Segment of text with large ship below which is this motto: “Freely ye have received. Freely give.”

The Church Missionary Gleaner and the Multifaceted Portrayal of Colonial Christianity

Author: Cherrie Kwok (University of Virginia)

External Peer-Reviewer: Winter Jade Werner (Wheaton College)

Internal Peer-Reviewing Editor: Adrian S. Wisnicki (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)

Copyeditor: Dino Franco Felluga (Purdue University)

Date (publication and updates): 2023

BIPOC Voices in the Victorian Periodical Press

Author: Cherrie Kwok (University of Virginia)

External Peer-Reviewer: Winter Jade Werner (Wheaton College)

Internal Peer-Reviewing Editor: Adrian S. Wisnicki (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)

Copyeditor: Dino Franco Felluga (Purdue University)

  1. Overview
  2. Historical Context: The Rise of Translation and English Language Education
  3. Topics and Extracts for Further Research and/or Classroom Learning
    1. Missionary, Nation, and Empire
    2. Historical Amnesia and the Problem with “Peace”
    3. The Complications of Conversion
    4. Instrumentalization of Scripture
    5. Gender in Portrayals of Individuals and Groups of Color
  4. Conclusion
  5. Acknowledgements
  6. Citation Practices in this Essay
  7. Works Cited
  8. Page Citation
  9. Lead Image Details

Overview

This essay is part of the “BIPOC Voices from the Victorian Periodical Press” project published by One More Voice. The essay introduces researchers, instructors, and students to a set of materials from the Anglican-affiliated Church Missionary Society (CMS) periodical titled The Church Missionary Gleaner. Since many critics may be encountering the Gleaner for the first time, this essay avoids establishing an argument about these materials. Instead, the essay introduces and contextualizes a diverse set of extracts to help guide further research and/or classroom learning.

Established in 1841, the Gleaner was a two-penny magazine (i.e., an affordable, mass-distributed periodical for a wide public readership) that circulated updates to British readers about CMS work at the latter’s African, Middle Eastern, South American, South Asian, East Asian, and Oceanic outposts during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

While overviews already exist about the Gleaner, scholars have not sufficiently considered what role the voices of people of color play in the periodical. In addition to printing anecdotes, serialized essays, illustrations, letters, and obituaries that British missionaries wrote, the Gleaner included what they claimed were English-language excerpts and English translations of essays and letters written by Black, Indigenous, or other people of color that British missionaries had converted. It is tempting to presume that the Gleaner therefore contains the authentic and intact voices of these writers. Indeed, the CMS wanted their readers to believe this.

However, rather than treating the converted people of color in the periodical as authentic reflections of missionary encounters, this essay takes a more nuanced approach in examining how the Gleaner positions the voices of converted people of color when portraying the value of CMS missionary work – a portrayal that was in large part colonialist and English-centric. The approach builds on the fact that any consideration of the voices of people of color in the Gleaner must acknowledge that the periodical and the CMS were part of what Winter Jade Werner (2020, 14) has described as the larger “modern missionary movement” in the nineteenth-century – a phenomenon whereby many different Christian denominations worked together to execute a “providential plan to achieve global Christianity.”

In the process, this essay aligns with the recent scholarly turn toward examining missionary periodical materials as purposefully and deliberately designed cultural artifacts and propagandistic materials in their own right – a point that Susan Thorne (1999), Elizabeth Elbourne (2002), and Lindsey Maxwell (2020) have made about other nineteenth- and twentieth-century missionary periodicals.

Of course, critics like Norman Etherington (2005, 3) have already cautioned readers to resist making an “easy link between missionaries and Empire” since many missions either worked in places that never came under imperial control or, in New Zealand, South Africa, and other such places resisted colonization. Recent scholarship by Hilary M. Carey (2011), Janet Wootton (2022), and others has continued to re-examine the relationship between missionaries and imperialism. This work is part of a larger critical push today to recognize the complexity of this relationship.

