Talk:Life in Corea
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How the book was read
The book was read in the Internet Archive scan lifeincorea00carl_0 (1888 London and New York issue), through its Wikimedia Commons copy, File:Life in Corea (IA lifeincorea00carl 0).pdf (348 PDF pages). The text layer was searched and every passage cited in the article was read in context, with page numbers taken from the running heads. From p. 11 to p. 317 the printed page is the PDF page less 24. Dates on the northern journey come from the day headings in the text and from the appendix itinerary (pp. 315–317).
- Hemp passages. A search for hemp and hempen finds them on pp. 38, 145, 168, 184, 212, 243, 257, 268, 269 and 277. All concern the crop, its cloth or mourning dress. Searches for hashish, bhang, ganja, opium, intoxicant, narcotic and cannabis find nothing. The article describes hemp as a fibre plant only.
- Passages not used. At Wi-ju (p. 203) Carles wrote that English shirtings were inferior to native goods "on account of the superiority of the Corean fibre". The fibre is not named, so the passage is not used. On p. 278 the text layer reads "fish, grass, cloth, and hides" among Gensan's exports; whether the original prints grass-cloth was not checked on the page image, so it is not used.
- The cloth tax at Ham-heung. "Probably hempen cloth" is Carles's own guess about a tax list he read on a wall (p. 268). The article quotes it as his.
- Preface date. The text layer of p. vii garbles the month of the preface; the year 1887 and the place (the consulate-general at Shanghai) are clear.
Dates of the northern journey
The appendix itinerary runs from 27 September to 8 November 1884 (pp. 315–317). Brother Anthony's page on Carles gives 29 September to 7 November. The article follows the book.
Reviews and later readings
- Nature, 19 April 1888, vol. 37, no. 964, pp. 581–582 (DOI 10.1038/037581a0). Unsigned. Only the opening of the notice, shown on the publisher's page, was read. The article uses that part alone.
- The Spectator, 15 September 1888, p. 21, "Corea". Read in the magazine's online archive. The archive's text of the footnote misreads the author as "W. B. Carlini" and the body has "Caries" for Carles, both OCR errors. The review's comparisons of Korea with Ireland and with the Middle Ages are the reviewer's and are attributed in the article.
- 2016 study in 문화역사지리 28 (2): 34–50. Only the Korean and English abstracts were read, on the Korea University repository and publisher listings. The article cites only what the abstracts say: the share of economic information and the reading of Carles's survey within British commercial imperialism and the treaty of 1883. The study calls the book 『조선풍물지(Life in Corea)』; whether a Korean translation was published under that title was not confirmed, so none is named.
- Brother Anthony (An Sonjae), "William Richard Carles and Korea". His statements that the book was among the first on Korea based wholly on personal experience, and the first book-length account from an extended residence apart from Lowell's, are attributed to him. He also says the book was reissued in 1894. That edition was not checked against a library catalogue, so the article does not mention it.
What the book does not connect
Life in Corea does not mention the hemp fibre and cloth Carles gave to Kew in November 1885 (Textile (Kew EBC 43417)), or the Peiho sheet Carles 195 (1885). The article lists both under See also without linking them to any passage.