A. E. Housman’s 1896

Mahdist War: Battle of Ferkeh

In 1896 Britain found herself in the midst of the Mahdist Revolt, a Sudanese war headed by the proclaimed Mahdi, the prophesied redeemer of the faith of Islam, against Turco-Egyptian rule. Britain’s interest in Egyptian affairs predates the war; interested in gaining influence over the Suez Canal, convenient passage to British occupied India, Britain purchased Egypt’s 44% share hold under conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. The North African country sold its share in the Canal to assuage its crippling debt and menacing European creditors. Egyptian debts would later lead Britain to enforce its occupation of Egypt in 1882. Having later refortified Egypt’s economy under this occupation, Britain would lead Egypt to reconquer Sudan from Mahdist rule. The first military victory for the Anglo-Egyptian army took place in June of 1896 when 11,000 soldiers equipped with modern weapons methodically overtook Mahdist troops at Ferkeh. The Sudanese would fall quickly, suffering from 30,000 casualties over two short years.

Medical X-rays

X-rays found a medical use in 1896 when, for the first time, a photograph of a human body-part was taken under radiation. Wilhelm Röntgen, who would become the first recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 for his discovery, took a photograph of his wife’s hand while exposing her to X-rays; the results Röntgen received from this test gave birth to the practice of medical X-ray examinations, despite accounts of radiation burns and, later, cancer, from those who were over-exposed.

Oscar Wilde’s Salomé

The same year Housman sent Oscar Wilde a copy of his A Shropshire Lad in sympathy of the Irishman’s conviction on counts of homosexuality, his play, Salomé, opened in Paris. Wilde’s Salomé is a tragedy about the possibly Biblical woman of the same name who is often known as a temptress for her association with an erotic dance mentioned in the New Testament. In Wilde’s play, Salomé desires to preserve her own chastity and virginity while exploiting male sexuality for her pleasure.

Adolf Brand and Der Eigene

Also in 1896 the world’s first gay journal, Der Eigene, was published in Germany by the writer Adolf Brand. The journal’s name was taken from anarchist Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own). The journal, housed in Berlin, evaded censorship laws until its termination in 1932 under Germany’s Nazi regime due to leverage gained by publishing many popular German artists and writers such as Friedrich Schiller and Thomas Mann.

 [With Rue My Heart Is Laden]

Contextualized by these events in the year 1896, the poem bearing the title above is more easily understood. Like in Hardy’s “I Look into My Glass,” Housman’s speaker now rues the “fad[ing]” memories of the “golden friends [he] had,” whose remembered beauty now pales in comparison to the depravity of the speaker’s contemporary state (8,2). The “misfortunes and anxieties” Ramazani attributes to Housman’s A Shropshire Lad are, in a way, corroborated by an understanding of the widespread prejudice against homosexuality in 1896 and of other injustices such as European, namely British, colonialism (84).