The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

English Jack Amongst the Afghans; or, The British Flag--Touch It Who Dare! (1878-1879)  

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

English Jack Amongst the Afghans; or, The British Flag—Touch It Who Dare! first appeared in Boys of England (Nov 1878-May 1879). Its author is unknown. English Jack Amongst the Afghans is one of the more interesting and enjoyable story paper serials of the nineteenth century.

English Jack Amongst the Afghans is set in Afghanistan in the late 1870s. The story begins in “Cabul, the proud capital,” which is ruled by “Shah Soojah, the king whose dynasty for good or for ill Great Britain had engaged herself to uphold¼his home is guarded by British troops because the warriors of his own country cannot be relied upon.”¹ Shah Soojah is personally guarded by “the gallant Kentish Buffs, or Light Bobs, as they are more commonly called.”² Two drummer boys, Bobby and Evan, take a moment to smoke their pipes. They are miserable and scared, because

since their arrival with a reinforcement from the English depot a few weeks ago, not a day has passed but what they have heard the hoots, hisses, and execrations of the Afghanistan rabble hurled at such handfuls of the occupying British force as dare to parade the public streets of the city.³ 

The evil rebel chief Ackbar Khan taunts the British forces from the hills, and British officers are assassinated on a daily basis. Jack Vere, the idol of the boys, strolls by and reproves them for smoking, as it is bad for their character. Jack is only seventeen and had left the Sandhurst military academy only ten months ago. He had gained his commission by bringing into the regiment “twelve strapping recruits, all young fellows belonging to his father’s broad estate, and clothed, kilted, and armed at his private expense.”⁴ All of Jack’s men love him and would happily die for him. “Jack Vere was loved besides by the whole regiment, for in addition to being handsome, he was gay, light-hearted, chivalrous, and brave, and had as kindly a word for the private soldier as for his brother officer.”⁵ 

Jack persuades the boys to stop smoking and gives them fruit instead. Jack walks away, feeling uncertain that any of the troops in the capital are going to live very long, much less keep the passes open for more than a week. As the drummer boys are talking about Jack they see thirteen robed men sneaking by the city walls. Even and Bobby do not like their look and follow them to a hidden temple, in the middle of which is an altar on which is an open copy of the “Al Koran.” The boys do not like the look of the temple and Evan runs to get Jack. When Jack returns the thirteen men are shouting “Death to the accursed British—death to the accursed ghiour! Death—death to old and young, to wives and mothers, to daughters and young children—ay, even to the babe that is unborn!”⁶ Jack sends boys off to get help, then announces his presence and bars the way. In the fight that follows he chops off a hand. The Afghanis prepare to charge him, but “Jack does not flinch—not he. He is every inch an Englishman.”⁷ English reinforcements arrive and the Afghanis flee. Jack picks up the severed hand; it is a small one, possibly a woman’s, and on one of its fingers is a ring whose huge opal gleams “with a baleful and malignant fire.”

Jack reports to his commanding officer, General Elphinstone, to tell him about the conflict in the temple, but Elphinstone and his friends are drunk and openly scornful of Jack, who is dismissively told to tell Shah Soojah about it. On the way to the Shah Jack finds his friend Willie Dunbar. As they walk they debate the British presence in Afghanistan. Willie is pessimistic, feeling that none of the troops will see Britain again because stupid leadership is going to get them all killed. Jack is not hopeful, either, but feels that it is their duty as Englishmen to serve in Afghanistan:

You know we must secure our northwestern frontier against even the prowlings of the Northern bear...oh, nonsense, Dunbar! There is no such word as fail to British troops...it is our duty as British officers, Willie, to obey the commands of our chiefs. General Elphinstone must know better than we do.⁸ 

