Rebels, Wanderers, and Castaways: Characterizing Small Social Groups in the Literature of Empire, 1849-1914

This project uses pivotal texts belonging to several nineteenth-century literary subgenres—adventure fiction, school stories, the historical novel and spy fiction—to argue that literary representations of small social circles create distinct narrative shapes and modes of characterization. The small groups that shape these texts generate an ambivalent dynamism of small circles that offers modes of resisting, renegotiating or extending models of authority in the age of empire. While studies of the literature of empire often focus on the figure of the solitary “imperial man” or the consolidation of large imperial bureaucratic systems, the scalar scope of this project considers what lies in between. While the Bildungsroman and the love-plot dominate accounts of nineteenth-century narrative trajectories, small group narratives structure the shape of key genres concerned with empire-building or empire-breaking. The groups I analyze include the castaways of the Robinsonade adventure in Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes (1852); the schoolboy tribes in the school fiction of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), Tom Brown at Oxford (1861) and the stories comprising Rudyard Kipling’s The Complete Stalky Co. (1897-1929); the quadrangle of lovers and friends in Charlotte Brontë’s historical romance Shirley (1849); and the revolutionary circles of Joseph Conrad’s spy novel Under Western Eyes (1911). The small group lends itself to a narrative form in which the character of imperial culture is debated and renegotiated. The interlocking metaphors of kinship and friendship in small-group narratives emphasize the inextricability of individuals from the social. I show how the representations of social interactions within groups are used to challenge racial hierarchies, ideals of national character, and individual agency. Rather than hierarchical patterns of imperial cultural transmission, my readings find that, even in pro-imperial texts, the small group establishes private codes of conduct that run alongside or even against the rules of larger social organizations. The narrative representation of a group’s ability to create networks with other groups models the process of creating cultural change (or, in some cases, maintaining cultural stasis). My analyses demonstrate that the small group form articulates the complexities of governance within imperial space.

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