Brokering Culture in Britain’s Empire and the Historical Novel by Matthew Carey Salyer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Brokering Culture in Britain’s Empire and the Historical Novel by Matthew Carey Salyer Ruth M. McAdams (bio) Matthew Carey Salyer, Brokering Culture in Britain’s Empire and the Historical Novel (New York: Lexington Books, 2020), pp. xii + 227, $95/£73 hardcover. Matthew Carey Salyer’s Brokering Culture in Britain’s Empire and the Historical Novel traces connections between nineteenth-century British and American historical novels and eighteenth-century imperial figures who mediated and brokered value between the metropole and the periphery. These imperial interlocutors were a motley crew of individuals excluded from or resistant to the Whig account of historical progress, including “High Tories, Catholics, (‘crypto-’) Jacobites, and other malcontents . . . displaced, whether directly or indirectly, by Britain’s eighteenth-century nation-building—whose peripheral status in the dominant national narrative meant that the terms of their ‘Britishness’ were more fraught at ‘home’ and more easily renegotiated abroad” (3). Salyer argues that the stories of these eighteenth-century imperial agents or “factors,” and the various texts they produced in their negotiations for power, influenced the development of the historical novel in the nineteenth century (4). In this way, he contests Georg Lukács’s influential understanding of the genre as forged by the mass experiences of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, pointing instead to earlier contexts. This argument, promised in the introduction, best encapsulates the claims made in the first three chapters. Each traces the way that eighteenth-century imperial contexts or events in Scotland, Ireland, and North America reverberate in early nineteenth-century historical novels. Chapter 1 observes striking parallels between the early life of the fictional protagonist of Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) and that of Edmund Burke, who was raised in a Jacobite milieu in the west of Ireland. Salyer charts prismatic connections among the 1745 uprising, Jacobite literary culture more broadly, Burke’s writing, and Scott’s novel. The second chapter reads Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799) alongside the famous mid-eighteenth-century Irish case of James Annesley, who claimed that his baron father had sold him into indentured servitude in North America. Chapter 3 analyzes James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41) in the context of the quasi-legal concept of locum tenens, meaning a person who holds the place or substitutes for another. From the fourth chapter onward, the relationship between the individual chapters and the book’s overall argument becomes more gestural. Additional synthetic commentary, cross-references, or explanatory sign-posting would have been valuable. One subtle thread relates to metaphors of imperial community. Chapter 4 suggests that Frederick Marryat’s The [End Page 383] Phantom Ship (1839) figures the ship’s multi-ethnic community as a microcosm of the empire, though the chapter also discusses the novel’s refraction of the Lower Canada Rebellion (1837–38). The fifth chapter explores two real-life, failed attempts to bolster modern claims for power by drawing upon historical myths: Emperor Téwodros II of Ethiopia’s use of the “Prester John” myth in diplomatic negotiations, and the North American adventurer William Augustus Bowles’s use of the Madoc myth in efforts to establish a sovereign British–Native American state on the Gulf Coast. Readers of Victorian Periodicals Review might be drawn to chapter 6, which focuses on Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Salyer argues that Blackwood’s conceived of the collaborative, polyphonic nature of periodical writing as a metaphor for heterogeneous inherited traditions that resist the dominant metropolitan worldview. He suggests briefly that the magazine’s model of “Greater Britain” may have accorded with the way that the “service classes” conceived of their place in the empire (168). The seventh chapter, the coda, analyzes Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888) as anachronistic historical fiction that refigures the political adventurism of young British men in central Asia in the 1830s through the 1850s. The book’s relative disengagement with the racist violence of British imperialism is troubling. Salyer might reasonably observe that his analysis concerns a particular kind of misfit British man (always a man) whose perceived exclusion from dominant historical narratives led him to find personal and professional fulfillment in the empire, resulting in a...