UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Imperialism and Widowhood: British Widows of the 1857 Indian ‘Mutiny’

by

Judith Edna Hinshaw

A THESIS

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DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

CALGARY, ALBERTA

JULY, 2011

©Judith Edna Hinshaw 2011

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text

Abstract

Just as women who accompanied their husbands into the spaces of the British

Empire have been termed imperial wives, those whose husbands died there can be considered imperial widows. To date, discussions of British nineteenth-century attitudes toward death and mourning practices have had a primarily domestic focus. This study examines how the British women widowed by the 1857 Indian Mutiny negotiated the

Victorian prescriptions for death and mourning, not only in imperial spaces but under the duress of conflict and deprivation. In doing so, it looks at the inherent tension in domestic/imperial marriages as well as nuances in the determination of women’s complicity in or resistance to imperial missions.

Furthermore as remnants and representatives of the imperial conflict, these women symbolized both domestic and national loss to Britain. This study follows the women to Britain where they were received as both victims and heroines. It examines the response of the traumatized nation to the women whose vulnerability echoed its own. The anxiety of the population became largely focused on the perceived duty of the nation to provide financial succour for all the widows whose protectors and providers had been sacrificed to the imperial cause. While the substantial Indian Mutiny Relief Fund, which resulted from generous public donations, ensured that all deserving widows received support, its regulations that the widows of soldiers in particular be industrious and respectable reinforced the imperatives of class. In addition to the Relief Fund, an examination of the range of other sources of income provides insight into how the widows negotiated their individual circumstances.

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Shortly after experiencing the fanfare which greeted the returning widows, the women disappeared from public view. This study looks at where the heroines went by examining the lives and subjectivity of several of the widows. It engages with their choices to remarry or remain widows, where and with whom to live, and their continuing ties to India and/or the imperial missions. In doing so, it not only demonstrates the diversity of widows’ experiences but through them how the mutiny and the empire became woven into the narrative of British families and communities.

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Acknowledgements

The supporting cast for this project is large and I owe an enormous debt of gratitude for the judicious direction, the support and encouragement, and the timely funding.

First and foremost, I owe a great deal to my advisor, Douglas Peers, who encouraged me to pursue this research focus and allowed me time and space to explore its discursive facets. His patience with my pace was exceeded only by his erudite guidance which allowed me to stay the course without being swamped by detail. His questions and suggestions kept me grounded, motivated and curious. It is to his credit that I continue to be a willing hostage to a topic which has captivated me for almost a decade.

In addition I am indebted to Warren Elofson, David Marshall, David Oakleaf, Bettina

Bradbury and Miriam Grant who, in addition to their generous comments, provided insightful and valuable suggestions regarding this work.

Brenda Oslawsky has been indispensable in guiding me through the paperwork which I love to hate, and I am particularly indebted to the University of Calgary library staff that operate the distance education services and who filled my seemingly endless requests for books with efficiency and good humour.

Financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the

Departments of Graduate Studies and History at the University of Calgary, the Dr. Frank

Eyck Memorial Graduate Scholarship in European History, and the David Hinshaw

Memorial Scholarship has been vital during my research and writing.

Of fellow students who have provided empathy and motivation, I am particularly cognizant of the friendship of Barbara Barnes, Danielle Kinsey, Ed Kaplan, Troy Wason,

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Patricia Gordon, and Helena Nunes Duartes. This process would not be complete without the commiseration of fellow-travelers.

And finally, my heart-felt thanks to the stalwart company of family and friends who have accompanied me on this journey, offering love and encouragement while conceding space for my work. Among the multitude: Erin, Brianna, Meghan, Aubrey, Carol, Tom,

Viv, Anita, Karina, Ryan and my in-laws: for your unceasing support. Darrel, Janet,

Dixie, Barry, Byron and Darlene: for your boundless generosity. Brenda and Dennis,

Clara and Gordon, Helen and Brian, Steve and Tracy, Nancy and Patsy: for the best and one-of-a-kind sibling support. And finally to Deena, Matthew, Heidi, Jodi, Karsten,

Jennifer, and Menko: you are my loudest cheering section, my unfailing support and my raison d’être.

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Dedication

To:

My Auntie Helen

who can look back over 90 years fully lived

and

My grandsons Anderson and Tobias

who are just getting started

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii!

Acknowledgements ...... iv!

Dedication ...... vi!

Table of Contents ...... vii!

Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1!

Chapter 2: Negotiating Victorian Prescriptions for Death (and Mourning) in

Imperial Spaces ...... 18!

Chapter 3: The Imperial Widow: Mourning in Imperial Spaces ...... 85!

Chapter 4: Response of the Nation: the anxiety and the duty ...... 144!

Chapter 5: Going Home: Where are the Heroines? ...... 190!

Chapter 6: Conclusion ...... 257!

Primary Sources ...... 268!

Secondary Sources ...... 276!

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Chapter 1: Introduction

War creates widows and it is at this intersection that military history and social history collide. However, despite their ubiquity, war widows have been largely neglected by both groups of historians. Similarly, the imperial widows begat by imperial conflict have also remained unstudied by imperial historians. The British women who were widowed by the Mutiny in India in 1857 and 1858 provide a unique opportunity to begin to address this lacuna through the examination of the attitudes and expectations which surrounded and defined these British widows both in India and Britain. We can also explore these women’s responses to the circumscriptions and prescriptions in domestic and imperial spaces. In comparison to contemporary campaigns such as the Crimean

War, the Indian Mutiny had fewer British combatants or casualties and was of shorter duration. However, the imperial conflict had a profound impact on Britain and India and its brevity and intensity combined with a British casualty list, “small enough for the dead to be listed almost individually,”1 provide an ideal lens through which to consider British widowhood and the juxtaposition of imperial and domestic attitudes. The women who were widowed form an identifiable and well-defined cohort. In addition their association with imperial missions and location in imperial spaces need to be considered in conjunction with their decisions, as widows, to return to Britain. Examining the widows

1 Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 2008), 1; Douglas M. Peers, India under Colonial Rule, 1700-1885 (Harlow: Pearson-Longman, 2006), 64; Edward M. Spiers, The Army and Society, 1815-1914 (London: Longman, 1980), 135; I. T. Tavender, Casualty Roll for the Indian Mutiny, 1857-59 (Polstead, Suffolk: J.B.Hayward & Son, 1983). Herbert quotes the figure of 1,300 British killed which was a contemporary estimate by Alexander Duff, a missionary in India and one of the first to publish a book about the conflict. The number has variously been estimated at 6,000 killed (Peers) to 11,021 dead, of which 8,987 died of sunstroke and sickness (Spiers). Although Tavender’s book is an invaluable resource of names of both officers and soldiers, it lists both wounded and killed but does not include any deaths from sickness.

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firstly in imperial space and subsequently in Britain is a unique opportunity to view close and critical connections between Britain and Empire, the two dimensions of the imperial equation that lay at the heart of the new imperial history.

The Indian Mutiny has been widely viewed as a transformative event for both

Britain and its empire. Although it has been studied, analyzed and documented extensively there has been little attention paid to the British women widowed by the conflict. Curiously, they have not been subjected to the same level of analysis as have the women who died in the conflict. Those who survived have been largely forgotten in the examination of the objectification, as victims and martyrs, of those who died. And yet those who lived and were widowed have a great deal to disclose, both about the symbolism and subjectivity of widows as well as the mutually constitutive elements of domestic and imperial imperatives. Moreover, while subsequent generations have forgotten them, at the time of the Mutiny they were the subject of considerable discussion. However, rather than being quickly defined and contained (as were the women who died) within overarching imperial narratives, these women are not easily captured nor can they be invoked with a single voice. As imperial wives, they became imperial widows and as such were remnants and representatives of both domestic and imperial destruction. This study is an examination of the disparate realities of these women who negotiated the prescribed ethos of widowhood and the milieu of imperial expectations.

Before looking more closely at the British widows, however, it is important to consider the context within which they operated as imperial wives. Encouraged by evangelical and utilitarian attitudes which were gaining ground in Britain, as well as the

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wider empire, the perception that British wives were domestic and civilizing foils for the exotic and potentially degenerative temptations of India and Indian women strengthened throughout the first half of the nineteenth-century. Facilitated by easier and quicker transportation between Britain and India, women increasingly travelled to India as wives and daughters. Viewed as the arbiters of British manners, culture, and domesticity, the wives were tasked with creating and maintaining an insular Anglo-Indian society which eschewed ‘indianization.’ They helped to establish the parameters within which Anglo-

Indians were expected to define their Britishness, including dress, etiquette, morality, recreation and social action which reflected Britishness. Colourful and looser style dress was discouraged in favour of imported clothing, European food and tableware became de rigueur, and industrious and intellectual pursuits were encouraged as a means of countering the indolence believed prevalent in India in general and in the zenanas in particular. Cohesion was provided by a rigid social code of manners and behaviour and helped to create a distinct Anglo-Indian community.2 Although the strict (and sometimes confusing) hierarchy which developed was unique to Anglo-Indian society, it was based on British culture and tradition and privileged the civil and military elite. At the top were the heads of government (Governor-General and Governors), the judiciary (Chief

Justices), the church (Bishops) and the military (Commanders-in-Chief) for each

Presidency followed by a sliding scale which incorporated civil positions and military ranks (and took into consideration time spent in India).3 The increasing numbers of civil servants’ wives as well as those of planters and businessmen were also included in the

2 E, M Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800-1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 60-80. 3 “Warrant of Precedence in India” in The Friend of India, May 10 1855; David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 77-78.

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descending but acceptable social scale if they were European, something which many women went to great pains to prove through their adherence to protocol.4

While British women increasingly inhabited what has been termed the masculine space of the colonial frontier, the expectation that they would create a domestic haven co- opted them into an imperial/domestic dynamic. In addition to the challenge of making a home and running a household in a vastly unfamiliar setting, as gatekeepers of morality and gentility, they were important symbols of British superiority. However, as has been explored by a number of scholars, their position was ambivalent. While their place in imperial settings implicated them as sharing in and approving of the imperial actions, they were at the same time provided options and opportunities not available for women in

Britain or possible for British men in India. Not only were women more involved in activities such as teaching and travelling, they had access to Indian women not permitted to European men. Despite this independence, they were also subject to the hierarchy of gender which existed in Britain.5 As such, they were both ruler and ruled. Although the consequent inherent tension for imperial wives has been described as a dialectic of complicity/resistance,6 as will be examined in this study, their subjectivity was more nuanced and their loyalties often more mixed than the binary indicates.

4 Collingham, Imperial Bodies, 50-52, 63-65, 75. 5 Sara Mills, “Knowledge, Gender and Empire” Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies ed. Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose (New York: The Guilford Press, 1994), 35-39; M. Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1991), xiii; Philippa Levine, Gender and Empire , The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Wm. Roger Louis (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2004). 6 Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia U.P., 1996), 122-123.

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Further imperial complexities were added by the divergent imperatives of the hydra-like East India Company7 and social and spiritual reform. The operations of the

East India Company which focused simultaneously on security, stability, and profit initially resisted what were generally believed to be potentially destabilizing forces of social reform and missionary work. This reluctance was countered by growing pressure for ‘anglicization’ and reforms were introduced by Governor Generals William Bentinck

(1828-1835) and Lord Dalhousie (1848-1856), which included the abolition of sati and thagi, introduction of western education, the Hindu Widow Remarriage Act, railways, telegraphs, and irrigation. In addition, the access to India granted religious reformers in

1813 resulted in an influx of missionaries from a range of Christian denominations who were determined to confer the benefits of western religion and education on a population which they believed had been oppressed by centuries of superstition and ignorance. In a fundamental shift from an earlier generation marked by admiration, emulation and study of the culture, language and history of India (Orientalism), mid-century officials in India, driven by utilitarianism and evangelicalism, focused on anglicizing the population and modernizing India. However, scholarship has demonstrated that missionaries were often critical of the failure of Company policies to spread Christianity and Christian values and, in turn, Company officials were uneasy with the destabilization of local society (between

7 Originally a trading monopoly, the East India Company eventually controlled most of the subcontinent through the military actions of their Indian Army and the civil administration of their Indian Government. Three regional Presidencies were established (Madras, Bombay and Bengal), each with their own army and civil administration. However, by the early nineteenth-century, the British government had enacted legislation which gave it considerable control over the Company. Executive power over all three Presidencies was granted to a Governor-General aided by a Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army both appointed by the Company after consultation with the British Government. The Company became in effect a department of state. For a concise history of this evolution from trading company to imperial power, see Philip Lawson, The East India Company: A History (London: Longman, 1987).

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castes and within families) that proselytizing could initiate.8 As imperial agents, convinced of their right to Christianize, civilize or modernize, the goals of the reformers and the missionaries were seen as counter to the Company’s equally powerful desire for stability, security and profit.

The disjunction between these various imperial imperatives helps explain the range of causes which have been posited for the Mutiny. A brief overview will provide a back-drop for the widows who are the focus of this examination. With approximately

300,000 troops, the Indian Army was one of the largest standing armies in the world.

Although the officers were exclusively British, the troops were principally Indian sepoys, creating a ratio in 1856 of about six Indian soldiers to one British soldier.9 Although for at least fifteen years there had been warnings that a mutiny was possible, the indication of sepoy disaffection early in 1857 was generally dismissed until a serious incident at the end of March at Barrackpure resulted in the execution of one man and the disbanding of two regiments of sepoys. Despite subsequent indications of dissatisfaction from the

Indian soldiers, many British officers refused to believe their regiments would rebel. On

10 May 1857, Indian troops mutinied in Meerut, a large British military base in northern

India, killing about fifty British men, women and children.

While there was no single determining cause for the uprising, the mutineers were reacting to an admixture of imperial attitudes and policies which had failed to

8 Lawson, The East India Company: A History, 149-156; Douglas M. Peers, India under Colonial Rule: 1700-1885 (Harlow: Pearson, 2006), 38-59; Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997 (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2008), 125-132. Andrew Porter, Religion versus empire? British Protestant missionaries and overseas expansion, 1700-1914 (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2004); Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818-1940 (Stanford: Stanford U.P., 2002). 9 Christopher Hibbert, The Great Mutiny: India 1857 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 19.

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acknowledge the Indians’ military contributions and threatened their traditions. Sepoy discontent over low pay, lack of promotion and deteriorating relations with British officers had been increasing for at least a decade. However, in the months prior to the

Mutiny, the perceived British disregard for Indian traditions and religious beliefs created additional distrust and anger. While new enlistment regulations which required troops to serve wherever they were sent threatened the high-caste sepoys with loss of caste were this to entail a sea voyage, the rumours of cartridges greased with beef or pig fat used in the new Enfield rifles ostensibly impacted the beliefs of all Indian soldiers. The requirement that the cartridges be bitten before loading meant ritual pollution for both

Hindus and Muslims. Thus, with discontent and suspicion already present, the rumours of greased cartridges became the catalyst for revolt. As the mutineers subsequently had little compunction about using these rifles, the continuing significance of the cartridges was arguably negligible. Rather it demonstrates the depth of fear and frustration amongst the sepoys. More importantly, the magnitude of the Mutiny was augmented by the resentment of both Indian soldiers and civilians of British revenue policies which involved land revenue settlements and the appropriation of territories The most egregious of the latter was the recent annexation of Awadh, the home of a large percentage of sepoys in the Bengal army, on grounds of misrule. Dispossessed of their livelihood, customary rights to revenue, and/or wealth and status, many civilians chose to vent their anger by joining the rebel soldiers. In confronting colonial rule, although there was no common cause for those who chose to fight, there was a common enemy to provide a rallying point. That being said, the discontent and anger which induced civilians to join the sepoys in the Mutiny were fueled by diverse and often individual grievances.

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The British were caught off-guard allowing the mutineers early success and momentum. After Meerut, the rebel sepoys quickly captured Delhi, symbolic as the capital of the Mughal Empire, and mutinies in other cantonments in the north began to break out. The uprising spread quickly throughout north-central India in what is present day Uttar Pradesh and within two months the mutineers, joined by peasants and aggrieved members of the old aristocracy, held much of the territory between Lucknow and Delhi, a distance of about 500 kilometres. In late June, the British in the besieged cantonment of Kanpur surrendered but were subsequently murdered. The events which resulted in the massacre of two hundred British women and children escalated the perceived need for British retribution and the women who died there became mute symbols of martyred and sacred British womanhood. In Lucknow, the former capital of the kingdom of Awadh [known as Oudh under the British], about two thousand British, five hundred of whom were women and children, fell under siege for five months before being relieved and evacuated. The fate of the women at Kanpur, embellished with retelling, became the impetus for the relieving forces to rescue the women’s Lucknow counterparts while the British public waited anxiously for the military reports which took several weeks to reach Britain. The drama of the mission to save British women and children captured the attention of the nation, and the successful defense and eventual relief of the Lucknow Residency became a powerful symbol of British stamina, resistance and superiority.10 Although the Mutiny did not spread beyond the Bengal

Presidency and many of the troops and civilians remained loyal to the British, the

10 After Lucknow was finally retaken in March 1858, to commemorate the siege, the Union Jack was flown day and night over the ruins of the Residency until Indian Independence on August 15, 1947.

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apparent precipitous and intense onslaught of the conflict put instant pressure on complacent and ill-prepared British officers. In the ensuing panic, factual reports and wild rumours became jumbled. The murder of women and children became integral to the tenor of the (largely indiscriminate) retaliation of the British. Rumours and sensational tales of the rape and mutilation of British women, later discounted, traumatized the

British public and energized the military. British officers such as General James Neill and

Lieutenant William Hodson, both quite possibly with psychopathic tendencies,11 showed no leniency toward prisoners and pursued Indians with a vengeance that was shocking to many. Although the conflict was not officially declared at an end until July 1859, by mid

1858 there was already broad consensus that the British had regained control. The conflict may have been over in deed but not in word. Mutiny histories, novels, and studies have continued to visit and define the complex sequence of events, and its impact on India, on Britain, and on their relations continues to be studied and debated.

While it is not within the purview of this study to engage in a discussion of the broader meaning and impact of the Mutiny, it is safe to say that the conflict combined military, political, religious and economic grievances stemming from reactions to a complex combination of imperial initiatives. This complexity is also manifested in the elusiveness of a definitive appellation for what is variously referred to as the “Indian

Mutiny,” “Indian Rebellion,” “Sepoy Revolt,” or “First War of Independence.” While

“Mutiny” has been dismissed as a fully descriptive referent, as it fails to acknowledge the participation of the public, alternate names are also problematic. Although “Sepoy

Revolt” may in fact more accurately describe how it began, its rapid expansion beyond

11 Peers, India Under Colonial Rule, 69; Herbert, War of No Pity, 130, 142, 192-194.

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the Indian Army needs to be acknowledged. The sobriquet of “First War of

Independence” indicates a cohesion, single purpose and leadership that is not evident and is arguably a result of reading history backward. “Indian Rebellion” could be viewed as the most accurate descriptor of the involvement of both disaffected military personnel and civilians, but it too carries a connotation of unity of purpose. Although “Indian

Mutiny” does not overtly acknowledge the involvement of the Indian population, the culpability for the uprising was and is primarily laid at the feet of the mutineers from the army. Despite its deficiencies, it is arguably the most widely used and recognizable referent for the conflict. Further, as it was the term with which contemporaries knew and understood it, and as this study engages with popular reaction, this will be how it will be known in this work.12

While the British widows examined here do not exist in isolation from the events and aftermath of the Mutiny, their place at the intersection of military, social and imperial history, as earlier noted, provide a unique opportunity to draw from a large bank of resources which in turn more broadly informs the research. While there were frustrating and inexplicable dead ends in the archival records, there were also unexpected rewards.

Considering the women’s adaptability and subjectivity, and the tensions inherent in their role as imperial wives/widows, it became quickly apparent that the study needed to begin with those widowed in India and follow them to Britain. For these women, as for many other Britons, the close and critical connections between Britain and India are therefore

12 For a comprehensive and invaluable discussion of this debate see Herbert, War of No Pity, 1-18. In addition, see Salahuddin Malik, 1857: War of Independence or Clash of Civilizations? British Public Reactions (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2008). Although this examination adds valuable commentary to the debate regarding the cause of the mutiny, its attempt to draw parallels to contemporary events and tensions between Christianity and Islam is somewhat tenuous and distracting.

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evident in the sequence of the following chapters. While all the women examined were widowed by the imperial conflict, not all were in India during the Mutiny. It is an illustration of how many of them divided their lives between their husbands in India and their children in Britain. However, those who were in India when the conflict destroyed their homes and resulted in their husbands’ deaths are the focus of chapters two and three of this study. It is arguable that the public engagement with the Mutiny encouraged many who had fought or been caught in the conflict to save and often publish their diaries and memoirs. Although the preponderance of those published concern the siege of Lucknow

(likely due to the public obsession with it), the relatively few other accounts provided valuable balance.

While men’s accounts of battle have great value, the voices of women from sites of conflict are exceptional and, as such, invaluable for studies such as this. It is not surprising that women’s diaries were often domestic in their focus while men recounted military strategies, marches and battles. Although many of these diaries and letters, published and unpublished, have been previously perused and used by scholars, there has been little attention paid to the response to or of the imperial widows. The extant documents proved to be rich sources of information about attitudes toward death, commemoration, burial, grief, and mourning in imperial spaces, particularly for widows.

Set against the array of excellent scholarship regarding Victorian attitudes toward domestic death and mourning, details and nuances in the Mutiny narratives that have been previously overlooked become significant and relevant.

Like the widows, chapters four and five move to Britain. Although the response of the population and the trajectories of the widows’ lives are in great measure

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intertwined, it is instructive to examine the ethos and the individual separately. The nation responded first to the reports, rhetoric, and rumours as it was several months before widows began to arrive in Britain. Therefore the initial response was to the widow in absentia and as the symbol of the nation’s vulnerability. This chapter examines the symbolic widow writ large (victim and heroine) and the subsequent practicality of dealing with the widow writ small (individuals). In addition, the imperatives of class, integral to the nation’s response, become evident in the discussion of the nation as provider and the attendant responsibility to monitor the widows of soldiers as opposed to those of officers.

Key to this examination was a broad range of British newspapers in conjunction with private correspondence and official pension records. Not only were reports and personal letters from India printed in the papers, the papers’ editorials, opinion pieces, letters to the editor, and other accounts indicated the engagement of the public and echoed the anxiety expressed in private correspondence. Press reports of the sermons preached on the National Day of Humiliation were particularly evocative. Also integral to establishing a national public response were the advertised organization of and widespread solicitation for the Fund for the Relief of the Sufferers of the Mutiny in India.

Not only were accounts of regional meetings printed but lists of donations and donors and subsequent financial reports were also widely published. These, combined with documents distributed by the administrators of the fund to regional committees, provided a great deal of information about income, expenditures, recipients of funding and distinctions made between the widows of the officer and soldier classes.

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Official records of the British and Indian Armies’ widows’ and orphans’ pensions were valuable not only for pension amounts but for supplementary information noted next to their columns of figures. Although the regulations which governed the distribution of funds for both armies provided valuable context, those of the East India

Company’s Pension Funds for officers, covenanted servants and uncovenanted servants respectively were particularly detailed. While the India Office Records contained records for Meritorious and Clive Fund pensions paid by the Indian Government, the attendant correspondence demonstrated the engagement of individuals in the process. Although it was often conducted by family members of the widows, the widows themselves were equally their own agents. Thus although pension records informed how the nation responded to the women, the documents were invaluable in also examining the agency of the widows.

The final chapter which analyses the subjectivity and trajectories of these women utilizes many of the sources previously used, in conjunction with a more specific focus on wills and estates, memorial inscriptions, demographic maps, census records, private letters, and marriage and obituary notices. Following the threads of individual lives after their widowhood was often aided by sifting through decades of census records and frequently ascertaining the widows’ natal names, siblings, parents, and homes before moving forward in time. It is equally instructive not only to locate the widow in the subsequent records but also her children as they leave home. It is also crucial that the ten years between each snapshot of information be acknowledged and considered. As such the wealth of data provided by each census must be balanced by what may have occurred in the intervening years. To help with this lacuna, pension and estate records

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administered by the Indian Government not only provided names and ages of children but forwarding addresses for the widows and occasionally significant correspondence with the administrators. Demographic maps, available on-line, allowed insight into residences, neighborhoods, and communities in which the widows lived and often revealed imperial enclaves, either Anglo-Indian or other colonial repatriates. In addition, the women’s personal correspondence and their co-respondents often revealed details about the widows’ finances, relationships and/or priorities while newspaper notices included marriages, obituaries, public activities and awards such as civil pensions or royal appointments. What became readily apparent as these women were drawn out of the extant records was that they had very individual trajectories. As such while it would be impossible to claim to have found a representative Mutiny widow, what the records consistently revealed was the overwhelming subjectivity of the women.

The analysis of these widows and their imperial/domestic ethos is developed within a matrix of scholarship without which this study would have been ineffectual.

While much of it will be introduced in the following chapters, the studies with which this work particularly engaged must be mentioned. With widows as the focus of this study, the excellent work of Pat Jalland and Julie-Marie Strange on Victorian death and mourning were invaluable and were supplemented by that of Lou Taylor, Ruth

Richardson, and Olive Anderson.13 They provided important documentation and analysis regarding death, dying, burial, mourning customs and suicide in nineteenth-century

13 Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1996); Julie-Marie Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2005); Lou Taylor, Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983); Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Olive Anderson, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

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Britain. While much work which has been done on the dynamic of gender and empire in

India focuses on the post-mutiny Raj, it nevertheless contributed context and perspective that greatly informed this study. Among this excellent scholarship this analysis relied particularly on that of Margaret Strobel, Antoinette Burton, Mary Procida and Elizabeth

Buettner.14 Although arguably only partly under the rubric of women and empire, the studies of women and the army were equally valuable resources. Myna Trustram has looked at marriage and the Victorian army while Anne Summers has examined the evolution of British military nurses.15

Within the range of Mutiny studies, those that examined the writing of women who survived the conflict and those that analyzed the rape narrative surrounding the women who died were useful and insightful. Articles by Alison Blunt, Penelope Tuson, and Claudia Klaver16 form a thought provoking set piece in which each looks at women’s diaries and memoirs from the Mutiny. The triumvirate of works by Nancy Paxton, Jenny

Sharpe and Sara Suleri explore, among other things, the objectification of the British

14 Margaret Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1991); Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Mary Procida, Married to the empire, Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883-1947 (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2002); Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2004). 15 Myna Trustram, Women of the regiment: Marriage and the Victorian army (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1984); Anne Summers, Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses, 1854-1914 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988). 16 Alison Blunt, “The Flight from Lucknow: British women travelling and writing home, 1857-8” in Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, James Duncan ed. (London: Routledge, 1998), 92-113; Blunt, “Spatial Stories under Siege: British women writing from Lucknow in 1857” Gender, Place & Culture Vol.7 No.3 (2000), 229-246; Penelope Tuson, “Mutiny Narratives and the Imperial Feminine: European Women’s Accounts of the Rebellion in India in 1857” Women’s Studies International Forum Vol.21 No. 3 (1998), 291-303; Claudia Klaver, “Domesticity under Siege: British women and imperial crisis at the siege of Lucknow, 1857” Women’s Writing Vol.8, No. 1 (2001), 21-58.

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women who died.17 In addition, among the many descriptions of the Mutiny that have been published, that of Christopher Hibbert continues to be one of the most accessible and well-researched.18 Gautam Chakravarty’s19 exploration of the Mutiny in British literature is joined by the recent work of Christopher Herbert on the aftermath of the mutiny on the British psyche, also as demonstrated through literature, which provides rigorous new arguments and insights into British attitudes toward the conflict.20

Finally, several studies on the British in India during the nineteenth-century contributed to the overall analysis of this study. E. M. Collingham looks at the evolution of the social body of Anglo-Indians, B. J. Moore-Gilbert writes about Anglo-Indian culture through their literature, and Andrew Porter and Jeffrey Cox have examined the work of missionaries.21 In addition the work of Douglas Peers has provided valuable military context for this study.22

17 Nancy Paxton, Writing Under the Raj (London: Rutgers U.P., 1999); Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: Chicago U.P., 1992). 18 Christopher Hibbert, The Great Mutiny, India 1857 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978). 19 Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2005). 20 Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 2008). 21 E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800-1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001); B. J. Moore-Gilbert, Kipling and “Orientalism” (London: Croom Helm, 1986); B. J. Moore-Gilbert ed., Writing India, 1757-1990: The literature of British India (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1996); Andrew Porter, Religion versus empire? British Protestant missionaries and overseas expansion, 1700-1914 (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2004); Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818-1940 (Stanford: Stanford U.P., 2002). 22 Douglas Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in Early Nineteenth-Century India (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1995); Peers, “ ‘Those Noble Exemplars of the True Military Tradition’: Constructions of the Indian Army in the Mid-Victorian Press” Modern Asian Studies Vol. 31 No.1 (February 1997), 109-142; Peers, “ ‘The more this foul case is stirred, the more offensive it becomes’: Imperial Authority, Victorian Sentimentality and the Court Martial of Colonel Crawley, 1862-1864” in Fringes of Empire: Peoples, Places and Spaces at the Margins of British Colonial India, eds. Sameetah Agha and Elizabeth Kolsky (New Delhi: Oxford U.P., 2009), 207-235.

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Finally, in the paucity of work on British middle-class widows, Cynthia Curran’s work is a thought provoking and insightful contribution23 to the field. This study likewise speaks to the value of examining women who were widows. The exploration of widowhood through an imperial lens allows both perspective and insight not accessible from a strictly domestic viewpoint. While the examination of death and mourning in imperial spaces demonstrates the internal tension of domestic/imperial marriages, it also illustrates the inherent comfort and strength which Anglo-Indian widows took from

British customs and traditions. Their symbolism as imperial victims of the Mutiny resonated with Britons’ own sense of vulnerability and loss and resulted in unprecedented publicly funded support for widows of all classes. Although their initial status as heroines quickly faded, it was attributable both to the public’s waning interest in the conflict and the widows’ discomfort with the spotlight. Their subsequent lives demonstrate considerable agency and ingenuity in their negotiation of lifestyle choices. Some remarried while others continued for decades to identify themselves with their late husbands. Many chose variously to live with family or in Anglo-Indian communities while imperial loyalties and ties were frequently maintained. Although remnants and representatives of imperial disorder, they were quickly incorporated into the domestic population, a demonstration of the relatively porous boundaries between empire and home.

23 Cynthia Curran, When I First Began My Life Anew: Middle-Class Widows in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Bristol: Wyndham Hall Press, 2000).

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Chapter 2: Negotiating Victorian Prescriptions for Death (and Mourning) in Imperial Spaces

The subjectivity of British women who found themselves in the empire at large has been and continues to be a fruitful field of study. Recent scholarship has left little doubt not only that “Western women were [central] to imperial development,”1 but how variously they viewed their roles and responsibilities in their colonial surroundings.

Although Margaret Strobel’s call for a “critical perspective on the subject of European women in the colonies”2 has been heard, much of the subsequent work, particularly that regarding British women in India, has been focused on the latter half of the nineteenth- century.3 Primarily positioned within the dialectic of ‘complicity in/resistance to’4 an imperial cause,5 these women are often viewed in relation to the people and culture into which they had re-located. However, asked to create a domestic presence (haven) within what Simon Gikandi has termed the masculine “forbidden space” of the empire,6 these women (wives) also exercised (and were exercised by) the norms and protocols that created cultural and social familiarity. There is in fact compelling evidence that “in the

1 Philippa Levine ed, Gender and Empire, The Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2004) vii. 2 Margaret Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1991), ix-x. 3 Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865- 1915 (Chapel-Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Mary Procida, Married to the empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883-1947 (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2002); Clare Midgley, Gender and imperialism (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1995); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial masculinity: the ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1995); Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham: Duke U.P., 1996); Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2004). 4 Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia U.P., 1996), 122. 5 See discussion in introduction regarding the divergence and plurality of imperial missions. 6 Gikandi, 123.

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face of the overwhelming [cultural] communities” which existed in India, the memsahibs were “subject to even stricter class and hierarchy rules than those which operated on them within Britain.”7 This being said, the evidence also implies a static quality that needs to be examined more closely. With apologies to the nuanced and oft-discussed distinctions between Englishness and Britishness, most recently tackled by Peter Mandler,8 could it be said that the British (in India) were more British than the British (in England)? Or was the transplanted ethos within which they operated more accurately a cultural/social hybrid with “its body in one country and its heart in another”?9 How fluid and adaptable was it under pressure? Did transgressions or perceived transgressions of ‘the rules’ constitute resistance to or complicity with the divergent imperial causes? Finally, how did domesticity simultaneously jeopardize and buttress the stability/security

(existence/establishment) of British rule/control?

To address these questions, it is instructive to examine the imperial wives in India against the backdrop of the destruction and trauma of the Indian Mutiny. A substantial body of valuable scholarship has examined and analyzed the seeming dichotomy of the domestic/imperial role which was expected of British wives in India.10 More specifically,

7 Sara Mills, “Knowledge, Gender, and Empire” in Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, eds. (New York: Guilford Press, 1994), 38. Also articulated in Margaret Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1991), 10- 14, and Margaret MacMillan, Women of the Raj: the mothers, wives and daughters of the British Empire in India (New York: Random House, 1998), 13. E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800-1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 65, 79, 91. 8 Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven and London: Yale U.P., 2008). 9 MacMillan, Women of the Raj, 46. 10 Margaret MacMillan, Women of the Raj: the mothers, wives and daughters of the British Empire in India (New York: Random House 20007); Veronica Bamfield, On The Strength; The story of the British Army wife (London: Charles Knight & Co., 1974); Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: the making of empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Myrna Trustram, Women of the Regiment: Marriage and the Victorian Army (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. 1984); Douglas Peers, “The Raj’s Other Great Game: Policing the Sexual Frontiers of the Indian Army in the First Half of the

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examinations of women’s voices and analyses of their significance in the mutiny narrative(s) have introduced British and Imperial scholars to a number of women who survived the Mutiny and subsequently published memoirs, diaries, and/or letters.11

Consequently, Adelaide Case, Katherine Bartrum, Rosa Coopland, Emily Polehampton,

Julia Inglis, Georgina Harris, and Emma Germon have become the focus of numerous studies and perspectives. Of these seven, four were widowed during the Mutiny and all but one endured the five month siege of Lucknow, an event which will later be shown to be a defining moment in the Mutiny.12 As an iconic site of British resistance during the conflict, those who survived to relate their experiences were given an equally exalted status. Although there is not a clearly discernible reason for the abundance of women’s published memoirs that came from Lucknow in comparison to the paucity of similar publications from elsewhere in areas affected by the Mutiny, it is arguable that they were compelled as no other Mutiny survivors were to share their stories. While Britons watched and waited, the triumph of survival in and rescue from Lucknow played out in direct contrast to the horror of the massacre at Kanpur. As has been analyzed by other scholars, although the voices of the women of Lucknow affirmed the strengths of British

Nineteenth Century” in Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism (Durham: Duke U.P., 2006); Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia U.P., 1996); Margaret Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington: Indiana U.p., 1991); Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, eds, Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (New York: Guilford Press, 1994); Mary Procida, Married to the empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883-1947 (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2002); Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2004). 11 Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Alison Blunt, “The Flight from Lucknow: British women traveling and writing home, 1857-8” in Writes of Passage: reading Travel Writing, James Duncan, ed. (London: Routledge, 1998) 92-113; Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, The Great Uprising in India, 1857-58: Untold Stories, Indian and British (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), Penelope Tuson, “Mutiny Narratives and the Imperial Feminine: European Women’s Accounts of the Rebellion in India in 1857,” in Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 21 No. 3 (1998), 291-303; Jane Robinson, Angels of Albion (London: Viking, 1996). 12 see introduction for national significance and symbolism of Lucknow.

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womanhood, the ability of British men to save them was equally crucial to the British narrative of triumph. However, despite the repeated exposés, there has been little attempt to study these and other women in India who were widowed during the Mutiny within the context of British nineteenth-century expectations surrounding death, commemoration and bereavement. Similarly, the many valuable studies of the Victorian celebration or culture of death, in focusing on Britain, have largely neglected the empire.13

In the imperial spaces of India where the alarming mortality supported the aphorism that “two monsoons [were] the age of man”14 the Mutiny exacted a toll which added to the already high death rate. Military records from 1851 indicate that in Bengal the annual death rate was 7.4 per cent of soldiers and 3.8 per cent of unmarried officers and 2.7 per cent of married officers.15 The average annual mortality was equal to the loss of the Bengal army every 10 ! years.16 By comparison, troops in Britain had a 1.7 percent morality rate in 1851.17 Although it is more difficult to ascertain the mortality of

British civilians in Bengal, Joseph Ewart used the estimated average of two percent between 1846 and 1854 when compiling his military statistics in 1859. The number of

13 Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1996); Michael Wheeler, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1990); Ralph Houlbrooke, ed Death, Ritual, and Bereavement (London: Routledge, 1989); Peter Jupp and Glennys Howarth, eds, The Changing Face of Death (London: MacMillan Press Ltd, 1997); Lou Taylor, Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983); James Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death (London: David & Charles, 1977); Trevor May, The Victorian Undertaker (Buckinghamshire: Shire Publications, 2007); Julie-Marie Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2005). 14 Theon Wilkinson, Two Monsoons (London: Duckworth & Co Ltd., 1976), frontispiece. Revd James Ovington, 1690 quoted “Which common Fatality has created a Proverb among the English there that Two Mussouns are the age of man.” 15 James Ranald Martin, The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions (London: John Churchill, 1866), 51 quoted in Arnold, 44. 16 Joseph Ewart, A Digest of the Vital Statistics of the European and Native Armies in India (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1859), 20. 17 Philip Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1989), 194.

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Europeans who were killed or died of disease during the Mutiny is also indefinite as references to casualties often do not differentiate between death in battle, massacre or disease, and seldom include civilian casualties. Acknowledging these uncertain numbers,

Douglas Peers estimates that roughly 6,000 of the 40,000 Europeans in India were killed,18a mortality of fifteen per cent.

Thus, in a relatively short time, the triumvirate of military engagement, disease and environment left a great number of widows. It is instructive to examine how these women viewed their husbands’ deaths (imperial context) and their husbands in death

(domestic perspective). Examining this juxtaposition gives us an opportunity to engage with the disconnect, if there was one, in the imperial/domestic role which these women filled. Further to David Gilmour’s assertion that men “almost universally perform the functions of protecting and providing for dependants”19 the British officers in India could be said to have been charged with the same directives writ large for ‘protecting’ the empire and ‘providing’ for the nation. Although in fulfilling the latter the former duty was ostensibly also discharged, as discussed later, the imperial duty often ran counter to domestic expectations. During the Mutiny, providing protection for wives constrained military movement and fully engaging in the conflict meant leaving wives under the protection of others. The arguably implicit priority for the men was articulated by John

Nicholson as he urged the Chief Commissioner of the Punjab, Sir John Lawrence, to send troops from the hill station of Murree to Delhi. “When an Empire is at stake,” he wrote

18 Douglas M Peers, India under Colonial Rule, 1700-1885 (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2006), 64. 19 David Gilmour, Manhood in the Making (New Haven, 1990), 222-225 quoted in John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: essays on gender, family and empire (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005), 78.

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“women and children cease to be of any consideration whatever.”20 Simply put, imperial duty outranked domestic duty. Close study of these Mutiny widows reveals to what degree they considered their husbands’ deaths as necessary or at least comprehensible imperial sacrifices for Britain. At the same time, it also looks at how they grieved their personal loss and memorialized the deceased. Their initial bereavement and commemoration, conducted under the duress and restrictions of the Mutiny, demonstrate the importance of adherence to mourning conventions. However, it is also crucial to examine how the widows’ domestic/imperial role changed and whether, despite the circumscriptions of widowhood, they were allowed or even desired an imperial voice.

To answer these questions, a brief look at death in Britain is necessary. Although, as Pat Jalland and others have acutely pointed out, the descriptions of a monolithic societal celebration of death have been overstated,21 there were widespread expectations and rituals which surrounded death for both the deceased and those mourning his/her demise. In the mid-century, due in part to the convergence of Evangelicalism22 and the

1832 Anatomy Act,23 much was made of a ‘good’ death, respectable funereal and burial practices, and subsequent mourning protocol. While the importance of a triumphant death for Evangelicals resulted in a focus on deathbed behaviour and the ideal of a good

Christian death, the Anatomy Act created a need to prove respectability after death. As the legislation of the latter allowed anatomists the bodies of paupers who died in need of

20 Reginald G Wilberforce, An Unrecorded Chapter of the Indian Mutiny (London: John Murray, 1894), 33. 21 Jalland, Victorian Family, 1-13; Strange, 1-26; Pat Jalland, “Death, Grief, and Mourning in the Upper Class Family, 1860-1914” in Death, Ritual and Bereavement, ed. Houlbrooke, 171-172; David Cannadine, “War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain” in Mirrors of Mortality, ed. Whaley, 187-196, 241-242. 22 Jalland, Victorian Family, 20. 23 Ruth Richardson, “Why Was Death So Big in Victorian Britain” in Death, Ritual and Bereavement, Ralph Houlbrooke, ed. (London: Routledge, 1989) 105-117.

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a parish burial, poverty replaced criminality as the key factor in those destined for the degradation of dissection. Ensuring the deceased a respectable burial became paramount.

In an effort to maintain or achieve the sobriquet of respectability, the rites of passage surrounding death were adopted, in varying degrees, across all classes.24

Although the proceedings differed in ostentation, the deceased were laid out by family or servants for viewing by family and friends before being consigned to a private grave.

Washing and caring for the corpse conferred dignity on the deceased and allowed the bereaved a final gesture of intimacy and affection,25 while the viewing facilitated communal sympathy and support.26 As Ruth Richardson and Julie Strange have both demonstrated, preserving the identity and honour of the departed through a respectable and marked grave was paramount not just for the upper and middle classes but also for the labouring poor.27 Similarly, wearing black was an integral signifier of grief and while it differed sartorially between classes and mourners, it nonetheless spoke to the wearer’s bereavement and respectability. In addition, commemoration and comfort were rooted in the form of condolence letters, written memorials, physical tokens such as death masks, photographs and hair, and other sundry ephemera. While the nature of this memorabilia depended on both material resources and level of literacy, for the poor or the illiterate even a lock of hair or an inexpensive mourning card could still provide the consolation of memory.

24 Ruth Richardson, “Why Was Death” in Death, Ritual and Bereavement, Houlbrooke, ed.; Pat Jalland, “Death, Grief, and Mourning in the Upper-Class Family, 1860-1914” in Death, Ritual and Bereavement, Houlbrooke, ed, 171-187; Taylor, Mourning Dress; Glennys Howarth, “Professionalizing the Funeral Industry in England, 1700-1960” in The Changing Face of Death, Jupp and Howarth, 120-134; Wheeler, Death and Future Life; Strange, Death; Jalland, Victorian Family; May, Undertaker. 25 Strange, 66. 26 Ibid.,80. 27 Richardson, 109-113; Strange, 114-117.

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As parameters for mourning these practices provided “death with a coherent system of values” that everyone in Victorian society understood. For the bereaved, widows in particular, the elements of prescription also provided consolation and the solace of memory.28 Paradoxically, by closely circumscribing her, this societal familiarity with its strictures also allowed the widow latitude for expression and agency. The symbolism inherent in the stages of mourning dress provided an unspoken code which not only indicated her bereavement but the timeline regarding her grieving. As Terri

Sabatos has so ably argued, the widow’s appropriate dress allowed her to appear in public and remain symbolically secluded. Although, as Sabatos observes, this was reassurance for the public that death had not dissolved the norms of morality, domesticity and femininity,29 the widow’s dress also signaled her new independence.

With the death of her husband the widow was ostensibly divested of her financial security and social status, but she also emerged from the coverture of marriage as a feme sole.30 In that moment of death she was invested with a legal identity and concomitant agency which allowed her contractual and property rights which had been subsumed in marriage.31 However, this freedom did not come without cost. Rather than ‘wife of’, her identity and status were now delineated as ‘widow of’ and were further weighted by the burden of her grief and the consequent mourning prescriptions.

28 Jalland, Victorian Family, 193. 29 Terri Sabatos, “Images of Death and Domesticity in Victorian Britain” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 2001), 65-66, 92-97. 30 Joan Perkin, Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1989), 1-2. Perkin quotes the eighteenth-century jurist, the “highest legal luminary of the day,” Sir William Blackstone, in Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-9) who wrote, “the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being, or legal existence of a woman is suspended during marriage.” Thus, while married, the woman was a feme covert, or a hidden person. 31 Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth- Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 25-33; Sabatos, “Images of Death,” 70-71.

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The magnitude of loss notwithstanding, the latter could also be her opportunity to seek financial support, as respectability frequently rested on the reputation of the deceased. By honouring her late husband with a respectable funeral and final resting place, and ensuring that his life and death were celebrated and/or commemorated, the widow could sustain her identity, albeit veiled, through her continued association with him. She could become, as Stephen Collins has so eloquently phrased, “a sort of animated gravestone”.32 While the financial support in the form of subscriptions raised for the widow often depended on the reputation of the late husband, a significant factor in emotional support was the condolence letters which eulogized the life and character of the deceased.33 Although this legacy initially established, by association, the worthiness of the widow to be succoured, it was subsequently her conduct while in mourning and beyond by which she continued to represent her late husband and affirm his respectability and therefore her own. A widow’s duty to a disreputable husband may have been somewhat more conflicted. Despite the lack of discussion regarding such cases, it is certain that they existed. It is plausible that attempts were made to erase or mitigate a questionable reputation by memorializing in death characteristics that had not been evident (or existed) in life. In addition, it is arguable that, if left with the unsavoury reputation of her late husband, a widow was faced with an uphill battle to prove her own worth.

32 Stephen Collins, “ ‘A Kind of Lawful Adultery’: English Attitudes to the Remarriage of Widows, 1550- 1800” in The Changing Face of Death, Jupp and Howarth, eds., 34 – 47. 33 Jalland, Victorian Family, 311-312.

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Thomas Laqueur has argued that by the mid-nineteenth century, no man’s reputation was assured until the moment of his death.34 Largely influenced by the

Evangelical approach to death, for Christian Victorians of all persuasions the respectability of the deceased was determined almost as much by how he died as by how he lived.35 Therefore much depended on the assurance of those present at the deathbed

(and their reassurance to those absent) of an ideal, or ‘good’, death. Based on the

“Evangelical impulses of seriousness, piety, discipline, and duty,” the defining features of a “triumphal death” were a protracted illness which allowed time for self-examination, proof of suffering with fortitude, reconciliation with others, and resignation to God’s will.36 Given these idealistic parameters, sudden deaths were problematic. In addition to shock, they were more likely to result in guilt, anger and regrets by the bereaved. Viewed by some as a sign of God’s retribution on the unrepentant, others contended that the possibility of an unattended and/or precipitous death encouraged holy living.37 Thus even for those dying heroically in battle, a ‘good’ death could only be assured through the reassurance that the deceased had led a spiritual life, an exercise that was crucial to the ethos of the Christian soldier which emerged from the Crimean War.38 Respectability was further consolidated by ensuring they received a decent burial. Public opinion was informed both by the widely held belief in the resurrection of the body and the shame and potential desecration of a pauper’s grave. Therefore provision of a safe and secure resting

34 Thomas Laqueur, “Bodies, Death and Pauper Funerals” in Representations, 1:1 February, 1983, 109. 35 Ibid. 20-58; Strange, 48-57. 36 Jalland, Victorian Family, 19,26,28. Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British adventure, empire and imagining of masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994), 64. 37 Jalland, Victorian Family, 67. 38 Dawson, 81-82; Olive Anderson, “The Growth of Christian Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain” English Historical Review 86, no. 338 (Jan 1971)

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place that would preserve the integrity and identity of the body, from anatomists and for eternity, was paramount.39

Beyond these immediate considerations, the widow was expected to engage in appropriate mourning by donning the requisite apparel, exhibiting a somber demeanour and attitude, and limiting her participation in social activities (as later exemplified by

Queen Victoria). Although, as Lou Taylor has so ably demonstrated, the practice of mourning dress had been observed since the early years of the Christian church, it was primarily adopted by the wealthy. However, by the nineteenth century the custom had been embraced by the middle classes and continued “to slide gently down the social ladder.”40 In addition to dress, correct mourning deportment and etiquette were integral to the system of signs and symbols that helped to determine class and status.41

Given the many studies of Victorian death and mourning, it is surprising that little, if any, attention had been directed at the concomitant ‘good’ military or imperial death, as viewed through the Victorian lens of respectability. It may appear self-evident to observe that death in battle did not allow the deceased the quintessential nineteenth- century ‘beautiful’ death or a respectable burial. However, the use of this lens of inquiry to study the imperial/domestic setting of the mutiny conflict provides a valuable opportunity for an examination of “the complex and contradictory links between ‘home’

39 May, Undertaker; Richardson, “Why Was Death” in Death, Ritual and Bereavement, Houlbrooke; F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900 (London: Fontana Press, 1988), 352-3. 40 Taylor, 120. 41 Taylor, 66, 120-127; Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1995), 37; Sabatos, 72.

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and ‘empire’.42 While it is axiomatic to observe that for soldiers’ widows, the bravery, gallantry and heroism of their departed husbands were important, as Joan Hichberger and

Graham Dawson among others have argued,43 by the mid-nineteenth heroic masculinity had begun to be fused with imperial patriotism. Thus “a ‘real man’… [was one] who was prepared to fight (and die) for Queen, Country and Empire.”44 The stakes were raised for those complying with the imperial/domestic ethos in India during the Mutiny. The sea change in British attitudes toward troops during the Crimean War which had elevated the military to the ‘people’s army’ was further bolstered by the picture of soldiers in India defending British women, children and, for Evangelicals in particular, Christianity.45 In addition to (or rather than) a peaceful acceptance of the ‘higher calling’ of death, a ‘good’ death in imperial military forces included one’s noble sacrifice for Britain and for family.

Furthermore, in or after the heat of battle, as opposed to the prescribed domestic praxis surrounding death, military funereal and burial practices were cursory at best and often not possible at all.

Certainly, there was seldom if ever any opportunity for a widow’s input, even if as in the Mutiny she was close to the site of her husband’s death. In addition, conventional mourning clothing, time and space for most widows was either diminished or deferred, while some appeared to dispense with it in some measure or altogether. Any

42 Alison Blunt, Traveling Home and Empire, British Women in India, 1857-1939, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of British Columbia, 1997. 43 J.W.M. Hichberger, Images of the Army: The Military in British Art, 1815-1914 (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 78,159,166. 44 Dawson, Soldier Heroes, 1. 45 Olive Anderson, “The Growth of Christian Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain” English Historical Review 86, no. 338 (Jan 1971): 46, 49; Veronica Bamfield, On The Strength: The story of the British Army wife (London: Charles Knight & Co.Ltd, 1974), 14-15; Myrna Trustram, Women of the regiment; Marriage and the Victorian army (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1984), 18-19; Edward M Spiers, The Scottish Soldier and Empire, 1854-1902 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U.P.,1980), 4-10, 115-116.

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mourning apparel the women owned was abandoned with their belongings as they fled their homes while the market outlets which had supplied fabrics were in great measure inaccessible, disrupted, or destroyed. In addition, whether in flight or under siege, the immediacy of peril to their or their children’s lives denied them the time for reflection on their personal loss, and limited space and cramped quarters meant there was little space for private grief.

It was an extraordinary time and in their attempts to accommodate both domestic prescriptions and the imperatives of their surroundings, the newly-widowed women chose variously how/where they would mourn. With their lives and worlds disordered by the destruction of their homes and the deaths of their husbands, many defaulted to the security and predictability of roles which conformed to the expectations of domesticity.

In their valuable commentary on and analysis of the Lucknow women’s diaries, Penelope

Tuson, Alison Blunt, and Claudia Klaver include discussions regarding the subjectivity that was exercised in the women’s conformity to “Victorian notions of womanly behaviour and domestic courage.” Not only did the women employ household management skills but they attended births and deaths, tended the wounded, provided childcare, and emotionally and spiritually nurtured and consoled each other. Tuson further argues that in doing so, they developed and expressed a female solidarity in which they found new strength and independence.46 However, despite the refuge sought in familiar and female duties, the women did not form a “monolithic domestic identity” and each, in particular those widowed, negotiated the “particularities of [their] situation.”47

46 Tuson, 296-298; Blunt, “Flight”, 98; Claudia Klaver, “Domesticity under Siege: British women and imperial crisis at the siege of Lucknow, 1857,” Women’s Writing 8, no.1 (2001): 38-44. 47 Ibid., 44.

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By crossing class and gender lines, many widows stepped into the relatively new space created by Florence Nightingale in the Crimea as they worked in the crude and ill- equipped hospitals established for the soldiers. Many widows were either asked or volunteered to help in the makeshift hospitals and for most their ‘tour of duty’ ended with their departure for England, via Calcutta or Bombay. However, despite the class hierarchy that was quickly restored after their evacuation from Lucknow, Emily

Polehampton, rather than seeking release from her duties with the wounded soldiers, insisted that she be given leave to look after her lower class charges until they reached

England.48

While somewhat unconventional in her desire to continue in these ministrations to the soldiers long after it was necessary, Polehampton was also carefully conventional in public. Seeking to avoid the very public reception which had greeted the first boatload of

Lucknow survivors, in response to her (and others’) special request their steamer from

Allahabad docked quietly in Calcutta at a ghat (wharf) where there were few people to observe them. Once in the city, she remained respectably secluded in the Houses of

Refuge provided for the women until her departure for England. This propriety of a genteel widow who deliberately maintained her privacy appears counter to

Polehampton’s equally deliberate continued association with and nursing of the lower class soldiers. Her determination to continue this relationship provides an intriguing side- bar to her concomitant preference for privacy and illustrates the individual negotiation that many widows exercised. While her aversion to the publicity given the Lucknow

48 Rev Edward Polehampton and Rev Thomas Stedman Polehampton, eds, The Memoir of the Rev H S Polehampton (London: Richard Bentley, 1858), 363-69, 375-78.

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women was arguably characteristic of her gentility, the origins of Polehampton’s desire to care for the wounded are less evident. Although a chaplain’s wife, she had little previous association with the soldiers and had nursed only her husband (through one serious illness) until the siege at Lucknow began.

This combination of subjectivity and prescription is further demonstrated by Rosa

Coopland’s journey from Agra to Bombay before embarking for England. Though she traveled hundreds of miles without English companions and confessed to feeling very alone while on route, when she encountered English officers on the road she assiduously observed etiquette that forbad ladies on their own to speak to gentlemen.49 But once in

Bombay, Coopland chose to book hotel accommodation (rather than stay at the House of

Refuge) and had little compunction about traveling freely in public until her passage left for home.

