the railway’s impact on mental perceptions, the railway also influenced another category of considerations from the field of mobility studies which should be foregrounded more in current debates: it brought about an increased self-conscious occupation with emotional anxiety16 and the clinging to safety nets in the shape of guidebooks. Byerly compares the development of the railway system to 13

Ana Parejo Vadillo and John Plunkett, ‘The Railway Passenger; or, The Training of the Eye,’ in The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble, ed. Matthew Beaumont and Michael Freeman (Bern/Berlin et al.: Peter Lang, 2007), 51. 14 Vadillo and Plunkett, ‘The Railway Passenger,’ 20. 15 Michel Foucault, ‘Different Spaces,’ in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. James Faubian (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 178. 16 According to Beaumont and Freeman, from the 1860s on different European newspapers also reported of an atmosphere of intense anxiety caused by the social proximity one was forced into in carriage compartments. See Matthew Beaumont and Michael Freeman, ‘Introduction,’ in The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble, ed. Beaumont and Freeman (Bern/ Berlin et al.: Peter Lang 2007), 37-38.

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the internet in that both were systems that started out as networks designed to be used by few and their ‘capacity to bring together people and ideas from widely dispersed locations promised the dawn of a new era.’17 Arguably, the acceleration of people’s daily lives and the time-spacecompression allowed travellers to shift the focus of a journey away from a purely physical one to journeys of the intellect and the imagination.18 But at the same time it was feared that the railway would bring about a lifestyle that put too much pressure on people and strained intimate relationships19 – again, fears that are similar to those uttered with regard to new technologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.20 In the Victorian context, travelling and the tourism industry can be regarded as being firmly embedded in the normative system of the value of work and efficiency. One can argue that handbooks and guidebooks, apart from the fact that they were a necessity in light of the increase in people’s mobility, became popular because they served as remedies to the widespread feeling of unsettlement. In order to calm down most people’s anxieties and scepticism concerning railway travel in particular but also travel in 17

Alison Byerly, Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 143. Byerly makes this connection in analogy to Tom Standage’s comparison of the telegraph to the internet in his book The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth CenturyҴs On-Line Pioneers (London: Phoenix, 1998); but the railway, much like the internet, had a more dramatic and direct influence on people’s daily lives and is therefore a more fitting symbol of change. 18 See Judith Johnston, Victorian Women and the Economies of Travel, Translation and Culture, 1830–1870, (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 1. 19 See Byerly, Are We There Yet? 143. 20 Other fears were the increase of unexpected dangers, accidents, and injuries. As Morgan points out, ‘[t]rain crashes were typically so sudden, uncontrollable and catastrophic that they transformed assumptions about illness. Prior to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, medical thinking attributed shock from accidents to physical injury of the spine. “Railway spine” was a recognized medical condition for which one could receive legal compensation. By the late 1880s, however, “traumatic neurosis” – a psychological rather than a physical condition – had become the accepted explanation for post-accident shock. The disorientation and violence resulting from train wrecks were unprecedented and so severe, said medical experts, that purely psychic trauma often occurred. [...I]n addition to the industrialization process, railways embodied many characteristics of the nineteenthcentury commercialized world of travel – democratization, standardization, predictability and loss of autonomy. As more people left home to encounter new peoples and places, their collective identities moved more sharply into focus.’ Marjorie Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain, (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 44–45.

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general, handbooks and guidebooks were filled to the brim with practical instructions. .

The Ordering Power of Modern Travel Already in 1846, a correspondent from The Times wrote, ‘All the world travels now-a-days. Great, therefore, will be the utility of a periodical to which every Tourist may communicate such of his experiences as to routes, sights, conveyances, inns, expenses, and the other economies of travelling, as may serve his fellow tourists’.21 In the course of the years, tourism was added to the list of recreational activities established by Victorians. In addition, ‘not only did the notion of the “total holiday” away from home become available to a majority of the British population, but the volume and range of geographical destinations expanded enormously’.22 Yet despite being a prototypically leisurely activity (after all, going on holidays can be a reward for those who spend most days of the year working), tourism was, in fact, more than mere recreation: it was an ordering power. The omnipresence of tours organized by the Thomas Cook Company evoked scenarios of its imperial aspirations, and one could also start picturing a certain unification of cultural diversity, for example when the same food (that which was familiar to the respective tourists, mostly English) would be served in every hotel in Europe. Buzard elaborates that [w]itnesses saw or suspected that tourism was capable of both physically remaking places (by introducing railways, hotels, restaurants, Thomas Cook offices, souvenir shops, crowds of tourists) and re-presenting them in a series of mnemonic stereotypes (symbols of Paris, Rome, Italy, the Rhine), and that it involved both material and ‘rhetorical’ coercion.23

The main fear was, therefore, that tourism would reduce cities or regions to the signifiers and signifieds that were located in their area, to take up terms that Jonathan Culler presents as having arrived from the field of linguistics in the discourse on tourism.24 It does change the way in which a

21

‘The Tourist,’ The Critic, 3.65 (March 28, 1846), 332. Peter Borsay, A History of Leisure: The British Experience Since 1500, (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 170. 23 James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 11–12, emphasis in original. 24 Jonathan D. Culler, ‘The Semiotics of Tourism,’ in Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 166. 22

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destination is perceived when one goes there only to tick off having seen a particular landmark – everything around it turns into something less worthy of being looked at.25 One can draw a parallel between the safety that readers of guidebooks were made to experience and the appeal and effect of moving panoramas: as Vadillo and Plunkett point out, the latter promised the ability of virtual travel, of realistically seeing places without having to suffer the physical or temporal exertions of travel. […] However, in so doing, they invariably offered a tour which reduced a country or region to a few key sites: they provided a disembodied, safe tourism without the cultural or physical contact that was part of the actual travel. As such, they mimicked the way that […] the railway created an experience for the passenger of moving through the landscape […] without having to engage with it.26

Tourism, therefore, not only visibly changed landscapes by bringing along railways that criss-crossed the country and train stations that were built in most towns; it also changed the way regions could be judged according to the degree of to-be-looked-at-ness and redefined the concepts of space and time for the needs of a new age. I want to especially emphasize the physiological and somatic component reflected in Vadillo’s and Plunkett’s choice of words: in the same way in which panoramas functioned like a cocoon wrapping those visiting them, guidebooks could prevent their readers from the emotion of ‘suffering’ the mental and physical exhaustion 25 This is analogous to Laura Mulvey’s concept of to-be-looked-at-ness, i.e. the idea that in the Western world, which is structured by sexual imbalance, man is the active bearer of the look while woman takes on the passive role of the entity that is being looked at. Women ‘are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.’ (Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18; quoted in Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley (New York/London: Routledge, 1988), 62, emphasis in original) Mulvey has in mind pin-up girls and striptease shows as well as, perhaps more importantly, the way women are portrayed in movies. Thus, Mulvey speaks of constellations within the industry of commerce within which women are not so much looked at for their own sake but rather for the fantasies (concepts, signifieds) they evoke in those looking at them. The analogy to the developments related to the tourism industry in the nineteenth century is that landmarks come to stand in for the passive/‘female’ position and serve as triggers for the fantasies of the bearers of the look, the (usually male) tourists. The notion of imbalance, as formulated by Mulvey, can, therefore, also be detected here. John Urry’s concept of the ‘tourist gaze’ is, in fact, directly related to Mulvey’s gaze. 26 Vadillo and Plunkett, ‘The Railway Plunkett’ 56, emphases added.

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travel could bring about because they enabled travellers to avoid an active engagement with the landscapes and their otherness. The guidebook functioned like a potion that numbed the travellers, in a way; one was made immune to any factors that would unsettle one’s routine and one’s sense of self. To replace the occupation with oneself and one’s perception of the possibly vertiginous journey, modern tourism and the railway brought about a time-consuming ‘preoccupation with time-budgeting’ because one depended on timetables and the coordination of various services and people, especially if one travelled in a group.27 The timetable was, in fact, a ‘sacred text’ which ‘mapped both the time and space of a nation’ and, by connecting disparate locations, ‘helped to cement the nation as an imagined community’.28 Victorian travelling was characterized by two main factors: measure instead of pleasure and anxious occupation instead of relaxation – which was hunted after instead of being enjoyed. An author in the Saturday Review observed that joys were acted out in a ‘mechanical style’ by the English.29 It seems that a great part of Victorian travellers did not allow themselves to be joyous because this emotion would mean a sort of transgression of the rules dictated by restrained manners. One cared too much about what others – onlookers – thought of one’s conduct and therefore it had to be disciplined. The consequence as regards travel was a pronounced fear to explore something new, a fear that was criticized already by contemporaries: We [...] are wearied with monotony. [...] The sheepish fear of deserting the common track is upon us. [...] Croquet and the afternoon kettledrum have been the only innovations of the present age, and they are both so passingly mild and inoffensive that even the staunchest Tory of the drawing-room could not carp at them for being too rash or audacious.30

Despite – or possibly because of – the fact that the Victorian age witnessed many innovations, for instance in the fields of technology of science, one can discern an oscillating of the Zeitgeist between the nervous clinging to

27

Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830 – 1885, (London: Routledge, 1978), 63. 28 Beaumont and Freeman, The Railway and Modernity, 19. 29 ‘Holiday Plans,’ Saturday Review 21.555 (June 16, 1866), 714. 30 ‘Holiday Plans,’ Saturday Review 21.555 (June 16, 1866), 714.

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one’s comfort zone31 and the need to challenge and confront one’s anxieties.

The Role of Guidebooks in Addressing Travellers’ Anxieties Because of the rapid development of domestic travel networks, Victorians both enjoyed and needed to read more about new modes of travel and about how to ‘negotiate the complexities of railway stations and timetables’.32 This new technology also evoked a very concrete fear because many accidents occurred and the stories of them and press reports generated ‘ripples of anxiety’33. Bradley argues that railway accidents disturbed people so much because they ‘brought home the powerlessness of the human condition in the face of what had become an indispensable technology.’34 Taken literally, the notion that this fear surrounded people in their homes is of interest: feeling that their personal space had been intruded by an innovation they had to make sure that they had the necessary means to control it at least to some extent. This explains why the popularity of guidebooks roughly coincides with the beginnings of the passenger railway – the most popular (to date) being Murray’s guidebooks, which were first published in 1836, and Baedeker’s guidebooks from 1839. They were supposed to prevent the travellers from being bewildered and answer the ‘uncertainties of travel’ by ‘clarity, precision, and “scientific” accuracy’.35 Guidebooks also reflected the ways in which the concept of (free) time was negotiated within the Victorian discourse as the discussion of the passages in the following will show. As Fussell rightly points out, ‘[g]uidebooks belong to the world of journalism, and they date; travel books belong to literature, and they last.’36 This means that guidebooks have a very short period of validity, especially when they are published during a time of transformation such as 31

Alasdair White, From Comfort Zone to Performance Management: Understanding Development and Performance (n.p.: White & MacLean, 2009), 3. 32 Byerly, Are We There Yet?, 289. 33 Simon Bradley The Railways: Nation, Network and People (London: Profile Books, 2015), 149. 34 Bradley, The Railways, 161, emphasis added. 35 Rudy Koshar, ‘“What Ought to Be Seen”: Tourists’ Guidebooks and National Identities in Modern Germany and Europe,’ Journal of Contemporary History 33.3 (1998): 326. 36 The Norton Book of Travel, ed. Paul Fussell, (New York/ London: Norton, 1987), 15.

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the mid-nineteenth century, and thus allow insights into the microcosms respective decades were made up of. Handbooks for travellers that were supposed to guarantee the holiday goer a successful holiday experience and were written for travellers who travelled by train, were, for instance, Bradshaw’s Handbook for Tourists in Great Britain and Ireland and The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book of Hints, Suggestions, and Advice. Travel transformed so dramatically during Queen Victoria’s reign that hints included in The Traveller’s Oracle published in 1828, that is, only nine years before Victoria ascended the throne, were no longer useful to travellers in the (late) 1830s and 1840s. Thus, William Kitchiner, the author of The Traveller’s Oracle, still had to warn his readers that they should not be afraid of undertaking the travelling enterprise. Admittedly, one could be drowned, break one’s neck, be murdered or fall sick abroad – but all these things could as well happen at home.37 In the same breath, Kitchiner went on for three pages with advice on how to make one’s will before setting out and referred his readers to another work on the subject he had written, namely ‘The Pleasures of Making a Will’.38 When one looks at travel handbooks from different decades of the nineteenth century, one can see both the attitude toward travel and the place it occupied in the public discourse gradually changing. Tina Choi is right in pointing out that guidebooks were a ‘deeply heterogeneous’ genre and that there were many variations both to address the needs of readers from different classes and travelling for different purposes but also to tackle ‘the representational challenges of making the train’s elusive velocities and distances legible by means of existing cartographic conventions’.39 Travel was a topic people were enthusiastic about which makes Morgan speak of the ‘democratization of travel’ and the Victorian age as the ‘travelling age’40 – apart from the fact that a growing number of people could afford it, it is apt to speak of a democratization because everyone was affected by it in one way or another. But what is most noteworthy in this context, and what makes the Victorian age to a certain extent surprisingly modern, is the speed with which this new invention, its effects on people’s lives and the place it occupied in the discourse on leisure and idle time were met with a variety of opposing approaches: it 37

William Kitchiner and John Jervis, The Traveller’s Oracle, Or, Maxims for Locomotion Containing Precepts for Promoting the Pleasures and Hints for Preserving the Health of Travellers. Part I, 3rd ed. (London: Colburn, 1828), 4. 38 Kitchiner and Jervis, The Traveller’s Oracle, 8. 39 Tina Young Choi, ‘The Railway Guide’s Experiments in Cartography: Narrative, Information, Advertising,’ Victorian Studies 57 (2015): 251–252. 40 Morgan, National Identities, 13; see also Buzard, The Beaten Track, note 18.

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was feared, celebrated, and – by a few – criticized with reference to the glorious past. In 1846, Basil Montagu satirized the state and value of modern times in his Railroad Eclogues. In the fourth eclogue ‘Young’ and ‘Old England’ quarrel. According to Young England, battles could have been won in the past, if, for instance, Richard the Lionhearted could have travelled by railroad.41 Old England replies eloquently: My argument is this: In olden time, Had railroads flourished, much in prose and rhyme Lost to the world had been; and ‘tis my notion, That noise and smoke and never ceasing motion Are tending strangely to unfit the nation For fancy’s charms and high imagination. No longer now we prize ‘retired leisure,’ That ‘in trim gardens’ used to ‘take his pleasure.’ No pensive Muse is now invoked to bring With her the Cherub, who, on golden wing High soaring, guides the fiery wheeled throne – So Milton tells us – Contemplation. No, no, our world’s a world of hurly burly; We’re late to bed, and we arise right early. Time’s precious – up! – would you a fortune make, Your maniac journey by express take. Sounds the loud whistle – but, with all this pother, Time saved one way is wasted in another.42

In a style reminiscent of one the final passages in George Eliot’s Adam Bede the anonymous poet makes the railroads directly responsible for the absence of imaginative prose and poetry as it was produced in the past. The railroads come to stand for an accelerated lifestyle that no longer allows for ‘retired leisure’ or the invocation of a ‘pensive Muse.’ Instead, days are busied and passed in a hurry and journeys are taken ‘by express’ – yet, according to the speaker, while Time may be saved thanks to these new developments, it is in fact wasted because it is not used to employ ‘fancy’s charms and high imagination.’43 The appeal to use and value one’s contemplative skills could have as well been uttered 50 years earlier and thus stands very much against the Victorian Zeitgeist. 41

See Montagu, Railroad Eclogues, 28. Montagu, Railroad Eclogues, 29–30. 43 George Eliot, Adam Bede (Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2008), 459. 42

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The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book of Hints, Suggestions, and Advice, published in 1862, reflects the High Victorian attitude toward the railway in a more representative way.44 Its three main sections are ‘before the Journey,’ ‘on the Journey’ and ‘after the Journey’ and there is a plethora of subchapters, minutely informing the traveller about the technicalities of travel (as in ‘Conveyance to the Station,’ ‘Materials for Comfort – Rug, Cap, and Cushion,’ ‘Ventilation and Draughts’ and ‘Sending Intimation of Safe Arrival’). Chapters such as ‘Pleasure-Seekers’ illustrate the degree in which the traveling enterprise was subdivided into as many units as possible; the detailed list of hints that follows created a sense of safety. Travellers are advised to compare the excursion schemes offered by different companies and also take into account the stops on their routes so that ‘the cost of the trip, and the privileges to be enjoyed, may be ascertained with something like reasonable certainty’.45 Then follows what seems like a rationale of pleasure: With regard to pleasure seeking, it may be observed that each person has his peculiar notion of what pleasure is. Most of us plead guilty to a hobby, and nearly every man has a predilection for some sport, amusement, or pursuit, which he follows at every opportunity, and enjoys with greater zest than all others. The geologist with his hammer, the entomologist with his hand-net, the botanist with his microscope, the angler with his rod, and the sportsman with his gun – each presses forward with an ardour unaccountable to his neighbour, and in the prosecution of his particular enterprise finds an enjoyment which he would neither forego nor exchange. The opportunities for indulging in any special diversion will be found to favour particular localities. These facts are duly recorded in topographical works, may be readily referred to, and will thus put the pleasure-seeker in possession of a certain amount of capital to start with. In like manner the mere sight-seer may ferret out in what direction are to be found the largest store of curiosities and marvels, on which to feast his wondering eyes.46

To make the best out of the somewhat unfortunate ‘guilty pleasure’ – pleasure seeking – it is absolutely necessary to consult a guidebook before the journey. What is striking here is the fact that each person that is presented as finding amusement in a particular hobby, only finds this amusement when equipped with an object, with a tool, so to speak. Instead 44

Tina Choi, in ‘The Railway Guide’s Experiments,’ refers to this guidebook as expecting “the passenger to exercise judgment and planning, to embody the railway’s mechanisms, and apply them to future actions and movements” (263). It, thus, sketches a very rational approach to travel. 45 Choi, ‘The Railway Guide’s Experiments,’ 5. 46 Choi, ‘The Railway Guide’s Experiments,’ 5, emphases added.

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of focusing on the pastimes at hand, the focus is on these objects: a hammer, a hand-net, a microscope, a rod and a gun. Thus equipped, one prosecutes the enjoyment one is looking for – the verb chosen here adds a formal, almost bureaucratic dimension. Yet it does not stop at that: the pleasure seeker then ‘ferrets out’ (again, a peculiar word choice that conjures up the image of a busy, bustling crowd) to ‘feast’ his eyes on whatever sight (or ‘prey’) he has been referred to by the topographical work of his choice. One gets the impression that one is reading a passage describing a pleasure hunting enterprise rather than advice for people looking for spots where they could enjoy themselves. The leisure activity as such is not the focus of the discussion; rather, to have a particular hobby enables one to load oneself up with different utensils and, thanks to handbooks which one can consult before the journey, one is provided with a reassuring starting capital that guarantees that one is not wasting one’s time or money. Actually, this passage and the passages that will be taken up in the following strike one as sounding like satires; but they are meant to be taken seriously. Their didactic tone and the astonishing number of details on seemingly trivial matters is what made Leslie Stephen, in an article signed with ‘A Cynic’ in the Cornhill Magazine, come to the conclusion that ‘[u]nluckily most people are stupid. Every genuine hobby is speedily surrounded by a crowd of mock articles.’47 Of course, ‘stupid’ is a rather harsh word but the impression that those consulting the handbooks are more or less dependent creatures dominates. One thematic focus in the guidebook that is interesting in light of the discussion of the evaluation of time and space are the chapters that deal with the problem of stretches of time in between stops that are not filled out, either with an activity or simply with objects that keep the traveller occupied. For instance, the railway passenger is compared to a prisoner ‘who is permitted to indulge in any relaxation and amusement to while away the time, but is denied that essential ingredient to human happiness, personal liberty.’48 To make this temporary ‘imprisonment’ more endurable, and spend a relaxing time, the handbook suggests ‘materials’ such as ‘conversation, reading, card-playing, chess-playing, smoking, musing, and sleeping.’49 Incidentally, English travellers who carried a large quantity of materials with them, were already ridiculed at that time, e.g. by John MacGregor and Anthony Trollope who in his Travelling Sketches (1866)

47

Leslie Stephen (alias ‘A Cynic’), ‘Vacations’, The Cornhill Magazine, 20.116 (August 1869): 213. 48 Anonymous, The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book, 75, emphasis added. 49 Anonymous, The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book, 75.

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ridiculed ‘The United Englishmen.’50 When one was forced to spend lazy hours in a railway coach, one had to be acquainted with the appropriate means to tackle the situation. One can see here an implied uneasiness with leaving both stretches of time and the actual space of the railway carriage uncluttered, empty, not busy and thus idle. Therefore, one gets the impression that travel guidebooks from the Victorian period tended to present solutions as to how to keep one’s timetable and itinerary busy. While, according to Choi, early guides emphasized the experience of the journey rather than efficiency and ‘sought to reestablish the referential relationship between narrative and landscape, to affirm a correspondence between the narrative representation of the journey and the journey itself’51 – a claim that can well be made about Montagu’s guide – I am arguing that the majority of publications from the second half of the nineteenth century, either periodical articles or guidebooks, were still debating the traumatic effects on the Victorian Psyche the railway had brought along.52 While there were other travel texts which, in my view, present a more self-assured and individual approach to fill and define one’s time and the surrounding space because their authors consciously choose to idle about,53 space is generally presented as the agent executing power over the subject.

Time and Space – Settling the Unsettling I want to conclude this analysis by taking the considerations about the exchange between traveller and space and time to a more abstract level in order to assess how space could play the role of an agent controlling the traveller. From a historical perspective, the topography of specific places is becoming scrutinized – these places are regarded as condensed memories/stores of signs and traces, which can be saved and decoded. Landscapes, cities, places and houses are charged with people’s feelings, and meanings are projected onto them which makes them readable – quite

50

Anthony Trollope, Travelling Sketches (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), 50. Choi, ‘The Railway guide’s Experiments,’ 255. 52 See Ralph Harrington, ‘The Neuroses of the Railway,’ History Today 44.7 (1994): 15–21, and Jill Matus, ‘Trauma, Memory, and Railway Disaster: The Dickensian Connection,’ Victorian Studies 43.3 (2001): 413–436. 53 See Heidi Liedke, ‘There Is No Joy But Calm – Idleness, Travelling, and Idle Travellers in the Victorian Age,’ unpublished doctoral thesis, Albert-LudwigsUniversität Freiburg, 2016. 51

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literally so in novels.54 Aleida Assmann is correct in emphasizing that space as a concept has a primarily anthropological dimension since its starting point is the human body and the human senses of perception. Its other dimensions are the sociological and political. In the political context, space appears as a territory which has to be defended, explored, transgressed, colonialized, measured, mapped, occupied, etc.55 On the other hand, there are non-places, that is, ‘spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure) and also spaces with which individuals have certain relations’.56 These non-places are the counterpart to those places that are saturated with history and that are containers for traces and signs of past times and in their anonymity can have an unsettling effect on the individual. I am taking up the concept of non-places and linking it to my previous observations concerning the treatment of time and space in guidebooks because what the concept of non-place portends is in fact very similar to the effects of an indirect experience of an ominous space that is unknown. I argue that by presenting techniques that enabled the traveller to be constantly busy, especially when waiting, guidebooks prevented him or her from experiencing the loneliness and anonymity typical for non-places and the unknown space that could now be (theoretically) travelled to. Otherwise the individual would have been exposed to a reflection on the self; he or she would have been thrown back to his or her fears and doubts, an act of energy. The trips propagated by Victorian guidebooks were, thus, not trips of self-discovery but rather trips of self-loss. Instead of providing the traveller with new impressions that could be collected by the active bearer of the gaze and would strengthen their subjectivity, the newly discoverable space was made to be complicit in contributing to the travellers’ passivity by the guidebooks. One can say that the content of guidebooks and press coverage made it almost impossible for the travellers consulting those texts to experience anything new. Instead of guiding their readers, they actually contributed to the numbness and disorientation of the travellers when facing a plurality of places, a characteristic of modernity, which brought about a ‘discontinuity between the spectator-traveller and the space of the landscape he is

54

See J. Hillis Miller, ‘Philosophy, Literature, Topography: Heidegger and Hardy,’ in Topographies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 20. 55 See Aleida Assmann, ‘Places,’ in Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 283. 56 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995), 94.

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contemplating or rushing through’57. Travel writing can fill the gap between the traveller and space since, according to Marc Augé, ‘[t]ravel […] constructs a fictional relationship between gaze and landscape’58 – the traveller’s movement runs parallel to the movement of the landscape which he compiles and recomposes in his memory in snapshots. Yet by shifting the focus to the hunting for pleasure instead of an engaging with leisure, guidebooks encouraged superficial and passive rather than deep and active experiences, both of the space travelled to and of the traveller him- or herself. As Simon Bradley puts it with reference to John Ruskin, to some extent the ‘particularities of place’ were indeed pushed off the experiential stage by railways, ‘reducing life to a frenetic and meaningless dashing about.’59 At the same time, however, both railways and guidebooks represent one of the first elements of the chain called modernity and the reaction to it – not letting it invade one’s personal space and life too much; not wanting to be touched by it – has been repeating itself throughout history.

Bibliography Anonymous. The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book of Hints, Suggestions, and Advice, Before the Journey, On the Journey, and After the Journey. London: Lockwood, 1862. Assmann, Aleida. ‘Places.’ In Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Functions, Media, Archives, 281-324. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, translated by John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Bailey, Peter. Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885. London: Routledge, 1978. Beaumont, Matthew, and Freeman, Michael. ‘Introduction.’ In The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble, edited by Beaumont, 13-43. Bern/Berlin et al.: Peter Lang, 2007. Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 217-251. New York: Schocken, 1968.

57

Augé, Non-Places, 84–85. Augé, Non-Places, 86. 59 Bradley, The Railways, 135. 58

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Borsay, Peter. A History of Leisure: The British Experience Since 1500. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006. Bradley, Simon. The Railways: Nation, Network and People. London: Profile Books, 2015. Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. Byerly, Alison. Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Choi, Tina Young. ‘The Railway Guide’s Experiments in Cartography: Narrative, Information, Advertising.’ Victorian Studies 57 (2015): 251–83. Culler, Jonathan D. ‘The Semiotics of Tourism.’ In Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions, 153-167. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2008. Foucault, Michel. ‘Different Spaces.’ In Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, edited by James Faubian, 175-185. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000. Freeman, Michael J. Railways and the Victorian Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Fussell, Paul, ed. The Norton Book of Travel. New York/ London: Norton, 1987. Harrington, Ralph. ‘The Neuroses of the Railway.’ History Today 44.7 (1994): 15–21. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity, An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. ‘Holiday Plans.’ Saturday Review, 21.555 (June 16, 1866): 714–715. Johnston, Judith. Victorian Women and the Economies of Travel, Translation and Culture, 1830–1870. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Kitchiner, William, and John Jervis. The Traveller’s Oracle, Or, Maxims for Locomotion Containing Precepts for Promoting the Pleasures and Hints for Preserving the Health of Travellers. Part I, 3rd edn. London: Colburn, 1828. Koshar, Rudy. ‘“What Ought to Be Seen”: Tourists’ Guidebooks and National Identities in Modern Germany and Europe.’ Journal of Contemporary History 33 (1998): 323–40. Liedke, Heidi. ‘There Is No Joy But Calm – Idleness, Travelling, and Idle Travellers in the Victorian Age.’ Unpublished doctoral thesis, AlbertLudwigs-Universität Freiburg, 2016.

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Matus, Jill. ‘Trauma, Memory, and Railway Disaster: The Dickensian Connection.’ Victorian Studies 43.3 (2001): 413–36. Miller, J. Hillis. ‘Philosophy, Literature, Topography: Heidegger and Hardy.’ In Topographies, 9-56. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Montagu, Basil. Railroad Eclogues. Pickering: London, 1846. Morgan, Marjorie. National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Mulvey, Laura. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’ Screen 16 (1975): 6–18. Quoted in Feminism and Film Theory, edited by Constance Penley, 57-86. New York/ London: Routledge, 1988. Ousby, Ian. The Englishman’s England: Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Standage, Tom. The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth CenturyҴs On-Line Pioneers. London: Phoenix, 1998. Stephen, Leslie (alias ‘A Cynic’). ‘Vacations.’ The Cornhill Magazine 20 (August 1869): 205–214. ‘The Tourist.’ The Critic 3.65 (March 28, 1846): 332–333 Trollope, Anthony. Travelling Sketches. London: Chapman and Hall, 1866. Turner, David, Victorian and Edwardian Railway Travel. Oxford: Shire, 2013. Vadillo, Ana Parejo and John Plunkett. ‘The Railway Passenger; or, The Training of the Eye.’ In The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble, edited by Matthew Beaumont and Michael Freeman, 45-67. Bern/ Berlin et al.: Peter Lang, 2007. White, Alasdair. From Comfort Zone to Performance Management: Understanding Development and Performance. N.p.: White & MacLean, 2009.

