Chapter 5.
Science and Technology in the Romance form
The writers of the late nineteenth century used machinery and tools, technical language and techniques, and futurism to reinforce their imperialist concepts and presented these concerns as an heroic feature of the genre. Whether it was radio transmission or a new bridge design, Kipling found room for admiration. In fact, the writers of the period appeared to venerate invention. The praise for professional in-words and codes was commonly found in the literature. Henley wrote in favour of speed and lauded modern inventions like the motor car in his work. The love of machines and the lore of their maintenance is a recurring theme, with poems by Kipling praising a kind of Pax Britannica of the machine hurtling towards its destiny, demonstrating how the personal quest for power can be expressed through machinery. The main theme of Kipling’s poetry of the machine is that calm, masculine courage is still detennined by mechanisation. In "McAndrew’s Hymn", when a passenger enquiries of McAnd.rew whether steam "spoils romance at sea", the engineer replies by describing the new foms of danger faced by the technician:
I’d been doon that mom to see what ailed the throws,
Manholin’, on my back - the cranks three inches off my nose. 1.
The engineer's reply is a laudation of the profession of engineering. Kipling uses machine language for its own sake, in a style which is most viable when it expresses the clarity and the logicality of engineering. He uses the language of the technicians themselves, and we would refer here to the spelling system he uses to capture the Scottish accent and the loss of endings. His language is not derived from romantic descriptions of nature, although he could not escape completely from Victorian literary conventions. He became the first writer to use the language of the engineer as the language of literature. His use of language reflects the engineering plain style in design and is adapted to more functionalist machinery and to more austere building. His engineers recognised that to do.a job efficiently was the only certainty of success and Kipling would hardly have allowed for any margin of error in his mechanics or in their machines.
In Kipling’s work there is a reference to the romance of steam and the glorification of power, with the arrival of a steam train captured on film, "...all unseen / Romance brought up the nine- fifteen". it is a romance defined in terms of a triumph over danger through physical courage. Kipling praises the excellence of the railway system with its steam hauled expresses, and in his use of the word "romance" is using the word in the same sense as would have Joseph Conrad or Robert Louis Stevenson.
Kipling again praised the efficiency of the pilot and the excellence of the flight in his tale 'With the Night Mail' 2. The electrical storm endured during the flight is only one of the dangers this hardy breed of captain and crew would overcome.
Kipling wrote this hymn to machines hurtling through the night to reach their many and varied destinations. He invents fantastic machinery, and uses in his poems technical terms to describe it which helps to keep the meaning moderately intelligible to the layman:
His hand was on the lever laid
His oil-can soothed the worrying cranks
His whistle waked the snowbound grade,
His foghorn cut the reeking Banks
By dock and deep and mine and mill
The Boy-God reckless laboured still! 3.
He enshrined in his stories the very essence of engineering. If it related to a new bridge design, then every technical detail was used to complete the scene such as in a description of the Findlayson bridge "with its approaches, his work was one mile and three-quarters in length; a lattice-girder bridge, trussed with the Findlayson truss, standing on seven-and-twenty brick piers". 4.
Kipling was interested in the modem developments in cinematography. Practical pictures had become available by the nineties, but talking pictures were not demonstrated until Ruhmer’s system was designed in 1900, followed by Eugene Lauste’s in 1906. The latter system was essentially modem in form and satisfactory in most respects apparently, but it failed from lack of amplification. 5.
One of his circle, Henley’s poem, "A Song of Speed", glorifies the wonders of modem technology, in particular the motor car. Inspired by a newspaper magnate’s car, the subject of his eulogy, written in 1903, is a gleaming Mercedes open tourer:
A Song of Speed
Hence the Mercedes!
Look at her. Shapeless?
Unhandsome? Unpaintable?
Yes; but the strength
Of some seventy-five horses:
Seventy-five puissant,
Superb fellow creatures:
Is summed and contained
In her pipes and cylinders.
