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Asian Classics on the Victorian
Bookshelf
Asian Classics on the
Victorian Bookshelf
Flights of Translation

A L E X A N D E R BU B B
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
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© Alexander Bubb 2023
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022947261
ISBN 978–0–19–886627–5
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866275.001.0001
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Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 Contents

Preface ix
List of Illustrations xvii
List of Abbreviations xix
Prologue: A Soldier’s Rubaiyat xxi
1. A Century of Translation 1
2. Taking an Interest 33
3. Circulating 63
4. Canonizing 89
5. Translating 118
6. Publishing 166
7. Reading 192
Epilogue: Flights of Translation 228

Appendix 235
Index 241
 Preface

I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the

orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who
could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth
the whole native literature of India and Arabia.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, Minute on Indian Education (1835)1

. . . the names of Firdusi, Sa’di, Omar Khayyám, Jami, and Háfiz, have a
place in our own temples of fame. They have won their way into the
book-stalls and stand upon our shelves, side by side with the other
books which mould our life and shape our character.
—Introduction to The World’s Great Classics: Oriental Literature (1899)2

During the last two centuries, those enthusiasts who have heralded the imminent
merging of national literary traditions into a new, joint configuration—world
literature—have often given shape to their vision by imagining a universal library.
The idea of a single institution, housing everything of value written in any lan-
guage, has made such a development seem not only desirable but inevitable. This
observation is not mine but was made recently by Aamir Mufti, citing among
other exponents Goethe (who coined the term Weltliteratur in 1827 after reading
a Chinese novel) and Macaulay, whose infamous remarks eight years later but-
tressed his recommendation that English-language schools should be established
in India to foster an educated class sympathetic to British rule. The universal
library is and continues to be an enticing notion, Mufti admits, provided one
overlooks certain inconvenient questions. Who assembles this library, and to
what end? By what principles do they decide which books to admit and which to
exclude? How are books categorized, and in what language is the catalogue writ-
ten? Most importantly, perhaps, who may enter and borrow from this library? For
Mufti, these objections give the lie to any blithe assumption that globalization
enables texts and ideas to travel unmolested around the world, any more than it
permits a free and equal trade in commodities. On the contrary, he remarks,

1 T.B. Macaulay, Speeches: with his Minute on Indian Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1935), p. 349.
2 Epiphanius Wilson (ed.), The World’s Great Classics: Oriental Literature (4 vols, New York:
Colonial Press, 1899), I, iii. Wilson correctly uses an apostrophe to register the glottal stop in Sadi, and
acute accents for the long ‘a’ in Khayyam and Hafiz (though he has overlooked Jami). Nineteenth-
century orientalists used a wide variety of diacritics and to prevent confusion I have avoided them in
my own transliteration.
x Preface

‘world literature has functioned from the very beginning as a border regime’, in
which some texts or languages are privileged over others.3
That a ‘border regime’ is in operation within the world library becomes obvious
if we extrapolate Macaulay’s dictum. So pure is the metal of European thought,
his image suggests, that when brought up for assay and set on the scales, even a
small and random assortment of nuggets will prevail over a whole wagonful of
ore from the mines of Asia. Better fifty tomes of Europe than an archive of Cathay,
apparently, to paraphrase Tennyson’s Locksley Hall (written in the same year as
Macaulay’s Minute). Now let us extend the ratio: isn’t Macaulay inviting us to sup-
pose that the latter might with facility be reduced to the dimensions of the for-
mer? Would not we (i.e. Europeans) be well served if efficient translators would
compress the cumbrous oriental archive into fifty convenient volumes? Such a
curatorial enterprise would require that a circumscribed canon of texts, or
extracts, be admitted to the library and much else turned away, and in Mufti’s
account (which draws ultimately on the work of Edward W. Said), such was the
task upon which British orientalists were already well advanced by 1835. He con-
vincingly argues for the fundamental continuity between world literature and
orien­tal­ism, by showing how the former came into being only when the extra­or­
din­ar­ily diverse range of writing practices and traditions observable in ‘the East’
had been ‘absorbed, recalibrated, rearranged, revaluated, reclassified, reconstel-
lated . . . and, in short, fundamentally transformed’ by the work of European trans­
lators, mainly active in the nineteenth century.4 I have no intention of disputing
Mufti’s thesis. But I do wish to ask one question. How might our understanding of
this process change if, instead of considering the universal library only as a concept,
we attempted to discover it in historical actuality? That is, what if we focussed on
real books, on real bookshelves, belonging to real people?
Lord Macaulay wrote most of The History of England in his study at Wallington
Hall in Northumberland, but that is not the library to which I am referring. In
fact I am not alluding to any specific location, but rather to the overall biblioscape
that Richard Gottheil seems to be describing, when he claims that the Persian
poets Firdausi, Sadi, Omar Khayyam, Jami, and Hafez have come to populate the
bookstalls and bookcases of the West. Made in a critical introduction to an
anthology of their poetry—the first of four ‘oriental’ volumes published in the
World’s Great Classics series at the turn of the century—Gottheil’s remarks suggest
that the Persians stand on an equal footing (‘side by side’) with the European clas-
sics. Furthermore, they seem to have attained that position, mysteriously, by their
own exertions (‘they have won their way’) rather than through any intermediary.
From streetside stalls (he does not say shops) they accost the casual browser, but

3 Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA and
London: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 1, 5, 9.
4 Ibid., p. 48 (Mufti’s italics).
 Preface xi

when housed on a domestic bookshelf (he does not say library), they take on a
more decided, indeed a quasi-religious significance. To Gottheil, a secular Jew,
the bookcase constitutes a sort of shrine, standing in relation to the greater canon
of literature in the same way perhaps that a Roman’s household gods stood in
relation to the city temple. Such grandiose rhetoric deserves scrutiny, and so I have
set about testing the truth of Gottheil’s assertions. Could Persian poetry really
have contributed to shaping the individual ‘character’—and thus to ­moulding the
collective ‘life’—of British and American readers at the fin de siècle, and if this was
so then what were the specific poems that accomplished this? Did those readers’
bookshelves hold one Asian book to fifty European, or did they choose a more
balanced ratio for their universal libraries-in-miniature? My findings will become
apparent in the following chapters—findings, on reflection, that I could scarcely
have imagined when I began my research eight years ago on a snowy day in
Syracuse, New York. But even though at that stage my destination remained
obscure, I had at least discerned three dark spots in our existing know­ledge which
I thought I might throw some light on.
The first of these lacunae was connected with what Raymond Schwab termed,
forty years ago, the Oriental Renaissance. Schwab’s historical focus was on the
1780s and 1790s, when Sir William Jones and his associates carried out ground-
breaking research in Calcutta. Despite the profound impact their translations
would make in the short term on Romantic literary culture, Schwab’s argument is
that in the course of the following century Jones’s cosmopolitan attitude was
negated by a wilful ignorance of Asian culture based on the conviction of white
racial superiority. Though it continued to flourish in France and Germany, in
Britain orientalism failed to recapture the attention it had drawn in its heyday and
grew steadily ‘ephemeral’ to public life.5 In spite of Schwab’s tendency to overgen-
eralize, this narrative has proved remarkably persistent. In her Imperial Babel
(2014), Padma Rangarajan points out Schwab’s shortcomings while broadly
acquiescing in his thesis, overlooking the obvious fact that orientalism did not
lose steam after Jones’s untimely death in 1794, but rather gathered speed relent-
lessly.6 By 1894, the volume of literature from Asia available in English was vastly
greater and more comprehensive than the fragmented corpus of Jones’s lifetime.
More importantly, a number of texts now existed in multiple translations—allowing
readers to differentiate—and most importantly, editions had been made catering
explicitly for the non-expert reader. Some up-to-date studies (e.g. Reza Taher-
Kermani’s 2020 The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry) have begun to pay heed
to the burgeoning world of popularization, but academic interest remains
weighted towards translations made for the benefit of oriental scholars, colonial

5 Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 43.
6 Padma Rangarajan, Imperial Babel: Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), p. 111.
xii Preface

officials, missionaries and other specialist readerships.7 Cheap and popular works
were sometimes made by people with a highly imperfect knowledge of the source
language, and yet sold more copies than authors with the proper credentials.
There has been a failure to take such works seriously—Rangarajan refers to Matthew
Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum, a basically accurate retelling of a well-known
­episode in Firdausi’s Shahnameh, as ‘merely costume’. We might make amends,
however, if we are willing to take up a challenge issued recently by Annmarie
Drury: ‘what would happen to our understanding of “world literature” if we read
the poetic translations that most Victorians read?’8
Inattention to popularizers (a fuller explanation of this term will follow in
Chapter 1) has been a problem in the study of European languages too, but that
is starting to dissipate. David Damrosch has described the effect of Charles
Jervis’s 1742 ‘popular translation’ of Don Quixote in eighteenth-century Britain,
while Chantal Wright has partly vindicated Dostoyevsky’s first English transla-
tor, Constance Garnett. For decades critics only saw it as their task to pick apart
the latter’s flawed Russian, rather than to try and understand the ‘formative’
influence her verbal choices had exerted on a generation of English readers.9 In
the area of Asian literature, however, the disparity remains pronounced. This has
a bearing on the other two lacunae I propose to address. Firstly, there has been a
tendency to treat the mediation of colonial cultures and contexts to the British
public as two distinct areas of activity: the highbrow (anthropology, comparative
religion, art, and collecting) and the popular (travel writing, fiction by Kipling
and Henty, stage melodrama, imperial exhibitions, and the spectacles of the
Kiralfy brothers).10 Historians have certainly allowed for the permeation of one
sphere by the other, but, with some exceptions, translation has been treated as
though it could only have been consumed by the wealthy and educated, when in
reality it was communicated in different forms to different audiences.11
Lastly, when researchers have specifically examined translation, focus has
usually rested exclusively on the translators, their intentions and methods
(often with reference to their prefaces and explanatory notes, and sometimes to
their manuscript drafts or correspondence). The intended audience and how it
responded (favourably or unfavourably) to the translation, still less the unintended

7 See also several of the essays in Pouneh Shaban and Michelle Quay (eds), The Routledge
Handbook of Persian Literary Translation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022).
8 Rangarajan, Imperial Babel, p. 121; Annmarie Drury, Translation as Transformation in Victorian
Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 225.
9 David Damrosch, ‘Translation and National Literature’, in Sandra Bermann and Catherine
Porter (eds), A Companion to Translation Studies (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), p. 351; Chantal
Wright, Literary Translation (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 99.
10 For a detailed study of the latter sphere of activity, see Neil Hultgren, Melodramatic Imperial
Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014).
11 One study that has considered the multiple audiences for a translated work, and their develop-
ment over time, is Dorothy Maria Figueira, Translating the Orient: the Reception of Śākuntala in
Nineteenth-Century Europe (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991).
 Preface xiii

audiences who more often than not made unbidden use of a translator’s work,
have not been much thought of in these investigations. This is an important
omission, because the major forces we can perceive with hindsight to have
shaped literary culture over time—what we might call the macro-history of
­literature—often look different when viewed from the vantage point of an indi-
vidual reader in the past. Book reviews, trade periodicals, and booksellers’
adverts are among the sources that have helped me trace the contours of the
period’s literary topography, and the fact that such sources have yielded various
references to the ‘oriental classics’, rhet­oric­al contrasts of the ‘old world’ of the
East with the ‘new world’ of the West, and figurations of the universal library,
very much supports Mufti’s narrative. But what actually happens at the micro-
level, when world literature is compressed into someone’s household shelf, is
thoroughly unpredictable and may even resist the dominant values pressing in
on that person from their surrounding context. A single text may trigger a
‘flight’ from those values, propelling the reader with the same momentum by
which it initially escaped the orientalist archive, and flew, chaotically, to an
untold number of individual bookcases. I am not referring merely to cases of
orientophilia, since infatuation with ‘the East’ proceeds from the same
entrenched habits of thought as the denigration of it. But I do mean alternative
ways of reading, more sensitive and more generous modes of conduct, and for-
gotten etiquettes of intercultural encounter. To excuse, or do any special plead-
ing, for the translators and orientalists mentioned here is far from my intention,
but I would like to suggest that the principles, or modalities, at work in the pro-
duction of the Victorian oriental canon may be undermined by the practice.
As evidence of the latter, the physical book has been central to my approach. In
2016, I bought a secondhand copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam that had
been enriched with extensive marginalia by its former owner, a Canadian school-
teacher named Winnifred Carruthers. This purchase, motivated by curiosity,
proved a turning-point. I began to seek out more translations from Persian con-
taining inscriptions, bookplates, annotations, underlining, booksellers’ stickers,
and other signs of use. Later I broadened my remit to all Asian languages, and
amassed a collection of more than one hundred books that I now call AVaTAR—
the Archive of Victorian Translations from Asia and their Readerships. A col­
lect­or of Yiddish schoolbooks, Miriam Borden, gave an interview in 2021 in
which she explained what she looks for on the antiquarian market: ‘I’m interested
in books that have a voice’, she said.12 In developing AVaTAR, I too have sought
out books that have a story to tell, books that may initially give off just a murmur
of past usage, but which begin to speak audibly once their former owners have
been identified. With the help of online public records (birth and death registers,

12 Borden was interviewed by Nigel Beale on The Biblio File podcast: https://thebibliofile.ca/
book-collector-miriam-borden-on-rescuing-the-yiddish-language (accessed 8 Oct. 2021).
xiv Preface

burial lists, the census, local newspapers, and so on) this is an activity that has
proved time-consuming but eminently doable. And so while some books in
AVaTAR did belong to well-documented individuals (like the Radical MP John
Bright, or the Indian dancer Ram Gopal), most sat originally on the shelves of
‘ordinary’ Victorians and Edwardians, whom it has been my privilege to grow
acquainted with. For the sake of brevity, I have not generally explained the full
process whereby I determined that the ‘E.J.C.’ who presented Winnifred Carruthers
with her copy of Omar Khayyam, and left his initials on the flyleaf, was Ernest
John Chave of Woodstock, Ontario; or that James Gemmell Knight was a Liverpool
printer; or that Willoughby Connor was a Hobart Freemason; or that the strange
dedicatory verses written inside Herbert Ormerod’s copy of the Hitopadesha were
alluding to the recent death of his wife. Moreover, within the space of this mono-
graph I was only able to mention a small selection of the books. However, a
descriptive catalogue of the full collection, with provenance notes, biographical
sources, and photographs, is available at https://avatar-books.com/. For the time
being AVaTAR remains in my own hands, and I warmly welcome enquiries and
requests to view items.