CHAPTER SEVEN GERMAN NATURE: JEROME K. JEROME AND READING NATIONAL CHARACTER INTO LANDSCAPE REBECKA KLETTE

During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the notion of national character, intimately connected with national landscape, permeated various forms of cultural production, even extending to tourist guides, travel writing and satirical travel accounts. While earlier works have traced the evolution of the concept of national character, only moderate attention has been paid to representations of national character in travel writing and tourist guides.1 This chapter will provide new insights into Victorian travel and tourism studies through its discussion on temporalised landscapes in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men on the Bummel (1900) and Grant Allen’s The European Tour (1899), emphasising the perceived relationship between landscape and nationhood during a period of heightened imperial tension, as well as develop a deeper understanding of how travel writing shaped British perceptions of Germany during the nineteenth century. As will be later shown, Jerome and Allen inscribed the German landscape with national identity, perceiving the German national character to be mirrored in the manner the German treated his nature. By deploying another approach to Jerome’s novel than has been done before, namely a semiotical and imagological one, as well as by incorporating Fabian’s

1

A significant work discussing the relationship between nature and national character is Thomas M. Lekan’s Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885-1945 (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2004).

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theory of temporalisation, the essay will contribute to scholarship on Jerome K. Jerome, which until now has received sparse attention.2 The ultimate goal of this essay concerns how this projected national stereotype became increasingly construed as, to use the terminology of Jean Baudrillard, hyperreal — perceived to be more real than the German individuals who supposedly possessed the imagined national character. My use of hyperreality builds on the works of Baudrillard as well as Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities and Edward Said’s imagined geographies, but is, to my knowledge, new to this field of study. I aim to show that depictions of the German in travel accounts and tourist guides engendered a national stereotype, a signifier which in turn became more real than the signified German people. This development was caused by the increased production and circulation of printed periodicals, illustrated magazines, travel guides, and scientific journals, thus enabling the emergence of a state of hyperreality, in which signs as mass commodities began to mask and pervert ‘basic reality.’3 The concept was first employed by French postmodernist and poststructuralist philosopher Jean Baudrillard in his Simulacra and Simulation (1981), defining hyperreality a state where the signifier has no relation with an external signified, but only with other signifiers; as a copy without an original, that which has replaced, and become more real than, the real.4 This process could only be achieved through the production and dissemination of national stereotypes through different mediums of late nineteenth and early twentieth century print media. Imagined national characters and stereotypes, I argue, were used as temporalising devices in order to encapsulate and contain the German in the Past, in a different Time. Before the German unification in 1871, Germany had been perceived as a backward, yet admirable culture, economically, politically, and colonially lagging behind Britain. However, the unified nation state’s subsequent economical and industrial prosperity, 2

Scholarship on Jerome is surprisingly scant - among more recent works, one should mention David Alexander Ibitson, Authorship, imperial masculinity, and parody in the works of Jerome K. Jerome, 1886-1902 (doctoral thesis, University of Leeds, 2013); Martin Green, ed., The other Jerome K. Jerome (Stroud: History Press, 2009); Joseph Connolly, Jerome K. Jerome: A Critical Biography (London: Orbis, 1982); Carolyn Oulton, Below the Fairy City: A Life of Jerome K. Jerome (Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2012). 3 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 6. 4 Baudrillard, Simulacra, 1-2; Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2002), 77.

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as well as its naval and colonial expansion, enabled Germany to emerge as a political rival to Britain, oscillating between the role of ally and a viable threat. In order to neutralise such a threat, the perceived German national characteristics of efficiency and organisation, subservience to authority, and excessive militarism, would have to be interpreted as symptoms of temporal distantiation, of a ‘barbaric’ Time. The medium of travel writing will be treated as imbued with the narrative of national character, not distinguishing between fictional and non-fictional travel accounts, as the narrative created by guidebooks and earlier travel writing appears to have preceded and shaped the experience of the travel writer. According to this interpretation, any form of travel writing is, essentially, a work of fiction, received as realism. Travel accounts are to be treated as historical and cultural artefacts — producing and reproducing contemporary discourses — rather than pragmatic travel instructions. They were not simply meant to guide the traveller through a country, but also to guide his gaze: to instruct the reader on how to view and read the landscape according to the discourse of national characteristics.5 While one must take into consideration the humorous genre conventions apparent in Jerome’s writing and not aspire to always take the message or meaning in satire to be literal, his work still conveys important imagological insights into how the English viewed the German (standardised hetero-stereotypes) and how they viewed themselves (standardised auto-stereotypes).6 Both travel writing and cartography represent imagined geography: the map is therefore not neutral, but rather a system of signs which colonises, and even precedes, space.7 In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard uses an analogy from Borges to illustrate the theory of hyperreality and precession of simulacra, in which a drawn map appears to precede the territory it depicts — the representation has become a copy of a reality that 5

For further discussion on the expectations and stereotypes guiding ‘the tourist gaze’, see John Urry’s The Tourist Gaze (London: Sage Publications, 1990). 6 Albert Meiner, ‘Travel Writing’, in Imagology: The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters, ed. by Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007), 447; Joep Leersen, ‘Imagology: History and method’, in Imagology, ed. Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, 27; Manfred Beller, ‘Stereotype’, in Imagology, ed. Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, 429. 7 Michael Wintle, ‘Cartography’ in Imagology: The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters, ed. Manfred Beller and Joep Leersen, 273-277 (pp. 273, 276); Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 49.

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does not exist, rendering it hyperreal.8 By ‘substituting the signs of the real for the real’, the copy becomes authentic and the authentic copy simultaneously, causing the liquidation of all referentials.9 Thus, neither Space nor Time is to be interpreted as neutral, but rather what Fabian terms ‘ideologically construed instruments of power,’ defining Time as ‘a carrier of significance, a form through which we define the contents of relations between the Self and the Other.’10 Arjun Appadurai uses the suffix ‘-scape’ to refer to ‘perspectivised constructs’ (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes) shaped by different actors’ historical, cultural, linguistic and political situatedness.11 I will build on Appadurai’s argument by studying what I will refer to as a nationscape, namely a landscape that is perceived to be embodying, mirroring, shaping and shaped by national character. This perspectival construct is similar to the mediascape and the ethnoscape, as it is constructed by, and in turn influences, the producers and disseminators of travel guides, travel writing, landscape artists and tourists alike, directing and manipulating the individual experiences and perceptions of subsequent travellers. The object under scrutiny will therefore be the imagined, stereotypical German landscape: the British tourist superimposed a national narrative upon the German forests and fields, generating the ‘nationscape’. By studying the alleged relationship between nature and national character in nineteenth and early twentieth century travel writing, one can discern British turn-of-the-century prejudices and perceptions of the German, and the German Nature, as distinctly Other. Nature was imbued with meaning, simultaneously revealing the ruggedly Romantic side of the German, and the authoritarian and excessively disciplined militarism so associated with Prussian mentality. As Scully purports, ‘relying largely on a handbook, the individual reader might undergo an experience of Germany almost ‘identical with all other experiences’’.12 What had been achieved was, I suggest, a phenomenological standardisation of the 8

Baudrillard, Simulacra, 1. Baudrillard, Simulacra, 2. 10 Fabian, Time and the Other, xi1, 144. 11 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 33-36; Arjun Appadurai, ’Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, in Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity, ed. Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1990), 296. 12 Richard Scully, British Images of Germany: Admiration, Antagonism & Ambivalence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 47. 9

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English traveller’s encounter with the imagined nationscape. The guidebook had preceded the experience, revealing and confirming national stereotypes, and shaping the way the traveller observed his surroundings, confirming preconceived ideas and ignoring contradictions to these prejudices.13 Travel writing thus serves as a discursive tool, a mode of communication of stereotypes which generates an imagined nationscape, the projection of perceived natural character upon space. According to this interpretation, travel writing and guidebooks had essentially preceded the represented landscape, rendering the imagined territory, or nationscape, hyperreal. Interpreting the German landscape as mirroring the German national character, the British traveller could, to use a quote from Edward Said regarding Orientalism, ‘make statements regarding the past in exactly the same form (and with the same content) that one makes them regarding the present’:14 in the German nature(s), past and present were simultaneously visible, positioning the German in a different time than the English, while at the same time present in the modern age. Johannes Fabian has famously claimed that anthropology, as a discourse, is inherently allochronic, exigently placing the observed Other in a different Time than the observer. This constitutes what Fabian calls ‘denial of coevalness’, construing the studied subject in terms of spatial and temporal distance.15 Time has here been spatialised, where different territories and societies — both distant from, and spatially adjacent to, the British Empire — existed in different times and stages of development, confining the Other to a different, more primitive time.16 Building on the works of Said and Fabian, Anne McClintock has suggested that the British imperial project involved the reconfiguration of colonised lands as ‘anachronistic space’, defined by Anne McClintock as ‘prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity.’17 This spatialisation and secularisation of time effectively weaponised temporal hierarchies in the service of imperial conquest, allowing ‘[g]eographical difference across space [to be] figured as a historical difference across time.’18 13

Manfred Beller, ‘Perception, image, imagology’ in Imagology, ed. Manfred Beller and Joep Leersen, 5. 14 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 235. 15 Fabian, Time and the Other, x1i; 25; 143; 173. 16 Fabian, Time and the Other, 15-16. 17 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York & London: Routledge, 1995), 40. 18 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 40; 359.

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While McClintock’s study is primarily focused on the use of temporal distancing in relation to colonial subjects, her use of the notion of anachronistic space can readily be applied to spaces of Otherness closer to home. The geographical proximity of Germany hindered the use of spatialisation to establish temporal difference, so German Otherness had to be emphasised in a radically different way. The Romantic idyll of the German landscape could still be construed as a microcosmos of ‘permanently anterior time within modernity’,19 existing ‘out of time’, but the truly threatening anachronism was epitomised in the German himself an atavistic and savage beast disguised under the cloak of efficiency and modernity. By portraying the landscapes of both Old and New Germany as ‘anachronistic spaces’, and the German himself as a temporal intrusion attempting to assert control over that landscape, Britain could paint Germany as an object, rather than a participant, of the Colonial project, a Continental centre of savagery within civilised Europe which had to be tamed. The nineteenth and early twentieth century is widely considered to be the grand era of travel writing on Germany: between 1869 and 1872, guide books and travel writing comprised 24% of all books published in Germany, forging the Baedeker guides into ‘the accepted international paradigm of guidebook literature.’20 The trend can be said to have commenced with Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers to Prussia, Northern Germany and the Rhine in 1836 (19 editions), to Southern Germany in 1837 (15 editions), and to Northern Germany in 1877 (20 editions). The guidebooks continued to divide the nation into Southern Germany and Northern Germany, thus maintaining the image of Germany as geographically fragmented, long after the German unification in 1871, until as late as 1929. Murray soon faced competition from the German publishing house Baedeker, which introduced the first translated Baedeker guides to the Rhineland in 1861, Southern Germany in 1868, and Northern Germany in 1873, published in 17, 12, and 16 editions respectively between 1861 and 1914.21

19

McClintock, Imperial Leather, 42. Rudy Koshar, ‘“What Ought to Be Seen”: Tourists' Guidebooks and National Identities in Modern Germany and Europe’, Journal of Contemporary History 33.3 (1998): 331. 21 Albert Meiner, ‘Travel Writing’, in Imagology: The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters, ed. Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007), 447; Scully, British Images of Germany, 64; Koshar, “What Ought to Be Seen,” 326; Ingrid and Åke Nilson, 20

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British tourists’ impressions of Germany were largely positive: Britons continuously visited Germany in large numbers even up until the outbreak of the Great War, travelling along the Rhine even emerging as a popular Victorian literary theme.22 A large part of the tourist’s experience of Germany was contingent upon the guidebook as a medium for disseminating national identities and national stereotypes which preceded the individual experience: as Richard Scully phrases it, ‘reading a Baedeker […] was like reading a part of Germany’, instructing the reader on what to see, and how to see, understand, and interpret the country.23 Here, Benedict Anderson’s emphasis on print culture as a nation-building tool may aid in understanding the phenomenological standardisation created by the guidebook and travel writing: in the newspaper, periodical or novel, the nation could be imagined and re-imagined. Through the constant repetition of the imagined narrative, it became consumed by the mass readership as real: it was only through the industrial revolution of printing technology that fiction could effectively, on a national scale, begin to seep ‘quietly and continuously into reality’.24 In accordance with Anderson’s assertion that the construction of ‘imagined communities’ was only enabled by ‘print capitalism’,25 I argue that the mass print industry of the nineteenth and early twentieth century enabled the emergence and dissemination of national stereotypes, particularly that of the German and his perceived national character. Ernest Gellner argues that the imagined nation precedes the nation in the sense that nationalism actively ‘invents nations where they do not exist’:26 the signifier of the nation precedes the signified nation, to use semiotic terms. Similarly, I will argue that the textual and visual representations of the imagined German preceded the Englishman’s encounter with the German landscape through widely distributed travel accounts.

‘Baedeker Editions Archive’ (2004-2006). URL: bdkr.com. Accessed 9 August 2015. 22 Scully, British Images of Germany, 63; John R. Davis, The Victorians and Germany (Oxford & Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 317. 23 Scully, British Images of Germany, 49. 24 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 3rd edn (London & New York: Verso, 2006), 36-37; 45-48. 25 Anderson, 48; 63. 26 Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Werdenfeld and Nicolson, 1964), 169.

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Gregory Ulmer has described the tourist as one who ‘will travel to see what is to be seen in order to reinvent our national identity’:27 the traveller’s gaze can therefore be read as being preconditioned by guidebooks, cartoons and fiction, as textual and visual imagery of national landscapes contributed significantly to nationalist discourses, emphasising cultural differences between nations. Similarly, Tricia Cusack argues that ‘a national landscape may be regarded as a visual text that forms part of a discourse […] it actively constitutes national imaginings’.28 Stereotypes do not only concern people, but also places and landscapes: as Simon Schama describes it, ‘landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock.’29 The landscape in question will therefore necessarily be a simulacrum of cultural difference and nationhood, a ‘symbolic ordering of space’, rather than the actual topography of the German landscape.30 In traversing these national spaces, the tourist’s gaze was instructed by guidebooks on ‘what ought to be seen’, reinforcing and producing British perceptions of German culture and national character.31 Travel literature acted as a mediator between the Self and the studied Other, engendering and reiterating national stereotypes, aimed at making cultural differences visible. Travel writing became an integral part of the comparative method: the traveller’s encounter with a different culture served to discern what could be learnt from it, if the country was perceived to be equal with the own nation, or what the visited country could learn from the traveller’s own culture, if the former was seen to be inferior or lacking. Marjorie Morgan defines landscape as ‘the perceived attributes of any surrounding outdoor environment’, ‘how and what people saw or imagined when they described a particular outdoor environment rather than on what was actually there’, and it is this imagined landscape which will be of 27

George Ulmer, ‘Metaphoric Rocks: A Psychogeography of Tourism and Monumentality’, Postmodern Culture 4.3 (1994): n.p., para. 8. URL: http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.594/pop-cult.594. Accessed 10 March 2017. 28 Tricia Cusack, Riverscapes and National Identities (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2010), 12. 29 Lutz Rühling, Imagologie des Nordens:Kulturelle Konstruktionen von Nördlichkeit in interdisziplinärer Perspektive (Frankfurt am Main & Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), 298-330; Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Perennial, 2004), 61. 30 Tim Ingold, ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, World Archaeology: Conceptions of Time and Ancient Society 25.2 (1993): 152. 31 Koshar, “What Ought to Be Seen,” 323-340; Davis, The Victorians and Germany, 303.

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interest, as it was interpreted as an integral part of a nation or a culture.32 The perceived correlation between national character and landscape can be said to be a vital component of nation building and the formation of national identity, built on the assertion that there existed ‘an organic link between a people and its landscape.’33 Thus, by regarding the nation and nationscape as an extension of national character, the German Volksgeist could be read and decoded from the characteristics, topography and physiognomy of the German landscape. Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men on the Bummel (1900) recounts the story of three companions bicycling through Germany, charting the different peculiarities of the German landscape, and from it deriving the features of the German national character. Jerome first gained wide literary recognition with his famous farcical travel account Three Men in a Boat (1889), in which he and his two friends embark on a journey along the Thames. In the sequel, the three friends embrace the cycling-mania of the 1890s by setting out to bicycle through Germany; the story was based on an actual cycling tour Jerome took with his friends, George Wingrave (George) and Carl Hentschel (Harris), through Germany a few months before the publication of the novel.34 The novel was well received by critics, especially in Germany, where the novel was not only admired by King Albert, but was even adopted as a school reading book.35 Despite being less successful than Three Men in a Boat, Three Men on the Bummel nevertheless sold 207 000 copies, with a new edition published in 1914.36 The new edition may have been read in a very different way in 1914, due to the political situation in Europe and rising Germanophobia, than Jerome had intended when the novel was first published: Jerome expressed a profound affinity for the German nation and its people, even taking his family to Dresden to live for two years.37 While Jerome focused greatly on the riverscape of the Thames in the first novel, the focal point of Three Men on the Bummel is the customs and characteristics of the German 32

Marjorie Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 47. 33 Thomas M. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885-1945 (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1. 34 Geoffrey Harvey, “Introduction” to Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel, ed. Geoffrey Harvey (New York & Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998; first published in 1900), xxi. 35 Harvey, “Introduction,” xxiv-xxx. 36 Scully, British Images of Germany, 74. 37 Harvey, “Introduction,” xiv-xxx.

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national character, and its reciprocal relationship with the German landscape - what I have labelled the nationscape. By emphasising how the German controlled and disciplined nature, governing his garden as if it was his army and he its officer, and preferring the wilderness of nature not to be ‘too wild’, Jerome sought to illustrate the German love of authority and uniformity, deeply rooted in his nature(s), simultaneously influencing and being influenced by the German landscape. While travel writing on destinations not easily accessible to large parts of the British public could contain stereotypes that would largely go unchallenged, the great influx of British tourists to Germany - guided by Baedeker’s and Murray’s handbooks - posed the possibility that stereotypes could be reinforced as easily as challenged.38 Jerome both adds to and mocks the content of guide books and conversational guides, finding them of little use to understand and interpret the German country;39 instead, it is through the mannerism of the German people that he argues the German nature may be discerned. Thus, even in questioning the phenomenological standardisation provided by guidebooks, Jerome informs his readers on what to expect when encountering the German, in turn creating his own form of standardised and stereotypical experience of Germany. Jerome’s fondness and admiration for the German people pervades the novel, asserting that they are ‘an amiable, unselfish, kindly people’: nevertheless, he did not hesitate to lampoon the ‘German love of order’, discipline, and over-regulation.40 Jerome thoroughly ridicules the absurdly specific laws regulating the shooting of crossbows in the streets, breaking glass or china in public, or the hanging of beds out the window, as well as the excessive separation of park roads according to position in society, sarcastically stating that ‘that no particular route has yet been set aside for bald-headed men or “New Women” has always struck me as an omission.’41 In Germany, the state regulated nature, in order for nature to regulate the citizens: ‘Nowhere, and under no circumstances, may you at any time walk on the grass. […] The very dogs respect German grass; no German dog would dream of putting a paw on it.’42 In German parks, ‘the roads don’t lead where you want to go, they lead you to where you ought to want to go’:43 Jerome contrasts the 38

Meiner, “Travel Writing,” 449. Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel, ed. Geoffrey Harvey (New York & Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), 209. 40 Jerome, Three Men, 236. 41 Jerome, Three Men, 263-264. 42 Jerome, Three Men, 266. 43 Jerome, Three Men, 267-268. 39

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prescriptive function of German landscape with the individualistic autonomy and sometimes anarchistic temperament of the three English travellers, who continuously found themselves in trouble because they, both figuratively and literally, walked on forbidden paths. The imagined German love of order was not only imposed upon nature, but also on the animal wildlife within it: the German was appalled by the untidy manners of birds, and systematically proceeded to build orderly and uniform wooden boxes for the birds to nest in, to avoid litter. The German bird, in turn, had started to prefer the box over their natural nests, and gladly submitted to the musical organisation of his bird-song by the precise and music-loving German mind. ‘In Germany one breathes in love of order with the air, in Germany the babies beat time with their rattles,’ every aspect of the culture pervaded by regimentation, even the choice of pets, as ‘the Germans are very fond of dogs, but as a rule prefers them of china’.44 The erratic and lively nature of dogs did not comply with the German laws of conduct, so the German preferred an artificial one, reassured that it would not dig up his garden. This dichotomy of artificial and natural calls for closer investigation: in the following paragraph, Jerome recounts how the German loves nature, as long as it can be regulated and ordered according to his principles: Your German likes nature, but his idea of nature is a glorified Welsh Harp. He takes great interest in his garden. He plants seven rose trees on the north side and seven on the south, and if they do not grow up all the same size and shape it worries him so that he cannot sleep of nights. Every flower he ties to a stick. This interferes with his view of the flower, but he has the satisfaction of knowing it is there, and that it is behaving itself.45

The reference to the Welsh triple harp’s three rows of strings alludes to the German authoritarian fondness of straight lines, neatly arranging his plants in regimented and precise rows to ensure uniform growth, evoking the image of soldiers lined up in ranks. The German aspiration to completely control nature was portrayed as absurd: Jerome even asserts that ‘no true German would allow his arrangements to be interfered with by so unruly a thing as the solar system. Unable to regulate the weather, he ignores it.’ Jerome recounted the popularity of the poplar in Germany, due to its tidy and obedient character:

44 45

Jerome, Three Men, 236-237. Jerome, Three Men, 237.

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Other disorderly nations may sing the charms of the rugged oak, the spreading chestnut, or the waving elm. […] The poplar grows where it is planted, and how it is planted. It has no improper rugged ideas of its own. It does not want to wave or to spread itself. It just grows straight and upright as a German tree should grow. […]Your German likes the country, but he prefers it as the lady thought she would the noble savage — more dressed. […] Your German is not averse even to wild scenery, provided it be not too wild. But if he consider it too savage, he sets to work to tame it.46

Jerome here equates taming of nature with taming of the savage, evoking the colonial aspirations of Germany as a locus of anxiety for the British imagination during the turn of the century.47 The protagonist encounters an idyllic rural environment being ‘corrected’, workmen ‘tidying up that valley, and making that stream respectable’, disciplining nature in order to create nature ‘as it ought to be, according to German ideas’. The result was a straight, orderly flowing river, surrounded with poplars planted in regimented, military-like ranks, completely devoid of any resemblance to its natural state, and ‘fit for a tidy-minded lover of German nature to walk in.’48 Thus not only the people of Germany, but also the landscape, lakes and rivers, plants and animals, were required to be obedient: In Germany there is no nonsense talked about untrammelled nature. Nature has got to behave herself, and not set a bad example to the children’, and if a policeman were to encounter a stream cascading down in a disorderly manner, he would promptly reprimand it, and ensure that it was regulated and taught ‘to come down sensibly, in the German manner.49

To Jerome, German national identity appears to be mirrored in the landscape as well as actively shaping and taming said landscape; a landscape inherently different from the English,50 not because of environmental differences, but because of the way the German national character shaped its nature according to its innate affection for order,

46

Jerome, Three Men, 238. Scully, British Images of Germany, 208; for a discussion on colonial and imperial themes in Jerome’s writing, see William J. Sheick, ‘Going to Find Stanley: Imperial Narratives, Shilling Shockers, and Three Men in a Boat’, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 50.4 (2007), 403-414. 48 Jerome, Three Men, 238-239. 49 Jerome, Three Men, 238-239. 50 Morgan, National Identities and Travel, 48. 47

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rendering the German landscape the very embodiment of German characteristics and virtues - the nationscape. However, one must, again, not interpret this conception of German nature(s) as evincing British antagonism towards Germany. As many scholars on Anglo-German relations during the studied period have asserted, British perceptions of Germany were inherently ambivalent, characterised by both admiration for German culture, music and literature, and rising concerns regarding German militarism and economical, colonial and naval expansion.51 Scholars such as Scully, Ramsden, Major, and Rüger have all argued that Anglo-German relations between 1870 and 1914 were characterised by a combination of fear and admiration, asserting that the wholly negative stereotype of the ‘Horrible Hun’ did not fully manifest until the outbreak of, or just before, the Great War.52 Germans were more likely to be regarded as allies than enemies, due to the perceived racial affinity between the English and the Germans through their shared Anglo-Saxon heritage. The Germanophilia shared by many British intellectuals persisted into the 1880s, when Bismarck’s colonial ambitions, military expansion, and the emerging economical, diplomatic and naval rivalry began to destabilise the perceived balance of power between the two countries.53 It was not until the late 1890s that Germany emerged as a potential enemy, rather than an ally against France and Russia. Changing perceptions towards Germany were largely caused by the deposition of Bismarck in 1890, the deaths of Wilhelm I and, 99 days later, Frederick III, and the accession of Wilhelm II as the new Emperor.54 The young emperor’s colonial aspirations and antagonistic tendencies, as exemplified by the Krüger Telegram in 1896 and the warmongering ‘Hun Speech’ on 27 July 1900,55 roused anti-German sentiments in Britain, British press increasingly portraying Wilhelm II as ‘the embodiment of threatening

51

Morgan, National Identities and Travel, 214. John Ramsden, Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans since 1890 (London: Abacus, 2006), 54; Scully, 3-5; 136; 254; Patrick Major, “Britain and Germany: A Love-Hate Relationship?,” in German History 26. 4 (2008): 457; Jan Rüger, ’Revisiting Anglo-German Antagonism’, The Journal of Modern History 83.3 (2011): 616. 53 Ramsden, Don’t Mention the War, 3; Scully, 208. 54 Jam Leonhard, “Construction and Perception of National Images: Germany and Britain, 1870-1914,” The Linacre Journal 4 (2000): 50-54. 55 Bertolette, “British Identity and the German Other,” 209; Scully, British Images of Germany, 254. 52

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Junkerdom’.56 Thus, when Germany emerged as England’s primary commercial, industrial and military rival in the 1890s, German success could be reinterpreted as innately aberrant, as it had been achieved through methods and values which were perceived to be antithetical to the methods favoured by Britain. This interpretation could account for the German transformation from several politically divided and backward territories to a unified nation-state which excelled, and even threatened to surpass England, in its military, economical and industrial aspirations.57 Thus, the German nation was portrayed as existing on a different evolutionary stage than the British nation, not yet ready for the democratic and enlightened political spirit found in Britain. One may therefore interpret Jerome’s critique of German militarism as the natural consequence of a nostalgic love for an imagined rural and ‘natural’ Germany,58 a Romanticised anachronistic space perceived as an escape from the industrial and artificial cityscape of London. Travel literature was utilised to further the discourse of national identity by conceiving of geography and landscape as embodying national character this discourse enabled the British tourist to read the physiognomy of the German landscape, the German no longer distinguishable from his surrounding environment. This was, clearly, a disciplined nature, regimented and submissive to authority: as Ramsden states, the guidebooks’ emphasis on the order of the German landscape caused tourists to read the narrative of national character into the landscape, noticing ‘that the trees, and even the cattle, stood in straight lines.’59 Conceiving of the German landscape as unique and distinctly different from other national landscapes, British travellers could observe the overly regulated German trees, so different from the liberally scattered English trees, embodying ‘the sort of liberated spirit so highly valued by the English.’60 This was, however, not to imply that English nature lacked order and restraint: as Marjorie Morgan claims, ‘what characterised the English and their landscape was a capacity for embodying liberty and order simultaneously.’ What was detested was the German geometric precision of regimented rows of trees, flowers, and corrected rivers: ‘Such highly controlled precision was an extreme, unnatural form of order distasteful to the English.’61 Thus, while English nationscape was civilised, 56

