1 INTRODUCTION
2 CONSTRUCTION AND ADMINISTRATION OF THE BRITISH COLONIAL EMPIRE IN THE 18TH AND THE 19TH CENTURIES
2.1 Reasons for expansion
2.2 Models of colonisation
2.3 17th and 18th centuries colonialism in America
2.4 British settlements in the 19th century
2.5 The British in India
2.6 The expansion of British commerce in Asia
2.7 Colonialism in Africa
2.8 Britain at the end of the 19th century
3 LITERARY PANORAMA IN BRITAIN AT THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY: JOSEPH CONRAD AND RUDYARD KIPLING
3.1 Literary background
3.2 Joseph Conrad´s life and works
3.3 Rudyard Kipling´s life and works
4 STUDY GUIDE
5 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 INTRODUCTION
The British Empire was the largest empire in history and for a time was the foremost global power. It was a product of the European age of discovery, which began with the maritime explorations of the 15th century, that sparked the era of the European colonial empires.
The growth of the British Empire was due in large part to the ongoing competition for resources and markets which existed over a period of centuries between England and her Continental rivals, Spain, France, and Holland. During the reign of Elizabeth I, England set up trading companies in Turkey, Russia, and the East Indies, explored the coast of North America, and established colonies there. In the early seventeenth century those colonies were expanded and the systematic colonization of Ulster in Ireland got underway.
The first British Empire was a mercantile one. Under both the Stuarts and Cromwell, the mercantilist outlines of further colonization and Empire-building became more and more apparent. Until the early nineteenth century, the primary purpose of Imperialist policies was to facilitate the acquisition of as much foreign territory as possible, both as a source of raw materials and in order to provide real or potential markets for British manufactures.
The loss in the late eighteenth century of the American colonies was not offset by the discovery of Australia, which served, after 1788, as a penal colony (convicts like Magwitch, in Dickens’s Great Expectations, were transported there). In 1773 the British government was obliged to take over for the financially troubled East India Company, which had been in India since 1600, and by the end of the century Britain’s control over India extended into neighbouring Afghanistan and Burma. With the end, in 1815, of the Napoleonic Wars, the last of the great imperial wars which had dominated the eighteenth century, Britain found itself in an extraordinarily powerful position, though a complicated one.
This state of affairs, however, was complex and far from stable. The old mercantile Empire was weakened during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by a number of factors: by the abolition in 1807 of slavery in Britain itself, a movement led by the Evangelicals ; by the freeing in 1833 of slaves held elsewhere in the Empire; by the adoption, after a radical change in economic perspective (due in large part to the influence of Adam Smith‘s The Wealth of Nations), of Free Trade, which minimized the influence of the old oligarchical and monopolistic trading corporations; and by various colonial movements for greater political and commercial independence.
During the Victorian Era, however, the acquisition of territory and of further trading concessions continued (promoted by strategic considerations and aided or justified by philanthropic motivations), reaching its peak when Victoria , at Disraeli‘s instigation, had herself crowned Empress of India in 1876. Advocates of Disraeli’s imperialist foreign policies justified them by invoking a paternalistic and racist theory (founded in part upon popular but erroneous generalizations derived from Darwin‘s theory of evolution) which saw Imperialism as a manifestation of what Kipling would refer to as “the white man’s burden.” The implication, of course, was that the Empire existed not for the benefit — economic or strategic or otherwise — of Britain itself, but in order that primitive peoples, incapable of self-government, could, with British guidance, eventually become civilized (and Christianized).
In the following topic we will study the conformation of the British Empire, from its birth to the last consequences of it, that is, the Commonwealth of Nations. Then, we shall describe the presence of the British in America, Asia, Africa and Australia. Finally, in the second part of this essay, we will deal with the lives and literary careers of Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad, writers whose works were affected by this aspect of the British history.
2 CONSTRUCTION AND ADMINISTRATION OF THE BRITISH COLONIAL EMPIRE IN THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES
2.1 Reasons for expansion
Except for brief intervals when people reacted against imperialism, the history of Europe between the 15th and the 20th centuries is strongly influenced by the expansionism of the European countries, especially England, France, Spain, Portugal and The Netherlands, as well as by their determination to build Empires overseas. The 18th and the 19th century were the two centuries when the British Colonial Empire was formed and expanded.
Many arguments have been used to justify this imperialism.
– Economic reasons. Colonies meant commerce and business. Raw materials could be obtained from them and at the same time they became markets to sell the industrial production on the metropolis. Economic historians have demonstrated that the conquest of unexploited areas of the world by Britain was in the later half of the 19th century was the only way out of the economic depression of the 1880’s.
– Religious reasons. Imperialism was also vindicated on moral grounds particularly by missionaries. It was considered as a means of liberating people from tyrannical rule or of bringing them the blessings of the Christian religion and of a superior civilisation.
– As a means of power. Annexing strategic points was a means of securing navigation routes and protecting ships. Besides, no European power was prepared to stand by while its rivals extended their territories.
– Outlet for population. Some English colonies began as a place where convicts were sent, such as Georgia or Australia, and still many others served as a refuge for unwanted population such as the religious dissenters who settled in America.
The supporters of colonialism did not see it as a means of domination or exploitation. It was considered a service to mankind. By the end of the 19th century, however, disillusionment prevailed as a result of the discrepancy between humanitarian ideals and the reality of colonial exploitation.
2.2 Models of colonisation
Although we speak about a colonial empire, we should take into account that British control over the various territories of the Empire was very different.
Some territories were colonies where the immigrants from the British Isles established, mainly in areas with a low native population which was displaced or used as labour, such as in the American Continent, in Australia, New Zealand and Africa.
In other territories they established their rule over a native population, such as in India,
and other colonies were established for their strategic situation for trading, either in the routes like Malta or the Faulklands, or as trading posts, like Hong Kong in China.