Given the centrality of AVaTAR to my enquiry, it is fitting that first thanks should
go to the many booksellers who helped me form the collection, by patiently
responding to my emails or by allowing themselves to be drawn into long,
­distracting conversations on the shopfloor. I am especially grateful to Ted at
Mythos Center Books in Frontenac, Minnesota, who made a lonely trip to his
warehouse during the Covid-19 lockdown to inspect a copy of the Bhagavad Gita
for me, and John Randall from Books of Asia who has been of assistance on sev-
eral occasions. Also Stephen Foster of Foster Books, West London, without whose
fascinating stock of miniatures I would not have discovered my 9cm × 6cm pocket
edition of Confucian maxims. Librarians and archivists, too, have generously
given their time to follow up my queries related to such tantalizing catalogue
descriptors as ‘ownership marks’ or ‘pencilled annotations’. In the digital age it
was a privilege to see Elaine Webster, the National Trust’s curator at Mompesson
House in Salisbury, turn to handwritten accession registers to help me trace the
provenance of their fascinating annotated Ramayana. The staff of the Wilson
Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were so kind as to send
me some scans of J.M. Dent & Co documents gratis, after I missed a crucial folder
during my visit in 2020. Emily DeVore, Amanda Wahlmeier, Andrew Gustafson,
and Darryl Jerome of the Johnson County Genealogical Society helped me track
down obituaries and other information on Stewart Bruce Terry, the former owner
of one of my AVaTAR books. A useful morning spent with the Mark Samuels
Lasner Collection at the University of Delaware was only made possible by the
collector himself graciously coming down to open the reading room for me out-
side of normal library working hours. And a special mention must go to Louise
 Preface xv

Anson of Kilmacrew House, County Down, who let me occupy her sitting room
all afternoon, and brought me endless cups of tea while I consulted some family
papers related to the Chinese translator Helen Waddell.
The typescript of this book benefited tremendously from the kind attention
and input of my Roehampton colleagues Mary Shannon and Susan Greenberg, of
my mentors Elleke Boehmer and Javed Majeed (both of whom championed this
project in its early stages, when it was known as ‘Persia in Pocket Edition’), of my
friends Sebastian Lecourt and John McBratney, and above all of Annmarie Drury
who read almost the whole manuscript. In addition, I received much help and
encouragement over the years from Dominic Brookshaw, Sinéad Moriarty, Clare
Broome Saunders, Mary Ellis Gibson, Jan Montefiore, Chris Murray, Rajeswari
Sunder Rajan, Jonathan Rose, Edmund G.C. King, Shafquat Towheed, Nicola
Kirkby, Shengyu Wang, Santanu Das, Ankhi Mukherjee, Brian Murray, Julia
Hartley, Paul Babinski, Mishka Sinha, Angus Nicholls, Maddalena Italia, Claire
Chambers, and Sukanya Banerjee. Thank you to all the seminar and workshop
participants who commented on my ongoing research, in particular Saronik Bosu
of New York University, who pointed out that the physical bookshelf could be
used as both a ‘metric’ and as a ‘metonym’ for nineteenth-century ecumenical
reading cultures. Thank you to my funders: without the financial support of the
Leverhulme Trust, Marie-Skłodowska Curie Actions, and the Trinity Long Room
Hub at Trinity College Dublin, none of this would have been possible.13 Thank
you to my family for their help in proofreading, with a special thanks to my
grandmother Diana Bubb, who gave me a copy of Arthur Waley’s One Hundred
and Seventy Chinese Poems that she had annotated as a schoolgirl in the 1940s,
and who made a habit of asking me, somewhat pointedly, whenever the opportunity
arose: ‘is your book finished yet?’ And thank you finally Tarun, the friend who
entered my life like a fragrance, or like the sound of Urdu (as my dedication
page could be translated into English), who has held me above water, preserved
me from mishap and dismay, encouraged all my whims, demanded clarity in
thought and expression, and taught me when to stop.

13 Co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Grant Agreement No. 713730.
 List of Illustrations

0.1 Corporal Palmer’s Rubaiyat (with permission of the Mitchell Library,

State Library of New South Wales) xxv
1.1 Frontispiece to The Rose Garden of Persia (author photograph) 14
2.1 West Norwood Cemetery, London (author photograph) 51
3.1 Brooklyn Museum, north-east corner (author photograph) 77
3.2 Los Angeles Central Library, detail of ‘Phosphor’ (author photograph) 79
4.1 Stewart Bruce Terry’s commentary on Mencius (author collection) 106
4.2 Confucian Analects with tram ticket (with permission of WM College) 113
5.1 Patten Wilson, ‘Sohrab Taking Leave of His Mother’ (courtesy of
Yellow Nineties 2.0) 146
5.2 James Legge, The Chinese Classics, with a Translation, Critical and Exegetical
Notes, Prolegomena, and Copious Indexes: Volume 4, Part 1, p. 53
(author photograph) 149
5.3 Helen Waddell, Lyrics from the Chinese, p. 1 (author photograph, copyright
permission granted by Louise Anson) 150
6.1 Ernest Griset’s cover design for Vikram and the Vampire (1870)
(courtesy of Hathitrust) 177
7.1 Way of the Buddha (1906) annotated by Duncan Lorimer Tovey
(author photograph) 219
 List of Abbreviations

AVaTAR Archive of Victorian Translations from Asia and their Readerships (author’s
personal collection)
Beinecke Beinecke Library, Yale University
Berg Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection at the New York Public Library
BL British Library
Bodleian Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
Bristol Special Collections, University of Bristol Library
Brotherton Brotherton Library, Leeds University
Columbia Butler Library, Columbia University
CUL Cambridge University Library Special Collections
FSL Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC
Houghton Houghton Library, Harvard University
Huntington Huntington Library, San Marino, California
HRC Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin
JMA John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland
LMA London Metropolitan Archives
LRO Liverpool Record Office
Morgan Morgan Library, New York
NLI National Library of Ireland
NLS National Library of Scotland
NSW State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
NYPL Manuscripts & Archives Division, New York Public Library
Pforzheimer Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle, New York Public
Library
Reading Archive of British Printing and Publishing, Special Collections, University
of Reading
SLV State Library of Victoria, Melbourne
SOAS Special Collections, School of Oriental and African Studies, London
Syracuse Special Collections Research Center, Bird Library, Syracuse University
TCD1 Department of Manuscripts & Archives, Trinity College Dublin
TCD2 Department of Early Printed Books & Special Collections, Trinity College
Dublin
UCLA Young Research Library, University of California Los Angeles
UNC Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Virginia Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia
WSRO West Sussex Record Office, Chichester
 Prologue
A Soldier’s Rubaiyat

In the State Library of New South Wales is a very small book, 5cm × 8cm, bound
in worn green leather, with a chalky-white stain swirling along its reverse side. At
some point, water, probably rain, has soaked through its pages, tinging them pink
at the corners with the red ink of the pastedown. Its spine is only long enough to
admit a stencilled name—‘Omar Khayyam’—and to that, turning inside, the title
page adds just two further, scrupulously accented words: Rubáiyát of Omar
Khayyám. There is no mention of the translator, nor indeed that the book’s con-
tents were originally written in Persian—though if we turn to the back, a short
biographical afterword gives us the few known facts about the eleventh-century
astronomer to whom the collection of ruba‘i or quatrains are attributed. It also
reveals this English version to be the first of four made by the Victorian poet and
recluse Edward Fitzgerald. His 1859 translation ‘attracted very little attention at
the time of its publication, but of recent years it has had an immense vogue, and
has been read and appreciated by thousands.’ That is all, more or less, that the
book carries by way of editorial baggage. Whereas in 1859 Fitzgerald himself had
offered his reader ten pages of preface, by 1907 the Edinburgh firm of Nimmo,
Hay & Mitchell seem to have felt that Omar Khayyam needed little introduction—
or at least no more than did Thoughts from Emerson, Winnowings from Wordsworth,
A Tennyson Treasury, and the five other literary works we find advertised in the
rear endpapers as forming entries in their Miniature Series.1
This then was a cheap, one-shilling edition of an English classic author. Sized
for the pocket, it was intended for a reader who was already familiar at least with
the poem’s title, and who desired perhaps a portable copy that could be referred
to at spare moments. The pocket in which this copy was carried was a soldier’s,
Corporal Thomas Ambrose Palmer, a farmer from Mangain, New South Wales,
who enlisted in 1915 at the age of thirty-six and was sent first to Egypt, then
France.2 He returned safely from the Western Front, and the Rubaiyat is bundled
with a collection of his war letters and diaries. He may have acquired the book
before, during, or even after the war; but the way it has been archived, and the
evident rain damage, would suggest that Palmer bore this book on his person
across the battlefields of Europe. In this he was not alone. As we will see later, the

1 NSW: MLMSS 9831 (Thomas Ambrose Palmer letters, diary and papers, 1916–19).
2 For Palmer’s war record, see National Archives of Australia: B2455, Palmer, Thomas Ambrose.
xxii Prologue

Rubaiyat was one of the poems most commonly read by First World War combat-
ants (and not only English speakers). Indeed, Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell reissued
their miniature Omar in 1914, possibly with a view to this vast and mobile read-
ership, though the little book in Sydney is from the original 1907 print run.3
Palmer has crammed every available space in the tiny book with annotations,
saving only those pages on which are printed the actual quatrains of the poem,
which it appears he wanted to preserve clean. Shafquat Towheed and Edmund
King describe how books were passed and swapped between soldiers in the
trenches as part of a communal reading culture.4 Not so with this item. The anno-
tations would be hard to read even without the water stains, and could not have
been intended for another reader—unless it were a hypothetical future reader,
such as a son or daughter. No, these quotations (for the notes consist entirely in
extracts from other poems) were designed as supplementary material to Palmer’s
own reading and re-reading of the Rubaiyat. Grouped together principally in the
front endpapers, they signal the points of reference and ‘frame of mind’ with
which he felt the text should be approached.5 This was what it originally meant to
‘illustrate’ a book, to cite Thomas Dibdin’s definition from 1809: ‘bringing together,
from different works, (including newspapers and magazines, and by means of the
scissars [sic], or otherwise by transcription) every page or paragraph which has
any connexion with the character or subject under discussion.’6 As we lever open
its crinkled pages, the book thus discloses a vista of its owner’s remarkable read-
ing habits, and evokes too the bookshelf—actual or mental—on which it once
assumed its place, the global bookshelf of Thomas Palmer. Appropriately, we find
also that the principal subject this soldier wished to illustrate was ‘connexion’
itself—or rather, the resonances and sympathies he detected between poems
drawn from distant parts of West, South, and East Asia.
Of course, Palmer could hardly carry a library in his knapsack, and he may
have decided to use his Rubaiyat as a commonplace book to preserve the chance
fruits of his browsing in YMCA huts and hospital day-rooms. But there is clearly
a more deliberate selection and ordering at work. The miniature Omar does serve
as a substitute for weightier pages, because the excerpts all bear some analogous
relationship to the longer text in whose wings they shelter. Moreover, several of
them appear to have been transcribed from memory. On the front pastedown can
be recognized the preamble to Tennyson’s late poem ‘Akbar’s Dream’ (1892), given

3 The copy bears no date of publication, but may be dated from its characteristics, as described in
A.G. Potter, A Bibliography of the Rubāiyāt of Omar Khayyām (1929; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms
Verlag, 1994), p. 15.
4 Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G.C. King, ‘Introduction’, in Towheed and King (eds), Reading
and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 12.
5 H.J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2001), p. 25.
6 Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Bibliomania; or Book Madness: a Bibliographical Romance, in Six Parts
(London: privately printed, 1809), p. 669.
 Prologue xxiii

here verbatim on the left, with the original for comparison (the book’s cramped
dimensions obliged Palmer to split each line in two).

O God in every temple I see
people that see Thee
feel
after Thee
each religion says Thou
art one—without equal
if it be a mosque people
murmur the holy prayer
has
people ring the bell
from love of Thee
sometimes I frequent
the Christian church
& sometimes the mosque
But it is Thou whom
I seek from temple to temple
Thy elect have no dealings
either with heresy or orthodoxy
for neither of them stands
behind the screen of your
truth
Heresy to the heretic
and Religion to the
orthodox
O god in every temple I see people that see thee,
and in every language I hear spoken, people praise thee.
Polytheism and Islam feel after thee
Each religion says, ‘Thou art one, without equal.’
If it be a mosque people murmur the holy prayer,
and if it be a Christian Church, people ring the bell from
love to Thee.
Sometimes I frequent the Christian cloister, and
sometimes the mosque.
But it is thou whom I search from temple to temple.
Thy elect have no dealings with either heresy or
orthodoxy; for neither of them stands behind the screen
of thy truth.
Heresy to the heretic, and religion to the orthodox,
But the dust of the rose-petal belongs to the heart of
the perfume seller.7

‘Akbar’s Dream’ is a dramatic monologue spoken by the Mughal emperor

(1542–1605), a Muslim ruler celebrated for the pluralist approach he adopted in
governing his multi-faith Indian empire. Tennyson read about Akbar’s Sufi-
influenced beliefs and his attempt to synthesize a unitary religion in the Ain-i-
Akbari, an account of his reign translated into English in 1873 by the orientalist
Heinrich Blochmann.8 Corporal Palmer has not transcribed Tennyson’s own
poem, however, but rather the preamble or epigraph that he extracted from
Blochmann’s introductory essay. This was a Persian composition produced by the
emperor’s vizier Abu’l-Fazl (Palmer renders the name ‘Abdul Fazi’), which he
apparently meant to be inscribed on a Hindu temple as a deterrent to would-be
Muslim iconoclasts. In preference to the English poem with its oriental colouring,
then, Palmer has chosen as his first insert a primary text from the same linguistic

7 Christopher Ricks (ed.), The Poems of Tennyson (London: Longman, 1969), p. 1441. Tennyson
abridged Blochmann’s text, and so must have been Palmer’s source. For the original, see H. Blochmann
and H.S. Jarrett, The Ain i Akbari, by Abul Fazi ’Allami, translated from the original Persian (3 vols,
Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1873–94), I, xxxii.
8 For Tennyson’s sources for ‘Akbar’s Dream’ and his wider interests in non-Christian literature, see
Kirstie Blair, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
pp. 189–96.
xxiv Prologue

tradition as the Rubaiyat. Indeed, he has not quoted Tennyson’s verses at all, but
only ‘An inscription by Abdul Fazi on a temple in Kashmir’. And if he mistook the
name of the Persian vizier in English, his attempt two pages later to transcribe it
in the Perso-Arabic script was a little nearer the mark.9
As we delve deeper into Palmer’s notes, let us think about the rationale for his
choice of ‘illustrations’. Omar Khayyam’s nineteenth-century translators, and to a
degree his readers, can be divided into two parties: those who honoured him as a
sceptical hedonist, preferring the company of cupbearers to that of the clergy;
versus those who insisted that he was a Sufi, and his wine and taverns mystic
symbols of a higher spiritual reality. They represent two Victorian responses to
the erosion of Christian doctrine, the first rejecting religion outright, the second
adopting non-Christian faiths or pursuing (like the Theosophical Society, founded
in 1875) a monist or pantheist solution. Palmer evidently fell into the latter camp
and, mirroring the comparative practices of the Theosophists, seeks to illustrate
or ratify Omar’s beliefs by citing a number of writers past and present. His second
quotation, following Abu’l-Fazl, reflects the same tradition of Indian religious
syncretism, as expounded by the medieval Hindi poet Kabir.

