IMPERIAL GOTHIC
VII.
⸻
“From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other,” said Charley, re-reading the sentence. “So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.” Like most everyone in the Britain, he was “captivated by the magic” of this great modern detective story. “Just like the Egyptians,” Charley thought. “They told detective stories under the shadow of the pyramids.”[1]
A Study in Scarlet.
In July 1888, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published A Study in Scarlet, which featured the debut of his popular character, Sherlock Holmes.[2] The work belonged to the late-Victorian subgenre, “imperial gothic,” which used the theme of nefarious forces from the colonial periphery invading the home country.[3] In the story, Sherlock Holmes is compelled to solve a mystery to the backdrop of Mormon polygamous intrigue. It followed in the wake of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1885 tale, “The Story of the Destroying Angel,” the themes of which drew parallels between the perceived failure of Mormons to respect the American boundaries, with their failure to respect the boundaries of matrimony and domesticity.[4] Though A Study in Scarlet was not without sensationalism, Doyle was decidedly more sympathetic of the Mormon enterprise. Being a vocal champion of what he termed “the [future] claims for the English-speaking race all over the globe,” Doyle used the story to praise the virtues of the Mormon spirit.[5] The Mormon Prophet, Brigham Young, built a thriving civilization where once there was inhospitable wilderness: “Maps were drawn and charts prepared […] In the town, streets and squares sprang up, as if by magic […] Above all, the great temple which they had erected in the center of the city grew ever taller and larger.”[6]
Sherlock Holmes.
Though polygamy was regarded as a sexual taboo, many of those polygamous husbands and wives had emigrated from Britain. Thus, Mormonism was, in a sense, both foreign and familiar to the English. Mormonism undoubtedly defied Victorian convention, and most agreed that it was “heathen,” but it could not confidently be classified as “non-Christian.” Beyond its appeal as a masterful work in the detective fiction, Doyle struck a nerve in his readership by using A Study in Scarlet to address two great anxieties which threatened public and private spheres alike. The first anxiety was the growing paranoia of a “state within the state,” which Doyle invited his readers to examine by projecting these fears onto Utah; a “state within a state” governed by the liminal-English Mormons. By indulging in the horror directed upon the Mormons, the English reader was also allowed to explore the inevitable horror that would, in due course, be visited upon them.[7] Would Britain share the fate of the city in Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” The same month in which A Study in Scarlet was published, the Conference of Bishops in communion with the Church of England discussed “polygamy, especially in its relation to those other races and nations with whom [they were] brought into contact in [their] own colonies and in foreign countries.” The Select Committee unanimously declared: “The sanctity of Marriage as a Christian obligation implies the faithful union of one man with one woman until the union is severed by death. The polygamous alliances of heathen races are allowed on all hands to be condemned by the law of Christ.” [8]
Mona Caird.
The second anxiety dealt with the ecosystem of tension surrounding the very institution of marriage. The growing unease about changing role which women played in society was palpable, and their challenge to the stability of the private realm of married life was particular heightened in the summer of 1888.[9] In August 1888, author and woman’s rights activist, Mona Caird, published an essay titled “Marriage” in The Westminster Review, which severely critiqued the Victorian marriage institution. The outcry was thunderous. Over 27,000 letters poured into the (London) Daily Telegraph in response to the topic.[10]
Caird’s critique belonged to the lineage of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. For context we turn to the Manifesto of the Communist Party (co-authored by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,) in which it is stated that the foundation of the bourgeois family is capital and private gain. It further states:
In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty […] The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, become all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.[11]
Lewis Henry Morgan.
This was followed by the American social-theorist, Lewis Henry Morgan, and his 1871 ethnological treatise, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. In this work Morgan states that there are 15 stages of familial/civilizational development: 1. Promiscuous Intercourse. 2. The Intermarriage/Cohabitation of Siblings. 3. The Communal Family. (First Stage of the Family.) 4. The Hawaiian Custom. 5. The Malayan Form. 6. The Tribal Organization. 7. The Turanian System. 8. Marriage Between Single Pairs. 9. The Barbarian Family. 10. Polygamy. 11. The Patriarchal Family. (Third Stage of the Family.) 12. Polyandria. 13. The Rise of Property with the Settlement of Lineal Succession. 14. The Civilized Family. (Fourth and Ultimate Stage of the Family.) 15. The Overthrow of the Classification System.[12]
Friedrich Engels.
