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Victorian Mentality

During the Victorian Age, the British Empire was at its strongest. England seemed to be the most powerful country in the world, both politically and militarily. Overcrowding became a problem in this prospering country and soon British subjects were optimistic about settling in the new world. When a wave of British immigrants arrived in Victoria in the early years of the age, they brought with them an attitude that they were superior to those already in the colony and to other European and non-European immigrants.

The Chinese settlers in Victoria were mostly from the southern province of Guangdong in China.¹ There, they lived in agrarian communities based on hard-work and kinship.² Kinship not only included family ties, but also community ties. The Chinese emigrants that left the province took with them their native cultural structure and felt strongly about preserving it in the colony.³ This meant that the Chinese colonists had little desire to join the European culture that had already established itself in British Columbia and Victoria.

Despite their reclusiveness, the Chinese people of Victoria were positively recognized for their perseverance and recognized as a “much-enduring and industrious race.”⁴ They were smart with their money, accumulating more savings than white workers each year even with less wages.⁵ As one author wrote in his book in 1872:

It is the fashion on the Pacific Coast to abuse and ill-treat the Chinaman in every possible way; and I really must tell my friends the Americans that in this respect they show an illiberal spirit utterly unworthy of them. The Chinese are really, as citizens, most desirable members of a community; they are hard-working, sober, and law-abiding - three scarce qualities among people in their station.⁶

Nontheless, Victorians continued to see the Chinese as lower on the social scale than themselves.

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Endnotes

1.Edgar Wickberg, ed. From China to Canada: A History of the Chinese Communities in Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd, 1982), 7.

2.Edgar Wickberg, From China to Canada, 10.

3.Edgar Wickberg, From China to Canada, 10.

4.Michael S. Cross, The Workingman in the Nineteenth Century(Toronto: Oxford University Press,1974), 66. The quote is from the book Very Far West Indeed:A Few Rough Experiences on the North-West Pacific Coast by a man named R. Byron Johnson and was published by London, Sampson, Low, Marston, Lowe, & Searle in 1872. 5.Irene Genevieve Maire Zaffaroni, "The Great Chain of Being: Racism and Imperialism in Colonial Victoria, 1858-1871" (MA Thesis, University of Victoria,1984), 162.6.Michael S. Cross, The Workingman in the Nineteenth Century, 65.