This chapter presents new information on British suburban expansion in Delhi, shown through the life and building activities of another East India Company official, William Fraser (1784–1835). In the chapter, I compare two newly built houses in expanding British suburban enclaves to the north and west of the walls of Shahjahanabad: the Gothicising Ludlow Castle in the Civil Lines, built a decade earlier but used after 1832 by Fraser and his successors as the Residency building; and the strategically located hilltop house that Fraser built for himself on the Northern Ridge which, through its symbolic location, linked India's resonant pre-Mughal past with a British present. Though they were stylistically quite different and situated several miles apart, these houses and the dates of their construction have been muddled in the secondary literature. I will try to disentangle the evidence for their histories. At first glance, each house seems to reflect an adaptation, in Delhi, of the two currently competing historic style vocabularies in European architecture: the classical and the Gothic. But when more closely examined they tell us about the disorderly layers of transculturation in Delhi. British builders now commonly drew on the functional aspects of north Indian architecture to help deal with the searing heat of the early summers. Yet the exterior style of a British house did not necessarily reflect its interior configuration and certainly not its contents. The objects contained within the households of William Fraser had multiple meanings, and his collections are a clue to his contradictory personality.

Within a very few years of their arrival in Delhi, the British had begun to erect new dwellings outside the fortified walls of Shahjahanabad. The Maratha invasions and periodic raids by displaced Gujjar tribesmen who had lost lands to the north of the city had been quelled, and the hinterland was becoming safer. The environment inside the city walls had always presented paradoxes that some British officials could not reconcile with what they knew of life on large estates in the Indian countryside.

This chapter examines the building activities of the distinguished East India Company servant David Ochterlony (1758–1825), twice British Resident at Delhi and often cited as the paradigm of a man who effortlessly (and colourfully) straddled British and Indian culture. By 1803, Ochterlony had already been many years in India, and he brought to the post of Resident both the pragmatism of a soldier and the mentality of a colonial aristocrat. Indianised in his habits and lifestyle, he consciously emulated the manners of Delhi's urban aristocracy, reflecting in both his public and private roles the behaviour of the elites of a country in which had lived and worked for nearly fifty uninterrupted years by the time of his death in 1825. The chapter begins by looking at the establishment of the first Delhi Residency, a house Ochterlony occupied immediately after conquest in 1803. The Residency was located in part of an appropriated sub-imperial Mughal palace inside the walled city of Shahjahanabad, and I suggest reasons for the choice of this site and its meaning in the visual landscape of the Mughal city, both before and after conquest, linking its location to ideas of symbolic capital. I then compare the Residency with what we know of other houses built by Ochterlony in Delhi and elsewhere in north India, focussing on the Mubarak Bagh, a garden house in a fanciful blend of Mughal and neo-Gothic styles, part of which was perhaps also intended for use as his mausoleum. Viewed through the lens of Ochterlony's very particular life, a comparison of these two houses – the one public and reused, the other private and newly built – begins to illustrate the permeable ways that heterogeneous style, form and function merged in British houses in late Mughal Delhi.

David Ochterlony, already an established officer in the Company's army, had been Adjutant General under the British commander Gerard Lake in the second Anglo-Maratha war. He was rewarded for his service by appointment to a first term as Delhi Resident between 1803 and 1806. During this time, much of his effort went towards forging a respectful relationship with the Emperor, Shah Alam II, and to following the protocols of the Mughal court. ‘The mode in which Lt. Col.

This chapter is about the legacy of East Indies sojourns. It traces the pattern of bodily return, or failure to return, among the Cumbrian women and men who went to the East Indies. It explores the financial and social outcomes for sojourners and their families after often years of physical separation and emotional and material investment in East Indies ventures. It is about how returning Cumbrians reinserted themselves and expressed their success in the Cumbrian world. It also considers how the East Indies infiltrated the fabric of provincial Cumbria in civil society, its politics and the day-to-day institutions of local authority.

