ABSTRACT
W. M. Graydon's The Perils of Pekin, which relates the adventures of two American boys during the Boxer Uprising, was one of the works that contributed to 'The Flood of Books about China' that the North China Herald reported on in 1904. The review reveals that authors' who wanted to write about China could no longer assume readers lacked knowledge of the country, for it was no longer the 'little-known Celestial Kingdom' that Dalton introduced to readers in the mid-nineteenth century. Historians and novelists have documented the influence which Henty and Gilson's books on China had on their lives. The chapter considers some early Boxer narratives to provide a point of comparison for how images of the event changed over the decade between 1899, when news of the Boxers first reached Britain, and 1909, when Gilson's novel was published eight years after the signing of the Boxer Protocol.