Jack stresses the point that if the British troops fail the British women and children still in Cabul will fall victim to the Afghanis. Jack and Willie reach the palace and demand that the Shah be awoken. As they are being escorted into the Shah’s quarters they hear a whispered threat: “Betray aught and you die!” Jack and Willie are unable to see who whispered to them and continue on. They find the Shah in his throne room, upset that someone has recently painted a cross of still-dripping blood on the roof of the throne room. Soojah is nonchalant about the conspirators’ vow to slaughter all the Europeans, even when Jack reminds him that “those same Europeans form the sole prop of your throne.”⁹ Jack and Willie are brusque and bold in their attitudes and statements to the Shah, which infuriates him. He threatens to switch his alliances: “Curses on these British meddlers, say I, who sought to checkmate Russia.”¹⁰ Jack is forced to placate him by promising that British reinforcements are on their way, which is a lie. Jack and Willie leave, and on their way out of the palace they discover that crosses of blood have been painted on their backs. They are fired on as they exit the palace, and while running back to the British section of Cabul see the lights of what must be the long-feared native uprising. They run back, form up with the other English troops at hand, and march into Cabul to rescue the English families in danger, even though there are only two hundred of the Buffs and an estimated 60,000 Afghanis. The Buffs encounter a large Afghani mob, all of whom are armed and who are carrying the head of the British paymaster on a spear. The Afghanis and the Buffs fight, with the Buffs sticking to honorable English tactics and the Afghanis fighting in a brutal and barbarous fashion: 

Children, like venomous little wasps, crawled in between the soldiers, and stabbed at them, or tried to hamstring them with sharp knives. Women rushed bare-bosomed, and with flashing eyes and streaming hair, into the thickest of the fight, and struggled as desperately as the men.¹¹ 

The Buffs realize they can’t reach the English families who are besieged, but they are unable to retreat, as a new Afghani mob is attacking their rear. Snipers begin firing on the British troops from the windows and rooftops. In the battle Evan saves Jack’s life by stabbing an Afghani who is trying to run Jack through from behind. Evan and Bobby are terrified, their teeth chattering, but they are trying to do their duty. Bobby sees a girl he knows trapped in the upper floor of a building occupied by the Afghanis. Bobby runs inside to rescue the girl, and finds the building full of butchered women and children. On the top floor Bobby finds the girl, clad only in tatters mad and mute from seeing her mother and sisters butchered, and only capable of a “ringing, hollow laugh.” Evan joins them, and from the window of the girl’s room they see the Buffs breaking and running. The Afghani mob charges into the building, searching for any surviving Englishmen. Bobby and Evan hide with the girl in a wardrobe and lock themselves inside it. An Afghani, unable to open the wardrobe, stabs a bayonet into the wardrobe, to make sure that no one is inside. The girl is stabbed in the shoulder, but that makes her break out into “wild shrill laughter,” causing the superstitious Afghanis to run away.

Bobby and Evan get clothes for the girl, bandage her eyes so that she can’t see the bodies of her family, and take her down into the cellar of the building. Hours pass as they wait for the Afghanis to leave the area. Bobby leaves the cellar to reconnoiter. He sees Afghani boys playing football with a human head and sees warriors carrying spears with human heads on the end, some female. The girl sleeps. When she awakens she is no longer mad, but still mute. Bobby and Evan gather food, they eat, and eventually it is safe for them to leave the building. Outside the building they find a tiger about to attack the prostrate form of Jack Vere, but Bobby and Evan play their drums and frighten the tiger. Bobby and Evan help Jack into a nearby house, and Jack explains that he went into the city to find the boys but twisted his ankle in a hole. Unfortunately, the boys’ drumming attracts a crowd, which breaks into the house to get at them. At the same time the tiger breaks into the house to eat the dying and wounded, and the Afghanis, to rescue their wounded comrades, are forced to fight and kill the tiger. But because the tiger fought them while they were hunting for an English officer the Afghanis believe that the soul of a British officer must have entered into the tiger, so rather than continue the hunt for Jack, Bobby, and Evan the Afghanis leave the house and set it on fire, intending to raze it. Jack, Bobby and Evan are trapped inside the burning building, but the British cavalry arrive in time to drive the mob off, and Jack and the boys are rescued. They return to the British cantonments with the British cavalry, but as they reach the cantonments they see Afghani mounted troops charging the cantonments and then the British dragoons who are accompanying Jack and the boys. The British charge the Afghanis, and “the resistless power, valour, and impetus of the British horsemen made itself felt.”¹² The British artillery drives off the remaining Afghanis, and everyone returns to the fort.

