3. In exile at home with the Colonel
A Scottish childhood with a Colonel of the Black Watch, a land steeped in myth and poetry, a place to meet 'old Indians', providing food for an observant mind.
Eliza Ogilvy described Tullymet House as, ‘a handsome dwelling in a beautiful situation looking down the strath to Dunkeld’. The site chosen by Dr William Dick for his family home was a promontory half way up the valley along which the Tullymet Burn tumbles before spilling into the River Tay. Built between 1805 and 1809, when the doctor purchased the surrounding farmland from the Atholl estate, Tullymet was and remains a fairly modest affair in a magnificent setting: two stories and an attic floor with a bow front and — its single affectation — a crenellated parapet. Neither a nabob’s palace nor a baronial mansion, it is nonetheless a large house with a commanding view of the valley looking southwards to the Tay and the hills that wrap around Dunkeld. Immediately behind the house is a steep climb that marks where the Grampian mountains begin: this was the land where the boys stalked roe dear and from which Eliza mined the songs and legends versed in her Book of Highland Minstrelsy.
Whatever the opinion of her aunt, Eliza Serena Harris, with her metropolitan airs, as far as Eliza Dick was concerned Tullymet was a lively house and not a backwater, and it had a strong Eastern flavour. The walls of the drawing room were hung with paintings illustrating “Venetian, Arabian, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Indian and Chinese scenes: galleys and frigates loading, depicting commerce, shipping, sport, play, religions of various kinds.”1 This was a place to meet those Eliza called ‘old Indians and other travelled people’ — meaning East India Company people, visiting while on furlough or in retirement — and which offered ‘plenty of food for a very quick and observant mind’, as was hers.2 Up the road at Blair Atholl was the woman Eliza called ‘the great lady’, she being Marjorie Forbes, the Duchess of Atholl, a maker of regular entertainments; and down the road in Dunkeld, Eliza recalled, you might find Sir Edwin Landseer ‘then a young artist full of fun and enthusiasm’, and very different from his maudlin older self.
In the fifteen years from 1823 to 1838 Tullymet was chock-full of children living there or visiting. For company Eliza had her elder sisters, Louisa and Charlotte — called Louie and Charley —and her younger brother William, — Willy — when he wasn’t at school.3 There were Robert and Elizabeth’s three children: William, James Abercromby and Rose Theresa (she was born in the Summer of 1825, so Eliza’s ‘little sister’, and after whom she named her own first child). Every Summer the Harris boys, George and William, would arrive with their soldier father but not their mother: Eliza Serena had died in childbirth in 1817 following an earlier stillbirth two years earlier, and the boys’ sister, also called Charlotte, had died soon after at the age of five. George and William valued their Scottish summers, spent tracking through the hills with their father, uncle and cousins and so tightening the bonds that one day would be contrivances of preferment and position. Two decades later, George Harris as Governor of Madras appointed his cousin and old stalking companion, James Abercromby Dick, to be his aide-de-camp. The benefits of patronage were kept within the family4.
