Victorian Writers and the Image of Empire: The Rose-Colored Vision. (Reviews: modern Britain).

Dunae, Patrick A.

Victorian Writers and the Image of Empire: The Rose-Colored Vision, by Laurence Kitzan. Contributions to the Study of World Literature. Westport, Connecticut, and London, Greenwood Press, 2001. xii, 203 pp. $59.95 U.S. (cloth).

The term "Victorian" in the title of this book refers less to an historical period than to a frame of mind. Several of the writers and works considered here belong to Edwardian and modern periods. John Buchan features prominently here and his novel A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906) is discussed at length. In a memorable phrase, Kitzan says that A Lodge "is not a novel in the conventional sense. It is a symposium, a series of long discussions on a congenial topic ..." (p. 58). The phrase provides an apt description of this study. Each of its chapters is a discourse in a larger, and eminently congenial, discussion about popular British literature in the Age of Imperialism.

The book is concerned principally with the allure of empire. It examines romanticized images of empire and endeavours to explain how imperial enthusiasms were inculcated in several generations of young readers in Britain and the Dominions. The first chapter is entitled "The Dreamweavers: An Empire of Imagination." It provides a brief introduction to imperial motives and imperatives and a broad overview of imperial images and stereotypes in popular literature. In chapters that follow, Kitzan looks more closely at some of the travellers, journalists, explorers, and popular fiction writers who comprised the fraternity of dreamweavers.

Writers like Buchan, Kitzan argues, presented a constructive, compassionate empire. The empire imagined in A Lodge in the Wilderness was not a place for racists and xenophobes. Kitzan suggests that the same kind of empire, constructive and compassionate, was represented in most of the popular fiction of the day. He draws on Kipling, Buchan, G.A. Henty, and a host of lesser writers to show how the empire was depicted. In imperial adventure yams, Britons settled in the overseas dominions in order to create a Greater Britain, which would ensure prosperity and peace worldwide. Tree, many empire-builders were also drawn by treasure, profits, and the lucre of empire. But in the literature of the time, even entrepreneurial imperialists were concerned with humanitarian issues. In popular fiction, manly, Christian young men ensured that the British Empire was essentially an honourable, noble enterprise.

Some readers may feel that Kitzan should have been more critical, more hostile in his assessment of imperial image making. But the book is concerned with the process, not the politics, of the product. It is about imagination and memory. It is about how the imperial idea, to borrow a phrase from A.P. Thornton, came to be embedded in the public consciousness.

That being said, Kitzan has been rather selective, since this study is concerned entirely with what the Victorians called "wholesome" literature. There was a parallel universe of allegedly unwholesome literature, a universe of "penny dreadfuls," populated by boisterous, jingoistic characters like Jack Harkaway. Although he was a public schoolboy, Harkaway was the antithesis of the approved models in boys' fiction. Unlike the heroes in Henty's tales, Jack thumbed his nose at authority. He also flirted with girls! And some girls, or at least fiction for girls, might have been included in this study. The Girl's Own Paper (1880) was the most popular illustrated magazine in the world and it featured many stories about plucky schoolgirls in the colonies. In the empire of the imagination, these young women were the sisters and sweethearts of the manly chaps in Henty novels. But perhaps they will be the subjects of a separate symposium.

Academic historians rediscovered Henty fifty years ago, when A.P. Thornton published an essay about him in the Fortnightly Review. Henty had virtually been forgotten, but Thornton reminded readers that the boy's own historian (as Henty liked to be styled) had contributed some potent elements to the elixir of empire. But Laurence Kitzan already knew that, even before he became one of Thornton's students. As a boy growing up in small, isolated Saskatchewan town in the 1940s, he had experienced the excitement and exhilaration of being part of the Empire. Or, rather, of an imagined empire, which he first glimpsed in a Henty novel called The Dash for Khartoum (1892).

In Victorian Writers and the Image of Empire, Kitzan has drawn on memory and deployed his considerable scholarship to assess the allure of imperially-minded literature. He concludes by asserting that, for many years, the literature of empire "gave a great deal of satisfaction, both in its real and in its fictional representations, to a great many people who could not escape the feeling that something special was going on, and that in some way that special occurrence was creditable, and even heroic" (p. 181). In this perceptive, well-researched, gracefully-written book, he explains why the images were so compelling and why they lingered on after the Empire was over.

Patrick A. Dunae
Malaspina University-College