Ramsden, Don’t Mention the War, 60; 80. Bertolette, “British Identity and the German Other,” 5; 221. 58 Scully, British Images of Germany, 50. 59 Ramsden, Don’t Mention the War, 22. 60 Morgan, National Identities and Travel, 46; 68. 61 Morgan, National Identities and Travel, 68-71. 57

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characterised by moderation and restraint, the German nationscape was excessively disciplined, favouring geometric precision over natural irregularity, the latter preferred by the English.62 The German government controlled and disciplined nature in much the same way it did its subjects, as both the German nature and individual were perceived to lack the capacity for autonomy and self-government, not naturally civilised in the manner the English nature and national character were. For the German environmental preservationists, the landscape was perceived to be ‘both the product and an active shaper of Germans’ unique natural character’,63 thus equating the preservation of nature with the preservation of the German national character and continuous nation building - a sort of ‘nation gardening’, so to speak. While earlier travellers had admired the rugged and wild beauty of the German landscape in their search for their own Germanic origins, the turn-of-the-century German environmental reform movement of Naturschutz and Heimatschutz had turned the rustic, backward nature of Old Germany, the Rhine and Schwarzwald Forest so deeply associated with mythology and folklore, into the excessively governed, over-regulated nature depicted by Jerome.64 As Geoffrey Harvey points out in his preface to On the Bummel, the travellers’ Romanticised image of the rural landscape is challenged by the heavily disciplined and standardised environment they encounter,65 engendering friction within the phenomenologically standardised expectation of Germany. The ambivalence expressed towards the German similarly produced two counter-images: the Good German and the Bad German, with contrasting attributes.66 However, these attributes were never polar opposites, but rather ‘two sides of the same coin’:67 the Good German’s admirable efficiency and idealism was juxtaposed with the Bad German’s unbounded discipline and fanatism. The German’s problem was seen as one of organisational and military excess: while the Good German was disciplined, the Bad German was excessively disciplined. The German came to be seen, I argue, not as the direct antithesis to the English, but as 62

Morgan, National Identities and Travel, 71. Lekan, Imagining the Nation, 22. 64 Lekan, Imagining the Nation, 2; Davis, The Victorians and Germany, 318; Scully, British Images of Germany, 91. 65 Harvey, “Introduction”xxv. 66 Joep Leersen, ‘Image’, in Imagology: The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters, ed. Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007), 343. 67 Leersen, ‘Imagology: History and method’, 29. 63

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having taken the shared Anglo-Saxon traits in the wrong direction, in excess: the Englishman, by contrast, was moderate in his discipline, without loosing his autonomy or individuality. While the English was emblematic of progress, development, and modernity, the German supposedly embodied stagnation, underdevelopment and backwardness: the German had become the Teutonic antiquity which the English could define its modernity against. Jerome had expected to travel back to a Romantic past, but instead found that this past had been disfigured by an overtly efficient, yet simultaneously savage, modernity. The Romantic naturalness of the landscape of Old Germany had transformed into the barbaric despotism of New Germany, and nostalgia for another age had been replaced by fear of an intruding past. Rather than positing a single type of anachronistic space, as McClintock has done, I would suggest that, in the case of Germany, two types were seen to exist simultaneously within the nationscape: the non-threatening, simple, rustic landscape of Old Germany, and the savagely disciplined landscape of New Germany, betraying the atavistic source of the German’s progress by brute force. It should be added that Jerome was not alone in temporalising the German landscape: one example is Grant Allen’s The European Tour (1899), in which Allen construes travelling on the continent as an evolutionary descent through cultures: ‘your progress is backward, from the known to the unknown […] the Rhineland takes you back to the roots of the Middle Ages in the system of Charlemagne.’68 This, I argue, correlates with Johannes Fabian’s notion of the spatialisation of Time, where ‘that which is past is remote, that which is remote is past’: the act of travelling was temporalised, construed as travelling along a temporal scale from civilisation to savagery.69 Allen asserted that ‘The Rhineland alone is the real and original civilised Germany’,70 implying that some parts of Germany were ‘more real’ than others, more expressive of the ‘true’ German national character. One can here once again behold the perceived dichotomy between the Old, Good Germany, often embodied by the Saxon and the Rhinelander, and the New, Bad Germany, epitomised by the

68

Grant Allen, The European Tour (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1899), 144. For different discussions on temporalised landscapes, see Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840: ‘From an Antique Land’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’, 1800-1918 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 69 Fabian, Time and Other, 95; 127. 70 Allen, The European Tour, 141.

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‘Prussian Bully’, coexisting simultaneously in the British imagination.71 This distinction enabled British tourists to visit and admire the German rural landscape until the very start of the Great War, ‘largely unaffected by any growing diplomatic difficulties between the nations’.72 Any British antagonism always contained a great deal of admiration for German organisational skills and efficiency, delaying the transformation of the image of the German as the enemy Other in the mind of British travellers until 1914.73 Since the German national character was seen to lack the ability or willingness for self-government, the notion of German colonisation became all the more deviant: Jerome K. Jerome commented on the German’s propensity for ruling others while being incapable of ruling himself, describing the main national characteristic as ‘providence in buttons and a helmet’. One of the travel companions even asserted that ‘anyone could rule this country […] I could rule it.’74 To Jerome, the modern German was placid and docile, merely a shadow of his Teutonic ‘wild ancestor, to whom individual liberty was as the breath of his nostrils’. It was all too clear that this individualism and autonomy had been retained by the modern English, while the German had shunned any individual responsibility: ‘He is willing, nay, anxious, to be controlled and regulated in all things. […] The German citizen is a soldier, and the policeman is his officer.’ Even socialism, the autonomy of the people, seemed to be impossible for the responsibility-evading German, quickly devolving into despotism, as ‘individualism makes no appeal to the German voter.’ This German refutation of individualism was taken to its comical zenith when Jerome even stated that: from what I have observed of the German character I should not be surprised to hear that when a man in Germany is condemned to death he is given a piece of rope, and told to go and hang himself.75

Jerome clearly viewed the German people as less threatening than many of his contemporaries, only faulting them for believing themselves to be superior to the Anglo-Saxon. Thus, Jerome was able to praise the German 71

Ramsden, Don’t Mention the War, 27. Scully, British Images of Germany, 317. 73 Scully, British Images of Germany, 65; 81; Peter Edgerly Firchow, The Death of the German Cousin: The Variations on a Literary Stereotype, 1890-1920 (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1986), 86. 74 Jerome, Three Men, 314. 75 Jerome, Three Men, 315. 72

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whilst still containing him, as the German was never threatening to catch up with the English, always ‘lagging behind’ in an Other Time. The German nation was still young and immature, and ’the German will, unless his temperament considerably change, remain always a long way behind his Anglo-Saxon competitor.’76 Even German colonial achievements were interpreted as mirroring the German ‘power of being drilled’, as the uniformed German was capable of ruling others, and be ruled by others, but incapable of ruling himself: ‘Left to run himself, one feels he would soon fade away and die, not from any lack of intelligence, but from sheer want of presumption.’ Jerome’s satirical solution to the problem was ‘to train every German for an officer, and then put him under himself,’ contrasting the self-governance embodied by the English with the German ‘blind obedience to everything in buttons.’ While maintaining that ‘it is the antithesis of the Anglo-Saxon scheme,’ Jerome displayed a rare humility by stating that ‘as both the Anglo-Saxon and the Teuton are prospering, there must be good in both methods.’ The German only becomes threatening when wrongly governed: when well governed, he would contribute to the maintenance of peace and culture, but having been for so long ‘the soldier of Europe, that the military instinct has entered into his blood’, the wrong (Prussian) regime may pervert these noble traits into military brutality and savagery.77 During the late nineteenth century, Germany emerged at the forefront of technological, industrial and scientific progress, as a both admirable and menacing rival to Britain.78 Social Darwinist anxieties regarding the possibility that a strong German nation could defeat a decaying British Empire could only be allayed by proposing that German advancements were simply the brute force of the savage. In an era where distinctions were continuously made between past and present, between the savage and the civilised,79 in order to combat British fears of imperial decline, any German progress had to be conceived of as an expression of reactionary backwardness, the ‘wrong’ kind of modernity. ‘The German’ was not yet ready for self-government or democracy, instead preferring authoritarian, paternal government and submission of autonomy — a stark contrast to the English propensity for self-government and freedom. In this chapter, I 76

Jerome, Three Men, 317-319, 323. Jerome, Three Men, 318. 78 Jam Leonhard, ‘Construction and Perception of National Images: Germany and Britain, 1870-1914’, The Linacre Journal 4 (2000):50. 79 Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (Newhaven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 112. 77

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have suggested that travel writing and tourist guides were used as ‘devices of temporal distantiation’, in order to construe the relationship between the English Self and the German Other as not only one of difference, but also of distance in space and time. Denying the German temporal coevalness, he was thereby contained in an anachronistic space, an Other Time, and an earlier stage of development than the English observer.80 The act of travelling spatially, in a way, also became a form of time-travel: in visiting Germany, the British traveller could explore his own Anglo-Saxon past, and admire the genuine, simple and idealistic people of ‘Old Germany’, yet also be confronted with the over-regulated, militaristic aspects of ‘New Germany’, revealing the German unconditional obedience to authority and almost fetishistic affinity for order.81 I have aimed to show how the German landscape was perceived as spatially Other, as different from the English landscape, and as indicative of a national character which belonged to a different, more primitive Time. Conceiving of travel as an imperial form of spatial and temporal exploration into ‘anachronistic space’, travelling ‘forward in space but backward in time’ to use Anne McClintock’s terminology,82 Victorian and Edwardian travellers could interpret the landscape they encountered as remnants of a historical, cultural, and evolutionary past. The Romantically backward German landscape appeared to be simultaneously ahistorical and ‘stuck’ in history, perceiving the environment to be ‘pregnant with the past’, to quote Tim Ingold.83 Additionally, I have argued that travel literature and guide books ought to be perceived as vital in the production of hetero-images, contributing to a stereotypical, hyperreal perception of the German character, as well as the phenomenologically standardised experience of the German landscape. The relationship between the English and the German was thus always conceived of to be allochronic, rather than synchronic: by construing the German and the English in the opposition of past and present, of primitive and civilised, of ancient and modern, the conflict was no longer interpreted as a contemporary political conflict, but rather a conflict between societies at different stages of development and in different Times. Introducing the notion of the nationscape, I have reconceptualised Jerome’s travel writing 80 Fabian, Time and Other, 30-31; 129; 137; 178; Matti Bunzl, Foreword’, in Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: how anthropology makes its object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), xi. 81 Scully, British Images of Germany, 74; Ramsden, 24; Fabian, Time and Other, 6-7. 82 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 40; 242. 83 Ingold, “The Temporality and Landscape,” 153.

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as an attempt to read scenery through national character and national character through scenery, inferring national characteristics and temporal alterity from the way the German engaged with his landscape. Incorporating a semiotical element, the imagined German national character, nation, and nationscape all represent intricate sign-systems of hyperreal signifiers, wherein travel guides and travel writing had preceded the English individual’s encounter with both the German landscape and the German people. Frameworks such as the nationscape and phenomenological standardization allow therefore for a revision of Jerome’s role in imagining and constructing the nation, national character and the foreign Other, and place him in a position of primary importance in the turn-ofthe-century travel writing canon.

Bibliography Allen, Grant. The European Tour. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1899. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 3rd edn. London and New York: Verso, 2006. Appadurai, Arjun. ’Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’. In Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity, edited by Mike Featherstone, 295-310. London: Sage, 1990. —. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1994. Beller, Manfred and Leerssen, Joep, eds. Imagology: The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007. Beller, Manfred. ’Perception, image, imagology’. In Imagology: The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters, edited by Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, 3-16. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007. Bertolette, William F. ‘British Identity and the German Other’. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Louisiana State University, 2012. Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’, 1800-1918. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics: The Basics. London: Routledge, 2002.

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Connolly, Joseph. Jerome K. Jerome: A Critical Biography. London: Orbis, 1982. Cusack, Tricia. Riverscapes and National Identities. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2010. Davis, John R. The Victorians and Germany. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: how anthropology makes its object, 3rd edn. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Firchow, Peter Edgerly. The Death of the German Cousin: The Variations on a Literary Stereotype, 1890-1920. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1986. Gellner, Ernest. Thought and Change. London: Werdenfeld and Nicolson, 1964. Green, Martin, ed. The other Jerome K. Jerome. Stroud: History Press, 2009. Harvey, Geoffrey. ‘Introduction’, Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel, edited by Geoffrey Harvey, vi-xvi. New York and Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998; original text published in 1900. Ibitson, David Alexander. Authorship, imperial masculinity, and parody in the works of Jerome K. Jerome, 1886-1902. University of Leeds, 2013. Ingold, Tim. ‘The Temporality of the Landscape.’ World Archaeology: Conceptions of Time and Ancient Society 25.2 (1993): 152-174. Jerome, Jerome K. Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel, edited by Geoffrey Harvey. New York and Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998; original text published in 1900. Koshar, Rudy. ‘“What Ought to Be Seen”: Tourists' Guidebooks and National Identities in Modern Germany and Europe.’ Journal of Contemporary History 33.3 (1998): 323-340. Leask, Nigel. Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840: ‘From an Antique Land’. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Leerssen, Joep. ‘Image’. In Imagology: The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters, edited by Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, 343-344. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007. Lekan, Thomas M. Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885-1945. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004. Mandler, Peter. The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair. Newhaven and London: Yale University Press, 2006.

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McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. Meiner, Albert. ‘Travel Writing’. In Imagology: The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters, edited by Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, 446-449. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007. Morgan, Marjorie. National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Nilson, Ingrid and Åke. ’Baedeker Editions Archive’ (2004-2006), Accessed 9 August 2015. URL: bdkr.com. Oulton, Carolyn. Below the Fairy City: A Life of Jerome K. Jerome. Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2012. Rüger, Jan. ’Revisiting Anglo-German Antagonism.’ The Journal of Modern History 83.3 (2011): 579-617. Rühling, Lutz. Imagologie des Nordens: Kulturelle Konstruktionen von Nördlichkeit in interdisziplinärer Perspektive. Frankfurt am Main and Bern: Peter Lang, 2004. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. London: Harper Perennial, 2004. Scully, Richard. British Images of Germany: Admiration, Antagonism and Ambivalence. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Sheick, William J. ‘Going to Find Stanley: Imperial Narratives, Shilling Shockers, and Three Men in a Boat.’ English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 50.4 (2007): 403-414. Ulmer, George. ’Metaphoric Rocks: A Psychogeography of Tourism and Monumentality.’ Postmodern Culture 4.3 (1994), n.p. Accessed 10 March 2017. URL: http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.594/pop-cult.594. Wintle, Michael. ‘Cartography.’ In Imagology: The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters, edited by Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, 273-277. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007.

CHAPTER EIGHT CARMEN SYLVA, POSTCARDS, AND THE COMMERCIALISATION OF TRAVEL LAURA NIXON

Carmen Sylva (1843-1916) was the pseudonym of Elisabeth Pauline Ottilie Luise zu Wied, a German princess and the first queen of Romania by marriage.1 Using her pen-name, however, she would publish numerous novels, poems, short stories and memoirs over the course of a thirty-year career. Fluent in German, French, Romanian and English, her work travelled on an international level.2 Sylva remains relatively unknown in modern Britain, but was a well-known traveller in the nineteenth century – from her physical journeys around Britain to her influence on literary tourism and her immortalisation in popular, ephemeral forms of communication.3 In particular, the postcard indicates her impact on national and international tourism and this essay argues that Sylva’s personal popularity was used to fuel the travel industry. Sylva was a 1

This essay contains variations of ‘Romania’ (e.g. ‘Rumania’ or ‘Roumania’), which reflects orthographic changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ‘Romania’ became the preferred English spelling in 1965. When alternative spellings are used, these are citations from sources. For more information, see James P. Niessen, ‘Romania,’ in Eastern Europe. An Introduction to the People, Lands and Culture, 3 vols, ed. Richard Frucht (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2005), 741. 2 This is partially evidenced by the international recognition she received: her collection of aphorisms, first written and published in French under the title Les Pensées d’une Reine, won the Prix Botta for Literature in 1888, a prize awarded by the Académie française. In Britain, she was inaugurated to the Gorsedd of Bards, during her visit to the 1890 Eisteddfod, and was also awarded membership of the Royal Society of Literature in March 1914. 3 Numerous periodicals and newspapers chronicled her movements, her home life and her literature, sometimes within the same article. See, for example, the anonymous article ‘Society,’ Bow Bells, 11 July 1890, 36.

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commodity of British travel, a commercialised memory of a travelling queen, not a professional writer; a factor that negatively affected the reception of her literary works and contributed to her later marginalisation. Consideration of a selection of postcards, featuring stand-alone images of Sylva as well as her charitable enterprises and literary works, can piece together Sylva’s contribution to British society and have wider implications for current engagement with nineteenth-century culture. This includes the celebrity, gender politics, tourism and communication in an age of increasing technology. Developed in Austria in 1869, the first British postcard appeared in 1870, where its size and scope revolutionised the public’s writing habits.4 They were soon cheap to produce and to send, as a result of advances in printing technology and changes to legislation. The introduction of the private postcard in 1894 and the growth of the tourism industry prompted an ‘extraordinary picture postcard ‘mania’,’ which saw over three hundred million sent in 1895 as well as the establishment of numerous societies and exhibitions to celebrate so-called ‘cartophilia’.5 This is a vogue that offers insight into nineteenth-century representations of, and public engagement with, Carmen Sylva. Such ephemeral artefacts, often seen as limited in both form and content, do not receive a large amount of critical attention. Indeed, Brown and Turley suggest that they are often treated contemptuously as a result of the ‘‘lovely-weather-we’re-having’ type banalities’ they are perceived to express.6 Similar attitudes can be found in earlier accounts, where the form was deemed a ‘curt and unceremonious missive’ that many perceived as vulgar.7 With that in mind, postcards associated with Carmen Sylva are even less likely to be re-examined or considered valuable, given that she is already marginalised in terms of her literary output. Elitist ideas aside, postcards are valuable souvenirs of nineteenth-century history, reflective of common attitudes towards the celebrity as well as the broader popularity of tourism. Such ‘stuff’ may now be overlooked, but they remain, as Boscagli notes, both ‘memory object and [….] history-teller,’ revealing public interest, significant events and how they were capitalised 4

Howard Robinson, The British Post Office. A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), 368. 5 Stephen Brown and Darach Turley, ‘Travelling in trope: postcards from the edge of consumer research,’ in Consumer Research. Postcards from the Edge, ed. Stephen Brown and Darach Turley (London: Routledge, 1997), 2. 6 Brown and Turley, ‘Travelling in trope,’ 4. 7 James Douglas [1907], cited by Frank Staff in The Picture Postcard and its Origins (London: Lutterworth Press, 1966), 81.

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on.8 Postcards that have been used – featuring a message or postmark – also reveal the human traces behind such ephemera and their interactions, albeit indirectly, with the cards’ subjects, as well as the eventual recipients. Postcards are transmitters of cultural significance, first used to advertise products or for political campaigning, but soon associated with tourism and large-scale events, exhibitions and fairs, thus developing the ‘wish you were here’ mentality.9 Carmen Sylva was a key part of these strategies, a bridge between the traveller and those at home; facilitating contact between them through her image, life and words. The decision to print a large number of postcards associated with her is a strong indicator of on-going interest, revealing her connection to different locations as well as different people and transforming her into a marketable commodity of travel, part of the process of memory-making and communication in the nineteenth century. Postcards of Carmen Sylva fall into different categories, yet they all focus in some way on her name and fame. Although this may have had a detrimental effect on the interest in her literature, defining her as a queen, rather than a writer, Sylva was bought and sold as part of the tourism industry. References to Sylva and her literary works began in the 1880s, but interest developed in earnest during her visit to Britain in 1890. This was not her first encounter with Britain, having spent time in the Isle of Wight, London, Hastings, St Leonards and Oxford, but it was her most significant visit, akin to the ‘grand tours’ popular with British travellers to continental Europe. 10 Sylva journeyed from London to Llandudno and Bangor before travelling to Ireland and finally Balmoral, where she spent a few days with Queen Victoria. Of these locations, Wales retains the evidence of what might be termed her ‘physical presence’. 11 In Llandudno, Sylva is mentioned on the town trail, leading interested tourists around sites of 8

Maurizia Boscagli, Stuff Theory. Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 31. 9 Brown and Turley, ‘Travelling in trope,’ 3. 10 This has been documented in contemporary biographies of Sylva, including: Elizabeth Burgoyne, Carmen Sylva. Queen and Woman (London: Eyre & Spottiswood, 1941), 41. Modern biographers Silvia Irina Zimmerman, Die dichtende Königin (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2010) and Gabriel Badea-Păun, Carmen Sylva, trans. Silvia Irina Zimmerman (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2011), 158, have also highlighted her presence in Britain. 11 Queen Victoria, The Letters of Queen Victoria. A Selection from her Majesty’s Correspondence and Journal between the years 1886 and 1901, ed. George Earle Buckle, vol. 1 (1886-1890), (London: John Murray, 1930), 642-644.

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significance, and is credited with creating the town motto, which can be found on a plaque outside The Marine Hotel (formerly The Adelphi) in which she stayed.12 She has also been immortalised on several streets in the Craig-y-don area, of which ‘Carmen Sylva Road’ is the most obvious, and which were soon capitalised upon through the postcard form.13 Such postcards are fragments in terms of both the message and the pictures on the front side: mass-produced, but they are still a snapshot of life. The images they feature are those deemed most likely to capture the tourist’s attention and induce them to buy a card. These images may be landmarks, or, as is more common with Sylva, key figures associated with an area. The streets named after Sylva and built into the suburbs of Craigy-don soon had their own commemorative tokens, becoming part of a set of eighteen postcards, which featured local Llandudno landmarks. The series was produced by Raphael Tuck & Sons, a family-run greetings card business, who found success in the increasingly popular postcard market, and became well-known for their artistic representations of people and places.14 The company marketed itself through its royal associations, printing the British Royal Family’s Coat of Arms on the reverse of the card and stating that they were fine art publishers by royal appointment.15 Tuck’s postcards were designed to be collected and Sylva has a prominent presence in three cards from the set: Carmen Sylva Road, Roumania Drive and Roumania Crescent.16 Whilst a postcard featuring a simple street scene might not entice tourists, one that markets itself through association to a famous individual will be more successful, seeking to profit from their name. Tuck’s cards are also one of the few instances where recognition is given only to Sylva’s pen-name on a postcard; clearly designed to connect with Llandudno’s own methods of commemoration and literary tourism; a practice which grew steadily throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.17 Visiting the places associated with particular authors or their 12 Although initially unimpressed upon her arrival, Sylva soon expressed her affection for the seaside resort, which was eventually translated into Welsh – hardd hafan hedd (‘beautiful haven of peace’) – as the town motto. 13 Laura Nixon, ‘Carmen Sylva’s Links to Llandudno,’ Notes and Queries 253 (2013): 274. 14 Frank Staff, The Picture Postcard and its Origins (London: Lutterworth Press, 1966), 60. 15 Anonymous, Carmen Sylva Road, Craig-y-Don [postcard]. England: Raphael Tuck & Sons Ltd., Image No. 11. No date. 16 Nixon, ‘Carmen Sylva’s Links to Llandudno’, 274. 17 Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 5.

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work is part of the ‘business of remembrance’ Jay Winter has tied to sites of memory and the tourism industry, which suggests that Sylva was popular enough to be recognised by only a pen-name. 18 These postcards are crafted by commerce – seen to be the best representation of the location, but only an abstract of reality – and they tie Sylva’s literary life to Llandudno’s development. Sylva was built into the town and then this act was further celebrated by the production of commemorative postcards. She makes the location memorable, transforming Craig-y-don into a viable tourist location through its association with her. Although the potential for modern literary tourism is reduced by Sylva’s current marginalisation, these markers reveal the wider impact of celebrity travel on nineteenthcentury culture: towns capitalised on significant visits, hoping to attract future tourists by maintaining their connection with popular figures. This visit impacted both on Sylva’s life as well as the lives of the local people. A year after her British tour, Sylva would use Wales as the setting for her novel, Edleen Vaughan; Or, Paths of Peril; a sensational story of illicit relationships, madness and witchery, set in ‘Snowdon’s eternal snow’.19 Similarly, business-owners in Llandudno would also advertise their connection to her long after 1890; a tactic that was also reflected in the British periodical press. Newspapers and periodicals published articles, printed photographs and reproduced poetry about her travels, both in Britain and abroad. With their fleeting focus on current events and day-to-day life, these articles were not necessarily designed to be preserved, but those that remain offer insight into public interest in Sylva and the way that interest was shaped, according to common attitudes and stereotypes. In the summer of 1890, there was a particular focus on Sylva’s involvement in the Bangor Eisteddfod. She travelled from Llandudno to Bangor to be part of the festival, but her influence travelled beyond this – stretching from local Welsh newspapers to ones with national coverage, including the Westminster Review and the Musical Standard. The earliest and most detailed accounts were published in the first few weeks of September, after Sylva had left Wales. They chronicle her participation in the festival and the positive reception she received, which would reportedly ‘live in eisteddfodic history.’20 This was largely because she was the first queen in 18

Jay Winter, ‘Historians and Sites of Memory,’ in Memory in Mind and Culture, ed. Pascal Boyer and James V. Wertsch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 261. 19 Carmen Sylva, Edleen Vaughan: or Paths of Peril, vol. 2, (London: F.V. White & Co., 1892), 155. 20 A.P. Thomas, ‘Welsh Mems. and Musings,’ Magazine of Music, October 1890, 192 .

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six hundred years to attend an Eisteddfod.21 The most recent royal visitor was the Duke of Sussex to the Denbigh Eisteddfod in 1828.22 Although she was initially celebrated as a writer, these articles show that the predominant focus in the British press – and therefore in the minds of the British public – was on Sylva as a queen. Yet coupled with the physical evidence that remains in Llandudno, they also demonstrate the significance of her visit, which continued to be viewed favourably long after she had left. Her visit was also immortalised in poetry and commercialised by the act of reprinting it in a periodicals or newspapers, where it would be quickly dispersed in articles designed for public, mass consumption. Murray’s Magazine reprinted a poem Sylva recited at the festival, drawing attention to her ‘great intellectual gifts’ and the ‘sunshine’ she had experienced in the ‘Emerald Isle.’23 Similarly, ‘impromptu lines’ published in both English and Welsh provided a first-hand poetic account of Sylva at the festival.24 An anonymous critic for The Musical World went one step further, reprinting and reviewing a poem written at the festival. The ‘exceeding badness’ of Cynonfard Edwards’s ode aside, reprinting this poem not only indicates the spread of knowledge as a result of Sylva’s travels – both the poem and newspaper provide the local people with access and insight into her life – but also how it was capitalised on by both poets and the popular press, who preferred to downplay her literature in favour of her status: Thrice welcome, O Queen of Roumania, To the temple of poesy song. We welcome thee, fair Carmen Sylva; Hurrah! is the voice of the throng. The bards of the Gorsedd to greet you, The people are happy to meet you, A queen who is queenly in action And royal in beauty and grace; Whose fame in the realm of her nation Is echoed in this holy place.25

Although the Eisteddfod is a celebration of literature and art and Sylva is invited to worship in Bangor’s literary ‘temple’, her royal background 21

Anonymous, ‘The Welsh Eisteddfod,’ Musical Standard, 13 September 1890, 211. Laura Nixon, ‘Marginalised memories: Carmen Sylva in Llandudno,’ International Journal of Regional and Local History 9 (2014): 102. 23 Anonymous, ‘Notes of the Month,’ Murray's Magazine, October 1890, 568. 24 J.E.W, ‘Staccato,’ Magazine of Music, November 1890, 3. 25 Anonymous, ‘Facts and Comments,’ The Musical World, 20 September 1890, 745. 22

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takes precedence in the poem. Status is the first quality attributed to Sylva and this is reaffirmed by imagery of the ruler and the repetition of ‘queen’. The nameless public in the poem are not excited to meet her because she is a talented writer, but because she is an individual whose appearance and behaviour is explicitly connected with the monarchy. Indeed, the reviewer’s corresponding commentary wonders why royalty ‘always inspires rubbish’, citing another poem commemorating the Prince of Wales as an example.26 In doing so, the critic suggests that unbiased reactions to well-known figures are impossible and the products of such prejudice are of poor quality. Other reviewers would draw attention to this problem with regard to Sylva’s literature, with one going so far as to suggest that ‘like every one [sic] else in her station who has literary or artistic pretensions, [Sylva] has been the prey of the pestilent tribe of flatterers and puffers.27 This royal emphasis should be viewed in conjunction with Carmen Sylva’s current literary obscurity: her status is elevated over her literary achievements and if the latter received less attention than her celebrity status during her lifetime, it is unsurprising that the memory of her work would fade after her death. Sylva’s own poetic tribute, however, would be immortalised in cards that, as Bernadette A. Lear has argued, become artefacts of ‘popular culture [and] sometimes even works of art.’28 The artistry of the cards lies, in part, in their ability to compel: to possess aesthetically pleasing qualities that inspire a tourist to make a purchase. Although there is no image of Sylva, she is still a key aspect of the overall product, credited with the poem, ‘A Tribute to Charles Dickens,’ on the front side of the card (see Fig.1). When she wrote the tribute in 1909, Sylva had not visited Britain in nineteen years, yet her poem and the postcard form allowed her to again become part of British travel narratives, both nationally and internationally. The creativity at work in this small but effective style of postcard is the bringing together of visual art (two reproductions of famous oil paintings of Dickens) and literary art, Sylva’s poem. Those who buy the cards are collecting art, curated by the printer, W.H. Barrell, who has successfully combined two well-known figures with the broader practice of literary tourism.

