Gaskell gently mocks.
During the Romantic period, the fictional subgenres that are more or less explicitly imperialistic include the historical romance as practiced by Sir Walter Scott, the swashbuckling maritime novels written by Captain Frederick Marryat, Frederick Chamier, Edward Howard, and others, and novels in the tradition of the Eastern tale of Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (1759) and William Beckford's
Like Romantic poetry and painting, Romantic fiction was responsive to the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Industrial Revolution. It was also occasionally responsive to the campaign against slavery, though with problematic results. The very title of Edgeworth's short story 'The Grateful Negro' (1802) suggests what is problematic about most antislavery fiction-and, indeed, about most representations of racial and cultural difference throughout nineteenth-century British fiction, no matter how sympathetically inclined the writers are toward racial or cultural others. With unconscious irony, Edgeworth names her grateful negro «Caesar» and afflicts him with a bad case of Uncle Tomism: Caesar refuses to join the other slaves in their conspiracy against their West Indian masters, because his own master Mr. Edwards 'treated his slaves with all possible humanity and kindness.' Instead, Caesar informs on his best friend and the rebellion is repressed, though with so little violence that only Mr. Jefferies, whose harsh treatment of his slaves has been the main cause of rebellion, is the worse for wear.
Perhaps the most interesting abolitionist fiction was published after the 1833 triumph of the antislavery cause. Harriet Martineau's Demerara, from her 'Illustrations of Political Economy' (1832–1834), is only slightly more realistic than Edgeworth's story, but at least Martineau recognizes that slavery does violence to human beings as well as to humane ideals. More noteworthy is Martineau's full-scale novel The -565- Hour and the Man (1841), which is an attempt to give a sympathetic rendering of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian revolution. But Martineau turns L'Ouverture into a too-perfect hero and fails to make any of her other characters lifelike, though not because she falls into the usual stereotypes of slaves or Africans: at least she treats L'Ouverture as on a par with any of the major figures of European history. On the other hand, most of the fiction of the Romantic period contains no hint of that greatest of liberal reform movements, the antislavery cause. There are abolitionist and, indeed, anti- imperialist sentiments in the Jacobin novels of the 1790s (see, for instance, the slave Fidel's tale of violent abuse in Robert Bage Man as He Is [1792]), but such fiction largely disappeared after 1800, when the dominant ideological mode became anti-Jacobin, conservative, and increasingly imperialistic.
Scott's
Scott inspired many imitators, and the historical novel flourished throughout the century. But with the exceptions of Thackeray's Henry Esmond (1852), Dickens's Tale of Two Cities (1859), George Eliot's Romola (1863), Thomas Hardy's Trumpet Major (1880), and a few others, almost all of this subgenre falls into two predictable categories: historical novels by conservative writers-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's White Company (1891), for instance-mourn 'the good old days' of 'merry England' and aristocracy; those by liberal writers- Edward BulwerLytton's Harold, Last of the Saxons (1848), for instance-look forward to the consolidation of the «liberties» of modern England. Both con-566- servative and liberal historical novels tend to be ventures in 'Whig history,' or the interpretation of the past so that it patriotically validates the present.
Early nineteenth-century fiction about Ireland, even when it depicts Irish poverty and oppression, usually also validates England's imperial hegemony. This is true of Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and
A different sort of imperialist stereotype is the non-British character whose weaknesses and misdemeanors demand British control. Fiction about Ireland is full of «Paddy» stereotypes even when the authors are Irish, as in William Carleton's Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830, 1834), and most Eastern tales are even more obviously stereotypic. Thomas Hope's Anastasius; or, Memoirs of a Greek (1819) and James Morier's The Adventures of Hajii Baba, of Ispahan (1824) both feature stereotypic Orientals incapable of reason, sustained industry or work, honesty, or self-restraint and its European sexual corollary of «respect» for women (the lustful Oriental was also incapable of monogamy-hence, that endlessly titillating aspect of Oriental life as viewed through male British lenses, the harem). But as with Rasselas, the Eastern tales of Hope and Morier also hold up more or less self-567- conscious satiric mirrors to conservative, stuffy, irrational English society at home. Perhaps the most subtle way in which Morier's Hajii Baba mocks English values is through the very form of his storytelling: 'The art of a story-teller is to make his tale interminable, and still to interest his audience,' says Morier's narrator-protagonist, who is also, on many occasions, a self-convicted liar.
But isn't good storytelling a form of lying? Are aesthetically pleasing stories necessarily true or even realistic? Moreover, why should a good story come to an end? Why not meander endlessly, episodically? Why should the English regime of progress through industry (and imperial government) be the only way to organize stories, novels, life itself? Thus like Lord Byron in his Eastern narrative poems or like Rudyard Kipling in his picaresque adventure novel Kim at the end of the century, Morier offers, albeit implicitly, fictive alternatives to the very English values that both construct and deride the Orientalist stereotype that is Hajii Baba. A stereotype of the racial, sexual, or cultural «other» is always a misrecognized mirroring of the stereotyper (who invariably reduces otherness to some version of the same). The best Eastern tales of the century achieve partial recognition of this process; their writers at least vaguely realize that their stories are as much Western as Eastern-that is, that they are reflections of repressive values at home, though the name of the mirror is 'abroad.'
The first Australian novel, Quintus Servinton, a Tale Founded upon Incidents of Real Occurrence by Henry Savery, appeared in 1830; the first Indian novel written in English, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's Rajmohan's Wife, appeared in 1864. The two dates span a period that historians used to describe as un-or even anti-imperialist, but during which territorial expansion and emigration to the colonies became standard themes in canonical British literature-the Micawbers' emigration to Australia in