Henley gives a sense of its aliveness, and there is an animal power to the machine which he appears to admire more than all, despite its ugly and unbumished exterior. He personifies, or at least anthropomorphises the machine. He, like Kipling, seems to delight in its sense of speed, and its technical refinements.
The poem continues with a glorification of God-made-machinery. The machine is seen as a providential gift with speed becoming a symbol of worship. It functions as a paradigm of understanding of rhythm to convey an essence of speed and power:
And at times when He feels
That His creatures are doing
Their best to assert
Their pan in His dream,
He loosens His fist
And a miracle slips from it
Into the hands
Of his adepts and servants...
Thus hath he slackened
His grasp, and this Thing
This marvellous Mercedes,
This triumphing contrivance,
Comes to make other
Man’s life than she found it:
The Earth for her tyres
As the Sea for his keels. 6.
Although this early twentieth century poetry did not turn into a genre, the speed poem was written as a companion to "A Song of the Sword". The poem was the subject of a letter to Charles Whibley expressing astonishment at its success:
Would you be surprised to hear that I've been safely delivered of a certain "Song of Speed", which they that know say is far and away better than the Sword? You will read it shortly in the World's Work. It is dedicated to Alfred Harmsworth, and relates to motor-cars; with special reference to his incomparable Mercedes. 7.
Parodies of the poem were soon to follow, as a letter by Henley on June 2 of the same year to Whibley makes clear:
''l’m told there’s an excellent parody of"Speed" in the new Cornhill. Also that there was another in a late Idler, and yet another, by E V Lucas, in the Monthly Magazine for May. I’ve seen, as yet, none! ''8.
Kipling, in a sense of the aliveness of inanimate and animate objects, wrote to Henley, on the subject of the collision of two great Titans (of Literature?), and, incidentally, in a most extraordinary confession of their proclivities, explained in a pesonal letter that:
“The way collisions at sea come about is this...the iron in the mine and under the hammer, and in the plates and engine-room, has a sort of blind lust beaten into it, for to meet and I suppose nautically to copulate with other iron and steel being linked into the frame of another ship. All the seven seas over, the ship yearns for its mate, tearing along under moon and cloud...rusting in dock; and so forth. At last comes the bridal night wind, current and set of the sea aiding, while the eyes of men are held, and steamer meets steamer in a big kiss, and sink down to cool off in the waterbeds.” 9.
Kipling used terms like panee lao, (bring water swiftly) juidee, (Be quick) marrow, (hit) and Harry By! (O brother) 10. as euphemisms for other imperial exhortations to conform to a soldier’s demands, illustrating how he sometimes used the language of the soldier. Kipling, used, too, the language of the working man in an attempt to level down at barrack room level. In Barrack Room Ballads he is in complete control of the language of the soldier, although it contains much of "the atrocious lingo - a mixture of all the slangs of the world", as W E Henley put it "with a rank, peculiar flavour of its own - of Thomas Atkins". In addition, Henley maintained that he wrote in "Atkinese": "he is so thoroughly conscious of its capacities", he pontificated "that he can and does use it not only to state facts and express ideas withal but also as a means of producing these effects in the arrangements of words that belong to pure art" ll. Kipling’s preoccupations with how to speak and behave are also seen in Aurelian McGoggin, his implausibly correct young man, who attempts to hold on to impossible notions of his superiority which finally drive him to suicide.
But in the use of technology and the laudation of the language and professionalism of engineering; in the praise for profe sional jargon in the canon of writers under consideration there is, in one sense, an implicit refutation of nineteenth century writing because it stressed the debilitating effect of progress by contrasting it with an heroic past, calling on aspects of chivalry and of heraldry. It should be recalled that the whole backlash contained within certain intellectual circles of the period was a rejection of the notion of continued improvement and mechanisation. That some artists, such as Haggard and Lang, and Stevenson, retracted into the writing of romance is hardly surprising. In fact there was an attempted revival of chivalry, with Allan Quatermain as a second Arthur in parts of Africa, and notions of emasculated manhood due directly to the onset of the machine age. The emergence of groups, as we have seen, like the Boys’ Brigade, Scouts, and the rise of adventure fiction for a more educated class after 1870 as a form of escape from technology, from the rise of the urban conurbation, and from the effects of machinery on the person, were all symptomatic of this movement.
