Media Portrayals and Legacy
Charlton Heston played Gordon in the 1966 epic film Khartoum, which deals with the siege.
Gordon's heroics have also been drawn on in the 2005 novel The Triumph of the Sun by Wilbur Smith.
The 2008 novel After Omdurman by John Ferry deals with the reconquest of the Sudan and highlights how the Anglo-Egyptian army was driven to avenge Gordon's death.
Many biographies have been written of Gordon, most of them of a highly hagiographic nature. By contrast, Gordon is one of the four subjects discussed critically in Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey, one of the first texts about Gordon that portrays some of his (supposed) weaknesses. Another attempt to debunk Gordon was Anthony Nutting's Gordon, Martyr & Misfit (1966). In his "Mission to Khartum - The Apotheosis of General Gordon" (1969) John Marlowe portrays Gordon as "a colourful eccentric - a soldier of fortune, a skilled guerrilla leader, a religious crank, a minor philanthropist, a gadfly buzzing about on the outskirts of public life" who would have been no more than a footnote in today's history books, had it not been for "his mission to Khartoum and the manner of his death" which were elevated by the media "into a kind of contemporary Passion Play". More balanced biographies are Charley Gordon - An Eminent Victorian Reassessed (1978) by Charles Chenevix Trench and Gordon - the Man Behind the Legend (1988) by John Pollock.
In Khartoum - The Ultimate Imperial Adventure (2005), Michael Asher puts Gordon's works in the Sudan in a broad context. Asher concludes: "He did not save the country from invasion or disaster, but among the British heroes of all ages, there is perhaps no other who stands out so prominently as an individualist, a man ready to die for his principles. Here was one man among men who did not do what he was told, but what he believed to be right. In a world moving inexorably towards conformity, it would be well to remember Gordon of Khartoum."
Read more about this topic: Charles George Gordon
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