British Imagination Research Articles

“The Corner Case Contains an Arctic Scene”

Following examples such as The Arctic and the British Imagination by David and Imagining the Arctic by Lewis-Jones this work focuses on the changing interpretations of the idea of the Arctic as it follows the interpretation of a taxidermied polar bear over approximately sixty years in three different exhibitions. Beginning in the 1880s this polar bear represented the resources available in the Arctic at international exhibitions. When the polar bear entered the Horniman Free Museum (London) in 1890 the interpretation changed to represent the wildlife of the Arctic in an “Arctic Scene”. Finally, in the twentieth century, the polar bear’s interpretation changed again to stress the evolutionary differences between large mammals, specifically those of the Arctic. Although the museum sold the polar bear in 1948, the analysis of this object in these institutions presents a model for understanding the construction and colonial interpretations of the Arctic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

‘Very curious and romantick Views’: Captain Cook’s Antarctic explorations and aesthetic education

In all three of James Cook’s expeditions to the Pacific, visual artists were hired by the Royal Society and the Admiralty to communicate scientific information that relied on visual evidence, while conveying the embodied experience of travel. The present article focuses on the representational challenges raised by the encounter with the Antarctic during the polar explorations of the second voyage (1772–75), with an emphasis on Cook’s textual accounts and William Hodges’s sketches and illustrations, which are shown to provide an interesting angle on the contemporary debates about the respective abilities of words and images, both as paths to knowledge and as sources of aesthetic experience. After a brief discussion of the complementary epistemological function of words and images in Cook’s Pacific voyages, this article argues that the specific representational issues raised by the encounter with the Antarctic not only encouraged Cook to reflect about the value of images for the publication of his discoveries, but also partook of his own aesthetic education, with significant and long-lasting implications for the subsequent construction of polar regions in the British imagination.

The Mayflower and Historical Culture in Britain, 1620–2020

Abstract In 2020 the Anglo-American world marked the 400th anniversary of the trans-Atlantic Mayflower voyage with a programme of activities. Intensive and focused interest in the story of the Mayflower is not a new phenomenon—especially in the United States, where it is the bedrock of the nation’s ‘origin story’. But the tale of the Pilgrims has historically also captured the British imagination. This article outlines a chronology for understanding the cultural importance in Britain of this voyage, from the New England chroniclers to the postcolonial critiques of historians today. In between, it offers a thematic analysis of the different groups which could use the story in their construction of morality and identity, from Romanticists and abolitionists to Anglo-American diplomats and civic boosters. Understanding the afterlife of the voyage in this long perspective, we argue, provides us with a more nuanced understanding of how ideas of history develop and evolve within broader arenas of politics and civil society. We use the concept of historical culture: an approach that is attuned to the interplay between memory, public history, heritage and popular history, and across forms of media (novels, plays, film) and spaces of interaction (cities, politics, movements). As the vogue for commemoration continues to exert power in Britain and beyond, and so does an increasing demand for more critical approaches to historical redress, we thus develop a critical framework that understands the powerful draw of ‘history’—both past and present.

Yugoslavia in the British Imagination: Peace, War and Peasants before Tito by Samuel Foster (review)

Yugoslavia in the British Imagination: Peace, War and Peasants before Tito by Samuel Foster (review)

The British in Arabia: the Genealogy of a Romantic Discourse and the Colonial (De)construction of Palestine

Abstract: The Romanticization of Arabia and of the noble Arab in the British imagination has long been apparent, exemplified by figures such as Richard Burton and T. E. Lawrence. However, the Romantic origins of British discourses on Arabia have never been fully explored. Tracing the evolution of the Romantic symbols of the ‘Arab’ and ‘Arabia’ in Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley and their entanglement in racial discourses of the later nineteenth century, this paper describes the mechanics of the discursive construction of the region, arguing that the morphology of the British colonization of the Arabian Peninsula is grounded in Romantic symbolism.

