Geography and the Literary Imagination in Victorian Fictions of Empire

The Poetics of Imperial Space

Jean Fernandez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000029598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Biographies littéraires

In this pioneering study, Dr. Fernandez explores how the rise of institutional geography in Victorian England impacted imperial fiction's emergence as a genre characterized by a preoccupation with space and place. This volume argues that the alliance between institutional geography and the British empire which commenced with the founding of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830, shaped the spatial imagination of Victorians, with profound consequences for the novel of empire. Geography and the Literary Imagination in Victorian Fictions of Empire examines Presidential Addresses and reports of the Royal Geographical Society, and demonstrates how geographical studies by explorers, cartographers, ethnologists, medical topographers, administrators, and missionaries published by the RGS, local geographical societies, or the colonial state, acquired relevance for Victorian fiction's response to the British Empire. Through a series of illuminating readings of literary works by R.L. Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, Flora Annie Steel, Winwood Reade, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling, the study demonstrates how nineteenth-century fiction, published between 1870 and 1901, reflected and interrogated geographical discourses of the time. The study makes the case for the significance of physical and human geography for literary studies, and the unique historical and aesthetic insights gained through this approach.

1 Introduction

In 1830, seven years before Queen Victoria ascended the throne, James Welsh, an East India Company army officer, published his memoir, Military Reminiscences, recording his experiences of India during the early decades of the nineteenth century. In one remarkable episode, Welsh recalled a visit to the office of Colonel Charles Reynolds, Surveyor General, at Surat, in 1804, when the latter was working on a map. Welsh’s encounter with this professional geographer and his cartographic project proved quite extraordinary, as evidenced in his description of the event:

With a fine manly person and genteel address, he possessed more knowledge of the country than any man I have ever conversed with in India; in his hall, I had the gratification of crawling over a map fourteen feet long and ten broad; to do which, without injury to a production intended to be presented to the Court of Directors, he furnished me with silk stockings for hands and feet, and cased in these, I moved at pleasure, stopping at particular spots for information, which was immediately obtained, from a library of immense folio manuscripts in his own handwriting.

(243–44)¹

Welsh’s relations with cartography are a paradigm for imperial fiction’s engagement with space. On his hands and knees, Welsh discovers that a representation of space designed for purposes of domination may subjugate and overwhelm a reader, so that power relations with this figural world are unpredictable, undignified, and, given his ludicrously appareled hands and feet, encased in stockings, almost unmanning. In addition, the supplemental relationship between image and text in a setting of nascent imperialism foregrounds an awareness of how space transmuted into place is always in process. Welsh discovers how the management of space through cartography evolves through a self-conscious alliance of military with scholarly interests, embodied, most certainly, in the person of Reynolds, but also spontaneously generated by the rapport between two men with complementary spatial agendas. As Welsh perceptively observes:

A similarity of pursuits soon leads to confidence and intimacy; I gave Colonel Reynolds copies of my routes, in directions where he had not an opportunity of surveying himself; and he very kindly allowed me to peruse such of his manuscripts as contained any information I required.

(244)

As an imperial author, Welsh appears to view the representation of foreign place as a complicated matter for English readers, who, like him, must struggle to “visualize” unfamiliar territory. To support his text, he uses illustrations that are often a cross between a map and a diagram, describing geographical terrain where battles and campaigns were waged. Additional visual supplements to Welsh’s textual descriptions include conventional maps, and sketches of famous monuments, natural landscapes, and ancient cities of South India. His List of Plates include titles such as “Position of the Army before Columbo” (280), “Plan of the Battle of Argaum” (188), “Fort of Pallamcottah” (46), “Fall at Courtallam” (50), “Map of Tinnevelly” (54), “Seringapatam” (146), “Colossal Statue at Nungydeo” (264), “Madura” (28), and “Pagoda of Papanassum” (48). Details of local castes and cultures that would do an ethnologist proud complete the picture. Welsh’s autobiographical narrative, it appears, may only acquire meaning in relation to the physical and human geography of the subcontinent.

Welsh also received a present from Reynolds, who seems to have spontaneously assumed the role of fraternal mentor. “At parting, also,” Welsh recounts,

he presented me with an English perambulator, which proved of the utmost service to me, in correcting any errors in my late routes, after leaving the army; having brought a theodolite only, to take bearings, and computing my distances by a watch.

(244)

As mobile subject, Welsh is dogged by the prospect of disorientation, arising out of miscalculation and a loss of bearings. His predicament typifies the complex spatial dynamic that the British would develop in relation to an empire that was in formation for most of the nineteenth century. As he switches from soldier, to amateur cartographer, to traveler, his manifold official and personal encounters with space as place reveal how foreign territory is charted, conquered, represented, and visually consumed. His improvisational approach is emblematic of the multiple means by which imperial narrators sought to politically and narrativally control space as place, and interpret it for an imperial reader.

Figure 1.1 Military Reminiscences, 1804.

