ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that, in late Victorian magazines at least, encounters with snakes represented both reckless bravery and the limits of colonial authority: The lion was easily hunted and not the king of the jungle, instead it was the snake, and the adventurous protagonists of penny dreadfuls knew that when they entered the serpents’ domain, they were sure to have their status as “Lords of Creation” challenged. There was one animal, however, which was rarely hunted or captured by the British colonialist: the serpent. Although the snake was rarely hunted in real life, when one turns the pages of late Victorian penny dreadfuls, the fictional adventurers of those stories encounter large snakes, such as the reticulated python, on a number of occasions when they venture far into the jungles. Columns were printed which offered young male readers advice on how to deal with snake bites and stop venom spreading up their veins, should they ever be unlucky enough to endure such an encounter, even though readers would likely never encounter a real snake except in a zoo.