Haiti in the British Imagination: Imperial Worlds, 1847-1915, by Jack Daniel Webb

Reviewed by: Haiti in the British Imagination: Imperial Worlds, 1847–1915 by Jack Daniel Webb Tim Watson (bio) Haiti in the British Imagination: Imperial Worlds, 1847–1915, by Jack Daniel Webb; pp. xii + 270. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020, £95.00, $130.00. Haiti and Britain have a long, complex, and significant entanglement, but scholarship on those connections has been scarce. Haiti has been silenced in the European and North American imagination, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995). In the British context, that silencing has been ongoing for more than two hundred years, since Britain’s disastrous 1790s invasion of the territory that would become independent Haiti. The combination of Black rebel armies and yellow fever utterly defeated the British army, killing more than 10,000 men. This inglorious imperial episode was actively forgotten in the years that followed. It haunted the British imagination nevertheless: for example, in the “meagre,” “ghastly” figure of the discharged soldier in Book 4 of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805), who returns to England from “the Tropic Islands” not as a military hero but as a figure of convalescent abjection (1850 edition, edited by Basil Worsfold, [The De la More Press, 1904], Book 4, lines 395, 398, 424). Haiti in the British Imagination: Imperial Worlds, 1847–1915 is a noteworthy and welcome contribution to recent scholarly efforts to redress this silencing and to accord Haiti its rightful place in anglophone cultural history. Lucidly written and impressively researched, Jack Daniel Webb’s book is structured around flash points when Haitians and Britons interacted at the edges of the formal British empire, analyzing the refraction of those encounters in the British public sphere. Webb convincingly argues, “From the ‘margins’, Haiti repeatedly returned to the forefront of British debates, providing a powerful example of a decolonised alternative to British imperial systems” (5). Although the emphasis is on Britain, as the book’s title suggests, Haitian intellectuals and politicians are significant characters in the book, shaping the ways in which they were represented. Webb spends time on Faustin Soulouque, for example, who declared himself emperor of Haiti in 1849, and on Alonzo Potter Holly, who was educated at Cambridge University and at New York Medical College, becoming a doctor and Haitian consul in the Bahamas (and later becoming a prominent Black community leader in 1920s Miami, although this is beyond the timeline and scope of Webb’s book). [End Page 709] A great strength of the book is the author’s archival research, which shows that while sensationalist, racist British tropes about Haiti were solidifying and repeating throughout the nineteenth century, British agents of empire on the ground in Haiti had to navigate a series of complex, shifting challenges, as Haitians worked to influence inter-imperial relations in the Caribbean. Most strikingly, Webb’s research in Foreign Office diplomatic papers provides a new context for the most notorious of all British accounts of Haiti, Spenser St. John’s Hayti, or the Black Republic (1884). St. John’s book—influential well into the twentieth century—promoted myths of Haitian cannibalism and sorcery, the author capitalizing on his previous posting as British consul in Port-au-Prince to claim eyewitness authority for his primitivist fantasies. Webb reads the diplomatic correspondence between St. John and his London bosses to recast The Black Republic as a retroactive literary revenge on Haitians who refused to recognize white supremacy or to acknowledge the beneficence of British power. For example, St. John had written in outrage to London in 1864 describing a Haitian general who had had the audacity to linger in the gardens of the consulate and to inform the British official “that he should stop on my premises as long as he pleased[,] and on my then requesting him to leave he addressed the most insulting language to myself” (qtd. in Webb 143). Webb’s research shows us the practical difficulties experienced by British agents in managing relations with Haiti and their profound discomfort in encountering Haitian independence in practice. In the fourth chapter, the author analyzes a fascinating set of diplomatic exchanges in the first decade of the twentieth century, as London...