With respect to the Gleaner, the investment in crafting a public image means that the periodical’s editors often portrayed missionary work in ways that did tie it more closely to imperialism and English jingoism. That strategy helped the periodical to connect with the public and raise popular support. This was especially important because the CMS itself was a voluntary society that had no substantial standing in the Church of England and often relied on direct donations from the British public to function. Periodicals like the Gleaner thus sometimes became involved in a public extension of the era’s cultural imperialism.

Historical Context: The Rise of Translation and English Language Education

This section provides some historical context for understanding the rest of the essay’s subsections about pieces in the Gleaner that include voices of color and offers suggestions for how instructors might use these pieces (and others like them) when teaching the relevant materials gathered by the “BIPOC Voices” project.

Critical discussions of the Gleaner typically do not make strong distinctions between British missionary writers and the voices of converted writers of color. Yet the voices of the latter appeared in a periodical like the Gleaner for reasons that differ their British counterparts. Of particular note was the rise of translation and English language education in the colonies. This section outlines this history and explores how it laid the foundations for the Gleaner’s inclusion of voices from people of color.

Understanding how and why translation and English language education in the colonies arose in the nineteenth century entails returning to events in the fields of theology and philology in the eighteenth century. Critics like Maurice Olender (1992) have already demonstrated how European philologists in the era, such as William Jones (who discovered apparent linguistic affinities between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin), formed part of the western world’s larger investment in claiming a link between European languages and eastern ones.

This theorized link served an important purpose because in the centuries leading up to Jones’s work, theologists and philologists became preoccupied with discerning what language Adam, Eve, God, and the serpent spoke in Eden in order to discover humanity’s secret primordial tongue and corresponding birthplace. Some philologists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thought that this tongue was Hebrew, while Jones and others in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries argued that this tongue was Sanskrit. The argument was important because Jones had also claimed that Sanskrit bore affinities to Greek and Latin. This line of reasoning became part of a larger theory – the “Indo-European hypothesis,” which proposed that all languages shared a common ancestor. For the purposes of this essay, the most important takeaway is that the perceived affinities between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin meant that scholars at the time could go on to claim that if the primordial tongue was Sanskrit, then by extension it was also European due to the presumed linguistic affinities between these three languages.

Such developments sought to position Europeans closer to God and set the stage for a specific type of translation that subsequently proliferated in the colonies. If eastern and western languages were indeed linked, the general logic ran, then other cultures and their texts simply represented variations of one another, and translation – understood as a neutral act – could then make them transparent to each other.

The obvious problem, however, was that translations in the nineteenth century often served imperial interests. Siraj Ahmed (2018) has explained, for example, how the East India Company (EIC) learned India’s sacred languages – Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit – in order to translate, edit, and print specific Islamic and Hindu manuscripts that the EIC wanted to use to govern the colony. The EIC delegitimized Islam and Hinduism’s diversity and fluidity of meanings by translating, editing, and authorizing specific iterations of these texts that best served the EIC’s own ends.

At the same time, the process of translating texts from languages spoken in the colonies into English, and the general belief that translations presented more or less transparent windows into other cultures, offered readers at home the opportunity to read and evaluate these texts. For example, politicians who had no knowledge of Sanskrit or Arabic, such as Thomas Babington Macaulay (the nephew of a CMS founder, Thomas Babington), read translations of texts in those languages and concluded that western literatures were of superior quality. This led Macaulay ([1835] 1919) to propose that the colonies must receive English language education and adopt Britain’s aesthetic values in his infamous piece, “A Minute on Indian Education.”

While the EIC was narrowing the diversity and meanings of religious texts and politicians such as Macaulay were devaluing non-English languages, English missionaries were promoting the significance of their own scriptures. This involved translating English books that showcased Christian values to convert those people of color in the colonies. Isabel Hofmeyr (2004, 17-18), for example, has carefully traced how English protestant missionaries translated and circulated John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress ([1678] 1856) in Africa, while often construing or fetishizing excerpts from the translated book as “magical” religious objects to facilitate conversion.