Tullymet became a darker place after two deaths in quick succession. First, in 1829 the children’s grandmother, Charlotte Dick; then, less than a year later in 1830, the catastrophe of Elizabeth’s sudden death at Kinnaird House across the Tay, at just 35 years of age5. Seven children would have been bereft, Robert was devastated. For 15 years he had fought the French and Spanish across the Mediterranean from Egypt to Italy then across the Iberian Peninsular. With his regiment, the 42nd Highlanders - ‘the Black Watch’ - he battled through Busaco, Fuentes do Onoro, Ciudad Rodrigo, Torres Vedras and Burgos. He was seriously wounded four times. At Quatre Bras, two days before Waterloo, Robert achieved his full colonelcy (and without paying for it - as Eliza Serena pointed out) when he took command of the regiment as it battled at the crossroads to fight off Marshall Ney’s Lancers. Robert later wrote to his father: “after their last charge and after I had put the Regiment into lines I was struck with a musket ball in the left shoulder that almost knocked me off my horse - I stood with the Regiment for some time after - but the loss of blood and pain made me return at last into the rear to get the wound dressed and the surgeon said that he never saw a more narrow escape with life”. After service in Ireland, Robert left the army with his knighthood, and on half pay, in the hope of a peaceful retirement in the Highlands with the life partner he had never expected to find. In her letters to William Fleming Dick, Eliza Serena Harris describes her brother as ‘the Gallant Royal Highlander” … “very gay, out every Night, & has as usual met with many of Papa's friends, who shew him every attention, & he owes much to the kindness of his most noble Colonel in introducing him to the first families around - & his own pleasing manners & amiable qualities will ever ensure him friends’; and on another occasion, in 1815: ‘he is well & gay, dancing away. He always declares he will not marry, but I imagine he never was seriously in love. Instead I hope & expect all my Brothers will marry. Robert says he will not marry for money & he cannot marry without.’6
Instead he married his first cousin, Elizabeth MacNabb, with whom he shared the same degree of status and wealth, but within 12 years she died. The man that is revealed in his letters to his ‘dear Aunt’, Mary MacNabb, after Elizabeth’s death, is not gay but in awe of his God. The widower — if not the husband — found it difficult to communicate or empathise with the children in his care although he seems to have been close to Charley, but not the more difficult Eliza.
Eliza describes herself at the age of twelve as, “an awkward shy odd child”. She and her guardian didn’t see eye to eye, so much so that her friend and mentor Marcelly Forbes Graham decided to intervene, and “took some trouble to explain my apparently unpleasant disposition to my uncle Sir Robert H. Dick who was much perturbed by my oddities and solicisms”.7
Perhaps the young Eliza had a tendency to breach etiquette and decorum; Sir Robert had a fondness for both and increasingly in later years took on a more melancholy outlook, tinged with a religious intensity. Marcelly, however, was a godsend for a girl child ten thousand miles beyond the protection of her mother.
Marcelly was the daughter of Alexander Niven, the Minister of Dunkeld parish, ‘the only girl in the Manse, with six wild headstrong brothers’. Taught by her father and taken with him to see his parishioners ‘from the humblest cotter up to the Duchess of Atholl’, Marcelly became a favourite of the Duchess (after whom she took her middle name, Forbes) as well as a regular visitor to Tullymet. There, she met Frederick Graham, the Duke’s factor, a man 20 years her senior and they married, she at just 15, he 35. The Duchess was pleased enough “to send to her London milliner for three dresses and a hat and a Spencer, and I don’t know how many dainty fichus…for her little pet of a bride”. But Frederick was an old soldier, a veteran of the disastrous Walcheren expedition, and despite or because of being ‘something of a genius’ had taken to drink. Eliza, writing as an adult, complained, “I never could comprehend the parents permitting it”: she had however — either carelessly or carefully — omitted to remark the gap of barely six months between the marriage and the birth of Marcelly’s first child, Charles Atholl Graham - a name that suggests the Duchess of Atholl took some responsibility for her factor’s misbehaviour.
Eliza’s first meeting with Marcelly Graham was at Tullymet in 1834. ‘She was then a pretty young woman of 25 … She sang German songs very sweetly and she remarked my admiration and interest in her songs both French and German, and took a kindly pains to question and examine me. She was the first grown person who seemed to care about my ideas and thoughts and feelings”. A friendship blossomed between the awkward girl of 12 and the confident young woman. Eliza often visited Marcelly at Fairy Bank (or Ferry Bank), the Graham’s house on the banks of the Tay below Dunkeld; their conversation wound around poetry, songs, the people they knew and Eliza’s character: ‘the real good she did me was by sympathising with me…She lent me books, she copied out poems for me to read. To her I owe my first knowledge of Shelley’s “Lark” and “Cloud”. She asked me to correspond with her when I went to India.’8
Eliza took readily to poetry, but she was on fertile ground. For someone of Eliza’s open disposition it would have been hard to live at Tullymet - where poetry was oxygen for the soul - and not develop a poetic sensibility. Verse was everywhere, in books, on gravestones, on the lips of friends and relations. Poetry seems to have been a common response in the Dick family to death: Eliza’s father — albeit a very distant influence until her 16th birthday — wrote a sentimental and anxious elegy in verse to his brother John on the tombstone in South Park Street Cemetery, Calcutta, marking John’s death in 1825 at the age of 27. Abercromby’s own grave is inscribed with a verse from Proverbs.9 Marcelly’s father, Alexander Niven, had been a friend of Robert Burns at Hugh Rogers’ school, when both were in their late teens — he sold subscriptions to the young Burns’ work. William Makepeace Thackeray was a second cousin, brought back from India as a child by Abercromby’s cousin James Munro MacNabb; the novelist’s mother, Anne Becher knew Eliza’s mother Louisa ‘out of old times’ [in India].10 Eliza’s grandfather, Dr William Dick, made his own lasting contribution to Scottish literature by saving Sir Walter Scott’s life, dosing him liberally with Calomel to repair a failing liver.
