War and the Victorians: Response

Victorianists have rediscovered war. The age of pax Britannica, it turns out, was not very peaceful after all. At least 196 “little wars” helped quadruple the size of the empire between 1837 and 1901 (Gooch 217). Big wars in Crimea and southern Africa also more or less bookended Victoria’s reign. Part of the reason for the myth of the long peace of the nineteenth century lies in contemporary understandings of Britain’s role in the wider world. While Conservatives embraced territorial expansion as a necessary characteristic of empire, Liberals took a more providential view, believing that the British Empire had, in the words of W. E. Gladstone, a “mighty mission” (“England’s” 570) to defend “the cause of public right, and of rational freedom” in imperial and international affairs (584).¹ It thus seems less surprising that the Victorian period witnessed a great many of Rudyard Kipling’s so-called “savage wars of peace” (line 18).

This year’s NAVSA conference theme, “Victorians and the World,” elicited responses from the disciplines of history, literature, art history, and others that read old debates about British power, colonial and otherwise, in new ways. British engagements in Crimea, southern Africa, Afghanistan, India, Egypt, and Sudan all received attention from literary and historical perspectives. The three papers by Lara Kriegel, Jonathan Franklin, and Melissa Free featured in this cluster explore the distinctive ways in which war played a central role in constructing Victorian worldviews. Kriegel uses the Crimean War (1854–56) as a touchstone for understanding how Victorians grappled with the idea of war on the eve of another great conflict, World War I (1914–18). Franklin understands the North African colonial wars of the 1880s as important in producing new ways of understanding the nomad as “other.” Finally, Free explores how Kipling’s ambivalence about British identity is revealed in subtle and unexpected ways in his writings about the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). In each of these accounts, war does more than merely provide a setting in which to talk about culture and identity. Rather, these papers explore key tensions inherent to nation- and empire-building in the nineteenth century—a time when war stands in constant dialogue with a presumed gospel of peace.

The wars Victorians fought were all imperial wars, but they were not always wars fought for empire. Scholars of Victorian Britain are especially well positioned, perhaps more so than those working in other fields, to understand the truism that in the era of the nation-state, the age of empire still reigned. Britain saw itself in competition with European land and seaborne empires. In response, the nation crafted a foreign policy that defended the interests of the British Empire while also preventing the imperial expansion of its Russian, Ottoman, French, and other rivals (Tusan 50–51). The wars in Crimea, Afghanistan, and North Africa were, variably, the results of actual competition or the effects of a fear of competition with the land-based European empires.

Britain’s status as both empire and nation-state speaks to the importance of considering specific wars in the larger context of Victorian geopolitical priorities. These issues traditionally have been the stuff of military and diplomatic historians.² Studying war from other subfields and disciplinary perspectives has proved challenging. Diplomatic history’s “cultural turn” has not yielded the results for Victorian studies that it might. While the Crimean War and the Boer Wars have received frequent treatment by researchers, the facts of Victoria’s small wars have largely belonged to the realm of curiosity rather than serious scholarly investigation. In a strange sort of Orwellian turn, it seems that war for the Victorians was both everywhere and nowhere.

This paradox sent me to the archives of Victorian Studies. How have Victorian scholars talked about war in the past? Not surprisingly, military and popular histories have predominated over literary and cultural analysis. Historians writing for a popular audience also wrote regularly about war and had books reviewed in the journal.³ Often these books appeared in what one reviewer called an “unending stream,” coinciding with a key anniversary...