Scholars can most usefully understand the voices of color in the Gleaner against this history, which complicates the periodical’s implicit claim that these voices are straightforwardly authentic, or that conversion was a natural (rather than coerced) process. Additional critical resources such as Padma Rangarajan’s (2014) work on translation and exoticism in nineteenth century British India as well as the historical timeline (2022) published by Adam Matthew Digital help to bring these contexts and issues to the fore.

Topics and Extracts for Further Research and/or Classroom Learning

Missionary, Nation, and Empire

The goal of this section is to identify starting points for further research or teaching about the ways that missionaries from organizations like the CMS adapted imperial images and metaphors to portray their missionary work to their readers.

One might examine, for example, how the Gleaner borrows the image of the beehive, which was commonly used to represent both the Queen and the British empire in the nineteenth century. Such use appears in an anonymous report from CMS’s South African post titled “The Missionary Bee-Hive” (Anonymous and Anonymous [1874] 2022), which can be linked to George Cruikshank’s famous etching “The British Beehive” (1867).

“The Missionary Bee-Hive” (Anonymous and Anonymous [1874] 2022) illustrates how the CMS’s Good Hope Parsonage takes the busy work of beehives as its inspiration. One might consider investigating how the report imitates and reinvents the same beehive metaphor that George Cruikshank famously used to illustrate Britain’s social classes and economic productivity in “The British Beehive,” then ask why this reinvention matters.

The report also describes how the parsonage’s scrapbooks preserve photographs and maps about different geographical regions, thus providing an opportunity to discuss how these activities illustrate what Edward Said (1979) describes as the transformation of the colonies into a subject of study.

The report concludes with a quotation from what the Gleaner claims is “a little negro boy.” This boy wants English schoolboys to know that “[i]f I be a good boy, master will give me something like a little book and other things which Church Missionary Society sent, for master make [sic] he must give all school-boys and school-girls” (Anonymous and Anonymous [1874] 2022). This passage offers an ideal opportunity to explore why it is important for the Gleaner to portray its work through a Black child who describes the relationship between missionaries and children of color using master-servant diction. One might consider how the Gleaner extended the long-standing missionary metaphor of the “family of mankind,” a subject that Esme Cleall (2012) has explored at length.

Historical Amnesia and the Problem with “Peace”

This section focuses on how the Gleaner strategically omits historical events related to settler colonialism in order to portray CMS missionary work as a harbinger of peace in conflicts between different colonized communities. The section draws on letters written by two Māori rangatiras, Reweti Maika and David Taiwanga, that were printed in a single piece, “To The Elders of the Church” (Anonymous, David Taiwanga, and Reweti Maika [1850] 2022), a report from the CMS outpost in Aotearoa (New Zealand). (Note: While this essay describes Maika and Taiwanga as rangatiras, the lack of historical evidence about these figures means that it cannot be established with certainty whether they really were the rangatiras of their Christian-converted iwi, or whether the report’s writer was attempting to add an “exotic” edge to the piece.) The letters as a whole and the report provide a starting point for a focused case study that examines how periodicals function as cultural objects shaped according to certain ideologies, rather than as objective historical records.

The two public-facing letters that Maika and Taiwanga purportedly wrote focus on the apparent good fortune and harmony that Jesus Christ bestowed on their respective communities. The CMS solicited these letters from its outposts in advance of the Jubilee.

Maika and Taiwanga’s letters appear after an anecdote from a British CMS missionary, M. Davis, to which neither of the letters refers. The anecdote concerns young men in Maika’s community who wanted to “[take] possession of some rich land in the neighborhood” from another rangatira, as Davis discovered when visiting the outpost (Anonymous, David Taiwanga, and Reweti Maika [1850] 2022). Davis claims that Maika appeased the angered rangatira by framing the incident as a “device of the enemy to hinder him in his Christian course” and suggested that he should “give up the land” (Anonymous, David Taiwanga, and Reweti Maika [1850] 2022). Appending Maika and Taiwanga’s letters after the anecdote reinforces to the reader that the positive demeanors of the rangatiras result not only from Christian conversion, but also from the social peace that the Christian gospels and Christianity more broadly supposedly enable.