Engels would elaborate on his original premise of capital and family, and write a work published in 1884 titled The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan, in which he states:
Man’s advent to practical supremacy in the household marked the removal of the last barrier to his universal supremacy. His unlimited rule was emphasized and endowed with continuity by the downfall of matriarchy, the introduction of patriarchy, and the gradual transition from the pairing family to the monogamic family. This made a breach in the old gentile order. The monogamic family became a power and lifted a threatening hand against the gens. [13]
The years immediately after publication of The Origin of the Family saw a dramatic rise on the popularity in the term “patriarchy” (reaching a zenith in 1887/1888.) In May 1888 The American Antiquarian Journal even asked: “Is it inevitable that in the progress of society matriarchy should change to patriarchy?”[14] It was in this milieu that Mona Caird developed her theory. “It is not very easy to trace the transition from the matriarchal to the patriarchal age,” Caird would say, “but we see here and there signs of the two systems working side by side.” In “Marriage,” Caird writes:
It is not difficult to find people mild and easy-going about religion, and even politics may be regarded with wide-minded tolerance; but broach social subjects, and English men and women at once become alarmed and talk about the foundations of society and the sacredness of the home! Yet the particular form of social life, or of marriage, to which they are so deeply attached, has by no means existed from time immemorial, in fact, modern marriage, with its satellite ideas, only dates as far back as the age of Luther. Of course, the institution existed long before, but our particular mode of regarding it can be traced to the era of the Reformation, when commerce, competition, the great bourgeois class, and that remarkable thing called “Respectability,” also began to arise […] That Luther did not observe the insult to womanhood of such a creed is not to be wondered at, since the nineteenth century has scarcely yet discovered it. Of course, from such ideas spring rigid ideas of wifehood. Woman’s chastity becomes the watch-dog of man’s possession. She has taken the sermon given to her at the time of her purchase deeply to heart, and chastity becomes her chief virtue. If we desire to face the matter honestly, we must not blink the fact that this virtue has originally no connection with the woman’s own nature; it does not arise from the feelings which protect individual dignity […] The quality, whatever be its intrinsic merits, has attained its present mysterious authority and rank through man’s monopolizing jealousy, through the fact that he desired to “have and to hold ” one woman as his exclusive property, and that he regarded any other man who would dispute his monopoly as the unforgivable enemy […] While considering the development of this burgher age, one must not forget to note the concurrence of strict marriage and systematic or legalized prostitution. The social chaos of the age of chivalry was exchanged for comparative order, and there now arose a hard-and-fast line (far more absolute than had existed before in Germany) between two classes of women: those who submitted to the yoke of marriage on Luther’s terms, and those who remained on the other side of the great social gulf, subject also to stringent laws, and treated also as the property of men (though not of one man). We now see completed our own way of settling the relations of the sexes. The factors of our system are: respectability, prostitution, strict marriage, commercialism, unequal moral standard for the two sexes, and the subjection of women.[15]
The system was not in women’s favor, but they did have a deal of authority within their own household. By the mid 19th century, a middle-class housewife was the acknowledged “mistress of her domestic sphere,” and though subordinate to her husband’s public work, she managed the house “as rationally and efficiently as her husband did his business.”[16] A problem which threatened to collapse this system, was one which the British government brought upon itself. Because of Britain’s “reckless policy, pursued through centuries, of sending her sons to possess the distant parts of the empire,” there were now “so many more women than men, that millions [were] spinsters by natural necessity.” England had “recklessly drained the home country of its young manhood for the sake of empire,” and “a million and a half of adult women were left without any possibility under monogamy of marriage.”[17] Perhaps it was because of this growing rise of “involuntary celibates,” that the British government began to whistle a different tune. A month after Charley joined the Civil Service in 1886, the Colonial and Indian Exhibition opened in London, presenting the British Empire as a place to relocate and domesticate as active heirs. It had been thirty years since the establishment of the Raj. Satisfied that the masculine enterprise of imperial conquest had been a success, the next stage would be a focus on the feminine enterprise of domesticity. The Calcutta Review in 1886 states:
The days are long past, when in units or by twos and threes, English ladies landed on these shores, braving the dangers of the sea and risks of climate; to be eagerly appropriated by the lucky-favored few, out of a host of aspirants to their hands: and who reigned henceforth the petted and adored queens of the little circles they adorned. They now come in scores; and as facilities for travel increase, means of communication multiply, and our picked men elect India as the scene of their career, so must their wives, daughters and sisters follow in larger numbers. Year by year, the eastward emigration is increasing. English mothers are sending forth their sons and their daughters, and while steam and wire do their work of unification, are not India and England being yet more firmly welded into one Empire by the unseen yet indestructible threads that unite millions of loving hearts across the seas?[18]
The Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London, 1886. c/o V&A Museum.
