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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Revolt of Man," Walter Besant presents a provocative exploration of societal norms, gender dynamics, and the quest for autonomy in an imagined future. Set in a world dominated by a matriarchal society, this speculative fiction delves into themes of male disenfranchisement and the struggle for personal liberty. Besant's narrative employs a blend of vivid characterization and philosophical discourse, engaging readers in a dialogue about the implications of power structures. His deft use of satire and dystopian elements positions the novel within the literary context of the late 19th-century social reform movements, resonating with contemporary debates about gender and social justice. Walter Besant, a prominent Victorian author and social commentator, was deeply influenced by the socio-political currents of his time, including the early feminist movement and the fight for women's rights. His extensive background in history and his involvement in various reformist activities undoubtedly shaped his understanding of societal inequalities. Besant was known for his commitment to addressing contemporary issues through literature, which is evident in this work. This compelling novel is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersections of gender, power, and societal change. Besant's insightful critique encourages readers to reflect on their own societal structures, making "The Revolt of Man" both a timely read and a timeless discourse on human rights. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Revolt of Man
Table of Contents
Introduction
In Walter Besant’s The Revolt of Man, a boldly imagined inversion of gendered power lays bare how custom hardens into creed and how any victorious orthodoxy, however reformist its origins, can calcify into a system that polices speech, narrows thought, and measures virtue by conformity rather than by justice, compelling readers to ask whether the ethics of authority flow from the identity of the rulers or from the principles by which they govern, and whether social order protects human possibility or quietly depletes it when it ceases to tolerate dissent and difference.
First published in the early 1880s, this novel sits within late-Victorian speculative fiction, a tradition that used imagined futures to scrutinize present-day institutions and anxieties. Besant sets his story in a future England transformed by a sweeping redistribution of power, presenting a matriarchal state whose laws, customs, and ceremonies normalize the reversal. The book blends elements of social satire and dystopian speculation rather than technological prophecy, keeping its focus on manners, education, and governance. Read in the context of intense nineteenth-century debates over suffrage, reform, and public morality, it stages a thought experiment rather than a forecast.
The premise is as direct as it is disquieting: women hold the levers of government, church, and culture, while men move within carefully hedged spheres and expectations. Institutions reinforce the new equilibrium through schooling, ritual, and precedent, and transgression is met less with shock than with administrative certainty. Within this order, a quiet current of inquiry gathers around those who question whether custom should stand as truth. The narrative follows the hazards of raising such questions in a world that prizes stability, charting the tension between personal conscience and public discipline without preempting outcomes or collapsing complexity into simple rebellion.
Readers encounter a voice steeped in nineteenth-century urbanity: omniscient, pointed, and often sly. Besant uses ceremony, courtroom-like exchanges, and domestic scenes to dramatize social logic, inviting the audience to observe not only what characters do but the pressures that shape their choices. The mood moves between comic deflation and sober appraisal, using irony to reveal what a polite society will overlook to preserve its self-image. Rather than rely on gadgets or discovery, the book builds its world from etiquette, policy, and pedagogy, allowing incremental details—the wording of a rule, the tone of a meeting—to carry unsettling weight.
At its core, the novel interrogates power by reversing it, not to endorse a blueprint but to test assumptions about fairness, competence, and the social uses of knowledge. It probes how educational systems define legitimacy, how tradition can become an instrument of exclusion, and how dissenters navigate institutions designed to absorb or silence them. Questions of equality, rights, and civic virtue are filtered through ordinary decisions about work, family, and status. The satire asks readers to separate principle from privilege: if justice is principled, it should survive a change in rulers; if it is circumstantial, the inversion will reveal its limits.
Besant was a prolific British novelist and commentator on social life, and his interest in institutions—charities, clubs, professional bodies, and urban governance—permeates the texture of this book. The Revolt of Man belongs to a cluster of Victorian fictions that used future societies as mirrors for contemporary argument, positioning policy and propriety as the real engines of history. Its engagement with gender and authority emerges from a moment when reformist rhetoric was pervasive and contested. Rather than mapping every complexity of politics, the narrative sharpens a single lens, examining what happens when roles flip but the administrative appetite for control remains.
For today’s readers, the novel’s provocation lies less in its prediction than in its method: a role reversal that asks how structures shape possibilities and how language normalizes power. It encourages reflection on who gets to define competence, which forms of knowledge are encouraged or sidelined, and how appeals to order can mask a fear of intellectual risk. Approached as a satirical experiment, it offers an engaging, sometimes uncomfortable, journey through the ethics of governance and the psychology of conformity. The result is an invitation to scrutinize our own assumptions, to test principles across contexts, and to listen for quiet dissent.
