Soldiers of the Queen: Reading newspaper fiction of the South African War (1899-1902) Elizabeth Rawlinson-Mills Address: Faculty of Education University of Cambridge 184 Hills Road Cambridge CB2 8PQ emm48@cam.ac.uk 01223 767525 This research was partially funded by a Postgraduate Scholarship from the Wolfson Foundation. Abstract This article considers the status of ‘Tommy Atkins’ in popular and literary culture at the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing material from the short stories published in the illustrated weekly The Sphere in the first year of the South African War, I argue that newspaper fiction illuminates and contributes to the complex and changing relationships between society and the military, during a period of impassioned public engagement with a controversial conflict. I argue that earlier Victorian conceptions of ‘Tommy’ as a disreputable scoundrel were challenged during the conflict by fictional representations of soldiers which blur traditional distinctions of class and rank. In making my case, I demonstrate that the physical juxtaposition of fictional with non-literary content on the newspaper page can be read as a form of silent editorial commentary, contesting the notion that parallels and contrasts between proximate items are attributable to chance. I consider the Sphere’s short stories as meaningfully connected to one another, establishing relationships between stories in separate issues by Thomas Hardy, Marie Corelli and others, as well as between the Sphere’s stories and other texts, such as the popular play Tommy Atkins and Rudyard Kipling’s phenomenally influential poem ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’. At a time when newspapers were under pressure to conform to a hegemonic pro-government narrative, I argue that the Sphere’s editor, Clement Shorter, found in fiction, and its presentation on the newspaper page, a space for disruptive and potentially subversive questions and counter-narratives. Comment by User: Abstract and keywords uploaded in separate file, not in main file. Keywords Thomas Hardy, Anglo-Boer War, short stories, newspapers, colonial literature, popular culture, visual contexts, Tommy Atkins, Marie Corelli, Rudyard Kipling, masculinity, military. I. Newspaper fiction: a transformative publication context Thomas Hardy’s ‘A Changed Man’ was first published in the Sphere in April 1900, as one of the new weekly newspaper’s regular short stories. It was later republished as the title story of Hardy’s 1913 collection, but a reader faced with the book version has no access to what Laurel Brake calls the ‘popular pre-history’ of the text: the tale’s original format is only available in archive copies of the newspaper in which it first appeared.[footnoteRef:1] The historical and visual contexts of the story’s original appearance are significant, however. While the text of ‘A Changed Man’ is identical, its meanings are altered in the transposition from illustrated weekly to high-status literary volume. In the move between these forms, as a ‘popular’ text gains ‘literary’ status, the reader loses access to what Brake calls ‘textual heteroglossia’.[footnoteRef:2] In its original newspaper context, the short story exists in a web of relationships with the news, advertisements, illustrative and editorial matter which crowd in upon it, as well as with the other stories which occupy the same position in preceding and subsequent issues. Alert to this productive heteroglossia, my reading of these texts is enriched by attention to what Brake calls ‘chance parallels’ between a particular story and the items which surround it, although the discussion below calls into question the notion that the design of the pages on which newspaper fiction is presented can be attributed to ‘chance’.[footnoteRef:3] [1: Laurel Brake, Print in Transition, 1850-1910 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 27.] [2: Brake, p. 27. ] [3: Brake, p. 45.] Newspaper fiction has yet to receive the kind of critical attention that has recently been paid to stories appearing in Victorian monthly magazines and literary annuals. Even where the newspapers themselves are the focus of attention, as in Matthew Rubery’s account of newspapers in Victorian fiction or Glenn Wilkinson’s study of images of war in Edwardian newspapers, the emphasis has been almost exclusively on non-literary content.[footnoteRef:4] Yet, as I show here, the study of short stories as they originally appear in the Sphere allows for the proliferation of meanings that are unrecoverable from later book versions, illuminating precisely the debates and issues that interest researchers like Wilkinson and Rubery. My reading privileges the original publication context of newspaper fiction and attends to the historical specificity of the stories in the Sphere during the South African War. In doing so, it highlights the presence of ideologically significant ambivalence and ambiguity, particularly in fictional representations of the soldier – a figure of peculiar and changing significance in the period. The stories discussed here, by Thomas Hardy, Marie Corelli and others, appear consciously to blur traditional distinctions of class and rank in their portrayal of soldier characters, challenging conventional stereotypes of the military. At the same time, the layout of the pages on which these stories appear implies deliberate editorial intervention, as tales of fictional soldiers are physically juxtaposed with non-literary content that disrupts, complicates or accentuates aspects of the literary representation of soldiers and the military. [4: Matthew Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Glenn R. Wilkinson, Depictions and Images of War in Edwardian Newspapers, 1899-1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).] II. The South African War and the figure of the soldier The various soldier-figures in the Sphere’s South African War stories reflect the moment of tension in which they appear. The early months of the war in the autumn of 1899 are typically represented as the last high point of popular enthusiasm for aggressive imperialism, and a moment of crisis for British self-confidence.[footnoteRef:5] It was supposed to be another straightforward imperial skirmish, the forces of a global empire ranged against two of the world’s smallest states, whose populations, an M.P. pointed out in a letter to The Times, totalled ‘less than half the population of Aberdeen’.[footnoteRef:6] Half a million British professional and volunteer soldiers faced a citizen-army of no more than 78,000 men – of whom, it is thought, fewer than 30,000 were ever in the field at one time.[footnoteRef:7] But by the time peace was negotiated in May 1902, 22,000 British men had died, almost two-thirds of them killed not in battle but by diseases attributable to the chronic under-resourcing of army medical services.[footnoteRef:8] As well as devastating the South African landscape and decimating the Boer population, the war raised troubling questions in Britain. A startling proportion of recruits had to be rejected on the grounds of their poor physical condition; blunders and disasters at the front undermined belief in the competence of officers; and the imperial army’s scorched-earth tactics, together with the appalling fatality rates in British concentration camps, eventually gave rise to clamorous moral objections to the military’s methods.[footnoteRef:9] In spite of being so outnumbered, the Boers had a number of crucial successes in the early stage of the war. Within a month of the war beginning, an alarming proportion of the British forces in South Africa was locked up in the sieges of Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley, and early December brought news of three more calamitous defeats at Magersfontein, Stormberg and Colenso. The British press called it ‘Black Week’. The army’s setbacks in South Africa were accompanied by an explosion of popular support at home; as the editorials and letters pages in all the daily newspapers attest, the expression of scepticism about the war, its motivation or methods, was met with hostility, the label ‘pro-Boer’, and in some cases physical violence.[footnoteRef:10] [5: Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870-1918, ed. by Elleke Boehmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. xxvi; Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850-2004, 4th edn (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2004), pp. 123–32, 167–78.] [6: James Bryce, ‘The Transvaal Crisis: London Liberals and the Crisis,’ Times, 10 October 1899, p. 5.] [7: Andre Wessels, “Afrikaners at War,” in The Boer War: Direction, Experience and Image, ed. by John Gooch (London: Frank Cass, 2000), pp. 73–106 (p. 97). ] [8: see Bill Nasson, The Boer War: The Struggle for South Africa (Stroud: Spellmount, 2010), p. 306.] [9: Nasson, pp. 26, 306. Ten per cent of Boer fighters were killed, while 28,000 Boer civilians died of starvation and disease in British concentration camps. The number of black African refugees who died in the camps is believed to be at least 20,000.] [10: For example, The Times reports one particularly violent attack upon a Tunbridge Wells councillor, ‘who was alleged to have held pro-Boer views’, and who was therefore ‘hotly assailed by a crowd of demonstrators several hundred strong’ (Times, 7 June 1900, p. 10). ] The prevailing mood, as expressed in newsprint at least, was enthusiastically imperialistic, noisily supportive of the war and indignant about insults to British dignity in South Africa. However, this imperial enthusiasm needs to be placed in the context of a century of complex and shifting representations of the relationship between civil and military worlds, where both the role of war in British society, and the status of soldiers, were constantly being renegotiated. Although as John Reed writes, ‘the great battles of the Napoleonic Wars, culminating in Waterloo, were accorded near-legendary status in Victorian Britain’, the ordinary soldier gained very little from such cultural valorization; after all, the Duke of Wellington himself ‘famously described his army as “the scum of the earth”’.