Cecil Rhodes, the “Colossus” of late Victorian empire, proudly proclaimed himself a barbarian. He spoke of his taste for things “big and simple, barbaric, if you like,” and boasted that he conducted himself “on the basis of a barbarian” (Millin 165, 242). His famous scholarships designed to turn out men fit for imperial mastery required success in “manly outdoor sports,” a criterion Rhodes privately called the proof of “brutality” (Stead 39). Yet while Rhodes celebrated qualities he called barbaric or brutal, his adversaries seized upon the same rhetoric to revile him. During the Boer War, for instance, the tactics by which Rhodes and his friends tightened their grip on South Africa were boldly condemned by Henry Campbell-Bannerman as “methods of barbarism.” Similarly, G. K. Chesterton denounced Rhodes as nothing more than a “Sultan” who conquered the “East” only to reinforce the backward “Oriental” values of fatalism and despotism (242–44). This strange consensus, in which Rhodes and his critics could agree about his barbarity, reflects a significant uncertainty about late Victorian imperial ambitions and their relationship to “barbarism.” Clearly, the term was available both to the empire's critics as a metaphor for unprincipled or indiscriminate violence and to imperialists as a justification for their efforts to bring civilization to the Earth's dark places, to spread the gospel, and to enforce the progress of history that the anthropologist E. B. Tylor called “the onward movement from barbarism” (29). But Rhodes's cheerful assertion of his own barbarity represents something altogether different: the apparent paradox of an imperialism that openly embraces the primitive. Nor was Rhodes alone in sounding this particularly troubling version of the barbaric yawp. During the period of the New Imperialism (1871–1914), Victorian popular culture became engrossed as never before in charting vectors of convergence between the British and those they regarded as primitive, and in imagining the ways in which barbarians might make the best imperialists of all. This transvaluation of savagery found its most striking expression in the emergence of a wildly popular genre of fiction: stories of lost worlds.

Tales of forgotten cities, rediscovered races, civilizations, and continents submerged beneath the sea or the ground, the hidden vestiges of ancient empires: over 200 such stories were published in Britain between 1871 and the First World War, many times the number that had appeared in all the years before. While such figures alone reveal a widening fascination in the psychic terrain of the ancient, the rich breadth of subject matter also deserves attention. These tales are set on every continent, and measure modern men against the imaginary remnants of almost every people of antiquity and legend, from Greeks and Romans to Vikings and Celts, Egyptians and Israelites, Phoenicians, Babylonians, Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas, and, more fancifully, Lemurians and Atlanteans. In nearly every case, the stories dramatize the rediscovery in apparently alien territories of some fundamental unity, thus refiguring the frontier as an uncanny space in which the grand narrative of progress collapses to reveal a timeless model of imperial character.

What I call here the “lost world” narrative (in preference to the older, narrower category of the “lost race”)Footnote ¹ might be regarded as the perverse offspring of the imperial romance and the utopian novel, energizing the political fantasies of the present not with a dream of what might be, but of what has been. Such stories thus turn repeatedly to contemporary anthropology, vividly rendering the same exploration of the primitive (and of the kinship of primitive and civilized) that the fledgling discipline of Tylor, John Lubbock, and John McLennan was even then claiming as its province. But while evolutionary anthropologists sought to prove the beneficent inexorability of progress, lost world romancers stress the value of barbaric qualities and maintain that modern adventurers may still live them by fighting both against and alongside their primitive role models. Accordingly, these stories demonstrate outright skepticism of the empire's civilizing mission. “Ah! this civilisation,” asks the eponymous hero of Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain, “what does it all come to?. . . [I]n all essentials the savage and the child of civilisation are identical” (10; intro.). Indeed, Quatermain goes on to claim, the savage energies concealed by civilization's “veneer” are the real font of strength: “It is on the nineteen rough serviceable savage portions [of ourselves] that we fall back in emergencies, not on the polished but unsubstantial twentieth” (12; intro.). In Haggard's novel, as in other lost world romances, the representation of a fundamental human barbarism is not an indication of pessimistic relativism but an ideological bulwark of the New Imperialism's aggressive militarism.

While these stories have little use for the traditional justifications of empire, they offer instead a powerful reconceptualization of masculinity, one which promises to fulfill an even deeper psychic desire. Casting off mid-Victorian constructions of middle-class Christian manliness, these romances emphasize new masculine qualities – raw strength, courage, instinctive violence, bodily size, and homosocial commitment to other men – that could become a bridge uniting the ancient and modern in ways that trump other cultural differences and even, as I shall suggest, cross boundaries of race. Conquering their civilized reservations and taking up swords, axes, and spears, the men of lost world romances imitate the primal strength that has eroded in the degenerate metropole. Lost worlds, the timeless strongholds of primal masculinity, remake the location of colonial conflict into a kind of Eden, so much so that we might think of lost world stories as the secular, imperial, late Victorian answer to Milton's Paradise Lost. But theirs is an Eden that reveals the marks of its ideological production, an Eden where the Garden is strewn with gold and jewels to be looted, where Eve is relentlessly marginalized, and where an international cast of Adams proves its manhood again and again in bloody combat.

Lost world fiction represents a momentous revision of both masculine codes and imperial ambitions, which come to reinforce and express one another through a celebration of impassioned barbaric might. Though the tendency to represent the colonial frontier as a scene of manly exploit is hardly new, the specific ways in which these stories stage heroic adventure challenge many of our expectations about Victorian masculinities and British imperialism. The British men who travel to these lost worlds do not confirm their manliness by vanquishing the primitive, but by partaking of it, by immersing themselves in the struggles of the men they recognize as their primal counterparts. Many of the terms we think the Victorians roundly despised appear in this context to articulate forms of desire for which we have scarcely begun to account: atavism becomes a sign of strength rather than of weakness or criminality; impulse and irrationality can be taken for passionate masculine authenticity; and regression – even the relapse into barbarism – offers an empowering fantasy rather than a paralyzing anxiety. Likewise, we can begin to refine the common assertion that imperial discourse imagines colonial spaces and native peoples as feminine, ready to be subdued and penetrated by the masculine British.Footnote ² Instead, lost world novels generally depict modern men discovering that barbarians of any number of races may be as manly as themselves (or even more so), and that Victorians can only express their potential manhood by converging with the primitive.