26

Anonymous, ‘Facts and Comments,’ 745. Anonymous, ‘Chronicle,’ Saturday Review, 27 September 1890, 360. 28 Bernadette A. Lear, ‘Wishing They Were There: Old Postcards and Library History,’ Libraries and the Cultural Record 43 (2008): 92. 27

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[ Fig. 8.1. Caarmen Sylva, 1909. A Tribute to Charrles Dickens [postcard]. Portsmouth: W W.H. Barrell, Ltd. L

Tourists interested in Charles Dick kens are currrently divided d between the Charles Dickens Birrthplace Museeum in Portssmouth, estab blished in 1904 after public campaigning, and the Charles Dickens Mu useum in London, whhich was his home h between n 1837 and 18839. Both offe fer insight into Dickenns’s life and seek to pro ofit from theeir association ns, using postcards ass a method off generating in ncome. This hhas been main ntained in modern musseum practice: the Charles Dickens D Museeum continues to sell a selection of postcards relating to Dickens, thee Museum and a their collection. S Such cards reetain their staatus as populaar, inexpensiv ve, easily transportable mementos for tourists and a contributte significantly to the museum’s inncome. In 2015, the Charlees Dickens M Museum in Lon ndon sold

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approximateely 4800 posttcards, with a retail value oof around £30 000.29 As Juliet Johnn has shownn, Dickens possessed p a ‘peculiar materialist m sensibility tthat attributedd life and vallue to things: he was awaare of the emotional aand the imaginnative, as welll as the econnomic, value of o things’ and he has continued too resonate in modern cultuure: from posstcards to Dickens Woorld in Kent and his imag ge being reprroduced onto o the tenpound note. 30

Fig. 2. Carmeen Sylva, 1909.. A Tribute to Charles C Dickenss [postcard]. Po ortsmouth: W.H. Barrell,, Ltd.

29

I am very ggrateful to Shannnon Hermes, Museum M Managger at the Charlees Dickens Museum, Lonndon, for providing informatio on about postcaards and their retail r value at the museum m. 30 Juliet John,, Dickens and Mass M Culture (O Oxford: Oxfordd University Preess, 2010), 249.

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There are two versions of this ‘Tribute’ postcard, one with a picture of Dickens aged twenty-seven and another, twenty years later (see Fig. 2). These were reproduced from oil paintings by W.P. Frith (Fig.1) and Daniel Maclise (Fig. 2).31 As such, they are images that the public are likely to have been familiar with. Indeed, Frith’s painting was created at the height of Dickens’s fame in 1859.32 The postcard featuring the more youthful Dickens provides further clues: it was printed by W.H. Barrell, Ltd, a Portsmouth-based business. Although there is no record of the Birthplace museum having sold these particular postcards, the local origins of the printers hint at literary tourism and commercial motives. The similarity of the two postcards’ layouts – in terms of the font, picture and content – makes it likely that W.H. Barrell was responsible for both cards and is evidence that such businesses wanted to maximise the potential for profit by creating different versions of the postcard to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Such cards were in keeping with existing, popular cards by printers including James Bamforth, who was known for printing ‘highly emotional verse’ alongside his images.33 The front side of the card is dominated by Sylva’s poem, praising Dickens across its three stanzas for his connection with human nature, ‘for all the good/His soul was want to see’, as well as his ability to entertain and instruct his readers.34 She also makes a clear reference to one of his most popular works, A Christmas Carol in the final stanza: He heard the Christmas Carols ring, He pitied moth and snake; And had a song for ev’ry wing, And balm for every ache! (lines 9-12)35

There is no clear evidence from either biographies or Sylva’s memoirs to suggest that she was familiar with all of Dickens’s oeuvre, but the specificity of the references makes it likely that these creatures were listed intentionally, beyond the simple reason of rhyme. Indeed, references to metaphorical snakes occur in a number of Dickens’s novels, including 31

Daniel Maclise, ‘Charles Dickens,’ oil on canvas, 1839. Held at the National Portrait Gallery, London. 32 W.P. Frith, ‘Charles Dickens’, oil on canvas, 1859. Held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 33 Staff, The Picture Postcard and its Origins, 74. 34 Carmen Sylva, 1909. A Tribute to Charles Dickens [postcard]. Portsmouth: W.H. Barrell, Ltd. 35 Sylva, 1909. A Tribute to Charles Dickens [postcard].

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Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield. However, it is more probable that the line refers to Great Expectations, in which Pip encounters both animals, albeit in human form. When Pip comments on Bentley Drummell’s increasing interest in Estella, she remarks disparagingly that ‘moths, and all sorts of ugly creatures […] hover about a lighted candle. Can the candle help it?’36 Estella, by her own admission, ‘deceives and entraps’ men like Drummell who are drawn to her flame and ultimately perish.37 Pip too, begins to unravel with the revelation that she feels nothing for him. Later, with the truth revealed, Pip recoils from his benefactor, Magwich, ‘as if he had been a snake’.38 The knowledge that Magwich is Estella’s father adds a layer of complexity and shows the moth and snake to be intertwined in Pip’s life, and in the overall novel, as they are in Sylva’s final stanza. The novel also provides evidence of the pity Sylva sees in Dickens’s work: towards Estella for the psychological damage caused by Miss Havisham and the abuse she experiences from Drummell, as well as for Magwich because of his violent death and his illtreatment by the British justice system. By incorporating metaphorical references from Dickens’s work into her own, Sylva creates a connection between them and a shadow of Dickens can be found in Edleen Vaughan or; Paths of Peril (1891), which engages with the ‘wretched, torn, misunderstood,/ Unknown humanity’ that she so praises in his work: her principle protagonist, Tom, is a depraved, alcoholic gambler who seduces and impregnates a local girl.39 Temorah then succumbs to madness after a rival lover burns down her home and kills her baby. The materiality of the postcard enhances the more covert parallel made by the poem by creating an association between Sylva, her writing, and the literary prestige of Dickens. Indeed, the postcard’s focus is split between Sylva’s poem and the image of Dickens (Fig.1), reflecting what Julia Gillen has described as the ‘multimodality’ of the postcard.40 The ‘Tribute’ card uses three channels of communication: the personal message from the sender, the image of Dickens, and Sylva’s “literary message” – her poem. Text and image are combined to reinforce the connection between Dickens and Sylva and memories of both writers are shared through the postcard. If, as Connerton argues, ‘we commonly 36 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations [1861] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 283. 37 Dickens, Great Expectations, 284. 38 Dickens, Great Expectations, 292. 39 Carmen Sylva, ‘A Tribute to Charles Dickens,’ [postcard], lines 3-4. 40 Julia Gillen, ‘Writing Edwardian Postcards’ Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (2013): 492.

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consider inscription to be the privileged form for the transmission of a society’s memories,’ then writing and sending a postcard is transcribing an experience and transporting it from its place of origin to the sender’s home.41 There is an added layer to this when considering the two Dickens postcards: Sylva is transcribing society’s memories of Dickens as an author worthy of tribute, but she is also creating a written memory of herself and her own literary work. The visitors may be going to Dickens’s haunts, but they are choosing to buy Sylva’s work. Moreover, they choose to advertise it, sending it across the country where it would have been seen by postmen as well as the eventual recipient. This memory transfer is, as Meek notes, dependent on ‘the random individual human element,’ in which the sender produces a personal message for a particular recipient, but the act of sending a postcard, rather than a letter encased by an envelope, is a conscious compliance with shared communication.42 The ephemeral form of the postcard thus plays a role in social storytelling, maintaining both the memories of those involved in creating the card and those who select it, add their own messages, and share it. Here is an example of multifaceted tourism, going one step further than the Llandudno postcards: Sylva’s poem preserves interest in Dickens and Portsmouth, but it is also self-serving, reminding senders and recipients of her literary credentials. The human interaction with the card continues to transmit the story of Dickens and Sylva well into the twentieth century, years after his death and her composition of the poem. One, sent by a Beattie to a Mabel, is postmarked 10 October 1913 and makes no mention of visiting the museum, but instead concerns itself with the important matter of buying Mabel a gift and being unable to do so.43 The postcard maintains the women’s friendship and simultaneously allows Sylva to retain her role in the commercial culture surrounding travel, whether the card explicitly mentions her or not. She remains in public consciousness not only through postcards specific to her life, but through her interest in the lives of others. The public’s interest in famous faces was not new to the fin-de-siècle. By the time Sylva began to publish, the reproduction of photographs and 41 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 102. 42 James Meek, ‘In our age of privacy the postcard is an endangered, subversive species’, The Guardian, 29 March 2008. Accessed 28 August 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/mar/29/britishidentity.post. 43 Carmen Sylva, A Tribute to Charles Dickens [postcard]. Portsmouth: W.H. Barrell, Ltd, 1909.

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images of an author had become conventional and those in the public eye were ‘expected to cooperate in the commodification of their faces, bodies, pets, houses, and favourite haunts, all in the name of art, if not profit.’44 Queen Victoria was one of the first monarchs to actively embrace the media with royal photographs being printed regularly from 1860 onwards, and Carmen Sylva’s relationship with commercial media conformed to this convention both in the British press and in postcard form.45 Whether Sylva was aware of the different postcards featuring her image is unclear, but she would have sanctioned photographs throughout her life, particularly those taken in her home. These photographs were then published in periodicals, or combined with the postcard form. To some extent, then, she collaborated in her own commercialisation. Sylva was a recognisable and popular figure, hence postcard printers, museums and other tourist sites seeking to profit from association with her. A relatively small number of people would have seen her during her 1890 tour, but the souvenir postcard makes Sylva portable, reducing the ‘public, the monumental, and the three-dimensional into the miniature […] which can be appropriated within the privatised view of the individual subject.’46 Postcards permitted any individual to purchase a small part of her life, work, or an area associated with her and the market for these cards ranged from the tourist looking for a well-priced memento to more wealthier buyers. One 1915 article reveals that postcards associated with Carmen Sylva could be found at auction houses and ‘among the letters that will be sold are those of Florence Nightingale, Nelson, […] Charles Dickens and Sir Robert Peele. Collectors will also be able to bid for a postcard from Carmen Sylva and an envelope in the handwriting of Queen Victoria, addressed to Queen Adelaide.’47 It is not clear whether the postcard mentioned here was explicitly connected to Sylva, but it seems likely that the signature was accompanied with a suitable image in order to strengthen the visual connection and maximise the potential for profit. The material condition of the postcard is ideal for autographs – small enough to be displayed or put into an album by a philographer or an avid collector of royal memorabilia. The details of this particular sale, however, emphasises 44

Annette R. Federico, Idol of Suburbia. Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian Literary Culture (Charlottesville, Virginia: The University Press of Virginia, 2000), 21. 45 John Plunkett, Queen Victoria. First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 10. 46 Susan Stewart, On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (London: Duke University Press, 1993), 137-138. 47 Anonymous, ‘Red Cross Autographs,’ Daily Mail, 11 March 1915, 3.

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the charitable nature of the auction, which was held at Christies on 12 April 1915, with proceeds going to the Red Cross. This was one of seven sales held during World War One to raise funds for soldiers and the wounded at home and abroad. The prominence of Christie’s auction house – and the fact that a limited number of auctions were held during this period – again suggests that the postcard featuring Sylva’s signature was seen as a valuable or covetable item. Although the sale price is unknown, this postcard is socially responsible purchase and connects Sylva with the broader practice of charitable giving as well as cementing her status as a celebrity figure. Postcards featuring her likeness were produced both in Britain – including a souvenir of the 1900 Woman’s Exhibition at Earls Court – and continental Europe. Her image travelled the world. As of 1908, the French businessman Félix Potin featured Sylva as one of five hundred Celebrités Contemporaires (contemporary celebrities), making her one of the many, but also one of the few; part of a larger series, yet also worthy of collection.48 Despite the diminutive size of the Félix Pontin card – far smaller than the traditional postcard, perhaps for the purposes of collection and display – the featured image of Sylva remains strikingly similar to larger cards. The postcard thus may be a limited representation of an area, but the celebrity figure is one of the fundamentally appealing features. Whether in Britain or abroad, there is a shared interest in Carmen Sylva and a common approach to depicting her. Many postcards with Sylva’s image were produced in later life: her hair is white and often covered with a headdress or shawl. Although not ostensibly royal in her dress – there is no crown, and jewellery is often limited to a string of pearls – there is a regal elegance to her poses, which is further emphasised in the titles printed underneath each image, which always describe her as Queen Elisabeth and are often prioritised over her penname, which appears in parenthesis if at all (as shown in Fig. 1, Fig. 2 and Fig. 3). A number of postcards produced in Britain are “close-ups” of Sylva, without any wider setting or scenery, and are typically side-view portraits.49 Even when the image is part of a wider photograph, such as Sylva walking in her gardens, her eyes look beyond the camera. This is also true of a postcard of Sylva at work:

48

Also included in this collection were Sylva’s husband, King Carol, Otto von Bismarck and Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia. 49 Anonymous, Queen of Roumania (Carmen Sylva) [postcard], London, The Rapid Photo Printing Co Ltd, Image no. 432, no date.

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Fig. 8.3, Anonymous, Königin von Rumänien (Carmen Sylva) an der Schreibmaschine [postcard], Germany, G.L Co. (Gustav Liersch and Co.) Image no. 2472, no date.

In Fig. 3, Sylva sits at a small desk, one hand poised over the keys of the typewriter, head looking down at the pages in front of her and this intentionally indirect female gaze has important ramifications for the public’s engagement with Sylva and the development of her reputation.50 As Daryl Ogden has argued, ‘empowered eyes’ have traditionally been associated with men and if found in a woman are meant ‘to engender oneself as masculine.’51 These postcards reaffirm gender norms: despite her elevated social status, what is emphasised is Sylva’s womanly virtue 50 This postcard was produced in Germany by G.L. Co., who also printed cards of other German royals, such as Kaiser Wilhelm II and his daughter, Viktoria Luise von Preußen, the great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. 51 Daryl Ogden, The Language of the Eyes (New York: State University of New York Press, 2005), 1.

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and enjoyment of the domestic sphere – the ‘queenly […] action’ celebrated by Edwards’s Eisteddfod poem.52 The postcard may provide insight into the royal world and, as Yoke-Sum has argued, ‘circles otherwise closed to view’, but the reality of this world is still restricted.53 The life revealed in postcards of Sylva is created and artificial, adhering to socially constructed ideas of femininity. There is an element of revelation, tempered with familiar expectations of female behaviour. This decision to emphasise passivity or an appropriately modest gaze is not surprising in the context of nineteenth-century societal expectations. Indeed, journalist James Douglas wrote that ‘the Postcard has always been a feminine vice’ and in doing so links the act of composing a postcard with the wider contexts of the domestic sphere, the popular and, by extension, the ephemeral and the trivial.54 It is, however, an image of Sylva that works against contemporary newspaper articles, which depict her as outlandish, ‘imprudent,’ and with the power to interfere in her husband’s political affairs.55 In the early 1890s Sylva’s involvement in the Ferdinand-Vacaresco affair – and the subsequent scandal – meant that she was forced to leave Romania and her charitable enterprises.56 These postcards, mass produced for public consumption, act as a counter-balance for the more salacious aspects of Sylva’s life, creating an image of an unassuming, domestically-orientated queen. Shahar Bram has argued that postcards ‘articulate a language of sites that apparently all visitors share’ and this can be extended to include the language surrounding what we might term the “celebrity postcard”.57 Their ‘language’ aims to downplay Sylva’s eccentricities to all who encounter her. This commercialised crafting of socially appropriate images may have resulted in her later marginalisation if Sylva’s literary endeavours were seen as secondary to, 52

Anonymous, ‘Facts and Comments’, The Musical World, 20 September 1890, 745. 53 Wong Yoke-Sum, ‘Beyond (and Below) Incommensurability: The Aesthetics of the Postcard’, Common Knowledge, 8 (2002): 356. 54 James Douglas cited by Frank Staff, 81. 55 Anonymous, ‘Carmen Sylva at Venice, by Pierre Loti,’ The Review of Reviews, February 1893, 163. 56 Her husband’s nephew and heir to the Romanian throne, Prince Ferdinand began a relationship with Hélène Vacaresco, Sylva’s long-time acquaintance and collaborator on The Bard of the Dimbovitza, a collection of folktales. Sylva, who was seen as having orchestrated the match, was subsequently exiled from Romania. She returned in 1893, to witness Ferdinand’s marriage to Princess Marie, granddaughter of Queen Victoria. 57 Shahar Bram, ‘Postcard Poem, Ekphrastic Delusion: On Margaret Atwood’s Poem “Postcard,”’ University of Toronto Quarterly 83 (2014): 28.

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or negatively contributing to, her royal reputation, which was to be preserved above all else. Socially acceptable responsibilities are also emphasised by postcards focusing on Sylva’s charity work and, more specifically, the dolls show she commissioned in 1898. Fig. 4 is an example of the ‘‘turn-of-thecentury’ format’, where images appeared the front side of the postcard with a short message on the same side, usually in the margins.58

Fig. 8.4, Ruby to Mrs Cox, 1899, Carmen Sylvas Königreich [postcard]. Berlin: H. Wagshund Kunst-Anstalt

In some ways, Fig. 4 fulfils a similar function to Tuck’s postcards of Carmen Sylva Road or the Dickens ‘Tribute’ card by encouraging the practice of visiting an area or location associated with a well-known figure. Yet this card has alternative functions, offering insights into tourist travel, the representation of the Eastern ‘Other’ and Sylva’s own status. It therefore exemplifies the many methods of commercialisation and tourism found in other postcards. On first inspection, the postcard depicts a Romanian mountain scene and this is supported by the title of the card – ‘Carmen Sylva’s Königreich’ (‘Carmen Sylva’s Kingdom’). The language of the card, however, reveals a German origin, and closer inspection of the image reveals that dolls, not humans, have populated the scene. One sender, Ruby, who posted the card to a Mrs Cox on 12 April 1899, 58

Gillen, 489.

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confirms this, writing that ‘we have just been to see this exhibition of dolls, which the Queen of Roumania collected and sent to her mother. Perhaps you saw the pictures of them in the Girls Realm. They have just come from Berlin.’59 Her comments reveal that the British public were clearly aware of this exhibition and that interest was not limited to Sylva’s home of Wied, but news had ‘travelled’ to the British periodical press. The postcard thus participates in what Wollaeger has termed a ‘human showcase,’ whereby western exhibition-goers have a privileged view, observing other nations that are displayed before them.60 Postcard souvenirs that attempt to recapture the exhibition are a way of sharing the experience with less privileged westerners – those at home. There is no way of knowing if the sender was in Germany solely to see the exhibition, but they clearly wanted to share the experience with friends and relatives. In this case, Ruby goes so far as to communicate key facts to Mrs Cox and refer her to a specific periodical for further information. The articles published in The Girl’s Realm and also in The Strand complement the card, describing the ‘extraordinary enthusiasm’ with which Sylva collected and established the doll’s show for the benefit of ‘little deaf and dumb children’ in a local orphanage.61 The doll-show proved so popular that it was transported to the 1900 Women’s Exhibition in Earl’s Court and became ‘one of the most interesting features’.62 This decision goes some way to explain the production of a postcard of Sylva at the event: such souvenirs created a celebrity connection to the doll show in front of the visitor, even if Sylva was not there in person. Sylva’s doll-show postcard creates a dual layer of travel and communication and has wider implications for understanding British engagement with other countries and cultures in the nineteenth century. As shown in Fig. 4, the British traveller, Ruby, was in Western Europe at the time of writing, but attending the doll-show provided her with insight into Eastern Europe. This representation of Romania may be stereotypical – it is a peasant scene, with sublime scenery, cattle and people in traditional costume – but it is one that would be far more difficult to access without Sylva’s input in the show and the decision to produce a corresponding postcard. The privileged view Wollaeger discusses is particularly true of 59 Ruby to Mrs Cox, 1899, Carmen Sylvas Königreich [postcard]. Berlin: H. Wagshund Kunst-Anstalt. 60 Mark A. Wollaeger, ‘Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race: Colonizing Women in The Voyage Out,’ Modernism/modernity 8 (2001): 48. 61 A. B. Henn, ‘Carmen Sylva’s Doll-Show,’ The Strand Magazine, December 1898, 682; 687. 62 E.F.V, ‘The Woman’s Exhibition,’ Art Journal, June 1900, 220.

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British travellers looking at the Romanian scene, even if it is staged. Nineteenth-century Romania was relatively unknown, and contemporary anthropological studies of the period emphasised its primitive people and ‘Oriental life.’63 Ruby, or the sender of any such postcard, was participating in a touristic rite of passage, writing and sending the card in order to authenticate her visit. Her western distance, however, is even more pronounced since she experienced Romanian culture through an artificial scene in a German town, rather than travelling there herself. Yet she has made a journey and her experience of the doll show remains authentic, albeit inaccurate. Her postcard is a marker of experience, a souvenir and an attempt to memorialise her travels, to ‘transport some of the sacred quality of the journey across boundaries and back to the home of the traveller.’64 Like the Dickens ‘Tribute’ card, the doll-show postcard is multifunctional in this respect. As a commercial tool, it capitalises on Sylva’s connection to Wied in order to encourage tourists to visit and ‘buy into’ the connection. This ‘“appropriately” framed vantage gaze’, whilst selective, elevates Sylva in the minds of senders and recipients.65 She is of importance to Romania, but is also part of German culture and a benevolent queen whose charitable venture, emphasised in Ruby’s message, has the potential to reach many other readers before the intended recipient. This is again part of the crafting of Sylva’s image, the mythmaking about her virtue and benevolence, and problematizes Staff’s assertion that the postcard functions as a ‘truthful record’ of topical events – the senders’ messages may be personal to them, but the method of communication is not.66 It has been crafted by photographers and postcard printers to optimise sales by adhering to social expectations and relying on the name of those associated with it. Travel did indeed broaden the mind – it gave Sylva experience of Britain that she would later draw on in her literary work, but perhaps more importantly, it allowed the British public to become more familiar with Sylva, her work and the country she ruled with her husband. If social status could be defined by the ‘style and quality’ of the postcards that were received or collected – from the perceived respectability of postcards featuring architecture, to the prestige and glamour associated with 63

James Samuelson, Roumania Past and Present (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1882), 14. 64 Russell W. Belk, ‘Been there, done that, bought the souvenirs. Of journeys and boundary crossing,’ in Consumer Research. Postcards from the Edge, ed. Stephen Brown and Darach Turley (London: Routledge, 1997), 32. 65 Bram, ‘Postcard Poem, Ekphrastic Delusion,’ 29. 66 Staff, The Picture Postcard and its Origins, 62.

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collecting foreign cards – then postcards of Sylva catered for every taste.67 Their mass appeal made her well-known, but may have proved damaging to her literary reputation, given their overarching focus on her royal role and charitable ventures. Sylva was a representative of the ‘Eastern other’ but also part of British literary tourism; she becomes what we might call a ‘transporter’ – part of other people’s travel narratives through ephemeral artefacts, but also through her writing. By recuperating Sylva, we gain a deeper understanding not only of British travel habits, but also wider cultural shifts: the commercialisation of the celebrity figure and the social attitudes to communication in an age that was increasingly conscious of mobility and the speed with which information could be sent and received.

Bibliography Anonymous. ‘Carmen Sylva at Venice, by Pierre Loti.’ The Review of Reviews, February 1893. Anonymous. ‘Chronicle.’ Saturday Review, 27 September 1890. Anonymous. [1908] Collection Felix Pontin. Elisabeth Reine de Roumanie, [postcard]. Anonymous. ‘Facts and Comments.’ The Musical World, 20 September 1890. Anonymous. [no date] Königin von Rumänien (Carmen Sylva) an der Schreibmaschine [postcard], Germany, G.L Co. (Gustav Liersch and Co.), Image no. 2472. Anonymous. ‘Notes of the Month.’ Murray's Magazine, October 1890. Anonymous. [no date] Queen of Roumania (Carmen Sylva) [postcard], London, The Rapid Photo Printing Co Ltd., Image no. 432. Anonymous. ‘Red Cross Autographs.’ Daily Mail, 11 March 1915, Issue 5908. Anonymous. ‘Society.’ Bow Bells, 11 July 1890. Anonymous. ‘The Welsh Eisteddfod.’ Musical Standard, 13 September 1890. A.P. Thomas. ‘Welsh Mems. and Musings.’ Magazine of Music, October 1890. Badea-Păun, Gabriel. Carmen Sylva. Translated by Silvia Irina Zimmerman. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2011. Belk, Russell W. ‘Been there, done that, bought the souvenirs. Of journeys and boundary crossing.’ In Consumer Research. Postcards from the

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Staff, The Picture Postcard and its Origins, 64.

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Edge, edited by Stephen Brown and Darach Turley, 22-45. London: Routledge, 1997. Boscagli, Maurizia. Stuff Theory. Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism. London; Bloomsbury, 2014. Bram, Shahar. ‘Postcard Poem, Ekphrastic Delusion: On Margaret Atwood’s Poem “Postcard.”’ University of Toronto Quarterly 83 (2014): 28-38. Brown, Stephen, and Darach Turley. ‘Travelling in trope: postcards from the edge of consumer research,’ in Consumer Research. Postcards from the Edge, edited by Stephen Brown and Darach Turley, 1-21. London: Routledge, 1997. Burgoyne, Elizabeth. Carmen Sylva. Queen and Woman. London: Eyre & Spottiswood, 1941. Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations [1861]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Douglas, James [1907] cited by Frank Staff in The Picture Postcard and its Origins. London: Lutterworth Press, 1966. E.F.V. ‘The Woman’s Exhibition.’ Art Journal (June 1900): 219-220. Federico, Annette, R. Idol of Suburbia. Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian Literary Culture. Charlottesville, Virginia: The University Press of Virginia, 2000. Frith, W.P. ‘Charles Dickens’s, oil on canvas, 1859. Held at the Victorian and Albert Museum, London. Gillen, Julia. ‘Writing Edwardian Postcards.’ Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (2013): 488-521. Henn, A. B. ‘Carmen Sylva’s Doll-Show.’ The Strand Magazine, December 1898, 682-687. J.E.W. ‘Staccato.’ Magazine of Music, November 1890. John, Juliet. Dickens and Mass Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Lear, Bernadette A. ‘Wishing They Were There: Old Postcards and Library History.’ Libraries and the Cultural Record 43 (2008): 77-100. Maclise, Daniel. ‘Charles Dickens,’ oil on canvas, 1839. Held at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Meek, James. ‘In our age of privacy the postcard is an endangered, subversive species.’ The Guardian, 29 March 2008. Accessed 28 August 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/mar/29/britishidentity.post.