Jack is interviewed by General Elphinstone about the situation in the city, but Elphinstone disbelieves that the Afghanis are capable of such cruelty and accuses Jack of exaggeration. When Jack admits that he promised Soojah reinforcements which are not forthcoming, Elphinstone orders Jack to return to Soojah and tell him the truth. Jack and the drummer boys return to Cabul and immediately run into a war-elephant leading an Afghani column of men, accompanied by a Russian officer. Before the Afghanis can slaughter Jack and the boys an English woman gives them rifle cover from an upper floor window. She leads them through the building and into a hidden temple, where the pursuing Afghanis do not find them. She explains that she is Rose Trevor, formerly a governess for one of the English families in Cabul. She collapses into tears as she describes how all of her wards and the woman she worked for were killed by the Afghanis. She hid from the Afghanis in a powder barrel, and after they left she explored and found the hidden temple, dedicated to “the god Boora Penna.” The temple is hidden, since the “entire Mussulman population¼have as great a horror of false gods as us Christian.”¹³ Rose tells Jack and the boys horror stories from India of human sacrifices.

They hear someone entering the temple, so Rose leads them to the back of the idol of Boora Penna which looms over the temple. The idol is hollow inside, and Rose, Jack and the boys hide inside it. They see the rebel chief Ackbar Khan, an armored “Oriental chief,” and a Russian officer conferring. The “Oriental,” a priest of Siva, and the Afghani quarrel about how best to deal with the British. The Russian reminds them that he is offering them an “unlimited supply of gunpowder and arms, together with a few thousand Cossacks, disguised”¹⁴ for their assistance in driving the British out of Afghanistan and overthrowing the Shah. The trio agree to settle their individual differences after they have killed the English. They leave and the worshipers of Boora Penna enter the temple for their services. The priest of Siva attempts to slip into the idol in order to have it pronounce a prophesy, but Jack strangles him and does his own prophesying about the evils of the Russians.

The British troops are eventually forced to pull out of Cabul and lead a long fighting retreat over the mountains toward India. They accompany the white civilians, and while some of the civilians survive many die and the Buffs are slaughtered to a man in the massacre of the Khyber Pass. The surviving cast slips into India and has a series of picaresque adventures. Jack, Bobby, Evan and Rose eventually return to Afghanistan. They battle with Thugs. Rose carries out a private mission by sneaking through an Afghani army while she is disguised as an Afghani warrior. The group take part in the relief of the besieged garrison at Jellalabad. They survive an attack of mountain apes. Bobby narrowly avoids being whipped as a deserter by several evil British officers. In the end the British win the war, Jack marries Rose, and Bobby and Evan grow up to be captains in the British Army.

English Jack Amongst the Afghans is perhaps the archetypal example of the patriotic story paper serial. It was written during the Second Afghan War (1878-1880), which began when the amir of Afghanistan, Shere Ali (1825-1879), signed a treaty with the Russians in August 1878. The British feared this treaty would lead first to Russian influence over Shere Ali and then to a Russian occupation of Afghanistan, with the consequent threat to India, so the British demanded that Shere Ali allow the British to install a mission in Kabul. When Shere Ali refused, a 35,000 man British army invaded Afghanistan in November, 1878. The war dragged on until September, 1880.

Although story paper serials were always patriotic, the quality of the patriotism and the range of feelings about the Empire and about foreigners varied depending on the years. During those years when the British public and policy-makers felt relatively sanguine about the Empire, the penny bloods and story papers produced what was for the time a relatively diverse set of heroes whose interaction with foreign cultures was comparatively tolerant; while those foreigners were different and inferior to Englishmen, they still had some virtues (even if only minor) of their own and were worthy of being added to the Empire. George Emmett’s Crusoe Jack was one of these; although the natives in Crusoe Jack were savages and needed the firm rulership of Crusoe Jack to enable them to even approach civilization, they were not entirely without positive aspects and would make useful servants to the Empire.