2.3 17th and 18th centuries colonialism in America
British colonialism in the 17th century obeyed a desire to find an outlet for population, specially for those unwanted in England such as religious dissenters and criminals and to expand commerce. The British government did not exert a direct control of the colonies. Commerce was in the hands of chartered companies, such as the East Indies, the Levant and the Hudson’s Bay Companies, while the territories where there settlers established enjoyed a certain degree of self-government. Until the mid 18th century the colonial expansion was directed mainly towards America. The colonial expansion in America reached its peak in 1763, when the war against France finished with the acquisition of Canada. But the situation in the thirteen colonies which England had in America was deteriorating.
On the one hand the English navigation acts were limiting more and more the possibilities of development for the colonies, since they restricted the creation of industries and forced them to sell their products only in England and to buy only from England.
Furthermore, after the war with France the English Parliament tried to make Americans pay taxes and import duties to pay for part of the expenses that the war had caused.
The attempts to make them pay taxes failed, since Americans opposed to pay taxes while they had no representation in the English Parliament. The American Revolution finally broke out in 1775, and the American colonies proclaimed their independence in 1777.
2.4 British settlements in the 19th century
After the loss of America Britain still kept control over Canada, Jamaica and many small islands in the Caribbean. However, they also started to look for new lands to substitute the American colonies as a place to transport convicts. At the end of the 18th century a penal colony was founded in Australia. Since 1718, transportation to the American colonies had been a penalty for various criminal offences in Britain, with approximately one thousand convicts transported per year across the Atlantic. Forced to find an alternative location after the loss of the Thirteen Colonies in 1783, the British government turned to the newly discovered land of New Holland, later renamed Australia.
In 1770, James Cook had discovered the eastern coast of Australia whilst on a scientific voyage to the South Pacific. In 1778, Joseph Banks, Cook’s botanist on the voyage, presented evidence to the government on the suitability of Botany Bay for the establishment of a penal settlement, and in 1787 the first shipment of convicts set sail, arriving in 1788. Matthew Flinders proved New Holland and New South Wales to be a single land mass by completing a circumnavigation of it in 1803. In 1826, Australia was formally claimed for the United Kingdom with the establishment of a military base, soon followed by a colony in 1829. The colonies later became self-governing colonies and became profitable exporters of wool and gold.
However, under increasing pressure from the abolitionist movement, the United Kingdom outlawed the slave trade (1807) and soon began enforcing this principle on other nations. By the mid-19th century the United Kingdom had largely eradicated the world slave trade. An act making not just the slave trade but slavery itself illegal was passed in 1833 and became law on August 1, 1834.
The colonization of Australia was followed by free immigration and the foundation of the first Australian colony, New Wales of South. British immigration was therefore directed to Canada, the Australian colonies, The Cape and New Zealand. To avoid a new situation like the one of the thirteen American colonies Britain organised these territories in a new way.
Along the 19th century self-government on questions regarding domestic affairs was given to the territories after they were conveniently settled, transforming them into Dominions, whose relation with Britain was based on their independence and freedom.
Furthermore, in this period there was also a liberalisation of commerce, which had been the source of most colonial wars in the 18th century.
This formula, however, was only applied to those colonies where white people were majority, while colonies where blacks predominated, those in the Caribbean, did not get self-government, although slavery was abolished in 1833.
2.5 The British India
But in the 18th century the British expansion was also very important in Asia. There the British presence was limited to commercial interests and not to the colonisation of territories. The commerce with India was monopolised by the East India Company, but this company progressively acquired more power in the area. At first the East India Company was limited to a few factories or trading posts in Madras, Calcutta, Suray and Bombay. But towards the mid 18th century both them and a similar French trading company initiated an imperial policy in India. The company defeated the French expansion with the help of the British government, and after the French left India the East India Company completed the conquest of Bengal. It changed its functions from trading to the administration of the conquered territories with the help of British troops. They progressively became an elite and excluded the former Indian aristocracy from government and kept distanced from the local population. However, they justified their intervention in the moral superiority of the Europeans and their obligation to provide good government and to set even by force their laws and economic policy.
During the 19th century English rule of India extended, but the British government progressively took control from the company, which was finally dissolved in 1858 after the Sepoys’ Revolt. The Sepoys were Indian troops in the service of the Company, and their revolt signified the Indian opposition to the imposition of westernising reforms challenging the religious beliefs of the Hindu and Muslim religions. The British rule strengthened, but religious neutrality was proclaimed, and Indians began to be accepted into some posts in the administration. The competition of English cotton destroyed India’s main industry and India drifted toward the status of a colonial economy, a supplier of raw materials, mainly cotton, tea, coffee and indigo, and a market for manufactured articles. The peak of English power in India was in the last quarter of the 19th century, marked by the proclamation of Queen Victoria in 1876 as Empress of India.
2.6 The expansion of British commerce in Asia
At the end of the 16th century, England and the Netherlands began to challenge Portugal‘s monopoly of trade with Asia, forming private joint-stock companies to finance the voyages—the English (later British) and Dutch East India Companies, chartered in 1600 and 1602 respectively. The primary aim of these companies was to tap into the lucrative spice trade, and focused their efforts on the source, the Indonesian archipelago, and an important hub in the trade network, India. The proximity of London and Amsterdam and rivalry between England and the Netherlands inevitably led to conflict between the two companies, with the Dutch gaining the upper hand in the Moluccas (previously a Portuguese stronghold) after the withdrawal of the English in 1622, and the English enjoying more success in India, at Surat, after the establishment of a factory in 1613. Though England would ultimately eclipse the Netherlands as a colonial power, in the short term the Netherlands’s more advanced financial system and the three Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 17th century left it with a stronger position in Asia. Hostilities ceased after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when the Dutch William of Orange ascended the English throne, bringing peace between the Netherlands and England. A deal between the two nations left the spice trade of the Indonesian archipelago to the Netherlands and the textiles industry of India to England, but textiles soon overtook spices in terms of profitability, and by 1720, in terms of sales, the English company had overtaken the Dutch. The English East India Company shifted its focus from Surat—a hub of the spice trade network—to Fort St George (later to become Madras), Bombay (ceded by the Portuguese to Charles II of England in 1661 as dowry for Catherine de Braganza) and Sutanuti (which would merge with two other villages to form Calcutta).