Dr Dick knew of more than medicine though; he spent many hours in conversation and correspondence with Scott on the topic of literature and linguistics. Both had known John Leyden, the Borders poet, physician and a remarkable linguist. Leyden had travelled extensively in India and studied Indian and Malay languages as well as Persian and Sanskrit.11 The Edinburgh periodicals had recently compared Leyden’s skills unfavourably with the Welshman, William Jones, the originator of the proposition that Sanskrit and European languages shared a common root. Dick knew Jones in Calcutta, where he was a judge, and Leyden in Java, and had his own view which was rather different from that of Jones’ many flattering biographers. He recalled Jones’ impoverished Hindustani and attempts at Persian so poor that they were mistaken by native speakers for English. Leyden’s gift was described as ‘more comparable to speaking in tongues and included a working knowledge of 45 languages’. Dick recalled that in Penang, just days after Leyden’s arrival, “two sons of the Sultan of Kedah had arrived on business for the mainland, and as no interpreter could be found, Governor Dundas called in Leyden, who astonished everyone present by carrying on a long conversation with the Malays with as much apparent ease as if he had been speaking in English”.12 Whatever their respective merits, Leyden “lived the contradictions between learning for its own delights and learning as an arm of imperial conquest …He spoke with a strong Borders accent, and yet wrote accomplished English — not Scottish — verse.”13 He was motivated by learning from other cultures, as was Jones: both were orientalists, Jones a standardiser, neither were Anglo-supremacists like Charles Babbington Macaulay, a cameo player in this story who, in 1836 imposed a monopoly of the English language on the Indian legal and educational systems, a legacy that remains the subject of heated debate, inside India and beyond.14
Scott left a valuable legacy of his own at Tullymet, not so much the silver inkstand inscribed with his thanks to the doctor, but the very fine 12 volume set of his complete poetical works to which Eliza must have had daily access, and would have known from its inscription: “A Highly Valued Present from the Author to Doctor Dick therefore not to be lent. January 1820.”15
Also down the road and across the Tay, at Kinnaird House above Dunkeld, where Eliza’s aunt had died, was Mrs Elizabeth Izett who is a subject of Eliza’s last commonplace book; she and her husband’s business partner, John Grieve, were supporters, advisers and friends to James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd and author of ‘The Modern Scottish Minstrel’, whose relationship with Sir Walter Scott was built on a shared interest in the supernatural tales and traditions of the Borders.16 Hogg’s narrative poem, Mador of the Moor, was written about the landscape around Kinnaird, after he spent some weeks at the house recuperating from illness. Mrs Izett was also a correspondent with Mrs Ann Grant of Laggan, who In 1811 published her essays on the Superstition of the Highlands of Scotland, and was entertaining Scotland’s literary set from her home in Edinburgh at a time when Eliza was in her teens and a term-time resident of the City, and developing her own passions for the tales and traditions of the Highlands.
