Diotimos Library · Literary Fiction Collection · English Edition
The Keepers of the People
A Critical Edition of the 1898 Novel
Swipe or use the arrow keys.
English Edition · Branch 2 of 254
Introduction
The Keepers of the People
p. 2INTRODUCTION
THE BOOK
The Keepers of the People was published in London in 1898, in one volume, by C. Arthur Pearson. The text printed here is taken from the issue Methuen & Co. brought out in the same year for Methuen's Colonial Library, the only setting that has been digitised. It runs to 358 pages, a little over eighty-two thousand words, and is divided into two books of markedly unequal length: Book I, In England, eleven chapters and about a third of the whole; Book II, In Varandaleel, nineteen chapters and the remaining two thirds. Jepson was thirty-four. He had published two novels before it — Sibyl Falcon (1895) and The Passion for Romance (1896) — and the title page of this one advertises them both.
On its face it is a lost-kingdom romance, the kind of book the 1890s produced by the hundred. A young man of English blood arrives at an English country house out of Asia, with two enormous hounds, a chest of jewels and two servants whose tongues have been cut out. He is looking for a wife. He finds a country half full of women who talk about the Woman Movement and a country house full of people who cannot think of anything to do, marries the cleverest of the women, abducts a thirteen-year-old girl who has run out of books to read, and takes both of them back over the mountains to Varandaleel, a state of some three million people walled into a valley somewhere north of India, where his grandfather made himself a god eighty years ago by putting on the mantle of Indra and winning a battle. A Russian force follows him. There is a war, a divorce, a murder, a suicide and a duel, and the book ends with laughter.
That description is accurate and it misses the book entirely. The romance is the vehicle. The Keepers of the People is an argument, and an argument of a particular and uncomfortable kind: it is a defence of absolute, secretive, hereditary, homicidal personal rule, mounted in earnest, on grounds its author plainly believed, against every political assumption its first readers held. Jepson took the most reassuring popular form available to him and filled it with the case against the century that was ending.
THE THESIS
The argument can be set out in five clauses, and the novel argues each of them in its own place.
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.