War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma 9781400832767

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War of No Pity

War of No Pity THE INDIAN MUTINY AND VICTORIAN TRAUMA Christopher Herbert

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved Frontispiece. Blowing Mutinous Sepoys from the Guns (Charles Ball, History of the Indian Mutiny) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Herbert, Christopher, 1941– War of no pity : the Indian Mutiny and Victorian trauma / Christopher Herbert. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-13332-4 (cloth : acid-free paper) 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. India—History—Sepoy Rebellion, 1857-1858—Literature and the rebellion. 3. India—History—Sepoy Rebellion, 1857-1858—Historiography. 4. India—History—Sepoy Rebellion, 1857-1858—Public opinion. 5. Politics and literature—Great Britain— History—19th century. 6. Literature and history—Great Britain—History— 19th century. 7. Polemics in literature. 8. India—In literature. I. Title. PR468.I517H47 2008 823/.809358—dc22 2007013326 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ press.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Paper ISBN 978-0-691-14330-9

For my little nuclear family, once again

How appalling to hear of such a death, and be able to feel no pity! —Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853) We had no room in our hearts for any feeling of pity. —A British observer of executions at Peshawur, quoted by Charles Ball, The History of the Indian Mutiny (c. 1860) Mercy is a word we have scratched out of our memories. —A British observer of executions at Mhow, quoted by R. Montgomery Martin, The Mutiny of the Bengal Army (c. 1861)

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

INTRODUCTION Jingoism, Warmongering, Racism

1

CHAPTER ONE Diabolical Possession and the National Conscience

19

CHAPTER TWO Three Parables of Violence

58

CHAPTER THREE The Culture of Retribution: Capital Punishment, Maurice Dering, Flotsam

99

CHAPTER FOUR The Mutiny in Victorian Historiography

134

CHAPTER FIVE The Infernal Kingdom of A Tale of Two Cities

205

CHAPTER SIX Lady Audley’s Secret: The Mutiny, the Gothic, and the Feminine

239

EPILOGUE Fiction Fair and Foul: Novels of the Mutiny

273

Notes

289

Works Cited

307

Index

317

ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece: Blowing Mutinous Sepoys from the Guns

ii

FIGURE 1. The Clemency of Canning

36

FIGURE 2. Justice

47

FIGURE 3. A Picket of Highlanders

122

FIGURE 4. Miss Wheeler Defending Herself

149

FIGURE 5. The Death of Major Skene and His Wife at Jhansi

151

FIGURE 6. In Memoriam, by Sir Joseph Noel Paton

209

FIGURE 7. Lady Audley Pushing George Talboys Down the Well, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

244

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The writing of this book was generously subsidized by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern University. I am very pleased to express my gratitude to each of them, and at the same time to the Department of English and to the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern for their support of my scholarly endeavors now and in the past. I was fortunate to have at my disposal for the duration of this project the rich resources of the Northwestern University Library; special thanks go to Victoria Zahrobsky of Interlibrary Loan and to Russell Maylone of Special Collections. I am grateful to the Houghton Library, Harvard University, for permission to reproduce a sketch by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and to Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber for permission to reproduce “In Memoriam,” by Sir Joseph Noel Paton. For many years I have been the beneficiary of the thriving intellectual and interpersonal community at Northwestern, where my good fortune decreed that I was to spend my scholarly career. Especially, I have been lucky to have as my closest departmental interlocutors two gifted and generous Victorianists, Jules Law and Chris Lane. Once again I have the pleasure of thanking here my old friends David Simpson and Chip Tucker for invaluable services at strategic moments. The two readers for the press, James Buzard and Margery Sabin, lavished incisive but sympathetic attention on my imperfect manuscript and made suggestions for improvement that I have done my best to follow. I trust they will see how much this book owes to them. A different order of thanks goes to George Levine, whose friendship over the past decade or so has lent so much sparkle to my existence, and not only by bringing so many warblers and other avian visitants within reach of my binocular lenses. Not the least of the kind offices for which I must thank him has been that of leading me to the Princeton University Press and to its exemplary literary editor, Hanne Winarsky. The book group has been as always a source of exhilaration and great cuisine. My wife and my two magnificent children, whose only flaw is that of living too far away, are nearest to my heart.

War of No Pity

Introduction

Jingoism, Warmongering, Racism

Of the many interconnected riddles that the Indian Mutiny of 1857–59 poses to a historian of nineteenth-century culture, the primary one is this: why did contemporaries consider it an event of epochal importance? Gauged purely in the light of its empirical scale and its practical consequences, the Mutiny might not seem an outstandingly momentous historical event. The two-year campaign waged by the British “Army of Retribution” against the 1857 rebellion of Indian mercenary troops did prove to be a harrowing and sanguinary one, a struggle marked on both sides “by a ferocity for which even the ordinary depravity of human nature cannot account” (Grant and Knollys 1) and which contemporaries sought perplexedly to explain to themselves. Nor should the war be considered a trivial episode, either militarily or in terms of its possible consequences for national and global politics. Undoubtedly, as John Colvin, the lieutenant governor of the North-Western Provinces, said at the time, “the safety of the Empire was imperilled” and “a crisis in our fortunes had arrived, the like of which had not been seen for a hundred years” (qtd. Kaye 3:196– 97). “The terrible Mutiny,” said General Hope Grant, “for a time, had shaken the British power in India to its foundation” (Grant and Knollys 334). Had the large, well-trained, and (except for the crucial lack of modern rifles) well-equipped but poorly led rebel armies prevailed, and had the rebels achieved their goal of effecting, in the words of one rebel leader, “the complete extermination of the infidels from India” (Kaye 3:275), the result would have been a catastrophe for Britain. Yet the magnitude of the conflict as measured in terms of numbers of combatants involved or of casualties sustained was, “by comparison to contemporary campaigns like the Crimean War . . . or the American Civil War,” not to mention the military apocalypses of later battlefields like those of the Somme or of Stalingrad, fairly small (Judd 73). The numbers of British victims who perished in the epidemic of massacres that swept through Bengal and appalled the Victorian public in the summer of 1857 were also, by twentiethcentury standards, surprisingly small, small enough for the dead to be listed almost individually in contemporary reports.1 And for all its initial desperate gravity, the uprising was suppressed fairly swiftly in a series of decisive battlefield victories owed in part to the lethality of the new Enfield rifle and celebrated at the time as glorious vindications of British racial

2

Introduction

prowess and imperial destiny. The government of India and the administration of the Indian army were then vigorously reformed (notably by the abolition of the East India Company), with the result that British control of India emerged stronger than ever in the aftermath of the great upheaval, strong enough not to be relinquished until almost a century later. The geopolitical significance of the Mutiny, in other words, was limited; nor do modern historians tend to treat it as more than a lurid footnote to the tale of nineteenth-century imperialism.2 British people at the time, however, experienced the Indian Mutiny as “[a] great crisis in our national history” (Kaye 3:654) and, despite all efforts to portray it as a magnificent national triumph, as the supreme trauma of the age, “our greatest and most fearful disaster” (H. Kingsley 3:274). Nor did they soon recover from it—if indeed they ever did. In a speech delivered at the end of September 1857, Benjamin Disraeli declared it to be “in fact one of those great events which form epochs in the history of mankind” (qtd. Ball 2:418). Looking back on it in 1891, R. E. Forrest observes in his novel Eight Days that the Mutiny “came as a terrible break” in the course of British affairs, one destined “to produce a new era in the history of India—in the history of the world” (3:135, 2:88). Henry Seton Merriman echoes this view in the following year, having the narrator of his novel Flotsam evoke the year 1857 as “a year truly of woe and distress and unspeakable horror; a year standing out prominently in great red letters, so long as the world shall remember the English race” (144). Contemporary accounts of the Mutiny portray it similarly, as an event of almost incomprehensible magnitude and historical importance— hence its common figuration as a gigantic natural disaster or national cataclysm. The British public, observes the early historian Charles Ball in the almost hallucinatory stylistic register that pervades Victorian writing about the Mutiny, had in the first days of the insurrection no premonition of “the rivers of blood that were to be waded through, the fields of carnage that were to be traversed” before it could be put down at last (1:605). For another Victorian historian, R. Montgomery Martin, the Mutiny was an “overwhelming tide of disaster,” an “ocean of blood and tears” (2:431). In his memoir the military hero Mowbray Thomson (one of the four among the thousand souls in the Cawnpore3 garrison to survive the massacres there) described the Mutiny as “a torrent which sweeps everything less stable than the mountains before it” (41). For Alexander Duff, a Presbyterian preacher in Calcutta, it was “a tempest of massacre and blood,” a “mighty torrent of evil that is now rolling in fire and blood over the plains of India,” an “awful whirlwind of fire and blood” (13, 93, 135). It is precisely the prevalence of this hyperbolic register in Mutiny discourse, and, in particular, the oft-registered sense that the “Red Year” of 1857 marked “a terrible break” in British experience, a traumatic ex-

Jingoism, Warmongering, Racism

3

pulsion from a known world into a frightening new historical era, that forms in effect the subject of the following book. I seek not so much to solve the riddle of the Mutiny that I have posed as to delve more deeply into it: I seek, that is, an enriched sense of the experience of the event from some semblance of the Victorian point of view. The premise that has governed my inquiry has been that the epochal impact of the Mutiny on Victorian and post-Victorian consciousness can only be meaningfully studied by considering it not as a geopolitical event but as a literary and in effect a fictive one—as a story recounted over and over, in one stylistic inflection and literary register after another, in various journalistic media, in the voluminous historical accounts that began appearing before the cannon had fairly ceased firing on the battlefields, in a spate of memoirs and biographies, in pictorial imagery, and in the innumerable poems and fifty or sixty novels in which the Mutiny was reenacted in the nineteenth century.4 The very existence of this vast archive is the clearest possible indication of the significance that the Mutiny took on in the Victorian imaginary. The torrent of blood and tears coursing over the plain of Upper India in 1857–59 was matched, we may say, by the torrent of representations of it, particularly literary representations, that coursed through Britain then and for years afterward. Such scholarly attention as this body of writing has received has been marked by condescension, not to say systematic denigration, for its supposed contamination by obnoxious political and racial sentiments. Among the motives and, I think, the novelties of my own project has been the wish to hold this judgment in abeyance long enough to make possible an attempt to salvage from oblivion a series of remarkable texts. To this extent, the following book, like others I have written, is conceived as a project of historical retrieval—in this case, one that necessitates opening up to possible critique a set of judgments that have hardened in recent times into a carapace of scholarly dogma and have made unprejudiced reading of the materials I survey well-nigh impossible. I offer here the briefest possible narrative of principal events of the Indian Mutiny, to be amplified at appropriate points in the chapters to come. The rebellion, smoldering for some months previously, broke into flame on May 10, 1857, when Hindu and Muslim sepoys (“soldiers”) of native regiments stationed at Meerut, panicked at being required to bite off the ends of newly issued paper rifle cartridges greased with beef and pork fat (taboo for Hindus and Muslims, respectively), and also by wild rumors that British forces were coming to attack them, murdered their British officers and many of their wives and children. They then galloped off to seize nearby Delhi, where massacres of British residents and native Christians took place the next day. The aged puppet king of Delhi, the

4

Introduction

last living representative of the Mughal dynasty, was proclaimed ruler of India. Bloody outbreaks occurred in the following weeks and months at military stations and towns across Bengal (but not in other areas of India, which remained loyal to the British government). Europeans were slaughtered without mercy whenever they fell into the hands of mutineers; many wretched fugitives fled their persecutors into the vast jungles, some reaching safety more dead than alive after weeks of wandering. In some places, notably at Cawnpore and Lucknow, small British garrisons encumbered by the presence of many women and children mounted long defenses against numerically overwhelming rebel forces. After holding out for twenty-two days, General Sir Hugh Wheeler finally surrendered his decimated entrenchments at Cawnpore to the rebel commander known as Nana Sahib under promise of safe passage down the Ganges, but his force was ambushed at the embarkation point and massacred almost to the last man, a number of women and children survivors being taken back to Cawnpore as prisoners. As Henry Havelock’s “army of avengers” (Ball 1:193) bore down on the town, laying waste the countryside and putting summarily to death every suspected rebel and rebel sympathizer who fell into its hands, Nana Sahib, his own troops having bridled at this terrible duty, sent a small party of butchers recruited from the bazaar to hack to pieces with swords and axes the more than two hundred British women and children prisoners. The victims’ bodies that would fit were stuffed into a well, the others thrown into the Ganges. Arriving the next day, Havelock’s troops discovered the scene of the mass killing, still awash in blood and littered with shreds of women’s clothing and clumps of hair. The discovery unleashed an “all but national cry for unmitigated vengeance” (Ball 2:168); the “retributive impulses of our people,” as the historian Sir John Kaye calls them (2:170), were given even freer rein than before. One primary instrument of these impulses was the sternly pious Colonel (subsequently Brigadier General) James Neill, who already had made a name for himself for the ferocious retribution he had inflicted elsewhere upon mutineers and their suspected sympathizers. Left in command at Cawnpore as Havelock moved on to attempt the relief of Lucknow, Neill invented a form of extra punishment for condemned men thought to have been implicated in the massacre. Before being taken out to the gallows, each was forced to clean up with his own hands or to lick up a small square of dried blood from the courtyard pavement where the prisoners had been slaughtered—an appalling pollution for a high-caste Hindu, as most of the sepoys were. Neill proudly expressed his conviction that God was at work in the “strange law” that he had instituted (Ball 2:400). This was only one of the best publicized of many instances of merciless reprisals visited by British authorities, often on the flimsiest legal

Jingoism, Warmongering, Racism

5

pretexts, upon Indian combatants and civilians in the course of the fierce campaign to restore British supremacy in India. The successful storming of Delhi in September by British and loyal Indian forces after a long, incredibly arduous siege, and then the lifting of the rebel siege of Lucknow and the reconquering of that city by the forces of Sir Colin Campbell, broke the back of the rebellion. The resistance entered thereafter a prolonged guerrilla phase that petered out after the death in battle of the Joan of Arc of the rebellion, the Rani of Jhansi, and the capture by treachery of the gifted rebel commander Tantia Tope. The archdemon Nana Sahib, prefiguring the career of his latter-day avatar Osama bin Laden (though the former was a Hindu and the latter is a Muslim), eluded massive British efforts to capture him, melted into the mountains of Nepal, and was never heard of again. The learned literature dealing with this episode over the past several decades affords a glimpse of the intellectual conditions that prevail currently in one broad sector of humanities scholarship. With few exceptions, Mutiny research has set itself for some time under the banner of that critique of imperialism known loosely as postcolonial studies and exemplified in the catalyzing writings of Edward Said. Even in instances (such as Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized) when it has traced certain self-contradictions said to inhabit the imperialist mentality, writing under the postcolonialist dispensation has taken as its first commandment the premise of the monolithic, always self-consistent nature of imperialism. All the mechanisms of imperialist society, political, cultural, psychological, work in concert to reinforce and to rationalize domination: such is the assumption guiding this scholarly field. To inhabit imperialist society is virtually by definition to be blind to the cruel reality of imperial domination. That an imperialistic society could experience serious ideological instability—that its inner contradictions could be visible to itself and could interfere for that reason with its flow of business; that public media could be channels for resistance to the imperial enterprise—is not a possibility that postcolonial analysis in its usual forms is equipped to entertain.5 Nor could this school of scholarly analysis ascribe any other character to any case of imperial dominion than that of malignancy. Imperialism and colonialism are always, in their every aspect, violent usurpation and enslavement, and are always, one again wants to say by definition, devoid of redeeming features other than their faculty of arousing emancipatory resistance to their own power. The benevolent humanitarian intentions expressed by many Victorian apologists for British rule in India—their professedly idealistic mission of bringing higher values and improved social institutions to benighted Hindustan, their contention that life would be far worse for the Indian masses were the British to return them to the

6

Introduction

mercies of their traditional rulers and to the likelihood of Hindu-Muslim internecine warfare—can only be taken in the postcolonialist perspective to exemplify colonialist bad faith in its pure form, to be nothing but the alibis and instruments of what Said identifies as the “Western . . . will to govern over the Orient” (95). The twofold axiom on which this line of scholarly practice rests is that the will to domination is primordial and unchanging in the Western outlook and that imperialism and racism are one and the same thing. Thus Said, though he bitterly indicts that mode of ideologically saturated learning called “Orientalism” for its impulse to “strip humanity down to . . . ruthless cultural and racial essences” (36), bases his own compelling study of this impulse upon the dictum that “a white middle-class Westerner believes it his human prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but also to own it, just because by definition ‘it’ is not quite as human as ‘we’ are” (108). This dogmatic premise, which takes as its implicit corollary the dehumanization of the white Westerner himself and for which so much confirmatory evidence may be cited, has given rise to volumes of enlightening and indeed indispensable scholarly research since Orientalism appeared in 1979. If one somehow did not know it before, one certainly knows by now, and for good, that no serious study of imperialism is possible that does not proceed by way of implacably skeptical analysis of imperialists’ professions of high-mindedness and altruism. As the quid pro quo of its invaluable revelations, however, postcolonial critique must at every moment skirt the danger of becoming doctrinaire and absolutistic, and of falling as a result into a compromised condition in which all its findings may come to seem subject to a law of steeply diminishing intellectual returns. Those who value its insights should be, I have come to believe, its most severe critics. For several generations of scholars, the great Indian uprising of 1857 can only be scripted as a struggle of national liberation against criminal oppressors, and British responses to it can only be portrayed, root and branch, as expressing the morally distorted dehumanizing logic of imperialism itself. Critics have thus asserted, with much vehemence, that Victorian Britons were uniformly hysterical in condemnation of the rebels, were driven by an unrelenting spirit of racial superiority and racial hatred, systematically suppressed evidence of wartime atrocities on the British side while exaggerating and sensationalizing excesses on the side of the mutineers, and invariably glorified British heroism and imperial right. “Not merely the British but the Westerners in general also showed the same racial proclivity and expressed their intense hatred and disgust for everything that was Asiatic or Indian,” declares S. B. Chaudhuri, author of an admirable study of British historians of the Mutiny. “One is tempted to believe that racial arrogance and imperial-colonial pretensions in so far as India was concerned was instinctive in their minds” (260). This

Jingoism, Warmongering, Racism

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is an unsurpassably succinct statement of the doctrine of postcolonialist scholarship on the Mutiny. There was “almost universal approval in Britain” of the “orgy of vengeance” unleashed upon Indians by the likes of James Neill, declares Denis Judd. “Neill and others were confident that the Almighty was glad to see so righteous and implacable a retribution” (73). “Imperial histories and novels alike were used to justify the extremely violent British military campaign of retaliation following the 1857 uprising and to legitimize more authoritarian, forceful, and racist policies in British colonial strategies of control after these events,” says Nancy L. Paxton. “British and Anglo-Indian writers alike” showed their complicity in these policies, she says, by “[participating] in the project of creating an idealized image of the British Empire” (6, 116). “The whole of Mutiny literature is saturated with . . . vicious cant,” with “Victorian self-righteousness” depicting the struggle as “the war between Darkness and Light,” declares Michael Edwardes, openly evincing the loathing of Victorian imperialism and all its associated sensibility that flows through this body of scholarship (“Mutiny” xvii). The distinguished Victorianist Patrick Brantlinger is no less frank. “Victorian writing about the Mutiny expresses in concentrated form the racist ideology that Edward Said calls Orientalism,” he unequivocally declares. This writing exhibits “the racist pattern of blaming the victim expressed in terms of an absolute polarization of good and evil, . . . civilization and barbarism.” “Innumerable essays, sermons, novels, poems, and plays expressed a general racist and political hysteria about the Mutiny” (Rule 199, 200, 202). Ian Baucom (to cite just one more instance) confirms the claim that the British portrayed themselves as wholly blameless for what happened in 1857: “the colonists were able to represent themselves not as India’s oppressors but as its gallant and benign victims, . . . and to derive the secondary advantage of a justification for racial separatism” (112). Were this now-axiomatic account6 of Victorian responses to the Mutiny fully accurate, it would be hard to understand, I think, why the war in India seemed to both contemporaries and subsequent generations to represent, as it manifestly did, a profoundly traumatic cultural crisis. If all it did was to reinforce Britons’ sense of their own merit and of the racially ingrained barbarous wickedness of their adversaries, it ought to have been experienced as an exhilarating episode of national reaffirmation. Not a few polemicists did seek at the time to portray it in precisely these terms (the stridency of their rhetoric suggesting constantly the desperate nature of the attempt). But the standard account proves to be at odds with too much discordant evidence, and to be too detrimental to lucidity in the study of the culture of imperialism, to remain unexamined. Take, for instance, the issue of the very naming of the conflict. Scholars have taken for granted that the term “mutiny” as applied to the Indian

8

Introduction

upheaval is a demeaning one meant to minimize and criminalize what ought properly to be portrayed as a broad-based civil insurrection and a war of national liberation. “The Victorians were . . . insistent that the uprising of 1857 was ‘the Indian Mutiny,’ ” says Judd. “It is only very recently that British historians and writers assessing the event have chosen words other than ‘mutiny’ to describe the uprising,” he declares (67, 68), stating a familiar argument. For books of English history, says Edwardes, the causes of the uprising “would seem to be little more than the affair of the greased cartridges”; these books are vitiated by their failure to acknowledge the deep causes of Indian hatred of foreign domination (“Mutiny” xiii). Nineteenth-century histories “usually” and invidiously portray it as a mere military uprising and “often accept the cliche´” that it originated in Hindu and Muslim soldiers’ objections to the greased cartridges, says Paxton (4, 109). Baucom cites as one symptom of the failure of the Victorians to recognize the true nature of the upheaval in India their “memorialization of the Insurrection as a ‘mutiny’ ” (106). Since “to acknowledge that the revolt was . . . widespread would be to admit the unpopularity of British rule, and to cast the subcontinent’s administrators in the role of tyrants,” argues Grace Moore, criticisms of the view that the Indian uprising was strictly a military mutiny were suppressed in the public media and “restricted to private correspondence only” (146). Among the lexicon of more honorific names employed by scholars making such assertions have been, along with the one proposed by Baucom (“the Insurrection”), the Great Revolution, the First War of Independence, the Great Indian Uprising, and so forth. It may only be inertia that accounts for the failure of this more elevated terminology ever to replace the customary designation “mutiny,” though it is worth noting in passing that a number of respected historians, including Surendra Nath Sen and R. C. Majumdar, have questioned the assumption that the 1857 outbreak can properly be called a struggle of national liberation or that any sort of progressive character can be ascribed to it.7 With regard merely to the issue of nomenclature, however, the truth is that the debate over the suitability of the term “mutiny” was not initiated by recent scholars, as they like to imagine, but was sharply and searchingly conducted in Britain almost from the moment of the events themselves. To misapprehend this point is to misread the historical conjuncture of 1857 in a crucial way. “It was of primary importance to know whether it was a military mutiny or a national revolt,” declared Benjamin Disraeli in a stupendous three-hour speech to the House of Commons on July 27, 1857, several weeks after the news of the uprising first reached England. The speech was transcribed verbatim in the Times the next day and was prominently highlighted by Charles Ball in his pioneering history that appeared in 1859 or 1860 (1:625–27). Disraeli blames the Indian upheaval not on

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9

military grievances over greased cartridges and other matters, a theory that he treats with disdain, but on widespread Indian resentment, not at all limited to the Army of Bengal, at the whole conduct of British rule: “first, our forcible destruction [i.e., dispossession] of native princes; next, our disturbance of the settlement of property [notably by laws enabling the government to seize property in the absence of natural as opposed to adoptive heirs]; and thirdly, our tampering with the religion of the people” (“State” 6). The whole speech is an extended rebuttal of the attempt of the government to portray the uprising as a “mere military mutiny,” a phrase that Disraeli invokes ever more ironically at least seven times in the course of his polemic. In fact, he declares, what has happened in India is “a national revolt,” “an insurrection favoured by the great mass of the population” (ibid.). Manifestly, the expression of such views was not “restricted to private correspondence only.” Almost by itself alone, Disraeli’s speech would be sufficient to overturn the principal dogmas of recent Mutiny scholarship, but there is a host of similar evidence. Sometimes dismissed as the epitome of the jingoistic imperial historian, Charles Ball himself—more radical in his historiographic politics than Sen or Majumdar—describes the mutinous uprisings as to some degree “an effect of some popular and systematic design to shake off the yoke of foreign domination” and as “a struggle for liberty and independence as a people” (1:402). That there was room in the Victorian public sphere at the time for such a statement may come as a surprise. The eminent Sir John Kaye concludes the first volume of his own Victorian-era history by noting approvingly that Lord Canning, the governorgeneral of India during the war, “soon ceased to speak of the mutiny, and called it a ‘rebellion’—a ‘revolt,’ ” and attributed it to deep-seated political causes (1:617). Some of those causes detailed by Kaye include the “reign of terror” and of “wholesale confiscation” unleashed by the British in Bengal in 1836–46, policies to which he refers as “the great war of extermination” waged by the British against native landholders (1:170, 177). Kaye continues to reiterate the point in subsequent volumes: this was no mere mutiny in the narrow sense of the word but an expression of profound Indian grievances under the imperial regime, “fears and discontents with which,” he conclusively says, “greased cartridges had no connexion” (3:306). In his 1858 memoir of the siege of Lucknow, L. E. Ruutz Rees observes of the native population of Oudh that “we had done very little to deserve their love and much to merit their detestation” and proceeds to specify the causes of Oudian grievance against the British (33–35). William Brock, in his hagiographic 1860 biography of Sir Henry Havelock, observes almost in passing, as though it were a well-known point, that the British in India “had often perpetrated oppressions of which a civilized Government should have been ashamed” (136). General

10

Introduction

Hope Grant and Henry Knollys, in their volume of war memoirs of 1873, vent their own scorn for the notion that the uprising was caused by the issue of the greased cartridges, which was, they declare, just “the puff of wind which fanned the smouldering mass of embers—accumulated for ages—into a flame” (2). All the classic Victorian histories of the Mutiny begin, like Kaye’s, with extended discussions of the deep causes of conflict, focusing on such matters as what is invariably represented as the unprincipled annexation of the kingdom of Oudh in early 1856 by Lord Dalhousie, the upsetting of traditional systems of land tenure, the British nonrecognition of the Hindu system of inheritance by adoption, and other matters. They elaborately document what the Illustrated London News indicted on July 25, 1857 (two days before Disraeli’s speech on the same theme to the House of Commons), as “our own neglect and misrule in India” (82). The idea that nineteenth-century writers ignored or dissimulated such subjects is a chimera that evaporates almost at the first contact with nineteenth-century texts.8 Nor, despite many assertions to this effect by latter-day polemicists, do “the Victorians” insist doggedly on referring to the uprising as a “mutiny.” In his 1858 war memoir, Charles Napier North imagines the writing of the “History of the Great Indian Rebellion of 1857” (165), and the missionary M. A. Sherring titled his book of 1859 The Indian Church during the Great Rebellion. Ball, G. B. Malleson (1858), and R. Montgomery Martin (c. 1861) all do designate the conflict in their histories as the “Mutiny,” but even the retributionist Malleson makes clear that the “dark deed” (12) of Dalhousie’s coup in Oudh was the cause of widespread popular loathing of British rule in Bengal. In his history of circa 1859, E. H. Nolan names the conflict “the Sepoy Mutiny” but heavily stresses the point that a strict interpretation of this conventional terminology would be deeply misleading. “The people of England generally persisted in regarding it as a sepoy revolt” and in nourishing the illusion that the Indian people were not in sympathy with it, he says; in truth, it was “a great rebellion of native princes and peoples” (2:712–13). “This is not merely a mutiny in some of our sepoy regiments, but a great political convulsion,” muses R. E. Forrest’s hero in his novel Eight Days (3:99– 100). Much similar evidence could be cited to make the point that “the Victorians,” less blinded by “racist ideology” than has been said, did not need late twentieth-century scholars to debunk the view of the uprising as a military mutiny unrelated to broad social and political grievances in British India. At the risk of excessively documenting this important point, let me briefly highlight Alexander Duff’s treatment of it in his work of 1858, The Indian Rebellion: Its Causes and Results. Duff, himself a missionary, exemplifies the discourse of the Victorian missionary establishment by

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filling his book with ardent calls for evangelizing “idolatrous, superstition-ridden India” (326); “the whole of Hinduism . . . is a huge congeries of falsities and lies,” he declares (355). In many ways, The Indian Rebellion (note the title) can be taken as a particularly extreme instance of cultural intolerance and imperial ideology. Yet Duff inveighs violently throughout his book against the official propaganda of the day, which sought to represent the crisis in Bengal as a “merely military mutiny.” “It is the fact that it is not a mere ‘military revolt,’ but a rebellion—a revolution—which alone can account for the little progress hitherto made [he writes this on December 10, 1857] in extinguishing it” (229). He treats “the oft-reiterated allegation that the revolt was nothing but a military mutiny” (300) with withering contempt. “Verily, the extravagance of official legerdemain, or the credulity of official hallucination, seems to recognize no limits!” he exclaims (303). The debasement of indigenous Indian culture notwithstanding, the rebellion, according to Duff, springs from the profound failings of British government in India. British officials may mean well, but they have no understanding of “the mental, social, and physical condition of the multitudes,” he declares (293). Among other shortcomings, they have failed to check the “cruelty and oppression” (296) visited upon the people by native police and tax collectors, with the result that the British government “appears toward [the population] in the attitude of a severe, unrighteous, and inexorable tyrant” (295). The very existence of an imperial regime guarantees hatred on the part of the native population, he further insists. “The mere fact of a forcible conquest, together with the systematic restraint and all-pervading regularity of our rule, . . . were enough to awaken and perpetuate feelings of exasperation and intensest hate” (202–3). The Bengali population is “proverbially passive” and slow to react to injustice and oppression, he says. “But even with such a people there may be a limit beyond which wrongs may not be tolerated” (293). The book gives another very clear signal that the politics of mid-Victorian imperialism and, in particular, of the interpretation of the “mutiny” were considerably more vexed and conflicted, less driven by unreasoning racism and chauvinism, less committed to idealizing British rule, than scholarship has so often and so dogmatically asserted they were. The purportedly universal Victorian insistence that the rebellion in India was only a mutiny is, to repeat, nothing but a kind of ideological mirage that Victorian writers themselves never cease exorcizing and that seems rarely to have been subjected to even cursory verification by latter-day scholarship. It was a site not of complacent Victorian certitude but of intense ideological strife where the very possibility of a morally defensible imperialism was keenly questioned.9 Nor, as Duff’s book suggests, will the oft-repeated theory of a nearly impenetrable Victorian conspiracy to whitewash the uglier elements of

12

Introduction

British rule in India and of British conduct in the war stand up to criticism. No contemporary who read T. Henry Kavanagh’s 1860 memoir How I Won the Victoria Cross would have thought that Mutiny literature uniformly projected “an idealized image of the British Empire.” From the pedestal of his fame as a war hero, Kavanagh denounces the original English colonizers, who “plundered and oppressed [Indians] to retire to sumptuous homes in England,” and he condemns no less pungently “our cruel policy” prior to the rebellion and “atrocities [committed during the war] which the British soldier will disown in the next generation” (ix–x, 161, 17). A similar tone had been struck (to single out just one more text for now) in a compelling text of 1857, The Sepoy Revolt: Its Causes and Its Consequences, written by the journalist Henry Mead. No bleeding heart, Mead writes harshly against the rebels, strongly endorses the British mission of reforming endemic abuses in Indian civilization, and ridicules the utopianism of the Peace Society. But he is no more blind to the dark side of the empire than are the other writers I have mentioned, for he issues at the same time a ferocious denunciation of “the cruelty, the oppression, and the measureless folly of our rule” in India, a rule based, he declares, on “torture and lawlessness, and the perpetual suffering of millions” (iv, iii). He traces in excruciating detail the system of torture employed by tax collectors of the raj (207–8) and asserts that “under Christian sway,” the peasant population of India has been reduced almost to a state of “ultimate wretchedness” (222). The British have imposed on India, he concludes, “a system of rule which is wholly destructive” (335). All that can be said on its behalf, according to Mead, is that it is slightly less horrific than the rule of the traditional despots of India. “Our government and laws have been, and continue to be, full of evil,” he states; “but they will certainly sustain a comparison with those of the native sovereigns to whose annals we can point with any degree of historic certainty” (244). It is more than possible to quarrel with the reasoning that leads Mead to this almost fatally equivocal judgment on behalf of British rule, but not to claim in the face of such a book that Mutiny literature takes a uniformly idealized view of the empire or that it imagines the war as a polarized struggle of good against evil. Mead is unusual among contemporary commentators for the harshness of his anti-imperialistic rhetoric, but, as we shall see at length in this book, his critique of the British government was far from unique and issued from every point on the Victorian political spectrum. One comes to a similar conclusion with regard to the frequent claim that Victorian chroniclers failed to acknowledge atrocities committed by the British in the two-year war. Michael Edwardes, an especially vehement promoter of this claim, asserts, for example, that the somber role played by Neill in the Cawnpore reprisals is glossed over in Mutiny writing to

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preserve the myth of a “war between Darkness and Light”—and then rectifies the supposed omission by quoting at considerable length incriminating material against Neill from the dean of Victorian Mutiny historians, Sir John Kaye (“Mutiny” xv–xvii). Patrick Brantlinger subsequently repeats the charge that the facts of Neill’s reign of terror “have remained suppressed” (Rule 201), keeping alive a habit of interpreting the history of Mutiny commentary according to a conspiracy theory that turns out to have its own fairly long history, one that predates by many decades the official advent of the postcolonialist school of scholarship. Already in 1926, Edward Thompson set it forth in his polemical tract The Other Side of the Medal. His own book, the stated goal of which is to debunk “the accepted ‘histories’ of the Mutiny,” has been “long suppressed,” he tells us, but without providing details (vi, ix). He promises in any case to address the “unsolved problem” of to what extent the uprising was “a real war for independence” or “merely the military mutiny it is always represented in our histories” (34). (We have seen that this perennial claim is contradicted by virtually every Victorian history.) In addition, a veil has been “drawn over the excesses of our own infuriated forces” in English histories, says Thompson, but not over misdeeds of the mutineers (39). The damning evidence of British misconduct has been “hidden from ourselves” (40). But in drawing up his indictment of various atrocities committed by the British, Thompson, like Edwardes three decades later, refutes his own central argument about Victorian historians’ supposed concealment of reprehensible British actions by quoting evidence constantly from widely read Victorian sources: Kaye, V. D. Majendie, Martin, W. H. Russell, and others, all of whom vividly publicized these matters, making them a conspicuous part of mid-Victorian debates and, thanks to them, of the permanent historical record. Even so, Thompson asserts to the bitter end, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary furnished by his own references, that the Mutiny “has been chronicled from one side only, and from one set of documents; or from no documents at all, but mere stereotyped hearsay” (135). One recent work crystallizes this set of historiographic issues in an especially distinct way and deserves special comment: Gautam Chakravarty’s The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (2005). This ambitious study makes a point of announcing its guiding principles at the outset, where the author declares that nineteenth-century imperial expansion, like the “US-led neo-colonial globalisation of the twentieth century,” “justified multiform violence through self-serving, self-congratulatory high talk about civilising and racial missions”; Victorian professions of philanthropic intent toward India were only so much “humbug” designed to justify plunder, he asserts (2). It would be fair to ask how he knows this to be true. Clearly, in any case, there can be no dispassionate or noninvidious

14

Introduction

analysis of a people whose moral system is known in advance to be “humbug,” and Chakravarty—though at one point he scornfully denounces those who believe in “the possibility of judging other societies” (55)— makes only a half-hearted pretense of it in his study of Victorian Britain. British imperialism in India was propelled by general belief in “an inevitable national and racial urge” to foreign domination, he declares (1). On the outbreak of the Mutiny, he writes, echoing a series of other recent commentators, there was in Britain an “almost immediate manufacture of a language combining patriotic fervour with xenophobia,” a language anticipating the “jingoism and warmongering of later, high imperial, decades” (25). On more than one occasion (2, 34, 41, 181), he introduces a potentially dramatic new note into modern Mutiny scholarship by acknowledging that the Victorian imperial idea had in fact its internal critics and that there were dissenters at the time who objected to the conduct of the war. It looks like an opening to an enriched exploration of Mutiny history emancipated from the ideological straitjacket worn proudly by so much recent scholarship. But Chakravarty raises this tantalizing prospect only to marshal all his rhetorical resources in a single-minded way for the project of erasing evidence of dissent from the historical record after all, in order to leave fully intact the image of a Victorian society monolithically devoted to the sinister, racially “inevitable” purposes of imperialism. For one thing, though he refers vaguely to the existence of dissent, he almost never specifies any of it and generally simply sets the subject aside without further comment. He insists that such dissent was at most “muted” (34); the Indian rebellion, he declares, closing the subject, “was not the occasion for serious dissent” (35). As should be clear even from the scattering of texts cited above, however, cleansing the historical record of “serious dissent” proves to be a challenging task once one ventures even slightly afield in the literature of the day. It leads Chakravarty into many an awkward place where his account must be approached with skepticism. I will confine myself here to a couple of illustrative instances. There is the matter of the tales of mutineers’ atrocities that were widely circulated in the Victorian media and that in many respects have long been judged to be apocryphal. The sole contemporary publication to challenge the authenticity of these tales, according to Chakravarty, was Edward Leckey’s Fictions Connected with the Indian Outbreak of 1857 Exposed (1859). The existence of this piece of blazing sardonic dissent only goes to confirm Chakravarty’s broad thesis, though, since “Leckey’s scepticism was largely ignored then and in subsequent years, and it is a forgotten and obscure volume” (181). As we will see in detail in later chapters, the debunking of the atrocity stories was in fact pursued by a long string of high-profile writers during the war and afterward, and not at all in “muted” terms, either. The falsity of the

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atrocity tales was perfectly well known by the time that Sir George Trevelyan, in his 1865 study of Cawnpore that is probably the most widely read of all Mutiny texts (though it goes uncited by Chakravarty), denounced these “prurient and ghastly fictions” which, he declared, “it is our misfortune that we once believed, and our shame if we ever stoop to repeat” (194, 233). Chakravarty’s erasure of this major preoccupation of Victorian Mutiny writers counts as a serious blow to his credibility. Another would be his presentation of the historian R. Montgomery Martin, whose Mutiny of the Bengal Army (c. 1861) figures by any standard as one of the most remarkable texts of the period. Chakravarty, who argues that Victorian historians of the Mutiny zealously propagandized on behalf of British imperialism and glorified the war in India, refers to Martin several times as one of the group of historians who “drew up a version of events that was to dominate the imperial imaginary for a long time to come” (16). Martin’s long preamble to the history of the Mutiny “obliquely” justifies the domination of India by Britain, he declares (26). This representation of Martin as an apologist for what Chakravarty has termed “the megalomania of empire” (39) and as a jingoistic war enthusiast would certainly have surprised Martin himself, as it will surprise anyone who has had the experience of reading The Mutiny of the Bengal Army. Martin’s book is in fact an almost Swiftian screed of outrage and nausea directed at every possible element of British conduct in India. British imperial rule has resulted in almost genocidal catastrophe for the natives of the country, Martin asserts; British war heroes in the Mutiny are commonly pathological mass murderers; the mutineers for the most part are victims, not villains. I will offer a detailed consideration of Martin’s astonishing book, so incomprehensibly misrepresented by Chakravarty, in chapter 4. In a very curious epilogue, Chakravarty qualifies his argument. What he has been describing, he now says, was “the dominant interpretation” of the Mutiny among British writers at the time. Yes, there were, after all, “a few dissident voices that questioned the dominant interpretation” (181)—though whose they were remains a mystery, since the first example of dissent mentioned specifically here is a 1922 essay by F. W. Buckler. But previous instances would not count in any case, since the dominant interpretation, Chakravarty declares, is by its nature strictly unified and consistent—a remarkably distinct formulation of the totalizing principle that underlies, as I have noted, much “postcolonial” critique. Chakravarty appears to be stating that he has simply excluded evidence of whatever contrary views about the Mutiny may have appeared in Victorian times, views not describable as “jingoism [or] warmongering,” since by definition they contradict the “dominant interpretation.” How we can be sure in that event that the jingoism was as dominant as he claims, he does

16

Introduction

not say. What he does explicitly declare is that under his scholarly doctrine, no recognition of significant complexities or ambivalence in the Victorian public sphere with regard to imperial ideology is permitted. In fact, the Mutiny called forth from writers of the day a voluminous discourse of dissent that often evoked, as the following pages seek to show, what can only be called a profound anguish of conscience and a profound disaffection from the war and from its sustaining ideology. Doctrinaire scholarship that ignores or suppresses such material or that excuses itself from the fairly modest research required to discover it does so at great cost to historical understanding. It is perfectly true that some contemporary publications (though not Disraeli’s celebrated speech of July 27 or the books of Nolan, Duff, Mead, Russell, Martin, Leckey, and so on) do strive to promote, as critics censoriously point out, “an idealized view of the British Empire” and of course do vilify the enemy: popular opinion in Victorian Britain at the outbreak of the Mutiny, we may say, took much the form that popular opinion takes in any nation in wartime. This fact in itself tells us little about Victorian racism or the Western racial instinct of domination, and it can distort judgment if we implicitly and uncritically take as our standard of historical comparison a utopian imaginary nation whose popular opinion would be free of xenophobia and such vices, if only it existed. (It ought to be the first rule of rigorous scientific historiography always to ask, relative to what?) What is altogether at odds with historical normalcy and thus laden with significance, on the other hand, is the critique of jingoistic patriotism, racism, and the retribution fever of the times that very swiftly manifested itself in the Victorian public media of 1857 and 1858 and afterward. It is this extraordinary countercurrent, not at all scanty or “muted,” not confined to private correspondence only, but tremendously robust and public, that expresses distinctive potentials of Victorian culture: such is the thesis my book sets forth. The numerous works on which I focus do not bear witness to a society and a literary culture in thrall to “racist ideology,” vengefulness, “vicious cant,” “humbug,” and “Victorian self-righteousness,” and they certainly do not constitute a uniform apologia for imperialism. Rather, they take us into the heart of a multiplex culture exercising a faculty of searching self-scrutiny and finding that in certain crucial respects its system of value, being fatally at odds with itself, was prone to shocking perversions. A culture in which racism was widely regarded as repugnant had fostered an imperial society drenched in an especially virulent and violent form of racism: such was one of the startling discoveries prompted by the Mutiny and driven powerfully, explicitly home, as we shall see, by a series of writers. Here, I believe, is the fundamental sense in which the Mutiny marked a “terrible break” in Victorian history: it was a moment when educated Britons suddenly were afforded a deeply disillusioning view into

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the national soul and found that they could never return afterward to their prelapsarian state of unawareness. The shock of finding that they were despised by their supposedly grateful imperial subjects in India was in part the shock of finding that their national idealism and national selfesteem were self-deluding and morally corrupting. The moment of this discovery coincides with the beginning of the rapid unraveling of the midVictorian fabric of values that forms the main story of British cultural history over the next several decades. The postcolonialist assault on “the Victorians” has its own significant history. That it can summon so much rhetorical force as to seem almost self-evident and unquestionable even when sharply at odds with masses of evidence is in a part a testimony to its roots in the anti-Victorianism that formed, as one may say, the fundamental institution of the modernist movement. Beginning in the 1870s and continuing well into the twentieth century, the modernist crusade against the supposed deformities of Victorian middle-class thought and culture served as the catalyst of a great project of cultural and intellectual renewal. Yet an essentially reactionary motive insinuates itself into the anti-Victorian revival that has been staged in academic cultural criticism of the past several decades. This new phase of anti-Victorian polemics has taught us much and has much still to teach. One recoils from it only because in its dogmatic form, at least, it functions as so evident a mode of self-aggrandizement and of intellectual complacency, fostering invective posing disingenuously as scholarly inquiry and thus mutating readily into forms subversive of historical understanding. The key characteristic of Victorian Mutiny literature, so I argue, is that it is not monolithic and cannot properly be read as anything like a confident allegory of British virtue and racial entitlement to rule. It seethes with its own self-diagnosed inner contradictions, which are those of nineteenthcentury culture itself, and it is the evidence of these lacerating, sometimes paralyzing contradictions in British attitudes that I stress.10 I seek in my book, then, as Margery Sabin does in Dissenters and Mavericks, to undo some of what I see as the deleterious effects of a longish course of doctrinaire anti-imperialist scholarship on the subject at hand. In a discursive field as rife as Mutiny literature proves to be with ambivalence, self-contradiction, rhetorical ruses and pitfalls, cognitive and textual dissonance, and unconscious displacements, doctrinaire analysis is sure to lead one astray. The sovereign remedy for such a state of affairs is that of intensive close reading and thick description of texts, shorn of as many presuppositions as possible. This at all events is the method I follow, starting with close readings and working outward from there. I adopt this approach at the risk of seeming sometimes to devote more space and more respectful attention to the analysis of certain works than they deserve, in view of either their questionable literary value or their

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Introduction

blameworthy politics. If, however, we start with the proposition that the value of historical inquiry lies finally in its power to disturb received ideas and ideological complacencies, and in so doing to complicate rather than homogenize and flatter our vision of things, adopting some such vantage as I propose to take up on the history of imperialism and on the Victorian legacy more generally would seem to hold much potential value at present. Bracketing for the time being the preoccupation with Victorian culpabilities affords us a new view of the Indian Mutiny as marking among other things the spot of a disillusionment, a psychological and spiritual wound, “a terrible break” in the Victorian world, that could never be set right again. The Mutiny appears in this perspective as a crucial episode in the history of racial ideology and feeling, of nineteenth-century religion, of imperialism, and of the formation of modern British national identity. It is precisely the fusion of these different elements into a single pathological complex that gives the Mutiny its distinctiveness as a cultural phenomenon and its extraordinary capacity to galvanize the Victorian imagination long afterward: so, at least, I shall argue. In the following chapter, I lay out the network of key tropes that I see as articulating Mutiny literature, focusing on the concept of trauma and on the idea of a fatal split at the center of Victorian moral being. Chapter 2 centers on William Howard Russell’s journalistic witnessing of the Mutiny as exemplary of the disillusionment produced at home by the shock of events in India. Chapter 3 traces important lines of the nineteenthcentury debate in Britain over Punishment and its supposedly primitive predecessor, Vengeance, and illustrates these themes as they are developed in a pair of Mutiny novels, Maurice Dering; or, the Quadrilateral (1864), by George Alfred Lawrence, and Flotsam: The Study of a Life, by Henry Seton Merriman (1892). The book’s long and central fourth chapter studies a series of Victorian historians of the war. Chapter 5 discusses Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities (1859) as an allegory of the Mutiny centered on the conception of a vast annihilation of moral value. Chapter 6 focuses on another novel pervaded by echoes of recent events in India, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s famous “sensation” novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1861– 62), which, I argue, depicts the postwar moment as one dominated by a condition for which no name yet existed, posttraumatic stress syndrome. In an epilogue, I survey a cluster of Mutiny novels from later years to trace the long-term reverberations of the great uprising in Victorian memory.

Chapter One

Diabolical Possession and the National Conscience

If I diverge in this study from the anti-imperialist idiom that has monopolized recent scholarship on the Indian Mutiny, it is in order to address with as much historical empathy as possible the riddle that I have evoked: that of the seemingly disproportionate impact that the crisis of 1857 had upon British thought and feeling at the time and for a generation or two afterward. Perhaps the one commentator to have framed the issue of the Mutiny in such terms was the novelist Hilda Gregg, author of an 1897 article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine titled “The Indian Mutiny in Fiction.” Gregg specifically wonders why the Mutiny, judging from its literary manifestations over the intervening forty years, held so much more fascination for the British public even than the war in the Crimea of 1854–56. “Of all the great events of this century, as they are reflected in fiction, the Indian Mutiny has taken the firmest hold on the popular imagination,” she declares (218). Her claim is that the Mutiny gripped British awareness as it did by happening to be exceptionally rich in materials suitable for exploitation in popular “romance.” “Valour and heroism, cruelty and treachery, sharp agony and long endurance, satiated vengeance and bloodthirsty hatred, were all present”; particularly, the drama of the rebellion “abounded in gore” and in the atrocities that drove contemporaries, as she says, striking the keynote of Mutiny literature in all its genres, “half-wild with the horror of it all” (218–19). No doubt—and yet equating the Mutiny with its richness in entertainment values and its ready availability for popular consumption may be essentially misleading. For one thing, this explanation glosses over its own embedded riddle: why should the fantasized recollection of nearly unbearable horrors form a compulsively attractive subject for late-Victorian readers? And what exactly was so horrible? Certainly Gregg offers no clue as to why the war in India would have seemed for decades afterward to signify, in R. E. Forrest’s phrase, “a terrible break” in history and an unhealing national trauma—all the reverse, in fact. Instead of a traumatic break, her account turns the Mutiny into a sensation melodrama performed in one imaginary revival after another according to the tried-and-true formulas of popular fiction. Gregg’s interpretation would be consistent with a view of Mutiny

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Chapter One

literature as an agency for spinning a kind of anaesthetizing web around the terrible events of 1857–59 and draining them of whatever culturally dangerous potential they might originally have possessed. Not to succumb too hastily to the allure of such a thesis, let us begin by highlighting, rather, the traumatizing effect the events of 1857 were often said to have had upon literary discourse itself. Far from seeming a quarry for materials readily and unproblematically translatable into the effect-system of popular romance, the great Indian upheaval seemed to many to define itself first and foremost by virtue of its unnerving recalcitrance to representation. It was a story that in many ways, so contemporaries never tired of stating, could not be written. It was precisely by virtue of this characteristic that it formed such a compelling literary subject at a moment in cultural history when the power of written media seemed invincible: in the readings of important Mutiny texts to be undertaken in chapters to follow, we will attempt to tease out various strands of a complex of effects based on this paradoxical rhetorical principle. I take it in the meantime as the stepping-off point for a compressed sketch of the thematic landscape of this book.

AGONIZING SUSPENSE Writers at the time declare that the Mutiny enacted itself on so large a scale and involved events so overwhelming in their effect as to “beggar description” (Nolan 2:275); that it defied narration in being dispersed over scores of local sites and over hundreds of individual dramas, each gripping in itself but ultimately monotonous in ways that rendered narration insidiously self-defeating; that it was pervaded by crucial unknowns and gaps in the historical record that doomed all attempted explanations to incoherence; that it was so fraught with national, political, racial, and religious passions and so infested with myth as to make objective description impossible. “It is easy to see, that with all these influences at work, the chances against anything like correct history being attainable at present are almost overwhelming,” wrote Edward Leckey (xiv). “The events which transpired within [Delhi] on the arrival of the Meerut battalions,” notes one early historian of these events, “have never appeared in a connected form, and never can be presented in consecutive order, so terrible was the massacre, and so little did those who escaped know of anything which did not appear before their own eyes” (Nolan 2:721–22). But especially, as one writer after another proclaimed, many of the leading events of the Mutiny (notably including imaginary ones) were too horrible and obscene, too “unspeakable,” to be decently depicted. “Of the horrible

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tortures inflicted on our countrymen and their families both in Central India and elsewhere, we dare not trust ourselves to speak,” says another of the earliest Mutiny historians, uttering a formula repeated in many variations in the literature we shall be surveying (Mead 175). “But the imagination which can paint the worst of torments that revenge and malice can devise, will attain to the best idea of the realised atrocities,” he adds, pointing to that usurpation of realistic factuality by phantasmagoria that forms one of the leading textual symptoms of the predicament of Mutiny writing. “You in England can never know or hear one-half of the atrocities committed by these savages, for they are too abominable ever to repeat, much less to publish,” declares a writer quoted by Charles Ball (1:493). “The heart-rending scene that ensued I cannot describe,” says another chronicler, referring to the massacre of Europeans in the church at Shahjehanpore on May 31, 1857. “Words seem too feeble to convey its horrors” (Butler 258). The same writer makes the standard apologia for drawing a veil over the massacre of the ladies at Cawnpore: “We purposely omit many of the details of the horrors of that dreadful evening” (307). In the specific narratology of Mutiny literature, “horror” is not so much a term of literary expression as the word for that which by its nature is inexpressible, that which makes itself known by the breakdown that it provokes in written language. If this war appeared to contemporaries to be the harbinger of a new historical epoch, it was, many signals in the literature suggest, in part for its seeming to announce an era in which events might overwhelm and paralyze available media of representation. Analysts of the disintegration of the Bengal Army in 1857 often spoke of the terrible break that had occurred between modern days and a sounder past when the British officer corps and the sepoys were bound together by ties of affection and mutual esteem. The equivalent experience for writers of the Mutiny was, as the materials to which I have pointed suggest, a growing sensation of a break between a once-upon-a-time state of supposed concord between historical subjects and discourse and a new phase of traumatic disconnection. The symptomatology of this sensation is a proliferation of textual signals, tics of style that seem like inarticulateness, indicating the heavy burden of representational difficulty borne by writers about the rebellion. These include almost obligatory hyperbolic assertions that never before in human history had events occurred to match these for pathos, cruelty, heroism, wickedness, suffering—events, that is, that outstrip available resources of literary language; recourse to the kinds of metaphors of cosmic catastrophe that we have noted; the persistent use of such nondescriptors as “unspeakable,” as in the signal phrase “unspeakable horror”; and, in particular, a persistent notation that the events of the Mutiny were not like reality but like a movement

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Chapter One

into the fantastic, into hallucination or into a terrible nightmare. The battle-hardened V. D. Majendie, who begins his war memoir by evoking “those horrors, so frightful that in many cases the narrators dared not describe them—those cruelties and savage outrages which threw all past atrocities far back into the shade,” sums up the aura of the Mutiny in the question, “Is not this all a dream?” (3). Another contemporary writer reports that a small handful of men escaped the slaughters at Cawnpore only “after weathering perils and sufferings which sound like the incidents of a dreadful and fantastic fiction” (Grant and Knollys 44). Victorian authors evidently portrayed the Indian Mutiny in a literary mode so full of the phantasmagoric and the surreal precisely because it seemed to them to exceed the capacities of writing. “The Indian Mutiny . . . was a very fantastic business,” definitively comments a character in Henry Kingsley’s 1869 novel Stretton (85). One factor in this predominating sensation of having only a vertiginous or hallucinatory connection with the events of 1857 was, as Kingsley said, the cultural remoteness—what often seemed like the unfathomable weirdness—of the setting in which the rebellion enacted itself; a related factor was the great remoteness in space and in time of Indian happenings as witnessed from home. Victorians who had not intuited it before discovered in this crisis that the globalization of Great Britain entailed a deeply disconcerting shift in their sense of relationship to contemporary actuality. News from India took at this time, telegraphic communication notwithstanding, about seven weeks to reach London (the outbreak of hostilities at Meerut on May 10, 1857, was first announced in the Times on June 27 and in the Illustrated London News on July 4, for example).1 Considerable evidence indicates that the time lag affecting the transmission of reports from the war theater constituted an almost unbearably anguished aspect of the situation for those at home, particularly, of course, for people all over the British Isles with friends or family in dire peril in India; it must at the same time have greatly stimulated the proliferation of fantasy and rumor that formed a principal characteristic of this war in which, as one writer said, “fables were accepted as facts” and then taken as the basis for policy (Martin 272). In addition to the usual sense of helplessness that afflicts civilians at home in time of war, one could not even know the fate of those caught up in the rebellion until long after the crisis had swept over them, and once news was at last received, it was already obsolete, in accordance with a law of information transmission that could pass almost unnoticed in normal times but that took on a tormenting poignancy in 1857. Knowledge of Indian events was not just delayed but, in the midst of the crisis, effectively unattainable for those at home. The outpouring of writing about the Mutiny must to a great

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extent have been stimulated by this maddening remoteness of events that the British public wanted to experience with unobstructed immediacy, so as at least to achieve direct heartfelt empathy with the martyred victims— not something, needless to say, that writing (set as it is under the sign of diffe´rance) can ever vouchsafe. In its place was “the state of anxious suspense” to which, as Alexander Duff commented (220), those who tried to follow the Indian news were condemned.2 The “scene of agitation, distress, alarm, and panic” that Duff describes in wartime Calcutta as a result of unverifiable rumors of massacres and atrocities in the faraway disturbed districts (18) was thus to some extent the prevalent scene and the dominant state of mind of the British public generally for many months during and following the summer of 1857. “That thirst for news from the distant scene of action, which became so distressing and lasted so long, had begun” (Raikes 2). “The heart of England has not, within the memory of living men, been so deeply moved as by the Indian rebellion of 1857,” wrote Thomas Hughes at the time. “It was a time of real agony,—the waiting, week after week, for those scanty despatches, which, when they came, and lay before us in the morning papers, with huge capitals at the top of the column, we scarcely dared take up, we could not read without a strong effort of the will” and “a cold sinking of heart” (qtd. Hodson 5). The sense that the Mutiny ordeal for those at home centered on the “real agony” of not knowing was acute enough for the Times to editorialize about it on August 1, 1857. “In many districts the communications are interrupted, the wire cut, and the means of conveyance everywhere dependent on natives. Thus the horrors, such as there are,—and there are not a few,—are aggravated by obscurity. The storm is terrible, but its darkness is even more awful than its lightning. We must submit to what many feel an agonizing suspense, in which everything is horrible which is unknown” (9). The panicky, obsessive, paralyzing “suspense” evoked here and often elsewhere in Mutiny writing felt to contemporaries, it is clear from the intensity with which they examine it, like a sudden immersion in an unprecedented sort of experience. It seems no less in retrospect like an inaugural moment of a distinctively modern mental condition. First intensively explored in the literary medium, perhaps, by Poe (“The Tell-Tale Heart” [1843]), this torturing condition would soon be subjected to close literary scrutiny in Dostoyevsky’s underground man (1864) or, later, in Kafka’s anguished, information-starved heroes—and in especially prescient form, as we shall see in chapter 6, in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1861–62), which links the advent of a new mode of psychological distress expressly to the shock of the Mutiny. The state of mind diagnosed by this line of writers was the one undergone in concentrated form (to

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cite just one more example) by Thomas De Quincey, whose daughter was living in India with her officer husband and their young child at the outbreak of the rebellion.3 Lacking reliable news of their fate, De Quincey slipped into that half-phantasmatic Poe-like state so often portrayed in Mutiny literature. “Every night, often times all night long . . . I had the same dream—a vision of children, most of them infants . . . ; and I heard, or perhaps fancied that I heard, always the same dreadful word, Delhi” (qtd. Schmitt 80). One may think of the Mutiny on the basis of such materials as marking a “terrible break” with an earlier, more serene, more stable psychological condition perhaps never afterward to be recaptured in Victorian Britain. Abundant testimony suggests that the Victorian public at home felt at the time of the Indian war that it was witnessing nothing less than an alarming disorganization of national personality. To seek to study this historical experience in depth is to focus attention necessarily upon one of its essential factors, the overwhelming literariness of the Mutiny as it was undergone by the Victorian public. I have hinted already at what seems to be the logic of this state of affairs: it is that only a gigantic effort of cultural, which is to say literary, production could hope in effect to neutralize the national trauma and to assuage the “agonizing suspense, in which everything is horrible which is unknown,” which the war inflicted upon contemporary British onlookers. It was at all events the great flood of often highly stylized, rhetorically elaborate literary writing about the rebellion—the densely textured histories that began appearing on the very heels of events, the memoirs, tracts, and pamphlets, the oratorical leading articles in London newspapers, the poems and novels, all heavily freighted with biblical and classical allusiveness—that formed the signal phenomenon of the times. This was the paradoxical other side of a crisis that otherwise defined itself precisely, as we saw, by the disabling trauma that it was said to have inflicted upon literary discourse itself. Or we could think of it as simply that trauma in another guise, as though the hyperproduction of hysteria-suffused literary discourse and the sense of the inefficacy of that discourse to dissipate the horror of the moment were inseparably connected reciprocal phenomena. The least philosophical Victorian observer must in any case have felt as though the experiential reality of far-off events in India had become so engulfed in writing, so transformed into a mass of literary productions noisily competing for attention, as to be almost irretrievable. Hilda Gregg’s suggestion that there seemed finally to be no boundary between the facts of Mutiny history and the sensationalistic world of popular romance, like Henry Knollys’s evocation of the ordeal of the Cawnpore survivors as being “like the incidents of a dreadful and fantastic fiction,” catches this estranging sense precisely. In defining the Mutiny for purposes

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of research as a literary, fictive, essentially imaginary event impossible to disembroil from the stylistic inflections and literary registers in which it was constructed and disseminated by authors of the time, I key the present study to just this aspect of the cultural crisis engendered by the Mutiny.

HORROR LITERATURE AND THE IDEOLOGY OF IMPROVEMENT The primary nexus between the historical and the literary in the Indian Mutiny is fully apparent in the citations sampled already: it is the idea of “horror,” the idea evoked by the military memoirist Majendie, for example, in referring to the circulation of atrocity tales rife with “those frightful and heart-rending details which struck all Europe with horror, blanched every lip, and made the blood of England to run cold” (2). Understanding the Indian upheaval from the Victorian perspective is roughly identical to fully explicating this term as it occurs, ubiquitously, in Mutiny discourse. More than anything else, the Mutiny signified for contemporaries a great collective electric shock of “horror.” Focusing on the experience named by this word helps us free the study of the Mutiny somewhat from reductively politicized terms of analysis and, among other significant results, situate Mutiny literature in that lineage of modern writing (particularly writing in the “gothic” register) that culminates in Mr. Kurtz’s encounter with “The horror! The horror!” in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899 [71]). Conrad’s fable of the mutation of the idealism of nineteenthcentury colonialism into megalomaniacal cruelty intimates that this idealism may contain dementia as one of its inherent latent elements or one of its specific potentials. Could it be that the sinister proximity of idealism and megalomaniacal cruelty is the very meaning of “horror”? We will explore versions of this hypothesis in the chapters to come. Here I want merely to suggest in a preliminary way that the category of “horror” should be regarded not as a timeless given but, rather, as a mode of experience with a definite logic and a specific historical and cultural structure that may be decipherable only at the cost of a certain effort of analysis. A perhaps profound shift of sensibility registered itself in the sphere of popular literature at about this historical moment in a shift of dominance from “terror romance,” as it was called, to its widely ramified and formalistically far more diverse successor, the literature of horror. Between these two categories, much slippage and overlapping occurs both within texts and in their historical interrelations, but they are not identical or smoothly continuous. Terror as a literary trope is keyed to panic of bodily harm and takes Manichaean dramatic form (villains persecuting helpless maidens). Horror is something else and its literature has another funda-

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mental structure. Horror is a moral and metaphysical condition having nothing to do with physical danger but, rather, everything to do with the shock of encounters with ultimate indecencies, with themes of moral nihilism and moral disgust. Terror is the mode of fear that triggers a burst of adrenaline and a pounding heart; the somatic signs of horror, as Majendie, a very expert witness, said, and as other Mutiny writers confirm in scores of passages, are the opposite, a blanched lip and blood running cold, a sensation of paralysis, suffocation, nausea. “A scene of bloodshed and horror was inaugurated” on May 11, 1857, in Delhi, writes the army chaplain J.E.W. Rotton, “over the contemplation of which the heart grows sick” (21). His phrase can stand as a good general definition of the state we are examining. Also, horror in its distinctively modern, which is to say psychologized, versions seems always to contain the reflexive movement that is so vividly annotated in Heart of Darkness: the Manichaean moral scheme that forms the basis of the literature of terror is internalized and subjected to hysterical fluctuation in the literature of horror. Horror in this inflection specifically refers to a dread of oneself, in other words. The literary archive to be surveyed in what follows makes clear that one of the founding moments of the literature of horror in modern times is the moment of the Indian Mutiny. At least initially, the referent of the “unspeakable horror” that Merriman identifies (144) as the keynote of British responses to the Mutiny was the devilish abuse supposedly inflicted by the rebels upon the many helpless British captives, particularly women and children, whom they subsequently massacred. The bare fact of the series of massacres that took place at Meerut, Delhi, Jhansi, Bareilly, Futtehgur, and, supremely, at Cawnpore, among other locations, in the first weeks of the uprising was dreadful enough. “But the barbarities connected with these massacres are what fill the soul with horror,” writes Alexander Duff (38). Some writers, as we saw, regarded the barbarities as truly unspeakable, but others overstepped the bounds of decency to provide a wealth of dreadful detail. “One European family they caught, and, having stripped father, mother, and children, they chopped off their toes and fingers, tied them to trees, and burned them alive!” Duff reports (24). Another European in Duff’s account is slowly cut into pieces by rebels and his children are forced to eat his flesh before they are torn in two (63). Almost the worst of all for Victorian sensibilities were tales of the sexual defilement of the British ladies who were said to have been given up to the lusts of mobs in Delhi and elsewhere before being put to death in excruciating ways. It would be hard to imagine a clearer sign of the terrible break produced by the Mutiny than the circulation of such obscene materials in the cultural sphere of the respectable, anxiously refined, pious, humanitarian Victorian middle classes. It was as though a cultural floodgate had been opened

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to allow every forbidden sadistic nightmare suddenly to surge up into uncensored public view. The propaganda function of these abominable tales was, of course, to whip up fury against the rebels, but the avidity with which they were disseminated and consumed at the time suggested to more than one observer that they had brought to the surface something depraved in the British imagination itself—a suggestion soon rendered inescapable by the discovery that the atrocity stories were largely fictitious, “gross fabrications,” as Majendie (who claimed to believe them even so) said, “written to satisfy a morbid craving for horrors” (59). The idea of Mutiny horror as the revelation of the dark side of British national character is one on which we will focus, tracing it through a range of literary manifestations. The atrocity narratives were key indicators at all events that the Mutiny for the British at home was indeed “a very fantastic business” in which imaginary events and historically real ones intermingled uncontrollably. In order to grasp fully the culturally destabilizing effect of the real and the fantasized horrors of 1857, one needs to set them in the context of the broadly diffused Victorian ideology of reform, progress, improvement, and “civilization.” No conviction ran more deeply in Victorian thinking and self-representation than did the belief in the civilizing conquest of modern, enlightened principles over all that was brutish, violent, primitive. At home, this meant such things as sanitary reform, the abolition of bearbaiting and bare-knuckle boxing, reform of the penal code, and a world of similar initiatives that Harold Perkin sums up as “the moral revolution” of Victorian England (273–90); abroad, it meant the abolition of the slave trade and the imposing of British legal, moral, and religious norms upon indigenous populations of the empire. The strength of the national belief in this all-encompassing project reflected what may seem to be the conclusive sign of the deep coherence of the Victorian middle-class mentality: the powerful nexus of evangelical Christianity, the dominant cultural influence through at least the first half of the nineteenth century, and its philosophical adversary, rigorously rationalistic Benthamite Utilitarianism. As modes of inspiration and action if not as programs of belief, the two systems coincided irresistibly, as scholars have said, at the moment of the rise of Britain to unrivaled global power.4 It was in the immediate pre-Mutiny years that the national creed of modernization and improvement seemed to attain its apogee. The decade of the 1850s, symbolically launched by the glittering imagery of the Great Exhibition in 1851, signified for contemporaries the attainment of an era of burgeoning wealth and of a newly tranquil social climate in Britain after the conflicts of the “hungry” 1840s. In an editorial on the opening of Parliament in 1852, the Illustrated London News trumpeted the British sense of prosperity and national destiny. “The ‘condition of England’

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question, that a few short years ago was of such painful interest, is now most cheering,” the paper declares. “[An observer] will have much reason to rejoice at the position of his country,” and Parliament, the editorial writer concludes, “may well be proud . . . and thankful for the privilege of legislating for so great and so advancing a people” (Nov. 6, 1852, 369– 70). Such writing may seem inhabited by doubts that it strains all too hard to repress, and it is worth noting certain currents of melancholia and disaffection that appear in Victorian popular literature in these years. But the mood of national well-being was real and by no means wholly self-delusive. “Of all decades in [British] history, a wise man would choose the eighteen-fifties to be young in,” G. M. Young later declared, echoing the official spirit of the day (77). It was the prevalence of this mood that rendered the impact of the terrible dispatches from Bengal in the summer of 1857 immensely greater than perhaps would have been the case in any other historical context. But the creed of progress contained within itself a bad dream that had in fact haunted the slumbers of Victorian optimism and ideological solidarity well prior to the shock they were fated to suffer in the crisis of the Mutiny: the bad dream of a catastrophic reversion to the primitive. This idea appears in cultural history as the negative reflex of the evolutionary theory that was elaborated in works such as Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of Creation (1844) and, most influentially, in Herbert Spencer’s voluminous writings, and that was given its conclusive scientific form in Darwin’s Origin of Species at just this time (1859). Spencerian evolutionism gave its own expression to the Victorian ideological complex by predicting as a necessity of nature a linear upward movement from a condition of brutish primitivism toward increasingly harmonious and altruistic social existence. But it seems clear that the ideal of improvement in its several Victorian figurations was driven all along by an intuition that the primitive could never be exorcized or transcended after all—that if human beings had bestial or “savage” origins, these origins would always be latent in them: they would always carry within themselves as their natural heritage the more or less successfully repressed impulse of a relapse into bestiality and savagery. Civilization in this system of thinking is therefore, at least at the level of the ideological unconscious, irremediably precarious, always threatened from below by the unsubdued instincts that Freud would eventually term the id. Given the “solid layer of savagery [lying] beneath the surface of society,” Frazer declares in The Golden Bough, making explicit this deep-seated implication of evolutionary thought, “we seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below” (64). No other conviction was possible for a culture saturated to its roots, as Victorian England was, not

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just with evolutionary speculation but also with the original-sin theology of which it can be seen to represent, among other things, a sublimated rewriting. The upheaval in India took on special significance in this milieu since India itself had long represented a key site for the realization of the British ideal of progress, improvement, and civilization. The text that set forth in its classic form the blueprint for the Victorian enterprise of “civilizing” the Asian subcontinent was James Mill’s eight-volume History of British India (1818), a book that exercised an extraordinary historical influence by causing its author (and in the fullness of time, the author’s philosopher son) to be propelled into an influential position in the East India Company, from which position he fostered a Benthamite reform policy heavy with consequences for millions of Indians living under British rule. In this book, James Mill brings to bear upon unfortunate India the psychoideological structure that came to be recognizable as the distinctive Victorian type of (male) humanity—the puritanical, dogmatic, cold, forceful ideal of masculinity often mythologized in British novels of the second half of the nineteenth century. As this personality type, this major cultural formation, presents itself in The History of British India, it is marked by such dogmatic assurance and expresses itself in a voice of such authoritative self-confidence that it must have seemed at the time invulnerably unified, impressive in its massive wholeness, as though its program for setting the world right could never prove to be riven by stress lines running beneath its adamantine surface. For just this reason, it is a case history worth pursuing briefly. James Mill’s son John Stuart emphasizes in his Autobiography the implacable hatred of organized religion as “a great moral evil” taught him by his father, an apostate licensed preacher in the Calvinistic Kirk of Scotland; he emphasizes by the same token his own historical position as almost the first boy in England to grow up in a home cleansed of religion (25–29). But The History of British India, particularly in its excoriating commentary on Hinduism in volumes 1 and 2, makes clear that the Calvinistic religious personality could more easily be disavowed than rooted out of James Mill’s nature. “Even when he had lost his faith, he remained a zealot,” says his editor, William Thomas. “He shed Calvinist doctrine but retained the moral outlook it had shaped” (xv). Like the missionaries whom he cites admiringly in footnotes, Mill (who never laid eyes on India) scornfully denounces Hinduism as a false and corrupt, “base” and disgusting religion, a system “in the highest degree absurd, mean, and degrading” (157) that exhibits “the uncontrolable [sic] sway of superstition” (69) and inevitably depraves its adherents. In all this rhetoric, he is exactly in accord with missionary denunciations of “such a degrading

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idolatry as Hinduism” and of India as a land “where for ages Satan has reigned” and that represents, morally speaking, “one of the very darkest spots in heathendom” (Weitbrecht 149, 139, 147). In epitomizing so clearly “the aggressive Evangelical conception of the British civilizing mission,” Mill’s book offers in fact a textbook demonstration of the principle that, in Eric Stokes’s phrase, “the key . . . to the emotionalism of imperialism is the transposition of evangelicalism to wholly secular objects” (English Utilitarians 302, 308)—a transposition performed obviously at the cost of instituting a potentially profound disjunction at the core of Victorian moral culture and of imperialist ideology in particular. We can only pity peoples who come under the sway of foreign authorities so imbued with the conviction of their own righteousness, so wed to abstract dogmas, so barren of sympathy for ways of life differently organized from their own, so obsessed with ranking societies preferentially on “the scale of civilization,” and so eager to create practical agencies to remodel society according to their own prescriptions.5 My point here, though, is only to highlight the dangerously unstable compound of antithetical values that was implicit in the Benthamite/evangelical British project of civilizing India—and that underwent a shocking disintegration in the crisis of 1857, as we shall see. Inspired by Mill’s harsh assessment of Indian society, the East India Company carried out an energetic reform agenda pursued for the first time in India (more than seventy years after the establishment of British rule), as at home in England, in the 1830s under Governor-General Lord William Bentinck; it continued until the eve of the Mutiny under the most vigorous reformer of all, Lord Dalhousie, governor-general from 1848 to 1856. Previously, the Company, the supreme power in India since the battle of Plassey in 1757, had followed a policy of strictly avoiding any interference in Indian life, particularly in connection with religion, that might cause social disturbance; even suttee (sati), regarded by the British as supremely objectionable, was tolerated prior to Bentinck’s arrival in 1828. During the heyday of the reform period, the long-standing Company policy of noninterference was thrown to the winds. Suttee was prohibited, educational reform was strongly enacted (and came to nothing), Hindu widows were granted the legal right to remarry, Indian converts to Christianity were allowed to inherit property, and sweeping land reform was enacted to break up the feudal system and give ownership rights to peasant proprietors or ryots. This reforming “assimilationist” regime aiming to bring about, in the words of the ardent reformer Charles Trevelyan, “moral and intellectual emancipation” in India (qtd. Metcalf 14) may well be taken to epitomize Western cultural arrogance in its most megalomaniacal aspect. But the point most significant for the argument

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of this book is that British thinking was in spite of everything severely divided on the matter of Indian policy. As a result of the campaigning of the eminent Clapham Sect evangelical William Wilberforce, then the leader of a powerful bloc in Parliament, India had at last been opened to missionary activity in 1813. Even those in the Indian government who had at heart the goal of the ultimate conversion of the country to Christianity, however, dreaded the destabilizing effects of interference, and particularly of missionary activity, on the volatile religious sensitivities of Hindus and Muslims; and there remained a party in the lineage of the “Orientalists” (the opposite pole of the “assimilationists,” who dreamed of reforming India in the British image) Sir William Jones and Warren Hastings, who admired Indian culture, sought to preserve it, and deplored the intolerant condemnation of it by the likes of James Mill.6 “The people of this country do not require our aid to furnish them with a rule for their conduct, or a standard for their property,” Warren Hastings had declared (qtd. Stokes, English Utilitarians 3). As a result of the persistence of this sentiment as well as for reasons of prudence, missionary activity was severely constrained at the same time as it was ardently promoted in Victorian India. Bible education was not allowed in schools; despite vehement objections, the government continued to contribute to the preservation and management of temples and mosques and to give financial support to native religious festivals; evangelizing was prohibited in native army regiments; and so on. The rage of the missionaries at the lack of evangelizing zeal on the part of the governmental authorities knew no bounds. We will consider further this deep split in the Victorian and AngloIndian body politic, focusing in particular on its religious aspect, in later chapters. For now, I want to highlight the imagery used everywhere by Mutiny commentators to suggest that what occurred in India in 1857 was nothing less than that dreaded event both prohibited and implicitly foretold by evolutionary speculation, the reversion of a portion of the world supposedly redeemed by “civilization” to a state of primitive savagery. The sepoy rebels, says Charles Ball, in a formula that is ubiquitous in this literature, were possessed by a “ferocious craving for European blood,” like cannibals or carnivorous beasts. He later quotes Cardinal Wiseman’s declaration, in which the latent nightmare of evolutionary thinking comes sharply into view, that “these hordes of savage mutineers seem to have cast aside the commonest feelings of humanity, and to have not merely resumed the barbarity of their ancient condition, but borrowed the ferocity of the tiger in his jungle, to torture, to mutilate, to agonise, and to destroy” (1:269; 2:421). The widely voiced sense that the “scenes of dark and unbroken horror” (Duff 39) played out in India marked the threshold of “a new era . . . in the history of the world”

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expresses just this, not a recognition that imperial government needed to be put on a new political and/or military footing but the opening of an era infused by the prophetic awareness that henceforth what the archbishop of Canterbury called “deeds of atrocity such as we had vainly imagined the world would never again witness” (qtd. Ball 2:435) might at any moment recur. This awareness was made all the more frightening, as we shall see in a moment, by the discovery that the rebels were not alone in the commission of acts of tigerish ferocity. The Indian upheaval gravely impaired Victorian belief in the British colonial enterprise, which never again could be idealized as benevolent parenthood extended to grateful primitive children. Faith in the transformative power of British values and more broadly in the inevitable triumph of civilization and progress had been shaken decisively. And although missionaries and other religious polemicists strove to portray the ordeal of the Mutiny as a moral fable illustrating the need to extend “the regenerating, humanizing influences of the gospel” (Duff 74) more forcefully to the Indian population, it seems clear that British religious faith itself was deeply, perhaps irreparably, affected by the catastrophe of 1857. The massacres and their rumored attendant horrors threw brutally into question the Victorian assumption that “the English race” enjoyed the special favor and protection of the Almighty. They could unsettle even more fundamental religious assurances than that one. In Forrest’s novel Eight Days, the fictional counterpart of the pious war hero John Nicholson looks around the courtyard where he and a group of women, including his fiance´e, are about to be executed by the rebels7 and gives voice to the ultimate thought that the barbarities of the Mutiny must have aroused in many Victorian minds: “God! there is no God!” (3:116–17). The Anglican clergyman Charles Kingsley testifies in letters of 1857 to just this crisis of religious faith. “My brain is filled with images fresh out of hell and the shambles,” he writes, exemplifying that state of paralyzed horror that the Mutiny injected strongly into the psychological repertoire of the nation. “I can think of nothing but these Indian massacres. The moral problems they involve make me half wild. Night and day the heaven seems black to me” (1:61). “I deny . . . that there is a Providence,” declares the heroic Frenchman Deprat in L. E. Ruutz Rees’s memoir of the terrible siege of Lucknow (219). “SOMBRE AND FEROCIOUS INSTINCTS” The horror that the Indian Mutiny provoked in Victorian Britain, as I am trying to suggest, was a multiplex phenomenon in which various factors of great cultural potency were almost inextricably fused together. We get

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a keen insight into an especially significant one from the famous war correspondent of the Times, William Howard Russell, who reported in person on the later phases of the rebellion and whose My Diary in India of 1860 forms the centerpiece of the next chapter. The crucial factor in English reactions to the bloody events of 1857, says Russell, was race. “In fact, the peculiar aggravation of the Cawnpore massacres was this, that the deed was done by a subject race—by black men who dared to shed the blood of their masters and mistresses, and to butcher poor helpless ladies and children” (1:164). What was unbearably horrible was not simply that British victims were cruelly sacrificed but that the sacrificers were black. A lot of evidence to be surveyed in the following chapters lends credence to Russell’s hypothesis. I focus on this hypothesis here not so much by way of indicting Victorian racism one more time, however, as to highlight the guiding idea of the present book: that the Mutiny derived much of its harrowing and ideologically disruptive effect from exposing to view certain unrecognized compulsions in the national psyche and certain profound contradictions in a culture often portrayed then and now as more unified than it was. Knowingly in some cases and unconsciously in others, Mutiny literature shows Victorian commentators not just recoiling from crimes perpetrated by barbaric adversaries but also wrestling with the inner demons of Britain itself. I use this figure of speech advisedly, for imagery of demonic possession forms the ubiquitous dominant trope of Mutiny writing. It is, of course, the dark-skinned rebels who predominantly appear in the guise of demons in Victorian writing (as the devilish “Feringhees,” the Europeans, do in the proclamations issued by the rebels), but it must be said that this paramount trope is charged here with a heightened rhetorical burden that causes it everywhere to break down into hysteria and self-parodying mawkishness, as though the expressive wiring of the figure were unable to bear the voltage of feeling that it is being asked to conduct. An analyst of this rhetoric may wonder where the overload comes from, exactly. Tennyson’s “The Defence of Lucknow” (1858), in which the Indian attackers loom “Dark thro’ the smoke and the sulphur like so many fiends in their hell” (l. 33), offers a representative specimen of the most insistent imagery of Mutiny literature. “If the demons of hell had been let loose, with no restraint on their Satanic fury,” writes Alexander Duff similarly, “they could scarcely have exhibited villainies and cruelties more worthy of the tenants of Pandemonium” (23). The desperate British defenders of the Residency in Lucknow “were confronted by an Oriental foe, whose fiendish malice and cruelty to women and children are not known in civilized warfare,” writes the missionary William Butler, a survivor of the massacre at Bareilly who, interestingly, emphasizes that his denunciation of the rebels is free of racism: the Hindus, he stresses at the outset of The Land of

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the Veda, “are of the same Caucasian race as ourselves” (329, 16). Not only the mutineers in their momentary blood-frenzy but the whole population of India is permanently under the sway of the diabolical, according to the standard rhetoric of missionary writing at the time. Hence one lady missionary’s condemnation of the caste system, “that stronghold of superstition by which Satan has held the poor Hindus so long . . . in bondage”; this system is one of “the lying vanities by which Satan, in the form of Brahman priests, deludes the minds of myriads of people,” she says (Weitbrecht viii, 253). A network of motifs in Mutiny writing suggests at the same time that the idea of a close relation between sahibs and sepoys was crucial to British imagining of the events of 1857–59 and that the fiendishly vengeful sepoys who populate this body of writing may reveal themselves at last to be the projections, scapegoats, surrogates of some dread ultimately not external but internal, as racialized bogeys commonly are. Not only the hysterical demonizing of the mutineers but also the recurring note of highly charged emotional intimacy in descriptions of them tells us this. Many writers evoke the propensity of British officers of native infantry regiments for referring to their men as their “children,” stressing their intense affection for them and their often fatally misplaced trust in their love and fidelity even when regiment after regiment was going into murderous rebellion. Frequently these writers express regret over the dissipation in recent years of “the intimacy which it is said prevailed in the early days of English rule” (Ball 2:655) between sepoys and British officers who formerly spoke their language fluently, fraternized with them, and would have trusted them unhesitatingly with their lives and those of their wives and children. “They had associated with them, had joined in their sports,” says the officer historian G. B. Malleson, adding the provocative phrase, “and had in every way identified themselves with them” (Mutiny of the Bengal Army 126). Sir John Kaye speaks of “that fond and affectionate confidence” in their men felt by British officers (2:219). All this material in Mutiny literature testifies to the occurrence of a terrible break in previously harmonious relations between British officers and their sepoys, and more generally between British masters and their Indian subjects. To read such material as simply casting blame on the mutineers for betraying British trust (Baucom 106, 112) is to overlook, for one thing, the fact that it invariably blames the British officer corps, not the sepoys, for the collapse of the supposedly affectionate relations of an earlier era. Such a reading also obscures the insight strongly implied in all these passages that nothing could be more perverse and delusive or more likely to generate a dangerous substrate of rage than a system claiming to be based on “fond and affectionate confidence” between British masters and mercenary soldiers recruited from a population subjugated by force and ruled ever after

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by a despotic foreign government whose instruments they are. Most fundamentally, such a reading fails to grasp the profound strain of emotion that runs throughout this myth of betrayed interracial homosocial love. It would be hard to explicate a deeply motivated cultural complex like this one by means of a single formula. It seems evident that it functioned to some extent as both an expiatory and an explanatory myth for the tremendous outburst of murderous racial hatred that stands out unmistakably in the annals of the Mutiny. As we will see, one of the shattering revelations that Mutiny literature made to contemporary readers was its disclosure of the brutal racism that had become rampant in Victorian Anglo-Indian society; the myth of the love of British officers for their sepoys, even if only as a memory of bygone days, served in part as a plea of not guilty to this indictment. But it is the recurring portrayal of the relations between officers and sepoys as like that between fathers and sons that particularly draws one’s attention. The officers most likely to have been slaughtered in the first outbreaks, observes Duff, hinting at that insight just mentioned into the necessarily perverse, hatred-infested nature of love under such circumstances, “were those who had seemingly gained the strongest hold of the affections of their men; who had most entirely identified their interests with their own; who looked on them as children and companions, . . . and indulged them in every way consistent with discipline” (83). One officer quoted by Charles Ball reports finding the horribly mangled body of one Colonel Platt, who “was like a father to the men” and had been with them for more than thirty years (1:540). Rees, the memoirist of the siege of Lucknow, commonly refers to the insurgents, with heavy irony, as the “babalog,” a term that he glosses as “the ‘children’ or ‘dear children,’ the term by which old officers used to address the loyal sepoys in whom they had such confidence” (128). It is impossible to mistake, in other words, the current of Oedipal passion that enters into the “unspeakable horror” of the Mutiny as it is represented in contemporary literature. It expresses not just a violent political dislocation but also an upheaval at the deepest possible levels of feeling. The Oedipal motif comes out with particularly distinct luridness in a cartoon that appeared in Punch on October 24, 1857, titled “The Clemency of Canning” (figure 1). The cartoon portrays a benignantly paternal Lord Canning, the governor-general of India, seated in an armchair with his hand resting lovingly on the head of a child-sized sepoy—who in each of his own hands clutches a sword dripping with blood and whose uniform is stained with it. The satirical critique of Canning’s “clemency” proclamation of July 31, 1857, in this cartoon8 is almost secondary to the revelation of the horror of perverted paternal and filial affection that was imagined to have occurred in the Mutiny. What the cartoon screens from view, given its advocacy of

Figure 1. The Clemency of Canning, Punch, October 24, 1857

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a policy of unsparing punishment, is the horror of circumstances in which fathers find themselves called upon to slaughter their own beloved sons for their misbehavior. It is not screened in the comment of General Hope Grant that “war is always fearful, but a civil [he might have said familial] war of this nature was most terrible even to think of” (234). All this material tells us that the trauma of the Mutiny must at some point be interpreted with an eye to a deep-running logic of identification between the British and their ferociously disloyal “children.” Hilda Gregg quotes from George Alfred Lawrence’s 1867 Mutiny novel Maurice Dering (considered in chapter 3 below) a passage that points us to the heart of this logic. “Has any one of us forgotten the evil spring, when there swept over this country of ours a blast from the East? . . . Have we forgotten how, with each successive mail, the wrath and the horror grew wilder; till the sluggish Anglo-Saxon nature became, as it were, possessed by a devil, and through the length and breadth of the land . . . there went up one awful cry for vengeance?” (Maurice Dering 98). Devilishness here arcs across the racial divide in alarming fashion. In his History of the Sepoy War in India(1864–76), Kaye makes the point still more shockingly. The harsh punishment inflicted by British forces upon the mutineers was surely justified in the light of their terrible crimes, he declares; but the puritan moral sensibility is not long in turning back on itself in this text and in revealing its own troubled conscience. “What is dreadful in the record of retribution,” says Kaye at one point, “is, that some of our people regarded it not as a solemn duty or a terrible necessity, but as a devilish pastime, striking indiscriminately at the black races, and slaying without proof of individual guilt” (2:403). Charles Ball quotes an officer who recounts some especially dreadful atrocity tales and concludes with the question, “Can you wonder that . . . we feel more like fiends than men?” (1:98). One dimension of the horror instilled in British minds by the Mutiny, these passages suggest, is the discovery that the diabolical ferocity of the mutineers was matched or exceeded in the war by that of British Christians and led the latter to commit crimes of their own perhaps no less terrible than those of their “dear children.” Contrary to the scholarly legend that they went unacknowledged by Victorian chroniclers, these crimes, we shall see, are extensively documented in contemporary writings and are portrayed in many of them as violent shocks to the conscience of the nation. It becomes as a result a cardinal function of Mutiny literature to seek to account for the propensity of valorous, chivalrous British troops to act “more like fiends than men” and to commit sickening atrocities. We get in this literature both overt explanations of this problem and also more cryptic ones calling for a certain effort of deciphering. Officially the explanation was, as General Hope Grant comments in relation to the widely condemned murder of

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three captive Indian princes by Major William Hodson outside Delhi, that “war—and especially such a fearful war as we were waging—blunts the finer feelings of humanity, and prompts many to deeds which in cool blood the perpetrators would be the first to shudder at” (135). British officers and troops and Anglo-Indian civilians were so crazed with grief and horror at the cruelties of the rebels that they were for the time not responsible for their actions. But a disturbing question keeps intruding upon such morally analgesic formulas: could it be that savage excesses on the part of the British forces in this war were not, after all, momentary aberrations committed in the fury of war but signals of essential characteristics? Did the circumstances of the Mutiny simply afford an opportunity for a strain of devilish cruelty native to the British character to cast off its garments of Christian piety and humanitarian sentiment and reveal itself in plain view? Writing in 1865, Sir George Trevelyan memorably expounds just this thesis. Maddening apocryphal tales of atrocities committed against Englishwomen and children, he declares, “served but to evoke from the depths of our nature the sombre and ferocious instincts which religion and civilization can never wholly eradicate” (234). Giving voice to the proto-Freudian bad dream that haunts evolutionary ideology, as we saw, Trevelyan suggests that the terrible break provoked by the Mutiny was ultimately a psychic or existential break at the heart of “our nature,” the one between our civilized, humane self and a barbaric monster that turns out to have been a primitive “survival” resident within us all along, biding its time in secret, awaiting a chance to spring forth. It was in any event not only the sepoy mutineers who “had cast aside the commonest feelings of humanity, and . . . borrowed the ferocity of the tiger in his jungle, to torture, to mutilate, to agonise, and to destroy.” Nor was Trevelyan alone in sounding this theme, which with its prevailing imagery of monstrous metamorphosis gave a drastic new ramification to the idea of the Mutiny as “a very fantastic business.” Scarcely a significant Victorian text on the Indian uprising fails to intimate this appalling possibility—more appalling by far to middle-class Victorians than the discovery of the fragility of British military hegemony on the Asian subcontinent. The ghost of Conrad’s devilishly depraved Mr. Kurtz hovers proleptically over this entire body of writing. In proposing that the Mutiny had released deep-dwelling barbarous impulses in pious, civilized British people, Trevelyan avoids a still more extreme possible suggestion: that the “sombre and ferocious instincts” that motivated British war crimes in India may not, after all, represent primitive adversaries of Christian religion and civilization kept down more or less effectively by them but, rather, essential components of religion and civilization themselves. At least from the time of the publication in 1854, three years before the Mutiny, of George Eliot’s English transla-

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tion of Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841), this heretical speculation had been in circulation in avant-garde intellectual circles in Britain. The Christian slogan “God is love” is belied by the intolerance and despotism intrinsic to faith, Feuerbach had declared; when these motives are in the ascendant, “God appears to me in another form besides that of love; in the form of omnipotence, of a severe power not bound by love; a power in which . . . the devils participate” (52). Thus “there lurks in the background of love . . . an unloving monster, a diabolical being, whose personality, separable and actually separated from love, delights in the blood of heretics and unbelievers,—the phantom of religious fanaticism” (52–53). It is of the very essence of religious feeling to imagine the God we worship as “a monster, a Nero or a Caligula,” says Feuerbach (202); “herein lies the noxious source of religious fanaticism, the chief metaphysical principle of human sacrifices, in a word, the prima materia of all the atrocities, all the horrible scenes, in the tragedy of religious history” (197). The “malignant principle” (252) of the absolute truth of God leads necessarily, he declares, to “the flashings of the exterminating, vindictive glance which faith casts on unbelievers” (255) and the centrality of the motive of blood revenge in religious tradition and religious sensibility. Among a host of chilling biblical texts proclaiming this motive, Feuerbach quotes, for example, 2 Thessalonians 1:7–10, which announces that “the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ” (258). Nothing is more quintessentially Christian, Feuerbach tells his readers, than that special form of demonic possession that expresses itself in a fanatical impulse to slaughter and exterminate those who are not Christians—and that habituates the moral imagination, we may add, to operating in a mode shot through with phantasmagoric visions of violence. John Stuart Mill, one of a network of Victorian freethinkers who, based on what they had seen of modern-day piety, shared Feuerbach’s view of the malignancy of the religious spirit,9 gives it a slightly different inflection in his Autobiography, chiefly composed between 1853 and 1861. He admiringly recites his father’s portrayal of the Christian God as “the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human mind can devise,” a diabolical sadist who brought the human race into existence for no other reason than to consign “the great majority of them . . . to horrible and everlasting torment.” But we note for important future reference that Mill’s diagnosis of the Victorian religious personality (26–29) stresses what he sees not as a single totalitarian mentality but as an irresolvable split between two sharply contrary impulses. Modern religion, this shrewd analyst says, consists of “a theory involving a contradiction in terms” and the combining of “things inconsistent with one another.”

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These things are, on the one hand, a “dreadful conception of an object of worship” and, on the other, “that which constitutes the principal worth of all religions whatever, an ideal conception of a Perfect Being, to which [people] habitually refer as the guide of their conscience.” A devotion to humane and altruistic moral principles coexists with the religious glorification of what goes unrecognized as a demonic being, or, to phrase the same complex of occluded recognition differently, the demonic being maintains in this system of thinking a covert existence behind a screen of idealistic values. Mill is optimistic enough to state that the worship of most Christians “was not paid to the demon which such a Being as they imagined would really be, but to their own ideal of excellence,” but it is hard to know whether the accent of this text falls at last on the affirmation of moral value despite the demonic logic of theology or, rather, on the subliminal presence of religious demonism in an era of moral uplift. Mill’s analysis of the religious imagination of his countrymen as bound up in this mystified conjunction of two opposite principles, one of cruel punitiveness and one of idealized benevolence, chimes closely in any case with other texts of the time and throws a strong raking light across the whole field of Mutiny literature. In giving the emphasis that I do in this study to the factor of religion in the history of the Mutiny, I seek not at all to abstract this war from the history or the infernal logic of nineteenth-century imperialism but only to insist that at this crucial moment in that history, the nexus of religion and the ideology and practice of domination was itself crucial. British Christianity, for one thing, was a powerful force on the ground in this war, since many of the most influential British commanders were zealous, old-fashioned Calvinistic evangelicals whose religious temperaments by all accounts dictated their conduct of military operations; and the religious influence is if anything even more prominent in Mutiny history on the discursive level. In Mutiny literature (a significant portion of which comes from the pens of missionaries and other clergy, and in which the leading British military figures are commonly portrayed as Christian crusaders against heathenism), religious thematics are all-pervasive. All in all, no adequate understanding of the Indian Mutiny is possible that fails to see it, in one of its facets, as enacting one of “the horrible scenes” that go, as Feuerbach says, to constitute “the tragedy of religious history” (197). And no understanding of the mood of horror and traumatic disillusionment that it incited in the British public is possible that fails to take into account the way in which this war signified for contemporaries a specifically religious trauma. On the one hand, as we saw, its titanic cruelties were enough to make pious folk doubt the existence of God. Almost worse was the discovery of the latent demonic potential within religious devotion itself.