My brother kneels—so says Kabir

To stone & brass in heathenwise
But in my brothers voice I hear
Mine own unanswered agonies
His God is as his fate assigns
His prayer is all the world’s—& mine.

It is possible that Palmer had come across the One Hundred Poems of Kabir
translated in 1914 by Rabindranath Tagore. But these lines are not Tagore’s—in
fact they are not a translation at all, but rather an imitation of Kabir written by
Rudyard Kipling, and used as a chapter heading in his novel Kim (1901).10
Nevertheless, they do faithfully recreate one of the poet’s distinctive mannerisms,11
and Palmer, who may have considered them genuine, must have intended them
to complement Abu’l-Fazl. They also find their pendant at the other end of the
book, in a contemporary quotation from the American dialect poet Joaquin
Miller: ‘In men whom men condemn as ill / I find so much of goodness still, / I[n]

9 I am conjecturing here, as the writing is so awkward as to be almost unintelligible. ‘Fazl’ has been
spelt using the medial fā’ instead of its initial, followed by sīn instead of ẓā. Whoever wrote these charac-
ters knew his limitations, however, and used pencil (Palmer’s notes are otherwise in pen).
10 Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London: Macmillan, 1902), p. 358. As with ‘Akbar’s Dream’, Palmer has
slightly misquoted—Kipling’s text has ‘saith Kabir’, ‘My own’ and ‘as his fates assign’.
11 Nearly all of Kabir’s vanis conclude with ‘kahat Kabir’ or ‘kahe Kabir’ (Kabir says).
 Prologue xxv

men whom men pronounce divine / I find so much of sin & blot— / I hesitate to
draw a line / Between the two, where God has not.’ Though Miller refuses to draw
a line between sinner and saved, these tolerant lines draw a line under the
Rubaiyat itself, for Palmer has written them out directly below the Persian slogan
with which Fitzgerald chose to conclude his translation: TAMÁM SHUD (‘it is all’).
All Victorian readers of the Rubaiyat, whether sceptic or Sufi, recognized the
poem’s message that one must savour the wine of life, and die gladly upon hearing
the fatal beat of Azrael’s wings: ‘While the Rose blows along the River Brink, /
With old Khayyám the Ruby Vintage drink: / And when the Angel with his darker
Draught / Draws up to Thee—take that, and do not shrink.’12 This simple credo
seems to have consoled more than one soldier of the Great War, and Palmer’s
response is to choose perhaps the most prominent space in the volume—the blank
verso facing the poem’s opening page—for the third of his oriental pendants
(Figure 0.1). This quotation is drawn not from the Perso-Indian tradition, how-
ever, but from the Japanese:

Figure 0.1 Corporal Palmer’s Rubaiyat (with permission of the Mitchell Library, State
Library of New South Wales)

12 Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the Astronomer-Poet of Persia (London: Bernard
Quaritch, 1859), p. 10.
xxvi Prologue

Fire of the Autumn turns to

Red & Gold the greeness [sic]
of the leaves before their
grave receive them
but for ever pure & cold
the white foam blossoms
on the tossing wave
Yasuhide

The verses are by the ninth-century poet and official Fun’ya no Yasuhide, and an
English reader of the 1910s enjoyed multiple routes of access to them. They were
available in a standard scholarly text edited by Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain,
as well as in a slim number of John Murray’s cheap ‘Wisdom of the East’ series,
Clara Walsh’s Master-Singers of Japan (though her decorous Georgian style is
markedly different from the proto-Imagism of the lines above).13 Palmer may
even have read an article by the brilliant young poet-critic Yone Noguchi, printed
in the Melbourne Herald six months before the outbreak of war, which mocks
Yasuhide and his overblown style. But his actual source was an Anglo-Japanese
collaborative translation, Sword and Blossom Poems, printed on crêpe paper at
Tokyo by the ingenious Hasegawa Takejiro, a publisher who specialized in pack-
aging Japanese literature for European audiences.14 Whether or not Palmer drew
any formal connection between the five-line tanka and four-line ruba‘i, he chose
it as an autumnal pendant to the Persian, and as a touchstone perhaps for the
growing melancholy he expressed in letters home to his fiancée Nell:

Trust you are O.K. & not worrying unduly. It’s a sad old world this and the best
anyone gets is a few years together with those they love & if I get through this
business all right I’ll have reason to be grateful, remembering all the boys who
have gone under . . .15

The Textual Horizon

Out of this tiny volume opens a vast horizon of possible intertexts, and from
artefacts like it we may achieve a global outlook on cultural production and

13 Basil Hall Chamberlain, The Classical Poetry of the Japanese (London: Trübner, 1880), p. 121;
Clara Walsh, The Master-Singers of Japan (London: John Murray, 1910), p. 87. For the possible influ-
ence of Sword and Blossom Poems on the Imagists, see Yoshiko Kita, ‘Imagism Reconsidered, with
Special Reference to the Early Poetry of H.D.’, PhD thesis, Durham University (1995), p. 38.
14 Yone Noguchi, ‘Japanese Essays: Poetical Vulgarity’, Herald (Melbourne), 31 Jan. 1914, p. 4
(reprinted from the Westminster Gazette); Shotaro Kimura and Charlotte M.A. Peake, Sword and
Blossom Poems, from the Japanese (3 vols, Tokyo: Hasegawa, 1907–10), II, 18. Yasuhide’s lyric is also
quoted by a reviewer in the Bookman, XXXV/205 (Oct. 1908), 61.
15 NSW: MLMSS 9831, T.A. Palmer to Ellen Honora Wilson, 21 Apr. 1918.
 Prologue xxvii

consumption in the nineteenth century. Palmer’s reference points are not exclu-
sively Asian (the rear endpapers also bear some words of Ruskin on the power of
education), but the bulk of the annotation, grouped prominently at the front of
the book, testifies to his evident interest in non-Western literature. His curiosity
may have predated the war, or it may have been inspired by his three months’
gunnery training in the Middle East. But of greater significance is the likelihood
that he cultivated this interest privately, without formal instruction, using the lit-
erature at his disposal in the 1910s.
This book takes its impetus from readers like Corporal Palmer, who invested
their time and money in studying what Victorians conceived as the ‘classic’ litera-
ture of the major Asian languages, and who were motivated to do so not because
of any professional commitment (academic, mercantile, missionary, or other-
wise), but by spiritual yearning, imperial enthusiasm, speculative philosophy, or
eccentric theories, a search for alternative sexual and gender norms, travel,
friendship, escapism, and various other forms of personal curiosity. This is what I
mean by a ‘general reader’—not a category defined by class or intellect, but by a
relationship of amateurism to the source-languages. Such readers were often
obliged to resort to dense and technical books which were never intended for use
by non-experts. But when possible, they consumed the accessible, affordable,
popular translations that began to appear in the 1840s and multiplied rapidly dur-
ing Palmer’s lifetime. Traditionally denigrated by specialists, these popular edi-
tions enabled an important and remarkable transition whereby, in the course of a
few decades, many texts that had been hitherto the preserve solely of orientalists
and antiquaries spread their boards and executed a dramatic flight from the
scholar’s desk to the domestic bookcase.
It is generally accepted now that the ‘common’ or ‘general’ reader has been a
label of convenience which obscures the ‘obstinate, irreducible individualism’ of
every historical person, and the particular conditions shaping their response.16
The individuals who populate these pages, and include country gentry, urban
bourgeoisie, working men and women, children and adolescents, British, Irish,
American, African American, and Australian readers, repeatedly expose the limi-
tations of such vague terms. I continue to use them, however, inasmuch as they
reflect translators’ priorities and appear in their correspondence. In the many
unsolicited ‘pitches’ addressed to various publishers that I have read, proposers of
new translations invariably claim that they will find favour with some nebulous
class of average educated people. The writers of such letters focussed their efforts
like rays of light towards a vanishing point called the ‘general reader’, beyond
which emerged—on the other side of the reading process—a refracted spectrum
of interpretations produced by multifaceted individuals like Corporal Palmer.

16 Anthony Grafton, ‘Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise? Guillaume Budé and his
Books’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, XCI/2 (1997), 141.
xxviii Prologue

The practice of such readers may be thought of in the terms used by Virginia
Woolf in 1925: ‘guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds
and ends he can come by, some kind of whole . . . Hasty, inaccurate, and superfi-
cial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring
where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and
rounds his structure.’17 The archetypal solitary autodidact that Woolf seems to
have in mind was a generalization: many readers arrived at Kabir or Omar
Khayyam not through a deliberate programme of study, but through happen-
stance. Many others did not read alone, but were introduced to Asian authors by
friends, teachers, and clubs. But the wish or ‘instinct’ for coherence—the wish to
minimize the random element in one’s browsing and maximize meaningful
return—is something Palmer shares with many distinct individuals.
My goal has been to explain both how these popular editions were made, and
also how they were read. Indeed, I aim to give a picture of the whole cycle, from
the conception and execution of translations, through the process of production
and publication in either book form or periodical, dissemination to libraries and
bookshops, and ultimately their consumption by readers and recirculation among
other readers (not forgetting that many laypeople read older or more difficult
translations in addition to, and in some cases in preference to, the new popular
editions).
In pursuit of this goal, a project that began in speculation bulged exponentially
as new findings and potential approaches came to light—including a huge cast of
largely forgotten translators. Of necessity it became a study of translation, of book
and reading history, and of poetry, prose, and drama originally written in Hindi,
Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese. The obstacles to such an enquiry
were clear: I had knowledge only of the first two languages, and that far from
expert. I would have to borrow the instruments of my methodology from several
disciplines, and write a book that could never adequately repay all its intellectual
creditors. That it raises issues which it has not the scope to conclusively resolve,
and plumbs depths which it cannot fully survey, I freely admit. Nevertheless I have
presented my research in the form in which I judge it will be of most use to schol-
arship. I decided that only by aiming at comprehensiveness (and inevitably falling
short), could I give an impression of the plenitude and diversity that characterizes
the Victorian consumption of ‘oriental literature’. Moreover, the very occurrence
of that vague, problematic designation so frequently in contemporary sources
made me realize that to understand both translators and readers of the nineteenth
century, I would in some ways have to emulate them. While some delved deep
into one literary tradition, the bent of others—restless, eccentric, prejudiced,
­misinformed, imaginative, or comparative—carried them widely if superficially
across a range of languages. Such practices were authorized by the existence of