But during those years when British culture and cultural assumptions were seen to be under attack, and when the British public and policy-makers felt anxiety about the Empire or its future, the tone of penny dreadful and story paper serials changed. These years saw the appearance of characters viewed at the time as subversive, whether outlaw heroes like Dick Turpin in Black Bess (see: Rookwood) or street Apache heroes like the Wild Boys (see: The Wild Boys of London) (although the latter appeared in a conservative rather than subversive serial). In America a similar trend, involving heroes like Deadwood Dick (see: The Deadwood Dick Adventures) and the James Brothers (see: James Brothers Adventures), sparked a moral panic and an establishment backlash (see: James Brothers Adventures). In England there was a similar backlash, as with the 1872 suppression of The Wild Boys of London, but also an increased production of stridently patriotic and even reactionary heroes and serials.

Those serials published during the particularly public wars of the Victorian years, whether the Crimean War or the “Little Wars” like the Second Afghan War or the British campaigns in the Sudan in the mid-1880s, were particularly intense in their patriotic messaging. English Jack is a pronounced example of such stories. Although Jack and Willie question the British military leadership, neither has any doubt about the righteousness of their cause. The British presence in Afghanistan, and the war on behalf of the Empire, is a good thing, especially since the Afghanis are such wicked people. While the Army’s leadership may be doubted, the English gentry are not. They are a shining beacon to the lower classes, who are simply happy to be in their presence and never question their orders. English Jack is actually almost feudal in its approach, as it stresses a noblesse oblige on the part of Jack and his fellow officers: they have a duty as Englishmen and members of the gentry to support the Empire, protect the women and children, provide a good example to the lower classes, and (if necessary) sacrifice their lives for the Empire. As Jack puts it “It’s my duty to go first because I’m the eldest, and I mustn’t shrink from duty, no matter how terrified I am. It wouldn’t be English.”¹⁵ 

English Jack reinforces this message of patriotism by showing a cast as characters from every corner of Great Britain, from Kent to Yorkshire to Wales to Scotland to Ireland. The modern reading audience may not find this a particularly diverse group of characters, but the contemporary audience would have found it as multiethnic as American film audiences found the casts of American movies made during World War Two.

The racial message of English Jack is, predictably, that the Afghanis are barbaric savages who deserve whatever they get. There are numerous descriptions of English babies and women impaled and beheaded. The author stresses the brutality of the war, but places the blame solely on the Afghanis and on Shah Soojah; Jack says that the massacres of the English civilians would never have happened had “our miserable puppet king¼regained his rule over his revolted capital.”¹⁶ English Jack takes an interesting (for the modern reader) approach to Shah Soojah. While the necessity of British support for Soojah is stressed, he himself is portrayed in traditionally Orientalist terms, as sexually decadent and cruel, even threatening at one point to poison his harem. Willie Dunbar’s description captures the characters’ feelings for Soojah:

A monarch who has an amiable penchant for having kinsmen’s eyes gouged out with red-hot dagger points and who will sentence a courtier to be cut into kabobs for the slightest breach of etiquette is not likely to have many friends. But when added to this, he is a voluptuary, a wine-bibber, and almost a driveling dotard as well, maintained on his throne against the will of the entire nation by foreign bayonets, who can wonder at conspiracies? Hang it! I’d be a conspirator were I an Afghan.¹⁷ 

This stands in contrast to the American tendency, in fiction and in real life, to portray American proxies in foreign countries as moral exemplars.

