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96 Horace Hayman Wilson d D In addition to more than 0ve hundred Sanskrit manuscripts, the Bodleian collection holds a fascinating notebook. An inch thick, bound in calf, it begins with ink drawings of English cottages and ends with portraits of Indian princes and caricatures of actors on the Calcutta stage. Interspersed are original, translated, and copied poems. Both the Sanskrit manuscripts and the commonplace book were assembled by a remarkable man: Horace Hayman Wilson (1786–1860), physician, amateur actor, employee of the East India Company, director of the Royal Asiatic Society, poet, and distinguished orientalist. Wilson was born in London, the illegitimate son of George Paterson, deputy accountant general of the British East India Company, and Elizabeth Woolston (or Wilson). He attended Soho Academy, London, where he acquired a lasting love for the theater, and afterward he was trained at St. Thomas’s Hospital, London . Admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1805, he was appointed assistant surgeon to the East Indian Company three years later, no doubt thanks to his father’s connections. Because of youthful holidays accompanying his uncle to work at the London mint, he was, on his arrival in Calcutta, recruited by the mint’s assay master, fellow-surgeon and poet John Leyden. In addition to his medical duties, Wilson became Leyden’s assistant. When Leyden departed for Java and subsequently died, Wilson succeeded him as assay master. In Wilson, the government found a man of talents similar to Leyden’s—they shared a knowledge of chemistry, a strong interest in Asian languages, a love of letters, and prior medical training. Wilson seriously took up the study of Sanskrit and took an active role in the Chowringhee Theatre. As was not uncommon for company o2cials in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Wilson formed a liaison with an Indian woman, by whom he had a son in 1811. His biographer Penelope Devereux was unable to identify Wilson’s partner, but she details his long-lasting love and support of this son. In an unpublished manuscript biography (British Library, Asia and Africa Collection , C 853), Devereux argues that one of the poems below, “The Brahman Maid,” arose from Wilson’s relationship with the mother of his 0rst child. His later relationship , that with Elizabeth Kelly, was better documented; Devereux shows that Wilson met Elizabeth Kelly through the theatre, where she was an actor. Because Kelly was the wife of an enlisted soldier, Wilson’s relationship proved a source of Horace Hayman Wilson D 97 controversy some years later when he sought appointment to the new Boden professorship in Sanskrit at Oxford. With Kelly, Wilson had two sons whom he cared for, educated, and assisted in life. During the years of his relationship with Kelly, Wilson continued his studies and his scholarly activity as secretary to the Asiatic Society. I deduce from Devereux’s research that, as he sought the respectability necessary to return to England as Boden Professor, Wilson needed to overcome two obstacles—his less than respectable domestic situation and his lack of a university degree. According to Devereux, in 1828 Wilson dissolved his relationship with Elizabeth, settling upon her the very considerable sum of three hundred pounds a year and made further provisions for their sons’ education. Shortly thereafter, he married Frances Sarah Parr Siddons, the daughter of an East India Company o2cial and a fellow Anglo-Indian. In marrying Fanny, who was half his age, Wilson did not stray far from his beloved theatre, for his wife was the granddaughter of the famous actor Sarah Siddons. The elder Siddons had raised Fanny when she was sent home from India as a young girl. Like many Anglo-Indian children, Fanny had returned to Bengal in her teens, and there she soon met and married Wilson. Together they had seven daughters, six of whom survived to adulthood. After his marriage, Wilson was appointed to the Oxford professorship , and he moved his family to England, where he shortly took the B.A. from Exeter College. During his time in India, Wilson showed himself to be a complex, perhaps even contradictory person. He intensely admired Sanskrit literature and much about Indian culture. He supported Indian education, which he believed should combine training in Indian languages and literatures with English and Western science. In the Orientalist/Anglicist controversy, he sided with those who wished the company to support learning in Indian classical languages. He also served on various local committees for the improvement of Indian education...

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