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IMPERIAL ROGUES: REVERSE COLONIZATION FEARS IN GUY BOOTHBY'S A PRINCE OF SWINDLERS AND LATE-VICTORIAN DETECTIVE FICTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2013

Clare Clarke
Clare Clarke*
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Dublin
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Extract

This essay looks at how the question of late-Victorian imperial decline is contested, formulated, and framed within Guy Boothby's A Prince of Swindlers – a popular, yet critically-overlooked, collection of detective stories set in Calcutta and London, that appeared in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. There is, of course, a familiar critical narrative about the Victorian fin de siècle that characterises the era as a particularly fraught period “of mounting complexity and contradiction” with regard to empire (Dixon 2). The Berlin Conference of 1885, the failure of British Troops at the Siege of Khartoum, the so-called scramble for Africa, the undermining of Britain's steel manufacturing superiority by German and American competition, and the decline of the Royal Navy relative to the navies of France, Germany, Russia, and Italy all underscored the fragility of British imperial dominion. As Patrick Brantlinger puts it, “After the mid-Victorian years the British found it increasingly difficult to think of themselves as inevitably progressive; they began worrying instead about the degeneration of their institutions, their culture, their racial ‘stock’” (230).

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , September 2013 , pp. 527 - 545
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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