‘Drowned Lands’ 77
Th e lowlands of the world, being the richest spots, have been generally the soonest
conquered, the soonest civilized, and therefore the soonest taken out of the sphere of
romance and wild adventure into that of order and law, hard work and common sense,
as well as – too oft en – into the sphere of slavery, cowardice, luxury, and ignoble greed.^12Given Kingsley’s apparent ambivalence towards the Victorian Fenland – he
admires the respectability and religiosity of its inhabitants but derides their
petty, mercantile concerns – it should come as no surprise that he romanticizes
the original wetland at the expense of its nineteenth-century counterpart. In
terms of masculinity, Kingsley’s modern lowlander ‘has his own strength, his
own “virtues,” or manfulnesses, in the good old sense of the word; but they are
not for the most part picturesque, or even poetical’.^13 Th e muscular Christianity
that Kingsley became closely associated with – a term coined in an 1857 review
of the author’s Two Years Ago and a concept allied closely with his Christian
Socialism – demands intelligence and piety in men as well as brawn and courage.
For Norman Vance, in his study of Victorian masculinity Th e Sinews of the Spirit,
‘Christian manliness represented a strateg y for commending Christian virtue by
linking it with more interesting secular notions of moral and physical prowess’.^14
Although Vance’s preference for the term ‘Christian manliness’ over the more
popular ‘muscular Christianity’ foregrounds morality at the expense of athleti-
cism, the movement’s mix of poetic virtue and physical potency remains intact.
It is this mix that Hereward the Wake personifi es.
Kingsley’s muscular Christianity also demands a particular ethnic profi le,
typically an English sensibility mixed with a northern European physicality.
Recent scholarly interest in Hereward the Wake has focused on its contribu-
tion to the development of an English national identity. Kingsley is not alone
in celebrating England’s Saxon and Scandinavian pedigree at the expense of its
Norman past. Once again, Scott provides the model for this literary project. His
1819 Ivanhoe – set in twelft h-century England – pits its Anglo-Saxon protago-
nist against the Norman Prince John. Richard the Lionheart may rehabilitate
the Norman contingent in collaborating with Ivanhoe against his brother but
the novel enshrines the Saxon’s moral and physical superiority. Edward Bulwer-
Lytton’s 1848 Harold, Th e Last of the Saxon Kings and Benjamin Disraeli’s 1845
Sybil continued the trend for Anglo-Saxon hagiography and Patrick Brantlinger
notes how ‘Disraeli draws from Scott the standard equation of the common,
authentic English people (the mainstay of the working class) with the Anglo-
Saxon race’.^15 Kingsley, although Hereward’s background is more Anglo-Danish
than Anglo-Saxon, perpetuates this literary mytholog y and the Fens become
an imagined community in which the racial multiplicity of eleventh-century
Britain is channelled into an Anglicized purity. For some readers of Kingsley,
this myth-making inevitably buttresses (and indeed glamorizes) Britain’s impe-
rial project abroad.^16 Staged as Victorian crusades, British incursions into Asia