Showing Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress by James Morris

Though complete in itself, Heaven s Command torms the opening volume of lames Morris s trilogy about the Victorian Empire, of which the central volume, Pax Britannica, has already been published. Like its predecessor, it is a narrative picture, but this time James Morris who now also writes as Jan Morris has embraced time as well as space. In a series of episodes, descriptive passages, character studies and evocations the book tells the story of the British Empire from Queen Victoria s accession in 1837 to her Diamond Jubilee in 1897; the last paragraph of Heaven s Command overlaps the first paragraph of Pax.
In range it is necessarily vast, and its scenes are set against backgrounds as diverse as Sierra Leone, the Ionian Islands, Fiji, Zululand and the Canadian prairies. We meet Hangman Eyre of Jamaica, Truganini the last Tasmanian, Louis Riel the Metis revolutionary, Sleeman the Thug-hunter, Napier of Sind, Colley of Majuba. We are present when the last survivor of the Afghan War arrives below the walls of Jalalabad, when the Government Steam Train chuffs along the Grand Trunk Road, when Garnet Wolseley sacks the capital of the Asantahene and Bishop Colenso is refused admission to his cathedral at Pietermaritzburg. We visit ships and botanical gardens, hill stations and sugar plantations, the Maharajah s Well at Ipsden in Oxfordshire and English Camp on San Juan Island off the coast of Washington.
Behind the colour and the fizz, though, which have so long been the hallmarks of James Morris s writing, there lies something more solid and ambitious: a reconstruction of the imperial progress, throughout the Victorian epoch, which unobtrusively embraces every aspect of the great adventure, and in the guise of entertainment aspires towards scholarship.