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“The barbarism of the Nana Sahib and others, the fanaticism of the Mohammedans of Lucknow and Delhi, made the Mutiny appear something of a religious conflict to the eyes of an England for which religion was fast becoming the predominant factor of life,” writes J. C. Pollock, a pious modern-day hagiographer of the war hero Sir Henry Havelock, an extreme (Baptist) evangelical whose military career was long impeded by his own reputation as a religious “fanatic.” “New ideals were emerging in the England of the eighteen fifties when, as never before, Christian faith and ethics were becoming the mainsprings of the lives of the people.” Havelock became in this context, we are told by Pollock, the consummate “Christian hero,” a man whose inspirational example triggered “a national exaltation of Christ” (208, 256, 249). The historian G. Kitson Clark partly corroborates the above account, speaking of what he calls “the second Evangelical revival” in Britain beginning in 1859 and arguably lasting until about 1865 (22, 188), though he fails to mention the war in India as a possible cause for it.10 It makes perfect sense, given all the logic of Christian and particularly evangelical devotionalism, that the current of religious despair provoked by the Mutiny would itself have fueled a flare-up of revivalism in the immediate aftermath of the war. Nothing is more intimately connected to religious fervor, for Christians of a certain temperament, than pangs of despair. But Pollock’s chronology is erroneous in an important respect. The upsurge of Calvinistically tinged piety that flowed from the Methodist revivalism of the eighteenth century and that profoundly shaped the Victorian ethos in the nineteenth was not at all a new growth at the time of Havelock’s rise to national celebrity status in the Mutiny; in fact, it was already markedly in decline in the increasingly secular, increasingly liberal 1850s. The great evangelical movement that had crested around 1830 was a memory of an earlier generation. Given the differential rates at which cultural decay proceeds in the metropole and in colonial territories, the situation in India was different, for the evangelical and Calvinistic impulse that was on the wane in England by 1857 retained much of its primitive power in Anglo-Indian society. The British enterprise in India was in fact deeply rooted in biblical culture and in the doctrine that “England owes a duty to India, and that is, to strive for her conversion to Christ” (Weitbrecht 210). “There was a great uplifting of the Christian flag in India,” wrote R. E. Forrest; the Clapham Sect was very powerful, both in the Board of Control and in the Board of Directors (of the East India Company) in England; the last ruler of these Provinces had been the son of a missionary; . . . it was desired to make the government of India of a distinctly Christian character; missionary effort was favoured (all of which, doubtless, had its influence in bringing about the coming “Mutiny”);

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men in high official positions professed—in the religious meaning of the word—Christianity, and promulgated it; piety spelled promotion, prayer paid. (1.90)11 As was noted above, the East India Company had always followed a policy of determined resistance to the Christianizing mission, fearing that the attempt to evangelize India would arouse Indian alarm and resentment and destabilize British rule. To the outrage of the religious establishment, the Company never failed to parade its tolerance and even its financial support of native religions, and it promoted, in the place of Christian religious enthusiasm, an ethos of businesslike exploitation of Indian resources. The last thing the authorities wanted was the inflaming of Indian religious sensibilities that proselytizing was sure to cause. The result of these circumstances was a chronic state of religious tension in the British community that writers of the day depict as a low-level civil war of a kind not entirely unlike the one that Hope Grant described, the one that broke out in 1857 between the British and their native Indian “children.” Religious polemicists assailed the government in the most intemperate terms of abuse for betraying the national mission to convert India at last to Christianity. As one missionary pamphleteer put it, expressing views widely disseminated at the time, “the Government . . . have always fondled and favoured superstition and idolatry” (A. D. 11). The government position of official neutrality in religious matters “dishonours the truth of God,” says another ( Indian Crisis 4). Mrs. Weitbrecht’s Missionary Sketches in North India (1858) is particularly direct in accusing the government of being effectively in league with Satan. “The Christian rulers of India have . . . allowed themselves to become patronisers of idolatry, persecutors of missionaries, and discouragers of Christian inquiry and Christian profession among their heathen subjects,” she declares (viii—ix). “The Christianisation of India ought to be regarded as the ultimate end of our continued possession of it” (xii), but “Britain has been disloyal to her God, and has compromised herself with idolatrous systems” (6); the Indian government acts “in a spirit little short of hostility towards Christianity” (59). This writer shrewdly draws the key lesson of this set of circumstances: that British society has discovered in India that for all its imposing facade of unity, it is at odds with itself. A nation whose cultural identity in the nineteenth century was largely derived from its powerful current of evangelical sensibility here had adopted a policy antagonistic to that very element. “History furnishes no parallel of a people governing a conquered nation on the principle of repudiating its own faith,” she declares; Britain has instituted in India “a government intolerant of its own religion,” one that strives “to hold India a preserve for heathenism” (28). In her analysis of a deep fracture dividing Britain into

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two antagonistic identities, the religious and the perversely antireligious, she reminds us of Mill’s diagnosis of a slightly different fracture in national religious feeling, or of that of John Ruskin in Unto This Last, published two years later: “I know of no previous instance in history of a nation’s establishing a systematic disobedience to the first principles of its professed religion,” he declares, with regard to the un-Christian science of wealth being elaborated by political economy (203). Once the calamity of the Indian uprising occurred, evangelical controversialists took the standard line of proclaiming it a divine judgment upon the British for failing in their religious obligations.12 (They skim over the fact that in this interpretation, innocent British women and children captives rather than the culpable officials of the East India Company were chosen to bear the brunt of divine indignation.) At the same time, in obedience to the contorted logic informing theological arguments of this kind and which Mill’s analysis of the conundrum of Victorian religious morality helps one parse, these writers condemned the mutineers, the instruments of divine chastisement of the faithless British, for their fiendish wickedness and were in the forefront of public calls for executing policies of extravagantly severe vengeance against them. These polemics make a head-spinning but also illuminating episode in cultural history that goes far, some might say, to confirm Feuerbach’s and Mill’s diagnoses of the intolerance and ferocious vindictiveness that they claim to lie at the core of the Christian mentality. The Rev. Alexander Duff thus denounces Canning for the “crowning and consummating sin” of having issued a proclamation inviting all religions in India to worship in harmony with one another without singling out Christianity as exceptional. It is, Duff declares, “as if [Canning were] afraid or ashamed to allude to the existence of the only true religion—that on whose origination and maintenance, and outspreading, the energies of the Godhead are embarked” (150–51). Malleson, the military officer and historian, for his part, concisely expresses the internal division of the British imperial establishment in his eulogy of the venerated Sir Henry Lawrence, who died as almost the first British casualty in the siege of Lucknow. He was, Malleson declares, “a good Christian” able to pursue at one time “the interests of his country and of his God,” unlike the irreligious British government, which takes the two interests to be “antagonistic” (Mutiny of the Bengal Army 161). At the heart of modern Britain, such writers allege, is not just a worldly indifference to the Christian religion that is officially the national faith but a treacherous betrayal of it. Like J. S. Mill, though of course from an antithetical perspective, they see the British religious spirit as fundamentally divided against itself. The self-division that they diagnose is in fact the very one exemplified in the case of James Mill, the ardent Calvinist

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whose religious fervor takes the apostate form of a rejection of religious belief itself as “a great moral evil.” Unlike the temporizing, commercially minded central government, however, the Indian military and civil establishment, particularly in the frontier region of the Punjab, which played a key role in suppressing the rebellion, was a stronghold of the militant evangelical Christianity that was widely seen elsewhere as an anachronistic survival from an earlier time. Here it was that the “great uplifting of the Christian flag in India” principally took place. Many of the leading military figures of the war— Havelock, Neill, Nicholson, Sir Henry and Sir John Lawrence, Herbert Edwardes, Colonel Stephen Wheler, Hope Grant, and others—were figures of that austere Calvinistic piety that may have been in recession but still ran strongly in mid-Victorian metropolitan culture. It certainly runs strongly in contemporary Mutiny literature. Many of its leading authors, including scholarly historians such as Ball, Martin, and Kaye, proclaimed their own religious zeal in their writings and thought it relevant to insert theological disquisitions on the superiority of Christian religion to Hinduism and Islam, as well as passionate briefs in favor of missionary proselytizing, into their works. These books leave little doubt that the Indian Mutiny, including the literature to which it gave rise at the time, must be seen to some significant degree as a testimony to the deep religious basis of Victorian civilization. These same writers define this basis with some precision in their frequently employed device of portraying the “stern” British officers of the war as revenants from an earlier age—specifically, as reincarnations of the Puritan warriors of seventeenth-century England. Their anachronistic character is essential to the charisma and prestige with which they are endowed in Victorian Mutiny literature. Henry Havelock was recognized in India to be a Christian, writes the Rev. William Brock in his 1860 biography, “not as men now usually are, according a faint belief to the doctrines taught in childhood, but a man of the true old Puritan stamp.” “The well-known characteristics of the Ironsides of Cromwell distinguished Havelock remarkably,” he writes later. “Belief in Providence possessed his soul” (26, 133–34). The equation of Havelock and other officers with Cromwell and his mode of primitive piety forms one of the common tropes of Mutiny writing, which, while it thus formulates the theme of the split in British religion as one between the spiritually robust past and the enfeebled present, persistently takes the glory of British victories in this war to signify a revival of ancient national religious devotion. Kaye describes Neill, whose harsh punitiveness made him a controversial figure at the time, as “a God-fearing Scotchman, with something in him of the old Covenanter type” (2:130).13 The historian W. H. Fitchett similarly highlights Neill’s descent “from a line of Covenanting ancestry” and

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praises Havelock’s ability to inspire in his men “a touch of that sternness of valour we associate with Cromwell’s Ironsides” (71, 124). These are all laudatory references, but they carried potentially alarming overtones for mid-Victorian readers, whose attitudes toward the Puritan tradition of England and, say, toward Cromwell’s genocidal persecutions of Catholics in Ireland was likely to be ambivalent. Just how ambivalent is suggested in one sharply dissident variation on the trope we are discussing in James Grant’s Mutiny novel First Love and Last Love (1868), which I will discuss more at length in the epilogue. An English girl who has been taken captive in the palace in Delhi is, the narrator says, “sickened and disgusted by the incessant amount of religion expressed by [her Muslim captors] on all occasions, and by their unwearying profession of their faith”; she is reminded, “after all the atrocities they had committed,” of the English Puritans and especially of the Covenanters, “who slew their foes in cold blood, and quoted Scripture most glibly while doing so” (286). Seen from a certain angle of disenchantment, as the reader is reminded at this point, the Puritan warrior tradition of England that seemed reborn magnificently in Upper India in the “Red Year” of the Mutiny is not an inspiring but a repellent and terrifying one in which Christian religion takes just the sinister form that Feuerbach calls “fanaticism.” Nothing in the dynamic of imperialism conceived as a system of economic exploitation—that is, with the passions incident to “the transposition of evangelicalism to wholly secular objects” left out—and nothing in mainstream British culture of the complacent 1850s prepares one for the crazed bloodthirstiness that stamps itself, particularly in the first six months, on British responses to the rebellion. The tone of much Mutiny literature is precisely the tone defined by Feuerbach as that of Christian faith in its essential form, the one fixated upon the infliction of “exterminating” vengeance not merely upon, say, disgusting Hindu cultural practices but, in the scriptural phrase, upon “those that know not God, and that obey not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.” This spirit may be sampled in distilled form, to mention just one illustrative text for now, in Malleson’s Mutiny of the Bengal Army, of which the first part (the influential “red pamphlet”) appeared in late 1857. Following an initial wave of “despair” at the fate of the victims of the massacres, Malleson reports, “there sprang up in its place a desire for retaliation, an unrepressed eagerness for vengeance” (171); the British community in Calcutta especially, he reports, was “mad for vengeance” (112). (The idea that religious vengefulness may arise as a compensatory outgrowth of “despair”—as effectively a substitute for, rather than an integral element of, faith—makes a provocative addendum to Feuerbachian theory.) Malleson’s book is a concentrated polemic in praise of vengefulness and the lex talionis (an eye for an eye) and in condemnation of the “shrinking

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from severe punishment” on the basis of “abstruse legal technicalities” that supposedly characterized the policies of Canning and other pusillanimous officials (46, 54). In a memorable final passage describing the fall of Delhi to the British assault in mid-September 1857, Malleson applauds the savage slaughter of sepoys and civilians alike that took place in the streets. All over the city, “the injured husband, son, or brother took his blood for blood,” until, regrettably, he writes, “the reign of red tape supervened” (214). Another vivid image of this spirit that appeared at just this moment would be the astonishing cartoon of “Justice” that was published in Punch on September 12, 1857 (figure 2). It is an image in which the religious dimension of its appeal is diplomatically veiled; most notably veiled, though, as though shocking candor like Malleson’s needed for the moment to be suppressed, is the wild personal craving for revenge and the scorn for legality that possessed many Britons at the time, both in India and at home. Rather, retaliatory massacres of Indians are depicted here in an ennobled, idealistic, allegorized form, as the dispassionate execution of righteous judgment. The female figure of Justice, her blindfold removed, is in the process of butchering piles of sepoys with her huge sword—an abstracted version of a kind of event that in fact transpired repeatedly in Mutiny battles—as orderly ranks of British soldiers (described so differently by Malleson as running amok, “[wild] for vengeance” [147]) calmly and methodically bayonet more sepoys alongside her. In the background, the viewer makes out a row of artillery pieces with sepoys lashed to the muzzles, ready to endure the frightful punishment, much favored by British commanders for its supreme deterrent value, of being “blown from the cannon’s mouth.” Yet if we look closely, there is one anomalous element in the composition: the group of grieving Indian women in the right background, some pleading desperately and in vain for mercy on their husbands. This part of the design looks very much like the bad conscience of the massively concerted retributionist imagery of this work peeking out despite all attempts to repress it. The hyperbolic cruelty and violence of Malleson’s early historical tract and of this image from Punch reverberate in innumerable texts of the period, which often seem polarized between the two mental states that we can see by now as complementary and closely interlinked: horrorstricken paralysis—the state so characteristic of those at home waiting in “agonizing suspense” for news from India—and an almost demented craving for vengeance. The national cry of “blood for blood” was only to be expected in the wake of the mass killings of defenseless British men, women, and children that occurred in India in the spring and summer of 1857. Censorious academics who write about it as a reprehensible thing might as well complain about the immorality of hurricanes and floods or

Figure 2. Justice, Punch, September 12, 1857

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of grizzly bears that attack those who come too near their cubs. But the spasm of rage and vindictiveness given iconic representation in The Mutiny of the Bengal Army and in “Justice” represented, for all that, a hugely anomalous cultural phenomenon in this society that habitually idealized the cluster of values based on philanthropy, benevolence, mercy, forgiveness, and compassionate sympathy; that idolized Dickens, whose novels promulgated just such values; and that took as its defining mission to cleanse social life of the vestiges of the brutal violence of past ages that had managed to linger into a proudly enlightened and humanitarian modern day. The eruption of this spirit of atavistic ferocity for six months in 1857 brought suddenly into the highest possible relief, in other words, exactly that discordance of values that for J. S. Mill defined the religious thinking of his countrymen, and in so doing, it forced a self-recognition upon British society that came as a traumatizing blow to the national conscience: so I argue in this book. Unlike scholars who take as axiomatic the massively unified motivation of imperialist society, I stress evidence of profound internal disjunctions. The clear sign of these disjunctions is that the policy of exacting unrestrained vengeance in India came quickly, in a reversion of public feeling for which there do not seem to be many equivalents in modern history, to be intensely controversial, to inflict painfully high levels of cognitive dissonance on many middle-class Victorians, and to take over the moral foreground of contemporary commentary. “Chapter and verse are quoted against revenge,” observes a piece in Punch on October 10, 1857, scornfully rebuking those who urge their countrymen in the Indian crisis to “blend mercy with justice” (154). “But chapter and verse must be construed reasonably,” declares this writer, so as to justify the extreme forms of retaliation against the rebels, that is, the mass immolation, evoked in the cartoon just considered. The argument continues in a theological vein. “Doubtless the burning indignation which such crimes excite arises from a sentiment implanted in man, on purpose, to secure the punishment of atrocious criminals,” opines the writer. In this exemplary instance of what Feuerbach calls the “diabolical sophisms” of religious ferocity (265), the primal impulses of murderous vindictiveness that are seen to burst forth in British bosoms are given unqualified approval. But the extraordinary feature of this minor item of wartime journalism is, of course, its acknowledgment that the party of extreme vengefulness, or extreme justice, had no monopoly on debate, even at that traumatized moment in the immediate wake of the massacres, when racial rage and xenophobia were running at flood tide. “Chapter and verse are quoted against revenge”: it seems that Victorian religion, the potential of which to take the form of “a power in which . . . the devils participate” is so harshly exemplified by a writer such as Alexander Duff, is experiencing what J. S. Mill called “a contradiction in terms” in this crisis. Does

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Christian religion call for justice or for mercy? Is the self-contradiction itself the crisis? Self-contradiction stands out unmistakably, in any case, in texts to which I have been referring in this chapter. “There is a loud cry for the visitation of retributive justice on the hosts of unpardonable murderers,” declares Duff, who by the phrase “retributive justice” unambiguously means “total liquidation.” “And all this is right, thoroughly right and Christian, in its way” (148). The note of defensiveness that enters Duff’s homily as he seeks to give religious warrant to the annihilation of “hosts” of guilty heathens is too plain to need much comment. The same note takes a more bombastic form in Malleson. He offers in one notable passage one of the earliest commentaries on Colonel James Neill’s institution of “strange law” in Cawnpore, according to which condemned rebels, before being put to death, were forced to defile themselves religiously by wiping or licking up blood from the pavement where the great massacre had taken place. “It may appear incredible, but it is a fact,” declares this author, “that the high civilians . . . in Calcutta, disapproved of this proceeding, pronouncing it unchristian.” But Neill, says Malleson admiringly, “was not to be disturbed by the scruples of men who were ever the most violent antagonists of their own religion, and, in spite of their remonstrances, the wiping up the blood and the hanging went on without interruption” (166). It is scarcely too much to say that for Malleson and many other writers of the time, the essential conflict in 1857 was not the one between the British and the Indian rebels but the one that had long been waged between true British religious faith and virtue and those spiritual subversives who in seeking to restrain the forces of retribution represented the diabolical other side of the British character, “the most violent antagonists of their own religion.” A provocative body of recent scholarship by Ian Baucom, James Buzard, Katie Trumpener, Linda Colley, and others has investigated the formation of the British sense of national identity and has shown it to have been a process fraught with instability and anxiety, persistently precarious and needing to be secured as well as possible by a variety of cultural strategies. Baucom’s Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity is particularly germane here. Far from acting as an anchor of British national identity, he argues, the empire acted to undermine it. “The empire . . . is less a place where England exerts control,” he proposes in a striking aphorism, “than the place where England loses command of its own narrative of identity. It is the place onto which the island kingdom arrogantly displaces itself and from which a puzzled England returns as a stranger to itself” (3). The history of imperialism, he suggests, is that of “the loss of Englishness” (6). Baucom’s focus falls on the dread of external contamination, particularly racial contamination,

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that has caused English people over the centuries to recoil from their imperial connections, to seek to glorify an “authentic” English past as a basis for present identity, and to erect various barriers to the invasion of the nation by racial aliens. The materials I have been citing suggest both the cogency of some of Baucom’s formulas and also their inapplicability in some respects to the case of the Mutiny. His insistence on the predominant role played in imperial history by British racism and xenophobia impels him, as I noted in the preface, to join the chorus of those who claim that the British invariably, at least until the 1925 publication of Edward Thompson’s The Other Side of the Medal, portrayed themselves as blameless victims of native treachery in the Mutiny. (A glance even at the violent retributionist Malleson’s Mutiny of the Bengal Army, with its unrestrained polemics against the “dark deed” [12] of “the immoral and illegal annexation of Oudh” [83] and against the “lust of territory and misgovernment” that have characterized British rule in India [94], would have disabused him of this idea.) The Mutiny certainly did enact a crisis of identity for the British nation, which seemed to discover at this historical watershed that in crucial ways it was indeed “a stranger to itself.” The source of this shocked discovery seems not chiefly to have been any fear of racial or other contamination by contact with India, however, even though suggestive materials pointing in this direction may be found.14 The chief source was the discovery of that fatal rift or dissociation of sensibility in British national character itself that J. S. Mill subsequently identified with Victorian religious thinking in particular. This schism in British moral and spiritual identity was increasingly registered at this time as a psychological deformation or breakdown. Two weeks after the appearance of “Justice” in Punch, Canning diagnosed this condition in a letter to Queen Victoria in which he deplored “the violent rancour of a very large proportion of the English Community against every native Indian of every class.” He describes this rancor as a mania of essentially genocidal character. “There is a rabid and indiscriminate vindictiveness abroad . . . which it is impossible to contemplate without something like a feeling of shame for one’s fellow-countrymen. Not one man in ten seems to think that the hanging and shooting of 40, or 50,000 Mutineers besides other rebels, can be otherwise than practicable and right” (qtd. Maglagan 140–41). Five days later (September 30, 1857), Disraeli gave a speech at Newport Pagnell in which he offered a lapidary statement of this state of affairs, which he specifically identified with an upsurge of perverted religion. “I have heard things said, and seen them written of late,” he declared, “which would make me almost suppose that the religious opinions of the people of England had undergone some sudden change; and that instead of bowing before the name of Jesus, we were preparing to revive the worship of Moloch” (“Mr. Disraeli” 10).15 The

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astonishing image of Jesus undergoing what amounts to a metamorphosis into “Moloch, horrid king besmeared with blood / Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears” (Milton, Paradise Lost 1:392–93) presents the sharpest possible articulation of the idea of a fatal self-contradiction inhabiting “the religious opinions of the people of England.” It chimes exactly with Feuerbach’s assertion that “there lurks in the background of [Christian] love . . . an unloving monster, a diabolical being, whose personality . . . delights in the blood of heretics and unbelievers” and with J. S. Mill’s evocation of the “dreadful conception of an object of worship” lying beneath the morally idealistic outward form of nineteenth-century British Christianity. To think of such an idea being broached on a public political platform in 1857 is to get a sense of how profoundly the Mutiny had thrown into jeopardy the image that the British people had of themselves. Disraeli’s imagery embodies what proves to be a typical effect of expressionistic, hallucination-laden Mutiny narrative, where surreal extremes of horror lead in one text after another to breakdowns of personality that seem to expose elemental states of feeling (or, as often seems to be the case, elemental absences of feeling). Writers never cease declaring—usually, it is true, in terms of patriotic affirmation—that the ordeal of the Mutiny brought to light the roots of “the true British character” (Ball 1:81). (To the extent that I make use of this suppositious category in the present study, I take my cue from a constellation of Victorian examples.) But in intensively scripting the Mutiny as a fable and a crucible of the national character, these writers make clear all along that the British character appeared to contemporaries as a haunted one riven with anxiety. As we shall discuss more fully in later chapters, it had become one of the key themes of popular psychological speculation (and popular fiction) in the nineteenth century that respectable, humanitarian British personality contained within itself a frightening alter ego driven by an instinct of cruelty. In introspective moments, observes the narrator of Marie Corelli’s 1895 novel The Sorrows of Satan, distilling this long-standing Victorian intuition, every man “frequently hates himself,—sometimes he even gets afraid of the gaunt and murderous monster he keeps hidden behind his outwardly pleasant body-mask” (37). The Cromwellian and Covenanting apparitions who fill Mutiny literature in the always iconically “stern” figures of Neill, Havelock, Nicholson, and the rest must have seemed to readers in this context like images of the punishing Puritan forefathers of the Victorian self rising up not so much from the pages of history as from “the depths of our nature” into contemporary actuality. At the same time, the realization running at a subliminal level throughout Mutiny literature is that “the gaunt and murderous monster” notoriously inhabiting Victorian personality may finally be nothing other than just this ancestral fig-

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ure, the specter of the profound Old Testament heritage of nineteenthcentury Britain. We return by way of this train of effects, in other words, to another gothic drama of fathers and sons. In the classic Victorian middle-class Oedipal narrative that is acted out in such texts as David Copperfield, Mill’s Autobiography, Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, or Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, the overshadowing authoritarian father appears as the distinctive Victorian manifestation of the structure that psychoanalysis calls the imago, the imaginary “residue” or “prototype” of parents or other figures from childhood that predominates in unconscious life ever after.16 In the literature of the Mutiny, James Neill, John Nicholson, Henry Havelock, and other stern, pitiless, moralistic, deeply religious military leaders play the role of father figures in an augmented sense, not merely incarnating “the terrifying father” (Laplanche and Pontalis 211) who manifestly was a strong psychosocial presence in many Victorian households, but incarnating also the ancestral or mythic father of the nation at large. To be a true Briton (at least a true British male), Mutiny literature insistently teaches, is to be spiritually descended from the Puritan origins brought back to life in the cadre of pious British commanders whose selfsacrifice in India (Neill, Nicholson, and Havelock all perished in the war) preserved British supremacy there. Mutiny writers make clear, moreover, that the mythic national father collectively represented by these heroes of Britain stood in turn for no less eminent a paternal prototype than Jehovah himself, the stern meter-out of justice to faithless nations. This is the idea that is in William Butler’s mind as he justifies “the alleged severities which some of the English soldiers and commanders inflicted upon those red-handed Sepoys” (313) by triumphantly citing Deuteronomy 32:43, a passage in which Moses praises the inflicting of retribution upon national enemies: “Rejoice, O ye nations, with [the Lord’s] people: for he will avenge the blood of his servants, and will render vengeance to his adversaries, and will be merciful unto his land, and to his people.” As though betraying his own trace of the bad conscience that insinuates itself even into the most vociferously patriotic Mutiny discourse, Butler fails to quote the preceding verse, where the psychopathology of divine revenge is made almost too clear, and where divine approval is expressly given for the unvarying British policy in India of murdering prisoners after battle: “I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh; and that with the blood of the slain and of the captives, from the beginning of revenges upon the enemy” (Deut. 32:42; Butler 457). To cite such a passage as this in 1871 was a highly charged cultural gesture and one that suggests again the great force with which the Mutiny had reacted back on the Victorians’ conception of themselves. The allpervading influence of evangelical spirituality on middle-class Victorian

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Britain was plain to all observers, as it has been plain to social historians ever since.17 But it must be repeated that this was a heritage from which progressive mid-century Victorians recoiled. The great cultural project of nineteenth-century Britain, one could say, was precisely to dissimulate this core element of Victorian identity or to sublimate its current of potentially barbaric harshness into sentimentalized humanitarianism, into a domesticated cult of “earnestness,” and into the gospel of improvement. The eruption of the vindictive savagery of Deuteronomy 32:42–43 into Butler’s book and many another book of the time was a demonstration that the “sombre and ferocious instincts” that the Victorians sought to put behind them had by no means spent their force and could still openly assert their cultural authority. On one level, it seemed to contemporary observers of such phenomena (Mill, for instance) as though the Victorian personality had split violently in two; on another, it felt like a discovery that the place of the fatherly Christian deity had been usurped in the crisis of the Mutiny by a diabolical interloper whose all-consuming love of vengeance was impossible to square with humanitarian morality: a Nero, a Caligula, a Moloch. My contention in the chapters to come is that the overriding horror of the Mutiny had ultimately much to do, to quote a letter of Charles Kingsley’s from September 1857, with a dawning suspicion not that “there is no God!” but something worse: “that God is the Devil, after all” (1:64).

TRAUMA The mode of cultural history by means of which I seek to trace this complex of developments in Victorian Mutiny literature is not psychoanalytic, but it borrows from psychoanalysis, along with the concept of the imago, the fundamental concept of psychological trauma. In defining it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud cites as “the most moving poetic picture of a fate such as this” (22) a hallucinatory episode from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered. The hero Tancred, who has unwittingly slain his beloved Clorinda in battle, enters a magic wood and strikes with his sword a menacing tree, in which her soul, to his horror, proves to be imprisoned. The tree bleeds and she cries out to him. O wonder! Blood gushed forth out of the wounded bark, and the whole ground suddenly grew vermilion all about. Though chilled with horror, with a second blow he struck it, and decided then to look. (13:41:2–6)

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This passage epitomizes for Freud, says Cathy Caruth in her suggestive book Unclaimed Experience, “the peculiar and sometimes uncanny way in which catastrophic events seem to repeat themselves for those who have passed through them” (1). It is just this symptomatology of compulsive imaginary reliving of unbearable experience that defines the specificity of trauma in Freud’s theory, as Caruth explains. “In its most general definition,” she writes, “trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (11). I advance in this book the hypothesis that it was precisely this dynamic, expressing itself on the cultural level in patterns of recurring textual effects, that rendered the Indian Mutiny “a very fantastic business” for several Victorian generations. A brief remark on methodology is in order here, though I hope that ultimately the sheer self-evidence of the archival materials surveyed in the following chapters will render methodological debate largely moot. The study undertaken in this book follows from the premise that a society in its cultural aspect (that is, with regard to its discursive structures and its systems of value, its iconography, all its manifold agencies of self-expression) is susceptible to trauma in the same way that an individual person is—or at least may at times of historic shock display symptoms equivalent to those of psychological trauma. This is so because collective trauma is based deeply in individual emotional experience. A cultural trauma is not the same thing as an individual one, however; its magnitude cannot be computed by any process of adding up quotients of individual experience, and individual members of a traumatized society may undergo the sensation of traumatic injury only in diffuse and oblique forms, or may in their quotidian existences seem altogether oblivious to it. Cultural trauma manifests itself in derangements of various kinds in cultural media such as novels, poems, historical scholarship, newspapers, paintings. To study it is to ask, Have the self-expressive institutions of the society in question suffered certain forms of damage as the result of “an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events”? At the same time, it is not only permissible but imperative, I think, to seek to extrapolate conclusions about the emotional and ideological dynamics of the times from patterns of cultural effects that painstaking reading of literary documents and other artifacts can reveal. In the absence of the scientific polling data that we will never possess for, say, the year 1857, such extrapolations may represent our sole means of gaining insight into the contradictory potentialities and the perhaps unconscious trends of feeling running beneath the surface of past states of mind. I myself see no insurmountable theoretical difficulty in such an approach and no reason to suppose the conscious or unconscious mind of a society as manifested in its literary media to form

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a construct any less plausible than the mind of a person. But I invoke such a methodology here heuristically, for purposes of analysis, not on a priori grounds. If it carries conviction at last, it will not be on the basis of theoretical justification but because it has served to illuminate otherwise recalcitrant materials—and because disallowing it would amount to declaring a domain of important historical phenomena more or less permanently beyond the reach of scholarly study. If it be said that the method of research I propose is as speculative as it is empirical and that it is based on the logical circularity of asserting as postulates the claims that it seeks to demonstrate (in this case, that cultural structures may properly be treated in terms of psychology), that is only to say, I believe, that it shares the conditions of possibility of all significant intellectual enterprise in the field of cultural study. The conjunction of surreal horror and violence in the passage that Freud quotes from Tasso—in particular, the frightful violence of the sword hacking at female flesh and then the ground saturated with gushing female blood, a complex of imagery that took on overwhelming emotional potency in the Mutiny—defines just the pattern of traumatic shock that operates pervasively in Mutiny literature. (Indeed, Tasso’s epic about the extended siege of Jerusalem by a valiant army of European Christians, replete as it is with imagery of mass slaughter of pagans in the streets, strikingly prefigures in one episode after another Victorian narratives of the long, ultimately triumphal British siege of Delhi in 1857.) I reserve for later chapters a discussion of how the “repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena” (Caruth 91) distinctively characteristic of psychological trauma come in effect to dictate the narrative logic of Mutiny literature—the logic to which Gautam Chakravarty calls attention in belittling what he calls the “unimaginative repetitiveness” (8) of Mutiny fiction. For now, I wish just to underline the essential factor of “horror” in the trauma of the Indian Mutiny and, for all I know, in trauma more generally. The Mutiny as it is theorized in the following book inflicted its wound on the British psyche not merely by confronting it with spectacles of terrifying physical violence but also, fundamentally, by inflicting upon it the shock of what seemed to be a catastrophic wound to the moral order itself. If I am reading Mutiny literature correctly, the discovery of the strain of genocidal cruelty inhabiting humanitarian Christian virtue and linking the British inseparably to “those red-handed Sepoys” formed an essential component of this horror. Thus arises, I think, to return to the starting point of this chapter, the widely expressed conviction that no correct account of the war could ever be written: commentators who said this meant ultimately that no factual history of the war could ever express the profundity of its consequences for the psyche of the nation.

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Once the panic and “agonizing suspense” of the war years had dissipated, what the Mutiny left in its wake was a mood of discouragement and depression that did appear to mark a terrible break in British experience, a passage into what seemed to contemporaries and then to later generations like a new historical phase of sensibility. Much polemical effort was undoubtably expended in portraying the British victory over the rebellion as a rejuvenating triumph of British energy, resourcefulness, indomitable will, and capacity for heroic self-sacrifice. And it is true that the mythography of the Mutiny was later resurrected and suitably modified (cleansed of scandalous impurities, for one thing) to provide ideological underpinning for the “new imperialism” of the 1880s and 1890s. But the nationalistic and racialized spirit of the fin de sie`cle was itself in significant degree a compensatory movement, a reaction against the post-Mutiny crisis of conscience of a couple of decades previously. Writers in the years following 1857 made sufficiently clear that the prime lesson of the Mutiny was that the exporting of supposedly universal, divinely sanctioned British ideals to India had led only to disaster. Montgomery Martin quotes (c. 1861) the “memorable” judgment by Sir Henry Lawrence that “on the whole, the people were happier under native government than under our own.” Martin draws his own devastating conclusion: “Our civilisation and our Christianity have failed,” he says categorically (433). Malleson, arch-retributionist that he was, drew exactly the same conclusion. The spread of the rebellion demonstrated, he wrote, that British dominion in India, “extending over an hundred years, had completely failed in attaching even one section of the population to British rule” (Mutiny of the Bengal Army 28).18 Such verdicts on British rule in India came as severe blows to that vital constituent of mid-Victorian culture, the national conscience: but they did not issue in any serious call in post-Mutiny Britain that I know of for national repudiation of the imperial enterprise itself as morally or politically indefensible. Why they did not had to do with a complex of factors that lie for the most part outside the scope of this book. It is important to remember, though, that British sovereignty in India was, as Malleson observed, fully a century old by the time of the great uprising, and the dominating British presence there older still. British sway in India had long since come to seem a permanent feature of the organization of the world that only a visionary—arguably only a reckless, irresponsible one at that—could have imagined undoing in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was no more open to fundamental challenge in the sphere of British public opinion than, say, the seizure of North America from its own indigenous inhabitants by European invaders somewhat more than a century ago is open to challenge today. The British disillusionment of 1857 expressed itself at all events not in a disavowal of imperialism but

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in a sharp retreat from the philanthropic reformist ideals that had furnished the moral rationale of British governance since 1830–the rationale that one memoirist in 1858 referred to as “the fatal error of attempting to force the policy of Europe on the people of Asia” (Raikes 170). Henceforth, the British raj was to be a rule of sheer despotic control and of political expediency.19 The new policy thus marked a historic defeat for the humanitarian ethos of the mid-Victorian decades. Good riddance, might say those who regard this ethos as sheer bad faith and “humbug” from its inception and delight in tracking its affiliations with various social pathologies. On the psychological plane, the disaster of the Mutiny undoubtedly fed strongly into the mood of despondency that infiltrated the Victorian world ever more noticeably from that point forward, expressing itself in a string of signal works of fiction such as Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right (1869) or Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), which take an onset of disabling psychological depression as their central theme and identify this trend with a collapse of ideals. The mood registered in these books did not stem wholly from the war in India, needless to say. The new tonality of depressiveness appears in fact in the 1850s as a crosscurrent to the dominant trend of Victorian optimism, expressing itself in Tennyson’s In Memoriam 20 and in works such as Charlotte Bronte¨’s Villette (1853), Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57), and J. S. Mill’s Autobiography (largely written in 1853–54), which figure among the earliest texts to bestow the technical name “depression” on the mental disorder that has become a defining malady of Western middle-class existence ever since. But after the “unspeakable horror” of 1857, with its revelations that “our civilisation and our Christianity have failed” and that in response to this tremendous failure, puritanical avenging angels such as James Neill had emerged in the role of paragons of national virtue, the syndrome of disconsolateness characterized by “the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” was to become something like the prevailing form of British sensibility for subsequent generations.

Chapter Two

Three Parables of Violence

Reports of the Indian massacres of the spring and summer of 1857 unleashed in Britain a great wave of “jingoism and warmongering”; patriotism, imperialist ideology, religion, racial phobias, and national bereavement all flowed irresistibly for several months in the same direction. But British avidity for the war soon became embroiled in the ambivalence and the sometimes piercing self-criticism that has been expunged almost without a trace from the history of the Mutiny. The national change of heart expressed itself on the level of political debate in the outbreak of bitter discord between the party of retribution and the party of clemency and between the East India Company and its many critics, notably those within the missionary establishment. On the literary level, contemporary feeling took the form of an increasingly marked displacement of bombastic hortatory and punitive rhetoric in Mutiny writing by a drastically different rhetoric focused on hallucinatory imagery of the horrors of the war—and of overwhelming psychological trauma. To document this pattern of literary effects is to point to what looks like a historic shift of sensibility. Despite what writers at the time said, it is not that this war was empirically any more ferocious than previous ones; it is that war had perhaps never before been witnessed through the medium of a certain modern lens of conscience. To portray this development as graphically as possible and to try to make its logic visible, I propose to survey in this chapter a trio of closely related texts published almost simultaneously during or immediately following the war. All offer eyewitness accounts of victorious military operations, two by what we now call “embedded” noncombatant civilians, one by an officer whose tour of duty in India took him into the heart of the fighting. Taken together, they make a compelling exhibit of the deeply self-divided character of Mutiny literature, and of the Victorian mentality itself. Official discourse on the war sought to idealize it as an affirmation of moral and patriotic values: to depict it as an infliction of just retribution, as an enactment of national virtue, and as a restoration of law and order in districts plunged into anarchy by the rebellion. The intractable dilemma of this discourse was its need to efface as far as possible the fact of physical violence, which filled Victorian sensibilities with revulsion. The taboo on violence amounts, in fact, to nothing less than a foundational ideological

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principle of middle-class society, which sanctifies domesticity, refinement, and sentiment, and among other things despises bodily violence as a repulsive (and frightening) lower-class phenomenon. (Antibourgeois polemicists—Carlyle, Marx, Nietzsche, Fanon—commonly identify the aversion to violence as a symptom of modern debilitation and as a self-protecting ideological formation of the middle-class regime.) In Victorian moral discourse, the revulsion from violence was given an evolutionary rationale: the “primitive” was specifically the domain of violence, and the evolutionary progress of civilization, as most fully theorized by Herbert Spencer, was specifically a movement away from the physical violence of early “militant” society and toward institutions of peaceful “industrial” cooperation. The drastic reduction of capital punishment statutes and the abolishing of public executions, as we will see in the next chapter, clearly expressed the Victorian imperative to purge society as far as possible of its residue of primitive violence. One of the transformative lessons of the Mutiny, as I argue, was the insight it gave contemporaries into the instability propagated in this society by its deep, indelible vein of Old Testament religiosity, which caused impulses of retributive violence to pulse strongly in the same Victorian middle-class psyche that regarded the abhorrence of violence as one of its cardinal values. Even so, the violence of the Mutiny, both the violence of the massacres and also the extravagant violence of the British counterrevolution, came as a traumatizing shock. Most reporting of the war was couched in an abstracting discourse of troop movements and positions seized and given up, not to mention an ennobling discourse of chivalry and gallantry, which went a long way toward dissimulating the realities of battlefield ferocity. But this important function of the discursive apparatus of middle-class society at war was only partly effective in this case. Not all writers were willing to cooperate in purging the British victory of its almost demented intensity of violence. What they reported back, in startling acts of nonsolidarity with official modes of representation, was that on the ground in India, the sole value was violence itself. All other considerations were eclipsed by the supremacy of violence. What such writers intimated and sometimes distinctly analyzed was the profound self-contradiction that Victorian society exposed in itself by sponsoring and glorifying such a war. THE CLERGYMAN ON THE BATTLEFIELD Chronologically the first of our three texts is John Edward Wharton Rotton’s The Chaplain’s Narrative of the Siege of Delhi (1858). What this book may lack in literary value it more than makes up for not only in

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documentary richness but also in the fascinating self-portrait that it offers of a certain religious sensibility that rarely discloses itself so candidly. In The Chaplain’s Narrative, Christian piety, the cult of military prowess, and the celebration of the killing of enemies unproblematically coincide. Like the British generally in the early phase of the conflict, Rotton, a chaplain attached to the British force that besieged and eventually reconquered Delhi, portrays the war against the rebellion first and foremost as a war of vengeance against the perpetrators of massacres. It is noteworthy for a student of the Victorian psyche that even at this early date of 1858 this ardent retributionist flags the doubtful authenticity of the tales of aggravated atrocities (of torture and rape in addition to killings) that were widely circulated in contemporary media as offering the supreme rationale for the war—without moderating his judgment of the accused culprits. “Report says a very great deal of what these atrocities were,” Rotton observes. “Much of what is said may be true, and much likewise untrue; and where so much uncertainty prevails, it is better to throw a veil over the sins which have so indelibly disgraced human nature, and leave the revelation of them to that day which will reveal all things” (7–8). As I have mentioned (and as both the other texts to be considered in this chapter also confirm), the falsity of at least the most extreme atrocity tales was discovered and publicized almost from the time they were first put in circulation, and even writers striving their hardest to inflame British public opinion against the mutineers were ashamed of them. Rotton was like some other writers in acknowledging the doubtfulness of the atrocity reports and simultaneously taking for granted the truth of “the sins which have so indelibly disgraced human nature.” The convolutions of the author’s language at this point are symptomatic of a state of affairs that caused an obvious strain of uneasy conscience to mix itself with, and perhaps to render all the more vitriolic, the warmongering rhetoric of the time. His own unease on this score notwithstanding, Rotton calls continually for the execution of seemingly unlimited violent revenge upon the mutineers. He produces in the process a text that exactly coincides with Patrick Brantlinger’s portrayal of Mutiny literature as displaying “an absolute polarization of good and evil” and as calling for the total subjugation, even “the wholesale extermination,” of Indians (Rule 200). For Rotton, the rebel soldiers are so many “incarnate fiends” (147); the British troops are praised by him accordingly for their success in “taking complete vengeance on those miscreants who had been principals and accessories in the murder of helpless women and the massacre of innocent children” (230). This writer may not seem in every respect a model of a pious Christian clergyman, but his specifically religious mentality does highlight itself in the weird mysticism of blood that runs in a lurid scarlet ribbon through his prose as it does through Mutiny literature as a whole, fueling his rheto-

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ric of unstinting violent retribution. “Again I thought of . . . the precious blood which [God] must shed in copious and living streams,” he writes, “ere God . . . could avenge atrocity and wrong without parallel in the history of nations both ancient and modern” (238). “That very blood [of women and children] was appealing to heaven for vengeance. The appeal was unquestionably heard, and its justice fully admitted. . . . The Lord could not otherwise than be avenged on such a nation as this” (123). One notes for future reference Rotton’s unproblematic equation of “vengeance” and “justice” (two categories insistently defined as antitheses in Victorian moral and legal theory, as we shall see), and for present purposes his exalting of the explicitly religious code of revenge. Taking revenge for the sepoys’ crimes—soaking India with real blood poured out in response to the uncanny call from the blood of the British victims—is not for this author a matter of human passions or government policy but a divine imperative rooted in the fantastic physics of blood. To take revenge is to obey God’s will and carry out a mystical duty. By a clear implication, though it is not one that Rotton makes explicit, to urge mercy toward mutineers would be to set oneself against God. It would be easy and probably not amiss to portray Rotton in the semblance of the “diabolical being” obsessed with the extermination of infidels and heretics that inhabits Christian faith, according to Feuerbach. The most striking feature of The Chaplain’s Narrative, however, is the complete disjunction of military from religious or otherwise inspirational discourse that usually prevails in it. Adopting the role of publicity agent for the units to which he was attached during the epic campaign, Rotton wholly sets aside his pastoral character to argue, for example, that the 60th Royal Rifles claims preeminence among British regiments for the proportion of its casualties killed in action as opposed to deaths from disease (34–35) and that the Delhi Field Force deserves to rank for valor above the celebrated defenders of the Lucknow Residency, in view of the comparative mortality rates suffered by the two forces (327–43). If such bloody computation of military glory on the part of a Christian clergyman is in any way unseemly or irreligious, Rotton evinces no awareness of it. What he does evince, along with a seeming disconnect between the religious and the military phases of his personality, is an utter obliviousness to the horrors of battlefield violence. The reader of The Chaplain’s Narrative gets the sense of observing scenes of combat through a deadening veil that blocks out their moral and emotional repercussions. It is this effect that makes the book the chilling document that it is. On the one hand, Rotton punctuates his narrative with the inspirational death scenes that form a leading trope of all patriotic Mutiny literature. “Dulce et decorum pro patria mori,” murmurs the mortally wounded “young and valiant” cavalryman Quintin Battye, a lover, Rotton says, of

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all classical literature expressing a “noble military spirit” (57); on another occasion, an unnamed captain, dying from a cannonball wound, embraces gratefully “the promises of pardon in the Gospel” as Rotton, kneeling beside him, explains “the doctrine of sanctification” while the cannon roar in the background (48–50). Decorative scenes like these are one way to anesthetize the reader to the potentially shocking realities of Indian warfare. Their darker rhetorical counterparts are scenes of frightful slaughter of the enemy that Rotton narrates with complete indifference to the victims’ horrible fate. Thus he notices almost in passing an attack by British forces on a serai (a walled enclosure for travelers) at Kissen Gunge, where “our” soldiers burst in “and bayoneted all the enemy within, to the number of some forty or fifty” (83). This briskly rendered moment exemplifies a scene that inhabits Mutiny literature like a recurrent nightmare: the scene in which a group of panic-stricken sepoys is trapped inside a confined space (building, room, courtyard, tunnel, grove, island) and destroyed to the last man. It is the mythic scene of combat that, judging from the literary archive, most vividly defined this war in British imagination, as heroic charges on enemies dug in behind fortifications define nobler wars. We could think of it as an instance of “a compulsion to repeat which overrides the pleasure principle” (Freud 22), except that in the text we are considering, the repetition compulsion and the pleasure principle seem inseparably interlocked: we are meant to admire and enjoy this scene as we do inspirational death scenes of British heroes. Rotton gives another instance of the same motif later, this time involving the destruction of two hundred terrified sepoy prisoners at Umballa. In applauding the massacre of these prisoners, one of the most notorious episodes of the war and one that we shall revisit, Rotton notes offhandedly that they had been confined “for some sufficient cause, but what I never remember to have heard of” (212). The recurrent extermination scene evokes on one level the popular sport of rat-killing as practiced in London sporting pubs in the mid-nineteenth century (a horde of rats is killed by a dog inside an enclosure).1 It evokes more immediately the imagery of the most grievous trauma of the war, the slaughter of the approximately two hundred women and children captives at Cawnpore2 who were hacked to pieces on July 16, 1857, in the paved courtyard of their prison building called the Bibighar or Ladies’ House. In the symbolically resonant scenario of British vengeance so often depicted in Mutiny literature, the culprits are inserted in effect, this time in the role of victims, into the same scene of pitiless extermination in which the British martyrs died at Cawnpore. In Rotton’s case, this conscious or subconscious reference produces only his casual, morally deadened manner of referring to what must have been scenes of transcendent horror and his seeming unawareness of their incompatibility with the “noble military spirit” that

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he steadily celebrates. A similar effect marks his testimony of admiration for the adeptness shown by the sinister British allies the Gurkhas with their Nepalese knife called the kukree. “Once plunged into the abdomen of an enemy, in a second he was ripped up, just as clean and cleverly as the butcher divides an ox or a sheep,” Rotton observes (86). In the same spirit, he reports with no sign of uneasy conscience the slaughter by British troops of eight wounded sepoy gunners left behind by their fleeing comrades on an ammunition wagon: “these were no times either for giving or expecting quarter,” he comments (94). Being a Christian clergyman obviously causes Rotton no squeamishness about the use of savage physical violence, even when it descends from lawful combat to massacres of helpless prisoners. Not to put too fine a point on it, The Chaplain’s Narrative exemplifies the peculiarly nihilistic character of the war of the Indian Mutiny, in which the most rudimentary standards of “civilized” conduct in warfare were routinely cast aside in acts that were just as routinely, on the British side, portrayed as compatible with military honor and Christian morality. And Rotton leaves little doubt that the underlying impulse of such conduct was, just as Brantlinger says, that of racism. Reporting the court martial of a British sergeant found guilty of murdering a native camp follower, the chaplain declares it a remarkable instance of British high-mindedness that General Archdale Wilson would insist on protecting the lives of all those in the British camp, “irrespective of colour or creed” (170). Rotton opines, in fact, that the general had carried such protection too far, though he says he is “ready to make allowances” (171) for Wilson’s lack of indiscriminate racial vindictiveness. In the eyes of this spokesman for orthodox British religious values, all blacks and all Hindus deserve whatever punishment they may get for the crimes of the mutineers. That Rotton expresses in his paean to cruelty and revenge one noteworthy strain of contemporary sensibility in the wake of the massacres of the summer of 1857 cannot be doubted. Just how aberrant it might seem from a more normal Victorian perspective may be suggested by setting Rotton’s self-portrayal in The Chaplain’s Narrative alongside the image of one of his immediate literary predecessors, Trollope’s Rev. Septimus Harding, the idealized clergyman of The Warden (1855) and Barchester Towers (1857) and later novels in the Barsetshire series. Mr. Harding, Rotton’s moral antithesis, personifies the complex of character traits central to the didactic system of pre-Mutiny fiction: innocence and sweetness, compassionateness, “womanly tenderness” (Barchester Towers 352). That the important cultural institution of the Anglican clergyman could give rise to such conflicting imagery in nearly contemporaneous works is testimony not just to the disturbing effect of the war that intervenes between them but also to the fundamental dissonance in Victorian moral

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thinking that the war seemed to reveal. The overriding rhetorical gesture of The Chaplain’s Narrative, we may say, consists in an ostentatious denial of ambivalence toward the brutalities of war. The author’s Christian vocation does not cause him the slightest twinge of remorse about the disemboweling of enemies or the murder of wounded enemy prisoners, he brazenly announces. Undoubtedly the ambivalence this text expels from itself was reflected back upon it in the reactions of many of its original readers, and undoubtedly, too, one aspect of such ambivalence would have been precisely Feuerbach’s intuition: the intuition that Rotton’s callousness represented in some sense a latency or Mr. Hyde—like hidden potential of its antitype, the sensitive, sentimentalized humanitarianism personified in such a figure as Trollope’s Mr. Harding. Was the idealization of philanthropy and “womanly tenderness” in Victorian popular culture a screen for a vindictive “diabolical being” lying at the core of Victorian personality? This anxious question is posed in more clearly legible form in differing visions of Indian battlefields produced by other commentators at the time.

THE JOURNALIST, THE SAHIB, AND THE “NIGGER” The scenario of a nearly contemporaneous work is a compellingly familiar one. Rumors of terrible atrocities have reached Europe from distant colonial outposts. The narrator, a seasoned professional traveler with a taste for adventure, is hired to go out on a hazardous mission to investigate and report home. Once in the foreign land, he travels upriver into the unsettled primitive interior, a voyage subtly cast in his narrative as a mythic descent into the underworld. At the colonial stations he passes on the way he witnesses shocking scenes of cruelty and enslavement visited upon the natives by their colonial masters. Ultimately he discovers that the idealistic agents of the civilizing European mission to the dark places of the earth, succumbing to “madness” and “the mere wantonness of power” (Russell, Diary 1:vii), have barbarically gone native, having “lived so long among [savages] as to have imbibed their worst feelings, and to have forgotten the sentiments of civilization and religion” (2:276). The result, he reports in summation, using a word often invoked in the course of the tale, is an upheaval marked by unspeakable “horrors” (2:433). Returning home, he strives nonetheless to salvage in his official report at least a remnant or a pretense of idealistic faith in the colonial enterprise that seems in this case to have gone dreadfully awry. Such, in broad outline, is the structure of the principal text of this chapter, William Henry Russell’s My Diary in India, in the Year 1858–9.

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When the uprising broke out in May 1857, Russell had recently returned to England from his two-year assignment as “special correspondent” for the Times in the Crimea, where he had attained European fame for his coverage of the war there. He was solidifying his fame with a successful lecture tour when he was sent to India to cover the latter phase of the war for the Times, which until this point in early 1858 had been a leading organ for advocacy of a policy of harsh retribution against the rebels and their sympathizers. (By the time he arrived, Delhi had been recaptured, the besieged garrison at Lucknow had been rescued, and the eventual victory of the British was assured.) Russell was no marginal or insignificant figure on the mid-Victorian scene, in other words. He was a celebrity writer for “the world’s most powerful newspaper” (Hankinson 268), a close friend of Thackeray, Dickens, and Trollope, and an authoritative public figure. At the conclusion of his fourteen-month sojourn (from January 1858 to March 1859) accompanying the army in India, during which he contributed a series of forty-five or so widely read dispatches to the columns of the Times, he published My Diary in India, in two substantial volumes (1860). A bestseller that, as he says in the preface to the fourth edition, went through three large editions so rapidly in its first year that he had no time to make minor corrections and revisions (1:v), it has long been out of print and unavailable except for a severely abridged edition published for the Mutiny centenary in 1957. It ought to be better recognized than it is as a notable work of a period in which prose writing in English comes to one of its highest points of achievement. The Diary stands as a massive corrective to The Chaplain’s Narrative and to the claim that Victorian writers saw the Mutiny in terms of “an absolute polarization of good and evil” and wrote about it, as Nancy L. Paxton asserts, solely “to justify the extremely violent British military campaign of retaliation following the 1857 uprising and to legitimize more authoritarian, forceful, and racist policies in British colonial strategies of control after these events” (6).3 Russell’s dispatches and then My Diary in India sharply took issue with all such policies. The book marks a major event in the history of commentary not just on the war but also on British imperialism more broadly, for it plainly predicts the collapse of the empire and of British world dominance, as a result not of geopolitics or shifts in global markets but of the deep moral and political failings of the imperial system itself. I see this text as something more, as its prefiguring of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) suggests: a decisive movement into a new phase of sensibility and into a post-Victorian literary mode keyed to severe disenchantment and an overriding sense of “horror.” It was, I think, with an intuition of just such a movement toward a condition in which ideals could be affirmed in serious literature only in

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negative and ironized forms, that is, in fables of their failures, that Disraeli spoke of the Indian Mutiny as “one of those great events which form epochs in the history of mankind.” Russell assumes the writerly prerogative to define in his own way, according to his own purposes, the great historical event that he is covering. Since he was personally present at the war scene only for the second main phase of military operations, his narrative of the Mutiny is sharply skewed, relative to the standard one. The key episodes of the standard version, the story of the greased cartridges, the rising of sepoy regiments at Meerut, the massacre of “Feringhees” (Europeans) at Delhi, the heroic struggles of besieged British garrisons at Cawnpore and Lucknow, the massacres at Cawnpore, the great military campaigns to recapture Delhi and to relieve Lucknow—almost all of this richly mythologized, constantly retold material is summarily excluded from Russell’s first-person account. My Diary in India in effect redacts the Mutiny so as to make it consist only of what from other vantage points (say, that of patriotic celebration) might seem like epiphenomena: Sir Colin Campbell’s final seizure of Lucknow; an interlude in the hill station of Simla, where Russell goes to recover from being kicked by a horse; and the mopping-up campaign conducted in the northern districts by Sir Colin (now Lord Clyde) in the final months of the war. Compared to the comprehensive accounts given by historians of the day, such as Ball, Martin, and Kaye, Russell’s version seems like a truncated, even perverse, interpretation of the Mutiny from which all the most dramatic and most glorious material has been pared away. This version is nominally dictated by circumstance and by Russell’s binding protocol of reporting only such events as he can personally witness and vouch for. Obviously, this method suffers from the liability of requiring the sacrifice of much crucial information and of being limited by the author’s reportorial capabilities, but it claims by way of compensation the great virtue of offering testimony that is unimpeachably authentic, certified by direct observation. Much of Russell’s rhetoric focuses, indeed, on juxtaposing his personally authenticated reporting with official or other widely credited accounts, with reference both to particular matters and to broader interpretations of the war and of the British mission in India. The truth is that Russell uses his supposed circumstantial constraints (only reporting what he himself witnesses) strategically, as his method for giving his readers a sharply vectored and ultimately sharply iconoclastic history of the Mutiny. For one thing, his reportorial lens is an introspective and morally focused instrument that turns the historian’s gaze back on his Victorian readers and requires them, in following the string of events that he narrates in far-off India, to examine their own souls.

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It is as though Russell in his narrative persona in My Diary in India needs to distance himself from the ideological force field of England in order to find insight into the great convulsion afflicting British rule in its imperial dominions. He thus strongly emphasizes the voyage out in My Diary in India, devoting his first six chapters, nearly one hundred pages, to the trip. His descriptions of the various ports of call along the way— Malta, Alexandria, Cairo, Aden, Galle, and others—could possibly be mistaken for exotic travel writing extraneous to the historiography of the Mutiny, but they are designed to dramatize a strenuous step-by-step penetration into an increasingly unknown world where conventional thinking may not apply. By the time Russell reaches “the aridity and desolation of Aden” (1:68)—“Not one little tree!—not one blade of grass!— not one patch of verdure the size of a man’s hand!” (1:67)—where the eye searches for “the smoke of the subterranean fires in which those rocks were melted and cast out in beds of scoriae and ashes” and where the few human dwellings are seen “rising out of ashes and backed by mountains of cinders” (1:67), the implicit allegory of the voyage begins to be legible. The scene, he says pointedly, has a “prophetic . . . resemblance to the Inferno,” and “the hideous Simawlees and demoniac shrieks of the creatures, who dance and whirl around one,” including the “predacious Charons” who come out in canoes and boats to take steamer passengers ashore, give an idea that “some of the spirits” of the underworld had been allowed to escape and to congregate in this place (1:68). (“It seemed to me I had stepped into the gloomy circle of some Inferno,” says Conrad’s Marlow at the Company station [17].) The underworld due to be explored by Russell is not a classical one full of languid shades but rather a powerfully moralized Christian one, a scene of anguished conscience, a place of diabolism and torment. For Russell, as for all contemporary commentators including the historians, the Mutiny is above all a great moral drama, a parable of the struggle of good and evil. But no longer does this struggle take the form of a polarized confrontation of civilized virtue and the barbaric, as it does in The History of British India or The Chaplain’s Narrative. Or rather, the confrontation occurs along a different axis than in either of these works. As a result, the wild-looking Simawlee savages of Aden turn out not to be the most alarming figures encountered by Russell in the course of his voyage to the East. These are the Anglo-Indians, most of them returning to their posts in India, whom he meets on board the steamer. One, he reports, “hates the rascally Mahomedans” and declares they must be “put down”; another vilifies “those slimy, treacherous Hindoos, with their caste, and superstition, and horrid customs”; an American, “tho’ opposed to slavery in general terms,” recommends instituting it in India and quotes the Old Testament in support of his views (1:49). An-

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other set composed of traders, merchants, and indigo planters, who, Russell says, “have the brand of wicked, interloping, jealous Cain upon them,” rail at being subject to the East India Company and not being allowed to govern India as they please (1:50). Most vivid in this embittered chorus is a British major who has drunk too much sherry, port, ale, and Madeira, and who in violently berating the punkah pullers in the steamboat cabin injects into the narrative for the first time what Sir George Trevelyan in his history of the Cawnpore atrocities calls “that hateful word” nigger (36). This is one of the key terms in the lexicon of My Diary in India, where commonly it is bracketed off hygienically from decent English by scare quotes. (In his momentous dispatch to the Times of October 20, 1858, titled “The Sahib and the Nigger,” Russell had noted, as a particularly offensive symptom of Anglo-Indian attitudes, that “the habit of speaking of all natives as niggers has recently become quite common.”) To the major, a good representative, as Russell says, of “the intelligent Briton,” the “dark hide” of the Indians makes them “as the beasts of the field.” “ ‘By Jove!’ he exclaims, thickly and fiercely, with every vein in his forehead swoln like whipcord, ‘those niggers are such a confounded sensual lazy set, cramming themselves with ghee and sweetmeats, and smoking their cursed chillumjees all day and all night, that you might as well think to train pigs. Ho, you! punkah chordo, or I’ll knock, &c., &c.’ ” (1:50–51). Russell usually trusts his savage caricatures in the mode of Ben Jonson, Thackeray, and Dickens to speak for themselves, but the importance of the lesson here is such that he spells it out plainly. “I fear that the favourites of heaven—the civilizers of the world— la race blanche . . . , are naturally the most intolerant in the world,” he says. “They have trodden under foot the last germs of the coloured races wherever they could do so; in other instances, they have hunted the ‘niggers’ out of their own land into miserable exile—which ends in slavery and annihilation. It is the will of Providence; it is the destiny of the white man” (1:51).4 We are still at this point in the narrative far from the Mutiny districts, where the major’s racial enmity will be seen acting itself out in forms and on a scale that at this stage would seem unthinkable. But already the focus of Russell’s book has shifted from the Mutiny itself to the mentality of the British civilizing mission, its substrate of race hatred, and its propensity for leading to “slavery and annihilation.”5 His visit to India was motivated principally by one thing, he tells us: the desire to confirm the terrible atrocity tales that had come back to England in the wake of the outbreak. He does not describe these, first, because his readers in 1860 are supposed to know them in detail already, but maybe even more because the mere imagining of such things seems to him unconscionable. Englishwomen captured by the mutineers were widely reported to have been horribly tortured and raped before being

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killed by their captors; others had reportedly been mutilated before being freed. Refined Englishwomen had their hands and breasts cut off; were flayed alive; were forced to eat the flesh of their children; were paraded naked on gun carriages and gang-raped in the bazaars by the scum of humanity.6 Russell refers to these stories of violence in its ultimate forms only in unspecific terms. Hideous massacres of men, women, and children,—compared with which Sylla’s proscriptions, the Sicilian vespers, the great auto da fe´ on Bartholomew’s eve, or the Ulster outbreak of 1641, were legitimate acts of judicial punishment,—were reported to us with such seasoning of horrors, made by skilful masters in that sort of cookery, as the imagination had never before devised. I had been deeply impressed by those awful scenes. I was moved to the inner soul by the narratives which came to us by every mail, and I felt that our struggle against those monsters of cruelty and lust must be crowned by Heaven with success. (1:2) Russell here strikes the keynote of all contemporary Mutiny literature: the idea that the horrors of this episode were of such a heinous character and of such unprecedented magnitude as to mark a turning point in history, a passage into a new era in which previous limits on human conduct (and on the kinds of obscenities that could be described in detail in public discourse) had broken down. The trouble, for Russell, is that the initial lurid reports of sepoy atrocities have not been followed by factual confirmation. “I never doubted their authenticity, but I wanted proof, and none was forthcoming,” he says (1:2). In the early chapters following his arrival in the East, he repeatedly notes the lack of corroborative evidence for widely credited tales of women mutilated at the hands of the mutineers and then released as a warning to their countrymen. No such women, he reports, have been seen going homeward through Aden (1:92), or in the hospital at Calcutta, where no one “could tell me of a single mutilation of any woman to which they could depose of their personal knowledge” (1:117), or at the downriver station of Raneegung (1:135–36). This theme significantly drops out of the Diary in India once Russell reaches the place that for the time figures as the ultimate heart of darkness in his allegorical voyage into the interior, Cawnpore, site of the slaughters of prisoners orchestrated by the Mephistopheles of British Mutiny mythology, Nana Sahib. It drops out for several interconnected reasons. First, by this point in his upriver voyage, Russell has concluded and plainly announces to his large readership that the stories of torture and sexual assault are deliberate fabrications. “The incessant efforts of a gang of forgers and utterers of lies have surrounded [the rebels’ crimes] with horrors needlessly invented in the hope of adding to the indignation and

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burning desire for vengeance which the naked facts aroused” (1:163), he declares here, in a passage that ought long since to have laid to rest the scholarly ide´e fixe that Victorian jingoism prevented contemporaries from ever questioning the truth of the atrocity tales. Early and courageous as Russell’s remarkable text is, it bears repeating that the atrocity reports that exercised such tremendous influence at the time were in fact exposed as fraudulent almost as soon as they were, to use Disraeli’s word for them, “manufactured.”7 As early as October 1857, as the Mutiny still raged at its fiercest, a published letter by one George Campbell notes the bravery needed to contradict these reports but firmly declares the author’s belief “that by far the greater part of the stories of dishonour and torture are pure inventions, and that the mutineers in their blind rage, made no distinction between men and women in any way whatever” (qtd. Edwardes, Red Year 163).8 The Manchester Guardian issued a similar statement in February 1858, citing reports in the Lahore Chronicle months earlier (qtd. Judd 73–74). In 1859 Edward Leckey published the entire astonishing volume of mocking skepticism that I have mentioned previously, Fictions Connected with the Indian Outbreak of 1857 Exposed. “So clumsily is the disgusting story [an alleged sepoy atrocity recounted by one contemporary writer] got up, that it reminds one of the penny theatres at home or the awkwardly conducted doll-shows of India,” he observes at one typical moment (4). Ball’s History of the Indian Mutiny, while trafficking freely in these horrific stories, carries out its own debunking of them (2:296, 590, 664), as does Kaye’s History of the Sepoy War (2:80, 373). Trevelyan’s Cawnpore offers a denunciation of the atrocity forgeries as violent as Russell’s own had been five years earlier, speaking with disgust of “those hateful falsehoods,” “those revolting stories” which “it is our misfortune that we once believed, and our shame if we ever stoop to repeat” (233–34). Russell drops the inquiry into the atrocity tales, then, because even as early as 1860, it had become an open secret in Victorian public discourse that the tales in their aggravated forms were false. He has let us see that they represent not just propaganda devices but noxious spontaneous emanations of the British psyche. According to his analysis, they are wired into and expressions of a depraved passion for vengeance; no less unforgivably, they implicitly discount “the naked facts” of the massacres themselves. “God knows the horrors and atrocity of the pitiless slaughter need no aggravation” (1:192). If the mass murder of helpless civilian captives must be given a surplusage of imaginary horror to command attention, the moral system of the English nation has gone haywire, he declares. Russell and the other debunkers stop short of plainly articulating the still more scandalous intuition that he, at least, implies: that the invention, propagation, and avid public consumption of sadistic horrors, particu-

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larly those directed at Englishwomen, suggest at some subterranean psychic level too profound for direct inspection, the level at which “sombre and ferocious instincts” at odds with civilization and religion live on, some perverted complicity of the upright British and their brutish adversaries. Russell’s gastronomic metaphor of the “seasoning of horrors” that has been added to the facts by “skilful masters in that sort of cookery” makes clear enough the element of delectation that horribly contaminated British responses to the events of 1857. To what extent is “our struggle against . . . monsters of cruelty and lust” in reality a struggle against wicked forces of “our” own depraved nature? As this implicit issue is highlighted ever more acutely by Russell, the initially urgent quest for accurate information about the atrocities is silently dropped from his narrative. He finds that his focus has shifted and that what might have been mistaken for the heart of darkness—the scene of the criminal acts of Nana Sahib—may only prove to be a station on the way to it. For Conrad, the essential logic of imperialism, the logic screened from the view of those at home by “the philanthropic pretence of the whole concern,” is nothing but the bathetically “mean and greedy” one of plunder (Heart of Darkness 25, 69). If it is not carrying his ironies too far to put it this way, he seems almost to entertain the possibility that colonialism would be less brutal and lethal if it could be conducted frankly on its true basis of sheer economic exploitation, without the crazed stimulus of pretended philanthropy. In Russell’s analysis, the British colonial mentality is driven in reality by a more malignant instinct than greed, and one far less well recognized by his readership, which in fact had no name yet for such a thing: the instinct of what we call racism.9 As we saw in the previous chapter, he shockingly ascribes British outrage about Indian atrocities against Englishwomen not to pity for the victims but, rather, to racial animosity toward “black men who dared to shed the blood of their masters and mistresses, and to butcher poor helpless ladies and children, who were the women and offspring of the dominant and conquering people” (1:164). It is not so much the shedding of blood in itself as the fact that the perpetrators were black that renders these crimes as appalling as they were to the British public. Yet it is another instance of the rift running through Victorian moral discourse (and energizing it) that Russell clearly expects his readership to be as surprised and outraged as he is by the many manifestations of the apartheid mentality that he discovers in India and that it becomes one of the main projects of his book to describe and analyze. He implies that the very raison d’eˆtre of British rule in India, the motive preceding even that of economic exploitation, is to establish a regime based on the principle of racial oppression. On one level, he notes as a surprising law of life in British India the preferential treatment accorded to all whites merely by virtue of race.

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“My skin is the passport—it is a guarantee of my rank,” he reports. “In India I am at once one of the governing class—an aristocrat in virtue of birth—a peer of the realm; a being specially privileged and exempted from the ordinary laws of the State” (2:56). The obvious consequence of this system is what Russell describes throughout the Diary as a total estrangement of Asians and Europeans in India. The two races are seen together on the Calcutta esplanade, but Russell can clearly perceive, he says, “the metaphysical Mahratta ditch which separates the white people, not only from the natives, but from the Eurasians” (1:104–5). “Between the two [races] there is a great gulf fixed: to bridge it over is the work reserved for him who shall come to stabilitate our empire in the East, if ever he comes at all” (1:180).10 This estrangement of the races, “the utter absence of any friendly relations between the white and the black faces when they are together” (1:189), has had calamitous effects in the military, Russell notes. Had British officers been close to their Indian troops, mutinous conspiracies in the ranks would never have been able to go undetected until it was too late; but the officers, he declares, know as little of their sepoys “as they do of the Fejee Islanders” (1:113). But the systematic racism that Russell identifies as the mainspring of British culture in India produces as its result not just a state of neglect, indifference, and callousness: it produces and also derives from an active state of contempt and hatred. The grounding of this system in venomous racial dislike is made clear everywhere in the Diary. This is the argument that is condensed in each one of Russell’s sharp notations of the cultural leverage exercised by the word nigger. The word is casually scattered through the pages of Heart of Darkness but never scrutinized by Conrad, who evidently fails to grasp, as Russell does not, its full significance for the perpetuation of large systems of racial cruelty. It is, Russell sees, the supreme signifier of the whole ideology of racial supremacy and a key instrument in its quotidian operations, the coupling that links abstract notions to direct inflictions of harsh, racially preferential rule upon its victims. It is the marker, first, of a species of brutal callousness that Russell shows to be endemic to Anglo-Indian society at mid-century. He gives credence perhaps too uncritically to the nostalgic myth, much invoked in Mutiny literature, of a fairly recent past of harmonious, affectionate relations between Indians and their European masters, a myth asserting the possibility of a genuinely humane and benevolent imperial despotism. But all his emphasis falls, after all, on present abuses and on their origins in the racial attitudes that he makes it his mission to disclose. His informant in Cawnpore explains to him, for instance, the system by which the station doctor receives a per capita stipend for his nominal responsibility for each native soldier in the garrison—but wouldn’t dream of actually providing medical care to them. “Why, how on earth could he attend a

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lot of niggers?” asks the man, surprised at the special correspondent’s naı¨vete´ (1:182). In one of the most striking vignettes of the Diary, Russell later witnesses at a medical station set up in a royal palace the amputation of a native dooly-bearer’s leg that had been shattered by a cannonball in the assault on Lucknow. “The dusky patient” dies with amazing stoicism on the operating table. “Some of my friends in camp,” Russell observes, “would deny he had any soul, or, as one of them put it, ‘If niggers have souls, they’re not the same as ours’ ” (1:300–301). Here he lets the coarse words of his speakers speak for themselves, but he is less reticent in his admiring portrait of the young Rajah of Puttiala: “Though he be a ‘nigger,’ he seemed to me a right gracious and noble sort of monarch,” says Russell (2:254). The insight that ultimately structures the whole work and provides its implicit theory of the origins of the Mutiny is that the scheme of racial feeling presided over by the fetishized term “nigger” leads inescapably to a system of violence that is interwoven throughout the mesh of the social order in India. He makes clear, indeed, that every utterance of the dire word is itself an act of violence. Russell, a journalist and not a philosopher, does not theorize abstractly about the phenomena that he uncovers, but his discoveries in India resonate strongly with writings of philosophical authors who have meditated on the violence implicit in ostensibly idealistic and benevolent systems. One uniquely pertinent case, as I suggested in the previous chapter, would be Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, translated into English by George Eliot in 1854, as though to be ready at hand as an aid to analysis of British conduct in the war and of such a text as The Chaplain’s Narrative. Feuerbach portrays the Christian message of divine love as a mystified ideology of tyranny driven in reality by a pathological craving for violence—by the worship, as he says, of “an unloving monster, a diabolical being, whose personality, separable and actually separated from love, delights in the blood of heretics and unbelievers” (52–53). Ultimately Christian love aims at one thing, says Feuerbach: liquidating those who refuse to accept it. Among latterday theorists of such phenomena, the one whose thinking seems most powerfully to flow from the nexus of works here surveyed—Feuerbach, Russell, Conrad—is undoubtedly Albert Memmi, whose noted work The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) could be described as a displacement of Feuerbachian analysis from Christian religion to one of its most closely related institutions, that of colonialism itself. Memmi exactly echoes Russell in describing colonialism, once divested of its idealizing rhetoric, as fundamentally a system of “preferred treatment” (12) for the colonizer, who, relative to the colonized native, is crowned wherever he goes, like a Christian saint, with a “halo of prestige” (20). Memmi claims to analyze the psychodynamics of the colonial rela-

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tion, and particularly the agonizing ambivalence that necessarily afflicts, he says, both the subjugated native and the omnipotent colonialist. In this stress on ambivalence, both as a defining symptom of a certain scheme of domination and as a catalyst of some of its most extreme effects, Memmi and Conrad most strikingly supplement Feuerbach. It is precisely the fact of being “separated from love” that turns the deity into a vampirish “diabolical being” in their analyses. The result of this failure or derangement of philanthropic love is the pathological condition that Memmi calls the “Nero” complex. The colonizer wants and needs to believe in his role as benevolent civilizer (as Mr. Kurtz wanted to believe in his own role as “an emissary of pity, and science, and progress” [25]) but knows himself to play in reality the odious role of oppressor. “Deep within himself, the colonialist pleads guilty” (57). Tortured by conscience, Memmi’s colonialist reacts by means of a variety of compensatory mechanisms, one of which is a deepening contempt for his colonial victims, deepening racism, which “sums up and symbolizes the fundamental relation which unites colonialist and colonized” (70), and deepening commitment to authoritarian repression. “If the necessity arises,” Memmi says, the colonialist “will become convinced of the necessity of massacres” (56). Indeed, the logic of the Nero complex leads inevitably at last to the colonialist’s “madness for destroying the colonized” (87), the irrational longing to exterminate the subject population, whose very existence is an accusation. “His soul was mad,” says Marlow of the formerly idealistic Kurtz (68). For Feuerbach, Conrad, and Memmi alike, altruistic and benevolent institutions thus prove inescapably, by the logic of their entire structure, to give rise to monstrous, tyrannical doppelga¨ngers sharing what in the last analysis is a creed of extermination. These are perversions and psychoses, yet they are not so much aberrations (as Kurtz, whose methods of collecting ivory are condemned by his Company superiors, may superficially seem to be) as they are the essential form of the systems they epitomize. Plans of benevolent transformation and conversion based on power inevitably generate Neros, Caligulas, Inquisitors, vampires: this is the lesson running through this powerful strand of modern writing. Diabolism, it tells us, is a phase of altruistic benevolence. My Diary in India tracks this line of thought with all the prescience of these other texts and makes it possible to recognize in the Mutiny of 1857 a key moment in the precipitation of that disenchanted modern consciousness that takes as its central theme the self-contradictions embedded in reigning systems of ideology (or, more succinctly, that diagnoses ideology as inescapably self-contradicting). It is with just such an analysis in mind that Russell, as we saw, gives his brief as war correspondent an unexpected twist by reporting first, and insistently, on the all-pervading influence of institutionalized racism in British India. The implication is that

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this ugly disorder is bound up in a crucial way with the military upheaval he has gone out to chronicle—a line of analysis that falls at an acute, potentially disruptive angle, needless to say, across the Manichaean model in which British martyrs and heroes are opposed to Indian “monsters of cruelty and lust” in “an absolute polarization of good and evil.” He does not probe the origins of the “angry passions” that he diagnoses as fundamental to the scene of racial division, idealized as benevolent stewardship but in reality a form of apartheid, that he describes in British India. He does not, that is, speculate as Memmi later does that the psychosis of the Nero complex originates in the morbid conscience of the colonizers and in the massive cultural dissonance implicit in the colonial relation. His theory seems to be closer to Conrad’s: that placing Europeans in a situation of unlimited power has made them dangerously susceptible to the influences of an environment permeated with “savagery” and has inflamed imperfectly suppressed drives. “It is one of the most deplorable signs of our deterioration in the East, and of the evil influences of the systems around us,” Russell says in a resonant footnote that chimes with Ian Baucom’s thesis about the undermining of British national identity in the imperial context, “that men can be found in the ranks of our statesmen and magistracy in India” who defend grossly sadistic forms of punishment meted out to mutineers (2:46n). Rather than speculating on the origins of this state of mind, he devotes his pioneering expose´ of imperialist racism to tracing in some detail the ramifying system of violence that grows, as he has discovered, directly, unavoidably, out of British antipathy for people with dark skins. The keynote of his view of the situation in India is struck in the early passage in which he implies, forecasting Memmi’s interpretation of colonialism, that the British, in their war fever, dream of nothing less than an unthinkable outcome: that of obliterating the population of India from the face of the earth. “Do what we may or can, our race can neither destroy the inhabitants of India as the Americans destroyed the Red men, nor can it dispossess them and drive them out to other regions as the Spaniards temporarily drove out the Mexicans,” he declares (1:52–53). He picks up here the argument made before in his dispatch to the Times of April 20, 1858: “We cannot, and God forbid that the British people would if they could, put to death all who have at any time and under any circumstances taken up arms against us. We cannot, after the work of the bullet and the sabre has been done, put hundreds of thousands of people to death” (10). This is not idle hyperbole on Russell’s part; he clearly imagines himself to be addressing a public seized by a fever of exterminationist thinking. A national policy of what amounts to genocide in India based on a racial phobia seems to him a real possibility that must be distinctly named and repudiated. “It would seem that the Anglo-Saxon and his congeners in India

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must either abate their strong ‘natural’ feelings against the coloured race, restrain the expression of their antipathies, or look forward to the day, not far distant, when the indulgence of their passions will render the government of India too costly a luxury for the English people,” he warns in the Diary (1:53). Racism is or at least has recently become not a philosophy or an attitude but a passion, and one of genocidal import. Some of the customary manifestations of this passion seem slight enough from the British point of view, but Russell is intent on marking them clearly as repugnant acts of violence. In this category fall all the casual indignities and insults that he is shocked to discover constitute the very fabric of daily social relations across the racial divide in India. “I could not help thinking . . . how harsh the reins of our rule must feel to the soft skin of the natives,” he says, evoking British governance at least figuratively as a system of bodily assault upon the governed. “The smallest English official treats their prejudices with contempt, and thinks he has a right to visit them just as he would call on a gamekeeper in his cottage,” the Times correspondent reports, adding that he has personally seen “one eminent public servant” receive “a great chieftain on a matter of considerable State importance” half undressed, “with his braces hanging at his heels, his bare feet in slippers, and his shirt open at the breast just as he came from his bath.” By this point, the reader is meant to recognize this habitual “insolence and rudeness” (2:270–71) of the British in India toward their Indian subjects not as bad manners but as a direct expression of the “passions” of racism and of that irrational murderous compulsion aimed at the colonized that Memmi was to label the Nero complex. Its consequences for the Mutiny are suggested in one audacious passage in which Russell, visiting the infamous site of Cawnpore, imagines the elegant soire´es held at the station in the days before the uprising, with the diabolical Nana Sahib (soon to preside over the butchery of the British ladies and gentlemen with whom he had long had the friendliest social relations) in attendance. A series of other writers subsequently imagined this scene, almost always to paint the Nana as the epitome of hidden villainy. Russell, visiting Cawnpore at a moment when the martyrs’ blood was still wet, figuratively speaking, in the courtyard where they were murdered, describes the scene to emphasize something else: the effect on a proud Indian prince of the racist disdain that he must have had perpetually to endure from his British hosts. Thus we get a vividly imagined picture of “the millinery anxieties of the ladies, the ices, and champagne, and supper, the golden-robed Nana Sahib, moving about amid haughty stares and ill-concealed dislike. ‘What the deuce does the General ask that nigger here for?’ ” (1:194). The eruption of the “hateful word” and its charge of hostile passion into the scene gives the British reader in 1860 an insight into the resentment and rage that the Nana was bound to feel at receiving

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on such an occasion his share of the humiliation inflicted, so Russell’s account suggests, on every Indian person, from punkah pullers to maharajas, in every encounter with the English. Russell’s dissident version of the scene scandalously revises its canonical form by portraying the Nana as the victim rather than the instigator of racial hatred. From the habitual aggression of racial insults, Russell shows, it is but a short step to heightened levels of violence, or rather, to an ascending series of the physical assaults that define the category of violence itself. In a sequence of incendiary scenes, Russell reports witnessing British masters savagely beating native menials for supposed laziness or insolence. The clearly demented quality of this behavior certainly begs, like so much else in the Mutiny archive, for analysis in terms of extreme psychopathology, though of course the vocabulary that allows Memmi to provide such an analysis was not available to Russell. Among these scenes is one at an improvised officer’s club in the battle zone where Russell is “very much shocked” to see two native servants lying bloody and heavily bandaged after being beaten by their master, while the wife of one sits by, weeping inconsolably and uncomforted by anyone. Russell learns and reports to his readers the amazing fact that such beatings of servants are common practice in India, and that the perpetrator “had no fear of any pains or penalties of the law.” “It is a savage, beastly, and degrading custom,” he declares, his usual ironic reticence momentarily overcome. “I have heard it defended; but no man of feeling, education, or goodness of heart can vindicate or practise it” (1:389–90). Clearly he imagines that it will come as a revelation to his public at home to learn that the supposedly philanthropic British regime in India, the proclaimed agency of Christian values, has fostered savage assaults on Indian servants as a recognized, widely practiced custom protected by law and defended by colonial opinion.11 Russell very clearly draws the linkage between everyday brutalities like the above and still more extreme outrages in which the underlying murderous and even genocidal impulse that Memmi theorizes as the essence of the colonial relation is unmistakable. He reports having heard “pitiable tales” of the sufferings of poor villagers around Simla during the construction of the road to the hill station there and then during forced service for British officials. The latter may seem to operate with Olympian indifference to the fate of their many victims; Russell’s implication, however, is that indifference is but a mask assumed by the “angry passions” (2:431) and the exterminating impulses that lie at the root of organized racism. “When a great personage, like the Governor-General or the Lord Sahib, is moving to or from Simla, several thousands of coolies are collected about the station,” he reports, “where they live as they can, be the weather fair or foul, robbed by the small native officials of their miserable pittance, at a time when the great demand for their simple food causes the price to

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rise enormously. I am assured that on such occasions many perish on the road; but that is considered as a matter of very little consequence” (2:172– 73). The logic of racist violence as Russell deciphers it runs unbroken from insulting and abusing servants to the engineering of great mechanisms for the immolating of large populations en masse—seemingly, on this occasion, as part of the ceremonial welcoming of great personages visiting the station. Greatly exceeding his brief as war correspondent, then, Russell uses his Diary to offer his readers a view of the whole environment of colonial relations in India. Whatever moral legitimacy the British raj might once have possessed has suffered a nearly complete and disastrous collapse: this is the plainest message of Russell’s reporting. Following a century of British rule supposedly devoted to developing and “improving” the country, he says, expanding his angle of vision, most natives of India appear to live in appalling poverty and wretchedness, and Anglo-Indians are so indifferent to this misery as to be virtually blind to its existence (1:146– 47). “In effect, the grave, unhappy doubt which settles on my mind is, whether India is the better for our rule, so far as regards the social condition of the great mass of the people. We have put down widow-burning, we have sought to check infanticide; but I have travelled hundreds of miles through a country peopled with beggars and covered with wigwam villages” (1:195). His condemnation of British government in India is sweeping and absolutely unsparing. “The action of the Government in matters of improvement is only excited by considerations of revenue,” he declares. “Does it—as the great instructor of the people, the exponent of our superior morality and civilization—does it observe treaties, keep faith, pursue a fixed and equitable policy, and follow the precepts of Christianity in its conduct towards states and peoples? Are not our courts of law condemned by ourselves? Are not our police admitted to be a curse and a blight upon the country?” (1:195). Like every other contemporary commentator, he denounces the British annexation of the kingdom of Oudh in 1856, widely regarded as a primary cause of the rebellion (1:226), and the seizing of the jewels of the king, “though we had no more claim on them than on the Crown diamonds of Russia” (1:131). “Indeed it begins to grow upon me that we are in India rather by force, than by affection” (1:87). As a result of its greed and brutality, British rule is maintained by “a Government which has violated all the conditions of its possibility” (1:52). Russell drives home the point in the concluding paragraph of the Diary, quoting the opinion of Sir Henry Lawrence “that he was persuaded, on the whole, the people were happier under native government than under our own. There,” he notes, “is the whole difficulty of our position” (2:437).

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His most extreme denunciation of British rule in India may come in the scene late in volume 1 where he describes the “eloquent but illogical sermon” preached in a military mess tent by one Rev. Mr. McKay. This fatuous clergyman is quoted as asserting that the empire of England will not fall like all other great empires, “because she was Christian and carried the ark of the covenant, whereas they had been heathen.” Russell takes this pronouncement of British religious virtue as an occasion for stating baldly his judgment of the British Empire in India as nothing other than a criminal enterprise—one intimately entwined with, sheltered and fostered by, all the institutions of British religiosity. The Christianity of a Roman Emperor could not save his empire; and as “Sarmatia fell unwept without a crime,”12 so might we fall unwept with many crimes, of which our people know nothing, in spite of our being Christian, with a Protestant constitution and an Empire of all religions in the world. I believe that we permit things to be done in India which we would not permit to be done in Europe, or could not hope to effect anywhere else without public reprobation; and that our Christian character in Europe, our Christian zeal in Exeter Hall, will not atone for usurpation and annexation in Hindostan, or for violence and fraud in the Upper Provinces of India. (1:356) Russell’s revulsion from shameful, unavowable British crimes of empire and from the perversion of the British conscience leads him one step further along the road of political disaffection, to undisguised expressions of sympathy for the rebels. The uprising, he declares, far from being a criminal mutiny by disloyal troops, had the character of a war of liberation driven by “national promptings to shake off the yoke of a stranger, and to re-establish the full power of native chiefs, and the full sway of native religions” (1:164). The rebels in Oudh, he declares elsewhere, “may fairly be regarded as engaged in a patriot war for their country and their sovereign” and should be treated as “honourable enemies” (1:274). He even has exculpatory words for the mutinous sepoys themselves, whose uprising was provoked in part (Russell here quotes a high-minded old colonel of a disbanded Bengal Native Infantry regiment) by “the ignorance and arrogance of the young officers who recently joined the service, and who treated the old native officers as ‘niggers,’ instead of showing them the respect and consideration they had been accustomed to under the former order of things” (2:129). Racial hatred and contempt once again are identified as the original sin of British India. And if our enemies are patriots and men driven to rebellion and murder by unrelenting racial abuse, our allies, says Russell, are likely to be as diabolical as the terrifying Gurkha Jung Bahadoor, whose evil tigerish eye “shines with a cold light, resembling a ball of phosphorus,” and to whom Russell pointedly avoids

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being introduced (1:310), or as despicable as the notorious Rugber Sing, “a Torquemada in the art of torturing” (2:371). Given this alienated view of British rule in India, Russell’s account of the war undertaken to preserve this rule is bound to be preyed on by the deepest possible ambivalence. He seems almost to highlight this effect in his text, though without ever explicitly diagnosing it. On the one hand, Russell, the first “embedded” journalist to cover a war as a quasi-official member of an army, has not yet fully abandoned the ideal of chivalrous warfare and the ideal of military bravery and glory. In his famous dispatch describing the charge of the Light Cavalry Brigade at Balaclava several years earlier, he could still glorify military heroism in its full tragic purity. “As they rushed towards the front,” he wrote of the doomed brigade, “the Russians opened on them from the guns in the redoubt on the right with volleys of musketry and rifles. They swept proudly past, glittering in the morning sun in all the pride and splendour of war” (Despatches 127). The Diary retains traces of such an attitude. Russell briefly rhapsodizes on the “beautiful sight” of the army moving into position before battle (1:279), and he writes admiringly of each successful maneuver carried out by the British forces with which his lot is cast. In the same spirit, he paints a series of almost adulatory portraits of heroic British officers. Sir Colin Campbell, commander of the army that recaptures Lucknow, is in Russell’s description “every inch a soldier in look and bearing”; “the jaw, smooth and broad, is full of decision; the eye of the most piercing intelligence, full of light and shrewdness.” His chief of staff, General Mansfield, is similarly impressive: “his face is handsome—a fine oval with a vigorous jaw; compressed, arched lips, full of power; a well-formed nose, and a brow laden with thought” (1:264). Here is the Victorian male ideal in perfected form—the ideal seen from a microscopically altered angle of vision as a scarily dehumanized and sinister one in the image of Mr. Murdstone in David Copperfield (1849–50).13 And in passages here and there Russell, like nearly every other writer at the time, praises the British national character for the unique endowment of gallantry and daring that was supposedly manifested in this war. “I saw it was the pride, self-reliance, and greatness of a conquering race alone [“race” in this context meaning “nation”], which had enabled a handful of men to sustain and successfully conduct the most hopeless military enterprise that was ever undertaken” (2:75). There is no reason to think that Russell is insincere in writing like this, even though there could almost be a trace of irony in such passages, in which he seems to mimic Samuel Smiles’s paean to Mutiny heroism in Self-Help of the year before (1859).14 The problem with such sentiments in the context of Russell’s book is never articulated by him, but it overshadows everything: it is, of course, that the mission of Sir Colin Camp-

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bell and the other British military figures praised by Russell is to salvage and perpetuate by force the repugnant system of racial oppression and brutality that he has so unsparingly documented. Only a very imperceptive reader could fail to notice this lethal contradiction at the heart of My Diary in India. Russell offers his response to this undiagnosed crisis in his text in his eyewitness accounts of military operations, including, among other episodes, the recapturing of Lucknow in March 1858. Here he brings his anatomy of Indian violence to its climax and most decisively refutes the claim that contemporary writing about the Mutiny was enclosed in an impenetrable grid of racism and imperialist jingoism. My Diary in India must in fact be seen not only as a bitter indictment of Britain’s imperial adventure in India but also as an inaugural text of modern antiwar writing (well predating, for instance, Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage [1895] and, by half a century, the works of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Erich Maria Remarque). War in general is bad enough. Despite reports that British troops in past wars in India acted mercifully, in obedience both to military honor and to Christian morality, toward wounded and captured enemies, the truth is different, Russell insists. “War can never be purged of a dross of cruelty and barbarism. It is all very well to talk of moderation in the hour of victory, but men’s passions do not cool in a moment, and in every army there must be ruffians who rejoice in a moment of licence, when killing is no murder. Soldiers do not always spare a wounded foe.” Like its close affiliate racism, war is inevitably a sphere of the dominance of human passions. The extreme rarity of mercy in this sphere is signaled, Russell argues, by the praise that is always lavished on instances of it, as in a celebrated act of chivalry by a French officer toward a wounded opponent at Waterloo. “Conduct warfare on the most chivalrous principles, there must ever be a touch of murder about it” (1:288–89). In this present, terrifyingly ferocious war, where, as Russell often notes, no quarter is given to the enemy by either side, and where British forces invariably bayonet all wounded sepoys on the battlefield and shoot or hang every prisoner, it is much more than a touch. After his initial stay in Cawnpore, he announces his departure with the army for the campaign against Lucknow, where, he says, I shall see . . . , though in a cruel, exterminating form, in which no quarter is given on either side, all the pomp of eastern warfare, which, if now it has no glory, has at least circumstance enough. It is horrible to be engaged in such a war. Wherever the rebels meet a Christian, or a white man, they at once slay him pitilessly. The natives who conceal them do so at their peril. Wherever we meet a rebel in arms, or any man on whom suspicion rests, we kill him with equal celerity, and without any greater show of pity. (1:221–22)

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The “absolute polarization of good and evil” has obviously collapsed altogether in My Diary in India. Russell suggests that a war like this, a war of ethnic extermination and passionate hatreds in which all capacity for pity and all principles of chivalry have been cast aside, marks an unprecedented experience in modern times. Henceforth, he declares in effect, the image of Britain as an idealistic nation guided by moral principle is defunct. But he means also for readers to see that the vertiginous excesses of cruelty committed by British forces are not so much effects of the momentary passions of battle as they are the inescapable culmination of the great system of institutionalized violence against native Indians that he has already traced in such excruciating detail. On Mutiny battlefields we see plainly revealed, that is, the genocidal essence, the ultimate subconscious intent, of such routine practices as the humiliating of Indian grandees and the beating of native servants. The battle scenes depicted by Russell repeatedly take the imagistic form so often reduplicated in Mutiny literature: episodes in which crowds of panic-stricken sepoys are trapped in a room or building or on a battlefield and massacred. This paradigmatic event, no less a literary trope, an imaginary projection, for being based in historical events, is enacted in the Diary in the assault on Lucknow when British troops surround three or four hundred sepoys in a courtyard house containing rooms full of old machinery; the sepoys are shot down to the last man, the house catches on fire, and “the wounded were burned with the dead” (1:336)—a sort of horrible victory in which, indeed, there is “no glory” for the victors. In another version of the same mytheme, Russell is “astonished” to hear an officer tell of an incident “in a recent celebrated action,” where, “in a place . . . to which I shall not more particularly allude,” fifty-seven sepoys are trapped on a roof and allowed to surrender and lay down their weapons. “Upon which,” Russell’s informant tells him, “I fell them in against the wall and told some Sikhs, who were handy, to polish them off! This they did immediately, shooting and bayoneting them, so that, altogether, they were disposed of in a couple of minutes” (2:311). Russell is shocked in this instance not so much at the report of the murdering of unarmed men, an act in violation of any minimal code of “chivalry,” for he says that he has heard of many such happenings in the war (2:310), as at the officer’s casual, cold-blooded, spiritually desiccated manner of ordering and then narrating the killings. The man’s soul has gone dead in a way that is a horrific novelty for the experienced war correspondent. Even so, it is the same attitude that he has encountered often before in India, as at a mess party one evening at which, he reports, “I heard a good deal of ‘potting pandies’ [pandy: the derisive term for mutineers] and ‘polishing-off niggers’ ” (1:266). The same attitude is expressed in the various excesses of vengeful military justice that Russell

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makes a point of very sharply underlining. He mentions the fierce retribution dealt out to the surrounding countryside by Colonel James Neill in his infamous march from Benares to Allahabad in June 1857, commenting that “one of the officers attached to his column had to remonstrate with him on the ground that if he depopulated the country he could get no supplies for the men,” and noting also that Sir Colin, awkwardly cast in this narrative as a somewhat anachronistic representative of a stilluncorrupted code of chivalry, “is utterly opposed to such extreme and reckless severity” (1:222). In the next stage of the campaign, an advance party toward Cawnpore was led by Major Sydenham Renaud, who, seeking to emulate Neill, pursued similar policies. “In two days,” Russell reports, “forty-two men were hanged on the road-side, and a batch of twelve men were executed because their faces were ‘turned the wrong way’ when they were met on the march” (2:425). For such actions, Russell does not use the term “atrocity,” but his judgment is unmistakable. So it is also in his detailed account of a report he has heard from a British officer of the “disgusting” aftermath of one episode of the battle of Lucknow. A band of sepoys cornered in a house called the Chuckerwallah Kothie fight heroically to the last man. One survivor is dragged from the wreckage by Sikh soldiers. He was pulled by the legs to a convenient place, where he was held down, pricked in the face and body by the bayonets of some of the soldiery, whilst others collected fuel for a small pyre, and when all was ready—the man was roasted alive! There were a few Englishmen looking on, more than one officer saw it. No one ventured to interfere! The horror of this infernal cruelty was aggravated by an attempt of the miserable wretch to escape when half-burned to death. By a sudden effort he leaped away, and with the flesh hanging from his bones, ran for a few yards ere he was caught, brought back, put on the fire again, and held there by bayonets till his remains were consumed. (1:302) The horror of the “infernal” tableau, in which the imagery of a scene in hell could not be more explicit, is almost surpassed by Russell’s detailed account of “a bloody, and a cruel, and cowardly act” (1:342) committed by an officer of the 23rd Fusileers in the aftermath of the British victory. A boy from Kashmir leading “a blind and aged man” comes up to the Fusileers’ post, throws himself at the feet of an officer, and pleads for mercy. The officer puts his pistol to the boy’s head and pulls the trigger, but the weapon misfires, not once but three times. “The fourth time— thrice he had time to relent—the gallant officer succeeded, and the boy’s lifeblood flowed at his feet, amid the indignation and the outcries of his men!” (1:348).

