‘It’s in the Soudan, as usual.’ ‘You lucky dogs…’
-Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed, 1891
What was it about Sudan that made it the favoured setting for Victorian novels about Englishwoman-troubled Englishmen setting out to prove themselves as Real Men who end up going blind by so trying? The Four Feathers and The Light That Failed were both written within 15 years of Gordon, himself only ever troubled by his sister, biting the Sudanese dust without having proved anything other than he shouldn’t have gone there in the first place.
Lytton Strachey answered that question in Eminent Victorians, about why Gordon chose Sudan for his last stand. Its ’dim tracts’, he wrote, ‘were the source of his honor.’ And also, the testbed of his British manhood, the unmade bed of his Victorian mind, and the deathbed of his ability to clearly see the world.