Red cloth binding with gilt title and blue and cream canoeing image on the spine and front board.

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A story from the First Burmese War

A well kept and written book concerning the British Empire. This remains a gripping yarn,

Reviews:

1. A ripping yarn from the early days of Empire, told from much nearer the time and informed by the values and ambitions of a different age; an age when a young man would expect to hazard his life in deadly climates, and hand to hand battles in order to establish his place in business. If you’ve been sent on a team or character building course, read this and cry. A long forgotten trade and long forgotten war are the dramatic backdrops, and it makes one yearn for the days when the whole world was a frontier filled with opportunities and the only stake you need to place on the table is your life.

2. Once again the British are fighting for someone else. An intriguing story of war escapism, Paddle steamers moving stores up to the troops, and of course sickness and death. A good gripping story.

3. I did not know about the war between the Indians and British against the Burmese made very interesting reading and the British Raj at its best.

George Alfred Henty (8 December 1832 – 16 November 1902) was an English novelist and war correspondent. He is most well-known for his works of adventure fiction and historical fiction, including The Dragon & The Raven (1886), For The Temple (1888), Under Drake’s Flag (1883) and In Freedom’s Cause (1885).

G. A. Henty was born in Trumpington, near Cambridge but spent some of his childhood in Canterbury. He was a sickly child who had to spend long periods in bed. During his frequent illnesses he became an avid reader and developed a wide range of interests which he carried into adulthood. He attended Westminster School, London, as a half-border when he was fourteen, and later Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was a keen sportsman.

He left the university early without completing his degree to volunteer for the (Army) Hospital Commissariat of the Purveyors Department when the Crimean War began. He was sent to the Crimea and while there he witnessed the appalling conditions under which the British soldier had to fight. His letters home were filled with vivid descriptions of what he saw. His father was impressed by his letters and sent them to the Morning Advertiser newspaper which printed them. This initial writing success was a factor in Henty’s later decision to accept the offer to become a special correspondent, the early name for journalists now better known as war correspondents.

Shortly before resigning from the army as a captain in 1859 he married Elizabeth Finucane. The couple had four children. Elizabeth died in 1865 after a long illness and shortly after her death Henty began writing articles for the Standard newspaper. In 1866 the newspaper sent him as their special correspondent to report on the Austro-Italian War where he met Giuseppe Garibaldi. He went on to cover the 1868 British punitive expedition to Abyssinia, the Franco-Prussian War, the Ashanti War, the Carlist Rebellion in Spain and the Turco-Serbian War. He also witnessed the opening of the Suez Canal and travelled to Palestine, Russia and India.

Henty was a strong supporter of the British Empire all his life; according to literary critic Kathryn Castle: “Henty … exemplified the ethos of the [British Empire], and glorified in its successes”. Henty’s ideas about politics were influenced by writers such as Sir Charles Dilke and Thomas Carlyle.

Henty once related in an interview how his storytelling skills grew out of tales told after dinner to his children. He wrote his first children’s book, Out on the Pampas in 1868, naming the book’s main characters after his children. The book was published by Griffith and Farran in November 1870 with a title page date of 1871. While most of the 122 books he wrote were for children and published by Blackie and Son of London, he also wrote adult novels, non-fiction such as The March to Magdala and Those Other Animals, short stories for the likes of The Boy’s Own Paper and edited the Union Jack, a weekly boy’s magazine.

Henty was “the most popular Boy’s author of his day.” Blackie, who published his children’s fiction in the UK, and W. G. Blackie estimated in February 1952 that they were producing about 150,000 Henty books a year at the height of his popularity, and stated that their records showed they had produced over three and a half million Henty books. He further estimated that considering the US and other overseas authorised and pirated editions, a total of 25 million was not impossible.  Arnold notes this estimate and that there have been further editions since that estimate was made.

His children’s novels typically revolved around a boy or young man living in troubled times. These ranged from the Punic War to more recent conflicts such as the Napoleonic Wars or the American Civil War. Henty’s heroes – which occasionally included young ladies – are uniformly intelligent, courageous, honest and resourceful with plenty of ‘pluck’ yet are also modest. These themes have made Henty’s novels popular today among many conservative Christians and homeschoolers.

Henty usually researched his novels by ordering several books on the subject he was writing on from libraries, and consulting them before beginning writing. Some of his books were written about events (such as the Crimean War) that he witnessed himself; hence, these books are written with greater detail as Henty drew upon his first-hand experiences of people, places, and events. On 16 November 1902, Henty died aboard his yacht in Weymouth Harbour, Dorset, leaving unfinished his last novel, By Conduct and Courage, which was completed by his son Captain C.G. Henty. Henty is buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.

