At the end of John Masefield’s Multitude and Solitude (1909), playwright- turned- explorer Roger asserts ‘the world is just coming to see that science is not a substitute for religion, but a religion of a very deep and austere kind’ (299). Reviewers were inclined to agree, characterising the novel as
‘find[ing] a new gospel in science and service’.94 Whilst out in Africa Roger understands his fear of ‘giving way and relapsing to the barbarism about him’ in terms of ‘the spiritual war’; his experimental work trying to cure sleeping sickness is ‘the duty of one who had taken a military oath of birth into a Christian race’ (262). He resolves to form a ‘brotherhood’ of ama-teur scientists with ‘a little school and laboratory’ and monthly paper
‘preaching [their] tenets’ to rid the world of ‘dirt and cowardice’ through the fearless invocation of sanitary science. Throughout the novel he is spurred on by visions of his dead fiancée, Ottalie, who—with her ‘fine, trained, scrupulous mind’—embodies a ‘new spirit coming into the world’, the spirit of science:
she seemed to him to be something of all cleanness and fearlessness, waiting for him to lead her into the world, so that men might serve her. (298)
93 Howell, Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire, p. 145.
94 ‘Multitude and Solitude by John Masefield’ rev. by North American Review 204.733 (1916) 941–42.
He prays that Ottalie’s influence on him might help him to
bring to earth that Promised life in which man, curbing Nature to his use, would assert a new law and rule like a king, where now, even in his strength, he walks sentenced, a prey to all things baser. (300)
These powerful final lines of the novel use a religious imperative to advo-cate for man’s absolute dominion over nature. Science, cleanly and fear-less, is imagined as a tool of imperialism on a global scale.
The entanglements between medicine, religious dogma, and imperial-ism in Multitude and Solitude reflect a rhetorical framing of the colonial encounter in which the conquest of tropical illness was championed as part of the Christian ‘civilising mission’. This was literalised in a subset of sto-ries published at the turn of the century in which recovery from sleeping sickness was associated with Christian conversion. In Alice Garland Steele’s
‘Awake Thou Sleeper!’ (1923), published in the semi-religious periodical The Quiver, a doctor recounts the tale of a friend of his, John Chalmers, who went to Africa as a missionary and caught the fatal sleeping sickness, but against all the odds recovered. The recovery, which the doctor describes as ‘a miracle’, is attributed to his steadfast belief in God and his conversion of a wayward woman. Despite dosages of atoxyl, variants of arsenic, and ‘a clinical thermometer in one hand and a dose of bluff in the other’, the doctor could not help John, who continued to deteriorate and eventually became comatose. However, upon seeing a girl he had met on the steamer over, who prayed, for the first time in her life, for him, John makes a sudden recovery—the only explanation given is divine intervention.95
In Joseph Hocking’s The Dust of Life (1915) British protagonist, Cedric Essex, similarly contracts sleeping sickness whilst on an expedition to Africa. He is considered as good as dead by the missionary doctor; how-ever, he subsequently consumes the titular substance and undergoes both recovery from the illness and a powerful Christian epiphany. The dust, which turns out to be a naturally occurring compound containing large amounts of radium, is found deep in the African mountains.96 It is a
95 Alice Garland Steele, ‘Awake Thou Sleeper!’ The Quiver (February, 1923) 326–34 (p. 329).
96 The positing of the sleeping sickness cure as radium-based engages with the radium craze of the early twentieth century, which saw a myriad of radioactive products sold as health improvers and panaceas.
precipitate of the ‘Water of Life’, a term that occurs in The Book of Revelation and the Gospel of John referring to the Holy Spirit, and in some versions of the Alexander romance. The dust is given to Cedric by African prince, Sunflower, himself a Christian whose support of Cedric is framed as a displaced gratitude to the British missionary who converted him.
Sunflower dissolves the compound in water and within half an hour Cedric regains a healthier colour and his breathing becomes regular. Mr Taylor, a British missionary, asserts that the ‘salts must possess some qualities as yet unrealised by the medical world’ (128), characterising the action of the drug as ‘like a miracle of which one reads in the New Testament’ (116).
