Michael Hays

The work of discovering colonial and imperialist moments in the literary products of nineteenth-century Europe and America has gone on for some time now, but with the appearance of Edward W. Said's powerful book, Culture and Imperialism, a larger conceptual scope and greater obligations have been allotted the critic who would engage in this enterprise. The question should no longer be whether there are such moments, but, rather, how these moments are fundamental to the historical development of imperialist discourse and to the production of Western culture in general, and, more importantly, how the retelling of this tale of “literary” production can move beyond merely providing further evidence of western imperialism and cultural hegemony to become a means of understanding how, for example, British imperial culture acquired its authority, and the power to impose itself both at home and in world at large.

As Said demonstrates, the best way to come to grips with these problems is to return to the cultural archive (Said's primary concern is novel and narrative fiction in the nineteenth century) to see what story it can tell us about the ways in which supposedly autonomous works of art participate in the labor of elaborating and consolidating the practice of empire by fixing and naturalizing the spatial as well as social relations that empower the imperial center, connecting it to and defining the priorities that regulate other, subordinate peoples and places. This essay is intended as a small contribution to the task that Said has so impressively set out for his readers. If I begin by reassembling some of the material from his book it is both to signal my debt to his text and to mark off the space in which this essay aims to insert a slightly different construction of the history of imperial culture in England, one which suggests that its presence is not quite so pervasive and its development less uniform than Culture and Imperialism seeks to claim.

The story I will sketch here highlights the difference between the triumphant tale of imperial sway Said locates in the (middle class) fiction of the nineteenth century and the somewhat different and disruptive history that emerges from a consideration of the popular theatre of the

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