In chapter 2, “Taking an Interest,” in Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation, Alexander Bubb recounts how Harriet Martineau once borrowed a copy of George Sale's translation of the Quran to write an essay on Unitarianism. The piece was intended for the Central Unitarian Association, which, in 1830, held an essay-writing competition, seeking works that could “adopt the perspective of the imagined Muslim audience, using analogies from Islamic tradition to explicate the Northern doctrine” (33). Despite limited knowledge of Islam, Martineau's essay ultimately won the prize. Over eighty years later, in chapter 4, “Canonizing,” Bubb describes another novice reader, Nellie Turner, who, in 1913, received an edition of the Quran for excellence in mathematics. Turner later annotated her copy, highlighting commonalities between Islam and Christianity. The Quran reappears in chapter 7, “Reading,” where the focus shifts to Victorians’ varied treatment of Asian literature—particularly their penchant for obtaining and “not reading” (210) such texts. An 1881 article in the Edinburgh Review highlights this trend, point out the prevalence of opinions on Muslim scripture without genuine engagement. Ironically, the article itself falls into this trap, claiming that the Quran is shorter than a Sunday edition of the New York Herald. Despite its shortcomings, Bubb takes this as a reflection of evolving discussions on Islam and the cultural cachet associated with liberal education at the time. William J. Curtis, a New York lawyer, who, as we learn in chapter 4, owned a pristine copy of the Quran, likely understood these dynamics; displaying such texts on one's bookshelf signaled cultural prestige, even if the pages remained uncut.
Reading Asian Classics, one quickly discovers that the above anecdotes are only a glimpse of its depth. Yet, my focus on anecdotes concerning the reception of the Quran serves a dual purpose: to highlight the book's novelty—many of its tales are previously untold—and to illustrate its scholarly objective by crafting a sense of coherence. Comprising seven chapters, each with numerous smaller segments, Asian Classics is intricately designed, defying a singular focus and a linear arrangement. While the opening chapter, “A Century of Translation,” surveys Oriental translations from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, the following chapters—“Taking an Interest,” “Circulating,” “Canonizing,” “Translating,” “Publishing,” and “Reading”—each center on “a different part of the process whereby a text crosses from one culture to another” (xxix). These chapters are arranged in a non-chronological order to reflect the inherent variability in textual transmission across cultures; to underscore the absence of uniformity in Western reception, reproduction, and consumption of Oriental literature is a primary objective in Asian Classics. Bubb's narrative in each chapter is similarly guided by a commitment to capturing the variability in the motifs and manners that define Anglo-American treatment of Eastern literature in the nineteenth century. In chapter 4, the exploration of Turner's probing of her Quran, for instance, takes place within a broader discussion on the dissemination of Asian classics in the classroom, with a focus on the Islamic prophet. Here, Bubb places Turner's positive engagement within the Victorian tradition of venerating Mohammad—which coexisted with a strong tradition of vilifying him. Turner's copy was translated by J. M. Rodwell but edited by George Margoliout, a clergyman with knowledge of several religious traditions, who advocated for a relativist mindset: “Muhammed may … be regarded as a prophet of certain truths, though by no means of truth in the absolute meaning of the term” (100). Such perspective, echoing those of Matthew Arnold in “A Persian Passion Play” (1871), did not emerge out of thin air; the tradition, as Bubb explains, traced its roots back to Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841) and extended all the way to works such as The Story of Mohammed (1914). A full grasp of Bubb's critical commentary, with its expansive scope and seldom scattered nature, may at times require a deeper familiarity with the broader context or occasional pauses to revisit observations made elsewhere in the book. However, such an approach is essential and, to a great extent, inevitable for achieving the book's objective: “To convey the abundance and diversity that characterize the Victorian consumption of ‘oriental literature’” (xxviii). Bubb accomplishes this with a discerning lens, meticulous research, and a remarkable ability to bring together findings that are often dispersed and distant.
Bubb's approach differs from earlier scholars in several key ways: first, rather than focusing solely on translators, he directs his attention to diverse audiences, particularly “the ‘common’ or ‘general’ reader” who engaged with Asian literature not out of any professional commitment—be it academic, mercantile, or missionary—but for “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” (xxvii). William J. Curtis exemplifies one such “reader,” who, for his own personal motivations, kept a copy of the Quran in his private library. Bubb's examination of these varied motives hinges on another distinctive aspect of his approach: the physical book as evidence. Many of the stories he recounts, such as the story of Curtis's unscathed copy, or that of Thomas Ambrose Palmer whose miniature edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) was filled with personal notes, annotations, and extracts from other poems, all derive from his first-hand study of the marginalia, inscriptions, and signs of use in physical books. This methodological distinction is pivotal to Bubb's goal of advancing the scholarship, in moving the field from theoretical (world literature as an envisioned library of privileged texts and languages) to the tangible: actual books, actual shelves, and actual readers. Reading through Asian Classics, we are reminded that examining literature from the viewpoint of the individual reader has the power to reshape the macro-history of literature. Bubb's focused approach, emphasizing nuanced examination over broad categorizations, affirms that interactions with Asian cultural material in the nineteenth century were uniquely idiosyncratic to each person.
The focus of Asian Classics spans primarily the years 1845–1915, during which Oriental studies in Britain were perceived to lack the rigor and seriousness it enjoyed in France and Germany. Bubb, however, holds a different view, contending that “orientalism did not lose steam after Jones's untimely death in 1794 but rather gathered speed relentlessly” (xi). He reinforces this argument, once again, by drawing attention to non-specialists; here, his keen eye for amateurish readers, such as Harriet Martineau or Nellie Turner, is complemented by his critical interest in amateurish contributors with imperfect and, at times, second-hand knowledge of the language they were working with. Bubb calls these individuals “popularizers”: enthusiasts who, while operating at the periphery of formal academic structures, played a significant role in adapting, translating, and representing Asian literary-cultural material for a broader English-speaking audience. The most distinguishing feature of Asian Classics perhaps lies in this theoretical distinction, in Bubb's attempt to differentiate enthusiasts from academics. Figures such as Louisa Stuart Costello, Edward FitzGerald, and Helen Zimmern have all been studied in varying degrees in the past, with some receiving more attention than others. But what Bubb accomplishes is offering a fresh set of information about those we are familiar with (see, for instance, his detailed account of the reasons behind the peak celebrity of the Rubáiyát at the turn of the twentieth century in chapter 2) and those we know less about (see, for instance, his commentary on Costello's translation strategies and how these may have caused her exclusion from Frederic Goldsmid's list of English translators from Persian in chapter 5). Notably, Bubb's focus on non-specialists does not overshadow academics; they, too, are included in Asian Classics, in part, to show something of the diverse nature of nineteenth-century British engagement with the Orient and in part to emphasize, by comparison, the necessity of heeding amateurish translators. Take, for example, the discussion in chapter 2, where he cautions against a blanket application of models of cultural hegemony, particularly those of decadence and primitivism. Such models, Bubb argues, can oversimply; Arabic literature, for instance, neither declined nor was uniformly perceived as such by nineteenth-century figures such as Charles James Lyall.
It is difficult to distil the wealth of insights from Asian Classics into a single thread; even in its prologue, the book offers perspectives that invite further scholarly exploration. But this is precisely the book's purpose: to promote a mode of engagement that attends to every detail, prioritizing the individual and the actual over the abstract and theoretical.
