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Kingsley’s Westward Ho! is well-known for its trumpet call for militarism. As critics have agreed and Kingsley himself maintained, this imperial romance is a fictional version of Kingsley’s imperialist propaganda, Brave Words for Brave Soldiers and Sailors. By vindicating Elizabethan England’s military interferences in Ireland and Spanish-ruled South America, Kingsley lent an ideological support to the Victorian soldiers who were fighting in the Crimea. However, the premise of this paper is that Kingsley’s celebration of Anglo-Saxon martialism in Westward Ho! had significant bearings on the domestic politics of the mid-nineteenth century England as well. Although the novel mostly centers on the rivalry between the Elizabethan England and Spain, this does not mean that it did not contain a class-related message for the mid-Victorian readership. Placed within the horizon of the early and mid-Victorian class struggles, the proud image of the Anglo-Saxon race as a Big Brother to other “lesser” races, this paper argues, offers an ideological counterweight to the internal class grievances of the Empire. This paper brings to light Kingsley’s often ambivalent position toward class problems and then accounts for the ideological function of the apparently racialized enterprise of Westward Ho! with regard to the Victorian class issues.
