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The Columbia History of the American NovelPopular at a time of heightened militarism and the movement of "muscular Christianity," Ben-Hur highlights virile body-building in the service of a spiritual global empire. The book also would have appealed to interest in the origins of slavery, as well as to curiosity about the exotic distant ancestors of more recent Italian and Jewish immigrants, ancestors who were superseded by the Christian civilization to which Ben-Hur finally converts as an apostle. Lew Wallace, a veteran of the Mexican W ar, a Union general in the Civil War, and governor of the territory of New Mexico, lived a career that followed the Westward Course of Empire. His first popular historical novel, The Fair God (1873), treated the Spanish conquest of Mexico (a la Prescott), a lens through which he would view the Christian conquest of Rome. No wonder President James Garfield appointed him minister to Turkey as an expert on "the East." -258- In the courts of Constantinople, Lew Wallace lived the life a younger writer, Richard Harding Davis, was famous for writing about in his novels of high society and colonial adventures ...» |
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