The Columbia History of the British Novel

through the collapse of the Bundelcund Bank, due to the machinations of the Indian financier Rummun Loll-a 'confounded old mahogany-coloured heathen humbug.'

In the 'hungry forties,' with the rise of Chartism and especially after the great potato famine in Ireland of 1845 through 1847, emigration became more than just an easy escape or deus ex machina for characters in debt or in trouble in Britain. Moving beyond the stereotype of ignorant, drunken Paddy-the 'stage Irishman' featured, for instance, in Samuel Lover's Handy Andy (1842) — Irish fiction achieved some tragic moments, especially in William Carleton's Valentine McClutchy (1845), The Black Prophet (1847), and The Emigrants of Ahadarra (1848). Though his earlier Fardorougha, the Miser (1837–1838) is more consistently realistic than the others, Carleton captures some of the desolation of his colonized country in, for example, chapter 17 of The Black Prophet, entitled 'National Calamity':

Ireland, during the season… we are describing, might be compared to one vast lazar-house filled with famine, disease, and death. The very skies of heaven were hung with the black drapery of the grave… Hearses, coffins, long funeral processions, and all the dark emblems of mortality were reflected, as it were, on the sky, from the terrible works of pestilence and famine which were going forward on the earth beneath it…

Those who could left Ireland in droves, as the M'Mahon family is preparing to do in The Emigrants of Ahadarra. Absentee landlordism, the subletting of tenant farms into ever smaller and smaller plots of land, the overreliance on the potato as staple crop, and general allaround poverty, exploitation, ignorance, and villainy are factors that Carleton stresses as causing mass distress and mass emigration.

Novels about emigration, whether focused on Ireland or not, reached a peak in the 1850s. Three of the more prominent examples are Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Caxtons (1850), on which Dickens may have drawn for the Australian ending of David Copperfield; Charles Reade's It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1856), with its Australian gold rush scenes and its aboriginal character Jacky; and Henry Kingsley's Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn (1859), featuring the emigration of Mary Thornton and most of the village of Drumston to Australia. In general, these and -569- other English novelists in the 1850s and 1860s treat emigration as an attractive alternative for characters seeking to better their circumstances and perhaps, like several of Bulwer's characters, to return to England afterward. So Pisistratus Caxton goes fortune seeking in the Australian bush, where he has an exciting but idyllic time. Like other young English adventurers to the outback, or Canada, or Africa, or India in much imperialist fiction, «Sisty» gains 'a health which an antediluvian might have envied, and… nerves so seasoned with horse-breaking, cattle-driving, fighting with wild blacks-chases from them and after them, for life and for death-that if any passion vex the breast of [Sisty or the other white] kings of the Bushland, fear at least is erased from the list.' As contrasted to the bleak scenes of poverty and famine in Carleton's novels, Bulwer paints Australia as a wide-open space of Arcadian freedom and potential prosperity, empty except for a few subhuman savages. Even the social problems at home that might motivate emigration are not major ones; in Sisty's case they are not social at all, but merely the failed financial speculations of his Uncle Jack. The Australia portrayed by Bulwer is the British Empire as it was portrayed in much imperialist fiction throughout the century: realms of adventure and opportunity where England itself, if need be, could repair its fortunes.

In a very different manner, the Eastern tale also achieved an apotheosis of sorts in the early and mid- Victorian period, first through the publication of two quite dissimilar novels- Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug (1839) and Benjamin Disraeli's Tancred, or The New Crusade (1847) — and then through the dozens of hysterical, racist accounts of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, starting with Dickens's and Wilkie Collins's 'The Perils of Certain English Prisoners' for the 1857 Christmas issue of Household Words. Dickens transposed the setting of the Mutiny from India to the 'Mosquito Coast' of Central America, but his intention is unmistakable. As he wrote to Angela Burdett Coutts:

I wish I were Commander in Chief in India. The first thing I would do to strike that Oriental race with amazement… should be to proclaim to them… that I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested; and that I was… now proceeding, with merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth.

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) may be a response to the Mutiny as well as to the French Revolution of 1789. Similarly, the sinister Indian back-570- ground to Collins's Moonstone (1868), one of the best-known 'sensation novels' of the 1860s, may reflect the fear and hatred aroused by the Mutiny (even though the Moonstone itself was first stolen from India), and so may the equally sinister Oriental motifs with which Dickens begins the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870).

