5. Dancing and death
Calcutta, 1838: "Nothing but Balls, every night, all the cold season!"
This was how Eliza’s grandmother, Charlotte Dick (of the Dunkeld wood) described Calcutta in 1789: “Nothing but Balls, every night, all the cold season”, and in 50 years little had changed.1 Balls were the mainspring of social life in the so-called City of Palaces and especially in the cooler Autumn. On great occasions — and the numerous anniversaries of battles won — Balls were held in Government House; on lesser occasions in the Old Court House, in theatres, assembly rooms and private mansions.
A grand Calcutta Ball differed from a Regency assembly in important details. The restraint (or encouragement) of the elderly was absent: anyone reaching 50 or even 45 would be overdue their return to Britain, for Calcutta was a young town, at least in its European quarter which was predominantly male and military; and so there was a scarcity of women and the elderly. “Young unmarried ladies are as scarce as old ones, and naturally more in demand … any damsel not yet wedded has as many partners on hand as she could accommodate in a week … consequently, a lady's dancing days last as long as she remains in India.”2 Eliza and Charley would have been much in demand. Whereas in England it was common to dance all evening with the same partner, in Calcutta female partners were so relatively few they were ‘never dancing two country dances with one gentleman, to avoid giving offence to the others, eagerly awaiting their turn on the floor…For the ladies, a ball was a strenuous occasion’.3 Happily, the ballrooms were expressly adapted for such efforts: “being lofty, spacious, and airy, windows open on every side, and ventilation facilitated by a hundred-punkah power.”4
These were not merely dances; they might include elaborate theatrical displays. A relative of Eliza’s, William Prinsep — he had married her mother’s cousin, Mary Campbell — records in his memoir the great efforts made to create a mise en scène for Mrs Casement’s ‘glorious 14th February Ball’ in 1823. ‘Fancy dress balls were then very much in vogue, and our party took the lead in getting up large groups from Shakespeare and Walter Scott … The first from Henry IV, including all Falstaff’s 24 characters in the dressing of whom I had the job of drilling the several tailors to understand the designs given’ (and sketched by Prinsep). Falstaff is of course a familiar and much-loved reprobate who permits failings and gives licence to a varied cast of colourful male and female characters, so ideal for a ball in a society in which make-believe was the stuff of everyday life. In Calcutta, where Europeans were removed from the constraints of home and occupied official positions of sometimes absurdly elevated status, Falstaff might have reassured imposters or even permitted the luxury of self doubt, in satire. East India Company civil servants were expected to turn their hands to many roles irrespective of experience or training: a tax collector could find himself promoted to magistrate in a second posting, then a salt agent or opium agent, an assistant superintendant of police, a secretary to the secret committee, a master of the mint, and then back into the courts as a senior judge. In 1839, a few months after Eliza’s arrival, her father Abercromby Dick was promoted from session court judge in Midnapore to be Officiating Special Commissioner in Calcutta and then — after a brief interim as no lesser person than Post Master General — he was made judge of the Sudder Dewanny Nizamut Adawlut, the Company’s supreme court of revenue in India. Dissimulation would have been an important skill in navigating such career zigzags. Falstaff’s brazen braggadocio would have helped too.
