The Verbal Culture of 1857 and the Politics of Fear

Abstract

The fact that 1857 was a crisis of conscience for the English is indicated in the long history there is, dating back at least to Edward Thompson’s The Other Side of the Medal, of investigations into the working of 1857 in the English imaginary. In addition to the much-cited work of Jenny Sharpe, and its addressing of the racialized, gender politics that made the (claim of) rape of the Englishwoman the very ground on which the English reading of 1857 was so hysterically conducted (4), there have been many studies that have looked at the culture industry’s making of 1857 the ground of a virulent patriotism.¹ The public outcry in Britain, with “its xenophobia and shrill call for revenge” (Chakravarty 32), as Gautam Chakravarty puts it, was, however, not the first nor last of its kind.²

To find parallels to the sepoy atrocities, we need not, as some London papers pretend, fall back on the middle ages, nor even wander beyond the history of contemporary England. All we want is to study the first Chinese war, an event, so to say, of yesterday. The English soldiery then committed abominations for the mere fun of it; their passions being neither sanctified by religious fanaticism nor exacerbated by hatred against an overbearing and conquering race, nor provoked by the stern resistance of a heroic enemy. The violations of women, the spittings of children, the roastings of whole villages, were then mere wanton sports, not recorded by mandarins, but by British officers themselves.

—Karl Marx, New York Daily Tribune, 16 Sept. 1857