Abstract
In 1807,11-year-old William Brunton wrote from Edinburgh to his father in Madras:
Major Bruce is in London, he is going out to Madras. I have seen your picture, it is not like you in the under part of the face. It makes you fatter than you are; at least since I saw you last. I hope you will be over soon. You always say that certainly you will be over in the first fleet. I was Dux at the examination and got Johnson’s lives of the Poets, in four volumes.1
From his father’s ‘fatter’ visage in a portrait to the annual broken promise that his parents ‘will be over in the first fleet’: the non sequiturs of this extract speak to the difficulties of maintaining a relationship between parent and child conducted at a distance of thousands of miles. As Kate Teltscher has argued, family letters ‘supply new ways to read the colonial archive…Indeed, familiar letters offer as valuable a resource to historians of empire as official correspondence, state papers, or government proceedings’.2 Held at the National Archives of Scotland, many of the Brunton family papers detail childhoods — some white and some mixed-race — spent in Madras and Scotland that the official archive does not recognize and cannot illuminate.
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Notes
Kate Teltscher, ‘Writing Home and Crossing Cultures: George Bogle in Bengal and Tibet, 1770–1775’, in Kathleen Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 282.
See, for example, Sarah M.S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008);
Bruce Elliott, David Gerber and Suzanne Sinke (eds), Letters Across Borders: The Epistolary Practices of International Migrants (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006);
Erika Rappaport, ‘“The Bombay Debt”: Letter Writing, Domestic Economies and Family Conflict in Colonial India’, Gender and History, vol. 16, no. 2 (2004), 233–60.
Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 130.
See, for example, Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Margot Finn, ‘Anglo-Indian Lives in the Later Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 33, no. 1 (2010), 49–65;
Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (London: Duke University Press, 1995), 52.
See, for example, Nicholas Hudson, ‘From “Nation” to “Race”: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 29, no. 3 (1996), 247–64;
Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 59–110;
David Arnold, ‘Race, Place and Bodily Difference in Early Nineteenth-Century India’, Historical Research, vol. 77, no. 196 (2004), 254–73.
On the prevalence of Indian women in wills, see Christopher Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833 (Richmond: Curzon, 1996), 4.
On climatic arguments, see Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 7–10.
Cited in Mary McKerrow, Mary Brunton: The Forgotten Scottish Novelist (Kirkwall: Orcadian, 2001), 78.
On the role of climatic arguments of race and the Scottish Enlightenment, see Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 181–90.
See for example, J.A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1986);
J.A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Innes Munro, A Narrative of the Military Operations of the Coromandel Coast (London: Privately Printed, 1789), 50.
Deborah Cohen, Family Secrets: Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day (London: Viking, 2013), 18;
Percival Spear, The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth Century India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 63.
Lillian Faderman, Scotch Verdict: Miss Pirie and Miss Woods v. Dame Cumming Gordon (New York: Quill, 1983), 28–29.
Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850–1983 (London: Longman, 1975), 199–200.
William Steven, The History of the High School of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Maclachlan & Stewart, 1849), 209.
Cited in James Grant, Old and New Edinburgh (London: Cassell, 1880), vol. 4, 296.
On the excess associated with those returned from India, see Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Cited in Franklin B. Wickwire and Mary Wickwire, Cornwallis: The Imperial Years (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 89.
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Filor, E. (2016). ‘He is hardened to the climate & a little bleached by it’s [sic] influence’: Imperial Childhoods in Scotland and Madras, c. 1800–1830. In: Robinson, S., Sleight, S. (eds) Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-48941-8_5
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