A recent query about Malays in English literature on the discussion list Victoria by Muhammad Irfan Zamzami, a graduate student at Arizona State University, produced the following suggestions by more than a half dozen readers from three countries. Thanks to Alexander Bubb of the University of Roehampton, Ross Forman of the University of Warwick, Sean Grass of the Rochester Institute of Technology, Simon Avery of the University of Westminster, Robert Morrison of Queen’s University, and Winter Jade Werner of Wheaton College— George P. Landow .
Bibliography of Primary Works
Bird, Isabella. The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither. (1883). Available on Project Gutenberg and in a modern Cambridge University Press edition.
Clifford, Hugh. Bush-whacking and Other Asiatic Tales and Memories. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1901.
Sir Hugh Charles Clifford, GCMG, GBE (1866-1941) served as governor of the Straits Colonies at the close of his career. According to Britannica, he arrived at the age of 17 and “began a close association of more than 20 years with the Malay people and their lives. Like all district administrators of the time, he learned the language and spent long periods living in remote parts of the country. Those experiences, most particularly in the state of Pahang, where he was sole British representative for two years from 1887, gave Clifford a romantic taste for the exotic that became the subject of his many essays, stories, and novels published from 1896, when more senior posts—as resident of Pahang from 1896 to 1903, with a brief interval as governor of North Borneo and Labuan—made it impossible to mingle as he had with all levels of Malay society. . . .”
“Clifford did depict with some freshness a Malay society that was fast disappearing—and one that the romantically ambivalent Clifford regretted the passage of, while acting as a principal agent of its disappearance.”
Clifford, Hugh. A Free-lance of To-day London: Methuen, 1903.
Clifford, Hugh. In Court and Kampong London, Richards Press, 1903. Available on Project Gutenberg.
Clifford, Hugh. A Prince of Malaya Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1916.
Henty, G[eorge]. A[lfred] (1832-1902). Among Malay Pirates: A Tale of Adventure and Peril. 1899. Available on Project Gutenberg.
Henty, G[eorge]. A[lfred]. In the Hands of the Malays. 1905. Available on Project Gutenberg.
Kipling, Rudyard. “The Limitations of Pambé Serang” (1891). Life's Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People. 1915. Kipling's story has a Malay protagonist, though it is set in the docks of London.
Muda, Nakhoda. Memoirs of a Malayan Family. Trans. William Marsden. [London? 1830]. Professor Werner reports that the 1874 Indian Magazine makes a reference to it, but she has not been able to locate a copy.
Reade, Charles. Hard Cash (1863). This novel contains an account of a pirate attack on an English merchant vessel, and Reade is careful to specify that Malay pirates are part of the bloodthirsty crew. Available on Project Gutenberg.
Stoker, Bram. “Red Stockade: A Story Told by the Old Coast-Guard.” Midnight Tales. Available in the Internet Archive.
Secondary Materials
Simon Hull, “Domestic Extremism and De Quincey’s ‘A-Muck’ Malay” in Essays in Romanticism, 21.1 (2014), 17-35.
Daniel Roberts, “Exorcising the Malay: Dreams and the Unconscious in Coleridge and De Quincey” in The WordsworthCircle, 24.2 (1993): 91-96.
Rzepka, Charles. “De Quincey and the Malay: Dove Cottage Idolatry” in The WordsworthCircle, 24.3 (1993): 180-85.
Last modified 22 November 2021