Emily Eden Research Articles

Doonstruck Diaries of Victorian Memsahibs: Between the Journal and Jhampaun in Mussoorie and Landour

Established as colonial hill stations in Indian's Doon Valley, in the 1820s, Mussoorie and Landour emerged in Victorian literary imagination with the journals of Emily Eden, Fanny Parks, and the Wallace-Dunlop sisters. This paper argues that the Doon's female imperial architextures invented new prospects of grafting Anglo-Saxon aesthetics on the Himalayan terra nullius, diminishing, miniaturizing, and depopulating aspects of the hazardous, the alien, and the local. A thread of archetypes —jhampauns (Himalayan loco-armchairs) and Himalayan vistas— link the aesthetic arcs in the journals of Eden, Parks, and the Wallace-Dunlops. Although the architexture was ostensibly apolitical, it imbued the Doon's representational spaces with a reproducible English character, rendering its terra incognita into terra familiaris in imperial psyche, while carving a distinct imperial subjectivity for Memsahibs.

The European Influence on Sikh Portraiture: Representations of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Sher-e-Punjab (the Lion of the Punjab)

Maharaja Ranjit Singh was one of the greatest patrons in the early modern period of South Asia. Under his sovereignty, local ateliers like the Imam Bakhsh workshop developed and many European artists like August Schefft and Emily Eden visited the Punjab region. His reign was also the period of economic and social growth, which fostered the spirit of Punjabi cultural identity across the Sikh Kingdom. Representations of Ranjit Singh changed significantly from his lifetime to posthumous portraits; the latter is characterized by advanced pictorial expression rather than the simply realistic technique. More development is evident in the colonial period, when the number of single portraits increased perhaps due to the import of small media like ivory and mica. Portraits of Ranjit Singh represent increasing European influence on Sikh art.

Representations of the East: Orientalism in Emily Eden’s Travel Writing

The publication of Orientalism by Edward W. Said in 1978 gave rise to a new area of studies examining how representations of the East were influenced by an Orientalist discourse, which functioned to maintain and justify Western hegemony. Emily Eden’s letters from her travels in Colonial India are examples of such representations, as they depict her meeting with and perception of the colonial Other. I argue that Eden’s writing displays Orientalism, as she tends to dissociate herself from the Indians through othering, in order to preserve her national identity. However, Eden’s letters are distinguished from other Orientalist travel writing in the sense that she does not articulate justification of Western superiority. Thus, I argue, that the Orientalist discourse demonstrated in Eden’s letters serves the personal purpose of self-definition rather than the political purpose of justifying colonial rule.

Tangled Encounters with the Indian Other:

The travel narratives of Emily Eden (1797- 1869) and Fanny Parkes (1794-1875), depicting their extensive travel through India, provide valuable insights into the initial encounter in the first half of the nineteenth century between the Europeans and the native Indians from a female perspective. The narratives, which comprise Eden’s letters Up the Country (1867) and Parkes’ journal Wanderings of a Pilgrim (1850), reveal the competing discourses of gender and imperialism at work that create tensions and ambivalences within the texts. On the one hand, the women as English travelers represented colonial power, but on the other hand, their gender placed them within a secondary or weaker position within the power discourse. Thus they wrote from a liminal position and their descriptions of their encounters with the colonial Other are fraught with anxiety and fractures. These travel narratives present an alternate view to empire building, and they manifest a complicated negotiation with Orientalism, evident in their use of the picturesque and in the moments when Eden and Parkes write about meeting Indian women. This paper argues that even though the women travel writers reinforce the dominant imperial and orientalist view, yet at times, they break away from the hegemony of monolithic Orientalism to present more personal and nuanced responses to India and Indians.

