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G.A. Henty

Tue, Apr 17, 2007

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G.A. Henty, the Victorian boy’s novelist, wrote stories about "muscular Christianity" and what "made Britain great… The moral is that blood will out. You can’t keep a good man down. If someone achieves something it will, if you look deep enough, be due to his breeding. A most unfashionable doctrine in the late twentieth century, but not in the late nineteenth!" Henty saw "the British as better than all others. It has been said of Henty that in all his books the white man is superior to the native and the Englishman superior to all other whites. This gave the British Empire its moral authority, especially considering, as Henty put it, ‘the utter incapacity of the Negro race to evolve, or even maintain, civilisation without the example and the curb of a white population.’"

Henty’s view of Negroes is seen in this quote from By Sheer Pluck:

They 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. A few, a very few, go beyond this, but these are exceptions, just as Shakespeare was an exception to the ordinary intellect of an Englishman. They are fluent talkers, but their ideas are borrowed. They are absolutely without originality, absolutely without inventive power. Living among white men, their imitative facilities enable them to attain a considerable amount of civilisation. Left alone to their own devices they retrograde into a state little above their native savagery.

But Henty was an imperialist as well, and though he remained very popular for 50 years after his death, the horrors of the First World War, which was a mortal blow to the White race, ensured that his imperial books were largely forgotten during the 20th century.

You can buy racist Henty books from Vision Forum. VF sells many other books full of vile words like "nigger," such as Elsie Dinsmore.

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