During the 18th and 19th century the British Empire kept extending its commercial net in the Mediterranean, with the control of strategic ports such as Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus and the building of the Suez Canal. In 1875, the Conservative government of Benjamin Disraeli bought the indebted Egyptian ruler Ismail‘s 44% shareholding in the Suez Canal for £4 million to secure control of this strategic waterway, a channel for shipping between the United Kingdom and India since its opening six years earlier under Emperor Napoleon III. Joint Anglo-French financial control over Egypt ended in outright British occupation in 1882.
In Asia and the Pacific, apart from the control over India the British added new colonies such as Burma, Ceylon or numerous Pacific islands. The trade with China was also very important, especially tea, and the British tried to establish trading posts relations along the 18th century. But in the 19th century the commerce kept rising China became also a target market for British merchants, especially with the illegal introduction of opium, resulting in social and economic disruption. With the Chinese attempt to finish the opium trade, the opium war broke out, but after the war the British position was strengthened, and they could establish trading ports such as Hong Kong and Shangai.
2.7 Colonialism in Africa
By 1870 the British Empire had the structure that we have seen, with different kinds of colonies, some for the settlement of Europeans, some where the British ruled over a large native population and some whose main aim was to guarantee British commerce in the area. However, the idea of a new colonialism was spreading in Europe, directed mainly towards Africa. Since the prohibition of slavery in most European colonies the European presence in Africa had been very limited, and the continent was scarcely known to the Europeans. The betterment in transports and communications intensified international trade, Europe’s industrial production was rising, and the standard of living rose as well as the demand for exotic products. Thus, the richest European countries started a race to obtain new colonies.
The British already controlled the Suez Canal and had the Cape Colony in South Africa. The Dutch East India Company had founded the Cape Colony on the southern tip of Africa in 1652 as a way station for its ships travelling to and from its colonies in the East Indies. Britain formally acquired the colony, and its large Afrikaner (or Boer) population in 1806, having occupied it in 1795 after the Netherlands was invaded by France. British immigration began to rise after 1820, and pushed thousands of Boers, resentful of British rule, northwards to found the Transvaal and the Orange Free State during the Great Trek of the late 1830s and early 1840s.
In this period their goal was the from the Cape to Cairo plan, trying to control a strip of territory from North to South. Although they did not achieve this aim, they formed many colonies in East Africa, such as Somalia, Kenia and Uganda, and in the river Niger. This expansion was realised through the old system of the chartered companies, such as The Imperial East Africa Company, The Royal Niger Company and The South Africa Chartered Company. These newly occupied territories in Africa as well as other new territories in Asia and the Pacific were mainly governed through protectorates, an indirect domain system according to which they enjoyed some independence by preserving native rulers although under severe British control.
2.8 Britain at the end of the 19th century
The Empire was not an Empire in the classical sense of territorial conquest, but a product of the private enterprise of traders and men of business in the search of markets, trade routes and concessions. It was the typical Empire of a nation of shop keepers. British attitudes towards the Empire were mixed. Empire meant trade and profit, but on the other side of the coin was the conviction that Britain had the duty of bringing British ideas of democracy and law to “primitive people”. The enthusiasm to extend both the Empire and the civilisation had a brutal and ugly side as numerous wars of imperial expansion demonstrated.
Queen Victoria died in 1901 after the longest reign in English history (64 years). Her death had a profound effect on society and it seemed to mark the end of an era. Some felt that an age of prosperity and oppression had died and that the future was uncertain and dangerous. She was considered the symbol of Victorian progress and of the British Empire. From the early 1850’s until the 1870’s England prospered as never before. An expanding population and little competition from abroad ensured a worldwide market for the manufactured goods. The transportation of the goods and raw materials was revolutionised by the development of railways. Popular support for British Imperialism was at its peak between Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee and the Boer War. In 1887 the British seized the opportunity to celebrate their successful imperial expansion with magnificent spectacles. Troops and governors from every colony came to London. But as the Empire grew, so did the criticism of imperialism. Free traders and middle class radicals denounced colonies as expensive, useless and the cause of needless rivalry with powers. Yet nothing halted the acquisition of new possessions. By 1900 the British Empire represented the largest, most populous and wealthiest empire yet seen.
3 LITERARY PANORAMA IN BRITAIN AT THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY: JOSEPH CONRAD AND RUDYARD KIPLING
3.1 Literary background
The 19th century was the great age of the English novel and the Victorian novel reader wanted to be entertained and in a way wanted to escape. Readers wanted to be close to what they read and to pretend that literature was journalism, that fiction was history. The novelists tried to make a transcription of life without the modifying effect of literary form and imagination. In fact, the Victorian novelists created symbolic meanings that went deeper than the superficial pattern of social action suggested to the casual reader. As regards the professional purveyors of literary entertainment in the later part of the 19th century we can mention Robert Louis Stevenson, George Gissing, George Moore and Rudyard Kipling.
If the characteristic theme of the 18th and 19th century novel was the relation between gentility and morality, that of the 20th century is the relationship between loneliness and love. But the question is how love is possible when everybody is selfish and also how even communication is possible. Society as a whole is empty and can provide no real communication between the individuals. The “great” society is always the enemy, only the “little” society, the intimate group of real friends is worth anything. Such are the concerns of a generation of writers who are going to inaugurate a new fiction style. Joseph Conrad, James Joyce or Virginia Woolf will be some of its earliest exponents.
