Grove Koger
In my post for December 18, 2019, I wrote about the novel Lost Horizon and wondered how we could account for its enduring popularity. I reasoned that in some cases, such popular or “minor” classics create “myths in fictional form—compelling embodiments of dreams and fears that linger just below the conscious level.” I’m not completely happy with that formulation, but in the weeks since, I haven’t come up with a better one. In any case, another outstanding instance of the form is Anthony Hope’s most famous romance, which entered our world in April 1894.
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Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda: Being the History of Three Months in the Life of an English Gentleman (Bristol: J.W. Arrowsmith, 1894)
Anthony Hope was born in Clapton, London, as Anthony Hope Hawkins in 1863 and studied to become a lawyer before turning his mind and considerable energy to writing. He was forced to publish his first novel, A Man of Mark, himself in 1880, but persevered and eventually began to sell more successful efforts. (It’s of some interest that while A Man of Mark is now forgotten, it featured an imaginary country.)
Hope seems to have begun The Prisoner in late 1893 and finished a first draft by the end of the year. It was then published the following April to wide acclaim from readers and fellow writers alike, including Robert Louis Stevenson. While he subsequently wrote quite a few more books, including a prequel (The Heart of Princess Osra) and a sequel (Rupert of Hentzau) to The Prisoner, neither is read today. It’s as if Hope had spent a few magical weeks in another world in 1893 but managed to convey the elusive experience only once. (I’m reminded, in this regard, of H.G. Wells’ fine story “The Door in the Wall.”)
The Prisoner opens, a little unpromisingly, like one of the brittle social comedies then popular. But when its protagonist, Rudolf Rassendyll, travels from his home in England to the Central European kingdom of Ruritania, it modulates into another mode. It seems that Rassendyll plans to attend the coronation of the new Ruritanian king—himself named Rudolf—who also happens, thanks to a scandalous liaison between ancestors of the pair, to be a distant relative. Embarrassingly enough, Rassendyll has even inherited the red hair and straight nose that are distinguishing characteristics of the Ruritanian royal family. When it turns out that the young Englishman and the king-to-be are actually identical in appearance if not character, and—what’s more—that the latter has been drugged and imprisoned in a castle in the little Ruritanian town of Zenda, the stage is set. Add the beautiful Princess Flavia, who’s betrothed to the dissolute heir-apparent, and we have the prospect of an impossibly romantic but perilous and dishonorable denouement.
But of course Rassendyll, as the novel’s subtitle makes clear, is an English gentleman. I’ve seen him described as “ridiculously honorable,” but that label misses the mark. To the teenage boy I was when I first read the novel, he’s instead extravagantly honorable—a dream character who appealed to the dreamer in me. (Which isn’t to say that I didn’t harbor other, more down-to-earth dreams at the same time.) I suspect that most of us still have a dreamer dwelling within, and I’m pretty sure that accounts for The Prisoner of Zenda’s continued appeal.
That appeal has been widespread, inspiring a play, an operetta, a musical, countless movies, other novels (Robert Heinlein’s Double Star, for instance), a board game, and so on. It even created its own genre—the Ruritanian Romance. I’ll add that it also inspired me to write my own very modest tribute, “The Fall of Ruritania,” which appeared in Quail Bell Magazine in 2013; see http://www.quailbellmagazine.com/the-unreal/prose-the-fall-of-ruritania.
If you’d like to learn more about Hope, Sir Charles Edward Mallet wrote a biography, Anthony Hope and His Books: Being the Authorised Life of Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, in 1935 (London: Hutchinson). The Prisoner is analyzed in at least two academic studies—Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination, by Vesna Goldsworthy (Yale UP, 1998), and Ruritania: A Cultural History, from the Prisoner of Zenda to the Princess Diaries, by Nicholas Daly (Oxford UP, 2020). The 1961 Pyramid edition includes an introduction by Robert Gorham Davis, and the 1999 Penguin edition an introduction by Gary Hoppenstand.
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The images for today’s post are (top to bottom) the cover of the Pyramid edition, the one I read as a teenager; an illustration by Charles Dana Gibson from an 1898 edition; a plan of the Castle of Zenda from a 1921 edition; the cover of a board game from 1896; and a still of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Ronald Colman from the 1937 film version.
World Enough 