Alimentary Orientalism: Britain’s Literary Imagination and the Edible East 9781684484690

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Alimentary Orientalism

TRANSITS LIT­ER­A­TURE, THOUGHT & CULTURE, 1650–1850

Series editors: Miriam Wallace, New College of Florida Mona Narain, Texas Christian University A landmark series in long-­eighteenth-­century studies, Transits publishes monographs and edited volumes that are timely, transformative in their approach, and global in their engagement with arts, lit­er­a­ture, culture, and history. Books in the series have engaged with visual arts, environment, politics, material culture, travel, theater and per­for­mance, embodiment, connections between the natu­ral sciences and medical humanities, writing and book history, sexuality, gender, disability, race, and colonialism from Britain and Eu­rope to the Amer­i­cas, the Far East, the Middle/Near East, Africa, and Oceania. Works that make provocative connections across time, space, geography, or intellectual history, or that develop new modes of critical imagining are particularly welcome. Recent titles in the series: Alimentary Orientalism: Britain’s Literary Imagination and the Edible East Yin Yuan Thomas Holcroft’s Revolutionary Drama: Reception and Afterlives Amy Garnai Families of the Heart: Surrogate Relations in the Eighteenth-­Century British Novel Ann Campbell Eighteenth-­Century Environmental Humanities Jeremy Chow, ed. Po­liti­cal Affairs of the Heart: Female Travel Writers, the Sentimental Travelogue, and Revolution, 1775–1800 Linda Van Netten Blimke The Limits of Familiarity: Authorship and Romantic Readers Lindsey Eckert “Robinson Crusoe” a­ fter 300 Years Andreas K. E. Mueller and Glynis Ridley, eds. For more information about the series, please visit www​.­bucknelluniversitypress​.­org.

Alimentary Orientalism B R ITAIN’S L ITE RARY IM AG INATION A ND T H E E D IB L E E AST

YIN YUAN

L E W I S B U R G , P E N N SY LVA N I A

​978-1-68448-467-6 (cloth) 978-1-68448-466-9 (paper) 978-1-68448-468-3 (epub) 978-1-68448-469-0 (web PDF) Cataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of Congress. LCCN 2022041603 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2023 by Yin Yuan All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-­Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) ­were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Bucknell University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­ Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. bucknelluniversitypress​.­org Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press

​For Baba, Mama, and Gugu

CO N T E N TS

Introduction: Exotic Ingestion and Self-­Reflexive Orientalism in Long-­Eighteenth-­C entury Britain

1

1

Virtuous Leaf, “Intoxicating Liquor”: ­ Britain’s Tea Talk (A Prelude on Tea)

2

“Eating Only What I Knew”: Exotic Consumerism and the Bound­a ries of Selfhood in The Citizen of the World and Vathek 36

3

Cups, Cures, and Curses: The Elusiveness of Cultural Identity in Lalla Rookh and The Talisman 59

4

The Exotic Self: De Quincey’s Opium Texts and Lamb’s Chinese Essays

5

“Barbarian Eye”: The Opium Wars as a Visual Proj­ect (An Interlude on Opium)

6

“Not the Track of the Time”: Antiquated Orientalism in Villette and ­Little Dorrit 146

25

98 133

Afterword: The Inadequate Language of Contagion

186

Acknowl­edgments

195

Notes 197 Bibliography 239 Index 261

Alimentary Orientalism

INTRODUCTION E xoti c I n g e s ti o n a n d S e lf- ­R ef l exive O ri e nt a li s m i n Lo n g -­E ig hte e nth - ­C e ntu r y B rit a i n

T

H I S B O O K T R AC E S T H E E D I B L E ­T H I N G S that moved from Eastern shores into Britain’s consuming bodies, domestic spaces, and narrative cir­cuits. My focus is on how this last narrative (that is, symbolic) phase generated a self-­ reflexive framework through which the British public interpreted the significance of how, what, and why they consumed. I begin with three scenes of exotic eating from Byron’s Don Juan. Together, they introduce the broad concerns of my study: the function of exotic foods in the construction of a material Orient within eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century Britain; the ironic exposure, in literary repre­sen­ta­tions, of the gap between trope and ­t hing; and the understated role of tea even in narrative moments that do not seem much to be about tea at all.

SCENE 1: THE GREEK DINNER

Midway through the second canto of Don Juan, Byron’s Spanish protagonist ends up shipwrecked on a Greek island, but he soon finds himself reconciled to the Eastern way of life. In the next canto, Juan showcases his successful cultural conversion by presiding over an opulent Oriental banquet alongside Haidée, his Greek lover and heiress to the island: The dinner made about a hundred dishes: Lamb and pistachio nuts, in short, all meats And saffron soups and sweetbreads; and the fishes ­Were of the finest that e’er flounced in nets, Drest to a Sybarite’s most pampered wishes. The beverage was vari­ous sherbets [1]

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Of raisin, orange, and pomegranate juice, Squeezed through the rind, which makes it best for use. ­ ese ­were ranged round, each in its crystal ewer, Th And fruits and date bread loaves closed the repast, And Mocha’s berry from Arabia pure, In small fine China cups came in at last, Gold cups of filigree made to secure The hand from burning under­neath them placed. Cloves, cinnamon, and saffron too ­were boiled Up with the coffee, which (I think) they spoiled.1

Oriental de­cadence is reflected in the “pampered” appetite for richly flavored foods: tangy “juice[s],” spiced “saffron soups,” and “meats” not plain but garnished with “pistachio nuts.” Denouncing gustatory plea­sure as a scandalously “Sybarite” propensity ­toward sensuous excess (“about a hundred dishes”), the text seems to invite the self-­righteous scorn of its British readers, who, unlike Juan, would surely not succumb to such debauched desires. But of course the passage actually works by whetting the appetite of ­these very readers, who in fact ­angle for a taste of the exotic to spice up their other­wise pedestrian lives.2 In this way, Byron’s enumeration of culturally specific articles of diet—­including “pistachio nuts,” “coffee,” “date[s],” “sherbets” prepared from “raisin[s], orange[s], and pomegranate[s],” and spices such as “cloves, cinnamon, and saffron,” all items that also appear in “Orientaliana,” Robert Southey’s aptly titled encyclopedia of Eastern subject ­matter—­crafts for its readers an immersive experience of the Orient.3 The piquancy of exotic foods titillates the nose and taste buds to conjure up the East as readily available and readily edible. The device of the epic cata­log instantiates a partly thrilling, partly threatening excess, as each additional item on the menu further proves not just the insatiability of Oriental appetite but also Eu­rope’s insatiable appetite for the Orient. In his descriptive accumulation of ingestible substances and aromas, Byron is drawing on a well-­established Eastern trope pop­u­lar­ized by the Arabian Nights story cycle, whose translation first into French and then into En­glish helped consolidate a par­tic­u­lar Orientalist “style” and “repertoire.” 4 One inset narrative in the Arabian Nights, for instance, opens with a key character, Amine, visiting first a “fruit-­shop, where she bought several sorts of apples, apricots, peaches, quinces, lemons, citrons, oranges, myrtles, sweet basil, lilies, jessamine, and some other sorts of flowers and plants that smell well,” then “another shop, [where] she took capers, cucumbers, and other herbs preserved in vinegar,” then “another shop, [where] she bought pistachios, walnuts, small nuts, almonds, kernels of pine apples, and such other fruits; and of another [where] she bought all sorts of confections,” and fi­nally [2]

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“a druggist, where she furnished herself with all manner of sweet scented ­waters, cloves, musk, pepper, ginger, and a ­great piece of ambergris, and several other Indian spices.”5 Along with other tropes (extravagant trea­sures stowed away in secret places, for instance, as well as the prevalence of magic and enchantment), this accumulation of material stuff that appeals to the eye, nose, and palate establishes the Orient as a fantastic site of fecundity within the Western imagination. The methodical cata­loging of such stuff, which recurs with enough frequency in the Arabian Nights to constitute a literary device, helps realize that fantastic space by anchoring it in literally consumable ­things. In this regard, British repre­sen­ta­tions that zealously focus on the vari­ous articles of Oriental diet reveal the desire for uninhibited access to the Orient. Remaking the Orient as an ingestible phenomenon materializes the exotic space as an appetizing one that invites and awaits assimilation. Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, for instance, describes in sexually charged language a Persian meal prepared by the “mild,” innocent natives. The traveler receives rice “white as the new-­ fallen snow” while the “damsel [of the f­amily] proffers him her lap of dates”; the “Boy,” who “had pierced the Melon’s pulp,” then “joyfully . . . ​brings / The trea­sure now matured,” pours out “its liquid lusciousness, / And proffers [it] to the guest.” 6 Erotic, exotic, and edible registers converge and enhance each other: desire for the Orient’s seductive juices (its “liquid lusciousness”), which the text traffics in and perversely provokes, gathers into sensuous distinctiveness the other­wise diffuse space of the Arabian desert. The evocative ethnographical description of a Persian feast, which Southey appends to this passage as a footnote, further materializes the other­w ise (and actually) discursive space. Southey’s four-­paragraph extract from Adam Olearius’s Voyages and Travells of the Ambassadors meticulously details “several sorts of meat, boiled and roasted, as beef, mutton, tame fowl, wild ducks, fish, and other ­t hings”; “one-­a nd-­t hirty dishes of silver, filled with several sorts of conserves, dry and liquid, and raw fruits, as melons, citrons, quinces, pears, and some ­others not known in Eu­rope”; as well as the Persian “custom” of garnishing rice with “a l­ittle of the juice of pomegranates, or cherries and saffron, inasmuch that commonly you have rice of several colours in the same dish.” 7 Regaling sight and taste, Persia gains in sensuous materiality through Olearius’s discursive cata­loging of multiple dishes. Authored in German and translated into En­g lish in the mid-­seventeenth ­century, Voyages and Travells represents an early Eu­ro­pean vision of the East as a space of luxurious sustenance—­a vision that would become more widely disseminated by the Arabian Nights and the Oriental tale genre it helped launch, which would in turn shape Southey’s depiction in Thalaba the Destroyer.8 [3]

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Don Juan’s “dinner [that] made about a hundred dishes” draws on this discursive convention in constructing a consumable Orient, but unlike Olearius’s encounter with foods “not known in Eu­rope,” Byron lists items that have significant material presence within his con­temporary Britain. For British readers, Byron’s words gain in efficacy ­because of the familiarity of their referents. Cloves, cinnamon, saffron, raisins, dates, and coffee all appear as articles of Britain’s East Indian trade in Malachy Postlethwayt’s mid-­eighteenth-­century Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce.9 The history of Eu­rope’s romance with spice barely needs rehearsing. Medieval E ­ ngland was besotted with pepper, cloves, cinnamon, saffron, and other Far Eastern seasonings, and the race for control of spice trade routes drove imperial exploration and technological advancements during the early modern era.10 Nuts like almonds and pistachios, as well as dried fruit like dates and raisins, w ­ ere sometimes classified as spices in the M ­ iddle Ages, and in the early modern period t­ hese ­were all common items on an En­glish grocer’s shelves.11 By the seventeenth ­century, however, demand for spices would taper off as ­England found its appetite whetted by a new set of exotic groceries—­tobacco, sugar, coffee, choco­late, and tea—­that established the landscape of modern consumerism.12 Historians have argued that the emergence of a consumer society in eighteenth-­century Britain was connected to the increasing consumption of t­ hese and other Eastern goods, whose exotic associations drove their popularity among the middling ranks.13 As quin­tes­sen­tial expressions of the new (­because they ­were culturally foreign), exotic commodities fulfilled the desire for novelty that Colin Campbell has identified as a distinctive feature of modern consumerism. The “modern consumer,” Campbell argues, “­will desire a novel rather than a familiar product b­ ecause this enables him to believe that its acquisition and use can supply experiences which he has not so far encountered in real­ity.”14 Porcelain, tea, and silk from China; chintz and muslin from India; coffee from the Mediterranean; and lacquerware from Japan all appealed on the strength of their “glamorous provenance” and their “exotic associations,” spurring the middle-­class appetite for luxury and accelerating the development of domestic techniques of mass production and distribution.15 Beyond just bringing the distant near, ­these foreign goods provided crucial materials for the cultivation of new forms of selfhood. British consumers increasingly saw themselves, to borrow Oliver Goldsmith’s apt phrase, as “citizen[s] of the world” whose consumption practices signaled their cosmopolitan sensibility.16 Julie Park argues that the prevalence of exotic commodities provided the En­glish with “an exotic idiom for displaying and constructing the self,” so that “the eighteenth-­ century ‘self’ would be forever tied with ‘the other,’ even as the pro­cess of domestication gradually softened the marks of novelty and exoticism in foreign goods and [4]

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eventually made them a ‘natu­ral’ feature of daily life.”17 Park identifies ­here an imperial exercise in self-­constitution that appropriates cultural otherness as a resource for selfhood. In ­doing so, she finds within eighteenth-­century ­England a nascent technology of identity formation that would become vastly more developed with the globalization of mass culture in our own time. T ­ oday, such commodification of difference proceeds via a violently destructive logic that bell hooks, and Deborah Root a­ fter her, has termed “cannibalistic.”18 In hooks’s stark language, “desire for contact with the Other” is desire to “eat the Other.”19 The meta­phor of ingestion that hooks employs is telling, for it highlights the extent to which exotic ingestion functions as exotic consumerism’s paradigmatic instance and limit case. If exotic commodities provided tantalizing opportunities for British consumers to incorporate into their vision of selfhood “a bit of the Other,” exotic ingestion literalizes that dream of incorporation.20 As the place where self opens up to the outside, the mouth marks the site of the most exhilaratingly intimate of cross-­cultural encounters. It is ­here, as Mikhail Bakhtin observes, that “man tastes the world, introduces it into his body, makes it part of himself.”21 In this regard, Byron’s Juan can be seen as a version of the cosmopolitan Eu­ro­pean consumer who found in the Greek banquet the opportunity to eat his way to a dif­ fer­ent self.22 Denise Gigante, Timothy Morton, Parama Roy, Troy Bickham, Lizzie Collingham, and o­ thers have shed light on the symbolic role that eating plays within the overlapping contexts of Britain’s consumer revolution and imperial expansion.23 The desire to consume the Orient can go so far as to register as literal hunger; the sensuous taste of foreign foods powerfully concretizes exotic encounter by locating it in somatic experience. This may be one reason for the strikingly prominent place that exotic foods occupied within Britain’s burgeoning consumer culture. As Carole Shammas notes, Britain’s mass adoption of exotic groceries—­ including tobacco, sugar, and caffeinated drinks like coffee and tea—­presented “the most striking development in consumer buying” between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries.24 British ­recipes and advertisements during this period not only regularly featured exotic edibles but pointedly played up their foreign associations.25 It is not surprising, then, that exotic foods constituted, in the words of Bickham, “empire’s most ubiquitous symbols.”26 In eighteenth-­century Britain, the Orient’s increasing materialization through its consumable goods necessarily affects how the foreign space is represented within literary texts. Commenting on the relationship between words and ­things, Diego Saglia argues that “Romantic uses of the East are distinguished by an increased repre­sen­ta­tional accuracy and a growing materiality of the orient within an overarching ‘consumer orientalism.’ ”27 Indeed, consumer Orientalism [5]

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would seem to serve literary Orientalism’s efforts to define, restructure, and master the Orient that it describes, since the consumerist backdrop provides a material archive of concrete and knowable (­because readily consumable) t­ hings that anchor and authenticate the text, contributing to its “real­ity effect.”28 Yet the rapid dissemination of exotic t­ hings—­particularly ingestible substances whose traversal of bodily bound­aries stoked excitement even as they provoked anx­i­eties of cross-­cultural contamination—­generated rich and varied discourse that muddied the link between t­ hese substances and their purported lands of origin. If the description of exotic diets provided readers with an immersive experience of the Orient, the controversial reception of recently pop­u­lar­ized foreign groceries complicated the symbolic economy that such Orientalist repre­ sen­ta­tions depended upon. Suggestively, in Byron’s Greek dinner passage, it is coffee (one of t­ hese recent imports) that solicits a parenthetical aside from the narrator, whose cavalier intrusions puncture the real­ity effect of his material Orient. Turning away from the range and arrangement of the vari­ous dishes, “each in its crystal ewer,” to foreground the prob­lem of gustatory taste, the narrator’s sudden, unsolicited opinion regarding how best to drink coffee unravels—­indeed, “spoil[s]”—­the tableau of Oriental de­cadence. For if readers had been losing themselves in the entrancing sensuousness of the detailed and seemingly objective description, the abrupt foregrounding of first-­person subjectivity, typographically underscored through the use of parentheses [(“I think”)], reminds readers that Juan and his experiences are but fictional devices fabricated by the “puppeteer” narrator who, as Leslie A. Marchand has observed, “invited his audience to see the strings as he pulled them.”29 Byron’s metatextual gesture h ­ ere disrupts the other­wise conventionally Orientalist banquet scene, showcasing the extent to which the dinner, a set piece for Eastern de­cadence, is merely so many words masquerading as ­things. Not incidentally, the a­ ctual source for his dinner, as Byron notes in a letter to John Murray, is from Narrative of a Ten Years’ Residence at Tripoli in Africa, an 1816 travel account that purports to “pre­sent a faithful picture of the manners, ideas, and sentiments” not of the Greeks (the subject of this Don Juan canto) but of “the Moors.”30 Just as Juan is impersonating Lambro, the a­ ctual master of the Greek island, by gathering around himself the trappings of Oriental power, Byron is playing at the Orient through the skillful deployment of literary tropes. In confessing his distaste for spiced coffee, the narrator expresses a culturally inflected preference that lifts readers out of the world of Oriental romance and returns them to con­temporary Britain. The focus on coffee brewing ­here alludes to the wealth of eighteenth-­century tracts that interrogated coffee’s uses, effects, and methods of preparation. ­These tracts, which frequently distinguished between [6]

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British and so-­called Eastern modes of consumption, paradoxically reveal the way in which the cultural symbolism of coffee drinking has become significantly re­oriented by domestic consumer practices.31 Initially a foreign commodity whose exoticism attracted some while repulsing ­others, by the eigh­teenth ­century coffee had become assimilated by polite British society due to the symbolic valence of its sites of consumption. Nevertheless, commentators continued to worry about exactly how much and ­under what circumstances coffee should be consumed.32 As Scott Taylor has demonstrated, coffee occupied an “ambivalent” role in Eu­ro­pean society even into the nineteenth ­century.33 The drink’s symbolic indeterminacy discursively interrupts the other­wise essentializing logic of the Greek dinner passage. In a moment of self-­reflexivity, Byron cautions readers against the blunt assignment of cultural meaning to dietary practices, the very sort of assignment that his passage initially depended upon in its description of the “Sybarite’s most pampered wishes.” Notably, this turn to coffee secures the textual transition from dinner dishes to the “Soft Persian sentences” and “oriental writings on the wall” (canto III, 64 and 65) in the two subsequent stanzas, creating a con­spic­u­ous juxtaposition of material food and figurative language that highlights the discursive logic of Byron’s Orient. Pointing to this juxtaposition, Morton has argued that “Don Juan’s meal employs figures of the M ­ iddle East as self-­reflexive emblems of 34 the power of poetic fancy.” Dedicating six of its sixteen lines to coffee’s preparation, the Greek dinner passage establishes both a qualitative and a quantitative difference between, on the one hand, the spices and fruits that regularly featured in Oriental tales, and, on the other hand, the new psychoactive groceries whose bodily, economic, and moral effects continued to be debated over in the public sphere. The progression of the passage dramatizes the evolution of British Orientalism, in which the conventional signifiers of Oriental fecundity are both displaced and destabilized by upstart groceries like coffee and tea.

SCENE 2: THE COFFEE BREAKFAST

If we exclude the grisly cannibal feast during the shipwreck in canto II, the Greek dinner is only the second of several banquets in Don Juan.35 The first (­really an extended sequence of several breakfasts that Zoe prepares for her mistress, Haidée, and Haidée’s newfound lover, Juan) centers on coffee. The drink is named in the meal “promised [to Juan] by daybreak”—­Haidée ­w ill “pay him a fresh visit with a dish / For breakfast of eggs, coffee, bread, and fish” (canto II, 133)—­and then becomes the gustatory keynote that connects all the ­actual breakfasts that [7]

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follow. As the narrator informs us, on subsequent mornings “Juan, a­ fter bathing in the sea, / Came always back to coffee and Haidée” (canto II, 171). As the drink initiating Juan into his Oriental life, coffee stiches together a vision of the East as pastoral idyll (the paradisial “bower” [canto II, 198] on the beach) and a vision of the East as de­cadent wealth (the extravagant feast in the hall). Jane Stabler has argued that the real­ity of coffee as “one of the most commercially exploitative drinks on the market” is initially obscured on the beach and then retroactively comes into view during the dinner in the hall, with a strategically intervening episode between the two scenes divulging the fact that “Haidée’s feast is underwritten by the economy of her ­father’s mercantile activities.”36 The spoiled coffee in the Greek dinner passage thus also provides meta-­textual commentary on its own retroactive “spoiling” of the beach breakfast, becoming a site where readers, made to reexamine their own “plea­sure” as a result of “contextual cultural issues,” experience an affective course correction through which Byron intentionally challenges their “arbitrary reliance on predetermined customs and codes of be­hav­ior.”37 I have suggested that coffee in Don Juan derives its rhetorical power from the massive domestic debates over Britain’s growing taste for the Orient. But if the noisy discourse surrounding what it meant to consume coffee created an ambivalence of meaning, this was even more so in the case of tea. Britain’s consumption of tea so far outpaced that of coffee during the eigh­teenth ­century that by the mid1780s, retained tea imports ­were seventeen times ­those of coffee.38 Just a few de­cades l­ater, the Chinese beverage that had provoked no small consternation upon its initial introduction to Britain would become an icon of British national identity. Forged in the protracted discursive wars about the physiological, moral, economic, and sociocultural effects of tea drinking, tea’s dramatic transformation in the British imagination not only underscored the role of cultural otherness in the constitution of selfhood, but also presented a wildly fluctuating symbolic terrain that forced writers to reckon with British identity as emerging out of the strategic negotiation between figurative and material economies.39 Not incidentally, tea makes its first appearance in Don Juan alongside coffee in Zoe’s breakfast for the lovers, but the former drink is notably invoked through its negation: “I c­ an’t say that she gave them any tea” (canto II, 145). Perhaps an attempt at ethnographic accuracy, the narrator’s exclusion of tea is nevertheless undermined by his decision to foreground that exclusion. First, this suggests that Byron intended to divulge the status of this entire Greek island episode as the fictive creation of a British author, himself member of a society in which, as Don Juan’s penultimate stanza observes, “breakfast” is “tea and toast, / Of which most men partake, but no one sings” (canto XVII, 13). Second, and more meta-­textually, [8]

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the foregrounded exclusion highlights how tea’s pre­sent absence governs the alimentary logic of Byron’s verse, where the incorporative power of exotic eating is repeatedly hinted at only to be ironically deflated.40 If the coffee reference “spoiled” the Oriental banquet, tea does so even more strongly, for Byron’s use of the negative modal (“I ­can’t”) exposes what coffee’s naturalization on the beach initially hides. In drawing attention to his inability to say, Byron paradoxically says more, as he makes vis­i­ble the real­ity of tea’s explosive spread in Britain and its inevitable influence on literary Orientalism.

SCENE 3: CHINESE GREEN TEA

Two cantos ­later, tea’s destabilization of the material vision of the East becomes explicit: ­ ere I must leave him [Juan], for I grow pathetic, H Moved by the Chinese nymph of tears, green tea, Than whom Cassandra was not more prophetic; For if my pure libations exceed three, I feel my heart become so sympathetic That I must have recourse to black Bohea. ’Tis pity wine should be so deleterious, For tea and coffee leave us much more serious. (canto IV, 52)

In this stanza, green tea’s avowed influence on the narrator expressly undercuts the logic of becoming what you consume, for drinking tea brings the British poet closer not to the Chinese but rather to Juan, the discursive product of his own imagination.41 The state of sympathy that the narrator finds himself in, moved as he is by the Chinese “nymph,” echoes anti-­tea treatises that worried about an “encrease [in] corporal sensibility” to the point of “effeminacy.” 42 Just as the narrator distinguishes between “green tea” and “black Bohea,” t­ hese treatises concluded that the “ner­vous ailments” induced by the drink are multiplied in green tea as compared to the bohea variety.43 Byron’s language of sympathy invokes the fear of leaky cultural bound­aries that underlies contemporaneous anti-­tea diatribes, haunted as they are by the prospect, as one anonymous critic put it, that “the brave, robust, stout, inhabitants of ­Great Britain ­shall be degenerated to the delicate effeminate stature of the diminutive p ­ eople of China.” 44 According to Adam Smith’s influential definition, sympathy is a state of “fellow-­feeling” that one person experiences for another when “by the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves [9]

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enduring all the same torments, we enter as it w ­ ere into his body, and become in some mea­sure the same person with him.” 45 In Smith’s account, the bodily transformation is a purely hy­po­t het­i­c al one, barred from real­ity by the strategically placed “as it w ­ ere.” In the anti-­tea diatribes, however, the transformation becomes nightmarishly real, materialized through the ingestion of a foreign commodity that physically alters one’s body. Indeed, exotic ingestion represents precisely the kind of threat that Lynn Festa has argued eighteenth-­century rhetorical per­for­mances of sentimentality worked to defuse, in a world where the circulation of foreign bodies and objects increasingly exposed the British to transcultural influences.46 To feel for the Chinese, as in Smith’s hy­po­thet­i­cal account of the Chinese earthquake that would draw solicitude from the man of conscience even at the expense of “self-­love,” is emphatically not to be the Chinese.47 In contrast, drinking tea disseminates a “universal infection” that threatens to turn the “WISE, ACTIVE, and WARLIKE nation” of G ­ reat Britain into “the most effeminate p ­ eople on the 48 face of the w ­ hole earth.”  If, for Bakhtin, the mouth is “where [man] triumphs over the world, devours it without being devoured himself,” in the context of empire it is also the site of the most visceral vulnerability, for in ingesting that which is foreign, man also risks being turned, overpowered by what he sought unsuccessfully to sublimate.49 In Byron’s text, the elision of sympathy with ingestion intentionally blurs the line between imaginative feeling for and material morph­ing into, spotlighting the fear of overidentification that always inflects global encounters. “The proclivity of feelings to wander,” Festa writes, “becomes particularly risky in the context of empire, resulting in a menacing usurpation of the self that threatens to collapse distinctions based on nation, religion, or race.”50 The moment ­t hese anx­i­e ties are invoked in Don Juan, however, the symbolic economies they depend upon are disrupted by the striking fact that the narrator’s object of sympathy is literally a figment of his own imagination. The fear of material morph­ing into slides back into an imaginative feeling for, one that is so merely imaginative as to be nothing but solipsistic fantasy. If sympathetic identification helps police the ideological line between self and cultural other by “creat[ing] difference rather than similitude,” Byron deploys sympathy to invoke this difference only to pull back and reveal its fabricated nature.51 Indeed, the green tea passage mocks the expression of sympathy through its pedantic distinctions. The narrator’s methodical correlation of affect with a precise quantity (“exceed three”) and type of drink (“green tea” or “black Bohea”) unwittingly exposes his “heart” as a machine whose amenity to calibration belies any claim to au­then­tic emotion. ­These distinctions also confuse more than they [ 10 ]

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clarify, for their rapid accumulation within the passage blurs the narrator’s referential targets. What, exactly, are the “pure libations” that become dangerous when they “exceed three”? Are they green tea, since they make the narrator’s heart “sympathetic,” or does the ritualistic dimension of “libation,” combined with Greek my­thol­ogy (prophetic Cassandra), instead cue wine, which comes up a few lines ­later? And how can the general category of “tea” leave one more “serious” if one variant of it (green tea) can engender such an intense emotional reaction? This drift of signification suggests that—­like the “tears” it has been equated with through proximity in spelling, sound, sight, and syntactical placement—­tea has no essential meaning. Just as Donna Julia can manipulate “tears” to disarm her husband ­a fter being caught in bed with Juan in canto I, tea serves as a performative weapon that the poet-­narrator can whip out at any moment for his own agenda. In the same way, as I demonstrate in detail in chapter 1, the British discourse surrounding tea has nothing to do with the commodity’s supposed cultural essence but rather is a con­ve­nient trope for domestic pundits looking to justify their own preexisting ideas. In Don Juan, the spectacular collapse of sympathy, rerouted as it has been from an other-­d irected cognitive exercise to the farcical externalization of selfhood as other, allows Byron to portray the diverse symbolic configurations of tea (including his own) as so many solipsistic projections. This self-­reflexivity explains why the green tea passage concludes with the easy conjunction of coffee and tea, a preview of which we saw in the beach breakfast episode in canto II. Byron’s claim that both drinks “leave us much more serious” again invokes con­temporary debates about coffee and tea, particularly the cele­bration of both as sober alternatives to alcohol.52 Yet in ­doing so, he also alludes to the welter of treatises that have created such varying portraits of both coffee and tea that the only conclusion one can draw is that both drinks can be anything to anybody. As Taylor has pointed out, coffee was entangled in a ­whole “palette of concerns, for ner­vous disorders, anxiety, and a medicine that both soothed but also caused the prob­lems”; this phenomenon was “not unique to coffee” but also characteristic of the discourse surrounding “both tea and choco­late.”53 Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger likewise note that throughout the eigh­teenth ­century tea was “assigned a complex network of physical and social functions and effects: it somehow both enfeebles and enlivens, it signals aspiration but produces insubordination, it is a sober potion that provokes intoxication.”54 The meanings accrued by ­these newly popu­lar exotic commodities have far exceeded the grounds of their material makeup, even as each piece of discourse on ­these commodities tried hard to anchor its own analy­sis within that materiality. Materiality, then, served as mere pretext; the discourse was all. [ 11 ]

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EXOTIC CONSUMERISM, ALIMENTARY TROPES, AND SELF-­R EFLEXIVE ORIENTALISM

This book examines how the debates occasioned by the influx of edible exotics in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century Britain reshaped con­temporary literary depictions of the Orient. Arousing thrill and threat in equal mea­sures, t­ hese ingestible exotic commodities—­what I call exotic ingestants—­destabilized the corporeal fictions that helped secure a fantasy of the autonomous British body politic while authorizing other fantasies of the East as endlessly available for consumption. Breaching both personal and national bound­aries, exotic ingestants generated varied and clashing discourses. The volatile configurations of their discursive terrains highlight the instability (indeed, the arbitrariness) of signification, thereby spotlighting the gap between figurative word and ingestible t­ hing. As exotic ingestants travel from foreign spaces onto domestic pages, their increasing deployment as Orientalist tropes also heightens their literary self-­referentiality. Circulating across a wide range of textual genres including poetry, essays, novels, medical treatises, and travel narratives, the repre­sen­ta­tions of ­these items do not simply inscribe their material lives as commodities but also invoke their symbolic currencies as Orientalist tropes, presenting what Saglia has described as a “playful re-­elaboration of Orientalist clichés . . . ​scattered with light, ‘knowing’ touches.”55 Alimentary Orientalism suggests that the migration of exotic ingestants into language provided the opportunity for a surprisingly self-­reflexive inquiry into the relationship between the Orient as fantasy and as fact, as rhetorical and as what is ­really ­there. “Self-­reflexivity” ­here refers to literary language that dramatizes and highlights its own role in the creation of realities it would other­wise seem to assume. Rather than simply constructing the East, the Orientalist authors in my study constructed the East at the same time that they diagnosed it as a solipsistic Western projection. The book’s title is my name for the distinctively self-­reflexive brand of Orientalism that emerged out of the repre­sen­ta­tion of exotic ingestants in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century British lit­er­a­ture. In my account, edible t­ hings in books are not just obscure rec­ords whose material meanings have been repressed in the ser­vice of imperial ideology and which the critic must now recover. Rather, their trajectories as words self-­referentially dramatize the entanglement of their material histories with their symbolic economies, underscoring the extent to which encounters with otherness are necessarily mediated through the narratives of ­those encounters.56 In considering empire’s alimentary logic, this book is indebted to work that weds postcolonial theory with food studies to illuminate the centrality of exotic [ 12 ]

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ingestants to Britain’s imperial enterprise.57 As Parama Roy has argued, “instances of the psychopharmacopoeia of empire—­spices, opium, sugar, and tea—­demonstrate [that] colonialism was in impor­tant re­spects a reconfiguration of the fantasmatic landscapes and the sensorium of colonizer and colonized, generating new experiences of desire, taste, disgust, and appetite and new technologies of the embodied self.”58 I suggest, however, that some British Orientalists writing in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth ­century ­were more aware of the fantasmatic structure of their own consumer practices than we have given them credit for. Before present-­day critics began attending to the ideologies of exotic consumerism specifically and of Orientalism more broadly—­which they analyze using concepts such as discursive hegemony, alterity, appropriation, ambivalence, and fetish—­literary authors in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries w ­ ere already d ­ oing something similar.59 The self-­reflexivity introduced by alimentary tropes derives precisely from the fraught cultural politics of eating. Acts of eating, with all the visceral affects that they engender, decidedly diminish in power when translated into language, heightening authorial awareness of the gap between figurative word and ingestible t­ hing. This is particularly the case for overdetermined cultural signifiers such as tea, whose semiotic fluidity makes vis­i­ble the role of discursive construction in the imagination of difference. In the texts central to Alimentary Orientalism, scenes of exotic ingestion spell out tantalizing or terrifying encounters with Oriental otherness only to reveal their nature as discursive projection. Through depictions of exotic eating, the authors of t­ hese texts dramatize and interrogate how visions of selfhood in a globalizing world depend not only on cross-­cultural encounters but also on the symbolic refiguration of ­those encounters. Significantly, such self-­critical diagnoses apply not just to linguistic practices, but to material ones as well. That is, ­these texts are concerned not only with the repre­sen­ta­tion of exotic ingestion (and exotic consumerism more broadly), but also with consumerism as repre­sen­ta­tion.60 The anthropologists Mary Douglas, Baron Isherwood, and Grant McCracken have all argued that the materiality of commodities m ­ atters as a way of substantiating preexisting cultural meanings.61 Consumer culture thus involves not just material goods but also the individual and collective desires, ideals, and visions of selfhood that ­these goods embody, so that it operates as a semiotic system in which ideological constructions occur and perpetuate themselves.62 This symbolic structure extends even to so corporeal a practice as eating. The item of food that an individual “buys . . . ​consumes . . . ​or serves,” according to Roland Barthes, “sums up and transmits a situation; it constitutes an information; it signifies.” 63 For Douglas, “food categories therefore encode social events”; they constitute what Arjun Appadurai calls “a highly condensed social fact.” 64 [ 13 ]

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As a social event, what exotic consumerism encodes thus says more about the fantasy of the domestic consumer and less about the foreign culture consumed, in spite of (or precisely b­ ecause of ) the desire for novelty that drives the act. As Campbell points out, modern consumers crave “new” products simply “to experience in real­ity the pleas­ur­able dramas which they have already enjoyed in ambition.” 65 Consumerism thus concerns not so much the “other” as it does the “self,” giving shape to “some of that idealized plea­sure which [the consumer] has already experienced in day-­dreams.” 66 As a par­tic­u­lar mode of cross-­cultural encounter, exotic consumerism largely substantiates preexisting constructions of cultural difference. The authors I consider in this book actively interrogate the discursive dimension of exotic commodities as repre­sen­ta­tions of the Orient that are located in domestic fantasy. In dramatizing the gap between words and t­hings, the self-­ referential alimentary tropes in ­these texts also draw attention to the illusory nature of all cultural signifiers, material and linguistic, thus highlighting the ways in which exotic commodities are pulled into the ser­vice of a discursive regime grounded more in fantasy than in fact. What is exposed as figurative, then, is not just language but also the consumption pro­cess, and ­here I am using “figurative” in distinct contrast to the empirical fact of material goods. Not simply an unmediated encounter with exotic ­matter, exotic consumerism proceeds as a rhetorical, symbolic pro­cess of encoding that makes ­matter exotically meaningful according to domestic fantasies. Beyond just desiring, appropriating, or repudiating the exotic commodity, the authors that I examine in Alimentary Orientalism critically assess how exoticism facilitated cross-­cultural exchange even as it turned the other into a cipher for domestic fears and fantasies. Their texts self-­consciously highlight how both material and discursive practices fetishize, appropriate, or other­wise distort the Oriental other in question. In drawing attention to the self-­reflexive dimension of discursive Orientalism, this book participates in the ongoing revision of Orientalism as a homo­ geneously repressive style. As critics have noted, Edward Said’s insistence upon a monolithic “West” whose end is always “authority over the Orient” perpetuates the very kind of cultural binary that he criticizes.67 Nigel Leask has questioned the hegemony of Romantic Orientalism by drawing attention to the “anx­i­eties and instabilities” that disorder British imperial as well as anti-­imperial perspectives.68 Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh’s edited collection on Romantic-­era race and imperial culture broadens the affective spectrum beyond “anxiety” by stressing the “discursive incoherence” and “generic hybridity” that emerge from the nexus of gender, class, and race concerns, which necessarily complicate any author’s response to empire.69 Saree Makdisi argues that Romantic authors exploited Oriental [ 14 ]

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otherness as a means of registering their own “opposition to a homogenizing system” of modernity.70 Focusing on an e­ arlier period, Srinivas Aravamudan proposes that “a transcultural, cosmopolitan, and Enlightenment-­inflected Orientalism existed at least as an alternative strain before ‘Saidian’ Orientalism came about.”71 In a similar vein, Ros Ballaster suggests that the Orient supplied “a source of story” that cultivated acts of imaginative sympathy and self-­abandonment among its Western readers.72 And more recently, James Watt recognizes this openness to the other as a par­tic­u­lar feature of late-­eighteenth-­century British imperial discourse but cautions that critics should temper their enthusiasm for “vari­ous kinds of seemingly ‘good’ Orientalisms” by “distinguish[ing] between the effects of cultural dissemination and po­liti­cal dominion.”73 Watt is rightly suspicious of the kind of cultural cosmopolitanism that manifests itself as aesthetic flair, characterized by an “insouciant fa­cil­i­t y of reference rather than by any reckoning with the substance of cultural difference.” 74 I contend, however, that this “insouciant fa­cil­i­ty of reference” was frequently undertaken with a self-­critical knowingness: the point, for ­these writers, was precisely to perform and make vis­i­ble the Orientalist fantasies that their culture constructed and subscribed to. Nevertheless, a self-­reflexive engagement with the Orient decidedly does not guarantee an ethical proj­ect, even if transcultural openness might be a pos­si­ble consequence. Rather, this book examines how self-­reflexivity served the needs of imperial subjecthood, as the extension of Britain’s global empire demanded constant renegotiations of its cultural identity. “Alimentary” in the book’s title thus is a pun on “elementary,” underscoring the constitutive role of self-­reflexive Orientalism in the construction and reimagination of imperial identity. Methodologically, Alimentary Orientalism treats exotic ingestants as Morton has treated spice in The Poetics of Spice—as a “discourse, not an object, naively transparent to itself.” 75 But in exploring how the self-­reflexive effects of such literary discourse w ­ ere specifically crafted by writers as a way of negotiating their own understandings of cultural identity, this book comes closer to Andrew Warren’s The Orient and the Young Romantics, which argues that the Orient, “self-­critically understood by the Young Romantics as a historically determined fantasmatic projection of the West’s own fears and desires,” also provided them with “a setting in which to explore and critique the epistemological, existential, and above all po­liti­ cal limits of their own solipsistic imaginations.” But while Warren’s analy­sis coheres around the shared “philosophical, po­liti­c al, and poetic commitments” of the second-­generation Romantics as a distinctive literary group, I suggest that a self-­ reflexive engagement with the Orient exists both before 1790 and ­a fter 1830, the temporal markers that traditionally bracket the Romantic period.76 [ 15 ]

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My broader time frame, which begins with the flowering of Britain’s tea discourse in the early eigh­teenth ­century and ends with Charles Dickens’s ­Little Dorrit (1855–1857), focuses on the cross-­cultural imagination that emerged out of the rich interplay between consumerist and literary modes of Orientalism during this time, ­until military conflicts in the mid-­nineteenth ­century supplanted exotic consumerism as the most con­spic­u­ous form of intercultural contact. The increased dissemination of Eastern lit­er­a­ture—­including Oriental tales, diplomatic correspondence, travel narratives, and po­liti­cal histories—in eighteenth-­century Britain occurred at the same time as exotic consumerism burgeoned.77 The feedback loop between the two (as narratives cultivated an appetite for material goods, whose consumption in turn spurred the market for literary Orientalism) created conditions for a heightened awareness of the uneasy relationship between word and ­thing. As I have suggested above and ­will further examine below, the explosive commentary generated about exotic ingestants of mass consumption crucially intensified the inquiry into that uneasy relationship, cultivating in the pro­cess a sense of British identity as being forged in the constant negotiation between figurative and material economies. The two Opium Wars, collectively ­running from 1839 to 1860, marked a decisive shift away from such self-­reflexive experiences of the Orient and should be understood as a crucial stage in Britain’s development of a visual regime during the second half of the nineteenth ­century. The second half of this book considers how the visual apparatus consolidated by Britain’s mid-­ nineteenth-­century exhibitions increasingly replaced exotic ingestion as a mode of cross-­cultural imagination, paving the way for more xenophobic repre­sen­ta­tions of Oriental otherness.

TEA, CHINA, AND ORIENTALISM

Tea’s symbolic fluidity in Britain, evident in its striking transformation from exotic brew to national drink, gives the Chinese ingestant a central place in my proj­ect. Of all the exotic ingestants that sparked British desires and spurred their imperial interests, tea underwent the most dramatic symbolic reconfiguration. The lengthy, chaotic pro­cesses by which this reconfiguration took place created an atmosphere of heightened freedom of signification, nurturing the kind of self-­reflexivity I am particularly interested in. Tea’s domestication also invokes opium’s opposite trajectory, highlighting by way of contrast the irony of the anglicization of Chinese-­produced tea and the sinification of Indian-­cultivated opium, which Britain grew and then smuggled into China in exchange for tea. I consider the two ingestants as a dialectical pair, [ 16 ]

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examining how their economic and cultural entanglements helped spotlight the deliberate way in which British identity was forged and negotiated through a calculated series of appropriations, fabrications, and disavowals that relied on precise calibrations of Oriental otherness to secure a par­tic­u ­lar vision of the self. For instance, chapter 4 suggests that Thomas De Quincey plays the differing symbolic currencies of tea and opium off each other to expose the foreign heart of En­glishness, only to then develop a model of imperial identity that is or­ga­nized around the fractures of empire. Despite the importance of tea and opium, however, Alimentary Orientalism focuses not only on the repre­sen­ta­tion of ­these ingestants but also, and more crucially, on the alimentary epistemology that they make pos­si­ble. Such an epistemology structures even scenes of exotic ingestion that do not immediately seem to be about tea or opium. Thus, for instance, the self-­reflexive potential of Don Juan’s food tropes is actualized through tea’s pre­sent absence. Similarly, as the rest of this book demonstrates, the forms of cross-­cultural imagination facilitated by Britain’s tea and opium trade not only shape the more obviously Chinese texts but also inflect scenes of ingestion in William Beckford’s Vathek, Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh, and Walter Scott’s The Talisman. In this regard, Alimentary Orientalism departs from cultural histories that focus on opium or tea only as single commodities, such as Barry Milligan’s Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-­Century British Culture; Julie E. Fromer’s A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian ­England; Ellis, Coulton, and Mauger’s Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf That Conquered the World; and, more recently, Erika Rappaport’s A Thirst for Empire: How Tea ­Shaped the Modern World. Instead, this book comes closer to what Kyla Wazana Tompkins has termed “critical eating studies,” a field that intentionally moves away from “the object-­based fetishism of the foodie world” and ­toward a “critique of the po­liti­cal beliefs and structures that underlie eating as a social practice.” 78 My focus on tea and opium gives China a distinctive place in this proj­ect. Yet as my choice of primary texts suggests, what I am tracing is not only how ­these exotic ingestants ­shaped British repre­sen­ta­tions of Chineseness but also how ­things associated with China helped cultivate a discursive self-­reflexivity that more broadly influenced the development of literary Orientalism in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries.79 Alimentary Orientalism thus questions the line between Sinology and Orientalism typically upheld in critical work by suggesting that the imaginative and material contours of Sino-­British relations complicate our understanding of Orientalism as a discourse of otherness.80 Indeed, the distinctively consumerist form of British encounters with China, coupled with the unstable, fluid meanings of ­those commodities, made the Chinese [ 17 ]

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Empire a particularly paradoxical figure in the British imagination. China’s economic prowess, lasting throughout much of early modern history and reflected in the superiority of its goods, sparked British desire and envy, rather than the w ­ ill to 81 impose that marked the British Empire’s attitude ­toward its colonies. As Chi-­ming Yang has argued, Britain’s desire to imitate China’s “superior moral and economic example” first drove its demand for Chinese goods.82 The refined antiquity that Eu­ro­pean Enlightenment thinkers found in China’s moral philosophy and po­liti­cal stability heightened the allure of Chinese t­ hings, even as subsequent refigurations of Chinese stability as stagnation gave t­ hose same ­things a shifting symbolic valence.83 The desirability and broad dissemination of Chinese goods in Britain contributed to contradictory ideas of China as virtuous or deceitful, civilized or morally precarious. The “strong ambivalence” that China as a figure and referent posed for the British imagination was made even more acute by the country’s geo­graph­ i­cal separateness.84 During Britain’s 1793 and 1816 embassies to China, British diplomats w ­ ere allowed to travel within the country only u ­ nder the escort of Qing officials, and the Chinese interior remained other­wise inaccessible to British visitors ­until the end of the Second Opium War.85 Foreign trade was strictly regulated through the Qing government’s Canton system, which confined foreign merchants to the trading com­pany factories along the north bank of the Zhujiang (the Pearl River, formerly known as the Canton River).86 Thus, while the prevalence of Chinese ­things made their place of origin feel familiar, British consumers remained particularly conscious of the gap between China’s commodified form and its physical real­ity.87 This is more acutely the case ­because of the conflicting meanings that Chinese commodities generated, meanings further blurred by domestically produced “Chinese-­inspired” goods whose unabashedly hazy exoticism dispensed with even the flimsiest claim to authenticity.88 Not just tea but also the porcelain from which to drink tea and the entire chinoiserie industry that the taste for teaware fueled took on and perpetuated volatile significations that w ­ ere appropriated and continuously refashioned in the ser­ vice of a w ­ hole range of ideological proj­ects within the overlapping realms of commerce, gender, domesticity, and morality.89 Southey’s claim that “plates and tea-­saucers have made us better acquainted with the Chinese than we are with any other distant p ­ eople” suggests, by dint of its satirical force, the very opposite.90 Indeed, the statement’s parodic logic exemplifies how the very proliferation of ­things as cultural signifiers can give rise to a self-­reflexive sense of the inauthenticity of such signifying practices. David Porter has argued that “chinoiserie”—by which he means goods that would have been recognized as “Chinese” by an eighteenth-­century consumer, [ 18 ]

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regardless of their ­actual place of production—­allowed British consumers “to luxuriate in a flow of unmeaning Eastern signs, to bask in the glow of one’s own projected fantasies.”91 I suggest that in the indulgence of such fantasies, some British writers also came face to face with their own powers of fantasy making. In their writings, scenes of exotic ingestion provide a way of mapping the dance between the substantive and the symbolic that structured Britain’s bodily, economic, po­liti­cal, and imaginative encounters with cultural alterity. At the moment of its emergence as a modern nation, then, Britain found in China a particularly productive figure to think with. This thesis has been amply demonstrated and variously nuanced in work by Porter, Eric Hayot, Yang, Eugenia Zuroski, Elizabeth Hope Chang, and Eun Kyung Min, all of whom have examined the foundational role of China and Chinese t­ hings in Britain’s construction of cultural and imperial subjectivity.92 My book is indebted to ­these critical accounts, themselves part of a broader turn to the global within literary studies that reconsiders traditional accounts of Eu­rope’s imperial imperative by drawing attention to the influence of Eastern goods and ideas on the West.93 Alimentary Orientalism adds to this conversation by suggesting that China provided a fertile site for British narrativizations of selfhood not simply through the wealth of material commodities and cultural ideas it supplied. Rather, I consider the self-­ referential way in which Chinese t­ hings, particularly ingestible ones, came to indicate for British writers not only a material real­ ity but also a history of repre­sen­ta­tion, whose volatile trajectory facilitated an active epistemological questioning through which t­ hese writers reworked their sense of self in an increasingly interconnected world.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Alimentary Orientalism examines scenes of exotic ingestion as dynamic sites of identity formation in which British authors negotiate their national and transnational subjectivities by consciously engaging with constructions of cultural otherness. Together, the book’s six chapters offer a historical narrative of Britain’s ongoing creation of imperial selfhood, which developed in response to historical events including the consumer revolution, the 1851 G ­ reat Exhibition, and the Opium Wars. Surveying British repre­sen­ta­tions of tea in periodicals, medical treatises, advertisements, and literary texts, the book begins with an in-­depth look at the conversation about tea following its mass commoditization. While Britain’s exotic appetite generated considerable anxiety about foreign contamination, the constant [ 19 ]

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debate over tea’s symbolic significance ironically created a recognition of its indeterminacy of meaning. My prelude on tea (chapter 1) thus lays the groundwork for considering how the discursive repre­sen­ta­tion of exotic ingestants can complicate the imagination of cultural otherness in surprising ways. By attending to the discourse on tea, we see the emergence of a distinctive self-­reflexivity whereby ­British commentators confronted their own self-­interested need to contain and define China. This self-­reflexivity provides crucial context for understanding the significance of eating in Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (1762) and Beckford’s Vathek (1786), which I focus on in chapter 2. Both texts demonstrate how the intersection between material and discursive forms of Orientalism can lead to a self-­ critical diagnosis of Britain’s cultural solipsism. In Citizen of the World, Goldsmith makes much of the gap between physical ingestion and its literary repre­sen­ta­tion to expose the solipsistic logic of British exotic consumerism, though he does so ultimately to defuse his own anxiety regarding the effects of foreign luxury on the national body politic. In contrast, Beckford demonstrates how even eating can amount to a literary style, and his more thoroughgoing critique of exotic ingestion as domestic projection reflects his embrace of cultural solipsism as a distinctive mode of personal freedom. While critical of the modes of cross-­cultural encounter that they depict, both Goldsmith and Beckford presume the existence of a relatively stable distinction between a self “in ­here” and an other “out ­there,” and their self-­reflexivity paradoxically helped fortify a cultural selfhood that was being threatened in the late eigh­teenth ­century. Goldsmith’s and Beckford’s shared faith in an autonomous cultural identity would increasingly break down across the turn of the nineteenth c­ entury, when the global circulations of p ­ eople, commodities, and forms of knowledge fractured imperial subjectivity. Chapter 3 traces this dissolution of selfhood in Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817) and Scott’s The Talisman (1825). Eating breaches the line between inside and outside. However, both Moore and Scott invoke this breach as real­ity and not as a threat, and they end up exploding the distinction between inside and outside, self and other. This deconstructive impulse is reflected at the level of textual form. Instead of local scenes of ingestion, in Lalla Rookh and The Talisman the exotic ingestant moves and circulates. Such circulation mirrors the globally intertwined paths of tea, sugar, and opium and reproduces their breaching of identity categories on multiple levels—­pharmacological, economic, and rhetorical. I trace the dissemination of the cup in Lalla Rookh and the medicinal talisman in The Talisman, focusing on how each narrative emplots its scenes of eating to expose essentialized cultural identity as imposture. Attuned to the vio­lence of a hegemonic imperial order as a result of their own cultural marginalization, Scott and Moore [ 20 ]

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both question the sovereignty of not just the Orient that is represented but also the Orientalist who does the representing. Against the backdrop of growing cross-­cultural transactions and dependencies, chapter 4 focuses on the transitional state of Sino-­British relations and their impact upon British constructions of imperial subjectivity during the first de­cades of the nineteenth c­ entury. Britain’s dependence on tea grew at the same time as China was doubling down on foreign trade restrictions, creating a heightened animosity between the two countries that would eventually break into war. I consider the discursive opportunities that exotic ingestion, as a figure for cross-­cultural encounter, offered during this time for acknowledging cultural influence while assuaging the attendant anx­i­eties of de­pen­dency. If Lalla Rookh and The Talisman reflect the increasing dissolution of autonomous cultural identity, in the writings of De Quincey and Charles Lamb we see the consolidation of a hybrid imperial subjecthood whose very integrity is predicated upon its fractures and dislocations. In Confessions of an En­glish Opium-­Eater (1821), De Quincey unravels tableaux of cloistered domestic life at the very moment when he creates them. By correlating the symbolic itinerary of tea (now an icon of En­g lishness) with that of opium (increasingly the specter of foreignness), De Quincey writes cultural heterogeneity into the very foundations of imperial identity. While he reenacts Chinese influence only to confine it to a fixed, even departed, moment in time, Lamb emphasizes both the historicity and dynamism of the contact zone. Lamb’s writings on China grapple with cross-­cultural encounter as the irreducible interweaving of ­mental projection with material exchange, whose effects in shaping cultural identity extend both backward and forward in time. By the 1850s, the sense of a hybrid subjectivity on display in e­ arlier writings becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. My interlude on opium (chapter 5) identifies the mid-­century Opium Wars as marking a paradigm shift in British imaginations of Chinese otherness. Named for an ­actual commodity, t­ hese wars are a dramatic instance of global patterns of commodity circulation being violently recast according to the zero-­sum logic of victory and defeat. As military conflict supplanted exotic consumerism to become the most con­spic­u­ous form of intercultural contact, the Opium Wars restricted the possibilities for cross-­cultural imagination. War­time rhe­toric both for and against military engagement reflects this change, as the motif of ingestion that tended to unsettle cultural bound­aries increasingly gave way to an obsession with seeing and being seen properly. Beyond territorial and economic expansion, British victory in the Opium Wars facilitated the discursive production and policing of hierarchical cultural binaries and should be understood as a crucial stage in Britain’s development of a visual regime in the course of the nineteenth c­ entury. [ 21 ]

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Reaching a climactic point with the G ­ reat Exhibition of 1851, this visual regime would even subsume depictions of exotic diet in the second half of the nineteenth ­century, as tropes of sight dismantled the alimentary epistemology that characterized ­earlier Orientalist texts. By examining the affinities between museum display and ethnographic writing, chapter 6 shows how China’s greater accessibility to British travelers and readers paradoxically led to the increased othering of Chinese food. The chapter’s focus on forms of ingestion that are more explic­itly marked (indeed, visualized) as Chinese thus reflects the era’s own growing investment in empirical realism, as writers sought to more rigorously define and delineate foreign cultures to essentialize them and thus set them apart from British identity. Against this backdrop, however, the second half of the chapter examines ­those writers who sought alternative ways of imagining cross-­cultural encounters and whose interrogations of their con­temporary moment played out as a deconstruction of realist ideology. Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), I suggest, draws on De Quincey’s Confessions as a key intertext, ironizing British tableaux of the Orient and deploying the ingestion motif to carve out a distinctly feminist identity for its protagonist, Lucy Snowe. But Brontë’s model of cultural hybridity has no real place in her con­temporary Britain, and her self-­conscious explorations of selfhood and otherness register within the novel only as dreamwork and hallucination. For Charles Dickens, writing between the two Opium Wars and in response to British refigurations of Chinese antiquity as cultural atavism, the Oriental other is legible only as an exaggerated cultural ste­reo­t ype, and while he criticizes the dissemination of such ste­reo­t ypes in ­Little Dorrit, he can imagine no ­viable alternative. Rather than retooling the normative British discourse on China, he can only censure that discourse as a piece of ideological fiction. It is no coincidence that in ­Little Dorrit, the character who rehashes Orientalist clichés also possesses a hearty appetite. We have, in a sense, come full circle from Goldsmith’s ­earlier need to disavow the power of exotic consumerism. While Goldsmith underscores the figurativeness of exotic consumerism out of fear of the material effects of foreign ingestants, Dickens uses eating as an allegory for the rapacity of the British Empire. In ­Little Dorrit, the utter crudity of the British appetite—­its lack of symbolic power over the generation (or regeneration) of cultural identity—­ reflects the meaninglessness of exotic consumerism as a mode of cross-­cultural encounter. Dickens’s pessimistic perspective on the possibility of genuine cross-­ cultural knowledge that goes beyond solipsism not only represents his keen evaluation of the interwar climate but also indexes the rise of xenophobic Orientalist repre­sen­ta­tions during the second half of the nineteenth c­ entury. [ 22 ]

I ntroduction

As my account above makes clear, a self-­reflexive discursive mode does not necessarily imply an anti-­imperial agenda. Nevertheless, while the critical engagement with (and even exposure of ) one’s own cultural projections can lend support to hegemonic discourse, it also always complicates that discourse, sometimes bringing it to a point of crisis. What remains consistent across the authors I examine is the way in which the interrogation of cultural binaries aids in the construction, renovation, or reimagination of self-­identity. By performing a diachronic analy­sis across the dif­fer­ent chapters, I trace how British imperial subjectivity emerged and developed in response to the interplay between consumer and discursive Orientalism, as well as how it is subsequently disrupted or transformed by violent, physical confrontation. My interest in modes of imperial subjectivity also necessitates an overlap between “Britishness” and “En­glishness” as national and cultural markers, especially as ­these terms are often used interchangeably in both the lit­er­a­ture that this book examines and the scholarship historically surrounding that lit­er­a­ture. Some attempts have been made to distinguish between the two terms. Orientation ­toward the global “forges,” to use Linda Colley’s language, a collective “British” identity out of En­glish, Welsh, Scottish, and, from the nineteenth ­century onward, Irish affiliations, yet “En­glishness” frequently supplies the core ethnic grounding.94 As Rebecca Langland argues, “En­glish ethnicity . . . ​provided the basis for the state-­ aided development of the British ‘nation’ during the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries.”95 In this book, I use “Britain” and “British” to indicate the sovereign state, whose sense of distinctiveness was consolidated through its encounters with the broader world, and “En­glish” when visions of ethnic purity seem central to the discourse, as was frequently the case in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century discussions of exotic ingestion.96 “En­glish,” “Scottish,” and “Irish” also highlight regional emphases, attachments, and loyalties. Irish and Scottish wariness t­ oward En­glish hegemony can generate a corresponding sensitivity t­ oward the constructed nature of all cultural repre­sen­ta­tions, as we see below in the writings of Goldsmith, Moore, and Scott. At the same time, the Eastern context also binds Scottish, En­glish, and Irish together as a “British” w ­ hole, motivating the consolidation of an imperial center whose trajectory is most explic­itly displayed in The Talisman. Since the late 1980s, historians and postcolonial critics have begun to emphasize the significant impact that the British Empire exerted upon domestic developments of nationhood.97 “The Empire,” Robert Colls observes, “brought E ­ ngland into a relationship with much of the world, and that world was influential on how ­England saw itself.”98 The significant expansion of British influence and domination from the late eigh­teenth ­century onward—­which marks what C. A. Bayly, [ 23 ]

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revising a phrase coined by the historian Vincent Harlow, calls the “Second British Empire”—­meant that the effects of empire increasingly structured the lives and experiences of ­those living in the metropole.99 My use of the term “empire” throughout this book does not refer to a center-­periphery relationship marked by the unidirectional flow of power, a framework that has become challenged in recent years. Rather, I emphasize the interpenetration of metropolitan, colonial, and other contact zones as a result of the global circulations of trade, knowledge, artifacts, and travelers—­the more so ­because China, unlike India and the British West Indies, was never colonized.100 Amid t­ hese global flows, exotic consumerism provided a distinctively material interface across which experiences of empire could unfold. The intimate connections between nation and empire suggest that ­every narrative of otherness (textual or consumerist) also invests in a par­tic­u­lar vision of selfhood—­one that is forged sometimes alongside and sometimes in re­sis­tance to other more prevalent expressions of national identity. Offering literary scenes of exotic ingestion as a crucial site where bodily, cultural, and territorial bound­aries are investigated and negotiated, this book contributes to ongoing efforts to relocate British consciousness at the intersection of national, imperial, and global discourses and practices.

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1

VIRTUOUS LEAF, “INTOXICATING LIQUOR” B rit a i n ’s Te a Ta l k (A P re l u d e o n Te a)

H

AV I N G “ G OT H I S E S TAT E BY the China trade,” a rich East Indian merchant freshly returned to E ­ ngland devotes himself to the “Chinese manner,” embracing it as salve for the injury that his patriarchal authority suffered at the hands of Angelica, his wayward d ­ aughter. Provoked by Angelica’s refusal to obediently marry the man he has provided for her, Sir Timothy Tallapoy declares with ­great passion that he ­will “comfort [him]self ­after the manner of the sage phi­los­o­pher Tychung . . . ​[then] incontinently espouse the most amiable Mariana, and engender a male offspring, who s­ hall drink nothing but the divine liquor tea, and eat nothing but oriental rice, and be brought up a­ fter the institutions of the most excellent Confucius.”1 Yet The Biter (1705), Nicholas Rowe’s satirical portrait of E ­ ngland’s newly moneyed merchant class at the beginning of the eigh­teenth ­century, reveals that comfort to be a delusional one. Rowe’s play ends with the lustful Tallapoy ensnared by his own desires for Mariana, who turns out to have been working in cahoots with Tallapoy’s nephew to entrap the East Indian merchant. As a result, Tallapoy has no choice but to marry Angelica to the man she had set her heart on all along. Rowe’s comedy of manners satirizes the craze for China and Chinese goods that swept across Britain in the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries. Silks, porcelains, and lacquerware arrived in growing quantities via Britain’s “China trade,” an arrival stimulated by and in turn stimulating domestic consumers’ fascination with China as an exotic space that could sustain endless won­der. By the early eigh­ teenth ­century, chinaware accounted for 13.3 ­percent of the En­glish East India Com­pany’s total imports, while Chinese silk was responsible for 19.7 ­percent.2 The ornamental motifs that ­these goods displayed became consolidated ­under the sign of a general Chinese style, domestically imitated and frenetically perpetuated in

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the form of what we now call chinoiserie and making its aesthetic mark everywhere from architectural design and furniture style to landscape gardening.3 Yet more than any other Chinese good, it was the “divine liquor tea” that Tallapoy claims his i­magined son “­shall drink nothing but” that became an item of mass and impassioned consumption beginning in the eigh­teenth ­century. Trade rec­ords show that the amount of tea entering Britain grew fivefold from the 1710s to the 1750s.4 Britain’s insatiable appetite for this Chinese beverage also triggered the popu­lar consumption of Chinese porcelain, whose ability to withstand moisture made it ideal as ballast cargo for the maritime transportation of tea. At the same time, the fashion for tea drinking stimulated the demand for teaware and associated paraphernalia.5 The prevalent taste for tea in eighteenth-­century Britain generated considerable anxiety. Jonas Hanway denounced the imported article as “poison” and “INTOXICATING liquor,” whose use constitutes “an EPIDEMICAL disease [that would] . . . ​engender an universal infection.” 6 The root of the prob­lem, Hanway suggests in Essay on Tea (1756), lies in a foreign moral deficiency that spreads through material agents and that threatens the purity of the En­glish character. To drink what the Chinese drink is to become like the Chinese, the “­great sippers” and “the most effeminate p ­ eople on the face of the w ­ hole earth, whose example we, as a WISE, ACTIVE, and WARLIKE nation, would least desire to imitate” (70). To make m ­ atters worse, the imported tea is likely to have already been “ADULTERATED” (72), since the fraudulent Chinese not only “use art to heighten the color of green tea” (67) but are also apt to “mix” the “fash­ion­able drug . . . ​with leaves of other shrubs” (72). The shrill language of contagion r­ unning through Hanway’s essay underscores the fraught nature of exotic ingestion, whose somatic location heightens one’s sense of vulnerability to external influence. Indeed, the physicality of Britain’s foreign appetite is at the forefront of a wider national debate on imported luxuries and their impact on the bodily politic.7 For instance, the 326th issue of The ­Spectator (March 14, 1712) pre­sents a letter from a husband confounded by his wife’s myriad of pregnancy cravings and fearful that their satisfaction would end in the delivery of monstrous progeny.8 While pregnant with their first two ­children, she had demanded first a new equipage, then “a new set of Plate, and as much China as would have furnish’d an India Shop” (196). But if her consumer appetite, though extravagant, was then somewhat within the realm of comprehension, it soon took a turn when “the Heighth of [the wife’s] Imagination came down to the Corner of a Venison-­Pasty” (196) during her third pregnancy. She went on to “devour” chalk and raw “Horse-­flesh” (196) while expecting her fourth and fifth ­children, respectively. [ 26 ]



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The wife’s increasingly indulgent physical taste h ­ ere underscores her con­ spic­u­ous lack of aesthetic taste, that gendered marker of rational sensibility that Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, defines as “govern[ing] men.”9 Emerging as an epistemological and moral concept in Enlightenment discourse, taste was called upon to mediate between the corporeal and the cognitive. It has its theoretical underpinning in a Lockean theory of self, according to which the subject forms and then exerts itself through the organ­ization of sensory experiences. The philosophical production of taste as an aesthetic faculty provides a handy device with which to resolve the prob­lem that carnal flesh posed for the sovereignty of h ­ uman identity.10 The extension of taste to consumer culture points not just to the worry about the porous boundary between h ­ uman individual and material t­hing but also to the par­tic­u­lar challenges that this porousness poses within the context of empire. If the rational citizen was to exercise their sovereignty through aesthetic discrimination and moral regulation, indulging the appetite signaled a dangerous subjugation not just to incontinent desire but also to culturally alien forces, in a world increasingly populated with foreign commodities that could be physically taken into the body. In The Spectator, the pointed reference to “as much China as would have furnished an India Shop” (196) folds the economy of foreign trade into the economy of female desire. In its efforts to preserve British consumer culture, the letter scapegoats the female appetite for the unsavory, even threatening, aspects of consumer activity, casting exotic taste as a specimen of that mysterious “Longing in ­Women” regarding whose “natu­ral C ­ auses” (195) the letter writer begs enlightenment.11 The paralyzing craving of the wife is held accountable for the prodigious amount of chinaware in the East India Com­pany’s ware­houses, the accumulation of which provided a painfully vis­i­ble sign of the “chinamania” that had depleted the British stock of silver and subjected Britain to China’s unequal trade terms. Though unmentioned, tea exerted significant influence upon this state of affairs, since the domestic appetite for tea not only stimulated demand for chinaware but also drove Britain to send large amounts of bullion to China. The Spectator invokes the horror of bodily contamination to warn against the excessive and uncritical consumption of imported goods. The wife’s appetite physically compromises not just herself but also her progeny—­witness the husband’s horror that his ­children would become “monstrous[ly]” (195) marked by what their ­mother had consumed in pregnancy. Indeed, the grotesque and increasingly literal trajectory of the wife’s consumption, as she moves from craving commodities to craving raw flesh, suggests that indiscriminate appetite leads to further cultural regression. If you consume too extravagantly, you risk turning savage.12 [ 27 ]

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At stake ­here is the health and heritage of Britain as a civilized nation, which is at risk of being undone through its bodily breaching by exotic entities. The Biter also gestures t­oward this threat of contagion by emphasizing Tallapoy’s voracious appetite for the “divine liquor tea” and “oriental rice” (230), an appetite that does not just debase Tallapoy but, more disastrously, devalues the En­glish stock that ­will issue from him. Yet unlike the essay in The Spectator, Rowe’s text remains pointedly ambiguous about the precise source of contagion. It is not clear ­whether the prob­lem arises from the Chinese ingestants themselves or from the manner with which Tallapoy consumes them. Does Tallapoy embody the vulgarity of the “Chinese manner” or merely a vulgar version of the “Chinese manner” (230)? The confusion ­here stems from the overlap of Britain’s class anxiety with its shifting attitude ­toward China, both of which contributed to tea’s unstable meanings. As an East Indian merchant who “got his estate by the China trade,” Tallapoy belongs to the newly moneyed class that significantly benefited from Britain’s imperial enterprise. Tea served as a particularly potent symbol for this blurring of class bound­aries, since by the eigh­teenth ­century, what had started as an aristocratic luxury had become widely accessible, as social emulation aided by falling prices cultivated an increasingly common taste for the Chinese drink. Critiques of the tea-­drinking habit in Britain during this time took frequent aim at social aping.13 Tallapoy thus embodies the sort of bourgeois pretentiousness that was regularly lampooned as the economic and cultural phenomenon known as the ­middle class took definitive shape. With a knighthood very likely to have been purchased, rather than inherited, Sir Timothy Tallapoy inadvertently gives away his pretensions to En­glish gentility in his display of an excessive appetite for Chinese ­things. Tallapoy’s class emulation parallels his cultural one, as he attempts to appropriate China’s virtuous refinement through his dubious per­for­mance of Confucian morality. But Britain’s ongoing reevaluation of Chinese antiquity only further obscures the issue. ­Until the end of the seventeenth ­century, Eu­ro­pean commentators had followed in the tradition established by enthusiastic Jesuit missionaries who extolled China’s ancient civilization, rational governance, and moral virtue.14 Early proponents of tea frequently invoked this view of China as an enlightened empire, allying, as Lynette Hunter has argued, the drink’s supposed “medicinal properties with the exotic practices of an aristocratic class in a country then perceived to be at the height of civilised culture.”15 In one of the earliest documents on tea to appear in ­England, Thomas Garway legitimizes his 1670 claim about the drink’s “known vertues” by citing the author[ 28 ]



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ity of “­those very Nations so famous for Antiquity, Knowledge and Wisdom.”16 In 1699, John Ovington continues this favorable estimation of tea, transposing the drink’s physiological qualities to a moral register by extolling its ability “to reconcile Men to sobriety, when their Brains are overcast with the Fumes of Intemperance,” so that this “China Liquor” should rightfully claim “an Interest and Share in the Affections of all Men . . . ​that would animate their Faculties without Disturbance, and maintain their Idea lively and bright.”17 In the course of the eigh­teenth ­century, however, this enthusiasm for Chinese morality began to wane, as Britain increasingly experienced Chinese superiority as a challenge to its own imperial position and therefore something that needed to be repressed or disavowed.18 Britain’s tea discourse reflected this shift in attitude, particularly as the depletion of the supply of silver (to pay for Chinese tea) gave economic ammunition to the argument against foreign imports.19 The Biter bears the marks of China’s symbolic fluidity in the British imagination, wavering between a satire of the Chinese manner and a satire of Tallapoy’s excessive per­for­mance of it. On the one hand, Tallapoy’s sexual appetite ironizes his veneration of Chinese moral philosophy: his devotion to tea, rice, and Confucianism is of a piece with his desire to “incontinently espouse the most amiable Mariana.” The description suggests addiction rather than taste, a lack of bodily control that is the very antithesis of Confucian self-­cultivation. A parody of the British consumer who thinks he can drink his way into virtuous living, the character of Tallapoy mocks the culturally prevalent idea that foreign culture can be accessed and appropriated simply through the consumption of its material ingestants.20 On the other hand, Tallapoy’s very taste for Chinese t­ hings might be culpable for his questionable morality. In this regard, “divine liquor tea” anticipates Hanway’s critique of tea as an “INTOXICATING liquor,” invoking the fear of Chinese ingestants as agents of contamination. “Divine liquor tea” and “oriental rice” thus perform double duty in The Biter. As comestibles, their carnal real­ity underscores Tallapoy’s lack of aesthetic taste and undercuts his pretensions to cultural and social prestige. This is a failure of British taste. But as exotic ingestants, tea and rice stoke the fear of cross-­cultural contamination by presenting that contamination across the intimate bound­aries of the body. As if following the fallacious logic of metalepsis, Tallapoy’s inability to properly consume Chinese t­ hings slips into the repre­sen­ta­tion of t­ hose t­ hings as contaminants, and therefore indexical of a failure of Chinese taste. Within Rowe’s satire, this ambiguity introduces an interpretive tension that blurs the symbolic significance of tea. Indeed, the scene derives its humor precisely by drawing attention to the fluid borders between social class and national identity, between [ 29 ]

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moral philosophy and consumer culture, and among the vari­ous and shifting significations of China. In a sense, however, Rowe’s subject was ready-­made: The Biter’s polysemy derives from tea’s overdetermined signification in con­temporary British society. Britain’s growing interest in tea during the long eigh­teenth ­century subjected the foreign herb to intense scrutiny, as merchants, natu­ral phi­los­o­phers, physicians, and satirists variously tried to pin down its nature and understand exactly what it ­ omen ­were consuming in such prodigious was that their countrymen and w amounts.21 Tea’s rapid popularization fired up a contentious debate, as evident in the wide spectrum of opinions—­from Garway’s and Ovington’s extolling of its virtue and sobriety to Hanway’s condemnation of its poison and intoxication. As Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger have pointed out, Britain’s tendency to read tea as a b­ earer of Eastern culture makes the Chinese leaf “an agent not just of commercial mediation, but of intercultural transformation.”22 Yet the diversity of opinions also imbued the exotic ingestant with a symbolic fluidity, highlighting the figurative nature of a discourse that depended not so much on the material ingestant itself as on the ideological needs it must serve. Conscious of the “contrariety of opinion” surrounding tea, John Coakley Lettsom repeatedly underscores its “contradictory” character and makes a show of his own impartiality in The Natu­ral History of the Tea-­Tree (1772).23 Thus, while Lettsom warns against “an active penetrating substance” that exists in tea, which produces effects such as “violent giddiness,” “universal spasms” (170), and the “depression of spirits” (171), he also concedes that among “strong, healthy, vigorous [men] . . . ​in common they bear [tea] well, it refreshes them, they endure fatigue ­after it, as well as ­after the most substantial viands” (174). The book’s series of experiments and testimonies reflects Lettsom’s attempt to pin down the herb by way of empirical science. The material fact of tea and its effects, rigorously inscribed in the text through Lettsom’s sketches (142), Linnaean categorization (144–147), experiment documentation (166–168), and user accounts and analy­sis (170–172), ostensibly ground the other­wise contradictory nature of ­those effects. Lettsom’s initial efforts in refraining from symbolic generalization reflect tea’s increasing volatility as a signifier of Chinese cultural essence. His emphasis on the plant’s materiality seeks to restabilize the pro­cess of cultural signification, yet the results can prove subversive. ­There exists, for instance, “men of this strong temperament . . . ​with not only the appearance, but the requisites of firm health, to whom a few dishes of Tea would produce the agitations familiar to an hysteric ­woman” (174 [emphasis added]). Lettsom’s language of effeminacy echoes the xenophobic register of anti-­tea diatribes like Hanway’s, which accused the Chinese of [ 30 ]



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being the “most effeminate p ­ eople on the face of the ­whole earth” (70). In Lettsom’s case, however, the cultural origin of tea’s effects is less than obvious. If ­there are strong men who bear tea well, and ­others with the appearance of health who do not, is the cause native or imported? Indeed, the distinction between the “appearance” and “requisites” of firm health underscores the cultural uncertainty that Lettsom attempts to mask, reflecting the high symbolic stakes of tea’s volatility. Amid the polarized conversation about tea, then, Lettsom’s Natu­ral History of the Tea-­Tree reflects a growing awareness of tea’s semantic instability as a cultural signifier, even as the author tries valiantly to correct his course by retethering tea’s effects to an essential Chineseness. This explains the rather abrupt turn from empirical experimentation to so­cio­log­i­c al analy­sis in section  14, where Lettsom—­having acknowledged that “it ­will be deemed rather foreign to an essay upon this subject, to take a concise view of the manners, or morals if the reader pleases, of the Chinese”—­proceeds nevertheless to draw a connection between character and diet. The Chinese, Lettsom asserts, are “feeble . . . ​pusillanimous, cunning, extremely libidinous, and remarkable for dissimulation and selfishness, effeminate, revengeful and dishonest” (176). Admitting that “it would be unjust to ascribe all ­these qualities to their manner of living,” Lettsom nevertheless defends his interpretive procedure: “It may be suspected, that the manner of life, or kind of diet, that tends to debilitate, virtually contributes to the encrease of the meaner qualities. Where force of body is wanting, cunning often supplies its place; and if not regulated by other princi­ples, it would discover its effects more universally; and thus ­will take place w ­ hether the debility is natu­ral, or acquired by a diet that enfeebles the body” (176). The disjunctive clause that concerns the source of debility (­whether “the debility is natu­ral, or acquired by a diet” [emphasis added]) is buried at the end of a long sentence, perhaps precisely ­because it threatens the foundation of Lettsom’s argument. If the Chinese debility is natu­ral, rather than acquired by diet, then the entire exercise of connecting food to moral character becomes a futile one. The ambivalent relationship between external and internal sources of deficiency echoes the ­earlier tension between the “appearance” and “requisites” of firm health, underscoring Lettsom’s attempt to defuse domestic anx­i­eties by scapegoating the Chinese. Indeed, as Lettsom elsewhere acknowledges, “in a multitude of cases, the infusions of our own herbs; sage, for instance, mint, baum, even rosemary, and valerian itself, w ­ ill now and then produce similar effects . . . ​[to ­those ascribed] to Tea” (169). As a wildly popu­lar but hotly contested foreign commodity, tea’s symbolic efficacy made it volatile. For many commentators, an awareness of tea’s [ 31 ]

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indeterminate meaning generated an inquiry into the relationship between material ingestant and cultural essence. Lettsom’s Natu­ral History of the Tea-­ Tree spotlights this pro­cess precisely b­ ecause its author pulls back at the last minute: the treatise’s superfluous distinctions and sudden shifts not only testify to the ideological work that tea is made to do, but also reflect the moment when this ideology cracks. Other writers would more boldly question the link between tea and an essential Chineseness. For ­t hese writers, tea’s semantic fluidity bore the signs of domestic fantasy, inviting them to consider the role their own writings played in the construction of cultural meaning. This self-­reflexivity that inflects the discourse on tea has rarely been noticed, as scholarly work on the subject has tended to read the conversation along the binary lines of e­ ither condemnation or commendation. For instance, Nahum Tate’s Panacea: A Poem upon Tea (1700) is frequently singled out for its high praise of tea.24 Yet the poem’s literary techniques suggest that Tate is much more ambivalent than his title proclaims. On one level, the poem’s introduction celebrates tea as an ethereal prize, capable of elevating all talents and curing all maladies (n.p.) ­A fter a detailed enumeration of the vari­ous benefits that the drink holds for prophets, statesmen, ­lawyers, doctors, natu­ral phi­ los­o­phers, scholars, musicians, paint­ers, and poets, Tate pre­sents two dif­fer­ent mythological accounts of tea. In the first canto, tea serves as a “timely Cure of Publick Grief ” (16), a celestial gift that heals the national wounds inflicted by the tyrannical Chinese emperor KI. In the second canto, Roman gods and goddesses of wisdom, beauty, chastity, commerce, and health fight to be tea’s patron, each claiming rightful dominion over the plant’s salutary properties. While Tate’s praise seems fairly unequivocal, t­ hese two dif­fer­ent accounts of tea’s origins (Chinese in the first canto and wistfully Greco-­Roman in the second)—as well as their explic­itly fanciful nature, which the author self-­ consciously describes as “the Tempting Lure / Of Fiction” (16)—­question how one could ever accurately diagnose tea’s effects and trace them to a par­t ic­u ­lar cultural source. In this regard, it is no surprise that Tate’s second canto rounds up its cata­log of Roman gods with “SOMNUS,” the god of sleep, whose exaltation of tea undercuts all preceding praises by suggesting that any baleful effect is but the result of dreams in “slumber” that are “by Tea inspir’d” (33): For sure, when sprightly Tea and Fancy join Their Wond’rous Pow’rs, the Work must be Divine. How rich the Figures! How surprising bright! Wrought on the sable Curtains of the Night. (33–34) [ 32 ]



V irtuous L eaf , “ I ntoxicating L iquor ”

Tate’s connection between “Tea” and “Fancy” articulates the conventional fear that foreign psychoactive ele­ments would fundamentally alter native constitution, both bodily and psychologically. For instance, Hanway worried about tea’s tendency “to create fantastic desires, and bad habits, which must render us less happy, or more miserable, than we should other­wise be” (76). Yet locating fancy as the province of the Roman god shifts responsibility away from the Chinese herb. Tea merely “improve[s]” preexisting “Desires to Extasy”: Visions of Wealth the poor Man’s Wants beguile; The hopeless Lover sees his Mistress smile. (33)

The implication h ­ ere is that tea facilitates the figuration (“How rich the Figures!”) of one’s native “Wishes,” “Desires,” and “Wants” as externally induced “Dreams” and “Visions” (33). That is, tea merely supplies an excuse for the consumer to proj­ ect their own delusions of grandeur. The critique of tea as fantasy inducing, then, is its own kind of fantasy. Indeed, Tate’s emphasis on “Figures” self-­reflexively underscores his own work of figuration, in which the Eu­ro­pean gods and goddesses compete to appropriate tea’s material influence. Thus, Somnus’s perspective is merely one among many, and his “strange Discov’ry” would “set the Goddesses again at Odds” (34). By having his gods and goddesses argue about the meaning of tea, Tate self-­consciously draws attention to the scripting and reading of tea’s effects that make up his own my­thol­ ogy. In this regard, then, the Greco-­Roman heritage of Tate’s would-be tea patrons represents not just an instance of British wish fulfillment but also an indictment of Britain’s inauthentic cultural construction. Indeed, this discursive self-­reflexivity that inflects many of the ­century’s commentaries on tea complicates the trope of tea-­table gossip that we frequently see in ­those same texts.25 Consider, for instance, the anonymous Tea: A Poem. Or, Ladies into China-­Cups; A Metamorphosis (1729), whose entire conflict turns upon the tongue-­loosening powers of the eponymous brew: As o­ ’er their Tea each Goddess sat, Each Cup inspir’d ’em with new Chat.26

This tea-­time chat in heaven, the story goes, generates falsehoods that provoke the goddesses to unfounded anger ­toward ­humans. The offended deities create a beautiful w ­ oman, Pandora, who is sent to Earth with a pot of tea as the “curs’d Pre­sent of revengeful Heaven” (8). Tea then does on Earth what it already did in heaven, inciting further scandal that so infuriates the goddesses that they end up descending to Earth and turning their mortal counter­parts into china cups. [ 33 ]

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While at first glance the poem reads like a humorous jibe at tea’s gossip-­ mongering qualities, what is striking is its narrative circularity. If the Pandora account provides tea with an origin story and thereby a culturally resonant framework for interpreting its material effects, the poem also makes that origin story itself the result of tea-­time chatter in heaven. Moreover, the poet claims this on the authority of Greek texts such as The Illiad and The Odyssey and En­glish authors such as John Dennis and Alexander Pope (3–4). The recursive, Eurocentric textuality suggests that the cause of all this ruckus is ultimately not a material ingestant but rather a piece of domestically perpetuated discourse. In this way, the poem reflects upon its own role in the creation and dissemination of such chatter, suggesting that tea’s material effects cannot be understood separately from the discourse about t­ hose effects. One last example ­will suffice. The anonymous Tea, A Poem. In Three Cantos (1743) ostensibly hails tea as the “best of Herbs,” yet its compliments are decisively backhanded, centering on the vari­ous forms of “elegant Disguise” that the drink produces among its devotees.27 Nevertheless, in praising tea for its tongue-­loosening powers (“­Free ev’ry Tongue, relax its fett’ring Strings” [15]) and in ironically celebrating the fictions woven by such an unbridled, deceitful tongue, the poem implicates itself as a version of the tea-­table chatter that it critiques. The poem underscores this self-­critique by describing itself as a “growing Verse” (8) that mirrors the loquaciousness of tea drinkers, whose vain talk constitutes a “growing Theme” (20) that defeats even the verse’s attempts to trace it. Halfway through the first canto, the verse shifts from the poet’s invocation to the tea goddess’s dictation through the poet: Its granted—­Now the Goddess all confest Swells ­every Vein, and animates my Breast! Raptures unfelt before my Fancy heats, And ­every Pulse prophetic Ardour beats. (9)

A poem describing the effects of tea becomes itself an effect of tea. Tea’s material effect is inescapably linked to its discursive production. Indeed, snippets of the chatter induced by “TEA’s reviving Sweets” are reproduced within and through the verse: And now Laurinda, with affected Airs, Complains ’twas hot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tattilia seconds her. . . . (17) [ 34 ]



V irtuous L eaf , “ I ntoxicating L iquor ”

Thus, the poem offers its own typographic body as a stand-in for the material effects of tea. This same logic also structures the tea-­table tableaux that the poem moves through. The focus is on verbal actualization: “The ­Table first be nam’d” (9), then let the TEA-­POT share Your applicated Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nor let or Dish or Sawcer be forgot. (13 and 15)

The real­ity of the tea t­ able is one conjured up by language. Neither praising nor censuring tea for its foreign effects, the poem dwells instead on the inseparability of t­ hose effects from their domestic repre­sen­ta­tion. In all three poems discussed above, tea functions less as a material ­bearer of exotic essence and more as a self-­reflexive figure that dramatizes and interrogates its own function as an empty signifier. While each account provides a dif­fer­ent estimation of tea, all three share the sense that domestic discursive practices have remade—­and are remaking—­the exotic ingestant in their own image. This self-­ reflexivity, I have suggested, emerged out of the contentious debate over tea in eighteenth-­century Britain, which produced among its commentators a sense of tea’s symbolic fluidity and amenability to cultural construction. Thus, while exotic ingestion stimulated the imagination of the Orient and promised to bring it home in material ways, tea’s controversy not only challenged the commodity’s status as a cultural signifier of Chineseness but also underscored the gap between the trope and the ­thing of tea. As I show in the next chapter, awareness of this gap would facilitate in the eighteenth-­century Orientalist writings of Oliver Goldsmith and William Beckford an imagination of otherness that knowingly exposes itself as invention. By interrogating and exploiting the gap between material ingestant and figurative language, both Goldsmith and Beckford activate a surprisingly self-­ reflexive critique of exotic consumerism as solipsistic self-­projection.