3.2 Joseph Conrad´s life and works
Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, in the Ukraine, in a region that had once been a part of Poland, but was then under Russian rule. His father Apollo Korzeniowski was an aristocrat without lands, a poet and translator of Shakespeare and Dickens and French literature. The family estates had been sequestrated in 1839 following an anti-Russian rebellion. As a boy the young Joseph read Polish and French versions of English novels with his father. English was Conrad’s third language; he learned to read and write in French before he knew English. Apollo Korzeniowski became embroiled in political activities. After being imprisoned for six months, he was sent to exile with his family to Volgoda, northern Russia, in 1861. Two years later the family was allowed to move to Kiev.
By 1869 Conrad’s both parents had died of tuberculosis, and he was sent to Switzerland to his maternal uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, who was to be a continuing influence on his life. Conrad attended schools in Kraków and persuaded his uncle to let him go to the sea. In the mid-1870s he joined the French merchant marine as an apprentice, and made between 1875 and 1878 three voyages to the West Indies. During his youth Conrad also was involved in arms smuggling for the Carlist cause in Spain.
After being wounded in a duel or of a self-inflicted gunshot in the chest, Conrad continued his career at the seas in the British merchant navy for 16 years. He had been deeply in debt, but his uncle helped him out. This was a turning point in his life. Conrad rose through the ranks from common seaman to first mate, and by 1886 he obtained his master mariner’s certificate, commanding his own ship, Otago. In the same year he was given British citizenship and he changed officially his name to Joseph Conrad.
Witnessing the forces of the sea, Conrad developed a deterministic view of the world. Conrad sailed to many parts of the world, including Australia, various ports of the Indian Ocean, Borneo, the Malay states, South America, and the South Pacific Island. In 1890 he sailed in Africa up the Congo River. The journey provided much material for his novel Heart of Darkness. However, the fabled East Indies particularly attracted Conrad and it became the setting of many of his stories. By 1894 Conrad’s sea life was over. During the long journeys he had started to write and Conrad decided to devote himself entirely to literature. At the age of 36 Conrad settled down in England.
Although Conrad is mostly known as a novelist, he tried his hand also as a playwright. His first one-act drama was not success-the audience rejected it. But after finishing the text he learned the existence of the Censor of the Plays, which inspired his satirical essay about an obscure civil servant. Conrad was an Anglophile, who regarded Britain as a land which respected individual liberties. As a writer he accepted the verdict of a free and independent public, but associated this official figure of censorship to the atmosphere of the Far East and the “mustiness of the Middle Ages,” which shouldn’t be part of the twentieth-century England.
Conrad married in 1896 Jessie George, an Englishwoman, by whom he had two sons. He moved to Ashford, Kent. Except trips to France, Italy, Poland, and to the United States in 1923, Conrad lived in his new home country. His first two novels, Almayer’s Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), repeat the theme of a blindly superficial character meeting the tragic consequences of his own failings in a tropical region far from his fellow Europeans. These two novels provoked the misunderstanding of Conrad as a writer of exotic tales, a reputation which continued because the sea was a central theme in his early works such as The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), Lord Jim (1900), Youth (1902), Heart of Darkness (1902) and Typhoon (1903).
The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ was a complex story of a storm off the Cape of Good Hope and of an enigmatic black sailor. Lord Jim, narrated by Charlie Marlow, told about the fall of a young sailor and his redemption.
Lord Jim was originally intended as a short story, but was then enlarged into a novel. It is partly based on true events: in 1880 a British captain and his crew abandoned the steamship Jeddah, carrying Muslim pilgrims, when the ship started to leak. Jeddah was brought by another steamship safely to port. Particular blame was attached to A.P. Williams, the first mate, who had organized the desertion of the vessel. The protagonist of Lord Jim is a British naval officer, who is haunted by guilt of cowardice, when he left his ship, Patna, in a storm without taking care of the passengers. During the voyage towards Mecca, the ship had hit a submerged object, and when the small crew lowers a lifeboat, Jim impulsively jumps in it. Contrary to the crew’s beliefs, the ship did not sunk and Jim is left to stand in front of the Court of Inquiry. After disgrace Jim moves through a variety of jobs ashore and finds work as an agent at the remote trading post of Patusan. The misjudged Jim gains the confidence of chief Doramin and becomes a respected figure, proving that he is “inscrutable at heart.” When Gentleman Brown and his fellow European adventurers appear, Jim promises Doramin that Brown and his men will leave the island without bloodshed. He is wrong, Doramin’s son is killed, and Jim is finally forced to face his past-he allows himself to be shot by the grieving Doramin.
Heart of the Darkness was partly based on Conrad’s four-month command of a Congo River steamboat. The book was written in 1899 and published in 1902 in Youth: A Narrative with Two other Stories. Conrad had learned about atrocities made by Congo “explorers”, and created in the character of Kurtz the embodiment of European imperialism.
The narrator, again Marlow, who perhaps is not so reliable, depicts to his friends a trip into Africa, where he becomes curious about a man called Kurtz. Marlow works for a company that is only interested in ivory and he witnesses the suffering of the native workers. He travels up the Congo River to reach Kurtz, an agent whom Marlow expects by his reputation to be a “universal genius,” an “emissary of pity, and science, and progress, and devil knows what else.” As they near the inner station of the company, they are attacked, and Marlow’s helmsman is killed. At the station they meet a Russian who idolizes Kurtz, a man who has made himself the natives’ god and who has decorated the posts of his hut with human skulls. Marlow tries to get the seriously ill Kurtz away down the river, but Kurtz dies, his last words being, “The horror! The Horror!” Back in Europe Marlow lies to Kurtz’s fiancée, that “the last word he pronounced was-your name.”
As for the portrait of the colonialist experience Heart of Darkness is an enquiry into the nature of colonialism and a denunciation of it. It portrays late 19th century colonialism in Africa, questioning the value of white civilisation and the desirability of its transplantation to the so-called primitive cultures. Conrad presents colonialism not just as a political and economic venture, but also as a consequence of the individual’s lust for power and possessiveness and even as an epitome of man’s capacity for evil. The anonymous narrator sees the voyage that the novel relates as a glorious adventure, at once an expression of England’s greatness and a means of adding to it. Marlow’s aunt also has an idealistic vision of Africa. She thinks that the motive behind colonialism is to civilise the conquered people, but in reality no effort is made to understand the alien population that they exploit as “raw material”. Marlow at least recognises the “reality” ant the “otherness” of the natives. He is also made to see into the real motives that bring white men to Africa when his travelling companion tells him that “of course” he has come to make money.
