Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain by Katherine Judith Anderson
Katherine Judith Anderson's Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain contributes to the expanding critical conversation around the role of liberal ideology in the long nineteenth century and its part in the formation of liberal capitalist modernity. Her book builds on the work of, among others, Amanda Anderson, Sukanya Banerjee, Nathan Hensley, and Lauren Goodlad. Anderson connects their studies of liberalism to explorations of bodily pain by Rachel Ablow, Lucy Bending, and Pamela Gilbert. She defines torture as "a state-sanctioned, physical or mental means of compulsion that is inflicted to elicit a specific response from either the victim, those who hear about the act … or both" (5). Her principal claim is that acts of torture became "foundational to Western modernity" during the nineteenth century and that Victorian and early twentieth-century literature reveals the complex evolution of the phenomenon (13). Most important for Anderson, however, is the concurrent phenomenon of what she describes as "the moments of possibility provided by liberalism's failures: that is, the moments when the seeming breakdown of liberal values under torture opens a space of possibility for tortured citizens to assert their rights" (10). Drawing upon fiction, government reports, and the periodical press, Anderson's five chapters explore representations of torture in the widely differing contexts of religion, imperial bureaucracy, the military, the family, and settler society in Oceania and southern Africa. Although the categories may at first appear to present unlikely juxtapositions, collectively they build a compelling case for the pervasiveness of torture and its significance for the liberal social structures with which it is ostensibly at odds but for which, Anderson shows, it has grown into a crucial underpinning. [End Page 142]
Chapter 1 focuses on half a dozen novels from the 1850s and 1860s that will be largely unfamiliar to most readers, all of which deal with the "liturgy of torture" (20). Anderson suggests their acutely graphic accounts of physical suffering establish "a kind of immersive ekphrasis, allowing the reader-witness to expand her phenomenological understanding and therefore her belief" (29). This empathetic experience becomes foundational to the ways in which nineteenth-century fiction engages the reader with both the anguish torture inflicts and its implications for the social context that permits and, indeed, furthers it. This first chapter, however, is Anderson's least compelling. Rather too attentive to secondary sources, it provides a substantive reading of only one of its chosen texts (George Eliot's Romola [1862]) and offers no support for the later claim that such martyrological fiction "flooded the market" (48). The argument here feels at once underdeveloped and overstated.
Chapters 2 through 5, by contrast, develop much richer and more persuasive cases. Of particular interest to readers of Victorian Periodicals Review will be chapters 2 and 3, which make extensive use of periodical sources for their evidence. Both deal with the role of torture in maintaining British imperial control: chapter 2 focuses on a mid-1850s investigation into claims that East India Company officials in the Madras Presidency had used torture to extract land-tax payments from native farmers, while chapter 3 examines the brutal British response to the Morant Bay uprising of the following decade. Anderson moves between documents recording official investigations of these events and the ways in which they were reported and discussed in the periodical press. In doing so, she reveals how torture developed into "the modern tool of a Western government" and how profoundly it debilitated not only its victims but many of its perpetrators "bent on preventing financial crisis through the production of colonial tax revenue" (47). As she demonstrates convincingly, issues of individual accountability succumbed to the pressures of official mandates, routinizing the use of coercive methods in previously unprecedented ways. Her illustrations come from a wide range of both national and provincial journalism, from the Times and Household Words to the Leeds Mercury and the Belfast Newsletter. Anderson shows how shock at actions carried out on behalf of British economic interests and the conservation of its global power resonated across publications serving a wide range of audiences and representing very different political viewpoints. Understandably, given that her focus is upon torture rather than the periodical press itself, she moves quickly between the various publications she cites and does not examine any single venue in greater depth. The very diversity of her examples, however, offers fertile lines of inquiry for researchers specifically interested in periodicals. One might, for example, imagine new layers of meaning to be [End Page 143] found in the Illustrated London News's coverage of the Indian Uprising when read through the lens Anderson provides.
Chapters 4 and 5 return to more conventional literary analysis, using fiction to examine representations of torture in British family life and settler environments, respectively. Chapter 4, "Family: Gendered Liberalism and Patriarchal Sovereignty," reads The Egoist (1879), Daniel Deronda (1876), and He Knew He Was Right (1869) as novels that "disrupt rather than normalize gender discrimination, breaking the linear trajectory of the courtship plot through an insertion of torture at various points along the way" (110). In a set of fully developed, insightful discussions, Anderson shows how such fiction "interrogates the fault lines in liberal modes of consent and contractual agency," making a convincing case for the connection between British domestic culture and its operations as a global power (115). She also demonstrates how powerfully these novels "disoriented readers who had come to the texts with their generic orientations firmly in place, only to have their horizons forcibly expanded" (135). Chapter 5 completes the book's argument by discussing three 1890s short stories by Louis Becke, all set in Oceania; three novels by Bertram Mitford about the Cape Colony set in the same decade; and W. C. Sculley's 1923 novel Daniel Varanda. With well-developed discussions of Becke's and Mitford's texts in particular, Anderson challenges "an easy categorization of the imperial adventure genre" to demonstrate torture's role in the ways in which such "settler colonial fictions challenge the artificial divide between imperial force and slavery on the one hand and colonial settlement and global capitalism on the other" (139, 141). Having used these two sets of texts effectively, it is not quite clear why the discussion then leaps three decades ahead and into the very different world created by World War I and its aftermath. As a result, the brief final section on Daniel Varanda feels somewhat redundant to the chapter's argument.
In closing, Anderson expresses the hope that Twisted Words will invite her readers to continue the conversation about the role of torture in nineteenth-century culture and its ongoing implications for how the liberal state maintains order. This it will surely do. Although the originary dissertation at times peeks through, particularly in the first chapter and in the choices of evidentiary texts throughout the book, the richness of her discussion of fiction, especially that of George Eliot, is eye-opening. Torture, as current events have shown only too tragically, is not simply an artefact of capitalist modernity. As Twisted Words makes tellingly visible, its role in the formulation and support of liberal democracy has been profound and remains alarmingly with us. [End Page 144]
Iain Crawford is Professor of English at the University of Delaware and the author of Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press (2020), which was runner-up for the RSVP Colby Prize. He is currently working on the paper supply crisis of the 1850s and a larger project on the British press and the American Civil War.