Christopher Herbert. War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2008. ISBN 9780691133324. Price: US$35

In War of No Pity, Christopher Herbert undertakes an act of “historical retrieval” (3) of texts about the Indian “Mutiny.” In so doing, he does us a great service, paying serious attention to a trove of texts that have long remained un- or under-attended. The fairly lengthy scholarly silence on the events of 1857, especially since the centenary of the event, appeared recently to be satisfied by Gautam Chakravarty’s The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (2004), a book Herbert, rightly, excoriates. His own monograph on the subject is a penetrating book of cultural and intellectual analysis, elegantly written, that rewards patient scrutiny. Herbert’s primary argument is that the events of 1857-9 had a profound effect on Britons, triggering an initial visceral reaction, but in time a more measured–if also phantasmagoric and riven–response that registers the full trauma that the uprising unleashed. Central to this national trauma was the recognition of the potential for violence and vengeance within themselves. In Herbert’s words: “The Mutiny ... inflicted its wound on the British psyche not merely by confronting it with spectacles of terrifying physical violence but also ... by inflicting upon it the shock of ... a catastrophic wound to the moral order itself.... [T]he discovery of the strain of genocidal cruelty inhabiting humanitarian Christian virtue and linking the British inseparably to ‘those red-handed Sepoys’ formed an essential component of this horror” (55). Locating British responses to the Uprising within domestic discourses and disputes about Puritanism, Evangelicalism and less stern forms of Christianity; vengeance and justice; humanitarian philanthropy and retribution; penal and religious reform, Herbert aims to “understand the Indian upheaval from the Victorian perspective” (25). He does this by approaching British writings through a psychoanalytically inflected approach. Herbert’s method of reading the texts of 1857–histories, newspaper reports, first-hand accounts, novels, and more–is closely allied to one of the central sub-themes of his argument: that Victorians’ responses to the Uprising were not monolithic or unified, but “divided” and “riven with stresses” (31), contradictory even. To make his point, he highlights “dissenting” (an oft repeated word) attitudes towards a number of key events or topoi–rebel atrocities towards the British, British reprisals, encomiums on British valor and gallantry, Anglo-Indians’ treatment of Indians, and more. Central to his argument about the psychological trauma of 1857 is the demonstration that such dissent existed not only between writers but within any given text. In every chapter and on every page, Herbert teases out–“parses out” is the term he uses (186)–the dissent latent in a text, its “self-division” (92) and ambivalence. “Ambivalence,” he suggests, is “the master trope of Victorian Mutiny literature” (229). Herbert’s psychoanalytic approach and method of reading produce considerable insights, but also occasions that give a reader pause. The overall argument—that what the British learned about themselves and the fault lines of their culture proved as devastating as mutineers’ actions—is beautifully developed, with a host of subtly read examples. The specific claim, on the other hand, that the images of the “fiendishly vengeful sepoys ... may reveal themselves at last to be the projections, scapegoats, surrogates of some dread ultimately not external but internal, as racialized bogeys commonly are” (34) is less persuasive because, as is not uncommon in psychoanalysis, a diagnosis either finds a willing audience or not. In this case the diagnosis of projection seems to run counter to Herbert’s finely contextualized readings of the 1857 archive. The method of drawing out “self-divisions” within a text too has its strengths and limitations. It produces critical insights such as the reading of Lady Audley’s Secret as a text of “numbed sensationlessness” and “immobilizing …