But most importantly, these stories require us to reconsider one of postcolonial theory's dominant tenets – amounting virtually to an orthodoxy: that imperial ideology must be predicated on the construction of difference between the colonizing self and the colonized Other. As Edward Said has summarized, “‘they’ were not like ‘us,’ and for that reason deserved to be ruled” (xi). While postcolonial theory after Said's early work has challenged the potentially reductive simplicity of this Manichean view, the effect has been largely to multiply the forms of difference at work in imperial discourse to include gender, race, and class rather than to question the necessity of difference itself. What Partha Chatterjee has famously called “the rule of colonial difference,” which demands “the preservation of the alienness of the ruling group” (10), threatens to become a ruling premise of our own understanding of the Victorian imperial imagination.Footnote ³ None of this is meant to disregard the power of difference in imperial discourse, but it should remind us that difference is not the only weapon in the ideological arsenal of empire. Lost world fiction demonstrates that recognitions of the self in the other, even the emulation of the other, may also serve imperial interests. Beginning with stories by Rudyard Kipling, Rider Haggard, and Arthur Conan Doyle, I will argue that this genre minimizes difference to represent barbarians not as the objects of disgust or even of intractably ambivalent envy, but as the models of a new imperial masculinity.

Onward to Barbarism

Understanding barbarism as an energizing myth of the New Imperialism rather than as a haunting anxiety allows us to reconsider a number of puzzling ideological inconsistencies in late Victorian popular literature. Take, for instance, a tale by one of Rhodes's friends, Kipling's “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888). For decades, this work by an ardent imperialist has been read, rather counterintuitively, as an allegorical indictment of empire.Footnote ⁴ With Dravot and Carnehan, the rough and dodgy vagabonds who pose as gods to seize power over the uncharted territory of Kafiristan, Kipling seems to unmask the morally upright heroes of empire as con-men driven by an unabashed lust for power. When a Kafiristani woman exposes their vulnerability by drawing Dravot's blood, the pair suffer a doom so grisly that imperial ambition itself seems to totter on the edge of madness and nightmare. Yet the lesson of Dravot and Carnehan is less a critique of imperialism than a warning against abandoning the masculine values that had made their conquest possible. For all their failings, after all, Dravot and Carnehan are treated with sympathy and even admiration by the unnamed journalist who narrates their story.Footnote ⁵ “We are not little men,” they boast to him before setting off to conquer Kafiristan, and the tale bears out the remarkable extent to which they accomplish their outsized ambition despite the narrator's chary pragmatism: “no Englishman has been through it. The people are utter brutes, and even if you reached them you couldn't do anything” (226).

Brutish as the Kafiristanis turn out to be, the protagonists are equally so. They find a society, as Kipling imagines it, predicated on superstition and war, and they proceed to construct their rule in the same terms. The story is not critical of these barbarous methods, and indeed, Kipling goes to surprising lengths to connect the protagonists and their primitive subjects. Dravot and Carnehan are atavistic in appearance (both are big, hairy men, the former distinguished by his enormous beard and the latter by his exceptionally broad shoulders), and they recognize a racial kinship with the Kafiristanis; like the protagonists, the Kafiristanis are big – “Not a man of them under six feet” (249) – and white – “the Chiefs come round to shake hands, and they were so hairy and white and fair it was just shaking hands with old friends” (241). Kipling here draws on contemporary ethnographic accounts of Afghanistan to suggest that the natives might be descended from the last European to conquer the region, Alexander. After claiming his own descent from Alexander, Dravot learns that Kafiristani religion contains an eroded knowledge of Freemasonry, which Dravot and Carnehan, Masons themselves, exploit by establishing a political structure incorporating the priests and chiefs into a Lodge hierarchy with themselves at the head. Such points of connection intensify Dravot's ambition, and at the same time lead him to identify even more closely with his subjects: “‘I won't make a Nation,’ says he, ‘I'll make an Empire! These men aren't niggers; they're English! Look at their eyes – look at their mouths. Look at the way they stand up. They sit on chairs in their own houses. They're the Lost Tribes, or something like it, and they've grown to be English’” (243–44). It hardly matters to Dravot whether the Kafiristanis are descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel or Alexander's Macedonians, where they learned their ancient Masonic traditions, or why sitting in chairs should imply proto-Englishness. Nor does it seem to matter much to Kipling that his ethnography is muddled; while some observers reported that the Kafiristanis had ties to Alexander, it was their neighbors in Afghanistan, the Pathans, who were rumored to be descended from the Jewish lost tribes.Footnote ⁶ What matters instead is the recognition of some forgotten bond between these primitive people and their would-be rulers, who may then feel at home in their new kingdom even as they exploit these primal relationships. The alien is revealed to be merely a lost, primitive version of the familiar, and imperial power flows less from civilizing the savage than from reviving the inner barbarian.