Haiti in the British Imagination: Imperial Worlds, 1847–1915 , by Jack Daniel Webb

Haiti in the British Imagination: Imperial Worlds, 1847–1915 , by Jack Daniel Webb

Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism, 1881–1922 by Rebecca Beasley

Reviewed by: Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism, 1881–1922 by Rebecca Beasley Tatiana Kuzmic Beasley, Rebecca. Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism, 1881–1922. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2020. xvi + 533 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £93.00: $125.00. Much has been written about the admiration prominent British modernists, most notably Virginia Woolf, had for the giants of nineteenth-century Russian literature once it became available to them in Constance Garnett’s and others’ translations. Rebecca Beasley’s new book emphasizes the important role that Russian writing played in the debates that shaped the very definition of modernism as it follows the course of the battle between French and Russian influences. The French tradition emphasized style, which has since become known as the defining feature of modernism, while the Russian became a repository for old-time romantic values, characterized by a kind of ‘linguistic optimism’ (p. 27) in its portrayal of individual life experiences and, by extension, a belief that a national literature could be representative of national identity. It ultimately lost the battle, however, as Francophile modernism became the main narrative about modernism and occluded Russia’s role, which Beasley’s Russomania brings to light. The book is somewhat unusually structured, with four lengthy chapters and three much shorter ‘interchapters’ that address lesser-known Russophile players in the development of British modernism. Each section brims with detail that at times seems overwhelming, but Beasley is deft at leading the reader through it, providing intermittent summaries of previous chapters that help to hold this immense book together. The story of British Russomania begins with the arrival of Russian émigrés to England in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and their collaboration with British socialists in translating and promoting Russian literature. The two main groups in this initial period were the Chaikovskii circle, which garnered sympathy for Russian revolutionary politics, and the Tolstoyan movement [End Page 537] with its emphasis on simplicity in both life and art. Chapter two focuses on the battle between the Francophile and Russophile strands of English modernism as played out on the pages of Ford Maddox Ford’s English Review, providing a different narrative to the accepted belief that the journal merely recorded the passing of the torch to the second generation of modernists. While firmly on the side of the Franchophiles as ‘artists’ and promoters of ‘imaginative literature’, Ford published their pieces alongside those he deemed ‘propagandist’ and ‘factual’, while himself having to strike a delicate balance between his own Tory politics and appeasing his revolutionary brother-in-law, on whose funding the publication of the journal increasingly depended. Russian literature acquired a new role as the First World War approached and the British public needed convincing that Russia was a worthier ally than Germany. The first generation of Russian émigrés in Britain separated Russian literature from the Russian state in order to win British approval, but these two now needed to be aligned if the British public was going to be comfortable with what was widely perceived as a brutal tsarist regime as a new war ally. An emphasis on Russia’s youth as a civilization (only recently discovered by the British readership) offered the promise of progress, while the notion of civilization was redefined to mean ‘simplicity, authenticity, and spiritual freedom’ (p. 253), values that had been associated with Russian literature since it first captured the British imagination. Where Tolstoi had played a significant role in the first period, Dostoevskii now rose in prominence as a prophet depicting the apocalypse of modern civilization, acting as a powerful coercive voice for those English writers who were not convinced of the rightness of England’s alliance with Russia or the rightness of the war at all. The final chapter considers the next generation of Russophilic dissenters from Francophile modernism, anti-Bolshevik sentiment in the wake of the October Revolution, and the rise of Chekhov’s influence on British literature. By this time, with the emergence of T. S. Eliot, ‘the contours of modernism were hardening’ (p. 345), and the Francophile aesthetic had won. The book’s three interchapters feature the...

Yugoslavia in the British Imagination, Peace: War and Peasants before Tito. By Samuel Foster. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. xv, 225 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Maps. $115.00, hard bound.

