The Insurgent Invasion of Anti-Colonial Idols in Late-Victorian Literature: Richard Marsh and F. Anstey

The fascination with the presence of the Indian/Oriental idol in Victorian London is a literary cornucopia that manifests variously in end-of-the-century fiction, particularly in Marsh's The Goddess: A Demon and Anstey's A Fallen Idol. These idols, Hindoo in Marsh and Jain in Anstey, are overdetermined in their association with Buddhism, Theosophy, and Spiritualism. What is determinative are the tensions between them and the anxieties about anti-colonial insurgency in the imperial metropolis. This discussion investigates the uncanny threat of the lifeless yet life-like colonial object that the idols signify and then analyzes the machine/automaton-like nature of this object, one that echoes with several narratives of insidious colonial insurgence. Besides suggesting the late-nineteenth-century English fears of an angry wave of Indian anti-colonial insurgency, the idols also come to embody the Western tensions surrounding industrialization and colonialism that were reaching their peak in the English readerly imagination of the 1880s and 1890s.