Description
In February 1837. Fanny Eden set out, with her nephew William Osborne, on the tiger-shooting trip to the Rajmahal Hills, 150 miles north-west of Calcutta. This expedition was a modest affair of 260 camp followers and 20 elephants, compared to the cavalcade of 12,000 which accompanied her brother Lord Auckland, Governor-General of India, on his visit to the ruler of the Sikhs, Ranjit Singh, later that year. Fanny and her sister Emily travelled with their brother in great state - and considerable discomfort. Emily Eden wrote an account of this journey to the Punjab called Upto we Country, first published in 1866, often reprinted and long one of the classic books of British Indian tiger. What went unremarked until about thirty-five years ago was that Fanny also recorded this and her earlier hunting trip in illustrated journals. Fanny was as witty, observant and detached a writer as her elder sister and her journals are a highly individual account. When I published extracts from them in my book The G0/den Interlude in 1955, The Timer commented, ‘One only wishes she had given us more of Fanny’s magnificent journals’. The wish is now granted and they are published here complete for the first time.