On 6th June 1837, in a letter dated “On the Indus above Mooltan”, Alexander Burnes wrote to Charles Masson in Kabul:
” Mr Trevelyan writes that he is instructed to join me, but I take it he is snug in Calcutta – he travels with four wives! “
The only Trevelyan with whom I can find evidence Burnes was in touch is Sir Charles Trevelyan, who later married Macaulay’s daughter and was famously the author of the great civil service reforms which were the major Victorian step towards meritocracy. My generation all learnt about these reforms at History O-level, not least because we learnt it from the textbooks by Trevelyan’s son and grandson, G.M. and G.O. Trevelyan, which were pretty well compulsory reading in British schools for sixty years.
Burnes definitely was in contact with Charles Trevelyan, who had recommended Mohan Lal to him. Trevelyan definitely lived in Calcutta in 1837. Trevelyan was two years younger than Burnes, and could well have been instructed to join him. I am pretty confident about the identification.
C.E. Trevelyan is one of the great, solid figures of the Victorian establishment. It is fascinating to think of him having four Indian wives. We know from Mohan Lal’s later writings that Burnes, in his camp near Mooltan, was being kept warm at night by some Kashmiri girls (plural) whom he lived with for some years and travelled with him.
I found that Burnes letter in the British library; we get the odd glimpse, but unfortunately there is no way to recover the voices of the women.
Much history has been active censorship. Trevelyan’s boss at the time was Sir Charles Metcalfe, who was a great and good man (he missed out on the permanent post of Governor General of India because when acting in that position for a year he abolished press censorship, annoying the Government). Metcalfe only had one Indian wife, whom unlike Trevelyan he acknowledged – possibly another obstacle to his becoming Governor-General.
There is a fascinating timeline to the setting in of Victorian morality. Burnes’ letter was written a few days before Victoria became Queen. Racism and hypocritical sexual morality became dominant in the ensuing decades – there was remarkably little colour prejudice in the UK before. Thus when three decades later Sir John Kaye came to write a three volume biography of Sir Thomas Metcalfe, he did not mention his marriage at all, or the existence of his children – despite the fact that one of them was then aide-de-camp to the Governor General of India!
On my Burnes biography, I was advised by William Dalrymple that the time to stop researching and to finish writing up is when you stop finding things that make you say “Wow!” Plainly I am not there yet.
UPDATE Thanks to commentators who have pointed out Trevelyan’s callous argument when administering relief during the Irish famine. This was quoted by Daniel below from Trevelyan:
‘The great evil [the Irish famine] with which which we have to contend’, said Trevelyan, ‘is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the [Irish] people’
I don’t know if you’ve come across Anne McClintock’s ‘Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest’ (London: Routledge, 1995) – which, according to the Routledge blurb, ‘…chronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race and class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling. Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.’ It’s sometimes a bit postcolonialish in its lingo, but I found the chapter on Hannah Cullwick fascinating.
Charles Trevelyan was one of the most monstruous figures in modern British history. On his watch, over 1 million Irish people died because he didn’t care enough to implement effective relief for a “famine” that was itself created by British imperial policy in Ireland.
Yakoub – thanks – I’ll look at it. I have one on my shelf to read called “Imperial Bodies” which looks interesting too.
Joe,
Yes I was aware of his role in so-called Irish famine relief – though I can’t recall how much he was responsible for policy. I have “The Great Hunger” somewhere, I’ll dig it out.
Tom Molineaux, a black, was British boxing champion in 1810, trained by another black boxer and near champion, Bill Richmond, who had fought the enormous Jewish champion Youssop in 1804.
The black Cornishman Joseph Emidy composed symphonies and concertos influenced by Handel, but failed to adapt to the more modern music of Beethoven and lapsed into obscurity.
I think more than anything the theories of Social Darwinism – which divided humanity on racial grounds and measured intelligence by racial origins – drove colour bars into our society and excused the late-Victorian carving up of the world.
This isn’t by any chance the same ‘free enterprise’ zealot who was devoted to ‘Manchester economics’ – the fashionable version of the laissez-faire that is today’s catechism?
‘The great evil [the Irish famine] with which which we have to contend’, said Trevelyan, ‘is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the [Irish] people’
Are there two Metcalfes, Charles and Thomas?
Thanks, corrected – had got used to typing Sir Charles.
