Race and the late-Victorian Imperial world-view: A Lodge in the Wilderness and Prester John

Daniel Gorman

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As a writer of both serious scholarship and what we would today call popular fiction, John Buchan's work provides an ideal sounding of late Victorian and early twentieth-century ideals. Indeed, his astounding industry meant that he at one time or another wrote about most of the concerns of the day. Buchan's popular work, what he termed his 'shockers', was crafted with an eye to the marketplace, and thus provides an especially good source for understanding the period's conventional thought and prevailing wisdom. I would like to examine Buchan's views on one of the more controversial topics of his age, namely race and the empire.

Buchan has often been criticized for perpetuating discriminatory stereotypes in his writing. The most common charge is that he was an anti-Semite. This claim is usually tied to the character Scudder from The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan's most famous novel. Scudder tells Richard Hannay that '[t]he Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the backstairs to find him,' and that at the heart of every crisis is 'a little white-faced Jew in a bathchair with an eye like a rattlesnake.' The critics usually fail to note, however, that Scudder's views are renounced in the book. Further, Buchan himself was a supporter of Zionism, and was on close terms with Chaim Weizman, president of the World Zionist Council and later the first President of Israel.

originally published in JBJ32 (Spring 2005)

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