G. A. Henty’s commercial popularity encouraged other writers to try writing juvenile adventure stories in his style; “Herbert Strang”, Henry Everett McNeil, Percy F. Westerman and Captain Frederick Sadleir Brereton all wrote novels in “the Henty tradition”, often incorporating then-contemporary themes such as aviation and First World War combat. By the 1930s, however, interest in Henty’s work was declining in Britain, and hence few children’s writers there looked to his work as a model.

Henty’s views have been contentious; some writers have accused Henty’s novels of being aggressively and obstinately nationalist and reactionary in such books as True to the Old Flag (1885) which features a Loyalist protagonist fighting in the American War of Independence, and In the Reign of Terror (1888) and No Surrender! A Tale of the Rising in La Vendée (1900) which are strongly hostile to the French Revolution.

Henty’s novel With Lee in Virginia has a protagonist who fights on the side of the Confederacy against the Union.

Henty’s popularity amongst homeschoolers is not without controversy. Quoting from the chapter of By Sheer Pluck called “The Negro Character” (“like children”), American television host and political commentator Rachel Maddow called Henty’s writings “spectacularly racist”. Carpenter and Pritchard note that while “Henty’s work is indeed full of racial (and class) stereotypes”, he sometimes created sympathetic ethnic minority characters, such as the Indian servant who marries a white woman in With Clive in India, and point out Henty admired the Turkish Empire. Some even accuse Henty of holding blacks in utter contempt, and this is expressed in novels such as By Sheer Pluck: A Tale of the Ashanti War and A Roving Commission, or, Through the Black Insurrection at Hayti. Kathryne S. McDorman states Henty disliked blacks and also, in Henty’s fiction, that “Boers and Jews were considered equally ignoble”.

In By Sheer Pluck: A Tale of the Ashanti War, Mr. Goodenough, an entomologist remarks to the hero: “They [Negroes] are just like children … They are always either laughing or quarrelling. They are good-natured and passionate, indolent, but will work hard for a time; clever up to a certain point, densely stupid beyond. The intelligence of an average negro is about equal to that of a European child of ten years old. … They are fluent talkers, but their ideas are borrowed. They are absolutely without originality, absolutely without inventive power. Living among white men, their imitative faculties enable them to attain a considerable amount of civilization. Left alone to their own devices they retrograde into a state little above their native savagery.”

In the Preface to his novel A Roving Commission (1900) Henty claims “the condition of the negroes in Hayti has fallen to the level of that of the savage African tribes” and argues “unless some strong white power should occupy the island and enforce law and order” this situation will not change. In the novel Facing Death: A Tale of the Coal Mines Henty comes down against strikes and has the working class hero of the novel, Jack Simpson, quell a strike among coal miners.

A review by Deirdre H. McMahon in Studies of the Novel in 2010 refers to his novels as jingoist and racist and states that during the previous decade “Numerous reviews in right-wing and conservative Christian journals and websites applaud Henty’s texts as model readings and thoughtful presents for children, especially boys. These reviews often ignore Henty’s racism by packaging his version of empire as refreshingly heroic and patriotic.”

In 1888, on the book jacket for Captain Bayley’s Heir, The Times wrote that Henty’s character in With Lee in Virginia, “bravely proving his sympathy with the slaves of brutal masters” escapes through “the devotion of a black servant and of a runaway slave whom he had assisted”. The reviewer recommended the book.

The First Anglo-Burmese War (5 March 1824 – 24 February 1826), also known as the First Burma War, was the first of three wars fought between the British and Burmese empires in the 19th century. The war, which began primarily over the control of what is now Northeastern India, ended in a decisive British victory, giving the British total control of Assam, Manipur, Cachar and Jaintia as well as Arakan Province and Tenasserim. The Burmese submitted to a British demand to pay an indemnity of one million pounds sterling, and signed a commercial treaty.

The war was one of the most expensive in British Indian history. Fifteen thousand European and Indian soldiers died, together with an unknown number of Burmese military and civilian casualties. The high cost of the campaign to the British, 5–13 million pounds sterling (£400 million – £1.16 billion as of 2021) contributed to a severe economic crisis in British India which cost the East India Company its remaining privileges.

Although once strong enough to threaten the interests of the British East India Company (especially with respect to the eastern border regions of Assam, Manipur, and Arakan), the Burmese Empire now suffered “the beginning of the end” of its status as an independent nation. They would be economically burdened for years to come by the cost of the indemnity. The British, eventually waging the Second and Third Anglo-Burmese Wars against a much-weakened Burma, would assume control of the entire country by 1885.