One of Falstaff’s crew, Fenton, was played by Louisa Dick’s brother, Edmund Wintle. Later on at the same event, Edmund appeared again in another of Prinsep’s surreal productions: ‘8 of the same party coming into the rooms as “Orpheus and his lute”, Dorin as Orpheus with his flageolet which he played well to charm Eurydice [played by William’s brother, Augustus] who came out of a palm tree which grew in the room and broke the chandelier: Wintle as a mountain: G. Morris as a Rosebush; Ravenshaw as a Dolphin; Fraser as a Bear [or more likely Cerberus, the dog]; Mat Furney as a Monkey: Archer as an Adjutant bird and myself as a Fountain!’. The intended narrative was entirely misunderstood: ‘…some said we were a procession of Hindoo Gods. We found it difficult to find room for our proposed quadrille. The mountain was so pushed about that Wintle lost patience and burst out of his paper and bamboo clothing to appear as an officer in full uniform’. This was Wintle’s role in the real world of Calcutta: he was an Ensign - a junior officer - in the 21st Bengal Native Infantry.5
The Government balls were formal affairs, conducted according to strict protocols that reflected the rigid stratification of Calcutta society. The appearance (it was mainly an appearance) of the dignity and etiquette of the court of the Governor General set the standard of civility, position and obedience in a society in which a small elite depended on the sense of awe it exerted over the mass of the population. Everybody played their part in the display. A ball, the most public of displays, “would be opened by a minuet, to be followed by country dancing, and it was the custom for the ladies to be led out for the minuet in strict accordance with the rank of their husbands”6. This would have been by class of civil servant, rated liked warships from first to sixth. The wife of the Governor General would have taken precedence over the wives of the most senior civil servants, then the wife of the Commander-in-Chief of the army, and she over Kings’ officers, then Company regimental officers and the rank and file of Covenanted civil servants, those chosen by Company place-mongers for the colleges at Haileybury and Fort William to begin their careers as Writers. This was the first division of Calcutta society, those employed by the Company or Crown. The second division were ‘non-official’ Europeans, now present in increasing numbers, who would enter in the order in which they had come into the room. The last was the uncovenanted (Indian or mixed raced) civil servants who, in the racist regime established by Lord Cornwallis, had no hope of rising from their junior positions any higher than munsiff, and would in any event be unlikely to receive an invitation to official social events, unless high zamindaris.7 Cornwallis regarded Indians as untrustworthy: in 1793 he told the Court of Directors, in support of his plans for the judiciary, ‘I conceive that all regulations for the reform of that department would be useless and nugatory whilst the execution of them depends on any Indian whatsoever…’. A strict colour bar was introduced, with middle-ranking and senior positions reserved for Europeans.8
Since Cornwallis’ death in 1805 the separation of occupier and occupied had continued to widen under the influence of utilitarian and supremacist philosophies emanating from London. There were two Calcuttas: White Town and Black Town - they were so-called and so labelled on the map. White Town was the Company town, inside Circular Road and centred on the original village of Kolikata where in 1690 the British had established a trading post on the left bank of the Hooghly river. It was dominated by the stronghold, Fort William, and the Writer’s Building running all the way along one side of Tank Square, two structures that would have accommodated the majority of the 3,138 ‘English’ (many of them were Scottish, some Irish or Welsh) recorded in the census of 1837. These were the soldiers who defended the citadel and the civil servants who administered and taxed to the hilt the states of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa that then comprised the Calcutta Presidency.
Company civilians were well paid. A puisne (‘puny’ - middle-ranking) judge would earn a salary of r4166 per month (c.£6,000 a year) around four times the income of his equivalent in London; and the Chief Justice earned r 5,000 per month (£7,500 per year).9 Calcutta had a reputation for being ‘dominated by wealthy men who lived high’, drinking and eating to excess, dancing to excess; used to winning and losing fortunes on the gaming tables and in the frequent agency and banking house collapses that rocked the city in the 1830s and ‘40s; they employed regiments of servants in large houses that were scattered about the city ‘with no regard for rational order or urban management’.10 A contemporary map of Calcutta or Madras is a simple visual illustration of the difference in wealth between the spaciousness of White Town and the packed density of Black Town. In White Town, along Chowringhee Road and Lindsay Street, stores catered exclusively for British, French and Portuguese tastes in fashion, food, furniture and carriages. The palaces and villas of Calcutta and its official buildings and residences with large gardens were both extravagant and eclectic, a casserole of Baroque, Neo-Gothic, Roman, Greek and Saracenic design that simmered away in Bengal and found its way back to London and spread out along Regent Street and Piccadilly as the late-Victorian Imperial style, an excessively ornate substitute for the Georgian elegance of Nash’s colonnaded arcades in the Regent Street Quadrant.
