Two closely observed photographs of the telegraph office in Governor's House Madras, 1918, illustrate a world in which the Governor's autonomy has evaporated and grip is now asserted by London. Telegraphy & telephony transformed the levers of imperial government. eaho.substack.com/p/a-peek-ins...
It demonstrates an Edwardian fusion of techno-orientalism: efficient, but neither omnipotent nor immovable (as the story reveals). At the time the pictures were taken a flu epidemic, food rioting and looting had broken out in the city - indirect consequences of war and laissez faire trade policy.
Here’s a distillation of Britain’s Indian Empire in two photographs (taken by Eliza Ogilvy's grandson) of the telegraph and telephone room at Governor’s House, Madras, taken shortly before the end of WW1 in November 1918. eaho.substack.com/p/a-peek-ins...
This is 1 of 3 posts
Today, part 2 of the story of Eliza Ogilvy’s hidden romance with William Edmondstoune Aytoun. In 1842 they parted. She was married within 6 months to a railway entrepreneur, published her first book, and began a lifelong friendship with Elizabeth Barrett Browning. eaho.substack.com/p/14-aytoun-...
In 1838, before Eliza Dick became Eliza Ogilvy, she began a passionate affair with William Aytoun when she was 16, he 25; it survived her visit to India in 1838-41, rekindled with 'The rapture of that evanescent May', and dying when 'in your hold my young existence lay / You dropped it — and went on
Do pardon my blushes ... !
Do pardon my blushes ... !
Any reader of A.S. Byatt’s Possession will know how one thing leads to another, especially when that ‘one thing’ is the discovery in a steel strong-box of a letter from a poet — two letters, in this case, sent from Rome to Edinburgh in the Spring of 1848.
eaho.substack.com/p/eliza-ann-...
Time to explode also art history's blindspot for JMC's support for racist imperialists of the ilk of Broadfoot, stirring up war in Punjab, and Eyre, massacring rebels in Jamaica. Seeing her portrait of Eyre in NPG's reopening I was shocked, and then realised I shouldn't be, that's who she was.
... in the Napoleonic wars (when there was reason to repine) & a sharp uplift after the bloody murder of Waterloo (when much repining required), then a rapid descent to become almost extinct by the end of the 19thC. Intriguingly, it appears there has been a just-detectible revival since the 1990s.
In poetry but also in prose Eliza Ogilvy had a fondness for the word ‘repine’, a useful rhyming word but one that jars on the modern ear. Interestingly (not surprisingly) the word was already archaic in the 1850s and ‘60s when she was using it. I checked Google ngram, which shows a sharp decline ...
Love The Great Cat Massacre
Eliza says: Set yourself the challenge of avoiding the curse of almost all history titles: the colon. As in, 'snappy title: long-winded explanation of what the damn book's actually about'. Something more like 'The Spy who came in from the cold'.
This is close to home. Who has the answer?
As if inspiration was needed!
I've decided to re-read Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd series for the first time in 30 years - 11 novels averaging 650 pp each. The purpose: inspiration for Eliza Ogilvy's Commonplace Book is Missing.. Last time I had time on my hands, not now. If anybody wants to talk me out of this, feel free!
The more ambitious among the once-declining gentlefolk of the East India Company set about establishing themselves as a new aristocracy. This was achieved by grafting onto the old using techniques that will be familiar to readers of the novels of Austen & Thackeray eaho.substack.com/p/2-beauty-l...
Now at eaho.substack.com
Third chapter: Wellington’s colonels (Dick was one, with Hardinge, Gough, Napier & Smith) planned the invasion of Punjab in 1845-46 & after their victory were praised by Robert Peel in the Commons in a speech that set the tone for a century of violent Christian militarism in Britain and its empire.
The is the second chapter: Dick was involved in a succession of Batta mutinies in Madras, Hyderabad and on the NW frontier with Punjab, where he became embroiled in a bitter dispute with the Governor General, Lord Ellenborough, over the use of ‘coercive’ violence to suppress the mutiny.
All three tell the story of the British Army’s takeover of the East India Company's army in 1838-46, during and after the first Afghan war; it's told through the experience of Major General Sir Robert Dick, Eliza (Dick) Ogilvy’s rather fearsome guardian through her childhood. This is the first:
After a long pause, two new chapters and one revised chapter in Eliza Ogilvy's commonplace book is missing:
Ogilvy was a Director of the Crystal Palace Company, and the manuscript was kept by his wife Eliza Ogilvy after his death and so it must have had some significance. Who might be the composer? I’d be very grateful for any suggestions.
Dear music lovers (especially of opera): This manuscript is said to have been retrieved by David Ogilvy from the Crystal Palace after the fire that destroyed the North Transept in 1866 (hence the burned edges).
Tartan swagger: Colonel the Hon. William Gordon, in Huntly tartan, painted during his Grand Tour by Italian artist Pompeo Batoni, Rome 1765. National Trust Scotland, Fyvie Castle #TartanDay #OTD
Tartan swagger: Colonel the Hon. William Gordon, in Huntly tartan, painted during his Grand Tour by Italian artist Pompeo Batoni, Rome 1765.
National Trust Scotland, Fyvie Castle #TartanDay #OTD
this later came to be known as the Picturesque, a style much appreciated by the Directors of the East India Company, some of whom would have been familiar with the villa gardens on the islands facing Canton, and who commissioned Repton in 1806 to design the gardens for the EIC college at Haileybury
This would have been less of a surprise to English observers had they understood that Kent and Brown had borrowed from the Chinese appreciation of irregularity and naturalism in garden design which had first reached England in the late 17th Century, via Dutch traders and English diplomats in Holland
British witnesses to the destruction of the Emporer's Summe Palace remembered the gardens, not the architecture, which were reminiscent of the English landscape gardens of William Kent, Capability Brown and Humphry Repton.
A treat for Burns night. Two poems by Eliza Ogilvy, one on the meaning & making of the tradition Burns represents, written for the 1859 centenary poetry competition, the other a rage against the competition itself, written 3 weeks before the winner was announced 🤔 open.substack.com/pub/eaho/p/p...