ABSTRACT
One of the dominant fantasies of fin de siècle Britain—the incorporation of the working classes into the British imperial project—does not only occupy the apparently lighthearted realm of juvenile fiction. In an attempt to transform this fantasy into reality, a number of turn-of-the-century organizations attempt to institutionalize what I call hegemonic imperialism, such that English men, women, and children of all classes identify as members of a unified imperial nation, rather than as members of socioeconomic classes with competing political interests and cultural values. This chapter examines one of the most prominent examples of such an attempt to institutionalize hegemonic imperialism, the Salvation Army social-reform scheme advanced in William Booth's bestseller In Darkest England and the Wa y Out (1890), 1 and how the Salvationist scheme intersects with discourses on class and empire that circulate in a range of late-century texts, including H. Rider Haggard's juvenile novel She (1887). In order to address concerns about the degeneration of the urban poor, which works such as Haggard's identify as a major impediment to the progress of the British Empire, Booth's scheme proposes to regenerate the poor by moving them through an interconnected series of “colo-nies”—a city colony in which the poor are “rescued” and “saved,” a farm colony in which they are trained to perform the work required of emigrants, and an overseas colony in which they buttress British imperial power. As such, the Salvation Army regeneration scheme is exemplary not only of the attempt to institute hegemonic imperialism but also of “social imperialism,” the notion that British imperialism can solve the domestic (or “social”) problems that have plagued England since the advent of industrial capitalism. Thus, in Booth's as in other texts advocating such emigration schemes, the need to populate the supposed “empty spaces” of the empire meets up with the need to empty out the over-populated working-class slums of England. However, all works that attempt to establish hegemonic imperialism—including juvenile fictions such as Haggard's She and those published in the “improving” penny magazines—are at base social-imperialist. Even if they do not explicitly advance emigration schemes, at some level they view urban decay and imperial expansion in terms of problem and solution, respectively, and seek, as Bernard Semmel puts it, “to draw all classes together in defence of the nation and empire and … to prove to the least well-to-do class that its interests were inseparable from those of the nation.” 2