Curry, Tins and Grotesque Bodies: Food, Cultural Boundaries and Identity in Anglo-Indian Life-Writing

The British Empire in India is closely bound up with the topic of food, since its origins go back to the spice trade. In fact, culinary culture had a special significance for the British in India. Many Anglo-Indians—Britons who spent part of their lives in India—used food as a potent token of their Britishness. Yet, their eating habits displayed substantial Indian influence. This essay hence considers Anglo-Indian culinary culture as an important sphere of cultural adaption and rejection in which the British struggle for dominance as well as the hybrid character of Anglo-Indian identity come clearly to the fore. In order to investigate the connection of culinary culture and identity construction in British India, the essay explores the functions of food references in Fanny Parks' Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque (1850) and Emily Eden's Up the Country (1866), two prime examples of Anglo-Indian life-writing. Focusing on the symbolic significance of food as well as its close association with cultural boundaries and collective identity, the essay considers British India as an area that generally highlights the signifying functions of culinary culture.

London’s Great Starfish: The Construction of Mid-Victorian Suburban Fiction

In Trollope's 1858 The Three Clerks, the coming of commuter railways generates a peculiarly modern image of suburbanised, starfish-like, London: ‘London will soon assume the shape of a great starfish. . . . .The old town, extending from Poplar to Hammersmith, will be the nucleus, and the various railway lines will be the projecting rays.’ It is an outgrowth only to be understood as an otherworldly creature: from some undefined depths of alterity, an exotic animal rises to finger the English countryside. The centrality of changing urban space in Victorian literature and culture has spawned some of the best interdisciplinary research, but precisely this concentration on the city has elided suburbia's significance. In discussions of urban modernity, suburbs are marginalised; clichéd images of bourgeois self-confinement failing to raise more than a passing interest in these margins. What was new and different about Victorian suburbia and how the cultural fictions that have shaped our understanding of what constitutes ‘suburbanism’ were created are rarely addressed issues. At the mid-nineteenth century, however, ‘the suburban’ formed an expanding field for fictional explorations in which the association between urbanisation and ventures into foreign spaces powerfully drew into debate the promotion of ‘suburbanism’ as the ultimate manifestation of the divorce of home and workplace. The construction of suburban fiction operated within a negotiation of domesticity and alterity that brought home the potentials and problems associated with urban expansion. In cutting across subgenres, it engendered some of the most pervasive clichés, but in an ambiguous process of redefinition that impels us to reconsider still current cultural myths. Writers as different as Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and also the little-known domestic novelist Emily Eden made the most of what had become a rapidly evolving space characterised by immense fluidity. They did so in markedly divergent ways that evince the versatility of suburban fiction.

Touring the Dead Lands: Emily Eden, Victorian Famines, and Colonial Picturesque

There is a striking tonal similarity amongst those who reviewed Emily Eden’s account of her journey with her brother George Auckland – the recently appointed Govenor-General of British India – across the northern provinces of the country between 1837 and 1840. On its publication in 1866, the Athenaeum decided that like Lawrence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Eden’s book had no information of interest to the Statistical Society. The Fortnightly Review agreed: ‘it is true that very little of what is commonly called “useful knowledge” will be found in these volumes’. Yet, it is precisely Eden’s failure to provide ‘useful knowledge’ that was seen as the strength of her work. Freshness, humour, feminine vivacity, grace, and charm were the typical adjectives employed to describe Eden’s prose. Moreover, the reviewers seem to have decided that Up the Country was best evoked in visual terms. The Athenaeum praised Eden for capturing the ‘picturesque appearance of Indian life’ and representing her ‘picturesque misery and magnificence’; the Fortnightly Review applauded the book as ‘a series of pictures true to life. In her letters we do not read about India; we see it’.

The First Strawberries in India: Cultural Portability in Victorian Greater Britain

This article examines a deep-seated Victorian preoccupation with the ways that portable property becomes the vector for the transplantation of national culture and individual identity. It argues that england's empire, the territory Charles Dilke labeled Greater Britain, was the forcing bed from which cultural portability emerged as a new way of imagining self, community, and nation. A range of Anglo-Indian texts— among them Julia maitland's Letters from Madras, emily eden's Up the Country, and the anonymous 1873 Overland, Inland, and Upland—suggest that self-styled exiles from england cultivated a connection with their fellow expatriates through objects and prac - tices transported to the colonies from england. These mobile containers of Britishness strengthened settlers' bond to their alma mater, even as they reminded them of their distance from home. The long-distance attachments thus reified by cultural portability allowed Anglo-Indians to draw a cordon of inattention that separated them from their Indian surroundings and to engage in the willful fiction that life in India was merely a continuation of the english experience. In this way, portable repositories of mobile memory in Victorian Britain served to unify an otherwise disparate global community.

