Imperial Literature 1870-1940

BOOK REVIEWS a published poet himself, especially interested in the verse. Kipling's earnings at different times in his life are usefully recorded. The copious notes (there is no bibliography) reveal that Ricketts is also familiar with the secondary literature. He has apparently found no evidence to support Martin Seymour-Smith's suggestion that Kipling was a closet gay, though he does quote Enid Bagnold as wondering whether Kipling was "a quite unconscious homosexual." This theory, which has been seized on by such writers as Sara Suleri in The Rhetoric of English India (whose thesis it suited so well), remains controversial: not disproved, but incapable of proof. Since some of Ricketts's British reviewers have reproached him for failing to endorse Seymour-Smith's argument, it may be worth mentioning that Seymour-Smith's book shows little sign of research : the argument depends on reading between the lines of earlier biographies , and of selected Kipling texts. Ricketts has made a few new discoveries: letters and diaries of Kipling 's grandmother and aunts in the Worcester Public Records Office, relating to his early childhood; naval and other records extending the background to the Holloways, Kipling's foster-parents at Southsea. These early chapters are the strongest part of the book. Ricketts's principal themes are that Kipling's divided nature was formed by his childhood , and that his art is full of what Ricketts calls "boundary-crossing": attempts to straddle two worlds—British and Indian, English and American, workaday and dream—and to create characters—Mowgli, Kim—who can perform this feat successfully. This is not a book for the voyeuristic reader, sniffing for scandal. Nor is it one to keep handy for checking on dates: there is, for instance, no family tree. To find exactly when Kay Robinson was Kipling's editor at the Civil and Military Gazette, it will be quicker and easier to look up Robinson in the index of recipients in Pinney's The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, volume 1, then consult the first page reference given. For those unfamiliar with the story, however, this is a usefully updated version. Lisa A. F. Lewis ------------------------------ Wallingford, England Imperial Literature 1870-1940 Daniel Bivona. British Imperial Literature, 1870-1940: Writing and the Administration of Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xi + 237 pp. $59.95 341 ELT 43 : 3 2000 DANIEL BIVONA'S second book on this general topic (his first was Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Domestic Debates in Victorian Literature, 1990) is an original, well-researched and wellargued study, better grounded in historical specificity than his earlier effort. Bivona integrates new, thoroughly researched historical and sociological information with his generally perceptive readings of literary texts. He draws on Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, and Harold Perkin for his key claim that imperialist expansion from 1870 down to World War II was the outcome in large measure of the logic of bureaucratic service, self-effacement, and hierarchization. Bivona persuasively argues that the doctrine of "Indirect Rule" promulgated by Lord Cromer in relation to Egypt and by Lord Lugard in relation to Nigeria gave rise to a contradictory ideology that involved "the bureaucratization of charisma [and] the systematization of personalized rule." Bivona also shows that this same contradictory logic of imperialist bureaucracy was at least foreshadowed by the "Punjab Creed" of Anglo-Indian soldier-administrators Henry and John Lawrence in the 1830s. But it is also the case that there were other precedents going back to the reforms of East India Company rule following the Warren Hastings trial of the late eighteenth century. The key strength of British Imperial Literature is not historical or sociological , however, but literary. In a series of insightful readings of texts from David Livingstone's and Henry Morton Stanley's exploration journals , through the fiction of Conrad and Kipling and T. E. Lawrence's autobiography, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and on to the novels of Joyce Cary, E. M. Forster, and George Orwell, Bivona demonstrates the rich interplay of charisma versus bureaucracy (Weber's terms) in imperialist discourse. In each case, he deals with a range of their writing—with Conrad, for instance, Bivona analyzes Nostromo and Lord Jim together with Heart of...