Dangerous Detours: The Perils of Victorian Periodicals in the Digitised Age

Abstract

The British public was first introduced to Captain Ernest Scott Jervis in the summer of 1866, when a Bombay correspondent alerted readers that a storm was brewing in the Indian Army’s high command:

Though I do not wish to emulate the gossipmongers, it is needful to speak of the scrape into which the new star of Indian chivalry — Sir William Mansfield — has plunged himself by his dispute with his aide-de-camp […] Sir William, who delights in the style peremptory and autocratic, has reckoned amiss this time, and has “caught a Tartar” in his gallant aide-de-camp.¹

This report from a London daily is typical of the ridicule heaped upon Sir William Mansfield, Commander-in-Chief in India, as with seemingly monomaniacal intensity he sought to expel one of his erstwhile subordinate officers from the Army. Mansfield’s underestimated victim, the ‘Tartar’, was Jervis. His plight as a young subaltern officer pitted against arguably the second most powerful man in the British Army elicited great sympathy. The vigour with which he defended himself, his ‘Tartarish tendencies’, impressed readers. The captain seemingly made for the perfect victim around whom Mansfield’s detractors could rally.