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The point of Russell’s compilation of these and other such instances of “crimes, of which our people know nothing, in spite of our being Christian, with a Protestant constitution,” is to make it possible to recognize them at last not as isolated instances of the psychosis of battle but as systemic phenomena bound up with all the mentality and the ideology of British India. National virtue, he tells his readers, has in India become engulfed in horrible perversions. With this discovery as its through-line, the Diary becomes a journey into a heart of darkness that the author locates ever more unmistakably in the heart of the British character and British national enterprises, particularly as they find expression in the polemics of the retributionist party. In his evocation of this party, he offers his most extreme instance of the theme of diabolical possession that runs throughout his book, as it does throughout Mutiny literature generally. As cruel as covenanters without their faith, as relentless as inquisitors without their fanaticism, these sanguinary creatures, from the safe seclusion of their desks, utter stridulous cries as they plunge their pens into the seething ink, and shout out “Blood! more blood!” with the unfailing energy and thirst of Marat or St. Just. “We want vengeance!” they cry—“We must have it full; we care not if it be indiscriminate. We are not Christians now, because we are dealing with those who are not of our faith; rather are we of the faith and followers of him who preached ‘the study of revenge, immortal hate!’ ” (2:276) The quotation of Milton’s Satan (Paradise Lost 1:107) makes unsurpassably explicit Russell’s theme, usually intimated more cautiously, of the transformation of Christian ideals into instruments of diabolical passions. My Diary in India thus formulates a problem that seems ever more intractable. From the point of view of literary interpretation, this problem looks like an incurable fracture in the organization of Russell’s book. How can a reader reconcile his glorification of British heroes such as Sir Colin Campbell with his fierce critique of the colonial society of which they are potent defenders? The book seems fatally flawed by its inability to resolve or even clearly to mark the fact of this conundrum. Seen in the lens of cultural analysis, My Diary in India offers a signal instance of that incoherent, self-divided state often diagnosed as a keynote of the age by Victorian commentators. Russell does his best to shore up the coherence of his book by stating his confidence that “our people [at home] know nothing” of the crimes of British imperialism (1:356) and by declaring in a late passage that the governmental authorities and the generals in the field “have acted generally as became enlightened statesmen and Christian men,” which is to say, “in opposition to the ferocious howl which has been raised by men who have lived so long among Asiatics as to have

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imbibed their worst feelings, and to have forgotten the sentiments of civilization and religion” (2:275–76). But these palliatives cannot resolve his dilemma, the vertiginous effect of which he seems to project in the strain of sickening, nausea-inducing imagery that forms one of the distinctive literary features of the Diary. What Russell has seen in India fills him with a revulsion and disgust that repeatedly take on the phantasmagoric quality that is the hallmark symptom of psychological trauma and that no rationalization can dispel. These moments in his text are portrayed by Russell as if they were the recurrences of a horrible, obscurely guilt-laden nightmare. In one episode, he goes fishing with a net in the Ganges during a lull in military activities and sees “several bloated bodies, covered with crows and vultures,” come floating toward him, “poisoning the air and water.” He catches “a number of very hideous fish” that seem to have swum out of the imagistic field of Hieronymus Bosch, including one kind “covered with a slimy skin, greasy and pustulous, with mouths like that of a shark, from which projected long worm-like feelers”; “but, worse than all, the net brought up parts of human skeletons, some with flesh upon them. . . . I have resolved never to eat fish whilst I remain in India” (1:204). Especially striking are his evocations of the two main locales of his memoir, Cawnpore and Lucknow. To visit Cawnpore in 1858 was to visit a sanctified shrine of English martyrdom, but, reports Russell, using his most heavily loaded adjective, “it was a horrible spot!” (1:178). Far from being inspirational, it is a loathsome scene that manifests again the allegorical character of all of Russell’s Indian landscapes. Inside the shattered rooms, which had been the scene of such devotion and suffering, are heaps of rubbish and filth. The intrenchment is used as a cloaca maxima by the natives, camp-followers, coolies, and others who bivouac in the sandy plains around it. The smells are revolting. Rows of gorged vultures sit with outspread wings on the mouldering parapets, or perch in clusters on the two or three leafless trees at the angle of the works by which we enter. I shot one with my revolver; and as the revolting creature disgorged its meal, twisting its bare black snake-like neck to and fro, I made a vow I would never incur the risk of beholding such a disgusting sight again. (1:179) The culmination of this imagery of hallucinatory disgust in the Diary occurs as Russell enters Lucknow just as the rebel-held city falls to the British assault. He describes a scene of devastation choked with tremendous piles of dead bodies. The imagery of a visit to hell becomes once more unmistakable, as does the overmastering note of nauseated disgust and the echoing of various cognates of the prevailing word “horror.” (This sector of Russell’s book vividly epitomizes, that is, the idea of “horror” as that form of dread centered on an unbearably intense sensation of sickened revul-

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sion.) Also, we get another recurrence of the surreal imagery of slaughtering sepoys trapped in buildings from which no exit exists. From court to court, and building to building, the sepoys were driven, leaving in each hundreds of men bayonetted and shot. The scene was horrible. The rooms in which the sepoys lay burning slowly in their cotton clothing, with their skin crackling and their flesh roasting literally in its own fat, whilst a light-bluish, vapoury smoke, of disgusting odour, formed a veil through which the dreadful sight could be dimly seen, were indeed chambers of horrors ineffable. It was before breakfast, and I could not stand the smell. (1:313) “The scene was horrible”; “it was a horrible spot”; “it is horrible to be engaged in such a war”: the word reverberates through Russell’s narrative, condensing its most urgent lessons. The apocalyptic scene of victory in Lucknow could scarcely be more remote from the evocation of “the pride and splendour of war” in the same author’s panorama of the charge of the Light Brigade. The earlier text dates from only three and a half years before, but Russell, one of the chief purveyors of the Mutiny to the Victorian public, seems to have passed into a completely alienated realm of sensibility where nausea has submerged all feelings of heroic idealism and where “exterminating” British armies seem utterly in thrall to the Nero complex. To his first readers, My Diary in India must truly have felt like the marking of a terrible break in the history of the nation. “HORRID WORK AT THE BEST” In Lieutenant Vivian Dering Majendie’s Up Among the Pandies: or, A Year’s Service in India (1859), we get another eyewitness account of the conquest of Lucknow in March 1858.15 In essential respects this book extends and powerfully confirms Russell’s dissident argument about the campaign, though it keys itself with such intensity to the surreal “cruelty and barbarism” of the war that it could be taken almost as springing from antithetical motives. In contrast to Russell’s mode of reasoned analysis and unwavering humanitarianism, Majendie makes clear in this memoir that his attitude toward the horrors of the Mutiny is a dangerously unstable, volatile, ambivalent one traversed by more than a slight streak of “the sombre and ferocious instincts which religion and civilization can never wholly eradicate.” It is no wonder that S. B. Chaudhuri condemns Up Among the Pandies, which he takes as a condensation of all the malignity of British racism, as “a wild savage book ‘born in blackness’ ” (260). The savagery of the book is very real and powerfully shocking even today, but it would be a mistake to consign it to the index of immoral literature. The

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humanitarianism of this pariah text is in fact no less genuine than Russell’s, but it bears witness to a moral trauma so violent and so disillusioning as to throw readers’ interpretive compasses out of magnetic alignment. Its guiding principle is that moral discourse faced with an event like the Indian Mutiny can no longer claim a risk-free immunity from the perversions that it criticizes and will only seem fatally sentimental and self-deluding if it does. Certainly, Up Among the Pandies has nothing whatever in common with the formulas of critics who tell us that Mutiny literature is subservient everywhere to national self-justification and to the ideological reinforcement of imperialism. Of the many books of the day that refute these dogmatic formulas, this one is undoubtedly the most extreme. Like Russell’s Diary and like Heart of Darkness, Majendie’s memoir opens with an extended account of the trip from England out to India and then by stages upriver to the scene of the action. The point of this narrative entre´e en matie`re is the same here as in the other texts, to emphasize the lengthy personal journey of perception and understanding that the narrator finds he must undertake in order to get to the bottom of the events to which he seeks to bear witness. The young lieutenant goes off to war fully under the sway of the vindictive rage against the mutineers that prevailed in England in the wake of the atrocity reports—but he emphasizes at the same time, once again, that the truthfulness of these tales was already at this early date of 1859 deeply in doubt. “Why is it that by some these tales of suffering and torture are now disbelieved?” he asks (57), declaring both that he firmly still does believe them and that “many of them [were], doubtless, gross fabrications, written to satisfy a morbid craving for horrors” (59; see also 225n, 341). We have seen that doubts about the atrocity tales were expressed (if not always in such shockingly bald terms) almost from the first. It is hard to avoid Majendie’s hint that the fury of retribution that seized the nation at the time may perversely enough have been aggravated by the very dubiousness of these tales—that only by abandoning oneself to fury could one chase away nagging doubts about the truth of the stories that had so strongly moved the nation and that Majendie himself, who makes a point of protesting his belief in them far too much, clearly at least half disbelieves. He evinces in any case total devotion to the British campaign against the rebellion, which he describes in an early passage in terms of that same delirious mysticism of blood— blood spilled and crying out for revenge, blood spilled in torrents to redeem sins, blood for blood—that saturates Mutiny literature and makes the war fever that Victorian Britain underwent at this moment look at times like a full-fledged psychotic episode. In the aftermath of the massacres, Majendie declares, the people of England watched an “avenging stream” of soldiers heading out for India, “a long stream of war which

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poured continuously from England’s bleeding side—a stream which was destined to wash out the cruel stain, to palsy and arrest the dark and blood-stained hand in the reeking triumph of its treachery, and to revenge, as all hearts prompted, the base indignities and savage ill-treatment of our murdered countrywomen and children” (4). England in this hysterical vision becomes Christ on the Cross, the troops fantastically become the purifying blood of the Savior, and the religious fervor of the moment becomes, as in The Chaplain’s Narrative and many other texts of the day (including The Essence of Christianity), not just inseparable from but identical to the passion of revenge. Majendie also invokes other characteristic elements of the British war mentality here in the early portion of his book. For one thing, he gestures once or twice to that celebration of ancestral military heroism that forms an important motif of Mutiny literature—hence his praise of the gallant exploit of Lieutenant Jeremiah Brasyer, who faced down the mutinous 6th Native Infantry (N.I.) regiment on June 6, 1857, at Allahabad. As in “the romances of old, wherein, though all the characters are heroes, one is always found to shine pre-eminently,” says Majendie, the name of this officer has gained “a high and glorious place in the annals of the mutiny” (96).16 Readers familiar with patriotic Mutiny literature will be surprised, though, by the relative feebleness of this theme of British chivalry in the book—and by the way it drops out almost without a trace once the author arrives on the front lines and gets his first taste of the war. Far more typical in this regard would be, for example, Charles Napier North’s Journal of an English Officer in India of the year before (1858), which is marked by constant eulogies of “gallant leader[s]” and “noble regiment[s]” (67) and by flowery praise of the heroism of soldiers “worthy of the Paladins of old” (100), or, for that matter, Russell’s Diary itself, with its series of glorified portraits of British officers. Majendie’s book also evinces a strain of racism, though again it is more or less confined to one footnote, in which he declares that Nana Sahib’s grievance against the government (which had disinherited him on dubious legal grounds) “rankled in his black, unforgiving, Asiatic mind till the payment of the grudge became the dearest wish of his heart” (119n), and to occasional asides such as the apostrophe he addresses to “my black friends with the black hearts, childkillers and murderers of women” (163). Majendie portrays his initial state of mind, in short, as an example of something like what Gautam Chakravarty describes as “the dominant view” of the war in Victorian Britain. But this patriotic, vindictive, racially inflamed attitude does not emerge unscathed from being plunged into “the fiery furnace of the Indian Mutiny” (H. Kingsley 3:279). Up Among the Pandies, in fact, is a parable of a moral transformation that is all the more striking rhetorically for never being stated in so many

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words—and never being sealed by the pledge of permanence that is supposed to crown Victorian fables of personal redemption. It is as though this narrator never fully grasps the significance of his own experience. Even so, the shift in perspective is registered with great clarity in the long series of vignettes and episodes of war by which Majendie (who displays little interest in the military history that is the bane of much Mutiny literature) recounts his momentous campaign. In one initiatory experience as he nears the combat zone, he comes on a hanged man on a green in Allahabad, guarded by a native policeman. Before long the sight of a dead man will be commonplace for him, but here he is taken aback. “It is rather startling when enjoying a quiet country ride to come suddenly upon a body writhing in its last agonies, or hanging lifeless before you,” he says. But “no feeling of sorrow, pity, or remorse for the fiends who, falling into our hands after a bloody and treacherous career, meet the death which is so justly their due, can ever be roused, I should think, in a Englishman’s breast” (101, 102). Obviously he invokes this boilerplate prose, in which the enemy are all “fiends” and the patriotic mission of retribution negates all sorrow and pity, precisely to repress a qualm of sorrow and pity that has caught him unawares, as well as to inject the supposedly nonexistent issue of compassion for the enemy plainly into his text. Such prose in any case makes few, if any, reappearances in the book, for its peremptory formulas turn out to be hopelessly incommensurate with what the author encounters on the battlefield. Just before joining the army for the assault on Lucknow, he happens by accident on another startling sight: the skeletons of twenty to thirty sepoys lying in a grove of trees where they were killed by a shell in an earlier battle: “a ghastly sight enough.” (Another premonition of Heart of Darkness: Marlow’s first revelation of the murderous cruelty of Company rule comes in a similar grove where he is “horror-struck” to discover a group of skeletal black men who have crawled there to die [17–18].) Majendie reconstructs the event: the men, either surrounded or fanatical, had climbed into the trees to fight, and many were shot down “like birds.” “Ah! many a dainty meal have the jackals and pariah dogs made over these horrible bodies.” And in a glimpse of something like empathy, he imagines the final moments of “two of the wretched devils,” who, “unable to bear the torture and suspense of waiting to be killed, in a mad desperation actually threw themselves down the well,” where their bones can be seen (146–48). Faced with such sights, he conspicuously forgets to brand the dead men “fiends” and to applaud their having met their deserved fate; he forgets also to mention their racial stigma. A similar forgetfulness marks our narrator’s first entry into combat, when he comes upon a striking tableau of war: a half-dozen mangled corpses of sepoys who had been surprised and slaughtered by British cav-

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alry. “A sickening sight it was,” observes Majendie, striking what will before long become the keynote of this memoir. (He never does develop the numbed sensibility that allows soldiers in combat not to be shocked by the sight of mutilated dead bodies.) Here his sickened revulsion from the horrors of combat fuses unexpectedly with a sudden impulse of compassion. A group of women is “weeping bitterly” over the dead men. “The poor women first looked up at us imploringly,” he reports, “with tearful eyes and clasped hands, as we passed, and then sadly down at the wretched, mutilated remains of perhaps all that was dear to them in this world.” He dwells on the horrible wounds, “the disfigured features and severed skulls” (166) that register the tornado of violence that has just passed over, leaving it to the reader to imagine the impact of such a sight on the grieving women. The latter figure in the scene exactly as do the grieving women depicted in the allegorical Punch cartoon of “Justice” (figure 2)—the contrast being that all evocation of the theme of just punishment again drops out of Majendie’s own allegorical image. The effect of the scene is a disconcerting one for a reader anticipating in this officer’s memoir a book like The Chaplain’s Narrative, where all is British heroism and triumph and where the destruction of the diabolical enemy is always grounds for celebration. The disconcerting effect is sharply magnified in the next phase of Up Among the Pandies, the phase of the author’s full immersion in battle. The clear if never explicitly stated theme of this section is the obliteration of all ideal imagery of military glory, gallantry, courage, or “chivalrous generosity,” not to mention all official apologias for the war and the leaden propagandistic prose style in which they couch themselves, in what Majendie portrays as the nihilistic pandemonium of combat. What dominates in this portion of the book is that sensation of nightmare and phantasmagoria that forms, as I have said before, the stylistic signature of Mutiny writing and of psychological trauma. To evoke it, Majendie invents a dizzying mode of impressionistic English prose in which the narrative voice dissolves into kaleidoscopes of fractured and always hideous images. Battle as seen from this point of view is utterly remote from Rotton’s rendering of it, in which gallant young heroes imbued with the “noble military spirit” quote Latin poetry as they die on the battlefield, or others enter in their last moments into theological conversation about the doctrine of sanctification—parables designed to reassure readers, and possibly the author himself, as to the morally elevated character of British actions in this war. By contrast, war reportage turns in Up Among the Pandies into nothing more coherent than strobe-lighted glimpses of the frenzy of battle rendered with an experiential immediacy that leaves no room for abstraction or, above all, patriotic declamation. Readers in 1859 must instantly have seen that Majendie’s literary experiment of ren-

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dering a battlefield as it feels to be there carried potentially drastic consequences for the propagation and maintenance of any official interpretation of events. A sepoy running by is shot down by a rifleman. “Now he is down, rolling a confused and bloody mass in the dust and dirt—a few convulsive struggles—a little clutching at the grass which is beneath him, and which his blood, as it wells forth, is fast dying a dark red—a low moan or two, perchance, and all is over” (178). “Ping! ping! close to your ears! Where are the enemy?—Who can see them? There!—there, away to the right, see, lurking behind the mud walls of that village. Ping! bang!” (178). But even more than its wild confusion, it is the blinding ferocity of battle that Majendie records, and he does so with a concentrated poetic fury never perhaps attained before in the literature of war. See that soldier fiercely plunging down his bayonet into some object at his feet—see, is it not red as he uplifts it for another blow? Raise yourself in your stirrups and look down and behold that living thing, above which the steel is flashing so mercilessly: is it a dog, or some venomous and loathsome reptile? No—but a human being: it is a man who lies at that soldier’s feet—a man disguised with wounds and dust and mortal agony, with blood gurgling from his lips, and with half-uttered curses upon his tongue, who is dying there; and the reeking bayonet is wiped hurriedly upon the grass, and the killer passes on, to drain, in the wild excitement of his triumph, every drop of that cup of blood which this day the God of War holds out to him, and which he sees foaming and brimming over before him. Ugh! It is horrid work at the best. (179–80) The mystique of human blood has obviously undergone a drastic revision in the course of this book. No longer a sacred elixir flowing from Christ’s side to cleanse the stain of sin, blood now is a repulsive and intoxicating beverage gulped by soldiers on the battlefield (and by extension, by civilian populations under the spell of war fever) to drive them to temporary insanity. The god of war who surges fantastically into Majendie’s text at this moment is easy to recognize as the latest apparitional form of the Moloch-like “diabolical being,” the “dreadful conception of an object of worship,” who figures insistently in Mutiny writing and in the Victorian moral imaginary more generally. Here the evil god appears specifically as an epiphany of violence in its absolute form: violence as sheer instinctual fury, from which the last trace of moral content and patriotic invocation has been evacuated and all the idealizing abstraction of, say, “Justice” stripped away. It might be hard to identify another passage in Victorian literature that more clearly announces the advent of a radically disenchanted post-Victorian sensibility.

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What gives Majendie his harrowing intensity of perception when it comes to battlefield slaughter? It is, as he expressly emphasizes, knowing full well how dire a confession it is, that he himself loves it. This is exactly what renders military killing, especially in face-to-face combat, so “horrid”; this—to spell out Majendie’s implication, which Russell, as we saw, makes explicit—is what makes it murder. Fighting like that which he experienced at Lucknow, he shockingly reports, is something like fox-hunting, “only more madly and terribly exciting even than that—it is manhunting, my friend!” (179). Majendie sees that the topic is one of such moral moment that full disclosure here is imperative. No veneer of patriotism or other morally respectable motives, no glorification of it as “heroism” or “valor,” must be allowed to mystify our knowledge of warfare: this is the overriding and, of course, sharply dissident argument of Up Among the Pandies. And the first obligation of such an enterprise of uncompromising truth-telling is for the author to acknowledge that he himself is as prone to the mad lust of killing as any other soldier. We meet in this text as a result an especially acute version of that anguished ambivalence that, as I argue, is the keynote of Mutiny discourse. Majendie’s ambivalence takes the form not, as in the cases of other writers, of divided political opinions but of a profound self-division between, on the one hand, revulsion from the horror of killing that he represents in such mercilessly graphic form and, on the other, his irresistible susceptibility to “the wild and terrible excitement of war” (252). Ugh! It is horrid work at the best; but that thought comes afterwards, and not now, when mad with excitement, your pulse beating quickly, and I fear me glad at the work of death, as the veriest butcher among them, you press forward, amid smoke, and noise, and cracking rifles, and burning houses and burning jungle, through an atmosphere thick with sulphurous smells, and choking dust, and heavy heat, while the scenes which I have just attempted to describe are going on, in all their licensed fury, on every side. (180) In his experience of delayed horror, we may say, Majendie undergoes much the same revulsion from the war that the Victorian public itself experienced in the first months of 1858, once the first emotions of the national campaign of retribution had passed. How much of the public change of sentiment might be attributed to the appearance of this very text somewhat later in the year would be hard to determine. Majendie, at any rate, focuses explicitly upon this disjunction of feeling as the key to the moral drama of the Mutiny. “Strange that I could then gaze, without shuddering,” he writes, “on a sight [the bayoneting of the sepoy] which it sickens me, now as I write of it, to read—strange the excitement should so deaden one’s sensibilities, and draw such a film of callousness and

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indifference over one’s eyes” (180). This expressly traumatic split between two states of feeling or actually two opposed selves, a humanitarian one and a callous bloodthirsty one, exemplifies just the pattern of experience—of ambivalence carried to its utmost pitch—that forms the essential thematic of Mutiny literature. The result of Majendie’s effort to rend away the film of callousness and indifference from the reality of war is, on the lexical level, the increasing dominance in this text, as in Russell’s, of the vocabulary of nausea, revulsion, and disgust, and on the structural level, an extended sequence of scenes illustrating the appalling nature of this struggle, which had assumed from the first, as he definitively says, “all the horrible features of a war of extermination, a war in which pity was unknown” (196). One decisive image of this war of no pity comes in the “Frightful Scene of Cruelty” (as it is called in the table of contents) that Russell, we recall, described secondhand in his Diary (1:302), in which a sepoy prisoner is tortured and then burned alive by Sikh and British soldiers (186–88). Majendie witnessed this event with his own eyes and reports it in its plenitude of ghastly detail, as though it were (as indeed it was on the moral if not the military axis) a major incident in the war. “Seizing him by the two legs, they attempted to tear him in two! Failing in this, they dragged him along by the legs, stabbing him in the face with their bayonets as they went,” he reports, putting before the Victorian public an atrocity scene that for once is of unquestionable authenticity. “I could see the poor wretch writhing as the blows fell upon him, and could hear his moans as his captors dug the sharp bayonets into his lacerated and trampled body, while his blood, trickling down, dyed the white sand over which he was being dragged” (186). The craving for vengeance is stunned and almost satiated by such a sight. “No one will deny, I think, that this man at least adequately expiated, by his frightful and cruel death, any crimes of which he may have been guilty” (187). “It seemed almost like a dream,” Majendie concludes, in the most familiar trope of Mutiny writing, “till I rode up afterwards and saw the black trunk burned down to a stumpy, almost unrecognizable cinder” (188). The moment crystallizes the supreme principle for Majendie’s project of authorship: that in this war, as the result somehow of the catastrophic collapse of the spirit of pity, dreamlike phantasmagoria and exacting realism horrifically coincide. In another frightful episode that expresses the same principle, he witnesses soon afterward a group of sepoys who have been discovered hidden in a dry drain, “crouched in abject terror,” slaughtered in a volley of bullets. “It was horrible to see, through the semi-darkness, these poor wretches trying to screen themselves behind the corpses of their comrades, but trying in vain, . . . while their groans and shrieks seemed, reverberated as they were by the echoing, sonorous, arched roofs of their underground retreat, to ac-

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quire a strangely deep and awful tone. There was no escape, no pity” (194). There follows an extended meditation on the indiscriminate vindictiveness shown by the British army at Lucknow toward the civilian population. Unlike the treacherous sepoy, the Oudh villager, Majendie says (expressing a view often taken by Victorian commentators), was essentially a patriot who had “simply taken advantage of a great revolt to strike a blow for his country, which we had taken from him, and who was fighting . . . with at least a show of right upon his side, and in a cause which was not wholly vile” (195). “It would have been more satisfactory,” he says with pointed understatement, “if for the people of Oude . . . there had been some mercy and quarter” (195). But no distinction was made between mutinous sepoy and patriotic civilian: “[the latter’s] skin was black, and did not that suffice?” (196).17 The culminating episode of the battle for Lucknow in Majendie’s account is another one mentioned by Russell (1:336), the massacre of three hundred sepoys jammed into a small room of a repository of old machinery called “the Engine House.” Majendie describes this event, too, with an excruciating fullness out of all proportion to its military significance (214–19). When the British troops burst into the building, a desperate struggle breaks out among men so crowded together they can hardly move, “our men having literally to mow their way through this living mass, . . . plying their bayonets busily and unceasingly . . . till they had hewn for themselves standing room out of this mass of struggling, bleeding, panicstricken mutineers.” Nothing redeems the ghastliness of this event. “It must have been an awful scene—a mob of friends and foes crowded into a few square yards, hacking and hewing at one another, reeking bayonets and reddened tulwar blades flashing high in air—occasional pistol-shots breaking in sharp and clear upon the hideous chorus of groans, and curses, and shrieks, which resounded through the air.” Trapped amid the machinery, “the miserable Sepoys seemed to have become perfectly paralysed and helpless with terror, and to have made no further efforts, or very feeble ones, to defend themselves from our men” (216). And then, “as though to magnify this overwhelming accumulation of horrors,” a fire breaks out, igniting the heaps of dead and still living sepoys; the latter are roasted alive in the inferno. “My readers will agree with me,” says Majendie, “that it would be scarcely possible to imagine a more terrible and ghastly scene” (217). My own will agree with me that it would be scarcely possible, either, to imagine a narration of a victorious battle less evocative of the triumphalist “jingoism and warmongering” that supposedly monopolized Victorian portrayals of the war against the Mutiny. In another anecdote illustrative, he says, of British soldiers’ “hardness of heart” and of “the carelessness and callous indifference with which they took away human life,” Majendie describes the beheading of a

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wounded “decrepit old man” dragged from a house by soldiers claiming that he was a spy. “I may perhaps be wrong in relating this anecdote,” says Majendie, knowing full well that his book may appear to patriotic readers to have crossed the line into seditious disloyalty; “but I have endeavoured, throughout my narrative, to describe as faithfully as possible what I have seen, and the impression such sights may have made on me” (224). He protests that his aim has been “not to vilify the British soldier, or to show that ordinarily he is cruel, bloodthirsty, or callous to human suffering,” but only to show that this war has tended to pervert those who fought in it by abolishing “those nobler feelings of compassion . . . , nay, even in overcoming that love of fair play which is usually so characteristic of Englishmen, and which is a point on which as a nation we have always prided ourselves” (224–25). The arousal of “a spirit of ferocity” (225) has overwhelmed the virtues of the national character and caused that great moral collapse that Memmi a century later names the Nero complex. Many more anecdotes illustrative of the same conclusion could be told, Majendie declares, if he wished to inflict the “unpleasant and sickening details” on his readers (226). By contrast, he refers in a footnote to the story of two female captives in Lucknow who were liberated by a pair of British officers. This story, which “reads more like a romance of the bygone days of chivalry than of this present time,” is “too long for me to insert,” says Majendie unpersuasively; what he means is that such a story would ring hollow against the backdrop of his bitterly disaffected narrative, which in effect has proclaimed the downfall of noble military chivalry and robbed the agencies of British ideology formation of this crucial prop. It would seem, as he says, like a mere anachronism, a fable of bygone days. Up Among the Pandies delineates ever more clearly, then, a disjunction between two motives that turn out to be fatally in conflict: that of avenging the victims of the massacres—a motive prone to issue in the lust of more or less indiscriminate killing—and that of maintaining such essential values as mercy, compassionate pity, and traditional English fair play. This is the disjunction and the moral emergency that runs throughout Mutiny literature. In this text, it manifests itself in the appearance of a particularly startling and perverse disorder of sensibility that makes one feel just how profoundly the experience of the war has affected the Victorian spirit: an attitude in which the most atrocious and most morally fraught things take on an air of ghastly burlesque, of the ludicrous and the absurd. This decentered angle of vision prevails everywhere in Majendie’s “battle” reporting, which never in fact reports what could properly be called a battle. For one thing, the battles of this campaign (and of the Mutiny war generally) were for the most part merely massacres, pseudo-battles.18 Worse, these events never seem grand or dignified enough to qualify as scenes of

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martial valor. The telltale hint of the ludicrous is met at every turn, in images of sepoys being shot from trees like birds or leaping into wells or cowering behind their comrades’ corpses in a drain, in the scene of soldiers trying in vain to tear a man in two by the legs, or in the preposterous imagery of the “battle” in the impossibly cramped quarters of the Engine House, where the rebels finally go limp and let themselves be slaughtered. Of course, being weirdly clownish and comical does not render these scenes any less horrific: all the contrary. The special Majendian note of tragicomic horror comes out vividly, for example, in one incident of the Engine House “tragedy” (218) in which, as our narrator reports, a little British drummer boy is given grog to drink by some officers. “Madly excited by drink” and by dreams of military glory, the little boy draws his “small toy sword” and charges by himself into the building where the sepoys are holed up; he is, of course, “ruthlessly hacked to pieces” on the spot (218–19). The joke is on him but also on the ideal of military heroism, which at this moment is made to seem pathetically illusory, fit only for deluding intoxicated children. The note of gruesome humor comes out in even more plainly farcical terms in the last of Majendie’s principal anecdotes. In a nighttime panic in camp, the soldiers, thinking themselves under attack, “became temporarily insane,” knocking each other down with their rifle butts and going as far as “to bayonet the comrades who were sleeping alongside them!!” An officer shoots himself in the leg and a native bullock-driver is mistakenly shot through the head. “Had it not been for these serious consequences, and the somewhat disgraceful nature of the whole affair, it would have been more laughable than anything else” (284–85), Majendie comments, in a formula with wide applicability to this war as seen through this author’s disenchanted eyes. Such a scene forms in effect his sardonic, devastating reply to George Hodson’s assurance, in writing about his war hero brother William, “that the poetry and romance of war are not yet extinct” and that in the Mutiny, “one seems transported back from the prosaic nineteenth century to the ages of romance and chivalry” (50–51). For Majendie, one is in fact transported not back but forward to a new, postheroic historical stage in which the poetry and romance of war seem only a ghoulish, nauseating joke. I do not know how much credence it behooves one to give to Memmi’s argument that the hatred of colonized peoples by their colonizers is an indicator of the troubled conscience of the latter; but the effects of bad conscience certainly stand out vividly both in Russell’s Diary and in Up Among the Pandies. In both, the writing of sensational expose´s of British crimes in India functions as a means of expressing and to some degree expiating personal and national remorse for those crimes. This strategy is considerably more problematic, more complicated by the threat of bad faith, for the soldier Majendie than for the journalistic observer Russell.

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The confessional impulse of his book is clear: he confesses (in his way) to continuing to give credence to atrocity stories that he knows to be false, as well as to his own susceptibility to the homicidal thrill of combat. For all that, his narration does not seem fully cleansed of the evasiveness that is the prime symptom of unassuaged conscience. Despite admitting his proneness to the mania of war, he never gives us the scene that full candor would seem to require: the scene of his own ultimate initiation as a soldier, when he himself takes a life. (Never, that is, unless, as one may strongly suspect, the horrific scene of bayoneting a sepoy to death was in reality one in which he himself originally played the role of killer and not merely that of an observer on horseback.) The evidence of evasiveness is even more distinct in connection with the episode of the prisoner burned alive. We recall Russell’s comment on the scene: “There were a few Englishmen looking on, more than one officer saw it. No one ventured to interfere!” (1:302). All the rhetoric of disgust and condemnation with which Majendie paints the “frightful scene of cruelty” seems transparently designed to appease a conscience anguished about having been himself, as we have discovered, one of these very onlookers who failed to interfere. It is a moment that enacts in little the ordeal of lacerating self-discovery that the Indian Mutiny forced upon the Victorian conscience at large. It is crucial to the final effect of Up Among the Pandies that it refuses to beguile its conscience by turning into a conventionally Victorian fable of moral rebirth or by calling for, say, the establishment of a regime of universal brotherhood and humanitarian sympathy in India. Majendie opens in this book a vein of radical antiwar testimony for which there is little if any modern literary precedent, and his reporting of British atrocities sets him sharply at odds with patriotic ideology, but he is under no illusions about the just deserts of the atrocity-stained sepoys, and the corrupting effects of the Nero complex, we may say, are not so readily expunged. Learning that the enemy had taken to opening British graves to carry off the heads of fallen soldiers as trophies, he disgustedly reports that “all the while pseudo-philanthropists at home were crying out for mercy for the poor Sepoy” (292)—highlighting again, we note in passing, the sharp controversy, marked with vigorous “philanthropic” dissent against harsh government policies, that characterized Victorian responses to the rebellion. “I by no means agree with those who would make this a war of extermination,” he declares; still, “the time for showing leniency had not yet arrived.” “Cruelty is ever odious, but justice surely is not only politic but right” (294). In such precariously divided reflections near the end of his remarkable book, Majendie exhibits all the disabling ambivalence that turns out to stamp itself on every significant text of Victorian Mutiny writing—even, by its very absence, upon such a book as The Chaplain’s Narrative. Like Marlow returning home from his own voyage

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into the heart of moral darkness, Majendie seems in the closing pages of his memoir to strive to renew his pledge of loyalty to the European ideals from which he had been so severely estranged by the “overwhelming accumulation of horrors” he witnessed in the field. Visiting Delhi as a tourist at the end of his tour of duty, he lapses back into a strain of stiffly conventional patriotic rhetoric that has been ever so conspicuous by its absence from the long main section of the book and that contrasts unmistakably, in what seems almost like a calculated ironic effect, with the phantasmagoric vividness of his battle writing. He praises, for example, the “heroes” of the battle there a year earlier, when “Nicholson, Home, Salkeld, and many others made for themselves such names as shall ever be proudly and gratefully remembered” (344). Uttering such phrases is for Majendie roughly the equivalent of Marlow’s final enshrining of Kurtz’s name by turning over his eloquent report for posthumous publication without revealing the horrible metamorphosis he had undergone since writing it and by telling his sentimental lie to the dead man’s Intended (50, 79). But no last-minute miming of a patriotic writer like Rotton could possibly restore Majendie’s “wild savage book” to official respectability or lessen the shock it gives to the dogma of the totalitarian ideological uniformity of Mutiny literature.

Chapter Three

The Culture of Retribution: Capital Punishment, Maurice Dering, Flotsam

For a cultural historian, the Indian Mutiny is a flash of lightning that brings suddenly into view, with lurid clarity, a complex of thinking that mid-Victorian society was reluctant to acknowledge in itself and usually allowed expression only in veiled or euphemistic forms. At its center was the idea, in fact the ideology, the cultural ideal, of punishment. Endless amounts of cultural labor had long been devoted to mystifying the sway that this tremendously potent but also—this is what makes it so interesting—culturally repulsive idea exercised upon the Victorian mentality. In order to suggest that the revelation of its power in the Mutiny was a key factor in the trauma of the war, I set Mutiny literature in this chapter against the backdrop of nineteenth-century discourses on punishment and penality. The main theme of these profoundly conflicted writings is the subject of capital punishment in particular, which by the time of the Indian upheaval had been the focus of several generations of strenuous controversy.

REVENGE, CLEMENCY, DOPPELGA¨ NGERS As we know, the atrocities committed by Indian rebels in the spring and summer of 1857 set in motion a massive national campaign to punish those responsible. In the rhetoric of the time, the word commonly used in place of “punishment” was one summoned from a biblical stylistic register: the word “retribution.” This lexical displacement and the compulsive intensity with which the latter word, along with its near synonym “vengeance,” is invoked by writers in every contemporary medium form defining phenomena of Mutiny literature and a primary clue, I think, to the significance of the war in British cultural history. We can get an immediate sense of the resonance of the word by surveying the coverage of Indian events in the Times during the month or so following the first news of the uprising at Meerut and of the “brutal outrages” (Times, June 29, 1857: 9) committed there on May 10 and the next day at Delhi. On June 27, the day when the news of the events at

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Meerut was first reported at home, an editorial calls for “a terrible retribution” to be exacted on the mutineers (9). On July 11, a news article tells readers of the departure of Sir Colin Campbell to India “to inflict exemplary punishment upon the offenders” (6); but articles on July 14 strike the more characteristic note. One calls for “stern and unflinching vengeance” on the rebels. Another, reprinted from the Delhi Gazette, is even harsher. “Half-measures will not do when the day of retribution arrives,” it declares. “It is to be hoped that a lesson may be taught, not easily forgotten, and Delhi remain no longer in the pages of history” (9)—in other words, that the city be not just reconquered but razed to the ground and annihilated altogether in the name of “retribution.” A dispatch from the Times correspondent in India on July 16, announcing with what proved to be very premature optimism that the crisis was already over, tells the nation “that it remains only to exact a fearful retribution” (9) for the crimes of the mutineers. The same writer looks forward on August 1 to the day “when the retribution has come” and the British dead “are fully if fearfully avenged” (10). A letter to the editor on August 8 calls for unstinting “retribution” (12); another on August 12 declares that “the case demands just retribution” (12); “we must now inflict a terrible retribution and purge the land of its crimes,” declares an August 15 editorial that calls for “exemplary vengeance on the authors and abettors of this unmerited insurrection” (9). This language sounded a deep chord in the Victorian public and catalyzed a national crusade to avenge the British victims of the uprising, whose blood, as one officer declared in the weird, hysterical formula that often recurs in Mutiny writing, “cries out for vengeance” (Ball 1:379). The calamity in Cawnpore (first reported by the Times on August 22, two months late), especially, aroused an “all but national cry for unmitigated vengeance,” reports Charles Ball (2:168); the “retributive impulses of our people,” as Sir John Kaye provocatively calls them (2:170), were henceforth given even freer rein than before. The compulsive insistency with which this clamoring for retribution was acted out in the Times and pervasively elsewhere in the British public media tells us that we are in the presence of a momentous psychocultural event—one heavy with consequences—calling urgently for interpretation. In order to fathom the wave of emotion that swept over Victorian Britain at this moment, one needs, that is, to try to parse out the logic of a cluster of words fraught with exorbitant cultural significance. As we saw, William Howard Russell ascribed the almost insane fury exhibited by his countrymen in the Mutiny crisis to the root cause of racism; even this penetrating insight seems to fall short of explaining the national state of mind in mid-1857, however. What seems unmistakable is that the campaign to exact “retribution” in India exceeded and to some extent belied all declarations of Britons’ patriotic duty to inflict punishment on the

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perpetrators of crimes, save the empire, and restore the shaken glory of the nation. “To win back our losses and vindicate our ancient reputation, were felt to be but small matters,” writes Henry Mead in 1857, making this important point very distinctly. “The cry was for vengeance, full and complete” (96). We have seen that “the Army of Retribution” (Kaye 2:192) more than lived up to its name and to the mandate given to it by a British public crazed momentarily by a passion of vengefulness. “The work of death and of Retribution went sternly on” as “the united army of retribution—for so it may justly be styled” marched toward Delhi in the summer of 1857, wrote James Grant (357, 361), his capitalization and italics signaling the intensity of the cultural force field radiating out from this word. The extravagant ferocity of Brigadier General James Neill’s martial law in Benares and Cawnpore was only one of the best publicized of many instances of merciless reprisals visited, often on the flimsiest legal pretexts, upon Indian combatants and civilians in the course of the pacification of the rebellious districts. What underlay such events both on the rhetorical and the military planes was a deeper motive even than racial phobias, one perhaps scarcely understood by any observer at the time and one that has been obscured by the ideological preoccupations of later ones. This was, so to say, the motive of retribution itself: of using the emergency of 1857 to vindicate a retributive view of the world and to assert the primacy of the principle of retribution in the Victorian moral cosmos. Saving the empire and purging it of racial demons were to some degree auxiliary to ensuring the triumph of the idea that the paramount rule of life was the exacting of a full measure of pain for every human infraction. Flora Annie Steel highlights just this point in her Mutiny novel On the Face of the Waters (1897). Enraged at reports of rebel atrocities, the British military men in her story engage in “one of the arguments, so common in camp, as to the right of revenge pure and simple” (326), which is to say, revenge voided of ethical content and carried out for sheer personal satisfaction, presumably with no necessary concern for the individual guilt of the victims of revenge, no recourse to judicial procedures, and no restraint. In effect, “revenge pure and simple” means revenge that claims precedence over the moral law. This expressly nihilistic philosophy of revenge was widely advocated at the time in letters printed in newspapers, Steel’s narrator observes, adding that the letters were “all alike in one thing, that they quoted texts of Scripture” (326–27). Steel notably does not brand the letter-writers as defamers of the Bible; rather, she refers obliquely in this passage to Psalm 137, with its song of praise and blessing for “[him] that taketh and dasheth [Babylon’s] little ones against the stones” (9). Her hint is that the nihilistic code of revenge may in fact be an inseparable component of Victorian piety. She might equally well have referred to Isaiah 13:15–18,

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with its even fuller inventory of the retribution to be visited on the people of Babylon for its sins against the Lord’s people. “Every one that is found shall be thrust through . . . ; Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished. Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them, . . . and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eye shall not spare children.”1 How could humanitarian Victorian culture not be divided against itself and plagued with bad conscience, Steel’s novel suggests, when its sacred texts contained such material and when the British nation consciously modeled its actions upon it? How could it fail to wonder about the diabolical potentialities of virtue? For that significant element of Victorian public opinion represented by the letter-writers of Steel’s novel (and real letters published in the Times and elsewhere), the principle of unstinting retribution had once been in the ascendant in Britain but had lapsed in the effete and philanthropic modern age, with grave consequences for the spiritual vitality of the country. The Mutiny signified from this point of view an epochal, in fact a providential, opportunity to resurrect the eroded cultural supremacy of the retributive principle and with it the entire moral order that it implied. The unmistakable note of something like exhilaration that mingles with fury in much of the most extreme Mutiny rhetoric is the note of a severely repressed cultural force suddenly able to cast off its inhibitions, to display itself in undisguised form, and to assert itself, under the militant banner of “Retribution,” as the salvation not only of British India but also of the national soul. The logic of this cultural insurrection (the internal reflex of the military insurrection mounted by the sepoy mutineers in Bengal) is never, I think, fully articulated in writing of the war years, however plainly it may be inferred from this writing. It is set forth with perfect retrospective clarity, however, in the 1891 Mutiny novel In the Heart of the Storm by Maxwell Grey (pseudonym of Mary Gleed Tuttiett). When the news of the rebel atrocities reached England, says the narrator, “a wave of passionate vindictiveness swept over men’s hearts,” and “an unsuspected trait in the national character was brought to light.” The novel proceeds to gloss this striking formulation in terms sharply at odds with the idea of Victorian Mutiny literature as an uncomplicated vehicle for “jingoism and warmongering.” “Not only in India, where their position was so desperate, but at home, where people were maddened by their impotence, there were loud cries for vengeance—vengeance alone in its naked ferocity [”revenge pure and simple,“ in Steel’s phrase]. Pious clergymen, peaceful laymen, gentle, kindly people, did not hesitate to say that no reprisal could be too severe for those monsters of iniquity. . . . It was a ghastly satire on our boasted progress and civilization” (71). Grey defines precisely the shock of horrified self-recognition that I am arguing in this book was a

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principal factor in the national trauma of 1857. The strain of “passionate vindictiveness” that the Mutiny seemed to bring to the surface from the unconscious lower strata of Victorian character was not all that unsuspected, however: as we will see, it had been the focus of keen anxieties in British culture at least since the early days of the century. The ideological struggle taking place in Britain during the war years stands out unmistakably in the abusive language directed by the partisans of retribution at their domestic adversaries—a crucial dimension of Mutiny literature that has been occluded by scholars’ presumption that Victorian responses to events in India were uniformly jingoistic and retributive. The jingoistic retributionists, whose voices did loudly prevail for a time, knew better. They knew that the harsh measures they advocated were resisted by a significant element of public opinion even in the first months of the rebellion, and they consistently linked their proretribution rhetoric to violent attacks on their opponents at home. Indeed, it often is unclear who the main villains are in their polemics, the devilish sepoys or the disloyal and un-Christian British antiretributionists who are vilified in retributionist literature. The latter’s active presence in the body politic at the time of the Mutiny is affirmed in every furious assault on the party of what was contemptuously labeled “humanitarianism” and, in what seems to have been a coinage at the time, “pseudo-philanthropy” or “mock” philanthropy. These are the terms used to brand those who opposed the “all but national cry for unmitigated vengeance” that reigned in England from the midsummer of 1857 until Christmas or so (but underwent a sharp diminution afterward, as I will observe once again). Spokesmen for the ultra-vengeance party equated vengeance with patriotism and Christian virtue and denounced any lack of ardor for it as unpatriotic and irreligious. These themes, which it is vital to restore to the literary history of the times, stand out clearly in the early war coverage in the Times and other newspapers. One letter to the editor of the Times on August 8, 1857, rails against “that apathetic humanity which makes judges in India refuse to inflict death for crimes that might make the very stones shriek”; another in the same issue declares, “we must have no maudlin sentimentalities, no mock humanitarianism here”; the “bloodthirsty fiends” who committed atrocities at Meerut and Delhi must be, the writer asserts, utterly liquidated (12). On the same day, the Illustrated London News printed a leading article decrying the “cant” of mercy toward rebels that is being preached, the paper says, by “mock philanthropists” (135). We recall that V. D. Majendie echoes this language in his own condemnation of the “pseudo-philanthropists at home [who] were crying out for mercy for the poor Sepoy” (292). “Let us on this occasion, I pray, have no false sentimentality—no mawkish, maudlin philanthropy,” one politician im-

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plored in late September 1857. “Let us have no cant about mercy” (Osborne 10). A clergyman’s letter published in the Times on August 12, 1857, links his call for a ruthless policy of revenge to a similar denunciation of “the morbid sentimentalist” who would spare mutineers. The cause of “just retribution,” he explains, illustrating Steel’s account of the letter-writers of the day, is nothing less than a religious obligation. “I wonder that any wise man should presume to be more merciful than God himself, who taught his creatures from the beginning, ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed’ [Gen. 9:6]. Surely, human and divine laws call equally for vengeance on those who shed innocent blood” (12). Or one could cite the satiric poem “Mercy for Nana Sahib,” by “a humanitarian,” published in Punch on November 21, 1857. Its first stanza: First catch your NANA SAHIB; then, though you may speak your mind to him, Oh! Pray do not harsh language use, or be at all unkind to him. Point out how naughty ’twas of him with cruelty to slaughter The mother and her little boy, and helpless infant daughter: But there stop. Don’t doom your brother NANA SAHIB to the drop. There may not in fact have existed at this date in Britain any “humanitarian” so extreme as actually to argue in favor of leniency toward Nana Sahib; nonetheless, the deployment of so much rhetorical heavy artillery in defense of the principle of revenge against misguided partisans of “mercy” tells us plainly that even at this early moment, when national passions against the Indian rebels were inflamed to a state of incandescence, “the retributive impulses of our people” encountered significant domestic resistance. We can only conclude that the Indian uprising was experienced by contemporaries not just as a military and geopolitical emergency but also, more immediately, as a cultural and ideological one, an event in which core issues of British national identity had been brought unexpectedly to a historic crisis. This certainly was the view of those who, from the other side of the ideological divide, witnessed the appearance of the “unsuspected trait in the national character” with alarm. One prime text of such a reaction was Disraeli’s remarkable speech at Newport Pagnell on the early date of September 30, 1857, in which he warned against carrying national revenge in India too far. When the expected English advance against the rebel army occurs, he says in a striking phrase, “I have no doubt, and I expect, that all that retribution—if I may use the expression—which the solemn necessity of the case requires will be exacted.” But the horrors of war, and of this war in particular, are such that adding to them wantonly

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in the name of retribution would be unpardonable, he declares. “I do . . . declare my humble disapprobation at persons in high authority announcing that, upon the standard of England, ‘vengeance,’ and not ‘justice,’ should be inscribed.”2 Disraeli sees that the war has produced as its most immediate effect a crisis in the value system of the country—or has exposed one that has been latent all along. He transcribes it first in his anxious parsing of the relations among the interlinked categories of “retribution,” “vengeance,” and “justice,” and then in specifically religious terms. Recent clamoring for revenge in India “would make me almost suppose,” he says in a formula that I have quoted already, “that the religious opinions of the people of England had undergone some sudden change; and that instead of bowing before the name of Jesus, we were preparing to revive the worship of Moloch” (qtd. Ball 2:419–20). His imagery gives compelling historical specificity to Frazer’s idea, elaborated in The Golden Bough (first published in 1890), that blood-soaked ancient religion lives on at a subliminal level as a psychotic potentiality of enlightened modern Christianity. Frazer at one point describes Carthaginian sacrifices to this terrible god Moloch, who demanded in particular the sacrifice of children by his worshippers. The children, he reports, “slid into a fiery oven, while the people danced to the music of flutes and timbrels to drown the shrieks of the burning victims” (Golden Bough 327). Disraeli’s warning that such a potentiality could actually come true in India as a result of the British retribution frenzy was not mere hyperbole. It might have been inspired, for example, by a contemporary account of British villageburning reprisal expeditions by a soldier in Neill’s army who described his desperate attempts on such occasions to rescue Indian women, children, and old men from the flames—scenes the fearful cruelties of which, says the historian Montgomery Martin, who quotes the soldier’s statement at length, “are surely enough to quench the thirst for vengeance in any human breast” (288). Neither he nor Disraeli mentions (as Flora Annie Steel subsequently does) that the prophet Isaiah’s and the psalmist’s visions of divine retribution upon sinful peoples make a point of highlighting the special religious virtue, in such circumstances, of massacring children, dashing out their brains on the stones, having “no pity on the fruit of the womb.” Killing children, such authors understand, is the fullest proof one can give that holy vindictiveness has cleansed one’s heart of all “maudlin sentimentalities” and “mock humanitarianism.” To have “no pity” is the very essence of this mode of religious feeling, this network of ancient and modern writers tells us. The episode in the annals of the Mutiny that brought such questions most pointedly before the British public was the controversy that arose over the “clemency” resolution issued by Lord Canning, the governorgeneral of India, on July 31, 1857, at a moment when retributionist pas-

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sions in India and England alike were at their peak. On June 6, in the first shock of the rebellion, Canning had issued Act XIV, making the waging of war or the commission of acts of sedition against the British government in India punishable by death. Subsequently, he became shaken by evidence of abuses widely committed under the aegis of martial law by British soldiers, civilian authorities, and vigilante militias, and more generally by what he spoke of in a letter as the “rabid and indiscriminate vindictiveness” of the Anglo-Indian community toward native Indians (Maglagan 140). The “clemency” resolution contained a series of instructions clarifying how Act XIV was to be administered. “Lest measures of extreme severity should be too hastily resorted to,” he proclaimed, the government will give free pardons to sepoys in guilty regiments who protected their officers, “provided they have not been guilty of any heinous crime against person or property.” Henceforth, “all reasonable clemency” was to be shown to sepoys who had left mutinous regiments to return to their villages, provided no officers of these regiments had been murdered or “any other sanguinary outrage” had been committed. No sepoy having left a nonmutinous regiment was to be treated as a deserter (and thus subject to a death sentence by court-martial) unless found with arms in his possession. Further, “the governor-general in council is anxious to prevent measures of extreme severity being unnecessarily resorted to, or carried to excess, or applied without due discrimination, in regard to acts of rebellion committed by persons not mutineers [i.e., civilians]” (Ball 1:589–91; see Maglagan 132–43). For this and other attempts to ensure as much legality and moderation in the administering of punishment as circumstances allowed, the governor-general was denounced in India and at home as a sepoy lover and widely vilified as “Clemency” Canning. The queen was petitioned, unsuccessfully, to recall him. Gradually Canning gained a measure of public vindication, but not before his famous proclamation had raised to an acute pitch the struggle between the principle of mercy and justice on one hand and retribution on the other that for many at the time formed the crucial algorithm of British policy-making.3 The origins of the Victorian ideology of retribution, according to observers at the time as well as later cultural historians, lay in the spirit of evangelical piety that emanated from the great eighteenth-century upsurge of Calvinistic Methodism and formed ultimately the basis of Victorian selfhood, “the rock upon which the character of the nineteenth-century Englishman was founded” (Stokes, English Utilitarians xii).4 What the Mutiny seemed to make evident to contemporaries was that the evangelical personality structure had in fact crystallized to a large degree around the principle of retribution and its psychological adjunct, revenge. Retributiveness was not in this light just an implication or a symptomatic outgrowth of the evangelical movement, in other words, but to some ex-

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tent its guiding principle and raison d’eˆtre, its definition of spirituality. It was in this sense that it could seem to represent “an unsuspected trait in the national character.” To put it this way would be to extrapolate only slightly from Timothy Gorringe’s illuminating study God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation. Gorringe argues that a theological tradition of atonement and expiation, in which the death of Jesus on the cross is interpreted as a sacrifice necessary for paying off or “satisfying” humankind’s debt of sin, has played a crucial role in justifying “judicial violence” and “retributive punishment in general” (12). From this tradition arises the doctrine that “sin and crime have to be punished, and cannot properly be dealt with in any other way” (7).5 Gorringe cites as one instance of the impact of retribution theology on historical events Oliver Cromwell’s invocation of the slaughter of the Amalekites by Saul (1 Sam. 15) as biblical justification for his annihilation of Irish Catholic communities in Drogheda and Wexford in 1649 (Gorringe 27). It is an episode with piercing relevance for the study of the cultural significance of the Mutiny, given what we have seen to be the ubiquitous trope in Mutiny literature (to be traced further in the next chapter) of likening stern and intensely pious British commanders such as Havelock, Nicholson, and Neill to Cromwell and his Roundheads. “Now go and smite Amalek,” the Lord instructs Saul in this text that (along with a string of others) enshrines the principle of genocidal retribution in the JudeoChristian moral imagination, “and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” Having taken the Amalekite king Agag prisoner, Saul “utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword,” but Samuel subsequently berates him for failing to carry out his divine instructions to slaughter the Amalekites absolutely to the last man. Making good the shortfall, he “hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord” (1 Sam. 15:3, 8, 34). In no other way but this brutal retribution could the treachery of the Amalekites toward the Israelites (three hundred years earlier) be expiated and the land, to quote the biblically inflected Times editorial of August 15, 1857, be purged of its crimes. This is the religious spirit that, originating in the theology of Anselm in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, passing later to Calvin, for whom “the need for blood to make expiation has the force of a principle” (Gorringe 139), and on to John Wesley and Methodism, then to strongly Calvinist atonement theologians of the early nineteenth century such as J. A. Haldane, came to impregnate the Victorian mentality, according to Gorringe. In the first half of the nineteenth century, he reports, “the language of atonement pervaded politics and literature, as well as religion, in a way which it never did in the eighteenth century” (193). He does not

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take into account the distinct waning of the evangelical spirit in Britain from the 1830s on, as a new ethic of humanitarianism, philanthropy, and sentimentalized benevolence—the ethic so loathed and vilified by the retributionists of 1857–became dominant in Victorian public and private culture. It is this tectonic shift in British sensibility that helps explain the vehemence with which the party of retribution and vitriolic anti-“humanitarianism” took the national stage in the last six months of 1857. This vehemence was the sign of a cultural current that had been driven underground for a generation or two and might almost have been taken to have gone culturally extinct, or to persist as nothing but an attenuated residue of earlier times, but suddenly had emerged from dormancy in an attempt to reclaim its ancient prerogatives. Calls for liquidating hosts of sepoys to the last man and for razing great Indian cities to the ground sound in this context less like reasoned policy suggestions than like revivalist calls for Britain to return to its deep biblical roots. Gorringe’s study of the impact of the Calvinist ideology of retribution on Victorian culture and temperament has many nineteenth-century precursors. From early in the century, that is, writers across a spectrum of literary media, including the literature of penology on which I will focus in a moment, intensively diagnose the national proneness to see religion and virtue as coextensive with the imperative of exacting “satisfactory” punishment upon wrongdoers. Many of these analysts note in effect that this imperative has a potentially contradictory relation to the religious rule of self-denial, since fulfilling it affords so much libidinal gratification to the punitive temperament as to be chronically in danger of becoming perverse and compulsive. I have highlighted already the work that theorizes this argument most elaborately and most scandalously, Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, which purports, as we saw, to reveal the inherent tendency of the Christian deity whose motto is “God is love” to take the form of “an unloving monster, a diabolical being, whose personality . . . delights in the blood of heretics and unbelievers” (52). When George Eliot translated the book into English in 1854, it was because she saw its theme of the proximity of Christian piety to fanatical vindictiveness as bearing urgent relevance for her own religiously saturated society.6 In the aftermath of the Mutiny and through the second half of the century, a series of cultural theorists in Britain explored the same thematic, diagnosing retributive vindictiveness as a main syndrome of Victorian personality and as the besetting cultural, spiritual, and social danger of the nation. Herbert Spencer thus identifies the code of blood revenge as the supreme institution of primitive “militant” society, in which “there . . . arises not only the practice of revenge but a belief that revenge is imperative—that revenge is a duty” (Principles of Ethics [1879–93] 1:362), and argues that contemporary society is in the throes of a reversion to just this savage

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heritage. One principal symptom of modern life, he says, is the resurgence of the ethic of vengefulness or, as he calls it in a resonant formula, the “sanctification of revenge” (ibid. 1:364). He notably identifies the “pursuit of international revenge and re-revenge, which the code we inherit from the savage insists on” (Study of Sociology [1872–73] 199)7 with racialized imperialism: in the empire, he suggests, Europeans are able to indulge without inhibitions their hereditary compulsion to find enemies upon whom to take revenge. In stark opposition to “the doctrine of forgiveness” promulgated by Christianity, he declares, delineating the cultural bifurcation for which we have seen so much evidence, stand “the actions of European soldiers and colonists who out-do the law of bloodrevenge among savages, and massacre a village in retaliation for a single death” (Autobiography [1904] 2:545–46). Mid-Victorian fiction, that uniquely sensitive instrument for registering the popular state of mind, focuses no less intensively on this complex of issues. Novelists identify the punitive impulse as a defining element of contemporary personality, the recession of the evangelical tide in Britain notwithstanding, but make clear that the Victorian culture of retribution, as I will call it, was the reverse of a stable, monolithic structure of feeling. For all its power, it was, they demonstrated, a conflicted, self-divided, self-denying one, in which the idea of “retribution—if I may use the expression” (in Disraeli’s painfully embarrassed phrase) coexisted with a current of sentiment in which Christian piety was identified not with stern retributive justice but with an ideology of kindness, forgiveness, compassion, clemency. For many mid-Victorian novelists, the almost insurmountable artistic challenge they faced was to devise imaginary expedients for bringing the two refractory trends of feeling into a semblance of harmony and keeping this deep cultural ambivalence from fatally sapping fictional energies. These writers portray the punishment complex (which they, like Gorringe, link closely to the influence of evangelical religion) as a defining susceptibility of their age, a moral and psychological disorder to which the English were constitutionally prone. Among the many fictional avatars of the archetypal Victorian punisher, one would be Maggie Tulliver’s self-righteous brother Tom in Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), whose leading character trait is a sense of justice “that desires to hurt culprits as much as they deserve to be hurt” (48). “Justice clearly demanded that Maggie should be visited with the utmost punishment,” thinks Tom when she misbehaves one day: “not that Tom had learnt to put his views in that abstract form; he never mentioned ‘justice,’ and had no idea that his desire to punish might be called by that fine name” (91). Yet although no character deformity is more widespread in Victorian novels than this one, they typically treat it, at least for didactic purposes, as a deviant sensibility

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unambiguously distinguishable from the kindly and sensitive forms of virtue that it was the mission of Victorian novels to idealize. The polarity between the two opposite moral principles or personality syndromes seems well-nigh absolute in such a novel as David Copperfield (1849– 50). On the one hand, there are Mr. Murdstone, the sadistic punishing stepfather; his ally Mr. Creakle the schoolmaster, who “had a delight in cutting at the boys, which was like the satisfaction of a craving appetite”;8 and Rosa Dartle, who if she could “would have [Emily the fallen woman] whipped to death” (89–90, 721). On the other side of the moral divide are their antitypes, figures of loving benevolence such as Peggotty, Mr. Dick, Tommy Traddles, or Agnes Wickfield, who collectively define the moral standard of this novel. Yet the insistency with which the punishment compulsion manifests itself in the popular fiction of this society tells us that exorcizing it must have felt to Victorians like a perpetual spiritual discipline, even though novels flatter and reassure their readers by representing this threat as a purely external one and by providing abundant fictional simulacra of good souls wholly uncontaminated by the sadistic punitiveness so much in evidence in their fictional environments. These works rarely acknowledge the possibility that people who embrace the credo “God is love” might need to wrestle with pathological retribution impulses in themselves and might after all find them indelibly written into the humanitarian moral code that opposes them. (Ones that do, such as Eliot’s Adam Bede [1859] or, as we shall see, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret [1861–62], play a key role in Victorian popular moral discourse.) Yet Victorian novels exemplify their immersion in the incoherencies of their culture by belying their own teachings after all: they condemn the “desire to punish,” which they portray as an especially lethal moral deformity, but vividly exhibit it themselves, in narratives in which the ethic of sympathy and benevolence and “the doctrine of forgiveness” are yoked by violence together with fables of severe, often sadistic punishment of the kind dealt out to Dickensian villains such as Bill Sikes, Quilp, Carker, Blandois, Orlick, and Bradley Headstone.9 The fixed destiny of such characters is to endure a cruel retributive death in order that the land may be symbolically purged of its crimes. The “satisfaction theory” that Gorringe traces in theology applies with just as much force, it turns out, to Victorian popular entertainment, which embodies even as it repudiates the doctrine, to quote another fictional work of Flora Annie Steel’s, “that without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins” (Hosts of the Lord 289). No one who extrapolates from Dickens’s novels an idea of their original readership can doubt that the impulse of harsh punishment was after all a dominating drive of the Victorian middle-class psyche, “a craving appetite” that popular writers failed to gratify at their own peril. Nor

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can one doubt that this impulse was also a locus of chronic moral anxiety and of the sense of self-alienation that seems inherent in the convoluted conceptual and rhetorical structures of Victorian fiction. It is just this severely unstable moral, emotional, and ideological structure, one threatening at every moment to dissociate disastrously into the two contradictory phases that in the Mutiny crisis were named Retribution and Clemency, that manifests itself in the prevalence throughout the century of the gothic fable of the virtuous protagonist shadowed by an alter ego or secret sharer who proves to be “a diabolical being” obsessed with revenge. The process of discovery enacted in these stories turns on the realization that the vindictive being who haunts the hero is not after all wholly foreign to his conscious personality but, rather, scarily inseparable from it, a fantastic projection of a potential ingrained within it. This “Dark Interpreter” of the deeply moralized Victorian self, to use De Quincey’s term for the phenomenon (187), poses such a scandal for moral ideology that it commonly can materialize only in uncanny gothic form, as a (mere) bad dream of moral virtue. It inhabits its host self, practitioners of this fictional mode suggest, as murderous ferocity inhabits philanthropic Christianity in Feuerbach’s analysis or, we shall see in a moment, as primitive Revenge inhabits modern Punishment in Victorian speculations. Victor Frankenstein’s monster, the devilish Gil-Martin in Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Sheridan Le Fanu’s “The Familiar,” Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde, John Jasper’s homicidal hidden personality in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the cursed vampire personalities that proliferate in Dracula, and many similar exemplars of the theme, including naturalistic ones (though the aura of necromancy never fully dissipates even here) such as the vindictive Uriah Heep in his alter-egoish relations with the primly virtuous David Copperfield, or Bertha Mason’s exactly similar relations with Jane Eyre: this ever-diversified figure of the revengeful alter ego represents the distinctive literary invention of the time. No other narrative formula had a more compelling significance for the British imagination in the nineteenth century than this fantasy of discovering in effect the cruel, depraved, malicious other side of virtue. Feuerbach’s analysis of the diabolical projections of religious faith tells us all we need to know, I think, about the logic of vicarious moral relations that catalyzes this mode of nineteenth-century fiction. The gothic alter ego embodies, as we can see with Feuerbach’s help, a characteristic formation of a nineteenth-century middle-class culture fervently devoted to what one Victorian commentator calls “the doctrine that hatred and revenge are wicked in themselves” (Stephen, History 2:82), yet permeated at the same time, at the cost of what must often have been painful cognitive dissonance, with the sensibility of a Calvinistic religious heritage

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based on the hatred of vice and on the obligation, not to say the “craving appetite,” to visit punishment upon it. Such a culture perpetually preaches sermons to itself on the virtues of benevolence and humanitarianism because it knows itself all along to be pledged to ideas of ferocious punishment like the one visited upon the Amalekites by Saul and Samuel, or (to cite another biblical point of reference) the ones that the Lord promises Moses to inflict upon Israelites who deviate from proper religious observances: “And if ye will not . . . hearken unto me, but walk contrary unto me; Then I will walk contrary unto you also in fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins. And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat. And I will destroy your high places, and cut down your images, and cast your carcases upon the carcases of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you” (Lev. 26:27–30). We need look no further for the ultimate cultural correlative of the evil doppelga¨ngers that proliferate in nineteenth-century British fiction. It is none other than the Moloch-like deity of Leviticus, this god who incarnates all the vindictive cruelty that the Victorians sought to disavow in the name of a purified religion of tolerance and mercy, but knew all along to constitute “an unsuspected trait in the national character.” Evil is the monstrous potentiality of Judeo-Christian moral virtue: this is the message these fables intimate if we read them through Feuerbach’s eyes. It was precisely this paradox that was brought home to Victorian readers in all the imagery of punitive British savagery that the literature of the Indian Mutiny suddenly released into the public media in 1857. The reign of enlightened virtue in this society, and notably in its imperial projection in India, where the British government never ceased proclaiming its success in putting down a host of ancient religious abominations (suttee, Thuggee, and so on), had turned out to entail a return to the kind of genocidal Old Testament vengefulness that was personified in such a figure as Brigadier General Neill piously enforcing his “strange law” of mass hangings and blowings from guns (augmented by psychological tortures worthy of the maniac deity of Leviticus) in Cawnpore. It reminded the Victorian public that the daydream of inflicting dreadful pain upon those who walk contrary to us was profoundly anchored in the national psyche. This has been rather a long disquisition to make an obvious point: that the war against the Mutiny was on one level a revelation and a militant assertion of the Old Testament spirit of vengeance that coursed within the British mentality and found vivid if always conflicted expression in the popular culture of the period. In normal times, the idea of putting entire infidel populations to the edge of the sword, razing sinful cities to the ground, and hewing prisoners in pieces before the Lord was so much imagery of mythological imagination. But in British India in 1857–59, such acts could actually be performed as a matter of national policy. For

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a vocal segment of contemporary observers, as I said at the outset, being given such an opportunity was like the fulfillment of the religious destiny of the nation. Patriotic writers about the war made a great point of indemnifying “the true British character” (Ball 1:81), “the great national character which was now so nobly reasserting itself” (Kaye 2:362), from critique by defining it as a radically unitary thing of inviolable integrity. The national character was one sterling substance through and through, free of unsuspected traits. But this insistent motif of Mutiny rhetoric must even then have been easy to recognize as a defensive tactic aimed at countering panicky ambivalence with regard to “the retributive impulses of our people”—impulses readily represented as arising from a high-minded love of virtue and hatred of vice, but that increasingly could look like nothing more elevated than a passion for inflicting retribution. THEORY OF PENALITY The theme of demented-seeming punitiveness in modern Britain is elaborated from another point of view in the literature on penality and penal reform, particularly with reference to capital punishment, that begins in the late eighteenth century and continues in the “incessant controversy over penal practice” (Gorringe 196) that characterized nineteenth-century Britain. The debate that erupted at home over Neill’s “strange law” in Cawnpore and more broadly over the application of the great opposed principles of Retribution and Clemency in India formed in a sense just the latest episode in this long-unfolding controversy. Fully to understand the reverberations of the Mutiny in Victorian culture requires us to revisit it at least briefly.10 In The History of the Criminal Law of England (1883), Sir James Fitzjames Stephen stresses the long-standing harshness of the law in the country, in which, he declares, “the number of executions was notoriously very great” for centuries past. “Early criminal law was extremely severe, . . . its severity was much increased under the Tudors,” and, having remained steady through the seventeenth century, became, after a momentary gentling early in the eighteenth, far harsher than ever before. Stephen ventures no explanation for the tremendous severity of traditional and modern English penal practices, but it is noteworthy that the great upsurge of modern harshness of punishment exactly coincided with the upsurge of Calvinistic Wesleyan Methodism that had, as all agree, a profoundly transformative effect on the national character. “Wherever Calvinism spread, punitive sentencing followed,” observes Gorringe (196). New felonies punishable by death were added in great number in this period; “the legislation of the eighteenth century in criminal matters was severe to the

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highest degree” (Stephen, History 1:466, 468, 471). In the 1760s no fewer than 160 different capital offenses were inscribed on the statute books in England; by 1819 sixty-three new ones had been added (Hibbert, Roots 55). Theft above the value of a shilling was a capital offense, as were, among so many others, letter-stealing, sodomy, sacrilege, destroying fishponds, and—a crime for which thirteen offenders were once executed at a single assize at Bury (Eden 304)—consorting with Egyptians (gypsies). It is fair to say from the evidence given by Stephen and other historians of British law that this was a social order possessed from time out of mind with something like a mania for inflicting capital punishment and one that regarded the gallows as a fundamental national institution. Commenting on the numerous places of execution and gibbeting (the extended display of the bodies of executed criminals) that were fixtures of the cityscape of London in the eighteenth century, W. C. Sydney notes in 1892 that “it was certainly not without reason that an eminent modern writer branded the capital and ten miles round . . . with the title of the ‘City of the Gallows’ ” (qtd. Radzinowicz 200n). Making just this point about the cultural centrality of capital punishment in England, Dickens in Barnaby Rudge (1841) has Dennis the hangman deliver a speech of praise for what he calls the “sound, Protestant, constitutional, English work” of rampant hanging. Three years before, he recalls, “I got Mary Jones, a young woman of nineteen who come up to Tyburn with a infant at her breast, and was [hanged] for taking a piece of cloth off the counter of a shop in Ludgate Hill, and putting it down again when the shopman see her. . . . Ha, ha!—Well! That being the law and the practice of England is the glory of England, an’t it, Muster Gashford?” (284). In his exalting of “the great Protestant principle of having plenty of [hanging]” (279), Dennis seems to be brazenly mocking any notion that justice and moral decency ought to prevail in public affairs; it is precisely the morally abominable character of the system he serves that makes his work so delightful to him. Protestant moral absolutism and implacable hatred of vice turn out to be strangely akin to cruel moral nihilism, according to Barnaby Rudge. The trend of legal philosophy in the humanitarian nineteenth century was a reaction against precisely this ambiguous heritage. “Philanthropic indignation” (Stephen, History 1:472) at the cruelty and disorder of existing law produced a reform movement that, starting in 1827 (roughly the date of the beginning of the decline of evangelicalism in England), began sharply to reduce the number of offenses punishable by death. Stephen traces the sequence of reforms of 1832, 1835, 1837, 1841, and 1861 as evidence of “the gradual growth of a sentiment very characteristic of our generation” (1:474)—the sentiment that was determined, to quote the phraseology of Canning’s “clemency” resolution, “to prevent measures of extreme severity being unneces-

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sarily resorted to, or carried to excess, or applied without due discrimination.” The reform of 1837 alone removed the death penalty from two hundred crimes that previously were capital offenses. In the arena of the law, as in other arenas such as the popular novel, we can gauge the force and the cultural sanctity of the punitive impulse in Victorian times largely by means of the reaction against it. What the historical evidence makes clear is that the doctrine of punishment represented an acutely neuralgic point for this culture as it sought in the nineteenth century to divest itself of the brutalities of the national past. Some of the leading texts of penal reform predated the century and some of these intimated an awareness that bringing a newly humane spirit into the legal system required calling the very basis of this obsessively punitive culture into question. “It is the end of penal laws to deter, not to punish,” declares William Eden, Baron Auckland, in his remarkable Principles of Penal Law (1771); indeed, “it is from an abuse of language, that we apply the word ‘Punishment’ to human institutions: vengeance belongeth not to man” (7, 6). In proposing to abolish the very idea of punishment, which we note collapses in his account into that of “vengeance,” this author, a distinguished progenitor of the attitude that Stephen later calls “a sentiment very characteristic of our generation,” appeals to “that natural sympathy . . . which forbids us to give unnecessary Pain to each other; or, in fuller words, to extend the severity of punishments beyond what is essentially necessary to the preservation and morality of society” (5–6). Eden, who lavishly embellishes his text with instances of cruelties and miscarriages of justice perpetrated by the law and evokes all the cruel methods of inflicting death that are recorded in history, including “crucifixions, burnings, boilings, flayings, famishings, impalements, and other modes of destruction, equally shocking to decency and humanity” (22), offers an early instance of the evolutionary genesis myth of modern law that will become a commonplace and a key ideological formula for later generations of theorists. In an early stage of society, he says, “the gratification of private resentment, and the pursuit of private satisfaction, are . . . the sole objects of criminal process,” but in a more advanced and enlightened stage, “the selfish passions are softened into an habitual acquiescence in the general dispensations of Law.” This is to say, society learns “to seek justice, not revenge” (2–3, 26). This mythic moment “when individuals [give] up the right of avenging their own wrongs” and when prosecutors learn to “seek the ends of justice” rather than “the gratifications of revenge” (217–18, 323) is for Eden the watershed moment in the history of law and indeed a watershed moment in the emergence of modern subjectivity: it is the moment when the primitive gives way to the modern. Yet although “Reason and Mercy” (199) have supposedly supplanted revenge, Eden contends that “in prosecutions of fel-

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ony, . . . we still retain some vestiges of . . . oppressive barbarism” (177) springing directly from ancient English character, particularly, he says, in its religious manifestations. Hence the almost paralyzing ambivalence with regard to the death penalty that Eden diagnoses as ingrained in that character. Modern times have indeed seen a proliferation of “sanguinary laws,” but the Englishman feels at the same time, this theorist declares, “a tacit disapprobation of the laws, which he hath enacted; and even, when injured, hesitates to bring the offender to justice” (291). The most noteworthy symptom of modern penal practice, for Eden, is precisely the bad conscience that arises at just that rift where modern humanitarian sensibility pulls apart from and disavows, though only passively, by hesitating to enforce it, the hereditary code of ferocious punishment.11 For Jeremy Bentham also, penal reform was among the most pressing imperatives for a “humanized and enlightened” country like England (411). Like Eden and other writers on the same topic, he sought to shock the conscience of his readership by citing instances of horrible cruelties carried out in the guise of legal punishment, and, having long argued for limiting capital punishment to the crime of murder, in 1830 he called for the total abolition of the death penalty, without exception (525–26). He, too, invokes the celebratory mythic narrative of the supersession of revenge by law (520), the ideological function of which is, of course, to vindicate and as it were to detoxify the modern regime of punishment. Yet the ambivalence about the infliction of punishment that Eden diagnoses in the public at large is exemplified unmistakably in Bentham himself. “Punishment, whatever shape it may assume, is an evil,” he says, apparently categorically (390). “All punishment is in itself necessarily odious” (412). But this transcendent principle is not an absolute after all. “Punishment is everywhere an evil,” he writes, crystallizing into an aphorism his thought on this subject; “but everywhere a necessary one” (528). The need to deter crime is so urgent that the odious evil of punishment is unavoidable. The poignancy of Bentham’s writing on this terribly vexatious point is a function of his determination to separate a legitimate code of punishment, which is to say, one from which all unnecessary cruelty has been cleansed, from the primitive longing for revenge. “That punishment which, considered in itself, appeared base and repugnant to all generous sentiments, is elevated to the first rank of benefits, when it is regarded not as an act of wrath or of vengeance against a guilty or unfortunate individual who has given way to mischievous inclinations, but as an indispensable sacrifice to the common safety” (396). Yet even the principled disavowal of wrath and vengeance, the standard protestation of English legal reformers, turns out to be fraught with ambivalence for Bentham. What he calls “vindictive satisfaction” or “the pleasure of vengeance” is after all a precious benefit to society in stimulating the prosecution of dangerous crime.

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“It is this which overcomes the public pity in the punishment of the guilty. Take away this spring, the machinery of the laws will no longer move.” “Thus mischievous is this same word mercy,” he writes elsewhere. “In a Penal Code, having for its first principle the greatest-happiness principle,—no such word would have place” (529). Such are the rhetorical expedients to which he is driven by his Eden-like analysis of the public mind of England as marked by a potentially disabling division between vindictiveness and its opposite, a spirit of humanitarianism, mercy, and “public pity”—the dissociation of sensibility that expresses itself so conspicuously in the formal incoherencies of the nineteenth-century English novel, as we have seen, and that Bentham himself so vividly exhibits. I will not attempt to disentangle the mare’s nest of Bentham’s unstable, convoluted discourse on vindictiveness and punishment, but will merely note how readily it could mutate into, say, the language of his ideological antithesis the Rev. Alexander Duff as the latter labors to justify the savage reign of punishment and reprisal that Neill imposed in Cawnpore in the summer of 1857. “Dismissing . . . from his mind all thoughts of harmful lenity, all feelings of maudlin sentimental pity,” writes Duff, “[Neill] sternly grasped the sword of retributive justice,” recognizing that “an exhibition of stern justice was imperatively demanded” (255). It is a striking indicator of the propensity of the two adverse principles linked together in the British ideology of punishment to shift places that the same rhetorical gestures deployed by Bentham on behalf of an idea of punishment free of “wrath and vengeance” could be invoked by the likes of Duff, who eulogizes Neill in the usual way, by quoting scripture. Here it is Romans 13:4, a text in praise of the minister of God who “beareth not the sword in vain: for he is . . . a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” (255). Cultural and intellectual history take a vertiginous gothic turn as Alexander Duff, implicitly challenging the whole humanitarian trend of nineteenth-century legal theory, seems in his scornful indictment of the ethic of pity to emerge here in the crisis of the Mutiny as Jeremy Bentham’s vindictive alter ego. The self-division in British penal thinking is given concerted analysis by the humanitarian crusader Sir Samuel Romilly in his Observations on the Criminal Law of England, as it Relates to Capital Punishments, and on the Mode in Which it is Administered (1810). A plea for repealing statutes that impose the death penalty upon various categories of petty theft, this work is not in fact a tract against capital punishment per se so much as an attempt to resolve the great discrepancy between conviction and execution rates that prevails in the country. “There is probably no other country in the world in which so many and so great a variety of human actions are punishable with loss of life as in England,” but it is well known, says Romilly, that very few capital felony convictions are

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actually carried out. Condemned criminals are executed in only one case out of six, he reports, and if one were to exclude from these statistics the more serious crimes, the execution rate of those condemned to death would be far lower, perhaps fewer than one in twenty.12 Contrary to the assertions of defenders of the penal status quo, Romilly demonstrates that the capital laws were originally intended to be enforced with unsparing rigidity, and were in fact so enforced. “In the long and sanguinary reign of Henry VIII,” he reports, for example, seventy-two thousand convicted criminals are said to have been executed (6). The later practice of commuting essentially all death penalty sentences for minor crimes is thus in his account strictly a modern development, the result of “that change which has slowly taken place in the manners and character of the nation, which are now so repugnant to the spirit of these laws, that it has become impossible to carry them into execution” (5). The statutes in question “are of such inordinate severity, that, as laws now to be executed, no person would speak in their defence” (60). In this way Romilly diagnoses yet again the profound self-division regarding the ethic of punishment that marks the British nation in “an age,” as he says in a chilly phrase, “which persuades itself that humanity is amongst its peculiar characteristics” (37) and is constitutionally averse to judicial killing. In the gothic vocabulary that itself seems, I have suggested, to derive from the cultural state of affairs analyzed by Romilly and others, one might say that a body of merciless law, according to which only the shedding of blood is efficacious for the remission of sins, haunts the nation from an ancient past like a kind of vampire form of the national character; the humanitarian modern conscience recoils from this terrible monstrosity, refuses to do its bidding, but refuses also to drive a stake through its heart by repealing the effectively dead but still officially living statutes. This it ought to do, Romilly argues (in vain: his bills were turned down), “for the honour of our national character” (63). Stephen’s History of the Criminal Law of England, with its analysis of “the gradual growth of a sentiment [opposed to harsh punitiveness and to the death penalty in particular] very characteristic of our generation,” thus is strikingly continuous with Romilly’s account from seventy-three years earlier. But rather than arguing like him and other reformers that the ancestral ethic of vindictive punitiveness subsists in nineteenth-century Britain beneath the veneer of enlightened modern leniency, Stephen turns out to personify that tenacious residual ethic in his own self. The modern trend toward lessening the harshness of the law is misguided, he declares. The true utility of inflicting severe punishment is not, as Bentham, Eden, Romilly, and others (including defenders of the capital statutes such as Martin Madan and William Paley) insisted, to deter crime but to placate

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and also vindicate and reinforce the punitive rage of the community. Nor is vindictive retributiveness an atavistic residue of earlier states of society or, as for Bentham, an evil but necessary stimulant to law enforcement but a ground of value in itself. “In cases which outrage the moral feelings of the community to a great degree, the feeling of indignation and desire for revenge which is excited in the minds of decent people is, I think, deserving of legitimate satisfaction” (Stephen, History 1:478). The orthodox narrative of legal philosophy based on the antithesis of primitive Revenge and modern Punishment here collapses in the name of a strong endorsement of “the public desire for vengeance upon . . . offenders” (2:83). We are reminded again, as we are by Mutiny literature to such an overwhelming degree, of the continuing vitality of the ideology of retribution and of the punitive sensibility in the Victorian cultural sphere. Stephen’s argument is echoed from an opposing standpoint in the work that we could think of as the terminus ad quem of the history of Victorian discourse on retributiveness, Edward Westermarck’s Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906–8). Westermarck rehearses and to some extent endorses the orthodox evolutionary narrative, according to which the primitive regime of Revenge was superseded in “civilized” nations by the regime of judicially regulated Punishment and by humanitarian motives of rehabilitation and deterrence (1:183).13 He then subjects this “common opinion” (1:170) to severe critique. The system of moral values and penal institutions in Western society is not, he argues, based in reality upon rational principles derived from ideas of moral excellence, as its philosophical apologists claim; it only seems to have deterrence and reformation as its goals; and the modern regime of Punishment does not in reality transcend the system of Revenge and “the spirit of vindictiveness” (1:74) after all. This spirit, he says, has never given up its ancient predominance, however much it may promote the ideologically saturated myth that it has (1:21–22, 42). What we think of as moral disapproval is in reality nothing more significant philosophically than an instinctive impulse to strike back in retaliation at anything that causes us pain. The notion that punishment is inflicted on lawbreakers to bring about reformation or to deter future criminality is a fable serving to mask “the retributive desire” (1:91) that really drives moral feelings. In reality, moral indignation “derives its peculiar flavour,” Westermarck dryly comments, “from being directed against a sensitive agent” (1:92–93). If supposedly enlightened modern moral and juridical practice be closely scrutinized, the primitive craving for revenge is found to persist indelibly at its core, he declares. “It is like a man of low extraction, who, in spite of all acquired refinement, bears his origin stamped on his face” (1:93).

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Westermarck avoids claiming for his deeply iconoclastic argument any particular application to Victorian Britain or to its special heritage of Calvinistic Protestantism; nor does he cite as evidence for his thesis the historic explosion of retributiveness that took place in the crisis of the Mutiny. His analysis, though, sheds much light on the long-standing struggle between Retribution and Clemency, or, alternatively, Revenge and Punishment, that clearly was central to the evolution of modern British culture. The two principles were antithetical, yet they implied and reinforced each other so strongly as to seem almost inseparable and thus gave rise to all the rhetorical and other symptoms of chronic anxiety and ambivalence that I have emphasized. In the main texts of penal reform literature, such symptoms notably include the failure of these texts to acknowledge the specifically religious infrastructure of the debate or to acknowledge, until Stephen makes it so plain, that the essential subject of the debate was not, as it was claimed to be, the practical efficacy of this or that instrument of deterrence, but the national avidity for punitive killing. The ardent defenders of capital statutes for crimes like destroying fishponds and petty theft never cease disavowing any such motive by insisting that their goal is not at all to multiply executions but, rather, to abolish them altogether by deterring potential criminality. If there is a shortcoming in Sir Leon Radzinowicz’s magisterial History of English Criminal Law, it is that he takes such protestations at face value and traces the long, extremely bitter controversy over capital punishment in Britain as though it were the dispute that it professes to be between two schools of thought on the deterrent value of what had become by the early nineteenth century largely unenforceable statutes. What drops out of his history is precisely “the passions of hatred and revenge,” the “desire for vengeance upon . . . offenders” that Stephen (History, 2:91, 83) thrusts into the polemical foreground. No cultural history of these matters will finally carry conviction that fails to highlight these usually unmentionable passions—the “desire to punish,” “the desire of vengeance,” “retributive desire,” “the retributive impulses of our people,” the “craving appetite” for punishment— and to insist that the protracted debate over reform of the English criminal law was at heart a debate about the role of compulsive punitiveness in the national character. As Stephen acknowledged ruefully, the issue between the two opposed doctrines of punishment seemed to have been decided in England long since: the harsh capital statutes had largely been stricken from the books; the ideology of humanitarianism and philanthropy seemed to have triumphed. In the crisis of 1857, the newly ascendant ideology then seemed to have been overthrown at a stroke. “Pious clergymen, peaceful laymen, gentle, kindly people” suddenly became possessed by a passion for retri-

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bution that could only be understood as the upsurge of a long-suppressed national disposition. Victorian readers learned, initially with glee, of the heavy festooning of trees along the road from Benares to Allahabad with the hanged bodies of mutineers and their supposed sympathizers (figure 3) and of the prolonged orgies of hanging that went on in Cawnpore, Delhi, and elsewhere after the British reconquest. A letter to the Times from a clergyman on August 25, 1857, described Neill’s rows of gallowses in Benares and the “scores and scores of prisoners” being hanged there; he worries “lest there should be any squeamishness about the punishment in store” for mutineers. In Delhi, two large gallowses were erected in the middle of the Chandnee Chouk, the main thoroughfare, and there, “day after day, week after week, month after month, the hanging went on,” wrote Montgomery Martin (451). It was not just a practical response to the exigencies of the situation but the apotheosis of capital punishment itself, the transformation of British India into the Land of the Gallows. The demon of “passionate vindictiveness,” supposedly exorcized from British policy and from the British mentality a generation before, had sprung back to life in India in forms that seemed to throw the identity of progressive, humanitarian modern British society into question.

TWO REVENGERS’ TRAGEDIES To get a sense of how the revenge/clemency conundrum could play itself out in the popular imagination, let us trace the surprisingly distinct articulations of it that appear in a pair of Victorian novels of the Mutiny. In these texts, the fracture that seems to run through British moral consciousness is represented not, as in gothic fiction, in terms of the trope of uncanny visitation nor, as in the literature of penal reform, in terms of the trope of the confused relations of Punishment and Revenge, but in the trope of psychosis. In Maurice Dering; or, the Quadrilateral (1864), by George Alfred Lawrence, the transformation of Jesus (or perhaps it is the Redcrosse Knight) into Moloch forms in effect the key theme of the story. The theme is given striking immediacy and potency, strangely enough, by the artistic coarseness of this crudely melodramatic novel. Lawrence’s tale is in fact so raw and so close to the pathology it studies that it is difficult for a critic confidently to measure just how knowing some of its most compelling fictional effects may be.14 Even so, this novel can only be construed as a remarkable exploration of the contemporary syndrome that we have traced and as a prime site of the conjunction of Mutiny literature and of nineteenth-century philosophy of punishment.

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Figure 3. A Picket of Highlanders (Charles Ball, History of the Indian Mutiny)

Maurice Dering is a tale of four friends who make up a sort of imaginary cross-section of upper-class mid-Victorian society: Dering, the military officer; Paul Chetwynde, the idle cynic; Philip Gascoigne, the country squire; and Geoffrey Luttrell, the clergyman. The plot, such as it is, centers on amorous entanglements involving the four friends and notably the malevolent Ida Carew, who nourishes a desperate passion for Dering despite being Luttrell’s fiance´e and then his wife. Her plots to cause the seduction and ruin of Georgie Verschoyle, whom Dering loves but nobly renounces when she marries the upright Gascoigne, furnish a perfect example of the taste for lurid indecency that animated the vogue of the “sensation” novel in the 1860s—a fundamental shift in Victorian literary tastes that the novel itself finally seems to wish to analyze self-reflexively as an aftereffect of the terrible Mutiny. Dering is depicted as an image of masculine military rectitude distinctly reminiscent of Talbot Bulstrode, the first fiance´ of the heroine of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s excellent sensation novel of a year earlier, Aurora Floyd (1862–63), which also, notably, is set in the “Red Year” of 1857 —though Bulstrode, a Crimean hero, resigns his commission rather than go off to India to fight the Mutiny, whereas Dering eventually goes and plunges rabidly, as Majendie did in reality, into the thick of the fighting. Dering has “bold, straight-cut features, with a hearty, frank expression.

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. . . You felt that all that was in the man . . . was thoroughly genuine and real” (11). He is “a picture of old-time chivalry” (41). Before this paragon of manly British virtue achieves his destiny in Bengal, the plot of the novel unfolds as a sequence of parallel but otherwise disconnected episodes, each one centered on dealing out severe punishment to wrongdoers. The novel exhibits, in fact, such an obsessive fixation on the theme of punishment and is keyed to such a degree to its full gratification that any less rudimentary plot—especially one that might mitigate or complicate the judgments rendered on the objects of “retributive desire”—is to all intents and purposes foreclosed in advance. It does not take a reader long, in fact, to see that Lawrence’s novel is essentially a treatise on the spirit of violent retribution itself, with ultimately a distinct special application to the case of the Mutiny. We get an intimation that there may be something potentially unstable, which is to say psychopathic, in the ideal type of British moral character represented by Dering in the scene of his horsewhipping of an insolent groom whose bad advice has nearly caused the impulsive Georgie to come to grief on horseback. Lawrence again seems to have in mind a similar scene in Aurora Floyd where the enraged heroine beats “with her slender whip, a mere toy,” a mentally defective groom who has kicked her beloved old dog, and who is then led out for more serious chastisement by Aurora’s husband, the squire John Mellish. Having “selected a stout leatherthonged hunting-whip from a stand of formidable implements,” Mellish sets up the offender in the yard and gives him one blow but stops there, feeling “that there was something despicable in the unequal contest” (193–95). No such qualms appear to intrude on Lawrence’s reenactment, which at first glance seems to express the same unalloyed celebration of vindictive punishment that comes out nineteen years later in Stephen’s History of the Criminal Law of England. In dealing out his own whipping, Dering, says the narrator, administers “the chastisement proper— or judicial; not erring on the side of mercy, nor yet degenerating into brutality; where every blow descends with the deliberate emphasis of scientific strength. . . . Such a spectacle is not a pleasant one to witness, of course; but if the provocation has been intense, it may be—endured” (34). Nothing indicates that we are not meant to participate fully in the pleasure of witnessing stern “scientific” justice—the historical successor of revenge—meted out by the high-minded protagonist. “Through curse, and prayer, and shriek, Dering smote on, neither moved at all to relenting, nor yet stirred to greater severity, till he thought the offense amply atoned” (34). Yet the characteristic sharp note of ambivalence that has so long a textual history in the literature of British penality intrudes after all. Following the whipping, Dering “felt slightly contrite and ashamed of himself; not because he had yielded to a natural impulse of violence,

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but because the opening of the safety-valve had relieved him so intensely” (35). The violence itself is evidently not objectionable, serving as due atonement as it does, but there is a plain notation that Dering enjoys meting out punishment too much. This hint of the bad conscience that pervades Victorian discourse on punishment is due to be amplified dramatically in what follows. Another strand of the plot involves Paul Chetwynde’s exposure of the crimes committed by his father, the Dean of Torrcaster, and his father’s associate, the evangelical lawyer Mr. Serocold. The story may be clumsily melodramatic but is none the less interesting, for its villain figures, as the narrator is at pains to stress, are examples of the very strain in nineteenthcentury English society most closely bound up with its constitutional love of inflicting punishment. The Dean is the “sternest of ascetics” and a man “before whose name Exeter Hall [the London center of evangelical militancy] bowed itself in fearful reverence” (17). He is a violent domestic tyrant who terrorized his wife and son, a man “liberal enough of chastisement” and who (like the most ardent proponents of “revenge pure and simple” in the Mutiny, according to Flora Annie Steel) “always had a text to back it with” (59). His religious principles and those of his friend Serocold belong, the narrator says, to “the scarce dissembled Calvinism which lurks in the outermost frontier of Low-Church,” a doctrine based, according to this narrator, on limiting the elect to a very few and persecuting everyone else (30). Serocold smiles at one point a “hateful smile” that is, the narrator comments, like the one that can be imagined to have played on John Calvin’s lips as he watched the heretical theologian Michael Servetus, whom he condemned to be burned at the stake in 1553, writhing in the flames (30). In its harsh satire of these figures of “fanaticism” and “austere bigotry” (56), Lawrence’s novel diagnoses as an especially alarming pathology of contemporary British society a strain of sadistic, even homicidal, vindictiveness garbing itself in the robes of piety and respectability. Lawrence seems momentarily to ally himself with the radical critique of Victorian punitiveness formulated by Spencer, George Eliot, Westermarck, and other writers of the day, who argued that the high moral principles and the earnest hatred of vice characteristic of Calvinistic middle-class Victorian culture served chiefly to provide a stimulus, an outlet, and an alibi for an incurable craving to punish. Such, Maurice Dering implies, is the real mainspring of what it calls “this severely civilized century” in England, “which delights to keep holy the Sabbath day” (59). The novel then seems to repudiate its own insight, or perhaps to offer itself as a sacrifice to that insight, by indulging to the fullest the impulse to inflict harsh punishment on these hypocritical wrongdoers. Serocold is discovered to be an embezzler, and the Dean, who intercedes to shield him from exposure, is found to have caused the death of his pregnant

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wife by his brutality to her. Like Dering whipping the groom, Paul exposes each in turn. Serocold’s countenance registers his agony at the exposure. “Near the cheekbones and the angle of the jaw the dull white seemed marbled with a faint livid green. A very close observer might have noticed a slight shaking of the thin, callous hands” (54). When he is finally found officially guilty in court, he receives “double severity of punishment” by reason of his religious hypocrisy (61)—a severity that the reader is plainly intended to applaud. In a just world, this is what should happen to swindlers and hypocrites! The same fantasized joy in watching the guilty destroyed is indulged in the scene of the exposure of the Dean, whose face at that moment, we are told, is like that of a man who has been guillotined. “His cheek remained ashen-white, veined and flecked here and there with dull purple. His mouth opened twice or thrice convulsively, but the dry, swollen tongue could form no intelligible syllable, and all the while his great limbs and frame were shaking as in an ague-fit” (60). Chetwynde enacts in this novel, we may say, exactly that Oedipal confrontation with the punishing Victorian father—a father explicitly designated as the surrogate of the figure who here passes for the (illegitimate) spiritual father of the nation, John Calvin—that forms, as I have argued, a leitmotif in the literature of the Mutiny. It is rhetorically a tricky confrontation, however. In this novel in which Calvin’s cruel pleasure in watching an execution is portrayed as the very type of moral depravity, the reader is inveigled into inspecting with delight every symptom of the victim’s suffering at his symbolic guillotining. What the author has in mind at this moment is deeply undecipherable, but one could scarcely hope for more vivid imagery of the violent inner inconsistency of Victorian moral consciousness, where the love of punishing and the condemnation of the love of punishing seem fused together in an insoluble conundrum. I pass over the parallel subplot in which Ida’s wicked schemes to put Georgie into the hands of a seducer are foiled by Dering and Paul and lead once again to scenes of pitiless retribution: the seducer is killed by Dering in a duel called an “execution” (85), and Ida, her guilt publicly exposed, suffers a fatal heart attack. In these moments, capital punishment is not symbolically but literally exacted. It is exacted more fully still in the final movement of the novel, in which Dering volunteers for service in India to take part in repressing the Mutiny. Lawrence has constructed his novel, we may say, to suggest that the British counterrevolutionary war in India in 1857–59 signifies not just the most extreme episode in an escalating series of punishment stories but also the culminating historical expression of the punitive impulse that dominated life, according to this book, in “this severely civilized century.” He displays little interest in the specifics of the Indian cataclysm or in undertaking even the most superficial analysis of the dynamics of imperialism. India in this novel is imag-

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ined purely as a theater of vengeance. All other issues, Lawrence suggests, are subordinate to the fundamental point that in waging its campaign in India, Victorian Britain was not so much pursuing its political and economic interests as expressing some of its deepest psychosocial compulsions. The profundity of this intuition comes as a surprise in a work that seems artistically so primitive in contrast to the finer productions of the popular fiction of this period. Nursing a broken heart after his high-minded renunciation of Georgie, Dering goes to India, where “he never by any chance lost his temper with a native, nor condescended to use threats or abuse” (61)—the one glimpse in the novel at race relations in British India and a pointed hint that threats and abuse toward natives may have been (as Russell’s and other accounts had revealed that they were) commonplace at the time. Wounded by a bear in a hunting expedition, he is nursed by Alice Leslie, who becomes his fiance´e. While he is home on sick leave, the Mutiny breaks out and Alice is murdered, perhaps after being sexually brutalized, by the mutineers. Stunned with grief, Dering feels at first that he has nothing left to live for, but he is summoned back to a sense of purpose by his friend Paul. “Then you do not care for vengeance?” Paul asks. “If I had your swordarm to strike with, I would have a life for every hair in that sweet innocent’s head” (99). With this invocation not just of the great code of revenge but also of the one-life-for-each-hair topos, one of the animating legends of the Mutiny (see chapter 4), the novel seems to endorse vengeance unqualifiedly as a heroic calling and as the noble, high-minded course of action in this crisis. But the endorsement quickly becomes tainted with horror. Dering refuses to kiss Georgie’s young son good-bye as he leaves for the war, fearing that his touch would curse him, and his fear is understood by his friends “in after days, as they heard with a shudder of the terrible deeds of semijudicial vengeance that made Dering’s name a by-word even in that bloody time” (103). The hero of this novel, praised earlier as a model of “old-time chivalry,” becomes possessed with a mania for revenge, and the image of the gallant British struggle against devilish enemies of civilization is portrayed in the novel, contrary to its own earnest invocations, as nothing more idealistic than a sickening bloodbath. Lawrence’s novel takes us back to the view of the Mutiny that we get in Russell’s Diary and in Majendie’s Up Among the Pandies. Dering’s clergyman friend Geoffrey Luttrell pleads with him to check his descent into savagery and “not to make duty a mere cloak for private revenge; . . . not to slay the innocent with the guilty—not to turn slaughter into massacre” (104). The binary of duty versus revenge runs through all Victorian discourse on punishment, as we have seen, though the analogous binary of “slaughter” (here the morally positive term) versus “massacre” is a striking innovation. Der-

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ing, in any case, answers scornfully, “You think I ought to temper justice with mercy, and show discrimination in punishment, and be generous in victory, and—all the rest of it” (104). The first readers of the novel could easily have recognized in this fictionalized debate an echoing of the language used by Canning as he issued his controversial order for the showing of “all reasonable clemency” toward enemies and for “due discrimination” in punishment (Ball 1:590)—for the observance, that is, of at least minimum standards of legality and humane decency in the war, and the repression of “semi-judicial vengeance.” The concluding scene of the novel evokes the mythic incident repeatedly depicted, as I have noted, in the annals of the Mutiny. Dering’s troop has cornered one hundred sepoys in a temple, where they beg for mercy and disarm themselves. Dering orders them to come out in groups of ten, exactly as Deputy Commissioner Frederic Cooper of Umritsir called out 216 imprisoned sepoys in groups of ten to be shot at Ujnalla on August 1, 1857 (Holmes 362)—an incident to which we shall return in the following chapter. The first group comes out, “their faces blanched to lividness— their great eyeballs rolling wildly—their shining teeth gnashing, as if ferocity had not quite given place to fear” (107). This is the dread etched on the faces of Mr. Serocold and the Dean raised to a new pitch of melodramatic Manichaeanism. The first ten unarmed men are immediately shot, and Dering’s troopers then enter the “close, darkened slaughterhouse,” much as Nana Sahib’s execution squad of butchers recruited from the bazaar entered the ladies’ prison house at Cawnpore armed with hatchets and swords to carry out, between 5:30 and 10:00 p.m., the “long and dreadful sacrifice” (Ball 2:591). Dering’s men proceed to carry out their own prolonged massacre of the helpless captives with their swords. As the carnage proceeds, every now and then “one of the executioners came staggering out into the open air, drunk and faint with the scent of blood. And Dering stood by, with that dark, pitiless look on his face whereof we have before spoken, allowing no pause in the work till it was thoroughly performed” (107–8). The narrator at this point observes that this scene—a kind of nightmarish magnification of the image of Mr. Creakle slashing with his switch at the schoolboys, making its underlying murderous implications explicit—does not exaggerate what really happened in India during this war (108).15 No one who had read Majendie’s Up Among the Pandies would have needed to be told. A reader may hardly know how to interpret the moral of this scene, which replays in a tonality of nightmare the earlier one of Dering, who enjoyed it too much, methodically flogging the groom. Nothing in the text suggests that the mutineers’ bloody crimes do not deserve the harshest possible reprisals, and the ethos of punishment has been so strongly affirmed at various moments in the novel that one might be tempted to

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conclude that it is meant to be affirmed no less strongly here. But the intended lesson, however incoherent it may be with other significant materials in this novel, can only be the one that Geoffrey vainly preaches to Dering: that in such excesses, the supposedly all-important dividing line between civilized “chivalry” and barbarity has broken down. This is very far from a heroic image of the war, which served chiefly, Lawrence proposes to his Victorian readers, as a vehicle for giving vent to the retributive drive marked so plainly in the national character, the drive that has been identified ever more distinctly and exposed to progressively sharper critique in the course of the novel. The critique certainly seems confirmed by our final view of the “pitiless” Dering, who remains in India after the war as a solitary, repellent, spectral figure with a “hard, haggard face” that chills all possible conviviality (109). If the Victorian reader expects to be offered a reconciliation with him after his efforts in avenging British womanhood and preserving the empire, none is provided. The blighted Dering, whose fate in Lawrence’s fable is to become another refraction of the perverted, fanatical love of punishing embodied earlier in disgusting figures such as Mr. Serocold and the Dean, remains at the end of the novel a cautionary image of the transformation of Christ into Moloch or into a kind of Mr. Hyde, the dark imago of the British national character. The pessimistic, profoundly demoralized, almost unfathomably ambivalent tone of Maurice Dering, its extreme ironies, its radical critique of the Victorian moral ethos and particularly of the cult of strong masculine character, which it shows to be linked inseparably to an ideology of punishment, is so drastically out of touch with mid-Victorian sensibility that it seems plainly to mark the “terrible break” that the Mutiny inflicted on the mentality of the times. So, too, does the other aberrant-seeming Mutiny novel on which I will touch here: Henry Seton Merriman’s (Hugh Stowell Scott’s) Flotsam: The Study of a Life (1892). It belongs to a distinctive genre of Victorian moral fable, the cautionary tale of the wellmeaning, amiable young man fatally crippled by lack of moral fiber. This characteristic fable is rehearsed in book after book: in Vanity Fair (in the story of George Osborne), in Bleak House (in the story of Rick Carstone), in Trollope’s Framley Parsonage and Ralph the Heir, in Jude the Obscure (which follows Flotsam by two years and in some respects strongly resembles it), in Conrad’s Lord Jim. Commonly the tale is orchestrated so as to contrast the feckless hero with an image of stern masculine integrity and rectitude. As in Vanity Fair, the novel that Merriman’s most frequently evokes, this positive masculine ideal is drawn in Flotsam from the military caste: Dobbin and Major O’Dowd in Thackeray’s tale, and here, the heroic Marqueray and the sternly moral Colonel Leaguer, “a man of the quality that has brought a certain small island of the north to the front rank of the nations” (97). Flotsam to this extent gestures at presenting

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itself as a paean to British national character—or, more exactly, to British masculinity (the book is marked in fact by a very distinct streak of misogyny). The central effect of Merriman’s tale is the opposite of jingoistic, however. In its almost unrelenting contempt for its “hero,” Harry Wylam, and its unswerving focus on his progressive self-destruction, it implies that the old national ideals of character, though they are not yet extinct, have disastrously lost their efficacy. And it links itself strongly to Maurice Dering in suggesting that those ideals themselves have a sinister potential. Harry is the antitype of the austere Maurice Dering except in their shared moral idealism. He is “a fine upright young Englishman, with a clear skin and honest eyes, tossing fair hair, and a weak mouth” (54). The weak mouth signifies his inability to resist any tempting pleasure and his proclivity for performing the meanest actions, such as betraying his fiance´e with another woman or participating in looting expeditions, with scarcely any knowledge that he is doing so. Merriman uses him not only as an object lesson of a certain lethal character failure but also, once Harry joins a regiment in India on the eve of the Mutiny, as a touchstone for an analysis of British conduct in the war. It proves to be another sharply ambivalent analysis. “Strange passions—national passions, which compare with the rage of a man as a thunderstorm compares to a sneeze—were bestirring themselves in the hearts of people hitherto peaceful,” observes the narrator (106), who may or may not be referring here only to the natives of India. The novel offers essentially no analysis of the causes of the great upheaval, though it does focus once or twice very keenly on the prevalence of aggressive British racism, at least on the part of the amiable hero. His blood heated by heavy gambling, Harry at one point berates his sleepy punkah-wallah (the servant who operates the overhead fan) as “you black scum of the earth” and pours a tumbler of brandy and soda over him. Marqueray, standing nearby, is shocked and rebukes him: “Don’t make an ass of yourself, Wylam,” he says. “He’s only a nigger, d—n it,” Harry replies.16 He tosses a propitiatory coin to the servant, who throws it into the long grass with a curse (109– 11). This vignette of the brutal racial arrogance that made the British presence in India so enraging to the natives of the country casts a shadow of doubt over the British cause. “At this time it was the fashion among the men, and even with certain of the officers, to nourish a cruel and unjust hatred against any man with a black face,” the narrator observes (171). The indictment of British racism is no novelty in Victorian Mutiny literature, as we have seen. Yet on this point Flotsam evinces the severely conflicted attitudes that few significant Mutiny texts seem to be without, for even as it condemns racial bigotry like Harry’s, it is full of praise for “the masterfulness of the dominant race” in India and at one point has the colonel, one of Merriman’s images of excellent character, proclaim the oldschool doctrine “that the line of racial demarcation can hardly be drawn

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too firmly” in dealings with native Indians (104).17 The ambivalence of this novel about the Mutiny of thirty-five years before takes its starkest form in the scenes of Harry’s participation in the fighting, scenes that ostensibly mark the high point of his otherwise lamentable career. The colonel somehow glimpses in him signs of “the manliness and energy which appeared to be dormant in the Anglo-Indian officers at this period” (104) and which clearly constitute the didactic standard in Merriman’s novel. (We have come far from the ethos of Dickens’s novels of mid-century, where humanitarian sympathy, not masculine aggressiveness, figures as the essential value.)18 Stressing with artistically appropriate heavy-handedness the theme of martial valor, the narrator at one point interrupts the story to insert an honor roll of the twelve most glorious British heroes of the war in India, placing at the top of the list the sadistic Neill and Major William Hodson, who scandalized the nation by shooting down with his own hand the three unarmed Indian princes who had surrendered to him after the capture of Delhi in September 1857:19 the novel holds up as its ideal of national virtue, in other words, two iconic figures of British brutality and vindictiveness (145). Harry’s battle record is worthy of them. As Hodson was alleged to be, for one thing, he is an unprincipled looter. Mostly, though, in combat he is a ferocious killing machine, especially when his fury can be exacted upon helpless adversaries. In two separate episodes, he reenacts the horrible scene of exterminatory warfare that concludes Maurice Dering and that manifestly haunted and preyed upon the British memory of its great victories in the war. In one, Harry and a handful of soldiers surprise twenty sleeping sepoys and slaughter them with swords before they have time to awake (190–91); in another, Harry, Marqueray, and three troopers massacre forty Cawnpore sepoys, who are huddled together helplessly in a room, paralyzed by “abject terror” (217). Both scenes seem designed to illustrate with maximum vividness the replacement of earlier ideas of military heroism in the British imagination—ideas imbued with “the poetry and romance of war,” in George Hodson’s phrase (50)—by imagery of sheer mass butchery. This thematic comes to its climax in Merriman’s evocation of the storming of rebel-held Delhi, where Harry reaches the supreme moment of his life, fighting with a wild enthusiasm that no other activity affords him. “He swept on—bloodstained, silent—killing—killing all he met, an avenging fury” (215). He is “half blinded by fury,” for “any black face had the power to make him mad” (216). In the grip of this delirium of racial hostility, the Nero complex, as we may say, in its culminating form, our “half blinded” hero seems to make no distinction between combatants and civilians. (The narrator has just commented that in the pandemonium of the street fighting in Delhi, “peaceful citizens, coming trembling to their doors to welcome their deliverers from the horrors of anarchy and licentiousness, were bayoneted on their own thresholds, be-

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cause their faces were black” [214].) In the battle Harry encounters the valiant Marqueray, who elsewhere plays the role of a manly figure of admiration for our mediocre hero, but who is bonded to him at this moment by a deep affinity. “Here was one who loved fighting as he loved it—whose quiet blood was stirred to a fury as wild as his own” (216). Though the novel has distinctly told us that its account of the Mutiny is to be read as an encomium of patriotic military virtue, Majendie himself scarcely suggests more powerfully than Merriman does that the fighting in India was all a horrific slaughter devoid of glory. The rhetoric of Flotsam is marked in this way by the radical incoherence that is the very signature of Mutiny literature, the textual effect that expresses everywhere in this literature the ambivalence running so deeply in Victorians’ ideas of the war that they often seem scarcely able to recognize its presence, even when, as it does here, it takes the most glaring forms. Harry’s experience in the war is a fable not of redemptive military heroism, in any case, but simply of the “wave of passionate vindictiveness [that] swept over men’s hearts” in this war, causing, as Maxwell Grey said, “an unsuspected trait in the national character [to be] brought to light.” The unsuspected trait in Harry’s lackluster character is a capacity for unreasoning fury that makes him seem when he is in its grip like his own doppelga¨nger. “Grim war is apt to strip human nature of the fine apparel of self-restraint in which we deck ourselves for social purposes,” the narrator remarks, touching on an insistent motif of Mutiny writing that obviously has nothing to do with jingoism (180). This same modernistic conception of personality as a bundle of furious primitive drives normally disguised by social conventionalities but prone to break out in frightening forms when controls are relaxed stands out also in a Mutiny novel of the following year, Hume Nisbet’s The Queen’s Desire, which dwells still more insistently than does Merriman on the terrifying susceptibility of armies and mobs to “the spirit of carnage” (133), “the fever of war” (144) and “warlust” (167), and replays once again the imagery of the massacre of trapped native troops by British soldiers. “Then the avengers waded through the gore, which splashed in their faces as they stumbled out again to the sunlight, and dashed on, their thirst for blood still unappeased, and maddened with the lust of war” (Nisbet 268). The glorification of military masculinity and of the national cause of retribution in India was obviously not uncomplicated in late-Victorian fiction. Merriman’s treatment of these themes is fraught with the irony that pervades every aspect of the novel. Most glaringly ironic is, of course, the fact that this protagonist, notable only for amiable feebleness of character, should turn out in the Mutiny to be so prone to deeds of ferocious violence. Merriman never makes explicit the paradoxical suggestion that undergirds this sector of the story: that Harry’s ferocity in battle is itself symptomatic of his pathetically diminished and incapacitated character.