Rider Haggard, too, was given to the use of technical, botantical and medical terms in his work. The author sought to promote the notion that his characters were well-versed in anthropological, zoological, botanical and scientific skills. His protagonist, Allan Quaterrnain, although of mean education, admitted to the reading of novels, and was capable to use advanced ballistic materials and to annotate his logs and joumals with an account of foreign and exotic species of plants which he had encountered. As a narrator of the adventures he was:
"more accustomed to handle a rifle than a pen, and (I) did not make any pretence to the grand literary flights and flourishes which I see in novels - for I sometimes like to read a novel."
and this led to the further observation that Quatertnain had discovered:
"eight varieties of antelope with which (I) was previously unrelated and many new species of plants for the most part of the bulbous tribe." l2.
If he had had time a linguistic study of the Zulu and the Kikuana dialects would have been made, and Alan Quatennain claims, confidently, that a few more pages might have been legitimately added to the text to the consideration of the indigenous flora and fauna of Kikuananland. Indeed, he had not dealt with the anthropological question of "the domestic and family customs of the Kikuanas, many of which are exceedingly quaint", nor with the technological study of their "proficiency in the art of smelting and welding metals", going on to add that, "The last they carry to considerable perfection, of which a good example is to be seen in their ‘tollas’ or heavy throwing knives, the backs of these knives being made of hammered iron, and the edges of beautiful steel welded with great skill on to the iron backs". Many of these items were to be catalogued by Quatermain in King Solomon's Mines, but he decided incomprehensibly to leave them to a subsequent volume, presumably because they needed so much space and detail to enumerate.
Missionary McKenzie was a cleric with an interest in botany, who reared an African garden which outshone its English counterpart due to the climate;
"First of all there were rows upon rows of standard European fruit-trees, all grafted; for on top of this hill the climate was so temperate that very nearly all the English vegetables, trees, and flowers flourished luxuriantly, even including severalvarieties of apple, which, generally speaking, runs to wood in a warm climate and obstinately declines to fruit. Then there were strawberries and tomatoes, such tomatoes! melons and cucumbers, and, indeed, every son of vegetable and fruit."13.
Veritably an African Eden in the English mode. For characters who were attempting to escape what many would see as a colourless and deprived period of history, this attempt at providing an African setting more physically and technologically rewarding than at home was suspect.
The effect of advanced technology is all apparent in his novel, King Solomon’: Mines, the effect upon the Kikuana people of the weapons which Captain Good’s party carry is so great that"a groan of terror burst from the group before us". l4. The rifles are so ffective that they are said to "roar out in thunder and slay from afar". At one point the Hausa people hang guns in trees and pray to them as symbols of western magic.
Haggard used the contemporary study of anthropology as a framework for his novel, referring to aspects of social organisation and law in his writings. In Nada the Lily he attempts to portray an African society in which polygamy is the norm. In She he portrayed a society in which there is the cult of the feminine which cements a lost civilisation. Ayesha does not exactly mean to represent the kind of early assertion of femininity that an Olive Schreiner (the feminist author of "The Story of an African Farm" and one of Haggard’s mentors) had advocated, but the basic viewpoint is the same. When in She a Armahagger woman steps up to the lovable servant Job and publicly kisses him, his reaction is one of incredulity: "‘Be off with you! Get away, you minx!’ he shouted", and when Ustane approaches the attractive bachelor Holly, the limitations of the lifespan of the group are evident from the reactions of the surrounding people. "The hussy! Well, I never," gasps Job. But it is all a matter of cultural relativity, for Haggard comments that morality is:
"an affair of latitude and religion, and what is right in one place is wrong in another. lt must, however, be understood that, since all civilised nations appear to accept it as an axiom that ceremony is the touchstone of morals, there is, even according to our canons, nothing immoral about this Amahagger custom, since the public interchange of an embrace answers to our ceremony of marriage which, as we know, justifies most things." 15.
