"Such a Sight You Never Saw": Harriett Low's Picturesque Language and the Romance of the Opium Trade

Abstract

To describe the opium trade in the decade before the First Opium War, early Americans adapted British models of literary romance and realism that included a style of landscape description known as the picturesque. In 1829, the nineteen-year-old Harriett Low from Salem, Massachusetts, accompanied her aunt and uncle to Macau. With her uncle William Low serving as a partner in the American trading firm of Russell & Company, Harriett not only socialized with influential merchants and missionaries from England and the United States, but also witnessed first-hand the opium trade that was a crucial commodity in building the family fortunes of the first American millionaires. During her three years in residence, Harriett wrote extensive journals that she mailed back to her sister in Brooklyn, New York, in which she recorded her daily habits, conversations, and reading practices as a young, self-consciously American woman in China. Today, her journals are a fascinating window into the period’s global network of letters. Low did not simply record what she saw around her, from the Portuguese legacies of faded empire to the manners and habits of Chinese people. She self-consciously used picturesque language to communicate her impressions of the physical and cultural landscape, thereby recognizing and rationalizing her family and friends’ participation in the opium trade of the early 1830s. Her style of writing also suggests more general anxieties about the gender roles that she was expected to negotiate as she moved across networks of trade from Massachusetts to Canton, Cape Town to London.