Daniel
Yes, that would be him. I think that answers my question about the role he played in “famine relief”.
Think so, Mary, they were brothers, and held sway in Indian during the 1850s.
Charles was the younger, and followed his older brother, Theophilus John Metcalfe, the 2nd Baronet as the 3rd, and First Baron Metcalfe.
I ran into TJ Melcalfe while researching my biographý of Lord Chancellor Brougham,and was surprised to learn that when Brougham was a total druggie during the summer of 1834, he refused to excuse TJ from serving as a Sheriff, apparently for Berkshire.
As far as I can make out, TJ (1828-1883)was only six years old at the time.
Just another surprise while the Chancellor was flying around the country in a crazed state as if he were the King and PM all rolled into one.
Wonder if he dropped in on the county’s new Sheriff.
My advice is to start writing when you begin to fear that the work is one more volume than you planned.
The advice I heard while I was doing my research on Brougham, and Sir Geoffrey Elton, the famous Tudor historian, asked me what I was up to, and when I answered a two-volume biography of Henry Brougham, he replied: “Two volumes? I would have thought that one would be enough, and a thin one at that!”
When it comes to writing biographies, there is no shortage of subjects, and advice about how to do it.
Brits always lagged behind their colonial partners in the miscegenation stakes.
Oh, I see the update, and Brougham, his drug habit apparently cured by the time the Irish famine came along, had a very different opinion about the cause – the failure of the Irish aristocracy to keep up their properties, and pay sufficient rates to keep the suffering populace alive rather than forcing them upon English rate payers.
It was all the doing of the absentee landlords, he claimed.
Brougham, at this time, was The Times’ famous Commissioner on the condition of Ireland, and wrote the famous series in the newspaper.
Craig and Jon, I’ve e-mailed on the moderators’ list; the message requests a receipt.
Meanwhile the poor in England were merely indigent.
It is interesting to speculate about whether the Famine (genocide by starvation and ideology) would have been quite so cruelly managed if the Act of Union had not been passed some forty years previously.
and a ps… the latter-day ballad, ‘The Fields of Athenry’, as sung at football stadia in all sorts of places has a line referring to ‘Trevelyan’s corn’.
‘Much history has been active censorship’
And that’s because much history is tailored to maintaining the illusion of capitalist supremacy and nationalistic ideology…
Pick up any book written about the conflict in Northern Ireland from any establishment university and you will come under the impression that the IRA were nothing more than misguided terrorists. Local histories are always competing with universally established histories. They are rarely given the care and respect they are due.
“And that’s because much history is tailored to maintaining the illusion of capitalist supremacy and nationalistic ideology…”
Is this why the BBC tends to overindulge the feminist and homosexual historians?
The whole subject matter is open to subversion, therefore every good ‘history’ should be accompanied by an agenda trail to and from the author, to warrant its credentials.
‘Brits always lagged behind their colonial partners in the miscegenation stakes’.
AC- only after the Mutiny, which was 20 years after the period Craig is researching; after that the empire builders were paranoid about England’s finest, in their pith helmets and Sam Browne belts, ‘going native’. Hence the ‘fishing fleet’ of vicar’s daughters and the like, dispatched out East as prospective marriage fodder.
‘Trevelyan’s corn’
CD- that’s a reference to the maize, or ‘Indian corn’, imported into Ireland to feed the victims in the workhouses after the ‘less eligiblity ‘ rule was relaxed, far too late to do much good.
Elizabethan Sexuality in C21.
Another miscellany from Aangirfan. I expect you might have heard that those arrested for the murder of the girl found at the New Year on the Sandringham estate have been released and that there are no other suspects according to Norfolk police.
http://aangirfan.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/queer-goings-on-alleged-scandals.html
{http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-19715353} Sandringham RIP Alisa Dmitrijeva, aged 17
I hear a 46 year old man has been arrested in the case of the missing little Welsh girl although she has not been found.
The Met are investigating the Savile rape charges. {http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19806312}
The last decade in Afghanistan Iraq and Libya has turned upside down the idea that colonial powers forced their supremacy on weaker nations. Africa and India were both powerful Muslim continents before colonialism. If recent history can be used as a model, they could not be subjugated without insider rogue religious renegades selling their countries for their own financial/ political gain.
