Kitty and the Prince: A Victorian Tragedy - Hardcover

SHEPHARD, Ben

9781861975102: Kitty and the Prince: A Victorian Tragedy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1861975104 ISBN 13: 9781861975102

Publisher: Profile Books, 2003

The story of the love affair between Kitty Jewell and Prince Lobengula. A heart-breaking tale, a real mystery, and a window into Victorian attitudes to race, the beginnings of tabloid journalism, and feminism, in the 1890s. In short, a true story that has everything. In 1899, a South African showman chartered a liner and filled it with two hundred Africans, countless wild animals and a man who claimed to be the son of the Matabele king, Lobengula. He brought all these ingredients together at Earl's Court in London, in a show called 'Savage South Africa', which combined thrilling re-enactments of the Matabele Wars of the 1890s and a 'Kaffir Kraal', where the British public could wander among Africans in their natural setting. At first all went well. Then Prince Lobengula, the star of the show, caused a scandal by marrying Kitty Jewell, a pretty, respectable Cornish girl, 'There is something inexpressibly disgusting in the idea of the mating of a white girl with a dusky savage,' declared the Evening News. Kitty and the Prince tells of their doomed romance, of the taboos it broke and of what happened to both of them in Africa, London and Salford.

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About the Author:

Ben Shephard grew up in South Africa, and has made numerous documentaries for British television. His history of military psychiatry, A War of Nerves (Jonathan Cape and Harvard) was hailed as 'enthralling' and 'combining the skill of a thriller-writer with the assiduous pride of the historian'.

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