We were not aware of the existence of any preceding studies in the United States on Mrs. E.F. Haskell's “
The Housekeeper's Encyclopedia, ” the original text of “
Keizaishogaku Kaseiyoshi” which is the translated book on home management spread most widely in the early Meiji Era in Japan. Recently, we knew that R.L. Shep ed. “
Civil War Cooking, ” the reprinted edition of “
The Housekeeper's Encyclopedia” was published in the United States. The purpose of this paper is to consider the special quality of “
The Housekeeper's Encyclopedia, ” using Notes in “
Civil War Cooking” by Shep, as part of the study on the translated books on home management in the early Meiji Era in Japan.
The conclusions are as follows :
Shep grasps “
The Housekeeper's Encyclopedia” as a book on the American household of the 1860's and not just as a collection of cooking recipes. According to Shep's Notes, we can think that the content of “
The Housekeeper's Encyclopedia” shows the process of americanizing the English life style of immigrants from Europe (especially England) in the new circumstances. Furthermore, Shep points out that “
The Housekeeper's Encyclopedia” was concerned with women's lives in the period of the Civil War, closely.
If the special quality of “
The Housekeeper's Encyclopedia” is in the description on general home life beyond just a cooking book, as Shep mentions in Notes, we should not consider that Nagamine Hideki's translation had failed the special quality of “
The Housekeeper's Encyclopedia, ” necessarily by not including in his translation the content on cooking which occupied the most part of the original text into “
Kaseiyoshi.”
View full abstract