Had Kipling wished to punish his protagonists for their imperial ambition or their often indiscriminate violence, he could easily have written an ending in which they pushed their kingdom's boundaries too far, or in which the Kafiristanis revolted against their draconian authority. Tellingly, their doom is instead precipitated by Dravot's decision to take a native wife, who exposes his vulnerability by biting him. Kipling's choice to demolish Dravot and Carnehan in this way emphasizes both the avenues and the limits of their primitive strength. Identifying with the savage in the service of power is well and good, but only insofar as it stays between men. Indeed, a particular construction of masculinity is the ethos through which Dravot and Carnehan come to identify with each other and with the Kafiristanis, first through a shared militarism and then through the exclusively masculine rites of Freemasonry. The Masonic tradition of brotherhood is in fact so central to the story that the narrator (yet another Mason) takes one of its principles as his epigraph, “Brother to a Prince and fellow to a beggar if he be found worthy.” This is immediately followed with the narrator's closest approximation to a moral: “The Law, as quoted, lays down a fair conduct of life, and one not easy to follow” (217). In other words, the primary “Law” in this story is the Masonic law of a unifying brotherhood that transcends divisions of class, politics, or race. And it is this ostensibly ancient law that Dravot so disastrously violates, not only in fraudulently abusing Masonic ritual to establish himself as a god, but also in betraying brotherhood by seeking a wife. If we accept that the central value of this story is not civilization but a particular code of manliness, we find it no more anti-imperialist than “Gunga Din” or “The White Man's Burden.”

Admittedly, the meanings of both manhood and empire in “The Man Who Would Be King” clash against the standards of earlier Victorians, to whom civilization was a less dubious ideal. For them, the progress of the British empire would be recorded as a glorious narrative, as Thomas Babington Macaulay had put it, “of prejudices overthrown, – of knowledge diffused, – taste purified, – of arts and sciences planted in countries which had recently been ignorant and barbarous” (723). Less obviously, the civilizing mission depended on exporting British domesticity, transplanting and then reproducing gender codes associated with the middle-class family. This emphasis was perhaps most strongly revealed in British reactions to the so-called Indian Mutiny, in which lurid depictions of the rebellious sepoys as housebreakers and rapists transformed a political challenge into an outrage against the domestic heart of civilization.Footnote ⁷ Bleak Malthusian prognostications of population growth had established the foundation for this view in the argument that sexual restraint was the lynchpin of progress, the distinction between civilized peoples and those condemned by war and famine to a life of Hobbesian savagery. If regulating the chaos of primitive energy had become a hallmark of empire's civilizing mission, it had also become, as studies of masculinity have emphasized, the focus of Victorian constructions of manhood. Herbert Sussman's analysis of the ways in which “psychic discipline defines what the Victorians term manliness” contends that “the proper regulation of an innate male energy” became “the central problematic in the Victorian practice of masculinity” (3). Likewise, in the persistent concern with self-discipline James Eli Adams reveals traces of surprising affinities between a wide range of models of the middle-class man, which “in their different ways embody masculinity as a virtuoso asceticism” (2). Defined in opposition to the raging and passionate savage abroad, and to the licentious and warlike aristocrat at home,Footnote ⁸ the bourgeois Christian man of the mid-nineteenth century predicated his mastery of the colonies on his mastery of the household and of his own impulses.

The double importance of restraint at the ideological nexus of empire and masculinity helps to explain the aversion of the Victorians to the horrifyingly unregulated figure of the noble savage.Footnote ⁹ The strenuous discipline required of the empire's men demanded that they fiercely reject the hypothesis of an instinctively moral and effortlessly manly native. Charles Dickens, in his essay on “The Noble Savage” (1853), took up this task with genocidal zeal:

Pointing here chiefly to the Zulus, whose lives, he imagines, are “passed chin deep in a lake of blood” (469), Dickens unwittingly projects upon them his own vicious fantasies; even as he delights in the prospect of their extermination, the violent impulses are represented as theirs rather than his own. Because of their own powerful prohibitions, in other words, the Victorians needed to identify violent impulse and passion, rather than untutored virtues, as the central features of primitive man. As Lubbock wrote in Prehistoric Times (1865), “the true savage is neither free nor noble; he is a slave to his own wants, his own passions” (Stocking 153).

When lost world romancers affirm the violent impulses buried in Dickens's desire to “civilise” the Zulus “off the face of the earth,” they defy the older value of restraint, both as a tenet of imperialism and as the underpinning of the forms of Victorian masculinity Sussman and Adams describe. The heroic man of the New Imperialism could recognize the barbarous other in himself and exalt his own untrammeled instinct as both a tool of empire and the core of his manhood. Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885), perhaps the most influential of the lost world novels, makes this turn abundantly clear. Setting off to find a lost brother, a trio of English adventurers – the hunter Allan Quatermain, the aristocrat and armchair anthropologist Sir Henry Curtis, and the naval officer Captain John Good – discover instead a lost brotherhood with the inhabitants of the biblical city of Ophir. In this ancient setting, which is repeatedly described as “like Paradise” (108; ch. 7), the adventurers find a lost tribe of Zulus, called Kukuanas, “the most magnificent set of men I have ever seen” (120; ch. 8). These men are distinguished by their martial prowess (they boast a “magnificent system of military organization” [39; intro.] that echoes England's own)Footnote ¹⁰ and by their physique (like Kipling's Kafiristanis, “not one of them was under six feet in height” [120; ch. 8]). Fighting among the Kukuanas in support of their rightful King Ignosi, the Englishmen discover their affinities with these primitive warriors. This is especially true of Sir Henry, whose imposing stature and Nordic features immediately remind Quatermain of England's Viking heritage: “if one only let his hair grow a bit, put one of those chain shirts on to those great shoulders of his, and gave him a big battle-axe” (44; ch. 1), Quatermain muses, he would be a model Viking. And when Ignosi later supplies Sir Henry with exactly this costume, Quatermain sees him not only as a Viking, but as a Kukuana, too: “The dress was, no doubt, a savage one, but I am bound to say I never saw a finer sight than Sir Henry Curtis presented in this guise. It showed off his magnificent physique to the greatest advantage, and when Ignosi arrived presently, arrayed in similar costume, I thought to myself that I never before saw two such splendid men” (167; ch. 12). Thus equipped, Sir Henry needs only to join the battle to regress triumphantly along his bloodline: “There he stood, the great Dane, for he was nothing else, his hands, his axe, and his armour, all red with blood, and none could live before his stroke. Time after time I saw it come sweeping down, as some great warrior ventured to give him battle, and as he struck he shouted, ‘O-hoy! O-hoy!’ like his Bersekir forefathers” (183; ch. 14). Finding his masculine ideal in a glorious atavism, Haggard turns Dickens's rejection of warlike savagery on its head. The berserk impulses of primitive masculinity, so central to mid-Victorian constructions of difference, are here used to collapse the differences of time, space – even race. Vikings, Quatermain tells us, are “a kind of white Zulus” (44; ch. 1).

