2 - Orientalising the British Class System: Exploring the ‘Chinese’ Landscapes of Sir William Chambers, 1740–1775

Summary

In his preface to The Citizen of the World (1760–1) – a philosophical satire in the manner of Giovanni Marana's Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (1684), describing the adventures of a Chinese philosopher in London – the playwright and essayist Oliver Goldsmith (1728–74) humorously describes a dream in which he foresees the critical reception of his book. Standing by the side of a frozen Thames, where a ‘Fashion Fair’ is taking place in booths on the ice, Goldsmith watches as other authors venture out into the centre, drawing carts and sleds packed with various literary wares, and return again with their spoils. Encouraged by their success, he decides to venture onto the river with a ‘small cargoe [sic] of Chinese morality’, reasoning that ‘The furniture, frippery and fire-works of China, have long been fashionably bought up […] If the Chinese have contributed to vitiate our taste, I’ll try how far they can help to improve our understanding.’ No sooner does he reach the centre, however, when ‘I fancied the ice, that had supported an hundred waggons before, cracked under me; and wheel-barrow and all went to the bottom.’

Goldsmith's anxiety dream could of course be interpreted in the broader context of the cut-throat eighteenth-century London literary world, but I would like in this chapter to focus on the more specific anxieties that China, in both literary and material culture, could evoke in mid-century Britons. The idea of China as a long-fashionable but now over-familiar and even ‘vitiate[d]’ topic – which may still win favour with an elite audience, or may alternatively sink unread to the bottom of the Thames – seems indicative of a contemporary ambivalence towards the country. As Elizabeth Chang summarises, the middle decades of the century saw ‘the waning of chinoiserie's popularity’, during a ‘period when the style's defiance of representational logic and multiplication of functionless ornament more disturbed than delighted’. The high cultural associations that Chinese material culture had possessed in the post-Restoration period, when the style had been largely the preserve of an aristocratic elite, had gradually declined as these designs – now imported in bulk and increasingly imitated by domestic manufacturers – became accessible to a broader commercial and professional middle class.