Volume 1

The good old days of Honorable John Company : being curious reminiscences illustrating manners and customs of the British in India during the rule of the East India Company from 1600 to 1858 / compiled by W.H. Carey.

Date:
1906-1907
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The good old days of Honorable John Company : being curious reminiscences illustrating manners and customs of the British in India during the rule of the East India Company from 1600 to 1858 / compiled by W.H. Carey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the events of the times alluded to. But these notes will afford both amusement and instruction, showing as they do how rapidly improvement and progress have been going on, both in the condition and lives of the English in India, and we may add especially of the natives also, during the Government of the East India Company between the years 1600 and 1858. The work was first taken up as an amusement during the leisure hour, but in the course of our reading, so many interest- ing records came under notice that it occurred to us, that the present generation might take an equal interest with ourselves in a narrative of events which happened during the two centuries alluded to in Calcutta and India generally. Like another Herculaneum, that had been buried for ages and afterwards exposed to view to a race unborn at the time of its entombment, the habits and amusements of people which had passed away from the face of the earth are reproduced in the pages we now present to the reader. We seem hereto live again among those who were contemproaneous with our great grandfathers, and we can in imagination see a little into their customs and habits, so old fashioned in our eyes as to rise a smile of contempt or ridicule. We see Calcutta before it possessed a single building of magnificence or even of importance, and when the Honorable Company of merchants were only in their infancy, and ruled the country with a jealous eye and iron hand. With friends of the past we visit spots once of note in the City of Palaces, and in some stations in the upper provinces. We joisi with them the masque, the ball, the convivial gatherings of those days. We take part in the quaint sayings and conver- sation of the old and the puerilities of the young. We see around us men whose names have passed down as heirlooms to posterity, and whose good deeds live in the memory of the present generation ; and others whose names indeed have passed to their children, but whose memory is alone marked by pompous