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2

“EATING ONLY WHAT I KNEW” E xoti c C o n s u m e ri s m a n d th e B o u n d ­a ri e s of S e lf h o o d i n T h e C itize n of th e Wo rld a n d Vath e k

E

IGHTEENTH-­ C E N T U RY M E N A N D ­ W O M E N of taste sip their s­ weetened tea, sniff from ornate snuffboxes, and dine on silverware and japanned trays, satisfying their desire for the exotic while signaling their respectability through the cosmopolitan consumption of imported luxuries. In “The Deserted Village,” Oliver Goldsmith blasts such foreign “luxuries” as “the freaks of wanton wealth” that plunder the native land and plunge it into “famine.”1 Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World takes a dif­fer­ent tack, satirizing Britain’s exotic consumerism by leveraging the critical perspective of a foreigner unfamiliar with domestic modes and manners. In a series of letters to his friends back home, Goldsmith’s fictional narrator reports on the strange customs that he observed while a resident in London. Chinoiserie comes u ­ nder par­tic­u­lar fire, yet the consumption of tea, a complementary good whose initial spread in British society provoked much debate, is recorded without additional comment and merely as part of the inconvertible backdrop against which Goldsmith spotlights other culturally salient modes of be­hav­ior. In one letter, the foreigner only briefly mentions “drinking tea” with an En­glish companion before launching into his main theme—­a discussion of “the En­glish method of treating w ­ omen caught in adultery.”2 Another letter that deals with “the En­glish passion for politics” introduces the topic by musing on the En­glish appetite for “a leaf of po­liti­cal instruction . . . ​ served up e­ very morning with tea” (“Letter V,” 31). Tea’s understated pre­sen­ta­tion ­here might be a function of its increasing assimilation into eighteenth-­century life. Despite its contentious entry, tea soon made itself at home in Britain, becoming incorporated into domestic rituals and held up as a polite and distinctively En­g lish way of life.3 In 1711, Joseph Addison identified the setting apart of “an Hour in ­e very Morning for Tea and

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Bread and Butter” as the defining feature of Britain’s “well-­regulated Families.” 4 In The Citizen of the World, however, tea’s occurrences also draw explicit attention to its exotic origins, since Goldsmith’s visitor from abroad, one Lien Chi Altangi, is “a native of Honan in China” (“Letter I,” 16). Tea drinking, readers are reminded, was a Chinese practice before becoming an En­g lish one, so it is unclear ­whether Lien Chi acquired his penchant for taking “breakfast over a pensive dish of tea” (“Letter LI,” 213) before or ­a fter he arrived in London. The references to tea in The Citizen of the World bring up the cross-­cultural context within which tea first took on symbolic meaning and thus resurrect the fantasy of exotic ingestion as a site of Oriental experience. At the same time, Goldsmith overlays the discursive path of tea’s exoticization upon its subsequent one of domestication, unleashing a variety of contrary effects that untethers the material act of ingestion from a par­tic­u ­lar cultural signification. In so ­doing, Goldsmith underscores the fact that cultural meaning is not intrinsic, but rather created and assigned. The understated comedy of a Chinese man drinking tea in Britain suggests Goldsmith’s attentiveness to tea’s symbolic fluidity and signals the author’s self-­ reflexive commentary on the fraudulent nature of British exotic consumerism.5 As I suggested in chapter 1, the constant debate about tea cultivated a discursively fluid environment in which cultural commentators confronted the solipsistic nature of their own signifying practices. In The Citizen of the World, local instances of taking tea form part of an extended motif of eating that works to indict exotic consumerism as narcissistic self-­projection. Yet if exotic ingestion constitutes the paradigmatic mode of exotic consumerism in its promise of materializing the Orient, The Citizen of the World more often dwells upon the possibility of exotic ingestion only to stage its failure. The materiality of what ultimately does not come to pass functions as a foil for the figurativeness of exotic consumerism, and the consumption of exotic t­ hings turns out to be no dif­fer­ent from the consumption of exotic texts, since both are captive to a Eurocentric Orientalist regime that fabricates the cultural other it claims to have encountered. In The Citizen of the World, references to eating do not facilitate any material contact with Chinese otherness; rather, they highlight British consumers’ attempts to materialize (and spuriously legitimize) preconceived notions of cultural difference. In this regard, tea’s easy transformation into an icon of Englishness—­and I emphasize En­glish ­here ­because of the author’s commitment to the term in The Citizen of the World—­a lso marks Goldsmith’s reluctance to engage the material impact of foreign commodities on domestic bodies and economies, a point I return to below.6 [ 37 ]

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EATING AS MOTIF IN THE CITIZEN OF THE WORLD

The parallel between exotic consumerism and discursive Orientalism is made much of in “Letter XIV,” which Lien Chi addresses to his chief correspondent, Fum Hoam, “first president of the ceremonial acad­emy at Pekin in China” (63). The letter recounts Lien Chi’s reception by an En­g lish “lady of distinction,” whose renowned “politeness, taste, and understanding” (63) are presumably on display in her collection of Chinese t­ hings: “jars . . . ​of the right pea-­green,” a “Chinese ­temple,” and “sprawling dragons, squatting pagod[a]s, and clumsy mandarins . . . ​ stuck upon e­ very shelf” (64–65). Her domestic interior, furnished in the “Chinese manner” (65), reflects con­temporary consumer trends. Yet Goldsmith’s sardonic portrait of the lady—­her pride in her “twenty t­ hings from China that are of no use in the world” (64) and her presumption in schooling the Chinese Lien Chi on what is properly Chinese—­denounces that taste as degenerate. In emphasizing the “precarious” (65) arrangement of the lady’s furniture, Goldsmith equates the frailty of chinaware with the frailty of female virtue, performing the typically  patriarchal gesture of scapegoating female taste for the excesses of exotic consumerism.7 The lady’s consumption of “Chinese” t­ hings extends even to her treatment of Lien Chi, and it is through the dramatized conflict between her own fantasy and Lien Chi in the flesh that Goldsmith powerfully exposes the solipsistic nature of exotic consumerism. The lady treats Lien Chi as she would an inert figurine, one pliant to her whims and fancy: “Bless me! can this be the gentleman that was born so far from home? What an unusual share of somethingness in his ­whole appearance. Lord how I am charmed with the outlandish cut of his face; how bewitching the exotic breadth of his forehead! I would give the world to see him in his own country dress. . . . ​Pray speak a ­little Chinese: I have learned some of the language myself. Lord, have you nothing pretty from China about you; something that one does not know what to do with: I have got twenty ­things from China that are of no use in the world.” (The Citizen of the World, 63–64)

The lady’s strug­gle to define the “unusual share of somethingness in his w ­ hole appearance” spotlights her attempt to construct Lien Chi as a cultural exemplar, the material embodiment of an essentialized Chineseness rooted more in fantasy than in fact. She is relentless in her pursuit of precision: just as her Chinese jars must be “of the right pea-­green,” Lien Chi needs to instantiate the specific cultural meaning that corresponds to En­glish understandings of Chinese otherness. Of course, [ 38 ]



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t­here is nothing inherently Chinese about Lien Chi: in fact, the lady “had [initially] taken [him] for an En­glishman” since he “was dressed a­ fter the fashion of Eu­rope” (63). The “outlandish cut of [Lien Chi’s] face . . . ​[and] exotic breadth of his forehead,” then, are En­glish projections. The superfluity of the lady’s monologue registers her efforts to gain discursive control over Lien Chi, and his newfound exoticism suggests that she has already remade him in her mind’s eye. Words attempt a material transformation: to call Lien Chi out as “outlandish” and “exotic” is to make him so. The lady’s sensitivity to the “cut of his face” (emphasis added) supposedly demonstrates her fashionableness.8 However, that sensitivity paradoxically operates through an insistent blindness to Lien Chi’s a­ ctual dress.9 Indeed, her discursive aggression seems to “cut” his face, and the term’s multivalence reveals the vio­lence at stake in the lady’s substitution of her own idea of Chineseness for Lien Chi’s material features. Lien Chi’s visit with the lady, then, materializes the dream of exotic consumerism only to expose its illusory nature. For the consumer searching for the Orient in physical t­ hings, the Chinese gentleman shows up like a wish fulfilled, only to be passed over in f­avor of a fictional idea of Chineseness. Exotic consumerism turns out to be nothing more than a domestic fantasy that effaces alterity. Furthermore, the text suggests that exotic consumerism is no dif­fer­ent from discursive Orientalism, a point of self-­reflexivity that turns the satirical edge back upon Goldsmith himself. In his “Editor’s Preface,” Goldsmith wryly underscores this parallel by presenting himself as a merchant of “fash­ion­able” literary goods who intends to satisfy the popu­lar appetite for “the furniture, frippery and fireworks of China” with his “small cargoe of Chinese morality” (15).10 As “cargoe,” Lien Chi represents, in embodied, commodified form, “distinctions [that] . . . ​are peculiar to the Chinese,” yet Goldsmith’s progressive, and progressively wry, description of t­ hose Chinese distinctions as first “polite” and “concise,” then “grave and sententious,” and fi­nally “dull” (14) telescopes an entire c­ entury of En­g lish (and l­ater British) attitudes ­toward China, moving rapidly from the seventeenth-­century idealization of Chinese virtue to the eighteenth-­century mockery of Chinese dullness. By spotlighting this cultural shift, Goldsmith underscores Britain’s discursive intervention in its characterization of Chineseness, thereby exposing the solipsistic logic that governs such a discourse. As an Irishman living and writing in En­glish society, Goldsmith would have been intimately aware of the imposition that cultural categories pose, and his “Chinese Letters” highlight this fact through parody.11 The irony that The Citizen of the World stages is double: Lien Chi appears like a wish fulfilled b­ ecause he r­ eally [ 39 ]

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is a kind of wish fulfilled—­the invention of an Anglo-­Irish author himself steeped in Orientalist narratives. Unsurprisingly, Lien Chi boasts a distinctively Western heritage: the literary device of the pseudoforeigner harks back to the established line of Eu­ro­pean “pseudoethnographies” that developed out of Giovanni Paolo Marana’s seventeenth-­ century classic, L’espion turc.12 Goldsmith’s Chinese phi­los­o­pher even gets his name from a British text—­Horace Walpole’s im­mensely popu­lar A Letter from Xo-­ Ho, A Chinese Phi­los­o­pher at London, to his friend Lien Chi at Peking (1757)—­ while his correspondent bears the same name as Fum-­Hoam, the Muslim who impersonates a Chinese mandarin in Thomas Simon Gueullette’s Chinese Tales (1723). The Citizen of the World also extravagantly and unabashedly recycles the content of its letters from other Eu­ro­pean writings on the Orient, including the marquis d’Argens’s Chinese Letters (1741), Louis-­Daniel Le Comte’s Memoirs and Observations (1698), and Jean-­Baptiste Du Halde’s The General History of China (1736).13 The “gentleman from China” names not so much an Eastern geo­graph­i­ cal locale as a Eu­ro­pean literary topos, and in drawing our attention to this fact, Goldsmith critiques what he dramatizes, lampooning his culture’s fabrication of Oriental alterity by performing an exaggerated version of it. Through the character of Lien Chi, Goldsmith thus reflects upon the relationship between Britain’s consumption of exotic texts and its consumption of exotic ­things. The parallel between the two exposes the figurative structure of exotic consumerism—­that is, its discursive, Eurocentric logic, contrary to the promise of materiality it bears. It is within the context of Goldsmith’s negotiation between figurativeness and materiality that we can understand the curious obsession with eating ­running throughout The Citizen of the World, an obsession thus far overlooked by the critical lit­er­a­ture. In “Letter XIV,” Lien Chi’s En­g lish host experiences a strangely “violent passion to see him eat”: “You that attend ­t here, bring up a plate of beef cut into small pieces; I have a violent passion to see him eat. Pray, Sir, have you got your chop-­sticks about you? it w ­ ill be so pretty to see the meat carried to the mouth with a jerk” (64). This passage comes immediately a­ fter the discursive surgery that Lien Chi received. Having previously “cut” Lien Chi up, the lady now seeks to endow her own idea of his “outlandish cut” and “exotic breadth” with material form, which she can then manipulate (“jerk”) to suit her fancy. This she tries to achieve by persuading Lien Chi to eat “a plate of beef cut into small pieces” (emphasis added). The act of ingestion, which transgresses the contours of body through the introduction of alien ­matter, attains the force of a Derridean boundary logic: the border between inside and outside, which safeguards the integrity of the self, is ­here conjured up and reinforced precisely through [ 40 ]



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the threat of its being breached.14 To “see [Lien Chi] eat” is thus to witness the production of a distinct bodily form, which the lady seeks as a way of materially realizing her idea of Chineseness. If Britain’s exotic ingestion concretizes its fantasized access to cultural otherness, in “Letter XIV” Goldsmith invokes the symbolic power of such eating only to stage its double failure: the En­glish host does not eat, nor does the Chinese gentleman. The letter ends by noting that Lien Chi “took leave just as the servant was bringing in a plate of beef, pursuant to the directions of his mistress” (65). While the lady displays a love for chinoiserie that rivals, in its excessiveness, the ravenous wife’s desire for “as much China as would have furnished an India Shop,” Goldsmith’s letter refuses the grotesque trajectory of taste recorded in The Spectator.15 Rather, the joke turns not so much on the ludicrousness of the lady’s appetite as on the ludicrousness of her appetite for seeing another eat. The letter traffics in the possibility of ingestion without ever fulfilling it. The mediated nature of eating stages the failure of producing and thereby vindicating a par­tic­u­lar idea of alterity through “see[ing] [the other] eat”—­thus underscoring the illusive nature of the Chineseness that the lady consumes. Her collection of Chinese ­things weaves her own solipsistic, discursive fantasies, interrupting any potential encounter with the cultural other. She remains trapped within a Eurocentric regime of signs that mocks rather than masters the historical referent that is China. Repeatedly in The Citizen of the World, the (unfulfilled) possibility of physical ingestion provides the tantalizingly material counterpoint against which British Orientalism, in both its discursive and material forms, can be exposed as figurative. “Letter XXXIII” hatches a joke that turns on the conjunction of material ingestant with literary style. Unlike in “Letter XIV,” however, on this occasion Lien Chi’s hosts attempt to prove their cultural sophistication by expressing shock at Lien Chi’s desire to eat beef: “A Chinese eat beef! that could never be! ­there was no local propriety in Chinese beef, what­ever ­there might be in Chinese pheasant. Sir, said my entertainer, I think I have some reasons to fancy myself a judge of ­these ­matters: in short, the Chinese never eat beef; so that I must be permitted to recommend the Pilaw, ­there was never better dressed at Pekin; the saffron and rice are well boiled, and the spices in perfection” (143–144). The recommendation of “Pilaw” instead of beef makes Lien Chi’s hosts the butts of the letter’s satire, since it betrays a ludicrous confusion of Indian, Chinese, and Persian diets. Hindus, not Chinese, are forbidden from eating beef, and “pilaw” originated from the cuisine of the Persian Empire before spreading into parts of the M ­ iddle East, Central Asia, and South Asia. Perhaps the hosts w ­ ere (mis)remembering Adam Olearius’s travel narrative, which depicted in extraordinary detail a Persian feast that included “saffron” and “rice.”16 [ 41 ]

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However, the point of the scene goes beyond the hosts’ erroneous Orientalism: the real humor lies in their attempt to translate that literary style into a material practice. The reference to exotic food once again invokes the dream of a substantial cross-­cultural encounter, yet it is rooted in a discursive logic in­ven­ted and perpetuated by Eu­ro­pean writers. Indeed, Lien Chi’s hosts are puffed up in their textual knowledge of the Orient. The hostess “had collected all her knowledge ­ nder of eastern manners from fictions ­every day propagated ­here [in ­England], u the titles of eastern tales, and oriental histories,” while “a grave gentleman” who disapproved of the fact that Lien Chi “made no use of [his] chop-­sticks” declared his superior understanding of the “true eastern style,” since he had “written many a sheet of eastern tale [him]self” (142 and 144). The success of Goldsmith’s joke, of course, depends upon his readers’ familiarity with pilaw’s ­actual provenance. Yet such knowledge would itself have been textually derived. Jean-­Baptiste Tavernier’s reference to the dish in Collections of Travels through Turkey into Persia, and the East-­Indies (1684) marks one of the e­ arlier appearances of the word “pilaw” in Western culture.17 Antoine Galland also refers to the dish (as “pilau”) in his 1695 compilation The Remarkable Sayings, Apothegms and Maxims of the Eastern Nations.18 By the mid-­eighteenth c­ entury, “pilaw” and “saffron and rice” would have been well established tropes of the East, appearing frequently in Orientalist narratives ­either written or translated by Eu­ro­pean authors for domestic consumption. Several eighteenth-­century British ­recipe books even provide instructions for preparing the dish the “Indian way”: Sarah Tully’s “Book of Receipts for Cookery and Pastry &c” (1732) lists a ­recipe for “Pilau ­a fter the East Indian manner,” while Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1747) contains a similar “pellow the Indian way.”19 The reader’s ability to make the kind of cultural discernment that Lien Chi supposedly embodies, then, is itself predicated upon their familiarity with Orientalism as a literary style. They do not need to know the difference between Persia and China, only that Tavernier (or Galland or Olearius) was talking about Persia and not China. And if they ­were to use Tully’s and Glasse’s ­recipes, the foods that they prepared and ingested would have been marked as Indian by patently Western perspectives. The reader would not be all that dif­fer­ent from Lien Chi’s hostess, well versed in the “eastern manners . . . ​­every day propagated h ­ ere, u ­ nder the titles of eastern tales, and oriental histories” (142). This comes as no surprise, since the author, Goldsmith, derives his own knowledge from t­ hese same sources—­“eastern tales, and oriental histories.” H ­ ere, Goldsmith again signals his participation in the kind of discursive Orientalism that he uses Lien Chi to mock, by subverting in turn Lien Chi’s claim to authority. Indeed, Lien Chi does not just witness Britain’s erroneous specification of [ 42 ]



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Chineseness: he also performs it himself.20 Thus, the Chinese phi­los­o­pher confesses that he is “utterly unacquainted” with “Bear’s claws” and “Birds nests,” obstinately declaring that he is “desirous of eating only what [he] kn[o]w[s]” (“Letter XXXIII,” 143). Yet bird’s nests and bear’s claws are genuine articles of Chinese diet that Lien Chi’s hosts in fact got right.21 As historians have pointed out, Eu­ro­ pean writers w ­ ere at this time just beginning to take note of “the Chinese penchant for exotic edibles collected in Southeast Asia,” including bird’s nests.22 James Warren argues that the demand for tea encouraged Britain to mine for commodities such as bird’s nests in the Malay States, which it could then exchange for the coveted Chinese article.23 Lien Chi’s ignorance on this point thus suggests that Britain’s specification of Chinese alterity through exotic consumerism requires disavowing the material texture of its ­actual trade relations with the country, including its own subjection to Canton’s famously unequal terms. Sophisticated eighteenth-­century readers familiar with Du Halde’s General History of China might have been tempted at this point to exult in their own superior understanding of Chinese manners, for the French historian has recorded in his text a Chinese banquet at which guests ate “Stags Pizzles and Birds-­Nests.”24 But Goldsmith’s repeated exposure of the textual provenance of seemingly material foods underscores the way in which cultural commodities function as ideological signifiers not directly traceable to real-­world historical referents. To the extent that Du Halde’s knowledge comes not from his own experience (the historian had never been to China) but from the reports of o­ thers, “Birds-­Nests” according to the logic of The Citizen of the World are no less mythical than the “Pilaw . . . ​ dressed at Pekin.” The point lies not in ­whether this or that material ingestant ­really originated from China, but rather in the exposure of a complicated weaving together of figurative and material understandings that makes the consumption of the East an inescapably discursive affair. Lien Chi’s desire for “eating only what [he] knew” thus undercuts the self-­ congratulatory reader who would identify e­ ither with or against him. The brilliance of Goldsmith’s repre­sen­ta­tional strategy lies in its refusal to let its audience off the hook, since Lien Chi’s shifting positionality works to erode any claim to cultural mastery that ­these readers would make. In The Citizen of the World, eating can occur only as a materialization of preexisting knowledge. Yet the connection between eating and knowledge in the first place also recognizes the fantasized link between exotic ingestion and cultural mastery, while distinguishing that sort of cultural mastery from the figurative knowledge one gains through the consumption of literary texts. Thus, while Lien Chi denies knowing “Bear’s claws, or a slice of Birds nests” in “Letter XXXIII” (143), he would have recourse to t­hese very items as meta­phors for his passion for exoticized reading ­matter in “Letter [ 43 ]

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XCVII”: “I am become a perfect Epicure in reading, plain beef or solid mutton ­will never do. I’m for a Chinese dish of bear’s claws and bird’s nests. I am for sauce strong with assafoetida, or fuming with garlic” (387–388). On the one hand, by correctly identifying “bear’s claws” and “bird’s nests” as Chinese, Goldsmith ­causes Lien Chi to contradict and further discredit himself. On the other hand, Goldsmith foregrounds the figurativeness of any claim to know ­these material dishes by employing them as figures of speech for reading. In this regard, he pre­ sents Lien Chi’s plea of ignorance as a deeper form of truth that recognizes and refuses discursive imposition. Nevertheless, Goldsmith is not immune to his culture’s narcissistic approach to cultural alterity. While The Citizen of the World parodies the consumption of otherness as a projection of self, that parody is motivated at least in part by Goldsmith’s anxiety about the potentially corrosive effects of Oriental luxury. “The Deserted Village” describes luxury as the betrayal of native, landed virtue. And in letter XVII of The Citizen of the World, Lien Chi laments E ­ ngland’s colonization of the Amer­i­cas to satisfy its appetite for “raw silk, hemp, and tobacco,” which has led to a colossal wasting of “­England[’s] . . . ​best and bravest subjects” (75). More facetiously, the Chinese phi­los­o­pher ­later declares that he can be in “no way displeased with a fashion which tends to increase a demand for the commodities of the East, and is so very beneficial to the country in which [he] was born,” for even while it “may introduce poverty ­here [in ­England] . . . ​[they] s­hall be the richer for it in China” (331). The Citizen of the World registers the impact of Eastern commodities but ultimately shies away from any real discussion of its significance. The focus on the figurative logic of consumption, then, can be read as a technique of evasion. Exotic ingestion conjures up the horizon of material cross-­cultural encounter, but such encounters ultimately fail to take place in Goldsmith’s text. Instead, Goldsmith focuses on the mediated nature of eating in “Letter XIV” to disavow the dangers of an unruly appetite, and thereby the possibility of a real threat from the outside. The lady’s passion to see Lien Chi eat is played for laughs, and unlike the ravenous wife’s grotesque cravings in The Spectator, it has no conceivably material impact. Goldsmith’s reticence on this issue traces back to his own position as a merchant of literary commodities that play on and contribute to Britain’s taste for the exotic. His self-­defensiveness ­toward his role accounts for the striking way in which The Citizen of the World ’s “Editor’s Preface” erupts into existential angst. Greatly alarmed by his acknowl­edgment that he hawks Eastern merchandise, Goldsmith “awake[s] from his reverie, with fright,” to muse upon his social alienation: “But at pre­sent I belong to no par­tic­u­lar class. I resemble one of ­those solitary animals, [ 44 ]



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that has been forced from its forest to gratify ­human curiosity. My earliest wish was to escape unheeded through life; but I have been set up for half-­pence, to fret and scamper at the end of my chain. Tho’ none are injured by my rage, I am naturally too savage to court any friends by fawning. . . . ​Too indolent for intrigue, and too timid for favour, I am—­But what signifies what am I” (15). The editor’s psychological identification with a monkey activates the vari­ous but intersecting discourses of social emulation, female consumption, and cultural savagery, for all of which the monkey functions as overdetermined trope. Intended or other­wise, the reference points also to the other Fum-­Hoam’s transmigrating soul in Gueullette’s Chinese Tales, which assumes an ape as one of its numerous forms. The role reversal ­here, in which the Eu­ro­pean editor takes on a bestial form usually accorded to the cultural other, underscores the anxiety about illicit contact with, and consequent contagion by, that other. At the same time, such a role reversal inevitably exposes the chimerical nature of the cultural other that, in the final analy­sis, turns out to be a Eu­ro­pean invention, a sort of cultural aping. Fi­nally, the preface’s abrupt termination in existential crisis gives away the fact that both the per­for­mance and the exposure of such cultural impersonation can help negotiate the dynamic contours of selfhood. This aligns with The Citizen of the World ’s stated interest in domestic critique, but more importantly, it reveals the cultural defensiveness that Goldsmith’s satirical position masks. Scholars have frequently read in Lien Chi’s ironic outings an expression of Goldsmith’s cosmopolitan humanism.25 Yet if The Citizen of the World, through the insistent groundlessness of the cultural insights it would supply, reveals the Orient to be a Eu­ro­pean solipsistic projection, that strategy nevertheless reinforces the borders of British identity by performing Britain’s appetite for the Orient as simply a self-­involved domestic drama. The Citizen of the World enters the fierce con­temporary debate over exotic ingestants precisely by refusing to consider their impact. Tea appears in its pages as an unremarkable, effortlessly En­glish practice, not the “EPIDEMICAL disease” that Jonas Hanway warned his readers against.26 In Goldsmith’s text, the only “epidemic” is the “epidemic terror” (285) disseminated by stories, and the “peculiar malady” (285) plaguing En­glish society is not any material contaminant but rather its own delusional fear. “Letter LXIX” dramatizes this gap between discursive and material contagion by mocking the way “a disregarded story of a l­ittle dog” “improve[s] and spreads” like wildfire through the nation, the account “­every moment gather[ing] new strength and grow[ing] more dismal” and eventually being transformed into the most horrendous rendering of mad dog disease (287–288). The joke turns on [ 45 ]

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the thin but stark line between mad dog disease and the story of mad dog disease: it is the latter, not the former, that has the nation in its pestilential grip. In her study of seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century Eu­ro­pean fictionalizations of the East, Ros Ballaster argues that “the East came to be understood as a (sometimes the) source of story,” only so it might be “dismissed or overcome to make way for the ‘adult’ development of a Eurocentric form.”27 Yet Lien Chi’s description of the pestilential spread of story relocates that source from East to West, offering the intriguing possibility that such a “fabulous Orient”—to borrow Ballaster’s formulation—is the Occident’s own fabulous, solipsistic projection.28 Indeed, “Letter XVI” explic­itly turns the charge of “false history and fabulous chronology” (69) back on Eu­ro­pean books, while “Letter XLV” lists among its “won­ders” vari­ous per­for­mances by an En­glishman (“a person ­here”), who feeds the local passion for “sights and monsters” by exhibiting himself as “a wax-­work figure” and “the figure of an Indian king” (190). Unlike most other Orientalist compositions, The Citizen of the World clearly equates Eastern won­ders with the Eu­ro­pean business of “making won­ders.” Goldsmith’s focus on the “figures” ­under which the En­glish performer “levied contributions” (190) registers his acute consciousness of the way repre­sen­ta­tion mediates and distorts any intercultural encounter. Figurations of the East are, ­a fter all, figurations by and for the West. Like the “Looking-­glass of Lao” that “Letter XLV” names as its final and “most useful” won­der (195), what shows up in the ostensibly Eastern mirror is a pockmarked, Western interiority. Precisely b­ ecause such figurations are grounded not in fact but fancy, and precisely ­because rhe­toric cannot produce the same kind of effect as material ingestants can, Goldsmith’s text cannot be held culpable for any threat to British identity. In fact, if his “Editor’s Preface” offers any sort of clue, it is that such self-­reflexivity shores up domestic identity as an endlessly fascinating drama. The proj­ect of national identity that Goldsmith advances, then, depends upon his distinction between literary trope and material ­thing, yet such a clear binary begins to break down in the hands of authors like William Beckford. For Beckford, the Orient constitutes a material space of possibility that he wishes to cling to rather than disavow, even as he acknowledges its necessary implication within a Western style of discourse. What makes Beckford’s Vathek dynamic, I argue, lies precisely in its exploration of the mutual implication between the material referent and its symbolic repre­sen­ta­tion. Furthermore, the dif­fer­ent significance that exotic ingestion takes on in Vathek points to a broader historical shift in Britain’s understanding of the Orient as the eigh­teenth ­century draws to a close. [ 46 ]



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BECKFORD’S IDEOLOGICAL SUBLIMATION: THE ORIENTALIST STYLE OF VATHEK ’S INGESTION

While The Citizen of the World addresses Britain’s appetite for a distinct Chinese “somethingness,” it is traditionally Vathek, with its rich cata­log of culturally specific artifacts, spaces, and rituals, that stands out for its particularity of Orientalist reference. Nigel Leask identifies Beckford’s novella as “a watershed between the old and the new [Orientalist] styles, largely on account of its preference for cultural typicality over neoclassical generality.”29 Diego Saglia has contextualized this cultural aesthetic within the era’s burgeoning consumer orientalism, noting in Vathek “an increased repre­sen­ta­tional accuracy and a growing materiality of the orient” that best characterizes “Romantic uses of the East.”30 If Goldsmith responded to his culture’s consumer Orientalism with a gesture of disavowal, downplaying its effects on British identity through evasive parody, Beckford embraces the materialized Orient as a promising source of self. In a journal entry dated December 4, 1778, Beckford describes his impersonation of Oriental royalty, a role-­playing episode facilitated by his access to Eastern commodities: “I then ascended the steps which lead to a vast hall paved with Marble and seating myself, like the Orientals, on Cushions of Brocade placed by a blazing fire was served with Tea and a species of white bread which has crossed the Atlantic. Meanwhile my thoughts w ­ ere wandering into the interior of Africa and dwelt for hours on ­those Countries I love. Strange tales of Mount Atlas and relations of Travellers amused my fancy. One instant I ­imagined myself viewing the marble palaces of Ethiopean princes.”31 “Cushions of Brocade,” “Tea,” and “a species of white bread which has crossed the Atlantic” are clearly impor­tant props for the flight of fancy that Beckford rec­ords. Imagining the Orient depends upon an exotic consumerism that extends even to literal ingestion: tea and bread enter the ­ ental and physical disposition, En­glishman’s body and seemingly transform his m prompting embodied thoughts of “wandering into the interior of Africa.”32 Beckford performs the role of the paradigmatic Romantic consumer h ­ ere. His deft movement between material artifact and imaginative travel perfectly accords with what Stana Nenadic, analyzing the Romantic “urge” to consume foreign artifacts, has described as that “easy transition from longing for some hard-­to-­define emotional fulfillment to longing for ­those material objects that could act as proxy for the emotions and thus make them real.”33 Yet in spelling out the difference between “Africa” and “the Atlantic,” Beckford’s alliteration diametrically opposes what it initially unites, highlighting the divergent courses traced by bread, tea, and the En­g lishman. Bread crosses [ 47 ]

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the Atlantic and tea passes through the China Sea and Indian Ocean, but the diarist wanders from E ­ ngland “into the interior of Africa.” In distinguishing between what he eats and what he fancies, Beckford foregrounds the gap between material real­ity and figurative imagination. The digestion of “Tea and a species of white bread” entails the simultaneous erasure of their imperial itineraries. The Oriental whimsy that emerges as a result depends upon the material real­ity of t­ hese ingestants, but it must si­mul­ta­neously disavow the par­tic­u ­lar contours of that materiality. The explic­itly dual structure of Beckford’s entry, with the first part evoking the con­temporary climate of exotic consumerism and the second returning to the narrative landscapes of ­e arlier Orientalist texts, thus makes vis­i­ble the figurative logic that undergirds not just exotic consumerism but also exotic ingestion. Even exotic ingestion, Beckford recognizes, works through the projection of meaning, for it entails the ideological sublimation of crude materiality.34 The digestion of material ingestants into an essential Orient follows a preexisting ideological framework, which in Beckford’s case is supplied by the “Strange tales of Mount Atlas and relations of Travellers [that so] amused [his] fancy.” The Romantic consumer consumes not so much Oriental essence as what he has determined in advanced to be the b­ earer of that essence, which he then digests accordingly. Beckford, I argue, does not share the illusion that exotic consumerism, even exotic ingestion, provides access to any kind of real Orient. Rather, he draws attention to the tautological pro­cess through which the Orient already functions as the discursive horizon for the very commodities that supposedly make it concrete. Vathek, frequently read as autobiographical, connects exotic consumerism with cultural transformation at the meta level by featuring an Islamic hero whose passion for exotic “rarities, collected from e­ very corner of the earth” parallels Beckford’s own famous connoisseurship of Oriental artifacts and contributes to the author’s sense of self.35 While Goldsmith’s Chinese impersonation satirizes the solipsism of British exotic consumerism, in Vathek Beckford’s role-­playing as a caliph (the integrity of which is maintained to the end by virtue of its being tacit) reflects upon the opportunities that exotic consumerism provides for the reimagination of cultural identity. As Beckford’s 1778 journal entry hints at, however, this reimagination works not through the uncritical appropriation of the East but through a surprisingly self-­reflexive reflection on how exotic eating can amount to a literary style. Appropriately, then, Vathek’s Oriental hero is a consumer and glutton, whose “addict[ion] to . . . ​the pleasures of the ­table” (1) rivals his passion for collecting and arranging “rarities . . . ​from e­ very corner of the earth” (2).36 The novella features the exploits of the “ninth Caliph of the race of the Abassides” (1), who [ 48 ]



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renounces his Islamic faith on the promise of power and wealth from a “stranger” claiming to be “from a region of India, which is wholly unknown” (14). Significantly, the “Giaour” (20) (a derogatory term meaning infidel, whose repeated application to the stranger highlights his otherness) makes his first appearance as a merchant, displaying before Vathek “extraordinary . . . ​merchandize” that dazzles by its ingenious workmanship. The merchandise includes “slippers, which, by spontaneous springs, enabled the feet to walk; knives, that cut without motion of the hand; sabres, that dealt the blow at the person they ­were wished to strike” (5). In par­tic­u­lar, the inscription on the sabers proclaims their function as material signifiers of a geo­graph­i­cal referent: “We ­were made where ­every ­thing is well made: we are the least of the won­ders of a place where all is wonderful and deserving, the sight of the first potentate on earth” (11). Yet while ­these curiosities stimulate desire not for themselves but for their place of origin, the tautological construction—­ “made where ­ every ­ thing is well made . . . ​ won­ ders of a place where all is wonderful”—­hints at the illusive nature of that place. Urged on by his ambitious m ­ other, Carathis, Vathek’s pursuit of this place “where e­ very t­ hing is well made” motivates the remainder of the novella’s plot. Of the Mephistophelean merchant, the caliph asks: “who he was? whence he came? and where he obtained such beautiful commodities?” (6). The dream of a place of infinite trea­sure establishes Beckford’s novella in the tradition of ­earlier Oriental tales, and the language of “merchandize” and “commodity” in par­tic­u­lar echoes the Arabian Nights’ focus on the merchant class. But Beckford also engages the consumerist motif to reflect upon eighteenth-­century Britain’s own attempts at pursuing the Orient through exotic consumerism. By deploying a genre-­specific feature as a simultaneous marker for con­temporary sociocultural real­ity, Beckford draws a parallel between discursive and material forms of Orientalism. Consuming the Orient through its commodities, Vathek suggests, is ­a fter all akin to the conspicuously literary imagination of the Orient as a mythical space. Functioning as signifiers, material objects can allude to this space, but they ultimately fail to yield the Orient up as a concrete geo­graph­i­cal location. Within the novella, Vathek’s gluttony serves as an analogue for the exotic consumerism that he participates in.37 The novella establishes this equation between the two forms of consumption early on, in a crucial scene where Carathis performs a ritualistic sacrifice to the Giaour in exchange for access to the place of trea­sure. Significantly, Carathis’s ritual proceeds in three stages: collection, consumption, and fi­nally sublimation. In the first stage, she gathers “the oil of the most venomous serpents; rhinoceros’ horns; and woods of a subtile [sic] and penetrating odour, procured from the interior of the Indies, together with a thousand other horrible rarities,” fi­nally adding to this “collection” “the dead bodies of the most faithful [ 49 ]

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of [Vathek’s] subjects” (31 and 35). In the second stage, she piles up ­these assorted materials for burning: “the venomous oil burst into a thousand blue flames; the mummies, dissolving, emitted a thick dun vapour; and the rhinoceros’ horns, beginning to consume; all together diffused such a stench, that the Caliph, recovering, started from his trance, and gazed wildly on the scene in full blaze around him” (32–33 [emphasis added]). Super­natural sublimation occurs in the final stage, as the crude materials of Carathis’s collection are refined into Oriental ambience: “the dead bodies vanished in the flames; which, at once, changed from a swarthy crimson, to a bright r­ose colour: an ambient vapour emitted the most exquisite fragrance; the marble columns rang with harmonious sounds, and the liquefied horns diffused a delicious perfume” (35). Carathis’s ritual, then, proceeds according to the logic of digestion: raw materials are gathered, consumed, and then sublimated. The striking gap between the crude and the refined already hints at the deceptiveness of the resulting Oriental ambience. And while this nefarious operation is ­under way, Vathek by her side has “acquired in ­these unsubstantial regions a voracious appetite” (31). Vathek’s position h ­ ere performs more than just a comic undercutting of the scene’s grotesqueness. Rather, his vocal complaints of hunger explic­itly frame Carathis’s activities as a devouring of the East, a point that Carathis foregrounds when she declares that Vathek “must have an excellent stomach if it can digest what [she has] brought” (32). Yet what is also striking about this scene is that Carathis’s ritual has admirably discharged that very task: the sublimation of her grotesque materials that Vathek would other­wise find impossible to “digest” produces not just “ambient vapour” but also “a ­table, covered with the most magnificent repast: flaggons of wine, and vases of exquisite sherbet reposing on snow” (35). Vathek’s decadent—­and de­cadently Oriental—­“repast,” then, is a sort of rarefied chyle, the already refined essence of more insidious materials. Vathek’s gluttony, particularly his taste for wine, showcases his blatant transgression of Islamic law. Yet in a curious way, it is Carathis, not Vathek, who performs the work of eating. The fact that Carathis’s ritualistic sublimation precedes (indeed, produces) Vathek’s meal underscores the immateriality of what the caliph ingests “in ­these unsubstantial regions” (emphasis added). The “magnificent repast,” a conventional trope of the East in the period’s Orientalist texts, is revealed to be mere sorcery, something conjured up rather than actually existing. In this way, Beckford’s self-­reflexivity t­ oward his own Orientalist discourse undermines his other­wise typically cynical Western characterization of the Muslim as an infidel, fraudster, or despot. As I argue in the next chapter, Thomas Moore not only displays a similar self-­reflexivity in Lalla Rookh (1817) but structures the form of his Oriental romance around this self-­reflexivity. [ 50 ]



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Significantly, Vathek gets his repast at the same time that his m ­ other receives the reward for her pains. While he “lay[s] hands on a lamb stuffed with pistachios,” she is “privately drawing from a fillagreen urn, a parchment that seemed to be endless” (35). On the one hand, the con­spic­u­ous parallel between food and language further reinforces the idea that Vathek’s banquet is more linguistic than corporeal. On the other hand, it also points to the discursive dimension of material food itself: the consumable, even ingestible, t­ hings of the Orient are not that dif­fer­ent from literary signifiers. Beckford’s decision to employ digestion as the super­natural machinery through which Carathis accomplishes her ends suggests that a figurative logic structures not only the Orientalist repre­sen­ta­tion of exotic ingestants but indeed eating itself. More precisely, the material act of eating is figurative insofar as its significance can be understood only via a preexisting Orientalist framework. Not an exotic meal bearing au­then­tic traces of some far-­off culture, Vathek’s feast is rather a conjuration, the materialization of discursive designs. And if Carathis sacrifices to the Indian merchant to help her son pursue “a place where all is wonderful and deserving,” then it is the literary topos of the Oriental trea­sure trove that governs the pro­cess by which Oriental essence is extracted from Carathis’s collection of grotesque materials. The assimilation of material otherness that underpins the dream of exotic consumerism, particularly exotic ingestion, turns out to be simply a projection of predetermined meaning. In Vathek, the Orient as a discursive horizon thus regulates consumption as a meaningful style. To drive home this point, Vathek works hard to spotlight the literariness of its locales. Oriental spaces such as “the interior of the Indies,” from which Carathis has wrested and “procured” her dark materials, cohere in sight only through the narrative delineation of t­ hese materials. In other words, the materiality of ­these spaces as spaces is generated through the cir­cuit and flow of language. Beckford makes this logic explicit by hinting at the uncanny similarity between the places Carathis has ransacked and the vari­ous wings of Vathek’s palace: the former contribute “a thousand . . . ​horrible rarities” to Carathis’s “collection” (31), while the latter feature “rarities, collected from e­ very corner of the earth” (2 [emphasis added]). The parallel between the two other­w ise starkly dif­fer­ent sets of locations pre­sents the intriguing possibility that space in Vathek does not attach itself to any material or historical site but is instead discursively produced through the act of collection.38 In this regard, then, the “enchantment” (2) that Beckford uses to characterize Vathek’s palace is not simply a clichéd reference to Oriental magic: it also points to the magical—­ideological—­sublimation that Orientalist writing performs in collecting tropes for the textual establishment of Oriental topoi. [ 51 ]

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The focus on collection has an obvious, and tongue-­in-­cheek, reference to Beckford’s own collection and connoisseurship of Oriental ­things, as critics have often noted. More than that, however, it signals Beckford’s awareness of the way in which Orientalist writers participate in discursive collection through their ethnographical and frequently fictionalized cata­logs of Eastern p ­ eoples and their manners. The explosive production in annotated poetry and prose at the beginning of the nineteenth c­ entury speaks especially to this tendency to document Oriental spaces. By “translat[ing] [otherness] into the ethnological or historiographical discourse of the same,” to borrow Leask’s formulation, Samuel Henley’s notes to Vathek can be said to have inaugurated the practice, setting the standard for an entire genre.39 Yet Vathek’s prose narrative reflects upon this practice at a meta level. This accounts for the novella’s peculiar interest in recording the names of the numerous wings of Vathek’s palace. The first palace, readers learn, is “called The Eternal or unsatiating Banquet”; the second “styled, The ­Temple of Melody, or The Nectar of the Soul”; the third “named The Delight of the Eyes, or The Support of Memory”; the fourth being “The Palace of Perfumes, which was termed likewise The Incentive to Plea­sure”; and the last “denominated The Retreat of Mirth, or the Dangerous” (2–3 [all boldface added]). The dizzying array of synonyms that Beckford deploys ­here draws attention to naming as a discursive act and suggests that what is being collected within and through the text is not just an assortment of material objects but, in an even more extreme manner, their literary stylizations. Italicization and the consistent use of “or” further evoke the style of con­temporary print titles. The repre­sen­ta­tion of Vathek’s luxurious Oriental spaces thus exposes their real­ity as discursive rather than material topoi, which Orientalist writers produce through the collection and accumulation of linguistic signifiers. The figurativeness of Vathek’s Oriental spaces points to their nature as a Western projection. By acknowledging the way in which physical mapping always depends upon a subjective filter, Beckford’s novella subverts the imperial attempt to define the space of alterity. The location-­signifying inscription on the Giaour’s sabers depends crucially upon interpretation: Vathek must rely upon “a venerable personage” (10) to “decipher [for him] . . . ​the uncouth characters engraven on their sides” (6). The fact that by the very next day t­ hese characters w ­ ill have “given place to o­ thers of dif­fer­ent import” (11 [emphasis added]) only underscores interpretation’s inevitably arbitrary nature. According to this logic, tracking down the Halls of Eblis, with its specifically Islamic religious iconography, as the ultimate end for both Vathek the character and Vathek the novella means only to submit to a par­tic­u­lar way (and place) of interpretation. Istakar as it exists within the text is not so much a concrete [ 52 ]



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referent as it is the product of a chain of signification. The fact that Istakar’s vast ruins are “embossed with vari­ous figures” and “marked by characters like t­hose on the sabers of the Giaour, and which possessed the same virtue of changing ­every moment” (107), points to the location as being no more substantial than a linguistic contingency. Indeed, only a­ fter the caliph has “read” the vacillating Arabic letters and confirmed their par­tic­u ­lar instantiation do the Halls of Eblis reveal themselves: “the rock yawned, and disclosed within it a staircase of polished marble, that seemed to approach the abyss” (108). The suggestively causal relationship between the reading of words and the discovery of place thus extends the logic that Vathek has already established to pre­sent the infernal Halls as an effect of language. However, Beckford’s deconstruction of the Orientalist’s strategy is self-­ serving in its own way. Part of the exhilaration of exotic consumerism, Colin Campbell has suggested, lies in its fostering of self-­consciousness: the exercise of imaginative agency through the act of consuming goods fosters within the individual an awareness “of the ‘object-­ness’ of the world and the ‘subject-­ness’ of himself.” 40 As Campbell notes, this phenomenon, if not original to the Romantic period, certainly underwent its first full flowering then. Emphasizing the gap between real­ity and fantasy allows Beckford to underscore the mediatory work of his own consciousness, so that he may experience to the fullest the exercise of his own imaginative capacity. Such a method is on prominent display as well in Beckford’s early travel writings, which are characterized, as Robin Jarvis has observed, by a “kind of self-­fueling fantasia, for which the material objects of travel provide no more than a tenuous motivation.” 41 Perhaps the discursive strategy can be understood as a response to his social marginalization. That is, Beckford may be asserting his own sovereignty by performing an extreme version of the role for which society has ostracized him. In this regard, the Orient offers what Donna Landry has called “a license for transgression, and a means of protesting against En­glish society by pursuing queerness in vari­ous forms.” 42 Yet this transgression can take shape as transgression only when the gap between imagination and mundane real­ity is kept alive, since it is the drama involved in this gap that makes Beckford’s sovereignty vis­i­ble. Beckford’s consumption of the Orient as a symbolic source of self thus works by acknowledging the discursive logic of that consumption: his queerness that so infuriates polite society partly consists in his honest insistence upon his imaginative dependence upon the Orient and, si­mul­ta­neously, his declaration of the way in which that imagination ultimately deviates from any real Orient. In his 1778 journal entry, Beckford goes to ­great lengths to emphasize his valiant traversal of the divide between dull society and magnificent imagination. [ 53 ]

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­ fter his fantastic flight through the “interior of Africa,” Beckford laments that A he “must return again to London, again be teized [teased] with Visits and dull impertinent Society,” but then he insists that he would nevertheless “break [his] shackles however splendid and maintain [his] Allegiance”: I ­w ill seclude myself if pos­si­ble from the World, in the midst of the Empire, and converse many hours e­very day with you, Mesron and Nouronihar. I am determined to enjoy my Dreams my phantasies and all my singularity, however irksome and discordant to the Wordlings around. In spite of them I ­will be happy, ­will employ myself in trifles, according to their estimation; and, instead of making myself master of the pre­sent po­liti­cal state of Amer­i­ca, instead of forming wise plans for its f­ uture subjection or calculating when Spain w ­ ill follow her Neighbor’s example, I ­will read, talk and dream of the Incas, of their gentle empire, the solemn worship of the Sun, the charms of Quito and the majesty of the Andes.43

Much of the passage’s heroism comes from Beckford’s strenuous tenacity: he is “determined . . . ​however irksome and discordant.” The obnoxious imposition of the real world must be established as a mea­sure against which “[his] Dreams [his] phantasies and all [his] singularity” can take shape. This strategy, and the urgency with which Beckford emphasizes his own rebellion against social norms, leads to the author’s striking exposé of his own discursive erasure of Britain’s material encounters with cultural ­others. Recall the stark distance between the imperial itineraries of tea and bread and the diarist’s narrative wandering “into the interior of Africa.” In this second half of the journal entry, the real­ity of Britain’s “wise plans for [Amer­i­ca’s] ­future subjection” is again opposed to Beckford’s dreams of “the Incas, of their gentle empire,” which not only divulges the ideologically distortive workings of the En­glishman’s imagination but also ruptures the supposed “gentleness” of an empire subjected to Spain’s violent conquest. Attending to the self-­reflexive energy that motivates Beckford’s Orientalism shifts how we understand the author’s exotic consumerism. Beckford ­handles the material artifacts of the Orient with a slight difference. He does not simply consume them for any sort of unmediated access to an ­actual Orient. Rather, to generate his own subjectivity and thereby sustain his sense of freedom, he explic­itly showcases how he converts exotic distance into personal space.44 It is thus formally apt that the more Vathek insists upon its cultural (Islamic) singularity, the more compelling it is as Beckford’s autobiographical rec­ord: Beckford’s conspicuously self-­reflexive engagement with the Orient in his novella foregrounds his appropriation of exotic distance as personal space. [ 54 ]



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Beckford sets the stage for this autobiographical reading of Vathek in an 1838 journal entry, where he famously established the novella’s infernal Halls of Eblis as a fictive version of the Egyptian Hall in his Fonthill estate. A nostalgic recounting of his twenty-­fi rst birthday cele­brations in 1781, the entry clearly depicts Beckford’s Orientalist mode as the imaginative creation of interior space. Much of the description focuses on how closely the partiers ­were “immured”: “doors and win­dows so strictly closed that neither common day light nor common place visitors could get in or even peep in.” 45 The clear boundary between inside and outside allows the Egyptian Hall to fully control one’s experience of the interior, so that passages ­were “apparently endless,” and the staircase seemed “interminable . . . ​ which when you looked down it—­appeared as deep as the well in the pyramid—­ and when you looked up—­was lost in vapour” (xi). Language that underscores perspective (“apparently” and “appeared”) foregrounds the way in which interior space becomes vastly expansive and “interminable,” b­ ecause it is infinitely malleable according to the whims of the imagination. “This l­ittle interior world of exclusive happiness” (xi) that Beckford describes increasingly turns out to be an “interior” world of the mind, as physical space modulates into an imaginative one. The Oriental artifacts in this physical interior play a particularly impor­tant role in the creation of imaginative space. “Wood aloes,” “cassolettes,” “silken carpets,” and “porcelain salvers of the richest japan” (xi), which Beckford takes g­ reat plea­sure in describing, concretize his fantasy for an exotic elsewhere. Not just an ornamental backdrop, t­ hese artifacts also function as material ele­ments authenticating Beckford’s experience of a luxurious Orient. Significantly, the vari­ous objects are woven together by the material effusion of “vapour” that the wood aloes emit, a weaving that Beckford’s syntax reflects in its hurried delineation of how “the uniform splendour of gilded roofs—­was partially obscured by the vapour of wood aloes ascending in wreaths from cassolettes placed low on the silken carpets in porcelain salvers of the richest japan.” The thick viscosity of the vapor arguably epitomizes Oriental materiality, with a sensuousness that beckons the imagination through its seductive reference to an Oriental beyond. Through its interpolation of a visual and aromatic veil of sorts, vapor arouses and sustains desire for the very t­ hings it is said to have “obscured”; it functions as the material signifier par excellence, catching the numerous Oriental commodities and converting them all into signs of an Oriental “essence” (xi). Vathek also featured an “ambient vapour” (35), whose appearance brought forth “splendid promises” of Istakar and prompted Vathek’s journey t­oward the “place where all is wonderful and deserving” (11). Yet in mediating between the crude materiality of “mummies,” “rhinoceros’ horns,” and “dead bodies” on the one hand [ 55 ]

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and the sublimated essence of “magnificent repast” and “endless parchment” on the other hand, Carathis’s “ambient vapour” also spotlights the intervention of Eu­rope’s Orientalist fantasy by presenting it in sensualized form. Similarly, in Beckford’s journal entry, the insinuative quality of Oriental materiality wavers easily into psychological projection. The “vapour of [Beckford’s] wood aloes” can just as soon pre­sent, in sensuous form and as its other face, the projective Western imagination itself.46 Thus, “vapour” in the journal entry also stands for the Egyptian Hall’s perspectival boundlessness: its staircase appeared “interminable” ­because “when you looked up—[it] was lost in vapour” (emphasis added). The patent lack of an objective source for this “vapour” points to its role as a meta­phor for the imagination.47 By focusing on this mediatory function of vapor and foregrounding its subjective character, the text establishes a parallel between this viscous medium and other material forms of mediation: “the strange, necromantic light” (xi) created by Philip James de Loutherbourg, the Franco-­ British designer of Fonthill’s Oriental scenery; the “air of summer” (xii) conjured up by the enclosed homestead, “whilst the wretched world without lay dark, and bleak, and howling” (xii); and fi­nally “the glowing haze investing ­every object” (xii) that transforms the physical space into a delirious dreamscape. The ultimate mediation, of course, comes from the nostalgia that serves as premise and drive for the journal entry: writing of 1781 in 1838, Beckford’s nostalgic pathos suggests that the “air of summer” enclosing himself and his friends is not simply the effect of Orientalist staging but rather flows out of the restorative work of memory. As the medium that undergirds all other mediums, nostalgia—­a construction of time past—­registers Beckford’s creative use of the Orient as symbolic material with which to establish the historical continuity of his self.48 To be clear, this use of the Orient works precisely ­because any shrewd insight into the solipsistic logic of Oriental ­matter cannot, in the final analy­sis, completely nullify its materiality. The materialized Orient is both “­really ­there” and an imaginative projection: it is his dance between the two that allows Beckford to maintain his subjectivity.49 The continuous movement from one pole to the other and back again infinitely sustains imagination. Even “the slightest approach to sameness,” Beckford tellingly writes in his 1838 journal entry, “was ­here untolerated” (xi). If, as Susan Stewart has argued, the collection of consumer objects turns each object’s broader socioeconomic system into a “small economy . . . ​self-­sufficient and self-­generating with regard to its own meanings and princi­ples of exchange,” Beckford’s Orientalist mode suggests that this self-­generation nevertheless depends upon a recurring wandering beyond the enclosure, so that the authenticating trace of materiality can be continuously converted into subjecthood.50 [ 56 ]



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Alternatively, it can unravel that subjecthood. In contrast to Goldsmith, Beckford’s demystification of Orientalist discourse preserves, albeit as an elusive trace, the other’s alienated materiality. If Carathis’s grotesque collection alludes to a violent ransacking of the East that involves the exploitation of ­actual ­peoples (thus the text’s emphasis on the “dead bodies”), the sensuous palpability of the “ambient vapour” (the potency of its “exquisite fragrance,” the vitality of its “bright ­rose colour,” and the resonance of its “harmonious sounds”) retains its raw ingredients in negative form.51 By preserving a shadow material real­ity of vio­lence and exploitation, Carathis’s vapor short-­circuits the Orientalist figuration of exotic commodities and thereby exposes their suppressed material histories. G ­ oing further than Goldsmith in countenancing the physicality of a­ ctual ingestion, Beckford also opens up the possibility of an ethical materialism capable of subverting the assimilative work of Orientalist ideology.52 In Beckford’s work one encounters, to varying extents, Carathis’s “dead bodies,” Britain’s “wise plans for [Amer­i­ca’s] f­ uture subjection,” and even the author himself as “master of the pre­sent po­liti­c al state of Amer­i­c a.” Indeed, as is well known, Beckford inherited his f­ ather’s Jamaican slave plantation and became, at the age of ten, “master of the pre­sent po­liti­cal state of Amer­i­ca” in a very literal sense.53 As Simon Gikandi has compellingly demonstrated, “slavery was the greatest repressed force in Beckford’s life,” for the absentee slave owner was “oppressed by the constant reminder that his sense of self as a modern subject was built on fortunes made in the complex of sugar and slaves.”54 The grotesque ingredients of Vathek’s meal, however, momentarily spotlight the corporeal link between the possibly sweetened “Tea” that Beckford sipped while seated “like the Orientals, on Cushions of Brocade” and the sugar plantation’s slave ­labor that fed his consumption activities.55 In this regard, Beckford’s repre­sen­ta­ tion of exotic consumerism as a literal eating not only captures the specific form of colonial vio­lence that underpinned its symbolic economy, but also carries a tacit recognition of and anxiety about the other as empowered and agentic, capable of wielding material influence. Romanticism’s bodily intimacy—­its explorations of the material grounds of being—is thus inescapably bound up with the period’s intensifying colonial and imperial investments. Nevertheless, such materiality exists in Beckford’s texts only as elusive trace, incapable of yielding a concrete historical-­material referent that can be definitively experienced as the East. The subversive trajectories opened up by Beckford’s shadow materialism are ultimately redirected ­toward self-­serving ends. But if the goal was to underscore Beckford’s distinctive selfhood, the outcome ends up simply as exposing the solipsistic tendencies of British consumer society. For Beckford, the [ 57 ]

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need to si­mul­ta­neously acknowledge and deny the material props of his Orientalist reverie puts him in a double bind. Trumpeting his dependence upon an Orient that he also exposes as self-­projection, Beckford celebrates his own deviation from British norms even as he questions exactly how deviant he is being. His transgression of polite society takes on the additional shading of a tragic irony, insofar as its failure becomes one that he both wishes to hide and inevitably must reveal. In their dif­fer­ent ways, both Goldsmith and Beckford responded to Britain’s prevalent exotic consumerism by interrogating its ideological function, examining the narratives of otherness and selfhood that exotic consumerism served as Britain grappled with its own place in an increasingly connected world. Exotic ingestants, particularly through the wealth of cultural commentary they generated, provided a prominent discursive space within which the British self can configure itself to the cultural other by fantasizing about it, appropriating it, or casting it as a threat. This mode of cross-­cultural encounter, in which the materiality of the exotic ingestant is mixed with its vari­ous symbolic figurations and refigurations in the British consciousness, provides a crucial context for understanding the scenes of ingestion in The Citizen of the World and Vathek. Even before the intervention of present-­day critics, writers such as Goldsmith and Beckford ­were turning a critical eye ­toward their own encounters with and projections of cultural alterity. To be clear, this does not make their proj­ects disinterested. Rather, we should attend to the way in which strategic self-­criticism is constitutive of identity formation. Goldsmith and Beckford both negotiate the gaps among material ingestant, literary trope, and geo­graph­i­cal Orient to establish a foundation for their own personally conceived identities. Repeatedly exposing Orientalist narratives of China as so many discursive constructs, Goldsmith disavows the influence of exotic material and ends by strengthening the bound­aries of cultural identity. Beckford does not deny cross-­cultural influence, but he draws attention to his distortion of that material encounter to demonstrate his own imaginative sovereignty. His careful distinction between the “pre­sent po­liti­cal state” and his literary “phantasies” signals the Romantic novelist’s continuing investment in a discrete, if not wholly autonomous, cultural identity. Nevertheless, Beckford’s distance from Goldsmith also highlights the first traces of a fluid selfhood that emerged as the eigh­teenth ­century gave way to the nineteenth, when the global circulations of ­peoples, commodities, and forms of knowledge paved the way for Britain’s increasingly mutable mode of imperial identity.

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3

CUPS, CURES, AND CURSES T h e El u sive n e s s of C u ltu ra l I d e ntit y i n L a lla R o o k h a n d T h e Ta li s m a n

R

O M A N T I C I S M H A R B O R S A TA S T E for opiate visions. In ­ these ­ rug-­infused dreams, the transmutation of material ingestant into literary land guage highlights not only foreign influence but also the interweaving of the symbolic and the material in Romantic uses of the Orient. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” which names both an Oriental drug and an Orientalist text as its sources, acknowledges in its preface the way the En­glish Romantic imagination consolidates around a paradoxically foreign source:

In the summer of the year 1797, the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm­house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effect of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in ‘Purchas’s Pilgrimage’: ‘­Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground ­were inclosed with a wall.’ The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images ­rose up before him as ­things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the w ­ hole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are ­here preserved.1

Ingestant and inscription combine to generate “images [that] ­rose up before [the author] as t­ hings, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.”2 ­These “expressions” first exist only [ 59 ]

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within the mind and then issue in “the lines that are ­here preserved,” though exactly how much of “Kubla Khan” is passive transcription and how much aesthetic invention remains intentionally obscured.3 “Anodyne” and “words” become “images . . . ​ as t­ hings,” then “expressions,” and fi­nally “lines”—­the clunky referential chain tries to eliminate the intervening presence of the Eu­ro­pean authorial self in the pro­cess of poetic creation, even as it draws attention to that self as inevitable mediator. This self-­consciousness explains Coleridge’s strange qualification that “he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas’s Pilgrimage” (emphasis added). Rephrasing “the following sentence” as “words of the same substance” highlights the materiality (“substance”) of language only to point to its opposite: not actually the same material words, only “words of the same substance”—­that is, the same in spirit. Indeed, the inscription that follows only approximates the text from which it was taken, a text whose repre­sen­ta­tion of Eastern ­matter originated from an Eu­ro­pean pen.4 The original sentence in Purchas his Pilgrimage spells out thus: “In Xaindu did Cublai Can built a stately pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull streames.”5 The differences of script materialize and thereby highlight the multiphase translation from Marco Polo’s oral memoirs, to his travel narratives (rendered by Rustichello da Pisa in Old French) and then to Purchas’s edited En­glish compilation. H ­ ere, the continuous adaptation and reformulation across the vari­ous authors further complicates the relationship among “words,” “images,” “­t hings,” and “lines.” At the same time, the materiality of the letter underscores, through a contrast of degree, the even more tangible materiality of the opium that Coleridge ingests. This salient interweaving of materiality with figurativeness underscores Coleridge’s self-­reflexivity in showcasing the elusive origins of the Romantic imagination.6 As an account of Coleridge’s composition pro­cess, “Kubla Khan’s” preface underscores the Oriental ground of the En­glish imagination only to suggest that Orient’s contrivance, its distance from any material source. Adapted and refigured, the Orient is perhaps not unlike “the miracle of rare device” (35) that the verse itself conjures up. Indeed, the poem begins with Kubla Khan’s po­liti­cal statecraft: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-­dome decree (1–2)

And it ends with the En­glish poet’s aesthetic vision: That with ­music loud and long, I would build that dome in air. (45–46) [ 60 ]



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It thus repeats the preface’s gesture of using “a bit of the other” for its own ends.7 The visionary poet, whom Jerome McGann has called “a dramatic repre­sen­ta­tion of imagination’s own self-­renovating powers,”8 exerts a mesmeric power that stems directly from his exotic ingestion: For he on honey-­dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise. (53–54)

But beyond just Eastern infection, the poem’s textual progression from the Oriental despot to the En­glish youth suggests the intertwining of what initially appears to be distinct binary categories. “Kubla Khan’s” sequential establishment of its three major characters—­the titular Kubla, the “damsel with a dulcimer” (37), and fi­nally the visionary poet—­arguably reflects the progressive consolidation of the lyric “I” through its textual counter-­position first to the Mongolian emperor and then to the Abyssinian maid.9 The Mongolian despot decrees a material construction, but the visionary poet undertakes a spiritual one. The Abyssinian maid possesses creative artistry, but she sings, as Anne Mellor points out, “only of a fallen or lesser paradise, of Mount Abora.” Hers can exist only as a feminine power awaiting appropriation by the creative male poet.10 Coleridge’s identity coalesces at the point of excess: more imaginative than Oriental creation, more active and self-­ conscious than female creation. Yet by showcasing this pro­cess, the poem does not just assume an essentialized identity but also gestures ­toward its dependence upon other cultural categories generated by Orientalist chains of signification (from Purchas his Pilgrimage to “Kubla Khan”). The Oriental other, whose “substance” turns out to be as much discursive as it is material, is a “rare device” indeed—­ itself contrived and framed, and whose materiality has been subsequently engineered into a “device” for selfhood. At the beginning of the nineteenth ­century, Britain’s participation in global exchange networks prompted an intensifying inquiry into the relationship between self and cultural other. Transnational circulations of commodities provided Britain with unpre­ce­dented opportunities for profit and power but also entangled it within networks of complicated transactions, dependencies, and influences. For instance, Britain fed its appetite for Chinese tea by exporting Bengal-­farmed opium from India to China, in a bid to reduce its Chinese trade deficit and strengthen its interests in colonial India. Following the 1757 ­Battle of Plassey, the East India Com­pany seized control of Bengal’s opium trade, cultivating the drug and auctioning it off to private trading companies. ­These country traders would then smuggle the opium into China through Canton. Along the way, they also traded (often illegally) at Southeast Asian ports, including Aceh, Melaka, and Batavia. In this way, opium flowed into China while tea flowed out. Meanwhile, the silver currency that [ 61 ]

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mediated between the two and that increasingly accumulated on the British side moved through the East India Com­pany and became bills of exchange that private traders could redeem in India or London.11 As Tan Chung has pointed out, “The East India Com­pany’s tea ‘investment’ increased from 6 million lbs. per year in the de­cade 1771–1780 to 35 million lbs. per annum during the period 1831–1837.” During the same period, Bengal went from producing 1,400 chests of opium to producing more than ten times that amount by 1840, the bulk of which went to China.12 The triangular trade in opium and tea bound Britain to China and India, but ­these ­were not the only commodities in play. From 1706 to 1856, although the British population only tripled, its sugar consumption grew by forty times.13 Increasingly demanded as part of what Jane Merritt calls a “consumption bundle” with the tea that it was used to sweeten, sugar’s trade routes—­which involved not just the commodity’s movement from the West Indies to Britain but also the forced movement of slaves from Africa to the American sugar plantations—­were ineluctably tied up with the path of the Chinese leaf, sometimes even overlapping exactly on the ships that carried “tea and slaves together.”14 “The success of tea,” Sidney Mintz writes, “was also the success of sugar,” and by the end of the eigh­teenth ­century tea and sugar had become “so vital . . . ​in the daily lives of the ­people that the maintenance of their supply had by then become a po­liti­cal, as well as an economic, ­matter.”15 An astute observer of En­glish rural life would won­der in 1795 how “strange” it is “that the common ­people of any Eu­ro­pean nation should be obliged to use, as part of their daily diet, two articles imported from the opposite sites of the earth.”16 The rapidly increasing circulation of t­ hese exotic ingestants seems to have produced within British consumers a growing awareness of domestic reliance upon foreign entities. As Evan Gottlieb has argued, the real­ity of economic interdependence among nations brought home to the British the recognition that “the maturation of a nation-­state depends, not so much on the development of a central, immutable core of identity, but rather on the continuous (and in the case of commerce, quite literal) give-­and-­take of goods, ser­vices, ­people, and ideas with other, equally permeable territorial entities.”17 ­These novel economic realities, and the unpre­ce­dented commodity flows they facilitated, taxed narrativizations of difference in new ways.18 In trying to make symbolic sense of such material exchanges, works like “Kubla Khan” question the role of otherness in configurations of cultural subjectivity. The precarity of Coleridge’s visionary poet suggests that the En­glish self is not only ­shaped by its exotic encounters but also depends upon ­those encounters for its articulation as self. The “anodyne” named in “Kubla Khan’s” preface supplies the material occasion for the visionary poet’s “expression” in and through [ 62 ]



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verse. Not a fixed entity, the self is forged in and through its continual encounters with otherness. Exotic ingestion, as a mode of cultural encounter that plays out across the intimate surfaces of the body, becomes a potent literary shorthand for exploring a vision of the self as fluid, contingent, and subjunctive.19 The rest of this chapter examines in detail how Thomas Moore and Walter Scott interrogate the provisional ground of British selfhood at the level of narrative form. While Oliver Goldsmith and William Beckford assumed, to some extent, the validity of the concept of selfhood, by the beginning of the nineteenth ­century such an assumption had become increasingly difficult to uphold. Goldsmith’s and Beckford’s self-­reflexive engagements with the Orient became, in Moore’s and Scott’s writings, metatextual investigations of the relationship between literary and material economies. The circulation of exotic ingestants as literary tropes in both Lalla Rookh (1817) and The Talisman (1825) generate narrative economies that not only mirror the globally intertwined flows of tea, sugar, and opium but also reproduce their breaching of identity categories. At the same time, each text also reveals a narrative drive that works to repair this breach and reestablish the illusion of autonomous identity. In so d ­ oing, Moore and Scott not only expose as fiction the sovereignty of British selfhood but also wrestle with the ideological function of narrative in creating and sustaining that fiction.

