Bombay Graveyards and British Beaches: The Tale of a Victorian Imperial Scandal

Abstract

This article follows the case of Colonel Crawley from his role in a bungled Indian court martial in 1862 to his own trial in England the next year. The death of a soldier and his wife during the original court case was the key to transforming the events in an obscure Indian cantonment into a British sensation. A close examination of the regional and imperial networks that were essential to relaying the dead couple's story shows how members of press collaborated with interested parties to craft a popular, fiction-infused narrative of the case calculated to raise public anger against Crawley. Yet, at the resulting trial, the Colonel's defence team were able to check this attack with the creation of their own theatrical narrative lifted from imperial dramas. This article will argue that the power of a self-confident and expanding Victorian British press to redress social ills was limited by their reliance on simplified melodramatic narratives that were prone to backlash. In the case of legal proceedings, lik...