 
Cannibals or knights – sexual honor in the propaganda of
Arthur Conan Doyle and W. T. Stead
Images of women were manipulated by both sides in the debate over the
Boer War concentration camps, with neither side giving much attention
to the lives of actual women in the camps. The army and the Colonial
Office eventually had to recognize the importance of the women and
children in the camps because the camps’death rates were reflecting
badly on men whose duty was to protect women and children. The
public debate surrounding the camps became a debate about gender.
This chapter examines another public debate that involved women but
was controlled by men. The exchange of war propaganda between
Arthur Conan Doyle and W. T. Stead focuses on the sexual honor and
conduct of the British soldier, but women are rarely given voice. The
terms of the debate arise from the phenomenon of Victorian medieval-
ism – Victorians went so far as to stage jousting matches and tourna-
ments in their nostalgia for a medieval past, filtered through Victorian
sensibilities.¹ The core nostalgic notion of Victorian medievalism, its
central metaphor, was the notion of chivalry as the right conduct of men
toward women. The chivalrous man needed a woman to inspire him,
but codes of chivalry were written for men; chivalry, for the Victorians,
was a male-oriented set of ideas about how to be a good man. Although
the Doyle-Stead debate about masculine sexual honor is couched in the
terms of medievalism, it nevertheless marks the South African War as
the beginning of a twentieth-century sensibility about what could be
expected of men as men. Public opinion about war, and especially about
such matters as the concentration camps, depends on shared ideas
about proper wartime conduct, but ideas about proper wartime conduct
relied on ideals about masculinity – about proper male conduct.
This chapter examines Doyle’s and Stead’s uses of the Victorian idea
of chivalry, exploring the importance of chivalry as part of a functioning

opinion? Was a British man in khaki a noble representative of his
nation, carrying British ideals abroad? Or was he simply ‘‘a single man
in barracks,’’ as Kipling wrote? Soldiers had always been seen as sexual
threats. But volunteer soldiers, with less of the discipline of military
training, might be an even bigger problem. Kipling’s returning volun-
teer wondered how he could ever fit in again: ‘‘me, that ’ave been what
I’ve been?’’² The soldiers were an unknown quantity, but Doyle and
Stead were participating in an effort to construct the new soldier of the
Empire within a framework that could contain and manage him, for
the people of Britain and for the returning soldiers themselves. Chival-
ry was a useful way of teaching the soldier how to behave and teaching
the British public how to think about the soldier during a war that saw
the recruitment of an entirely different kind of soldier. Before the Boer
Cannibals or knights
War, officers were gentlemen and footsoldiers were rough-and-ready
types who took the Queen’s shilling for lack of a job, to escape troubles
at home, or for adventure. With the large-scale recruiting necessary
during the Boer War, the middle and lower middle class Volunteer
corps meant that much of the fighting would now be done by non-
career soldiers who had left decent jobs at home. Public ideas about
soldiers needed revising.
Public discourse about the Boer War did not feature a strong rhetori-
cal focus on the home front. The women of Britain were in no danger
and were not especially called upon to encourage their men to join up.
To be sure, Kipling’s ‘‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’’ raised money for
the troops and their families by calling up an image of wives and
children left behind, but there was no overwhelming sense of ‘‘Women
of Britain Say, Go!’’ and no posters of bestial, ravaging Boers. Chivalry’s
place as one of the central ideologies in support of the war, and the
proper conduct of it, had to depend on women, but with the lack of

restraint had to be imposed on the soldier. For both Stead and Doyle,
sexual honor was an English issue at the same time as it was an imperial
one, and concerns about male sexual behavior in the Empire reflected
concerns about male sexual behavior at home.³ Stead’s anti-war posi-
tion is almost as influenced by ideas of chivalry drawn from Victorian
medievalism as Doyle’s pro-war position, and Stead and Doyle’s fight
about the nature of the Victorian soldier appears to have less to do with
their positions on the Boer War than with their relations to turn-of-the-
century notions of masculinity, Darwinism, and social progress.
    