THE CONFECTIONARY ORIENTALISM OF THOMAS MOORE’S LALLA ROOKH

Lalla Rookh displays the conventional trappings of the eighteenth-­century Oriental tale, a genre that took off in Eu­rope following Antoine Galland’s popu­lar French translation of Les mille et une nuits and its subsequent rendering into En­glish as the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Moore’s poem draws on the familiar device of the frame narrative: in this case, “a young poet of Cashmere . . . ​reciting the Stories of the East” provides the formal motivation for the subsequent introduction of four in­de­pen­dent inset tales.20 The “Oriental” “Romance” proved a hit from its first publication in May 1817 (6:v and xxii). A sixth edition appeared before the end of the year, and by 1841 the book-­length poem had reached its twentieth edition. The Longman publishing firm, which acquired the rights to the work for the unpre­ce­dented amount of £3,000, was well rewarded for its investment. In 1836, Thomas Longman triumphantly declared Lalla Rookh to be “the cream of copyrights.”21 Moore’s contemporaneous critics had much to say about his poem, but what is particularly striking is the gustatory language that persisted across their reviews. [ 63 ]

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Francis Jeffrey, whose review of Lalla Rookh was favorable on the ­whole, nevertheless critiqued the poem’s stylistic excess by comparing it to overly sweetened food. Moore, Jeffrey complained, was “too lavish of his gems and sweets,” which “seem so plainly intended for ornaments and seasonings only, that they are only agreeable, when sprinkled in moderation over a plainer medium.”22 The Asiatic Journal called Moore’s images “luxuriating, as if enamoured of their own sweetness,” while ­ nder the influence of Lalla Rookh “the the Literary Speculum confessed that u spirit is oppressed with sweets, almost to satiety, and becomes too luxurious and enervated.”23 Less sympathetically, The Eclectic Review charged the poet with “extract[ing] ever the same sweet but cloying honey,” and The British Review “think[s] that to all this the phrase of ‘too delicious,’ . . . ​may be properly applied. We are so cloyed before we come to the end of Mr. Moore’s quarto volume, with ­these stimulating sweets, as to be ready almost to wish ourselves in a garden of leeks and onions to relieve our senses.”24 In each of ­these instances, Moore’s rhetorical luxuriousness is criticized as a specifically gastronomic indulgence. Sweetness recurs as a descriptor across all of t­ hese reviews, each time associated with excessive indulgence and sensual overstimulation. Lalla Rookh’s nineteenth-­century reception situates the poem within contemporaneous debates on foreign luxury, which framed the domestic appetite for exotic commodities (including literary commodities) as a dangerous indulgence that threatened Britain’s native virtue. The critique of Eastern luxury, essentially Britain’s attempt to manage an economic phenomenon by mapping it onto an ethical order, extends ­here to a critique of the British emulation of that moral laxity.25 According to The British Review, Lalla Rookh’s “voluptuous[ness]” results from Moore’s “constant study in this new Oriental school.”26 Indeed, discussions of Eastern verse employed similar terms of analy­sis. Captain Vans Kennedy’s “An Essay on Persian Lit­er­a­ture” (1817), presented at a literary society meeting just four months ­after Lalla Rookh’s first publication, praised Persian poetry for its “sweetness of . . . ​ versification” but “admit[ted] that the love of meta­phor and of figured diction sometimes leads the writer to deviate from his usual purity and simplicity.”27 Nigel Leask has argued that Jeffrey’s review of Lalla Rookh “combined praise for the luxury commodity of orientalism with a moral indictment of eastern poetry and my­thol­ogy and a culturist legitimation of imperial policy.”28 When it comes to Lalla Rookh’s luxuriousness, however, Jeffrey offered at best tempered praise: he regrets that Moore “is decidedly too lavish of his gems and sweets” (emphasis added). The ornate quarto edition of Moore’s poem, which at forty-­t wo shillings a copy would have been unaffordable for regular British consumers, provided a focal point for this critique by virtue of the materiality of its book form.29 As [ 64 ]



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Matthew Hale Clarke observes, “through its lavishly ornamented form, the quarto offered an unsettling reminder to Regency readers that Britain, bloated on colonial wealth, was as enslaved to luxury as the Orient was ­imagined to be.”30 The discursive connections among luxury, literary language, and sweets are crucially related to the poem’s meanings. I suggest that the repeatedly drawn parallel between words and ingestants in Lalla Rookh’s con­temporary reviews is neither innocent nor arbitrary but rather responds directly to a motif of exotic ingestion within the poem. As an imperial good whose consumption in nineteenth-­century Britain was increasingly driven by the taste for tea, sugar is intimately linked to slavery at both ends of the production-­consumption chain: it was farmed by slave ­labor in the West Indies; it produced British devotees who ­were willing to tolerate the morally degrading enterprise of slavery; and it was used in conjunction with another foreign ingestant (tea), whose conquest of domestic taste would have been draining British coffers if not for the traffic in that other physically enslaving ingestant, opium.31 In his lecture on the slave trade, Coleridge si­mul­ta­neously describes sugar as “the blood of the Murdered” and indicts tea as a “beverage sweetened with ­human blood.”32 Elsewhere, he refers to tea as a “pernicious Beverage” that drove Britain’s “commercial intercourse with the East Indies” and in the pro­cess left a “most foul and heart-­inslaving Guilt.”33 Moore invokes ­t hese material economies in Lalla Rookh to reflect on the prob­lem of cultural identity posed by the movement of exotic ingestants across territorial and bodily bound­aries, but he does so in a way that undermines the Orientalist ste­reo­types to which his Oriental tale seemingly subscribes. In contrast, his reviewers compare the poem to sweets to fix the play of meaning. In associating Lalla Rookh with exotic food, they seek in Moore’s text a stable repre­sen­ta­tion of cultural otherness that the poem ironically denies through its own motif of exotic ingestion. Indeed, the reviewers sensed this lack of stable meaning, and their moral indictment of Moore’s poem can be read as compensatory reactions against its infuriating ambiguity. Lalla Rookh’s frame narrative depicts the relationship between Feramorz, “a young poet of Cashmere,” and the titular Lalla Rookh, the Mughal princess traveling with her bridal party from Delhi to Cashmere, where she is to marry the King of Bucharia. Each of the four inset tales occurs as a poetic recital that Feramorz performs for Lalla Rookh to help “beguile the tediousness of the journey” (6:15), and in the pro­cess of narration the storyteller and his listener would fall in love with each other. Despite this relatively straightforward plot, Moore’s reviewers complained about the poem’s elusiveness. The British Review wished that “Mr. Moore would consider, that . . . ​words and sentences must have definite, clear, and substantial meaning,” and that while “poetry has an extensive empire, [it has] [ 65 ]

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not an absolute sway” (emphasis added). “To play about the margin of meaning, where the colours of thought are blending into confusion,” the reviewer warns, “is a dangerous exercise of the poet’s talent.”34 Jeffrey similarly cautioned that “the outposts of all empires are posts of peril” (emphasis added). Moore, in Jeffrey’s estimation, treads on perilous ground, since his poetry seems “to occupy the extreme point of refinement . . . ​that can be said to fall within the legitimate domain of poetry.”35 In pointing to Lalla Rookh’s “gossamer lines” and “superfluous images,” both reviewers suggestively diagnose the play of meaning as a specific effect of Moore’s repre­sen­ta­tional style.36 Furthermore, their strikingly unan­i­mous recourse to “empire” as a meta­phor for the poetic province registers the po­liti­cal implications of such uncertainty. At stake in poetic repre­sen­ta­tion, both reviewers recognize, is nothing less than the delineation of national and cultural bound­aries. While critics t­ oday frequently read the proliferation of figurative language in Lalla Rookh as an exploitative Orientalism and thus a sign of the poem’s defective politics, this linguistic extravagance in fact works to displace any stable cultural meaning.37 From the outset, Moore’s poem pre­sents its indeterminacy of meaning as a distinct prob­lem of intercultural encounter, a prob­lem that it dramatizes both within and across its multiple levels of narration. In the inset tales, marginalized cultural communities revolt against oppressive ones. In the frame narrative, the Mughal princess marries the Bucharian king. More metatextually, the Anglo-­Irish author discursively constructs and pre­sents a derivative Oriental subject ­matter taken, as he acknowledges, from “the w ­ hole range of all such Oriental reading as was accessible to [him]” (6:xviii). The meetings of strangers that Lalla Rookh repeatedly stages at the level of plot provide dramatic occasions for vari­ous scenes of cultural misreading. But Moore’s poem subverts cultural ste­reo­t ypes most effectively when, g­ oing beyond the circumstances of plot, it enacts this elusiveness of meaning at the level of formal repre­sen­ta­tion. For instance, an extended motif of ingestion operates self-­ reflexively in “The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan” so that the tale’s explicit critique of Oriental fraudulence is extended to the Orientalist author as well. In this way, “The Veiled Prophet” activates a supplementary play of meaning that undermines not just its discursive pre­sen­ta­tion of the other but also the integrity of cultural selfhood. “The Veiled Prophet” establishes its ingestion motif with the “brilliant banquet” (6:37), a device that Mokanna, the titular prophet, employs to draw in the faithful. The tale follows Mokanna’s encounters with Azim and Zelica, ill-­fated lovers who ­were separated by war and then in­de­pen­dently lured into joining Mokanna’s revolt against Caliph Mahadi’s Islamic state. The narrative opens from [ 66 ]



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the perspective of Mokanna’s adoring hordes, angling to get a glimpse of their “Prophet-­Chief” (6:19) through his Veil, the Silver Veil, which he had flung In mercy t­ here, to hide from mortal sight His dazzling brow, till man could bear its light. (6:19–20)

The visual potency of the veil, which mesmerizes both Mokanna’s audience within the text and Moore’s audience beyond the text, suggests that the prophet wields power primarily through his deft manipulation of material form. Prostrating himself before the veil, Azim believes the form, to which he bends his knee, Some pure, redeeming angel. (6:30 [emphasis added])

Yet the veil’s efficacy necessarily depends upon its own transcendence, and only the promise of the “pure” beyond the “form” can legitimize its other­wise crude dazzle. This rhetorical valence of the veil conditions our understanding of the “brilliant banquet” when it appears. Just as Azim succumbs to the lure of materiality, Zelica, installed as “Priestess of the Faith” (6:39) in Mokanna’s harem, catches her zeal “from a brilliant banquet, where the sound / Of poesy and ­music breath’d around,” ­because the banquet is a “pictur[e]” for a “heav’n” Where all was pure, where ­every stain that lay Upon the spirit’s light should pass away. (6:37 [emphasis added])

As religious props, Mokanna’s veil and banquet work analogously. Each material form is supposedly only shadow and sign of a more “pure” spiritual essence. But by exposing the Veiled Prophet as a fraud early on—in the earliest pages, readers learn that “ne’er did Faith with her smooth ban­dage bind / Eyes more devoutly willing to be blind” (6:25)—­Moore disrupts the pro­cess, exposing the paradox upon which religious ideology relies. From the outset, then, readers are alert to the method through which Mokanna manipulates the play between material signifier and spiritual signified to create and sustain the illusion of an originary presence. In his understanding of the rhetorical-­material dichotomy of the veil, Moore shares the intuition of other Romantic-­era poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, who employs the veil figure to work through the relationship between poetic language and divine truth.38 But Moore deploys this metaphysical problematic and Romantic aesthetic to articulate, if not resolve, the specific prob­lem of cultural repre­sen­ta­tion, for the [ 67 ]

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analogous functions of the veil and banquet spotlight exotic ingestion as a crucial context. The word “banquet” activates two symbolic trajectories. While Mokanna exploits it for its sacramental meanings, Moore employs it as a well-­e stablished trope of Eastern de­c adence, covertly mounting a critique of Oriental excess and hy­poc­risy by appealing to the racist Eu­ro­pean imaginary. For instance, Lord Byron’s Don Juan uses a similarly opulent Oriental banquet to underscore the toward indulgence.39 Indeed, the curiously multisensory “Sybarite” propensity ­ nature of Mokanna’s banquet makes it idolatrously suspect: the banquet’s synesthetic conjunction of the auditory (“sound / Of poesy and m ­ usic”), tactile (“breath’d around”), visual (“picturing”), and olfactory (“banquet,” “breath’d”) pre­sents an excessive materiality whose exorbitance threatens the very spiritual real­ity it is supposed to establish. Its ambiguity of signification—­did this “brilliant banquet” actually occur, or is the phrase deployed metaphorically?—­only intensifies this effect, since the banquet’s untethering from a concrete referent focuses attention on its opulence. However, the rhetorical character of Mokanna’s banquet trou­bles its Orientalist function, since Moore deploys the term “banquet” as an efficacious cultural shorthand underpinned by an entire set of ste­reo­t ypical notions regarding Oriental de­cadence. Moore himself becomes implicated within the rhetorical framework he has just deconstructed, for the Orientalist resonance of “banquet” activates a dif­fer­ent version of the signifier-­signified binary that readers have just witnessed Mokanna exploiting for religious ends. In Moore’s version, the invoked presence is no longer divine but rather cultural. This logic becomes particularly clear in a ­later scene in Mokanna’s garden oratory, where the false prophet has to reconvert Zelica ­after she accidentally overhears his true intentions. Significantly, Mokanna proffers a “cup” as material evidence for his divine status: Thou seest this cup—no juice of earth is h ­ ere, But the pure ­waters of that upper sphere, Whose rills ­o’er ruby beds and topaz flow, Catching the gem’s bright colour, as they go. Nightly my Genii come and fill ­these urns— Nay, drink—in ­every drop life’s essence burns; ’Twill make that soul all fire, ­those eyes all light. (6:50–51)

Mokanna manipulates his “cup” ­here in much the same way that he manipulated the veil and banquet. The materiality of the cup and its contents—­a materiality that the text foregrounds through the deictic demonstrative “this”—­conjures up for [ 68 ]



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Zelica “the pure ­waters of that upper sphere,” but the cup’s existence can be justified only on the basis of its own imminent transcendence. Accordingly, Mokanna’s rhe­ toric begins with a physical perception of the cup (“Thou seest”) and ends with a metaphysical perception (“ ’Twill make that soul all fire, t­ hose eyes all light”). Yet “this cup” gives away the discursive manipulation of not only the religious demagogue but also the Orientalist writer. Chronologically, Mokanna first imbibes literal wine from the cup, and only when detected does he convert the de­cadent ingredients of his enjoyment into sensory props that shore up his religious ideology. Thus, readers first see Mokanna lying on the couch, where beside him Stood Vases, fill’d with KISHMEE’s golden wine, And the red weepings of the SHIRAZ vine; Of which his curtain’d lips full many a draught Took zealously, as if each drop they quaff’d, Like ZEMZEM’s Spring of Holiness, had power To freshen the soul’s virtues into flower! (6:45)

The increasingly de­cadent trajectory of the ingestion motif within the narrative—­ from figurative banquet to literal feeding—­converges h ­ ere with the Islamic injunction against wine, further underscoring the gap between material signifier and spiritual signified to expose Mokanna’s hy­poc­risy. That is, Mokanna’s “cup” turns out to be a sort of empty signifier: its material form does not incarnate divine presence but is only retroactively—­and rhetorically—­imbued with spiritual meaning. Yet the success of Moore’s deconstructive maneuver depends on a prior act of cultural presencing, through which the author’s series of textual figures (“KISHMEE’s golden wine,” “the red weepings of the SHIRAZ vine”) come to stand for a self-­ evident Oriental essence. Moore himself foregrounds this discursive mediation by annotating several figures in this passage. One note explains that “KISHMEE” is “an island in the Persian Gulf, celebrated for its white wine,” and another says that “ZEMZEM’s Spring of Holiness” refers to the “miraculous well at Mecca; so called, says Sale, from the murmuring of its w ­ aters” (6:45). A gloss of the phrase “maids of YEZD and SHIRAS” (6:76), which occurs thirty-­one pages ­later, provides a retrospective explanation for “the red weepings of the SHIR AZ wine” as well: the note quotes Jean-­Baptiste Tavernier’s statement that “the [Persian] proverb is, that to live happy a man must have a wife of Yezd, eat the bread of Yezdecas, and drink the wine of Shiraz” (6:76). As what Gérard Genette calls a formalized “break in the enunciative regime,” Moore’s annotation spotlights the way in which an entire Orientalist apparatus must intervene to bolster the apparent materiality of Mokanna’s wine, ­those “red [ 69 ]

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weepings” that feel so thickly real and so de­cadently “Oriental.” 40 The explicit references to George Sale and Tavernier further underscore the mediatory role that Eu­ro­pean Orientalism plays. All ­these provide an impor­tant and necessary setup for Mokanna’s own proffering of “this cup,” for the literary resources that Moore gleaned from his extensive scholarly research ultimately prop up Mokanna’s spiritual transfiguration of his cup. Discursive Orientalism intervenes to represent the cup before Mokanna can pre­sent it as a material emblem: the Orientalist’s rhetorical per­for­mance anticipates the Oriental priest’s. Moore’s heightened sense of wine as a symbol of conviviality is relevant ­here as well. For the poet who got his start writing in the Anacreontic style, a classical (read: Western) genre within which wine ranges as a prominent poetic topos, the rhetorical dimension of his chosen Orientalist trope in “The Veiled Prophet” would have been even clearer.41 By laying bare the discursive logic that connects signifier with signified, Moore subverts not just the ideology of religion that Mokanna wields but also the Orientalist ideology that creates and sustains the illusion of an Oriental essence. A securely pre­ sent cultural other that can be defined, appropriated, and fi­nally mastered is no less a fantasy than the divine essence that Mokanna so brazenly invokes. The poem’s self-­reflexivity t­ oward its own Orientalist rhe­toric explains why the description of Mokanna’s de­cadent drinking does not immediately shut down the false prophet’s pretensions but holds out the potential power of his act through an “as if” clause: Mokanna’s lips full many a draught Took zealously, as if each drop they quaff’d Like ZEMZEM’s Spring of Holiness, had power. (6:45 [emphasis added])

In the equivocal tense of the past subjunctive, “quaff’d” wavers between probability expressed in past time (each drop that Mokanna “quaff’d” did have power) and methodical pretense (it did not have power, but Mokanna “quaff’d” each drop as if it did). In fact, the alignment of Orientalist and religious ideologies makes Mokanna’s power not fabricated but simply ambiguous. This is so for two reasons. First, it is not clear what the source of that power is, since a straight reading names the source as an Oriental fraud but a critical one suggests that the power is discursively created by the Orientalist author’s similes. Second, in drawing attention to its own discursive mediations, the text acknowledges the ultimate unknowability of the Oriental other that Mokanna embodies. This complicated series of intersections between Moore and Mokanna problematizes any straightforward characterization of the latter as Oriental despot. At least nine times, the text explic­itly refers to Mokanna as an “impostor” (6:18, 36, 42, 50, 107, 120, 123, 133, and 138). This aligns with a Christian stereotyping of [ 70 ]



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the prophet Muhammad as an impostor, but as Mohammed Sharafuddin points out, Mokanna’s intentional abuse of religious princi­ples makes the character “less an attack on Islam than a bad imitation or parody of it.” 42 In fact, in his practiced cynicism t­ oward the “superstitious thieves” and “grave fools” (6:47) who make up his devotees, Mokanna comes remarkably close to an Enlightenment critique of religious doctrine.43 Furthermore, Mokanna’s blasé exploitation of the superstition that he has just mocked aligns him with the opportunistic Eu­ro­pean author who denounces “Oriental” doctrine even as he seeks profit in the marketplace of commodified Orientalist discourse. As is well known, Byron advised Moore to “stick to the East,” since “if [Byron’s own Eastern tales have] had any success, that also ­will prove that the public are Orientalizing.” 44 Moore surely embraced the role of Orientalist with gusto, even claiming that “never was anything more unlucky for [him] than Byron’s invasion of this region. . . . ​Instead of being a leader as [he] looked to be, [he] must dwindle into a h ­ umble follower.” 45 If Mokanna’s be­hav­ior implicates Moore, then the false prophet as “impostor” does not just critique the East, but also reveals the West’s self-­reflexive acknowl­edgment of its own repre­sen­ta­tion and thus imposture of the East. Mokanna as figure thus plays between two ostensibly binary categories. His troubling of the opposition between East and West registers the broader social experience of disintegrating cultural bound­aries. As I have suggested, Moore’s self-­ reflexive repre­sen­t a­t ion of Oriental alterity must be understood in relation to a dawning sense of the mutability of cultural identity, occasioned by Britain’s increasing exposure to and dependence on commodities such as tea, opium, and sugar. Moore’s deployment of the ingestion motif as a way of staging the fracturing of cultural categories thus has significant sociohistorical determination. But he represents cultural alterity neither according to a model of infection (which would react against the flux in identity by scapegoating the other as an external contaminant) nor according to a model of domestication (which would seek mastery over the other through the fantasized assimilation of a projected cultural essence). Rather, Moore provides an honest evaluation of the mutual dependence and constitution of identity categories that Britain’s global situation at once makes vis­i­ble and intensifies. The textual refiguration of the “brilliant banquet” as “cup” converts Mokanna’s religious sacrament first into a symbol of Oriental de­c adence and then into a characteristically Orientalist trope. And ­a fter Zelica discovers Mokanna’s true intentions, “cup” gains a further shade of meaning as the “madd’ning hell-­cup” (6:55) that incarnates a satanic, not a divine, presence. This supplementary chain of signification continuously alters the identity of the imitator and the implications of imitation. The cumulative effect of such formal elusiveness is to problematize [ 71 ]

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not just the positive content of a par­tic­u­lar category, such as the essential nature of the Oriental other, but also the validity of cultural categories in the first place. In other words, Moore’s deconstruction of the line between Oriental and Orientalist impostor does not just blur the bound­a ries of cultural identity: it also exposes the illusiveness of cultural essence as such. W ­ hether of the self or of the other, cultural essence is in the final analy­sis derivative, supplementary to a posited point of origin that continually shifts and that the text ultimately cannot produce. Perhaps the deconstructive impulse of the Oriental(ist) cup traces partly to the cups of tea—­what Jonathan Swift calls “­Water bewitch’d,” in a striking echo of Mokanna’s description of the cup as “pure ­waters of that upper sphere”—­endlessly debated in the British press, where commentators worried about how best to prepare w ­ ater (by paying attention to temperature and steeping time) to maximize the drink’s benefits and reduce its risks.46 Moore’s Irish position also accounts for his wariness ­toward a metaphysics of cultural presence, usually employed in the ser­vice of a hegemonic imperial order seeking to define and control the colonized other. Ireland’s experience of physical and discursive colonization would have given its writers a greater sensitivity to the politics of repre­sen­ta­tion. As Moore explains in his preface to Lalla Rookh, “the spirit that had spoken in the melodies of Ireland soon found itself at home in the East” (xvi). In par­tic­u­lar, the liminality of the colonial space, caught between its re­sis­tance to dominant imperial culture and its strug­gle to articulate a more organic core of identity, gave the Irish Moore an intuitive sense of the relativity of any cultural position.47 In this regard, it is perhaps no coincidence that what identifies the “Veiled Prophet” also conceals him, or that “the well-­known Silver Veil” provoking Azim’s vio­lence at the tale’s conclusion turns out to be Azim’s beloved Zelica (6:139). ­Earlier, Zelica’s discovery of Mokanna’s agenda renders him as no longer veiled but simply veil: The maid had stood, gazing upon the Veil From which ­these words, like south winds through a fence Of Kerzrah flow’rs, came fill’d with pestilence. (6:53 [emphasis added])

Synecdoche h ­ ere serves more than just the purpose of shorthand, since Mokanna’s conversion into veil crucially occurs through the medium of Zelica’s perspective, as she remains undecided about Mokanna’s true nature: like a dream Seem’d all he said: nor could her mind, whose beam As yet was weak, penetrate half his scheme. (6:53) [ 72 ]



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The portrayal of Mokanna as veil points not so much to the truth of who he is as to the truth of the unavailability of that knowledge; indeed, it suggests that truth lies in recognizing his unknowability. This certainly does not mean that the cultural other is wholly a self-­projection and has no real material impact. A genuine investigation of intercultural encounters works not by wishing away the materiality of their effects but by acknowledging the asymmetrical mix of physical contact and figurative (­because rhetorical) construction that structures e­ very such encounter. Alterity, Michael Taussig has suggested, “is e­ very inch a relationship, not a t­ hing in itself.” 48 Thus, while the ingestant is undeniably discursive, it also maintains a material, nondeconstructable remnant as the mysteriously efficacious “draught” that seals Zelica’s pledge to Mokanna: ­ ere, in that awful place, when each had quaff’d Th And pledg’d in silence such a fearful draught, Such—­oh! the look and taste of that red bowl ­Will haunt her till she dies—he bound her soul By a dark oath. . . . (6:38)

The intentional ambiguity of the “red bowl”—in terms of what it contains and what kind of power it holds—­only contributes to its potency. Jeffrey complained about this overwrought plot device, declaring that “the bridal oath, pledged with blood among the festering bodies of the dead, is one of the overstrained theatrical horrors of the German school.” 49 The super­natural plot turn indeed feels incongruous within a tale that has worked so hard to demystify all religious doctrine. Yet the anomaly might be precisely the point. Mokanna’s claim to super­natural power cannot be dismissed out of hand: the power that he wields is more than just a m ­ atter of rhe­toric. Zelica cannot be released from her bondage just by her enlightenment, for their relationship contains a bodily intimacy that goes beyond discursive repre­sen­ta­tion. Thus, the flicker of emotional re­sis­tance that Zelica displays upon discovering the truth is immediately quashed when Mokanna reminds her of “that cup we pledg’d, the charnel’s choicest wine,” which Hath bound thee—­aye—­body and soul all mine; Bound thee by chains that, ­whether blest or curst No ­matter now, not hell itself ­shall burst! (6:58)

What was previously a sign of Mokanna’s fraudulence now becomes the key to his mysterious power over Zelica. The “cup” marks the point of excess in their relationship, which takes the form of a bond whose inescapability seems to comment [ 73 ]

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upon Britain’s addictive appetite for exotic ingestants. Offering a more subtle version of the “blood sugar topos” that Timothy Morton has shown to be prominent in abolitionist lit­er­a­ture, the “red bowl” or bloodied “cup” operates along with the “chains” that bind Zelica to Mokanna to deliver an indictment of the British as both enslaver and enslaved.50 Moore’s cup thus underscores the material real­ity of Britain’s addiction to a ­whole host of interconnected exotic ingestants (including tea sweetened with sugar and opium exchanged for tea), as well as their disorienting effects on British self-­understandings.51 If in Lalla Rookh the ingestant as circulating trope represents the global movement of commodities, then the trope’s enigmatic remainder ruptures any metaphysical system that attempts to control or sublimate the relationship to alterity, including the system of deconstruction that wishes away that relationship as mere projection. We are now in a better position to understand just why Lalla Rookh so exercised its con­temporary reviewers. The poem’s excessive signification refuses the kind of unproblematic distinction that cultural commentators want to draw between Occident and Orient. Even what is geo­graph­i­cally indicated by the Orient continuously drifts, from the ­Middle East to the Far East and from the West Indies to the Indian subcontinent. Yet what is supplementary in Moore’s deployment of the ingestant as trope—­what, in other words, does not just embellish the point of spiritual or cultural origin, but through its excessive play reveals the illusiveness of that origin—­becomes secondary in the reviewers’ recourse to confectionary as meta­phor.52 Thus, when Jeffrey criticizes Moore for his “lavish” use of “ornaments and seasonings” that are “only agreeable, when sprinkled in moderation over a plainer medium,” the critic uses the opposition between “seasoning” and “plainer medium” to pre­sent sugar as a nonessential dressing for a more elemental, more organic nourishment.53 This opposition allows Jeffrey to diagnose the lack of a grounding presence in Moore’s poem as a symptom of an improper appetite, one that forgoes basic nutrition in f­ avor of embellishing flavors. By holding Lalla Rookh hostage to a metaphysical model of nature versus artifice, necessity versus luxury, and elegance versus simplicity, Jeffrey turns Moore’s style into the epiphenomenal manifestation of a fundamental base that should be pre­sent but is not. Given that sugar evolved from a kind of spice, which “alters the flavor of food . . . ​without clearly sweetening it,” to a sweetener in Britain only when it became an item of mass consumption in the seventeenth c­ entury, Jeffrey’s invocation of “sweets” as “ornament and seasoning” also reflects nostalgia for an e­ arlier time, before the real­ity of global commerce decisively shifted British understandings of selfhood in relation to otherness.54 [ 74 ]



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Jeffrey’s is a compensatory reaction to the paradoxically empty sensuousness of Moore’s style. His charge against Moore for having made “an entire meal on sauce piquante” bespeaks his bewilderment that Moore’s language, while sensuously material, reveals nothing essential b­ ehind it.55 Moore’s language exerts an effect rather similar to what Morton has described as “the poetics of spice:” Spice appeals ­because its “potent concreteness” is akin to “language trying to touch, or incarnate the Real,” yet this same concreteness also confounds us, for “when we look ‘­behind’ spice to find some general or universal category that might substantiate its meaning or fix its place, we find none. We simply re-­encounter spice.”56 As Mokanna well understood, a rich “banquet” is permissible only on the ground of its imminent transcendence: material food must reveal a spiritual essence ­behind it. For Jeffrey, this originary essence would be something like natu­ral, unmarked, “pure” nutrition.57 Lalla Rookh confounds precisely b­ ecause it resists such transcendence. Its sensuous style provokes a desire for an originary presence that it also endlessly exposes as illusory. The conservative British Review goes even further than Jeffrey’s critique. In attempting to fix the play of meaning, the Tory publication identifies Lalla Rookh’s empty sensuousness as an expression of the Orient itself. The elusiveness of cultural alterity is attributed w ­ holesale to an excessive, immoral Orient. Thus, the reviewer contrasts the “stimulating sweets” of Moore’s poem to “a garden of leeks and onions,” native vegetables whose life-­giving influence contrasts starkly with the “transplant[s] of the East.”58 “So luxuriantly have ­these [Eastern] exotics expanded,” the reviewer laments, “that the indigenous products of a mere En­glish fancy have in a g­ reat mea­sure lost their odour and their flavour.”59 By conjuring up both a geo­graph­i­c al boundary and a horticultural distinction between the “indigenous” and the “exotic,” the reviewer invokes the threat of contamination to reestablish the distinction between native self and insinuating other. Unequivocally opposing the “miserable Turks and Greeks and Persians and Albanians” to the “En­glish gentleman of cleanly habits,” the review unsurprisingly culminates in the essentialization and othering of entire groups of ­people.60 It anticipates, as well, the Victorian fetishization of cleanliness, which helped justify imperialism as a civilizing mission even as it disavowed imperial vio­lence.61 While Coleridge had feared that the British appetite for exotic commodities would “debauch” the integrity of Britain’s body politic and leave “an indelible stain on [its] national character,” The British Review sanitizes that fear by projecting it onto the East as a moral flaw.62 The alarmist tone of The British Review not only speaks to the prob­lem that global commerce posed for cultural identity, but also highlights the par­tic­u­lar role [ 75 ]

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of imperial botany. Britain’s global commodity flows ­were not restricted to consumer goods: they also included the botanical specimens that British scientists, collectors, and merchants acquired from, dispersed to, and transplanted in vari­ ous parts of the world. The botanical diction in The British Review reflects this con­temporary climate, but its protectionist model is increasingly out of step with imperial policy. In real­ity, state-­sponsored plant collection followed a neomercantilist logic, gathering scientific and material knowledge from other parts of the world to bolster British self-­sufficiency.63 The transfer of botanical specimens contributed significantly to the imperial accumulation of wealth. Thus, while Britain’s global reach produced a precarious sense of dependence upon ­others, the porousness of bound­aries represented at the same time an opportunity for the stockpiling of goods, knowledges, and technologies. I now turn to Lalla Rookh’s fourth and final inset narrative, “The Light of the Haram,” as an imaginative expression of this opportunity and a strategic counterpart to “The Veiled Prophet.” The ideological sublimation that failed in “The Veiled Prophet” prevails ­here, becoming the engine through which the cultural other is made available for consumption. Moore continues to develop the motif of ingestion established in the first inset tale, flirting with the fantasy of an embowered land that reaps the benefits of global trade without making any compromises to its own sovereignty. If in the ­earlier tale Moore acknowledges the elusiveness of cultural essence as such, h ­ ere he imagines the successful consolidation of an imperial identity that sustains itself by feeding on the Oriental other, even as he reveals such consolidation to be a kind of magical thinking. “The Light of the Haram” has a deceptively trivial plot. The Mughal emperor Jehan-­Guire has a lovers’ tiff with his queen, Nourmahal, the cause of which remains unknown. Nourmahal’s maid, Namouna, resolves the quarrel by weaving for the queen an enchanted wreath of flowers, which gives Nourmahal such an angelic voice that she successfully recaptures the emperor’s heart. Significantly, Namouna’s weaving proceeds by way of a global botanical collection: out she flew, To cull each shining leaf that grew Beneath the moonlight’s hallowing beams, For this enchanted Wreath of Dreams. Anemones and Seas of Gold, And new-­born lilies of the river, And ­those sweet flow’rets, that unfold Their buds on CAMADEVA’s quiver;— The tube-­rose, with her silvery light, That in the Gardens of Malay Is call’d the Mistress of the Night. (7:29) [ 76 ]



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The cata­log goes on for some twenty lines, including “amaranths,” “the white moon-­flower,” the “Amrita tree,” “the basil tuft,” and “the h ­ umble rosemary” (7:30). ­These plants come variously from Sumatra, Persia, the Malay Peninsula, India, and Tibet. In a provincial narrative on the subject of a quotidian lovers’ quarrel, Namouna exercises a strikingly global reach. Moore documents the international origins of t­ hese botanical specimens in his verse and the accompanying glossary. The “Mistress of the Night,” for instance, refers to the tuberose from Ma­la­ya, while the amaranths are native to “the Batta country in Sumatra” (7:29–30). Significantly, t­ hese geo­graph­i­cal regions all belonged to a vast botanical network through which British subjects acquired and dispersed exotic plant specimens. Moore seems to have re-­created within his text a version of the global horticultural emporium that Britain was trying to become during this time. The second half of the eigh­teenth ­century witnessed a par­tic­u­lar intensification of this global effort. Sir Joseph Banks, a natu­ral phi­los­o­pher and president of the Royal Society, directed the enterprise from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, where he oversaw the collection and cultivation of plants from all around the world that ­were previously unknown in Britain.64 In many cases, foreign specimens w ­ ere coveted as literal food for the empire. Banks commissioned William Bligh’s expeditions that sought to transplant breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies, where it could be used to feed slaves.65 Banks also championed the establishment of the Calcutta Botanic Garden in 1786, which he hoped would produce, among other ­things, sago, dates, sugarcane, cinnamon, coffee, pepper, raw cotton, and teak. Robert Kyd had initially proposed the idea of a botanic garden as a solution for the famines caused by the British East India Com­pany’s capture of Bengal.66 However, Kyd’s humanitarian vision was soon replaced by an aggressive profit motive, and Banks envisioned the garden as supplying abundant ­labor and ground for the cultivation of “raw material of many sorts, ­dying drugs, medicines, spices, ­etc sure of a ready and advantageous market and of producing a most beneficial influence upon the commerce of the m ­ other country.” In par­tic­u­lar, Banks hoped that t­ hese articles could be used to “undersell the Chinese at their own market, and diminish at least, if not annihilate, the im­mense debit of silver” that Britain was “obliged to furnish” in exchange for tea.67 The desire to cure Britain’s de­pen­dency on China was so strong that Banks made per­sis­tent efforts to cultivate the Chinese tea plant in Bengal, though commercial production of tea in India would not take off u ­ ntil the second half of the nine68 teenth ­century. The contributions of natu­ral science t­ oward Britain’s imperial enterprise have been well studied.69 “The Light of the Haram” folds this broader imperial context into its narrative through the attention it lavishes on Namouna’s act of botanical [ 77 ]

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“cull[ing]” (7:29). But while many of Banks’s botanical schemes failed, Namouna crucially does not. Indeed, her loving attention to her baskets of flowers and leaves makes her like the “fostr’ing nurse” in Henry Jones’s Kew Garden (1763), an embodiment of British horticultural ingenuity that rears t­ hose orphans up, From regions far remote beyond the burning line, From Indian gardens, and from Eden’s groves, To Britain’s cold adopting climate brought.70

“The Light of the Haram” can thus be seen to participate in the contemporaneous cele­bration of Britain’s royal gardens. Particularly in vogue during the second half of the eigh­teenth ­century, poems like Kew Garden and Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791) combined floral my­thol­ogy with a detailed botanical description made pos­si­ble by advances in natu­ral science, celebrating what Alan Bewell calls a “new consumerist vision of nature that would underpin Britain’s emergence as an imperial nation.”71 Indeed, Britain’s global horticultural efforts represented exotic consumerism elevated to the level of a state-­sponsored undertaking, and they played out within the more visibly transnational arena of natu­ral science. But Moore does not simply eulogize ­these gardens, as Jones and Darwin did. Instead, he exposes how such botanical transfers serve the fantasy of imperial nourishment, which turns the East into a mythical cornucopia. Namouna’s weaving proceeds crucially through ingestion: As, in a kind of holy trance, She hung above t­ hose fragrant trea­sures, Bending to drink their balmy airs, As if she mix’d her soul with theirs. And ’twas, indeed, the perfume shed From flow’rs and scented flame, that fed Her charmed life—­for none had e’er Beheld her taste of mortal fare, Nor ever in aught earthly dip, But the morn’s dew, her roseate lip. (7:31–32)

The sublimation of food that was repeatedly short-­circuited in “The Veiled Prophet” occurs h ­ ere not just successfully but at an elevated pitch. The ethereal quality of Namouna’s repast (“balmy airs,” “perfume,” “morn’s dew”) and the rarefied tone of the passage cast the enchantress’s feeding as a kind of incorporeal ingestion, magically undoing the forces of material enslavement that Zelica’s “red bowl” in [ 78 ]



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the first inset narrative made vis­i­ble. It is worth noting h ­ ere that the logic of Namouna’s ingestion differs significantly from the figurativeness of Vathek’s eating in Beckford’s novella, which presented exotic ingestion as a mode of discursive projection. In contrast, Namouna’s rarefied eating reflects upon and disavows the state-­sponsored acts of materialist acquisition: its fairy lightness speaks to a desire to wish away the violent exploitation that such acts entailed. Moore’s language captures this incorporeality of ingestion at the level of form: the ambivalence of “as, in a kind of holy trance” blurs the line between an ­actual occurrence (the temporal function of “as”) and a figure of speech (the comparative function of “as”). Eating does not seem to ­really happen. All Namouna has to do is “h[a]ng above,” and the “fragrant trea­sures” w ­ ill happily “shed” their essence. Restricted geo­graph­i­cal access, mutinous voyages, and failed transplantation efforts—­a ll of which challenged Banks and his collectors—­have no place in this scene of easy, overflowing abundance. Moore’s language formalizes the voluntary nature of floral self-­giving: it is not that Namouna feeds on the trea­sures she has collected from the vari­ous places of the East, but that the trea­sures themselves feed her. The fantasy of Eastern spontaneity positions Britain as the legitimate recipient of material blessings. Particularly during the heyday of the spice trade, as Morton has pointed out, this fantasy performed an ideologically expedient role in “justify[ing] Britain’s place at the centre of the theatre of the globe.” 72 Within “The Light of the Haram,” the East offers itself not just in the fullness of its presence but as a spiritual nourishment that has “fed / [Britain’s] charmed life” (7:31–32). Yet by playing up the talismanic aspect of Namouna’s “enchanted Wreath of Dreams” (7:29), whose effects are wrought by “spell[s]” (7:32), Moore subtly divulges the ele­ment of wish fulfillment at work in his discursive repre­ sen­ta­tion. Amid the broader historical context of the frequently exploitative and always asymmetrical forces of commodification connecting the British Empire to other territories, the insistence that Namouna eats neither “earthly” nor “mortal fare” disavows the vio­lence that sustained British trade, acquisition, and colonial plantation. The shadow side of Namouna’s magical eating or weaving is, perhaps, not just the backbreaking harvesting of sugarcane but also the laborious weaving of cotton. As with tea, sugar, and opium, global flows of raw and manufactured cotton highlight the impacts that British, Mughal, and Asian economies had on each other through trade and conquest. For instance, large amounts of Indian cotton went to China along with opium to help balance Britain’s tea trade, but Britain also attempted to establish self-­sufficiency by transplanting Persian cotton to the West Indies.73 Following the conquest of Bengal, Britain’s expansion of domestic cotton production and heavy taxation of Indian textiles severely disrupted India’s [ 79 ]

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cotton economy, so that in 1835, India’s governor-­general, William Bentinck, declared that “the bones of cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India.” 74 “The Light of the Haram” unfolds in Indian Kashmir, and the frame narrative ends ­there as well. Nevertheless, the gritty traces of commodification and imperial exploitation have been mostly effaced from the Edenic “vale of Cashmere” (7:12). In depicting the Kashmir valley as an “Elysium on earth” (7:48) ringing with the ­music of “wandering minstrel-­maids” (7:41), Moore—­like Sydney Owenson and William Jones before him—­participates not just in the Romantic idealization (and construction) of Indian Kashmir as a prelapsarian space, but also in the specific association of this space with ­music and enchantment.75 All the same, Moore’s fantasy of a self-­giving East leaves a material remnant that resists complete sublimation. During the much-­anticipated Feast of Roses, Jehan-­Guire partakes of a repast that is the opposite of Namouna’s spiritual meal: The board was spread with fruits and wine; With grapes of gold, like t­ hose that shine On CASBIN’s hills;—­pomegranates full Of melting sweetness, and the pears, And sunniest apples that CAUBUL In all its thousand gardens bears;— Plantains, the golden and the green, MA ­L A­YA’s nectar’d mangusteen; Prunes of BOKARA, and sweet nuts From the far groves of SAMARCAND, And BASRA dates, and apricots, Seed of the Sun, from IRAN’s land. (7:44–45)

Eating h ­ ere is no holy affair but a fleshly feasting, serving merely as an end in itself rather than conjuring up any sublimated essence—­“amply SELIM quaffs of each” (7:46). Th ­ ese exotic foods from afar, upon which the monarch de­cadently feeds, come contained in equally exotic vessels: All t­ hese in richest vases smile, In baskets of pure santal-­wood, And urns of porcelain from that isle Sunk under­neath the Indian flood. (7:45)

Moore’s footnote explains that t­hese vessels are “supposed to have been sunk in the sea” near Formosa and then fished up by divers who sell them “at an im­mense price in China and Japan” (7:45). The explicit flows of commodity reverse the magical work of Namouna’s weaving, hinting at the complex transcultural networks within which Jehan-­Guire’s Mughal empire is embedded. Indeed, the text explains [ 80 ]



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early on that the “magnificent Son of ACBAR” has come to Cashmere precisely to escape from power and pomp and the trophies of war . . . ​forgetting them all With the Light of the Haram. (7:19)

Set as foils for each other, Jehan-­Guire’s de­cadent board thus exposes Namouna’s “charmed” repast as an ideological “forgetting” (7:19). But this “forgetting,” it seems, can only be temporary. Even as Namouna works her spell, she repeatedly points to the transience of its effect: the refrain that “To-­morrow the dreams and flowers w ­ ill fade” occurs four times in her musical incantation (7:32–34). The specter of the garland’s imminent disintegration exposes the wreath as a deceptive reification of forces that cannot actually be arrested. The fantasy of an ever-­present, self-­giving East depends upon the successful capture of the flows of commodity, yet in real­ity commodities do not flow in a single direction. Movement cannot be solely or securely harnessed for the work of imperial accumulation, since movement potentially disrupts and displaces that work as well. Nevertheless, in “The Light of the Haram,” discourse helps create and sustain this imperial fantasy. Namouna’s magic literally spells the fantasy into being. The exotic m ­ atter that features increasingly in British life provides the material ground for this immersive narrative experience. This ideological alliance between culture and ­matter can be observed in Jones’s “Botanical Observations on Select Indian Plants,” which provided source material for several of the specimens in Moore’s floral cata­log.76 In interpreting Indian plants through the framework of Hindu my­thol­ogy, Jones exhibits a genuine interest in Indian culture, and his overt preference for Sans­krit over Linnaean names in “Botanical Observations” has been celebrated as what Timothy Fulford calls “a kind of colonization-­in-­reverse.”77 Yet the material sites of plant life also help Jones actualize Britain’s long-­ standing fantasy of an Oriental bower. This materiality, exoticized through the Hindu narratives that Jones invokes in “Botanical Observations,” becomes an authenticating mark of cultural difference that is nevertheless contained through the text’s inevitable recourse to Western Linnaean taxonomy.78 It comes as no surprise, then, that Jones declares his desire to “transfer to Eu­rope all the sciences, arts, and lit­er­a­ture of Asia,” while si­mul­ta­neously sending Indian plant specimens to Kew at Banks’s request.79 The material exploitation of Oriental space goes hand in hand with the cultural adoption of its so-­called traditional lit­er­a­ture. “Botanical Observations” repeats the fantasy of an essentialized Orient by pairing culture and ­matter in a mutually reinforcing relationship. Botanical m ­ atter grounds Indian culture, and at the same time, Indian cultural forms sublimate and essentialize [ 81 ]

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that ­matter to facilitate British consumption—­much like in Namouna’s holy ingestion of “fragrant trea­sures.” For the poet who ranges only over a discursive field, however, the delusory nature of such mutual reinforcement becomes obvious. Woven entirely out of language and wrought as it w ­ ere by Moore’s Orientalist incantations, “The Light of the Haram” can make no substantial claim to Eastern materiality. Moore foregrounds this by representing Namouna’s floral wreath as a textual cata­log. His prominent footnotes explic­itly refigure the vari­ous geo­graph­i­cal spaces of the East as so many discursive topoi. The talismanic nature of Namouna’s wreath suggests that literary tropes are not necessarily grounded in Eastern plant m ­ atter, but rather work to conjure up a vision of that ­matter as being endlessly available for British acquisition and consumption. In this way, “The Light of the Haram” self-­consciously reflects on how imperial activity works through and depends upon discursive mediation. Even beyond the world of the literary text, material encounters and transactions across nations still depend upon their ideological refigurations; the material Orient is never accessible on its own terms but is necessarily re-­presented through Orientalist desires and fantasies. But Moore does not turn his self-­consciousness into outright critique. A ­ fter all, “The Light of the Haram” warns of the transience of its magic but does not ultimately make good on that warning, and the tale concludes with the accomplishment rather than termination of Namouna’s charm: “The mask is off—­ the charm is wrought” (7:55). The spell cast in “The Light of the Haram” is so power­ful as to transgress its textual boundary, extending to the frame narrative where romantic consummation between a princess betrothed to someone ­else (Lalla Rookh) and a balladeer from a significantly lower class (Feramorz) turns upon Feramorz’s magical transformation into the king of Burcharia. Lalla Rookh and Feramorz end their journey in the valley of Cashmere, exactly where Jehan-­Guire’s and Nourmahal’s magical reunion takes place. The frame narrative explic­itly pre­sents its final inset tale as one told for the purposes of “delay[ing] the moment of separation” (7:10) between the star-­crossed lovers. Alluding to Scheherazade’s storytelling as a device for delay in the Arabian Nights, Moore points ­here to the power of narrative in imagining an alternative state of ­things.80 The act of creating “The Light of the Haram” as a story realizes the “enchanting scenery” (7:60) of a fantasized Cashmere within which Feramorz and Lalla Rookh can marry b­ ecause Feramorz is king. As “a young poet . . . ​much celebrated . . . ​for his manner of reciting the Stories of the East” (6:15), Feramorz narrates tales that arguably transform the dream of erotic ­union into real­ity. [ 82 ]



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Lalla Rookh suggests that narrative carries a greater revolutionary potential than the po­liti­cal uprisings that, as evident in both “The Veiled Prophet” and the poem’s third inset tale “The Fire-­Worshippers,” are likely to end in failure. In privileging the transformative effect of narrative, Moore accords power not just to Feramorz but, more significantly, to himself as si­mul­t a­neously Orientalist and Ireland’s national bard. Yet Moore’s appropriation of discursive power also reinscribes Orientalist fantasies of the East, even as the fantasy of an originary cultural presence remains incomplete in Moore’s poem. By suggesting that the end of the frame narrative simply extends the magical topos constructed by “The Light of the Haram,” Moore self-­reflexively highlights the place of Edenic Cashmere as a Romantic construct. That is, he perpetuates the mythological origin of a pure India only to expose its inevitable implication within discursive repre­sen­ta­tion. Cashmere (as well as the happy ­u nion it makes pos­si­ble) lasts only as long as Namouna’s spell does: “to­morrow the dreams and flowers w ­ ill fade” (7:32). The fact that Moore chooses nevertheless to keep his readers in the space of ­today speaks to the temptation to hold t­ hings in suspension, to reduce messy intercultural relations into neatly reciprocal romantic desire and thereby prevent the emergence of “difference, of this dangerous kind” (7:24).

“MORE THAN ORIENTAL LUXURY”: THE ECONOMY OF THE TALISMAN IN WALTER SCOTT’S THE TALISMAN

“In ‘The Talisman’ t­ here is too ­little Orientalism for our taste; and what we have is frequently bad. This fault w ­ ill be appreciated by t­ hose who recollect how much of the charm of Lalla Rookh . . . ​is owing to the fidelity and skill with which Oriental scenery, manners, and customs, are described and preserved.”81 Thus writes an anonymous critic in the Edinburgh Magazine, in an other­w ise enthusiastic review of Walter Scott’s 1825 crusader tale.82 The second of Scott’s two historical novels drawing on the medieval holy wars, The Talisman (1825) locates the intercultural encounter and conflict between Occident and Orient within the time of the Third Crusade, fought in Palestine between Eu­ro­pean Christian allies and Muslims. Set during a cease-­fire ­toward the end of the crusade, the narrative follows a series of private encounters among the En­glish king, Richard; the Scottish prince, Kenneth; and the Muslim leader, Saladin—­but the significance of t­ hose encounters is crucially veiled from Kenneth and Richard ­because Saladin adopts dif­fer­ent personas in each of them. [ 83 ]

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Exactly what the Edinburgh Magazine means by “too l­ittle Orientalism” remains ambiguous, but the reviewer is surely picking up on the novel’s sparseness of local color, a consequence of Scott’s decision to set the bulk of the action in the Eu­ro­pean camp. The displaced and makeshift nature of the Christian camp eliminates from the Palestinian locale the other­wise signifying attributes of indigenous “scenery, manners, and customs.” Scott’s critics t­ oday share the nineteenth-­century reviewer’s opinion, though they assess the significance of the sparse Orientalism differently. For instance, Andrew Lincoln points out that “unlike other crusader narratives of the period, Scott conspicuously excludes the familiar oriental locations that keep readers in contact with the order of civilization—­t he ­c astles, ­temples, palaces, and so on in which social hierarchies find their spatial equivalent.”83 The meaningfully vacant setting thus provides a blank canvas upon which Scott can reconsider and even subvert normative hierarchies, including cultural ones. In fact, the foregrounded conflict between East and West, Saracen and Christian, that is inherent in the novel’s framework only sets the stage for a subsequent disruption of essentialized cultural identity. The Talisman thus comes much closer to Moore’s Oriental romance (published seven years ­earlier) than their stylistic differences might other­wise, but only initially, suggest. I have argued that Moore deconstructs his repre­sen­ta­tion of Oriental alterity precisely by carry­ing his Orientalism to excessive, aberrant signification. In contrast, Scott underscores the emptiness of Orientalism as style, even as the novel’s spare cultural backdrop directs attention to the focused reiteration of a single key Oriental motif: the titular talisman. The talisman, which Saladin wields as a mysteriously curative ingestant, conjures up ideas of Eastern occultism, but the truth of that occultism (and of Eastern identity more broadly) gets displaced with ­every additional application of the talisman. Wavering between gift and commodity, the talisman instantiates Britain’s cultural fantasy of an appropriable East even as its dissemination in the novel undermines the cultural binary on which that fantasy depends. As is the case with Moore, Scott’s cultural identity influenced his perspective on the Orient. Scotland, as Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen have pointed out, “occupies an anomalous position in the topology of post-­colonialism—­ shifting between the coordinates of colonized and colonizer.”84 On the one hand, Scotland, more than Ireland or Wales, reaped the benefits of the imperial economy following its consolidation into the British state u ­ nder the 1707 Treaty of Union. By the mid-­eighteenth ­century, Scots w ­ ere holding prominent offices in both the administrative and military arms of the East India Com­pany. On the other hand, Scotland was divided between the Lowland burghs and the Highlands.85 Imperial earnings ­were mostly harvested by the former, while the latter [ 84 ]



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was more like an internal colony that suffered ­England’s economic and military repression. Scotland’s heterogeneous position within the empire complicates British imaginations of Oriental otherness. The figure of the Scottish nabob, memorably depicted in James Gillray’s 1788 cartoon “Dun-­Shaw” (Figure 3.1), highlights the mix of British anxiety and En­glish resentment that s­ haped imperial constructions of the Orient.86 In “Dun-­Shaw,” Henry Dundas, the power­ful Scottish politician who would assume presidency of the East India Com­pany’s Board of Control in 1793, straddles the sea with one foot on London’s India House and the other on Britain’s colonial holdings at Bengal. Dundas’s hybrid attire—­Oriental turban paired with Scottish kilt—­equates the Scottish Highlands with a despotic Orient, signaling both Britain’s anxiety about its own integrity ­after contact with the East and ­England’s jealousy of Scotland’s more competent opportunism.87 Gillray’s satire ­here relies for interpretation on an audience proficient in the meanings of cultural signifiers. “Turban” and “kilt,” according to Britain’s imperial logic, encode de­cadent despotism and primitive feudalism, respectively, with each to be taken as a stable characteristic of a specific cultural essence.88 James Watt has noted the prevalence in this period of analogies between the Scottish Highlands and Eastern cultures such as t­hose of India, Af­g han­i­stan, and Albania.89 In an 1816 essay for the Quarterly Review, Scott himself compares the Highlanders both to “the inhabitants of the mountains of India” and to the “Afghaun tribes.”90 But the difference between Scott’s analogy and Gillray’s is stark, as Scott draws upon a stadial theory of cultural development that undermines precisely the kind of essentialism on which Gillray’s cartoon depends. For Scott, the “curious points of parallelism” between Highlanders and Easterners prove that “the same state of society and civilisation produces similar manners, laws, and customs, even at the most remote periods of time, and in the most distant quarters of the world.”91 This argues for the universality of h ­ uman nature, not irreducible cultural difference.92 In The Talisman, Scott went even further in criticizing the myth of cultural essentialism by exposing the emptiness—­indeed, the sham—of signifiers that supposedly refer to stable cultural characteristics. The articles of dress that Gillray draws on in his cartoon became the novel’s par­tic­u­lar target, for exotic textiles played a prominent role in disseminating cultural clichés in the Britain of Scott’s time. In Scott’s hands, t­ hese cultural signifiers obscure rather than illuminate, and cultural identity is always more than the vis­i­ble markers that are used to define it. Responding to the problematic nexus of Scotland-­England-­Orient with his own multicultural trio—­Scotland’s Kenneth, E ­ ngland’s Richard, and the Saracens’ Saladin—­Scott satirizes Gillray’s associative logic by ingeniously transforming [ 85 ]

Figure 3.1. ​James Gillray, “Dun-­Shaw” (London: S. W. Fores, 1788). Henry Dundas is depicted as a Scottish nabob, wearing an Oriental turban and a Scottish kilt. He is straddling the sea, with “one foot in Leadenhall Street, & the other in the Province of Bengal,” as the inscription on the print reads. Dundas’s figure recalls the Colossus of Rhodes, the statute of Helios that stood guard over the island harbor during the third c­ entury BC as a testament to Rhodes’s imperial and commercial might—­though the classical perfection of Hellenic form has become a cultural patchwork in Gillray’s cartoon. Courtesy of the Boston Public Library via Digital Commonwealth (https://­ark​.­digitalcommonwealth​.­org​/­ark:​/­50959​/­2z111j99c).



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Oriental attire into the instrument of Saladin’s disguise. The novel trains a critical eye on the pro­cess of cultural signification that associates exotic commodities with essentialized o­ thers and then intentionally disrupts that pro­cess, deploying an ingestion motif to highlight the elusiveness of cultural identity. I begin with the crucial scene in which cultural identity is successfully disassociated from its conventional signifiers b­ ecause this scene not only changes how we understand the cultural binary framework that the novel seems so wedded to, it also highlights the par­tic­u­lar role that exotic ingestants play. The scene opens with Kenneth waking up to find himself “in circumstances so changed from ­those in which he had lain down to sleep, that he doubted w ­ hether he was not yet dreaming, or w ­ hether the scene had not been changed by magic” (210). Kenneth’s e­ arlier failure to guard the En­glish standard had led to his exile from the Christian camp. El Hakim, the Moorish leech who had been attending King Richard, interceded for Kenneth and was granted owner­ship of the knight, ­a fter which the pair began their journey ­toward the Moorish tents. The previous chapter closed in the desert, with El Hakim administering a “narcotic” (209) to the banished knight to relieve him of his physical oppression. Now Kenneth wakes to find himself in a space of “more than Oriental luxury” (210): He had been canopied only by the palm-­trees of the desert, but now he lay beneath a pavilion of silk, which blazed with the richest colours of the Chinese loom. . . . ​He looked around, as if to convince himself that he was actually awake, and all that fell beneath his eye partook of the splendour of his dormitory. A portable bath of cedar, lined with silver, was ready for use, and steamed with the odours which had been used in preparing it. On a small stand of ebony beside the couch, stood a silver vase, containing sherbet of the most exquisite quality, cooled in snow. . . . ​ Having dried himself [­a fter a bath] with napkins of the Indian wool, he would willingly have resumed his own coarse garments. . . . ​­These, however, ­were nowhere to be seen, but in their place he found a Saracen dress of rich materials, with sabre and poniard, and all befitting an emir of distinction. (210–211)

Chinese silk, Indian wool, silverware, and M ­ iddle Eastern sherbet would have been easily available in Scott’s Britain as well. Luxury textiles such as silk entered Eu­rope from Asia and the ­Middle East as early as the fourth c­ entury BC and since then have been prominently associated with an exotic East.93 Despite its historical backdrop, this scene stands out for the modern cosmopolitanism of its setting, and it would have seemed right at home in the pages of a nineteenth-­century realist novel. The telescoping of time and space (from twelfth-­century Palestine to nineteenth-­century Britain) in this scene of “more than Oriental luxury” comments on the literary [ 87 ]

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nature of exotic consumerism—­particularly the way in which luxurious commodities in Britain served as con­ve­nient signifiers of their lands of origin. The discursive repre­sen­ta­tion of exotic Eastern goods contributed to their allure and increased their consumption, creating a positive feedback loop that Diego Saglia has described as a “material-­discursive continuum” within which texts and objects mutually referred to and legitimized each other.94 Indeed, Eu­ro­pean travel narratives seeking to unlock a mysterious East for their countrymen and w ­ omen back home frequently used exotic dress and ornament as an easy index of cultural difference. While recounting her experiences in the Ottoman Empire, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu repeatedly refers to the native fashions that she observed and even donned. Writing to her ­sister from Adrianople, Montagu claims to offer “a full and true relation of the novelties of this place” by focusing on her “Turkish habit” as the pièce de résistance.95 Her par­tic­u­lar emphasis on silver brocade, gold embroidery, and ornate gems marks the consolidation of a textured Eastern motif that emerged in other travel narratives of the period, such as Quintin Craufurd’s Sketches Chiefly Relating to the History, Religion, Learning, and Manners, of the Hindoos.96 This dress vocabulary, culturally synonymous with an exotic Orient, informs Scott’s depictions of the “form, dress, and features” (212) of his Saracen characters. El Hakim, the leech, wears a “high tolpach” and an “ample caftan, or Turkish robe” (71), items that Montagu also singled out when describing her Turkish habit. The novel emphasizes that nothing much about El Hakim’s “visage,” save for his “piercing eyes,” could be “discerned amid the darkness in which he was enveloped” (71). Similarly, Sheerkohf, the warrior whom Kenneth fights in The Talisman’s opening pages, is first known by his dress: “The distant form separated itself from the trees, which partly hid its motions, and advanced ­towards the knight with a speed which soon showed a mounted h ­ orse­man, whom his turban, long spear, and green caftan floating in the wind, on his nearer approach showed to be a Saracen cavalier” (6). Saladin, in turn, w ­ ill be recognized by his “snow-­white turban, vest, and pantaloons, with a sash of scarlet silk” (252).97 Yet in The Talisman exotic dress conceals rather than reveals the Saracen’s true identity. Saladin, Sheerkohf, and El Hakim turn out to be the same person, and the Saracen successfully moves among ­these vari­ous roles by altering his costume. In the ­earlier scene of “more than Oriental luxury,” Kenneth learns part of the truth through El Hakim’s change of clothing: “As [El Hakim] spoke, the Christian knight repeatedly shut his eyes, and while they remained closed, the idea of the Hakim, with his long flowing dark robes, high tartar cap, and grave gestures, was pre­sent to his imagination; but so soon as he opened them, the graceful and richly gemmed turban, the light hauberk of steel rings entwisted with silver, which [ 88 ]



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glanced brilliantly as it obeyed e­ very inflection of the body . . . ​announced the soldier and not the sage” (212 [emphasis added]). ­Toward the end of the nineteenth ­century, as the second half of this book demonstrates, vision became increasingly dominant as an instrument of cultural othering. ­Here, however, vision’s essentializing logic registers as a form of blindness, for Kenneth’s tendency to see the Saracen in terms of clothing is precisely what leads him into error. The visual focus on dress emblematizes the material veil that exotic signifiers constitute, and the text suggests that t­ hese signifiers, on which British culture relied for its understanding of the cultural other, do not yield up the essence of alterity so much as they distort it. As long as Kenneth derives his idea of the Saracen from the exotic accoutrements that supposedly make up Oriental culture, that idea remains a solipsistic projection. The same blindness afflicts the other Eu­ro­pean characters. King Richard and his attending baron could hardly believe their eyes when “Saladin exchanged his turban for a Tartar cap” (255). When Richard expresses his surprise that “[he] should lose [his] learned Hakim . . . ​merely by absence of [Hakim’s] cap and robe” (256), he implicitly acknowledges the farce of cultural costume and its obfuscation of a real­ity that necessarily extends beyond show and signification. Given all the emphasis on Saladin’s vari­ous disguises, then, the text does not r­ eally lack in cultural specification—­contrary to what critics have observed. Rather, The Talisman only seems to lack in exotic detail ­because it insists on exposing that detail as a farce. A fundamental emptiness structures Scott’s depiction of cultural alterity, and any attempt to master that alterity inevitably comes up short. Using Oriental clothing as an object lesson, Scott demonstrates the way in which exotic consumerism functions as a discursive-­material technology that constructs and disseminates ste­reo­t ypical ideas of cultural alterity. Kenneth’s naiveté in the scene allegorizes the British consumer who seeks an essentialized Orient through the consumption of its commodities. Of course, Kenneth soon recognizes the fallacy of such exotic consumerism when he discovers that his assumptions regarding Oriental costume have blinded him to El Hakim’s identity. Thus, in describing this scene as one of “more than Oriental luxury” (emphasis added), Scott also hints at the exorbitant proliferation of cultural meanings that ­will be unleashed once one recognizes that cultural identity is not so much a fundamental attribute as an adaptable per­for­mance. Crucially, Kenneth’s cultural education catalyzes his own transformation as well. As Caroline McCracken-­Flesher points out, Kenneth learns from Saladin the art of deploying his own otherness as agency.98 When Kenneth discovers that his old “coarse garments . . . ​­were nowhere to be seen, but in their place he found a Saracen dress of rich materials, with sabre and poniard,” he makes the remarkable [ 89 ]

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decision to remain undressed throughout his exchange with Sheerkohf. Just as Sheerkohf proves, through a change of costume, to be “more than” what he initially seemed, Kenneth’s state of undress becomes symptomatic of the flux in the Christian knight’s cultural identity—­a flux that the text connects to the elusiveness of the Oriental other. By the end of the scene and chapter, the Saracen has persuaded Kenneth to adopt “a disguise as unsearchable as midnight” (218). The ­ ere (which is ambiguous relationship between Kenneth’s disguise and undress h an oblique counterpart to Saladin’s exploitation of dress as disguise) points to the cultural unreadability of the physical body and to its function as the ­bearer (and material veil) not of meaning but rather of meaning’s elusiveness. Notably, it is the ingestion of an opiate that first propels Kenneth’s body into this zone of excessive signification, for the Scot finds himself in his pre­sent situation as a result of the “narcotic” that El Hakim administered to him. The leech draws special attention to the drug in his cautionary instructions. Si­mul­ta­neously a “blessing” and a “cure,” this “elixir” must be used wisely, for “when applied to the purposes of indulgence and debauchery, it rends the nerves, destroys the strength, weakens the intellect, and undermines life” (209). As Scott points out in a footnote, “some preparation of opium seems to be intimated,” though the drug’s medicinal instability also recalls the debates about tea in seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century Britain.99 In this way, Scott subtly imports the triangular trade in opium among Britain, India, and China into the narrative space. It is not just the drug’s hallucinogenic effects that make it an appropriate catalyst for Kenneth’s subsequent dream state (210). As a global currency whose flow undercuts national, cultural, and even corporeal bound­aries, opium sets the stage for Kenneth’s bodily dislodgement from the signifying framework of normative chivalric culture. The fact that this dislodgement follows Kenneth’s enlightenment suggests that the novel pro­cesses it as liberation, not crisis. Indeed, the flux in Eu­ro­pean Christian identity in The Talisman dramatizes not so much the anxiety about Eastern contamination as the recognition of that Eu­ro­pean identity’s dependence upon an essential East. Thus, a deconstruction of the logic of cultural signification that associates the East with certain signifiers—­ such as clothing—­a lso affects the validity of the West as category. Saladin’s multiplicity catalyzes Kenneth’s mutability. While not explic­itly named in the narrative itself, opium thus plays a critical role in The Talisman, for it is ­under the influence of this narcotic that the narrative discloses its cultural insights. In other words, Scott pre­sents his self-­reflexive Orientalism as a paradoxical consequence of exotic ingestion. Beyond this local scene, the ingestant circulates in the novel’s world as it does in Scott the writer’s. [ 90 ]



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In dramatizing, and thereby bringing to light, the contingency of Eu­ro­pean (and, with Kenneth and Edith’s marital ­union at the novel’s end, specifically British) identity, the ingestion motif in The Talisman functions as an aesthetic diagnosis of historical real­ity. This narrative circulation occurs through Saladin’s reiterative deployment of the titular talisman, which bears a remarkable similarity to the narcotic that Kenneth took. At least five times, Saladin as El Hakim administers his talisman to cure multiple Christian crusaders of “one of t­ hose slow and wasting fevers peculiar to Asia” (55). The description of the talisman as necessitating “severe restrictions, painful observances, fasts, and penances . . . ​on the part of the sage who uses this mode of cure” (161) is intriguingly aligned with the narcotic’s oscillation between blessing and curse. In both instances, self-­restraint to prevent “indulgence” (161 and 209) is paramount. At the same time, tea continues to exert a shadowy presence, given that its dissemination in Eu­rope is also accompanied by mythic accounts of how “taking one or two cups of this decoction while fasting alleviates the fever.”100 Furthermore, like the Chinese drink, Saladin’s talisman is prepared as an infusion in w ­ ater. The repeated blurring between opium and tea suggests that more than ­these material ingestants themselves, it is their economic entanglements and consequent discursive overlap that informs The Talisman’s alimentary logic. In Scott’s novel, Saladin’s multiple applications of the talisman displace the logic of contamination that might other­wise structure any single ingestion of an exotic commodity. The repeated breaching of bodily bound­a ries provides an oblique sort of access to the primal scene of identity establishment, in which one sees cultural categories being progressively conjured into existence through the repeated threat of their violation. Crucially, each talismanic application also differs in its particulars from the other instances.101 The first administration for Kenneth’s squire remains crucially unrepresented. Readers see only the second stage of his treatment, but they are informed that El Hakim has already “ministered to him not two hours since” (69). The next administration represents this “most holy elixir” in the form of a “small silken bag made of network, twisted with silver, the contents of which the bye-­standers could not discover,” and when the bag was immersed in a silver cup “it seemed to the spectators as if some effervescence took place during the operation, but if so it instantly subsided” (82). The third administration is to King Richard. The “small silken bag made of network, twisted with silver” in the previous instance is now described as a “small red purse, which, as formerly, [El Hakim] took from his bosom,” dipping it into “a cup of spring ­water” (94). Yet the potential difference between a “silken bag . . . ​t wisted with silver” and a “small red purse” opens up the possibility that two dif­fer­ent kinds of infusions have been [ 91 ]

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used, though the use of “as formerly” immediately rejects that idea. In this way, the text spotlights how it forcibly reestablishes control over an aberrant path of signification that could potentially threaten the meaning of Saladin’s vari­ous talismanic treatments. The final two uses of the treatment are not represented in the novel. Readers learn only that on the eve­ning when Kenneth assumed his post as guardian of the En­g lish banner, “the physician attended the King from his retiring to bed till midnight was past, and twice administered medicine to him during that period, always previously observing the quarter of heaven occupied by the full moon, whose influences he declared to be most sovereign, or most baleful to the effect of his drugs” (141 [emphasis added]). As the motivating cause for Saladin’s medical intervention (“fevers peculiar to Asia”) suggests, the threat to the crusaders’ camp initially registers as external contamination. But the novel reveals such a threat to be unfounded and even dangerously misleading. Scott’s decision to make an Oriental ingestant not a curse but a cure ironically plays on the psychobiological anx­i­eties attendant on the act of exotic eating. Of course, the subsequent alignment of the talisman with the opium-­like narcotic provokingly heightens the fear not just of contamination but even of addiction. Thomas de Vaux makes this anxiety explicit when he protests against the imprudence of allowing a Muslim leech access to the body of the En­glish king: “­shall I do well, in a land where the art of poisoning is as general as that of cooking, to bring this unknown physician to practice with his drugs on a health so valuable to Christendom?” (69). “Poison” invokes the fear of a contaminating other, but the articulation of that fear also allows de Vaux to conjure up “Christendom” as a coherent cultural category, definable by its opposition to all that is “unknown.” In this regard, Scott’s crucial veiling of the talisman’s first administration suggests that difference always already exists within, necessarily preceding any state of uncorrupted cultural purity that can then be contaminated by the introduction of a foreign ingestant. ­There is no initial administration simply ­because the drama of first contact—of a single, localizable encounter between two opposing and hitherto unacquainted cultures—­remains a concocted fantasy. This lack of an originary instance and the differences that open up among the subsequent curative sessions highlight how the invocation of cultural binaries as a stable referent turns out to be the very act that generates ­these binaries as coherent categories. De Vaux fears the “unknown” effects of each curative session ­because he imagines that the Christian body ­will be contaminated by an Oriental source, yet his imagination is precisely what sets Christian off from Oriental in the first place. Scott foregrounds this logic by repeating this drama multiple times in his novel. That is, the generation of cultural binaries unfolds along the axis of narrative plot: each [ 92 ]



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instance of Saladin’s cure invokes the threat of bodily contamination to institute cultural distinction, and ­every additional curative session repeats the pro­cess and thereby reinforces that distinction. The talisman’s multiple deployments thus point to the serial, not referential, logic of cultural categories, akin to the sort of “grammatical” logic that Paul de Man has theorized in Aesthetic Ideology. In analyzing how texts generate referential meaning and thereby produce ideology, de Man crucially distinguishes between “grammar” and “referen[ce].” He argues that “the system of relationships that generates the text and that functions in­de­pen­dently of its referential meaning is grammar. . . . ​­There can be no text without grammar: the logic of grammar generates texts only in the absence of referential meaning, but e­ very text generates a referent that subverts the grammatical princi­ple to which it owed its constitution.”102 De Man describes ­here an ideological bait and switch: the referent (in the case of The Talisman, the fact of Eu­ro­pean Chris­tian­ity and M ­ iddle Eastern Islam as distinct and opposed) is produced by the text (Saladin’s series of cures, which also constitutes the book’s plot) that it supposedly anchors. By deploying its grammatical accretion of talismanic cures in the referential ser­vice of founding cultural categories, Scott’s novel makes vis­i­ble this pro­cess of ideological production. To the extent that The Talisman, as an aesthetic text, comes into formal being through the serial applications of a “talisman,” and insofar as the novelistic content reveals that pro­ cess of generation to its readers, the text exposes the consolidation of cultural binaries as the effect, not the premise, of plot. Thus, one observes that, as the cumulative effect of Saladin’s sequential administration of the talisman, the novel proceeds ­toward the consolidation of a unified British nation-­state. As it turns out, the “health” that de Vaux declares to be “so valuable to Christendom” is, in fact, valuable to few. Using Richard’s physical incapacitation as a con­ve­nient reason for abandoning the cause of Christendom, the crusaders’ camp soon splinters into its constituent national factions. In this way, the ostensibly external threat to Richard’s health becomes the occasion for the revelation of an internal disease: “Upon [Richard’s] illness, and the disadvantageous circumstances in which the crusaders ­were placed, the national dissension between the vari­ous bands united in the crusade, began to display itself, just as old wounds break out afresh in the ­human body, when ­under the influence of disease or debility” (64). The real source of contamination comes neither from Asian fever nor from Saladin’s intrusion. Rather, it already exists within the Eu­ro­ pean camp as a deadly discord: “a laming palsy,” Richard calls it, “a dead lethargy— a disease that deprives them of speech and action—­a canker that has eaten into the heart of all that is noble, and chivalrous, and virtuous among them—­that has made them false to the noblest vow ever knights w ­ ere sworn to” (60). [ 93 ]

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Christendom, then, is not so much threatened by alterity as it is riven with alterity. In dramatizing the heterogeneity of what de Vaux so naively names “Christendom,” The Talisman exposes the ideological function of the “unknown” (“unknown physician” and unknown drugs) in consolidating the cultural categories it is said to threaten. Furthermore, this consolidation occurs not simply through the positing of a central core of immutable otherness, but through the flow and circulation of that alterity. Saladin’s talisman is pharmakon not just as the simultaneous coexistence of “blessing” and “curse,” but in the Derridean sense of “movement, . . . ​locus, and . . . ​play.”103 By the end of the novel, thanks to Saladin’s deft manipulation of both talisman and disguise, the real strangers within the crusaders’ camp are flushed out. Both betrayers of the crusaders’ cause, the ­Grand Master of the Templars and Conrade of Montserrat (Scott’s misspelling for Montferrat) have been associated with cultural alterity from the start. The former follows the type of the cruel and veiled Oriental tyrant, while the latter explic­itly professes his preference for “the eastern form of government” (90 and 97).104 In a highly symbolic gesture, the novel’s key characters return once more to the Diamond of the Desert, the location of Kenneth’s and Sheerkohf’s initial ­battle. This time, however, the conflict draws both of its combatants from within the camp of so-­called Christendom, so the clash unfolds not between Christian and Saracen but between loyalist and turncoat. In the final analy­sis, the realignment of positions with which The Talisman ends does not abolish the binary structure of cultural categories; rather, it simply reapplies ­those categories to comprehend a dif­fer­ent set of individual terms. While Kenneth previously entered a liminal space in which his body momentarily enjoyed an ambiguous relationship both to the Oriental signifiers that populate Saladin’s camp and to the En­glish ones populating Richard’s, he must now embrace his identity as Scotland’s royal heir and consequent instrument for Scotland’s u ­ nion with ­England. Yet the neat resolution of Scott’s novel in the ser­vice of consolidating the nation-­state is striking, given the aberrant path of signification that the dissemination of the talisman has opened up. The differential applications of this “talisman”—­also named “drug” (69), “elixir” (82), “medicine” (161), and “narcotic” (209)—­underscore its elusive identity, unleashing the potential for remedy to revert to poison at any point in the text. Indeed, the material fact of the talisman is itself ambiguous. In its primary meaning, “talisman” names a charm that derives its magical potency from its being “engraven with figures or characters.”105 Saladin’s description of the “medicine” as “a talisman, composed u ­ nder certain aspects of the heavens, when the Divine Intelligences are most propitious” (161) points to the linguistic (that is, figurative) dimension of his curative agent, analogous perhaps [ 94 ]



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to the way that exotic ingestants are invoked in the novel not as concrete material substances but only through their discursively ascribed properties. Yet upon immersion in w ­ ater the talisman also produced material “effervescence,” or so at least “it seemed to the spectators” (82). Furthermore, as the wielder of the talisman, Saladin exercises his power by remaining on the edge of undecidability: he is at once warrior and physician, friend and foe, “king of kings” and one who “must die” (272).106 Ultimately, however, Scott’s novel leaves untapped this potential for the reversion of cure into curse. The circulation of the talisman in the novel, which constitutes the global circulation of goods writ small, ultimately preserves the fantasy of a benevolent East that can aid in, rather than disrupt, the consolidation of British subjecthood. The associations of “talisman” with the sacred realm locate it on the opposite pole from commodity, sublunary, material, and mercenary. A kind of magical thinking akin to the Orientalist fantasy of Cashmere persists h ­ ere, and “talisman” becomes the name for a willful wishing away of con­temporary forces of commodification.107 For Moore, who articulates the crisis of subjecthood by dramatizing the confusion between self and other, even the capitulation to fantasy in “The Light of the Haram” remains compromised by its own con­spic­u­ous improbability. In contrast, Scott clear-­sightedly diagnoses the use of alterity for the consolidation of selfhood, but he nevertheless insists upon maintaining the cultural other as inviolably other and ser­viceable for the self precisely b­ ecause of its enigmatic potency. Thus, Saladin’s ability to save the day increasingly takes on the quality of a deus ex machina as the novel hurtles ­toward its oppressively neat resolution. The traitors are exposed and dealt with, Kenneth’s proper identity and lineage are recognized, and Scotland (Kenneth) and E ­ ngland (Edith) join in blessed matrimonial ­union. This tendency t­oward the stabilization of what the novel initially subverted carries over to the repre­sen­ta­tion of the boundary-­breaching ingestant as well. The talisman’s edge of undecidability, in its dance between poison and remedy, ­settles into the determined referentiality of religious ideology. Thus, the novel ends by spotlighting a dif­fer­ent kind of cup. If Saladin has been administering his “wonderful talisman” (275) and saving lives the ­whole novel long, he now proves his ability to not just “cure wounds” but also “inflict them” (212). Denying the Templar the religious cup of Eastern hospitality, Saladin deals him a fatal blow instead. Yet the villainous responsibility, according to the novel’s assignment of approval and blame, lies clearly with the Templar, who first perverted the Christian cup by killing Conrade “with the words accipe hoc” (275). As Judith Wilt points out, “in substituting the dagger for the sacramental cup the priest-­knight pronounced the words which . . . ​Scott means to associate both with the liturgical formula marking the [ 95 ]

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distributing of the Eucharist and the chivalric formula conferring knighthood.”108 The sacramental trajectory of this initially ambiguous talisman points to Scott’s recourse to religious iconography as one more historical attempt at converting the absolute referent of spiritual ideality into the currency of cultural meaning. Ultimately, The Talisman’s closed aesthetic loop, which resolves the cultural problematic that the narrative initially set up by scapegoating and banishing the traitors within the camp, effaces the potential for aberrant signification and thereby preserves the fantasy of an absolute other distinctly separate from the precincts of the self. Yet if the text can only legitimize itself through the invention of what de Man describes as a “transcendental princi­ple of signification,” an absolute referent capable of holding the chain of signification in place, Scott’s novel nevertheless registers its subversive energy by demonstrating how such a referent came into being.109 The lack of an originary moment that can distinguish the Eu­ro­pean camp before and a­ fter the intrusion of the talismanic other points to the illusiveness of the in­ven­ted referent. In Scott’s charged aesthetic diction, to si­mul­ta­neously acknowledge and disavow that illusiveness is to write romance, a self-­authorizing and self-­perpetuating drama of crisis and reconciliation, disguise and revelation, whose signification is at once comprehensive and tautological, oblique to the demands of history. Exotic ingestion, largely a thematic concern in The Citizen of the World and Vathek, occurs as a vexed issue of form in Moore’s and Scott’s texts. This stylistic shift registers the increasing destabilization of British identity at the beginning of the nineteenth ­century. While Goldsmith and Beckford critique the fantasy of exotic consumerism, they still assume the validity of British cultural identity. The growing ubiquity of circulating exotic commodities, however, increasingly called that assumption into question. In both Lalla Rookh and The Talisman, the formal deployment of the exotic ingestant as a literary motif with manifold determinations explodes binary cultural categories by revealing their interdependence. Scenes of eating that would seem to adhere to a normative cultural script are sequenced so as to continuously expose identity as a form of imposture. As I have suggested, the narrative circulation of the exotic ingestant in both texts mirrors the global movements of exotic ingestants and reproduces their breaching of identity categories on multiple levels—­ pharmacological, economic, and rhetorical. In this way, the deconstructive impulse in both texts connects a specifically Oriental and Orientalist horizon to the cadence of Romantic-­era thinking, fascinated as that era is with questions of language and signification. Furthermore, the religious framework that both Moore and Scott invoke underscores the importance of the metaphysical (usually read in [ 96 ]



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the context of Romanticism’s natu­ral supernaturalism) as a compensatory bulwark against the other­wise incessant proliferation of pos­si­ble cultural meanings. As the flux in cultural identity becomes a more per­sis­tent real­ity, writers develop other strategies to work through the instability of subjecthood. The next chapter focuses on the transitional state of Sino-­British relations and their par­tic­u­lar impact on British imperial identity in the first half of the nineteenth ­century. As the construction of British identity increasingly depended on the Anglicization of tea—­ that “­simple shrub” to which, as G. G. Sigmond emphatically wrote in 1839, “individually and nationally we are deeply indebted”—­the commodity’s provenance and supply became of critical import.110 Thus, the Sino-­British trade in, and eventual wars over, tea served as a touchstone for the anx­i­eties and opportunities that attended Britain’s global expansion in the nineteenth c­ entury. In par­tic­u­lar, I consider how Thomas De Quincey and Charles Lamb reckon with Chinese influence through their strategic creation of affective texts, which work by using emotional experience to fashion models of hybrid, even cosmopolitan, cultural identity.

