popular from the 1830s on. Though not much read today, Marryat made a great impact on such later writers as Conrad and Graham Greene, and even Virginia Woolf wrote an appreciative essay about him ('The Captain's Death Bed'). Starting with -572- Frank Mildmay (1829) and running through Newton Foster (1832), Peter Simple (1834), Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836), and his
For this adolescent readership, increasingly important after the Education Act of 1870, new journals sprang up, featuring supposedly wholesome fare as an alternative to 'penny dreadfuls' and other cheap literature. This was the explicit aim of The Boy's Own Paper, founded in 1879; its mainstay was the imperialist adventure story, and among its contributors were Ballantyne, Henty, Kingston, and Conan Doyle. From the 1860s forward, moreover, adventure fiction often drew its inspiration from the excitement generated by the exploration of central Africa and the search for the sources of the Nile. David Livingstone's Missionary Travels (1857) had been a best-seller, and an even greater publishing sensation was Henry Morton Stanley's How I Found Livingstone (1872). In between came Richard Burton's Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860), John Hanning Speke's Discovery of the Sources of the Nile (1864), and Samuel White Baker's Albert N'Yanza (1866). These great exploration narratives set the pattern for numerous African adventure stories, including Baker's own Cast Up by the Sea (1866) and Stanley's My Kalulu: Prince, King, and Slave (1889). The great Scottish explorer of Africa James Thomson also tried his hand at fiction with Ulu: An African Romance (1888), ostensibly for adults.
Imbued with social Darwinist ideas about race, both explorers' journals and the novels that imitated them reinforced the myth of Africa as the 'dark continent,' land of fetishism, slavery, and cannibalism. The -573- stereotype was offered repeatedly in adventure stories for boys, like Ballantyne's Gorilla Hunters (1861), in which a white trader tells Peterkin:
… all the nigger tribes in Africa are sunk in gross and cruel superstitions. They have more fetishes, and greegrees, and amulets, and wooden gods, and charms, than they know what to do with, and have surrounded themselves with spiritual mysteries that neither themselves nor anybody else can understand.
'Superstitions,' that is, that legitimize human sacrifice and cannibalism. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad does not challenge the stereotype, but instead challenges-through the powerful theme of Kurtz's 'going native'-the assumption that European civilization is superior to African savagery.
Before Conrad, the most important English novelist to base much of his work on the myth of 'the dark continent' was H. Rider Haggard, whose best-selling King Solomon's Mines (1885), She (1887), and Allan Quatermain (1887) follow the exploration paradigm into mysterious regions of savagery and 'lost civilizations.' One of Haggard's recurrent themes concerns a black African savagery in the present that has lost touch with an earlier, lighter-skinned civilization from Egypt or the Middle East. With Haggard time stalls, tries to march backward. In his daydream romances about Africa, including those about the rise and fall of the Zulu kingdom (Nada the Lily in 1892, for instance), he expresses racist, authoritarian attitudes toward adventure, masculinity, empire, and the 'dark places' of the world that continue to influence popular culture. Films like the Indiana Jones series (and, of course, the recent cinema version of King Solomon's Mines) still express nostalgia for adventure, power, and the exotic that characterized late-nineteenthcentury fiction about exploration and empire. If, as Chris Bongie writes in Exotic Memories, exoticism is 'a discursive practice intent on recovering 'elsewhere' values 'lost' with the modernization of European society,' Haggard's romances-and perhaps all imperialist fictions that follow the exploration-adventure paradigm-are always quests for an impossible, lost reality that ultimately assumes the frighteningly maternal, incestuous form that Haggard named «She» or 'Ayesha.' For Haggard, moreover, nostalgia about adventure and empire was part of his late-Victorian conservatism. More clearly than in most fiction of his era, in Haggard's work the voice of romance and empire was simultaneously, in Katz's words, 'the voice of the moribund gentry.' He seems today an archetypal reactionary whose stories consist of reactionary -574- archetypes: myths of power, misogyny, magic, racial purity, and the mastery of both nature and the 'darker races' by white male adventurers from England. His literary-or perhaps subliterary-energy derives largely from the directness and simplicity with which he renders these reactionary archetypes in narrative form.
Through gun power, fist power, and English pluck, Allan Quatermain and his white sidekicks, along with the faithful noble savage Umbopa, inevitably dominate the less noble savages whom they encounter. It goes without saying that they also dominate nature: the toll in the hunting episodes is just as horrific as in the battle scenes. Haggard had to defend himself against charges of bloodlust. Yet in his 1894 essay ''Elephant Smashing' and 'Lion Shooting, ' he mourns the disappearance of 'the ancient mystery of Africa,' and wonders where 'the romance writers of future generations will find a safe and secret place, unknown to the pestilent accuracy of the geographer, in which to lay their plots?' Once all the wilderness is tamed, once the last stones crown the pyramids of the European empires, there will no longer be room for romance, adventure, freedom, nature. An interesting aspect of Haggard's writing is his apparent awareness of this tragic outcome, even while he advocates the completion and defense of what he clearly views as the ultimate imperial pyramid.
Olive Schreiner's
Although Schreiner does not say much about whites' treatment of blacks, her portrayal of the psychic toll taken by the cruelty and oppressiveness of life on her South African farm approximates a critique of imperialism, expressed most directly in Lyndall's feminism, that becomes explicit in Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), her allegorical indictment of Cecil Rhodes's violent expansionism. Indeed, though Haggard and the writers of adventure fiction give the final third of the century a jingoistic tone, there is also an increasing note of skepticism or criticism, registered also in Robert Louis Stevenson's realistic stories about squalor and treachery in the South Seas, The Beach of Falesá (1893) and The Ebb-Tide (1894), which can be read as versions of Heart of Darkness transposed to Polynesia. Both novellas offer versions of the theme of 'going native,' and both are as dubious about the impact of Western civilization on non-Western societies as anything Conrad wrote.
Very different forms of social criticism are registered in Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) and in the greatest of nineteenth-century Australian novels, Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life (1872). Based on Butler's five years as a sheep farmer in New Zealand, Erewhon offers a satiric, antipodal or upside-down utopia or dystopia (it is a little of each) that mocks, among other things, therapeutic approaches to crime and the false worship of machinery and technology. But if crime is treated as illness and illness as crime in Erewhon, that is certainly not the case in the Tasmanian convict settlements depicted in Clarke's great, grim masterpiece of melodramatic social realism.
Clarke's novel, which has been called an Australian Les Misérables, also offers an interesting contrast to that other great crime novel of the British Empire, Confessions of a Thug. In the story of unjustly convicted Rufus Dawes, most of the criminals are not larcenous, murderous Orientals or cannibalistic Africans, but larcenous, murderous, and indeed, in the most extreme instances, cannibalistic English and Irish prisoners. 'All that the vilest
