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The Keepers of the People
A Critical Edition of the 1898 Novel
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Introduction
The Keepers of the People
p. 2Fourth, that the price is paid twice. This is where the book is better than its thesis. It is paid in the lives of those killed for it — that is the visible cost, and Jepson makes the reader watch several of the deaths. But it is paid a second time by the rulers, and the novel is quite clear-eyed about what they have given up. Asked by the Princess Agnes whether the Varandals are not simply slaves, Prince Ralph turns the question round:
"Slaves? What are slaves? There is not one man in a thousand, no, nor in ten thousand, free. If, as you say, the Varandals are my slaves, am I not a slave to them? Since I was a child, I have been their slave; and till I die my days will be laborious, and my nights wakeful in their service. With what an easier servitude do they serve me! … While we, their rulers, may only lay aside our burden under the spell of the love of loves, the pleasure of pleasures; and for how brief a space! Paying for our relief the best blood of our hearts. Yet — the people laugh. And, by the sword-arm of Ralph, while I live, they shall laugh still!" (II.iv)
Later, riding home from an execution he has just refused to remit, with Althea in tears ahead of him on the road, he says six words and nothing else for twenty miles: "It is the price of laughter" (II.viii). The Princes have bought the people's laughter at the cost of their own, and in all the palace only Althea and a hill-girl in a walled garden laugh at all.
Fifth, that the authority rests on nothing but force and will. The novel does not pretend otherwise for a moment, and it is careful to have its own hero say so. "But what right have you to treat them so? Who gave you the right?" — "The sword, and the strong will" (II.iv). The godhead is a stage property. The first Prince took the flame-coloured mantle off the image of Indra and walked into the council hall wearing it; his descendants ride at night in a burnished helmet "because it was only by night that he was seen dimly by the people; and it seemed good to impress them by these insignia of power" (II.iv). The worship is policy. The Princes know it, and the reader is told so long before any Varandal could be.
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.