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Peer Reviewed

My Dear Amelia: The Doty Letters from Amoy, Christian Parenthood, the Heathen Chinese, and the Missionary Enterprise

Ting Man Tsao, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY

Endnotes

1 This work was supported in part by a grant from The City University of New York PSC-CUNY Research Award Program and by a CUNY Fellowship Leave. Special thanks are also due to an anonymous reviewer for her/his useful suggestions.

2 For a contemporary controversy over the role of Christian ladies in the China field see the following interrelated articles: C.E. [Charlotte Elizabeth], “China, India, and the East,” Christian Lady’s Magazine 3 (1835): 540-42; Lydia, “China, India, and the East,” Christian Lady’s Magazine 6 (1836): 498-502; J.S., “China, India, and the East,” Christian Lady’s Magazine 7 (1837): 540-43. For some of the histories of American women missionaries in China see Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984); Eva Jane Price, China Journal 1889-1900: An American Missionary Family During the Boxer Rebellion: With the Letters and Diaries of Eva Jane Price and Her Family (New York: Scribner, 1989). 

3 For a list of American missionaries and their spouses in China during the mid-nineteenth century, see Rufus Anderson, Memorial Volume of the First 50 Years of the American Board of Commissioners For Foreign Missions, 4th ed (Boston: The Board, 1861) 414-32.

4 The historical literature on Christian missions in China is too voluminous to cite. For some classic studies see Paul A. Cohen, “Christian Missions and Their Impact to 1900,” The Cambridge History of China, ed. John K. Fairbank, vol. 10, pt. 1 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978) 543-90; John K. Fairbank, ed., The Missionary Enterprise in China and America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1974); Ellsworth C. Carlson, The Foochow Missionaries, 1847-1880 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1974). For a brief history of the Reformed Church’s missionary activities in China see Gerald F[rancis] De Jong, The Reformed Church in China, 1842-1951, Historical Series of the Reformed Church in America, No. 22 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, [1992]) .

5 For Elihu Doty and his family’s biographical information, I rely on: [Alexander Wylie], Memorials of Protestant Missionaries to the Chinese (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Press, 1867; Taipei, Taiwan: Cheng-Wen, 1967) 97-98; Ethan Allen Doty, The Doty-Doten Family in America (Brooklyn: [Published for the Author], 1897) 108-11; De Jong 17-43; “List of Protestant Missionaries to the Chinese,” Chinese Repository 20 (1851): 513-45; W[illiam] J[ohn] Pohlman, Letter to Rev. Dr. DeWitt, 8 October 1845, Chinese Repository 16 (1847): 175-77 .

6 E[lihu] Doty, Letter to Rev. Dr. DeWitt, 30 September 1845, Chinese Repository 16 (1847): 174-75 .

7 I am grateful to the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York, for their permission to publish transcripts and quotations from the Doty-Dubois Family Papers.

8 Henrietta Harrison, “A Penny for the Little Chinese: The French Holy Childhood Association in China, 1843-1951,” American Historical Review 133.1 (2008): 79.

9 Harrison 79.

10 For a discussion of evangelical Protestantism and family life in the United States see Sally K. Gallagher, Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003). For a history of evangelism, imperialism, and the gendered American missionary family in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries see Hunter, particularly chapters 5 and 6.

11 Jean R. Walton, “Elihu Doty’s Garden: New Brunswick, Borneo, and China,” Journal of New Jersey Postal History Society 32.4 (November 2004): 137-39.

12 Walton 138.

13 Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) 129-41.

14 Walton 137.

15 [Elihu Doty], Letter to John Dubois, 15 December 1847, Doty-Dubois Family Papers: Correspondence 1846-50, Personal [Misc.], Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York.

16 [Elihu Doty], Letter to Amelia Caroline [Doty-Dubois], 2 August 1848, Doty-Dubois Family Papers: Correspondence 1846-50, Personal [Misc.], Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York. This letter was written in blue ink on the front and back of thin paper of 5 5/16" x 8¼".

17 Mrs. E.A.L. Doty [Eleanor Augusta Smith], Letter to Mrs. John Dubois, 21 October 1848, Doty-Dubois Family Papers: Correspondence 1846-50, Personal [Misc.], Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York. This letter was written in blue ink on the front and back of thin paper of 8 3/8" x 10 13 /16".

18 [Elihu Doty], Letter to Amelia Caroline [Doty-Dubois], 16 August 1849, Doty-Dubois Family Papers: Correspondence 1846-50, Personal [Misc.], Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York. This letter was written in blue ink on the front and back of thin papers of 5 3/8" x 8 ½".

19 [Elihu Doty], Letter to Amelia Caroline [Doty-Dubois], 18 September 1850, Doty-Dubois Family Papers: Correspondence 1846-50, Personal [Misc.], Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York. This letter was written in black ink on the front and back of thin paper of 5¼" x 8 1/16".

20 [Elihu Doty], Letter to Amelia Caroline [Doty-Dubois], 21 January 1851, Doty-Dubois Family Papers: Correspondence 1851-60, Personal [Misc.], Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. This letter was written in black ink on the front and back of thin paper of 8 1/8" x 10½".

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