Abstract
Millicent Pilkington (1872–1960) travelled from Lancashire to India in 1893 for a year of ‘frivol’. Pilkington was the daughter of Thomas Pilkington, son of William Pilkington, one of the founders of the hugely successful Pilkington glass works at St Helens on Merseyside. The 1881 census lists Millicent’s mother Catherine C. S. Pilkington as born in Calcutta, and some of her time in India was spent with cousins in Hyderabad. Her journey to India followed fairly well-established tourist routes: London to Brindisi by train, and then by steamship to Bombay with Port Said and Aden as the major stops on the way. She documented her sojourn in India in a 50-page, leather-bound travelogue-cum-souvenir album that combines a carefully arranged mix of watercolours, sketches, photographs,1 autographs and ephemera with extensive narrative passages.
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Notes and references
For further information on women’s albums see Patrizia Di Bello, Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England: Ladies, Mothers and Flirts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)
Renate Dohmen, ‘Memsahibs and the “Sunny East”: Representations of British India by Millicent Douglas Pilkington and Beryl White’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 40.1 (2012), 153–77.
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See Judith T. Kenny, ‘Climate, Race, and Imperial Authority: The Symbolic Landscape of the British Hill Station in India’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 85 (1995), 699.
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See Richard Sha, ‘The Power of the English Nineteenth Century Visual and Verbal Sketch: Appropriation, Discipline, Mastery’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 24 (2002), 85–9.
See Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 147.
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© 2016 Renate Dohmen
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Dohmen, R. (2016). Material (Re)collections of the ‘Shiny East’: A Late Nineteenth-Century Travel Account by a Young British Woman in India. In: Henes, M., Murray, B.H. (eds) Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form, 1760–1900. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543394_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543394_3
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