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149 David Lester Richardson d D David Lester Richardson (1801–1865) was the single most inluential teacher of British literature in nineteenth-century India. He was among the 0rst to publish Indian poets writing in English, and his editorial activities did much to encourage literary English in Bengal. Born in London , Richardson appears not to have gone out to India until he was eighteen, and he returned to Britain on numerous occasions, eventually retiring to London , where he continued his Indian connections by editing the newspaper Allen’s Indian Mail. Like many other Anglo-Indians, Richardson experienced profound contradictions , even a disconnection, between his life and career in India and his role as a husband and father to a wife and children “at home” in Britain. On the one hand, he had an obvious enthusiasm for India, for educating Indian students, and for editing Indian belles lettres, yet on the other hand he possessed a highly conventional understanding of what an Anglo-Indian poet might write. The legacy of those contradictory inclinations is mixed; Richardson left us the fruits of his many signi0cant publishing ventures, but he also left us many poems of futile longing for a rural England that perhaps never existed at all. David Lester Richardson was born at the turn of the nineteenth century in London to Lieutenant Colonel David Thomas Richardson of the Bengal Army and Sara Lester Richardson. In 1819 he joined the family business, so to speak, enlisting as a cadet in the Bengal Native Infantry. The literary life, however, held more attraction for the young man than did the military, and only three years later he published his 0rst volume of verse, Miscellaneous Poems (1822). While furloughed owing to illness in 1827–29, he returned to London and attempted to 0nd a means of support outside of the military; against his father’s advice that such ventures were likely to lose money, he founded and edited the Weekly Review. As his father predicted, Richardson was unable to make a living with this enterprise , and so he returned to military service in Bengal, where he became aidede -camp to the governor-general, William Bentinck. In 1833, he retired as a major, having been invalided out. With his retirement nest egg and many connections in India, Richardson moved on to the next phase of his working life as an educator and editor. 150 d Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India From 1836 to 1843, Richardson served as a professor of English literature and later the principal of Hindu College. After quarrels over 0nancial and governance matters with the Hindu College board, he served as the principal of Krishnagar College and of Hugli College near Calcutta, in all three of these institutions teaching young Bengali men. In his most important position, as the principal of the Hindu College, he exercised considerable inluence on a generation of Bengali students, many of whom acknowledged his importance as a teacher of literature. Among others, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, who later became a leading Bangla poet, was strongly inluenced by Richardson’s teaching of Milton, Shakespeare, and the eighteenth-century British poets. Richardson combined his career as an educator with much labor as an editor. As editor of the The Bengal Annual, The Orient Pearl, and the Calcutta Literary Gazette, he became the most important publisher of English belletristic writing in India. His anthology of English literature, 0rst requested by Thomas Babington Macaulay for use in Indian English-medium schools, established a canon for northern India of English language verse written on the subcontinent. Unusually, Richardson included poems written by Indians and Anglo-Indians together in a section of Anglo-Indian verse. This collection of poetry in English, Selections from the British Poets, from Chaucer to the Poets of the Present Day (1840), became a standard text for schools and private reading, an important means for young Indian poets to learn about the British tradition. Of the periodicals he edited, the Literary Gazette established Richardson as an arbiter of literary taste. The Gazette was the most important northern Indian source for reviews of literature in English. Not surprisingly, a young poet such as Mary Carshore viewed Richardson as an authority worth both impressing and opposing when she argued that he and the Irish poet Tom Moore were mistaken in their romantic representations of young Indian women. Such women, she said, were unlikely to gad about at night in the way Moore described in his poem Lalla Rookh, and her cheeky dismissal of...

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