[footnoteRef:11] Such temporary popularity as the army may have gained from its victory at the start of the century was undermined, in the post-war period, by its use in the suppression of domestic political dissent, most famously at Peterloo (1819), but also in Bristol (1831) and at the Kennington Common Chartist rally in 1848.[footnoteRef:12] The Crimean War (1853-56) is widely recognized as having brought about a transformation in public attitudes towards the army in general and serving soldiers in particular, as military catastrophes and army medical mismanagement focused popular debates on the suffering and resilience of the common soldier. Thanks to William Howard Russell’s ground-breaking reporting in The Times, and the introduction of photography from the battlefield, Reed notes that ‘for the first time, the public back home could see, as well as read about, the reality of conflict’, gaining an intimate insight into the price of war and the men who paid it.[footnoteRef:13] Michael Brown argues that this period represents ‘the beginnings of a popular militarism in Britain’, but reminds us that improvements in the status of the ordinary soldier in the public understanding came at the cost of the reputation of the aristocratic officer class who had formerly received the plaudits for military success: ‘it was subalterns, non-commissioned officers and private soldiers who were generally credited with snatching victory from the arms of defeat, a “democratization” of heroism that was most clearly expressed in the inauguration of the Victoria Cross (1856) as an award for valour, regardless of rank.’[footnoteRef:14] [11: John Reed, ‘The Victorians and War’, in The Cambridge Companion to War Writing, ed. by Kate McLoughlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 135–47 (p. 137); Michael Brown, ‘Cold Steel, Weak Flesh: Mechanism, Masculinity and the Anxieties of Late Victorian Empire’, Cultural and Social History, 14.2 (2017), 155–81 (p. 159) .] [12: Michael Brown, ‘“Like a Devoted Army”: Medicine, Heroic Masculinity, and the Military Paradigm in Victorian Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 49.3 (2010), 592–622 (pp. 595–96).] [13: Reed, p. 138.] [14: Brown, ‘“Like a Devoted Army”’, p. 607.] Holly Furneaux points out that the increase in charitable impulses toward serving soldiers in this period, expressed, for example, in the proliferation of Wounded Soldiers’ funds, required a new set of stereotypes to replace the traditional view of ‘the brutality and fecklessness of the regular soldier’.[footnoteRef:15] Her book traces the development of ‘representations of working-class soldiers’ gentlemanliness’ in literature which ‘directly challenged established perceptions of [their] brutish violence’.[footnoteRef:16] In literature, Furneaux argues, ‘Components observable in depictions of the military in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts concerned with the man of feeling […] were developed by mid-Victorian writers to become central features of representations of soldierly heroism across classes’.[footnoteRef:17] Increasing public concern for and valorization of the army during and after the Crimean conflict undoubtedly contributed to the improved social status of the common soldier. Meanwhile, the Cardwell reforms of 1868-71 aimed to integrate the military more closely with civil society by creating connections between regiments and particular localities, and by promoting middle-class meritocratic values over the army’s formerly aristocratic ‘gentlemanly ethos’ by abolishing the purchase of commissions and promotions.[footnoteRef:18] It is important to note, however, that the earlier stereotype of the common soldier as dissolute, profligate and untrustworthy continued to underpin fictional representations of soldiers as in need of redemption. Furneaux discusses Dickens’s Doubledick, from his Christmas tale, ‘Seven Poor Travellers’ (1854), and Kingsley’s Amyas Leigh in Westward Ho! (1855), showing how tropes of ‘the military man of feeling’ play out in stories which emphasize gentlemanliness rather than battlefield violence. Both stories, however, also contribute to what Furneaux calls ‘a familiar narrative of army recruitment’, in which desperate and unruly men with no viable alternatives join the army, to be reformed and redeemed by their experiences.[footnoteRef:19] Even as the popular reputation of the army improved, then, the common soldier continued to be a fraught and conflicted figure. [15: Holly Furneaux, Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 82–83.] [16: Furneaux, p. 7.] [17: Furneaux, p. 19.] [18: Brown, ‘Cold Steel, Weak Flesh’, p. 160.] [19: Furneaux, pp. 55, 76, 78.] In the second half of the nineteenth century, ‘small wars’ in far-flung places provided the British public with the spectacle of imperial triumph without any risk to the imperial centre. Set in appealingly exotic locations reassuringly far from Britain, war took on an aesthetic and morally satisfying relationship with both British commercial success and missionary righteousness: a relationship which, in MacKenzie’s view, helped to effect a ‘complete transformation from the “rapacious and licentious soldiery” of the early century to the soldier hero of the 1880s and 1890s’.[footnoteRef:20] Although he describes this characterization as ‘somewhat overdrawn’, Brown acknowledges that it is ‘broadly accurate in outline’: ‘there can be little doubt that the latter decades of the nineteenth century saw the army assume an ever greater and more positive role in British society’.[footnoteRef:21] However, Reed points out that ‘Victorian war writing is particularistic’, demonstrating new configurations of obsessions and anxieties with each of the major conflicts across the century.[footnoteRef:22] In particular, he notes that by the end of the century, ‘invasion fears, long laid to rest by Waterloo, were current again’, while new technologies which brought geographically distant wars imaginatively close to Victorian Britons led to ‘an uneasy tension between glorifying individual heroics and recognizing war’s cost’.[footnoteRef:23] [20: Brown, ‘Cold Steel, Weak Flesh’, pp. 156–57.] [21: Brown, ‘Cold Steel, Weak Flesh’, pp. 156–57.] [22: Reed, “The Victorians and War,” p. 137, original emphasis.] [23: Reed, p. 145.] There were three distinct strands to the particular anxieties and tensions surrounding responses to the South African War of 1899-1902. The first was that, in contrast to the ‘small wars’ of preceding decades, Britain was engaging once again with a white, Christian enemy. Notwithstanding the many newspaper portrayals of the Boers’ backwardness, quiet rural lifestyles and lack of commercial acumen, they could not be called uncivilized in the way that earlier African adversaries had been, and there was no getting around their reputation for Protestant devoutness. Debates about the compatibility of Christianity and militarism which had surfaced earlier in the century returned with renewed vigour in the light of New Imperialism’s expression in South Africa.[footnoteRef:24] Secondly, Brown argues that technological modernity and Britain’s performance in the preceding wars, for example against the Zulus in 1879, served to resurrect earlier anxieties about the state of British military masculinity. The disaster at Isandlwana and the tiny contingent of British troops’ subsequent defence of Rorke’s Drift taught the uncomfortable lesson that the ordinary soldier was no match, physically, for the ‘manly strength’ of the Zulus; when firepower alone secured success, it was painfully clear that ‘the security of the empire rested upon technological advantage more than inherent martial prowess’.[footnoteRef:25] Older concerns about ‘the physical degeneration of the soldier’, and whether this might be associated ‘with a general falling off in the strength and stamina of the population’, were revived in 1899 by revelations about the numbers of prospective recruits rejected on the grounds of their poor physical condition.[footnoteRef:26] Meanwhile, there were many who had argued that decades of comparative economic prosperity had softened the middle classes too; as Social Darwinist Captain Henry W. L. Hime put it in 1876: ‘as the industrial spirit increases, the military spirit decreases, at all periods and in all climes’.[footnoteRef:27] The fear that ‘commercial culture was inimical to military vigour’ took on particular pertinence as the nineteenth century came to an end, with the war in South Africa further souring the already-fraught relations between Britain and her nearest neighbours in Europe – the third strand of contextual factors shaping public responses to the South African War.[footnoteRef:28] While they had been around for decades, at least in military circles, these anxieties about British masculinity became more acute as the spectre of European war drew closer. As Brown shows, international events like ‘[t]he battle of Solferino (1859) and the American Civil War (1861-65) had demonstrated the destructive potential of conflict between equivalent belligerents, casting it in a different moral light to that between imperial armies and their colonial enemies’.[footnoteRef:29] [24: See Furneaux, chap. 2.] [25: Brown, ‘Cold Steel, Weak Flesh’, p. 164.] [26: Leith Adams, ‘The Recruiting Question, Considered from a Military and Medical Point of View’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute, 18 (1875), pp. 56–57; Nasson, pp. 26, 306.] [27: Henry W. L. Hime, ‘Universal Conscription: The Only Answer to the Recruitment Question’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute, 19 (1876), 92–127 (p. 107).] [28: Brown, ‘Cold Steel, Weak Flesh’, p. 161.] [29: Brown, ‘“Like a Devoted Army”’, p. 618.] Popular responses to the South African War, and to the figure of Tommy Atkins on whom success in that conflict ultimately depended, are shaped, then, by a complex history. Even the newspapers’ pro-war stances have to be read in the context of sabre-rattling European imperial competition, while representations of ordinary soldiers are illuminated by analysis of the class, gender and racial anxieties which they articulate or repudiate. In the late 1890s, Furneaux’s ‘military man of feeling’ or ‘gentle warrior’ is largely eclipsed, in newsprint at least, by a return to earlier versions of the common soldier – one who is, in Reed’s words, ‘a determinedly unglamorous, lower-class, antiheroic figure, whose true mettle emerges in courage and fortitude shown in fraught conditions or in the face of public indifference or criticism’.