The New Journalism, the New Imperialism and the Fiction of Empire, 1870–1900 by Andrew Griffiths

Reviewed by: The New Journalism, the New Imperialism and the Fiction of Empire, 1870–1900 by Andrew Griffiths Richard Fulton (bio) Andrew Griffiths, The New Journalism, the New Imperialism and the Fiction of Empire, 1870–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. viii + 233, £60/$90 (cloth). In The New Journalism, the New Imperialism and the Fiction of Empire, Andrew Griffiths has compiled a careful study of a phenomenon that many scholars of late nineteenth-century Victorian culture have long been aware [End Page 512] of: the synergy among the New Journalism, the New Imperialism, and the fiction of empire as three significant influences in late Victorian popular culture. The New Journalism has been the subject of a number of important books and articles in the last thirty years by the likes of Joel Weiner, Laurel Brake, Lucy Brown, Mark Hampton, Alan Lee, John Mackenzie, Barbara Onslow, Matthew Rubery, and others. The New Imperialism is a somewhat more contested field, with Bernard Porter, John Darwin, and others arguing that late-century imperialism ran shallow in popular culture and John Mackenzie arguing that imperialism infiltrated all levels and all classes. The fiction of empire is emerging as something of a new study: Dallas Liddle, Joseph Bristow, and most recently Mathew Connolly have commented on popular literature of empire—Kipling, Haggard, and Conrad, among others—as an entrée into understanding cultural views of imperialism. Griffiths argues that the sensational nature of the news produced by war correspondents writing from a variety of romantic imperial sites—narrated in the discourse of adventure unique to military dispatches, adventure stories, and the romances sited in the empire—were essential elements of the New Imperialism. For Griffiths, the New Imperialism became popular imperialism because, more than anything, its writers provided an exciting narrative. For Griffiths, the synergy finds its locus of the sensational, imperial narrative in Africa in general and the Sudan in particular. Africa offered the requisite romantic setting for Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Rudyard Kipling’s Light that Failed, and Rider Haggard’s sensational novels, including King Solomon’s Mines, Alan Quatermain, and She. The Sudan offered the newspapers—both sensational New Journalism papers, such as the Pall Mall Gazette and the Telegraph, and traditional papers, such as the Times and the Illustrated London News—a site for their special correspondents to report on the adventures of imperial British soldiers, in an equally romantic setting, engaged in life-and-death struggles to advance the cause of British civilization against the forces of heathenism and ignorance. The Sudan supplied a convenient narrative arc. In the late 1870s, a Sudanese cleric named Muhammed Ahmad proclaimed himself the Mahdi and launched a jihad against the British-supported Egyptian government. Egyptian disasters at Aba and Fashoda followed, and finally a British-led Egyptian army under Hicks Pasha set out to quell the revolt. Hicks and his army were massacred at El Obeid in 1883. In 1884, an Egyptian force under Valentine Baker was routed at El Teb. The actions were widely reported in the British press; indeed, Edmund O’Donovan of the Daily News and Frank Viztelly of the Graphic were killed at El Obeid, and Frank Powers of the Times died shortly thereafter. Suddenly, the Mahdi and the Sudan had become essential components of the adventure narrative of the New Journalism (romance, conflict, good versus evil, and the appropriate [End Page 513] discourse), as well as of the narrative of the New Imperialism (defeating the heathen Mahdi and bringing the light of civilization to the oppressed). W. T. Stead launched his “Gordon for the Sudan” campaign with an interview (a New Journalism feature) in the Pall Mall Gazette. Then Gordon decided to hold out in Khartoum instead of evacuating. Stead (and much of the rest of the metropolitan press) proclaimed him a Christian hero. Then Gordon was “massacred” by Mahdist forces, prompting Stead and others to proclaim him a Christian martyr. Griffiths follows the hyper-emotional reporting of Stead and other correspondents on the ground as Herbert H. Kitchener assembled an Anglo-Egyptian (and less reported, Sudanese) army to retake the Sudan. For Stead and some other journalists, Kitchener’s goal was partly to bring...

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