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Far from possessing a latent potential for “manliness and energy,” as the colonel mistakenly thinks, he gives himself over to frenzied violence with such wild enthusiasm precisely because he is such a weak, depleted, emasculated personality. It is a notable intuition that rings a surprising turn on Feuerbach’s argument that ideological “fanaticism” is at the root of exterminatory violence; Merriman suggests instead, in a premonition of Albert Memmi’s analysis of colonial bad conscience, that this kind of violence belongs to a syndrome of psychological enfeeblement. Merriman is a moralist rather than a psychologist, and he does not diagnose his character’s motivation in a way that might render the matter less paradoxical-seeming. Were psychological analysis the point here, a reader might conclude that Harry’s proneness to episodes of homicidal rage expresses not so much his retributive hatred of the rebels as his furious hatred of his own worthlessness, for which the sepoys and his other victims serve as obvious scapegoats. More pertinently, the strange destiny of Merriman’s well-meaning hero offers one more testimony to the rift in British national character on which I have focused, one more or less successfully screened from view in normal times by a variety of cultural expedients (the nonenforcement of barbaric death penalty statutes, for example) but that was exposed in the stark form of a national psychosis by the crisis of the Mutiny: the rift between one set of values based on the clemency and leniency of “an age which persuades itself that humanity is amongst its peculiar characteristics,” and another based on a biblical code of punishment defining the pious man as “a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.” But even this fundamental binary is almost undone by Merriman’s irony. Harry Wylam, for one thing, is a figure merely of lackadaisical good nature, not of clemency or “humanity.” He is only the most ironically reduced version of the quality of benevolence so admired by an earlier Victorian generation but that had sunk into obsolescence by this point in the century. More to the point here—it is the most significant aspect of Flotsam in the context of this chapter—all the rhetoric of retribution that, as we have seen, dominated contemporary discourse on the Mutiny has dropped out of this novel almost without a trace. The strain of religious fervor (and religious despair), the terrifying biblical quotations, the passion of the blessed martyrs of Cawnpore and the blood calling out for vengeance: none of this matrix of hysterically charged themes makes its way across the intervening decades into Merriman’s novel. Nor does the great theme of the problematics of punishment that is explored with such concentrated intensity in Maurice Dering. The result is a lapse of historical understanding that makes the bloodthirsty fury of the British soldiers in the assault on Delhi seem in Flotsam largely unmotivated, simply a personality dissociation bound up with the pathology of battle. The rea-

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son for this lapse seems clear enough. By 1892, by which date the evangelical revival of earlier decades had faded to a distant memory, the idea of a national crusade of “retribution” would have seemed anachronistic and scarcely plausible. The closest that Merriman’s narrator comes to invoking it is his comment that in the frenzy of the war, “greed of gain and a bitter thirst for revenge took hold of hearts at other times charitable and forgiving enough” (180–81). The comment is striking for its suggestion that British mercilessness in this war sprang chiefly from a craze for looting and only secondarily from revenge (it is not said for what). The stupendous intensity of British violence in the war appears as a result oddly vestigial in Flotsam, cut off as it is from the biblical and retributive frame of reference that texts more closely contemporary with the Mutiny emphasize. The book is incoherent at this point, as it is fundamentally incoherent with respect to the ideology of violence that it professes, both wanting to celebrate the prowess of the great Mutiny heroes and also insisting that the warfare of 1857–59 signified little but bloodthirsty fury. It is as though the novel runs in two contradictory tracks, the jingoistic and the bitterly antijingoistic, the relations between which remain forever unresolved. Flotsam in this sense represents a sort of literary flotsam in its own right, a text unmoored from the cultural context in which its story was originally set and caught in the same self-contradictory, vacillating condition that engulfs its incapacitated protagonist. Maurice Dering and Flotsam suggest, as William Howard Russell’s Indian reporting does, that if the Indian Mutiny did mark a terrible break in history and the beginning of a dire new epoch, it was because it seemed to let out of its bottle a genie of fanatical cruelty impossible to reconcile with the Victorian creed of a world transformed by the progress of humanitarianism and “civilization.” This spiritually distorted genie is personified in different modulations in characters such as Maurice Dering and Harry Wylam, who seem to incarnate the latent or subliminal dark side of British virtue, the compulsive vindictiveness that both these novels depict as a kind of national dementia. The appearance of this nihilistic Mr. Hyde—like projection of Victorian idealism was regularly noted in Mutiny writing and, we have seen, usually analyzed there as an upsurge of imperfectly repressed primitive passions, as something, that is, specifically archaic. But the genie looked at the same time alarmingly modern and condemned thinking Victorians to live henceforth with the knowledge (which, of course, they usually were at pains to conceal from themselves) that they themselves, heirs as they were of a culture based to an important degree on the “sanctification of revenge,” were Neros, Caligulas, Maurice Derings, Harry Wylams, under the skin.

Chapter Four

The Mutiny in Victorian Historiography

HISTORY-WRITING AND TOTALITARIAN DISCOURSE Almost before the cannon had gone quiet on the battlefields, full-scale documentary histories of the Mutiny began issuing from the presses.1 In this chapter I explore four major early instances of this body of writing, which has gone largely unstudied (though not uncommented upon) for what I guess to be a combination of reasons: the daunting magnitude and density of many of these texts; a slowness to recognize certain forms of scholarly literature as culturally expressive in the ways that fiction and poetry are; and perhaps also the tendency of these books to throw wrenches into the smoothly running machinery of received wisdom about Victorian attitudes toward the war and toward the imperial enterprise more generally. I focus on the following: Charles Ball’s massive two-volume History of the Indian Mutiny and R. Montgomery Martin’s extended account of the war in his Indian Empire, each published c. 1860–61; Sir George Trevelyan’s Cawnpore (1865); and John William Kaye’s magisterial three-volume History of the Sepoy War, published from 1864 to 1876 and subsequently completed in three more volumes by G. B. Malleson. I refer less fully to other nineteenth-century historical studies including Malleson’s inflammatory Mutiny of the Bengal Army (1857–58), E. H. Nolan’s recounting of the Mutiny in volume 2 of his History of the British Empire in India (c. 1859), J. Cave-Browne’s The Punjab and Delhi in 1857 (1861), General Sir Hope Grant and Henry Knollys’s Incidents in the Sepoy War, 1857–58 (1873), T. Rice Holmes’s History of the Indian Mutiny (1883); and Malleson’s third redaction of the Mutiny story in his Indian Mutiny of 1857 (1892). Beyond this already imposing archive, scores of memoirs, biographies, and other contemporary works reported on particular incidents in various disturbed districts. The production of such a vast historical literature rehearsing in one book after another wellknown events of the very recent past testifies powerfully to the Victorian perception of the Mutiny as a watershed event deserving exhaustive, minutely detailed documentation; it testifies also to the almost insatiable fascination that the great Indian upheaval exercised upon the Victorian imagination. It suggests even before a reader opens the first of these texts that this fascination had a compulsive character, that it expressed a cul-

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tural need to relive the Indian war again and again, a need driven perhaps by tenacious passions and anxieties that refused to be pacified as the rebellious districts of Bengal had been. One’s motives for a sustained rereading of this body of work today are bound to be of other kinds: first, to seek insight into those very passions and anxieties, which prove to be vividly stenciled in all these books and seem like potentially key indices of the mid-Victorian mentality; and second, to seek to validate what we think we know to be the logic of imperial historiography, that important nineteenth-century cultural institution. Is all such writing necessarily in thrall to imperialistic and nationalistic ideology? Scholarship under the postcolonial dispensation has tended to take for granted a dogmatically affirmative answer to the question and to take this answer as its axiomatic point of departure. The eminent scholar of British India Bernard S. Cohn has highlighted “the historiographic modality” of the exercise of colonial power: by writing its own history according to protocols that importantly included “the creation of emblematic heroes and villains,” he declares, a colonial power such as Victorian Britain reinforces its domination of subject peoples; history-writing under such circumstances is first and foremost an instrumentality of power (5– 6). This scheme of interpretation is exactly of a piece with Frantz Fanon’s in The Wretched of the Earth, which lays down as a law springing from “the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation” that “the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil,” as, in fact, “absolute evil” (41). Gautam Chakravarty, who takes for granted a relation of seamless complicity between “the colonial state, and its instrument, colonial historiography,” gives such formulas specific application to the ways in which the Victorians supposedly represented the Indian Mutiny. The early histories of the uprising, he declares, “exemplify the ways in which historiography worked in tandem with the administrative needs of the colonial state during periods of crisis” (69, 21). That is to say, this exercise cannot properly be called history-writing at all; it is not an honorable scholarly calling but an agency of state control and a purveyor of what Chakravarty calls “the pathology of jingoism” (3). Victorian historians persisted uniformly in “misreading” the Mutiny, Ian Baucom declares; they “misrecognized a plot of oppression and resistance as a plot of loyalty and betrayal.” By this distortion, they enabled the British “to represent themselves not as India’s oppressors but as its gallant and benign victims, . . . and to derive the secondary advantage of a justification for racial separatism” (106, 112).2 This would not be the place to inquire into the categorical identification of “oppression” as the touchstone of all true interpretation of the Mutiny (which might entail a potentially complicated assessment of British claims that their rule was far less oppressive for the Indian populace than that

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of native princes and tax collectors). As a description of the workings of the four classic texts of imperial historiography to be scrutinized in this chapter, however, the schema laid down by recent commentators proves to be misleading enough to call its basic premises into question. As we will see, these texts are full of material that contradicts and disrupts the patriotic interpretation of the Mutiny that sometimes they profess to espouse. For one thing, far from being apologists for apartheid and for the doctrine of the “essential racial superiority” (Chakravarty 4) of Europeans, the historians take as one of their leading themes the evils of racial bigotry and racial separatism in India, which, they repeatedly assert, were responsible for the uprising in the first place. Nor do they always distribute the roles of “emblematic heroes and villains” in their renderings of the Mutiny as anti-imperialist scholarship predicts. Scandalously, the most sinister villains in the works of Mutiny historians of the Victorian era often are British. Aside from the obligation that bears upon scholars not to defame their scholarly predecessors unjustifiably, what is chiefly at stake in the study of the books to be looked at in this chapter is precisely the doctrine of “the totalitarian character” of the culture of imperialism. Commentators in taking this usually unspoken doctrine for granted foreclose careful close reading of texts of imperial history on principle. If it is known in advance that the sole content of such works is the ideology of domination, then close reading of them is at best useless labor—at worst, morally suspect labor. Commentators like those I have cited deny at the same time the specific historicity of works that are construed as projections of a political structure imagined to be endowed with the power to stamp its image peremptorily on every cultural manifestation connected to it—this being what “totalitarian” means in the field of cultural study. But supposedly chauvinistic and propagandistic Mutiny historiography takes on a more dynamic, more unpredictable, more pathos-infused—that is to say, more literary—character from the moment that one suspends the a priori definition of it as an unproblematic instrument of power. It comes into focus from this shifted angle as a defensive, anxiety-driven formation brought into existence to allay as best it could the cultural crisis that the great rebellion left in its wake. The cultural labor invested in it is a measure of the severity of that crisis, in other words. What comes into focus at the same time is the sometimes dizzying rhetorical instability of these texts, which, far from achieving totalitarian ideological self-consistency, incorporate within themselves the same acutely conflicted attitudes that they came into being to exorcize. They seem in many ways to dramatize and to aggravate rather than repair the deep, anguish-laden cracks that the Mutiny earthquake violently exposed in the Victorian mentality. So, at least, I seek to show in this chapter.

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Imperial history arises in the aftermath of the trauma of 1857 in obedience to an urgent need to cleanse the Mutiny of that aura of paralyzing dread that surrounded it in the British psyche; its task in effect was to detoxify national memory. Historians were to accomplish this task, first, by constructing a detailed factual record of a concatenation of events that from the first had been experienced by the Victorian public more as a phantasmagoria of detached incidents, horrible scenes illuminated, as I have said, as though by the flash of a strobe light, or as an incomprehensible visitation, than as historical reality, and that seemed all the more unreal for having occurred so far away and across the excruciating time lag of which I have spoken. All historians have the responsibility of separating truth from error, but this mandate took on unusual urgency in the aftermath of 1857. To shift recent events in India from the realm of lurid nightmare to that of potentially reassuring factuality, Victorian Mutiny historians had as their principal burden that of extricating historical truth from the web of rumor, legend, fantasy, fables, fabrications, forgeries, and propaganda in which it had become almost irretrievably enveloped. They underline the difficulty of the task by regularly stressing their commitment to what Charles Ball calls the “endeavour to record facts only.” “In the earlier stages of the mutiny,” he writes in the concluding sentence of his monumental history, “when the mind of Europe was kept in a state of fevered excitement by reports of outrage that reached this country, in the most exaggerated form, much caution was necessary in sifting the husks of fiction from the grains of truth” (2:664). This cautious sifting, he assures his reader, is the basis of his work as historian. Trevelyan declares in the same way that he has observed “a scrupulous fidelity” to reliable sources, even to “the most trivial allusions, the slightest touches” of the story (v). This motive (exemplified in a variety of official inquiries into disputed events as well as in the work of historians) was a volatile one, however, and operated somewhat insidiously in two opposite ways. On the one hand, it opened up to critical examination a fabric of Mutiny mythology, much of it cherished, not to say sanctified, by British public opinion. Central to this mythology was a pantheon of high-minded British heroes, many of whom, such as Sir Henry Havelock, were popular icons of Christian piety who had confirmed their sanctity by giving their lives on then-famous Indian battlefields.3 The historian’s vocation of strict truthtelling in these circumstances meant casting a potentially skeptical eye on the conduct of national heroes. Equally fraught with possibilities of scandalous outcomes was historical research into the conduct of “our” adversaries in the war, and particularly into the factual authenticity of the atrocity stories that were universally cited as the grounds for policies of devastating British retribution against mutineers and rebellious civilian populations. A genuinely totalitarian Mutiny historiography would have

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gone to any lengths to confirm the veracity of these stories. In fact, the historians we shall consider carry out sharply skeptical assessments of what often proved to be, in Trevelyan’s words, nothing but “prurient and ghastly fictions” (Cawnpore 194). The determination “to record facts only,” if at crucial junctures it throws ideological orthodoxies into jeopardy, operates at the same time to construct a scientifically solid, durable basis for national patriotic-religious and sometimes xenophobic Mutiny mythology. Often the two motives of skeptical sifting and evidentiary affirmation function smoothly in tandem in the texts we shall consider; at various moments, though, the skeptical and debunking impulse disrupts the spirit of textual reciprocity, with drastic results that seem to take the authors themselves unaware. The challenges posed by the Mutiny to the practice of scientific historiography proved in the event almost insuperable—wholly insuperable if one imagines that the sign of success in rigorous documentary history ought to be progress toward a master narrative of established facts to which expert opinion increasingly converges. Victorian histories of the Mutiny are marked by strong continuities, but they are almost as striking for their differences, as we shall see: each projects a vividly distinctive image of the uprising and the British war against it. It turns out that the Mutiny, far from resolving in the historiographic lens into a totalitarian orthodoxy, was open in mid-Victorian decades to such a spectrum of diverging interpretations as to raise philosophical doubt as to the attainability of historical truth itself. Kaye registers this doubt in the introduction to the second volume (1870) of his great work. Historical truth seems almost impossible to ascertain definitively, he says here, even in the case of eyewitness testimony from unimpeachable sources, who may, for instance, recall intentions as accomplished facts. Such problems render the historical inquirer “very sceptical even of information supposed to be on ‘the best possible authority,’ ” he writes. “Truly, it is very disheartening to find that the nearer one approaches the fountain-head of truth, the further off we may find ourselves from it” (2:xiv). In formulating this Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of historiography (in which the very act of scientific observation seems to estrange one from precise knowledge), Kaye touches a note of epistemological pessimism increasingly characteristic of late-Victorian intellectual discourse.4 He identifies a dilemma implicit in any historian’s vocation, but one that takes distinctive forms in the writing of Mutiny history in the nineteenth century. For one thing, there are what may seem to be the purely mechanical problems of presentation inherent in the telling of a story that unfolded as a multiplicity of more or less simultaneous dramas taking place in widely scattered locations. All historians remark on the necessarily awkward narrative expedients to which they are driven by this aspect of the events

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of 1857–59 (see Kaye 3:vi, for example). These are not just mechanical problems, however, for they arise from the fundamental problematics of narrative history, governed as it is by the principle that entangled masses of events must be rendered in story form in order to be intelligible. From the moment that this principle is embraced, as it wholeheartedly is by nineteenth-century historians, it brings in its train, as Hayden White has insisted (in “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact”), a whole panoply of interpretive necessities belonging to what Tzvetan Todorov calls “the laws of the text” (83), which is to say, the esthetic conventionalities of fictional literature. The overwhelming literariness that I have stressed in the Victorian experience and construction of the Indian Mutiny is nowhere more acutely accented, in fact, than in the works of the historians. The sign of literariness is imprinted on them on the level of verbal style (always strongly marked in these books, which are rich in figurative texture, emotive invocation, and literary allusiveness) as much as on that of narrative structures. So a fundamental contradiction inhabits this body of writing, which on the one hand takes as its raison d’eˆtre an emancipation from literary fictiveness (in the form, say, of “prurient and ghastly fictions”) and on the other exploits—not without many signs of strain— all the instrumentalities of imaginative literature as the very condition of producing a certain kind of scientific history. The ideology of historiographic Mutiny narration is split between two contrary principles, then: that of stringent factuality and that of the decorum of storytelling. What appears at their nexus is what we saw in the first chapter to be a cardinal trope of Mutiny discourse in all its genres: the trope of the unspeakable. Some historical facts are unspeakable, as Kaye said, because they stubbornly elude historical investigation and are able to manifest themselves in historical narration only in the form of breaks in the text and of twinges of epistemological alarm. This has been more than a routine problem in Mutiny historiography, since so much vital information concerning the actions and motives of the rebels was rendered forever irretrievable by the liquidation or final disappearance of nearly the entire leadership of the uprising. As a result, the tale of the great rebellion can only be told in a severely truncated form that privileges British points of view to an overwhelming degree. Other historical and pseudohistorical materials that held an especially significant place in the annals of the Mutiny could not be spoken of because they were deemed too disgusting for respectable public discourse. “You in England will not hear the worst [about the rebels’ atrocities],” writes an officer quoted by Ball, “for the truth is so awful that the newspapers dare not publish it” (1:97). “You in England can never know or hear one-half of the atrocities committed by these savages, for they are too abominable ever to repeat, much less to publish,” declares, as we saw, another of Ball’s informants

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(1:493). As British forces approached Cawnpore in July 1857, rumors circulated, writes Ball, in a phrase that crystallizes the issue, of “overwhelming horrors that seemed too great for utterance—too appalling for description” (1:298). It seems that the most important information about the mutinies is precisely that which no historian is allowed to repeat and which no reader could bear to read. This is the ubiquitous catch-22 of Mutiny historiography and the crucial indicator of the mentality that this literature embodies. “It is difficult to give any correct relation of the fate of the Englishwomen dragged from the boats [after the first Cawnpore massacre],” observes the historian E. H. Nolan circa 1859, linking together the two seemingly different modes of unspeakability, “not only because the narratives of survivors [are] so different, but because the scenes in which the relaters substantially agree are too indelicate to place before our readers in their atrocious details” (2:729). The correlation between the breakdown of historically factual narrative and the horrors with which it may have to deal, Nolan suggests in a provocative passage that I have cited before, may not be merely adventitious but essential. “The events which transpired within the city [of Delhi] on the arrival of the Meerut battalions, have never appeared in a connected form, and never can be presented in consecutive order,” he writes, “so terrible was the massacre, and so little did those who escaped know of anything which did not appear before their own eyes” (2:721–22). Certain events are so filled with that species of metaphysical panic known as “horror” that they incapacitate narrative and never can figure in the form of a coherently constructed recital of historical facts. Of course, it has long been a mandatory principle of intellectual sophistication to hold in disdain Victorian squeamishness with regard to “indelicate” subjects—to regard this squeamishness not only as ridiculous but as symptomatic of broad failings in Victorian middle-class moral culture. The anxiety of Mutiny historians about reporting horrifying materials seems at the least a quaint concern from the point of view of an age when the families of terrorism victims are able, if they please, to witness their loved ones’ beheadings on Islamist Web sites. Yet Victorian chroniclers of the Mutiny were not wrong to perceive the seriousness of the problem that certain historical materials, once committed to print, seem inescapably, without regard to their factual authenticity, to take the form of “prurient and ghastly fictions” unfit for the pages of legitimate scientific inquiry. Fully to depict certain atrocities would be in this sense, they saw, to violate the charter of reputable historiography and, for example, to expose the historian to the charge that popular British histories “sensationalized the deaths of innocent English civilians” (Paxton 5; see also Chakravarty 37)—though not to do so would violate the charter in another way. “What followed is best told in the fewest and simplest words,” says the

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normally loquacious Kaye (2:372) of the massacre of the women and children at Cawnpore, struggling to resolve this intractable conundrum. And though we may be tempted to take the incessant invocation of “unspeakable” horrors in Mutiny writing as a prime stylistic sign of the “general racist and political hysteria about the Mutiny” (Brantlinger, Rule 202) to which Victorian Britain was subject at the time, we should not mistake its significance as an index of modern historical experience. To prescient contemporary observers, the notion that events transpiring in India had taken such extreme form and attained such a magnitude of “horror” as to be “too great for utterance—too appalling for description” marked nothing less than the advent of a new phase of European sensibility. If the Mutiny signified, in Disraeli’s phrase, “one of those great events which form epochs in the history of mankind” (qtd. Ball 2:418), it was because it seemed to announce an era in which historical calamity may outstrip and disable the capacity of human moral faculties to grasp it and, for that reason, the capacity of language to transcribe it. The topos of the unspeakability of history and the paralysis of language is one that we associate with imagination-dwarfing twentieth-century sites such as the Somme and Auschwitz, but reading Victorian “imperial history” reveals that it found what was perhaps its first concerted expression in the Indian crisis of 1857–59. If only for this reason, these works are worthy of deep and respectful critical attention. It is precisely the intuition of a traumatic separation from the past that underlies, I think, the habitual association of British heroism in the war with what the author of one important Mutiny memoir calls “military honour and British heroism, of olden times” (Thomson 151). The military celebrities of the Indian campaign are said again and again by Victorian writers to embody the ancient ideal of “chivalry,” though almost invariably, we have seen, the historical equation put forward is not with the chivalric Middle Ages (though see Malleson, Mutiny of the Bengal Army 108) but with the “stern,” pitiless Puritan warriors of the English seventeenth century, to whom Havelock, Neill, Nicholson, and other Mutiny celebrities are habitually compared. Describing Havelock’s troops marching toward Cawnpore, “animated . . . by the certainty . . . of avenging their countrymen,” Malleson imagines them in the usual way as “like Cromwell’s Ironsides” in that “there was a stern determination in their aspect, even in their very tread, which showed the earnestness of purpose within” (ibid. 144). This identification, or, rather, this fantastic apparition of the ghosts of the national past, is ubiquitous in Mutiny histories. It stresses, as this book does, the inseparable link between the Victorian fury of vengeance in India and the puritanical religious spirit that the crisis of 1857 seemed to summon from British historical memory. For obvious reasons, it was a thesis that held particularly compelling appeal for Mu-

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tiny historians. I must risk belaboring the point, however, that rather than delivering to the Victorian world a secure sense of “a fixed identity rooted in an ancestral past” (Schmitt 15), the identification of British officers and troops with seventeenth-century models was fraught with ambivalence. Cromwellian Puritanism was far from signifying a unified and honorific English identity impervious to the passage of centuries. It stood for a cult of sternly moralistic and punitive masculine personality still predominant in British culture a generation or so prior to 1857 but that had come to seem, what with the “change from severity to leniency” in Victorian attitudes that Fitzjames Stephen deplored (History 2:87), not just anachronistic but also potentially monstrous and perverse. The Cromwellian motif in Mutiny writing implies, that is, just that potentially lethal fracture of national temperament that forms the insistent theme of Mutiny literature. No cultural work seemed more crucial than the attempt to heal this fracture. Thus originated the rhetorical labor expended by Mutiny historians in seeking to make plausible the proposition that the sternly righteous, punitive phase of Victorian religious personality and its humane, benevolent, philanthropic phase—masculinized and feminized, old-fashioned and modern ideals, respectively—were not antagonistic after all but complementary. We get an instance of this conceit in the best-selling biography by George H. Hodson of his famous, probably psychopathic brother, Major William Hodson, whose sanguinary brutality did not prevent his being canonized as one of the hero-martyrs of the Indian war. George thus quotes a testimony to William from a brother officer whom William had tended while he recovered from a wound: “It was whilst lying helpless and feeble I saw that the brave and stern soldier had also the tenderness of a woman in his noble heart” (357). A man of rectitude must be “stern”—one of the most culturally saturated terms in the Victorian lexicon, and one invoked incessantly in Mutiny literature—but sternness, the defining attitude of Calvinistic piety, is not, we are assured, antithetical to the other strain of feeling idealized in Victorian discourse centered on mercy, sympathy, tenderness, forgiveness. This scene represents almost a cliche´ of Mutiny discourse. George Hodson quotes a similar testimonial to the fallen hero from W. H. Russell, who declared in an obituary letter to the Times that Major Hodson “was of a humane and clement disposition, but”—a formulaic phrase that might have come straight from the lips of Dickens’s Mr. Murdstone, or from an essay of Stephen’s on behalf of the death penalty—“firm in the infliction of deserved punishment” (436). Alexander Duff gives a version of the same formula in praising Sir Henry Lawrence as a man “in whom the heroism of ancient chivalry was singularly combined with the benevolence of Christian philanthropy” (114). These lapidary statements asserting the

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at least occasional and exceptional concordance of the two sides of ideal British character are underlain, of course, by the implicit fear, evidently an acute and persistent one, that the cultural molecule formed by the bond between stern heroism and mercy (or, in the terminology of the previous chapter, Retribution and Clemency) might in fact be prone to fly apart, leaving its two constituent elements to degenerate into, say, the effeminate sentimentalism often attributed to partisans of mercy such as “Clemency” Canning, and the sadistic rage of punishing and killing that writers such as V. D. Majendie, G. A. Lawrence, and Russell himself declared to have been unleashed in India. The linkage to the ancestral past, and particularly to a sternly religious ancestral personality, thus proves to be subject to a sharply dissonant interpretation. Instead of signifying a restorative bond with the historical roots of national virtue, it may seem only to reflect the tenaciousness of primitive drives in the national psyche and to demonstrate the difficulty of consolidating an authentically modern, humane, progressive Britain. This characteristic anxiety of a period deeply committed to its own selfmodernization is just the predicament identified and theorized at length by Herbert Spencer in these years, as I have noted. Though the evolutionary process of history leads inevitably in the direction of modern “industrial” modes of social life characterized by individual freedom and cooperative social relations, Spencer teaches, the mid-nineteenth century had seen a pathological reversion, amounting almost to a violation of the laws of nature, to the historically earlier “militant” mode characterized by the glorification of totalitarian and militaristic discipline and by the prevalence of a primitive code of blood revenge. The modern day has witnessed, in Spencer’s view, “a return to barbaric principles of government” (Study of Sociology 244).5 For all the powerful patriotic and religious motives that they proclaim to their readers, Victorian histories of the Mutiny construct a cultural site of extraordinary amplitude for entertaining versions of precisely this theme. One can guess that this group of works in fact played a key role in articulating this preoccupation of late nineteenthcentury intellectual life, the persistence of the barbaric past in modern civilization. It was a project by no means exactly congruent with that of “[working] in tandem with the administrative needs of the colonial state” and of constructing apologias for domination. It will not do, in any case, to lump the Mutiny historians indiscriminately together to dismiss them as purveyors of an ideology of jingoism—as instances, that is, of that totalitarian mode, “imperial history.” If we are interested in gauging the capacity of Victorian culture to evaluate itself and to reflect, in particular, on the soul of man under imperialism, these texts constitute an essential episode in the literature of the age.

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CHARLES BALL, “JINGOIST HISTORIAN” The first thing that strikes the reader of Charles Ball’s History of the Indian Mutiny is the sheer scale of this work that comprises two huge double-columned, typographically dense quarto volumes, more than 1,300 pages in all. The very magnitude of the book must have produced a compelling effect upon its initial readership when it appeared in 1860 or 1861.6 The effect was surely a calculated one. At every stage of the vast, complexly ramified epistemological circuit that carried the Indian news, from remote stations in the wilds of Bengal or the Punjab to major centers such as Cawnpore, Delhi, and Lucknow, then to the capital of the British raj in Calcutta, and finally by ocean voyage or overland route to anxious consumers of the news at home throughout Britain, the phenomenology of the Mutiny, as we saw, was dominated by an agonizing penury of information. The telegraph lines being cut and the roads impassible to the mail service, besieged garrisons in places such as Cawnpore and Lucknow sought desperately to communicate with British commanders elsewhere by means of messages written in Greek on almost microscopic pieces of transparent paper that could be hidden inside quills or turbans and carried by native “cossids”—most of whom were never heard of again or were returned to the British entrenchments with their noses and ears cut off. Lord Canning, the governor-general, could only follow unfolding events in Upper India from his post in Calcutta with weeks of delay. Such fragmentary, attenuated, doubtful news as did emerge from the mutinous interior took seven additional weeks to reach England and by the time of its arrival was already months out of date. Rarely has an awareness of the materiality of the signifier and of its constitutional disconnection from the signified reached such a painful pitch in the daily existence of a nation. And, of course, all these failures of communication were surpassed in the end by the ultimate failure of communication with the captives of various local uprisings. All potential messages from sites such as the Bibighar in Cawnpore, where the two hundred British women and children were imprisoned and then massacred, were swallowed up forever like light signals sucked into a black hole in space, or, we may say, into the heart of darkness; even the messages from the doomed women found scratched on the walls of their prison turned out to be forgeries. In all this, the trope of unspeakability in Mutiny discourse takes another exceptionally poignant form. Actors in the great drama strive to speak, but their words wither away to nothing. Ball seems to have imagined The History of the Indian Mutiny first and foremost as a healing response to this harrowing epistemological ordeal—as an almost fantastic superabundance, that is, of all

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the information from India for which the nation had famished for two nearly unendurable years. This motive operates so powerfully in Ball’s History as nearly to overwhelm the analytical, abstracting, ordering, summarizing, explanatory functions that historians usually put foremost; it nearly overwhelms by the same token even the narrativizing function that I have emphasized. A reader is bound to find this work at least initially bewildering and to be tempted to judge it as hopelessly uncouth historiography or, indeed, as not historiography proper at all, but rather merely a great welter of raw materials. Its leading formal feature is its accumulation of primary documents. Lengthy quotations from speeches, official papers, proclamations, newspaper accounts, and the like are prominent, but what predominates are extended citations of personal statements and letters by Europeans, both those occupying official positions and many private citizens, men and women, caught up by chance in the maelstrom. His philosophy as a historian, Ball says, is to write history based on “details furnished by individuals on the spot” (1:60) and to retain “the exact language of the writer” (1:81), for the sake of authenticity. For example, the account he provides of the initial outbreak at Meerut on May 10, 1857, comes chiefly not in the form of his own historical narrative, which he provides ever so succinctly, but in that of a compendium or collage of lengthy extracts from no fewer than seven letters by eyewitnesses, plus the commanding general’s dispatch to his superiors plus an article from a Calcutta newspaper (1:56–67). What we get is not so much a narrative as a chorus, or a cacophony, of witnesses containing masses of experiential detail that plunge a reader novelistically, sometimes with electrifying vividness, into the phantasmagoria of action (“We saw a poor lady in the verandah, a Mrs. Chambers. . . . We bade the servants bring her over the low wall to us, but they were too confused to attend to me at first. The stables of that house were first burnt. We heard the shrieks of the horses” [1:62]) but usually contribute little to historical explanation. This method has not much in common with the usual self-aggrandizing style of history-writing aimed above all at demonstrating the historian’s mastery of his materials, the power of his organizing intellect to impose lucidity and order; rather, it is a style aiming at just the opposite, at exposing the author and his readers to the shock of historical events in their maximum, almost unmediated intensity, leaving disorder unresolved. The texture of this section is representative of Ball’s work and of the demands it places on the reader. The almost incredible documentary richness of the History of the Indian Mutiny has a deeply impressive effect upon a reader willing to submit to it.7 One can hardly imagine how Ball managed to assemble such an archive of primary materials in the very midst of the upheaval.8 The liabilities entailed by his method of indiscriminate quotation for the formal

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unity and readability of his account are tremendous, but so, too, always supposing a compliant reader, is the leverage that it exerts upon alternative ways of conceptualizing the Mutiny and similar large-scale violent social upheavals. The principle that governs large tracts of Ball’s story, especially at the beginning, is that the ordeal undergone by the helpless (British) victims of the rebellion constitutes its moral center and primary subject, and that the historian’s paramount task, to which other desiderata such as narrative economy and coherence must be sacrificed if need be, is to bear empathetic witness to their suffering. This is not an ideologically innocent principle (it precludes computation of the victims’ share in the wrongs of imperialism), but it produces striking effects keyed everywhere to Ball’s strong predilection for individual testimony over official accounts. Thanks to this predilection, his work affords access to the immediacy of personal experience of the Mutiny—of the advent on the world stage of what Fanon admiringly terms “absolute violence” (37)—as no other historian does. His redaction of the Cawnpore story thus allots much space to the quotation of long, somber private letters, sent in the last mails to leave the city by those destined to die in the siege and in the two massacres, at the boats and in the Bibighar, that followed. These letters “are so interestingly descriptive of the position of the European residents at this station during the latter part of May, that their insertion here will need no apology,” says the narrator apologetically, drawing attention to his heterodox method of narration (1:307). “If these are my last words to you, my dearest sister,” writes Emma Ewart, an officer’s wife, “be assured that we think of you with most grateful and affectionate feelings, and that we consign to your charge our dear boy with the utmost confidence that you will ever be a mother to him and do your very best for him. My sweet one here will share whatever is my fate, most likely” (1:312).9 Ball similarly gives prominence to narratives of British fugitives who escaped the wave of massacres at various stations and wandered, sometimes naked, often for weeks, through the tiger- and rebellion-infested jungles of Bengal, enduring every extremity of suffering before coming, those who did, to safety. These are the kinds of intensely personalized materials that other historians elide as falling below the threshold of historiographic significance. Ball, by contrast, recounts the entry of the Meerut mutineers into Delhi and the massacres of Europeans there on May 11, 1857, in just seven pages (1:72–79), while devoting twenty-one to quoting the narratives of escapees (1:79–100). Modern readers, particularly those for whom the Mutiny must be scripted solely as a Manichaean political allegory of “oppression and resistance,” are bound to recoil from the labored language in which Ball struggles to express the ordeals of the British victims. “The history of the world,” he says in a stereotypical formula, “scarcely affords a parallel to

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the frightful and cruel outrages that, in the summer of 1857, cast a stain upon the annals of British India, that it will take oceans of tears, and ages of humiliation and practical repentance, to efface” (1:392). But however suitable such phraseology may be to would-be scientific history-writing, it possesses, after all, historiographic value in its representation of what we can think of as the second experiential dimension of the Mutiny: the way the Victorian public at home experienced it. Precisely in its strains of mawkishness and its characteristic hyperbole—the stylistic sign here of the sense of witnessing unprecedented events for which adequate techniques of literary representation have not yet been developed—Ball’s writing conveys this element of the historical reality of the times more compellingly than any other document of the period I have discovered. This is not abstracted academic history, in other words, but a mode of history in which the expanding shock wave of contemporary experience is understood to form an essential element of the record, something not to be filtered out fastidiously without serious historiographic impoverishment. Among other things, it conveys that current of religious despair that was mixed in—though sometimes only in the inside-out form of emphatic denial—with contemporary responses. “A feeling more terrible than the mere desire of vengeance, arises in the heart when contemplating such barbarity,” Ball provocatively declares in one passage; “and the most reverent Christians may shudder when they are called upon to believe, that in the sight of the All-Wise, All-Beneficent, such a terrible ordeal [as that of the women and children captives at Cawnpore] could have been deemed necessary for the purification of His creatures” (1:392). The “feeling more terrible” that the pious Ball does not quite name looks ahead to the theological sensibility of Ivan Karamazov twenty years later: it is the realization that the Christian God has turned out in the Indian crisis to be a cruel torturer, not a loving protector, of the innocent and helpless. For Ball, the historical significance of the Mutiny consisted significantly in the blow it gave to that core element of British identity, the national confidence in the goodness of providence. Formalistically speaking, the chief effect produced by Ball’s insistent quotation of personal statements is the almost overwhelming repetitiveness of this text. In recounting each important event, never does he offer one authoritative narration of it; rather, as in his account of the Meerut outbreak, he is likely to quote at length as many as six or seven overlapping accounts by witnesses or participants. Major events are thus narrated not once but over and over again, from differing points of view that Ball refuses to synthesize into an orthodox historian’s preferred form of an abstracted, definitive, streamlined version. This refusal is at the center of a nexus of expressive effects and particularly of what turns out to be a striking subtheme of Ball’s book: the great difficulty (always diplomati-

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cally dissimulated by skilled historians as the very condition of their assertion of professional authority) of establishing factually true narratives of events when these must be constructed, as they always must, out of scattered data and witnesses’ disparate statements. This difficulty is acute when important participants have perished before giving testimony and are permanently unavailable for questioning, when passions are high and every possible witness has a polemical agenda, and when the events to be described have already become enmeshed in mythology—all of which conditions obtained very strongly with regard to the Indian upheaval. As we saw, Ball’s successor, Sir John Kaye, despaired in his own Mutiny history that ascertaining truth in such circumstances was almost insurmountably difficult, even in the case of eyewitness information on “the best possible authority” (2:xiv). Disdaining to whitewash or, in the contemporary expression of Dickens’s Mrs. General, to “varnish” this issue, Ball inscribes a historiographic scandal at the center of his book by leaving largely unreconciled contradictory accounts of crucial matters and contradictory interpretations of the Mutiny itself. We get a distinct sense in this text, as a result, of the multidimensional and thus always dubious nature of historiographic truth—that factor of experience which it is the historian’s professional task to cover with an impenetrable layer of varnish. One crux of this pronounced Rashomon effect in Ball is his treatment of the aggravated atrocities allegedly committed by the mutineers, the most lurid testimony about which he reports even as he increasingly acknowledges its unreliability; I will return to this point in a moment. An instance of another kind would be his treatment of the famous story of Eliza Wheeler, the youngest daughter of the commander of the Cawnpore garrison, General Sir Hugh Wheeler. One of the women who survived the massacre at the boats on June 27, 1857, she was reported to have been abducted by one of Nana Sahib’s troopers in defiance of his orders. Quoting the testimony of W. J. Shepherd (a Eurasian clerk who had been captured trying to slip out of the entrenchment in disguise and was in the Nana’s jail at the time of the first massacre), Ball states that Miss Wheeler procured a sword, murdered her abductor and three other members of his family, then threw herself into a well (1:340). Four pages later he quotes the statement of an ayah (nurse) employed by an Englishwoman who lived near Cawnpore; this statement repeats the story of Miss Wheeler’s murder of the trooper and his family, and adds to it a scene of her defiance of other troopers as she prepares to commit suicide in the well: “Go inside,” she says to them, “and see how nicely I have rubbed the rissaldar’s feet” (1:344). Ball now, at this second rendition, expresses some doubt about the veracity of the tale but guesses that “some retributive act” on Miss Wheeler’s part probably did take place (1:344). The dubious story, however, is allowed to stand in the text. Later, Ball quotes

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Figure 4. Miss Wheeler Defending Herself (Charles Ball, History of the Indian Mutiny)

an officer of the Madras Fusileers who asserts that Miss Wheeler killed five sepoys before they could kill her and, on the facing page, includes a grandly romantic engraving (figure 4) of this heroine in a domestic interior defending herself with a revolver against swarming mutineers (1:380). On the immediately preceding page, however, Ball had recited one of the hardy legends of Mutiny literature, in which the first British soldiers to enter the bloody slaughterhouse in Cawnpore where the two hundred women and children had been hacked to death find a mass of Miss Wheeler’s hair, divide it among themselves, and take an oath to kill a mutineer for each hair. Ball declares, “the anecdote borders on romance, but it is doubtless based on fact” (1:379n); he leaves starkly unreconciled the contradiction between this version and the several others in which his tragic heroine throws herself into a well or is killed in a shoot-out with her assailants. Even a casual reader will notice the incongruities among Ball’s various accounts (which subsequent scholarly inquiries partly sustain and partly replace with a scarcely less startling version).10 Ball similarly quotes two versions of the death of Captain Alexander Skene in the uprising at Jhansi. In the first of these he is executed along with his wife after the garrison surrenders under a pledge of mercy, and

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in the second he dies in a tower of the fort, famously committing suicide after killing his wife to spare her from capture. Ball (or his publisher) seems to validate the latter version by including an illustration titled “Death of Major Skene and His Wife at Jhansi” (figure 5), showing him committing suicide in breastworks as sepoys swarm about; then, in one of two official reports quoted by Ball on events at Jhansi, we learn that Skene was in fact murdered after surrendering (1:270–75, 295). We return to the tragic tale in volume 2, on the occasion of the eventual recovery of the massacre victims’ bodies when the British retake the town. A rebel eyewitness denies that Skene shot his wife and himself (2:294); a new report based on the “searching inquiries” of a Captain Pinkney is then quoted to narrate the Jhansi atrocities anew in detail; here Skene is cut down with swords as he stands bound and defenseless, after which all the women and children are killed (2:296). Ball comments that he takes this report to confirm the substance of his earlier account—glossing over the fact that we have heard not one but several differing stories by this point. We will notice in a moment other instances of this sort of disconcerting effect in Ball’s text. From the point of view of scientific historiography and its fundamental presumption that there is one true version of any event, it need hardly be said that this work in which conflicting versions of things are allowed to coexist can only be judged intellectually disreputable. But Ball, in his narrative of this war that in all of its aspects “borders on romance,” seems not to aim at the determination of the one true account so much as to seek to capture the experiential reality of 1857 by giving the materials of the national tale of the Mutiny in their molten, imaginatively volatile, fluctuating state, before they had congealed into two officially distinct categories of fact and fable. In evoking this mercurial in-between state, he offers a parable of the mechanism by which events conditioned at once by affective overload and by agonizing remoteness will tend powerfully to duplicate themselves in differently refracted forms. Under these textual conditions, iconic half-imaginary figures such as Miss Wheeler and Major (actually Captain) Skene will almost necessarily be enabled to live multiple lives—or rather, to die multiple deaths. The predominance of the trope of repetition in Ball’s History captures this dynamic in another way. As I am emphasizing, the narrative method of this book causes its leading events to take place not once but over and over again, as they are narrated by one witness after another. Colonel J. P. Ripley, one of the first British officers to be killed by his own men in Delhi upon the arrival of the Meerut mutineers on the morning of May 11, 1857, is shot down again and again in Ball’s chronicle (1:73, 86–87, 106–8). Lieutenant George Willoughby’s famous act of blowing up the powder magazine in Delhi to prevent its falling into the hands of the rebels, expecting that he and his eight companions would inevitably per-

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Figure 5. The Death of Major Skene and His Wife at Jhansi (Charles Ball, History of the Indian Mutiny)

ish in the blast (though he and two others incredibly survived it), is witnessed and recounted at least five times (1:75–76, 76–77, 87, 106). Having been exhaustively treated already via a long series of informants’ statements in volume 1 (1:379–85), the “harrowing and heart-sickening details” (1:385) of the massacre of the ladies in Cawnpore are narrated all over again in the words of yet another witness late in volume 2 (2:590– 91). And so on. It would be an error to take this method of historical narration as evidence of mere compositional disorder on the author’s part, though how knowing he was about his experiment in a kind of proto-postmodern nonlinear historiography is anyone’s guess. He declares that he multiplies accounts as he does “for the sake of corroboration” (1:338), but the artistic and expressive effects of his strategy dramatically exceed this motive—and besides, as we have seen, the different accounts often contradict rather than corroborate one another. What the insistent repetitiveness of Ball’s text seems in fact to do is to compress into a single text and vividly to thematize the paramount effect of Mutiny literature as a whole: its perpetual reiteration, in book after book, of the same set of famous happenings and the same cast of famous personages.

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Colonel Ripley, Lieutenant Willoughby, and the others meet their fates not once but over and over again for any reader who sets out to survey even a small portion of Mutiny literature. On one plane, then, Ball dramatizes the way in which historical events, caught up in literary discourse, come to be transformed into myth—a myth being, precisely, a culturally significant story that comes to be told again and again. The transformation of historical events into mythic ones forms in this way an essential subject of Ball’s book. His crucial insight is that these literary and cultural phenomena are generated in Mutiny writing by a tremendously powerful psychological dynamic. At a certain intensity of “overwhelming horror,” Ball intimates, as though formulating a new law of textual physics, linear narrative decomposes. It is replaced under these conditions by another convoluted kind in which not only do fact and fantasy collapse into one another but events are, precisely, compelled to take place over and over. Narrative set under the sign of this law exhibits, that is, the defining symptom of psychological trauma, “the peculiar and sometimes uncanny way in which catastrophic events seem to repeat themselves for those who have passed through them”; its characteristic pattern is that of the “uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (Caruth 1, 11). Ball never states such a principle in so many words, but his intuitive grasp of it could hardly be stronger. He deploys it in his endlessly repetitious text as almost his most potent device for incorporating into the recital of historical information the reverberation of obsessive-compulsive remembrance that the events of the Mutiny clearly possessed for Victorian readers and that for this author formed, as we saw, an essential element of the historical record. We recall the torment experienced by Charles Kingsley at his inability to get the horrible, uncontrollably repeating imagery of Cawnpore out of his head (“I can think of nothing but these Indian massacres” [2:61]). For contemporaries, the distinctive mark of the events of the Mutiny was that they could not help playing them over and over in imagination, and it is precisely the half-hallucinatory property of these events that Ball, improvising historiographical poetics as he goes, evokes by recounting them again and again and again. The History of the Indian Mutiny seems to register a shock so powerful as to render unified, linear, conventional narrative impossible: the very effect that readers are made to feel a half century later, in the aftermath of the similarly overwhelming horrors of the Great War, in self-consciously experimental works such as The Waste Land or Mrs. Dalloway. A similarly profound perturbation makes itself felt in Ball’s text on the level of ideology. An abundance of materials in the book could be cited

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to corroborate Andrew Ward’s brisk dismissal of “the jingoist historian Charles Ball” (441), though it is precisely its jingoistic baseline, I want to argue, that makes the surprisingly vexed and at last almost incoherent argument of the History significant. Like other Victorian chroniclers of the Mutiny, Ball advertises the war as inspiring testimony to “the true British character” (1:81) that can be counted on to emerge, he says, in the face of desperate emergencies. The Indian empire was acquired in the eighteenth century “by the union of consummate ability with indomitable perseverance and resistless valour” (1:20), and these same qualities are exemplified, he proclaims, by “the heroic spirit and unwavering faith” (2:2) of the British heroes and heroines of 1857. Here, it seems, is imperial history in undiluted form. Ball never ceases defaming Hinduism and Islam and asserting that the depravities of Indian civilization can only be cured by evangelizing the country. Brahmanism, he remarks in the surprising theological polemic that concludes his first volume, for example, “is the most multifarious and outrageous system of idolatry in the world” (1:644), and idolatry inevitably corrupts moral character. “No European can fathom the dark black villainy of the natives,” comments an unnamed officer whom he quotes with evident approval (1:485). He regularly denounces the rebellion as inflamed “by resentment for imaginary wrongs, and . . . by hatred and fanaticism” (1:644). It lacked “a particle of justification” (2:501). Nationalistic and (what is the same thing for Ball) religious partisanship is the openly proclaimed motive of this history. The History of the Indian Mutiny accordingly stresses two principal themes. The first is the “pitiless ferocity” (1:330), “a ferocity only to be compared to that of the untamed brutes of the jungle” (2:501), demonstrated in the sepoys’ atrocities. Every cruelty alleged to have been committed against British women is evoked by Ball (or, rather, by the witnesses he quotes) in graphic, almost salacious detail. A clergyman declares in a letter that forty-eight British women were seized by the mutineers in Delhi and raped for a week by “the heads of the insurrection.” Then they were stripped naked and given up “to the lowest of the people, to be abused in broad daylight in the streets of Delhi. They then commenced the work of torturing them to death, cutting off their breasts, fingers, and noses, and leaving them to die. One lady was three days dying. They flayed the face of another lady, and made her walk naked through the street” (1:105). “Give full stretch to your imagination—think of everything that is cruel, inhuman, infernal, and you cannot then conceive anything so diabolical as what these demons in human form have perpetrated,” says another informant (1:105). Of all standard sources, it is Ball’s History that most flagrantly crosses the line of unspeakability in order to traffic in these horrible obscenities, which did indeed largely proceed, as the above infor-

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mant hints, from an almost crazed imagination and which produced, as we know, a shattering effect upon the Victorian middle-class public. For a post-Freudian reader, the most striking aspect of this sector of the book may be the polymorphousness of the sadistic perversity that seems to vent itself, if only in the form of horrific fantasy, upon British womanhood as well as upon racially stigmatized enemies in Bengal. The two motives are almost identical, for Ball goes to such shocking lengths in branding the rebellion as the reign of hellish cruelty in obedience to his overriding motive of justifying the British policy of revenge, usually referred to diplomatically as “retributive justice,” upon the Indian rebels and their sympathizers. The themes that we traced in the previous chapter appear in fiercely concentrated form in the History. The British forces gathered to reconquer Delhi are called honorifically by Ball “the army of avengers” (1:193); they are a “noble band of avengers” (1:372), “the army of retribution” (1:527) assembled, as he says, “for the stern purpose of retributive justice” (1:185). But the objects of the shrilly vindictive rhetoric that suffuses the History are only proximately the barbaric sepoys whose image Ball paints in such lurid colors. The real objects of his polemic, in accordance with the pattern that we have observed, are those misguided people at home who protested against the harshness of British reprisals in India and claimed that these reprisals frequently degenerated into undiscriminating slaughter. Ball, that is to say, is not exactly voicing in his glorification of the crusade of revenge the sentiments of the nation whose conscience he strives to vindicate, even though we have it on his testimony that the crimes of the mutineers had produced in England an “all but national cry for unmitigated vengeance” (2:168). The vengeful spirit was not universal in Britain after all: as he reports in the conclusion of the first volume, men in both houses of Parliament were found who, incredibly enough, used what he slightingly calls “the pretext of Christian feeling” to cast doubt upon the conduct of “the just and retributive war” being waged against the Indian rebels. In fact, Ball declares here, “the man who should counsel half measures, or any measure short of the most stern and unrelenting justice, ought to be deemed an enemy to his country and to the human race” (1:648). He denounces in similarly extreme terms the representatives of “that morbid sensibility [that] would urge a plea for moderate punishment, and has profaned the spirit of Christianity by appeals for mercy in its name” (1:439). It would be hard to find balder, more unequivocal statements identifying the spirit of Victorian piety with what this author unforgettably calls “the righteous demand for blood” (2:412) or making clearer the extent to which the violence of retributive passion in Britain at this time was directed not just at rebellious Indians but at domestic enemies of “unmitigated vengeance.” That the Mutiny

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had exposed to view a profound schism in the British national character is one of the central themes of The History of the Indian Mutiny. In all this exhortation, Ball gives vent to a complex of passions only faintly suggested by the rubric “jingoism”: these are the primary drives of the collective Victorian self that we surveyed in the previous chapter, forces rarely allowed such overt expression but that dragged powerfully against all efforts (by novelists, for instance) to weaken the cultural grip of the Calvinistic mentality and its “retributive desire” (Westermarck, Origin 1:91). Ball signifies his own mentality by painting throughout the book an admiring portrait of Colonel, later Brigadier General, James Neill, the officer mainly responsible for the campaign of extravagantly severe reprisals carried out in Benares, Allahabad, and Cawnpore in June and July of 1857. Our historian describes without condemnation Neill’s notorious policy of forcing mutineers to clean up with their hands or tongues patches of the blood-stained pavement of the Bibighar before being hanged (1:389–90; 2:43n). He no less approvingly reports an equally notorious episode, “the almost total destruction of the 26th (native) regiment” (which, previously disarmed, had mutinied and killed two British and several native officers) by Frederic Cooper, deputy commissioner of Umritsir in the Punjab. Following the slaughter in the field of 185 of these unarmed sepoys, Cooper superintended the summary execution of 237 the next day, and the deaths of 41 more who, Ball says vaguely (we shall see in a moment what his phrase referred to), “died from fatigue”: “in round numbers, 500 men were thus accounted for,” Ball chillingly states (2:141).11 Yet for all this, The History of the Indian Mutiny is marked by a growing rhetorical instability. Ball gives the greatest possible stress to the split in British opinion, particularly religious opinion, with regard to war policy, but he is less lucid in analyzing the way in which his book internalizes this same self-divided condition. Its most distinct effect, it might well be claimed, is the extent to which it contradicts and undermines its own professed arguments. For one thing, it proves to be rife with imagery of the sickening ugliness of British reprisals, imagery upon which the anti-imperialist critical tradition, never acknowledging indebtedness, has drawn ever since. His professed intentions notwithstanding, Ball brought home to any attentive Victorian reader how readily the ideal of “retributive justice” took in the Indian war the form of nihilistic brutality. “I saw one [sepoy] have both hands cut off with a tulwar, shot in the body, two bayonet wounds in the chest, and he still lived, till a rifleman blew his brains out,” an officer quoted by Ball writes home to his family describing the storming of the palace in Delhi. “I did not feel the least disgusted or ashamed of directing or seeing such things done, when I reflected on what those very wretches

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perhaps had done; and I hope you won’t think worse of me for saying so” (1:509). It did not require the shocking “perhaps” in this sentence to make a Victorian reader feel all the horrified disgust and shame that the writer protests, too much, he did not himself feel. The explicit theme of the letter, needless to say, is a dread that the exacting of retributive justice in India has entailed a catastrophic collapse of British moral feeling. “You lose all horror at the sight,” writes another participant in the same assault quoted by Ball, describing a mass execution of prisoners and testifying to the numbing of conscience that Mutiny memoirs such as V. D. Majendie’s dwell upon (1:517). Was the ultimate horror of the Mutiny for Victorian Britain precisely the loss of the feeling of horror? “No mercy can be shown to [captured enemy soldiers],” writes another soldier quoted by Ball. “Every sepoy we catch, ‘Shoot him’ is the word” (1:521). “Our orders are to destroy, burn, kill, and hang,” writes an officer in August 1857 (2:143). Ball quotes another letter from an artillery officer describing an incident in which some loyal natives were harshly flogged for setting off small explosions “in honour of a wedding” and causing a false alarm in camp. “In these times of danger and treachery, we don’t bother ourselves about the quirks of law, but hang, shoot, or flog, as circumstances arise. The general swears he will maintain discipline” (2:141). It is hard to fathom how conscious Ball may be of the searing irony that such materials bring to bear on his frequent condemnations of “the exterminating ferocity of the rebel hordes” (1:530) and his praise of the “rational and benevolent faith” (1:644) supposedly directing the actions of the British armies, so often lauded by him for their moral nobility. Exterminating ferocity, he clearly documents, was no monopoly of the rebel armies in this conflict. Materials that testify to nothing but the moral evil of war and the brutality of the British repression of this uprising are in fact so overwhelmingly abundant in Ball’s book, and are cited by him to such massive effect, that it is impossible to represent them adequately here. One could imagine a no doubt perverse counterreading of the book as an antiwar manifesto of a strikingly post-Victorian style, camouflaged in the sheep’s clothing of militaristic jingoism. This illicit potentiality of the History reaches what may be its apogee in Ball’s lengthy accounts of the spectacle of blowing prisoners from guns, a mode of military execution revived by the British forces from the past and often resorted to in this war (see, e.g., 1:412– 13). These scenes were transcendently appalling, not only to the religious sensibilities of the Hindu and Muslim victims and onlookers horrified at the mingling of victims’ blood and body parts but also to hardened British soldiers perfectly accustomed to the putting of captured enemy soldiers to death in large numbers. All who witnessed them knew that they represented the principle of punishment carried to an unsurpassable, ultimate form, not merely putting the condemned man to death but actually liqui-

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dating him, changing him from human form to an eruption of sickening fragments. Rather than screening the gruesome imagery of these executions and all their aura of metaphysical horror from view for fear of casting the “noble band of avengers” (1:372) in too disturbing a light, Ball, pursuing the macabre logic of the war wherever it leads, deploys it unsparingly and even includes the engraving of one such scene (1:410) that appears as the frontispiece of this book. As though the details of such spectacles were, even so, too indecent to appear in the main body of a reputable historical text, he at one point inserts in a long footnote a description by a Bombay medical officer of the nauseating effects of this mode of punishment. “All you see at the time is a cloud like a dust-storm, composed of shreds of clothing, burning muscle, and frizzing fat, with lumps of coagulated blood. Here and there a stomach or a liver comes falling down in a stinking shower.” Again the taboo of unspeakability set up to shield the regime of Victorian respectability and moral complacency from disturbance is violated by Ball in shocking fashion. There follows an account of one blowing from guns in which a victim slips from his trussedup position at the cannon’s mouth just before the detonation. His arm is “nearly set on fire,” and as he hangs there in agony, a sergeant attempts to administer the coup de grace with a pistol, which misfires three times, “the man each time wincing from the expected shot. At last a rifle was fired into the back of his head, and the blood poured out of the nose and mouth like water from a briskly-handled pump. . . . I have seen death in all its forms—never anything to equal this man’s end” (2:145). As Majendiee¨sque testimonies like this one, so detrimental to the idea of the war as an ennobled struggle for justice and an expression of Christian spirit, accumulate in Ball’s book, one comes to recognize the sort of narratological agon that is being played out in its pages in the guise of documentary history. The dogmatically opinionated voice of the narrator, by the foundational convention of historiographical discourse the sole authority of the text, finds its supremacy placed in doubt as it is transformed ever more unmistakably into a potentially unreliable or contestable voice, and in any case just the voice of one speaker among the great concourse of those who are cited, some of whom insist successfully on offering judgments of Indian events sharply at variance with the author’s own. The standard formula, in which the omniscient historian complacently narrates and explains events, seems in the face of the moral cataclysm of the Mutiny to have become inoperative. It is again as though the shock of the Indian crisis has been traumatic enough to produce in this text a disordering of the basic rules of history-writing. The effect I am seeking to highlight is made particularly distinct in Ball’s surveys of reactions to the war at home, which he illustrates with long quotations from speeches in Parliament (see 1:604–47, 2:459–68). Consider his extended

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transcription of Disraeli’s speech at Newport Pagnell on September 30, 1857, in which, as we saw, the future prime minister declares “that the religious opinions of the people of England [seemed to have] undergone some sudden change; and that instead of bowing before the name of Jesus, we were preparing to revive the worship of Moloch” (2:420)—a speech that casts Ball’s own praises of “stern, unsparing vengeance” in the harshest possible light. Or there would be Ball’s long rendition of the “extraordinary” diatribe delivered by General Thomas Perronet Thompson, member for Bradford, during the parliamentary debate on India in February 1858 (2:460–62). Thompson blames the Indian uprising not on sepoy villainy but on the arrogance and racism of the British in India, particularly in the religious establishment, and on the sadistically cruel harshness of the punitive policies adopted by the Indian government. He is unmeasured in his condemnation of British atrocities and, implicitly, of all the retributionist rhetoric of the narrator of Ball’s book. Ball notes that the general’s speech is greeted by “the derisive laughter of the house” (2:462), but he reports it fully.12 The rhetoric of the History pulls violently at this point in two opposite directions. Ball’s own interpretations of events are themselves shot through with increasingly conspicuous inconsistencies. As we have seen, he denounces the rebellion as being “without a particle of justification” and as prompted simply by the ferocious pathologies of Hindu and Muslim character. Yet he offers elsewhere a long inventory of causes of rebellion that goes far toward making possible a balanced, even sympathetic view of the rebel cause. He quotes at length the Marquis of Clanricarde’s harsh critique of the government of the East India Company, condemning its “outrageous and unjust legal system, that provided scarcely any protection for the natives,” and its patronage system, that “excluded the natives from any fair share in the government in a manner unknown in any other country” and thus “had really retarded the improvement of the country” (1:41–42). With regard to the 1856 annexation of the kingdom of Oudh, Ball corroborates the views of other contemporary observers by tracing the rebellion largely to this provocation. After giving a long, detailed survey of the situation of Oudh (1:143–54), he declares that the annexation “has not yet ceased to be looked upon by many as an arbitrary and unjust proceeding on the part of the Indian government”; the Oudians felt, he says, that “the subversion of the independence of their country was an arbitrary and despotic act.” He quotes to this effect the judgment of two members of the court of proprietors of the Company “that the seizure of the territories of Oude is one of the worst examples of Indian spoliation, and an act of the basest ingratitude” toward the king, a faithful British ally. Thus the revolt in Oudh had to be regarded not as a merely military mutiny, says Ball, but as “a popular insurrection” (1:143–54). In volume

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2, returning to this sharply antijingoistic theme, he speaks of the insurgents of Oudh as patriots resisting alien domination and declares that the war, “as regards the Oudians . . . , might be regarded as a war of independence” (2:247)—a qualified but, considering the very important role of Oudh in the conflict (among other things, as the native land of the bulk of the sepoy army), major contradiction of the theory that the rebellion was groundless and unjustified. Ball quotes a speech by Sir John Packington harshly indicting the British system of revenue collection, arguing that the government had knowingly employed agents who practiced “tortures little less horrible than those which we now deplored” (2:424). He does not pursue this last sensational allegation, but he does, as the mighty second volume moves toward its end, articulate ever more clearly a theory of the root causes of the Mutiny sharply at variance with all explanations focused on the fanaticism and ingratitude of Asiatics. In this alternative view, which coincides unexpectedly with the one put forward by William Howard Russell, the conflict arose from “the overweening and offensive assumption of superiority” habitually displayed by the British in their intercourse with Indians (2:637). Amazingly for this strong proponent of the Christian evangelization of India, Ball here indicts British intolerance with regard to the caste system, “that most venerated institution” of Hindu India. Native Indians are obliged under the British regime, he says, to witness “the highest and most privileged of their race looked down upon with a repulsive affectation of superiority by strangers of another faith”; “the treatment of the native races of India by European officials, was, as a rule, such as no people of spirit would submit to for an hour,” the supposed jingoist and apologist for British rule in India remarkably declares (2:636). The calamity of 1857 was “the consequence of the gulf that existed between the Englishman and the native,” by reason of “the want of sympathy between the two races.” Like other contemporary analysts, he evokes the myth of a golden age of harmonious relations between the British and their Indian subjects before the collapse of “the intimacy which it is said prevailed in the early days of English rule.” But the English officer of fifty years earlier, “who lived on courteous terms with the native gentlemen of his neighbourhood, had been unfortunately succeeded by a class whom an unchecked and abused instinct of nationality, had influenced to look with immeasurable disdain upon all native society” (2:655). That this ideal of imperial power relations rendered humane and legitimate by interpersonal sympathy may amount to nothing but ideological (self-)mystification, or at the least, wishful thinking, is all too clear. But this strong trend of analysis in The History of the Indian Mutiny toward condemning British racism and national arrogance for the uprising, and even toward expressions of sympathy for the cause of rebellion, none the less obliges one to reach a complicated final appraisal

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of “the jingoist historian Charles Ball.” It suggests, too, that one should regard with skepticism all sweeping assertions that imperial historiography was everywhere subservient to “the administrative needs of the colonial state.” The ideological instability of the History is most decisively signaled in its self-contradicting explorations of the great issue of “retributive justice.” I have stressed Ball’s emphatic endorsement of the policy of exacting “the most stern and unrelenting justice” (1:648) upon mutineers and his glorification of the “stalwart avengers” (2:87) of the “Army of Retribution.” Yet clear signs of his discomfort with such formulas multiply. For one thing, volume 2 is marked by a series of admissions that the factual veracity of tales of sadistic atrocities perpetrated against British victims— tales luridly told, as we saw, in volume 1–is in doubt. No question could be raised about the historical authenticity of numerous cold-blooded massacres of British captives, but accounts of rape and mutilation and other tortures, as Ball first acknowledges, I believe, in a grudging footnote (2:143), came, as we know, to be widely challenged. Given the tremendous weight of the atrocity tales in influencing the course of British reprisals and in justifying those fearful reprisals afterward, and, especially, given the overwhelming emotional investment of the Victorian public in these tales, Ball is reluctant to disavow them. To question their truthfulness was to suggest that the Army of Retribution inflicted apocalyptic reprisals upon northern India under at least partly false pretenses. Writhing on the point of this difficulty, Ball quotes at one point in legalistically evasive language a report of a British lady whose ears were said to have been cut off by the rebels. “This was, perhaps, one of the least horrible in the series of outrages alleged to be systematically perpetrated by the Hindoo and Mohammedan fanatics, in their wild attempt to gratify their hatred and revenge” (2:417). The tangled syntax of this sentence betrays plainly the embarrassment of a historian parading as historical realities things that he knows to be dubious allegations. Not long after, he disgustedly reports on the appearance of a strain of public opinion urging moderation in punishment and even “excusing” the crimes of the sepoys. “These advocates for over-strained humanity denounced the universal cry for justice,” Ball says; the atrocity tales “were declared to be for the greater part utter fabrications, or wild and malicious exaggerations. With such people it was impossible to hold an argument” (2:426–27). We note yet again how distinctly Ball registers the fact that Victorian public opinion was not monolithic but, rather, passionately divided on the war and that many found the unrestrained exercise of British military power in India morally repugnant. Nor does Ball himself dismiss as wholly misguided the debunkers’ claims about the alleged atrocities, much as the whole argument of the History requires him to do so. In fact, he quotes forceful statements

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from a series of members of Parliament who report investigators’ conclusions that the accounts of the mutilation of European women had proved to be “almost, if not entirely, without foundation”—and asking, in the words of one, whether “it was right to hang, in cold blood, men who fought to free their fatherland from the stranger, or for disaffection to our rule” (2:467). Ball’s shifting perspective on the atrocity tales comes to a mixed, ambiguous conclusion. In a contorted late passage, he both concedes, at last, the untruthfulness of the tales and yet clings once again to his rhetoric of almost tongue-tied condemnation. “In the early days of tumult and revolt, the terror inspired by the sudden and unlooked-for visitation, led to much exaggeration as to the atrocity and extent of the outrages by which the innocent and the defenceless—weak women and tender children, feeble age, and helpless unoffending infancy—were offered up as the first victims to revenge and brutal lust.” It is hard to know if this anguished phraseology should be construed as a refutation or as an endorsement of the atrocity tales. Ball then surveys in this passage a string of notorious massacres at Delhi, Futtehgur, Shahjehanpore, Bareilly, Lucknow, and Jhansi and, remarkably, points in each case to “extenuation” of the rebels’ crimes: in Cawnpore alone, he declares, “there was not a plea to be urged” (2:590). Readers are left to compute for themselves the implications of this deeply equivocal summation for all the sweeping rhetoric of mutineer barbarity that marks earlier portions of the book. Ball’s oft-proclaimed devotion to the principle of merciless retributive justice shifts correspondingly as the History unfolds. At the end of volume 1, he recounts Canning’s proclamation of July 31, 1857, requiring commanders in the field and British civil authorities henceforth to show “all reasonable clemency” toward mutineers not guilty of direct involvement in bloodshed. Ball here aligns himself with the many vociferous critics of the proclamation, blaming the governor-general for having rebuked “the acts of those who, in the defence of order, had avenged the wrongs of humanity and of European society” (1:592). We have seen already that this unrelenting attitude by no means drops out of the second volume, but it is overlaid there by an almost antithetical line of argument. As usual, Ball allows this dissident argument to be put forward in quotations from actors and informants, as he does in citing at length the eloquent selfjustification sent by Canning to the Court of Directors of the East India Company on December 11, 1857 (2:395–98). Elsewhere he speaks in his own voice—now, in a string of passages, strongly in defense of Canning’s policy, praising the governor-general for “his resistance to the clamour against the native populations” (2:386). “On the one hand was the impulsive and all but national cry for unmitigated vengeance,” says Ball, praising the clemency proclamation; “on the other, the calm and prudent dictates of high policy and humanity” (2:168). All of a sudden, retribution

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is not invoked as an imperative national duty but is opposed by what seems to be the higher duty of “humanity.” It is the crux of starkly opposed values that one encounters wherever one looks in Mutiny literature. Evincing the humanitarian spirit that progressively gains ascendance in the History, Ball praises Sir James Outram’s “humane principle” of “amnesty and forgiveness” in his role as chief commissioner of Oudh after the Mutiny, a principle opposed, he says, by those who insisted that the mutineers’ crimes “could only be atoned for by the inflictions and endurance of a merciless severity” (2:305)—the latter view being the one that Ball himself had supported unequivocally over hundreds of pages. In the early stages of the uprising, he writes in another late passage, the friends and relatives of victims “vented their grief and indignation in a wild demand for vengeance, that could only have perpetuated the horrors which had already moistened the soil of India with blood and tears, and which it would have been impossible for any government professing to be guided by the precepts of Christianity, to have sanctioned” (2:411). Previously, of course, our author had asserted that the spirit of Christian piety was unequivocally opposed to any “plea for moderate punishment” and had condemned those who “profaned the spirit of Christianity by appeals for mercy in its name” (1:439). He veers back to this proretribution position late in volume 2, in a militant passage that, however logically incoherent it may be with other passages, lucidly frames the policy crisis of the war as an illustration of just that philosophical debate over the legitimate role of (capital) punishment that we surveyed in the previous chapter. The strong consensus on the home front in favor of aggressive policies ensured, he says, that “no effeminate simulation of philanthropy was allowed to stand in the way of a righteous demand that the crimes of Meerut, of Delhi, and of Cawnpore, should be avenged. The true meaning of punishment had become intelligible to the nation at large; and, in the general belief, retribution had properly resumed its inseparable connection with guilt” (2:443). Righteousness means above all having a grasp of “the true meaning of punishment”—which is to say, its inseparability from the principle of revenge. One notes in this striking passage the violent split that it highlights in Victorian popular moral ideology, usually so adept in inventing cultural expedients for the maintenance of harmonious coexistence between its two adverse tendencies. Corroborating Albert Memmi’s dictum that colonizers by the very nature of their situation always reserve their most vitriolic loathing for “humanitarian romanticism” (21), Ball here exalts the doctrine of retribution by expelling from the pale of legitimate morality the doctrine of humanitarianism and philanthropy, which he denounces, in the trope that we have seen to recur throughout Mutiny literature, as a denatured, effeminate, delusive form.

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As in his half-incoherent discussions of the atrocity rumors, Ball’s lucidity thus breaks down without repair in reference to the clemency controversy. His opinions on this subject waver almost grotesquely from one page to the next, gravely impairing his scholarly credibility, perhaps, but rendering The History of the Indian Mutiny at the same time an exceptionally vivid exhibit of the broad, anguished, melodramatically pitched Victorian self-scrutiny that the Indian crisis provoked. The book reminds us, as it pungently reminded contemporaries, that the ethic of sympathetic and humanitarian sentiment inculcated throughout mid-Victorian literary culture was by no means uncontested at the time. Rather, it formed one always imperiled element in the self-divided syndrome that stands out so clearly in Ball’s text. His vacillations from one pole of the binary to the other are telling indications that the two ideologies of punishment and of benevolence constituted in Victorian Britain not so much irreconcilable opposites as complementarities or alternating phases of each other, one and the same principle as viewed at different moments from different perspectives. Ball is attracted to both and leaves uneffaced in his book stark signs of his ambivalence. Few works of the age enact in such explicit terms the internally conflicted structure of the Victorian moral temperament, which normally a cultural historian can only reconstruct in hypothetical terms by collating dispersed textual indicators. It is characteristic of Ball’s no doubt fatally flawed History, which violates every statute of scholarly historiography and seems perpetually on the verge of collapsing into incoherence, that this great cultural dilemma manifests itself in plain view, in the form of incurable self-contradiction.

MONTGOMERY MARTIN'S GOTHIC HISTORIOGRAPHY The other earliest full-scale historical study of the rebellion is R. Montgomery Martin’s account in The Mutiny of the Bengal Army, volume 2 (c. 1861) of his three-volume work The Indian Empire.13 This book presents itself in several different ways as a companion volume to Ball’s History. Published by the same London publisher, Martin’s book is laid out in the same distinctive double-column quarto format and is typographically identical to Ball’s. In its material appearance, it rather ostentatiously advertises itself as a continuation or supplement of Ball, in other words. And so it is, in certain respects having to do with fundamental structures of the Victorian imaginary. Like Ball and every other contemporary historian, Martin conceives the Indian crisis as, first and foremost, a parable of British national character: in these events, he tells his readership, we discover who we are as a people. And in Martin as in Ball, the Mutiny is seen chiefly not in terms of political analysis (though both books have

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important political dimensions) but as a moral and religious fable. It conforms even less than Ball’s work does to the pattern said to be universal in Mutiny writing, “the racist pattern of blaming the victim expressed in terms of an absolute polarization of good and evil, . . . civilization and barbarism” (Brantlinger, Rule 200), but The Mutiny of the Bengal Army certainly does portray the Mutiny as above all else a moral crisis. Like Ball, too, Martin emphatically announces his religious sympathies. He strongly supports, he says, “the extension of Christianity” by evangelizing in India, and he aligns himself with those of the missionary party (typically the party of extreme nationalism and harsh repressiveness in 1857– 59) who condemn “the anti-Christian policy,” the “practical atheism,” of the British government in India (12–16). But readers led by these signals to expect from Martin an echoing of Ball’s interpretation of the Mutiny were in for what was undoubtedly a calculated shock, for the motive of Martin’s book is in fact the framing of a violent critique of the patriotic and triumphalist myth of the war that Ball strives, however conflictedly, to set forth for posterity. Perusing The Mutiny of the Bengal Army ought to immunize any reader against supposing that there was no room in Victorian public discourse, even in the immediate aftermath of the massacres of hundreds of British women and children by dark-skinned rebels, for any register of language about the empire other than that of jingoistic chauvinism and racial animosity. The book needs for this reason to go on the required reading list for students of the Victorian imperial mentality. Martin holds up to fiercely skeptical scrutiny the standard nineteenth-century Eurocentric version of the Indian uprising, in which it appears, as scholars have said, as a drama of diabolical sepoys and British heroes and martyrs. His intent is to turn this schema scandalously inside out—to reverse the polarity of its moral force field. As he does so, he offers a searching analysis of the whole syndrome of barely suppressed ambivalence and shrill nationalistic rhetoric that governs Ball’s account and expresses itself symptomatically in the often almost paralyzing stylistic clumsiness that is the prime literary feature of the book. We saw that Ball himself offers an extensive indictment of British maladministration in India, but his is scanty compared to Martin’s. Like Ball, Martin strongly condemns the arrogance and intolerance of the British in India (“such as no people of spirit would submit to for an hour”) and the resultant lack of sympathy between the races. With a harsh emphasis that reminds one immediately of the guiding spirit of dissident Mutiny commentary, William Howard Russell, he goes further and ascribes the estrangement of the British from their Indian subjects to active, malignant racism. Early in the book, he quotes to this effect the Indian authority Sir Thomas Munro: “We treat [Indians] as an inferior race of beings,” Munro

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declares. They are regarded by British people as “little better than menial servants . . . scarcely permitted to sit in our presence,” and are rigorously excluded from all participation in governance and all lucrative positions (8). One “painful and significant symptom” of British attitudes, Martin says, obviously expecting his readership to be shocked and dismayed by his revelation of British racial attitudes in India, is “the repeated use of the word ‘niggers’ ” in published writings about India (11). In its intensive focus on this subject, Martin’s book belongs, like Russell’s and, for that matter, Ball’s, to the foundational literature of the diagnosis of “racism” (a word, unlike the n-word, coined only in the twentieth century) as an inherent constituent of the imperial relation, that relation broadly portrayed at the time as a benevolent and altruistic one. It does not take a reader long to recognize that in Martin’s analysis, the upsurge of racist arrogance in Anglo-Indian society signifies nothing less than a sweeping, epochal collapse of British moral character: for this is the subversive angle from which Martin recasts the parable of “the true British character” (Ball 1:81) in the Mutiny. “If colonization destroys the colonized, it also rots the colonizer,” says Albert Memmi (xvii), defining just the theme that runs through Martin’s study. A strong current of evangelical discourse portrayed the British calamities in India in 1857, we have noticed, as divine retribution upon a country that had failed in its sacred mission of support for Christian proselytizing. Martin’s message has nothing in common with the rabid sectarianism of much of the missionary press (which raged at excessive British tolerance of Indians and Indian religions and which Martin, his announced evangelical sympathies notwithstanding, despises for its “vindictive, unchristian, and cruel spirit” [124]), but it certainly shares the insistence that the Mutiny was to be interpreted as a visitation upon the British for their own failings of character and their forgetfulness of national ideals. According to Martin, these failings were exactly the reverse of a supposed excess of tolerant friendliness toward Indians. Like Russell, he never ceases citing instances of British racism and highlighting the tendency of this state of mind to issue in acts of brutality. Each native servant in India “hears the word ‘nigger’ used every time a native is named,” he remarks, “and knows well that it is an expression of contempt. In India, the ears of Europeans become familiarised with the term, which soon ceases to excite surprise or disgust” (123)—feelings to which readers at home are presumably not yet inured. It is precisely this numbing effect with regard to things that ought to arouse surprise and disgust that forms in Martin’s analysis the essential symptom of the perversion of British moral character in India. The result goes beyond an epidemic of obnoxious racially derogatory speech, he insists. Nothing, in fact, is more characteristic of race relations in Victorian India, according to The Mutiny of the Bengal Army, than

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brutal physical assaults by sahibs upon helpless Indian dependents. Only the severe imposition of police power would suffice to protect Indians from the “insolent cruelty” of the British, who, Martin declares, “are acting in such a manner as to disgrace the British army, and even the British nation, in the eyes of Europe” (123). The passage from which I have just quoted ends with a testimony to the “heroism” of Russell’s advocacy “for the rights of the wretched and despised native population” suffering under what Martin calls the “cruel tyranny” of their European oppressors (124). The outcome of chronic Anglo-Indian disdain for Indians, Martin thus declares, has been the institution of a despotism that proclaims its devotion to the welfare of the population of the country, as the humanitarian ethic requires, but in fact treats that population with callous indifference. Like Ball and every other significant contemporary analyst, Martin stresses the annexation of native states by the preceding governor-general, Lord Dalhousie, as a chief cause of the rise of rebellious spirit in India; he devotes to this theme no fewer than fifty pages (37–87), portraying the annexation campaign of the British government as tyrannical, dishonorable, and deeply pernicious. This section culminates in an account of the annexation of Oudh and in a rendition of the scene of the shameful coercion of the king of Oudh, Wajid Ali Shah, which the enlightened General James Outram was obliged to perform (77–79). The grief and humiliation of the deposed monarch is narrated in the tonality of Shakespearean drama, followed by a vivid account of the auction of all the property of the royal household and of the forcible ejection of the ladies of the household from their palaces “by officers who neither respected their persons nor their property, and who threw their effects into the street” (80). The British coup in Oudh left behind, says Martin, “a smouldering mass of disaffection” (82). “By assuming dominion over [the previously friendly territories of Oudh],” he says, the British have transformed it into “a turbulent and insurrectionary province” (87). But the absorption of Oudh figures in Martin’s history as just a particularly flagrant and reckless manifestation of the harsh, grasping policies followed broadly by the “despotic government” (23) of the East India Company. Despite the vast investment of Victorian cultural resources in representing the British colonial mission in India as idealistic, Martin describes it as a machinery of cruel domination, based not on humanitarian motives but on violence that finally can only be evoked in the language of a kind of hallucination: “We have rolled, by sheer brute force,” he writes, “an iron grinder over the face of Hindoo society—crushed every lineament into a disfigured mass— squeezed from it every rupee that even torture could exact” (89). He cites a clairvoyant warning from Lord Byron in his violently anti-imperialistic poem “The Curse of Minerva” (1811) against the British attempt, as Mar-

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tin says, to “to get and keep [India] down beneath the iron heel of despotism” and “to rivet the chains of a feebler race, for whose welfare we have made ourselves responsible before God and man” (123).14 As was inevitable given the racial attitudes on which it rests, British sovereignty in India, according to Martin, has been responsible for a long history of calamitous misgovernance by “ignorant and listless legislators” (2) and of disregard for the sorrows of the “inferior race of beings” native to the land. He analyzes at length such things as the shattering effect of the British revenue system upon Indian society and the wholly dysfunctional administration of imperial justice, which he declares to be rife with notorious costliness, procrastination, perjury, and corruption. All this is the sign of “shameful indifference to [natives’] interests” (10–11). The Company has failed to build roads, develop native agriculture, and, especially gravely, ensure water supply to the countryside. As a result, we learn from Martin, vast preventable famines have swept over British India, causing as many as 250,000 deaths in a single district (28). This is the first instance of what will become a prevalent figurative device in Martin’s History: what we may call the trope of large numbers. In invoking it, Martin insinuates an almost unspeakable idea that will, however, emerge in explicit form as one of the master themes of the text to come: that these Holocaust-like consequences of British government are not, after all, merely accidental by-products of ineffective administration but instead reflect what would be called in a twentieth-century idiom (another dire word that comes into the language long afterward) a genocidal motive. “What excuse, even of ignorance, can be offered for a government that turns a deaf ear to statements so appalling as these, made by their own servants?” he asks, referring to reports of catastrophic famines in neglected districts and suggesting plainly enough the at least passive complicity of the colonial administration in these calamities (29). Martin seems to have detected in British India an instance of the “exterminating glance” that, according to Feuerbach, Christian belief turns on unbelievers, or that psychotic impulse of annihilation of the colonized that forms, according to Memmi, who calls it “the Nero complex,” the unacknowledged core of the mentality of colonialism.15 Martin’s analysis of the British record in India furnishes, then, one more stinging corrective to scholarship based on the proposition that the Victorian public sphere was unqualified in support of the British imperial enterprise and that racism was all-pervasive there. And when Martin comes to treat the 1857 uprising itself, it becomes plain that if the Indian crisis aroused a great surge of “racist and political hysteria” in Britain, the merciless suppression of the rebellion aroused also an anguished counterreaction that made British thinking on this subject seem in danger of splitting into two irreconcilable camps.