17 Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), pp. 11–12.
 Prologue xxix

monolithic notions such as ‘the East’, which I had been well taught—and now
teach my own students—to deconstruct. But nonetheless I, too, would have to
read Confucius in the morning and Rumi in the afternoon, so to speak, if I was to
perceive the various skewed frameworks that individuals or groups might piece
together in order to connect such incongruous authors. Having observed the
impulse to order Asian texts manifesting itself throughout the literate public,
I would be better placed to articulate one of this book’s central arguments: that an
effort was underway in the nineteenth century to assemble an Oriental Canon as
a supplement to the Greco-Roman classics.
That effort is described fully in the book’s central chapter, Chapter 4, which
integrates the findings of the first three chapters and lays the groundwork for the
final three. The reader will notice that each of my chapters is named for a different
part of the process whereby a text crosses from one culture to another—‘Translating’,
‘Publishing’, ‘Circulating’, ‘Taking an Interest’, ‘Reading’, ‘Canonizing’—and yet
may be puzzled as to why I have not arranged them in ‘chronological’ order. This
is in part because the order in which these stages arise is not the same for every
text. Sometimes a publisher decides to issue a text before its translation has been
undertaken. Sometimes (often, in fact) the business of sorting and sifting texts
into a canon does not come until after the translators have done their work—
rather, the translators engage with and attempt to influence canon-makers before
and during the act of translation. Moreover, it was necessary first to map out the
social, cultural, and political background, as well as the institutional structures at
work in the period under consideration, so that when I came to describe the pro-
duction and reception of individual translations I could more effectively situate
them within their context. Thus Chapters 1 to 3 serve the purpose of naming the
many source-texts under discussion, showing how each entered the English lan-
guage and was diffused through English literature. They examine the difference
between academic and popular translations, explain how readers accessed trans-
lations (as well as original texts), and point to the various motive forces driving
interest in Asian literature—an interest that spread and increased steadily in the
course of the century. The second half of the book focusses more closely on the
production and consumption of translations, with Chapter 5 investigating and
comparing the methods and motivations of individual translators. Chapter 6
turns to the publishing world and its internal processes—proposal, editing, print-
ing, illustration, marketing, pricing—by which the texts assumed their material
form, while Chapter 7 examines their reception and usage by a variety of readers
(though reader responses are cited and referred to throughout the book). In all
chapters, discussion will range widely across the breadth of the Victorian oriental
‘canon’, but to reduce the risk of disorienting my own readers, most chapters are
linked with a key text that illustrates the issues at stake in that chapter. In Chapter 2,
the focal text is the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam; Chapter 4 dwells on the teachings
of Confucius; an extended comparison of different translations of the Ramayana
xxx Prologue

is the centrepiece of Chapter 5; while in Chapter 7, Sadi’s Gulistan offers a common

touchstone for a host of Victorian readers.
In their aim to recover and locate the presence of texts like these within the
wider reading culture of the time, the first three chapters build on the sustained
labour of many scholars to shift our outlook away from national contexts towards
global patterns of circulation, and to understand the act of writing or reading as
an event that often takes place at the juncture of multiple international networks.
Such an approach, Caroline Levine writes, ‘allows us to reconceive what is proper
to Victorian literature: Tolstoy and Whitman, The Arabian Nights and Euripides,
Fénelon and Gilgamesh, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle and the Bhagavad
Gita.’18 The second half of the book, meanwhile, could not have been written
without the intensive research over the past fifteen years into ‘ordinary’ readers of
the nineteenth century, and the electronic tools (better catalogues, digital texts,
the Reading Experience Database) that scholars in this area have created or pro-
moted. Translation theorists, notably Lawrence Venuti, and contributors to the
ongoing debate on world literature have informed my methodology throughout
the book, but my most important interlocutor has been Annmarie Drury. Her
Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry (2015) considers texts such as
Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in the light of nineteenth-century trans-
lation theory (a subject fervently debated in contemporary periodicals) and she
makes poetry central to her enquiry, since most of the aforementioned theorists
held prosody to have ‘an intrinsic relationship to cultural and national identities’.
Thus, poetry was the literary form in which the characteristics, temperament, and
spirit of foreign nations was most apparent—a view held by many of the trans­
lators and readers mentioned in this book. Furthermore, Drury explains how the
rapid expansion of the field of translated literature, to include many works bear-
ing no relationship to the anglophone literary tradition, ‘tests and transforms’
English poetry.19 Victorian writers display a remarkable openness to foreign lit-
erature, a phenomenon observed long ago by Lionel Stevenson.20 But only more
recently have we begun to understand their willingness to confront their readers
with foreign word and script—as Robert Browning’s Ferishtah’s Fancies (1884)
bombards its readers with chunks of Hebrew—and to bend English verse to admit
foreign forms—as does Browning, again, with the Arabic tāwil octameter in
‘Muléykeh’ (1880), a poem which Drury suggests could possibly have inspired
the ‘culturally expansive range of speakers and subjects’ in Tennyson’s late works,
among them ‘Akbar’s Dream’.21 In this, poets were stimulated by translators

18 Caroline Levine, ‘From Nation to Network’, Victorian Studies, LV/4 (Summer 2013), 664.
19 Drury, Translation as Transformation, p. 3.
20 Of the Pre-Raphaelites, Stevenson writes, ‘their preoccupation with foreign literatures put an
end to the parochialism that was stultifying English authorship.’ Lionel Stevenson, The Pre-Raphaelite
Poets (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), p. 26.
21 Drury, Translation as Transformation, p. 146.
 Prologue xxxi

seeking to bring unfamiliar texts before an untrained public, and in turn they
furnished translators with new stylistic strategies for doing so.

Setting Some Limits

I have confined my enquiry approximately to the years between 1845 and 1915,
partly for practical reasons but also because I believe this period to be note­worthy.
The following, first chapter will give an overview of oriental translation from the
late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and will touch straight away upon
the great interest generated by Persian literature in the Romantic period—the
same phenomenon Raymond Schwab, somewhat too grandly, termed the
‘Oriental Renaissance’.22 Schwab argued for his specialist period as one surpass-
ingly open to foreign thought and writing of all kinds, before its legacy was
­forsaken by the Victorians. Though I am wary of making the same sort of gener-
alization, my dissenting view is that while the cosmopolitan appetite Schwab
­cele­brates did fall away somewhat in the 1830s and 1840s, it rallied from the mid-
century onwards.23 The data gathered by Peter France and Kenneth Haynes based
on the Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue would seem to bear this out: they
found ‘Eastern’ texts to make up 11.6 per cent of all English translations published
in 1810. In 1850, that figure was down to 7 per cent, climbing to 9.9 per cent in
1870 and 16.8 per cent by 1900.24 My explanation for this is the increasing avail-
ability of translation, after 1845, in various popular forms. Of course, if we go
only by these percentages, the public in 1900 was not significantly more interested
in oriental literature than at the beginning of the century. But looking at it another
way, the total number of translations (in all languages) published annually had
more than doubled in that period, and while in 1810 a relatively select and priv­il­
eged class of ‘general’ reader had access to the work of the pioneer orientalists,
in the fin de siècle a much larger public drawn from all sectors of society was
en­gaging with their successors. The period 1845 to 1915 is one wherein classic
literature drawn from Asian languages became widespread and diffused through-
out the reading culture of the United States, Britain, and its empire.
It might well be asked why I did not push my argument further, and try
to ­ determine whether the Victorian bookshelf was not truly a global one,

22 Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p. xxiii.

23 Louise Curran, ‘Reviews of Foreign Literature: Some Special Problems’, Victorian Periodicals
Newsletter, XX/2 (1973), 1.
24 Peter France and Kenneth Haynes, ‘The Publication of Literary Translation: An Overview’, in
France and Haynes (eds), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 4: 1790–1900
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 149. Moreover, where a text was translated through an
intermediary language, France and Haynes assigned it to the intermediary’s column. Thus their fig-
ures likely underrepresent late Victorian popular oriental translations, which were often made from
French or German rather than from the original.
xxxii Prologue

accommodating literature from across the European languages, Africa, and

beyond. Again, there were practical objections to such a vast enquiry, but more
significantly, the popularization of Asian texts and the emergence of a popular
audience for them raises some particular issues and challenges. In comparison
with their counterparts working in French, German, or Italian, the community of
oriental trans­lators in English was characterized by a much sharper contrast
between highly trained experts and novices with the barest understanding of the
source languages. Furthermore, unlike the Divine Comedy or Don Quixote, many
Asian texts were being studied for the first time, and in such a situation trans­
lators typ­ic­al­ly enjoy considerable liberty in their handling of the text. Thirdly, the
ever-present possibility of misinterpretation or misrepresentation reminds us that
up to the 1880s virtually all oriental translators were not native speakers. Though
they often relied heavily on ‘native’ informants, they were scarcely answerable to
any native public, and in most cases their activities were to some degree involved
in the complex power relations of imperial rule. All these issues make the popular
consumption of Asian texts an important area of enquiry, especially as with one
or two exceptions (notably Omar Khayyam), the phenomenon has been very lit-
tle studied. France and Haynes comment that through the period of their survey,
Asian translations intended for the ‘general public’ are outnumbered by those
‘designed for specialists and students’.25 They make no conjecture, however, as to
the size of those two classes of reader, and this very much begs the question Drury
asks in the closing paragraphs of Translation as Transformation: how might our
understanding of this history change if we concentrated our attention on the
translations that ‘most Victorians’ actually read?26
Finally, a caveat—and a cautionary tale. Beyond a few much-admired texts,
like the Arabian Nights, serious readers of Asian literature were a relatively small
group. Not tiny by any means, but small in comparison with the much vaster pub-
lic for travelogues and fictions about the mysterious East. In 2017, I spent an
afternoon at the Leeds Library, a private subscription library that is unusual in
having preserved its borrowing registers from the early twentieth century. They
also hold an old copy of Herbert Giles’s History of Chinese Literature, a cheap and
accessible guidebook of 1901, once well-represented in lending collections on
both sides of the Atlantic. But approval by a library committee does not guarantee
interest among patrons. Between 1910 and 1912, only one reader borrowed it
from the shelves of the Leeds Library, ‘Miss Baines’, while in that same period
Robert Hichens’s 1904 novel The Garden of Allah, which features a decadent
Algerian poet and abundant local colour, was loaned thirty-one times.27 Small
wonder that towards the end of his career Giles wrote to a Chinese academic

25 Ibid., p. 140.
26 Drury, Translation as Transformation, p. 225.
27 Leeds Library: Borrowing Ledgers GI 1908–1957 and GA 1910–1970, and Share Book 259.
 Prologue xxxiii

based in Switzerland, telling him how ‘l’apathie anglaise pour tout ce qui se
­rapporte à la Chine’ had been one of the greatest ‘chagrins’ of his life. Indeed, it
was quite common for orientalists to criticize the perceived indifference of the
British to their activities, and to Asian culture generally. ‘I believe that linguists
are undervalued instinctively’, complained Richard Francis Burton in 1874,
‘because they are popularly supposed to be too clever by half.’28 Furthermore,
how did Miss Baines react when she opened the History of Chinese Literature—
with interest and wonder, or bafflement? At present we are apt to celebrate any
intercultural encounter that might set an example for tolerance and understanding
in our divided world, but as Nan Z. Da has recently challenged, do incidents like
this have any ‘mappable’ consequences beyond their immediate circumstance?29
Even prolonged study did not necessarily foster the earnest and convivial
exchange that idealists may have hoped of face-to-face encounters with actual
Asians. I have often reminded myself of what took place when Moncure Conway
met the exiled Egyptian nationalist Orabi Pasha, in Ceylon. A lifelong enthusiast
of Persian poetry, the American writer thought to engage Arabi in a discussion of
Hafez and Omar Khayyam, only to discover his companion was a soldier and
Wahhabist with scant regard for such poets. Conway’s overture was reduced to an
awkward and quizzical gesture, his nonplussed companion bluntly changing the
topic to British policy in the Sudan, and the American Civil War.30
Bearing all this in mind, I have tried not to overstate my case. But I will show
nonetheless that not all intercultural dialogues were as abortive as this one.
Conway would find other, sympathetic listeners, and inspire hundreds of his
readers to take up the study of Asian religions. Miss Baines may not have enjoyed
Giles’s History, but if so it did not deter her from developing her oriental interests,
for later she borrowed Okakura’s Ideals of the East. Their experiences form just
single incidents of weather within a larger climactic change that suffused the liter-
ary atmosphere generally, and was triggered when the orientalist archive that had
been steadily accumulating through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
began to lift off and float away from the stacks.

28 UCLA: Collection 1506 (Herbert Allen Giles Papers, 1877–1929), H.A. Giles to Hain-jou-kia,
11 Nov. 1927; Morgan: MA Unassigned (Richard Francis Burton to anon., 2 Apr. 1874).
29 Nan Z. Da, Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 10.
30 Moncure Daniel Conway, My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East (Boston, MA: Houghton
Mifflin, 1906), p. 166.
 1
A Century of Translation

On 13 June 1857 it was reported in London that the 3rd Bengal Cavalry had
mu­tin­ied at Meerut, and that a conspiracy was afoot to organize a general rising
throughout the army.1 The Great Rebellion had begun. Six weeks later, seventy-
two-year-old Leigh Hunt wrote to a friend in Calcutta, but the war—which would
so brutally disfigure any prospects for mutual respect and sympathy between the
people of India and their arrogant rulers—was little on his mind, it seems.

Pray tell me how literature stands in the East, both Eastern and English, and
whether there is yet such a thing as a selection of all the best stories (in English)
from the Persian and Hindoo poets and others. There ought to be and it ought to
be called the Eastern Story Teller, and sell famously.2

Poet, critic, and political gadfly, friend of Keats and Hazlitt, Hunt was a Romantic
who had stood on the beach at Shelley’s funeral and yet survived into the third
decade of Victoria’s reign. He would certainly have experienced the tremor of
interest in non-Western literature that passed through British letters in his youth,
and which gave rise to Byron’s Giaour (1813), Southey’s Curse of Kehama (1810),
Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817) and Landor’s Poems from the Arabic and Persian
(1800). Most literary-minded people of that generation had some knowledge of
Sir William Jones, who had founded the Asiatic Society in 1784—the year of
Hunt’s birth—and had been the chief progenitor of the dictionaries and gram-
mars in Persian, Sanskrit, Arabic, and the modern Indian vernaculars that tum-
bled out of Calcutta in the years following, along with a representative selection of
literary translations to serve as aids in learning these tongues.
Persian, which remained the official medium of administrative and judicial
proceedings in the East India Company’s territories up to 1832, was the priority:
it accounts for the bulk of translations emerging in this period, and its literature
was the first to attain general recognition and admiration in the West. One of
Jones’s followers, Joseph Champion, gave English readers a first, much abridged,
version of the Shahnameh in 1788, rendering Firdausi’s epic of the legendary
kings of Iran in the heroic couplets of Pope’s Iliad. Among several versions of

1 ‘Foreign and Colonial News’, Illustrated London News, XXX/863 (1857), 560.
2 Thornton Leigh Hunt (ed.), The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt (2 vols, London: Smith, Elder,
1862), II, 286: James Henry Leigh Hunt to David Lester Richardson, 26 June–28 July 1857.

Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation. Alexander Bubb, Oxford University Press.
© Alexander Bubb 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866275.003.0001
2 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf

Sadi’s thirteenth-century Gulistan (Rose Garden), an influential collection of

didactic stories, it was Francis Gladwin’s 1806 volume that found favour in the
1840s with Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists, who disseminated
it among American readers.3 Another text which attracted their attention was
the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gita, in the 1785 prose of Charles Wilkins—like Jones, a
founding member of the Asiatic Society. Jones’s own activity was polyglot and
prolific. He brought for the first time to English notice Kalidasa’s drama Sakuntala
(from the Sanskrit), the Muallaqat (seven Arabic odes that were supposedly hung
on the Kaaba in pre-Islamic times), and the great Persian lyricist Hafez. The last
was received principally in the form of his famous couplet on the Shirazi Turk,
whom Jones tactfully transformed (in six lines) from a comely boy into a gram-
matically feasible, but historically improbable girl.

