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The Keepers of the People
A Critical Edition of the 1898 Novel
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English Edition · Branch 10 of 254
Introduction
The Keepers of the People
p. 2How much of the politics of this book Jepson held, and for how long, is not something the present editor can settle. The novel is unironic in a way that is hard to explain except by conviction; but he was thirty-four, he was writing for money in a crowded market, and the two later books that touch the same ground — On the Edge of the Empire (1899) and The Dictator's Daughter (1902) — have not been examined for this edition. The question is left open rather than answered by silence.
SIGNS AND SYMBOLS
Jepson was a careful builder, and the novel is held together by a small number of objects and names that carry more than they are asked to.
The quatrain. Four lines are the first words in the book and they are the plot: Across the hills, and far away / Beyond their utmost purple rim, / And deep into the dying day / The happy Princess followed him. Ruth is reading them aloud when Ralph Falcon steps out of the wood; Althea repeats them three hundred pages later on the steps of the house as his wedding carriage drives off, with one word changed, and says "I think that you ought to have been the Princess, Ruth." Ruth does follow him across the hills, and she does it on her own feet. Whether the altered word is the compositor's or the child's is discussed in the Editorial Note.
The girdle of falcon's claws. Seven linked claws of wrought gold, each holding a stone, made by Ralph's own hands and clasped round Ruth's waist by him while she stands with her arms raised — a scene staged, deliberately, as a wedding. "It is a magic girdle … That girdle will take its wearer safe through five hundred miles of barbarous Asia." It does: twice, on the road, it saves her life. Girdles in this tradition bind and consecrate, and Jepson lets the reader see what Althea sees when Ruth puts it on again in Varandaleel — that she has been wearing it next to her skin all the way across Asia, and that it has cut her.
Socrates
Reading The Keepers of the People · Introduction · Introduction
Ask about a concept, passage, contradiction, or connection.
Socrates will begin with this book and its sources.About This Reading Edition
Edgar Jepson’s The Keepers of the People begins as a late-Victorian lost-kingdom romance and becomes an unsettling political argument. Ralph Falcon moves from an English country house to the hidden state of Varandaleel, where laughter, secrecy, violence, education, and the duties of rulers are tested against one another.
Historical Text
The novel was first published in London in 1898 by C. Arthur Pearson. This reading text follows the owner-supplied critical edition, whose copy-text is the Methuen Colonial Library issue of the same year digitised by the Internet Archive. The supplied editorial note records the edition’s corrections, normalisations, limits, and unresolved textual risks.
About This Edition
This English Edition preserves the complete supplied text and apparatus: the introduction, reading guide, key words, plot outline, editorial note, both books and all thirty chapters, and the end notes. Its reader branches end at paragraph boundaries, with the original chapter structure and chapter page references mapped to the 1898 printing.
Rights
Edgar Jepson’s 1898 novel is in the public domain. The introduction, reader’s guide, key words, outline, editorial note, notes, editorial arrangement, and design of the supplied edition are © 2026 Diotimos Editions.