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On the one hand, Martin’s study is driven by the steady motive, which he carries at some points to extraordinary lengths, of portraying the rebellious sepoys and those in India who rallied to their cause in the most sympathetic light possible. He does not portray the mutineers as justified in rising against what he has depicted in such unsparing terms as a hateful, blighting foreign despotism; to call for so much ideological consistency would be to wish for a book that could not possibly have been written and published in England at that moment. Martin does, however, bend all his considerable rhetorical brilliance to challenging the widely prevalent portrayal of the mutineers as “utterly diabolical and hopelessly depraved” (124). His argument, reiterated a score of times as he analyzes the risings at one station after another, is that the sepoys’ actions were the result not of malignant hatred of their British masters and certainly not of natural wickedness but, rather, of irresistible panic. For one thing, he emphasizes “the panic-terror” (16) aroused in the sepoys’ minds by the consequences to them of violating caste by biting what Martin, subtly registering his identification with them, calls “the filthy cartridges”—which did, he notes, “actually contain the forbidden substance [beef fat], which [Hindu] prisoners starving in a dungeon, and sepoys on board ship, will perish sooner than touch” (129). (We should note here that an emphasis on the matter of the greased cartridges was not necessarily for Victorian controversialists a means of delegitimizing the Mutiny, as commentators of our own day have always assumed; rather, it sometimes signifies, as it does in the text at hand, an attempt to view the events of the time from an Indian point of view, and it often works to place blame on blundering British authorities for triggering the conflagration by their insensitivity to Indian religious sensibilities.) Even more strongly than he stresses the issue of the cartridges, Martin stresses the climate of “feverish anxiety bordering on panic” (119) among “the terrified sepoys” (140) as a result of their belief, richly justified, he says, by menacing British actions, that the British had a plan to solidify their grip on the country by attacking and annihilating native regiments without warning. In particular, he claims, “the incendiary proceedings” of the military authorities at Barrackpore in carrying out a humiliating public punishment of eighty-five troopers who had refused the cartridges threw the guilty men’s fellow soldiers “into a state of panic” that “verged on despair,” causing their obedient humility suddenly to change to “reckless, pitiless, unreasoning ferocity” (147). “Panic,” Martin says later, “is a form of madness” (401); in effect, he pronounces the Meerut mutineers not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. For inciting it, he categorically declares, the British commanders were to blame. The incredibly harsh sentence of public fettering and condemning the eighty-five troopers to ten years’ imprisonment with hard labor “was, in truth, the death-warrant of every European massacred in the following

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week” (157). It would be hard to imagine more inflammatory polemical rhetoric than this. One of its adjuncts is Martin’s constant debunking of the tales of sepoy crimes. “The newspaper columns were filled with the most circumstantial details of often imaginary, always exaggerated, atrocities,” he declares (273). He simply takes for granted, in fact, that these reports were unfounded fantasies and that the mutineers, “conscious of their own weakness, . . . naturally adopted a cowardly and merciless, but not vindictive or wantonly cruel policy” (173) aimed simply at cleansing the land of “Feringhees.” He hews to this thesis even, sometimes, in the face of what seems like compelling eyewitness evidence to the contrary. One instance would be the escape narrative of James Morley, a survivor of the pogrom against Europeans carried out by the mutineers in Delhi in the days following May 11, 1857. He miraculously escapes the whirlwind of violence in which his wife and three children, his friend and housemate William Clark, the pregnant Mrs. Clark, and their young son all perish. Morley manages to flee the city in disguise and wanders for six days before reaching safety. Ball quotes his unforgettably vivid statement at length (1:81– 84), to give the reader, he says, “some idea of the horrors that deluged with blood many of the homes at Delhi” (1:81). The climax of Morley’s narration is the moment when he returns with a faithful servant to his house after the mob has left. “Oh! I had indeed need to nerve myself. Just before me, pinned to the wall, was poor Clark’s little son with his head hanging down, and a dark stream of blood trickling down the wall into a large black pool which lay near his feet.” He then sees “a yet more dreadful sight”: the presumably horribly mutilated bodies of Clark and his wife. “But I will not, I could not, describe that scene,” he says, striking the note of unspeakability that forms, as we have seen, a presiding trope of Mutiny literature. “I have said that she was far advanced in her pregnancy.” He then hears his servant exclaim at what he has discovered in the bathroom. “I rushed to the door,” says Morley, “but I could not enter. I could not bear to face that spectacle. I could not bear to think that I might see my poor wife as I had seen poor Mrs. Clark. I sat down and placed my hands on my knees. I did not cry; it seemed as if there was some terrible weight that had been placed on my brain, and the tears could not come out” (Ball 1:83). It is an iconic image of the state of paralyzed spectatorship and of feelings short-circuited by an overload of trauma that many at home in England also experienced (of course at a lesser degree of intensity) in the late summer of 1857. Martin quotes Morley in his turn—but treats the lacerating verisimilitude of his account with an air of barely veiled skepticism. This narrative is “important, as one of the exceptional ones made by a European eye-witness, of massacre aggravated by wanton cruelty,” and as containing “horrors . . . far ex-

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ceeding any which the other fugitives encountered, or heard of,” says Martin. Most of the widely publicized allegations of mutilations and sexual assaults have been shown, he insists, to be sensationalized rumors only; such acts are prohibitively unlikely, for they would cause “irremediable forfeiture of caste” for high-born Hindus. Possibly the case is different for Muslims, he allows, but could it be that our own expectations of sadistic barbarity, based on “the history of cities sacked in European warfare by nominally Christian conquerors,” is what makes us imagine them here (172–73)? We will see how far he carries this theme of the diabolical dimension of Christian faith in the nineteenth century. Martin’s treatment of James Morley is exceptional in The Mutiny of the Bengal Army in that he pares to a minimum his coverage of the ordeals of British fugitives that are given such extensive treatment by Ball. What in effect fills this vacant place in Martin’s Mutiny story is the ideologically opposite category of materials: tales of native magnanimity, of the sheltering of fugitives at the risk of their own lives by Indian Samaritans, of the courageous fidelity of native servants and others to their European masters, of mutineers who protect their officers and allow them to escape unharmed, of valiant service by loyal sepoy units in the war against the rebels. These materials are worked everywhere into the fabric of Martin’s book, which (diverging from common practice among the early Mutiny historians) never fails to name when possible the often wholly obscure native Indians whose good deeds are being memorialized. “All the Delhi fugitives have to tell of some kind acts of protection and rough hospitality,” says Martin, quoting an official’s statement about the saving of a European child by a fakir (169). One cluster of episodes can stand for the abundance of such materials in Martin’s book. After the uprising in early June at Fyzabad, formerly the capital city of Oudh, several different parties of fugitive officers, civilians, and their families sought to escape, many eventually reaching safety after enduring dreadful sufferings. Of the six Fyzabad survivors’ narratives quoted, as usual, at length by Ball (1:395– 403), only one mentions the services rendered to the fugitives by a faithful sepoy named Teg Ali Khan. This extraordinary personage, praised afterward by one officer as a “loyal and true man” (Martin 230), emerges as almost the hero of the tale in Martin’s rendition. Martin notes that the officer, his wife, and their child were able to escape thanks also to native boatmen who “had risked their lives to bring [the boat] round” for them under fire (232). A party of fugitives, including a Colonel Lennox and his wife and daughter, then is sheltered from the hordes of rebel sepoys scouring the countryside for Europeans by “the considerate and noble nazim” Meer Mohammed, who later confesses to the sepoys his act of saving the Lennoxes—and is praised by them for it (233). “The sepoys of each regiment were solicitous for, and did actually preserve, the lives of

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many favourite officers at the risk of their own” (233). Shortly thereafter in Martin’s narrative, Captain Gould Weston rides alone up to a unit of mutinous cavalrymen from Lucknow to seek to persuade them to return; one of the mutineers raises his musket to kill him, but a dozen others strike it down, exclaiming, “Who would kill such a brave man as this?” (236). Other historians cite the episode as an instance of almost suicidal valor on Weston’s part; Martin cites it as an instance of the high-mindedness of the mutineers. For Martin, the story of the Fyzabad mutiny, and to some extent that of the Mutiny as a whole, becomes a fable of the chivalrous and merciful spirit of the very Indians whom many publicists at the time were vilifying as, to use the endlessly echoed formula, “devils incarnate.” It would be overstatement to claim that Martin writes as an apologist for the uprising, but the trend of his rhetoric is such that it seems it might tip over into that forbidden mode at any moment. Just how perilously close he comes to it may be illustrated by his recounting of the aftermath of the mutiny and massacre at Bareilly on May 31, 1857. Among other enormities, five British officials seized by the rebels were put on trial with a great show of legal procedure, condemned, and publicly hanged. Martin shockingly fails to denounce these executions. “To appreciate the force of this horrible sarcasm,” he declares, one must remember that the British administration of justice was “detested by the natives” for the best of reasons. He takes the opportunity to quote a magistrate of the Bareilly district who had, he says, been complaining for a year about “the great abuse of the power of the civil courts . . . and the dangerous dislocation of society which was in consequence being produced” (214). Martin seems almost to appreciate the “horrible sarcasm” of the mutineers’ proceedings, which he portrays not as an atrocity but as a political statement. No wonder that the Rev. William Butler, who himself escaped by the skin of his teeth from Bareilly, should devote several pages of The Land of the Veda to denouncing Martin, who, he bitterly says, “half undertakes to whitewash” the “ensanguined fame” of the local fomenter of rebellion, Khan Bahadur Khan, and who generally displays “mistaken and conceited notions of ‘impartiality’ toward bloodthirsty wretches” who should properly be regarded, Butler asserts, like those debauchees condemned in the Bible “as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed” (443–45; see 2 Pet. 2:12). The Mutiny of the Bengal Army most strikingly rewrites the history of the rebellion in focusing its attention, to an overwhelming degree just here, on the theme of British retribution. Martin chiefly emphasizes not the nihilistic fury of battle, as Russell, Majendie, and others had done, but, rather, the infliction of massive punishment upon the mutineers and rebellious or disaffected populations as a matter of policy. In his Account

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of the Mutinies in Oudh (1858), Martin Gubbins, a prominent figure in the siege of Lucknow, describes an early incident in which a troop of soldiers captured a sepoy mutineer and were uncertain what to do with him. “We had not yet learnt to kill in cold blood,” says Gubbins (108). It is precisely the institution of a system of cold-blooded mass killing by British authorities in India that forms Martin’s main theme. Necessarily, given the cultural and historical conjunction that I am seeking to trace, it is a theme fraught with irreconcilably conflicting principles and impulses. In Ball’s History, the bad conscience that Albert Memmi tells us is inherent in the psychology of colonizers is made ever more plainly legible, as we saw, in signs of the author’s increasingly severe ambivalence toward Canning’s clemency policy. Martin, who has no such personal incoherence to seek to exorcize, traces this dilemma in a concerted analysis of what he portrays as a struggle between the two conflicting rules of a polarized national character, each of which clothes itself in the mantle of Christian piety: the rule of vengeance and the rule of mercy. In placing this struggle at the center of this chapter in the history of imperialism, Martin, it is fair to say, was one of the first interpreters to understand the modern condition as specifically that of, in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, a dissociation of sensibility. For Martin, that is, the “terrible break” of the Mutiny was, first and foremost, one internal to the British character—a condition that involved, as he asserts, an epochal crisis in the moral destiny of his country. “Despite the fierce cry for vengeance which speedily arose [after the outbreak at Meerut],” he writes at a typical moment, “some voices were still raised in favour of a rule of action more befitting a Christian people, than the adoption of the Draconian principle, that death was to be the indiscriminating punishment of every grade of mutiny or insurrection” (218). This polarized state of British opinion is played out in Martin’s text in local parables such as the story of the conflict between the military and civilian authorities in Patna in the wake of the outbreak at that station. “Conciliation was the motto of the major-general [Lloyd],” writes Martin; “unlimited hanging” that of the commissioner, William Tayler (398). This is the Manichaean antithesis that is projected by Martin as the organizing principle of his epic cast of characters. The party of conciliation, compassion, mercy, and moderation is represented by a series of honored figures such as Sir James Outram, Sir Colin Campbell (who was, says Martin significantly, “free from any love of killing for its own sake” [467]), Sir Charles Napier, Canning, John Colvin, and, preeminently, Sir Henry Lawrence, the newly installed chief commissioner of Oudh who died as almost the first casualty of the siege of Lucknow when a shell exploded in his room in the Residency. Among the array of British heroes to gain at least temporary immortality in the Mutiny, the venerated Sir Henry, who emerges from Mutiny literature of all political stripes as a

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kind of saint, is in a class by himself. His subordinate, Martin Gubbins, had difficult relations with Sir Henry, who mistrusted him, but Gubbins in his 1858 memoir has nothing but praise for him and for the beneficial effects of his “deeply sympathizing” nature and “his kind and conciliatory demeanour towards the native community”; he was, says Gubbins, “essentially a friend of the natives” and—a phrase of Gubbins’s that Martin aphoristically quotes (221)—“much inclined to clemency” (Gubbins 2, 3, 115). Martin strongly reinforces the cult of Sir Henry, who, he says, had a “horror of indiscriminate slaughter” and who willingly accepted demotion from his previous position in the frontier district of the Punjab, then ruled by his authoritarian brother, the “prompt and pitiless” Sir John Lawrence, “sooner than be instrumental in perpetrating injustice or oppression” (365, 372). It is easy, again, to recognize this idealized image of the saintly Sir Henry, “a friend and generous benefactor to the races of India” (244n), as an ideological formation meant to persuade colonizers and colonized alike of the possibility of something that may undoubtedly be a chimera: a humane, compassionate imperialism devoted to the welfare of the population. Martin does not expose the myth of Sir Henry Lawrence to such a critique, though it would fully be consonant with his broad portrayal of British imperial rule in India, the idealizing and propagandistic mechanisms of which he persistently excoriates. His point about Sir Henry is twofold. First, he insists that British idealism and philanthropic benevolence are not illusory but authentic historical realities, and that understanding the trauma of the Mutiny requires that one give them their full weight. Any portrayal of British imperialism as uniformly malignant, or of the “civilizing mission” of the East India Company as purely a sham (or “humbug,” in Chakravarty’s term [2]), obfuscates a complex historical reality and, for one thing, makes the imperial relation seem less insidious and less powerfully seductive than it is. Martin seeks at the same time to bring uncompromisingly home to his readers in 1861 the irreconcilability of the ideal that Sir Henry represented (in his idolized mythic persona, at least) with “the fierce cry for vengeance” that galvanized popular feeling in Britain about the war. In his account of Sir Henry’s death in Lucknow, he cites to this effect the obituary published by the influential missionary-connected Calcutta newspaper The Friend of India. “The commissioner of Oude died, not before he had breathed into his little garrison somewhat of his own heroic spirit,” declares the paper. “Great actions are contagious, and gladly would [the members of the garrison] have died for him; but it was not so to be; henceforth they will live only for vengeance.” Martin quotes this characteristic text of the time to highlight the moral argument that runs through his book. “The English at Lucknow happily understood the spirit of their beloved chief much bet-

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ter,” he states. “They had recognised in him a Christian, not an Homeric hero; and the pursuit of vengeance, ‘the real divinity of the Iliad,’ was, as they well knew, utterly incompatible with the forgiving spirit which Sir Henry uniformly advocated as the very essence of vital Christianity. . . . His talent lay in preventing revolt, rather than in crushing it with the iron heel of the destroyer.” “Avengers and subjugators have done their work,” he says, in another iteration of the duality that he often refers to: “we want peace-makers now” (244). The predominating rhetorical feature of The Mutiny of the Bengal Army is in fact its extended portrait of what it calls “the ultra-vengeance party” (413) and, interchangeably, “the anti-native party” (455). Ball certainly left a vivid record of the national fury for vengeance that swept over Britain in the summer of 1857, but no other writer of the day equals Martin for the fullness of his account of “the vengeance fever” (499) that emerged at this time from its state of latency in the Victorian psyche into a full-blown wave of fanaticism. A noticeable nuance differentiates Martin’s diagnosis of this contagious psychopathology from Russell’s and Majendie’s. Those two authors highlight shocking instances of sadism on the part of “our” forces in 1857–59; Martin proposes the still more shocking thesis that British policy and actions in the field were driven not so much by a mania of cruelty as by an ideology of extermination. For Martin, the expressed goals of British military action in India, revenging the victims of massacres and restoring British sovereignty, bore a euphemistic relation to the deeper motive of destroying an entire population. Such a motive could never be plainly avowed, of course; it constitutes another aspect of the hydra-headed category of the unspeakable in Mutiny discourse. Nor could Martin frame this theme in explicit terms as Feuerbach does in analyzing the exterminating impulse that religious faith, as he argues, always feels toward its other, or as Memmi does in tracing its presence in the psychology of colonialism. But this impulse seems to manifest itself plainly enough when Martin declares, for instance, that British functionaries carrying out martial law in Allahabad in June and July of 1857 needed to be restrained “from the indiscriminate destruction, not only of innocent men, but even of ‘aged women and children’ ” (295), or that “the majority of the Europeans seem [in the early days of the rebellion] to have concentrated their energies on indiscriminate slaughter” of natives instead of rushing to the assistance of the besieged garrison in Cawnpore (299). These phrases, “indiscriminate destruction” and “indiscriminate slaughter,” which recur incessantly in the literature of the time, may be taken as roughly synonymous with what the twentieth century came to term, in its word for the supreme crime, “genocide.” They mean liquidating an entire population (perhaps only synecdochically, by wiping out a village or a regiment, for example) as far as one’s ability to do so

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goes. This motive is implicit in Martin’s quotation of what he calls the “sanguinary and impracticable measures for the suppression of the mutiny” proposed by the bloody-minded clergyman Mr. Coopland, which involved the total destruction of every native regiment “that showed the least sign of disaffection” (335n). The Times, which Martin identifies as one of the principal disseminating agencies of the vengeance fever in its most virulent form and which he frequently quotes, offers on October 21, 1857, a sort of gloss on the Coopland doctrine. “Ladies and gentlemen, preachers of all persuasions, and speakers of all platforms—every tongue, every pen, demands the destruction of 70,000 sepoys,” declares the paper (Martin 414). The historian does not cite here, as he might have, Rev. Alexander Duff, who had declared that a harsh program of pacification would be called for “even after the army of a hundred thousand murderous mutineers has been literally annihilated” (Duff 209). Or he might have cited a letter published in the Times on April 20, 1858, in which Russell, arguing for the need to pacify India by other means than sheer military force, declares, “we cannot, after the work of the bullet and the sabre has been done, put hundreds of thousands of people to death.” He cites this possibility as an unthinkable hyperbole, but there were those who did not recoil from such grandiose thinking. The idea of genocide was definitely in the air. Well might Majendie observe in Up Among the Pandies, as we saw, that the British campaign to regain India “had, at its commencement, most naturally assumed all the horrible features of a war of extermination, a war in which pity was unknown.” “I by no means agree with those who would make this a war of extermination,” he declares later (196, 292). What this exterminationist strain of thinking begets in Martin’s great historical allegory is a parade of figures—British commanders, civilian authorities, clergymen, ordinary civilians—who exemplify and give voice to the spirit of genocidal vindictiveness. Some leading members of “the ultra-vengeance party” were revered national heroes when the book appeared in the immediate aftermath of the war. Most revered of all was Sir Henry Havelock, whose extreme evangelical piety and “startling,” nearly “incomprehensible” love of “the horrors of war” are portrayed with undisguised revulsion by Martin (275–77). Quoting one of Havelock’s hagiographers to the effect that “he set forth to command ‘the avenging column,’ having received his commission from the Lord of Hosts” (277n), Martin notes how often Havelock was said to have “resembled the Puritans of English history,” but then he sharply qualifies this resemblance, since the Puritans, he says, fought for liberty, while Havelock was a veteran of “repeated foreign wars of conquest and subjugation” (277). Later he criticizes Havelock’s deficiencies in commissariat planning: he “lacked qualifications indispensable in the person entrusted with the care of such

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costly and perishable articles as European troops,” Martin declares (393).16 Other sacred cows of British patriotism who are subjected to harsh, disdainful commentary by Martin are General John Nicholson, in whose career there is “little [evidence], if any, of the horror of indiscriminate slaughter which characterised Sir Henry” (372), and Colonel Neill, who “has been frequently compared to ‘an avenging angel’ ” (282–83) but is pilloried here for the brutality of his campaign of retribution in Benares, Allahabad, and Cawnpore in June 1857, a campaign that was prosecuted, Martin shockingly alleges, “at the cost of leaving Sir Hugh Wheeler and his companions [besieged in Cawnpore] to perish.” As he says, putting it mildly, “the charge is a very serious one.” “The indiscriminate burning of villages, and the pillaging of ‘niggers,’ was the most costly amusement Europeans in India could indulge in” (282–83). Martin stresses the record of Neill’s sadistic special punishments and his mass executions, quoting at one point from a letter (one that I cited in the previous chapter) from a Benares clergyman published in the Times on August 25, 1857, approvingly describing the constant hangings of “scores and scores of prisoners” carried out on Neill’s specially designed row of gallowses—three separate gibbets, three ropes each—and worrying “lest there should be any squeamishness about the punishment in store for the brutal and diabolical mutineers” (287n). The trope running through Martin’s account of such things is that of numbers of victims beyond counting—implicitly, numbers that will multiply until the entire rebellious population has been done away with. The number of sepoys killed in the repression of the mutiny in Benares on June 4 “has not been estimated,” he says; “neither is there any record of the number of natives executed on the scaffold, or destroyed by the far more barbarous process of burning down villages, in which the sick and aged must often have fallen victims, or escaped to perish, in utter destitution, by more lingering pangs” (288). The British do not bother to keep track even of the rough numbers of the native Indians they kill because they are indifferent to the “indiscriminate slaughter” of “niggers”: this is Martin’s point. But the deeper point is that counting one’s victims is unimportant when one’s goal in effect is to annihilate an entire population. “No estimate has been attempted of the number of insurgents who have perished by the civil sword; indeed, there are no records from which a trustworthy approximation could be framed,” Martin notes as he sums up this topic at the end. The mass executions carried out by the special commissioners became intensely controversial “even in Calcutta,” he reports, for having “spilt blood like water.” “One stated, on a requisition made by government, that he had sentenced ‘about’ 800, but had kept no exact account” (499). Another much-glorified military hero portrayed in macabre terms by Martin is Major William Hodson, the swashbuckling commander of the

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irregular cavalry corps known as “Hodson’s Horse.” Hodson is held up by Martin as an instance of the piratical “freebooting . . . which men who live by the sword, gain wealth by, at the expense, direct or indirect, of utter destitution to the wretched peasantry who live by the plough or by their herds and flocks” (446n). It is hard to appreciate at this historical remove the personal bravery evinced by an author willing to publish such libelous depictions of patriotic icons, many of whom, such as Havelock, Nicholson, Neill, and Hodson, had very recently given their lives in the Indian struggle. That such depictions could actually be published is impressive evidence, too, of the openness of the Victorian public sphere to stridently dissident opinions on the national imperial mandate. Martin, in any case, does not recoil from proclaiming such opinions and reinforces the high-profile portraits that I have mentioned by surrounding them with a cloud of similar ones of less eminent Victorians: the Rev. Mr. Coopland and his repulsive loot-greedy wife (454); Commissioner Tayler of Patna, “hanging right and left” (401); the much-lionized Major Vincent Eyre, ardent practitioner of “the village-burning system” (405); or a magistrate in Mirzapoor named Moore who burned villages and “went on shedding blood like water,” pursuing a policy of (in the words of an official report quoted by Martin) “indiscriminate hanging, not only of persons of all shades of guilt, but of those whose guilt was at the least very doubtful,” until his actions provoked a local leader to rebel and cut off his head (411)—not an outcome that Martin seems to deplore. The climax of this central line of argument in Martin’s book is undoubtedly his portrayal of a personage to whom I have alluded a few times previously, Frederic Cooper, deputy commissioner of Umritsir in the Punjab and, in the dire epithet bestowed on him by Martin, “the exterminator of the 26th N.I.” (426). Sixty-five years later, Edward Thompson, who highlights Cooper in The Other Side of the Medal, declares that his frightful actions are “passed over in silence by our histories” (65); but they were surely not passed over in silence by Martin—or, it transpires, by Victorian public opinion at large.17 Like other allegations of the suppression of unpalatable facts of the rebellion, this one is a scholarly fiction. Ball, we recall, traced the outlines of the episode of August 1, 1857, in which Cooper presided at Ujnalla over the summary executions by firing squads—without trials or the slightest inquiry into the circumstances of the case—of 237 mutinous (but previously disarmed) sepoys who had surrendered to his police; 41 others, Ball reported, had died “from fatigue” (2:141). Martin discloses that these men died in fact of panic and suffocation in the bastion into which they had been brutally jammed overnight to await execution in the morning. Martin treats this episode in merciless detail (426–29), ostensibly “as affording an insight into the state of feeling, or, to speak more charitably, frenzy, which characterised this

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terrible epoch” (427), but in reality to immortalize Cooper, one of his most odious villains, as a supreme example of the exterminating mentality of the British authorities. He quotes at length from Cooper’s book The Crisis in the Punjab (1858: a volume almost sacrilegiously dedicated to Sir Henry Lawrence, though neither Martin nor Thompson notes the brazenness of this irony), in keeping with his practice of quoting as much as possible the direct testimonies of Mutiny participants “in evidence,” he says, “of facts which would hardly be believed on other authority than that of the chief actors” (302). He underlines Cooper’s own boastful association of this slaughter, after which the hundreds of dead bodies were thrown into a dry well, with two other Indian atrocities, both perpetrated by Asiatics: the smothering of British captives in the Black Hole of Calcutta in 1756 and the filling of a well in Cawnpore with the dismembered bodies of the two hundred British women and children massacred by Nana Sahib. “There is a well at Cawnpore; but there is also one at Ajnala!” Cooper had vaingloriously written, in a phrase that deeply shocked his Victorian readership (167). Martin almost goes beyond the limit of what could be written at this moment by halfway extenuating the Nana’s epochal crime, which he declares to have been less culpable than Cooper’s. “The wretched captives of the Nana were preserved as long as was consistent with the safety of their gaolers” and only killed when the risk of holding them became too great, says Martin. “The sole extenuation for such deeds, is their being perpetrated by persons whose own lives are at stake” (428)—an extenuation that, of course, did not apply in the case of Cooper. For the most part, in this section of his book Martin allows Cooper’s own narration to speak for itself, but he highlights the complicity of the ardent evangelical Robert Montgomery, second in command in the Punjab, whose congratulatory letter to him Cooper (whose anxiety about the public reception of his actions is evident) quotes in his book. Montgomery tells Cooper that the mass execution “will be a feather in your cap as long as you live”; begs him to send any survivors to him for execution at Lahore, saying “you have had slaughter enough” (i.e., you ought to share); and expresses a wish that three other shaky regiments at Lahore would mutiny, “as they are a nuisance; and not a man would escape if they do” (Cooper 168–69). “It is startling to know that one of the leading advocates for the propagation of Christianity in India, should regard the above transaction as a feather in a man’s cap,” Martin comments (428). “Mr. Montgomery, on his own showing, contemplated the extermination of the 3,000 remaining sepoys at Lahore as a desirable event,” he continues; “and there is no reason to suppose the feeling was not general [among British authorities] in the Punjab” (429). The desirable event predictably occurred, leading, Martin says, to a grand “extermination of sepoys” at

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Peshawur (429). The word “extermination” resonates ever more urgently through this section of The Mutiny of the Bengal Army, which for Martin displays above all what he most despises, “an utter recklessness of human suffering,” on the part of Cooper and the government he represented. “What crime? what law? the reader may ask, demanded the extermination of a helpless multitude, described by the very best authority [Cooper himself] as unarmed and panic-stricken, famishing with hunger, and exhausted with fatigue?” (428). Martin notes that Cooper was also congratulated for the massacre by the autocratic Sir John Lawrence, who at that time “was, to all intents and purposes, a dictator in Northern India” (430). Two pages later, Martin quotes one contemporary testimony to the character of Sir John’s brother Sir Henry, praised in the usual way for his “love of the people of the country” (432). The antithesis of the two brothers, the Cooper-like dictator and the saintly philanthropist, constitutes one more vignette of the profound rift that Martin had discerned in the soul of British India, and in Victorian Britain itself. Since I have stressed Martin’s theme of the negligence of the exterminating authorities in keeping count of their victims, I must digress briefly to note in Cooper’s infamous memoir the appearance of exactly the opposite effect: a ferociously detailed, scrupulous accountancy that expresses no less eloquently that aspiration to total annihilation that the Times, Rev. Coopland, Cooper, Montgomery, and others make manifest in Martin’s pages. Cooper exhibits this aspiration with hair-raising clarity as he tells the tale of the “almost complete annihilation” inflicted upon another sepoy regiment, the mutinous 51st N.I. at Peshawur. “Some idea may be gathered of the terrible and swift destruction,” Cooper writes, “when it is remembered that the strength of the regiment before the mutiny amounted to 871.” Cooper then narrates the tale in the terms of a chilling numerology. “The Punjab Infantry shot and killed 125; Captain James’s party killed 40; Lieutenant Gosling’s party killed 15. The Peshawur Light Horse, the villagers, and H.M.’s 27th and 70th killed 36. By sentence of drum-head court-martial, on the same day, there were executed by H.M.’s 87th, 187; and by a similar summary tribunal, on the 29th of August, 167; also on the same date, 84; one thanahdar killed five: total, within about 30 hours after the mutiny, no less than 659!” (177). What is annihilated most particularly in this quantifying, counting discourse is, of course, all sense of the moral significance of these events, all conscience, all pity. In imposing such a terrible dehumanization upon these sepoys, Cooper reveals, as Martin shows, the one that he himself exhibits. And the continuing extension of his list of victims by large numerical increments, clause by clause, expresses the deep logic of a process that energetically proceeds toward the unstated but all too evident goal of the total slaughter of the entire sepoy army in Bengal: the whole seventy thousand

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marked out for elimination by the Times or even the one hundred thousand called for by Rev. Duff. As it moves toward its conclusion, The Mutiny of the Bengal Army focuses ever more relentlessly on tableaux of British barbarities in which scarcely any room is left for those invocations of British valor, gallantry, and heroism that form the common currency of much Mutiny literature. Martin harshly analyzes British boasts of mercy toward noncombatants, which, as contemporary writers were fond of declaring, supposedly differentiated the “civilized” forces in the war from the barbaric rebels. Having noted ironically that the recently despised Gurkhas, notorious for looting and merciless savagery, were now regarded as excellent allies in the repression of the uprising, Martin (invoking yet again the ubiquitous trope of horrors so great as to surpass description) comments, for example, that “no pen has traced, or perhaps ever can trace, even a sketch of the misery which must have been inflicted by the British army, and its hasty heterogeneous assemblage of irregular troops—with its . . . almost inevitable accompaniments of violence and pillage—on the helpless population of India. It is only an incidental remark here and there, which affords a glimpse of the working of what are termed military operations in a densely populated country” (206). The truth of war is not found in gallant acts on the battlefield but in the vast suffering visited upon civilian populations and then expunged from historical records, says Martin. Having noted General Archdale Wilson’s order to his troops to spare women and children in the assault on Delhi, he observes that 2,500 women and children who sought to escape from the city beforehand were prevented by the British from doing so and that no order of military restraint was given with reference to noncombatant men. “Not one suggestion of mercy was made for age or youth. The license for slaughter was as large as could well be desired” (440–41). Even so, he quotes a letter from “a gentleman” published in various Indian and English papers denouncing “the general’s hookum regarding the women and children,” who were, this writer asserted, “not human beings, but fiends, or, at best, wild beasts, deserving only the death of dogs.” The “gentleman” does report with satisfaction that “all the city people found within the walls when our troops entered were bayoneted on the spot; and the number was considerable, as you may suppose, when I tell you that in some houses forty and fifty persons were hiding. These were not mutineers, but residents of the city, who trusted to our well-known mild rule for pardon. I am glad to say they were disappointed” (449). As always, these massacres of unoffending civilians trapped by events defy computation: this is almost the defining characteristic of “what are termed military operations in a densely populated country.” “It is not likely that the number of natives, whether sepoys or city people, who were slaughtered at Delhi, will ever be even approximately

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estimated,” Martin says. And even if it were theoretically possible to discover how many women and children died of violence or destitution as a result of the siege, “where is the Englishman who would make the inquiry?” Nor, he declares, would any but the almost willfully naı¨ve credit any claims about chivalrous or humane conduct on the part of the British troops who stormed the rebel capital, though such claims were often made at the time. “That the European soldiers, maddened as they were with the thirst for vengeance, and utterly insubordinate through drunkenness, really refrained from molesting the women, is what many may hope; but few who have had any experience of military life . . . will credit” (450). The heroic pure-hearted Christian army was a drunken horde of rapists: it seems that there is nothing that Martin recoils from saying. He cites testimony that Sir John Lawrence, put in charge of the Delhi district after the reestablishment of British rule, was “the opponent of blind, indiscriminate vengeance” and sought to put a stop to mass executions (451). “The fact, however, remains,” Martin reports: the vindictive slaughter in Delhi was not stopped. “Day after day, week after week, month after month, the hanging went on” (451). Martin invites us again to recognize that the impulse behind it is that of a mass killing program that would ideally, were it only possible, go on forever, until there were no more native Indians left to eradicate. The trope of the unspeakable, in particular reference to an idea so appalling that it is prohibited for even a radically dissident writer like Montgomery Martin to name it, reaches in this phase of his text what is perhaps its conclusive form. The Mutiny of the Bengal Army narrates the Mutiny as a gothic romance, if by that term one means the literary form built upon the interlinked ideas of the divided soul and of diabolical possession. The theme of Martin’s book is the usurpation of the British soul (or “national character”), embodied in its natural state by Sir Henry Lawrence or Sir Colin Campbell, by a terrifying protean doppelga¨nger whose many aliases include James Neill, Frederic Cooper, and Sir Henry Havelock. In elaborating this conception, Martin transcribes into the historiographical vocabulary the gothicism of such a text as James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). In Hogg’s novel, a cardinal point of reference for the cultural syndromes brought to light throughout the literature of the Mutiny, Lucifer appears as a kind of fantastic projection of the cruel vindictiveness of the Calvinistic religious faith of the narrator, Robert Wringhim. Wringhim is tormented by the sense of being haunted by “a second half, who transacted business in my likeness” (246) and who renders him “liable to the commission of crimes” that he is “not sensible of and could not eschew” (247). Wringhim, though, can dream of nothing but a utopia of mass extermination, of “[dooming] all that were aliens from God to destruction” (147). “I felt great indignation

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against all the wicked of this world, and often wished for the means of ridding it of such a noxious burden” (196), Hogg’s protagonist confesses, rather uncannily prefiguring Robert Montgomery’s confidences to Cooper about the Lahore sepoy regiments. In his pursuit of what he calls “blessed vengeance” (190), Wringhim takes an oath “to destroy and root out all who had moved hand or tongue against the children of the promise” (165), to promote, as he later calls it, a “great work of purification” by “[cutting] sinners off with the sword!” (210). In the fable Martin tells of the Indian Mutiny, the British nation in 1857 is under the spell of a diabolical possession of exactly this exterminating character. Martin does not, however, investigate or even distinctly recognize the insidious interlinkage of the two opposed moral formations he portrays. He does not, that is, entertain the possibility that Frederic Cooper should be seen not as Sir Henry Lawrence’s spiritual and political antitype but as in some sense his diabolical double, an embodiment of the infinitely dark potentialities of the latter’s own role as an imperial administrator. Is Cooper an image of Sir Henry himself as he would appear if not seen through the medium of idealizing sentiment? Is he, among other things, the necessary outgrowth of the ideology of benevolent paternalistic imperialism professed by Sir Henry? For such a speculation one must turn not to Martin but to a modernistic tradition of analysis represented by such figures as Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Memmi, Octave Mannoni—and the clairvoyant Hogg himself. Martin’s blind spot is a real one, but it does not rob his expose´ of British crimes in India of its searing polemical power.

TREVELYAN'S HOMERIC EPIC Ball and Martin pursue drastically different agendas in their Mutiny histories, but each author registers the shock of 1857 in the form of a kind of textual neurosis that powerfully affects his work at the level of style and rhetoric. In Ball’s case, this effect of emotional instability resides in the almost tongue-tied denunciations of sepoy cruelty that seem in fact symptomatic of the author’s painfully unresolved ambivalence about the cruelties of the British; in Martin’s, it manifests itself in the reckless virulence of his heretical critique of British imperialism and British war policy, a critique that seems to reflect his deeply conflicted loyalty to his own British identity. The two works imply from opposed polemical angles that the Indian upheaval was too acutely traumatic, and, a year or so afterward, too fresh in memory, to be accessible to narration in balanced, disinterestedly explanatory historiographical prose.18 Sir George Trevelyan’s famous monograph Cawnpore (1865) seems at least initially to in-

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augurate a new era of historical studies of the Mutiny. Trevelyan tells the story of the three-week siege of the British garrison at Cawnpore, some one thousand souls, by mutinous sepoys under the command of Nana Sahib; the ambush and massacre of the survivors, who had surrendered under a pledge of safe passage down the Ganges from the Sati Chowra ghat (landing place); the ordeal (from which four men somehow emerged alive) undergone by those aboard a couple of boats that managed to escape the ambush; the slaughter in the Bibighar two weeks later of two hundred women and children captives; and the retaking of the city by the British the next day. The book is as sleekly and elegantly organized, and as lucidly written, as Ball’s is tortuously impacted, amorphous, repetitious, and self-contradicting. The sometimes half-pornographic luridness that gave the works of the other two historians their aura of hysteria and horror has dropped away. Moreover, Trevelyan seems orthodox and, from a Victorian point of view, sanely respectable in his interpretive outlook. His narration of the Cawnpore drama seems securely anchored in the official mythology of British valor and projects a view of British India that allows no room for painful doubt about the imperial enterprise and its sustaining ideology. Much of this system of mutually reinforcing effects comes from Trevelyan’s decision to frame his account of the most notorious episode of the war not as a political or, as it were, historical study (in the sense of a study aimed at deciphering deep historical causes) but as a moral parable, with the clarity and abstractness of thematic pattern dictated by such an intent. The dense facticity and the layered massing of sometimes dissonant testimony that mark Ball’s and Martin’s books have no place in Trevelyan’s scheme. He offers just enough discussion of underlying historical causes of the rebellion and of Indian hatred of British rule to furnish a prologue to his drama depicting “the most terrible tragedy of our age” (3), “the great disaster of our race” (9). He has little or nothing to say about the problems of the land tenure system or the administration of justice in British India, the greased cartridges, the annexation of Oudh, or other causes widely pointed to by contemporaries as the catalysts of rebellion. The one notable exception to this rule, as we should note carefully, is his stress on British racism in India. Like other writers of the day, he argues that the state of “confidence and regard” (32) once prevalent between European officers and sepoys had been undermined by the contempt that new generations of officers had come to have for their native soldiers and for Indians generally. “And so it came to pass that . . . the sepoys were ‘niggers,’ ” Trevelyan declares. “That hateful word, which is now constantly on the tongue of all Anglo-Indians, . . . made its first appearance in decent society during the years which immediately preceded the mutiny” (36). “An ignorant slip of an ensign” would, he says, freely refer to

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high-caste Rajpoots and battle-scarred Sikh veterans as “niggers” (36). In identifying this “hateful” British trait, Trevelyan picks up what we have seen to be a key theme of Mutiny literature. Its negative adjunct, so to say, in Trevelyan’s narration of the Cawnpore story is the absence of all the rhetoric of self-righteousness, national superiority, and justified vengeance that Martin intensively documents and that Ball himself exemplifies. Having told the tale of the most infamous of all Indian crimes committed against helpless British captives, Trevelyan surprisingly expounds a moral not of racial antipathy but of racial harmony, urging his reader “to do in his generation some small thing towards the conciliation of races estranged by a terrible memory” (173). This is the ethic of sympathy and generous forgiveness that forms the moral keynote of mid-Victorian fiction. Its rhetorical function in Trevelyan’s book is to reassure his readership that humanitarian values still obtain in spite of everything, still afford a hope and expectation of a restored moral regime in India based on “mutual attachment” (36), on “confidence and regard,” even after the atrocious events played out in Cawnpore. Yet Cawnpore portrays the upheaval of 1857 as a confrontation of British virtue and barbarous Indian cruelty. There is almost no trace in this text of Martin’s sentimentalization of Indian actors or of his exculpatory analysis of sepoy atrocities as the result of a panicky near-madness that the British themselves induced. Nor is there any detailing by Trevelyan of Indian grievances (other than resentment at what he describes as constant racial humiliation—an admittedly major qualification). The ideal of reestablished “confidence and regard” across racial lines is contradicted by Trevelyan’s portrait of the sepoys, which is shot through with disdain and aversion. “The insolence and greed of the soldiers, their impatience of discipline, and their lust of power, were the effective causes of the outbreak,” he flatly declares (23). No cross-cultural sympathy mitigates his scorn for the men’s reaction to “the fancied insult which had been offered to their national religion” by the greased cartridges, which he calls “the proximate cause” of the uprising: “the mind of the sepoy reeked with religious prejudice” and with “superstition,” he says, unsympathetically (23). He points out that sepoy sharpshooters during the three-week siege of the British entrenchments fired “with unexampled barbarity” at small children (134).19 Their cause, he declares, overriding any pretense of scholarly evenhandedness, was “detestable to God and man” (171). Just how detestable, Trevelyan captures in a series of tableaux epitomizing in different refractions that constant trope of Mutiny literature, the trope of the scene from hell. After the ambush at the boats, in which most of the British garrison perished, 125 women and children survivors huddle on the muddy riverside “beneath the pitiless sun,” roughly treated and robbed of their jewelry by the surrounding crowd. “On the banks of the

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Ganges, in the midst of that devilish horde, those English girls and matrons abode till the morning was almost spent” (192). Nana Sahib, imagined as nursing deep-laid plans of vengeance against the British even as he extends urbane hospitality to them in pre-Mutiny days, dreaming of one day slaughtering the lads and ladies who regularly dine at his table at Bithoor near Cawnpore, is evoked as a figure of Mephistophelian evil, a voluptuary whose “effete sensuality” (50) is exceeded only by his treacherous cruelty. During the interval between the massacre at the boats on June 27 and the slaughter of the women and children captives on July 15, the Nana “lived from day to day in a perpetual round of sensuality, amidst a choice coterie of priests, pandars, ministers, and minions,” Trevelyan reports; the sounds of their “unhallowed revelry” were plainly audible to the doomed captives in the Bibighar nearby (230–31). “History will never cease to shudder” at his evil deeds (167). The historian’s vocation for Trevelyan is not an impartial instrumentality for ascertaining facts but a sensitive moral consciousness that recoils from the baseness and cruelty that it forces itself to examine. Trevelyan’s portrait of the British actors in the drama is correspondingly eulogistic. As the surviving members of the garrison marched out of the entrenchment down to the landing place on the Ganges on the fatal Saturday morning, the townspeople came out to watch, “some desirous to catch one more glimpse of the kind-hearted strangers who had so long sojourned in their midst, and unfeignedly sorry to see the last of such easy customers and such open-handed masters,” Trevelyan states (177), casting over the scene a glow of interracial affection that seems to ignore what he has already reported about British arrogance and racism. But this book rarely touches, after all, on the allegedly kindly and philanthropic side of the Anglo-Indian personality. Its strong emphasis falls, rather, on heroic military valor and—a recurrent word throughout the book as it is throughout a broad sector of Mutiny literature—“chivalry.” On the eve of the outbreak at Cawnpore, the British commander Sir Hugh Wheeler, “prompted by a genuine sentiment of chivalry” (70), sends a detachment of his precious troops off to reinforce Sir Henry Lawrence at Lucknow. One great cultural difference between Europeans and Asiatics, says Trevelyan, is the worshipful respect accorded to women by the former. “We who live among the records and associations of chivalry still make it our pride to regard women as goddesses” (95). To illustrate the commonplaceness of the most valiant exploits during the siege, Trevelyan describes a daring raid led by the exceptionally heroic Captain Moore: “This chivalrous act, one among many such, at that time passed without reward or public approval” (115). Or there was the heroic civilian John Mackillop, who took over the lethal duty of fetching drinking water from the well,

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which was exposed to the fire of the sepoy sharpshooters, and who unexpectedly lasted a week before being killed (135). From the point of view of later generations schooled in the modernist code of what Jose´ Ortega y Gasset admiringly called “the dehumanization of art,” Trevelyan’s celebration of “the immortal garrison” (184) in Cawnpore is almost too readily identifiable as an instantiation of a special mode of sentimentality, that blighting vice of taste and feeling said to be the very signature of Victorian bourgeois sensibility. Sentimentality of any sort seems fatally at odds with the kind of scientific historiography that Trevelyan professes to be writing, and its nationalistic mutation seems an especially debased and corruptive formation. Can appeals to national pride and glory be anything on such an occasion but screens for the huge injustice of imperialism? Without consenting for a moment to evade the incriminating force of the question, one might argue for the expenditure of effort that would be necessary for a more complex response to Trevelyan’s nationalistic rhetoric than derision and embarrassment—and indeed for a principle more valuable to the cause of sustaining humane forms of life than antisentimentalism. My goal for the moment is not to defend Trevelyan against critique from whatever angle, however, but only to seek to understand his glorification of British heroism in its own historical frame and to parse out its rather complicated special valences. Partly it functions as a form of mourning the dead and as a means of salvaging redemptive value from a set of events that was as disturbing as it was to the British public because, like the Somme and the concentration camps of the next century, it seemed by its unprecedented magnitude of horror to numb moral response and to eclipse any possible affirmative interpretation—the effect that I have termed the “cultural trauma” of this war. Celebrating the “immortal garrison” and its chivalrous virtue needs to be seen as a response to that influx of nihilism and religious despair that, as I have emphasized, deeply marks Mutiny literature and links it to the shock of the Darwinian revolution, the Essays and Reviews controversy, the Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica, and other culturally destabilizing happenings in the early 1860s. The embarrassing note of adulation that marks this dimension of Trevelyan’s study is the sign of how challenging a rhetorical task it had become by 1865 to reassure readers that the order of providence was still intact, despite multiplying signs to the contrary. More particularly, the glorification of British character in Cawnpore must be seen as an implicitly polemical response to vociferous critics of the war and of British rule in India who, like Martin, had argued that the conscience of Britain should be deeply troubled in the aftermath of the rebellion. To this extent, the patriotic current in Trevelyan’s book needs to be construed as a defensive, compensatory formation, a symptom not of the proud national self-assurance it proclaims but of something like its

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opposite, a bad conscience as pressing as the cultural narcissism of this text is exorbitant. The recourse had by this sophisticated writer to an undiluted register of jingoism is in other words the sign of the almost fatal difficulty of Trevelyan’s project of authorship. It was a difficulty certainly as perceptible to Victorian readers (often caricatured as profoundly oblivious consumers of indoctrination bereft of critical awareness) as it is to us. Anyone who had read Russell, Martin, or Majendie, or who had followed the harsh denunciations in Parliament of the East India Company and of British excesses in the war, knew that bestowing a patent of chivalry on British forces in India was open to very grave reservations. Trevelyan’s decision to restrict his redaction of the Mutiny to the one episode in the war in which the polarity between British virtue and sepoy depravity seemed most undeniable is definitely a symptom of this knowledge. It is not surprising, then, that the insistent patriotic exhortation of this book turns out to be preyed on, after all, by textual symptoms of unquellable uncertainty. There is the problem of reconciling the language of chivalry and high-mindedness with Trevelyan’s own portrait of his countrymen in India as infected with a virulent form of arrogant racism. Indeed, the very category of “chivalry,” invoked by Trevelyan and other authors as though it were an unquestionable point of moral reference, is in fact hedged with an ambivalence that becomes more evident as the book proceeds—and that finally causes it to implode in shocking fashion. The chivalrous heroism of the besieged British at Cawnpore seems at first glance to affirm national character in the well-recognized way of linking the present with “a fixed identity rooted in an ancestral past” (Schmitt 15), an honored, immutable past beyond the reach of modern uncertainties.20 Lieutenant Mowbray Thomson (ultimately one of the four survivors of the thousand-person garrison) was thus a hero, Trevelyan declares, who vindicated England’s “ancient honour” (105). The invocation of this principle in the Mutiny can be seen, I think, as a specific response to the shock of novelty that the crisis inflicted upon Victorian awareness, the panicky sense that events in India marked in fact a “terrible break” in history and the threshold of a terrifyingly new set of conditions to which the relevance of the very category of “ancient honour” was not self-evident. Trevelyan’s insistence on this theme comes fraught with subtly destabilizing effects. For one thing, it turns the valiant bravery of Moore, Mackillop, Thomson, and others into an imitation, necessarily a faded or only nostalgically derivative, anachronistic one, of a great original, a lofty order all too obviously—as a book like Up Among the Pandies tells us in no uncertain terms—no longer in existence. The antiquarianism of the word “chivalry” in reference to such a war as this one, “a war of extermination, a war in which pity was unknown,” has for this reason an insidiously diminishing effect that drains the book of some perceptible

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quantum of its imaginative immediacy (in contrast, say, to such a text as James Morley’s account in Ball of his refusal to look at his wife’s mutilated body in the bathroom). The Victorian reading public was well aware in 1865 that this had been a war in which, for example, British forces would routinely bayonet wounded enemy soldiers in captured hospital wagons; to speak of the spirit of chivalry in such a context was a mystification of a kind that contemporaries were perfectly equipped to register. Nor is the exalted past an unproblematic locale in its own right. For one thing, Trevelyan does not, in the stereotypical way of Mutiny writers, invoke the association of the British combatants in India with the piously ferocious Puritan warriors of England’s past. (Historical circumstances were for once unfavorable to the standard simile, Sir Hugh Wheeler, the garrison commander, being no stern evangelical in the pattern of Havelock, Neill, Nicholson, and other Mutiny heroes.) Rather, Cawnpore insistently links British heroism in 1857 not to the British past at all but, introducing a still more extreme problem of replication and a still sharper reduction of immediacy, to models from classical history and myth. “It was then much as it had been in the days of Troy, throughout the villages of ancient Achaia,” comments the historian, describing the mailing home of relics of soldiers fallen on faraway battlefields (178). The Cawnpore story was, he says elsewhere, “an Iliad of bloodshed” (202). “It moves to tears as surely as the pages in which the greatest of all historians [Thucydides] tells the last agony of the Athenian host in Sicily” (101). “In such a strait [as the one in which the Cawnpore garrison found itself from the incapacity of the elderly Sir Hugh] men act as acted those ten thousand Greeks, when by the banks of far Euphrates their chief had been slain and their allies scattered to the winds” (102). In this latest vivid example of the literary mediation of the Mutiny for the Victorian public, Trevelyan repeatedly suggests that the story he narrates with such “scrupulous fidelity” to historical fact has the form of Greek tragedy. “A dramatist of ancient Greece would have attributed such obstinate blindness [as that of the Cawnpore authorities with regard to signs of impending mutiny] to the malice of some injured deity, deluding those whom he had marked for destruction” (69). The fusion of supposedly rigorously factual documentary history and ancient literature stamps itself plainly on the stylistic texture of the book, as well, in Trevelyan’s almost ostentatious fondness for Homeric phraseology: “As in a frame predisposed to disease the slightest irregularity is productive of fatal results, so now at Cawnpore the smouldering fires of discontent and distrust were inflamed by an incident which at ordinary times would have passed almost without remark” (70). The insistent classical allusiveness of this text proclaims an intent to cast an aura of heightened tragic glory around the Cawnpore dramatis personae—and suggests in this very gesture of rhetorical heightening that

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modern Britons may fall short of the requisite degree of glory after all unless they are transposed by stylistic fiat into the costuming of ancient Greeks. The literary machinery called into play by Trevelyan is all too visible and all too openly inflationary, in other words, and the estranging effect of systematic literariness that it introduces between the reader and the experiential realities of the Cawnpore story is too plain. The rhetorical shakiness of this system of effects is further accentuated by the way in which Trevelyan, disregarding the most basic historiographic proprieties, seems to collapse indiscriminately together the two very different modes of heroic virtue with which he associates “the immortal garrison,” the Greek and the chivalric. It is not merely pedantic to note the disparity between a medieval Christian military cult of a sexual and sentimental character and the Bronze Age warrior ethos of the Homeric epics; rather, it is to highlight a line of what I believe is calculated incoherence running through Trevelyan’s work and leading at last to something like the upending of the whole rhetorical scheme that it seemed to embody. He focuses at all events on a problem not new to Mutiny writing. We recall here Montgomery Martin’s rebuke of The Friend of India for eulogizing Sir Henry Lawrence as an inspiration to British vengeance and his insistence that the Lucknow garrison “had recognized in him a Christian, not an Homeric hero,” one who deplored and disavowed the archaic code of vengeance, “the real divinity of the Iliad” (244). It is just this disjunction of heroic idealisms—one might say of different divinities—that comes starkly to the surface in Trevelyan’s book. On the one hand, his depiction of the British heroes of Cawnpore as embodiments of past ages of chivalry and valor is put severely in tension with intimations that this war, after all, produced not an ennobling reaffirmation of heroic values but a disintegration of them. In this, Cawnpore picks up the thematics of other Mutiny writers who stress precisely the unprecedentedly barbaric and antichivalric character of this conflict, an exterminating war of no pity. “This was no generous rivalry of national vigour and skill and prowess,” Trevelyan says at one point. “Little of military science was here, and less of military courtesy.” Rather than a war conducted according to the principles of chivalry, it was, he says, just a fierce “death-grapple” (93), a conflict in which there existed between the two sides “a degree of mutual distrust which could only end in mutual extermination” (92). He clearly draws the lesson that a war of extermination—that word that echoes with such nihilistic overtones through Majendie, Martin, and Ball—can only be one in which the British cast off what they profess to be their own most fundamental nation-defining values. To carry on such a war is in a sense to cease to be British. The rebels discovered to their pain, says Trevelyan to precisely this effect, in the mode of harsh irony that forms one of his distinctive stylistic registers,

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“that our social science talk about the sacredness of human life, and our May Meeting talk concerning our duty towards those benighted souls for whom Christ died, meant that we were to forgive most of those who had never injured us, and seldom hang an innocent Hindoo if we could catch a guilty one: that the great principles of mercy and justice and charity must cease to be eternally true until the injured pride of a mighty nation had been satisfied, its wrath glutted, and its sway restored” (95). The disjunction of the two national principles, of wrath and of “mercy and justice and charity,” could not be stated with greater clarity. Another signal of the value-annihilating character of the war comes out in the “questions of novel and momentous sophistry” that arose, Trevelyan reports, among the members of the doomed garrison as they battled to hold off the besieging hordes day after day. Did one have the right to keep one’s supplies of food and drink for oneself? Would a man be justified in shooting his wife to spare her from falling into the hands of the sepoys? To pose such questions, Trevelyan sees, is to cross the “terrible break” into uncharted moral wilderness. No wonder that the garrison baptized one of their fortified outworks “the Redan,” in memory of a site of British heroism at the battle of Sebastopol in the Crimea, “as if to cheer themselves, during their cruel and inglorious struggle,” Trevelyan comments, “with a reminiscence of chivalrous European warfare” (86). In the “inglorious” conflict that was the Mutiny, the British found themselves in a crisis where their cherished principles of “ancient honour” seemed only a forlorn reminiscence of obsolete values drastically incongruous with the crisis at hand—hence their, and their historian’s, strenuous efforts to proclaim those very principles to a public worried that the war had been won at the cost of the soul of the nation. This line of argument comes to its climax in Trevelyan’s account of the aftermath of the Cawnpore massacres, a sort of epilogue that throws everything preceding it into question. A suggestion of what is to come is found in his treatment of the atrocity tales so widely circulated in British India and at home at the time of the uprising. Like Leckey, Russell, Martin, Majendie, and, finally, Ball also, Trevelyan unequivocally brands this entire category of reports—tales of Englishwomen and young girls given up to be raped by mobs, flayed alive, made to devour the flesh of their children, and so forth—as fraudulent, but he does more than this: he furiously attacks them in several different passages as symptoms of a deeply alarming national perversion. People’s imaginations at the time, he says, in a phrase I have quoted already, “were excited by a series of prurient and ghastly fictions” (194). He declares it his duty to debunk “those fables which it is our misfortune that we once believed, and our shame if we ever stoop to repeat”: he says categorically that “those revolting stories” were unfounded in each of the three places (Cawnpore, Futtehgur, and Delhi)

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where any number of Englishwomen were held prisoner (233). The result of “those hateful falsehoods” was, he says in another formulation quoted previously, “but to evoke from the depths of our nature the sombre and ferocious instincts which religion and civilization can never wholly eradicate” (234) and to cause much innocent blood to be spilt.21 He denounces with equal vehemence the “vulgar and disgusting forgeries” (276), supposedly messages from the doomed Cawnpore captives calling for revenge, that were found written on the walls of the Bibighar. He does not quite articulate the grounds of his outrage at the circulation of these “hateful falsehoods,” but the matter does not require much teasing out. They appall him for what they show of the moral condition of those who could imagine such things in such excruciating detail and could find pleasure in publicizing them: pleasure both in demonizing their alleged perpetrators and in calling for savage revenge upon them, and—could it be?—in fantasizing these events themselves, for their own libidinal purposes. What Trevelyan perceives, even if he cannot quite say it, is that those who manufactured these immeasurably sadistic fantasies, were “excited” by them, energetically colluded in disseminating them and assailed those who doubted their veracity, at some level wanted them to be true. Such a possibility represents, of course, the unspeakable opposite, the criminal doppelga¨nger, of chivalry, with its code of reverence for women. He might have cited Ball’s History, in its continued trafficking in stories it has acknowledged to be unfounded, as an especially vivid case in point. Or he might have cited Majendie’s Up Among the Pandies, where the author both asserts his belief in the atrocity tales and, noting that many regard them with skepticism (already in 1858, in the midst of the war), qualifies his credulity: “I do not wish . . . to intimate my belief in the whole of the stories which appeared . . . in the public prints,” he writes, “many of them being, doubtless, gross fabrications, written to satisfy a morbid craving for horrors” (59). Majendie has none of Trevelyan’s gentlemanly reticence about calling perversion by its unvarnished name. Trevelyan did not possess the psychoanalytic vocabulary necessary fully to articulate his insight into the complex of cruelty and morbid cravings that he vociferously condemns: that is, he cannot analyze the way in which great numbers of British people, by so passionately embracing “prurient and ghastly fictions” of the sexual torture of women, evince their own delectation for them, though the resounding word “prurient” in this context suggests just this. What Trevelyan can explicitly name is the way in which the atrocity fantasies acted as a catalyst for that outburst of exterminating brutality among respectable English people that represents, again, the horrible opposite of the chivalrous. In praising the “modest and tolerant” tone of Mowbray Thomson’s memoir The Story of Cawnpore (1859), Trevelyan pours scorn on those who, profiting themselves from the Mutiny, “were declaiming

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and printing about battues [hunts], and fine bags [of human quarry], and tucking up niggers, and polishing off twenty brace of Pandies” (209). This is the same callous, racially inflected ferocity, in other words, that Nana Sahib himself exhibits, and both instances are marked in Trevelyan’s text by the same ironical note of loathing. In the prominent treatment he gives to the obscene atrocity fables and the vindictive passions they kindled in the Mutiny, Trevelyan implies a sharply revised reading of the patriotic polemic that has hitherto borne much of the weight of his book. Up until this point, the identification of the heroes of Cawnpore with models from the ancient past, whether from the age of Christian chivalry or that of classical Greece, signified magnificent elevation of character. But invoking “the sombre and ferocious instincts which religion and civilization can never wholly eradicate” throws Trevelyan’s theme into a new light. The reconnection with the past may, after all, signify a reconnection not with a period of glory but with the primitive and the atavistic, and may throw into jeopardy the whole idealizing project of the book. This nightmare inversion of the patriotic argument of Cawnpore is exactly what occurs in the final sections of the book, which recount the punitive campaign of the British forces as they battle their way into the city and then take their vengeance for the massacre they discover there. Trevelyan here indicts a variety of British commanders, some of them still, in 1865, in the full glow of canonization as venerated national heroes, almost as harshly as does Martin himself. First, Trevelyan describes the results of the scorched-earth policy followed by Major Sydenham Renaud as he pushed his advance force toward Cawnpore in June 1857, “tranquillizing the country by the very simple expedient of hanging everybody who showed signs of insubordination”; when Havelock follows with the main force, he traverses a blasted landscape where no sign of human habitation remains “except the bodies which hung by twos and threes from branch and signpost, and the gaunt swine who by the roadside were holding their loathsome carnival” (246, 247). Trevelyan condemns the celebrated Hodson (though without naming him) by mentioning in an aside the public display in Delhi of the corpses of the three princes whom this officer shot dead in the road with his own hand, “slain and spoiled by one who knew neither pity nor scruple” (279). But he concentrates in this closing section on a portrait of Colonel James Neill, whom he depicts as a monster responsible for what he describes as a murderous British rampage. Once the sahibs returned to Cawnpore, he says, “the truth was that it mattered to them very little whom they killed, as long as they killed somebody. After the first outbreak of joy and welcome the inhabitants of Cawnpore began to be aware that the English were no longer the same men, if indeed they were men at all.” The crimes that they had been led

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by their officers to commit on the march to the city “had depraved the conscience and destroyed the self-control of our unhappy soldiers.” The historian refuses at this point to provide details. “Of what did take place the less said is the better.” Once again, as at so many other crucial moments in Mutiny literature, the history of the time comes to things so appalling as to be unspeakable. “Regarding carnage as a duty and rapine as a pleasure,” says Trevelyan, the soldiers “enacted a scene into the details of which an Englishman at least will not care to inquire” (272). Clearly Patrick Brantlinger’s attack on this book as an imperialist apologia centered on “a widening chasm dividing the forces of absolute righteousness from the demonic armies of the night” (Rule 204) requires fairly drastic qualification—unless we recognize that in this concluding phase, it is the British themselves, their consciences wholly depraved, who have been transformed into the demonic army of the night. Evidently, too, Cawnpore needs to be recognized as seriously qualifying John M. MacKenzie’s assertion in Propaganda and Empire that “imperialism was depicted as a great struggle with dark and evil forces, in which white heroes and heroines could triumph over black barbarism, and the moral stereotyping of melodrama was given a powerful racial twist” (45), or Ian Baucom’s that the Victorians narrated the Mutiny wholly as a tale “of native betrayal and imperial martyrdom” so as “to represent themselves not as India’s oppressors but as its gallant and benign victims” (109, 112). A more accurate statement of the argument of Trevelyan’s book about the “cruel and inglorious struggle” against the Mutiny would follow Charles Ball’s disillusioned description of this “most arduous and most discouraging kind of war,” in which, as he memorably says, formulating a very different paradigm from that of a melodramatic clash of good and evil, “the cruelties perpetrated on the one hand, and the merciless retaliation pursued on the other, placed the contending forces almost beyond the pale of civilisation and humanity” (1:622). The rampaging British soldiers in Cawnpore were hardly to blame, Trevelyan declares in relation to Neill, “when the ablest among our officers had forgotten alike the age in which he lived, and the religion which he professed” (273). It would be hard to find a clearer illustration of Baucom’s concept of the British Empire as “the place onto which the island kingdom arrogantly displaces itself and from which a puzzled England returns as a stranger to itself,” “the territory of the loss of Englishness” (3, 6). What needs to be specified, though, is the particular form this frightening loss of national identity takes in Cawnpore. The culminating trauma of the Mutiny in this text is the discovery that Neill, idolized in 1857–59 as the very embodiment of British valor in a crisis that unmanned weaker men, in fact presented a case of pathological derangement. Neill arises late in this book as the monstrous counterimage of

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figures such as the self-sacrificial Mackillop or the tolerant, unvindictive Mowbray Thomson; he enacts for Trevelyan just that gruesome reversion to a primitive racial past at which the text has been hinting all along, though seeming only in its last pages to come to a full grasp of its own implications. Trevelyan quotes at length, giving to it the status of a key document in the historiography of the Mutiny, the letter in which Neill proudly describes instituting the “fearful punishment” of forcing Hindu mutineers to contaminate themselves by cleaning up patches of the murdered ladies’ and children’s blood before being taken out to be hanged (273–74). “For a parallel to such an episode we must explore far back into the depths of time,” says Trevelyan, bringing forward with maximum emphasis his ide´e fixe of the linking of present and past (274). Reminding us of his continuing invocation of Homeric models in particular, he then cites, again at length, the chillingly cruel passage from the Odyssey in which the returned Odysseus and his son Telemachus force the maidservants, who had cooperated with the suitors, to clean the hall before being hanged (274). The juxtaposition of the British commander’s letter and the passage from the great epic might seem like the culminating instance of that ostensibly glorifying association of Mutiny heroes with Greek ideals of nobility that has run through the book. But, of course, the juxtaposition here, to which all the others seem now to have been deceptively leading, is suddenly an ironic one that highlights both the vindictive cruelty of warrior society and the fatal incompatibility of Homeric models and modern English identity. Neill’s atavistic savagery—again, a reversion to a barbaric past by this officer who “had . . . forgotten the age in which he lived”—forms the coda of Trevelyan’s study, leaving readers at the time, surely, bewildered to witness the displacement of Nana Sahib from the role of the diabolical villain of the piece by a British figure widely considered one of the heroes of this war and the epitome of “the true British character.”

KAYE’S AMBIVALENCE Neill certainly is given the heroic treatment in John William Kaye’s threevolume History of the Sepoy War in India (1864–76), the standard Victorian history (along with its three companion volumes by G. B. Malleson). At the end of volume 3, Neill is named as one of the triumvirate of the greatest martyr-heroes of the conflict, the other two being Sir Henry Lawrence and General John Nicholson, who was killed in the assault on Delhi. It is a somewhat unlikely grouping, if one recalls, for instance, Montgomery Martin’s deification of Lawrence as the representative of an ethic sharply at odds with the fierce military credo of the other two. In yoking

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such contraries together, Kaye signals the ambivalence that is the prevailing characteristic of his history. Having traced such effects in detail through a series of his predecessor historians’ books, we will be able, I think, to discuss his fairly succinctly. For Kaye, the Mutiny is once again first and foremost a testimonial to British national character, a concept much explored not just in Mutiny literature but in British writing generally around this time.22 The insistency with which it is addressed in all this writing makes clear the anxiety surrounding the subject at the time, yet Kaye makes plain that in his own text it is intended as a wholly honorific category. The war against the Mutiny, he proclaims histrionically at the outset, signifies “perhaps, the most signal illustration of our great national character ever yet recorded in the annals of our country” (1:xii). There will be no need for anachronistic harkings back to past models of greatness, in other words. His theme, Kaye says plainly, is “the gallantry and fortitude of my countrymen in doing and in suffering. No one could rejoice more in the privilege of illustrating their heroic deeds than the author of these volumes” (2:xvi). This expressly nationalistic and eulogistic motive of narrating what he entitles “the story of English heroism” (2:344) is reiterated frequently by Kaye. Yet this strong current of rhetoric does not, after all, flow unimpeded in his book. Its very excess of rhetorical emphasis will suggest to any reader that it originates in the bad conscience that analysts have identified as a structural constituent of the European colonialist mentality, and the suggestion is confirmed by an abundance of materials in the History of the Sepoy War that fail to bear out a high estimate of the British record in India. The entire first volume (more than six hundred pages: this is history cast on the monumental scale of Ball’s) turns out after promising its readers a parable of “our great national character” to be void in fact of British nobility and heroic deeds, for it devotes itself to tracing exhaustively, and in a tone that is the opposite of nationalistic, the antecedents and likely causes of the uprising. Like Ball and Martin (and, need I say again, contrary to the current stereotype of Victorian imperial commentary), Kaye rehearses a great litany of British folly, rapacity, and injustice, the causes to which he attributes Indian rebelliousness. Arrogance, besetting national vanity, and other debilitating flaws of character cause British government in India to be productive, despite all good intentions, of widespread injustice and maladministration, says Kaye. The fatal annexation of the kingdom of Oudh by Lord Dalhousie was a sign of a “grievous lust of dominion” (1:135) and was particularly culpable, the historian argues, for committing “a cruel wrong and a grievous error” (1:160) against the talukdars or great landholders. The British government carried out against them what Kaye calls, in what by now is a profoundly loaded

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phrase, a “great war of extermination” (1:177) and unleashed a tyrannical “reign of terror” (1:170) upon Bengali society. For hundreds of pages, Kaye rehearses a detailed historical indictment against the reckless selfrighteousness with which the British attempted to remake India according to their own prejudices. “The evil lay broad and deep in the national character,” he says in a striking formula (2:103). “The story of English heroism” is deferred for a surprisingly long time in Kaye’s History while these matters are traversed. Clearly this is a text set from the beginning under the sign of very extreme ambivalence. And the telling of the Mutiny story, when it does proceed, turns out to be less purely affirmative than Kaye seemed to promise. This is because once again, as in all the histories that we have surveyed, the analysis of British national character focuses on a potentially irremediable inner contradiction between the two phases or potentialities that inhabit it, the phase of mercy, sympathy, and tolerance and the phase of retributiveness. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the “great crisis in our national history” (3:654) articulated by Kaye is not the one involving the struggle against the sepoy army, desperate as that struggle was, but the internal one between two conflicting imperatives of British personality. He articulates the point with unsurpassable clarity. After Neill and his forces recapture Allahabad, he writes, “now there lay before them the great question—the most difficult, perhaps, which soldiers and statesmen ever have the responsibility of solving—whether, after such convulsions as have been illustrated in these pages, true righteousness and true wisdom consisted in extending the hand of mercy and aiming at conciliation, or in dealing out a stern and terrible retribution” (2:268). Kaye wrestles with this conundrum throughout his book, an extended dialectical treatise on ethics in the guise of historiography. He documents fully the overriding British choice, particularly in the earlier stages of the war, for that definition of “righteousness” that gives primacy to “stern and terrible retribution”; and he by no means disavows the “avenging thirst for blood” (2:170) that, as he shows, galvanized “the Army of Retribution” (2:192) in the aftermath of the massacres at Cawnpore, Delhi, Jhansi, and other stations. If Trevelyan’s book took the Homeric epics as its literary point of reference, Kaye’s takes as one of its own inspiring texts (though without ever referring to it by name) John Milton’s vindictive sonnet “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont,” which begins: “Avenge O Lord thy slaughter’d Saints, whose bones / Lie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold.” This phraseology resonates through the History of the Sepoy War, reminding us of what it specifically means for this author to portray the war in India as an expression and vindication of “the great national character” (2:362). “That a number of Christian people should be thus foully massacred was a great sorrow,” the historian

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observes in reference to the public executions of fifty or so British captives in a public square in Delhi, “but that nothing should be done to avenge the blood of our slaughtered countrymen was a far greater shame” (2:100). The European troops as they assembled for the push against Delhi “had the blood of their slaughtered countrymen to avenge,” he says (2:178). Neill arrives in Benares “eager to avenge the blood of his slaughtered countrymen” (2:217). The Miltonic echoes—echoes of the seventeenth-century English Puritan mentality—that run almost subliminally through this text reinforce Kaye’s evident awareness that the “eager desire to find criminals and to execute judgment upon them” displayed by the British forces in 1857–59 represented a deeply ingrained trait of British character (the one Westermarck calls “retributive desire” [Origin 1:91]) and one inseparable from the soldierly courage and endurance that he regularly celebrates. “It was not easy for the hands of authority to restrain the retributive impulses of our people,” he memorably declares (2:170). An admiring portrait of James Neill, that iconic figure so bitterly portrayed by Trevelyan, forms the centerpiece of Kaye’s apologia for British retribution in India. The author’s militant evangelical piety (which he shares with Ball and Martin) is put plainly on display in volume 1, and his accounts of both Neill and Havelock emphasize their own puritanical religious faith. Neill, says Kaye, “was a God-fearing Scotchman, with something in him of the old Covenanter type” (2:130). The historian declares that the entire war effort and “the great national courage of the English” (2:208) that it exemplified were inseparable from hereditary religious faith. “Whilst some, girding up their loins, were eager to anticipate danger and to strike at once, smiting everywhere, hip and thigh, like the grand remorseless heroes of the Old Testament, others were fain to oppose to the mass of rebellion that was surging upwards to the surface, the calm impassive fortitude of patient resolution, born of an abiding faith in God” (2:208)—a formula, we note, that again depicts Victorian piety as sundered into two antithetical forms. Neill is celebrated in A History of the Sepoy War for epitomizing the phase of extreme proactive Old Testament violence in unqualified form. Not only does he inflict morally imperative retribution upon the authors of horrible crimes, but, Kaye argues in more than one passage, in so doing, he actually is following the prompting of a higher compassion. “He came to strike and to destroy. He was one of those who wisely thought from the first, that to strike promptly and to strike vigorously would be to strike mercifully,” by suppressing the rebellion and ending the bloodshed as swiftly as possible (2:217–18). This, of course, is one more variant of the argument, crucial, I have suggested, to the maintenance of the Victorian ideological economy, that wrath and sympathetic benevolence were not necessarily antagonistic principles but coeval, interlinked, complementary ones.

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Yet Kaye’s eulogizing of the “avenging angel” Neill is at odds with masses of other materials in the History that argue for a contrasting set of judgments. The work as a whole is conceived, in fact, as an extended moral fable of which the lesson, no less compelling for never being expressly stated and for being everywhere in tension with its opposite, is that of the need for sympathy and charitable understanding even of one’s enemies: the lesson that is rehearsed in a host of Victorian novels. “The fears and discontents of powerful classes, who felt that they had been downtrodden by the English, that their old dynasties had been subverted, their old traditions ignored, their old systems violated, their old usages contemned, and that everywhere the reign of annexation and innovation had commenced, and was threatening to crush out the very hearts of the nations, struck deep root in the soil” (3:306). Kaye at such moments sounds almost like a patriotic Indian nationalist urging resistance to the imperialist yoke. As for the uprising itself, Kaye evidently reflects the impact of the iconoclastic Montgomery Martin on Mutiny historiography by strongly stressing sepoy panic as the precipitating cause of the outbreaks—panic at the caste desecration to which they were exposed from the greased cartridges, and panic at rumors of a British plot of treacherous violence against them. They were moved, that is, not by diabolical malice but, Kaye says, by a “great panic of despair, out of which came the spasm of madness which produced such unexpected results on the Sabbath night [of May 10, 1857, at Meerut]” (2:57). Even Kaye’s portrait of the archfiend of the Mutiny drama, Nana Sahib, is conspicuously muted (3:371– 72). Allied to his surprisingly exculpatory portrayal of the mutineers is his sharpening critique of that glorification of British national character that he earlier declared to be the motivating purpose of his book. He speaks ever more scornfully in the latter portions of the History of “that national self-love, which so often over-rides truth and justice in our estimate of and our conduct towards others” (3:312). “Blinded by the intense national self-love, of which I have so often spoken,” he reports in one typical passage, “[the bigoted Colonel H. M.] Durand . . . could not discern the fact, that the great burden of responsibility for all these troubles was upon our own shoulders” (3:347). Long before this, though, Kaye zeroes in on the demented savagery of the British troops, and on the unrestrained “feeling of hatred against the coloured races” (2:602) that inflamed it, as the great moral crisis of the Mutiny. Like every other reputable Victorian commentator of the war after the earliest days, he debunks the tales of aggravated atrocities supposedly committed by the sepoys (2:373, etc.), but he compiles, by contrast, a great register of authentic atrocities committed by the British in their frenzy of “retributive impulses.” One of the epicenters of the frenzy was Benares in June 1857. “Already our military officers were hunting

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down criminals of all kinds, and hanging them up with as little compunction as though they had been pariah-dogs or jackals, or vermin of a baser kind,” he reports; military commissions were soon busy “sentencing old and young to be hanged with indiscriminate ferocity.” (In the lexicon of Mutiny writing, the word “indiscriminate” had long since come to be invested with the most atrocious connotations, as we have seen.) Kaye quotes a letter from one man boasting of the numbers he had hanged, his victims “being strung up, as though for a pastime, in ‘the form of a figure of eight’ ” (2:236, 237). In its anatomy of what it unforgettably terms “the vindictive eagerness which longed to be let loose, not only upon proved murderers and mutineers, but upon whole races of men guilty of the unpardonable offence of going about with dark skins over their lithe bodies” (3:6), Kaye’s book testifies unequivocally and in a tone of absolute condemnation to that genocidal, exterminating impulse that seems to have been intimately bound up with the “heap of platitudes about Humanity and Civilisation” that, he scornfully declares, lay at the core of Victorian imperialist ideology (3:427), and—though this is an insight that he cannot quite avow in explicit language—with “the courage and constancy of the national character” (3:220). What he had described as “the story of English heroism” becomes in such passages as these about as scathing a judgment upon his countrymen and as cogent a diagnosis of the violence of imperialist racism as the most virulent anti-Victorianist could wish. Kaye describes the Mutiny, then, as a historic moment of choice between two competing schemes of value, each as characteristic of the British nation as the other: stern Old Testament justice (or its practical form, “indiscriminate ferocity”) and mercy. Increasingly, as the History unfolds, it espouses the code that unites it not, after all, with the attitude of Milton’s vengeful sonnet but with the moral sensibility of mid-Victorian prose fiction: the code of toleration, compassion, and humanitarianism, in which the presiding imperative of conduct is that of “sympathy.” Hence his portrait of the enlightened and prescient William Tayler, the Sir Henry Lawrence—like commissioner in Patna,23 who “had studied the Native character, as only it can be rightly studied, with large-hearted toleration and catholicity of sentiment”—in the spirit, we may say, of what George Eliot held up in The Mill on the Floss (1860), a book in which the ethic of self-righteous punishment is subjected to a focused critique, as “a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human” (435). Making the point that had become, we have seen, a commonplace in Mutiny commentary, Kaye quotes from one of Tayler’s reports on the lamentable state of British relations with Indians: “We are . . . isolated from their hearts by the utter absence of all individual feeling or sympathy” (3:70, 69n). The bigoted Colonel Durand at Indore, who “looked at everything through the pure

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crystal of Christianity,” says Kaye, “wanted imagination” and exhibited the fatal character flaw: he was “lacking [in] sympathy” (3:324–25). The original instructions for the administration of Oudh in February 1856 had many merits, Kaye opines. “But lacking the great essential of sympathy, they were utterly unsuited to the purpose” (3:428). Sir Henry Lawrence, the embodiment of would-be benevolent imperial rule, “was a man equally just and tolerant,” says Kaye; “he had large human sympathies which no amount of wrong-doing on the part of others could repress” (3:439). His prime characteristic was “his own sympathising nature. All men loved him because he loved all men. It was this sympathy that so especially suited him for the work of Indian Government” (3:518). We have noticed that Mutiny literature generally and Kaye’s History in particular are marked by attempts, sometimes rhetorically grotesque ones, to bring the ethic of “sympathy” into line with military necessities by portraying the two adversarial phases of ideal British character, stern masculine righteousness and feminine sympathetic mildness, as not antagonistic after all but as harmoniously complementary. In Charles Napier North’s Journal of an English Officer in India (1858), to cite another version of this topos, a fugitive family finds its way into the camp of Havelock’s army and the troops, gathering for a moral tableau of a kind much to this author’s taste, surround the European woman. “Fine fellows they are!” he exclaims. “And most truly are their hearts open to the influence of melting charity! Lips that have breathed the firmest imprecations of vengeance against the destroyers, whose ruthless hearts quenched their lust for slaughter in the blood of gentle women and innocent babes, now fashion the softest expressions of sympathy” (149). Sympathy, the cardinal virtue, and the spirit of vengeance are not mutually exclusive, North assures his readers; bloodthirsty vengefulness need not be dehumanizing. (The anxiety that they may be mutually exclusive after all is, of course, the unvoiced theme of North’s homily.) Much the same principle is basic to what is perhaps the founding text of Mutiny historiography, G. B. Malleson’s influential Mutiny of the Bengal Army, of which the first part, the “red pamphlet,” appeared in late 1857. This furious polemic denouncing the British authorities’ reluctance to “execute terrible vengeance” (188) against the mutineers asserts by another reasoning that vengefulness and tender sympathy (here, for the sufferings of the sepoys’ murdered European victims) are not just reconcilable but identical. The interposing of legalistic red tape and other obstacles “between our soldiers and retributive justice,” Malleson declares, gives evidence of “the cold-hearted nature of our rulers, their want of sympathy with humanity, if that humanity be allied with their own” (197). Humanitarian sympathy and peremptory vengeance are by this logic, again, one and the same thing. Such an effect duplicates in inside-out form the argument often

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alleged in defense of British deeds in India that this or that act of “indiscriminate ferocity” was merciful in the long run. Though “certain mock philanthropists may cry out” about his liquidation of the 26th N.I., protests Frederic Cooper, “their extermination probably saved the lives of thousands” (166). True philanthropy and true “sympathy,” as opposed to the contemptible spurious kinds, do not draw the line at “extermination.” In Kaye’s effort to unravel these “questions of novel and momentous sophistry” that proliferate in Mutiny discourse and suggest that moral norms have been thrown by events in India into head-spinning incoherence, watershed moments come in two passages situated strategically at the midpoint of the second volume (and thus of the History itself). In the first (2:268–71), a long meditation titled “Retribution,” Kaye portrays the scene of English vengeance upon Allahabad at its recapture by his hero Neill in June 1857. For once, all the rhetoric of justified punishment that forms the supporting framework of much contemporary Mutiny literature drops away. “Soldiers and civilians alike were holding Bloody Assize, or slaying Natives without any assize at all, regardless of sex or age. Afterwards, the thirst for blood grew stronger still,” Kaye reports in his most austere and laconic prose. He quotes official records acknowledging that “the aged, women, and children, are sacrificed, as well as those guilty of rebellion,” in the rampant burning of villages. “Englishmen,” he writes in his own voice, “did not hesitate to boast . . . that they had ‘spared no one,’ and that ‘peppering away at niggers’ was very pleasant pastime, ‘enjoyed amazingly.’ ” In three months’ time, says Kaye, citing another of the large exterminatory numbers that horrifically punctuate Mutiny annals, six thousand people were killed in Allahabad, turning the town into a charnel house. Picking up on Martin’s earlier suggestion, he evokes the possibility that the massacre of the women at Cawnpore not long afterward was actually provoked by this slaughter.24 Kaye derives from these events the moral lesson that is at the antipodes of the imperialistic racism so often said to be paramount in Victorian Mutiny commentary: “the great lesson of Universal Toleration” (2:270). There is no argument here that “stern and terrible retribution” is identical to mercy and benevolence. Nor is there in the other watershed passage I wish to highlight, an extended discussion of Neill’s campaign of retribution in Cawnpore itself (2:386–403) that shows Kaye struggling, never fully successfully, to absolve the British of guilt for their brutalities there. At some points in warfare, he notes, echoing Trevelyan, “the instincts of a brutal nature are stronger than the conscience and the reason of man,” and in Cawnpore, the British forces, yielding wholly to these instincts, “spared neither sex nor age, yielded to no pity, and abstained from no crime.” Again he identifies this “retributory carnage” as the manifestation of essentially geno-

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cidal impulses. “Those were days,” he says, “in which whole races were looked upon as enemies, and whole cities were declared to be guilty and blood-stained.” He states in defense of these soldiers who had, by his account, abandoned conscience and reason that their acts were, even so, “not wholly . . . unrighteous,” for they had at their base “a just hatred and horror of the crime of the wrong-doers” (2:386). What is more significant than assessing the persuasiveness of so casuistic a brief on behalf of the deranged soldiery is the fact that Kaye makes the issue of British “sanguinary acts” (2:271) central to his view of the war and dramatizes it urgently. No observant reader, I think, could possibly mistake the History of the Sepoy War as being the confident eulogy of British national character that Kaye himself sometimes claims that it is. When he comes in this same passage to the evaluation of Neill’s conduct in particular, the argument seems similarly conflicted. Recalling Trevelyan, he quotes at length an extended statement of Neill’s describing and defending the “strange law” that he invented when he was in command in Cawnpore, portraying these measures as religiously inspired. “I will hold my own, with the blessing and the help of God,” says Neill. “I cannot help seeing that His finger is in all this” (2:400). Having introduced such a damning piece of evidence, Kaye defends his declared hero against facile condemnation. “If ever, in the history of human strife, it were righteous” to have recourse to such cruel practices, he says, taking refuge in an obfuscating qualification that expresses all his ambivalence, “it was whilst the blood of our innocents was still red in the slaughter-house” (2:400). Many wise men at the time felt it their duty to disavow mercy, he says, illustrating the point by quoting an astonishing document new, I think, to the historiography of the Mutiny: John Nicholson’s letter to his fellow Punjab administrator Herbert Edwardes (like him and like Neill, an ardent evangelical) in which he announces his intention to propose a bill for “the flaying alive, impalement, or burning of the murderers of the women and children at Delhi” (2:401). “If I could, I would inflict the most excruciating tortures I could think of on them with a perfectly easy conscience,” declares Nicholson, the venerated hero-martyr of the reconquest of Delhi (2:402). The idea of legalizing such tortures sprang not from personal bloodthirstiness on Nicholson’s part, Kaye declares, but on rigorous reasoning from the biblical injunction, which Calvinistic Victorians, as I argued in the previous chapter, were inclined to regard as the very basis of religion, “that stripes shall be meted out according to faults” (2:401). “There was a remorseless logic in the arguments on which [Neill and others] built up this faith” in the need for instituting a policy of “exceptional severity of punishment,” says Kaye (2:400), heavily underlining this culminating instance of “the novel and momentous sophistries” occasioned by the Mutiny. A critic of nineteenth-century Christianity such as

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Feuerbach, or of the hereditary British code of punitiveness such as Eden, Romilly, or Westermarck, would argue that Nicholson’s “remorseless logic” should be regarded not as a demented aberration but as a line of reasoning laying open to view the “essence” of national religious sensibility. At all events, no other text of the day illustrates more glaringly than this letter of Nicholson’s the potentially extreme disconnect in Victorian moral ideology between the principle of punishment, here exhibited in an undisguisedly sadistic form, and the principle of sympathy and tolerance. Kaye offers at this critical moment in his book a defense of punitive cruelty on the express basis of religious duty. “Christian piety . . . was not slow to rebuke” those whose compassion made them “reluctant to smite heavily at the persecutors of our race,” Kaye writes. He cites a letter to Henry Tucker (an ardently pious commissioner at Benares) from a person whom he identifies only as “one of the purest hearts . . . in all our Christian community.” “I fear . . . your natural tenderness,” writes this pure heart. “But, consider that we have to crucify these affections as well as our lusts. . . . The Word of God gives no authority to the modern tenderness for human life which would save even the murderer” (2:402). Here is the punishing Calvinistic mentality in its quintessential form—a cultural phenomenon to some extent obsolete at home in England by the late 1850s but still a massive presence in Victorian psychic and social life. Kaye then ends his extended meditation on Neill’s reign in Cawnpore with an unexpected twist. “What is dreadful in the record of retribution is, that some of our people regarded it not as a solemn duty or a terrible necessity, but as a devilish pastime, striking indiscriminately at the black races, and slaying without proof of individual guilt” (2:403). Christian moral severity transformed itself in Cawnpore into devilish genocidal savagery. Neill himself is placed finally under the shadow of a dire reservation. He was convinced, Kaye declares, that the “terrible punishment” he ordained was inflicted only upon “actual perpetrators of the great crime which he was called upon to punish . . . ; and we must all devoutly hope that he was right” (2:403). Clearly the historian has grave doubts. He offers in any case not the slightest evidence of judicial scrupulousness on Neill’s part to buttress the devout but very wan hope. It is at about this midpoint stage of the History of the Sepoy War that its tide of argument seems to shift and the moral about the primacy of sympathy and toleration begins to take over the rhetorical foreground from earlier apologias for the “avenging thirst for blood.” In ensuing decades, the complex of values centered on sympathy and humanitarianism that formed the core of mid-Victorian popular moral ideology came unraveled (as did also, as the theory of their intimate interconnectedness would predict, the culture of Calvinistic evangelicalism) and was replaced by a notably desentimentalized set of attitudes—ones

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more suited in some ways to the roughly masculine administration of empire under the “New Imperialism” at the end of the century. Historians’ inflections of the Mutiny changed accordingly. When T. Rice Holmes comes, for example, to recount Frederic Cooper’s annihilation of the 26th N.I. in his History of the Indian Mutiny (1883), he not only exonerates him on the grounds of the exigencies of circumstances but also praises him as a British hero and, in what is by now a familiar polemical formula representative of the severe inner divisions that traversed Victorian culture, anathematizes those who had pilloried him for his cruelty and ruthlessness. “For this splendid assumption of responsibility Cooper was assailed, as other men of his mettle, both in the East and the West Indies, have been, by the hysterical cries of ignorant humanitarians,” writes Holmes (363). Or there would be G. B. Malleson’s Indian Mutiny of 1857 (1892), which takes another tack to the same issue, passing over virtually without notice the entire subject of the British campaign of retribution that was central to the accounts of earlier historians (and to his own Mutiny of the Bengal Army in 1858), then in a late passage (405–6) categorically declaring that “not only was [British] retaliation not excessive,” but it “did not exceed the bounds necessary to ensure the safety of the conquerors.” By this late stage of the century, the stricken conscience, the commitment to moral accountability, and the humanitarian ethic that animated Montgomery Martin and other historians of an earlier day had obviously become obsolescent. One may look back to the mid-Victorian generation, its manifold blindnesses and complicities notwithstanding, with a sense of loss.

Chapter Five

The Infernal Kingdom of A Tale of Two Cities

FICTION AND TRAUMA If “the cataclysm of the Mutiny” (Fitchett 267) did constitute what can properly be termed a cultural trauma for Victorian Britain—if it inflicted damage on Victorian cultural institutions comparable to the paralyzing damage of psychological trauma—its effects are bound to be legible in what had become by this time the primary medium of Victorian artistic expression: the popular novel. The convulsion of 1857–59 coincided with what seems in retrospect, as it did to observers at the time, like the endpoint of a dozen or so years of an unsurpassed efflorescence of novelistic invention.1 To many contemporaries, the sudden emergence of the vogue of trashy-seeming, indecent “sensation fiction” in the early 1860s signified the collapse of this glorious period of popular literature. In the next chapter we will consider the possibility that the “terrible break” of the Indian rebellion marked itself on the cultural body of Britain in the form of a perhaps unhealable fracture inflicted upon the English novel. I wish to highlight here some general considerations arising from the nexus of the Indian crisis with Victorian popular fiction, a nexus that sheds light on the nature of both. Hilda Gregg’s 1897 article on fictional portrayals of the Mutiny set forth what amounted to a major discovery (since forgotten) about the cultural history of nineteenth-century Britain: the discovery that the great archive of sixty or so novels about the Mutiny produced in the second half of the century testifies to the overshadowing significance of 1857–59 in Victorian consciousness ever afterward. She notes at the same time the striking fact of “the length of time which elapsed before its ‘value’ (we use the word in its dramatic sense) was perceived” (219). The bulk of Mutiny fiction, that is, concentrates itself strongly in the latter part of the half century; Gregg finds “no fiction dealing with the subject” (220) prior to the 1864 Maurice Dering, by G. A. Lawrence, and the next instance in her survey is Henry Kingsley’s Stretton, published in 1869. Gautam Chakravarty’s recent census of Mutiny fiction is marked by many omissions (for instance, he fails to include either Maurice Dering or Stretton in his tally) but confirms Gregg’s finding of a significant lag time in the emergence of the Indian rebellion as a subject for fiction, followed by a

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flood of Mutiny novels in the 1890s.2 That the late-century literary vogue of the Mutiny was linked to the rise of an aggressive spirit associated with “the new imperialism” of the 1880s and 1890s seems evident; but I wish to focus for the moment on the roughly decade-long near-absence of the Mutiny from fiction, a phenomenon for which neither of the above critics ventures an explanation. It is all the more noteworthy in view of the great volume of writing about the Indian war that thronged the Victorian literary marketplace from the start in a range of nonfictional forms written by historians, journalists, memoirists, biographers, and political and religious controversialists—but not by novelists. In order to make sense of this lacuna, we need, I think, to begin with the premise that novelists’ prolonged avoidance of the Mutiny sprang not from any alleged slowness on their part in discovering its dramatic “value” but rather from a recognition that it was impossible for the time being to treat this subject in fiction. For novelists in the postwar years, that is, the Indian calamity was not a neglected or inadvertently overlooked subject but a forbidden, strongly repressed one. A more vivid indication of the traumatic character of the Mutiny for the Victorian mind could hardly be wished for—a psychological trauma being precisely an event one cannot bear to remember (and remembers obsessively as a consequence). It is precisely the absence of this subject from contemporary fiction that betrays the powerful grip it exerted on Victorian consciousness, in other words. It follows that such influence as the Indian Mutiny exercised on mid-Victorian fiction was chiefly of the uncanny kind that radiates out from an absent or unrecognized object of fixation that can only be identified by deciphering the more or less enigmatic signs that it projects onto various reflectors—in this case, as we shall see, textual ones. Considered in the light of a potential subject for novelistic treatment, the Mutiny exposed starkly to view certain dilemmas inherent in literary “realism,” as the guiding principle of Victorian fiction was called as of 1851 (Stang 148). On one level, the very genius of the British novel of the period for realistic verisimilitude incapacitated it for dealing with events that seemed to contemporaries like an eruption of nightmarish unreality or surreality, “a very fantastic business” (H. Kingsley 85) on an almost incomprehensible scale. In order to attempt the representation of such a subject, novelists who specialized in constructing patiently detailed exhibits of modern social life centered artistically and ideologically on middleclass domestic interiors would have needed to learn a new artistic vocabulary keyed to drastically revised principles of verisimilitude. No less incapacitating was the multifaceted problem of decency. Novelists must have felt prohibited from taking up the subject of the Mutiny by the appearance of indecency they would risk in turning an experience laden with stillfresh grief and horror into the commodity form of popular entertainment.

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And they were peculiarly subject to the decency problem in the broad form that it took for historians as well. As we saw, the latter repeatedly complained that the “indelicate” and even “unspeakable” character of many leading episodes in the Mutiny story was so extreme as to throw the possibility of factually authentic historiography of the war into jeopardy. This dilemma was a particularly acute and in fact a disabling one for the Victorian popular novel, bound as it was by the norms of taste that governed a literary mode identified with consumption in the middleclass domestic circle by a largely feminine and also juvenile public. The Victorian popular novel at mid-century took as its charter and the source of its creative vitality an ethic of respectability and didactic moral affirmation; in all its varied stylistic registers, it communicated to its readers, or was expected to (since insidious deviancy was a crucial part of its repertoire all along), optimistic fables of sympathy, sentiment, altruism, and moral self-discovery. It pitched itself to what the novelist Margaret Oliphant polemically described in 1867 as “that sublime respect for sentimental morality and poetic justice which distinguishes the British public” (261).3 In this socioartistic matrix, the dreadful Mutiny had no imaginable place; the oft-repeated statement that the story of the uprising was one of “horrors that seemed too great for utterance—too appalling for description” (Ball 1:298) amounted almost to a statutory prohibition in the realm of Victorian popular fiction. The Mutiny, we may say, confronted the Victorian novel with all the range of subject matter that it was constitutionally debarred from contemplating. By the same token, the Victorian reader’s habit of exorbitant emotional investment in the fortunes of vividly real-seeming fictional characters— the whole affective dynamic of nineteenth-century British realism, that is to say—made it next to impossible for novelists to portray the events of the spring and summer of 1857 in any manner that would be bearable by an already traumatized public. To read of the notorious Indian atrocities in newspapers and in historians’ accounts was bad enough, in fact barely tolerable; to experience them via the sympathetic intimacy with fictional characters that was the essence of this mode of fiction would have seemed a wanton assault on readers’ feelings. That such assaults came to function as tropes of artistic seriousness will be evident when we consider certain Mutiny novels from later in the century, by which time either the middleclass regime of feeling had shifted or a space had opened in the Victorian public sphere for fiction emancipated from servitude to middle-class domestic sensibilities. In the meantime, any novel attempting such effects would have been fated to duplicate the reception history of Sir Joseph Noel Paton’s 1858 Royal Academy Exhibition painting “In Memoriam,” which depicted in somewhat edulcorated and homiletic form a group of British women and children, evidently captives at Cawnpore, moments

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before their massacre (figure 6). All, implausibly enough, are handsomely dressed, decorously posed, and radiant with beauty and good health. Had Paton’s canvas depicted with the slightest fidelity to historical reality the condition of the Cawnpore captives after their ordeal of brutal imprisonment, Montgomery Martin observed with his usual relentless acerbity, it “would have been turned from with horror and loathing” (2:378): here was a field of historical reality where realism, faced with a choice between equally grotesque alternatives, dared not tread. As it was, the skulking sepoys who originally figured in the background rendered the painting “so excruciating” for viewers—the critic for the Illustrated London News condemned Paton’s work as “too revolting”—that the artist painted them out and replaced them by Highlanders coming to the rescue, in the process seemingly shifting the imaginary scene to that of the deliverance of Lucknow by Sir Colin Campbell’s army in November 1857 and rendering the funerary title nonsensical (Ward 531, 680n467). Artistic self-alienation of this kind (the need to veneer over “excruciating” materials with optimistic cover stories) was the fate that almost inescapably threatened other works on the Mutiny as well. The saturation of the British public with knowledge of the events of 1857–59 formed its own barrier to novelistic exploitation of these materials supposedly so rich in untapped dramatic values. “The events of that time are graven very deeply on the minds of all who witnessed them,” observes R. E. Forrest at the end of his 1891 Mutiny novel, Eight Days. “Reviewing my own work, I think they are graven too deeply for the purposes of fiction” (281). In such circumstances, the novelistic imagination may be not stimulated but handcuffed and, as Forrest says in a suggestive phrase to which we shall return, “apt to be overpowered with incident.” “The events of the Indian Mutiny are sure to dominate the narrator” (282). Partly he means that the well-known historical facts of the time impede a novelist’s usual prerogative of developing narrative interest by inventing a story line as he or she sees fit; partly he also means that the specifically traumatic character of the events of the Mutiny is “graven very deeply on the minds” of contemporary readers—which again is simply what it means for an event to be psychologically traumatic—and overpowers a novelist’s ability to narrate them in any more affirmative mode than the compulsively repetitious one of trauma itself. Perhaps Forrest has a further suggestion in mind as well. The deepest component of the Mutiny trauma, I have argued, may have been the shock given to the British national conscience by revelations of British cruelties perpetrated in India and by the spectacle of the rabid vindictiveness of the British public during at least the early months of the war. Fully to have registered this shock of conscience in fiction would have disrupted beyond repair the artistic principle on which mid-Victorian fiction depended: the

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Figure 6. In Memoriam, by Sir Joseph Noel Paton (by permission of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber)

principle of an inviolable moral continuity binding together in a unified circuit of feeling idealized heroes and heroines, wise and benevolent omniscient narrators, and, crucially, the idealized community of sympathetic readers—in effect the British nation itself—that is imagined to be participating uncannily in the story and is often interpellated directly by the novelist. This is exactly the principle defined by Oliphant in her equation

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of the rhetorical practices of Victorian novelists with the moral sentiments of “the British public.” The assurance of national virtue represented in this sense the implicit (that is, ideological) organizing idea of this class of novels, the idea on which their artistic wholeness depended. The risk, of course, was that this wholeness effect would be achievable only by mimicking and flattering the conventionalities of the middle-class novelreading public. The risk was different for novelists in the wake of bitterly disenchanting works on the Mutiny such as Russell’s Diary in India, Majendie’s Up Among the Pandies, or Frederic Cooper’s Crisis in the Punjab, for the assurance of national good-heartedness that presided over the imaginary of the Victorian novel could suddenly no longer be taken for granted. This disenchantment was precisely the cultural trauma of the Indian Mutiny. Was it not finally this very realization that was “graven too deeply [in the contemporary mind] for the purposes of fiction”? To the extent that this was so, writing serious fiction henceforth could not fail (so it must have seemed to prescient novelists) to require nothing less than a revision of the essential codes of British fiction writing. The problem can be framed at the same time from a slightly different angle. We have seen that British attitudes toward the war were passionately polarized in the Mutiny years. One main current of public opinion, especially in the early months, was furiously patriotic and retributive. It stood for violent hostility to the rebellion, but also for harsh denunciation of what it became commonplace to deride, as we have noted, as the “maudlin sentimentalities” and “mock humanitarianism” (Times, August 8, 1857: 12) of antiretributionists. A potential Mutiny novelist in the near aftermath of 1857 could scarcely afford to dissent from such attitudes. But the principles of “sentimental morality” and humanitarianism eulogized by Oliphant were at the same time absolutely integral to the mid-Victorian fictional imagination; a novel antagonistic to these principles would have been an artistic solecism, almost a contradiction in terms. It was an apparently insuperable predicament. No wonder that novelists in the aftermath of the great Indian rebellion shunned it as a taboo subject, leaving that expressive lacuna in fictional literature that I began by highlighting. Yet so significant an event as the war in India could scarcely be embargoed with impunity by a literary mode founded on the claim to offer a searching and truthful view of contemporary existence. Did the brilliant artistic achievements of the Victorian novel mask possibly insoluble incoherence in the ideology of the genre? In raising such questions, the multifaceted dilemma posed by the Indian Mutiny to the novelistic imagination signified a true cultural crisis, as the rebellion in its own right signified a geopolitical one: it signified a challenge to the viability of the modern British novel itself. How this challenge played itself out is the burden of

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the remaining portion of the present book. In this chapter and the one following, I consider two instances of novels of the immediate post-Mutiny moment that are propelled into uncharted artistic territory by their attempts to resolve the predicament that we have described.

