SOURCE: Lindeborg, Ruth H. “The ‘Asiatic’ and the Boundaries of Victorian Englishness.” Victorian Studies 37, no. 3 (spring 1994): 381-404.

In the following essay, Lindeborg examines the writings of Joseph Salter, a missionary to Africans and Asians in the ports of London, suggesting that Salter's memoirs of his missionary work reveal anxiety about the penetration of non-Europeans into English society as well as an early anthropological perspective.

Didn't dislike foreigners, for he never saw none. What was they?

—Ragged school pupil in London, late 1850s, Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1861)

Joseph Salter, a London City Missionary, begins his second memoir, The East in the West; or Work Among the Asiatics and Africans in London (1895), by invoking the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson as a model of missionary practice. Delving into London's “plague spots of Oriental vice” in the 1820s and 1830s, the Clarkson of Salter's description must marry the skills of...