Soon after arriving in England both widows published memoirs. However,

Polehampton’s was under the rubric of her late husband’s memoirs and her contribution was deferentially inserted after his letters and diary. On the other hand, although her husband’s voice was included, Coopland deliberately narrated her story and disseminated her opinions under her own name. Just as each of these women complied variously and individually to the parameters of domestic mourning protocol and imperial/military necessities, other widows too demonstrated an admixture of accommodation.

Gautam Chakravarty’s observation that in first person accounts such as letters, diaries or memoirs the narrative is circumscribed by their individual horizons50 carries a

49 R.M. Coopland, A Lady’s Escape from Gwalior in 1857 (London: Smith & Elder, 1859), 290-291. 50 Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2005), 127.

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caution that should be heeded when studying the widows’ diaries. Beyond their self- descriptions and narratives, the inclusion of a broader multivalent view of the widows is necessary. It is ironic that British women were considered an imperial asset until conflict erupted, when they immediately became a liability, particularly the widows who had no obvious protectors. However, as will be discussed later, their value was subsequently realized in the pathos of their condition. But it was primarily for what they represented, as British white women, dead or alive, avenged or saved by British troops. As survivors of the Mutiny, they became symbolic of vulnerable yet heroic British womanhood and representatives of the women who had not survived. Although they excited an unprecedented degree of attention and sympathy, they were widows, nevertheless, and expected to behave as widows.

If death was frequent and familiar to Victorian society at large, it was exponentially so in British India. With cholera, dysentery and heat stroke as primary lethal agents, the1853 military records indicate that the death rate was almost 3 ! times greater for those serving in Bengal than those serving in Britain.51 It was this high mortality rate that Emily Eden, sister to Lord Auckland, the Governor General in India between 1836 and 1842, attributed to the lack of due protocol: for if proper mourning had been followed, they would have never been free of it.52 That being said, at the least, a

51 Philip Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1989) 194-195. This 1853 figure can be compared to 1859 when the rate jumped to over 5 ! times due to an astonishing drop in the mortality in Britain. Curtin posits that this is due to the 75% drop in tuberculosis deaths in Britain. pg. 35. This emphasizes the fact that different diseases and conditions existed in each region; cholera continued to be a significant factor in Bengal. For discussion about comparison of home army and civilian populations see also Alan Ramsay Skelley, The Victorian Army at Home (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s U.P., 1977) 21-41. 52 Taylor, Mourning Dress, 130-131; Pat Barr, The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian India (London: Secker & Warburg, 1976), 14-15.

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modicum of ritual was expected53and the customs of dress were adhered to with the resources that they had at hand.54 Following the death of a member of a British party traveling to Simla, Emily Eden recorded a hunt for any black goods that would suffice for mourning wear which yielded “four pairs of black gloves, with a finger or so missing and a pair of [unusable] black earrings.”55 It is difficult to ascertain whether Eden and her companions also donned black dresses for, as Pat Jalland has observed, the wearing of a black dress was generally taken for granted and therefore seldom noted.56 It was clearly a starting point for Julia Inglis who noted that in Lucknow “a black dress was all that any of the widows could procure”57[emphasis added]. While Pat Barr’s description of Simla as “black with widows” after the disastrous 1842 invasion of Afghanistan58 could be viewed figuratively, it is resonant of observations made of the Lucknow survivors in mourning garb when they arrived in Calcutta. In all cases, it is arguable that both fashion and prescription were secondary to the sombre semiotic of colour.

However, not content with nominal gestures of mourning, once the resources were available, the mourners often fulfilled the demands of protocol or style in varying measure. Already in mourning for her mother-in-law, Mrs Ouvry was pleased to obtain a

“decent dress to wear” shortly after she was informed of her brother’s death.59 Despite the fact that she already had a black dress, Rosa Coopland had mourning clothing made

53 Harriet Tytler, An Englishwoman in India: The Memoirs of Harriet Tytler, 1828-185 ed. Anthony Sattin (Oxford: Oxford U P, 1986), 55. Arriving in India shortly after her father died, seventeen year old Harriet Earle hoped to identify her mother by her black dress and slight stature. 54 Emily Eden, Up the Country (first published 1866, repr. Oxford U.P., 1930) quoted in Taylor, 130-131. 55 Ibid. 56 Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 305. 57 Julia Inglis, The Siege of Lucknow: a diary (London: James R Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1892), 227. 58 Pat Barr and Ray Desmond, Simla: A Hill Station in British India (London: The Scolar Press, 1978), 14. 59 M H Ouvry, A Lady’s Diary Before and During the Indian Mutiny (Lymington: Printed by Chas T King, 1892), 114.

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soon after taking refuge in Agra, while Adelaide Case keenly felt her lack of a widow’s cap while in Lucknow and promptly obtained one when she reached Calcutta. Although they were already in black, other widows arriving in that city were promptly issued collars and cuffs,60 like Case’s widow’s cap, an integral part of respectable mourning wear.

While mourning dress was not notable when worn, it was worthy of comment when it was not. During the Mutiny, Mrs. Hall was the subject of much talk when she refused to put on mourning for her father, Colonel Goldney, despite reliable reports of his death. While her failure to acknowledge his death likely indicates denial on her part, the subsequent gossip demonstrates not only the expectation of conformity but also the unspoken communication which mourning dress held.61 It was a message not limited to the British community. When she and other British women visited the quarters of the captive king of Delhi, Bahadur Shah, the significance of Rosa Coopland’s black dress elicited an unsympathetic response from his wife, Zinat Mahal, when she “sneeringly asked what had become of [Rosa’s] sahib.”62 As a signifier of bereavement, appropriate clothing was obviously a pervasive and eloquent element in and beyond the Anglo-Indian community. Although there is little evidence regarding if, or when, the full complement of mourning dress was adopted/worn in India,63 it is demonstrable that a measure of

60 Pat Barr, The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian India (London: Secker & Warburg, 1976), 142. 61 Ouvry, 125. 62 Coopland, 276-277. 63 The question of how widely this was followed in Britain has also been raised. Despite the dictates of full (deep) mourning wear which fashion magazines promulgated, several scholars have expressed caution regarding the unqualified proposition of widespread societal acceptance of and full compliance with mourning prescriptions. Jalland argues that mourning dress was often approached economically and practically even by those in upper classes. Terri Sabatos, citing Jay Mechling’s study of the methodological difficulties of using advice manuals as historical documents, concurs with Jalland.

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mourning wear was observed regularly and widely enough to establish its propinquity to

British custom and thus British propriety.

The strictures of leading a respectable life and being honored in, and after, death, so important to domestic and civilian lives in England, was increasingly part of the baggage of those traveling to live and serve in India. Identity for women was determined by the rank or position of their husbands and their ability to comply with and apply the complex social code. In an attempt to ‘be at home’ in India, this social protocol and custom provided the framework for Anglo-Indian society, both military and civilian.

During the Mutiny, its fundamental place was borne out by the grounding it provided to help ‘normalize’ those living under siege conditions and also by comparison to emphasize the barbarities of the mutineers and other Indian combatants.

Studies of nineteenth- century masculinity have demonstrated how manliness was increasingly essentialized as “active, rational, and resolute” and that empire was a space for these masculinities to “flourish.”64 Key to this discussion is Mrinalini Sinha’s argument that British masculinity was also defined against that of the colonized male, an opposition which in India increasingly took the form of the “effeminate Bengali”.65 Sinha contends India was neither the backdrop nor the arena for masculinity to play out but fully constitutive in the evolution of British manliness.66 Although Sinha’s focus is post-

Mutiny, Douglas Peers has pointed out that even prior to mid-century the manliness of the European soldier had already been “set against the fickle and effeminate Indian

64 John Tosh, “Masculinities in an Industrializing Society: Britain, 1800-1914” Journal of British Studies 44 (April 2005), 330-342; Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830- 1914 (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1988) 12; Dawson, Soldier Heroes. 65 Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1995), 2-12. 66 Ibid.10.

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male.”67 Furthermore, it is arguable that with masculinity thus defined against effeminate characteristics, the feminine attributes of British women, particularly those living in

India, would also be concomitantly viewed in greater relief. Correspondingly, despite the close social prescriptions within which the women operated, many flexed their ‘feminine’ domestic skills and/or gender privilege in order to engage with the Indian and/or imperial landscape to which they had relocated while remaining within the parameters of respectability. Wives such as Honoria Lawrence and Susan Hodson assisted their husbands’ work by taking on clerical duties, and Helen Mackenzie, Lena Login and

Fanny Parkes established close relationships with women living in zenanas. Although philanthropic opportunities were more limited than in England, Lawrence, Caroline

Chisholm, and Mary Sherwood, among others, were instrumental in establishing schools and orphanages for the children of British soldiers. In her study of European women,

Strobel includes British wives in India who ran medical clinics for Indian women and children and for soldiers’ wives, while Rosemary Raza looks at a variety of women’s occupations including missionary work, independent travel, documentation of landscapes, customs and people, hunting, and botany.68

Although they often traveled with their husbands, until the Mutiny these memsahibs were seldom in the crucible of conflict,69 certainly not in any number. The

67 Douglas M Peers, “Soldiers, Surgeons and the Campaigns to Combat Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Colonial India, 1805-1860” Medical History, 42 (1998), 138. 68 Strobel, European Women, 7-8; Barry Joynson Cork, Rider on a Grey Horse: A Life of Hodson of Hodson’s Horse (London: Cassell & Co. 1958), 67-68; Barr, Memsahibs, 34, 51,97-98; 102; Rosemary Raza, In Their Own Words: British Women Writers and India, 1740-1857 (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2006), 106-147. 69 Byron Farewell, Queen Victoria’s Little Wars (New York: WW Norton & Co., 1985), 83. The women in India were seldom involved in, or close to, battles or military campaigns, one exception being those who traveled to Kabul to join their husbands before the revolt which resulted in several months of captivity for the wives and families of the officers.

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maelstrom of the mutiny enveloped soldiers’, officers’, chaplains’ and civilians’ wives equally, many of whom were subsequently widowed. While some witnessed their husband’s death, others, either in siege or in flight, were close enough to know with certainty if, where, when, and how they had died. Those wives who had been sent to safety in Simla or elsewhere in India received the dreaded news more quickly than those

‘safely’ in Britain. Thus, for many of the newly widowed, knowledge of their husband’s deaths was often quickly ascertained and the circumstances more fully assimilated than those who were informed, often months later, by a euphemistic and/or official report.

Women such as Ellen Kirk whose husband was killed in her presence and Rosa Coopland who saw her husband led away and heard the fatal gunfire were agonizingly aware of the surety and brutality of death. Likewise, though Jane Mawe’s husband died from exposure and exhaustion as they were fleeing together, she was witness to the stark reality of not only her loss but the ignominy of both his manner of death and lack of burial. Acutely aware of the danger their husbands faced, Catherine Simons and Helena Angelo waited in

Simla and Calcutta respectively for the dreaded news which took weeks to reach each of them. Conversely, wives in England such as Sarah Finnis and Louisa Douglas, whose husbands were early casualties, were widows even before they knew of the Mutiny.

Although the loss of each widow was comparable, those closest to the epicenter of the conflict were far better placed to know of the death, not just with their head, or heart, but viscerally and intimately.

This knowledge allowed these women an unprecedented (or privileged) understanding of their husbands’ military deaths and therefore the opportunity to speak with some authority of his manner of death and his final spiritual state. In concert with

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the Victorian ‘civilian’ ethos, the establishment by the widow that her husband had died a

‘good’ death not only validated his respectability but provided latitude within which she could establish hers. Similarly, beyond personal pride and gratification, financial support was often contingent on this combination. While a ‘good’ death was believed to be the peaceful acceptance of one’s ‘higher calling’, dying in imperial conflict also included

‘finishing the course’ having ‘fought the good fight’, both spiritually and literally.70

Numerous studies point to the confluence of romanticism and evangelicalism which were instrumental in the emergence of Christian militarism during the Crimean

War.71 The veneration of heroic figures that embodied chivalric ideals was a key component in the romanticism that grounded itself in an historic tradition exemplified by the novels of Walter Scott. Stephanie Barczewski has posited the reintroduction of the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood as integral to defining Britishness in the nineteenth century. She argues that after 1815 when France could no longer be ‘the

Other’ to be defined against, Britons turned to examples of English actions and accomplishments (frequently mythical or legendary) to help construct a new form of

British national identity.72 Douglas Peers has further demonstrated that the empire, in particular India, provided not only new ‘others’ but an opportunity for new chivalric

70 Katherine Bartrum, A Widow’s Reminiscences of Lucknow (London: James Nisbet & Co, 1858), 47. 71 Olive Anderson, “The Growth of Christian Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain” in English Historical Review, vol 86, no 338 (January 1971), 46-49; Dawson, Soldier Heroes, 105-109; Douglas M. Peers, “ ‘There is Nothing More Poetical than War’: Romanticism, Orientalism, and Militarism in J.W.Kaye’s Narratives of the Conquest of India” in Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press, ed. Julie F. Codell (London: Associated U.P., 2003), 274-277; John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on gender, family and empire (Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd., 2005), 72-77; Hichberger, Images, 46. 72 Stephanie L Barczewski, Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1997), 1-10.

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heroes, “redolent of an earlier age” but with Victorian virtues.73 In addition, as

Hichberger has illustrated, Britons continued to define themselves as a non-military nation that was only involved internationally to arbitrate justice, or imperially to take on the responsibility for reform that by the turn of the century was termed ‘the white man’s burden,’ a perspective which could elevate most combat to that of a noble cause.74

Thus despite the sundry motivations (political, economic, nationalistic, religious) for entering the Crimean War, the martial commitment could be justified as simply going to the defence of Turkey and thereby continuing to act as arbiter of world affairs. The nobility of the cause, quickly and significantly diminished by the ineptitude and disorganization of the senior officers and officials, was salvaged by an unprecedented focus on the common soldiers. The sympathetic reporting of the actions, attitudes, and conditions of these ‘brave men’ during the Crimean War by, among others, the Times news correspondent William Russell profoundly changed the British public’s perception of the regular troops. Likewise, Russell subsequently provided on location coverage and personal commentary from India of the Mutiny. However the shift in attitude was not completely due to Russell or the Crimean conflict as Hichberger sees evidence of an earlier acceptance of the British common soldier as an archetype for masculine moral qualities with the emphasis on duty, discipline and self-sacrifice rather than martial prowess.75 Although she does not make the connection, it is arguable that these chivalric expectations were synchronous and synergistic with the Evangelical Anglican anxiety to

73 Peers, “Nothing More Poetical”, 276-277. 74 Hichberger, Images, 2-6. 75 Hichberger, Images, 1-6, 46. Also see Dawson, Soldier Heroes, 108.

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demonstrate the compatibility of piety with military service.76 Thus the emergence of the soldier-saint from the Crimean War had roots in both the romance of chivalry and hero- worship and the evangelical belief that good soldiers could also be good Christians.

Widely disseminated through the mediums of the rapidly expanding popular press and literary genres, this face of chivalric heroism became the masculine counter-part to the feminine ‘angel in the house’77 and key to national and imperial British identity.78

Although it has been argued that the empire was considered an outlet for men to exercise their masculine characteristics while escaping from the domestic sphere, for many with domiciles in the midst of the conflict, the Mutiny in India demanded duty to both empire and home. Thus beyond the patriotic impetus of fighting for ‘Queen, Country and

Empire,’ those in India were also defending, firstly, their wives and children, and secondly, others’ wives and children, a combination of imperial and domestic imperatives which created a new mandate for chivalry from the men.79 Under the aegis of this new configuration, dying for the women and children became an additional defining feature of the ‘good’ imperial death and stretched the posthumous parameters for encomium by and for the widows. However, the reality eclipsed the romance.

As part of the relief forces, Robert Bartrum was killed outside the gates of

Lucknow where his wife was among those under siege. His death was eulogized in

Katherine Bartrum’s subsequent memoirs as “coming to the rescue of his wife and child,”

76 Anderson, 47. 77 Dawson, Soldier Heroes, 109. 78 Ibid., 1. 79 Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 2008), 141; Dawson, Soldier Heroes.

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he fell “at his post doing his duty.”80 Although recorded by his widow as a “glorious death,” and arguably conforming to a chivalric ideal, it was nonetheless the final twist in the grievous unraveling of the imperial/domestic duality for her. Katherine’s imperial duty had superseded her domestic duty when early in the Mutiny she acquiesced to imperial demands and, stifling her domestic instincts, had reluctantly deemed it her duty to leave Robert free to fight as she sought refuge in Lucknow.81 Four months later, as the devastated and desolate widow questioned the will, the love and the mercy of God,82 she also recorded Robert’s summary dismissal of danger just prior to being shot. While she tried to be grateful that his death was instant and was gratified to hear him praised by his comrade in arms, Katherine gave little indication that she viewed as heroic his disregard of his companion’s warning of danger.

Similarly, Ellen Kirk’s account of her husband’s precipitous actions and subsequent death in front of his wife and young son implied rashness, rather than heroism, on his part. As the rebellion began to escalate in Gwalior, the Kirks had time to agree on a strategy that they hoped would deflect, if even briefly, the attention of the mutineers. Assuming that the anger of the sepoys would be primarily directed towards the

European men, Surgeon Kinloch Kirk initially agreed to remain hidden while his wife attempted to placate the rebels. However, their plan went awry when, as the mutineers attempted to take her wedding ring, Kirk “rushed out to confront at least 25 armed ruffians with [only] a walking stick in his hand” and was killed instantly by a volley of

80 Katherine Bartrum, A Widow’s Reminiscences of Lucknow (London: James Nisbet & Co, 1858), 47. 81 Bartrum, 11. 82 Bartrum, 46; Letters, Bartrum Private Papers,1857-1858, IOR: Mss Eur A.67, B.L.

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shots.83 Both Ellen and her son stood helpless but untouched by the rebels as her husband died at her side. While Kirk’s initial choice to hide as his wife and child put themselves in unknown peril to protect him arguably transgressed chivalric ideals, his impulsive and ill- prepared defense of his family was likely seen by contemporaries as a self-sacrifice that elevated his death to that of a soldier-martyr.84 However, like Bartrum, whether it was bravery or bravado that contributed to his death, the presence of Kirk’s wife and child were strongly implicated in his subsequent death.

Widowed in Gwalior, Rosa Coopland was acutely aware that the presence of women which allowed/demanded a chivalrous response from the men had also placed the men in greater danger. While Coopland could eulogize that “England and Scotland [had] good cause to be proud of their chivalrous and noble sons,”85 she also conceded that the presence of the women and children had prevented the men’s escape. She noted that had

Lieut. Proctor not stopped to help an “unprotected woman,” he might have saved himself.86 More poignantly, Coopland regretted her refusal to leave her husband George for the safety of Agra, believing in retrospect that her absence would have left him

“unimpeded” to ride out of danger87 as many of the unmarried men managed to do.

Although ostensibly romantic, the sacrifice of prudence to chivalric impulse was of little comfort to the widows left behind. While scholars have ably demonstrated how integral

83 Kirk Private Papers, 1857, IOR: Mss Eur B268, B.L. 84 Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British adventure, empire and the imagining of masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994), 123; Hichberger, Images, 6. 85 R M Coopland, A Lady’s Escape from Gwalior in 1857 (London, 1859), 74. 86 Coopland, 152. 87 Ibid., 107-8.

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the ideals of chivalry were to the Mutiny narrative,88 both then and now, for these widows they were at best bittersweet. The more immediate concern for many of the women left behind was not for whom but how their husbands had died.

Contrary to the domestic British preference for protracted deathbed scenes, during the Mutiny it was often quick military deaths that were celebrated. Death in battle, at least for the godly, had long been regarded as a good death.89 Therefore, as slow deaths allowed the dying time for reconciliation, repentance and spiritual preparation,90 those bereaved suddenly often needed to provide assurance of the state of grace within which the deceased had lived and died. That they had not suffered brought an additional sense of divine benefaction. In their subsequent published memoirs, Katherine Bartrum and

Adelaide Case reiterated both the precipitous nature of their husbands’ deaths and the men’s spiritual readiness to die. However, their perspectives and articulations differed considerably. Having ascertained from her husband’s companion that Robert had been shot in the temple and died instantly, Bartrum’s sole consolations were that Robert had felt no pain, that he had not fallen into the hands of his enemies, and that he had received his crown of life.91 Early in the conflict, he had written, “Let us at this season ask for the grace of God in a repentant spirit. I am not fit to die; but do … pray that a new heart may be given me and that if anything happens we may meet at that throne of grace where

88 Hichberger, Images; Herbert, War of No Pity; Stephanie L Barczewski, Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2000); Dawson, Soldier Heroes. 89 Lucinda McCray Beier “The Good Death in Seventeenth-Century England” in Death, Ritual, and Bereavement ed. Ralph Houlbrooke (London: Routledge, 1989), 60. 90 Pat Jalland, “Victorian death and its decline: 1850-1918” in Death in England: An Illustrated History, Peter Jupp and Clare Gittings, eds. (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1999) 230-255. 91 Bartrum, 48.

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there is no mourning or sorrow.”92 Thus stated, it could be argued that for Bartrum the battle-field had been, in measure, a protracted (death-bed) time of purging and preparation, and why the newly widowed Bartrum could state that “he was better prepared to die” than she.93

Case addressed both the state of her husband’s soul and his manner of death more obliquely in her published diary. Rather than a panegyric testament to his beliefs or spiritual state, she included a letter written by her late husband that clearly expressed in his words the Christian values and orientation that he held. It is interesting that despite the strong faith which undeniably sustained both her and her husband, the diary is strangely silent regarding William Case’s eternal reward or an anticipated heavenly reunion. Mrs. Case was also reticent about her husband’s manner of death and included only her sister’s description of her husband being shot through the heart while rallying his troops at a battle outside of Lucknow. Arguably an indication of an instant and painless death,94 Mrs Case’s diary did not record her distress that her late husband, by two battlefield accounts, lingered after being shot with no one able to confirm his time of death.95 One report indicated that though he lived long enough for some of his men to return to rescue him, he commanded them to leave him to the enemy in order to save

92 Bartrum papers, letter of June 9, 1857, Mss Eur A.67. 93 Bartrum papers, Mss Eur A.67. 94 Adelaide Case, Day by Day at Lucknow: A journal of the Siege of Lucknow (London: Richard Bentley, 1858), 45-7. 95 Julia Inglis, Letters containing extracts from a journal kept by Mrs Inglis during the siege of Lucknow (London: Printed for private circulation, 1858), Aug 1st entry “Mrs Gidding … acct of battlefield … source of misery to poor Mrs Case …”, Acct by Birch ADC of battle & Case’s death – shot twice, shook hands, pallor of death over him – left him there; also Julia Inglis, The Siege of Lucknow: a diary (London: James R Osgood, McIIvaine & Co., 1892), 50, 103-104.

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themselves.96 Although an example of the ultimate chivalric act, his widow made no mention of the incident. For both Bartrum and Case instant death was regarded as ‘clean’ and merciful. Not only ostensibly painless, it also saved the men from the horrors of torture or mutilation which were believed to “always [be] perpetrated by Asiatic … foes”97 and widely rumoured to have taken place at the sites of Mutiny.

Despite the belief that atrocities were committed on British bodies, Hichberger argues that the British were reluctant to depict conflict through “gruesome details,” preferring until about 1865 to romanticize death in battle.98 Thus reports of being ‘shot through the head’ or ‘shot through the heart’ could be argued as facilitating clichés and therefore euphemistic. While it should not be over-stated, it is intriguing that these vital but vulnerable sites of the body corresponded to the key areas, “a cool head and resolute heart,” which constituted a Christian warrior.99 Whether or how often a good death in battle was ostensibly effected by a mortal wound to either the head or heart is worthy of examination beyond this study. However, it is arguable that by believing their husbands had been shot in the head (Bartrum) or the heart (Case) these widows were consoled by their husbands’ good military deaths. Bartrum could know this with certainty, while

Case, by recording a sanitized version of her husband’s death, could only hope to assuage her uncertainty.

Memoirs were not the only venue for establishing the manner of death and/or the state of grace. In a letter which was subsequently published in a British newspaper, Mrs.

96 Martin Richard Gubbins, An Account of the Mutinies in Oudh, and of the Siege of the Lucknow Residency (London: Richard Bentley, 1858), 210-211. 97 William Gordon Alexander, Recollections of a Highland subaltern (London: Edward Arnold, 1898), 301; Coopland, 85. 98 Hichberger, Images, 1-2, 67-69. 99 Dawson, Soldier heroes, 108.

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E Banks was able to assure her brother-in-law (and the reading public) that her husband,

Sherbroooke, had gone on to “a happier world” and that he had died “without a groan” when the bullet struck him in the temple.100 However, her account of her husband’s death included measured criticism, similar to that of both Katherine Bartrum and Ellen Kirk.

He was, she wrote, “always [at] the foremost where anything difficult and dangerous was to be done” despite warnings from herself and others to “remember his own peril.”

Viewed alone, it could simply be the stalwart voice of an imperial widow but if she was lauding bravery and self-sacrifice, others were not. Banks had been cautioned that the

“ardour of a soldier” which he was demonstrating was risky and would be detrimental to all those under his watch if it resulted in his death. His greater responsibility to “fulfill the duties of his … office well and bravely” was as an administrator, not a soldier.101 After his death, in a more direct censure of Banks’ ill-advised bravery, another officer’s wife wrote that by “being a gallant soldier” he had exposed himself too much and had failed to heed the admonitions of peers that as the acting Chief Commissioner of Lucknow, “his head was more valuable than his hands.”102 Adelaide Case noted additionally that Banks, eschewing prudence, “was killed [as] he was firing just as any private soldier.”103 After

Banks’ death, Martin Gubbins, the Financial Commissioner of Oude, recorded that despite remonstrations Banks always walked erect, leaving his head exposed and was killed as he looked out “incautiously.”104 Although his widow was using the appropriate

100 E H Banks, Letter published in Ipswich Journal, Jan 23, 1858. 101 Julia Inglis, Letter containing extracts from a journal kept by Mrs Inglis during the siege of Lucknow (London: printed for private circulation only, 1858), 19. 102 Inglis, Siege, 86 103 Case, 104. 104 Gubbins, Account of the Mutinies, 251-252.

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words to describe her husband’s bravery and self-sacrifice, they are less convincing when considered in the context of what was widely considered as impetuousness.

For other widows, the description of a ‘good’ imperial death and state of grace needed to be presumed. Catherine Simons, who was safe in Simla while her husband fought at Lucknow, first anticipated the dreaded news of his death when his name was not among the list of survivors released weeks after he had died. Before learning of the details, she was certain that God had taken her Alfred while he “nobly fulfilled his duty from which …he never shrank.” Although Catherine acknowledged that he had not

“talked much about religion,” the recent death of their young daughter made it even more vital for her to believe that his “Christian life” had sufficiently sanctified him for a heavenly reunion with their child.105

Although both Emily Polehampton and Eliza Glen’s accounts of their chaplain husbands’ deathbeds emphasized spiritual elements (in the tradition of a ‘good’ domestic death) rather than military or imperial aspects, they could not escape the shadow of the latter. Despite the death of both men within the elements of a domestic setting (in their bed and attended by their wives), they were also part of the imperial/military conflict and their deaths were as attributable to the conflict as those who died in battle. Henry

Polehampton’s bravery had been clearly demonstrated in his willingness to expose himself to enemy fire as he ministered to the wounded and dying and attended burials in

Lucknow. That he was shot while he was shaving is a graphic illustration of the vulnerability of their besieged quarters. While Henry was recovering from his wound, he contracted cholera and died two days later. Eschewing any military heroism, his wife

105 Stock C. A. papers, Cambridge Centre for South Asian Studies.

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rather recorded the “perfect serenity and peace” with which he entered into glory and the

“strange unearthly peace” that she had at the time of his death. Using the phraseology of a good evangelical death, Polehampton wrote, “He had not the least fear of death … and his beautiful fearless smile must have proved to [those who visited his deathbed] how little dread there was … in the prospect of death.”106 However, similar to the deliverance that other widows believed a quick imperial death effected, Emily was convinced that

Henry had been benevolently “saved by being called at the time he was …[and] taken away from the evil to come [as their] troublous times had scarcely commenced.”107

Like Polehampton, Eliza was comforted that William Glen’s “end was joy and peace.”108 Nevertheless, unlike Polehampton, the imperial shadow cast a measure of indictment over the manner of her husband’s death in Agra as her account of the event describes what could be argued as the antithesis of chivalric conduct. An order issued in late June that every man who was “capable of bearing arms, was to be armed and take part in garrison duty”109 had swept the forty-six year old chaplain and surgeon into reluctant military service.110 Formerly a missionary with the London Missionary Society,

Glen was not a military man and his wife recorded that being sworn into the Militia in

Agra “preyed on his mind.” Rather more anti-military than anti-imperial in her assessment, Eliza blamed this martial demand on her husband as the primary factor in his death. Writing to relatives, she related sympathetically, “He was naturally a nervous man and the idea of becoming a soldier and going every morning to be drilled carrying a

106 Emily Polehampton, The Memoir of the Rev H S Polehampton (London: Richard Bentley, 1858), 330- 32. 107 Ibid. 333. 108 Glen private papers, 1837-1893, IOR: Mss Eur C332, B.L. 109 Coopland, 170. 110 Vansittart private papers, 1842-1858, IOR: Mss Eur B 167/3,B.L.; Glen papers.

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heavy gun at his time of life was more than he could bear.” Her concomitant relief that he

“did not fall into the hands of those horrid, cruel men” echoes the general fear expressed primarily for women and children. However, refusing to see this as ‘unmanly’ or

‘unheroic’, Eliza was more interested in recording William’s focus on, and delightful conversation about, heaven during his short illness before his death. For his widow, as for

Emily Polehampton, the unalloyed state of grace within which her husband had died was paramount. Neither man died a typical chivalric death. However, more militarily engaged, Polehampton was weakened by injury and died of his subsequent illness both a direct result of the larger conflict. Glen, on the other hand, was undone by the prospect of military service, and took to his bed with an illness (possibly dysentery)111 to which he quickly succumbed, surprising even the doctor. Eliza Glen’s account presents a clear indication of her belief that her husband escaped his circumstances by surrendering to

[escaping in] death, rather than fighting for his or his family’s lives. In the face of this antithesis of chivalry, the widow nonetheless took comfort in his spiritual ‘end’. William

Glen’s unwillingness, or inability, to engage in (or be engaged by) the military and masculine requisites which the conflict demanded provides a unique perspective to add to the analyses of missionary work in the empire. Norman Vance has argued that within the

“varieties of manliness” was one which primarily exhibited “inherent moral strength”112 and Susan Walton describes the “Church Militant” in mid-Victorian society as “military valour with an absence of violence.” Walton differentiates between soldiers who kill and

111 M. A. Sherring, The Indian Church during the Great Rebellion (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1859), 76. 112 Norman Vance, The sinews of the spirit: The ideal of Christian manliness in Victorian literature and religious thought (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1985), 8-10, 26-28; Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2003), 40-41.

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missionaries who turn the other cheek, “prepared to sacrifice their own lives but never spill the blood of enemies.”113 While it is arguable that Glen’s widow took comfort in this manifestation of missionary masculinity, it also demonstrates a need to more closely examine a juxtaposition of the perceived manly qualities of Christian soldiers and missionaries.

Recent studies have pointed out the complex and often ambiguous relationship between missionaries, colonizers and the colonized in which the “missionary impulse” often clashed with British imperialism.114 As Kenneth Hendrickson observes, the former was to create fundamental change while the latter was to maintain order and stability.115

For this reason missionaries were considered by some as a danger to imperial order and subsequently blamed by Lord Ellenborough, a former Governor General in India, and others for the Mutiny.116 However by 1857, as army officers and officials increasingly behaved as if they too were missionaries, the distinction between the intentions of the groups had blurred.117 Among these was Major-General Sir Henry Havelock who became the icon for Christian militarism with a combination of piety and martial skill which he demonstrated for thirty years until his death in the Mutiny. Holding regular religious services in his regiment, he was also anxious regarding the “heathen and their salvation”

113 Susan Walton, Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Era: Charlotte Yonge’s Models of Manliness (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2010), 141-142. 114 Andrew Porter, Religion versus empire? British Protestant missionaries and overseas expansion, 1700- 1914 (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2004), 1-13; Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818-1940 (Stanford: Stanford U.P., 2002), 13-19, 175-177; Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant missions and British imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Leicester: Apollos, 1990),69, 101-104; Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2003), 202. 115 Kenneth Hendrikson III, Making Saints: Religion and the Public Image of the British Army, 1809-1885 (London: Associated University Presses, 1998), 114-115. 116 Cox, Imperial Fault Lines, 31. 117 Christopher Hibbert, The Great Mutiny, India 1857 (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 51.

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and sympathetic toward those whose “object … was to preach the Gospel to the natives.”118

While Hendrickson argues that there was an inherent contradiction in the military officers’ attempts simultaneously to enforce British presence and evangelize (convert sepoys),119 little has been written about army chaplains who, like Henry Polehampton, despite being forbidden to proselytize, desired “to spread the gospel to non-Christian

Indians.”120 How many other chaplains wished to branch out is not clear but as

Polehampton was kept too busy with his assigned duties to do so it is arguable that if others harboured similar aspirations they too were constrained by their work load. For the most part, however, the commitments, the work, the congregants, the loci, the loyalties, and the rewards differed (to varying degrees) between missionaries and chaplains. That being said, it would perhaps seem fruitful to distinguish between the attitudes and actions of military chaplains and civilian missionaries during the Mutiny. However, in their work on the Mutiny, both Christopher Hibbert and Christopher Herbert view them as equally imperial-minded,121 invoking in particular Reverend John Edward Wharton Rotton, the chaplain at Meerut. Author of The Chaplain’s Narrative of the Siege of Delhi (1858),

Rotton personified for Herbert a religious sensibility that combines “Christian piety, the cult of military prowess and the celebration of the killing of enemies.”122 Somewhat more nuanced, Derrick Hughes’ examination of the East India Company’s garrison chaplains during the conflict differentiates even between their responses to the mutineers.

118 Hendrikson III, 112; DNB, Dawson, Soldier Heroes, 94-104. 119 Hendrickson, 115. 120 Derrick Hughes, The Mutiny Chaplains (Wiltshire: Michael Russell Publishing, 1991), 128-129, 177- 178. 121 Hibbert, The Great Mutiny, 214; Herbert, War of No Pity, 58–64. 122 Ibid. 60.

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While he too includes Rotton, his study is expansive enough to demonstrate varying attitudes among the chaplains of the military. Claiming that their first concern was for their spiritual duties, Hughes records that Midgeley Jennings and Edward Moncreiff,

“died bravely, but did not physically confront their killers.” Conversely, though Hughes has no doubt regarding Frederick Fisher’s Christianity or “suitability for holy orders,”

Fisher, the chaplain of Fatehgarh, “saw himself as a member of the garrison and had no hesitation in bearing arms” and slaying “his foes and the enemies of his friends”123

William Glen was obviously not a Frederick Fisher, but neither had he been a member of the military establishment prior to the conflict like some of the more pacifistic army chaplains. Even Rotton, whose Chaplain’s Narrative extolled the military prowess of the units to which he was attached and gloried in the harsh retributions against the rebels, was not a combatant.124

It is not immediately evident whether the chaplains or missionaries who were killed in the conflict were honoured as heroes or martyrs but Hughes argues that a distinction should be made. He posits that the former, as part of the army command, were killed as soldiers while the missionaries “had better claims to have been martyrs.” 125 On the other hand, Jeffrey Cox points out the difficulty in claiming martyrdom for British missionaries without acknowledging the deaths of the Indian Christians. Thus any impulse to racialize and masculinize the narrative of missionary heroism126 was aided by the considerable degree of overlap of intent to proselytize between British missionaries

123 Hughes, The Mutiny Chaplains, 62-63, 69. 124 Herbert, 61. 125 Hughes, 172. 126 Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818-1940 (Stanford: Stanford U.P., 2002), 30-31.

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and military personnel. However, for the purpose of this study, why they were killed is not as crucial as how their deaths identified them posthumously. While neither man died in battle they were nevertheless casualties of the conflict, with each succumbing to different agents of war: Polehampton to injury and illness, Glen to illness and despair.

However, it was their final spiritual states that both wives chose to focus and record, a domestic ‘good’ death in a military setting.

Although she too faced a death outside the parameters of chivalry, there was no such ‘easy’ heavenly consolation for Sarah Graham. Two weeks after his wife had given birth to their third child and three days after one of their two older daughters had died of starvation, Lieutenant James Graham shot himself in his bed.127 Suicide was not only antithetical to a ‘good’ death (either imperial or domestic), but as Graham was part of the forces defending Lucknow, it was also an egregious contravention of the mores of chivalry. In an apparent attempt to palliate the circumstances, Sarah’s letter to her mother and sisters one month after his suicide simply stated that her husband had been shot.128

However, she could not escape the fact that his manner of death was quickly and widely known in Lucknow and later officially documented as suicide and published as part of the casualty list.129

Although clearly contrary to the self-sacrificing ideals of chivalric death,

Graham’s self-destruction was not condemned as such. Rather, as was becoming the case in Britain, where there was increasing reluctance to condemn the perpetrator/victim of

127 Inglis, Siege, 143. 128 Sarah Graham, “Lucknow Privations”, Lady’s Newspaper, Feb 13, 1858; also published as “Letter from a Yorkshire Lady in Lucknow”, Leeds Mercury, Feb 6, 1858.. 129 India Office, Accountant General, Meritorious Pensions, IOR: L/AG/21/16/15, B.L., cause of death listed as suicide.

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felo de se,130 his cause of death was determined to be temporary insanity. In England although the punishment of the deceased through profane burials had ceased with the

1823 Suicide Act, they continued to be denied burial in consecrated ground and their property was still liable for confiscation by the Crown.131 Inquests were held into all deaths to determine cause of death but when they were self-inflicted proof of precipitating factors was necessary. The verdict of an ‘unsound mind’ or ‘state of mind unknown’ allowed jurors not only to spare a family social disgrace but defended the families’ “rights against the Church, the Crown, and insurance companies.” By the 1860s, the nominal three per cent of all suicide verdicts which were determined as felo de se included two essential determinants: that it was a willed action and that it was part of an evil design. As the latter was an indication that the suicide had aroused no feelings of pity for the deceased,132 it is arguable that most suicides were apprehended as having been caused by extenuating circumstances and viewed with some degree of compassion.

In India, as the “unhealthy” environment was deemed culpable for physical ailments,133 it was not surprisingly assumed to be a destabilizing agent for mental health.

Waltraud Ernst has indicated that despite the ongoing nineteenth-century discussion regarding the causes of insanity in Europeans in India, “most expatriates tended to agree

130 Olive Anderson, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 193- 232; Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 69-76; John C. Weaver, A Sadly Troubled History: The Meanings of Suicide in the Modern Age, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s U.P., 2009), 23, 42, 60. Although Weaver’s recent study of suicide is a valuable addition to this field, his focus on New Zealand and use of anecdotal evidence unfortunately limit its application for this study. 131 Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 71-74; Margaret Cox, “Eschatology, burial practice and continuity: a retrospection from Christ Church, Spitalfields” in Grave concerns: death and burial in England 1700 to 1850 ed. Margaret Cox (Walmgate, York: Council for British Archaeology, 1998), 119- 120. 132 Anderson, Suicide, 218-226. 133 E.M.Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800-1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 1-2, 23-29, 80-92.

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… [that] the Indian climate was … inhospitable and dangerous.”134 Notably, weeks before the Mutiny, Rosa Coopland recorded the “shocking suicides” of two high ranking officers and concluded the reason as “assigned both in the papers and by people who ought to know, was that the Indian climate so upsets people’s nerves as to render them unfit for any great excitement or responsibility.”135 Thus, combined with the trauma of the Mutiny, for those under siege at Lucknow, there appears to have been little need to probe for cause and no apparent censure in the immediate assessment that Graham’s suicide was due to temporary insanity136 brought on by the “stress of [his] trials.”137

Climate was fingered somewhat later. Although it is not clear whether the information was garnered from an official medical diagnosis, if it was speculation, or was based on private information, his widow’s arrival in England was accompanied by the news report that Graham “had destroyed himself while in a state of insanity, caused by a coup de soleil.”138 It was perhaps easier to lay the blame on a physical disorder caused by external circumstances rather than the deceased’s inability, even under duress, to maintain a sound mind.

However, it is also arguable that the presumption and persuasion of Dr George

Cheyne’s “English Malady” mitigated the stigma of an officer such as Graham falling

134 Waltraud Ernst, Mad Tales From the Raj: The European Insane in British India, 1800-1858 (London: Routledge, 1991), 156-163. 135 Coopland, 76. Despite both officers serving in Persia when they committed suicide, it is noteworthy that the Indian climate was nonetheless implicated. 136 Mrs. G. Harris, A Lady’s Diary of the Siege of Lucknow (London: John Murray, 1858), 108; Bartrum, Widow’s Reminiscences, 41; T.F.Wilson, The Defence of Lucknow: T.F.Wilson’s Memoir of the Indian Mutiny, 1857 (London: Greenhill Books, 2007), 116. Capt R P Anderson, “A Personal Journal of the Siege of Lucknow” incl in Sir Colin Campbell, Narrative of the Indian Revolt From its Outbreak to the Capture of Lucknow (London: George Vickers, 1858), 305. 137 Fayrer, Recollections, 208. 138 Hampshire Advertiser, May 15, 1858. This was reported when Sarah Graham arrived in Southampton from India via the passenger ship ‘Colombo’.

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victim to a nervous disorder. Introduced in 1734, Cheyne’s conjecture, that those who were more civilized were also more prone to madness and suicide, continued to have currency in the nineteenth century.139 Intentionally class-specific, he asserted that nervous disorders (including insanity) could only afflict the “fine-spirited, [those] who have a great deal of sensibility, are quick thinkers [and] feel pleasure and pain the most readily.”140 By the mid-nineteenth century it had become an acceptable and useful explanation for nervous disorders in middle and upper-class men and the gentry who had succumbed to the “numerous sources of cerebral excitement in the worry and turmoil of the world.”141 Thus Lieut. Graham, described after his death as “kind”, “good”,

“amiable” and “brave,” was also, as an English officer and a gentleman, possibly more susceptible to the “privations,” “suffering,” “fretting” and “slight fever” which were deemed to have “deranged his intellect.”142 This refusal of public or private opinion to indict Graham for felo de se was echoed by officialdom. Although suicide was listed as the manner of death, his widow was accorded the Meritorious Pension in his name, a strong indication that there was no official stigma attached. However, as discussed further in chapter four, the pension was generally intended for widows of those killed in action.

It was only due to the exceptional circumstances of the Mutiny that women whose husbands died outside of battle were so awarded.

139 Roy Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A history of madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (London: The Athlone Press, 1987), 81-89; Andrew Scull ed., The Asylum as Utopia: W.A.F. Browne and the Mid-Nineteenth Century Consolidation of Psychiatry (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1991), xxx-xxxiv. 140 Porter, 84-85. 141 Janet Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves” : Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New York: Oxford U.P., 1991), 153. Oppenheim also introduces the nineteenth-century face of the ‘English Malady’ as introduced by Dr. James Johnson, p.145. In 1831, Johnson wrote about the “Wear-and-Tear Complaint”, a concept which was reiterated by the London Lancet in 1865. 142 L.E. Ruutz Rees, A Personal Narrtive of the Siege of Lucknow (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1858), 220.

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Mortal judgment aside, suicide was still considered an offence against God,143 and there is tantalizing evidence that when the act could be hidden, as was not the case with

Graham, the cause of death was often listed as cholera.144 While for many widows proving the state of grace in which their husbands had died was paramount, it was also relatively straight forward. Rather than presenting evidence, it is arguable that Sarah

Graham relied once again on public convention. Given the mid-Victorian consensus that, under certain conditions, suicide was forgivable by God145 or, when out of their mind, the deceased was not chargeable,146 a state of grace could be assumed for Lieutenant

Graham. However, unlike other widows who viewed their husbands’ new conditions as enviable, Graham’s account of her husband’s death (“poor James was shot”) and burial

(“no idea where poor James [was] lying”) are suffused with pity.147 Her relief that he was spared the news of his father’s death at Sialkot in addition to the “many sorrows and hardships which [those who survived] had to endure”148 demonstrates the protectiveness that other widows also expressed with regards to their husbands. However, while many widows would lionize their late husbands, either for their spiritual and/or their martial life and death, she was unable to view or portray Graham’s death as either laudable or victorious. Her inability to glamorize her husband’s death approximates more closely the situation of Rosa Coopland.

143 Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 70; Anderson, Suicide, 235. 144 B.J.Moore-Gilbert, Kipling and “Orientalism” (London: Croom-Helm, 1986), 143. Moore-Gilbert suggests that Kipling’s writing indicates that due to the opprobrium attached to suicide, friends of the deceased could disguise it by blaming cholera. Similarly, Theon Wilkinson in Two Monsoons has found deaths due to dueling also attributed to cholera. p.200. 145 Anderson, Suicide, 250. Conditions listed as "sickness, want, sorrow, or other unnerving stress.” 146 Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 71. 147 Graham, “Lucknow Privations”. 148 Ibid.

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While not denying the chivalry and nobility of those who fought and died, Rosa

Coopland refused to be co-opted by the ethos of the ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’ imperial death when she published her memoirs in 1858. She did not embellish her chaplain husband’s death in Gwalior, although she assumed that it was quick, simply reporting the volleys of gunfire she heard after he was taken from her and knowing him to be dead. She was, however, rather more graphic about Dr. Kinloch Kirk’s death, describing how the “black- hearted wretches had attacked his wife and beat out his brains with the butts of their muskets.”149 That her report differed from that of Kirk’s widow is not immediately problematic as accounts of events during the Mutiny often quickly accrued sensational and spurious details in their retelling. However as Rosa Coopland and Ellen Kirk were forced to flee Gwalior together, Coopland had been given the details by Kirk herself.

Kirk’s account not only clearly stated that her husband was shot dead instantly but that she dared not touch her husband’s body for fear the mutineers would “ill use his precious body.”150 It is arguable that the desecration that she feared, although certainly fueled by the reports of mutilation by mutineers, also stemmed from the British horror of dissection which is discussed later in this chapter. While Sharpe argues that mutilation was always reported as a crime against women,151 Kirk’s belief that her husband’s body would be desecrated indicates a more general fear of physical debasement. However, employing both Sharpe’s observation and Herbert’s discussion regarding the imagery of mutilation of “tender female flesh” that prevailed,152 it is possible that Kirk’s choice to protect her husband’s body by not protecting it was, in measure, predicated in the male/female

149 Coopland, 119-127. 150 Kirk, Mss Eur B268. 151 Sharpe, 67-68. 152 Herbert, War of No Pity, 244-245.

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dichotomy in which women did not protect men from physical harm. Paradoxically, by adopting a rational (masculine) rather than emotional (feminine) response, Kirk also felt that she was protecting herself as she believed that her resistance in not touching the body provided no further impetus for the mutineers to touch it. Given the difference in their narratives, if, like Adelaide Case, Kirk chose to memorialize her husband’s death by sanitizing it, it is arguable that many other ‘messy’ or unsettling versions of death were likewise given a similar airbrushing. If however Coopland chose to embellish the details of his death, it is consonant with the abrasiveness with which she strips the veneer from a

‘beautiful’ imperial death in her published memoirs:

Death will come, it matters not in what shape; whether as it comes to some, quietly on a bed of down with kind friends around, or as it has come to others, equally tenderly brought up, who have been left by a cruel enemy slowly to gasp at life … or a hand to close their eyes, and at the mercy of jackals and vultures; or mangled, torn and tortured, after seeing those nearest and dearest to them put to a shameful death, from which there is no escape. We cannot always be on a bed of roses, sipping the sweets of life and taste not its woes and pangs.153

It is significant that she chose not to make reference to death on the battlefield. Hers was the brutal truncation of the domestic ideal, anathema of the Victorian ‘good’ death. For

Coopland, however, this horror did not extend to those “chivalrous and noble sons” of

England and Scotland who had fought and died. Refusing to beautify death did not mean that Coopland did not support the imperial cause.

Her preface “looked to 1859 for success to [British] arms in India and the establishment of peace, under rule of [the] Sovereign; [with hope that the] Empire there be founded on a surer base and Christianity spread.”154 Visiting Delhi three months after

153 Coopland, 73-74. 154 Ibid. Preface.

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it had been retaken from the mutineers, Coopland resented the impudent looks of the natives, “as though they thought [the British] had no right there.” She fulminated about the “insult offered to England’s honour” and believed that Delhi should have been razed to the ground and a church or monument erected on its ruins which would be funded by

“every native implicated in the mutinies, but not openly accused of murder.”155 Bartrum too desired the destruction of Delhi as an example of imperial might,156 while she also predicted an ominous shift of power as “the natives [had] lost their fear and therefore their respect for Europeans.”157

Both Coopland and Bartrum lent their support not only to the British imperial presence in India but to the need for retribution. Even before her husband’s death,

Bartrum had called for European soldiers to avenge the “blood of our brothers and sisters,” believing that if “vengeance [was] taken on the mutineers, … others [would] be intimidated.”158 The published memoirs of both widows included letters written by their husbands championing the pursuit of retribution rather than clemency.159 Although these opinions were clearly echoed by the bereaved women, the inclusion of their husbands’ voices in their respective narratives may or may not have been within their editorial purview. Despite the lack of evidence to determine who made the decision, there was a rationale for all parties to incorporate the men posthumously. As widows, the women maintained their respectability through their continuing association with their late husbands and, at the same time, established the caliber of the men to whom they had been

155 Ibid. 263. 156 Bartrum, 5. 157 Bartrum letters, Mss Eur A.67. 158 Bartrum, 5. 159 Coopland, 94; Bartrum 86.

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married. In addition, they may have hoped to mitigate the stigma of impoverished gentility that continued to dog women authors by providing a medium and context for their husbands’ voices, lives and deaths. Likewise, the publishers could only gain as well.

By including both the women’s and men’s voices, the publishers appealed to both male and female readership and emotively illustrated the sacrifice which the women had made.

As survivors of the conflict and remnants of marriages they represented both British strength and British loss to a public that continued to debate the causes of and ‘cures’ for the imperial crisis.

While the debate has been acknowledged, there has been little discussion by historians about the subsequent polarization in Britain between those advocating retributive justice and those who resisted vitriolic calls for vengeance. Christopher

Herbert has argued that there was, from the beginning, a significant degree of support for the clemency which Governor General Canning favoured. Canning’s ‘clemency’ resolution was an addendum to his initial response to the Mutiny which made the

“waging of war or the commission of acts of sedition against the British government in

India punishable by death.” Shaken by what he termed the resultant “rabid and indiscriminate vindictiveness” toward Indians, Canning’s attempt to “ensure legality and moderation” in the administration of punishment earned him the mocking sobriquet of

“Clemency Canning.” Despite pitched demands to recall him, the Queen refused.160

Privately she agreed with him.161 Disraeli too concurred with Canning, worrying publicly that retribution would go too far. The Lady’s Newspaper implored “let us … hear no

160 Herbert, War of No Pity, 102-109. 161 Letters of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence Between the Years 1837 and 1861 vol. III ed. Arthur Benson and Viscount Esher (London: John Murray, 1907), 328.

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more cries for vengeance.” They had been, they claimed, “the first to [voice protest] against the wild, passionate, indignant clamour of the nation for an overwhelming retribution.”162 However, as Herbert argues, the slumbering “spirit of evangelical piety” which emanated from the eighteenth-century “Calvinist ideology of retribution” not only revived but became personified in officers who believed that revenge was a duty. Those who disagreed, particularly in the first few months of the Mutiny were abused alongside

Canning as being mawkish and maudlin, and guilty of false sentimentality and misguided philanthropy.163 The women’s publications placed both themselves and the publishers materially into what was often an emotive debate, on the side of retribution.

Christopher Herbert’s conclusion that the “all but national cry for unmitigated vengeance” sharply diminished after the end of 1857 has a great deal of merit. Although interest in the events in India lasted well into 1858,164 by the latter half of that year, when

Coopland and Bartrum’s memoirs were published, much of the ‘fury of vengeance’ had abated and their support could only be viewed latterly as justification of the retribution that had taken place. Herbert suggests that, as mutilation accounts were discounted and

British atrocities were reported (largely through Russell in the Times), the magnificent national triumph of early 1858 became obscured by national disillusionment and the trauma of self-doubt.165 As more fully explored in chapter five, the memoirs were received by a wary public. Although officially the conflict was not over until July 1859

162 Lady’s Newspaper, October 17 1857. The August 29 issue had called for dignity and restraint and that revenge not be taken in the name of the dead women. 163 Herbert, War of No Pity, 103-108. 164 A perfunctory tally of Mutiny references in British newspapers in the last half of 1857 and 1858 shows that, although the number dropped significantly in 1858, it was still substantially higher than pre-Mutiny references. 165 Herbert, War of No Pity, 1-18.

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when Lord Canning announced a Day of Thanksgiving, many newspapers had months earlier reflected on the “suppression” or “almost entire suppression of the mutiny” by the end of the previous year.166 The January 1st edition of the Hampshire Advertiser stated that India was “suffering from a spasm of dullness” and in April reprinted an excerpt from the Calcutta Englishman that bemoaned having to return to the “dull routine of business.”167

More overtly vengeful than Coopland or Bartrum, Sarah Graham determined shortly after being rescued from Lucknow that “no punishment [could] compensate for

[their] sufferings.” She concluded her letter to her mother, “we have got the King of

Oude here but of course he is a prisoner. I would like to see him killed – indeed I think I could do it myself, for revenge is sweet.”168 While Christopher Herbert has recently explored the “fury of vengeance” animated by the increasing “ethos of the stern pitiless

Puritan warriors of 17C England,”169 it is also instructive to listen to the widows’ voices.

Beyond the imperial assumptions that peace was coterminous with Empire and

Christianity with which Coopland introduces her memoirs, women such as Coopland,

Bartrum and Graham called for degrees of retribution. However, other widows, notably

Polehampton, were silent or like Catherine Simons, possibly because she was relatively safe in Simla, wondered “what retribution [would] bring back [her] husband and child.”170

166 Bristol Mercury, Jan 1, 1859; The Manchester Weekly Times, Jan 1, 1859; The Preston Guardian, Jan 1, 1859; Aberdeen Journal, Jan 5, 1859. 167 Hampshire Advertiser, Jan 1, 1859, April 2, 1859. 168 Graham. 169 Herbert, War of No Pity, 141. 170 Stock papers.