There are, however, two sorts of discipline maintained in Haggard's novel. The first is martial discipline, though this is distinct from, and far older than, the nineteenth-century emphasis on prudential restraint. The second form of discipline, more in keeping with Victorian tradition, is sexual. Women are largely banned from King Solomon's Mines – Quatermain proclaims at the outset that “there is not a petticoat in the whole history” (42; ch. 1) – but the women who do appear challenge the story's tactic of constructing primitive heroism through masculine identification. Gagool, the ageless witch, threatens to expose the sordidly material motives of the white presence in Africa (134; ch. 9), and thus to shatter the fantasy of interracial brotherhood in arms. Foulata, the loyal Kukuana ingenue with whom Good falls in love, raises the specter of miscegenation, at which Haggard's shallow racial relativism balks. As in Kipling's Kafiristan, women mark the boundary of acceptable primitive heroism. But with their marginality strictly enforced, manliness may be defined in a way that trumps racial difference. The questions with which Quatermain begins his narrative – “am I a gentleman? What is a gentleman?” – cannot be answered in terms of racial difference: “I don't quite know, and yet I have had to do with niggers – no, I'll scratch that word ‘niggers’ out, for I don't like it. I've known natives who are,. . .and I have known mean whites with lots of money and fresh out from home, too, who ain't” (43; ch. 1). The answer to Quatermain's problem, which ultimately displaces gentlemanliness with the more inclusive issue of manliness,Footnote ¹¹ is finally answered through the experience of primal ferocity on the battlefield: “for the first time in my life, I felt my bosom burn with martial ardour. . . . my blood, which hitherto had been half-frozen with horror, went beating through my veins, and there came upon me a savage desire to kill and spare not. I glanced round at the serried ranks of warriors behind us, and somehow, all in an instant, began to wonder if my face looked like theirs” (182; ch. 14). Binding together Vikings, Zulus, and Britons – as well as the Israelites, Egyptians, and Phoenicians who have left their marks amid the ruins – the imperial heroism of Haggard's tale ultimately depends on regressing toward a primitive martial manliness.Footnote ¹²

This same constellation of concerns persists in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), written at the latter end of the New Imperialist period. The quest again begins with a crisis of masculinity, as the narrator, journalist and rugby player Edward Malone, is rejected by his love for failing to live up to the imperial heroism of the late Victorian explorers; she tells him to strive after the model of Stanley and Burton (7; ch. 1). Together with the simian Professor Challenger and the renowned sportsman Lord Roxton, Malone travels to the borders of British Guyana to prove his manhood. The primitive in Doyle's adventure is more expressly Darwinian than those of his predecessors, since the lost world in this case is a plateau stalked by dinosaurs and malevolent ape-men who approximate the fabled “missing link” (194; ch. 11). The British men also discover a tribe of Indians on the plateau, and they identify with these men as representatives of the human struggle against the beasts in evolutionary history. With these “savage allies” (254; ch. 14), the British conduct a war of extermination against the ape-men, decisively establishing the supremacy of man on the plateau (256-57; ch. 14). In this battle, Malone proves his heroism by unleashing his barbarous potential:

Having achieved this savage heroism, Malone returns to London, only to find that his beloved has hypocritically married a fatuous “little man” (306; ch. 16), who works as a solicitor's clerk. The rottenness of the metropole thus established, Malone decides to return with Roxton to the masculine world of the “dear old plateau” (309; ch. 16). The masculine allure of the lost world on the empire's frontier is reiterated in the novel's striking final image: “a brown hand was stretched out to me across the table” (309; ch. 16). As it turns out, the brown hand is in fact Roxton's and not, as we might first expect, a South American native's, but this momentary ambiguity is telling: the call of true masculinity makes such a distinction unnecessary.

Malone and Roxton will return to South America and Quatermain and his companions will return to Africa in the sequel to King Solomon's Mines, just as Dravot and Carnehan, before their downfall, launched raid after raid in their unrelenting efforts to widen their domain and repeat their adventures. And why not? Short of death, the lost world romance suggests no reason to abandon the unending satisfactions of primitive struggle, any more than the expansionist aspirations of New Imperialism recognized any necessary territorial limits. These stories escape the conventional restrictions of two commonplace Victorian narratives. The first is the narrative of progress. Understanding civilization as a veneer or even a degenerate delusion, the lost world adventurer frees himself from the risk of ever accomplishing the civilizing mission; in the struggles of perpetual primitivism, there is no ultimate objective, only the immediate purposefulness of an interminable series of battles. The second narrative is that of manliness: as Sussman argues, “For the Victorians manhood is not an essence but a plot,” a condition to be arduously achieved and carefully maintained (13). By experiencing manly behavior as an instinctive expression of his body, the barbaric hero finds his fulfillment suddenly, fitfully, in moments of stress. His masculine plot thus escapes the plodding linearity of the mid-Victorian Bildungsroman and anticipates the self-realization of a Modernist epiphany. His manliness, like the setting of his stories, can be fundamentally unchanging; his adventures, like the growth of empire in a jingoist's dream, can be limitless.

