The Keepers of the People

Readers will reach for Nietzsche, and the reach is not absurd — the first English translations were appearing from 1896 — but Jepson's Prince is a Carlylean hero-king, a strong man with a burden, not a transvaluer of values; he never claims to be beyond good and evil, only to be responsible for a larger good than his critics can see. The nearer relations are Carlyle, the anti-New-Woman novels of the decade, and Jepson's own Sibyl Falcon, which gives this book its family: Ralph is a Falcon, the portrait of the pirate Sir Ralph Falcon hangs in the Quivern gallery, Ruth was born a Falcon, and the grandfather who walked out of England with a sword, a horse and seven diamonds dropped the "Sir" on the way.

What cannot be read in 1898 and can be read now is the last clause of the programme. Abolish literacy; abolish the press; make several hundred of your servants permanently unable to speak; destroy a village that develops an opinion; contrive a war to thin a population you consider too thick on the ground; and feed six hundred prisoners a good dinner and poison it. In 1898 this is the picturesque East. It did not stay picturesque. Jepson died in 1938 and cannot be charged with what came after, but the book is a laboratory model of an argument the twentieth century would make in earnest, and it is a better model than most because it is made by someone who found it beautiful.

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A note on the author

The novel establishes almost nothing about its author, and the following comes from outside it.

Edgar Alfred Jepson was born on 28 November 1863 and died on 12 April 1938. He was educated at Leamington College and at Balliol College, Oxford. He edited Vanity Fair for a short period, during which he gave work to the poet Richard Barham Middleton; he was a friend of Ford Madox Ford, a member of the Square Club from 1908 and of the drinking club called the New Bohemians, and he collaborated at various times with Arthur Machen, John Gawsworth and Hugh Clevely. He was a prolific and very various professional writer: the Tinker and Lady Noggs books for children, the detective novels of which The Loudwater Mystery (1920) is the best known, the standard English translations of Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin and of Gaston Leroux, and, in The Horned Shepherd (1904), one of the period's odder pieces of occult fiction. He left two volumes of memoirs, Memories of a Victorian (1933) and Memories of an Edwardian and Neo-Georgian (1937). His son Selwyn Jepson became a crime novelist; his daughter Margaret published fiction, and her daughter was the novelist Fay Weldon.