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"Ah, my nineteenth-century friend, your father stole me from the land of my birth, and from the resting place the gods decreed for me; but beware, for retribution is pursuing you, and is even now close upon your heels." -Guy Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian, 1899
What of this piercing of the sands?
What of this union of the seas?
What good or ill from LESSEPS' cut
Eastward and Westward shall proceed?
-"Latest-From the Sphinx," Punch, 57 (27 November 1869), 210
IN 1859 FERDINAND DE LESSEPS began his great endeavour to sunder the isthmus of Suez and connect the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, the Occident with the Orient, simultaneously altering the geography of the earth and irrevocably upsetting the precarious global balance of power. Ten years later the eyes of the world were upon Egypt as the Suez Canal was inaugurated amidst extravagant Franco-Egyptian celebrations in which a glittering cast of international dignitaries participated. That the opening of the canal would be momentous was acknowledged at the time, though the nature of its impact was a matter for speculation, as the question posed above by Punch implies. While its codevelopers France and Egypt pinned great hopes on the canal, Britain was understandably suspicious of an endeavor that could potentially undermine its global imperial dominance-it would bring India nearer, but also make it more vulnerable to rival powers. The inauguration celebrations were thus followed closely in Britain, the journalistic coverage characterised by speculation about the canal's effect on empire, with Punch's verse exemplifying the pessimistic view.1 This nineteenth-century version of the riddle of the Sphinx ponders the likelihood of ensuing profit or loss, war or peace, ominously concluding: "We know what seas the work unites, who knows what sovereigns it divides."2 As political and economic speculation proliferated, popular authors, ever attuned to the chords of societal unease and their pecuniary potential, turned in large numbers to the gothic as a suitable medium for the treatment of fears concerning the consequences of the canal for Britain. And if an answer to Punch's riddle was sought in the libraries of contemporary British popular fiction, the inescapable conclusion would be that grievous ill alone would proceed westward through Lesseps's cut from the land of the Pharaohs to the lands...