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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. 2The set-pieces are done with a cold and rapid camera and they are the best writing in the book: the sacrifice in the wood at midnight (II.viii); the night battle seen from the top of a tower, eight miles off, as flashes and sound (II.xiii); and the feast of the six hundred Cossacks (II.xiv), which is either the worst thing in the novel or the most self-aware, and possibly both. Jepson gives it to Lord Lisdor to watch. The prisoners are marched to long tables under the palace wall loaded with smoking dishes and pitchers of wine; "their dull faces lightened with an expression of incredulous, joyful amazement"; and he rides away "assured that he left them at the highest pitch of felicity; assured that death would come upon them, unknowing and unterrified, at the crowning moment of their lives." The hemlock is Althea's idea. She thought of it because she is kind.
WHERE IT STANDS
The Keepers of the People was written into a crowded shelf and it knows it. Rider Haggard had established the hidden kingdom; Anthony Hope had made the small European principality a national pastime with The Prisoner of Zenda (1894); and behind both stands the story Jepson is answering most directly, Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King (1888), in which two Englishmen go up into Kafiristan and make themselves gods and it destroys them. Jepson names Kafiristan twice. His Englishman goes up into the mountains, makes himself a god, and it works — for eighty years and three generations — and the novel's whole energy comes from that reversal.
The date matters too. 1898 is the year of Omdurman and Fashoda, the year Curzon was appointed to India, and the high season of the Great Game; the Chitral campaign was three years old and the conversion of Kafiristan by the Amir of Afghanistan two. Jepson's Russians come over the Oxus with Maxims and mountain guns because that is exactly what the frontier press of the 1890s expected Russians to do. What the novel does with them is its own: they are not defeated at the pass, where they could have been stopped by five hundred men, but let into the country and destroyed in front of the palace, because the Prince has calculated that his people need a war and that five or six thousand of them need to die.
Socrates
Reading The Keepers of the People · Introduction · Introduction
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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.