In Eliza’s family too Calcutta offered the opportunity to live beyond the bounds of domestic social norms. Her maternal grandfather, James Wintle, gained a reputation as a rake. He had arrived in Calcutta in 1781 as a 16 year old, fresh from the streets of Southwark and armed with his appointment to the Honourable Company as a Writer. After one or two years he would be an assistant magistrate, collector or factum, possibly trading on his own account as a merchant. Wintle was always the opportunist, not one to waste a chance. He spent some time in Calcutta searching for a wife but unable to make up his mind: ‘He had been ready to marry one young lady; but very shortly afterwards was contracting to marry another, then in Patna’; and yet James was not ready to journey up the Ganga to bring her to Calcutta because that would have meant ‘wasting the cold weather’, so he tarried in the city while enjoying the company of his ‘European bibi’ - his mistress or concubine. The diarist Richard Blechynden, recording Wintle’s transgressions, concluded: ‘I have long been convinced he must be ignorant of the real passion of love’.11
This would be James Wintle’s first marriage. The unfortunate fiancée was Elizabeth Hammond, daughter of the captain of a Company sloop who had died in an armed expedition to Burma in 1755, the year she was born. Five years into the marriage she died giving birth to Wintle’s first child, James. The child died too: mother and son are buried in South Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta, a graveyard of British ambitions for fortunes won without cost.12
And so it turned out like father like son: Edmund Wintle was James’ eldest son by his second marriage to Sarah Jennings. Many years after his triumphant performance as ‘a mountain’ at Mrs Casement’s Ball, Edmund returned from England to Calcutta in the fateful year of 1857 as a Major General. He had for 34 years been attached by marriage to Fanny Wilkinson but she and their 14 children remained at their home in Bath’s Royal Crecent. The unintended consequence was a fifteenth child by a woman probably named Pitt, her first name unknown. The boy, James Pitt Wintle, was brought up in an orphanage in Dum Dum, north of Calcutta, until his removal to England by his natural father 18 years later. James Pitt Wintle died very soon afterwards, in Kensington, aged 19.
Eliza’s uncle, Sir Robert Dick, began his military career in India in 1800 as a 15 year-old Ensign in the 75th Foot, an event he marked by having a son with an Indian woman. The offspring, also named Robert, is recorded as a Lieutenant in Skinner’s Horse, ‘the European element of the officers of which were mostly of the same kind’ (ie. of mixed European and Indian parentage, and so barred from regular military or civil service) and he was later employed as a renegade soldier of fortune by Shah Shujah to raise and train a body of Hindustanis for an abortive attempt to regain the throne of Kabul. Dick absconded with half the force he commanded and the pay of the other half, turning up in 1834 in the army of the Amir of Sindh. His career and fate are described as ‘typical of those of the majority of the more obscure adventurers in Indian services most of whom lived as hectic a life and died as unknown and unhonoured as Dick, save by the men they had commanded.’ Whether the Dick family had been aware of his existence is also unknown, but it would be surprising if Robert's father, Dr William Dick, had not, for he would have had to tidy away the scandal.13
What would Eliza have made of it all? It’s hard to imagine that she wasn’t warned by family members that 'Anglo Indians’ in India behaved differently to Anglo Indians at home. Her memoir of the trip in her commonplace book is of course missing. There are clues; she was impressed by the manners of Bengal Civil Servants, one such described in her melodramatic novella, The Autobiography of Laura Studlegh: ‘Mr Elphinstone … was a civilian in the East India Company’s Service. His manner to ladies was distinguished by a respectful deference which I have noticed to belong to Anglo-Indian gentlemen. It was not that he flattered, or was effeminately overflowing with petits soins; it was a ready interest displayed when a lady spoke; considerate handling of female opinions, even when most sillily expressed; the silent and unobtrusive attention to the comfort of every single woman in company … Say what you please, this sort of general deference to the sex is always taken by each lady as a particular tribute to herself.’14
As for ‘sillily expressed’, such deprecation of her sex was rare in Eliza’s writing; she may have had a ladle of irony ready to pour over this. The novella, published as a serial in The Ladies’ Companion in 1852, is of course — in parts — the autobiography of Eliza Ogilvy and therefore may be revealing and misleading in equal measure.