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Beyond retribution, however, these widows and others were primarily concerned with the moment of death, that it was painless, swift, and transitional for those prepared to enter glory. For the widows, the chivalric ideals of bravery and self-sacrifice were secondary to the manner of death. Although there was often an acknowledgment of dying for the imperial cause, the domestic aspects of defense of family, home, and/or women and children were equally important and help to explain the muted criticism for ‘over- exposure’ to danger. Similarly, it is what informed Coopland’s horror that neither gentility nor devoted domesticity guaranteed an easy or beautiful death. Whether these widows believed their late husbands to be agents of their own destruction or victims of barbaric perfidy (or both), establishing a ‘good’ death offered the women some compensation for their inability to perform customary mourning rituals or provide consecrated burial places for the deceased.

Farewells to the deceased and their final resting places in Victorian England were highly prescriptive and an opportunity for widows to prove and/or provide respectability.

The need to preserve the body’s identity and integrity, and provide a place of undisturbed repose for the deceased, was rooted in the Christian belief in the physical resurrection of the whole body.171 For Victorians, in addition to the deathbed attendance, proper funeral rites included the reverent preparation of the body and a respectable burial in a safe resting place. While laying out, washing and dressing the dead were important

171 Ruth Richardson, “Why Death was so Big in Victorian Britain?” in Death, Ritual, and Bereavement ed. Ralph Houlbrooke (London: Routledge, 1989), 111; Julie Rugg, “A new burial form and its meanings: cemetery establishment in the first half of the 19th century” in Grave concerns: death and burial in England 1700 to 1850 ed. Margaret Cox (York: Council for British Archaeology, 1998),48; John Morley, Death, Heaven and the Victorians (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), 32-33.

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ministrations, the deceased were also ritually viewed and touched172 during the funeral week173 before they were consigned to the grave, their new ‘bed of rest’.174

Despite ongoing eschatological discussion about whether the grave held the body or the body and soul and what resurrection would entail, belief in the physical resurrection of the body was commonplace.175 With this expectation, the security of a grave was paramount to protect the body from the threat of indignity or desecration by grave-robbers and/or anatomists. Prior to the nineteenth century, the practice of adding the ‘insult’ of dissection to the ‘injury’ of execution for criminals had resulted in a strong stigma against allowing dismemberment of any respectable corpse.176 Following the 1832

Anatomy Act, the legal use of the bodies of paupers for dissection further associated any dismemberment with pauperism and created more impetus to ensure that one’s loved one was accorded a burial place which allowed “polite and safe post-mortem decay.”177

In addition to the fear of deliberate desecration, secure burial increasingly became a public health issue. Subsequent to the 1832 cholera epidemic, the burial practices and prerogatives of individual churches and/or chapels came under the scrutiny of sanitation advocates such as Dr George Walker and Edwin Chadwick,178 a confluence which galvanized the public health movement. The return of cholera in1848 convinced a public

172 Richardson, “Why Death was so Big”, 109. 173 Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 210-224. Whether or not it was a full week between the death and the burial depended on when mourners arrived and also the weather which could accelerate decomposition. 174 S.T.Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, 4th edition, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (London: William Pickering, 1839), 229. First published in 1825, this book continued to be republished, reaching a 6th edition by 1848. 175 Michael Wheeler, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1990), 26-68; Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 269; Rugg, in Grave Concerns, 48. 176 Rugg, 48. 177 Richardson, 113. 178 George Walker, Gatherings from graveyards (1839) quoted in John Pinfold, “The Green Ground” in The Changing Face of Death Jupp and Howarth (London: MacMillan Press Ltd, 1997), 80-85.

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already cognizant of the connection between disease and sanitation of the danger of inner-city burial grounds.179 A key element was the belief in the miasmic hypothesis that gases which emanated from human putrefaction carried cholera as well as other fatal diseases. Although the widely held miasma theory was challenged, it continued to hold sway until displaced by germ theory after 1866.180 Overcrowded churchyards, under sectarian auspices, led to the establishment of extramural interment in park-like cemeteries, run first by cemetery companies and after the Burial Acts of 1852 and 1853 by burial boards.181 Driven by, as Chadwick argued, both medical and moral impetus, by mid-century burial reform in England had gained significant ground.182 The increasingly standardized practices cultivated widespread assumptions that the deceased would be guaranteed the respectability and security of a truly restful place.

Although British cemeteries in India continued to be located and maintained by either the military or individual churches, the expectation for security and sanctity of burial equaled that of the Victorians in Britain. As was traditional, where time, space and material were available, military burial continued to be conducted as respectably and personally as possible. Thus, in the chaos of the Mutiny, even as the domestic imperative to preserve both the integrity and identity of the body183 was diminished, it was not

179 John Pinfold, “The Green Ground” in The Changing Face of Death, ed. Peter Jupp and Glennys Howarth, 86-87; Peter C Jupp, “Enon Chapel: No Way for the Dead” in The Changing Face of Death, Jupp and Howarth, 101-102. 180 R.J.Morris, Cholera 1832: The Social Response to an Epidemic (New York: Homes and Meier Publishers, 1976), 197-212; Pinfold, 80; Jupp, “Enon Chapel”, 96. 181 Julie Rugg, “The Origins and Progress of Cemetery Establishment in Britain” in Changing Face, Jupp and Howarth, 116. 182 Pinfold, “The Green Ground” in Changing Face, Jupp and Howarth, 85. 183 Richardson, “Why was Death” in Death, Houlbrooke, 111. This also became the rationale for executing rebels in a manner that would dismember them (blowing them from cannons) as it was believed to be an affront to their religion and therefore a powerful deterrent. In addition, the practice resonated with the custom in England of using the executed bodies of criminals for dissection. Although anatomists were

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dispensable. While the latitude to fulfill domestic burial oblations and obligations was, of necessity, curtailed, the women had varying degrees of success within their restricted parameters. Despite the onerous reality of their constraints, many still mourned the lack of opportunity to ‘properly’ say good-bye or provide their husbands with appropriate resting-places.

Polehampton was fortunate enough to tend both her husband’s death bed and participate in the funeral service read over Henry’s body.184 Although Glen, too, closely tended her husband’s sickbed, she was chagrined that she failed to recognize (or believe) the signs of her husband’s imminent departure and he slipped away before she could bid him farewell.185 Dr. Thomas Mawe died while he and his wife, Jane, were fleeing from mutineers. Both believing they were near death, they “took leave of each other” and when her husband died, Jane did what she could to make the body respectable. Despite being in immediate danger she chose to delay her escape while she approximated the farewell ritual of laying out the body. Although customarily these ministrations were primarily to ready the corpse for viewing by friends and family, for Mawe it was important to provide such dignity to the deceased as she could. She used her dress to bind his head and face but was forced to leave him lying there, as “there was not earth to bury him.” His body was not recovered and, despite doing everything possible, the inadequacy of her final administrations continued to haunt her.186

initially granted the right to four felons per annum (1540), the practice of dissection evolved to become part of the punishment exacted by the state, as Ruth Richardson states “a fate worse than death”. Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Desitute (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2000), 32. 184 Mrs. G. Harris, A Lady’s Diary of the Siege of Lucknow (London: John Murray, 1858), 86-87. 185 Glen, Mss Eur 332. 186 Jane Mawe, quoted by Jane Robinson, Angels of Albion: Women of the Indian Mutiny (London: Viking, 1996), 68-71.

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In contrast, at the fort at Agra, where death could be treated far more conventionally, Eliza Glen laid her husband beside his newly deceased daughter in the

Kirk burial grounds.187 Although crowded with British refugees, the continual, if limited, flow of goods, services and communication from outside the fort allowed the “daily offices [to be] attended to,”188 and funerals (and weddings) were conducted with a modicum of normalcy. As there was limited burial space in the fort, more extensive burial grounds were subsequently added outside its walls to meet the demand. Coffins were widely available while burial services, albeit hasty, were conducted with a semblance of decorum. However, it was not the place of repose and remembrance to which English cemeteries aspired and Coopland found it “dreary and mournful” with the graves being “mere heaps of sand, occasionally varied by a tombstone.”189

In contrast, the Residency of Lucknow lacked the space, time and material needed for respectable burials. Under siege for almost five months, the inhabitants increasingly suffered from the lack of supplies (primarily food), disease and constant shelling, and death exacted a heavy toll from women and children as well as men. The churchyard, not previously used as a burial place,190 quickly became the site of mass graves which were filled with the dead of each day under the cover of darkness and often under fire. Despite the danger, a concerted effort to provide a proper farewell was maintained and burial services continued to be read during the hasty interments. The necessity for brevity notwithstanding, a semblance of segregation persisted in the sectarian services that were

187 Glen, Mss Eur 332; Coopland, 170. 188 Coopland, 170. 189 Coopland, 211-212. 190 L E Ruutz Rees, A Personal Narrative of the Siege of Lucknow (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1858), 102-103.

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read over Protestant and Roman Catholic bodies which lay together in the shallow graves.191 However, the dead lost their identity in these haphazard and hurried mass burials: Sarah Graham would not have been alone in her sorrow that she had “not the slightest idea where [her] poor James and [her] darlings [were] lying”. Nor was she even sure if “the earth [had] covered them.”192

This increasingly limited space not only meant that several bodies were consigned at one time to the same grave but, with no time to make coffins, the deceased were simply sewn into their bedding or buried ‘with their boots on’. Despite these necessary modifications to a proper and respectful burial, Emily Polehampton insisted that her husband be buried in a coffin. Against all probability, a search of the Residency proved fruitful and Henry was given both a coffin and a grave of his own. Not content to leave it unmarked, Emily also contracted to have a stone erected over the grave.193 Made of white marble which had been procured from one of the King’s palaces, for the widow it became a fitting memorial on which to inscribe her husband’s work and death in India. The sketch of the churchyard, including the grave, which Mrs. Barbor completed for her shortly before they were evacuated provided a focus for remembrance in which she took a great deal of pleasure.194 Mrs. Banks, too, was allowed a separate grave for her husband and also arranged for a stone to be placed at the grave. However, she was acutely aware that if Lucknow was abandoned the stone might be moved or destroyed and without a

191 Maria Germon, Journal of the Siege of Lucknow: An Episode of the Indian Mutiny, ed. Michael Edwardes (London: Constable, 1958), 94. Rees, 191, 215-216. 192 Graham. 193 Harris, 86-87; Polehampton, 330-333, 350. 194 Harris, 152.

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visual memento, such as Polehampton’s, the grave would simply have to be marked in her memory.195

Prepared for some disturbance of her husband’s grave, Banks could not have been oblivious to the attendant fear of disinterment. The well-established British apprehension of grave-robbery and dismemberment of corpses was echoed in the rumours of mutineers desecrating the graves of the British. Anticipating such actions prompted the burial of

Lieutenant-Governor Colvin within the walls of Fort Agra,196 rather than in the extramural burial grounds and the grave of Sir Henry Havelock was so completely disguised that only an official map could locate and identify it.197 Rosa Coopland’s horror at the tales which circulated in Agra of mutineers disinterring, dishonoring and burning corpses in the churches198 reflected not just the Christian fear of defilement but also anxiety regarding violation of the sanctity of the church. Although devastating, the vandalism and razing of the church buildings were not as heinous as the reported desecration which preceded the destruction. For Coopland, Christian bodies disinterred and exposed “before the Communion tables” not only debased the integrity and sanctity of the corpse but they insulted the sacrament of communion, a fundamental tenet for all

Christians.

In addition, the purported subsequent burning of Christian bodies was the final indignity to the remains. The horror at British Christians being not just disinterred but burned in the church by the rebels was not only due to the dishonor of those buried

195 Banks, Ipswich Journal. 196 Coopland, 169, 206. 197 Sir James Outram, Lieutenant General Sir James Outram’s campaign in India, 1857-58 (London: printed for private circulation only by Smith Elder, 1860), 124. 198 Coopland, 189.

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respectably but a desecration of sacred space. Although there is nothing to suggest that the British considered the burning of corpses as an attempt by the mutineers to impose

Hindoo death rituals on Christian bodies, the act of burning corpses was equated with heathen and unnatural practices.199 David Arnold has pointed out that with cremation still rare in Europe the debate about this method of disposal of the dead had been heavily influenced by the repugnance with what was viewed as a total lack of “tender feeling

[which was] cherished in burying the dead among Christians.”200 As Coopland is alone in recording the burning of corpses, it is likely that she reacted to rumours which circulated in Agra but were not widespread. However, the fear of bodies being disinterred was more prevalent.

For widows such as Banks and Polehampton who, despite the constraints of their circumstances, had honored their late husbands by arranging individual and marked graves, such threats after they had been evacuated were particularly egregious. Safe in

Allahabad, Polehampton waited anxiously for news of the Lucknow burial grounds,201 and when the “terrible reports” of its desecration reached her two weeks later, she could scarcely think about it.202 Her fears were allayed by Dr Fayrer, a fellow evacuee, who, while he had “no doubt about the church being razed,” dismissed the rumours that graves had been violated.203 His repudiation of the stories of desecration appears to be corroborated by the lack of comment by those who recaptured Lucknow in March 1858.

However, further examination of the source of these British fears, although beyond the

199 Jalland, Death in the Family, 209. 200 David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800-1856 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006) 52-54. 201 Polehampton, 368. 202 Ibid. 370. 203 Ibid. 371.

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scope of this study, is needed.204 While the contemplation of the desecration of their late husbands’ bodies was, arguably intensely traumatic widows who had experienced the satisfaction of a personal farewell and a place of remembrance had been allowed a comparatively rare act of closure that most of the widows of the Mutiny were not afforded.

Although both Kirk and Coopland well knew the location of their husbands’ deaths, they were forced by the mutineers to leave the men’s bodies and thus were denied any ministrations. As she recorded, Kirk resisted even touching her dead husband in a salutary farewell, afraid that the mutineers would “ill use it” if she did so.205 The accounts of atrocities in Delhi, Jhansi and other sites of Mutiny which had reached Gwalior had prepared the inhabitants for similar treatment if the sepoys rebelled.206 It is arguable that

Ellen Kirk fully expected that her husband’s body would/could be subjected to the same outrages about which they had heard. Although she begged them to shoot her as well, they responded (in an overt allusion to sati) that with her husband dead she was already dead as well.207 As they appeared to have no wish to kill her, given the reports of bodies being mutilated after death,208 Kirk feared that any reprisals for her actions would have been acted out upon her husband’s body. Once in Agra, Coopland requested that

204 How widespread the fears of disinterment and violation were, how grounded the fears were based on past experience, and how valid the reports of desecration were, are all beyond the scope of this study. However, like the rumours of rape, mutilation, etc were these stories rooted in British insecurities rather than fact? Rose Llewellyn-Jones, The Great Uprising in India, 1857-58 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), 183, although Llewellyn-Jones alludes to the validity of reports of desecration of the Lucknow graves, there is no indication of the source of her information. 205 Kirk, Mss Eur B268. 206 Coopland, 91-113. 207 Kirk, Mss Eur B268. 208 William Gordon Alexander, Recollections of a Highland subaltern during the campaigns of the 93rd Highlanders in India, under Colin Campbell, lord Clyde, in 1857, 1858 and 1859 (London: Edward Arnold, 1898) 301. It is arguable that Alexander’s belief that “Asiatic and African foes” always mutilate the dead was a widespread belief.

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information be obtained about those killed at Gwalior. Ten days after his death, on the first anniversary of her wedding, Coopland heard that her husband’s body, with those of the other Europeans (presumably including Kirk’s), had been dumped by the mutineers in a nullah [dry stream bed]. Temporarily buried a few days later, they were disinterred and reburied in the Gwalior churchyard some months later. Well aware of the rapid decomposition and four-legged and/or winged scavengers, Coopland could have not expected positive individual identification of the remains but, content with a consecrated resting place, she subsequently had a tomb erected over what she deemed to be George’s grave.209

The realities of dying on the battlefield meant hasty burial if possible but nothing was guaranteed in the melee. This could be more easily accepted when the widow was not near the site of battle. It is one more reminder of the uneasy alliance of the imperial/domestic world that these women inhabited. Although there is no indication that

Colonel Case was buried in the aftermath of the rout of the British at Chinhut, his widow’s diary is silent about the fate of his remains. Bartrum knew her husband’s body had been placed in a doolie [cart] but had no information about a burial spot nor if he had indeed even been buried. Her great grief was not where his final resting spot was but that she had not be able to attend to his body, to “kiss his cold lips and lay him, herself in his quiet grave.”210 The widow’s sole connection to his place of death and possible burial came as she rapidly passed the spot during the confusion of the hurried evacuation from the Residency at Lucknow. Her opportunity to erect a memorial to Robert was provided

209 Coopland, 146 - 148. 210 Bartrum, Mss Eur A.67.

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later when she buried their two year old son in Calcutta. Following the birth and death dates of both her husband and son, the inscription on the headstone concluded with the scriptural assurance: “Is it well with thy Husband? Is it well with the Child? And she answered: ‘It is well’.”211 However, the equanimity expressed for the dead was not yet possible for the widow. As she boarded the ship for England she grieved, “I am stripped of all, I am empty and desolate, all is gone now.”212

Bartrum’s heart-stricken words, and those of other widows, articulate significant characteristics of grieving that are identified by Jalland. Grief and mourning in the nineteenth century (as, arguably, today) were not interchangeable. The former was and remains the experience of deep sorrow while the latter, as the expression of sorrow, facilitated it.213 Jalland argues that, similar to patterns described by modern psychologists, Victorian widows often experienced the concatenation of anguish or numbness and/or disbelief, anxiety and/or panic at their loss of security, and apathy and/or a profound sense of helplessness.214 In the crucible of the conflict, the Mutiny widows experienced a similar sequence of stages of grief. However, in the vortex of trauma and displacement, the stages were often disordered and the manifestations, for many women, were occluded, attenuated or deferred.

Beyond the conflict and consequent death in battle, the overwhelming number of casualties due to sunstroke and sickness215 meant some wives were ‘fortunate’ enough to

211 Polehampton, 376. 212 Bartrum, Mss Eur A.67. 213 Jalland, “Death” in Death, Houlbrooke, 180. 214 Ibid. 178-179; Jane Littlewood, Aspects of Grief: Bereavement in Adult Life (New York: Routledge, 1992), 53-59; Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 230-240. 215 Edward Spiers, The Army and Society, 1815-1914 (New York: Longman, 1980), 135. Spiers estimates that of 11,021 officers and men who died in the Mutiny, 8,987 were due to sunstroke or illness.

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attend their husbands’ death-beds. Consistent with the expectations of an Evangelical

‘good’ death, these women initially exhibited a calm, even euphoric, response. Informed by their confidence in their late husbands’ states of grace, their own loss was not immediately considered. One day after her husband’s death from cholera at Lucknow,

Mrs. E Dashwood was remarkably calm and cheerful.216 However, within two weeks, her grief had rendered her unable to care for her two young children.217 Though stricken,

Emily Polehampton appeared “cheered and cheering with a mild but unaffected smile”218 and described the “rapture” she felt at her husband’s death. However, within days the

“joy … became less radiant as the death-like blank of [her] life became more apparent.”219 Similarly, Eliza Glen, while accepting the ‘good death’ of her husband, found that she increasingly felt her “sore affliction.”220 It is arguable that their initial response was akin to the numbness or disbelief of early bereavement. To varying degrees, their grief surfaced once their husbands were buried. However, most of the Mutiny widows were not granted the brief buffer to prepare for death but were forced to try to immediately apprehend the unthinkable, the reports of their husbands’ deaths.

Despite their knowledge of the degree of danger that their husbands faced, the finality of death was still unexpected. Mrs. Hayes refused for several days to believe that her husband and father of their five children had been killed.221 Murdered during what was widely viewed as a suicide mission, Major Gall’s death was nevertheless a “fearful

216 Germon,61. 217 Harris, 89. 218 Bartrum, 32; Harris, 86-88. 219 Polehampton, 330-331. 220 Glen, Mss Eur C332. 221 Ibid., 274.

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blow” to his wife.222 Stricken by anguish at the news of Colonel Case being fatally wounded, Adelaide Case needed “sleeping draughts” and port wine for several days to make her sleep.223 More heartbreakingly attenuated, after the first attempt to relieve

Lucknow had failed, Katherine Bartrum’s hope to reunite with her husband was slowly devoured by disbelief and agony as she endured two days of waiting before his servants reported his death and an additional day before it was confirmed by his fellow officer.224

Subsequently, for Bartrum, as for many of the widows besieged in Lucknow, the expectation of their own death and/or the exigencies of their circumstances reduced the desire and limited the opportunity to grieve. Reeling from the death of two children as well as her husband’s suicide, Sarah Graham “did not feel it” as she believed that “they had gone [only] a short time before [her].” By early October, Mrs. Banks fully expected that she and her child would soon follow her husband to a “happier world.”225 While

Bartrum despondently cared little whether they were relieved or not for her sake, she was at the same time animated by the desire to deliver her young son safely ‘home’ to

England. However, as the probability of relief became stronger, her ambivalence also became more pronounced as she felt by leaving Lucknow she was abandoning what was

“dearest” to her.226 Similarly, Polehampton spoke for herself and the widows Gall and

Barbor when she later reflected that they had “cared little for what was going on, … and looked forward with small interest to the prospect of relief.”227 Further, she admitted that she had taken pleasure in placing herself in danger, walking outside alone at night, with

222 Germon, 45; Inglis, 33-34. 223 Case, 64, 96-97, 104-105; Inglis, Siege, 77. 224 Bartrum, 43-48. 225 Banks, Ipswich Journal. 226 Bartrum, 48-50. 227 Polehampton, 340.

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bullets flying overhead, and longing for [her] summons to that blessed home.” Hours before she was evacuated, she longed instead to have “died where [Henry] had died and there [been] buried.”228 Her expressed desire could be viewed as a Victorian trope of bereavement. However, in spite of the melodramatic language, the apathy and meaninglessness of life which Polehampton and others articulated were also characteristic of the stages of early grief.229

Despite their grief and the perceived imminence of their own deaths, the immediate demands on the widows provided a distraction. Although it should not be over-stated, Jalland’s inclusion of ‘restlessness’ as an adjunct to anxiety or panic in the second phase of grief230 resonates with the level of energy which some of the widows sustained throughout the siege. Bartrum’s responsibilities included cooking and cleaning for those in her compound while caring for her young son.231 Case, despite a bout with serious illness, successfully maintained the cramped quarters that she, her sister, Mrs.

Inglis, and the three Inglis children shared.232 Deemed indefatigable, Polehampton, Gall and Barbor spent a great deal of time nursing the wounded in the hospital. Polehampton in particular found her work energizing and cathartic.233 As these activities ostensibly conformed to what was deemed ‘women’s work’, they may have temporarily provided the grounding of familiar occupation which, in measure, helped mitigate some of the

228 Ibid., 339, 350. 229 Jane Littlewood, Aspects of Grief: Bereavement in Adult Life (London: Routledge, 1992), 53-55. 230 Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 231. Littlewood too lists ‘restlessness’ as a more current manifestation of grief; 51. 231 Polehampton, 344-345; Bartrum, 22-23; Inglis, Siege, 225-226. 232 Inglis, Siege, 103-104. 233 Polehampton, 345-347; Bartrum, 68; Inglis Siege, 122.

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panic or sense of loss of security which Jalland views as an intermediate phase of grieving.

Following the death of their husbands, this loss of security was expressed and exhibited by the Mutiny widows in various ways. Some while grieving their loss accepted self-reliance without apparent hesitation, while others profoundly felt and expressed anxiety about their newly unprotected state. Possibly because she was relatively safe in

Fort Agra, rather than being apprehensive over the loss of physical protection, Eliza Glen more profoundly felt her precarious financial position. From Simla, after describing herself as a “poor widowed child,” Catherine Simons asked her mother for refuge in

England234 while Bartrum wrote to her father of her desire to return to him as his

‘desolate child’ in need of his protection.235

Although Bartrum keenly felt and articulated her loss of security after she heard of her husband’s death, it echoed what she had expressed when she and Robert had parted four months earlier and what she continued to feel while separated from him before his death. In addition to his loss, Bartrum experienced a crisis of faith triggered by her husband’s death. Not only did she question the love and mercy of God but felt that He had not answered her supplications to protect her husband. Despite her assertion that God

“defendeth the fatherless and the widow,” she also wondered why she had been punished by Him. It is arguable that in spite of her assertions of God’s presence she could not be fully certain of His divine protection,236 a fearful position in which to find herself.

Anticipating being evacuated from Lucknow, with “no husband near [for ] protection,”

234 Stock papers. 235 Bartrum, Mss Eur A.67. 236 Ibid; Bartrum, Reminiscences, 8, 13, 17, 22-23, 46, 50-51.

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Bartrum’s “heart fail[ed her] at the prospect of the journey.” In the confusion of the subsequent march to safety, her fears were partly realized. Certain that her bearers were taking her to the mutineers, she left the doolie and ran wildly into the dark until stumbling upon a group of British soldiers who were also lost. Together, they finally reached safety at 3:00 the next morning where she was discovered by Captain Edgell, under whose watch the women had been placed. Several days later, after a long march, and only reaching camp in the early morning hours, she had “no tent and sat on the wet ground until daylight.” She despaired that no one spoke to her and that in “all that host of fellow creatures [there was no one] to care whether [she] was living or dead.”237 Rather than being left on her own, Mrs. Banks and her infant were personally escorted out of the fort, she having to be placated by Captain Spurgin, her rescuer, by false assurances that the heavy gun-fire was that of their own men.238

Protection, it appears, was not only required against the mutineers. During an early stage of their evacuation from Lucknow, Mrs. Dashwood, who was traveling with a small child and an infant (born Aug 31), was left behind and found her way to the next camp. She was discovered wandering about in the middle of the night, having been

“dreadfully frightened by a drunken soldier [who had attempted to] accost” her.”239

Although resonant of the earlier reputation of soldiers of being debauched and intemperate,240 the incident was recorded only by Mrs. Harris, the chaplain’s wife who had taken Dashwood under her wing throughout the siege. Although drunkenness was not

237 Bartrum, 55-59. 238 Major John Blick Spurgin private papers, 1857, IOR: Mss Eur D747, B.L. 239 Harris, 165. 240 Myrna Trustram, Women of the regiment: Marriage and the Victorian army (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1984), 24-26.

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uncommon among soldiers, the evacuation from Lucknow appears to have had more than the usual inebriation. Brevet Major Anson recorded that the soldiers “fall out, pillage some mess or officers’ hackery, get drunk and then tumble into the first conveyance they find on the road.” Often it was his buggy. He further stated that the irregularities had been so shocking that the Commander-in-Chief had been forced to order roll-call every two hours.241 As Dr. Fayrer, who discovered and rescued Dashwood, did not find it noteworthy enough to include in his account of the siege evacuation, the incident appears to have been dismissed or covered up. His memoirs were written several decades after the conflict and Fayrer’s failure to note the soldier’s egregious behaviour could have been because it was common (and he had forgotten it) or because it was anomalous (and he chose to exclude it). In addition, between the confusion of the evacuation and Fayrer’s concern over his wife’s delicate condition, it may have been for him a relatively insignificant event.

Polehampton’s account of the evacuation exhibits little, if any, of the vulnerability felt by Bartrum, experienced by Dashwood, or exhibited by Banks. Her sense of independence is illustrated by an ‘outing’ that she and widows Barbor and Lewin took when they reached Fort Allahabad. Without considering possible peril, they engaged in an unattended evening stroll that took them to the European shops a mile from the Fort.

Polehampton was surprised at both the sharp rebuke from the gentleman who picked them up in his buggy, and the subsequent sensation this caused in the Fort. Although she did not dismiss the furor, and admitted that it was “a far more rash proceeding than [they]

241 H. S. Anson ed., 9th Lancers during the Indian Mutiny: the Letters of Brevet Major O.H.S.G. Anson (London: Allen, 1896), 209.

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had any idea of,” her rather prosaic record of the incident hints at her refusal to regard herself as defenseless.242 Similarly, Coopland’s journeys, first to Simla to visit her widowed aunt and then to Bombay to start her voyage to England, are recorded in a tenor of self-sufficiency. There is no indication that she felt particularly defenseless, although there was a sense of isolation. Her journal indicates that she engaged only in necessary dialogue with the Indians she had employed for her travel and that etiquette prevented her from speaking to British officers that they met on the road. The European soldier’s widow whom she had hired as a nurse early in her journey soon proved “troublesome” and they parted ways in Simla.243 Despite her modest claim as she arranged to leave Agra that she was not “an adept” with business, her subsequent journey demonstrates little, if any, ineptitude. Once in Bombay, despite feeling “again worried with business,” she made independent decisions about accommodation (as opposed to the Refugee’s House), met with her agents, contacted the committee for the Relief Fund, arranged passage to

England, and purchased clothing for herself, her baby and her baby’s nurse for the voyage.244

While the self-sufficiency demonstrated by both Polehampton and Coopland is notable, both women credited the support of others, particularly other widows, in the amelioration of their grief. Denying herself the “indulgence [of] private grief with so much suffering and sorrow surrounding her”, Case quickly succumbed to a serious physical illness and credited her survival to the care of her sister, Caroline and Julia

242 Polehampton, 62. 243 Coopland, 280, 288. 244 Coopland, 247, 306.

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Inglis.245 While women helped, supported, and nursed other women, it was the shared experience of sorrow, particularly of widowhood, that became a lifeline for many. The indomitable Rosa Coopland sank into days of lethargy when she reached the relative safety of Agra, but in the subsequent months she also recognized the analgesic effect of being in close company with others similarly afflicted.246 In Lucknow, widows comforted widows. Katherine Bartrum welcomed Polehampton’s empathy and “her quiet heartfelt sympathy” in that “first hour of desolation.”247 Polehampton herself recorded the “chain of sympathy between [widows] which very few [could] understand.”248

Although current studies of bereavement have revealed that grieving is substantially facilitated when widows support other widows,249 such reciprocity was not consciously sought out during the nineteenth century. While there was no doubt commiseration between widows, the process of mourning in domestic settings drew primarily on the consolation offered by family, friends and religious beliefs.250 Separated from this support network by distance, the newly-widowed were further isolated by the conflict and keenly aware that those ‘at home’ were not yet aware of their bereavement.

The women were left with their faith and a new ‘family’ of fellow-sufferers. Despite receiving universal sympathy and concern, the coterie of widows created by the Mutiny was unique. It was this unprecedented multitude who had “passed through the [same] furnace,”251 many who were of similar age252 and stage of grief, that provided the

245 Case, 64, 96-97, 104-105. Inglis, Siege, 77. 246 Coopland, 249. 247 Bartrum, 46. 248 Polehampton, 372. 249 Littlewood, 87-89. 250 Jalland, “Death”, in Death, Houlbrooke, 180. 251 Bartrum, Reminiscences, 46.

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reciprocal support that Coopland suggested kept them from succumbing to grief and/or losing their reason.253

252 Ibid. 349. Polehampton records 20 widows of offices, most who were under 25 y.o.a. 253 Coopland, 249.

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Chapter 3: The Imperial Widow: Mourning in Imperial Spaces

Beyond support networks, the grieving process for Victorians was further facilitated by a coherent set of mourning customs which included mementos, memorials, consolation letters and mourning dress and etiquette. In the disorder of the conflict and new unfamiliar and insecure reality of widowhood, these practices provided an opportunity for the women to ground themselves within a familiar subset of domestic rituals, both during and following the conflict. Not only could they expect therapeutic benefits similar to those in a domestic setting,1 but in normalizing their mourning as best as they could, they helped impose a level of domestic order upon the imperial chaos in which they found themselves. However, even the consolations of mourning could not fully mitigate the impact of the conflict.

With the destruction of their homes, most women were left with few, if any, of their husband’s personal belongings. Her identity diminished without her husband or son, the magnitude of Bartrum’s loss was exacerbated by the paucity of keepsakes that she had salvaged. Familiar possessions evoked a sense of closeness to or symbolically represented the deceased2 and arguably eased the sense of loss. For widows, such as

Bartrum, denied the physical ministrations of a farewell or the locus of “remembrance and meditation” which a grave provided,3 mementos accrued greater significance.

Adelaide Case was grateful to have “dear William’s” Bible, two Prayer Books and a little

1 Jalland, “Death” in Death, Houlbrooke, 181. 2 Jalland, Victorian Family, 295. 3 Jalland, “Death” in Death, Houlbrook, ed., 182; Pat Jalland “Victorian death and its decline: 1850-1918” in Death in England: An Illustrated History, Peter Jupp and Clare Gittings, eds. (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1999), 247; Strange, Death, 106.

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‘Companion to the Altar’, the latter which had been “shot through by a ball”.4 A soldier from Case’s 32nd Regiment had attempted to retrieve a locket from around the dying man’s neck (to give to the widow, one must assume) but was deterred by enemy fire.5

Katherine Bartrum was left with only Robert’s Bible, uniform, and diary as everything else had been looted.6

Although Ellen Kirk had her wedding ring torn from her finger, both Rosa

Coopland and Jane Mawe managed to hide and preserve theirs. It was the only tangible memento of their husbands that either woman salvaged. While both wedding and engagement rings were customary, the latter most often had inset gems while the former was considered most appropriate if it was a heavy plain gold band.7 Mawe most regretted not having her husband’s medals and clasps, and Bartrum noted specifically the loss of

Robert’s sword, pistol and instrument case. Despite both men having been doctors, for their widows, the men’s identities were bound up in the military roles within which they had practiced their profession. In addition, for both Case and Bartrum, the items that they retained provided proof of the imperial/spiritual duality which had resulted in their husbands’ deaths. At least one of Lieut. Case’s prayer books had been shot through (one could assume) by a mutineer’s ball and was a visual reminder of both the military and spiritual facets of her late husband’s life.

Beyond personal possessions, the Victorians were comforted by memorabilia which provided a tangible physicality. The tradition of preserving the presence of the departed through representative mediums such as portraits (painted or sketched), death

4 Case, 87. 5 Inglis, Siege, 103-104. 6 Bartrum, 56-57. 7 Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England 2nd ed. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2009), 160-163.

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masks, busts or sketches had by mid-century been supplemented by the new option of photography. Although it was not unusual to take a photograph of the sufferer of a terminal illness when it was apparent that death was unavoidable, a likeness was more often taken after death.8 However, as photography became more accessible and affordable, in addition to the dead or dying, photographs increasingly documented life and lifestyles. As part of positioning themselves in the world at large, travel photography became an important medium both for Victorian travelers and for those at home in

Britain who could travel vicariously through the photos. For middle-class Britons in

India, it became possible and popular to document their stay, whether it was a visit, a longer sojourn,9 or, for many, their final resting place. For those living in or returning to

Britain photographs of loved ones who had died in India were profound mediums of remembrance whether taken before or after the subject’s death.

By the time of the Mutiny, photography in India had become well established as new techniques and advances in the existing processes were quickly disseminated and eagerly adopted. Introduced in France in 1839, daguerreotype cameras were imported into India by early 1840.10 The subsequent development of photography using negatives, both glass and calotype, although introduced shortly afterward, was not immediately as popular for portraiture. Although sitting time for a daguerreotype was somewhat less than a minute, early photography using negatives required exposure of at least two minutes,

8 Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 288-291; Jalland, “Death”, in Houlbrooke, 182; Strange, Death, 214-215. 9 Sophie Gordon, “‘Under the Sunny Skies of Ind’: Photographing Antiquities and Tribes” in Reverie and Reality: Nineteenth-Century Photographs of India from the Ehrenfeld Collection ed. Robert Flynn Johnson (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2003), 17; Peter D. Osborne, Travelling Light: photography, travel and visual culture (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2000), 12-13. 10 John Falconer, “The Early Years of Photography in India” in Reverie, 8.

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making the latter more conducive to still subjects such as architecture and landscape.11

Quickly appreciated by government officials as a new medium for architectural and ethnographic work,12 photography was encouraged by the military and by 1855 it had been added to the curriculum of the military academy at Addiscombe. By 1856, Bengal surgeon John McCosh was recommending to officers that all branches of photography,

“on paper, on plate glass, and on metallic plates,” be mastered.13 However, by that time, a significant number of officers had been practicing photography as a hobby for at least a decade. Portraits of friends and military colleagues taken in 1843 by McCosh are some of his earliest and an album containing both portraits and landscapes captured by Bengal

Artillery officer Alfred Huish can been dated to 1848.14 In addition to military personnel, amateur civilian photographers such as Jules Itier, a French customs inspector, also traveled and photographed in India during the 1840s, and, like McCosh and other officers, Itier’s daguerreotype portraiture was simply a hobby, albeit an expensive one.

Although a professional daguerreotype portraiture service was advertised in Calcutta as early as1844, little is known of the venture and there are few indications of other similar attempts until 1849. The alacrity with which the daguerreotype studios that opened in both Bombay and Calcutta in 1850 replaced the commercial (traditional) portrait painter

11 Julia Ballerini, “Rites of Passage: A Frenchman’s Albums of British India” in Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 1850-1900 ed Maria Antonella Pelizzari (New Haven: Yale U.P., 2003), 89, 94-96. 12 Gordon, “Sunny Skies” in Reverie, 16. 13 Maria Antonella Pelizzari, “Introduction” in Traces of India, 13; Omar Khan, “War Photography in Nineteenth-Century India and Afghanistan” in Reverie, 145. 14 Falconer, “Early Years” in Reverie, 10; Ray Desmond “Photography in Nineteenth-Century India” in Simla: A Hill Station in British India by Pat Barr and Ray Desmond (London: The Scolar Press, 1978), 43.

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studios, at least in Calcutta, demonstrates the attraction of the new medium.15 Despite their popularity for portraiture, daguerreotypes had several drawbacks. As unique images, they could not be duplicated. In addition they produced a mirror-image only fully visible from a limited angle and needed to be fitted in a protective case (often behind glass) as they were easily damaged. Some of these issues were addressed by the calotype paper process which was patented in France two years after the daguerreotype. However, while it created a negative which could then be reproduced on paper making it more durable and reproducible, the “bright precision” of the costlier daguerreotype was often preferred to the “softer paper image” of the newer less expensive technology.16 By 1849 a studio which advertised “photographic likenesses on paper” was also operating in Calcutta, offering a cheaper alternative for many.17

Photography was an art form that also appealed to Indians and a significant number of Indian photographers emerged after 1850, particularly in Bombay and

Calcutta. By 1845, the “court city” of Lucknow was supporting two Indian photographers, Ahmad-Ali-Khan (alias Chote Mizan) and Mushkooroodowlah,18 who had become integrated into the city’s large “complex of luxury industries.”19 By the mid

1850s, between amateur and professional, European and Indian, and military and civilian

15Ballerini, “Rites of Passage” in Traces of India, 94-96; Falconer, “Early Years” in Reverie, 10-11.Clark Worswick “Notes on Photography in Nineteenth-Century India” in The Last Empire: Photography in British India, 1855-1911 (New York: Aperture Inc., 1976), 3-4. 16 John Falconer and Louise Hide, Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs (London: British Library, 2009), 16, 22-23, 40; Vidya Dehejia, India Through the Lens: Photography 1840-1911 (New York: Prestel Publishing, 2000), 12. 17 Ray Desmond, Photography in India During the Nineteenth Century (London: Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 1976), 8. 18 Judith Mara Gutman, Through Indian Eyes (New York: Oxford U.P., 1982), xi-xii, 26-27; Ray Desmond, Photography in India During the Nineteenth Century (London: Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 1976), 30. 19 Veena Talwar Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow: 1856-1877 (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1984), 3-5, 12-16.

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photographers, and choices in photographic processes, there were ample opportunities for

Anglo-Indians to obtain a likeness of one’s self or one’s loved ones.

Early cameras were made of wood but not of equal quality and John McCosh advised that photographers avoid “flimsy portable models” and use more durable, albeit more cumbersome, equipment.20 While he particularly noted its need to withstand the extremes of heat, transportability was also crucial as amateur photographers (many of them in military service) and early professionals (most of whom were itinerant) were required to travel, often long distances. Although the growing public familiarity with the medium and its increasing affordability encouraged the establishment of commercial studios, their permanent locations in the larger centres did not preclude the necessity to visit more remote locations, which led photographers from established studios to travel great distances to ply their trade.21 Samuel Bourne of the photographic firm Bourne and

Shepherd, who operated across India between 1863 and 1870, estimated in 1864 that his photographic equipment alone formed twenty loads.22 Bourne itemized his needs as “a pyramidal tent ten feet high by ten feet square at the base … [a] stock of glass [that] consisted of 150 plates 12 X 10 and 400 plates 13 X 8,” duplicate boxes of all chemicals and distilled water in case of damage or loss of one them and his camera equipment. It is reasonable to assume that the photographer from Calcutta who arrived at Gwalior (a distance of over 1,000 km) in April 1857 would have been similarly laden. As he spent several days (or more) photographing both British and Indians stationed in Gwalior, it is very likely that either the regiment had no resident amateur photographer or those

20 Deheija, India Through the Lens, 18. 21 Falconer, “Early Years” in Reverie, 11; Gordon, “Sunny Skies” in Reverie, 17-19. 22 Worswick, Last Empire, 9-10.

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photographed desired a better quality product than was available locally. Newly established in Gwalior, the Cooplands did not take advantage of the photo opportunity but Rosa was impressed by the “pretty pictures” taken of other Anglo-Indian residents, many of which were “sent home,” and, as she was later certain, provided comfort for the bereaved.23

Six weeks before the Mutiny irrevocably changed their world, the Polehamptons took advantage of the acclaimed expertise of Ahmad Ali Khan, a Muslim photographer in

Lucknow who had taken daguerreotypes of most of the military personal who were stationed there. Being a “gentleman,” he refused any payment for his work though Henry

Polehampton estimated the chemicals cost Khan more than £100 per annum. The photographer appears to have been progressive in his range of photographic dabbling and was likely engaged in three different processes, the daguerreotype, the calotype and the wet-process collodion method. As contemporaneous studios such as that of James

Newland in Calcutta offered more than a single photographic process,24 Khan may well have done the same. Although Henry referred to Khan’s products as daguerreotypes, they were more likely calotype portraits or photos made from glass negatives. Daguerreotypes, being positive images, could not be replicated and Kahn’s practice of supplying multiple likenesses to each sitter would have necessitated a substantial amount of time and supplies as an equal amount of time and material was required for each photo/sitting.

Although the Polehamptons obtained from the photographer a number of what Henry termed “paper daguerreotypes,” “paper impressions” and “paper likenesses” to send back

23 Coopland, 80. 24 Ehrenfeld, Last Empire, 11.

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to England, he also acknowledged their lack of quality, a frequent observation of the lack of clarity of calotypes.

Khan’s personal albums which held the portraits of “everyone in the station”25 consisted primarily of salt prints, the positive image obtained from the calotype negative.

As this was a faster and more inexpensive method, particularly if the photographer was not being reimbursed, it is more likely that the Polehamptons sat for calotype rather the daguerreotype portraits. Additionally, in October 1856 the Photographic Society of

Bengal reported Khan’s expertise with glass negatives, the newest photographic technique to reach India. However Kahn’s notable success with glass negatives did not transfer to his reproductions on paper as they were purported to be “not quite clear.” 26

This lack of clarity, an issue that was inherent to calotype impressions, was predominately only an early problem for the wet-plate collodion process which used glass negatives. By 1860 it was the preferred photographic method, one which produced sharpness not bettered even by the film of the twentieth-century.27 The imperfection, however, did not deter those wishing to take advantage of Kahn’s services as he was inundated with requests for photos.

No matter what the process, the Polehamptons benefited from Khan’s generosity as they obtained a number of likenesses including one of Henry and their dog, Chloe.

25 Polehampton, 225. Henry indicated that he held this album in his hand in one of his portraits. John Fraser, “Some Pre-Mutiny Photograph Portraits” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 58 no.235 (Autumn, 1980), 134. Fraser indicates Kahn’s albums held 300 photos. Ray Desmond, Victorian India in Focus: a selection of early photographs from the collection in the India Office Library and Records (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1982), 64-65. The albums were found in the ruins of Lucknow and given to war correspondent W.H.Russell. They were subsequently obtained by the India Office Library, “a poignant record” of men, women and children caught in the siege. 26 Ray Desmond, “Photography in Victorian India” Royal Society of Arts Journal 84, no.5353 (Dec 1985), 57; Dehejia, Through the Lens, 15. 27 Dehejia, India Through the Lens, 12.

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They mailed several of these to family in England, accompanied by photos taken of their

“poor little boy” in January, seven hours after his death. Although Henry and Emily were required to go to the photographer’s studio for their sittings, three months earlier, the daguerreotypes of their deceased child had been taken in their back yard on a sofa removed from the house for the occasion. Pictures of the dead child were posted to family in England with Henry’s morose (and perspicacious) note that the picture “may be the only representative of [himself] that may ever reach England.” For several months Emily had resisted Henry’s desire to send pictures of their son. Her consent to include them with hers and Henry’s likenesses and Henry’s melancholy note are poignant reminders of significance of photos, not just to bridge the separation from family that they profoundly felt but to provide a tangible presence of the physical gap left by the dead. Henry’s hope that the miniatures (likely the better quality daguerreotypes) of Emily and himself that he planned to send next would be “living ones” acknowledged the possibility of them being captured for perpetuity in death.

For survivors of the mutiny, photographs became treasured mementos,28 a physical representation of those left behind. Before fleeing their bungalow ahead of the mutineers, among few other belongings Emily Polehampton ensured she had the box that contained the remainder of the daguerreotypes of their “darling in Heaven.”29 These and photos of her late husband and herself were among the few belongings that she carried from Lucknow during the evacuation. Sadly, none of these photos nor the impressions

28 Coopland, 80-81. 29 Polehampton, 140-142, 224 – 226, 259.

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previously sent to England were of sufficient quality or clarity to reproduce in the memoir subsequently published to celebrate his life.30

Polehampton was more fortunate than other widows. Having lost most of her late husband’s and her possessions, in addition to his letters, Adelaide Case particularly mourned the loss of her late husband’s picture.31 Although Bartrum likewise had no photos of her late husband, before his burial, she had her young son’s likeness taken in the “peaceful slumber of death.”32 Surrounded by flowers, with “a sweet smile on his face,” and tinted to remove the pallor of death, Polehampton described the portrait as

“most successful.”33 Polehampton’s emotive and descriptive entry of the child’s death and burial preparations, a departure from the otherwise prosaic tenor of her diary, resonated with her own loss one year earlier. Although Polehampton had salvaged portraits of her husband, for both women the images of their children taken after death were among the very few tangible reminders that they retained of their marriage and motherhood.

As was frequently done, Bartrum also tenderly placed a lock of her hair in her child’s hand before his coffin was closed. Hair had long been considered an important commodity of exchange between the dying and the bereaved and locks of hair were often buried with the corpse while close family and friends cherished the hair of the deceased.

As a part of the body that did not decay it was the most intimate memento that could be kept and provided a lasting, corporeal connection to the departed. Widely practiced, it is arguable that those widows who had the opportunity, for example Polehampton, Glen and

30 Ibid. introduction. 31 Case, 222. 32 Bartrum, 69-71. 33 Polehampton, 376.

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Banks, saved locks of hair from their late husbands before they were buried. Aside from these personal mementos, which were imbued with more sentimental than material worth, most of the women were left with very little of monetary value.

However, what they did have was often sold. For women such as these, the custom in military cantonments of selling the deceased’s effects within days of a death34 offered a financially expedient solution for those left with their late husbands’ possessions. In India, the practice of auctioning the deceased’s effects also extended beyond the military as there were many without wives or kin close enough to administer a will or participate in probate. Material goods needed to be disposed of expeditiously.

When practicable, probate auctions were advertised but often to be held as shortly after death as possible. 35 In 1836, the newspaper which carried the death notice of Lieutenant

John Germon also advertised the date for the auction of his effects, the latter being six days after his decease.36 After the death of Major William Hodson at Lucknow, his horse and the arms he had been carrying were purchased immediately by friends.37 Two months later, and only one day after arriving at Futtehguhr, the effects that Hodson had left there were dispersed by auction. William Russell recorded that, although Hodson’s horses were

“well sold,” his “handsome swords and good guns” went cheaply. One rifle which

Russell estimated had cost £50 was sold for £3 10s.38 Four hundred kilometers away in

34 Alan Harfield, British & Indian Armies in the East Indies, 1685-1935 (Chippenham: Picton Publishing, 1984), 187. 35 Margot Finn “Colonial Gifts: Family Politics and the Exchange of Goods in British India, c. 1780-1820” in Modern Asian Studies 40 (2006), 204. 36 Harfield, 187. 37 Cork, Rider, 171. 38 William Russell, My diary in India, in the year 1858-9 Vol 2 (London: Routledge, 1860), 39.

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Ambala, his wife, Susan, had no control over the sale(s) of his possessions and, after debts were paid, she realized very little income from them.

During the siege of Lucknow, such auctions were held on an ad hoc basis, the demand for basic items outstripping the supply. These sales were increasingly lucrative as the besieged had money (or prospects of income)39 but needed clothing for the cold weather and sought food-stuffs that had been hoarded.40 On July 11, two weeks into the siege, a box of Major Francis’s clothing was sold for £50.41 Five days after Henry

Polehampton’s death on July 20, his effects were auctioned and netted £7042 ("£45,990 in

2009).43 On Sept 19 three old shirts realized £10.5 while a bottle of brandy fetched £2 and one month later one old and very dirty flannel shirt was sold for £4.5 and a bottle of brandy for £5.4.44 The same day her late husband’s effects were auctioned, Emily sold some of her clothing by circulating it privately. It is likely that, as others widowed in

Lucknow, she had adopted mourning dress and had no need for the clothing she had brought to the Residency when she and Henry had fled from their bungalow. One of her silk dresses was purchased for Rs26 (" £2.5),45 most certainly more than she had paid for it as the prices of most silk dresses in England in the mid-1850s ranged between £1 and

£2.46 The swift evacuation from Lucknow on November 19, two days after being

39 Germon, 83. As related by Maria Germon, the bidding was reckless as payment could be deferred until the purchaser’s next issue of pay, which many did not think they would live to receive. 40 MacFarlan Collection, IOR: Mss Eur C315/5, B.L. 41 Sir Joseph Fayrer, Recollections of My Life (London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1900), 172. 42 Germon, 70-71; Harris, 90. 43 According to ‘Measuringworth.com’ purchasing power of £1 in 1857 is equivalent £657 in 2009, www.measuringworth.com/index/html. 44 Harris, 114-115, 138; Rees, 298. 45 Germon, 71. 46 C. Willett Cunnington, English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century: A Comprehensive Guide with 1,117 Illustrations (New York: Dover Publications Inc, 1990), 175-191. The prices which Cunnington

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relieved, not only abruptly precluded any possibility for further auctions but the limited baggage allowed for the evacuees meant that a great deal of personal property needed to be left behind. Viewing the many possessions that were simply discarded out of necessity, an evacuee noted that what would have in previous days brought large sums for the owners was now free for anyone who had the means to carry it.47

When Emily Polehampton left Lucknow, she carried her husband’s sermons in a large pocket around her waist, his clerical vestments and clothes of their baby who had died prior to the conflict. Like Bartrum she needed a tangible reminder of her brief motherhood but her other choices clearly demonstrated not simply an ecclesiastical focus, but her desire to perpetuate her late husband’s voice and disseminate his message. While many evacuees discarded what they could not carry, others, including Polehampton and widows Barbor and Gall, took time to burn their valuables rather than “let them become spoil to the enemy.” Among the treasured possessions which the three widows destroyed were their wedding dresses, veils, and wreaths.48

Wedding dresses in the early 1850s were often muslin or silk but could be either colored or white. Pragmatically, they were frequently re-used for other occasions after marriage and as late as 1868 brides were advised to wear them as often as possible after they were married.49 Thus it is likely that the widows’ gowns had been well used for various occasions and not been retained and stored solely for sentimental purposes.

quotes are “trade advertisements … used for articles with ‘popular prices’” (p.7) and very likely not the most expensive. 47 Rees, 343-344. 48 Bamfield, Strength, 113; Polehampton, 348; Harris, 209-211. 49 Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England 2nd ed. (London: Greenwood Press, 2009), 161-162; Cunnington, English Women’s Clothing, 174, 232; Phillis Cunnington & Catherine Lucas, Costume for Births, Marriages & Deaths (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1972), 280-81.

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On the other hand, as more specifically bridal attire, the veils and wreaths could provide no secondary service. Their salvage from the cantonment fires at the beginning of the siege of Lucknow by women not yet widowed was due primarily to their nostalgic

(and arguably monetary) value. Although the wreaths and even the dresses may have been somewhat problematic to carry out of Lucknow, veils, often made of fine expensive lace and one of the more costly accessories of a bride’s apparel,50 were more easily compressed and thus more transportable. One evacuee who was not widowed stitched not just her veil but her wedding dress, both made of Honiton lace, into her bustle.51 The choice of the three widows to burn their wedding ensembles after having previously salvaged them may have in part been due to panic or expediency, but it is also arguable that once the women were widowed the garments carried less intrinsic value than the photos, hair or possessions of their late husbands. While Pat Jalland and Julie-Marie

Strange have both indicated the consolatory value of material mementos belonging to the deceased,52 further study is required to ascertain whether (and how much) comfort for widows was taken from the material remnants, such as their wedding garments and accessories, of their marriage. Certainly for these widows in Lucknow, although the garments were too bulky to carry away they were too precious to be left behind for the enemy. Therefore rather than attempting to preserve them as mementos or discard them as excess baggage, for the widows, the “blackened ashes” became testament to the temporal truncation of their marriages and a monument to their husband’s resting places.

50 Cunnington & Lucas, Costume, 280-81. Cunnington, English Women’s Clothing, 182. In 1854, a Honiton or Brussels bridal scarf in England cost between 7 and 45 guineas. 51 Germon, 123-24. 52 Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 288-291; Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty, 213-215.

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Even as widows salvaged mementos, they themselves became living symbols

(mementos) of their late husbands. Considered the remnant of the marriage, they were to honor their late husbands by demonstrating their grief and respect for the deceased.