Yugoslavia in the British Imagination, Peace: War and Peasants before Tito. By Samuel Foster. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. xv, 225 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Maps. $115.00, hard bound. - Volume 81 Issue 2

Preface to "Wheatley Pedagogies: A Forum on Teaching"

Preface to "Wheatley PedagogiesA Forum on Teaching" Tara A. Bynum (bio), Brigitte Fielder (bio), and Cassander L. Smith (bio) The essays that constitute this pedagogy forum address strategies for teaching Wheatley by attending to both the context of her historical moment and our own. Importantly, the essays highlight strategies for teaching Wheatley in a variety of settings—classrooms, scholarly conferences, and public events. They also provide interdisciplinary approaches to studying her life and work. This forum makes clear that teaching Wheatley offers students transformative opportunities for profound learning and even unlearning. [End Page 797] Tara A. Bynum University of Iowa Brigitte Fielder University of Wisconsin–Madison Cassander L. Smith University of Alabama Tara A. Bynum tara a. bynum is an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. Her book Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America is forthcoming in fall 2022 from the New Black Studies Series at the University of Illinois Press. Brigitte Fielder brigitte fielder is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke UP, 2020) and coeditor of Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print (U of Wisconsin P, 2019). She is currently writing a book about racialized human-animal relationships in the long nineteenth century, which shows how childhood becomes a key site for humanization and racialization. Cassander L. Smith cassander l. smith is an associate professor of English and associate dean for academic affairs in the Honors College at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic (LSU Press, 2016) and coeditor of The Earliest African American Literatures (UNC Press, 2021). Currently, she is working on a monograph, Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic, under contract with LSU Press. The book examines respectability as a coping strategy for early Black Americans like Phillis Wheatley. Copyright © 2022 The University of North Carolina Press

Equal Outsiders: Woolf and Coleridge Thinking Community, Romance, and Education in the Face of War

Equal Outsiders:Woolf and Coleridge Thinking Community, Romance, and Education in the Face of War Laura Cernat In a passage from Three Guineas (1938), which rhetorically foreshadows Churchill's famous June 1940 "we shall fight on the beaches" speech, Virginia Woolf prompts women to preserve and expand their ancestresses' habit of thinking critically even while lacking some comforts. Joining the newly-available public sphere, women who had thought "while they stirred the pot" (2001a: 160) are now called to become more articulate: Let us think in offices; in omnibuses; while we are standing in the crowd watching Coronations . . . let us think as we pass the Cenotaph; and in Whitehall; in the gallery of the House of Commons; in the Law Courts; let us think at baptisms and marriages and funerals. Let us never cease from thinking—what is this "civilization" in which we find ourselves? . . . Where . . . is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men? (161) These lines echo Blake's "I will not cease from mental fight," which Woolf explicitly cites later in "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid" (1942: 155). Woolf often interweaves Romantic tropes in her plea against war. Near the end of Three Guineas, for example, she alludes to Coleridge's line from "Kubla Khan," "ancestral voices prophesying war"1 (Coleridge 1954: 298), when she speaks of "some ancestral memory prophesying war" (Woolf 2001a: 218). Such resonances of Romantic affects in Modernism are both frequent and meaningful, as the work of Mary Favret (2010) and Alexandra Harris (2010) shows. While Favret emphasizes the skewed remoteness of war imagery, especially for the British imagination, and Harris sees the Modernists' return to the Romantics as a tradition-embracing homecoming, an "imaginative claiming of England" [End Page 121] (10), they both give less attention to the implications of the Romantic connection for a conception of community that truly goes beyond nationalism. Building on an understudied textual reference, this paper traces some threads that tie Woolf's attitudes towards war to her critical response to Romantic political thought, particularly Coleridge's, as she works to dissociate the representation of women from "romance" (a trivialized inheritance of Romanticism) and recover the societal ideals of Romanticism for the feminist cause. Significantly, Woolf refers to Romantic writers at a crucial point in her argument. After delving into historical and socio-economic issues, after invoking both "the white light of facts" and "the coloured light of biography" (2001a: 143), after imagining the Society of Outsiders, Woolf sounds weary, almost unsure at the end of Three Guineas. Having unveiled the connection between war, capitalist greed, and the oppression of women, having proposed indifference to honors and the refusal of excess as chief solutions, Woolf points to something not yet fully thought out: "we can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods" (241). To indicate the purpose of these new, outsider-specific methods, Woolf falls back on "the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty" (241) and, in her very last endnote, cites three sources that might reveal "the views and aims of the outsiders" (293): Romantic writers from different nations—S. T. Coleridge, Walt Whitman, and George Sand. Woolf's use of three examples from the 19th century suggests a renewed reliance on the Romantic paradigm. Although Favret, drawing on Woolf's notes in "The Leaning Tower" about the relatively limited effects of war on novelists such as Austen and Scott, thinks that Woolf underestimated her own remoteness from war and unfairly considered the 19th century "immune" to mass conflict in a way the 20th century was not (Favret 46), Woolf's return to the Romantics and their social models at the end of her pacifist essay suggests that her very conception of the nature of mass conflict has its roots in the 19th century. There is more at stake in Woolf's pointing towards Coleridge as a precursor of the Society of Outsiders than first meets the eye. This neglected reference reveals a deep-seated affinity between the two writers' worldviews, which functions in spite of (or perhaps...