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Niessen, James P. ‘Romania.’ In Eastern Europe. An Introduction to the People, Lands and Culture, 3 vols, edited by Richard Frucht, 735-790. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2005. Nixon, Laura. ‘Carmen Sylva’s Links to Llandudno.’ Notes and Queries 253 (2013): 274. —. ‘Marginalised memories: Carmen Sylva in Llandudno.’ International Journal of Regional and Local History 9 (2014): 94-106. Ogden, Daryl. The Language of the Eyes. New York: State University of New York Press, 2005. Plunkett, John. Queen Victoria. First Media Monarch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Queen Victoria. The Letters of Queen Victoria. A Selection from her Majesty’s Correspondence and Journal between the years 1886 and 1901, edited by George Earle Buckle, Vol. 1, (1886-1890). London: John Murray, 1930. Robinson, Howard. The British Post Office. A History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948. Ruby to Mrs Cox. [1899], Carmen Sylvas Königreich [postcard]. Berlin: H. Wagshund Kunst-Anstalt. Samuelson, James. Roumania Past and Present. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1882. Staff, Frank. The Picture Postcard and its Origins. London: Lutterworth Press, 1966. Stewart, Susan. On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. London: Duke University Press, 1993. Sylva, Carmen. Edleen Vaughan: or Paths of Peril, 3 Vols. London: F.V. White & Co., 1892. Sylva, Carmen. [1909] A Tribute to Charles Dickens [postcard]. Portsmouth, W.H. Barrell, Ltd. Watson, Nicola J. The Literary Tourist. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Winter, Jay. ‘Historians and Sites of Memory.’ In Memory in Mind and Culture, edited by Pascal Boyer and James V. Wertsch. 252-268. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Wollaeger, Mark, A. ‘Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race: Colonizing Women in The Voyage Out.’ Modernism/modernity 8 (2001): 43-75. Yoke-Sum, Wong. ‘Beyond (and Below) Incommensurability: The Aesthetics of the Postcard.’ Common Knowledge 8 (2002): 333-356. Zimmerman, Silvia Irina. Die dichtende Königin. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2010.

SECTION D: CIRCLING THE GLOBE: 'EMPIRE BOYS' AT HOME AND IN THE WORLD

CHAPTER NINE H. RIDER HAGGARD, ENGLISHNESS AND ‘RURAL ENGLAND’: A COSMOPOLITAN VOICE FROM THE COUNTRYSIDE ELVAN MUTLU

England is the country, and the country is England.1 Thus from a Mixture of all Kinds began, That Het’rogeneous Thing, An Englishman: In eager Rapes, and furious Lust begot, Betwixt a Painted Britton and a Scot: Whose gend’ring Offspring quickly learnt to bow, And yoke their Heifers to the Roman Plough: From whence a Mongrel half-bred Race there came, With neither Name nor Nation, Speech or Fame. In whose hot Veins new Mixtures quickly ran, Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane. While their Rank Daughters, to their Parents just, Receiv’d all Nations with Promiscuous Lust. This Nauseous Brood directly did contain The well-extracted Blood of Englishmen.2

As a late-Victorian romance fiction writer, popularly known for King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She: A History of Adventure (1887), H. Rider Haggard’s romances set in African landscapes have attracted the attention of several critics, who have explored his representation of the African land 1

Stanley Baldwin, On England and Other Addresses (London: Philip Allan, 1926), 6. 2 Daniel Defoe, “The True-Born Englishman (1701),” in Daniel Defoe, ed. James T. Boulton (London: Batsford, 1965), 63–64. Emphasis in original.

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as a female body, while his works set in rural England have been relatively neglected.3 For the modern reader, as for the contemporary audience of his era, Haggard’s romances exert an appeal that places them at the forefront of cultural and economic representations of the Empire, romance fiction writing and the psyche of late-Victorian people. Growing up in a rural environment, Haggard was without a doubt enthusiastic about rural life and developed ‘strong agricultural tastes’.4 He was ‘at one with nature and the land’, and this is reflected in his fiction and non-fiction works.5 He was one of the pioneers of afforestation and worked keenly towards preventing coastal erosion. He was a farmer and gardener both in Africa and in England, keeping a detailed record of his experience in his journal, later published as A Gardener’s Year (1905). In this book, Haggard communicates the experience of being a gardener at his house, Ditchingham, throughout different seasons of the year. His garden, as he puts it, is a ‘great rest and refreshment’, and ‘to see sleeping roots awake in the mystery growth’ is a great source of inspiration for him, sustaining his motivation for his work on rural England. 6 The garden that Haggard is developing stands as a metaphor for the garden island, whose origins are still a mystery to many people who have not studied the history of Britain.7 Through his experience as a gardener, Haggard won several prizes, especially for the orchids he presented at local exhibitions.8 In his books, he refers to his amateur hand in the study of anthropology and history as well as gardening. These books reflect Haggard’s search for the historical origins of the English national identity and, as he searches, he learns more and more, his books becoming a guide for a journey into the history of England.9 This chapter begins with the representation of the English landscape in the nineteenth century and considers how national identity is 3

See for example, Rebecca Stott, “The Dark Continent: Africa as a Female Body in Haggard’s Adventure Fiction”, Feminist Review, 32 (1989): 69–89; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York; London: Routledge, 1995). 4 H. Rider Haggard, The Days of My Life: An Autobiography, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1926), vol. 1, 4. 5 Peter B. Ellis, H. Rider Haggard: A Voice from the Infinite (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 11. 6 H. Rider Haggard, A Gardener’s Year (London: Longmans, Green, 1905), 13. 7 See Robert Colls, ‘England as A Garden’, in Identity of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 203–211. 8 “Mr. Rider Haggard in the Garden,” Speaker: The Liberal Review, January 21, 1905, 404. 9 See Elvan Mutlu, ‘The Expansion of Englishness: H. Rider Haggard, Empire and Comopolitanism,’ unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Kent, 2016.

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defined within this context, before turning to an examination of Haggard’s non-fiction works of rural England which are about the agricultural developments in the English countryside, as the setting and time of these works are significant in defining Englishness. Focusing on his ‘rural England’ works, such as A Farmer’s Year (1898), Rural England (1902) and A Gardener’s Year, this chapter is an interdisciplinary attempt to examine the construction of English national identity and the ways in which Haggard encourages his readers to develop and express cosmopolitan perspectives, affirming Robert Spencer’s suggestion that cosmopolitanism starts at home.10

Englishness and the Cosmopolitan Countryside ‘Identity’, as an important topic in recent research, attracts the attention of scholars from various disciplines. Historians look at the evolution of identities, psychologists assess social identities in order to understand personal traits, and literary scholars attempt to investigate characters and their representation in relation to national identity. In 1983, Benedict Anderson described the concept of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ that is ‘both inherently limited and sovereign’. He goes on to explain, It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. […] The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them […] has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. […]. It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. […] It is imagined as a community, because regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.11

So, what gives this community a national identity? In order to analyse this topic in Haggard’s works, it is useful to refer to Pierra Nora’s concept of

10 Robert Spencer, “Cosmopolitan Criticism,” in Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, ed. Janet Wilson, Cristina ùandru and Sarah L. Welsh (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 40. See also Robert Spencer, Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 15. 11 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 6–7.

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lieux de mémoire.12 Nora suggests that the environments of memory are subject to change, because they point to both the present time in which we are living and the past which we are usually pondering on. On the other hand, a place of memory, a lieu de mémoire, is stable. It can take the form of a place, a literary text, a person, a landscape or an institution, and always has a key to unlock the door of past experiences. Following Nora’s concept, Ian Baucom has defined lieux de mémoire as strong ‘traditionsoaked places to secure and bestow English identity’, places in which ‘an identity-preserving, identity-enchanting, and identity-transforming aura lingers, or is made to appear’.13 Here, Baucom’s definition is associated with the construction of national identity and the invention of tradition. Robert Young suggests that ‘[t]oday it is customary to portray the racialism of the nineteenth century as “pseudo-scientific”, and to assume that it was mostly designated to denigrate colonised peoples’.14 He adds that ‘[n]owadays we tend to think of white English culture as relatively homogenous, and celebrate its challenge and diversification by ethnic minorities in Britain’.15 In Civilising Subject, Catherine Hall makes a similar observation, that national identity could be explained and defined by focusing on what is not part of it, because identity mostly depends on the outside: ‘A focus on national histories as constructed, rather than given, on the imagined community of the nation as created, rather than simply there, on national identities as brought into being through particular discursive work, requires transnational thinking.’16 This transnational thinking suggested by Hall, Baucom and Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire are both portrayed in Haggard’s writing on rural England. In Haggard’s case, however, transnational thinking is integrated into the English national identity with the help of historical consciousness, and this historical construction of identity is cosmopolitan rather than homogenous. In other words, Haggard’s works show that it is not quite possible to

12

Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations, 26 (1989): 7–24. 13 Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 18–19. 14 Robert J. C. Young, “Hybridism and the Ethnicity of the English,” in Cultural Readings of Imperialism: Edward Said and the Gravity of History, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, Benita Parry and Judith Squires (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1997), 127. 15 Young, “Hybridism,” 127. 16 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 9.

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define English national identity within a homogenous discursive framework. In his chapter ‘The Moment of Englishness’, Kumar reverts to the traditional concept of English national identity and prefers to see it as rural and timeless – a concept that is shared by Stanley Baldwin, William Morris and George Orwell. Kumar contends that this ‘moment of Englishness’ is a cultural movement, rather than a political one, where the critics turn their attention to the character of the English people as a nation, with its specific traditions and history. Kumar affirms that ‘all that the English can really call upon is the highly selective, partly nostalgic and backward looking version of “cultural Englishness” elaborated in the late nineteenth century and continued into the next’.17 One of the paradoxes arising from this contention is that Englishness is both fixed and flexible. Although it appears paradoxical, it could be said that traditions look not only backwards but also forwards; as Queenie Leavis notes, ‘A live tradition must, obviously, contain both continuity and innovation.’18 Raymond Williams dates this rural interest in English culture, shared by these intellectuals, to the days of when Piers Plowman (1370-90) was written.19 Thomas Carlyle’s work, Past and Present (1843), also takes this interest in rural England, presenting her as deeply rooted in the past.20 Throughout the centuries, Englishness has been associated with romantic pastoralism. This association is manifest in literature, as William Wordsworth portrays the Lake District, Thomas Hardy enhances Dorset and Rudyard Kipling imagines a mythical England, found in his later books, Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910). These writers locate the nation at the intersection of images of the countryside and the rural life of the past. Kipling defines Englishness through key historical moments, for example, and situates England in Sussex and the wider countryside. This patriotism, as Bruce King contends when describing nationalism, ‘is an urban movement which identifies with the rural areas as a source of authenticity, finding in the “folk” the attitudes, beliefs, customs and language to create a sense of national unity among people who have other loyalties’.21 Haggard’s writing is different in this 17

Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 269. 18 Queenie D. Leavis, Collected Essays, Volume I: The Englishness of the English Novel, ed. G. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 303. 19 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), chapter one. 20 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (London: Chapman & Hall, 1843). 21 Bruce King, The New English Literatures (London: Macmillan, 1980), 42.

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sense because he embraces the whole of England when he is locating national identity, and therein resides his cosmopolitanism. As William Mitchell puts it, landscape could be best expressed ‘as a medium of cultural expression, not a genre of painting or fine art’.22 Landscape, then, becomes a part of the explanation process, an address for agency. The English imagination in this sense is ‘forever green’, as Peter Ackroyd has suggested.23 Rebecca Scutt explains that in England ‘the word “country” can be used to describe both a nation and a specific landscape: it can be the whole of society or just its rural area. However, it would seem that in England at least, the English countryside has become the image of the nation.’24 The countryside is a central figure in national symbolism, and rurality is usually accepted as a sign of nation. Englishness is represented through the association with an imaginary rural world. In The Cosmopolitan Novel, Berthold Schoene writes that cosmopolitanism is used to indicate some kind of cultural mixing, dramatised by the literary texts.25 Anderson singles out both the novel and the newspaper as the two important available ‘means for “re-presenting” the kind of imagined community that is the nation’ and for ‘creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity’.26 Timothy Brennan also suggests that ‘It was the novel that historically accompanied the rise of nations’, and he continues that ‘by mimicking the structure of the nation, […] its manner of presentation allowed people to imagine the special community that was the nation’.27 Matthew Rofe suggests that Anderson’s theory takes this national consciousness to a cosmopolitan viewpoint: ‘Acknowledging community as a form of “collective imagining” […] enhances the ability to conceptualise the existence of

22

William J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 14. 23 Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002), 418. 24 Rebecca Scutt, In Search of England: Popular Representations of Englishness and the English Countryside (Newcastle upon Tyne: Centre for Rural Economy Working Paper Series, 1996), 1. 25 Berthold Schoene, The Cosmopolitan Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 13. 26 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 25, 36. Emphasis in original. 27 Timothy Brennan, “The National Longing for Form,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London; New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 49. Emphasis in original.

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communities beyond the constraints of territory.’28 In the same way, Schoene also concludes that ‘this formation of transterritorial’ goes beyond all the spatialities, whether local or global, and it ‘strengthens and renews our sense of rootedness and belonging by requiring us to define who we are, or strive to be, within an ever-broadening spectrum of contexts’.29 More recently, Anthony Appiah has argued that the notion of cosmopolitanism includes some kind of obligation to one’s fellow citizens as well as to the people of the world: ‘we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship’.30 A world in which, in Appiah’s contention, ‘communities are neatly hived off from one another’ is no longer possible, as cultures, nations and customs are constructed, reconstructed and deconstructed. 31 Appiah characterises citizenship as an action, not as a state of being; in this sense, it could be concluded that it is not necessary to make a distinction between the local and the global, ‘for we can and must do both at the same time’.32 In this context, it is essential to ‘work through the national towards the global’, in order to establish an autonomy and a mutual understanding between the two. 33 It is due to these obligations that Haggard conducted a keen study on the condition of the land in England. He talked to his fellow farmers in different counties, fulfilling his duty to his fellow Englishman. By doing so, he explored the national past and the origins of the English national identity, which demonstrates that Haggard’s works on rural England are highly informed by a sense of rootedness, a ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ in Mitchell Cohen’s words, which ‘accepts a multiplicity of roots and branches and that rests on the legitimacy of plural loyalties, of standing in many circles, but with common ground’.34 The importance of cosmopolitan criticism here is that Haggard’s travels around rural England sometimes required him to detach himself from any national identity and to criticise the nation as a whole. He approaches the cultural and national context of England not from a 28 Matthew Rofe “‘I Want to be Global’: Theorising the Gentrifying Class as an Emergent Elite Global Community,” Urban Studies, 40 (2003): 2518. 29 Schoene, The Cosmopolitan Novel, 13. 30 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Penguin, 2007), xv. 31 Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, xviii. 32 Robert Spencer, “Cosmopolitan Criticism,” 40. 33 Spencer, “Cosmopolitan Criticism,” 40. 34 Mitchell Cohen, “Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Thoughts on the Left, Nationalism, and Multiculturalism,” Dissent, 39 (1992): 483.

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specific point of view but from a cosmopolitan angle, often referring to the multiple identity roots. He starts from the local viewpoint, as the ‘national experience is basically a matter of rootedness in local conditions, and of respect and affection for them’, since ‘[t]raditionally humans have known and related to the world through their immediate surroundings’.35 His works begin with concern for local matters and the definition of Englishness at home, while later this definition and representation take a global perspective in his texts written on non-English spaces, adding to the cosmopolitanism of Englishness.

The Representation of the English Landscape in the Nineteenth Century England was mainly a rural society until the emergence of the industrial revolution. With this new introduction, thus, the representation of the English landscape, both in literature and in art, underwent a significant change during the nineteenth century, especially within painting. The concerns of the artists shifted from rural labourers to industrial workers; thus, industrial civilisation replaced the emphasis on the pastoral representations of nature. In Rural England, much as in A Farmer’s Year, Haggard repeatedly stresses his concern over the discontinuity of the formation of national identity within the boundaries of urbanised Britain, and sees the exodus from rural England to the cities as the direct consequence of the obsession with financial issues that modernity has brought into everyday life. It is of some note that Haggard places the land issue at the centre of the ‘greatest of all Causes’.36 In the nineteenth century, the national population was growing rapidly and moving into industrial towns, leaving the villages desolate. The farmers in the villages were outnumbered by the newly industrial communities, which were hostile to the nature of the countryside. As the industrial communities increased in influence, the connection between the English stock and the land was disappearing rapidly, changing the character of the nation. Faced with the threat of a decline in the character of the nation as a whole, A Farmer’s Year seeks 35

Jonathan Rée, “Cosmopolitanism and the Experience of Nationality,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nations, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 82; Schoene, The Cosmopolitan Novel, 101. 36 Quoted in Morton Cohen, Rider Haggard: His Life and His Work (London: Hutchinson, 1960), 269.

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the answer to all the distress of the industrial era within the fellowship of nature: There is no education like that which we win from the fellowship of Nature; nothing else teaches us such true lessons, or, if we choose to open our minds to its sweet influence, exercises so deep an effect upon our inner selves […] Nature is a mistress who must be worshipped with the spirit as well as admired with the eyes.37

For Haggard, nature, including agriculture, is no longer understood or appreciated by those individuals who walk on the streets of the urban space, deprived of the everyday experience of the true landscape. Responding to this disconnection from nature, A Farmer’s Year bases the lessons and education that one might seek in the fellowship of land in a rather historical context.

‘Back to the Land’: In his Quest for Rural England ‘The English land is being drained of its inhabitants, who, in everincreasing numbers, flock day by day into London and the great trading cities, there, in obedience to the laws of Nature, to whither and deteriorate.’38 Haggard wrote these words in an article on ‘Rural England’ published by the Daily Express, 12 April 1901. In 1901, he travelled around England, examining the conditions of the rural land in order to find answers to the rural depopulation and the diminishing interest in the farming lands, intending to ‘arrive at the truth out of the mouths of many witnesses’.39 In his quest for rural England, accompanied by his friend Arthur Cochrane, he crossed twenty-four counties and two Channel Islands, interviewing farmers. The results of these interviews were published twice a week between 17 April and 3 October 1901 in a series of articles in the Daily Express, under the title ‘Back to the Land’, as well as in the Yorkshire Post with the title ‘State and outlook of the English countryside’ and in a number of local newspapers. Together with the letters received from local farmers and reports of the questionnaires, these articles formed the skeleton of the two published volumes Rural

37 H. Rider Haggard, A Farmer’s Year: Being His Commonplace Book for 1898 (London: Longmans, Green, 1906), 1–2. 38 H. Rider Haggard, Daily Express, April 12, 1901, MS 4692/21, Norfolk Record Office, Norwich. 39 Haggard, Days of My Life, vol. 2, 142.

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England.40 Being a farmer’s journal, Rural England is also a traveller’s book, in which the traveller this time is not a person but, as J. H. Baron puts it, ‘British agriculture’.41 The book prompted several criticisms, the most interesting of which between Haggard and an unnamed reader, who was referred to as ‘East Yorkshire’ in The Saturday Review. The unnamed critic turned out to be a lady, to whom Haggard had to publish an apology letter in the magazine because of his ‘ill-natured’ language.42 As a writer of agriculture and rural land, Haggard counters the destruction of modernising and industrialising England, thus questioning another issue at the centre of the national identity discourse, namely the conflicts in the sustainability of Englishness. Urban commentators were convinced that the city would punish its poorest inhabitants and, accordingly, deprive them of their biological existence. Only a radical transformation in the explicit environmental conditions of late Victorian and early Edwardian England, as Peter Gould suggests, could save the hungry and ill-housed from declining mentally and physically.43 In the nineteenth century, the English rural landscape witnessed more rapid changes than the previous centuries. Criticising the industrial transformations during the nineteenth century, Haggard finds the displacement from rural land to urban areas as the main reason for the declining English national identity: In this twentieth-century England we seem to have grown away from the land; we have flocked to the cities, and are occupied with the things of cities; […] But the land is still the true mother of our race, which, were it not for that same land, would soon dwindle into littleness.44

The deterioration of the race, then, is always in the background of Haggard’s efforts to seek answers to the agricultural debate of nineteenthcentury England. Far from offering a simple vision of traditional rural ways in the manner of farmland mapping, however, Haggard’s travel book 40

Haggard and Arthur Cochrane conducted 484 interviews and sent out several questionnaires as well as receiving letters from farmers they had not contacted. 41 J. H. Barron, “H. Rider Haggard,” English Illustrated Magazine, June 15, 1904, 298. 42 See H. Rider Haggard, “Mr. Rider Haggard and Lady Skyes,” Saturday Review, August 3, 1907, 144. 43 See Peter C. Gould, Early Green Politics: Back to Nature, Back to the Land, and Socialism in Britain 1880–1900 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1988). 44 H. Rider Haggard, Rural England: Being an Account of Agricultural and Social Researches Carried Out in the Years 1901 & 1902, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1902) vol. 1, 2.

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traces the historical locations of the rural land, reminding the reader of the cosmopolitan nature of the nation. Before leaving Canterbury, during his visit to Kent, Haggard writes in Rural England that he visited St. Augustine’s, a missionary college that he had visited earlier on an occasion to ‘lay the foundation-stone of a new building’.45 The masonry and debris were already cleared away, Haggard observes, and some excavations were made in the channel of the ancient church and surroundings, offering interesting archaeological results and, in return, adding to the English national memory: Thus the original square tiles of the flooring and the bases of the old walls were brought to light and proved to be of Roman origin. In the south of chapel also, which is believed to have been built in the time of Ethelbert, the foundation of the Augustine altar was uncovered, and the plan of the Roman building, with its Anglo-Saxon imitations and mediaeval additions, more or less made clear. […] These are relics which even the most unimaginative could not contemplate without emotion.46

Of interest here are the ‘Roman building’, ‘Anglo-Saxon imitations’ and ‘medieval additions’ that Haggard takes from this scene of the ruin of the old church. Adding the notion of ‘emotion’, it captures in a single moment his sentimentality about the origins of England and national identity. Reminding his readers of the Roman roots of England and the AngloSaxon monarchs’ success in creating a unified English kingdom between the seventh and eleventh centuries, Haggard shares in the responsibility for the idealisation of locating English national identity within the context of cosmopolitanism. It reminds readers of Hilaire Belloc’s suggestion that all the institutions of England are descendants of the Roman civilization, which added more to the cosmopolitan nature of English national identity.47 David Lowenthal suggests that ‘Beloved rural England is trebly historical. Its features are compages of datable cultural acts, mostly ascribable to ancestral precursors.’48 For instance, Haggard visits an ancient town that witnessed a significant scene in history. ‘Close to the borders of Shropshire stands […] Bewdley, on the Severn, where, on May 19, 1499, Prince Arthur, the eldest son of Henry VII., was married […] to 45

Haggard, Rural England, vol. 1, 154. Haggard, Rural England, vol. 1, 154. 47 Hilaire Belloc, A Shorter History of England (London: George G. Harrap, 1934), 21. 48 David Lowenthal, “British National Identity and the English Landscape,” Rural History, 2 (1991): 216. 46

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the Princess Katherine of Aragon.’49 Descriptions of place and people, at this moment of the narration in Rural England, are integrated with historical and cultural reflections. Dorota Kolodziejczyk emphasises the significance of place in the process of border-crossing, as this process not only involves geographical movement but also involves mobility ‘between histories, philosophies, sciences, technologies and, last but not least, letters. Such narratives of the local activate in the process of bordercrossing a distinctive form of worldliness’.50 She links this type of cosmopolitanism to Arjun Appadurai’s ‘grassroots cosmopolitanism’, in which cosmopolitanism is used as a localising process and the local is the source of globalisation.51 Haggard’s mobility brings together the interconnectedness of different locations and places in rural England. The ancient town of Bewdly stands therefore as a symbol and representation of the solidity and unity of the old English cultural and social institutions. Haggard himself admits in Rural England ‘[h]ow rich in history our English countryside!’ is.52 During other travels, Haggard comes across an ancient farming method: On Mr. Main’s farm I saw, for the second time in the course of my late travels, some of the S lands which are common in Huntingdon, Oxford, Northampton, and other counties, and excite, I believe, much controversy among the learned. The peculiarity of these ‘lands’, or ‘stretches’, as we should call them in Norfolk, is that they are shaped like an inverted S – thus – – curving towards the end of the furrows, and have so curved for generations – I am told since the Saxon or early British times.53

Haggard here confirms Simon Schama’s notion that ‘[e]ven the landscapes that we suppose to be most free of our culture may turn out, on closer inspection, to be its product’.54 In his quest to locate the process of identity formation in a historical context, Haggard traces the origins of Englishness on the farmlands in his visits to Huntingdon, Oxford and other counties. The lands he observes in these places are in the shape of peculiar ancient 49

Haggard, Rural England, vol. 1, 323. Dorota Kolodziejczyk, “Cosmopolitanism in a Comparative Perspective,” in Rerouting the Postcolonial, ed. by Wilson et al., 153. 51 Arjun Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,” in Globalization, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2001), 3. 52 Haggard, Rural England, vol. 2, 81. 53 Haggard, Rural England, vol. 2, 69. 54 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 9. 50

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symbols, representing the locations of the traditional English agricultural places that are embedded in the cosmopolitan root of national identity. Such lands might even refer back to an earlier period in England’s history, as Haggard contemplates: ‘All this cultivation may date back to a very much earlier period, when an unknown England was densely inhabited. […] [T]hose whose labours gave them that shape, lived in Roman and preRoman days.55 In Haggard’s view, land was much more appreciated during the early periods of England, and he assumes ‘probably it was in the days of Romans, when […] agricultural England was much richer than is generally suspected’.56 All of his writing and thinking in the early history of English agriculture in this respect is thus a confirmation of the going-back-to-theland process on which Haggard spends much time elaborating in Rural England. He notes several times in his works that ‘some parts of England are becoming almost as lonesome as the veld of Africa’.57 More significantly, though, it helps the reader to define the national identity on the English landscape with the help of the ‘sense of rootedness’.58 ‘In the mid-nineteenth century, nostalgia became institutionalised in national and provincial museums and urban memorials. The past was no longer unknown or unknowable. The past became “heritage”. In the nineteenth century, […] old monuments were restored in their original image.’59 Haggard narrates such a place in his book. During his visit to Kent, he comments on one of the places he visits in Canterbury: I called upon the Rev. Mr. Watkin Mynn Williams, the librarian, at his chambers over the Gateway. It was strange to drink tea in that medieval apartment, [...] which […] served as a bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth; to Charles I., who here spent the first days of his honeymoon with the Princesses Henrietta Maria; and to Charles II., who slept in it on his triumphal progress to London at the time of the Restoration.60

In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym defines two versions of nostalgia: reflective nostalgia and restorative nostalgia. The former, for her, ‘dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity’, while the latter 55

Haggard, Rural England, vol. 2, 125. Haggard, Rural England, vol. 2, 211. 57 Haggard, Rural England, vol. 2, 540. 58 Schoene, The Cosmopolitan Novel, 13. 59 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 15. 60 Haggard, Rural England, vol. 1, 155. 56

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is ‘at the core of recent national and religious revivals; it knows two main plots – the return to origins and conspiracy’ – and ‘attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home’.61 The passage above is a significant example of restorative nostalgia in Haggard’s work, Rural England: it not only helps the revival of a medieval building but also reminds the reader of the Celtic origins of Englishness. Another example of this ‘transhistorical reconstruction’ of the country in Haggard’s writing could be observed when he makes a visit to Oakham: Oakham […] is chiefly famous for its castle, an ancient building with beautiful Norman arches. In the hall of the castle, or perhaps it was the chapel, hang about 130 horseshoes, […] According to a pamphlet written by Miss Margaret Finch, a certain de Ferrars, who was created Baron of Oakham by Henry II., originated the custom, under which every peer on his first passing through the town of Oakham is obliged to leave a shoe off his horse to be nailed on the castle gate. […] Among these horseshoes are specimens left by Queen Elizabeth, George IV., Queen Victoria, her present Majesty, and other historical personages. The effect of them all hanging together upon the wall is very curious, as indeed is the custom which accounts for their presence there. 62

The passage in which Haggard elaborately describes the tradition of horseshoe nailing on the gate of the castle shows how much emphasis he puts on history and national ties. As Hugh Kearney suggests, ‘history has been taught and written along national lines, and hence tied, often unconsciously, to national ideologies and nation-building’.63 The idea of restorative nostalgia is a key element here in this passage, as a means of both communicating the history of England and building English national identity on the multiple national roots. As another significant work by Haggard on rural England, A Farmer’s Year, published by Longman on 2 October 1899, is not a simple journal of a year of farming, but a handbook of farming techniques for his fellow farmers and a recommendation for financial aid from the government. It came out as a result of Haggard’s several letters written to The Times on ‘The Land Question’, communicating his opinions on the agricultural decay of rural England. During the year 1895, he sent several letters to The Times about ‘the decrepit and even dangerous state of the farming industry