‘I reflected on the mental improvement I might acquire from visiting India — a land where many of my young dreams had strayed. I got a grammar and a master, and began to study Sanskrit. I set before me the life of Sir William Jones, and I said, why should not I climb up a few paces where he ascended miles?’ Extraordinary — of course she wasn’t privy to her grandfather’s conversations concerning Jones with Sir Walter Scott.
In Laura Studlegh there are three sisters, the elder two pretty and biddable; one taking after her mother, and so unerringly targeting a good marriage at any price; the other is sympathetic but conventional and facing the same inevitable fate; the third sister, Laura, is (like Eliza) comparatively plain but clever, both qualities that are disparaged by her mother. Laura makes the astonishing discovery (to her) that while not beautiful she is attractive to men and, possibly, not so clever as she thinks she is — a degree of self-doubt that may add to her allure. She becomes engaged to Elphinstone but cannot love him (and loves another) and so jilts him, a social crime for which she is banished from the family home and forced to take paid work, as a writer — of all things!
While it would be unfair to accuse Eliza of modelling Laura’s fictional sisters (Adelicia and Millicent) on her own, Louie (in real life) had large eyes and dark locks and was called “The Enchantress”. ‘She always made herself agreeable to men — it was her nature’ and yet she never married.15 Charley, in her correspondence, is charming and winsome, and in her portrait pale, red-headed, pouting: she is festooned with a tartan shawl, all curls and bows and tumbling ringlets, a child of the Regency, whereas Eliza in a photograph as a young woman appears more severe, more independent and more obviously Victorian. In Calcutta, Charley won over Captain Archibald Lorne Campbell with little difficulty and this was ultimately to be her downfall.
Robert Dick wrote from Madras in March 1839 to his brother William Fleming Dick. "I had a letter on 25th January from Calcutta, from Charlotte Dick, informing me she was to be married to a Captain Archibald Campbell of the Bengal Cavalry, the youngest son of Mr Duncan Campbell of Inverneil. He is about 32 she says … a captain is better able to support a wife … if Aber is satisfied I am”; and with that — rank and family scrutinised — the approval of the head of the family was granted.16
Eliza took a different path, the one described by Elizabeth Barrett Browning as “celebrated in India for refusing everybody!”: a rejection of every advance by Anglo Indian men and ultimately of India itself as a life choice. Arid intellectual life may have been one reason, aversion to the climate another. Robert Dick, in his letters to his aunt Mary MacNabb, spills much ink over the question of Eliza’s and Louie’s health in the furnace of Calcutta. On one occasion in March 1839, when they visited Madras, “Eliza has been very ill since [her] arrival, with liver complaints, she was very faint’; and ‘Calcutta is too hot for Louie’. Two years later in January 1841, ‘Louie is very thin and delicate & will be much the better for the change to Scotland … Eliza must go home .. the climate of India will never agree with her. She has dreadful attacks of inflammation & constant headaches. It is quite astonishing how she keeps up her spirits’.17 Their parents suffered too: “Aber is looking so much better than I expected from Louisa’s letters. His hair is turning grey … the hot weather affects him, but he regains his strength in the cold’ — for which reason Aber would head for the hills of Darjeeling in the long summers. And there were other scourges. Robert wrote: ‘Louisa is looking as well as when I last saw her, except the loss of her front teeth. On Monday I danced a quadrille with her and she looked as nice as any lady in the room, & danced better.’
