Archive - Eliza Ogilvy's commonplace book is missing ...

Eliza Ann Harris Ogilvy, an introduction

The life of a Scottish poet from an East India Company family, in a network of writers, artists, scientists & engineers, gives a vivid portrait of 19th…

Mar 5 •

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 •

14. 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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

October 2024

Light: man's newly captured slave

A poem: "On a photograph of Alfred Tennyson", by Eliza Ogilvy, 12th January 1863. But which photograph? And which photographer? Who dashed thy semblance…

Oct 16, 2024

6. The machine in the garden

A visit to Madras, 1839; the glory of the garden house; dinner with Lord Elphinstone; the beautiful Jennings sisters; Macaulay's comical code…

Oct 14, 2024 •

Research update: on the pitfalls of serial publication

Observant readers will notice that the Chapter numbering of Eliza Ogilvy's commonplace book is missing has suddenly leapt from 5 to 9. Here's why:

Oct 8, 2024 •

September 2024

Research update: How much money did Scotland squander on the Darien scheme in 1698?

Historians using RPI are getting the answer to this question wildly wrong. The cost of a basket of goods adjusted for inflation veers increasingly from…

Sep 27, 2024 •

Research update: Dr William Dick and the art world in Regency London

A visit to a country house has ignited a little explosion of research into the life of Eliza Ogilvy’s grandfather, Dr William Dick, and his position in…

Sep 5, 2024 •

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