He could be clear on the point that the Zu-Vendis people had a rule of law which was far less materialistic than that of the west. Contrasted with the prevailing system of justice of the Zu-Vendis, the emphasis on materialism which Haggard places on the west was seen as a corrupting influence:
"The laws of the country (Zu-Vendis) is, on the whole, mild and just, but differs in several respects from our civilised law. For instance, the law of England is much more severe upon offences against property than against the person, as becomes a people whose ruling passion is money. A man may half-kick his wifeto death or inflict horrible sufferings upon his children ata cheaper rate of punishment than he can compound for the theft of a pair of old boots."
In "Finished" Haggard deals comprehensively with the Zulu nation and he establishes early on that the rule of law prevails in Zululand. The Zulus take part in a council of war at which Cetshwayo, the Zulu chieftain and his advisers must decide one way or another on what action to take. The ruler, totally committed to justice, favours arbitration - hardly what Zikali wants. So Zikali stage manages the appearance of a white goddess, the Nomkubulwana who indicates to the Zulus by a sign that it is the time for steel. 16.
Haggard wanted to put forward the idea of the Zulus as having the potential and the spiritual dimensions which made them capable of being transfomied into the most advanced peoples (but not without implying that they were backward and intellectually inferior). After his last visit to South East Africa, he prophesied:
"In the case of the Zulus, civilisation has one of its greatest opportunities, for certainly in them there is a spirit which can be led on to higher things. My earnest hope...is that this opportunity may not continue to be neglected in the years to come. If so, it seems to me that we shall incur a heavy responsibility towards a bewildered people, that we have broken and never tried to mend, and suffer evils to arise of which the effect will not be endured by them alone." 17.
Haggard’s repeated exhortations to military preparedness could not have reached fruition without the dependence on technology, and the advances in military organisation and equipment which he featured in his works. Not only were his characters equipped with the latest rifles and bullets, but their unflinching superiority in social arrangement, morality and power were self- evident. It is beyond question that Quatermain arrived in Africa by steamship and used the Martini-Henry where appropriate, and had at his disposal tables of reckoning, compasses and other western technological, medical and scientific improvements.
The overweening and self-confident expansionism of the period that continued from 1851 to 1901 was encapsulated in the Great Exhibition of 1851. Symbolising the ideals and achievements of the early Victorians, its glittering glass-covered structure housed every aspect of arts, industry and commerce. Queen Victoria, on the 29th April, writing in her diary in the full flush of a happy marriage had been quite certain of the prospects: "We are capable of doing anything," she attested. Indeed, the Great Exhibition of that year at the Crystal Palace was testimony to those words. With its 100,000 exhibits, it was, perhaps, the greatest occasion of Victoria’s reign. Its theme was that of a great international exposition displaying works from every comer of the Empire. Originated by Prince Albert and aided by Lyon Playfair, exhibits were organised into raw materials, the manufactures which were made from them, and the arts which adorned them. They were not organised according to countries of origin, and only 520 out of the 14,000 exhibitors came from the Empire. Foreign and colonial goods were exhibited in the eastem wing and those from the tropics placed nearest the transept. Queen Victoria remarked, with usual Victorian understatement, that "Canada made an admirable show" and India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), the West Indies and Malta all made contributions.
Lord Alfred Tennyson in his grandiloquent "Ode Sung at the Opening of the Intemational Exhibition in the Crystal Palace" declaimed:
''Uplift a thousand voices full of sweet, In this wide hall with earth's invention stored, And praise the invisible universal Lord, Who lets once more in peace the nations meet, Where Science, Art and Labour have ourpour‘d Their myriad homs of plenty at our feet." 18.
The belief he demonstrated in the rightfulness of Victorian ownership was symptomatic of the times, but hardly took account of the inequalities in its distribution.
