Separate Accounts: Class and Colonization in the Early Stories of R.M. Ballantyne

Abstract

When addressing the role of the popular imperial romance in promulgating an ideology of empire, surveys of the genre have tended to identify that ideology with the ‘New Imperialism’ of the last three decades of the nineteenth century: Disraeli’s imperialism, ‘a new vision of an expanding, militant empire which was often linked with an undemocratic and illiberal imperial spirit glorifying British achievements and rule overseas’.1 The consequence for studies of boys’ adventure fiction is that stories written in this later period can receive subtle readings of their relation to their immediate historical context,2 while earlier fiction, by Frederick Marryat, W.H.G. Kingston, or the subject of this essay, R.M. Ballantyne, do not. It is read either without regard to its historical location, as if late-century doctrines of empire held sway throughout Victoria’s reign, or as developing in accordance with its own generic logic rather than under the pressure of changing historical circumstances.3 Yet empire was figured in mid-nineteenth-century British culture in ways that were quite specific to this period. The purpose of this article is to counter the unhistorical generalization common in treatments of adventure romance by demonstrating the complexity with which this type of fiction could engage with the midcentury context. It will do so by examining Ballantyne’s fiction of the late 1850s and early 1860s, concentrating on the last story in this stage of his career, Gascoyne the Sandal-Wood Trader (1863).4 This article’s account of class and colonization as interrelated discourses in this period, and of the deployment of these discourses in popular fiction, will I hope suggest much about the role of empire in mid-Victorian metropolitan culture more generally, suggestions which may be more broadly developed by future scholarship.