English Jack caps off its call to patriotism with its portrayal of the British generals. The leader of the British forces in Kabul in the first section of English Jack is “General Elphinstone.” He is almost cartoonishly incompetent, drunken, and indolent. He has an absurd faith in the Afghanis and in Shah Soojah, he has no regard for the lives of the English women in Kabul, and he tells Jack that if Shah Soojah cuts his head off that Elphinstone will “severely upbraid” the Shah. General Elphinstone leads the retreat to India and gets himself and the Buffs killed at the Khyber Pass.

The General Elphinstone of English Jack is a fictional version of Major-General William George Keith Elphinstone (1782-1842). During the First Afghan War (1839-1842) Elphinstone took command of the British forces in Afghanistan. The First Afghan War began when the amir of Afghanistan, Dost Muhammad Khan (1793-1863), made overtures to the Russians. This alarmed the British enough to prompt the taking of Kabul, in July 1839, and the installation of Shah Shuja-ul-Mulk (1785-1842) in the place of Dost Muhammad. Shuja-ul-Mulk was corrupt, immoral, and unpopular with the Afghani people, but he was a willing ally of the British and British troops enforced his rule in Kabul, although the countryside was in Afghani hands. (Shah Soojah, in English Jack, is the fictionalized version of Shuja-ul-Mulk).

There was no immediate Afghani military response following the conquest of Kabul, and the British troops acted in a lax and overconfident manner, which was not helped by the 1841 arrival of Major-General Elphinstone, who had successfully served at the Battle of Waterloo (1815) and in India. Elphinstone had a particularly arrogant attitude toward the situation in Kabul and toward the Afghanis. Later that year the son of Dost Muhammad Khan, Akbar Khan (c. 1825-1879, fictionalized in English Jack as “Ackbar Khan”) raised an army and attacked. Kabul was shelled in November, and a brigade sent out to take the cannon was destroyed. British attempts to negotiate with Ackbar Khan resulted in the murder of the envoys. By the end of November the British garrison in Kabul was surrounded, and many officers and women had been taken as hostages. On January 1, 1842 the British agreed to go to India, and in exchange for assurances by the Afghanis that the British would be protected by the Afghanis during their retreat Elphinstone agreed to surrender the British artillery. On January 6 the British army of 4,500 English and Indian soldiers, along with 12,000 women, children, servants, and general camp followers, began the retreat to India. Akbar Khan’s troops repeatedly attacked the British troops as they labored through the snow-covered mountain passes. On January 13 the only English survivor reached the British fortress at Jalalabad; a handful of Indian troops and women and children followed him soon after.

The disastrous retreat from Kabul was the most humiliating military defeat of the nineteenth century for the British military, and Major-General Elphinstone, who was taken hostage by Akbar Khan and died in captivity, became a byword for British military incompetence. The retreat from Kabul is accurately reenacted in English Jack, with a similarly disastrous ending, but the author follows this with the arrival of a group of supremely competent generals who defeat Ackbar Khan and retake Kabul. English Jack retells the disaster, which the British public in 1878 was still painfully aware of, but then assures its readers that Elphinstone was an aberration and that the generals who followed Elphinstone, and who were portrayed as being highly moral and highly competent, were the norm.

English Jack is almost always interesting, and for long stretches it makes for oddly compelling reading. It has three sections: the first section in Afghanistan, the interlude in India, and then the second Afghanistan section. The first section is much the best. The author sets a good pace from the beginning and never lets up. At times there is a feeling of real desperation in the story, and of danger and hair’s-breadth escapes, although these are always couched in story paper terms rather than those of reality–while the reader is always conscious that Jack, Bobby, and Evan are going to survive until the end of the serial, they are constantly in danger, and the reader is always aware that the situation of the British in Kabul is dire. The author does his best to stress the horror of war while working within the confines of the story paper medium. There are few explicit descriptions of heads on pikes, beheadings, torture, and rape of women, but there are many references to them. The author often mentions the fear of the British troops and how conscious they are of being outnumbered. And while the author shows a weakness for describing the British cavalry charges in romantic terms, his portrayal of street fighting in Kabul leaves the reader under no illusions as to its ferocity and danger.

