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 7 of 254
Introduction
The Keepers of the People
p. 2"Was ever woman in the world called on to settle such a matter! I will not say! It is putting names to things! You should never put names to things! It is my hour now. Althea's hour may come. I leave it — on the knees of the Gods." (II.xix)
The novel is titled for the Princes. Its last chapter is called Althea Intervenes, and its last image of her is a girl alone in a forest under a patch of starry sky with another woman's baby inside the curve of her arm. The argument wins. The book is not sure it should have.
THE MANNER
Jepson writes short. The sentences are declarative, the paragraphs are unhurried, and the dialogue advances by monosyllables and repeated tags: "said Ralph Falcon" some hundreds of times, always in that order, always without an adverb if he can help it; "don't you know?" every third speech from Lord Lisdor. It is a deliberate technique and it produces a strange effect, which is that the novel's central figure is almost never described from the inside. We are told what Ruth thinks, what Althea thinks, at length what Agnes Freshington thinks; of Prince Ralph we mostly get a face that does not move and a voice that answers questions with two words. When the interior does open — the ride to rescue Ruth in II.x, with its "dull mutter of 'Faster! Faster!'" — the effect is disproportionate, because it has been withheld for two hundred pages.
The comedy is Lord Lisdor's and it is very good. He is a man with no opinions, no energy, an unembarrassed appetite for women and a perfect ear, and Jepson uses him as the only character permitted to say what a scene looks like from outside — "it certainly partakes of the nature of the distinctly rum"; "By Jove, that's pretty thick!"; "Varandaleel ain't my country, don't you know?" He is also, quietly, the instrument by which the book's ideal state is shown behaving exactly like every other court: he seduces the king's favourite daughter under the roof that is sheltering him, and then trades his wife for her.
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.