Romanticism and Colonial Disease (review)

Alan Bewell. Romanticism and Colonial Disease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 373 pp. $45.00.

In this extraordinarily important, exhaustively documented book, Alan Bewell for the first time tracks the emergence in Britain between 1780 and 1848 of an understanding of the fundamental conjunction of colonial expansion with epidemic disease, both in the colonies themselves and, more anxiety-provoking, at home in England. As Britain sent its sailors, soldiers, colonial administrators, settlers, and missionaries in ever-larger numbers to farther-flung regions of the globe, they disseminated European diseases for which the natives of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands had no immunities. At the same time, they contracted diseases for which Europeans had no immunities, establishing "biomedical contact zones" (p. 3), or what Le Roy Ladurie has called a "common market of bacilli" (p. 4).

Bewell shows that this interchange of pathogens produced a new ideology of disease in the Romantic era. European doctors and colonialists increasingly "pathologized" entire areas of the globe as places that "needed to be cured" by Western medical practices, while they defined themselves, in contrast, as "disciplined," "hygienic," "clean," and "healthy." A specific dietary practice and regimen of physical exercise thus became conflated with moral self-discipline in the development of British national subjectivity. The very land of England was identified with good health; as Lord Mansfield so memorably announced in his antislavery judgment of 1772, "the air of England is too pure for slaves to breathe in."

But as Bewell trenchantly documents, the borders between England and the "pathogenic places" of its growing colonial empire could not be policed. Ever new and more virulent diseases invaded England. In a perceptive reading of Wordsworth's "The Ruined Cottage," Bewell traces the emergence of "the plague of war" and the condition of disease in the very heart of rural England. As Wordsworth reveals in "The Brothers," pastoralism itself has become a disease as homesick British sailors leap into the sea, imagining the green waves to be the very fields they yearn for. Bewell provides the appalling statistics: the death rates from disease in Britain's various military campaigns in South America, Canada, the West Indies, the Philippines, and Africa. So virulent were the diseases among the military in the West Indies, for instance--as the surgeon James Lind argued in his influential Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates (1768), and John Stedman revealed in his Narrative of a Five Year Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1792)--that European "soldiers . . . did not come home" (p. 71). The fate of sailors was little better, as Coleridge acknowledges in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." And those few who did return to England were permanently disabled by disease--here Wordsworth's crippled "discharged soldier" in ThePrelude is symptomatic of a widespread phenomenon.

More troubling to the British cultural imagination was the ever-growing presence of what came to be known as "tropical invalids," upper- and middle-class colonialists who had gone to India or the Americas to make or secure their fortunes, only to return enfeebled, jaundiced, consumptive, in permanent bad health. De Quincey powerfully evoked this diseased hybrid (the colonial European) in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater, as John Barrell first observed. In a brilliant reading of Jane Eyre, Bewell shows that England's claim to a "healthy heart" and invigorating clean air is everywhere undermined in this novel by the presence of the infected hybrid colonizer: both Richard and Bertha Mason are "tropical invalids," and both carry the infection into England (p. 289). Rather than remaining immune, Jane Eyre herself ends up breathing the "insalubrious" air of Ferndean, sharing a site of disease with the disabled Rochester. Her "sanitation campaigns," her "cleaning down" of Moor House and the miasmas of Marsh End, have signally failed to protect England from contagion.

In two telling chapters on Percy and Mary Shelley, Bewell first details Percy Shelley's optimistic belief that diseased environments might potentially be transformed by human...