ABSTRACT
He Knew He Was Right is imbued as well with the memory of European intertwinings of race, gender, and imperialism encoded in English literature from Othello to Jane Eyre. In opposition to Mill, Buxton, T. H. Huxley, Charles Darwin, Sir Charles Lyell, Thomas Hughes, John Bright, and their liberal company Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin chaired the Governor Eyre Defense Committee, which included the social protest novelist and Anglican clergyman Charles Kingsley and Charles Dickens among its number although, as Grace Moore states in Dickens and Empire, the great novelist was only a nominal member. In 1872, the Liberal government under Gladstone voted to defray the costs of the Governor's legal expenses, and the Conservative government granted him a pension in 1874. Anthony Trollope was therefore writing He Knew He Was Right just as J. S. Mill and the Jamaica Committee were vigorously trying to get Eyre tried for using excessive force at Morant Bay, as the Royal Commission had reported.
