Edkins’s death at 81, in 1905, produced four obituaries, one in each of the major Chinese Studies journals of his day.[20] The overriding impression from them is of an old campaigner who had died in harness, a figure notable a generation or two before who continued to plough his furrow with energy but whose best work had been produced some time earlier. There is, in one at least, the snide tone of a younger competitor keen to prick the bubble of what he evidently saw as an overblown reputation.
Edkins was born in Nailsworth, near Stroud, in Gloucestershire, on December 19, 1823. The son of a Congregational minister who also ran the school where Edkins was first educated, he later entered Coward College for theological training. He graduated in arts from the University of London and was ordained in 1847 at the age of 24 in the Stepney Meeting House, London, a Congregational institution. On gaining ordination, he left England for China under the auspices of the London Missionary Society, arriving in Hong Kong in July 1848 and proceeding to Shanghai soon after. In his first correspondence with the LMS in London in 1848 Edkins started to plead for a Miss Phillips to join him in China. These pleas continued for almost two years, and were evidently never acceded to, as he finally had to let the London office know that his engagement had terminated.[21] His colleagues at Shanghai included Medhurst, William Lockhart, a notable medical missionary with whom he would later travel to Beijing, and Alexander Wylie. With Wylie, in 1857, he formed the Shanghai Literary and Debating Society that later became the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of North China. In 1858 he left for England in order to marry his wife, Jane (nee Stobbs, 1838–61), a Presbyterian minister’s daughter from Orkney. Returning the following year, in 1860 he made several famous visits to the leaders of the Taiping Rebellion in Nanjing and Suzhou, not far up the Yangtse from Shanghai.
After the opening of more treaty ports after the Second Opium War, in 1860 Edkins moved to Yantai in Shandong, then to Tianjin in 1861 and finally in May 1863 to live permanently in Beijing, where he spent nearly 30 years. Jane Edkins had died of dysentery in 1861 at the age of 23 but some of her letters home were published posthumously under the title Chinese Scenes and People, with Notices of Christian Missions and Missionary Life in a Series of Letters from Various Parts of China. In one of her letters to Edkins’s brother she wrote endearingly:
You ask me to tell you about your brother. He is very well indeed, and is busy as a bee. We breakfast every morning at eight, and have prayers before. He spends the morning at home studying, and in the after part of the day he is in the city preaching, and otherwise attending to the work of the Mission. I have got his study all in nice order, and there he is in his glory. From nine till one each day you might take a peep in and find him excogitating, diving deeper and deeper into the mysteries of Buddhism and Confucianism. Seated thus by his study table he puts me in mind of that picture, "As Happy as a King," for he looks quite that, with all his Chinese books in notable confusion beside him.[22]
In Beijing, Edkins spent much of his time preaching in the hospital Lockhart had established and otherwise going about mission business in Beijing and surrounds. In 1862 he requested that a Miss White be sent to marry him and she arrived early the following year. They married on May 9, 1863.[23] The second Mrs Edkins subsequently founded a school for girls and gave birth to three daughters. The family went to England in 1873, when Edkins was honoured in 1875 with a doctorate in divinity from Edinburgh University. They subsequently returned to Beijing in 1876, but his wife died the next year from breast cancer — two of their children had already died and, two years later, the third girl was buried next to her mother and two sisters.[24]
Relations between Edkins and some younger missionaries from the LMS stationed in Beijing became strained by the late 1870s. In particular, it would appear that Edkins was viewed as being too generous to Chinese converts with the mission’s funds. His younger colleagues were rather more suspicious than Edkins of the motivations of new converts who were given to “backsliding” as it was called. Ultimately, as Box wrote in his obituary: “In 1880 he resigned his connection with the L.M.S., not through any lack of interest in mission work, for until his death he was devoted to the cause of missions, but through difference of opinion with his colleagues as to methods of mission work.”
There was, however, another side to this story revealed in his unpublished correspondence. For the second time in his life, head office of the LMS appears to have refused Edkins’s request to get married — this time to an expatriate German missionary by the name of Miss Johanna Schmidt.[25] After resigning from the LMS, Edkins married Miss Schmidt and began working for the Inspector-General of Imperial Maritime Customs while still active in the life of the church. About 1890 they moved to Shanghai, where they stayed until his death. Little is known about the third Mrs Edkins, including how long she stayed in China, and when and where she died. Box relates Edkins’s passing in a superb description of the “good death”:
As she [Johanna] sat by his bedside she saw his eyes fixed upward and his face suffused with a strange light. His lips moved, and presently she heard him murmur, “Wonderful! Wonderful!” She asked him what he saw, and he replied, “I cannot tell you, but you will know what it means tomorrow!” It was on the morrow he passed through the gates of death into “the Glory Land”, of which he evidently had a vision.[26]
Throughout his time as a missionary, Edkins was also writing. His scholarly output is extraordinary in its sheer volume, its range and its quality. Henri Cordier’s obituary is, in reality, a catalogue of Edkins’s works and incomplete though it is, it lists more than 140 books and learned articles. His best-known work today, though it is by no means as well-known as it ought to be, is his Chinese Buddhism: a Volume of Sketches, Historical, Descriptive and Critical from 1880.[27] However, it is clear that, as Bushell wrote in his obituary, “China’s Place in Philology was probably the book nearest the author’s heart”.[28] But he continues:
…the general consensus of opinion is that it hardly suffices to prove his somewhat daring thesis of the common origin of the languages of Europe and Asia. Dr Edkins was always original. His reading of Chinese literature was most extensive, and the words of the other languages cited in the text were actually taken down from the mouths of Tibetans, Koreans, Manchus, and Mongols, yet the theme was almost too discursive even for his power of concentration.
Others, too, marvelled at his proficiency in languages; thus Box: “His knowledge of languages was most extensive — English, German, French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Assyrian, Persian, Sanscrit, Tamil, Chinese (in most of its dialects), the Miao dialects (…), Japanese, Manchu, Corean, Thibetan, Mongolian and others.”
The anonymous obituarist in the Journal of the China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society was more caustic:
It is only fair to say that in his philological theories Dr Edkins stood almost alone, and that very little sympathy, sometimes even very little patience, was shown to them by other scholars whose study of the Chinese language itself had perhaps been more thorough than that of Dr Edkins. However, it must be said that in combining a knowledge of Eastern languages — of Hebrew, Persian and Sanskrit — with a knowledge of the modern languages of Europe, Dr Edkins was perhaps the foremost of his generation. The vast scope of his language studies made them all more or less superficial, while at the same time it made it possible for him to make philological comparisons which would have been impossible to anyone else.[29]
In these comments it is possible to see the emergence of one style of scholarship, and the concomitant decline in another, which has ruled much of humanities scholarship to this day. Edkins was one of the last generation, in Chinese Studies at least, of the grand comparativists. Partly as a result of the decline in the kind of broad linguistic training he received, and partly because of the growth in university departments concentrating on a single subject (the Chairs in Chinese Studies at Oxford and Cambridge date to 1876 and 1888 respectively), scholars of later generations have ploughed much narrower, but much deeper.