[footnoteRef:30] The place of soldiers in the hearts and minds of civil society is once again contested and conflicted. This ambivalence was captured perfectly by Theodore von Sosnosky in 1901 who, having witnessed a catalogue of discriminatory behaviour against soldiers in civilian life, wondered at the ‘blind glorification and worship of the Army’ which paradoxically ‘continues to coexist with the contemptuous dislike felt towards the members of it’.[footnoteRef:31] In spite of improvements over the century, army pay continued to be very poor, meaning that soldiers were recruited from among the most desperate; Stephen Miller suggests that in 1899, even among the working class, ‘it was considered a disgrace to have a son who served in the regular army’, and John Peck writes that military service was seen as ‘a calling for the man who could not cope with civilian society’.[footnoteRef:32] Edward Spiers argues that even Kipling’s sympathetic portrayal of soldiers ‘probably reinforced traditional attitudes towards military life – that it was poorly paid, lacked status, and was bereft of prospects; that it attracted recruits from the least respectable sections of the population; and that its soldiers periodically indulged in drunken and licentious behaviour’.[footnoteRef:33] [30: Reed, p. 136.] [31: T. von Sosnosky, England’s Danger: The Future of British Army Reform (London: Chapman and Hall, 1901), p. 80. Quoted in Edward M. Spiers, The Late Victorian Army 1868-1902 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 202.] [32: Stephen M. Miller, Volunteers on the Veld: Britain’s Citizen-Soldiers and the South African War, 1899-1902 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007); John Peck, War, the Army and Victorian Literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 12, 24. See also Spiers, pp. 119–47; Halik Kochanski, ‘Wolseley and the South African War’, in The Boer War: Direction, Experience and Image, ed. by John Gooch (London: Frank Cass, 2000), pp. 56–69 (p. 64).] [33: Spiers, p. 203.] By the end of the 1890s, however, ‘the once-despised Tommy Atkins’ seemed to have become ‘a national hero’, at least in terms of cultural artefacts: his image was to be found ‘on board games, cookie tins, and cigarette cards’, as well as in countless advertisements.[footnoteRef:34] In Miller’s view, the volunteer movement contributed significantly to this drastic change in attitudes. Prompted by the shock of the war’s disastrous opening months to enlist as irregulars, over the duration of the South African War more than 100,000 non-professional soldiers left Britain for South Africa as part of militia, yeomanry and volunteer regiments. Made up of predominantly urban, middle-class men, the culture of these units was perceived as wholly distinct from that of the regular army, in which the working-class ranker Tommy Atkins was led by his upper-class and public-school-educated officers. The volunteer regiments were seen as a reassuring sign that, in the words of one newspaper poet, ‘Britain’s brave sons still bear, at desk and mart / A soul unslackened and a dauntless heart’.[footnoteRef:35] Perhaps mercantile success ‘at desk and mart’ was compatible with military valour after all. Roaring crowds of well-wishers accompanied volunteer regiments’ departures from cities and ports, enjoying the pomp and ceremony of military displays. As streets and parks were filled with ‘military spectacle’, and volunteer regiments became ‘focal points of civic interest and pride’, Miller argues, the status of Tommy Akins was correspondingly elevated by association.[footnoteRef:36] [34: Miller, p. 69.] [35: A. J. C., ‘C. I. V. [City Imperial Volunteers]’, Westminster Gazette, 29 October 1900, p. 2.] [36: Miller, pp. 37, 31.] There continued to be a difference, however, between the reception of Tommy’s double on a music hall stage, or the marketing value of his image on a biscuit tin, and the welcome extended to real soldiers returning from the front. That the rehabilitation of Atkins’ reputation was not completely secure is clear from responses to Lord Roberts’ praise of his troops’ good conduct in November 1900. For instance, Private Paul Grey of the Royal Lancaster Regiment writes to the editor of The Times to urge readers ‘to refrain from showing mistaken kindness’ to returning soldiers by ‘offering us drink’, betraying his doubts about how robust the public’s newfound sympathy might turn out to be. Grey warns that the public must bear the blame for the consequences of their own ‘spontaneous generosity’ if Tommy ‘behaves badly in our streets’ having ‘become intoxicated’.[footnoteRef:37] [37: Times, 05 November 1900, p. 8. In a similar expression of defence for Tommy Atkins’s reputation, in an unpublished diary/memoir Private 1281 of the City Imperial Volunteers describes a ‘campaign of disgraceful calumny, falsehood and hatched up abominable lies’ in ‘the reptile press of this country and others’ against ‘Tommy Atkins’, and hopes that his personal experiences (‘I lived with Tommy, fought with him, captured and entered towns with him’) will help correct the impression – evidently still widespread – that Tommy Atkins was not to be trusted. Private No. 1281, With the Infantry Batallion [sic] of the C. I. V., unpublished manuscript, private collection.] Fifty short stories appear in the Sphere between its first issue in January 1900 and the end of the South African War in May 1902, one quarter of which make use of military characters and themes. In light of the British public’s vicarious participation in and enthusiasm for news of the disasters and (more rarely) triumphs of the army in South Africa in the opening months of the war, this unsurprising military emphasis reflects a broader cultural interest; Peck argues that ‘by the 1890s, soldiering and the empire might be considered to be the most important subjects in literature’.[footnoteRef:38] Steve Attridge claims that ‘images of the soldier in the press, periodicals and music hall’ were central to a realization that, far from belonging out at its contested margins, ‘the army was in fact an intrinsic part of Victorian society’, embodying ‘certain indigenous cultural values’.[footnoteRef:39] Peck goes further, suggesting that fiction contributed to the changing status of soldiers in the last decade of the nineteenth century, rather than simply reflecting it; in his view, fictional portrayals of ‘Tommy Atkins’ and his officer counterparts participated in the ongoing assimilation of the soldier into the imaginative life of late Victorian Britain.[footnoteRef:40] Public feeling towards soldiers and the military was neither monolithic nor static over the course of the conflict, however, and as victory against the Boers continued to prove elusive, and the personal and financial costs of the war began to be felt, enthusiasm for the conflict waned.[footnoteRef:41] The patriotic effusions in honour of Tommy and his colleagues that had accompanied the volunteers’ embarkation parades faded into memory – as the Naval and Army Illustrated had foreseen that they might, early in 1900: [38: Peck, p. 3.] [39: Steve Attridge, Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late Victorian Culture: Civil and Military Worlds (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 45.] [40: Peck, p. 74.] [41: Spiers notes that by its conclusion, the ‘increasingly unpopular’ war had ‘cost the British taxpayer some £201,000,000’ and resulted in the deaths of 22,000 British men and nearly half a million horses, mules and donkeys. Spiers, p. 312.] How long will the sight of the Queen’s uniform waken a thrill of pride and enthusiasm in the citizen’s breast? […] How long will red coats and khaki tunics be welcomed with cheers in places of public entertainment, instead of being frowned upon, and in some cases shut out altogether? As the old rhyme effectively puts it, “In time of danger and in time of war, Our God and soldiers we alike adore; The danger o’er, our honour righted— Our God’s forgot, our soldiers slighted.”[footnoteRef:42] [42: Naval and Army Illustrated, 24 March 1900, p. 1] The contested status of ordinary soldiers, and the productive proximity in a newspaper of literary accounts with real news, combine to make the Sphere’s soldier stories a rich testing-ground for alternative representations of and responses to the military, reflecting and shaping debates about the figure of the soldier in ways that are sometimes surprising. The Sphere was conceived by Clement Shorter in March 1899 and first published in January 1900, three months after the outbreak of war. Its founder was passionate about literature, contributing the Sphere’s weekly literary column from the paper’s inception until his death in 1926.[footnoteRef:43] The price of 6d distinguishes the Sphere from ‘popular’ penny weeklies and establishes it, as Shorter wrote, as ‘a rival newspaper to the Illustrated London News’, the prestigious publication of which Shorter himself had previously been editor.[footnoteRef:44] Creating and sustaining a diverse readership was a challenging undertaking at a time of rapid change and expansion in the newspaper industry, and Andrew Thompson is right to warn against the temptation to draw simplistic conclusions about the extent to which readers ‘agreed with all the opinions expressed’ in the newspapers they read.