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The Keepers of the People
A Critical Edition of the 1898 Novel
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English Edition · Branch 5 of 254
Introduction
The Keepers of the People
p. 2THE MOST EXPOSED SENTENCE IN THE BOOK
The dynasty has a scripture. It is a work in several volumes called the Book of the Wisdom of the Princes, and Jepson tells us what its first sentence is:
It begins with the words, "It is expedient that one man die for the people," and contains all kingcraft, and the art of the building of nations. (II.iii)
That sentence is not Jepson's. It is Caiaphas's, at John xi. 50, spoken to the chief priests and the Pharisees in the council that resolves on the death of Christ, and it is the most famous piece of political reasoning in the Gospels precisely because the Evangelist sets it down as the moment expediency destroys God. Jepson takes it, removes the irony, and makes it the founding text of a dynasty and then a proverb in the people's mouths — "a frequent saying of his … had grown a household word among them, and in their eyes it was wholly good."
He then does something stranger. At the execution of a young man in the wood in II.viii — a boy whose parents and sister are on their knees in front of the Prince's horse begging for him — Prince Ralph says the sentence aloud, and the elders of the village say it back to him: "'It is expedient that one man die for the people!' cried the older men … very sternly; and the sword fell." It has become a response in a liturgy. The people themselves make the responses at their own killings.
A reader should see clearly that the novel knows what it is quoting. It puts a missionary in front of the Prince in II.xvi and gives him every chance to say so, and he cannot, because he has come to preach damnation and black clothes rather than the Gospel, and Prince Ralph dismisses him not as a Christian but as a bad one: "There is no room in Varandaleel for the teaching of a fool and a liar — that is not Christianity! You die!" The book has arranged things so that the only voice that could name what it has done to the text is a voice it has already discredited. This is the most audacious thing in The Keepers of the People and the thing most worth arguing with.
WHAT ELSE IS EXPOSED
Two further things will trouble a modern reader, and neither is incidental.
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.