The British loved to denigrate their colonial opponents, calling them ‘fanatics’ in India. But I suspect that we will later look back on the war on terror as a devilish collusion between political Islam and the West. The rhetoric of ‘terror’ was invented not by George Bush but by political Islam because it could not win authority by intellectual argument or scriptural evidence.
Perhaps the rhetoric of Irish ‘perversion and turbulence’ was supplied from the Vatican. Political people lie all the time.
The only way to dismantle their power is to defibrillate the fabric of their lies and force your imagination to understand the satanic obsession with sex money and power which motivates their obsession with concealing the truth.
What is the truth? The truth is that there is one God who has made plain His divine Laws through holy prophets, the incumbent version being the Holy Qur’an revealed to Muhammad May Allah’ peace and blessings be upon him.
Laisa ba’ad al-kufri thnab. All other sins are insignificant compared to disbelief in this truth. The sexual, genocidal, thieving, torturing histories of the rejecters of truth are interesting as a comparison to the present day. Their knowledge and consequences is known to Allah and it is He, not we, who will weigh the balances.
What is truly amazing to me is that the when the message of God’s omniscience and omnipotence is so simple to understand, that political people still prefer to use the slogan of religion to gain tiny scraps of that omniscience and omnipotence by lying, spying and collaborating with the enemies of truth, instead of getting on with promoting that truth.
@Guano, ah, the truth! It is elusive for all of us, I contend. If we agree on that – and perhaps we do not – then my saying that we shouldn’t worry too much about god is just as valid as your insisting, repeatedly over some years here, that ‘the truth of God should be promoted’.
In fact, scientific rationalists would say that the ball is in your court, since if you insist that god is omniscient, then it is up to you to prove that, and not for me to disprove it. (With that in mind, there is an excellent discussion between Clark and Sunflower on the nature of proof and rationality on the Leave Of Absence thread).
As it happens, I contend that a fundamental societal problem stems from the major religions’ prescriptions upon, and interferences with, sexual morality. You seem to approve of that, even though it appears to have deliberately propagated shame as a mechanism for social control – these days a widespread and harmful societal meme. Admittedly, Burnes’ letter would undoubtedly have demonstrated the sexism of the era if he were writing about a woman with many husbands, and perhaps it was that sexism that permitted a liberal attitude towards men only. Nevertheless, its tolerance shows up the major religions for the regressive structures they have become.
With all that in mind, I think gay marriage – quite a possibility here in the UK, at least in Scotland – is just the start of the religions’ waning influence upon how relationships are defined. Emerging western instances of polyamory has not yet caused a backlash amongst conservatives, but it is interesting to ponder how religions will respond to them.
Craig, Gawain, I agree, and ‘the active censorship’ still goes on. Just over two years ago I discovered the identity of a previously anonymous 18th century novelist, Elizabeth Jervis, (later Elizabeth Pipe Wolferstan (1763-1845)). She wrote one novel “Agatha – or a narrative of recent events (1796)”. That same year she got married and published nothing further until her husband, Samuel, died in 1820. Even though she was already recognised in women’s circles as a minor poet, nobody was aware of the novel she wrote before her marriage. At my own expense I published a 2nd edition of ‘Agatha’ which as well as the narrative contained a 10,000 word biographical sketch and the only extant chronology of the life of Elizabeth Pipe Wolferstan. (Up to then nothing was known of the year of her death). She wrote a treatise on education as well but only a second edition was thought to have survived. In the British Library I discovered the 1st edition which had a slightly different title and informed the B. L. archivists. Almost immediately after the 2nd edition of Agatha was off the press somebody who selects novels to review by some kind of roulette process put a long exposition of the book on the web which contained more than enough of my original research and arguments, and 2 of the 3 illustrations found in the original. A fairly thorough resume of the plot makes it less likely for somebody to order the book but I am acknowledged as the person who discovered the identity of the author. All this was going on as I was completing a 60,000 word M Litt thesis on English novelist, Robert Bage, (1730-1801). I thought every university literature department would want a copy. But as the author of this literary blog mentions:
“A limited run of the novel was released earlier this year…and has, apparently, already been pirated by those print-on-demand outfits. Charming.”
http://acourseofsteadyreading.wordpress.com/category/reading-roulette/page/3/
My edition of her novel still has the only extensive biographical sketch of Elizabeth Pipe-Wolferstan, and her humorous courtship the year she published ‘Agatha’; and the experience has made me reluctant to publish an up-to-date biography of Robert Bage, which would correct several historical errors.