[footnoteRef:45] However, Thompson’s description of proprietors as ‘shrewd entrepreneurs’ depending for success upon ‘knowing their readers well and supplying them with what they wanted’ is also apposite. A prevailing pro-war – or at least anti-Boer – rhetoric effectively enforced a system of informal self-censorship on newspaper editors; those who took a stand against the conflict were made to suffer, both personally and financially.[footnoteRef:46] Accordingly, in the frenzied atmosphere of the opening months of the South African War, the Sphere repeatedly emphasizes its patriotic credentials. ‘Loyalty to the Queen and the Empire’ is described as its ‘watchword’.[footnoteRef:47] Coverage of the South African War is staunchly patriotic and consistently supportive of the government, conforming at all times to Shorter’s belief that it was vital for ‘the modern editor of an illustrated newspaper to keep all “opinions” of a controversial character out of his journal’.[footnoteRef:48] This determinedly conventional stance tells us more about commercial imperatives than it does about Shorter’s ideological convictions. In this context it is striking that the Sphere’s fiction constitutes the only content under an author’s name and thus, perhaps, the only space for potentially controversial ‘opinions’. [43: Caroline Zilboorg, ‘Shorter, Clement King (1857-1926)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 .] [44: Clement Shorter, C.K.S. An Autobiography: A Fragment by Himself, ed. by J. M. Bulloch (London: Constable and Co., 1927), p. 96.] [45: Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005), p. 42.] [46: W. T. Stead, for example, who had been called ‘the most powerful journalist in the island’ during the 1880s, encountered severe financial difficulties because of his outspoken opposition to the South African War. See Historical Dictionary of the British Empire, ed. by James Stuart Olson and Robert Shadle (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 1062; J. O. Baylen, ‘Stead, William Thomas (1849-1912)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) .] [47: ‘Forewords’, Sphere, 27 January 1900, p. 3.] [48: C.K.S., p. 96.] III. The Sphere’s soldier stories: reforming Tommy Atkins ‘A Changed Man’ was published in the Sphere in April 1900.[footnoteRef:49] Shorter, who was a personal friend of Hardy’s, had requested a contribution from him in December 1899, and Hardy had responded enthusiastically.[footnoteRef:50] At the same time, he began another story, ‘Enter a Dragoon’, which he had promised to Harper’s Magazine, and he continued working on both simultaneously, finishing them at the end of January 1900.[footnoteRef:51] The fact that Harper’s delayed publication of ‘Enter a Dragoon’ for almost a year is not necessarily remarkable; in his 1899 guide for aspiring journalists Arnold Bennett notes that monthly magazine publishing ‘means weary waiting; nine months, a year, even two years being the time that often elapses between the acceptance of an article and its appearance’, and such delays could only be exacerbated by the logistical challenges of transatlantic publication.[footnoteRef:52] In contrast, however, Shorter’s decision to publish ‘A Changed Man’ in April 1900 seems significant: the story, which raises questions about military values and civilian enthusiasm, appears after the sieges at Kimberley and Ladysmith had been relieved, but before the relief of Mafeking – in other words, at the moment that national anxiety and excitement about developments in South Africa were at their most intense. That Hardy wrote his tale with the Sphere – and his friend its editor – in mind implies that the writer may have seen the Sphere as a potential platform for the challenge to hegemonic discourse his story implies. Moreover, it seems he was right to do so, since, in spite of his aversion to ‘opinions’, Shorter published the story at a highly sensitive moment. [49: Thomas Hardy, ‘A Changed Man’, Sphere, 21 April 1900, pp. 419–21; Thomas Hardy, ‘A Changed Man (Continued)’, Sphere, 28 April 1900, pp. 451–52.] [50: Hardy, Collected Letters, ii, p. 239.] [51: Hardy, Collected Letters, ii, p. 246.] [52: [Arnold Bennett], How to Write for the Press: A Practical Handbook for Beginners in Journalism, by an Editor (London: Horace Cox, 1899), p. 118.] ‘A Changed Man’ tells the story of Captain Maumbry and his young wife Laura, whose fondness for the army is emphasized by the military trimmings of her dress in A. S. Hartrick’s original illustration (Figure 1: A. S. Hartrick, Illustration for ‘A Changed Man’, Sphere, 21 April 1900, p. 419. © British Library Board). Laura is furious when Maumbry decides to retire from his regiment of Hussars to pursue a new calling in the Church, since this means that she is forced to exchange her comfortable position as a stylish officer’s wife for life with the parson of ‘a low-lying district of the town […] crowded with impoverished cottages.’[footnoteRef:53] Nonetheless, Maumbry ‘pursue[s] his daily labours in and out of the hovels with serene unconcern’, either for his wife’s dismay or for the general judgement of the town that ‘God A’mighty’ had ‘spwiled a good sojer to make a bad pa’son when He shifted Cap’n Ma’mbry into a sarpless’.[footnoteRef:54] Hardy’s phrasing here ironically echoes Catherine Marsh’s bestselling Memorials of Captain Hedley Vicars (1856), the biography of the Crimean War’s ‘foremost soldier saint’, in which Marsh offers Vicars’s life and letters as ‘ample refutation’ of the notion that ‘in making a good Christian you may spoil a good soldier’.[footnoteRef:55] In the context of the Crimean War, Vicars was able to reconcile Christian morality with soldierly heroism; at home, amid the vanity and spectacle of military domesticity, Maumbry can find no such congruence. Laura, meanwhile, is far from convinced that ‘a woman’s husband has a right to do such a thing, even if he does feel a certain call to it’.[footnoteRef:56] When Casterbridge is struck with cholera, the new Reverend Maumbry works tirelessly to alleviate ‘the sufferings of the victims’, while Laura is sent away for her safety.[footnoteRef:57] She chooses to stay in a nearby village where, by astonishing coincidence, a regiment of infantry is stationed. There, Laura makes the acquaintance of a lieutenant, ‘Mr. Vannicock’, who (to Laura’s delight) wholly lives up to his suggestive name. Their ‘reckless flirtation’ progresses and when the regiment leaves for Bristol, Vannicock arranges for Mrs. Maumbry to accompany it. As the lovers approach the carriage that will take Laura away from Casterbridge, she catches sight of her emaciated husband burning the clothing and bedding of the dead in a ‘squalid and reeking scene’.[footnoteRef:58] Laura realizes that she must go to him, and both she and Vannicock are present when Maumbry is finally struck down, ‘a victim—one of the last—to the pestilence which had carried off so many’. The couple find that his death casts ‘an insistent shadow’ over their relationship; their feelings ‘decline from their former incandescence to a mere tepid civility’. Chastened, they separate, and Laura ‘lived and died a widow’.[footnoteRef:59] [53: Hardy, ‘A Changed Man’, p. 421.] [54: Hardy, ‘A Changed Man’, p. 421.] [55: quoted in Furneaux, pp. 69–70.] [56: Hardy, ‘A Changed Man’, p. 421.] [57: Hardy, ‘A Changed Man (Continued)’, p. 451.] [58: Hardy, ‘A Changed Man (Continued)’, p. 452.] [59: Hardy, ‘A Changed Man (Continued)’, p. 452.] Captain Maumbry is not Tommy Atkins, of course – his rank and social status make that clear. But readers in 1900 would have noted the parallels between Hardy’s plot and a highly successful play by Arthur Shirley and Ben Landeck which had been touring the country regularly from 1895, and which continued to be popular throughout the first year of the South African War. The Era’s review of the premiere of Tommy Atkins describes its protagonist, Harold Wilson, as a ‘chivalrous young curate’ who, in despair at his unchristian congregation, gives up on the Church to join the army: He has laboured among the villagers to no purpose. He has taught them the lesson of charity, and his teaching and example are useless. Henceforth he will renounce the Church and serve the Queen.[footnoteRef:60] [60: ‘The London Theatres’, Era, 21 September 1895.] It is a transformation that Hardy inverts in the case of Captain Maumbry, who renounces the military to join the church, becoming ‘a soldier—of the church militant’.[footnoteRef:61] Importantly, both Maumbry and Wilson believe that they are exchanging vanity and spectacle for courageous self-sacrifice. The ex-curate Harold Wilson becomes the epitome of ‘British pluck’ in colonial Egypt, demonstrating ‘the depth of purpose and unflinching courage and devotion of the sorely beset but undismayed lieutenant’.[footnoteRef:62] The Era review concludes with a description of the play’s closing scene: ‘a stirring picture that appeals very strongly to the patriotic pulse’.[footnoteRef:63] Predictions of ‘a long career for Tommy Atkins’ proved astute; advertisements for and reviews of productions of the play appear regularly in London and regional newspapers during each of the remaining years of the 1890s. As patriotic imperial pageant, the play was entirely in tune with its times: ‘There are few pieces that stand the test of repeated presentation better than Tommy Atkins does’, the Era observed in 1899.[footnoteRef:64] In the same vein, a reviewer the following year commented: [61: Hardy, ‘A Changed Man’, p. 420.] [62: ‘The London Theatres’, Era, 21 September 1895.] [63: ‘The London Theatres’, Era, 21 September 1895.] [64: ‘The London Theatres’, Era, 9 September 1899.] Officers and men have shared alike in the glory of the African campaign, but it is the man in the ranks to whom attaches a popularity that is perennial. [T]hough the scenes of Tommy Atkins […] are laid in the arid desert and amid Arab encampments rather than by veldt and kopje, the interest in the way the British soldier fights is keen and enthusiastic.