Victorian Poetry and the Indian Rebellion: Shaking, Shocking and Reshaping the Empire

Historians of the British Empire in the long nineteenth century (c. 1789–1914) generally agree that the Indian Rebellion of 1857 may be regarded as marking a major watershed in the development of British imperialism. As well as an ‘ideological turning-point’ (MacKenzie 1999, 280) in British imperial history, such a destabilising event proved to be ‘a compelling literary subject’ (Herbert 2008, 20). However, scholarly investigations of the Indian Uprising, or ‘Mutiny’, in Victorian literature have tended to centre on fiction, particularly addressing either the impact of the event on the emerging genre of sensation fiction or the ensuing production of so-called ‘Mutiny fiction’. By contrast, my paper will attempt to shift the focus of attention towards Victorian poetry and study the various ways in which a host of imperial voices engage with the causes and effects of a ‘national shock’ (Herbert 2008, 250) in their poems. In my survey of selected poetic responses to the Indian Rebellion, I will pay sustained attention to the recurring tropes deployed by shocked poets aiming to shock their readers. At the same time, I intend to tease out the broader ideological implications of these poetic representations of a pre-WWI collective shock. In so doing, not only will I explore the extent to which ‘the pattern of traumatic shock’ (55) pervades ‘Mutiny’ poetry as well as fiction, but I will also offer a contribution to the scholarly effort to historicise shock (Matus 2010)