Books about the impact of Buddhism in the West in the late nineteenth century are not entirely unknown: Jeffrey Franklin acknowledges at the outset the studies of Philip Almond and Donald Lopez and also makes good use of Guy Welbon and Roger-Pol Droit. But the tendency has been to chart either the rise of the academic understanding of Buddhism or the construction by European thinkers of Buddhism as a nihilistic “Other,” a creed answering as much to the fears as to the hopes of the age. Franklin maps out by contrast less explored territory, treated only in a scattering of journal articles, namely, the diffusion of notions derived from Buddhism to a wider readership through the writings of some of the major literary figures of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. He is naturally interested in the degree to which these notions were distorted, for plainly the process whereby diffusion entailed distortion—or not—is one that is both difficult to grasp yet surely important if we are to understand the major shifts in religious outlook that followed in the twentieth century.

The opening chapter concerns Sir Edwin Arnold and his best-selling life of the Buddha, The Light of Asia, a presentation of its subject as a protestant reformer of Indian religion whose more disturbing ideas are transmuted into something palatable enough for contemporary tastes. Franklin contrasts this with another verse biography by Richard Phillips. This was much less successful—Arnold's poem continued to stimulate interest in Buddhism long after its publication in 1879—but does yield points of interest. Thus, the idea that the Buddha deliberately invented his religion for humanity (41–42) neatly turns aside the long-established missionary criticism still (as Droit shows) current in the late nineteenth century in which the Buddha was castigated as an amoral father of heartless lies. A second chapter deals with late Victorian hybrid religions, mainly the Theosophy of Madame Blavatsky, since this strange but intoxicating mixture of religious knowledge—only partially derived from Buddhist sources—was the main vehicle whereby a wider circle of writers became acquainted with Buddhist concepts. But Theosophists found these by no means all suitable for propagation as part of their own beliefs, and Franklin is meticulous in trying to describe what came across and what did not. This means relegating some important issues, such as the Theosophist position on the supposed hierarchy of spiritual attainment of different races, to footnotes, as on page 229, notes 42 and 48, where he balances the good work of Annie Besant in supporting anticolonialism in India against other strains in Theosophy. There was certainly a strong tendency among Theosophist translators to assign no value whatsoever to contemporary Asian understandings of early Asian religious literature, especially by comparison with the supposed religious acumen of Western experts like themselves. This may explain the penchant of some later writers like H. Rider Haggard and Guy Boothby (cited, but omitted from Franklin's bibliography) to include in imagined Tibetan monasteries wherein ancient wisdom was supposed to have been preserved figures who are not even Asian, let alone Tibetan.

Rider Haggard and Marie Corelli occupy the next chapter, wherein their complex if not somewhat confused depictions of reincarnation—deriving, as Franklin again is at pains to show, from a number of different models—are probed for Buddhist resonances. Given the remarkably wide readership that their novels enjoyed, the degree to which these self-professed Christian authors were already departing from earlier orthodoxy in the direction of Asian religious thought is for all the ambiguities of their works well worth bringing to scholarly attention. But the jewel in the crown for this book is surely its reading of the one novel of the period that has a Tibetan lama as a hero, and that is Rudyard Kipling's Kim. The preceding chapters turn out to have been an excellent introduction to this exercise in that it becomes possible to discuss succinctly issues such as why despite Kipling's considerable understanding of Buddhism he was obliged (probably with his less well-informed readership in mind) to depict the lama's great Quest as looking for a river that will “wash away sin,” rather than bad karma, as a contemporary author might more accurately say. But when the chapter turns to a broader Buddhist reading reconciling the two themes of the Quest and the Great Game of espionage that run in counterpoint throughout the novel, Franklin both departs from any perspective that would have been available in the early twentieth century and thereby neglects to give a close examination to the final paragraphs of the novel, in which the lama renounces absorption into the Great Soul in order to secure Kim's salvation—good Buddhist ethics, but rather more questionable metaphysics, which surely required as close a scrutiny as that devoted to the disguised role of karma.

Even so, and despite the more tentative nature of a final chapter taking the story of Buddhist influence on to D. H. Lawrence, enough has been achieved by this point to show that the role of Buddhism, understood and misunderstood, is an aspect of the British literature of the period that demands serious study. One fears that this book will not be well reviewed by scholars in the field of Buddhist studies, who generally do not like to be told that E. J. Eitel was Boden Professor of Sanskrit (7) or that Eugene Burnouf worked in the Ceylon Civil service (9), nor to be confronted almost consistently with a garbled Sanskrit title for the text translated as the Questions of King Milinda. But such mishaps should certainly not distract more lenient readers from learning a great deal that is both novel and important from Franklin's research.