THE GRANDFATHER OF THACKERA.Y.*
MR. BRADLEY-Brae presses so closely on the heels of the late Sir W. W. Iunter, his eminent predecessor in Anglo- Indian administration and letters, that it is not surprising that be should attbmpt a new rendering of the traditions and records of which such admirable use was made in The Thackerays in India. Mr. Bradley-Birt has had advantages denied to the earlier historian of Thackeray, "the elephant- hunter," the bluff,' stolid John Bull, sensible and practical, who was the first Collector of Sylhet. He has bad the advice and help of,-the descendants 'of the novelist, and has apparently consulted Government records which were over- looked by Sir ,William Hunter. We could wish that hie trans- literation of local names' had been " Hunterian," or that he had • "Syllee" ihackeray. By F. 11, Bradleyinit, I.C.S. London Smith, Elder and Co. 17e. 6d. net.)
consulted some official colleague who had actually served in .:Sylhet, since his place-names, in the quaint Anglo-Indian *Telling of 150 years ago, are not easily identified. We should Also have liked to know whether be has studied the beautifully • written volumes of early records at Sylhet itself (or did they verish in the disastrous earthquake of 1897P). Mr. Bradley- • d3irt writes with as contagious an enthusiasm as his pre- .-decessor's of a subject full of interest to all students of the .origins of Thackeray's genius, in which Anglo-Indian influ- ences played an unmistakable and decisive part ; interesting, .'too, to all who would know in bow homely a fashion, by -what surprisingly simple means employed, and by what matter- -of-fact Britons British rule was established in Bengal. Once • more we read the curiously moving tale of how a little handful of British traders established themselves on the low-lying swampy banks of the Hoogbly, competitors in commerce with Dutchmen and Danes and Frenchmen ; how they strove to mitigate the ennui of their dull exile by -somewhat strenuous feasting and frivolity ; how they im- ported their pretty sisters and married them off to the, • factors, their colleagues ; how they gradually secured, first • pre-eminence and then the monopoly in Eastern trade ; bow the effete incapacity of the Mohammedan rulers of the country compelled these traders unwillingly to add political -control to commerce ; and how out of all these obscure and humble beginnings arose the great Empire which a British • King-Emperor has visited in person for the first time in history this year. Those first merchant administrators were stolid, unimaginative, middle-class Englishmen, bent chiefly on making an honest competence so as to retire to a comfort- able middle age as country gentlemen at home. Yet they lived among stirring and exciting scenes, and it is surely not -extravagant to suppose that their romantic surroundings Awoke some latent gift of imagination in them and, in the third generation, produced, from such commonplace material as
• William Makepeace Thackeray the first, the genius, the com- bined pathos and humour of his wonderful grandson, and the delicate literary art of his great-granddaughter, whose kindly :assistance Mr. Bradley-Birt gratefully and proudly acknow- ledges. The greater men of the time—the Olives, the Warren . Hastingsea, the Francises—exhausted themselves in the excite- ments, the intrigues, the conflicting ambitions, which were the necessary outcome of the novel work of founding a great Empire by men untrained to the task and only dimly conscious of the importance of their often-hesitating and bewildered -efforts. Their subordinates, honest Britons who only saw in the decay of Muslim rule an opportunity to establish their own fortunes and those of their relatives, probably -did even more by their sober industry and sturdy common sense to found the Empire of India on a sound, businesslike basis. From one of the most typically British of these sprang the great novelist, who was to tell a delighted world of Jos Sedley and Colonel Newcome, of Mr. Binnie and Colonel Dobbin, whose History of the Punjaub must have been as delightful reading as Orme's immortal chronicle of British India. Of these early beginnings of the settlement of Bengal Mr. Bradley-Birt writes with competence and with an easily flowing style, which makes his narrative as pleasant to read its that of Sir William Hunter himself. If he has a defect it is that in his eagerness to provide a vivid and living picture for his readers he is apt to surmise and guess where docu- mentary proof is wanting. W. M. Thackeray the first spent only ten years in India in all, and was only twenty-seven sears old when he began his long leisure of retirement. During only three years of his brief administrative career was he in independent charge of Sylbet, and even then he -sae for the most part occupied with contracts for the supply of lime and elephants to his masters in Calcutta and Leaden- ball Street. Yet Mr. Bradley-Birt jumps to the .conclusion that this mere lad was "a collector of revenue, a maker of roads and bridges, an elephant hunter and shikari, a magistrate, judge, policeman, and doctor in one." Roads and bridges were .sadly lacking in Sylbet even thirty years ago, and there is „little probability that Thackeray had either time or money for amateur engineering. There is no evidence whatever to "show that he shot so much as a basking crocodile on the banks of the Surma, and his fame as an elephant hunter rests . solely on the fact that he bad much difficulty in getting his -employers to make payment of half the price of sixty-six - elephants which he contracted to supply to the military authorities through his native subordinates. His most im- portant administrative performance was the subjugation and punishment of the recalcitrant Raja of Jaintia, whose posses- sions in the plains of Sylbet were subsequently confiscated from his descendants as a consequence of an hereditary and traditional addiction to the sacrifice of British subjects to the goddess Juinteswari. In short, Mr. Bradley-Birt has made himself a practised craftsman in the art of book-making, and if he is a little too given to eking out scanty materials by assuming that events must have gone as probability would show, his last work is not unworthy of a singularly fascinating subject, the beginnings of British rule as exemplified in the chronicles of a family which, in