The Victorian Suburb as Imperial Stage: Emily Eden and the Theatrics of Empire

This article examines the representation of Indian spaces in the 1830s/1840s travel writing of Emily Eden, sister of the Governor-General of India, and the ways in which these representations shape a fictional 'journey' into Victorian middle-class suburbia in her 1859 novel The Semi-Detached House. Eden's letters home set up an opposition between Indian spaces as essentially public and intrusive, and her remembered English spaces as the secure locations of private selfhood. However, this opposition is challenged by the theatricality of imperial ritual, which turns all spaces into stages of one form or another. These experiences inform Eden's fictional depiction of London suburbia, nearly twenty years later. The tropes of her travel writing are invoked to characterise a journey across class spaces, as the aristocratic protagonists of The Semi-Detached House venture into suburbia and encounter a different form of 'alien other': their bourgeois neighbours. A narrative of cross-class reconciliation ensues, whose apparent security is, however, undercut by the parallels between imperial ritual and bourgeois suburbia's staging of intimate family life.

Seeing Double: Performing English identity and imperial duty in Emily Eden's Up the Country and Harriet Martineau's British Rule in India

This article explores the textual performances of Englishness inEmily Eden's Up the Country (1866) and Harriet Martineau's British Rule in India(1857) to disclose the fraught and double nature of colonial power. Eden's text,an epistolary travel narrative, is light-heartedly self-conscious and advertises itselfas a first-hand, if partial, glimpse of British rule in India. In contrast, Martineau'spopular history is an intervention in colonial historiography following theexplosive events of the Indian Rebellion in 1857, aimed explicitly at plugging agap in the British public's knowledge of their empire in order to improvegovernance in India. Mindful of these differences, this article examines how Edenand Martineau rely on visual tropes and particular narrative strategies in theirrespective texts to perform their English identity, and convey their sense ofimperial duty as well as their claim on knowledge and narrative authority. Whatemerges is a double vision of the nature of colonial power as masochistic, at oncepleasurable and desirable even if always guiltily and painfully so.

The Technology of Sanitation in Colonial Delhi

I. Sewage Under CapitalismThe preservation of the wealth and welfare of nations, and advances in culture and civilisation depend on how the sewage question is resolved.(von Liebig, 1850s).Delhi is a very suggestive and moralising place—such stupendous remains of power and wealth passed and passing away—and somehow I feel that we horrid English have just ‘gone and done it’, merchandised it, revenue it, and spoiled it all. (Emily Eden, 1838).Veena Oldenburg argues that after the Rebellion of 1857 British colonial officials inaugurated a process of urban reconstruction following three imperatives: safety, sanitation and loyalty. To make the cities of India safe, clean and loyal, the colonial regime exerted a measure of ‘social control . . . In an era when tinkering with the structure of society had been officially and unambiguously forsworn.’. If the highest offices of the colonial regime proclaimed its remove from society, she argues, the ‘lowest levels of decision making and action’, intruded effectively to reconstruct the social fabric of urban life. In this essay, we will examine this lowest level of the colonial regime in the local government of Delhi (the Delhi Municipal Corporation [DMC], the commissioner's office, the army, the Public Works Department [PWD], the railway officials) and its relations with the local nobility (the rais and amirs), the merchants, and working people.

