The Journal to Eliza and Various Letters
9781465633972
118 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
STERNE married Miss Lumley of York. He afterwards held sentimental converse with Miss Fourmantelle, Lady Percy, “My witty widow Mrs. F—,” &c., &c. But his one passion was for the Eliza to whom this volume is dedicated. “Not Swift,” he wrote to her just before she sailed for India, “so loved his Stella, Scarron his Maintenon, or Waller his Sacharissa, as I will love and sing thee, my wife elect! All those names, eminent as they are, shall give place to thine, Eliza.” Mrs. Elizabeth Draper was daughter to one May Sclater who went out to India when a mere boy. He married there a Miss Whitehill, and settled at Anjengo, a small factory on the coast of Malabar, where Elizabeth was born on April 5, 1744. In due time she was sent to England for the “frivolous education” accorded to “girls destined for India.” “The generality of us,” she wrote in sorrowful retrospect, “were never instructed in the Importance of any thing, but one Worldly Point, that of getting an Establishment of the Lucrative kind, as soon as possible, a tolerable complection, an Easy manner, some degree of taste in the adjustment of our ornaments, some little skill in dancing a minuet, and singing an air.” With no training in “useful Employments,” she returned to India in her fourteenth year to become, six months later, the wife of Daniel Draper, her elder by some twenty years. Since 1750 Draper had been in the service of the East India Company, and in 1759, the year after his marriage, he was appointed Secretary to the Government at Bombay, where with some interruptions he continued for the rest of his life in India. His faithful services were eventually rewarded by a seat in the Council and the post of Accountant General. If a somewhat heavy official, he was described by a friend and admirer as “a very noble and good-humoured man.” There was nothing unusual about the Draper marriage, which now seems so ill-sorted in respect to age; and we may suppose that neither husband nor wife found it too uncomfortable. A boy was born in 1759, and two years later a girl, named for her mother—the Eliza or Betsey who figures in one of the letters. In 1765, the Drapers brought their children to England that they might be given an English education. Later in the same year Mr. Draper went back to Bombay, but his wife remained in England to recover her health, which had been much weakened by child-bearing and the heat of India.