Primal Men and New Imperialists

Lost world fiction flourished at a time when established dogmas of gender and empire were both under siege. After 1870, as John Tosh has argued, middle-class masculinity began to drift away from the domestic values that had anchored it for decades. A man of Dickens's generation measured himself as a homeowner, husband, and father, but his boys would be more likely to assert their manhood in the homosocial contexts of the military, the playing field, and the club. This “flight from domesticity,” as Tosh calls it, was particularly evident among the men who left Britain for the colonies, with the result that “[t]he empire was run by bachelors” (175). Though this may be too broad a generalization, it is certainly true that the great imperial heroes, such as Gordon, Kitchener, and later T. E. Lawrence, were conspicuously unmarried, while Baden-Powell married quite late in life. Rhodes was so averse to women that he hired only male servants.

While the colonies promised a manly alternative to a metropole that seemed increasingly feminized, the values of the empire itself were in flux. Confidence in the imperial mission was shaken by a number of military defeats at the hands of Afghanistanis, Zulus, Sudanese, and Boers, and by the very successes of expansion, which left London in control of vast new territories. Even to the Victorians the motives for this burst of acquisition were unclear: were they civilizing the savages, opening new areas of trade, competing with European rivals for prestige, or merely protecting their existing territorial interests? Unless, like Rhodes, one believed in expansion as an end in itself, in empire for empire's sake, the purpose behind the explosive growth seemed ambiguous. As John Seeley famously joked, “We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind” (12). Out of this ideological fog emerged lost world stories, sustained by a more general unease about the apparent degeneracy of an England that had grown decadently over-civilized. The bogey of the hen-pecked, lower middle-class clerk was beginning to seem more of a danger to imperial character than the primitive, bloodthirsty Zulu.Footnote ¹³

The Victorian transvaluation of primitive masculinity may be traced back to the popularization of “muscular Christianity” at the middle of the century in such novels as Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days (1857), which idealizes, within limits, the rowdy expression of masculinity in the rough contests of boys. Charles Kingsley's great historical novels of the 1850s – Hypatia (1853) and Westward Ho! (1855) – are even more apposite: these novels emphasize at once masculinity's embodiment and its historicity, so that the appropriate experience of the male body becomes vital to the progress of civilization. While Kingsley accords a new respect for the fleshly impulses of manliness, he is reluctant to value them for their own sake, and he measures the unrestrained savage against other potential models of manhood. In Hypatia, fifth-century Alexandrian politics pit Christian monks, who signify both moral rectitude and an effeminate retreat from active struggle,Footnote ¹⁴ against a group of gigantic Gothic barbarians, whose strength and warlike spirit Kingsley treats as admirable but insufficiently checked by conscience or principle. Kingsley holds out hope for some reconciliation between these warring masculine types, most notably in the “Squire-Bishop” Synesius, who writes devotional hymns when not hunting ostriches from horseback, and who “manfully” refuses to give up his wife when he takes holy office (319; ch. 21). Yet Hypatia's clash of monks and barbarians, emblematic as it is of a confrontation between early and late Victorian symbols of masculinity, demonstrates that even though proper manhood was beginning to include valuable primal instincts, such instincts were not yet trusted. Like Hughes, Kingsley maintained that masculine impulses needed to be controlled and channeled in accordance with Christian behavior,Footnote ¹⁵ and neither would go so far as to accept a non-European savage as a role model.Footnote ¹⁶

The Victorians also began to attend more closely to the physical dimensions of masculinity during the mania for sports that spanned the period from the 1850s to the ‘80s, when new images of well-muscled and massive manliness appeared regularly in the popular press. Still, as Bruce Haley has shown, the healthy development of the body tended to be valued only insofar as it accompanied a healthy mental development; the corpore sano was suspect without the mens sana. Haley points out that in The Egoist (1879), George Meredith rejects the aristocratic Willoughby Patterne as a masculine model because his prepossessing athletic body masks a brutal and primitive soul. Willoughby is thus a barbaric throwback in both body and spirit whose anachronistic style of manhood must be superceded.Footnote ¹⁷ Nevertheless, the emerging views of athletic masculinity were not all as tempered by reservations about intellectual or spiritual growth. At the imperial training grounds of the public schools, as J. A. Mangan has observed, the cult of competitive athleticism that began with the doctrines of muscular Christianity eventually privileged the muscular so much more than the Christian that their sporting events owed more to the values of social Darwinism (30–31).

Just as religious virtues of restraint gave way to physical force and impulse among the athletic “bloods” on the public school pitches, so too did Christian rectitude recede as a heroic quality in the imperial adventure stories the students read. British adventurers in lost world fiction may sometimes refer to Christ, but they do surprisingly little to promulgate Christianity. Indeed, they are easily satisfied if the natives’ faith vaguely approximates a hopeful monotheism. More strongly held religious differences present an obstacle to the identification between the British and their counterparts, which is why these heroes so routinely find that their chief adversary is a malicious native priest, shaman, or witch-doctor, whose cruel superstitions are conventionally indicated by the threat of human sacrifice. But the same logic that necessitates the elimination of ostentatiously heretical natives also demands the absence of aggressively proselytizing Christians, since they too highlight the differences between the British and their counterparts. Missionaries, therefore, tend to come off badly in these stories. Andrew Lang's “The End of Phaeacia” (1886), for instance, is narrated by a blustering missionary of “the Bungletonian communion” (4), who is washed ashore on the same Phaeacia described in The Odyssey. His zealous disdain for secular learning prevents him from recognizing the importance of his discovery or the grandeur of the Greek survival Lang describes, and by painting him as an imbecilic bully, Lang suggests a terrible distance between the Homeric hero and the modern man of god. In Alan Quatermain, Haggard describes the failed attempt of a peaceful missionary to create an entirely British domestic space in Africa, an “oasis. . .of European civilization” (104; ch. 9). The missionary realizes that he must return his family to England, but not before an encounter with Masai kidnappers teaches him that the best way of interacting with heathens is with a carving-knife. On Haggard's imperial frontier, a man is not ennobled by either his domestic ties or his Christian convictions, but by his bloodiest impulses.