W. T. Stead supported women’s rights. He campaigned against the
Contagious Diseases Acts and in favor of women’s suffrage. His 
Pall Mall Gazette series on child prostitution in London, ‘‘The Maiden
Tribute of Modern Babylon,’’ included vivid descriptions of the sexual
debaucheries of a class of aristocratic men who preyed on the ‘‘daugh-
ters of the people.’’ These men, styled ‘‘minotaurs’’ by Stead, had so
indulged in sexual excess that for them stimulation could come only
from the rape of young virgins. Judith Walkowitz and others have
discussed the Maiden Tribute’s attitudes toward male sex drives and
Stead’s own satisfactions from playing the part of a sexual predator in
the drama he staged to ‘‘purchase’’ a thirteen-year-old girl. Upper-class
sexuality is unnatural sexuality, for Stead, because it has been corrupted
by excess. Stead’s assessments of male sexuality take a different form in
his Boer-War propaganda, however, as the sexuality of the working-
class Tommy Atkins becomes the issue, and predatory sexuality be-
comes equated not with aristocratic men but with men in a kind of
primitive, natural state.
Stead was the loudest voice in the pro-Boer movement even if the
work of Leonard Courtney and Frederic Harrison was, in the long run,
more influential (Davey The British Pro-Boers ). Because of Stead’s

and the Review of Reviews office and offering bulk discounts for mass
distribution.
War Against War is definitively Stead’s production – he uses the first
person in its leaders and in many unsigned articles, and it was he
personally who was both attacked and credited for the views the journal
contained. On the cover of the  November issue, Stead prints a
private letter to him from Olive Schreiner (‘‘Though it is a private letter,
I am sure our correspondent will forgive me for bringing it before my
readers’’). Readers of War Against War were, for Stead, ‘‘my readers.’’
Stead was seen, by himself and by observers on both sides of the war
question, as the patron saint of the anti-war movement. So the strategies
Stead would use in his propaganda to characterize the British soldier
were strategies that had to be met head-on by propagandists on the
other side of the issue.
 Gender, race, and the writing of empire
   
One of the most important propagandists opposed to Stead was Arthur
Conan Doyle. The creator of Sherlock Holmes is not the first Victorian
writer we associate with the promotion of the aims of Empire. Rudyard
Kipling and Rider Haggard come to mind more readily, with their
tales of adventure in India and Africa. Although Doyle’s most popular
and most lasting works, the Holmes stories, often contain imperial
details, the stories are not set in the outposts of British civilization.
Holmes is a Londoner, rooted firmly in the metropolis, making occa-
sional excursions to the surrounding countryside. Nor is Doyle’s other
fiction imperial, unless we count the delightfully comic Brigadier
Etienne Gerard, who served a different Empire. Doyle’s fiction is,
however, often about war, and it is because he is concerned about war
that Doyle becomes an important public figure in support of British
imperialism at the turn of the century. Empire per se did not interest

a lead’’ (quoted in Carr Life of Doyle ). He was not accepted into the
military, but he was able to reach the fighting by another route. Resur-
recting his dormant qualifications as a physician – he had abandoned
his practice when he became a literary success in the early s–he
went out to South Africa as senior surgeon of a hospital for British
soldiers funded by a friend, John Langman.
   
From his first fame as a writer until his death, Doyle lived in the public
eye, speaking out on many issues of public controversy of the times. He
felt it was his obligation as a public figure to help defend the honor of his
country as well as to make recommendations to its leaders as to what the
best and most honorable courses of action would be. It was during the
Boer War that this newly bestselling author made his first foray into
public debate. His sense of himself as an important example for young
British men led him to volunteer for active military service during the
conflict, and his sense of his talents as a writer led him to produce a
propaganda pamphlet in defense of Britain’s conduct during the war.
He suggested, in letters to the War Office and to the newspapers,
innovations in military strategy and equipment – rifle fire that would be
able to drop into trenches rather than shooting straight over them, metal
helmets and lightweight body armor, and militia drill at home in
England to train an ever-ready defense force. (His suggestions, however,
were not enthusiastically welcomed by the War Office.) He even ran for
parliament in the Khaki Election of .
War had always interested Doyle, and he had had a brief encounter
with it in , when he happened to be in Cairo when war was
declared. ‘‘Egypt had suddenly become the storm centre of the world,
and chance had placed me there at that moment,’’ he wrote later in the
autobiographical Memories and Adventures. ‘‘Clearly I could not remain in
Cairo, but must get up by hook or by crook to the frontier’’ (–). He

