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Dickens, China and Tea: Commodity Conversations and the Re-Conception of National Identity Between 1848 - 1870

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Dickens, China and Tea: Commodity Conversations and the Re-Conception of National Identity Between 1848 - 1870 Dickens, China and Tea: Commodity Conversations and the Re-conception of National Identity between 1848 - 1870 Submitted by Hannah Ruth Kathleen Lewis - Bill, to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, January 2015 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. ……………………………………………………………………………… 1 Abstract Between 1848 – 1870 Dickens’s novels became increasingly outward looking towards transnational spaces. Dickens’s growing interest in China and Chinese commodities such as tea can be seen in his novels where contemporary anxieties about a close association with China and the Chinese is identified. The fraught trading and political relationships between Britain and China both during and after the Opium Wars and the opening of five new ports identifies this nation as one which Dickens perceived to pose a threat to British national identity. Looking at this relationship in terms of commodities, Chinese tea can therefore be a marker not only for a fetishised commodity but also as a representation of a nation. This thesis argues that Dickens’s representation of China through commodities such as tea presents a new way for British national identity to be conceptualised. Dickens’s inclusion of Chinese commodities intersects with other foreign countries that, unlike China, formed part of the British Empire. China’s independence facilitated a commercial freedom that was not available to nations that formed part of the Empire and, as a consequence, increased its commercial power. This thesis underscores some of the significant moments in Dickens’s novels from 1848 -1870 to reveal a commodity dialogue between China and Britain which moves beyond the page and reflects an increasingly interconnected world which was both assimilated and ostracised. This provides a new understanding of Britain that, far from establishing its commercial autonomy, shows how it became increasingly reliant on China and the conversations that these commodities contribute to an understanding of Dickens’s world. The thesis considers the productive readings of China in Dickens’s fiction and the importance of geopolitical commodities in forming an understanding of nation and nationality, identity and culture, and Britain and Britishness through trade. 2 Contents Acknowledgements 2 List of illustrations 4 Introduction 5 Chapter 1: ‘The world was very busy now, in sooth, and had a lot 24 to say.’ The growth of commodity culture in Dombey and Son Chapter 2: Beyond the Empire in David Copperfield 52 Chapter 3: From Britain to beyond: Bleak House and objects of 85 social desire Chapter 4: Little Dorrit and the Chinese commodity matrix 119 Chapter 5: Our Mutual Friend and the China Question 149 Chapter 6: Dickens’s vision of the old and new world 178 in The Mystery of Edwin Drood Conclusion 194 Bibliography 200 3 Acknowledgments This thesis could not have been completed without the assistance of many wonderful people and institutions, and it is here that I am delighted to extend my thanks to them. I would like to thank the University of Exeter and the Centre for Victorian Studies which has been a place of great energy and discourse. I hope that, during my time at the university, I have contributed to this and the student community in some way. The Chris Brooks Collection and the special collections have also been excellent and valuable resources. I would like to thank the librarians at the British Library. I would also like to thank the organisers of Dickens Journals Online, a Leverhulme-funded project, which has facilitated such ready access to the journals I have used. I am grateful for the opportunities afforded by many of the conferences I have attended and the thought-provoking dialogues that these engendered. The conference held at the University of Buckingham led to the publication of an article forming an adapted part of Chapter 3. Another, held at King’s College, London, forms an adapted part of Chapter 1. Conferences are such an excellent opportunity to meet with fellow Victorianists and I would like to thank those who I have spoken with whilst there. I would like to thank my mentors and friends who, without their support, would have made this process a less engaging one. I wish to firstly thank Regenia Gagnier for her supportive, constructive and careful supervision from which I have benefited from enormously. I would also like to thank John Plunkett, Tricia Zakreski, Kate Hext, Ruth Livesey, Robert Patten, Murray Baumgarten, Holly Furneaux, Ana Parejo Vadillo, John Drew, Iain Crawford, and Jude Piesse. My friends outside academia have also been enormously supportive and I would like to particularly thank, Marilyn Thompson, Amelia Scott and Kate Wakely- Mulroney for their moments of wisdom, fun and thoughtfulness. 