Shorn of its connections with civilization and religion, the emerging sense of a masculinity rooted in the powerful body became a fixation of late Victorian culture, and it is virtually ubiquitous in lost world fiction. We have seen it already in the British protagonists of these stories (Dravot and Carnehan, Sir Henry Curtis, Roxton and Challenger), but it also appears in their primitive counterparts (the Kafiristanis, Kukuanas, and Indians). Haggard repeats the formula of size and strength in Allan Quatermain to describe both the Masai (“none of the Masai that I saw were under six feet high” [63; ch. 5]) and his great Zulu hero Umslopogaas (“a very tall, broad man, quite six foot three” [22; ch. 1]). In R. M. Ballantyne's The Giant of the North (1881), British explorers are led to the north pole by a friendly Eskimo (“seven feet two. . . with a lithe, handsome figure [and an] immense chest and shoulders” [2; ch. 1]). In Francis Atkins's The Devil Tree of El Dorado (1896), the British heroes go to war in the service of that lost city's rightful king, Monella, a towering man over two thousand years old, with a body as “supple and muscular as that of a young man's” (146; ch. 14). Similar logic also produces in these stories an abundance of dwarves, who, as in J. M. Cobban's The Tyrants of Kool-Sim (1896), can be used to imply a stunted masculinity in opposition to their giant neighbors.Footnote ¹⁸ Whether titanic or dwarfish, the anachronistic men of the lost worlds underscore the new emphasis on the physicality of manliness, which generally stands as shorthand for martial prowess.

By embodying masculinity, these stories give it evolutionary implications; in addition to presenting idealized individuals, they speak of “manly” or “warlike” races. This too is an aspect of a wider pattern in late Victorian thought. While imperialists certainly feminized certain “races,” they also found it useful to imagine others as especially masculine and fierce (e.g., Sikhs, Pathans, Gurkhas, Sudanese, Zulus, Matabele). This tendency was particularly pronounced among military men, not only because they had fought against these peoples, but because they had fought with them: many of the empire's great victories were won by “native” regiments and conscripts. Garnet Wolseley, Gilbert and Sullivan's “very model of the modern Major-General,” was among those who conceded the martial prowess of savage races:

Racist as Wolseley's assessment is – he is unwilling to admit any virtue of the Zulus other than an aptitude for fighting – the logic of his argument nevertheless drives a wedge between the qualities of military fitness and those of civilization. If this centrally important dimension of manliness were to be discovered in the bodies, in the “very blood” of savages, then primitive men could equal, or even surpass, the British.

Lost world stories dramatized encounters with such manly races, and popularized precisely the physical qualities of manliness prized in the militaristic strains of the New Imperialism. They transformed the imperial frontier into the great crucible of manhood, not only because the frontier was easily imagined as a space of combat, but also because the battles in that setting against and alongside other races were particularly suited for measurements of power in terms of bodily form and instinct untrammeled by civilized or religious constraint. The ability of British heroes to hold their own on the frontier could also assuage late Victorian anxieties about degeneration, even if their success required mimicking barbarians; the real threat to manliness conceived in these terms was not savagery but rather civilization itself. “I suspect that in many ways [ours] has been a progress from strength to weakness,” wrote the influential colonial administrator James Fitzjames Stephen: “If this should be so, it appears to me that all other gains, whether in wealth, knowledge or humanity, afford no equivalent. Strength, in all its forms, is life and manhood. To be less strong is to be less of a man, whatever else you may be. This suspicion prevents me, for one, from feeling any enthusiasm about progress” (199). The hulking heroes of lost world stories, whatever their race, bear out this simple equation of manliness and strength. Yet it is the flamboyant anachronism of this fiction that speaks to Stephen's other concern: the problem of progress itself.

Anthropology and Atlantis

Neither muscular Christianity nor social Darwinism can account for the tendency in lost world fiction to stage the search for imperial masculinity as a transformative encounter between the modern and the primitive. Nor do they quite answer the more pressing problem posed by these stories: how was “the primitive” modified into the psychically charged category of “the lost”? Like the opposition between primitive and modern, loss suggests distance, yet it orients an implied narrative of change backwards toward a traumatic moment of separation while simultaneously necessitating the recognition of an earlier time of unity or relative wholeness. Stories of lost others require their readers to entertain the notion of a forgotten shared identity, so that differences between peoples can be regarded as circumstantial rather than ontological, and difference itself read as a sign of absence rather than proof of progress. Lost worlds, after all, are not the same as discarded worlds. Loss presupposes some value worth recovering, and even the hope of restoration, of paradise regained. In its propensity to grant the “primitive” an unprecedented psychic and sociological value, lost world fiction shares a surprising number of assumptions with the contemporary discourse of evolutionary anthropology.

At first glance, the dynamics of nostalgia and desire implicit in formulations of lost worlds seem markedly opposed to familiar condemnations of the primitive in the emerging discipline of anthropology. E. B. Tylor's landmark Primitive Culture, for instance, attempts not only to scrutinize “primitive” peoples in other parts of the globe, but to reassure Victorians of a supremacy that follows from the peremptory logic of cultural development:

In Tylor's comparative model, the function of “the primitive” is to inspire belief in a grand narrative of cultural progress quite counter to narratives of loss; the temporal poles of savagery and civilization can be used confidently to assert a European superiority guaranteed by scientific law. And by constructing a naturalized model of space-time that views non-European peoples as living relics of cultural obsolescence, as Johannes Fabian has emphasized, evolutionary anthropology is “founded on distancing and separation” (26–27). Tylor's comparison of “modern savage tribes” to “the early state of the human race” implies a Victorian vision of global domination as an unfinished narrative, the ending of which will be written by imperial projects ranging from civilizing missions to genocidal violence.