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4

THE EXOTIC SELF D e Q u i n cey ’s O p i u m Tex t s a n d L a m b’s C h i n e s e E s s ays

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E I G H H U N T ’ S 1 8 3 4 E S S AY “The Subject of Breakfast Continued—­ Tea-­Drinking” opens with a scene of the En­glish “breakfast-­table in the morning, clean and white with its table-­cloth, coloured with the cups and saucers, and glittering with the tea-­pot.” “Is it not a cheerful object, reader? And are you not always glad to see it?” Hunt asks rhetorically, before affirming in the next paragraph that “we know not any inanimate sight more pleasant, ­unless it be a very fine painting,” for the ele­ments of the breakfast ­table “all have a ­simple, temperate look, very relishing however to a hungry man.”1 Hunt’s formulation slides curiously from the alimentary to the visual: what is “relishing . . . ​to a hungry man” is not, as one would expect, the taste of breakfast but the meal’s “­simple, temperate look.” This visual emphasis subsequently extends to the essayist’s mockery of Chinese appearance, which he claims to be reflected in “their tea-­cup repre­sen­ta­tions of themselves . . . ​[as] a ­people all toddling, little-­eyed, little-­footed, little-­bearded, little-­minded, quaint, over-­weening, pig-­tailed, bald-­headed, cone-­capped or pagoda-­hatted” (113). Hunt’s preoccupation with how ­things “look” (in both senses of the word) becomes a key way for him to enforce cultural bound­aries: the distinction between E ­ ngland’s “­simple, temperate look” and “little-­eyed” China stabilizes the two regions’ construction as polar opposites.2 Tea’s capture by the visual regime constitutes a marked departure from its controversial reception in the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries, which had been chiefly concerned with the exotic ingestant’s pharmacological properties. While e­ arlier commentators such as John Ovington and Jonas Hanway emphasized tea’s curative or poisonous effects on the bodily and moral constitutions of its consumers, Hunt brackets his relatively restrained remarks on the “­wholesome” nature of tea with the aesthetic beauty of the tea ­table (comparable to a “very fine [ 98 ]



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painting”) at one end, and at the other, the “pleasant and rich . . . ​sight” of the teacup (114).3 As I demonstrate in this chapter and the next, within the realm of cultural repre­sen­ta­tion, a broadly discernible shift away from ingestion ­toward the visual order parallels (and in fact contributes to) tea’s gradual evolution into an icon of En­glishness. First encountered as an exotic beverage, by the nineteenth c­ entury tea had shed its foreign connotations to become the quin­tes­sen­tial expression of national identity. In identifying this expression of national identity as En­g lish (rather than British), I am responding to the prevalence of En­glish markers in the many tea t­ able portrayals that emerged during this time. As Julie Fromer observes, “the ideal domestic setting evoked by many depictions of the tea t­able reflects a particularly insular, enclosed, ‘En­glish’ sense of bound­aries between self and other, between inside and outside, private and public.” Th ­ ese depictions do not envision En­glishness as distinct from Britishness, but seek to secure imperial strength by founding it on the cloistered virtues of the domestic space.4 Such is the case for Hunt, who connects tea with “all the polite part of E ­ ngland” (113) in his essay. As ­will become clear l­ater in this chapter, a similar logic governs Thomas De Quincey’s treatment of the tea ­table, but he deploys this logic the better to explode it in order to critically reflect on the ideological function of En­glishness. Returning to “Tea-­Drinking,” Hunt’s ideologically resonant descriptions communicate the moral virtues that supposedly characterize En­glish identity: the En­glish have “­simple” and “­wholesome” desires, and their physical appetites are politely tempered by the aesthetic taste for “painting[s]” and “book[s]” (113). In the course of the eigh­teenth ­century, moderation as virtue increasingly legitimized the socioeconomic ascendency of Britain’s ­middle class (what Charles Lamb would call the blessed “­middle state”) and came to inform civic discourse on multiple fronts.5 Hunt’s use of “temperate” is particularly suggestive in this context, and it spotlights the importance of the temperance movement in helping disseminate a vision of tea as “not only moral . . . ​[but] also critical to national belonging and development.” 6 In fact, the British Association for the Promotion of Temperance, chiefly directed at regulating the alcoholic consumption of members of the working class, was founded just one year a­ fter the publication of Hunt’s essay. Significantly, tea’s fitness as an icon of En­glish temperance depends on its prior cultural sanitation, for the drink that Hanway had denounced as an “INTOXI­ CATING liquor” must be purged of foreign excess.7 This explains why Hunt precedes his discussion of tea’s nutritional value with detailed instructions on “how to make good tea,” suggesting that the “proper” procedure is necessary for purifying the “Chinese infusion” (113). A “mistress of the art” (113) presides over the pro­ cess, her nurturing presence endowing the ritual with moral heft. As Fromer has [ 99 ]

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pointed out, “within nineteenth-­century domestic ideology” the female tea maker “represented the physical, individual link that was necessary to fully convey the sense of En­glish national identity and the morals of domesticity that accompanied a cup of tea.”8 Thus, for Hunt, breakfast nourishes not just the body but also, and no less importantly, familial ties: “we quaff the odorous refreshment, perhaps chatting with dear kindred, or loving and laughing with the ‘morning f­aces’ of ­children” (113). One way by which tea can be “properly” domesticated is through the addition of moderate quantities of milk and sugar (113). While sugar produced by slaves on West Indian plantations had drawn sharp criticism in the previous de­cades, the gradual abolition of slavery beginning in 1833 made the commodity a relatively safe symbol of imperial strength. During this period, as Sidney Mintz has argued, “the Ca­rib­bean cane-­sugar industry, which had been colonial, industrial, and export-­oriented,” was being transformed and would eventually become “absorbed into expanding overseas Eu­ro­pean capitalism.”9 In a dramatic reversal, sugar’s addition to tea now sanitizes instead of further sullying the drink, elevating it into an emblem of British cultural superiority. “Thus compounded,” Hunt emphasizes, tea “is at once a refreshment and an elegance, and we believe, the most innocent of cordials” (113 [emphasis added]). The innocence is manifested not just at the level of taste but visually as well, for sugar and milk distinguish the British brew from the perniciousness of Chinese green tea (“The more green t­ here is in it, certainly the less ­wholesome it is”). As an embodiment of En­glishness, tea is no mere ingestant but part of a wholly vis­i­ble ritual: a par­tic­u­lar way of brewing, serving, and consuming.10 The domestic hearth’s ideological function as the guardian of native virtue depends on the strategic construction of “cheerful” tableaux, each of whose “­simple, temperate look” proves its successful assimilation and transformation of exotic ele­ ments. Unlike ingestion, vision as a mode of cross-­cultural imagination tends not to threaten the hierarchical boundary between cultures: rather, it observes and enforces that boundary. Incorporated into the canvas of f­ amily life, tea is perceptually naturalized, its foreign origins eclipsed. By an identical logic, but in the opposite direction, the othering of the foreign also proceeded through its objectification as a passive spectacle, a point to which I return in chapter 5. The assertion of Britain’s cultural supremacy as a distinctly visual proj­ect would culminate in the 1851 G ­ reat Exhibition, whose “vast multitude of compositions—­not of words, but of t­ hings” presented, as one commentator claims, the “image of the world and its arts . . . ​before [the visitor’s] bodily eye in a vast crystal frame.”11 Yet this ideological proj­ect depends crucially on the British Empire’s capture of transnational trade flows. The expansion of global trade, conducted u ­ nder [ 100 ]



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the East India Com­pany’s auspices for significant periods of time during the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries, contributed to Britain’s imperial power and facilitated its appropriation and objectification of foreign cultures. Quite appropriately, the East India Com­pany was a major contributor to the G ­ reat Exhibition. In Hunt’s essay, tea’s assimilation into the tableau of En­g lish domesticity hinges on tea’s continuous supply as a commodity. A ­ fter all, national identity could not be founded on something as transient as a foreign import. But while Britain would increasingly consolidate its imperial power over the course of the nineteenth ­century, Sino-­British trade remained a fraught issue u ­ ntil the mid-­century Opium Wars. At the end of the eigh­teenth ­century, Britain still had a trade deficit with China as a result of its appetite for tea. While Britain would go on to reverse that trade imbalance through the exportation of Indian opium to China, the Qing Empire’s strict regulation of foreign trade meant that Britain remained at the mercy of Chinese trade terms, a disruption of which would lead to two full-­scale wars. Indeed, the year that saw the publication of Hunt’s essay began with the establishment of an official tea committee whose job it was to “make tea British” by looking into the ways and means of cultivating an Indian replacement for Chinese tea.12 Before that endeavor took off in the second half of the nineteenth ­century, “China’s control of the tea trade,” Erika Rappaport points out, “endangered Britain’s national honor, the liberty of its merchants, and the daily habits of its populace.”13 This state of dependence produced a cultural anxiety that registers, in Hunt’s essay, in the narrator’s wholly unexpected discovery of a fly in his teacup. The tea enthusiast finds his effusive strain rudely cut short: Yea, pleasant and rich is thy sight, l­ittle tea-­cup (large though, at breakfast) round, smooth, and coloured;—­composed of delicate earth,—­like the earth, producing flowers, and birds, and men; and containing within thee thy Lilliputian ocean, which we, a­ fter sending our fancy sailing over it, past islands of foam called ‘sixpences,’ and mysterious b­ ubbles from below, ­will, giant-­like, engulf,— But hold—­there’s a fly in. (114)

Hunt values the teacup chiefly for its richness of “sight,” but grotesque ingestion—­ the fly is on the verge of being “engulfed” or already engulfed, for the author is intentionally vague on the timing—­reins in the “fancy” that has sought to remake victual into visual. The specter of contamination raised by the discovery of a fly in one’s teacup (or worse, mouth) reencodes tea as a foreign, indeed monstrous (“monster of the air” [114]), import. Hunt’s abrupt tonal shift registers an undercurrent of anxiety about Britain’s lack of control over foreign trade, which in turn compromises [ 101 ]

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its ability to perfectly assimilate imported articles into the “compounded . . . ​ innocen[ce]” of the tea-­table ritual. Furthermore, the fly’s plight alludes to Britain’s position in the network of global maritime trade. Driven by an appetite that might prove excessive, Britain too is in danger of becoming “saturated and overborne with wateriness” (114). Nevertheless, despite ­these shadowy implications, Hunt’s constant comparison of ­great ­things to small ones defuses anxiety at the same time that he raises it, as his mock heroism rewrites the specter of Britain’s economic reliance as a ludicrous debt that the “House of Fly” owes to the writer: “His suctions of sugar, his flights, his dances on the win­dow, his ­children, yea, the ­whole House of Fly, as far as it depends on him their ancestor, w ­ ill be owing to us” (114). The outlandishness of Hunt’s tone cultivates an ironic, urbane perspective through which the writer not only articulates his own subjectivity but consolidates his middle-­class readership by inviting them to appreciate and thus participate in the joke.14 The daring hybridity of “­these our most mixed and reflective papers” (114) testifies to a demo­ cratizing impulse that founds its authority not on the nature of the subject m ­ atter, but on the genteelness of its sentiment. Hunt’s mock heroism thus reconsolidates the integrity of a British subjecthood already on proud display in the opening scene of the breakfast ­table. The exotic occupies an altogether ambiguous space in Hunt’s essay. In a “mixed” state like his “mixed and reflective papers,” the exotic is neither wholly other nor completely assimilated. Tellingly, this uneven heterogeneity registers as a tension between vision and ingestion. The contrast between t­ hese two modes of cultural imagination highlights the ideological significance of ingestion as motif. If the visual construction of En­glish domesticity paints a picture of confident cultural distinction, ingestion undermines this pleasant tableau through its inevitable breaching of the line between inside and outside, domestic and foreign. The involuntary ingestion of foreign substances explodes the fiction of a sacrosanct self, and the grotesque way in which this unfolds in Hunt’s essay suggests that he pro­cesses such a violation with dread. At the time of Hunt’s writing, then, the kind of cultural binary that the ­Great Exhibition both relied on and reinforced was still very much a work in pro­gress. “The Subject of Breakfast Continued—­Tea-­Drinking” highlights the uneven development of the visual regime in the first half of the nineteenth c­ entury, a consequence of Britain’s rapidly shifting global position when, having emerged victorious from the Napoleonic Wars, it sought to consolidate its colonial holdings in India, Africa, and the Ca­rib­bean as well as to expand its influence in the Far East.15 In par­tic­u­lar, Hunt’s essay highlights the transitional state of Sino-­British relations during this period. On the one hand, British society was becoming increasingly [ 102 ]



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familiar with, and even putting out its own domestic versions of, originally Chinese goods. Assam-­farmed tea would appear in London’s commercial markets in 1839, although the colonial brew would have to wait u ­ ntil 1887 before it overtook its Chinese counterpart in terms of the percentage of tea consumed in Britain.16 Tea’s evolution from an exotic luxury to everyman’s drink in the course of the eigh­ teenth ­century drove the mass commoditization of porcelain as well. The rise of domestic potteries such as the Staffordshire works increasingly replaced Chinese manufactures with domestically produced versions on dining t­ables throughout Eu­rope.17 Chinese t­ hings, then, w ­ ere confidently being rewritten as British, at the same time that China itself was being cast as a known entity, its miraculous aura now a t­ hing of the past as its enviable consumer goods w ­ ere being not just replaced 18 but increasingly surpassed by British creations. On the other hand, Britain’s continued reliance on Chinese tea u ­ ntil the late nineteenth c­ entury meant that this familiar China could always exercise its foreign recalcitrance in a way that would materially impact Britain’s national diet. In the first de­c ades of the nineteenth ­century, then, the distant Chinese Empire offered the comfort of an increasingly familiar entity, yet t­ here was always the uneasy sense that t­ hings could radically change in the blink of an eye. It might be China’s contradictory place in the British imagination that explains why increasing contact with the Chinese Empire heightened rather than reduced Britain’s sense of cultural difference. Elizabeth Hope Chang has described this paradoxical mix of familiarity and difference as the “familiar exotic,” and scholars such as Peter Kitson and Anne Veronica Witchard have noted how both British literary responses to China and the construction of chinoiserie as aesthetic remained strikingly out of step with the “substantive archive about China [that in fact] existed.”19 Against the broader context of Sino-­British trade relations, it seems that Britain’s cultural creation of absolute Chinese alterity entails an intentional mischaracterization of China, in which the fast and loose playing with fact constitutes both a complacent appropriation of China’s cultural and economic values and a displaced fear that an exercise of Chinese sovereignty ­will shatter the illusion of British control. Writing in a similar historical moment, however, De Quincey and Lamb ­adopted strategies dif­fer­ent from what has been sketched out. The rest of this chapter examines how ­these two authors acknowledge Chinese influence and reckon with the exotic heart of the British subject. If the familiar exotic registers the impulse to contain Chinese power by dismissing it as laughably other, delightful in its strangeness but only inconsequentially so, De Quincey underscores rather than displaces Britain’s cultural anxiety about Chinese influence by creating an aesthetic mood of horror. In Confessions of An En­glish Opium-­Eater, fear functions [ 103 ]

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as a strategic affective device that allows De Quincey to build a model of identity or­ga­nized around the fractures of an imperial, globally networked polity. Lamb’s Chinese writings, in contrast, mobilize enchantment rather than horror as affect, sparking in his readers a somatic openness to the influence of the foreign. Unlike De Quincey, who locates Britain’s indebtedness to the East in an immemorial past, Lamb opens the pre­sent and even the ­future to cross-­cultural exchange, demonstrating a cosmopolitan sensibility that affirms the continuous place of the other in British subjecthood.

DE QUINCEY’S PERSONAL PARADIGM OF HORROR

Confessions of an En­glish Opium-­Eater (1821) is or­ga­nized around a b­ attle of w ­ ills between a confessing subject and the subject of confession. The strug­gle unfolds at the level of form, made salient by the narrative’s performative indecisiveness about who its true protagonist is. “Not the opium-­eater, but the opium, is the true hero of the tale,” De Quincey concludes at the story’s end, despite the significant narrative real estate devoted to the “preliminary confessions, or introductory narrative of the [writer’s] youthful adventures.”20 Indeed, as the text acknowledges, the “confessing subject” exists “apart from the ­matter of the confessions” (5), and that subject’s per­ sis­tence as an organic entity beyond the aesthetic bound­aries of any par­tic­u­lar narrative is reflected in the autobiography’s accretive impulse. Thus, twenty or so years ­later, Confessions generated a sequel, Suspiria de Profundis (1845), in which the opium eater recants his ­earlier declaration of triumphant “self-­conquest” (2). ­A fter another de­cade, Confessions doubled in length, notably through an expansion of the opium eater’s backstory. Such acts of revision write into being an open-­ended self that persists beyond the formal telos supplied by the conquest of addiction. Opium provides the initial ground for writing and motivates the construction of the autobiographical “I,” yet it is relegated to the background as that “I” grows through its continual textual revisions. The exotic ingestant produces the self, only to be taken over by that self. The autobiographical additions and revisions reflect the self’s growing preeminence at the thematic level as well. Thus, while the 1821 Confessions recorded De Quincey’s dreams to “display the marvelous agency of opium” (78), in both the sequel and the expansion, the dreams draw their materials from the “early experiences of erring childhood,” with opium exerting only a “secondary” influence.21 This increasing displacement of opium as a primary agent constitutes a bodily assimilation in which the opium eater appropriates the drug’s pharmacological alterity, a pro­cess facilitated by the mysterious chemistry between ingesting body [ 104 ]



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and ingestant. What is striking ­here is that the narrative does not so much displace opium as it conspicuously stages opium’s displacement. The difference is a subtle but striking one, for h ­ ere the integrity of the confessing subject is predicated upon the power of opium to threaten that integrity. This peculiar dynamic has profound implications for how we understand De Quincey’s mode of cross-­cultural imagination. Physically and formally, opium’s incorporation as part of the confessing subject breaches the line between the British consumer and an expansive Oriental world. The opium eater gets his substance from Asian Turkey, while the Indian-­farmed variant of the drug, shipped through the East India Com­pany’s trading ports in Southeast Asia to Canton in China, props up his tea habit.22 Critics such as John Barrell, Barry Milligan, and Nigel Leask have been influential in tracing the ingestion motif as a symptom of De Quincey’s fear of Oriental infection, yet such a reading is inevitable only if one accepts the nightmarish affect of the opium dreams as an unmediated expression of how the opium eater r­ eally feels.23 Consider, however, the famously self-­reflexive portrait of En­glish domesticity that occurs as a narrative interlude between “The Pleasures of Opium” (37) and “The Pains of Opium” (62) in Confessions. De Quincey’s ironic still life of the tea-­table ritual underscores the unevenness of his tone when it comes to the relationship between home and abroad, self and other, and E ­ ngland and the Orient, complicating how we are to understand the affective tenor of the opium dreams that follow. In the same way that the autobiographical oeuvre as a w ­ hole enacts the confessing subject’s dependence on the subject of confession, the tea-­table tableau dramatizes the paradoxical consolidation of the En­glish self around the very exotic ingestants that supposedly threaten it. The scene in question, with its “winter fire-­side: candles at four ­o’clock, warm hearth-­rugs, tea, a fair tea-­maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on the floor” (59), is an En­glishman’s cloistered pastoral dream come true. As with Hunt’s “mistress of the art,” De Quincey’s “fair tea-­maker” presides over the sacred domestic space, her Anglo-­Saxon ancestry and virtuous female work supplying the requisite moral values that anchor and sustain the h ­ ouse­hold.24 Yet even as De Quincey enshrines this fantasy of secluded domesticity, he exposes the scene’s artificiality by laying bare the laws of its aesthetic construction: the interposition of an imaginary artist between the narrator and this “picture of one eve­ning” (58) converts the fantasized hearth into a discursive construct, the product of a w ­ ill to repre­sen­ta­tion. The artificiality of this “fair” and “closed” scene derives from its material implication within a network of global trade, and the health of hearth and home is sustained by the constant flow of foreign commodities and p ­ eoples across the bound­aries of the body politic.25 Given the crucial [ 105 ]

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roles of tea and opium in propping up the British Empire, the fantasized scene coheres unsurprisingly around the “tea-­table,” upon which sit “an eternal tea-­pot” and a “receptacle” of “ruby-­coloured laudanum” (60 and 61). De Quincey goes to ­great lengths to denaturalize the ele­ments that make up his domestic tableau, citing “Dr Johnson in a bellum internecinum against Jonas Hanway” (60) to remind his audience of the debate about tea’s pharmacological foreignness and potentially noxious effects on the body, a debate that lasted well into the eigh­teenth ­century. Hanway’s recoil against tea as “INTOXICATING liquor” and “EPIDEMICAL disease” not only foregrounds the recently exotic status of this icon of En­glishness: it also makes vis­i­ble the trajectory of tea’s cultural assimilation, a trajectory that rehearses what the opium eater ­will do with opium.26 Thus, what Hunt attempted to gloss over by emphasizing the “temperate look” of the tea ­table, De Quincey highlights instead. As Eugenia Zuroski has observed, “the mention of Hanway’s essay . . . ​introduces a minute tear in the seam of the text’s vision of ideal En­glish life, a fissure that destabilizes the fantasy of domesticity that frames the troubled subjectivity of the opium addict.” But Zuroski reads this foreignness inscribed in the heart of the domestic tableau as an “unwitting” effect, one that persists despite its author’s attempts at “scapegoating . . . ​opium for a host of cultural anx­i­eties that can be traced back to the history of British tea consumption.”27 Yet De Quincey seems bent on highlighting the leakiness of the home space: the presence of the strange constitutes more than just an “unwitting” effect. David Simpson and Sanjay Krishnan have shown how the tea-­table tableau, coming immediately ­after the visit from the Malay, allows De Quincey to rupture the fantasy of domesticity in the very act of constructing it.28 The Malay’s mobility draws par­tic­u­lar attention to Britain’s movement of opium from Indian ports to Canton through the Malay Archipelago; his appearance “amongst En­glish mountains” (55) gestures ­toward the relationship between Britain’s imperial agitation and domestic felicity. Unlike Hunt, for whom the reminder of the strange comes unbidden in the figure of the fly, a “monster of the air” whose contamination of tea undercuts the function of the tea t­able as a visual icon of En­g lishness, De Quincey intentionally draws attention to the alterity of the ele­ments that make up his “picture of one eve­ning” (58). Foregrounding rather than disavowing the presence of the exotic in fact affirms the exotic as a valid foundation for British imperial identity.29 Having completed the domestic tableau with its tea-­table set piece, the opium eater, directing the steps of his “good painter” (60), declares that “the next article brought forward should naturally be myself—­a picture of the Opium-­eater, with his ‘­little golden receptacle of the pernicious drug,’ lying beside him on the t­ able” (61). The sequential [ 106 ]



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logic—­tea t­able first and opium eater ­later—­explic­itly pre­sents selfhood (a selfhood that is mediated through a “picture”) as an effect of cultural ritual, rather than the other way around. The pun on “article” as both commodity and periodical writing underscores the fungible and discursive nature of that self, further emphasizing its inevitable implication in a global economic and cultural order. In fact, by assembling tea, opium, and opium eater as articles on the same plane of repre­sen­ta­tion (all are called forth to the ­table), the tableau pre­sents each ele­ment as constituting (and being constituted through) its relationship to the ­others. At the same time, the narrator’s turn to opium—­“As to the opium, I have no objection to see a picture of that, although I would rather see the original” (61)—­activates a dizzying play across levels of inscription by drawing a distinction between “picture” and “original,” a distinction that is a facetious one for readers, since what counts as “original” for the opium eater remains a textual image for his audience. The hierarchy of repre­sen­ta­tion thus established in fact draws subtly on the trajectory of ingestion (the opium eater wants the “original” for the s­ imple reason that he wants to eat it) to provoke desire for the physical opium eater, whose “body,” the text acknowledges in a calculating turn, “should be had into court.” From an “article” to a “body,” De Quincey’s domestic tableau ­here offers a fascinating look at the discursive construction of an embodied subject from the ground up. Although by the nineteenth c­ entury tea had become more or less synonymous with En­glishness, the scandalously foreign taint that opium bears and ­w ill continue to bear requires additional assimilation. Nonetheless, it provides at the same time an ideal opportunity to consolidate national identity around the very fractures of its imperial (and therefore exposed) situation. The figure of the En­glish opium eater reflects De Quincey’s attempt to make En­glishness itself imperial, not cloistered but globally extended. De Quincey’s construction of the domestic tableau in real time, which excavates the exotic origins of commodities (specifically tea) Britain has already appropriated as symbols of its identity, rehearses what the En­glish opium eater w ­ ill try to accomplish with regard to opium throughout Confessions and Suspiria de Profundis. Not yet demonized as the sign of an incorrigibly depraved other (that w ­ ill happen l­ater), opium h ­ ere holds the potential for Anglicization, and the par­tic­u­lar route that it takes in Confessions spotlights a moment during the formation of imperial identity when hybridity was acknowledged, even embraced. Thus, the opium eater appropriates the drug as a constituent part of his self, even as he preserves its exotic trace. This double logic accounts for the “law of antagonism” that everywhere regulates the aesthetic structure of his text. The phrase names a cognitive habit that the opium eater tends to display (particularly while ­under the drug’s influence), in which the observation of a par­tic­u­lar phenomenon [ 107 ]

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mentally conjures up its opposite: “For it may be observed, generally that wherever two thoughts stand related to each other by a law of antagonism, and exist, as it ­were, by mutual repulsion, they are apt to suggest each other” (75). This law undergirds the opium-­induced Liverpool “reverie” (48) that De Quincey falls into, in which he imagines a “scene” coalescing along the contrary axes of “tumult” and “respite,” “strife” and “repose,” “resting” and “­labours,” “life” and “grave,” “anx­i­eties” and “calm: a tranquillity that seemed no product of inertia, but as if resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms; infinite activities, infinite repose” (49). In endowing dissonance with aesthetic form, the law not only accommodates the scene’s most strident ele­ments but also makes them foundational for a Romantic, distinctively En­glish, sensibility. Thus, the “sorrows and . . . ​ graves” (a dark allusion to Liverpool’s status as a slaving port) heighten rather than undercut the scene’s imaginative power, in the same way that an addiction to opium (which takes its own slaves) both unravels and is remade as the creative agency of the mind. In other words, a transverse “law of antagonism” foregrounds opium’s pharmacological alterity and at the same time appropriates it as a source of imaginative expression. Indeed, De Quincey goes to ­great lengths to underscore the artistry of his reverie as counterbalance to the influence of “just, subtle, and mighty opium” (49). The town, the opium eater meticulously explains, “represented the earth, with its sorrows and its graves left b­ ehind, yet not out of sight, nor wholly forgotten,” while the “ocean . . . ​might not unfitly typify the mind and the mood which then swayed it” (49 [emphasis added]).30 The aesthetic transcendence on display ­here is supposedly evidence of a superior, and superiorly En­glish, cast of mind. Turkish opium eaters, De Quincey emphasizes, cannot possibly be “capable of any pleasures approaching to the intellectual ones of an En­glishman” (45 [emphasis added]). The irony, of course, is that opium has an ambivalent effect on the “law of antagonism.” Did opium give rise to this law, only to be assimilated by its aesthetic structure? We are back to the tug of war between confessing subject and subject of confession, a dynamic around which the narrative repeatedly circles. Indeed, the trajectory of “law” in De Quincey’s confessional oeuvre limns the En­glish opium eater’s gradual appropriation of opium as an exotic ingestant. Initially, law occurs in the explicit context of opium’s pharmacological effects: “whereas wine disorders the ­mental faculties, opium, on the contrary (if taken in a proper manner), introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation, and harmony” (40 [emphasis added]). This material effect of opium subsequently shifts inward, blurring into the cognitive habit that the “law of antagonism” constitutes and which De Quincey formulates as an abstract observation (“For it may be observed, generally . . .”) By the time De Quincey wrote Suspiria de Profundis, the [ 108 ]



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scope of the law had expanded into the structure of autobiography—­“the law of the work,” as he calls it, “i.e. the princi­ple which determined its form” (89). Just as the opium eater ingests and assimilates opium, the autobiographical work that produces the opium eater as subject appropriates the material legislation of opium as its own discursive law. This intimate interweaving between the foreign m ­ atter (opium) and the cognitive aesthetic (the En­glish mind) enacts, at the structural level, De Quincey’s preservation of the exotic as a source of self. More than that, the par­tic­u­lar structure of his aesthetic law facilitates the appropriation not just of the foreign but also of the horror that the foreign provokes. By constructing a formal structure that calls for (indeed, depends on) the coexistence of opposites, De Quincey transforms the strange and the familiar into aesthetic allies and thereby establishes a clear interpretive framework through which the subsequent “horror” (73) of his opium dreams can be pro­cessed. In this way, he fashions an imperial subjecthood that proves its resilience in its ability to incorporate, rather than disavow, the fractures and anx­i­eties of empire. The series of Orientalist nightmares that De Quincey rec­ords as “the immediate and proximate cause of [the opium eater’s] acutest suffering” (67) demonstrates the way in which the fear of “Asiatic” (72) infection is made into a sublime source of self. Explaining that he has been “­every night . . . ​transported into Asiatic scenes,” the opium eater proceeds to “give the reader some slight abstraction of [his] oriental dreams, which always filled [him] with such amazement at the monstrous scenery, that horror seemed absorbed, for a while, in sheer astonishment. . . . ​ Over e­ very form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove [him] into an oppression as of madness” (72 and 74). The diction and logic of this passage (the suspension of horror in astonishment and the sense of brooding and its connection to infinity) return the reader to the scene of the Liverpool reverie, where “the ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded over by a dove-­like calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and the mood which then swayed it” (49 [emphasis added]). The affective contrast between the two passages—­“madness” in one instance and “dove-­like calm” in the other—­inscribes the same law of antagonism already operative in the e­ arlier scene, prefiguring the absorption of horror that the latter scene explic­itly spells out. De Quincey’s “law of antagonism” constitutes a version of the Burkean sublime, through which feelings of terror turn out to be generative for the self. “The passion caused by the ­great and sublime in nature, when ­those ­causes operate most powerfully,” Edmund Burke writes, “is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of [ 109 ]

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horror.”31 For Burke, the passion of the sublime leads to a productive “swelling” of the self, which is “never more perceived, nor operates with more force, than when without danger we are conversant with terrible objects.”32 Within the specifically Orientalist context of Confessions, horror as affect produces the swelling of a distinctly imperial selfhood, paving the way for the opium eater’s act of imperial assertion: “­Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights [sic], I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan. From kindred feelings, I soon ­ nder the same law” (73 [emphasis added]). Law’s brought Egypt and all her gods u trajectory from the pharmacological to the aesthetic reaches a crucial transitional point in the form of the imperial law that conquers through cata­loging and classification. The sort of colonial archive that De Quincey “assem­ble[s]” h ­ ere evokes what Barrell described as “the beginnings of the large-­scale, scientific collecting of the nineteenth-­century museum age, with its aspiration to represent every­ thing.”33 The inexorable ­will to repre­sen­ta­tion means that the material specificities of the vastly dif­fer­ent cultures of China, India, and Egypt are consolidated ­under the sign of an Orient on display.34 This is alterist Orientalism at its most ruthless—­“a Western style,” as Edward Said has characterized it, “for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”35 The Orient on display h ­ ere, however, disrupts the ideology of empirical vision that underpins the museum age, for its “scenes” are grounded not in observation but in imagination. Furthermore, the opium-­eater seems to have derived his own ability to “bring together” from the “connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights” (emphasis added). Who or what is the agent of connection ­here? The very indeterminacy points to a viscous, pervasive Oriental atmosphere that infects the opium eater, whose verbalized horror of such an Orient seems fundamental to his subsequent acts of connection (“brought together” and “assembled”). Thus, the dream scenery begins with, and is repeatedly punctuated by, the opium eater’s declarations of horror. Indeed, his act of collection connects (syntactically) to the preceding sentence through a spatial (and thus corporeal), rather than cognitive, logic: “­under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights” picks up on the physical dimension of “upon” in the previous sentence, in which the opium eater describes “the unimaginable horror which t­hese dreams of oriental imagery, and mythological tortures, impressed upon me” (73 [emphasis added]). It seems that the horror provoked by the other catalyzes the opium eater’s assertion of imperial ­will, despite his repeated claims that ­there exist “a barrier of utter abhorrence, and want of sympathy” between himself and “Asiatic” manners and modes of life. Humid like tropical heat, affect sticks and blends, even as the [ 110 ]



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source of that affect retains its alterity as a “mystic sublimity” that “refuse[s] to mix” (73). Like a Möbius strip, this alterity turns—­paradoxically, yet in perfect accordance with the aesthetic “law of antagonism”—­into the “connecting” and “kindred” feelings that drive the opium eater’s imperial act. Not just a ­simple fear of infection, horror ­here serves as an instrument through which the opium eater preserves Oriental alterity at the same time that he appropriates (ingests) it as a source of imperial self. The creation of interiority accounts for the constant invocation of depth: “the ­causes of [the opium-­eater’s] horror lie deep,” rooted as they are in a sublimely massive Orient (“the vast age of the race and name”) that “impressed upon him” (emphasis added) “unimaginable horror.” The unbearable sense of weight is so palpable that psychological affliction soon turns into physical burial: “I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids” (74). Yet this trauma also produces within the opium eater “feelings deeper than [he] can analyze” (73 [emphasis added])—as if, along with opium, De Quincey has ingested the very vastness of the Orient and appropriated it in the creation of interior depth.36 The sublimity of terror contributes to the formation of the self.37 Thus, though the opium eater ostensibly fears the Chinese as “an antediluvian man renewed” (73), he also welcomes opium’s gift of “that sort of vital warmth . . . ​which would prob­ably always accompany a bodily constitution of primeval or antediluvian health” (41 [emphasis added]). Textually, De Quincey achieves this transformative trick through the figure of the palimpsest, “a membrane or roll cleansed of its manuscript by reiterated successions” but whose effaced inscriptions can always be “restor[ed]” (139 and 142). De Quincey draws explic­itly on this device in Suspiria de Profundis to describe similar pro­cesses in the “­human brain,” which he calls “a natu­ral and mighty palimpsest”: “Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet in real­ity not one has been extinguished. And if, in the vellum palimpsest . . . ​ ­there is any t­ hing fantastic or which moves to laughter, as oftentimes t­ here is in the grotesque collisions of ­those successive themes, having no natu­ral connexion, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied the roll, yet, in our own heaven-­created palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, t­ here are not and cannot be such inconherencies” (144 [emphasis added]). What began as an oppressive experience of physical burial in the “Asiatic” dream shifts inward, becoming a ­mental “bur[ial]” that is in fact a ­mental accumulation. De Quincey invokes the vector of depth to convert the textual chronology of life events he has been presenting into a multilayered accumulation that endows a subject with an expansive interiority. [ 111 ]

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In other words, the palimpsest equates a narratable life with a deep one. The opium eater dreams of being buried alive, but the palimpsestic brain internalizes the external overlay; the opium eater fears Southern Asia as “the seat of awful images and associations” and “shudder[s]” at its “immemorial tracts of time” (73), but the brain carries “everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings” in its “deep memorial palimpsest”; and the opium eater brings together natu­ral specimens “­under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights,” but the palimpsestic brain fosters meaningful relations among events that other­wise have “no natu­ral connexion.”38 In this way, the textual progression from Confessions to its sequel moves through the opium dreams to assimilate opium—an imperial commodity and exotic ingestant—as the ground of its subjectivity. By internalizing his horror of Oriental alterity, De Quincey develops a model of imperial subjecthood so capacious that it can accommodate the anx­i­eties about cross-­cultural dependence that we saw in Hunt’s essay. The trope of ingestion dramatizes the constitution of the En­glish opium eater’s identity around the incorporation of the foreign as foreign, building a model of En­glishness whose claim to distinction paradoxically lies in its imperial dislocations. Anxiety itself becomes foundational to En­glish selfhood, even as its association with time immemorial locates the source of that anxiety in an already departed past. For this reason, in Suspiria de Profundis De Quincey exalts c­ hildren as uniquely capable of looking into “the elementary feelings of man” (127), an observation that prompts his subsequent narration of a childhood experience characterized by “anxiety without definite limits” (128). Having subscribed to “a general history of navigation, supported by a vast body of voyages,” the young De Quincey had feared the “debt” he would run up given the likelihood of “such a work tend[ing] to infinity” (131). He worries: “What was l­ittle E ­ ngland to the universal sea? And yet that went perhaps to fourscore parts” (131). The anxiety, then, is distinctively imperial in character, and the “truth” (127) of perception that De Quincey claims c­ hildren have turns out in this instance to be the recognition of British maritime overextension. In this way, De Quincey does not just incorporate the horror associated with cultural dependence into the meaningful structure of his private life: he also makes it emblematic of an entire psychological and philosophical framework that celebrates the universal child as the source of creative power.39 Tellingly, at this point De Quincey brings in the Arabian Nights tales. His imaginative amplification of his guilt in subscribing to what proved too vast to ­handle “connected itself with one of the Arabian nights which had particularly interested [him]self and [his] ­sister” (135 [emphasis added]). His reference to the popu­lar nursery text h ­ ere participates in the broader cultural tendency in nineteenth-­century Britain to appropriate and contain the exotic charge of the East [ 112 ]



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by casting it as a departed and always idealized childhood.40 The usefulness of the Arabian Nights sequence as an imaginative resource for ­children reflects the incorporation of a par­tic­u­lar kind of Oriental alterity into the foundation of childhood consciousness that becomes, as William Words­worth famously put it, “­father of the man.” 41 The Romantic period has often been credited with the creation of childhood as a discursive category.42 That discovery turns out to have an imperial aspect as well, in which the exotic is appropriated as the imaginative ground for the development of one’s coherent identity. De Quinceyean horror, then, is not just the spontaneous product of virulent racism, but a strategic affective device that transmutes the anxiety of influence into an aesthetic mood. It allows De Quincey to acknowledge the exotic heart of the En­glish subject while still insisting on its cultural sovereignty. Yet if such a paradigm perpetuates a binary understanding of cultural identity, it also shifts easily into a diagnosis of the way in which the terrifying other is simply a projection of one’s own fears. If the language of aesthetic construction ­running throughout De Quincey’s Asiatic dreams reflects his calculated per­for­mance and instrumentalization of Oriental phobia, the same language also reveals the fabricated nature of the Orient. Thus, it is not simply Asia that the opium eater fears, but “Asiatic scenes” (72 [emphasis added]). The terror of Southern Asia resides not in any material ­thing but rather in “awful images and associations,” and what the passage ultimately traffics in are one man’s trumped-up “feelings associated with all oriental names or images” (73). De Quincey’s “dreams of oriental imagery” (73) turn out to be exactly what they have already advertised themselves to be: Orientalist fantasies and figurations rooted “deep” in the En­glishman’s own psyche. De Quincey makes this point clear in his discussion of the “mysterious [Brocken mountaintop] apparition” (154) in Suspiria de Profundis. This creature, who “lived so many ages with foul Pagan sorcerers, and witnessed so many centuries of dark idolatries,” turns out a­ fter “two or three experiments” to be “but a reflex of [one]self,” “a phantom” that serves as “the dark symbolic mirror for reflecting to the daylight what ­else must be hidden for ever” (154 and 156). The ste­reo­t ype of the Oriental pagan as one who threatens the Judeo-­Christian foundation of Eu­ro­pean identity breaks down h ­ ere. For the opium eater, who e­ arlier described his drug addiction as a “prostration before the dark idol” (90), the pagan creature that he so fears emerges as no more or less than his own self. Furthermore, when De Quincey represents this self-­projection as a visual mirroring (“dark symbolic mirror”), he also specifically critiques Eu­ro­pean vision as a colonizing framework that makes of the other a “reflex of [it]self.” This is not to argue that De Quincey’s repre­sen­ta­tions are motivated by an ethical refusal to subject the Oriental other to discursive imprisonment. Rather, [ 113 ]

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he characteristically capitalizes on the tension between the strange and the familiar by converting that tension into a reservoir of veiled interiority. “Sometimes,” he confesses, “the Dark Interpreter . . . ​swerves out of [his] orbit, and mixes a ­little with alien natures,” yet it is precisely this mixing that “recall[s] [the narrator] to [his] own lurking thoughts” (156 and 157, emphasis added). Nevertheless, coming ­after the elaborate deconstruction of the apparition, the claim of an encounter with “alien natures” inevitably sounds disingenuous. The relentless internalization of external forces—­the con­spic­u­ous per­for­mance and aesthetic instrumentalization of t­hose forces for the purpose of transforming anxiety into sovereignty—­looks increasingly like the external projection of internal fears. The impossibility of distinguishing between the two yields the supplementary effect of keeping cultural alterity beyond the pale of Western repre­sen­ta­tion. In Lamb’s writings on China, this same supplementary effect fuels an extensive meditation on the distortive effect of British perspective. Though the charm of Lamb’s “Old China” seems antithetical to what De Quincey calls the “antiquity of Asiatic ­things,” which provoked in the opium eater “horror” to the point of “mad[ness]” (73), Lamb’s self-­consciousness t­oward his act of cultural projection brings his writings closer to Confessions than to Hunt’s tonally more similar essay on breakfast tea. Lamb confronts Chinese alterity as an enigma irreducible to a Western framework, even as he underscores China’s role in the making of his own subjectivity. Paradoxically, the former view does not detract from the latter but instead secures its ongoing possibility.

LAMB AND THE UBIQUITY OF CULTURAL INFLUENCE

As a clerk for the East India Com­pany from 1792 to 1825, Lamb personally benefited from Britain’s China trade. During the years of his employment, the Com­ pany saw a steep growth in its business in China goods, of which tea represented over 90 ­percent. To balance trade, British Indian exports—­chiefly opium, but cotton as well—­expanded in lockstep over the same period.43 Thus, what might have seemed to some to be a debilitating national de­pen­dency proved eco­nom­ically advantageous for the young author, whose imperial employment both paralleled and facilitated the literary work that he was si­mul­ta­neously undertaking as an essayist for the London Magazine.44 Like many a Romantic author Lamb had begun with poetic ambitions, but straitened circumstances forced him to lay ­those ambitions aside for the more lucrative opportunities that literary wage ­labor and an East Indian clerkship offered. [ 114 ]



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For Lamb, China represented not just a distant horizon but also a ­matter of quotidian, material concern. Nor w ­ ere his Chinese transactions ­limited to an official capacity and solely mediated through the India House. His correspondence with the Quaker poet Bernard Barton, for instance, rec­ords his private trading in “desired vases” on behalf of John Mitford, whose f­ ather worked in the China trade ­under the auspices of the East India Com­pany.45 By his own account, Lamb paid twenty-­eight pounds “for the freight and prime cost” of the porcelain, though it seems that Mitford’s “roses must [continue to] be content in a Wedgwood pot,” since the vessel that carried the vases in question apparently never made it back to ­England (CWL, 916 and 888). In his own travels, Lamb only went as far as Paris, and the China that sustained him eco­nom­ically also strained his imagination to excess.46 As Lamb exclaimed in a letter to Thomas Manning dated December 5, 1806, “China! Canton! Bless us—­how it strains the imagination and makes it ache!” (CWL, 757). From 1806 to 1810, Manning had worked as a doctor at the East India Com­pany’s Canton factory, and in 1811 he became the first En­glishman to enter Lhasa, Tibet. For the much more provincial Lamb, the distant Chinese Empire—­“so many hemi­ spheres off!” (CWL, 758)—in which his close friend had taken up temporary residence presented a space of exotic sublimity, whose thrilling difference might be usefully appropriated in the generation of poetic frisson.47 But the prosaic real­ity of Lamb’s day job would have made any such idealism unsustainable: the East Indian clerk won­ders in the very next sentence “­whether [his letter] can go tomorrow by a ship which [he has] just learned is ­going off direct to [Manning’s] part of the world” (CWL, 757). The emphasis on maritime routes reconfigures China as a material site in a con­temporary and increasingly globalized world: if one cannot personally visit the place, one can nevertheless inquire about it of friends and business associates. The physical dispatch of Lamb’s letter accomplishes the cross-­cultural course that his imagination strained to accomplish. Indeed, the letter’s being composed on Com­pany stationery transforms this instance of private correspondence into a material metonym for the entire network of trade connecting the British Empire to China.48 Paradoxically, Lamb’s consciousness of his imperial embeddedness accounts for the increasingly facetious trajectory of his letter to Manning, which concludes with the writer’s mock exclamations at how ­little space he has left on the paper: “How the paper grows less and less! In less than two minutes I ­shall cease to talk to you, and you may rave to the g­ reat wall of China. N.B. Is t­ here such a wall? Is it as big as Old London Wall, by Bedlam? Have you met with a friend of mine, named Ball, at Canton?” (CWL, 760). Lamb’s plea of ignorance [ 115 ]

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­ ere is obviously a sham, especially as he names in the same breath his old school h friend Samuel Ball, a tea inspector whose daily dealings with Chinese officials made him well positioned to contradict Lamb’s mock speculation about the ­Great Wall.49 Of course Lamb knows that the wall exists. Yet more than just a bit of indirection played for laughs, Lamb’s understated and ironic contrast between diminishing paper space and the extensive Chinese wall critically acknowledges the difference between book knowledge (Lamb knows that the wall exists) and personal encounter (he has not seen it himself ). It also points to the material exchanges that pass through the wall—­the quin­tes­sen­tial sign of Chinese seclusion—in the form of shipped goods, dispatched letters, and well-­placed friends. Is ­there, then, ­really such a wall? Lamb’s seemingly flippant question conveys the dream of busy cross-­cultural traffic cutting through both physical and imaginative barriers and rendering them inoperative. But this dream, too, is a tease, since Canton on China’s southeastern coast, to which Eu­ro­pean traders in China ­were restricted, is nowhere near the G ­ reat Wall, which is situated across China’s historical northern border with Mongolia. The famous impenetrability of the Chinese interior for foreign merchants, and thus the sheer impossibility of even approaching the ­Great Wall, underscores the alterity of the vast Qing Empire, which cannot be mastered simply by a commercial logic. “Is ­there . . . ​such a wall?” Lamb’s question thus represents not just a sham ignorance that mystifies China to exoticize it, nor simply the fantasy of barrier-­ free commerce and dialogue. Rather, it articulates a genuine concern about the border between British selfhood and Chinese otherness—­where that border stands and ends, in both space and time. Lamb’s day job (as an imperial servant) and artistic temperament (as a Romantic author) supply mutually correcting impulses, creating a cosmopolitan sensibility that resists both absolute difference and the erasure of that difference. Lamb, that is, experiences cosmopolitanism not simply as a par­tic­u­lar set of practices, habits, or affiliations but as a question, a confrontation with an otherness whose thickness of reference is irreducible to native definition or comprehension.50 In Lamb’s “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig” (1822) and “Old China” (1823), this cosmopolitan sensibility w ­ ill register as a dramatized tension between the fanciful and the prosaic, through which Lamb first exaggerates cultural binaries and then explodes them, dramatically deconstructing the myth of cultural purity. Playing with, and continuously subverting, the line between aesthetic and gustatory taste, Lamb underscores the dialectical dynamic between figurative imagination and material encounter. Physical contact is always mediated through ­mental perception, [ 116 ]



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and perception extends contact, so that the contact zone is never localizable and therefore never containable. For Lamb, cultural identity is always already hybrid, revealing the traces of cross-­cultural encounters and exchanges that extend both backward and forward in time. “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” one of a series of essays that Lamb wrote for the London Magazine ­under the pseudonym “Elia,” creatively engages the found manuscript device so that its author can wax lyrical about his favorite dish. Playing with the typical British construction of Chinese culture as antiquated, the essay opens with a “Chinese manuscript” that locates the culinary invention of roast pig in ancient China at some unspecified time.51 Bo-bo, the son of a swineherd, accidentally sets fire to his ­house with its “fine litter of new-­farrowed pigs” and ends up discovering “how nice the burnt pig eats” (CWL, 108 and 109). Soon conflagrations begin to spread as news circulates, ­until “in pro­cess of time, says [Elia’s] manuscript, a sage arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked (burnt, as they called it) without the necessity of consuming a ­whole ­house to dress it” (CWL, 110). Civilization arrives on the scene, if in a rather bumbling manner, with humankind’s movement from raw to cooked food. Lamb’s farcical history seems to satirize both China and consumer appetite. Indeed, Karen Fang reads the essay as a revisionist history that attempts to purge the taint of Britain’s exotic consumerism by scapegoating the Chinese. “By portraying the Chinese as an ignorant and primitive society whose consumer desire precipitates social regression, and by allying the proper or correct practice of that consumer be­hav­ior with E ­ ngland,” Fang argues, Lamb displaces Britain’s China mania and the British implication within the opium trade.52 Yet Lamb’s essay already trou­bles any easy binary between primitive China and civilized Britain by locating the discovery of roast pig within, rather than beyond, China. While Elia mocks China’s apparent inability to abstract its cooking pro­cess, what fi­nally terminated “this custom of firing ­houses” (CWL, 110) is the advent of a Chinese sage—­not Locke, only someone “like our Locke” (emphasis added). The reference to the En­glish Enlightenment phi­los­o­pher does not so much efface Chinese civilization as it tries to elucidate that civilization through a gesture ­toward universalism. Something like cultural translation seems to be at work, especially when one considers that the essay’s premise depends on Manning (“my friend M.”) being “obliging enough to read and explain” (CWL, 108 [emphasis added]) the Chinese manuscript to Elia. It is at this point that the story switches gears, moving into the pre­sent so that Elia can pour out his unabashed love for this best of “delicacies” (CWL, 110). [ 117 ]

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What follows is a sensory account of the pleasures of eating roast pig, as the En­glishman takes over the scene from his Chinese pre­de­ces­sor, Bo-­bo: ­ ere is no flavour comparable, I w Th ­ ill contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-­watched, not over-­roasted, crackling, as it is well called—­the very teeth are invited to their share of the plea­sure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance—­with the adhesive oleaginous—​O call it not fat! but an indefinable sweetness growing up to it—­the tender blossoming of fat—­fat cropped in the bud—­taken in the shoot—in the first innocence—­the cream and quintessence of the child-­pig’s yet pure food—­the lean, no [sic] lean, but a kind of animal manna—or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended and ­running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosian result or common substance. (CWL, 110)

Is Elia’s luxurious taste for this “ambrosian” substance dif­fer­ent from Bo-­bo’s “beastly” (CWL, 108) form of consumption, or does the En­g lishman’s feverish ingestion exhibit cultural regression? “Crackling,” ­a fter all, is by Elia’s own admission irresistible, rupturing civilized taste in much the same way that Lamb’s italicized word ruptures the typography of his text. Indeed, the plea­sure Elia takes in the “cream and quintessence of the child-­pig’s yet pure food” hovers on the brink of savagery. The irony, of course, is that this savagery is associated not with Chinese primitivism but with French epicureanism.53 The painfully exquisite focus on the moment of “teeth” sinking into “pleasur[able]” flesh suggests fantasies of pederasty, even infant cannibalism. Elia’s lavish use of dashes shows him luxuriating in e­ very moment of sensuous taste. At the same time, the dashes break the narrative flow, producing a series of punctuated close-­ups that align the gruesome mastication of the pig (with the skin breaking at one moment and the fat blossoming at the next) with the gourmand’s intensifying oral bliss. Elia’s alignment with Bo-bo breaches the boundary between rude and refined taste, troubling any investment in consumption be­hav­ior as an expression of cultural identity. Into this scene of cultural mis-­signification, Lamb introduces a third dietary discourse that clarifies and intensifies the po­liti­cal stakes. Denise Gigante and Gerald Monsman have both highlighted the way “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig” parodies nineteenth-­century vegetarianism, which denounces carnivorousness by rhetorically equating it with cannibalism.54 Lamb seems to have embraced the criticism with gusto, enthusiastically performing the role of the cannibal through taking dev­ilish delight in teeth penetrating skin to draw fat. His description, already strongly suggestive of bloodsucking, is made more grotesque by the personification of the “child-­pig” taken “in the first innocence.” Yet by labeling pig fat as “pure food,” Lamb turns on its head the cardinal concept of vegetarian philosophy and thereby undermines the discourse in which [ 118 ]



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he seems to be participating. In “A Vindication of Natu­ral Diet” (1813), Percy Bysshe Shelley argues passionately for a “pure vegetable diet” that can reconcile “the advantages of intellect and civilization . . . ​with the liberty and pure pleasures of natu­ral life.”55 Shelley’s recurring emphasis on purity (the term appears no fewer than ten times in the fourteen-­page pamphlet) invokes the idealism of high Romantic ideology to pre­sent vegetarianism as a kind of pure, unmarked nutrition, purged of gross, material excess.56 Thus, for Shelley, adherence to a vegetable diet signifies devotion to moral truth: “the pure and passionate moralist, yet unvitiated by the contagion of the world . . . ​­will embrace a pure system, from its abstract truth, its beauty, its simplicity, and its promise of wide-­extended benefit.”57 When it comes to foreign imports, though, purity is no longer just a m ­ atter of moral discipline but also one of national security. The “pure food” of vegetarianism invokes what Timothy Morton calls “the myths of a primitive, natu­ral consumer” to code foreign commodities as “contagion” (Shelley’s word) and thereby guard the sanctity of British identity.58 By deploying the phrase in an exactly opposite context to describe “animal manna,” whose “blended[ness]” highlights the foreign implications of Elia’s eating, Lamb suggests that the extreme abstraction of vegetarian philosophy leads not to the elimination of the material base but in fact constitutes its fulfillment: “the cream and quintessence.” The polite taste for “pure food,” which Shelley insists reflects “the advantages of intellect and civilization,” turns out to be simply the other face of an extreme epicureanism, continuous with the indulgence in foreign luxury. Through the power of his prose, Lamb evokes the sensory potency of “pure food” to expose the fantasy of essential nutrition and thereby erase the artificial line between cultural categories. The ideology of a temperate Britain—­the healthy “­middle state” that Elia’s cousin Bridget w ­ ill so idealize in “Old China”—­depends on locating a primitive culture at one end of the spectrum and a nation like France, overcivilized to the point of de­cadence, at the other end. The confusion between rudeness and refinement subverts the binary logic needed to anchor Britain’s position as one of healthy moderation. Britain, Lamb’s essay suggests, is in the midst, not the ­middle, of this cultural soup. Epicureanism turns out to be not that dif­fer­ent from primitive taste, and the En­glishman is most like the Chinese when he eats in the French mode. As cultural bound­aries unravel, the purity of cultural identity is increasingly revealed as a myth. Lamb h ­ ere espouses not a universalist vision but one of cross-­ cultural influence, with the trope of ingestion foregrounding the drama of contact. Suckling pig, of course, is a famous Chinese (specifically, Cantonese) dish, and by the time of the Qing dynasty, it was already part of the Manchu-­Han Imperial Feast.59 John Barrow’s widely popu­lar Travels in China (1804) mentions that “of [ 119 ]

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animal food, pork is mostly consumed,” and that “a morsel of pork, to relish their rice, is almost the only kind of meat that the poor can afford to taste.” Barrow also recounts two separate occasions on which the Macartney embassy was treated to sumptuous meals of “roast pork.” 60 Not having been to China, Lamb would not have tasted roast pork prepared the Chinese way, but he could have certainly heard of it from Manning, who makes an appearance in the essay as “my friend M.” The mediated nature of Lamb’s encounter with this Chinese dish, a mediation that is foregrounded by the fictiveness of the manuscript, complicates how we are to understand the nature of cross-­cultural influence. With the East India Com­pany’s establishment of cultural interpreters at its Canton factory, where individuals such as John Francis Davis, George Thomas Staunton, and Manning worked in­de­pen­dently or in collaboration to produce ethnographical accounts as well as translations of major Chinese works, Romantic Sinology was just coming into its own and increasing both the quality and quantity of Britain’s knowledge of China.61 While the manuscript is spurious, then, the textual technology it refers to is not. In “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” the prominent blend of the gustatory and the discursive highlights cultural influence but makes it impossible to pinpoint any inaugural moment for that influence. The essay’s ambiguous and diffuse temporal coverage, from the “first seventy thousand ages” (CWL, 108) of mankind recorded in the Chinese manuscript to the moment of that manuscript’s pre­sent reception, allegorizes the continuity of this influence without locating it within an identifiable time frame. To further complicate ­things, it is not only Chinese influence that Lamb’s essay documents. The essay’s satirical mode and gastronomical focus takes its cue from the Roman tradition, and Monsman has argued that Lamb has in mind specifically the hog r­ ecipes of Marcus Gavius Apicus, an ancient Roman gourmand whose work l­ater inspired William King’s The Art of Cookery at the beginning of the eigh­teenth ­century.62 In this regard, Lamb seems to have adapted not just his essay’s title from William Chambers, who authored the controversial Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, but also that author’s invocation of Rome and China as twin sources of inspiration.63 Lamb’s essay signals its sources but refuses to specify e­ ither the nature of their influence or the pro­cess of that influence. The Chinese context, then, is not all farce: t­ here are morsels of truth in it. One can surmise that the indeterminacy of the composition constitutes Lamb’s critical reflection on historical distance, a reflection that the hybrid form of his allegory bequeaths to the readers of his essay as well. Fact and fiction come together like the “fat and lean” of pig meat, “so blended and ­running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosian result or common substance.” The impossibility of identifying one cultural and historical origin for roast pig is part of the point. [ 120 ]



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Felicity James has argued that Lamb’s essay “is informed by the idea of travellers’ tales and tall stories.” 64 But it is not just a skeptical parody of the genre. Instead, the essay engages with and acknowledges the global circulation of commodities, narratives, and technologies, the real­ity of which ruptures the myth of any primitive state of cultural purity. The Manning reference that opens the essay is both spurious and not, and the pro­cess of cultural translation that it indexes goes beyond the empirical determination of authenticity and accuracy. As David Porter puts it, the act of translation should be evaluated “not as a more or less accurate means of transmitting a set of ideas across cultural bound­aries, but rather as an intimate pro­cess of engagement with foreignness that itself conditions the emergence of t­ hese ideas within their new cultural context.” 65 As a mode of intercultural engagement, “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig” names China as a legitimate source, yet it refrains from presenting that source in the form of a discrete, localizable entity that can be e­ ither fully appropriated or disavowed as other. The logic of this cross-­cultural interaction, and its implications for the individual subject, remained very much on Lamb’s mind when he composed “Old China” half a year ­later. Besides the obvious Chinese context, a common focus on firing technique connects “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig” and “Old China.” The former locates the practice of pig roasting in the era of “Chofang,” a transliteration of the Chinese term meaning “kitchen” or literally “cooking or firing h ­ ouse.” The firing of pig in the former essay becomes the firing of porcelain in the latter.66 The historical indeterminacy of the “golden age [of ] . . . ​Chofang” is, in “Old China,” grafted on to the private order of memory: Elia professes his “almost feminine partiality for old china,” but he claims that his “taste” is “of too ancient a date to admit of [his] remembering distinctly that it was an acquired one.” He is “not conscious,” Elia reiterates, “of a time when china jars and saucers ­were introduced into [his] imagination” (CWL, 217). But “Old China” seems to approach the topic of cultural influence from the opposite direction as “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” since the former deals with a patently aesthetic “taste” and is concerned with an antiquity (“ancient”) that makes sense only on the level of personal history. The essay’s idiosyncratic character, already implicit within the multiple meanings of “old” that its title plays on, suggests that where “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig” seems to be all crude appetite and material history, “Old China” focuses instead on the speculative and whimsical, having to do with the subjective order of the “imagination.” Yet, as has been shown, “Dissertation upon Roast Pig” turns on the subversion of this very binary between the material and the figurative. As I go on to demonstrate below, considering the two essays not as opposites but rather as a dialectical [ 121 ]

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pair foregrounds a bodily dimension of the l­ater piece that critical readings have crucially overlooked, and whose function points to the radical nature of Lamb’s intercultural imagination. “Old China” begins with a m ­ ental reverie that underscores the intervention of the British perspective, only to transform that perspective into an ave­nue for material influence. “Old China,” which unabashedly uses porcelain as the material occasion for its flights of imagination and nostalgia, embraces consumer culture but half disavows its entanglement with the exotic by underscoring the deep-­rootedness of Elia’s taste. Unsurprisingly, this cultural appropriation of the Oriental commodity is continuous with the essay’s recourse to the visual register. Thus, Elia introduces his “taste” for “china jars and saucers” by way of his relationship to the “picture gallery,” the “play,” and the “exhibition” (CWL, 217), visual spectacles all. The essay devotes its next six paragraphs to a methodical description of the visual patterns that ornament a china teacup. On display h ­ ere is cultural domestication as a work in pro­gress, one that would culminate, a de­cade l­ ater, in Hunt’s “breakfast-­ table” with its “­simple, temperate look.” However—­perhaps symptomatic of the as yet incomplete nature of such domestication—­the vision that “Old China” rec­ords is a strikingly disordered one, defiant of classical (read: Western) laws of perspective. Figures on a “china tea-­cup” strike up “lawless” and “grotesque” poses, which make them fitting inhabitants of the “world before perspective” that the “decorous artist” (CWL, 217) has crafted. Fang, Chang, Porter, and Kitson concur on the Chineseness that this disordered vision signifies for Elia. Chang, in par­tic­u­lar, argues that Lamb exploits this visual difference to construct his own subjecthood.67 Yet Lamb’s emphasis on perception surely destabilizes the assignment of a par­tic­u­lar kind of perspective to China. The essay remains intentionally vague about the source of visual deficiency. Is it the Chinese whose “lawless” perspective is inscribed on the teacup that Elia contemplates, or is it Elia himself who fails to see properly? Much of this ambiguity turns on how one reads Elia’s description of the china teacup as a “world before perspective”: “I had no repugnance then—­why should I now have?—to t­ hose l­ ittle, lawless, azure-­tinctured grotesques, that u ­ nder the notion of men and w ­ omen, float about, uncircumscribed by any ele­ment, in that world before perspective—­a china tea-­cup” (CWL, 217). “World before perspective” seems to be a ste­reo­t ypical critique of Chinese aesthetics, whose “lawless” and “grotesque” nature reflects a stagnant po­liti­cal order fast slipping into degeneracy. But “before” also exerts a prepositional force that transfers “perspective” from the Chinese artist to the British Elia. If Lamb means that the “world” was set before (as in physically in front of ) Elia’s perspective, he opens the way for the distorting influence of Elia’s perceptual filter. Indeed, Elia underscore this when [ 122 ]



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he qualifies his description of the teacup figures: “(so they appear to our optics)” (CWL, 217). To further complicate ­things, the essay’s opening paragraph introduces yet another spin on the “perspective” that Elia is referring to. Notably, the “china jars and saucers” that Elia opens the essay with exist solely in his imagination: he is “call[ing] [them] to mind” (CWL, 217), even if he fails to the identify the moment of their initial introduction to his imagination. In this sense, “world before perspective” can also refer to a foreign world that is always antecedent (“before”), and thus inaccessible, to Elia’s perspective. In other words, the strange world as strange world necessarily predates his visual comprehension: what Elia sees is always the “world” of his own imagination, a world within which china jars and saucers have taken their place. The progression of the narrative bears out this logic as well, since the abrupt transition from the “china jars and saucers . . . ​[in Elia’s] imagination” in the first paragraph to the description of “­those ­little, lawless, azure-­tinctured grotesques” in the second gives the impression that he is still talking about t­hose same m ­ ental occupants—­u ntil the picture visually resolves into one single “china tea-­c up” (CWL, 217) at the end of the second paragraph. The deictic demonstrative (“­those”) seems initially to refer to “china jars and saucers,” but it soon becomes clear that “­those . . . ​grotesques” are in fact figures adorning one par­tic­u­lar teacup, whose ontological status (is it an a­ ctual teacup or still an imaginary one?) remains uncertain. Readers visualize jars and saucers that transform into imaginative figures before ­those figures usher into view again the one teacup upon which they float. The surreal effect of such perceptual play blurs the line between m ­ ental and porcelain worlds. The ambivalence of “world before perspective” ironizes the essay’s own meanings by underscoring the extent to which exotic encounter is always caught up within a pro­cess of self-­projection. The visual mechanism by which Elia organizes his identity also intensifies his awareness of the distorting influence that his perspective exerts in any encounter with the foreign. This self-­reflexivity is not just an unwitting textual effect; rather, it signals Lamb’s consciousness of the growing popularity of domestic blue and white, which increasingly replaced Chinese porcelain in British homes. Despite their sophisticated techniques, British potteries continued to imitate Chinese designs.68 This was a derivative pro­cess that did not so much replicate as construct the original, turning china in the British perspective into a fantasized standard of authenticity through the methodical reiteration and exaggeration of preexisting designs. Chinese prototypes thus harden into formulaic, Oriental motifs, of which the willow pattern is only the most famous.69 Lamb’s seemingly straightforward reference to the “decorous artist” responsible for the teacup’s figures is thus complicated by this history of British artistry, [ 123 ]

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whose intervention mirrors the intervention of Elia’s perspective. By extension, too, the severing of Elia’s imaginative “china jars and saucers” from any materially existing referent reproduces the severing of china (the porcelain) from China (the country). What emerges is a self-­conscious reflection on the hybrid nature of creation—­its blends of influence and innovation and, less benignly, of appropriation and projection—­t hat attains the proliferative power of a mise en abyme. Britain’s porcelain artistry implicates Elia’s imaginative one. Elia’s imaginative artistry, in turn, implicates Lamb’s discursive one. But the essay does not stop with this point of self-­consciousness, as if the advent of domestic craft spelled the definitive end of cross-­cultural influence. To totalize Britain’s china/China as nothing but self-­projection would have constituted a dif­fer­ent order of cultural erasure, perhaps merely the other face of a more uncritical reification of Chinese difference. “Old China,” in contrast, brings its whimsy down to earth by linking it to somatic desire. The creation of bodily affect locates intercultural encounter not just in a bygone era but in the pre­sent and ­future as well, and occurring through the “world” physically set “before” one. This shift away from reverie ­toward bodily comportment happens in the essay’s eighth paragraph, where the hitherto ambiguous “china tea-­cup” that Elia has been describing takes concrete shape as one par­tic­u­lar “set of extraordinary old blue china (a recent purchase) which [Elia and his cousin Bridget] ­were now for the first time using” (CWL, 217). Domestic usage, reflective of porcelain’s everyday real­ity in the nineteenth-­century British h ­ ouse­hold, grounds Elia’s speculative play by endowing his teacup with a material referent. More significantly, the spatial and prepositional markers that Elia used in his attempt to bring the lawless world of the teacup into focus—­“­here the same lady, or another . . . ​stepping into a ­little fairy boat, moored on the hither side of this calm garden river, with a dainty mincing foot, which in a right a­ ngle of incidence (as a­ ngles go in our world) must infallibly land her in the midst of a flowery mead—­a furlong off on the other side of the same strange stream” (emphasis added)—­now function to assem­ble Elia’s and Bridget’s physical situation. Elia “point[s] out,” “over” their Hyson tea, ­these “speciosa miracula upon . . . ​[the] old blue china” (emphasis added). Lamb’s discursive method thus accomplishes a traversal across repre­sen­ta­tional levels, as the world within the teacup opens out into the world of tea drinkers without. It appears that the scene on the teacup, as well as the liquid within it, exerts a somatic influence on Elia and Bridget.70 The depiction of “a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to a lady from a salver” (CWL, 217), cues the British civil servant and his lady interlocutor: they, too, drink tea and thus become what they contemplate. Following the Portuguese practice, the British used “Mandarin” to denote any se­nior official in the imperial Chinese government. Within a cross-­ [ 124 ]



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cultural context, the term could well have applied to Lamb, a civil servant employed through the East India Com­pany. Elia’s and Bridget’s bodily mirroring of the scene depicted on the teacup retroactively imbues the deictic “­here”—­“­Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea”—­with a second referent: not just the Chinese Mandarin, but also the British civil servant. On the one hand, this dual reference, used alongside the pre­sent progressive tense (“is . . . ​handing”), attempts to capture an experience of simultaneity between the Chinese and British worlds: the events on the teacup unfold at the same time that Elia and Bridget are taking tea. On the other hand, b­ ecause the description of the porcelain figures precedes that of the tea drinkers, the essay’s narrative sequence also diagnoses this experience as an effect of the pre­sent influence of the teacup on the cousins. A cross-­cultural encounter mediated through exotic commodities thus facilitates the imagination of transnational synchronicity. At the same time, the proliferation of deictic terms in foregrounding the depicted scene’s re­sis­tance to any stable geometrical repre­sen­ta­tion retains the irreducible difference between the two worlds. Lamb’s letter to Manning in Canton exhibits a similar imagination of Chinese space-­time as simultaneous but also dif­fer­ent.71 His fallacious pre­sen­ta­tion of the time of his writing (“In less than two minutes I ­shall . . .”) as the ongoing time of Manning’s reading (“. . . ​a nd you may . . .”) produces an experience of simultaneity that cognitively bridges Britain and China (CWL, 760). Yet Lamb’s strange insistence on the timeliness of his correspondence distances China even as it brings it close. Declaring it “a point of conscience to send [Manning] none but bran-­new news (the latest edition),” Lamb worries that his letter w ­ ill miss the ship headed for Canton and be detained in Britain, where “it ­will grow staler in a fortnight than in a five months’ voyage coming to you” (CWL, 757). The bizarre claim that “news w ­ ill but grow the better for a sea voyage” (CWL, 758) distinguishes voyage time (time moving over space and across borders) from localized time (time within Britain’s geopo­liti­cal bound­aries) to result in two opposing sets of implications. On the one hand, Lamb suggests that China’s own fixity would make any news seem up-­to-­date. “News is news at Canton” (CWL, 758), he assures Manning in a bit of condescension that reflected nineteenth-­century Britain’s characterization of China as stagnant and antiquated. Surely the “Celestial Empire,” to use nineteenth-­century parlance, suffered a temporal lag that made it belated to any bit of news from abroad, no ­matter how dated the news in question.72 According to this framework, the sea functions as a chasm that separates more than it unifies. On the other hand, Lamb’s distinction between localized and voyage time looks ­toward the kind of unified “railway time” that would not only increasingly [ 125 ]

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affect Britain over the course of the nineteenth ­century but would fi­nally place distant and foreign nations on a universal space-­time grid.73 For Lamb, who imagines the contact zone not simply in spatial terms but as a meeting of simultaneous ­orders of activity, news somehow maintains its contemporaneity in the act of crossing. The absurdity of the claim that “news w ­ ill but grow the better for a sea voyage” reflects Lamb’s strug­gle to articulate a new and as yet disorienting experience of time and space moving si­mul­ta­neously, with neither being able to serve as a stationary mea­sure for the other. H ­ ere, the sea represents a zone of heterogeneity in which the concurrent shifting of time and space facilitates the physical voyage from one temporal order to another. By coordinating a physical voyage with a movement of time, Lamb’s letter brings Britain and China together in a complex interchange in which each is neither diametrically opposed nor fully reducible to the other. Lamb’s ability to imagine the synchronic unfolding of individual lives forges bonds between individuals as actors embedded in a shared sociocultural context, thus paving the way for cosmopolitan empathy.74 Yet the dif­fer­ent and still enigmatic nature of Chinese temporality also prevents its complete reduction into (and colonization by) an abstract, deeply Eurocentric order of time. Thus, at one point in his letter, Lamb urges Manning to keep the secret of a play due to be released “in January next, as we say—­January last it w ­ ill be with you” (CWL, 759). Despite the apparent outdatedness of this secret by the time it reaches Manning, Lamb still worries about being “forestalled,” in a con­spic­u­ous violation of chronology that underscores his sense of China’s dif­fer­ent and opaque order of time. Read alongside Lamb’s letter, “Old China” reveals an attempt at imagining the alterity of Chinese space that goes beyond Orientalist fancy. Elia’s “blue china” alludes also to the shipments of porcelain across the blue sea, and the “same strange stream” (CWL, 217) that figures so prominently in the teacup’s dizzying perspectival shifts discloses the watery logic of maritime circulation. Tea brings the sea, with its “strange” spatiotemporal logic, into Elia’s and Bridget’s British bodies, as the cousins sip the “Hyson” that they “are old-­fashioned enough to drink unmixed still of an after­noon.” ­Here, the invocation of gustatory taste is explic­itly placed in opposition to the aesthetic “taste” with which the essay began. Contrary to the taste for china so “ancient” that Elia could hardly remember that “it was an acquired one,” the taste for Hyson is specifically one that is “still” exotic. As Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger have pointed out, “Hyson” had been used as a general term to designate high-­quality green tea since the 1730s.75 Recall Hunt’s wariness, in his essay on breakfast tea, that “the more green t­here is in it, certainly the less w ­ holesome it is.” Over the course of the nineteenth c­ entury, green tea became increasingly synonymous with [ 126 ]



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Chinese tea consumed in the Chinese way, while drinking black tea mixed with milk and sugar was appropriated as a distinctly British ritual. Britain’s increasing reliance on Indian-­farmed black tea from the 1830s onward only further exacerbated the equation of green tea with a threatening foreignness. In 1878, Samuel Day warned against the artificial coloration of tea by Chinese producers, who used “Prus­sian blue, a deadly poison, and inimical to health even in the minutest quantity” in order to “enamour the eye of the unsuspecting purchaser.”76 The green color of arsenic must have only heightened this cultural wariness about green tea. Making green tea a code for Chinese duplicity, Day’s fearmongering is symptomatic of the residual anxiety associated with the practice of tea drinking and points to the foreignness that still needed to be purged in the pro­cess of tea’s adoption as Britain’s national beverage. As an ill-­disguised advertisement for “Horniman’s Tea Com­pany,” founded by the British tea trader John Horniman, Day’s treatise is dedicated “to the Lovers of Pure Tea” and thus returns to the rhe­toric of “pure food” that Lamb so delightfully mocked in “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig.”77 In “Old China,” the typographical foreignness of the loanword “Hyson” (which comes from the Cantonese hei-­ch’un) literally spells out the un-­English practice of drinking green tea “unmixed” with milk and sugar.78 But Lamb expresses no anxiety about the prospect of cross-­cultural contamination. In fact, his word choice (“unmixed”) deliberately mocks the so-­called purity of tea that has been “mixed” (adulterated?) with milk and sugar. Nor does the movement from aesthetic to gustatory taste in Lamb’s essay register as a threatening regression of the kind we saw in Hunt’s essay. Instead, the tone of “Old China” establishes Elia’s and Bridget’s bodily susceptibility to the foreign not as nightmare but as enchantment—­a pleasant reverie on a slow “after­ noon” during which one tenderly recalls one’s “old friends” (CWL, 217). Bridget’s monologue replaces Elia’s porcelain “old friends” with departed “old times” (CWL, 218), and her wistfulness maintains the air of whimsy with which “Old China” began. But the logic of Bridget’s replacement also suggests a compensatory reaction against the somatic energies that fired in the En­glish cousins—­ note the distinctively En­glish, and not just British, markers in Bridget’s choice of memories described below—as they responded to teacup and tea. Tellingly, Bridget’s nostalgia frequently centers on a kind of bodily disposition, as she resists her body’s state of desire by coding it as a longing for a mythically pure past. The first concrete memory she invokes is of Elia’s “brown suit, which [he] made to hang upon [himself], till all [his] friends cried shame upon [him], it grew so threadbare—­and all ­because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which [Elia] dragged home late at night from Barker’s in Covent Garden” (CWL, 218). Bridget’s recollection itself hangs on the textural tension conjured up by Elia’s “brown [ 127 ]

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suit” and the En­glish folio that he “dragged home . . . ​wishing it w ­ ere twice as cumbersome” (CWL, 218). Elia’s body becomes the ground against which the thinness of the suit and the weightiness of the folio take on meaning, with the material difference between suit and folio serving as tangible evidence for the money expended and value gained in the economic transaction between Elia and the bookseller. This same connection between body and currency structures a subsequent memory of their having “squeezed out [their] shillings apiece to sit three or four times in a season in the one-­shilling gallery” (CWL, 219). ­Here, Bridget embodies the financial “squeeze” that she remembers experiencing by literalizing it in the squeezing of bodies, as they “crowd[ed] up ­those incon­ve­nient staircases” to get into the gallery. In each of t­ hese examples, the body functions as a material referent that anchors the circulation of economic value. Perhaps we are meant to take Bridget more literally than we initially expect when she explains that “a ­thing was worth buying then, when we felt the money that we paid for it” (CWL, 218 [emphasis added]). As Fang has pointed out, Bridget voices the kind of economic conservatism that treats luxury as moral flaw.79 But this is a moral philosophy that derives its potency from the construction and subsequent policing of binary categories: necessity versus luxury, pure versus mixed, moderation versus excess, En­glish versus foreign, and good versus bad. The supplementary logic that threatens Bridget’s point of view explains her insistence upon precise definition. Thinking fondly back to the “good old times,” she assigns to her and Elia’s past selves the esteemed “­middle state” (CWL, 218), carefully protected from the excesses of both richness and poverty. The harmless “treat” that Elia and Bridget could enjoy then would not be pos­si­ble now without becoming a “selfish and wicked” indulgence, since it is only “the very l­ittle more that we allow ourselves beyond what the ­actual poor can get at, that makes what I call a treat—­when two ­people living together, as we have done, now and then indulge themselves in a cheap luxury” (CWL, 220). The proliferation of modifiers (“very,” “­little,” and “­actual”) and the resort to oxymoron (“cheap luxury”) index the futility of Bridget’s efforts. Her strict delineation of categories, so exact as to border on the absurd, only points to their artificiality. Bridget’s response can be read as a reaction against the candid consumption of foreign ­things that nineteenth-­century British consumers increasingly displayed, which blurs the line between luxury and necessity and, by extension, between self and cultural other. Against the background of this crisis, Bridget poses a bulwark: an En­g lish body that wears s­imple brown suits and reads Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Tellingly, this is also a body nourished by “plain [ 128 ]



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food” (CWL, 219). As in “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” h ­ ere Lamb draws on the intimate connections among economic conservatism, vegetarian philosophy, and nationalism. ­Under this ideology of primitive consumption (for which Lamb makes Bridget a spokesperson), the “pure,” native consumer feeds on “savoury cold lamb and salad,” “strawberries,” and “the first dish of peas” (CWL, 219)—­a ll local produce. The very antithesis of “roast pig,” “cold lamb” channels the essayist’s humorous pun on his own name to at once build up and subvert the pastoral vision that vegetarianism draws on. Bridget’s idealized En­glish body, however, is no more in the pre­sent. While its supposed naturalness manifests En­glishness as an immediate and self-­sufficient presence, the body’s irrevocable loss divulges the supplementary logic by which the natu­ral is in­ven­ted as origin and referent. Bridget disavows the provocative effects of both china teacup and Hyson tea by replacing her somatic desires with a nostalgia for a lost En­glish body. Paradoxically, however, by presenting Bridget’s reaction as a proximate effect of their tea session, Lamb draws attention to the pro­ cess of cultural assimilation that Elia quite cavalierly articulated at the beginning of the essay. Bridget’s erasure of teacup and tea by substituting for them an alternative history of En­g lish purity enacts, in real time, Elia’s appropriation of old china as the foundation of his own identity. Yet the essay undercuts this appropriative logic when it lays bare the continuing influence that porcelain and Hyson exert on the En­glish tea drinkers. Elia foregrounds this influence when he recuperates the somatic energy that he and his cousin experience as a pre­sent state of desire. As he reminds Bridget, the plea­ sure of days past consisted not simply in their carefulness about expenses but also in the youthfulness of their bodies. By underscoring the contrast between their young, past selves and old, pre­sent selves (and thereby turning on its head Bridget’s use of “old,” as in the “good old times”), Elia places the body, only implicit in Bridget’s account, front and center. In this way, he realizes the body as a site of affect: They are dreams, my cousin, now—­but could you and I at this moment, instead of this quiet argument, by our well-­carpeted fireside, sitting on this luxurious sofa—be once more struggling up ­those incon­ve­nient staircases, pushed about, and squeezed, and elbowed by the poorest rabble of poor gallery scramblers—­could I once more hear ­those anxious shrieks of yours—­a nd the delicious Thank God, we are safe, which always followed when the topmost stair, conquered, let in the first light of the ­whole cheerful theatre down beneath us—­I know not the fathom line that ever touched a descent so deep as I would be willing to bury more wealth in than Croesus had, or the g­ reat Jew R—is supposed to have, to purchase it. (CWL, 220–221) [ 129 ]

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The pathos of Elia’s contrast turns Bridget’s virtual recollection into a physical state of longing. William Flesch has pointed out that the affective power of the Elia essays lies precisely in Lamb’s grimly realist demystification of the dream world. Flesch focuses his analy­sis on “Dream-­Children; A Reverie,” but the mechanism by which affect is generated is similar in “Old China.”80 In “Dream ­Children,” Elia experiences the full force of what could have been but is not when he wakes up in his “bachelor arm-­chair . . . ​w ith the faithful Bridget unchanged by [his] side” (CWL, 93). In “Old China,” the yearning for his youthful body registers in the contrast that Elia draws between “sitting on this luxurious sofa” in the pre­sent and “struggling up t­ hose incon­ve­nient staircases” in the past. In both cases, the affective power released through the pathos of demystification releases somatic energies in the h ­ ere and now. Lamb’s successful communication of this pathos means that t­ hese energies do not just resonate in Elia’s and Bridget’s bodies but are produced in the essay’s readers’ bodies as well. Part of the reason why “Old China” works is ­because the text has so skillfully concealed the precise details of the cousins’ physical situation. Lamb’s descriptive prose, dwelling painstakingly on “threadbare” suits (CWL, 218), “cumbersome” folios, “savoury” foods, and boisterous playgoers, pre­sents a multisensory carnival of sight, sound, taste, and touch. Caught up in this vivid scenery, readers are surprised to discover at the end of the essay that the interlocutors have been lounging on the sofa the ­whole time. Readerly bodies register this shock as an extension of Elia’s and Bridget’s own longing for a par­tic­u­lar kind of embodiment. In this way, Elia’s and Bridget’s imitation of the “young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to a lady” anticipates and contextualizes the formal effect of “Old China” on its readers. “Old China,” Richard Haven has argued, “fixe[s]” and memorializes its characters “in words” the same way that the china “fixe[s]” its Chinese figures “in glaze.”81 The parallel between Chinese figures and British characters in the essay also establishes a corresponding parallel between ­t hese British characters and the readers contemplating them. Bridget and Elia are thus surrogates for the essay’s audience, transmitting to its members a bodily disposition that remains open to the influence of exotic t­ hings coming from, and indexical of, a foreign world. Indeed, when Elia pointedly returns to the teacup in the essay’s last sentence, he reminds his readers of the material occasion for this nostalgic interlude. This detour through memory is given a pre­sent and even a ­future orientation as it plays out in the time of Elia’s narration and his audience’s reading. The essay’s very title signals both this dynamic temporality and the implications it holds for Lamb’s mode of intercultural imagination. Bridget’s idealization of the “good old times” fixes the past as a static point. In a sense, her idea of [ 130 ]



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oldness resonates with Britain’s construction of China as a stagnant land stuck in its antediluvian ways and therefore incapable of pro­gress. To view China as helplessly old is also to make it passively available for appropriation: this is the logic of economic exploitation and cultural ransacking that mines the foreign as a resource for the self. At least on first glance, this would seem to be the framework that structures “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig” as well. Bo-­bo’s bumbling discovery of roast pig apparently furthers the joke about a foolish and primitive China. Yet just as that ­earlier essay undermines the distinction between civilization and primitiveness to lay bare the hybridity of cultural identity, “Old China” relativizes the meaning of “old” by moving between significations. When Elia professes affection for his “old friends” on the teacup, he invokes the idea of familiarity to pre­sent the old not as something irrevocably lost but as something that one has had and continues to have for a long time. In effect, Elia recasts what is usually thought to be an essential trait as something relative to one’s own standpoint, thus foregrounding the real­ity of intercultural encounter and exchange. By approaching the question of cultural taste from seemingly opposite ends, “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig” and “Old China” collapse the distinction between aesthetic and gustatory taste, unraveling the imperial ideology that t­ hese binary categories are used to shore up. The former essay takes epicureanism to its extreme and channels its unapologetic materialism t­ oward the deconstruction of the myth of cultural purity. Initially, “Old China” seems to be entirely dif­fer­ent—­a ll fanciful and speculative, in which the “lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay” (CWL, 217) also repeatedly turns out to be the lucid atmosphere of Elia’s own “perspective.” Yet aesthetic taste wields material effects as well. Lamb’s cosmopolitanism works through a distinctively bodily practice, notably cutting across the mental-­material divide that tends to frame critical accounts of cosmopolitanism.82 “Old China” traces what happens at the contact zone, when the experience of a Chinese difference that one si­mul­ta­neously proj­ects and encounters is still granted physical legitimacy—­a lthough that experience is never confined to a specific material site bound in space and time. In this regard, Lamb’s physical distance from China paradoxically creates a more expansive, and less reductive and colonizing, form of cross-­cultural imagination. The essay elaborates on the model of cultural hybridity that “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig” has begun to build by extending it into the pre­sent and ­future. Never entirely assimilated, Chinese difference continues to exert material impact. In this way, Lamb’s essays pave the way for an ethics of cross-­cultural encounter that resists the tempting t­ heses of both contamination and assimilation. Taken together, “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig” and “Old China” suggest that the other [ 131 ]

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was always already a part of Britain’s past and ­w ill continue to be a part of its pre­sent and f­ uture. While Lamb’s cross-­cultural perspective has roots in the idiosyncrasies of his own character and circumstances, it is also symptomatic of the uniquely transitional time of the 1820s, when China (an “old friend,” now) occupied an increasingly familiar place in Britain’s cultural imagination even as it was constructed by some as hopelessly antiquated and impossibly distant. For authors like Lamb, who was conversant with China but never visited it, the contradictions between t­hese two narratives provided resources for his surprisingly cosmopolitan mode of cross-­cultural imagination. Playing with the meanings of “old” as long-­ standing familiarity and as entrapment in a distant, spatialized past, Lamb pre­sents China as a dynamic zone that transacts with Britain in ongoing time, though the meaning of the transaction remains impossible to fully understand, ­because it is necessarily mediated through Britain’s own projecting consciousness. Yet this mode of imagination was not to last, as the First Opium War solidified racist thinking. Cultural repre­sen­ta­tion, always hardening too fast into ­ste­reo­t ype, would lose a significant degree of its discursive flexibility and thus its ability to generate iconoclastic possibilities out of the materials of imperial ideology.