A MISBEGOTTEN ALLEGORY Undoubtedly, the first significant piece of Mutiny fiction was not, after all, Maurice Dering but Charles Dickens’s Christmas story for 1857 in Household Words, “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners,” coauthored with Wilkie Collins (whose assignment was to write the second of the three chapters). In letters to Henry Morley and Angela Burdett-Coutts, Dickens makes explicit that his adventure tale set in a South American colony in the eighteenth century was meant to be recognizable as an extended reference to the rebellion that at that time was still blazing out of control in India. “I wish to avoid India itself,” he significantly writes in the former letter (we have seen why the avoidance would seem necessary); “but I want to shadow out . . . the bravery of our ladies in India”; he seeks to commemorate, he writes in the latter, “some of the best qualities of the English character that have been shewn in India” (Letters 8:469, 482–83). In other words, he conceived this project as a subterfuge allowing him a certain idealizing gesture consonant with that idea of national virtue usually only implicitly inscribed in Victorian fiction and with the current wave of patriotic feeling emanating from the war, but one exempted specifically from any burden of confronting directly the anguish-laden reality of events in India—not by any means a promising conception. (It is Dickens’s and Collins’s equivalent, in a sense, of Paton’s artistically incoherent overlayment of sepoys by Highlanders in his painting “In Memoriam.”) A group of British women and children, along with a few British marines, are captured in the story by a treacherous AfricanIndian pirate chief named Christian George King and held captive in the jungle until they are rescued by a detachment of British sailors. In the battle, the British kill the wicked pirate (as the British in India were never able to do to his evident original, Nana Sahib) and leave his body hanging in a tree, “with the red sun making a kind of a dead sunset on his black face” (206). About this tale, a couple of main points are to be made. The first of these has to do with its polemical and ideological rawness, which critics eager to convict Dickens and the culture he embodied of inveterate racism have construed in deeply malignant terms. “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners” is marked by an undeniable racial animus that certainly evinces one dismaying current of Victorian response to events in India. The pirates are referred to disparagingly as “Sambos”:

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we know from the testimonies of William Howard Russell and others the corresponding “hateful word” that was freely used by the British in India to refer to the natives of that country. “I never did like Natives, except in the form of oysters,” declares the narrator (170). William Oddie and Patrick Brantlinger focus on such factors in this work.4 That Dickens expressed racially inflammatory attitudes on more than one occasion has been well publicized. “I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested,” he wrote in an earlier letter about the Mutiny atrocities to Burdett-Coutts (8:459). The shocking phrase is essentially quoted in the story in the brave British captain’s rejoinder to the contemptible bureaucrat of the station (an obvious heavyhanded satire on Canning) when the latter argues for treating pirates “with great delicacy, consideration, clemency, and forbearance.” The captain states in reply that he intends “to exterminate these people from the face of the earth” (179). In “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners,” Dickens thus expresses “the pathological hatred of ‘natives’ that swept over England during the mutiny,” says Oddie (7; see Brantlinger, Rule 207). The statement is true, yet the defamatory portrait of Dickens as racist ought to mention at the same time, for one thing, his violent, uncontrollable loathing of slavery and his revulsion from his countrymen’s widespread sympathy for the Confederacy in the American Civil War at just this time (Johnson, Dickens 1:402–4). That the Mutiny could induce a man holding such views to utter the kinds of racially abusive sentiments that he did in his letter to Burdett-Coutts, and, to a lesser degree, in his notorious Christmas story, is a striking sign of the “terrible break” it had inflicted upon British thinking and on the British conscience even in its most impressively developed manifestations.5 The other main point to make about “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners” is that its artistically and intellectually paltry character ought immediately to suggest the unwisdom of making too much of it. The very fact of its joint authorship—with so undistinguished a collaborator as Wilkie Collins—is a plain warning against giving it exaggerated weight in any discussion of Dickens’s outlook on the Mutiny, race, or anything else. It is written throughout in thin, often inane, stylistically vacuous prose, and all of its characters and narrative situations are of the most schematic sort, scarcely fictional creations at all. The artistic crudeness of the tale seems almost like a rhetorical method designed to advertise the crudeness of the jingoistic response to the Mutiny that it expresses. The pirates who stand in for unrepresentable Indian sepoys are grotesquely wicked and wholly uninteresting (“they were, really and truly, more devils than men” [189]), vacant of the charisma and idiosyncratic glamour that enliven Dickens’s and Collins’s significant villains; the heroic British rescuers are all correspondingly admirable, almost parodically valiant, and

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artistically null and void. “At the helm of the first boat, Captain Carton, eager and steady. At the helm of the second boat, Captain Maryon, brave and bold” (199). Altogether this is a trivial occasional work cast in a literary register wholly discontinuous with that of the magnificent fullscale novels of this period of Dickens’s career, such as Bleak House and Little Dorrit; only in the most limited sense can it and they be said to be works of common authorship. Nor do the strains of patriotism and racist xenophobia in the tale have anything in common with any element of those other novels, pervaded as they are by utter despondency at the condition of contemporary England and by Dickens’s contempt for the nationalistic complacencies of “this boastful island” (Bleak House 137). These cautions are necessary to emphasize from the moment that one recognizes that Dickens produced another and a far more significant literary response to the Indian Mutiny a year afterward: A Tale of Two Cities (1859). This is a novel of consequence—much more consequence than criticism has typically discovered in it—and one in which the implicit train of thought regarding the Indian insurrection seems, as Grace Moore argues in Dickens and Empire (129), notably at odds with the one projected in Dickens’s and Collins’s unfortunate Christmas story.

MORAL INSANITY Nothing could make plainer the occlusion of the Mutiny in historical remembrance than scholars’ failure, or actually refusal, to recognize its connection to A Tale of Two Cities.6 At the end of his article on “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners” titled “Dickens and the Indian Mutiny,” William Oddie gingerly puts forward the possibility that “the fevered intensity of Dickens’s evocations of French atrocities” in A Tale of Two Cities may in part reflect “his feelings about the massacre of English victims in India” (15), but that is all he has to say on this point. Patrick Brantlinger peremptorily rejects Oddie’s suggestion: “no obvious parallels are drawn in the novel between the events of the French Revolution and those of the Mutiny,” he declares. It is a consequential point for both scholars, since any identification of the Mutiny with Dickens’s portrayal of the Revolution would leave the door open, Brantlinger rightly says, to a suggestion that the Indian upheaval, like the French one, had been provoked by oppression—an idea with which, he declares, Dickens, a violent jingoist in Indian politics, did not agree (Rule 208). At the risk of uncovering complexity or ambivalence in Dickens’s thinking on these matters, though, it must be said that the evidence of an inseparable linkage between the Mutiny and Dickens’s fictionalized revolution is too plain at first glance and too richly confirmed in webs of textual detail to require

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much proof. Not to stress this linkage is to deprive the novel of its immediate historical anchorage and to deprive the literary history of the Mutiny of one of its cardinal texts. We know from John Forster (2:280) that Dickens’s idea for his novel about a sanguinary revolutionary uprising, and then about its sequel, a great retributive program of mass executions, first came into his mind in the summer of 1857–that is, though Forster does not make this point, at precisely the moment when the appalling news from India first broke upon Britain. The composition of the book, beginning in February 1859 (immediately following in Dickens’s corpus “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners,” a declared allegory of the Mutiny), overlapped with the final phase of the rebellion, which was still playing itself out as the novel began its serial publication at the end of April. For its first readers, we may be sure, Dickens’s fictionalized revolution and the continuing drama in India were inescapably entangled. The question under the circumstances is not whether the French Revolution as depicted in A Tale of Two Cities is to be taken as another fictionally refracted image of the Indian Mutiny, but how the latter is in fact refracted in the book. I will cite in what follows more than a sufficiency of textual evidence to make apparent, I think, the Indian frame of reference of Dickens’s novel, but I propose for the time being not so much to argue the point as simply to take it for granted. The object of the exercise carried out in this chapter will not be to construct a table of correspondences between historical events and fictional ones but to see whether weaving Dickens’s novel back into the fabric of Mutiny literature may not help enhance its significance for readers of a later day. Except in a roundabout way, the Tale promulgates no specific views on those aspects of the Indian crisis that were roiling British public opinion in 1859–imperialism and the viability of its supposed philanthropic mandate, race relations, the politics of retribution and clemency. Its vital connection to the Mutiny lies rather in the extended meditation it pursues upon the kind of mass violence, particularly mass violence carried out under official or quasi-official auspices, that had been thrust shockingly into public awareness in Britain by the previous one and a half years of news from Upper India. Mass violence forms the key subject of the Tale and gives it both the motive of its philosophical dialectic and the impetus of its mode-bending distinctiveness in Victorian literary history: this premise forms, I think, the necessary basis of a renewed critical engagement with it. Dickens’s sudden fixation upon the subject of mass violence signals its presence by the formal distortion that it almost necessarily imposes on this novel, according to a logic that we need to begin by seeking to decipher. A Tale of Two Cities has often been praised, relative to other Dickensian narratives, for its supposed artistic unity, but it suffers in fact from

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“an essential defect in the entire composition,” as Georg Luka´cs said (244). This defect is the thematic disjunction of its treatment of historical events from the sentimental and domestic story centered on its cast of morally exemplary main characters: Dr. Manette, his daughter Lucie, Charles Darnay, and Sidney Carton. For Luka´cs, the structural flaw of the book exemplifies “the weaknesses of [Dickens’s] petty bourgeois humanism and idealism” (243), which supposedly prevent him from adequately articulating the social causes (chiefly rooted in class conflict, according to Luka´cs) underlying private individuals’ destinies in the modern historical environment. Yet the thematic disjunction in A Tale of Two Cities can be seen not as an artistic or ideological flaw but as the expression of a concerted novelistic intention and the mainspring of some of this novel’s most powerful and most unexpected effects. The irreparable thematic incompatibility of the didactic story of sentiment, virtue, and redemption centered on the lives of beloved characters (all that is contemptuously signified in the phrase “petty bourgeois humanism and idealism”) with the tableau of revolutionary violence can be seen to embody Dickens’s most profound conception for the novel, in other words. It seems quite precisely to suggest the caesura that the mid-Victorian novel is fated to endure at the moment when mass violence invades it, for this is a subject that it has no way to accommodate. It suggests, that is, that the “terrible break” of the Mutiny and the “essential defect” in the structure of this novel are one and the same. Does the “essential defect” of A Tale of Two Cities carry by extension a chilling intuition of the nullification of “humanism and idealism,” or of moral value itself, by convulsive historical events of modern times? of the obsolescence of moral sentiment when confronted with certain newly revealed modalities of violence? These extraordinary questions are the ones that Dickens’s clairvoyant novel finds itself entertaining, at the greatest possible peril not only to conventional norms of artistic unity but to the moral sensibilities of his contemporary readership. In the meantime, the ManetteCarton-Darnay story line of love and redemption, though it occupies, in accordance with the prescribed structure of mid-Victorian fiction, the ostensible center of the book, comes increasingly to appear marginal to it, as though its role were merely to provide a narrative pretext for the evocation of another phase of modern experience, one wholly estranged from potentialities of love or redemption, which otherwise would lie for just that reason beyond the reach of novelistic representation. A novel built on an experimental platform such as this evidently runs a great risk of taking a form unsuitable for popular consumption, or of tending to break in two before our eyes. In very knowingly running this risk, A Tale of Two Cities registers in its own severe internal stresses the stresses deeply affecting British public

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awareness in the closing months of the repacification of India. It registers in particular the shock of patriotic disillusionment that the war had produced and that Dickens, to judge from this work, seems to have undergone with unusual force. In his novel he does not allude to specific particulars of its Indian frame of reference; rather, he distills from contemporary Mutiny literature the idea of a historical moment marked by a catastrophic moral implosion. The historian Charles Ball formulates with great cogency what must have been the reaction of many in Britain to news of the Mutiny once the initial six months’ mania of jingoism had faded. In the “most arduous and most discouraging kind of war” fought in India in 1857–59, he writes, as we saw, “the cruelties perpetrated on the one hand, and the merciless retaliation pursued on the other, placed the contending forces almost beyond the pale of civilisation and humanity” (1:622). Not, after all, a Manichaean struggle of British Christian heroism and idealism against heathen savagery, it had come to be perceivable as an apocalyptically “merciless” war that had produced as its chief result the annihilation of “humanity” (we shall return to Dickens’s intensive exegesis of this term) in the land where it was waged. The distinguishing feature of British combatants in India, V. D. Majendie similarly reported, was not bravery or gallantry but, rather, “the carelessness and callous indifference with which they took away human life” (222). This same nihilistic attitude stamped itself unmistakably on the writings of the partisans of extreme retribution and the defenders of the likes of James Neill, many of which we have sampled in the course of previous chapters. The Bengal war thus came increasingly to be depicted to the Victorian public in the guise of that appalling thing, “a war of extermination, a war in which pity was unknown,” one in which the British were so “tortured by the fierce thirst of revenge” that they “spared neither sex nor age, yielded to no pity, and abstained from no crime” and in which respected moral and religious authorities advised the British people to dismiss from their hearts “all feelings of maudlin sentimental pity” (Majendie 196; Kaye 2:398n, 386; Duff 255). The appearance of such materials in the Victorian public sphere must have suggested compellingly to many contemporary readers—this is the claim of my book in a nutshell—that British India in the days of the Mutiny had suffered a metamorphosis into a truly satanic kingdom of cruelty and of what even Neill’s admirer the chauvinistic early twentieth-century historian W. H. Fitchett called “inhumanity unworthy of the English name” (147), a state of feeling in which the spirit of pity, clemency, and forgiveness had been violently abolished. A Tale of Two Cities suggests that Dickens had come to exactly this conclusion between the summer of 1857 and March 1859, when he began composing his novel about the rise to power

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of a group of insatiably vindictive people such as Madame Defarge, avengers, as the narrator says, “absolutely without pity” (344).7 The disillusionment generated by this “most arduous and most discouraging kind of war” expressed itself across a broad spectrum of Victorian political and cultural phenomena. It was reflected in postwar Indian policy, for one thing, in what amounted to the abandonment of the idealistic and reforming imperial mission that heretofore had served to ennoble the British overseas enterprise in Victorian eyes. Jettisoning the reforming enterprise in India (the project of improving the condition of the peasantry, for example) as politically untenable meant giving up the idea that India represented for the British a sphere of moral action based on benevolence and sympathy for native Indians. What remained in the absence of this idea was a system of authoritarian governance based on sheer military force and sustained by new alliances with the native potentates and great landowners whose power the British government had long sought to destroy.8 Karl de Schweinitz, Jr., describes the post-1857 regime in India by invoking the figure of the “terrible break” that is ubiquitous in Mutiny writing. The Great Revolt, he says, “was a break in the continuity of British governance in India. Thereafter, there was little pretense that imperial rule was anything but imperialist”; what was expunged “was the belief in and hope for Indian transformation that had animated much of the Company’s rule,” and what was embraced was “the naked power underlying British imperialist rule” (175, 172). That the altruistic humanitarian conception of imperialism in India was no doubt fatally self-deluding from the outset does not render any less noteworthy its ideological and cultural significance for nineteenth-century Britons, or the shock given to their moral universe by its failure. More germane to this juncture of my study, though, was the danger that the Indian upheaval posed to the possibility not of would-be humanitarian foreign policy but of humanistic Victorian fiction. Does the appearance of such works as Ball’s History of the Indian Mutiny, Majendie’s Up Among the Pandies, or L. E. Ruutz Rees’s retributionist Personal Narrative of the Siege of Lucknow (1858), each in its own way a vision of a world in which moral value has been brutally swept away, threaten with negation the discourse of the Victorian novel, predicated as it hitherto had been upon “sentimental morality and poetic justice”? Dickens focuses his thinking upon this question at this moment. Thus arises his conscious conception of this new work, according to Forster, along artistically hazardous new lines. “It differs as to method from all his other books,” says Forster (2:281), undoubtedly echoing the author’s own statements and suggesting his intuition that established methods of novel-writing had suddenly lost validity in 1859. His goal, Dickens said, was to construct a novel involving characters “whom the story should express more than

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they should express themselves by dialogue. I mean in other words, that I fancied a story of incident might be written . . . , pounding the characters in its own mortar, and beating their interest out of them” (Forster 2:281). Forster interprets this ambiguously sadistic-sounding formula to mean an intent “to rely less upon character than upon incident” (Forster 2:282). Evidently, the “essential defect in the entire composition” identified by Luka´cs—the disjunction of historical events from personal stories—is nothing other than precisely the artistically heretical experiment intended by Dickens to constitute the prime effect of this novel. For all its supposed petty bourgeois humanism, the novel in fact originates, I want to suggest, in the exactly contrary idea of a historical crisis in which private individuality and personal moral faculties are usurped and in some sense nullified by events. Dickens seems in forming this conception to have recognized exactly the predicament identified several decades later by R. E. Forrest: that in any philosophically serious narrative of the Indian Mutiny, fictional characterization is bound to be “overpowered with incident.” Designing a novel around the exposition of this principle has the effect of menacing nominally exemplary figures such as the Manettes, Carton, and Darnay with the fate of seeming to be nothing but dead or mortally ill metaphors masquerading as the kinds of substantial and expressive fictional entities called “characters” that populate other Victorian novels.9 This idea of the eclipsing of individuality and personal agency by historical circumstance forms a significant motif of Dickens’s main historiographic source for his portrait of the Revolution, Carlyle’s “wonderful book” (as he justifiably called it in the preface to the first edition) The French Revolution: A History (1837). Carlyle does in The French Revolution, as in other works of his, insist on the role played by potent individual actors able to assert themselves heroically against the annihilating influence of events: Mirabeau, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and MarieAntoinette are some of the leading ones in his narrative. But he negates any idea of the capacity even of such extraordinary personalities as these to control their own destinies by persistently emphasizing their embeddedness in a set of historical necessities governed implacably by fate, or natural law, or divine providence, as Carlyle indiscriminately names his sense of historical inevitability. “So it was appointed, in the decrees of Providence, that this same Victorious Anarchy, Jacobinism, Sansculottism, . . . should have its turn” (167). “Human things wholly are in continual movement, and action and reaction; working continually forward, phasis after phasis, by unalterable laws, towards prescribed issues” (312). Any Victorian novel written under the aegis of such a deterministic metaphysic as this would need to put radically into question all its usual morally affirmative vocabulary, which is to say, its vision of a human destiny that is conformable to the laws of poetic justice.

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The theme of the disablement of character takes accordingly in A Tale of Two Cities a particular form that clearly signals its linkage with the national trauma of the Mutiny: the incorporation into the story of what amounts to an extended fictionalized treatise on psychological trauma itself. The treatise centers in the first instance on the case histories of Dr. Manette and Madame Defarge. Dr. Manette is so traumatized by his eighteen years’ imprisonment in the Bastille that his personality comes undone and shoemaking (the one activity of his life over which he still exercised control) becomes his obsessive fixation. Long after his release and rehabilitation, he is prone, in one manifestation of a mode of utterly humorless slapstick comedy that forms a stylistic keynote of this book, to sudden relapses into shoemaking in times of stress; considerable discussion ensues as to the mode of psychotherapy best suited to the treatment of this disabling repetition compulsion. Madame Defarge’s symptomatology is so dissimilar to Dr. Manette’s that one might at first fail to recognize the parallelism of their conditions. Traumatized by the cruelties of the Evre´mondes when still a child, she has become as an adult, like the revolutionary movement she personifies, a dehumanized monster whose only motive is a vengeful monomania toward aristocrats. She is not so much a fictional character endowed with sensibility and volition as a crazed automaton helpless in the grip of her fixation. This monomaniacal fixity is one form of that negation of “character” that was at the center of Dickens’s idea for this novel. Yet another form of it is the antic behavior of the Paris mobs, examples as they are of an obviously damaged hysterical state of mind that, among other symptoms, causes them to veer farcically from calling for a potential victim’s blood to embracing him the next moment with rapturous affection. “The very same people” weeping with joy at Darnay’s temporary deliverance, he knows well, “carried by another current, would have rushed at him with the very same intensity, to rend him to pieces and strew him over the streets” (271). This is the disablement of character carried to an ultimate extreme. It is of a piece with this psychological thematic that the story patterns of A Tale of Two Cities seem at every step also to negate that possibility of affirmative moral agency that formed the very definition of “character” in the Victorian perspective. What appears in its place is an absurdist Alice in Wonderland effect that proliferates everywhere in this novel, thwarting nearly every attempt of the morally admirable characters at the accomplishment of significant action. In one paradigmatic instance of this effect, Charles Darnay, the high-minded humanitarian e´migre´, hears that an old family retainer has fallen foul of the revolutionary authorities in France and rushes back to rescue him—only to be immediately arrested and thrown in prison himself. We may be reminded of the grimly farcical episode in Majendie’s Up Among the Pandies in which the intoxicated drum-

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mer boy gallantly charges a sepoy position all by himself, armed with his “small toy sword” (219)—and is instantly chopped to pieces. In both episodes, the theme is the ludicrous futility of the protagonist’s deluded attempt at heroic action. The same idea is played out in a series of variations in the rest of A Tale of Two Cities. Dr. Manette is a venerated figure in the eyes of the revolutionary authorities, but his earnest testimony before the revolutionary tribunal on behalf of his beloved son-in-law serves only to plunge the latter into deeper peril; Lucie, no enterprising, energetic, effective heroine like Jeanie Deans, can do nothing to help her husband but stand outside the prison in all weather, staring mutely at the window where he may sometimes be; Darnay, the nominal hero who has become a hapless victim of circumstances, at last is bundled humiliatingly to safety so that another man can die in his place; the egalitarian idealism of the revolutionaries expresses itself only in the perverted form of fanaticism and sickening abuses. Ultimately, it is not so much that the novel suffers from an essential defect of structure as that an all-pervading incoherence prevails in its imagined world such that volition, acts, and consequences everywhere become disjointed and self-contradictory. Between the idea and the reality in A Tale of Two Cities, between the motion and the act, falls the Shadow: this ramifying principle of a precociously postVictorian mentality is central to the weirdly dissociative fictive texture of this novel. It is an effect that gives the widely registered post-Mutiny sensation of inhabiting a morally traumatized world a new quality of meaning and a new artistic vehicle.10 Its predominance in the story is only accentuated by the supposedly salvific episode of Sidney Carton’s climactic self-sacrifice. Only the most extravagant and hyperbolic act of personal heroism, the novel implies, can possibly salvage moral reassurance at the end of so disillusioned a narrative. Only such a conclusion could persuade a reader that A Tale of Two Cities is indeed a fable of the triumph of the good and the efficacy of virtuous “character.” But even here, reassurance may be illusory. Is Carton’s last act one of inspiring bravery and generosity that redeems the cause of moral idealism, or merely a suicide based on his hopeless infatuation with another man’s wife and his longing to look noble, for once, in her eyes (and at the same time to saddle his rival, Darnay, with the inexpungable guilt of his death)? Even if we rule such questions out of order and take Carton’s self-sacrifice to be unimpugnably high-minded, could it be anything but a novelistic hoax to suggest that one such act could offer consolation for the incalculable horrors of the Revolution that Dickens evokes so fully in the novel? As though almost perversely undermining his own climactic effects (this is the “essential defect” or selfcontradicting property of A Tale of Two Cities in another form), Dickens at one moment makes this point explicitly. “All the air around was so

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thick and dark, the people were so passionately revengeful and fitful, the innocent were so constantly put to death on vague suspicion and black malice, it was so impossible to forget that many as blameless as [Lucie’s] husband, and as dear to others as he was to her, every day shared the fate from which he had been clutched [when he is temporarily released from prison], that her heart could not be as lightened of its load as she felt it ought to be” (274). One should give its full weight to the severe moral that Dickens here draws: that amid such circumstances as prevail in France in 1792–93, no redemption of this or that privileged character (privileged in the sense of being one’s husband or the hero of the novel one is reading) can decently be taken as a consolation or grounds for optimism. To draw any such conclusion—the very one that the novel might be taken to propose—would be not just delusional but tainted with a particularly despicable form of egoism. This is Dickens’s express caution against readings like those of Michael Timko, who, like many another reader, sees A Tale of Two Cities and particularly Carton’s death on the scaffold as a kind of inspirational sermon designed to glorify “the celestial” in human character. “Rather than cruelty and killing, Dickens would rather bring out the essential nobility and goodness of man, the nobility that comes from his ability to cooperate with and indeed love other humans and further even be willing to sacrifice his life if necessary,” declares this critic (189). But much in the novel makes Carton’s melodramatic gesture look less like an act of affirmation than like an act of despair reflecting in its own way the condition of a morally stricken world. The chief sign of this stricken condition in A Tale of Two Cities is the engulfing of the French nation by that callous moral numbness with regard to taking human life that Majendie had declared to be the prevalent state of the British armies in India in the war against the Mutiny and that Martin showed in his devastating analysis to have extended its dehumanizing effects over the British nation as a whole. Nuclear explosions, as we know, give off a tremendous electromagnetic pulsation that causes all electronic communications systems within its range to collapse. An exactly similar principle governs the moral physics of Dickens’s novel. A Tale of Two Cities depicts an allegorical realm called “France” in which an explosion of atrocious violence has left in its wake not just the disjointedness effect that we have noticed but, above all, a state in which no moral communication, which is to say, in the words of Dickens’s narrator, “no touch of pity, sorrow, or kindred humanity” (308), seems able to pass from one person to another. This is the nullification of “character” in what from a Dickensian point of view (in which the faculty of sympathetic communication is the very essence of “character”) represents its ultimate form. The book may or may not suffer artistically from an “essential defect,” that is to say, but the moral world it imagines certainly does. In

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this world, “passionate revenge” (309) is the sole effective motivating force, and the condition known to Victorian psychiatry as “moral insanity” has in effect become well-nigh universal. James Cowles Prichard, the discoverer and analyst of this condition, defined it in his Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (1835) as mental disease characterized not by delusionality but by “a moral perversion, or a disorder of the feelings, affections, and habits of the individual” (7). Precisely in these terms, Dickens’s narrator, in a striking formula, gives a medical and spiritual diagnosis of the French populace in the revolutionary years as exhibiting a “frightful moral disorder, born of unspeakable suffering, intolerable oppression, and heartless indifference” (329). The French nation generally, that is, displays the symptomatology of massive and specifically moral trauma.11 In building a novel around this principle in 1859, Dickens, though his story is set in “France,” seems clearly to have in mind the great pulsation of “frightful moral disorder” that the nuclear explosion of the Mutiny had caused to reverberate in the Victorian psyche. This psychiatric mode of analysis of social and cultural phenomena marks at least for the moment a startling eclipse of the mid-Victorian novelistic code of “sentimental morality and poetic justice”; nor does it leave any room at all (a little more than a year after “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners”) for patriotic invocation. Indeed, the words “patriot” and “patriotic” represent almost uniquely malignant signifiers in the lexicon of A Tale of Two Cities. When Charles Darnay is condemned to death by the revolutionary tribunal, a victim of “the most revengeful passions of the time,” the narrator sees in the courtroom “wild excitement, patriotic fervour, not a touch of human sympathy” (316). At this moment, which defines in yet another set of terms the theme of the terrifying negation of humanistic values by historical events, “patriotic fervour” and the pathological state of being “absolutely without pity,” accessible to “no touch of pity, sorrow, or kindred humanity,” turn out to be identical. The term “patriot,” that is, functions in this novel essentially as the antonym of the term “human.” Often it is used in its perverted official sense to signify an adherent of the Revolution, but we should note that its first occurrence in A Tale of Two Cities comes in fact not in a French but in an English context, where patriotism is associated ironically with the contemptible courtroom spy, “the patriot . . . John Barsad” (62), who is praised by the prosecuting attorney as an especially luminous instance of “the bright virtue known as patriotism, or love of country” (61). This is fair warning that the stridently patriotic impulse that motivated Dickens’s Christmas story the year before might be destined in the present work for severely ironic revision, even as the book revises no less severely the ideology of the supremacy of “the feelings, affections, and habits of the individual” that formed the basis of respectable mid-Victorian fiction.

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MODES OF VIOLENCE Carlyle rehearses in The French Revolution a version of the theme that we have sketched: he portrays the Revolution, that is, as propelled inescapably toward a drama of violence and cruelty so extreme as to transform humanity itself or, as he prefers to phrase it, to release the usually suppressed and ignored diabolical potentiality of human nature. Given a collapse of belief in the organizing values of society, he warns, in a formula he invokes many times, “the whole daemonic nature of man will remain,—hurled forth to rage blindly without rule or rein; savage itself, yet with all the tools and weapons of civilization: a spectacle new in History” (13). “Alas then, is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?” (668). We recognize at such moments, which forecast one of the predominant motifs of Mutiny literature also, that the French Revolution in its Carlylean redaction seemed to Dickens the supremely significant historical analogue for contemporary events in India precisely because its accompaniments of violence and cruelty seemed in themselves, by their almost unthinkable extravagance, to signal “a spectacle new in History.” Carlyle’s phraseology here is echoed persistently by Mutiny writers such as William Brock, who declares in an 1860 biography of the war hero Havelock that the massacre of the women and children by Nana Sahib was “a deed of relentless cruelty to which history scarcely affords a parallel” (176), or J.E.W. Rotton, who indicts the sepoy mutineers for “atrocity and wrong without parallel in the history of nations both ancient and modern” (238), or Charles Ball, who declares that “the history of the world scarcely affords a parallel to the frightful and cruel outrages that, in the summer of 1857, cast a stain upon the annals of British India” (1:392). This was just what Disraeli meant also, I am sure, in speaking of the Mutiny in September 1857 as “one of those great events which form epochs in the history of mankind” (qtd. Ball 2:418): he meant first and foremost not that the Indian war posed an unprecedented challenge to British imperial rule but that it set an epochal new metric for man’s merciless inhumanity to man and that henceforth “the history of mankind” would need to reckon with the possibility that human beings under certain circumstances could pass “almost beyond the pale of civilisation and humanity.” The writings that we are surveying go far to suggest that it was the Indian Mutiny that first crystallized for the popular imaginary that category more recently and more indelibly defined by the mass murder of Jews by Germans under the Third Reich: the category of the ultimate crime, the ultimate standard of evil “without parallel in the history of nations.”

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This idea at all events is the one that governs Dickens’s portrayal of the Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities. Studying closely The French Revolution as he planned his novel, he could not have failed to be constantly aware of the replication of the “horrors of French Revolution” (Carlyle 167) by the Indian horrors that streams of newspaper accounts and books had thrust before the British public in the preceding year and a half. In some key instances, the homologies between macabre episodes in Carlyle’s chronicle and events in Bengal in 1857–59 must have seemed uncannily close. Carlyle narrates in detail, for instance, the terrible episode that took place on October 16, 1791, at Avignon. Following the murder of a revolutionary zealot in that city, the fanatical local leader Jourdan “Coupe-Teˆte” rounds up a crowd of aristocratic men, women, and children and subjects them to an impromptu court-martial on the spot. “Close by is the dungeon of the Glacie`re, or Ice-Tower: there may deeds be done—? For which language has no name!—Darkness and the shadow of horrid cruelty envelopes [sic] these Castle Dungeons, that Glacie`re Tower: clear only that many have entered, that few have returned” (399). A month later, Carlyle reports, 130 corpses are discovered heaped in the pit of the tower, “putrid, under putridities: the horror of the world” (400). This fearful episode in Carlyle would immediately have summoned to mind the scandal provoked by Deputy Commissioner Frederic Cooper’s infamous work of 1858, The Crisis in the Punjab, one of the texts of the day that brought home most vividly to the British public, as we have seen, the awareness of how moral insanity could masquerade as “Christian heroism” (Chakravarty 4) in the war to reinstate British power in Upper India. Cooper boasts in the book, it will be recalled, of having summarily judged, thrown into “a large round tower,” and there subjected to “extermination” 282 captured sepoys of the mutinous 26th N.I., whose bodies he then gloatingly piled into the well at Ujnalla (160, 166). Other materials in Carlyle were equally suggestive of Indian analogues and of the fundamental proposition guiding Dickens’s historical and philosophical parable: that the point at which the collapse of “civilisation and humanity” occurs is a point marked by violence. In order to chart Dickens’s elaboration of this essential theme, we may think of the violence inventoried in Mutiny literature as falling into four main modes or phases: (1) what Montgomery Martin (123) called the “insolent cruelty” directed routinely by the sahibs against the native population under the colonial regime; (2) the real and imagined atrocities committed by mutineers, rebels, and “the scum of the bazaars” against British victims in the spring and summer of 1857; (3) the violence of the two-year military conflict; and (4) the violence of the reprisals visited by British authorities and vigilante freelancers upon mutineers and other supposed rebels. Of the four intimately interconnected modes, Dickens ex-

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plores all but that of military combat—which by virtue of its regimented and impersonal character evidently seemed to him of lesser import for the spiritual diagnostics he had undertaken in this novel. The disaffected slant of his Mutiny allegory is indicated clearly enough in his treatment of the first category of violence, that of the quotidian brutality directed by upper-caste rulers against a subject population. His imagery of revolutionary lynch mobs scouring the streets of Paris for aristocratic victims mirrors vividly all the copious nightmare imagery in Mutiny literature of mobs of Indians scouring the streets of Delhi and other cities for British victims. Readers who assumed too quickly that a straightforward equation was to be drawn between devilish sepoys and devilish French revolutionaries must have been perplexed, however, at the stress given by Dickens to the oppressions of the ancien re´gime and to the novel’s rhetoric of clear initial sympathy with the rebellion.12 This area of A Tale of Two Cities reflects a significant shift in emphasis from Carlyle, who does strongly emphasize the corrupt and unconscionable nature of monarchic rule in France—so strongly as almost to imply that all the horrible crimes of the Revolution were not, after all, an exorbitant price to pay for the overturning of the regime13—but does not indict the selfish, effete, morally vacuous ruling classes for wanton brutality. Dickens, for his part, sets the portrayal of prerevolutionary France under the sign of compulsive violence from the start. As theorists and psychoanalysts of colonialism such as Albert Memmi, Octave Mannoni, and Frantz Fanon argue at a later date, Dickens implies strongly in A Tale of Two Cities that the result of unchecked racial, caste, or class domination can only be a reign of sadism in which the dominator, “to gain some psychological satisfaction, resorts to violence . . . of a peculiar kind, a theatrical sort of violence” (Mannoni 87). Among other morbid by-products, domination generates in the ruling group, so this line of analysis suggests, a depressing ennui that only displays of violence can alleviate. Nothing in Carlyle is comparable to the emblematic scene in which Dickens’s Marquis de Saint Evre´monde, the incarnation of exactly that form of moral insanity that Memmi (52) names “the Nero complex,” indulging “the fierce patrician custom of hard driving [that] endangered and maimed the mere vulgar in a barbarous manner,” runs down under the wheels of his carriage a small peasant child, then displaying only a callous indifference (easy to recognize as a form of voluptuous “satisfaction”) toward the bereaved father’s grief (103–4). One might take such material as evidence of Dickens’s supposed propensity for “melodrama,” but readers in the years following 1857 would have known that it was grounded in contemporary actuality. For parallels to it and to the theory of domination that it implies (one in which domination, rather than appeasing and satiating the dominator, only aggravates his hatred of the

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dominated and his craving for violence), one looks, rather than to Carlyle, to revelations made recently to the British public by chroniclers of British colonial brutalities in India and, notably, as we have seen, by Dickens’s longtime friend William Howard Russell. In his dispatch to the Times titled “The Sahib and the Nigger” of October 20, 1858, Russell recounts, among a series of other manifestations of “the arrogance of power” including wildly sadistic punishments inflicted on negligent servants, the testimony of “a respectably-dressed [Indian] man” whom he had seen brought forward with a bleeding head wound. The man reluctantly reports that “as he was walking down the street of the bazaar ‘a sahib,’ riding by, gave him a cut on the head with the butt of his whip without the smallest provocation” (10). Russell reports that the sahib need fear no punishment, so deeply ingrained and so apparently compulsive is random quotidian brutality in the relations of the British and their colonial subjects in India. In another dispatch that appears in his Diary in India, he describes certain “gay young men” who amuse themselves in Simla by “riding full tilt through the crowded bazaars,” snatching natives’ umbrellas with their boar-spears and tossing them onto the roofs (2:162–63). Dickens’s brutal, hard-riding marquis evidently traces his ancestry less to Carlyle’s indolent French aristocrats than to these casually but compulsively, uncontrollably violent Anglo-Indians. The modality of Mutiny violence that tended to eclipse all others in the minds of British people at the time was, of course, the second one on my list: that of the atrocities committed by sepoys and other rebellious Indians upon British victims, particularly women and children captives. Yet we have seen that the “harrowing and heart-sickening details” (Ball 1:385) of such episodes as the massacre of the prisoners at Cawnpore could scarcely be portrayed, even in sentimentally sublimated form, as the episode of Paton’s painting “In Memoriam” demonstrated. This crucial blockage in Mutiny discourse, productive of so much compensatory bombast in texts such as Rees’s Personal Narrative of the Siege of Lucknow, is precisely what Dickens seeks to circumvent by means of allegorical indirection in A Tale of Two Cities. Thus originates his focus upon the “September massacres” of 1792, which Carlyle describes as equivalent to “whatever is savagest in the annals of this world” (493). From September 2 to 6, 1792, about 1,100 mainly aristocratic political prisoners were hauled from cells in the glutted Paris jails, given hasty pseudojudicial hearings, and thrown out to be slaughtered in the streets by mobs. In portraying these events, Dickens does not philosophize as Carlyle does, and as Disraeli later does in reference to the Mutiny, on the opening of “a new Chapter in Universal History” (Carlyle 488), but he does make the massacres the crux of his fictionalized history of the Revolution, just as the massacres at Cawnpore, Delhi, and elsewhere formed

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the crux of the standard Victorian narrative of the recent upheaval in India. The first hints of what is happening late in the day on September 2 are too distant and too unimaginable to be fully grasped, but Dickens’s narrator conveys them even so in hair-raising poetic prose. “From the streets beyond the high wall and the strong gate there came the usual night hum of the city, with now and then an indescribable ring to it, weird and unearthly, as if some unwonted sounds of a terrible nature were going up to Heaven” (246). Soon after, Mr. Lorry and Dr. Manette look out their window into a courtyard where forty or fifty men and women, fresh from human butchery, feverishly sharpen “hatchets, knives, bayonets, swords” at a grindstone. Dickens registers the transcendent moral horror of the moment by imagining this French premonition—actually this fantasized afterimage—of the bloodbath at Cawnpore as a carnivalesque tableau just on the edge of slapstick, like so much else in this novel, and shot through grotesquely with imagery of orgiastic sexual pleasure. The grindstone had a double handle, and turning at it madly were two men, whose faces, as their long hair flapped back when the whirlings of the grindstone brought their faces up, were more horrible and cruel than the visages of the wildest savages in their most barbarous disguise. False eyebrows and false moustaches were stuck upon them, and their hideous countenances were all bloody and sweaty, and all awry with howling, and all staring and glaring with beastly excitement and want of sleep. As these ruffians turned and turned, their matted locks now flung forward over their eyes, now flung backward over their necks, some women held wine to their mouths that they might drink; and what with dropping blood, and what with dropping wine, and what with the stream of sparks struck out of the stone, all their wicked atmosphere seemed gore and fire. The eye could not detect one creature in the group free from the smear of blood. (248–49) The literary antecedents of such material in A Tale of Two Cities are to be found not in any novel but rather, again, in the literature of the Mutiny that we have been surveying, with all its phosphorescent imagery of the transformation of India into “a theatre of savage strife, of anarchy, and of pitiless carnage” (Ball 1:439). “The horrors of that dreadful night could scarcely have been surpassed,” writes Ball, referring not to the night of September 2, 1792, in Paris, but May 10, 1857, at Meerut (1:60). “If the demons of hell had been let loose, with no restraint on their Satanic fury, they could scarcely have exhibited villainies and cruelties more worthy of the tenants of Pandemonium,” wrote Alexander Duff in the same rhetorical register in 1858 (23), as though providing a stylistically crude model for Dickens’s surrealistic vignette of the blood-soaked crowd of devils

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around the grindstone. No reader at the time could possibly have failed to be vividly aware of this textual and historical counterpoint running through Dickens’s novel. To put it mildly, Dickens does not minimize these atrocities that he evokes in such lurid terms. In declaring that the French people were “changed into wild beasts” (223) in the period of the upheaval, he pointedly invokes the formula that stamps itself on a hundred contemporary descriptions of the Indian rebels.14 But sensationalized imagery of bestiality is refracted in A Tale of Two Cities through a medium of thought that importantly differentiates the rhetoric of this novel from, say, the Manichaean rhetoric of “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners.” In the earlier story, as in Dickens’s private correspondence at the time, the rebels figure as brutal predators fit only to be exterminated swiftly and without remorse. In the novel the argument is far more ambivalent. Ostensibly the focus of the narrative is the suffering of innocent bystanders, such as Darnay and the Manettes, who become ensnared in the uprising, but a more profound poignancy centers on the revolutionaries themselves, victims of “the frightful moral disorder, born of unspeakable suffering, intolerable oppression, and heartless indifference” that has bestialized them. France before the uprising is blighted by incurable misgovernment. “Far and wide lay a ruined country, yielding nothing but desolation. Every green leaf, every blade of grass and blade of grain, was as shrivelled and poor as the miserable people. Everything was bowed down, dejected, oppressed, and broken” (216). This land of despair (“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water”) can only be redeemed by a revolution that will sweep away every vestige of the old order: this is the unambiguous political premise of A Tale of Two Cities. The paradox at the heart of Dickens’s disquisition on mass violence is that in order to carry out their redemptive cause, the revolutionaries must, by embracing the horrid code of purgative violence, sacrifice their own souls and endure a metamorphosis into a diabolical subhuman species. Representatives of this species such as Madame Defarge, her female friend “The Vengeance,” the ghoulish wood-sawyer, the “life-thirsting, cannibal-looking, bloody-minded juryman” (300) called Jacques Three, and similar fomenters of massacre are never treated by the novel as simple items in a conflict of evil versus good: utterly depraved as they are, they are the liberators of an enslaved country. The suggestion that there may be ultimate forgiveness in store for them is strong enough that Sidney Carton is made to go to his death essentially vindicating the Revolution. “I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, . . . I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expia-

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tion for itself” (357).15 This particularly extreme instance of the ambivalence that we have seen to be the master trope of Victorian Mutiny literature highlights the idea that underwrites all the logical structure of this novel: that the moral calculus basic to the tradition of humanistic Victorian fiction, where individual good-heartedness figures as the irreducible moral criterion, no longer applies, having effectively gone defunct in the presence of epochal mass violence. In this morally post-apocalyptic or post-thermonuclear setting, good-heartedness, Dickens insistently suggests, may be cursed with futility; the benefactors of humankind, on the other hand, may be moral monsters “absolutely without pity.” No less provocative than this dizzying conundrum in A Tale of Two Cities is Dickens’s allegory of the fourth category of Mutiny violence, that of the British reprisals and particularly of the program of mass executions enacted by the British civil and military authorities as they regained control of the rebellious districts. Of the different modes of violence that he surveys, seeing them as closely interlinked correlatives or phases of one another, clearly this one chiefly occupied his imagination at the moment of writing this novel. I proposed in chapter 3 that in order to understand the contemporary significance of British policies of “retributive justice” in India, one needs to see them in the context of the prolonged controversy over capital punishment in Britain—as the culmination, that is, of an agonized decadeslong debate in which the spiritual fate of the nation was often declared to be hanging in the balance. A generation before the Indian uprising, this controversy seemed to have been largely laid to rest with the repeal of capital statutes that had come to be felt as an intolerable burden on the British conscience. In the wake of May 1857, pent-up national cravings for the cathartic spectacle of the death penalty seemed to burst forth uncontrollably like Furies released from underground cells, along with a great wave of justificatory rhetoric shot through with Christian invocation. Such, at any rate, is the interpretation of contemporary events that emerges in allegorically coded form in A Tale of Two Cities, which on one of its levels could be described as a fictional disquisition on capital punishment itself. Hence Dickens’s surprising insistence throughout the first third of the novel on the prevalence in both England and France of especially awful forms of the death penalty inflicted as a normal, everyday procedure of justice. “Under the guidance of her Christian pastors,” observes the narrator, France in the late eighteenth century “entertained herself . . . with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive” for failing to kneel to a procession of monks (2). This extravagant imagery of official savagery, replete with disgusting physical details, in effect brings shock-

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ingly into the protected sphere of the Victorian novel all the accounts of the horrible mutilations allegedly inflicted by mutineers upon British victims in India that had filled Mutiny literature for the previous couple of years. Dickens’s narrator is quick to insist that similarly bloodthirsty penal practices were normal in Britain, too. Indeed, London as portrayed in this novel seems to be the theater of a virtual orgy of capital punishment. “The hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; . . . to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer’s boy of sixpence” (3). This was a society, the narrator tells us, that lived to put people publicly to death. In 1780, he later comments, seemingly apropos of nothing, the occupants of lawyers’ chambers in London “were but newly released from the horror of being ogled through the windows, by the heads exposed on Temple Bar with an insensate brutality and ferocity worthy of Abyssinia or Ashantee” (50)—again, the pervasive theme of the atavistic ferocity that continues to run powerfully beneath the surface of modern life. Echoing William Eden, Sir Samuel Romilly, and other authors in the literature of penal reform, Dickens lists here a long series of crimes punishable by death in England at the time: forgery, uttering a bad note, unlawfully opening a letter, theft of more than forty shillings, horse theft, coining a bad shilling. “Putting to death was a recipe much in vogue,” though, despite claims that such harshness discouraged crime, “the fact was exactly the reverse,” says the narrator (50). Dickens’s polemic against the English mania for inflicting the death penalty reaches a still higher register in the episode of the first of Charles Darnay’s three trials, the one in which he stands accused of treason at the Old Bailey. The jail was notorious, the narrator remarks, “as a kind of deadly inn-yard, from which pale travellers set out continually, in carts and coaches, on a violent passage into the other world: traversing some two miles and a half of public street and road [on their way to the gallows at Tyburn]” (56). This “hideous scene of action” (56) of course foreshadows the imagery of condemned prisoners being carted in tumbrils to the guillotine that comes to dominate the later sections of the novel. Avidity for promiscuous capital executions is the key trait shared by the two cities that are conjoined in Dickens’s tale. His analysis of the place of capital punishment in European society stresses the motive of sheer cruelty, of “insensate brutality and ferocity,” that it expresses. Theorists of penality in the nineteenth century and afterward have argued that despite the long ascendancy of draconian capital statutes in England, English society, unlike Continental ones, had “been averse to the infliction of death by torture” (Stephen, History 1:478). Dickens powerfully dissents from any such comforting distinction. The

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prospect that Darnay will suffer the spectacularly sadistic punishment stipulated for the crime of treason fills one bystander in the court with a bloodthirsty anticipation that leaves no doubt that the British capital punishment regime, however it might be rationalized as a regrettably necessary system of deterrence or as a vindication of “the moral feelings of the community” (ibid.), in fact taps directly into the depraved lower regions of the national libido and signifies exactly that theme of the annihilation of moral value in the name of violence that dominates, as I am arguing, the complicated philosophical fable of A Tale of Two Cities. “ ‘Ah!’ returned the man, with a relish; ‘he’ll be drawn on a hurdle to be half hanged, and then he’ll be taken down and sliced before his own face, and then his inside will be taken out and burnt while he looks on, and then his head will be chopped off, and he’ll be cut into quarters” (57). Darnay narrowly escapes this fate, but the same ide´e fixe of a public execution that carries sadistic imagination to almost unthinkable lengths returns before long in Dickens’s text, the designated victim this time being the murderer of the evil marquis, who, it is rumored, will be executed as a parricide. “One old man says at the fountain, that his right hand, armed with the knife, will be burnt off before his face; that, into wounds which will be made in his arms, his breast, and his legs, there will be poured boiling oil, melted lead, hot resin, wax, and sulphur; finally, that he will be torn limb from limb by four strong horses.” Such was the ordeal inflicted upon the regicide Damiens, the old man informs us (162). In his almost pornographically detailed account of this celebrated execution in Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault denies the motive of sadism in such a punishment, representing the execution of Damiens as “a ceremonial of sovereignty,” a ritualized imposition of royal authority directly upon the body of the criminal (130). In the manifesto on capital punishment that he incorporates into A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens, however, persistently stresses the “Ogreish” (59), lascivious impulse of the citizenry that loves and craves such scenes. Among the huge crowd that assembled to witness the torture of Damiens, a witness of the scene reports in the novel, nothing was more noticed “than the crowd of ladies of quality and fashion, who were full of eager attention to the last—to the last, . . . prolonged until nightfall, when he had lost two legs and an arm, and still breathed!” (163). One revolutionary juryman, in a comment that strains the decorum of respectable Victorian fiction almost to the breaking point, later imagines the enjoyment, obviously laced with sexual perversion, there would be in sending Lucie Manette to the scaffold. “ ‘I have seen blue eyes and golden hair up there, and they looked charming when [the executioner] Samson held them up.’ Ogre that he was, he spoke like an epicure” (341). In piling up such materials, A Tale of Two Cities suggests the premise that is made explicit in Don Siegel’s

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1956 horror film classic, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers: what seems in Dickens’s novel to be a population of normal modern Europeans in both England and France turns out on closer inspection to be a population of alien humanoid forms devoid of moral consciousness, ravenous, insanely cruel ogres posing as human beings. Such is the fully allegorized form of the idea of an epidemic of pitiless “inhumanity” or of General Hope Grant’s seeming commonplace (a very familiar one in the literature of the Mutiny, expressive of the moral revulsion that it widely provoked) that “war—and especially such a fearful war as we were waging—blunts the finer feeling of humanity” (Grant and Knollys 135). Dickens’s portrayal of the French Revolution, then, is more than anything else a fantasy—no less a fantasy for its historical reality—of a society in which the primordial craving for spectacles of capital punishment has been given absolute sway. It has the same mythic significance for Dickens that the ceremonial system of ancient Mexico is given several decades later by James Frazer, who (allegorizing modern British society in another idiom) portrays Aztec society in the culminating section of The Golden Bough as monomaniacally devoted to the ghastly human sacrifices that were “systematically offered on a large scale” in the course of various festivals (Scapegoat 305). All the thematic development that I have been tracing in A Tale of Two Cities comes to its culmination similarly in its depiction of the reign of the guillotine, which “sheared off heads so many, that it and the ground it most polluted were a rotten red” (260)—imagery in which Dickens gives a sharply demystifying twist to that theme of the occult property of blood, especially the sacred blood of innocents that cries out for retribution, that we have seen to be a prominent leitmotif of Mutiny literature. “Every day, through the stony streets,” the narrator reports, “the tumbrils now jolted heavily, filled with Condemned . . . to slake [La Guillotine’s] devouring thirst” (261). Revolutionary Paris, he says in a lapidary formula, is “a city dominated by the axe” (298): he means that all the values of revolutionary society have come to be identical with “the crashing engine that constantly whirrs up and falls” in the Place de la Re´volution (356), the original modern instance of mechanized systems of industrial-volume mass executions. The constantly crashing engine, an image, as we may say, of the repetition compulsion carried to its most extreme form, is the essential emblem of a society in which, as in eighteenth-century England with its unreformed death penalty statutes, ancient Mexico as described by Frazer, Kafka’s Penal Colony, or, in a shocking implication, Upper India under martial law in the months following the uprising at Meerut, capital punishment has become the primary institution, not a practical expedient but the very function that the society exists in order to perform.

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For this is the point in A Tale of Two Cities at which the allegorical identification of French revolutionaries and Bengal sepoys—already troubled by the strains of ambivalence that we have noted—scandalously breaks down. The revolutionaries of Dickens’s novel are easy to identify at first, as Grace Moore does identify them (129–30), with the sepoy mutineers—but the great program of executions they undertake, by means of the feverishly active guillotine or by “gibbets we see rise, on the one side and on the other; and wretched carcasses swinging there, a dozen in the row” (Carlyle 397), corresponds, of course, not to any actions of the Indian mutineers but to the mass hangings and prolonged mass executions carried out in India by the British. The allegorical equation linking the Revolution and the Mutiny thus recomputes itself dramatically, and with ideologically extreme consequences, in the middle of the novel. Dickens’s overriding stress on the theme of “vengeance and retribution” (170) and particularly on the engulfing of Madame Defarge and her fellow “patriots” by the “revengeful passions of the time” (315) links the novel inseparably to contemporary discourse of the Indian Mutiny, constantly expressive as the latter is of “the impulsive and all but national cry for unmitigated vengeance” (Ball 2:168) that arose in Britain against the rebels and to some extent against the native Indian population at large. The linkage is not weakened by the intimation running through Dickens’s text, as in the anecdote of the female spectators at the execution of Damiens, that vengefulness in such cases may be something of a secondary elaboration built upon the “ogreish” perversion of the instincts—the perversion diagnosed by Majendie (59) as a “morbid craving for horrors”—that seems to be widespread among modern people in civilized countries. Only a very imperceptive Victorian reader, in any event, could have read Dickens’s evocations of the mass executions carried out in revolutionary France without connecting them to their historically immediate correlatives, the “unlimited hanging” (Martin 398), the rampant use of firing squads, and the great ceremonialized spectacles of “blowing from guns” (see frontispiece) that for the past year and a half had been lavishly practiced by British authorities in Bengal. A reader in 1859 might have thought of the much-publicized spectacle of Colonel Neill’s specially designed row of three gallowses in Benares, each equipped with three ropes, on which “scores and scores of prisoners” (according to a letter published in the Times in August 1857 and quoted by Martin [287n]) were hanged daily after drumhead trials, instituting, this historian remarks, “a reign of terror . . . for the natives” (Martin 399).16 “Day after day, week after week, month after month, the hanging went on” in Delhi, too, at the two large gallowses set up in the middle of the main thoroughfare called the Chandnee Chouk, writes Martin (451). At another point, focusing as he regularly does on the emotional disorders associated with his coun-

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trymen’s program of retributive capital punishment in India, Martin disgustedly quotes an officer at Jhelum on “ ‘the satisfaction’ afforded by shooting forty-eight sepoys one evening, and blowing twenty-five away from the cannon’s mouth next morning” (368). Here we encounter in an undiluted form, the historian wants us to recognize, precisely that mode of moral insanity in which the colonial master, “to gain some psychological satisfaction, resorts to violence . . . of a peculiar kind, a theatrical sort of violence.” Writing a year or so before Martin (and possibly providing him with a model for his great dissident history), Dickens personifies the love of mass executions in the ghoulish wood-sawyer who lives opposite the prison of La Force and gloats about the daily execution statistics: “Sixty-three to-day. We shall mount to a hundred soon” (296). Rather than giving vent to the genocidal rage against the mutineers that Dickens said he felt upon first hearing of the Indian massacres, A Tale of Two Cities, the product of a year’s intervening reflection, evidently is designed to express the contrary sentiment, an overwhelming revulsion from the holocaust of revenge inflicted by the victorious British upon the defeated rebels. No doubt Dickens portrays with such intensity of horror the orgy of vengeful capital punishment that he depicts in this novel precisely because it stood for an impulse that he had recognized in himself and felt an urgent need to exorcize. In its condemnation of the code of revenge and retribution that was elevated by many authors in the Mutiny years to the status of a national moral ideal, A Tale of Two Cities confronts its readers, in fact, with a philosophical dissent from all forms of political and legal violence. (This dissent may be what Luka´cs has ultimately in mind in deploring Dickens’s “petty bourgeois humanism,” just as Victorian proponents of merciless retribution in India denounced the “puling, maudlin sentimentalism” [Duff 209] of antiretributionists.) Violence, this novel tells its reading public, is that which by its nature abolishes positive moral and political value and is always equivalent only to its own nature as a “monstrous [violator] of the realm of the private,” to borrow a phrase from Catherine Gallagher’s eloquent essay on A Tale of Two Cities (126).17 This is the intuition that is condensed in Dickens’s portrayal of the guillotine, the all-encompassing symbol in this book not just of a wave of ogreish personality disorders but of that apocalyptic extinction of moral value that forms the ultimate theme of A Tale of Two Cities and the crux of its refracted commentary on the war in India. He identifies it as an allegorical image of what amounts to the principle of violence itself. “All the devouring and insensate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself,” the narrator declares, “are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine” (353). Some readers might have noticed that such language echoes strikingly Feuerbach’s portrayal of the Judeo-Christian God, supposedly the foun-

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tainhead of moral value, as “an unloving monster, a diabolical being, whose personality . . . delights in the blood of heretics and unbelievers” (52). Others might have recalled V. D. Majendie’s vision of the god of war, another image of the same monster deity, holding out to soldiers on the battlefield at Lucknow a foaming goblet of human blood to drink (179–80). Dickens does identify the guillotine, in fact, as an object of specifically religious devotion or, rather, as the very antithesis and nemesis of genuine religion. “It was the sign of the regeneration of the human race. It superseded the Cross. Models of it were worn on breasts from which the Cross was discarded, and it was bowed down to and believed in where the Cross was denied” (260). All authentic religious values, which for Dickens mean nothing but humane feeling in its most concentrated form, have been negated by this perverted new cult. Nihilism, which is to say, the worship of violence for its own sake, for the psychological “satisfaction” it gives, assumes here its radical form, dropping the pretense of moral consciousness altogether and avowing itself enraptured by violence pure and simple. A Tale of Two Cities reads in this respect like a book-length fictional gloss on Disraeli’s observation that British actions in India made it seem as if the religion of Jesus had transformed itself in 1857 into the barbaric cult of Moloch. When Moloch in his avatar as Guillotine is in the ascendant, the highest religious ideal is not pity for human suffering (precisely the faculty that has gone dead in the France of this novel) but its absolute opposite, the apotheosis or the furthest possible extension of violence: genocidal “extermination.” The keyword “extermination” recurs with compulsive insistency in A Tale of Two Cities, on both sides of the great social and political divide. “I would ride over any of you very willingly,” says the wicked marquis to a crowd of peasants, “and exterminate you from the earth” (105). The Defarges, for their part, doom “the chateau and all the race” of the Saint Evre´mondes, and by extension the whole race of the French upper classes, to “extermination” (164). Stryver, the contemptible London lawyer, currying favor with an aristocratic French e´migre´, displays his coarseness and brutality by prating about “his devices for blowing the people up and exterminating them from the face of the earth” (227)—a moment when Dickens seems to direct biting satire at his own earlier epistolary outburst against the Bengal mutineers, of which critics have made so much, declaring his wish that he could “exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested; and . . . blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth” (Letters 8:459). “It is true what Madame says,” comments the Jacobin activist nicknamed “Jacques Three” in a policy discussion with the Defarges in their wine shop.

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“Why stop [in inflicting vengeance upon aristocrats]? There is great force in that. Why stop?” “Well, well,” reasoned Defarge, “but one must stop somewhere. After all, the question is still where?” “At extermination,” said madame. (322) In all this, Dickens’s novel, while seeming to prophesy horrors that could not realistically be attained until specially designed gallows and the guillotine had been surpassed by even more perfected technology such as Zyklon B gas, strikes one of the defining chords of Mutiny literature. “Nothing but extermination will cure the malady [of India],” declared a writer in the Times on August 8, 1857, denouncing, as we saw, the “maudlin sentimentalities” and “mock humanitarianism” of the antiretributionist party (12). I have sufficiently stressed in previous chapters (and, in this one, with reference to Cooper’s Crisis in the Punjab) the insistency with which the rhetoric of exterminationism pervaded British writing about the crisis in India not to need to cite further examples here. What the novel intimates in exploring this theme is the sense of its own contemporary moment as marked by a terrible break in history, a moment in which collective experience has been suddenly transformed by a great outburst of surreal-seeming and wildly unforeseeable violence. Charles Darnay, who has only to set foot in France to discover that circumstances there are infinitely more terrifying than he had any inkling of, undergoes this realization in particularly acute form: Troubled as the future was, it was the unknown future, and in its obscurity there was ignorant hope. The horrible massacre, days and nights long, which, within a few rounds of the clock, was to set a great mark of blood upon the blessed garnering time of harvest, was as far out of his knowledge as if it had been a hundred thousand years away. The “sharp female newly born, and called La Guillotine,” was hardly known to him, or to the generality of people, by name. The frightful deeds that were to be soon done, were probably unimagined at that time in the brains of the doers. (241) The events of the time—of 1792 and 1857–59 alike—were literally unthinkable. Prophecy, in the sense of a capacity for forecasting the future, in such circumstances is specifically disabled. But in a richer sense of the word, the motive of Dickens’s novel lies precisely in its prophetic register. From the point of view of its Victorian readership, it imagines the upheaval in France as prophetic of the upheaval in British India just coming to its conclusion as the novel first appeared. Read from our own perspective, A Tale of Two Cities seems eerily prophetic of the rise of terroristic police states and of the genocidal ethnic cleansing fated to be carried out

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on a megalomaniacal scale in the century to come. Beyond this range of effects, though, Dickens’s novel, like his other greatest works, is prophetic in the deep biblical sense of conceiving national destinies as linked inseparably to the spiritual histories of peoples. When a nation falls victim to passions that impel it into the worship of false nihilistic and vindictive gods—when the guillotine replaces the Cross or when a Christian nation revives the religion of Moloch—then horrible events are in store: this is the lesson of prophecy and the basis of Dickens’s allegory of the movement of Victorian society “almost beyond the pale of civilisation and humanity” in the year 1857. His novelistic exposition of this theme ran counter to vigorous attempts by representatives of religious ideology at the time to gain a monopoly on the prophetic register by depicting the Mutiny as divine punishment for British tolerance of Indian religions and for a national lack of zeal for the project of converting India to Christianity. The rebellion, writes the pamphleteer John Wilson, was “designed in providence for our severe chastisement” (28). British colonial officials, similarly declaims the Rev. Alexander Duff, have tended “practically to ignore or scornfully repudiate the very name and faith of Jesus, while they foster and honor the degrading superstitions of Brahma and Mohammed” (110). Duff the extreme retributionist is, of course, putting to his own polemical purposes the trope of the usurpation of true religion by barbaric false ones that is employed by Dickens and Disraeli in such a different way. His need to do so is suggested elsewhere in his Indian Rebellion (yet another work18 published in London the year before A Tale of Two Cities), where he furnishes about as vivid an instance of the replacement of the Cross by the guillotine or of Christ by Moloch as could well be imagined. Praising Neill’s program of mass executions in Cawnpore, Duff declares, as we saw, that his mighty hero rejected “all feelings of maudlin sentimental pity” in order to “[grasp] the sword of retributive justice”—transforming him in the process, as it must have seemed to Dickens, into one of “those unmerciful beings” (Ball 1:96) whose emergence on both sides of the conflict in India gave it its overwhelming aspect of “moral insanity.” In instituting his notorious blood-lick policy, Neill did not regard this form of punishment, Duff assures us, “as torture or cruelty, in the ordinary sense of these terms. . . . Neither, may I add, need any enlightened Christian shrink from avowing that he has felt no special indignation at a procedure so unwonted in such strangely unwonted circumstances” (255–56).19 This statement tells us all we need to know about the contemporary resonance of Dickens’s fable of a “frightful moral disorder” submerging a Christian country and producing a generation of ogreish zealots “absolutely without pity.” Such a fable, both sharply incompatible with the “sentimental morality” of the mid-Victorian novel and at the same time driven by revul-

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sion from contemporary denouncers of “morbid sentimental pity,” was bound to manifest itself in “an essential defect in the entire composition”: this is perhaps the chief conclusion that sympathetic criticism can derive from A Tale of Two Cities. That Dickens’s version of the fable bore an urgent relevance to the pandemonium in India and to the claim of the likes of Alexander Duff to speak for the conscience of the nation: this the novelist left his readers to discover for themselves.

Chapter Six

Lady Audley’s Secret: The Mutiny, the Gothic, and the Feminine

PANIC ATTACKS “Lady Audley’s Secret,” says Elaine Showalter, the most illuminating modern commentator of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s famous “sensation” novel of 1861–62, “though it is often brash and hasty, has been much underrated” (164). The pioneering Braddon scholar Robert Lee Wolff is scarcely more generous in praise of what he calls “her artless and somewhat trashy first great success” (Sensational Victorian 4). These half-hearted endorsements probably do more harm to the reputation of Braddon’s novel than the torrent of vilification and contempt that was poured upon it by high-minded critics in its own time—and that surely did much to stimulate its phenomenal success with the Victorian reading public. Readers of today who are unfamiliar with the oeuvre of this incredibly prolific novelist, whose reputation as subliterary entertainer always precedes her, are likely to be surprised at Henry James’s testimony to her near the end of her career as “a magnificent benefactress to the literary estate” (qtd. Wolff, Sensational Victorian 11)—a testimony all the more noteworthy by contrast with denigrating judgments of her that he issued at the time of Lady Audley. But of all written assessments of Braddon that I know, only one conveys an adequate idea of the interest her work might possess for readers willing to suspend their prejudices toward the stigmatized category of “sensation fiction.” Arnold Bennett feels obliged to end his 1901 essay on her by regretting her supposed lack of “the first-rate passionate imagination which . . . might have made her great” (33), but before this put-down he admiringly quotes a long, mesmerizing passage from Lady Audley’s Secret that does more to suggest the possibility of taking her sensation masterpiece seriously than uneasy critics, at least until very recently, ever have been able to do.1 Robert Audley, the idle young barrister turned detective, has sent the beautiful Lady Audley a letter threatening to expose her bigamous imposture to her husband, Sir Michael. “He will do it,” she said, between her set teeth; “he will do it, unless I get him into a lunatic asylum first; or unless—”

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She did not finish the thought in words. She did not even think out the sentence; but some new and unnatural pulse in her heart seemed to beat out each separate syllable against her breast. The thought was this: “He will do it, unless some strange calamity befalls him and silences him for ever.” The red blood flashed up into my lady’s face with as sudden and transient a blaze as the flickering flame of a fire, and died as suddenly away, leaving her more pale than winter snow. Her hands, which had before been locked convulsively together, fell apart and dropped heavily at her sides. She stopped in her rapid pacing to and fro—stopped as Lot’s wife may have stopped, after that fatal backward glance at the perishing city, with every pulse slackening, with every drop of blood congealing in her veins, in the terrible process that was to transform her from a woman into a statue. Lady Audley stood still for about five minutes in that strangely statuesque attitude, her head erect, her eyes staring straight before her—staring far beyond the narrow boundary of her chamber wall, into dark distances of peril and horror. (310) The hair-raising intensity of this passage springs from the fierceness with which it compresses some of the key thematic impulses of the novel as a whole; it illuminates in the process the meaning of “sensation” itself, that allegedly disreputable (artistically crude and intellectually vacant) fictive property that it enacts with unsurpassable vividness. Making this clear means first and foremost, I think, spelling out the relation between the prevalent mood of dread in Lady Audley’s Secret, the mood that is given such extreme expression in the above passage, and the historical moment in which the novel appeared: the immediate aftermath of the great Indian war. I propose in what follows that the imaginative power and artistic inventiveness of Braddon’s text flow from its attempt to portray the traumatic inner damage inflicted upon Victorian society by this war that haunted the national conscience and remained two years later, for the reasons evoked in the previous chapter, a taboo, unrepresentable subject for popular fiction. There may in fact be no other contemporary document that testifies in such a concentrated, single-minded way, or with such prescience, to the transforming effect of the Mutiny on the Victorian psyche. In order to spell out its argument so as to register its full historical specificity and to revitalize patterns of metaphor in it that have become somewhat deadened (that is, have come to seem “melodramatic”) through forgetfulness of their original referents, we will need to approach the book by means of a certain hermeneutic circularity. We deepen our understanding of Braddon’s text, so I argue, by reading into it from other texts of the time the distinctive symptomatology of what we can call the

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Mutiny syndrome; simultaneously, we learn to parse this syndrome and to gauge its significance by our reading of the novel itself. Whether this circularity will prove to be productive or merely vicious is for the following discussion to show. Lady Audley’s hallucinatory metamorphosis into Lot’s wife as the latter suffers her own horrible metamorphosis into a statue (a pillar of salt, according to Genesis) reverberates with significant implications. “The perishing city” would have been well known to Victorian readers, intimately familiar as they were with the Bible, and the uncited scriptural verses would have throbbed in their minds as the idea of murder throbs inarticulately in Braddon’s heroine’s mind. “Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities. . . . And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace” (Gen. 19:24–28). Lot’s wife is stricken with incredulous horror, as though transformed into a pillar of salt, before this tableau of the genocidal firebombing of civilian populations—an act to which the Old Testament God is obviously determined to leave no living eyewitnesses. That the disturbing biblical fable carried a particular contemporary reference would have been no less clear. Braddon’s refracted imagery of the incineration of cities on the plain and of the extermination of peoples who rebelled against the Lord could hardly have failed to summon up for readers in 1861 vivid memories of the rain of brimstone and fire inflicted by British artillery and storming columns several years before upon sinful mutinous cities of the North Indian plain, particularly Lucknow and Delhi. The biblical equation was in fact a commonplace of Mutiny discourse. Delhi in particular, “this modern Sodom,” as G. B. Malleson called it in The Mutiny of the Bengal Army (215), was widely portrayed in the early days of the rebellion as “the accursed city” (Times, August 1, 1857 [10]) deserving of complete obliteration in punishment for its crimes. “I for one shall not be satisfied until I hear that Delhi, on which I look as the modern Gomorrah, has been razed to the ground,” declared the Liberal M.P. Bernal Osborne in a speech reported in the Times on September 26, 1857 (10).2 As the final assault on Lucknow was being prepared in March 1858, Alexander Duff declared this rebel stronghold also to be “a very Sodom and Gomorrah of iniquity” where “monstrosities of wickedness and vice” were promiscuously practiced. “Sooner or later the thunderbolt of [God’s] righteous vengeance will smite into the dust guilty cities and nations,” he promised, adding, “I could gaze at the ruins . . . without one feeling of regret” (393, 395). The thunderbolt did fall with all the fury that Duff could have wished, and imagery of annihilated cities, imagery that obviously sprang, with

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momentous consequences, from the deeps of British religious thinking, plays a key role throughout contemporary Mutiny literature. Charles Ball’s History of the Indian Mutiny, published a year or so before Lady Audley’s Secret, gives an extended account of the “righteous vengeance” taken by the British in the reconquest of Delhi, ending with a biblically inflected vision of “the sword of retributive justice suspended over the smoking city, its streets desolated, its palaces in ruins, its king a wretched captive, and the rebel host that had converted it into a Golgotha, scattered to the winds” (1:527). William Howard Russell gives in 1860, it will be recalled, an especially lurid and phantasmagoric account of the fall of rebel-held Lucknow, though one from which the overtones of religious righteousness have been expurgated, with shattering rhetorical consequences. “From court to court, and building to building, the sepoys were driven, leaving in each hundreds of men bayonetted and shot. The scene was horrible. The rooms in which the sepoys lay burning slowly in their cotton clothing, with their skin crackling and their flesh roasting literally in its own fat, whilst a light-bluish, vapoury smoke, of disgusting odour, formed a veil through which the dreadful sight could be dimly seen, were indeed chambers of horrors ineffable” (1:313). Here was the immediate objective correlative, for Braddon’s first readership, of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and of all its attendant imagery of hosts of sinners burning alive, spreading plumes of smoke over the plain “as the smoke of a furnace.” Does Lady Audley’s horror at her own half-conscious murderous impulse, figured so weirdly as the horror experienced by Lot’s wife as she beholds the immolation of the evil cities, conjure in some way and help us understand the horror inflicted upon the mid-Victorian generation by the flood of imagery like this reaching England from the recent convulsion in India? More broadly, was the sudden appearance of “sensation” fiction in the Victorian literary marketplace itself a marker of the “terrible break” in British life that the Mutiny was said to have produced? A constellation of textual and external evidence lends credence to both these suggestions. Lady Audley seems, like Russell, frozen with horror at “the dreadful sight” of ravaged Asian cities, a spectacle that fantastically seems both external to her and an image of her own deepest homicidal thought. It is crucial to note at the same time the uncanny effect of displacement on which the passage insists so heavily: she does not think this thought. She is not aware that she has formed the idea of murdering her enemy, Robert Audley. It is carried as a kind of unnamable potential in “some new and unnatural pulse in her heart” (presumably beating in counterpoint to her regular pulse of sane self-awareness) but not formulated as a conscious intention. I am not sure if there exists in previous English fiction another passage that could be cited as a precedent for this one: a passage in which

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this sensation of self-estrangement, of thinking thoughts that one does not think (that is, that one is unable to recognize as one’s own thoughts), is so explicitly and so intimately registered. Braddon seems to have discovered in a flash of intuition an especially subtle and rarefied function of human psychology previously unrecorded in British fiction—or is it that she diagnoses at this moment a function that might be a new phenomenon in its own right, expressive of a new historical phase of experience? The novel to this point may not offer an answer to this question, but it does pick up and amplify the provocative effect in the scene not long afterward in which Braddon’s wicked heroine supposedly acts on her intention by attempting to burn Robert Audley to death in the inn where he is sleeping. She double-locks the door of his room from the outside, seemingly a conclusive incriminating gesture of malice prepense (322); then she leaves a burning candle dangerously near some combustible fabric. But again, the narrator makes a point of telling us that Lady Audley does not intentionally set the fire that soon erupts. “She went to the glass, and then put on her bonnet. She was obliged to place the flaming tallow candle very close to the lace furbelows about the glass, so close that the starched muslin seemed to draw the flame towards it by some power of attraction in its fragile tissue” (323). The exquisitely formulated evasiveness of this moment (not at all the sort of prose we might expect from an “artless and somewhat trashy” melodramatic novelist), in which the muslin, not the woman, is the agent of the disaster, is reproduced once again with regard to Lady Audley’s great crime—or rather attempted crime, since she is no more successful in murdering her returned husband George Talboys than she is in murdering Robert Audley. “When the first husband returns and confronts her, she impulsively pushes him into a well,” says Showalter (166), echoing Winifred Hughes’s statement that Lady Audley “[disposes] of her superfluous husband by pushing him down an abandoned well” (4). Braddon’s own sketch of the scene (figure 7) does show her heroine doing just this. But, again, the novel very specifically contradicts this account. “It was then that I was mad,” says Lady Audley in her eventual confession to Robert. “It was then that I drew the loose iron spindle from the shrunken wood [of the windlass of the disused well at Audley Court], and saw my first husband sink with one horrible cry into the black mouth of the well” (393–94). As far as this minutely calculated (and, like every other significant phrase in the novel, piercingly lyrical) phrase tells us, he sinks weirdly of his own accord, independently of her, just as the candle flame is drawn by the muslin furbelows. Conspicuously, there is no mention, at this moment of full confession, of Lady Audley’s having intended to harm George Talboys. Braddon has clearly been at pains to imagine the scene in such a way that Lady Audley does not push George to his (intended) death. Nor do we get more incriminat-

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Figure 7. Lady Audley Pushing George Talboys Down the Well, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University [MS Eng 1122.4])

ing details when Luke Marks subsequently recounts to Robert the eyewitness account of the scene at the well that he got from his wife Phoebe (hearsay evidence, legally inadmissible), who was watching from a window in a high gable: “She told me how she’d been sittin’ at work at the window of her little room, which . . . overlooked the lime-walk and the shubbery and the well, when she see my lady walkin’ with a strange gentleman, and they walked together for a long time, until by-and-by they—” “Stop,” cried Robert Audley, “I know the rest.” (430) In other words, Lady Audley’s Secret is consistently and very pointedly evasive in stating the supposed facts of the criminal heroine’s guilt—guilt that in any case is greatly mitigated by the failure of her alleged victims to stay murdered. Much of the argument of the novel and much of the logic of its reference to the Mutiny, as we shall see, turns upon this finely spun conceit. Whether the evasiveness I have traced would be sufficient to gain Lady Audley’s acquittal on a charge of attempted murder in a court of law is not clear. At trial, had one been held, another piece of evidence would have been introduced: the lurid bruises left by George Talboys’s “strong and cruel fingers” on Lady Audley’s slender wrist, where the mark of a ring “had been ground into the tender flesh” (88). We may register almost subliminally this invocation of the imagery of the cruel mutilation of tender female flesh that acted in the Mutiny as such a

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maddening goad to British horror and outrage. The supposedly sympathetic George, the hero Robert Audley’s best friend, is prone to the violent physical abuse of women, just as the demonic Nana Sahib and the other Indian rebels were, it seems. The truth here, in any case, is (so Lady Audley’s barrister would insist) that it was George who attempted in a vindictive rage to hurl his former wife, whom he had previously deserted in poverty along with their infant child, down the well, but who perished himself in the struggle. The deep-dyed moral guilt assigned to Lady Audley by her many accusers both within the novel and among her critical interpreters past and present seems as a result of such effects to slip through our fingers. Braddon seems to be setting devilishly clever fictional traps and ruses for her readers, as though to arouse the spirit of “retributive justice” only to entangle it in a maze of ambiguity and to leave the way open for that countercurrent of sympathetic readerly identification with the villainess that forms, after all, the essential dynamic and the most morally inflammatory element of this painstakingly constructed novel. The perplexing effect of morally equivocal maneuvers like these is characteristic of the new style of popular fiction that emerged in Britain in the 1860s, and of which Lady Audley’s Secret is arguably (along with Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White [1860]) the original instance: the “sensation novel.” These “stories of blood and lust, of atrocious crimes and hardened criminals” (Rae 105), which take as their theme “the numberless possible forms of human malignity” (James, “Miss Braddon” 593), were easy to recognize as descendants of the gothic terror romances of earlier decades. Still, contemporary observers concurred with Kathleen Tillotson’s judgment many years later that these books represent a type that “really was new in the eighteen-sixties” (xi) and regularly drew attention to the suddenness of its emergence. The distinguishing stylistic feature of the type, as the young Henry James, like other commentators, observed, was its device of translating the materials of gothic terror romance into commonplace modern-day settings. “Instead of the terrors of ‘Udolpho,’ we were treated to the terrors of the cheerful country-house and the busy London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely the more terrible” (James, “Miss Braddon” 593; see Hughes ix). Tremendously popular, the sensation romances were branded by many critics of their day as not only artistically contemptible but also perverted and immoral. Commentators phrased the latter objection in various terms; some accused sensation writers of pandering to a morbid “craving for . . . unnatural excitement” (Mansel 512), while others accused them of proselytizing readers on behalf of vice. Most repugnant of all the sensationists to such critics was Braddon, whose works collectively were denounced by W. F. Rae in the North British Review as “one of the abominations of the age”; Lady Audley’s Secret in particular was called by him

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“one of the most noxious books of modern times” (104, 96). Obviously he was keenly sensitive to the novelistic effects by means of which Braddon, all the time professing blameless didactic intentions, worked insidiously at cross-purposes with contemporary moral sensibilities. Yet even the most ardent condemners of sensation fiction agreed that this great development in the British publishing market was fraught with serious meaning and expressed, while it affected, important features of the mental world of its decade. “A class of literature has grown up around us, usurping in many respects . . . a portion of the preacher’s office, playing no inconsiderable part in moulding the minds and forming the habits and tastes of its generation,” declared the noted theological writer H. L. Mansel (482). “These works [of Braddon’s] are censured and ridiculed,” says James in 1865, “but they are extensively read. The author has a hold upon the public. It is, assuredly, worth our while to enquire more particularly how she has obtained it” (“Miss Braddon” 594). Commentators have not done well, though, in seeking to account for the sudden vogue of “sensation fiction.” Victorian critics and reviewers presumed that writers such as Braddon aimed with disgraceful cynicism merely at seizing a profitable merchandising opportunity. Mansel sneers at “the evidently commercial character of the whole affair [of sensation fiction]” (485). But what exactly enabled Braddon “to catch the public ear” (James, “Miss Braddon” 593) as she did, and why did the sensation style so suddenly appear in 1860–61? Mansel describes it as a by-product of new mass-distribution agencies for Victorian popular literature: periodicals, circulating libraries, and railway bookstalls, in particular (483–85). But materialist explanations do not get at the conditions that caused the Victorian middle-class reading public suddenly to be driven to consume disreputable-seeming literary subject matter “which novelists used formerly to shrink from” and “which would have made our fathers and grandfathers stare,” as E. S. Dallas wrote in his 1862 review of Lady Audley’s Secret. According to this astute observer, that cordon sanitaire that heretofore had kept mid-Victorian fiction free from certain kinds of objectionable impurities had suddenly been breached. It seems evident that the sensation novel, seen as a vehicle for the propagation of scandalously disreputable and indecent literary materials, is the manifestation not just of new distribution mechanisms but also and primarily of an important cultural shift or, as we might say, of a shift in the Victorian soul. At the same time as she constructs the definitive instance of the scandalous new literary type in Lady Audley’s Secret, Braddon intimates in the pages of the novel itself her own theory of its genesis. The widespread convention of mid-Victorian realistic fiction was the setting of the action several decades back in time, not, in serious works, for purposes of nostalgia but as a strategy of historical interpretation. Preoccupied as they were

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with themes of modernity and historical change, serious writers of this age situated their stories at moments in the fairly recent past that they identified implicitly as marking in some fashion the point of transition from the old world of traditional England to the contemporary world in which readers lived. For Thackeray in Vanity Fair (1847–48), the watershed moment was imagined to be the epoch of Waterloo. Often it was situated in the period around the Reform Bill of 1832, as in George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866) and Middlemarch (1871–72) or Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864–66). In Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), it is 1839, the date of the failure of the first Chartist petition to Parliament, and in her novella Cranford (1851–53), it is 1836–37, the date of Pickwick Papers and of the coming of the railway. Victorian realism is linked insistently in this way to a conception of historical change marked out by epoch-making events. Braddon in Lady Audley’s Secret signals her own authorial seriousness by observing the convention, but she sharply, one might say heretically, compresses the temporal gap between the fictional action and the reader’s present time frame, as though to argue that the great historical shift from the past to the contemporary occurred only yesterday. This matter of dating is insisted upon with an almost obtrusive emphasis throughout the novel, in the first instance for the purposes of the detective-story plot apparatus. The narrative “present” runs roughly from “midsummer of fifty-seven” (221), the time of Lucy Graham’s marriage to Sir Michael Audley, to March 1859, when Lady Audley, kidnapped by Robert Audley with the connivance of the accommodating Dr. Mosgrave, is sent to her living burial in the Belgian madhouse. The tombstone of George Talboys’s wife, Helen, is dated August 24, 1857 (42); he sees the death notice in the Times on August 30, 1857 (50), and he disappears on September 7, 1858 (118). Any reader of Braddon’s book in 1861 would immediately have recognized that the time span of this narrative, insistently specified as it is, almost exactly corresponds to the historical event that here seems covertly to figure as the dividing line between the older world and the contemporary one: the Indian Mutiny—“one of those great events,” to quote again Disraeli’s phrase, “which form epochs in the history of mankind” (Ball 2:418).3 For at least a couple of generations following what one memoirist of the day called in typical phraseology “the black year of 1857” (Cooper 65), the phrase “midsummer of fifty-seven” would have triggered immediately the rush of half-hallucinatory memory that the phrase “September 11, 2001” triggers for Americans today. Indeed, in introducing such a phrase into the narrative as though it were a commonplace time reference like any other, with no recognition of its tremendous emotional resonance for every contemporary reader, Braddon hints at the powerful repression of memory that was necessary to enable the mid-

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Victorian generation to regain its equilibrium following the appalling events of that summer. This process of willed forgetting becomes, in fact, a primary theme of this novel, in which several characters struggle to repress unendurable memories that keep welling up in their minds despite all their efforts to think of anything else. In engineering its elaborate metanarrative effect centered on its scheme of dating, at all events, Lady Audley’s Secret intimates not only that the fictive murder story and the Indian Mutiny in some important sense are linked together but that the appearance of the shocking, immoral-seeming new style of fiction that the novel itself represents, a style in which morally affirmative sentimental discourse is eclipsed (as it is also, in a somewhat different fictional vocabulary, in A Tale of Two Cities) by nihilistic-seeming “sensation,” is to be understood as one of the cultural and psychological aftereffects of the Mutiny. This was not always Braddon’s perspective on the war, as we can see from her poem “Captain Skene,” published in October 1857 under her stage name of Mary Seyton. She recounts in this work the same famous apocryphal story that Christina Rossetti does in “In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857,” in which a British officer was said to have shot his young wife and then himself just before the sepoy rebels overran the British fortifications (see figure 5). Braddon’s poem, like several Mutiny poems that the teenaged author published at this time,4 is cast in the same register of undiluted jingoism that commentators have portrayed as universal in Britain at the time. It praises Skene’s act as an instance of “British glory”; “while England lives victorious,” the poet declares, Skene’s name will be praised (ll. 11, 24). This work bears exactly the same literary relation to Lady Audley’s Secret of four years later, however, that “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners” bears to Dickens’s ideologically divergent vision of the Mutiny in A Tale of Two Cities. It enables us to gauge how quickly its author shifted out of the jingoistic celebratory mode and toward a more disillusioned outlook in her reflections on the war.5 Lady Audley’s Secret is punctuated by specific allusions to events in India, as Lillian Nayder has pointed out in a brief but valuable article; Braddon’s tale of domestic corruption and treachery deserves on the strength of these references to be numbered among the sixty or so “Mutiny novels” produced in nineteenth-century Britain—possibly as the very first of them and surely as one of the most significant. “They’re fighting in Oudh . . . at this very day, sir,” someone observes late in the story (329)—and late in the war (it is March 1859). The novel shows no interest, for all that, in Indian history per se; there are no detailed references to the events in Bengal that are so closely concurrent with the story line centered on the Audley marriage, and, above all, there is no trace of Braddon’s earlier celebration of “British glory.” The book has no argument to make about British imperialism, either in its practical or its ideological

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dimension. Nor does Braddon’s project involve anything so programmatic as any set of direct correspondences between Indian events and those of her story, which in no sense is readable as an allegory of the Mutiny.6 Rather, the book focuses all its attention on a systematic investigation of the conditions that the war has left in its wake in England. It carries out this investigation with such pertinacity as essentially to construct a new category of analysis, the category definable in a latter-day vocabulary as that of profound psychological and cultural trauma. Braddon’s remarkable conception is not just to explore intensively a certain syndrome of psychological damage, as we shall see that she does, but also to enact in her book the transforming impact of recent events upon the quintessential cultural formation of the day, the mid-Victorian popular novel itself. This she sets out to do in Lady Audley’s Secret not by any explicit depiction of the Mutiny but in effect by viewing the ensemble of materials that defines conventional realistic fiction of the time (sentimentalized love stories, stories of domestic relations, stories didactically contrasting mercenary and sincere young women, stories of idle young men discovering their purpose in life, stories suitable for family reading, stories, above all, faithful to affirmative and respectable middle-class moral norms) by viewing these culturally idealized materials through the distorting, luridly colored lens of the Mutiny literature that had thronged the literary marketplace for several years past. What shape would conventional mid-Victorian fiction take, this book implicitly asks, if the embankments counted upon to keep nineteenth-century literary types flowing safely in separate channels were to spring a leak, allowing decent popular fiction to be invaded by the nightmarish imagination that operates so powerfully in works such as Majendie’s Up Among the Pandies, Ball’s History of the Indian Mutiny, or Russell’s Diary in India? Braddon’s answer to this question is that such a process, if undertaken in full artistic seriousness, would entail necessarily a revision of the whole ideological, didactic, and affective structure by which respectable Victorian fiction was constituted. On the level of subject matter, such a work might resemble standard fiction (in fact the resemblance would be crucial to the effect) but at heart would be something new, a mode focused sharply on the theme of moral and psychological injury and carrying, among other things, the message of the inefficacy or even the delusiveness of the ethic of redemptive sentiment and good-heartedness, and also of the punishment of wrongdoers, that formed the optimistic ideological basis of the mid-Victorian realistic novel. This message is epitomized in A Tale of Two Cities, as we saw, by Dickens’s conception of plunging morally admirable characters into a maelstrom of nihilistic mass violence that renders their good intentions almost ludicrously inoperative and irrelevant; in Lady Audley’s Secret, it is epitomized most flagrantly in Braddon’s transforma-

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tion of the exemplary heroine, the moral keystone of Victorian fiction, into a figure of diabolical villainy. To readers who recognized its underlying motivation, such a disillusioned new-style work, a work suggesting that the British moral universe and thus its main literary form could never again be the same after the summer of 1857, inevitably would seem repellent and perverted. An early passage in Lady Audley’s Secret suggests how knowingly Braddon conducts the fictive thought experiment that I have just described. In the story it is August 1858, by which historical time Sir Colin Campbell’s army has recaptured Lucknow, the last great rebel stronghold in the rebellious kingdom of Oudh, in the apocalyptic slaughter described in the Times dispatches of W. H. Russell; the conflict in India, the great crisis overcome, has entered its mopping-up stage. Back in Robert Audley’s peaceful chambers in London, George Talboys seems to be recovering from the traumatizing shock that he underwent a year before—not the national shock of the mass murders of British women and children that became known in newspaper reports at just that moment (on August 22, 1857, the Times first reported the news of the great massacre at the Sati Chowra ghat in Cawnpore), but his personal loss of his wife, of which he learned in the death notice in the Times. A year ago, the narrator says, “the horror of his grief was new to him, and every object in life, however trifling or however important, seemed saturated with his one great sorrow.” (One notes the stylistic anomaly registered in this sentence in the word “horror,” the distinctive word in the lexicon of Mutiny writing and an odd term to use in describing the bereavement of a man who had walked out on his scolding wife and remained away, incommunicado, for three and a half years. The narration seems to allude to more than the sentence explicitly names.) George appears a year later to have recovered his spirits, though the narrator, exactly signaling Braddon’s theme of the possibly indelible aftereffects of the summer of 1857, comments, “Heaven knows what inner change may have been worked by that bitter disappointment!” The novel then puts in George’s mouth a speech specifically connecting his damaged state of mind with the great sepoy rebellion. “Do you know, Bob,” he said, “that when some of our fellows were wounded in India, they came home bringing bullets inside them. They did not talk of them, and they were stout and hearty, and looked as well, perhaps, as you or I; but every change in the weather, however slight, every variation of the atmosphere, however trifling, brought back the old agony of their wounds as sharp as ever they had felt it on the battle-field. I’ve had my wound, Bob; I carry the bullet still, and I shall carry it into my coffin.” (49)

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Writing in 1861, Braddon evokes the Mutiny not as a great victory by which the empire and the prestige of British character were heroically preserved but as an unhealed wound rife with “the old agony” lying at an incurably deep level in the national psyche. For the one time that she does so in the novel, she here specifically identifies the mental disorder of one of her heroes as epitomizing the long-term consequences of the war in India, though of course no causal connection is alleged between the war and George’s psychologically wounded condition. (As we will see more fully in a moment, Lady Audley herself exemplifies this same condition, being said to be “wretched by reason of a wound which lay too deep for the possibility of any solace from such plasters as wealth and luxury” [295].) Outwardly “stout and hearty,” veterans injured in 1857–59 remain subject to waves of undiminished agony long after their wounds seem to have healed. The nominal reference is to bodily wounds and pains, but the whole intensely psychologized ambience of Lady Audley’s Secret and of George’s reference to himself in this passage tells us clearly that Braddon’s concern is with a version of what would now be called post-traumatic stress syndrome, the same condition that afflicts Dr. Manette in A Tale of Two Cities and that may be said to appear as a distinct psychiatric entity at just this historical moment. The Mutiny has not been put behind us, Braddon tells her readers, as if they needed to be told: it has left in its wake a gnawing psychological disorder and a painful excitation of the nerves of which one may often hardly be conscious but which pervades all of life and which, she suggests, forms the defining condition of the postwar period. British emotional life remains “saturated” in 1861 by half-conscious Indian memories, the distinctive symptom of which, she observes, is a hysterically sensitized mood of barely suppressed “horror” that may be triggered unexpectedly, at any moment, by almost anything. To discover the centrality of the Indian frame of reference in Lady Audley’s Secret is thus to recognize it as, among other things, perhaps the first concerted fictional exploration—long predating Virginia Woolf’s treatment of the same theme in Mrs. Dalloway—of the ways in which potentially severe mental suffering comes to infest peacetime society in the aftermath of war. Braddon’s two main characters, Robert Audley and Lady Audley, represent two instances of a single state of mind that arcs surprisingly across the positive and negative moral poles the two nominally embody—a provocative and, I think, wholly original design for a Victorian popular novel, unless indeed we take Dickens’s portrayal of Dr. Manette and Madame Defarge, two parallel victims of psychological trauma, as forming an equivalent pair. The two adversaries of Lady Audley’s Secret, one good and one bad, are strikingly alike in being plagued with bad dreams, incapacitating panic attacks, inexplicable-seeming waves of dread and psychological “agony,” all graphically depicted in the novel.

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So afflicted are Robert and Lady Audley by “hypochondriacal” (403) obsessions that they both feel menaced at one time or another by actual insanity. “There is nothing so delicate, so fragile, as that invisible balance upon which the mind is always trembling,” says Braddon’s narrator, describing a state of affairs acutely characteristic of English life in 1861, according to this novel: “Mad to-day and sane to-morrow” (403). “Who has not been, or is not to be, mad in some lonely hour of life?” asks the narrator in a subsequent discussion of the case of Dr. Johnson. “Who is quite safe from the trembling of the balance?” (404). Lady Audley’s Secret tells us that precarious sanity is the chronic mental state of English people in the post-Mutiny period. “Mad-houses are large and only too numerous,” comments the narrator at another point; “yet surely it is strange they are not larger” (205), given the prevalence of acute emotional disorders in these times. This clinical diagnosis of the national state of mind is confirmed by the appearance of the sinister Dr. Mosgrave, a physician “experienced in cases of mania” (368), as the final arbiter of our heroine’s fate. Psychiatrists along with lawyers, reflects Robert, defining a “terrible break” that seems to have occurred in modern culture in tandem with the rise in mental illness (and the rise of the sensation novel also), have replaced priests as “the confessors of this prosaic nineteenth century” (374). This is what is genuinely shocking in Braddon’s inaugural “sensation” novel: not its supposed depiction of English life as pervaded by crime but, rather, the extraordinary depiction of it as pervaded by contagiousseeming psychological disorders. In her intensive rendering of this phenomenon, Braddon sharply contradicts those who have argued that once the Indian war was over, it and India in general quickly lapsed from British public consciousness. She suggests at the same time the consequences of war trauma for novel writing. If the lacerating national memories of 1857–59 were to be confronted in fiction and, by this means, made available for a less morbid sort of forgetting, Braddon suggests by her own practice, it needed at first to be in oblique or refracted form only. It was just this process of refraction, I want to propose, that was designated by the loaded term—loaded with historically specific potency—“sensation.” To put the same point in another way, we could say that “sensation” was precisely the name by which the mid-Victorian novel designated the “terrible break” of the Indian Mutiny.7 According to Lady Audley’s Secret, the postwar complex of panicky hypersensitivity and haunting horror expressed itself distinctively in that state of psychological breakdown that is depicted in the image of Lady Audley congealing paralytically into a statue, stricken with dread like Lot’s wife, as she stares off into “dark [specifically Asian] distances of peril and horror,” or in that of Robert Audley imagining George Talboys “paralysed by horror” (210) if he could have foreseen his wife’s iniquities.