Although more study is required on how widely and closely it was practiced, commentary regarding the mourning protocol for widows has been included in the substantial scholarship which has examined nineteenth-century British death.53 An integral part of this body of work, Lou Taylor’s widely cited Mourning Dress traces not only the centuries-long nexus of mourning garments for British widows but also examines the traditions in many cultures which were rooted in viewing widows with fear and/or as redundant.54 Taylor argues that both aspects sprang from the function of a wife being defined by her sexuality, both as a bearer of children and facilitator for her husband’s physical needs. As a widow, she not only became an economic liability to the extended family but her sexuality, no longer controlled by a living husband, needed to be contained. While some cultures encouraged the death/murder of the widow, such as the practice of sati in India, European widows were to withdraw to varying degrees and for varying for periods of time from society. Whether physically secluded in their living space or symbolically set apart by their mourning garb, their isolation was resonant of the retreat from society and abnegation of sexuality practiced by early Christian widows who founded and maintained convents for women.55 Although ostensibly it provided them space to grieve privately, it also ensured their separation from society and constrained their sexuality. Thus universally monitored the various parameters for widowhood

53 See ftnte 13, chapter 2. 54 Taylor, Mourning Dress, 48-64. 55 Ibid., 66-69.

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although culturally, regionally or nationally particular were nonetheless variously prescriptive.

In England, by the latter half of the nineteenth-century, those who attempted to fulfill the exacting requirements of mourning protocol were often left stymied. Although etiquette manuals failed to agree completely on the complicated rules and possible social faux pas 56 those whose husbands had died continued to be the most circumscribed.

Historians Lou Taylor, Pat Jalland, Phillis Cunnington and Catherine Lucas have ascertained that widows were to follow diminishing degrees of mourning dress (‘deep’ or

‘first’ for twelve months, ‘second’ for six to nine months, ‘ordinary’ for six to three months, and ‘half’ for final six months) that spanned a minimum of thirty months, and also to maintain a degree of decorum that included withdrawal from society at large for at least one year.57 Based on traditional customary judgment concerning the most appropriate time needed to work through grief,58 the dictates of widows’ weeds,59 if closely followed were no doubt onerous for many widows.

In western cultures black was the predominant colour of mourning and although traditionally the poor had alternately worn a dull shade of brown called ‘drab’ or the ‘sad colour’ by the mid-nineteenth-century British widows, even those of lower classes, expected or were expected to wear black.60 While it is generally understood that

56 Taylor, Mourning Dress, 133-134; Sabatos, “Images of Death”, 67. 57 Jalland, “Death” in Death, Houlbrooke, 183; Taylor, 142-146, Taylor also indicates that a year was considered the time that it took for the husband’s body to decay, 56; Cunnington and Lucas, 268; Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 300-301. 58 Jalland, “Death” in Death, Houlbrooke, 183. 59 The term ‘weeds’ which was commonly used to describe the clothing of widows was a derivative of the ME wede from the OD wæd, which originally meant ‘garment’ but by the late 16th century only referred to widows’ mourning dress. Cunnington & Lucas, 261. 60 James Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death (London: David and Charles Ltd, 1972), 9-11, Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty, 118-120.

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discarding color symbolized “grief and rejection of joy,” the speculation that wearing black was originally used to disguise the souls of the bereaved from the vengeful spirit of the deceased 61 may be also more applicable than is immediately evident. C Willett

Cunnington has posited that black was used for mourning as it diminished the wearer in size thus helping the “grief-stricken to shrink from observation.”62 However, as Sophie

Gilmartin has observed, the adoption of mourning dress also gave the widow a striking presence,63 particularly when in the distinctive deep (or first) mourning. Although seemingly contradictory, the widow could be said to be hiding in plain sight when in public. As Gilmartin has further argued, dressed in mourning (particularly in the first and second stages), the widow’s individual identity was erased while her social identity or social position as a “grieving widow in a certain stage of mourning” was abundantly clear. She became an “icon of walking grief.”64

Prescriptive elements of deep mourning dress included, at a minimum, black clothing using materials which had no reflective qualities as the dull finishes of the fabrics were to be indicative of the intensity of the mourner’s grief. A description of the widow Mrs. Pipchin’s gown in Charles Dicken’s Dombey and Son provides some indication of the effect desired. Made of “black bombazeen, of such a lusterless, deep, dead, sombre shade, that gas itself couldn’t light her up after dark, and her presence was a

61 Geertje van Os, “Widows Hidden from View”, in Between Poverty and the Pyre, Moments in the history of widowhood, Jan Bremmer and Lourens van den Bosch, ed. (London: Routledge, 1995), 233; Curl, Victorian Celebration of Death, 9; Taylor, Mourning Dress,77, 62 Cunnington, English Women’s Clothing, 16. 63 Sophie Gilmartin, “The Sati, The Bride, and the Widow: Sacrificial Woman in the Nineteenth Century” in Victorian Literature and Culture Vol 25, no 1 (1997), 147. 64 Ibid. 147, 149.

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quencher to any number of candles.”65 Bombazine, a mixture of silk and wool, paramatta, a cheaper type of bombazine made from cotton and wool, and bombazet, the cheapest mourning fabric of twilled cotton and wool shared the dull, lifeless blackness required of deep mourning. While these fabrics were made into bodices, skirts and capes, the garments were not complete without mourning crape, a black silk fabric which had been processed to remove all sheen and softness. It either covered or trimmed mourning garments in diminishing degrees throughout the first two years of mourning. In addition to the black garment, a white widow’s cap was worn in private and was covered by a black bonnet with distinctive crape weepers when in public.66 The subsequent stages which allowed black dresses with a moderate sheen or lustre, the amount of crape to be reduced, and finally, in half-mourning, dresses of grey and/or lilac symbolized the graduated journey through grief. Purple had been traditionally a mourning colour restricted to royalty but was more fully adopted by upper and middle classes in the nineteenth-century in a range of soft mauves.67 The fact that many widows remained in half-mourning for the remainder of their lives is an indication that these women did not view mourning as a temporary state but adopted it as their permanent identity and thereby signaled a lifetime of homage to their late husbands.

While these ‘guidelines’ were adopted most fully by the upper classes the middle classes increasingly followed the general dictates of colour if not of style. Although by mid-century the fashion magazines for middle-class women regularly promulgated the latest fashions for mourning, Pat Jalland has cautioned historians not to assume that

65 Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, 1st published 1848 (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 117. 66 Taylor, 128-129, 136-139,202-204. 67 Cunnington, Costumes, 147; Taylor, 146.

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all/most middle-class widows were motivated by social emulation, convention or vanity to adopt the mourning etiquette and advice found in their pages.68 Rather she argues that many middle-class widows pragmatically accommodated mourning dress by dying clothes or reviving used mourning dress.69 Similarly, Lou Taylor has suggested that

“impecunious widows often sold their weeds at the end of their period of mourning to other, newly widowed women, who in their turn, sold off the coloured clothes that they could no longer wear.”70

Although this too could have been a strategy for the lower classes, it is arguable that few had the resources to engage in this medium of exchange. Nonetheless, as they were able, the working class adopted the culture of wearing black. While there is evidence of both pressure from within the working classes to conform to mourning protocol and criticism from without of extravagance when they did so,71 Julie-Marie

Strange has included a valuable and insightful examination of mourning wear in her work on death in the working class. While, as Taylor and Ruth Richardson have also indicated, the need for a respectable burial was paramount for the poor, Strange argues that even when the dead were interred in pauper graves, the families strove to fulfill mourning dress expectations, often juggling costs against respectability. While neither the styles nor mourning stages of the upper and middle classes were likely to be followed, widows could obtain suitable black garments, at the least, temporarily from pawnbrokers, by buying and then pawning them, or by borrowing them from community members. Those who used burial club insurance money to purchase clothing have often been used as

68 Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 300-301; Taylor, 123-124. 69 Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 302-307. 70 Taylor, 132-133. 71 Curl, 9-10; Morley, 63; Cunnington and Lucas, 198-199; Taylor, 36-39, 44-46.

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examples of inappropriate extravagance and opportunism. Although this indeed must have happened on occasion, Strange diffuses the stridency of the criticism with the equally valid “possibility that the garments in question were much needed” and subsequently supplemented a meager wardrobe.72

Studies of the Victorian ‘culture of death’ have often focused on the commercialism and the extravagance of, among other things, the industry which surrounded mourning dress. David Cannadine, in particular, has argued that the rituals of mourning merely lined the pockets of those who served the ‘death’ industry and that the expense of satisfying ‘proper’ etiquette was an added stress to the bereaved.73

Additionally scholars have pointed to the complete and lengthy effacement of the widow as an extension of their subsumed identity in marriage.74 Both arguments have merit but, as Jalland has pointed out, they fail to look beyond the rituals to the Victorians’ personal experiences with, and expressions of, grief.75 To this end, she and Strange argue that mourning dress was frequently a genuine expression of grief which signaled not only respect for the deceased but private grief, both which elicited sympathy and support.76 In addition, Jalland speculates that the lack of discussion in correspondence or diaries regarding black dress is an indication of the ubiquity of the practice.77 As it appears to be an unspoken assumption it seems consonant with the understated importance for the

Mutiny widows to adopt mourning both by the widows themselves and other women.

72 Taylor, 153-54; Richardson in Houlbrooke, 116-117; Strange, Death, 117-120. 73 David Cannadine, “War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain” in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (London: Europa Publications Ltd, 1981), 190- 191. 74 Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 301; Taylor, 48-64. 75 Jalland, “Death”, 183-187; Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 302. 76 Ibid; Strange, 118-120. 77 Jalland, “Death”, 184.

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Those under siege in Lucknow were limited to what could be borrowed or reworked. One day after Colonel Halford died, Surgeon Joseph Fayrer noted sympathetically of Halford’s widow and daughter, “poor things! Some of [the ladies in my house] are endeavoring to make mourning.”78 Although Adelaide Case had worn a black dress from the time of William’s death, it was “a great trial to her … that she had been unable to wear suitable mourning for him” and she quickly acquired a widow’s cap when she reached Calcutta.79 When Lieutenant Dashwood died, Georgina Harris, despite the heavy demands on her time, made it a priority to sew the widow a black dress,80 and

Bartrum donned a borrowed black gown which she worried would wear out before they were evacuated.81 For Julia Inglis, the black dresses that the widows procured in

Lucknow were not as noteworthy as their inability to conform more fully to the sartorial dictates of mourning.82 It must have been a relief to her, as it was to Adelaide Case, that

Lady Canning ensured that all widows were issued mourning caps and cuffs thereby helping those who lacked the proper accoutrements when they arrived in Calcutta.83

With better access to supplies, Fort Agra offered more latitude. On Coopland’s arrival at Agra, she was forced to make do with a “miserable black print” until she could buy enough black cloth for a dress, cloak and bonnet to be made.84 Although European milliners had been forced to leave their stock behind when they took refuge in the fort,

‘kuppra wallahs’ (cloth sellers) who were allowed into the fort supplied all those who

78 Sir Joseph Fayrer, Recollections of My Life (London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1900), 185. 79 Inglis, Siege, 227. 80 Harris, 89. 81 Bartrum, 48. 82 Inglis, 227. 83 Pat Barr, The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian India (London: Secker & Warburg, 1976), 142. 84 Coopland, 129, 199.

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wanted black cloth.85 Although arguably not bombazine or crape, the material was sufficiently lugubrious that many widows were able to wear what Coopland deemed deep mourning garments.86

The close circumscription of the protocol of mourning dress both reinforced and transcended class lines. Although the custom of wearing black was widely followed by the lower classes in England, it often involved strategies such as dyeing, borrowing, or buying and then pawning the clothing.87 However, there is a dearth of analysis (possibly due to the lack of first hand accounts) regarding the mourning practice, if any, of the widows of soldiers, particularly those who traveled with imperial regiments of the regular army. What is certain is that survival often meant remarrying quickly.88 Apocryphal stories in which the widow was approached by, and had accepted, another soldier before her late husband was buried very possibly had some basis in truth.

Under current regulations, British regiments allowed only twelve soldiers out of

100 to bring wives and although estimates of an equal number who came unofficially inflated the presence of European women somewhat, the disproportionate numbers placed widows of soldiers in high demand.89 Myrna Trustram has argued that to minimize the (natural) tendency for a married soldier to create a “self-contained domestic unit,” the

“system of military marriage” instead absorbed the women into the regiment making it

85 Ibid. 198-199. 86 Ibid. 244-245. 87 Strange, 112-120. 88 Trustram, 92; Bamfield, 80. 89 Douglas Peers, “The Raj’s Other Great Game: Policing the Sexual Frontiers of the Indian Army in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century” in Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism eds. Anupama Rao and Steven Pierce (Durham: Duke U.P., 2006), 125, 133-134.

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the de facto family.90 The high mortality rates91 of soldiers left many widows and it is arguable that for these women it was easier to re-marry within the familiarity of their military family. The rapidity with which Jean McCulloch remarried twice within the 21st

Regiment of the Royal Scots Fusiliers would certainly indicate some familiarity with each of her new husbands. Ten weeks following the death of her first husband (of thirteen years), John McCulloch, she married James Stevenson, the regiment hospital sergeant.

Six years later, Stevenson too died and she waited four months to wed Sergeant David

Trench of the same regiment. Five years later, Trench received a medical discharge and they returned to Edinburgh. Despite the seeming vagaries of her marriages, the family unit must have retained a measure of cohesion as, contrary to Scottish tradition, Jean’s oldest surviving son from her first marriage named his first son after his surviving step- father, arguably a gesture of respect and/or affection.92

While Jean McCullough’s successive marriages are individually and officially documented, John Pearman’s memoirs, recalling events over thirty years past, are more subjective. However his disparaging comments concerning the tendency of widows to remarry quickly within the regiment betrays a lack of sympathy for the women’s position.

Writing of his time served in India in the 1840s he recalls after one battle that there were

“fourteen or fifteen widows in the regiment and most of them [were] married in a month

90 Trustram, 190-191. 91 Douglas Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in Early- Nineteenth Century India (London: Tauris, 1995), 83. Peers estimates that European regiments suffered an annual ten percent loss in the first half of the nineteenth-century. P J Marshall, “British Society in India under the East India Company” Modern Asian Studies Vol 31, no 1 (February 1997), 94. 92 Derek J Oddy, “Gone for a Soldier: the anatomy of a nineteenth century army family,” Journal of Family History 25 (2000), 41-45.

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after [the troop’s] return to quarters.” He adds “[they] soon forgot the one dead some of them had had 3 or 4 husbands one that was married made her sixth husband.”93[sic]

His indictment allowed no acknowledgment of the tenuousness of the lives of soldiers’ wives. If they were ‘on the strength’ they were provided accommodation in the barracks (albeit often shared and crowded), army rations, educational instruction for their children, and a small allowance.94 Durba Ghosh has argued that, just as native women entered into a “series of monogamous relationships with soldiers,” in an attempt to remain with one regiment for their children’s sake, European women used a similar strategy.95 The cessation of pay six months after being widowed and free passage back to

England offered only for the same duration96 were no doubt contributing factors to rapid re-marriages by the women. For those who were ‘off the strength’, with none of the afore-mentioned benefits, arranging another relationship was even more crucial. Beyond the security of a relationship, Douglas Peers has also pointed out the contemporary opinion that women (married or widowed) were reluctant to leave India for England as they were “little disposed to exchange their present life of ease and idleness for labour and privation at home.”97 While life there was not free from labour, India was quite different from other postings in the empire; in India servants filled most of the traditional roles that would otherwise have gone to soldiers’ wives. In 1835 Emma Roberts observed that “in no other country in the world can the wives and children of European

93 Caroline Steedman, The Radical Soldier’s Tale: John Pearman, 1819-1908 (London: Routledge, 1988), 142-143. 94 Peers, “Raj’s Other Great Game”, 125; Trustram, 190-192. 95 Durba Ghosh, “Making and Un-making Loyal Subjects: Pensioning Widows and Educating Orphans in Early Colonial India” in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History vol. 31 no1 (2003), 16-17, 27 ftnte 69. 96 Bamfield, 80; India Office, Gratuities to widows and children of British soldiers in India, IOR: L/MIL/7/5615 – Military Collection No.121, B.L. 97 Peers, Mars and Mammon, 82; Peers, “Raj’s Other Great Game”, 134-135.

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soldiers enjoy the comfort and happiness which await them in India.” Her deprecating assessment that India often rendered them “lazy, insolent, and overbearing” was based on what Roberts deemed to be their “unaccustomed luxuries” and/or the economic opportunities which they enjoyed.98 In addition to having their own servants, she estimated that they could command between £5 and £10 a month as domestics or wet- nurses (certainly not an option in Britain) and also took on airs through this close proximity to the upper classes.99

Two decades later, as officers’ wives took passage from Calcutta to England after escaping from the conflict of the mutiny, Charlotte Canning commented on the lack of soldiers’ widows to accompany them as the widows preferred to “stay in the regiment and marry again.”100 Similarly, a soldier’s widow engaged by Rosa Coopland to travel back to England with her as a nurse for her son changed her mind about leaving India, making it necessary for Coopland to engage a dhye (Indian nurse) instead.101 Although not all the soldiers’ widows rushed into re-marriage102 as it was also possible for them to remain widowed and work, most of the evidence continues to point to a common practice of quick remarriage.103

Whether this precluded any acknowledgement of the protocol that they would have followed in civilian life is a tantalizing question that needs to be answered.

98 Emma Roberts, Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan, with sketches of Anglo-Indian society vol. 3 (London: W H Allen & Co, 1835), 47-49. 99 Peers, “Raj’s Other Great Game”, 134-135, Roberts, 48-50. 100 Augustus Hare, The Story of Two Nobles Lives, vol 2 (London: 1893), 340. 101 Coopland, 280, 288. 102 William Forbes-Mitchell, Reminiscences of the Great Mutiny, 1857-1859 (London: MacMillan and Co. 1893), 116-117. A widow of a sergeant of the Bengal Field Artillery, who was killed at Lucknow or shortly after its evacuation (circa late 1857), waited until late 1860 to marry Sergeant Gaffney. Although it has not been possible to confirm, it is likely that Gaffney was not of the same regiment. 103 P J Marshall, “British Society in India under the East India Co.” in Modern Asian Studies Vol. 31 no.1 (Feb. 1997), 93-94; Trustram, 92.

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Customary or not, following the evacuation of Lucknow they were expected to conform in some measure to the rituals expected of widows and when the Lucknow survivors reached Allahabad, all the widows of soldiers were quickly issued black dresses from the

Relief Fund.104 While this suggests that, contrary to what the officers’ widows had managed to do, many of the soldiers’ widows had not managed to put on mourning, it proves neither their ignorance of nor their disregard for protocol. As difficult as it had been for the former to find black garments, for the latter, whether they desired to wear black or not, it would most likely not have been possible. While providing the appropriate clothing was one aspect of making the women respectable, it was also arguably part of re- establishing or re-firming the hierarchy of regimental class. To distribute appropriate clothing and necessary supplies, the officers’ wives first visited and enumerated the garrison women. After determining that the children needed to be taken in hand, they organized and ran a school for them.105 This hierarchy held as the refugees were taken by boat from Allahabad to Calcutta, the ladies (officers’ widows included) and officers, traveled in the large river steamers with the garrison women and children on flats towed behind them.106 The soldiers’ wives, widows, and children were left at Dum Dum, ten miles from Calcutta, where there were regimental barracks,107 while the steamers continued to Calcutta. Thus rescued and made respectable, they were returned to their space, leaving the ladies of Lucknow to the scrutiny of the public eye.

Three weeks earlier, the first steamer carrying refugees from Lucknow had been greeted in Calcutta by a royal twenty-one gun salute, red carpet and throngs of people

104 Harris, 192. 105 Ibid. 192-93, Polehampton, 366-369; Inglis, 224. 106 Polehampton, 369-70. 107 Inglis, 230.

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who lined the gangplank. However, the symbol of bereavement borne by most of the disembarking women in mourning garb silenced those who had come to celebrate the arrival of the heroines.108 Although black dress was in order, a suitable decorum was also expected. Thus the first news report of those from Lucknow arriving in Calcutta noted approvingly the downcast looks and slow walk which bespoke of their bereavement.

Resembling a funeral procession, as a highly publicized and public event, it also subverted the tradition of widows withdrawing from public life (including the burial service). As reported “the widows and orphans [passed] in solemn review”109 before the on-lookers. The military allusion adds more dissonance to the violation of the widows’ privacy. The gaze of the on-lookers, whether sympathetic, curious and/or salacious, simultaneously stripped them of respectable anonymity and objectified them as the symbol of imperialism.

It was a welcome not repeated for the remainder of the Lucknow evacuees. To avoid a similar public demonstration when Polehampton and the others arrived in

Calcutta, “the Captain took [them] by [their] special request to a ghat where he knew

[they] might land quietly” … and there were “very few people awaiting [them].”110 While they were deliberate in their attempts to avoid attention, the impetus to officially (or publicly) celebrate the evacuees’ arrival had waned after the initial reception. The arrangements for the reception of the “first installment of refugees from Lucknow” (the appellation courtesy of Lady Canning), not only well planned but advertised, were

108 Cheltenham Looker On, Feb 20, 1858. 109 Ibid. 110 Polehampton, 374; Inglis, 226-227.

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apparently not repeated for the arrivals of the successive steamers.111 Whether this was due to diminished interest or curiosity, a sense of chagrin at the impropriety of scrutiny and/or an understanding that the honour paid the first evacuees extended to all the

Lucknow refugees, even without a surreptitious landing they would have encountered a much diminished degree of attention. However, for the widows in particular, their request to avoid publicity indicates not only their eschewal of public demonstration and attention but also of their active compliance with the strictures of private mourning.

For the first year after their husband’s death (the time of deepest mourning), widows were to remain secluded as etiquette dictated that she leave home only to attend church or visit close family members. In 1825, Mrs William Parkes referred to this time as “the season … which decorum has appointed for retirement from public amusements, and from scenes of gaiety.” The circumscription remained intact as fifty plus years later, the English Woman’s Domestic Magazine cautioned that “during the first year of mourning a widow can neither accept invitations nor frequent places of public amusement,” and in 1880 Queen magazine confirmed that “it was in the worst taste to be seen in places of public resort” while in deepest mourning.112 However, Terri Sabatos has questioned the extent to which widows adhered to this edict. Arguing that etiquette manuals dictate precept rather than practice, she has examined the frequent inclusion of widows in paintings of public venues and concludes that widows spent more time in

111 Hare, Noble Lives, 408; Calcutta Gazette Extraordinary, January 6, 1858, Chevers private papers, IOR: Mss Eur C506/10, B.L.. 112 Taylor, 56-57; Mrs. William Parkes, Domestic Duties or Instructions to Young Married Ladies on the Management of their Households and the Regulation of their Conduct in the Various Relations and Duties of Married Life (London: Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1825), 433; Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1876, 66; quoted in Anne Buck, “The Trap Re-baited: 1860-1890” High Victorian Costume, 1860-1890: Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference of the Costume Society (London: published for the Society, Victoria and Albert Museum, 1969), 32.

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public than the strict protocol appeared to encourage. Although a number of her subjects are in second or ordinary mourning, a time of reduced restrictions for the bereaved, she has also found images of widows in deep mourning in business as well as the predictable domestic settings. They were not, however, included in paintings of social gatherings such as the balls, dances, and other social events which both Jalland and Davidoff have indicated would have been off limits.113 Sabatos has further argued that wearing mourning was a public ritual and for this construction of the grieving widow to work, it was crucial that she be seen, albeit isolated by her veil, apparel and somber decorum.114

Certainly if, as she contends, a widow’s public appearances were an opportunity to monitor her mourning, the widows disembarking under the scrutiny of the Calcutta public satisfied this aspect of the ritual. At the same time, the widows who requested privacy were exercising a prerogative of privacy that was not followed as widely in India as in

Britain. This was arguably a consequence of the lack of privacy in everyday Anglo-

Indian life in comparison to domestic private life in Britain.

For some time, although they donned black mourning garments, the British in

India had not practiced the seclusion or mourning periods that were prescribed in Britain.

Emily Eden, brother of the Governor General of India from 1836 to 1842, noted “how [in

India] the ranks close in the very day after death [and] the most intimate friends never stay home above two days,” immediately resuming their rounds of visiting.115 While this relative laxity has been attributed to the high rate of mortality, Eden’s comment also likely applied primarily to those other than widows, particularly those of officers. There

113 Sabatos, 80-94; Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 306, Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Women and Society in Victorian England (New Jersey: Rowman and Lttlefield, 1973), 55. 114 Sabatos, 92-98. 115 Pat Bar, The Memsahibs, 14-15; Taylor, 130.

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was little time or space to retreat into seclusion for those who chose to return directly to

England. Although it is difficult to determine how many did so, Ghosh has determined that as pensions were remitted from London there was an assumption that the widows and children would be sent back to England.116 In addition, the two to four months that these women were given to take paid passage from India would have precluded any time for isolation.117

Similarly, during the Mutiny the circumstances in which most of the widows found themselves were not conducive to conforming to strict protocols of mourning.

While it was most easily met by donning black, strict seclusion, even if they had desired it, was not an option. Further, within the parameters and unique circumstances of their enforced environments, many widows engaged in activities that, in English society, would have ranged from questionable to highly improper. While the most potentially egregious enterprise was their engagement in social outings, the nursing care provided by a number of widows could also have proved problematic. However, at this time and this place, there was general approbation for both activities, an approval that was subsequently echoed in England.

The most widely practiced occupation was that of nursing the wounded soldiers which entailed crossing both class and gender lines. The respectability of nursing was still under debate, with Florence Nightingale’s “aggressive interpretations of the duties of a nurse”118 viewed with some ambivalence. Although deemed heroic, there was also anxiety regarding a “woman assuming authority over a helpless and dependent male

116 Ghosh, “Making and Un-making”, 6. 117 Bombay Almanac & Directory, 1859; Christopher Hawes private papers, IOR: Mss Eur F531/22, B.L. 118 Barcesewski, 170;

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patient.”119 That being said, Mary Poovey has explored the domestic (and thus angelic) aspects of bringing ‘home’ and a mother’s love to the battlefield120 which Nightingale’s work in the Crimean created. While those engaged in the lively scholarly debate regarding Nightingale’s contributions to and impact on nursing have viewed her variously as ineffective, egotistical, manipulative, meritocratic and/or a brilliant reformer, much of the discussion ranges beyond the parameters of this study.121 However, her early influence, particularly within the context of military nursing, is integral to an examination of the widows and the wounded soldiers during the mutiny in India. Anne Summers argues that Nightingale did not control Crimean nursing as she was given (or took) credit for nor, following the war, was there a consensus from the Army Medical Department about the effectiveness of female nurses in general.122 This is corroborated by Myrna

Trustram. While Monica Baly123 has largely concurred with Summers’ position, Mark

Bostridge and Lynn McDonald have posited what they argue was her decisive role in the

Crimea and the new and positive image of nurses.124 Despite this disagreement regarding

Nightingale’s degree of effectiveness in the Crimean, what is undisputed is the publicity and accolades that she received which quickly generated the iconic ‘Lady with the Lamp’

119 Mary Poovery, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 171; Barczewski, 176. 120 Poovey, 169-172, 240 ftnte 13. 121 F.B.Smith, Florence Nightingale: Reputation and Power (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 11-12, 77; Anne Summers, Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses, 1854-1914 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988), 2, 13, 29; Lynn McDonald, Florence Nightingale at First Hand (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier U.P., 2010),xi-xv, 33, 72-73; Mark Bostridge, Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend (London: Penguin Books, 2008), xx-xxii, 526-543; Monica Baly, Florence Nightingale and the Nursing Legacy (Philadelphia: BainBridge Books, 1998), vii-xiii, 219-221; Martha Vicinus and Bea Nergaard eds., Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale: Selected Letters (London: Virago Press, 1989), 1-10. 122 Summers, Angels, 46-47, 52, 64-65, 68; Trustram, 113. Trustram contends that prior to the mid 1880s “to have women ministering to young soldiers … [was] thought to be beyond the bounds of propriety.” 123 Baly, 118. 124 McDonald, 69, 177; Bostridge, 249-250, 270-271, 298-300.

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image among the British public.125 While it is beyond the purview of this study to determine how deserved was her reputation, the social construction of the heroine, as detailed by Mary Poovey, consolidated the narratives of patriotic service, the nurturing and self-sacrifice of the maternal domestic ideal, and the individual assertion and will of the military ideal.126 It is not much of a stretch to see how easily this could be subsequently applied to British women in India who, while they were discharging their domestic duties, were suddenly faced with the exigencies of need which emerged out of the military crisis.

However, for genteel ladies it was still a new role. Nursing in military hospitals had traditionally been done by army wives, soldiers’ widows and camp followers. In the years of relative peace following the Napoleonic campaigns, female nurses (of any class) in military hospitals were decreasingly needed and then increasingly discouraged as by the eve of the Crimean War the army medical system was “for the most part a regimental, colonial and masculine club.” By 1854, the re-introduction of female nurses would have been an attempt to ‘feminize’ a masculine occupation and ‘civilize’ a military institution, neither of which would have been acceptable to most military medical officers.127 As

Summers has ably demonstrated, the re-integration of female nurses (and introduction of trained female nurses) into military hospitals, although initiated during the Crimean War, was a fractured, and often fractious, process which continued through the rest of the century and into the next.128

125 Bostridge, 251-268. 126 Poovey, 166-172. 127 Summers, Angels, 26-28. Soldiers’ wives and widows continued to attend regimental wives and children and also attend in men’s ward if the workload was heavy. 128 Ibid., 2-9, 67, 97-122; Baly, 119, 215-218.

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After the Crimean War, Nightingale advised that in military hospitals preference be given to army surgeons’ and officers’ widows, but as she felt that “misconduct in women [was] more pernicious [there] … than any other [hospital],” she also advocated as few women as possible be engaged. They were never to do what could be done by a male orderly, be busy, and (preferably) be over the age of thirty.129 In issuing these edicts,

Nightingale assumed the military widows were to be managed and required the same surveillance as the lower class paid nurses that she initially brought to the Crimean.

Her initial reluctance to accept lady volunteers to go to the battlefront, as she believed they would prove incompetent, contradicts the apparent advantages of upper class women who, believed to be naturally endowed with qualities of gentleness, sympathy and nurturing, were also experienced in managing households and servants.

Although they were widely seen as (uniquely) qualified to supervise ward work,

Nightingale refused to view them as anything but amateur philanthropists.130 By her request the first contingent of nurses to go with her to the Crimean had no ladies but the second group, vetted and sent by her friends with less reservation, included ten lady volunteers with no experience of paid nursing. Though the ladies proved to be both dedicated and serious about nursing, Nightingale’s disparaging depictions of them

“scampering about the wards ineffectually, wandering about with notebooks in their hands, and indulging in nothing but spiritual flirtations” continue to be a point of discussion for Nightingale scholars.131

129 Florence Nightingale, Subsidiary Notes on the Introduction of Female Nursing into Military Hospitals in War and Peace (London: Harrison & Sons, 1858) quoted in Baly, 105. 130 Summers, Angels, 3-4, 64. 131 Summers, Angels, 42-43, 52; Bostridge, 243; Smith, 52-53.

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A key assumption which both the British public and Nightingale shared about the lady volunteers was the upper class women’s immunity to sexual temptation from lower- class patients. 132 It was not an expectation held of the paid lower class nurses and the ladies were charged with setting a moral standard both by their example and closely monitoring the lower class nurses. Nightingale felt she could prevent inappropriate behaviour by reducing the number of female nurses (to prevent overindulging men who were not ‘really sick’) and forbidding night nursing (although she frequently visited the wards at night alone). In another hospital, supervised by Mary Stanley, nurses were not allowed in the wards unless supervised by a lady, and they were also prevented by the same from exercising too much familiarity with male patients of their same social class.

Similar to Nightingale’s seemingly unassailable virtue during her nightly forays into the wards of wounded soldiers, the night nursing in hospitals not under her supervision was done by nuns or lady volunteers rather than the paid nurses.133

The unimpeachable respectability with which a lady was indelibly imbued and could bring to nursing continued to have currency. Although Nightingale insisted that women from all classes and religions who attended her Nightingale Training School take equal training, the ladies with “better education and general culture than women from other classes” had the advantage of obtaining senior posts.134 In the last decades of the century, class continued to be key to promotion as reports on individual nurses read

“Satisfactory report on all points. Not being a lady, is unfit for promotion” or simply,

“socially ineligible for promotion.” As the century came to a close, training hospitals

132 Summers, Angels, 3-4. 133 Ibid.,49-50, 56-57. 134 McDonald, 33.

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took in two classes of trainees, the lady and the ordinary. Only the former could expect promotion to the rank of sister.135 Nightingale also believed firmly in the “leavening” which the ladies added to the “mass of nurses” that came from the “high and unassailable dignity” which encompassed gentlewomen from birth to death.136

Moral rectitude aside, given the narrow public parameters within which the newly widowed were to operate, their attendance to wounded soldiers under ‘ordinary’ circumstances would have been considered, at the least, audacious. Although the seclusion of the bereaved which was expected in Britain was not practiced as such in

India, those recently widowed were expected to exhibit decorum appropriate to their class and the rank of their late husbands. In addition to satisfying their peers (or themselves) with their propriety, their example of respectability was also an extension of their duties to the lower class troops. The relationship of officers’ wives to the families of the soldiers was an elevated one of instruction, discipline, and moral and civilizing example,137 one which arguably continued after an officer’s death. This would preclude the familiarity of tending wounded soldiers, certainly in first stages of grief. Trustram has noted that despite Nightingale’s work and recommendations, the War Office continued to see any

“women ministering to young soldiers [as] … beyond the bounds of propriety.”138

However, beyond the official sanction of the military, Nightingale’s immediate legacy as

135 Summers, Angels, 109-110, 120. 136 Poovey, Uneven Developments, 180-181; Anne Summers “Pride and Prejudice: Ladies and Nurses in the Crimean War” History Workshop No 16 (Autumn 1983), 53. 137 Bamfield, 25; Trustram, 95, 112-113, 188-189, 191, 195. 138 Trustram, 113-114.

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a divine being139 covered even the newly widowed officers’ wives with a cloak of respectability.

Although Polehampton had helped nurse the soldiers while still married, she was aided by Barbor and Gall who had been widowed early in the Mutiny. Her early ministrations, tendered as a clergyman’s wife and with his full approval and admiration, paved the way for her to continue the work as a widow, her reputation protected by the spirit and status of her late husband. Although it was she who initiated the request,

Polehampton followed a chain of command by asking her husband to obtain permission from Sir Henry Lawrence, the Chief Commissioner in charge of the British at Lucknow, for her to volunteer as a hospital nurse. Her request prompted two widows, Mrs. Barbor and Mrs. Gall, to make similar offers and Lawrence demonstrated no hesitation in accepting the willing hands of all three. As the two widows and the Polehamptons shared a room off the hospital, they were not only available for work but also subjected to the sights, sounds and smells as the hospital became increasingly crowded. However, immediately after Henry Polehampton’s death, the three widows were removed to a safer location and their nursing ceased. Although their retreat was due to danger rather than mourning prescription, the widows subsequently spent a great deal of the next two months in cramped seclusion. Their new quarters consisted of three-quarters of a room in the Begum Kotee, the other quarter separated by purdahs (screens) to allow space for a widower and his daughter. When Polehampton returned to the hospital two months after

Henry (her husband) died, it was once again at her behest although, rather than

139 Poovey, 171; Bostridge, 251-277. Poovey’s chapter which discusses the social construction of Nightingale is an excellent companion to Bostridge’s chapter entitled “A Visible March to Heaven” which examines the ‘Lady of the Lamp’ persona.

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approaching the acting commander (Lawrence had since died), she simply asked the doctors if she could return. Once again, they were very happy to have her help. Despite working in increasingly deplorable conditions, Polehampton took great delight in her occupation, spending most of her waking hours with the soldiers.140 Although Barbor’s ill health prevented her from returning, Mrs. Gall followed Polehampton’s example until

Gall, too, was worn out and forced to cease her activities.

Even after evacuation, Polehampton was loath to relinquish her nursing duties.

Although she visited the hospital tents after the first leg of their retreat from Lucknow, she did not seek out the wounded again until they were in Allahabad, most likely because in the subsequent days’ marches the sick and wounded were not always kept together but separated and scattered even when the evacuees were at rest.141 On reaching Allahabad she quickly communicated her desire to continue nursing the men to the doctors and

Reverend Spry, the head of the Relief Committee. However, although she discussed the sick and wounded with the doctors, Polehampton provided no further care nor did she even visit them until she accompanied the doctor through the hospital tents to assess which patients would be sent first to Calcutta. Being transported in slow moving marching carts, they had arrived several days after Polehampton and the others and had then been incorporated into the wounded from other regiments in the hospital tents in

Allahabad. Moving through the tents with an Allahabad doctor, she was unable to see all the patients and was limited to noting the Lucknow cases, mixed up together with other regiments, who were scattered throughout the facilities.

140 Polehampton, 345-347. 141 Harris, 186.

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Arguably, Allahabad had adequate number of male orderlies to perform the duties for which she had been needed in Lucknow. In addition, her purview had been granted under enforced conditions while under siege. Although her energies were now re-directed by Reverend and Mrs. Spry toward tending to the soldiers’ widows and children, the

Relief Committee (of which Reverend Spry was head) did agree with her request to be appointed as a nurse on the first boat carrying the sick and wounded to Calcutta.

However, as the first sick to be transported were what she deemed merely ‘convalescent,’

Polehampton saw no need for her services and gave her passage to another officers’ widow. Her diary continued to document her work with the soldiers’ children but it is silent in regard to hospital visits of any kind. Neither did she record any nursing duties on her steamer travel from Allahabad to Calcutta one month later. Although she did/could not continue nursing in Allahabad, Polehampton had not lost interest in the men nor acquiesced to rules of propriety. While her work in Lucknow had facilitated her continuing negotiation of the boundaries of respectability, Polehampton appears acutely conscious of the fact that it would have no currency beyond the intensity of site of siege.

Once in Calcutta, she again pursued an opportunity to nurse the men. Fearing the naval authorities would not allow her to tend the wounded soldiers on the ship back to England, she arranged a meeting with Lady Canning in Calcutta to request the Governor General’s wife to obtain permission for her to do so. Backed up with an official sanction,

Polehampton helped care for 137 sick and wounded soldiers, 12 of whom subsequently died on board, until the ship docked in Plymouth four months later.142

142 Polehampton, 353-378; Augustus Hare, The Story of Two Noble Lives, vol 2 (London: 1893), 414, while Lady Canning’s journal indicates that Polehampton approached her about obtaining permission, Polehampton’s diary is rather vague and credits Canning with initiating the proposal.

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In Agra as well, widows and other ladies were conscripted both for day and night shifts to tend the wounded and sick, giving them medicine and cooling drinks, and moistening their bandages. As the officers, often nursed by their wives, were separated from the rank and file, the widows were primarily responsible for the soldiers. In a gesture that encompassed both domestic service and respectability, the ladies replaced the men’s government-issue tin mugs with (more proper) cups and saucers with which to serve tea to the wounded.143 Similarly at Lucknow, “overworked officers” were refreshed during their night shift by “stronger” ladies serving tea and refreshments.144 With the increasingly Spartan rations during the siege, the strength which allowed some women to provide this nocturnal service was undoubtedly an indication of physical stamina.

However, as Janet Oppenheimer has also pointed out, ‘strong’ could have a masculine (or at the least, unfeminine) connotation unless equated with the maternal qualities of fortitude in self-denial and exertion to help and support others.145 This domestic role of service set against the backdrop of military conflict allowed the women to remain within a respectable sphere. To reassure those who may be tempted to censure the women,

‘Notes on the Revolt in the N.W. Provinces’ published assurances that, even in unconventional circumstances, conventional gender relations were maintained:

For weeks that the ladies watched over their charges never was a word said by soldier which could shock the gentlest ear. The ladies were divided into watches, and attended day and night. Too [sic] avoid teasing the men by too much nursing, they were in a small separate room, and at stated periods, went round to give tea, jelly, soda water, coffee, soup, or to help in dressing the wounds of the patients. All was done under the orders of the medical officers … Every lady in Agra was ready to join in this good work, and not one of them but will bear testimony to the

143 Coopland, 235. 144 Reverend Arthur Spry private papers, 156-1867, IOR: Mss Eur B219/1, B.L. 145 Janet Oppenheim,“Shattered Nerves” Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New York: Oxford U.P., 1991), 207-208, 211.

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delicacy of feeling and conduct, as well as the hearty gratitude of these brave men.146

With their nurturing role organized and supervised by the medical officers, concerns about the ladies tending to the physical needs of unrelated and lower class males could be minimized. As carefully noted by the author of ‘Notes on the Revolt’, there was no evidence of impropriety by the men or over stimulation triggered by the women’s attentions.147 However, the passage illustrates the tensions of class and gender inherent in the early dynamics of nursing, particularly in a military setting. Although the change in public perception of the common soldier from that of a drunken brute to a courageous man worthy of respect has been largely attributed to the dispatches of journalist William

Howard Russell and the nursing mission of Nightingale during the Crimean War,148 the transformation was given further impetus by the Mutiny scarcely a year later.149 Accounts from the Crimean glorified the soldiers as “the finest types of their social class” and, as

Anne Summers has described, a “special category of the deserving poor.” In India, as the ostensible defender against heathenism, the soldier was further endowed with the mantle of Christianity.150 While Florence Nightingale’s assessment that (middle-class) nurses, rather than their patients, would possess and exercise the moral imperative,151 the account of the women in Agra assured readers that the soldiers were capable of self-control, both in speech and conduct, equal to the gentle and delicate natures of their nurses. Not only

146 From Raikes, “Notes on the Revolt in the N.W.Province” Oct 10, 1857, incl in Vansittart, Mss Eur B167/3. 147 Ibid. 148 Vicinus and Nergaard, Forever Yours, 109; Bostridge, 298; Poovey, 172; Bamfield, 14. 149 Russell was sent by the Times to report on the Mutiny early in 1858. 150 Summers, Angels, 127. 151 Poovey, 184-185.

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did this underscore the ‘new’ chivalry of soldiers, but it illuminated the asexual pedestal from which the women were deemed to be operating.

Conversely, the women were also marshaled and monitored by the medical officers so as not to “tease” the men, an indication that neither the ladies nor the soldiers were to be entirely trusted. The caution has parallels with Nightingale’s fiercely held assumptions that too much nursing “cosseted” the men and would impair martial discipline.152 It is an indication of the potential danger of domestic (maternal) impingement into the masculine ethos of the military, the emasculation from too much feminine attention. This resonates with the contemporary debate over the value of marriage to the army, some believing it strengthened the men153 and others who saw it as softening them.154

Despite the close scrutiny from above, the ladies wielded more agency than was arguably publicized. Similar to the actions by Nightingale and others in the Crimea,155 in addition to “introducing comfort [and] cleanliness,” they took the “idle apothecary boys and hospital apprentices” in hand to establish order.156 These actions fell acceptably under the domestic rubric of running a household with servants, reassuringly compatible with the nurturing maternal/angelic skills used in caring for the wounded men.

At Agra, two months after the battle which had resulted in the heavy casualties, the grateful 9th Lancers hosted the ‘Taj Party’ to honor the ladies who had nursed the soldiers. It was an occasion that “all grades” of countrymen and countrywomen attended

152 Smith, Florence Nightingale, 34-35; Summers, Angels, 49. 153 Trustram, 29-32. 154 Dawson, 65-66. 155 Anne Summers, Angels, 48. 156 Vansittart, Mss Eur B167/3.

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and at which they mingled, even those in deep mourning.157 When he addressed the assembly, Commissioner Harvey spoke of the ladies’ “[holy] thrill of pleasurable satisfaction in tending to the wants of a wounded soldier.” By ascribing the ‘sacred’ benefits to their work, what could well have been considered prurient was given a divine detour. Harvey pointed out the need of fierce men of war for “ ‘Ministering Angels’ whose kindness and care took off the edge from pain and sorrow.” Such women were, he alluded, “that cordial drop Heaven in our cup has thrown, to make the nauseous draught of life go down.”158 The bitterness of their current imperial cup was sweetened by the women’s touch. In an interesting twist on gratitude, his conclusion that “the fair

Nightingales of Agra” would continue to carry their gallant hosts [H.M.9th Lancers] in their hearts restored the reciprocity (hierarchy) of women ministering to men, who in turn would save them.159

Three widows of Lucknow were similarly celebrated as the ‘Ministering Angels’ for their work in the much more difficult surroundings of the Residency hospital. Tending to over two hundred sick and wounded in cramped and airless rooms, Barbor, Gall and

Polehampton elicited admiration from soldiers, officers and the Commissioner of the

Residency, Sir John Inglis. As the siege progressed, medical supplies ran out and they were reduced to bathing heads and soothing the dying.160 By mid October, one officer reported that there was no medicine, no wine and no clean rags “so but few can recover.”161 The grueling demands eventually wore Gall and Barbor down but

157 Vansittart; Coopland, 244-245. 158 Poem written by Earl of Rochester, poet/libertine (1647-1680) – ‘cordial drop’ was love, not women. 159 Vansittart. 160 Spurgin, Mss Eur D747; Polehampton, 35, 347. 161 Spurgin.

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Polehampton’s good health enabled her to continue, although she felt hampered in her efforts by the absence of the others. As in Agra, their “tender and solicitous” nursing of the dying and wounded was viewed both through the lens of Nightingale’s example and as the manifestation of womanly virtues. The widely publicized commendation of the

Lucknow widows emphasized their charity, cheerfulness and modesty.162 Beyond the laudable feminine characteristics, the subsequent official accolades for all three widows also celebrated their nobility, the attribution of inherent qualities of class (rather than gender) which had publicly celebrated and defined Nightingale and her work.163

Despite the accolades for the widows from Lucknow, discomfiture with the incongruity of ladies being subjected to military action, and/or being publicly praised, was articulated by R H Birch, Aide de Camp to Brigadier Inglis:

Those noble women who, little fitted to take part in such scenes, [italics added] have assumed so cheerfully and discharged so earnestly their task of charity in ministering to sickness and pain. It is likely that to themselves the notoriety of praise publicly given may be distasteful; yet the Governor General in Council cannot forego the pleasure of doing justice to the names of Birch, Polehampton, Barbor and Gall of offering to those whose acts have so adorned them, his tribute of respectful admiration and gratitude.164

While their ability to exhibit domestic virtues outside a domestic landscape (in a military setting) was laudable, it was also unsettling and disconcerting and widows operating outside their prescribed mourning parameters exacerbated this disorientation. Thus, while there was a tacit understanding that feminine characteristics could be employed (and celebrated) outside what was customary, it was also recognized as a temporary situation.

162 Inglis Report, Extraordinary, Calcutta Gazette, Dec 9,1857. 163 Poovey, 168-172. Poovey quotes John Davies’ poem “Florence Nightingale, or the Heroine of the East, etc., etc., etc., A Poem” an explicit analogy to Christ which ends “Thou has the noblest work of time achieved.” Bostridge, 254-255. Bostridge refers to Nightingale’s secular sainthood described in Henry Longfellow’s “Santa Filomena” which ends “a noble type of good / Heroic womanhood.” 164 Extraordinary – Calcutta Gazette – Wed, Dec 9/57 #1543, IOR: Mss Eur C506/10, B.L.

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The seeming inflexible boundaries of respectability could be transgressed if necessary by deeming the actions not necessarily transgressive. However, the women’s seeming breach of propriety (albeit assumed a temporary situation) most certainly assured the writers that the widows would be uncomfortable with the very public recognition. Equally certain was the fact that once the imperial world had righted itself, so too must the class, domestic and mourning imperatives needed to sustain it.

In large part, class lines were maintained where possible throughout the conflict.

Although convalescing officers and soldiers were segregated and living quarters reinforced class lines, they were often living ‘cheek and jowl’ with little but mindful decorum to separate them. Despite the ladies’ close contact with wounded soldiers in the hospitals, they maintained their status through the mystique of ‘ministering angels’. As it was customary for soldiers’ wives who were with the regiment to tend their husbands when wounded,165 it is arguable that their widows were similarly employed. However, there appears to have been little, if any, sense of collegiality between the ladies and the soldiers’ wives or widows and, latterly, it was only the ladies who were given accolades in the official dispatches. Although the traditional practice of wives of the lower ranks tending the wounded (particularly their husbands)166 provided the precedent for female nursing, they were largely as invisible or as anonymous (faceless) as the regular soldiers they tended. Twenty-five years after the Mutiny, considered too “dirty” and “ignorant” to be candidates for nurses training,167 soldiers’ wives were still being put in their place.

165 Bamfield, 80. 166 Trustram, 113-114. 167 Summers, Angels, 157-158.

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Even under the extreme conditions of the Mutiny, the hierarchy held. In their flight from Gwalior, Coopland and other officers’ widows were thrown together with a number of soldiers’ widows. Despite the common peril of all, Coopland found these women “very pitiable” and emotional, “their feelings being less under control than ours.”168 Forced to share a hut for three days with two sergeants’ wives/widows and their babies, Lieutenant Gambier recounted that he and his female companions could have done without the noise of the children and the wide mood swings (between kissing and drubbing) of their mothers.169

Shortly after taking refuge at Lucknow, an argument that broke out between two soldiers’ wives was taken up by their respective spouses and resulted in the murder of one of their husbands by the other. Georgina Harris’s visit with the charitable well- spoken widow convinced her of the woman’s respectability while she deemed the wife of the murderer “a most violent woman who had excited [her husband] to the fatal pitch of fury.”170 The affair was widely noted, as was the deemed respectability of the husbands, placing the onus directly on the bickering wives.171 Further there was understated criticism that the women had hindered the imperial cause by reducing the fighting force by two good soldiers.172 As a cautionary note, it not only illustrated the lack of control and decorum deemed to be characteristic of the wives of the soldier class, but was a stark reminder of the heightened necessity, indeed, the duty, for the wives to be the ‘cordial

168 Coopland, 129. 169 Forrest family papers, 1857, Add Mss 45810, West Sussex Archive. 170 Harris, 51-52,56-57; Inglis, Siege, 33-34. Although both writers deemed the men steady and respectable, Harris’s appraisal of the differing character of the wives was arguably influenced by their religious differences, the ‘respectable’ widow being Church of England, the ‘violent’ wife of the murderer being Roman Catholic. 171 Inglis, Siege, 33-34; Harris, 56; Rees, 40-41; Polehampton, 302-303; Wilson, 16; Fayrer, 151-152. 172 Rees, 40.

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drop’ rather than a source of ‘gall and wormwood’. While affirming class difference, it also reiterated all women’s responsibility to create a domestic haven in imperial space, not only for the men’s sake but ultimately for their own safety. As such, those engaged in nursing the wounded men were not only extending their domestic purview but, as importantly, restoring their protectors.

Widows had a similar opportunity for posthumous restoration of their late husbands. The loss of identity, loneliness and vulnerability that widows experienced were frequently assuaged through capturing memories in a written record the life and death of the deceased.173 While the consolation of such memorials cannot be disputed, these records could also serve to provide an encomium which established the reputation of the deceased. Through written memorials they could not only sustain a sense of closeness to the deceased, but theirs became the last, and lasting, representation of their late husbands.

After completing her late husband’s memoirs, one British widow observed how “death under all circumstances, and most particularly when accompanied by calamity, added[ed] to the estimate of [the] talents” of the deceased.174 Although such memoirs were often kept for the writer or her family, they were also occasionally distributed for a local congregation and/or community and it was not unusual for memorials, originally intended for family and/or friends, to be published.175

Within approximately one year of being widowed, Bartrum, Case, Polehampton and Coopland had published diaries and/or memoirs. They provide an interesting pastiche of theirs and other’s voices, including their late husbands. Polehampton, whose autonomy

173 Jalland, “Death”, 182-183; Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 240, 287. 174 Anna Bray, Autobiography of Ann Eliza Bray, ed John Kempe (London: Chapman and Hall, 1884), 172- 174. 175 Ibid., 287.

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was exercised in her continued engagement with the wounded soldiers (during the siege, the evacuation, and on the voyage home) and other widows (particularly Bartrum but also soldiers’ widows) until landing in England, deferred to her late husband’s brothers in the publishing of her book. She who had gained praise for her actions and attitudes retreated demurely behind the veil of widowhood allowing her brothers-in-law to tell Henry’s and her story. The published book contained primarily her late husband’s letters, diaries and extracts of sermons (presumably those that Emily had chosen to salvage). As was traditional, a considerable number of condolence letters were also printed (29 letters – 25 pages). While Emily’s voice was added, it was appropriately supplemental and, as was made clear by the editors, not by her request. Despite the strength and leadership she had demonstrated when it was required, the book removed any suspicion that she was not content to return to conventional respectability.

Conversely, the publications by Case, Bartrum and Coopland were ostensibly the voices of the widows themselves. However, what could have appeared to be an untoward intrusion into the public domain was ameliorated by the printed protestations of the first two that they had been coerced by friends, (Case in particular “listened to friends rather than her own heart”) and their sureties that theirs were ‘only’ women’s accounts. Similar to Polehampton’s publication, all three women also allowed their late husbands’ voices to be heard through excerpts from the men’s letters and diaries. It allowed the widows to become the medium through which their husbands continued to speak and by choosing the men’s words, they became the guardians for their husbands’ voices and how they were remembered.

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However, beyond the self-effacement that permeated the publications of Case,

Bartrum and Polehampton to varying degrees, Coopland eschewed conventional demurral. Believing it was her duty to provide a description of what had happened, she lifted her widow’s veil in defiance to let Englishmen “know what their countrywomen

[had] endured”:

Some men may think that women are weak and only fitted to do trivial things, and endure petty troubles, and there are women who deserve no higher opinion: such as faint at the sight of blood, are terrified at a harmless cow, or make themselves miserable by imaginary terrors, and unreal sorrows; but there are many who can endure with fortitude and patience what even soldiers shrink from. Men are fitted by education and constitution to dare and to do; yet they have been surpassed, in the presence of mind and in the power of endurance, by weak women.

It was a clear demand that the feminine attributes of patience, endurance, and equanimity be recognized as inherent strengths which had helped to preserve the imperial hegemony.

It echoed Mary Vansittart’s pragmatic response to reports in the English papers:

They say ‘the letters of ladies shut up in the Fort of Agra breathe a spirit of bravery and cheerfulness for which we know no parallel in ancient or modern times.’ The reality in danger and difficulties are worse in imagination than when they really come to pass and the spirit with fortitude can always rise to its misfortunes, and overcome them. Any English women are not cowards in danger. They meet it with a courage they do not know they possess until tried.

Certainly Julia Inglis would have agreed. After Mrs. Bruere’s ayah had an eye removed while her mistress held her during the operation, Inglis observed how accustomed they had become to sights that they could not have formerly even discussed.176

While Vansittart attributed the resilience of the women to national character,

Coopland included a scathing indictment of those women not fit for ‘imperial duty’.

