Miss Eden's Letters

by Emily Eden

Tell me an immense deal about yourself, and do write, there’s a duck. Your most affectionate

E. E.

Miss Eden to Lady Campbell.

Government House, Calcutta,
August 16, 1836.

MY DEAREST PAM, Your long, dear letter has actually found its way here—came in last week quite by itself, having travelled 15,000 miles with nobody to take care of it, and it arrived feeling quite well and not a bit altered since it left you. I cannot sufficiently explain the value of a letter here; rupees in any number could not express the sum which a letter is worth, and I do not know how to make you understand it. But, you see, the scene in India is so well got up to show off a letter.

I was suddenly picked up out of a large collection of brothers, sisters, and intimate friends, with heaps of daily interests and habits of long standing, devoted to the last night’s debate and this morning’s paper, detesting the heat of even an English summer, worshipping autumn, and rather rejoicing in a sharp East wind, with a passion for sketching in the country, and enjoying an easy life in town—with all this we are sent off out of the reach of even letters from home, to an entirely new society of a most second-rate description,—to a life of forms and Aides-de-Camp half the day, and darkness and solitude the other half—and to a climate!!

Topics of interest we have none indigenous to the soil. There is a great deal of gossip, I believe, but in the first place, I do not know the people sufficiently by name or by sight to attach the right history to the right face, even if I wanted to hear it, and we could not get into any intimacies even if we wished it, for in our despotic Government, where the whole patronage of this immense country is in the hands of the Governor-General, the intimacy of any one person here would put the rest of the society into a fume, and it is too hot for any super-induced fuming....

The real calamity of the life is the separation from home and friends. It feels like death, and all the poor mothers here who have to part from their children from five years old to seventeen are more to be pitied than it is possible to say. And the annoyance of the life is the climate. It is so very HOT, I do not know how to spell it large enough.

Now I have stated our grievances, I must put all the per contras lest you should think me discontented. First, George is as happy as a King; then our healths, as I said before, are very good, though we look like people playing at Snap-dragon—everybody does. And though it is not a life that admits of one doing much active good, some is always possible in this position, and then it is a life of great solitude, which is wholesome.

Then, as a set-off to discomforts peculiar to the climate, we have every luxury that the wit of man can devise, and are gradually acquiring the Indian habit of denying ourselves nothing, which will be awkward. I get up at eight, and with the assistance of Wright and my two black maids—picturesque creatures as far as white muslin and scriptural-looking dresses can make ugly women—contrive to have a bath and to be dressed, and to order dinner by nine, when we meet in the great hall for breakfast.