Sweet maid, if thou would’st charm my sight,

And bid these arms thy neck infold;
That rosy cheek, that lily hand,
Would give thy poet more delight
Than all Bocara’s vaunted gold,
Than all the gems of Samarcand.4

While bearing in mind these landmarks of English translation, it is also vital not
to lose sight of French, Italian, and especially German scholarship, which was often
far in advance of its British and American counterparts. With a copy of Joseph
von Hammer’s translation at his side, Goethe was much better-placed to write his
lyrical tribute to Hafez, the West-östlicher Divan (1819), than English con­tem­por­
ar­ies who—had they no German—knew the poet only in extracts.
Thus, largely through the agency of the East India Company, a variety of major
Persian writers became at least partially accessible in English between 1770 and
1820, along with a number of important Sanskrit and Arabic works (a Quran had
already been published in 1734, courtesy of the London solicitor George Sale).5
More familiar to Hunt than any of these texts, though, will have been the Arabian
Nights, which entered English literature from the French of Antoine Galland in
the first decade of the eighteenth century. Numerous unauthorized ‘Grub Street’
translations of Galland ensured the Nights a special status in English reading

3 John D. Yohannan, Persian Poetry in England and America: A 200 Year History (Delmar, NY:
Caravan Books, 1977), pp. 24, 113.
4 Lord Teignmouth (ed.), The Works of Sir William Jones (13 vols, London: John Stockdale,
1807), X, 251.
5 Sale’s was the first translation founded at least in part on the original Arabic (though Maracci’s
Latin edition was no doubt constantly at his elbow). An earlier English version based on du Ryer’s
French text had appeared at London in Charles I’s time, ‘for the fatisfaction of all that defire to look
into the Turkifh vanities’. See The Alcoran of Mahomet (London, 1649).
 A Century of Translation 3

culture long before the first Arabic-to-English version appeared in 1838,6 by

which point the tales formed part of the furniture of every affluent (and many
working-class) English child’s imagination. They were enjoyed as fervently by
Tennyson and Walter Bagehot as by the dyer’s son and future Chartist, Thomas
Cooper, who in the late 1810s borrowed the ‘enchanting’ collection from the cir-
culating library run by Mrs Trevor, a stationer at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire.7
Even non-readers may have absorbed the stories through advertising or the the­
atre. Aladdin or, The Wonderful Lamp had appeared at Covent Garden as early as
1788, and by 1831, when it was staged at Bury St Edmunds, it was becoming
known as a pantomime throughout the country. Other tales followed suit. In 1861,
Her Majesty’s Theatre in London advertised ‘Flying Women of the Loadstone
Island . . . the Most Startling Romance of the Age’, while at the end of the century the
Kiralfy brothers would stage a series of spectacular Nights productions at Olympia.8
The popularity of the Nights encouraged publishers to support a range of analo­
gous ventures, and at this point Hunt’s remarks become rather puzzling—because
the anthology he envisages had already been anticipated by more than one pub-
lisher. The editor of Tales of the East, brought out by Ballantyne of Edinburgh in
1812, ransacked the work of out-of-copyright European orientalists to fill his
three volumes. Anything answering to the description ‘popular romance’ was
admissible, including Alexander Dow’s version of a Persian textbook used by the
Mughal nobility, the Bahar-i-Danish—one story from which gave Thomas Moore
the scenario for Lalla Rookh.9 In a period when taxation and paper costs kept the
price of new works of literature relatively high, oriental rechauffés made economic
sense whether in book form, or in sixpenny number publications like The Library
of Romance and The Story-Teller, which carried not only Nights-style tales but
also caizi jiaren (Scholar and Beauty) stories popular in Ming and Qing China.10
Among these was the Haoqiu Zhuan, translated by a Canton merchant in the
1760s and again in 1829 by the future governor of Hong Kong, John Francis Davis
(who titled his version The Fortunate Union).11 Leigh Hunt himself enjoyed a
similar work, the Yu Jiao Li (Two Fair Cousins)—referring to it as ‘my beloved

6 Paulo Lemos Horta, Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press: 2017), p. 91.
7 Roger Ebbatson, ‘Knowing the Orient: The Young Tennyson’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts,
XXXVI/2 (2014), 125; Walter Bagehot, ‘The People of the Arabian Nights’, National Review, IX/17
(1859), 44–70; Thomas Cooper, Life of Thomas Cooper (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1872), p. 34.
8 Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights (2011; repr. London:
Vintage, 2012), pp. 354–63.
9 Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London: Tauris Parke, 2005), p. 264.
10 See the May 1843 issue of The Story-Teller; or, Table Book of Popular Literature: a Collection of
Romances, Short Standard Tales, Traditions, and Poetical Legends of All Nations, in which is reprinted a
caizi jiaren story, ‘The Shadow in the Water’, that was originally translated by John Francis Davis in his
Chinese Novels (London: John Murray, 1822).
11 Peter J. Kitson, Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange, 1760–1840 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 32–3.
4 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf

Chinese novel’ and passing his 1827 copy onto Thomas Carlyle.12 Publications
like The Story-Teller, which mingled Chinese with Middle Eastern stories, helped
create a fabular notion of Asia as a realm of marvellous tales, and brought them to
a sixpenny audience long before non-narrative, more ‘serious’ genres found a
non-elite public.
How to make sense, then, of Hunt’s eager query in 1857? Was his want of an
‘Eastern Story Teller’ merely the forgetfulness of an elderly man, or was he dissat-
isfied with what London booksellers and periodicals could presently offer him?
Though Hunt asks for ‘the best stories’, he also specifies that they be by ‘poets’,
and the Yu Jiao Li was not poetry. Nor would educated Chinese have classed it
among their ‘best’ literature. Written in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth
century, it long postdates the canon of poetic masterpieces, and though its near-
contemporary The Dream of the Red Chamber has now achieved the status of a
classic novel, in Hunt’s time it would have been regarded as light reading.13 The
Story-Teller’s editor, Robert Bell, admitted as much when he suggested to his
readers that ‘a sample of the short popular fictions of that stately empire may help
to prepare the way for the profounder speculations of enterprising publishers.’14
Even Davis’s forbiddingly titled Poeseos Sinensis Commentarii (1830) mostly
­contains the tea-picking ballads and other popular verse upon which English
­students of Chinese would have cut their teeth in 1820s Hong Kong.15 The
­situation for ‘Persian and Hindoo poets’ was of course better, though even then
English ­readers of Hafez had to rely on such guides as Richardson’s Specimen
of Persian Poetry (1774) and Hindley’s Persian Lyrics (1800)—both of which fea-
ture a mere handful of odes, annotated with parallel text for the benefit of the
language learner.
The issue of what is canonical (in both Eastern and Western eyes) shall be
treated fully in Chapter 4, but other considerations which are relevant here—and
which may have troubled Hunt—are what is genuine, and what is representative?
Generally speaking, discerning Victorian readers desired authentic cultural arte-
facts, and authenticity for them was measured by antiquity. But the older a text,
the harder it is to verify its genuine provenance and unadulterated content, and
even if it is genuine, whether it adequately represents, say, the Persian literary
trad­ition is quite another question. Again, the prevailing view (with some notable
exceptions) was that classic texts epitomized Persian taste and sentiment, and
were a better guide to the essential qualities of that nation and its people than
modern vernacular literature. But how were the East India Company’s translators
to delineate the canon of Persian literature when they were accessing it through a

12 Hunt (ed.), Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, II, 161 (Leigh Hunt to Southwood Smith, 23 Mar. n.y.).
13 Chloë F. Starr, Red-Light Novels of the Late Qing (Leiden: Brill, 2007), p. xxi.
14 The Story-Teller (May 1843), p. 110.
15 Eva Hung, ‘Chinese Poetry’, in Peter France (ed.), The Oxford Guide to Literature in English
Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 224.
 A Century of Translation 5

third, intermediary culture—that of Mughal India? And how were their counter-
parts at Canton and Malacca, far from China’s literary centres and reliant on pos-
sibly reticent or conservative informants, to understand the difference between
the ancient texts formally denoted ‘jing’ (classic), and those that were merely very
old and universally admired? Considerable uncertainty on these matters in the
early part of the century was an encouragement to firms like Ballantyne with their
Tales of the East—a compendious publication but, as I have already hinted, a rag-
bag. It editor used the Bahar-i-Danish (Spring of Knowledge) to supplement the
Arabian Nights of which it is partly derivative, but this text originated in Mughal
Lahore and is of much lower importance in the global history of letters. The so-
called ‘Persian Tales’ in the second volume are in reality the mysterious Mille et
Un Jours pieced together—and perhaps largely invented—by the French traveller
François Pétis de la Croix in the 1710s, while the accompanying ‘Tales of the Genii’
are altogether ersatz productions from the pen of the army chaplain James Ridley.
Hunt may well have felt, then, that he wasn’t quite getting the real thing. His
fellow Romantics, in spite of their infatuation with the Orient, had in fact done
very little actual translation or paraphrase—Landor’s Poems from the Arabic and
Persian are not even paraphrase, but out-and-out pastiche with a derisory intent.16
Among the poets of that generation only Moore truly studied, his books (now
held by the Royal Irish Academy) testifying both to his efforts and to the limita-
tions imposed on the private enthusiast in the early nineteenth century. Moore
knew French but not German, which enabled him to read Sadi’s Gulistan in an
old Paris edition that may have been more congenial than the English versions of
Gladwin or James Ross, whose preface makes it perfectly clear that his only an­tici­
pated public is the East India Company cadet (‘the Persian tyro of Bengal’).17 For
Hafez, however, he was thrown back on Richardson and Hindley. The other
Persian texts in his collection reflect Company translation priorities (and, to some
degree, Mughal tastes), being generally works used to inculcate good prose and
wise conduct. Thus we find the Tutinama (Tales of a Parrot), a series of cautionary
tales about adultery, but of Firdausi, Nizami, and the other major Persian writers
not a trace. Moore may also have found himself priced out: though prolific and
successful in his lifetime, he was never a wealthy poet, and the books he possessed
must have represented a considerable investment. Perhaps this is why he owned only
the first instalment of Terrick Hamilton’s four-volume Antar (1819), an Arabic
saga attributed to the eighth-century poet Al-Asma‘i (and this was supplied gratis

16 Yohannan, Persian Poetry, p. 34. For a much fuller discussion of Romantic engagements with
Persian literature, see Hasan Javadi, Persian Literary Influence on English Literature (1987; repr. Costa
Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2005), pp. 72–107.
17 James Ross, The Gulistan: or Flower-garden, of Shaikh Sadī of Shiraz (London: J.M. Richardson,
1823), p. 25. Thomas Moore’s library at the Royal Irish Academy is classed under the shelfmark
ML. For Moore’s ignorance of German, see Wilfred S. Dowden (ed.), The Journal of Thomas Moore
(6 vols, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983–1991), V, v, 1867.
6 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf

by the publisher). Alternatively, he may merely have found the translation

im­pene­trable. Of the two dozen works of oriental research in his collection, only
the slim Specimens of Arabian Poetry (1796) by the Cambridge divine J.D. Carlyle,
makes any acknowledgement of the needs or interests of the non-expert reader.
Carlyle’s is typical of the specimen-book genre that prospered in the early nine-
teenth century, an unsystematic sample of short excerpts chosen for their ‘­elegance’
or ‘novelty’, and translated intermittently, ‘to fill up an idle hour’ between diocesan
engagements. Yet, in spite of his diffidence, Carlyle’s fond hope that the volume
might offer ‘a sort of history (slight indeed and imperfect, yet to an English reader
perhaps not uninstructive) of Arabian poetry and literature’ foreshadows the
more methodical and purposeful anthologies that were to come.18

Costello and The Rose Garden, 1845

Though it is hard to quantify, a demand for a more accommodating style of

­edit­or­ship akin to J.D. Carlyle’s can be detected among the rising generation of
the 1830s and 1840s—a demand that remained unsatisfied, for the time being. In
October 1843, the elderly Moore made an irritable diary entry about strangers
writing him speculative letters in the hope of getting his autograph: ‘Sir, though
personally unknown to you, I venture to ask you a question which your familiar-
ity with the Persian Poets will enable you to answer. Do you think a new transla-
tion of Hafiz would at the present moment be well received etc etc.’19 Nothing
appears to have come of this enquiry. Meanwhile, in County Kildare, the future
reformer and suffragist Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) was using her parents’
books and Marsh’s Library in Dublin to compensate for the formal education
denied to her as a young woman. Having digested most of the Greek and Latin
authors, her interests ‘centred more and more on the answers which have been
made through the ages by philosophers and prophets to the great questions of
the human soul. I read such translations as were accessible in those pre-Müller
days, of Eastern Sacred books; Anquetil-Duperron’s Zend Avesta (twice); and
Sir William Jones’s Institutes of Menu.’20
Cobbe refers to Friedrich Max Müller, the Oxford Sanskritist who from the
1860s onwards would lecture on philology and theology to packed houses of

