The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes by Rudyard Kipling

Nineteenth century British literature cannot be properly understood, as Spivak points out “without remembering that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English”.(Ashcroft et al, 269) The British imagination, however, responded to the Empire in different ways. Even during the heyday of the Empire, there had been conflicting attitudes towards the Empire. In 1883, Sir John Seeley wrote in The Expansion of England:

There are two schools of opinion among us with respect to our Empire, of which schools the one may be called the bombastic and the other the pessimistic. The one is lost in wonder and ecstasy at its immense divisions,…this school therefore advocates the maintenance of it as a point of honour or sentiment. The other is the opposite extreme, regards it as founded in aggression and rapacity…a kind of excrescence upon England…this school therefore advocates a policy which may lead at the earliest possible opportunity to the abandonment of it. (qtd. in Smith 36)

Seeley’s analysis lays bare the unpalatable fact that one section of the British population viewed the Empire as a potential subject for assault and would prefer its dissolution. If patriotism is the watchword for Charles Kingsley, Alfred Austin, Henry Newbolt, William Ernest Henley figures like C. A. Parnell, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Robert Buchanon, Hilaire Belloc raised their voice against the imperial enterprise. Between these two opposite extremes literary analysts are often at pains how to place Kipling. The majority of critics applaud or castigate him on the same premise that Kipling expresses a form of jingo-imperialism in his works. In the recent years we have the authority of Jeff...

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