61

Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xviii. Haggard, Rural England, vol. 2, 271–72. 63 Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3. 62

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in Eastern England’.64 In this book, Haggard admits that ‘the crown and charm of rural England is its antiquity’.65 English national identity and cultural memory is constructed and traced in the symbolic landscapes and places, with a particular emphasis on the significance of the historical memory: This morning I was walking to the bricklayer […] He gave me a brick, which he found built into the wall, which has cut upon it, in antique figures, the date 1393 […] these dwellings have been several times rebuilt during that long period of time, although the mason tells me that, so far as he can judge, this particular brick seems never to have been disturbed since it was first set in place. Here is an example of the great antiquity of our country life in England.66

Memory is all about context; it is all about associations. The ‘brick’ in Haggard’s narration proves itself a visible expression of Englishness and cultural identity and, more importantly, as the symbol of national memory, which is constructed on a symbolic space. Some measure of the ways in which Haggard uses this symbol of an antique brick as his guide to locating the national identity within the context of national history might be taken from the appendix he includes in A Farmer’s Year. In the appendix, Haggard comments, ‘Take the people away from their natural breeding and growing grounds, thereby sapping their health and strength in cities […] and the decay of this country becomes only a question of time.’67 The effect of the depopulation of the countryside upon the national health, physique and character is the fundamental motive behind the inclusion of the antique brick in the narration of A Farmer’s Year. Haggard concludes: ‘That is why this question of the depopulation of the country is a question of national interest.’68 In his chapter in Modernism and Race, Max Saunders quotes H. G. Wells’s ideas on race: ‘[e]thnologists (students of race) have fallen into grievous disputes about a multitude of minor peoples, as to whether they were of this or that primary race or “mixed”, or strayed early forms, or what not. But all races are more or less mixed.’69 Haggard makes this observation when he notes that ‘from 64

H. Rider Haggard, letter to The Times, January 25, 1895. Haggard, A Farmer’s Year, 7. 66 Haggard, A Farmer’s Year, 322–323. Emphasis is mine. 67 Haggard, A Farmer’s Year, 466. 68 Haggard, A Farmer’s Year, 466. 69 Quoted in Max Saunders, “‘All these Fellows are Ourselves’: Ford Madox Ford, Race and Europe,” in Modernism and Race, ed. Len Platt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 41. 65

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the highest to the lowest, in the past ages at any rate, the blood of our English villagers was curiously mixed.70 From one perspective, this notion could be defined as ‘the melting pot theory of Englishness’, as Saunders suggests.71 He writes that ‘England’s invaders, and cultural religious antecedents, are “all English” in the sense that they have contributed to the formation of modern England by settling there’.72 In order to understand England and Englishness, therefore, Saunders reminds the readers that ‘one needs to see it from a cosmopolitan rather than an insular perspective, to be able to compare it with a range of other possibilities’, as ‘[t]o be of many races would be to be of no single race’.73 Thus it could be concluded that modern races resulted from centuries of cultural mixing and Englishness needs to be approached from this cosmopolitan point of view, as Englishness was constructed at home as well as overseas.74 In the same way, Haggard tells the story of how his village, Bungay, obtained its name: But Bungay has bygone grandeurs of its own. Its name has been supposed to be derived from Bon Gue or Good Ford, but as the town was called Bungay before ever a Norman set foot in England, this interpretation will not hold. More probable is that suggested to me by the Rev. J. Denny Gedge, that the origin of the name is Borne-gay or Boundary Ford. Or the prefix ‘Bun’ may, as he hazards also, have been translated from ‘placenta,’ a sacred cake, indicating, perhaps – but this is my suggestion – that in old times Bungay was the town that pre-eminently ‘took the cake.’ Mayhap, for in philology anything might chance; but if so, alas! It takes it no longer.75

Bungay is a key reference point in Haggard’s writing, and his house, Ditchingham, which is ‘a Georgian country house standing at the heart of Norfolk, outside the village of Ditchingham, just a few kilometres away from Bungay along the Waveney’, is celebrated in his novel Montezuma’s Daughter (1893) as well.76 The story is narrated by Thomas Wingfield of 70

Haggard, A Farmer’s Year, 51. Saunders, “Ford Madox Ford,” 45. 72 Saunders, “Ford Madox Ford,” 45. 73 Saunders, “Ford Madox Ford,” 47. 74 Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire 1939–1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3. 75 Haggard, A Farmer’s Year, 23. 76 Marilena Parlati, “Memories of Exoticism and Empire: Henry Rider Haggard’s Wunderkammer at Ditchingham House,” in Writer’s House and the Making of Memory, ed. Herald Hendrix (London: Routledge, 2012), 176. 71

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Ditchingham, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and discusses how his adventures were caught up with Cortes, who invaded the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan. Half of the story takes place in Mexico; however, Ditchingham – at both the start and the end of the narration – has a significant place in the novel. The narrator writes the story at a desk in Ditchingham House, which has parallels to Haggard’s own study desk and study room. In the same way in which Haggard wrote several of his novels at the same desk, looking through the same window, Wingfield writes his life story, imaging the transnational journey he had taken in the past: From the window of the room wherein I write I can see the peaceful valley of the Waveney. Beyond its stream are the common lands golden with gorse, the ruined castle, and the red roofs of Bungay town gathered about the tower of St. Mary's Church. Yonder far away are the king's forests of Stowe and the fields of Flixton Abbey; to the right the steep bank is green with the Earsham oaks, […] All these are about me, and yet in this hour they are as though they were not. For the valley of the Waveney I see the vale of Tenochtitlan, for the slopes of Stowe the snowy shapes of the volcans Popo and Iztac, for the spire of Earsham and the towers of Ditchingham, of Bungay, and of Beccles, the soaring pyramids of sacrifice gleaming with the sacred fires, and for the cattle in the meadows the horsemen of Cortes sweeping to war.77

As could be concluded from the passage, Haggard is working from a national level towards a global level. Emily Johansen calls for the need to ‘consider how members of rural communities imagine their affiliations to the globe and how their location in rural places shapes their framing of cosmopolitan ethical and political responsibilities’.78 Haggard is uniting the rural, local place with a global one. In his imagination, both places become the same. This cosmopolitanism suggested by Haggard is fulfilled as a result of his travels to Mexico, before he wrote his novels Montezuma’s Daughter and Heart of the World (1895), the latter being a fantasy about a lost Mayan city in modern Mexico. At the beginning of the novel, Haggard portrays Wingfield in a struggle against his national ancestry, which also includes Spanish origins; his quick adaptation to Aztec customs brings about in him an identity crisis, yet his return to Ditchingham reconnects him with his roots. Ditchingham, as both a start 77

H. Rider Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter (London: Longmans, Green, 1893),

4. 78

Emily Johansen, “Imagining the Global and the Rural: Rural Cosmopolitanism in Sharon Butala’s The Garden of Eden and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide,” Postcolonial Text, 4.3 (2008): 2.

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and end point in the novel, strengthens the idea that the local is essential in the definition of cosmopolitanism. The narrator goes through a period of self-reflection after returning to the familiar landscape which has not changed ‘at all, the only change was in myself’.79 This change in Wingfield is the result of his rooted cosmopolitanism. Accepting the diversity of his roots, Wingfield celebrates the multicultural past of England and the English national identity, reflected in his description of his birthplace, which ‘was built or added too early in the reign of the seventh Henry, but long before his time some kind of tenement stood here, which was lived in by the keeper of the vineyards, and known as Gardener's Lodge’.80 Montezuma’s Daughter, like Rural England and A Farmer’s Year, connects rural England to the multicultural history of the country. This attachment to a place is described as ‘topophilia’ by Yi-Fu Tuan; it is the love or appreciation of a place.81 The place provides a sense of emotional security and the preservation of the national identity in familiar conditions, which propels a sense of rootedness, as Edward Relph suggests: ‘To have roots in a place is to have a secure point from which to look out on the world, a firm grasp of one’s own position in the order of things.’82 Ditchingham is the main location around which A Farmer’s Year is written and, by doing so, Haggard associates the farmlands and the local places with several symbolic locations, deeply rooted in ancient past: ‘Look at the long procession of them […] a Roman overseer; Saxons, Danes, Normans, monks, English of all the dynasties, our immediate predecessors, and, last of all, ourselves. […] Then there were Bigods and de Udedales, and Gostlings and Shelton, […] in the time of Henry VIII’.83 In Haggard’s writing, there is a sense of multiple historical representations of one place that have been shaped throughout the centuries, and which brought different selves together in a collective history. Doreen Massey defines a ‘progressive concept of place’ as the notion that ‘what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalised history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of

79

Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter, 313. Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter, 7. 81 See Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974). 82 Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness, Research in Planning and Design, I (London: Pion, 2008), 38. 83 Haggard, A Farmer’s Year, 4–5. 80

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relations, articulated together at a particular locus’.84 This cosmopolitan conceptualisation of place involves several relations that develop this place from a global angle, adding diversity to the locality of it. In this context, Haggard’s English travel books are a challenge to any assumptions that might suggest the rural is a homogeneous entity and that cultural imaginations remain unchanged. The rural place is a result of many different relations, and paves the way for the recognition of cosmopolitan identities. ‘Landscape is a way of seeing the world, a codification of social order […] Places encapsulate and communicate identity.’85 As has been seen, the pastoral and the medieval are the informants of his rooted cosmopolitanism, which connects the national identity to the ancestral roots. In A Farmer’s Year, both Ditchingham and Bungay are given essential representation, their environment becomes the place of revival of an imagined English community. The presence of historical references to the early days of England, such as Normans and Saxons, in Haggard’s writing is the indication of how much emphasis he puts on the imagined common ground, in which kings and new rules bring different selves together, paving the way for a rooted rural cosmopolitanism. To conclude, pastoral countryside, agricultural life, historical connotations and collective memory are essential compounds of Haggard’s work on rural England. Knowing the history of a place and its people, and attachment to this local knowledge are so important in Haggard’s writing. This is an objective that he shares with several of his contemporaries. From his famous house, Bateman’s, in Burwash, Sussex, on December 22 1902, Kipling wrote to Haggard: ‘Dear Cobbett-Young-Haggard, For the last week or more the wife and I have been reading Rural England […] It’s a magnum opus and altogether fascinating and warning and chock full of instruction.’86 Earlier than this letter, Kipling sent Haggard another letter on November 12 1899, in which he told Haggard how much his wife and he had enjoyed reading A Farmer’s Year: ‘I’ve been going back and rereading it slowly and leisurely: for the mere taste of it – same as Gilbert

84

Doreen Massey, “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,” in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird et al. (London: Routledge, 1993), 66. 85 Caroline Mills, “Myths and Meanings of Gentrification,” in Place / Culture / Representation, ed. James Duncan and David Ley (London: Routledge, 1993), 150. 86 Rudyard Kipling to Rider Haggard: The Record of a Friendship, ed. Morton Cohen (London: Hutchinson, 1965), 49.

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White.’87 Haggard was not only inspired by agricultural writers, such as Arthur Young and William Cobbett, but he was also an inspiration for his successors, most significant of whom was his own daughter, Lilias Haggard. To commemorate her father’s memory and passion for the country life, she wrote a rural trilogy: Norfolk Life (1943), Norfolk Notebook (1947) and Country Scrapbook (1950), which celebrate rural life in the county of Norfolk.88 Through the symbolic landscapes and places that have specific cultural meanings, Haggard’s works written about ‘rural England’ illustrate the origins and traditions of Englishness as diverse and cosmopolitan. There is not only one origin of Englishness; instead, it is constructed on a collective memory of different identities, which makes it even more confusing than the differentiation between Britishness – a unified national concept comprising different cultural and ethnic groups – and Englishness, as a distinct identity from Scottishness and Welshness. R.S. Thomas sees ‘Britishness’ as ‘a mask. Beneath it there is only one nation, England.’89 Englishness, with its cosmopolitan origins, is a mask in the sense that beneath it are several cultural meanings and histories. Haggard’s works propel the representation of Englishness to be exemplified in relation to the history of England, the significance of historic places within the cultural memory and the multiplicity of the ancestral roots.

Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter. Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. London: Chatto & Windus, 2002. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Appadurai, Arjun. “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination.” In Globalization, ed. by Arjun Appadurai, 1–21. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2001. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. London: Penguin, 2007. Baldwin, Stanley. On England and Other Addresses. London: Philip Allan, 1926. 87

Morton Cohen, Rudyard Kipling, 42. Lilias Rider Haggard, Norfolk Life (London: Faber, 1943); Norfolk Notebook (London: Faber, 1947); Country Scrapbook (London: Faber, 1950). 89 Quoted in Katie Gramich, “Cymru or Wales?: Explorations in a Divided Sensibility,” in Studying British Cultures: An Introduction, ed. Susan Bassnett (London: Routledge, 2003), 101. 88

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Barron, J. H. “H. Rider Haggard.”English Illustrated Magazine, June 15, 1904. Belloc, Hilaire. A Shorter History of England. London: George G. Harrap, 1934. Baucom, Ian. Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Brennan, Timothy. “The National Longing for Form.” In Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha, 44–70. London; New York: Routledge, 1990. Carlyle, Thomas. Past and Present. London: Chapman & Hall, 1843. Cohen, Mitchell. “Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Thoughts on the Left, Nationalism, and Multiculturalism.” Dissent, 39 (1992): 478–83. Cohen, Morton. Rider Haggard: His Life and His Work. London: Hutchinson, 1960. —. ed. Rudyard Kipling to Rider Haggard: The Record of a Friendship. London: Hutchinson, 1965. Colls, Robert. Identity of England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Defoe, Daniel. “The True-Born Englishman (1701).” In Daniel Defoe, edited by James T. Boulton, 51–81. London: Batsford, 1965. Ellis, Peter B. H. Rider Haggard: A Voice from the Infinite. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Gould, Peter C. Early Green Politics: Back to Nature, Back to the Land, and Socialism in Britain 1880–1900. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1988. Gramich, Katie. “Cymru or Wales?: Explorations in a Divided Sensibility.” In Studying British Cultures: An Introduction, edited by Susan Bassnett, 101–116. London: Routledge, 2003. Haggard, Lilias Rider. Country Scrapbook. London: Faber, 1950. —. Norfolk Life. London: Faber, 1943. —. Norfolk Notebook. London: Faber, 1947. Haggard, H. Rider. Daily Express, April 12, 1901, MS 4692/21, Norfolk Record Office, Norwich. —. The Days of My Life: An Autobiography, 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1926. —. A Farmer’s Year: Being His Commonplace Book for 1898. London: Longmans, Green, 1906. —. A Gardener’s Year. London: Longmans, Green, 1905. Haggard, H. Rider. Letter to The Times, January 25, 1895. —. Montezuma’s Daughter. London: Longmans, Green, 1893. —. “Mr. Rider Haggard and Lady Skyes.” Saturday Review. August 3, 1907.

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—. Rural England: Being an Account of Agricultural and Social Researches Carried Out in the Years 1901 & 1902. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1902. Hall, Catherine. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Johansen, Emily. “Imagining the Global and the Rural: Rural Cosmopolitanism in Sharon Butala’s The Garden of Eden and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.” Postcolonial Text 4.3 (2008): 1–18. Kearney, Hugh. The British Isles: A History of Four Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. King, Bruce. The New English Literatures. London: Macmillan, 1980. Kolodziejczyk, Dorota. “Cosmopolitanism in a Comparative Perspective.” In Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, edited by Janet Wilson, Cristina ùandru and Sarah L. Welsh, 151–162. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. Kumar, Khrishan. The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Leavis, Queenie D. Collected Essays, Volume I: The Englishness of the English Novel. Edited by G. Singh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Lowenthal, David. “British National Identity and the English Landscape.” Rural History, 2 (1991): 205–230. Massey, Doreen. “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.” In Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, edited by Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam and Lisa Tickner, 59–69. London: Routledge, 1993. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. New York; London: Routledge, 1995. Mills, Caroline. “Myths and Meanings of Gentrification.” In Place / Culture / Representation, edited by James Duncan and David Ley, 149–70. London: Routledge, 1993. Mitchell, William J. T. Landscape and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. “Mr. Rider Haggard in the Garden.” Speaker: The Liberal Review. January 21, 1905. Mutlu, Elvan. ‘The Expansion of Englishness: H. Rider Haggard, Empire and Comopolitanism.’ Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Kent, 2016. Nora, Pierra. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Translated by Marc Roudebush. Representations, 26 (1989): 7–24.

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Parlati, Marilena. “Memories of Exoticism and Empire: Henry Rider Haggard’s Wunderkammer at Ditchingham House.” In Writer’s House and the Making of Memory, edited by Herald Hendrix, 175–185. London: Routledge, 2012. Rée, Jonathan. “Cosmopolitanism and the Experience of Nationality.” In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nations, ed. by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, 77–90. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness, Research in Planning and Design, I. London: Pion, 2008. Rofe, Matthew. ‘“I Want to be Global’: Theorising the Gentrifying Class as an Emergent Elite Global Community.” Urban Studies 40 (2003): 2511– 2526. Saunders, Max. “‘All these Fellows are Ourselves’: Ford Madox Ford, Race and Europe.” In Modernism and Race, edited by Len Platt, 39– 57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. London: Harper Collins, 1995. Schoene, Berthold. The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Scutt, Rebecca. In Search of England: Popular Representations of Englishness and the English Countryside. Newcastle upon Tyne: Centre for Rural Economy Working Paper Series, 1996. Spencer, Robert. “Cosmopolitan Criticism.” In Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, edited by Janet Wilson, Cristina ùandru and Sarah L. Welsh, 36–47. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. —. Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Stott, Rebecca. “The Dark Continent: Africa as a Female Body in Haggard’s Adventure Fiction.”, Feminist Review, 32 (1989): 69–89. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Webster, Wendy. Englishness and Empire 1939–1965. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Chatto & Windus, 1973. Young, Robert J. C. “Hybridism and the Ethnicity of the English.” In Cultural Readings of Imperialism: Edward Said and the Gravity of History, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson, Benita Parry and Judith Squires, 127–150. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1997.

CHAPTER TEN KIPLING THE ORIENTAL TOURIST: RUDYARD KIPLING’S TRAVEL LETTERS OF 1889 JOHN ANDERS

Introduction In March 1889 at the age of twenty-four Rudyard Kipling left India to return to England to become a full-time writer of fiction. The letters that he wrote about this journey are a neglected collection of texts but nevertheless important in that they represent a generally unrecognised turning point in his writing career.1 Although they were written, like his earlier India stories, for an Anglo-Indian readership, they were not written about that community. For the first time in his writing career, Kipling experienced cultures and communities that lay outside the formal boundaries of the then British Empire, and this decentring had a profound influence upon the young, brash writer of twenty-four years of age. The public letters were first published as a complete series in book form by the proprietors of the Allahabad Pioneer in 1899 and finally by Kipling as the two volumes From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches in 1928. Kipling’s version also included some of the last short stories and accounts of India that he produced.2 The material chosen for this chapter focuses upon Kipling’s experience of China, Japan and the USA, and his reactions to the

1

This neglect is partially addressed by Hugh Cortazzi and George Webb, in Kipling’s Japan: Collected Writings (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) which includes material from Kipling’s later 1892 visit to Japan during his honeymoon as well as the earlier 1889 material. 2 The Indian material is discussed in Jan Montefiore’s “Vagabondage in Rajasthan: Kipling’s North Indian Travels,” in Times Eye: Essays on Rudyard Kipling, ed. Jan Montefiore (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 159-176.

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apparent strangeness and incongruities of the peoples that he encountered. The argument presented is that this journey was pivotal in creating the mature Kipling’s perception of different cultures and living practices. As Kipling journeyed away from the British Raj and the closed Anglo-Indian world, he found himself the incongruity, the ignorant tourist delivering ‘brawling judgments all day long on all things unashamed’.3 His writing assumes a new freedom and apparently a new willingness to question the practice of empire as he experienced ways of life that were markedly different to the “grim and miserable” existence of the Anglo-Indian community.4

Kipling’s perspective Rudyard Kipling was a Victorian, or at least he started out as one. He was born in the then Bombay in 1865, went to school in England, returned to India as a young adult at 16 to work on the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, later moving to the Pioneer in Allahabad. It was during this period that he produced his early fictions, first published as short space fillers in the newspapers and later collected in volumes such as Plain Tales from the Hills and Departmental Ditties. Kipling’s family was immersed in the Victorian Arts and Crafts movement and the ethos of craft expounded by John Ruskin and William Morris.5 His father Lockwood Kipling was an artist and teacher of architectural sculpture working for the Indian colonial Government, his mother had direct family connections to William Morris and the Burne-Jones’.6 Throughout Kipling’s writing career he makes constant reference to ‘craft’, the ‘craft’ of the writer obviously, but also a mysterious ‘craft’ of the knowing, capable individual. Craft to Kipling appears as an essence that predated and defied modern systemised, industrial society, and it occurs frequently in the material discussed here. The majority of Kipling’s time in India was in a world dominated by the British Empire. Kipling was still a very junior and young participant, with effectively little or no experience outside of the colonial. Indeed, in 3

Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches (Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Vol. 1, 207-8. 4 Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 367. 5 George P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); William Morris’s “Hopes and Fears for Art: The Art of the People,” accessed 8 May 2014. http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1882/hopes/index.htm. 6 Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself (London: Macmillan and Co., 1937), 1120.

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his private letter to E. K. Robinson of 30th April 1886 he writes: ‘Would you be astonished if I told you that I look forward to nothing but an Indian journalist’s career? Why should I? My home’s out here; my people are out here, all the friends etc. I know are out here and all the interests I have are out here’.7 Kipling’s break with the Pioneer came at the end of 1888 when he returned to England. Kipling’s choice of route is significant. The usual route would have been westwards from India, through the Suez Canal (opened in 1869), then through the Mediterranean and back to England. Instead of using this safe, convenient and predictable route Kipling chose to go east on a Cooks tourist ticket, stopping at Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and finally the U.S.A. At each stage, the colonial regime changed its character, appearing to Kipling’s eyes to be less restrictive and intrusive, until it finally disappeared in Japan and America. The letters are different in style and feel to his previous short stories but like those, still written for an Anglo-Indian readership. It may be that the difference can be accounted for purely by the epistolary nature of the material, intended to be published at intervals, like magazine fashion in the newspapers to fill space as required. The argument followed is that they represent something far more important than that simple utilitarian view; rather that they demonstrate an increasing engagement with the world system as it existed outside of the British Empire. There is an evident decentring present, moving Kipling as a writer away from a commentator on, and for, the Anglo-Indians to that of a writer engaged with the greater world. Compared to his early fictional stories the distance between narrator, subject and reader is reduced. In the early letter series ‘Letters of Marque’, concerned with travel solely within India, the narrator is identified as ‘the Englishman’ and we see India through the ‘Englishman’s eyes’.8 The later letter series, concerned with travel outside of India show a shift in Kipling’s tone as the geographic range of travel expands. It becomes noticeably different to his fictional work and to the earlier ‘Letters of Marque’. In these later letters, the style becomes friendlier and more affectionate. The personal pronouns ‘I’, ‘us, or ‘Us’, and ‘you’ are frequently used, ‘I’ refers to Kipling and ‘us’ either to the Anglo - Indian community or the wider British community, conveniently identified as ‘English’. ‘You’ is used to address the Anglo-Indian readership directly 7 The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Macmillan, 1990), Vol.1, 126 8 Mary Condé, “Constructing the Englishman in Rudyard Kipling's 'Letters of Marque',” The Yearbook of English Studies, 34 (2004): 230-239, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3509496.

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with Kipling’s narrator appearing to act as an informant for them. The native English are placed at some distance, almost as foreigners, people who are out of place and do not belong. The following extract is taken from Letter II of Sea to Sea which deals with a short visit to Burma, formally attached to the Indian Empire but, as Kipling discovers, a different culture altogether: In the Pegu Club I found a friend – a Punjabi – upon whose broad bosom I threw myself and demanded food and entertainment. […] But he had come down in the world hideously. Years ago in the Black North he used to speak the vernacular at it should be spoken, and was one of Us. ‘Daniel, how many socks master got?’ The unfinished peg fell from my fist. ‘Good Heavens!’ said I, ‘is it possible that you – you – speak that disgusting pidgin-talk to your nauker? It’s enough to make one cry. You’re no better than a Bombaywallah!9

In this extract, apparently concerned with the simple problem of determining how many socks Kipling’s acquaintance possessed, Kipling descends into the mundane. Such a trivial question, but probably not so trivial to the sock owner, requires an interaction between coloniser and colonized. Interaction that should, in Kipling’s opinion, take place in the supposedly inferior everyday vernacular language and avoid bastardising English. However, it does not and imperfect English is used instead, degrading English to a ‘disgusting pidgin-talk’ that destroys its supposed purity. The extract is humorous; the incongruity of the subject (the master’s socks) is one factor, Kipling’s apparently horrified reaction is another and so is his adoption of the derogatory term ‘bombaywallah’, itself a bastard word. The hybridised language of the extract reflects a dramatic change in the relationship between the colonised and the coloniser. It signifies a changing world; even the sacred English language is not stable, insidiously adapting itself to accommodate changing circumstances. Outside of the closed world of Anglo India, Kipling experiences a different nuance of empire. In this empire, new trading patterns erode the old rigidities, and he tries to communicate this reality to his old Anglo-Indian world. In Singapore, Hong Kong and Canton, Kipling for the first time discovered the Chinese, not as a few isolated labouring coolies doing jobs that other races would not, but as large coherent communities.

9

Kipling, From Sea to Sea, vol. 1, 226-227.