Primitive Culture may thus seem a supremely arrogant expression of Britain's imperial chauvinism, one designed to bolster a flattering dogma of progress. But the taxonomies of cultural difference Tylor sketches are only one dimension of his project, which is in fact founded upon a complicated and unstable tension between past and present. Central to his work is a desire to discover civilization's distant origins, to “reconstruct lost history” (15), and these origins can be recaptured only by acknowledging that the foreign is necessary to understand the familiar, so that British identity is revealed to be partial, unfixed, and relative. Consequently, primitive others relate to the modern man not merely as his foils, but as vital exemplars of his own heritage.Footnote ¹⁹ Tylor announces that his work depends on “two great principles”: he needs to show that civilization's “various grades may be regarded as stages of development or evolution,” but equally important is “the uniformity which so largely pervades civilization” (1). The comparative method, at its heart, insists as rigorously on similarity, continuity, and analogy as it does on difference and contrast: “Progress, degradation, survival, revival, modification are all modes of the connexion that binds together the complex network of civilization. It needs but a glance into the trivial details of our own daily life to set us thinking how far we are really its originators, and how far but the transmitters and modifiers of the results of long past ages” (17). So important to Tylor are these “modes of. . . connexion” that he expressly dismisses the divisive category of race as a necessary tool of cultural analysis; he points out, for instance, that there is “scarce a hand's breadth difference between an English ploughman and a negro of Central Africa” (7).

While Primitive Culture may be dedicated to the principle of progress, its pages are crowded with examples of cultural “survivals,” the customs and superstitions of modern Europe that, Tylor argues, are but the thinly disguised vestiges of primitive practices. Tylor regards survivals as “evidence of the “direct and close connexon. . . between modern culture and the condition of the rudest savage” (159), and he sees them everywhere: in the persistence of bonfire celebrations, in the seemingly innocent games of children, even in the salutations evoked by a sneeze, which Tylor uses to link British courtesy with ancient Greek divination and modern Zulu animism (97–100). Primitive Culture's long parade of survivals partly undermines Tylor's own thesis of progress by challenging complacencies about a wholly distinct state of civilization. But Tylor is far more troubled by “revivals” – such as the late Victorian growth in spiritualism – through which ancient practices return, quite forcefully, to a modern world that should have superceded them. Revivals are not merely the harmless shadows of ancient barbarism, but strong evidence of “the directness with which antiquity and savagery bear upon. . .modern life” (159), and are therefore even more menacing to the narrative of progress. No doubt Tylor would condemn the barbaric values of lost world fiction as yet another regrettable revival, but his own success in establishing the intimate and ubiquitous connection between the primitive and the modern nonetheless bolsters the genre's central premises. Lost world romancers share Tylor's fascination with psychic and cultural survivals along with his belief in the profound but hidden connections between civilized Europeans, modern savages abroad, and a universal condition from which both originated. In their fantastic anachronisms, these stories transfer the pure primitive state from the realm of anthropological conjecture to the stage of colonial adventure.

Of course, stories of loss differ sharply from progress narratives in their attitude toward time, orienting attention backward rather than forward to future goals of change and reform. Lost world stories mark their distrust of narratives of progress and civilization by imagining settings in which time is largely impotent. Free of the assumptions those grand narratives bring, lost worlds can be peopled with cultures whose feats rival or surpass those of modern Britain. The relative greatness of lost cultures became a recurring theme, encouraged not only by comparative anthropology but also by a public engrossed by dazzling archaeological discoveries: Stephens and Catherwood's survey of Mayan ruins, Layard's work on Nineveh and Babylon, Schliemann's excavation of Troy, Mauch's discovery of Great Zimbabwe, and Flinders Petrie's Egyptological explorations. Understanding these discoveries in light of their own concerns, the Victorians saw images of both the grandeur and transience of forgotten empires. Stories of lost worlds develop this theme into a vision of imperial time in which encounters with the past serve less to illustrate theories of progress or decline than to imply a vast, cyclical chronology: empires come and empires go, but empire itself remains constant.

Archaeology and comparative anthropology combined to revive and rewrite the greatest Western myth of a forgotten world, the lost continent of Atlantis, which now began to appear in its modern guise as both a lost paradise and a prehistoric empire of enormous reach. Of the many quasi-scientific projects to rediscover Atlantis in the late Victorian period, the most influential was the American Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882). Donnelly's view of Atlantis suggests both the powerful appeal of myths of primitive unity and the tendency to articulate such fantasies in imperial terms. The Atlantis he describes was an empire that cast its colonies over five continents and shaped the culture of all ancient peoples. The Atlanteans, he writes,

Donnelly's was not as marginal an opinion as we might expect. In the Westminster Review in 1895, Oliphant Smeaton cites the monuments of Easter Island as confirmation of Donnelly's view, calling Atlantis a “great empire,” “an advanced civilization,” and “the cradle of the human race” (“A Mystery” 31). In 1868, James Churchward, a British colonel serving in India, began researching a lost continent called Mu, “an incalculably ancient civilization, which was in many respects, superior to our own” (8). Such hypotheses often included the superior masculinity of the long-lost men. Donnelly, for instance, contended that the Greek myths of gods and giants were half-remembered stories of Atlanteans, whose “physical strength was extraordinary, the earth shaking sometimes under their tread” (286). An article in the Cornhill asserted that the original inhabitants of the Canary Islands were “remnants of the ancient race” of Atlantis, and praised the greatness of their men: “So tall were they that the Spaniards speak of them as giants, and their strength and endurance were so great that they were conquered by stratagem but not by force. They ran as fast as horses. . .they could climb the highest mountains and jump the deepest ravines” (“Forgotten Race” 41). The fantasy of Atlantis, rediscovered as both a living culture and an ancient imperial progenitor, inspired a flurry of lost world stories at the end of the nineteenth century, and it has remained a familiar theme in popular culture ever since. C. J. Cuttliffe Hyne's The Lost Continent (1899) and Atkins's A Queen of Atlantis (1898) are both classics of the modern Atlantis tradition, and Haggard and Doyle would eventually try their hands at Atlantis stories as well.Footnote ²⁰

