CHICKEN SCRATCH:
An Examination of How the 18th-Century
British Viewed Chinese Script
(History of China 346)
Various authors have written on the topic of Chinese writing, and most have determined the characters illegible, nonsensical, and difficult to understand.
In Spectator 142 Steele writes, "Ned Puzzlepost had been ill-used by his writing master, and writ a sort of Chinese, or downright scrawlian: however, upon his buying a seal of my friend, he is so much improved by continual writing, that it is believed in a short time one may be able to read his letters, and find out the meaning, without guessing."
This insinuates that an alphabet in use long before the English language is as juvenile as young Ned first learning to write. This is a notion widely held after the decline of the chinoisie frenzy. That the nation of China was once an intelligent industrious child, but has fails to grow into its age. Once it had led the world in science, but by the close of the 18th-century the British thought China stagnant.
This article also serves as an advertisement, it has an economic motivation. Britain prided itself of the strength of its economic web stretching around the globe, and thought the more isolated economy of China less wealthy and weaker. The rational behind the ad is to convince consumers not to appear so impoverished as the Chinese, especially in the fine art in letter writing.
However the article takes an odd twist when the lad improves. "His pistols and fusses are so very good, that they are fit to be laid up among the finest china. Apparently the Chinese are still revered for the discovery of gun powder, and the fascination with Chinese merchandise abounds. While the British may grow disillusioned with the culture of china, any thing that can be bought and sold still has value.
Swift also takes an interest in the Chinese script. When Gulliver, of Gulliver's Travels, goes to the land of the Houyhnnm, where horses talk in a language of neighing, he goes out of his way to mention the Chinese language in a derogatory manner. He says, comparing the two languages, "I plainly observed, that their language expressed the passions very well, and the words might with little pains be resolved into an alphabet more easily than the Chinese." (Swift 218) Perhaps not so coincidentally Houyhnnmland lies not far off the coast of China in the middle of the South Seas. Swift may have China on the brain, but why, in a world of oral culture, (How could a horse hold a pen?--there is no written language) need Swift even mention a foreign written language? The comment is further inflammatory when one considers that in this story the horses have reason and the people, the Yahoos, are brutes. He is satirically saying that the Chinese language is devoid of meaning, significance and reason.