India and the British Raj - Letters from William Ewing to Hi...

Hammer

£2,300

India and the British Raj - Letters from William Ewing to His Dear Brother Malcolm Hart Orr-Ewing From India 1874-1878, a finely bound one-sided family correspondence, 94pp of ink manuscript letters, each linen-laid and collated in pencil by a later hand, all the letters are addressed from Calcutta, via Brindisi, where William seems to have been involved in trade & industry (iron?), and detail the life among the burgeoning British middle-class in India in the first-second decade of the Raj, including accounts of domestic native life (picked-out with vernacular nouns and their English equivalents), typical game and other shoots, anecdotes about fellow British people on the scene, as well as curiosity and concerns for the Ewings back home in Scotland, etc., collected then bound in the latter 19th/early 20th century by Ramage, London, stamped, in brown morocco gilt, slightly bevelled boards with a graduating double-fillet gilt enclosing a singular-fillet in blind, the upper cover lettered in gilt, six-compartment spine of raised bands, gilt-fillet and blind-rolled turn-in, marbled endpapers, the recto pastedown with a gilt tooled and lettered title label, 4to, [1]