Walter Landor Dickens had been serving as a military officer in India after being granted a cadetship in the East India Company’s Bengal Army in 1857. Cadets had to secure nomination by a Company director. Each director had a limited number of civil and military nominations in his gift each year and patronage networks often determined who should receive favor. In Walter’s case, Angela Burdett Coutts used her influence with director John Loch.
Nomination was just the first step in being appointed an officer in the Company armies. Direct entry cadets such as Walter, who had not attended the Company’s Military Seminary at Addiscombe, England, had to pass a number of tests which had been introduced in June 1851:
• Write English correctly from dictation.The education Walter had received from the Reverend John Brackenbury at Wimbledon equipped him to succeed in these tests administered by professors from Addiscombe. He was also given a medical and was certified as being free from ‘any mental or bodily defect whatever’. Unfortunately Walter’s health failed in India, and he was on his way back to England on sick leave when he died. His burial certificate in the India Office Records gives the cause of death as hematemesis (vomiting of blood). He was interred on 1 January 1864 in the military burial ground at Fort William in Calcutta. The childhood nickname of Young Skull given to him by his father sadly proved to be all too appropriate.
• Have a ‘competent knowledge’ of the rules of arithmetic.
• Be able to translate passages from Latin into English.
• Be able to parse and show a knowledge of grammar and syntax.
• Pass a translation test from French to English, or from Hindustani to English.
• Pass an exam on the history of Greece, Rome, England, and British India.
• Know the modern divisions of the world, the principal nations of Europe and Asia, the names of European capitals and of the chief cities of India, and of the main rivers and mountains of the world.
• Have an elementary knowledge of fortification and some instruction in drawing.
• Submit a declaration of being a confirmed member of the Church of England, otherwise a certificate from a minister to prove they had been well instructed in the principles of religion in which they were raised.
• Produce testimonials of good moral conduct from their place of education.
Margaret Makepeace
Lead curator, East India Company Records
Rico says that list would be a hard one to pass these days, but here's more about Dickens:
The 1850’s saw the advent of the ‘beard movement’. The Victorians believed that manliness was directly linked to facial hair. Beards promoted impassivity, health, and epitomized the successful and distinguished Victorian male. Household Words, a periodical edited by Dickens, even ran an article entitled Why shave?, a veritable declaration of the rights of all men to shun the razor.
Dickens first began to experiment with facial hair around 1844 with the addition of a mustache. He can be heard praising it in a letter to his friend Daniel Maclise: "The moustaches are glorious, glorious. I have cut them shorter, and trimmed them a little at the ends to improve their shape. They are charming, charming. Without them, life would be a blank".
In 1844 he can be found expressing his dismay in a letter to his wife Catherine that his brother Fred had grown a mustache: “He has a moustache … I feel (as the Stage Villains say) that either he or I must fall. The Earth will not hold us both.”
A few years later, in 1853, Dickens (sporting mustache and ‘Newgate Fringe’ (hair under the chin) was traveling in Italy with Wilkie Collins and Augustus Egg who, in the spirit of competition, were both attempting to cultivate facial hair: “Collins’ mustache is gradually developing… He smooths it down over his mouth, in imitation of the present great Original…” Dickens compares Egg’s to those of the witches in Macbeth and expresses chagrin that his valet has also begun to grow one.
Dickens’ friend John Forster took especial issue with the new mustache and called for a portrait of the author which he’d had commissioned to be delayed because of the ‘hideous disfigurement’. He mistakenly assumed it was a mere passing fancy on Dickens’ part but, as portraits from the time suggest, it was a stepping stone to greater things; the mustache foreshadowed the beard.
When friends expressed concern that it aged him, and disguised his precious expressions, Dickens responded that "the beard saved him the trouble of shaving and, much as he admired his own appearance before he allowed his beard to grow, he admired it much more now, and never neglected, when an opportunity offered, to gaze his fill at himself”. He also joked that some people liked it because it meant they saw less of him.
By 1858, Forster had accepted that the beard was there to stay and quickly re-commissioned the portrait before the author’s face became covered entirely by hair.
Andrea Lloyd
Curator, Printed Literary Sources 1801-1914
No comments:
Post a Comment