THE HUSBANDS and WIVES WHO RULED BRITISH INDIA, 1774-1925. a Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of T
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SUBJECTS AND SOVEREIGNS: THE HUSBANDS AND WIVES WHO RULED BRITISH INDIA, 1774-1925. A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Christina Casey January 2017 © 2017 Christina Casey SUBJECTS AND SOVEREIGNS: THE HUSBANDS AND WIVES WHO RULED BRITISH INDIA, 1774-1925 1 Christina Casey, Ph. D. Cornell University 2017 While men held the titles of governor and viceroy in British India, it was women who were responsible for cultivating and preserving the public image of these offices. This dissertation explores the evolution of domestic ideology in British imperial politics, popular culture, and historiography over the course of the long nineteenth century. Though scholars have outlined the ways in which domesticity was appropriated by the colonial and imperial government to maintain British sovereignty in India, no one has yet explored the ways in which Victorian domesticity became part of the identity of ruling elites, and how it was employed to help promote the empire to audiences in Britain. Focusing on the private correspondence of the governors’ wives, as well as popular biographies of these ruling elites which developed over the late Victorian period, this dissertation argues women helped to establish a viceregal celebrity centered on domesticity, and reinforced the patriarchal and racial hierarchies upon which the empire relied for its preservation. When this system came under attack during the 1857 rebellions, the vicereines, led by the example of Queen Victoria, helped usher in the new Raj by promoting domestic values, such as charity and wifely devotion, in their capacity as imperial figureheads. These wives also played a crucial role in imperial commemorations, as both subjects and authors, and helped to establish a new biographical genre in the late nineteenth century: the imperial domestic biography. These biographers turned to a particularly controversial governor of the early British Indian empire, Warren Hastings, and attempted to restore his reputation by recasting both he and his wife as an exemplary Victorian family. This revival effort represented the beginning of the end of viceregal domesticity, as the twentieth century brought the waning of the Indian empire and challenges to Victorian gender norms. This genre resurfaced in the 1980s, during a moment of Raj nostalgia, when biographies of the vicereines reappeared. It is time to reexamine the intersection of official and unofficial sources, politics and gender, history and biography—to acknowledge the roots of Victorian domesticity in British imperial historiography. 1 This title references the seminal work on British India’s governors, Philip Mason’s The Men who Ruled India (1953; repr., NY: W.W. Norton, 1985). BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Christina received her Bachelor of Arts, cum laude , in history and political science from American University in Washington, D.C. in 2008. She received her Master of Arts in English history from Cornell University in 2012. She defended her Doctoral dissertation at Cornell in 2016. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and daughters. iii This dissertation is dedicated to my family. You are my motivation and inspiration. This would not have been possible without you. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee for their steady support, guidance and encouragement over the last few years, and especially for reading and commenting on many drafts of this thesis. It has been the highest privilege to learn from each of you. Dr. Travers, thank you for giving me the opportunity to come to Cornell and work with you—I am deeply grateful for all of the chances you have given me and for all the extra time you have put in to help me face my challenges. Dr. Weil, thank you for your tough but truthful criticism, which has helped my writing immeasurably and which will always be welcomed. Dr. Ghosh, thank you for your unwavering optimism, and for sharing your wisdom about work and life—these conversations have helped me more than you will know. Thank you also to my undergraduate advisor, Phil Stern, for inspiring me to pursue the PhD. I would also like to thank the many librarians who have helped guide my research along the way—particularly the staff at the British Library in London, the Public Records Office in Belfast, and the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. Thank you to Sir Anthony and Lady Bamford, for allowing me to visit Daylesford Estate. Thank you to my friends who have read and provided comments on numerous drafts, including Mate Rigo, Abi Lewis, Kate Horning, and Jacqueline Reynoso. Thank you to my mom for the countless hours of babysitting you did so that I could work. And finally, thank you Bob for being there every step of the way, and for patiently helping to see this through to the end. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Dedication iv Acknowledgements v Table of Contents vi List of Figures vii Introduction 1 Marian Hastings and the perils of lady governorship, 1773-1785 34 Authors of empire: the Eden sisters as lady governors, 1836-1842 74 Charlotte Canning, Queen Victoria, and the consolidation of imperial domesticity, 111 1856-1862 Celebrity and performance: Lady Dufferin’s Canadian and Indian journals, 1872-1888 147 Writing home: George Curzon’s viceregal inheritance, 1898-1925 189 Epilogue 232 Bibliography 237 vi LIST OF FIGURES James Gillray, “-Coaches,” (Piccadilly: Fores, 20 May 1788), National Portrait Gallery, 57 London. “Cheyt-syngs, ghost,” (Piccadilly: S.W. Fores, Mar. 9, 1788), British Museum, London 59 vii Introduction In 1787, Warren Hastings was impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors committed over the course of his eleven years as governor-general of Bengal. His wife Marian also faced censure and condemnation in the British papers over the course of the impeachment trial. She was accused of tarnishing the image of the empire, the monarchy and, more severely, endangering the sovereignty of the colonial government in India. These sharp critiques laid bare the latent fears circulating in Britain at the time about the involvement of women in domestic and imperial politics. As women travelled to India in increasing numbers over the nineteenth century, they became convenient targets upon which to pin the blame whenever the colonial government’s popularity waned. Memsahibs were frequently accused of aggravating tensions between Britons and Indians and enforcing racial divisions in their role as hostesses and household managers.1 Concerns about women in empire were eased by the conscious promotion of domesticity in imperial ideology and popular culture, led by the governors’ wives. Images, in newspapers and biographies, of women reinforcing Victorian gender roles and applying these values to imperial service, helped to placate fears about the possible deterioration of British values through imperialism. Though domesticity proved a crucial trope by which Britons understood and critiqued their empire as early as the eighteenth century, its application as a ruling ideology, or a propaganda tool, particularly by the lady governors themselves, would not consolidate until the mid-nineteenth century. While historians have addressed the debates about women and empire which flourished over the long nineteenth-century, my project seeks to develop how women who 1 Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: the figure of woman in the colonial text (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), chap. 4; Margaret Strobel refers to the scapegoating of memsahibs as the “myth of the destructive female,” in European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), Preface and chap. 1. 1 participated at the highest levels of the empire, as well as their biographers, addressed these concerns. This dissertation is divided into two parts: pre-mutiny and post-mutiny, with the consolidation of viceregal domesticity taking place in the course of the recovery from the mutiny and subsequent transition to Raj rule.2 It follows five governing couples chronologically from the initial consolidation of the governor-general position in Bengal in 1773-4 to the posthumous, nostalgic publication of the last Victorian viceroy, Lord Curzon, in 1925. Focusing on five governing couples over a lengthy chronology allows me to develop a sense of long-term evolutions in ideologies of gender and domesticity in relation to wider changes in imperial and domestic politics and culture. The first part chronicles the experiences of Warren Hastings and George Eden, who ruled from 1774 to 1785 and 1836 to 1842, respectively. These governors were two of the few in the pre-mutiny era who brought a female partner (or partners, in Eden’s case) with them to act as lady governor. They ruled during a period of significant change in the colonial government, while it was still under East India Company control. Governors at this time had very little oversight and were largely free to establish their own precedents. The challenges these early governors and their wives or sisters faced trying to determine the scope of their authority and deal with growing concerns in Britain about Company rule laid the groundwork for the consolidation of the official position of viceroy and vicereine at the beginning of the Raj in 1858, when the Crown replaced the East India Company as head of the colonial government. In this moment of transition, the governor was given a new title, viceroy, signaling that he was the 2 The so-called “mutiny” of 1857 was in fact a series of several rebellions across India against British rule. To highlight the fact that this moment proves to be a crucial turning point in my argument, I am referring to it here as a mutiny, though clarifying that it was not in fact one event, and the participants were not confined to members of the army, as the name also implies.