Haiti in the British Imagination: Imperial Worlds, 1847-1915. By Jack Daniel Webb

<i>Haiti in the British Imagination: Imperial Worlds, 1847-1915</i>. By Jack Daniel Webb

The Hilditch-McGill Chinese Palace Temple: Exhibitions, Mass Culture, and China in the British Imagination in the 1920s.

In February 1926, Chinese art collector John Hilditch opened the Hilditch-McGill Chinese Palace Temple in Manchester. Filling a garage with Chinese objects and performing what he claimed to be Buddhist rituals, Hilditch insisted the temple offered visitors a chance to see Chinese art in 'actual Chinese fashion and atmosphere'. This article analyses Hilditch's attempts to construct an authentic temple and visitor accounts of its realism to analyse the relationship between high and low culture, and how China was understood and imagined in the 1920s. It shows how Hilditch's combination of sensory effects adopted from mass culture and claims to museum notions of scientific verification, in addition to the projection of well-established stereotypes of China, skewed understandings of authenticity and invited faith-albeit most likely 'ironic' faith-in the temple's legitimacy. Scholars have argued that the rise of mass culture prompted art museums to restructure on high cultural values but interpretation of the temple as a museum shows that the lines between mass culture and museums were blurred. The temple thereby encourages a broader definition of museums and complicates our understanding of interwar culture more generally by showing how the categories of high and low culture were less stable than some scholars have presumed.

Alfred Russel Wallace and the Models of Amazonian “Indians” Displayed at the Crystal Palace Ethnological Exhibition

Abstract This paper discusses Alfred Russel Wallace’s Amazonian ethnography and his collaboration with Robert Latham on the models of indigenous Amazonian peoples that were placed on display at the Crystal Palace ethnological exhibition in 1854. The reception of scholars and the public to this innovative work is also considered. Wallace’s involvement in the first British ethnological exhibition of large proportions was fundamental to the dissemination of his work, which made a valuable contribution to a field of study—the ethnology of South America—that was still in its infancy in Britain, in marked contrast to Portugal, Spain, Germany and France. Wallace’s field observations of indigenous peoples were instilled in the British imagination through the handbook to the exhibition, in which Latham stressed the importance of Wallace’s descriptions to the advancement of the field of ethnology. Indeed, Wallace’s ethnographic accounts were deemed to provide an authoritative supplement to James Prichard’s preliminary and still somewhat limited ethnological map of northern South America, contributing to the creation of a more complete picture of the indigenous Amazonian peoples of Brazil.

The bewildered peasant: family, migration and murder in the Greek Cypriot community in London

Abstract Greek Cypriots became a key feature of early post-Second World War London. This article focuses on the case of the penultimate woman hanged in Britain, Styllou Christofi, who was executed in December 1954 for the murder of her German-born daughter-in-law, Hella. It outlines the emergence of the Cypriot community in London, tackles the image of the Cypriot in the British imperial imagination and investigates the hostility that this new community faced in Britain. The article investigates the nature of family in Cyprus and London and questions why Cypriots have received so little attention from historians, despite their numbers.

Robert Holland. The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination.

