ABSTRACT
In The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a text inadvertently truncated by untimely death, we see how the attempt to define a corporate Englishness is mediated through corporeality and the policing of the body. The plot’s central focus on the missing body of Edwin Drood, the would-be colonizer, becomes symbolic of the larger ideological plot to find a solution to the ever-collapsing boundaries of Englishness signified by John Jasper’s identity as an opium addict. The novel’s anxiety about the way boundaries are blurred, drawn, and re-drawn within the national space anticipates the thickening of concern over the meaning of Englishness and the question of reproducing and continuing the national and racial blood line in late Victorian society. The imperative to reproduce Englishness for the sustainability of empire forms the central ideological dilemma in Henry Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain (1887), a novel which like many of his other imperial romances stages the enactment of Englishness far away from the moribund imperial metropolis and its distorted temper of modernity.
