Historical Background

European involvement in the Muslim world, which accumulated as the century progressed, came to a head with the French invasion of Tunisia in 1881 and the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. Colonel Urabi, leader of the revolt of 1881–1882 against foreign interference in Egypt that took his name, ‘came to be seen in some quarters as representing the authentic voice of the Egyptian people’ (Cleveland 2000: 99). Muslims were not forward in staging coherent resistance to imperialism, though the earliest articulations of opposition frequently combined Islamic and nationalist loyalties, as was the case in Egypt in the first decade of the twentieth century. A European invention, nationalism had been invoked earlier in the century against the last Muslim empire, the Ottoman, by its Christian subject peoples: Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians and Armenians. As these achieved autonomy or, backed by the force and diplomacy of the Christian powers, split away, the largest non-Turkish population left in the Ottoman Empire was the Arabs. Preponderantly Muslims, with the exception of a small politically conscious group from among the Christian minority, hardly any contemplated let alone actively pursued the break up of the Ottoman Empire. But the Syrian reformer Abdul Rahman Kawakibi ‘suggested that the Ottomans were responsible for the corruption of Islam, [and thus] introduced a nationalist argument that had profound implications for the Ottoman-Islamic order in the Arab provinces’ (Cleveland: 125).

A controversial figure to this day, Lawrence was born in Caernarvonshire and moved to Oxford when he was eight. Educated at the City of Oxford High School and Jesus College, he graduated from Oxford with first class honours in 1910. During vacations in 1909 and 1910 he went to Syria and Palestine to research crusader castles for his Oxford thesis. Between 1911 and 1913 he worked with D.G. Hogarth on a British Museum archaeological dig at Carchemish. It has been suggested that these trips, apart from their archaeological significance, were part of intelligence work. With his knowledge of the Sinai Lawrence was an obvious candidate to join the Military Intelligence Department in Cairo shortly after outbreak of war in 1914. In 1916 he was involved in the Arab Revolt against the Turks, which formed the subject matter of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, first published in a limited edition in 1922. An abridged version with the title Revolt in the Desert was a huge popular success in 1927, but Lawrence withdrew it before a second edition could be put out. The same year Seven Pillars first appeared, Lawrence joined the RAF under an assumed name, and a year later the army tank corps as ‘Private Shaw’. He both enjoyed and affected to disdain the ‘Lawrence myth’ disseminated by the lectures of the American publicist Lowell Thomas. His last foreign posting was in India in 1927.

Samson Agonistes is a difficult text to negotiate in the twenty-first century. The new face of terrorism and the war against terror, the currency of terms like jihad and suicide bombings in everyday vocabulary, the justifications suggested for many forms of the culture of violence in many corners of the world today cannot but have an impact on the way we now read Samson Agonistes. A ‘new alternative Samson’ had begun to emerge some time ago, reaching its culmination in John Carey's reading and in Joseph Wittreich's Interpreting Samson Agonistes, a Samson whose story is not an allegory of redemption but one of violence, lust and rash presumptions of divine guidance. More recently, in Shifting Contexts: Reinterpreting Samson Agonistes and Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on Samson Agonistes, as well as other recent works, Wittreich and other scholars have sought to open up a text long regarded as one to be examined for its conformity to scriptural traditions. The new readings begin with the beliefs

As the conflict entered its third winter, an Allied victory appeared remote and uncertain. The bloody four-month Battle of the Somme had sputtered out in the cold and rain of November with negligible gains. Despite strenuous efforts, the Italian offensives along the Isonzo River in 1916 had not succeeded in denting the Austrian line or pushing it back significantly. Hopes that Romania, which joined the Entente on August 17, 1916, would become a factor in the war had been quickly dashed when it was overrun by the Central Powers four months later. In June 1916 Russian armies under General Brusilov attacked the Austrians along a wide front, but their advance, which began with such promise, was thrown back when the Germans rushed troops to support their ally. When the fighting ended, the Russians had lost another million men and their army was practically finished. On the seas, German U-boats were taking an increasing toll on Allied and neutral shipping. Sir John Jellicoe, then C-in-C of the Grand Fleet, found it necessary to warn the cabinet that shipping losses on the present scale might drive the Allies out of the war by the early summer of 1917. Adding to this somber picture was the cost of the war, which had risen to about £5,000,000 a day. In the autumn of 1916 the Treasury revealed that Britain's reserves of gold and convertible securities were nearly exhausted and that soon it would have to finance the war with US loans.