As for man’s existential isolation we should consider that Heart of Darkness does not deal exclusively with colonialism, it also presents a journey into the self. It recreates a voyage of self-discovery and it is often described as a story of initiation. Conrad reconciles the two aspects of Marlow’s experience, that is, his confrontation with the reality of colonialism and an introspective voyage leading to spiritual change. He shows how loneliness can force a man to explore his own identity with his moral “opposite”, “the secret sharer”. The problem is how we come to terms with the secret sharer, the enemy that we recognise as ourselves. This theme also explains the final crisis in Lord Jim.
No doubt one of the story’s greatest achievements is that the actual voyage evokes a journey into the self. But it is also essential to realise that Conrad does not present two separate issues, a public one (colonialism) and a private one (knowledge of the self). The two are only one, and Marlow’s story clearly implies that the kind of world men make for themselves largely results from the character of individual behaviour. Possibly Conrad’s interest in the relation between loneliness and the demands of society derives from his own story. His pessimism has a different quality from that of any sceptical writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This novel has received a great deal of critical attention. It has been criticised for merely adopting the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination, that is, the continent as “a place of negations”.
In 1977 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe described Conrad as “a bloody racist”. The novel is seen as a racist work in which “the very humanity of African people is called in question”. But other people only agree partly with this assumption, considering that it overlooks Conrad’s attack on colonialism.
Heart of the Darkness has inspired several film version, starting from Orson Welles but his project for RKO never materialized. Kurtz fascinated Welles; a genius destroyed by inner conflicts, greatness gone wrong. During his career as a director and actor, Welles would play this kind of Faustian figure repeatedly, most notably as Citizen Kane, who also dies with a mysterious phrase on his lips. In Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), the “horror” is symbolically repressed (killed), while in Heart of Darkness it is brought into the light, as horrible as it might be to do so. The film, then, accepts as a premise our capacity for evil, and goes ahead to show how the colonialist psychosis of Kurtz, and by extension Western culture, translates into a social nightmare.
In Youth (1902) the title story recorded Conrad’s experiences on the sailing-ship Palestine. Nostromo (1904) was an imaginative novel which again explored man’s vulnerability and corruptibility. An analysis of his later books indicates the aspects where modern critics lay emphasis. To Conrad the testing time comes when a man is in a situation where the normal public codes do not work and he either finds strength out of self-knowledge and loneliness or goes down to destruction in the “heart of darkness”. In this novel he explores the various ways in which politics and economics threaten the integrity of character and corrupt personal relationships, often without the knowledge of those who are threatened and corrupted. Nostromo is not a story of surrender to temptation under particular circumstances, it is a symbolic rendering of the inevitable fate of political man. Society is corrupting, this is the most remarkable theme in Conrad’s novels. He shows how material interests corrupt human relationships and the attempt to escape into solitude results in destruction. In Nostromo this is seen through the presentation of the evils of economic exploitation of a young nation by a powerful capitalist country. But Conrad is not complaining: he is illustrating a permanent aspect of human condition. All alternative to what is corrupting is worse, he did not believe in any way out, and therefore saw political reform as folly. It includes one of Conrad’s most suggestive symbols, the silver mine. In the story the Italian Nostromo (“our man”) is destroyed for his heroism like Lord Jim. With his death the secret of the silver is lost forever.
In the later works he also became a master of what is called “indirect narration”, which consists in presenting information in bits and pieces and from different points of view. This is specially relevant in novels such as The Secret Agent (1907), which deals with the equivocal world of anarchists, police, politicians and agents in London, and Under Western Eyes (1911), also dealing with political issues and set in Russia and Switzerland. The Secret Agent (1907) took a bleak view of prophets of destruction and utopians, but Conrad also once confessed, that “there had been moments during the writing of the book when I was an extreme revolutionist”. Conrad dedicated the novel to H.G. Wells.
The period between The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and Under Western Eyes (1911) is considered artistically Conrad’s most productive. H.G. Wells encouraged Conrad and gave him good reviews and his work was also recognized by John Galsworthy. With Ford Madox Ford he wrote three books: The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903), and The Nature of Crime (1924). Although Conrad was prolific, his financial situation wasn’t secure until 1913 with the publication of Chance.
Last years of his life were shadowed by rheumatism. He refused an offer of knighthood in 1924 as he had earlier declined honorary degrees from five universities. Conrad died of a heart attack on August 3, 1924 and was buried in Canterbury.
Conrad’s influence upon 20th-century literature was wide. Ernest Hemingway expressed special admiration for the author, and his impact is seen in among others in the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Arthur Koestler, T.S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, André Malraux, Louis-Ferdiand Céline, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Graham Greene.
Conrad, an emotional man subject to fits of depression, self-doubt and pessimism, disciplined his romantic temperament with an unsparing moral judgment. Writing in what to the visual arts was the age of Impressionism, Conrad showed himself in many of his works a prose poet of the highest order: thus, for instance, in the evocative Patna and courtroom scenes of Lord Jim; in the “melancholy-mad elephant” and gunboat scenes of Heart of Darkness; in the doubled protagonists of The Secret Sharer; and in the verbal and conceptual resonances of Nostromo and The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’.
The singularity of the universe depicted in Conrad’s novels, especially compared to those of near-contemporaries like John Galsworthy, is such as to open him to criticism similar to that later applied to Graham Greene. But where “Greeneland” has been characterized as a recurring and recognizable atmosphere independent of setting, Conrad is at pains to create a sense of place, be it aboard ship or in a remote village. Often he chose to have his characters play out their destinies in isolated or confined circumstances.
