The next meeting of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar will take place on Friday 21 March 2025 in Room 349 (third floor), Senate House, University of London, starting at 5.30 pm. As our guest speaker, we are delighted to welcome Dr Daniel Sanjiv Roberts of Queen’s University Belfast, who will present a paper entitled Imagining China in Romantic-period Magazines: The Amherst Embassy. This will be followed by a discussion and wine reception. The seminar will be chaired by Gregory Dart (University College London).

The event is free and open to everyone, including postgraduates and members of the public.

Daniel Sanjiv Roberts is a Reader in English at Queen’s University Belfast. Author of Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge and the High Romantic Argument (2000), he has edited De Quincey’s Autobiographic Sketches, Robert Southey’s The Curse of Kehama and Charles Johnston’s The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis for major scholarly editions of these writers. His other publications include Thomas De Quincey: New Theoretical and Critical Directions (2009) and Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine: ‘An Unprecedented Phenomenon’ (2013), both co-edited with Robert Morrison, and two other co-edited collections: India and Europe in the Global Eighteenth Century (2014) and Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775-1947 (2019). Recent work includes the chapter on ‘Asia’ for The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose (2024).

Regarding the topic of his paper, Daniel writes:

“Britain’s second trading embassy to China in 1816 was reported extensively in metropolitan magazines. It was widely dismissed in reviews as a failure. The ambassador, Lord Amherst, was uncomfortable about performing the ceremonial kowtow required by his hosts, his audience with the Jiaqing emperor after an arduous journey was unfulfilled after a fractious exchange, their gifts carried from Britain were rejected, and to make matters worse their ship the Alceste was wrecked as they returned. As recent scholarship has shown, this diplomatic rupture was enacted in the context of a growing concern with the balance of trade with China and of shifting aesthetic attitudes in Britain to chinoiserie even as tea drinking was domesticated as an English habit. Earlier assessments of failure have given way to more nuanced considerations of knowledge acquisition and cultural impact. My paper explores the outpouring of print in British journals in the wake of the Amherst Embassy at this important moment for trading and cultural relations, arguing for the interdependence of these factors in the affective response of the press. Patriotic anger at the humiliation of the ambassador and his party along with pity and admiration for their tale of shipwreck and fortitude entered the metropolitan imagination within the discursive field opened up by the magazines. I will trace narrative continuities from the Quarterly Review’s aggressively Sinophobic notices of the embassy and the Edinburgh Review’s response to the shipwreck of the Alceste to the ways in which China was imagined in life writings and personal essays such as De Quincey’s opium-induced nightmares in ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’ and Lamb’s Elian reflections on ‘Old China’, both of which appeared in the London Magazine.”