From George Lawrence's Maurice Dering (1864) and James Grant's First Love and Last Love: A Tale of the Indian Mutiny (1868) down to Henry Merriman's Flotsam (1892) and Flora Annie Steel's On the Face of the Waters (1897), the sentiments expressed by other English novelists writing directly about the Mutiny are seldom more temperate than Dickens's. Flora Annie Steel's novel is a partial exception, though a more striking one is Meadows Taylor's Seeta (1872), which offers both the best account of the motives for the Mutiny in any Victorian novel and also-another rarity-a highly sympathetic account of an interracial marriage between Seeta, the Indian heroine, and the English hero, Cyril Brandon. Taylor himself had married a Eurasian woman, and his long service as police superintendent for the Nizam of Hyderabad provided the experience that makes his Confessions of a Thug an even more significant achievement than Seeta or than any of his other novels about India.

Like Morier's Hajii Baba, all Eastern tales-indeed, perhaps all imperialistic novels-feature «natives» whose often amusing but always irrational, childlike behavior cries out for British rule. The most spectacular instance of a Victorian novel about such a character is Confessions of a Thug-an Eastern tale with a new, unhumorous twist, since it is also a stunning roman policier. Taylor has rightly been called the greatest Anglo-Indian novelist before Kipling, and in Confessions he produced one of the greatest crime novels of the nineteenth century-a sort of Orientalist version of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment-in which he put his own years of investigating Thuggee (a secret cult of professional robbers and murderers who worshipped Kali, Hindu goddess of destruction) to effective use. The narrative structure of Taylor's novel is paradigmatic of all imperialist fiction that purports to map the alien (and always supposedly irrational) mentality of the foreign other or 'native.' It is especially paradigmatic both because it is «panoptical» (in the sense Michel Foucault derives from Jeremy Bentham's plan for an ideal, all-seeing system of prison surveillance), and because Taylor is so obviously an interested, sympathetic observer of India and Indians. The novel takes the panoptical form of a silent British police «Sahib» -571- listening to the horrific, interminable confession of Ameer Ali, who proudly rather than contritely narrates his initiation to the cult and his years as a practitioner of it, through dozens of robberies and murders. Like his unnamed Sahib, Taylor quite naturally assumes a dominative position: the imperialist writer, no matter how sympathetic or how unburdened by racism, is always in the position of the Sahib or of Colonel Creighton with his 'ethnographic survey' in Kim, exploring the crime (so to speak) of being non-English or non-European.

Disraeli's very different Tancred was the last of his Young England trilogy, and like Coningsby and Sybil it features the political education of a young aristocrat bound for greatness. With the blessing of the wise Sidonia (the immensely wealthy, mysterious Jew who also mentors Coningsby), Tancred travels to Jerusalem and has a spectacular encounter with 'the Angel of Arabia' on Mount Sinai. The angel tells him, among other things, that Europe is 'the intellectual colony of Arabia' and that, if its faith is to be renewed, the revival will come through 'Arabian principles.' For «Arabia» (or peoples of Semitic origin including the Jews, because Disraeli like Sidonia believes that 'all is race; there is no other truth') has been and will continue to be the source of the world's great religions, and therefore the source of civilization. Moreover, how have those religions, and therefore civilization, spread throughout the world? Disraeli's answer is that they have spread through the creation of empires. Tancred and his Syrian friend Fakredeen therefore hatch a world-conquering scheme, close to Disraeli's own designs for Britain's role in the Near East, India, and elsewhere. As Tancred informs the Queen of the Ansaray: ''We wish to conquer [the] world, with angels at our head',' though the novel peters out before that happens, ending anticlimactically when Tancred's doting parents come to Jerusalem.

Confessions and Tancred are both novels by men who participated directly in the government and, in Disraeli's case, expansion of the empire. The same can be said of Captain Marryat, who after Sir Walter Scott was the most influential shaper of the explicitly imperialist fiction of the century. Marryat's semiautobiographical, patriotic tales of youthful escapades and glorious combat in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars were highly