[footnoteRef:65] [65: ‘The London Theatres’, Era, 18 August 1900.] The claim that real-life soldiers enjoyed ‘a popularity that is perennial’ is a misleading, though perhaps an understandable, exaggeration in the autumn of 1900, when the play’s appeal was enhanced by popular obsession with the disasters and triumphs of the South African War. More striking, however, is the fact that the reviewer considers the play to provide an insight into the working life of ‘the man in the ranks’. Notwithstanding its title, Tommy Atkins is not obviously concerned with ‘the man in the ranks’. As an educated former churchman, Harold Wilson is not really Tommy Atkins even when he is an ordinary private soldier, a role which he assumes for only part of one of the four acts; having begun the play as a curate, he begins Act 3 ‘in the uniform of a private of the Royal Irish’, but almost immediately attacks his captain (the play’s ‘arch-scoundrel’) and runs away, before attaining the rank of officer off-stage, in the ten years that elapse during the interval between acts.[footnoteRef:66] We find a more traditional ‘Tommy’ figure in Private Mason, an escaped convict who has a change of heart, betrays the villain he has been assisting and ends up dying heroically in the siege of the Malaki fort, singing “Rule, Britannia”, back-to-back with Lieutenant Wilson. It would seem an uncomfortable stretch, however, to argue that this minor character was Shirley and Landeck’s eponymous hero. Instead, the play invites its audience to side with good against evil – the kindhearted curate-turned-Lieutenant Wilson and the reformed Private Mason against the scurrilous Captain Maitland, who dishonours his officer rank, first by being a seducer, bigamist and murderer, and later by attempting to betray his comrades and surrender the Malaki Fort ‘for a consideration’. The play’s ‘Tommy Atkins’ is not one character or another, but a patriotic ideal towards which both officers and men can strive. [66: ‘The London Theatres’, Era, 21 September 1895.] From its first performance, the play Tommy Atkins included a new musical setting of Kipling’s ‘Tommy’, a poem which had appeared in the Scots Observer in 1890 and was collected in Kipling’s Departmental Ditties, Barrack-Room Ballads and other verses, published in 1892. In the theatre, it appears in a version set to music by Mary Carmichael. Picking up the themes familiar from popular rhymes such as that quoted in the Naval and Army Illustrated, above, the poem sets out the various ways in which soldiers experienced everyday discrimination: a publican who will ‘serve no red-coats’; a theatre at which ‘a drunk civilian’ is given a seat where none can be found for a sober soldier.[footnoteRef:67] In doing so, Kipling draws attention to the hypocrisy of a society which tolerates or celebrates the military only when in need of it: [67: Naval and Army Illustrated, 24 March 1900, p. 1; Rudyard Kipling, ‘Tommy’ [originally ‘The Queen’s Uniform’], Scots Observer, 1 March 1890. ] O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, go away”; But it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins,” when the band begins to play […] Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Tommy, “’ow’s yer soul?” But it’s “Thin red line of ’eroes” when the drums begin to roll […] For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!” But it’s “Saviour of ’is country” when the guns begin to shoot.[footnoteRef:68] [68: Kipling, ‘Tommy’.] The song argues for social justice and civilian acceptance for Tommy, when he’s behaving well and when he’s ‘drunken’ or ‘goin’ large a bit’; after all, ‘single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints’. Its characteristic Cockney reflects the fact that the hypocritical attitude it censures primarily affected unranked ordinary soldiers, but the play which it accompanies refuses to make clear distinctions between officers and men when it comes to behaviour or merit. Morality and character are determined by action, not rank. Since performances of the play always included Kipling’s ‘Tommy’, there is some irony in the Era reviewer’s claim that ‘the man in the ranks’ enjoys ‘a popularity that is perennial’; perhaps they are justified, however, in collapsing class and rank distinctions in the comment that the play demonstrates ‘the way the British soldier fights’.[footnoteRef:69] [69: ‘The London Theatres’, Era, 18 August 1900.] Hardy’s tale ‘A Changed Man’ is not a simple indictment of the military or of a militaristic society, any more than Tommy Atkins is a straightforward celebration of it. While Kipling’s poem invites audiences of the play to consider whether the ‘heartiest enthusiasm’ with which they greet ‘a soul-stirring war scene’ in the theatre translates into their behaviour towards real soldiers in the city streets, Hardy’s targets are the people of Casterbridge who are only superficially interested in the military.[footnoteRef:70] In ‘A Changed Man’, Laura is most pained by the visual contrast between the spectacle of the departing Hussar regiment and the increasingly ‘shabby’ appearance of her clergyman husband;[footnoteRef:71] likewise, her neighbours initially welcome the regiment of Hussars not because they honour or value their noble calling, but because the ‘splendid band’ constitutes a spectacular addition to the town’s social scene.[footnoteRef:72] Moreover, the didactic purpose of Hardy’s story is intimately related to and enhanced by its position in the Sphere, where its meanings are shaped by the hybridity of the textual space it inhabits. Sometimes in the Sphere the combination of fiction and other items is merely incongruous; Laura’s distress at her husband’s new career, with which the first part of the story concludes, leads directly into an account of ‘Salmon Fishing on the Dee’.[footnoteRef:73] But there are other moments, where fictional material is juxtaposed disruptively with decidedly un-fictional content, which call into question Brake’s notion of ‘chance parallels’.[footnoteRef:74] The final page of ‘A Changed Man’ covers three columns which frame a central illustration; four photographs of young men in their regimental uniforms over a caption: ‘Some of our dead officers’ (Figure 2: ‘Some of our dead officers’, Sphere, 28 April 1900, p. 452. © British Library Board). The reader’s eye has to skip from the account of Laura and Vannicock’s planned elopement, over this almost wordless obituary, before the story continues with Maumbry’s death. The invisible hand of the compositor of the page aligns two kinds of heroism, two sets of sacrifices. Maumbry’s fictional renunciation of military prestige, in spite of social censure, is juxtaposed with the real-life sacrifices of the four young men pictured, whose regimental uniforms are not spectacular costumes but reminders of the real cost of Britain’s military pride and ambition. The possessive tone of the photograph’s caption, ‘Some of our dead officers’, works in a comparable way to the presence of Kipling’s poem in performances of Tommy Atkins, turning the reader’s reproach of Laura inwards. Just as audiences of Tommy Atkins are invited to scrutinize the hypocrisies in their own responses to the military, the presentation of ‘A Changed Man’ rebukes a society in which military enthusiasm is superficial and transitory, by reminding readers that military life is about much more than sweeping about the British countryside with splendid bands and dashing uniforms, as Vannicock and Maumbry’s former Hussar regiment seem to do. [70: ‘The London Theatres’, Era, 21 September 1895.] [71: Hardy, ‘A Changed Man’, p. 421.] [72: Hardy, ‘A Changed Man’, p. 419.] [73: see Sphere, 21 April 1899, p. 421.] [74: Brake, p. 45, emphasis added. ] This simple reminder of the reality of the army’s current situation reinforces Hardy’s fictional critique of a perspective which sees the military only as entertainment or spectacle. Laura is not the only representative of late nineteenth-century society who ‘knew nothing of the inner realities of military life, and hence idealized it’, as the story says of her.[footnoteRef:75] But if they had neglected to attend to the ‘realities’ of army life before, the Sphere’s readers were being taught some harsh truths in early 1900, as the dead officers’ photographs remind us. The layout of the final page of ‘A Changed Man’ reinforces and complicates the implications of Hardy’s tale, contrasting Maumbry’s sacrifice with Vannicock and Laura’s dishonourable (military) frivolity, while placing both in the context of real military struggle. The Tommy Atkins reviewer’s conviction that ‘the man in the ranks’ enjoys ‘a popularity that is perennial’ is testament to how far the national mood might have shifted, at least towards fictional or theoretical soldiers, over the last decade of the century. But while the years of the South African War undoubtedly contributed to an ongoing transformation in the image of the soldier for the better, the disasters faced by the British army began to recall uncomfortable questions which had been raised half a century earlier in public responses to the Crimean War, about the proficiency and values of the military more generally, and about the imperial politics it served.[footnoteRef:76] As the fighting in South Africa descended into ugly and unprofitable guerilla warfare, reviews of Shirley and Landeck’s play become harder to find, and the Era does not mention Tommy Atkins at all after December 1900. In this context, Hardy’s inversion of the drama’s plot in ‘A Changed Man’ (written in December 1899) looks prescient. The questions posed by his story’s portrayal of military values and civilian sacrifices anticipate the mood in Britain of the second half of the South African War, while the memorial which illustrates its final page emphasizes the contemporary resonances of Hardy’s moral message. Two further examples will serve to demonstrate that neither the ambivalent presentation of soldiers, nor this kind of silent editorial commentary, are unique to ‘A Changed Man’. [75: Hardy, ‘A Changed Man’, p. 420.] [76: Reed, p. 138.] IV. Soldiers on the margins Edith Jay, writing in the Sphere under her pseudonym E. Livingston Prescott, was, even more than Hardy, an ardent supporter of the military. Like Tommy Atkins, her Sphere story collapses class distinctions in the figure of its protagonist. Trooper Graeme of the Cuirassiers may rank as a common soldier, but he is no more the stereotypical ‘Tommy’ than Harold Wilson. As ‘a Scot of ancient family’ he is separated from the ordinary ‘man in the ranks’ by birth and by nationality, and the narrative clearly distinguishes him temperamentally from his comrades, whose ‘loves, easy or vulgar […] did not content him’.