Adopting the diverse roles of spy, missionary, and Arabian explorer, like his contemporary Burton, Gifford Palgrave was an outsider who travelled both in order to test himself and in pursuit of an identity. Brought up in a conventional Anglican household though half Jewish through his father, Palgrave enjoyed a controversial reputation during his lifetime owing to perceived disloyalty to his country. After a brilliant academic career at Charterhouse and Oxford he surprised his family by giving up his studies to join the army in India in 1847. An even greater shock ensued when he converted to Catholicism and became a Jesuit in South India in March 1848, staying at Jesuit College, Negapatam, and then Collegio Romano, Rome until 1855. In the same year he travelled to Syria as Father Michel Sohail, where he witnessed in 1860 the massacre of Maronite Christians during their conflict with the Druze. By now well versed in Arabic language and culture, he went to Arabia as an agent of Napoleon III in the disguises of a Syrian doctor/merchant. He set out from Ma'an in June 1862 and traversed the heart of Central Arabia to Ha'il via Djowf and Jebel Shammar, then went on to Riyadh from where he crossed the Dahna desert to Hufuf, sailing around the northern coasts of Bahrain. Here Palgrave departed from his travelling companion, continuing to Qatar then through the straits of Hormuz, completing his journey in Muscat.

Son of a small Eskdale farmer, Malcolm went to India as a boy soldier for the East India Company and his career took off there under the patronage of Lord Wellesley. A second career as a diplomat began when aged 30 he was sent as the Company's envoy to Persia in 1799. A speaker of Persian and admirer of Persian poetry with experience of the etiquette of the Persianized courts of the Indian Nawabs, Malcolm seemed well qualified to lead a diplomatic mission to Persia, and should his superiors have chosen to employ force he could equally have put to use his military skills. Although he negotiated a treaty with Persia in 1801 this was never ratified, and after the French gained a foothold in Persia in 1807, Malcolm sailed to Bushire with a military force to threaten dire consequences if the Shah did not expel them. The option was still open to seize Kharg Island in the Gulf; however Harford Jones pursued the diplomatic route, arriving in Tehran in 1809 to successfully negotiate a new treaty. Malcolm's mission to replace Jones and restore the preeminence of the Indian Government in Persian affairs was unfruitful. Knighted in 1815, he spent the last three years of his career as Governor of Bombay, retiring in 1830. Given his limited early education and soldier's background, Malcolm's achievement as a writer is all the more remarkable.

At the close of Act I, a new day dawning prompted a Panthea “who loves” to leave Prometheus and seek out Asia. Now in response, an Asia with her eyes fixed on the same “point…[of the morning star] quivering still/Deep in the orange light of widening morn” implores her sister “wear[ing]/The shadow of that soul by which I live” (30–31) not to delay any longer but to come:

Act I starts out with Prometheus in chains; its successor begins with Asia in suspense, hanging on every word her sister might be bringing of Prometheus.

But at this dawn of a new day and a new act, Panthea does not directly tell Asia what has happened to Prometheus in his long night of pain and bondage. Instead, she tells of two dreams that have presumably arisen from within the tortured psychic and textual space of Act I.