The idea of marriage was not on Charley’s mind, at least it was not on his mind until recently, for “young Theosophists in the ‘running for Mahatmaship’ were supposed to take vow of celibacy.”[19] This was not an issue in the past, and Charley “did not mind being twitted about it.”[20] But Charley kept thinking about what Blavatsky and the ladies had said about “woman’s nature,” and it seemed decidedly at odds with what Caird had written:
The nature of women is the result of their circumstances […] they are not a sort of human “wild rice,” come by chance or special creation, no protest can be too strong against the unthinking use of the term “woman’s nature.” An unmanageable host of begged questions, crude assertions, and unsound habits of thought are packed into those two hackneyed words.[21]
When Charley consulted his father about “woman’s nature,” Ballykilbeg sensed there was a question within a question. Ballykilbeg, perhaps still exhilarated from the recent “Orangeman” demonstrations in Downpatrick, offered his paternal sagacity in the form of autobiography, and recounted the time of his imprisonment for breaching the Party Procession Act around the time of Charley’s first birthday.[22]
“Charley, when I followed the Orange flag and listened to the music of the ‘Protestant Boys’ on the Twelfth of July, it was not that I desired to trample upon any law, but it was to claim for the Protestants and Orangemen of Ulster the right to celebrate the birth of liberty on liberty’s birthday,” said Ballykilbeg. “I must say, your mother was a great encouragement to me while I was a guest at the ‘Queen’s Hotel, Downpatrick.’ I was never bothered by her to plead guilty, or to come out of jail. A good Protestant wife is a great help to a man under such circumstances.” Ballykilbeg smiled at Charley. “I think that her Scotch blood stood her in good stead on that occasion.”[23] Ballykilbeg then placed his hand on Charley’s shoulder. “The nature of a woman is truly inscrutable, my boy.”[24]
Johnston of Ballykilbeg in Orange Order regalia. c/o Murray Club.
