<i>Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain</i> by Katherine Judith Anderson

Anderson’s Twisted Words examines the many ways in which torture featured as a tool of public and private governance in mid- and late-Victorian Britain and the British Empire. Anderson draws from critical terrorism studies to argue that the use of torture was not an extreme and anomalous practice that contravened liberal ideals of citizenship but rather a “state-sanctioned, physical or mental means of compulsion that [was] inflicted to elicit a specific response” from victim and perpetrator alike (5). She interweaves literary analysis with investigations of British-government reports to build her case, focusing on the many bodily and sensory experiences of those who suffered torture and those who inflicted it. At its core, the book argues that the use and experience of torture in the Victorian world was ordinary and normative, not a barbarous anomaly.The book begins with a reading of Victorian martyrological novels. Anderson posits that this genre reflected a sensory liberalism, referring to works by well-known writers like George Eliot and Cardinal John Henry Newman. Chapter 2 addresses the use of torture by Indian tax collectors in the Madras Presidency, the ways in which the British government responded to these acts, and Indian subjects’ narratives of pain as revealed in the government’s report on the abuses. Chapter 3 expands on this theme, examining the well-known Morant Bay uprising in 1865 and the subsequent Governor Eyre controversy concerning the colonial government’s violent conduct in quelling the uprising. Anderson’s attention to the physical and mental strain that British troops underwent through inflicting violence, including the haunting suicides of Gordon Duberry Ramsay and Colonel Thomas Hobbs, demonstrates the “tension between emerging expectations for a gentler form of masculinity and traditional expectations for military stoicism” (98).Chapter 4 shifts attention from the public to the private realm to argue that the patriarchal structure of the British family, and the psychological and physical abuse of women that it sometimes facilitated, constituted a form of domestic torture. In this context, Anderson’s argument that women existed in a liminal space between citizen and subject is somewhat opaque. It would be interesting to assess her argument beyond a close reading of novels by George Meredith, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope. In the book’s final chapter, Anderson makes the case that late-Victorian colonial-settler fiction, especially romantic adventure novels, demonstrates how torture was sanctioned by the liberal imperial state.Anderson’s insightful and thorough use of Victorian periodicals and newspapers, along with other literary and printed historical sources, reveals how torture was imbricated in Britons’ daily lives. The book, attuned to the question of audience, explains how different media reached different readers, and it inspires further interest in how visual sources might have functioned. Anderson’s broad reach across time and space—from Britain to Jamaica, South Africa to India, and Oceania and the settler colonial world—aptly demonstrates the pan-imperial nature of torture, but it also obscures the different social, cultural, and political circumstances of each locale. The Victorian Empire was both a single entity and a multitude of separate and distinct societies. Anderson implicitly suggests as much when she notes the tension between the universal assumptions of liberal citizenship and the unequal and violent experiences of different people. How did the administering of, and suffering from, torture change, for instance, in India once Britain officially became an empire after 1858? The Raj was instituted, after all, as a means for London to assert direct control of the subcontinent in response to the Indian Rebellion. Atrocity stories of British Indians suffering torture at Cawnpore, which produced outrage in Britain, served as excuses for extreme reprisals by the British, such as execution by cannon.A key finding of the book is that a close look at torture in British history helps us to understand the ways in which imperial citizenship was literally embodied through sensory experiences. This approach complements studies about the legal, cultural, and economic aspects of citizenship to provide a well-rounded sense of how citizens and subjects experienced the Victorian Empire. Anderson’s impressive interdisciplinary analysis demonstrates how scholars can benefit from methods of literary analysis and the tools of neighboring disciplines to enrich our understanding of the past.

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