176 Inglis, Siege, 195.

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Describing them as the weaker of the ‘weaker sex’, she prefigured the

‘heroic/destructive’ duality which Maud Diver addressed fifty years later177 and, as

Margaret Strobel and others have demonstrated, continued to define European women in

India.178 A more nuanced description was Katherine Bartrum’s assessment of Mrs. Clark as “one of those gentle beings who could not struggle through hardships and trials,” who

“folded [her] hands … meekly” and chose death.179 While Bartrum’s judgment was an understated acceptance of the essential nature of gentility, it carried the same assumptions of weakness articulated by the Calcutta trader, Arthur Peppin, who, after early reports reached Calcutta of the torture and mutilation of women, privately determined that half the “poor creatures” who had escaped to Calcutta would not survive six months, and “it would have been better if many [of them] had been killed.”180 Coopland, on the other hand, was harshly critical of what she felt was, to great extent, self-determined behaviour.

However, despite the cause both women (and Peppin) would have taken issue with

Vansittart’s blanket assessment of the suitability and/or adaptability of all English women for/to imperial landscapes.

Despite her advocacy of their contributions, Coopland also acknowledged what many others privately believed, the liability which the women had presented. Her determination that if the men in Gwalior had not been ‘burdened’ with the women and children they could have successfully fought their way out, corroborates Bartrum’s sense of ‘duty’ to leave her husband, so he would be free to fight.181 The failures of the first

177 Maud Diver, The Englishwoman in India (London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1909). 178 Margaret Strobel, European Women, ix; Bamfield, 78. 179 Bartrum, 34. 180 Arthur Peppin private papers, 1857, IOR: Mss Eur C 488, B.L. 181 Coopland, 107-108; Bartrum, 11; Harris, 32.

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attempt either to retake Lucknow or evacuate it were both laid at the feet of the women and children.182 They continued to be viewed as a great source of weakness after the second (and successful) relief and evacuation.183 Arranging for their safe passage to

Allahabad, Sir Colin Campbell, the Commander-in-Chief in India was “more than thankful to see them go.”184

Although the widely stated chivalric impetus in relieving Lucknow was to save all the women and children,185 it was the bereaved women who subsequently came under the strongest surveillance and harshest criticism. While the “women’s failure to express appropriate feminine gratitude for their release,”186 and their “troublesome” discontent after evacuation has been noted and/or analyzed in previous studies, 187 the subsequent close and often critical observations of the widows have been overlooked. With physical freedom came the constraint of custom for the bereaved women. Although they could not go into seclusion, they were expected to wrap themselves in mourning attitudes and actions. While some accomplished this to the satisfaction of observers, others fell far short of the expectations. Having completed a series of marches and a final train ride, the

182 Inglis, 162; Spurgin; Major Gen John Ruggles, Recollections of a Lucknow Veteran, 1845-1876 (New York: Longman, Green & Co, 1906), 95-96; Capt R P Anderson, A Personal Journal of the Siege of Lucknow (London: W Thacker & Co, 1858), vi; Ltn Gen McLeod Innes, Lucknow & Oude in the Mutiny: A Narrative & A Study (London: A D Innes & Co, 1895), 237-38, taken from Lieut-Gen Sir James Outram’s military notes made after leading forces into Lucknow; Forbes-Mitchell, 35. 183 Harris,180; Francis Collins private papers, Brigade Surgeon, 1857-1858, IOR: Mss Eur Photo Eur 59, B.L.; Fred Roberts, Letters Written During the Indian Mutiny (New Delhi: LAL Publishers, 1923), 98. Roberts wrote of the “women, children and other impedimenta”; Spurgin. 184 Christopher Hibbert, The Great Mutiny: India 1857 (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 352. 185 Helen M I Groom, With Havelock from Allahabad to Lucknow, 1857 (London: Sampson Law, Marston & Co, 1984), xi; Rees, 244, Forbes-Mitchell, 24, 34-35, 81, 194; Sir Colin Campbell, Narrative of the Indian Revolt from its Outbreak to the Capture of Lucknow (London: George Vickers, 1858), 152. 186 Hibbert, 348. 187 Alison Blunt, “The Flight from Lucknow” in Writes of Passage, ed. James S Duncan, 96; Blunt, Traveling Home and Empire, British Women in India, 1857-1939, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of British Columbia, 1997, 134-5. Tuson, “Mutiny Narratives” in Women’s Studies, 298.

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“Lucknowites” as they were subsequently called188 arrived in Allahabad two and half weeks after leaving Lucknow. Once there, Reverend and Matilda Spry were charged with rendering assistance and relief to the evacuees. From her vantage point, Matilda was strongly critical of what she viewed as the lack of mourning in the widows. Taken aback by the bravado exhibited by “young delicate looking widows” who claimed to have had no fear, she further stated that they “were with few exceptions a jolly party, the widows, wonderful, young and pretty and most of them light-hearted.” In fact their cheerfulness made it difficult for Spry to distinguish the widows from the general group.189 She found their attendance at the social events such as band concerts even more incomprehensible, as she herself “had not the heart” to enjoy the music and fun. It is arguable that her comments were directed at the widows of the officers and her expectations of their mourning were more rigorous than those of the soldiers’ wives. Certainly the median age of the officers’ widows fit her description. During evacuation, Polehampton, who was twenty-five years of age, noted that there were twenty officers’ widows, fourteen of whom were younger than her, two being only nineteen.190

Additionally, Spry had less contact with the widows of the soldiers than those of the officers. Shortly after their arrival in the fort, Polehampton and Harris were asked to visit the barracks to collect the names of the widows, enabling Spry to issue proper black dresses from the Relief Fund.191 The personal interest which they and Julia Inglis took in their welfare, helped to re-delineate class lines and re-establish a hierarchy that may have been blurred during the siege and retreat from Lucknow. Whether it was the ennui of

188 Spry. 189 Spry. 190 Polehampton, 349. 191 Harris, 192.

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grief and trauma, or the lack of discipline in the soldier class, the “wildness of the children” in the barracks prompted Polehampton and Harris to take them in hand through an ad hoc school. Once thus occupied, Polehampton found them far less wild and unmanageable than expected and all very clean and nicely dressed.192 Inglis sponsored a

Christmas dinner for the women of the 32nd Regiment and noted that the mood “anything but festive,” most of the seventeen surviving women being widows.193

In sharp contrast to Spry’s observations, the Hampshire Advertiser quoted ‘a lady in Calcutta’ who had heard from ‘ladies in Allahabad’ that the “torpor of death” was pervasive and “young brides of a few weeks [were] grown into aged, grey-haired widows, not to be recognized.”194 This somber mood was also reported by those who welcomed the first steamer into Calcutta. The black dresses, the pallid faces, the downcast looks, and the slow walk were evidence of the sufferings they had undergone.195 However, scarcely a week later, John Stanley, a young Aide de Camp to the governor-general,196 fulminated to his sister that he was sick of hearing and seeing the

“Lucknow people” and their petty complaints. Three months later he continued with disparagement of their ‘heroine’ status, cheeriness, and “vulgar and showy” clothes.197

His comments, based on both hearsay and personal observation, indicate a strident level of both judgment and resentment which echoes Spry’s discomfort with and dismay at the lack of propriety exhibited in Allahabad. However, criticism was not only directed toward the Lucknow ladies. Several months earlier, a Calcutta dowager who was charged

192 Polehampton, 365; Harris, 193-194. 193 Inglis, Siege, 224. 194 Hampshire Advertiser, Feb 6, 1858. 195 Cheltenham Looker On, Feb 20, 1858. 196 Hare, Noble Lives, 412. 197 John Stanley, letters from India, 1858-1861, DSA/174, Cheshire Record Office.

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with the supervision of one of the houses of refuge expressed her consternation with the lack of feeling of many of the refugee women, particularly the high spirits and fulsome bravado of a young widow whom she had known since childhood.198

Stanley (and others) in Calcutta may have been reacting in part to expectations of the purdah-like seclusion that the Houses of Refuge offered the widows. Established through the Relief Fund, eleven well appointed houses provided temporary homes until the widows could arrange (or have arranged for them) passage to England.199 Housed and clothed by charitable donations, the widows entered an interlude of time and space (a kind of half-way house) until they could be returned to familial protection. For those widows with family or friends in Calcutta, the government was absolved of offering temporary refuge. During their two week stay Polehampton and Bartrum conducted their social and business activities primarily at 3 Harrington Street, the House of Refuge set aside for the Lucknow refugees. While Polehampton paid at least one visit to

Government House (to request intercession for her continued nursing), they remained respectably secluded receiving few visitors, among whom were Lady Canning and Mr

Hogg, Secretary of the Relief Fund.200

In Bombay, although a House of Refuge was provided, it appears to have not been as fully utilized as those in Calcutta, almost certainly because fewer refugees transited through the western port. However, there were sufficient numbers that the Bombay

Presidency was unable to provide accommodation and passage without financial help from the Relief Fund in London. (Calcutta received £51,000 and Bombay was given

198 Hare, Noble Lives, 315. 199 Hare, Noble Lives, 324,409; Germon, 136. 200 Polehampton, 374; Bartrum, 64-65.

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£15,400, a rough indication that the latter had about one-third of the refugees of the former.201) After having facilitated the first wave(s) of “sufferers”, Lord Elphinstone, the

Governor of Bombay, noted in mid-December 1857 that in contrast with what he assumed to be hundreds of widows and children passing through Calcutta, Bombay had not “a single widow or orphan made by the Mutineers.”202 Arriving from Karachi by steamer on March 9, Coopland chose to go to the Hope Hall Hotel as she did not know how to find the Refugee House. Although it was overcrowded and Coopland’s accommodation was little more than a screened-off section of the hall, she did not consider relocating or moving to the House of Refuge and, after several days, accepted an invitation to move to the private home of a friend of fellow Gwalior widow, Mrs. Blake.

Rather than choosing seclusion during her nine days in Bombay, Coopland stayed busy conducting business with her agents and ‘the committee’203 and accompanying others in rounds of sightseeing and shopping. Although the apparent low profile of the Refugees

House may have concomitantly diminished both awareness of, and prescription for, the mutiny widows, Coopland had also demonstrated independence which may have muted, for her, the social strictures against public engagements. Thus, as the women in deep mourning attended the Taj party in Agra without censure, she enjoyed limited transgression in Bombay.

Coopland’s relative freedom, while dressed in mourning clothes, is symbolic of the delineation of mourning prescription that the Mutiny blurred. If, as has been stated,

201 Indian Mutiny Relief Fund, Report by the General Committee of the Fund for the Relief of Sufferers by the Mutiny in India, February, 1858. ZCCF/31, Cheshire Record Office. 202 Lord Elphinstone papers, 1853-1859, IOR: Mss Eur C725, B.L. 203 Coopland, 305-311, ‘the committee’ can be presumed to be that for the Relief Fund for the ‘Sufferers of the Mutiny’. Her sightseeing began the evening that she arrived at the hotel as she, Mrs Blake and two gentlemen drove to the Botanical Gardens.

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“strict class and hierarchy rules” were imposed on imperial wives in India, the Mutiny in

India gave women license to negotiate those parameters. Although the re-ordering of their domestic/imperial ethos required recalibration for most if not all women, those who were widowed were most profoundly impacted. For them, the domestic half of the equation had not just been overshadowed by the imperial, it had been devoured by it.

It is not surprising that the women defaulted to the strictures of Victorian death and mourning ritual, if only in an attempt to normalize the chaos in which they found themselves. However, in examining their efforts to do so, it is evident that the domestic/imperial ethos prevailed, albeit primarily in that order. The women, first and foremost, mourned the loss of their companions, protectors and providers. Those husbands who had died in battle or skirmishes were often valorized, firstly for trying to protect their families and secondly for their imperial sacrifice. The spirituality of the husbands who had the ‘luxury’ of attended deathbeds was paramount, but it was also crucial in the deaths of the others. The testament of their faith was often in their own words, affirmed in letters salvaged by the widows, or in deeds and actions in living and in dying as attested to by those who could bear witness. Even without these certainties of the evangelical convictions of the deceased, putative faith could be ascribed. It was comforting for Catherine Simons to remember that although Alfred had not talked much about religion, “his was a Christian life and he was the kindest of husbands and fathers.”204 The currency of the ‘Christian soldier’ which Olive Anderson has argued emerged from the Crimean War meshed easily with the masculine chivalric virtues of

204 Stock.

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discipline, dedication and self-sacrifice.205 Thus in India, beyond fighting (and dying ) for

“Queen, Country and Empire,”206 the duty of a real man also included defending his family and the faith.

Although duty was inextricably wound through both domestic and imperial spaces, it both enabled and disabled the duality. While the domestic duty of a husband and father to protect and provide had some confluence with his imperial duty to defend

Britain’s honor and sovereignty, the former both hampered and motivated the latter. For

Katherine Bartrum, her imperial duty to leave her husband free to fight eclipsed her domestic duty to support and care for him. In other locales the duty of the wives to remain with their husbands in order to maintain the appearance of an unflappable imperial/domestic front superseded the duty of the men to ensure the protection of their wives.207 Similarly, for the widows, when the men’s bravery became bravado, there was muted censure of their late husbands’ assumed disregard for their domestic charges. At the same time, a glorious (imperial) death could be used as proof of the heroic and self- sacrificial character of the deceased, a legacy which provided for those he had left behind.

However, by fulfilling their ‘imperial duty’, the deceased had stripped the women of their domestic identity and the widows were left to negotiate a new imperial landscape.

Despite defaulting to the familiar haven of the protocols and prescriptions of mourning, they were unable or unwilling to escape either the imperial ethos or its current chaos. In addition to the obvious constraints of their locations, regrets by Bartrum, Case and Mawe

205 Anderson, “Growth of Christian Militarism”, 46-49; Dawson, 108-109; Peers, “”Nothing More Poetical”, 274-277, 291; Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, 66; Barczewski, 216-221; Hichberger, 46. 206 Dawson, 1. 207 Coopland, 108.

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that they had not salvaged military memorabilia demonstrate their need to identify their late husbands in an imperial setting. Certainly the call for retributive justice by Bartrum and Coopland illustrated a measure of co-option into the imperial hegemony which existed.

In addition to these imperial/military considerations, the widows also anchored themselves in domestic activities which also accommodated such mourning ritual as they could arrange. Their nursing activities ostensibly fell under this aegis. However, the approbation and celebration of their abilities to ‘take part in such scenes,’ despite being judged ‘ill-fitted’ to do so, articulated the ambivalence with which their foray into these muddy imperial waters was regarded.

Aside from these heroic, albeit quasi-domestic and ostensibly supervised, contributions to the imperial cause, the widows continued to be cast publicly as heroines and victims (brave, good, mournful, grieving). Privately, they were viewed more variously. While attributes which reflected ideal English womanhood were observed, accorded and recorded, complaints of ingratitude, greed, selfishness and/or dishonesty were also leveled at single, married and widowed women. In addition, widows were more specifically denounced for being both “unnaturally” unfeeling (cold-hearted) and light- hearted. Further, their ‘temerity’ in boasting about their experiences and the relish they showed in their new fame were seen as disconcerting and vulgar. These behaviours were the antithesis of the demeanour and attitude of a respectable mourning widow and while local circumstances had allowed some latitude in activities and movement, these breaches of protocol were more egregious.

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Although most of the women who survived the Mutiny had lost a great deal, it was the widows who had lost the most, and stood to lose even more if they failed to conform to the strictures of proper mourning. Under the scrutiny of a widening microscope, there were more observers and with correspondingly more expectations.

That there were criticisms is not surprising given the singular combination of the extraordinary hype, the numbers of widows, and the intense trauma. However, expressions of disapproval remained primarily private and generally conceded that the trauma may have interfered with the women’s ‘natural’ response. Spry wondered if the

“continued exposure to such fearful scenes [had] caused their feelings to be blunted”208 while Currie thought their “nerves and minds [to have been] unhinged.”209 Arguably, both women would have agreed with R H Birch, who intoned that the women were “little fitted to take part in such [imperial] scenes.”210 Their observations also carried the unspoken assumption that ‘natural’ and ‘rational’ mourning would have been manifested as the media reported the widows: giving way to “the torpor of death,” the “downcast looks,” “pallid faces,” and solemn and slow movements.211 Ostensibly, it illustrates another disjunction in the imperial/domestic ethos; that the trauma of the conflict had overwhelmed/removed the sensibility of the women to grieve properly/respectably for their husbands.

Although it would be difficult to ascertain how/if/when these widows, as individuals, adopted mourning protocol, what is more certain is the evidence that many women did appropriate bereavement customs as they were able and grieved their loss

208 Spry. 209 Hare, Noble Lives, 315. 210 Ftnte 164. 211 Hampshire Advertiser, Feb 6/57; Cheltenham Looker-On, Feb 20/57.

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profoundly. It is equally evident in the extant writing of many widows that the necessity to conform to the mourning prescriptions was primarily self-driven, rather than a result of external dictate. Claudia Klaver has argued that, through their writing, the diarists from

Lucknow were able to maintain their subjectivities and negotiate “otherwise unthinkable realities.”212 However, beyond this, for those widowed it was the approximation of the familiar norms and protocols of death that allowed both subjectivity and reassurance in the chaos. Although tempered by the imperial, the domestic mores prevailed, a clear indication of the strength of the Victorian cultural/social ethos they had internalized and brought intact to India.

212 Claudia Klaver, “Domesticity under siege: British women and imperial crisis at the siege of Lucknow, 1857” Women’s Writing, Vol 8: 1 March 2001, 51.

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Chapter 4: Response of the Nation: the anxiety and the duty

Four months after the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny on 10 May 1857 the first refugees from the conflict began arriving in England to be embraced by a nation suffused with anxiety and outrage. Initial reports of the conflict which reached England in mid

June had been accompanied by cautions to avoid “unnecessary alarm,”1 but within weeks this insouciance had been replaced by concern over, and then obsession with, news from

India. In London one correspondent observed, “it is impossible to walk the streets of the metropolis without witnessing the anxiety with which the arrival of news from India is expected.”2 Another wrote that the “rebellion [had] … created [a] far greater sensation of fear and alarm throughout England than the expected approaching comet which was said to either set [the] planet on fire or shatter it to pieces or both.”3 By mid-August, “all

England [remained] in a state of greatest impatience for the arrival of … telegraph[s]”4 and early in September, the front page of the London Illustrated News declared that

“never within memory [had] the homes of Great Britain been filled with such misery and mourning … and never such a feeling of indignation been excited among all classes.”5

The depth and breadth of public engagement was unprecedented and echoed by one private correspondent who claimed that “the intense concern manifested by every soul in the kingdom from the Queen to the lowest peasant [was] past all description.”6

Undoubtedly the tenor and intensity were in great part due to the too recent debacle that

1 Times, June 15, 27, 29 1857. 2 July 27, 1857, Hansard in Blunt, Travelling. 3 Letter to William Glen from Matthew Morton, July 18 1857, Family Correspondence of Reverend William Glen, IOR: MssEurC 332. 4 Letter to Lord Elphinstone from Lord Falkland, August 4 1857, Papers and Correspondence of John Elphinstone, Governor of Bombay, 1853-60, IOR: Mss Eur F87/167, B.L. 5 London Illustrated News, Sept 5,1857. 6 Letter to G.M.Talbot, secretary to Lord Canning, Aug 9, 1857, IOR:Mss Eur C860, B.L.

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the Illustrated London News called “the ! war in the Crimea.”7 Although their consequent sense of vulnerability was articulated in British fears that their prestige, power and security would be further compromised if they lost their control over India,8 the added factor of the death of “their poor dear unoffending women and children”9 was an accelerant to the popular response.

This level of interest allowed newspaper reports and the frequently published private correspondence from India to shape domestic public knowledge and popular consciousness. Thus unsubstantiated reports of atrocities, rapes, and mutilations perpetrated on British women by the mutineers rapidly garnered attention in the population, fueling outrage and cries for vengeance. Valuable studies including those of

Nancy Paxton, Jenny Sharpe, Gautam Chakravarty, Patrick Brantlinger, and Rudrangshu

Mukherjee have examined why these reports were so readily accepted and how accounts of the violations of the vulnerable and sacrosanct bodies of English women were used to reinforce social prescriptions and imperial superiority, as well as justify harsh retaliation.10 Although stories also circulated of women who had survived mutilation to escape to safety, much of the horror at reported atrocities was accompanied by solace in

7 Illustrated London News, September 5 1857. 8 Illustrated London News, July 4, September 26 1857; Times, July 21 1857; Englishwoman’s Review, September 26, October 24 and 31, 1857. 9 Letter to G.M.Talbot, August 9 1857. 10 Nancy Paxton, Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830-1970 ((New Brunswick: Rutgers U.P., 1999); Paxton, “Mobilizing Chivalry: Rape in British Novels about the Indian Uprising of 1857” Victorian Studies, (Fall 1992); Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1993); Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2005); Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1988); Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Spectre of Violence: The 1857 Kanpur Massacres (New Delhi: Viking Penguin Books, 1998).

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the murdered women’s escape through death and their subsequent elevation through martyrdom.

In addition, as Sharpe and others have indicated, the truism that an English lady would choose “death over dishonour” meant it was very unlikely that any one “of pure

English blood”11 would survive violation, or even attempted violation, to tell the tale. The poem “Avenge, O Lord, Thy Slaughtered Saints,” first printed in the London Daily News and reprinted in regional newspapers throughout September, declared “every outraged woman died a virgin undefiled.”12 Thus for those so abused, death was deemed to have provided redemption.

While considering this spiritual consolation, Christopher Herbert has further examined the trauma experienced by Britain during the conflict. His perceptive observation that this “breach of the nimbus of immunity [which was] supposed to guard

… the angelic female virtue from contact with carnality and violence” represented a

“catastrophic failure of the mysterious feminine virtue itself”13 exposes deep insecurities which resulted from the conflict. Herbert argues that this response to this apparent weakness in what Pat Barr has termed the “revered Victorian institution [of the] English

Lady”14 was also demonstrated in the unease with the violence associated with femininity. Herbert further states that although it did not immediately disappear, the

11 Sharpe, Allegories, 71-73; Paxton, Writing, 8-11; Brantlinger, Rule, 217; Mary Procida, Married to the empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883-1947 (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2002), 121. 12 Martin F Tupper, Daily News, September 2 1857; Hampshire Telegraph & Sussex Chronicle, September 5 1857; Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, September 10 1857; Bristol Mercury, September 12 1857; Jackson’s Oxford Journal, September 12 1857. 13 Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 2008), 263-265. 14 Pat Barr, The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian India (London: Secker & Warburg, 1976), 113 quoted in Sharpe, Allegories, 64-65.

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“cultural fantasy of [both] feminine innocence and benevolence” became questionable.15

The retribution exacted in the name of the dead women (“their blood cried out for vengeance”) and the surviving women’s call for or approval of the harsh measures fused

“two supposedly antithetical principles,” namely “the angel of mercy and the angel of merciless vengeance.”16 Although his examination of literature written in the decade after

1857 extends the discussion beyond the immediate reaction to the Mutiny, it is a well considered adjunct to the rape narrative as examined by the previous studies. While there is valuable instruction to be taken from his discussion regarding women’s supposed uncharacteristic engagement with retribution, it is primarily beyond the scope of this study. The critical point for this analysis is that although these works which have explored and highlighted the rape narrative are invaluable and salient contributions to imperial and domestic history, they have unfortunately tended to eclipse narratives of women who survived, traumatized and dispossessed but, nevertheless, verifiably un- molested by the mutineers.

Alternately, valuable scholarship has focused on the voices and subjectivity of women who lived through the conflict, many of whom left memoirs or diaries of their experience. In particular, Alison Blunt, Claudia Klaver, Penelope Tuson and Jane

Robinson have examined the writings of women who endured the four and half month siege of the Lucknow Residency. However, their analyses are limited to the women’s experiences while still in India and include both those whose husbands survived and those who were widowed. Although women of both marital states returned to England as

15 Herbert, War of No Pity, 263. 16 Ibid., 265-268.

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refugees, it was the widows who mostly fully and unproblematically symbolized the sacrifices made in the imperial conflict and who received the greatest support. Viewed as both heroines and victims, the women who survived embodied the British womanhood which was attributed to the women who had died. Ascribed the same noble characteristics as the martyred women, it is arguable that their significance as survivors was enhanced by the deaths of their counterparts. In particular the rescue of the “Lucknow ladies” was particularly celebrated because they had not met the same fate as the “Cawnpore martyrs.”17 However, the widows were also tangible remnants of marriages and men sacrificed for the imperial cause. Having left their husbands in often unmarked graves in the distant imperial soil of India, the women returned to Britain bearing the identities of the deceased men. As such they were defined, individually and collectively, by the reputation, rank, and sacrifice of their late husbands. Beyond their personal bereavements, the widows represented for Britons not only the loss of British lives but living gravestones which symbolized and memorialized both personal and national loss.

Before the first refugees reached Britain, public attention became increasingly focused on the sufferers of the Mutiny, in particular the plight of the widows and orphans. Closely identifying with the death and destitution occurring in India,

Englishwomen ‘at home’ mourned the loss of ‘sisters’ they had never known,18 and relief was solicited throughout Britain for the “state[s] of their sister countrywomen.”19 The

17 Daily News, December 24 1857; Aberdeen Journal December 30 1857. 18 Englishwoman’s Review, September 12 1857. 19 Indian Mutiny Relief Fund, “Resolutions of London Committee for the Relief of Sufferers,” August 27 1857, ZCCF/31.

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conflict was seen to have invaded their own homes,20 and the “suffering, insult, dishonour, torture and death … of Englishwomen … [was believed] unparalleled in the world’s history.”21 Queen Victoria was not alone in her view that, by comparison, the recent Crimean conflict was “honourable warfare … where … women and children were safe.”22

Stung by the perception of national dishonour and violation, it became every

Briton’s stated ‘duty’ to support the sufferers, “to mitigate with the corruptible things, silver and gold, … the desolation of the widows’ hearts.”23 ‘Duty’ became the rallying call for donations and subscriptions, and communities, churches, businesses, and individuals from all classes responded overwhelmingly. Organized throughout Britain and the Empire, scores of Committees for the Relief of the Sufferers from the Indian

Mutiny quickly became consolidated under the aegis of the Indian Mutiny Relief Fund.

Women were particularly engaged as was evidenced by their presence and influence in the organization and administration of the Relief Fund. In London, the inaugural meeting drew more women than men, a ratio that was not unusual as was indicated by the acknowledgement of the predominance of women at other meetings.24

The Lady’s Newspaper was pleased at the interest of women in the meetings, deeming it natural for them to be involved in a fund primarily for widows and orphans.25 However, even while the formation of a Ladies’ Committee gave women an official presence with

20 The Times, November 8 1858. In retrospect the Times reflected that the “crisis [had] been more terrible … than any episode of even Crimean experience: for the enemy [had been] at home, and in the house.” 21 Englishwoman’s Review, September 12 1857. 22 The Letters of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence Between the Years 1837 and 1861, vol III, Arthur Christopher Benson and Viscount Esher, eds. (London: John Murray, 1907), 313. 23 The Times, Oct 8, “Day of Humiliation Sermon” Canon Dale. 24 Times, August 26 1857; Cheltenham Looker-On, September 19 1857; Daily News, October 24 1857. 25 Lady’s Newspaper, September 29 1857.

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the Relief Fund, it also subordinated them to the managing General, Financial and Relief

Committees which were comprised solely of men. Although Frank Prochaska has argued that in the “mid- and late Victorian years” managing committees were beginning to mix men and women on their executive committees;26 it is arguable that the military context of the Relief Fund precluded any further involvement of women. The Royal Patriotic

Fund, established for widows and orphans of the Crimean War, which served as a template for the Relief Fund included no women in managerial or advisory capacities in its administration.27 While the Patriotic Fund did later establish Local Committees of

Ladies to monitor widows who were beneficiaries,28 their task was akin to the traditional role that officers’ wives played in overseeing the welfare of the wives of the regiment.29

On the other hand, the Ladies’ Committee of the Mutiny Relief Fund was an integral part of its organizational structure from its inception. Initially charged with collecting funds and soliciting and distributing clothing, it also was asked to “consider cases of female applicants [who] had been referred to them and to make suitable arrangements for [their] education and disposal [sic].”30 Meeting once a week, at least at the beginning, to accomplish its mandate, its contributions to the early operation of the fund were invaluable. However, its tenure was brief. Although the committee’s organizational and advisory roles were both praised in the 1858 Report of the General

26 Frank Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 30-31. 27 Denis Blomfield-Smith, Heritage of Help: The Story of the Royal Patriotic Fund (London: Robert Hale, 1992), 12-19. 28 First and Second Reports of the Royal Commissioners of the Patriotic Fund (ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, March 26 1858), 28. 29 Myrna Trustram, Women of the regiment: Marriage and the Victorian army (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1984), 166-167. 30 Indian Mutiny Relief Fund, Report by the General Committee of the Fund for the Relief of the Sufferers by the Mutiny in India (February 15 1858), 8-9, ZCCF/31.

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Committee,31 the Ladies’ Committee met only seven times in 185932 and was not mentioned in subsequent reports. Whether they continued to work behind the scenes is difficult to ascertain but it is arguable that the death in November 1861 of the seeming indefatigable Ann Finnis, the Lady Mayoress of London until November 1857, may also have been the end of the Committee. As the face of the Ladies Committee, Mrs. Finnis was a driving force behind its early operation. Not only did she head the committee, she was committed to meeting the ships carrying refugees and for several months traveled to

Southampton to do so. Dressed in mourning for her brother-in-law, Colonel John Finnis, who was the first officer to be killed in the conflict, she was at once a somber symbol of loss and the representative of Britain’s sympathy and support.33

This type of ad hoc philanthropy was common in Britain and estimates by Frank

Prochaska and Geoffrey Best indicate that mid-nineteenth century voluntary philanthropic activity equaled or exceeded the Poor Law expenditures in England and

Wales. Between 1850 and 1870 official Poor Relief rose from five to seven and a half million pounds per annum, over ninety per cent raised through local poor rates. By comparison, an estimate of sums donated for charities in London alone (circa 1870) was five and a half to seven million a year.34 Given the multitudinous range of causes and charities and the records (or lack thereof) in what Best calls “laissez-faire philanthropy,” establishing hard figures for charity is not possible, yet he argues that the amount expended annually by charities was certainly more than the money raised by the poor

31 Times, April 11 1859. 32 Times, June 30 1860. 33 Illustrated London News, September 26 1857; Cheltenham Looker-On, October 10 1857; Hampshire Advertiser, September 26, October 10, December 12 1857. 34 Geoffrey Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, 1851-1875 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 138-140.

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rate.35 However, while these charitable subscriptions were frequently for various local or regional needs, the Indian Mutiny Relief Fund subscribers were responding to a national and imperial cause beyond their immediate horizons.

As a proven charitable vehicle, the Royal Patriotic Fund established only three years earlier in response to the Crimean War provided a convenient template for the organizers. While the focal point of the Patriotic Fund had been on widows and orphans of soldiers, the focus of the Indian Mutiny Relief Fund was expanded by the shattered imperial and domestic order of all classes and ranks in India. Comparing the demand to that of the Patriotic Fund, the Glasgow Herald estimated there would be four times as many sufferers from the Mutiny due to the increased number of troops involved and the

“civil sufferers … for the first time thrown on [the nation’s] bounty.”36 Sorting through the array of applicants, the administrators of the Mutiny Relief Fund established four categories for widows. The first two included widows (and orphans) of Indian and British

Army officers and of civilians in the service of the Indian Government. The third category was a catch-all for widows and orphans of missionaries, indigo planters, uncovenanted servants [see ftnt 142] of the Indian Government, Indian Railway

Company employees, and others. The final category for widows was for soldiers and sailors.37 Although the restoration of confidence in both imperial and national security was the purview of the military, the widows and orphans became the responsibility of the

35 Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, 21-22; Prochaska, “Philanthropy” in Cambridge Social History of Britain: 1750-1950 Vol. 3 Social Agencies and Institutions, ed. F.M.L.Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. 1990), 358; Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, 134-140; David Owen, English Philanthropy, 1660-1960 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard U.P., 1964). 36 Glasgow Herald, September 21and 27 1857. 37 Treasury Solicitor, Charities, Indian Mutiny Relief Fund Regulations, TS18/343, N.A.

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general public. As fragments of the destruction, they became the focus for restoring order, both domestic and social.

Following the example of relief agencies for the sufferers that had been quickly established in India, a London committee was formed for the same purpose by the end of

August. Fiercely proactive the Fund committee dispatched thirty-five thousand letters to churches and municipalities throughout the United Kingdom, to British ambassadors in other countries, and to British governors throughout the Empire.38 As committees in

Britain were formed, regional rivalries encouraged donations with their determination that the amount of funds raised was commensurate to the degree of sympathy in the community. In Cheltenham, one of the British enclaves for Anglo-Indians, it was expected that they would “not be behind other towns in the liberality of its contributions” while Reverend Wagner predicted the same for Brighton.39 Bath and Norwich both considered it noteworthy that they were among the first communities to “stretch forth the hand of warm and earnest sympathy for the sufferers.”40 Few opportunities were overlooked to remind and allow the population to demonstrate their sympathy through financial sacrifice and support. Although churches were a common venue for solicitation, subscription lists were available at banks and libraries, canvassers went door-to-door for pledges, bazaars and other fund-raisers were held, and tradesmen organized their own collections.41

38 Report by the General Committee of the Fund for the Relief of the Sufferers by the Mutiny in India, February 15 1858, p 6-7, ZCCF/31 Cheshire Record Office. 39 Cheltenham Looker-On, September 19 1857; Morning Chronicle, September 24 1857. 40 Bristol Mercury, September 12 1857; Morning Chronicle, September 11 1857. 41 Bristol Mercury, September 12 & 26 1857; Daily News, September 16 & October 28 1857; Morning Chronicle, September 18 & 24 1857; Glasgow Herald, September 25 1857; Talbot, IOR: Mss Eur C860, B.L.

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In addition to substantial donations from the well endowed, those with very little contributed. Reverend Canon Dale, vicar of St Pancras church, was pleased by the self- sacrifice of the “poorer classes” evident in the “large number of small silver coins and copper coins” that had been received from 2,500 contributors on the day of humiliation,42 while the villages of Road and Woolverton, combined population 1,000, “most of whom

[were] of the poorer class,” contributed £56, an average of just over one shilling per person.43 Most employees of the Monmouthshire Railway and Canal Company subscribed between one and two shillings with at least one contribution as small as three pence,44 and boys from the East London Ragged School collected twelve shillings amongst themselves.45 Further proof of the universal appeal of the fund was provided when the inmates of the Reformatory in the New Road contributed to the collection at All

Saints Church in Gordon Square, St Pancras on humiliation day.46

The generosity which ensured the success of the campaign, however, reduced the funds given for other projects and causes. This was indicated by the plaintive reminder issued to parishioners of St James Church in Southampton not to forget the necessities of the parish in their focus on the Mutiny refugees.47 Further, the earnest and concerted fundraising efforts resulted in individuals being solicited repeatedly either at different venues or in disparate locales, particularly if they were landowners in more than one parish. Rather than being seen as an indication of resistance to or ignorance of the cause,

42 The Daily News, October 15 1857. 43 The Times, October 6 1857. 44 Monmouthshire Railway and Canal Company, Relief Fund Subscriptions, 1857, RAIL 500/57, N.A. A pence was 1/12 of a shilling. 45 The Times, October 31 1857. 46 The Daily News, October 15 1857. 47 Hampshire Advertiser, Decemeber 19 1857.

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the blank or meager subscription lists returned by some canvassers often noted that those asked had given elsewhere.48

The prevailing spirit of benevolence and heightened attention to the Mutiny also created an opportunity for the unscrupulous. In the climate of persistent sensational rumours of mutilations of women by the mutineers, the Cheltenham Relief Fund

Committee was compelled to publish warnings of fraudulent solicitations of funds for those elusive mutilated women who had reputedly returned to Britain to a life of seclusion.49 Further, the notice that the London Relief Fund ran several times in The

Times, which warned the public that “NO COLLECTORS [were] authorized to

RECEIVE any SUBSCRIPTIONS whatever on behalf of [the] FUND”[sic],50 is a strong indication that eager subscribers were giving money to equally eager fraudsters. In mid

August an enterprising tradesman in Cheltenham began to package his trade circulars to the upper classes in envelopes that appeared to be a telegraph from the Cheltenham

Station with directions to deliver immediately. While his marketing approach was legal, it was considered insensitive. As the newspaper fulminated, “when so many persons are painfully anxious for the safety of their friends and relatives … such trifling with their feelings cannot be too severely reprobated.”51 Two weeks later the same paper itself took advantage of the anticipation of news from India when it offered subscriptions to a supplemental “Indian Fly-Leaf” which would provide information of Telegraphic

48 Papers in connection with Indian Mutiny Relief Fund papers, 1858-1864, GD260/6/4/1, National Archives of .Scotland. 49 Cheltenham Looker On, January 16 1858. 50 The Times, October 15, 21, November 4, 19, 20, 21, 30, 1857. 51 Cheltenham Looker On, August 22 1857.

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Summaries as they were received.52 Initially it was to be issued every fortnight, but within two weeks it had been issued five times in one week, arguably responding to either demand for or the volume of news. Although Cheltenham had a disproportionately high number of Anglo-Indians who likely had a great deal at stake personally, it was not unique in its response.

The volume of subscriptions from all regions of Britain demonstrates the national engagement. Raising over four hundred thousand pounds53 between August and

December of 1857, the Relief Fund represented the collective sympathy and outrage of the nation. Generous subscriptions were frequently pledged in emotional meetings charged with allusions to “savage slaughter”, “unparalleled atrocities,” and “diabolic conduct” “beyond imagination.”54 The horror and helplessness at the “barbarous butchery” of those who were killed was for the British public partially offset by the focus on the “sufferers,” particularly the widows and orphans, who had escaped the “cruel and perfidious fiend-like monsters.”55

Of these survivors, the greatest outrage was most frequently reserved for those perceived to have suffered and lost the most, the ladies, many of whom were the widows of officers. The committee meeting in Bath resolved “to succour and help the sorrowing widows … [and earnestly appealed] to the people … to pour out their treasures for the delicately nurtured women … as lavishly as their husbands … had poured out their blood

52 Ibid., September 5 1857. 53 According to ‘Measuringworth.com’ purchasing power of £1 in 1857 is equivalent £657 in 2009, making the funds raised equivalent to £262,800,000. www.measuringworth.com/index/html. 54 The Times, August 27 1857; Bristol Mercury, September 12 and 26 1857; Hull Packet and East Riding Times, September 11 1857; Morning Chronicle, September 24 1857; The Newcastle Courant, September 25 1857. 55 Bristol Mercury, September 26 1857.

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for [the subscribers].”56 In Norwich, a public meeting directed their Relief Fund to place the widows of officers “on the highest scale of pensions.”57 Although the most galvanizing focus for the donors remained these “high born daughters of England [who had been] plunged into bitterest destitution and bereavement,”58 the fund supporters and administrators were not unsympathetic to the widows of other classes. While the intensity of the women’s suffering was widely considered commensurate to their class, new sensibilities toward widows of the rank and file which had taken root during the Crimean

War59 were also reflected, albeit with somewhat greater circumspection.

The practice of soldiers’ widows to remarry quickly had fueled the widespread belief that they were incapable of strong sentimental attachments and therefore less likely to be suffering the trauma and acute grief experienced by the widows of higher classes.

Sergeant John Pearman, a sergeant in the British Army, observed that of fourteen or fifteen recent widows in his regiment, most of them were remarried within a month as they “soon forgot the one dead.” Early in the siege of Lucknow, Mrs. Harris, a chaplain’s wife, commented on how “little that class of people seem[ed] to feel things that would almost kill a lady” and Lady Canning was frustrated by the lack of available soldiers’ widows to accompany ladies back to England. She wrote, “they like to stay in a regiment and marry again. It does not sound very feeling but I believe the practice is common.”60

56 The Times, Sept 11, 1857. 57 Ibid. 58 Bristol Mercury, September 26 1857. 59 Myrna Trustram, Women of the regiment: Marriage and the Victorian army (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1984), 169-174; J.W.M.Hichberger, Images of the army: The Military in British Art, 1815-1914 (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1998), 61, 78-79.Olive Anderson, “The Growth of Christian Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain” English Historical Review Vol 86 No 338 (January, 1971), 59. 60 Carolyn Steedman, ed. The Radical Soldier’s Tale: John Pearman, 1819-1908 (London: Routledge, 1988), 142-143; Mrs G Harris, A Lady’s Diary of the Siege of Lucknow (London: John Murray, 1858), 56; Augustus Hare, ed. The Story of Two Noble Lives vol 2 (London, 1843), 340.

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Despite the consequent lack of empathy for their emotional states, Myrna Trustram has argued that the destitution of soldiers’ wives and widows became increasingly visible during the Crimean War. The new willingness of the mid-Victorians to see soldiers as noble and heroic included the acceptance, albeit conditional, of their widows as deserving poor61 and therefore worthy dependents on the largesse of the nation.

However, in conjunction with this newly discovered potential virtue of the rank and file was the need for their continued subordination to their superiors. J. W. M.

Hichberger has demonstrated that soldiers who had distinguished themselves by winning the Victoria Cross were often depicted as rescuing others, frequently superior officers.62

This class hierarchy was even more critical away from the battlefield and despite the

“brief period of popular respect” for British soldiers during the decade after 1857,

Douglas Peers has argued that empathy for soldiers continued to be contingent first on maintaining order in the ranks. While his discussion examines the primacy of the perception of hierarchical control within the troops in the post-mutiny ethos of both

Britain and India, it suggests the tenuousness inherent in the ascendancy of the reputation of soldiers.63 While there was a willingness to sympathize with the soldiers and their wives, sympathy had its limits.

Conscious that this imperative could result in disparity between the ranks,

Edinburgh’s Relief Committee directed that its £2,500 be directed to widows and orphans

61 Trustram, 152-158, 169-179. 62 J.W.M.Hichberger, Images of the army: The Military in British Art, 1815-1914 (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1988), 65-66. 63 Douglas Peers, “ ‘The more this foul case is stirred, the more offensive it becomes’: Imperial Authority, Victorian Sentimentality and the Court Martial of Colonel Crawley, 1862-1864” in Sameetah Agha & Elizabeth Kolsky, eds. Fringes of Empire: Peoples, Places, & Spaces at the Margins of British Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford U.P., 2009), 19,32-33.

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of soldiers and sailors, and stressed the necessity for “making provision for that class of claimants.”64 Although this direction was fully approved by the London committee,65 the administrators of the fund issued prophylactic parameters which denied access to the fund for “wives and families of soldiers [who were] simply serving in India … and undergoing exposure to the ordinary casualties of war.”66 Likewise, wives of soldiers engaged in the

Mutiny conflict were considered adequately supported unless their husbands were killed.

The awareness of the destitution of soldiers’ wives which had attended the Crimean War was demonstrated by the national concern aroused for families of men sent to India to quell the Mutiny.67 Although relief committees (independent of the Mutiny Relief

Committee) were formed to address their needs, the Mutiny Relief Fund was seen as a possible resource. As a consequence the flood of applications to the Relief Committee on behalf of the wives of soldiers made it necessary for the committee members to issue guidelines which excluded these women. As was specifically pointed out by the secretary of the London Relief Committee, if they were in distress, it was not due to the Mutiny but was simply a condition of military life and therefore did not fall under the purview of the fund.68 While responsibility for the impoverished state of the wives of soldiers was evaded, as widows they earned the nation’s guardianship but it was their destitution in widowhood rather than their bereavement that invoked the duty of the donors to the

Relief Fund.

64 The Times, Oct 24, 1857. 65 The Times, Nov 5, 1857. 66 The Times, Dec. 7 1857. 67 Trustram, 152-153, 170-174. 68 Indian Mutiny Relief Fund, Report by the General Committee of the Fund for the Relief of the Sufferers by the Mutiny in India, Appendix C, February 15 1858, 18-20, ZCCF/31, Cheshire Record Office.

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Beyond the military ranks, the perceived atrocities against the British “civil settlers and inoffensive citizens” further elevated the level of anger against the mutineers.69 The particular sensitivity of the Glasgow committee to dependents of civil servants and “pacific citizens” was arguably a result of the high proportion of Scots serving in civil as well as military positions. However, this is difficult to demonstrate conclusively. While the preponderance of Scotch and Irish soldiers in India is regularly cited, little work has been done on Scottish civil servants or missionaries. In his work on the Scottish soldier, Edward Spiers alludes briefly to the broad range of capacities in which the Scottish served the empire and as P. J. Marshall has observed, although it is generally agreed that proportionately more Scots and Irish than English went to India, conclusive statistics are hard to find.70 After noting the preponderance of her “poor countrymen” buried in the Agra cemetery, Rosa Coopland was pleased to be surrounded by a similar living representation of Scots at a party in Gwalior and commented that

“nearly everyone in India is Scotch or Irish.”71 More specifically, in his work on the

Scottish influence throughout the British Empire, Michael Fry has pointed out the traffic to Bengal in textiles which was established by Glasgow merchants after the Napoleonic wars.72

Regional origins notwithstanding, the scores of widows of East India Company employees, missionaries, traders, planters and others who had suffered bereavement and destitution reinforced the sense of national outrage at the violation of British domestic

69 Daily News, October 7 1857. 70 Edward M Spiers, The Scottish Soldier and Empire, 1854-1902 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U.P., 2006), 3; P.J.Marshall, “British Society in India under the East India Company” Modern Asian Studies 31, 1 (1997), 90-91. 71 Coopland, 26, 46. 72 Michael Fry, The Scottish Empire (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001), 84-85.

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sanctity in India and its own loss of security. National angst peaked in often large and frequently emotional assemblies73 on Wednesday October 7, the date reluctantly appointed by Queen Victoria74 as the “Day Appointed for National Fast and

Humiliation.” Although she had acquiesced to Palmerston’s request for such a commemoration, the Queen was of the opinion that Fast days did not produce the desired effect. She felt that if held on a Sunday it would be more fully observed. Her preference that it be called a “day of prayer and intercession for [their] suffering countrymen,” rather than a day for “fast and humiliation,” demonstrated a lack of enthusiasm for the national flagellation which ensued. Nevertheless, businesses and shops closed while the nation gathered in churches throughout Britain encouraged to acknowledge mea culpa for omissions of duty and commissions of sin such as pride, and adding collective supplications for victory over the mutineers and consolation for the bereaved. Preaching at the Crystal Palace to an estimated audience of 24,000, Charles Spurgeon called for the

British troops to “destroy the enemy who had defiled Britain” and exhorted the crowd to help the sufferers by giving as much as they could afford.75 Rather than viewing the

Mutiny as simply a military campaign, Spurgeon employed an intimate imagery that articulated the violation felt by Britons. Not only had the Mutiny come to Britain, the nation had been dishonoured at its deepest level. The shock and vulnerability felt both individually and collectively by the British population were sharply reflected in the

73 The Service at the Crystal Palace on Wed. Oct 7/1857 – The Day Appointed for National Fast and Humiliation (London: J.A.Berger, Queen’s-Head Passage, 1857), T-48387, B.L.; Rev. Dale, “Fast Sermon for the Mutiny in India preached at Bosney Sussex on the afternoon of the 7th Oct 1857, Par252/7/3, West Sussex Archive; “Indian Mutiny: A Prayer for Peace” (London: George Edward Eyre & William Spottiswoode, 1857), ORB 30/95, B.L. 74 Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol. 3, pp313-314. 75 “Service at Crystal Palace.”

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perceived trauma and unprotected states of those widowed by the Mutiny. The poignant resonance resulted in profound empathy from the public for the widows’ suffering.

Further, the opportunity to succour the women through subscription to the relief fund provided a tangible outlet for both personal and the national pain.

It became the expressed duty of all individuals to support these women who, as the media intoned, had been “deprived of their natural protectors,”76 and were now

“bequeathed to [the care of the nation].”77 Myrna Trustram has argued that, in comparison to state relief, which was regarded as degrading and impersonal, philanthropic undertakings that “sprang from the generosity and conscience” of the

“simple and great people of the nation” were considered “ennobling and purifying to the recipients.”78 Thus enlivened and mandated by the sympathy of the nation, the Relief

Fund, rather than the state, was ostensibly to take the place of the women’s providers and protectors, their late husbands. In reality, however, this spirit of guardianship was illusory. Similar to other large philanthropic endeavours such as the Royal Patriotic Fund, the Relief Fund could provide a conditional safety net only after state relief and all other resources were exhausted. More specifically this included War Office pensions from the

Royal Bounty, the Indian Government’s Lord Clive Fund, Compassionate Fund, and

Meritorious Pension as well as several East India Company Widow and Orphan funds to which either officers or civilians subscribed. Contingent firstly on the widows’ unmet need from the afore-mentioned (or personal income) and secondly on class-specific actions and attitudes from them, the Relief Fund was the option of last resort to which

76 The Times, October 20 1857. 77 Morning Chronicle, September 25 1857. 78 Trustram, 186-187.

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widows could apply. But it was not an insignificant alternative. Thanks to the engagement and generosity of the British public, it was an option of sizeable proportions.

However, the liberality of the subscribers was balanced by the economic prudence of the Relief Committee administrators. Although relief was “to be given … to every person of whatever rank who [had] a just claim upon the sympathy and assistance of the

British people,”79 it was to be supplementary only. With a heterogeneous group of widows from all ranks of military personnel from the British and Indian armies, East

India Company employees, civilians and missionaries, potential recipients were particularly diverse as were their means of support. Combined with private income, the gratuities, pensions and annuities payable by the British crown, the Indian Government, and/or EIC Funds (Military and Civil) provided various avenues of relief for widows. In accommodating this mixture, early resolutions quickly established that without superseding “the assistance which was … to be given by the Government, by established

Widows’ and Orphans’ Funds, or by the Relations of the Sufferers,” support was “to enable sufferers to live with frugality in their respective states of life until other means of subsistence [were] available.”80 As both inclusive (every person, every rank) and conditional (just claim, frugality, respective state of life), the Relief Fund reflected for widows an overlap of Victorian social norms and expectations and existing military pension guidelines. While it acknowledged the profound impact on all classes, and more particularly the ladies, most importantly it also assured the public that the status quo would be maintained. In fact, by following rather than leading with its relief, the fund

79 Indian Mutiny Relief Fund, Report by the General Committee of the Fund for the Relief of the Sufferers by the Mutiny in India, Appendix B, February 15 1858, ZCCF/31, Cheshire Record Office. 80 Ibid.

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administrators took the opportunity to further reinforce class boundaries. Although they addressed perceived inequities and gaps between and within the various agencies of support, their regulations also established different expectations regarding the financial need and the deservedness of the widows of officers as opposed to those of soldiers.

Although these deficiencies included the ‘obvious’ need for relief and its regulation for soldiers’ widows, they also recognized the lesser known disparities between the British and Indian Army pensions for widows of officers. In addition, the diverse claims from the widows of missionaries and other civilians each required validation and classification. Despite the strength of national sympathy behind the fund, there was no attendant desire for more latitude or increased contingencies for the women who applied for support. The standards for the widows which dictated merit and worth were applied as usual by the established pension funds and were largely adopted by the

Relief Fund. For the deceased men, however, the distinctions regarding manner of death, ostensibly followed by the British War Office, were blurred by the Indian Government and largely ignored by the Relief Fund.

The nature of the husband’s military service and his circumstances of death had long been critical considerations for both the British and the Indian Armies.81 As Patricia

Lin has observed, early nineteenth-century benefits for military families were based solely on the husband’s military service while the women’s “qualities and contributions were unimportant.”82 Although by mid-century the widows of military men were required to prove that they deserved support by establishing their personal merit, the manner of the

81 Royal Warrant: Widows Pension Regulations, 1856, WO 43/975, N.A.; Nicolas Duffy, Gunner, private papers, Army Pay Book, 1849-1860, IOR: Mss Eur A-88, B.L. 82 Patricia Lin, “Extending Her Arms: Military Families and the Transformation of the British State, 1793- 1815” unpublished dissertation (Berkeley: University of California, 1997), 208-209.

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life and death of their husbands was still critical for the women left behind. In addition to the men’s service records, pension allowances routinely distinguished between men killed in action or dying of wounds sustained in battle and those who died of illness.

While a Royal Warrant issued in July 1857 had shortened the requirement of an officer’s time served from seven to five years before their widows qualified for a pension, the

British War Office continued to require an investigation of each deceased officer’s service record and circumstances of death before approving a widow’s pension application.83

Generally unable or unwilling to make this distinction, Indian pension officials considered most Mutiny deaths in the most valorous light. The deaths of officers killed in action had long been honoured differently than their deaths from other causes. However despite the vast majority of officers and soldiers dying from sunstroke and sickness

(9,000 of 11,000),84 there was less distinction than usual made in pensions paid by the

Indian Government to widows of soldiers and officers in its army which arose from the mutiny. Although the Court of Directors initially considered circumstances of their husbands’ deaths in widows’ applications, the change of policy early in 1858 granted pensions reserved for families of officers killed in action to those also falling victim to exposure and hardship due to the mutiny.85 While there were still claims disallowed, the broader latitude extended by the Court of Directors resulted in the award of pensions to widows of officers who had died from a range of causes. In July 1858, the Birmingham

Daily Post observed that when awarding pensions there had been little distinction made

83 Widow’sPension, WO 43/975, N.A. 84 Edward Spiers, The Army and Society: 1815-1914 (London: Longman, 1980), 134-135. 85 India Office, Court of Directors, Bengal Military Fund, Home Correspondence, Jan 7 1858, IOR:E/1/308, B.L.

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between the officers killed in action and those who had been murdered.86 However, pensions were awarded when officers had died in less valorous manners. Although Sarah

Graham’s husband Lieutenant James Graham committed suicide,87 Lieutenant Fullerton

“walked out a window in his sleep” and fell to his death,88 and Captain W Beatson died of sunstroke,89 each of the widows was awarded a pension from the Indian Government.

Elizabeth Moyle’s circumstances became particularly egregious when her husband

Captain J G Moyle was court-martialed and cashiered in December 1857. Sent back to

England in disgrace aboard the Genghis Khan in January 1858, he died en route. Left destitute with three small children, she was granted a small pension of £45 in

“consideration of her distressed condition” one year later. 90 While it was far from an adequate living allowance as Elizabeth was forced to live with her widowed mother, arguably it provided a much appreciated supplement to other income. That it was granted at all is an indication that she, rather than her disgraced husband, was the object of consideration.