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5

“BARBARIAN EYE” T h e O p i u m Wa r s a s a V i s u a l P ro j ­e c t (A n I nte rl u d e o n O p i u m)

T

“

H E M O D E O F U S I N G O P I U M I N C H I N A ,” British readers ­ were informed, “is by smoking. . . . ​[A]nd the opium-­smoker in his heaven . . . ​is a most fearful sight.”1 The curious who desired a glimpse of this “most fearful sight” apparently needed to look no further than the 1842 London exhibition titled “Ten Thousand Chinese Th ­ ings,” which claimed to pre­sent a “China in miniature” through the “curiosities and won­ders” that the American collector Nathan Dunn had amassed during his time in China.2 In his official guide to the exhibition, William Langdon promises that the visitor who spends even “an hour . . . ​with such curiosities” ­will “appear to have the living Chinese in the images before him, and with a ­little imagination, to be moving and living among them” (xxii). An example of such a curiosity is the set of opium pipes displayed in case 18, which prompted Langdon to quote from “a late memorial to the [Chinese] emperor” in order to set forth “the baneful effects of this deleterious drug” (138). The ekphrastic prose in the quoted passage aids readerly efforts to imagine the Chinese opium addict through its insistently visual logic:

In the ­houses devoted to their ruin, t­ hese infatuated p ­ eople may be seen, at nine ­o’clock in the eve­ning, at all the dif­fer­ent stages; some entering half distracted to feed the craving appetite they had been obliged to subdue during the day; ­others laughing and talking wildly ­under the effects of a first pipe, whilst the couches around are filled with their dif­fer­ent occupants, who lie languid, with an idiotic smile upon their countenance, too much u ­ nder the influence of the drug to care for passing events, and fast merging to the wished-­for consummation. The last scene in this tragic play is generally a room in the rear of the building, a species of dead-­ house, where lie stretched ­those who have passed into the state of insensibility the opium-­smoker madly seeks—an emblem of the long sleep to which he is blindly hurrying. (139) [ 133 ]

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This “scene” of opium infatuation unfolds before the reader’s m ­ ental eye, furnishing their “idea of t­ hese Tartar governed millions” (xxii). The visual “emblem,” composed of languishing bodies, distracted countenances, and idiotic smiles, indexes a malevolent Chinese alterity that is available for view by, yet safely set apart from, the British exhibition visitor. Unlike the immobile Chinese, “who have passed into the state of insensibility,” the British observer “passes [freely] from scene to scene” (xxiii) as they move among the vari­ous exhibition display cases, entertaining themselves with images both real and imaginary and then putting ­those images aside as they wish. As in the case of tea, opium’s capture by the visual economy reinforced hierarchical cultural bound­aries. In contrast to the Chinese opium addict on passive display h ­ ere, the British visitor as an agent of sight is thoughtful and inquisitive. The othering of opium as a spectacle of Chinese difference marks the other face of tea’s assimilation into the tableau of En­glish domesticity: in both cases, the visual repre­sen­ta­tion of an ingestant reifies cultural identity. Yet opium’s vilification h ­ ere represents a significant departure from Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an En­glish Opium-­Eater, in which opium ingestion facilitated the creation of a hybrid imperial identity that was dependent on its encounters with cultural otherness. So what produced this change? Between the initial publication of De Quincey’s Confessions in 1821 and the Chinese exhibition in 1842, the First Opium War (1839–1842)—­what Peter Kitson suggestively called “one of the last wars of the Romantic period, or even, a Romantic war itself”—­catalyzed a paradigm shift in British repre­sen­ta­tions of Chinese otherness.3 Notably, the account of Chinese opium infatuation that Langdon cites above is itself a war­time artifact. While Langdon claims a Chinese provenance for the quoted passage, it actually comes from a work written by Robert Jocelyn describing his military expedition to China in the First Opium War, and the scene in question concerns the Chinese in Singapore, not China itself.4 The falsified origins of the account not only identify the Sino-­British military conflict as ground zero for a particularly ruthless vision of the Chinese as depraved, but also underscore the crucial ideological work that such othering performs. Authors like De Quincey had previously acknowledged China’s influence on British imperial identity, but this dramatically changed with Chinese re­sis­tance to their country’s economic and discursive expropriation on the world-­historical stage. Britain’s acknowl­edgment of its Chinese debt (with De Quincey g­ oing so far as to make that debt a point of imperial distinction) depended on a certain degree of economic compliance from China. Withdrawing that compliance would mean undermining the foundation of British imperial identity, which is exactly what happened in the 1830s. [ 134 ]



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­A fter the East India Com­pany lost its tea mono­poly in 1834, illegal opium imports into China by private British firms reached unpre­ce­dented levels. Provoked by the flagrant violation of its opium bans, the Qing Empire charged Lin Zexu with ending the illicit trade. Lin confiscated and destroyed all the foreign opium held at Canton. This spectacular act of Chinese self-­assertion aggravated the British, who pursued a military solution to redress their humiliation and force the Chinese to grant them more advantageous trading terms. The British victory in the First Opium War led to the Treaty of Nanjing, which opened five Chinese ports to the British and ceded Hong Kong to them as a colony. A de­cade and a half ­later, China’s alleged violation of the terms of that treaty gave Britain a pretext for starting the Second Opium War (1856–1860). This second war concluded with even more favorable terms for Britain, including the legalization of the opium trade in China.5 Britain’s war­time commentary underscores the symbolic prob­lem that Chinese opposition posed for British self-­conception. War hawks dwelled endlessly on the injuries to national honor.6 Two articles, “The Quarrel with China” and “The China Trade,” protested China’s audacity in “placing ­under duresse [sic] the w ­ hole En­glish community at Canton . . . ​including the agent of the British Government,” especially when it was the “Chinese Government” that first committed “fraud and vio­lence.”7 Another article, “War with China, and the Opium Question,” criticized Britain’s ­earlier willingness “to crouch to tyranny in its pettiest and most degrading shapes,” for such “slavish submission” has only “invite[d] oppression” and led to the representative of “the person of the Sovereign and the majesty of the British empire . . . ​[being] held in custody, outraged, maltreated, and threatened with execution like the vilest of felons.”8 In all of ­these cases, indignation rises in response to Chinese disdain for agents of the British Empire. How dare the deceitful, backward Chinese, the thinking goes, infringe on the rights of the superior British government? Yet another article, a review of military accounts of the First Opium War, thus regretted ­earlier “compliances” made by the East India Com­pany that “fostered the overweening pride of a semibarbarous p ­ eople,” and it recounted with triumph how the Nemesis warship eventually blew up Chinese junks to secure a resounding British victory.9 De Quincey made this concern with British honor explicit in his own war­ time writings. Indeed, the Sino-­British conflict greatly exercised the En­glish opium eater, who could not seem to stop expressing his bellicose opinions. In 1840, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine published De Quincey’s “Opium and the China Question.” The Second Opium War provoked an additional stream of essays: one published in February 1857 and a second published in April 1857, both of which ­were then revised, supplemented, and republished as an in­de­pen­dent pamphlet, [ 135 ]

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complete with “Preliminary Note” and “Preface.” A third new article followed in July 1857.10 The ground for war with China, as De Quincey acknowledged, was economic, a consequence of Britain’s tea habit and its need to sustain Chinese consumption of Indian-­farmed opium. But the motivation was also symbolic, for “without tea . . . ​­Great Britain, no longer g­ reat, would collapse into a very anomalous sort of second-­rate power.”11 As De Quincey declared in 1840, “­there is a causa belli quite apart from the opium question; a ground of war which is continually growing more urgent; a ground which would survive all disputes about opium.” That “ground,” he ­later specified, was “winning honour for the name of Britain.”12 Strategically, of course, Britain’s emphasis on honor con­ve­niently sidestepped the issue of its own rapacity. The precise cause of the first Sino-­British war remains a point of historiographical debate, and Song-­Chuan Chen has recently argued that the agenda was driven not so much by opium or national honor, but rather by the profit motives of a small but vocal contingent of private merchants.13 According to Chen, the rhe­toric of national honor was simply a public relations campaign waged by the pro-­war faction to “[reason] Britain into . . . ​war,” which it was able to accomplish by exploiting the po­liti­cal vulnerabilities of the Whig government.14 Nevertheless, t­ hese pro-­war arguments established the terms of the debate with resounding success, consolidating a view of the Opium Wars as not just a pragmatic contest over economic resources but also a strug­gle over Britain’s self-­ representation on the global stage. Indeed, the ease with which public opinion was swayed suggests that the pro-­war discourse touched a real nerve, tapping as it did into existing cultural anx­i­eties about Britain’s tea habit. Thus, even t­ hose ostensibly against war submitted to the idea that China’s Canton system—­the protectionist set of policies through which the Qing government regulated all foreign trade, including the confinement of foreigners to a single port and allowing trade only through designated intermediaries—­was “unnatural” and “replete with evils,” arising out of an improper acknowl­edgment of the re­spect and “friendly intercourse” due to in­de­pen­dent powers of the West.15 “The character of foreigners has been misrepresented in the sight of the Chinese; it should be vindicated,” “Negotiations with China” declared, though its author hastened to clarify that “the nations of Christendom ­ought not to commence hostilities against the Chinese.”16 Nevertheless, “­England, France, and Amer­i­ca [should], by united and judicious mea­sures . . . ​open and establish a ­free, honorable, and well regulated intercourse with China,” though exactly what ­those mea­ sures would look like if not military, the article did not say.17 This obsession with “open” and “­free . . . ​intercourse” was common in commentaries of the period, uniting economic, po­liti­cal, and religious positions that [ 136 ]



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other­ wise exhibited varying takes on Sino-­ British relations. One “resident in China,” who advocated for a “pacific policy,” concisely articulated this common ground in expressing his hope for “throwing open to commerce, to civilization, and Chris­tian­ity, that mighty empire.”18 The missionary perspective was well represented by Elijah Bridgeman’s startlingly forthright pronouncement that “CHINA MUST BEND OR BREAK.” While Bridgeman hoped “that from this country the scourge of war may be averted,” the prob­lem at hand was “how the Chinese are to be brought into the ­family of nations, and be made willing to exercise f­ree and friendly relations with all.”19 Similarly, an anonymous article in the Chinese Repository, a missionary periodical published at Canton that was spearheaded by Bridgeman, Robert Morrison, and Karl Gützlaff, argued that “a ­free and friendly intercourse between China and the western nations” was vital for exercising “the moral powers of Christendom . . . ​to attempt the amelioration of the condition of China.”20 A few years ­earlier, Bridgeman, Morrison, and Gützlaff, who also serve as founding members for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China, had along with their fellow committee members lamented how China “closed up the ave­nues for the introduction of knowledge from abroad,” so that it “stands stationary,” lagging ­behind other nations in the “race of improvement.”21 In adopting the ethos of f­ ree and open trade that, as Chen has demonstrated, formed the centerpiece of the pro-­war position, missionary rhe­toric not only reflects the broad alignment between t­ hose who preached Chris­tian­ity and t­ hose who wanted war but also provides an index for the consequent shift in British understanding of China from enlightened civilization to stagnant state.22 The rhe­toric of an open China would eventually be ­adopted even by ­those more sympathetic to the Chinese cause. For instance, a speaker at an 1842 peace meeting held in Dublin lambasted “our most cowardly slaughtering of our fellow-­men in China” as the “Chinese butchery,” yet they went on to “declare cause of joy on account of the prospect of improved trade opened up to us by t­ hese cessations from war.”23 The origins of war might be evil, the speaker suggested, but the results—­referring to China’s trade concessions as stipulated in the Treaty of Nanjing—­are cause for cele­bration. The contradictory logic of forcing China into “­f ree intercourse”—­China must “be made willing,” in Bridgeman’s words—­reflects the prevalent anxiety about China’s exercise of ­free ­will, which disrupted the flow of commodities and threatened the doctrine of f­ree trade that had increasingly come to define Britain’s imperial identity. As early as 1711, Joseph Addison had sketched a vision of London as an “Emporium for the w ­ hole Earth,” facilitating “mutual Intercourse and Traffick among Mankind” through the ­free circulation and consumption of goods, including the “the Infusion of a China Plant sweetned with the Pith of an [ 137 ]

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Indian Cane.”24 However, the realization of such a vision required the willing participation of ­those with whom Britain had entered into transnational relationships. As Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger note, the First Opium War “was also a ‘tea war’: even as late as the 1860s, Britain continued to depend on the opium trade to fund its purchase of tea, [by now] the ‘necessary luxury’ of its ­people.”25 By tapping into anxiety about the impending loss of this “necessary luxury” and national icon, the merchants who lobbied for war turned their private interests into a national cause. ­ ill must be branded as not f­ ree to secure Britain’s Thus, China’s act of f­ ree w construction of imperial selfhood. To the same degree that Britain’s ­free trade policy is made into a hallmark of enlightenment, Chinese protectionism signals its barbarity, evidence of a primitive “savage[ry]” closed off to science and pro­gress.26 A de­cade ­later, Charles Dickens and Richard Horne made this paradoxical logic explicit when they acknowledged that China had “­free w ­ ill,” but that w ­ ill was a “perverse one”: “­t here may be an odd, barbarous, or eccentric nation, h ­ ere and ­there, upon the face of the globe, who may see fit to exercise its ­free ­will, in the negative form of will-­not, and who may seclude itself from the rest of the world, resolved not to move on with it.”27 This Victorian idea of China as a stagnant, decomposing empire thus traces back to war­time discourse, when the specter of a disrupted foundation for British selfhood led to the increasingly common construction of China as an absolute other, inferior to and securely set apart from any conception of British national identity. This discursive shift is reflected in De Quincey’s corpus, as the self-­reflexivity of his confessional writings gives way to a war­time obsession with the distinction between the British “­free state” and the barbaric “Asiatic state.”28 Kitson points out that De Quincey’s opium war writings perpetuate the idea of “China [as] completely ‘Other’ to Britain (and the west).”29 Yet in De Quincey’s autobiographical accounts, it had been precisely the blurry line between En­glish self and Oriental other that the opium eater negotiated to produce his own subjectivity. In Suspiria de Profundis, the narrator describes his drug habit as a “prostration before the dark idol,” a suggestive meta­phor that would become literal when he gets on his knees to test the Brocken mountaintop apparition.30 The outcome of the trial reinforced the narrator’s sense of identity by confirming to him that “the apparition is but a reflex of [him]self.”31 In his Opium War essays, however, De Quincey is tripped up by the kowtow, the ritual prostration that the Qing court required from anyone who appeared before the Chinese emperor. As Dongqing Wang notes, on this occasion De Quincey vehemently contrasted the “upright” posture of “ ‘enlightened’ [British] citizens” to the prostration of “slaves.”32 [ 138 ]



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De Quincey seems to have been particularly threatened by the kowtow’s interpretive fluidity, which exposed the British character to dangerously unstable signification. The East India Com­pany, De Quincey points out, might insist that it is a “pure ceremonial usage, of no more weight than a bow or a curtsey,” but the Chinese tendency to “assign a symbolic and representative value to ­every act of intercourse between their official deputies and all foreign ambassadors” means that “a special, almost a superstitiously minute, attention to punctilios is requisite.”33 The respectable British citizen must never submit to “the Eastern style of servile prostration,” a worse form of degradation than “any or all of the other symbols at any time devised for the sensuous expression of a servile condition.”34 In his authoritative interpretation of the “kotou,” De Quincey attempts to fix the play of signification that he made such productive use of in his confessional writings. The proliferation, reduplication, and transformation of imagery that certified the opium eater’s superior imagination and fashioned his deep, palimpsestic interiority now becomes something to be feared. A porous selfhood in the confessional text is h ­ ere replaced by selfhood that is autonomous, discrete, and stable. Notably, at the level of discursive repre­sen­ta­tion, De Quincey’s recalibration of national identity occurs through exchanging a figure of exotic ingestion for one of vision. The opium eater’s drug-­induced dreamscapes and optical illusions are replaced by the insistence on empirically verifiable sight in De Quincey’s essays on war. For De Quincey, who articulates his fear of appearing “contemptible in Oriental eyes,” the pro­cess of “winning honour” entails a seizing of visual control—­for to counteract the Chinese “view [of ] all foreigners as barbarians,” Britain must accomplish a “vis­i­ble demonstration of power” to make a “favorable impression” (emphasis added).35 This visual register does not appear only in De Quincey’s essays. In war­ time commentary from the period, the prob­lem of self-­definition is consistently manifested as an anxiety about Chinese perception and China’s ability to dictate the terms of seeing. “Negotiations with China” worried specifically about British misrepre­sen­ta­tion “in the sight of the Chinese,” while Bridgeman stressed that “­great care w ­ ill be requisite in order to place the subject in its true light, so that the Chinese may see and understand that foreign governments have no wish to infringe their rights and their laws. . . . ​[The Chinese] must see and feel the necessity of having recourse to milder means, to moral suasion, to self-­restraints, and to diplomatic negotiations.”36 This preoccupation with perception inflects even a trenchantly antiwar perspective like that of the evangelical clergyman Algernon Thelwall, whose Iniquities of the Opium Trade with China makes its argument by repeatedly asking readers [ 139 ]

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to consider “in what light the Government of China look[s] upon this traffic, and upon us as a ­people engaged in it.”37 For “any one who is jealous of the honour of his country,” Thelwall concludes, the results of such an inquiry can only be “humiliating”—­“how insecure and precarious—­how undesirable and humiliating—­ must be the position which we hold!—­how unfavourable to any prospect of ­free and comfortable intercourse, ­either commercial or po­liti­cal, with that government and ­people in ­future.”38 In this regard, Thelwall’s decision to excerpt in his antiwar pamphlet detailed accounts of “some paintings by a native artist in China-­street, (Canton) . . . ​designed to exhibit the pro­gress of the opium-­smoker” can be read as an attempt to supply a corrective to China’s poor perception of the British. Thelwall’s explicit aim in transcribing “the explanations which accompany the pictures” is to “[illustrate] the fearful consequences which result from smoking opium.”39 Yet the detailed sketches—of the rich, indulgent young man whose taste for opium has left him “emaciated, shoulders high, teeth naked, dozing from morning to night . . . ​moping, on a very ordinary couch, with his pipe and other apparatus for smoking lying by his side”—­work to construct a vivid image of the Chinese as depraved, thereby relieving Britain’s humiliation of being scorned by the Chinese through its pre­ sen­ta­tion of an equally humiliating portrait of the Chinese.40 Indeed, Thelwall’s transcriptions anticipate the discursive wave that emerged in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth ­century, which centered on the opium parlor as a site of Chinese excess. The transcriptions thus offer an early example of the way that Britain would increasingly visualize China as depraved in the next fifty years.41 At the time Thelwall was writing, however, Britain did not yet possess the kind of visual control that characterized mid-­to late-­nineteenth-­ century imperial culture, in which foreign objects and images w ­ ere displayed and written about as an exercise of imperial power.42 Before the conclusion of the Opium Wars, British identity was perilously open to Chinese construction, and that construction threatened Britain’s sense of its own distinctiveness as a modern civilization. When Sino-­British tensions started to escalate following the abolition of the East India Com­pany’s China mono­poly, Canton’s viceroy, Lu Kun, not only refused to meet with Britain’s superintendent of trade, Lord Napier, but went as far as to announce in an edict that if the “Barbarian Eye . . . ​wishes to come to Canton, he must inform the [Hong] merchants, that they may previously petition me.” 43 De Quincey’s indignation at being viewed as barbarian—­“We must not any longer allow ourselves to be called barbarians”—­stems from Britain’s shocking confrontation with the relativism of such cultural definitions.44 In Britain’s nineteenth-­century discourse on China, “barbarian eye” became a fuse, a maddening touchstone of Chinese contempt that Queen Victoria would cite [ 140 ]



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as reason for military redress. As Lydia Liu has pointed out, the phrase was actually a British mistranslation of the Chinese character yi, and what Napier’s interpreter rendered as “barbarian eye” should instead have been understood as something like “foreign principal.” 45 Chen further describes how the mistranslation had been perpetuated by British private merchants in Canton between 1824 and 1834, and that while the error was corrected in 1837, “this belated conclusion did not help break the equivalence between yi and ‘barbarian’ or change the argument that cited the naming as one argument for war, both of which gained wide circulation ­after the 1835 war campaign in London.” 46 Indeed, the idea that the Chinese saw the British as “barbarian” was endlessly circulated in the British press, reflecting the degree of threat that Britain experienced from its perceived misconstruction by the Chinese. Repeatedly, British writers ­adopted the epithet even as they advanced withering critiques of China’s tyranny and fraudulence, brandishing the quoted phrase as an implicit mockery of Chinese delusion.47 An anonymous writer for Bentley’s Miscellany went so far as to fabricate Chinese letters that ridicule “the junks of the [British] Barbarians” for “hav[ing] no eyes, and, therefore, see[ing] not.” 48 The joke turns on the Chinese custom of painting eyes on their ship bows, a custom that Dickens referred to in “The Chinese Junk” (1848) when he satirized the junk’s “mimic eye” as a symbol for Chinese blindness.49 In parodying the Chinese perspective, Bentley’s Miscellany disarms the insulting “barbarian eye” by turning it into a case of Chinese myopia. The outsized response to and complex rhetorical pyrotechnics provoked by the phrase exposes the discomfort that Britain felt in reckoning with its own status as an object, rather than an agent, of sight. De Quincey, in contrast, went straight for the jugular, presenting vio­lence as the only solution for controlling the terms of cultural interpretation: “By all means thump [the Chinese] well: it is your only chance—it is the only logic which penetrates the fog of so conceited a p ­ eople.”50 At the conclusion of the Second Opium War, the victorious British w ­ ere able to prohibit the Qing government from using the offending Chinese character that they themselves had mistranslated as “barbarian.”51 Britain’s military victory allowed it to restructure the visual hierarchy, exactly as De Quincey had predicted. In the throes of ­battle, even eyewitness accounts meant to condemn the war helped perpetuate the image of a helpless China now passive and “opened” up to foreign sight, as in this 1840 account of “the capture of the island of Chusan”: “­Every h ­ ouse was indiscriminately broken open, ­every drawer and box ransacked, the streets strewed with fragments of furniture, pictures, chairs, t­ables, grains of all sorts, &c., &c. For two days the bodies w ­ ere allowed to lay, exposed to sight, where they fell.”52 The Nemesis warship, which played a crucial role in the First Opium War, also seized the cultural imagination as a visual emblem of Britain’s modern [ 141 ]

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technological prowess. On November 12, 1842, for instance, the Illustrated London News published a sketch titled “The Nemesis Steamer Destroying Chinese War Junks, in Canton River” with a narrative of how the warship had “distinguished herself in a very extraordinary manner, shortly ­a fter her arrival in the Chinese ­waters, by blowing up a number of the enemies’ war-­junks, which created no l­ ittle consternation amongst the Celestials.”53 Five years a­ fter the First Opium War, an anonymous writer still fantasized about “the first appearance of the Nemesis” through Chinese eyes, tracing with irrepressible relish how “this singular specimen of naval architecture” must have seemed nothing less than a “demon ship” to the naive locals (“curious gazers”) unfamiliar with such technological advancement.54 Despite the writer’s stated sympathy for the Chinese, who suffered “death and destruction,” his repeated invocation of the scenes of misery and destruction, especially when juxtaposed with British triumph (“At the capture of the famous Bogue forts the British had five men slightly wounded, and the Chinese five hundred killed and wounded!”) betrays a hint of De Quinceyean elation at having “thump[ed] [the Chinese] well.”55 Beyond economic gains and colonial expansion, then, British victory in the Opium Wars restructured the terms of visual repre­sen­ta­tion and should be understood as a crucial stage in Britain’s development of a visual regime during the second half of the nineteenth ­century. A review of Dunn’s Chinese exhibition in Fraser’s Magazine underscores this connection between military success and the right to exhibitionistic display. Adopting the “Barbarian Eye” as a byline, the anonymous reviewer prefaces the review by gloating over the outcome of the recent war: “Truly our ‘persuasive powers’ appear to have been estimated at a very low rate a few years ago by our official friends the mandarins,” but “what a change in the state of affairs is presented by the recent accounts! What a fall of blue buttons and peacocks’ feathers has taken place!”56 The occasion for the article points to China’s visual subjugation, and the reviewer takes no small plea­sure in delineating all the Chinese “curiosities” and “figures” now neatly ordered and passively awaiting inspection by British eyes—­particularly the “ludicrously grotesque” effigies of “ferocious” creatures whose “golden eye-­balls” make them look more like “gingerbread poodle-­dogs.”57 China’s recent agitation against Britain, the reviewer suggests, is no more than ludicrous bravado perpetuated through the failure to see and recognize British supremacy. In a similar vein, the “Ten Thousand Chinese Th ­ ings” exhibition reveled in the objectification of the vast Chinese Empire. Langdon’s exhibition guide begins with a direct reference to “the pre­sent crisis of affairs in China [that] has awakened in the public mind a deep and power­ful feeling of enquiry t­oward this singular and secluded ­people” (n.p.). While not as derogatory as the review in Fraser [ 142 ]



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Magazine, the guide nevertheless appeals to the desire for an open China by presenting this previously “secluded” nation as a conquerable, comprehensible object that is now endlessly available for study. “ “The view,” Langdon notes, “is imposing in the highest degree,” but the staging of the exhibition crucially makes order out of disarray. In this way, “the rich screen-­work . . . ​the many-­shaped and varied-­ colored lanterns . . . ​the native paintings . . . ​the Chinese maxims . . . ​the embroidered silks . . . ​and the multitude of smaller cases crowded with rare and in­ter­est­ing objects, form a tout ensemble, possessing a beauty entirely its own, and which must be seen before it can be realized” (27–28). Taking his discursive cue from the exhibition’s meticulous ordering, cata­loging, and display, Langdon invites “the visitor . . . ​to commence with the screen at the entrance, and then take the large wall cases on the right hand in the order in which they are numbered, commencing with the t­ emple” (27–28 [emphasis added]). The mastery of exotic space through such visual curatorial delineation triumphantly invokes Britain’s recent military subjugation of China. At the same time, the exhibition’s overt pedagogical goals efface the vio­lence of that subjugation by masking it as an objective endeavor in the ser­vice of moral instruction. Presumably that instruction operates in two directions, benefiting both the heathen Chinese awaiting Christian evangelism and the inquisitive British who had so long been kept in the dark about the “Celestial Empire” (Langdon xxiv).58 Continuing the fascination with an “open” China that inflected war­time accounts, Langdon celebrates with the “devoted missionary . . . ​that the doors of a new empire are about to be opened! A living light is about to flash among the benighted millions” (xx). Langdon’s language of visual penetration ­here underscores the extent to which the war­time rhe­toric of an “open” China helped disseminate the terms of repre­sen­ta­tion that would lead directly to China’s visual objectification in mid-­ century exhibitions. Con­temporary reviews of the exhibition and its cata­log also use this same visual language. The Court and Lady’s Magazine, for example, praises Langdon’s guide for providing a “key to [the exhibition’s] almost innumerable points of information” and thereby “throw[ing] a flood of light upon the all-­important question of China, and rais[ing] the veil, more completely than it has ever been before done from the domestic-­life, manners and habits of the dwellers in ‘the Celestial Empire.’ ”59 Britain’s claim to visual mastery over the Oriental other also constructs a narrative of its own coming of age. Such a narrative celebrates the progressive sophistication of Britain’s techniques of cultural ethnography, in contrast to a prior stage of Orientalist discourse that is now demystified as mere “romance.” In a gesture of naive empiricism, Langdon recommends the exhibition and his cata­log as an effort to “narrate nothing but facts. . . . ​A ll fiction and romance have been [ 143 ]

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carefully avoided” (xxiii).60 Four years l­ater, the Scottish plant hunter Robert Fortune, who successfully penetrated the interior of China in his search for botanical specimens, described Britain’s maturation in terms of its evolving perspective on China. Significantly, this evolution is presented as a change in the way of seeing. In the past, the British “looked with magnifying eyes on e­ very t­hing Chinese” and ­were “in the position of l­ittle c­ hildren who gaze with admiration and won­der at a penny peep-­show in a fair or market-­place at home.” Now, however, “the curtain which had been drawn around the celestial country for ages, has been rent asunder; and instead of viewing an enchanted fairy-­land, we find, ­a fter all, that China is just like other countries.” 61 “The satirical denial of early, often quixotic literary modes,” George Levine has argued, “becomes a kind of signature of realism.” 62 The claim to disenchanted realism that runs through both Langdon’s and Fortune’s accounts highlights the affinities that connect the museum, ethnography, and the realist novel, the last of which is a genre that may be characterized by paradox but is nevertheless “always also committed to the common-­sense notion that what we see—­not our words or our ideas—is ‘­really ­there.’ ” 63 The connections among ­these dif­fer­ent discursive modes can be traced back to their foundation in the epistemology of empire.64 The next chapter further unpacks t­ hese ideas to show how Charlotte Brontë’s and Dickens’s self-­reflexive Orientalism engendered a critique of such mimetic realism in their novels, which work to stage not the real but, to borrow Audrey Jaffe’s apt formulation, the “fantasy of the real.” 65 For now, however, I want to emphasize how Fortune’s “­children . . . ​at . . . ​ a peep-­show” analogy echoes De Quincey’s autobiography, but with a difference. The assimilation of the exotic into the structure of childhood has become a national achievement, but the accomplishment of that pro­c ess allows its disavowal as well. This cultural rewriting works by recasting Britain’s vulnerability to Chinese perception as Britain’s evolving perception of China, a recasting that war made pos­si­ble. Thus, while Fortune’s revelation that “China is just like other countries” seems to disavow the whimsical or horrifying China portrayed e­ arlier by authors like Charles Lamb and De Quincey, it in fact marks a culmination of that logic of appropriation through which the exotic is incorporated into the ground of one’s identity. The exotic has become so familiar that the history of its incorporation, along with the economic and psychological vulnerabilities that such incorporation introduced, can now be ignored through an act of willful amnesia. Conversely, what is not appropriated becomes a damning sign of an absolute (and absolutely inferior) difference, and the next chapter suggests that this explains why claims to ethnographical realism in the Victorian period paradoxically [ 144 ]



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led to a greater exoticization of Chineseness. Fortune goes on to observe that “a ­great proportion of the northern Chinese seem to be in a sleepy or dreaming state, from which it is difficult to awake them,” and any foreigner who makes his appearance in ­these parts would draw out crowds of Chinese, “who gaze at him with a sort of stupid dreaming eye.” 66 If China still did not know how to view Britain aright, this was no longer cause for anxiety in Britain but a Chinese prob­ lem: a militarily successful Britain in control of the terms of economic exchange could confidently chalk the prob­lem up to China’s visual deficiency. The economy of the visual so carefully erects a boundary between the “self-­ in-­here” and the “other-­out-­there” that ­there remains ­little space for the kind of hybrid subjectivity on display in De Quincey and Lamb’s prewar writings. The assertion of British cultural supremacy as a distinctly visual proj­ect culminated in the 1851 ­Great Exhibition, which ranged beyond China to include “British colonies and dependencies” and more than forty “foreign states.” 67 The two Sino-­British wars not only helped launch this new discursive paradigm, but also provided a distinctive forum for Orientalism’s transition from an alimentary mode to a chiefly visual one. In their wake, Chinese-­related ingestants would become e­ ither completely domesticated or thoroughly othered, thereby shutting down the kind of self-­reflexive Orientalism that had been so productively mobilized through the rhetorical drift of tea and opium. Tea and opium now separated and became reified as fixed expressions of cultural essence, with tea a quin­tes­sen­tial symbol of British domesticity and opium the sign of Eastern depravity. While critics tend to read De Quincey’s Confessions through this binary framework, the text actually spotlights a moment when this symbolic splitting, while in pro­gress, was not yet complete. The autobiography’s self-­reflexivity lies precisely in its exposure of the extent to which imperial identity consolidates around not just material ingestants but also the idea of them as exotic. In addition to the fact of opium’s and tea’s repre­sen­ta­tions against a generally Orientalist backdrop, then, we also need to attend to the nature of ­those repre­sen­ta­tions. The discursive evolution I have traced so far in this book points to the dif­fer­ent ways in which cultural alterity can be i­magined, constructed, and deployed in the ser­vice of an imperial identity, particularly when that imperial identity must respond to changing geopo­liti­cal constraints. Simply labeling t­ hese ideological productions as racist or xenophobic risks prematurely glossing over the myriad ways in which the self, ­whether private or collective, takes shape in a dynamic pushing and pulling with what it encounters and construes as other.

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6

“NOT THE TRACK OF THE TIME” A nti q u ate d O ri e nt a li s m i n V illet te a n d ­L it tle D o r rit

H

OW “ E P I C A L” I T I S , the natu­ ral phi­ los­ o­ pher William Whewell enthuses, that in London’s G ­ reat Exhibition of 1851, the visitor finds an

image of the world and its arts, which he had vainly tried to build up in his mind, exhibited before his bodily eye in a vast crystal frame;—­true in ­every minutest thread and hue, from the sparkle of the diamond to the mighty bulk of the colossus; true to that which belongs to ­every part of the earth; and this, with the effects which the arts produce, not at the intervals of the traveller’s weary journey, but everywhere at the pre­sent hour. And, further . . . ​looking at the objects, not like a fairy picture in the distant lands, but close at hand; comparing, judging, scrutinizing the trea­sures produced by the all-­bounteous earth, and the indomitable efforts of man, from pole to pole, and from east to west; or, as he would learn more truly to mea­sure, from east to east again.1

The promise of an “image of the world and its arts . . . ​exhibited before [one’s] bodily eye” (emphasis added) echoes William Langdon’s visual claim to China in his exhibition guide to “Ten Thousand Chinese Th ­ ings” nearly a de­cade e­ arlier.2 As in Langdon’s account, in Whewell’s the exhibition goer seems akin to an omniscient god in their ability to master time and being, holding within their purview “a simultaneous view of the condition of the ­whole globe as to material arts,” including arts from India, China, Mexico, Amer­i­ca, and vari­ous parts of Eu­rope (8).3 Vast and ancient cultures are supposedly cut to size and subsequently contained within the Crystal Palace (9), so named to highlight the technologically unpre­ce­ dented use of glass in the construction of the principal exhibition hall.4 Beyond its own visual splendor, the spectacle of the G ­ reat Exhibition embodied the British Empire’s claim to cultural domination through its reification of the world as a unified image, a pro­cess that depended on Britain’s ability to collect [ 146 ]



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and categorize.5 Invoking the commonly drawn parallel between the Crystal Palace and the Arabian Nights, Whewell underscores Britain’s scientific appropriation and triumphant demystification of the visual enchantments of the East: “dif­fer­ent nations . . . ​and all their dif­fer­ent stages are seen at once, in the aspect which they have at this moment in the magical glass, which the enchanters of our time have made to rise out of the ground like an exhalation” (10). Thus, the exhibition “is not a mere picture of ­things which are found standing together that we have had presented to us; the ­great achievement was the bringing [of ] them together” (11). The act of rational collection and classification manifests the imperialist w ­ ill to contain, order, and “mea­sure” (10).6 In exercising their own faculty of “comparing, judging, [and] scrutinizing” (10), the British spectator repeats this gesture and thereby reiterates Britain’s claim to cultural domination.7 At the same time, Whewell’s meta­phorical repre­sen­ta­tion of imperial agents—­organizers, collectors, merchants, engineers, and the sundry other administrators involved in the construction of the ­Great Exhibition as part of what Thomas Richards has called Britain’s “imperial archive”—as “enchanters” reflects a seemingly countervailing impulse, one that mystifies the operations and revelations of empire as a form of magic making.8 Geoffrey Baker has pointed to the presence of this “Orientalist paradox” in Edward Said’s definition of Orientalism as both “absolutely anatomical and enumerative” and “a form of paranoia.”9 What Whewell’s logic suggests is that this paradox is a functional one, instrumental to the alterist proj­ect that works by drawing an absolute line between the rational West and the magical Orient. The effects of enchantment are visually outsourced, so to speak, to the East, while the anatomical epistemology—­the order of collection, naming, and classification—­helps legitimize Britain’s display of such an Orient as essentially enchanted and magical. Museums and world exhibitions thus play a key role in the construction of the imperial archive through their visualizations of the Orient as exotic spectacle.10 Their claim to empiricism and scientific scrutiny helps secure the exoticization of the East as absolutely other, as shown in John Tenniel’s cartoon “The Happy ­Family in Hyde Park” (Figure 6.1).11 Published in Punch in July 1851, two months ­a fter the ­Great Exhibition opened, Tenniel’s cartoon draws a distinctive line between the Eu­ro­pean spectator and the exotic spectacle. Prince Albert, who served as founding president of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, dominates the picture, while Mr. Punch occupies the bottom left of the cartoon.12 The two are part of a smartly dressed Eu­ro­pean crowd whose members look on with rapt attention at the exhibition building, evidently impressed by both its construction and its contents. ­Behind the glass, exotic foreigners engage in what the critic Jeffrey Auerbach has described as a “bizarre and perhaps primitive dance,” exuding [ 147 ]

Figure 6.1. ​John Tenniel, “The Happy F ­ amily in Hyde Park.” Eu­ro­pean visitors to the ­Great Exhibition gaze on the Crystal Palace. Chief among the spectators is Prince Albert dressed in a suit. Inside the glass walls of the Crystal Palace, foreigners strike up bizarre dance poses. Mr. Punch himself occupies the bottom left of the cartoon, his hump and beaked nose a reference to the figure’s origin in puppetry. In Punch, vol. 21, July 19, 1851, Punch Historical Archive, 1841–1992.



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a thrilling savagery whose dangerous, potentially infectious, energy remains safely contained within the four walls.13 The cartoon’s title—­“The Happy ­Family in Hyde Park”—­aptly reveals its ideological stakes. A chief accomplishment of the exhibition lies in its gathering of what an article in House­hold Words calls “the ­great ­family of mankind.”14 But in Tenniel’s cartoon, the clear physical divide that separates the Eu­ro­pean spectators outside the Crystal Palace from the non-­European revelers within (who include Chinese, Turks, and Indigenous Americans) points to the strikingly exclusive nature of this “­family.” The salubrious influence of virtuous domesticity, coded in the phrase “happy ­family,” exerts power only over the Eu­ro­pe­ans, and indeed seems to derive its validity from the contrasting dehumanization of the non-­Europeans. As Auerbach argues, “the British and Eu­ro­pe­ans, looking in, are separated from, and literally defined by, ­those they are looking at.”15 While Auerbach reads Tenniel as “ridicul[ing] the strange rituals of foreigners,” the satirical energy of Tenniel’s caricature subverts Britain’s claim to civility as well.16 The fascination with which the spectators, including Prince Albert, gaze upon the riotous scene undercuts the assertion of visual mastery, breaching the distinction between self-­possessed spectator and savage spectacle that the cartoon initially sets up. Tenniel accomplishes this satire through an a­ dept hierarchical positioning of two dif­fer­ent kinds of seeing. The first kind—­t he passive, bedazzled gaze of the onlookers—­suggests their alarming vulnerability to exotic influence. Yet the second kind—­the satirical and autonomous vision of Mr. Punch, who looks not at the bacchanalian parade but, with derisive knowingness, at the readers of Punch—­ introduces into the cartoon an additional representative frame, one that objectifies the British “happy ­family” in much the same way that the British spectators can be said to objectify the Oriental revelers. Of course, Tenniel’s cartoon ultimately reconstitutes the community of enlightened, sovereign British subjects along the axis of a critical reading, opposing self-­conscious readers who are in on the satirical joke to the overawed onlookers passively consuming the spectacle of the ­Great Exhibition. In this way, Tenniel does not so much subvert as he appropriates the visual ideology that the ­Great Exhibition helped reinforce, through his claim to a comprehensive, more discerning vision. Indeed, the visual regime is so dominant in the second half of the nineteenth ­century that even repre­sen­ta­tions of exotic ingestion operate as occasions for spectacle, appealing to sight rather than to taste. This was certainly the case for the tellingly named “Soyer’s International Exhibition, the Gastronomic Symposium of All Nations”—­the restaurant that the celebrity chef Alexis Soyer established as a parallel attraction to the ­Great Exhibition, designed to capitalize on the crowds [ 149 ]

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visiting the Crystal Palace and con­ve­niently located just a few hundred yards away. Publicity for the restaurant played up its extravagant decor and its numerous culturally themed “attractions,” including (as listed on Soyer’s advertising cata­log, the “Symposium Programme”) “The Hall of Architectural Won­ders,” “The Transatlantic Passage,” “The Gallic Pavilion,” and “The Celestial Hall of Golden Lilies,” the last of which a friendly review in the Morning Post lauded as “a complete Chinese exhibition of itself.”17 Soyer’s paean to “cosmopolitan cookery” promised a feast not for the stomach but for the ­mental eye, for visitors ­were invited “to imagine within the walls of the Symposium grave and lively Frenchmen, expatiating over their potages and fricandeaux; phlegmatic Turks, discussing pillaf and hachis; mercurial Persians, enjoying their sherbet; sententious Spaniards, luxuriating over olla podrida; wide-­awake Americans, consuming johnny-­cakes and canvas-­backed ducks; pigtailed Chinese, devouring their favourite stewed dog.”18 While e­ arlier scenes of exotic eating synthesized a diverse range of ingestants u ­ nder the general sign of a consumable Orient, the ascendant visual logic ­here aggressively differentiates among so-­called national diets to demarcate and categorize. The potential for cross-­cultural hybridity that exotic ingestants carried in the preceding de­cades is inactivated through their capture by the visual economy, which works to shore up rather than unravel cultural differences. And if “potages and fricandeaux,” “pillaf and hachis,” “sherbet” and “olla podrida” still fall within the realm of acceptable eating, certainly no respectable En­glishman could fathom himself dining on dog meat. With Britain’s victory in the Opium Wars, scenes of ingestion that are coded Chinese no longer whet British appetites but begin to signal what Paul Young has described as “a divide beyond which it was difficult and undesirable to cross.”19 The figure of the Chinese opium addict reflects this logic of perverted Chinese ingestion, as does the contemporaneous wave of ethnographical and pseudoethnographical accounts obsessing over the Chinese penchant for eating rats, dogs, cats, and sea slugs. In contrast, e­ arlier works such as William Alexander’s The Costume of China (1805) make only passing references to diet, and even then the interest typically lies with the banal items of rice and meat.20 One of the first British texts to describe the Chinese appetite as something that inspired “rather disgusting contemplation” is George Newenham Wright’s China, in a Series of Views, Displaying the Scenery, Architecture, and Social Habits of That Ancient Empire (1843).21 Produced in the immediate aftermath of the First Opium War, Wright’s compendium depicts Chinese taste as “unrestricted by the most nauseous species of food,” including “dogs, cats, rats, or birds, e­ ither tame or wild, generally alive—­sea-­slugs, and grubs found in the sugar-­cane.”22 [ 150 ]



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Similarly, Peter Lund Simmonds’s The Curiosities of Food; or the Dainties and Delicacies of Dif­fer­ent Nations Obtained from the Animal Kingdom (1859) contends that rats allow the Chinese in California to “live like Celestial emperors.”23 As evidence, Simmonds not only extracts a “bill of fare” from a San Francisco restaurant that lists such items as “Grimalkin steaks,” “Bow-­wow soup,” and “stews rat-­ified” (67), but he quotes also from one “Albert Smith, writing home from China,” who describes the “filth [the locals] eat in the eating ­houses . . . ​consist[ing] for the most part of rats, bats, snails, bad eggs, and hideous fish” (66–67). Citing as his authority John Bowring, the governor of Hong Kong from 1854 to 1859, Simmonds concludes that “the Chinese have no prejudices what­e ver as regards food; they eat anything and every­thing from which they can derive nutrition” (41). “The heads of fowls, their entrails and fat, with ­every scrap of digestible animal ­matter, earth-­worms, sea reptiles of all kinds, mice, and other vermin . . . ​black frogs . . . ​the hind-­quarters of a ­horse . . . ​unhatched ducks and chickens . . . ​[and] rotten eggs” (42) are all considered fair game. This idea that the Chinese are savage enough to eat anything they can get their hands on becomes a cliché of British discourse and is endlessly circulated in the print media during the second half of the nineteenth c­ entury. “The Chinese, as a nation, are curiously exempt from prejudices in regard to food,” a journalist writes for Fraser’s Magazine, and “although nature has literally supplied them with e­ very article of diet usually most prized, they are not above eating dogs and rats, and a wild cat that has been caught and fattened in a cage fetches in the market about the same price as a pheasant.”24 “To eat every­thing which can possibly give nourishment is the comprehensive princi­ple upon which Chinese diet is regulated; so that dogs, cats, and even rats and mice, are not rejected by them,” an article in Reynolds’s Miscellany repeats more than a de­cade l­ater in an article titled “The Chinese and Their Peculiarities.”25 A Punch cartoon published in the year of the ­Great Exhibition imagines “London dining rooms” overrun with such instances of depraved eating, as a group of Chinese, visually coded through ste­reo­typical racist markers (pigtails and slit eyes), are waited on by a complaisant server who offers them a ­whole range of dietary choices—­including birds’ nest soup, rat pie, and dog (Figure 6.2).26 My concern ­here is not with the veracity of ­these repre­sen­ta­tions of Chinese food, a concern that would simply reproduce the empirical epistemology that increasingly underpinned and indeed secured alterist discourse on China and the Orient in the second half of the nineteenth ­century.27 Rather, the point is that the British fixated on ­these articles of diet, which ­were by no means common in everyday Chinese meals, as a way of othering China as savage. Commenting on the pervasiveness of ­these ste­reo­typical (mis)characterizations, Walter Henry [ 151 ]

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Figure 6.2. ​John Leech, “London Dining Rooms, 1851.” Chinese customers are depicted dining among the En­glish in a London dining room. The waiter obsequiously affirms the Chinese dietary choices. In Punch, vol. 20, January 1, 1851, Punch Cartoon Library / TopFoto.

Medhurst, the British consul in Shanghai, writes: “The prominent idea with regard to a Chinaman is that he is a quaint but stolid besotted creature, who smokes opium perpetually, and drowns his ­daughters as fast as they appear, whose everyday food consists of puppies, kittens, rats, and such like garbage; whose notions of honor, honesty, and courage, are of the loosest; and to whom cruelty is a pastime.”28 Pressed to correct t­hese “erroneous . . . ​popu­lar notions” (1), Medhurst offers his “­little book,” The Foreigner in Far Cathay, as a way to “enlighten the home public as to the ­actual circumstances in which residents in that remote region find themselves, and to supply a few scraps of information, part of it new, and part of it hitherto misapprehended, concerning the Chinese themselves” (“n.p.”). As a resident of China, Medhurst makes his claim to authority on the basis of his own firsthand experience, writing that “the moral qualities of a p ­ eople can only be judged of by such salient points in their character and conduct as come ­under the observation of ­those who study them, or are thrown into more or less intimate association with them” (168). Medhurst’s empirical gesture is characteris[ 152 ]



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tic of this period and particularly so in the case of China, as the so-­called opening up of a remote nation so long inaccessible to most Westerners produced a stream of ethnographical and natu­ral historical accounts by diplomats, merchants, and missionaries, all seeking to tell the truth about the Celestial Empire. Building on work by Bruno Latour, Gayatri Spivak, and Richards, James Hevia has argued that the conclusion of the Second Opium War in 1860 instituted a new imperial order, through which British “inscriptional practices” effectively “reterritorialized” China, creating a set of “misreadings” of China sustained by the real­ity effect—­that is, by the fantasy of access to a “real” China that could now be reproduced as an object of “total knowledge.”29 Medhurst’s aim of “enlighten[ing]” his readers with a purportedly more impartial view thus works to reinforce, not undermine, what Hevia calls the “epistemological complex of empire.”30 It is no surprise, then, that Medhurst’s study concludes with the author’s definitive statements about “the character of the Chinese” (167). As with the mid-­century exhibitions that mined foreign resources for their own pedagogical aims, Medhurst’s ethnographical account works by privileging the ocular. It is his “observation” that authorizes him to speak on the “moral qualities” of the Chinese (168), and his writing reproduces t­hese qualities as exotic specimens available for the reader’s examination. Thus, The Foreigner in Far Cathay opens its requisite chapter on opium smoking with the now standard invitation for the British reader to “[visit] in imagination one of ­these [opium den] establishments, and observ[e] for himself what is to be seen ­there” (90 [emphasis added]). The chapter dedicated to “Eating and Drinking in China” also grounds its insights in the realm of the visual, beginning with the acknowl­edgment that “early travelers have observed puppies and kittens exposed for sale in the markets of Canton amongst articles for t­able consumption” (103) and noting that the author “once saw a mob of boat-­people fight for the carcasses of some ­horses” (104). If, as Elizabeth Chang has argued, the opium den provided a “primary [example] of Chinese difference” and offered “a per­sis­tent spatial shorthand denoting corrupting iniquity in British urban space,” the Chinese marketplace seems to have empirically validated that iniquity by tracing it back to everyday life in China.31 A visual obsession with the marketplace runs throughout British writings from the period. For instance, Wright’s tellingly titled China, in a Series of Views provides a literal view of “Cat merchants and tea dealers at Tong-­Cow” by pairing its commentary with an illustration of an avaricious-­looking customer attended by e­ ager merchants as he evaluates cats in baskets with barely suppressed greed, his hunched back and feminized hand gesture functioning as supposed visual signifiers for an unnatural taste.32 [ 153 ]

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Two de­cades ­later, a British traveler would similarly begin his “reminiscence of Canton” with a textualized image of the market scene: “­There w ­ ere w ­ hole rows of sucking pigs, smoking and savoury; t­here ­were roast and stewed rabbits, and one l­ ittle animal which quite upset all my calculations. I examined it closely. ­There was no m ­ istake; it was a rat. I examined more minutely the rabbits. I found them to be cats. I examined more minutely the sucking pigs. Alas! they w ­ ere but dogs. It is indeed too true. Upon such [a] diet do the poorer classes in China live.”33 If what initially appeared to be “the most tempting viands” (4) offered a dangerous gustatory enticement for the British consumer, analytical sight intervenes to save the day, reestablishing the cultural boundary that had been on the verge of being ­violated. The progressive revelation of the true character of each item of food, methodically communicated through the orderly repetition of “I examined,” captures a kind of microscopic vision that zooms in according to precise calibrations. While the visitor alleges that “never in all [his] travels [has he] witnessed a more awful, loathsome, disgusting scene than that which [he] witnessed in Canton city” (3), the language of scientific examination and inductive reasoning legitimizes the sensationalist account by turning it into one of ethnographical instruction in the ser­vice of truth. As in Tenniel’s cartoon, the author solicits the reader’s fascination with the culturally bizarre, while crafting British vision as a scientific gaze immune to unsavory influence. Beyond policing cultural bound­aries, such insistent recourse to the visual helps secure the image of a depraved China by grounding it in ostensible real­ity. As Peter Brooks points out, the genre of realism is “almost by definition highly visual, concerned with registering what the world looks like.”34 That concern with the world is inextricably tied up with the proj­ect of empire, as the global economy not only cultivated the sense of a world out t­here but made that world increasingly available for colonization, exploitation, experience, and consumption. If ethnographical descriptions of foreign—in this case, Chinese—­diet operate like display cases, offering quaint national characteristics for inspection and study, their empirical connection to a par­tic­u­lar time and space is what validates their gesture of cultural essentialization. In the ethnographical writings on China, the Chinese marketplace thus provides an example of the way the Orient functioned as what Timothy Mitchell has called “the g­ reat ‘external real­ity’ of modern Europe—­the most common object of its exhibitions, the ­great signified,” providing the training ground for the perfection of realist repre­sen­ta­tion as an epistemological framework.35 Through a sleight of hand, the act of repre­sen­ta­tion helped create the real­ity it claimed to model, by seemingly standing “in perfect correspondence to the external world” while always announcing its own status as “mere repre­sen­ta­ tion, the picture of some further real­ity.”36 [ 154 ]



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It comes as no surprise, then, that the ascendancy of Victorian realist fiction coincided with the age of the exhibition. Tracing the affinities between the two, Barbara Black argues that “both depend on circumstantial evidence, on physical description of a material world constituted of many subjects and many more objects. Both then order this profusion, committed as they are to visuality and visualizing, to inviting the reader or visitor to visualize a world and comprehend the ties between community and vision.”37 In looking, the viewers are consolidated as “a community, or collectivity, of the tasteful” and set apart from the exotic specimens that are mere objects of sight.38 Yet rational looking is not a ­matter of course. Recall the defensiveness of Tenniel’s cartoon, which underscores the tenuousness of the cultural boundary that the act of looking helps institute between the subject and object of vision. The British exhibition visitors’ cultural autonomy and superiority depends not just on the act of looking, but also on how they look. Both Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens, for instance, found the G ­ reat Exhibition a perceptually overwhelming one. Brontë, who visited the exhibition five times while working on her novel Villette, described the Crystal Palace in a letter to her ­father as “gorgeous—­animated—­bewildering,” with an “interior . . . ​like a mighty Vanity Fair—­the brightest colours blaze on all sides—­and ware of all kinds—­from diamonds to spinning jennies and Printing Presses are t­ here to be seen.”39 For her, the collection’s confounding diversity exhibited no law or method, and its equation with Vanity Fair undercuts Whewell’s lofty claims to the “scientific morals” (7) supposedly on display. Dickens also felt “ ‘usedup’ by the Exhibition,” despite having reviewed it favorably for House­hold Words.40 Like Brontë, he found himself “bewildered” by the sheer excess of “so many t­ hings,” whose “fusion” stoked his “natu­ral horror of sights.” 41 For both Brontë and Dickens, the line between British rationality and Oriental de­cadence seems to be a tenuous, perhaps even illusory, one. In fact, both writers interrogate that line in their writings of this period, examining the extent to which British identity not only defines itself in relation to cultural otherness but indeed depends on the ideological production of foreign cultures as other. In Villette (1853) and ­Little Dorrit (1855–1857), this interrogation manifests itself as a critique of the realist epistemology that structures contemporaneous Orientalist representations—an epistemology that the authors suggest is grounded in fantasy. Such a subversion of realism in the work of authors routinely cited as realists raises an issue familiar to critical debates: the status of the real in realism and the degree of self-­awareness with which such a real is pursued and presented. Did Victorian realist novelists promise access to an unmediated real­ity, sought to offer an acceptably close version, or conjured up the existence of the real through their failures at mimesis? Or did they, to pre­sent yet another alternative, “represent not [ 155 ]

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the real but the desire for it,” as Audrey Jaffe has recently argued? 42 I suggest that this strug­gle with the real as a fundamental problematic must be understood in the context of modes of imperial knowledge production during the second half of the nineteenth ­century. Against the backdrop of the visual regime ushered in by Britain’s mid-­century military conflicts and cultural productions, this chapter investigates the resources available to ­those writers who desired to imagine alternative modes of cross-­cultural encounter. Tellingly, that desire plays out as a recurrence of the alimentary. Brontë’s Villette establishes a conspicuously scopic economy only to privilege the insight that comes with “shut[ting] [one’s] eyes” (424), and its protagonist, Lucy Snowe, attains such an insight through a pro­cess of exotic ingestion whose effects bear striking similarities to the opium dreams in Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an En­glish Opium-­Eater.43 In her use of De Quincey’s text, Brontë returns to a formative moment of nation making, subverting the accomplished narrative of imperial confidence and revealing the uneven fractures that have been violently sutured together. Villette reminds its mid-­nineteenth-­century audience of the par­ tic­u­lar resources that the motif of exotic ingestion offers for self-­formation, as well as the extent to which such self-­formation is bound up with modes of cross-­cultural imagination and encounter. Nevertheless, in the climate of a much more militant brand of imperial identity that asserts itself as distinct from, and superior to, the Orient, Brontë’s insights can register only as spectral and out of joint, a “repressed Romanticism” whose ambiguous meanings cannot ultimately be settled within the confines of realist repre­sen­ta­tion.44 Arthur Clennam, Dickens’s male protagonist in ­Little Dorrit, might have characterized ­these insights as “not the track of the time,” not unlike the f­ amily business that he helped run for “more than twenty years in China” before abandoning.45 While the self-­reflexively hybrid subjectivity on display in ­earlier British writings has become increasingly untenable by the second half of the nineteenth c­ entury, Dickens advances a metacritique by examining the existing state of Britain’s Chinese imagination and the material conditions that it both depends on and distorts. Written in the aftermath of one Opium War and on the eve of another, ­Little Dorrit wrestles with Britain’s increasing construction of China as moribund not by refuting it but by reversing the object of critique. Instead of imagining China in this or that way, Dickens deflects the reification of China by suggesting that what is temporally out of joint is not China but Britain’s popu­lar discourse about China. In ­Little Dorrit, ingestion no longer marks cross-­cultural encounter; rather, it only reveals domestic greed. This discursive shift underscores the increasing impossibility of genuine cross-­cultural knowledge as the nineteenth ­century wears on. [ 156 ]



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EXOTIC INGESTION, FEMINIST IDENTITY, AND THE IMPERIAL ENCOUNTER IN VILLETTE

Recording the experiences of Lucy Snowe, the En­glish protagonist working as a teacher in the novel’s titular foreign city, Villette conveys and perpetuates the central mystery of its first-­ person narrator through a hierarchy of vision. The orphaned Lucy, who insists she has a right to remain unknown both socially and psychologically, preserves her privacy by positioning herself as an omniscient observer who spies on ­others’ spying. This power contest plays out not only between Lucy and her employer, Madame Beck—­for whom, as Lucy informs her readers, “ ‘surveillance,’ ‘espionage,’ . . . ​­were . . . ​watch-­words” (72)—­but also between Lucy and her colleague (and eventual lover), Paul Emanuel. Thus, while Paul monitors and polices “female h ­ uman nature” from his overhanging “post of observation” (363), as the novel’s authorized narrator Lucy constructs a superior vantage point from which Villette’s readers are in turn privy to Paul’s spying.46 Like “The Happy ­Family in Hyde Park,” Villette is structured around nested visual frames. Unlike Tenniel’s cartoon, however, the novel does not use this hierarchy of vision to set the British gaze up as superior: rather, it reveals Britishness (and more specifically En­glishness, befitting of the novel’s use of De Quincey’s En­glish opium eater) as a per­for­mance that works through Orientalist othering. This becomes clear when we consider the visual transactions between Lucy and Polly, Lucy’s foil and rival for affection in the Bretton ­house­hold. A name that approximates “Britain” in both sound and spelling, Bretton’s initial adoption of Lucy and Polly, who is notably surnamed “Home,” underscores the imperial nation’s investment in the ideals and idylls of domesticity.47 While Polly’s orphanhood is short-­lived (she is only briefly separated from her f­ather at the beginning of the novel), Lucy’s homelessness becomes her permanent way of life and eventually culminates in her voluntary exile in Villette, a fictional analogue to Brussels. At the end of the novel, Polly marries John Graham Bretton, while Lucy must lay her own desires to rest. If the ­union between Polly Home and John Graham Bretton (or John G ­ reat Britain, as James Buzard observes) underscores the ideological alliance between home and nation, Lucy’s and Polly’s divergent fates indict this alliance as a form of patriarchal oppression that exerts itself at the expense of single w ­ omen with neither money nor social support.48 While Villette’s gender dynamics have been well explicated by scholars, the visual logic that structures the interactions between Lucy and Polly remains underappreciated.49 Yet this visual transaction proves impor­tant for understanding the novel’s Orientalist context, as it activates a narrative self-­reflexivity that ironizes the Orientalist othering both Polly and Lucy perform in the novel. Making a visual [ 157 ]

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“study of [Polly’s] character” in one scene, Lucy observes Polly “seated, like a ­little Odalisque, on a couch, half shaded by the drooping draperies of the win­dow near” (29). Lucy’s Orientalization of Polly as a Turkish female slave and of Graham as her “­Grand Turk” (25) reflects Brontë’s tendency to investigate questions of gender and sexuality through recourse to Eastern imagery.50 Yet Lucy’s discursive construction is complicated by the cultural othering that Polly engages in, for Polly is reading an Orientalist “picture-­book” (30):51 “This book was given me by Graham; it tells about distant countries, a long, long way from E ­ ngland, which no traveller can reach without sailing thousands of miles over the sea. Wild men live in ­these countries, Miss Snowe, who wear clothes dif­fer­ent from ours. . . . ​­Here is a picture of thousands gathered in a desolate place—­a plain, spread with sand—­round a man in black,—­a good, good Englishman,—­a missionary, who is preaching to them u ­ nder a palm-­tree.” (She showed a l­ittle coloured cut to that effect.) “And ­here are pictures” (she went on) “more stranger” (grammar was occasionally forgotten) “than that. Th ­ ere is the wonderful G ­ reat Wall of China; ­here is a Chinese lady, with a foot littler than mine. ­There is a wild h ­ orse of Tartary; and h ­ ere—­most strange of all—is a land of ice and snow, without green fields, woods, or gardens.” (30)

If in Charles Lamb’s “Old China,” the proliferation of spatial deictics reflects the bodily influence of Chinese tea and teacup on the British consumers, thereby penetrating the meta­phorical Chinese wall, Polly’s use of ­these same deictics (“­here” and “­there”) fixes China as distinctly other and securely set apart from “En­glish” identity. Visual repre­sen­ta­tion at once amplifies and contains exotic difference: the “wild men” in “desolate” countries “wear clothes dif­fer­ent from ours,” but they pose no harm, for their wildness is kept safely within the covers of the book, and home remains inviolate. In bringing together vari­ous dif­fer­ent cultures, Polly’s picture book conquers space and time, proclaiming Britain’s ability not just to represent but also to order and compare foreign civilizations. Capable of instructing a child on “distant countries, a long, long way from E ­ ngland,” the book functions much in the same manner as the ­ Great Exhibition, which “annihilate[d] space and time” by “produc[ing] instantaneously a permanent picture, in which the ­whole ­were [sic] seen side by side.”52 Yet while Polly looks at her “picture-­book,” she herself pre­sents a picture that Lucy repeatedly studies.53 Lucy’s gaze turns Polly into an aesthetic tableau in which her posture on “a couch, half shaded by the drooping draperies” prefigures the literal “picture” of Cleopatra “half-­reclined on a couch” amid an abundance of “drapery” (199 and 200) that Lucy ­will l­ater see in an exhibition. Polly’s diminutive size (she is the “picture . . . ​[of] a good-­sized doll”) further parallels the minuscule [ 158 ]



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repre­sen­ta­tions of Oriental cultures in her picture book of “­little coloured cut[s],” where the dramatic decrease in size allows for the side-­by-­side pre­sen­ta­tions of the “­Great Wall of China” and “a Chinese lady, with a foot littler than [Polly’s].”54 Thus, Lucy’s skeptical vision subverts the hierarchical cultural boundary between the En­glish home that Polly embodies and the foreign cultures that she exoticizes as “more stranger.” Indeed, Polly’s grammatical slip diagnoses the “strange” as an effect of her linguistic construction rather than as any preexisting cultural essence captured by her picture book. The signifiers of Polly’s naiveté—­she is slight in figure, forgets her grammar, and carries around a “toy work-­box” (15)—­pre­sent her be­hav­ior as infantile playacting, suggesting that Eu­ro­pean repre­sen­ta­tions of Oriental alterity constitute a sort of pretend play. Brooks has argued that the ­human plea­sure in “scale models of the real” reflects the desire “to master the real world,” and that realism “is a kind of lit­er­a­ture and art committed to a form of play that uses carefully wrought and detailed toys, ones that attempt as much as pos­si­ble to reproduce the look and feel of the real t­ hing.”55 Villette’s antirealist energies, then, register partly in its constant emphasis on Polly’s predilection for role-­playing, which directs attention away from the accuracy of the scale model and ­toward exposing the fantasies of mastery that the model si­mul­ta­neously articulates and sustains. As a model of the real, the Orient as staged in the narrative is demystified as just that: mere staging. Polly does not just play with her “toy work-­box”; in Lucy’s eyes, she is herself a “good-­sized doll.” By exoticizing Polly in the same way that Polly’s picture book exoticizes the Orient, Villette’s nested visual frame draws attention to the intimate alliance between identity and othering. En­g lish identity establishes itself as dif­fer­ent from the “distant countries, a long, long way from ­England” even as Lucy’s harem analogy blurs the line between En­glish domesticity and Eastern despotism. The simultaneous operation of ­these opposing logics exposes the extent to which En­glishness (and the British culture that it helps to underpin) depends on the ideological production of foreign cultures as other.56 Indeed, not only does British culture come perilously close to the Oriental cultures it would disavow, but in many cases it is based on the appropriation of ­those cultures. This insight accounts for the peculiar form that the cherished En­glish tea-­table ritual takes in Brontë’s novel: it is presented first as a kind of cultural pretense and subsequently as a haunting of the past. In Villette’s first and only sustained scene of a­ ctual tea making, it is Polly—so “­silent, diligent, absorbed, womanly” (16)—­who presides, and she performs her womanliness by playing the role of De Quincey’s “fair tea-­maker.” Bronte writes: “During tea, the minute ­thing’s movements and behaviour gave, as usual, full occupation to the eye. . . . ​ [ 159 ]

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Throughout the meal she continued her attentions: rather absurd they w ­ ere. The sugar-­tongs ­were too wide for one of her hands, and she had to use both in wielding them; the weight of the silver cream-­ewer, the bread and butter plates, the very cup and saucer tasked her insufficient strength and dexterity; but she would lift this, hand that, and luckily contrived through it all to break nothing. Candidly speaking, I thought her a ­little busy-­body” (14–15). The implications of Polly’s small size are explicit ­here. Her “minute” and “absurd” figure parodies and thereby undermines the symbolic weight of the female tea maker—­who is supposed to supply, as Julie Fromer writes, “moral and physical sustenance for the f­ amily, creating the intimate ­family relationships that provided the foundation for domestic ideology.”57 The joke ­here is not only on Polly but also on the “contrived” tea-­table ritual and, by extension, the En­glish domestic ideology that the ritual shores up. If cloistered En­glish domesticity, which is securely set apart from foreign influences, constitutes a form of playacting, what is the truth that the tea t­ able holds? Brontë’s answer to this question lies in the tea ser­vice’s subsequent appearance in La Terrasse, Lucy’s, godmother’s transplanted residence in Villette. In the narrative leading up to this scene, Lucy had fainted in the streets only to be discovered by Graham, who carried her to his home. At this point, Lucy has no knowledge of the Brettons’ move from E ­ ngland to Villette, and thus, upon waking, she finds herself in “an unknown room in an unknown h ­ ouse” that is nonetheless populated with articles of furniture “with which [she] had been so thoroughly intimate,” including “two china vases, some relics of a diminutive tea-­service, as smooth as enamel and as thin as egg-­shell, and a white centre-­ornament, a classic group in alabaster, preserved u ­ nder glass” (166 and 167). Not realizing that she is in her godmother’s residence, she finds the tea ser­vice more strange than familiar: indeed, it is strange in its very familiarity.58 “­These articles of furniture could not be real,” Lucy reflects in alarm. “They must be the ghost of such articles” (168). In her reading of this scene, Eva Badowska notes “the rhe­toric of sumptuous material detail and its reliance on the language of museological display.”59 By framing the tea ser­vice as a “classic group . . . ​preserved ­under glass,” Brontë invokes an exhibitionistic order that consolidates and amplifies cultural difference through the act of aesthetic containment. I have suggested that tea’s appropriation as an icon of En­glishness worked through its assimilation into the tableau of tranquil domesticity, at the same time as other foreign articles w ­ ere gaining in aesthetic difference through their confinement b­ ehind the display glass. Th ­ ese trajectories are continuous with each other, and together they help shore up a cultural binary that disavows Britain’s influence by, and dependence on, foreign nations. However, Brontë defamiliarizes En­glish domesticity by putting the tea ser­ vice on display, pointedly recalling its Chinese origins. By the nineteenth c­ entury, [ 160 ]



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advances in British manufacturing techniques had made chinaware more readily available for use in local ­house­holds. While Nathan Dunn’s “Ten Thousand Chinese ­Things” and the ­Great Exhibition both showcased specimens of Chinese porcelain, their markedly foreign contexts significantly differed from the domestic tea-­drinking rituals performed daily in Victorian homes.60 Suggestively, in this scene Lucy invokes the G ­ reat Exhibition’s parallel to the Arabian Nights by presenting herself as a “Bedreddin Hassan, transported in his sleep from Cairo to the gates of Damascus” (167). Unlike Hassan, however, she was not carried into the exotic ­ ngland” (167). lands of the East but rather “laid . . . ​down beside a hearth of Old E If mid-­nineteenth-­century exhibitions consolidated an imperial identity that relied on the visual subjugation of, and distinction from, exotic specimens b­ ehind glass, Brontë’s intersection of home and exhibition through Lucy’s uncanny vision transforms British imperial confidence back into an experience of economic and physical contingency, exposing the domestic sphere’s dependence on global trade. Suggestively, this blending of the foreign and domestic takes the form of a curiosity cabinet that, as Badowska has pointed out, constitutes “the place of Lucy’s awakening.” 61 An “odd meta­phor to use ­a fter 1851,” to quote Badowska again, the “cabinet with seagreen walls” (168) that Lucy finds herself in is more similar to the private “china-­closet” in Lamb’s “Old China” than to the order of public display underpinning the ­Great Exhibition.62 Eugenia Zuroski has demonstrated how the eighteenth-­century china cabinet served “the functions of what Locke pre­sents as universal (yet distinctively En­glish) self-­making.” 63 In “Old China,” this kind of self-­making occurs as a per­for­mance of cultural hybridity that works through the essay’s increasing problematization of vision and its eventual subordination to ingestion as the dominant motif for cross-­cultural encounters. In Villette, too, as I show below, the visual architecture that the novel so insistently constructs gradually gives way to a focus on exotic ingestion. Yet the fact that this movement can be initiated only through an encounter with the uncanny underscores Brontë’s distance from Lamb, as she writes in a moment when realist vision is ascendant. Unlike the rational gaze that governs the ­Great Exhibition, Lucy’s vision is, by her own account, “spectral” (165). The haunting sense of déjà vu—­“Strange to say, old acquaintance[s] w ­ ere all about me, and ‘auld lang syne’ smiled out of e­ very nook” (166 [emphasis added])—­stages the resurrection of a bygone era in which imperial identity is not assured but depends prominently on the supply of exotic ­things. Thus, Lucy’s affective experience of La Terrasse provides a win­dow into the past, when Britain’s imperial identity was still ­under construction.64 The subsequent dawn of Lucy’s consciousness, as she slowly arrives at a proper understanding of her physical circumstances, makes vis­i­ble the cultural evolution of tea and the tea ser­vice from exotic artifact (“relics”) into icons of En­glishness. If Britain’s [ 161 ]

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consolidation of its imperial identity during the nineteenth c­ entury proceeded through an increasing mono­poly of the visual, Lucy’s “spectral” vision turns the clock back, returning to the scene of uneven national formation in which the exotic ele­ments on which British imperial identity depends have yet to be completely assimilated. This critical frame governs the subsequent picture of restored En­glish domesticity, unsurprisingly signaled by the tea-­table tableau: “We descended one flight of carpeted steps to a landing where a tall door, standing open, gave admission into the blue damask room. How pleasant it was in its air of perfect domestic comfort! How warm in its amber lamp-­light and vermilion fire-­flush! To render the picture perfect, tea stood ready on the ­table—an En­glish tea, whereof the ­whole shining ser­vice glanced at me familiarly; from the solid silver urn, of antique pattern, and the massive pot of the same metal, to the thin porcelain cups, dark with purple and gilding” (172–173 [emphasis added]). Fromer points to this passage as exemplifying tea’s symbolic role as an “icon . . . ​of En­glish national identity.” 65 The scene’s insistently visual logic once again underscores the shift from ingestion to vision that facilitates and accompanies tea’s cultural appropriation. Brontë’s description of this scene as “picture perfect” echoes both the “­simple, temperate look” of Leigh Hunt’s “breakfast-­table in the morning,” as well as the “warm hearth-­ rugs, tea, a fair tea-­maker” that constitute the En­glish opium eater’s “picture” of “happiness” (59). 66 Yet this “frozen tableau of En­glishness,” to use Fromer’s formulation, has been thoroughly ironized by the initial strangeness of that which now “glance[s] at [Lucy] familiarly.” 67 This quintessentially En­glish tea-­table scene, it turns out, simply marks a perfected pro­cess of cultural appropriation in which tea’s integration into the tableau of domesticity disavows its originally exotic connotations. Furthermore, its “picture perfect” quality also recalls the ­earlier “picture” (14 and 15) of Polly as tea maker, in which the domestic ritual has been exposed as a form of pretend play. If the massiveness and solidity of the teaware (“massive pot of the same metal” and “solid silver urn”) in this l­ater scene connote the moral heft of steadfast En­glish domesticity, their previous taxation of Polly’s “insufficient strength and dexterity” (15) in turn denaturalizes this domestic ideology and reminds readers of its oppressive weight. Villette’s sensitivity about the imperial investments and appropriations that undergird the En­glish home must thus be understood in relation to the confining roles of w ­ omen, who are tasked with shoring up imperial ideology.68 The visual subjugation of foreign cultures proceeds hand in hand with the misogynistic gaze, as Lucy well understands from both Paul Emanuel, who claims that Lucy “need[s] watching, and watching over” (363) and Graham Bretton, who fails to recognize [ 162 ]



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her for who she is (98–99).69 Furthermore, while Lucy seems to rehearse the despotic male gaze in framing Polly as part of a tableau, her vision works to undermine rather than reinforce the per­for­mance of femininity. Lucy’s “spectral” and “distempered vision” (169) when she wakes in La Terrasse, then, is not just a revelation of empire’s secrets. Rather, it is symptomatic of the novel’s critique of a realist repre­sen­ta­tion that assumes the G ­ reat Exhibition’s narratives of referential objectivity and scientific knowledge. Rather than this empirical gaze, the novel privileges a kind of inner vision that involves the refusal of sight: b­ ecause she “value[s] vision, and dread[s] being struck stone blind,” Lucy explains to Polly, she “shut[s] her eyes” (425 and 424). Lucy does not fit the mold of the objectified and eroticized ­woman, and she fashions her own identity by both withholding sight and withholding herself from sight. The “plea­sure” she takes in “being consummately ignored” (99) grows into an active re­sis­tance by the end of the novel: Graham “could not see my face, I held it down; surely, he could not recognize me; I s­ topped, I turned, I would not be known” (457). Crucially, Lucy’s construction of a distinctly feminist identity occurs through a pro­cess of exotic ingestion.70 Her spiritual self-­sufficiency paradoxically depends on a pro­cess of cultural introjection not unlike that through which British imperial identity was consolidated.71 Thus, in distinguishing between her “life of thought” and that “of real­ity,” Lucy remarks that “provided the former was nourished with a sufficiency of the strange necromantic joys of fancy,” then “the privileges of the latter might remain l­imited to daily bread, hourly work, and a roof of shelter” (77 [emphasis added]). Lucy’s gothic taste for the “strange necromantic joys of fancy” recalls the demonic exploits of the antihero in William Beckford’s Vathek, whose gluttony served as an analogue for his fashioning of self through the consumption of Oriental commodities.72 ­Going beyond a single scene, ingestion in Villette establishes a traffic between inside and outside that allows Lucy to negotiate between her “life of real­ity” and her “life of thought” throughout the novel, in a movement continuous with the novel’s generic oscillation between typology and realism.73 In fact, it is exotic ingestion that brings about Lucy’s spectral vision, which in turn subverts the narrative of cloistered En­glish domesticity. In this way, ingestion supersedes the rational, realist vision championed by the ­Great Exhibition, replacing it as the privileged order of truth and providing the narrative axis around which Lucy’s subjectivity coalesces and takes shape. By building her identity on the same exotic ele­ments foundational to the En­glish domestic space, Lucy repeats the gesture that she criticized in Polly, though she does so self-­consciously. As Antoinette Burton has observed, Brontë’s novels underscore how imperialism implicates “all cultural productions, ‘feminist’ productions included.” But Villette is also forthright about its own “embeddedness in [ 163 ]

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colonial encounter,” to borrow Burton’s formulation, and Brontë uses emplotment to foreground the imperial dimensions of Lucy’s self-­fashioning.74 The novel’s strategic reiteration of a key scene charts the progressive consolidation of Lucy’s feminist identity alongside the increasing revelation of that identity’s imperial character. In par­tic­u­lar, this consolidation of selfhood occurs in the novel through Lucy’s growing expression of her own desires as she strug­gles to escape the choke hold of a patriarchal society. I consider in sequential order three episodes that are tellingly distributed across the three volumes of the novel, with each episode repeating and building on crucial ele­ments in the preceding one(s). Each episode concerns Lucy’s attempt to escape the confinements of Madame Beck’s pensionnat, whose rigid system of “surveillance” exemplifies the disciplinary structure of both the patriarchal society and the tyrannical Catholic church.75 The theme of physical and psychological emancipation plays out across the three episodes, building to a crescendo with Lucy’s “strange vision of Villette at midnight” (450) t­oward the end of the third volume. The novel indexes Lucy’s growing agency through the conversion of empirical referents into symbolic markers of the heroine’s emotional state: in other words, Lucy constructs her subjecthood by remaking external real­ity as a psychological one. All three episodes center on the moment when the realist narrative fabric falls away and is replaced by the typological mode, a formal transition that reinterprets material circumstances as symbolic signs. Lucy’s famous first utterance in the novel—­“Of what are ­these ­things the signs and tokens?” (6)—­thus signals the modus operandi of her self-­writing. More strikingly, when considered in sequential relation to each other, the three episodes chart the increasing literalization of exotic ingestion, in which the physical consumption of an imperial commodity (opium) catalyzes Lucy’s coming into selfhood. The first episode, which I call the “Sisera and Jael” episode, occurs when Lucy discovers the garden ­behind the pensionnat (108). While not amounting to an a­ ctual escape, Lucy’s movement into the outdoor garden nevertheless places her in a liminal space, where she freely articulates for the first time her desire for the “gay city” (108) beyond. The provisional nature of Lucy’s freedom becomes clear in her subsequent outpouring of agitated feelings, as she recalls “long past days” when physical accidents of weather stirred up the truth of her psychological affliction, “wild . . . ​black and full of thunder” (109). The invocation of a past time endows Lucy’s desire with historical consistency, legitimizing her as a subject. At the same time, it also allows Lucy to repress her feelings, as she pulls back to contrast her past turmoil with her pre­sent peace: “To-­night, I was not so mutinous, nor so miserable” (110). The sounding and immediate repression of Lucy’s “craving cry,” I argue, marks the first step in her journey ­toward autonomous selfhood. She is [ 164 ]



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on the verge of breaking out, but the energy remains in potentia, like the “moon . . . ​in the sky” that was “not a full moon but a young crescent” (109), coming into its w ­ hole splendor only with Lucy’s successful transgression of the pensionnat’s bound­aries in the third and final episode.76 Significantly, ingestion exerts only a shadowy presence in this episode through the biblical story of Sisera and Jael—­which Lucy invokes to contrast her past and pre­sent. If during her past afflictions, she had tried to kill her longings “­a fter the manner of Jael to Sisera, [by] driving a nail through their t­emples,” to­night her Sisera “lay quiet in the tent, slumbering; and if his pain ached through his slumbers, something like an angel—­the Ideal—­k nelt near, dropping balm on the soothed ­temples, holding before the sealed eyes a magic glass, of which the sweet, solemn visions ­were repeated in dreams” (110). Contrary to what Lucy explic­ itly claims ­here, the check on her freedom is in fact more insidious in the pre­sent than the past, since lulling Sisera into a slumber creates a false sense of relief and glosses over the real­ity of suffering. Notably, a “magic glass” helps accomplish this deception, in an allusion not just to the con­temporary phantasmagoria lantern shows that Sally Palmer has argued served as a “panoptic machine for enforcing the status quo,” but also to the Crystal Palace with its glass architecture and display cases.77 Yet embedded within this device for sight is also one for taste, as the “magic glass” also gestures to De Quincey’s magical glass of laudanum in Confessions of an En­glish Opium-­Eater, which makes a more explicit appearance in the next narrative episode that I call the “La Terrasse” episode. This next episode begins with Lucy’s “strange fever” (159) during the school vacation, which extends across the novel’s first and second volumes and includes Lucy’s escape from the pensionnat, her fainting in the streets of Villette, and her subsequent spectral vision at La Terrasse. The episode refers back to the ­earlier one through a few recurring markers, including the “dark and wet” weather (159) and the keeping of time by St. Jean Baptiste’s clock (110 and 159). In the “La Terrasse” episode, Lucy journeys out into the city, and the “moonlight wings and robe” (110) shed by the angel “Ideal” over Sisera now become an ­actual “cloak” (160) that covers Lucy as she sets forth. The fact that Lucy’s physical transgression in this second episode comes only ­a fter an “avenging dream” (159) also suggests a necessary emotional prelude in which the “sweet, solemn visions” of the e­ arlier episode are rejected and replaced by an acknowl­edgment of pain. Significantly, the text registers this affective switch from sweetness to terror through the corresponding shift from vision to ingestion. “Between twelve and one that night [of my fever],” Lucy narrates, “a cup was forced to my lips, black, strong, strange, drawn from no well, but filled up seething from a bottomless and boundless sea. . . . ​Having drank and woke, I thought all was over: the end come [ 165 ]

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and past by” (159 [emphasis added]). The Orientalist and religious resonances of the cup, on display both in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh and in De Quincey’s Confessions, are operative ­here as well, and their symbolic freight helps move the narrative from the realist realm into the typological. This mysterious scene of drugging comes in the midst of Lucy’s “avenging dream,” which lasted “a brief space, but sufficing to wring [her] ­whole frame with unknown anguish; to confer a nameless experience that had the hue, the mien, the terror, the very tone of a visitation from eternity” (159). Lucy’s dream bears striking similarity to De Quincey’s explic­itly drug-­induced one in Confessions: her “nameless experience” echoes his “deep-­seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy, such as are wholly incommunicable by words”; her juxtaposition of “a brief space” of time with the “visitation from eternity” mirrors his characteristic oscillation between temporal contrarieties; and her sense of “the end [having] come and past by” captures the apocalyptic tenor of his thought, as he imagines “the morning . . . ​ come of a mighty day—­a day of crisis and of final hope for ­human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and laboring in some dread extremity” (68 and 77). Villette’s invocation of Confessions facilitates what is essentially a ­battle over repre­sen­ta­tional modes. The transition from a phantasmagoric “magic glass” to a glass of laudanum (De Quincey’s “portable ecstasies . . . ​corked up in a pint ­bottle” [39]) accomplishes Lucy’s breaking of patriarchy’s repre­sen­ta­tional shackles and catalyzes her physical movement out of the pensionnat and into the city. Like the opium eater, Lucy appropriates pharmacological alterity as a source of self: her romantic hijacking of the realist mode parallels his pre­sen­ta­tion of opium-­induced dreamwork as revelations of deep interiority. Villette’s logic of exotic ingestion is further reinforced when the vaguely specified “cup” at the end of volume 1 turns into the mysterious “dark-­tinged draught” (168) that the bonne tries to feed a semiconscious Lucy at La Terrasse. As Kristina Aikens has suggested, the darkness of color, the method of preparation, and the Eastern provenance all point to the drug as laudanum or something similarly opiate-­based.78 Indeed, Lucy’s hyperbolic description of the draught as some “Genii-­elixir or Magi-­distillation” (168) explic­ itly echoes De Quincey’s description of his “celestial drug” as an “elixir of plea­ sure” (38 and 58). Paradoxically, then, Lucy’s spectral subversion of En­glish domesticity through the revelation of its exotic ele­ments emerges as an opium-­induced effect. While nineteenth-­century Britain witnessed the increasing domestication of laudanum and corresponding exoticization of opium smoking, Brontë’s invocation of De Quincey’s Orientalist dreamwork intentionally blurs the line between the two forms of opium ingestion and thereby underscores Britain’s own exotic practices. Reversing the correlated twin trajectories of opium’s increasing sinification [ 166 ]



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and tea’s accomplished anglicization in nineteenth-­century Britain, Lucy’s exotic ingestion of opium facilitates her subsequent exposure of the En­glish appropriation of tea. Once it is resurrected in Brontë’s Victorian narrative, the figure of the En­glish opium eater haunts the rest of the novel. In the third and final episode (that of the “­Grand Fête”), Goton—­the cook, who brought tea to Lucy just before her departure from the pensionnat—­administers a “strong opiate” (449) to Lucy on Madame Beck’s ­orders.79 Rousing rather than quelling Lucy’s spirit, the opiate produces Lucy’s “strange vision of Villette at midnight” (450) and leads to her final and definitive transgression of the pensionnat. If in the “Sisera and Jael” episode Lucy had “long[ed] . . . ​for something to fetch [her] out of [her] pre­sent existence” (109), and in the “La Terrasse” episode her soul had “gone upward, and come in sight of her eternal home” only to be “warned . . . ​away from heaven’s threshold” (165), now she fi­nally passes the threshold by stepping through the “­great portal” between the pensionnat and the city. “I won­der,” Lucy reports, “as I cross the threshold and step on the paved street, won­der at the strange ease with which this prison has been forced” (451). The “land of enchantment” (453) that awaits Lucy again bears traces of the opium eater’s Oriental dreams, particularly in its focus on architecture, pyramids, sphinxes, and brilliant gems (De Quincey, 71–73). This exorbitant scenery uses its own heightened deviation from mundane real­ity to draw attention to Lucy’s fully realized ­mental world and thereby to underscore her growing agency.80 Lucy’s is a strange vision precisely ­because it goes against the realist grain that rendered her ­silent, thus extending the thrust of spectral insight around which her subjectivity continues to coalesce. The fact that Lucy’s imaginative self-­expression takes shape as Orientalist imagery points to Britain’s cultural tendency to appropriate the East as a rite of passage for the Western self. Yet the novel’s increasing foregrounding of exotic ingestion not only exposes such cultural appropriation but also pre­sents that appropriation as a par­tic­u­lar kind of projection in which alterity loses its material specificity to become simply aestheticized difference. Internalizing the foreign as a source of self, Brontë recognizes, means si­mul­ta­neously disavowing and fabricating (by exoticizing) the foreign. In her critical perspective, Brontë in fact goes further than De Quincey does, for she does not deploy ­these insights for any consistently self-­ serving purpose. Rather, she discloses their vari­ous, and frequently conflicting, implications without resolving ­t hose implications in any ideologically coherent manner. Thus, just as she did with the tea-­table tableau, Brontë demystifies the symbolic geography of the “park of Villette” that the previous few paragraphs had built [ 167 ]

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up, offering the history of Labassecour’s revolution and subsequent national founding as a decidedly realist “explanation of the w ­ hole ­great fête” (453). “The won­ders and the symbols of Egypt,” Lucy recognizes, turn out to be so much “timber . . . ​ paint . . . ​and paste-­board” (453), counterfeit accessories supplementing Labassecour’s cultural costume party. Labassecour’s revelry in the “signs and tokens” of its own making recasts specular vision as solipsistic rather than liberating, as “the town, by her own flambeaux, beholds her own splendour” (452). Referring back to Lucy’s feminist self-­regarding at La Terrasse—­“In this mirror I saw myself . . . ​ I looked spectral” (166)—­t his self-­beholding extends from the personal to the national, diagnosing Lucy’s “strange vision of Villette at midnight” as complicit in the visual economy of empire.81 It is well known that Labassecour serves as Brontë’s fictional analogue for Belgium, where she spent two years—­first as a student and then as a teacher. Thus, beneath the enchanting vision of Villette at midnight lies the specific history of Belgium’s revolt against Dutch rule in 1831, as well as Belgium’s ongoing efforts to transition from colony to colonizer ­under King Leopold I. Does Belgium’s recent liberation, as well as the consequences of that liberation, figure Lucy’s ongoing one? Certainly, Labassecour’s festal appropriation of Oriental iconography in the ser­vice of its national identity anticipates Belgium’s more violent imperial plundering overseas, which would ultimately culminate in King Leopold II’s colonization of the Congo in 1886.82 To complicate t­ hings further, Lucy also finds out during this opium-­induced outing to the park that Paul is being sent to “Basseterre, in Guadaloupe,” to serve as steward for Madame Walravens’s “large estate” (461 and 462). As a contested colonial site over which Britain and France repeatedly sparred, Guadeloupe (with its bloody history of annexation, enslavement, and revolt) further underscores not just the vio­lence of imperial conquest but also empire’s ruthless co-­option of the strug­gle for in­de­pen­dence. France’s abolition of slavery ­a fter the French Revolution met with re­sis­tance from the royalists occupying Guadeloupe, who solicited British help to reinstate slavery. Napoleon’s restoration of slavery to the French colonies prompted a slave rebellion that led to a death toll of around ten thousand. Guadeloupe would change hands multiple times before the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna in 1815 definitively recognized French control.83 This violent history is condensed in the text’s brief mention of Paul’s journey, erupting symbolically only with the shipwreck in the novel’s concluding pages. The overdetermined significance of opium, at once a psychoactive substance that shapes Lucy’s (hallucinatory) vision of Villette and a plot device that catalyzes her discovery of Paul’s colonial involvement, thus obscures even as it divulges the truth of Eu­ro­pean imperialism. As Lucy muses ­a fter her return to the pensionnat, [ 168 ]



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“I felt very glad now, that the drug administered in the sweet draught had filled me with a possession which made bed and chamber intolerable. I always, through my w ­ hole life, liked to penetrate to the real truth” (465). The irony, of course, is that the “truth” Lucy refers to ­here concerns Paul’s so-­called engagement to Justine Marie, an engagement that the novel ­will discredit as false. Not only does this undermine the reliability of Lucy’s other revelations, but this latest plot twist also points to the way in which Villette’s double generic register necessarily prevents any definitive identification of “truth.” Indeed, a blunt demystification of Lucy’s “strange vision of Villette at midnight” not only seems ­counter to the novel’s developmental logic, but in fact capitulates to the realist framework that Lucy has consistently shown to render her suffering invisible.84 For this reason, Villette refuses to provide a conventional happy ending for Lucy, despite paving the way for such an ending in having Lucy find out the truth about Paul (that he loves her, not Justine Marie). The famous open-­endedness of Villette’s conclusion does not simply preserve Lucy’s in­de­pen­dence by protecting her from marriage, but also refuses to specify the terms and implications of that in­de­pen­ dence by interweaving Lucy’s professional enterprise with Paul’s prominently colonial one. The text goes so far as to call both Paul (462) and Lucy (487) “stewards.” Repeatedly, the novel suggests that Lucy’s feminist enterprise cannot be separated from the continued imperial exploitation of foreign resources, including not just Eu­rope’s plunder of its colonies but also the Opium Wars that bear on Polly’s tea making and Lucy’s drug-­induced revelations. But although Lucy must perform the very exotic appropriation she has critiqued in order to craft her own agency, the novel’s recourse to exotic ingestion problematizes the cultural hierarchy that mid-­nineteenth-­century Britain commonly assumed. Villette’s vector of ingestion, which supplies a material base that exists in tension with the novel’s symbolic landscape, opens up space for a critical self-­reflexivity that calls into question Victorian Britain’s cultural ideology. In the novel, the bodily influence of opium as a psychoactive drug operates tangentially to its Far Eastern circulations as an imperial commodity. In turn, both ­these material trajectories differ from “the material of t­ hese solemn fragments [in the park of Villette]—­the timber, the paint, and the paste-­board,” since the Labassecourian history that emerges as an “explanation” for the “strange vision of Villette at midnight” implicates yet another imperial context (453 [emphasis added]). Self-­identity is always founded obliquely on an asymmetrical relationship with the cultures that it variously encounters as foreign, yet the precise nature of that relationship cannot be pinned down in the form of any sort of overarching narrative. The decentering of truth that Mary Jacobus has located in Brontë’s novel thus entails a crucially cross-­cultural dimension. The shadowy, shifting nature of [ 169 ]

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Villette’s insights are symptomatic of their cultural obsolescence. In an era of increasingly asymmetrical power relations, a non-­oppressive, even potentially hospitable, intercultural imagination must oscillate between the empirical inquiry into historical encounters and the continuous repre­sen­ta­tion of ­these encounters as stories and “strange visions,” without settling definitively as one or the other. Brontë can re­create cultural hybridity only by turning back the clock, and her self-­ conscious explorations of selfhood and otherness ultimately occur as dreamwork and ahistoricity. Working against the grain of imperial triumph and visual colonization, Brontë’s recognition of cultural interdependence subsists as a privatized psychological drama whose integrity can lie only in its re­sis­tance to full understanding or resolution.