In the satirical Letters of Obscure Men circulated by Crotus Rubeanus, Ulrich von Hutten and others shortly before the Lutheran Reformation, one of the lampooned old-style clerics pours scorn on Erasmus' new learning:

In fact, all through the Letters, special scorn is poured on ‘poets’, i.e. those who have imbibed the new literary and philological tenets of the Revival of Learning. In another letter, Erasmus is coupled with the clerics' special target, the Hebraist Johann Reuchlin:

The first Chinese immigrant to Calcutta was Yang Tai Chow. He arrived in 1778 on the banks of the Hooghly. He gathered together a group of Chinese, many of whom had jumped ship and decided to stay on in the area of Calcutta or were working on the Khidderpore docks. Yang started a sugar mill with the eventual goal of saving enough to start a tea trade. Though history has obliterated the sugar mill, Yang's endeavour has been immortalized in the Bengali word for sugar, chini, which is derived from the Mandarin (similar to the Bengali word for porcelain, chinamati). Yang, known locally as Tong Achi, established the first Chinese community in the area which came to be known as Achipur, a place 33 km from Calcutta, near Budge Budge. The place no longer has any Chinese inhabitants but Yang Tai Chow's grave, and a temple that he built, are still visited by the Calcutta Chinese at the time of the Chinese New Year to seek his blessings.

Geographical proximity of the city to China and its accessibility by land made Calcutta the natural choice for many emigrating Chinese. The first record of modern Chinese immigration to India, writes Haraprasad Roy, can be found in a short notice in the Chinese book of 1820, A Maritime Record. It mentions the city of Calcutta as housing a small Chinese population from Fujian (Fukien) and Guangdong (Canton).

For a writer often credited with radically changing the style of earlier nineteenth-century English travel writing, Alexander William Kinglake had a surprisingly conventional background and upbringing, and lived the largely uneventful life of a Victorian gentleman. Born into a well-off family in Taunton Somerset, like his father he went into the law, though without any great success. Eton and Cambridge would have strengthened a predilection for Classics first given him by his mother and which is inscribed in the Greek title (‘from the East’) of his celebrated work of travel. Eothen, or, Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East was published in 1844, a decade after its author set out on a tour of the Levant. It is the product of a young, unattached Englishman confident in the superiority of his class, race and nation. Rejected by the publisher John Murray on account of its irreverent style, ‘it had undergone more than thirty printings by the end of the century’ (Corwin, DLB/166: 191). In the preface Kinglake made it clear he had intentionally produced a travel book that ‘was quite superficial in character’ having ‘discarded from it all valuable material derived from the work of others.’ However, while displaying his ‘egoism and colonial attitudes’ these are ‘continually undercut by his irony’ (Baker LTE: 677) and self-mockery. At the Catholic church in Tiberias, for example, the English gentleman sneers at the genuflections of a local ministrant only to break into a lament over ‘the fleas of all nations’ consuming his flesh.

On First Impressions and Lasting Choices

“The first impression is always the strongest,” writes Doroshevich of his initial view of Sakhalin island, and this well-worn adage is also appropriate here, for this translation introduces Doroshevich to English-language readers. Despite having been imperial Russia's most famous and successful journalist; having changed Russian journalism with his feuilleton-style; having been read by every segment of society and lauded by such literati as L. N. Tolstoi, A. P. Chekhov, V. G. Korolenko, A. M. Gor′kii and V. V. Stasov; and despite his Sakhalin feuilletons' renewed popularity in post-Communist Russia, Doroshevich remains largely unknown to non-Russian readers. A pity, for he deserves wider recognition.

Vlas Mikhailovich Doroshevich was born 5 April 1864 (old style) to Aleksandra Ivanovna Sokolova (1836–1914), of the wealthy and titled Denis′ev clan of Riazan′ Province. Details concerning Vlas's father are vague, but he appears to have been an unsuccessful writer who died shortly before his son's birth. Aleksandra was educated at the prestigious Smol′nyi Institute, but was disinherited by her parents for having married beneath her social status. Struggling, and with two other children, Aleksandra took her son when he was six months old to Moscow and gave him to a childless woman and her husband, one Mikhail Doroshevich, with a note pinned to the infant's blouse requesting he be called Blez (Blaise) in honor of the French philosopher Blaise Pascal.