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Writing the Journey: June 1999

"'Old Egypt's New River' Contemporary British Accounts of the Opening of the Suez Canal"


Emily A. Haddad
University of South Dakota
ehaddad@usd.edu

The Suez Canal opened in November 1869 with what one British visitor described as "brilliant doings." Egypt's ruler, Khedive Ismail, hosted an enormous international party at which the Empress of France was the guest of honor; the Empress's yacht led a flotilla of vessels in a ceremonious first passage through the canal. These events were widely reported in the British periodical press. I focus in this paper on the account of W. G. Hamley, a colonel in the Corps of Royal Engineers who attended the gala opening of the canal. Hamley wrote a series of four lengthy articles on the topic for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine under the pseudonym "Scamper;" the articles were collected and published as A New Sea and an Old Land in 1871.

Hamley's articles take a variety of logically incompatible but typically Victorian positions. He marvels over the engineering of the canal, but at the same time wonders that this technological feat could have been achieved "by means of Egyptians and Arabs, obstinately wedded to old thriftless ways" in effect, "negro labour." He praises the modern efficiency of preparations for the festivities and for dealing with mishaps such as ships run aground in the canal, but is also drawn to the "Arabian Nights" world of medieval Cairo. He is awed by the French Empress, yet claims for an explicitly imperial Britain the primary benefit of the canal, which had been conceived and financed almost entirely by the French: "we, and not our rivals, will be the gainers by the piercing of the isthmus."

Various critics have analyzed in a domestic context the conflict in midVictorian culture between the attractions of modern technology and the nostalgia for a premodern world. In this paper, I examine the ways in which this conflict manifests itself in British writers' representations of the world outside of England. Hamley and other writers in the 1870's are torn between admiration for the canal and concern about its implications for British national security, between hopes for commercial advantage and fear of its loss. I argue that for Hamley and his colleagues, the "spell of Egypt" encompasses the Nile region but not Egypt's "new river." The Suez Canal stands to the side of Egypt conceptually as well as geographically, for the Arabian Nights image of Egypt cannot accommodate the obvious modernity of the canal.

Hamley may have, as he puts it, "exchanged fancies for realities" by visiting Egypt, but his narrative is unable to integrate the reality of the canal with that of nineteenth-century Cairo or Alexandria. He rejects as "shocking" the contemporary Egyptian villages that would have been the counterpart of the fundamentally pastoral, rural world which was the usual object of Victorian nostalgia, but he neatly substitutes for them the ancient and medieval worlds of Egypt; Egypt remains, in the last paragraphs of Hamley's last article, "Ancient of Days, Enchantress, long-descended Queen." The canal, on the other hand, belongs to technology and to the complexities of international politics, commerce and finance. That it has no place in the Egypt of his imagination only facilitates its incorporation into the schema of British imperial mercantilism: the canal "brings India nearer to Europe, and India is England's."


Emily A. Haddad
Assistant Professor of English
212 Dakota Hall
University of South Dakota
414 E. Clark St.
Vermillion, SD 57069
(605) 6775981
ehaddad@usd.edu

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Updated May 23, 1999