What was occurring in that period was that the late Victorians were having to come to terms with many major inventions that were revolutionising their way of life; their homes, workplaces, schools, vehicles, and their entertainment and travel arrange- ments. The improvements in steam propulsion were instrumental in the opening up of the colonies by sea. India had been accessible since the days of sail, but one of the earliest steam companies was the Pacific and Orient (P & O). Passengers sailing out to India had long been used to the best method of travelling as P O S H which meant "port out, starboard home" as the precursor of today’s slang word. The company had origi-nated as the Dublin and London Steam Packet C0. and after 1835, with the introduction of its service to Vigo in Spain, it became the Peninsular Steam Navigation Co. In 1840 it extended its line to Malta and Alexandria, and across Egypt by land, Thomas Cook and Co. specialising in the travel arrangements, as always.
After the building of the Suez Canal, it continued its service and entered the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean, and on to Calcutta. The Hindostan, 1,800 tons and 52 horsepower, was the vessel employed in this trip, and later the Himalaya, 3,500 tons, made the journey. Speeds of eight or ten knots were achieved in the 1840s and by the mid 1850s eleven to fourteen knots were reached. Malaysia, Singapore and China became destinations by the 1860s and Australia was reached by steam as well, with coaling stations arranged along the route, the coal for the Suez depot being brought across the Egyptian desert by camel pack.
Cross Atlantic steam ship services began in 1840 after the Sirius and the Great Western had crossed the Atlantic on steam alone. The first of the Cunard liners was the Britannia.
The challenge of crossing the oceans and bracing oneself to the sea breezes was one frequently met by Haggard, Kipling and company as they sailed on cruise liners to Southern Africa. In those days of steam travel ocean liners afforded a luxury and elegance never experienced in the days of sail. The ship’s library could provide ample material for a novelist and always carried the latest adventure stories of a Stevenson, a Buchan or a Haggard for that matter. There is an unsubstantiated story of one voyage where the issue of the latest Marie Corelli was a matter of some contention and all of the passengers were vying for it.
Many of the Cunard liners were used as cruise liners, not least of which was the Britannia. Their cabins were well fitted, Port Lectures were well rehearsed and deeply researched and there would be commentary from the captain during the most interesting passages, and for whale spotting. In the first class restaurant the food was excellent, while less so in steerage. The vessels were smooth and elegant and the stopovers were particularly delightful.
Journeys by Haggard included one aboard the Kinfauns Castle with members of the Dominions Commission in 1912. After a long voyage from England, stopping for a couple of weeks in Madeira, they arrived in South Africa after a total joumey of five weeks. This return to Southern Africa after so many years alighted in Haggard many memories. Writing in his diary, regretful of the passing of the years, he complained, "I have passed from youth to age since then...Much has changed but the sunshine is the same." 19.
Coming back on the way home Haggard used the time spent under steam to write up his diary in his cabin: "So ends my visit to South Africa," he wrote, "on the whole it has been successful, if sad in ways, I am truly grateful for the extreme kindness with which I have been welcomed everywhere, in fact I have experienced quite a little triumph. Affectionate as was my greeting I think really it was more to do with the fact that I am a sort of curiosity, a survival from a past generation, than to my own individuality...So to South Africa farewell." 20.
Tripping down the gangplank onto South African soil, Kipling would have been greeted, just as he was in America, by groups of joumalists eager to interview him about his visit and to obtain details of his itinerary. What is clear is that his joumeys were undertaken for reasons of health as well as any literary or financial expedients.
Kipling also travelled on cross Channel crossings, writing from the R.M.S.S. Normandia on one occasion to Haggard "l wish you were along too. You’d cuss the cold - in spite of the lavish and odorous steam-heat - but you'd like the smell of the docks again." 21.
There were cross Channel steamers and packets of all kinds; indeed Dickens referred to such a spy-ridden packet in A Tale of Two Cities, but in the late eighteenth century, when the story was set, that would have still been a sailing ship. By 1875, however, even a twin-hulled Channel steamship had been tried out, its twin hulls bridged over by one deck, the space between being occupied by the paddle wheels. The effect of stabilisation was achieved by each hull acting as an outrigger to the other and thus neutralising the rolling effect caused by the waves. In that year the joumey from Dover to Calais took just under two hours, and this time was much reduced by the turn of the century, as faster craft took the place of the "Castalia", as it was known.
