Thread by @jessnevins

Last time, we finished up the text of “English Jack.” Now, some notes & thoughts.
Although story paper serials were always patriotic, the quality of the patriotism and the range of feelings about the Empire and about foreigners varied depending on the years.
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https://twitter.com/jessnevins/status/1448703112361959435

During those years when the British public and policy makers felt relatively sanguine about the Empire, the story papers produced what was for the time a relatively diverse set of heroes whose interaction with foreign cultures was comparatively tolerant.
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But during those years when British culture and cultural assumptions were seen to be under attack, and when the British public and policy makers felt anxiety about the Empire or its future, the tone of penny dreadfuls and story paper serials changed.
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These years saw the appearance of characters viewed at the time as subversive, whether outlaw heroes or “street Apache” heroes. In America a similar trend, involving cowboy/frontier heroes, sparked a moral panic and an establishment backlash.
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In England there was a similar backlash, as leading to the suppression of suspect story papers, but also an increased production of stridently patriotic and even reactionary heroes and serials.
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Those serials published during the particularly public wars of the Victorian years, whether the Crimean War or the “Little Wars” like the Second Afghan War or the British campaigns in the Sudan in the mid-1880s, were particularly intense in their patriotic messaging.
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“English Jack” certainly *appears* to be one of those. The British presence in Afghanistan, and the war on behalf of the Empire, is stated to be a good thing, since the Afghans are such wicked people. While the Army’s leadership may be doubted, the English gentry may not.
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The gentry are a shining beacon to the lower classes, who are simply happy to be in their presence and never question their orders. “English Jack” is almost feudal in its approach, as it stresses a noblesse oblige on the part of Jack and his fellow officers:
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they have a duty as Englishmen and members of the gentry to support the Empire, protect the women and children, provide a good example to the lower classes, and (if necessary) sacrifice their lives for the Empire.
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As Jack puts it, “It’s my duty to go first because I’m the eldest, and I mustn’t shrink from duty, no matter how terrified I am. It wouldn’t be English.”
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“English Jack” reinforces this message of patriotism by showing a cast of characters from every corner of the British isles, from Kent to Yorkshire to Wales to Scotland to Ireland. The modern reading audience may not find this a particularly diverse group of characters, but
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the contemporary reading audience would have found it as multiethnic as American film audiences found the casts of American movies made during World War Two, which featured Irish, Polish, and even Jewish characters.
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The racial message of “English Jack” is, predictably, that the Afghans are barbaric savages who deserve whatever they get. There are numerous descriptions of English babies and women raped, impaled, and beheaded.
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The author stresses the brutality of the war but places the blame solely on the Afghans and on Shah Soojah; Jack says that the massacres of the English civilians would never have happened had “our miserable puppet king...regained his rule over his revolted capital.”
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This blame, however, is gainsaid by what actually happens in the novel, in which the English are always cast in the best possible light during a fight—but too much so. Sarcasm and irony scream from the pages in those scenes. Even 1878 readers would have seen it.
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“English Jack” takes an interesting approach to Shah Soojah. While the necessity of British support for Soojah is stressed, he himself is portrayed in traditionally Orientalist terms, as sexually decadent and cruel, even threatening at one point to poison his harem.
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Willie Dunbar’s description captures the characters’ feelings for Soojah:
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What “English Jack” is saying with this passage is that the British are >deliberately siding with a bad person for the sake of Empire<, a remarkable statement for a story paper to make at the beginning of yet another of the colonial wars.
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This stands in contrast to the American tendency, in fiction & in real life, to portray American proxies in foreign countries as moral exemplars.

But as “English Jack” stresses, Elphinstone kills far more people through his incompetence than Shah Soojah does.
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“English Jack,” as mentioned, is almost always interesting, and for the first third of the serial is oddly compelling reading. The author sets a good pace from the beginning and never lets up. At times there is a feeling of real desperation in the story.
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The danger and hair’s-breadth escapes are always couched in story paper terms rather than those of reality, but the reader, while always aware that Jack, Bobby, and Evan are going to survive until the end of the serial, nonetheless feels that they are in real danger.
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The author does their best to stress the horror of war while working within the confines of the story paper medium. There are few explicit descriptions of heads on pikes, beheadings, torture, and rape, but there are many references to them.
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The author often mentions the fear of the British troops & how conscious they are of being outnumbered. The author’s puffs up English cavalry charges, but the author’s portrayal of street fighting in Kabul leaves the reader under no illusions as to its ferocity and danger.
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The retreat to Jalalabad is the high point of the serial. At times this sequence becomes genuinely harrowing. The troops are cold and hungry and afraid, and the civilians the troops are escorting are a drag on the troops’ resources as well as a constant vulnerability.
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Near the end of the march the civilians, starving and aware that Akbar Khan’s troops are closing in, begin to panic:

“’Despatch us! Kill us! For God’s sake shoot or bayonet us!’ The poor Englishman cried. And in more than one instance the request was complied with.”

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This section ends with a clinical description of the Khyber Pass battle and the massacre of the British troops. God only knows how the readers of 1878 took it; I found it painful to read.
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Interestingly, “English Jack” has some moments of fantastika (sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/fantasti…), out of place in the context of the grimly realistic tone of the serial but fascinating and a little chilling when they occur.
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During the India section of the story Rose Trevor is threatened by Thugs. As this occurs both Jack and Willie dream about a terrifying Death carrying Rose away. In the dream Death tells both Jack and Willie that Rose is “the bride of Death.”
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Speaking of Rose: quoting Christopher Banham’s “’England and America Against the World: Empire and the USA in Edwin J. Brett’s ‘Boys of England,’ 1866-99” (Victorian Periodicals Review v40n2 (Summer, 2007),

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The Orientalism of “English Jack” is very real; the author wasn’t a political progressive. She or he was, however, a misanthrope who exaggerated the praise of the English to the point that even the duffers who made up the 1878 reading audience must have gotten the point.
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The 2021 reading audience should see right through it, to what’s beneath it: the venomous hatred of foreign wars and what they did to English troops. I’d rate the first third of “English Jack” in the second tier of Deadly Imperial Wars Abroad fiction:
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below classics like Michael Herr’s DISPATCHES and Tim O’Brien’s THE THINGS THEY CARRIED, but on par with Larry Heinemann’s CLOSE QUARTERS.
Thanks for reading!
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