Editorial Leonard Woolf in Ceylon 1904–1911

Abstract

It should surprise no one that Leonard Woolf titled the second volume of his five-volume autobiography, Growing. This is the volume that covers the seven years Woolf spent as a British civil servant in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), and in those seven years he not only grew in years and experience, but significantly outgrew the assumptions about Britain and its Empire with which he had confidently embarked from Tilbury Docks on the P. & O. Syria in October 1904, taking with him into an unknown, exotic, tropical world his ninety volumes of Voltaire, three bright green flannel collars, and a wire-haired fox-terrier named Charles to assist him in his task of helping to rule the British Empire. “The complete selfconfidence of the British imperialist”, Woolf was to write later of his years in Ceylon, “was really rather strange”. While on leave in England in 1912, Woolf took the “icy plunge” back into his old life, re-entering the circle of his Cambridge friends, and eventually marrying Virginia Stephen. But although the old life might have seemed familiar at first, it was not the same. The world had changed, and so had Woolf. His seven years as a servant of imperialism had disillusioned him about many concepts that he had never questioned in 1904: imperialism, for instance, and even the nature of civilization itself: