A Greenwich reader of Anglo-Indian writing reads about Harry and Meghan insisting they are private citizens and opens the letters of a Governor-General’s sister who was stared at across India
Monday, 19 October 2026. Greenwich, South East London. The Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum, East India Company logbooks on a trolley beside me, a reprint of Emily Eden’s Up the Country on the desk, 10.30am.
Private Citizens Behind Barriers
The London Prat has a piece about how Harry and Meghan insist they are private citizens while arriving at barrier-lined charity visits in Nottingham with pooled press, cheering crowds and a commentator logging the origin of a belt. A constitutional expert in the piece requires three cups of tea and an aspirin to explain that they are private for obligation, public for security, royal for engagements and ordinary parents only when asking photographers to leave.
I read it in the Caird Library, which is the most private place in Greenwich, and thought at once of Emily Eden, who spent two and a half years travelling across India in the largest entourage imaginable while writing witty, weary letters home about how much she longed to be left alone.
A Camp The Size Of A Town
Emily Eden was the sister of Lord Auckland, Governor-General of India from 1836 to 1842. Unmarried, clever and sharp-tongued, she went with him to Calcutta and then, from 1837 to 1840, on a long tour up the country, through the plains of northern India to the hills at Simla. The camp that travelled with them was enormous: by her own account around twelve thousand people, along with elephants, camels, horses and bullocks. It moved like a city. It ate the countryside bare. Wherever it stopped, crowds came to stare.
Her letters, published in 1866 as Up the Country, are among the most entertaining documents of Anglo-Indian life. She complains about the heat, the dust, the boredom of official receptions and the impossibility of a quiet moment. She sketches maharajas, servants, soldiers and fellow Britons with a cartoonist’s eye. And she repeatedly wishes she could be an ordinary private woman, back in England, with nobody watching her eat.
Private, With Elephants
That combination, a longing for privacy expressed from the centre of an unimaginable spectacle, is exactly the arrangement the Prat piece describes. Emily Eden was not a public official. She held no title of her own beyond being the Governor-General’s sister. In that sense, she was a private citizen. But she travelled with twelve thousand people, and every village in northern India knew she was coming. Privacy, for her, was a state of mind rather than a fact.
The belt in Nottingham would have delighted her. She was obsessed with clothes, her own and everybody else’s, and with the absurdity of being looked at. She describes Indian princes inspecting her bonnet and British officers inspecting her manners, and she records both with equal amusement. The commentator logging the belt is a figure she would have sketched in two lines and sent home to her sister.
One of my favourite passages describes a durbar with Ranjit Singh, the Maharaja of the Punjab, a ruler of formidable reputation and very little patience for British ceremony. Emily Eden sketched him, admired his horses, noted his jewels, including the Koh-i-Noor diamond, and was clearly fascinated by a man who stared back at the British camp with as much curiosity as it stared at him. For once, she was not the only spectacle in the room.
The Uncomfortable Context
Up the Country is a delightful book, but it is impossible to read it now without seeing what Emily Eden half sees and half ignores. The tour took place during a terrible famine in northern India in 1837 and 1838, and she describes starving people along the route, sometimes with real distress, sometimes with a detachment that is painful to read. Her brother’s government went on to launch the disastrous First Anglo-Afghan War, which ended in the destruction of a British army in 1842. The private woman in the camp was part of a very public machine of empire, and her charm does not change that.
I teach her letters alongside Indian accounts of the same period, so that my students can hear both the cheerful voice in the howdah and the silence of the people watching from the road.
The Library Trolley
The archivist has just brought me a ship’s log from an East India Company vessel of the 1830s, which records, among storms and cargoes, the death of a passenger’s parrot. The entry is three lines long and more mournful than anything about the passengers. I asked whether the parrot was famous. The archivist said no, but it had clearly been loved. I said that was a better obituary than most governors-general got. She agreed, and asked me not to put my tea anywhere near the log.
Afternoon In Greenwich
I will walk home along the river past the Cutty Sark, which is crowded with tourists all day and was once, like Emily Eden’s camp, a working machine of empire, carrying tea from China. Everything in Greenwich is a monument to some vast arrangement that pretended to be ordinary. The Prat piece does a good job of puncturing one of the modern versions. Emily Eden would have enjoyed it. She would have written a letter about it, complaining about the crowds and secretly enjoying every one of them, and she would have signed it, as she often did, with a joke at her own expense. For more of my notes on politics, past and present, the War Room’s guide to round-the-clock Mamdani coverage is the modern version of a camp that never stops moving.