Robert Dick avoided long stays in Calcutta, but he enjoyed Madras. His difficult and delayed journey across the Egyptian desert and Arabian Sea, in the wake of the Misses Dick, had ended when he arrived in Madras in December 1838, where he took command of the Central Division of the army. His motivations for giving up Tullymet and family to return to military life were described colourfully in an obituary in The Gentleman’s Magazine. He had relinquished command of the Black Watch to retire to Tullymet, ‘happy in the possession of domestic love’. When Robert’s wife died, the obituary author continued (not inaccurately): ‘he became an altered man. Tullimet [sic] was no longer the scene of calm and tranquil family retirement. He went forth again into the world — sought, and obtained, an honourable command in his Sovereign’s service — and, after years spent under the scorching influence of an Indian sun, died gloriously in his country’s cause’.18
Sir Robert went forth having been promoted to Major General and knighted — for the second time — in 1838, as KCB in Queen Victoria’s coronation honours list. He had sought a staff position and was offered Madras, where he could rely on powerful family interests. The governorship of the Presidency was not quite the private property of the Harris family but they shared several tenancies. General George Harris had won his victory over Tipu Sultan in 1799, and his son-in-law Stephen Rumbold Lushington crowned two decades of Company service in Madras with the governorship of the Presidency between 1827 and 1835. George’s grandson, another George, was the boy who had played in the garden at Tullymet; he was Governor from 1856 to 1859 with Sir Robert Dick’s youngest son James at his side as his ADC. In between, Stephen’s brother, Charles May Lushington, was for five years a member of the Madras Council, coincident with Robert Dick’s command. Stephen Lushington’s wife was Nancy Harris, the sister of Robert’s great friend and brother-in-law, George William Harris. These relationships persisted through generations and established new links in the network and new opportunities ‘at home’ in England, when members of the Lushington, Harris, Ogilvy, McNaghten and Prinsep families reunited as investors and directors in British railway companies at the beginning of the ‘railway mania’ of the 1840s. In the 1850s railways were put to the service of art and culture - or was it the other way around? - when Charles Manners Lushington (Stephen’s son) became a founding investor in the Crystal Palace Company at Sydenham and he invited Eliza’s husband, David Ogilvy, to join him on the Board of Directors. East India Company connections were numerous and influential: in the metropolis there was a ready network to be put to use for commercial, political and dynastic advantage.
Family connections had their petty benefits, too. Sir Robert plumped up the featherbed of nepotism by appointing his neice’s new husband, Captain Lorne Campbell, to be his aide-de-camp in Madras. “Charley is quite delighted to be with me again. It will save them from having to make further expense … and make no difference to me. I would not have taken any other man as ADC”.
Charley’s marriage wasn’t easy; it was a typical Company marriage made in the Colonial style: older man, young wife, long separations while the husband was off campaigning, numerous children, the progeny once grown were delivered in multiples to the military and civilian recruiters; a pattern (and an alternative reality) that Eliza escaped when she sailed away from Calcutta having spurned all advances. Charley’s marriage to Lorne Campbell in April 1839 was such an affair: she was 19, he 32, older by 13 years; both from good Scottish and East India Company families. For much of her marriage Charley lived separately from her husband, with her parents or a Mrs Eliot: a cousin of his, she became a friend of hers. Three children arrived within seven years: Amelia in Midnapore in 1841; Lorne Robert Henry Dick in Bengal on 11 February 1846, the day after his namesake was killed in battle; and the third child, Florence Eliot Campbell, in February 1848.19 Florence was born in the army cantonment of Umbalah (Ambala), north of Delhi, a huge barracks town planned on a colonial grid over 48 square miles. Charley died five months later in July in Kalka, the town at the foot of the railway to Simla, the hill station where Europeans spent the broiling summer. The early death quite likely arose from complications of childbirth, an all-too common outcome of 19th Century marriages, but especially so in India.
After Charlotte died the children were brought up by their aunt Louie and their grandparents Louisa and Abercromby, first in Calcutta, later Scotland (there were eventually 16 grandchildren). Lorne Campbell, meanwhile, remarried in 1856 as a 50 year old widower to a 20 year old spinster, Jemima Paterson; they had three children, at least one of whom survived to adulthood. In July 1857 when the national uprising reached Sialkot barracks in the Punjab, Colonel Campbell of the 9th Bengal light Cavalry (as he was then) and his new wife had a narrow escape thanks to the protection of Indian cavalry troopers; these horsemen had rebelled alongside the garrison’s infantry regiments but let Campbell and his wife escape ‘as he has always been kind to us’.20 This is to Campbell’s credit, because the mercy shown towards him by the Indian sowars of the Bengal cavalry was a much more plentiful commodity than kindness in a British officer, before or during the bloody summer of 1857. When the British caught up with the Sialkot rebels at Trimmu Ghat on the Ravi River, the sowars of the 9th were annihilated in the first day of the battle, despite a ferocious charge against the British guns. The survivors - there were 13 from the regiment - were shot out of hand or removed to Sialkot, strapped to the muzzle of canon and blown to pieces.21
This was not an unusual event, but a longstanding policy of responding to mutiny with massacre. The so-called Mutiny of 1857 — and this was how the national uprising started, or so it was perceived at the time — was by no means the first in the history of the East India Company army to have been put down with the most brutal reprisals. Mutiny was an ever-present menace, and one that resulted in a crisis in 1844 that threatened to destroy Sir Robert Dick’s reputation and very nearly finished his career - and any chance of a glorious death in his nation’s cause.
