Diotimos Library · Literary Fiction Collection · English Edition
The Keepers of the People
A Critical Edition of the 1898 Novel
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Notes
The Keepers of the People
p. 359Chapter vi
"then they died by hemlock" — the Athenian method, and the death of Socrates in the Phaedo, where it is described as a gradual numbness rising from the feet. Althea's argument throughout the novel is not against execution but for hemlock, and she means it as mercy.
"A Salic law!" — the rule excluding women from the succession, so called from the Salian Frankish law code and invoked in France from the fourteenth century. England had never had one, as the Princess Agnes points out; Queen Victoria was in the sixty-first year of her reign when this novel was published.
Chapter viii
a variant of the rites of Siva — Shiva; the head-man's report is vague and the novel's own explanation at II.ix is different again. What Jepson actually stages is a generic blood sacrifice.
Chapter ix
"Obeah, or Voodoo, or some such devilry" — Obeah, the folk sorcery of the British Caribbean, and Vodou, the Haitian religion. Prince Ralph's explanation — that the frenzy is an African inheritance surfacing in the descendants of the second Prince's black soldiers — is offered by the novel without qualification and is discussed in the Introduction under What else is exposed.
Chapter x
a raid over the Oxus — the Amu Darya, the river that runs from the Pamirs to the Aral Sea and served through the nineteenth century as the conventional line between Russian Central Asia and the Afghan buffer. To raid over the Oxus is to raid into the Tsar's territory.
seven of them were Sikhs — Lord Lisdor's servants, hired in India; the scout can identify them and cannot identify the Europeans.
"a worker in the vineyard of the Lord" — Matthew xx. 1–16, the parable of the labourers in the vineyard.
"the Reverend Peter Stucker" — at II.xvi, shrieking from the doorway, the same man calls on God as "I, James Stucker." The 1898 printing has both, clearly set, six chapters apart. The inconsistency is Jepson's and is left standing, with this note, rather than silently harmonised.
Chapter xiii
"You would be the Brutus of the hour" — Lucius Junius Brutus, first consul of the Roman Republic, who presided over the execution of his own sons for conspiring to restore the monarchy: the standing classical type of public duty overriding private love. Althea is proposing that Lord Lisdor sacrifice his wife; Lord Lisdor declines on the ground that Varandaleel is not his country.
Socrates
Reading The Keepers of the People · Notes · Notes
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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.