In the view of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis, it was not until the first volumes of Anthony Powell‘s sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, were published in the 1950s, that an English novelist achieved the same command of atmosphere and precision of language with consistency, a view supported by present-day critics like A. N. Wilson. This is the more remarkable, given that English was Conrad’s third language. Powell acknowledged his debt to Conrad.
Conrad’s third language remained inescapably under the influence of his first two — Polish and French. This makes his English seem unusual. It was perhaps from Polish and French prose styles that he adopted a fondness for triple parallelism, especially in his early works (“all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men”), as well as for rhetorical abstraction (“It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention”).
In Conrad’s time, literary critics, while usually commenting favourably on his works, often remarked that his exotic style, complex narration, profound themes and pessimistic ideas put many readers off. Yet as Conrad’s ideas were borne out by 20th-century events, in due course he came to be admired for beliefs that seemed to accord with subsequent times more closely than with his own.
Conrad’s view of life is deeply pessimistic. In idealism he sees the seeds of corruption, and the most honourable men find their standards totally inadequate to defend themselves against the assaults of evil. It is significant that Conrad repeats again and again situations in which such men are obliged to admit emotional kinship with those whom they have expected only to despise. Conrad’s influence on later novelists has been profound both because of his technical innovations and because of the vision of humanity.
Conrad’s great achievement is that he based his writings on his many personal memories of strange characters and exotic countries. His respect and admiration for England are constant in his work. He explored man with profundity and explained the truth of loneliness, exploitation and despair. Perhaps the most impressive single characteristic of Conrad’s style is his use of irony when describing a character or situation he dislikes. All his characters are meticulously elaborated. He analyses a social and individual behaviour and a vinculation of the setting with the influence it exerts upon them.
3.3 Rudyard Kipling´s life and works
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, where his father, John Lockwood Kipling, was an arts and crafts teacher at the Jeejeebhoy School of Art. His mother, the former Alice Macdonald, was a sister-in-law of the painter Edward Burne-Jones. India was at that time ruled by the British. Ruddy, as Kipling was affectionally called, was brought up by an ayah, who taught him Hidustani as his first language.
Kipling’s writings at the age of thirteen were influenced by the pre-Raphaelites – and he also had family connections to them: two of his mother’s sisters were married into the pre-Raphaelite community. At the age of six he was taken to England by his parents and left for five years at a foster home at Southsea. Kipling, who was not accustomed to traditional English beatings, expressed later his feeling of the treatment in the short story Baa Baa, Black Sheep, in the novel The Light that Failed(1890), and in his autobiography (1937).
In 1878 Kipling entered United Services College, a boarding school in North Devon. It was an expensive institution that specialized in training for entry into military academies. His poor eyesight and mediocre results as a student ended hopes about military career. However, these years Kipling recalled in lighter tone in one of his most popular books, Stalky & Co (1899). Kipling’s bookishness separated him from the other students; he had to wear glasses and was nicknamed “Gigger”, for gig (carriage) for lamps.
Kipling returned to India in 1882, where he worked as a journalist in Lahore for Civil and Military Gazette (1882-87) and an assistant editor and overseas correspondent in Allahabad for Pioneer (1887-89). The stories written during his last two years in India were collected in The Phantom Rickshaw. It included the famous story The Man Who Would Be a King. In the story a white trader, Daniel Dravot sets himself up as a god and king in Kafristan, but a woman discovers that he is a human and betrays him. His companion, Peachey Carnehan, manages to escape to tell the tale, but Dravot is killed.
His reputation began in the late 1880’s with his short stories set in India, such as the ones in Plain Tales from the Hills. They dealt with a world on which he imposed his order. They include characters of various social and occupational classes, with Anglo-Indians, both male and female, military and civilian. The manipulation of the narrative, the actual putting together of the story is often excellently done: Kipling’s combination of a journalistic training and experience with his clear sense of the shape and the patterns of things helps to account for this.
Kilping’s short stories and verses gained success in the late 1880s in England, to which he returned in 1889, and was hailed as a literary heir to Charles Dickens. When he toured Japan he criticized the Japanese middle-class for its eagerness to adopt western fashions and values.
Between the years 1889 and 1892, Kipling lived in London and published Life´s Handicap (1891), a collection of Indian stories that included The Man Who Was, and Barrack-Room Ballads, a collection of poems that included If and Gunga Din, a praise of a Hindu water carrier for a British Indian regiment. Wellington had viewed the private soldier as “the very scum of the earth”, but Kipling portrayed him as the embodiment of British virtue. Kipling was also very popular as a poet at the time. In his poetry he also expressed his imperialistic ideas, conveying his perception of the nature of relationships, duties and moral patterns involved in life as he saw it. The ritual element is also strong in his poetry. Formally he used the rhythms of Methodist hymns, but he also used popular elements from the ballad and tried to introduce colloquial speech to reproduce the common soldier’s language. He also wrote poems about the Boer War as in The Absent Minded Beggar.
In 1892 Kipling married Caroline Starr Balestier, the sister of an American publisher and writer, with whom he collaborated a novel, The Naulahka (1892). The young couple moved to the United States. Kipling was dissatisfied with the life in Vermont, and after the death of his daughter, Josephine, Kipling took his family back to England and settled in Burwash, Sussex. According to the author’s sister, Kipling became a “harder man” – but also his political beliefs started to stiffen. Kipling’s marriage was not in all respects happy. The author was dominated by his wife who had troubles to accept all aspects of her husband’s character. During these restless years Kipling produced Many Inventions (1893), Jungle Book (1894), a collection of animal stories for children, The Second Jungle Book(1895), and The Seven Seas(1896).
Widely regarded as unofficial poet laureate, Kipling refused this and many honours, among them the Order of Merit. During the Boer War in 1899 Kipling spent several months in South Africa. In 1902 he moved to Sussex, also spending time in South Africa, where he was given a house by Cecil Rhodes, the influential British colonial statesman. In 1901 appeared Kim, widely considered Kipling’s best novel. The story, set in India, depicted adventures of an orphaned son of a sergeant in an Irish regiment. His own children appeared in the stories as Dan and Una – the death of “Dan” (John) in the WW I darkened author’s later life. John Kipling was a brave young officer, unspoilt by his father’s fame.