addition to the gift to the world of the great novelist and his distinguished daughter, has furnished many soldiers and statesmen to the maintenance and development of the great Empire whose modest beginnings are here agreeably and lucidly set forth. In the account of the Jaintia Expedition it is pleasant to meet Once more the gallant Captain Elliker, of whom mention is made in Sir Henry Cotton's admirable Revenue History of Chittagong. Perhaps the moat delightful chapter in Mr. Bradley-Bit-ea book is that which deals with the fortunes . of the excellent Jane Thackeray and her husband, the first and most famous of Anglo-Indian engineers and map makers. But something of the curious interest which attaches itself to all Thackeray's belongings may be felt in every page, and especially in the charmingly homely letters which Mr. Bradley-Birt quotes with a just appreciation that shows that he has the root of the matter in him—that be is more than a mere com- piler from not very inaccessible records. How signifi- cantly do the simple words "Ever My Dearest Girls' Most Affectionate Father, W. M. T.," remind us of the pretty conclusion of the grandson's White Squall. But the most characteristic and instructive scrap of eighteenth-century correspondence in the book is the letter in which the great Rennell, already a man with a European reputation, petitions Warren Hastings for a modest pension. His con- temporaries had won handsome fortunes by " slinking the Pagoda Tree," by the private trade that was then permitted to John Company's servants. Rennell, crippled by wounds and exhausted by repeated attacks of malarious fever, had been compelled by his exacting duties as a surveyor and explorer to content himself with a salary less than that now allowed to the most junior civilian. "I will not," he says, " take up Your Time with a Detail of my Misfortunes and sufferings, as the Particulars are already well known to you; nor, as the Hon'ble Court of Directors have been pleased to approve of my Services, shall I plead the merit of having done my Duty." Could there be a finer example of the proud humility of the toil-worn servant of State who demands his due as though it were a favour, and is ready, if refused, "to linger out a few years longer" in the then deadly climate of Eastern India P
Mr. Bradley-Birt introduces us to many other worthies of Calcutta society at the end of the eighteenth century—to governors, judges, factors, soldiers, to gallant men, and the lovely and accomplished women who thronged to India in those adventurous days, when overseas Empire had a tinge of poetry and romance which it has lost in these times of rapid and comfortable travel. There are many touching references to the brief and hectic careers of the charming English girls who " faded timelessly " in the hideously insanitary conditions of Anglo-Indian life at that period; such as the girl-wife of Richard Burwell, of whom a friend—perhaps a disappointed admirer—wrote that " of all her sex I never observed one who possessed more the arts of conciliating her admirers equal to herself." The grammar is defective, but the compliment is genuine and manly. On the whole Mr. Bradley-Birt's book holds its own well with its delightful predecessor in style, in temper, and in unforced loyalty to the remarkably distin- guished family circle which furnished so congenial a nurture for the genius of the novelist.
One or two points we have noticed which might be recon- sidered in view of a second edition. On p. 119 Mr. Bradley- Birt speaks of the sacred burning spring of Sitakund as giving. its name to the beautiful peak which soars above it. The real name of the bill is, we think, Chandra-sekhar. On p.135 the author seems to assume that the title of Collector was first used of Thackeray in Sylhet, and "henceforward down to the present day has remained the official deeignation.
of the head of all the regulation districts of Bengal." .Mr.
• Bmdley-13irt may be right, but the early administrators of • Chittagong seem to have been indifferently styled " Chief " or • " Collector," and the matter is one on which evidence should
• be readily procurable in Bengal. On p. 143 is mention of the existence of " pergunnahs " before the Permanent Settlement. It would be interesting to know what these territorial and fiscal divisions were. At the bottom of p. 151 a "not" seems to have slipped out of print or MS. We have already noted Mr. Bradley-Birt's disregard of " Hunterian " or other modern conventions of transliteration, but when he speaks of " Achmet Riza " as the Tannadah of Pandua, on p. 168, and as the Tbanndah on p. 171, he must not think vs hypercritical if we suggest Thana-dar as a better rendering of the vernacular word. We should like some account of the "terms" for measuring lime mentioned on p. 144 and elsewhere. Mr. Bradley-Birt seems uncertain whether to use the word in the singular or the plural. Frenchmen early engaged in the Sylhet lime trade, and we make the suggestion for what it is worth, that the word is simply the French word terrasse.
Not to part with Mr. Bradley-Birt in a mood of fault- finding let us, in conclusion, draw the attention of his readers to the delightful letters of the novelist's grand- mother to his uncles at school and at the old college at Hailey- bury. Miss Austen would have taken pleasure in an anxious mother who would have her son "honourably and punctually
• attending school in time and passing the rest of your time in the manner which your tender parents wish you, that is to say, both consistent with your improvement and your educa- tion, sometimes taking exercise and pleasure in the open air and sometimes within doors, in reading with attention The Bosphoric Travels, which, believe me, will yield you both amusement and profit, for they treat on subjects truly taste- ful, classical, and delightful." So wrote the kind mother whose own. voyages •had been far more than Bosphoric in extent, and who remained, for all her Eastern experiences, a
• typical English gentlewoman, a fit ancestress for the novelist whose inimitable style was based on the careful and loving study of Augustan models, and whose views of life and society were largely borrowed from the conventions by which his Anglo-Indian relatives guided lives of which their country and their class may well be proud.
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