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7 - Travel Writing and the Humanitarian Impulse: Alicia Little in China
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
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7 Travel Writing and the Humanitarian Impulse: Alicia Little in China Susan Schoenbauer Thurin Humanitarianism does not usually spring to mind as the subject of travel writing. In writings about nineteenth-century China, however, and in particular in the writing of Alicia Little, or Mrs. Archibald Little, to use the name under which she published her books and articles about China, it has a prominent position. By humanitarianism I mean efforts undertaken to alleviate the pain and suffering of others; subjects Little addresses in her books about China. Her positive attitude toward China and Chinese women and children in particular, and her work on their behalf, distinguishes her humanitarianism. What this essay attempts to do is examine the motivation for Little’s humanitarianism, how her life in China aroused her humanitarian conscience, and the specific subjects that demanded her attention and action. Two of the standard topics mentioned in nineteenth-century travels in China are missionaries and footbinding — the humanitarians themselves and an issue claiming humanitarian interest. The numerous works about China that missionaries themselves produced are often essentially travel and description books such as Rev. Virgil Hart’s Western China, or those suitable for a shelf on ethnography and anthropology such as Arthur H. Smith’s Chinese Characteristics and Village Life in China, and S. Wells Williams’ The Middle Kingdom. Non-missionary travelers, on the other hand, typically describe visits to missionaries and comment on the cost and value of their work, thus weighing in with evidence from the field to fan the debate back in Great Britain about the role of missionaries in the last decades of the Victorian era. Humanitarian work in the colonial world goes beyond the work of missionaries, however, even as it follows in the wake of historical precedent. Humanitarianism, as used in this essay, is the practical application of altruism, a subject probed variously in philosophy, social psychology, developmental psychology, and evolutionary biology.1 A useful starting point for my discussion is Gertrude 92 Susan Schoenbauer Thurin Himmelfarb’s interpretive history of humanitarianism, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians. Noting the shift from the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century connotation of compassion as a moral sentiment to a political principle and subject of scientific research, Himmelfarb explains that the Victorian idea of poverty as a social problem that could be eradicated differed from the earlier notion of destitution as a condition needing immediate redress. Mayhew’s social exploration and novelists such as Dickens and Disraeli dramatized and popularized the image of the poor, while a large pantheon of reformers such as Booth and Rowntree, and later the theories of those such as the Fabians, contributed to the development of agencies and institutional change aimed at eliminating poverty. The humanitarianism of Alicia Little discussed in this essay incorporates these wide-ranging views of compassion, from making individuals the object of benevolent action to her colorful depiction of those in need of philanthropy, to her portrayal of those engaged in this work, and finally her description of an organized campaign addressing a specific societal need. In the context of travel writing discourse, the analysis of scholars such as Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes develops an interpretation essentially antithetic to the humanitarian impulse. Pratt’s evocative study of “the gaze,” for example, argues that the rhetoric of travel literature exposes the goals of exploitation of peoples and appropriation of riches as an object of the traveler.2 The obverse is that the humanitarian-hearted travel writer such as Alicia Little prefers to describe conditions and cultural practices with an eye to reforming them. Often critical of missionary endeavor per se, she may be seen as a secular missionary, one who aimed to change for the better the culture of those among whom she lived. Her activism in China does not announce itself until 1895, eight years after her arrival there. This long gestation period includes several critical events, as well as being a consequence of her work as a writer, a traveler, and resident of China. Biographical Information The light of Alicia Little has dimmed over the course of a century, but in her own time she was a minor celebrity, significant enough to earn an acerbic description tinged with envy by Gertrude Bell, who met her at a dinner party in Shanghai in 1903. Bell, whose brilliant political work in the Near East would earn her the title of “uncrowned queen of Iraq,” writes to her...