At the heart of those processes was a dynamic interplay between place attachment, identity and expressions of success. As previous chapters have shown, going to the East Indies was fundamentally about returning and returns. Yet as sojourners prepared, and were prepared for the East Indies, not coming home was as probable as returning. Financial failure was a constant anxiety. Returning and returns, therefore, cannot be considered without giving attention to the issue of those who did not return to Cumbria. Consequently, the discussion starts with the pattern of bodily return to Cumbria. It notes that some returning sojourners resided outside of Cumbria when they returned to the British Isles. It notes, too, how the cycle of aspiration, passage and return was interrupted for many by death. It is in the context of death and the way in which Cumbrian sojourners were memorialised, that issues of Cumbrian attachment and detachment associated with the East Indies is initially explored.

There are many theories about why the novel emerges (or re-emerges) as an important literary form in the long eighteenth century. Ian Watt argued the novel was the result of a demographic shift, creating a desire for what he dubbed ‘formal realism’ among a rising ‘middling’ class. A number of notable studies have followed, including the work of Margaret Doody, Nancy Armstrong, William Beatty Warner, Michael McKeon, Homer Obed Brown, Lennard Davis, Catherine Gallagher, Clifford Siskin, and J. Paul Hunter (to name but a few). These have greatly informed our knowledge of the period, but in all these studies the effect of mobility on the novel has never been given its due. This study has aimed to rectify this; my view is that the extended prose narratives of the 1700s mirror the extended range of spatial experience that accompanied the transport revolution. The energy that characterises the early novel is that of expanded horizons and new possibilities, exemplified by Denis Diderot's Marquis des Arcis, who admits that ‘sometimes I feel I want to jump into a post-chaise and keep on going for as long as there's road to drive on’. The life-as-a-journey trope dominates so many early narratives precisely because mobility was no longer an extraordinary event (as in The Odyssey, or chivalric quests) but had become a common part of everyday experience. To describe someone's life in the detail demanded by the novel, it became necessary to consider not just the arrival at key scenes, but the process of each step in between. This is not just true of a journey text like Tom Jones, but of ‘domestic’ novels like Pamela. One of the central experiences of reading about Samuel Richardson's protagonists is that their every move is detailed and examined. To do this, writers had to develop a poetics of movement, to find a way to describe and represent the experience of people in motion.

The importance of in-between spaces also became paramount. Tristram Shandy celebrates his ‘plain stories’, which are interested in the process of travel, not just the set-piece descriptions of cities and major sights. The novel is notoriously hard to define, but one of its key characteristics in the eighteenth century is the way the journey becomes part of the story.

Sir Thomas and Lady Hester gained first-hand experience of wardship in the early part of the second decade of the seventeenth century when Sir Thomas acquired the wardships of the co-heiresses to Stantonbury, Buckinghamshire, Dorothy and Mary Lee, when both were beneath the age of 14 years. The circumstances in which these wardships came to the Temples, the purpose for which they were intended and the care which Thomas and Hester accorded the wards are the main subject of this chapter.

The sale of wardships has been studied from a rather different perspective from that adopted here. Work previously focused on sales of wardships as a source of income and patronage for the crown or individuals. Historians have debated whether it was a tale of corrupt practices. There has sometimes been an emphasis on describing and sympathizing with the fate of the wards, particularly when female. However, the acquisition of wardships by the aristocracy and gentry also has to be seen as part of developing investment strategies in the age before the foundation of the Bank of England and investment in stocks.

Joel Hurstfield describes the ‘evil’ trade in wardships, which made substantial profits for agents and middlemen, but individual aristocrats and gentlemen possibly regarded specific wardships as a contribution to the family coffers, present and future. For it is equally true that the purchase of a wardship might have, and often did have, a deeply personal implication for the individual families involved. These twin strands frequently became entangled in the approach to the wards themselves.

The Temples like so many of their class had great familiarity with the system of wardships and proceedings in the court that was there to protect the interests of the wards. In 1536 Thomas Herytage I had purchased the wardship of Anthony Styrley of Styrley, Nottinghamshire from Sir Nicholas Styrley apparently in anticipation. Anthony's mother was Isabel Spencer, daughter of John Spencer I, a distant relative of the Herytages. Thomas Herytage granted the rights to this wardship to Peter Temple (1516–78) and John Palmer of London, whose money had been used to buy the wardship in the first place, on 12 November 1537. Sir Thomas Temple found evidence that his grandfather Peter had also been granted the wardship of stepdaughter Alice Ratcliffe.

