His own religious nonconformity saw to it that he never became a fully-fledged member of the British establishment. Oxford at the time was almost entirely under the control of the Church of England, and Legge's position as a Congregationalist ensured he was regarded as half-insider, half-outsider, a position he had in fact occupied for the whole of his life.
But more than half of his heart, it could be said, lay in the Chinese world. His efforts in translating the "sacred classics" of China into English can be judged as infinitely more successful than his missionary work. His series The Chinese Classics, published between 1861 and 1872, contained the Confucian Analects, The Works of Mencius and many other venerable books. He translated Lao Tze's Daode jing several times, comparing it on one occasion to Christ's Sermon on the Mount -- not bad for a former missionary. Later in life he tackled the fifth century Buddhist text The Travels of Fa-Hien, published in 1886. Many of his translations are still in print, and some even remain, despite their slightly stilted, mannered style, the standard versions in English.
Legge contributed all the important items translated from Chinese to the 50-volume set The Sacred Books of the East, published from 1879 onwards by Oxford University Press, including the I Ching and most of the major Confucian and Taoist classic texts. This Sacred Books project was typical of the massive publishing enterprises the Victorians specialized in, and was comparable in scope and importance to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Revised Version of the Bible, and the Dictionary of National Biography. The general editor was Max Muller, another eminent Victorian generally seen as the greatest of all 19th century pioneers of the comparative study of religion. He features prominently in this book, if for no other reason than that Norman Girardot has opted to write a work focusing on the whole world of Victorian translation from Chinese rather than merely penning a simple biography of Legge.
The Victorian Translation of China is a magnificent book, learned and witty (and specializing in the author's own brand of self-deprecating humor), with trails leading off into obscure and fascinating corners of Victorian life. Girardot is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Religion at Lehigh University and previously the author of Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism (University of California Press, 1989). The only existing biography of Legge, compiled by the great man's dutiful daughter and published by the Religious Tract Society in 1905, is, in the words of Girardot, "well-intentioned but hopelessly insipid." By contrast, this book on Legge's intellectual career and ethos is magisterial, urbane, very scholarly, and likely to remain definitive for a long time to come.
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