Sunflower similarly remarks: ‘you see! It is life fighting with death. It is like Christ in my heart. He overcome death!’ (116). Here Hocking, who was himself a United Methodist Free Church minister, provides narrative jus-tification for the ‘civilising mission’ by celebrating the combined efficacy of religion and medicine. As missionary Mr McFinn puts it, the work of Christianity is tied up with the ‘romance’ of exploration, and the practical work of medical science:
Was it not Livingstone who climbed a mountain one morning, and from the summit of the mountain saw the smoke rising from a thousand African vil-lages, and who said that, God helping him, Christ’s work should be known in each of those thousand villages before end of the century. Isn’t there romance in a thought that? […] I’ve cured hundreds of sickness. I’ve taught them something of the meaning of sanitation, of decency, of the laws of health.97
The material overlap between Divine and medical intervention depicted in imperial romance was reinforced by parasitologists’ own investment in theological language. Patrick Manson, for example, refers to mosquitoes as ‘the twelve apostles in glycerine’ and himself as a ‘preacher of the gospel of Laveran’. Meanwhile Ross invokes a form of theological redemption when he thanks ‘relenting God’ for showing him how to end human suf-fering in the form of scientific inspiration.98 In his Memoirs, Ross recalls trying to persuade Surgeon-Colonel Lawrie of the Indian Medical Service
97 Joseph Hocking, The Dust of Life (London: Cassell and Company, 1915) p. 86.
98 Manson, ‘Letter 32 02/011’ in The Beast in the Mosquito: The Correspondence of Ronald Ross and Patrick Manson ed. by William F. Bynum and Caroline Overy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998) p. 92; Ronald Ross, ‘Reply’ (1897) in Philosophies (London: John Murray, 1911) pp. 53–54.
to believe in Alphonse Laveran’s still disputed discovery of the malaria parasite, which he conceptualises as a belief in ‘Laveranity’. He writes,
‘being a convert like St Paul I became a militant apostle’ (178). Such lan-guage implies that ‘belief’ is a practice conserved across both realms: reli-gious and scientific.
Examining the complex politics of Ross’s intellectual affiliations and disputes with Patrick Manson, Alphonse Laveran, and Robert Koch over the course of his career, Jeanne Guillemin argues that in the late nine-teenth century ‘a medical scientist might strategically choose intellectual forebears to legitimize the claim to originality’.99 Ross’s own assertion that he was converted to the ‘gospel’ of Laveran alleged a prestigious and for-eign patrimony that helped to reinforce Ross’s priority claims. His choice of language and poetic framing of his work as divinely ordained doubly benefitted Ross by reinforcing the gospel-like authority of scientific knowl-edge and quelling what Ross went on to call ‘petty inter-tribal advantage’
by claiming God as his true mentor. He writes: ‘I, with eyes upcast/
Gazing warn and weary from this Dark World/Ask of thee thy Wisdom, steadfast Eye of God’.100 His poetic anthology, which was published in 1911 in tandem with a malaria textbook, contains many such appeals to Divine intervention:
In this, O Nature, yield I pray to me.
I pace and pace, and think and think, and take The fever’d hands, and note down all I see, That some dim distant light may haply break.
The painful faces ask, can we not cure?
We answer, No, not yet; we seek the laws.
O God reveal thro’ all this thing obscure
The unseen, small, but million-murdering cause.101
When Ross finally found his experimental proof, he made room for both the benevolence of God and for the innovations of the scientist, writing
‘This day relenting God hath placed within my hand/A wondrous thing’, but also: ‘the voice of God is heard/Not in the thunder-fit;/A still small
99 Jeanne Guillemin, ‘Choosing Scientific Patrimony: Sir Ronald Ross, Alphonse Laveran, and the Mosquito-Vector Hypothesis for Malaria’ Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 57.4 (October 2002) 385–409 (p. 385).
100 Ross, ‘The Star’ (1890–1893) in Philosophies (London: John Murray, 1911), p. 21.
101 Ross, ‘Indian Fevers’ (1890–1893) in Philosophies, p. 21.
voice is heard,/Half-heard, and that is it’ (53–54). Ross’s narration of his work subscribed to a form of idealised masculinity, embodied by Carlylean heroism and the ‘muscular Christianity’ of writers like Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, by presenting himself as a lone genius persevering in earnest for the good of humanity, informed by both Christ and his own innate skill.
Norman Vance has highlighted the wide reach of the concept of
‘Christian manliness’, which ‘represented a strategy of commending Christian virtue by linking it with the more interesting notions of secular moral and physical prowess’.102 Donald E. Hall characterises this as a ‘reli-gious, social, and literary movement’ which ‘evinced not only admirable agendas for moral and social salvation, but also sexist, classist, and imperi-alist ideological underpinnings’.103 The muscular Christian movement forged an association between ‘physical strength, religious certainty, and the ability to shape and control the world around oneself’ (7). The overlap between these tenets and the political discourses of tropical medicine are particularly visible in fiction like Hocking’s The Dust of Life where tensions in the imperial project are inscribed onto male ‘sporting’ bodies.