upon earth. Take this formidable people and train them for seven generations
in constant warfare against savage men and ferocious beasts, in circumstances
under which no weakling could survive, place them so that they acquire
exceptional skill with weapons and in horsemanship, give them a country which
is suited to the tactics of the huntsman, the marksman, and the rider. Then,
finally, put a finer temper upon their military qualities by a dour fatalistic Old
Testament religion and an ardent and consuming patriotism. Combine all
these qualities and all these impulses in one individual, and you have the
modern Boer – the most formidable antagonist who ever crossed the path of
Imperial Britain. ()
This enemy bore little relation to the stupid, backward farmer many
Britons had thought they would find in the South African republics. Of
course, a rude peasant enemy would not have allowed the British a
chance to shine – they needed a worthy opponent. In addition, how-
ever, Doyle had to account for why the war had not proceeded as
Cannibals or knights
expected. The general feeling in Britain had been in accord with the
lieutenant of the Irish Fusiliers who wrote to his parents in early October
: ‘‘I don’t think the Boers will have a chance, although I expect
there will be one or two stiff little shows here and there . . . I think they
are awful idiots to fight although we are of course very keen that they
should’’ (quoted in Pakenham Boer War ). The war was not over by
Christmas , as General Lord Roberts had predicted it would be.
Doyle’s Sir Nigel himself, with his eternal hopes for ‘‘some opportun-
ity for honorable advancement’’ through contest with any ‘‘worthy
gentleman,’’ would have been proud to do battle with The Great Boer
War’s version of Boer leader Piet Joubert. Joubert, Doyle wrote, ‘‘came
from that French Huguenot blood which has strengthened and refined
every race which it has touched, and from it he derived a chivalry and
generosity which made him respected and liked even by his opponents’’

After Doyle’s return to London, he remained deeply concerned about
the war. He continued to revise The Great Boer War, interviewing as many
key participants as he could and keeping up with all the details of the
war’s progress. But what disturbed him the most about the war was the
increasingly anti-British tone of the newspapers on the Continent. The
European press was printing more and more accounts of the miscon-
duct of British troops. Doyle recounted in the Cornhill after the war that:
To anyone who knew the easy going British soldier or the character of his
leaders the thing was unspeakably absurd; and yet, as I laid down the paper and
thought the matter over, I could not but admit that these Continental people
were acting under a generous and unselfish motive which was much to their
credit . . . How could they know our case? . . . Nowhere could be found a
statement which covered the whole ground in a simple fashion. Why didn’t
some Briton draw it up? And then, like a bullet through my head, came the
thought, ‘‘Why don’t you draw it up yourself?’’ (‘‘Incursion into Diplomacy’’
)
Thus began what Doyle called his ‘‘incursion into amateur diplomacy’’
(). Having already written The Great Boer War, Doyle was in a good
position to draw up a defense of Britain’s part in the war. His defense
was The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, a book-length pamphlet
which Doyle raised funds to have translated into twenty languages and
distributed for free throughout Europe, the Americas, and north Africa.
The recipients Doyle designated – the press, ministers, and professors –
were the ones J. A. Hobson would list that very year in Imperialism as the
public figures who wielded the largest influence on public opinion on
imperialism.

Chivalry came back into fashion in Victorian Britain on a wave of
revived interest in things medieval. While this Victorian medievalism
might seem to be an essentially conservative ideology, a harkening back

whether of chivalry or of faery,’’ which had ‘‘filled the youthful imagin-
ation with pictures of heroic men, and of what are at least as wanted,
heroic women’’ (quoted in Houghton Victorian Frame of Mind –).
The chivalrous gentleman who was the hallmark of Victorian and
Edwardian Britain had been, Girouard explains, ‘‘deliberately created’’
(Return ). In a century that saw the class struggle of Chartism, calls for
extension of voting rights and universal education, it seemed necessary
to many to recreate a medieval, aristocratic ruling class. No longer
would England be ruled on the middle-class basis of capitalism and
private property. ‘‘The aim of the chivalric tradition was to produce a
ruling class which deserved to rule because it possessed the moral
qualities necessary to rulers,’’ Girouard notes (Return ).
Although much of the revival of chivalry and its values was for-
mulated by the upper classes for the greater glory of the upper classes,
the ideology had its implications for the workers, too. A new chivalric
Britain would contain a working class bound by affection and loyalty to
 Gender, race, and the writing of empire