Beschreibung:

INDIAN MUTINY]. A series of 56 autograph letters signed by Matthew John Harpley to members of his family, Allahabad, Cawnpore, Lucknow, Calcutta and others, 9 August 1857 - 17 April 1859, approximately 281 pages, 8vo, 4 pages, 4to ; together with a collection of 42 letters and other documents relating to the Mutiny, 8 Ocober 1855 - 25 March 1863, 209 pages, various sizes (small tears in some letters, one document badly mouse-eaten, with loss of text). The correspondence of Matthew Harpley, a Veterinary Surgeon serving with E Troop, the Royal Horse Artillery, covers his entire service in India, the first letter being written on board ship off Queenstown, Ireland, the last in Calcutta on the eve of his return. When he arrived in Calcutta on 2 November 1857, the Mutiny was six months old, and the chief events - the siege of Delhi, the massacre at Cawnpore, the relief of Lucknow - already past. His letters, addressed mostly to his mother and frequently cross-written, provide, however, an informative and broad-ranging account of the campaigns of the succeeding year, chiefly in Oudh, and in particular of the advance on and siege of Lucknow. His accounts of the frequent skirmishes are vigorously told, a reflection of the vengeful mood of the time ('We rode through & through them sabering them right and left'). Although particularly concerned with the military actions of the final stages of the Mutiny, Harpley's letters also provide a broader picture of the India of the Mutiny, where the destruction visited by both sides - Harpley describes on one expedition 'firing the villages as we passed through doing as much mischief as possible' - contrasts in other areas with the placidity of the peasants working the fields; the letters give a sense of Harpley's work as a veterinary surgeon, and of the tensions of British life in India in general. The remainder of the collection includes two letters and a copy of a letter by Jardy Robinson to his mother, Cawnpore and Bulandshahr, 4 May 1857 - 20 October 1857, the copied letter being a dramatic description of a never-completed journey to Meerut on 11 May, the very morning after the mutiny there which is regarded as the first incident of the broader uprising; a letter of 10 June 1857 communicates news of the siege of Delhi and the Cawnpore massacres; three letters by his brother John Robinson 25 August 1857 - 2 November 1858, give news of military operations, the first of them expressing the emotional shock of the mutiny - 'It shows how the Europeans must have been hated all the time they thought they were beloved'. The remaining letters, almost all by members of the British army in India, consist chiefly of enthusiastic accounts of the pursuit of scattered bands of insurgents in the latter stages of the Mutiny: they include a series of eleven letters by 'MWS', apparently a brigadier, fourteen letters by various officers to a Major Bulwer, four signed testimonies of 1862-3 witnessing the brave conduct of Captain Tytler at the flagstaff tower outside Delhi on 11 May 1857, and an unsigned letter of 10 January 1858 from General Outram's camp at Kaiser Bagh in Lucknow which gives a sketch map of the position. (98)