Kim (1901) – Kimball O’Hara is the orphan son of an Irish colour-sergeant and a nursemaid in a colonel’s family. Kim meets a Tibetian Lama and attaches himself to the old man as a discipline. Working for the British Secret Service, Kim carries a vital message to Colonel Creighton in Umballa and is helped by the Lame on his journey. The chaplain of his father’s old regiment recognizes Kim and he is dispatched to the scool of Anglo-Indian children at Lucknow. Kim rejoins the Lama in an expedition to the hill country of the North and his destiny is left undecided – the life of an adventurer and the values of contemplation both attract him. – Behind the story of Kim is perhaps true characters – Peter Hopkirk mentions in his book Quest for Kim (1997) a certain Tim Doolan, the son of an Irish sergeant.
Soon after Kipling had received the Nobel Prize in 1907, his output of fiction and poems began to decline. Kipling was so closely associated with the expansive, confident attitude of late 19th century European civilization that it was inevitable that his reputation would suffer in the years of and after World War I. Kipling also knew personal tragedy at the time as his only son, John, died in 1915 at the Battle of Loos, after which he wrote “If any question why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied”. It is speculated that these words may reveal Kipling’s feelings of guilt at his role in getting John a commission in the Irish Guards, despite his initially having been rejected by the army because of his poor eyesight. Partly in response to this tragedy, Kipling joined Sir Fabian Ware‘s Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission), the group responsible for the garden-like British war graves that can be found to this day dotted along the former Western Front and all the other locations around the world where Commonwealth troops lie buried. His most significant contribution to the project was his selection of the biblical phrase Their Name Live For Evermore found on the Stones of Remembrance in larger war graves and his suggestion of the phrase “Known unto God” for the gravestones of unidentified servicemen. He also wrote a two-volume history of the Irish Guards, his son’s regiment. The Irish Guards in the Great War was published in 1923 and is considered to be one of the finest examples of regimental history.
With the increasing popularity of the automobile, Kipling became a motoring correspondent for the British press, and wrote enthusiastically of his trips around England and abroad, even though he was usually driven by a chauffeur. In 1922, Kipling, who had made reference to the work of engineers in some of his poems and writings, was asked by a University of Toronto civil engineering professor for his assistance in developing a dignified obligation and ceremony for graduating engineering students. Kipling was very enthusiastic in his response and shortly produced both, formally entitled The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer. Today, engineering graduates all across Canada are presented with an iron ring at the ceremony as a reminder of their obligation to society. The same year Kipling became Lord Rector of St Andrews University in Scotland, a position which ended in 1925.
Kipling died on January 18, 1936 in London, and was buried in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey. Kipling’s autobiography, Something of Myself, appeared posthumously in 1937.
Kipling’s glorification of the “Empire and extension” gained its peak in the poem The White Man’s Burden’(1899). George Orwell, who also spent his early childhood in India, rejected in an essay in New English Weekly (1936) Kipling’s view of the world, which he associated with the ignorant and sentimental side of imperialism, but admired the author as a storyteller. However, readers loved Kipling’s romantic tales about the adventures of Englishmen in strange and distant parts of the world. Characteristic for Kipling is sympathy for the world of children, satirical attitude toward pompous patriotism, and belief in the blessings and superiority of the British rule, without questioning its basic nature.
Kipling was neither a naturalist nor an aesthete and he derived his skills and his view of art from journalism. In India he observed the humorous, the rituals, and the characteristic patterns of the life of the ordinary British soldier far from home and helping maintain an empire of which they had little real knowledge. His imperialism is also very especial. It was not the romantic imperialism of Disraeli, but it is rather compared to a schoolboy imperialism, deriving from a love of classes, orders, rituals and views of duty and responsibility not thought out beyond the schoolboy level. The Darwinian survival of the fittest became in Kipling’s simplified imperialistic vision a perpetual struggle between the upholders of the law and the rest, where the latter had to be constantly watched to prevent any disobedience of the rules and punished if they did disobey.
All in all, his distrust of democracy, his belief in authority and his advocacy of war as a necessary instrument of good government as well as the assumption of Western supremacy throughout his works have made them sound offensive to later generations, but he is certainly the best representative of the way of thinking during his period of history.
4 STUDY GUIDE
As we have already seen, the British expansion all over the world has been one of the most important events in British history, and one of the historic facts that British people were to be highly proud of. The British Empire was the largest empire in history and for a time was the foremost global power. It was a product of the European age of discovery, which began with the maritime explorations of the 15th century, that sparked the era of the European colonial empires. Many arguments have been used to justify this imperialism: economic reasons, that is to say, colonies meant commerce and business; religious reasons, that is, imperialism was also vindicated on moral grounds particularly by missionaries; military reasons, since annexing strategic points was a means of securing navigation routes and protecting ships, etc.
The colonial expansion in America reached its peak in 1763, when the war against France finished with the acquisition of Canada. But the situation in the thirteen colonies which England had in America was deteriorating. The American Revolution finally broke out in 1775, and the American colonies proclaimed their independence in 1777.
After the loss of America Britain still kept control over Canada, Jamaica and many small islands in the Caribbean. However, they also started to look for new lands to substitute the American colonies as a place to transport convicts. At the end of the 18th century a penal colony was founded in Australia, and it was followed by free immigration and the foundation of the first Australian colony, New Wales of South. British immigration was therefore directed to Canada, the Australian colonies, The Cape and New Zealand. To avoid a new situation like the one of the thirteen American colonies Britain organised these territories in a new way. Along the 19th century self-government on questions regarding domestic affairs was given to the territories after they were conveniently settled, transforming them into Dominions, whose relation with Britain was based on their independence and freedom. This formula, however, was only applied to those colonies where white people were majority, while colonies where blacks predominated, those in the Caribbean, did not get self-government, although slavery was abolished in 1833.
