Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain by Katherine Judith Anderson (review)

Reviewed by: Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain by Katherine Judith Anderson Iain Crawford (bio) Katherine Judith Anderson, Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain ( Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022), pp. xi + 214, $69.95 hardcover. Katherine Judith Anderson's Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain contributes to the expanding critical conversation around the role of liberal ideology in the long nineteenth century and its part in the formation of liberal capitalist modernity. Her book builds on the work of, among others, Amanda Anderson, Sukanya Banerjee, Nathan Hensley, and Lauren Goodlad. Anderson connects their studies of liberalism to explorations of bodily pain by Rachel Ablow, Lucy Bending, and Pamela Gilbert. She defines torture as "a state-sanctioned, physical or mental means of compulsion that is inflicted to elicit a specific response from either the victim, those who hear about the act … or both" (5). Her principal claim is that acts of torture became "foundational to Western modernity" during the nineteenth century and that Victorian and early twentieth-century literature reveals the complex evolution of the phenomenon (13). Most important for Anderson, however, is the concurrent phenomenon of what she describes as "the moments of possibility provided by liberalism's failures: that is, the moments when the seeming breakdown of liberal values under torture opens a space of possibility for tortured citizens to assert their rights" (10). Drawing upon fiction, government reports, and the periodical press, Anderson's five chapters explore representations of torture in the widely differing contexts of religion, imperial bureaucracy, the military, the family, and settler society in Oceania and southern Africa. Although the categories may at first appear to present unlikely juxtapositions, collectively they build a compelling case for the pervasiveness of torture and its significance for the liberal social structures with which it is ostensibly at odds but for which, Anderson shows, it has grown into a crucial underpinning. [End Page 142] Chapter 1 focuses on half a dozen novels from the 1850s and 1860s that will be largely unfamiliar to most readers, all of which deal with the "liturgy of torture" (20). Anderson suggests their acutely graphic accounts of physical suffering establish "a kind of immersive ekphrasis, allowing the reader-witness to expand her phenomenological understanding and therefore her belief" (29). This empathetic experience becomes foundational to the ways in which nineteenth-century fiction engages the reader with both the anguish torture inflicts and its implications for the social context that permits and, indeed, furthers it. This first chapter, however, is Anderson's least compelling. Rather too attentive to secondary sources, it provides a substantive reading of only one of its chosen texts (George Eliot's Romola [1862]) and offers no support for the later claim that such martyrological fiction "flooded the market" (48). The argument here feels at once underdeveloped and overstated. Chapters 2 through 5, by contrast, develop much richer and more persuasive cases. Of particular interest to readers of Victorian Periodicals Review will be chapters 2 and 3, which make extensive use of periodical sources for their evidence. Both deal with the role of torture in maintaining British imperial control: chapter 2 focuses on a mid-1850s investigation into claims that East India Company officials in the Madras Presidency had used torture to extract land-tax payments from native farmers, while chapter 3 examines the brutal British response to the Morant Bay uprising of the following decade. Anderson moves between documents recording official investigations of these events and the ways in which they were reported and discussed in the periodical press. In doing so, she reveals how torture developed into "the modern tool of a Western government" and how profoundly it debilitated not only its victims but many of its perpetrators "bent on preventing financial crisis through the production of colonial tax revenue" (47). As she demonstrates convincingly, issues of individual accountability succumbed to the pressures of official mandates, routinizing the use of coercive methods in previously unprecedented ways. Her illustrations come from a wide range of both national and provincial journalism, from the Times and Household Words to the Leeds Mercury and the Belfast Newsletter. Anderson shows how shock at actions carried out on behalf...

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