The Columbia History of the British Novel

are British. This is true whether or not specific novels deal explicitly with aspects of empire, and also whether or not those that do deal with empire are chauvinistic or critical in their treatment of imperialist ideology or specific instances of territorial conquest and control.

In relation to this broadly imperialist context, the history of nineteenth-century British fiction falls into three main periods. The first, that of literary and artistic Romanticism, extends from the French Revolution of 1789 down to the 1830s. The second, early and mid-Victorian phase runs from the 1840s through the decades of industrializing Britain's greatest international power and domestic prosperity (the 1850s and 1860s) to approximately 1880. And the third, late-Victorian and Edwardian phase continues into the twentieth century down to World War I. By 1800 several subgenres of fiction had evolved that were already important vehicles for imperialist ideology and, less frequently, for partial critiques of that ideology. These subgenres-traveladventure stories, historical romances, 'Eastern tales,' war novels, and emigration novels among them-underwent various permutations through the three periods. After indicating how all nineteenth-century British fiction was affected by the imperial context, I will outline the main features of these more or less explicitly imperialistic subgenres.

The Imperial Context

Coupled with the earlier loss of the American colonies, the campaign against slavery helped give the Romantic period what has sometimes mistakenly been interpreted as an anti-imperialist tendency. Advocacy of free trade by the early political economists also seemed to downplay the colonies, if not to entail explicit advocacy of decolonization. Such an anti-imperialist tendency, it used to be held, extended through the early and mid-Victorian periods. Only in the third, late-Victorian phase did imperialism come to the fore as a factor in British politics and therefore also as a factor in British literature. But although Britain lost the American colonies in the 1770s and abolished slavery in 1833, it gained new colonies through its defeat of France. The antislavery campaign itself drew Britain deeper into Africa just as the consolidation and reform of the East India Company, from the time of the Warren Hast-561- trial through the Great Mutiny of 1857, secured British hegemony in India. Meanwhile, the pace of emigration to 'the colonies of white settlement'-Canada, Australasia, South Africa-increased with Britain's domestic population explosion, while also increasing the economic, political, and scientific motivations for exploring and conquering the 'blank spaces' still left on the global map.

In The Expansion of England (1883), Sir John Seeley could declare that 'we seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.' Absent-mindedness, however, is very different from opposition to the expansion of empire. What emerged with the socalled New Imperialism of the late Victorian period was an often «jingoistic» self-consciousness about Britain's apparently manifest imperial destiny, aroused by the emergence of new and the resurgence of old imperial rivals (Germany and the United States come under the first heading, France and Russia under the second). To Seeley's absent-mindedness, an approximately accurate description of the first half or two-thirds of the century, Cecil Rhodes's late-Victorian expansionism offers an obvious counterpoint: Rhodes wanted 'to paint the map of Africa British red,' and he declared, 'I would annex the planets if I could.' Similar attitudes were often expressed in late-Victorian and Edwardian fiction, usually underwritten by social Darwinist racism, but sometimes also filtered through an ironic narrative perspective bordering on anti-imperialism, as in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899). But Conrad's Marlow himself declares that only in the «red» places on the map of Africa is any 'real work' accomplished. With similar ambivalence, Harvey Rolfe in George Gissing's Whirlpool (1897) reacts to a friend's argument about «niggerhunting» as the coming fashionable sport:

There's more than that to do in South Africa… Who believes for a moment that England will remain satisfied with bits here and there? We have to swallow the whole, of course. We shall go on fighting and annexing until-until the decline and fall of the British Empire… We shall fight like blazes in the twentieth century.

Even more than Rolfe, Gissing is appalled by what he treats as a sort of civilized cannibalism ('swallow[ing] the whole'), though he offers no alternative to it: constant warfare is the appalling name for the human condition, past, present, and future.