[footnoteRef:77] His downward trajectory – through the cruelty of ‘a dishonest guardian’ he has ended up ‘a lonely man without near kin, friends, or money’ – may serve as a reminder that the non-commissioned ranks contain more social variety than cockney ‘Tommy’ stereotypes imply.[footnoteRef:78] In addition to collapsing the class distinctions that had shaped civilian understanding of the Victorian army, ‘Marjorie’s Trooper’ blurs the line between professional soldiers and auxiliary yeomanry, militia and volunteer regiments. Unlucky in romance and thwarted in his military career, the story’s Trooper is saved from suicide after striking up an unlikely friendship with the eight-year-old Marjorie, who turns out to be the niece of his Colonel. When the Colonel fails in his efforts to redress Trooper Graeme’s mistreatment by the army, he promises to ‘pack him off to certain wild regions where an old chum of mine is raising a corps of irregulars, and wants crack shots and good riders, and where he will have a good chance of promotion.’[footnoteRef:79] By the time Graeme reappears in London, ‘[t]en years of adventure’ have transformed the ‘mournful cuirassier’ into a ‘dashing and well groomed’ volunteer, but by referring to him with the title ‘Trooper’ throughout, the story allows the regular army some part in the positive transformation of his character. Furthermore, Trooper Graeme moves from imperial military adventure to domestic heroism when he rescues the grown-up Marjorie from the poverty into which ‘a great commercial smash’ has plunged her family, by marrying her.[footnoteRef:80] In so doing, his story ‘bridge[s] the gap between the military and the people’, in just the way that Miller sees the volunteer movement as doing in Britain.[footnoteRef:81] [77: E. Livingston Prescott, ‘Marjorie’s Trooper’, Sphere, 2 November 1901, pp. 125–28 (p. 126).] [78: Livingston Prescott, p. 126.] [79: Livingston Prescott, p. 128.] [80: Livingston Prescott, p. 128.] [81: Miller, p. 31. See above, p. 7.] ‘Marjorie’s Trooper’ might prove a soldier-hero, but he does so outside the bounds of the normal military world. He is unsuited to the role of a common soldier, but he is also distanced from the officer class, through their mistreatment of him, and from the regular army, when he transfers to ‘wild regions’ at the borders of the empire as a highly skilled irregular. Attridge argues that the South African War presented a challenge to writers of fiction unlike that of earlier conflicts; by 1901, when ‘Marjorie’s Trooper’ appeared in the Sphere, popular enthusiasm for the war had, by and large, been replaced by frustration with the British military’s failings and anxiety about what this meant for the future of the empire or for the anticipated European conflict.[footnoteRef:82] While historical military leaders and contemporary figures like Roberts, Kitchener and Baden Powell continued to exert a pull on the public imagination, as the war dragged on the army’s supply of traditional heroes appeared to be drying up. In their absence, according to Attridge, fiction writers were called upon to supply a protagonist ‘who epitomized something English and worthy, but moved more alone, as an outsider, critical and recalcitrant’.[footnoteRef:83] As a Scot, and as a man too spirited and independent to submit to the strictures of the regular military authorities, Trooper Graeme is just such an ‘outsider’. The officer class to which he might naturally have belonged by virtue of his birth is implicated in the British army’s failings in South Africa, but Graeme is set apart from these hierarchies of military authority, able to demonstrate his British pluck and character only when ‘led to the borders of empire’, as Attridge says, and returning with ‘ambiguous’ or ‘critical’ perspectives on ‘Britishness’.[footnoteRef:84] [82: Porter, pp. 177–78.] [83: Attridge, pp. 160, 14.] [84: Attridge, p. 162.] Once again, the story’s meanings are complicated by its place in the Sphere; as was the case with ‘A Changed Man’, the layout of the final page of the tale disrupts a simplistic reading (Figure 3: ‘An officer who died of wounds’, Sphere, 2 November 1901, p. 128. © British Library Board). The centre of the middle column contains the image and short obituary of ‘An officer who died of wounds’ in South Africa. His military background might be different – this officer is from a company of mounted infantry – but his name, Lieutenant Graham, corresponds so closely with the fictional trooper’s that coincidence is implausible. Trooper Graeme combines in one character the paradox of a well-born private and the independence of an imperial volunteer, and ‘Marjorie’s Trooper’ disrupts assumptions about military stereotypes by collapsing class distinctions. The non-fiction item intrudes on the space of the story, layering another identity on top of the ones Trooper Graeme inhabits and intensifying the effect of the story’s challenge to conventional representations of soldiers and the military. V. ‘A definite lesson to convey’ Marie Corelli’s ‘The Laurels of the Brave’ was published in the issue of the Sphere immediately preceding the ones containing ‘A Changed Man’ and therefore, as noted above, at a time when popular enthusiasm and anxiety about the South African War was at its most intense.[footnoteRef:85] Corelli’s biographer describes her as ‘a moral crusader’; by 1901 her public tirades would earn her the nickname ‘Quarrelli’.[footnoteRef:86] She is a captivating and contradictory figure, ‘the acknowledged “Queen of the Victorian Bestsellers”’, but not one to let an opportunity to sermonize pass her by.[footnoteRef:87] As Kent Carr delicately put it in 1901, her novels ‘have a definite lesson to convey’, and ‘[w]hen art and the purpose she has in view occasionally jostle each other […], it is Art which almost invariably has to stand aside’.[footnoteRef:88] When Shorter approached Corelli for a story, he would have been certain that her name would appeal to readers; he must have been equally sure that she would use the Sphere to denounce some of her famous ‘pet dislikes’.[footnoteRef:89] [85: Marie Corelli, ‘The Laurels of the Brave’, Sphere, 15 April 1900, pp. 387–90.] [86: Teresa Ranson, The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli, Queen of Victorian Bestsellers (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999), pp. 4 and 109.] [87: Eileen Bigland, Marie Corelli: The Woman and the Legend (London: Jarrolds, 1953), pp. 134-5.] [88: Kent Carr, Miss Marie Corelli, Bijou Biographies (VIII) (London: Henry J. Drane, 1901), pp. 88-9 and 108.] [89: Bigland, pp. 176–77. Corelli’s ‘pet dislikes’, which she lists in a Lady’s Realm article in 1897, include: ‘The woman who cannot consecrate her life purely and faithfully to the one great love-passion’; ‘The “new poet” who curls his hair with the tongs and writes his own reviews’; ‘The modern marriage market’, and ‘Women bicyclists and he-females generally’. ] ‘The Laurels of the Brave’ focuses on ‘the beautiful Mrs. Arteroyd’, a woman who feels trapped in her ‘poor marriage’ to ‘a mere British officer, with a V.C. won in the prime of his manhood’. She is jealous of ‘other women, older and plainer’ who ‘had “caught” or bought real live Russian princes’. She reads the newspaper reports of South Africa, where her husband is fighting, ‘sulkily—they were full of war news—nothing but war! war! war! How sick she was of the war!—how tired of all the deaths and wounds, and blunders and casualties and botherments generally’. Looking for her husband’s name in the casualty lists, her concern is simply that ‘if he were killed she would have to go into mourning. “And I look my worst in black.”’[footnoteRef:90] Her bad mood is assuaged by the realization that she could take the opportunity afforded by the war to secure her position in society. The echoes of Kipling’s ‘Absent-Minded Beggar’ in her efforts to ‘do a Poem!’ are conspicuous: [90: Corelli, ‘The Laurels of the Brave’, p. 387.] But we’re off. Good-bye England! I’ll trust ye! The great British Nation’s my pal! Pass the hat round! and say when I’m done for, “We’ll all look after his gal! Refrain— Just look after my gal, will ye? While I’m frontin’ the fire an’ the foe— Like a good old pal, look after my gal, An’ Gawd bless ye wheerever I go![footnoteRef:91] [91: Corelli, ‘The Laurels of the Brave’, p. 388.] Kipling’s poem had raised £50,000 for soldiers’ families by Christmas 1899 and was being lauded by the Daily Mail as ‘the incarnation of the national spirit’, as well as inspiring dozens of amateur poets and newspapermen to pen supplementary verses in Kipling’s memorable jingling rhythm.[footnoteRef:92] It did not gain Corelli’s approval, however, and her various objections to it are vented at length in a 1900 publication: Patriotism—or Self-Advertisement? ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’, Corelli fumes in her pamphlet, slanders ‘the British soldier’ as a morally dubious and ‘criminally’ forgetful figure, and exposes him ‘to the ridicule of Europe’.[footnoteRef:93] ‘Tommy’, Corelli insists, [92: Daily Mail, 25 December 1899; John Lee, “Following Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar,’” Kipling Journal, 341 (2011), 5–24 (p. 6). ] [93: Marie Corelli, Patriotism--Or Self-Advertisement? A Social Note on the Present War, 6th edn (London: Greening & Co., 1900), p. 4.] has a strong heart as well as a long memory for his dear ones at home. […] [G]iven a fair all-round specimen of him, he is never “absent-minded” about anything which concerns his home or his family belongings.