The main narrative line of Mansfield Park (1814), for example, is to follow the fortunes of Fanny Price, who leaves the family home near Portsmouth, at the age of ten, to live as a poor relation/companion at Mansfield Park, the country estate of the Bertram family. In due course, Fanny acquires the respect of the family, in particular the various sisters, and the love of the eldest son, whom she marries at the end of the book, becoming mistress of the house. Said, however, concentrates on a few almost incidental remarks of Austen’s, to the effect that Sir Thomas Bertram is away, abroad, overseeing his property in Antigua in the West Indies. The incidental nature of these references, Said says, betrays the fact that so much at the time was taken for granted. But the fact remains, ‘What sustains life materially is the Bertram estate in Antigua, which is not doing well.’96 Austen sees clearly, he says, that to hold and rule Mansfield Park is to hold and rule an imperial estate in close, not to say inevitable association with it. ‘What assures the domestic tranquillity and attractive harmony of one is the productivity and regulated discipline of the other.’97
It is this tranquillity and harmony that Fanny comes to adore so much. Just as she is herself an outsider brought inside Mansfield Park, a ‘transported commodity’ in effect, so too is the sugar which the Antigua estate produces and on which the serenity of Mansfield Park depends. Austen is therefore combining a social point – old blood needs new blood to rejuvenate it – with a political point: the empire may be invisible for most of the time, but it is economically all-important. Said’s underlying point is that Austen, for all her humanity and artistry, implicitly accepts slavery and the cruelty that went with it, and likewise accepted the complete subordination of colony to metropolis. He quotes John Stuart Mill on colonies in his Principles of Political Economy: ‘They are hardly to be looked upon as countries, but more properly as outlying agricultural or manufacturing estates belonging to a larger community . . . All the capital employed is English capital; almost all the industry is carried on for English uses . . . The trade with the West Indies is hardly to be considered an external trade, but more resembles the traffic between town and country.’98 It is Said’s case that Mansfield Park – rich, intellectually complex, a shining constituent of the canon – is as important for what it conceals as for what it reveals, and in that was typical of its time.
Both Kipling and Conrad represented the experience of empire as the main subject of their work, the former in Kim (1901), the latter in Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900) and Nostromo (1904). Said pictures Kim as an ‘overwhelmingly male’ novel, with two very attractive men at the centre. Kim himself remains a boy (he ages from thirteen to seventeen in the book) and the important background to the story, the ‘great game’ – politics, diplomacy, war – is, says Said, treated like a great prank. Edmund Wilson’s celebrated judgement of Kim had been that ‘We have been shown two entirely different worlds existing side by side, with neither really understanding the other . . . the parallel lines never meet . . . The fiction of Kipling, then, does not dramatise any fundamental conflict because Kipling would never face one.’99 On the contrary, says Said, ‘The conflict between Kim’s colonial service and loyalty to his Indian companions is unresolved not because Kipling could not face it, but because for Kipling there was no conflict.’ (Italics in the original.) For Kipling, India’s best destiny was to be ruled by England.100 Kipling respected all divisions in Indian society, was untroubled by them, and neither he nor his characters ever interfered with them. By the late nineteenth century there were, he says, sixty-one levels of status in India and the love–hate relationship between British and Indians ‘derived from the complex hierarchical attitudes present in both peoples’.101 ‘We must read the novel,’ Said concludes, ‘as the realisation of a great cumulative process, which in the closing years of the nineteenth century is reaching its last major moment before Indian independence: on the one hand, surveillance and control over India; on the other, love for and fascinated attention to its every detail . . . In reading Kim today we can watch a great artist in a sense blinded by his own insights about India . . . an India that he loved but could not properly have.’102
Of all the people who shared in the scramble for empire, Joseph Conrad became known for turning his back on the dark continents of ‘overflowing riches’. After years as a sailor in different merchant navies, Conrad removed himself to the sedentary life of writing fiction. Conrad’s best-known books, Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (published in book form in 1902), Nostromo (1904) and The Secret Agent (1907), draw on ideas from Darwin, Nietzsche and Nordau to explore the great fault-line between scientific, liberal and technical optimism in the twentieth century and pessimism about human nature. He is reported to have said to H. G. Wells on one occasion, ‘the difference between us, Wells, is fundamental. You don’t care for humanity but think they are to be improved. I love humanity but know they are not!’103
Christened Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, he was born in 1857 in a part of Poland taken by the Russians in the 1793 partition of that often-dismembered country (his birthplace is now in the Ukraine). His father, Apollo, was an aristocrat without lands, for the family estates had been sequestered in 1839 following an anti-Russian rebellion. Orphaned before he was twelve, Conrad depended very much on the generosity of his maternal uncle Tadeusz, who provided an annual allowance and, on his death in 1894, left about £1,600 to his nephew (well over £100,000 now). This event coincided with the acceptance of Conrad’s first book, Almayer’s Folly (begun in 1889), and the adoption of the pen name Joseph Conrad. He was from then on a man of letters, turning his experiences and the tales he heard at sea into fiction.104
Some time before Conrad’s uncle died, Józef stopped off in Brussels on the way to Poland, to be interviewed for a post with the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo – a fateful interview which led to his experiences between June and December 1890 in the Belgian Congo and, ten years on, to Heart of Darkness. In that decade, the Congo lurked in his mind, awaiting a trigger to be formulated in prose. That was provided by the shocking revelations of the ‘Benin massacres’ in 1897, as well as the accounts of Stanley’s expeditions in Africa. Benin: The City of Blood was published in London and New York in 1897, revealing to the Western civilised world a horror story of native African blood rites. After the Berlin Conference of 1884, Britain proclaimed a protectorate over the Niger river region. Following the slaughter of a British mission to Benin (now a city of Nigeria), which arrived during King Duboar’s celebrations of his ancestors with ritual sacrifices, a punitive expedition was dispatched to capture this city, long a centre of slavery. The account of Commander R. H. Bacon, intelligence officer of the expedition, in some of its details parallels events in Heart of Darkness. When Commander Bacon reached Benin he saw what, despite his vivid language, he says lay beyond description: ‘It is useless to continue describing the horrors of the place, everywhere death, barbarity and blood, and smells that it hardly seems right for human beings to smell and yet live.’105 Conrad avoids definition of what constituted ‘The horror. The horror’ – the famous last words in the book, spoken by Kurtz, the man Marlow, the hero, has come to save – opting instead for hints such as round balls on posts that Marlow thinks he sees through his field-glasses when approaching Kurtz’s compound. Bacon, for his part, describes ‘crucifixion trees’ surrounded by piles of skulls and bones, blood smeared everywhere, over bronze idols and ivory.