But constant 'fighting and annexing' wasn't the only outcome of Britain's imperial aggrandizement. Besides the novel, new literatures -562- sprang up because of Britain's overseas hegemony. In global terms, the most significant literary development throughout the century was the transplantation of the English language to North America, Australasia, South Africa, and India, and the emergence of new literatures-not 'English literatures,' of course, but literatures in English-around the world. 'American literature' is the earliest, most spectacular instance of a new literature that arose from Britain's imperializing endeavors, but that also, through the American colonies' revolutionary self-assertion, developed in nationalistic opposition to Britain's imperial hegemony. Any account of the relationship between nineteenth-century British fiction and the British Empire would be incomplete without an emphasis on the imperial origins of national literatures also in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India.

For the nineteenth-century British novel in general, the empire operates as an outer limit that stablizes and in some sense partially determines what happens at the center. The colonial «periphery» always appears marginally, though sometimes only as the faintest of traces, in the central, metropolitan texts of the century (see Perera Reaches of Empire, 1991). Thus, Jane Austen's seemingly apolitical, domestic novels are just as imperial- though not overtly 'imperialistic'-as Charles Kingsley's racist, militaristic, «bloodthirsty» (as Kingsley himself described it) historical novel Westward Ho! (1859). An obvious difference is that Austen, though writing in the midst of the Napoleonic era, saw no need to beat the tom-toms of patriotism, whereas Kingsley-dismayed by the muddle the British army was making of the Crimean War-felt compelled to write a swashbuckling, thoroughly chauvinistic romance. Concerned with the imperializing derring-do of the Elizabethan 'sea dogs' who, along with the weather, defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, Westward Ho! reads today like a Victorian Rambo.

In contrast, Austen etched her psychological portraits of quiet domestic life on a 'little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory,' and her heroines never travel farther than London and Bath. Yet, though it is not described, Antigua is the place to which Sir Thomas Bertram travels in Mansfield Park (1813); the chief source of his family's prosperity is an Antiguan plantation where the labor is performed by slaves (about whose situation Austen says nothing at all). So, too, though episodes of war are not featured in Persuasion (1817), naval officers-Admiral Croft and Captain Wentworth-are central characters whose social -563- standing is very much an issue for the other characters, and whose worldly travels and adventures during the Napoleonic era form a sharp contrast to Anne Elliot's quiet, submissive life. But for Austen, worldly adventures are not the exclusive prerogative of men: Admiral Croft's wife has been 'a great traveller,' who tells Mrs. Musgrove: 'in the fifteen years of my marriage… I have crossed the Atlantic four times, and have been once to the East Indies, and back again… besides being in different places about home-Cork, and Lisbon, and Gibraltar.' Despite writing to her niece Anna that '3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on,' Austen takes the empire for granted in all her novels, while also portraying it more or less explicitly, in Mansfield Park and Persuasion, as a source of adventure, wealth, and uncontroversial authority.

Throughout the nineteenth century, many other 'domestic novels' follow the same pattern, according to which the quietest of lives in the seemingly most placid English towns or country estates turn out to have exotic connections to far-flung parts of the empire. A familiar example occurs in Dickens's Great Expectations (1869), where Pip's mysterious windfall turns out to come from the transported convict Magwitch, who while making his fortune in Australia dreams of making a gentleman back in England. Magwitch's vicarious ambition and his illegal return to England operate as a sort of 'return of the repressed' from the colonies through most of the novel, forging the 'gold and silver chains' that weigh Pip down with guilt. The pattern is reversed when Pip joins Herbert Pocket as assistant manager of 'the Eastern Branch' of Clarriker and Co. in 'the land of the Arabian Nights' (that is, Egypt).

Just as dramatic is the return of the repressed that occurs in Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (1853), in which Miss Matty's prodigal brother Peter reappears after years of military adventuring in India, both to rescue Matty from the genteel poverty into which she has fallen and to enliven the village society of spinsters and widows with colorful tales like that of his hunting expedition to the Himalayas, during which (so he tells Mrs. Jamieson) he 'shot a cherubim.' Peter's sometimes tall tales of imperial adventure are matched or overmatched not only by the tall tales of less honest Anglo-Indians in some of Thackeray's stories (particularly those of Jos Sedley in Vanity Fair [1848] and of the Major in 'The Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan' [1838]) but also by the entire subgenre of the imperial/military adventure stories like -564- Westward Hot! that flourished throughout the century and which