The subject of British cultural relations with China is one that has attracted and is attracting a great deal of critical attention. Ross Forman's China and the Victorian Imagination is one of a number of important new studies that problematizes our accepted notions of British understandings of the Qing Empire during the nineteenth century and demonstrates the complexity of the processes of those understandings, or “how the Victorians imagined China and their place in it.” Forman wisely does not promise a comprehensive survey of the Victorian response to China, and there are many influential economic readings of China, for instance by J. S. Mill, that are not revisited. Indeed, the works that Forman features are frequently unfamiliar, rather than the more canonical discussions of China. Forman focuses on Anglophone representations of China and does not discuss how Chinese people responded to British fiction about them or the role of translation. Overall, the study seeks to “pluralize” both China and the ways that Chinese people were represented in the period.
Forman focuses on several key areas of this interrelationship. Moving away from binary treatments of Sino-British relations, Forman prefers his informing metaphor of “empires entwined” as a conceptual framework for his thesis. He argues that one of the versions of Victorian imaginings of China was as part of a global imperial network, an “entwined” but differentiated system. The use of “entwined” thus implies symbiosis or parasitism, transcultural agency, as well as “twinning” or doubling, emphasizing multiple, interrelated, and mutually constitutive notions of agency with the sense of China as a crucial, perhaps even the crucial, other for Victorian Britons. Forman expands Orientalism's purview, extending it east and viewing imperialism as a complicated network of imperial ventures. Eschewing the more familiar emphasis on opium-related literature, especially De Quincey, Dickens, and Wilde, already extensively discussed by critics such as Elizabeth Chang, Forman's study is most innovative in its serious treatment of the publishing of books in English about East Asia and the ways in which Britons living abroad, in Hong Kong, and elsewhere viewed their relationship to empire and home. Local productions thus proved to be more self-aware than those of the metropolis, and, perhaps surprisingly, away from the charmed trinity of De Quincey, Dickens, and Wilde, the subject of opium and the opium trade appears not to be as urgent a concern for Victorians, at least in the discourse of literary consumption. The voluminous accounts of missionaries, traders, and travelers to China do not form part of the remit of China and the Victorian Imagination, which concentrates primarily on novels, short stories, and dramas by a range of writers.
The key areas discussed are narratives about China and the Chinese set in China, works that present anxieties about Chinese invasion or reverse colonization (the “Yellow Peril”), and texts about Chinese people and subjects in London. The most original element of the book is Forman's impressive researching and discussion of English-language literary production in the treaty ports themselves, notably Hong Kong and Shanghai, about life and its frustrations there. These texts were published either in the imperial metropolitan centers of London and Edinburgh, or by locally based publication houses in China with a defined local audience in mind. Studying these texts, Forman finds that they tend not to validate contemporary notions of “hybridity,” and those relationships between British men and local women (and sometimes vice versa) are viewed in largely positive ways. Xenophobia is present, however, but more in the metropolitan narratives of the Boxer Rebellion and the “Yellow Peril” invasion tales and is frequently mutual.
Covering the period from c. 1840 to 1911, China and the Victorian Imagination very much concerns the impact of the new treaty port system established by the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 and the contribution it made to understandings of China now that substantial numbers of British were resident and working in this “informal empire.” This system produced numerous writers, such as Julian Croskey, Lise Boehm, William A. Rivers, and “Dolly.” Forman marks out this new critical terrain, demonstrating how for these writers the marginal space they inhabit becomes a locus for cruelty, murder, betrayal, and the occult, equally dangerous for British and Chinese alike. Typical of this kind of writing is Croskey's “detective novel” The Chest of Opium (1896). Forman also champions the imperial maritime writings of James Dalziel about Hong Kong as an “unknown ‘Joseph Conrad’” and his representation of the sexual relations between the Cantonese and British. Forman provides a fascinating discussion of metropolitan fiction accounts of the Boxer Rebellion (1900) before turning to the more familiar area of the “Yellow Peril” and the invasion fiction of M. P. Shiel, William Carlton Dawe, Sax Rohmer, and others. Both kinds of fiction explore anxieties and threats arising from the prospective of a modernized, if not Westernized, China and its potential to dominate the globe. The study also contains an extremely valuable discussion of China on the Victorian and Edwardian stage and how this is affected by political events, notably the two opium wars. Finally, it offers a valuable concluding discussion of fiction about the Chinese community in Britain at this time, in particular the fiction of Thomas Burke and the “symbiotic” relationships established between the British and Chinese in London, the imperial metropolis.
Overall, Forman's examination of the cultural entwining of Victorian and Qing empires is a most valuable addition to the steadily growing corpus of criticism about Britain and China in the nineteenth century, taking the reader forward into some new and exciting areas of critical debate while revisiting others with fresh insights.