Synopsis
The novel opens in a future England reshaped by a long, peaceful revolution that has placed women at the center of public life. Parliament, the courts, and the established Church are directed by women, while men are defined in law as the dependent sex, sheltered but excluded from authority. Property follows the maternal line, and custom celebrates feminine guardianship of the state. The country is calm and respectable, yet motionless in its ambitions. Practical science, mechanical invention, and adventurous enterprise are treated with suspicion, remembered as disturbers of order. Within this carefully arranged hierarchy, chivalry has been inverted, and male aspiration is confined to limited, ornamental roles.
Institutions reflect this settlement. Universities favor classical studies, rhetoric, and moral philosophy, and are closed to men beyond elementary training. Scientific inquiry is discouraged as disruptive, its textbooks quietly removed and its practitioners remembered with qualified censure. The pulpit reinforces the virtues of obedience and stability, and ecclesiastical dignitaries wield broad influence in civil affairs. Commerce survives, but innovation is rare and foreign competition grows. Magistrates and ministers, all women, preside over an efficient but conservative administration that prizes decorum over discovery. In city and countryside alike, etiquette codifies the dependence of men, who are taught graceful accomplishments and domestic arts rather than law, medicine, or engineering.
A young man of ability emerges within this framework, trained in the permitted accomplishments yet restless under their limits. He has talent for observation and a patience for careful work that finds no recognized channel. From a provincial town he comes to London, where he sees the full reach of the new order—its ceremonious grandeur, its confident leadership, and its blind spots. His prospects are narrowly defined: music, drafting, decorative crafts, or quiet service under female superintendence. He wants, instead, the chance to test, to build, and to contribute in ways reserved to others. That want becomes the seed of a wider, quietly organized dissatisfaction.
A chance meeting draws him into a discreet circle of older men who have preserved fragments of the forbidden past. In a hidden room, he sees instruments and books once common in laboratories: treatises on physics and chemistry, diagrams of engines, and histories of civic institutions that formerly shared power. Guided by a cautious mentor, he learns method rather than dogma—the habit of experiment, the patient recording of results, and the discipline of reasoning from evidence. He also learns that such habits once shaped public life. This knowledge gives him a language for his unease and suggests a practical program that could be taught, replicated, and spread.
At the same time, a prominent young woman—high-born, well-educated, and destined for influence—begins to question the settled assumptions of her class. She sees the nation's dignity, yet also its drift, and wonders whether the exclusion of half its people from decision has a cost. Through family connections she encounters the young man. Their guarded conversations, full of deference on both sides, compare duty with aptitude, custom with capacity. She does not renounce her order, but she listens. Her presence opens doors to drawing rooms and committees that would otherwise remain shut, and her doubts lend legitimacy to questions that men alone dare not raise aloud.
From scattered friendships grows a network. Artisans, clerks, and teachers exchange lessons in arithmetic, mechanics, and history. Small workshops become evening schools. Safe codes and signals develop, not for violence but for mutual help and secrecy. Pamphlets, handwritten and copied, argue for the public usefulness of men and the harmlessness of honest inquiry. A scheme of petitions is drafted, temperate in tone and moderate in demand, seeking recognition of competence rather than dominion. Authorities, informed by spies, treat these efforts as restlessness to be soothed, not as a movement to be crushed, and therefore neglect its reach. The young man's organizing skill quietly matures.
A test arrives. A qualified man challenges a regulation that bars him from advanced study, and the case rises through the courts. Newspapers, controlled but not silent, report the pleadings. In the House of Ladies, speeches praise the virtues of protection and warn against ambition; others ask whether capacities should be wasted. Ecclesiastical warnings are issued; local officials tighten surveillance; a few arrests follow to reassure opinion. The organizers reply with scrupulous legality: no incitement, no arms, only a vast, visible assertion of presence. Plans are laid for a day when men across the land will step forward together, under the eyes of the nation.
The appointed day brings an unprecedented gathering to the capital. Processions converge in disciplined order, unarmed and silent, filling the avenues before the seat of power. Ministers, magistrates, and church dignitaries ride out to command dispersion; troops are present but held in check. Speeches are attempted, then forbidden; the crowd remains. A carefully prepared demonstration—symbolic rather than destructive—reveals capacities that cannot easily be dismissed and shows how knowledge long suppressed still lives. The effect is not chaos but a pause, in which authority hesitates and opinion begins to shift. In that pause, the central figures find themselves at the hinge of events.
What follows turns on negotiation, reputation, and the recognition of mutual dependence. The narrative moves from spectacle to settlement, tracing proposals that would admit competence without overturning security, restore inquiry without inviting disorder, and redefine honor for both sexes. Without detailing the final arrangement, the story closes on the prospect of a nation that draws strength from cooperation and from the disciplined use of knowledge. Throughout, the book's central idea remains clear: a society that excludes capacity, wherever found, courts stagnation; one that balances authority with truth-seeking renews itself. The Revolt of Man frames that idea in events that test patience, courage, and restraint.