18 J.D. Carlyle, Specimens of Arabian Poetry, from the earliest time to the extinction of the Khaliphat,
with some account of the authors (Cambridge: John Burges, 1796), pp. i–ii. For a discussion of the
‘Specimen’-style anthology in the Romantic period, see Colleen Glenney Boggs, ‘Specimens of Translation
in Walt Whitman’s Poetry’, Arizona Quarterly, LVIII/3 (2002), 36.
19 Dowden (ed.), Journal of Thomas Moore, vi, 2354. The correspondent was one George Abingdon
of Brighton.
20 Frances Power Cobbe, Life of Frances Power Cobbe, as told by herself (2 vols, London: Richard
Bentley, 1894), I, 71. Kate Flint highlights Cobbe’s autodidact efforts to catch up with her formally
educated brothers in The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 224.
 A Century of Translation 7

non-experts (among them J.S. Mill and Gerard Manley Hopkins).21 No such
resource existed in her youth, though general-interest periodicals like Fraser’s and
the New Monthly occasionally carried instructive articles and reviews. In 1822,
for ex­ample, ‘P.W.R’ addressed ‘the English reader who is acquainted with the
translations of Sir William Jones’, soliciting his agreement that Hafez and Sadi
‘will scarcely yield in competition’ with Britain’s poets.22 Dedicated linguists and
antiquarians would send for the Proceedings of the Asiatic Society from Calcutta,
while the Company-sponsored Asiatic Journal was printed at London and pro-
vided Indian commercial and political intelligence with a smattering of literary
matter. And in 1820 the house of Longman, it would seem, attempted to tap the
latter’s market with a new journal, the Annals of Oriental Literature, tilting the
content in favour of cultural researches. Priced at a daunting six shillings, it folded
almost immediately, but its inaugural page of contents hints at the sort of reader
the publisher may have envisaged: one who would be diverted by ‘An Essay on the
Life and Genius of Firdausi, the great Epic Poet of the Persians’, but who also took
a practical interest in Asian and African affairs encompassing the geographic
(‘Account of a Mission to Ashantee’) and military (‘Origin and Increase of the
Chinese Tartarian Army’).23
One reader of the short-lived Annals was a young protégée and admirer of
Moore’s, Louisa Stuart Costello, who had just had her short adaptation (from a
French translation) of an episode in the Ramayana rejected by the publisher
William Fearman. She at once sent it off to the editors, who printed it in their
third and final issue.24 Costello (1799–1870) was the daughter of an Irish infantry
officer who, after her father’s premature death, was obliged to support herself and
her ailing mother by her pen. In the 1840s she was turning out two or three books
every year, including novels, travelogues, biographies, and translations, with no
fixed sphere of activity and no special interest in Asia (at the time of her rejection
by Fearman, she was actually studying Italian to further expand her range of liter-
ary activity).25 It was thus very much a short-term commercial venture, based on
an empty niche she perceived in the book market, when in 1845 she inaugurated

21 Cary H. Plotkin, The Tenth Muse: Victorian Philology and the Genesis of the Poetic Language of
Gerard Manley Hopkins (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989),
pp. 20, 55.
22 ‘Persian and Arabic Literature’, New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, IV/13 (Jan. 1922),
263. France and Haynes count four Persian, two Arabic, and two Chinese translations featuring in
Fraser’s in the 1830s (‘Publication of Literary Translation: An Overview’, p. 144).
23 Annals of Oriental Literature, I/1 (June 1820), 9.
24 Bodleian: MS.Don.c.203, f.108 (Louisa Stuart Costello to William Lisle Bowles, 18 July 1819).
The episode was the accidental killing of Yajnadatta by King Dasaratha.
25 Costello did also translate some of the pseudo-oriental tales written by the Frenchman Thomas-
Simon Gueulette in the early eighteenth century: The Thousand and One Quarters of an Hour, and
The Adventures of the Mandarin Fun-hoam. For a full discussion of her life and work, see Clare
Broome Saunders, Louisa Stuart Costello: A Nineteenth-Century Writing Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015).
8 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf

an unacknowledged epoch by publishing a little-known book called The Rose

Garden of Persia.
The Rose Garden is a digest of five articles Costello published in Fraser’s
Magazine between 1838 and 1840,26 and presents an anthology of Persian poetry
culled from the works of Jones, Gladwin, von Hammer, Garcin de Tassy,
Quatremère, and other orientalists, who are helpfully listed in an appendix. To
this professional community she is strategically apologetic. As the book went to
press she wrote to the East India Company’s librarian, H.H. Wilson, to check the
orthography of the couplet from Hafez that appears on her title page. The book,
she explained to him, ‘gives biographies and specimens of Persian poets, merely
for the English reader, but I think a great Oriental scholar like yourself will not
disdain the attempt to do honour to his favourites, even though the unskilful
should presume to do so.’27 The couplet in question, which Costello plucked from
Jones’s Persian Grammar (where it is used to exemplify ‘the third person of the
preterite’28), is given without attribution, citation, or translation. To the layman the
foreign script serves no purpose other than the ornamental, but to the Persianist
it is a tacit acknowledgement of his expertise, offered just before the start of a
preface that unambiguously addresses the non-specialist:

The softest and richest language in the world is the Persian: it is so peculiarly
adapted to the purposes of poetry, that it is acknowledged there have been more
poets produced in Persia than in all the other nations of Europe together: yet,
except Sadi and Hafiz, and, it may be, Ferdusi, there are few whose names even
are known to the general English reader; and the too common impression is,
that there exists a great monotony in their verse, both as to sound and sense.29

In this striking opening sentence, Costello vindicates Persian as a major literary

language, identifies it with the common inheritance of ‘the other nations of
Europe’, and ascribes ignorant preconceptions to her putative reader. These are
instantly excused, however, on the basis that the general public has been inhibited
from exploring Persian literature by ‘the idea that it belonged exclusively’ to
orien­tal­ists. Costello thus invites the uninitiated to enter territory hitherto
‘untrodden by all but learned feet’—a metaphor that puns, perhaps, on another
meaning of feet. For as her preamble also makes clear, her anthology is to be
concerned exclusively with poetry: poetry which has so far been rendered mainly

26 ‘Specimens of Persian Poetry’, Fraser’s Magazine, XVIII/100 (Apr. 1838), 447–66; XVIII/105
(Sept. 1838), 348–60; XIX/112 (Apr. 1839), 486–500; XX/116 (Aug. 1839), 127–38; and XXI/124
(Apr. 1840), 414–25.
27 BL: Mss Eur E301/9 (Louisa Stuart Costello to Horace Hayman Wilson, 23 Feb. 1845).
28 Teignmouth (ed.), Works, V, 227.
29 Louisa Stuart Costello, The Rose Garden of Persia (London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans,
1845), pp. i–ii.
 A Century of Translation 9

in English, French, or German prose, an emasculating process which has robbed

the original of its ‘forcible expressions’, ‘bold metaphors’, and ‘sentiments of fire’,
and left behind a bald record of tropes and similes. The ironic gendering at play
here (a restoration of heroic qualities by a female translator, amending the work
of an entirely male body of scholars) is brought home by the myth Costello subse-
quently relates about the origin of rhythmical composition. The world’s first line
of poetry was, according to legend, uttered spontaneously by the Sassanid king
Bahram Gor as he grappled with a wild tiger.30
The Rose Garden differs from William Ouseley’s Persian Miscellanies (1795) or
Samuel Rousseau’s Flowers of Persian Literature (1801), and indeed from the
Specimens of Arabian Poetry that Moore kept on his cottage shelves, in that it is
not a sample of miscellaneous extracts, but attempts to provide a structured over-
view of the Persian canon. Flowers of the East (1833), a Persian anthology created
by Ebenezer Pocock of Bristol, also adheres to the former pattern. Though its
author aspires to ‘supply a desideratum in general literature’, the Flowers are really
a mixed bouquet of poetry and prose not yet apprehended by established trans­
lators, artfully strung together (so it is claimed) after the fashion in which Persian
poets are said to thread on a metrical necklace their individual pearls of verse.31
Costello’s goal instead is reflected in her choice of title: not a display of cut ­flowers,
but a complete and self-contained garden. In horticultural terms, we might say
her preference was for perennials rather than the blooms of a season. She orders
her extracts chronologically by author, subdividing these thematically (‘On True
Worth’, ‘In Praise of Wine’), adds light-touch historical context and explanatory
notes, and thus arranges a cohort of sixteen major figures—including Firdausi,
Sadi, Hafez, Nizami, Jami, Rumi, and Attar—who provide a superficial but ef­fect­
ive crash-course in Persian poetry. In these respects, her work is more com­par­
able to the Greek and Latin collections that appeared in the same generation, such
as George Burges’s Public School Selections (1852), and The Golden Treasury of
Ancient Greek Poetry (1867).
Joseph Phelan sees Costello’s priorities as illustrative of the two orientalisms
Edward Said spoke of in his landmark study: a Romantic Orientalism, based on a
free-floating ‘collection of dreams, images, and vocabularies’ that can be adopted
and manipulated by both Asian and European agents for a variety of purposes,
and the ‘systematic and scientific’ orientalism that is committed to the collation
and application of knowledge about Eastern cultures.32 The latter, which is the

30 Ibid., pp. ii–v. ‘Forcible expressions’, ‘bold metaphors’, etc. are phrases lifted from Jones.
31 Ebenezer Pocock, Flowers of the East, with an Introductory Sketch of Oriental Poetry and Music
(London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co., 1833), p. v. My thanks to Fatima Burney for bringing this anthol-
ogy to my attention.
32 Joseph Phelan, ‘Empire and Orientalisms’, in Matthew Bevis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of
Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 802; Edward W. Said, Orientalism:
Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978; repr. London: Penguin, 2006), p. 73.
10 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf

helpmeet of colonial rule, comes to supplant the former in the course of the
nineteenth century, and its ordering impulse might be detected in Costello’s
project. Like the Cambridge orientalist Edward Byles Cowell, who gave her
book an approving if condescending review in 1847, she is preoccupied by the
notion of Persian literature being representative of Persian nationality and
identity. As Phelan points out, this Victorian bias leads to a magnification of
Firdausi as the Homer or Chaucer of his language. The Shahnameh had attracted
relatively little attention from William Jones, but it takes up almost 20 per cent
of Costello’s text.33
Phelan exaggerates, however, the gap between the practice of Victorian Persianists
and that of their precursors in the early part of the century. Firdausi does indeed
come to assume a central position, a realignment mirrored by the increasing
focus on epic poetry in other languages like Sanskrit. But he never eclipses Hafez
on the literary horizon—least of all that horizon as it was perceived by the general
public. Phelan quotes Costello’s rendition (‘in the accents of Pope or Johnson’) of
Firdausi’s satire on his fickle patron Mahmud of Ghazni, but this specimen is
not representative of the volume as a whole. Costello’s dominant concern is
with lyric poetry, the bulk of her selections comprising philosophic odes,
allegorical descriptions of nature, and poetry on the great lovers of Persian
le­gend, such as Layla and Majnun, or Khusro and Shirin. Even her selections
from the Shahnameh are governed by this bias, with much the largest extract
being related to the courtship of Jamshid. Stressing that her version is based only
very loosely on James Atkinson’s prose translation, Costello dwells particularly
on the inner thoughts of the young princess who, a soothsayer has foretold,
will marry the famous hero.

King Gureng’s lovely daughter lies

Beside a fountain gently playing;
She marks not though the waves be bright,
Nor in the roses takes delight:
And though her maids new games devise,
Invent fresh stories to surprise
She heeds not what each fair is saying . . .34

Costello’s unusual rhyme scheme here, quite alien to the measured verse of
Pope or Johnson, may have been taken from Shelley’s ‘The Cold Earth Slept
Below’. But the poet she sought chiefly to emulate—as she had in her earlier

33 ‘Persian literature is national’, Cowell remarks (his italics), ‘and without this all literatures are
worthless.’ E.B. Cowell, ‘The Rose Garden of Persia’, Westminster Review, XLVII/2 (July 1847), 274.
34 Costello, Rose Garden, p. 34; her source is James Atkinson, The Sháh Námeh of the Persian Poet,
Firdausí (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1832), p. 17.
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why then has it become so like a fish? For the same reason that the
penguin’s wings have become so fin-like, and the seal’s arms and legs
have become flippers, namely, that during the long time in which the
whales have taken to a watery life, those which could swim best and
float best in the water have been the most successful in the struggle
for existence; and as a fish’s shape is by far the best for this purpose
the warm-blooded milk-giver has gradually imitated it, though
belonging to quite a different order of animals.

Fig. 85.

The Humpback Whale187 suckling her young (after

Scammon).

We saw this imitation already beginning in the seals, with their

bodies sloping off towards the tail and their legs fastened back in a line
with the body; but they have not gone so far in this direction as the
whales have, since they still have hind legs and furry bodies. The sea
cows, on their line, have gone a little farther, for they have lost their
hind legs, and their skin is smooth, with very few hairs upon it. But it
remained for the whales to take up the best fish-form, the old spindle-
shape, thinning before and behind, with the strong fleshy tail ending in
two tail lobes, which act like a screw in driving the body along.
 Any good drawing of a whale shows at once how admirably these
animals are fitted for gliding through the water (see Fig. 85). True,
many of them have enormous heads, but these always have long face-
bones ending in a rounded point, and even the huge head of the
sperm whale (see Fig. 87), eighteen feet long, six feet high, and six
feet wide, is rounded off above, and gradually thins away below, like
the cutwater of a ship. The eyes are very tiny and so little exposed,
that it is difficult to find them; there are no outer ears, though the bones
within are large and probably very useful for hearing in water; the
bones of the neck are seven, as is the rule among milk-givers, but they
are so flattened and firmly soldered together, and so covered with
blubber, that there is not even a hollow between the head and the
body; while to crown all, the skin is perfectly smooth so as to offer no
resistance to the water. Here, however, would be a disadvantage in the
loss of the furry covering, since most of the whales travel into cold
seas, were it not compensated by the great mass of oily fat or blubber
which fills the cells in the under part of the skin, and keeps the whole
body warm; and thus the whale, by a covering of fat often as much as
a foot and a half thick, solves the problem of a warm-blooded animal,
with a smooth gliding body, living in icy water without having its blood
chilled.
In every essential for swimming, then, whales are as well provided
as any fish, while their immensely strong backbone, and the long cords
or tendons running from the mass of muscle on the body to the tail,
give them such tremendous power that a large whale makes nothing of
tossing a whole boat’s crew into the air and breaking the boat in two.
But, though they are so far true water-animals, yet they cannot live
entirely below as fish can, for they have no apparatus for water-
breathing. The outside of their body takes on the appearance of a fish,
but inside they have the true lungs, the four-chambered heart, and all
the complicated machinery of a warm-blooded animal. Therefore,
though a whale may dive deep and remain below to seek its food, yet
before an hour has passed even the largest of them must come
floating up to the top again, to blow out the bad air through the nostrils
at the top of the head, and fill the capacious lungs with a fresh supply.
It is then that, partly because of the water which has run into the
blowhole, and partly because the rush of breath throws up spray from
the sea, we see those magnificent spouts of water which tell that a
whale is below. The older naturalists thought that these spouts were
caused by the water which the whale had taken into its mouth; but this
is not so, and Scoresby, the great Arctic traveller, states distinctly that if
the blowhole of the whale is out of the water only moist vapour rises
with the breath, while when it makes a large spout this comes from its
blowing under water and so throwing up a jet.
If, however, the whale is a simple air-breather and yet swims under
water with its mouth open, how comes it that this water does not run
down the windpipe and choke the lungs? This is prevented by a most
ingenious contrivance. At the top of our own windpipe there is a small
elastic lid which shuts when we swallow, and prevents water and food
from running down to the lungs. Now, in the whale the gristle
answering to this lid runs up as a long tube past the roof of the mouth
into the lower portion of the nose, and is kept there tightly, being
surrounded by the muscles of the soft palate. The upper portion of the
nose cavity then opens on the forehead by means of one or two
“blowholes,” as the outside nose holes are called; so that when the
blowholes are closed the whale can swim with its mouth open and feed
under water, and yet not a drop will enter its lungs.
A large sperm whale will often remain twelve minutes or more at
the top of the water, taking in air at the single blowhole in the front of
its head, and purifying its blood, and then with a roll and a tumble it will
plunge down again, and remain for an hour below, trusting to a large
network of blood-vessels lying between the lungs and the ribs to
supply purified blood to its body and retain the impure blood till it
comes up again to breathe.
But the smaller whales and porpoises, which play about our
coasts, have to come up much more often, and even when they are
not tumbling and jumping, as they love to do, you may see them rising
at regular intervals as they swim along, their black backs appearing
like little hillocks in the water, as they “blow” strongly from their single
nose-slit, take a quick breath in, and sink again to rise a few paces
farther on and repeat the process.
Thus provided both with swimming and breathing apparatus, these
purely air-breathing animals wander over the wide ocean and live the
lives of fish, making such good use of food which cannot be reached
by land animals, or those which must keep near the shore, that we
shall not be surprised to find that the whale family is a very large one.
But it is curious that the fierce animals of prey among them should
be, not the huge whales but the smaller Dolphins, Porpoises, and
Grampuses; and this shows how different water-feeding is to land-
feeding, since, because the water is full of myriads of small and soft
creatures, the sperm whale feeding on jelly-fish, and the large
whalebone whale feeding on soft cuttle-fish and the minutest beings in
the sea, are those which attain the largest size.
Most people have at one time or another seen a shoal of porpoises
either out at sea or travelling up the mouth of some large river, where