Grant, Hogg, Grieve and Izett represented a “fascinating, dense alternative if not counter culture flourishing in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh” in Gillian Hughes’ description. ‘This is not a world of lairds, lawyers and aristocrats, the visible face of Scotland's official literary landscape in the Regency period, where Scott, Jeffrey, Mackenzie and Wilson were the legislators and Hogg would always, as an outsider, be an easy target. Here instead are professionals: printers, schoolteachers, physicians, working farmers. And also women, not only as subjects of adoration or satire, but also as authors, contributors in their own right to social debate’.17
This was one important part of Eliza’s education: as an author, poet and social debater herself, she came to work with a range of subjects extending from death and motherhood to national rights, traditions & identity, as well as political satire — well beyond the conventional sphere of 19th Century women’s writing. Eliza did not, then, suddenly become a poet in the first known recorded instance in her ‘Natal address to a child’ that marked the birth of her daughter, Rose Theresa, in 1844 (and there is another extant unpublished manuscript from the same year, ‘The Iris’). More likely, Eliza was writing from at least the age of 16, on the voyage out to Calcutta with her sister or before. Her apprenticeship in folk stories, songs and verse began no later than the age of 12 and included the published works of Scott, Burns and Shelly, and probably of James Hogg and Ann Grant; we can speculate that all of these made their mark on Eliza’s preparatory research for A Book of Highland Minstrelsy, published in 1846 to favourable reviews, along with the strong encouragement and support of her ‘two most appreciating friends’, Marcelly Graham, who we have already met, and William Edmonstoune Aytoun, her other longtime friend, critic and guide.
© William Owen 2024 - All rights reserved
Dick archive, Perth Library
Unpublished typescript memoir of Marcelly Graham by Eliza Ogilvy, transcribed from her commonplace book by Ella Ogilvy Tomes
William Abercromby attended the Edinburgh Academy, the school founded by Sir Walter Scott and Roger Aytoun, from 1832-39. See The Edinburgh Academy in India, Calcutta Review vol. 100, 1895.
This was an established family practice. George was criticised, when Governor of Trinidad, for appointing his own people to plum positions. However in this case James did not prosper. After the outbreak of the great rebellion he went north to Avadh with the Madras Army, to relieve the garrison at Lucknow. Here he fell ill and after convalescing in 1858 rejoined his regiment at Mooltan, in Bengal, where he died in September 1859 after a relapse. Sir Robert Dick’s great grandson, Herbert Collingridge, kept up the family tradition when he became Military Secretary to Lord Pentland, Governor of Madras in 1919.
Kinnaird House, across the Tay from Tullymet, belonged to Elizabeth and Chalmers Izett. The dd
Eliza Serena Harris to William Fleming Dick, February 17 1815, from Courtray, Flanders. Harris family papers I, p.32; 14pp, MS, Belmont House, Kent.
Eliza Ogilvy, unpublished memoir of Marcelly Graham
Ibid
“The path of the just is as the shining light / that shineth more and more unto the perfect day”, Proverbs iv, Holy Rude Kirkyard, Stirling
Letter from William Thackaray to his daughters from Edinburgh, 8 November 1856
Life of John Leyden Poet and Linguist, John Reid, Walker & Sons, 1908
Dr William Dick to Sir Walter Scott, 23 August 1819, [Sir Stamford Raffles and some of his friends and contemporaries, John Bastin]. See also Familiar letters of Sir Walter Scott, Vol. 2, Houghton Miflin, Boston 1893. Philip Dundas, Lord Melville’s nephew, was governor of PoW Island, his secretary was Stamford Raffles.
An introduction to Scottish Poets in the Empire, Nia Clark, [scotspoetsempire.wordpress.com]
“I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.” Macaulay wrote in his infamous Minute to Parliament proposing creating an English-speaking class of Indian administrators. 2nd February 1835. The full text is available here:
The edition of Scott’s complete poetical works was sold at Bonhams in December 2020
Eliza wrote a memoir, “Izett, Mrs, related to going to India”, according to Phillip Heydon’s note on the contents of her commonplace book (Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, 1849–1861, ed. Peter N. Heydon and Philip Kelley.). Chalmers Izett was a wealthy Edinburgh hatter.
Gillian Hughes, quoted in James Hogg’s Literary Friendships with John Grieve and Eliza Izett, by Janette Currie