Essays of the ‘age of catastrophe’ encompassing the two World Wars have been judged aesthetic failures because, in their argumentative force and dogmatism, they break with a fundamental commitment of the essayistic: to provide an open, even democratic relational space between reader and writer. This has hindered our ability to recognise them as important objects of historic memory. Assuming that the rhetorical power of the essay may just as often be used to defend truth and justice as to agitate for and justify violent conflict, this chapter will examine the essayistic mode of political essays by Rudyard Kipling and Vernon Lee. It will argue that political essays often display the same longing for connection and attachment that has long been deemed the cornerstone of the literary essay.

Britain’s Education Act of 1902 created a unitary secondary education system emphasizing humanistic studies, eliminated funding for vocational programs, and served only academic students. Denmark’s 1903 Grammar School Act created a system with multiple academic programs (in classics, mathematics, and modern languages) and retained ample funding for vocational, agricultural, and folk high schools. The authors contributed to the momentum for secondary education. British authors largely advocated for a classical curriculum: Rudyard Kipling linked education to nationalist imperialistic ambitions and H.G. Wells feared cultural degradation. Some, for example, Thomas Hardy, sought classical study for the working class and viewed vocational training as second-class education. Alternatively, Danish authors across the political continuum portrayed workers’ education and skills as essential to the industrial project, economic competitiveness, and the collective good. Writers joined in struggles over secondary education reform. British Fabians worked closely with Robert Morant, the architect of the 1902 secondary education act; Kipling waged a public opinion campaign linking education to the Boar War. Danish authors in the Modern Breakthrough movement formed “the Literary Left” faction to help forge the Left Party’s positions on education and fostered closer ties among evangelical farmers and workers.

This chapter shows that a lack of self-consciously literary excess in Kipling’s prose was sometimes mistaken for the absence of style. Yet there is a control in Kipling’s writing that a careful and sensitive reading can access. The chapter considers a particular habit of punctuation in Kipling: the use of a semicolon followed by a strictly superfluous ‘and’. This mark of punctuation advertises the writtenness of the prose and so signals the presence of a knowing narrator, whilst also raising questions about causation and consequence.

This chapter explores how the Gothic in the late nineteenth century can be related to the different imperial contexts of India, Egypt and America. It argues that it is important to acknowledge the specificity of different colonialisms in order to situate the Gothic of the period and to understand its political complexity. The ghost stories of Rudyard Kipling, for example, challenge many of the colonial contexts that they ostensibly work within; in turn, Kipling’s ambivalent account of India reflects a politically conflicted view of British colonialism. Colonial ambivalence is also clear in the context of Britain’s seemingly illegitimate occupation of Egypt during the period. A number of mummy stories by Grant Allen, Eva M. Henry, Arthur Conan Doyle and Kate and Hesketh Prichard, which explore this specific colonial context, are discussed. The chapter concludes with an account of Bram Stoker’s change in attitude towards America as the country becomes increasingly cast as a colonial threat in Dracula (1897) and The Lady of the Shroud (1909).

This chapter reexamines the Victorian three-volume novel and its disappearance in the mid-1890s as an event in the media history of fiction. The three-volume format for novels didn’t come to an end because novelists felt aesthetically constrained by it or because readers suddenly rejected it. But its disappearance had important implications for the form and content of fiction, and it provoked widespread discussion of late nineteenth-century fiction’s relationships to its own media and to others. Building on the work of the book historians who have told the economic story of the three-volume format and its fall, this chapter examines the three-volume novel in a different way: as part of a media system that linked private libraries to publishers in an information empire, that tied the distribution of fiction to its material form, and that aligned novels with other print genres such as periodicals that didn’t center on the single codex book.

Although Alexander Graham Bell introduced the electric telephone to Britain soon after its invention, it was not quickly adopted there and remained less than ubiquitous in Victorian daily life and literature. But in the 1890s, three fictional tales of young writers—Rudyard Kipling’s “The Finest Story in the World” (1891), Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), and George Paston’s A Writer of Books (1898)—all invoke the telephone as they treat the obstacles to literary production. These texts highlight not the device’s technical properties so much as its unexpected ability to embody a new concept: the idea of a media system that fused new communication technologies with print forms created for a mass audience—a version of what would later be called mass media.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.

This chapter outlines the ways in which historical traditions of climatic medicine influenced nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial discourses. It further examines three authors’ engagements with and reaction to these discourses, in both fictional and non-fictional literatures of empire. Rather than simply recapitulating pro-imperial uses of climate science, works by Richard Burton, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling all ‘map’ race and climate in a way that reflects the ambivalences and contradictions at the heart of colonial discourse. Further, this chapter analyses the imaginative potential provided by the structures of fiction for authors like Conrad and Kipling to grapple with concepts of chronic disease, bodily transformation, adaptation, and degeneration in Africa and India.