>That's pretty standard model for those times - when dealing with "inferior" peoples, its pretty much either "noble savage" or "inscrutable deceitful liar".

This is incorrect and historically uninformed. To give one example, the same year, 1859, saw Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam, which electrified Victorian England with its meditations on divine inscrutability. A few years earlier, Carlyle had written "The Hero As Prophet", a positive evaluation of Mohammed (but certainly not the first - Voltaire and even Jean Bodin had got there before, says ChatGPT).

There was plenty of racial bigotry in the nineteenth century, but also plenty of people with a deep interest in other cultures.