The persistent association of these diverse themes – embodied masculinity, primitive imperial power, lost and rediscovered connections with the barbarous past, the flattening of imperial time – are nicely illustrated by Smeaton's lost world novel, A Mystery of the Pacific (1899). Set in the South Seas, the novel's principal English characters represent imperial power in three of its most prominent aspects: the narrator, Bill Markham, works for the Australian Colonial Secretary, and he is joined by an officer of the Polynesian Labour Trade, and an ethnologist named Professor Barlow. On the trail of Barlow's lost brother-in-law, they happen upon an uncharted island and a mysterious city populated by the unaltered descendents of first-century Roman colonists. After overcoming some resistance from the local Pontifex, they praise the Romans as “a fine, noble, manly race” (92; ch. 6), and as representatives of “that mighty empire, the stateliest and the most imposing the world has ever known” (48; ch. 3). The Romans are perpetually at war with the island's natives, the “negroid” Ariuta (177; ch. 12), whom they regard as barbarians. While Smeaton offers no Haggardesque scenes of epic bloodbaths, the Englishmen are given the chance to fight against and with both peoples. Eventually they discover that the Ariutas are not natives at all, but the descendents of colonists from Atlantis, and guardians of a civilization “even more complex and more advanced” than that of the Romans (279; ch. 17). Their sacred underground city represents “the last surviving link uniting the world of to-day with the glories of the lost Atlantis” (275; ch. 17). In short, the novel juxtaposes modern English colonists with the greatest imperial powers of the past, both historical and mythical. The characters respect, and even revere, these ideological ancestors, and Markham happily minimizes the potential differences between them: he tells a Roman “that it is immaterial under what name we worship the great Father of all, whether as Jove, or God, or Siva, or whatever else” (221; ch.14). At the novel's conclusion, Markham decides to remain on the island: “Never have I regretted taking farewell of Old England, dear though it shall ever be to me, nor of severing all ties of race and kindred in the land of my fathers” (335; ch. 20). The search for a lost brother has led him to a land of still older fathers, and a more blissful and fulfilling life in the lost world.

Smeaton's story is a bizarre assemblage of incongruities; surely few novels are more absurd than this one, which yokes together plucky modern British imperialists, magical Atlanteans, and Romans arrested in historical time. How strange this combination of wild anachronism, racial and religious relativism, primitive imperialism, and masculine militarism, and yet, within the contours of the lost world genre, how thoroughly predictable. The coherence of Smeaton's novel lies not in the logic of the text itself, but in the range of psychic needs and imperial aspirations that intersect in the Victorian fantasy of the lost world.

This cultural fantasy is not as easily traced outside the pages of popular fiction, nor are its influences as easily delineated as its origins. Certainly it promotes both an aggressive masculinity and the violent imperial tactics contemporary Liberals condemned as “methods of barbarism.” For military strategists such as Wolseley, colonial problems demanded a kind of warfare suited to the conditions of savagery: “Almost all our colonial military misfortunes during the reign of Queen Victoria, are to be accounted for by the fact that we have attempted to fight great warlike native races with the same formal tactics as those which succeeded at Waterloo” (702). The approach to conflict that the British associated with the “warlike native races” might, at best, be justified by some greater goal, becoming what Kipling called “the savage wars of peace” (“White Man's Burden” 216). At worst, it could amount to a creeping realpolitik and the sort of brutality perpetrated by the British in South Africa or the Americans in the Phillipines.Footnote ²¹ And well before the publication of Nietzche's The Will to Power (1901), lost world stories began to prepare a British popular audience for the coming century's bloody international conflicts in the same terms as Nietzsche's darkly celebratory prophecy:

By portraying militarism as the primal expression of enduringly essential masculine qualities, lost world stories use war and manly strength to naturalize one another in a sinister tautology. “Man is born to kill,” says Haggard's savage champion Umslopogaas in Alan Quatermain. “He who kills not when his blood is hot is a woman, and no man. The people who kill not are slaves” (52–53; ch. 4). Lost world fiction dreams of a pre-historical mandate for empire articulated in the blood and sinews of the male body, and it is worth remembering that this mandate does not stand on the foundations of Enlightenment principles, Christian virtues, or even the qualities of Britishness or whiteness. These stories seize the familiar binarisms of Victorian imperialism and complicate, reverse, or even collapse them, and not merely in ways that indicate ambivalence or anxiety.

Lost world fiction's disruption of the progress narrative and its blurring of space, race, and time generated an empowering conception of imperial masculinity, one which would find concrete expression in the tribute to such ostensibly hybrid heroes as Richard Francis Burton and Lawrence of Arabia.Footnote ²² And lost worlds bolstered in their way the celebration of strength and the tide of unchecked violence across the twentieth century that Eric Hobsbawm has called the “slide down the slope of barbarization” (256). Hobsbawm's analysis reminds us, as lost world writers do not, that barbaric violence is not merely the “re-emergence of primordial forces too long suppressed” (264). But neither is it, as Hobsbawm contends, simply what remains when Enlightenment standards crumble, a Hobbesian pre-rational condition that drags us down its slope with a terrible inertia. The history of lost world fiction teaches us that modern barbarism is not some irresistible impulse to which we inevitably return when reason fades; it is an ideology with its own history, actively encouraged and sustained by a set of carefully elaborated fantasies presented to men as the psychic solution to their own sense of loss. Barbarism is made and remade – by popular culture no less than by governments – and it can be unmade.