In the January 1858 issue of Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, a broadly titled survey entitled ‘Woman and Womankind’ sketches a picture of the conditions, abilities, and limitations of Englishwomen in the century's middle decade. After several opening pages set in dreary ballrooms, the author decides to ‘[…] call a fact in illustration, and remove our scene to China’; an apparently advisable detour given that ‘[d]uring the last two years, China and the Chinese have been peculiarly brought before our notice, and thoughts of China have been floating through our minds’. As a part of the subsequent catalogue of depredations of female existence in China, the author takes care to emphasize that ‘[t]he crippled feet of the highclass Chinese women typifies their mental condition’, a double crippling that supports the article's ultimate conclusion: ‘The women of China, and the women of England, occupy positions far removed. The former need commiseration, for their's [sic] is a helpless state of physical and moral dependence,’ while the women of England, at least the middle and upper classes, ‘are free’ and yet still insist on choosing the metaphorical crippling of a ‘vapid mind and useless life’ of their own volition. Far from the domestic social scene that began the piece, the reader finds herself concluding the article with China, and China's crippling negative difference, as the lasting example to direct her understanding of British women's self-determination.

This was neither a new nor a distinctive position for a reader of midcentury periodicals to be in. Each of the assumptions reviewed in Tait’s are common to writings of the era – that Chinese bound feet constituted a mental as well as physical disability, that such disability was externally imposed, and could, theoretically at least, also be reversed by external means, and, most of all for the purposes of this essay, that ‘thoughts of China’ were floating, ungrounded, through the minds of British periodical readers as a shaping condition of their own self-conception. For China had been an object of interest in periodical culture since the beginning of the First Opium War.