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Robert Holland, 2018. The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination

Robert Holland, 2018. The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination

From Orientalism to Cultural Capital: The Myth of Russia in British Literature of the 1920s by Soboleva Olga (review)

SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 342 whilst also narrating details of Wells’s three visits to Russia and the Soviet Union. Nadel’s rather reverential attitude is offset by the edgier tone adopted by Galya Diment in her account of the relationship between Wells and his lover Odette Keun, whose first-hand experience of many of the horrors of life in the Soviet Union is juxtaposed with Wells’s more sympathetic stance. If the nine chapters making up the main part of this volume concentrate primarily on Wells’s works, then a welcome appendix of six translations of memoiristic and observational writing by V. D. Nabokov (father of the novelist), Aleksandr Amfiteatrov, Aleksandr Beliaev, Karl Radek and Solomon Lozovsky, Iurii Olesha and Iulii Kagarlitskii contains some evocative pen portraits of the author and his entourage. Reflecting Russian interest in the man, as much as the author, these set the artistic and political influence of Wells’s work into a very human context and remind us of the contingency of the personal passions and antipathies which shape cultural exchange. H. G. Wells and All Things Russian takes its place in the burgeoning field of recent scholarship on Anglo-Russian relations, a field to which its editor has already made so many significant contributions. Wadham College, University of Oxford P. R. Bullock Soboleva, Olga and Wrenn, Angus. From Orientalism to Cultural Capital: The Myth of Russia in British Literature of the 1920s. Peter Lang, Oxford, Bern, Vienna and New York, 2017. xiii + 337 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €61.95: £49.95: $75.95 (paperback). This book utilizes the theories of Edward Said and Pierre Bourdieu to examine the shift in British perceptions of Russia that occurred in the early twentieth century. The first chapter revisits familiar Russian tropes offered by British travellers to the country, summed up on page 31 as ‘barbarism, despotism, and extreme cold’. The argument is rooted in Said’s scholarship, but it was surprising to see only one reference to Larry Wolff, whose monograph Inventing Eastern Europe (Stanford, CA, 1994) has already done the work of applying Said’s concept to Western Europe’s geographically closer other, and defines it as ‘an intellectual project of demi-Orientalization’ (p. 7). As the first chapter proceeds to describe the turn-about of the British imagination, one is struck by how quickly Russophilia replaced Russophobia, especially when the authors remind us that the two countries waged wars against one another in Crimea in the 1850s and then again at the turn of the century in north-west India. The rebranding testifies to the great power of literary masterpieces, since it was the onslaught of Constance Garnett’s REVIEWS 343 translations that played the crucial role in turning recent military enemies into aesthetic lovers. No author can be credited more with this shift than John Galsworthy, whose contribution, as the authors state in the opening of chapter two, ‘is difficult to overrate’ (p. 65). He viewed Russian authors as more spiritual and more sincere than the English and, therefore, their works as more broadly encompassing of the human condition. Tolstoi occupied the first place among them, and the parallels between War and Peace and Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga are obvious, but it was Turgenev who influenced his aesthetic the most. H.G.WellstravelledtoRussiathreetimesand,asanenthusiasticsupporterof the Russian Revolution, made enemies at home among both English politicians and Russian émigrés. His view of Russia, though not explicitly identified so by the authors, had more to do with Orientalism than cultural capital. ‘Regarding the influence of Russian literature on Wells’ own writing, one can hardly make the case for any definitive impact’ (p. 111), while his visits to the country were ‘dominated by his mental schemes and preconceptions’ (p. 109), which allowed him to see what he wished to see and reinforce his own politics. For this reason, this third chapter of the book also begs for more engagement with Wolff, especially when it describes Wells ‘seeing Russia as a prospective social project’ (p. 130), which echoes Wolff’s assessment of Eastern Europe as ‘the laboratory of ideological exploration’ (p. 236) for French philosophers. J. M. Barrie was another author not...

