Otherwise Engaged

https://www.tes.com/lessons/xhy3B93t5h9qmQ/the-boxer-rebellion-1900-1901. This contemporary political cartoon from the time of the Boxer Rebellion. is highly prescient, since it was disputes between western powers about how to carve up colonies and spheres of influence that were a major factor in the start of The First World War. 

The founding of Wombwell’s menagerie had proved quite a pebble to throw into the pond of a simple Essex farming family, and more than rippled down subsequent generations. In the case of Ann Fanny Wombwell, she virtually vaulted across the social class structure, only to find herself by the banks of the Yangtze River.

The family and community she married into in a sense represent both the best and worst of Victorian Britain.  On the one hand, the scope, energy, erudition, science, and urge to explore and understand the world around them of families like the Sowerbys is astounding by any standards.

The co-opting of these talents by the Church and governments of the time is in retrospect rather less worthy of admiration. Certain sectors of Victorian society had by now convinced themselves that they represented a superior civilization and value-set that the rest of the world should be only too grateful to be the recipients of. The missionaries brought with them education in the form of the schools they founded; they brought the advanced medical understanding of the time; and of course, naturally, they brought their Bibles and catechisms.

As far as China is concerned, their conversion rate was low to the point of utter insignificance, though elements of the local population were happy enough for a while to take advantage of the educational and medical carrots that were put in their way. The idea though that the Chinese would be won over from their own extraordinarily rich culture and traditions into Christian practice was profoundly optimistic. They did however have a seemingly limitless capacity for interference and provocation.

In China, such policies came to a head in 1899 with the commencement of the Boxer rebellion, and the massacres that accompanied it. This gave at least some food for thought to the governments of the western world, as to whether the missionary operations really served national interests. 

Since China was not actually part of the British Empire, the interests of the British were largely commercial, and aimed through political pressure and enticements of various types to maximize profits , which included a rather dubious involvement in the opium trade. The problem with the missionaries was that their awareness of such finely nuanced strategic policies was profoundly limited, and they became in the end as much as a liability as an asset, and were seen as such by many political operators. Of course, the Boxer Rebellion horrified all and sundry, and revived the concept of the ‘yellow peril’ in the popular imagination in the media, a media to whom the concept of cultural imperialism would hardly have entered their mindset.

The Western powers were to continue however to repeat the same experiments and hope for different results, bemused that undeveloped and unenlightened peoples should so stubbornly seek to hold to their own traditional values and ways of life. Yet, if projects of this type could not even achieve a conclusive outcome in a country as close as Maria West’s Ireland, it would be thought that there might have been more seriously sceptical voices raised as to the likelihood of such methods achieving useful results in a country like China.

These considerations aside, at least we know why one of George Wombwell junior’s daughters was not around to tend to him in the long years of his decline. And all things considered, she did have quite a reasonable excuse. She really was ‘otherwise engaged’. And in that most optimistically Victorian of pursuits, on a civilizing mission to the world.