But in the 18th century the British expansion was also very important in Asia. The commerce with India was monopolised by the East India Company, but this company progressively acquired more power in the area. At first the East India Company was limited to a few factories or trading posts in Madras, Calcutta, Suray and Bombay. But towards the mid 18th century both them and a similar French trading company initiated an imperial policy in India. The company defeated the French expansion with the help of the British government. During the 19th century English rule of India extended, but the British government progressively took control from the company, which was finally dissolved in 1858 after the Sepoys’ Revolt.
During the 18th and 19th century the British Empire kept extending its commercial net in the Mediterranean, with the control of strategic ports such as Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus and the building of the Suez Canal. In Asia and the Pacific, apart from the control over India the British added new colonies such as Burma, Ceylon or numerous Pacific islands. The trade with China was also very important, especially tea, and the British tried to establish trading posts relations along the 18th century.
The presence of the British in Africa was effective with the control of the Suez Canal and the Cape Colony in South Africa. In this period their goal was the from the Cape to Cairo plan, trying to control a strip of territory from North to South. Although they did not achieve this aim, they formed many colonies in East Africa, such as Somalia, Kenia and Uganda, and in the river Niger. This expansion was realised through the old system of the chartered companies, such as The Imperial East Africa Company, The Royal Niger Company and The South Africa Chartered Company.
With regards to literature, Kipling was the main writer that glorified the Empire and its international policy although his distrust in democracy and his advocacy of war as an essential instrument of good government as well as the assumption of Western supremacy, sounded offensive to later generations, however readers loved Kipling´s tales about the adventures of Englishmen in strange and distant parts of the world. On the other hand, the contribution to literature of Joseph Conrad were to come later on, since his advanced literary techniques and unusual themes like “man in isolation” were more appreciated for the next generation of writers than for his own contemporaries.
Among Conrad’s best-known works are Lord Jim (1900) and Heart of Darkness (1902). Conrad discouraged interpretation of his sea novels through evidence from his life, but several of his stories drew the material, events, and personalities from his own experiences in different parts of the world.
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) is the novelist who best presented the imperialism of the late 19th century. He was Polish, and served first in the French merchant navy and then in the English navy, taking took part in the expansion of European colonialism in Asia and Africa. After retiring he established himself in England and started to write novels in whose production he used his personal experiences. During his lifetime Conrad was admired for the richness of his prose and his renderings of dangerous life at sea and in exotic places. But the themes that he covers are universal, such as feelings of guilt, responsibility or insecurity. His reputation diminished after his death, but a revival of interest in his work directed attention to these qualities and accordingly to books different from the ones successful in his lifetime. Nowadays he is appreciated for his first hand portrayal of colonialism.
But his masterpiece is regarded to be Heart of Darkness (1902). This is the first of Conrad’s novels or stories which achieves the complexity of a work of art, at the same time that it deals with the theme of colonialism. Man’s existential isolation was to become a major theme in modern fiction.
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) represents another aspect of English colonialism, since he was born in India into an English family that belonged to the highest Anglo-Indian society. After being sent to England to attend school, he returned to India and worked there in a journal where he started to publish some sketches and poetry. When Kipling returned to England in 1889, his reputation had preceded him due to the publication of several collections of his short stories. His fame increased even more with the publication of the verse collection Barrack-Room Ballads in 1892, to the point that he was the most popular writer of the time. He was famous for his imperialist ideas, which expressed the conviction of the civilizing mission that required every Englishman to bring European culture to the heathen natives of the uncivilized world. But these ideas which made him popular at first were fell out of date and as he became older he was an increasingly isolated figure. As a poet his reputation was never recovered, but it is otherwise with his prose.
Later, when Kipling returned to England his essential vision remained unchanged. It is in The Jungle Book (1894), one of his best known works. The soldier, the engineer, the schoolboy, the fisherman, whatever a man is, he is involved in certain kinds of work, of responsibility, of ritual. Other codes and rituals may command wondering respect, as the Indian way of life does in Kim (1901), but that is really because he cannot imagine the essential otherness of another way of life. The schoolroom in Stalky and Co. (1899) and a fishing vessel in Captains Courageous (1897) are equally adequate microcosms of the world and can illustrate the kind of education necessary to survive in it.
His best known poetry collection is Barrack Room Ballads, with poems about Indian army life, including If and Gunga Din, but he also wrote poems about the Boer War as in The Absent Minded Beggar.
The complexity of some of his creations is also acknowledged, such as the main character in Kim, the half Indian half English orphan in whom the Western aspects of his personality contrast with typically Indian characteristics making him a complex character, or the portrayal of the wild animals with human personalities in The Jungle Book.
5 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rudyard Kipling by Martin Seymour-Smith (1989);
Kipling’s Vision by Sukeshi Kamara (1989);
East and West: A Biography of Rudyard Kipling by Thomas N. Cross (1991);
The Culture Shocks of Rudyard Kipling by W.J. Lohman (1990);
The Poetry of Kipling by Ann Parry (1992);
Narratives of Empire by Zohreh T. Sullivan (1993);
Rudyard Kipling; A Study of the Short Fiction by Helen P. Bauer (1994);
Rudyard Kipling; Author of the Jungle Books by Carol Greene et al (1995);
The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling by David Gilmour (2002)
Culture and Irony: Studies in Joseph Conrad’s Major Novels by A Winner (1988);
Joseph Conrad by Jeffrey Meyers (1990);
Conrad’s Existentialism by O. Bohlmann (1991);
Conrad’s Fiction as Critical Discourse by Richard Ambrosini (1991);
Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition by Andrea White (1993);
Joseph Conrad by M. Seymour-Smith (1995);
The Invention of the West. Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire by Christopher Lloyd GoGwilt (1995);
Joseph Conrad and the Anthropological Dilemma by John W. Griffith (1995);
The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, ed. by J.H. Stape (1996).