It was an approach that would find aesthetic manifestation in the novel of empire as it emerged in the later decades of the nineteenth century, and in some hybrid forms of fiction and nonfiction that also addressed the imperial experience primarily as a form of spatial engagement with foreign lands and peoples. If the British Empire necessitated the description and transformation of foreign space into place, it held profound implications for fictional narratives of the imperial experience, governed by an aesthetic of realism. Geographical consciousness was already present in fiction from the earlier decades of the Victorian era, where exploration, colonization, or cross-cultural encounters with individuals of varied ethnicities determined the dynamics of plot. We see this in an inter-textual moment, in Kim, when the hero of Rudyard Kipling’s novel, squatting on the road amidst coolies and foreign spies, recalls a book he read as a child, in St. Xavier’s library: The Adventures of a Young Naturalist in Mexico, by Francis Sumichrast.² Geography texts as “pre-texts” informed real-life narratives and influenced fictional plots related to empire. In the early nineteenth century, the adventure story as genre transported the implied reader, who was generally a British juvenile male, like Kim, to the remotest regions of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania. Edward Augustus Kendall’s The English Boy at the Cape: An Anglo-African Story (1835), Frederick Marryat’s Masterman Ready, or The Wreck of the Pacific (1841) and The Settlers in Canada (1844), William Delafield Arnold’s Oakfield; or, Fellowship in the East (1853), Roger Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857) and The Gorilla Hunters (1861), Ouida’s Under Two Flags (1867), and G.A. Henty’s Out on the Pampas (1871) are samples of early to mid-Victorian fictional responses to geography that celebrate inquisitive and resourceful Europeans who operate cleverly in an alien environment. For the most part, a robust and unself-conscious exploration of new territories and peoples, supported occasionally by the singularly co-operative native, typified fictional narratives of empire during the first half of the nineteenth century. By contrast, the canonical novel of empire that emerged over the last decades of the Victorian era exhibited a more reflective, self-consciously geographical approach to the imperial experience. Its practitioners – Robert Louis Stevenson, Flora Annie Steel, Olive Schreiner, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling – developed the genre at a time when the British Empire as a full-blown polity had grown increasingly dependent upon institutional geography for managing its overseas possessions effectively. This is not to lay claims for a simplistic teleology of genre. The simpler representations of exotic and dangerous geographies where imperial adventure beckoned, continued, especially in popular fiction. Nevertheless, over the course of the nineteenth century, as geography grew more influential and “disciplinary” under the aegis of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), founded in 1830, the novel of empire increasingly directed its attentions towards the politics and poetics of spatiality, the problematic nature of spatial relations, and the challenges imperial space as place posed for Realism.

Discussions of geography in imperial fiction have tended to focus upon place, as represented in literary and non-literary discourse. Edward Said’s landmark study Orientalism; Patrick Brantlinger’s Rule of Darkness; Zoreh T. Sullivan’s Narratives of Empire; Sara Suleri’s The Rhetoric of English India; Alison Blunt’s Travel, Gender, and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa; Christopher Gogwilt’s The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire; and Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation are among many significant pioneering studies.³ More recently, Robert Hampson’s Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction; Deborah Shapple Spillman’s British Colonial Realism in Africa; Roslyn Jolly’s Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire and the Author’s Profession; and the critical anthology, Oceania and the Victorian Imagination, edited by Richard Fulton and Peter Hoffenberg, continue this focus.⁴ If such studies assume that geographical logic informed nineteenth-century European approaches to the “foreign,” what demands attention is the need to explore how modes of conceptualizing the spatial, developed by institutional geography, impacted fictions of empire.

How did the geographical imagination in late-Victorian imperial fiction reflect, problematize, or anticipate contending discourses of the spatial? In addition, how do such spatialities operate as a crucial dimension of the imperial plot? This study explores how the fiction of R.L. Stevenson, Flora Annie Steel, Olive Schreiner, Joseph Conrad, Winwood Reade, and Rudyard Kipling is self-consciously geographical and tasked with narrating complex spatial relations that could astonish, stupefy, or dazzle the imperialist. For the general public, geography, as a field associated with exploration and discovery, was big news during the Victorian Age. Victorians as colonizers, missionaries, traders, industrialists, and scholars acquired a sustained interest in new territories and new peoples, purposively “discovered” over the better part of the nineteenth century. Geographical discourse was ubiquitous, whether in best-selling works of travel writing, or newspapers that reported on sensational geographical developments, be it the discovery of a marooned community of Bounty survivors on Pitcairn Island, the Suez Canal as a technological marvel that remapped the Persian Gulf, or discussions of Africa’s commercial prospects at the Berlin Conference. But institutional geography was also a new and influential discipline, developed, disseminated, and promoted for study in schools and universities, not only by major institutions such as the RGS, founded in 1830, but also by a host of local geographical societies that mushroomed over the course of Queen Victoria’s reign.

Hence, although it has been something of a platitude to view the nineteenth century as engaged with time, rather than space, in Britain, the rise of institutional geography, and the influential role of the RGS, contradicts such assumptions. It becomes necessary to interrogate what Michel Foucault famously declared in “Of Other Spaces” that “the great obsession of the nineteenth century was … history: with its themes of development and suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciations of the world.”⁵ Attention to the growth of the geographical imagination during the Victorian Age will demonstrate that the spatial turn he predicted for the postmodern era was already present in British imperialists, compelled as they were to engage with cognitive mapping in relation to...