ABSTRACT
Samuel Mossman's The Mandarin's Daughter: A Story of the Great Taiping Rebellion, and Gordon's 'Ever-Victorious Army' was one of the few Victorian novels that featured the Taiping Rebellion. As The Times review suggests, although the book is for boys, older readers would be able to glean information about the Taiping Rebellion from it. In addition to Gordon, Mossman also incorporated the American adventurer Henry Burgevine, the Chinese statesman Li Hongzhang, and other key figures of the Rebellion into the story. Little about the Rebellion appeared in contemporary children's texts, perhaps because it was regarded as a civil war and because more attention was paid to the American Civil War at the time. The Taiping Rebellion ended not long after Nanjing was captured in 1864. The successful suppression of the Taiping Rebellion is characterized as 'one of the most brilliant campaigns of modern warfare in the far East, in which British valour and generalship maintained its supremacy in the field'.
