Abstract
On 26 January 1885, General Charles George Gordon was killed at Khartoum. His death shocked the newspaper and periodical reading public of Great Britain. ‘The death of General Gordon is the greatest tragedy of contemporary times’, lamented a Blackwood’s writer in August of that year. The same article gives an indication of the impact of Gordon’s death: ‘In most houses in England the day of our hero’s death was as the day when a dear friend has died.’ Gordon’s death was both ‘a national calamity’ and ‘an individual grief’.1 Queen Victoria herself wrote to Gordon’s sister to communicate her grief inexpressible (Her Majesty’s italics).2 Although the precise manner of Gordon’s death remains uncertain, he died in the fighting as Khartoum was seized by Islamic rebels led by Muhammad Ahmad, known to his followers as the Mahdi. On the front cover of this book, George William Joy’s iconic 1893 painting, entitled ‘General Gordon’s Last Stand’, depicts a defiant Gordon — resplendent in improbably crisp-looking uniform — standing at the top of the steps to his residence looking calmly down on the heavily armed Mahdist fighters, his revolver lowered. The Mahdists appear at once poised to strike and cowed before Gordon’s imperial presence. Blackwood’s compared Gordon to ‘a nobler Achilles’.3 As these sources indicate, Gordon had come to be identified with Britain’s imperial mission and his death was felt as a collective national and imperial experience.
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Notes
Andrew Porter, European Imperialism, 1860–1914 (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1994), 7.
See, for example, Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists (2006);
John Darwin, The Empire Project (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Krebs , Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2.
See Robert Fraser’s chapter ‘The Catawampus of Romance’ in Fraser , ed., Victorian Quest Romance: Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling, and Conan Doyle (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998), 5–17.
A.B. Theobald, The Mahdiya: A History of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1881–1899 (London: Longmans, 1967), 103.
Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 169–244.
Specifically, the Garden of Eden might be found ‘at Praslin, a small isle twenty miles north of Mahé.’ General Gordon, ‘The Site of the Garden of Eden’, Strand Magazine, 17:99 (March 1899), 314.
See A. Egmont Hake, ed., The Journals of Major-Gen. C.G. Gordon, C.B., at Kartoum (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1885)
and M.A. Gordon, ed., Letters of General C.G. Gordon to His Sister M.A. Gordon (London: Macmillan and Co., 1897 [1888]). Every page of each text contains abundant evidence of Gordon’s profound faith in God.
Eva Hope, Life of General Gordon (London: Walter Scott, 1887 [1884]), 7. Born Mary Ann Hearne, Hope also wrote under the pseudonym Marianne Farningham.
Dominic Green, Armies of God: Islam and Empire on the Nile, 1869–1899 (London: Century, 2007), 44.
W.H. Mallock, ‘General Gordon’s Message,’ Fortnightly Review, 36:211 (July 1884), 57.
Estelle W. Stead, My Father: Personal and Spiritual Reminiscences (London: William Heinemann, 1913), 106.
Brake , Subjugated Knowledges (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 97.
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (London: Penguin, 1992), 128.
Andrew Lang, ‘Realism and Romance,’ Contemporary Review, 52 (November 1887), 688.
Henry Rider Haggard, ‘About Fiction,’ Contemporary Review, 51 (February 1887), 177–178.
Raymond L. Schults, Crusader in Babylon: W.T. Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette (Lincoln, Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press: 1972), 137.
Stead , ‘Lest We Forget’: A Keepsake from the Nineteenth Century (London and Melbourne: The ‘Review of Reviews’ Office, 1901).
Stead, quoted in Estelle W. Stead, My Father: Personal and Spiritual Reminiscences (London: William Heinemann, 1913), 106.
Incongruously, perhaps, Stead distanced himself from jingoism, which he described as ‘imperialism sodden with gin’. Brendon , The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997 (London: Vintage Books, 2008), 166.
Rubery , The Novelty of News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 113.
T.P. O’Connor, ‘The New Journalism,’ The New Review, 1 (October 1889), 362.
Bernard M. Allen, Gordon and the Sudan (London: Macmillan and Co., 1931), 220.
A.N. Theobald, The Mahdiya: A History of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1881–1899 (London: Longmans, 1951), 71.
Agatha Ramm, ed., The Political Correspondence of Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville, Volume II: 1876–1886 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 149.
G.A. Henty, The Dash for Khartoum: A Tale of the Nile Expedition (London: Blackie and Sons, 1892), 196.
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© 2015 Andrew Griffiths
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Griffiths, A. (2015). W.T. Stead, General Gordon and the Novelisation of the News. In: The New Journalism, the New Imperialism and the Fiction of Empire, 1870–1900. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137454386_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137454386_3
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