How the report instrumentalizes Christian virtue to advance land possession offers an obvious opportunity for discussion. However, scholars should note that another more important point lies in the Gleaner conveniently eliding the fact that the inter-Māori conflicts in the region occurred during and after The Flagstaff War (1845-46). This war occurred between British settlers who established legal claims to the land despite not being engaged in colonizing it, and the Māori iwi who objected to this ruse. Generally speaking, the British established policies that unevenly impacted trade and economic growth for different Māori iwi, and the inter-Māori conflict began in part because those who benefited became British allies and those who did not rebelled.

Future scholarship might contextualize this Gleaner section alongside the first and only sustained study about the war (Buick 2011). It might also investigate the broader theme of the Gleaner’s reliance on strategic historical amnesia to protect the empire’s image and to bolster the Gleaner’s own reputation as a global peacemaker, in this case between the Māori iwi and British settlers who were once at war.

This Gleaner section also provides a strong starting point for broader investigations about the relationship between the CMS and Māori iwi more generally. Hirini Kaa has demonstrated how the Māori were able to take aspects of Christianity and adapt them to serve their own purposes in the nineteenth century. For instance, when the CMS translated the Book of Common Prayer into the reo Māori, the CMS translators “typically viewed the Māori language and culture as inherently inferior to the western world view” (Kaa 2020, ch. 5) and did not allow the Māori to participate in the translation process.

However, they were able to influence the process in informal ways. Early editions of the Rāwiri (the te reo Māori translation of the Book of Common Prayer), for instance, included daily prayers not for the British royal family but for other Māori rangatiras. This Gleaner section suggests that the CMS concealed the delicate ways that the Māori reshaped Christianity’s rituals and texts, and, instead, preferred to portray CMS work as a form of noblesse oblige when presenting missionary work back home to the British public.

The Complications of Conversion

This section focuses on a set of serialized narratives written by a Māori rangatira and converted Christian, Tamahama Te Rauparaha (Anonymous and Tamehana Te Rauparaha [1852a] 2022; [1852b] 2022; [1852c] 2022; [1852d] 2022; the first name has been Anglicized and should be “Tāmihama”), across four Gleaner issues from September to December 1852. These materials offer a starting point for further research or teaching about the way the Gleaner portrays religious conversion as a tool of colonial control and as a process that can, as Gauri Viswanathan (2006) has argued, open up space for colonized people to hold multiple religious and/or cultural affiliations. (Note: The previous section on the relationship between the Maori and the CMS concluded with the same line of inquiry, and it is possible that these two sections could be combined for a larger research project or teaching activity.)

Te Rauparaha makes multiple references about his regard for and emulation of the English. He describes events and developments like burning down Māori houses in order to build houses “like [the] English,” reorganizing the Māori family structure so that “only one family [lived] in one house” per the English style (Anonymous and Tamehana Te Rauparaha [1852a] 2022), establishing both English fashion and a new trading and economic system (Anonymous and Tamehana Te Rauparaha [1852b] 2022), loving the English (Anonymous and Tamehana Te Rauparaha [1852c] 2022), and reflecting on God prior to death through an English religious framework (Anonymous and Tamehana Te Rauparaha [1852d] 2022). Such references make it tempting to conceptualize Te Rauparaha’s narrative as an example of white brainwashing. However, Viswanathan’s (2006, 519) insight that, in some cases, “multiple affiliations [are] opened up by conversion [of a colonized person]” when a colonized person converts to a different religion and culture offers a more nuanced approach to Te Rauparaha’s predicament.