“Upon the swelling waves the dolphins show

Their bending backs, then swiftly darting go,
And in a thousand wreaths their bodies throw;”

and though they are small creatures, only about five feet long, they are
very good examples of the whale shape, with their tapering bodies,
broad tails, and the back fin, which is found in some whales and not in
others. Sometimes they swim quietly, only rising to breathe, and then
they work the tail gently from side to side; at others they gambol and
frolic, and jump right out of the water, beating the tail up and down, and
bending like a salmon when he leaps; and whether they come quietly
or wildly, you may generally know they are near by the frightened
mackerel and herrings, which spring out of the water to avoid them.
For the porpoises have a row of sharp teeth in each jaw, more than a
hundred in all, and they bite, kill, and swallow in one gulp, without
waiting to divide their food, so that they make sad havoc among the
fish.
 Fig. 86.

The Porpoise.188

They are here to-day and gone to-morrow. A few kinds wander up
into fresh water, such as the Ganges and the Amazons, but by far the
greater number range all over our northern seas, together with their
near relations the dolphins, and the bottle-nosed whales, and the
strange narwhal, with its two solitary eye teeth, one only of which
grows out as a long tusk. All these roam freely through the vast ocean
home, coming into the still bays to bring up their young ones, which
they nurse and suckle tenderly, afterwards moving off again in shoals
to the open sea. There they will follow the ships, and sport and play,
and probably we shall never know exactly where their wanderings
extend, though it seems that they prefer the northern hemisphere.
Among all the dolphin family the most voracious and bloodthirsty is
189
the Grampus or Orca, which is commonly called the “Killer Whale,”
because it alone feeds on warm-blooded animals, seizing the seals
with its strong, sharp, conical teeth, devouring even its own relations
the porpoises, and attacking and tearing to pieces the larger whales.
No lion or tiger could be more ruthless in its attacks than this large-
toothed whale, which is sometimes as much as twenty-five feet long
and has broad flippers. In vain even the mother walruses try to save
their young ones by carrying them on their backs; the cunning Orca
swims below her, and coming up with a jerk shakes the young one
from its place of safety and swallows it in a moment. Nor do they
merely fight single-handed, for many voyagers have seen them attack
large whales in a pack like wolves, and in 1858 Mr. Scammon saw
three killer whales fall upon a huge Californian Gray Whale and her
young one, though even the baby whale was three times their size.
They bit, they tore, and wounded them both till they sank, and the
conquerors appeared with huge pieces of flesh in their mouths, as they
devoured their prey. How much they can eat is shown by one orca
having been killed which had the remains of thirteen porpoises and
fourteen seals in its stomach!
How strange now to turn from this ravenous hunter to the huge
Sperm Whale, eighty feet long, with a head one-third the size of its
whole body and more than a ton of spermacetic oil in its forehead, and
to think that this monster swims quietly along in the sea, drops its long
thin lower jaw, and with wide-open mouth simply gulps in jelly-fish,
small fish, and other fry, thus without any exertion or fuss slaying its
millions of small and soft creatures quietly, as the orca does the higher
creatures with so much battle and strife!
For the sperm whale (Fig. 87) must need a great deal of food to
feed its huge body. Though it has forty-two teeth in the lower jaw it
never cuts those in the upper one, and seems to depend more on
sweeping its prey into its mouth than on attacking it. And this perhaps
partly explains the use of that curious case of spermaceti which lies in
its huge forehead over the tough fat of its upper jaw. For this oil gives
out a powerful scent, which, when the whale is feeding below in the
deep water, most probably attracts fish and other small animals, as
they are also certainly attracted nearer the surface by the shining white
lining of its mouth. This light mass is also, however, useful in giving the
head a tendency to rise, so that when the whale wishes to swim
quickly it has only to rise to the top, so that the bulk of its head will
stand out of the water, the lower and narrow part cutting the waves. In
this position he can go at the rate of twelve to twenty miles an hour.
 But if the sperm whale is curious, as it carries its oil-laden head
through all seas from pole to pole, chiefly in warmer latitudes, how
much more so are the whalebone whales, which are monarchs of the
colder and arctic seas, where they feed on the swarms of mollusca,
crustaceans, and jelly animals which live there. For these large
whales, though they have teeth in their gums, never cut them, but in
their place they have large sheets of whalebone hanging down from
the upper jaw (see Fig. 84), smooth on the outside, fringed with short
hairs on the inside, and crowded together so thickly, only about a
quarter of an inch apart, that as many as three hundred sheets hang
down on each side of the mouth of the great Greenland whale.

Fig. 87.

The Sperm Whale.

It is easy to see the use of these whalebones when we remember

that this huge whale feeds entirely by filling its enormous mouth with
water, and then closing it and raising its thick tongue at the back so as
to drive the water out at the sides, straining it through the fine fringes,
which fill up all the spaces between the plates and keep back every
little shell-fish and soft animal. But it is less easy to guess where these
whalebone plates come from, till we look back at the manatee, and
remember those horny ridges which it uses for biting, and which are
exaggerations of the rough fleshy ridges at the top of a cow’s mouth.
Then we have a clue, for each blade of whalebone grows from a
horny white gum, being fed by a fleshy substance below much in the
same way as our nails are, so that these blades are, as it were, a
series of hardened ridges, which grow out from the soft palate, till they
become frayed at the edges, and form that dense fringe which is the
whale’s strainer, upon which he depends entirely for his food.
Explain it as we will, however, it is a most wonderful apparatus.
Imagine a huge upper jaw forming an arch more than nine feet high, so
that if the whalebone were cleared away a man could walk about
inside, upon the thick tongue which lies in the lower jaw fastened down
almost to the tip so that it cannot be put out of the mouth. And then
remember that this enormous mouth has to be filled with food sufficient
to nourish a body fifty or more feet long. Who would ever guess that
this food is made up of creatures so small that countless millions must
go to a mouthful? Yet the whole difficulty is solved simply by these
triangular fringed plates or mouth-ridges (see section Fig. 84, p. 318),
covered with horny matter and frayed into minute threads like the
horny barbs of a feather.
Nor are we yet at the end of the wonderful adaptation, for while the
jaw is only from nine to twelve feet high, the long outside edge of the
plates is often eighteen feet long, and for this reason, that if they were
only as long as the jaw is deep, then when the whale went fishing with
his mouth open the animals would escape below the fringe, while as
they now are, he may gape as wide as he will, the long curtain will still
guard the passage of the mouth and entangle the prey in its meshes.
But what, then, is to become of this great length of whalebone when
the animal shuts his mouth? Here comes in the use of the beautiful
elasticity of the plates, for the great Arctic whaler, Captain Gray, has
shown that as the mouth shuts the lower ends of the longer plates
bend back towards the throat and fall into the hollow formed by the
short blades behind them, so that the whole lies compactly fitted in,
ready to spring open again, and fill the gap whenever the jaws are
distended.
With this magnificent fishing-net the whalebone whales go a-
fishing in all the salt waters of the world. They are not all of enormous
size,—many of them are not more than twenty feet long,—nor have
they all such a perfect mouthful of whalebone as the great Polar
Whale; but when the whalebone is shorter, as in the Rorqual, and
other whales with back fins, the stiff walls of the lower lip close in the
sides of the mouth and prevent the escape of the prey; and many of
these whales have a curious arrangement of skin folds under the lower
jaw, which stretch out and enable them to take in enormous mouthfuls
of water, so as to secure more food.
New Zealand, California, Japan, the Cape, the Bay of Biscay, and
in fact almost every shore or sea from pole to pole, has some whale
called by its name; for these gaping fishers are everywhere, and it is
not always easy to say whether the same whale is not called by
different names in various parts of the world. In the shallow bays and
lagoons they may be found with their newly-born young ones very
early in the year; while far out at sea ships meet with them travelling in
shoals, or “schools,” northwards, as the summer sets in and the Arctic
Sea is swarming with life. In fact the Californian gray whales go right
up into the ice, poking their noses up through the holes to breathe, and
then they travel far away south again into the tropics to bring up their
young ones.
And whether large or small, toothed whales or whalebone whales,
active as the dolphin and the huge fin-whales or rorquals, which dash
through the water although some are nearly a hundred feet long, or
lazy and harmless as the Greenland whale is unless attacked, in one
thing all the whale family betray their high place in the animal kingdom.
Nowhere, either on land or in the water, can mothers be found more
tender, more devoted, or more willing to sacrifice their lives for their
children than whale-mothers. Scoresby tells us that the whalers, as
means of catching the grown-up whales, will sometimes strike a young
one with harpoon and line, sure that the mother will come to its rescue.
Then she may be seen coming to the top with it encouraging it to swim
away, and she will even take it under her fin, and, in spite of the
harpoons of the whalers, will never leave it till life is extinct. Nay, she
has been known to carry it off triumphantly, for the lash of her tail is
furiously strong when she is maddened by the danger of her child, so
that a boat’s crew scarcely dare approach her.
And now there remains the question what enemies besides man
these strong-swimming milk-givers can have in their ocean home? We
have seen that the orca or killer whale will turn cannibal and devour
those of its own kind, and the swordfish is said to attack whales with its
formidable spear; but these are not their greatest enemies. With many
of the whales it is tiny creatures like those on which they feed which
hasten their death, for small parasitic crustaceans cover their head and
fins, and feed upon their fat, so that whales which have been infested
with these animals are often found to be “dry,” or to have lost nearly all
their oil. And thus we see the tables turned, and while the whale feeds
upon minute creatures, it is in its turn destroyed by them.
Nevertheless, as a rule, they probably live long lives, till their teeth
are worn, or their whalebone frayed and broken, and their blubber
wasted away; and then, it may be after eighty or one hundred years of
life, they die a natural death. Therefore they probably share with the
elephant the longest term of life of any of the warm-blooded animals;
and though their existence cannot certainly be said to be an exciting
one, yet, when undisturbed by man, it is at least peaceful, sociable,
and full of family love.
It may perhaps seem strange that we should have taken these
ocean-dwellers last in our glimpses of animal life; but in the first place,
how was it possible to show how they are truly related to the land
mammalia until we understood the structure of these last? And in the
second place, we have as our object to see how the backboned family
have won for themselves places in the world, and surely there are
none which have done this more successfully or in a more strange and
unexpected way than the whales, which, while retaining all the
qualities of warm-blooded animals, have won themselves a home in
the ocean by imitating the form and habits of fish, and so adapting
themselves to find food in the great oceans, where their land relations
were powerless to avail themselves of it.
WHEN THE COLD HAS PASSED AWAY
 CHAPTER XII.
A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF THE RISE AND
PROGRESS OF BACKBONED LIFE.