An album of the governors-general of India

Abstract Albums of the sketches of public characters fascinated the Victorians, and one often comes across titles such as The Portrait Gallery of the Female Nobility, The Celebrated Women of All Countries, Portraits of the Principal Characters in the Waverltry Novels, or The Shakespeare Gallery in publishers' catalogues.1 Thus, for instance, Emily Eden, sister of Lord Auckland, Governor-General of India from 1836-42, who spent the years of her brother's tenure with him in India, published her Portraits of the People and Princes of India in 1844. In 1851 Lithographic Sketches of the Public Characters of Calcutta, 1838-50 appeared in Calcutta. The sketches were by Colesworthy Grant and the book was reprinted in 1853. Then came photography, and with it photographic albums: ‘The photographic album was a Victorian household article, a means of whiling away the time with boring visitors.’22

Reviews

Innermost Asia. By Sir Aurel Stein, K.C.I.E. Four volumes. Clarendon Press, Oxford. £26 5s. Said Bin Sultan (1791–1856), Ruler of Oman and Zanzibar. By (his grandson) Rudolph Said‐Ruete, with Foreword by Sir Percy Cox. 10? × 6¼?. Pp. lxviii + 260. Alexander Ouseley, Ltd. 16s. Northern Negd. By Alois Musil. The Sumerians. By C. Leonard Woolley. 7¼? × 5?. Pp. xi + 198. Illustration and map. Oxford University Press. 1928. 6s. India — Stepmother. By Sir Claude H. Hill, K.C.S.I., C.I.E. Blackwood. Demy 8vo. 12s. 6d. Life of General Dyer. By Ian Colvin. Octavo. Blackwood. 20s. The Land of the Lama. By David Macdonald. 5¾ × 8¾. Pp. 283. Illustrations and map. London: Messrs. Seeley, Service and Co. 21s. net. A History of Christian Missions in China. By A. S. Latourette. 9½ × 6½. 948 pp. S.P.C.K. 18s. Tamerlane, The Earth‐Shaker. By Harold Lamb. 9 × 5¾. 318 pp. Thornton Butterworth and Co. 10s. 6d. A Baghdad Chronicle. By Reuben Long, M.A. Illustrated. 7¾ × 6. Pp. 274. Cambridge University Press. 15s. An Adventurous Journey: Russia — Siberia — China. By Mrs. Alec‐Tweedie, F.R.G.S., F.R.C.I. Fifty‐eight illustrations. Thornton Butterworth, Ltd., 15, Bedford Street, London, W.C. Price 3s. 6d. The Fringe of the Moslem World. By Harry A. Franck. Pp. xiv + 426. 8½? × 6?. Ninety‐five illustrations and map. Methuen: London. 12s. 6d. Among the Forest Dwarfs of Malaya. By Paul Schebesta. 134 illustrations, 8 diagrams, and a map. Pp. 288. 6½ × 9½. Hutchinson and Co. 21s. In Java. By John C. Van Dyke. Pp. xii + 310. 5¼ × 7½. Scribners. 1929. 8s. 6d. Ten Thousand Miles in Two Continents. By Mrs. Patrick Ness. Dead Sea Salts Concession. Documents relating to. Presented to Parliament by Command of His Majesty, April, 1929. Cmd. 3317 (1d.), Cmd. 3326 (3d.) * By an Expert Committee appointed by the Colonial Office in 1924. * The word Government throughout means the Governments of Palestine and Transjordan jointly. The Seventh Dominion. By Josiah C. Wedgwood, D.S.O., M.P. 7½? × 5?. Pp. xii + 131. (London: Labour Publishing Co.) 1928. 4s. 6d. and 2s. 6d. The Baghdad Air Mail. By Wing Commander Roderic Hill. 6 × 9. Pp. x + 328. Illustrations and Maps. Edward Arnold and Co. Price 18s. The Life of Charles M. Doughty. By D. G. Hogarth. Illustrations and map. 216 pp. 7½ × 10½. Oxford Press. 1928. An Indian Journey. By Waldemar Bonsels. Pp. 273. 8½? × 5¾?. Allen and Unwin. 7s. 6d. net. The Manners and Customs of the Rwala Bedouins. By Alois Musil. New York: American Geographical Society. $8.00. Up the Country. Letters written to her sister from the Upper Provinces of India. By the Hon. Emily Eden. First Edition. Bentley. 1866. Shortly to be reprinted. On Alexander's Track to the Indus. By Sir Aurel Stein, K.C.I.E. 9¾ × 7. Pp. xvi + 182. Illustrations and maps. (London: Macmillan.) 21s.