Abstract
Horatio Herbert Kitchener, standing amid the ruins of conquered Khartoum in September, 1898, considered sending the skull of his enemy to the Royal College of Surgeons for study and display.1 He felt inspired both by a victor’s sense of trophy and a Victorian’s enthusiasm for measuring heads, and the Mahdi’s skull, which had been brought to Kitchener after he had ordered the Muslim leader’s tomb destroyed, was unusually large and well shaped. According to the fashionable views of the craniologists, study of it could well contribute to the distinguishing between the qualities of the civilized man and those of the barbarian. Indeed, Paul Broca, the French anthropologist (1824–1880), thought that the shape of a skull made all the difference in comparing the hero to the savage:
Frontal deformation produced blind passions, ferocious instincts, and animal courage, all of which I would willingly call occipital courage. We must not confound it with true courage, frontal courage, which we may call Caucasian courage.2
They are the dark places of the earth, full of unimaginable cruelty, touching the Railway and the Telegraph on one side, and, on the other, the days of Harun-al-Raschid.
Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King (1889)
I saw him open his mouth wide — it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
But a cough like this — I didn’t know there was such a cough! It isn’t a human cough at all. It isn’t dry and yet it isn’t loose either — that is very far from being the right word for it. It is just as if one could look right into him when he coughs, and see what it looks like: all slime and mucous —
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924)
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Notes
Julian Symons, England’s Pride: The Story of the Gordon Relief Expedition (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1965), p. 236.
George Bernard Shaw, Agitations: Letters to the Press 1875–1950, ed. Dan H. Laurence and James Rambeau (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985), pp. 49–51.
Ernest W. Bennett, ‘After Omdurman’, The Contemporary Review, 75 (1899), 29; 31.
Winston S. Churchill to Lady Randolph on 26 January 1899, in Winston S. Churchill, ed. Randolph S. Churchill, I, Part 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 1004–1005.
Quoted by Frederick R. Karl, Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), p. 440.
Short references are to Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).
Norman Sherry in Conrad’s Western World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 92–118, argues for Arthur Eugene Constant Hodister, a commercial agent and explorer in the African ivory country, about whom Conrad might have heard anecdotes during his visit to the Congo in 1890.
Max Nordau, The Conventional Lies of Our Civilization, trans. Louis Schick (Chicago: Laird and Lee, 1895), p. 1.
Also, see the account of the rise of pessimism in Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), pp. 10–14.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), p. 91.
Philip Warner in Kitchener: The Man Behind the Legend (New York: Atheneum, 1986), p. 100, reports that Sir Reginald Wingate was ‘more discreet’ about the skull of the leader of the Dervishes, the Khalifa, and that ‘he was said to have drunk champagne out of it for the rest of his life on each anniversary of the battle of Omdurman’.
Short references are to W. B. Yeats: The Poems, A New Edition, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1983).
Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 33.
Short references are to W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1976).
Short references are to T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952).
Short references are to Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969).
Jacque Lassaigne, The Genius of Henry Moore’, in Homage to Henry Moore: Special Issue of the XX Siècle Review, ed. G. di San Lazzaro; trans. Wade Stevenson (New York: Tudor, 1972), p. 6.
Henry Moore on Sculpture, ed. Philip James (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 105.
Alan G. Wilkinson in The Drawings of Henry Moore (London and Toronto: The Tate Gallery in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Toronto, 1977), p. 103, describes the origin of the drawing and provides a parallel but different interpretation of its figures: ‘On 3 September, the day war was declared, the Moores were bathing off the Shakespeare Cliffs at Dover.
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© 1991 George H. Gilpin
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Gilpin, G.H. (1991). Victorian Shades. In: The Art of Contemporary English Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21746-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21746-5_1
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