Romanticism and Colonial Disease (review)

Alan Bewell. Romanticism and Colonial Disease. Medicine and Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xv + 373 pp. Ill. $45.00.

Some years ago, Edward Said (Imperialism and Culture, 1992) reminded us that imperial expansion had had a profound impact upon the cultures of colonial powers. Said may have pushed his argument too far, claiming a centrality for imperial themes that was, in some cases, unjustified. But the same cannot be said of this excellent monograph: Alan Bewell demonstrates convincingly that anxieties over the human cost of empire were manifest in the literature of the Romantic period--in the works of such notable writers as Keats, Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley, as well as in a host of lesser-known travel narratives and factual works.

Romanticism and Colonial Disease begins with a useful chapter on "Romantic Medical Geography," which examines the framing of the tropics as a "pathogenic space" and then moves on to consider literary explorations of the experience of disease in the colonies. The analysis of "Colonial Military Disease Narratives," in which Bewell charts the growing literary awareness of the plight of British servicemen overseas, is particularly worthy of note. Gabriel Steadman, the chronicler of an expedition that set out in 1773 to quell the slave revolt in Surinam, was warned that "the Climate will murder you all" (p. 90); the warning proved prophetic, for fewer than 100 of the 1,650 men engaged to suppress the evolt returned alive.

Small wonder that many soldiers considered tropical service a form of punishment. By the time Steadman's account of the expedition was published in 1796, there was already widespread concern about the fate of British servicemen overseas. Literary works, such as Smollett's Roderick Random, were frank about the risks involved in tropical service. The medically trained Smollett portrayed the typical Georgian naval vessel as "a floating plague house" (p. 84) where stinking emanations combined with putrefying tropical air to cause epidemics of fever. Nevertheless, the eponymous hero of Smollett's novel opted for service in the West Indies when given the choice, in the sure knowledge that deaths from disease would provide opportunities for rapid promotion.

However, those servicemen who returned from the tropics faced an uncertain future, their lives often blighted by debility and disease. This aspect of colonial expansion has received little attention until now, and it is to the author's credit that he has devoted a whole chapter to what the British colonial physician James Johnson termed the "tropical invalid." Indeed, Bewell goes so far as to argue that Charlotte's Brontë's Jane Eyre can be read as a book on tropical invalidism: those who returned from the tropical colonies (in this case, Jamaica) wore a sallow and deathly countenance; they appeared neither foreign nor English, but a kind of hybrid, inferior to both.

One of the most interesting features of Romanticism and Colonial Disease is that it also considers how the tropics became a metaphor for sickness in Britain itself. Bewell argues that, with the advent of epidemic cholera in the 1830s, the natives of India and the "unwashed" of Britain emerged simultaneously as a sanitary threat, their habits being seen as conducive to the spread and propagation of disease. He makes the interesting point that the "fever nests" of urban England were seen as a "social replication of tropical nature, a special kind of pathogenic microclimate that had emerged in manufacturing cities" (p. 272). The same was apparently true of factories themselves, whose atmosphere writers such as Dickens and Engels described as feverish and enervating. The great heat generated by the machinery in these overcrowded and ill-ventilated workshops seemed to resemble that of the tropics, turning men into "pygmies" and stimulating early sexual development and licentiousness.

Bewell perhaps reads too much into the occasional allusions of Dickens and others, but his argument is largely convincing, and even when it is not wholly so, it is highly suggestive. Romanticism and Colonial...