Adopting a Chinese Mantle: Designing and Appropriating Chineseness 1750-1820

This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Adopting a Chinese Mantle Designing and Appropriating Chineseness 1750-1820 Newport, Emma Helen Henke Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 24. Sep. 2021 Adopting a Chinese Mantle: Designing and Appropriating Chineseness 1750-1820 Emma Helen Henke Newport King’s College London Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Research 1 Abstract The thesis examines methods of imagining and appropriating China in Britain in the period 1750 to 1820. It considers how those who engaged with the textual and material culture of China depicted and envisioned China. The thesis identifies a set of practices by which eighteenth-century writers, scientists, and designers appropriated elements of Chinese culture: adopting a Chinese mantle in the dressing of bodies, the dressing of rooms and the dressing of text as Chinese. Extending the work of Chi-Ming Yang on performing China beyond theatrical performance, this thesis explores the limits and effects of performance of Chineseness in home decoration, scientific thought, and satire. Divided into three sections, the first addresses the relationship between women and Chinese ornamentation within a domestic setting. Identifying a theory of ornamentation prevalent in eighteenth-century culture, it addresses the way women negotiated their engagement with the Chinese aesthetic, due to the negative associations it carried. It shows how the appropriation of Chinese goods represented a novel and alternative method of expression and identity formation, even permitting the recreation of an Empire at home. The second section examines how China becomes an object of study and the practices it produces, including translation, location, dislocation and display of exotic objects and texts. This section brings to light an account of Lady Banks’s Chinese porcelain collection as an example of how networks of exchange were created and complicated by the influx of Chinese goods, materials and ideas. The final section addresses the way in which satire employs a ludic Chinese mantle to challenge received ideas about aesthetics, monarchy and misrule. The thesis argues that adopting a Chinese mantle contributes to the fluid concept of identity formation whereby the performance of identity, through Chinese objects, dress and speech, helped to project a civilised and sophisticated personality. It charts British delight and anxiety felt towards China: playfulness and intellectual dismantling, rather than Orientalist aggression, were the primary methods of accommodation until the militarisation of the British and Chinese Imperial projects in the nineteenth century. 2 List of Abbreviations BL British Library BM British Museum BM (NH) British Museum Natural History Department DB ‘Dairy Book’ FRO Flintshire Record Office HL Huntington Library KA Kent Archives RS Royal Society OED Oxford English Dictionary 3 Contents Introduction 6 Section One: Home 29-100 Introduction - Dressing up as Chinese: Rooms, Bodies, Women and China 29 Chapter One In Full Chinese Pomp: Elizabeth Montagu and the Delineation of 54 Domestic Space Chapter Two Two Elizabeths and the Chinese Taste at Erddig House 86 Section Two: Science 106-208 Introduction - Scientific Curiosity and China 105 Chapter Three - William Jones and the New Repository for Curiosity 120 Chapter Four - Interplay and Interpretation: Lady Banks’s ‘Dairy Book’ 144 Chapter Five - ‘Gaudy’ Fantasies: the European Mantle of Chineseness 183 Section Three: Satire 200-292 Introduction - Dressing up Texts: the Satirical Chinese Texts Of William Chambers and Peter Pindar 209 Chapter Six - William Chambers and the Art and Philosophy of Gardening 221 Chapter Seven - Peter Pindar and the Satirical Dismantling of Translation, Monarchy and Empire 257 Thesis Conclusion 293 Appendices 300 Bibliography 328 4 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Clare Brant, who has been my advocate and advisor during my years at King’s College London as an undergraduate and post- graduate student and without whom this project would never have been realised. I am indebted to Dr. Elizabeth Eger for her guidance and support in researching Elizabeth Montagu and for sharing so generously her research into the letters of Montagu, which was completed at the Huntington Library. I am also grateful to Professor Josephine McDonagh for asking the right questions. Emily Wong and her family gave invaluable help translating eighteenth-century mandarin. I would also like to express my appreciation for Neil Chambers's scrutiny of the Banks family's handwriting. All of the staff at Erddig House in Wrexham were very generous with their time and access to materials, as was Francesca Hillier, who discovered the second copy of the ‘Dairy Book’ sitting, uncatalogued, on a shelf in the British Museum. Finally, I would not have been able to complete this thesis without the support of the Art and Humanities Research Council, Benjamin Parker and my mother, Helen Newport. This thesis is dedicated to the memory of Ollie. 5 Adopting a Chinese Mantle: Designing and Appropriating Chineseness 1750-1820 When I ceased to look upon [Dr Courayer] as a missionary, I began to consider him as the best piece of Chinese furniture I had ever seen, and could hardly forbear offering him a place on my chimney-piece. Elizabeth Montagu to Gilbert West, Esq. London, Oct. 31st, 17511 In the eighteenth century, China represented a place of infinite possibility fashioned by its distant exoticism and its domestic familiarity: a country far away and inaccessible, even to East India Company traders who were confined to Canton, yet one that produced goods that would eventually emerge from the aristocratic cabinet of curiosities to sit on or in every middle-class mantelpiece and kitchen cabinet.2 At the same time, texts written by missionaries and merchants and translations of Chinese works arrived in increasing number in a journey from China that usually included stops in India and continental Europe before reaching British shores. British artists, writers, scholars and manufacturers reacted to the new objects and ideas entering the British marketplace by producing counterfeit and replica Chinese goods and texts.3 1 Elizabeth Montagu, The Letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu: With Some of the Letters of Her Correspondents, 2 vols (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1825), II, p. 214. 2 Reigniting twentieth-century interest in sinology, the art-historian Hugh Honour identified the fantastical appeal of distant China. See Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: A Vision of Cathay (London: John Murray, 1961). This view is shared by Raymond Dawson in The Chinese Chameleon: an Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilisation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). Further references from this edition. 3 Ros Ballaster discusses Oriental tales, authentic and invented, in Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 6 The combination of industrialisation and an expanding global network of exchange contributed to a popular response to this growing aesthetic influence: the adoption of Chineseness in dress and in the decoration of rooms, whether a cabinet of curiosity, a china closet, the bedroom or the dressing room itself, as well as the figurative, playful dressing up of British texts and ideas as authored or inspired by the Chinese. Thus, people began to dress rooms, bodies, ideas and texts as Chinese: adopting a Chinese mantle. Connected from the tenth century in a sparse manner by the silk roads between China and Europe, by the early modern period there was still only a minimum of goods and knowledge transferring between East and West. The record of objects from China in European hands reveals them to be so rare and inordinately expensive that only a tiny number of vastly expensive pieces of Chinese porcelain, glass, and silk resided in the cabinets of the nobility and monarchs, including Elizabeth I, whose inventories included seven pieces of Chinese porcelain.4 Until the British East India Company managed to establish a trading post in Taiwan in 1672, Chinese goods were received only in the houses of the richest of the aristocracy. In the closing decades of the seventeenth century, trading companies heading

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