China in a Book: Victorian Representations of the ‘Celestial Kingdom’ in William Dalton’s The Wolf Boy of China

Authors

  • Shih-Wen Chen The Australian National University, Australia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21153/pecl2011vol21no1art1137

Keywords:

The Wolf Boy of China, William Dalton, Edwardian children's literature, Victorian children's literature, reader response, children's literature set in China

Abstract

Despite the wealth of material related to China in Victorian and Edwardian children’s literature, relatively few scholarly works have been published on the subject. Critics who have discussed the topic have tended to emphasize the negative discourse and stereotypical images of the Chinese in late nineteenth-century children’s literature. I use the case of William Dalton’s The Wolf Boy of China (1857), one of the earliest full-length Victorian children’s novels set in China, to complicate previous generalizations about negative representations of China and the Chinese and to highlight the unpredictable nature of child readers’ reactions to a text. First, in order to trace the complicated process of how information about the country was disseminated, edited, framed, and translated before reaching Victorian and Edwardian readers, I analyse how Dalton wove fragments from his reading of a large archive of texts on China into his novel. Although Dalton may have preserved and transmitted some ‘factual’ information about China from his sources, he also transformed material that he read in innovative ways. These are reflected in the more subversive and radical parts of the novel, which are discussed in the second part of the essay. In the final section, I provide examples of historical readers of The Wolf Boy of China to challenge the notion that children passively accept the imperialist messages in books of empire.

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Author Biography

  • Shih-Wen Chen, The Australian National University, Australia

    Shih-Wen Chen received her PhD in Literature, Screen and Theatre Studies from The Australian National University in December 2009. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow at The Australian Centre on China in the World, ANU. Her research interests include Victorian children’s literature, print culture, and histories of reading. Her monograph, China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851-1911, is forthcoming from Ashgate.

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Published

2011-01-01

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How to Cite

“China in a Book: Victorian Representations of the ‘Celestial Kingdom’ in William Dalton’s The Wolf Boy of China” (2011) Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, 21(1), pp. 1–18. doi:10.21153/pecl2011vol21no1art1137.

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