[footnoteRef:94] [94: Corelli, Patriotism--Or Self-Advertisement?, p. 6.] With a humourlessness that is almost endearing, she imagines the indignation of a soldier who, on his return from South Africa, will find ‘that through the efforts of a few pushing journalists, […] he should have the taunt “Beggar!” flung in his face from one end of the world to the other’.[footnoteRef:95] Mrs. Arteroyd’s satisfaction with her work in ‘The Laurels of the Brave’ resonates precisely with these criticisms: [95: Corelli, Patriotism--Or Self-Advertisement?, pp. 8–9.] It suggests love and a spice of immorality. His “Gal”—one of the silly creatures who walk out with him, not “on the strength”, of course. […] Not his wife—and not his baby […] but his “gal”![footnoteRef:96] [96: Corelli, ‘The Laurels of the Brave’, p. 388.] Mrs. Arteroyd thus combines the appearance of being charitable with the patronizing moral censure which Corelli sees in Kipling’s work. Recruiting a popular actress to recite the poem ‘dressed in khaki’ at a bazaar ‘for the benefit of Tommy’, Mrs. Arteroyd illustrates another of Corelli’s objections: that so-called ‘charity’ galas ostensibly in aid of soldiers’ families are appealing primarily because they allow society women to ‘display [their] charms in gowns which have cost as much as the whole profits of the […] business’.[footnoteRef:97] The actress she has engaged recognizes Mrs. Arteroyd’s motives – ‘It will be a splendid advertisement for you—I mean for your pretty poem!’– but is also well aware of what she stands to gain herself.[footnoteRef:98] Sure enough, the poem scores ‘a great “social” success’; Mrs. Arteroyd is invited to dinner with European royalty, and ‘an enterprising newspaper proprietor offer[s] to buy the manuscript and “run it up to auction” for one of the Tommy funds’.[footnoteRef:99] Having received a wreath of laurels, with instructions to ‘keep [them] for your husband. […] Add them to his V.C.!’, Mrs. Arteroyd enjoys her ‘proud moment’ to the full. The telegram informing her of Mr. Arteroyd’s death finds her ‘pleasantly engaged in reading a glowing description of herself and her gown in a favourite pictorial “weekly”’. She is left ‘rigid and tearless. Her “society” laurels were withered. She would have to “look her worst in black” after all!’[footnoteRef:100] [97: Corelli, Patriotism--Or Self-Advertisement?, p. 4.] [98: John Lee has shown how profitable ‘the reciting rage’ surrounding ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’ was for actresses such as Maud Beerbohm-Tree (Lee, p. 6) – something Corelli’s actress acknowledges when she considers ‘what a first-rate business’ Mrs. Arteroyd is ‘starting [her] on’ (Corelli, ‘The Laurels of the Brave’, p. 389). ] [99: Corelli, ‘The Laurels of the Brave’, p. 390.] [100: Corelli, ‘The Laurels of the Brave’, p. 390.] Marie Corelli’s novel Boy, also published in 1900, is a sentimental eulogy for the ordinary soldier in South Africa ‘doing something good—brave’ to make up for earlier indiscretions and failings; as a traditional military reformation narrative, it thus participates in the conventional portrayal of Tommy Atkins as a potentially-loveable rogue, best seen from a great distance.[footnoteRef:101] Like ‘The Laurels of the Brave’, however, Boy makes clear that for Corelli the most disturbing aspect of the war is what it reveals about the moral fibre of civilian society: ‘how un-Christian’, the narrator muses, ‘how terrible it seemed, that shot and shell should be used to tear poor human beings to pieces for a quarrel over a bit of land, so much gold’.[footnoteRef:102] Here, Corelli’s narrator hints at one of the key arguments made by contemporary anti-war campaigners: that Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain has been corrupted by the influence of powerful capitalists, with their eyes on the Transvaal’s gold and diamond mines, into provoking an unjust war for grubbily economic reasons. Corelli makes the same argument in a poem which first appears, alongside a reprint of her Sphere story, in a 1901 collection, A Christmas Greeting. In ‘Joe’s Orchid’, Corelli ironically ‘thanks’ Chamberlain for the fruits of British victory in South Africa: ‘shining buds’ and ‘golden blossoms’.[footnoteRef:103] Though ‘The trail of human blood and pain / Has left upon its leaves a stain’, Joe’s ‘skill in Orchid cultivation / Has given us a conquered nation’: ‘Can England such a plant forgo? / Why, no!’ The pairing of this poem with ‘The Laurels of the Brave’ emphasizes Mrs. Arteroyd’s grasping social ambition; Corelli’s Sphere story shows how disordered social priorities precipitate military catastrophe. In an inversion of the conventional fear that ‘Tommy’ might infect civilian society with his dubious morals, here it is the civilian world which threatens the integrity of the military. Corelli’s soldiers are marginalized, distanced from the concerns of metropolitan society both physically and metaphorically, but they expose and are tainted by the flaws in cosmopolitan society. Mrs. Arteroyd’s mania for social advancement contaminates the pristine military virtue of Colonel Arteroyd, who explains to a comrade that he would rather die honourably than go home to face his wife’s disdain, and gains his fatal wound after refusing to ‘lie low’. His death is presented as a result of social decay, rather than as a tragic accident of war.[footnoteRef:104] South Africa might seem ‘far removed from all “social” hypocrisies’, as the narrator suggests, but the corroding influence of society’s misplaced priorities succeeds in undermining the moral courage even of Colonel John Arteroyd, V.C. [101: Marie Corelli, Boy: A Sketch (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1900), p. 346.] [102: Corelli, Boy: A Sketch, pp. 337–38.] [103: Marie Corelli, ‘Joe’s Orchid’, in A Christmas Greeting of Various Thoughts, Verses, and Fancies (London: Methuen, 1901), p. 82. ‘The Laurels of the Brave’ is the next item in the book.] [104: Corelli, ‘The Laurels of the Brave’, p. 390.] What would readers of the Sphere in April 1900 have made of ‘The Laurels of the Brave’, with its unstable tone slipping disconcertingly between the genuinely funny and the irredeemably bleak? Notwithstanding the Sphere’s news and society pages’ interest in charity galas such as the one Mrs Arteroyd orchestrates, it is certainly conceivable that Corelli’s denunciation of the ‘self-promotion’ of society figures in ‘The Laurels of the Brave’ struck a chord with some of the its readers. In fact, her ‘lesson’ was immediately reiterated in Hardy’s ‘A Changed Man’, which appeared the very next week. When Laura Maumbry asks her husband’s permission to participate in a regimental amateur dramatic production ‘to raise some money for your sufferers’, the reformed curate regrets that they had not chosen something ‘more in keeping with the necessity it was to relieve’. Although he had been an enthusiastic participant in such entertainments himself in his life as a soldier, he laments that ‘“The grief of Casterbridge is the excuse for their frivolity”’, observing that ‘nobody cared’ about the precise charitable pretext, ‘provided the play were played’.[footnoteRef:105] In their respective Sphere stories, then, both Marie Corelli and Thomas Hardy make use of the platform provided by newspaper publication to expose and critique society’s preference for military spectacle over true military values. [105: Hardy, ‘A Changed Man (Continued)’, p. 451.] The ethical challenge presented by Corelli’s and Hardy’s tales, with their conflicted presentation of soldier figures and military values, contrasts conspicuously with the Sphere’s otherwise pro-government reporting of the war. In commissioning short stories from figures like Hardy and Corelli, Shorter’s most pressing concern was to ensure the commercial success of his new venture; as Bennet laments, newspaper editors typically ‘make a show of “big names”’ in an effort to boost circulation.[footnoteRef:106] The fact that these writers courted controversy made them household names that were certain to appeal to readers. But the same fact meant that Shorter could be sure that the fiction they supplied him with might not align comfortably with the Sphere’s ‘watchword’ of ‘loyalty to the Queen and the Empire’. These stories present complex, ambivalent soldier characters and tense, often conflicted relationships between civil and military worlds, reflecting the ‘doubts and vicissitudes’ that Attridge describes as characteristic of national self-consciousness at the turn of the century; but they do so in the pages of a newspaper which otherwise worked hard to allay or even to deny the existence of such doubts.[footnoteRef:107] [106: Bennett, p. 3.] [107: Attridge, p. 1.] VI. Facts and fictions In conclusion, I turn to one final story: ‘The Day of His Glory’, by W. E. Norris, published in the Sphere at the end of 1900. This is the tale of a disreputable soldier who finds himself caught up in a piece of real British military history, and whose life and death present a serious challenge to the concepts of military glory and honour that were ubiquitous in early press accounts of the South Africa War.[footnoteRef:108] Norris’s story begins with aristocratic and wild Fred Streynsham resolving to ‘turn over a new leaf’ in order to win the approval of Miss Agnes Okeden. His plans are spoiled, however, when his alcoholic and heavily indebted father kills himself, leaving Fred ‘absolutely stone-broke’. His uncle the Marquis sends him as a soldier ‘to the colonies’, initiating the familiar soldierly reformation plot. Fred does not write to Agnes for so long that eventually, in spite of her promise never to forget him, she gets engaged to the decent and extremely boring John Levett. Fred ends up in the Soudan as an officer with the 21st Lancers. He is an impoverished ‘scapegrace’ of ‘dubious’ morals with a reputation for ‘drink’, ‘high play’, ‘doubtful transactions in the matter of horseflesh’ and ‘intrigues with skittish married women’ – in other words, although an ordinary soldier, he is closely identified with the conventional literary stereotype of dissolute and aristocratic officers which were the frequent counterpart of representations of Tommy Atkins as brutish and violent.