In his essays “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” and “To My Missionary Critics,” published in the North American Review for February and April 1901, respectively, Mark Twain expressly disparaged foreign missions in China in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion. He was particularly critical of William Scott Ament (1851–1909), who as a longtime agent of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) had extorted reparations from Chinese villages where Christians had been killed or their property destroyed. Ament's actions, Twain averred in the first of these two essays, consigned “pauper peasants” and their families “to inevitable starvation and lingering death” and “concrete a blasphemy so hideous and so colossal that, without doubt, its mate is not findable in the history of this or of any other age.”1 In the second essay, rather than retract his allegations, Twain doubled down on them, repeating that Ament was guilty...
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Research Article|
April 01 2022
A Note on Mark Twain and Chinese Missions
American Literary Realism (2022) 54 (3): 275–276.
Citation
Gary Scharnhorst, Leslie Diane Myrick; A Note on Mark Twain and Chinese Missions. American Literary Realism 1 April 2022; 54 (3): 275–276. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/19405103.54.3.06
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