Charley heard the story before, and though he found it sentimental, it did not really answer his question. If humanity was a part of nature, then human nature was not a construct of society. Marriage, however, was certainly a construct, and anchored to both tradition and religion. If other relics of the church proved imperfect and corruptible, then it only stood to reason that the institution of marriage should be imperfect and corruptible as well. Was Caird’s statements indicative of nature recalibrating? Charley, who was on something of an Emerson kick at the time, consulted the works of the “man esteemed of good understanding and entire sanity at the present day,” and who repeated “the very words almost that a Theosophist would use.”[25] For Charley, Emerson’s works were the rebirth in “the thoughts and ideals of the most ancient Upanishads.”[26] The Bombay Theosophist, Tukaram Tatya, even used Emerson’s “Laws of Compensation” as a Western “analogue” for the (then) peculiar Eastern concept of “Karma.”[27] If Caird’s protestation against marriage was an articulation of “karmic retribution,” then Emerson’s essay, “Compensation,” would offer some insight:
Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature […] An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole […] Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The entire system of things gets represented in every particle. There is somewhat that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and night, man and woman, in a single needle of the pine, in a kernel of corn, in each individual of every animal tribe […] In the animal kingdom the physiologist has observed that no creatures are favorites, but a certain compensation balances every gift and every defect. A surplusage given to one part is paid out of a reduction from another part of the same creature. If the head and neck are enlarged, the trunk and extremities are cut short. The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What we gain in power is lost in time; and the converse. […] The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man. Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something […] Is a man too strong and fierce for society, and by temper and position a bad citizen,—a morose ruffian, with a dash of the pirate in him;— nature sends him a troop of pretty sons and daughters, who are getting along in the dame’s classes at the village school, and love and fear for them smooths his grim scowl to courtesy. Thus, she contrives to intenerate the granite and felspar, takes the boar out and puts the lamb in, and keeps her balance true. [28]
II.
Back in England, Annie Besant was talking with W.T. Stead (who just returned from Russia.) They, too, were discussing the institution of marriage. One topic that was circulating in society was the case of Sarah Vennell Begum, the English wife of the late-Nawab of Murshidabad. A woman whose life intersected with both Besant’s life (if only very briefly,) and that of Charley’s (but that story is yet to come.) Because of her status as an Englishwoman who married a Muslim Prince, the British courts, for many years, were at a loss when determining the custody rights of her children after the death of the Nawab. In July 1888 the British government formally recognized the marriage of Sarah Begum and the late-Nawab, thereby formally acknowledging her legal status as a widow. After consulting experts of Indian and British law, it was declared that, under Indian and Shia law, Sarah held the same status as the late-Nawab’s other nikah wives. Though the marriage could not be recognized under British law, it was no longer regarded as an immoral relationship. It was her hope that this would help strengthen her case for retrieving her daughters from India.[29] As for her connection with Besant, Sarah’s brother, George, was the defense lawyer for Charles Evans, the man who stole Besant’s St. Bernard, “Lion,” in 1882.[30]
Talk soon drifted to Besant’s failed marriage.
“I longed to spend my time in worshipping Jesus,” said Besant, “and was, as far as my inner life was concerned, absorbed in that passionate love of the Savior which among emotional Catholics really is the human passion of love transferred to an ideal—for women to Jesus, for men to the Virgin Mary. All girls have in them the germ of passion, and the line of its development depends on the character brought into the world, and the surrounding influences of education. I had but two ideals in my childhood and youth, round whom twined these budding tendrils of passion; they were my mother and the Christ.”
W.T. Stead.
“Your prayers were like those of ecstatic nuns, full of the passion of the bride in the Song of Solomon,” said Stead. “Is it not the usual outlet which religion supplies for the dawning feelings of womanhood?”
“I know this may seem strange,” said Besant, “but I am trying to state things as they were in this life-story, and not give mere conventionalisms, and so it was. I had men friends, but no lovers—at least, to my knowledge, for I have since heard that my mother received two or three offers of marriage for me but declined them on account of my youth and my childishness—friends with whom I liked to talk, because they knew more than I did; but they had no place in my daydreams. These were more and more filled with the one Ideal Man, and my hopes turned towards the life of the Sisters of Mercy, whoever worships the Christ, and devotes her life to the service of His poor. I knew my dear mother would set herself against this idea, but it nestled warm at my heart, forever that idea of escaping from the humdrum of ordinary life by some complete sacrifice lured me onwards with its over mastering fascination.”
“Your mother kept you ignorantly innocent of the nature of men and women,” said Stead, “through the customary conventional delusion that ignorance is the same as innocence. It was, as it always has been, a blunder, and in your case a fatal blunder.”
“The position of a clergyman’s wife seemed second only to that of a nun, and its attractiveness had very little to do with the personality of the particular clergyman.”[31]
Stead then pulled out copy of his nearly-finished first book, The Truth About Russia, so that he might get Besant’s “review,” that is, the opinion of someone he could trust. “When I visited Count Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, it was in the last week in May,” Stead told Besant, focusing his eyes. “These are his thoughts on marriage—”
Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana.