[footnoteRef:109] If his behaviour is disreputable, however, his character is attractive; in spite of his poverty and the hopelessness of ever earning his way back to Agnes, ‘he kept up his spirits’ and ‘became more popular than he had ever been before in his life’. Even his belief that he ought to ‘get himself killed’ in order to ‘set the girl who loved him […] free’ strikes the reader as appealingly romantic and generous, and forms a stark contrast to Agnes’s fiancé, who ‘was quite sure to behave decently always, come what might’ and could not be described as ‘personally charming’ even on his wedding day.[footnoteRef:110] News reaches Fred that his uncle the Marquis has been drowned in an accident, making Fred, his remaining heir, extremely wealthy. Fred goes off with his regiment to the battle of Omdurman resolving once again to reform himself, and in high spirits – not because of the money itself, but because his new fortune will make him worthy of Agnes. In his description of the battle, Norris makes an appeal to his readers’ knowledge of recent imperial history – the battle of Omdurman had taken place in September 1898 – and to the memory of previous military blunders. His tale thus confounds the distinctions between his fiction and the Sphere’s news: [108: W. E. Norris, ‘The Day of His Glory’, Sphere, 1 December 1900, pp. 259–61.] [109: Norris, p. 260.] [110: Norris, p. 260.] The story of the battle of Omdurman has been so often told that everybody knows where the 21st Lancers were. […] Held back until the persistent, successive waves of the enemy’s advance faltered and ceased, […] they were slipped at last […] and so swept forth into the unknown—into, as it turned out, the wholly unsuspected. […] [W]ithout a moment’s warning they were upon the brink of that awful ravine, swarming with desperate concealed foes.[footnoteRef:111] [111: Norris, pp. 260, 262.] In this military catastrophe, Fred is killed, last seen ‘sailing forward, bare-headed, jubilant, and calling out, “This is glorious!”’[footnoteRef:112] We might have some sympathy for the faithful and optimistic Fred, but his bad luck is repeatedly compounded by his naive folly, as C. Grenville Manton’s illustration of the story emphasizes (Figure 4: C. Grenville Manton, Illustration for ‘The Day of His Glory’, Sphere, 1 December 1900, p. 259. © British Library Board). While his fellow lancers’ attention is fixed forward, their helmets low over their eyes and their ceremonial lances aligned in formation, Fred gazes directly out of the image, as though into a camera, brandishing a sword, grinning and ‘bare-headed’. The caption reiterates the narrator’s ironic commentary: ‘Glorious no doubt it was, and thoroughly enjoyable while it lasted.’ The overriding impression is that Fred, and the notion of heroism that his enthusiasm embodies, is a bit silly. The title is ironic; ‘The Day of His Glory’ is a pointless waste of life. On the other hand, we might read Grenville Manton’s decision to show Fred with his sword drawn in light of Brown’s argument about the symbolic significance of the bayonet at a time of anxiety about British military masculinity.[footnoteRef:113] The Battle of Omdurman, where ‘eleven thousand Dervish warriors were killed for the loss of only twenty-eight British and twenty Egyptian soldiers’, was a powerful testament to ‘the devastating power of modern munitions’.[footnoteRef:114] However, the fate of the 21st Lancers, surprised into hand-to-hand combat by their opponents’ superior tactical skill and knowledge of the local landscape, and unable to capitalize on the advantage given by their superior firearms, provokes a striking contrast between the individual physical prowess of British soldiers and that of their adversaries. In another famous image of the 21st Lancers at the Battle of Omdurman, the 1898 painting by Richard Caton Woodville, the Dervishes’ swords, spears and rifles, all precisely aimed at British bodies, contrast strikingly with a thicket of flimsy-looking ceremonial lances, pointing skywards or bending unconvincingly when they come into contact with African bodies.[footnoteRef:115] Perhaps the sword with which Grenville Manton arms Fred is testament to what Brown calls ‘that “muscle” and “personal skill” seemingly lacking in the average urban recruit’, and which the story’s portrayal of Fred might imply he lacks, notwithstanding his fidelity and personal charm.[footnoteRef:116] [112: Norris, p. 262.] [113: Brown, ‘Cold Steel, Weak Flesh’, pp. 169–74.] [114: Brown, ‘Cold Steel, Weak Flesh’, p. 170.] [115: Richard Caton Woodville, The Charge of the 21st Lancers at the Battle of Omdurman, 1898 (National Army Museum, Study Collection, 1898) .] [116: Brown, ‘Cold Steel, Weak Flesh’, p. 172.] If the story ultimately exonerates the individual, however, it is much less forgiving of the military more broadly. Considering the fate of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman, the narrator comments: ‘so they contributed one more page to the rather long record of British exploits which the cold military critic has to pronounce devoid alike of object and result.’[footnoteRef:117] While the ‘cold military critic’ might have the impartiality to make such an observation, however, the narrator objects that society at large is more inclined to accept the reassuring tale of heroic adventure and victory without paying too much attention to the details: [117: Norris, p. 262.] Critics who are not military may, to be sure, discern something tangible and valuable in the shape of example when weighing the results of such splendid absurdities, for the 21st, as we know, got through. They got through—some four hundred of them against three thousand, it is said—holding together, slashing, stumbling, and recovering themselves on their undersized Arab chargers; but they put themselves practically out of action for the remainder of the day, and they left the seventh Marquis of Godalming [Fred] behind.[footnoteRef:118] [118: Norris, p. 262.] Laura Maumbry, Mrs. Arteroyd, and the audiences of Tommy Atkins might all be accused alongside these unmilitary critics of celebrating ‘splendid absurdities’ while failing to count the true cost of the war. Meanwhile, there are painful parallels between the Dervishes’ superior use of the landscape and the Boers’ similar advantage over British forces in 1899 and 1900, which had contributed significantly to the ‘Black Week’ disasters, evoking to a depressing sense of military déjà vu, and conveying barely-veiled criticisms of the army’s failure to learn from its mistakes. This study of short stories in the Sphere suggests just some of the ways that newspaper fiction can help illuminate the complex and changing relationships between society and the military at the close of the nineteenth century, during a period of impassioned public debate about the justice and methods of a highly controversial conflict. Clement Shorter, as an ambitious newspaper editor with a reputation for literary taste and a keen sense of what would appeal to a broad readership, commissioned literary content for his new publication which introduced questions about, even criticisms of, the war in South Africa and civilian responses to it that would have been impermissible in the politically ‘neutral’ news sections of the paper. The original publication context of these stories is significant; reading them in the Sphere allows for the proliferation of meanings generated by the juxtaposition of materials in a hybrid textual space and helps establish a network of relationships between the short stories. While the ideological claims of each individual tale might seem to be drowned out by the politically and socially orthodox content of the rest of the Sphere, when the stories are taken as a series, the insistent way in which they pose questions about the relationship between civil society and imperial war comes more clearly into focus. In particular these tales, and the designs of the pages on which they are presented, repeatedly collapse the class and rank distinctions between ordinary soldiers and officers, between the professional but still somewhat dubious ‘Tommy Atkins’ and the celebrated volunteers. Shorter’s use of fiction – the writers he commissioned, the presentation of the stories they produced, and the timing of each tale’s publication – suggests a conscious attempt to make space for more ambivalent responses to ‘Queen and Empire’. The Sphere’s fiction frequently offers a challenge to the prevailing ideology of patriotism and militarism that would have been incommensurate with the newspaper’s appeal to a heterogeneous, middle-class readership, had such challenges appeared in the non-fiction sections of the newspaper. Moreover, moments such as Norris’s explicit reference to real military history, and the visual juxtaposition of fictional soldiers with images of real, recently killed servicemen, serve to undercut the generic distinctions between different sections of the publication, allowing fictional texts to speak powerfully to real, topical concerns. Figures Figure 1: A. S. Hartrick, Illustration for ‘A Changed Man’, Sphere, 21 April 1900, p. 419. © British Library Board. Figure 2: ‘Some of our dead officers’, Sphere, 28 April 1900, p. 452. © British Library Board. Figure 3: ‘An officer who died of wounds’, Sphere, 2 November 1901, p. 128. © British Library Board. Figure 4: C. Grenville Manton, Illustration for ‘The Day of His Glory’, Sphere, 1 December 1900, p. 259. © British Library Board. Acknowledgements This research was partially funded by a Postgraduate Scholarship from the Wolfson Foundation. I am grateful to John Lee for his comments on an early version of this paper. Thanks are due also to the conveners of the Colonial and Post Colonial New Researchers Forum at the Institute of Historical Research for their encouragement and helpful feedback, and to the reviewers who guided me to invaluable wider reading. Images from the Sphere are reproduced with the permission of the British Library. 1