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In the native town, I found a large army of Chinese – more than I imagined existed in China itself – encamped in spacious streets and house, some of them sending block-tin to Singapur, some driving fine carriages, others making shoes, chairs, clothes, and every other thing that a large town desires. They were the first army corps on the march of the Mongol. The scouts are at Calcutta, and a flying column at Rangoon. Here begins the main body, some hundred thousand strong, so they say. Was it not De Quincey that had a horror of the Chinese – of their inhumanness and their inscrutability? Certainly the people of Penang are not nice; they are even terrible to behold. They work hard, which in this climate is manifestly wicked, and their eyes are just like the eyes of their own pet dragons. Our Hindu gods are passable, some of them are even jolly – witness our potbellied Ganesh; but what can you do with a people who revel in D.T. monsters and crown their roof ridges with flames of fire, or the waves of the sea? 10

After making due allowance for Kipling’s bias in emphasising the positive aspects of British colonisation, the description of the Chinese inhabiting ‘spacious streets’ and driving ‘fine carriages’ remains incongruous. According to colonial dogma they are supposed to live in filth, continually engaged in gambling and drugged with opium, not living in civilised conditions. These positive images are, however, mixed with others that compare the Chinese in militaristic terms to an unstoppable army, possibly insect like, that can never be eradicated. The Chinese are a puzzle to Kipling, they have ‘pet dragons’, and they ‘revel in D.T. monsters’ and celebrate destructive fire.11 These are odd, incongruous people that appear to Kipling, as Ross Forman writes of the Victorian encounter with China, ‘as a place of possibility, not just negative association’ and that releases a flood of inquisitive energy in Kipling’s writing.12 Kipling may have resorted to a well-worn trope of colonial writing, the ‘inhumanness and their inscrutability’ of the Chinese, but the ethnographic description is inadequate and Kipling reverts to imaginative images to describe the strange people he encounters. Even in the domain of the Gods, and Kipling appropriates the Hindu god Ganesh as an image of normality, the Chinese appear to be beyond reason; they inhabit a world of their own. In this extract Kipling confronts his otherness to a people who seemed so diametrically different to those he had encountered before as to make 10

Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 245. D. T. (Delirium tremens) is a severe form of alcohol withdrawal and appears frequently in descriptions of colonial and service life. 12 Ross Forman, China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 16-17. 11

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them terrifying. The Anglo-Indian colonial mind had adjusted itself to the differing cultures in India and had devised ways of controlling these through the construction of fixed stereotypes and difference formulated around ethnographic description.13 One important element of this difference was the alleged superior British work ethic, identified by Teresa Hubel when writing that ‘Kipling’s concern is to establish an empire, or an ideal of an empire, based upon a masculine work ethic’.14 Here in the Chinese, Kipling depicts a race which can work harder than the English, indeed is possessed of an almost demonic ability to work, is capable of organizing itself, has a long history of civilization and possesses a religious dimension which is, to Kipling, totally alien. In Hong Kong, Kipling examines the workmanship of the Chinese and admiringly writes that even ‘the baskets of the coolies were good in shape, and the rattan fastenings that clenched them down to the polished bamboo yoke were whipped down, so that there was no loose ends’.15 The Chinese coolie and his craftsman like attention to detail produces a sympathetic reaction in Kipling, these are real people, not just invisible labourers. Through their work and the artefacts produced and used by them, Kipling gives the Chinese a partial voice. Kipling continues, or rather his fictional companion the Professor does, ‘I don’t think much of him (meaning our Indian craftsman) as I used to do … They are a hundred times his superior in mere idea – let alone execution’.16 A fitting summary of Chinese superiority occurs later in the same letter, where addressing his AngloIndia readership he writes: And you think as you go to office and orderly-room that you are helping forward England’s mission in the East. ‘Tis a pretty delusion, and I am sorry to destroy it, but you have conquered the wrong country. Let us annex China.17

This is ironic humour, turned inwards towards the Anglo-Indian empire and mocking the idealism of liberal imperialism. Colonial India, Kipling argues, is stagnant and lacks the vitality that the Chinese demonstrate on the fringes of empire. As in the comments on direct and indirectly administered India that appear in the story The Man Who would 13

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2009), 94-120 Teresa Hubel, Whose India? The Independence Struggle in British and Indian Fiction and History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 23. 15 Kipling, From Sea to Sea, vol. 1, 272. 16 Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 272. 17 Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 277. 14

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be King,18 Kipling repeats that greater creativity and vigour exists outside of the colonial regime than within it. Kipling’s ironic statement to annex China jokingly positions the British as a supreme power, while at the simultaneously deflating it, for such a proposition is ludicrous and beyond the power and legitimacy of the British. In the Chinese, Kipling has discovered vitality and an appetite and ability for work that astounds him. Not only can the Chinese work very hard, but they are also craftsmen and that is admirable, for to be a craftsman is to be more than a mere operative or unthinking labourer. Kipling’s schooling in craft and an eye for the incongruous (why would a mere coolie pay such attention to a basket?) collapses the stereotype of the pigtailed coolie, addicted to opium and gambling, and forces him to see a different Chinese. In Kipling’s view these strange people are no longer just ignorant day labourers but a creative and imaginative people who work hard and value the tools that they use. As Kipling travelled, his world was no longer centred upon Anglo-India and the British Empire, he had begun to experience the wider world without, and that had shaken some of his assumptions of British superiority. Kipling journeyed next to Japan that was a country in the midst of a modernization. The restoration of the Meiji emperor in 1869 had instigated a number of important reforms that were rapidly turning Japan into a modern state.19 The new dynamic Japan provided another series of culture shocks to Kipling, subverting the myth of European superiority over the Oriental. Indeed, Japan appeared superior in so many ways in art, taste, manners and skill that Kipling could not reconcile its rush towards westernization. He makes frequent mention of the new Japanese constitution modelled on English lines. I took the pamphlet and found a complete paper Constitution stamped with the Imperial Chrysanthemum – an excellent little scheme of representation, reforms, payment of members, budget estimates, and legislation. It is a terrible thing to study at close quarters, because it is so English.20

In the Japanese adoption of an English inspired ‘democratic’ constitution, Kipling has discovered a Bergsonian incongruity of a lithe organic body being constrained by an unyielding coat. He is, in effect asking ‘Why 18

Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who would be King and Other Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 210. 19 Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 20 Kipling, From Sea to Sea, vol. 1, 314.

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place a manufactured ‘democratic’ straightjacket on a living culture?’ There is laughter in Kipling’s writing; at the Japanese for adopting such a course, and of the preposterous idea that the English model is fit to be copied. For it ultimately can be held responsible for the rise of the new Indian administrative class, that in his virulent attack on the Bengal Legislative Council, he condemns as a major impediment to real progress in India.21 The heart of Japan for Kipling was its efficient agriculture, its sociable tea rooms, its craftsmanship expressed in every facet of life and its air of a refined and civilised society, quite different to the brashness and commercialism of the West. He feels for example, out of place in the quiet refinement of the house of a dealer in curiosities when he is offered tea: What I wanted to say was, ‘Look here, you person. You’re much too clean and refined for this life here below, and your house is unfit for a man to live in until he has been taught a lot of things which I have never learned. Consequently I hate you because I feel myself your inferior, and you despise me and my boots because you know me for a savage. Let me go, or I’ll pull your house of cedar-wood over your ears.’ What I really said was, ‘Oh, ah yes. Awf’ly pretty. Awful queer way of doing business.22

The civilised English gentleman is now the barbarian, the ignorant tourist who neither sees nor understands, and Kipling illustrates the stiffness and the inability of the English visitor to amend his behaviour by adopting the stereotype English manner. The Englishman is the incongruity in the piece; it is he, who by his inflexibility and defensive aggressiveness disrupts the scene by making himself ridiculous and the object of laughter. Another jolt to the myth of Western superiority is given by a visit to a pleasant, comfortable and clean Japanese tea house recently opened near Osaka: Although it was not quite completed, the lower stories were full of teastalls and tea-drinkers. The men and women were obviously admiring the view. It is an astounding thing to see an Oriental so engaged; it is as though he had stolen something from a Sahib.23

21

Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches (Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), vol. 2, 216-225. 22 Kipling, From Sea to Sea, vol. 1, 320. 23 Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 360.

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To see such something as ordinary families sitting peaceably and sociably drinking tea destabilizes Kipling’s stereotypical view of the oriental, and he can only describe it ironically as theft; the Japanese have stolen a civilised human pleasure from the all-powerful Sahib. But they have not, the theft is reversed, and so is the incongruity. It is not the tea drinking Japanese that are incongruous but the ignorant English Sahib, for the pleasures of the tea house and garden are oriental. Imitated and stolen by the Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and reinvented in places like the coffee houses of London that were integral to the surge in print culture of the time. In this short passage, the humour is not directed at the Japanese, but at the ignorant onlooker, the Englishman. There is the realization here in Kipling that there is as much diversity in the oriental world as the occidental, and the interactions and interdependencies between the two spheres are considerably more complex than simple colonial dogma will admit.24 In this reversal of incongruity, Kipling’s Englishman becomes the odd one out. He is the object of laughter and ridicule, because of his assumption that oriental society did not have, or could not have, a civilised social life. Suddenly there is the realisation that the Japanese and the English, at least the middle classes, share common, simple and innocent pleasures. Art and craft is important to Kipling’s perception of societies; it appears in his descriptions of architecture, of adornment to religious sites and to domestic artistic objects. He visits a number of workshops, one dealing in cheap articles for Western consumption and another producing true Japanese art for the Japanese home market. For the latter he describes the finishing process for enamel wear: A man sits down with the rough article, all his tea things, a tub of water, a flannel, and two or three saucers full of assorted pebbles from the brook. He does not get a wheel with tripoli [i.e. an abrasive wheel], or emery, or buff. He sits down and rubs. He rubs for a month, three months, or a year. He rubs lovingly, with his soul in his finger-ends, and little by little the efflorescence of the fired enamel gives way, and he comes down to the lines of silver, and the pattern in all its glory is there waiting for him.25

This artefact is completely different to the mass produced western items or even the pseudo traditional craft wear produced by William Morris and his associates. Here it bears a true relationship to the human spirit that produces it, and its glory appears only as time and patient effort work their 24 25

See Edward Said’s Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 2003). Kipling, From Sea to Sea, vol. 1, 388.

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magic. Japanese art may be “purely mechanical” as the Professor asserts but the Japanese are “spiritually mechanical” and that is one of their great strengths.26 When describing the Japanese craftsman Kipling appears to be borrowing from William Morris in describing the idealised relationship between human beings and work. He “rubs lovingly”, implying that there is a natural bond between the man and his work, and as the man patiently works, some of spiritual force embodied within him imperceptibly appears in the artefact. Kipling has produced a sympathetic portrait of the craftsman, who, despite the apparently monotonous and repetitive work, appears to be a contended and a complete human being. That meticulous attention to detail similarly impressed Kipling when he saw the Japanese system of land cultivation: But the countryside was the thing that made us open our eyes. Imagine a land of rich black soil, very heavily manured, and worked by the spade and hoe almost exclusively, and if you split your field (of vision) into half acre plots, you will get a notion of the raw material the cultivator works on. But all I can write will give you no notion of the wantonness of neatness visible in the fields; of the elaborate system of irrigation, and the mathematical precision of the planting. There was no mixing of crops, no waste of boundary in footpath, and no difference of value of land.27

This passage is interesting because of the dynamic revolving around the phrase “wantonness of neatness”. While Kipling is impressed by the neat and efficient use of land, a preoccupation with the British administration in India, he seems overcome by its apparent excess to the extent that its neatness becomes wantonness. Wanton(ness) is defined by the OED as “wilfulness, wildness, unruliness, Lustfulness, lasciviousness; sexual promiscuity, extravagance, undisciplined, ungoverned; unmanageable”. To say that neatness is driven by unruliness etc. is a contradiction. Zohreh Sullivan writes that Kipling’s work “involves a dialectic between the accurate, the official and the prescribed as against the dreamlike, the repressed, and the outlawed”, and it this dialectic which surfaces here. 28 There are two energies in Kipling’s description, one is the urge to control, to order, and to make neat and to colonise. The other is its opposite, a wildness and unmanageable unruliness which threatens to make productive order so extravagant that it becomes disorder. 26

Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 390. Kipling, From Sea to Sea, vol. 1, 350. 28 Zohreh T Sullivan. Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 30. 27

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In Japan, Kipling found a vibrant country that was transforming itself from an inwardly focused society, based upon a peasant – noble relationship, into a modern commercial and industrial state that apparently retained its old values of art, craftsmanship and spiritual foundation. And importantly for Kipling it was completing this transformation on its own terms with its own accumulated wealth; it was neither being held back by class self-interest nor having change forced upon it by some imposed colonial authority.29 It is worth noting that Kipling’s generally optimistic view of Japan in 1889 is countered to some in extent by his later published letters of his second visit in 1892. In the letter ‘Our Overseas Men’ he writes of Japan ‘as an Oriental country, ridden by etiquette of the sternest, and social distinctions almost as hard of those of caste.’30 Kipling’s initial encounter with Japan in 1889 is not unlike the reactions of British adventurers to the Ottoman Empire two centuries earlier. Gerald Maclean coins the phrase ‘imperial envy’ to describe the British reaction to ‘[the Ottoman’s] power, potency, military might, opulence and wealth’.31 There is admiration of a country that is coming to terms with modernity on its own terms, and using its accumulated wealth to do it. Admiration however coupled with a sense of envy that Britain, constrained by internal and imperial politics and obligations cannot, or will not, act with the same freedom. In his letter from Kyoto, Kipling encounters a group of English tea merchants and gains a view of how trade operated outside of formal empire. The rich and comfortable life that these tea merchants enjoyed was in direct opposition to that enjoyed (or suffered) by middle and lower ranking Anglo Indians, and his conclusions on Anglo-Indian life are revealing: I knew in a way that We were a grim and miserable community in India, but I did not know the measure of Our fall till I heard men talking about fortunes, success, money, and the pleasure, good living, and frequent trips to England that money brings.32

After his experience of travelling Kipling is able to reflect upon the intensities of Anglo-Indian life and compare it to other, non-anglicised 29

Kipling, From Sea to Sea, vol. 1, 396. Rudyard Kipling “Our Overseas Men,” Times [London, England] July 30, 1892:8. The Times Digital Archive. 31 Gerald Maclean, Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 20. 32 Kipling, From Sea to Sea, vol. 1, 367. 30

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societies and alternative modes of cultural interaction. The passage suggests a new dimension in Kipling’s thought, he “knew in a way” that the Anglo-Indian service is “grim and miserable” and many of his Indian stories have that quality. However, this is the first time that he is able to clarify his thoughts to the extent that he feels able to explicitly express this. A shift from realism into something else occurs immediately after this when Kipling talks of ‘our fall’. Fall from what? The most obvious is a fall from grace, of being ejected from heaven into a world where men, or at least the Anglo Indians, are no longer masters of the world, but forced to exist in a form of bondage. This is irony, verging on satire, on the dream of imperialism. Empire in India Kipling says, brings not wealth and due comfort to its administrators, but a miserable existence of grim endless work.

Modern America The United States of America provided Kipling with another set of new and perplexing experiences. The conversation with another traveller in Tokyo, identified only as ‘the Californian’ on the fatal results of carrying a gun must have predisposed him to look for, and to find lawlessness.33 Stories of turning a Gatling gun onto German rioters in Chicago shootings in gambling dens and stabbings in the street duly found their way into his material.34 Kipling refers to the fictional America of Bret Harte and Mark Twain, and while he encountered this, he found a nation on the cusp of modernity and a frightening vision of the future.35 In a conversation on shooting street rioters and the relative restraint shown in England, Kipling’s acquaintance from Louisiana points to the future: Then you’ve got all your troubles before you. The more power you give the people, the more trouble they will give. With us our better classes are corrupt and our lower classes are lawless. There are millions of useful, law-abiding citizens, and they are very sick of this thing. We execute our justice in the streets. The law courts are no use.36

He continues:

33

Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 451-454. Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 467. 35 Letter XXXVII concerns itself entirely with an interview with Twain. Kipling, From Sea to Sea, vol. 2, 182-198 36 Kipling, From Sea to Sea, vol. 1, 468. 34

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Never mind; you Britishers will have the same experience to go through. You’re beginning to rot now. Your County Councils will make you more rotten because you are putting power into the hands of untrained people. When you reach our level, - every man with a vote and the right to sell it; the right to nominate fellows of his own kidney to swamp out better men, you’ll be what we are now – rotten, rotten, rotten!37

In these extracts, which verge on the hysterical, the portrait drawn of modern democracy is a frightening one, where the freedom of a new selfsufficient middle class is threatened by ‘aliens in our midst who were shot down like dogs’.38 Wealth has corrupted the natural leaders, ‘the better classes’, and law, that impartial guarantor of middle class values is ignored by the lower classes. Modernity allied to democratic reform, instead of encouraging responsibility in the people, merely deepens the web of corruption, and reasoned law and order is in danger of being replaced by bloody chaos. It is almost as if Carlyle was speaking through Kipling’s pen, reiterating the dogma that putting power into untrained hands results in corruption and failure.39 The parallels for Kipling are obvious. Firstly, native control of the civic councils in Indian cities has (in Kipling’s opinion) caused stagnation and corruption and delayed much needed reforms. Secondly, alien emigration into America has reduced it to a state of lawlessness. Finally, increasing democratization of England will inevitably follow the precedents set in India and America, and will ultimately lead to corruption and moral collapse. Kipling’s America is not all despair, he is entranced by the beauty and splendour of the country and by the dignity and restraint of many of the people he met. The most striking are the people of the small towns and the farmers he encountered on his fishing trips. In a private letter to Edmonia Hill dated 17 September 1889 he recorded his emotions at Concord: This day I have spent in Concord – and this day has more impressed me with the ‘might majesty dominion and power’ of the Great American Nation than any other. (Let’s take a thicker pen). I wonder if you will understand how and why I came near to choking when I saw ‘the Minuteman’ and realized that I was standing on the first battle field at the

37

Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 468-469. Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 467. 39 Thomas Carlyle., “Lectures on Heroes (1840). On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History,” Project Gutenberg (1997) accessed 7 May 2014, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1091/1091-h/1091-h.htm. 38

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Chapter Ten very beginning of things. I can’t explain the emotion; but there it is for you.40

There is in this letter the spirit of discovering a new beginning, an age of freedom, where aristocratic privilege and corruption are overturned in favour of a society in which work, intelligence and skill is properly rewarded. This sense of a newly created free and innocent world contrasts to his public letters and their sense of defilement. He cites alien rioters defiling the American Revolution and the rich and vulgar invading the Yellowstone Park, forcing soldiers to patrol to prevent the park from being destroyed by souvenir hunters.41 The tone of his criticism is not unlike his treatment of the destruction of his idealised childhood by ‘the Woman’.42 In one, the possibilities of a free, joyous and innocent life are challenged by vulgarity and greed, and in the other by misplaced evangelicalism. However, the abundant energy and vigour of America impresses Kipling, and possibly he inwardly compared it to a stagnation and lethargy within Anglo-India. He writes: Let there be no misunderstanding about the matter. I love this People, and if any contemptuous criticism has to be done, I will do it myself. My heart has gone out to them beyond all other peoples; and for the life of me I cannot tell why. They are bleeding-raw at the edges, almost more conceited than the English, vulgar with a massive vulgarity which is as though the Pyramids were coated with Christmas-cake sugar-works. Cocksure they are, lawless and as casual as they are cocksure; but I love them and I realised it when I met an Englishman who laughed at them.43

The Englishman laughs because the Americans are different to the idealised, civilised, urbane construct that he believes he is. The difference and subsequent reflection, destabilizes the Englishman, and triggers a defence of superiority laughter. In this passage, however, Kipling makes the Englishman the incongruity, the unnatural thing that is out of place and to whom the corrective laughter is ultimately reflected onto. Kipling’s sympathetic description of the Americans reverses the supposed norms of the Englishman, turning the raw, conceited, vulgar, cocksure and lawless Americans into people to be admired and loved for their naturalness. In terms of Ruskin’s imperfect artefact, it is the unfinished imperfections in 40

Pinney Letters, vol. 1, 345. Kipling, From Sea to Sea, vol. 2, 80. 42 Kipling, Something of Myself, 6. 43 Kipling, From Sea to Sea, vol. 2, 130. 41

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the Americans that attract Kipling, not the smooth polished exterior of the finished English item. Kipling is entranced by America and the possibility of change, of taking a land and transforming it into a new nation free of fossilized customs and restrictions. He tempers this vision with the reality of suppression and near annihilation of its native peoples44 but senses the rising of a new power in the world. He talks of the two ‘Great Experiments’ and of the result. ‘A hundred years hence India and America will be worth observing. At present the one is burned out and the other is just stoking up’.45 In this dream, India under his idealised autocratic Anglo-Indian rule could be what America was then, dynamic and rich and without requiring the near extermination of its native peoples. Kipling writes that it was in Hong Kong he discovered that the English Sahib was just ‘an ordinary human being after all’,46 and these experiences, which subverted the myth of British superiority, increased throughout the journey of discovery. The Chinese astounded Kipling by their ability and appetite for work, breaking the colonial racial stereotype, the Japanese dismayed him for their seemingly headlong rush to modernise along English democratic lines, and his reaction to America was ambivalent. While Kipling was dismissive of the ever and increasing materialist American culture, he was enthralled by the vigour of the ordinary people, the splendour of the unspoilt country and potential that the developing nation was showing. Kipling’s journey out of the Raj truly marked a turning point in his understanding of the world as a space of heterogeneity and unevenness, and was to influence his writing throughout the rest of his life.

Bibliography Bayly, C. A. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2009. Carlyle, Thomas, “Lectures on Heroes (1840). On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History.” Project Gutenberg (1997). Accessed May 7 2014. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1091/1091-h/1091-h.htm. Condé, Mary. “Constructing the Englishman in Rudyard Kipling's 'Letters of Marque’.” The Yearbook of English Studies, 34 (2004): 230–239. 44

Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 61-62. Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 132. 46 Kipling, From Sea to Sea, vol. 1, 322. 45

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http://www.jstor.org/stable/3509496. Cortazzi, Hugh and George Webb. Eds. Kipling’s Japan: Collected Writings. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Dewan, Deepali, “The Body at Work: Colonial Art Education and the Figure of the 'Native Craftsman.” In Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post-Colonial India, edited by James H. Mills and Satadru Sen, 118–134. London: Wimbledon Publishing Company 2004. Forman, Ross. China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Forster, E. M., A Passage to India. London: Penguin Books, 1936. Gordon, Andrew. A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Hubel, Teresa. Whose India? The Independence Struggle in British and Indian Fiction and History. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Kipling, Rudyard, Debits and Credits. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1926. Kipling, Rudyard. Departmental Ditties and Other Verses. Calcutta; London: Thacker, Spink and Co, 1890. —. The Man Who would be King and Other Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. —. “Our Overseas Men.” Times [London, England], July 30, 1892: 8. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 21 Sept. 2016. —. Plain Tales from the Hills. London: Penguin Books, 1994. —. From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, 2 Vols. Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. —. Something of Myself. London: Macmillan and Co., 1937. Landow, George P. The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Maclean, Gerald, Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Montefiore, Jan, ed. In Times Eye: Essays on Rudyard Kipling. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. —. “Vagabondage in Rajasthan: Kipling’s North Indian Travels.” In Times Eye: Essays on Rudyard Kipling, edited by Jan Montefiore, 159–176. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Morris, William, Hopes and Fears for Art: The Art of the People. Accessed May 8 2014. http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1882/hopes/index.htm. Pinney, Thomas, ed. The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, 6 Vols. London: Macmillan, 1990.

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Said, Edward, W. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Sullivan, Zohreh T. Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Tarapor, Mahrukh. “John Lockwood Kipling and British Art Education in India,” Victorian Studies, 24(1980): 53–81. Trivedi, Harish. “Kipling's Vernacular: What He Knew of it - and what He made of it.” In Times Eye: Essays on Rudyard Kipling, edited by Jan Montefiore, 177-2016. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.

INDEX

Ackroyd, Peter; 201; 215 Adams, Percy G.; 67; 81 adventure novel; 23; 24; 49 afforestation; 197 Africa; 4; 5; 6; 18; 21; 72; 86; 87; 88; 90; 91; 92; 93; 94; 95; 98; 99; 100; 102; 103; 126; 197; 208; 218 Afyoncu, Erhan; 72; 75; 79; 81 agriculture; 8; 204; 205; 208; 226 Ahmed, Sara; 2; 3; 4; 10; 41; 42; 49; 51; 62; Allen, Grant; 150; 165; 169 alterity; 2; 30; 59; 169 Altick, Richard; 94; 103 America; 90; 221; 230; 231; 232; 233 American Revolution; 232 Americas, the; 72 Anatolia; 66 ancestry; 212 201 Anderson, Benedict; 151; 156; 169; 198; 201; 215 Angel in the House, the; 80 Anglo-Boer War. See Boer War, the Anglo-Indian; 220; 224; 229; 230 community; 8; 220 readership; 219; 221 rule; 233 world; 222 Anglo-Saxon; 162; 165; 166; 167; 168; 206 Anthropological Society; 22 anthropology; 14; 91; 97; 154; 197 Antosa, Silvia; 22; 37 Appadurai, Arjun; 153; 169; 207; 215

Appiah, Anthony; 202; 216 Arabia; 18; 27; 29; Arabian Nights. See The Book of One Thousand Nights and a Night Arabic people; 21 Armstrong, M.; 99; 103 Asia; 5; 66; 68; 71; 72 Assmann, Aleida; 146; 147 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal; 66 Augé, Marc; 146; 147 Austen, Jane; 49; 62 Austria; 173 Aydn, Kamil; 71; 81 B Bachman, Maria K.; 49; 63 Badea-Păun, Gabriel; 174; 191 Baedeker; 28; 35; 140; 155; 156; 159; Bailey, Peter; 139; 147 Baldwin, Stanley; 196; 200; 216 Balmoral; 174 Bangor; 174; 176; 177 Bardi, Abbie; 49; 62 Barrell, John; 49; 62; Barrell, W.H.; 178; 179; 180; 181; 183 Barron, J. H.; 205; 216 Bartlett, William Henry; 66; 74 Baucom; 199; 216 Baudrillard, Jean; 151; 152; 153; 169 Baylen, J. O.; 127; 129 Bayly, C. A.; 233 Beaumont, Matthew; 135; 139; 147; 149

Crossing Borders in Victorian Travel: Spaces, Nations and Empires Belk, Russell W.; 190; 192 Bell, Gertrude; 73 Beller, Manfred; 152; 154; 155; 164; 169; 170; 171 Belloc, Hilaire; 206; 216 Benjamin, Walter; 134; 147 Bennett, Alfred William; 27; 33 Berlin Conference, the; 4 Bertolette, William F.; 162; 163; 169 Bhabha, Homi; 16; 37; 57; 60; 62; 201; 216; 224; 233 Bird, Isabella; 73 Black and White Budget, the; 107; 112; 123; 124; 126; 129 Blanton, Casey; 68; 69; 70; 81 Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen; 24; 37 Boehmer, Elleke; 20; 37 Boer War, the; 7; 108; 110; 112; 113; 119; 120; 121; 130 Booth, William; 95; 104 border; 8; 9; 10; 56; 206; 207; border-crossing; 207 Borsay, Peter; 137; 148 Boscagli, Maurizia; 173; 174; 192 botany; 69 boundary; 3; 26; 93; 190; 228 boundaries; 2; 5; 9; 10; 17; 42; 54; 190; 198; 203; 219 Boym, Svetlana; 208; 209; 216 Bradley, Simon; 140; 147; 148 Brahmins; 42; 48; 49; 50 Braidotti, Rosi; 9; 10 Bram, Shahar; 187; 190; 192 Brantlinger, Patrick; 4; 6; 10; 62; 94; 104 Brennan, Timothy; 201; 216 Briefel, Aviva; 62 Bristow, Joseph; 4; 10; 24; 37 Britain; 5; 7; 19; 29; 41; 43; 45; 46; 48; 52; 53; 55; 56; 57; 59; 61; 94; 95; 96; 99; 106; 108; 109; 110; 113; 114; 116; 124; 127; 141; 151; 152; 155; 162; 163; 167; 172; 174; 176; 178; 185; 190; 197; 199; 203; 229

237

British colonialism; See colonialism British Empire; 3; 17; 19; 51; 73; 103; 112; 154; 167; 219; 220; 221; 225 British Raj; 8; 15; 220; 233 Britishness; 49; 57; 78; 215 Brontë, Charlotte; 49; 62 Brown, Stephen; 173; 174; 190; 192 Brown, William Haig; 124 Burgoyne, Elizabeth; 174; 192 Burma; 221; 222 Burton, Richard; 4; 5; 9; 14; 15; 17 36; 37; 38 The Arabian Nights. See The Book of One Thousand Nights and a Night The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night; 20; 22; 37 Falconry in the Valley of the Indus; 26; 37 A Mission to Gelele; 22; 37 Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage; 21; 37 Scinde, or The Unhappy Valley; 20; 37 Sind Revisited; 19; 37 Wanderings in West Africa; 22; 37 Burton, Isabel; 20; 29; 30; 37 Butler, Judith; 52; 62 Buzard, James; 137; 141; 148; 165; 169 Byerly, Alison; 135; 136; 140; 148 Byron, George Gordon Lord; 65; 81 Byzantine; 1; 75 Byzantium; 67 C Canada; 48 Canterbury; 206; 208 Cape Town; 109; 114; Cape Town Weekly, the; 116; 129 capitalism; 54; 156 Carlyle, Thomas; 200; 216; 231; 233

238 Carnochan, W.B.; 21; 28; 37 cartophilia; 173 Celtic ancestry; 209 Chandler, Daniel; 151; 169 Chapman, Alison; 107; 108; 129; Chateaubriand, René de; 1 Chicago; 230 Choi, Tina Young; 141; 143; 145; 148 Christian identity; 1; 44; 70; 71; 74; 76; 127 ‘non-Christian savage’ 68; Çrakman, Asli; 72; 76; 81 city; 1; 2; 3; 65; 74; 75; 76; 205; 212 Clark, Steve; 68; 81 Clarke, Edward; 116 Claudet, Antoine; 26; 32 Coetzee, J. M.; 110; 119; 125; 126; 129 Cohen, Mitchell; 202; 216 Cohen, Morton; 203; 214; 215; 216 collective memory; 214; 215; Collins, Wilkie; 5; 6; 40-62 The Moonstone; the; 5; 6; 40-61; 63 The Woman in White; 49; 62 Colls, Robert; 197; 216 colonial discourse; 17; 18; 30; 57; 62 colonial identities; 3; 5-6; 15-22; 26-31; 56-62; 77-81; 126; 220233 colonial mission, the; 22; 69; 224 colonial project, the; See imperial project colonialism; 3-5; 14; 43; 44; 50; 52; 69-71; 79 Condé, Mary; 221; 233 Congo, the; 86; 87; 88; 91; 99 Connerton, Paul; 182; 183; 192 Connolly, Joseph; 151; 169 Conrad, Joseph; 86; 87; 91; 102; 104 Constantinople; See Istanbul contact zone; 3

