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Reviewed by:
  • Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851–1911 by Shih-Wen Chen, and: Colonial India in Children’s Literature by Supriya Goswami
  • John McBratney (bio)
Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851–1911, by Shih-Wen Chen; pp. xiv + 203. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013, £60.00, $109.95.
Colonial India in Children’s Literature, by Supriya Goswami; pp. xvi + 197. New York and London: Routledge, 2012, $140.00, £85.00.

These two monographs, by Shih-Wen Chen and Supriya Goswami, join a large and ever-increasing corpus of criticism about children’s literature set in the nineteenthand early twentieth-century British Empire. What distinguishes them most readily from other works in this field is their sharp focus on a particular geographical area: China in Chen’s book and India in Goswami’s. Chen’s focus is particularly welcome. As critics like Ross G. Forman have pointed out, the British Empire in China has been a neglected stepchild in colonial studies, receiving less scholarly attention than the Empire in India and in Africa. Chen’s monograph helps to remedy this neglect, particularly with regard to British children’s and young adult literature. Although Goswami’s focus on India is not in itself innovative, her decision to examine together two different and ideologically opposed literatures from the Indian subcontinent—nineteenth-century British colonial literature for children and early twentieth-century Bengali literature for children—is original.

Chen’s study analyzes, in admirable detail, the ways in which British children’s fiction from 1851 to 1911 “disseminated and popularized ‘knowledge’ of China through various discourses about ‘the Chinese’” (2). Given the widely diverse discourses upon which these fictional works drew, she sees these works—by Anne Bowman, William Dalton, E. Harcourt Burrage, Samuel Mossman, Bessie Marchant, G. A. Henty, and Charles Gilson—as “polyphonic” (16). In her desire to assert the heterogeneity of British representations of the Chinese, she dissents sharply from what she sees as a tendency endemic to postcolonial studies as influenced by Edward Said: a readiness to find in British depictions of the ethnic other “an ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ mentality” in which the “Orient” is “constructed . . . as uniform, backward, inferior, fixed, and unchanging,” in contrast to the progressive, superior, civilized West (10). [End Page 151]

Chen proves this thesis with mixed results. Her strongest chapter—her study of Burrage’s “‘Immortal’ Ching-Ching”—combines deep, assiduous research with sharp-eyed, sympathetic analysis in tracing the development of a popular boys’ adventure hero from “comic trickster” to “brilliant detective” (51). Although certain aspects of Ching-Ching’s characterization—his awkwardly rendered pidgin English and his resemblance to Charlie Chan—complicate her claims, Chen succeeds in proving how skillfully Burrage’s creation eludes negative stereotypes of the Chinese. In other chapters, however, her analysis seems over-eager to prove the frequency with which racist depictions of the Chinese were revised or undone in the texts she studies. In her conclusion, she writes, “To varying degrees, the authors examined in this book wrote with a desire for their child readers to put on the mantle of power with the knowledge about China they acquired from the stories” (163–64). Yet it is precisely this “mantle of power”—the vestment of imperial power that British and (later) American juvenile readers assumed as the sons and daughters of empire—that this study neglects to inspect closely. With this neglect comes an occasional blindness to the ways in which imperial power also invests the delineation of Chinese characters by their British authors. In discussing Lyu Payo (also called Herbert Richardson), the half-English, half-Miao hero of Dalton’s The Wolf Boy of China (1857) and The Wasps of the Ocean (1864), Chen dissects his ethnic hybridity fully and sensitively; however, she might have probed more deeply the protagonist’s ultimate decision to settle in England and to emphasize the English side of his identity. And when, in her treatment of Henty’s With the Allies to Pekin (1903), she argues that the bond between the strong, intelligent servant Ah Lo and his young master, Rex Bateman, “transcends the boundaries of a traditional master-servant relationship” (140), she...

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