Abstract
This chapter explores the status of “Tartary” in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary imagination, with reference to works by Penelope Aubin, William Chambers, John Gilbert Cooper, Daniel Defoe, Nicholas Rowe, and Laurence Sterne. I show how this pseudo-mythical space, stretching from the borders of Eastern Europe to the Great Wall of China, becomes associated with a distinctive “nomadic” aesthetic, figuratively connected with chaos, hubris, madness, or political transgression. The concluding section, discussing Thomas De Quincey and later nineteenth-century travelers including George Fowler, shows how, under the later influence of British imperialism in the Middle East and Central Asia, the trope of the horseback “Tartar” journey becomes gradually reimagined as an increasingly aestheticized and controlled idea of movement, threading together romanticized images of the East.
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Notes
- 1.
See Oxford English Dictionary, “Tartar, Tatar, n.”, A.2. The first recorded use (in slightly divergent form) is in Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1674) (“Now thou has got me for a Tartar…”).
- 2.
- 3.
Mingjun Lu (2015, pp. 177–179) argues that Satan’s ambitions to establish a “global Leviathan” can additionally be read as a historical allusion to the Mongol empire of Genghis Khan.
- 4.
A noteworthy exception is the Scottish physician John Bell, who joins a Russian embassy to Beijing in 1719–1722, and publishes an account of Travels from St Petersburg in Russia, to Diverse Parts of Asia (1763).
- 5.
Cham-Chi-Thaungu’s name suggests “Cham” (Khan), a word used since the medieval period to refer to the rulers of China and Tartary (and later revived as an ironic epithet for Samuel Johnson, “the Great Cham”).
- 6.
The glosses of Gildon’s terms are from Rogers (1995, p. 44).
- 7.
See also Kitson’s discussion (2007, pp. 179–182) of “Tartar” as an Enlightenment racial category denoting the borders of the human.
- 8.
Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s Description de l’Empire de la Chine (Paris, 1735) was published in octavo by John Watts as The General History of China (4 vols., 1736), although the more lavishly-produced English version was the folio translation published by Edward Cave, Description of the History of China (2 vols., 1738–1741), read by numerous eighteenth-century writers including Johnson and Walpole.
- 9.
The question of how British involvement in the Crimean War (1853–1856) may have affected later Victorian perceptions of the Tartars is an interesting one, although outside the boundaries of this essay.
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Williams, L. (2019). The Manchu Invasion of Britain: Nomadic Resonances in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Chinoiserie Aesthetics, and Material Culture. In: Gallien, C., Niayesh, L. (eds) Eastern Resonances in Early Modern England. New Transculturalisms, 1400–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22925-2_7
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