The retreat to India is the high point of the serial. At times this sequence becomes genuinely harrowing. The troops are cold and hungry and afraid, and the civilians the troops are escorting are a drag on the troops’ resources as well as a constant vulnerability. Near the end of the march the civilians, starving and aware that Ackbar Khan’s troops are closing in, begin to panic: “’Despatch us! Kill us! For God’s sake shoot or bayonet us!’ The poor Englishman cried. And in more than one instance the request was complied with.”¹⁸ This section ends with an almost painful description of the Khyber Pass battle and the massacre of the Buffs.

Unfortunately, the author bows to the demands of the medium and unrealistically allows Jack, Willie Dunbar, Bobby, and Evan all to be knocked out in the battle but neither killed nor even seriously injured. (This happens again later in the serial). This allows the author to bring back his cast and send them to India. After the almost grittily realistic tone of the first section, the light tone and picaresque adventures of the India sequence jar. The second Afghanistan sequence is a more standard story paper war adventure, lacking the tension of the first Afghanistan sequence and striking a grating tone of English triumphalism. The author also inserts, awkwardly, the character of Barney O’Murphy, Esquire, an Irish dragoon who is a barely altered copy of the lead character from Charles Lever’s once quite popular Charles O’Malley, the Irish Dragoon (1838). The serial’s illustrations are crude and stiff, and racist in their portrayal of the Afghanis, but interesting and seemingly accurate in their reproduction of the landscape of Afghanistan, the architecture and scenery of Kabul, and the clothing of the Afghanis.

Interestingly, English Jack has a moment of fantastika, out of place in the context of the (usually grimly realistic) serial but intriguing when it occurs—and, as previously mentioned (see: Broad Arrow Jack), a recurring plot device in the penny bloods and story paper serials. During the India section of the story Rose Trevor is threatened by Thugs. As this occurs both Jack and Willie dream about a terrifying Death carrying Rose away. In the dream Death tells both Jack and Willie that Rose is “the bride of Death.”¹⁹  

Notably, English Jack, though possessing no doubts about the contemporary English war in Afghanistan, is not an unthinking advocate for imperialism.

Empire was not an overriding concern of Boys of England. However, the paper was certainly more conscious of it than historians contend, even in recent studies. Boys of England did not treat empire simply as a colourful backcloth; nor did it merely endorse free trade imperialism. Rather, the paper perceptively mirrored the gradual transition from free trade to direct rule in British imperial policy which occurred during the latter part of the nineteenth century, publishing a succession of stories which reflected how Britain found it increasingly necessary to protect her foreign interests through military intervention.²⁰ 

Similarly of note is Rose,

one of the most exceptional girl characters among the many stories published in the BE in 1879. Not only does Rose possess courage to stand up against the villains, but she also has the physical strength to pull it off. Jack first meets Rose when she shoots an elephant that was attacking him and his friends. Jack tells Rose that her “shot was a deadly one—it has killed the monster. I vow you are a regular little Joan of Arc, and have saved all our lives” (“English Jack” 51). Rose may well be permitted to act with violence and power because the situation is an exception to the typical rules of gender. The story takes place at a time of national crisis when Britain’s forces stationed in the Afghan region are under serious threat¼much later in the story, when the Afghans are pursuing them, Jack tells her that she “must help fight, comrade. I know you’re a good shot,” and Rose readily agrees (“English Jack” 153). Rose “drops” several of her enemies with her shooting ability, and the narrator describes how she “soon . . . had a chance in turn of paying a little delicate attention to the camel and the dromedary riders, with her brace of pistols” (“English Jack” 154). The femininity of the phrase “delicate attention” emphasizes the contrast between the norms of girlhood and Rose’s ability to shoot. Rose demonstrates that she is independent, courageous, and capable in these passages, a girl capable of saving herself and others.²¹ 

English Jack Amongst the Afghans features some of the best story paper writing of the century and is well worth the trouble to find.

Recommended Edition

Print: English Jack Amongst the Afghans; or, The British Flag—Touch It Who Dare!. London: “Boys of England” Office, 1880.