The Representation of Turkey and the Turks in Household Words and All the Year Round in the 1850s and early 1860s

• Published in: Dickens quarterly 2016-06, Vol.33 (2), p.125-142
• Main Author: BERBER, NEVAL
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 19th century; British & Irish literature; Dickens, Charles (1812-1870); English literature; Foreign policy; Households; Orientalism; Otherness; Power; Reforms; Said, Edward; Stereotypes
• ISSN: 0742-5473; 2169-5377; 2169-5377
• DOI: 10.1353/dqt.2016.0024

"Style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices," he argued, which formed the basis of texts dealing with the Orient, were the same which gave origin to the stereotypes by which the West consistently represented - and, indeed, invented - the Turk as savage, cruel and debauched, a figure devoid of moral values (21). [...]as Nedret Kuran Burçoglu observed in 1999, even as stereotypes of the Turks circulated among the Western-Europeans from the eleventhcentury, acquiring different forms in the process, they became inseparable from the prevalent Orientalist discourse associated with expansive Western-European policy (196). Even the name "Turk," formerly a synonym for a "barbarian," had begun to change, so much so, he reported, that in Turkey "no man likes to be called a Turk; he is an Ottoman; a Turk in his eyes is a barbarian" {HW9: 57). [...]it will be seen that the Turk (for we must still call him so) born in the present time, does not enter upon a scene quite so barbarous as that upon which his grandfather played a part" {HW9: 57). [...]cramp a Moslem in Paris boots till corns spring out all over him, pinch his brown fists in Jouvin's white kid gloves, squeeze him in invisible green Yorkshire cloth, scent him, eye-glass him, grease him, uniform him as you like, the Turk will still remain the unimprovable Chinaman of the world, his religion a dangerous lie, his polygamy detestable, every country he governs a dunghill or a desert. [...]when economic and political interests prompted the English to protect the Ottoman Empire, this development contributed to modify the language used to describe Turkey and its inhabitants.