As Robert Morton mentions in the book, to confess at the outset that I am also writing a biography of Rutherford Alcock may be permitted and also fairer. From this viewpoint, the life described here is very familiar to me and I enjoy following various stages of his path.
Alcock lived a long and truly varied life (1809–1897). He started as a young, promising surgeon, gradually shifted from practical to bureaucratic work, experienced a drastic change by assuming a post as one of the first China consuls after the Opium War and moving to Asia at the age of 35. He became the first British representative to Japan 15 years later and was then promoted to a minister to China in 1865. After retirement from diplomatic and consular services in 1870, he was active in various honorary positions relating to British external and colonial affairs mainly concerning Asia, as well as back in medical fields until his last days, and was also a prolific contributor to magazines. In addition, his interest in art, especially that of Japan, was notable.
When Morton says that he has “learned a lot about a really diverse range of topics while working on this book” (p. 12), I can sincerely understand this sentiment. At the same time, I am astonished and respect the fact that he accomplished this arduous work within a couple of years of envisioning it; I have been writing on the same person’s life for 20 years and am not yet able to finish it.
I particularly agree with Morton’s comment: “Throughout his life, Alcock would always mix pride in his achievements with laments that were not appreciated and were assailed by the ignorant and malign” (p. 33). He was certainly such a person!
This work is distinctly valuable in aspects relating to Alcock’s family members and also his subordinates at work. Alcock’s father Thomas, first wife Henrietta, second and last wife Lucy, and her children, are amply spotlighted and introduced in detail. Among the subordinates, Pemberton Hodgson, the problematic first consul at Hakodate, also receives notable attention. Alcock’s well-known colleagues Ernest Satow and Algernon Beltram Mitford of course make frequent appearances; not only themselves in the story but their books, diaries, and reports, which talk about Alcock from the side, are the fruit of Morton’s accumulated biographical works, including his 2017 book on Mitford.
Within the narrow diplomatic circle in Asia at the time, these family members and subordinates interacted closely. Alcock’s stepdaughter (Lucy’s daughter) Amy accompanied her parents to Beijing as a teenager when Alcock was posted there in 1865, and that Morton follows how she was popular with young men under Alcock, which eventually shortened Mitford’s career in China and resulted in his early move to Japan, is of particular interest.
Another remarkable element is the minute focus on money throughout this work. Not only Alcock’s income at different stages of his career, including pensions he may have received after retirement from public life (although Morton says that “it is hard to estimate what Alcock’s total income must have been” [p. 266]), but even particulars about the auction to sell off Alcock’s collection of art after his death, provide a distinctive, concrete representation of the individual.
However, the continuing interest in money-related matters seems to have led to a view that Alcock was a person “angling for money for improvements” (p. 212). Morton also relates the fact that Alcock did not often take leave of absence as evidence of this personality. Knowing that he gave up opportunities for leave for the sake of his subordinates and for other official and private reasons, I must say that this speculation was somewhat unfair to him.
Alcock’s excessive dedication to his public duties and sensitivity to different cultures seems not to have attracted the biographer’s attention. His declared love of travelling and the surprisingly relativistic observation of local people’s lives are missing. At the same time, some crucially important issues in which Alcock was engaged, including the formation of Shanghai foreign concession systems or the Tokugawa shogunate’s desperate negotiations for postponement of the opening of additional ports on the Japanese coast, are only scantily mentioned. Perhaps, as a result, this work does not provide a larger picture of the progress of international relations in East Asia at the time.
Remembering that he had various jobs and was also an individual before being a diplomat, that Alcock’s life would embody international affairs of the time may be a biased expectation. Morton’s challenge would have been to shed a different light from being a great pioneer of Great Britain’s Eastern relations on this individual. Although the personality that emerges from this book is somewhat unvenerable compared with the one that is constructed herein, I have had a good opportunity to carefully question my own research results as well as reaffirm the interest of writing a biography from different perspectives.
That said, one final question I must raise as a historian concerns the usage of primary sources. While setting aside the fact that almost no sign of referring to records of the Japan or China side exists, a more basic problem is the “mixed” use of documents from different times; that is, to try to justify a certain situation with descriptions mentioned in dispatches, for instance, from several years or even a decade before or after it. Examples are unfortunately numerous. I am not sure whether such looseness may be effective in any other era, but this would not be possible in this period when things – political environment, relations between concerned agents, or landscape – changed year by year or day by day.