DICKENS, IMPERIAL GREED, AND BRITAIN’S OLD CHINESE DISCOURSE

Dickens—­who, like Brontë, found the G ­ reat Exhibition bewildering rather than orderly—­turns unexpectedly to China as a framework for organ­izing the chaos: “As it is impossible in any allowable space to ‘go through’ the w ­ hole Exhibition, or touch upon a tithe of its Cata­logue, let us suggest as curious subjects of comparison, ­those two countries which display (on the w ­ hole) the greatest degree of pro­gress, and the least—­say E ­ ngland and China. ­England, maintaining commercial intercourse with the w ­ hole world; China, shutting itself up, as far as pos­si­ble, within itself. The true Tory spirit would have made a China of E ­ ngland, if it could. Behold its results in the curious ­little Exhibition now established close beside the ­great one.”85 Suggestively titled “The ­Great Exhibition and the ­Little One,” the article from which the quote above is taken engages in a point-­by-­point contrast between the 1851 ­Great Exhibition and a contemporaneous revival of Dunn’s “Ten Thousand Chinese ­Things,” which Dickens and his coauthor, Richard Horne, call the “­little one.” The article’s overt intention is to exalt British advancement at the expense of China, and scholars have cited this essay as evidence for Dickens’s par­tic­u­lar hostility t­ oward the foreign nation.86 Indeed, the repre­sen­ta­tion of China as an example of “an odd, barbarous, or eccentric nation . . . ​who may seclude itself from the rest of the world, resolved not to move on with it” (356) aligns perfectly with contemporaneous British constructions of China as antiquated and stagnant. While Jesuit missionaries and Enlightenment phi­los­o­phers had celebrated China’s ancient morality, in the second half of the eigh­teenth ­century the symbolic significance of Chinese antiquity started to undergo reevaluation. In his En­glish translation of the Qing novel Haoqiu zhuan, Thomas Percy claims that [ 170 ]



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“the abjectness of [Chinese] genius may easily be accounted for from that servile submission, and dread of novelty, which enslaves the minds of the Chinese, and while it promotes the peace and quiet of their empire, dulls their spirit and cramps their imagination.”87 War­time discourse during the Opium Wars made much of Britain’s naval superiority, centering in par­tic­u­lar on the showdown between the Nemesis (a British warship) and supposedly primitive Chinese junks. By the Victorian era, the idea of China as a moribund empire that had squandered away its past achievements was a commonplace. Thus, John Stuart Mill describes China as a “warning example” of how “a nation of much talent, and, in some re­spects, even wisdom” tragically allowed itself to “become stationary”; how its ­people “have remained so for thousands of years; and if they are ever to be further improved, it must be by foreigners.”88 Certainly Dickens participated in his culture’s construction of China as stationary. But the sense of cultural superiority that “The ­Great Exhibition and the ­Little One” expresses is not as straightforward as it initially reads. Indeed, the authors’ belligerent tone suggests an apprehensiveness directed not so much ­toward China as t­oward their own homespace. They intimated “how impossible” it was for the contents of the ­Great Exhibition “to be thoroughly singled out and examined amidst the crowding masses of men and t­ hings, raw materials and manufactured articles, machines and engines that surround you on ­every side” (357). It is only the presupposition of China as opposed to Britain in ­every regard that helps give form to this other­wise unwieldy mass: any British article that defies categorization or symbolic formulation can be elucidated simply by being held in “comparison” with its Chinese counterpart. China, then, serves as a cognitive aid: the assumption of Chinese difference supplies a ready-­made framework through which one can order the chaos of Britain’s modern material culture.89 Following the binary logic that the passage quoted at the beginning of this section so definitively established, the rest of Dickens’s and Horne’s essay ­settles into the assured rhythm of an itemized comparison and contrast. Repeatedly, the authors investigate a par­t ic­u ­lar ele­ment of the G ­ reat Exhibition and then turn immediately to a corresponding section of the ­Little Exhibition. Dickens’s and Horne’s article provides a particularly clear look at the way Britain’s national identity can be defined only through a visual contrast with an alien culture, although it is precisely such an act of contrast that first constituted the alien culture as such.90 The visual reification of China in the ­Little Exhibition not only reduces the vast Chinese Empire to a stable foil for British technological power, but also concocts that power out of an other­wise disorienting mass of materials. Yet the authors might be more aware of their own ideological method than [ 171 ]

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it initially appears. As Sabine Clemm has pointed out, Dickens frequently displays a recognition of the arbitrariness of En­g lish identity—­perhaps nowhere more clearly than in “Why?,” published in House­hold Words on March 1, 1856.91 If this self-­awareness remains mostly suppressed in “The ­Great Exhibition and the ­Little One,” it makes a much more pronounced mark in an ­earlier article titled “The Chinese Junk.” When in 1848 the Keying, a Chinese junk that some British men had illegally purchased in Hong Kong, fi­nally docked at the East India Docks in London’s Blackwall neighborhood, it attracted significant public interest. The Illustrated London News enthusiastically heralded the arrival of this “first ship constructed by the Chinese which has ever reached Eu­rope, or even rounded the Cape of Good Hope.”92 Dickens’s report on his visit to the junk opens with the by now familiar contrast between British pro­gress and Chinese stagnation: “The shortest road to the Celestial Empire is by the Blackwall railway. . . . ​With ­every carriage that is cast off on the road—at Stepney, Lime­house, Poplar, West India docks—­thousands of miles of space are cast off too. . . . ​Nothing is left but China.”93 It is no coincidence that in this passage, the British visitor travels, while China can only wait to be visited. The docked Keying and the vast Chinese empire’s rhetorical reduction to the extent of that junk are made to suggest both China’s inherent condition of stasis and its complete subjugation by Britain’s allied technologies of ship (the Nemesis), transportation (the railway), and pen (Dickens’s journalism). “Thousands of years have passed away,” Dickens writes, “since the first Chinese junk was constructed on this model; and the last Chinese junk that was ever launched was none the better for that waste and desert of time” (103). A picture of China’s “patient and ingenious, but never advancing art,” the Keying embodied “the doctrine of finality beautifully worked out,” and like the L ­ ittle Exhibition, the junk’s immobility serves a visual and pedagogical purpose, since “this in­ter­ est­ing and remarkable sight” was now “shut up in a corner of a dock near the Whitebait-­house at Blackwall, for the edification of men.” Repeatedly, Britain’s visual reification of China is made into fallacious proof of the Chinese culture’s stagnation, which then provides a counterpoint against which British pro­gress can be mea­sured. This constitutes a distinct legacy of the Opium Wars, one that answered a specific need. As I argued in chapter 5, a victorious Britain avenged itself for having allegedly been called the barbarian eye by recasting the label as a Chinese visual deficiency. Dickens follows this discursive tradition in his par­tic­u­lar attention to the “mimic eye upon [the Keying’s] prow,” indicative of the blindness and misdirection of “the general [Chinese] eye [which] has opened no wider, and seen no further” (104). But Dickens also self-­consciously exposes this imperial method by exaggerating to the point of ludicrousness the equation between the junk and the country, with the jarring juxtaposition of [ 172 ]



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the “Celestial Empire” and the “Blackwall railway” calculated to provoke awe and mockery in equal mea­sures. In addition to parodying this method, however, Dickens also recognizes and underscores its utility for the working out of selfhood. Another way to read the opening of “The Chinese Junk” is as an explicit allegory of the kind of cognitive instrumentalization of China that Dickens performs in “The G ­ reat Exhibition and ­ ittle One”: the alien culture, which one can more easily reify than one’s own, the L becomes a localized point against which the moving confusion of Britain as a nation and a concept can be clarified. The ludicrousness of the opening statement that “the shortest road to the Celestial Empire is by the Blackwall railway” turns out to be more than just for comedic effect; it also acknowledges the ideological expediency of mea­sur­ing and understanding “Stepney, Lime­house, Poplar, West India docks,” all stops along the Blackwall railway, through their contrast with China. What is particularly intriguing about Dickens’s cultural self-­consciousness lies in the connection he makes between the form of China’s othering and the cognitive structure that makes cultural thought pos­si­ble as such. China is coded as “stationary” not only b­ ecause of prevailing Sino-­British relations, but also b­ ecause the gesture of holding something to be stationary is structurally necessary for reflection upon the self. Dickens’s insightfulness on this point makes him particularly conscious of the ideological function that China serves—­which, while helpful for narratives of selfhood, does not come close to any true estimation of the Chinese character. Jonathan Grossman has argued that the passenger transport revolution in the 1820s and the 1830s, beginning with the acceleration of stage coaching and culminating in the birth of the railway, allowed Dickens to conceive of an increasing interconnectedness among “si­mul­ta­neously circulating” individuals both within Britain and internationally.94 This consciousness of cross-­cultural simultaneity implies that while Dickens uses China to work through his sense of his own national identity, he does not presume to make any definitive judgment about China. Certainly, such a perspective would have been out of step with the typical pre­sen­ta­tion of China as a stagnant culture that must be saved from itself through foreign intervention. For Dickens, though, such ste­reo­typical views frequently worked to conceal Britain’s own domestic disorders, so that the uncritical othering of China went hand in hand with the sugarcoating of domestic ills.95 Dickens exposes this ideological work in “The Chinese Junk.” While the article seems initially to turn on the contrast between the primitive Chinese junk and the modern Blackwall railway, Dickens actually undermines this hierarchical binary structure by using the figure of the railway to expose Britain’s cultural scapegoating. The railway’s physical movement stages in real time the act of ignoring unsavory [ 173 ]

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domestic prob­lems by directing one’s critique elsewhere. Thus, traveling by the vaunted rail, one casts off not just “thousands of miles of space” but also the real­ity of domestic suffering—­“backs of squalid h ­ ouses, frowzy pieces of waste ground, narrow courts and streets, swamps, masts of ships, gardens of dock-­weed, and unwholesome l­ittle bowers of scarlet beans”—­until “nothing is left but China” (102). The logical progression of Dickens’s prose ­here suggests that the visual reification of China as other helps obfuscate the evils of domestic poverty. In effect, Dickens identifies a kind of ideological conservatism to which the cognitive structure of cultural comparison easily lends itself, a point that I elaborate on below in my reading of ­Little Dorrit. Dickens’s attitude ­toward such cultural scapegoating explains why cast-­off domestic junk (“junk” in the sense of “discarded items or materials,” the first use of which was recorded in 1836) reappears in displaced form as and on the Chinese junk.96 Instead of “masts of ships” and “unwholesome l­ittle bowers of scarlet beans” ­there are “red rags” tied “upon the mast, rudder, and cable” (102). Indeed, “The Chinese Junk” ends by insisting, with all of the dramatic force of irony, that surely “it is pleasant, coming back from China by the Blackwall railway, to think that WE trust no red rags in storms, and burn no joss-­sticks before idols; that WE never grope our way by the aid of conventional eyes which have no sight in them; and that, in our civilisation, we sacrifice absurd forms to substantial facts” (104). The implication, signaled through the pointed capitalization, is of course that the British do ­t hose very ­t hings. Unlike Mill, who adheres more or less uncritically to the binary distinction between “stationary” China and “improving” Britain, Dickens underscores Britain’s own social stagnation, problematizing the binary by exploding the very cultural difference that he seems to insist on.97 The intentional confusion between supposedly opposing cultures also accounts for the deeply ambivalent, single-­sentence paragraph with which “The Chinese Junk” closes: “­There is ­matter for reflection aboard the Keying to last the voyage home to ­England again” (105). At the literal level, Dickens means that he has acquired enough “­matter for reflection” while “aboard the Keying” to last during his voyage by railway back to ­England. The explicit connection between the Keying and ­England acknowledges the discursive strategy of using one to think about the other, yet the perplexing form of the statement also suggests that the two cannot be so easily distinguished from each other. The sentence’s strategic omission of the Blackwall railway creates a moment of false expectation: the seamless transition from “Keying” to “the voyage home” misleads the reader into thinking that it is the Chinese junk, and not the narrator, that is to embark on the voyage. The journey’s unexpected termination in “­England” rather than China, from which the Keying set sail, then forces a reevaluation of “voyage” as referring to the railway. [ 174 ]



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This dizzying back-­and-­forth not only undermines the distinction between what one calls E ­ ngland and what one calls China, but also diagnoses that disorientation as an effect of the Keying’s syntactical refusal to stay in its place. The grammatical form of the sentence captures, if only for a fleeting moment, the awareness of Chinese movement and, by extension, the artificial objectification of China that the junk represents. The end of “The Chinese Junk” thus leaves us with a startlingly decentering experience that critics have tended to associate with Dickens’s novels rather than his periodical writings. As Dickens puts it in Dombey and Son, the division of the world into hierarchical levels is but a self-­deceiving exercise, for when we “make a weary journey from the high grade to the low,” we “find at last that they lie together, that the two extremes touch, and that our journey’s end is but our starting place.”98 In a novel like ­Little Dorrit, whose satirical force turns on the dramatization of vari­ous forms of social and cultural pretense, the irony that subtly plays through “The Chinese Junk” becomes explicit. What ­Little Dorrit judges to be stationary and outdated is not China but rather the existing state of British discourse on China. The cultural binary that Dickens’s essays interrogate without ever entirely d ­ oing away with collapses in this novel into a relationship of doubling between a material state of imperial Britain and the lies that it has to tell to disguise and thus maintain that state. The multiple resonances of “old” that facilitated Lamb’s cosmopolitan imagination lose their creative possibilities in a world in which the power balance between Britain and China is significantly more asymmetrical.99 Writing in the context of Britain’s increasingly ossified cultural discourse on China, Dickens criticizes the cele­bration of British progressiveness vis-­à-­vis foreign stagnation as an imprisoning discourse that not only traffics in insidious ste­reo­t ypes but, more crucially, distracts attention from social issues at home. In ­Little Dorrit, China represents both a crucial frame of reference and an intentionally displaced one.100 The novel opens with a key character, Arthur Clennam, on his way back from China, where he had spent a formative two de­cades of his life in unwilling ser­vice to the f­ amily business. From offstage, China as a foreign space influences the plot by bequeathing to Arthur a sense of mysterious wrongdoing that he is determined to understand and atone for once back in ­England and that first draws the novel’s titular heroine, Amy Dorrit, into the Clennam f­ amily’s orbit. Wenying Xu first made a case for the importance of this Chinese context to the meaning of the novel, reading Arthur’s guilt as “an internalization of a national guilt” incurred by Britain’s opium trade and arguing that “the narrative of ­Little Dorrit is ordered by concealing the disorders that permeated the Sino-­British relationship.”101 [ 175 ]

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The particulars of the Sino-­British relationship informing ­Little Dorrit are complicated by the novel’s historical timeline. ­Little Dorrit was first serialized in nineteen parts from December 1855 to June 1857, but the narrative is set “thirty years ago” (15). Arthur, whom we first meet in quarantine at Marseilles, tells his fellow traveler Mr. Mea­gles that he is “an En­glishman, who has been more than twenty years in China” (33).102 Thus, Arthur’s years in China are roughly from 1805 to 1825, at the conclusion of which time the Clennam business became “a mere anomaly and incongruity . . . ​out of date and out of purpose” (60). “The track we have kept is not the track of the time; and we have been left far ­behind,” Arthur ­later explains to his ­mother, in an attempt to defend his decision to “abandon the business” and come home (60 and 61). Arthur’s f­ ather, who had gone to China shortly ­a fter Arthur’s birth, worked the business from 1785 to his death in 1825 (62). The major goods that drove Britain’s China trade during this time ­were Chinese tea on the import end, and British woolens, Indian cotton, and (increasingly) Indian opium on the export end. What­ever trade the Clennams specialized in, w ­ hether it be cotton (as Xu suggests), tea, or an assortment of dif­fer­ent goods, “the track of the time” Arthur refers to is clearly opium.103 Tan Chung notes that the East India Com­pany’s “export of Indian opium to China in 1821–1830 nearly tripled the previous rec­ord. . . . ​In 1821, opium overtook tea to become the first commodity of the triangular trade.”104 The outmoded Clennam trade functions as a sort of objective correlative of the psychological decay that permeates the novel and that also connects with the dominant theme of imprisonment.105 Dickens populates ­Little Dorrit with characters trapped in the past, for whom physical confinement serves as the outward index for a more debilitating ­mental stagnation. Mrs. Clennam, whose “world has narrowed to [the] dimensions” of her bedchamber, is as much circumscribed by her “rheumatic affection” (49) as by her half-­decade-­old resentment of her husband’s love affair.106 The “old brick ­house” that she still lives in, “a piece of antiquity” (380) that long ago began to fall apart and is “propped up . . . ​on some half dozen gigantic crutches” (46), proves to be yet another Clennam “House” that has failed to keep the track of time (60). L ­ ittle Dorrit’s f­ather also continues to be haunted by his time in the Marshalsea Prison even ­a fter his physical release, and the novel suggests that it is the psychologically irreconcilable gulf between past and pre­sent that prompts Dorrit’s final descent into death (679). While the “­Little Exhibition” illustrates Chinese “Stoppage” (360), in ­Little Dorrit, stasis and stagnation are psychological conditions that afflict the novel’s British characters. Significantly, this stasis extends to British imaginations of China, embodied most memorably by Arthur’s “old sweetheart” (55), the garrulous Flora Finching.107 Flora’s effusiveness on China makes the character a thematically [ 176 ]



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s­ignificant counterpoint to the novel’s silence on the subject, and the way in which she is presented transforms the novel’s Chinese context. Her old lover and his time in China provide Flora with the two subjects on which she endlessly speculates: “Oh good gracious me I hope you never kept yourself a bachelor so long on my account!” tittered Flora; “but of course you never did why should ­ on’t answer, I d ­ on’t know where I’m r­ unning to, oh do tell me you, pray d something about the Chinese ladies w ­ hether their eyes are r­ eally so long and narrow always putting me in mind of mother-­of-­pearl fish at cards and do they ­really wear tails down their back and plaited too or is it only the men, and when they pull their hair so very tight off their foreheads ­don’t they hurt themselves, and why do they stick ­little bells all over their bridges and ­temples and hats and ­things or ­don’t they ­really do it!” Flora gave him another of her old glances. Instantly she went on again, as if he had spoken in reply for some time. “Then it’s all true and they r­ eally do! good gracious Arthur!—­pray excuse me—­old habit—­Mr Clennam far more proper—­what a country to live in for so long a time, and with so many lanterns and umbrellas too how very dark and wet the climate ­ought to be and no doubt actually is, and the sums of money that must be made by t­hose two trades where every­body carries them and hangs them everywhere, the ­little shoes too and the feet screwed back in infancy is quite surprising, what a traveller you are!” (166–167)

This virtuoso per­for­mance of what Arthur privately considers to be “disjointed volubility” (166) sounds the keynote of Flora’s character. Her overextended syntax marks her as a parodic character: what she says is delegitimized, almost before the fact, by the way she says it. As Tamara Wagner has argued, Flora’s “scatterbrained chinomanie [sic]” embodies an older, Romantic exoticism increasingly at odds with the “commercial rapidity and restrictive red tape” that define “nineteenth-­century references to semicolonial China.”108 Yet while Flora rehashes Orientalist tropes that seem untethered from even the barest claim to fact, her curiosity mirrors the ethnographical obsession with Chinese modes and customs that war­time discourse helped create and sustain.109 Prompted by Arthur’s experience as a “traveller” in China, Flora’s inquisitiveness (“oh do tell me something about the Chinese ladies”) exhibits the kind of empirical epistemology that was increasingly sharpened through the dissemination, in mid-­century writings, of China as an object of firsthand knowledge. The Manchurian queue (“wear tails down their back”), foot binding (“the ­little shoes too and the feet screwed back in infancy”), willow pattern (“­little bells all over their bridges and t­ emples and hats and t­ hings”), and “lanterns” w ­ ere part and parcel of [ 177 ]

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this discourse, and the graphic nature of Flora’s descriptions is of a piece with Britain’s mode of visual objectification. For instance, “The Chinese and Their Peculiarities,” which includes both a discussion of the Chinese diet and an image of Chinese food vendors, begins by examining the physical features of the Chinese, focusing in par­tic­u ­lar on their bound feet: “A broad face, diminutive waist, pale features, and feet small to deformity, constitute female beauty in the eyes of the Chinese. To ensure this last, their feet are confined from tender age in shoes calculated to stop their growth, so that the feet of some ladies only mea­sure three inches from toe to heel.”110 First published in 1869, well a­ fter the conclusion of the Opium Wars, this article was reprinted five years l­ater as “The Chinese” in the ­family periodical Bow Bells.111 Included as a subsection in the regular column “Adventures, National Customs, and Curious Facts,” “The Chinese” is presented as one national specimen among many ­others, sharing space in the column with “How the Greenlanders Dress” and “The African ­Widow” and followingly, quite troublingly, a piece titled “About Rats.” If bound feet recurred in the British imagination as a symbol of China’s depraved sexual politics, the queue played a complementary role, repeatedly “singled out for special mention” as a visual meta­phor for Chinese effeminacy.112 Both “The Chinese From Home” and “Missionary Scenes and Adventures in China” open with the “curious” sight presented by the “Chinaman”—­“sloping eyed, yellow-­complexioned, with a shaved head, and pigtail carefully secured in a twisted knot ­behind.”113 China’s apparent penchant for “lanterns” and “­little bells all over their bridges and ­temples and hats and ­things” also contributes to the image of a country unnaturally consumed by frivolous luxuries. For example, one British writer described the “showy and attractive . . . ​lantern vendors” and “large silken lanterns” he had seen “in Peking,” particularly one that was such “a perfect masterpiece of mechanical skill” that he “regretted very much that, from the frailty and delicacy of its construction, it was impossible to remove . . . ​to ­England.”114 Dickens deployed the same tropes to construct China as a precarious empire on the verge of obsolescence. Thus, in “The G ­ reat Exhibition and the L ­ ittle One,” ­these “laborious” (358) and useless constructions become “signs and tokens” (357) of Chinese “Stoppage,” and China is described as an empire overrun with “pagodas with their turned-up corners and their bells, and the t­ emples and bridges, and the vari­ous teapot works, with few additions, if any, and prob­ably none, all just as they ­were centuries ago, suggesting the idea of the same Emperor having sat upon the same enamelled porcelain throne during the ­whole time” (360). By making Flora a mouthpiece for t­hese ideas, Dickens satirizes the mid-­ century ethnographical impulse as one that is profoundly solipsistic. Flora notably [ 178 ]



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does not wait for Arthur to answer her questions about China: “Instantly she went on again, as if he had spoken in reply for some time.” In an about-­face that his subtly ironic periodical writings have already anticipated, Dickens turns the critique of Chinese stoppage on its head by suggesting that it is British perception that is unreflective of current realities. Tellingly, Flora’s speculations about China unfold in tandem with her “old glances” at Arthur, and her constant “expectation of the time when Clennam would renew his boyhood, and be madly in love with her again” (716 [emphasis added]) is a case of “old habit[s]” ­dying hard. Flora’s singular adherence to days past, despite Arthur’s (rather faithless) protestation that it is “all so long ago and so long concluded” (169), evinces a perversity of w ­ ill strikingly reminiscent of China’s “exercise [of] its f­ree w ­ ill, in the negative form of will-­not” (356) that Dickens and Horne so sharply denounced in “The G ­ reat Exhibition and the L ­ ittle One.” If, in that essay, China had “resolved not to move on with [the rest of the world]” (356), in ­Little Dorrit Flora has “left herself, at eigh­teen years of age, a long way ­behind again; and came to a full stop at last” (169). By representing what is in fact Britain’s current mode of imagining China as an antiquated relic, Dickens suggests that the naive empiricism underpinning such imaginations is no dif­fer­ent from the “fairy-­land” fantasies that Robert Fortune had claimed to be a ­thing of the past.115 In other words, Flora’s fantasy of China pre­sents what Jaffe calls a “framed or marked instance” of what typically appears “unframed and unmarked” in the period’s Chinese discourse, thereby drawing attention to the realist conventions that worked in ­those other writings to produce “realist fantasy: a desire for the real that takes shape as a wish, dream, daydream, and, in its most exemplary form, the realist novel itself.”116 The outmodedness of Flora’s Chinese discourse does not reflect its lack of currency within Britain, but rather indicts con­temporary British discourse itself as out of joint. Flora thus represents Dickens’s strong critique of empire’s epistemological complex, which uses the gesture of empirical realism to mask ­actual geopo­liti­cal realities. Notably, ­Little Dorrit’s composition and serialization coincided with the beginning of the Second Opium War, and if the pro-­war lobby had controlled the discursive terrain of the first Sino-­British conflict with relative ease, the second military engagement would prove much more controversial. Jurisdiction disputes over the Arrow lorcha (a type of Chinese vessel) provided the British merchants, who had been unsuccessfully seeking a way to revise the Treaty of Nanjing, with the casus belli for a second war.117 As J. Y. Wong points out, on this occasion the British press was fairly evenly split between t­hose who excoriated the Chinese infraction and ­those who denounced the cause as a false pretext for war. British defenses of Chinese conduct, which centered on praise for the imperial commissioner Ye Mingchen, [ 179 ]

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partly “reflected mid-­Victorian values of justice and humanity.”118 Periodicals including Punch and the Daily News, which Dickens had founded and edited for a few months in 1846, decried British acting consul Harry Parkes’s false policy and cautioned against entering into another wicked war.119 Across the two Opium Wars, the ever flimsier grounds for military engagement made increasingly clear the gap between Britain’s economic motivations and the cultural narratives that worked to disguise or sugarcoat t­ hose motivations. ­Little Dorrit draws attention to this gap by staging it as a temporal lag, which also explains why the novel is set thirty years before its time of writing. In depicting the outmoded Flora through a perspective that the novel expressly identifies as disenchanted—­Flora, “who had seemed [to Arthur] enchanting in all she said and thought, was [now regarded as] diffuse and silly” (165)—­­Little Dorrit does not do away with realism but rather stakes its claim on a higher-­order realism, one characterized by its recognition of the impossibility of genuine cross-­cultural knowledge in an era of military conflict. Thus Arthur, “who has been more than twenty years in China,” remains to the end ­silent about his experience ­there. Strikingly, the novel reflects Dickens’s pessimism about cross-­cultural knowledge through an ingestion motif. ­Little Dorrit employs the familiar binary between material ingestion and figurative discourse to expose Britain’s exoticization of Chinese difference as an ideological cover-up for its crude acquisitiveness. This provides one way of understanding the meaning of Flora’s voracious appetite. During Arthur’s first visit, the Casbys treat him to a “neatly-­served and well-­ cooked dinner”: ­ ere was mutton, a steak, and an apple-­pie . . . ​a nd the dinner went on Th like a disenchanted feast, as it truly was. Once upon a time Clennam had sat at that t­ able taking no heed of anything but Flora; now the principal ­ ill, that she was very heed he took of Flora was, to observe, against his w fond of porter, that she combined a ­great deal of sherry with sentiment, and that if she w ­ ere a l­ ittle overgrown, it was upon substantial grounds. . . . All through dinner, Flora combined her pre­sent appetite for eating and drinking, with her past appetite for romantic love, in a way that made Clennam afraid to lift his eyes from his plate; since he could not look ­towards her without receiving some glance of mysterious meaning or warning, as if they ­were engaged in a plot. (172–173)

Flora’s physical appetite is meant to diminish the credibility of her romance: the parallel between her “pre­sent appetite for eating and drinking” and “past appetite for romantic love” exposes through pointed contrast the incompatibility of ingestion and romance. The material crudity of food only “disenchant[s].” Unlike in Vathek, no ideological sublimation intervenes ­here to bridge the gap between the [ 180 ]



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material and the ideal. In this way, Flora’s disjointed speech not only reflects a failure of internal logic but also points t­ oward the lack of “substantial grounds” for her romance with Arthur and, according to the analogy that the narrative sets up, her romance with China as well. With the exception of Flora—­a point to which I ­will return—­the characters that ­Little Dorrit singles out for their physical appetites (or lack thereof ) all profit from the monetary exploitation of ­others. The villain Rigaud (alias Blandois), who tries to blackmail Mrs. Clennam, is as greedy for food as he is for money and is chiefly identifiable by “his avaricious manner of collecting all the eatables about him” (374). Casby, Flora’s ­father, also “had always been a mighty eater, and [during that first meal with Arthur] he disposed of an im­mense quantity of solid food with the benignity of a good soul who was feeding some one e­ lse” (173). Casby’s false pretense on this occasion is in general keeping with a self-­serving policy that he hides ­under an appearance of benevolence, a fiction that he shrewdly maintains by delegating the mean work of extortion to the “snorting” Pancks with the “dirty hands” and “rusty iron-­grey pockets” (170). A hearty appetite, then, is associated not just with economic greed but also with its disguise, and it is telling that the financier Merdle, “simply the greatest Forger and the greatest Thief that ever cheated the gallows” (743), suffers from “some deep-­seated recondite complaint” (272) that the novel ­later identifies as “indigest[ion]” (589).120 Increasingly incapable of keeping up appearances and sinking beneath the weight of his fraud, Merdle eventually commits suicide. Meanwhile, at ease with his dealings, Casby enjoys a “quiet digestion” within the “Patriarchal ­house­hold” (172).121 Merdle’s indigestion indexes a failure of sublimation dif­fer­ent from what we have seen with Flora. Her ability to “[combine] her pre­sent appetite for eating and drinking, with her past appetite for romantic love” seems ridicu­lous only ­because of the critical form of Dickens’s pre­sen­ta­tion. In ­actual fact, Flora’s easy transition between greed and romance spotlights their ideological alliance, revealing the existence of a well-­oiled imperial machine churning out discursive fictions to mask its acquisitiveness. What Flora eats is as significant as how she eats. The text repeatedly shows her to be consuming tea tinctured with “some brown liquid that smelt like brandy” and that had been “prescribed by her medical man” (302 and 303). The contemporaneous practice of prescribing opiates for pain and other ner­vous conditions suggests that Flora is ingesting laudanum.122 Unlike Lucy’s exotic ingestion in Villette, laudanum-­laced tea ­here is returned to its quotidian Victorian context. What Flora calls “magic in a pint b­ ottle” (304)—in a suggestive reference to De Quincey’s description of opium as “portable ecstasies . . . ​corked up in a pint ­bottle” (39)—­brings her “not ecstasy but . . . ​comfort” (304), indicating a cultural [ 181 ]

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ease with empire that is continuous with exotic imaginations of China. The nonchalance surrounding the ingestion of both tea and opium indicates an assured British identity that can disavow any cross-­cultural influence, and the cavalier appropriation of foreign resources and denial of attendant vio­lence also facilitates the kind of uncritical, detached cultural othering that Flora performs so ably. In contrast, Merdle provides a local instance of the imperial machine’s breaking down. As a global cap­i­tal­ist whose “daily occupation [consists] of causing the British name to be more and more respected in all parts of the civilised globe, capable of the appreciation of world-­wide commercial enterprise and gigantic combinations of skill and capital” (416–417), Merdle’s work expresses in quin­tes­sen­ tial form the kind of imperial logic that mystifies violent state making as the harmonious transfer and accumulation of capital—­not unlike how national honor served as a pretext for the two Opium Wars that ­were in ­actual fact motivated by the speculative logic of capital.123 In Dickens’s novel, however, the imperial work that Merdle carries out fails to be properly discharged as sanitized, palatable cultural discourse. In contrast to Flora, therefore, Merdle eats and speaks l­ittle, even making the “Chief Butler, the Avenging-­Spirit of [his] life” (582), his “Nemesis” (596). Strikingly, the butler’s menace manifests itself as an ocular threat: his “function” of “looking at the com­ pany as they entered” (587) disconcerts every­one who comes into his presence, and “his eye was a basilisk to Mr Merdle” (582).124 Sustaining no fantasy of Eastern plenitude, the butler’s exotic dinners—­“the rarest dishes, sumptuously cooked and sumptuously served; the choicest fruits; the most exquisite wines; marvels of workmanship in gold and silver, china and glass”—­only nauseate Merdle, “who took his usual poor eigh­teenthpennyworth of food, in his usual indigestive way, and had as ­little to say for himself as ever a wonderful man had” (589 [emphasis added]). Unlike Flora, who copiously and comfortably consumes laudanum without suffering harm, Merdle’s drug ingestion marks the prelude to his death: the anodyne that eases his pain also facilitates his final ruin. The “empty laudanum-­bottle” (738) at the scene of his suicide thus foreshadows an empire that, having consumed more than it can digest, is fi­nally collapsing u ­ nder the glut of its global pickings. More than just the spectacle of unmasked greed that has lost the sugarcoating of a par­tic­u­lar kind of cultural discourse, Merdle’s downfall also sounds Dickens’s warning that profits reaped in this manner cannot be sustainable in the long run. Dickens’s concern, as “The Chinese Junk” makes clear, stems from his sense of the ideological alliance between cultural othering and domestic mismanagement. His disillusionment with Britain’s protracted engagement in the Crimean War (1853–1856) certainly s­ haped his distrust of international engagements and [ 182 ]



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their positioning in popu­lar discourse.125 Public focus on the Crimean campaign, for instance, drew attention away from pressing domestic issues such as the cholera outbreak in 1854.126 Tellingly, Merdle’s global enterprise results in the financial ruination of his countrymen and ­women at home. Arthur—­who invested his new firm’s money with Merdle—­seems for a dismal period to have bankrupted his business partner Daniel Doyce, the novel’s crucial figure of British ingenuity who combines good sense with hard work (206–207). The inception of this disastrous event is given in chapter 13 of volume 2, suggestively titled “The Pro­gress of an Epidemic” (597). Incidentally, Dickens’s audience would be reading this in January 1857, the same time when the British press was debating the Arrow lorcha controversy. As a narrative event, this “epidemic” formally mirrors, yet significantly differs from, the “plague” that caused Arthur and the Mea­gleses to be quarantined at the beginning of the novel. That was a material infection “from the East,” which Arthur called “the country of the plague” (30); this is a discursive “fever” (598) and is notably bound up with the collusive profiteering of local financial and governmental interests. Given the homegrown nature of this epidemic, it is hardly a surprise that the novel identifies Pancks, who “began to give out the dangerous infection with which he was laden” (609), as a disease carrier.127 The novel’s social pretenders (Casby and Dorrit) embody the benignly “patriarchal” (158) face and “genteel fiction” (89) of British imperialism, and Casby’s ­daughter, Flora, supplies that imperial drive with its target, a largely in­ven­ted Chinese other waiting to receive the blessings of Eu­ro­pean modernization. It is only the grubby Pancks who engages in and makes vis­i­ble the real work of empire. Indeed, the telling comparison of Pancks to a “coaly steam-­tug” (164) alludes to the importance of steamers both for the East India Com­pany and during the First Opium War, hinting at the global scope of an employment that goes beyond Pancks’s rent collection in Bleeding Heart Yard.128 If in a ­later novel like The Mystery of Edwin Drood the threat of death coalesces around “peculiarly-­looking pipe[s]” filled “not with tobacco,” in ­Little Dorrit the “Eastern pipe[s]” (608) that Clennam produces for himself and Pancks as they discuss the Merdle investment are precisely not the agents of contamination.129 The dangers of empire do not come from some stable outside but are the exhaust fumes of imperial power. The victims are not just a Chinese ­people physically oppressed and discursively ste­reo­t yped but, more insidiously for Dickens, the honest En­glish workers who buy into the speculations—­both financial and imaginative—of empire. The specifically discursive nature of this “rife and potent” (598) fever also connects with Dickens’s critique of the spuriousness of cultural discourse, particularly [ 183 ]

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the social malignity of the on dit in perpetuating illusions that obscure the true state of t­hings. Bleeding Heart Yard, the victim in the grip of the epidemic, is crucially a working-­class community whose members also suffer from xenophobia. As Amanda Anderson has observed, Dickens remains critical of the “vulgar nationalism” that this community displays in its treatment of the Italian John Baptist Cavelletto.130 The “Bleeding Hearts,” Dickens writes in ­Little Dorrit, “had a notion that it was a sort of Divine visitation upon a foreigner that he was not an En­g lishman. . . . ​In this belief, to be sure, they had long been carefully trained by the Barnacles and Stiltstalkings” (322). ­Here, again, is Dickens’s clear denunciation of an imperial ideology that scapegoats foreigners to both justify global exploitation and displace feelings of working-­class disenfranchisement. Anderson points out that Dickens’s critique of “nationalism and provinciality . . . ​keep[s] [­Little Dorrit], in a deep sense, productively cosmopolitan.”131 In the case of China, though, this is a cosmopolitanism by negation, as Dickens remains pessimistic about the possibility of genuine intercultural knowledge during the period between the two Opium Wars.132 The cultural binary that ­Little Dorrit initially sets up—­the East as infection and Britain as pure—­are dismantled almost immediately, but it is only in the course of the novel that we see this dismantling as more than a gesture t­ oward universalism. Rather, Dickens replaces binaries with doubles (Casby and Pancks, Flora and Merdle, and Flora and Arthur), thereby exposing constructions of the East as cultural fictions that disguise the real­ity of economic rapacity. While ­Little Dorrit critiques as outdated the kind of empirical exoticization of China that Flora performs, the novel’s inability to offer ­viable alternatives indexes the ­actual obsolescence of hybridity and hospitality as modes of cross-­cultural encounter. In the midst of the Opium Wars, with the hardening of British perspectives on China, the possibilities for intercultural imagination that grew out of exotic consumerism became increasingly l­ imited. Exotic ingestion once provided the site for an interrogation of the narratives of selfhood and otherness, but by the second half of the nineteenth ­century even a self-­conscious account of that ingestion could reimagine cross-­cultural relations only by conjuring up a bygone era. In Villette, this temporal disjunction consigns the cross-­cultural account to the realm of romance and dreamwork, whose re­sis­tance to realism at once makes and undoes its legitimacy. In contrast, Dickens’s response is to diagnose domestic ills while staying s­ ilent about their implications for cross-­cultural encounters. This impoverished imagination explains why Dickens’s self-­reflexive Orientalism comes so close to a ste­reo­t ypical British understanding of Chineseness. A comparison between Lamb’s and Dickens’s discourses on “oldness” helps underscore this historical development. Both Elia and Arthur trivialize the [ 184 ]



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memories of their female interlocutors as “old foolish dreams,” but while Bridget’s nostalgia provides Lamb with a material ground for the re-­imagination of “oldness,” Flora’s wistfulness is allowed to be nothing but “a caricature of her girlish manner” (165)—in other words, a debased repetition that offers no new insight.133 As I have suggested throughout this book, more than just the cultural expression of global economic transactions, exotic consumerism represents the stories that par­tic­ u­lar consumer communities tell themselves concerning their identity in relation to the broader, and novel, world beyond. Exotic ingestion, which involves the intimate ground of the body, materializes that identity and thus heightens the potency of such cultural narratives. By endowing the china teacup and the Hyson it contains with an irreducible somatic influence, Lamb creatively engages the place of the exotic Chinese commodity in British society to imagine a hybrid cultural identity that affirms the real­ity of cross-­cultural exchange. For Dickens, however, the desiccated state of British discourse on China permits no creative interpretation. Flora’s hearty appetite during what Arthur calls “a disenchanted feast” does not influence that discourse in any substantial way, for ingestion functions as a crudely material affair that has no symbolic power over the constitution or transformation of subjectivity. In ­Little Dorrit, the Chinese commodity can exist only as a British invention. Thus, Flora herself becomes the china that is too inelastic and brittle to sustain change: “Clennam’s eyes no sooner fell upon the object of his old passion, than it shivered and broke to pieces” (164 [emphasis added]). Repeating the misogynistic equation between female superficiality and frail china so prevalent in the eigh­teenth ­century, ­here Dickens scapegoats the w ­ oman not to censure her improper consumption of exotic t­ hings, but rather to identify that consumption as a vacuous projection. The figuration of the garrulous Flora as brittle porcelain reflects not just on the status of the material commodity, but also on the narratives of self and other that that commodity has hitherto made pos­si­ble. As military conflict supplanted exotic consumerism to become the most con­spic­u­ous form of intercultural contact, Lamb’s old china turns brittle and shatters, indexing the wearing out of one cultural mode of imagining China.

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But as we come from the East, and as the East is the country of the plague . . . —­Charles Dickens, ­Little Dorrit Never in all my travels have I witnessed a more awful, loathsome, disgusting scene than that which I witnessed in Canton city. . . . ​­ There w ­ ere ­whole rows of sucking pigs, smoking and savoury; t­ here w ­ ere roast and stewed rabbits, and one ­little animal which quite upset all my calculations. I examined it closely. Th ­ ere was no ­mistake; it was a rat. I examined more minutely the rabbits. I found them to be cats. I examined more minutely the sucking pigs. Alas! they ­were but dogs. It is indeed too true. Upon such diet do the poorer classes in China live. —[P. G. L.], A Reminiscence of Canton. June, 1859 I’d just like to ask the Chinese for a formal apology. This coronavirus originated in China, and I have not heard one word from the Chinese. . . . ​ [It started in China b]ecause they have ­these markets where t­ hey’re eating raw bats and snakes. They are very hungry p ­ eople. China’s communist government cannot feed the p ­ eople. —­Quoted in Victor Garcia, “Jesse Watters Demands Apology from China Over Coronavirus Outbreak”

B

Y T H E S EC O N D H A L F O F the nineteenth ­century, Britain’s perception of the East as “the country of the plague” had become rife enough that it would amount to its own kind of plague, as Dickens incisively diagnosed in ­Little Dorrit.1 The novel’s spotlight on the connections between contagion, ingestion, and racism would unfortunately remain relevant even in our own time, as we enter yet another year of a global pandemic that has closed national borders, fueled racist

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imaginations, and stirred up anti-­A sian vio­lence.2 The coronavirus now known as COVID-19 was first identified in Wuhan, China, though the precise source of the outbreak remains debatable. As the virus spread throughout the world, it presented not only a global health crisis but also a racial one, sparking a return to the rhe­toric of the Orient as a diseased space that could threaten the moral integrity of Euro-­A merican identity.3 Donald Trump, who was president of the United States during the first year of the pandemic, repeatedly called COVID-19 the “Chinese virus,” stoking the fear of an insidiously “invisible e­ nemy” that had infiltrated the pristine home space to corrupt it from within.4 The racist discourse about COVID-19 replicates xenophobic descriptions of China’s “loathsome, disgusting” diet in the second half of the nineteenth ­century, as a comparative analy­sis of the epigraphs to this afterword reveals.5 The claim by Jesse Watters, a Fox News commentator, that the coronavirus “originated in China. . . . ​[T]hey have ­these markets where t­ hey’re eating raw bats and snakes” replays, beat for beat, the fascinated horror with which texts like A Reminiscence of Canton dwelled on the Chinese market and its rats, cats, and dogs.6 In constructing and then scapegoating a grotesque Chinese taste, Watters attaches symbolic significance to the coronavirus by reading a physical phenomenon as a cultural one, indicting China as a source of infection in the same way that the East became “the country of the plague” (as Dickens put it) in nineteenth-­century British discourse. Watters’s rhe­toric is just one example of a widespread cultural panic that consolidated in both Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca around the video of a Chinese ­woman drinking bat soup, which offered evidence of a regressive consumer taste whose links to disease had supposedly scientific support in a host of studies that found a bat origin for COVID-19.7 The only prob­lem, of course, was that the video was shot in the Pacific island of Palau, not in China, and featured a travel host who was sampling local cuisine, not unlike the kind of food adventuring regularly shown on American travel shows that cater to Western viewers’ appetite for exotic places and diets.8 While the myth of the video’s origins was soon debunked, Chinese bat soup persisted as a viral racist meme, spotlighting the fear of not just an infectious virus from China but also of the infectiousness of Chineseness itself. “China,” a Wall Street Journal opinion piece proclaimed, “is the real sick man of Asia.”9 The construction of Chinese taste as not just degenerate but also threateningly infectious repeats the “Yellow Peril” trope that emerged in Euro-­A merican consciousness when a Chinese presence became prominent in both Britain and the United States during the last third of the nineteenth c­ entury.10 Ross Forman points out that the addition of Chinese treaty ports and Britain’s expanded [ 187 ]

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control over Hong Kong at the end of the Second Opium War, coupled with the opening of the Suez Canal, launched the first significant wave of immigration to the imperial center. Britain’s Chinese community, made up mostly of sailors and shop­keep­ers, settled in the Lime­house district of East London.11 They w ­ ere seen as cultural strangers who threatened the heart of empire, bringing with them a depraved taste that would not remain safely confined within the bound­aries of page and glass but instead infiltrated the material spaces of Britain to irrevocably corrupt white bodies.12 Opium provided the chief means of contamination, and the opium den, endlessly disseminated in Victorian novels and periodicals, offered a focal point for articulating the fear of a degenerate Chineseness.13 The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), for instance, insistently links the En­glishman John Jasper’s opium habit to his suspected murder of his nephew. Jasper’s drug-­induced fantasies in the sinister East London opium den that he frequents serve as trial run for his eventual murderous deed: “Well; I have told you. I did it, h ­ ere, hundreds of thousands of times. What do I say? I did it millions and billions of times. I did it so often, and through such vast expanses of time, that when it was ­really done, it seemed not worth the ­doing, it was done so soon.”14 What, exactly, did Jasper do? The ambiguity of “it” blurs the distinction between ­doing drugs and ­doing murder, reflecting opium’s increasing stigmatization alongside its formalization in medico-­legal discourse.15 Jasper’s deed highlights the racist logic of such stigmatization. The novel’s opening pages established opium’s power of bodily transmogrification. We are told that Princess Puffer, the den keeper, has “opium-­smoked herself into a strange likeness of the Chinaman,” whose “form of cheek, eye, and ­temple, and his color, are repeated in her” (8). Soon it would transform the En­g lishman into the kind of person who is capable of murder. For many critics, the narcotic potency in Edwin Drood reflects the paranoia created by Britain’s guilty conscience.16 Cognizant of its own role in abetting Chinese drug addiction, Britain feared reverse colonization as a retributive justice that it recognized it deserved.17 Yet t­ hese critical accounts tend also to name Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an En­glish Opium-Eater in the same manner, reading that ­earlier text as expressing a similar imperial anxiety about foreign infection.18 Certainly, stylistic affinities connect the two works. Jasper’s compulsive reenactment of the unspeakable deed through “vast expanses of time” echoes the dilation of time and space in De Quincey’s opium dream scenery: “Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time.”19 [ 188 ]

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As I have argued, however, the amplification of space and time that De Quincey confesses himself to be so threatened by helps create the opium eater’s deep interiority. In contrast, in Edwin Drood the suggestion of a­ ctual murder—­a violent annihilation of the subject—­prevents such a symbolic use of opium as material for selfhood. Opium’s material effects are enigmatically anchored, but anchored nevertheless, by an empirical referent: Drood’s disappearance and probable death. Though unfinished, the novel’s detective fiction conventions establish a narrative drive t­oward formal resolution, where morality would likely be restored through the exposure of Jasper’s villainy and his expulsion from the community. Thus, while opium ingestion helps carve out De Quincey’s imperial subjectivity, in Edwin Drood it is named as a source of unequivocal evil that must be flushed out. The Orient in Dickens’s last novel exerts a malignancy that is not merely confined to the psychological realm. Its influence, disseminated through opium smoke and materialized as literal death, locates the Orient in a social realm whose violent disruption codes the presence of that Orient as real and ­really other. What is of special note is that Oriental infection in Edwin Drood occurs not just orally, but visually as well. The Chineseness that Princess Puffer catches from opium is passed on to Jasper by means of the ocular: “As he watches the spasmodic shoots and darts that break out of her face and limbs, like fitful lightning out of a dark sky, some contagion in them seizes upon him” (10 [emphasis added]). As Elizabeth Chang has pointed out, “Drood ’s opium den offers a prime example of practices of looking understood to be Chinese in origin.”20 In turn, it is the power of the eye that Jasper holds over Rosa Bud, who confesses to Helena Landless that “he has made a slave of me with his looks” (70). This visual axis becomes a way for the novel to separate culturally sanitizable forms of exotic ingestion from ­those that are irrecuperably other. While Miriam O’Kane Mara has read t­ hese dif­fer­ent forms of exotic ingestion—­Rosa’s taste for Turkish sweetmeats, the Crisparkles’ de­ c adently stocked cabinet, and the “enchanted repast” (241) that Tartar lays out for Rosa—as varying degrees of the same consumer appetite, I argue that their visual logic sets them apart from opium smoking.21 The orderly display of the Crisparkles’ cabinet reins in the potential threat posed by its contents.22 Along the same logic, Rosa’s evolution—­from one who “partake[s] of [the Lumps-­of-­Delight] with g­ reat zest” (30) to one who delights in Tartar’s “dazzling enchanted repast” not for its taste, but as a visual sign of his excellence—­showcases her improved ability to regulate her appetite. Thus, on the night before her visit to Tartar’s place, which the text describes as “the neatest, the cleanest, and the best-­ordered chambers ever seen” (236), Rosa refuses her guardian’s offer of “a nice ­jumble of all meals” (224) and chooses instead to “only [ 189 ]

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take a cup of tea” (225). In contrast, Jasper’s stare remains unruly, a sign of his capitulation to the Oriental(ized) drug. This interplay between the oral and the ocular locates Edwin Drood as a post–­ Great Exhibition novel, for the narrative registers Oriental infection as a simultaneous violation of visual law. Refusing to stay contained in scenes of Chinese drug addiction set forth by William Langdon and ­others, the “languid” bodies of opium smokers have instead migrated into British urban space.23 Unlike e­ arlier texts such as De Quincey’s Confessions of an En­glish Opium-­Eater, exotic ingestion in Edwin Drood necessarily registers as contamination when it transgresses visually established bound­aries between selfhood and otherness. While the novel’s aborted form prevents any definitive interpretation, its resolution would likely have occurred as a reestablishment of visual propriety, which legitimizes certain modes of exotic ingestion while criminalizing o­thers. This qualitative distinction imbues par­ tic­ u­ lar exotic ingestants with a kind of material real­ity, preventing the sort of self-­reflexive Orientalism that spotlights the gap between trope and t­hing. The harmless “Eastern pipe[s]” (608) in ­Little Dorrit are resolutely fatal h ­ ere, and contagion takes a corporeal, not discursive, form. I have strived to demonstrate the significantly dif­fer­ent inflections of exotic ingestion in Confessions of an En­glish Opium-­Eater and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, despite the two texts’ stylistic affinities that have led critics to read them as versions of a similar cultural panic, directed against the Orient in general and China in par­ tic­u­lar. Writing in the 1820s, De Quincey wrestles with Britain’s dependence on Chinese trade by turning that dependence into a foundation of imperial identity. At the same time, the trajectory of appropriation that Confessions traces—in contrast, say, to Oliver Goldsmith’s strategy of disavowal in The Citizen of the World—­also signals China’s gradual shift in the cultural imaginary as Britain increasingly fired its own porcelain and farmed its own tea. By 1870, a de­cade ­a fter Anglo-­French forces burned down the Qing emperor’s Summer Palace and decisively reordered Eu­ro­pean relations with China, the prob­lem of such cultural and economic dependence had become more or less moot. Instead, in Edwin Drood, Dickens grapples with the postwar racialization of Chineseness and the attendant fear of contamination, as well as its implications for the British at home who variously imagine themselves as perpetrators or victims in this transnational world order. Thus, while the general language of contamination spotlights the way in which both Dickens and De Quincey negotiate the threat of bodily breaching in thinking through the coherence of cultural categories, it also obscures impor­tant historical nuances and authorial idiosyncrasies. Moreover, it fails to capture the myriad creative ways in which such a threat can be disavowed, exploited, or even self-­reflexively criticized. [ 190 ]

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The deluge of Oriental infection narratives that occurred when “Oriental London” became a distinct cultural prob­lem requiring imaginative negotiation and resolution has misled us into retroactively interpreting ­earlier texts according to what is in fact a late-­nineteenth-­century phenomenon.24 One of the key objectives of this book is to highlight the discursive flexibility of exotic ingestion as a figure for cross-­cultural imagination. As an Orientalist trope, exotic ingestion does not only invoke the threat of contamination. Nor, to swing to the other extreme, does it simply facilitate the uncritical appropriation of exotic material for the consolidation of national identity, which critics usually argue to be the case when they focus on tea instead of opium. Instead, as I have suggested, the linguistic repre­sen­ta­tion of material ingestants can activate a discursive self-­reflexivity that does not just assume and perpetuate cultural binaries, but instead thinks critically through them. Responding to the pervasive exotic consumerism of the late eigh­teenth ­century, a socioeconomic phenomenon that is itself symptomatic of the widespread desire for unknown worlds and novel experiences, authors like Goldsmith and William Beckford analyze how exotic eating functions (or fails to function) as a material counterpoint to exotic consumerism. Th ­ ese authors show their sensitivity to the ways in which consuming exotic commodities entails a solipsistic projection of one’s preconceived ideas and biases on a foreign culture. With the growing permeability of national bound­aries across the turn of the nineteenth c­ entury, writers respond to the circulation of foreign commodities and persons e­ ither by interrogating the real­ity of a stable cultural identity, as in Thomas Moore and Walter Scott, or by underscoring its cross-­cultural hybridity, as in De Quincey and Charles Lamb. By paying attention to creative adaptations and explorations of what seemed initially to be a hegemonic formula, we can also see how the critique of national repre­sen­ta­tions of cultural otherness allows marginalized authors, such as Moore and Charlotte Brontë, to carve out space for their own subjectivities. I do not mean to suggest that narratives of cultural contamination are few and far between before the late nineteenth ­century. Rather, they frequently provide the baseline upon which more self-­critical narratives reflect and innovate. Tea, for instance, represented poison and universal infection to a significant segment of eighteenth-­century British society, but tea’s trajectory from a pernicious beverage to an icon of En­glishness in the course of the nineteenth ­century allows De Quincey, Lamb, and Brontë to acknowledge and reimagine Britain’s cross-­cultural influences and investments. Thus, while De Quincey and Lamb both engage with the history of tea’s rising consumption and increasing domestication in Britain, De Quincey coordinates tea with opium to convert the foreign heart of En­glishness into the ground of its distinctive imperial identity, while Lamb mocks the rhe­ toric of “pure [national] tea” not to shore up imperial sovereignty but to affirm an [ 191 ]

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ongoing cross-­cultural relationship.25 ­These dif­fer­ent figurations of tea underscore the gap between the material history of an ingestant and its symbolic repre­sen­ta­ tion. Taking this gap seriously means, on the one hand, to maintain the importance of commodity exchange and circulation as a crucial interpretive context and, on the other hand, to examine how literary scenes of exotic ingestion construe or clarify the significance of that commodity in a variety of ways. Furthermore, exotic ingestion takes on distinctive signification in lit­er­a­ture at the level of both content and form. Eating’s explicit thematization allows Goldsmith and Dickens to examine how the self relates (or fails to relate) to the cultural other through exotic consumerism. Brontë allegorizes ingestion to consolidate her feminist identity in opposition to patriarchal despotism, which tends to exert itself through a visual, and decidedly realist, regime that assumes certain imperialistic narratives of referential objectivity. Fi­nally, the formal sequencing of multiple scenes of ingestion—in Lalla Rookh and The Talisman most prominently, but also to a certain extent in Villette—­dramatizes how the cultural self as an autonomous entity came about in the first place, as well as the functional role that the other played in that pro­cess. ­These dif­fer­ent figurations and the plurality of interpretive horizons that they open up testify to the fact that exotic ingestion is a particularly capacious and multivocal site for cross-­cultural imagination. By focusing on exotic ingestion as a distinctive Orientalist trope, I have sought to expand our understanding of Orientalism as a cultural discourse and thus to avoid what Srinivas Aravamudan has called “the worst excesses of the national lit­er­a­ture paradigm,” according to which Britain can define itself only in binary opposition to a cultural other that it seeks to manage and dominate.26 More importantly, I suggest that exotic ingestion holds resources for alternative, more self-­reflexive, ways of conceiving otherness. In our own moment, the racist proliferation of the bat soup video has generated its fair share of parodies, including “The Bat Soup Song” posted on YouTube by the Mechanic Shark Channel.27 The video begins with the creators considering a number of existing popu­lar tunes and eventually deciding to use Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” as the melody for their own lyr­ics. The lyrical narrative, told from a first-­person point of view, follows a Western traveler who goes to Wuhan, drinks bat soup, contracts COVID-19, and brings it back to the Euro-­ American world, where the virus kills ­people and sparks panic buying, leading to tussles over toilet paper. Crucially, the video features a number of intentional changes to the pandemic narrative. First, Patient zero is a Westerner, for whose face the song creators used a stock photo of a Eu­ro­pean model famous in meme culture for its seemingly fake smile.28 Second, the taste prob­lem it foregrounds is created not by unciv[ 192 ]

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ilized Eastern eating but by Western food adventuring, as it is presumably this traveler’s ingestion of bat soup in Wuhan that has, as he laments at the end of the song, “doomed the ­whole world.”29 Third, while the recoil against eating bats has been weaponized for racial othering and discrimination (eating bats is disgusting; ergo, the Chinese are disgusting), h ­ ere that affect of disgust traces a straight line from the protagonist’s consumption habits to his upset stomach and then to the need for toilet paper.30 Not only is the critique of a depraved taste redirected away from China and t­oward the West, but the video also becomes a critique of self-­ inflicted pain: you eat the bat, you get sick, it comes out, and you fight for toilet paper to clean yourself up. Exotic ingestion, which dramatizes the fear of contact with a contagious Chineseness, is conjured up in this video only to be collapsed. Given that the bat soup link to the pandemic has been debunked, the illness depicted in the video allegorizes the pathology of Western ignorance and perpetuation of untruths, which are of a piece with its panic buying and refusal to socially distance (“I hear the outcry / ‘I w ­ on’t stay at home!’ / Go to the bar, / Then to the graveyard, / And I think to myself, / What a tasty bat soup.”) Bat soup’s connection to a material Chineseness is exposed as fiction, no more concrete than the traveler’s solipsistic imaginings (“I see . . . ​/ I think to myself . . .”). In this regard, the choice of ­music taps into the satirical undercurrent of “What a Wonderful World,” a feel-­good song produced in the midst of racial segregation whose intense focus on the first-­person point of view underscores the profound gap between sentimental imagination and harsh real­ity. Furthermore, the video parody’s prominently recombinational quality—­w ith its con­spic­u­ous juxtaposition of existing ­music, multimedia clips, stock photography, and news headlines—­emphasizes the constructed nature of its cultural narrative and pre­ sents a metatextual diagnosis of con­temporary alterist discourse as invention and reinterpretation. As in ­Little Dorrit, and dif­fer­ent from Edwin Drood, what is infectious and kills is not just the virus but also the consumption and dissemination of viral cultural falsehoods. The exotic ingestion motif, I have suggested, spotlights the gap between ­things and words to unleash a plurality of meanings that can complicate and even transform normative expressions of power. The bat soup video plays on this gap, juxtaposing the gross materiality of the bat with its virtual cut, copy, and paste technologies to expose the insubstantiality of racist COVID-19 discourse. In the twenty-­first c­ entury, the genre of remixing, which both relies on and exposes the ideologies of preexisting cultural ele­ments, provides particularly rich opportunities for such self-­reflexivity, yet this self-­reflexivity is not l­imited to our postmodern moment.31 It can be traced back to an ­earlier time, and it was conspicuously [ 193 ]

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displayed during an age of imperial expansion when self-­narrativization had to proceed through rapidly shifting encounters with global ­others. The history of racialization that we write must attend to ­these moments of creative subversion and even transformation, not only ­because they pre­sent opportunities for retooling hegemonic discourse and setting it down a dif­fer­ent path but also b­ ecause they reveal the extent to which subversiveness can be insidiously appropriated to create a more robust imperial subjectivity. The authors I have discussed in this book offer historicized insights into how the restructuring of power dynamics could have occurred, as well as why and where it did or did not occur. Sometimes, the self-­reflexive exploration of language’s ideological functions created moments of possibility that w ­ ere subsequently shut down. At other times, taking the language of difference to its limits ruptured it, offering ways of encountering and imagining difference differently.

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This book, many years in the making, would not have been pos­si­ble without the support of mentors, colleagues, friends, and f­ amily members. I am grateful for the opportunity to thank them ­here. My dissertation advisers at Boston College shepherded this work into existence. Their generative questions and insightful feedback clarified my ideas and spurred new lines of inquiry. Alan Richardson was a staunch advocate for the proj­ect from its earliest stages, believing in it even when I did not. He and Maia McAleavey and James Najarian offered tireless guidance on the vari­ous drafts of this manuscript, making each version better than the last. Seminars and conversations with Beth Kowaleski Wallace, Judith Wilt, and Kevin Ohi provided crucial intellectual foundation for this proj­ect. Their generous mentorship ­shaped it, and me, in enduring ways. I am more grateful than I can say for Judith’s care beyond duty. She coaches me in scholarship as in life, and I thank her for giving me not just her guidance but also her friendship. My colleagues at Saint Mary’s College of California provided a welcoming home for the completion of this book. I am thankful to Lisa Manter for many ­things, not least of which is her encouraging me to write for a ­whole range of readers I had not even dared imagine. Her witty insights and unflagging support ­shaped this work in ways that go beyond content. Special thanks also go to Sunayani Bhattacharya for her inspiration and companionship and Gina Kessler Lee for helping me navigate library databases. Elisa Findlay Herrera, Makiko Imamura, Emily Klein, Kathryn Koo, Hilda Ma, Molly Metherd, Aeleah Soine, Elena Songster, and Meghan Sweeney provided advice and friendship that sustained my writing in more ways than they know. This proj­ect has been supported by multiple institutions. I am grateful for a dissertation fellowship from Boston College and the two provost’s grants from Saint Mary’s College of California, which gave me time to complete the book. ­Earlier and partial versions of chapter 3 appeared as “Thomas Moore’s Confectionary Orientalism,” in SEL Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture 1500–1900 59, no. 4 (Autumn 2019): 763–785, and as “Spelling the Orient,” in Keats-­Shelley Journal 68 (2019): 194–196. My thanks go to Johns Hopkins University Press and the [ 195 ]

A cknowledgments

Keats-­Shelley Association of Amer­i­ca for permission to reuse t­hese materials; to Logan Browning, Becky Byron, and Jonathan Mulrooney for their editorial support; and to the anonymous peer reviewers who provided invaluable feedback. Maia McAleavey introduced me to Bucknell University Press’s Transit series, and I could not have dreamed of a better home for this book. I thank Miriam Wallace, Kate Parker, and Mona Narain for believing in my ideas and the anonymous manuscript reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions, which strengthened this book beyond mea­sure. I owe a special debt to Suzanne Guiod for her advice and guidance during ­every stage of the proj­ect. I am also grateful to Pam Dailey for supporting me through the production pro­cess, to Jeanne Ferris for her meticulous copyediting, and to Sergey Lobachev for preparing the index. This book has been nourished by the care of friends near and far. My gratitude goes especially to Alyssa Bellows, Rachel Ernst, Rowena Kramer, Linda Martin, and Irene Ruiz Dacal, who ­were with me during this proj­ect’s inception and who, now that all of us are dispersed in vari­ous places, I continue to miss daily. Though they may not know it, the enduring love I have received from Chen Jin Jing, Mo Yin, Ong Shieh Yuan, Leanne Michelle Robers, Wang Ye, Cherie Wong, and Xu Dingjiao marks e­ very aspect of this proj­ect. Ila and Jon Casselberry, Renee and Aaron Croteau, Mitali and Rob Perkins, Heather and Vik Ramamurthy, and Ashley and Chad Somers have held and continue to hold space weekly for me to rest, reflect, and recenter, so that each day brings the possibility of beginning anew. I thank my in-­laws for their unconditional support and for loving me as their own ­daughter. If translation is an act of love, as I believe it to be, then my father-­ in-­law, who translated my writing into Mandarin, remains this book’s most dedicated reader. My partner, Zhenyu, sustains this and e­ very other one of my pursuits ­because he sustains and makes pos­si­ble who I am. He and our son, Noah, are, in the words of Wendell Berry, “the known place to which the unknown is always / leading me back.” My parents and aunt gave me my first language, the words that I learned in the shelter of their love and that underlie all that is written h ­ ere. It is to them that I dedicate this book.