Historical Context
Walter Besant’s The Revolt of Man (1882) imagines a future England in which women have attained complete political supremacy, displacing men from the franchise, public office, and the higher professions. The stage is recognizably British—Westminster as the seat of government, cathedral cities, and ancient universities—yet reorganized under a female establishment. The time is projected beyond the late Victorian present into an era of settled institutions, thick bureaucracy, and curtailed scientific enterprise. Railways, print networks, and centralized administration sustain a decorous order that conceals mounting tensions. Within this setting, the plot dramatizes a political uprising that contests female rule, using familiar locales to explore altered power relations across family, church, academy, and state.
The organized women’s suffrage movement of the 1860s–1880s forms a crucial historical backdrop. John Stuart Mill’s 1867 proposal to amend the Second Reform Act to include women failed, but it catalyzed activism. The National Society for Women’s Suffrage (London, Manchester, Edinburgh, 1867–1868), led by figures such as Lydia Becker and Millicent Garrett Fawcett, pursued petitions and bills. Single and widowed female ratepayers gained the municipal vote in 1869; women stood for School Boards after the Education Act of 1870; and the Isle of Man granted women property-based parliamentary suffrage in 1881. Besant’s dystopian inversion extrapolates from these partial gains, imagining a polity where the incremental successes of campaigners culminate in unchallenged female political control.
Victorian legal reforms that reshaped marriage and property law inform the novel’s preoccupation with domestic power. The Married Women’s Property Act 1870 gave wives control over earnings and certain property; the more sweeping Married Women’s Property Act 1882 (in force from 1883) established married women as separate legal persons owning and disposing of property. The Custody of Infants Acts (1839, 1873) and the Matrimonial Causes Acts (1857, 1878) expanded women’s rights in custody, divorce, and protection from violence. These statutes eroded coverture and the husband’s traditional legal authority. Besant’s scenario reverses the old hierarchy to test anxieties and expectations produced by these reforms, projecting a society where the legal redistribution of power is complete and institutionalized.
Expanding female access to education and the professions in the 1860s–1870s directly frames the book’s depiction of the academy under women’s control. Girton College (Cambridge, 1869) and Newnham (1871) opened pathways to advanced study; Bedford College (London, 1849) educated women earlier in the century. The University of London admitted women to degrees in 1878, with the first female graduates in 1880. The Medical Act 1876 enabled licensing of women doctors; Sophia Jex-Blake organized the London School of Medicine for Women (1874); Elizabeth Garrett Anderson qualified in 1865 and founded the New Hospital for Women in 1872. In the novel, universities and learned corporations favor women, a satirical magnification of contemporary reforms and fears about the guardianship of knowledge.
Public campaigns over sexuality, morality, and bodily regulation supplied another live context. The Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869) subjected women in garrison towns and ports to compulsory medical examinations, provoking Josephine Butler’s Ladies’ National Association (1869) and a mass repeal movement that succeeded in 1886 (with suspension from 1883). Parallel social purity and temperance activism, including the British Women’s Temperance Association (1876), mobilized large female constituencies for moral reform. Besant’s imagined moralizing state, governed by women and regulating male behavior and movement, echoes debates about the reach of state power into private life and the gendered direction of public virtue.
Conflicts over science, religion, and education shaped Victorian policy and thought. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and the 1860 Oxford debate between T. H. Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce symbolized tensions between scientific naturalism and ecclesiastical authority. The 1871 Universities Tests Act removed religious tests at Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham, while the Elementary Education Act 1870 created elected School Boards that wrestled with the place of denominational instruction. Anti-vivisection agitation led to the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876. In Besant’s future England, scientific inquiry is constrained and policed, a fictionalization of anxieties that clerical or moral authorities could limit experimental knowledge and secular intellectual life.
Urban poverty, administration, and class order in late Victorian Britain also inform the novel’s concern with hierarchy and governance. The Long Depression (c. 1873–1879) strained employment and intensified debate over state responsibility for welfare. London’s East End—Whitechapel, Mile End, and Stepney—exhibited overcrowding and sweated labor in tailoring and furniture trades. Philanthropic and civic reform gathered pace: Samuel and Henrietta Barnett’s work at St Jude’s culminated in Toynbee Hall (1884), and Besant’s own All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) helped inspire the People’s Palace (opened 1887). By depicting an orderly but stultifying regime, The Revolt of Man reflects contemporary arguments about bureaucratic paternalism, social discipline, and the costs of stability for the urban poor and lower middle classes.
As social and political critique, the book leverages inversion to expose the stakes of Victorian reform. By granting women untrammeled control over Parliament, universities, law, and moral regulation, it interrogates the limits of state power, the custody of knowledge, and the justice of unequal civil status—issues sharpened by suffrage, property, and education reforms. Its constricted science and ceremonial governance warn against orthodoxy suppressing inquiry. The displacement of men into a dependent caste dramatizes the arbitrariness of privilege and the harms of legally enforced subordination. In doing so, the narrative scrutinizes class deference, clerical influence, and bureaucratic rigidity that characterized Britain’s late nineteenth-century public life.