We have now sketched out, though very roughly, the history of the
various branches of the great backboned family, and we have found
that, as happens in all families, they have each had their successes
and their downfalls, their times of triumph, and their more sober days,
when the remaining descendants have been content to linger on in the
byways of life, and take just so much of this world’s good as might fall
to their share.
We have seen also that, as in all families of long standing, many
branches have become extinct altogether; the great enamel-plated
fish, the large armour-covered newts, the flying, swimming, and huge
erect-walking reptiles, the toothed and long-tailed birds, the gigantic
marsupials, the enormous ground-loving sloths, and many others,
have lived out their day and disappeared; their place being filled either
by smaller descendants of other branches of the group, or by new
forms in the great armies of fish, birds, and milk-givers which now have
chiefly possession of the earth.
Still, on the whole, the history has been one of a gradual rise from
lower to higher forms of life; and if we put aside for a moment all
details, and, forgetting the enormous lapse of time required, allow the
shifting scene to pass like a panorama before us, we shall have a
grand view indeed of the progress of the great backboned family.
First, passing by that long series of geological formations in which
no remains of life have been found, or only those of boneless or
invertebrate animals, we find ourselves in a sea abounding in stone-
190
lilies and huge crustaceans, having among them the small forms of
the earliest fish known to us, those having gristly skeletons. Then as
the scene passes on, and forests clothe the land, we behold the
descendants of these small fish becoming large and important,
wearing heavy enamelled plates or sharp defensive spines; some of
them with enormous jaws, two or three feet in length, wandering in the
swamps and muddy water, and using their air-bladder as a lung. But
these did not turn their air-breathing discovery to account; they
remained in the water, and their descendants are fish down to the
present day.
It is in the next scene, when already the age of the huge extinct
fishes is beginning to pass away, and tree ferns and coal forest plants
191
are flourishing luxuriantly, that we find the first land animals, which
have been growing up side by side with the fish, and gradually learning
to undergo a change, marvellous indeed, yet similar to one which goes
on under our eyes each year in every country pond. For now, mingling
with the fish, we behold an altogether new type of creatures which,
beginning life as water-breathers, learn to come out upon the land and
live as air-breathers in the swamps of the coal forests.
A marvellous change this is, as we can judge by watching our
common tadpole, and seeing how during its youth its whole breathing
organs are remade on a totally different principle, its heart is
remodelled from an organ of two chambers into one of three, the whole
course of its blood is altered, some channels being destroyed and
others multiplied and enlarged, a sucking mouth is converted into a
gaping bony jaw, and legs with all their bones and joints are produced
where none were before, while the fish’s tail, its office abandoned, is
gradually absorbed and lost.
The only reason why this completely new creation, taking place in
one and the same animal, does not fill us with wonder is, that it goes
on in the water where generally we do not see it, and because the
most wonderful changes are worked out inside the tadpole, and are
only understood by physiologists. But in truth the real alteration in
bodily structure is much greater than if a seal could be changed into a
monkey.
Now this complete development which the tadpole goes through in
one summer is, after all, but a rapid repetition, as it were, of that slow
and gradual development which must have taken place in past ages,
when water-breathing animals first became adapted to air-breathing.
Any one, therefore, who will take the spawn of a frog from a pond, and
watch it through all its stages, may rehearse for himself that
marvellous chapter in the history of the growth and development of
higher life.
And he will gain much by this study, for all nature teaches us that
this is the mode in which the Great Power works. Not “in the
whirlwind,” or by sudden and violent new creations, but by the “still
small voice” of gentle and gradual change, ordering so the laws of
being that each part shall model and remodel itself as occasion
requires. Could we but see the whole, we should surely bend in
reverence and awe before a scheme so grand, so immutable, so
irresistible in its action, and yet so still, so silent, and so imperceptible,
because everywhere and always at work. Even now to those who
study nature, broken and partial as their knowledge must be, it is
incomprehensible how men can seek and long for marvels of
spasmodic power, when there lies before them the greatest proof of a
mighty wisdom in an all-embracing and never-wavering scheme, the
scope of which is indeed beyond our intelligence, but the partial
working of which is daily shown before our very eyes.
But to return to our shifting scene where the dense forests of the
Coal Period next come before us. There, while numerous fish, small
and great, fill the waters, huge Newts have begun their reign
(Labyrinthodonts), wandering in the marshy swamps or swimming in
the pools, while smaller forms run about among the trees, or, snake-
like in form, wriggle among the ferns and mosses; and one and all of
these lead the double-breathing or amphibian life.
In the next scene the coal forests are passing away, though still the
strange forms of the trees and the gigantic ferns tell us we have not left
192
them quite behind; and now upon the land are true air-breathers, no
longer beginning life in the water, but born alive, as the young ones of
the black salamander are now (see p. 81). The Reptiles have begun
their reign, and they show that, though still cold-blooded animals, they
have entered upon a successful line of life, for they increase in size
and number till the world is filled with them.
Meanwhile other remarkable forms now appear leading off to two
new branches of backboned life. On the one hand, little insect-eating
warm-blooded marsupials scamper through the woods, having started
we scarcely yet know when or where, except that we learn from their
structure that they probably branched off from the amphibians in quite
a different line from the reptiles, and certainly gained a footing upon
the earth in very early times. On the other hand, birds come upon the
193 194
scene having teeth in their mouths, long-jointed tails, and many
other reptilian characters. We have indeed far more clue to the
relationship of the birds than we have of the marsupials, for while we
have these reptile-like birds, we have also the bird-like reptiles such as
the little Compsognathus, which hopped on two feet, had a long neck,
bird-like head and many other bird-like characters, though no wings or
feathers.
The birds, however, even though reptile-like in their beginning,
must soon have branched out on a completely new line. They for the
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first time among this group of animals, have the perfect four-
chambered heart with its quick circulation and warm blood; while not
only do they use their fore limbs for flying (for this some reptiles did
before them), but they use them in quite a new fashion, putting forth a
clothing of feathers of wondrous beauty and construction, and with true
wings taking possession of the air, where from this time their history is
one of continued success.
And now we have before us all the great groups of the backboned
family—fish, amphibia, reptiles, birds and mammalia; but in what
strange proportions! As the scenery of the Chalk Period with its fan-
palms and pines comes before us, we find that the gristly fish, except
the sharks and a few solitary types, are fast dying out, while the bony
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fish are but just beginning their career. The large amphibians are all
gone long ago; they have run their race, enjoyed their life and finished
their course, leaving only the small newts and salamanders, and later
on the frogs and toads, to keep up the traditions of the race. The land-
birds are still in their earliest stage; they have probably scarcely lost
their lizard-like tail, and have not yet perfected their horny beak, but
are only feeling their way as conquerors of the air. And as for the milk-
givers, though we have met with them in small early forms, yet now for
a time we lose sight of them again altogether.
 It is the reptiles—the cold-blooded monster reptiles—which seem
at this time to be carrying all before them. We find them everywhere—
in the water, with paddles for swimming; in the air, with membranes for
flying; on the land hopping or running on their hind feet. From small
creatures not bigger than two feet high, to huge monsters thirty feet in
height, feeding on the tops of trees which our giraffes and elephants
could not reach, they fill the land; while flesh-eating reptiles, quite their
match in size and strength, prey upon them as lions and tigers do upon
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the grass-feeders now. This is no fancy picture, for in our museums,
and especially in Professor Marsh’s wonderful collection in Yale
Museum in America, you may see the skeletons of these large reptiles,
and build them up again in imagination as they stood in those ancient
days when they looked down upon the primitive birds and tiny
marsupials, little dreaming that their own race, then so powerful, would
dwindle away, while these were to take possession in their stead.
And now in our series of changing scenes comes all at once that
strange blank which we hope one day to fill up; and when we look
again the large reptiles are gone, the birds are spreading far and wide,
and we come upon those early and primitive forms of insect-eaters,
gnawers, monkeys, grass-feeders, and large flesh-eaters, whose
descendants, together with those of the earlier marsupials, are
henceforward to spread over the earth. We need scarcely carry our
pictures much farther. We have seen how, in these early times, the
flesh-feeders and grass-feeders were far less perfectly fitted for their
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lives than they are now; how the horse has only gradually acquired
his elegant form; the stag his branching antlers; and the cat tribe their
scissor-like teeth, powerful jaws, and muscular limbs; while the same
history of gradual improvement applies to nearly all the many forms of
milk-givers.
But there is another kind of change which we must not forget,
which has been going on all through this long history, namely,
alterations in the level and shape of the continents and islands, as
coasts have been worn away in some places and raised up or added
to in others, so that different countries have been separated from or
joined to each other. Thus Australia, now standing alone, with its
curious animal life, must at some very distant time have been joined to
the mainland of Asia, from which it received its low forms of milk-
givers, and since then, having become separated from the great
battlefield of the Eastern Continent, has been keeping for us, as it were
in a natural isolated zoological garden, the strange primitive Platypus
and Echidna, and Marsupials of all kinds and habits.
So too, Africa, no doubt for a long time cut off by a wide sea which
prevented the larger and fiercer animals from entering it, harboured the
large wingless ostriches, the gentle lemurs, the chattering monkeys,
the scaly manis, and a whole host of insect-eaters; while South
America, also standing alone, gave the sloths and armadilloes, the ant-
bears, opossums, monkeys, rheas, and a number of other forms, the
chance of establishing themselves firmly before stronger enemies
came to molest them. These are only a few striking examples which
help us to see how, if we could only trace them out, there are reasons
to be found why each animal or group of animals now lives where we
find it, and has escaped destruction in one part of the world when it
has altogether disappeared in others.

* * * * *
So, wandering hither and thither, the backboned family, and
especially the milk-givers, took possession of plains and mountain
ranges, of forests and valleys, of deserts and fertile regions. But still
another question remains—How has it come to pass that large animals
which once ranged all over Europe and Northern Asia,—mastodons,
tusked tapirs, rhinoceroses, elephants, sabre-toothed tigers, cave-
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lions, and hippopotamuses in Europe, gigantic sloths and llamas in
North America, and even many huge forms in South America, have
either been entirely destroyed or are represented now only by
scattered groups here and there in southern lands? What put an end to
the “reign of the milk-givers,” and why have they too diminished on the
earth as the large fish, the large newts, and the large lizards did before
them?
To answer this question we must take up our history just before the
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scene at the head of our last chapter, which the reader may have
observed does not refer, as the others have done, to the animals in the
chapter itself. Nevertheless it has its true place in the series, for it tells
of a time when the great army of milk-givers had its difficulties and
failures as well as all the other groups, only these came upon them not
from other animals but from the influence of snow and ice.
For we know that gradually from the time of tropical Europe, when
all the larger animals flourished in our country, a change was creeping
very slowly and during long ages over the whole northern hemisphere.
The climate grew colder and colder, the tropical plants and animals
were driven back or died away, glaciers grew larger and snow deeper
and more lasting, till large sheets of ice covered Norway and Sweden,
the northern parts of Russia, Germany, England, Holland, and
Belgium, and in America the whole of the country as far south as New
York. Then was what geologists call the “Glacial Period;” and whether
the whole country was buried in ice, or large separate glaciers and
thick coverings of snow filled the land, in either case the animals, large
and small, must have had a bad time of it.
True, there were probably warmer intervals in this intense cold,
when the more southern animals came and went, for we find bones of
the hippopotamus, hyæna, and others buried between glacial beds in
the south of England. But there is no doubt that at this time numbers of
land animals must have perished, for in England alone, out of fifty-
three known species which lived in warmer times, only twelve survived
the great cold, while others were driven southwards never to return,
and the descendants of others came back as new forms, only distantly
related to those which had once covered the land.
Moreover, when the cold passed away and the country began
again to be covered with oak and pine forests where animals might
feed and flourish, we find that a new enemy had made his appearance.
Man—active, thinking, tool-making man—had begun to take
possession of the caves and holes of the rocks, making weapons out
of large flints bound into handles of wood, and lighting fires by rubbing
wood together, so as to protect himself from wild beasts and inclement
weather.
In America and in England alike, as well as in Northern Africa, Asia
Minor, and India, we know that man was living at this time among
animals, many of them of species which have since become extinct,
and with his rude weapons of jagged flint was conquering for himself a
place in the world.
He must have had a hard struggle, for we find these flint
implements now lying among the bones of hyænas, sabre-toothed
tigers, cave-lions, cave-bears, rhinoceroses, elephants, and
hippopotamuses, showing that it was in a land full of wild beasts that
he had to make good his ground.

“By the swamp in the forest

The oak-branches groan,
As the savage primeval,
With russet hair thrown
O’er his huge naked limbs, swings his hatchet of stone.

“And now, hark! as he drives with

A last mighty swing,
The stone blade of the axe through
The oak’s central ring,
From his blanched lips what screams of wild agony spring!

There’s a rush through the fern-fronds,

A yell of affright,
And the Savage and Sabre-tooth
Close in fierce fight,
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As the red sunset smoulders and blackens to night.”

Many and fierce these conflicts must have been, for the wild
beasts were still strong and numerous, and man had not yet the skill
and weapons which he has since acquired. But rough and savage
though he may have been, he had powers which made him superior to
all around him. For already he knew how to make and use weapons to
defend himself, and how to cover himself at least with skins as
protection from cold and damp. Moreover, he had a brain which could
devise and invent, a memory which enabled him to accumulate
experience, and a strong power of sympathy which made him a highly
social being, combining with others in the struggle for life.
 And so from that early time till now, man, the last and greatest
winner in life’s race, has been taking possession of the earth. With
more and more powerful weapons he has fought against the wild
beasts in their native haunts; and by clearing away the large forests,
cutting up the broad prairies and pastures, and cultivating the land, he
has turned them out of their old feeding grounds, till now we must go to
the centre of Africa, the wild parts of Asia, or the boundless forests of
South America, to visit in their homes the large wild animals of the
great army of milk-givers.

* * * * *
Since, therefore, these forms are growing rarer every century, and
some of them, such as the Dodo, Epyornis, and Moa among birds, and
the northern sea-cow or Rhytina among milk-givers, have already
disappeared since the times of history, we must endeavour, before
others are gone for ever, to study their structure and their habits. For
we are fast learning that it is only by catching at these links in nature’s
chain that we can hope to unravel the history of life upon the earth.
At one time naturalists never even thought that there was anything
to unravel, for they looked upon the animal kingdom as upon a building
put together brick by brick, each in its place from the beginning. To
them, therefore, the fact that a fish’s fin, a bird’s wing, a horse’s leg, a
man’s arm and hand, and the flipper of a whale, were all somewhat
akin, had no other meaning than that they seemed to have been
formed upon the same plan; and when it became certain that different
kinds of animals had appeared from time to time upon the earth, the
naturalists of fifty years ago could have no grander conception than
that new creatures were separately made (they scarcely asked
themselves how) and put into the world as they were wanted.
But a higher and better explanation was soon to be found, for there
was growing up among us the greatest naturalist and thinker of our
day, that patient lover and searcher after truth, Charles Darwin, whose
genius and earnest labours opened our eyes gradually to a conception
so deep, so true, and so grand, that side by side with it the idea of
making an animal from time to time, as a sculptor makes a model of
clay, seems too weak and paltry ever to have been attributed to an
Almighty Power.