The novel establishes an association between physical health and moral virtue by describing the protagonist, Cedric, as ‘springy, muscular, with health and vitality manifesting itself in his every movement and look’ (8).
He is an ‘open-air English boy’ and his first action in the narrative proper is to win a rugby game (3). His victory on the field foreshadows his even-tual victory in the empire, a common narratological progression born of a culture in which competitive and team sports (and the kind of masculini-ties associated with them) became ‘rhetorically and practically imbued with a spirit of martial imperialism’.104 As Vanessa Heggie argues, educa-tional reformers drew on ‘games-based models of fair play, sportsmanship and muscular Christianity’ to instil ‘discipline, self-sacrifice, leadership and stoicism in middle- and upper-class boys’ in preparation for them to become the military and political leaders of the future.105 The triumphant conclusion to the novel, in which the ‘lionine’ Cedric—newly converted
102 Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) p. 1.
103 Donald E. Hall, Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. 4.
104 Vanessa Heggie, ‘Bodies, Sport and Science in the Nineteenth Century’ Past and Present 231.1 (2016) 169–200 (p. 174).
105 Heggie, ‘Bodies, Sport and Science’, p. 176.
to Christianity—wins himself a fortune and a wife reiterates the kind of heroism to which readers should aspire.
Cedric enacts an idealised imperial masculine citizenship by demon-strating his athleticism, bravery, stoicism, and fair-mindedness in a series of mini-trials with increasing stakes. First, he wins a rugby game and then he saves a young woman from drowning in the sea in the Cornish town of Perranzeth. After swapping the playing field for the ‘real thing’—the African jungle—Cedric demonstrates his marksmanship and loyalty by sav-ing his friend, the duplicitous and cowardly Roger, from a lion. John M. MacKenzie argues that the lion became a ‘national and imperial sym-bol […] the epitome of empire itself’, with fantasies of lion killing repre-senting ‘the striving and victory of civilised man over the darker primeval and untamed forces still at work in the world’.106 Juvenile literature, annu-als, journannu-als, and travelogues were filled with pictorial representations of lion hunting, particularly of David Livingstone’s famous encounter with a lion, to illustrate the heroism of missionary-explorers (48). Indeed, Hocking too makes reference to the attack on Livingstone, dropping his narratorial voice to remark: ‘I think it was Livingstone who, when explain-ing some scars on his arm which he carried to his grave, declared that when the lion’s teeth had entered his arm—which had caused the scars—
he felt no pain’ (91).
Cedric goes on to save Roger’s life again—this time by rescuing him from the mouth of an extinct volcano, which their native companions call the ‘mountain of the devil’, and which Cedric considers to be ‘like the mouth of hell’ (96). Descending into the fiery darkness suspended by a rope, Cedric enacts the mytheme of descending into the underworld and recites lines from Dante’s Inferno. After returning triumphant, he recovers swiftly owing to his ‘vigorous young life’ and his ‘splendid physique’
(102). He is heralded as a hero and a sportsman; as we are reminded throughout, he was invited to come on the expedition in the first place because he is ‘a sportsman to the fingertips’ (77)—a shorthand that speaks to the strength of his character as much as to his physical ability.
In Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880–1915, Joseph A. Kestner locates imperial romance within a landscape of crisis in which the coherence of British masculinity and British nationhood were being steadily and catastrophically undermined by fracturing gender roles, the
106 John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 47.
increasingly insistent voice of the working class in domestic politics, and decreasing confidence in the imperial project. One response to these crises was an intensification of the adventure genre in which male readers could gratify their desire for a stable masculine ideal.107 Anthea Trodd argues that in the Edwardian period, English literature was increasingly domi-nated by discussions of manliness, a phenomenon that helped to inculpate the voice of a masculine ruling class and, in turn, to map Englishness and masculinity in close proximity.108 A variety of stories emerged in Britain at the fin de siècle which reimagined, reinforced, lauded, negotiated, and interrogated masculine ideals using empire as a conceptual space within which men might ‘practice’ manhood (in more ways than one). Amongst the diversity of masculinities that operated in this period, one prominent imagined identity was that of the man-of-action, most often typified by sports and big game hunting.
