Introduction

Abstract

Beginning with George Orwell’s novel Burmese Days and its portrait of the boredom and lethargy that characterized British colonial life in the 1930s, the introduction poses the question of when and why the British Empire became so monotonous and melancholy. It presents the book’s main argument: that despite the many and famous tales of glory and adventure, a significant and overlooked feature of the nineteenth-century British imperial experience was boredom and disappointment. It provides an overview of boredom’s historical and psychological origins, and summarizes the chapters that follow. It asserts that the empire came to be constructed as a place of adventure, opportunity, and picturesque beauty not so much because British men and women were seeking to escape from boredom at home, as has often been surmised, but because the empire lacked these very features.