The Royal Navy, too was no stranger to steam and in 1875 the battleship H M S "Benbow" was commissioned. Rated at 10,000 tons, and with 11,500 horse power, it was a massive and daunting prospect for any adversary. Until then a combination of sail and steam had been used, one such vessel being the Shah, 10,000 tons and in 1873 it had been the fastest in the navy. it was 337 feet in length and its breadth was 50 feet. Using both sail and steam, the ship was capable of 18 knots. The Inflexible of 1876 was an originally conceived unrigged ironclad known as a "monitor". With amour plating 16 to 24 inches thick the vessel was armed to the gunwales with four 81 ton guns. Actually, depending entirely on its motor power, it could achieve a rate of 14 knots; not particularly fast, but with such huge fire power speed was, arguably, unnecessary. 22.
Another use for steam was in the powering of the ubiquitous gunboat, a wide, flat-bottomed craft which was used for "gunboat diplomacy" in shallow rivers, yet it was strong enough to be used to ride out in the open sea. Such a vessel Conrad must have had in mind when he described a gunboat shelling the African shore in Heart of Darkness. A Chinese writer described the gunboat in 1843 thus: "On each side is the wheel which by the use of coal fire is made to revolve as fast as a horse...Steam vessels are a wonderful invention of foreigners, and are calculated to offer delight to many." 23.
The invention of gunpowder was a distant memory in Victorian times, but without the increased improvements in ballistics and the manufacture of improved munitions, a virtual gun revolution could not have taken place in the 1860s, which continued up to and was completed in the 1890s. The early machine guns were cranky affairs with numerous barrels, such as the Gatling of American Civil War fame. The explorer H M Stanley admired a machine gun produced by the American inventor, H Maxim, at Woolwich Arsenal in 1887 and, after firing 333 shots in 30 seconds, commented that, "it is a fine weapon, and will be invaluable for subduing the heathen". The gun used only one barrel and was light enough to be carried on the back of an infantryman.
The type of gun referred to by Haggard when he mentioned the use of the Martini-Henry (see chapter 4) was a breechloading, repeating rifle capable of firing repeated rounds, with a calibre of 11-11.5 millimetres. Fast, light, accurate and weather proof, it was the pride and joy of the British army in the eighteen-seventies. In addition to this weapon, Sir Henry Good carried "three heavy breech-loading double-eight elephant guns", "Three double .500 expresses", "One double No. 12 central- fire Keeper’s shotgun, full choke both barrels", "Three Winchester repeating rifles" and besides spare guns, "Three single- action Colt’s revolvers, with the heavier pattern of cartridge". 24.
Alongside these improvements in guns went improved ballistics. The invention of smokeless powder meant a soldier could fire his rifle without being detected, and reduced the need to frequently clean the barrel. Burning more evenly, smokeless powder produced more velocity than gunpowder and was resistant to moisture. The invention of eordite assisted in colonial expansion because it was more stable in high temperatures. With smaller and smaller calibre rifles, (8mms by 1890), and these significant improvements in ballistics, the scene was set for the domination of Africa and Asia. 25.
On a lighter note, the invention of the phonograph became the crowning wonder of an exhibition held in London at the Royal Institute. A cartridge having been prepared by the poet Tennyson, visitors were able to hear the words of his poem (later set to music), "Come into the garden, Maud", recited by the author himself. Crowds collected to hear the miracle of speech recorded for posterity, and were only persuaded to disperse with great diplomacy.
In the Victorian novel, the innovations in machinery were such that the demands of a new generation of readers could be satisfied by the improved techniques of printing. Compositors were able, by virtue of the "New Steam Type Composing Machine" to set up to about twelve thousand types per hour as against an earlier average of two thousand. The machine invented by McKenzie was regulated by a perforated, thick paper in a continuous strip of about five cms wide. 26. Improvements in typesetting meant that problems such as spacing, adjusting the length of the line and hyphenating words that must be separated was taken care of. The copy was composed on the steam type c