Mobility and stasis

The publication of Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) helped to define and popularise the prose form that was later to be called the novel. Its connection with mobility is obvious – both Robinson Crusoe and its sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published later the same year, use journeys as a framework. Critics have argued much of the drama of the narrative is a result of its ambivalence between what Martin Price called ‘the adventurous spirit and the old piety’, when the traditional insistence on ‘keeping one's place’ was being loosened by the ethos of circulation and trade that helped drive a nascent capitalist economy. Robinson Crusoe formulates his journey in precisely these terms; he sees leaving his family as his ‘Original Sin’ and worries his vicissitudes at sea are a punishment for his ‘wandering Inclination’ and his rejection of traditional, paternal authority. Robinson Crusoe is also highly responsive to the changes experienced in mobility in the second decade of the century. Defoe's novels debate the relative advantages of moving by sea or land at a time when roads were becoming much more important for internal transport in Britain, rivalling the ships that skirted the coast and the boats that worked the river routes. The shifts between motion and stasis, and moving alternately by sea and land, pattern the narrative and give it much of its power. In the surprising sea section, the gradual development on the island, or the exciting denouement set along the strand, something new is glimpsed in Robinson Crusoe: the beginnings of a poetics of mobility, of an investigation of the self in transit.

Much of the long history of Crusoe criticism has concerned itself with precisely this problem; what is it that motivates him to move, what drives himfrom place to place? It is a critical debate that is impossible to recount in all its complexity but the fact that it is constantly being regenerated suggests both the rich suggestiveness of Defoe's story and also the fact that the various theories deal only in partial truths.

Sir Thomas was sovereign in the little kingdom that was the Temple household and estate, until 1624 when he effectively surrendered much of it. He tried to cling to this position even after he handed Stowe to his son and heir. As patriarch it was Thomas who had overall authority. Any authority exercised either by his wife Hester or by other members of the family was delegated by him. According to the religious teaching of the time, all wives thus had bestowed upon them the authority to lead the household. By the 1620s it was widely accepted that whereas a married woman would normally require the implicit or explicit consent of her husband she could enter into a contract independently in cases of necessity.

The practical application of this doctrine and the assertion of power were another matter than authority or legal rights and one which conduct books did not generally address and legal rules could not control. The evidence suggests that Hester Temple had both power and influence inside and outside household and estate circles. There is little evidence that either Hester or her daughters’ movements and activities were circumscribed spatially and otherwise in the way apparent at, for example, Wollaton, Nottinghamshire in the previous reign. There are strong hints that Sir Thomas tried to exercise some control over his daughter Meg's propensity to engage in ‘business’ but, if he did so, he failed. It is impossible to tell whether this freedom was a feature of the social standing or the excess of the respective households, of family tradition, of personality, of a change through time or of the available documentation. Hester, however, does not appear ever to have followed Henry Smith's dictum of 1591 that a wife be not a street wife, like Tamar, nor a field wife, like Dinah, but a housewife ‘to show that a good wife keeps her house’. This resulted in part from the authority delegated to her by her husband but in part from her own strong personality and considerable abilities, which were recognized (though not always admired) not only by her spouse but also by members of the family and network.

In order to understand relationships within the Temple family it is important to establish as far as possible the organization of the household and the ways in which both Sir Thomas and Lady Hester related not just to each other and to family members but also to their servants. This is all the more true of the Temples because of the ways in which some of those servants demonstrably had an impact upon the future of both family and estate. Servants acted as intermediaries in the relationships which the early Temples had with their kin and, indeed, with others.

