Context

Context

In terms of the novel's 'literary' context, it is possible to see the novel, and Buchan's work in general, as belonging to a wider tradition of writers, and a wider social and cultural context. After Buchan come the works of writers such as Graham Greene, Leslie Charteris, Peter Chayne and Compton Mackenzie. Prior to Buchan we can see the "influence" of writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Erskine Childers, Joseph Conrad, and writers such as Henty, Ballantyne, Rider Haggard and R.L. Stevenson. Such novelists write novels of espionage, pursuit, spies and secret agents, of individuals beyond tested in some way, through adventures and experience in life "out there", in the Real World. Does the novel remind you of similar novels or novelists? How would you introduce the novel to somebody who hadn't read it but wanted to know what it was like?

	The Thirty-Nine Steps comes at a particular moment in the development of this type of novel. In retrospect it is possible to see three distinct cultural and literary movements in popular fiction, which provide the context for seeing the novel in relief:
(i)	The mutation of the "adventure novel" ("Boys Own") of the late nineteenth century. This is the tradition of writers such as G.A. Henty, Ballantyne, Rider Haggard, R.L. Stevenson. The tradition has been masterfully explored by Martin Green, in his study of Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire, and more recently by the work of Joseph Bristow. Such novels were seen to be character-building tales, which emphasized the role of the energetic and muscular (Christian) male in the great "Gymnasium" of the World, in the service of Queen, Country and Empire. As Martin Green suggests, there are grounds for seeing this tradition of writing as supplying British Imperialism with an energising myth. Furthermore, in terms of these values and the attributes of the central hero (self-resilience, 'Character', 'bravery', 'capacity for action', etc.) it is possible to see the roots of this tradition lying with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, (1719), or perhaps even earlier;
(ii)	emergence of the thriller fiction, particularly as associated with spying and espionage. The tradition continues into the work of writers such as Edgar Wallace, John le Carre and Frederick Forsythe, and initiated by the detective thriller fiction of Edgar Allen Poe and Wilkie Collins. It is significant that, from the turn of the century onwards, there was an increasing degree of interest in novels about espionage and spying, most notably Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands, G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, and, most notable of all, Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (which is concerned with a group of anarchists attempting to blow up Greenwich Observatory). One point which is often made about the rise of the spy/espionage thriller is that it is connected with the emergence of advanced bureaucratic societies, and the creation of a civil service which can administer and protect advanced industrial and imperialist civilisations.
(iii)	Related to this, we can see The Thirty-Nine Steps as one of a number of popular novels of the period which explore the threat of Invasion. The most notable and popular of these was Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands but, as Samuel Hynes demonstrates in The Edwardian Turn of Mind, fears about invasion from the Continent had been a dominant theme in literary and popular culture from 1900 onwards, including Eustace Saves England, about a Boy Scout who valiantly thwarts a continental plot to invade England. A measure of this "invasion sensibility" can be gauged from David French, in his study of Edwardian spy fever: Early in 1909 Le Queux published another book, Spies for the Kaiser. Plotting the Downfall of England. He wrote it with the specific intention of awakening the government and the public to the inadequacies of the British counter-intelligence system. His constant theme was that the east coast and London were swarming with German spies disguised as waiters, barbers, and tourists. They had orders to reconnoitre likely landing beaches, to list the resources of the countryside which might be useful to a hostile army, and to prepare to sabotage telephone, telegraph, and railway lines, bridges and water mains. Almost as soon as the book was published he received a stream of letters telling him of suspicious behaviour of German waiters, barbers and tourists in the vicinity of telephone, telegraph and railway lines, bridges and water-mains on the east coast and near London. The letters presented an almost exact mirror image of his book. He immediately sent them to [Lieutenant Colonel] Edmonds [of military operations counter-intelligence section] who used them to construct a picture of what he supposed was the German intelligence organisation in Britain.

Beyond this we can see the wider patterns of "spy fever" in the Empire-dominated sphere of Edwardian popular culture: youth organisations, music halls, schools, the Empire Day movement and the popular press. The Thirty Nine Steps is but one example of this wider pattern.

Return to The Thirty-Nine Steps

Critical Issues raised by the novel