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N OT E S

INTRODUCTION 1. ​George Gordon Byron, Don Juan, ed. T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan, and W. W. Pratt (London: Penguin Books, 2004), canto III, stanzas 62–63. Don Juan is hereafter cited in the text parenthetically with canto and stanza numbers. 2. ​On “spice” as a potent figure for the Orient, see Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 3. ​Robert Southey, “Orientaliana, or, Eastern and Mahommedan Collections,” in Robert Southey, Southey’s Common-­Place Book: Second Series, ed. John Wood Warter (London, 1849), 402–521. For “dates,” see 428; “sherbet,” 468; “pistachio,” 470–471; “spices,” 425 and 483; “orange,” “pomegranate,” and “coffee,” 500. 4. ​Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 51. On the increase in “ ‘Eastern’ materials” in Eu­rope at the beginning of the eigh­teenth c­ entury, and Arabian Nights’s par­tic­u­lar role in this discursive flowering, see 50–51. 5. ​ Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, ed. Robert  L. Mack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 66–67. 6. ​See Robert Southey, Thalaba the Destroyer, ed. Tim Fulford (London: Routledge, 2016), 35–36 (book 2, lines 314–353), vol. 3 of Robert Southey, Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810, ed. Lynda Pratt. 7. ​Southey refers to the Olearius passage in his note to Thalaba the Destroyer, book 2, line 327. Quoted in Southey, Thalaba the Destroyer, 208–209. 8. ​For the material, consumerist texture of Southey’s Orientalist writings, see Diego Saglia, “Words and Th ­ ings: Southey’s East and the Materiality of Oriental Discourse,” in Robert Southey and the Contexts of En­glish Romanticism, ed. Lynda Pratt (London: Routledge, 2006), 167–186. 9. ​See Malachy Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce [. . .] (London, 1751), 1:679–696. 10. ​Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, trans. David Jacobson (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 3–14. 11. ​On the classificatory overlap between nuts, dried fruit, and spice, see Morton, The Poetics of Spice, 18. On the range in grocers’ stock available in early modern ­E ngland, see Jon Stobart, Sugar and Spice: Grocers and Groceries in Provincial E ­ ngland, 1650–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 25. 12. ​See Maxine Berg, Luxury and Plea­sure in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Carole Shammas, “Changes in En­glish and Anglo-­A merican Consumption from 1550 to 1800,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 177–205. 13. ​See, for instance, Maxine Berg, “New Commodities, Luxuries, and Their Consumers in Eighteenth-­Century ­England,” in Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Eu­rope 1650–1850, ed. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (Manchester, UK: Manchester University [ 197 ]

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Press, 1999), 63–85, and Luxury and Plea­sure in Eighteenth-­Century Britain; John  E. ­Wills Jr., “Eu­ro­pean Consumption and Asian Production in the Seventeenth and Eigh­ teenth Centuries,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, 133–147. 14. ​Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 89. 15. ​Joanna de Groot, “Metropolitan Desires and Colonial Connections: Reflections on Consumption and Empire,” in At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, ed. Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University ­ ills, “Eu­ro­pean Consumption and Asian Production,” 133–134. Press, 2006), 186 and 187; W For historical accounts of how foreign luxury accelerated the development of domestic En­glish technologies, see also Werner Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967); Neil McKendrick, “Commercialization and the Economy,” in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-­Century E ­ ngland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 9–196; Carole Shammas, The Pre-­Industrial Consumer in E ­ ngland and Amer­i­ca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Berg, Luxury and Plea­sure in Eighteenth-­Century Britain. 16. ​Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, in Oliver Goldsmith, vol. 2 of The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1966). On the par­tic­u­lar role of China and “­things Chinese” in the construction of this cosmopolitan sensibility, see Eugenia Zuroski, A Taste for China: En­glish Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 17. ​Julie Park, The Self and It: Novel Objects and Mimetic Subjects in Eighteenth-­Century ­England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 4–5. 18. ​bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Re­sis­tance,” in bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Repre­sen­ta­tion (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 21–40; Deborah Root, Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996). 19. ​hooks, “Eating the Other,” 22. 20. ​hooks, “Eating the Other,” 22. 21. ​Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 281. 22. ​As Jean Anthelme Brillat-­Savarin claimed in 1825, to declare “what you eat” is to disclose “what you are” (The Physiology of Taste; or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, trans. M.F.K. Fisher [New York: Everyman’s Library, 2009], 15). 23. ​Denise Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Timothy Morton, ed., Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and The Poetics of Spice; Parama Roy, Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Troy Bickham, Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (London: Reaktion Books, 2020); Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food S­ haped the Modern World (New York: Basic Books, 2017). 24. ​Shammas, “Changes in En­glish and Anglo-­A merican Consumption,” 178. See also James Walvin, Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660–1800 (New York: New York University Press, 1997). 25. ​Troy Bickham, “Eating the Empire: Intersections of Food, Cookery and Imperialism in Eighteenth-­Century Britain,” Past and Pre­sent 198, no.  1 (2008): 72. On the imperial marketing of exotic goods, including tobacco, tea, sugar, and Indian textiles, see de Groot, “Metropolitan Desires and Colonial Connections,” 186–187. 26. ​Bickham, “Eating the Empire,” 71. [ 198 ]



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27. ​Diego Saglia, “William Beckford’s ‘Sparks of Orientalism’ and the Material-­Discursive Orient of British Romanticism,” Textual Practice 16, no. 1 (2002): 76. 28. ​This description of literary Orientalism derives, of course, from Edward W. Said’s influential account of “Orientalism” as a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Orientalism [London: Vintage Books, 1979], 3). For the “real­ity effect,” see Roland Barthes, “The Real­ity Effect,” in Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, ed. François Wahl (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 141–148. 29. ​Leslie A. Marchand, “Narrator and Narration in ‘Don Juan,’ ” Keats-­Shelley Journal 25 (1976): 27 and 41. 30. ​[Miss Tully], Narrative of a Ten Years’ Residence at Tripoli in Africa: From the Original Correspondence in the Possession of the F ­ amily of the Late Richard Tully, Esq. [. . .] (London, 1816), iii. For Byron’s adaptation of material from the Tripoli account, see George Gordon Byron, “Born for Opposition,” 1821, vol. 8 of George Gordon Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 186. 31. ​See, for instance, Benjamin Moseley, A Treatise Concerning the Properties and Effects of Coffee, 5th ed. (London, 1792), 73; “The Natu­ral History of the Coffee Tree; with an Historical Account of the Origin and Use of Coffee,” Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Plea­sure, June 1789, 320. 32. ​On the coffee­house as a “recognized center for what was increasingly being called ‘polite’ society,” see Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffee­house (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 255. On coffee’s threatening foreignness in the seventeenth ­century and the ambiguity of its reception that extended into the nineteenth ­century, see Scott K. Taylor, “Coffee and the Body: From Exoticism to Wellness in Eighteenth-­ Century Eu­rope,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 54, no. 3 (Spring 2021): 633–650. 33. ​Scott Taylor, “Coffee and the Body,” 642. 34. ​Morton, The Poetics of Spice, 21. 35. ​On Don Juan’s multiple banquets, see Carol Shiner Wilson, “Stuffing the Verdant Goose: Culinary Esthetics in ‘Don Juan,’ ” Mosaic 24, nos. 3–4 (1991): 41. 36. ​Jane Stabler, “Byron’s World of Zest,” in Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite, 150. 37. ​Stabler, “Byron’s World of Zest,” 144 and 147. 38. ​S. D. Smith, “Accounting for Taste: British Coffee Consumption in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27, no. 2 (Autumn 1996): 184. 39. ​For the cultural history of tea in Britain, see Walvin, Fruits of Empire, 9–31; Julie  E. Fromer, A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian ­England (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008); Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger, Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf That Conquered the World (London: Reaktion Books, 2015). 40. ​In this light, too, we can understand why Juan’s arrival on the Greek island is preceded by a bloody episode of cannibalism (see canto II, 75–82), which Gigante reads as an “oxymoronic paradox of the tasteful cannibal, whose taboo desire resists incorporation into the symbolic economy of consumer capitalism” (Taste, 118). Repeatedly in Don Juan, mocking references to Juan’s “most prodigious appetite” (canto II, 153) undercut his pretensions to romance, suggesting that food imposes a crude, grotesque real­ity that resists sublimation into romance of ­either the erotic or the cultural variety. 41. ​On the deliberately con­spic­u­ous overlap between the poet and the narrator, see Marchand, “Narrator and Narration in ‘Don Juan,’ ” 27. 42. ​John Coakley Lettsom, The Natu­ral History of the Tea-­Tree, inTea in Natu­ral History and Medical Writing, ed. Richard Coulton, vol. 2 of Tea and the Tea-­Table in Eighteenth-­ Century ­England, ed. Markman Ellis (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010), 177. 43. ​Lettsom, The Natu­ral History of the Tea-­Tree, 171. [ 199 ]

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44. ​“Of Diet in General, and the Bad Effects of Tea-­Drinking [. . .],” Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Plea­sure, July 1763, 29. 45. ​Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.  D. Raphael and A.  L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 10 and 9. 46. ​Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-­C entury Britain and France (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 47. ​Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 136–137. 48. ​Jonas Hanway, Essay on Tea, in Tea, Commerce and the East India Com­pany, ed. Matthew Mauger, vol. 3 of Tea and the Tea-­Table in Eighteenth-­Century ­England, ed. Markman Ellis (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010), 86 and 70. 49. ​Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 281. 50. ​Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire, 6. 51. ​Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire, 4. 52. ​For the sobriety discourse surrounding coffee, see Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee, 40–43. For that surrounding tea, see Erika Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea ­Shaped the Modern World (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2017), 34–40. 53. ​Scott Taylor, “Coffee and the Body,” 643. 54. ​Ellis, Coulton, and Mauger, Empire of Tea, 106. 55. ​Saglia, “Words and Th ­ ings,” 175. 56. ​This signals a key methodological difference between my proj­ect and critical studies of imperial commodities in the Victorian novel, which tend to read discursive repre­sen­ta­ tion as ideological obfuscation. See, for instance, Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in ­Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Suzanne Daly, The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). 57. ​See Morton, The Poetics of Spice; Bickham, Eating the Empire; Roy, Alimentary Tracts; ­Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985); Fromer, A Necessary Luxury; Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-­Century British Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of ­Virginia, 1995); Gitanjali Shahani, “The Spicèd Indian Air in Early Modern ­England,” Shakespeare Studies 42 (2014): 122–137. For a helpful account of this “gustatory turn” in postcolonial literary studies, see Parama Roy, “Postcolonial Tastes,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lit­er­a­ture and Food, ed. J. Michelle Coghlan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 161. 58. ​Roy, Alimentary Tracts, 7. 59. ​Working in a broadly postcolonial and poststructuralist vein, critics who examine exoticism as a form of imperialism have given us an expanding and increasingly nuanced vocabulary to diagnose and deconstruct its logic. See, for instance, Dorothy M. Figueira, The Exotic: A De­cadent Quest (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); Isabel Santaolalla, ed., “New” Exoticisms: Changing Patterns in the Construction of Otherness (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). For a helpful summary of the Marxist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories that variously underpin this set of critical discourses, see Figueira, The Exotic, 1–18. 60. ​As Gigante argues, in an era when m ­ atters of bodily appetite w ­ ere always closely tied to consumer discernment and thus aesthetic taste, “writers deployed the gustatory meta­ phor of taste in the full awareness that by this point in the extended culture of taste, its subsets ­were not only taste and appetite but also a commingled version of the two in consumerism” (Taste, 3). 61. ​See Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: ­Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (New York: Routledge, 1996); Grant McCracken, Culture and Consump[ 200 ]



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tion: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 74. 62. ​Commenting on the implications of Douglas’s work, for instance, Roberta Sassatelli observes that it has “done much to consolidate a cultural reading of consumption, providing a communicative approach that considers commodities as a semantics with consumption working as a language” (Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics [London: SAGE, 2007], 100). The influence of structuralism and poststructuralism on anthropology is too complex to summarize h ­ ere, but the intersection of t­hese fields can be productively examined in the work of Claude Lévi-­Strauss and Roland Barthes. See Claude Lévi-­Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963); Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 63. ​Roland Barthes, “­Toward a Psychosociology of Con­temporary Food Consumption,” in Food and Culture: A Reader, 3rd ed., ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (New York: Routledge, 2013), 24. 64. ​Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” in “Myth, Symbol, and Culture,” special issue, Daedalus 101, no. 1 (Winter 1972): 61; Arjun Appadurai, “Gastro-­Politics in Hindu South Asia,” in “Symbolism and Cognition,” ed. Janet W. D. Dougherty and James W. Fernandez, special issue, American Ethnologist 8, no. 3 (August 1981): 494. See also Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Sidney W. Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). 65. ​Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, 89 (emphasis added). 66. ​Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, 89. 67. ​Said, Orientalism, 3. Critics in the subaltern school have particularly questioned the hegemonic functioning of colonialist discourse, instead directing attention t­ oward the opportunities for creative reinterpretation through which the other of colonial discourse can negotiate, mimic, or other­wise subvert dominant ideology. See, for example, Ranajit Gu­ha, ed., A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Within the materialist realm of Orientalist art and design, to underscore the genuine influence of Eastern arts and craft on Western forms of artistic expression, John MacKenzie has sought to historicize the precise pro­cesses of translation through which Oriental sources are received and adapted within Eu­ro­pean culture. See John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995). 68. ​Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anx­i­e ties of Empire (Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 1992), 2. 69. ​The quoted phrases (“discursive incoherence” and “generic hybridity”) are from Alan Richardson’s essay on Peru and Gebir (“Epic Ambivalence: Imperial Politics and Romantic Deflection in Williams’s Peru and Landor’s Gebir,” in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996], 279), but they exemplify the edited volume’s broader commitment to “register the colonial or racial encounter as a two-­way exchange marked not only by domination but also by subaltern re­sis­tance and mutual vulnerability” and to “understand the cultural identity of the colonizer as no more unitary, stable, or immune to the effects of the encounter than that of the colonized” (Richardson and Hofkosh, introduction to Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 6). 70. ​Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 13. 71. ​Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, 3. [ 201 ]

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72. ​Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in ­England 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 17. 73. ​James Watt, British Orientalisms, 1759–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 5. 74. ​Watt, British Orientalisms, 19. 75. ​Morton, The Poetics of Spice, 3. 76. ​Andrew Warren, The Orient and the Young Romantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 3. 77. ​See Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, 50. 78. ​Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th ­Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 2. 79. ​By “­t hings associated with China,” I mean something similar to what Zuroski has called “­t hings Chinese”—­t hat is, t­ hings that are Chinese not by virtue of some essential quality, but as a result of the cultural meanings ascribed to them by British consumers and readers (A Taste for China, 7). 80. ​Scholars working in China studies usually emphasize the difference between Sinology and Orientalism to underscore China’s unique position within Britain’s cultural imaginary. As Peter J. Kitson writes, “the intercultural encounter between Britain and China in the nineteenth ­century is thus extremely complex and sophisticated, incapable of being constrained within conventional orientalist bound­aries of ‘East’ and ‘West’ and ‘self’ and ‘other’ ” (Forging Romantic China: Sino-­British Cultural Exchange 1760–1840 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013], 5). Similarly, Shanyn Fiske argues that China presented an “awkward situation within a dominant theoretical framework of Orientalism that largely fails to account for the cultural and historical nuances of its special relations with the West” (“Orientalism Reconsidered: China and the Chinese in Nineteenth-­C entury Lit­er­a­ture and Victorian Studies,” Lit­er­a­ture Compass 8, no. 4 [2011]: 215). 81. ​Groundbreaking work by Andre Gunder Frank and Kenneth Pomeranz, among ­others, has done much to challenge the Eurocentric notion of the West as the driver of modernity, pointing instead to the existence of what Frank calls a “Sinocentric international order” from the sixteenth c­ entury onward (ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998], 18). See also Kenneth Pomeranz, The ­Great Divergence: China, Eu­rope, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2000). For ­England’s imagination of China as a “fantasy space for mercantile capitalism” in the seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries, see Robert Markley, The Far East and the En­glish Imagination, 1600–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4. 82. ​Chi-­ming Yang, Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-­ Century E ­ ngland, 1660–1760 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 25. 83. ​Ballaster, Fabulous Orients, 208. 84. ​Yang, Performing China, 7. 85. ​Though Britain’s victory in the First Opium War led to the opening of five additional treaty ports, the Chinese interior remained largely inaccessible to the British. Only with the decisive Euro-­A merican victory in the Second Opium War w ­ ere foreign legations established in Beijing. For the spatial partition between the treaty ports and the largely inaccessible Chinese mainland, as well as how this partition impacted British imaginations of China, see Ross  G. Forman, China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 30–63. For the so-­called opening up of China following the Second Opium War, see James L. Hevia, En­glish ­Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-­Century China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 119–184. [ 202 ]



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86. ​See Peter Ward Fay, The Opium War 1840–1842: Barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the Early Part of the Nineteenth ­Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), especially 15–28. 87. ​On China as a “familiar exotic,” see Elizabeth Hope Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Lit­er­ a­ture, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-­Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 6. 88. ​David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Eu­rope (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 134–135. 89. ​Chinese porcelain’s “power in the popu­lar imagination,” David Porter writes, “derives not from any fixed or autochthonous meaning but rather from its relational position as the locus of deeply fraught ideas of sensuality, novelty, desire, femininity, temptation, and exchange” (The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-­Century E ­ ngland [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010], 139). 90. ​Robert Southey, Letters from E ­ ngland, ed. Jack Simmons (London: Cresset Press, 1951), 192. Kitson reads Southey’s facetious claim as a targeted evasion of the China that he actually knew much about (Forging Romantic China, 168–169). 91. ​D. Porter, Ideographia, 134. 92. ​D. Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-­Century E ­ ngland; Eric Hayot, The Hy­po­thet­i­cal Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Yang, Performing China; Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye; Zuroski, A Taste for China; Eun Kyung Min, China and the Writing of En­glish Literary Modernity, 1690–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 93. ​See Felicity  A. Nussbaum, ed., The Global Eigh­teenth ­Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, eds., The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-­Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Evan Gottlieb, ed., Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760–1820 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2015); Bärbel Czennia and Greg Clingham, eds., Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce, and Communication in the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2020). More specifically, my book intervenes in the critical conversation that focuses on how the global circulation of material t­hings impacted British understandings of selfhood and otherness. For a helpful survey of this conversation, see Ileana Baird, “Introduction: Peregrine ­Th ings: Rethinking the Global in Eighteenth-­Century Studies,” in Eighteenth-­Century ­Thing Theory in a Global Context: From Consumerism to Celebrity Culture, ed. Ileana Baird and Christina Ionescu (London: Routledge, 2013), 1–16. 94. ​Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). For a study of “the elision of En­glish into British” during the long eigh­teenth ­century, see Krishnan Kumar, The Making of En­glish National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 95. ​Rebecca Langlands, “Britishness or En­glishness? The Historical Prob­lem of National Identity in Britain,” Nations and Nationalism 5, no. 1 (1999): 59. 96. ​Fromer, for instance, notes that “when discussing tea drinking within their own culture . . . ​ nineteenth-­c entury tea historians almost invariably define their national identity as ‘En­glish’  ” (A Necessary Luxury, 15–16). 97. ​See, for instance, C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); Kathleen Wilson, “Citizenship, Empire, and Modernity in the En­g lish Provinces, c. 1720–1790,” Eigh­teenth ­Century Studies 29, no. 1 (1995): 69–96, and The Island Race: En­glishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eigh­teenth ­Century (London: Routledge, 2003); Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire [ 203 ]

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(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, eds., At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For a helpful survey of the critical conversation, see Catherine Hall and Sonya  O. Rose, “Introduction: Being at Home with the Empire,” in At Home with the Empire, 8–18. For a specific examination of ­t hese issues through the lens of eighteenth-­ and nineteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture, see Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo, eds., Macropolitics of Nineteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Richardson and Hofkosh, eds., Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture; Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1997); David Simpson, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). More recently, David Higgins has examined “how narratives of localised selfhood in En­glish Romantic writing are produced in relation to national and transnational formations” (Romantic En­glishness: Local, National, and Global Selves, 1780–1850 [Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014], 2). 98. ​Robert Colls, Identity of ­England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 162, quoted in Higgins, Romantic En­glishness, 2. 99. ​Bayly, Imperial Meridian, 2. See also Hall and Rose, “Introduction.” 100. ​For instance, Ballantyne conceives of the British Empire “as a ‘bundle of relationships’ that brought disparate regions, communities and individuals into contact through systems of mobility and exchange” (Orientalism and Race, 1). CHAPTER 1 ​—­ ​VIRTUOUS LEAF, “INTOXICATING LIQUOR” 1. ​Nicholas Rowe, The Biter, in Nicholas Rowe, The Works of Nicholas Rowe, Esq. (London, 1792), 1:223 and 230. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 2. ​Maxine Berg, Luxury and Plea­sure in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 56. 3. ​On chinoiserie, see Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (New York: Dutton, 1962); David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Eu­rope (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 133–192, and The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-­ Century ­England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 93–129. Scholars have increasingly used “chinoiserie” to describe a general cross-­cultural phenomenon that peaked in the eigh­teenth ­century, and the term indexes the multiple contradictory ways in which cultures encountered, made use of, and responded to each other. See, for instance, Michael E. Yonan, “Veneers of Authority: Chinese Lacquers in Maria Theresa’s Vienna,” Eighteenth- ­Century Studies 37, no. 4 (2004): 656–667; Eugenia Zuroski, A Taste for China: En­glish Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 67. For the influence of the Chinese style on Romantic princi­ples of art and lit­er­a­ ture, see Arthur Lovejoy, “The Chinese Origin of a Romanticism,” Journal of En­glish and Germanic Philology 32, no. 1 (1933): 1–20; D. Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-­ Century ­England, 154–183. 4. ​James Walvin, Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660–1800 (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 16. 5. ​Walvin, Fruits of Empire, 21. 6. ​Jonas Hanway, Essay on Tea, in Tea, Commerce and the East India Com­pany, ed. Matthew Mauger, 67, 71, and 86, vol. 3 of Tea and the Tea-­Table in Eighteenth-­Century ­England, ed. Markman Ellis (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 7. ​Critics of luxury framed the influx of foreign goods as a contagious disease that threatened Britain’s native virtue. In contrast, free-­trade pragmatists such as Bernard Mandev­ille [ 204 ]



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advocated for such foreign trade as a spur to economic development, while acknowledging the moral dissipation associated with the culture of spending and getting (The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits [London, 1714]). 8. ​[Richard Steele], “No. 326,” in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1965), 3:195–196. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 9. ​A nthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 413 (emphasis added). 10. ​On taste as a “trope for aesthetic judgment,” see Denise Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 4. 11. ​Founded in 1711 by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator played a crucial role in regulating British morality as a response to the demands of an increasingly commercialized and globalized society. See Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), and introduction to The Commerce of Everyday Life: Se­lections from The Tatler and The Spectator, ed. Erin Mackie (Boston: Beckford, 1998), 1–32. See also Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, 8th  ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). Laura Brown (Ends of Empire: W ­ omen and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-­ Century En­glish Lit­er­a­ture [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993]) and Elizabeth Kowaleski-­Wallace (Consuming Subjects: ­Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth-­ Century [New York: Columbia University Press, 1997], 52–69) have both examined the extent to which eighteenth-­century moral discourse appropriates the female body to denounce, and thereby disavow, the negative implications of a culture of spending. Kowaleski-­Wallace focuses on chinaware as a particularly salient trope through which the eighteenth century achieves this scapegoating of the female. 12. ​For the rhe­toric of raw food in the discourse of cultural binaries, see Claude Lévi-­Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of My­thol­ogy, vol. 1 of Claude Lévi-­ Strauss, Mythologiques, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1969). 13. ​See Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger, Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf That Conquered the World (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 187–191. 14. ​See William W. Appleton, A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in ­England during the Seventeenth and Eigh­teenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 37–52. 15. ​Lynette Hunter, “Tea Drinking in ­England: Ceremony, Scandal and Domestic Bliss,” in New Comparison 24 (Autumn 1997): 110. 16. ​Thomas Garway, An Exact Description of the Growth, Quality and Vertues of the Leaf Tea, in Tea in Natu­ral History and Medical Writing, ed. Richard Coulton, 5, vol. 2 of Tea and the Tea-­Table, ed. Markman Ellis (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010). 17. ​John Ovington, An Essay upon the Nature and Qualities of Tea, in Tea and the Tea-­Table, 2:28, 31, and 28. 18. ​Of course, the shift in British repre­sen­t a­t ions of China is an uneven and complex one that cannot be easily reduced to a single overarching narrative. See, for instance, Robert Markley, The Far East and the En­glish Imagination, 1600–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 189 and 193; D. Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-­Century ­England, 7. 19. ​Hunter observes that Ovington’s essay on tea is the “last of the relatively uncomplicated books in praise of tea and of w ­ omen” (“Tea-­Drinking in ­England,” 113). [ 205 ]

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20. ​For the commodification of Chinese virtue as a cultural phenomenon in eighteenth-­ century ­England, see Chi-­m ing Yang, Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-­Century ­England, 1660–1760 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Also see Yang’s reading of The Biter (10). 21. ​See Ellis, Coulton, and Mauger, Empire of Tea, 73. 22. ​Ellis, Coulton, and Mauger, Empire of Tea, 25. 23. ​John Coakley Lettsom, The Natu­ral History of the Tea-­Tree, in Tea and the Tea-­Table, 2:165, 141, and 172. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 24. ​Nahum Tate, Panacea: A Poem upon Tea; In Two Cantos (London, 1700). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. See also, for instance, Ellis, Coulton, and Mauger, Empire of Tea, 79–81. More recently, Mengmeng Yan has rightly observed in her close reading of Tate’s Panacea that “verses about tea are less concerned with Chinese culture than with the meanings it might have brought to Britain itself,” though she does not read in this discourse any kind of self-­reflexivity t­ oward its own role in the constructions of Chineseness (Foreignness and Selfhood: Sino-­British Encounters in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture of the Eigh­teenth ­Century [London: Routledge, 2022], 28). 25. ​One famous instance of this trope, of course, comes in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, where the zeugma that mocks Queen Anne for taking “counsel” and “tea” (in Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, and Other Poems, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson, 3rd ed. [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962], canto 3, line 8) pre­sents the triviality of tea-­table chatter as a foil for the formal affairs of state. 26. ​Tea, A Poem. Or, Ladies into Tea-­Cups; A Metamorphosis (London, 1729), 4. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 27. ​ Tea, A Poem. In Three Cantos (London, 1743), 4 and 8. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. CHAPTER 2 ​—­ ​“ EATING ONLY WHAT I KNEW” 1. ​Oliver Goldsmith, “The Deserted Village,” lines 284, 260, and 299, in Oliver Goldsmith, The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1966), 4:287–304. 2. ​Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, in Goldsmith, Collected Works, “Letter XIX,” 2:80. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 3. ​­There have been many studies of tea’s introduction to and subsequent domestication in Britain during the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries. For recent accounts, see Erika Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea S­ haped the Modern World (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2017), 23–56; Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger, Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf That Conquered the World (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 73–92. 4. ​Joseph Addison, “No.  10,” in The Spectator, ed. Donald  F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1965), 1:44. 5. ​For an alternative perspective that reads The Citizen of the World as “participat[ing] ­blatantly in the willful, Eu­ro­pean concoction of the exotic,” see Tao Zhijian, “Citizen of Whose World? Goldsmith’s Orientalism,” Comparative Lit­er­a­ture Studies 33, no.  1 (1996): 23. 6. ​“En­glish” and “En­glishness” repeatedly occur in The Citizen of the World, significantly outweighing the presence of “Britain” and “Britishness.” On the significance of En­glishness in the writings of Goldsmith, who is Anglo-­Irish, also see note 11 below. 7. ​Similarly, Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock equates Belinda’s virginity with “some frail China Jar [about to] receive a Flaw” (in Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, and [ 206 ]



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Other Poems, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson, 3rd  ed. [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962], canto 2, line 106). On china as a marker for female superficiality, see Elizabeth Kowaleski-­Wallace, Consuming Subjects: ­Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eigh­teenth ­Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 52–69. On chinoiserie’s “flattening of cultural value” throughout the eigh­teenth c­ entury, see David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Eu­rope (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 139; see also 133–192. 8. ​I am drawing ­here on the definition of “cut” as “the shape to which, or style in which a ­thing is cut; fashion, shape (of clothes, hair, ­etc.).” See Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, “cut, n.2.17a,” accessed December  5, 2022, https://­w ww​.­oed​.­com​.­stmarys​-­ca​.­idm​.­oclc​ .­org​/­view​/­Entry​/­46339. 9. ​Michael Griffin points out that “the metropolitan notion of a fixed or essential cultural otherness is ­here parodied to the extent that any such quality is revealed ultimately to be as fungible as clothing” (Enlightenment in Ruins: The Geographies of Oliver Goldsmith [Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013], 97). 10. ​The irony of this passage has been widely noted by critics. See, for example, Wayne  C. Booth, “ ‘The Self-­ Portraiture of Genius’: ‘The Citizen of the World’ and Critical Method,” Modern Philology 73, no. 4, part 2 (1976): S85–­S96. 11. ​In an anonymous contribution to the Weekly Magazine in 1759, just a year before the serialization of “Chinese Letters” in the Public Ledger, Goldsmith went so far as to impersonate an “En­g lish Gentleman” commenting on “manners and customs of the Native Irish” (“A Description of the Manners and Customs of the Native Irish,” in Goldsmith, Collected Works, 3: 26. Goldsmith’s inverse role-­playing uses a literary fiction to expose the En­g lish imposition upon Irish identity, even as it highlights the daily inherent imposture that an Irishman living in E ­ ngland must experience. This also accounts for the investment in En­g lishness that The Citizen of the World dramatizes—­Englishness in Goldsmith’s oeuvre invokes its own history of fabrication and thus highlights the constructedness of cultural identity. For detailed accounts of the impact of Goldsmith’s Irish identity on his po­liti­c al thought, see Robert W. Seitz, “The Irish Background of Goldsmith’s Social and Po­liti­c al Thought,” PMLA 52, no. 2 (1937): 405–411; Griffin, Enlightenment in Ruins. For The Citizen of the World as a commentary on “the place of the foreigner in the insular-­island ethos of ­England,” see Christopher Brooks, “Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World: Knowledge and the Imposture of ‘Orientalism,’ ” Texas Studies in Lit­er­a­ture and Language 35, no. 1 (1993): 134. 12. ​The term “pseudoethnography” comes from Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 13. ​For Goldsmith’s vari­ous sources and the uses he made of them, see Hamilton Jewett Smith, Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World: A Study (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1926). 14. ​This idea recurs throughout Jacques Derrida’s writings. For his formulation of this prob­ lem specifically within the context of the pharmakon, an ingestible poison or cure, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 110. 15. ​[Richard Steele], “No. 326,” in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1965), 3:196. See my reading of this item in chapter 1. 16. ​Adam Olearius, The Voyages and Travells of the Ambassadors Sent by Frederick, Duke of Holstein [. . .], trans. John Davies (London, 1699), 239. For a reading of the Olearius passage as referenced in Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, see the introduction. 17. ​Jean-­Baptiste Tavernier, Collections of Travels through Turkey into Persia, and the East-­ Indies [. . .] (London, 1684), 12. [ 207 ]

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18. ​Antoine Galland, The Remarkable Sayings, Apothegms, and Maxims of the Eastern Nations [. . .] (London, 1695), iv, 15. 19. ​Sarah Tully, Lady Hoare [and o­ thers], “Book of Receipts for Cookery and Pastry &c” (Wellcome Collection MS.8687, 1732), 152; Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (London, 1774), 101. I owe this history of pilaf in Eu­ro­pean discourse to Katherine Foxhall, “Pilau, Eighteenth-­Century Style,” The ­Recipes Proj­ect (blog), July 2, 2013, http://­recipes​.­hypotheses​.­org​/­836. For the way in which con­temporary cookbooks sought to appeal to the domestic appetite for exotic foods, see Troy Bickham, “Eating the Empire: Intersections of Food, Cookery and Imperialism in Eighteenth-­Century Britain,” Past and Pre­sent 198, no. 1 (2008): 94–107. For the general history of curry in British cuisine, see Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 20. ​Goldsmith exposes Lien Chi’s inauthenticity despite his own advice in 1757 that “the writer who would inform, or improve, his countrymen ­under the assumed character of an Eastern traveller should be careful to let nothing escape him which might betray the imposture” (“Letters from an Armenian in Ireland, to His Friends at Trebisonde,” in Goldsmith, Collected Works, 1:90–91). 21. ​In his editorial note, Arthur Friedman points out that The Citizen of the World is a “curious mixture of genuine misconceptions about the Chinese and genuine Chinese customs about which Goldsmith could hardly have been ignorant, since they appear in his sources” (The Citizen of the World, 143). 22. ​Geoffrey  C. Gunn, History without Borders: The Making of an Asian World Region, 1000–1800 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 150. 23. ​James F. Warren, “A Tale of Two Centuries: The Globalization of Maritime Raiding and Piracy in Southeast Asia at the End of the Eigh­teenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in A World of W ­ ater: Rain, Rivers and Seas in Southeast Asian Histories, ed. Peter Boomgaard (Leiden, the Netherlands: KITLV Press, 2007), 128–129. 24. ​Jean-­Baptiste Du Halde, The General History of China; [. . .] (London, 1741), 2:201. 25. ​ See James Watt, “Goldsmith’s Cosmopolitanism,” Eighteenth-­Century Life 30, no.  1 (2006): 56–75; Griffin, Enlightenment in Ruins, 97. 26. ​Jonas Hanway, Essay on Tea, in Tea, Commerce and the East India Com­pany, ed. Matthew Mauger, vol. 3 of Tea and the Tea-­Table in Eighteenth-­Century ­England, ed. Markman Ellis (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010), 86. Significantly, Hanway’s essay provoked a mocking review from Goldsmith, published in the Monthly Review (1757). Goldsmith cites the very portion of Hanway’s text that focuses on tea as an “epidemical disease,” taking issue with the excessiveness of Hanway’s account. See review of Hanway’s Essay on Tea in Goldsmith, Collected Works, 1:171. 27. ​Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in ­England 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 17 and 19. 28. ​The marquis d’Argens’s Chinese Letters (1741), which provided a significant amount of source material for Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World, exhibits the same cultural relativism in attaching the term “fabulous” specifically to Eu­ro­pean texts. In letter 12, for instance, Sioeu-­Tcheou, a Chinese traveler in Paris, describes “The History of the chief Eu­ro­pe­an Saints” as a “Book full of wonderful but fabulous Stories” (Marquis d’Argens, Chinese Letters. Being a Philosophical, Historical, and Critical Correspondence between a Chinese Traveller at Paris, and His Countrymen in China, Muscovy, Persia and Japan [London, 1741], 73). 29. ​Nigel Leask, “ ‘Wandering through Eblis’: Absorption and Containment in Romantic Exoticism,” in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 180. [ 208 ]



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30. ​Diego Saglia, “William Beckford’s ‘Sparks of Orientalism’ and the Material-­Discursive Orient of British Romanticism,” Textual Practice 16, no. 1 (2002): 76. 31. ​Quoted in Lewis Melville, The Life and Letters of William Beckford of Fonthill (New York: Duffield, 1910), 62. 32. ​As a consequence of the extensiveness of the Ottoman Empire, Beckford’s Orient follows con­temporary convention in including not just Asia and the M ­ iddle East but also Africa and present-­day Eastern Eu­rope. 33. ​Stana Nenadic, “Romanticism and the Urge to Consume in the First Half of the Nineteenth ­C entury,” in Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Eu­r ope 1650–1850, ed. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999), 210. 34. ​As Timothy Morton points out, it is hard “to distinguish between a style of consumption and a way of representing that style, in that all styles are forms of repre­sen­ta­tion” (The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 6). 35. ​William Beckford, Vathek, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 2. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. As Andrew Elfenbein points out, Beckford encouraged an autobiographical reading “by telling his first biographer, Cyrus Redding, that he had used p ­ eople and places from his life in Vathek” (Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role [New York: Columbia University Press, 1999], 40). For a reading that focuses on how Beckford appropriates Eastern otherness for his self-­definition, see El Habib Benrahhal Serghini, “William Beckford’s Symbolic Appropriation of the Oriental Context,” in Oriental Prospects: Western Lit­er­a­ture and the Lure of the East, ed. C. C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 43–64. 36. ​For a symbolic reading of Vathek’s gluttony as existential hunger, see Alan Liu, “­Toward a Theory of Common Sense: Beckford’s Vathek and Johnson’s Rasselas,” Texas Studies in Language and Lit­er­a­ture 26, no. 2 (1984): 183–217. 37. ​On the relationship between Vathek’s extravagant consumption and Beckford’s self-­ fashioning as a gay genius, see Elfenbein, Romantic Genius, 39–62. 38. ​On collection as an act of decontextualization and discursive mystification, see Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 151. 39. ​L eask, “ ‘Wandering through Eblis,’ ” 180–181. For a more detailed treatment of the Romantic paratext as exotic gesture, see David Simpson, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 109–143. 40. ​Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 73. 41. ​Robin Jarvis, “William Beckford: Travel Writer, Travel Reader,” Review of En­glish Studies 65, no. 268 (February 2014): 103. Elinor Shaffer argued that Beckford’s reading materials provided a discursive framework for his subsequent interpretation of very dif­fer­ent physical landscapes: for instance, “the Chinese travels of the French Jesuits” ­shaped Beckford’s encounter with Venice (“William Beckford in Venice, Liminal City: The Pavilion and the Interminable Staircase,” in Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: En­glish Fantasies of Venice, ed. Manfred Pfister and Barbara Schaff [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999], 77). 42. ​Donna Landry, “William Beckford’s Vathek and the Uses of Oriental Re-­Enactment,” in The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West, ed. Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 175. 43. ​Quoted in Melville, The Life and Letters William Beckford, 65–66. 44. ​My analy­sis h ­ ere draws on Stewart’s reading of the souvenir as “exotic object,” which facilitates the “appropriat[ion]” and internalization of foreign distance (On Longing, 147). [ 209 ]

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45. ​Quoted in Roger Lonsdale, “Introduction,” Vathek, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), x. Hereafter cited in text. 46. ​My account of this double aspect of vapour follows Morton’s analy­sis (The Poetics of Spice, 33). 47. ​The use of “vapour” as an emblem for the (distinctively Romantic) imagination would, of course, achieve its most famous repre­sen­ta­tion in the Mount Snowdon section of Words­ worth’s The Prelude. See William Words­worth, “The Prelude of 1805 in Thirteen Books,” book sixth, line 595, in The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, eds. Jonathan Words­worth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 218. 48. ​On the relationship between nostalgia and the “souvenir,” see Stewart, On Longing, 134. 49. ​Morton’s description of spice is once again apropos: “the luxury commodity is in the realm of the signifier but also somewhat spookily ‘­really ­t here’: a sign of incarnation” (The Poetics of Spice, 32). 50. ​Stewart, On Longing, 159. 51. ​In its double nature, this “ambient vapour” exhibits the kind of “aberrant” reference that Paul de Man has analyzed as language’s radical materialism, whereby the figures of language produce aberrant meanings that undercut the ideological work of transparent referentiality (Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietz­sche, Rilke, and Proust [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979], 235). For a helpful overview of the ideas in this essay, see Andrzej Warminski, “Introduction: Allegories of Reference,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1–33. 52. ​James Watt argues that the “bewildering particularity” of Vathek’s Orientalist detail achieves a parodic effect (“ ‘The Peculiar Character of the Arabian Tale’: William Beckford and The Arabian Nights,” in The Arabian Nights in Historical Context, 206). 53. ​This is, of course, despite Beckford’s declaration that he ­will not make himself such a master: “instead of making myself master of the pre­sent po­l iti­c al state of Amer­i­c a . . . ​ I ­will read, talk and dream of the Incas.” 54. ​Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2011), 137 and 136–137. 55. ​For the typical consumer, Gikandi argues, that link is invisible, as “a discursive or conceptual gap separated the leisure of drinking coffee or tea from the brutality of slavery” (Slavery and the Culture of Taste, 111). CHAPTER 3 ​—­ ​CUPS, CURES, AND CURSES 1. ​Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 102 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text with line numbers). 2. ​The “Kubla Khan” Crewe manuscript identifies the “anodyne” as “two grains of opium.” See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems, ed. John Beer (London: Everyman, 1993), 204–206. For a summary of “Kubla Khan’s” composition history, see John Spencer Hill, A Coleridge Companion: An Introduction to the Major Poems and the Biographia Literaria (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983), 62–73. 3. ​Of course, the question of conscious volition also reflects Coleridge’s interest and participation in con­temporary brain science. See Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 39–65. 4. ​For a list of the travel lit­er­a­ture that inspired Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” see Jonathan Livingstone Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (London: [ 210 ]



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Pan Books, 1978). See also Nigel Leask, “Kubla Khan and Orientalism: The Road to Xanadu Revisited,” Romanticism 4, no. 1 (1998): 1–21. 5. ​Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage. Or Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages and Places Discovered, from the Creation unto Pre­sent in Foure Partes (London, 1613), 350. 6. ​For Romanticism as a par­t ic­u ­lar kind of response to Britain’s global contexts, see Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); David Higgins, Romantic En­glishness: Local, National, and Global Selves, 1780–1850 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 7. ​bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Re­sis­tance” in bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Repre­sen­ta­tion (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 23. The essay argues that the commodification and appropriation of cultural difference affirms, rather than subverts, white hegemonic domination. 8. ​Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 100. Pointing to “Kubla Khan’s” critical history, Barry Milligan observes that “it is almost impossible not to equate this milk of Paradise with the laudanum to which the preface attributes the poem’s spontaneous composition” (Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-­Century British Culture [Charlottesville: University Press of ­Virginia, 1995], 38). For mesmerism as sociocultural discourse during the Romantic era, see Tim Fulford, “Conducting the Vital Fluid: The Politics and Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790s,” Studies in Romanticism 43, no.  1 (2004): 57–78; Anne DeLong, Mesmerism, Medusa, and the Muse: The Romantic Discourse of Spontaneous Creativity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012). 9. ​For the cultural symbolism of the Abyssinian maid, see Leask, “Kubla Khan and Orientalism,” 12–27. 10. ​Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (Routledge: New York, 1993), 20. 11. ​On the East India Com­pany’s appropriation and expansion of the Bengal opium trade following the ­Battle of Plassey, see Carl A. Trocki, Opium, Empire, and the Global Po­liti­ cal Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade 1750–1950 (London: Routledge, 1999), 49–52. As Trocki argues, “the entire commercial infrastructure of Eu­ro­pean trade in Asia was built around opium” (52). See also Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China 1800–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 8–9. 12. ​Tan Chung, “The Britain-­China-­India Trade Triangle, 1770–1840,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 11, no. 4 (1974): 412 and 417. 13. ​Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), 143. 14. ​Jane  T. Merritt, The Trou­ble with Tea: The Politics of Consumption in the Eighteenth-­ Century Global Economy (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2017), 6. 15. ​Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 114 and 116. For a general overview of British consumption of foreign groceries in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries, see Maxine Berg, “Consumption in Eighteenth-­and Early Nineteenth-­Century Britain,” in Industrialisation, 1700–1860, 357–387, vol. 1 of The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, ed. Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 16. ​David Davies, The Case of Labourers in Husbandry [. . .] (London, 1795), 39. Mintz quotes this passage in Sweetness and Power, 116. 17. ​Evan Gottlieb, Romantic Globalism: British Lit­er­a­ture and Modern World Order, 1750–1830 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014), 21. 18. ​The growing permeability of national bound­aries, especially as the British Empire transitioned from commerce to aggressive, territorial conquest following the loss of the American colonies in the late eigh­teenth ­century, also placed the British identity ­under psychological [ 211 ]

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assault. As Kate Teltscher observes, “the assumption of colonial power marks the emergence of a much more precarious sense of self” (India Inscribed: Eu­ro­pean and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995], 7). For a similar account of the challenge that imperial growth posed to the formation of the Romantic nation-­state, see Marlon B. Ross, “Romancing the Nation-­State: The Poetics of Romantic Nationalism,” in Macropolitics of Nineteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism, ed. Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 56–85. 19. ​A s Leask points out, the visionary poet’s transcendence in “Kubla Khan” remains couched in the “subjunctive mood,” dependent on the revival of an exotic vision (“Kubla Khan and Orientalism,” 17). 20. ​Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh, in Thomas Moore, The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, Collected by Himself (London, 1841), 6:15. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 21. ​Quoted in Thomas Moore, 1818–1847, 821, in Thomas Moore, vol. 2 of The Letters of Thomas Moore, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden, (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1964). 22. ​Francis Jeffrey, “Lalla Rookh; An Oriental Romance. By Thomas Moore,” Edinburgh Review, November 1817, 3. 23. ​“Lalla Rookh, an Oriental Romance, by Thomas Moore,” The Asiatic Journal, November  1817, 466; [J.  G.  G.], “On the Genius and Writings of Moore,” Literary Speculum, February 1822, 225. 24. ​“Lalla Rookh, An Oriental Romance. By Thomas Moore,” The Eclectic Review, October 1817, 342; “Lalla Rookh; an Oriental Romance. By Thomas Moore,” The British Review, and London Critical Journal, August 1817, 33. 25. ​For a comprehensive account of the eighteenth-­century debate on luxury, see Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, eds., Luxury in the Eigh­teenth ­Century: Debates, Desires, and Delectable Goods, (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002); Maxine Berg, “New Commodities, Luxuries, and Their Consumers in Eighteenth-­Century ­England,” in Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Eu­rope 1650–1850, ed. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999), 63–85. For the relationship between rhetorical luxuriance, Oriental verse, and exotic consumerism in the specific context of John Keats’s poetry, see Andrew Warren, The Orient and the Young Romantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 231–261. For the relationship between luxury and aesthetic refinement in eighteenth-­century Britain, see Diego Saglia, “The Dangers of Over-­Refinement: The Language of Luxury in Romantic Poetry by W ­ omen, 1793– 1811,” Studies in Romanticism 38, no. 4 (1999): 641–672. 26. ​“Lalla Rookh,” The British Review, and London Critical Journal, 31. 27. ​Captain Vans Kennedy, “An Essay on Persian Lit­er­a­ture,” Transactions of the Literary Society of Bombay (London, 1820), 2:97 and 77. 28. ​Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anx­i­eties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 22. 29. ​William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 198. 30. ​Matthew Hale Clarke, “Luxury Romanticism: The Quarto Book in the Romantic Period” (PhD diss., Loyola University Chicago, 2014, http://­ecommons​.­luc​.­edu​/­luc​_­diss​/­1257), 248. 31. ​Deirdre Coleman also points out that despite “the democ­ratization of its consumption, sugar still retained something of its former status as a luxury item” (“Con­spic­u­ous Consumption: White Abolitionism and En­glish ­Women’s Protest Writing in the 1790s,” ELH 61, no. 2 [Summer 1994]: 344). 32. ​Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “On the Slave Trade,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Watchman, ed. Lewis Patton (London: Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1971), 139, vol. 2 of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn. [ 212 ]



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33. ​Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Lectures on Revealed Religion, Lecture 6,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures, 1795: On Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 226, vol. 1 of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn. 34. ​“Lalla Rookh,” The British Review, and London Critical Journal, 41. 35. ​Jeffrey, “Lalla Rookh,” 34. 36. ​“Lalla Rookh,” The British Review, and London Critical Journal, 41; Jeffrey, “Lalla Rookh,” 34. 37. ​For critiques of Lalla Rookh’s exploitative Orientalism, see Stephen Gwynn, Thomas Moore (London: Macmillan, 1905), 188–189; Terence Brown, Ireland’s Lit­er­a­ture: Selected Essays (Mullingar, Ireland: Lilliput Press, 1988), 25. Critics who take seriously Lalla Rookh’s anti-­ imperial dimension focus mostly on the poem’s po­liti­cal content rather than its style. See, for instance, Mohammed Sharafuddin, “Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh and the Politics of Irony,” in Mohammed Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters with the Orient (London: I.  B. Tauris, 1994), 134–213; Jeffrey Vail, “ ‘The Standard of Revolt’: Revolution and National In­de­pen­dence in Moore’s Lalla Rookh,” Romanticism on the Net 40 (2005), https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­7202​/­012459ar. Javed Majeed remains one of the few critics who recognizes the subversiveness of Lalla Rookh’s repre­sen­ta­tional style. Moore’s poem, Majeed suggests, has an “intimate and parodic relationship with the imperial sensibility it plays upon” (“Thomas Moore and Orientalism,” in Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism [Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1992], 106). 38. ​Poetry, as Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in 1821, “makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanis­hing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them or in language or in form sends them among mankind” (A Defence of Poetry, in Percy Bysshe Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 698 [emphasis added]). The question remains ­whether language expresses a preexisting divine truth or creates that truth (“makes [it] immortal”) through the act of expression. For the Irish connotations of the veil, see Susan B. Taylor, “Irish Odalisques and Other Seductive Figures: Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh,” in The Containment and Re-­ Deployment of British India, ed. Daniel  J. O’Quinn, November 2000, pars 1–37, Romantic Circles, https://­w ww​.­rc​.­umd​.­edu​/­praxis​ /­containment​/­taylor​/­taylor​.­html. 39. ​George Gordon Byron, Don Juan, ed. T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan, and W. W. Pratt (London: Penguin Books, 2004), canto III, stanza 62. Also see my introduction. 40. ​Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 328. 41. ​For Moore’s participation in the Anacreontic tradition, see Jane Moore, “Thomas Moore, Anacreon and the Romantic Tradition,” Romantic Textualities: Lit­er­a­ture and Print Culture, 1780–1840 21 (Winter 2013), http://­w ww​.­romtext​.­org​.­u k​/­a rticles​/­rt21​_­n02​/­. 42. ​Sharafuddin, “Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh and the Politics of Irony,” 161. 43. ​For this reason, Sharafuddin (“Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh and the Politics of Irony,” 141–142), Leask (British Romantic Writers and the East, 113), and Vail (“ ‘The Standard of Revolt,’ ” par. 14) have argued that Mokanna is a Napoleonic type who embodies not so much religious despotism as radical Jacobinism. 44. ​George Gordon Byron, “Alas! the Love of W ­ omen,” 1813–1814, vol. 3 of George Gordon Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie  A. Marchand (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 101. 45. ​Moore, Letters of Thomas Moore, 1:275. 46. ​Jonathan Swift, A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation [. . .] (London, 1738), 24. This is quoted in Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger, [ 213 ]

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Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf That Conquered the World (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 12. For the preoccupation with w ­ ater preparation, see, for instance, Nahum Tate, A Poem upon Tea: With a Discourse on Its Sov’rain Virtues [. . .] (London, 1702), 43–44. 47. ​On the influence of Moore’s Irish identity on his Orientalism, see Susan Taylor, “Irish Odalisques and Other Seductive Figures”; Joseph Allen Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 156–160; J.C.M. Nolan, “In Search of an Ireland in the Orient: Tom Moore’s Lalla Rookh,” New Hibernia Review 12, no. 3 (2008): 80–98. 48. ​Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Par­tic­u­lar History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 130. 49. ​Jeffrey, “Lalla Rookh,” 12. 50. ​Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 173; see also 171–206. 51. ​It is perhaps not just a coincidence that Lalla Rookh’s frame narrative is set during the reign of Aurungzeb, the collapse of whose Mughal empire led the way for Britain’s eventual monopolization of the opium trade. See Richard Harvey Brown, “The Opium Trade and Opium Policies in India, China, Britain, and the United States: Historical Comparisons and Theoretical Interpretations,” Asian Journal of Social Science 30, no. 3 (2002): 623–656. 52. ​I am drawing h ­ ere on Jacques Derrida’s sense of supplementarity as simultaneous addition and replacement: it remains “undecideable” w ­ hether the supplement “is a plenitude enriching another plenitude,” or if the “supplement supplements . . . ​adds only to replace . . . ​ represents and makes an image” (Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976], 144). 53. ​Jeffrey, “Lalla Rookh,” 3. 54. ​Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 79 and 86. 55. ​Jeffrey, “Lalla Rookh,” 3. 56. ​Morton, The Poetics of Spice, 19 and 35. 57. ​Morton, The Poetics of Spice, 125. 58. ​“Lalla Rookh,” The British Review, and London Critical Journal, 33 and 32. For the history of leeks and onions as Britain’s traditional vegetables, see Christopher Stocks, Forgotten Fruits: The Stories ­behind Britain’s Traditional Fruit and Vegetables (New York: Windmill Books, 2008), 111–115 and 122–129. 59. ​“Lalla Rookh,” The British Review, and London Critical Journal, 32. 60. ​“Lalla Rookh,” The British Review, and London Critical Journal, 32. 61. ​For the Victorian festishization of cleanliness, see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 207–231. 62. ​Coleridge, “Lectures on Revealed Religion,” 223 and 226. 63. ​See John Gascoigne, Science in the Ser­vice of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially 103–110. 64. ​See Peter J. Kitson, Forging Romantic China: Sino-­British Cultural Exchange 1760–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 134–152. 65. ​Timothy Fulford, “The Taste of Paradise: The Fruits of Romanticism in the Empire,” in Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism, ed. Timothy Morton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 41–57. 66. ​Zaheer Baber, “The Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens, Colonial Power and Botanical Knowledge,” Journal of Con­temporary Asia 46, no. 4 (May 2016): 667. 67. ​Joseph Banks, letter to Sir George Yonge, May 15, 1787, in Joseph Banks, Letters 1783–1789, 190–192, vol. 2 of The Indian and Pacific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1760–1820, ed. Neil Chambers (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009). [ 214 ]



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68. ​See Adrian P. Thomas, “The Establishment of Calcutta Botanic Garden: Plant Transfer, Science and the East India Com­pany, 1786–1806,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 16, no. 2 (July 2006): 165–177; Kitson, Forging Romantic China, 134–143. 69. ​See, for example, Gascoigne, Science in the Ser­vice of Empire; David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill, eds., Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Repre­sen­ta­tions of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 70. ​Henry Jones, Kew Garden: A Poem. In Two Cantos (London, 1767), 12. 71. ​Alan Bewell, “Erasmus Darwin’s Cosmopolitan Nature,” ELH 76, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 21. 72. ​Morton, The Poetics of Spice, 45. 73. ​See H. V. Bowen, “British Exports of Raw Cotton from India to China during the Late Eigh­teenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” in How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2009), 118–119; Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the En­glish Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 186. 74. ​Quoted in Nayan Chanda, Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors S­ haped Globalization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 78. 75. ​On the connection between ­music and Cashmere, see Tilar J. Mazzeo, “The Strains of Empire: Shelley and the M ­ usic of India,” in Romantic Repre­sen­ta­tions of British India, ed. Michael J. Franklin (London: Routledge, 2006), 180–196. On Romantic Britain’s idealization of Indian Kashmir, see John Drew, India and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 201–206; Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East, 122; Ashok Malhotra, Making British Indian Fictions 1772–1823 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 77. 76. ​William Jones, “Botanical Observations on Select Indian Plants,” in The Works of Sir William Jones, ed. Lord Teignmouth (London, 1807), 5:62–162. 77. ​Timothy Fulford, “Poetic Flowers/Indian Bowers,” in Romantic Repre­sen­ta­tions of British India, 123. 78. ​See, for instance, the reference to the Puranas in Jones, “Botanical Observations,” 77. 79. ​William Jones, “The Design of a Treatise on the Plants of India,” in The Works of Sir William Jones, 5:1. For Jones’s work on behalf of Banks, see Fulford, “Poetic Flowers/Indian Bowers,” 121–122. 80. ​As Ros Ballaster points out, this device in Arabian Nights’ Entertainments foregrounds the ethical power of narrative in providing an opportunity for the self to “imagine itself serially in the place of the ‘other’ ” (Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in ­England 1662–1785 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], 14; see also 7–24). 81. ​ “Remarks on ‘Tales of the Crusaders,’ ” Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, June 1825, 646. 82. ​Walter Scott, The Talisman, ed. J. B. Ellis, with J. H. Alexander, P. D. Garside, and David Hewitt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). Cited parenthetically in the text. 83. ​Andrew Lincoln, “Western Identities and the Orient: Guy Mannering and The Talisman,” in Andrew Lincoln, Walter Scott and Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 110. 84. ​Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen, introduction to Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2. 85. ​See James Watt, “Scott, the Scottish Enlightenment, and Romantic Orientalism,” in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, 95. 86. ​James Gillray, “Dun-­Shaw” (London: S. W. Fores, 1788). On the figure of the nabob, see Century Britain Tillman  W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-­ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), particularly 121. [ 215 ]

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87. ​See Lincoln, “Western Identities and the Orient,” 98. 88. ​On the En­glish invention of the kilt as a (necessarily mythic) metonym for Highland culture, see Hugh Trevor-­Roper, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 15–42. 89. ​Watt, “Scott, the Scottish Enlightenment, and Romantic Orientalism,” 97–98. 90. ​Walter Scott, “Culloden Papers,” Quarterly Review, January 1816, 288. 91. ​Scott, “Culloden Papers,” 288 and 290. 92. ​See Watt, “Scott, the Scottish Enlightenment, and Romantic Orientalism,” 99. 93. ​As Maxine Berg notes, “the exotic East had . . . ​long been perceived over the course of the medieval and early modern period through contact with par­tic­u ­lar objects—­fabrics, carpets, ceramics, furnishings, jewels, colours, patterns, and ornament” (Luxury and Plea­ sure in Eighteenth-­Century Britain [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], 50). Quite strikingly, at least half the items that Berg lists ­here have something to do with textiles—­ “fabrics,” “carpets,” “colours,” and “patterns.” On the history of luxury textiles in Eu­rope, see also Adam Geczy, Fashion and Orientalism: Dress, Textiles, and Culture from the 17th to the 21st ­Century (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 17. 94. ​Diego Saglia, “Words and Th ­ ings: Southey’s East and the Materiality of Oriental Discourse,” in Robert Southey and the Contexts of En­glish Romanticism, ed. Lynda Pratt (London: Routledge, 2006), 172. 95. ​Mary Wortley Montagu, “Letter 30,” in Mary Wortley Montagu, The Turkish Embassy Letters, ed. Teresa Heffernan and Daniel O’Quinn (Buffalo, NY: Broadview Editions, 2013), 113. 96. ​Quintin Craufurd explains that “persons of high rank sometimes wear above the Jama [a long muslin robe] a short loose vest of fine worked muslin, or silk brocaded with small gold or silver flowers; and in the cool season, of shawls” (Sketches Chiefly Relating to the History, Religion, Learning, and Manners, of the Hindoos. With a Concise Account of the Pre­sent State of the Native Powers of Hindostan [London, 1792], 2:42–43). 97. ​As Geczy has noted, in the cultural lexicon of the West, “turbans had been used since at least the fifteenth ­century to denote worldliness and prosperity.” In contrast, a loose robe like Hakim’s connoted a freedom of thought that became synonymous with learnedness (Fashion and Orientalism, 50 and 48). 98. ​See Caroline McCracken-­Flesher, Pos­si­ble Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 121–126. 99. ​David Simpson notes that this footnote was added in the 1832 revised edition of The Talisman (Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013], 95). On the medicinal claims surrounding tea, see Ellis, Coulton, and Mauger, Empire of Tea, 103–108. 100. ​Quoted in Ellis, Coulton, and Mauger, Empire of Tea, 103. 101. ​Simpson also notes this ambiguity. As he writes, “it is not clear ­whether ­t here is a single drug that Saladin dispenses over and over again in dif­fer­ent forms, or ­whether he carries a diverse supply, only one of which is the talisman of the novel’s title (Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger, 96). 102. ​Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 268–269 (emphasis added). 103. ​Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 127. As Derrida explains, pharmakon emphatically does not refer to a substance that is si­mul­ta­neously poisonous and curative. “Pharmakon,” he cautions, is “something quite dif­fer­ent from s­imple confusion, alternation, or the dialectic of opposites” (99). Rather, “[it] constitutes the original medium of that decision [through which differentiation [ 216 ]



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in general is produced], the ele­ment that precedes it, comprehends it, goes beyond it, can never be reduced to it” (99). Not so much substance (indeed, Derrida calls it “antisubstance”) as flow, “the pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play: (the production of ) difference” (127). 104. ​On Scott’s misspelling, see Marianne McLeod Gilchrist, “Getting Away with Murder: Runciman and Conrad of Montferrat’s ­Career in Constantinople,” The Mediæval Journal 2, no. 1 (2012): 31–32. 105. ​See Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, “talisman, n.2,” accessed December 5, 2022, https://­ www​-­oed​-­com​.­stmarys​-­ca​.­idm​.­oclc​.­org​/­view​/­Entry​/­197239. 106. ​In this sense, Saladin himself constitutes the ultimate “talisman,” a term that in its oldest signification means “a Turk learned in divinity and law, a Mullah.” See Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, “talisman, n.1,” accessed December  5, 2022, https://­w ww​-­oed​-­com​ .­stmarys​-­ca​.­idm​.­oclc​.­org​/­view​/­Entry​/­197238. 107. ​Of course, the sacred and restorative properties of the talisman remain operative only within the historical, geo­graph­i­cal, and aesthetic bounds of Scott’s romance. The novel, as is well known, ends with a delightfully ironic postscript that laments the talisman’s decline in powers ­after Saladin gives it as nuptial pre­sent to Kenneth and Edith and it is taken to Eu­rope: “though many cures ­were wrought by means of it in Eu­rope, none equaled in success and celerity to t­ hose which the Soldan achieved. It is still in existence . . . ​its virtues are still applied to for stopping blood, and in cases of canine madness” (277). On the talisman as a precapitalist fantasy that reacts against nineteenth-­century global trade, see Simpson, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger, 94–95. 108. ​Judith Wilt, Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 184. 109. ​De Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietz­sche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 276. 110. ​G. G. Sigmond, Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral (London, 1839), 1. CHAPTER 4 ​—­ ​THE EXOTIC SELF 1. ​L eigh Hunt, “The Subject of Breakfast Continued–Tea-Drinking,” London Journal, July 9, 1834, 113. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 2. ​For the role of China in the British visual imagination during the nineteenth ­century, see Elizabeth Hope Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Lit­er­a­ture, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-­ Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 2010. 3. ​See John Ovington, An Essay upon the Nature and Qualities of Tea, in Tea in Natu­ral History and Medical Writing, ed. Richard Coulton, 17–31, vol. 2 of Tea and the Tea-­Table in Eighteenth-­Century ­England, ed. Markman Ellis (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010); Jonas Hanway, Essay on Tea, in Tea, Commerce and the East India Com­pany, ed. Matthew Mauger, 59–107, vol. 3 of Tea and the Tea-­Table (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010). 4. ​Julie E. Fromer, A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian ­England (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 16 and 17. 5. ​Charles Lamb, “Old China,” in Charles Lamb, The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb (New York: Modern Library, 1935), 218. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CWL. 6. ​Erika Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea ­Shaped the Modern World (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2017), 62. 7. ​Hanway, Essay on Tea, 71. 8. ​Fromer, A Necessary Luxury, 97; also see 88–115. See also Marcia Pointon, Strategies for Showing: ­Women, Possession, and Repre­sen­ta­tion in En­glish Visual Culture, 1665–1800 [ 217 ]

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(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 15–58; Elizabeth Kowaleski-­Wallace, Consuming Subjects: ­ Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eigh­ teenth ­ Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 19–36. 9. ​Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), 69. 10. ​For the role of the visual order in normalizing the tea t­ able as a symbol of Britishness, see Emalee Beddoes, “The Art of Tea: Late Victorian Visual Culture and the Normalization of an International National Icon,” (MPhil thesis, University of Birmingham, 2014), http://­etheses​.­bham​.­ac​.­u k​/­4915​/­2​/­Beddoes14MPhil​.­pdf. For the role of the visual order in constructing the ideology of domesticity, see Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian ­Family (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2000). 11. ​The natu­ral phi­los­o­pher William Whewell made this claim during the November  26, 1851 lecture he gave on the ­Great Exhibition (“Lecture I. Dr. Whewell on the General Bearing of the ­Great Exhibition on the Pro­gress of Art and Science,” in Lectures on the Pro­gress of Arts and Science, Resulting from the ­Great Exhibition in London, Delivered before the Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, at the Suggestion of H. R. H. Prince Albert [New York, 1856], 5 and 9). 12. ​Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire, 86. 13. ​Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire, 86. 14. ​For the ideological idiom of eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century periodicals, particularly its role in consolidating a m ­ iddle class, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, 8th  ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Jon P. Klancher, The Making of En­glish Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). 15. ​See Andrew Porter, “Introduction: Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth ­Century,” in The Nineteenth-­Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1–28, vol. 3 of The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Wm. Roger Louis. 16. ​James Walvin, Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1600–1800 (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 147. 17. ​For the history of ceramics in Britain, see Howard Coutts, The Art of Ceramics: Eu­ro­pean Ceramic Design 1500–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). 18. ​On the “miraculousness” of Chinese consumer goods in the En­glish imagination, see Chi-­ ming Yang, Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-­Century ­England, 1660–1760 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 6. 19. ​Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye, 6; Peter  J. Kitson, Forging Romantic China: Sino-­British Cultural Exchange 1760–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 10. See also Anne Veronica Witchard, Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Lime­house Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown (UK: Ashgate, 2009), 17–18. 20. ​Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an En­glish Opium-­Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 78 and 4. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. De Quincey’s essay was first published in London Magazine from September to October 1821, before undergoing significant revision and expansion in 1855 and being published separately in 1856. U ­ nless other­wise stated, the page references are to this 2008 edition, which reprints the 1821 version. 21. ​ Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an En­glish Opium-­Eater (1856), in Thomas De Quincey, The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 240, ed. Grevel Lindop, vol. 2 of Confessions of an En­glish Opium-­Eater 1821–1856 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000). Suspiria de Profundis similarly describes the connection between opium and the faculty of dreaming as a “secondary” one (Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis: Being a Sequel to the [ 218 ]



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Confessions of an En­glish Opium-­Eater, in Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an En­glish Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], 88). Suspiria de Profundis was first published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine from May to July 1845. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 22. ​On the Britain-­China-­India trade triangle, see Tan Chung, “The Britain-­China-­India Trade Triangle, 1770–1840,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 11, no. 4 (1974): 411–431. For the British consumption of Turkish opium, see ­Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards, Opium and the P ­ eople: Opiate Use in Nineteenth-­Century E ­ ngland (London: Allen Lane, 1981); Thomas Dormandy, Opium: Real­ity’s Dark Dream (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 69–75. For the historical significance of opium trade routes and their symbolic reconstitution in Confessions, see Sanjay Krishnan, “Opium Confessions: Narcotic, Commodity, and the Malay Amuk,” in Sanjay Krishnan, Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain’s Empire in Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 59–94. 23. ​See John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-­Century British Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of ­Virginia, 1995), 46–68; Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anx­i­eties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 170–228. 24. ​On the nineteenth-­century cult of domesticity, see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Po­liti­cal History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Catherine Hall, White, Male and ­Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1992); Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle-­Class W ­ omen and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 25. ​See David Simpson, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 69–76. 26. ​Hanway, Essay on Tea, 86. 27. ​Eugenia Zuroski, “Tea and the Limits of Orientalism in De Quincey’s Confessions of an En­glish Opium-­Eater,” in Writing China: Essays on the Amherst Embassy (1816) and Sino-­ British Cultural Relations, ed. Peter  J. Kitson and Robert Markley (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2016), 108, 120, and 109. 28. ​See Simpson, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger, 74–75; Krishnan, “Opium Confessions,” 73–74. 29. ​For a psychoanalytic reading of De Quincey’s compulsive attraction to the foreign, see Rajani Sudan, Fair Exotics: Xenophobic Subjects in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 1720–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 65–95. 30. ​The allusion to William Words­worth’s The Prelude further underscores the Romantic imagination that undergirds this scene. See Vincent A. De Luca, “ ‘The Type of a Mighty Mind’: M ­ ental Influence in Words­worth and De Quincey,” Texas Studies in Lit­er­a­ture and Language 13, no.  2 (1971): 239–247. For De Quincey’s relationship with Words­ worth, see Charles J. Rzepka, Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 1995), especially 166–222. 31. ​Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1757), 1. 32. ​Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 31. Markus Poetzsch underscores precisely this “productive” effect of De Quincey’s sublime horror (“Fearful Spaces: Thomas De Quincey’s Sino-­A nginophobia,” En­glish Studies in Canada 41, nos. 2–3 [June–­September  2015]: 27–41). For a contrasting reading of the De Quinceyean sublime as an “abject narrative,” see Steve Vine, “ ‘Intermitting Power’: De Quincey’s Sublime Identifications,” Prose Studies 30, no. 2 (2008): 142–158. [ 219 ]

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33. ​Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey, 6. 34. ​Daniel Sanjiv Roberts has argued that the Orientalist imagery in this scene is less syncretic or “hazy” than has been generally supposed and in fact can be traced back to early Orientalist scholarship (“ ‘Mix(ing) a ­Little with Alien Natures’: Biblical Orientalism in De Quincey,” in Thomas De Quincey: New Theoretical and Critical Directions, ed. Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts [New York: Routledge, 2008], 27; see also pages 19–44). 35. ​Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Vintage Books, 1979), 3. 36. ​ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has identified the “correspondence” between “within” and “without” as the rhetorical linchpin of De Quincey’s writings (“Language as Live Burial: Thomas De Quincey,” in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions [North Stratford, NH: Ayer Com­pany, 1999], 41–103). 37. ​Charles J. Rzepka argues that for De Quincey, “being possessed by ‘power’ comes to be experienced as possession of it,” but he focuses on the reader rather than the author as the ­ ill: De Quincey’s Opium locus of response (“The Lit­er­a­ture of Power and the Imperial W War Essays,” South Central Review 8, no.  1 [Spring 1991]: 39–40). Relatedly, Cannon Schmitt argues that De Quincey uses the Gothic mode to construct both his private and his national identity on the ground of persecution and suffering (Alien Nation: Nineteenth-­Century Gothic Fictions and En­glish Nationality [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997], 45–75). 38. ​ For a neurophysiological reading of De Quincey’s “palimpsest” in the context of nineteenth-­century science and modern cognitive psy­chol­ogy, see Markus Iseli, “Thomas De Quincey and the Cognitive Prospects of the Unconscious,” Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review 24, no. 3 (2013): 325–333. 39. ​For a helpful survey of the relevant criticism on the topic of the Romantic child, see Linda M. Austin, “­Children of Childhood: Nostalgia and the Romantic Legacy,” Studies in Romanticism 42, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 75–98. Barrell has argued that we should “think of the relation between childhood and the oriental in De Quincey’s writings as a relation between two forms of guilt, personal and po­liti­cal, in which each can be a displaced version of the other, and in which each aggravates the other in an ascending spiral of fear and of vio­ lence” (The Infection of Thomas De Quincey, 21). I suggest, however, that the autobiographical coherence of De Quincey’s writings registers his attempt to control such an “ascending spiral.” Autobiography becomes the way through which De Quincey forges an imperial identity capable of accommodating the fractures that mark its sense of self. 40. ​See Peter L. Caracciolo, “Introduction: ‘Such a Store House of Ingenious Fiction and of Splendid Imagery,’ ” in The Arabian Nights in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture: Studies in the Reception of The Thousand and One Nights into British Culture, ed. Peter L. Caracciolo (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), especially 30; Brian Alderson, “Scheherazade in the Nursery,” in The Arabian Nights in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 81–93. 41. ​William Words­worth, “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold,” in The Poetical Works of William Words­worth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1917), 79. 42. ​See, for instance, Judith A. Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (New York: Palgrave, 2001). On the relationship between the Romantic rhe­toric of infancy and the rise of a vernacular national lit­er­a­ture, see Ann Wierda Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 43. ​Chung, “The British-­China-­India Trade Triangle,” 412–413. 44. ​For the imperial ideology of the London Magazine (particularly its impact on Lamb, who worked both as periodical writer and an India House clerk), see Karen Fang, Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs: Periodical Culture and Post-­Napoleonic Authorship (Charlottesville: University of V ­ irginia Press, 2010), 31–65. [ 220 ]



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45. ​Charles Lamb, letter to Bernard Barton on December  1, 1824, in Charles Lamb, The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb, 888. All of Lamb’s letters are from this edi­ ill hereafter be cited parenthetically in the text as CWL. tion and w 46. ​David Higgins, Romantic En­glishness: Local, National and Global Selves, 1780–1850 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 134. In studying how Lamb’s imperial employment necessarily s­haped his imaginations of the exotic, Higgins argues that Lamb was conscious of his dependence on cultural ­others but that he experienced that dependence as a threat. 47. ​This discursive strategy reifies the Orient as wholly and thrillingly other at the same time that it idealizes (and desires to appropriate) that Orient as a source of redemption for the Western consciousness. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Alastor most obviously embodies this Orientalist method, although the poem’s split perspective between the narrator and the visionary “Poet” suggests Shelley’s ironization of such a mode of discourse. For a reading of Alastor as Shelley’s critique of solipsistic Orientalism, see Andrew Warren, The Orient and the Young Romantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 131–151. 48. ​See Fang, Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs, 37. 49. ​Kitson reads this scene as Lamb’s strategic evasion: “a wish to concentrate on [popu­lar British imaginations of China] to the profound exclusion of the polity of China” (Forging Romantic China, 173). 50. ​On ethical cosmopolitanism as a question in the Romantic era, see David Simpson, “The Limits of Cosmopolitanism and the Case for Translation,” Eu­r o­pean Romantic Review 16, no. 2 (2005): 141–152. Simpson hesitates to call such a state of openness “cosmopolitanism” and argues that it is more adequately represented by the paradigm of “translation.” 51. ​Charles Lamb, “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” in Charles Lamb, The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb, 108. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CWL. 52. ​Fang, Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs, 61. 53. ​A s Denise Gigante points out, “quintessence” is a “technical term for the substance so essential to the edifice of French haute cuisine” (Taste: A Literary History [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005], 113). 54. ​Gigante (Taste, 97) and Gerald Monsman (“Satiric Models for Charles Lamb’s ‘A Dissertation upon Roast Pig,’ ” Nineteenth-­Century Prose 33, no.  1 [2006]: 1–6) also both identify Joseph Ritson’s Essay on the Abstinence from Animal Flesh and Jonathan Swift’s satirical “A Modest Proposal” as two of the multiple sources that Lamb drew on. 55. ​Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Vindication of Natu­ral Diet,” in Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. E. B. Murray (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1993), 1:79. 56. ​For the ideological function of “pure diet” in Shelley’s writings, see Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natu­ral World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 57. ​Shelley, “A Vindication of Natu­ral Diet,” 1:88 (emphasis added). 58. ​Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 115; Shelley, “A Vindication of Natu­ral Diet,” 1:88. 59. ​Shen Songmao 沈松茂, Manhan quanxi 满汉全席 [Manchu-­Han imperial feast] (New Taipei City, Taiwan: Yangzhi Wenhua Shiye 揚智文化事業, 1994), 32. 60. ​John Barrow, Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, [. . .] (Philadelphia, 1805), 372, 370, 60, and 335. 61. ​As Kitson notes, however, Manning’s material contributions to Romantic Sinology ­were slight. His claim to fame rests chiefly on his personal eccentricities and his pioneering entrance into Lhasa (Forging Romantic China, 174). For a survey of periodical repre­sen­t a­t ions of [ 221 ]

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China in the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries, see William Christie, “China in Early Romantic Periodicals,” Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review 27, no. 1 (2016): 25–38. 62. ​Monsman, “Satiric Models,” 3–4. 63. ​For the Roman and Chinese influences in Chambers’s work, see David Porter, “ ‘Beyond the Bounds of Truth’: Cultural Translation and William Chambers’s Chinese Garden,” in Sinographies: Writing China, ed. Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 143. 64. ​Felicity James, “Thomas Manning, Charles Lamb, and Oriental Encounters,” in “Cross-­ Cultural Negotiations: Romanticism, Mobility, and the Orient,” Poetica 76 (2011): 31. 65. ​D. Porter, “Beyond the Bounds of Truth,” 146. 66. ​Fang points out that even the etymology of “porcelain” is connected with pigs (“porcellana”; Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs, 63). 67. ​Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye, 78–82. Similarly, David Porter argues that China represents an “aesthetic monstrosity” that Lamb si­mul­ta­neously appropriates and denies (The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-­Century E ­ ngland [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010], 3 and 10). Kitson notes that the teacup signals Lamb’s intentional departure from his economic and scholarly understandings of China (Forging Romantic China, 172). Fang, who reads the essay as a materialist “desublimation” of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” that indicates Lamb’s modern sense of “guilt-­free consumption,” argues that “the gravity-­ defying imagery on the teacup” offers Elia “a glimpse into remote China itself ” (Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs, 56, 64, and 47). 68. ​Coutts, The Art of Ceramics, 153–154. 69. ​See Robert Copeland, Spode’s Willow Pattern and Other Designs a­ fter the Chinese (New York: Rizzoli, 1980). 70. ​Jane Bennet has described the somatic engagement with and openness to “the in­de­pen­ dent vitality of nonhuman forms” as a form of “enchanted materialism,” capable of cultivating a spirit of moral generosity (The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics [Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2001], 157). In the case of Lamb, I suggest, this generosity plays out in the form of a cosmopolitan thinking that pursues cultural connections even as it re­spects differences. 71. ​Space-­time is a mathematical concept that theorizes the interdependence between time and space as entities in a continuum. Mikhail Bakhtin has adapted the concept as a literary theory that he names “chronotope,” a term that “expresses the inseparability of space and time . . . ​as a formally constitutive category of lit­er­a­ture” (“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981], 84). For a specific consideration of the role of spatiotemporality in repre­ sen­ta­tions of empire, see Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially 12–13; Holt Meyer, Susanne Rau, and Katharina Waldner, eds., SpaceTime of the Imperial (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016). 72. ​The “Celestial Empire” was a common term for China in nineteenth-­century Britain. For instance, William Langdon’s guide for an 1842 Chinese exhibition held in London is titled Ten Thousand ­Things Relating to China and the Chinese: An Epitome of the Genius, Government, History, Lit­er­a­ture, Agriculture, Arts, Trade, Manners, Customs, and Social Life of the ­People of the Celestial Empire, Together with a Synopsis of the Chinese Collection (London, 1842). For my analy­sis of this exhibition, see chapter 5. On the Euro-­A merican tendency to construct cultural ­Others as non-­coeval, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). For an application of Fabian’s thinking to Romantic lit­er­a­ture, see Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism, 178. [ 222 ]



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73. ​Jonathan Grossman, Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 9. Grossman argues that nineteenth-­century developments in passenger transport created new ways of imagining time, space, and transnational community. For a history of the development of Greenwich time, see also Derek Howse, Greenwich Time and the Discovery of Longitude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 74. ​As Benedict Anderson has argued, the experience of simultaneity, established and cultivated by eighteenth-­century technologies of the newspaper and novelistic form, first allowed the “nation” as an “­imagined po­liti­cal community” to emerge (­Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [rev. ed.; London: Verso, 2006], 6). 75. ​Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger, Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf That Conquered the World (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 127. 76. ​Samuel Phillips Day, Tea: Its Mystery and History (London, 1878), 46–47. See also Fromer’s reading of Day’s pamphlet (A Necessary Luxury, 35–42). 77. ​Day, Tea: Its Mystery and History, [n.p.]. 78. ​For the etymology of “hyson,” see Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, “hyson, n,” accessed December 5, 2022, https://­w ww​-­oed​-­com​.­stmarys​-­ca​.­idm​.­oclc​.­org​/­view​/­Entry​/­90630 79. ​Fang, Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs, 40. 80. ​William Flesch, “ ‘Friendly and Judicious’ Reading: Affect and Irony in the Works of Charles Lamb,” Studies in Romanticism 23, no. 2 (1984): 163–181. 81. ​R ichard Haven, “The Romantic Art of Charles Lamb,” ELH 30, no.  2 (June  1963): 141–142. 82. ​See Judith R. Walkowitz, “Cosmopolitanism, Feminism, and the Moving Body,” Victorian Lit­er­a­ture and Culture 38, no. 2 (2010): 429. CHAPTER 5 ​—­ ​“ BARBARIAN EYE” 1. ​William B. Langdon, Ten Thousand Th ­ ings Relating to China and the Chinese: An Epitome of the Genius, Government, History, Lit­er­a­ture, Agriculture, Arts, Trade, Manners, Customs, and Social Life of the P ­ eople of the Celestial Empire, Together with a Synopsis of the Chinese Collection (London, 1842), 138. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 2. ​On Nathan Dunn and his Chinese exhibition, see John Haddad, “The Romantic Collector in China: Nathan Dunn’s Ten Thousand Chinese Th ­ ings,” Journal of American Culture 21, no. 1 (1998): 7–26. 3. ​Peter J. Kitson, “The Last War of the Romantics: De Quincey, Macaulay, the First Chinese Opium War,” Words­worth Circle 49, no. 3 (2018): 148. 4. ​Robert Jocelyn, Six Months with the Chinese Expedition; or, Leaves from A Soldier’s Note-­ Book, 2nd ed. (London, 1841), 40–41. 5. ​For histories of the Opium Wars, see Peter Ward Fay, The Opium War 1840–1842: Barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the Early Part of the Nineteenth ­Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975); J. Y. Wong, Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism, and the Arrow War (1856–1860) in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 6. ​The national honor rhe­toric was common in the pro-­war discourse and appeared as early as 1830. See Song-­Chuan Chen, Merchants of War and Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017), 1–3. 7. ​“The Quarrel with China,” The Examiner, March  22, 1840; “The China Trade,” The Examiner, November 17, 1839. 8. ​“War with China, and the Opium Question,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, March 1840, 369 and 379. 9. ​Review of The Chinese War, with an Account of All the Operations of the British Army [. . .] and The Voyages and Ser­vices of the Nemesis [. . .], Dublin Review 16, no. 32 (June 1844): 444. [ 223 ]

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10. ​See David Masson’s headnote to Thomas De Quincey, “The Chinese Question in 1857,” in Thomas De Quincey, Miscellanea and Index, 345–347, vol. 14 of The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson (London, 1897). 11. ​Thomas De Quincey, “Hints ­towards an Appreciation of the Coming War in China,” in Thomas De Quincey, 1853–8, ed. Edmund Baxter, 155, vol. 18 of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001). 12. ​Thomas De Quincey, “The Opium Question with China in 1840,” in Thomas De Quincey, Miscellanea and Index, 165 and 203. 13. ​Chen, Merchants of War and Peace, 3. For a helpful summary of the vari­ous critical positions on the cause of the Opium War, see 6–7. 14. ​Chen, Merchants of War and Peace, 103; see also 103–125. 15. ​“Negotiations with China: Relative Rights and Duties among Nations Not Acknowledged by the Chinese [. . .],” Chinese Repository, January  1, 1835. The phrase “friendly intercourse” recurs in the period’s war­time commentary, regardless of w ­ hether the piece is pro-­or antiwar. For examples of how “friendly intercourse” was mobilized as a desired end on both sides, see “­Free Intercourse between China and Christendom [. . .],” Chinese Repository, October  1, 1836; Elijah Coleman Bridgeman, “Foreign Relations with China [. . .],” Chinese Repository, May 1, 1840. Dongqing Wang has suggested that the discourse of “natu­ral law” was central to Sino-­British war­time debate, and that its vari­ous articulations and formulations in national conversations became a key way for Britain to consolidate its own identity as enlightened practitioner of international law (“ ‘An Armed Negotiator’: Thomas De Quincey and the British Empire in China,” Forum for World Lit­er­a­ture Studies 8, no. 4 [December 2016]: 595; see also 596–600). 16. ​“Negotiations with China.” 17. ​“Negotiations with China.” 18. ​“­Free Intercourse between China and Christendom.” 19. ​Bridgeman, “Foreign Relations with China.” 20. ​“­Free Intercourse between China and Christendom.” On the history of the Chinese Repository and its role in the Western construction of China as an object of knowledge, see Elizabeth L. Malcolm, “The Chinese Repository and Western Lit­er­a­ture on China 1800 to 1850,” Modern Asian Studies 7, no. 2 (1973): 165–178. 21. ​Wm. S. Wetmore and J. Robert Morison, “Proceedings Relative to the Formation of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China,” Chinese Repository, December 1, 1834. The article was also signed by En­glish, American, and German missionaries, including Bridgeman and Gützlaff. Chen argues that the Society for Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China waged “an information war with ‘intellectual artillery’ ” that ultimately paved the way for the military war (Merchants of Peace, 61; see also 61–81). 22. ​On the f­ree trade doctrine underpinning the pro-­war position, see Chen, Merchants of War and Peace, 24–31. On how the campaigners for war influenced British national discourse and led to a “paradigm shift in British knowledge of China,” see 119. On the ideological alignment between missionaries and merchants on the Sino-­British wars, see 61–81; Murray A. Rubinstein, “The Wars They Wanted: American Missionaries’ Use of The Chinese Repository before the Opium War,” American Neptune 48, no. 4 (Fall 1988): 271–282. 23. ​Quoted in “Peace Meeting—­Royal Exchange,” Freeman’s Journal, December 2, 1842. 24. ​[Joseph Addison], “No.  69,” in The Spectator, ed. Donald  F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1965), 1:293, 294, and 295. 25. ​Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger, Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf That Conquered the World (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 292–293.

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26. ​“­Free Intercourse between China and Christendom.” 27. ​Charles Dickens and Richard Horne, “The ­Great Exhibition and the ­Little One,” House­ hold Words, July 5, 1851, 356. 28. ​Thomas De Quincey, “China [I],” in De Quincey, 1853–8, 92. 29. ​Kitson, “The Last War of the Romantics,” 155. 30. ​Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis: Being a Sequel to the Confessions of an En­glish Opium-­Eater, in Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an En­glish Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 90. 31. ​De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, 156. For a detailed analy­sis of this mountain apparition, see chapter 4. 32. ​Dongqing Wang, “Representing Kowtow: Civility and Civilization in Early Sino-­British Encounters,” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 60, no. 3 (Fall 2019): 281. 33. ​De Quincey, “China [I],” 91 and 89–90. 34. ​De Quincey, “The Opium Question with China in 1840,” 184; “China [I],” 92. 35. ​De Quincey, “The Opium Question with China in 1840,” 184 and 202. 36. ​ “Negotiations with China” (emphasis added); Bridgeman, “Foreign Relations with China” (emphasis added). 37. ​Algernon Sydney Thelwall, The Iniquities of the Opium Trade with China [. . .] (London, 1839), 62. 38. ​Thelwall, The Iniquities of the Opium Trade with China, 62 and 107. 39. ​Thelwall, The Iniquities of the Opium Trade with China, 16 and 18. 40. ​Thelwall, The Iniquities of the Opium Trade with China, 18. 41. ​On the connection between vision and the opium den in nineteenth-­century Britain, see  Elizabeth Hope Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Lit­er­a­ture, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-­Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 111–140. 42. ​On British imperial culture as a culture of display and exhibition, see John M. MacKenzie and John McAleer, eds., Exhibiting the Empire: Cultures of Display and the British Empire (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2017). 43. ​Quoted in Elijah Coleman Bridgeman, ed., “Journal of Occurrences: Edicts from the Governor and Hoppo of Canton; Imperial Commissioners; New Hoppo; Literati; Siamese and Cochinchinese Tribute B ­ earers,” in Chinese Repository, August 1834. For the confrontation between Napier and Lu Kun, see Priscilla Napier, Barbarian Eye: Lord Napier in China, 1834, the Prelude to Hong Kong (London: Brassey’s, 1995), 116–134; Fay, The Opium War 1840–1842, 67–79. 44. ​De Quincey, “The Opium Question with China in 1840,” 199. 45. ​Lydia H. Liu, “The Thug, the Barbarian, and the Work of Injury in Imperial Warfare,” PMLA 124, no. 5 (October 2009): 1860. 46. ​Chen, Merchants of War and Peace, 82. 47. ​The examples are too numerous to be cited in this note, but ­here is one: “The Celestial Empire, like the laws of the Medes and Persians, remains unchanged and unchangeable ever; and the barbarians of the ‘evil eye,’ in return for prostration the most abject, . . . ​ caprice and exactions the most outrageous and despotic, reflected with concomitant circumstances of offensive exaggeration from the precincts of the Imperial Court by subordinate provincial del­e­ga­tion, are spurned with the same apparent contempt, and trampled on with as ­little ceremony, as when ­Great Britain was no[t] other­wise known in China than by a few straggling traders” (“War with China, and the Opium Question,” 369). 48. ​“China. The Real State of the Case Freely Translated from the Original Chinese, and Illustrated by Alfred Crowquill with Four Real China Plates,” Bentley’s Miscellany, January 1840, 479.