Correspondingly, scant attention was paid in the regulations of the Relief Fund to ascertaining the manner of life or death of the men, whether military or civilian, who had died in the imperial conflict. The sacred image of the men “pouring out their blood”91 or

86 “Indian Pensions” Birmingham Daily Post, July 5 1858. 87 India Office, Meritorious Pension,IOR: L/AG/21/16/15; “Ship passengers” Hampshire Advertiser May 15 1858. 88 Maria Germon, Journal of the Siege of Lucknow:An Episode of the Indian Mutiny ed. Michael Edwardes (London: Constable, 1958), 92-93. 89 Colonel Henry Vibart, private papers, c.1859-1874, “Annual Pensions,” IOR: Mss Eur F 135/40, B.L. 90 Morning Chronicle, January 20 1858; Morning Chronicle, April 29 1858; India Office, Special Pensions Granted by Court Directors, IOR:L/AG/30/10, B.L.; Meritorious Pensions, IOR: L/AG/21/16/15. Two years after receiving the pension, Elizabeth was certified insane and the pension was paid to her mother, herself a widow, Manchester Times, March 15 1851; Jackson’s Oxford Journal, June 3 1820. 91 The Service at the Crystal Palace, Broadsheet of C. H. Spurgeon’s Day of National Fast and Humiliation sermon, T-48387, B.L..

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the chivalric ideal of the officer who fought “the battles of his country [while he] held his child in his protecting arms”92 which were published and celebrated were ample proof of the men’s worthiness and masculine identity. The less glamorous deaths due to dysentery and cholera received little coverage or notice.93

The widows on the other hand continued to be both officially and unofficially vetted. As noted in previous chapters, the widows were expected to exhibit respectable decorum and were criticized for levity, among other things, while still in India. During her passage back to England, Louisa Compton took issue with a “merry” widow “whose husband had been taken from her side and murdered.”94 However, once in England, the intense interest to which the first refugees from the mutiny to arrive were subjected resulted in approving reports of the dress and demeanour of the bereaved passengers.95

As appearance and conduct were integral to respectability, it was the first indication of the worthiness of the widows.

The British Army’s Royal Bounty for an officer’s widow could be withheld in the

“case of any misconduct” which rendered her “unworthy,”96 and the Indian Army

Military Pensions to which officers contributed could be denied to widows if they chose to pursue a life of “notorious incontinence.”97 Widows receiving support from the Relief

Fund were warned that immoral conduct would not be tolerated and could result in termination of their allowance. Not only were the women responsible for continuing to

92 Morning Chronicle, September 24 1857. 93 Spiers, Army and Society, 135; Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British adventure, empire and the imagining of masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994), 95-104. 94 Louisa Compton private papers, 1858, IOR: Mss Eur A.39,B.L. 95 Illustrated London News, September 26 1857; Hampshire Advertiser, September 26 1857. 96 Widows Pension Regulations, 1856, WO 43/975. 97 F C Clark, East India Register and Army List for 1853 (London: Wm Allen & Co, 1853), lxv, lxxxviii.

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prove themselves deserving of support, their actions were also viewed as an ongoing testament to their late husbands. In addition to the caution against “a state of incontinence,” widows in receipt of annuities from the Bombay Military Fund forfeited all claims if, according to the directors of the fund, they lived “in a manner discreditable to the memory of [their] husband[s].”98 As pensions from these funds were the result of mandatory premiums paid by the officers, the questionable lifestyle choices ostensibly made by the widows could arguably be viewed as disregard for both their late husbands and the men’s provision for their wives. In regulations adopted by the Relief Fund, the

Royal Patriotic Fund for widows of the Crimean War stated that “no woman was to continue to receive relief if she should ‘by profligate conduct dishonour the memory of her husband.’”99 By placing the responsibility on the widow’s actions to be a memorial to her late husband, she was to become a living gravestone, a signifier of his death and the medium by which he was remembered and honoured. Her pension or allowance had been

‘earned’ by her late husband’s service and consequently she continued to be supported by him and was expected to demonstrate the appropriate loyalty.

As this fealty changed when a widow remarried, it is not surprising that her pension allowances generally ceased. However, the British and Indian Armies, and the

East India Company provided for a second (or subsequent) widowhood by reinstating either the original pension or, if the second husband’s death also qualified her for an allowance, the higher of the two pensions.100 In the absence of further conditions she was

98 Ibid, lxxxviii. 99 “First and Second Reports of the Royal Commissioners of the Patriotic Fund, P.P. 1857-8” p.p. 33, quoted in Trustram, 176. 100 Widows Pension Regulations, 1855, WO 43/975, N.A.; Samuel Brown, Report on Bengal Military Fund (London: Charles & Edwin Layton, 1869), 208; Fund for the Benefit of the Widows and Families of

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ostensibly supported by the higher ranked but it is arguable that by her exemplary conduct she could/would be honouring both/all previous husbands.

Neither the regulations for British nor Company pensions addressed the possibility of a widow’s clandestine remarriage while continuing to enjoy her pension income. This was not only fraudulent but there was arguably a whiff of bigamy in the situation where a widow simultaneously enjoyed benefits from two husbands. However, in August and September 1857 the cases of two widows of officers charged with continuing to receive pension funds from the East India Company (at least one being the

Lord Clive Fund) after re-marrying illustrate the opportunities available for women and the potential legal impotence. In both cases, charges were dropped when it was revealed that the women were living with men who were married to someone else, making the women’s marriages with them null and void and the women still widows.101 While it was legal for the women to collect their pensions as a widows, there was arguably a moral issue that it must be assumed was pursued by the pension administrators. Although, as

Myrna Trustram has indicated, women were “often viewed sympathetically as innocent victims of deceitful men”102 there was little defensible about this practice. They were either complicit in an illegal marriage (which would there confirm valid widow status) or fraudulently misrepresenting themselves (if they believed that they were married) as they continued to claim a widow’s pension. In the case of Mrs. Charlotte Knox, one of the accused, the man with whom she was living, Mr. Richard Cross, was charged with

Deceased Officers and Clerks in the East-India Company’s Regular Home Establishment (London: Cox & Wyman, 1859), 13. 101 The Preston Guardian, Aug 29 1857; Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, September 25 1857; Daily News, August 27 1857. 102 Trustram, 184.

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felonious marriage nineteen months after charges against her were dropped.103 While there is no indication of any subsequent action to suggest the social cost to either of the women for living with someone else’s husband, the cases demonstrate that officers’ widows were not above using the system.

Possibly as a pre-emptive measure against fraud, the regulations of both the

Bombay Military Fund and the Indian Navy Fund did allow widows to retain ! of their annuities during a subsequent marriage104 and, similarly, for a period of two years (1856-

1857) the Bengal Military Fund continued to pay widows 1/3 of their benefits when they remarried.105 Although the latter may have also been preventative, it was introduced during a period of financial re-structuring which raised subscription rates and reduced the rates of annuities. Arguably, it was believed that in allowing widows to retain some pension, they would be encouraged to re-marry thus lightening the drain on pension funds. It may also have been considered a concession to the subscribers for the higher subscription rates and lower allowances. Available for only two years, the policy was discontinued when it was deemed to be financially burdensome even though few widows

(only seven who had remarried were receiving benefits in 1860) had taken advantage of the option.106

Although secret marriages were arguably not viewed as a concern for the higher ranks, there was a considerable level of concern for Relief Fund administrators that soldiers’ widows would so indulge. The Royal Patriotic Fund had allowed application for

103 The Times, March 11 1859. He was subsequently acquitted and an unsubstantiated family source indicates that they did indeed get married. 104 F C Clark, ed. East India Register and Army List for 1853 (London: Wm H Allen & Co, 1853), lxxxv, xci. 105 Brown, Report of the Bengal Military Fund: 1869 (London: Charles & Edwin Layton, 1869), 55. 106 Ibid., 55-56; Memo, n.d., Official Memoranda from 1857-1869, Financial Department, IOR/L/F/5/168.

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re-admission to the fund after subsequent widowhood.107 But they had neither required notification of second marriages nor specified any penalties if the widow concealed her new marital state and continued to receive an allowance. While it is not clear whether this became a problem or it was simply believed to pose too strong a temptation for the soldiers’ widows, the Relief Fund administrators felt it necessary to tighten the regulations around remarriages. The widow was allowed to resume a portion of her allowance on second widowhood providing her second/subsequent marriage had not only been reported but had been approved (presumably beforehand) by the committee.108

Further cooperation was ensured by the £10 which the fund issued to widows for a “new start.” To this paternalistic incentive the added threats of prosecution and permanent expulsion from the fund if she did not report her remarriage also provided strong disincentives.

The case of Ellen Ready demonstrates the administration of the fund, public engagement with soldiers’ widows and both the women’s circumscription and their agency. Widowed by the death of her husband Private Patrick Ready in July 1857, Ellen left their five year old daughter with a missionary in Madras and returned to England. As the recipient of 2 ! shillings a week from the Lord Clive Fund and 5 shillings a week from the Relief Fund, the widow had an income of £18 per annum. One year after her husband’s death she married Samuel Spurling who she had known for only a few days, on the basis that he claimed to be from her husband’s old regiment and had an annual income of over £40. While she was initially reluctant to marry, the character references

107 First and Second Reports of the Royal Commissioners of the Patriotic Fund Presented to Parliament (House of Commons printer, Mar 22 1858), 39. 108 Treasury, “Allowance to Widows” IMRF Regulations, TS18/343, N.A.

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that she solicited from soldiers’ wives were sufficiently favourable to convince her not only to marry Spurling but to pay all the marriage expenses. Directly after the wedding,

Spurling deserted his new bride taking the £10 which she had been given by the Relief

Fund. Ellen brought her situation before the courts and her destitute circumstances became the focus of the judicial system. Reported in several London papers, the proceedings also prompted an unsolicited response in the form of letters and small donations from the public. Awarded one half of Spurling’s pension which was in reality only £18 a year, her income was reduced to £9 from the former £18 which she had been receiving and when she refused to return to him, despite the sympathy of the court, she was subsequently consigned to the workhouse. Six weeks later Ellen was back in court with information that Spurling had a wife living in India. Although she apprised the

Relief Fund administrators of this information, they refused her request to be reinstated, citing the £10 marriage settlement as her final assistance. However, at the subsequent written request of the judge, they reversed their decision and agreed that she be conditionally reinstated until the £10 was repaid and at that point her previous pension would be restored. In addition, the judge also agreed to plead her case with the secretary of the Lord Clive fund.

The pathos of Ellen’s situation resulted in public sympathy and donations which the judge collected to go toward repayment of the £10. However, despite his sympathy, the judge would not consign the money to her keeping and refused the request of a philanthropic organization to help her further. He believed that she had been helped enough and although she had been “grossly imposed upon,” she had also “acted with considerable indiscretion in marrying a recruiting sergeant of whom she knew so little in

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so hasty a manner.”109 While there is no mistaking the inherent paternalism in both the sympathy and the chastisement of the judge as well as the responses of the Relief Fund, her identity as a soldier’s widow had cachet with both the authorities and the public. Her late husband’s valiant service and sacrifice for his country and her respectable appearance and speech were the key signifiers which, as Trustram argues, the Victorians saw as worthy of philanthropy.110 However, although she demonstrated agency both in her refusal to return to Spurling and her actions subsequent to learning about his previous marriage, Ellen was not considered capable of financial acumen. That she had acted unwisely in trusting Spurling was further proof that soldiers’ widows (and wives) needed instruction and supervision.

As evinced by Ready’s case, sympathy did not negate the requirement for additional surveillance and guidance of these women and a special sub-committee of the

Relief Fund was appointed to consider the circumstances of the soldiers’ widows and orphans. The inherent concern for nurturing and/or guarding the women’s morality and respectability was evident not only in the committee’s supervision of their second, or subsequent, marriages but in their oversight of the widows’ industriousness. As Myrna

Trustram has argued, the perceived dangers of ‘charity’ threatened to pauperize soldiers’ widows if they were allowed to be idle. To ensure they were not thus debilitated, the

Relief Fund tightened the regulations adopted from the Patriotic Fund to establish

109 Morning Chronicle, August 13 1858; Lloyds Weekly Newspaper, August 29 1858; Times, October 16 1858; Morning Chronicle, October 21 1858; Lloyds Weekly Newspaper, October 24 1858; Morning Chronicle, October 25 1858. 110 Trustram, 164.

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rewards for women who demonstrated “honest industry.”111 Concern that the women would conceivably “live in idleness on the Fund” dominated the ordinances and widows could be struck off the books if they did not “go to service or assist to maintain

[themselves]”112 when deemed capable of doing so. Although going to work could result in their allowance being suspended, they were eligible to be reinstated if and when their work ended “properly.” In addition, upon receipt of a certificate of merit from their employers, the Relief Fund rewarded the women for working, with a gratuity of 4 or 6 guineas each year. Not only was a guinea worth slightly more than a pound (at twenty- one shillings, it was £1 1s.) it was not widely used in currency exchange and was associated primarily with luxury items,113 possibly giving it an even more desirable cachet. As allowances for the soldiers’ widows ranged from £13 to £18 per annum, this was not a negligible sum.

However, the latitude with which these regulations appear to have been interpreted and enforced can be extrapolated from the 1859 Relief Fund Report which listed 490 widows of soldiers on annual allowances and only 26 widows of the same in domestic service.114 It is arguable that the Relief Fund once again used the guidelines established by the Patriotic Fund which stated that “relief [would be given to] widows who from want of health, or for the infancy or number or helplessness of their children are not able to maintain themselves.”115 Nevertheless, the sub-committee’s stated belief

111 Trustram, 169-187; Treasury, “Allowance to Widows,” Fund for the Relief of the Sufferers by the Mutiny in India, TS 18/343 N.A. 112 Treasury, “Allowance to Widows”. 113 Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England 2nd ed. (London: Greenwood Press, 2009), 30. Guineas ceased being minted in 1813 arguably making them somewhat scarce as well. 114 Daily News, July 5 1860. 115 First and Second Report of Patriotic Fund, 33.

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that going into domestic service would improve the widows’ comforts and prospects placed the administrators firmly within the ethos of the mid-Victorians which encouraged industry and frugality and provided assistance to help the poor stand on their own.116

While it was the duty of the public to give, it was the responsibility of the fund administrators to encourage and reward industry and self-reliance,117 and to allay fears that the nation’s philanthropy would be abused.

No comparable test of respectability was considered necessary for officers’ widows receiving assistance. Early in its organization, the fund administrators recognized the disparity between the pensions and allowances for widows and orphans of the British

Army and those of the Indian Army.118 Pensions from the Royal Bounty for which the former could apply were lower than the annuities paid from the Military Funds to which it was compulsory for the Indian Army officers to contribute.119 In addition, the Indian

Government administered the Lord Clive fund which provided support for widows of the

Indian Army on a charitable basis and also awarded Meritorious Pensions to widows of

‘deserving’ officers. Viewing the circumstances of bereavement to be equal, the Relief

Fund administrators sought to put all the officers’ widows on the same financial footing by supplementing the pension paid by the British War Office.120 As the more aristocratic

Royal officers had long viewed the officers of the Indian Army with condescension, 121 those widows of the former who were in need of the Royal Bounty and the Relief Fund

116 Frank Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 112. 117 Trustram, 177. 118 Treasury, Mutiny Relief Fund Correspondence, TS 18/343, NA. 119 The Times, February 18 1860. 120 Treasury, IMRF Correspondence, TS 18/343 N.A. 121 J. M. Brereton, The British Soldier: A Social History from 1661 to the Present Day (London: The Bodley Head, 1986), 80.

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supplement suddenly became the ‘poor cousins.’ To allow them to maintain their dignity, the administrators also adopted the practice of the Patriotic Fund not to publicize the names of the women who were receiving help.122

On the other hand, the Relief Fund administrators believed that mendicant positions were reversed for widows of the Indian Army who were left with large families, particularly those with predominantly boys. This was in spite of the Military Orphan

Funds to which it was compulsory for officers to contribute and from which children were subsequently entitled to annuities on their fathers’ deaths. As each of the three

Presidencies established and administered separate funds, subscription rates and annuities differed between them. However, all funds adopted methods to ensure that females could be supported until marriage or death, rather than an established age limit. The Bengal

Military Fund differentiated between girls and boys early as from six to eighteen years of age girls received £45 while boys were paid £40 p.a. Although the latter also received a final grant of £63 when they turned nineteen, girls continued to receive a reduced annuity

(£35) until they married. If their marriage was approved by the fund directors, girls also received a dowry of £150.

The Madras and Bombay funds were administered without dowries but also provided options for continued annuities beyond eighteen for daughters. The extra expense was funded through higher subscription rates for females (in the Bengal Fund, three rupees per month for daughters and one rupee for sons) and reflected the reality that

122 Indian Mutiny Relief Fund, Letter from Calcutta Sub-Committee, November 4 1857, ZCCF/31, Chester Record Office; First and Second Reports of Patriotic Fund, 13.

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many daughters would not marry until after twenty-one or at all.123 While not large, the annuities were a source of guaranteed income for unmarried daughters which arguably could be used to supplement the household income of their widowed mothers.124 Aside from the additional sundry benefits for daughters, the Military Funds provided significant support for widows with allowances between £15 and £30 for children under seven and between £22 and £45 for ages seven through eighteen (to twenty-one for Madras

Fund).125 Unlike the widows’ other pension income, earned ostensibly through the service and sacrifice of the deceased officers, these benefits were, in effect, part of mandatory insurance plans established by the Indian Army but funded by the men themselves.126

In addition to these annuities, the widows receiving the Indian Government meritorious pension also received children’s allowances. However, while the

Compassionate Fund of the Royal British Army paid specific amounts per child, meritorious pension support for children of Indian Army officers was capped at a maximum amount established by a percentage of the deceased officer’s wage, a liability for widows left with large families. For instance, Eliza Lumsden, whose late husband had been a Lieutenant, was eligible for a maximum of £100. As her pension was £60 she could only receive £40 in total for her children, despite the established amount of £14 per

123 Samuel Brown, Report on Bengal Military Orphan Society and Valuation, 30th April 1866 (London: Charles and Edwin Layton, 1873), 123,126-132; F. Clark, The East-India Register and Army List for 1845 (London: Wm H Allen & Co., 1845), 473-480, 621-622. 124 Geoffrey Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, 1851-1875 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 281. Best argues that the “dependant daughter” was essential to the mid-Victorian home. 125 Clark, East-India Register, 479-480, 621-622; Brown, Bengal Military Orphan Society, 126-132. 126 Brown, Bengal Military Orphan Society, 174; Brown, Bengal Military Fund, 57. Due to the substantial mortality which not only created heavy demand for annuities but drastically reduced the numbers of subscribers, the Indian Government committed to paying over 75% of the liability incurred from the mutiny.

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child of men of that rank. Lumsden’s four children were allocated £10 each until her eldest was no longer eligible (18 for boys and 21 or marriage for girls). Even then, she would receive marginally less than £14 for each child (just over £13 for each).127 With six children, the widow of Lieutenant Sir Norman Leslie was initially granted only £6 10s per child, less than half of the £14 which was allocated for the orphans of that rank. This policy was applied despite the rank of the late officer. Thus even the widow of the celebrated Brigadier General Neill was also given less than full allowances for her seven youngest children in order for her to stay within the (somewhat more generous) limit allowed for his rank.128

Given these graduated amounts for large families and the larger annuity for girls from the Bengal Military Orphan Fund, it is arguable that the Relief Fund administrators felt it necessary to grant assistance only to those widows with more than one son as they were concerned with “adequately educating the boys.”129 It was a policy for which

Isabella Fulton would have been grateful. As the widow of a Captain, she was entitled to a meritorious pension of £70 for herself with the family maximum of £150. This allowed

£13 # per child until her oldest (son) reached eighteen, when she would be given the full allowance of £16 for each of her five remaining children. With six children under eight years of age (five of them boys), it would have been a full decade before her maternal load was lightened.130 The purpose of the Relief Fund supplement was to help launch her

127 India Office, Court of Directors, “Home Correspondence,”, IOR:E/1/308, B.L.; The Times, January 1 1858. 128 Ibid. 129 Treasury, Mutiny Relief Fund Correspondence, TS 18/343, N. A. 130 India Office, Meritorious Pensions, IOR:L/AG/21/16/15, B.L.; India Office, Court of Directors, “Home Correspondence,” IOR:E/1/308, B.L. It is likely that she was also eligible for an additional £125 p.a. for herself and £200 p.a. in total for her six children from the Bengal Military Fund.

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sons: if she had been blessed with daughters, there would have been no assistance. In

May 1860 the fund reported that it was supplementing the income of 132 officers’ sons, an expense estimated at £6,985 before they all turned 18. Beyond the major expense of

£50 allotted for an outfit for each boy the widows were given an average of £4 per son

(£1 less than the £5 difference of the Bengal Military Fund allowances between girls and boys). Ostensibly maintaining their focus on equity, although there were 133 officers’ daughters enumerated there was no supplement from the fund provided for them.131

Similar to the Military Orphan Funds, both the Compassionate Fund of the British

Army and the Indian Government widow’s pension paid allowances for daughters until they turned 21 or were married. While figures for the Bengal Military Orphan Fund suggested that in mid-century 27 to 36 percent of women between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five who had received Indian Pension Funds had not married, the numbers were considered too low by the report’s author.132 As such, given a slight upward adjustment, the figures have some resonance with the revelations of the 1851 Census that 42 percent of women between the ages of twenty and forty were unmarried.133 However the expectation of marriage, as reflected in the actuarial calculations for orphaned officers’ daughters supported by the Relief Fund (with no living parents), was even lower as it determined that only twenty percent of the girls would marry.134 Arguably this figure would be higher for those girls who had the networking advantages of living with a

131 Third Report of the Indian Mutiny Relief Fund, London Daily News, July 5 1860. 132 Brown, Bengal Military Orphan Society, 21-23. 133 Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments:The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 1-4. 134 Daily News, March 25 1862. Although the girls were fully supported until age 18, they received 75% of their former allowance until married. This would indicate that the percentage was calculated on their marriage at any age. The same actuaries calculated 4% of the widows (or sisters) of officers and 10% of soldiers’, seamen and marines to remarry.

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widowed mother. While, admittedly, both circumstances and opportunity varied a great deal, many middle-class mothers were both the initiators and gatekeepers for the marriage of their daughters.135 For a widow, if her finances were limited, the role carried greater import.

While no precise figure is available, it is clear that many of the officers’ daughters did not marry and continued to receive a portion of their former pension. Without supplemental earnings it was not enough to be self-sufficient and it is arguable that many of the widows and their daughters continued to live together in order to consolidate income. Needless to say, for officers’ widows, even those in receipt of Military Fund annuities, a large family of predominantly girls could prove more of a long term hardship than one that had more boys. Although the goal of the Relief Fund administrators was to assure that recipients could maintain their “station in life” and to “place the widows and orphans of officers of both services on the same footing”, their measures for parity provided a short term solution.

In addition, while their support for large families with several boys helped widows educate and launch their sons, it begs the question as to why those administering relief felt that the Indian Army widows required more assistance than the widows of the

British Army. Arguably any of the latter who had been forced to apply for pensions from the Compassionate Fund for their children had the same limited financial resources as the

Indian Army widows. Although it is beyond the scope of this study, a closer examination of the Relief Fund committee members may reveal divided sympathies between the ‘old

135 F.M.L.Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900 (London: Fontana Press, 1988), 103; K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846-1886 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 319; Buettner, Empire Families, 225.

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Indians’ and troops of the British Army and their respective dependants. Given the friction which at times existed between the two, it is arguable that this could have influenced some of the committee’s priorities.136 That said there is no indication that their priorities were publicly questioned. In addition, the Relief Fund may have privileged the sons of the Indian Army officers as they believed that, despite penury, the sons of the

British Army officers had other resources such as familial connections that would provide career opportunities which were not available to the former.137

Beyond the officers, in an examination of the Relief Fund’s efforts to help soldiers’ widows, another inequity emerges. Though the administrators felt that soldiers’ and sailors’ widows were “peculiarly entitled to consideration”, there is no evidence that, as they had done for officers’ widows, they made allowances for the extra source of income available only to the Indian Army widows. Those whose husbands had served in either the Indian or the British Armies were equally eligible to receive an allowance from the Relief Fund while only the former could apply for a Lord Clive Fund pension. The latter was calculated as ! of the half-pay rate of their late husband’s rank. The amount was not inconsiderable as for a private’s widow it supplemented the Relief Fund by half again (£13 to £19.6.0). Although Indian Army officers’ widows were eligible for this pension as well as soldiers’ widows, the grant of a meritorious pension to many of the former who had been widowed during the mutiny superseded any support from the Lord

Clive Fund. As such it is conceivable that a considerable portion of the 774 widows in

136 The differences between the armies had deep roots as the purchase system of the British Army resulted in military rank being considered property or investment which was not the case in the officer ranks of the Indian Army. 137 P.E.Razzell, “Social Origins of Officers in the Indian and British Home Army: 1758-1962), British Journal of Sociology vol. 14 no. 3 (Sept 1963), 248-260. Although somewhat dated, this comparison of the two armies provides insight into their respective demographic compositions.

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Britain at the end of 1858 who were receiving pensions from the fund was of the soldier class.138 Therefore, as it was very likely that the Relief Fund was the only support for soldiers’ widows of the British Army, the financial inequity between the widows of the two armies could have been (relatively) significant.

Compared to the officers’ and soldiers’ widows, the widows of civilians had no claim on military contingency funds. The early communication of the Relief Committee to the British public anticipated that thousands of non-military individuals139 (including an unknown number of widows) would require aid. While initial reports indicate a total of £663 in donations to a small number of widows of railway officials, clergymen and traders,140 by the end of 1858 the Relief Fund had dispersed £2,697 to just six widows of clergymen and twenty-six widows of ‘uncovenanted’ civilians,141 the latter from the lower rungs of administrative positions.142 The subsequent annual report ceased to differentiate between widows of officers and widows of civilians. As many of the civilians had been granted special pensions from the Government of India, the Relief

Fund administrators augmented only those who had inadequate means for “their position

138 Daily News, July 21 1859; Ipswich Journal, July 23 1859; Lloyds Weekly, July 24 1859. 139 Indian Mutiny Relief Fund, Report by the General Committee, February 1858 Appendix A, p.14, ZCCF/31, Cheshire Record Office. 140 Ibid., 31. The General Summary indicated donations to 8 widows and relatives of Railway Officials, 2 widows and wives of Clergymen, and 8 widows and relatives of traders. 141 The Times, April 11 1859. As the amounts given were cumulative totals, this included 1857 and 1858 donations. 142 Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1995), 37; David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 41. Covenanted civil servants were young men who had been educated for civil service in India and signed a ‘covenant’ with the East India Company attesting that they would not trade for personal gain nor accept ‘corrupt gifts’ or make ‘corrupt bargains.’ Uncovenanted had neither the training nor had signed a covenant, relegating them to lower positions, less security, and fewer prospects. In Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country Vol. 80 (July 1869), 719.

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in life”143 as they had done for the widows of officers. But beyond the careful individual scrutiny initially given each application neither the widows of civilians nor officers were subject to the close monitoring that the regulations for soldiers’ widows required. The onus was primarily on the widows of soldiers to prove they deserved the generosity of the public.

Class notwithstanding, all these women represented and were remnants of both domestic loss and imperial chaos. Although Britons could not restore the widows’ marriages or homes, they could provide support, specific to rank or class, for those who proved worthy. In doing so, they were recreating order from the disorienting and distressing disorder of the Mutiny. Six weeks after the Relief Fund in London had been organized, the Times noted approvingly the “unanimity of feeling and purpose” which had prompted the “sympathy [and] … the flow of benevolence” from the British public.

It was in their words “an almost unprecedented national reunion.” 144

Although scholarship regarding philanthropy has established that the tradition of

“co-operative benevolence” (which brought classes into contact) and its ready response to a “dramatic emergency or national crisis” was not unusual,145 the immediate and generous response was noteworthy. As the material expression of almost the entire population, the flow of funds into the Relief Fund followed the trajectory of insecurity and alarm experienced by the British public. Although subscriptions continued to be

143 “3rd Report of IMRF,” Daily News, July 5 1860; Treasury, Indian Mutiny Relief Fund Regulations, TS18/343, N.A. 144 The Times, October 14 1857. 145 F.K.Prochaska, “Philanthropy” in Social Agencies and Institutions, Vol 3 Cambridge Social History of Britain: 1750-1950, ed. F.M.L.Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1990), 366; David Owen, English Philanthropy, 1660-1960 (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard U.P.,1964), 176.

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forwarded to the Relief Fund until 1863,146 £343,000 of the eventual total contributions of £433,000 had been received within five months of the fund’s establishment at the end of August. Of this amount Britons had contributed £315,510, £280,749 of which had been received by the Central Committee by November 24.147 As most of the regional committees had met during September and October, it is arguable that the majority of the funds had been pledged during those anxious months.

By November 1857 there was a sense in Britain that the crisis in India was waning. With news of the recapture of Delhi and the anticipated relief of Lucknow, celebration of British heroism began to replace expressions of outrage. By mid-

November, Prime Minister Lord Palmerston boasted that no nation could equal the people of the British Isles in duty, deed or zeal.148 In December, a week before reports of the successful evacuation of Lucknow reached Britain, the Glasgow Herald optimistically believed that the “fortunate progress of affairs in India” gave them latitude to review the mutiny and “generalize on the … events [of] the last six months.”149 One day before Christmas, as news of the relief of Lucknow arrived, the Daily News celebrated the “triumphant re-assertion of British supremacy,” the re-establishment of their prestige and the security of their empire.150 Committees such as Cheltenham and

Bath announced the closure of their subscription lists in January 1858 only four months

146 Papers in connection with the Indian Mutiny Relief Fund, GD 260/6/4/1 N.A.S. 147 Indian Mutiny Relief Fund, “Report of IMRF” February 15 1858, ZCCF/31, Cheshire Record Office; Daily News, November 26 1857; Morning Chronicle, November 26 & 27, 1857; The Examiner, November 28 1857. Aside from Britain and India, subscriptions came primarily from British Dependencies, British residents living elsewhere, the Channel Islands and Europe (heads of state, aristocrats, and municipalities). 148 Hampshire Advertiser, November 14 1857. 149 Glasgow Herald, December 16 1857. 150 Daily News, December 24 1857.

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after they had been opened, having raised £2646 and £4216 respectively.151 In the first six months of 1858 the number of newspaper accounts dropped significantly from the flood of reports from India which had saturated the media between July and December 1857.152

Responding to reports from Britain, in May 1858 William H. Russell wrote acerbically,

“I see the wise people at home have determined the war is over. But many an Englishman must shed his blood, and many a pound must be spent, ere peace comes again.”153

By January 1859, reflecting on the past year, one newspaper felt confident enough to judge it as a “successful but lingering campaign … [that had] followed … the desperate struggles of the previous [1857] summer and autumn”154 Similarly, the

Aberdeen Journal referred to the previous year as “the year of recovery from the effects of the Sepoy revolt,”155 and the Hampshire Advertiser noted William Russell’s recent report about the “spasm of dullness” from which India was suffering.156 Anticipating the official cessation of the conflict (three months before it was announced) the Relief Fund administrators established 31 March 1859 as the date beyond which no casualty would be considered eligible for the fund’s support. That week, the Hampshire Advertiser observed that “the excitement of the rebellion [had] ceased … and [they had] returned to the dull

151 Cheltenham Looker-On, January 16 1858. 152 Although not strictly a qualitative analysis, a key word search of The Times and nineteen other British newspapers indicates that between July and December 1857, there were 5,105 reports regarding the mutiny in India while January to June 1858 shows 2,284 articles and July to December 1858 registers 1,158 items. By 1860 there were 1,552 for the entire year and in 1861 there were 614. These totals include not only news articles of the conflict and casualties and Relief Fund related information but advertisements which included art, music and even perfume created to memorialize or celebrate aspects of the conflict. 153 William Howard Russell, My Diary in India: the year 1858-9, Vol II (London: Routledge, Warne & Routledge, 1860), 26. 154 Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, January 3 1859. 155 Aberdeen Journal, January 5 1859. 156 Hampshire Advertiser, January 1 1859.

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routine of business.”157 Although the fund’s administrators kept the subscription lists open until 31 December 1859, little was added to the balance of the previous year,158 a clear indication of the waning sense of urgency reflected by the papers.

Lethargy or complacency seems to have replaced the early urgency and funds which had been pledged failed to be forwarded as it was believed that there was a surplus.159 The last £300-£400 of Preston’s fund was forgotten and lost until finally resurrected fifteen years later.160 The subscriptions collected in Leeds were never submitted to the Central Committee as the general fund was believed to have been oversubscribed.161 After a series of unfortunate incidents with the local subscriptions, Mr.

Babtie, secretary of the Dunbarton Relief Fund, contacted the General Committee after hearing the fund administrators did not require further contributions with expectations that the funds would not need to be sent. The fund administrator’s unequivocal response emphasized the necessity for receiving all possible funds in light of the long term commitments due in large part to the preponderance of young widows.162

The seeming success (or surfeit) of the fund also made it a target for other causes.

During collection for the Indian Famine Relief Fund in 1861,163 subscribers to the Mutiny

157 Hampshire Advertiser, April 2 1859. 158 “IMRF Report to October 27, 1858,” Daily News, November 2 1858; “IMRF Report to December 31 1858,” The Times, April 11 1859; “IMRF Report to December 31 1859,” The Times, July 5 1860. Although the reports do not break down sources of revenue per year, they do provide a clear indication of the diminished income after January 1858. As opposed to the £343,000 which was subscribed to that date, only an additional £90,000 was added by subscription to the fund in the next 23 months. The total subscriptions for 1858 were £85,000, much of which came from the colonies. The 1859 report states that revenue for that year was £13, 345 but as this included subscriptions, interest and repayment of loans, it is clear that the amount of donations was small. 159 Caledonian Mercury, April 17 1861. 160 Preston Guardian, February 28 1874 and March 14 1874. 161 Leeds Mercury, April 13 1861. 162 Papers in connection with Indian Mutiny Relief Fund, GD 260/6/4/1, N.A.S. 163 The first of four famines in India in the last half of the nineteenth century was in North India and between 1860 and 1861 left two million dead. In total, the four famines claimed about twelve million lives.

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Relief Fund in several locales pressed for the “large un-appropriated balance” from the latter to be “applied toward alleviation of distress” of the former.164 While one writer deemed it a “fitting … demonstration of Christian magnanimity … [that funds] originally subscribed for relief of persecuted [could] be applied to succour the persecutors,”165 the

General Mutiny Relief Fund administrators refused and countered by stressing the long term demands on the fund and their responsibility to use the funds for the purpose for which they were subscribed.166 However, both Huddersfield and Sunderland were convinced of the legitimacy of redirecting the funds they had not yet remitted to the central Mutiny Relief Fund Committee. At the behest of one of the principal contributors,

Huddersfield’s Mutiny Relief Committee met and unanimously agreed to give the £900 plus collected three years earlier for Mutiny relief to the Famine Relief Fund.167

Similarly, the Famine Relief Committee in Sunderland summoned a meeting of its

Mutiny Relief subscribers for their consent to recover what they expected would be only half of their Mutiny Relief Fund of £300 from the liquidators of the failed District

Bank.168 Despite the transfer of these funds and the appeals for a perceived surplus, most communities established famine relief committees and collected subscriptions without reference to the Mutiny Relief Fund. It is evident however that they were largely motivated by what Colonel Baird-Smith, secretary of the Calcutta Famine Relief

Committee, termed the “noblest revenge” which he predicted would result in “gratitude toward benefactors and admiration for a religion that teaches men to be so God-like in

164 The Times, April 25 1861; Caledonian Mercury, April 17 1861; Daily News, May 2 1861. 165 Daily News, May 2 1861. Writer was quoting Colonel Baird Smith, the secretary of the Calcutta Famine Relief Committee. 166 Caledonian Mercury, April 17 1861; Times, April 25 1861. 167 Leeds Mercury, April 9 1861; Daily News, April 10 1861; Bengal Catholic Herald, May 18 1861. 168 Newcastle Courant, May 17 1861.

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their actions.” 169 Regrettably it is beyond the scope of this study to examine the tantalizing and overt connections between these funds, particularly in light of the post-

Mutiny ambivalence regarding the conflict which Herbert argues traumatized the British population.170

As evidenced by its evocation in famine relief efforts, although the publication of its annual financial report allowed the subscribers ongoing access to its operations, keeping the Relief Fund in the public eye also attracted discussion regarding its assets and administration.171 Beyond its perceived surplus, petitioners for famine relief decried the “frittering away” of funds for salaries and other “paid agents.”172 However, despite opposing beliefs about whether there was an excess or a paucity of funds,173 or if it was being carefully or extravagantly administrated,174 there was little commentary regarding the recipients themselves or their amount of support. One year after the conflict was declared at an end, The Times “looked back upon the terrible crisis of 1857” and basked in the knowledge that the nation had “saved [their] Empire … and [had] assumed the obligations of those who fell.”175

There has been much excellent scholarship that has examined Britain’s response to the mutiny. Noteworthy studies conducted by Nancy Paxton, Patrick Brantlinger, Mary

Procida, Gautam Chakravarty, Sara Suleri, Jenny Sharpe and, most recently, Christopher

Herbert have examined the literature which subsequently re-wrote the Mutiny to contain,

169 Daily News, May 2 1861. The writer was quoting Baird-Smith the Secretary of the Calcutta Famine Relief Committee. 170 Herbert, War of No Pity. 171 Leeds Mercury, July 3 1860. 172 Liverpool Mercury, May 4 1861; Daily News, May 16 1861. 173 The Times, November 8 1858; Leeds Mercury, July 3 1860; Morning Chronicle, July 5 1860; Caledonian Mercury, April 17 1861. 174 Daily News, July 6 1860 and May 2 1861; The Times, June 30 1860; Morning Chronicle, July 5 1860. 175 The Times, June 30 1860.

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explain or exploit it. As earlier argued, the focus of most of the work has been on the women who died. Examining women who lived included the corollary of their rescue by

British white men. Of these works, Herbert comes closest to explaining the seeming trajectory of reaction from the British public that peaked in the fall of 1857. His argument regarding the ambivalence of the British with respect to the presence and roles of both men and women in the Mutiny suggests that rather than the self-satisfaction and waning interest that seem apparent in the British public in 1858, it was unease and trauma that pervaded the population.176 Although it is beyond the time-line and scope of this study to examine this in detail, it is a backdrop against which to set the response of the British to the widows who returned to England. It could be argued that in depending on the Relief

Fund (or even the front-line pension funds) these women too were rescued by British men. But that is both reductive and dismissive of the engagement of women in both the local and the central Relief Fund committees, as well as mid-Victorian philanthropy. That said, in acknowledging and accepting the obligation to support the widows, the duty of the late husbands had passed to the subscribers and administrators of the funds. While these women remained largely faceless and symbolic of the nation’s trauma, they were not without agency as will be examined by the next chapter.

176 Herbert, War of No Pity, 6-7, 16-17, 20-24, 273-281.

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Chapter 5: Going Home: Where are the Heroines?

Early in 1859, the Daily News reprinted a letter from the Homeward Mail, asking what had been done for the “Ladies of Lucknow” as the writer could find no indication of any acknowledgement of their services. Beyond the trauma of all women who had experienced the threat and destruction of the mutiny, the letter focused on the “four ladies

[who had trod] in the footsteps of Florence Nightingale, unselfishly disregarding their own heavy and life-lasting sorrows.”1 Particularly noted were the widows (three of the

“four ladies”2), Polehampton, Gall, and Barbor, whose conduct in the face of their individual bereavements, the writer believed, elevated them above Julia Inglis who, in addition to being “justly honored” by the Queen, had also been spared her husband in the conflict and had shared the honors bestowed on him.

While four of these five women were married when the siege began, within weeks

Polehampton, Gall, and Barbor were widows. Not only did Inglis’s husband survive but he was subsequently promoted to Brigadier General and made a KCB in honour of his services as Commander-In-Chief during the siege of Lucknow. Although it was Inglis who initially called attention to the noble actions and attitudes of the four ‘Ladies of

Lucknow’ in his official military report of the siege,3 it was his wife whose return was widely reported and celebrated in a melodramatic poem entitled The Lady of Lucknow:

1 Daily News, January 5 1859. 2 The fourth lady was Miss Birch, the daughter of Major Frederick William Birch of 41st Bengal N I who was killed on June 9 at Seetapore by mutineers. 3 Extraordinary, Calcutta Gazette, December 9 1857, IOR: Mss Eur C506/10. This report was widely printed and excerpted.

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(on the arrival in England of Lady Inglis).4 Her audience with the Queen three weeks later was the first of a number of royal events to which Lady Inglis was invited and when she and her husband returned to India in December 1858, their grand farewell at

Southampton included the accolades which had continued to publicly define her.5

The letter looking for the ‘Ladies of Lucknow’ appeared shortly after Inglis and her husband departed for India. These widows could and should, it stated, be looked on

“in part [as] public property” of England and honoured as such.6 While the writer’s query was specifically regarding the widows who had been the subject of official accolades following the relief of Lucknow, the question may well have been more broadly applied.

Although the ‘Ladies of Lucknow’ were identified by name, they also represented scores of others whose husbands had died in the Mutiny. In addition, as the previous chapter argued, these widows and orphans for whom the coffers and hearts of the British public had opened symbolized the trauma of the nation.7 This chapter examines to what extent the bereaved women regarded themselves as imperial/national symbols and/or public property. Further, it will consider their agency as such, including where the widows went after leaving India. Although all the British women caught in the Mutiny were elevated as representatives of English womanhood, the survivors’ currency as symbols differed from those who died in the conflict. Unlike the dead who were mourned as martyrs, those who survived as widows became living victims and heroines. Like the dead women they could

4 Daily News, February 25, March 4 & 27 1858; Belfast News Letter, March 27, April 9 1858; Hampshire Telegraph, February 27, March 27 1858; Caledonian Mercury, March 27 1858; Bristol Mercury, March 27 1858. 5 Liverpool Mercury, April 19 1858; Morning Chronicle, April 19, June 14 1858; Daily News, April 22, June 12, December 6 1858; Birmingham Daily Post, April 23, May 17 1858. Intriguingly, a ship entitled ‘Lady Inglis’ also appears in shipping news in late 1858. Newcastle Courant, November 5 & 19 1858. 6 Daily News, January 5 1859. 7 Claudia Klaver, “Domesticity under Siege: British women and imperial crisis at the siege of Lucknow, 1857” Women’s Writing Vol 8, No 1 (2001), 30.

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be and were easily objectified. However, beyond the invocation and symbolism for which the deceased are often useful, the widows’ survival and their degrees of subjectivity gave them a multivalence which made it more difficult either to appropriate or define them.

Much has been written about the vengeance demanded and exacted for the women who died during the Mutiny and the attenuated use of the purported atrocities against

British womanhood which were ascribed to their deaths.8 They were the martyrs in whose name the men fought and carried out retribution and for whom imperial sovereignty was justified. Locations such as the Memorial Well at Cawnpore (Kanpur) became “an iconic site of memory” for the British9 for the next century and, despite the lack of evidence of torture, mutilation and rape, many subsequent “Mutiny novels” continued to perpetuate the early atrocity narratives. This objectification of the women who were killed owed a great deal to the fact that their voices could be invoked and appropriated and has been closely examined by scholars such as Nancy Paxton and Jenny Sharpe. However, the interest that the rape narrative has garnered has tended to over-shadow the work done on the women who survived, traumatized and dispossessed but, nevertheless, un-molested by the mutineers.

8 Jenny Sharpe, “The Unspeakable Limits of Rape: Colonial Violence and Counter-Insurgency” Genders 10 (1991), 25-46; Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 4,57-102,113-118; Nancy Paxton, “Mobilizing Chivalry: Rape in British Novels about the Indian Uprising of 1857” Victorian Studies (Fall 1992), 5-30; Nancy Paxton, Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830- 1947 (London: Rutgers U.P., 199), 109-136; Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2005), 37-41; Kate Teltscher, “ ‘The fearful name of the Black Hole’: fashioning an imperial myth” in Writing India, 1757-1990: The literature of British India ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1996), 45. 9 Stephen Heathorn, “Angel of Empire: the Cawnpore Memorial Well as a British Site of Imperial Remembrance” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History v 8 n.3 (Winter 2007) http://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed August 15, 2010); Elizabeth Buettner, “Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia in Post Colonial Britain and India” History and Memory Vol 18 n.1 (2006), 5-42; Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988) 199-223.

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While Jane Robinson’s focus is solely on the British women of the Indian Mutiny, most of whom survived, Veronica Bamfield also includes a number of women who experienced the conflict in her examination of the British Army wife. Further, Alison

Blunt’s work on the writing and spatial location and dislocation of British women under siege in Lucknow is complemented by the work of Penelope Tuson and Claudia Klaver.

Unfortunately their valuable focus on the women in Lucknow has not yet been balanced by work done on the women who experienced the Mutiny in other parts of India.

Although in large part this is due to the rich extant diaries of the women in Lucknow it is also arguable that the siege of Lucknow continues to be the yang to the yin of the

Cawnpore massacre in the mutiny narrative, giving these women greater symbolic meaning. In spite of this seeming disproportionate focus on Lucknow women, the studies which have examined written diary records of the female survivors have significantly augmented both mutiny and colonial scholarship. However, beyond considering all the women as commensurate, the widows themselves as symbols of sacrifice and survival have a unique contribution to make. The iconic stature accorded to them has considerable value both in their collective symbolism and their individual response.

Much of the excellent scholarship which has examined the diaries and publications of women caught in the conflict of the mutiny has focused on the voices of the women and their subjectivity both during the siege in Lucknow and in their subsequent evacuation.10 While there is consensus that the women’s writing was focused

10 Penelope Tuson, “Mutiny Narratives and the Imperial Feminine: European Women’s Accounts of the Rebellions in India in 1857” Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol 21, No 3 (1998), 291-303; Alison Blunt, “The Flights from Lucknow: British women traveling and writing home, 1857-8” in Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, ed. James Duncan (London: Routledge, 1998), 92-113; Blunt, “Spatial Stories under Siege: British women writing from Lucknow in 1857” Gender, Place & Culture Iss. 7 (2000),

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on their domestic identities, Pat Tuson has also noted the expressions of female solidarity and self-reliance in the absence or infrequent presence of husbands. Rather than seeking sanctuary in nuclear familial groups, the women and children of the officers at Lucknow formed enclaves of various sizes in the most protected spaces in the Residency compound, often sharing quarters with strangers or mere acquaintances. Within these enclaves they delegated responsibilities and established routines necessary for both physical and spiritual survival. While this included the domestic imperatives of cooking, cleaning, and childcare, they also, when necessary, attended to their own spiritual needs.11 “Cut off from the dominant ideology of Victorian patriarchy,” they found new strengths and new independence even as they carried out their domestic duties.12

In addition, Klaver and Blunt both argue that the women’s writings reveal their awareness of their symbolic importance as survivors in the imperial landscape. However, the two scholars differ on when this occurred. Klaver argues that it was articulated early in the conflict, several weeks before they were besieged, while Blunt sees it emerge in the women’s diaries only after they were evacuated and became more aware of the full magnitude of the conflict and the nation’s concern. The former maintains that the women used their journals throughout the siege to reconcile their on-going domestic roles with the subjectivity of a new imperial identity, that of a ‘Lucknow Lady’. Blunt, on the other hand, believes that only once free of Lucknow did the women see themselves at the heart of an imperial crisis. She argues that this happened after the women had received and

229-246; Blunt, “Embodying war: British women and domestic defilement in the Indian Mutiny, 1857-8” Journal of Historical Geography 26 (2000), 403-428; Klaver, “Domesticity under Siege” 21-58; Jane Robinson, Angels of Albion: Women of the Indian Mutiny (London: Viking, 1996); Veronica Bamfield, On The Strength: The story of the British Army wife (London: Charles Knight and Co, 1974). 11 Case, 80; Inglis, 60-61. 12 Tuson, 298; Klaver 31.

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read previously undeliverable letters from concerned friends and family and gained greater knowledge of the fighting and the casualties, particularly at Kanpur. Although

Klaver posits that during the siege they struggled to maintain their symbolic role as an emblem of British moral superiority and the civilizing mission,13 as Blunt has stated, there is more evidence that the importance of doing so was more obvious to them once they more fully realized what they had escaped and how the British public had responded to their plight and their survival.14 This new perspective was crucial for their appreciation of the extent to which Lucknow had become the nation’s crucible.

While it is arguable that Klaver presupposes too much early awareness of their iconic status as the ‘Lucknow ladies’,15 she has nevertheless identified a crucial imperial characteristic in the narratives of those widowed while under siege. As she has perceptively demonstrated, crucial to all the women’s identities as wives and mothers was the survival or death of their husbands.16 Klaver argues that in losing their husbands, they “lost one of the most important narrative threads” around which the other women continued to “weave their feminine subjectivities.”17 She posits further that in losing their identity as wives, they became not just widows but symbols of national sacrifice. Those widowed, Klaver writes, became “tragic heroines in the narrative of imperial crisis,” a new state of being that consolidated their private domestic identity with the “symbolic widowhood that figured an empire in crisis.”18 This national register in regard to widows of the Mutiny was different than that of widows of previous military campaigns and a

13 Klaver, 23-24. 14 Blunt, “The Flight” 103-104. 15 Klaver, 24. 16 Ibid., 44. 17 Ibid., 37. 18 Ibid. 30.

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significant departure from previous responses. Although wives in India had shared some degree of danger with their husbands, the minimal military threat to them had resulted in an expectation of domestic security not possible for wives traveling with the troops during a war.19 Rather their dominant fears were of sickness, disease and separation from children sent back to Britain. While the Crimean War had created an incipient awareness of military widows (primarily those of soldiers), it was the confluent destruction of domesticity added by the Indian Mutiny that created the new national and imperial crisis.

The similar experience of the British women caught in the Afghan revolt fifteen years prior to the Mutiny had been primarily viewed through a military lens. With the exception of published extracts from the captive Lady Sale’s letters to her husband, the widows tangential to the newspaper reports and, thus, the public.20 However, in 1857 the scale of domestic destruction was not only greater but an unsettling addition to the climate of unresolved national insecurity and the new sense of responsibility to military widows, both legacies of the recent Crimean War.

Although it is not clear precisely how Klaver is applying her analogy of widowhood, the perception of loss and vulnerability which permeated the British public, the media, and the government was akin to the bewilderment and fear expressed by women whose security and identity had vanished with the death of their husbands.

Although, as previously argued, the importance of this symbolism was felt by the nation, it was not evident in the memoirs and diaries of the women while under siege. Rather,

Jenny Sharpe’s argument that the “English women who describe their Mutiny experience

19 Byron Farwell, Queen Victoria’s Little Wars (London: W.W.Norton & Co., 1972), 83. 20 Saul David, Victoria’s Wars: The Rise of Empire (London: Viking, 2006), 41, 60, 67-71; Farwell, 9-11; Pat Barr, The Memsahibs: The women of Victorian India (London: Secker & Warburg, 1976), 57-67; Bamfield, 81-85.

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… primarily expressed a concern for staying alive”21 is more demonstrable although considerably understated. As the focus of Sharpe’s valuable analysis was primarily the discourse surrounding the English women killed in the Mutiny (silenced by death), the voices of those who survived were peripheral to her examination. Despite her oversimplification of the women’s responses,22 she has accurately indicated the presentism from which the women wrote. Although there is little evidence that, as Klaver argues, the women under siege were aware of themselves as imperial symbols, the widows’ writings were more imperially (or militarily) fraught than indicated by Sharpe’s analysis. Additionally, although the deaths of their husbands had fundamentally changed their status, the “important narrative thread” which Klaver deems lost continued to be used, albeit now woven around a deceased husband rather than a live one. As such it was in concert with the symbolism subscribed to by the nation. While they continued to define themselves by their late husbands, for the British public the women could be representatives of whom and what they and the empire had lost. However, until they were evacuated and aware of “their place at the heart of the imperial crisis,”23 their writing focused primarily on their personal loss.

Although Klaver has indicated that the married women’s narratives were woven around their husbands, it is important to note that even after the men’s deaths the widows continued to anchor their accounts around their husbands. From the domestic locus and security of marriage, having been transformed from wives to widows by the conflict, their new reality was inextricably wound into the imperial mission. The day after her

21 Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 68. 22 Klaver, 25-26, 53. 23 Blunt, “The Flight,” 104.

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husband was killed, Katherine Bartrum could “almost forget [her] sorrow” in the “high terms of praise” with which her late husband’s death were described. In the intensity of those first moments of awareness of the heavy price she had paid, that he had fallen “at his post doing his duty” was as important as his attempt to rescue her and their son.24

Four months after Colonel Case’s death, Adelaide Case was stricken when Colonel

Berkely arrived to take command of the 32nd Regiment, the position to which her husband would have been promoted had he been alive. Joining the 32nd Regiment as an

Ensign in 1831, Case had moved up to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel by 1855. All his promotions with the exception of that to Captain had been without purchase due to the death of a superior officer. In her keen awareness that “it had always been his greatest ambition to command the regiment,”25 she grieved over Case’s ultimate failure to secure promotion to full colonel. The new commanding officer standing before her represented what she, William, and the military had lost. Like Katherine Bartrum, for Adelaide Case at that moment the imperial and personal were inextricable. Responding as such the women’s identities continued to be defined by their deceased husbands and despite the resonance of the military ethos in of their husbands’ deaths, the women were unaware of their own significance in, and to, the conflict. Similarly, Emily Polehampton was more fixed on her husband’s death and ecclesiastical legacy than in establishing her own imperial credentials. Further, for Bartrum, Polehampton, and Katherine Simons, theirs was the onerous responsibility to inform their mothers-in-law, a task in which rather than considering themselves as symbols of sacrifice they were the mediums of the message,

24 Bartrum, 59. 25 Inglis, 196.

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speaking to the women who would most likely feel the loss of their sons as keenly as they, the wives, did.

On the other hand, although they were not to know this until they had been evacuated, much of the helplessness and vulnerability felt by the British public was demonstrated through the solicitations and donations made primarily for “the widows and orphans”. Other examinations have argued the usefulness of the threat to the sanctity and domesticity of British women in inciting and justifying chivalrous retribution (arguably an oxymoron) from the military (which was largely supported by the British public) as well as countering the new demands for women’s greater political and social equality.26

The latter, as argued by Paxton, was facilitated by the narrative of British women needing to be rescued by British men. While there is little disagreement about how the perceived vulnerability and helplessness of the women supported retribution in India as well as

Victorian notions of British women being agency-less victims,27 closer analysis of the individual faces and degrees of agency possessed by surviving women illuminates a largely unexplored aspect of the conflict. As with the studies regarding those considered martyrs, an examination of survivors also needs to be set against the backdrop of the

British response to the Mutiny narratives which had been informed by both fact and

26 Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1992), 80; Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1993), 61-73, 85-102; Nancy Paxton, Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830-1947 (London: Rutgers U.P., 1999), 4-12, 109-136; Paxton, “Mobilizing Chivalry: Rape in British Novels About the Indian Uprising of 1857 in Victorian Studies (Fall, 1992), 5-30; Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1988), 203-205; Alison Blunt “Embodying war: British women and domestic defilement in the Indian ‘Mutiny’, 1857-8” Journal of Historical Geography Vol 26 Iss 3 (2000), 403-428; Mary A Procida, Married to the empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883-1947 (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2002), 111-135. Procida also argues that in India Mutiny narratives allowed Anglo-Indian women to, several decades later, construct a discourse of agency which justified their participation in the politics of the Raj. 27 Paxton, Writing, 112.