Viswanathan (2006) argues, in part, that converted colonized peoples often engage in a critique of precisely the new religion and culture, while their concurrent rejection of their initial religious and cultural community also allows the converts – in some cases – to reform and rejuvenate that community. She makes this argument by way of a Maharashtrian Brahmin convert to Christianity, Narayan Viman Tilak, who “assimilated [the] norms of Christian belief and conduct, [but] also sought to indigenize Christianity and make it compatible with Hinduism,” while also implicitly critiquing the alienating effects of British colonialism (Viswanathan 2006, 520).

Further scholarship could investigate how this crisscrossing dynamic of assimilation and dissent shapes narratives of the religious conversion of colonized people in the Gleaner. Scholars might also reflect on how this dynamic shifts once the missionary periodical’s investments in public image are considered. Although not writing explicitly about the CMS or the Gleaner, scholarship about religious conversion from Leela Gandhi (2006), Sebastian Lecourt (2018), Emily Madsen (2020), J. Barton Scott (2016), and Winter Jade Werner (2018) may provide some useful frameworks for pursuing this line of inquiry.

Instrumentalization of Scripture

This section focuses on how the Gleaner instrumentalizes Biblical scripture in “Not Far from the Kingdom of God” (Anonymous, [Vaughan], and Anonymous). How might one highlight issues about strategic scriptural reinterpretation and the re-framing of voices of color? These materials might serve as supplementary items for research or classroom activities about the role of translation in portrayals of missionary work.

“Not Far from the Kingdom of God” offers an opportunity to extend the focus on translation and the struggle for religious authority outlined in the prior section on “The Rise of Translation and English Language Education.” How did the CMS instrumentalize Biblical scripture for colonial ends? As the title suggests, the periodical piece focuses on a section in Mark (12:34) where Jesus conveys God’s most important commandments to his scribes, among them that one shall recognize that the “Lord our God is one Lord” (12:30) and that people should “love th[eir] neighbour[s] as th[em]sel[ves]” (12:31). After a scribe repeats these commandments, Jesus praises him, claiming that he, the scribe, is “not far from the kingdom of God” (12:34). Yet, the anonymous Gleaner author re-presents the biblical text in a way that vilifies colonized Muslims and Hindus in India. These Indian Muslims and Hindus, while spiritually allied with Christianity, hesitate to publicly convert in part because they do not feel they can “forsake [their] families and friends, nor give up [their] employments” (Anonymous, [Vaughan], and Anonymous).

The detailed list of reasons that the Indians provide (Anonymous, [Vaughan], and Anonymous) offers a fruitful site for further scholarship about the social and familial changes that the CMS’s version of Christian conversion entailed. Broadly speaking, however, the author’s frustration with these Indian “borderers” (Anonymous, [Vaughan], and Anonymous) exposes serious struggles over biblical exegesis within the CMS itself. The anonymous author disregards the reasons that these Indians provide and, instead, slams them for their cowardice. Ultimately, the author wants to draw firm distinctions between, on one side, Christian Britons and missionaries who are “not far” from God and, on the other, the Indians who are hesitant to publicly convert. In the process, the move distances the author from other CMS members who see the Indians, despite some shortcomings, as being “not far” from God as well.

The report is thus an opening for further research that considers how the EIC’s strategic translation and selective reinterpretation of eastern religious Hindu scriptures occurred alongside similarly convoluted and strategic biblical exegesis. Such exegeses, in turn, enabled Christian missionaries to establish new interpretations that would either accommodate or vilify the colonized people that the missionaries wanted to “save.”

Gender in Portrayals of Individuals and Groups of Color

This section focuses on the role that gender plays in the Gleaner’s portrayals of British and converted men, women, and families of color. Drawing on a report from a CMS outpost in India titled “Trials of Converts in India” (Anonymous and Jagadishwar Bhattachargya [1853] 2022), the section highlights how the Gleaner often portrayed women and children as inconvenient barriers to conversion. Scholars might approach such materials as a starting point for further work about constructions of masculinity and femininity that take portrayals of converted men and women of color into account.

