This chapter focuses on the pairing of popular fiction and imperialism. It takes as a starting point the historical coincidence of the rise of new forms of popular fiction with the intensification of colonialism in Britain during the New Imperialism (roughly from the 1870s to 1914). Examining titles including H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) and numerous others, the discussion treats Victorian popular fiction as both a site where colonialist ideology exerts its power and a site where ambivalences, vagaries and paradoxes speak of a struggle to make sense of imperial rationales. Examining how popular fiction represents history and the individual, landscape and temporality, threat and assimilation and the supposed adaptability of Englishness reveals some of the rhetorical and ideological contortions that rendered British imperialism thinkable to its own prosecutors.

‘BLESS ALL SEAFARERS’, wrote Wyndham Lewis in BLAST (1914): ‘THEY exchange not one LAND for ANOTHER, but one ELEMENT for ANOTHER. The MORE against the LESS ABSTRACT.’ This chapter attends to the sea’s capacity to substitute the concrete for the abstract, the local for the global, in the work of canonical modernist writers. If the laying of undersea telegraph cables rendered ‘the breadth of the Atlantic, with all its waves … as nothing’, for T. S. Eliot such marine nothings famously represented an aesthetic opportunity to ‘connect’, while the invention of wireless telegraphy at the turn of the twentieth century gave Virginia Woolf a sense of permanent immersion in the ‘murmur of the waves in the air’. The rise of oceanography made the formerly unknowable space of the sea seem newly present and palpable, while newly routinised maritime networks of exchange were established. At the centre of this chapter’s focus on the sea as both formal and contextual stimulus for modernist writing is the question of how far the internal schisms and collapses of modernist form attend to the pressures and demands of British global imperialism.

In Thoughts about Art (1862), the artist and essayist Philip Hamerton speculates on ‘the relation between photography and painting’. He compares ‘a wonderful little picture by Holman Hunt’, Fairlight Downs, Sunlight on the Sea – first exhibited in 1858 – with a marine photograph by Gustave Le Gray (Figures 11.1, 11.2). The focus of Hunt's picture is the brilliant seascape running along the top of the frame. The sea reflects the sun so brightly that it is almost white in places, and the glare distorts the outlines of the steamers and sailing ships dotted along it. In his analysis of Le Gray's photograph, Hamerton also draws attention to the effect of the sunlight on the water. He observes that ‘the blaze of light upon the sea is given with perfect fidelity’; however, in his eyes this effect has been achieved at a cost:

‘It is’, Hamerton submits, ‘one of the peculiar misfortunes of the photograph that it is not capable of giving two truths at once.’ While Hamerton frames his conclusion generally, the particular substance of his discussion – and of Le Gray's marine photographs – associates the need for ‘two truths’ with seas and skies, and with the coastline.

Although Hamerton could not have known at the time, he was not strictly correct in his appraisal of Le Gray's pictures. In fact, the startling light effects of Le Gray's marine scenes of the mid-to late 1850s were the result of a doctoring process in which two negatives – one containing the sea and shore, and the other the sky – were joined to make one image.

In the latter part of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth, the British cultural imagination turned to coasts. Prior to this period, coasts tended to be thought of as uninviting, even dangerous, places – ‘repulsive’, according to Alain Corbin. A compound of interlinked developments – in medicine, in aesthetics, in leisure, in law, in military strategy, for example – altered the prevailing mood, however, and during the long nineteenth century, the coast was visited more often, and by an increasingly diverse collection of people. This swell of interest in the littoral meant that coasts began to function as zones of cultural and commercial interchange. In part, this was because coasts became places of literal intermingling, where geologists and quack doctors, composers and painters, holidaymakers and recluses might meet intentionally or accidentally. Geological tourists followed Mary Anning to Lyme Regis in droves to purchase or discover for themselves sea-shells by the sea-shore. And towards the end of the nineteenth century, artists formed colonies at Pont-Aven, St Ives and elsewhere. Coasts became common ground for manifold, often contrasting styles of thought and practice.

At the same time, though, the coast was as much a place for imaginative projection as actual visitation, and a growing obsession with depicting and defining the coast characterises the period considered by this volume. Increasingly, the coast could seem to be at once a space of clarity, and misty distance, a terminus or breaking-off point, and a place of embarkation – a place of solitude and exhilaration, of uselessness and instrumentality. It offered a location for convalescence as well as sublime abandon, for the eking out of a fixed income in old age, but also for reckless gambling, a place for showing off and a place to retire from public view. The susceptibility of the coast to such varied conceptions means that it often functioned as literal grounds for their comparison – both a means of discriminating between superficially related considerations, and a point of contact between apparent immiscibles.

This disposition toward intermixture need not be a matter of vanishing horizons and vaporous liminality. Indeed, some of the strongest links between the seemingly contradictory understandings sustained by the coast are material and political.

Paltry Feasts

The workhouses of London ‘have their enjoyments’ at least one day of the year, the Morning Post reported in 1872, and accordingly at Christmas patients of the Metropolitan Asylums Board (MAB) received their special feast. Imbecile inmates at the asylums were provided with roast beef, plum-pudding, beer, fruit, tobacco and snuff as well as ‘other luxuries in celebration of the festival’ in ‘hand-somely decorated’ surroundings. Residents of the infectious hospitals operated by the MAB, meanwhile, made do with ‘such maimed rites as the necessity of the various cases demanded’. Paupers benefitted from the honoured tradition of treating the destitute to a sumptuous Christmas repast. Newspapers conventionally reported on enormous quantities of food lavished on paupers that merry day and sometimes wondered if the ‘workhouse system cannot be so very bad which permits, and in fact sanctions, the annual Christmas feast for the poor’. Yet, as everyone must have known, this single and circumscribed day of generosity merely marked a temporary suspension of the year-round rule of parochial austerity. The smug hypocrisy of the festivity formed a central theme in George R. Sims's very popular poem, ‘In the Workhouse: Christmas Day’. In it, an old male inmate explains why ‘a penniless pauper spits on your paltry feast’: his wife had starved to death the previous Christmas because the parish would not allow her bread at a crucial moment.

While rarely considered a ‘skin’ disease per se, smallpox has nearly always been seen as an imprintation of the skin. The story of smallpox contains two figures who visibly exhibited the disease: the pustuled sufferer and the pitted survivor. Its terrible symptoms and sequela were undeniably unique and practically universally recognizable. Robert John Thornton's description of smallpox in 1805 maintained that ‘no disease … presents a more melancholy scene’. Following the earliest symptoms of backache, intense fever and delirium, an eruption of pimples mature into pustules, which then ooze pus before sinking into depressions on the skin. These distinctive ‘pocks’ cluster on the face, neck and arms, and mark an individual as a smallpox sufferer. In severe cases, the ‘human face divine, bereft of every human feature, then exhibits the most distressing sight, being one mass of corruption’. Often permanent, these seams and scars also identify the smallpox survivor. Fortunately, a single attack conferred immunity to the disease; if it had not, Thornton believed, ‘the human race would have presented a frightful spectacle of corroded scars and mangled deformity, or, what is more probable, would have become extinct’.

The competition between two medical responses to smallpox – inoculation and vaccination – underlines the complex interstices of skin and visuality. More than practically any other affliction, smallpox was consistently associated with the terrifying ability to see disease and to visualize infection. Its social meaning resided within practices of displaying the body and, in particular, the skin. It represented contagion inscribed in the flesh of the dangerous sufferer and immune survivor; written across the face, smallpox was shockingly and necessarily spectacular.