When Henry Worsley died last month attempting the first solo, unaided expedition across the Antarctic, he was 30 miles short of the finish line. He fits right in with a long British tradition of heroic failures: General Gordon killed at Khartoum; the defeat of the British by the Zulus at Isandlwana. And the most precise parallel with Worsley’s tragedy, Captain Scott, who also died in the Antarctic, just 11 miles short of the next food depot.
Stephanie Barczewski, Professor of History at Clemson University in South Carolina, is on to something when she identifies a peculiarly British propensity for glorifying disaster. Where she is crashingly wrong is in her interpretation of the reason why: that it’s all down to the desire to show the British empire in a good light.
According to the professor’s theory, Gordon’s heroic death gave a bene-volent face to the increasing aggression of British imperialism in late-19th-century Africa.
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