Previous studies have generally focused on the issue only from the perspective of British missionary men and women. For example, Emily J. Manktelow (2015) shows how the Gleaner depicted the ways that British missionary men struggled to uphold the dual commitment to family and vocation that constituted missionary masculinity, and constructed Indian femininity as “fallen” in order to justify the importance of British missionary women’s labor, which often focused on “saving” these fallen women.

Yet the pieces identified by the “BIPOC Voices” project and attributed to converted men of color reveal that another dimension of missionary masculinity lies in its contempt for women and families of color, who were often portrayed as disappointing and irrational barriers to Christian conversion. This suggests that while the British missionary man was expected to balance his commitments to vocation and family, the CMS expected converted men of color to leave families or wives who did not believe in Christianity in order to prove their true devotion to God.

“Trials of Converts in India” (Anonymous and Jagadishwar Bhattachargya [1853] 2022) illustrates these themes. The article reprints a letter from Rev. Jagadishwar Bhattachargya, who describes the case of Shrinath Ghose’s conversion in India. When Ghose’s mother discovered that her son had visited the CMS compound and converted to Christianity, Bhattachargya indicates that the mother entered the compound and “flung herself upon his neck, and set up a most terrible howling. Her cries, her shrieks, the beating of her breast, and tearing her hair, drew floods of tears from the spectators” (Anonymous and Jagadishwar Bhattachargya [1853] 2022).

However, Bhattachargya shifts away from such animalistic descriptions when he describes how and why Ghose returns to his mother. On the one hand, Bhattachargya recasts Ghose’s return as a kidnapping and imprisonment orchestrated by Ghose’s mother, who is “wicked in intentions,” and notes that the mother is monitoring all Ghose’s activities and communications. Bhattachargya also indicates that his own notes to Ghose have not been delivered. Yet, on the other hand, Bhattachargya also admits that “no chains [have been] put on [Ghose]” and closes by noting that Ghose – despite being monitored around the clock – has apparently managed to send word to him, Bhattachargya, that Ghose is “continuing firm in faith and bearing testimony to ‘the truth as it is in Jesus’ in the midst of all his trials” (Anonymous and Jagadishwar Bhattachargya [1853] 2022). This communication appears to happen even though Ghose is under surveillance and has never received any of Bhattachargya’s notes in the first place.

Throughout this narrative, Bhattachargya thus continually frames the mother as the reason why Ghose’s conversion was incomplete. In doing so, Bhattachargya portrays the mother as irrational and overemotional. Yet, concurrently, Bhattachargya represents her as a clever, wily, and deceptive woman with “such deep and consummate subtlety as to deceive the most wary and experienced” (Anonymous and Jagadishwar Bhattachargya [1853] 2022). Bhattachargya’s portrayals of women as being deceptive are part of a typical strain of patriarchal thinking. However, such portrayals also allow Bhattachargya to craft a contrasting veil of innocence for himself and Ghose, the sort of veil usually associated with femininity.

In the process, Bhattachargya’s letter provides an instance of the representation of heroic and adventurous missionary activity eschewing “muscular, imperial Christianity” (Van der Veer 2006, 535). After all, not only does Bhattachargya (Anonymous and Jagadishwar Bhattachargya [1853] 2022) portray Ghose as a helpless “youth of twenty [who] fell into [his mother’s] snare,” but Bhattachargya also claims that it is on the advice of his (Bhattachargya’s) European friends that he abandons “the rescue” of Ghose and any legal measures to retrieve him and so leaves the matter up to God instead.

“Trials of Converts in India” also suggests that broader lines of inquiry about the way converted men of color portrayed women of color in the Gleaner would make for rich and important scholarship. Such scholarship might reveal how understandings about the constructions of masculinity and femininity in the periodical shift dramatically when the voices and portrayals of people of color come into consideration.