“‘I wish,’ said Count Tolstoy to me one night, ‘to write a novel, a romance, exposing the conventional illusion of romantic love. I have already written it, but it must be turned upside down and re-written. It is too much of a treatise as it stands, and there is not enough of action in it. In this story my object is to fill the reader with horror at the result of taking romantic love au sérieux. The end to which the whole story will lead up will be the murder of a wife by her husband. It will exhibit the deprivation of married life by the substitution of romantic love, a fever born of carnal passion, for true Christian love, which is born of identity of sentiment, similarity of ideal, the friendship of the soul. Upon that love—Christian love, the love of brother and sister—if the carnal love can be grafted it is well, but the former, not the latter, is the first condition of happy married life. Herein the peasants teach us a lesson. They regard what we call romantic love as a disease, temporary, and painful and dangerous. With them no marriage is made under its influence. Anything is better than that. The Herstarten, who marry by the drawing of lots, are wiser than we. Our system is the worst possible, and the whole of our wedding ceremonial, and the honeymoon the feasting, and the incitement to carnality are directly calculated to result in the deprivation of matrimony. Not in one case out of a hundred does romantic love result in a lifelong happy union. The young people whose lives lie in different orbits are drawn together by this evanescent passion. They marry. For a month they are happy—perhaps even for a year, or two years, never longer, when the only tie is the sensual passion. Then they hate each other for the rest of their lives, spending their time in paying homage to the respectabilities by concealing the truth from their neighbors. It must be so. If Anna Karenina had married Wronsky she must have abandoned him likewise. Romantic love is like opium or hashish; the sensation is overpowering and delightful. But it passes. It is not in human nature not to wish to renew the experience; for this novelty is indispensable. So, the wife betrays her husband, and the husband is false to his wife, and the world becomes one wide brothel. I wish to open the eyes of all to the real of the tragic consequences of this substitution of romantic for Christian love,’ he told me. ‘I see it clearly, oh! so clearly; and when you see a thing which no one else seems to see, you feel you must gather all your forces, and devote yourself to setting forth truth as you see it. This deprivation of marriage is all because Christianity has been a word and not a thing. It will however be a reality again soon.'”[32]
Tolstoy at Home.
THE AGONISED WOMB OF CONSCIOUSNESS SECTIONS:
INTRO: CHARLEY.
I. WITCH TALES.
II. CARELESS WHENCE COMES YOUR GOLD.
III. THE TIMES ARE CHANGED.
IV. DENIZEN OF ETERNITY.
V. DOMOVOY.
VI. WITH LOW AND NEVER LIFTED HEAD.
VII. IMPERIAL GOTHIC.
VIII. THE SERVANT OF THE QUEEN.
IX. THE DWELLER ON THE THRESHOLD.
[APPENDICES]
SOURCES:
[1] Johnston, Charles. “The Detective Story’s Origin.” Harper’s Weekly. Vol. LIV, No. 2773 (February 12, 1910): 16, 34.
[2] The story was originally published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887.
[3] Lecourt, Sebastian. “The Mormons, the Victorians, and the Idea of Greater Britain.” Victorian Studies. Vol. LVI, No. 1 (Autumn 2013): 85-111.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Doyle, Arthur Conan. A Study in Scarlet. Ward, Lock, Bowden, and Co. London, England. (1892): 137.
[7] Fillingham, Lydia Alix. “’The Colorless Skein of Life’: Threats to the Private Sphere in Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet.” ELH. Vol. LVI, No. 3 (Autumn 1989): 667-688.
[8] Richard, A.P. Marriage and Divorce. Trübner And Co. London, England (1888): v.
[9] Fillingham, “’The Colorless Skein of Life.’”ELH. (Autumn 1989): 667-688.
