The Death of a Civil Servant

Before he became the husband of Adeline Virginia Stephen—later a novelist of some considerable reputation—Leonard Woolf was a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service. At Cambridge, Woolf had been a member of the Apostles, the exclusive secret society that also included John Maynard Keynes and the philosopher G. E. Moore. But he didn’t graduate from Cambridge with any particular distinction, and unlike his peers he didn’t have very much money: he was one of nine children, and his father, a Queen’s Counsel, had died when he was eleven, of tuberculosis and workaholism. Woolf couldn’t afford to read for the bar himself—the registration fee alone was forty pounds—and he wasn’t especially confident that, as a Jew and an atheist, he was cut out for school teaching, which would have been the other conventional option. So in 1904 he took the British civil service examination. He placed sixty-ninth out of ninety-nine.

That wasn’t good. But it was good enough to get him a second-rate position: an Eastern Cadetship in the Colonial Service. He packed up his clothes and the complete works of Voltaire in ninety volumes and steamed off over the horizon, bound for Colombo, then the capital of Ceylon, aboard the SS Syria of the P&O line. The journey would take a month. Because the P&O line wouldn’t carry dogs, Woolf’s faithful wire-haired terrier, Charles, had to come by a separate boat.

At twenty-four, Woolf was both world-wearily cosmopolitan and touchingly innocent. As was the fashion among the Apostles, he was a misanthrope and a committed cynic—his personal motto was “Nothing matters.” He was proud and touchy and sharp-tongued. He was also exceptionally brilliant; by the time he was a senior in high school he was already a first-rate classicist. (His poor showing in the civil service exam was the result of spotty preparation, not a lack of brainpower.) But Woolf was also a virgin who had never traveled farther from home than northern France. He was nowhere near as jaded as he liked to pretend. Fifty-five years later he would write in his second volume of autobiography, Growing, that when he waved good-bye to his mother and sister on the London docks that morning, it felt like a second birth.

Ceylon was a giant step forward into adulthood and independence for Woolf, but it was also a great leap backward—backward in time. Ceylon had yet to enter the twentieth century, at least as it was known in the Western world. “Before the days of the motor-car,” Woolf wrote, “Colombo was a real Eastern city, swarming with human beings and flies, the streets full of flitting rickshas and creaking bullock carts, hot and heavy with the complicated...