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The essence of “sensation” in this text is just this paradoxical-seeming idea of a traumatized numbing of sensation and of paralyzing psychic overload. To be under the sway of “sensation” is to feel one’s sensory faculties freezing up. Braddon elaborates this motif here with a singleminded intensity that conveys her sense of discovering what amounts to a historically new state of being and a compelling new subject for artistic treatment.8 Identifying the new mentality specifically with the war years, she channels directly into her fiction contemporary descriptions of the effects produced upon British people by the news of the Indian calamities of 1857. “The mind was so overmastered by the magnitude of the deeds of cruelty and treachery that were transpiring,” writes the missionary M. A. Sherring, another close analyst of the psychological consequences of the Mutiny, “that its powers of realisation and perception seemed benumbed and paralysed. It grew faint and exhausted. It tried to think, but could not. It tried to feel, but the ability was gone. It tried to weep, but the fountain of tears was dried up” (33). In letters to friends in 1857, Charles Kingsley makes clear his own subjection to this state in which unbearably acute “sensation” short-circuits and the sufferer, like Lady Audley as she undergoes the fate of Lot’s wife, is hypnotized in effect by his or her own horror. “I can think of nothing but these Indian massacres,” he writes. “I can hardly bear to look at a woman or child—even at my own sometimes. They raise such horrible images, from which I can’t escape” (2:61). Majendie writes similarly in 1859 of “those frightful and heart-rending details [of the Cawnpore massacres] which struck all Europe with horror, blanched every lip, and made the blood of England to run cold” (2). “Overcome with horror, my heart seemed almost to cease beating,” reported a spectator at the blowing from guns of a group of sepoys in 1857 (Griffiths 46). Or there would be the exemplary image of James Morley sitting stricken on the floor of his ransacked home in Delhi, unable to look in the bathroom where the mutilated body of his young wife is lying, and, again, weirdly unable to weep, “as if there was some terrible weight that had been placed on my brain, and the tears could not come out” (Ball 1:83). In incorporating deeply into her tale this set of sensations, or, more exactly, these states of sensationalized panicky numbness in which one is “paralysed by horror,” portraying them as keynotes of contemporary British sensibility, Braddon dramatizes her evident perception that memory of the Indian war persisted in the postwar years not chiefly at the level of conscious awareness but, rather, in the form of a complex of “hypochondriacal” symptoms. The origins of these symptoms (symbolically loaded dreams, morbid fixations, panicky horrors, obscure premonitions and sensations of de´ja` vu, and other indications of traumatic mental injury) were barely traceable for a nation eager above all else to expunge

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the Indian drama from its mind: this is the intuition that dictates both the depictions of character in Lady Audley’s Secret and the narrative method according to which the ordeal of the Mutiny is displaced so strangely onto a story of domestic crime and punishment. The primacy of Mutiny memories in this text requires a certain effort of analysis to discover, that is. Braddon seems further to have guessed, anticipating the teachings of Freudian psychoanalysis by several decades, that the severity of the disturbance of Victorian emotional life by the Mutiny was both a consequence and a cause of its insidiously indirect mode of operation. It is the very indirectness and, so to say, the uncanniness of imaginary constructions that reveal their true referents in cryptic form only that testify to their potency and importance. And so we get such a device as the novel’s almost obsessive preoccupation with the old well behind Sir Michael’s country house, Audley Court. This site is charged from the first with sinister portents. “They walked on to the ruined well; and Alicia told them some old legend connected with the spot—some gloomy story, such as those always attached to an old house, as if the past were one dark page of sorrow and crime” (66). Many ominous references to the Audley Court well serve as premonitions of its importance as the scene of Lady Audley’s (supposed) attempted murder of her first husband George. Robert Audley’s first direct accusation of the supposed murderess, when he declares his intention to dig up the entire property in search of his friend’s body, takes place at the very well where the body supposedly is hidden and which seems to emit reverberations of what we have seen to be the characteristic state of mind in this novel: “a shiver of horror, something akin to fear, chilled [Robert] to the heart” (273). Once Robert believes he knows that George’s body is lying at the bottom of the well, he becomes almost unbalanced by the intensity of his fixation on the imagined scene. “His friend—his murdered friend—lay hidden amongst the mouldering ruins of the old well at Audley Court. He had lain there for six long months, unburied, unknown; hidden in the darkness of the old convent well. What was to be done?” (395). In this predicament, Robert is afflicted massively with the paralytic state of mind so widespread in this novel: he dares not bring up the body for fear of provoking a catastrophic criminal investigation, but he is obsessed with “the full horror” of leaving the body in its “unhallowed burial-place” (396). “How could he hope for anything, or think of anything, while the memory of his dead friend’s unburied body haunted him,” as similar memories of the Mutiny haunted Charles Kingsley, “like a horrible spectre?” (401). He finds intolerable the “careless talk of politics and opera, literature and racing” with which his London friends amuse themselves while he dwells on thoughts of “the unhallowed hidingplace in which the mortal remains of the dead man lay, neglected and

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uncared for” (403, 405). After suffering a panic attack of such severity that he comes actually to fear for his life (Braddon’s acute study of this peculiarly modern disorder is closely in accord in this respect with latterday clinical accounts of it), he decides that he must rescue the body from the well at any cost: “I must do it; or I shall die of some panic like this which has seized upon me to-night” (405). He discovers at last that George escaped the attempt on his life and that no body lies at the bottom of the well after all; until then, this locale pervades the narrative like an obsessive ide´e fixe, a topic ultimately too horrible to think of and by the same token, as the logic of trauma dictates, impossible to chase from thought, the source of hallucinations and of the paralyzing mental spasms that for Braddon, to judge from this book, form the common symptoms of contemporary British emotional life. All this agonized reference to a body that one dares not bring up from a deep well, like George’s metaphor of the deeply embedded bullets that are only known by the pain that emanates from them through the bodies of wounded veterans, makes an exceptionally vivid figure of deeply buried mental trauma exercising its powerful effects, just because it is so deeply buried, on people’s lives. The well at Audley Court confirms at the same time the historical reference frame of such material by carrying an unmistakable Indian allusion (though Victorian critics, exhibiting another symptom of what I am calling the Mutiny complex, seem, like the text itself, not to mention it): the infamous cemetery well at Cawnpore that, as Patrick Brantlinger says (Rule 199–224), formed the supreme image of horror in British Mutiny literature. This was the well into which Nana Sahib’s followers dumped the hacked remains, living and dead, of the two hundred or so British women and children captives slaughtered on July 15, 1857, as Sir Henry Havelock’s army advanced on the city (about the same date at which Lady Audley reads of George Talboys’s return from Australia [354]).9 The cathexis of national horror on this fatal site was well established by the time of Lady Audley’s Secret. G. B. Malleson’s 1858 account of the discovery of the Cawnpore atrocities in The Mutiny of the Bengal Army was representative in its evocation of the psychic shock wave that radiated out from that site to those at home in England. “It was a sight sickening, heart-rending, maddening. It had a terrible effect on our soldiers. Those who had glanced upon death in every form, could not look down that well a second time” (159). This is the originary instance of the paralyzing (and at the same time “maddening”) Asian trauma that one cannot bear to think of “a second time” and that projects itself, as though involuntarily, into the midst of Braddon’s tale of bigamy and marital violence, seeming to multiply its own image uncontrollably throughout the text and utterly transforming the domestic scene as it had been depicted in Victorian popular fiction heretofore.

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The Indian reference of the Audley Court well, instantly perceptible though it must have been to contemporary readers, appears in the narrative in uncanny or hallucinated form only, as a repressed memory of unnamable origin. Much of the refracted Indian material in the book is still more oblique and unspecific—that is, still more powerfully repressed— than this. One might not be aware nowadays of its provenance without a certain effort of scholarly excavation, but its importance in the tale is clear. Its leitmotif is the same one that governs A Tale of Two Cities: the idea of the invasion of the sphere of English peace, domestic affection, and respectability by appalling cruelty and violence. “Even in these civilised days all kinds of unsuspected horrors are constantly committed,” thinks Robert Audley (97), distilling in this phrase precisely the shock inflicted by the Mutiny upon the consciousness of a Victorian public accustomed to take for granted, as an essential proposition of national ideology, that the advance of Christian civilization in the century of progress had made barbaric violence a thing of the past. As I have remarked once before, physical violence had indeed become, over the course of a couple of generations, one of the defining taboos of Victorian middle-class existence, a thing not to be contemplated by refined people without dread and revulsion—that is, without “horror.” The Mutiny shattered the taboo by enacting in their most dreadful forms, as the archbishop of Canterbury said, in a phrase quoted previously, “deeds of atrocity such as we had vainly imagined the world would never again witness” (qtd. Ball 2:435). In his 1859 war memoir, Majendie describes in the same spirit having witnessed the burning to death of a captured sepoy and expresses his shock that “in this nineteenth century, with its boasted civilization and humanity,” such a scene could occur “while Englishmen . . . looked calmly on” (187). Just this subversive shock to the Victorian myth of the nineteenth century (and, of course, to the idea of the war as a high point of “British glory”) is repeatedly registered in Lady Audley’s Secret, transposed into domestic English settings. “There are murders enough in these times,” comments Lady Audley’s maid Phoebe, more or less in passing (28). The account of Robert’s early visit to the Essex countryside with the convalescent George is interrupted abruptly with a meditation on this obviously culturally fraught theme of the eruption of violence in surroundings supposedly immune to it. “We hear every day of murders committed in the country. Brutal and treacherous murders.” The narrator tells of hearing of a murder of a girl by her rustic lover. “And yet even now, with the stain of the foul deed upon it, the aspect of the spot is—peace” (54). The same sensation of the haunting of the placid everyday scene by terrifying violence or, rather, by gnawing thoughts of it, is conveyed in Lady Audley’s Secret by the deployment of a certain expressionistic mode

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of imagery, essentially Braddon’s invention (by way of Dickens), that pervades the novel and again bears visible traces of its Indian origins. We get a striking instance of this effect early in the third chapter, where Audley Court is first introduced. Sir Michael’s picturesque home embodies the idealized image of the rural aristocratic scene that forms a main symbolic and ideological locale in novels from Jane Austen to Trollope to James’s Portrait of a Lady, in all of which fictional iterations it stands iconically for the idea of the harmonious perfection of the traditional social order of England. It is sunset one day in August 1857 (thousands of miles away, out of sight and apparently out of mind, “the fiery furnace of the Indian Mutiny” [H. Kingsley 3:279] is raging at its peak of most desperate intensity at this moment). A fierce and crimson sunset. The mullioned windows and the twinkling lattices are all ablaze with the red glory; the fading light flickers upon the leaves of the limes in the long avenue, and changes the still fish-pond into a sheet of burnished copper; even into those dim recesses of briar and brushwood, amidst which the old well is hidden, the crimson brightness penetrates in fitful flashes, till the dank weeds and the rusty iron wheel and broken woodwork seem as if they were flecked with blood. (24)10 The tranquil sunset falling on a beautiful country scene of luxurious privilege turns before our eyes into a phantasmagoria of conflagration and of spattering blood centered on the image of the inexplicably terrifying well. This is the kind of crazy distortion (apparently arbitrary and unmotivated at this early stage of the novel) that is likely at any moment to usurp one’s ideas even of lovely rural England, the novel intimates, once one’s mind is “saturated” by unassuaged horrors brought back from the trauma of 1857 and repressed into a (leaky at best) form of unconsciousness. Braddon’s imagery, that is to say, exactly transcribes the experience of a panic attack: of “the peculiar and sometimes uncanny way in which catastrophic events seem to repeat themselves for those who have passed through them” by triggering episodes of “flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena” (Caruth 1, 91). In accordance with this principle, which is the basic one of Braddon’s novel, imagery of the outbreak of arson that all over northern India was the signal of mutiny seems to flare up here wholly unprovoked, as though not just Lady Audley, Robert Audley, and George Talboys but the novel’s narrator, too, were suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress likely to trigger panicky hallucinations of India at the most unlikely moments. (Woolf’s Septimus Smith relives the same experience seventy years later as the “exquisite joy” of a beautiful afternoon in Regent’s Park is suddenly overwhelmed by the apparition of his dead comrade Evans, killed in the war [104–5].) The

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Audley Court passage in fact is sensationalistic in the same way that Lady Audley’s vision of smoke billowing up from “the perishing city” is: it is fraught with the kind of unavowed references that I am suggesting are embedded in the term “sensation.” The difference is that here, rather than being identified as in some sense a projection of a fictional character’s mental state, the horrified hallucination seems to indicate an impulse freely traversing the world of the novel in a vertiginous effect sharply at odds with the idiom and the metaphysic of conventional realistic fiction. A version of the same effect is carried in the imagery of panic-inducing storms that runs through Lady Audley’s Secret. “The wind had its own way with the Castle Inn, and had sometimes made cruel use of its power,” says the narrator. If any trelliswork or creeping plant was put up, the wind “tore and scattered it in its scornful fury”; “it was the wind, in short, that shattered, and ruined, and rent, and trampled upon the tottering pile of buildings, and then flew shrieking off, to riot and glory in its destroying strength” (111). Given the much-emphasized historical context of Lady Audley’s Secret, it is impossible, again, to mistake the continuity of such imagery with that of wild anarchic mobs that runs through British literature of the Indian upheaval, or for that matter with the constant use of metaphors of natural calamities—hurricanes, tidal waves, earthquakes, rivers of blood—in that literature to stand for the great uprising. (The rebellion is an “awful whirlwind of fire and blood,” exclaims Alexander Duff in 1858 [135]; “the influences of this mutiny spread with all the impetuosity of a torrent which sweeps everything less stable than the mountains before it,” writes Mowbray Thomson in 1859 [41].) Lady Audley’s response to the storm has that telltale quality of extravagant, paralyzing intensity that we have seen to be the keynote of this novel. Declaring herself “terribly frightened of the lightning,” she has her bedstead wheeled into a corner of the room, where, “with the heavy curtains drawn tightly round her, she lay with her face buried in the pillows, shuddering convulsively at every sound of the tempest without” (75–76). It is an image that evokes and centers all attention once again upon the psychologically traumatized condition often pictured in Mutiny writing. One recalls Alexander Duff’s 1858 description of a house in Calcutta filled with fugitives from the recent hurricane of massacres. “Some of them have their nervous system fairly shattered,” he writes, in a formula with broad application, as Braddon suggests, to the British nation in general, “and they seem as if still shivering with terror” (95). Or one recalls the same author’s evocation of “those awful nights of panic-terror” endured by the British in India, and by multitudes of friends and relatives at home, in the anguished early weeks of the rebellion, when mutiny and massacre were spreading contagiously from district to district (234). It is not, then, that Braddon’s novel makes direct reference to the Mutiny in

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a systematic way, but rather that it incorporates all its defining symbology of dread and panic deeply into the texture of a story that seems at first glance to have little in common with military struggles in the empire. It is, of course, a particularly disconcerting effect, and no doubt a source of the moral impropriety of which the novel seemed to contemporaries to be guilty, that it should be the villainess, of all characters, who chiefly stands in for those victimized by Mutiny terror.

THE HEROINE'S INSANITY Lady Audley’s Secret does invent the sensation novel, as James and others observed at the time, by modernizing the conventions of gothic terror fiction; however, Braddon’s novel could in some essential respects be better described as a subversive revision of the gothic mode. Dwelling on tales of sexual terrorism, gothic romance organized itself in its classic forms around a paradigmatic scene of panic and hysteria in which the noble-minded virginal heroine undergoes the persecutions of a diabolical, usually racially tinged, villain. But this structure became destabilized as the genre matured and became, so to say, more deeply conscious of its own motivations. Practitioners of the gothic became increasingly skeptical of its basic scapegoating mechanism, in which all vice and depravity were loaded symbolically upon the heroine’s tormentor and expelled at last from human society; evidently they became aware of the insidious character of a mode of didactic popular entertainment in which the reader, male and female alike, was plainly invited to share in the evil pleasures of sexual cruelty. They evidently came to recognize as a law of this literary genre, that is, just that perverted strain of feeling that seemed to some observers to underlie the avid consumption of Indian atrocity tales by the Victorian public in 1857–the ones denounced by Majendie as “gross fabrications, written to satisfy a morbid craving for horrors” (59) and by Trevelyan as “prurient and ghastly fictions” deliciously spiced up to suit the contemporary palate (194). It was possible to question in particular the dubious role played by the idealized heroine herself in the gothic commerce in prurient pleasures. Braddon dramatizes her own acute skepticism on this score by imagining the object of persecution and imprisonment in Lady Audley’s Secret not as a pure Christian maiden—not as a figure for the blessed lady martyrs of Cawnpore—but as a scheming villainess, a woman “selfish, cold, and cruel, eager for her own advancement, and greedy of opulence and elegance” (299). Had the idealized heroine been a vampire all along? Before this culturally transformative question was posed by Braddon, the deeply embedded tensions in the

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gothic scenario (or rather, in the cultural ethos that the gothic expressed) had reflected themselves in a complex of literary symptoms. One to which we shall return was the trope of the merciless punishment of the villain, which typically was carried out in gothic romance and in related modes of popular fiction with a severity almost worthy of the execution of Damiens, as though to purge the fictional scene in this way of any lingering sense of readerly collusion in his criminal drives. Another closely related one was the increasingly crucial identification of this kind of fiction with the theme of the devilish doppelga¨nger and with what it implied, the idea of eerily vicarious relations between good and evil. Vice revealed itself with increasing clarity in gothic moral metaphysics to be not the opposite term but a phase or latency or apparitional form of its counterpart, respectable virtue—an ideologically vertiginous principle that escaped the boundaries of gothic writing narrowly defined to become the dominant motive of a broad sector of Victorian fiction and at the same time a widely diffused notion of commonsense psychology and even of medical science.11 Virtue was fated in this regime of thinking to be shadowed by its inherent potential for vice, as the Christian God of Love is shadowed in Feuerbach’s gothic theology by His alternate identity as a “diabolical being” (52); cruelty was found to be a perverse or aberrant form of humanitarianism. Braddon sets her novel under the sign of just this dizzying principle and links it profoundly in so doing with the patterns of thinking that we have seen emerge at every turn in the literature of the Mutiny. Among Lady Audley’s various secrets, the first one, and the initial source of the novelistic fascination that she exercises, is that she possesses a series of different identities almost inextricably tangled together: as Lady Audley, as Helen Maldon/Talboys, and lastly as the woman who died on August 24, 1857, and was buried in the churchyard at Ventnor under a headstone inscribed “Helen, the Beloved Wife of George Talboys” (42). There is no room for gothic supernaturalism in this strictly realistic novel, but Lady Audley is nonetheless cast by Braddon in the role of a revenant who has come back amazingly from the dead, like the vampire that in a moral sense she is: in this way a vibration of necromantic horror does enter the story after all. But the idea of ghostly second selves takes its primary form in Lady Audley’s Secret in the theme of the heroine’s insanity. Her “secret self” (Mannoni 200) or “second half” (Hogg 243) is that part of her schizoid personality that is mad. We get our first glimpse of this hidden inner being in the striking scene in which Robert Audley and George Talboys discover in her boudoir her recently completed Pre-Raphaelite portrait. On the level of the brilliantly concocted “sensation” plot, which Braddon unfolds with a virtuoso display of ingenious teasing, the portrait reveals to George that Lady Audley is

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in fact his long-lost wife, whom he had believed to be dead. Of greater thematic import is the revelation that her enchanting femininity contains a streak of frightening evil. To appreciate the impact of this revelation on Victorian readers and of this novel on modern cultural and literary history, and at the same time to decipher the logic connecting it to the crisis of the recent Indian war, we need to stress how strongly the author has heretofore idealized her golden-haired heroine. When the latter arrives in the neighborhood of Audley Court as a governess, she impresses one and all by her brilliant musical and artistic accomplishments, her piety, her childish good nature, and of course her fascinating beauty. “It was part of her amiable and gentle nature always to be light-hearted, happy, and contented under any circumstances,” say those about her. “Wherever she went she seemed to take joy and brightness with her. In the cottages of the poor her fair face shone like a sunbeam”; she becomes a byword for kindliness and “benevolence” (5–6). To George Talboys it seems “that she was something too beautiful for earth, . . . and that to approach her was to walk in a higher atmosphere and to breathe a purer air” (57). Lucy Graham, as she calls herself, is a revenant already in a special sense, as one might say, for she appears in this novel like Dickens’s Esther Summerson herself summoned back to life (in more vivaciously sexy form) to star in one more didactic tale of angelic feminine excellence. Victorian and subsequent commentators have indeed never tired of declaring, at least until Elaine Showalter shifted the valences of the discussion, that behind her perfidious appearance of virtue, Lady Audley is wholly evil, “diabolically wicked” (James, “Miss Braddon” 593), a “demon in human shape” who is “meant to be detested” (Mansel 489, 492), a deceiver whose sole passion is her “utter selfishness” (John 206). These formulas rob the novel of the shocking, heretical power that it manifestly exercised upon the Victorian public. What made Lady Audley the most disruptive and culturally seditious figure of mid-Victorian fiction is the abundance of evidence in the novel that her idealized benevolence, that moral attitude lying at the heart of Victorian self-representation, is in fact genuine. There is no indication that her role of kindhearted visitor in the cottages of the poor is merely a pretense (as the mimicry of virtue and benevolence sometimes is for a character such as Thackeray’s Becky Sharp), despite critics’ acquiescent echoings of Robert Audley’s indictment of her supposedly “hellish power of dissimulation” (274). She seems genuinely astonished and upset when she learns that she has won the heart of Sir Michael, and as her exposure looms, she is moved, Braddon’s narrator makes a point of emphasizing, by “womanly feeling,” “compassion,” and “pitying tenderness” as she watches him sleeping and thinks of the pain the disclosure of her misdeeds will cause him (309). In the scene of her great confession to him, she

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declares with evident sincerity that as a rich woman she “took pleasure in acts of kindness and benevolence” (354). In short, she never quite abdicates her role as an authentic version of that humanitarian ideal that Victorian popular fiction invested first and foremost in an idolatry of saintly womanhood. When George Talboys writes to his sister that his young wife’s golden hair “falls about her face like the pale golden halo you see round the head of a Madonna in an Italian picture” (261), he is not entirely misrepresenting her. The Pre-Raphaelite portrait throws the very idea (the cultural institution) of morally beautiful femininity brutally into question by revealing not the duplicity but the doubleness of its subject’s nature. Outwardly devoted to philanthropic “kindness and benevolence,” Lady Audley has a hidden capacity for murderous cruelty. Could the two potentials conceivably be identical? Could the ideal and its wicked opposite be the alternating aspects of a single impulse? The painter is said to have given “a strange, sinister light to the deep blue eyes” and a “hard and almost wicked look” to the “pretty pouting mouth”; the image, we are told, is “like and yet so unlike” the adorably childlike woman who had posed for it. “I suppose the painter had copied quaint medieval monstrosities until his brain had grown bewildered, for my lady, in his portrait of her, had something of the aspect of a beautiful fiend” (70–71). Her secret insanity, which the painter has intuitively perceived, is the naturalistic equivalent in this novel of the late-gothic scenario expressed, say, in the haunting of James Hogg’s protagonist Robert Wringhim by his uncanny “second half” the devilish Gil-Martin in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. In the terms of another line of her literary genealogy, we could think of the Lady Audley depicted in the portrait as representing the transitional stage in the evolutionary transformation of Esther Summerson into what in some sense her idealized example implies, the alluring female vampires of Bram Stoker’s murderously misogynistic Dracula.12 As Braddon’s first readers were acutely aware, in any event, the Pre-Raphaelite portrait signifies a more subversive possibility by far than the morally banal one of hard-hearted wickedness masquerading as pious goodness. It suggests that sociopathic cruelty and angelic Christian femininity may somehow be interchangeable. The telltale adjunct of this heretical deconstruction of Victorian gender romance is the Stoker-like misogyny that Robert Audley injects brazenly into Braddon’s tale. “I hate women,” he thinks (207), meaning, I take it, to vent antipathy not so much toward women themselves as toward woman-worship as a cultural imperative (though also, perhaps, betraying the misogyny implicit in all Victorian idealizations of women). Braddon’s exposition of this nexus of uniquely volatile themes ties Lady Audley’s Secret in yet another way to the literature of the war that forms

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the historical backdrop of her story. She seems on the evidence of this novel to have perceived that the Mutiny, among its other culturally destabilizing effects, had provoked a traumatic crisis in Victorian gender ideology, and that the heart of the crisis lay precisely at the point of linkage of idealized femininity to cruelty and violence. This linkage actualized itself in the most horrific way, of course, in the massacres of British women and children that took place in the spring and summer of 1857, crimes aggravated in contemporary fantasies by mutilations and sexual torture. There is reason to guess that these real and imaginary events produced, if only at a level too deep in consciousness for overt statement, a moment of shattering disenchantment and ideological scandal. The gruesome physical abuse suffered by British women at the hands of their aggressors in India signified, among other things, a massive breach of the nimbus of immunity supposed to guard that ethereal substance, angelic female virtue, from contact with carnality and violence. Such events could only have seemed on one level to bear witness to a catastrophic failure of the mystique of feminine virtue itself. On another level, disillusionment may have taken a darker form. The ultimate offense of rape is, of course, that the victim is always held to have been dishonored by it: why should the victims in this case have been any different? Not that the cultural fantasy of pristine feminine innocence and benevolence became defunct overnight; of course it did not. It could still be invoked in all its original emotional fervor by Ruskin in such a text as “Of Queen’s Gardens” (1865), where the good English wife is pictured as the presiding spirit of a domestic space of inviolable serenity and purity. But already in 1865, in the midst of the decade of the sensation novel, to proclaim such an ideal sounds unmistakably defensive, reactionary, “hypochondriacal.” It seems, in fact, like evidence of the cultural trauma in the sphere of sex and gender thinking that the Indian upheaval had inflicted on Victorian Britain. As though precisely to ward off the kinds of disillusionment that I have mentioned (and the guilty conscience that such feelings would be sure to arouse), contemporary writers insistently invoked the terrible events in India as occasions for the deification of Victorian womanhood.13 In his personal narrative of the Cawnpore siege, Mowbray Thomson focuses characteristically on the figure of the heroic Mrs. Fraser. A survivor of the Delhi massacres who found her way to what proved to be only illusory safety at Cawnpore, she was conspicuous during “the horrors of the siege,” he writes, for “her indefatigable attentions to the wounded”; “neither hunger nor fatigue seemed to have power to suspend her ministry of mercy” (27). Her example was hardly unique, says Thomson, who praises the women in the doomed garrison generally, “our heroic sisters,” for their bravery and for “their tender solicitude and unremitting attention to the wounded, though all smeared with powder and covered with dirt”;

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he ends this passage with a quotation from Scott’s Marmion (1808) celebrating the ideal woman as “a ministering angel” (99). What gives such invocations of a well-established cultural iconography their special character is that for Thomson, as for all Victorian writers on the Mutiny, the sanctification of martyred British womanhood is inseparably bound up with all the stupefying imagery of violence generated by this war. It turned out that it was hard for the angelic image of woman to emerge undistorted from its immersion in so destructive an element. The sign of the difficulty was the appearance in Mutiny literature of a new imaginary of womanhood linked in implicitly or potentially misogynistic ways to ideas of vindictive cruelty. Officially, of course, nothing could be more perverse than to suggest that violence and cruelty could in any sense be said to be necessary constituents of the cult of what the Mutiny novelist R. E. Forrest praised (25) as “mild, gentle, saintlike” Victorian femininity. Yet the proximity of the feminine and its saintlike spirit to the impulse of ferocity came in Mutiny writing to define a site of increasingly evident anxiety, even if the origin of the anxiety was usually illegible to those affected by it.14 There is the famous legend (a legend based, as we saw in chapter 4, on historical fact)15 of Eliza Wheeler, the Eurasian daughter of Sir Hugh Wheeler, the commanding officer of the Cawnpore garrison. Kidnapped and carried off by a rebel sowar (a Muslim cavalryman) at the massacre at the boats, she was reported to have bided her time until night, when she procured a sword and murdered the sowar, his wife, his son, and his mother-in-law (Ball 1:344). Montgomery Martin, recoiling from these images of femininity turned violent, indignantly debunks them. “That a young girl should kill two men and two women with a sword, is . . . glaringly improbable,” he declares (262), though he might equally well have said “indecent” or “disgusting.” Sir George Trevelyan comments in his 1865 Cawnpore, as we saw, that this legend was able to gain credence because in England at the time—he significantly uses the same language here as do literary critics in denouncing the immoralities of the sensation novel at just this moment—“the imaginations of men were excited by a series of prurient and ghastly fictions” (194). The most ghastly fiction of all was clearly the idea of a delicate young woman appearing in the guise of vindictive killer. Trevelyan seeks to cleanse this episode of what for him is its deeply alarming “prurient” character by his astonishing comment on the heroine’s Eurasian identity. “She was by no means of pure English blood. To some the very statement of the fact may appear heartless, but truth demands that it should be made” (195). Such a declaration by a writer whose book is noteworthy for its ideal of racial amity and its harsh indictment of British racism can only be explained as a symptom of how disturbing the association of femininity—at least in its pure English

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form—with an act of violence was to him, and his need to salvage decorum by some maneuver of rhetoric, however “heartless.” Or there is the case of the much-publicized inscription supposedly written on the wall of the Cawnpore prison house by one of the doomed female captives: “Avenge us!” This exhortation was soon recognized to have been put there after the fact by a soldier in Havelock’s army and was bitterly denounced by Martin, striving, like Trevelyan, to cleanse the female participants in the Indian tragedy of the stigma of violence, as an instance of “vulgar, slandering forgeries . . . utterly at variance with the feelings of the sufferers” (383)16—even though, according to another report, the ladies imprisoned in the Bibighar were accustomed to keep up their spirits by gathering to read “the denunciatory Psalms,” such as Psalm 11: “Upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, and an horrible tempest: this shall be the portion of their cup” (qtd. Ward 375). “Their blood cries out for vengeance,” declared one of the first British officers to view the horrors of the slaughter room, a sentiment echoed by Ball the year before Braddon wrote her novel (1:379). The iconic phrase crystallizes the overwhelming coalescence of woman-worship with vengeful, even genocidal violence in Mutiny literature and makes clear the almost lethal hazard it poses for Victorian gender mythologies. Once such a formula becomes the animating motto of the war spirit, the image of the angelic woman is bound to become by an associational ellipsis the quintessential signifier and catalyst of fury. “A spirit of ferocity arose among our men whenever they recalled the tragedies of Cawnpore, Delhi, Bareilly, and fifty other places, which little disposed them to discriminate between one black face and another,” says Majendie, that deep student of primal ferocity. “It would scarcely be reasonable to expect a man whose wife had been put to death with every atrocity and indignity conceivable . . . to retain ‘merciful feelings’ toward the perpetrators” (225). The angel of mercy and the angel of merciless vengeance have effectively fused into one. Martin’s Mutiny of the Bengal Army provides other striking instances of the interweaving of idealized femininity and the spirit of ferocity in Mutiny literature—of the perverted connection, he would say, drawn between them by partisans of retribution. He cites, for example, bloodthirsty war poetry by Martin Farquhar Tupper that was published in the retributionist paper the Daily News. Tupper’s writings (notably Proverbial Philosophy) are to be found “on every lady’s work-table” and typically exhibit an “almost feminine weakness which renders those writings unreadable by men,” states the paper, but it then prints verses that fail, Martin avers, to reflect credit on “the author and his lady admirers.” Tupper urges the British to “hang every Pariah hound, / And hunt them to death in all the hills and cities round”; to cover India with “groves of

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gibbets”; to execute vengeance until Delhi is “wiped out” and the traitorous land is marked by “the hand of justice, the Cross—a cross of flame” (Martin 410). Martin expects his readers to be shocked by any such feminization (and at the same time Christianization) of the voice of exterminating cruelty. With the same rhetorical intent, in the midst of his account of the mass hangings and floggings and indiscriminate village burnings carried out by the British at Benares under Neill in late June 1857, Martin cites a letter to the Times (August 21, 1857) by the Rev. James Kennedy, who notes approvingly “that even fine delicate ladies may be heard expressing their joy at the vigour with which the miscreants are dealt with” (qtd. Martin 288). (We recall Dickens’s evocation in A Tale of Two Cities of “the crowd of ladies of quality and fashion, who were full of eager attention to the last—to the last” at the torture of Damiens [172].) And I will cite one more time the terrifying cartoon in Punch (see figure 2) in which the female figure of Justice is depicted sword in hand, ready to hew to pieces a mass of helpless sepoys—maybe the supreme Mutiny image of the fusion of the two supposedly antithetical principles of the feminine spirit of benevolent tenderness and the ethic of vindictive violence that it seems to foster. Even to contemporaries swept up in war fever, such imagery must have carried a jarring charge of sacrilege and must have caused the deification of the moral beauty of womanhood suddenly to seem fraught with doubt. For Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the revelation of the tremendous power of the occulted linkage that we have been tracing (capable as it was in 1857 of galvanizing the passion for war in one country and deluging another in blood) evidently formed a cardinal lesson of the Mutiny; she takes it as her principal fictional theme and as the basis of the ambivalence that is the most potent artistic effect of Lady Audley’s Secret. This she does most explicitly and with the greatest charge of cultural scandal, to repeat, in her conception of an angelic-seeming heroine, the very image of delicate childlike femininity, whose character proves to be traversed by the streak of latent brutality that the Pre-Raphaelite portrait painter intuitively recognizes. Of course, it may seem far-fetched to annex Lady Audley to themes of retributive slaughter in India; but we have seen that Braddon never stops insinuating into her story the implication of an identity between the two. This suggestion underlies the startling moment when Robert accuses Lady Audley of being potentially a fanatical mass murderess. “If by a second massacre of Saint Bartholomew you could have ridded yourself of me, you would have freely sacrificed an army of victims,” he declares, adding, with an inconsistency that he seems not to notice, “The day is past for tenderness and mercy” (344). (Denouncing her for mercilessness, he rejects mercy.) Linking Lady Audley’s story in a new if perhaps only subliminal way to the Indian crisis transpiring concur-

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rently with it, Robert echoes here a strain of language that had run luridly through the polemics of the Mutiny. The claim that Lady Audley was cruel enough to annihilate “an army of victims” if it served her purposes suggests such a text, for example, as the declaration of a letter-writer in the Times (August 8, 1857) that “nothing but extermination” would suffice in dealing with rebellious troops, or the subsequent pronouncement of the paper (October 21, 1857) that the united voice of the country “demands the destruction of 70,000 sepoys.” From a certain point of view, Braddon’s heroine is an image of the exterminationist side of the national character. But we now can understand that she is unconscious of her own murderous impulses even as they arise powerfully within her because they spring not from her everyday psychology but from her insane “secret self,” a function of her nature uncannily disconnected from her conscious personality. (She strolls back into the house happily singing to herself just after George has fallen to his supposed death [78] not because she is a bloodthirsty psychopath, which we know she is not, but because she does not remember what has just taken place—an artistically striking effect that indicates just how far Braddon has gone, in one bold step of Dostoyevskian intuition, in the exploration of psychological incoherences unknown to conventional Victorian realism.) On the level that here concerns us, that of the symbolic representation of cultural deep structures, Lady Audley’s submerged homicidal personality reflects, I have been suggesting, the potential for murderous cruelty that has proved to be inherent in the sanctified image of the angelic heroine—the potential that so much cultural labor (Ruskin’s, for example) had to be expended in mystifying and that came so starkly into view in the crisis of the Mutiny. The same thematic is mirrored in inverted form, one with still more pressing significance for the events in India that are unfolding in the novel’s background, in the personage of George Talboys’s sister and determined avenger, and Lady Audley’s principal foil, Clara Talboys. Officially Clara occupies the role of heroine that Lady Audley has vacated by reason of her moral deficiencies: young and beautiful, she is morally on the right side (that is, she is opposed to Lady Audley) and she is credited by Robert with giving inspirational purpose to his previously idle and mediocre existence. But the book introduces here another dizzying twist in its glorification of the inspirational female, for instead of epitomizing angelic “kindness and benevolence,” Clara, like the legendary Eliza Wheeler, is a heroine in the form of an avenging fury—a type not before seen, I believe, in significant English fiction, except perhaps for the figure of the obviously demented Rosa Dartle in David Copperfield. The appearance of such a type (like the parallel appearance of Lady Audley herself) gives spectacular form to Braddon’s evident perception that the Mutiny had produced as one of its reverberations an upheaval in gender ideology in Britain.

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Clara personifies unmistakably the mania of retribution that had coursed through Mutiny discourse for a couple of years previously. She represents in effect the transformation necessarily undergone by the cult of saintly humanitarian femininity once Moloch, in Disraeli’s way of putting it, replaces Jesus as the national divinity; to this extent, she is an icon of a very specific moment of acute cultural disruption. “I shall go mad unless I can do something—something towards avenging [George’s] death,” she declares (197). “You will see vengeance done upon those who have destroyed him. You will do this, will you not?” she pleads to Robert (199). “Do you wonder . . . that when I hear that his young life has been ended by the hand of treachery, that I wish to see vengeance done upon the traitor? Oh, my God, . . . let mine be the hand to avenge his untimely death!” (200). “Let us hope for nothing but revenge” (202). In her feverish vindictiveness, Clara echoes the language of Martin Farquhar Tupper, the military memoirist Charles Napier North, who describes himself as “tortured by the fierce thirst for revenge” (76), and a hundred other vengeance-obsessed Mutiny commentators; she appears in Lady Audley’s Secret like a migration of the Punch figure of pitiless Justice directly into the pages of fiction. Robert adores and idolizes Clara, whom he eventually marries and who seems to be the anointed heroine of this novel. But the structures of Victorian popular fiction can barely be made to contain the disruptive presence of so anomalous a heroine. Robert’s ambivalence about her creed of retributive violence is unstintingly registered and proves to be so intense as almost to throw the novel into an uncontrollable rhetorical tailspin. He despises the job assigned to him by Clara of bringing Lady Audley to justice; he pities both her and her second husband, Sir Michael, whose life will be devastated if she is exposed. He thinks of Lady Audley, whom he believes to be a cold-blooded murderess, as a “pitiful” (145) object of compassion. “Something in the childish innocence of her expression,” the narrator observes, “seemed to smite him to the heart” (263). The vengeful Clara has forced him, he complains, “upon the loathsome path . . . of watchfulness and suspicion” (204). Increasingly he finds himself tormented, that is to say, by the moral dilemma that was furiously debated in British public media during the Mutiny, the conflict between implacable justice and its antitheses, widely denounced at the time, as we have seen, as effeminate sentimentalism: pity, mercy, clemency. Vacillating, he feels at first that his mission to discover George’s killer has “made him what he had never been before—a Christian,” and from this new religious spirit he draws the conclusion that justice, which for the supposed murderess means hanging, takes precedence over mercy: “ ‘Justice to the dead first,’ he said, ‘mercy to the living afterwards’ ” (157–58). In this religious mood, he resembles such a figure as the half-

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insane Colonel Neill, who, “eager to avenge the blood of his slaughtered countrymen” (Kaye 2:217), declared in reference to his mass executions of rebels in Allahabad, Benares, and Cawnpore in 1857 that “the Word of God gives no authority to the modern tenderness for human life” (Hibbert, Great Mutiny 201). “Retributive justice has its claims as surely as compassion,” Neill’s admirer Alexander Duff had written (393) in just the tonality of Clara Talboys, hoping to quell any squeamishness in the British public about punishing the rebels of 1857 as they deserved. Seeking to live up to this inflexible moral code that had been so loudly trumpeted in the polemics of the day, Robert confronts the guilty Lady Audley “with a cold sternness that was so strange to him as to transform him into another creature—a pitiless embodiment of justice, a cruel instrument of retribution” (271). His aversion to the dogma of “pitiless” and “cruel” justice and his compassion for his victim cannot be suppressed, however, with the result that the irresolvable ambivalence that I have identified as the stylistic marker of significant Mutiny literature emerges as the dominant trope of Braddon’s novel. Thus arise Robert’s contradictory feelings about his beloved Clara, for his revulsion from the “pitiless” (182) gospel of punishment is necessarily a revulsion from her, even though he cannot bring himself to acknowledge this fact. He does, though, emphasize its startling misogynistic implications. “How pitiless these women are to each other,” he thinks ruefully at one point (237), underlining with absolute clarity the identification of womanly virtue and the impulse of vindictive cruelty that has turned out to form in different inflections the central theme of the novel. As he meditates on the ruthlessness of Madame de Pompadour, who behaved like “an implacable fiend” (274) toward a gentleman who had offended her, is his immediate reference perhaps not to the “beautiful fiend” Lady Audley after all but to his fiance´e, Clara, pitiless Justice incarnate, instead? We need not be able to answer this riddle in order to see how insistently Lady Audley’s Secret translates its rehearsal of the great Mutiny debate between retribution and clemency into a meditation on the unmentionable linkage of the cult of the “ministering angel” to the potential for vindictiveness and cruelty.17 Nor need we answer it to recognize that bringing this potential so distinctly into play is seen by Braddon (as it certainly was by the literary lynch mobs of her original critics) as almost undoing the Victorian cultural fabric itself. Clara and Lady Audley are dramatic antagonists, then, but thematically they are congruent. Clara is the heroine who turns out to be driven by an impulse of frightening, repulsive vindictiveness; Lady Audley is the angelic woman possessed by a diabolical “second half,” under the influence of which she is as though “impelled by some horrible demoniac force” (324). Each of the novel’s alternate heroines is in the grip of mania. Showalter’s witty remark that “Lady Audley’s real secret is that she is sane and, more-

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over, representative [of aggrieved Victorian womanhood]” (167) dismisses much too briskly Braddon’s intense concern with the theme of madness in a range of the different manifestations we have traced, from rampant panic disorders to what J. C. Prichard would class psychiatrically as “moral insanity.” Lady Audley defines her own mental illness as a visitation from a “restless demon” and, in a particularly searing phrase, as “the frightful, passionate, hungry craving for violence and horror” (287). She thus diagnoses in herself exactly the psychosis often diagnosed by nineteenth-century analysts of the murderous excesses committed by the British in 1857–59, when events in India served “to evoke from the depths of our nature,” as Trevelyan wrote, “the sombre and ferocious instincts which religion and civilization can never wholly eradicate” (234). (The reason they cannot, Feuerbach would say, is that these instincts are not, after all, external to religion and civilization but essential components of them.) “A sort of madness seized upon the [English] people” at the news of the atrocities in India, says the narrator of Maxwell Grey’s Mutiny novel In the Heart of the Storm (1891). “A wave of passionate vindictiveness swept over men’s hearts, an unsuspected trait in the national character was brought to light” (70–71). This assertion that the English, like the sepoy rebels, were seized with temporary madness in 1857 (and thus were not responsible for their more horrific acts at the time) is, we have seen, one of the commonplaces of Mutiny literature. In the Mutiny, “our two races were mad, with an awful homicidal insanity,” writes Edward Thompson (131). For Grey, Trevelyan, and Braddon alike, however, it is not that madness overturns or momentarily supplants one’s true nature but, rather, that a dormant indwelling potential of that nature is somehow activated by madness and enabled to rise terrifyingly to the surface. This is the argument in Lady Audley’s Secret that catalyzes its paramount effect, Braddon’s transformation of gothic romance from the eroticized tale of terror into a mode superficially similar but focused now on that experience of metaphysical trauma called horror. I need not illustrate again the stress given to the word throughout Victorian Mutiny writing, where it figures, as we have seen, as the defining term of the war. Even had Braddon not so carefully indexed the narrative of her novel to 1857– 59, it could be recognized as a product of those years by the insistency with which this keynote is sounded in its pages. I have cited already an array of its representative appearances in the text, from the vision of Lady Audley as Lot’s wife “staring far beyond the narrow boundary of her chamber wall, into dark distances of peril and horror” (310) to her characterization of her madness as “the frightful, passionate, hungry craving for violence and horror” (287). Robert Audley, the victim of “a gloomy horror engendered of his own monomania” (287), is for his part unusually prone to “the horrors” (106). This state of mind afflicts him, for

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example, as he meditates on the crimes of women and experiences “a shiver of horror, something akin to fear, [that] chilled him to the heart” (273) just as the Rev. James Kennedy (to cite only one such echoing) was chilled to the heart by Neill’s rampant hangings in Benares. “It is horrible, very horrible!” he wrote. “To think of it is enough to make one’s blood run cold” (qtd. Ball 1:240). When Robert, expressing a fictionally displaced version of the shock inflicted by Cawnpore on the Victorian public, hears that George’s body lies in the well, he flings up his hands and gives “one loud cry of horror” (392); “the memory of his dead friend’s unburied body haunted him,” as we have seen, “like a horrible spectre” (401). Lady Audley’s maid Phoebe strikes the same note, describing the story she has witnessed by exclaiming, “it’s too horrible, it’s too horrible, it’s too horrible!” (326). The novel is so deeply penetrated by this mode of feeling that it risks seeming at times to move from the condition of plotdriven realistic fiction to that of a kind of obsessive daydream. It is an effect incompatible not just with any possible invocation of “British glory” (the jingoistic spirit of Braddon’s war poems has gone extinct in this novel) but also with the term “sensationalism” in its usual acceptation. According to Lady Audley’s Secret, the paralyzing shock given to the national nervous system by the crisis of 1857–59 bears witness to what is ultimately a moral and philosophical trauma. Robert Audley, appalled at his encounter with Lady Audley’s depravity and at his own destiny of having to pursue “the loathsome path” of retribution, not only feels his sanity wobbling but becomes a figure of a kind of hypochondriacal despair that previously had been unknown, like other key elements of this book, in mid-Victorian fiction. In his depressive state, he has a vision of his daily life as a horrible clocklike mechanism “which knows no stoppage or cessation, though the mainspring be for ever broken, and the hands pointing to purposeless figures upon a shattered dial” (205). The striking passage suggests the impossibility of distinguishing extreme philosophical “horror” from psychological trauma, the state marked, as we know, by the sufferer’s subjugation to “the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (Caruth 11). “The mental monologue still went on,” Braddon writes, “and the young philosopher of the modern school,” experiencing in another form that sensation of the negation of moral value that runs through A Tale of Two Cities, “was arguing the favourite modern question of the nothingness of everything and the folly of taking too much trouble to walk upon a road that led nowhere, or to compass a work that meant nothing” (206). Robert’s spell of philosophical nihilism is experienced in even more devastating form by his supposed antithesis, but in this respect as in others—an effect so remarkable that even Henry James could mistake it for

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the expression of authorial sympathy with “vice” (Notes 171–72)—his spiritual alter ego, Lady Audley. Prone as she is to “fits of violence and despair” (353), “sickness and despair” (385), she reasserts her claim to the role of heroine by being fated to undergo the most extreme anguish meted out to any character in the novel. “She would rather have suffered anything,” comments the narrator, pioneering uncharted artistic territory, “than that slow suspense, that corroding anxiety, that metaphysical dryrot in which heart and mind seemed to decay under an insufferable torture” (340). This metaphysical decomposition under the influence of an overwhelming wave of horror and despair gives new significance to that condition misnamed “sensation” and so often identified with the motive of pandering to “the cravings of a diseased appetite” for excitement (Mansel 483). The theme of the passage and of the book as a whole is the state of numbed sensationlessness shot through with immobilizing panic that is produced, as the literature of the Mutiny copiously demonstrated, by severe moral shock. Such a state is the widespread disabling condition of English men and women in the wake of 1857–59: this is the profound history lesson given fictionalized form in Lady Audley’s Secret.

Epilogue

Fiction Fair and Foul: Novels of the Mutiny

In attempting to define what it has argued was the traumatic break (a sensation both of internal splitting and of a fracture in history) inflicted on Victorian Britain by the experience of the great Indian rebellion, this study has focused chiefly on materials from the war years or their immediate aftermath. The aim of this epilogue is briefly to track some of the longer-term cultural and psychic reverberations of the events of 1857–59. For this purpose, no medium could be more revealing than that of popular novels, where Victorian sensibility manifests itself more distinctly and in more richly textured form than anywhere else. For a decade or so, as we saw, the recollection of the Mutiny was at the same time too overwhelmingly a matter of experiential fact and too lacerating emotionally to allow for fictional treatment except in refracted forms like the ones described in the last two chapters. (No doubt other contemporary texts illustrative of the same refractive process remain to be identified.) Once the literary taboo on the Mutiny expired and it became possible to explore these historical events in the way that the Victorians did best, by making up stories about them, Mutiny fiction proliferated to the point of becoming a major subcategory of the British novel. Of the sixty or so Mutiny novels published in Britain before the end of the century, I refer in what follows to a dozen titles culled somewhat haphazardly from this archive: Charlotte Mary Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family (1865); James Grant’s First Love and Last Love (1868); Henry Kingsley’s Stretton: A Novel (1869); Meadows Taylor’s Seeta (1872); George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Dilemma (1876); R. E. Forrest’s Eight Days (1891); Maxwell Grey’s In the Heart of the Storm (1891); Hume Nisbet’s The Queen’s Desire (1893); G. A. Henty’s Rujub, the Juggler (1893); Mrs. Everard Cotes’s The Story of Sonny Sahib (1894); and two novels by Flora Annie Steel, On the Face of the Waters (1897) and The Hosts of the Lord (1900). With the exception of these last two, none of these works is likely to strike readers as particularly distinguished, relative to the high artistic standard of Victorian popular fiction. These are items of commercial art produced for a broad readership; for this very reason, they are particularly valuable as indices of popular consciousness at the time. It may be an artificial exercise to think of these books as forming in a sense a single extended work, since no reader, certainly no contemporary

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one, ever read them in this way. But if we begin with the proposition that these texts harbor at some level an awareness of one another’s presence (that they all are embedded inextricably in intertextuality), then it will be apparent that their distinctive organizing logic is exactly that of emotional trauma, which manifests itself, to quote one more time Cathy Caruth’s powerful formula, in “the peculiar and sometimes uncanny way in which catastrophic events seem to repeat themselves for those who have passed through them” (1). In cases of trauma, “the unavoidable and overwhelming imposition of historical events on the psyche” takes the form of “the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (ibid. 58, 11). Repetitive, compulsive-seeming, redundant, exorbitant retelling (“the unwitting reenactment of an event that one cannot simply leave behind” [ibid. 2]) is indeed the fundamental trope of narrative in these books, as we saw that it was, notably, in Ball’s History of the Indian Mutiny and throughout this literary field in general. (It is largely Ball’s intensive deployment of this trope, in defiance of all rules of narrative economy, that renders his book the quintessential document of the Mutiny.) Repetition is a problematic device of expression, needless to say, from an artistic point of view; one is forced to wonder about the logic of its obviously irresistible appeal for Victorian readers in Mutiny narrative. The multiplying literary incarnations of the figure of Lieutenant George Willoughby can serve to illustrate just how powerfully the repetition compulsion operates in the cluster of novels at hand. The historical Willoughby performed a famous act of suicidal gallantry in Delhi on May 11, 1857, when the Meerut mutineers rode into the city and launched the massacre of Europeans and native Christians that followed. Willoughby and eight fellow soldiers defended the great Delhi powder magazine against a host of mutineers and rebels as long as possible, then blew it up with themselves inside to prevent its falling into enemy hands. (Along with a couple of his comrades, Willoughby somehow survived the blast, only to be murdered by villagers as he fled the city and tried to make his way back to the British lines at Meerut.) The episode was recounted again and again in Victorian literary media. First reported seven weeks afterward in the Times of June 30, 1857 (5), Willoughby’s “feat of gallant devotion” was described in Malleson’s “red pamphlet,” the first installment of his Mutiny of the Bengal Army, in 1857 (41); the same author rehearsed the story again in his 1890 Indian Mutiny of 1857 (79–81). Other renditions include those by Rotton in 1858 (12), Martin c. 1861 (158, 162), Kaye in 1870 (2:87–91), and Holmes in 1883 (108–9), among others. When Charles Ball comes to the story of Willoughby in 1860, he treats it, in accordance with his usual method, not as a unitary narrative moment but as a recurring, echoing, self-duplicating one. It is recounted

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first in the voice of the historiographical narrator (1:75–76), then twice again, in an official abstract of the report by one of the survivors of Willoughby’s party, then in the detailed report itself (1:76–77). Ten pages later we witness the event again as described this time by a British lady who survived the Delhi massacres (1:87)—and subsequently yet again, in the words of a report by a Major Abbott. “Suddenly we heard the report of heavy guns; and shortly afterwards a violent explosion announced the blowing-up of the magazine in the city. This was done by Lieutenant Willoughby, who, seeing all hopes of keeping the magazine gone, adopted this last resource” (1:106). It is an event that in this work, as in the historiographic literature generally, repeats itself almost endlessly. Forrest’s Eight Days picks up just this suggestion by seeming to transpose Ball’s narrative method directly into fiction. In its novelistic retelling of the Delhi story, Willoughby’s blowing up of the magazine (under a fictional name) forms the climactic event of the second volume (2:283). To underline its significance, this event then is described in detail a second time over from the point of view of a native eyewitness (2:285); but this is not all. Later we relive the huge explosion once again and see the column of smoke rising over the city from the point of view of the fictional Willoughby’s wife and daughters (2:297). The explosion is reenacted yet again in volume 3, this time as witnessed by British captives in the palace (3:98); and it is later enacted for the fifth time, now from the point of view of observers on the Ridge outside the city (3:228). All the temporality of this large sector of Forrest’s novel, we may say, is synchronized to the explosion, which bends imaginary space-time in this book the way a gravitating body does in relativity physics, or as the booming of Big Ben does in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, or, in another variant of the effect, as the narrator’s compulsive revisitation of moments of his mistress’s supposed infidelity governs the convoluted time of traumatic jealousy in Proust’s La prisonnie`re. Forrest’s canny novel suggests that the significance of the event lies not in itself—not in its impact on the course of events, which in historical fact was minimal, since many of the munitions stored in the magazine were undamaged by the explosion—but in the way it reverberates in memory and is replayed there again and again. The effect that Forrest highlights is confirmed in Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters, which echoes Eight Days and many other Victorian narrations of the uprising in Delhi by devoting an entire chapter (236–48) to a detailed fictional reconstruction of the episode of Willoughby’s famous deed, with which readers were supposed to be perfectly familiar long before picking up the book. Willoughby then appears as a character in three more novels from our list: Stretton, First Love and Last Love, and The Queen’s Desire. In exactly similar fashion, other well-known events and characters from Mutiny history recur in book after book, weaving networks of texts to-

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gether in a fabric of incessant repetition and dramatizing in this way the proposition that the Mutiny figures above all in subsequent Victorian existence as a thing—the thing—impossible to chase from the mind. One obviously traumatic episode treated in this way, for example, would be the scene of the discovery of the blood-soaked massacre chamber at Cawnpore by Havelock’s appalled soldiers, an event described in every history of the war and reenacted in Rujub, the Juggler, In the Heart of the Storm, and The Queen’s Desire. It is, of course, not repetition per se but phantasmatic or hallucinatory repetition that expresses the emotional injury of trauma. For a reader attuned to such effects, the incessant reenactment of Mutiny events in the literature we are surveying carries just this aura. Though on one level a reader experiences such events as belonging to the world of fictional (or historical) factuality, on another level they take on their full imaginative potency from the moment that they reveal themselves as psychological rather than factual events, ide´es fixes, objects of obsessive fantasy and ungovernable memory, sites of intense emotional cathexis that Britons for decades afterward, exhibiting “the unavoidable and overwhelming imposition of historical events on the psyche,” are obliged to relive and relive again in imagination. This, I think, is exactly the logic of another fundamental trope of Mutiny discourse in all its contemporary and later modalities: the insistence on the dreamlike, fantastic, hallucinatory character of the events of the time. His experience in India, Majendie said in a definitive formula, was “almost like a dream” (188). In British stories of the uprising in all literary media, factual reality is never far from spinning into imagery of phantasmagoria (and picking up in a sort of feedback loop the hysteria aroused in people at home by the maddeningly sketchy and delayed reports of horrors occurring in Bengal). I suggested in chapter 4 that historiographic accounts of the Mutiny proliferate as they do in obedience to what was felt to be an urgent need to cleanse the event of its fantastic, emotionally supersaturated character and to bring it back under the sway of factual knowledge and rational understanding. By contrast, the phantasmatic aspect of the Mutiny in Victorian perception (which the historians themselves do not succeed in expurgating from their accounts) is repeatedly invoked in the works of fiction that I have listed. Having fictionally reenacted the tortuous wanderings through the Bengal jungles at night that fugitives from the massacres in Delhi and elsewhere enacted in reality, the characters of Eight Days observe, in the phrase that is uttered in a thousand iterations throughout Mutiny literature, that the experience has been “like a terrible dream” (3:211). Each of the three heroines of Grant’s First Love and Last Love makes much the same comment. “If I ever survive these strange passages of life—which I greatly doubt,” says one, in effect defining the essential logic of late-

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Victorian Mutiny writing, “I shall have them often in dreams at night for years to come” (264). “Lying in her own bed,” the narrator says of another, “it was difficult to conceive, at times, that she was not labouring under some horrible nightmare” (273). A third describes her sojourn as a prisoner in the Delhi palace in words that could be mistaken for one of Freud’s explications of the condition he named “traumatic neurosis.” Young Polly Weston, says the narrator, “felt herself as if under that species of nightmare peculiar to a disturbed dream, in which the sleeper seems unable to escape or elude a pursuing monster, a falling rock, or other threatened danger; but her state appeared to be a permanent dream, from which there could be neither awaking or escape” (287). The passage vividly renders that feeling of stricken paralysis that is the essence of “sensation,” as I have argued; but here I want to suggest that it contains a kind of compacted parable of the ordeal of the British nation in the decades following the horrors of 1857. It focuses on that dimension of the Mutiny that was less a geopolitical event than a psychological one, a nightmare from which Britain was long unable to awake and was compelled to relive in communal memory, in a mode antithetical to that of patriotic commemoration, over and over again. When the narrator of Kingsley’s Stretton declares that the Mutiny “was amorphous, hideous, fantastic, not reducible to words” (3:236), this is the implication: that for those at home and those of later generations, the events of the Mutiny, “graven” as they are “very deeply on the minds of all who witnessed them” (Forrest 3:281), are not to be understood as belonging to the order of historical factuality but as imaginary and emotional events that continue to take place involuntarily in the theater of the Victorian psyche long afterward. The conundrum that Mutiny novels must strive not, perhaps, to resolve but to exploit for artistic purposes is thus this vertiginous structural doubleness of the fantastic and the historically realistic—a conundrum that is implicit in all historical fiction but that takes its most extreme possible form here, where it reflects back from the fictional surface the powerfully traumatizing experience undergone by readers themselves as they lived historically through the events being summoned once again from memory by the agency of novelistic make-believe. Writers in the present group embody the conundrum (in which the factual and the fantastic seem to spiral dizzyingly together) in an array of fictive conceits that always are artistically precarious and seem in the more sophisticated works of the kind to draw attention to their own precariousness, as though this neuralgic point of representation marked after all a key node of historical understanding. Sometimes in these novels, historical personages walk fantastically in under their own names from the supposed world of historical reality to play roles in the fictional dramas of make-believe protagonists; sometimes these historical personages mask themselves (as Lieutenant

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Willoughby, Major William Hodson, and General John Nicholson do in various of these novels) in fictional incognitos that the reader is weirdly enough meant immediately to penetrate; sometimes historical documents, whether identified as such or not, are introduced verbatim into the madeup stories; and in all these stories, imaginary people move in the milieu of historical reality and live through real-life events, though of course only pretending to be subject to the consequences endured by their flesh-andblood predecessors (as figments of imagination, they are immune to them). Insistently, these texts force upon readers by their use of all these self-dramatizing illusionistic devices the problem of the treacherously fluid metaphysical line between fiction and history. Can George Willoughby, for all the traces of his obscure prior existence that he left in historical records, ever be for us anything other than the fictional apparition into which he is transmuted in Mutiny novels and historiographical narratives? Alternately, can the heroes and heroines of novels like these be said to occupy an inferior status of reality, mere fictional inventions that they are, relative to the authenticated personages who populate historians’ chronicles? In certain texts such as The Queen’s Desire or Rujub, the Juggler, the problem is highlighted and pushed to the breaking point by the introduction of openly fantastical romance elements, including magic and the supernatural, into realistic fictional environments based on historians’ accounts of the Mutiny. Such devices seem designed, that is, to accentuate the magical system of imagination that is essential to this mode of fiction but that novelists wed to the representational ethics of “realism” strive to dissimulate. The radical genre-bending tendency that runs through Mutiny fiction (as we have seen in the cases of A Tale of Two Cities and Lady Audley’s Secret), expressing the sense that the Mutiny had altered reality itself and obliged realism to reinvent itself accordingly, takes another form at the end of First Love and Last Love, when, in a fantastic image without historical warrant, the sixteen-year-old heroine is discovered by the British conquerors of Delhi to have been crucified against a wall.1 It is as though an Indian nightmare were allowed to emerge for once in this episode in absolutely uncensored form, with its full charge of horror and savage unavowed misogyny intact, and in the process to shatter irreparably all the anxiously maintained decorum of mid-Victorian popular fiction. These are the sorts of artistic and epistemological fluctuations that arise when “the unavoidable and overwhelming imposition of historical events on the psyche” is such that events take on in the cultural imaginary the aspect of trauma. To try to venture educated guesses about the cultural functions of this literature that seems locked into the compulsively repetitious dynamics of trauma, we must return here at the end of this study to consideration of the polemical and ideological operations of these texts. Recent scholarly

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investigation of the Mutiny and of British imperial culture at large has handicapped itself, I have argued in this book, by imposing a Manichaean grid of political vice and virtue on its objects of study, one that renders always, over and over, according to a compulsive repetitiousness of another kind, the same absolute and often ahistorical judgments. To depart from this model by insisting on the methodological primacy of close reading is quickly to dispel the supposition that Mutiny novels, with perhaps a fleeting exception here and there, express a monolithic imperialist and racist mentality, celebrating uncritically the British raj and “British glory,” uniformly vilifying the rebellion, and stoking enthusiasm for the imperial expansionism of the fin de sie`cle. This set of presumptions is dictated by the fundamental one (motivated perhaps more by “the paranoid style” of analysis2 than by observation) that imperial culture constitutes almost by definition a seamless ideological whole; but Mutiny novels fit the caricature no more closely than Victorian historiography of the Mutiny does. What one finds instead are the self-division and painful ambivalence that form the defining properties of nearly the whole field of nineteenth-century Mutiny discourse. The dozen novels here held up for consideration all strongly condemn the savagery of the rebels’ attacks upon defenseless British victims, and it is perfectly true that none of them pronounces British imperial domination of India to be morally unjustifiable. Every one of them overtly or implicitly takes the view that British rule in India (a century old at the time of the uprising: a feature of the immutable world order) was preferable to the restoration of native Indian feudalism that the rebels called for. Readers for whom the intolerable character of imperialism in any form is not just a presumption but a matter of passionate conviction have therefore treated this fiction en bloc as culpably complicit with it.3 (Closely gauging forms and degrees of complicity or weighing complicity in a relativized way against other possible attitudes are not computations that enter into such judgments.) With one exception to which I will return in more detail, however, all these books also evince, along with evidence of complicity, more or less profound disenchantment with the British imperial regime. For one thing, they reinforce the indictment of British racism in India that we have seen to be an insistent theme of national self-reproach across the bandwidth of Mutiny literature. They contribute importantly, as I would say, to the historical construction of the very category of “racism”—the category of a malignant violation of the spirit of humanity—itself. Revulsion from racism forms a particularly salient motive of Taylor’s Seeta, which centers on a strongly affirmative portrayal of an interracial marriage and preaches a gospel of interracial sympathy and amity. The book focuses its trenchant critique of the British in India on the venomous racial phobia that it identifies as the mainspring of British attitudes. “She’s

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a native,” declares one bigoted matron about the deputy commissioner’s beautiful Indian bride, “and they are all niggers, and—and—I hate them— that’s all” (183). The didactic mission of the novel is to enact a correction of such attitudes, which Taylor’s Victorian readership is obviously expected to judge repugnant. He presumes that his readers in 1872 will side with him in condemning those who denounce interracial love and marriage. The deputy commissioner’s successor writes to him later to express his own gradual acquisition of a respectful view of native Indians. “I hope that you will forgive the petulance with which I used to speak of the people as ‘niggers,’ ” he writes (433). Banishing this revolting term from the British vocabulary, along with all the noxious attitudes that it encapsulates, is seen by this novel, as it had been by such a commentator as W. H. Russell long since, as the precondition of morally decent British rule; it makes clear by the same token just how far short of this goal British rule has heretofore fallen. Kingsley’s Stretton makes the same point, underlining the extreme rarity of friendships between British people and Indians but finding a glimmer of hope in the shift of vocabulary that Taylor had hoped for. “Our people have dropped the horrid word ‘nigger’ now,” comments the narrator (this is in 1869). “Fancy calling Scindiah [a distinguished young rajah who remained loyal to the British in the uprising], for instance, a ‘nigger’! Can one wonder at what happened?” Indians may come eventually to love the British for the improvements they have brought. But “social impertinences had much to do with one phase of the Indian Mutiny. The most courteous people in the world get sick in time of continual insults” (2:281). Over and over, these books defy the stereotyping of Mutiny fiction by reminding us that the obnoxious racial attitudes of the British were central causes of the events of 1857. Probably the harshest and most consistent indictments of British conduct in India to be found in this group of texts come in Chesney’s The Dilemma and Nisbet’s The Queen’s Desire. After the character who stands in Chesney’s novel for the controversial war hero William Hodson has an elderly Indian fugitive bayoneted to eliminate a witness to the theft of his jewels (one of the most searingly antijingoistic scenes in Victorian writing), the hero Yorke comments in the note of moral nausea that increasingly fills this novel, “I am getting sick of this executioner’s business in cool blood after the battle; it is beastly work” (2:259).4 Murdering prisoners was standard British practice in this supposedly high-minded war, the novel tells us, among other things. The Queen’s Desire is laced with similarly pungent anti-British commentary. The leading characteristics of traditional British government in India were “crass stupidity and overbearing injustice,” declares the narrator definitively (14). “It was nothing for [one of the protagonists of the story] to see fair women in their petulance of jealousy, or fits of temper, at some supposed neglect

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strike the humble and servile Hindoo, that waited upon them, savage blows on the face, or to see the gentlemen kick a passing servant from the path into the jungle”; in English eyes, the narrator declares, the natives are “rubbish”; “it is astonishing how quickly even the most genial of men and the gentlest of women can become tyrants when they get the unlimited chance” (32–33). Absolute power corrupts absolutely and has turned the British imperial masters in India (notably including the British womenfolk) into a race of savage tyrants, according to this novel. “There were Indian mothers and children butchered by our men” in a certain reprisal assault, the novel reports, “although these casualties are not so particularly noticed when they happen to our enemies as they are when the loss and horror are on our side” (144). Albert Memmi and Octave Mannoni, in diagnosing the “Nero” complex and the “Prospero” complex, respectively, had little to teach this Victorian novelist about the cruel pathologies of colonialism. The most remarkable gesture of all in The Queen’s Desire is its guardedly but unmistakably sympathetic portrayal of the ultimate monster of British imagination, Nana Sahib, whom the novel names “a patriot” (141) and shows as subject to outrageous insults by the British before the uprising, and whom Nisbet has the audacity to picture in one scene in a tender domestic moment in his zenana (women’s quarters). “He was the most tender of husbands and fathers to his beautiful young wife and daughter,” declares the narrator (143). Nisbet’s almost treasonous image offers an extreme instance of the critique of British power that runs through these novels, ambiguously intertwined with the equally consistent argument that in spite of every qualification, the British on balance do good in India. The valor of British soldiers in the war is a theme of regular patriotic praise in this body of fiction, but so, too, is the recurring assertion that the British public and British troops alike were seized at the time with “the war passion,” a wild atavistic impulse that robs men of all humanity and nullifies all moral restraint. “A sort of madness seized upon the people” (Grey 33, 70–71), “a sort of passion to kill” (Henty 268).5 Is the quality so vociferously praised under the name of patriotic “heroism” reducible to “mere love of combat,” mere “brute courage” (Yonge 147)? In repeatedly raising such themes, these novels pick up the mood of disillusionment that we have seen propagate itself in Mutiny literature at large. They testify clearly to a society seeking in retrospect to construct a securely nationalistic and affirmative mythology of the great Indian war and expressing a wracking uncertainty in so doing. Several of these texts center on portraits of idealized British administrators, figures calculated to embody to Victorian eyes the nobility of the British national mission in India: Cyril Brandon, the deputy commissioner in Taylor’s Seeta who marries the young Hindu widow; Ralph Bathurst, the benevolent Company administrator of Hen-

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ty’s Rujub, the Juggler; and the kindly Dr. Campbell, the civil surgeon of Forrest’s Eight Days, are examples of this imagery. The vital ideological function performed by mythology of high-minded British imperial officials is clear: the British public needed to believe in the humanitarian virtue of its representatives in foreign lands. But the polemical valences of such figures are subtly ambiguous after all, since the point is distinctly made in one book after another that the examples they give of highminded altruism, hatred of racism, and devotion to the welfare of the Indian population are in many ways sharply at odds with prevailing attitudes in the British imperial establishment. It is an open secret in these texts that the ideal administrators of British power that they are fond of depicting are wish-fulfillment fantasies, not depictions of imperial reality. Thus Henty’s Bathurst is said to be deeply loved by the natives whose legal disputes he adjudicates. “His perfect knowledge of their language, the pains he took to sift all matter brought before him to the bottom,” and “his sympathy, the real interest which he showed in their cases,” made him loved and trusted, the narrator rhapsodizes (11); but any reader with a passing familiarity with Mutiny literature would have known that one of the bitterest grievances expressed by native Indians against British rule, and then confirmed by a series of British commentators, had been the “positively disgraceful” legal system that provided “no legal protection whatever” for native Indians (Ball 1:42), “the inefficient administration of justice throughout India” by a system rife with notorious costliness, procrastination, perjury, and corruption, administered by “ingenuous youths” ignorant of Indian languages (Martin 6–7). In so clearly evincing in his novel the principle that British rule in India needed to justify itself by a spirit of racial sympathy and by untiring devotion to the welfare of the people, Henty’s portrait of Bathurst may not unequivocally glorify the raj after all. As we have seen throughout this study, one of the most pressing themes of Mutiny writing had long been its indictment of the disintegration of the sympathy that originally prevailed (so went the myth) between British and Indians, the nearly complete alienation and isolation of the British community from the local population, the spread of shockingly abusive racism, the inability of British officers and administrators to communicate with Indians in their languages. The depiction of ideal British administrators such as Bathurst and Brandon in this fiction is too easy to construe in this context as an uncomplicated apologia for imperialism; does it function subtly in just the opposite sense, as a reminder of the well-documented grievous shortcomings of British stewardship in India? One novel does seem to match the description that anti-imperialist scholars have given of Mutiny fiction: James Grant’s First Love and Last Love. Spanning the period from the outbreak at Meerut in May 1857 to

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the conquest of Delhi and the capture and killing of the three Indian princes by William Hodson in September, the story told in this work has two main strands: the love story of Captain Jack Harrower and Lena Weston, the daughter of a clergyman in Delhi, and the ultimately tragic gothic tale of young Polly Weston’s captivity in the palace by the lascivious prince, Mirza Abubeker. The most striking feature of both plot lines is their strain of undisguised racial vindictiveness. British heroism and pluck are uniformly glorified and are set off in Grant’s tale against depictions of native Indians’ fanaticism, sadism, treachery, and odious sensuality. In its opening scene, the novel stages a conversation between Harrower and his comrade Rowley Mellon, who predicts that there will be “an awful row about those greased cartridges, as the niggers call them.” Harrower, identifying the dominant theme of the book, immediately takes him up on his language. “A thorough Englishman, Mellon; you stigmatize them all as niggers, from the King of Delhi down to a Calcutta porter” (1). Three years after Trevelyan’s blistering denunciation in Cawnpore of “that hateful word, which is now constantly on the tongue of all AngloIndians” (36), it seems as though Grant is himself rehearsing one more time the condemnation of “the horrid word ‘nigger’ ” (H. Kingsley 2:281) that forms, we have seen, a standard motif of Mutiny writing and certainly goes a long way toward exonerating it of the charge of systematic racism. But what appears to be a warning flag about the evils of AngloIndian racism proves in First Love and Last Love to be merely a feint, for racism manifests itself in this book as nothing less than a ruling compulsion that has taken on the aspect of a form of hysteria. Grant’s narrator almost never mentions a native character without noting, with undisguised distaste, his or her dark skin. The punkah servant in Harrower’s bungalow “seemed to be cut out of the darkest mahogany” (6); another servant is Pandy, “his copper-coloured valet” (10); the conspiratorial dervish has a “tawny face” (15); “swarms of dark-skinned imps” are seen playing around the sepoy barracks (17); the soldiers themselves are not just “sepoys” but, as if the information were needed, “brown sepoys” (40). The description of the princes, “their eyes black as coal; their complexion pure copper; their lips thick and sensual” (18), sums up the racial phobia that flows with amazing virulence through this novel. Grant treats with great contempt what he presents as the extravagant, irrational Hindu code of uncleanness and purity, but obviously such a code in blatantly racialized form is the basis of his own sensibility. Its explicit sign is the word “nigger,” which is constantly on the lips of the British characters in the story, the hero Jack Harrower included, and is particularly affirmed in the scene in which the heroic young ensign Dicky Rivers and another prisoner, a native Christian, defy their captors and choose death at their hands rather than convert to Islam: “To turn Nig-

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gers?” he replies, denouncing the sepoys as “nigger scoundrels” (381, 382).6 The violent animosity toward Indians that fuels the book is stoked to fever pitch, as Brantlinger notes (Rule 209–10), by Grant’s retailing of a host of horrendous atrocity tales that by 1868 had long since been exposed as malicious fabrications, most recently by Trevelyan in his condemnation of “those fables which it is our misfortune that we once believed, and our shame if we ever stoop to repeat” (233). Repeating them nonetheless as Grant unstintingly does seems a reckless rhetorical tactic, since readers even superficially informed about Mutiny history could have been expected to recognize the distortions of that history that this novel makes so little secret of practicing. It is as though Grant, in the grip of obsessive racial demons, cannot help himself from doing so, however damaging to the credibility of his novel and to his own authorial honor the use of such materials may be. Nor can he restrain himself from putting starkly on display a macabre fantasy of finally obliterating altogether all those repulsive black bodies that so preoccupy him. Thus results the climactic scene in which his hero presides at a mass execution in which sixty mutineers are blown from guns, blasting them into “a falling rain of human fragments—of arms, legs, heads, and portions of the mortal frames, the veritable rags and fritters of Hindoos and Mohammedans, all mingled together” (397). It is hard to imagine that many of Grant’s original readers nine years after the end of the war could have found such a scene—one of those characteristic moments, like the flashes of horror that beset Braddon’s Lady Audley, in which Mutiny narration tips suddenly into phantasmagoria—very edifying. We find in this novel, then, a consummate instance of the discourse of racism, nationalism, and exterminating rage against the imperial subject that Canning, the governor-general of India, described at the height of the crisis, as we saw, as “the vindictive eagerness which longed to be let loose, not only upon proved murderers and mutineers, but upon whole races of men guilty of the unpardonable offence of going about with dark skins over their lithe bodies” (Kaye 3:8). Many critics have analyzed this vindictive impulse as essential to the pathology of imperialism, as we have noted. Grant has written in effect a fictionalized projection of the Nero complex, which springs, its theorist Albert Memmi claims, from the colonial usurper’s “disquiet and resulting thirst for justification” (53). If the racial ferocity put on display in this text does derive from the author’s troubled conscience, no obvious evidence of this origin is to be found there. But two further remarks about this book must be made. First, the most striking thing about First Love and Last Love, apart from the affective barrenness, the penury of novelistic poignancy, that blights it, is how unrepresentative it is of the norms of Mutiny fiction in general. The latter, as we have seen, persistently voices the ideal of a “conciliation of

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races” (Trevelyan 173) and is laden with criticism of British actions in India and of the debasement of the British humanitarian spirit to which these authors bear witness. Vindictive racism of the kind that Grant exhibits may lie necessarily at the core of imperial domination, as theorists have asserted; possibly we should ascribe to his novel the merit of frankly avowing the impulses that other writers strive to dissimulate. The rhetoric of Grant’s book at all events is wildly deviant in relation to other Victorian Mutiny fiction and in relation to nearly any other significant Mutiny commentary that appeared in Britain after the first wave of national outrage dissipated and a reaction against extreme retributionism set in at the end of 1857. Its rantings about “nigger scoundrels” and its spectacles of violent retribution exemplify the whole nexus of values or, rather, pathological symptoms that mainstream Victorian opinion repudiated as obnoxious and as contrary to national principles in the wake of the Mutiny. One needs secondly to highlight the bizarre instability effect that insinuates itself, after all, into the vindictive moral absolutism of Grant’s fiction. The note of sometimes anguished ambivalence that I have identified as the hallmark of Victorian Mutiny literature seems to have been expunged without a trace from this Manichaean novel, in which heroic white characters and “murdering black devils” (123) confront each other in stark opposition. Indeed, the extreme rhetorical violence to which Grant must resort in order to banish ambivalence is a measure of how deeply ingrained the latter had become in contemporary thinking about the Indian war. But what takes the place of overt ambivalence in this novel is a subrhetorical textual effect almost more evocative of troubled Victorian awareness, namely, its weird obliviousness to pieces of dissonant evidence that it seems to produce without knowing it and that if attended to would risk seriously compromising the jingoistic and racist ideology that it aggressively promotes. As though seeking to include in his novel for purposes of verisimilitude a realistic representation of the range of contemporary opinions, Grant introduces at one moment a progressive clergyman known for “broad, human, and liberal views of mankind,” who expounds a code of tolerance and moderation for the British in India. “It is a dreadful mistake to treat contemptuously, and to trample on a vast and warlike people, as too many of our countrymen are disposed to do,” he observes (26). This wise pronouncement seems like a warning against the very sentiments that dominate Grant’s xenophobic novel; but this moral that many contemporary commentators of all political stripes derived from the Mutiny—that the uprising was largely provoked by British racial arrogance and oppression in India—is never again echoed in the rest of the novel. It is simply deleted from the book’s memory, if not from the reader’s, the moment it is uttered, as though the sentiments it expresses could not be processed by the thought system of the text whose surface they

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have unexpectedly punctured. Obliged elsewhere to give speech to various Indian conspirators, Grant puts in their mouths telling indications of how they experience their fate of living under British dominion, and of how the experience has led them to dream of rebellion. “White brute and pariah! You call me yellow nigger,” cries a Thug assassin as he attacks Harrower’s friend Mellon (107); but the novel, given its own addiction to exactly this lexicon of racial degradation, has no way of acknowledging even for an instant the force of the protest against the outrage to Indians’ self-respect that is inflicted on them by British racism. When the unfortunate Polly is taken prisoner in Delhi by a character known as Baboo Sing, the narrator gives her thoughts in free indirect discourse and gives rise to a similar effect of blocked acknowledgment. “Was she so utterly friendless or abandoned by Fate, as to be quite at the mercy of this man, Baboo Sing, at whom she and her companions had so often laughed, and were wont to characterize as a ‘perfect toad,’ when they rode or drove past him on the course?” (197). What is the authorial impulse, the reader may ask, that impels Grant to insert in his tale gratuitously such a shocking avowal of his heroine’s provocation of the fate that has befallen her? It is as though he is utterly unconscious of the grievous insult that would be given to an Indian dignitary by being made the object of the public mockery of groups of pampered white teenage girls. In another instance of the same distracted or dislocated effect, a British soldier mocks a group of captured rebels as “black wretches,” and one of them replies with surprising poignancy. “Taunt us not with our colour,” he says, declaring that the creation of people of different colors was the work of God. Harrower is deaf to the rebuke. “Where was the memory of our common father when in the mosques and bazaars you urged the slaughter of our helpless women and innocent children?” he scornfully asks in return (372), leaving conspicuously unanswered the man’s complaint about British racism, and implicitly about the constant taunting of Indian characters with their color that forms the stylistic signature of Grant’s text itself. Refractory moments like these punctuate this novel frequently enough as almost to tempt a reader to wonder whether Grant might not be playing behind a screen of violent racial enmity an unexpectedly devious rhetorical game. Could the racial animus of the novel be intended to contradict itself at last and to expose its own deformities and disablements? No, this can hardly be: the racial invective and the vindictiveness (still unappeased a decade after the event) of First Love and Last Love are expounded with too much conviction to let one doubt that they spring straight from this author’s cankered heart. And yet Grant’s story keeps formulating these moments when revulsion from British imperial racism, the revulsion expressed openly by Russell, Martin, Disraeli, Trevelyan, Canning, Meadows Taylor, Nisbet, Henry Kingsley, and other contemporaries, seems to

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flow subliminally just below the textual surface and to pose the risk that the novel might at any moment transform itself without warning into a frank indictment of the diseased mentality of imperialism. It is as though the chronic, deeply embedded ambivalence of Mutiny literature, its perpetual wavering between contradictory views of British actions in India, here takes a submerged or unconscious form too deeply repressed for explicit statement. Grant’s book seems to know perfectly well that its obsessively racially fixated perspective on the great uprising is perverse yet to be incapable of acknowledging its own knowledge and, as a result, to be driven to ever more extreme rhetorical expedients to maintain its air of conviction. For a reader willing to read it slightly against its own grain in this way, First Love and Last Love may seem like a text in which the stress of British ambivalence about the Mutiny is registered with particular acuteness, precisely by virtue of its semihysterical determination to sink all ambivalence, and all the troubled conscience of which it is the symptom, in racial hatred. In discussing this novel, I have meant to reinforce by contrast the point that the Victorian Mutiny novel in general cannot by any means be classed as an uncomplicated vehicle for “the visceral popular mood of counterinsurgency” or for “themes of masterful reconquest and punishment” tracing a celebratory arc “from martyrdom to a proactive martial heroism” (Chakravarty 105, 111, 112). It is far too conflicted a literary field, one too laden with remorse and explicit anti-jingoism, for any such description. Its pattern of characteristic effects can only be well understood, I think, as evidence of a surprisingly protracted cultural project aimed at healing a trauma that manifestly, judging from abundant literary evidence, continued to reverberate strongly in the Victorian psyche and the Victorian conscience three or four decades afterward. The trauma consisted crucially, my book has argued, in a moment of shocked self-discovery. “A wave of passionate vindictiveness swept over men’s hearts” in 1857, as Maxwell Grey pellucidly put it, and “an unsuspected trait in the national character was brought to light” (71). In order for the Victorian middle-class mind to regain its equilibrium, if not its buoyancy and the sense of righteousness and confident national purpose that an earlier generation had regarded as its birthright (these were lost forever), this culture needed in the wake of the Mutiny to discover ways of assimilating recognition of its own aberrant possibilities into a framework of understanding that would allow it to salvage its belief in its own humanitarian idealism. This valedictory project of mid-Victorian literary culture was doomed to fall short of its goal. Visions of a regenerated India in which the devastation of the Mutiny has been mended and racial reconciliation achieved mark these works (Forrest 3:275, for example) and signify to a great degree a vision of the

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regeneration of the damaged Victorian spirit itself. Kipling’s Kim (1901) offers such a vision in its most tangible-seeming, most nearly credible form. But these novels of the Mutiny have a self-deluding aura of wish fulfillment about them and fail to exorcize the mood of discouragement and the thematization of trauma that regularly appear in this literature. In Kingsley’s Stretton, the narrator recounts a meeting with an old colonel who had served in the Mutiny years before. He is “a man with a smitten face, as if destiny herself had smote him.” He refuses to discuss the Mutiny, saying, “I will speak to you on any other subject but that.” “I had forgotten that unutterable horror for one instant,” the narrator says, sounding one more time, the last in the present study, the Mutiny keyword. “One does forget. But the bright English summer day was turned into dark night, as I walked along behind the Colonel’s elbow.” The Mutiny is an unhealed trauma for the colonel because his two daughters were lost in the uprising. But the discussion moves immediately into an anguished, inconclusive meditation on the legitimacy of British rule in India in the first place. “It was dacoitee on our part, you know,” says the colonel, using the Hindi word for banditry.7 “We had not any business there by the law of nations.” “I couldn’t answer the Colonel, and what is more, I cannot now,” the narrator admits (3:83–85). The recounting of British military triumphs in Kingsley’s novel of 1869 is marked by this same inexpungeable note of despondency. For one thing, unrepressed memories of ghastly British atrocities committed at the time overshadow any mood of patriotic celebration. “Hanging rebels is a very old institution,” and that it was freely practiced in India is nothing blameworthy, the narrator declares. “But things were done with women and children that night at Belpore, of which there is no need to speak” (3:265). No wonder that the exhilaration of victory is poisoned in this novel. The Mutiny “had been our greatest and most fearful disaster, and we all looked a little older and more worn.” Following the suppression of the revolt, Britain was depressed and demoralized rather than invigorated, according to this report: “we were dull, sickened, disheartened, and captious” and without heart for further military adventures, the narrator concludes (3:274–75). We recall Chesney’s hero Yorke complaining, “I am getting sick of this executioner’s business in cool blood after the battle; it is beastly work.” The panic attacks to which Lady Audley was subject in 1857 have given way, these later texts suggest, to a mood of sick depressiveness. This was the traumatized postwar mental condition for which Mutiny literature attempted for the rest of the nineteenth century to provide a therapy. Given the depth of the “terrible break” suffered by the Victorian spirit in 1857–59, it was an enterprise bound to fail, but not necessarily an unimpressive or a dishonorable one for all that.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. Alexander Duff (135) estimates at 1,300 the number of British victims killed in these massacres, so this was no trivial number, either. 2. A. P. Thornton, for example, gives the Mutiny merely a couple of passing references in The Imperial Idea and Its Enemies; it is true that he focuses in this work on imperialism in the 1870s and afterward. 3. Now known as Kanpur. Here and throughout, I retain nineteenth-century British spellings of Indian proper names. Nor have I regularized variant spellings of them in cited texts. 4. See Brijen K. Gupta, India in English Fiction, and Hilda Gregg, “The Indian Mutiny in Fiction.” 5. Margery Sabin has made just this point in her admirable study Dissenters and Mavericks. Highlighting Edward Said’s presumption of “the homogeneous and unified quest for power” supposedly expressed “throughout every activity of culture in the West” (6), she insists on the occurrence of variously inflected forms of dissent in British writings on India. Her critique of “the schematizations of postcolonial critical practice” and on the “distorting grids” imposed on texts by such practice (20) is one that I seek to confirm, and her goal of reasserting the primacy of what she calls “literary” values by means of close readings of texts is to some extent my own goal. Sabin has little to say about the Mutiny except indirectly in the course of a brief discussion of Edward Thompson’s The Other Side of the Medal (20–23). 6. Not all recent study of the cultural implications of the Mutiny has worshipped in the chapel of postcolonial critique. One exception to the rule is Graham Dawson’s admirable chapter on the history of the war hero Henry Havelock’s reputation in Soldier Heroes. An extremely valuable corrective to the assumption of uniform pro-imperialist sentiments and consistently racist responses to the Mutiny in Victorian Britain is offered in Michael J. Turner’s essay “ ‘Raising up Dark Englishmen.’ ” 7. “Many historians in both England and India have interpreted it as a revolt against the reforms the British introduced into India, a last stand of conservative, traditional, backward-looking communities against the threats to [their] privileges,” says Karl de Schweinitz, Jr., adding that such was the view expressed by Karl Marx in dispatches to the New York Daily Tribune at the time (175). 8. Even the chauvinistic historian W. H. Fitchett rejects in his 1907 Tale of the Great Mutiny the “absurd” idea that the greased cartridges caused the uprising. Like all the significant nineteenth-century historians, he then cites a long list of deep causes, starting with Dalhousie’s annexation of Oudh in 1856 (15). 9. In retaining for service in this book the traditional (indeed the almost obsolescent) name of “Mutiny,” I have certainly not meant to give credence to any

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portrayal of the uprising as “a mere military mutiny.” I employ it, rather, as the least tendentious nomenclature that seems to be available in this polemically charged field of historical research; I have intended at the same time to focus attention in this way on the hotly contested status that calling the war by this name has possessed since the very earliest debates to which it gave rise. 10. Thomas R. Metcalf (72–79) emphasizes that contemporary English opinion toward the war was not monolithic but flexible and varied, encompassing a range of theories as to the causes of the uprising. No other scholar, to my knowledge, has made this important observation.

CHAPTER ONE DIABOLICAL POSSESSION AND THE NATIONAL CONSCIENCE 1. Vernon Smith, the president of the Board of Control for India, explained the system of communication from India to the House of Commons on July 20, 1857. There were two government mails from that country each month, sent by ship to Suez. From there they were conveyed to Trieste, whence a digest of dispatches was sent by telegraph to London (Times, July 21, 1857: 6). 2. “We continued in this state of suspense and anxiety,” Mrs. Inglis noted in her Lucknow diary, “sometimes receiving reports that Delhi had fallen and troops arrived at Cawnpore, but never obtaining any reliable information” (qtd. Rees 83). 3. De Quincey’s son-in-law was Colonel Baird Smith, who became one of the leading figures in the British siege of Delhi. 4. See Perkin for a description of the Benthamites as “secular Evangelicals” whose movement for social and moral reform represented “the apotheosis of puritanism” (287). 5. Only a zealot of a different school might insist on brushing aside every aspect of Mill’s indictment of Hinduism and Hindu society. His extended argument that the criminality, disorder, intemperance, and immorality said to be prevalent among the people of India are rooted in social misery (574–78) and that to combat these evils, the government “must lessen the poverty which prevails among [the natives of India] to so extraordinary a degree” (578) is one of many claims in his book that carry conviction to a reader of today. It was not an argument commonly made by the missionaries whose polemics Mill so often echoes. 6. To identify “Orientalism” with the Western spirit of cultural domination, as is done in the work of Edward Said and scholars inspired by him, thus turns the original sense of the word inside out. 7. Nicholson in fact was killed in battle in the storming of Delhi. 8. Canning is saying to his sepoy son, “Well, then, they shan’t blow him from nasty guns; but he must promise to be a good little sepoy.” 9. I outline this freethinking tradition in Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery. 10. Kitson Clark suggests that British revivalism in 1859 may have been triggered by revivalism in the United States at just this time (188)—an explanation that raises more questions than it answers. 11. See also Metcalf (28–29).

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12. The rebellion, declares John Wilson in the 1857 pamphlet The Indian Military Revolt Viewed in its Religious Aspects, was “designed in providence for our severe chastisement” and also for the destruction of the rebels (28). 13. For the classic fictional portrayal of the Covenanters, the most fanatically extreme of all the British Calvinistic sects, see Sir Walter Scott’s novel Old Mortality (1816). 14. One exception to this statement would be the occasional complaints by the retributionist party that certain old India hands had imbibed excessive sympathy for the natives and excessive tolerance for their culture and their religious practices. “Such men had become Hindooized from long contact with idolatrous usages and ceremonies,” declares William Butler (358). Expressing a similar disdain for the attitudinal mongrelization undergone by Anglo-Indians of “the old school” who have grown unhealthily sympathetic toward natives and native society, James Neill belligerently defends his order requiring condemned rebels in Cawnpore to wipe up the blood of the murdered women before execution, an order, “however objectionable in the estimation of some of our Brahminised infatuated elderly gentlemen, I think suited to the occasion” (qtd. Kaye 2:398–99). William Howard Russell invokes the idea of “our deterioration in the East” (2:46n) contrariwise, to account not for the excessive cross-cultural sympathy but for the racist brutality manifested by the Anglo-English, “men who have lived so long among Asiatics as to have imbibed their worst feelings, and to have forgotten the sentiments of civilization and religion” (2:276). The fear of what Cannon Schmitt calls “an internalization of the foreign” (14) does leave its mark in Mutiny writing, therefore, though the idea is never, I believe, carried very far there. 15. The same issue of the Times in which this speech is given in full contains also a letter from an officer serving in the siege of Delhi that illustrates what Disraeli had in mind. “There seems every reason to believe that when our troops enter Delhi a fearful massacre of the inhabitants will take place,” the author writes. “The officers as a body will do nothing to check it,” he adds approvingly (8). 16. See Sigmund Freud, Complete Works 12:100, 102; 19:168. 17. John Wesley, the founding father of Methodism and thus by extension of Victorian Evangelicalism, was “arguably the most important individual in British history between 1750 and 1850,” declares the historian Thomas William Heyck (2:218). 18. Here, as elsewhere, echoes of current events poignantly haunt the study of the Indian Mutiny. On the day I write this (September 28, 2006), an opinion poll has been published reporting that a clear majority of Iraqis support attacks against the American occupation troops sent in 2003 to liberate Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. 19. For example, the great campaign of land reform that had been undertaken to end the immemorial tyranny of the feudal talukdars or great land agents over the Indian peasantry was abandoned in the interest of consolidating talukdar loyalty to British rule in the future. See Metcalf (109) for the new “laissez faire view of social change” adopted by the British government in India in the wake of the Mutiny, a policy at odds with “the heady exuberance of the pre-Mutiny reformers.”

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20.

Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick And tingle; and the heart is sick, And all the wheels of being slow. (50:1–4)

CHAPTER TWO THREE PARABLES OF VIOLENCE 1. See, for example, V. D. Majendie’s evocation of the battle at the Secunderabagh in Lucknow, “where two thousand Sepoys were caught like rats in a cage, and whence, I believe, not one escaped, thanks to the keen bayonets of the Highlanders and Sikhs” (164). 2. By one scholar’s calculation, 73 women and 124 children (David 254). 3. Paxton backs up this thesis about post-Mutiny history by an unspecific reference to Thomas R. Metcalf’s important work The Aftermath of Revolt. Metcalf, however, portrays the period following the uprising as one of a policy of scrupulous noninterference in Indian life by the authorities and describes it as “the golden age for the Indian princes” (236). 4. The scalding satire with which Russell portrays the various representatives of the British civilizing mission on his way out to the front so clearly prefigures the portraits of the colonial officials encountered by Conrad’s Marlow in his way up the Congo—the chief accountant, the manager of the Central Station, the brickmaker, a “papier-maˆche´ Mephistopheles” (26), and others, all of them avatars of “a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly” (17) masked in “philanthropic pretence” (25)—that it is hard not to think of Heart of Darkness as modeled to some important degree on My Diary in India. 5. For the history of the nineteenth-century discourse about the supposedly inevitable disappearance of primitive societies, see Brantlinger’s remarkable study Dark Vanishings. 6. See, e.g., Ball (1:60, 75, 97–98, 105–6, 252–53). 7. “I cannot altogether repress a suspicion, tho’ it is only for your own ear,” Disraeli wrote to a friend on September 16, 1857, “that many of the details of horrors, [which] have so outraged the sensibility of the country, are manufactured” (Letters 7:67). 8. I have been unable to locate this letter in the Times, where Edwardes says it appeared. A later letter to the editor of the Times from Campbell, writing from Lucknow on July 20, 1858, makes the same argument. There was “not an instance” in which women were subjected to sexual torture, he declares. “There never has been good ground for believing, or even any reasonable suspicion, that in any case the victims were kept alive for the purpose of torture prior to death.” “Our passions should not be inflamed, our judgment distorted by the uncontradicted circulation of most unwholesome, unfounded, and injurious romances” (10). 9. The first occurrence of the word in the OED is from 1936.

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10. In one of his few brief allusions to Russell, Gautam Chakravarty amazingly alleges that he “ignores . . . that the rebellion was . . . the result of a polarisation of the ‘two races’ that predated the rebellion by a good number of years” (200 n95). This polarization, on which Russell harps incessantly, forms essentially the main theme of his book, in fact. 11. In “The Sahib and the Nigger,” his dispatch in the Times of October 20, 1858, he cites cruel punishments inflicted by officers on dilatory servants: one, angry at his syce (groom) for having put the wrong saddle on his horse, “fastens him on a pole placed out in the full sun of May”; another “fastens down his syce in the sun by heel-ropes and foot-ropes as if he were a horse, and spreads grain before him in mockery” (10). 12. Thomas Campbell, The Pleasures of Hope (1:376). 13. “Several times when I glanced at him, I observed [his] appearance with a sort of awe, and wondered what he was thinking about so closely. His hair and whiskers were blacker and thicker, looked at so near, than even I had given them credit for being. A squareness about the lower part of his face, and the dotted indication of the strong black beard he shaved close every day, reminded me of the wax-work that had travelled into our neighbourhood some half-a-year before. This, his regular eyebrows, and the rich white, and black, and brown, of his complexion . . . made me think him, in spite of my misgivings, a very handsome man” (Dickens, David Copperfield 22). 14. “Never did sudden calamity more severely test the individual pluck, endurance, and energy of a people, than did the recent outbreak of the rebellion in India; but it only served to bring out the unflinching self-reliance and dormant heroism of the English race,” wrote Smiles (38). 15. The siege of the Lucknow Residency by rebel armies began on June 6, 1857. In mid-August Havelock abandoned his first attempt to invade Oudh and relieve the Lucknow garrison. On September 25 Havelock and Outram succeeded in reaching the besieged British but were unable to fight their way back out and joined the defense of the garrison. Sir Colin Campbell finally was able to fight his way into the Residency and evacuate the garrison on November 17: the siege had lasted twenty-four weeks. The recapture of Lucknow and the clearing of the city of rebels (the campaign reported by Russell and Majendie) took place in March 1858. 16. Yet the famous name has been elusive in these annals. Majendie refers to the hero as “Brasier,” with no rank or first name. Saul David names him “Lieutenant Brayser.” Ball, Holmes, and Sen identify him as “Captain Brasyer.” Kaye calls him “Lieutenant Brasyer.” Richard Collier gives what seems the definitive identification: “Lieutenant Jeremiah Brasyer.” Whatever the uncertainty about the hero’s name, no one questions the bravery of his exploit. 17. It is a case of extreme misreading for Chaudhuri to describe Up Among the Pandies as a signal instance of the “incurable deepseated racial feeling of contempt towards the Asiatics and Indians” that all British people of the time allegedly harbored and that meant that “writings on the Indian Mutiny could not be either restrained or objective” (260). Chaudhuri’s English Historical Writings on the Indian Mutiny is an invaluable scholarly resource, but its goal of exhaustive coverage and its ideological certainties cause it to scan some works, including Up Among the Pandies, carelessly. At least Chaudhuri has read it; other scholars issu-

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ing similarly categorical pronouncements about the uniformly imperialistic and racially invidious agenda of Mutiny writing, such as Chakravarty, Brantlinger, Paxton, Baucom, and others, fail to mention it. 18. In the battle of the Engine House, 350 sepoys are killed with a British loss, “incredible as it may appear,” of 8 or 9 killed, 15 or 16 wounded (Majendie 218); in the fight at Simcree on May 12, 1858, the rebels suffered 300–400 fatalities, with a British loss of “two or three killed, and perhaps half a dozen wounded” (282); in the June 13 battle of Nawab-Gunge, 600–700 of the enemy are killed with a British loss of half a dozen killed, 20–30 injured (296).

CHAPTER THREE THE CULTURE OF RETRIBUTION: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, MAURICE DERING, FLOTSAM 1. The role of the Medes in this passage is played in the Mutiny by the savage Sikhs and Gurkhas who fought alongside the British and were prone, according to all the contemporary literature, to unbridled atrocities. 2. Disraeli spoke at this time as a chief spokesman of the Tory opposition to Palmerston’s Liberal government (which fell in February 1858). He recognized the rebellion in India, and the responsibility of the government for causing it by the annexation of Oudh, as a means of returning the Tories to power. “The government of India must be one of the main springs of [which] any ministry can now be formed,” he wrote to a colleague in October 1857 (Letters 7:78). His denunciation of rabid British popular vindictiveness was a different matter, and certainly did not reflect Tory electoral politics at this moment. 3. Gautam Chakravarty condemns Canning’s “clemency” resolution as an act of imperialist oppression. “Despite an appearance of clemency the guidelines constituted a more authoritative and authoritarian act than the reprisals carried out by the upcountry freelancers,” he declares, arguing that Canning’s attempt to restore legality and mercy in the country was merely a strategy to ensure “an imperial future” (44) for India. By seeming to call for higher standards of legality for the British than were displayed by the rebels, Canning’s resolution, says Chakravarty, insidiously “expropriates the rebellion” (47). There is no way of arguing for or against such assertions, which belong more to the discourse of dogmatism than to that of scholarly investigation. It is still worth stressing Canning’s personal loathing of what he called in a letter to the governor of Ceylon “the rabid unreasoning spirit of blood and vengeance” that “is activating the European community” with regard to the rebellion (qtd. Hibbert, Great Mutiny 165). This was the spirit that he opposed at great peril to his own career. That the British governorgeneral envisioned “an imperial future” for India goes without saying. 4. For a lucid introductory account of the Methodist revival and its aftermath in nineteenth-century Evangelicalism in Britain, see Heyck (2:218–25). 5. J. F. Stephen declares in 1864 that the doctrine “that sin is a rebellion to be chastised and avenged in some way or other” constitutes nothing less than “the fundamental tenet . . . of Christianity” (“Capital Punishments” 760).