Conclusion

Recent calls to “undiscipline” the whiteness that shapes Victorianist scholarship and teaching has provoked a renewed turn toward the archive to discover what people of color thought, said, and wrote (Chatterjee, Christoff, and Wong 2020). The means by which the Gleaner portrays voices of color indicates, however, that identifying, documenting, and engaging with such voices in the British imperial and colonial archives – a goal that is not only central to the “BIPOC Voices” project, but also to One More Voice – is never a straightforward endeavor. In the Gleaner’s case, readers encounter a periodical that preserves voices of color in many instances, but also uses those voices in service of specific religious and political agendas.

These tensions between preservation and exploitation epitomize the larger challenges that mark the on-going engagement of Victorian Studies with the nineteenth-century archive as a whole – from the archive’s catalogs and maps to its diaries, letters, ledgers, journals, and photographs. As Saidiya Hartman (2008) has already shown so well, many of these documents are not neutral; they are shaped, like the Gleaner’s, through a particular gaze and agenda. This knowledge should provoke critics to expand or refine their potential questions for the archive – questions that must acknowledge both the archive’s ability to preserve pieces of the historical past and the limits that shape how much those pieces tell us about what “really” happened.

There have, and will continue to be, instances where the archive can deliver beautifully on the desires of critics through, say, an overlooked letter, an understudied diary, or a forgotten novel. However, in the instances where the archive leaves the desires of critics unfulfilled or only half fulfilled – as in the case of problematic texts recovered by the “BIPOC Voices” project – critics will have to learn how to ask new questions. Whose hand wrote this, and under what conditions? Can we trust the words that are written? What is the role of such trust when we encounter materials that promise to offer authentic voices, but whose very words we cannot trust? Is there any possibility of using these materials to recover perspectives previously excluded from accounts of history? This essay has not sought to answer such questions, but has indicated key, representative texts where critics might start to grapple with these questions.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Adrian Wisnicki for his careful and tireless help on this article, and for inviting me to contribute to this important project. I am also indebted to Ryan Fong for his generous assistance, to Winter Jade Werner for her detailed and encouraging peer-review, and Dino Felluga for his meticulous copyedits.

Citation Practices in this Essay

The project team for “BIPOC Voices” encountered a variety of non-European names in the project's periodical pieces for which it proved difficult to determine what qualified as the forename and surname or if such a distinction was even appropriate for the given cultural context. The project's limited scope prevented full investigation of each case. As a result, the team decided that referencing of the project's primary texts in both in-text citations and “Works Cited” lists would use the full name of each primary text contributor – non-European and European – in the order given in the text.

The result is that all project materials consistently follow two citation practices. For periodical piece contributors, the project materials use full names in the original order for all individuals for citation purposes. For the authors of other primary and secondary texts, the project materials default to using only surnames for in-text citations and to following the convention of "surname, forename" in “Works Cited” lists. (See Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom's lesson plans on “Transimperial Networks and East Asia” for a comparable use case.)

Works Cited

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Anonymous, David Taiwanga, and Reweti Maika. (1850) 2022. “New Zealand.” In One More Voice: BIPOC Voices in the Victorian Periodical Press, edited by Cassie Fletcher, Jocelyn Spoor, and Kenneth C. Crowell, solidarity edition.

Anonymous, [Vaughan], and Anonymous. (1875) 2022. “‘Not Far from the Kingdom of God.’” In One More Voice: BIPOC Voices in the Victorian Periodical Press, edited by Cassie Fletcher and Kenneth C. Crowell, solidarity edition.

Anonymous, and Anonymous. (1874) 2022. “The Missionary Bee-Hive.” In One More Voice: BIPOC Voices in the Victorian Periodical Press, edited by Cassie Fletcher and Kenneth C. Crowell, solidarity edition.

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Anonymous, and Tamehana Te Rauparaha. (1852d) 2022. “Tamahana Te Rauparaha.” In One More Voice: BIPOC Voices in the Victorian Periodical Press, edited by Cassie Fletcher, Jocelyn Spoor, and Kenneth C. Crowell, solidarity edition.

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