Index Coombes, Annie; 99; 104 Corbey, Raymond; 99; 101; 104 Cordell, Ryan; 109; 129 Cortazzi, Hugh; 219; 234 cosmopolitanism; 8; 56; 57; 196; 198-215 country; 15; 46; 56; 71; 76; 111; 112; 113; 115; 117; 118; 125; 138; 152; 156; 157; 159; 161; 166; 183; 190; 196; 201; 209; 210; 211; 213; 215; 224; 225; 229; 231; 233 countryside; 43; 119; 197; 198; 200; 201; 203; 204; 207; 210; 214; 228 Craig-y-don; 175; 176 Crimean War; 19 cross-dressing; 6; 26-31; 78 Crusades, the; 68 Culler, Jonathan D.; 137; 148 cultural memory; 210; 215 Cusack, Tricia; 157; 170 D Daily Chronicle, the; 106; 107; 108; 113; 128; 129 Daily Express, the; 204; 216 Daily Mail, the; 111; 184; 191 Daily News, the; 107; 118; 121; 129 ‘Dark Continent’, the; 6; 7; 87 Davis, John R.; 156; 157; 164; 170 De Amicis, Edmondo; 1-3; 6; 10 Constantinople; 1-3 Defoe, Daniel; 47; 48; 62; 196; 216 Robinson Crusoe; 47; 48; 55; 62 degeneration; 95; 102 detective; 43; 51; 53; detective novel; 6; 40; 60 Devon; 19 Dewan, Deepali; 234 diamond; 6; 40; 41; 42; 43; 45; 46; 47; 48; 50; 55; 56; 57; 58; 60; 61; 62; 76; 80

Crossing Borders in Victorian Travel: Spaces, Nations and Empires Dickens, Charles; 29; 40; 48; 62; 178; 179; 180; 181; 182; 183; 184; 188; 190; 191; 192; All the Year Round; 29 Great Expectations; 182; 192 Oliver Twist; 48 Dickens Museum, the; 179; 180 displacement; 10; 15; 19; 205 domesticity; 6; 42-62; 65; 74; 80; 140; 187; Douglas, James; 173; 187; 192 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; 24 Driver, Felix; 87; 102; 104 drugs; 40; 59; opium; 6; 41; 46; 56; 59; 60; 61; 223; 225 Dubino, Jeanne; 71; 81 Dugard, Martin; 28; 37 E East India Company; 18; 19; 41 Edwards, Ernest; 27; 33; Edwards, Cynonfard; 177; 187 Eisteddfod; 172; 176; 177; 187; Eliot, George; 142; 148 Eliot, T. S.; 40; 62 Elizabeth I, Queen of England; 208; 209; 212 Ellis, Peter B.; 197; 216 El-Medina; 20; 21; 26; 37 Empire; See British Empire and Ottoman Empire Empire Boys; 4; 8; 10; 24; 37; 192; England; 8; 15; 24; 40; 41; 47; 48; 49; 50; 51; 52; 55; 57; 59; 60; 74; 75; 78; 80; 95; 99; 122; 134; 139; 142; 163; 175; 219; 220; 221; 224; 229; 230; 231 Rural England; 8; 196-215 English countryside; 43; 198; 201; 204; 207 English national identity; 8; 157; 197-213; 214

239

Englishness; 8; 48; 196; 198; 199; 200; 201; 203; 205; 207; 209; 210; 211; 215 Enlightenment, the; 47; 55; 56; 69; 72; 73; 91; 98; 99; 198 ephemera; 109; 174 ephemeral objects; 107; 108; 172; 173; 183; 187; 191 ethnicity; 14; 15 Eurocentric gaze; 6; 9; 102 Eurocentric travel narratives; 67; 69 Eurocentrism; 9; 67; 69 Europe; 1; 5; 7; 16; 18; 19; 57; 61; 68; 69; 70; 71; 72; 73; 75; 80; 90; 125; 131; 137; 155; 158; 167; 174; 185; 189 European culture; 43; 72; 96; European identity; 16; 21 European mind; 69-71; 76; 91 European superiority, myth of; 22; 66; 69; 89; 225 European travel; 4; 6; 7; 56; 66; 71; 74; 77; 81; 91; exoticism; 5; 9; 14; 23; 24; 26-28; 30; 41; 59; 60; 61; 70; 71; 74; 75; 76 exploitation (colonial and natural); 44; 46; 87; 198 exploration(s); 3; 7; 17; 21; 29; 49; 56; 68; 86; 87; 90; 94; 95; 100; 102; 168 explorers; 4; 6; 14; 15; 17; 18; 21; 22; 23; 24; 25; 26; 27; 28; 30; 31; 40; 73; 86; 87; 88; 89; 90; 91; 97; 98; 100; 102 F Fabian, Johannes; 6; 10; 87; 90; 91; 93; 104; 150; 153; 154; 165; 168; 170 Faroqhi, Suraiya; 68; 81 Federico, Annette R.; 184; 192 femininity; 52; 53; 187 fin-de-siècle; 24; 108; 183 Firchow, Peter Edgerly; 166; 170

Index

240 foreigness; 48; 49; 50; 53; 56; 57; 59; 60; 66; 70; 125; 169; 191; 222 Forman, Ross; 223; 234 Forster, E. M.; 234 Fortnightly Review, the; 14; 23; 38 Foucault, Michel; 135; 148 France; 19; 32; 162 Free, Melissa; 46; 50; 51; 56; 57; 62 Freeman, Michael J.; 133; 135; 139; 147; 148; 149 friendship; 8; 41-45; 183 Frith, W.P.; 181; 192 Fussell, Paul; 140; 148 futurity; 44; 54; 58 G gardening; 51; 52; 53; 164; 197 Gautier, Théophile; 1 gaze; 27; 28; 29; 49; 77; 80; 190 anthropological gaze; 91; 96; 97 female gaze; 186; 187 traveller's/tourist's gaze; 3; 5; 77; 135; 138; 146; 147; 152; 157 Western/Orientalist gaze; 3; 4; 6; 80; 125 Gellner, Ernest; 156; 170 gender; 2; 5; 6; 8; 9; 14; 20; 22; 41; 42; 43; 45; 46; 52; 53; 73; 78; 80; 173; 186 Germany; 55; 140; 150; 151-168; 170; 171; 186; 189; 191 German national identity; 161; 166; 168 Gérôme, Jean-Leon; 75 Gillen, Julia; 182; 188; 192 Gooch, John; 110; 113; 130 Gooch, Joshua; 63 Gould, Peter C.; 205; 216 Gramich, Katie; 215; 216 Grand Tour, the; 54; 67; 68; 174 Great War, the; 99; 156; 162; 166 First World War, the; 127 Green, Martin; 151; 170 Greenhalgh, Paul; 99; 104

Greenslade, William; 92; 104 guidebook(s); 2; 5; 7; 9; 65; 132; 135-145; 146; 147; 152; 154; 155; 157; 159; 163 H Haefele-Thomas, Ardel; 44; 60; 63 Haggard, H. Rider; 4; 8; 196; 197; 198; 199; 200; 202; 203; 204; 205; 206; 207; 208; 209; 210; 211; 212; 213; 214; 215; 216; 217 The Days of My Life: An Autobiography; 197; 204; 216 A Farmer’s Year; 198; 203; 204; 209; 210; 211; 213; 214; 215; 216 Heart of the World; 212 King Solomon’s Mines; 8; 196 Montezuma’s Daughter; 211; 212; 213; 217 Rural England; 198; 203-214; 217 Haggard, Lilias Rider; 215; 216 Hall, Catherine; 199; 217 Hardy, Thomas; 106; 125; 126; 129; 146; 200 harem, the; 6; 67; 74; 75; 80 Harrington, Ralph; 145; 148 Harris, Frank; 25; 28; 38 Harrison, William; 21; 38 Harte, Bret; 230 Harvey, David; 134; 148 Harvey, Geoffrey; 158; 159; 164; 170 Hastings; 174 Henn, A. B.; 189; 192 heteronormativity; 42; 43; 44; 54; 58; 59; 60 heterosexuality; 58; 59; 61 Hobbs, Andrew; 108; 129 Hoffenburg, Peter; 99; 104 Holy Land, the; 68 home; 7; 10; 18; 23; 40; 42; 43; 44; 46; 47; 49; 50; 51; 52; 53; 56;

Crossing Borders in Victorian Travel: Spaces, Nations and Empires 57; 61; 97; 109; 117; 122; 125; 136; 137; 140; 141; 155; 172; 174; 179; 182; 183; 184; 185; 189; 190; 194; 198; 203; 209; 211; 221; 227 homoerotic desire; 41; 44; 54; 58; 60 male-male desire; 22; 37 homosexuality; 44; 52; 58 Hong Kong; 221; 222; 224; 233 Houston, Natalie; 107; 129 Howell, Jessica; 4; 10 Hubel, Teresa; 224; 234 Hughes, Linda K.; 107; 129 Hulme, Peter; 18; 38; 74; 82 Hunt, James; 22 Hutcheon, Linda; 50; 63 hybridity; 5; 16; 17; 54; 55; 222; hysteria; 57; 58; 231 I Ibitson, David Alexander; 151; 170 identity; 2; 3; 5; 6; 7; 8; 9; 10; 15; 16; 17; 21; 24; 26; 27; 28; 44; 53; 56; 62; 77; 78; 81; 126; 150; 157; 158; 161; 163; 197; 198; 199; 200; 201; 202; 203; 205; 206; 207; 208; 209; 210; 212; 213; 214; 215 imagined community; 139; 198; 199; 201 imperial hegemony; 5 imperial networks; 40; 41; 53 imperial project, the; 14; 62; 132; 154; 155 imperial space; 4; 9; 10; 42 colonial space; 90 imperialism; 3; 9; 17; 24; 31; 41; 43; 45; 50; 66; 86; 88; 102; 224; 230 imperialistic discourse; 49 anti-imperial discourse; 61 India; 4; 15; 18; 19; 20; 21; 26; 27; 29; 40; 41; 46; 48; 55; 59; 61;

241

219-226; 228; 229; 230; 231; 232; 233 'Indian Mutiny', the; 15 Ingold, Tim; 157; 168; 170 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique; 74 Ireland; 141; 174 Islam; 1; 21; 67; 71; 72; 74; 82 Isle of Wight; 174 Istanbul; 1-3; 6; 66-81 Italy; 19; 137 J Januszewski, Claire; 108; 109; 129 Japan; 8; 219; 221; 225-229 Jeal, Tim; 21; 28; 38 Jerome, Jerome K.; 4; 7; 150-169; 170; 171 Three Men in a Boat; 158; 159; 170 Three Men on the Bummel; 7; 150; 158; 170 Jerusalem; 68 Jervis, John; 141; 148 Johansen, Emily; 212; 217 John, Juliet; 180; 192 Johnson, Robert; 15; 38 Johnston, Judith; 136; 148 Jones, Stephen; 28; 38 journey; 2; 3; 8; 18; 21; 24; 26; 41; 68; 87; 90; 91; 96; 102; 136; 139; 142; 143; 144; 145; 158; 172; 174; 190; 197; 212; 219; 220; 225; 233 K Kabbani, Rana; 20; 38 Kaplan, Sefa; 73; 82 KapuĞciĔski, Ryszard; 65; 69; 70; 82 Kasaba, Resat; 72; 73; 82 Kaufman, Heidi; 49; 63 Kearney, Hugh; 209; 217 Kent; 180; 206; 208 Kidwai, Abdur Raheem; 68; 82

Index

242 Kim, Jongwoo Jeremy; 27; 38 King, Bruce; 200; 217 Kingsley, Mary; 73 Kipling, Rudyard; 4; 8; 9; 106; 111115; 200; 214; 219-233; 234 'The Absent-Minded Beggar'; 111; 114; 115; 116; 130 Departmental Ditties; 220; 234 From Sea to Sea; 219-233 The Jungle Books; 8 The Man Who would be King; 224; 234 Plain Tales from the Hills; 220; 234 Something of Myself; 220; 231; 234 Kitchiner, William; 141; 148 Kolodziejczyk, Dorota; 207; 217 Konuk, Kader; 77; 82 Korte, Barbara; 69; 73; 82 Koshar, Rudy; 140; 148; 155; 157; 170 Kumar, Krishan; 200; 217 L Lake Tanganyika; 21; 87 Lamartine, Alphonse de; 1 Landow, George P.; 220; 234 landscape; 8; 40; 75; 110; 111; 116127; 128; 135; 138; 139; 145; 146; 147; 150; 152-169; 196; 197; 199; 201; 203; 204; 205; 207; 208; 210; 213; 214; 215 Lear, Bernadette A.; 178; 192 Leask, Nigel; 165; 170 Leavis, Queenie D.; 200; 217 Leerssen, Joep; 152; 154; 155; 164; 169; 170; 171 Leighton, Frederic; 27; 28; 30; 34 Lekan, Thomas M.; 150; 158; 164; 170 Leopold II of Belgium; 87 Linné, Carl; 69 Livingstone, David; 4; 11; 29; 87

Llandudno; 174; 175; 176; 177; 183; 191 Locke, John; 68 London; 16; 22; 26; 27; 29; 30; 33; 34; 36; 41; 70; 74; 86; 90; 98; 99; 117; 120; 122; 133; 163; 174; 179; 180; 181; 191; 192; 193; 204; 208; 227; 233; 234; 235 Lorang, Elizabeth; 107; 130 Louisiana; 230 Louvre Museum; 75 Lowenthal, David; 206; 217 M Mackenzie, John; 99; 104 Maclaughlin, Joseph; 94; 104 Maclean, Gerald; 229; 234 Maclise, Daniel; 181; 192 Mandler, Peter; 167; 170 map(s); 4; 23; 65; 68; 87; 89; 95; 102; 132; 133; 135; 152; 205 Marino, Elisabetta; 75; 82 Marroni, Francesco; 15; 38 Marsh, Jan; 30; 38 masculinity; 6; 40; 42; 44; 45; 46; 52; 53; 58 Massey, Doreen; 213; 214; 217 Mathieson, Charlotte; 5; 10; 46; 47; 48; 55; 60; 63 Matus, Jill; 145; 149 McClintock, Anne; 10; 43; 44; 45; 53; 63; 154; 155; 165; 168; 170; 171; 197; 217 McLynn, Frank; 24; 38 Mecca; 20; 21; 26; 77 Meek, James; 183; 192 Meiner, Albert; 152; 155; 159; 171 Melman, Billie; 74; 82 Middle Ages, the; 52; 68; 71; 165 Middle East, the; 68; 74; 82 Miller, J. Hillis; 146; 149 Milligan, Barry; 41; 59; 63 Mills, Caroline; 214; 217 Mills, James H.; 234

Crossing Borders in Victorian Travel: Spaces, Nations and Empires Mills, Sara; 18; 38 mimicry; 57; 60; 61 missionary; 45; 87; 206 Mitchell, William J. T.; 201; 217 mobility; 3; 5; 8; 9; 40; 41; 42; 43; 44; 45; 46; 49; 50; 53; 59; 61; 133; 135; 136; 191; 207 modernity; 7; 40; 132; 146; 147; 154; 155; 165; 167; 189; 193; 203; 208; 229; 230; 231 monogenetic theory; 22 Montagu, Basil; 132; 142; 145; 149 Railroad Eclogues; 132; 142; 149; Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley; 66; 68; 73; 74; 75; 76; 77; 79; 82 Montefiore, Jan; 219; 234; 235 Moretti, Franco; 54; 63 Morgan, Marjorie; 136; 141; 149; 157; 158; 161; 162; 163; 164; 171 Morning Leader, the; 120; 129 Morris, William; 97; 200; 220; 227; 228; 234 Mullen, Abby; 109; 129 Mulvey, Laura; 138; 149 Munjal, Savi; 41; 60; 63 Murray, Brian; 88; 95; 104 Murray’s Guidebooks; 28; 35; 104; 140; 155; 159 Murray’s Magazine; 177; 191 Muslim; 21; 68; 76; 78 N Napier, General Charles; 20 Nasson, Bill; 112; 121; 130 Nasson, William; 110; 130 nation; 3; 5; 8; 9; 15; 19; 48; 55; 60; 66; 76; 95; 139; 142; 150; 151; 155; 156; 157; 158; 161; 163; 164; 167; 169; 177; 189; 196; 198; 199; 200; 201; 202; 203; 206; 215; 230; 231; 233 nationalism; 50; 156; 157; 200;

243

National Portrait Gallery; 30; 33; 34; 36; 38; 181; 192 nature; 10; 24; 29; 52; 90; 96; 97; 102; 118; 120; 121; 125; 150; 153; 154; 157; 159-164; 181; 185; 197; 203; 204; 206; 221 Newton, Isaac; 69 Niessen, James P.; 172; 193 Nile, the; 21; 37; 38; 39 Nilson, Ingrid and Åke; 155; 171 Nixon, Laura; 175; 177; 193 Nochlin, Linda; 27; 28; 38 nomadic subjectivity; 9; 10; nomadism; 66 non–European world; 18; 69; 70; 89; 91 non-white individuals; 45; 48; 59; 69 Nora, Pierre; 198; 199; 217 novel, the; 5; 6; 23; 24; 40; 41; 42; 43; 44; 45; 46; 47; 48; 49; 51; 54; 56; 59; 60; 61; 65; 74; 96; 115; 146; 150; 156; 158; 159; 172; 176; 181; 182; 201; 211; 212; 213; novella, the; 6; 96 O Ogden, Daryl; 186; 193 Olson, James Stuart; 127; 130 opium; 6; 16; 41; 46; 49; 56; 59; 60; 61; 223; 225 Orient, the; 6; 16; 27; 41; 49; 59; 67; 68; 70; 74; 75; 82 Oriental individuals and cultures; 16; 23-29; 30; 31; 66; 68; 70; 74; 76; 190; 219; 225; 226; 227; 229 Orientalism; 1; 6; 13; 15; 16; 17; 18; 31; 65-81; 154 Other(s), the; 2; 3; 6; 7; 16; 17; 40; 49; 65; 69; 70; 75; 79; 81; 90; 93; 113; 131; 136; 153; 154; 157; 161; 162; 163; 166; 167; 168; 169; 178; 188; 196; 216; 219; 220; 225; 226; 228

Index

244 otherness; 31; 59; 61; 139; 155; 223 Ottoman culture; 2; 6; 66; 67; 70; 72; 73; 75; 76; 77; 78; 79; 80; 81 Ottoman Empire; 1; 3; 66; 67; 70; 71; 72; 73; 74; 78; 81; 229 Ouida, pseudonym for Maria Louise Ramé; 14; 23; 24; 25; 38 Oulton, Carolyn; 151; 171 Ousby, Ian; 134; 149 Oxford; 19; 174; 207

Portsmouth; 179; 180; 181; 183; 191; 193 postcard; 172-191; 193 Powell, Timothy B.; 16; 17; 31; 38 Pratt, Mary Louise; 3; 11; 17; 18; 39; 110; 130 Pretorius, Fransjohan; 112; 120; 130 print culture; 156; 227 Punch; 28; 35; 38 Q

P Pakenham, Thomas; 119; 120; 130 Pall Mall Gazette, the; 111; 122; 123; 124; 129; 130 Pardoe, Julia; 5; 6; 9; 65; 66; 67; 73; 74; 75; 76; 77; 78; 79; 80; 81; 82 The City of the Sultan and the Domestic Manners of Turks; 65; 66; 67; 73-81; 82 Parlati, Marilena; 211; 218 parody; 44; 46; 50; 51; 53; 108; 111; 116; 126 Parrinder, Patrick; 97; 104 patriotism; 7; 108; 111; 114; 115; 126; 127; 201 Pellegrini, Carlo; 29; 36 performative identity; 5; 25; 26; 27; 28; 30 periphery; 6; 43; 44; 49; 61; 116 photography; 26; 27; 30; 112; 123; 126; 176; 183; 184; 185; 190 phrenology; 23; 25 pilgrimage; 20; 21; 29; 67; 71 Pinney, Thomas; 221; 232; 234 Plunkett, John; 134; 135; 138; 149; 184; 193 poetry; 7; 108-111; 133; 142 travel poetry; 2; 4; 7; 176; 177 newspaper poetry; 7; 106-111; 122; 126; 127-128; Polo, Marco; 67 The Travels of Marco Polo; 67 Porter, Dennis; 67; 82

queer; 40; 42; 43; 44; 45; 50; 51; 54; 59; 60; 61; 62; 226 queerness; 5; 6; 13; 41; 42; 43; 44; 51; 52; 53; 54; 60 R race; 1; 14; 21; 22; 44; 51; 61; 72; 88; 92-101; 115; 123; 196; 205; 210; 211; 222; 224 racism; 22; 69 Radcliffe, Ann; 73 railway; 5; 69; 98; 133; 134; 135; 136; 138; 139; 140; 143; 144; 145 Ralph, Julian; 111; 130 Raphael Tuck & Sons; 175 Rée, Jonathan; 203; 218 Relph, Edward; 213; 218 Renaissance, the; 68; 72 Rhineland; 155; 165 Roberts, Diane; 63 Robinson, Howard; 173; 193 Rofe, Matthew; 201; 202; 218 Roman culture (ancient); 1; 196; 206; 208; 213 romance, late-Victorian; 4; 8; 50; 196; 197; Romania; 7; 172; 175; 177; 185; 187; 189; 190; 193 Romantic period and culture, the; 70; 153; 155; 163-165; 168 roses; 51; 52; 53; 54; 59; 122; 128; 160 Roumania; See Romania

Crossing Borders in Victorian Travel: Spaces, Nations and Empires Roy, Parama; 26; 39 Royal Geographical Society; 18; 21; 29; 73 Royal Society of Literature; 172 Rubery, Matt; 87; 104 Rüger, Jan; 162; 171 Rühling, Lutz; 157; 171 Rumania. See Romania Ruskin, John; 25; 39; 147; 220; 232; 234 Rydell, Robert; 99; 105 S Said, Edward; 1; 15; 16; 17; 18; 24; 39; 63; 67; 70; 82; 151; 152; 154; 171; 227; 235 Samuelson, James; 190; 193 Saunders, Max; 210; 211; 218 Schama, Simon; 157; 171; 207; 218 Schiffer, Reinhold; 74; 75; 82 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang; 133; 134; 149 Schoene, Berthold; 201; 202; 203; 208; 218 Schwab, Gabriele; 67; 82 Scottish geography and culture; 133; 215 Scramble for Africa, the; 4 Scully, Richard; 153; 155; 156; 158; 161; 162; 163; 164; 166; 168; 171 Scutt, Rebecca; 201; 218 Sen, Satadru; 234 Seringapatam, siege of; 41 sexuality; 5; 14; 20; 41; 42; 61; 228 See also heterosexuality and homosexuality Shadle, Robert; 127; 130 Shaw, Stanford Jay; 66; 83 Sheick, William J.; 161; 171 Singapore; 221; 222 sociability; 41; 42; 43; 45; 60; 61 Somaliland; 28 South Africa; 7; 106-128; 130 South America; 18

245

South Pacific; 4 souvenirs; 137; 173; 184; 185; 189; 190; 232 Spain; 68 Speke, John Hanning; 21 Spencer, Robert; 198; 202; 218 St Leonards; 174 Staff, Frank; 173; 175; 181; 187; 190; 191; 192; 193 Standage, Tom; 136; 149 Stanley, Dorothy; 93; 105 Stanley, Henry Morton; 4; 11; 8796; 98; 99; 100; 101; 102; 104; 105; 196; 200; 216 Stead, W. T.; 127; 130 Stephen, Leslie; 144; 149 Stevenson, Robert Louis; 4 Stewart, Susan; 184; 193 Stiebel, Lindy; 4; 11 Stott, Rebecca; 197; 218 stranger, the; 2; 49; 50; 56 subaltern, the; 59 Suez Canal, the; 221 Sullivan, Zohreh T.; 228; 235 supremacy; 22; 41; 61 Surridge, Keith; 113; 130 Sylva, Carmen; 4; 7; 9; 172-193 Edleen Vaughan; 176; 182; 193 A Tribute to Charles Dickens; 178-183; 193

T Tarapor, Mahrukh; 235 The Musical World 177; 187; 191 Time Traveller, the; 88; 89; 90; 9398; 100; 101; 102 Thomas, A.P.; 176; 191 Thomas, Ronald R.; 59; 63 Thompson, Carl; 2; 11 Tokyo; 230 Tosh, John; 53; 63 tourism; 7; 9; 54; 136; 137; 138; 139; 150; 151; 153; 156; 157; 159; 163; 166; 168; 172; 173;

Index

246 174; 175; 178; 179; 181; 183; 184; 188; 190; 191; 219; 220; 221; 226 town; 43; 138; 174; 175; 176; 190; 203; 206; 207; 209; 211; 212; 223 trade; 5; 41; 52; 59; 67; 72; 229 travel and celebrity culture; 7; 173; 176; 178; 185; 187; 189; 191 travel accounts; 4; 5; 6; 22; 25; 66; 68; 69; 70; 74; 150; 151; 152; 156; 158 travel narratives; 4; 67; 69; 90; 178; 191 travel practices; 3-7 travel writing; 2; 4; 5; 7; 8; 10; 65; 66; 67; 70; 71; 72; 74; 75; 90; 98; 101; 110; 147; 150; 152; 153; 154; 155; 156; 157; 159; 168; 169 traveller(s); 2-7; 10; 15; 21; 22; 26; 29; 30; 35; 43; 44; 49; 50; 66; 67; 69; 71; 72; 73; 74; 77; 78; 80; 81; 88; 89; 91; 97; 100; 126; 134; 135; 136; 139; 140; 141; 143; 144; 145; 146; 147; 152; 153; 154; 157; 160; 163; 164; 166; 168; 172; 174; 189; 190; 205; 230 travelogues; 20 tree; 91; 125; 160; 161; 163; Trieste; 22 Trinity College; 19 Trivedi, Harish; 235 Trollope, Anthony; 144; 145; 149 Tromp, Marlene; 49; 63 Tuan, Yi-Fu; 213; 218 Turley, Darach; 173; 174; 190; 192 Turner, David; 133; 149 Twain, Mark; 230 U U.S.A; 221; 230 Uglow, Jenny; 52; 63 Ulmer, George; 157; 171

V Vadillo, Ana Parejo; 134; 135; 138; 149 van Wyk Smith, Malvern; 108; 126; 127; 130 Vanity Fair; 29; 30; 36; 39 Victoria, Queen of England; 15; 24; 112; 141; 174; 184; 186; 187; 193; 209 Victoria and Albert Museum; 181 Victorian age; 4; 8; 73; 133; 139; 141; 145 Victorian gentleman; 20; 25; 27; 28; 54; 55; 111; 226; Victorian traveller; 4; 7; 10; 22; 26; 139 W Wales; 174; 176; 178 Welsh language; 175; 176 Welshness; 215 Walker Gore, Clare; 63 Watson, Nicola J.; 175; 193 Watson, William; 120; 121 Webb, George; 219; 234 Webster, Wendy; 211; 218 Weir, R. J.; 107; 130 Wells, H. G.; 6; 86; 87-99; 100; 101; 102; 103; 105; 210 The Chronic Argonauts; 88; 105 'Imperialism and the Open Conspiracy'; 102; 103; 105 The Time Machine 6; 86; 88-98; 99; 100; 102; 103; 105 Westminster Gazette, the; 108; 116; 117; 118; 119; 120; 121; 122; 129 'White Man’s Burden', the; 69 White, Alasdair; 140; 149 ‘white nigger’; 19; 26; 28 whiteness; 9; 45; 46; 48; 57; 59; 69; 78; 79; 90; 98; 106; 127; 128; 185; 199 Wilcox, Scott; 69; 83 Williams, Raymond; 200; 218

Crossing Borders in Victorian Travel: Spaces, Nations and Empires Winter, Jay; 176; 193 Wintle, Michael; 152; 171 Wisnicki, Adrian S.; 21; 39 Wollaeger, Mark; 189; 193 Wright, Thomas; 22; 23 Wrightson, Thomas; 112; 113 Wulf, Andrea; 56; 64

247

Yoke-Sum, Wong; 187; 193 Young, Arthur; 215 Young, Paul; 99; 105 Young, Robert J.C.; 17; 39; 199; 218 Youngs, Tim; 74; 82 Z

X xenophobia; 49; 50 Y Yapp, Malcolm Edward; 66; 83 Yellowstone Park; 232

Zimmerman, Silvia Irina; 174; 191; 193