China in Early Romantic Periodicals

ABSTRACT

This essay is concerned with the understanding of China expressed through the wider periodical press. It shows that coverage of work relating to the rest of the world was substantial in the period, pointing out that the role of the periodical in mediating current knowledge about the globe has been substantially overlooked. The essay looks at the broader understanding of China in the period by looking at the representation of the Macartney embassy in a series of periodicals beyond the Quarterly and Edinburgh that have so far dominated our critical purview. Concentrating on reviews of Sir George Staunton's official Authentic Account (1797) of the Macartney Embassy of 1792–1794 and the spectrum of viewpoints it produced, it demonstrates the fluidity and ambivalence of periodical responses to China and the embassy and concludes that it would be wrong to assume that by the end of the eighteenth century, the ideological debate about China was settled.

Notes

1. A recent exception to this general neglect of the periodical representation of China in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is the unpublished MA dissertation of Collins. Collins looks at “close to 400 articles on China from sixty-nine different journals” (4) and I shall refer to his extensive study on occasion throughout this article.

2. For an exhaustive, revisionary interpretative account of the Macartney mission, see Hevia, passim.

3. Only when China had become engaged in an extended and unequal battle with the forces of British imperialism would British radicalism (in the form of Chartism) extend its sympathies (Collins 33).

4. I discuss Francis Jeffrey's influential representation of China in Christie.