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6. “With the ideas of Feuerbach I everywhere agree,” she wrote to Sara Hennell on April 29, 1854 (Letters 22:153). 7. This idea had long been a commonplace among theorists of primitive society. W. Cooke Taylor, for instance, asserted in The Natural History of Society (1840) that red Indians were characterized by their “insatiate thirst for vengeance” (108). 8. In his merciless punitiveness, Mr. Creakle seems uncannily like a proleptic image of William Hodson or other savage swordsmen of the Mutiny riding down and slaughtering fleeing sepoys. “I heard that Mr. Creakle had not preferred his claim to being a Tartar without reason,” David reports; “that he was the sternest and most severe of masters; that he laid about him, right and left, every day of his life, charging in among the boys like a trooper, and slashing away, unmercifully” (86). Compare the imagery of Hodson’s Horse (fictionalized as Kirke’s Horse) riding down among the fleeing enemy infantry after a battle in the Mutiny, slashing with their cavalry sabers and “indulging to the full the passion for taking life inherent in most human hearts” in G. T. Chesney’s The Dilemma (2:255–56). 9. Trollope in his Autobiography emphasizes the prevalence of the rule of punishment across the tradition of novel-writing by such authors as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and of course himself. In all their novels, “when men in their pages have been described as dishonest and women as immodest, have they not been punished”—at least to the extent that the offender “will be dishonoured in the estimation of all readers by his or her vices”? (223). 10. For good overviews of this subject, see, along with Fitzjames Stephen’s polemical History of the Criminal Law of England, the articles “Punishment” and “Capital Punishment” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (1910), and Christopher Hibbert, The Roots of Evil. But the fundamental work for all research in this area is Sir Leon Radzinowicz’s History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750. 11. The modern sensibility was far from being in the ascendant in 1771, however. Eden’s plea for moderation was met with violent rejoinders at the time, notably by the Rev. Martin Madan in his “severe and influential” (Hibbert, Roots 57) Thoughts on Executive Justice (1785). In 1810 William Frankland, an M.P. who ardently supported the death penalty in its harshest possible applications, quoted at length as a model for legislators the list of capital crimes stipulated in Deuteronomy (Hibbert, Roots 61). 12. The article “Capital Punishment” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., by William Feilden Craies, states that in England in 1831, 1,601 death sentences were passed and 52 executions resulted: a rate of just less than one in thirty-one. 13. The enduring importance of this myth is signaled in its rehearsals by latterday expositors such as Rene´ Girard, whose close intellectual affinities with Westermarck in this area seem to go unacknowledged. “Though the system of revenge helps to keep down crime, it also has a tendency to cause disturbance and destruction,” Westermarck says. “Any act of vengeance which goes beyond the limits fixed by custom is apt to call forth retaliation in return,” a danger that societies seek to contain at all costs (Origin 1:182)—hence “the substitution of punishment for revenge and . . . the rise of a judicial organization” (Ethical Relativity 73). Primitive societies, Girard similarly explains, live under “the specter of perpetual

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vengeance” (16). Such societies “have only private vengeance. Thus, public vengeance is the exclusive property of well-policed societies, and our society calls it the judicial system” (15). Westermarck emphasizes the importance of “the principle of substitution” (Origin 1:444) in the institution of human sacrifice and seeks to demonstrate the continuity of sacrifice and judicial capital punishment. Girard similarly develops “our theory of sacrificial substitution” (5) to explain that sacrifice functions to maintain social harmony. Like Westermarck, too (as will be seen below), Girard argues that “retribution still holds sway” in systems of judicially regulated punishment (21). In Violence and the Sacred, he gives Westermarck one passing dismissive mention in another connection (230). Michel Foucault reprises the standard myth of the transition from a regime of vengeance to one of justice and regulated punishment, applying it not in an anthropological frame of reference but in connection with the passage from the European ancien re´gime to postmonarchical society—and giving it a sharply pessimistic interpretation. Penality in the ancien re´gime expressed “the vengeance of the sovereign” (59), which could be inscribed directly upon the body of a guilty subject. In the next phase of penal philosophy, “the right to punish has been shifted from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defence of society” (90). This shift to a new carceral system based on surveillance, normalization, and rehabilitation only masqueraded as humanitarianism, Foucault argues. The professed intent to eliminate torture and other vindictive excesses of punishment was the alibi for the development of “ever more insistent surveillance” and “an accumulation of disciplinary coercion” (301). 14. Brantlinger reads the novel as an enthusiastic apologia for the bloody vengeance in India that it describes (Rule 209); I read it very differently. 15. For accounts of similar massacres of sepoys, see, for example, Ball (1:477, 490, 504; 2:293). 16. It is of course conspicuous that one of Harry’s curse words is too offensive to be printed, while the other is not. 17. One exponent of this doctrine was Fitzjames Stephen, who held the post of legal member of the viceroy’s council in India from 1869 to 1872. In a letter to the Times on the subject of the controversial Ilbert Bill of 1883, granting Indian judges the power to try Europeans, he stressed his view that British rule in India “is essentially an absolute government, founded, not on consent, but on conquest.” It represents not “native principles of life” but “the superiority of the conquering race” (qtd. Stokes, English Utilitarians 288). 18. For a richly textured account of the shifting imagery associated with the imperial adventure hero in the Mutiny period and afterward, see Dawson (79–154). 19. An episode eerily reenacted in the killing of the two sons of Saddam Hussein, Uday and Qusay, by American troops in the aftermath of the conquering of Baghdad in July 2003. For a fascinating fictional treatment of Hodson, see George Chesney’s novel The Dilemma (1876). For a searching biographical account of this controversial figure, see J.C.P. Riddy’s introduction to the 1983 reprint of the 1859 edition by his brother George of his selected letters, Twelve Years of a Soldier’s Life in India. Riddy summarizes the evidence against Hodson and portrays him as a mentally unbalanced murderer and a pathological liar.

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CHAPTER FOUR THE MUTINY IN VICTORIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 1. G. B. Malleson notes early in The Mutiny of the Bengal Army that he is writing in June 1857, a little more than a month following the outbreak at Meerut on May 10 (30). For a full survey of the literature, see Sashi Bhusan Chaudhuri’s English Historical Writings on the Indian Mutiny. 2. The sole exception to this dictum and the first indication that the English were “not . . . wholly unanimous in their readings of the Mutiny,” according to Baucom (113), was Edward Thompson’s The Other Side of the Medal, published in 1925. 3. See Graham Dawson’s extended study of the construction of the myth of Havelock in Soldier Heroes (79–154). It is a major lacuna in Dawson’s research, which focuses on newspapers and biographies, that he never considers the portrayals of his subject in Victorian historiography. 4. I survey some instances of this theme in “The Conundrum of Coherence.” 5. I trace this exposition of Spencer’s in Victorian Relativity (81–83). 6. Chaudhuri assigns it these dates on the basis of internal evidence. Volume 2 brings the narrative up to midsummer 1859. 7. Chakravarty, who dismisses Ball as a “hack historian” (42), is clearly not such a reader. I myself will acknowledge, though perhaps the word should be “confess,” that I was mesmerized by my first reading of Ball’s book and that my now long-standing interest in the literature of the Indian Mutiny originated in that experience. 8. S. B. Chaudhuri, deep as his aversion is to Ball’s racial and political attitudes, praises him as a pioneer historian of the Mutiny and as an invaluable foundation for subsequent scholarship (70–71). 9. The badly wounded Colonel Ewart and his wife straggled behind the procession of the surrendered garrison down to the boats at the Sati Chowra ghat on June 27, 1857; a group of sepoys took them aside and chopped them to pieces with their sabers (see Ward 317). 10. Miss Wheeler did apparently survive the massacre, thanks to her rescuer or rapist, a trooper named Ali Khan, and lived with him as his wife in the neighborhood of Cawnpore to an advanced age. For a detailed treatment of this matter and an argument that the young woman in question was not Eliza Wheeler, as most writers suppose, but her sister Margaret, see Ward (504–6). Already in 1859, Edward Leckey refers to “the well known fact that Miss Wheeler was seen alive at Futtehghur in 1858” (158). 11. Chaudhuri is thus incorrect to assert that Ball “ignores this widely condemned massacre” (73). 12. For a survey of Thompson’s career, see Michael J. Turner’s “‘Raising up Dark Englishmen’: Thomas Perronet Thompson, Colonies, Race, and the Indian Mutiny.” 13. The date of this volume is uncertain. Martin cites both Ball’s History and Russell’s Diary (1860), and he indicates at one point (144) that he is writing in late 1858–at which time major military operations were still under way in Bengal. Chaudhuri guesses at a likely publication date of 1861.

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14. In Byron’s poem, Athena says to the speaker, who is musing over Lord Elgin’s plundering of the marbles from the Parthenon, Look to the East, where Ganges’ swarthy race Shall shake your tyrant empire to its base; Lo! there Rebellion rears her ghastly head, And glares the Nemesis of native dead; Till Indus rolls a deep purpureal flood And claims his long arrear of northern blood. So may ye perish! Pallas, when she gave Your free-born rights, forbade ye to enslave. (ll. 221–28) 15. This is the portion of Martin’s book that Chakravarty portrays, without explanation, as “obliquely” justifying British rule in India (26). 16. In his otherwise admirable study of the construction of the Havelock myth, Dawson fails to note the possibility of such a violently negative contemporary view of the great hero. Nor, in emphasizing Havelock’s image as a specifically Christian hero, does he make clear that the category of the “Christian” was a very sharply contested one at the time. 17. Cooper’s revelation of the mass execution carried out by him at Ujnalla aroused a storm of consternation and outrage, including intense criticism in Parliament, as the brutal repression of the Jamaica uprising by Governor Eyre a few years later also did. The episode was lengthily recounted by another of the earliest historians of the Mutiny, E. H. Nolan, who makes clear the widespread revulsion that it provoked in England (2:734–39). 18. E. H. Nolan does provide a straightforward chronicle of events in his History of the British Empire in India and the East (c. 1859), but at the cost of limiting his account to a relatively sketchy outline that largely screens controversial matters (other than the Frederic Cooper episode, which, curiously, it highlights, though in nonjudgmental terms) from view. 19. As Serbian sharpshooters did long afterward at the siege of Sarajevo. 20. On this principle, see also Baucom (37). 21. Trevelyan’s phrase counts as a noteworthy early statement of what became a crux of late-Victorian speculation. The possibility of the reemergence of primitive instincts or cultural forms supposedly eclipsed by the evolutionary advance of religion, education, and civilization forms a main theme, for example, of Walter Bagehot’s Physics and Politics (1876), which portrays social phenomena such as riots as the revelation of “a secret and suppressed side of human nature; . . . the outbreak of inherited passions long repressed by fixed custom” but slumbering in the depths of the mind (540). Once established authority is relaxed, says Bagehot, “the savage propensities of men break forth” in “the keenest and most violent passions” (560). “The permanent existence of . . . a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society” can only be seen as “a standing menace to civilization,” says James Frazer in The Golden Bough, in language exactly concordant with Trevelyan’s; only “a thin crust” of civilization separates people in modern

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society from “the subterranean forces slumbering below” (64); “that proneness to revert to savagery which seems to be innate in most men” (449) is a constant peril. Freud called the secret and suppressed side of human personality the id. 22. It is explored notably in Bagehot’s Physics and Politics. 23. As noted above, Tayler was depicted in far more sinister terms by Martin. 24. Brantlinger is thus mistaken to claim that the facts of the British reprisals at Allahabad “have remained suppressed” and that not until the appearance of Vinayak Savarkar’s The Indian War of Independence (1947) was the Cawnpore massacre linked to Neill’s campaign (Rule 201).

CHAPTER FIVE THE INFERNAL KINGDOM OF A TALE OF TWO CITIES 1. The period began with such works as Vanity Fair, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, published in 1847–48, then included, among other notable works of fiction, the first four of Trollope’s Barset novels and Dickens’s two most grandiose books, Bleak House and Little Dorrit, and culminated in George Eliot’s first two novels, Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss. The “long” 1850s were the glory days of the English popular novel. 2. Chakravarty counts just one true novel of the Mutiny (Edward Money’s The Wife and the Ward (1859) in the 1850s, then two in the 1860s, four in the 1870s, three in the 1880s, and nineteen in the 1890s (5–6). 3. The occasion was an attack by Oliphant on the supposed improprieties of the “sensation” novel and, in particular, on Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the subject of the following chapter. Oliphant’s formula was derided in its turn by G. A. Sala (“The Cant of Modern Criticism”), but it expressed an essential truth about Victorian popular fiction. 4. Chakravarty (108–9) briefly discusses “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners” from much the same angle. 5. The portrait of Dickens as inveterate Carlylean racist is carefully analyzed and sharply revised by Grace Moore in her valuable 2004 study Dickens and Empire (see, e.g., 164–66). Dickens’s initially vindictive responses to the Mutiny soon subsided and were replaced by more measured understanding, Moore demonstrates. She speculates that the India reporting of his friend William Howard Russell was influential in his change of heart. She makes clear also that Dickens’s subsequent membership in the committee formed by Carlyle and others to defend Governor Eyre of Jamaica against the charge of murder for his suppression of the Morant Bay uprising in 1865 was “only nominal” and no indication of Carlylean racial attitudes on his part. 6. In his afterword to the Signet edition of A Tale of Two Cities, the Dickens biographer Edgar Johnson sets the novel in its contemporary historical context, arguing that its portrayal of the French Revolution reflects anxieties about a series of recent revolutions in France and elsewhere in 1848, as well as “ominous” social unrest in England during the Crimean War (369–71); he does not refer to the Mutiny. In his introduction to the Collier paperback, Steven Marcus highlights the year of publication of the novel, 1859, as the same in which The Origin of

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Species appeared but then declares, “it is certain that Dickens was in no way influenced by Darwin or the immediate events of 1859” (11). Grace Moore (113– 34, 150–54), on the other hand, insists on Dickens’s central reference to the Indian Mutiny in A Tale of Two Cities, though her discussion is thin in specific textual reference. 7. The message of nearly unbounded pity for all the many actors in the Revolution forms a prominent theme in Carlyle’s French Revolution. “One thing . . . History will do: pity them all,” he declares, with regard to the revolutionary leadership, “for it went hard with them all.” Even Robespierre “shall have some pity, some human love, though it takes an effort” (568). His account of the destruction of the Girondins by their Jacobin rivals touches the same note. “Alas, whatever quarrel we had with them, has not their cruel fate abolished it? Pity only survives” (631). 8. This is the morally evacuated outlook that expresses itself distinctly in such a work as Charles Raikes’s Notes on the Revolt in the North-Western Provinces of India, published in London in 1858. “Not to waste words,” the author declares in this harshly racist and authoritarian polemic, “unless we exert a despotic power in Upper India, we must leave the country and the people to the most frightful state of anarchy which the world ever saw. We cannot even try any longer to rule Asia on the constitutional principles of Europe.” “However much philosophers may sneer, a ‘paternal despotism’ is not only the happiest, but the only regime for India.” “We should legislate and govern in India as the superior race” (172, 173, 177n). 9. My argument runs parallel at this point to Daniel Stout’s brilliant essay “Nothing Personal: The Decapitations of Character in A Tale of Two Cities.” Interpreting the novel as a dramatized contest between political ideologies based respectively on the principle of collective, corporate, or family membership and on the principle of personal identity, Stout argues that Dickens’s theme is “the murderousness of a society that prioritizes membership over members” (4). Stout is convincing as to the importance of this thematic complex in the novel, though his strongly abstracting analytic bent tends to isolate A Tale of Two Cities from the historical milieu of its publication, which I seek to reconstruct. 10. Dickens’s concern with the replacement of a personal by a collectivist definition of character prompts him “to write a novel that would be almost all action and no character, all agency and no agent,” argues Stout (6). My own point is that agency and action themselves seem cursed with disablement in this novel. 11. Prichard’s formulation and Dickens’s fictional expression of it resonate with latter-day psychiatric study of violence. Nor has the theory vanished from the field of psychiatry. In “Murder Without Apparent Motive,” Joseph Satten, Karl Menninger, Irwin Rosen, and Martin Mayman focus on “murderers who seem rational, coherent, and controlled, and yet whose homicidal acts have a bizarre, apparently senseless quality” (48). These morally insane figures display “evidence of disturbances in affect organization” (51) and a seeming breakdown of a capacity for emotional connections with others. These are the symptoms of an “unconscious traumatic configuration” that seemingly grows out of “a history characterized by extreme parental violence and early severe emotional deprivation” (52). This essay is made much of by Truman Capote in In Cold Blood (298– 302, 315) 12. Grace Moore (130) makes this important point.

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13. In his penultimate chapter, Carlyle computes the number of those who perished in the Terror at perhaps four thousand, compares it with the starvation menacing at that time a third of the population of Ireland, and rhetorically asks the reader to say which is worse (717–18). 14. The mutineers, Ball declares conventionally, were driven by “a ferocity only to be compared to that of the untamed brutes of the jungle”; he quotes to the same effect the assertion of Cardinal Wiseman that “these hordes of savage mutineers seem to have cast aside the commonest feelings of humanity, and to have not merely resumed the barbarity of their ancient condition, but borrowed the ferocity of the tiger in his jungle, to torture, to mutilate, to agonise, and to destroy” (2:501, 421). 15. Carton’s eulogy echoes the vision of a regenerated India that concludes Mowbray Thomson’s exactly contemporaneous The Story of Cawnpore (1859), a work notable for its freedom from vindictive animus against the rebels whose merciless cruelties it describes from the author’s firsthand experience. “Under the sanctions of unrestricted commerce, the vast natural resources of the land will multiply beyond all conception,” writes Thomson; “hideous superstitions will give place to a pure faith; righteous laws will rectify tyrannic abuses; science will clear the jungle and irrigate the desert” (262). 16. “Take two instances—the Reign of Terror and the suppression of the Indian mutiny,” writes James Fitzjames Stephen in an article in Frazer’s Magazine titled “Capital Punishment” (753), arguing that the wholesome deterrent value of the death penalty is illustrated in both parallel cases. For other equations of the British retribution campaign with the French reign of terror, see Russell (2:276) and Kaye (1:170). 17. My argument has much in common with Gallagher’s essay, “The Duplicity of Doubling in A Tale of Two Cities,” though our interests do not finally coincide to any great extent. She portrays the novel as largely articulated around three cognate themes: “English public executions, the French Revolution, and the crime of resurrectionism” or exhuming bodies for sale. She argues that Dickens focuses on these monstrous violations of privacy as a diversionary maneuver meant to disguise the violation of privacy inherent in fictional narration. “By contrast, the narrator’s activities will seem restrained and salutary” (127). My own analysis suggests another provenance for these materials in A Tale of Two Cities than the motive of artistic self-reflexivity (which Gallagher associates with a stronger charge of authorial anxiety than I can see evidence for in Dickens’s text), but her reading of the novel as fixated upon the theme of “monstrous violators of the realm of the private” seems to me fully persuasive and important. 18. Along with works by Cooper, Gubbins, Raikes, Rees, Rotton, and North, among others. 19. As I write this on December 5, 2005, the headlines are full of accusations that the Bush administration has had recourse to torture in seeking to extract information from suspected terrorists captured in Iraq and elsewhere, and of protestations by administration figures that its authorized interrogation techniques do not strictly constitute “torture.” This is one of the many ways in which today’s current events seem to replay the drama of the Mutiny.

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CHAPTER SIX LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET: THE MUTINY, THE GOTHIC, AND THE FEMININE 1. One harbinger of a new era in studies of Braddon’s work is the admirable collection of essays Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context, edited by Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Aeron Haynie. 2. Braddon herself at age nineteen called down such a fate upon the guilty city in her poem “Delhi” of September 1857. “Down to the Ground! Scattered be every stone! / Annihilation be thy mildest fate,” she wrote (ll. 1–2; rpt. Carnell 403). 3. The rebellion in India broke out in the mutiny at Meerut on May 10, 1857, a month previous to Lady Audley’s marriage to Sir Michael; its last significant event may be said to be the hanging of the rebel commander Tantya Tope on April 18, 1859, a month after Lady Audley is sent to the asylum in Belgium (and two weeks before the beginning of serial publication of A Tale of Two Cities). Any more precise correspondence of dating would presumably have been too heavyhanded a device for this novelist of subtly calibrated effects. 4. They are reprinted in Carnell (403–7). 5. To judge from a novel she published twenty years later, The Story of Barbara (1880), the hero of which is a fictionalized and adulatory version of the notorious Major William Hodson, she reverted eventually to a vein of “popular imperialist sentiment” (Carnell 100) with respect to the Mutiny. 6. Lillian Nayder argues in her article “Rebellious Sepoys and Bigamous Wives: The Indian Mutiny and Marriage Law Reform in Lady Audley’s Secret” that Braddon refers to the Mutiny in order to identify supposedly refractory English wives such as Lady Audley with the rebellious sepoys—a rigidly moralistic reading of the novel that seems to me drastically to misread Braddon’s sensibility (she ran away from home as a teenager to pursue a career as an actress, later lived openly out of wedlock with her publisher, and defied codes of inhibited Victorian femininity in other ways) and to falsify all the most significant effects of the novel, notably its abiding empathy with its criminal heroine. Such a reading fails to explain why orthodox moralistic readers of the time, such as Mansel and Rae, not to mention Henry James, found the book so alarming in its alleged sympathy with vice. 7. In identifying the category of “sensation” with the effects of painfully repressed memory, I partly diverge from James A. Secord’s understanding of the term in its nineteenth-century acceptation as “an excited or violent emotion felt by an entire community and produced by a common experience” (12). 8. My view of Lady Audley’s Secret is thus at variance with the assumption that “the sensation novel, as the name implies, was defined by its ability to cause a physical sensation in the reader—a thrill, a gasp, a creeping of flesh” (Tromp et al., “Intro” xviii–xix), that the “most important role” of a novel of this type “was to thrill, to stimulate the sensations” (Carnell 153). 9. Lillian Nayder notes (38–39) the Indian reference of the well in Lady Audley’s Secret. A second cemetery well also figures in the terrible drama of Cawnpore: the well just outside General Wheeler’s entrenchment, in which, as Mowbray Thomson reported in his 1859 memoir, the besieged garrison buried the 250 victims killed in the three weeks’ battle (89). And then there was the well at Ujnalla in the Punjab, which the infamous Frederic Cooper filled with the bodies of hun-

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dreds of sepoys executed by him in reprisal. “There is a well at Cawnpore,” he boasted in his memoir The Crisis in the Punjab (1858), “but there is also one at Ajnala!” (167). Braddon’s fictional well no doubt carries resonances of all three. 10. In a similar passage, Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities describes the sun rising over the chateau where the evil marquis lies stabbed to death in his bedchamber. “In the glow, the water of the chaˆteau fountain seemed to turn to blood, and the stone faces crimsoned” (132). 11. In a work on the physiology of the brain and the nervous system published in 1852, the distinguished physician Sir Henry Holland pursues a discussion of the two-hemisphere structure of the brain into speculations on cases of insanity that seem to reveal a splitting of the mind into two opposed personalities. “In certain states of mental derangement, as well as in some cases of hysteria which border closely upon it, there appear, as it were, two minds,” he writes. In “one of the most painful studies to the observer of mental disease,” says Holland, “the incongruity is chiefly marked in the moral feelings,” such that sufferers from this condition compulsively perform acts that they themselves regard as vile and disgusting; this, he concludes, represents “what has been termed ”double consciousness“ (184–86). My thanks to Hyun-Jung Lee for bringing this work to my attention. 12. I trace Stoker’s misogyny in “Vampire Religion.” 13. For a study of various heroines of the Mutiny, see Robinson, Angels of Albion. 14. As a specimen text of this anxiety, Christina Rossetti’s poem “In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857” would be hard to surpass. This slight work narrates a famous bit of Mutiny apocrypha, Captain Alexander Skene’s shooting of his young wife to spare her from falling into the hands of the sepoy rebels who were on the point of overrunning the British position (see Ball 1:274; Ward 350– 51). The horrible act of violence against the noble-minded heroine forms the whole subject of the poem, which romanticizes it into an act of loving kindness by a brave husband—but whatever effect the poem achieves lies in the wrenchingly mixed feelings that such an act is bound to arouse. This is “sensation” writing of a very different kind from Braddon’s, which never traffics in such melodramatic shock values. 15. For accounts of the fascinating Miss Wheeler, who seems in fact to have been carried off from the scene of the massacre at the boats, to have married her Muslim captor and protector, and to have lived a long anonymous life afterward as his wife, see Hibbert, The Great Mutiny (194–95), and Ward (504–6, 630n). Ward speculates that the young woman in question was not Eliza (age twentysix) but Margaret Wheeler (age unknown). Robinson, in Angels of Albion (131– 35), reports that her name was Ulrica. 16. Trevelyan picks up Martin’s phraseology, calling the inscriptions on the walls a set of “vulgar and disgusting forgeries” (276). 17. This theme is dwelt upon just as intensively in Braddon’s novel of the next year (1863), Eleanor’s Victory. The heroine of this novel, a vivacious, purehearted young girl, is a kind of composite of Lady Audley (without the latter’s criminal streak) and Clara Talboys. Her beloved father is driven to suicide by cardsharps (the early portion of the novel being modeled visibly on the early chap-

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ters of Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop), and she takes on “a horrible vendetta” against them (75). Despite the urging of her friends, she denies the possibility of “one merciful feeling” toward her chief enemy. “If he were going to be hung tomorrow, I should be glad, and could walk barefoot to the place of his execution to see him suffer. . . . There is no slow torture I could inflict upon him that would seem cruel enough to satisfy my hatred of him” (95). Braddon’s stress falls on what the narrator calls “a horrible discrepancy between this girl’s innocent youthful beauty and all this determined talk of fierce and eager vengeance, which would have been more natural to a Highland or Corsican chieftain than to a young lady of seventeen” (96–97). Eleanor herself more than once questions “whether it is womanly or Christian-like” (71) to entertain such vindictive motives—a question retroactively applicable in an obvious way to Clara Talboys, nominally the moral ideal of the earlier book. In the later one, the moral issue is resolved without ambiguity: Eleanor, her father’s abuser once in her power, declines to take revenge after all, amid the congratulations of all her well-wishers, and her clemency produces the excellent outcome that the guilty man experiences a change of heart and a moral reformation. Braddon in this way brings the tender and compassionate feminine ideal back into seemingly uncomplicated alignment with her tale—but only having pointedly suggested its potentially cruel, and morally catastrophic, modulation.

EPILOGUE FICTION FAIR AND FOUL: NOVELS OF THE MUTINY 1. The only mention I can find in Mutiny historiography of this species of atrocity is in Nolan’s account from around 1859 (2:750). By 1868, the date of Grant’s novel, the idea that Englishwomen had met such a fate in Delhi was long since consigned to the category of groundless fantasy. 2. “The typical procedures of the higher paranoid scholarship,” writes Richard Hofstadter in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, “is to start with . . . defensible assumptions and with a careful accumulation of facts, or at least what appear to be facts, and to marshal these facts toward an overwhelming ‘proof’ of the particular conspiracy that is to be established. It is nothing if not coherent; in fact, the paranoid mentality is far more coherent than the real world since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities” (36). 3. See, for example, Brantlinger’s Rule of Darkness, Paxton’s Writing Under the Raj, and Chakravarty’s The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination. 4. Brantlinger, commenting on this scene, indicts it for “Yorke’s tacit approval of the murder of the rich Indian,” which demonstrates, he says, “how far some Victorians were prepared to go for revenge” (Rule 212). But Yorke distinctly condemns the murder: he says it sickens him. 5. For further instances of this theme, see: Chesney (2:38, 255); Nisbet (136, 144, 268); Steel, On the Face of the Waters (300); and Merriman (214–16). 6. In this episode, Grant fictionalizes a famous moment in Mutiny mythology in which little ensign Arthur Cheek, who had been captured by the rebels, urged a native Christian fellow captive not to accept their captors’ offer to spare his life

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if he renounces his religion. “Oh, my friend, come what may, do not deny the Lord Jesus,” Cheek calls before dying (qtd. Ball 1:256). The racial invective with which Grant besmirches this scene is all of his own invention. 7. It is the word employed similarly by Samuel Lucas in his blazing 1857 polemic against the ruthlessness of British imperial expansionism in India, Dacoitee in Excelsis; or, The Spoliation of Oude by the East India Company.

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INDEX

Abbot, Major, 275 Account of the Mutinies in Oudh, An (Gubbins), 172–73 Achaia, 188 Act XIV, 106. See also “Clemency Resolution” Adam Bede (Eliot), 110 Aden, 67, 69 Aftermath of Revolt, The (Metcalf): on post-Mutiny government, 291n19, 292n3 Agog, 107 Ajnalla. See Ujnalla Alexandria, 67 Alien Nation (Schmitt), 142, 187, 291n14 Allahabad: martial law in, 174; Neill’s march to, 83; re-capturing of, 196, 201; reprisals in, 17, 88–89, 121, 155, 269 alter egos: 64, 111–12; in Feuerbach, 182; in gothic novel, 111, 181; as trope of Mutiny literature, 111, 260–62; as trope of popular novel, 51 Amalekites, 107, 112 ambivalence: in Ball, 163–64, 172, 182; in Braddon, 266, 268–69; toward British military conduct, 129–31, 187; toward capital punishment, 116; toward clemency, 172; in Dickens, 213, 228–29, 233; inherent to imperialism, 74; in Kaye, 195–96, 202; in Majendie, 86, 96–97; in Mutiny literature, 17, 113, 229, 279–81, 285, 287; in penality literature, 116–17, 123; in political debate, 58; toward Puritanism, 45, 142; toward racism, 129–30; toward retribution, 109–11, 268; in Rotton, 97; in Russell, 80–81, 84–86, 96; toward violence, 64, 92–93 American Civil War, 1, 212 American occupation of Iraq, 291n18 ancien rgime, 225 Angels of Albion (Robinson), 303n15 annexation, 166, 198. See also Oudh, annexation of Anselm: theology of, 107 anti-war writing, 81–82, 97, 156

anti-Victorianism, 17 apartheid, 71, 75. See also extermination; genocide aristocracy, French, 225, 236 Army of Bengal: disintegration of, 21. See also sepoys “Army of Retribution,” 1, 101, 196 arson, 257 atavism, 48, 119, 281 atrocities, British, 6, 12–13, 57, 198–99. See also reprisals, British; retribution; vengeance atrocity tales: authenticity of, 14–15, 27, 60, 69–70, 87, 137–38, 160–61, 169– 70, 198; Ball on, 70, 148, 153–54; and British perversion, 26–27, 70, 190–92; from Cawnpore, 190–91; Duff on, 26; in Mutiny fiction, 284; as propaganda, 27, 70; public consumption of, 259; Russell on, 68–71; and A Tale of Two Cities, 224, 226; Trevelyan on, 15, 70, 190–92; unspeakability of, 26–27, 139–40 Aurora Floyd (Braddon), 122–23 Auschwitz, 141 Austen, Jane, 257 Autobiography (Mill), 29, 52, 57, 290n5; on religious contradictions, 39–40 Autobiography, An (Spencer), 109 Autobiography, An (Trollope), 295n9 Aztecs, 232 babalog (“children”), 35 back-dating: in Victorian fiction, 246–47 Bagehot, Walter, 298n21 Bahadoor, Jung, 79 Balaclava, 80 Ball, Charles, 134, 144–63; as compared to other historiographers, 163–66, 183; religious views of, 44, 197. See also History of the Indian Mutiny, The Barchester Towers (Trollope), 63–64 Bareilly, massacres at, 26, 33, 161, 171, 265 Barnaby Rudge (Dickens), 114 Barrackpore, 168

318

Index

Bastille, 219 Battye, Quintin, 61–62 Baucom, Ian, 7–8, 49–50, 75, 135, 193 Benares, 203; executions at, 121, 233, 269, 271; martial law in, 101; Neill’s march from, 83; retribution in, 155, 176, 197– 99, 266 benevolence. See humanitarianism Bengal, 4, 10–11, 276; “reign of terror” in, 9, 196. See also Army of Bengal; sepoys Bennett, Arnold, 239–40 Bentham, Jeremy, 116–18. See also Utilitarianism Bentinck, Lord William, 30 bestiality: sensationalizing of, 228; of sepoys, 31–32, 301n14 Beyond Sensation (Tromp et al.), 302n1 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 53– 55 Bibighar, at Cawnpore, 62, 183, 185, 265; messages on walls of, 191; mutineers’ “cleaning” of, 155; outside communication with, 144, 146. See also Cawnpore bin Laden, Osama, 5 Biographical Sketch (Brock), 9, 223 Bithoor, 185 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 19 Bleak House (Dickens), 128, 213 Board of Control for India, 290n1 Bombay, 157 Bosch, Hieronymus, 85 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth: Aurora Floyd, 122–23; “Captain Skene,” 248; criticism of, 245–46, 299n3; “Delhi,” 302n1; Eleanor’s Victory, 303–4n17; trope of horror in, 284; imperialist views of, 302n5; military rectitude in, 122–23; on Mutiny, 248, 271, 302n2; on retribution, 110, 303–4n17; and sensation fiction, 245– 50, 259–60, 270. See also Lady Audley’s Secret Brahmanism. See Hinduism Brantlinger, Patrick, 13, 60, 193, 255; on British reprisals, 299n24; on Dickens, 212–13; on The Dilemma, 304n4; on First Love and Last Love, 284; on Maurice Dering, 296n14; on racism, 7, 63, 141, 164 Brasyer, Jeremiah (Lieutenant), 88, 293n16 Brock, William, 9, 44, 223 Bronte¨, Charlotte, 57 Buckler, F. W., 15

Burdett-Coutts, Angela, 211–12 Bush administration, 301n19 Butler, William, 21, 33–34, 52, 171, 291n14 Buzard, James, 49 Byron, Lord, 166–67 Calcutta, 45, 69, 72, 144–45; Black Hole of, 178; executions at, 176; rumors at, 23 Caligula, 39, 53, 133 Calvin, John, 124–25. See also Calvinism Calvinism, 29–30, 111–13; of British officers, 40–41, 44; principle of retribution in, 107–8, 124, 155, 202–3. See also Christianity; Evangelicalism; Methodism; Puritanism Campbell, George: on atrocity tales, 70, 292n8 Campbell, Sir Colin, 66, 80, 83–84, 100; mercifulness of, 172; re-conquering of Lucknow by, 5, 66, 80, 208, 250, 293n15; as soul of Britain, 181 Canning, Lord, 9, 127, 144, 161, 286; “clemency resolution” of, 105–6, 114– 15; criticism of, 35–37, 143, 161, 212; defense of, 161–62; as imperialist, 294n3; lenient policies of, 43, 46, 172; on vengeance, 50, 284 cannon, sepoys blown from, 46, 234, 253 “Cant of Modern Criticism, The” (Sala), 299n3 Canterbury, Archbishop of, 32, 256 “Capital Punishment” (Craies), 295n12 “Capital Punishments” (Stephen), 294n5, 301n16 Capote, Truman, 300n11 “Captain Skene” (Braddon), 248 Carker, Mr. (fictional character), 110 Carlyle, Thomas, 59, 223–26; on Governor Eyre, 299n5. See also French Revolution, The Carnell, Jennifer, 302n8 Carstone, Richard (fictional character), 128 Carton, Sidney (fictional character), 215, 218, 220–21, 228–29 cartridges, greased: as putative cause of Mutiny, 3, 8–10, 168, 198, 289n8; in Trevelyan’s Cawnpore, 183–84 Caruth, Cathy, 54–55, 152, 257, 271, 274 caste system, 34, 67, 168, 198

Index Cave-Browne, J., 134 Cawnpore: aftermath of massacres at 190– 94, 196; atrocity tales from, 190–91; British casualties at, 292n2; escapes from, 22; events leading up to, 4, 76; female heroism at, 263–65; female victims of, 259, 265; as “heart of darkness,” 69; imagery of, 85, 152; lack of sympathy for massacres at, 161; martial law in, 101; mass executions at, 112–13, 121, 237, 269; massacres at, 26, 201, 227, 276; mythologizing of, 66, 132, 226–27; Neill’s “strange law” in, 49; news reports from, 100, 144, 146, 250; prison house at, 127; reprisals at, 12, 117, 130, 155, 176, 201–3; siege of, 174; significance of race at, 33; survivors of, 2, 24; trauma of, 62, 253; Trevelyan’s account of, 183–94; unspeakability of, 21, 140– 41, 226; vengeance toward, 162; visual representations of, 207–8; well at, 178, 255–56, 302n9. See also atrocity tales; Bibighar, at Cawnpore; Cawnpore; Neill, James Cawnpore (Trevelyan), 134, 182–94; on atrocity tales, 15, 70, 190–92, 259, 284; British heroism in, 187–89, 194; on female violence, 264–65; historiography of, 137–38, 189–90; on inscriptions, 303n16; on instinct, 38, 270; on interracial sympathy, 284–85; on loss of Englishness, 193–94; as moral parable, 183; official mythology of, 183; on patriotism, 185–88, 192–94; on racism, 68, 183–85, 264, 283 Chakravarty, Gautam, 13–16, 88, 173, 224; on Canning, 294n3; on Mutiny fiction, 55, 205–6, 287, 299n2; on Mutiny historiography, 135, 140; on Russell’s Diary, 293n10 Chambers, Robert, 28 Chandnee Chouk, 121, 233 Chaplain’s Narrative, The (Rotton), 59– 64; ambivalence in, 97; British heroism in, 90; on horror, 26; military discourse in, 61; on vengeance, 88; on violence, 67, 72, 90, 223; on Willoughby, 274 Chapters on Mental Physiology (Holland), 303n11 character, British national, 49–51, 104–5, 155, 187, 193–200; and atrocity tales, 70–71; blindness in, 198; and capital

319

punishment, 229–32; efficacy of, 129; heroism in, 80; loss of, 75; in Mutiny literature, 51; natural state of, 181–82; savagery in, 27, 38–39, 71, 182, 223, 287; self-recognition of, 48, 208; split in, 53, 71, 84, 163, 172; transformation of, 24, 216–17, 234–35, 237; trauma to, 240, 250–54; vengeance in, 102–113, 197, 270. See also opinion, public Chartism, 247 Chaudhuri, Sashi Bhusan, 6, 86, 293n17, 297n6, 297n8, 297n13 Cheek, Arthur, 304n6 Chesney, George Tomkyns, 273, 280, 288, 295n8 chivalry, 185–92. See also heroism, British Christianity, 29, 39, 45, 192, 256; conflict between mercy and vengeance in, 38–53, 172; diabolism of, 61, 108, 170, 202–3, 260; divisions in, 105, 109, 298n16; and doubt, 32, 40, 53, 147, 186; figure of clergyman in, 63–64; and genocide, 107; God of, 39, 108, 112, 234–35, 260; and imperialism, 41–42, 79; mercifulness of, 162, 174–75; moral absolutism in, 114; Mutiny’s effect on, 32, 147, 157; mysticism of blood in, 60–61; primitive religion in, 105, 109, 112; and retribution, 101–2, 105, 229, 268–69, 294n5; treatment of non-believers in, 167, 174, 241; violence of, 45, 51, 64, 73–74, 203. See also Calvinism; Evangelicalism; Methodism; Puritanism Chuckerwallah Kothie, 83 Clanricarde, Marquis of, 158 Clapham Sect, 31, 41 Clark, G. Kitson, 41 Clark, William, 169 clemency, 106, 173, 212, 216; controversies over, 113, 214, 268–69; as figured in popular novel, 109–11; versus retribution, 58, 111, 132, 143. See also “Clemency Resolution” “Clemency of Canning, The” (Punch), 35–37 “Clemency Resolution” (Canning), 35–37, 105–6, 161–62, 172; as imperialist, 294n3; and penal reforms, 114–15. See also Canning, Lord Clever Woman of the Family, The (Yonge), 273, 281 Clyde, Lord. See Campbell, Sir Colin

320

Index

Cohn, Bernard S., 135 Colley, Linda, 49 Collins, Wilkie, 211–13, 245 colonialism. See imperialism Colonizer and the Colonized, The. See Memmi, Albert Colvin, John, 1, 172 concentration camps, 186. See also genocide; Third Reich “Condition of England,” 27–28 Conrad, Joseph, 25–26, 38, 71–75, 128; pre-figurings of, 65, 67, 86, 89, 292n4 Cooper, Frederic (Deputy Commissioner), 127, 155, 210, 224, 247; on extermination, 177–79, 182, 201, 204, 236; as monstrous alter ego, 181; on Ujnalla, 302–3n9 Coopland, Reverend, 175, 177, 179 Corelli, Marie, 51 Cotes, Mrs. Everard, 273 “Coupe-Teˆte,” Jourdan, 224 Covenanters, 44–45, 51, 84, 197. See also Calvinism; Christianity; Evangelicalism; Puritanism Craies, William Feilden, 295n12 Crane, Stephen, 81 Cranford (Gaskell), 247 Creakle, Mr. (fictional character), 110, 127, 295n8 Crimean War, 1, 65, 190 Crisis in the Punjab, The. See Cooper, Frederic Cromwell, Oliver, 44–45, 51, 107, 141–42 crucifixion, 278 “Curse of Minerva, The” (Byron), 166–67 Dacoitee in Excelsis (Lucas), 305n7 Daily News (London), 265 Dalhousie, Lord, 10, 30, 166, 195 Dallas, E. S., 246 Damiens, Robert-Franc¸ois, 231, 233, 260, 266 Danton, Georges Jacques, 218 Dartle, Rosa (fictional character), 110, 267 Darwin, Charles, 28, 186, 299–300n6. See also evolutionary theory David, Saul, 292n2 David Copperfield (Dickens), 52, 80, 110– 11, 127, 267, 295n8 Dawson, Graham, 289n6, 297n3, 298n16 De Quincey, Thomas, 24, 111 de Schweinitz, Karl, Jr., 217, 289n7 Deans, Jeanie (fictional character), 220

death penalty. See punishment, capital “Defence of Lucknow, The” (Tennyson), 33 Dehumanization of Art, The (Ortega y Gasset), 186 Delhi, 98–100, 103, 144, 194; arrival of Meerut battalions in, 140, 146, 150, 274; as equated with Sodom and Gomorrah, 241–42; executions in, 121, 192, 197, 233; female victims in, 153, 190– 91, 265; fugitives from, 170; king of, 3– 4; massacres at, 3–4, 26, 161, 169; mythology of, 226; palace at, 277; powder magazine at, 150–52, 274–75; re-capturing of, 46, 60, 66, 130, 154, 202, 283; reprisals in, 242; sepoys in, 225; siege of, 55, 290n3; storming of, 5, 155–56, 180– 81; survivors of, 263, 275–76; vengeance toward, 162, 196 “Delhi” (Braddon), 302n2 Delhi Field Force, 61 Delhi Gazette, 100 demonism. See diabolism Dennis the hangman (fictional character), 114 depression. See disillusionment Desmoulins, Camille, 218 determinism, 218 Deuteronomy, Book of, 52–53, 295n11 diabolism, 33–34, 182, 184–85, 223; and imagery of hell, 64–67, 83–84, 88, 227, 256; inherent to Christianity, 61, 108, 260. See also ferocity Dickens, Charles: alter egos in, 111; ambivalence in, 213; Barnaby Rudge, 114; Bleak House, 128, 213; blood imagery in, 303n10; on capital punishment, 114; disillusionment in, 57; heroines of, 261, 267; humanitarianism of, 48; Little Dorrit, 57, 148, 213; male ideal in, 80; morality in, 110, 128, 231–32; on Mutiny, 211–14, 235; on patriotism, 248; Pickwick Papers, 247; punishing figures in, 142; alleged racism of, 212–13; and Russell, 65, 226; satire in, 235. See also Tale of Two Cities, A Dilemma, The (Chesney), 273, 280, 288, 295n8 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 231, 296n13 disillusionment, 16–17, 57, 91, 216–17, 288; in Ball’s History, 193, 217; with pa-

Index triotism, 216, 222; and religion, 40; in Russell’s Diary, 210 Disraeli, Benjamin, 8–10, 70, 104–5, 286, 294n2; on Mutiny as epochal, 2, 66, 141, 223, 226, 247; on religious transformations, 50–51, 157, 235, 237, 268 dissent. See opinion, public domination. See imperialism doppelganger. See alter egos Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 23, 267 Dracula (Stoker), 111, 262 Drogheda, 107 Duff, Alexander. See Indian Rebellion, The Durand, H. M. (Colonel), 198–99 East India Company, 2, 68, 161, 166–67; critique of, 158, 187; James Mill’s position in, 29; reform agenda of, 30; religious policies of, 41–43, 58. See also raj, British Eden, William (Baron Auckland), 114–18, 203, 230 Edwardes, Herbert, 44, 202 Edwardes, Michael, 7–8, 12–13 Eight Days (Forrest), 2, 10, 19, 32, 41–42, 273; British nobility in, 282; on feminine virtue, 264; on Mutiny as dream, 276– 77; on public response to Mutiny, 208; on regeneration, 287–88; on Willoughby, 275 Eleanor’s Victory (Braddon), 303–4n17 Eliot, George: Felix Holt, 247; Middlemarch, 247; Mill on the Floss, The, 109, 199; on punishment, 109–10, 124, 199; translation of Feuerbach by, 38–39, 73, 108 Eliot, T. S., 152, 172 Engine House, the, 94, 96, 294n18 English Historical Writings on the Indian Mutiny. See Chaudhuri, Sashi Bhusan escape narratives, 146, 169–71, 188 Essays and Reviews, 186 Essence of Christianity, The. See Feuerbach, Ludwig Euphrates, 188 Evangelicalism, 41, 44, 159, 165, 197; civilizing mission of, 30–31, 153, 164; cultural influence of, 27, 52–53, 106–9; decline in, 41, 114, 203; founding of, 291n17; versus Utilitarianism, 30–31. See also Calvinism; Christianity; Covenanters; Methodism; Puritanism

321

evolutionary theory, 28–29, 31–32, 38–39, 59. See also Darwin, Charles; ferocity; Spencer, Herbert Ewart, Colonel, 297n9 Ewart, Emma, 146, 297n9 executions, 59, 229–30, 232–34, 237. See also cannon, sepoys blown from; guillotine; punishment, capital; reprisals, British; retribution Exeter Hall, 79 extermination, 39, 75, 82, 93, 201, 266– 67; as British policy, 1, 9, 195–96; imperialist logic of, 74, 77, 199; Mutiny figured as, 216; in national character, 182; of non-believers, 167, 174, 241; in popular novel, 212; in A Tale of Two Cities, 235–36; trope of large numbers in, 167, 176, 178–89, 201; vengeful demand for, 60–64, 174–79, 189, 191. See also genocide Eyre, Governor, 298n17, 299n5 Eyre, Jane (fictional character), 111 Eyre, Vincent (Major): village-burning system of, 177 Fame and Fiction (Bennett), 239–40 “Familiar, The” (Le Fanu), 111 famine, 167, 301n13 fanaticism, 41, 160; Feuerbach on, 132; inherent to Christianity, 39, 45 Fanon, Frantz, 59, 135, 146, 225 Father and Son (Gosse), 52 Felix Holt (Eliot), 247 femininity, 264; as linked to humanitarianism, 130, 162; as linked to violence, 263–69 “Feringhees,” 33, 66, 169 ferocity, 28, 111–12, 153, 199, 223, 279; atavistic nature of, 48, 230, 295n7; on both sides, 1, 67–68, 156, 294n1; as instinct, 270; linked to femininity, 264–69; of punishment, 116, 118, 155–57, 198, 229–30; reversion to, 31–32, 38–39, 108–9, 133. See also diabolism feudalism, 279 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 48, 111–12, 132, 182, 270; on diabolism, 61, 108, 260; on Judeo-Christian God, 234–35; on religious intolerance, 39–40, 43, 167, 174; on violence of Christianity, 45, 51, 64, 73–74, 203 fiction. See novel, popular

322

Index

Fictions Connected with the Indian Outbreak of 1857 Exposed (Leckey), 14, 20, 70, 190, 297n10 fin de sie`cle, 56 First Love and Last Love (Grant), 45, 101, 273, 278, 282–87; atrocity tales in, 284; on Mutiny as dream, 276–77; as unrepresentative of Mutiny fiction, 284–85; on Willoughby, 275 Fitchett, W. H., 44–45, 205, 216, 289n8 Flotsam (Merriman), 2, 26, 128–33 Forrest, R. E.: on “incident,” 218. See also Eight Days Forster, John, 214, 217–18 Foucault, Michel, 231, 296n13 Framley Parsonage (Trollope), 128 Frankenstein, Victor (fictional character), 111 Frankland, William, 295n11 Fraser, Mrs., 263–64 Frazer, J. G., 28, 105, 232, 298n21 Frazer’s Magazine, 301n16 French Revolution: allegorizing of, 221; as parallel to Mutiny, 213–14, 223–24; trauma produced by, 222; vindication of, 228–29. See also Tale of Two Cities, A French Revolution, The (Carlyle), 218, 223–24, 233, 300n7, 301n13 Freud, Sigmund, 182, 254; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 53–55; on the “id,” 28, 299n21; on repetition compulsion, 62; on trauma, 53–55, 277 Friend of India, The (Calcutta), 173–74, 189 Futtehgur, 26, 161, 190–91 Fyzabad, 170–71 Gallagher, Catherine, 234, 301n17 Galle, 67 gallows, 114, 121, 176, 233 Ganges, 4, 85, 183–85 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 247 gender ideology, Victorian, 262–69. See also femininity General, Mrs. (fictional character), 148 Genesis, Book of, 104, 241 genocide, 199, 234, 236; in Judeo-Christian imagery, 107, 241; as motive of reprisals, 15, 50, 167, 174–75; and racial phobia, 75–76, 82, 201–2. See also concentration camps; extermination Gilbert, Pamela, 302n1

Gil-Martin (fictional character), 111, 262 Girard, Rene´, 295–96n13 Girondins, 300n7 Glacie`re Tower, 224 globalization, 22 Golden Bough, The (Frazer), 28, 105, 232 Golgotha, 242 Gomorrah, 241–42 Gorringe, Timothy, 107–10, 113 Gosling, Lieutenant, 179 Gosse, Edmund, 52 gothicism, literary, 25, 52, 111, 181; in relation to sensation fiction, 245, 259–60, 270 Grant, Hope (General). See Incidents in the Sepoy War Grant, James. See First Love and Last Love Great Exhibition, 27 Greeks, 188 Gregg, Hilda, 19–20, 24, 205–6 Grey, Maxwell (Mary Gleed Tuttiett). See In the Heart of the Storm Griffiths, Charles John, 253 Gubbins, Martin, 172–73 guillotine, 230, 232–35 Gurkhas, 63, 180, 294n1 Haldane, J. A., 107 hallucination, 2, 51, 166; as symptom of Mutiny trauma, 22, 258, 276–77. See also horror; phantasmagoria Hankinson, Alan, 65 Harding, Reverend Septimus (fictional character), 63–64 Hardy, Thomas, 57, 128 Hastings, Warren, 31 Havelock, Sir Henry, 4, 52, 181, 200, 293n15; biography of, 9, 223; at Cawnpore, 255, 276; Christian piety of, 137, 175, 197; criticism of, 175–77; heroism of, 41, 44; as Puritan warrior, 44, 51, 107, 141, 175, 188 Haynie, Aeron, 302n1 He Knew He Was Right (Trollope), 57 Headstone, Bradley (fictional character), 110 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 25–26, 38, 71–75, 128; pre-figuring of, 65, 67, 86– 87, 89, 292n4 Heep, Uriah (fictional character), 111 Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, 138

Index Hell, imagery of: 64–67, 83–84, 88, 227, 256 Hennell, Sara, 295n6 Henry VIII, 118 Henty, G. A., 273, 276, 278, 281–82 heroism, British, 216, 220, 224, 249–50; associated with ancestral past, 88, 141– 43, 187–90, 192, 194; glorification of, 6, 80–81, 204, 283; in Kaye’s History, 196–98 Heyck, Thomas William, 291n17 Hibbert, Christopher, 114, 269, 303n15 Highlanders, 292n1 Hinduism, 6, 10–11, 30, 34, 283; Christian treatment of, 9, 29–31, 153, 237, 290n5; fanaticism of, 160; in Mutiny literature, 44; pathologies of, 158; racism toward, 33–34, 63, 67; religious sensibilities of, 3–4, 31, 156, 168, 170, 194; violence toward, 166 Historical Novel, The (Luka´cs), 215 historiography, 138, 189. See also historiography, Victorian, of the Mutiny historiography, Victorian, of the Mutiny, 8, 10, 134–43, 185, 197; ancestral heroism in, 141–42; factuality of, 137–40, 148, 276; and imperialism, 135–36; mythmaking in, 152; rhetorical instabilities of, 136, 139–40, 157; scholarly dogmas about, 134–36, 160; and unspeakability, 139–41; voluminousness of, 134–35. See also Mutiny fiction; Mutiny literature History of British India, The (Mill); polarized conflict in, 67; on progress in India, 29–30 History of English Criminal Law, A (Radzinowicz), 120 History of the British Empire in India and the East, The (Nolan), 10, 134, 140, 298n17, 304n1; on Mutiny historiography, 20, 298n18 History of the Criminal Law of England, A (Stephen): on avidity for punishment, 118–21, 123; on capital punishment, 230; on harshness of British law, 113– 14; on penal reform, 114–17; on Puritanism, 142; on vengeance, 111 History of the Indian Mutiny, A (Holmes), 127, 134, 204 History of the Indian Mutiny, The (Ball), 134, 144–63; ambivalence in, 163–64, 172, 182; as anti-war text, 156; on atroc-

323

ity tales, 70, 148, 153–54, 190, 226; on bestiality of mutineers, 31, 301n14; on British national character, 51, 113; on Canning, 127; on causes of Mutiny, 158–59, 195; on Cawnpore, 127; on Cheek, 305n6; on Cooper, 177; disillusionment in, 193, 217; documentary nature of, 144–48, 188; escape narratives in, 146, 169–71; on Havelock, 4; historiography of, 66, 137, 146–47; incongruities in, 149–50, 155–64; jingoism in, 153–56; on legal system, 282; mercifulness in, 158–62; on Mutiny as natural disaster, 2; on Mutiny as revolt, 8–10; on myth of fraternity, 34; on Neill, 4, 237; nightmarish imagination in, 249; on reactions to Mutiny, 216; repetition in, 150–52, 274–75; on retribution, 100, 242; on Skene, 303n14; on unspeakability of Mutiny, 21, 139–40, 153–54, 157, 207; on vengeance, 4, 174, 233, 265; on Willoughby, 274–75 History of the Sepoy War in India, A (Kaye), 1–2, 34, 113, 134, 194–204; on anti-sentimentality, 216; on atrocity tales, 70; on causes of Mutiny, 9–10, 195–96; historiography of, 138–40, 148; as moral fable, 198–200, 203; on Neill, 13, 44; on religion, 44, 197; on retribution, 4, 37, 100–101, 202–3; on sympathy, 200–201; on unspeakability, 139– 41; on Willoughby, 274 Hodson, George, 9, 130, 142 Hodson, William (Major), 130, 142, 176– 77, 192; literary incarnations of, 278, 280, 296n19, 302n5; murder of Indian princes by, 38, 283 Hodson’s Horse, 177, 295n8 Hofstadter, Richard, 304n2 Hogg, James, 111, 181–82, 260, 262 Holland, Sir Henry, 303n11 Holmes, T. Rice, 127, 134, 204, 274 Holocaust, 167. See also concentration camps; genocide Home, Duncan Charles, 98 Homer, 174, 188–89, 194, 196 homosociality, 35 horror, 25–26, 51, 140–41, 156, 270–71; of Cawnpore well, 255; of identification with sepoys, 37, 55; in Mutiny literature, 250, 270; as paralysis, 46, 254;

324

Index

horror (cont.) revulsion from, 89–98; unspeakability of, 180. See also trauma Hosts of the Lord, The (Steel), 110, 273. See also Steel, Flora Annie House of Commons. See Parliament How I Won the Victoria Cross (Kavanagh), 12 Hughes, Thomas, 23 Hughes, Winifred, 243 humanism: in Dickens, 215, 218, 234; negation of, 222, 229 humanitarianism, 53, 162, 173, 184, 285; bad conscience of, 102, 121, 166; co-existing with cruelty, 38–40, 51, 55, 64, 74, 93, 200–201, 260; defeat of, 57, 77, 203–4, 219; as depicted in popular novel, 110, 210; figured as feminine, 130, 162; hostility toward, 103–4, 108, 154; idealization of, 48, 282, 285, 287; and imperialism, 5–6, 13, 71, 112; in Kaye’s History, 199–201, 203; and penal reform, 112, 114–19; and punitive religion, 142–43, 163, 197; in Russell’s Diary, 86–87; versus government policies, 97; versus vengeance, 173, 236. See also mercy; progress; reform Hussein, Qusay, 296n19 Hussein, Saddam, 291n18, 296n19 Hussein, Uday, 296n19 Hyde, Mr. (fictional character), 64, 111, 128, 133 id, 28, 299n21 identity, British national. See character, British national Ilbert Bill, 296n17 Iliad, The (Homer), 174, 188–89 Illustrated London News, 10, 22, 27–28, 103, 208 imago, 52–53 imperialism, 5–6, 11, 65, 182, 214, 279– 85; bad conscience of, 96, 109, 172, 195; as culturally monolithic, 5–6, 14– 15, 135–38, 143; as economic exploitation, 45, 71; and extermination, 199; and historiography, 135–36, 164; and humanitarianism, 112; impact of Mutiny on, 32, 56, 217; incongruities in, 30, 43, 48; Indian resistance to, 198; in Lady Audley’s Secret, 248–49; moral failings of, 65, 234; propagandizing of, 173; pub-

lic blindness to, 84, 159, 186; racism inherent to, 16, 71–78, 165; religious logic of, 40–42; sadism of, 225–26; as threat to “Englishness,” 49–50. See also New Imperialism In Cold Blood (Capote), 300n11 “In Memoriam” (Paton), 207–8, 211, 226 In Memoriam (Tennyson), 57 In the Heart of the Storm (Grey), 131, 273, 276; on national character, 270, 287; on vengeance, 102, 281 “In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857” (Rossetti), 248, 303n14 “incident,” in fiction, 218 Incidents in the Sepoy War (Grant and Knollys), 10, 22, 44, 134; on ferocity of Mutiny, 1, 37–38, 232; on Mutiny as civil war, 37, 42 Indian Church during the Great Rebellion, The (Sherring), 10, 253 Indian Crisis, The (anon), 42 Indian Empire, The (Martin). See Mutiny of the Bengal Army, The (Martin) Indian Military Revolt Viewed in its Religious Aspects, The (Wilson), 237, 291n12 “Indian Mutiny in Fiction, The” (Gregg): on Mutiny literature, 19–20, 205–6 Indian Mutiny of 1857, The (Malleson), 134, 204, 274. See also Mutiny of the Bengal Army, The Indian Rebellion, The (Duff), 23, 26, 142, 175, 180; on anti-sentimentality, 216, 234; on British casualties, 35, 289n1; on Canning, 43; demonic imagery in, 33, 227; on epochal nature of Mutiny, 31; on Lucknow, 241; on Mutiny as moral fable, 32; as natural disaster, 2, 258; as revolt, 10–11; on Neill, 237; on religion, 48–49, 237; on reprisals, 117, 269; on trauma, 258 Indian War of Independence, The (Savarkar), 299n24 Inglis, Mrs., 290n2 insanity, 25, 121–33, 252–53, 281, 303n11; of Lady Audley, 243, 247, 260– 64, 267, 269–70. See also moral insanity instinct, 71, 86, 91, 233; ferocity of, 38, 192, 201; as threat, 28, 191, 298n21. See also evolutionary theory Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The, 231–32

Index Iraq, 291n18 Ironsides, 141–42. See also Cromwell, Oliver Isaiah, Book of, 101–2, 105 Islam, 6, 44, 67, 158; Christian reactions to, 9, 31, 153, 237; conversion to, 283– 84; fanaticism of, 41, 160; religious sensibilities of, 3–4, 31, 156, 170 Israelites, 112 Jacobins, 300n7 Jamaica, 186, 298n17, 299n5 James, Captain, 179 James, Henry, 239, 245–46, 257; on Lady Audley, 261, 271–72, 302n6 Jasper, John (fictional character), 111 Jerusalem Delivered (Tasso), 53–55 Jews, 223. See also concentration camps; genocide Jhansi, 26, 149–50, 161, 196; the Rani of, 5 Jhelum, 234 jingoism, 14–16, 135, 153–55, 187, 285; in Braddon, 248, 271; in Dickens, 212– 13; Grant’s of historiography, 143, 153; as prompted by Mutiny, 58, 216; scholarly dogma about, 70, 94 John, Juliet, 261 Johnson, Edgar, 212, 299n6 Jones, Sir William, 31 Jonson, Ben, 68 Journal of an English Officer in India (North), 10, 88, 200, 268 journalism. See news, war Judd, Denis, 1, 7–8 Jude the Obscure (Hardy), 57, 128 “Justice” (Punch), 46–48, 50, 90, 266, 268 Kafka, Franz, 23, 232 Karamazov, Ivan (fictional character), 147 Kavanagh, T. Henry, 12 Kaye, Sir John William, 194–204. See also History of the Sepoy War in India, A Kennedy, Rev. James, 266, 271 Khan, Khan Bahadur, 171 Khan, Teg Ali, 170, 297n10 Kim (Kipling), 288 King, Christian George (fictional character), 211 Kingsley, Charles, 152, 253–54; and religious doubt, 32, 53 Kingsley, Henry. See Stretton

325

Kipling, Rudyard, 288 Kissen Gunge, 62 Knollys, Henry, 1, 10, 22, 24, 134 Kurtz (fictional character), 25, 38, 74, 98 La prisonnie`re (Proust), 275 Lady Audley’s Secret (Braddon), 239–72; ambivalence of, 266, 268–69; criticism of, 245–46; dating of, 246–48, 302n3; displacement in, 242–44, 254, 267; expressionistic mode of, 256–59; genrebending in, 278; figure of Audley Court in, 254–58; figure of heroine in, 240–42, 249–50, 252–53, 259, 266, 268–72; figure of well in, 254–57; horror in, 284; insanity in, 23, 247, 269–70; as interpretation of Mutiny, 247–54, 266, 270; and Lady Audley, 240–45, 252–54, 260–64, 267, 288, 302n6; nihilism in, 271–72; on retribution, 110, 245, 266–69, 271; and Robert Audley, 239–40, 268–69; as sensation fiction, 245–46; on trauma, 23, 251–55, 270–72, 284; violence in, 256–59 Lahore, 178, 182 Lahore Chronicle, 70 land laws, 9–10, 30, 183, 291n19 Land of the Veda, The (Butler), 21, 33–34, 52, 171, 291n14 Language of Pyscho-Analysis, The (Laplanche and Pontalis), 52 Laplanche, Jean, 52 Lawrence, George Alfred, 37, 121–30, 133, 205 Lawrence, Sir Henry, 43–44, 56, 78, 185; mercifulness of, 172–74, 199–200; mythologizing of, 181–82, 194; praise of, 142, 178–79, 189 Lawrence, Sir John, 179, 181 Le Fanu, Sheridan, 111 Leckey, Edward, 14, 20, 70, 190, 297n10 legal system, in India, 282 Lennox, Colonel, 170 Leviticus, Book of, 112 library, circulating, 246 Life of Charles Dickens, The (Forster), 214, 217–18 Light Cavalry Brigade, 80, 86 literature, popular. See novel, popular Little Dorrit (Dickens), 57, 213 Lloyd, Major-General, 172 Lord Jim (Conrad), 128

326

Index

Lot’s wife, 240–42, 252–53, 270 Lucas, Samuel, 305n7 Lucknow, 33, 66, 144, 161, 172; imagery of, 85–86, 241–42; Majendie’s account of, 92–98; mutineers from, 171; re-capturing of, 80, 250; Rees’s memoir of, 9, 32; relieving of, 4–5, 185, 208; reprisals at, 73, 82, 95; Residency at, 61, 293n15; Russell’s account of, 81–82, 86 Luka´cs, Georg, 215, 218, 234 lynch mobs, 225 MacKenzie, John M., 193 Mackillop, John, 185–87, 194 Madan, Martin, 118, 295n11 Madras Fusileers, 149 Maglagan, Michael, 106 Majendie, Vivan Dering, 86–98. See also Up Among the Pandies Majumdar, R. C., 8–9 Malleson, G. B. See Indian Mutiny of 1857, The; Mutiny of the Bengal Army, The (Malleson) Malta, 67 Manchester Guardian, 70 Manichaean structure, 25–26, 75, 127, 172, 228; in First Love and Last Love, 285; Mutiny as allegory of, 146–47, 216; scholarly imposition of, 279 Mannoni, Octave, 182, 225, 260, 281 Mansel, H. L., 245–46, 261, 272, 302n6 Mansfield, General, 80 Marcus, Stephen, 299–300n6 Marie-Antoinette, 218 Marmion (Scott), 264 Martin, R. Montgomery, 163–82. See also Mutiny of the Bengal Army, The (Martin) Marx, Karl, 59, 182, 289n7 Mary Barton (Gaskell), 247 Mason, Bertha (fictional character), 111 Maurice Dering (Lawrence), 37, 121–30, 133, 205 Mayman, Martin, 300n11 McKay, Reverend, 79 Mead, Henry, 12, 21, 101 Medes, 102 media, Victorian, 5, 8, 14 Meerut, 26, 140, 198, 227, 232; first news from, 99–100, 103; outbreak at, 3, 22, 145, 282; vengeance toward, 162

Meerut mutineers: arrival of in Delhi, 20, 146, 150, 274; temporary insanity of, 168 melancholia, 28. See also disillusionment Memmi, Albert, 5, 73–77, 95–96, 165; on bad conscience, 132, 172, 182; on extermination, 174; on humanitarianism, 162; on “Nero Complex,” 167; on pathologies of imperialism, 281, 284; on sadism, 225 Menninger, Karl, 300n11 mental illness. See insanity Mephistopheles, 69, 185 mercy: as juxtaposed to vengeance, 95, 172, 190; as potentiality of national character, 196–97, 199. See also humanitarianism “Mercy for Nana Sahib” (Punch), 104 Merriman, Henry Seton (Hugh Stowell Scott), 2, 26, 128–33 Metcalf, Thomas R., 290n10; 291n19, 292n3 Methodism, 41, 106–9, 113, 291n17. See also Calvinism; Christianity; Covenanters; Evangelicalism; Puritanism middle class, Victorian, 27, 287; divisions in, 111–12; literary consumption of, 246; morality of, 124, 249; psychological realizations of, 38, 48; religious heritage of, 52–53, 111–12; sentimentality of, 186, 207; taboos of, 58–59, 140, 256 Middlemarch (Eliot), 247 Mill, James, 29–31, 43–44 Mill, John Stuart, 52–53, 57, 290n5; on religion, 29, 39–40, 43, 48, 50–51 Mill on the Floss, The (Eliot), 109, 199 Milton, John, 51, 84, 196–97, 199 Mirabeau, 218 Mirzapoor, 177 misogyny, 129, 262, 269, 278 “Miss Braddon” (James), 245–46, 261. See also James, Henry missionaries, 32, 164–65; as destabilizing force, 31, 41; and Hinduism, 29–30; versus East India Company, 58 Missionary Sketches in North India (Weitbrecht), 30, 34, 41–42 modernism, literary, 17, 25–26, 131 Mohammed, Meer, 170 Moloch, 91, 112, 268; figured in Maurice Dering, 121, 128; worship of, 50–51, 53, 105, 157, 235, 237

Index Money, Edward, 299n2 Montgomery, Robert, 178–79, 182 Moore, Captain, 185, 187 Moore, Grace, 8, 213, 233, 299n5, 300n6 Moore (magistrate), 177 moral insanity, 222, 224–25, 234, 237; in Lady Audley’s Secret, 270; in twentiethcentury texts, 300n11 Morant Bay uprising, 186, 298n17, 299n5 Morley, Henry, 211 Morley, James, 169–70, 188, 253 Moses, 112 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 152, 251, 257, 275 Mughal Dynasty, 4 Munro, Sir Thomas, 164–65 “Murder Without Apparent Motive” (Satten et al.), 300n11 Murdstone, Mr. (fictional character), 80, 110, 142 mutilation, 244–45, 263. See also atrocity tales mutineers, 1, 15, 31–34; loyalty of, 170– 71; mercilessness of, 4, 230, 279; reprisals against, 50, 60–64, 284. See also sepoys Mutiny, Indian: affecting popular literature, 20–25, 205–10, 217, 249–50, 252; aftermath of, 2, 56–57, 216–17, 273, 287; casualties in, 1, 289n1; causes of, 3, 8–10, 158–59, 168, 195–96; contemporary view of, 2–3, 16, 134–35, 147, 208, 290n10; current echoes of, 291n18, 296n19, 301n19; disillusionment produced by, 216–17, 288; as divine judgment, 43, 165, 237; as epochal, 2–3, 66, 69, 102, 133, 141, 189, 223, 247; as evolutionary reversion, 31–32; as extermination, 216; ferocity of, 1, 58, 81; as fictive event, 3, 21–25, 139–40; and French Revolution, 213–14, 223–24; and gender ideology, 262–69; hallucinatory aspects of, 276–77; historical importance of, 1–3, 18; historiography of, 10–16; as melodrama, 19–20, 96, 146–47; as metamorphosis, 216–17, 240, 256; as moral fable, 32, 51, 67; and national character, 33, 50–53, 104, 112–13, 163–65, 172– 73; as natural disaster, 2, 258; nomenclature of, 6–11, 37; and religion, 38–53, 102, 106–9, 147, 186; repressed memories of, 247–48, 251; scholarly dogmas

327

about, 2–3, 5–7, 11–18, 279; “sensation” resulting from, 248, 272; synopsis of, 3–5; as “terrible break,” 2, 16–21, 26–27, 56, 86, 128, 172, 187, 242, 252; as trauma, 2–3, 7, 23–25, 55, 186, 205, 240, 250–55, 258; uncanny nature of, 206; unspeakability of, 20–22; war news from, 22–25, 144; veterans of, 251; violence of, 223, 256. See also historiography, Victorian, of the Mutiny; Mutiny fiction; Mutiny literature Mutiny fiction, 121–33, 273–88; ambivalence of, 279–81, 285, 287; disillusionment in, 281; genre-bending in, 278; on imperialism, 279–85; insanity in, 121– 33; phantasmagoria in, 276–78, 284; publication history of, 205–6, 273; on regeneration, 287–88; scholarly dogmas about, 282, 287; self-delusion in, 288; sympathy in, 279–82, 284–85; as therapy, 281–82, 287–88; trauma in, 274– 78, 287; and unspeakability, 206–7. See also Mutiny literature Mutiny literature: alter egos in, 111, 260; ambivalence in, 92–93, 113, 229, 287; archive of, 3, 24; Biblical allusions in, 241–42; British heroism in, 88, 107, 141–43, 180; contradictions in, 11–12, 17, 131, 162; diabolism in, 33–34, 83, 85, 184–85, 227; hallucinatory style of, 2, 51, 58, 276–77; horror in, 19–22, 25– 27, 85–86, 250, 272; hyperbole in, 2, 21–22; insanity in, 270; intertextuality of, 274; justificatory nature of, 7; as means of neutralizing trauma, 20, 24; mysticism of blood in, 60–61, 87–88, 91, 232; myth-making in, 13; Oedipal complex in, 125; phantasmagoria in, 21–24, 90, 93, 249; popular appeal of, 19–20; on race 7, 35, 129, 183–84, 279, 283; religion in, 40–53, 142–43; repetition as trope of, 150–52, 274–78; on revenge/clemency debate, 121–33; scholarly dogmas about, 50, 164, 167; trauma symptoms in, 20–25, 54–57, 258; on unspeakability, 139–41, 144, 169, 226; violence in, 224. See also Mutiny fiction Mutiny of the Bengal Army, The (Malleson), 10, 134, 194, 274, 297n1; on annexation, 50; on Cawnpore, 255; on chivalry, 141; as compared to later

328

Index

Mutiny of the Bengal Army, The (cont.) works, 204; on Delhi, 241; on failures of British government, 56; historiography of, 297n13; on myth of fraternity, 34; on Neill, 49; on Sir Henry Lawrence, 43; on vengeance, 45–50, 200, 204. See also Indian Mutiny of 1857, The Mutiny of the Bengal Army, The (Martin), 2, 10, 134, 163–82, 204; as apologist, 171, 198, 201; on British conduct, 15, 175–82, 187, 224; on causes of Mutiny, 168, 195; compared to Ball’s History, 163–64, 174; on failures of British government, 56; on female violence, 264– 66; large numbers as trope in, 167, 176, 178–79; on legal system, 282; on moral numbness, 221; native magnanimity in, 170–71, 184; on Paton’s “In Memoriam,” 208; on race, 164–67, 286; on religion, 44, 197; on reprisals, 105, 121, 171–72, 174–79, 182, 189, 192, 233– 34; rumors discounted in, 22, 169–71, 190; on Sir Henry Lawrence, 189, 194; on Willoughby, 274 My Diary in India (Russell), 13, 64–86, 159, 175; ambivalence in, 80–81, 84–86, 96; as anti-war text, 81–82, 92; on atrocity tales, 68–71, 190; on British cruelty, 226; on British deterioration, 65, 291n14; on British heroism, 80–81, 88, 187; and Dickens, 299n5; disillusionment in, 210; on failures of British government, 78–81; humanitarianism of, 86–87; imagery of hell in, 64–67, 83–84; portrayal of massacres in, 126; pre-figuring Heart of Darkness, 292n4; nightmarish imagination of, 249; on nihilism, 171; on racism, 33, 68, 71–79, 100, 164–66, 212, 280, 286; redaction of, 66; on reprisals, 93–94, 242; Up Among the Pandies compared to, 86–87 Mysteries of Udolpho, The (Radcliffe), 245 Mystery of Edwin Drood, The (Dickens), 111 Nana Sahib, 4–5, 183, 185, 211; abuse of women by, 245; fanaticism of, 41; figured as Mephistopheles, 69, 185; sympathy toward, 104, 198, 281; troopers of, 127, 148, 255; as victim, 76–77, 88, 216; violence of, 127, 178, 194, 223 Napier, Sir Charles, 172

Narrative of the Siege of Delhi, A (Griffiths), 253 nationalism. See jingoism; patriotism Natural History of Society, The (Taylor), 295n7 Nawab-Gunge, 294n18 Nayder, Lillian, 248, 302n6, 302n9 Neill, James (Colonel and Brigadier General): at Allahabad, 83, 196, 201; criticism of, 176–77; evangelicalism of, 197, 202–3, 269; glorification of, 7, 130, 155, 194, 197–98, 237; martial law of, 101; monstrous nature of, 181, 192–94; public debate over, 113, 216; as Puritan icon, 44, 51–52, 57, 107, 141, 188; on race, 291n14; reprisals enacted by, 12– 13, 105, 117, 121, 233, 266, 269, 271; “strange law” of, 4–5, 49, 112–13, 202; vengeance of, 197, 201–3 Nero, 39, 53, 133 Nero Complex, 74–76, 86, 95, 97, 167; and French aristocracy, 225; in Mutiny fiction, 281, 284; and racial violence, 130–31. See also Memmi, Albert New Imperialism, 56, 203–4, 206. See also imperialism New York Daily Tribune, 289n7 Newport Pagnell, 50–51, 104–5, 157 news, war: in Indian newspapers, 145; national spirit impacted by, 28, 46, 58–59; time lag in, 22–25, 144, 276, 290n1 Nicholson, John, 98, 176–77, 194, 290n7; fictional depictions of, 32, 278; as Puritan icon, 44, 51–52, 107, 141, 188; reprisals enacted by, 202–3 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 59, 182 nigger, 68, 165, 183–84, 212, 280; cultural leverage of, 72–73, 76–77; in First Love and Last Love, 283–84. See also racism nihilism, 26, 63, 90, 133, 186; in Lady Audley’s Secret, 271–72; of retribution, 101, 155, 171, 189; worship of, 235, 237 Nisbet, Hume. See Queen’s Desire, The Nolan, E. H., 10, 134, 140, 298n17, 304n1; on Mutiny historiography, 20, 298n18 noninterference, 30 North, Charles Napier, 10, 88, 200, 268 North British Review, 245–46 Notes and Reviews (James), 272

Index Notes on the Revolt (Raikes), 23, 57, 300n8 novel, popular, 28, 51, 246, 273; as affected by violence, 215; code of decency in, 246, 278; and Mutiny, 205–10, 217, 249–50; patriotism in, 211–13; on retribution, 109–11, 117; shift toward horror in, 25–26. See also realism, literary “Novels” (Oliphant), 207, 209–10 Observations on the Criminal Law of England (Romilly), 117–18 Oddie, William, 212–13 Odyssey, The (Homer), 194 Oedipal narrative, 35, 52, 125 “Of Queen’s Gardens” (Ruskin), 263 Old Bailey, 230 Old Morality (Scott), 291n13 Old Testament, 67, 199, 241; cultural heritage of, 52, 59; vengefulness of, 112. See also Christianity; Evangelicalism Oliphant, Margaret, 207, 209–10, 299n3 On the Face of the Waters (Steel), 101–2, 104–5, 273, 275. See also Steel, Flora Annie “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” (Milton), 196–97 opinion, public, 31, 208, 268; and dissent toward British conduct, 14–16, 177, 285; divisions in, 160, 167, 172. See also character, British national optimism. See progress orientalism, 31, 290n6 Orientalism (Said), 6 Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, The (Westermarck), 119–20, 155, 197 Origin of Species, The (Darwin), 28, 299– 300n6 Ortega y Gasset, Jose´, 186 Osborne, Bernal (Liberal MP), 241 Osborne, George (fictional character), 128 Other Side of the Medal, The (Thompson), 13, 50, 270, 289n5; on Cooper, 177–78; on imperialism, 297n2 Oudh, 9, 94, 170, 183, 248; administration of, 162, 172, 200; annexation of, 10, 50, 78, 158, 166, 195; rebels in, 79, 158–59, 250 Outram, Sir James, 162, 166, 172, 293n15 Owen, Wilfred, 81

329

Packington, Sir John, 159 Paley, William, 118 Palmerston, Lord, 294n2 pandy, 82 panic: in Lady Audley’s Secret, 254–55, 257, 272, 288; of sepoys, 3, 168. See also trauma Paradise Lost (Milton), 51, 84 “paranoid style,” 279 Parliament, 8–10, 27–28, 157–58, 161, 187, 298n17 pathology: of idealized morality, 123–24; of imperialism, 281, 284–85; as manifested during Mutiny, 15, 126, 132–33, 193–94; of punishment, 121–28; of racism, 77, 212; of repetition, 152; of vengeance, 52–53, 73, 222. See also insanity Patna, 172, 177, 199 Paton, Sir Joseph Noel, 207–8, 211, 226 patriotism, 58, 186, 210, 281; critique of, 16, 130–31, 164, 192–94; disillusionment with, 216, 222; in popular novel, 211–13; and vengeance, 103–4; and xenophobia, 14. See also jingoism patronage system, 158 Paxton, Nancy L., 7–8, 65, 140 Peace Society, 12 Penal Colony (fictional place), 232 penality, 27, 99, 113–21; ambivalence toward, 123; historical transitions in, 296n13. See also punishment “Perils of Certain English Prisoners, The” (Collins and Dickens), 211–14, 222, 228, 248 periodical press, 246 Perkin, Harold, 27 Personal Narrative of the Siege of Lucknow (Rees), 9, 32, 35, 217, 226 personality, national. See character, British national Peshawur, 178–79 Peshawur Light Horse, 179 Peter, Second Book of, 171 phantasmagoria: in Mutiny literature, 21– 22, 24. See also hallucination; horror philanthropy. See humanitarianism Physics and Politics (Bagehot), 298n21 Pickwick Papers (Dickens), 247 piety, 42, 44–45, 197; and clemency, 109– 11, 142; as cover for savagery, 38, 60, 124; military icons of, 137, 197; and

330

Index

piety (cont.) vengeance, 101–2, 108, 154, 162, 203. See also Christianity Pinkney, Captain, 150 Plassey, battle of, 30 Platt, Colonel, 35 pleasure principle, 62 Poe, Edgar Allan, 23 Pollock, J. C., 41 Pompadour, Madame de, 269 Pontalis, J.-B., 52 Portrait of a Lady (James), 257 postcolonial criticism, 5–7, 15, 17, 135, 289n5 post-traumatic stress syndrome, 251, 257. See also trauma Pre-Raphaelitism, 260–62, 266 princes, native, 9, 38, 130, 283 Principles of Ethics, The (Spencer), 108–9 Principles of Penal Law (Bentham), 116– 17 Principles of Penal Law (Eden), 114–17 Pritchard, James Cowles, 222, 270 Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, The (Hogg), 111, 181–82, 260, 262 progress, 29, 32; Victorian ideology of, 27–28; and violence, 256. See also reform propaganda, 27, 137 Prospero Complex, 281 Proust, Marcel, 275 Proverbial Philosophy (Tupper), 265–66 Psalms, Book of, 101, 105, 265 psychiatry, Victorian, 222. See also insanity; moral insanity psychoanalysis, 53–55, 254 psychosis. See insanity Punch, 104; Canning cartoon in, 35–37; “Justice” cartoon in, 46–48, 50, 90, 266, 268 punishment: avidity for, 118–21, 123–24; bad conscience of, 37; as British policy, 171–72; versus clemency, 132; as dominant Victorian drive, 99, 110–11, 203; as humanitarianism, 163; as necessary evil, 116; pathology of, 121–28; as patriotic duty, 100–101; in popular novel, 109–111, 260; questioning of, 90, 115– 18; quotidian nature of, 293n11; religious nature of, 107–8, 112, 132, 194, 203; reprisals figured as, 125–28, 156–

57; and revenge, 111, 126, 162; sadism and, 176, 226, 231. See also punishment, capital; retribution; vengeance punishment, capital, 59, 113–18, 229, 232; controversy over, 99, 113, 120, 162, 229; defense of, 120, 142, 295n11; in Maurice Dering, 125; in A Tale of Two Cities, 229–35. See also punishment; retribution; vengeance Punjab, the, 44, 173, 177–78 Punjab and Delhi in 1857, The (CaveBrowne), 134 Puritanism, 29, 37, 44–45, 51–52, 141–42, 188–89; vengeance inherent to, 45, 197. See also Calvinism; Christianity; Evangelicalism; Methodism Puttiala, Rajah of, 73 Queen’s Desire, The (Nisbet), 131, 273, 276, 280–81; fantastic elements in, 278; on Willoughby, 275 racism, 16, 72, 136, 198–99, 279; in Anglo-Indian society, 35, 73–79, 82, 126, 157; bad conscience of, 74; critique of, 279–80, 286–87; as fear of contamination, 49–50; in First Love and Last Love, 283–87; and genocide, 201–2; and imperialism, 6–7, 71–79, 129–30, 165; in Indian Empire (Martin), 164–67; as lack of sympathy, 159, 183–85, 199; in Maurice Dering, 126; in “The Perils,” 211–13; reactions to Mutiny impacted by, 33, 48–50, 141; in Trevelyan’s Cawnpore, 264; underlying vengeance, 63, 100; in Up Among the Pandies, 86, 88 Radcliffe, Ann, 245 Radzinowicz, Sir Leon, 120 Rae, W. F., 245, 302n6 Raikes, Charles, 23, 57, 300n8 raj, British, 57, 78, 84, 164, 217; injustice of, 195–96, 280–81; misgovernment by, 12, 50, 56, 78, 167, 171. See also East India Company Rajpoots, 184 Ralph the Heir (Trollope), 128 Raneegung, 69 Rashomon effect, 148 realism, literary, 206–8, 246–47, 249, 277– 80. See also novel, popular rebels. See mutineers; sepoys Red Badge of Courage (Crane), 81

Index “Red Pamphlet” (Malleson), 45, 200, 274. See also Mutiny of the Bengal Army, The (Malleson) Redan, the, 190 redemption, 89, 249; in A Tale of Two Cities, 215, 220, 228 Rees, L. E. Ruutz, 9, 32, 35, 217, 226 reform, 27–30; penal, 113–17; post-Mutiny retreat from, 57. See also progress Remarque, Erich Maria, 81 Renaud, Sydenham (Major), 83, 192 repetition, 62, 232, 257; and trauma, 219, 271, 274–78; as trope of Mutiny literature, 55–57, 150–52 reprisals, British, 4–5, 126, 160, 299n24; and civilian victims, 180; savagery of, 155–58. See also retribution retribution, 4–5, 58, 61–64, 210, 214; atrocity tales as grounds for, 87, 100, 137–38; bad conscience of, 37, 46, 96, 160; and British policy, 162, 171–72; versus clemency, 58, 111; evolutionary narrative of, 119; justification for, 154, 196–97, 202–3; in Lady Audley’s Secret, 245, 266–69, 271; as merciful, 143, 200–201; Mutiny as vehicle for, 128; mysticism of blood in, 232; and national character, 102–113, 196–97, 199; nihilism of, 216; and penal reform, 229; in popular novel, 109–11; and religion, 7, 52–53, 99, 101, 104, 106–9, 268–69; as repressed sorrow, 89; resistance to, 16, 83–84, 92, 103–4, 113, 131, 268–69, 289n7; revival in Victorian culture of, 101–2, 108, 120–21; in A Tale of Two Cities, 229–30, 232–34; violence of, 224. See also Army of Retribution; punishment; reprisals, British; vengeance revenue system, 159, 167 revolutionaries, French, 225, 228, 233, 300n7 rifles, Enfield, 1. See also cartridges, greased Ripley, J. P. (Colonel), 150, 152 Robespierre, Maximilien Marie Isidore, 300n7 Robinson, Jane, 303n15 Romans, Book of, 117 Romilly, Sir Samuel, 117–18, 203, 230 Rosen, Irwin, 300n11 Rossetti, Christina, 248, 303n14

331

Rotton, John Edward Wharton, 59–64. See also Chaplain’s Narrative, The Roundheads, 107. See also Cromwell, Oliver Royal Academy Exhibition (1858), 207–8 Rujub, the Juggler (Henty), 273, 276, 278, 281–82 Ruskin, John, 43, 263, 267 Russell, William Howard, 13, 64–86; on Hodson, 142; on reprisals, 133, 250; on violence, 126, 143, 174, 226, 293n11. See also My Diary in India Sabin, Margery, 17, 289n5 sadism, 27, 39, 124, 191, 225–26; inherent in punishment, 143, 174, 176, 231 “Sahib and the Nigger, The” (Russell), 68, 226, 293n11 Said, Edward, 5–7 Sala, G. A., 299n3 Samuel, First Book of, 107, 112 Sarajevo, 298n19 Sati Chowra ghat, 183, 250 Satten, Joseph, 300n11 Saul, 107, 112 Sassoon, Siegfried, 81 Savarkar, Vinayak, 299n24 Scapegoat, The (Frazer), 232 Schmitt, Cannon, 142, 187, 291n14 Scindiah, 280 Scott, Hugh Stowell. See Merriman, Henry Seton Scott, Sir Walter, 264, 291n13 Sebastopol, 190 Secord, James A., 302n7 Secunderabagh, the, 292n1 See ta (Taylor), 273, 279–82 Self-Help (Smiles), 80 Sen, Surendra Nath, 8–9 “sensation,” 242, 252–53, 277; as effect of Mutiny, 248–50, 258, 272. See also horror; trauma sensation fiction, 205, 245–46, 252; prejudices against, 239, 299n3 “Sensation Novelists” (Rae), 245 “Sensation Novels” (Mansel), 245–46, 261, 272 Sepoy Revolt, The (Mead), 12, 21, 101 sepoys: figured as children, 34–37; clemency toward, 106, 160–61; entrapment of, 62, 82, 86, 94, 127, 292n1; ferocity of, 153, 164, 184, 223, 228, 283; and

332

Index

sepoys (cont.) French revolutionaries, 225, 233; identification with, 37, 55; loyalty of, 170–71; myth of fraternity with, 21, 34–37, 72; panic of, 3, 93, 168, 184, 198, 270; racism toward, 183–84; reprisals against, 60–64, 93–95; slaughter of, 46–48, 89– 90, 130, 155, 175, 177–80; sympathy for, 79, 132, 168–69; treatment of women by, 190. See also mutineers September massacres, 226–27 Servetus, Michael, 124 Seyton, Mary. See Braddon, Mary Elizabeth Shah, Wajid Ali, 166 Shahjehanpore, 21, 161 Shakespeare, William, 166 Shepherd, W. J., 148 Sherring, M. A., 10, 253 Showalter, Elaine, 239, 243, 261, 269–70 Siegel, Don, 231–32 Sikes, Bill (fictional character), 110 Sikhs, 82–83, 93, 184, 292n1, 294n1 Simawlees, 67 Simla, 66, 77, 226 Sing, Rugber, 80 Skene, Alexander (Captain), 149–50, 303n14 slavery, 27, 212 Smiles, Samuel, 80 Smith, Baird (Colonel), 290n3 Smith, Septimus (fictional character), 257. See also Mrs. Dalloway; Woolf, Virginia Smith, Vernon, 290n1 Sodom, 241–42 Somme, the, 1, 141, 186 Sorrows of Satan, The (Corelli), 51 Spencer, Herbert, 28, 59, 108–9, 124, 143 Stalingrad, 1 Stang, Richard, 206 Steel, Flora Annie, 273; on revenge, 101–2, 104–5, 110, 124; on Willoughby, 275 Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames, 113–17, 142, 296n17, 301n16; on penal reform, 114– 17; on punishment, 118–21, 123, 230; on vengeance, 111, 294n5. See also “Capital Punishments” Stevenson, Robert Louis, 111 Stoker, Bram, 111, 262 Stokes, Eric, 30, 106 Story of Barbara, The (Braddon), 302n5

Story of Cawnpore, The (Thomson), 2, 191, 258, 301n15, 302n9; on heroism, 141, 263–64 Story of Sonny Sahib, The (Cotes), 273 Stout, Daniel, 300n9–10 Stretton (Kingsley), 2, 88, 205, 256, 273; on Mutiny as fictive, 22, 206; as nightmare, 277, 288; on racism, 280, 283, 286; on Willoughby, 275 Study of Sociology, The (Spencer), 109, 143 Summerson, Esther (fictional character), 261. See also Bleak House; Dickens, Charles “survival,” 38, 44. See also evolutionary theory; ferocity Suspiria de Profundis (De Quincey), 111 suttee (sati), 30, 78, 112 Sydney, W. C., 114 sympathy, 130, 184, 198–200, 207, 221; interracial, 279–82, 284–85; and retribution, 200–201; unraveling of, 203–4, 217 Tale of the Great Mutiny, The (Fitchett), 44–45, 205, 216, 289n8 Tale of Two Cities, A (Dickens), 213–38; ambivalence of, 228–29, 233; capital punishment in, 229–35; compared to Mutiny literature, 227–28, 278; Madame Defarge, 219, 228, 251; disabling of character in, 218–21; disillusionment of, 248–49; formal distortions in, 214– 16, 220–21, 238; negation of morality in, 231–32, 271; parallels to Mutiny in, 213–14, 299n6; on patriotism, 222; prophetic nature of, 236–37; retribution in, 233–34; on September massacres, 226– 27; on transformation of British Empire, 216–17, 234–35, 256; trauma in, 219; violence in, 214–15, 224–38, 266, 303n10 Talukdars, 195, 291n19. See also land laws Tasso, 53–55 tax collectors, 11–12 Tayler, William, 172, 177, 199 Taylor, Meadows, 273, 279–82, 286 Taylor, W. Cooke, 295n7 “Tell-Tale Heart, The” (Poe), 23 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 33, 57 terror, 25–26. See also horror Thackeray, William, 65, 68, 128, 247, 261

Index Third Reich, 223. See also concentration camps; genocide; Holocaust Thomas, William, 29 Thompson, Edward, 13, 50, 270, 289n5; on Cooper, 177–78; on imperialism, 297n2 Thompson, Thomas Perronet (General), 157 Thomson, Mowbray (Lieutenant), 187. See also Story of Cawnpore, The Thornton, A. P., 289n2 Thoughts on Executive Justice (Madan), 295n11 Thucydides, 188 Thuggee, 112 Tillotson, Kathleen, 245 Times (London), 8, 23, 107, 175, 247, 296n17; on atrocity tales, 292n8; depiction of Delhi in, 241; on extermination, 179–80; obituaries in, 142; on retribution, 65, 103–4, 121, 210, 233, 236, 266–67; Russell’s correspondence in, 33, 65, 75, 175, 250; war news in, 22, 99– 100, 250, 274 Timko, Michael, 221 Todorov, Tzvetan, 139 Tope, Tantya, 5, 302n3 Tory opposition, 294n2 trauma, 53–55, 62, 85, 210, 276–77; as disabling perception, 87; and gender ideology, 263–66; in Lady Audley’s Secret, 250–55, 270–72; Mutiny as cause of, 2, 7, 205; in Mutiny literature, 18, 287; narrative effects of, 20–25, 54–57, 90, 205, 252, 274–78; and national character, 240, 252; paralysis of, 169, 186, 255; punishment as cause of, 99; of selfrecognition, 48, 102–3; in A Tale of Two Cities, 219, 222; as uncanny repetition, 54–57, 152, 219, 271, 274–78. See also horror Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders, A (Pritchard), 222 Trevelyan, Sir George, 134, 182–94; 202; on assimilation, 30; on national character, 201; on racism, 286. See also Cawnpore Trollope, Anthony, 65, 257; Barchester Towers, 63–64; Framley Parsonage, 128; He Knew He Was Right, 57; on punishment, 295n9; Ralph the Heir, 128; The Warden, 63–64

333

Tromp, Marlene, 302n1, 302n8 Trumpener, Katie, 49 Tucker, Henry, 203 Tupper, Martin Furquhar, 265–66, 268 Turner, Michael J., 289n6 Tuttiett, Mary Gleed. See Grey, Maxwell Twelve Years of a Soldier’s Life in India (Hodson), 130 26th Native Infantry, 155, 177, 201, 204, 224 Ujnalla, 127, 177–78, 224, 302n9 Ulster, 69 Umballa, 62 Umritsir, 127, 155, 177 underworld. See diabolism unspeakability, 20–22, 26, 139–41, 153– 54, 180; in Ball’s History, 139–40, 153– 54, 157, 206–7; of massacres at Cawnpore, 140–41, 226; in Mutiny literature, 144, 169; of vengeance, 174, 181, 193 Unto This Last (Ruskin), 43 Up Among the Pandies (Majendie), 86–98, 175, 235, 253, 293n17; on anachronism, 187, 256; on atrocity tales, 25, 27, 190–91, 259; on casualties, 294n18; disillusionment in, 210, 217; on horror, 26, 156–57; on instinct, 233; on Mutiny as dream-like, 22, 249, 276; nihilism in, 171, 189, 216, 219–20; on race, 86, 88; on reprisals, 93–94, 96, 126–27, 265; on savagery, 143, 174; on the Secunderabagh, 292n1; tragicomedy in, 95–96 Utilitarianism, 27, 30–31. See also Bentham, Jeremy Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 128, 247 vengeance, 37–38, 101, 219, 264–69; and atrocity tales, 70; for Cawnpore massacres, 4, 192; controversy over, 48, 124, 154–55; as first reaction to Mutiny, 4, 60–64, 100–102; as justice, 61, 242; versus mercy, 95, 172–73, 190; and national character, 133, 197; and patriotism, 103–4; and penality, 111, 115–16, 119, 123; primitive character of, 143, 281; and religion, 39–40, 43–45, 141, 197, 241, 294n5; and reprisals, 82–84, 94, 125–28; symbolism of, 62, 99; as complementary to sympathy, 200–201; in A Tale of Two Cities, 233–34,

334

Index

vengeance (cont.) 236; thirst for, 181. See also punishment; retribution “Vengeance, The” (fictional character), 228 Vestiges of Creation (Chambers), 28 Victoria, Queen, 50, 106 Villette (Bronte¨), 57 violence: femininity linked to, 263–69; and narrative form, 215; as negation of moral value, 229, 234; in A Tale of Two Cities, 214–15, 224–38 as transformative, 223–24, 228–29. See also ferocity; punishment; retribution; vengeance Ward, Andrew, 153, 208, 297n10 Warden, The (Trollope), 63–64 warmongering, 14–15, 58, 94 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 152 Way of All Flesh, The (Butler), 52 Weitbrecht, Mary E., 30, 34, 41–42 Wesley, John, 107, 291n17. See also Methodism Westermarck, Edward, 119–20, 124, 155, 197, 203 Weston, Gould (Captain), 171 Wexford, 107

Wheeler, Eliza, 148–50, 264, 267, 297n10, 303n15 Wheeler, Sir Hugh (General), 4, 185, 188, 302n9 Wheler, Stephen (Colonel), 44 White, Hayden, 139 widow-burning. See suttee Wife and the Ward, The (Money), 299n2 Wilberforce, William, 31 Willoughby, George (Lieutenant), 150–52, 274–75, 277–78 Wilson, Archdale (General), 63, 180 Wilson, John, 237, 292n12 Wiseman, Cardinal, 31, 301n14 Wives and Daughters (Gaskell), 247 Wolff, Robert Lee, 239 Woman in White, The (Collins), 245 Woolf, Virginia, 152, 251, 257, 275 Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon), 135, 146 Wringhim, Robert (fictional character), 181–82, 262 xenophobia, 14, 48–50, 213, 285 Yonge, Charlotte Mary, 273, 281 Young, G. M., 28