[DOWNLOAD] "Introduction: Byron's Scots and Byron's Scotland (George Gordon, Lord Byron) (Critical Essay)" by Studies in Romanticism ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Introduction: Byron's Scots and Byron's Scotland (George Gordon, Lord Byron) (Critical Essay)
- Author : Studies in Romanticism
- Release Date : January 22, 2008
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 203 KB
Description
"WE HAVE BEEN FEEDING ON STRAWBERRIES AND MILK AND HAVE made jam of them but our sugar ran out and we were forced to have done.... We hear the cuckoo all day long.... Thus we could almost imagine ourselves at home." This description of high tea in the Himalayas, a repast taken regularly after climbing some of the highest mountains in the world, comes from an 1815 letter written by the artist and travel writer James Baillie Fraser (1783-1856) to his sister, Jane Anne, and their parents in Moniack, near Inverness. Fraser was traveling on an expedition to the mountainous north of India as the official artist of the Commissioner for the Gharwal region of the Himalayas, who was also his brother, William Fraser. The highland landscapes and mountain magnitudes north of Gharwal appealed to the artistic Scotsman, who found the scenes awe-inspiring, sublime, and pleasingly reminiscent of his native land. "Asia was almost lost in our imagination: a native of any part of the British Isles might have believed himself wandering among the lovely and romantic scenes of his own country. The delight of such association can only be understood by those who have lingered out a long term of separation, and who anxiously desire the moment of reunion with their native land." (1) Amid the "burns and conifers" and isolated "savage wilderness" of the high Himalayan valleys, James and William Fraser found familiar (but not too familiar) fruit and floral reminders of their childhood Scotland: "We took notice of many old friends peeping from beneath [the ice and snow] ... more than one species of raspberry-bush and bramble, the strawberry, but of a very worthless sort, trefoil or clover ... bushes of thorn and plum, wild peach trees, a sort of crab-pear, and apple, and dog roses" as well as "small forms" of iris, columbine, larkspur, orchis, anemones, cowslips, and polyanthus. (2) There was more to complicate James Baillie Fraser's experience in India and his associative memories of home and boyhood. The two Fraser brothers had not seen one another since they had been children: in 1799, at the age of sixteen, James had traveled to Guiana to assume management of the Fraser family's sugar plantation, and he had only returned to Scotland in 1811; William, meanwhile, in 1801, also at the age of sixteen, had joined the East India Company as a writer in India and risen in the ranks of Governor-General Wellesley's administration in Delhi, and then had been appointed Political Agent for the Nepal War (for British domination) and made responsible for recruiting tribal warriors of the north and neutralizing local militia. When the brothers met for the first time since 1799 at the younger brother's establishment in the Himalayan foothills, William was the British Commissioner for the entire region, representing the empire's military and territorial interests (and his own private interests in horses, arms, and equipage) among the warlords and mountain communities. James, who had journeyed to Calcutta in 1814 to organize the Fraser family's indigo business into a mercantile partnership called "Fraser and Mackintosh," was traveling north in 1815 as a respite from what he described in letters home as an always hot, dusty, noisy, "detestable" Calcutta, with no good servants and a drudgery of work. James declared the comforts found at his brother's "white palace," set amid spectacular and seemingly familiar mountains, to be "quite a life to my liking. I am deep in Politics and War. The country is beautiful, and the climate is superior to anything I ever saw"; "in Calcutta I had so few servants ... I now am again in splendour [because of William]." (3) To avoid familial dismay at any news in his letters of the period, James neglects to tell his parents and sister in Scotland that his brother has settled in for good in his self-created paradise in Gharwal--he had "gone native," married a Rajput princess, wore tribal dress and an "Asiatic" beard, kept a harem and a private