Peter Kitson

Byron and Post-Colonial Criticism: The Eastern Tales

In recent years Romantic period studies have been transformed by the application of critical approaches deriving from post-colonial critical perspectives to the writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What we describe as the Romantic Movement coincided with the beginnings of a modern British imperialism which involved the governance and exploitation of increasingly large portions of the globe as the nineteenth century wore on. It also involved the conflict with other imperial formations of the time, some expansive and others in decline; European empires such as the French and Russian, and non-European empires such as the Turkish Ottoman Empire and the Qing Empire of China. Romantic writers were not themselves imperialists in the literal sense of the term, though some of them became implicated in the imperial process; Coleridge, for instance, acted as a civil servant for the Governor of Malta, Sir Alexander Ball, and Charles Lamb and Thomas Love Peacock worked for the British East India Company. Many Romantic period writers, the Wordsworths, Coleridge, De Quincey, Austen and so on, had family who were involved in Empire in one way or another, and it certainly impinged on their consciousness as a pressing fact of life. This chapter, however, is concerned with a different sense of imperial involvement.

Coleridge’s Bristol and West Country Radicalism

In the 1790s S. T. Coleridge was a Dissenter in both politics and religion. Numerous critics have discussed the nature of Coleridge’s then Unitarian beliefs, but what has so far insufficiently been highlighted are the ways in which his dissent was fashioned, deepened, and reinforced by the poet’s West Country background, specifically the political and religious milieu of the thriving commercial city of eighteenth-century Bristol and the surrounding area. It was the experience of Bristol and West Country opposition that turned Coleridge from an opponent of the government in politics and an anti-Trinitarian in religion into a Protestant Dissenter more fully immersed in the milieu and history of post-Reformation religious radicalism. Although he had abandoned much of this belief by 1805, his West Country experience had substantial implications for Coleridge’s intellectual and literary career and the formation of what one might term early British Romanticism. The young Coleridge first became acquainted with Bristol, and subsequently its West Country environs, through his friendship with his fellow poet and radical, Robert Southey, who had spent his childhood there (Holmes, 1989, 89–106). Coleridge began his actual residence in the city in January 1795 after Southey had dutifully fetched him back from London to make him live up to his obligations to marry Sara Fricker, whose sister, Edith, Southey was also courting. It was here that Coleridge’s most active and ardent Dissenting days were spent lecturing against the war with revolutionary France, established religion, and the transatlantic slave trade.

Introduction: China and the British Romantic Imagination

The essays in this cluster engage with recent work on British cultural representations of, and exchanges with, Qing China, extending our existing but still provisional understanding of this complex and emerging area of study in new and interesting directions. Although Orientalism as a discursive field has been extensively established in Romanticperiod critical writing for some time, studies of the cultural relationship between Britain and China are still relatively few. This is clearly a situation that is now rapidly changing. As evidence of this we note the 2013 NASSR supernumerary conference held at the University of Tokyo addressing Romantic Connections and featuring work on connections between European Romantic writers and Southeast Asia and vice versa. This cluster attempts to take forward this critical agenda. In the 1980s Romantic criticism experienced a famous “turn to history,” largely focused on British cultural responses to the French Revolution and the debate it created. With the increasing presence of the China on the global stage, imminently about to assume the status of the world’s largest economy, it might now be argued that in the second decade of the twenty-first century our critical focus might be attuned to China and Southeast Asia, and the crucial political and cultural events, among others, that will define this scholarly enquiry will be the first two British embassies to China (Macartney, 1793 and Amherst, 1816), the end of the East India Company’s monopoly of the China trade in 1833, and the outbreak of hostilities leading to the first so-called “Opium War” of 1839–1842, ushering in the period of China’s “century of humiliation” (baˇinián guóchıˇ) from 1839– 1949. The essays in this cluster further the case that Qing China was an important, though highly problematic, referent in the literature and culture of what we know of as the British Romantic period, and that this crucial presence has not been sufficiently addressed. China, as Eric Hayot, David Porter, Chi-ming Yang, Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, and Elizabeth Chang have reminded us was central to the making of modernity and the formation of the modern western self. A. O. Lovejoy, many years ago, put forward the then unusual thesis that one of the origins of Romanticism was located in a Chinese source, the preference for a form of wildness and irregularity in the eighteenth-century British landscape garden. Other scholars of British literature and culture in the long eighteenth century, such as Robert Markley and Ros Ballaster, have addressed such issues placing British cultural responses to China in the context of a dominant sinocentric global economy, up until around 1800. Such criticism has also demonstrated the sustained allure that Chinese commodities, tea, silk, porcelain, furniture, lacquerware, and Chinese designs in gardening and

“The Kindness of my Friends in England”: Chinese Visitors to Britain in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries and Discourses of Friendship and Estrangement

ABSTRACT This essay deals with the presence of Chinese visitors in London from the 1750s onwards. Its focus is on the discourses of hospitality, cosmopolitanism, gift-exchange, and linguistic exchanges that were involved in these seldom discussed encounters between Britons and Chinese. While the dominant and paradigmatic textual encounter of the period remains the meeting of Thomas De Quincey with his uncanny Malay in Grasmere, this should not be regarded as the primal encounter that informs later discussion. Instead this essay deals with a number of “elite” Chinese visitors to London. It describes the ways in which they were, for the most part, welcomed by late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century polite society according to the rituals of rational civility and cosmopolitanism. These cultural exchanges involved the linguistic, music, works of art, botanical, medical, scientific knowledge, and even literature.

‘That mighty Wall, not fabulous/ China’s stupendous mound!’ Romantic Period Accounts of China’s ‘Great Wall’

The case of the Great Wall of China viewed within the larger context of early British understandings of Qing China significantly complicates in interesting ways our understanding of Enlightenment and Romantic period travel writing. This essay discusses the first British encounter with the Great Wall in the accounts of the Macartney embassy of 1792–94. Applying a combination of historical contextualization with aesthetic-materialist understanding of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British travel writing about ‘antique’ monuments, it seeks to articulate the ways in which the Wall became a catalyst in the revelation of the embassy’s assumptions about class, race and other categories. The key point is that Macartney’s embassy allowed Britons physically to view and describe the celebrated Great Wall for the first time in their history and to comment on the significance of the monument in several of the accounts that derived from this event. Julia Lovell, in her recent history of the Great Wall, has claimed that ‘Macartney’s visit marks a crucial episode in the modern history of both China and the Great Wall, his experiences and reactions helping to construct the view of the wall that is still widely, if erroneously, held today.’ For Lovell, Macartney identified two walls, the physical landmark and the mental barrier that the Chinese state constructed to keep out foreign influence.

Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger; Romantic Marginality: Nation and Empire on the Borders of the Page

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