[10] Kelley, Katherine E. “Pandemic and Performance: Ibsen and the Outbreak of Modernism.” South Central Review. Vol. XXV, No. 1 (Spring 2008): 12-35.
[11] Marx, Karl; Engels Friedrich. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Charles H. Kerr & Company. Chicago, Illinois. (1906): 40-41
[12] Morgan, Lewis Henry. Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. The Smithsonian Institute. Washington, D.C. (1871): 480.
[13] Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Charles h. Kerr & Company Co-Operative. Chicago, Illinois. (1902): 196-197.
[14] “Literary Notes.” The American Antiquarian. Vol. X, No. 3 (May 1888): 191-192.
[15] Caird, Mona. “Marriage.” The Westminster Review. Vol. CXXX, No. 2. (August 1888): 186-229; Caird, Mona. “The Emancipation of the Family: Part I.” The North American Review. Vol. CL, No. 403 (June 1890): 692-705.
[16] Blunt, Alison. “Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886-1925.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Vol. XXIV, No. 4 (1999): 421-440.
[17] Martin, John; Martin, Prestonia Mann. Feminism, Its Fallacies and Follies. Dodd, Mead and Company. New York, New York. (1916): 158, 172.
[18] Dawson, J.E. “Woman in India: Her Influence and Position.” The Calcutta Review. Vol. CLXVI. (1886): 347-357.
[19] Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats: Vol. I 1865-1895. Edited by John Kelly and Eric Domville. Clarendon Press. Oxford, England. (1986): 105.
[20] Tynan, Katherine. Twenty-Five Years. The Devin-Adair Company. New York, New York. (1913): 287.
[21] Caird, Mona. “Marriage.” The Westminster Review. Vol. CXXX, No. 2. ((August 1888): 186-229.
[22] “National Protestant Institute.” The Belfast News-letter. (Belfast, Northern Ireland) July 22, 1867; “This Evening’s News.” The Pall Mall Gazette. (London, England.) February 27, 1868; “Ireland.” The Times. (London, England.) February 29, 1868; “The Twelfth of July.” The Morning Post. (London, England) July 13, 1888.
[23] “The Liberation of Mr. William Johnston of Ballykilbeg.” The Belfast News-Letter. (Belfast, Northern Ireland.) April 28, 1868.
[24] Johnston, Charles. “Okhoy Babu’s Adventure.” The Atlantic Monthly. Vol. 114, No. 3. (September 1914): 309-316.
[25] Johnston, Charles. “Emerson and Occult Laws.” The Theosophist. Vol. IX, No. 104 (May 1888): 493-498.
[26] Johnston, Charles. From the Upanishads. Thomas B. Mosher. Portland, Maine. (1899): ix-xiii.
[27] Tatya writes: “By the term Karma, we understand the law of conservation of energy which regulates the effects of merit or demerit. It is the law of compensation on a plane where individual will and reason comes into action; the law by which merit receives its reward and demerit, its punishment, not according to the arbitrary decision of a natural or supernatural judge, but as a certain and necessary consequence of thoughts harboured, or acts performed.” Tatya, Tukaram. A Guide to Theosophy. Bombay Theosophical Publication Fund. Bombay, India. (1887): 251.
[28] Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Compensation: An Essay. The Riverside Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts. (1903): 8-14.
[29] Innes, Lyn. The Last Prince of Bengal. The Westbourne Press. London, England. (2021): 75-134.
[30] “General Intelligence.” The Citizen. (Gloucester, England): April 4, 1882; Tribe, David H. President Charles Bradlaugh, M.P. Elek Books. London, England. (1971): 187; Innes, Lyn. The Last Prince of Bengal. The Westbourne Press. London, England. (2021): 122.
[31] Besant, Annie. Annie Besant: An Autobiography. T. Fisher Unwin. London, England. (1893): 65-100, 340; Stead, W.T. “Mrs. Annie Besant.” The Review of Reviews. Vol. IV, No. 22 (October 1891): 349-367.
[32] Stead, William T. The Truth About Russia. Cassell & Company, Limited. London, England. (1888): 420, 425-426.
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