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fiction. However, beyond the new and immediate sense of national vulnerability and public duty as discussed in the previous chapter, a longer-term relationship must also be considered. To examine the subjectivity of widows in the context of their return to

Britain, it is also necessary to take yet another step back and look at how Anglo-Indians viewed and in turn were viewed by the British public.

In his discussion of empire and English identity, Ian Baucom has observed that after displacing itself in its empire, “a puzzled England returns as a stranger to itself.”28

While he is speaking metaphysically, the concept is applicable to the ambivalence with which Anglo-Indians experienced their return to Britain and how they were viewed.

Despite the range of valuable studies which have examined the response of the British public to perceived atrocities on the Anglo-Indian women, little attention has been paid to how Anglo-Indians, particularly women, were viewed in Britain prior to 1857. Although a great deal more study needs to be done, there is clear indication of a shift in the attitudes of Britons toward Anglo-Indians who returned to Britain throughout the nineteenth-century.

In her work on empire families, Elizabeth Buettner has devoted some attention to the mid-century change of attitude toward these returning expatriates. Early nineteenth- century commentaries typically viewed “so-called nabobs and others whose wealth and status flowed from overseas” as “vulgar upstarts with inappropriate social and political aims” and afflictions which were the result of a “dissipated Indian lifestyle.”29 Although

28 Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1999), 3. 29 Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2004), 219- 22; Durba Ghosh, Sex and the family in colonial India: the making of empire (New York: Cornell, 2006), 50-51.

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the opportunities for individuals to make immense fortunes in India had been greatly reduced through reforms of the East India Company by the early nineteenth century,30 those returning from India continued to be viewed disparagingly and with suspicion through the first decades of the 1800s. Nevertheless, as E. M. Collingham, Elizabeth

Buettner and Tillman Nechtman have argued, this “nabob imagery” faded in response to utilitarian and evangelical attitudes which “infiltrated all levels of Company administration.”31 Although, as Nechtman has further posited, the nabob was no longer viewed as a “cultural problem for domestic arbiters of British identity,” returning Anglo-

Indians struggled with the challenges of re-integration.

While there is considerable evidence that Anglo-Indians frequently gravitated to centres already occupied by repatriates, joining and forming communities which offered affordable and familiar environments,32 little has been written about how they in particular were viewed by the British population at large. As the target of Victorian novelists such as William Thackeray (himself of Anglo-Indian background) and Anthony

Trollope, they were frequently satirized33 in stock characters such as Jos Sedley in Vanity

Fair (1837). Thackeray, although born in India, was six when he left, never to return.

30 Philip Lawson, The East India Company: A History (London: Longman, 1987), 119-120, 128-130. 31 E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800-1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 50-59; Buettner, Empire Families, 221-222; Tillman W Nechtaman, “Nabobs: Defining the British Nation and the Indian Empire” (PhD Diss., University of Southern California, 2005), 407-409. 32 Buettner, Empire Families, 13-20, 188-238; Richard Smart, ed. The Bousefield Diaries: A Middle-Class Family in Late Victorian Bedford (Bedford: Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 2007), xviii-xix; Patricia Bell, “Aspects of Anglo-Indian Bedford” in Worthington George Smith and Other Studies, ed. Joyce Godbi (Bedford: Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 1978), 181-203. B.J.Moore-Gilbert, Kipling and “Orientalism” (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 42-45; Simon Potter, “Empire, Culture and Identities in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain” History Compass Vol.5 Iss 1 (2007),57; Nupur Chaudhuri, “Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain” in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1992), 231-246. 33 Rowland McMaster, Thackeray’s cultural frame of reference: allusion in the Newcomes (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s U.P., 1991), 111; Richard Mullen, “Trollope and the Pious Slippers of Cheltenham” Contemporary Review (February 2001); Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 73-107.

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Thus he had little direct experience of India but gained his knowledge from growing up in an Anglo-Indian community where “talk was chiefly about the land they had left.”34

As Bart Moore-Gilbert has argued, the novelist’s depiction of Anglo-Indians who returned to Britain suggests not only their oddity when compared to their metropolitan contemporaries but also their inability to adjust or readjust to life in Britain.35 Moore-

Gilbert’s assertion that this had been a common theme since the beginning of the century is echoed in the letters of Thomas Munro who in 1794 was contemplating a return to

England. He envisioned himself an alien “in the midst of a race of people unknown to

[him] … [with] Tea drinking and Card Parties and Suppers, and female conversations with interludes of Italian singers.” Four years after returning to England in 1808, Munro confided to his sister that he wished he had never left India as he “had but few acquaintances in [Britain and could] scarcely be said to belong to its society.”36 At the end of the century, Rudyard Kipling continued to express this ambivalence. His writing manifested a “double attitude towards the metropolitan homeland” which served as both an ideal for the exile and a place of deprivation for the repatriated.37

In mid-century, as Malcolm Allbrook has indicated, the “schools for ‘boys whose parents were in India’ and the guest-houses and hotels owned and patronized by ‘Indian people’” were established because “the long years of their Indian sojourns [had] they felt marked them off from other British people.” The Anglo-Indians were, Allbrook contends,

34 McMaster, 111. 35 Bart Moore-Gilbert, Writing India, 1757-1990: The literature of British India (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1996), 19-20. 36 Margot Finn, “Anglo-Indian Lives in the Later Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries” Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies Vol.33 no.1 (2010), 62-63. 37 B.J.Moore-Gilbert, Kipling and “Orientalism” (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 44-45; Buettner, Empire Families, 121-130, 180-182; David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 325.

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conscious and resentful that the “society they had been part of in India was considered uncouth, presumptuous and degenerate.”38 Driven by this desire for common experiences, tastes, language and often income, the insularity of Anglo-Indian enclaves became, as

Buettner argues, self-perpetuating. Although not everyone who returned from India sought out such communities, several localities including the London district of

Bayswater, Cheltenham Spa, Eastbourne, Edinburgh and Bedford offered “cultural comfort” with socio-economic viability for those with limited income, primarily pensions.39 By the 1840s, in contrast to the nabob-dominated image, retired Anglo-

Indians and officials, although regarded as more respectable, were often perceived as poor, proud and boring to those without colonial experience.40

As Buettner has astutely noted, most observations regarding repatriated Anglo-

Indians were of men (both those retired or on leave), relegating women, both married and widowed, to the shadows.41 However, there is evidence that women too felt disconnected. Believing it the best choice, Louisa Compton left India with her two young children in March 1858. Once in England, rather than resting in the refuge of England and care of new friends, she longed to return to the life and people she had left. Those who had befriended her in England formed an unfamiliar “world of itself” and a “life

[which] pleased her not.”42 Despite missing her loved ones (among whom arguably was

Abingdon, her husband), her failure to express the possibility of anyone joining her illustrates clearly her sense of exile rather than that of coming home. Having been raised

38 Malcolm Allbrook, Imperial Family: the Prinseps, Empire and Colonial Government in India and Australia unpublished PhD dissertation (Griffith University, 2008), 131-132. 39 Buettner, 208-209, 221-225. 40 Buettner, 222; Collingham, 200-201; Gilmour, 316-324. 41 Beuttner, 223. 42 Compton papers, IOR:Mss Eur A.39, B.L.

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in Trinidad, Compton’s geographical roots had been stretched more than the Anglo-

Indians who moved between India and Britain. After her marriage in 1853 Compton may have spent very little time in England before joining her husband who was a member of the Bombay Civil Service. Although it is not certain how quickly her return was facilitated, Compton was again residing in India in 1865.43 However, by that time she was a widow, her husband having drowned in 1862. By 1866 she brought her daughters once more back to England, this time somewhat more prepared to enter British society.

Renowned for her musical ability, Compton volunteered her time and talents for causes such as the Royal Seamen Orphan School, the Portsmouth Ragged School, the Hampshire and Isle of Wight School and Home for the Blind, and for the sick and wounded of the

Franco-Prussian War. Moving in a circle of illustrious artistic and literary friends, her country home welcomed such artists as Gustave Doré and her daughter recalled lunching with the eccentric novelist Ouida. In 1870, neither her social standing nor the fact that she was forty deterred Compton from volunteering with the incipient Red Cross Society to nurse the wounded of the Franco-Prussian conflict in both Versailles and Wiesbaden.

Although there is no indication that they were acquainted, Compton and Florence

Nightingale were both subsequently awarded the German Iron Cross and French Bronze

Cross in recognition of their contributions during the conflict, the former for her hands-on work in horrific conditions and the latter for her organizational efforts from England.44

They were not the only women to receive medals for their nursing efforts but possibly the only women who received both. While Anne Summers has noted the names of others

43 Compton collection, India Office Select, IOR: Photo 150, B.L. 44 Hampshire Telegraph, Apr 15 1871, March 16, April 6 1872, Sept 29 1875; Times, November 17 1911, June 29 1938; Lynn McDonald, Florence Nightingale at First Hand (Waterloo, Wilfred Laurier U.P., 2010), 92-93.

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who were accorded the honours, she has been frustrated by the lack of information regarding the British women who nursed in the Franco-Prussian War. Included in this anonymous group, despite her relatively public profile, Compton’s efforts (or rewards) were not publicly acknowledged. Contrary to most of the identified women who volunteered to nurse, there is also no evidence that she had prior experience with nursing or that she pursued it after the war.45 What is apparent is the agency that she exercised.

While she had brought her daughters back to Britain, she did not settle into an Anglo-

Indian enclave. Rather her participation in public (fund-raising) concerts, her eclectic circle of friends, her voluntary involvement in the horrors of warfare, and her daughters’ marriages to men who were not Anglo-Indians demonstrates that Compton was arguably not content to be fully absorbed into society unless it was on her terms.

A story written about an Anglo-Indian woman three decades later by Jeanette

Duncan, herself a memsahib, echoes Thomas Munro’s words. As the female protagonist boarded a ship for Bombay she expressed the “relief and solace … [to be] again among

[her] own people.”46 Whether her sense of well-being was due to her escape from attitudes of Britons toward Anglo-Indian women or the perception of Britons held by

Anglo-Indian women is a question which requires examination beyond this study.

However, it is instructive to consider the apologetic entitled The English Woman in India published in 1909 by Maud Diver. Born and raised in India but educated, married and residing in England, the author relied on her Anglo-Indian credentials to both acknowledge and defend the reputation of the memsahib. Initially appearing as articles in

45 Anne Summers, Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses, 1854-1914 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988), 133-142. 46 Sara Jeannette Duncan, “A Mother in India” (1903) quoted in Buettner, 17.

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the magazine Womanhood, she responded to “the unsparing criticism,” condemnation and

“judgment … of their Anglo-Indian sisters” by Englishwomen.47 Although she and

Duncan both wrote well after the mid-nineteenth century, it is arguable that this attitude of both the Englishwomen and the Anglo-Indian women had been in evidence, in some measure, at least since the 1850s when women had begun going to India in large numbers.48 Although scholars P J Marshall and Margot Finn allow some basis in fact for the so-called ‘fishing fleets’ of single women seeking rich husbands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,49 the estimated 250 European women in Bengal in 1810 demonstrates the paucity of British women in India earlier in the century.50 As

Collingham has astutely argued, the vastly disproportionate fewer European women (to

European men) meant that a ‘nabobess’ as clearly defined female counterpart to the nabob could not emerge. She further asserts that similar to their role as repositories of morality in British society, in India the women were to be the ultimate symbols of the civilized state of the West.51 By mid-century the combination of Victorian moral certitude which women represented and improved transportation meant that most women traveling to India were wives rejoining their husbands or daughters returning to families.52

In November 1857, the expectation that married women belonged with their husbands in India was implicit in Minnie Barnes’ disdain for the fuss made over Lady

47 Diver, Englishwoman, 5, 19. 48 Tuson, 293. 49 Margot Finn, “Anglo-Indian Lives in Later Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries” Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies Vol 33 No. 1 (2010), 58-59; P.J.Marshall, “The White Town of Calcutta under the Rule of the East India Company” Modern Asian Studies Vol. 34 No. 2 (2000), 311-312. 50 Collingham, 63. 51 Collinham, 36-43. 52 Marshall, “White Town” 311-312; Collingham, 50; Buettner, 5.

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Havelock as Havelock and her daughters attended a concert in England. Barnes “was of the opinion that [Havelock] had no business there” while her husband fought in India.

After Henry Havelock had died although Barnes felt some pity for the widow she also speculated that “perhaps she does not care.”53 It echoes the belief expressed by Frederick

Thesinger whose daughter Julia Inglis returned to India with her husband after leaving three young children with her parents. Thesinger concurred with Julia’s belief that “the proper place for a wife is by her husband’s side.”54 Fifty years later, Diver described the choice to be in India with one’s husband rather than in England with one’s children as

“the lesser of two evils.”55 Susan Bayley’s observation that “in imperial families … a woman “who went ‘home’ to be with her children was ‘selfish’ for failing to focus on her primary duty: care and support of her husband”56 resonates with the opinions of both

Barnes and Thesinger.

Duty aside, there was also a sustained perception of the lack of culture and respectable character traits such as industry, discretion and modesty in the women.57 In response to the query of a friend in England about the Anglo-Indians in Calcutta, Emily

Eden replied that she had met no “pleasing or accomplished” woman. Twenty years before the Mutiny, Eden’s assessment simply perpetuated the reputation of narrow parochialism for which Anglo-Indian society had been notorious for decades.58 Similarly, both Lady Falkland and Lady Dufferin, the wives of a Governor (1840s) and a Viceroy

53 Frank Barnes private papers, Letters of Minnie Barnes, 1857-1867, IOR: Mss Eur F/261,B.L. 54 Captain Richard Warner private papers, 1830-1862, IOR:Mss Eur B407,B.L. 55 Diver, Englishwoman, 46. 56 Susan Bayley, “Introduction” in Daughters of the Empire: A Memoir of Life and Times in the British Raj by Iris Macfarlane (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2006), xxxii. 57 MacMillan, 55, 113, 119,158. 58 Pat Barr, The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian India (London: Secker & Warburg, 1976), 11-12.

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(1880s) respectively, found the Anglo Indian societies of local ladies dull and uninteresting,59 an observation which no doubt was conveyed to those in Britain. Anglo-

Indian women also gained a reputation in England for gossiping, triviality, and materialism.60 The frivolity of many Mutiny widows that disconcerted observers

(discussed in earlier chapters) lent credence to the lack of substance of which Anglo-

Indian women were accused. The Cannings’ Aide de Camp John Stanley wrote irritably to his sister from Calcutta that the Lucknow women were “cheery as birds” and their clothes “vulgar and showy.”61 Captain Chardin Johnson was highly critical of the gluttony of the same ladies after their evacuation and indignant at the expedience of one who borrowed a carriage from a regimental chaplain and subsequently sold it rather than return it.62 Further, considering the trauma of their experiences and circumstances, the bravado and chatter of women seeking refuge in Allahabad and Calcutta was quietly noted with some surprise.63 Similarly, the perceived uncouth and petty behaviour of the women, many of them widows, on passages back to England served to confirm their fellow travelers’ conviction of the women’s lack of propriety. Louisa Compton found her fellow passengers “a horrid vulgar set” and after four weeks at sea concluded that she

“had never thought so ill of women” before being on the ship.64 Ten months later, a young officer returning to England expressed disgust at the lack of decorum and squabbling of the women about, among other things, whose rank entitled them to

59 MacMillan, 50. 60 Indira Ghose, Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze (Delhi: Oxford U.P., 1998), 72; MacMillan, 50. 61 Stanley papers, DSA/174, Cheshir Record Office. 62 Lieutenant Colonel Chardin Johnson private papers, 1857-1858, IOR: Mss Eur A 161/B, B.L. 63 Hare, Noble Lives, 315; Stanley papers, DSA/174 Cheshire Record Office; Spry. 64 Compton papers, IOR: Mss Eur A.39.

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precedence at the table. Although the women settled the argument themselves, their conclusion that the honour would go to the widow as her late husband had outranked their husbands (who were still alive) did not sit well with the officer. His doubt that widows held any rank65 was arguably driven by the official regulations governing precedence to which Anglo-Indians turned for their degree of importance.

Although the rigid adherence to status of rank in Anglo-Indian society has long been caricatured, it sprang from the perceived need to establish hierarchy (and arguably order) in a society where there was little class variance between the inhabitants. As

Gilmour observes, “no one was poor, and no one was very rich. There were no old people and no teenagers; the only children were infants under the age of 7 who had not yet been sent ‘Home’. … It was as if a society restricted in differences of class, age, wealth and profession, compensated by exaggerating the gradations of official recognition.”66 The defining document was a government publication called The Warrant of Precedence which took into consideration both military rank and the number of years in India. Thus a civilian who had been in the country for eighteen years was equal to a Lieutenant-Colonel but above a Major or a Civilian who had been in India for twelve years.

As the young officer enroute to England was aware, although the warrant accorded women the rank of their husbands, there was no stated accommodation for those widowed.67 Left unstated, it is arguable that it was a negotiated status. The widow on board the ship not only continued to identify herself by her late husband, but she was successful in convincing the other women to do the same. However, the ambivalence

65 Oswald, H.P. Diary, 1859, MS9009, National Library Scotland. 66 Gilmour, 77-79. 67 Asiatic Journal, February 1 1842; The Friend of India, May 10 1855, Gilmour, 77.

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expressed by the officer is an indication of how ephemeral precedence and rank could be for women. Beyond his observation on the insubstantiality of widows, his disgruntled commentary also includes the married women. While it is arguable that those with criticisms were predisposed to view the women through the lens of the unflattering but seemingly well established perceptions of Anglo Indian women, the tenor of indignation in the diaries and letters also registers a level of surprise and distaste at their actions.

Whether or not the lack of decorum had been anticipated due to prevailing stereotypes, all writers were voicing a private corrective to the sympathy-driven public accolades and admiration which, as previously argued, cast the women both as heroines and victims rather than the stereotypical memsahib. Lauding their demonstrated high and noble qualities, Lord Palmerston declared “the bravest soldier may think it no disparagement to be told his courage and his power of endurance are equal to those of an

Englishwoman.”68 His endorsement clearly resonates with Rosa Coopland’s assertion that many women had demonstrated greater presence of mind and fortitude than had the men during the Mutiny crisis.69 The organizational meeting for the Bristol Mutiny Relief Fund had high praise for the women who although accustomed to wealth and comfort had through their courage and endurance “done honour to the British name and to their own sex.”70

In addition to this public celebration of the strength of their heroism, their losses concomitantly made them defenseless victims. As such, reports of one of the first ships to arrive with refugees from the conflict compared the marks of great suffering and anxiety

68 The Times, November 10 1857; Hampshire Advertiser, November 14 1857. 69 Coopland, 116-117. 70 Bristol Mercury, September 26 1857.

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in the visages and apparel to the usual high spirits and lavish dress of female passengers coming from India. In addition the press expressed indignation at the intrusive questions put toward women “of good families and … the best society” on delicate subjects which could hardly be broached privately.71 However, this ostensible sensitivity of the press to the sensibility of the women did not preclude the public reports in newspapers of sufficient details of the women’s experiences to underscore both their losses and their newly celebrated heroism. Furthermore, as discussed in the previous chapter, solicitations for the Relief Fund were propelled by the rhetoric which focused on the sacrifice and vulnerability of the Anglo Indian women. It was, however, a relatively short reprieve from public criticism.

In April 1859 a correspondent from Bombay felt compelled to warn the public of the ill-effect that the misconduct of Englishwomen in India had caused prior to the mutiny and what it would continue to do unless curbed by the “pillory of public opinion.”

Allusions to Englishwomen’s excessive drinking and publicly consorting with Indian men are summarized as the “female immorality” which was a prelude to “the [1857] humiliation of the nation.” In addition, the writer provided egregious examples of inappropriately aggressive women, one who carried a horsewhip “to keep the gentlemen in order” and another who terrorized a “refined and accomplished lady” by appropriating the latter’s room in a traveler’s bungalow, relegating the poor woman and her children to a corner of the apartment for several days.72 More direct castigation was evidenced by the criticism of the Calcutta Review in September of the same year that “some of the

71 Illustrated London News, September 26 1857; Hampshire Advertiser, September 26 1857. 72 Belfast News-Letter, April 25 1859. The writer’s aspersions are accompanied by a Latin quote which in some contexts is used to allude to the dangers of wealth and luxury for women.

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Lucknow ladies [had] been polking [sic] to the tune of the ‘Relief of Lucknow’.” “Great trials” they continued “do not alter the character; they only manifest and to a certain degree modify it.”73

As such, endorsements such as Mary Vansittart’s assertion that any English woman was capable of courage and fortitude when faced with danger could be accepted as a temporary but unsustainable response.74 Not only does this demonstrate an underlying belief that the response of the Anglo Indian women had been temporary and they were showing their true colours once again, it indicates that the women’s actions continued to be scrutinized and were noteworthy when deemed transgressive. Further

Rosa Coopland’s distinction between the strong and the weak Anglo Indian women75 could be re-read in the light of Jenny Sharpe’s astute observation that the female bravery was judged in terms of moral strength and fortitude.76 However, while her argument is valid, Sharpe’s analysis of the praise for the women’s “heroism, endurance and bravery” relies primarily on responses to the women who died and retrospective histories about the mutiny.77 She neither addresses the women who survived and returned to Britain nor the immediate public response to them.

In addition to Sharpe, there is a wealth of post-mutiny scholarship which examines the place of women in the ‘new’ Indian ethos.78 While Paxton and others argue

73 Calcutta Review, quoted in Alison Blunt “Flight from Lucknow: British women traveling and writing home, 1857-8” in Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, ed. James Duncan (London: Routledge, 1998), 96. 74 Vansittart, discussed in chapter three. 75 Coopland, 116-117, discussed in chapter three. 76 Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: London, 1993), 70-73. 77 Ibid. 78 Herbert, War of No Pity; Buettner, Empire Families; Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of British India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Paxton, Writing; Chakravarty, Imagination; Procida, Married; Moore-

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that the vulnerability of women continued to provide a rationale for the mobilization of chivalry,79 Herbert teases out the unease and ambivalence which attended the women’s exposure and subsequent (vindictive) reaction to the Mutiny violence.80 Beyond this,

Procida also believes that Anglo-Indian women subsequently constructed a discourse of imperial violence in which they had been active agents. She argues that in order to counter the narratives which viewed women as “victims of Indian aggression” or

“dependants of virile British men,” female authors of both Mutiny novels and non- fictional accounts portrayed women as resourceful and valorous, creating an active role for the women.81 However, despite this range of analysis there has been minimal interest in the Anglo-Indian women who returned to Britain as widows and, as the letter writer

(who opened this chapter) observed, quickly disappeared from public view. Cast monochromatically as heroines or harridans, the individuality and subjectivity of these women are an integral but missing part of the Mutiny narrative.

Recent scholarship has demonstrated the value of examining “individual trajectories” that run “across and athwart state archived paper trails.”82 Both Linda

Colley’s study of one woman’s peripatetic life in the eighteenth century83 and David

Gilbert, Writing India; MacFarlane, Daughters; Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1995); Mary Procida, “Good Sports and Right Sorts: Guns, Gender and Imperialism” Journal of British Studies 40 (October 2001), 454-488. 79 Paxton, Writing, 109-136. 80 Herbert, War of No Pity, 239-272. 81 Procida, Married, 111-132. Among other works, Procida uses the Wagentreiber account of their family’s escape from the mutiny and the novels White Dove of Amritzir (1896) by Eliza Pollard and The Devil’s Wind (1912) by Patricia Wentworth. 82 A.L.Stoler, “Tense and tender ties: the politics of comparison in North American history and (post) colonial studies,” The Journal of American History 88, 3 (2004), 852 quoted in David Lambert & Alan Lester eds, Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2006), 3; Lambert & Lester, 3. 83 Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (New York: Anchor Books, 2008).

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Lambert and Alan Lester’s anthology which focuses on the movements of individual imperial subjects through different imperial spaces84 are what Stoler has termed “organic histories.”85 Although the “trans-imperial” movements studied in the Lambert-Lester collection focus on imperial careers and networks which often included multiple geographical loci in the British Empire, their work reinforces the value to imperial scholarship of recalibrating concepts of ‘periphery’ and ‘centre’ with ‘home’ and ‘away’ through the lives of individuals. More specifically for this study the recovery, in part, of the lives of individual Mutiny widows following their return to Britain not only adds to the Mutiny narrative but demonstrates the “mutually constitutive” dynamic recently explored by scholars of empire.86

In accordance with the binary that is being dismantled by these and other scholars,

Philippa Levine writes, it has been too easy to see ‘home’ as here and Empire as ‘out there.’ Burton has argued that domestic Britain may not only have been dependent on the empire but significantly constituted by it. The domestic sphere she adds must be conceived as “parliamentary politics, social relations or cultural mores.” In addition, as

Blunt has posited, ‘domestic’ must also be seen as embodied by the women who traveled between Britain and India, a moving target that also demonstrates the complex and contradictory links between ‘home’ and empire. Catherine Hall’s study of the shifting constructions of Englishness also illustrates the centripetal influences which acted on the

84 Lambert & Lester. 85 Stoler, “Tense and tender ties,” 852. 86 Alison Blunt, “Travelling Home and Empire, British Women in India, 1857-1939,” (PhD Diss., University of British Columbia, 1997); Antoinette Burton, “Déjà vu All Over Again,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 3:1 (2002), 2; Philippa Levine, “Preface,” Gender and Empire, Companions Series, The Oxford History of the British Empire, Philippa Levine, ed. (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2004), viii; Catherine Hall, Civilising subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination: 1830- 1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).

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metropole. Similarly, each Mutiny widow’s individual experiences and narratives brought the mutiny not just to Britain but in varying measure to the communities, whether familial or familiar, to which they returned. Further, this study includes four widows who were, fortuitously for them, in Britain when the conflict broke out. Of these, two had just returned from India and one was preparing to travel there.87 It is a reminder of how flexible (and elastic) the concept of domestic/imperial households needed to be and what it demanded of Anglo-Indian wives and mothers.88

Although those widowed while in Britain and those who returned to Britain as widows all experienced loss and grief and all left loved ones buried in Indian soil, each chose or was drawn into her own unique trajectory. As their subsequent lives followed discursive paths, the domestic/imperial imperatives shifted and though for many they remained inextricable, for most the domestic transcended the imperial. It is difficult, if not impossible, to extricate the deceased husband from his imperial profession/mission.

As widows they continued to honor their deceased husbands and were supported by pensions flowing from imperial coffers. To assume they therefore shared equal loyalty to the imperial cause is unsupportable. Susan Bayly’s observation that “India [for many] was not a cause but an instrument”89 reflects an attitude that requires more study; however, it is arguable that for the many Mutiny widows it articulates their new priorities given the demands suddenly placed on them.

87 Augustus Hare, The Story of Two Noble Lives vol 2 (London: 1893), 200-203; New Calcutta Directory, Ship Departures, March 11 1857; M.H.Ouvry, A Lady’s Diary: Before and During the Indian Mutiny (Lyminton: Chas T King 1892), 71.Regina McCallum and Isabella Anson left India shortly before the conflict and Isabella Barnard had planned to travel to India when it was cooler. 88 The term ‘Anglo-Indian’ itself is flexible and relatively used. Lady Canning as well as other Governor- General’s wives did not consider themselves ‘Anglo-Indian’ (see later discussion). 89 Bayly ed., “Introduction”, Macfarlane, Daughters, xxx.

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Cynthia Curran’s recent work on nineteenth-century middle-class widows in

Britain provides insightful and necessary scholarship in an area that has been greatly overlooked.90 Her focus on the precarious nature of a middle-class woman’s world when her husband died describes a bleak existence for those whose husbands were professionals. As Curran indicates, for these men the “delicate balance between inadequate incomes and the cost of living precluded any significant investment for the future.” While the expense of life insurance premiums and the instability of the insurance industry were deterrents to purchasing policies, the relatively few breadwinners who did insure themselves left payouts that, once invested, often realized insufficient annual returns. For instance, a £1,000 insurance investment at three percent yielded only £30 per annum, a paltry sum for a widow struggling to raise children. Likewise pensions and relief societies into which professionals paid frequently could not provide annuities at even a subsistence level for all the claimants. In addition, as Curran notes, for most widows of middle-class professionals, there was no ownership of land to fall back on.91

Furthermore, she argues, charities were often well meaning but ineffective and, contrary to social ideals, families often failed to provide support and protection for widows.

Curran’s work is, no doubt, a corrective for anyone who sees Victorian domestic middle- class ideals and philanthropy in an idyllic light. However while her research sheds light into the dark corners to which middle-class were often relegated, it is also illuminating to look at the options available to and the choices made by the Mutiny widows.

90 Cynthia Curran, When I First Began My Life Anew: Middle-Class Widows in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Bristol: Wyndham Hall Press, 2000). 91 Curran, 24-38, 143-146.

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In spite of the seeming prevailing lack of latitude which Curran describes, many of the women widowed by the Mutiny demonstrated considerable degrees of agency which included publishing accounts of their experiences, petitioning authorities for further funding or favours, and either living independently or remarrying. Some died tragically (young and old) while others lived long lives. In both significant and subtle ways, some continued to pay homage to the imperial/domestic life shattered by the

Mutiny. While admittedly not all of the widows of the Mutiny were of the same class, as widows of an imperial conflict that had traumatized Britain, they provide an opportunity to examine more closely the experience(s) of public widowhood that transcended but did not obscure class.

As previously discussed, the widows became living symbols of the shattering events of the Mutiny but as such they were also uncomfortable reminders of the less than valorous aspects of the conflict. The ferocity of retribution which included widespread killing, mass executions, and wanton destruction prompted John William Kaye, author of

A History of the Sepoy War in India, to write “what is dreadful in the record of retribution is, that some of our people regarded it not as a solemn duty or a terrible necessity, but as a devilish pastime, striking indiscriminately at the black races, and slaying without proof of individual guilt.” Although the murder of three captive princes by Major William

Hodson was justified by some, it was condemned by many and William H. Russell’s reports reflected his horror at acts “in violation of any minimal code of ‘chivalry’” and the almost casual sport that it became.92 Herbert argues that the possibility that “the

92 John William Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War in India, 1857-58 vol 2 (London: Allen, 1877), 403 [3 volumes 1864-1876] quoted in Herbert, 37; Herbert, 35-38, 46-48; 64-86.

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savage excesses of the British forces [could signal] essential characteristics,” was appalling to middle-class Victorians. Although his work does not address the public disappearance of the women, Herbert’s postulation that Britain suffered from introspective and retrospective trauma regarding both the harsh retribution of the military and the martial involvement of the women93 could explain, in part, why they did not continue to be lauded publicly. Although Russell’s indictment that Britons had prematurely declared victory was made in response to the apparent waning interest in the conflict, it is arguable that the diminishing engagement was, in part, driven by the desire to “efface as far as possible the [facts] of physical violence, which filled Victorian sensibilities with revulsion.”94 In addition, there is little to suggest that many of the women desired to be singled out as heroines. Perhaps they too just wanted to forget.

Nevertheless, whether it was too painful for the public or the women or both had simply moved on, for the most part, as the letter-writer indicated the women were quickly absorbed into the post-Mutiny fabric of domestic and/or imperial life.95 Yet even as they began quietly and privately reconstructing their shattered lives, some widows chose to memorialize their husbands publicly through published accounts of the men’s lives and deaths as well as their own experiences.

93 Herbert, 262-272; Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 98. Suleri’s use of the phrase “the derangement of maternity in Ango-India” refers to a memoir published half a century after the conflict. Although it resonates with earlier fears that Herbert explores, as a long-delayed retrospective it cannot be directly equated with the literature that was more concurrent with mutiny which Herbert discusses. 94 Herbert, 58-59. 95 While it is beyond the purview of this study, mutiny widows were located in locations other than Britain or India. A letter to The Times on August 13 1862 indicates that widows were being supported by the Relief Fund in Halifax, Nova Scotia and an 1892 report of the Fund published in The Times on March 11 1892 lists 11 widows of officers and 8 widows of soldiers still being supported in “India and Colonies.”

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Memoirs published quickly by Adelaide Case, Katherine Bartrum and Rosa

Coopland enjoyed very limited shelf-life while the Memoir, Letters and Diary of Rev.

Henry S. Polehampton on which Emily Polehampton collaborated with her brothers-in- law had a considerably longer run. The latter’s appeal over the former three was arguably due to a number of factors which distinguished it from the others. It was, as it announced, a story of an ordinary man who by simply doing his duty became a hero. Other heroes emerged from the conflict but although their military standing and prowess engendered respect, Polehampton (although a military chaplain) could more easily be identified as a self-made man. He was, the introduction intoned “an encouragement for others, [an example of] how dear and influential a man may become who without shining abilities, or high station, or wealth resolves by the help of God to do his duty steadily and unassumingly in his appointed sphere.”96 As such, Polehampton exhibited the Victorian manliness that, as John Tosh describes, “had to be earned, by mastering the circumstances of life and thus securing the respect of one’s peers.”97 The introduction concluded with an acknowledgement of Emily Polehampton’s true and faithful service to her husband and, after his death, the comfort she took in ministering to the sick and wounded. She was, as her brothers-in-law maintained, their brother’s legacy to themselves and to England,98 and part of his story rather than her own. Thus the memoir was at once, a eulogy for one man, motivation for other men, an example of wifely virtues, and an account of the mutiny, giving the publication a broader application than those written by Case, Bartrum or Coopland.

96 Polehampton, 3. 97 John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on gender, family and empire (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005), 86. 98 Polehampton, 35.

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In addition to what the women chose to include, it is important to see how they were presented to the British public. Despite the excellent analyses of the women’s diaries which were discussed earlier in this chapter, there has been no attempt to look at the publishing, reviewing or advertising of those that were subsequently published. A preliminary compilation of Case’s diary entries entitled Our Life in Lucknow was announced on 31 May 1858,99 but its title had been changed to Day by Day at Lucknow:

A Journal of the Siege of Lucknow by June 4100 when it went on sale. Although Case had not arrived in England before the middle of April 1858, hers was one of the earliest accounts available to the public. Thus while she protested that she had published her memoir under pressure from her friends, the personal struggle to make the decision that she described in her preface was arguably brief enough to allow publication within less than six weeks. Similarly, albeit six months later, Bartum also pointed to the expectation of her friends in convincing her to publish her account of the siege.101 Both women denied having any literary skill or pretensions; Bartrum claimed “simple truthfulness [in her] detail of the domestic occurrences,” and Case denied any attempt “to produce effect or aim at glowing description,” thereby hoping to escape literary criticism. That both works were publicized in like manner indicates that the publishers were not only complicit with the self-deprecation of the women but that they believed the public would be as well. Initially advertised on 25 December 1858, the Bristol Mercury described

99 Daily News, May 31, June 1, 2, & 3 1858. Also advertised in Morning Chronicle, June 2 1858. 100 Morning Chronicle, June 4 1858. Author was identified as “Mrs. Case – Widow of Colonel Case, 32 Regiment.” 101 Katherine Mary Bartrum*, A widow’s reminiscences of the siege of Lucknow (London: James Nisbet, 1858). *Although the book is not deliberately published anonymously, Bartrum’s name does not appear as the author in the publication information neither in the book nor in advertisements for the book. As it is not excised from the letters and diaries which the book contains, Bartrum was obviously not adverse to her name being known.

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Bartrum’s book as an “unpretending narrative” through which “the arm of the Lord was her stay,” while in its review of the “books of the week” the Examiner assured readers that as “the story [told] itself, no skill [was] required or employed” in the writing.102 One review of Case’s book more generously stated that it delivered what it promised, “a record of the hopes and fears and anxieties of the besieged” which with “the few particulars given” would be welcomed.103 While another reviewer from John Bull &

Britannia lauded her “unadorned recital of bravery and resistance,” it was Case’s “self- abnegation” and the “modest succinctness and tender feeling with which [she detailed] the endurance of the army” that were seen as particularly admirable.104 The oblique reference to Case’s proximity to the conflict was necessary to praise her feminine approach to a subject that was, ostensibly, not within her purview. For the greater part, however, reviews of neither publication gave any indication that the women (or the editors) had included the voices of men or military aspects as appendices.

In addition to her memoirs, Bartrum’s book included letters and diary entries of her husband, a letter of a medical officer describing the battle in which her husband died, and a newspaper account of her husband’s death. As well as the personal narratives of

Adelaide and her sister Caroline, Case’s book contained the twenty-six page official military despatch of Brigadier Inglis regarding the defence of Lucknow. Whether it was the women’s or the editors’ choice to expand beyond the women’s voices is not easily determined, but given the lack of media coverage to the ‘masculine supplements’ it is arguable that it was the women’s decision. The choice to publicize the works with no

102 Examiner, January 15 1859. 103 Examiner, July 5 1858. 104 John Bull & Britannia, July 10, 12 1858.

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mention of the addendums which focused on the military (and more masculine) aspects of the conflict indicates a belief by the publishers that those inclusions would not increase readership. Certainly, if the publishers had thought a masculine perspective was important to the books as a selling feature, they would also have informed prospective readers of the fact. As there was no such forthcoming information, it is plausible therefore that they were not as interested in the men’s voices as they were in the women’s narratives. Consequently, it is arguable that not only did the women choose to add masculine viewpoints, possibly feeling that they were anchored (or legitimated) by the inclusion, they were also exercising a measure of editorial license.

It is furthermore instructive to look at the publishers and their anticipated readership. Both women had well-known and respected publishing houses behind their work. Case’s book was distributed by Richard Bentley who as he was considered one of the top publishers, catered to a large female readership105 while the lesser-known Nisbet and Co., Bartrum’s publisher, focused on religious tracts and books.106 In consideration of their respective audiences, it is quite possible that the publishers were interested in a domestic or woman’s voice or a spiritual lesson rather than the deluge of military reports with which the nation had been blanketed. Beyond the marketing of the publishers, the reviews in the newspapers were also driven by independent reviewers and it is arguable that they too were attempting to extricate the domestic from the martial. Certainly, as the

John Bull reviewer demonstrated, the tenor of the reviews was to focus on the women,

105 Gaye Tuchman, Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, publishers and social change (1989), 68. 106 Rev J A Wallace, Lessons from the Life of the late James Nisbet: A Study for Young Men (London: James Nisbet & Co, 1867),

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their experiences and their lack of pretension without overtly acknowledging their imperial role or military exposure.

The ambivalence regarding the “destabilizing” of “idealized femininity” which

Herbert discusses and Suleri’s “derangement of maternity”107 are demonstrated in response to Rosa Coopland’s A Lady’s Escape from Gwalior, during the Mutinies of

1857.108 As a colonial procurer, Smith & Elder had been heavily involved in supplying guns, saddles, books, equipment and provisions to troops in India and were dealt a serious financial blow with the death of many of their debtors during the Mutiny. In order to recoup some of the losses to that branch of their business, they quickly published several titles relating to the Mutiny. Although it was a successful venture, the last book which was Coopland’s was received with mixed reviews.109 While neither The Examiner nor the Morning Chronicle could detect or celebrate the feminine virtues they found in

Case’s and Bartrum’s books, they did attest to “the truth stamped on every line” the

“terrible minuteness” and the “wrath and wretchedness” which it conveyed.110 However, there was little attempt to avoid the bluntness of Coopland’s narrative by Lloyd’s Weekly.

While the reviewer tried to condone her call for vengeance and the “fierceness of English matrons mourning their butchered husbands” by invoking the horror of the well of

Kanpur, as discussed in the previous chapter, by April 1859 public passions had diminished. However, despite (or because of) the waning public obsession with the atrocities, the reviewer warned that Coopland’s voice was to be used/heard judiciously.

107 Herbert, 263; Suleri, 98. 108 Rosa Coopland, Escape (London: Smith & Elder, 1859). 109 George Smith, DNB. The four books published prior to Coopland’s included a political commentary by Harriet Martineau and three mutiny narratives by men. 110 The Examiner, March 19 1859; Morning Chronicle, April 1 1859.

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No matter that it was written (and experienced) by a woman, the reviewer could not recommend it for women to read. He determined that Coopland’s “feast of vengeance

[was] hardly wholesome food for the general reader, but [was] of service to any serious man who wishe[d] to [comprehensively] study the rebellion.111 This suggestion was followed by at least one of the first ‘Mutiny historians,’ the ‘retributionist’

G.B.Malleson,112 who both approved of Coopland’s “good sense and courage” and praised her in his account of the outbreak at Gwalior.113 However, despite the “niche in history books” that has been attributed to Coopland’s book, it was advertised in Britain for only a few months.114 While it would be premature without further study to suggest that the book, as written by a woman, was too graphic or vengeful, Jane Robinson has argued that all the books published “on the first wave of sensationalism … were treated as part of the … Mutiny melodrama”115 and thereby lost their early currency.

Although they did not completely disappear, Case’s, Bartum’s and Coopland’s publications did not achieve the level of interest gained by the Polehampton memoir.116

Two editions were published within four months and the book was selected for inclusion in Mudie’s Select Library,117 a significant coup as the distinction “virtually ensured a profit for the publisher.” As the most influential circulating library of the mid-century, it

111 Lloyd’s Weekly, April 3 1859. 112 Herbert, 10, 134, 194, 204, 274. 113 Stokes Papers, Cambridge Centre for South Asian Studies. Eric T Stokes notes Malleson’s admiration of Coopland after reading her book. His praise of her is found in Vol III of Kaye and Malleson’s History of the Indian Mutiny (1877). 114 It was advertised in several British papers including The Times, The Examiner, Morning Chronicle, Daily News and Lloyd’s Weekly from January to May 1859 but was listed in Calcutta’s Friend of India until May 1860. 115 Jane Robinson, Angels of Albion: Women of the Indian Mutiny (Harmondsworth: Viking Press, 1996), 249-255. 116 Rev. Edward Polehampton.and Rev. Thomas Stedman Polehampton , The Memoir, Letters and Diary of Rev. Henry S Polehampton, M.A. (London: Bentley, 1858). 117 Morning Chronicle, December 24 1858; The Examiner, December 25 1858.

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was in some years the largest purchaser of novels in the world. A “religious fundamentalist and patriarchal Victorian,” Charles Mudie’s practice of buying only books that met his standards attracted a large clientele from the upper middle-class, particularly women. It was not only a stamp of approval for Polehampton’s book but an assurance of wide readership.118 A third and cheaper edition made available in June 1859 was still being advertised in January 1861.119

Although it was likely edited by Emily Polehampton’s brothers-in-law, her contributions were vital to the success of the book. It was she who had salvaged, with some ingenuity, her late husband’s diary and sermons which graced the book and her voice was necessary to tell the intimate details of his death. Her interest and involvement is evident in the disclosure by one of her brothers-in-law that she had interpolated commentary about her deceased husband into their introduction.120 Although her story, solicited for the publication, was not an insignificant portion of the book (50 of the 440 pages), it was scarcely regarded by the reviewers. Published by Richard Bentley, the memoir did what Emily’s brothers-in-law (and arguably herself) had hoped it would. It celebrated the heroism and “manly excellence” of a “a good [English]man’s life.”121

Eclipsed by the narrative of an ‘everyman’ who became a hero, Emily was nonetheless praised by both the Polehampton’s brothers and the reviewers for her (very appropriate)

118 Gaye Tuchman and Nina E Fortin, Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers and Social Change, (New Haven: Yale U.P., 1989), 29-31, 66, 151-157. 119 The Examiner, June 25 1859, January 14 1861. 120 Polehampton, 27. 121 The Examiner, September 18, October 9, 20 1858, January 15 1859; Daily News, October 19 1858, October 15 1859; Reynolds Newspaper, October 31 1858; John Bull & Britannia, October 16, 18 1858; Calcutta Review, December 1 1858; Letters and Diary of Rev. Henry S Polehampton, 1-4. Polehampton’s brothers introduced him as one who “was not … favoured by opportunity or endowed with brilliant talents [but who had] won for [himself] a famous name.” They offered the memoir as “encouragement for others, how dear and influential a man may become who without shining abilities, or high station or wealth, [does] his duty … in his appointed sphere.” 1-4.

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supporting role.122 The book’s success as a memorial to her late husband was due, in large part, to her diligence in saving his papers and thereby his voice. But even as the third edition was making its more affordable way into the hands of the reading public,

Emily was entering into a new chapter in her life. On August 23 1859 Emily quietly married Colonel Henry Durand CB, two years and one month after being widowed.123

Twenty-one years older than Emily, Durand had become a widower during the mutiny when his beloved wife Annie died leaving him with seven children. His connections with a very well known family meant that, as well as becoming a step- mother to his young family, she was moving up the social ladder.124 Nonetheless, the wedding appears to have been a low key affair. Polehampton was not alone either in marriage shortly after a two year mourning period or in the privacy of her nuptials.

Although several of the widows were remarried by 1865, there was little-to-no information which publicly announced the occasions. Similar to their disappearance after returning to Britain, there was public silence surrounding the women’s new marital commitments. Whether this was due to the wishes of the women and their new spouses, societal disinterest or societal discomfort is difficult to ascertain. Curran has argued that the remarriage of widows continued to be a debated issue as it demonstrated impropriety on the part of the woman (sleeping with more than one man in her lifetime) and Pat

Jalland’s study of death in the nineteenth-century found no “evidence of encouragement

122 Letters and Diary of Rev. Henry S Polehampton, 35-36; Daily News, October 15 1858; The Examiner, January 15 1859; Calcutta Review, December 1 1858. 123 The Examiner, September 17 1859. 124 DNB; Charles Mosley, Burkes Peerage, Baronetage & Knightage, 107th edition, 3 volumes (Wilmington, Delaware: Burkes Peerage (Genealogical Books) Ltd, 2003), vol 1, 1244-1245 at Darryl Lundy, Our Family History, http://www.thepeerage.com/p39397.htm#i393969.

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to widows to ‘love and live’ again.”125 In 1859, Edward Leckie wrote “there is in …

England no prohibition to the marriage of widows, and although such marriages are known to have … been of beneficial results, still there is, in the mind of the general

British population, an ill-concealed feeling of contempt for the widow who, having been well provided for by her late husband, links herself to another.”126 [italics added]

Although it may appear that Leckie deemed a widow’s remarriage acceptable for financial support, it is more likely that he was alluding to the caricature of the predatory and bawdy rich widow which had been prevalent in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.127 Curran argues that by the mid-nineteenth-century this stereotype of excess sexuality had been suppressed by the desexualizing of widows. In addition the message to respectable widows was also to refrain from pursuing marriage as a financial solution.

They were to accept their lot and remain sequestered from the world unless sought out by a man.128

While this discomfort with which widow marriages were viewed in Britain appears at odds with the perceived necessity to encourage Hindu widows to remarry, the apparent disconnect was arguably driven by the expectations of culture and climate.

Focusing on young, particularly child, widows, remarriage in India was viewed as the solution to curb the “prevalence of incest” and the “amount of profligacy” which resulted from the “enforced celibacy” of Hindoo widows. As The Times and the Belfast News

125 Curran, 114-115; Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1996), 256. 126 Edward Leckey, Fictions connected with the Indian Outbreak of 1857 Exposed (Bombay: Chesson and Woodhall, 1859), 51. 127 Curran, 115; Stephen Collins, “ ‘A Kind of Lawful Adultery’: English Attitudes to the Remarriage of Widows, 1550-1800” in The Changing Face of Death: Historical Accounts of Death and Disposal ed. Peter Jupp and Glennys Howard (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1997), 34-47. 128 Curran, 116.

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intoned, between the “tropical climate and code of manners lax beyond what Europeans

[could] even conceive” young widows were “certain to go wrong.”129 Not only was sexual restraint believed to be difficult to achieve in the heat of the tropics, the option of high caste child widows to become temple dancers or devadasis was also problematic for the British who increasingly viewed the dancers’ freedoms as indicative of “the feminine embodiment of Hindu depravity.”130 To provide a father an opportunity to arrange a marriage for his widowed daughter would, as The Times assured, “secure the family from disgrace.” Ostensibly the primary focus of the Widow Remarriage Act, passed in August

1856, was to provide legal protection for widows who married but it is arguable that is was also a means of controlling their sexuality. As Suleri argues, Anglo-Indian narrative categorizes Indian women into either the “too much hidden” of the zenana or the “too much exposed” of the courtesan, or ‘nautch-girl’.131 While widowhood did not automatically consign the women/girls to the latter, the perception that widows were morally vulnerable and susceptible to immorality132 and that “continence [was] not in

[the] blood of Bengali girls”133 continued to inform debate about child marriage and widowhood. This control of the sexuality of widows, although not paramount for middle and upper class British widows, has resonance for the British lower class, particularly soldiers’ wives.

129 The Times, January 14, August 15 1856; Belfast News, August 18 1856; Caledonian Mercury, January 15 1856. 130 Collingham, 182; Nancy Paxton, Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830-1947 (New Brunswick: Rutgers U.P., 1999), 84-91. 131 Suleri, 91-97. 132 Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham: Duke U.P.,1996), 212-213. 133 Manhomini Wheeler quoted in Sinha, 168-169.

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As discussed in the previous chapter, the remarriage of widows who were supported by the Relief Fund was considered a potential benefit.134 The average age of recipients was not over thirty135 and provision for them represented a long-term commitment unless they remarried or died. As the majority of these were soldiers’ widows, it is arguable that the concomitant belief that theirs were marriages of the head rather than the heart diminished the benchmark of impropriety. There was, no doubt, more ambiguity regarding class and gender expectations surrounding the officers’ widows, firstly due to the reluctance of that class to acknowledge marriage for financial needs and secondly as middle class marriages were considered to be affairs of the heart.

In 1864 the English Women’s Domestic Magazine stated that although second marriages could be contracted, “second love [was] debatable [as the] transfer of the heart’s affection

[was] … impossible.”136 As Terri Sabatos has observed this attitude is underscored by the scarcity of images created during the Victorian era of widows remarrying and the contemporary comic or derisive treatment of the subject matter.137 Richard Redgrave’s

Preparing to throw off her Weeds is one of the most well-known examples of both depiction and derision. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1846, it originally featured a young widow about to abandon her mourning wear while a young officer (presumed to be her fiancée) entered the room and a bust of her late husband sat high above them.

Considered crass in comparison to Redgrave’s earlier depictions of poor widows, it was

134 The Times, April 25 1861. 135 Papers in connection with Indian Mutiny Relief Fund, GD 260/6/4/1 N.A.S. 136 English Women’s Domestic Magazine (May 1864) quoted in Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983), 61 and in Curran, 115. 137 Terri Sabatos, “Images of Death and Domesticity in Victorian Britain” (Ph.D.diss., Indiana University, 2001), 114-115.

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not well received and eventually the figure of the young officer was painted out.138

Exhibited more than a decade before the British public was faced with the flood of young widows in the aftermath of the Crimean and Indian conflicts, its military nuances may have been more sympathetically received in the late 1850s or early 1860s when many

Mutiny widows were remarrying.

While Sabatos’s analysis of the images of the Victorian widows includes valuable insight into their ambiguous role in society, she does not comment on the almost exclusive portrayal of widows as young with or without young children as opposed to older women. Even as the youth and attractiveness of the women arguably created more emotive subjects, they also belied the domestic demographics139 and the statistics for widow remarriage in the mid-nineteenth century. While obviously there were widows of all ages, Jalland has pointed out the greater likelihood of younger widows to remarry.

William Farr’s statistics demonstrate that in 1851 over twenty percent of widows between the ages of twenty and twenty-four and almost fifteen percent of those between twenty- five and twenty-nine remarried. Slightly less but still a significant number, over 11.5% of those between thirty and thirty-four also retied the conjugal knot.140 As many of the officer’s widows from Lucknow were under thirty-five, it is arguable that many of those who remarried after the Mutiny were in this demographic.

138 Sabatos, 115-116. 139 Ralph Houlbrooke, ed., Death, Ritual and Bereavement (London: Routledge, 1989), 2; E.A.Wrigley, R.S.Davies, J.E.Oeppen, & R.S.Scholfield, English Population history from family reconstitution, 1580- 1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1997), 303, 316. Houlbrooke estimates that # of all children lost one or both parents before their 16th birthdays in the 1830’s. In the 1820’s, 1/3 of all marriages begun at an average age was terminated by death within 20 years. Wrigley, et al estimate that between 1800 and 1849, the deaths of women between the ages of 25 and 29 were almost triple those of men. These figures constitute only married women and Wrigley et al speculate that the disparity was due to childbed deaths. By the end of childbearing years, women’s mortality dropped to marginally less than men’s. These figures indicate that, contrary to the popular images, older widows were more prevalent than younger ones. 140 William Farr, Vital Statistics (1885) quoted in Jalland, 254.

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Nevertheless it is interesting that the marriages of both Polehampton (1859) and

Bartum (who remarried in 1860), whose public profiles (through their publications) had been closely connected with their late husbands, were not noted or noteworthy.141 It is arguable that conscious of the perception of betrayal of the husbands they had recently memorialized or possibly being somewhat conflicted about their choice they chose to wed quietly. The silence of the press particularly regarding Polehampton whose new husband also had a moderately public profile indicates either tacit approval, a level of ambivalence or apathy regarding their nuptials. Privately, however, Florence Nightingale for one expressed disappointment in Polehampton’s choice. In the search for a qualified matron for a nurse’s training school in Calcutta, Nightingale used Polehampton as an example of applicants who would not be capable of resisting an opportunity for marriage.142

Conversely, the wedding of Catherine, widow of Captain Alfred Simons, to

Lieutenant Hector Munro in July 1860 was not simply announced but reported as a

“fashionable wedding” complete with sartorial particulars. The commentary which provided details of the friendship between her late and her new husbands, the former’s brave soldier’s death and the subsequent protection of her by the latter143 was a reassuring and possibly familiar narrative. As both men belonged to the same regiment, Munro’s ostensible rescue of the widow carried the elements of camaraderie, honor and chivalry

141 London Gazette, September 17 1859. While this issue announced Polehampton’s marriage, it did not include the location (which was in London) and was also published almost a month after the event. While there is no evident marriage announcement for Bartrum, she was married and had a child by the 1861 census taken the first week of April 1861. 142 Gerard Vallee, Florence Nightingale on Health in India vol.9 of Collected Works of Florence Nightingale (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier U.P., 2006), 944. 143 Bristol Mercury, July 14 1860.