Natasha Korda's invaluable discussion of the legal position and material practice regarding women's property rights under coverture has demonstrated their complexity. William Gouge's Domesticall Duties of 1622 at first presents what appears to be a straightforward denial that a married woman might hold any property, whether moveable or immoveable, but then proceeds to offer many exceptions to this rule. This was, it seems, as a direct response to the uproar caused by his earlier attempt to prevent the housewife from ‘disposing the common goods of the family without, or against her husband's consent’. Korda suggests that ‘ this rule may have been as honoured in the breach as in the observance’. Gouge gives the following exceptions to the rule that a wife can hold no property under coverture: paraphernalia ‘proper to wives’; and goods set aside as separate estate or as a jointure; and gifts made to herself where her husband has not adequately provided for her, which she may conceal from him. He also argues that the wife has de facto managerial control over common goods and does not need her husband's specific consent to spend them: ‘I doubt not but the wife hath power to dispose them; neither is she bound to ask any further consent of her husband. For it is the wives place and dutie to guide or governe the house.’ He specifies many circumstances in which the common law regarding women's absence of control over property is unworkable.

Scholars in history and related disciplines have been writing about specific examples of sibling relationships for years. Only now, however, are they studying the phenomenon of the sibling relationship itself or what historian Amy Harris calls ‘siblinghood’. The subject has received more but not overly much attention from scholars and practitioners in the social sciences. Here studies have been of relatively small family units, containing youngsters who grew to adulthood within the same household, often within a primarily urban environment. Specific explorations of modern sisters and brothers have frequently concentrated upon no more than two siblings. Handling multiple sibling relations has been regarded as too complex and slippery for the scholar to attempt. Historians of the early modern period do not have this luxury. The Temple family with which this book is concerned involved at least three very large nuclear families, comprising eleven, thirteen and ten children, most of whom achieved adulthood.

Within the Temple household these relations between brothers and sisters may have been underpinned by what we today might term ‘family feeling’ but they were also played out against a more pragmatic backcloth. Hester's brother Henry, for example, loaned her and his brother-in-law Thomas money and also borrowed money from them. He and her brother William acted as her trustees and thus formed a continuing and crucial part of her life. The issue of the entail placed on the Temple estates by John Temple and its implications for sibling relationships among his heir Sir Thomas's children are treated in later chapters.

Thomas, as executor of his father John's will, had a particular obligation to his several younger siblings, male and female. He was made responsible for the education of his brothers. In John Temple's will especial care was taken to make watertight provision for these four younger sons, John, William, Alexander and Peter, and especially for the three youngest. To safeguard their interests further, copies of the will and of documents securing the annuities of the younger brothers were deposited both with their mother Susan Spencer Temple and with Sir Edward Wotton. Thomas was also left to tidy up the jointure arrangements for his sisters, especially young Mary and Elizabeth. He was a trustee for Elizabeth's separate estate and provision for her younger children.

In 1783, Edmund Burke thundered:

It was a speech that brought together themes developed over three decades of pejorative discourse about the East Indies and those who ventured there from the British Isles. The men and women who went to the East Indies and returned were portrayed as venal, uncouth nabobs and nabobinas. They were depicted as disconnected from the moral restraints of polite society and corrupted culturally with wealth unnaturally acquired. They were the stuff of satire in pamphlet, picture and play. At best they were ridiculous in their pretentions. At worst, they were disruptors of the rightful order, displacers of the landed gentry and debasers of the middling ranks.

No doubt the vociferousness of that public discourse persuaded some that a career in the East Indies was to be avoided. But that same discourse also conveyed and reinforced another motif which served to encourage rather than dissuade; that of the East Indies as a place of abundant opportunities for the acquisition of wealth. Certainly, there appears to have been no appreciable difference in the propensity of Cumbrians to seek success in the East Indies. Prior to Burke's speech in 1783, around 129 Cumbrian men are known to have been appointed or licensed to the East Indies. At least a further 241 Cumbrian were appointed or licensed from 1783 to 1829. Nevertheless, the deep ambivalence evident in the British Isles about East Indies ventures cannot be ignored. It shaped the Cumbrian encounter with the East Indies. The way in which Cumbrians expressed and managed the ambivalences around the East Indies encounter demonstrates the nuanced and contingent nature of success.