Diotimos Library · Literary Fiction Collection · English Edition
The Keepers of the People
A Critical Edition of the 1898 Novel
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English Edition · Branch 13 of 254
On Reading This Edition
The Keepers of the People
p. 3The Introduction contains the interpretation, and the case it makes is contestable. It can be read first or last. Readers who prefer to meet a book without an argument already in their hands should read it afterwards; the book is perfectly legible without it.
The Editorial Note records what was done to the text — which errors were corrected, which period conventions were normalised, and which oddities were left standing because they are the author's and not the compositor's. It is there so that the edition can be judged rather than trusted, and it should be consulted by anyone who intends to quote from this text.
A word about what is in the book. The Keepers of the People is a novel about a benevolent autocracy, and it contains, described without disapproval, a human sacrifice, several judicial executions including that of a boy whose family are begging for him, the deliberate mutilation of children to produce mute servants, a war fought on purpose to reduce a population, and the mass poisoning of six hundred prisoners of war. It also contains eugenic and racial argument of a kind that was ordinary in 1898 and is load-bearing here rather than decorative. None of this has been softened, cut or apologised for in the text; the Introduction says what it thinks of it, and the reader is left to disagree.
Socrates
Reading The Keepers of the People · On Reading This Edition · On Reading This Edition
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.