fighting talk their mangled bodies....Childrenhave been compelled to eat the quivering flesh of their
murdered parents, after which they were literallytorn asunderby the laughing fiends who
surrounded them.^57
Victorian war poets have been accused of being irresponsibly squeamish about the
effects of conflict, yet many poets who responded to the Indian Mutiny could be
charged with not being squeamish enough, for their use of the press reports led to
poems in which salacious detail served only as an excuse for hysterical cries of retri-
bution. Mary E. Leslie borrowedThe Times’s gratuitous ‘quivering’ when drawing
attentionto‘acommongrave|Heaped high with quivering, crushed humanity’,^58
while Martin Tupper’s poems dwelt on atrocity in order to countenance an equally
violent revenge: ‘Who pulls about the mercy?—the agonized wail of babies hewn
piecemeal yet sickens the air.’^59 Even before the Cawnpore incident, John Nicholson
had suggested ‘a Bill for the flaying alive, impalement, or burning of the murderers
of the women and children at Delhi’. After the atrocities, the tone became even
more vindictive, and, as one historian has pointed out, ‘the Cawnpore massacre
gave sanction to a retributive savagery which is one of the most shameful episodes
in British history’.^60 The sanction was upheld by poems like Leslie’s and Tupper’s,
although there were other voices that resisted this kind of grimly gleeful baiting.
Christina Rossetti’s ‘In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857’, as its title implies,
tries to get close to the action and dates itself journalistically; yet, after an initial
reference to how ‘The swarming howling wretches below|Gained and gained and
gained’,^61 the focus turns to the last moments of the Skene family inside the tower
as they decide to take their own lives rather than die at the hands of the mutineers.
The emphasis is on the creation of a desperate dignity, rather than the incitement of
a bloodthirsty revenge. Indeed, Rossetti kept the poem in the volume even after she
found out that Captain Skene and his wife were actually captured and killed by the
sword.^62 The violence of the Mutiny is also handled with sensitivity in Tennyson’s
first volume ofIdylls of the King(1859), a collection which sold more than any
previous volume of his work, and which dwelt on how imperial aggression might be
seen as both the model and the catalyst for the violence it deplored in its colonies.^63
(^57) The Times, 17 Sep. 1857, 9.
(^58) Mary E. Leslie, ‘Massacre at Cawnpore, 1857’, inSorrows, Aspirations, and Legends from
India(London, 1858); repr. in Donald Thomas (ed.),The Everyman Book of Victorian Verse: The
Pre-Raphaelites to the Nineties(London: Dent, 1993), 161.
(^59) Tupper, quoted in Sashi Bhusan Chaudhuri,English Historical Writing on the Indian Mutiny
1857–1859(Calcutta: World Press, 1979), 259.
(^60) Ronald Hyam,Britain’s Imperial Century 1815–1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion(London:
Batsford, 1976), 224.
(^61) Christina Rossetti, ‘In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857’, inThe Complete Poems of
Christina Rossetti 62 , i, ed. R. W. Crump (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 26.
SeeThe Timesreport on 11 Sept. 1857, 7. Rossetti added a note to the poem in 1875 to
acknowledge the factual inaccuracy.
(^63) See Matthew Bevis, ‘Tennyson’s Civil Tongue’,Tennyson Research Bulletin, 7/3 (Nov. 1999),
113–25.