Anchored by the letters that Sir Robert Hart wrote to three generations of women in a British family associated with the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, Mary Tiffen's book, Friends of Sir Robert Hart, narrates the lives of the Carrall family in China and explores Hart's personal story. Sir Robert Hart (1835–1911) was the renowned inspector general of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service during the second half of the nineteenth century. Until the workshop on Hart and the Customs Service held at Queen's University Belfast in 2003, scholarly interest in Sir Robert Hart and the Customs Service had undeservedly waned in the wake of a China-centered history. This workshop and its published papers complement the herculean task that Hans van de Ven and Robert Bickers undertook in the early 2000s to catalogue and digitize the records of the Customs Service at China's Number Two Historical Archive.Footnote ⁷ Tiffen's contribution to this renewed interest in the Customs Service is to humanize the public Sir Robert Hart, who has been praised for his administrative and diplomatic skills, but criticized for his imperious management of the service.

A specialist in agricultural development, Mary Tiffen is the granddaughter of James Wilcocks Carrall (1849–1902), who worked for Sir Robert Hart at the Chinese Customs Service. Hart befriended Carrall's mother, sister, wife, and daughters—in particular Carrall's daughter Kathleen Carrall Newton (1883–1971), Hart's goddaughter—and exchanged letters with them over more than fifty years. Hart's relationship with the Carralls deepened when James Carrall and his family lived with Hart during the seven months that Carrall served as Hart's private secretary in 1883–84.

Friends of Sir Robert Hart alternates chapters dissecting Hart's personal life with chapters on the Carrall family, quoting extensively from Hart's letters to the Carrall women and providing more abbreviated entries from Hart's diaries and letters to his colleague and confidante in London, James Duncan Campbell. (This chapter structure is awkward, but reflects the bifurcated nature of Tiffen's project.) The book is a rich account of China's expatriate world during the second half of the nineteenth century that depended in no small measure on its women to ameliorate hardships and enliven isolation.

Tiffen presents an image of Sir Robert Hart as a man dedicated to his career, but troubled by the demands of his position. Tiffen argues that Hart's failed marriage; his growing estrangement from his two children, who lived abroad with their mother; his guilt over his three illegitimate children with a Chinese woman before his marriage; and the pressures of his professional position drew him to satisfy his emotional needs by forming attachments with those of his employees' wives and children he found congenial. Hart's letters and diary entries show his appreciation for women as intelligent, witty, and companionable individuals. Husbands and fathers permitted the correspondence and sent daughters on extended visits to Hart in Beijing, where they were entertained with dances, sightseeing excursions, and musical evenings. Countering accounts by former employees that characterize him as domineering and disposed to favoritism in hiring and promotion decisions, Tiffen portrays Hart as a chief who took a personal interest in his subordinates and assessed new hires and staff on their individual merits. In the case of James Carrall, an initial unfavorable opinion turned to appreciation when Carrall acquitted himself well during a tricky situation in 1884 when French troops attacked the port of Fuzhou.

Friends of Sir Robert Hart will appeal to the general reader interested in biographies vivid in historical background and detail. Tiffen's book concentrates on Hart the man, a less familiar topic than his tenure at the Customs Service, but her account of his personal life is in some respects incomplete. For example, she did not consult Hart's letters to his wife that are in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which raises questions about the portrayal of his marriage. Tiffen's claim that Hart suffered a breakdown in 1878–79 after his wife's departure from China with their two children seems overwrought against the evidence she presents for this period from his letters and diary. Another flaw is the rigidity with which she portrays the mores of Victorian society, which validates for her the unusual nature of Hart's friendships with the expatriate women of Canton and Beijing. Victorian society was more fluid than she allows, and she also does not give enough credit to the distance between Britain and China that lessened strictures of class, fortune, and behavior. Tiffen's book is an important reminder to China scholars of the need for a fuller biography of Sir Robert Hart that brings together the many facets of Hart the man and Hart the venerable inspector general.