“The effects of history on today’s politics are fascinating, and dangerous when perceived historical injustice or heroism becomes an obsession,…”
And in a historical context, it is a combination of the circumstances within which persons found themselves, that combined with individual predispositions and the opportunities availed to fulfill ambitions that directed the course of history. Maybe, Trevelyan found himself within that matrix, and acted then as a man of his era and time?
Craig :
That’s the man.
‘The great evil [the Irish famine] with which which we have to contend’, said Trevelyan, ‘is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the [Irish] people’
– Charles Trevelyn
Incidentally, in “The Fields of Athenry” – the unofficial Irish national anthem sung at Irish (Munster rugby fans give it a good airing too) sporting fixtures – in the opening verse Mr. Trevelyn gets a mention :
“….Michael they are taking you away,
For you stole Trevelyn’s corn,
So the young might see the morn,
Now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay.
Low lie the fields of Athenry……”
Up there with Cromwell as one of the most reviled figures in Irish history.
Trevelyan was a libertarian ideologue who reviled the principle of charity, and believed that the famine was the Will of God. He was determined to uphold free market principles, which he believed would lead to natural population control. The human toll is well documented:
http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/hunger.htm
The policy was in keeping with the Whig party’s Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which restricted relief for the poor to the workhouses, in conditions so wretched that no-one would willingly enter them (as portrayed in Oliver Twist). They believed that poor people deserved their fate because they were so wretched. The suffering caused by that policy, in Britain as well as Ireland, was unconscionable.
Great song Munsterman. Pete St. John’s lyrics about the Irish Famine fits his beautiful tune so well. This is Paddy Reilly’s version. Unfortunately you have to watch a 15 second advertisement first. Trevelyan was not the only landowner who kept corn from the Irish people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nIrLS3gI8A&feature=context-gau
Back home in good old England, was Robert Peel, whose fickle policy on the corn laws was well captured by Ebenezer Elliot’s poem “Queer Bobby in 1837. But not the Bobby of 1846” likening Peel’s arse to the leather of shoe soles.
“But if backsides, once soft as down,
Have tough as teak become,
Sir Robert, bobbing up and down,
Is like a butcher’s bum.”
The foxhunter Peel’s protectionist policies for farmers ensured that there were no cheaper imports and the populace of England and Ireland starved. Peel, like his father, was a landowner at Drayton Manor, now a thrill theme park, and both believed in protectionist policies. Of course it is not the evil that men do that lives after them but the good, and Peel is remembered for introducing the organised policing. Sorry, I’m not laughing!
Sorry the wrong link was pasted for Paddy Reilly’s ‘Athenry’
This is the correct one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9InnXP64To
I’m trying to do too many things at once. Apologies.
I have just listened to it John on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr1rzSSMsac&feature=related. It is a very moving song especially seeing the photos of the fields and countryside and the contemporary etchings, as well as being able to read the lyrics.
One can only weep.
I have just had the loft insulated properly and it was csrried out by the energy supplier. The two young men, aged about 25, who did the work arrived on time, did the job quickly, explained what had been done and cleaned up afterwards. They are both from Rochdale and leave their wives and young children Monday to Friday to work down South because they cannot find work up there. It seems so very wrong that this is the state of affairs in GB 2012. Neither of them considered joining the army by the way which demonstrated their high intelligence.
John Goss :
Thanks for the link to Paddy Reilly’s great version – would melt a snowman.
“Of course it is not the evil that men do that lives after them but the good,…” very often that is indeed the case.
However, sometimes even the genuinely good guys do get the girl in real life – check out E.D. Morel in Adam Hochschild’s excellent book “Kind Leopold’s Ghost”, detailing King Leopold of Belgium’s insatiable greed in the Congo. It is a very well written book, although on a very depressing subject – be no harm to keep a bottle of whiskey handy so you can fortify yourself with a few stiff ones on the way.
Oooppsss.. “KinG Leopold’s Ghost” – Adam Hochschild.(Not KinD Leopold as per typo just now……)
John Goss
I think you are unfair to Peel. He was genuinely horrified by the Irish famine, and dramatically abandoned protection, splitting the Tory Party in the process. He escaped from the class interests he was brought up in when faced with human suffering. It is, I think, a grave mistake to judge human beings by the political principles of a different era to that in which they lived.