4 Last, but by no means least, I have been incredibly lucky to have two wonderful parents and their love, friendship and support has been vital over the past years. My mother has been an avid reader of this thesis throughout and I have so appreciated her time, thoughts and cups of tea! Sadly, my father passed away a short time ago and his presence during the final stages of this thesis has been missed greatly. He did not have the opportunities I have been afforded but ensured they were there for me. It is to him that this thesis is dedicated. 5 Table of Illustrations Fig. 1 Twinings Tea Shop, Strand, London Fig. 2 Gustave Doré: ‘Opium Smoking – the Lascars Room in Edwin Drood’ in Gustave Doré & Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage, (London: Grant & Co, 1872). Fig. 3 ‘Charles Dickens helps the suffering at the fatal Accident’ in The Penny Illustrated Paper, Vol. IX No. 1145, London, June 24 1865 Vo. IX No. 1145. 6 Introduction Confronted by an ever-growing and cosmopolitan London, Dickens’s novels and journalism address the world beyond Britain and the foreign commodities fetishised by the British consumer. Outside the Twinings shop, which conceivably Dickens walked past every day on the way to his office on Wellington Street, is this grouping of figures. Here in London, China is present in commodity form and, indeed, the statues commodify the physical body of China over the doorway. Looking at the image above, two Chinese merchants in traditional Chinese attire are stationed on either side of a golden lion. The Chinese merchants stand as representatives of what China brought to London, whilst the lion in the centre pays homage to Britain’s insignia. Together this forms a representation of the trade that was being undertaken between Britain and China. The premises where the shop stood had originally been called ‘Tom’s Coffee House’ and it came to meet ‘the border between Westminster 7 and the City of London, an area that was newly populated with the aristocracy displaced by the Great Fire of London.’ 1 Tom’s Coffee House later became known as Twinings Tea Shop and, in Twinings’ hands, supplied tea - as opposed to coffee which was an increasingly popular Chinese commodity. The shop provides evidence of China’s commodity presence in a British space, for over 300 years, and a reference to our continued reliance on this beverage. Henry Sirr notes in 1849 that: It is stated that tea was originally introduced into Europe by the Dutch, in 1602, but the first official report we have of tea being used in England will be found in 12 Car. II. C. 23, as an act of parliament was passed in 1660 by which a tax was levied at eightpence per gallon on all tea made or sold in coffee-houses or taverns. We read in Pepys’s Diary September 25, 1661, - “I sent for a cup of tea, a Chinese drink, of which I had never drank before”. 2 Whilst tea had been present as a popular beverage since the seventeenth century, the rise in the fetishisation of this Chinese product can be noted far more explicitly in the mid-nineteenth century and it is at this juncture that I would like to situate my use of the words fetishisation and fetishism. There are two main theorists who introduce the idea of fetishisation and fetishism, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud and I would like to firstly outline their understanding of the terms and then distinguish their understanding from my own. In Das Capital3, Marx suggests that A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them 1 This quotation is taken from the Twinings Tea Shop website which outlines the history of the company: http://www.twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/history-of-twinings The tea shop is still present in the same location of the Strand and now houses a museum as well as a tea shop. 2 Henry Charles Sirr, M.A., China and the Chinese: Their Religion, Character, Customs, Manufactures: The Evils Arising from the Opium Trade With a Glance At Our Religious, Moral, Political and Commercial Intercourse with the Country, (London: Wm. S. Orr & Co. Amen Corner, and 147, Strand, 1849) pp. 364-365. 3 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, ed. by McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) p. 41. 8 as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.4 The quality of this relationship alongside its mysterious production finds its basis, as suggested by Marx here, by the way in which the labour that was utilised to construct the product becomes inseparable from the person who produced it.
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