Rereading the 1890s: Venereal Disease as “Constitutional Crisis” in Britain and British India

My tale is an eloquent one, with heroes and villains, crises and angst, passion and fury. What it lacks in resolution it more than makes up for in dramatic tension. It is a story set in Britain and India in the 1890s, a time of intense polarities. This was the decade in which Oscar Wilde, Britain's most lionized playwright, was imprisoned for homosexuality; in which the spark of “new unionism” flared and then fizzled; in which Britain competed in the “scramble for Africa,” adding new colonial possessions to its already ample stockpile. It was the decade of imperial budgets, of mounting tension in South Africa, of the call for tariff reform, of the “new Woman,” and of that curious political hybrid, Liberal-Unionism.