© William Owen 2024 - All rights reserved
Charlotte Dick, letter to Eliza Macpherson, Macpherson family papers, CSAS, quoted in Brendon V., Children of the Raj, London 2015.
Carey W.H.: The Good Old Days of Honourable John Company, Calcutta 1882, abridged edition 1964, Ed. Amarendra Nath Mookerji
Ghosh, S.C.: The social condition of the British community in Calcutta 1757 - 1800, University of London 1966, unpublished PHD thesis
Colborn’s United Services Magazine 1857 p499
Memoir of William Prinsep, Vol 2 1870, The date given for the entry is August 1823, but the incident (and the sketch) dates from 14 February 1823. BL
Ghosh
A munsif is a judge in the lowest civil court
Cornwallis Correspondence, Ross Vol 1 p548, quoted in Sinha, C.: Personnel of Indian judges in Bengal Presidency under the East India Company’s administration 1793-1833, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress Vol.30 pp340-351
Carey. Also see Madras Almanac 1840, Civil Salaries. Calculated on the basis of r8 to £1 in 1820. For comparison, Robert Browning’s father, a clerk at the Bank of England, earned £1800 pa. (see The Brownings and Slavery Simon Avery (?). Note, in 1820 H.T.Prinsep, then 27 years old, earned 3000R/m (£4500 pa) as “Persian secretary to the Govt.”
Marshall, P.J. : The White Town of Calcutta under the Rule of the East India Company, Modern Asian Studies, Volume 34.2, 2000, pp. 307 - 331
Blechynden, R.: Sex and Sensibility: Richard Blechynden’s Calcutta Diaries, 1791-1822
The mental strain of colonial life was sometimes too much to bear. Eliza’s maternal grandfather, Dr William Dick, received permission from the HEIC in 1787 to found India’s first insane asylum - ‘madhouse’, he called it - for women in Calcutta (exclusively European women), and he served as both superintendent and owner until 1802, paying the expenses and receiving the profits.
Grey, European Adventures in Northern India 1785-1849, Punjab 1929
The Ladies’ Companion, January 1st 1852. Eliza borrowed the names of people she had heard of or knew. Elphinstone shared his name with a real life Governor of Madras, John Elphinstone, the 13th Baronet and an occasional dinner companion of Robert Dick’s at Government House, which Eliza visited in 1839; another similarity is difficult to ignore, that between the name of Laura’s companion, Carola Morton, and an acquaintance of Eliza’s, Caroline Norton. She was Sheridan’s daughter and married William Stirling Maxwell shortly before her death in 1877.
Memoir of Marcelly Graham, ibid
Sir Robert Dick, letter to his brother William Fleming Dick, Madras 15 March 1839, MacNabb archive BL
Sir Robert Dick to Mary MacNabb, Madras 14 January 1841 MacNabb BL
Gentleman’s magazine, obituary Sir Robert Dick, 1846 p539
Florence, the youngest of Charley’s children, married a member of the Gladstone family, a cousin of Eliza’s bete noir in later years, William Ewart Gladstone, a subject of her scorn and satirical verse. The children were brought up in Scotland by their aunt, Louie, and their grandparents Abercromby and Louisa.
Wagner, Kim A.: The Skull of Alum Beg, London 2017. Note original source: Letter from India, Glasgow Herald, 11 Sept 1857; also Report regarding the mutineers of the 14th and 46th regiment native infantry Jhelum and Sealkote, Report by Lt. Col. A Campbell 11 July 1857. National Archives of India, military dept. 15 July 1857.
Wagner