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which, as Herbert argues, Britons needed to celebrate “as a point of moral reference.”144

Without the added complexity of having published a panegyric to her late husband,

Simons was less a public widow and more a symbol of new beginnings. If as previously argued the widows were a symbol of Britain’s vulnerability, the new security which

Simons had achieved was an echo of the security restored in the empire.

However, this should not be overstated. The account of the Simons-Munro nuptials is noteworthy because it is the most elaborate report to appear in the records.

While it contains elements which cannot be ignored in this discussion, it must be also noted that its uniqueness highlights the fact that most marriages of the Mutiny widows, even if they held similar celebrations, were not publicized. Reports, if they were published at all, were often the same succinct announcements that were employed by the general public in the marriage columns of newspapers. It is these columns that reflect the frequency of widows’ marriage and illustrate that the unions were reported in the same manner as those marrying for the first time. Despite the ambivalence which continued to surround remarriage, widows did marry again and although, as in the Simons-Munro wedding, there may have been opportunity to celebrate something larger than the nuptials, the silence surrounding the marriages of other Mutiny widows echoes the practice of other widows. Whether this was their choice or the public’s is not easily determined but their relative anonymity demonstrates how quickly all the women were absorbed into the general population.

Beyond remarriage, Curran argues that the removal of middle-class widows from public view allowed society to avoid the evidence of the failure of the middle-class value

144 Herbert, 184-192.

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system.145 Modifying this argument, Sabatos has posited that despite the mourning prescriptions and attendant anxieties widows continued to operate in public.146 As

Sabatos has focused her study primarily on widows during the first two years of their widowhood, Curran’s observations which include the lifetime of the widow are thus overstated. That being said, many aspects of her research resonate with the experiences of widows who returned to Britain from the Mutiny, particularly those who remained widows.

Thrust into the spotlight by the circumstances of their widowhood, these women initially had little option regarding seclusion, but once in Britain their lives demonstrate degrees of public engagement that support the analyses of both Sabatos and Curran. As previously discussed, four widows quickly published books. Whether this was at their initiative or that of others (as both Case and Bartrum demurred) their choice to do so was an indication of their willingness to be seen in public, if only in print. Coopland not only stepped into the public but came out swinging. While it could be argued that, of the four widows, Polehampton had the least to do with going public, her involvement was integral to the book. However, as earlier discussed, their foray into the publishing world was legitimized by their subject matter and therefore irreproachable. In addition, as Linda

Peterson’s examination of the nineteenth-century interest in publishing women’s autobiographies indicates, the favourable climate for women’s voices also ensured they were not breaking new ground.147 Thus while the widows were, in fact, engaging in

145 Curran, 116. 146 Sabatos, 147-148. 147 Linda Peterson, Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 16-27.

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business, they were “contributing to an increasingly popular genre”148 and moreover fulfilling the purview of widows by honoring their late husbands. With this business behind them, Bartrum and Polehampton quickly disappeared into marriage while Case and Coopland also retreated into respectable privacy. Of the four women, only

Polehampton, in her second widowhood as Lady Durand, ventured again into publication.

Beyond involvement in publishing, other widows were not loath to engage with authorities regarding their own business matters. Although a number of the women relied on family members or other representatives to sort out pension and estate matters, many others were personally involved. The father-in-law and brother-in-law of Esther Garbett, widow of a surgeon, were both involved in the applications that resulted in an increase of ascribed rank and pension for herself and her three children while Charlotte Thornhill was successful in her petition for a pension for her widowed daughter-in-law. However a great deal of the correspondence from the Indian Government was responses to requests directly from the widows.149

While a denial for pension was generally accepted by the applicants, Regina, the widow of Reverend John McCallum, proved both stubborn and mettlesome. She and her two children had sailed to England and left Reverend McCallum fulfilling his duties at

Shahjehanpore in March 1857, two months before the hostilities began and eleven weeks before he was killed.150 Her initial application in September 1857 was turned down as her husband had not been in the regular service of the East India Company. She persisted and was informed in February 1858 that her request would be forwarded to the Government

148 Peterson, 21. 149 India Office, Court of Directors, Home Correspondence, IOR:E/1/307, 308, B.L. 150 Reverend M.A. Sherring, The Indian Church during the Great Rebellion (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1859) 332-333; New Calcutta Directory, Ship Departures, March 11 1857.

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of India. Although the pension that she was granted in April was due to a change in regulations rather than her persuasiveness, her tenacity was a foreshadowing of her subsequent exchange with the administrators of her late husband’s estate. Between

December 1857 and February 1864, McCallum continued to pressure the Accountant

General office not only for her share of her husband’s estate but also for interest on her children’s portion. She felt the latter was justified as being necessary for the maintenance of the children. The officials responded that it could only be facilitated if she could prove absolute destitution, a concession which McCallum refused to make. After her portion of the estate was paid in full in August 1859, the widow argued that the remaining two thirds was principle from which she was entitled to the interest (for the children’s sake) but refused to sign a guarantee that it would be repaid. Letters between the India Office in

London and the Office of the Administrator in Calcutta reveal a stubborn woman and an equally obdurate administration with a frustrated India Office agent caught in the middle.151 Regina McCallum was neither passive nor timid as Curran suggests widows were portrayed or expected to act. Although her determination may have been unusual, many of the mutiny widows were involved in their financial affairs and, not unlike the widows studied by Jalland and Curran, some were more successful than others.152

While McCallum became a familiar name to both the pension and estate administrators, neither Jane Stephenson nor Louisa Moore would have become as well- known. Although both requested increases in their pensions, they were denied and continued to receive the amounts initially assessed. This despite the fact that Moore was

151 India Office, Accountant General, Record of the Estates and Wills Branch, Misc.Correspondence, IOR: L/AG/34/1/26, B.L.; India Office, Accountant General, Letters of Administration and Remittance, IOR:L/AG/34/1/2, B.L. 152 Jalland, 244-245; Curran, 129-138.

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twice forced to apply for money from her late husband’s estate which had been bequeathed entirely to her four children in order to meet expenses for them.153 As opposed to McCallum, there is no record of resistance from the estate administrators regarding Moore’s applications. It is arguable that, although McCallum continued to refuse to provide proof of her need due to destitution, Moore willingly complied with the request. The attendant loss of dignity which may have been the price that Moore paid in exchange for receiving the funds resonates with Curran’s observation regarding the humiliation which middle-class widows often suffered when forced to pursue charitable assistance of any kind.154 There may have been an even more egregious sense of humiliation when having to beg for support from one’s late husband via the faceless administrators.

In addition, this was not emergency funding in terms of immediate need or response time. The requests were submitted via the India Office in London to be sent to the Calcutta office where they were deliberated and the answer returned to the India

Office from which the widow finally received the response, a process of at least several months. While Isabella Barnard, widow of Major General Sir Henry Barnard, had assistance from her brother and her eldest son as she was the executrix (duties which she may have shared with her son), she was also involved in the procedures of having her late husband’s estate finalized in India and pursuing the donation batta155 owed to him.156 Not

153 India Office, Court of Directors, Home Correspondence, IOR:E/1/307,308; India Office, Letters of Administration and Remittance, IOR:L/AG/34/1/2; Meritorious Pensions, IOR:L/AG/21/16/15; Col Henry Vibart, Madras Engineers, private papers c.1859-1874, IOR:Mss Eur F 135/40, B.L. 154 Curran, 90-93. 155 Batta began as an extra allowance paid to soldiers of the Indian Army when on campaign which grew to be a constant addition to pay for European officers in India.

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only were there questions about the general’s substantial outstanding debts in India which delayed estate proceedings but the final remittance was also temporarily lost between departments. Although by July 1859 she had received the bulk of what was due to her, five months later and two and half years after her husband’s death, the widow was still attempting to tie up the loose ends. However, the acumen that she demonstrated in navigating between the jurisdictional bureaucracies of India and England was not as clearly observable in her own affairs. It is not certain whether her misinformation was deliberate (strategic) or inadvertent, but her failure to fully divulge her income in the

Declaration of Widows which was required when applying for a Royal Bounty pension is surprising if not suspect. Although her omission prompted a call from authorities for more specific directions to all those completing the applications,157 there is no indication that she was subsequently penalized. In fact, in addition to a widow’s pension (£250),

Barnard was awarded an additional £100 p.a. due to her late father’s rank and a civil pension of £200 which was generally reserved for diplomatic or scholarly services.158

While the civil pension was designated for “persons who had rendered service to the state or who had made special contributions in the arts and sciences or their near relations,”159 Barnard and one other Mutiny widow, Lady Anson, were each awarded allowances “in consideration of the services of [their] late husband[s].”160 The £200 that

156 Barnard estate, War Office: Secretary at War, Correspondence, 1854-1859, W.O.43/887, N.A.; Pay Master General, Army Letter Book, 1857-1859, PMG 1/112, N.A. 157Pay Master, Army Letters, PMG 1/112. 158 Pay Master, Army Letters, PMG 1/112; Pay Master General, Army Establishment: Compassionate List and Royal Bounty, 1854-1859, PMG 10/61, N.A.; Liverpool Mercury, August 6 1858. Her father was the late Brigadier General James Catlin Craufurd. The civil pension was awarded in February 1858 and was subsequently protested due to the amount and the fund it came from. 159 William Kuhn “Queen Victoria’s Civil List: What Did She Do With It?” Historical Journal 36, 3 (1993), 651. 160 Liverpool Mercury, August 6 1858; Newcastle Courant, August 6 1858.

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each received was substantial in comparison to the amounts of between £30 and £50 which were bestowed on other recipients. As the Lord of the Treasury was empowered only to award a total of £1,200 per year, Barnard and Anson together received 1/3 of the mandated allotment, leaving eighteen other recipients to share the remaining £800, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the public. Editorials fulminated that the pension was primarily for widows and orphans of those who had devoted their lives to literary or scientific pursuits. Further, they stated, even without such sizeable awards, the limits of the fund meant that relatively few of the numerous applications could be awarded and the amounts were often too small to relieve anything except dire distress. The large sums awarded to the widows of military officers was seen as an affront to those who had made mental pursuits their calling and had no alternate source of revenue. 161 One year earlier, the pensions of £150 and £100 given respectively to relatives of two officers who had died in the Crimean War had been greeted with approbation despite the rather tempered desire that there could be another fund for those who had distinguished themselves in war.162 A year later, the aggrieved reaction to Barnard and Anson receiving civil pensions was due to the perceived over-generosity of the pensions in conjunction with the secure financial position which it was believed the women enjoyed.

The demands that military claims be satisfied from other and ampler sources did not deny the widows’ right to pensions, but indicated that they had avenues that widows of civilians did not. In addition, it is arguable that the belief that neither of the men had been effective in India also made them and, therefore, their widows less deserving of a

161 Birmingham Daily Post, July 29 1858; Morning Chronicle, August 7 1858. 162 Glasgow Herald, July 17 1857.

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civil pension. Although cited for their service in India, both General Barnard and General

Anson had spent much of their lives serving elsewhere. The former, at fifty-seven, had spent most of his military career in staff appointments and had only recently arrived in

India. Similarly, sixty-year old General George Anson had been appointed Commander- in-Chief in India only months before the outbreak of the Mutiny after having long been involved in domestic politics as an MP (1819-1853). After cholera cut short their respective commands, both men were subsequently criticized for a lack of decisiveness during the early days of the conflict which allegedly prevented the British from quickly retaking Delhi.163 Lord Palmerston’s decision, as Lord of the Treasury, to include the women on the civil list and cite their husbands for what was arguably not their finest moments appears either misinformed or defiant. Although it is beyond this study to determine Palmerston’s rationale, the women became beneficiaries from a fund not traditionally connected with the military.164 Tragically Isabella Anson enjoyed her pension for only a few months. In December of that year, she accidentally swallowed a fatal dose of laudanum.165 While this was a “favourite suicide poison,”166 Anson’s death was ruled an “accidental administration” and the media were very careful to support this by providing the details of the unfortunate sequence of events which led to her death.167

While there is no reason to suppose that she did take her own life, it is arguable that her

163 Christopher Hibbert, The Great Mutiny, India 1857 (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 121-122, 280- 283; DNB entries for Barnard and Anson. Barnard was determined by Colonel Keith Young as “no more fit for his present post than he was to be Pope of Rome.” DNB. 164 Liverpool Mercury, August 6 1858. An examination of civil lists between 1856 and 1861 reveals that the few pensions awarded to relatives of military personnel were consistently due to destitution, not a stated factor in the pensions of either Anson or Barnard. 165 Leeds Mercury, January 8 1859. 166 Olive Anderson, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 185, 230, 365-366; Curran, 119-120. 167 Leeds Mercury, January 8 1869.

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grief played some part in her fatal error. When Charlotte Canning heard of General

Anson’s death she reflected mournfully on his wife’s unbounded devotion to him and her observation that his widow would be “utterly lost and undone without him”168 is perhaps an indication of her state of mind when she mistook laudanum for her gout medicine.

In spite of Anson’s untimely death, it is evident that both she and Barnard had resources and connections not available to most Mutiny widows. In August 1860 Barnard was offered a Grace and Favour residence at Hampton Court Palace. Referred to disparagingly by William IV as the ‘Quality poorhouse’, the apartments at Hampton

Court were allocated to needy individuals or their dependants who were deemed to have performed a great service to the crown or the country.169 As Barnard’s late husband and late father were considered to have rendered valuable service she was ostensibly doubly eligible. This may explain why, despite the intense demand and long waiting period for warrants to Hampton Court, Barnard seems to have leaped the queue. As there were no expiring leases, there were also no guaranteed vacancies and although occupants were free to move out when they chose, more often they remained in residence until they died.

Barnard’s unmarried daughter, Rosamund, was twenty-three when they occupied the apartment and, having no place to go when her mother died, remained a Grace and

Favour recipient until she died in 1920 at eighty-three. It is little wonder that the occupants of these apartments were described variously as “old ladies,” “frowsy old dowagers” or “ancient tabbies,” and were seen as taking advantage of the public purse.170

However, while the apartments were spacious and rent free, they were often cold, damp

168 Hare, Noble Lives, 200-203. 169 Sarah E Parker, Grace and Favour: The Hampton Court Palace Community, 1750-1950 (Hampton Court Palace, Surry: Historic Royal Palaces, 2005), 14. 170 Daily News, September 28 1865; Reynolds Newspaper, May 12 1867.

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and difficult and costly to heat. In addition, although some restoration was done before occupants moved in, any additional renovations were to be paid by the resident.171 Lady

Barnard, who was fifty-two when she occupied her suite, lived there for another twenty- six years and was perhaps closer to the quintessential “patrician pauper” than a fellow

Mutiny widow who was also quickly awarded a warrant.

Susan Hodson was thirty-seven when her late husband Major William Hodson left her a widow with minimal financial resources172 and the legacy of his controversial reputation. Although there were few who would dispute her late husband’s bravery and fighting skills, he had been more of a ferocious killing machine173 than the Arnoldian ideal of a Victorian gentleman. Whether deserved or not his demotion in 1855 due to charges of dishonesty and harsh treatment of his Indian soldiers left him almost financially insolvent. Beyond these imputations, Lord Canning was also convinced that he had embezzled funds and his reputation as a “notorious looter” was immediately appended to his manner of death at Lucknow in March 1858. Hodson’s defining moment, for good or ill, was his murder of the three unarmed Indian princes who had surrendered to him. While there was considerable approval at his actions, many others were appalled and he was severely criticized both then and long after.174

However, at his death, his widow was awarded a meritorious pension of £70 and a special pension “in consideration of the services of her husband” of £100. It is probable

171 Parker, 14. 172 While the DNB lists his wealth at death at £170 it is unclear whether this was before or after his debts were paid. B Cork (see ftnte below) asserts that the sale of his personal belongings only covered his debts and William Russell, My Diary in India, (1862) commented on the how cheaply some of his valuable swords and guns were sold. pp 39. 173 Herbert, 130. 174 Hibbert, 315-316, 361; Herbert, 130, 142-143, 177; DNB, Barry Joynson Cork, Rider on a Grey Horse (London: Cassell & Co. Ltd, 1958), 80-89, 150-154, 169-171.

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that she also received a pension from the Bengal Military Fund, a sum of just over

£100.175 Shortly after returning to England Hodson was offered a suite of apartments at

Hampton Court which she accepted quickly. The warrant was made public and widely noted in January 1860,176 but Hodson did not occupy the apartments until after April

1861, most likely due to time needed for their restoration.177 Although the widow lived there until her death in 1884, the records describe a querulous and dissatisfied woman who continued to complain and request additional or alternate accommodation. Her suite described by the previous occupants as a “very small apartment”178 had nevertheless housed three adult women and two servants prior to her occupation. Before her death at sixty-one, Hodson was retaining three servants and shared her apartments with no one else but visitors, a relatively commodious, if lonely, arrangement. However, the constraints of limited finances may well have plagued her. The three servants that she was employing in 1881 would have cost her in excess of £60 a year,179 just under a quarter of her pension income. In addition expenses such as the requisite fees of £9 p.a.

(the parish and the chaplain) that the residents were expected to pay were not negligible

175 India Office, Speical Pensions, IOR:L/AG/30/10; India Office, Meritorious Pensions, IOR:L/AG/21/16/15.; It is difficult to know what Hodson received from the Military Fund, but given her husband’s demotion to a subaltern rank (Captain), it must be assumed that she received what a Captain’s widow would have received which was ~£112 p.a. 176 Bristol Mercury, January 14 1860; Derby Mercury, January 11 1860, Newcastle Courant, January 13 1860; The Examiner, January 14 1860; Lloyds Weekly Newspaper, January 15 1860. 177 Parker, Grace and Favour, 14. Parker records that although Mrs Caroline Shore was awarded an apartment in 1935, she did not move in until 1938 due to the time required for restorations. As the 1861 Census shows Hodson living as a lodger in London, her occupation date would have been after that time. 178 Parker, Grace and Favour, 39-40. An 1884 description indicates the apartment to have “four bedrooms, a dressing room, dining room or school room, lavatory & lobby, drawing room, entrance hall, servant’s bedroom, ante-room, kitchen & lobby coal cellar/store.” 179 Patricia Branca, Silent Sisterhood: Middle Class Women in the Victorian Home (Pittsburgh:Carnegie- Mello U.P., 1975), 54-55. Anne Summers, Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses, 1854- 1914 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988), 110-111; 1861 Census. Branca indicates the average wage for both a cook and a parlourmaid was £20 each. Summers indicates that an army sisters’ commencing yearly salary was £30 in 1870. Although arguably the trained nurse which Hodson retained would have cost approximately the same, for this purpose she has been estimated at £20+.

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to her limited income. For those so tempted, extra income from boarders was expressly forbidden as was subletting the apartment. Grateful as she may have been for some place to live, it is arguable that she felt trapped in her circumstances as her limited means

(pension) may been stretched for living expenses and were not sufficient to enable her either to pay extra for renovations or to take other accommodations.

One widow’s benevolent ‘prison’, however, was seen as another’s key to benevolence. While her economic realities may have kept Hodson at Hampton Court,

Louisa Penny hoped that an apartment there would be a solution for her economic dilemma. Six years after her husband, Major General Nicholas Penny, was killed in action Penny applied for a Grace and Favour apartment with the hope that it would allow her enough sufficient funds to keep her brain injured son at the prestigious and expensive

Newingham Asylum in Ticehurst. While she had been left both financially solvent and received a relatively generous pension of £300 p.a., Penny hoped to use the rental of her home in London to supplement her son’s pension income to enable him to stay where he was “comfortable and well cared for” even after her death. Her letter of application was not addressed to the Lord Chamberlain as was customary but rather Penny wrote to

Colonel Charles Beaumont Phipps, an influential member of the Queen’s household and the Keeper of the Privy Purse. Although she did not fail to refer to her husband’s faithful and honorable service to the Queen and the country, the letter was an appeal from a dutiful widow and loving mother to the “well known sympathy [of the Queen] with the widows and orphans” of her officers. Penny emphasized the necessity of honoring her late husband’s choice to keep their son at Newingham and her desire as a mother to

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establish lifetime provision for a helpless child.180 It is also arguable that Penny hoped that the recent publication of a panegyric memoir which celebrated her late husband’s service would aid her cause.181

However, despite the impressive credentials of her late husband (including Aide de Camp to the Queen) and her noble need, Penny’s request was not granted.

Nevertheless, she left her home, arguably to obtain its rental income, and by 1871 Penny was living in her daughter and son-in-law’s modest home in Monmouthshire. Her death five years later at Herne Bay, a seaside health resort for “ordinary Londoners,” is further indication of her self-imposed economic restraints.182 Although Penny’s failure to procure a warrant to Hampton Court could be attributed to her personal financial security, the number and need of other mendicants (always high), the time elapsed since her husband’s death or the diminished immediacy of the mutiny, it is not easily determinable.

In addition, as Parker has indicated that the waiting time could be as long as twenty years,

Penny may well have been successful if she had lived beyond her sixty-three years.

Nevertheless, she demonstrated both financial foresight and personal sacrifice in order to provide ongoing quality care for her son.

180 India Office, Meritorious Pensions, IOR:L/AG/21/16/15; Vibart Papers, Mss Eur F 135/40; Major General Nicholas Penny private papers, 1849-1864, IOR:Mss Eur C738/1-19, B.L. 181 William H.G.Kingston, “Memoir of Major General N Penny C.B. – ADC to the Queen – Who Died in India on the Field of Battle, April 30, 1858: In Memory of As True a Hero and Gallant a Soldier as Ever Led the Troops of England to Victory” (London: Griffith & Farron, 1863) in Mss Eur C738/1-19. 182 1871 Census; Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, October 10 1876; Pall Mall Gazette, February 12 1873; Daily News, August 23 1873. A regular day destination for ‘ordinary’ Londoners, in February 1873 Herne Bay was listed with Margite and Brighton as having the highest mortality of sea-side resorts between 1861 and 1870. A new pier built in August 1873 was opened with a great deal of fan-fare and the assurance that Herne Bay was then listed as one of the three healthiest resorts. Penny’s death at Herne Bay was arguably while she was seeking the benefits of a moderately priced health resort.

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While Jalland has argued that many widows sought to be as independent of their families as possible,183 and Curran cites the frequent reluctance or inability of families to add widows to their households,184 neither appears to have been the case for Penny.

Given her stated desire to save and invest for her son, her daughter (and her son-in-law) arguably supported her aims by providing her lodging. While she may have contributed to the household income from her pension, their employment of only one servant is a clear indication of frugality and possibly sacrifice for the young man. While living with family may not have always been possible or advisable, for Penny it was a practical means to a viable end.

Although the circumstances were different, it may have been for her son’s sake as well that the fiery Rosa Coopland, just twenty when she was widowed, was also content to spend the remainder of her life with family, firstly with her parents and after their deaths in 1875 and 1876185 with her widowed aunt Lady Stuart-Menteath. If she had been on her own, her relatively small pension combined with her son’s allowance186 would have resulted in a straitened existence but it was not likely needed as a financial supplement to her vicar father’s £400 plus living.187 Coopland’s book was penned in the haven of the Thorp Arch Vicarage in Yorkshire and it was there she raised her young son.

He may have already been at St Catherine’s College in Cambridge when Coopland’s parents died and in 1881, in the footsteps of his father and both his grandfathers, George

183 Jalland, 235-237. 184 Curran, 50-58. 185 Leeds Mercury, March 13 1875; North Wales Chronicle, March 20 1875, February 19 1876. 186 Coopland’s Meritorious pension was £70 and her son’s was £16 but she may have also received a pension from the Bengal Military Fund of ~£112. As the latter was contingent on subscription, it is likely that her husband had been paying since joining the E I Co in 1854. 187 Leeds Mercury, March 13 1875.

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Coopland was ordained as an Anglican priest. While Curran posits that widows often sacrificed to educate their children, considering it an investment for the future,188

Coopland was arguably able to finance her son’s education because she could live with her parents. Whether she expected eventual support from her son is not likely but there is an indication that she continued to be closely engaged with his life. In late 1883, after he had been given a curacy, Rosa Coopland wrote to the Under Secretary of State for India requesting information on pensions and furloughs in regard to an offer made to her son from the Bishop of Lahore for a position in India.189 Not only was the Bishop a well- respected friend who had shared the same Mutiny experience as had she in Agra, the

Bishop of Worcester who had written the letter of recommendation for her son had been her late husband’s mentor, and was one of her son’s namesakes and the individual to whom Coopland had dedicated her book. While there is nothing to suggest that she sought the public eye after the publication of her memoirs, it is evident that Coopland had maintained connections that could be useful, particularly for her son.

Although as Jalland has argued children were considered a reason for widows to carry on,190 the responsibility for them could be onerous. Many of the Mutiny widows returned with young children, a number of them infants born after their fathers had died.191 Rosa Coopland was fortunate enough to return to family and a secure

188 Curran, 57. 189 India Office, Public and Judicial Department, letter from Rosa Coopland to Under Secretary of State for India, October 24, 1883, IOR:L/PJ/6/109/File 1889, B.L. 190 Jalland, 242-244. 191 Vibart papers, Mss Eur F135/40; Meritorious pensions, IOR:L/AG/21/16/15. The list of annual pensions being paid to Indian army dependants circa 1869 demonstrates, from the number of children still included, how many were under the age of nine in 1857. It is also interesting that census records in England of years subsequent to 1857 indicate 1858 as year of birth for children born in 1857 during the conflict. Whether this is a registration issue is not clear but their place of birth is given as India and pension records indicate the date of birth accurately.

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environment in which to raise her son. Helena Angelo, whose son was born in Calcutta after she fled Kanpur where her husband was later killed, returned to a more precarious life in England. Born in Ireland, Angelo chose to return to St Helier, Jersey with her three children, ages three, two and a few months.192 With pension income of under £200, she took lodging as a boarder with all three children. Twelve years later, at sixteen, her eldest daughter returned to India to marry Richard Whiteaway, a member of the Bengal Civil

Service at Mynpoorie.193 One less mouth (albeit also £11 less in pension income) allowed

Angelo to establish a household of her own and by 1871 she, sixteen year old Katherine and thirteen year old Frederick had moved only a short distance away from where they had previously boarded. Angelo’s life changed a great deal in the following decade as

Katherine moved away and Frederick joined the military. Frederick was already a

Lieutenant when he was killed in Afghanistan in May 1880, not yet twenty three.194 With the responsibility of children behind her, Angelo returned to taking lodging and in 1881 was living with the Anglo-Indian family of Fitzwilliam Pollock, a retired colonel.195

Eliza Glen was another widow left with an infant and two young children.

Although her husband had not been in the Indian Army, she was informed on reaching

England that the Indian Government had sanctioned a pension of £60 for herself and £18 for each of her children. Originally from Middlesex, Eliza returned to its familiarity and her family there. She quickly established a household in Stoke Newington, but her eldest daughter Margaret, born in 1850, was placed with Eliza’s family in Edmonton just

192 Meritorious Pensions, IOR:AG/21/16/15; Robinson, 234; 1861 Census. 193 Times of India, December 19 1870. 194 Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, May 8 1880; British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia, United Kingdom Monumental Inscriptions, Sussex, IOR:Mss Eur F 370/1137, B.L. 195 1881 Census.

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outside of London. It is likely that her young son William (born 1854) was also with extended family as the 1861 census records Eliza living with only her youngest daughter

Annie, born during the Mutiny, and one servant. Although at that time Eliza felt able to employ a servant (likely costing £9-£14), it is notable that by 1871 she had all three of her children living with her and had no hired servant. However, by 1865 she had taken

Margaret out of school, a decision for which she was gently censured by her mother-in- law in Edinburgh and she had moved to Tottenham which was closer to her family.

Sometime after 1881 she was left alone, though Eliza continued to maintain her own household with, once again, the domestic help of one servant. Her son William did not marry until he was thirty six and, though he and his wife took lodgers, neither his mother nor his sisters were among them.196 As neither sister married the small pension that they continued to receive from the Indian Government would have been a welcome supplement to other earned income. There is an indication that both Eliza and Annie also received a supplementary allowance from the Indian Mutiny Relief Fund although Eliza continued to declare herself a fundholder or pensioner of the Government of India. It is arguable that this allowed her to remain independent but her frugality in order to do so is demonstrated by her gratitude for money “to go for a drive” which Margaret sent to her in

1874.197

Whether she was exercising frugality or personal choice, it was twenty-five years before Elizabeth Gall (one of the ‘Lucknow Ladies’) established her own household and

196 Calcutta Directories 1858-1859; Glen, Mss Eur C332; 1861 - 1911 Censuses. Although it is beyond the scope of this study, Margaret spent several years in India as a teacher and some time in Paris as a governess or companion. She was forced to apply to the Indian Mutiny Relief Fund in 1893 and received some assistance. Although she continued to live on her own, there is some indication that Annie and her mother did live together again about 1893. 197 Letter from Eliza Glen to her daughter, Margaret, August 1874, Glen, Mss Eur C332.

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employed two servants. Widowed at twenty-six, Gall claimed her income as dividends and pensions and lived more of a peripatetic lifestyle than many other widows. With no children, she was arguably more unencumbered and there is evidence that she returned to

India for a short time after 1861. By 1871, however, she was lodging in London on a street populated with retired Anglo-Indians and in 1881 she was living in the seaside resort of Ramsgate. Her move to Tunbridge Wells, where she died in 1898 at sixty-seven, reveals the adoption of a more comfortable lifestyle which included employing a lady’s maid and a cook for herself.198 While Ramsgate had been developed for middle-class clientele, Tunbridge Wells had a longer history of gentility,199 possibly a signal that Gall was either financially more secure or more confident about spending. More importantly,

Tunbridge Wells was an Anglo-Indian enclave that Buettner describes as relatively cheap but socially respectable.200 Her choice to spend her final days there demonstrates the attraction and security of a familiar community, akin to family. For Gall, as for Helena

Angelo, returning home meant living in the communities or the homes of fellow Anglo-

Indians. Even as Gall and Angelo, from Northumberland and Ireland respectively, chose not to return to their places of birth (and arguably family), other Mutiny widows including Eliza Glen and Rosa Coopland were drawn to the security of the familiarity of their childhood homes and family. However, despite their choice of birth family over

198 India Office, Meritorious, IOR:LAG/21/16/15; Hampshire Advertiser, May 15 1859; 1871 – 1891 Census; British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia, United Kingdom Monumental Inscriptions, Kent, IOR:Mss Eur F370/1118, B.L.; Charles Booth Online Archive, B358 p.160-161, http//booth.lse.ac.uk. In 1898, Booth’s notes indicate that Gall’s London address (Kildare Terrace) was populated with retired army men. 199 F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900 (London: Fontana Press, 1988), 255-256; K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation: 1846-1886 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 367. Hoppen’s discussion is short but he does allude to the appropriation of sea-side resorts by the middling or middle classes. 200 Buettner, 194, 208, 218.

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Anglo-Indian family, imperial considerations continued to intersect with their new domestic realities, primarily through their children.

While Helena Angelo saw two of her three children return to India to fulfill traditional roles of service and sacrifice, Glen and Coopland were drawn into the possibility of their children returning to India in roles which emulated each of their respective fathers’ callings. Although Antoinette Burton’s examination of the interest in

(and of) British women working in India in the late nineteenth-century looks primarily at medical opportunities, it is more broadly instructive regarding the respectability of single women doing so in other fields as well.201 While women had long traveled for missionary work, it was primarily (if not exclusively) as the domesticating partner of a married couple. Recent scholarship corroborates the records of the Indian Missionary Directory which show an increasing number of unmarried women who worked for missionary societies in India between 1843 and 1881.202 Procida’s observation that in the late nineteenth-century “charitable organizations preferred or required their female workers to be unmarried” demonstrates the broader acceptance of single women to positions beyond medical or missionary work.203 It was in this climate that Glen’s daughter Margaret traveled to Allahabad as a teacher in circa 1874. She was delighted to “return to [her]

201 Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865- 1915 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994). 202 B. H. Badley, Indian Missionary Directory and Memorial Volume (Lucknow: Methodist Episcopal Church, 1881), 237-239; Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in 19th-Century England (Stanford, Stanford U.P., 1999), 99-100; Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2003), 21; Andrew Porter, Religion versus empire?British Protestant missionaries and overseas expansion, 1700-1914 (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2004), 8-9; Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818-1940 (Stanford: Stanford U.P., 2002), 5, 155-156, 167-170. 203 Procida, 169.

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native land and visit [her] birth place”204 though, at seven, she had been old enough to remember the destruction and death they had fled eighteen years previously. Despite receiving several offers of marriage in the decade that she worked in India, accepting what Buettner describes as the “imperial service baton”205 did not interest Margaret, and she returned, single, after working in India for a over a decade. While there is little indication of how much influence Eliza had on her daughter’s decision to return to India or over her disinterest in marriage, Margaret’s letters from India demonstrate a loving and open relationship between them. Although too much should not be extrapolated from the limited extant communication, given its tenor it is arguable that Margaret had her mother’s approval, if not encouragement, to reconnect with her birth place.206

Conversely, although Coopland’s son was offered a position in India, there is no evidence that he pursued the option. This may have been despite, or due to, his mother’s interest, involvement and influence in the presumably prestigious offer. While Coopland left India vowing never to return and declaring Indian people to be black-hearted, she had also expressed hope that “Christianity [would] spread throughout the land.”207 Whether she saw her son as a spiritual facilitator or the opportunity as a tempting temporal foothold for him is not ascertainable. Although it is arguable that her old ties with the

Bishop of Lahore had precipitated the offer, her subsequent letter to the Secretary of State suggests more overt involvement than a twenty-six year old curate may expect or want from his mother. Nevertheless there is no indication whether she received the information that she requested or, if there was a response, whether she found it favourable. Beyond

204 Letter from Margaret to her mother, Eliza Glen, circa April 1875, Glen papers Mss Eur C332. 205 Buettner, 248. See also, Bayly ed., “Introduction” Macfarlane, Daughters, xvi – xxxix. 206 Glen papers, Mss Eur C332. 207 Coopland, vi, 315.

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her high profile contacts, there is no further proof that Coopland exerted any influence over her son’s decision, either for or against the appointment. However, it is sufficient to recognize the importance for her of remaining engaged with the past and maintaining the interconnecting strands between Britain and India.

In finely nuanced subjectivities other Mutiny widows as well carried residues of their past into their present, reflecting their continued, albeit limited, investment in the domestic/imperial life that had been destroyed. Many (if not most) of the officers’ widows who did not remarry relied on their pensions as their primary (or sole) income.

As argued in the previous chapter, this could be regarded as ongoing support by the deceased husband and required the appropriate behaviour of the widows in response.

However, in addition to earning/deserving their support and despite many years on their own, some of the Mutiny widows also continued to weave their narratives around the identity of their late husbands. In 1881, over twenty years after becoming widows, both

Hodson and Angelo still defined themselves as officer’s widows while Case specified that she was the widow of a Lieutenant Colonel.208 Expressed thus to census takers, their perception of their identity is a subtle but visible indication that they continued to carry and be identified by their past. Having not remarried, it was a tangible connection with what had been a defining part of their lives.

More tenuous, but nonetheless tantalizing, was Katherine (Bartrum) Popham’s decision in naming her second son (assuming, of course, that it was her decision). After remarrying and dutifully bearing namesakes for her new husband and herself, Katherine named her third child Bradshaw. Although it could admittedly be coincidence, Dr.

208 1881 Census.

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Bradshaw had been the last person to see Katherine’s first husband, Robert Bartrum, alive and it was he who delivered to the grieving widow the heroic account of Bartrum’s last moments. If it was indeed an echo of her former life, she was not fortunate enough to enjoy it as Katherine (33 y.o.a.) and her young daughter Katherine (3 yr.) died shortly after Bradshaw’s birth in 1866.209 She had been married only six years to physician

Benjamin Francis Popham and died unnoted either as a Mutiny survivor or an author; her previous identity and symbolism were in effect erased. Although, as earlier discussed, this may have been influenced by the ambivalence surrounding the marriage of widows it is also arguable that the currency of the symbolism had long since passed.

Despite the attempt of the letter writer in 1859 to resurrect the symbolism and reclaim the ‘Lucknow Ladies’ as public property, there is little evidence that they or other

Mutiny widows coveted the honour. However, it is difficult to tease out whether the women were reluctant to be appropriated as signifiers of sacrifice, vulnerability and/or heroism or if the public through disinterest or discomfort turned their attention elsewhere.

Arguably it was a mutual accommodation of positions albeit made more complex by the

Anglo-Indian ‘factor’ (discussed in this chapter) and the post-Mutiny national trauma for which Herbert argues. The examination in this chapter of only a few of the widows demonstrates the difficulty of making general observations about the women. Just as the conflict impacted Britain, it profoundly shaped each of them by changing the individual contours of their lives. Although there is no question that many of the women exercised substantial agency, many also had family members in the wings who could step up if needed. While not always successful, the women routinely engaged authorities who could

209 Bartrum, 47; 1871 Census; Pall Mall Gazette, April 11 1866.

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improve either their or their children’s lives. Remarriage was not uncommon and for some, like Polehampton (as Durand) and Simons (as Munro), it meant returning to India.

There is also indication that widows too traveled between England and India, arguably like Mary Goldney210 to visit (or live with) married children there. Without incurring the expense, still others could return in spirit through the shared memories and familiar company found in the Anglo-Indian communities.

While some of the widows were left financially comfortable with personal property as well as pension income, others were left to make do with much less. However it must be pointed out that as opposed to the bleak existence for middle-class widows that

Cynthia Curran posits, the widows of the Mutiny were, for the most part, singularly fortunate in the funds that were available to them. While there is no question that some fell through the cracks between the different supporting agencies, most of the widows had guaranteed income, albeit relatively slender, from either the British or Indian

Government or the Mutiny Relief Fund. No doubt for many if not most of the women, accustomed to an officer’s wage and frequently from genteel families, the pensions required significant lifestyle changes but they were not reduced to the humiliation of applying to charities as Curran argues was the experience of many middle-class widows.

Thus sustained by imperial endeavours the women were freed to disappear into domestic pursuits.

However, as is evident by Polehampton’s and Simons’ marriages and Angelo’s,

Glen’s and Coopland’s children the ties to India were also sustained. Moreover, despite

210 India Office, Meritorious, IOR:L/AG/21/16/15. Wife of Colonel Philip Goldney, she requested that her pension be paid in India from 1861. Although there is no information other than notes on her pension record of payment, Agnes Phillott, widow of Captain Phillott, appears to have been in England from 1859 to 1861, in India until January 1866, back to England for 4 months, returning to India in April 1866.

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their disappearance from public view, the scores of Mutiny widows who chose to return and remain ‘at home’ augmented the ‘domestic’ Britain that Antoinette Burton has argued was significantly constituted by the empire.211 The three widows singled out by the letter writer who opened this chapter are not only examples of how quickly the women were absorbed into the population but they also represent the diverse directions which widows took. None of them were eager to become public property as the letter writer suggested. With her marriage to Mr White of Chelsea in 1864, Eliza Barbor effectively disappeared from the records. While Elizabeth Gall chose to remain a widow she was absorbed by the Anglo-Indian communities in which she lived. Emily

Polehampton, as has been discussed, married a high profile Indian Civil Servant (and military officer) and spent several years in India with him. She returned to England due to ill health ten months before her then husband, General Sir Henry Durand, Lieutenant

Governor of Punjab, was killed in a freak accident in 1871. She was by then Lady Durand and in her husband’s obituaries was identified as being formerly the widow of a heroic

Lucknow chaplain (a testament to the success of the publication). Although the upward mobility of her marriage to Durand was arguably due to the status conferred on her by her

Mutiny experience, she continued to be defined by both men whom she had married. At her death, however, she was granted a bit of her own identity, albeit retrospective.

Almost half a century after the conflict, Gall and Durand (Polehampton) were publicly reintroduced as the iconic ‘Lucknow Ladies’ in their obituaries in 1898 and 1905 respectively.212 While the Mutiny had been a defining moment for all the widows,

211 Antoinette Burton, “Déjà vu All Over Again,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 3:1(2002), 2. 212 Times, May 25 1898, March 31 1905.

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arguably their individual trajectories had moved them substantially beyond that time and place. However, for at least two of the Lucknow Ladies, being re-appropriated in death effaced their lives after 1857 and defined them almost as surely as the gravestones which marked their husbands’ deaths in the conflict.

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Chapter 6: Conclusion

Despite the number of studies that have examined the Mutiny, many of which have focused on women, widows have been incidental. Yet it was they who suffered the greatest personal loss and who became the symbols of both domestic and imperial destruction. The examination of these British widows demonstrates the close connections between ‘home’ and ‘away’ and the shifting perceptions of the security and utility of the imperial/domestic model in India. Although more study of widows in domestic settings is required, the use of the mutiny as a backdrop for these women is a unique opportunity to view them in both imperial and domestic contexts. It allows scholars to see the women as more than simply static creped and veiled symbols of death: it illustrates their individual negotiation and agency within the circumscription of customs and circumstances.

Stripped of the security and identity imbued in their husbands and homes, how the women grieved in the newly unfamiliar imperial space is evidence not only of the ubiquity of British mourning custom but the refuge that its familiarity could provide. Who the new widows grieved indicates that within the duality of imperial/domestic marriages, the significance of the former was secondary to their investment in the latter. As widows, they were often more concerned with the immediate cause of death (how the men had died) than the imperial cause which had resulted in death (what the men had died for).

Although the ‘good’ Victorian death has been widely documented and discussed, the ‘good’ Victorian military death has been examined primarily with reference to chivalry and heroism. For the widows, however, there were other elements that constituted a ‘good’ military death. Chivalry and heroism were not in and of themselves

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enough; the spiritual state of the deceased before his death was vital. As this was believed to be much easier to ascertain in the case of a protracted domestic death, the military widow was left to extract from the previous words or deeds of her late husband whether

(or not) he had been a true Christian soldier. More important than a heroic death was that he had gone to a better place. Furthermore, the manner of death was often a key factor in their narratives and frequently related as instant, often due to being shot in the head or the heart. As such, for the widows a ‘good’ military death rested not only on their late husbands’ character and spirituality but also on the belief that the deceased had been spared the protracted death that was idealized in domestic settings.

Aside from celebrating ideal characteristics and the manner of death, the tensions of the women’s imperial/domestic roles frequently informed the circumstances of their husbands’ deaths. In recognizing the conflicted loyalties which they inflicted on their husbands by their presence, widows such as Rosa Coopland also felt some measure of responsibility for their late husbands’ consequent untenable positions. Although they did not take direct responsibility for their husbands’ subsequent deaths, women like Ellen

Kirk and Katherine Bartrum were acutely aware that they had been an added distraction for their husbands in the conflict. The outrage expressed by Annie Durand, the wife of the Agent for Central India, at two officers who chose to “be off and save their wives,”1 rather than fight with the defenders of the Residency at Indore, illustrates not only a questionable choice on the men’s part but also the double bind in which the officers found themselves. There is no evidence to indicate how frequently duty to wives

1 Durand Papers quoted in Angels of Albion: Women of the Indian Mutiny by Jane Robinson (London: Viking, 1996), 183-184.

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outweighed military obligations, but as the women generally recognized that their husbands’ first responsibility was to respond to imperial rather than domestic demands, it was likely a rare occurrence. However, as widows they mourned the domestic loss (a husband) first and counted the imperial cost (a soldier) latterly and it is arguable that some blamed bravado for rather than celebrated bravery in their husbands’ deaths. That said, many were keenly aware of their husband’s military identity, duty and aspirations, and they coveted memorabilia such as their late husbands’ medals and weapons or, like

Adelaide Case, grieved for a promotion that her husband had desired but not achieved.

Important too were the spiritual remembrances and bibles and prayer-books became treasured keepsakes. In her attempt to salvage her chaplain husband’s identity, Emily

Polehampton chose to save his sermons and vestments over her books and her wedding garments.

Despite difficult conditions, widows performed burial obligations and mourning prescriptions as fully as they were able. After her husband died as they fled from the mutineers, Mrs. Mawe had time only to close his eyes and bind his head before continuing her flight. More conventionally, Mrs. Polehampton had time and resources to hear prayers, prepare the body, and see her deceased husband accorded the respectability of a coffin. Although the sanctity of the body was respected and honoured as fully as possible, fears of desecration by the mutineers were fueled by speculative rumours.

Stories of the routine mutilation of bodies by “Asiatic foes” and the perceived lack of dignity accorded the Hindu dead resonated with the dishonour associated with disinterment and dissection of bodies in England.

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In addition to the decency of burial, officers’ widows with access to black clothing quickly donned it as a modicum of respectable mourning. While there is little evidence that they later adopted full deep mourning dress, when the women reached larger centres, they added other mourning accoutrements such as caps, collars and cuffs.

Whether this was due to increased pressure to be correctly attired or there were more available accessories is not completely clear. Certainly for Mrs. Case it was the latter as, having felt inappropriately dressed while under siege in Lucknow, she quickly acquired a mourning cap when she reached Calcutta. There is no indication that the widows of officers felt coerced to procure mourning dress but rather, choosing to be defined by what they wore, they actively sought and were comforted by it. Further, the degree of respectability that it conferred should not be discounted and was emphasized by the black dresses issued by officers’ wives and widows to soldiers’ widows after being evacuated from Lucknow.

Like the mourning wear, the widows also mediated between ‘proper’ and

‘pragmatic’ actions during the conflict. Thus their nursing of soldiers could be accepted as the women were ostensibly performing domestic duties and ministering to those who were seen ultimately as their protectors, despite the differences of class. Ensuring that they were viewed as ‘angels of mercy’ or ‘Ladies of Lucknow’ helped counter imputations of impropriety. Polehampton could continue nursing soldiers during her passage back to England without losing respectability, despite the greater availability of the more traditional male orderlies or women of a lower class on the voyage. Similarly, the latitude given to widows to travel alone, socialize and sight-see stretched the parameters of respectability but they were not necessarily viewed as transgressive. On the

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other hand, there were criticisms of the untoward levity, brashness and bravado exhibited by some of the widows. Deemed to be characteristics of the lower classes, this lack of decorum was judged improper for any respectable British woman and therefore was particularly egregious for a grieving widow.

However, most censures of the women were done in private as the British public viewed the widows through the lenses of sacrifice and victimhood. The women became symbols of the loss and vulnerability felt collectively and individually by Britons and this study examines the consequent anxiety and sense of duty of the nation. The overwhelming sympathy of the public was demonstrated materially through financial donations to the Indian Mutiny Relief Fund. The fund, in turn, was expected to adopt the role vacated by the late husband as the provider and protector for those widows who were deemed to have been left without adequate support. Despite the stated intent of providing front line assistance, the Relief Fund administrators were left with the task of establishing equity between the various sources of income received by the widows. The regulations established for doing so illustrate not only the continuing need to monitor soldiers’ widows as opposed to the widows of officers, but a focus on equipping officers’ sons rather than their daughters for the children’s respective futures. Further, while most of its recipients were military widows and orphans, the fund was unique in its task of accommodating both military and civilian recipients. The inclusion of the widows of civilians in the same category as the officers’ widows reinforced the division of classes which kept the soldiers’ widows firmly in their “position in life.” It also indicates that civil officials and military officers were considered to be equal partners in the greater struggle of class.

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Although the public’s close attention to the women diminished as interest in the mutiny waned, the Indian Mutiny Relief Fund, existing pension funds, and civil and royal grants continued to operate and perpetuate these class and gender expectations. As living grave-stones, the widows were expected to honour and represent their late husbands by their lives. Even after the men’s deaths, widows continued to be defined by the reputation and rank of their late husbands and in leading respectable lives the women honoured the memory of the men and thus merited the support initiated by the men’s deaths. When criticism of the officers’ widows emerged, it was because of their alleged failure to mourn appropriately or conduct themselves respectably. While their lack of discretion was in some cases attributed to them being tainted by Anglo-Indian customs, most of these complaints remained private. On the other hand, the lower expectations for propriety in soldiers’ widows and the perceived lack of emotional investment in their marriages resulted in less surveillance of their mourning practices and more monitoring of their morality and industry, creating opportunities for instruction. Yet for all that, beyond the intense early scrutiny born in large part from the national trauma many of the widows were quickly absorbed into life in Britain. Largely disappearing from public view, they returned to family and familiar homes, established new lives, often but not exclusively in Anglo-Indian communities, or returned to India, frequently having remarried.

Despite their seeming commodity as symbols (imperial and national), they were far from a homogenous group and, as survivors, less easy to appropriate or define than the women who died in the conflict. Whether it was due to public apathy or post-Mutiny trauma, their utility as public property quickly waned. In addition, their usefulness as a

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defined group was also diminished by the divergence of the widows’ individual trajectories. After the widows’ widely publicized arrivals from India and aside from the relatively brief public profile of those who published their memoirs, for the most part, the women retreated into privacy, if not anonymity. It is in those spaces, however, that their agency becomes apparent and the negotiation and accommodation of their individual circumstances are glimpsed.

While Britain was ‘home’ writ large for all the British women who returned from

India, ‘home’ writ small for each widow was an admixture of connotations, locations and people. Although family was an invaluable resource for widows such as Eliza Glen, Rosa

Coopland and Louisa Penny, its utility differed for each woman and while neither Helena

Angelo nor Elizabeth Gall returned to their birth-places, they gravitated to the familiarity of Anglo-Indian communities. Simons, Polehampton and Bartrum too had returned to family as widowed daughters, but marriage soon removed them once again from their natal homes, the former two returning to India. Although they did not provide familial or familiar refuge, the royal favour apartments at Hampton Court Palace offered sanctuary to Isabella Barnard and Susan Hodson. For the latter, however, the terms of residence and her financial constraints made it more of a genteel prison than a place of refuge.

Feeling cramped and arguably trapped, Hodson’s litany of complaints indicates that she did not suffer in silence. Like Regina McCallum she became known for her persistence and, although McCallum achieved more results, both women exasperated authorities with their demands. Although their negotiating style may have been more abrasive than most, Hodson and McCallum were not alone in being actively engaged in business matters, particularly dealing with pensions and estates often complicated by

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Indian considerations. Widows demonstrated acumen and, like Penny, ingenuity in providing for themselves and for their children. While the women’s independence and agency should not be overstated as there were also many widows who relied on others for assistance and guidance, it is evident that in spite of the trauma and loss that the women had experienced many refused to be or remain objectified as victims.

Nevertheless, despite their determination to get on with their lives, it can be argued that the new realities of all the women remained inextricably woven into their past. Not only had their husbands died in the imperial cause but many, if not most, of the widows were financially supported by funds flowing from imperial coffers or donated for such support. Although collectively the women continued to be defined by the imperial conflict, once again, the widows, as individuals, were more diverse in how they chose to identify themselves and in the homage paid to their previous life. While some widows continued to define themselves by their late husbands’ military rank, others encouraged their children’s return to India to engage in military or missionary work. Coopland, who had vowed never to return to India, actively pursued an appointment there for her only son, two of Angelo’s three children returned to India, and Glen’s eldest daughter was delighted to return to her “native land” and her birthplace of Mirzapore. Often having remarried, other widows themselves made the trip back to India and established new lives where their old ones had been cut short. Durand’s (Polehampton) burial of her young daughter in Lucknow where she had buried her first husband ten years previously illustrates the strata of experiences which connected the women’s new lives with their old ones. Similarly, for all the Mutiny widows who returned to Britain, it was the experiences which they carried that informed Britain at a family and community level of India.

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Although collectively, they informed the nation of high-blown tragedy and trauma, as individuals, they were the bridge which traversed boundaries between ‘home and ‘away’ for families and communities with their personal narratives.

It is at this level that the boundaries between home and empire dissolve. The examination of movement between Britain and India of children who were sent to Britain as children and returned to their parents in India as young adults focuses on the fractured dynamic of Anglo-Indian families. In addition, generations of Anglo-Indian widows who returned, often to Anglo-Indian communities, have also been documented. Despite the seeming exclusivity of these ‘old Indian’ enclaves, by catching the attention of the nation, the Mutiny became part of the British narrative. Although fractured imperial families and widows returning to Britain were not new, as remnants and representations of the imperial/domestic destruction the mutiny widows became a symbol of both imperial loss and survival. However, as symbolism is generally important to serve an end and the dead are more easily appropriated as symbols than the living, the end of the conflict and the heterogeneity of the widows helped them disappear from public view. However, removed from public scrutiny, their personal narratives and negotiation of domestic grief and loss demonstrate degrees of adaptability, ingenuity and strength of purpose which Mutiny narratives have hitherto obscured.

This lack of focus on widows is consistent with the tertiary space they have been given in discussions of married and never-married women in British social history.

Despite the recognition of their significant presence and contribution to society,2 they are

2 Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 6-7. Vicinus acknowledges that she has excluded widows from her

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not easily integrated into the married or maiden binary which continues to define nineteenth-century British women. Addressing this lacuna, my study on middle-class

English widows during the first half of the century has demonstrated the complexity and ambiguity of widows’ lives.3 Like the Mutiny widows, although their lives were fixed and circumscribed by death, they too demonstrated subjectivity and mediated their own space between prescription and practice. However, unlike the Mutiny widows, their loss and grief were not echoed by public and imperial trauma nor did they have the benefit of similar financial support. While it should not be overstated, most widows of the Mutiny were eligible for pension and/or relief fund support by virtue of the imperial circumstances of their widowhood. Although this baseline of income provided many with only subsistence and others, at best, with a much reduced standard of living, it allowed the women to adopt strategies for supplementing or stretching what was a reasonably reliable income. In one of the few studies which focus on nineteenth-century widows,

Curran argues that this was not an option available for many civilian middle-class widows.4 While this examination does not refute Curran’s findings, it does demonstrate that the experiences of widows were far too diverse for a single study. Almost two decades ago, Amanda Vickery issued a challenge to look beyond precept in gender history to discover practice.5 Similarly, widows need to be extracted from the marginal notes in history and the temptation for caricature renounced. Just as these women brought

study as they did not fit her parameters. However she also states that widows were an important part of every social class, have suffered from economic and social invisibility and deserve a separate study. 3 Judith Hinshaw, “Early Nineteenth Century British Widows: Caught Between the Spheres” (Master’s Thesis, University of Calgary, 2003). 4 Cynthia Curran, When I First Began My Life Anew: Middle-Class Widows in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Bristol: Wyndham Hall Press, 2000). 5 Amanda Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History” The Historical Journal. 36 No. 2 (1993).

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the empire back to Britain, bringing widows to the centre from the periphery of gender history allows a fresh centripetal perspective.

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