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The Man Alone in British Colonial and Scientific Romance 1886-1904

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The Man Alone in British Colonial and Scientific Romance 1886-1904 The Man Alone in British Colonial and Scientific Romance 1886-1904 Russell Ion Gray MSc by Research in English Literature The University of Edinburgh September 14 th 2007 Gray 2 My signature certifies that this thesis represents my own original work, the result of my own original research, that I have clearly cited all sources, and that the work contained within has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. Signed: Date: Gray 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgments 4 Abstract 5 1. Introduction: The Man Alone 6 2. “One of Us” 13 2.1 Lord Jim: Man Overboard 21 2.2 Kim: Little Friend of all the World 51 3. The Good Doctor? 78 3.1 Nunez: The One Eyed Man 97 3.2 Doctor Moreau: The ‘New Man’ Alone 104 3.3 Doctor Jekyll: Kosmonaut of the Appalling 118 4. Conclusion 140 5. Works Cited 145 Gray 4 Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Dr. Marie-Anne Syre, Dr. Bill Bell, Dr. Jonathan Wild, Dr. Robert Irvine, Dr. Penny Fielding and Dr. Lee Spinks and for their guidance and support in the preparation of this thesis. In memory of Joan Gray 1919-2007. Gray 5 Abstract This thesis uses some of the key texts of the ‘romance revival’ of the late nineteenth century to develop a theory of the Man Alone, and to explain its significance in both literary and cultural terms. A historicist approach is used to counter a tendency amongst critics to overlook some of the more commercially successful texts of the period in favour of their less ‘popular’ but more ostensibly ‘artistic’ fin-de-siecle or early modernist contemporaries. The study centred on an analysis of novels by four of the most influential authors of the period – Conrad, Kipling, Stevenson and Wells – as well as a selection of their essays and short stories. This was accompanied by a period of archival research studying the original publication context of the source material, and also contemporary press coverage of some of the issues raised. It was discovered that the Man Alone fulfilled two functions in romance fiction, notably in examining the destabilisation of traditional assertions of identity that resulted from Britain’s imperial experiences, and also in dramatising the shift from theology to science as the authorising discourse of British society that happened in the wake of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species . The Man Alone can thus be argued to be critical to the popular interpretation of the major political and philosophical shifts of late nineteenth century society. The romance revival itself, therefore, should be read as having played a formative role in the emergence of a Modernist literary culture, with Stevenson, Kipling and Wells playing significant roles alongside Conrad in this process. Gray 6 1. Introduction: The Man Alone Four months after its first publication in April 1719, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was on its fourth edition, having sold over 80,000 copies and caused a publishing sensation. The book was the first popular romance of the Man Alone in the life of the newly formed Kingdom of Great Britain; shipwrecked and seemingly destitute, yet blessed with a self-sufficiency that enabled him to survive and triumph. 1 By 1912 James Joyce was able to identify Crusoe as “the true prototype of the British colonist,” arguing that: The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness, the calculating taciturnity. (356-7) This conception of Crusoe serves as a useful opening definition for the figure of the Man Alone which this thesis will seek to identify. The association of masculinity with independence, the social dysfunction of an “unconscious cruelty” and “calculating taciturnity,” and the imperious aspirations of an “efficient intelligence” (recognising no authority higher than itself) all define the terms of the estrangement of this anti-social, but clearly emblematic, facet of British identity. 1 The rather less dignified story of Alexander Selkirk, the historical model for Crusoe, who’s own four year exile ended with him covered in his own faeces and forming questionable relationships with local wildlife, has easily been supplanted by Robinson Crusoe as the defining figure of the shipwrecked Man Alone in British culture. For a full account of Selkirk’s adventure see Diana Souhami’s Selkirk's Island: The True and Strange Adventures of the Real Robinson Crusoe. Gray 7 From John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) onward, the literary culture of the putative, protestant British state used the Man Alone as a means of testing and validating – and, in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), satirising – its metaphysical identity and the moral authority of its growing political dominance. 2 The biblical archetype for this kind of inquiry was Christ’s exile in the wilderness, and the challenge to resist external influences and temptations to retain control over an integral identity is a constant theme of texts featuring the Man Alone figure. The literary form that drew most extensively from the story of Christ’s exile was the medieval romance, in which the questing hero was abstracted from his social context and put through a series of trials to exemplify the community of which he was a part. 3 It is significant, therefore, that the closing decades of the nineteenth century witnessed what was identified as the ‘revival of romance,’ which can be seen as a reaction against the narratives of social realism that had dominated the middle part of the century. 4 Social realism, with its insistence on the submission of people and events to inescapable economic and political meta-narratives, presented the community as the unit and the meaning of dramatic action, with the liberty of the individual circumscribed by socially experienced sources of authority. 2 That Britain, one of the most enduring collective political identities, should express such a yearning for autonomy and unity is, perhaps, unsurprising. 3 The relationship between the medieval romance and the Man Alone will be discussed in greater detail in section 2.1 in relation to Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. 4 The background premise to this thesis, of the importance of the romance in articulating the political and epistemological shifts of the late nineteenth century to a popular audience, owes much to Nicholas Daly’s work Modernism, Romance and the fin de siècle : Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914. Gray 8 In this context, no man was alone, and the lived experience of literary characters was of the illusion of personal autonomy in the face of inexorable social processes. The ‘revival of romance,’ on the other hand, seemed to liberate the (re- masculinised) individual; to offer him the chance to determine his relationship with social identities through the expression and experience of his own will – as Cavor puts it, gambolling on the lunar surface in H.G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon , “We are out of Mother Earth’s leading-strings now” (97). Nicholas Daly argues that “the romance offered an alternative to unhealthy foreign realism [and] was also welcomed as putting an end to the rule of the home-grown realism of the domestic novel” (19), and the Man Alone thus re-emerged as expressive of an independent, masculine, British agency. The period studied by this thesis begins with the publication of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886 and concludes with Wells’s short story The Country of the Blind in 1904. 5 The intervening years encompassed not only the high point in sales terms of the romance revival (Daly 20-24), but also that of British imperialism, the precariousness of which will be discussed in section 2. As well as containing some of the most significant texts of the romance revival, this period was also influenced by the fate and growing legend of a historical model of the Man Alone who serves as a useful introduction to some of the tensions that will be explored. 5 Stevenson, alongside H. Rider Haggard, was the most prominent exponent of the romance in the 1880s, and the success of Jekyll and Hyde was largely responsible for this. Wells, too, made his name writing scientific romances, before turning his attention to novels and polemics. Gray 9 “… my life is not an open book, to you or to any man, least of all to myself.” Almost a year to the day before the first publication of Jekyll and Hyde , General Charles “Chinese” Gordon was killed by the Mahdist army as it finally captured Khartoum. Gordon was very much the archetype of the Victorian Man Alone: Richard Davenport-Hines claims that “Despite his vanity [Gordon] strove from the 1860s to accomplish that resignation of self which he conceived to be the highest Christian duty” (864), and notes his “total irreverence for age or position, and his supercilious indifference to his official superiors” (865), a description that speaks of a man at war with himself and contemptuous of the claims of others over this struggle. 6 Davenport-Hines also argues that Gordon achieved, in both life and death, a certain mythic, emblematic status in wider British culture: The Indian mutiny […] fostered a cult of the Christian military hero: Chinese Gordon became a totem of this cult in the mid-1860s, and in death came to represent its apotheosis. (865) Gordon thus embodied the central paradox of being both a Man Alone and also the popular hero; the unorthodox, unpredictable man of genius who came to represent communal aspirations.
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