ABSTRACT
D ickens began writing when the East India Company lost its monopoly: an event which took force in 1834.1 From that moment on, the dominant ideology at work in colonialism was free trade, which had already elbowed out the company’s protectionism. British East India Company ships freighted with opium had begun arriving in China before that, in 1781, and the first embassy from Britain to China took place in June 1793, when Lord MacCartney (1737-1806) was granted audience with the Qianlong Emperor (1711-1799, ruled after 1735). If we think about comparing novels as expressions of different cultures, it is worth remembering M acCartney’s expedition came one year after the posthumous publication of the Peking writer Cao Xueqin’s Honglou meng (The Dream of Red Mansions), certainly China’s greatest novel. In contrast to Dickens’s writings, which show an anxiety about China as foreign, which is the substance of this paper, Cao Xueqin in the eighteenth century shows no anxiety about what is foreign to China, and virtu ally ignores it.