The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination, by Robert Holland

Reviewed by: The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination by Robert Holland Eric R. Dursteler (bio) The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination, by Robert Holland; pp. xiv + 317. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018, $35.00. Each summer millions of British vacationers disgorge from discount airlines at destinations across the Mediterranean. Some are drawn by the region's rich history and culture, many more by its beaches and nightlife. Few are likely aware that they follow in the footsteps of generations of forebears on a quintessentially British pilgrimage. In his highly erudite and captivating book The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination, Robert Holland explores the deep roots of this British sentiment for the Mediterranean and the role that it has played in British culture. While British connections to the sea date back to at least Roman times, Holland argues that it is only beginning in the mid-eighteenth century that the Mediterranean began to function as a "laboratory for ideological, political and cultural struggles within Britain" (4). Increased interaction and rivalry in this period gave rise to a cultural inferiority complex vis-à-vis France and, to a lesser extent, Germany. Though its political, [End Page 126] industrial, and economic stars were in ascendance, the British gentry felt a nagging suspicion that they were "crude and untutored" and that a glaring cultural gap separated them from their continental kin (5). The Mediterranean provided a prepackaged, esteemed legacy that Britons might co-opt, transfer, and translate into a cultural hybrid that partly filled this void, while also serving as a touchstone for comprehending and living in the modern world. This multi-century instinct was "riveted" into the British national psyche and experience (259). The book is organized in a half-dozen chapters with a straightforward chronological structure and a fluid narrative format. Each follows a set pattern: the primary focus is on Italy, followed by Greece, with Spain usually treated more cursorily. This is a high cultural history in the traditional sense: elite poets, artists, writers, and sculptors own the stage. Indeed, the cast of characters is a who's who of British society: Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Benjamin Disraeli, John Ruskin, William Gladstone, John Singer Sargent, and Robert Graves. Everyone who was anyone traveled at the very least to Italy, and many set down roots, usually in British hothouses that isolated them from the uncouth local heirs of these formerly great lands. The book begins in the pivotal period 1740 to 1800: this is when the Grand Tour became an essential element in the finishing school for noble men and a growing number of women. Italy occupied pride of place on the itinerary; Greece, while highly prized, was more distant and thus less often visited; Spain was generally avoided for historical and religious reasons. The eruption of Napoleon onto the scene was profoundly disruptive both politically and psychologically for Britons seeking to parse their standing in the world. The early Victorian period, 1830 to 1860, while on the surface a time of growing power and confidence, was actually characterized by significant "fears of individual and collective decay" (111). During the high Victorian period, 1860 to 1890, the Mediterranean preserved its centrality within what was a fundamentally conservative British culture. Elevation and imitation of the past served as a familiar and reliable aesthetic counterweight to the revolutionary changes that were disrupting and energizing the continent. "Cultural despair" combined with "a sense of national fragility" (192) and the enduring sense of a British "aesthetic void" characterized the years preceding the Great War (193). Some turned to vibrant continental cultural centers for inspiration, but more often modernism was processed through the familiar Mediterranean cult of beauty. In the post-war era, classicism provided a familiar harbor for a healing civilization. During the Second World War the Mediterranean was the most important British front after the homeland, and following the war the region once again became an escape for Britons fleeing the home-front's "cultural deadness" (249) and the enduring "unresolved confusion" about Britain's cultural identity and relevance (262). Beyond simply providing a cultural education, the Mediterranean was profoundly...

William Le Queux and Russia

This article examines how Le Queux’s writings about Russia both reflected and shaped the construction of the country in the British imagination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first part examines Le Queux’s early novels, showing how his conviction that tsarist Russia posed a major threat to the security of the British Empire was reflected in his surprisingly positive treatment of the Russian revolutionary movement. The second part then examines how Le Queux’s later writings on Russia reflected the changing nature of international politics following the outbreak of war in 1914. Russia’s new-found status as Britain’s ally in the First World War shaped the content of a number of books written by Le Queux in 1917–1918. These include Rasputin the Rascal Monk (1917) and The Minister of Evil: The Secret History of Rasputin’s Betrayal of Russia (1918), in which Le Queux claimed that Rasputin was a creature of the German government.