Hunting was part of the cult of English public-school athleticism in which activities like game shooting and sports, especially team sports, were thought to cultivate manly virtues. As MacKenzie argues, towards the end of the century,
the hunting cult was transferred overseas, often searching for a genuine wil-derness, and generat[ing] an entire ethos which distinguished certain char-acteristics of the Hunt as markers of civilisation and gentlemanly conduct […] the combination of science and ethic, nature study, human control and moral code began to take a central role in popular fiction and juvenile training.109
Hunting was widely conceived as ‘preparation and training for European expansion and conflict with other peoples’ and, for writers like G. A. Henty and H. Rider Haggard, ‘lay at the centre of imperial experience’ (43). An article in ‘country gentlemen’s newspaper’, Field, drew on the association between sportsmanship and empire to communicate the value of Ross’s
‘mosquito crusade’ in 1901. The sanitation work that Ross had been car-rying out in West Africa would be of the ‘very first importance to travel-lers, sportsmen, and all those whose duties or pleasures take them to
107 Joseph A. Kestner, Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880–1915 (London:
Routledge, 2016) pp. 2–5.
108 Anthea Trodd, A Reader’s Guide to Edwardian Literature (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1991) pp. 6–8.
109 John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature, p. 26.
unhealthy tropical regions’, a comment that perpetuates the concept of empire as an extension of the playing fields of English public schools. The article goes on to advise sportsmen and travellers to avoid the ‘huts of the malaria-stricken natives in which the mosquitoes absorb the poison’ and to advocate the extermination of mosquitoes, not from ‘the whole of the dark continent but from those parts of it which white men particularly frequent’.110 It could not be clearer here that the writer is concerned, not with global health, but with the accessibility of Africa to sportsmen. They conclude ‘there could be no more cheering news for those who travel in tropical swamps whether to kill game or dig gold’, a statement that sug-gests that these are the dominant activities of men in imperial space.
As an article in the New York Times demonstrated in 1895, the activities of parasitologists were often moulded to fit this narrative; it opened: ‘the world’s mightiest hunters in the last thirty years have been those who have pursued infinitesimal game—who have found, caught, killed, or held cap-tive those curious little organisms called microbes or bacilli’.111 In 1926, Paul de Kruif published a popular history of microbiology entitled Microbe Hunters, which similarly professed to be ‘a tale of the bold and persistent and curious explorers and fighters of death’.112 He used the sports and games ideology to characterise the work of parasitologists such as Ross, David Bruce, Louis Pasteur, and Robert Koch as heroic. In de Kruif’s words, Bruce discovered the connection between tsetse flies and sleeping sickness ‘because he was a hunter. Not only with his mind—but a bold everlasting curious snouting hunter with his body […] he carried the fight to the enemy’ (267–68). He was a fighter and a ‘viking’ (277); his wife and collaborator, Mary, ‘was a scientific Diana’—the Roman goddess of wild animals and the hunt (267–68). The British edition of the book included a preface that read: ‘Here is the true story of the adventures of explorers in the fantastic world of the unseen’. Reviews of the book made the lexis of sport and romance even more explicit; the Saturday Review of Literature asserted that Microbe Hunters was ‘a chapter of scientific history [as] thrilling and romantic as any conquest, or voyage, or discovery’. The Emporia Gazette characterised it as ‘a hunting story as interesting as any story of African game hunters, or tiger hunters in Asia’, and the Boston
110 ‘The Mosquito Crusade’ Field, Saturday 21 September 1901, p. 25.
111 ‘Hunting the Bacteria’ New York Times, Sunday 3 February 1895, p. 24.
112 Paul de Kruif, Microbe Hunters (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1926) p. 3.
Transcript dubbed it ‘an adventure story’ full of ‘biography, science, and heroism’.113
This type of heroic imperial masculinity was, however, undermined and destabilised by the very fictions that sought to promote it. In Multitude and Solitude, Roger contemplates death from sleeping sickness, now dis-possessed of the glory and heroics of earlier chapters: ‘this death of which he had thought so grandly seemed very stupid now that he was coming to know it’ (319). He writes a death note and reflects, dejectedly, on who might find it:
Some great German scientist about to banish the disease. Some drunken English gold prospector with a cockney accent. Some missionary, or sports-man, or commercial traveller. More likely it would be some roving savage with a snuff-box in his earlobe and a coil of copper wire about his
Some great German scientist about to banish the disease. Some drunken English gold prospector with a cockney accent. Some missionary, or sports-man, or commercial traveller. More likely it would be some roving savage with a snuff-box in his earlobe and a coil of copper wire about his