Eliza Ogilvy's commonplace book is missing ...

A mystery musical fragment from the Crystal Palace fire of 1866

Eliza's husband David Ogilvy was a director of the Crystal Palace. After a fire destroyed the north transept he chose to salvage the charred remains of…

Sep 28 • 

William Owen

1

Married again, the East India Company way

A previously unpublished poem by Eliza Ogilvy: Married again

Sep 6 • 

William Owen

12. Victory and lies - the invention of imperial mythologies

Robert Peel's speech to Parliament on 2 April 1846 after the battle of Sobraon, celebrated a cult of Christian militarism and established tropes of…

Sep 4 • 

William Owen

11. Taking the bull by the horns

Part 2 of Mutiny at Ferozepur, 1844: a rebellion with disputed origins and chaos between government and army; a battle of wills between Dick and…

Sep 2

10. Mutiny at Ferozepur, 1844

A sepoy rebellion along the North West frontier with Punjab caused a bitter dispute between General Sir Robert Dick and Lord Ellenborough, and exposed…

Sep 1 • 

William Owen

March 2025

Eliza Ogilvy's commonplace book - an introduction

A cultural history of the East India Company and its influence on art, literature, science and commerce in 19th Century Britain, told through the lens…

Mar 5 • 

William Owen

January 2025

Poems at the Crystal Palace for Burns' centenary, 1859

Eliza Ogilvy wrote two poems for the Burns Centenary: one was her entry for the Crystal Palace competition; the other ridiculed the affair, in a parody…

Jan 25 • 

William Owen

Loot and arson - the destruction of the Yuanmingyuan

After the Great Uprising came the 2nd Opium War. Eliza's brother embarked for China with his regiment, part of the British & French force that destroyed…

Jan 6 • 

William Owen

2

December 2024

The remarkable Captain sisters, organising women's resistance to British rule in India

Dadabhai Naoroji paid for his granddaughters to have the very best education at Oxford & the Sorbonne; they used it wisely, to lead the women's…

Dec 9, 2024 • 

William Owen

November 2024

9. William Prinsep in Canton, caught with his hand in the tea bucket

Prinsep's memoir of his voyage to Canton is a tale of espionage, smuggling & culture shock; a narrow escape from the Chinese police; and a tense meeting…

Nov 27, 2024 • 

William Owen

8. The Bengal renaissance: great expectations, strangled at birth

The Bengal Renaissance of the 1830s and '40s was an alternative economic and cultural legacy that the British empire chose not to nurture, but to crush.

Nov 19, 2024

7. Strange company: the Zamindar and the Englishmen of Calcutta

Macaulay's Indian Penal Code of 1837 was an exercise in liberal hypocrisy, provoking odd alliances in opposition, and a public row between Dwarkanath…

Nov 14, 2024 • 

William Owen