“The Chinese have a great history, a past which they love and revere, and notwithstanding the contempt in which they are held by more warlike Europeans, they possess all the elements of a great people” (p. 168). So proclaims William Dalton's The Wasps of the Ocean (1864), one of the texts that Shih-Wen Chen uses in Representations of China in British Children's Fiction to explore the myriad, sometimes contradictory ways that children's literature educated young Victorians about China. Easy to read and compellingly written, Chen's monograph covers key episodes in the Sino-British relationship from 1851 to 1911, with chapters on the first wave of writers after the establishment of the treaty port system, a late-nineteenth serial series featuring Britain's first Chinese detective, the Taiping Rebellion, and the Boxer Uprising.

The book's strength lies in its consistent recognition that British knowledge about China and the Chinese during the nineteenth century was “polyphonic” (p. 16) and that children's literature as a genre gave authors a chance to employ less standardized modes of representing them. Thus, however static overall British understandings of the Chinese might have been, fiction aimed at young people had more wiggle room to portray them favorably or at least more ambiguously. Throughout, Chen is attentive to the authors' investment in Christianity and its relationship to the didactic function of children's literature. Her chapter “Heroes and Hostile Hordes,” for example, views adventures like Bessie Marchant's 1901 Among Hostile Hordes as indicative of “deepening anxiety about the distortion of Christian knowledge by the Chinese” at the fin de siècle (p. 125). Chen also rightly characterizes Marchant's rewriting of the Taiping Rebellion as a Boxer narrative, especially in its descriptions of anti-foreign antagonism.

In general terms, Representations of China in British Children's Fiction accurately emphasizes how Chen's material reflects various shifts in the ways in which the British viewed the Chinese, resulting, for instance, in more negative depictions from the 1890s onwards (p. 127). Sometimes, however, she seems on more tenuous ground. In a world where readers often could not grasp the distinction between the Manchus and the Han, her speculation that Dalton might have chosen to make the protagonist of The Wolf Boy of China (1857) half-Miao “because his audience knew relatively little about the Miao, but may have had negative stereotypical ideas of the Chinese entrenched in their minds” (p. 39) is intriguing. On the one hand, British audiences, especially juveniles in the early period after the Treaty of Nanking (1842), would have been more likely to amalgamate the Chinese and make no distinction between different linguistic and ethnic groups. On the other hand, the fact that Dalton does comment on the protagonist's ethnic background bolsters her argument that mid-century writers—if not readers—drew heavily on a standard set of works about China and saw didacticism as central to their role.

More problematic is the treatment of miscegenation. Here, Chen praises The Wolf Boy of China for not endorsing “widely held stereotypes about ‘worst qualities’ and instead [emphasizing] positive qualities and strengths” (p. 40). Scientific racism was just starting in the 1850s, however, and many of the late-century injunctions against mixing were not yet hegemonic. Moreover, although Chen notes some of the scholarship about the conflict known to the Victorians as the Indian Mutiny of 1857, better historicizing would have helped her to see that Dalton's novel was published on the cusp of a radical reorganization of imperial sexual regulation. Such reorganization is probably also a key reason why Dalton's sequel The Wasps of the Ocean erases many of the protagonist's Chinese traits. A larger weakness of the book, then, is its failure to explore how representations of China were integrally tied to Britain's geopolitical activities elsewhere in Asia.

Representations of China in British Children's Fiction devotes a whole chapter to E. Harcourt Burrage's Ching-Ching, the protagonist of an extraordinary set of late nineteenth-century “penny dreadfuls” about a Chinese sailor turned British detective. Chen performs welcome work in recovering this little-known but extremely popular character and in putting popular literature at the heart of her study. She offers a solid analysis of how this trickster figure resists many late nineteenth-century stereotypes about Chinese men, including their cunning, savagery, and effeminacy. But she sets up a bit of a straw man here—and throughout the book—when she makes statements such as the following: “Ching-Ching's transformation from an outlandish globetrotter to a serious intelligent detective residing in England also challenges the idea of the image of the Other as fixed and unchanging” (p. 91). More than thirty-five years after the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), only the crudest critic would continue to entertain such a notion. A better sense of geopolitics also would have improved the discussion of black characters. The chapter would have benefited from more discussion of the abolition movement and a fuller recognition of the way in which Ching-Ching's mobility partly depends on the less fluid position of “Sambo” characters like Samson.

In her conclusion, Chen accuses other critics of “skim[ming] through the large corpus of children's texts on China before concluding that they overwhelmingly reflect imperialist tendencies and racial essentialism of the age. . . . This has led to an obscuring of the nuances of British writing on China for children” (p. 160). As the title Representations of China in British Children's Fiction, 1851–1911 suggests, however, Chen does not always achieve her goal of elucidating such complexity. The book opens up an important vista on Sino-British relations through its steadfast engagement with popular culture and its insistence on the centrality of children's literature to Britain's worldview and sense of self. Yet Chen could be more aware of the fact that representations have a dynamism of their own.