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49. ​Charles Dickens, “The Chinese Junk,” in Charles Dickens, Miscellaneous Papers, additional vol., The Au­then­tic Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens (London: Chapman and Hall, 1908), 104. 50. ​De Quincey, “The Opium Question with China in 1840,” 175. 51. ​See James  L. Hevia, En­glish Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-­Century China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 39. As Hevia points out, the translation of Chinese characters, as well as Britain’s seizure of Qing governmental correspondence, “indicated the extent to which the [Qing] Court had lost control of its own discursive universe in its dealings with Western powers” (59). For a semiotic analy­sis of the character in question, see Lydia H. Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), especially 31–69. 52. ​Quoted in William Jay, “National Honor a Plea for War,” Advocate of Peace (1837–1845) 4, no. 10 (September 1842): 228 (emphasis added). 53. ​“China,” Illustrated London News, November 12, 1842. For an in-­depth historical account of the Nemesis, see Fay, The Opium War 1840–1842, 260–263. 54. ​“The Nemesis and Chinese War,” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, March 6, 1847, 155. 55. ​“The Nemesis and Chinese War,” 157 and 156. 56. ​“Wan Tang Jin Wuh: By a Barbarian Eye,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, February 1843, 176–177. 57. ​“Wan Tang Jin Wuh,” 177. 58. ​As Chang argues, Dunn’s exhibition “implicitly rewrote the story of the Opium Wars for British viewers by reclaiming Chinese material objects from scenes of economic or martial conflict to moments of anthropological and aesthetic instruction” (Britain’s Chinese Eye, 116). Catherine Pagani examines how repre­sen­ta­tions of Chinese material culture through exhibitions and in the periodical press point to shifting British perceptions ­a fter the First Opium War (“Objects and the Press: Images of China in Nineteenth-­Century Britain,” in Imperial Co-­Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press, ed. Julie F. Codell [Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003], 147–166). 59. ​“Ten Thousand Th ­ ings related to China and the Chinese,” Court and Lady’s Magazine, June 1843, 102. 60. ​On naive empiricism and its relationship to the En­glish novel, see Michael McKeon, The Origins of the En­glish Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), especially 47–52. 61. ​Robert Fortune, Three Years Wandering in the Northern Districts of China, Including a Visit to the Tea, Silk, and Cotton Countries (London, 1847), 4. For the role of this text in Britain’s construction of a Chinese way of looking, see Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye, 62. 62. ​George Levine, Realism, Ethics, and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Lit­er­a­ture and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 188. 63. ​Levine, Realism, Ethics, and Secularism, 189. 64. ​As Geoffrey Baker has argued, imperialism played an “indispensable role” in “two linked historical developments . . . : the crystallization of an empirical epistemology, emblematized by the rise of the museum; and the contemporaneous birth of realist narrative” (“A Vision of Realism: Empiricism and Empire in Honoré de Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin,” in Realism’s ­Others, ed. Geoffrey Baker and Eva Aldea [Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010], 2). 65. ​Audrey Jaffe, The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 5. 66. ​Fortune, Three Years Wandering in the Northern Districts of China, 5. [ 226 ]



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67. ​­Great Britain, Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851, ­Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851: Official Descriptive and Illustrated Cata­logue (London, 1851), 1:x. CHAPTER 6 ​—­ ​“ NOT THE TRACK OF THE TIME” 1. ​William Whewell, “Lecture I. Dr. Whewell on the General Bearing of the ­Great Exhibition on the Pro­gress of Art and Science,” in Lectures on the Pro­gress of Arts and Science, Resulting from the ­Great Exhibition in London, Delivered before the Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, at the Suggestion of H. R. H. Prince Albert (New York, 1856), 9–10. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 2. ​See the discussion in chapter 5 of William B. Langdon, Ten Thousand ­Things Relating to China and the Chinese: An Epitome of the Genius, Government, History, Lit­er­a­ture, Agriculture, Arts, Trade, Manners, Customs, and Social Life of the P ­ eople of the Celestial Empire, Together with a Synopsis of the Chinese Collection (London, 1842). 3. ​See also Langdon, Ten Thousand ­Things Relating to China and the Chinese, viii. 4. ​On Victorian glass culture and the forms of imagination it facilitated, see Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Andrew H. Miller, Novels b­ ehind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 5. ​Con­temporary reviews highlight the ­Great Exhibition’s power of cultural assimilation. See, for instance, “The G ­ reat Industrial Exhibition,” Athenaeum 1228 (May 10, 1851): 500. 6. ​For a broader analy­sis of the imperial ideology that underpinned Victorian knowledge structures, see Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993). 7. ​For the historical and cultural significance of the ­Great Exhibition, see Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The ­Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Richard  D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian E ­ ngland: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 17–72; A. Miller, Novels ­behind Glass, 50–90. 8. ​On the imperial archive as a “fantasy of knowledge collected and united in the ser­vice of state and Empire,” see Richards, The Imperial Archive, 6. 9. ​Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Vintage Books, 1979), 72, quoted in Geoffrey Baker, “A Vision of Realism: Empiricism and Empire in Honoré de Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin,” in Realism’s ­Others, ed. Geoffrey Baker and Eva Aldea (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 1. 10. ​See Timothy Mitchell, “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order,” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 409–423. James  L. Hevia (En­ glish Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-­Century China [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003]), Catherine Pagani (“Objects and the Press: Images of China in Nineteenth-­Century Britain,” in Imperial Co-­Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press, ed. Julie  F. Codell [Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003], 147–166), and Amy Jane Barnes (“Exhibiting China in London,” in National Museums: New Studies from around the World, ed. Simon J. Knell et al. [London: Routledge, 2011], 386–399) have developed ­these insights in the specific case of China, showing how Britain’s collection and display of Chinese t­ hings a­ fter the First Opium War helped consolidate the image of China as moribund. 11. ​John Tenniel, “The Happy F ­ amily in Hyde Park,” Punch, July 19, 1851, 38. [ 227 ]

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12. ​On Mr. Punch’s physical appearance and his origins in puppetry, see Frank Felsenstein, “Mr. Punch at the ­Great Exhibition: Ste­reo­t ypes of Yankee and Hebrew in 1851,” in The Jews and British Romanticism: Politics, Religion, Culture, ed. Sheila A. Spector (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 20. 13. ​Auerbach, The ­Great Exhibition of 1851, 159. 14. ​[Charles Knight], “Three May-­Days in London,” House­hold Words, May 3, 1851, 122. 15. ​Auerbach, The ­Great Exhibition of 1851, 159. 16. ​Auerbach, The ­Great Exhibition of 1851, 159. 17. ​The “Symposium Programme” is quoted in Alexis Soyer, Memoirs of Alexis Soyer; With Unpublished Receipts and Odds and Ends of Gastronomy, ed. F. Volant and J. R. Warren (London, 1859), 203. See also “Soyer’s Symposium at Gore House,” Morning Post, April 28, 1851. 18. ​Soyer, Memoirs of Alexis Soyer, 200 and 201. 19. ​Paul Young, “The Cooking Animal: Economic Man at the G ­ reat Exhibition,” Victorian Lit­er­a­ture and Culture 36, no. 2 (2008): 579. 20. ​William Alexander, The Costume of China, Illustrated in Forty-­Eight Coloured Engravings (London, 1805), 6. 21. ​George Newenham Wright, China, in a Series of Views, Displaying the Scenery, Architecture, and Social Habits of That Ancient Empire [. . .] (London, 1843), 1:78. 22. ​Wright, China, 1:78. 23. ​Peter Lund Simmonds, The Curiosities of Food; or the Dainties and Delicacies of Dif­fer­ent Nations Obtained from the Animal Kingdom (London, 1859), 66. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 24. ​“E. R. H,” “Some Talk about Food,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, April 1857, 477. 25. ​“The Chinese and Their Peculiarities,” Reynolds’s Miscellany of Romance, General Lit­er­a­ ture, Science, and Art, February 20, 1869, 157. 26. ​John Leech, “London Dining Rooms, 1851,” Punch, January 1, 1851, n.p. 27. ​Indeed, sea cucumber, bird’s nest soup, and shark’s fin have pride of place in Chinese banquets. Dog meat, too, was considered a delicacy by many, while rodent eating was a much more marginal custom practiced in par­tic­u ­lar regions. For the history of dog meat consumption in China and colonial Hong Kong, see Shuk-­Wah Poon, “Dogs and British Colonialism: The Contested Ban on Eating Dogs in Colonial Hong Kong,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42, no. 2 (2014): 308–328. On the history of rodent eating in China, see Zhang Qi 张琦, and Hou Xu-­dong 候旭东, “Hanjingdi buchi laoshu ma?—­Women ruhe kandai guo qu” [­Doesn’t Emperor Ching-­Ti of the Han dynasty eat mice?—­How do we view the past”], Shixue Yuekan 史学月刊 10 (2019): 47–55. 28. ​W. H. Medhurst, The Foreigner in Far Cathay (London, 1872), 2. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 29. ​Hevia, En­glish Lessons, 125 and 128. 30. ​Hevia, En­glish Lessons, 127. 31. ​Elizabeth Hope Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Lit­er­a­ture, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-­ Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 111. 32. ​Wright, China, 1:77; see also 78–80. 33. ​P. G. L., A Reminiscence of Canton. June, 1859 (London, 1866), 4. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 34. ​Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 16. 35. ​Mitchell, “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order,” 419. 36. ​Mitchell, “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order,” 414 and 415. 37. ​Barbara  J. Black, On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (Charlottesville: University Press of V ­ irginia, 2000), 126. [ 228 ]



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38. ​Black, On Exhibit, 105. 39. ​Charlotte Brontë, letter to Reverend Patrick Brontë, May  31, 1851, in Charlotte Brontë, ­ amily 1848–1851, 625, vol. 2 of The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, with a Se­lection of Letters by F and Friends, ed. Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 2000). See also Charlotte Brontë, Villette, ed. Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 40. ​Charles Dickens, letter to the Hon. Mrs. Richard Watson, July 11, 1851, in Charles Dickens, 1850–1852, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson, 428, vol. 6 of Charles Dickens, The Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Nina Burgis (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University ­ reat Exhibition comes in Charles Dickens Press, 1988). Dickens’s favorable review of the G and Richard Horne, “The G ­ reat Exhibition and the L ­ ittle One,” House­hold Words, July 5, 1851, 356–360. As I show ­later in the chapter, however, the essay’s congratulatory tone is complicated by the contrast between China and Britain that it relies on. On House­hold Words’ general perspective t­oward the ­Great Exhibition, see Sabine Clemm, Dickens, Journalism, and Nationhood: Mapping the World in House­hold Words (New York: Routledge, 2009), 16–47. 41. ​Dickens, letter to the Hon. Mrs. Richard Watson, July 11, 1851, 428. 42. ​Audrey Jaffe, The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 5. 43. ​Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an En­glish Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 44. ​Mary Jacobus, “The Buried Letter: Feminism and Romanticism in Villette,” in ­Women Writing and Writing about ­Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 42. 45. ​Charles Dickens, ­Little Dorrit, ed. Stephen Wall and Helen Small, rev. ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 60 and 33. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 46. ​Joseph Boone makes this point in “Depolicing Villette: Surveillance, Invisibility, and the Female Erotics of ‘Heretic Narrative,’ ” Novel 26, no. 1 (Fall 1992): 21. The significance of surveillance in Villette is well-­studied. See also, for instance, Jane Gezari, Charlotte Brontë and Defensive Conduct: The Author and the Body at Risk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Margaret L. Shaw, “Narrative Surveillance and Social Control in Villette,” Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 1500–1900 34, no. 4 (Autumn 1994): 813–833. 47. ​Heather Glen, Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 232. For a reading of Villette as a counternarrative to the “bourgeois triumphalism” (222) of the ­Great Exhibition, see 251–284. 48. ​James Buzard, “Outlandish Nationalism: Villette,” in James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-­Century British Novels (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 2005), 257. 49. ​A n exception is Anita Levy’s “Public Spaces, Private Eyes,” which considers the gender implications of Lucy Snowe’s “domestic tableau framing [of] l­ittle Paulina Home pouring tea for her beloved papa” (“Public Spaces, Private Eyes: Gender and the Social Work of Aesthetics in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette,” Nineteenth-­Century Contexts 22, no.  3 [2000]: 395). However, Levy does not discuss the Orientalist implications of such spectatorship. For the gender politics of Polly as Lucy’s repressed other self, see Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 428; Beverly Forsynth, “The Two ­Faces of Lucy Snowe: A Study in Deviant Be­hav­ior,” Studies in the Novel 29, no. 1 (1997): 17–25; Maureen Peck, “Are You Anybody, Miss Snowe?,” Brontë Studies 29, no. 3 (2004): 223–228. 50. ​For Villette’s use of the Oriental harem, see Aimillia Mohd Ramli, “From Pasha to Cleopatra and Vashti: The Oriental Other in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette,” Brontë Studies [ 229 ]

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35, no. 2 (2010): 118–127. Tanya Llewellyn has connected the Orientalization of erotic desire in Villette to Brontë’s broader fascination with the Arabian Nights (“ ‘The Fiery Imagination’: Charlotte Brontë, the Arabian Nights and Byron’s Turkish Tales,” Brontë Studies 37, no. 3 [2012]: 216–226). 51. ​Siobhan Carroll reads this scene as a kind of “geo­graph­i­cal game” through which the global is brought into the domestic space, a movement Lucy experiences as “traumatic” (“ ‘Play You Must’: Villette and the Nineteenth-­Century Board Game,” Nineteenth-­Century Contexts 39, no. 1 [2017], 33 and 34). 52. ​Whewell, “Lecture I,” 11. 53. ​Observing Polly’s interaction with her f­ ather, for instance, Lucy notes that “it was a picture, in its way, to see her, with her tiny stature and trim, neat shape, standing at his knee” (14 [emphasis added]). 54. ​Levy reads the preoccupation with Polly’s diminutive size as an intentional miniaturization that “spectacularizes” the scene so that Lucy can “negate or make unattractive the domestic coziness for which Paulina is destined” (“Public Spaces, Private Eyes,” 396 and 403). 55. ​P. Brooks, Realist Vision, 1 and 3. 56. ​On the relationship between En­g lishness and Britishness, see also my introduction and chapter 4. 57. ​Julie  E. Fromer, A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian E ­ ngland (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 90. 58. ​Sigmund Freud theorizes this strange familiarity using the concept of the “uncanny” (The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock [London: Penguin Books, 2003]). 59. ​Eva Badowska, “Choseville: Brontë’s Villette and the Art of Bourgeois Interiority,” PMLA 120, no. 5 (October 2005): 1514. 60. ​For the ­Great Exhibition’s Chinese collection, see G ­ reat Britain, Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851, ­Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851: Official Descriptive and Illustrated Cata­logue (London, 1851), 3:1418–1425. For the tension between domestic and museological space in the furnishing of the Victorian home, see Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 61. ​Badowska, “Choseville,” 1514. 62. ​Badowska, “Choseville,” 1514. 63. ​Eugenia Zuroski, A Taste for China: En­glish Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 57. 64. ​For a reading of this scene as the creation of an “alternative Britishness,” see Buzard, “Outlandish Nationalism.” In contrast, Kate Lawson and Lynn Shakinovsky read La Terrasse as the novel’s denunciation of the En­glish homespace as a fictional fantasy (“Fantasies of National Identification in Villette,” Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 1500–1900 49, no. 4 [Autumn 2009]: 925–944). 65. ​Fromer, A Necessary Luxury, 3. 66. ​L eigh Hunt, “The Subject of Breakfast Continued–­Tea-­Drinking,” London Journal, July 9, 1834, 113. For a detailed reading of Hunt’s essay, see chapter 4. 67. ​Fromer, A Necessary Luxury, 3. 68. ​Similarly, Seohyon Jung argues that Villette reveals the “intrinsically colonial construction of the En­glish domestic ideal,” though she focuses on Paul Emanuel’s colonial enterprise in Guadeloupe (“ ‘Leave This Wilderness and Go Out Hence’: W ­ omen’s Work and Colonial Domesticity in Villette,” Brontë Studies 45, no. 4 [2020]: 333). 69. ​As Andrew Miller points out, the objectification of ­women in the cultural discourse sur­ reat Exhibition helped police desires that might other­wise threaten the rounding the G hierarchy between spectator and spectacle (Novels ­behind Glass, 64–70). [ 230 ]



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70. ​Janet Tanke has argued that Brontë uses food to “represent the development of Lucy’s sexual identity,” but she does not focus on the contexts of commerce and commodification that inflect the depictions of the food (“The Hungry Heroine: Food as Erotic Discourse in Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Villette,’ ” in “Food and the Literary Imagination,” ed. Walter Levy, special double issue, CEA Critic 69, nos. 1–2 [Fall 2006–­Winter 2007]: 43). Rosemary Tate examines the repre­sen­ta­tion of sugar in Villette, arguing that while Brontë “maintains ­earlier anx­i­eties connected to abolitionism in which sugar was the site of concerns about the body,” she nevertheless repositions sugar “as a domestic item, rather than a colonial one,” to recuperate the taste for sugar as “rebellion against patriarchal authority” (“The Aesthetics of Sugar: Concepts of Sweetness in the Nineteenth ­Century” [PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2010], 34 and 82, https://­ora​.­ox​.­ac​.­uk​/­objects​/­uuid:960ac765​-­d21b​-­43d3​-­a 26b​ -­0188b4792186). 71. ​Conversely, Rajani Sudan (Fair Exotics: Xenophobic Subjects in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 1720–1850 [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002], 138–145) and Annette Cozzi (“ ‘I Have No Country’: Domesticating the Generic National W ­ oman,” in Annette Cozzi, The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-­Century British Fiction [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010], 71–104) have focused on how ingestion in Villette functions as a way to police national borders. Sudan argues that Lucy distinguishes between Continental and En­glish appetites ­because she uses ingestion to police the borders of national identity. On the trope of self-­starvation in Villette as a symbol for artistic power, see Diane Hoeveler, “ ‘A Draught of Sweet Poison’: Love, Food, and Wounds in Jane Eyre and Villette,” Prism(s) 7 (1999): 165–189. 72. ​In an 1838 journal entry, William Beckford also uses “necromantic” to describe the Orientalist scenery of his Fonthill estate, supposedly the inspiration of Vathek’s infernal Halls of Eblis (Quoted in Roger Lonsdale, “Introduction,” Vathek, ed. Roger Lonsdale [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970], xi). See chapter 2 for a detailed reading of this journal entry and of Vathek. 73. ​For Brontë’s use of typology as Villette’s dominant narrative mode, see Emily W. Heady, “ ‘Must I Render an Account?’: Genre and Self-­Narration in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette,” Journal of Narrative Theory 36, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 341–364. In par­tic­u ­lar, Heady argues that the novel critiques realism as an ideology that underpins the “culture-­wide materialism” (342) of Victorian E ­ ngland. 74. ​Antoinette Burton, Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 177 and 176. 75. ​Thus, Brontë deploys the same language of surveillance in describing the hold of the Catholic Church over Paul Emanuel and his relationship with Lucy: “We w ­ ere ­under the surveillance of a sleepless eye: Rome watched jealously her son through the mystic lattice at which I had knelt once, and to which M. Emanuel drew nigh month by month—­the sliding panel of the confessional” (409). For the pensionnat as a disciplinary structure, see Boone, “Depolicing Villette.” For the significance of Catholicism and its relationship to Villette’s nationalistic attitudes, see Rosemary Clark-­Beattie, “Fables of Rebellion: Anti-­Catholicism and the Structure of Villette,” ELH 53, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 821–847. 76. ​Robert  B. Heilman notes that the moon recurs as a figure for imagination in the novel (“Charlotte Brontë, Reason, and the Moon,” Nineteenth-­Century Fiction 14, no. 4 [March 1960]: 283–302). 77. ​Sally B. Palmer, “Projecting the Gaze: The Magic Lantern, Cultural Discipline, and Villette,” Victorian Review 32, no. 1 (2006): 27. 78. ​Kristina Aikens, “A Pharmacy of Her Own: Victorian ­Women and the Figure of the Opiate” (PhD diss., Tufts University, 2008), 76, https://­w ww​.­proquest​.­c om​/­docview​ /­304428041. [ 231 ]

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79. ​A s Sudan notes, Goton functions as the agent for the continuous contamination and subversion of Lucy’s En­glish identity (Fair Exotics, 145). 80. ​Critics have frequently pointed to the formative role that Lucy’s midnight exploit plays in her eventual attainment of in­de­pen­dence and self-­determination. See, for instance, Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 434–445. 81. ​Lawson and Shakinovsky argue that Lucy ­here “unveil[s]” the extent to which “all historical narratives—­national and personal—­rest on inventions and fantasies,” thus beginning the work of freeing herself from “the limitations of fixed histories, both personal and national, by which other characters are so often bound” (“Fantasies of National Identification in Villette,” 930 and 928). See also Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-­Century Gothic Fictions and En­glish Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 103. 82. ​For the role that Belgium’s territorial acquisitions abroad played in shoring up Belgian in­de­pen­dence, see Herman vander Linden, Belgium: The Making of a Nation, trans. Sybil Jane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920). 83. ​For details of this history, see Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Ca­rib­bean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 84. ​As Jacobus argues, neither the “real” nor the “imagination” has a mono­poly on Villette’s “truth”: the novel’s “double ending, in reversing the truth/fiction hierarchy, not only reinstates fantasy as a dominant rather than parasitic version of real­ity, but at the same time suggests that t­ here can be no firm ground; only a perpetual de-­centering activity” (“The Buried Letter,” 54). 85. ​Charles Dickens and Richard Horne, “The ­Great Exhibition and the ­Little One,” House­ hold Words, July 5, 1851, 357. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 86. ​See Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye, 122–124; Jeremy Tambling, “Opium, Wholesale, Resale, and for Export: On Dickens and China (Part One),” Dickens Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2004): 31–33; Clemm, Dickens, Journalism, and Nationhood, 25–26 and 32–33. See also Jeremy Tambling, “Opium, Wholesale, Resale, and for Export: On Dickens and China (Part Two),” Dickens Quarterly 21, no. 2 (2004): 104–113. 87. ​Thomas Percy, Hau Kiou Choaan; or, the Pleasing History. A Translation from the Chinese Language (London, 1761), xii–­x iv. 88. ​John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. David Spitz (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 67. For the relationship between Victorian liberalism and imperialism, see Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-­Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), especially 97–144. 89. ​Chang points out that Dickens’s “response to the terror of the unnarratable scene of seeing in the G ­ reat Exhibition is an immediate redirection to the Chinese example,” but she does not see in Dickens’s redirection a self-­conscious ironization of his own repre­sen­ta­ tion of China (Britain’s Chinese Eye, 124). 90. ​This visual lexicon runs throughout the essay, as the authors’ repeated calls for exhibition goers “to glance at” (356, 360), “to consider” (357, 358, 359), and to “contemplat[e]” (358, 360) iconic Chinese scenes perpetuate ste­reo­t ypical images of Chineseness in the ser­vice of concretizing and thereby elucidating En­glishness. Like many of their contemporaries, Dickens and Horne also articulate British national identity as En­glishness. On House­hold Words’ tendency to emphasize “En­glish” over “British” concerns while using the two terms “interchangeably,” see Clemm, Dickens, Journalism, and Nationhood, 70 and 78. 91. ​Clemm, Dickens, Journalism, and Nationhood, especially 48–49. See also Charles Dickens, “Why,” House­hold Words, March 1, 1856, 145–148. 92. ​“The Chinese Junk, ‘Keying,’ ” Illustrated London News, April 1, 1848. [ 232 ]



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93. ​Charles Dickens, “The Chinese Junk,” in Charles Dickens, Miscellaneous Papers, additional vol., The Au­then­tic Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens (London: Chapman and Hall, 1908), 102. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 94. ​Jonathan Grossman, Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6. 95. ​For Dickens’s ambivalence about British imperial expansion, see Patrick Brantlinger, “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 166–203; Deirdre David, “The Heart of Empire: L ­ ittle Nell and ­ omen, Empire, and Florence Dombey Do Their Bit,” in Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: W Victorian Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 43–76; Anny Sadrin, ed., Dickens, Eu­rope and the New Worlds (London: Macmillan, 1999); Wendy  S. Jacobson, ed., Dickens and the ­Children of Empire (New York: Palgrave, 2000); Grace Moore, Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004). Scholars generally agree that Dickens was critical of imperial expansion not ­because it was inherently bad, but ­because it drew attention away from social ills at home. 96. ​O xford En­glish Dictionary Online, “junk, n.1.5a” accessed December  5, 2022, https://­ www​-­oed​-­com​.­stmarys​-­ca​.­idm​.­oclc​.­org​/­view​/­Entry​/­102090. 97. ​Mill, On Liberty, 68. 98. ​Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, ed. Alan Horsman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 525. Incidentally, that novel also features a scene in which Dombey, traveling by railway, fails to notice the signs of domestic poverty disclosed by the “rushing landscape”: ­ ouses close at hand, and through the battered roofs and “­There are jagged walls and falling h broken win­dows, wretched win­dows are seen, where want and fever hide themselves in many wretched shapes” (299). A similarly critical perspective governs “The Noble Savage,” which intentionally adopts a tone of racist contempt to underscore the parallel between British “civility” and African “savagery”: the essay’s dramatic turn works at the affective level to startle its En­glish readers out of their sense of cultural superiority (Charles Dickens, “The Noble Savage,” House­hold Words, June  1853, 337–339). For the historical circumstances motivating Dickens’s composition of “The Noble Savage,” which suggest an attitude that is more complicated than ­simple racism, see G. Moore, Dickens and Empire, 63–70. 99. ​Charles Lamb, “Old China,” in Charles Lamb, The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb (New York: Modern Library, 1935), 217–221. 100. ​In his discussion of the place of China in Dickens’s writings, Tambling remarks that ­Little Dorrit is the novel that “makes the most significant use of China” (“Opium . . . (Part One),” 34). 101. ​Wenying Xu, “The Opium Trade and ‘­Little Dorrit’: A Case of Reading Silences,” Victorian Lit­er­a­ture and Culture 25, no. 1 (1997): 58 and 54. 102. ​Since the end of the eigh­teenth c­ entury, Marseilles had served as the “main reception center on the continent for merchandise [referring to opium] from Turkey and the M ­ iddle East and would remain so till the 1790s” (Thomas Dormandy, Opium: Real­ity’s Dark Dream [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012], 71). 103. ​See Xu, “The Opium Trade and ‘­Little Dorrit,’ ” 56. As Earl H. Pritchard notes, compared to the East India Com­pany’s trade with China, a much greater variety of articles w ­ ere both imported and exported by private traders (The Crucial Years of Early Anglo-­Chinese Relations, 1750–1800, vol. 6 of Britain and the China Trade 1635–1842, ed. Patrick Tuck [London: Routledge, 2000], 171). See also Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China 1800–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), especially 18–40. 104. ​Tan Chung, “The Britain-­China-­India Trade Triangle, 1770–1840,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 11, no. 4 (1974),” 419–420. [ 233 ]

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105. ​On the prison as the novel’s “emblem,” see Lionel Trilling, “­Little Dorrit,” Kenyon Review 15, no.  4 (1953): 578. See also J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 227–247; T. N. Grove, “The Psychological Prison of Arthur Clennam in Dickens’s ­Little Dorrit,” Modern Language Review 68, no. 4 (1973): 750–755; Angus Easson, “Marshalsea Prisoners: Mr. Dorrit and Mr. Hemens,” Dickens Studies Annual 3 (1974): 77–86; Philip Collins, “­Little Dorrit: The Prison and the Critics,” Times Literary Supplement 18 (April 1, 1978): 445–446. 106. ​“More than forty years,” the narrator comments, “had passed over the grey head of this ­ oman, since the time she recalled. More than forty years of strife and strug­ determined w gle with the whisper that, by what­ever name she called her vindictive pride and rage, nothing through all eternity could change their nature” (808). 107. ​Flora had an analogue in Dickens’s own youthful crush, Maria Beadnell. Their reunion in 1855 shattered the illusions Dickens had entertained of her all t­ hese years. See Michael Slater, The ­Great Charles Dickens Scandal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 7–8. 108. ​Tamara Wagner, “Imperialist Commerce and the Demystified Orient: Semicolonial China in Nineteenth-­Century En­glish Lit­er­a­ture,” Postcolonial Text 6, no. 3 (2011): 10–11. 109. ​Furthermore, as Anne Veronica Witchard points out, throughout the nineteenth c­ entury chinoiserie continued to be “the chosen style for places of urban entertainment,” within which pantomimes burlesqued the strange world of Far Cathay (Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Lime­house Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown [Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009], 17; see also 40). 110. ​“The Chinese and Their Peculiarities,” 157. 111. ​“The Chinese,” Bow Bells, January 7, 1874, 592. 112. ​Rachel K. Bright, “Migration, Masculinity, and Mastering the ‘Queue’: A Case of Chinese Scalping,” Journal of World History 28, nos. 3–4 (December 2017): 13. For the significance of foot binding in Victorian periodicals, see Elizabeth Hope Chang, “Binding and Unbinding Chinese Feet in the Mid-­Century Victorian Press,” in Writing China: Essays on the Amherst Embassy (1816) and Sino-­British Cultural Relations, ed. Peter J. Kitson and Robert Markley (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2016), 132–151. 113. ​The quoted words above all appear in “The Chinese From Home” (“The Chinese from Home,” All the Year Round, March 20, 1869, 367), while a description of the “Chinaman” with “hair . . . ​plaited into a queue,” “eyes oblique” and “complexion whitish yellow” appears in “Missionary Scenes and Adventures in China” (“Missionary Scenes and Adventures in China,” The Sunday at Home, May 7, 1864, 293). 114. ​“Chinese Shops,” Bow Bells, September 10, 1873, 174 (emphasis added). 115. ​Robert Fortune, Three Years Wandering in the Northern Districts of China, Including a Visit to the Tea, Silk, and Cotton Countries (London, 1847), 4. See chapter 5 for my reading of Fortune’s book. 116. ​Jaffe, The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real, 12 and 10. 117. ​For an account of the Arrow incident, see J. Y. Wong, Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism, and the Arrow War (1856–1860) in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 43–44. 118. ​Wong, Deadly Dreams, 159. See also Andrew Blake, “Foreign Dev­ils and Moral Panics: Britain, Asia, and the Opium Trade,” in The Expansion of E ­ ngland: Race, Ethnicity and Cultural History, ed. Bill Schwarz (London: Routledge, 1996), 232–259. 119. ​Items in the Daily News of January 2, 1857, and Punch of January 24, 1857, that praised Ye while denouncing Parkes are summarized and quoted in Wong, Deadly Dreams, 159–165. 120. ​On Dickens’s use of the deadly, mercenary feast as a critique of the rich, see Deborah A. Thomas, “Dickens and Indigestion: The Deadly Dinners of the Rich,” Dickens Studies Newsletter 14, no. 1 (March 1983): 7–12. [ 234 ]



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121. ​­Little Dorrit, of course, hardly eats. While Merdle suffers from indigestion as a consequence of imperial bloat, L ­ ittle Dorrit seems to have no need for food. For a reading of the contrast between her abstemiousness and Flora’s appetite from the perspective of gender, see Elaine Showalter, “Guilt, Authority and the Shadows of ­Little Dorrit,” Nineteenth-­ Century Fiction 34, no. 1 (1979): 20–40. According to the logic of my argument, however, ­Little Dorrit’s form of bodily abstention may be in keeping with the character’s function as what Sherri Wolf calls “the model of virtue,” which “tacitly criticizes the logic of expansion governing the nation and the empire” even as it “engages in its own set of expansionist practices” (“The Enormous Power of No Body: ­Little Dorrit and the Logic of Expansion,” Texas Studies in Lit­er­a­ture and Language 42, no. 3 [2000]: 224, 225, and 242). 122. ​See ­Virginia Berridge, “Victorian Opium Eating: Responses to Opiate Use in Nineteenth-­ Century ­England,” Victorian Studies 21, no. 4 (Summer 1978): 441. 123. ​Drawing on the writings of the po­liti­cal economist Giovanni Arrighi, Ronald Thomas has argued that Merdle belongs to that class of “merchant cap­i­tal­ists” whose members “firmly held state power in its grip so that ‘territorial acquisitions ­were subjected to careful cost-­ benefit analyses and, as a rule, ­were undertaken only as the means to the end of increasing the profitability of the traffics of the cap­i­tal­ist oligarchy that exercised power’ ” (“Spectacle and Speculation: The Victorian Economy of Vision in ­Little Dorrit,” in Dickens, Eu­rope and the New Worlds, 40). On ­Little Dorrit as an allegory of the Victorian cap­i­tal­ist economy, see George Letissier, “ ‘The Wiles of Insolvency’: Gain and Loss in ‘­Little Dorrit,’ ” Dickens Quarterly 27, no. 4 (December 2010): 257–272; Daniel P. Scoggin, “Speculative Plagues and the Ghosts of ­Little Dorrit,” Dickens Studies Annual 29 (2000): 233–268. On opium as speculative capital, see Jairus Banaji, “Seasons of Self-­Delusion: Opium, Capitalism and the Financial Markets,” Historical Materialism 21, no. 2 (2013): 3–19. 124. ​On the butler’s “looking” as an instance of Dickens’s nonmimetic realism, see Jayda Coons, “ ‘Spectral Realities’: ­Little Dorrit, Stereoscopy, and Non-­Mimetic Realism,” Nineteenth-­ Century Contexts 42, no. 1 (2020): 17–31. 125. ​For Dickens’s attitude ­toward the Crimean War, see Grace Moore, “Empires and Colonies,” in Charles Dickens in Context, ed. Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 284–291. 126. ​For the significance of air and atmospheric pollution in ­Little Dorrit, see George Yeats, “ ‘Dirty Air’: ­Little Dorrit’s Atmosphere,” Nineteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture 66, no. 3 (2011): 328–534. 127. ​Scoggin reads this epidemic as the “plague of [financial] speculation” (“Speculative Plagues and the Ghosts of ­Little Dorrit,” 234). 128. ​See Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and Eu­ro­pean Imperialism in the Nineteenth ­Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 17–57. Pancks’s employer, Casby, in turn works for the Barnacles, whose f­ amily fills the vari­ous foreign diplomatic positions that are administered through the Circumlocution Office: “And ­t here was not a list, in all the Circumlocution Office, of places that might fall vacant anywhere within half a c­ entury, from a lord of the Trea­sury to a Chinese consul, and up again to a governor-­general of India, but, as applicants for such places, the names of some or of ­every one of t­ hese hungry and adhesive Barnacles w ­ ere down” (429). 129. ​Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ed. David Paroissien, electronic ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 51. 130. ​See Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2001), 69; see also 84–90. 131. ​The Powers of Distance, 89. James Buzard goes further and argues that “­Little Dorrit conducts an inquiry into the possibilities of some other than tendentiously differential relationship between the ideals of cosmopolitanism and national belonging . . . ​[as Dickens] [ 235 ]

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attempt[s] to think his way beyond the false dichotomy of the home and the world” (“ ‘The Country of the Plague’: Anticulture and Autoethnography in Dickens’s 1850s,” Victorian Lit­er­a­ture and Culture 38, no. 2 [2010]: 418). 132. ​Focusing on the novel’s internationalist dimension, Grossman simply remarks that “in ­Little Dorrit, China marks the far-­flung realm of ongoing, separate h ­ uman activity that is still as yet too far off to exist co-­laterally” (Charles Dickens’s Networks, 186). In contrast to the conventional repre­sen­ta­tion of China as antiquated, Dickens does not deny China’s synchronic existence, yet he remains pessimistic about Britain’s ability to imagine such synchronicity. 133. ​The phrase “old foolish dreams” (168) comes from ­Little Dorrit , but Elia deploys similar terms, referring to Bridget’s “dear imagination,” “younger,” “dreams,” “good old times” in his patronizing response to Bridget (Charles Lamb, “Old China,” in Charles Lamb, The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb [New York: Modern Library, 1935], 220 and 218). AFTERWORD 1. ​Charles Dickens, ­Little Dorrit, ed. Stephen Wall and Helen Small, rev. ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 30. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 2. ​See “Covid-19 Fueling Anti-­A sian Racism and Xenophobia Worldwide: National Action Plans Needed to ­C ounter Intolerance,” H ­ uman Rights Watch, May 12, 2020, https://­ www​.­h rw​.­org ​/­news​/­2020​/­05​/­1 2​/­c ovid​-­19​-­f ueling​-­a nti​-­a sian​-­r acism​-­a nd​-­xenophobia​ -­worldwide. 3. ​Scientists are continuing to investigate the origins of COVID-19. For the latest findings published on the World Health Organ­i zation website, see World Health Organ­i zation, “Origins of the SARS-­CoV-2 Virus,” March 30, 2021, https://­w ww​.­who​.­int​/­emergencies​ /­diseases​/­novel​-­coronavirus​-­2019​/­origins​-­of​-­t he​-­virus. 4. ​A July  16, 2022, search on Factba.se, a database that compiles all statements made or tweeted by Donald Trump or members of his administration during his presidency, turns up 34 hits for “Chinese virus” and 130 for “invisible e­ nemy.” 5. ​[P. G. L.], A Reminiscence of Canton. June, 1859 (London, 1866), 3. 6. ​Victor Garcia, “Jesse Watters Demands Apology from China over Coronavirus Outbreak,” Fox News, March  2, 2020, https://­w ww​.­foxnews​.­c om​/­media ​/­jesse​-­watters​ -­demands​-­apology​-­china​-­coronavirus; P. G. L., A Reminiscence of Canton, 4. 7. ​See, for instance, Muhammad Adnan Shereen et  al., “COVID-19 Infection: Origin, Transmission, and Characteristics of H ­ uman Coronaviruses,” Journal of Advanced Research 24 (July 2020): 91–98. 8. ​On the circumstances surrounding the bat soup video, see Jing Wang, “Bats, Virus and Racism,” UnCoVer, March  15, 2020, https://­uncoverinitiative​.­home​.­blog​/­2020​/­03​/­15​/­issue​-­9​/­. James Palmer draws the connection between the bat soup video and “the well-­trodden cannon of adventurism and enthusiasm for unusual foods that numerous American chefs and travel hosts have shown in the past” (“­Don’t Blame Bat Soup for the Coronavirus,” Foreign Policy, January  27, 2020, https://­foreignpolicy​.­com​/­2020​/­01​/­27​/­coronavirus​-­covid19​-­dont​ -­blame​-­bat​-­soup​-­for​-­the​-­virus). On food adventuring tele­vi­sion programs, see Jacqui Kong, “Feasting with the ‘Other’: Transforming the Self in Food Adventuring Tele­vi­sion Programs,” Asian American Lit­er­a­ture 2 (2011): 45–56. 9. ​Walter Russell Mead, “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia,” Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2020, https://­w ww​.­wsj​.­com​/­articles​/­china​-­is​-­the​-­real​-­sick​-­man​-­of​-­asia​-­11580773677. 10. ​In the wake of the pandemic-­induced anti-­A sian discrimination, several commentators have pointed to the resurgence of this “Yellow Peril” trope. See, for instance, Anita Jack-­ [ 236 ]



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Davies, “Coronavirus: The ‘Yellow Peril’ Revisited,” Conversation, August 3, 2020, https://­ theconversation​.­com​/­coronavirus​-­t he​-­yellow​-­peril​-­revisited​-­134115; Hannah Joy Sachs, “ ‘Yellow Peril’ in the Age of COVID-19,” Humanity in Action USA, April 2020, https://­ www​.­humanityinaction​.­org​/­k nowledge​_­detail​/­a rticle​-­usa​-­hannah​-­sachs​-­yellow​-­peril​-­in​ -­t he​-­age​-­of​-­covid​-­19​/­. 11. ​Ross  G. Forman, China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 195. Kwee Choo Ng points out that the Chinese population in London increased sharply in the mid-1860s (The Chinese in London [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968], 6). 12. ​Xenophobic suspicions of this small but growing immigrant population ­were further reinforced by events of the 1900 Boxer Uprising. Domestic coverage of the Chinese anticolonial rebellion depicted in graphic and sensationalized terms the mass slaughter of innocent Christian converts and Eu­ro­pean missionaries. See James L. Hevia, En­glish Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-­Century China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 186–193. 13. ​On the symbolic place of the opium den in Britain’s imagination of Chineseness, see Elizabeth Hope Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Lit­ er­ a­ ture, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-­Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 111–140. 14. ​Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ed. David Paroissien, electronic ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 260. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 15. ​For the medicalization of opium as a late nineteenth-­century phenomenon, see V ­ irginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards, Opium and the P ­ eople: Opiate Use in Nineteenth-­Century ­England (London: Allen Lane, 1981), especially chapters 10–13 and, for the intersection between the medical and the racial discourse, chapter 15. For a reading of Edwin Drood as a response to opium’s increasing “evaluat[ion] and conceptualiz[ation] by the medical profession,” see Joachim Stanley, “Opium and Edwin Drood: Fantasy, Real­ity, and What the Doctors Ordered,” Dickens Quarterly 21, no. 1 (March 2004): 12–27. 16. ​According to Suvendrini Perera, “Edwin Drood suggests that the increasing savagery of  En­glish domestic life is a product of the imperial connection, [with] the register of that guilty relation [being] opium, a commodity made globally available only through the workings of the imperial system” (Reaches of Empire: The En­glish Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens [New York: Columbia University Press, 1991], 108). Barry Milligan suggests that the novel’s En­glish characters are compromised by a Chineseness disseminated through opium smoke, articulating Britain’s fear “of a pos­si­ble inversion of colonial dynamics—­ this time of the Indo-­Chinese opium trade” (Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-­Century British Culture [Charlottesville: University of V ­ irginia Press, 1995], 100). Miriam O’Kane Mara argues that “colonial infection begins, not in the colonies, but with the British themselves and their attempts to ingest other cultures” (“Sucking the Empire Dry: Colonial Critique in The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” Dickens Studies Annual 32 [2002]: 234). Grace Moore reads the novel as “an attempt to interrogate a society’s addiction to the empire—­particularly the East—­a nd its commodities, as well as its mystical, habit-­forming pleasures” (“Turkish Robbers, Lumps of Delight, and the Detritus of Empire: The East Revisited in Dickens’s Late Novels,” Critical Survey 21, no. 1 [2009]: 85). Amid this critical consensus, Saree Makdisi stands out as a notable exception, suggesting that mere contamination or corruption “takes for granted the normative stability and homogeneity of the En­glishness which is seen to have been thus infiltrated and contaminated” (Making ­England Western: Occidentalism, Race and Imperial Culture [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014], 198). 17. ​As the missionary C. F. [Constance Frederica] Gordon Cumming warned, “if . . . ​a taste for opium-­smoking should once gain a footing in ­England . . . ​­there may be reason to [ 237 ]

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fear lest the poison which Britain has so assiduously cultivated for China, may eventually find its market amongst our own ­children—­a retribution too terrible to contemplate, ­ ere well to guard” (Wanderings in China though one against the possibility of which it w [Edinburgh, 1886], 2:316). 18. ​See, for example Perera, Reaches of Empire, 110–112; Grace Moore, Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 183. Robert Tracy has argued that De Quincey’s Confessions is a direct source text for Edwin Drood (“ ‘Opium Is the True Hero of the Tale’: De Quincey, Dickens, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” Dickens Studies Annual 40 [2009]: 199–213). 19. ​Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an En­glish Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 68. 20. ​Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye, 130. 21. ​Mara, “Sucking the Empire Dry,” 236–238. 22. ​See Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye, 130. 23. ​William B. Langdon, Ten Thousand Th ­ ings Relating to China and the Chinese: An Epitome of the Genius, Government, History, Lit­er­a­ture, Agriculture, Arts, Trade, Manners, Customs, and Social Life of the P ­ eople of the Celestial Empire, Together with a Synopsis of the Chinese Collection (London, 1842), 139. 24. ​I borrow the formulation, “Oriental London” from Forman, who identifies it as “a phenomenon that arose only in the second half of the nineteenth ­century” (China and the Victorian Imagination, 194). 25. ​See chapter 4. 26. ​Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 7. 27. ​The Mechanic Shark Channel and Bart Zeal, The Bat Soup Song, YouTube, March 24, 2020, video, 3:04, http://­w ww​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­o6J1TckBD3o. The Mechanic Shark Channel underwent a name change in May 2022, and is now listed as Nanar Studios. 28. ​See “Hide the Pain Harold,” Know Your Meme, 2011, https://­knowyourmeme​.­com​ /­memes​/­hide​-­t he​-­pain​-­harold. 29. ​For a definition of “food adventuring,” see Lisa M. Heldke, Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer (London: Routledge, 2003), xi–­x xx. 30. ​On how the psy­chol­ogy of disgust has been weaponized in COVID-19 discourse, see Jérôme Viala-­Gaudefroy and Dana Lindaman, “Donald Trump’s ‘Chinese Virus’: The Politics of Naming,” Conversation, April  21, 2020, https://­theconversation​.­com​/­donald​ -­t rumps​-­chinese​-­v irus​-­t he​-­politics​-­of​-­naming​-­136796; Na­la Rogers, “Disgust Evolved to Protect Us From Disease. Is It Working?,” Discover, April  3, 2020, https://­w ww​ .­discovermagazine​.­com​/­health​/­disgust​-­evolved​-­to​-­protect​-­us​-­from​-­disease​-­is​-­it​-­working. 31. ​On the self-­reflexivity of remix culture, see, for instance, Eduardo Navas, “Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture,” in Mashup Cultures, ed. Stefan Sonvilla-­ Weiss (Vienna: Springer, 2010), 157–177.

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INDEX

Page references in italics indicate illustrations. Addison, Joseph, 36, 137, 205n11 Aikens, Kristina, 166 Albert, Prince Consort, 147, 148, 149 Alexander, William: The Costume of China, 150 Anderson, Amanda, 184 Anderson, Benedict, 223n74 Apicus, Marcus Gavius, 120 Appadurai, Arjun, 13 Arabian Nights tales, 2–3, 49, 82, 112–113, 147, 215n80 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 15, 192 Argens, Jean-­Baptiste de Boyer d’: Chinese Letters, 40, 208n28 Arrighi, Giovanni, 235n123 Arrow lorcha controversy, 179, 183 Auerbach, Jeffrey A., 147, 149 Aurungzeb, Emperor of Hindustan, 214n51 Badowska, Eva, 160, 161 Baker, Geoffrey, 147, 226n64 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 5, 222n71 Ball, Samuel, 116 Ballantyne, Tony, 204n100 Ballaster, Ros, 15, 46, 215n80 Banks, Joseph, 77 “barbarian eye,” 140–141, 142, 172, 225n47 Barrell, John, 105, 220n39 Barrow, John: Travels in China, 119–120 Barthes, Roland, 13 bat soup video, 192–193, 236n8 Bayly, C. A., 23 Beadnell, Maria, 234n107 bear’s claws: as exotic edible, 43, 44 Beaumont, Francis, 128 Beck, Madame (character), 157, 164, 167

Beckford, William: on autobiographical reading, 209n35; early travel writings, 53; Egyptian Hall of, 55, 56; on exotic eating, 191; identity formation, 58, 63; inheritance of, 57; journal of, 48, 53–54, 56; language of, 231n72; nostalgia of, 56; Orientalism of, 35, 46, 47–48, 53–58, 63, 209n32; reading materials, 209n41; rebellion against social norms, 54, 58; as slave owner, 57; social marginalization of, 53. See also Villette (Beckford) Bennet, Jane, 222n70 Bentinck, William, 80 Bentley’s Miscellany, 141 Berg, Maxine, 216n93 Bewell, Alan, 78 Bickham, Troy, 5 bird’s nests: as exotic edible, 43, 44 Biter, The (Rowe), 25, 28, 29–30 Black, Barbara J., 155 Blackwall railway, 172, 173, 174 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 135 Bligh, William, 77 Bo-bo (character), 117, 118, 131 Boone, Joseph, 229n46 botanical specimens: transfer of, 76, 77–78 Bow Bells, 178 Bowring, John, 151 Boxer Uprising, 237n12 Bretton, John Graham (character), 160, 162–163 Bridgeman, Elijah Coleman, 137, 139, 224n15, 224n21 Bridget (character), 127, 128, 129, 130, 236n133 British Association for the Promotion of Temperance, 99 [ 261 ]

INDEX

British imperial identity: China’s influence on, 97, 134–135, 138, 139, 140, 171–172, 190; colonial power and, 211n18; myth of purity of, 119; opium and, 106–107, 108, 109, 110, 134; relation to cultural otherness, 155; tea and, 8, 136, 160, 203n96, 206n24 Britishness: vs. En­glishness, 23, 206n6, 232n90 British potteries, 123, 124 British Review, The, 64, 65, 75–76 Brontë, Charlotte, 22, 191–192, 231n75; depiction of En­glish domesticity, 160–161; on G ­ reat Exhibition, 155; Orientalism of, 144. See also Villette (Brontë) Brooks, Peter, 154, 159 Bud, Rosa (character), 189 Burke, Edmund, 109 Burton, Antoinette, 163–164 Buzard, James, 235n131 Byron, George Gordon Byron, baron, 6, 7–8, 71; Don Juan, 1–2 Calcutta Botanic Garden, 77 Campbell, Colin, 4, 14, 53 cannibalism, 7, 118, 199n40 Canton, 105, 106, 154, 186 Carroll, Siobhan, 230n51 Casby, Christopher (character), 180, 181, 183, 235n128 Cashmere, 63, 65, 80, 81, 82–83, 95 cats, 150, 151, 154, 187 Cavelletto, John Baptist (character), 184 Chambers, William, 120 Chang, Elizabeth Hope, 19, 103, 122, 153, 189, 226n58, 232n89 Chen, Song-­Chuan, 136, 137, 141, 224n21 China: anti-­colonial rebellion, 237n12; attitude to foreigners, 135, 139–141; books on, 19, 43; British perception of, 103, 133–134, 140, 142–145, 156, 170–175, 179, 184, 202n80, 202n81, 222n67, 225n47; Canton system, 18, 136; as Celestial Empire, 125, 143, 172–173, 222n72, 225n47; cultural stagnation, 18, 138, 140, 145, 171, 172; ethnographic descriptions of, 151–152, 153–154, 178, 236n132; Eu­ro­pean encounters with, 17–18, 19, 144, 190; [ 262 ]

foreign trade, 18, 21, 25–26, 103, 136, 138; military subjugation of, 143; missionaries in, 28, 137; morality, 28, 29, 170; northern border of, 116; opening of, 137, 141, 153, 202n85; opium consumption in, 133, 135, 136; primitivism and savagery of, 45, 117, 118, 119, 131, 138, 149, 151; Qing Empire, 101, 116, 135; re­sis­tance to economic exploitation, 134–135; satire of, 25; se­nior officials, 124; sexual politics, 178 china (porcelain), 101, 103, 121, 122, 123–125, 185, 203n89, 206n7, 222n66 “Chinese and Their Peculiarities, The,” 151, 178 Chinese commodities, 18–19, 25, 26, 205n11 Chinese food: accounts of, 150–151, 153, 154, 178; animals as, 43, 44, 119–120, 178; mockery of, 151; othering of, 22; regional customs, 228n27 “Chinese Junk, The” (Dickens), 141, 172, 173, 174–175 Chinese marketplace, 153, 154, 187 Chineseness: exoticization of, 145; fear of contact with, 187, 193; ste­reo­t ypes of, 17, 38–39, 41, 42–43, 152, 232n90; tea as cultural signifier of, 30–31, 35 Chinese otherness, 21, 37, 38, 116, 134, 138 Chinese Repository (journal), 137 Chinese taste, 29, 150, 187 chinoiserie, 18, 26, 36, 41, 103, 204n3, 207n7, 234n109 choco­late, 4, 11 Chung, Tan, 62, 176 Chusan island, 141 cinnamon, 2, 4, 77 Citizen of the World, The (Goldsmith): characters, 38, 208n20; depiction of tea, 37; En­glishness in, 207n11; exotic ingestion in, 20, 37, 38, 41, 43–44, 58, 96; humor in, 41, 42; idea of Chineseness in, 38–39, 41, 42–43; Lien Chi’s reception by an En­glish lady, 38–39, 40–41, 42; mad dog disease story, 45–46; Orientalism of, 42, 45; otherness in, 44; preface, 44–45, 46; repre­sen­ta­tion of China in, 190, 208n21; satire of exotic consumerism, 36 Clarke, Matthew Hale, 65

INDEX

cleanliness: Victorian fetishization of, 75 Clemm, Sabine, 172 Clennam, Arthur (character), 156, 175, 176, 177, 179, 180–181, 183, 185 Clennam, Mrs. (character), 176, 181 cloves, 2, 3, 4 coffee, 1, 2, 4, 5–6, 7–9, 11, 210n55 Coleman, Deirdre, 212n31 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 59–60, 65, 75, 222n67 Colley, Linda, 23 Collingham, Lizzie, 5 Colls, Robert, 23 Confessions of an En­glish Opium-­Eater (De Quincey): aesthetic structure of, 107–108; comparison to Villette, 22, 156, 165, 166–167; depiction of China in, 188; En­glish domesticity in, 21, 105–106, 107; figure of the palimpsest, 111–112; horror in, 103, 109, 110, 111, 112; imperial identity in, 134, 145, 220n37, 220n39; opium ingestion motif, 104, 106–107, 108, 109, 181, 189, 190; plot, 104; publication of, 218n20; revision of, 104; sequel of, 104, 112; tea-­table ritual, 105, 106–107 consumerism, 4, 5, 13, 14, 47, 48, 78. See also exotic consumerism consumption: British vs. Eastern modes of, 7; cultural reading of, 118, 201n62; style of, 209n34 cosmopolitanism, 87, 116, 131, 184, 221n50 cotton production, 79–80 Coulton, Richard, 11, 30, 126, 138 Court and Lady’s Magazine, 143 COVID-19 pandemic, 186–187, 192–193, 236n10 Craufurd, Quintin, 88 Crimean War, 182–183 cross-­cultural contamination, 6, 29, 127, 191 Crystal Palace: con­temporary accounts of, 146–147, 155; Tenniel’s cartoon, 147, 148, 149 cultural otherness: British identity in relation to, 155; encounters with, 65, 134; exotic ingestion as access to, 41; repre­sen­ta­tions of, 191; self and, 5, 20, 61, 62–63 cup, 20, 68–69, 70, 71–74 cup of tea, 72, 98, 100, 190

Daily News, 180 Darwin, Erasmus: The Botanic Garden, 78 dates, 2, 3, 4, 77, 80 Davis, John Francis, 120 Davis, Leith, 84 Day, Samuel, 127 De Man, Paul, 93, 96, 210n51 Dennis, John, 34 De Quincey, Thomas, 17, 97, 145; auto­ biographical accounts of, 112–113, 138, 220n39; on British character, 134, 138–139, 220n37; construction of En­glish national identity, 107; cross-­cultural imagination, 105; fear of Oriental infection, 105; on kowtow ritual, 138–139; law of antagonism, 109, 110; “Opium and the China Question,” 135; Orientalism of, 113–114; reference to nursery text, 112; Suspiria de Profundis, 104, 108, 111, 112, 138, 218n21; on tea consumption, 99, 191; writings on China, 103–104, 135–136, 138, 141. See also Confessions of an En­glish Opium-­Eater (De Quincey) Derrida, Jacques, 216n103 Dickens, Charles: construction of British identity, 172–173, 174, 232n90; discourse on China, 138, 170, 171–173, 179–180, 236n132; discourse on “oldness,” 184–185; Dombey and Son, 175, 233n98; on ­Great Exhibition, 155, 170, 232n89; Orientalism of, 22, 144, 184; “The Chinese Junk,” 141, 172, 173, 174–175; “The G ­ reat Exhibition and the ­Little One,” 170, 171, 172, 173, 178, 179, 229n40, 232n90; “The Noble Savage,” 233n98; use of eating as allegory, 22; view of imperial expansion, 233n95. ­ ittle Dorrit (Dickens) See also L “Dissertation upon Roast Pig, A” (Lamb): account of eating of roast pig, 118; binary between the material and the figurative, 121–122; comparison to “Old China,” 121–122, 131–132; deconstruction of myth of cultural purity, 131; gastronomical focus, 120; parody of the vegetarianism, 118, 119; plot, 117–118, 131; portrayal of the Chinese, 117; rhe­toric of “pure food,” 127; sources of, 121; style of, 116, 117, 120; temporal coverage, 120 [ 263 ]

INDEX

dogs, 150, 151, 154, 187, 228n27 Don Juan (Byron): episode of cannibalism, 7, 199n40; food tropes, 17, 199n40; green tea passage, 9–11; Oriental banquet in, 1–2, 4, 6, 7; reference to coffee, 7–9 Dorrit, Amy (character), 175, 235n121 Dorrit, William (character), 183 Douglas, Mary, 13, 201n62 Doyce, Daniel (character), 183 “Dream-­Children; A Reverie,” 130 Du Halde, Jean-­Baptiste, 40, 43 Duncan, Ian, 84 Dundas, Henry, 85, 86 Dunn, Nathan, 133, 142, 161, 226n58 Eastern lit­er­a­ture: dissemination of, 16, 120, 170–171 East India Com­pany: Canton factory, 120; capture of Bengal, 77; importance of steamers for, 183; investment in tea, 62, 135; opium trade, 61, 176; Scots at ser­vice of, 84, 85; trade with China, 25, 27, 62, 101, 105, 114, 115 eating: cultural politics of, 13; literary repre­sen­ta­tions of, 20; symbolic role of, 5. See also exotic ingestion Elfenbein, Andrew, 209n35 El Hakim (character), 88, 89, 90, 91 Elia (character), 117–118, 119, 121–130, 131, 236n133 Ellis, Markman, 11, 30, 126, 138 Emanuel, Paul (character), 157, 162, 168–169, 230n68, 231n75 enchanted materialism, 222n70 En­glish breakfast-­table, 98 En­glish identity, 5, 99, 100 En­glishness, 26, 207n11; vs. Britishness, 23, 206n6 ethnographical realism, 144 exotic commodities, 5, 6, 44, 209n44, 216n93 exotic consumerism, 13–14, 16, 36, 37, 39, 40, 49–50, 57, 88–89, 184, 185, 190 exotic food: con­temporary debate over, 45; as discourse, 15, 20; literary repre­sen­ta­tion of, 1–2, 3, 4; mass adoption of, 5, 12–13, 16, 62, 208n19; types of, 2 exotic ingestion: cross-­cultural imagination and, 58, 63, 184, 191, 192; as domestic greed, 156; fear of, 26–27, 92, 191, [ 264 ]

192–193; forms of, 22; literary depictions of, 13, 22, 24, 191, 192; materiality of, 48; as Orientalist trope, 37, 192; as spectacle, 149–150; studies of, 19; symbolic power of, 41 exoticism, 14, 200n59 exotic places: Western appetite for, 187 Fang, Karen, 117, 122, 128, 222n66, 222n67 Feramorz (character), 65, 82, 83 Festa, Lynn, 10 Finching, Flora (character): appetite of, 180, 181, 185, 235n121; drug ingestion, 182; enthusiasm about China, 176–177, 178–179, 180–181; as face of British imperialism, 183; as model of virtue, 235n121; prototype of, 234n107; Romantic exoticism of, 177, 181–182 First Opium War, 132, 134, 135–136, 138, 141–142, 183, 202n85 Fiske, Shanyn, 202n80 Flesch, William, 130 Fletcher, John, 128 Foreigner in Far Cathay, The (Medhurst), 152, 153 Forman, Ross G., 187 Fortune, Robert, 144, 145 Frank, Andre Gunder, 202n81 Fraser’s Magazine, 142, 151 Friedman, Arthur, 208n21 Fromer, Julie E., 99, 160, 162, 203n96; A Necessary Luxury, 17 Fum Hoam (character), 38 Galland, Antoine, 42, 63 Garway, Thomas, 28, 30 Genette, Gérard, 69 Gigante, Denise, 5, 199n40, 200n60, 221n53 Gikandi, Simon, 57, 210n55 Gillray, James: “Dun-­Shaw” cartoon, 85, 86 ginger, 3 Glasse, Hannah: The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, 42 Goldsmith, Oliver: approach to cultural otherness, 44; on exotic consumerism, 4, 22, 47, 58, 191; on Irish identity, 39, 207n11; Orientalist writings of, 35, 58, 63; proj­ect of national identity, 46; review on Hanway’s essay, 208n26;

INDEX

sources of, 42, 208n21, 208n28; “The Deserted Village,” 36. See also Citizen of the World, The (Goldsmith) Gordon Cumming, C.F., 237n17 Goton (character), 167 Gottlieb, Evan, 62 ­Great Britain: accumulation of wealth, 76; Chinese perception of, 140–141; cholera outbreak, 183–184; cotton production, 79; cultural and technological superiority of, 141–142, 145, 146–147, 155, 171, 172–173; domestic life, 233n98, 237n16; foreign relations, 204n100; global exchange, 61, 101, 128; horticulture, 78; opium use in, 188, 237n17; perception of China, 131–132, 175; population growth, 62 ­ ittle One, The” “­Great Exhibition and the L (Dickens and Horne), 170, 171, 172, 173, 178, 179, 229n40, 232n90 ­Great Exhibition of 1851, 19, 22; con­ temporary accounts of, 146–147, 155, 170; ideological aspect of, 100, 145, 147, 149; as imperial archive, 147; objectification of ­women, 230n69; parallel to the Arabian Nights, 161; public attention to, 218n11; reviews of, 146, 229n40 ­Great Wall of China, 116 green tea, 9, 126–127 Grossman, Jonathan H., 173, 223n73, 236n132 Gueullette, Thomas Simon: Chinese Tales, 40, 45 Gützlaff, Karl, 137, 224n21 Hanway, Jonas, 98; Essay on Tea, 26, 29, 30, 33, 45, 99, 106, 208n26 “Happy F ­ amily in Hyde Park, The” cartoon, 147, 148, 149 Harlow, Vincent, 24 Haven, Richard, 130 Hayot, Eric, 19 Henley, Samuel, 52 Henry, Walter, 151 Hevia, James L., 153 Higgins, David, 221n46 Hofkosh, Sonia, 14 Home, Polly (character): as doll, 159, 230n54; Lucy’s view of, 157–158, 159–160, 163, 229n49, 230n53; Orientalist “picture-­

book” of, 158, 230n51; tea-­making act, 159–160, 162, 169 Hong Kong, 135, 187–188 Horne, Richard, 138, 232n90; “The G ­ reat Exhibition and the L ­ ittle One,” 170, 171, 179, 229n40 Horniman, John, 127 Horniman’s Tea Com­pany, 127 House­hold Words, 149, 172 Hunt, Leigh, 101, 102, 162; “The Subject of Breakfast Continued—­Tea-­Drinking” essay, 98, 99, 101 Hyson tea. See green tea Illustrated London News, 142, 172 imperial archive, 147, 227n8 imperialism, 162–164, 226n64 India: cotton economy, 79–80; plants, 81 Indian Kashmir, 80 Iniquities of the Opium Trade with China (Thelwall), 139–140 Irish identity, 207n11; for Goldsmith, 39; for Thomas Moore, 72 Isherwood, Baron, 13 Jacobus, Mary, 169, 232n84 Jaffe, Audrey, 144, 156, 179 James, Felicity, 121 Jarvis, Robin, 53 Jasper, John (character), 188 Jeffrey, Francis, 64, 73, 74–75 Jehan-­Guire (character), 76, 80–81, 82 Jocelyn, Robert, 134 Jones, Henry, 78, 81 Jung, Seohyon, 230n68 Kennedy, Captain Vans: “An Essay on Persian Lit­er­a­ture,” 64 Kenneth (character), 87, 89–90, 91, 92, 94, 95 Keying (Chinese junk), 172, 173, 174–175 King, William: The Art of Cookery, 120 King Richard (character), 87, 89, 91, 93 Kitson, Peter J., 103, 122, 134, 138, 202n80, 221n49, 221n61, 222n67 Kowaleski-­Wallace, Elizabeth, 205n11 kowtow (kotou) ritual, 138–139 Krishnan, Sanjay, 106 Kubla Khan, Mongolian emperor, 60, 61 “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge), 59–60, 61–62 Kyd, Robert, 77 [ 265 ]

INDEX

Lalla Rookh (Moore): allusion to Shelley, 67; annotated figures, 69–70; anti-­imperial dimension, 213n37; banquet theme, 67, 68, 71; cele­bration of royal gardens, 68–69, 78; characters of, 70–71; con­temporary reviews of, 63–66, 73, 74–75; copyright, 63; depiction of Kashmir, 80; dissolution of selfhood in, 20, 21, 66; exotic ingestion in, 17, 63, 66, 69, 71, 74, 79–80, 96, 192; exploitation of superstition, 71; historical context of, 214n51; motif of the cup, 68–69, 70, 71–72, 73, 166; Orientalism of, 66, 68, 80, 82–83; plot of, 63, 65, 67, 73, 76, 82; preface to, 72; prob­lem of cultural identity, 65; publication of, 63; “red bowl” motif, 73–74, 78; self-­reflexivity of, 50, 66, 70; style of, 213n37; “The Fire-­Worshippers” tale, 83; “The Light of the Haram” tale, 76, 79–80, 81, 82, 95; “The Veiled Prophet” tale, 66–67, 70, 72–73, 76, 78, 83 Lamb, Charles: c­ areer of, 114, 115, 125, 221n46; Chinese writings of, 21, 97, 103, 104, 114, 115, 117; cosmopolitanism of, 222n70; cross-­cultural perspective of, 130, 131, 132; discourse on “oldness,” ­ reat Wall, 116; 184–185; on the G imagination of Chinese space-­time, 125–126; letter to Manning, 115, 125–126; sources of, 120, 121; on tea consumption, 191–192; travels of, 115; view of China, 144, 221n49, 222n67. See also “Dissertation upon Roast Pig, A” (Lamb); “Old China” (Lamb) Landless, Helena (character), 189 Landry, Donna, 53 Langdon, William, 142, 143–144; on Chinese opium addict, 133, 134, 190; guide to “Ten Thousand Chinese ­Things” exhibition, 133, 146, 222n72 Langland, Rebecca, 23 Latour, Bruno, 153 laudanum, 165, 166, 181, 182, 211n8 law of antagonism, 107–108, 109, 110, 111 Lawson, Kate, 230n64, 232n81 Leask, Nigel, 14, 47, 52, 64, 105, 211n9, 212n19, 213n43 Le Comte, Louis-­Daniel: Memoirs and Observations, 40 [ 266 ]

Leech, John, 152 Léopold II, King of the Belgians, 168 Lettsom, John Coakley: The Natu­ral History of the Tea-­Tree, 30–31, 32 Levine, George, 144 Levy, Anita, 229n49, 230n54 Lien Chi (character), 37, 38–39, 40, 41, 42, 43–44, 46, 208n20 Lincoln, Andrew, 84 Lin, Zexu, 135 literary trope, 46 ­Little Dorrit (Dickens), 16; characters of, 156, 175–177, 178–179, 181, 184; Chinese discourse, 22, 156, 175–179, 180, 184, 185, 186; composition of, 176, 179; criticism of the British empire, 175–176, 182–184, 235n123; exotic ingestion in, 181; internationalist dimension of, 236n132; laudanum consumption in, 182, 183; Orientalist tropes, 155, 177–178, 182; physical appetite and greed in, 180, 181, 235n121; plot of, 181; serialization of, 176, 179 Liu, Lydia H., 141, 226n51 Liverpool, 108, 109 Llewellyn, Tanya, 230n50 London: Chinese community of, 188, 237n11; as global emporium, 137–138 “London Dining Rooms, 1851” cartoon, 151–152, 152 Longman, Thomas, 63 Loutherbourg, Philip James de, 56 Lu, Kun, 140 luxury goods, 64, 87, 204n7, 216n93 MacKenzie, John M., 201n67 Majeed, Javed, 213n37 Makdisi, Saree, 14, 237n16 Man, Paul de: Aesthetic Ideology, 93 Mandarin, 124–125 Mandev­ille, Bernard, 204n7 Manning, Thomas, 115, 120, 121, 125, 221n61 Mara, Miriam O’Kane, 189, 237n16 Marana, Giovanni Paolo, 40 Marchand, Leslie A., 6 Mauger, Matthew, 11, 30, 126, 138 McCracken, Grant, 13 McCracken-­Flesher, Caroline, 89 McGann, Jerome J., 61

INDEX

Medhurst, Walter Henry: The Foreigner in Far Cathay, 152, 153 medicinal talisman, 20 merchant cap­i­tal­ists, 235n123 Merdle, Mr. (character), 181, 182–183, 235n121, 235n123 Merritt, Jane T., 62 Mill, John Stuart, 171, 174 Miller, Andrew H., 230n69 Milligan, Barry, 105, 211n8, 237n16; Pleasures and Pains, 17 Min, Eun Kyung, 19 Mintz, Sidney W., 62, 100 “Missionary Scenes and Adventures in China,” 178 Mitchell, Timothy, 154 Mitford, John, 115 Mokanna (character), 66, 67, 68, 69–70, 71, 72–73, 75, 213n43 Montagu, Mary Wortley, 88 Monthly Review, 208n26 Moore, Grace, 237n16 Moore, Thomas: comparison to Scott, 84; language of, 74, 75, 79; on Irish identity, 72; Orientalism of, 71, 84; self-­reflexively of, 83; style of, 75, 191 Morrison, Robert, 137 Morton, Timothy: 5, 119, 209n34; The Poetics of Spice, 7, 15, 74, 75, 79, 210n46, 210n49 museum display, 22 Mystery of Edwin Drood, The (Dickens): characters of, 189; opium ingestion in, 183, 188–189, 237n16; Orientalism of, 189–190 Namouna (character), 76–77, 78, 79, 81, 82 Nanjing, Treaty of, 135, 179 Napier, William John, 140 Narrative of a Ten Years’ Residence at Tripoli in Africa, 6 Nemesis (warship), 135, 141–142, 171 Nenadic, Stana, 47 Ng, Kwee Choo, 237n11 nostalgia, 56, 210n48 Nourmahal (character), 76–77 “Old China” (Lamb): vs. “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” 121–122, 131–132; characters of, 130; cultural hybridity of,

116, 125, 127, 131, 161; depiction of porcelain, 122, 123, 124–125, 126; depiction of tea, 126, 127, 158; effect on readers, 130; ideology of primitive consumption, 128–129; on myth of cultural identity, 119; self-­reflexivity of, 123; treatment of luxury, 128; trope of ingestion, 119 Olearius, Adam, 3, 4, 41, 42 opium: availability of, 237n16, 237n17; bodily influence of, 169; British imperial identity and, 21, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 134; cultural history of, 17; effect on the “law of antagonism,” 108; export to China, 61–62; as global currency, 90; ingestion of, 140, 153, 166–167, 181–182; literary depiction of, 90–91, 104–105, 133–134, 188–189; medicinal use of, 108, 109, 181, 237n15; Romanticism and taste for, 59; trade of, 61, 90, 135, 136, 211n11, 233n102; vilification of, 134; visual trope of, 134, 138, 140 Opium Wars: Britain’s naval superiority in, 135, 141–142, 171, 183; ­causes of, 135–137, 180; cultural effect of, 16, 19, 21, 180, 184; legacy of, 172, 179–180; outcomes of, 101, 135, 142, 153, 188, 202n85; as ‘tea wars,’ 138. See also First Opium War; Second Opium War Orient: Britain’s taste for, 8; desire for, 3, 5; encounter between Occident and, 83; as exotic spectacle, 147; geography of, 209n32; imperial constructions of, 85, 221n47; literary depiction of, 12; vs. Orientalism, 199n28; Romantic use of, 5–6, 59; self-­reflexive engagement with, 15 Oriental attire, 85, 86, 87, 216nn96–97 Orientalism: as a cultural discourse, 5–6, 192; definition of, 147; discursive and material forms of, 49; evolution of, 7, 143–144, 145; impact on Western arts and crafts, 201n67; literary modes of, 16, 70; vs. Orient, 199n28; origin of, 1; scholarly studies of, 14–15; self-­reflexive, 12, 14, 15, 145; vs. Sinology, 17, 202n80 Oriental luxury, 87–88 Oriental otherness, 13, 16, 17, 85 Oriental pagan: ste­reo­t ype of, 113 [ 267 ]

INDEX

otherness. See cultural otherness Ovington, John, 29, 98 Pagani, Catherine, 226n58 Palau island, 187 palimpsest, 111–112 Palmer, James, 236n8 Pancks, Mr. (character), 183, 235n128 Park, Julie, 4–5 Parkes, Harry, 180 passenger transport revolution, 173, 223n73 passion of the sublime, 109–110 pepper, 3, 4, 77 Percy, Thomas: translation of Haoqiu zhuan, 170–171 Perera, Suvendrini, 237n16 Persian feast, 3, 41 pharmakon, 94, 207n14, 216n103 pilaw rice dish, 42, 43 pistachio nuts, 1, 2, 4, 51 ­ attle of, 61 Plassey, B Pomeranz, Kenneth, 202n81 Pope, Alexander, 34; The Rape of the Lock, 206n7 Porter, David, 18, 19, 121, 122, 203n89, 222n67 Postlethwayt, Malachy: Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, 4 Princess Puffer (character), 188, 189 pseudoethnography, 40, 207n12 Punch, 147, 148, 149, 151–152, 180 raisins, 2, 4 Rappaport, Erika, 101; A Thirst for Empire, 17 rats, 150, 151, 152, 187 ­recipe books, 42 Reynolds’s Miscellany, 151 Richards, Thomas, 147, 153 Richardson, Alan, 14, 201n69, 210n3 Rowe, Nicholas: The Biter, 25, 28, 29–30 Roy, Parama, 5, 13 royal gardens, 78 Rzepka, Charles J., 220n37 saffron, 1, 2, 3, 4, 41, 42 Saglia, Diego, 5, 12, 47, 88 Said, Edward W., 14, 110, 147, 199n28 Saladin (character): attire of, 88, 89; medical intervention of, 92, 216n101; talisman of, 91, 92, 93, 94–95, 217n106, 217n107 [ 268 ]

Sale, George, 70 Sassatelli, Roberta, 201n62 Schmitt, Cannon, 220n37 Scotland, 84–85 Scott, Walter, 191; comparison to Moore, 84; critics of, 83–84; depiction of opium, 90; on Highlanders, 85; historical novels of, 83; view of the Orient, 84. See also Talisman (Scott) Second British Empire, 24 Second Opium War, 135, 141, 153, 179, 188, 202n85 self, 4–5, 8, 20, 61, 62–63 self-­identity, 23, 169 self-­reflexivity, 12, 13, 15, 20, 193 Shaffer, Elinor, 209n41 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of, 27 Shakinovsky, Lynn, 230n64, 232n81 Shammas, Carole, 5 Sharafuddin, Mohammed, 213n43 Sheerkohf (character), 88, 90 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 67, 213n38; Alastor, 221n47; “A Vindication of Natu­ral Diet,” 119 sherbets, 1, 2 Sigmond, G. G., 97 Simmonds, Peter Lund: The Curiosities of Food, 151 Simpson, David, 106, 216n101, 221n50 simultaneity, 125, 223n74 Sino-­British relations: British imperial identity and, 21, 97; evolution of, 102–103, 140; “natu­ral law” discourse in, 224n15; trade and, 101, 136–138 Sinology, 120, 202n80, 221n61 slavery, 57, 100 Smith, Adam, 9–10 Smith, Albert, 151 Snowe, Lucy (character): avenging dream of, 166; development of sexual identity, 231n70; exotic ingestion of, 156, 166–167, 181, 231n71; imperial dimensions of, 164; “La Terrasse” scene, 161–162, 165–166; midnight vision of Villette, 164, 167, 169, 232n80; Paul and, 168–169, 231n75; strive for in­de­pen­dence, 164–165, 166, 169; tea ritual and, 160; view of Polly, 157–158, 159–160, 163, 229n49, 230n53

INDEX

Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China, 137, 224n21 Sorensen, Janet, 84 Southey, Robert, 2, 18; Thalaba the Destroyer, 3 Soyer, Alexis, 149, 150 “Soyer’s International Exhibition, the Gastronomic Symposium of All Nations” restaurant, 149–150 space-­time, 125–126, 222n71 Spectator, The, 26, 27, 28, 41, 205n11 spices, 2, 3, 4, 7, 13, 77, 210n49 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 153 Stabler, Jane, 8 Staunton, George Thomas, 120 Steele, Richard, 205n11 Stewart, Susan, 56, 209n44 “Subject of Breakfast Continued-­Tea-­ Drinking, The” (Hunt), 98, 99, 101 suckling pig (dish), 119 Sudan, Rajani, 231n71 Suez Canal, 188 sugar: as addition to tea, 100; as luxury item, 212n31; mass adoption of, 4, 5; slavery and, 65, 100, 231n70; trade, 62 Suspiria de Profundis (De Quincey), 104, 108, 111, 112, 138, 218n21 Swift, Jonathan, 72 sympathy, 9–10 talisman, 94, 95, 217n107 Talisman (Scott): aesthetic of, 93, 96; characters of, 85, 87, 88, 89; conflict between East and West, 83, 84; critics of, 83, 84; depiction of exotic food and commodities, 87, 88–91; depiction of medical cure, 92, 93, 216n101; dissolution of cultural identity in, 20, 21; ending of, 95; exotic ingestion in, 17, 89, 96, 192; Orientalism of, 83–84; plot of, 92–94; talismanic applications, 91–92, 93, 94–96, 217n106, 217n107 Tallapoy, Timothy (character), 25, 28, 29 Tanke, Janet, 231n70 taste: as aesthetic faculty, 27; for exotic ­t hings, 27, 28, 29, 44, 200n60 Tate, Nahum, 32–33; Panacea: A Poem upon Tea, 32, 206n24 Tate, Rosemary, 231n70 Taussig, Michael, 73 Tavernier, Jean-­Baptiste, 42, 69, 70

Taylor, Scott K., 7, 11 tea: advertisement of, 127; artificial coloration of, 127; association with the sea, 126; benefits of, 28–29, 98, 99, 106; British identity and, 8, 37, 99–101, 136, 160, 182, 191, 206n24; vs. coffee, 11; as cultural signifier of Chineseness, 30–31, 35, 37; domestication of, 4, 11, 16–17, 36–37, 61, 65, 134; historiography of, 17, 30; Indian-­farmed, 127; mass consumption of, 5, 8, 103; negative perception of, 33; origin story and, 33, 34; poisonous effects of, 98, 106, 191; popularization of, 30, 32–35; self-­reflexivity in discourse of, 32, 33, 35; slavery and, 65, 210n55; symbolic significance of, 19–20, 192; trade, 21, 62, 79, 127. See also green tea Tea: A Poem. Or, Ladies into China-­C ups; A Metamorphosis, 33–35 tea-­drinking habit, 9–10, 28–29, 159–162, 203n96 Teltscher, Kate, 212n18 Tenniel, John: “The Happy F ­ amily in Hyde Park,” 147, 148, 149, 155 “Ten Thousand Chinese Th ­ ings” exhibition, 134, 161, 171, 226n58; guide to, 133, 143–144, 222n72; review of, 142–143 Thelwall, Algernon Sydney, 139–140 Thomas, Ronald R., 235n123 tobacco, 4, 5, 44 Tompkins, Kyla Wazana, 17 Trocki, Carl A., 211n11 Trump, Donald, 187 Tully, Sarah, 42 turbans, 85, 86, 88, 89, 216n97 Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (Postlethwayt), 4 Vail, Jeffrey, 213n43 Vathek (Beckford): ambient vapour featured in, 50, 55–56, 57, 210n51; autobiographical reading of, 49, 54–55, 209n35; creation of imaginative space, 55; depiction of ritualistic sacrifice, 49–50; exotic ingestion in, 17, 20, 46, 48–50, 51, 57, 163; Islamic religious iconography, 52, 53, 55; language of, 49, 55; Orientalism of, 46, 47, 51–53, 210n52, 231n72; plot of, 48–49; scholarship on, 47 [ 269 ]

INDEX

Vaux, Thomas de (character), 92, 93, 94 vegetarianism, 118–119 Victoria, Queen of ­Great Britain, 140 Victorian realist fiction: Chinese motifs in, 154, 155–156, 158–159 Villette (Brontë): characters of, 157–160; comparison to De Quincey’s Confessions, 22, 156, 165, 166–167; cross-­ cultural dimension of, 169–170; ending of, 169, 232n84; En­glish domesticity in, 156, 160, 162, 230n68; erotic motif, 159, 230n50; exotic ingestion in, 163, 166–167, 169, 181, 192, 231n71; feminist motif, 163, 164, 169, 232n81; gender dynamics of, 157, 229n49; “­Grand Fête” episode, 167; history of Belgium’s revolt in, 168, 169; imperial discourse of, 156, 161–162, 163–164, 169, 170, 232n81; “La Terrasse” scene, 161–162, 163, 165–166, 230n64; nested visual frames of, 157; Orientalist imagery of, 155, 156, 158, 161, 167; plot of, 156, 157–160; “Sisera and Jael” episode, 164–165, 167; structure of, 157; surveillance theme, 229n46, 231n75; tea-­making scenes, 159–160, 162

[ 270 ]

Wagner, Tamara S., 177 Walpole, Horace, 40 Wang, Dongqing, 138, 224n15 Warren, Andrew, 15 Watt, James, 15, 85, 210n52 Watters, Jesse, 187 West: Eurocentric notion of, 202n81 Whewell, William, 146, 147, 155, 218n11 Wilt, Judith, 95 Witchard, Anne Veronica, 103, 234n109 Wolf, Sherri, 235n121 Wong, J. Y., 179 Words­worth, William, 113 Wright, George Newenham: China, in a Series of Views, 150, 153 Xu, Wenying, 175 Yan, Mengmeng, 206n24 Yang, Chi-­ming, 18 Ye, Mingchen, 179 Young, Paul, 150 Zuroski, Eugenia, 19, 106, 161, 202n79

A B O U T T H E AU T H O R

is an assistant professor of En­glish at Saint Mary’s College of California. Her work has been published in Studies in Romanticism, Keats-­Shelley Journal, and SEL Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture 1500–1900.

YI N Y UAN