Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah by Elizabeth Hamilton (review)

humanities 389 writings of Baron Melchior Grimm and virtuous epistolary manuals of Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, both of whom were Mozart family acquaintances. Given that the epistolary mode was a staple of eighteenthcentury novels, journalistic correspondence, biographies, and memoirs, and an accepted mode of moralistic instruction, Schroeder contends that Leopold's letters, especially those directed to his son during the latter's 1777B79 journey to Paris (where Wolfgang's mother died in July 1778), participated in the epistolary commerce. Leopold's advice, admonitions, and harangues repeatedly met with his son's dissimulating responses and harlequinesque masquerading. Although `never entirely privy to his father's apparent plan,' Wolfgang, now a young man in his early twenties and liberated from his father, fought against the proffered astringent and moralistic advice by fabricating stories, adopting an obsequious tone, offering convoluted explanations about his compositional endeavours, and writing scatological letters to his cousin Bäsle. Indeed, his strategies of deception, evasion, subterfuge and verbal pantomime amount to àvirtuosity of deceit' rivalled only by the French philosophes, among whom Voltaire was the recognized master of French epistolary ventriloquism. Intentionality looms large in this book, leading to forced interpretations and language of collusion. The immediate aim of moral instruction need not be incompatible with the long-term goal of posthumous publication of the letters for posterity. If plans for a biography vanished with the child Mozart, why did Wolfgang continue the epistolary charade following his ultimate acts of revolt B his move to Vienna in 1781 and marriage to Constanze the following year? Further explanation of the moralizing tone in his correspondence with Constanze during their courtship and his elliptical letters to her from his Berlin journey in the spring of 1789 could also be offered. Welcome are Schroeder's fresh and frank translations of selected letters and his provocative readings in the penultimate chapter`Operatic Epistles.' (CARYL CLARK) Elizabeth Hamilton. Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. Edited by Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell Broadview. 340. $15.95. Elizabeth Hamilton's witty and ironic novel, first published in 1796, makes no secret of its writer's position on contemporary controversies: it is dedicated to Warren Hastings, presumes throughout the benevolence of British rule, and is utterly opposed to Islam. For these views, Hamilton was criticized by her reviewers, and today's reader is equally unlikely to accept them. But it is her description of English society and manners that chiefly holds the attention and rewards the reader, then and now. Her 390 letters in canada 1999 clear critical eye provides a compelling, amusing, and thought-provoking picture presented in prose that manages to be sharp despite its pseudoEastern ornamentations. In the manner of Montesquieu's Persian Letters and its many imitators, Zaarmilla, the rajah of the title, finds himself in a strange land to whose customs he brings a naïveté and innocence that serves to highlight their hypocrisy. His desire to visit England begins when he meets a virtuous Englishman named Charles Percy, who introduces him to the Christian Bible, which Zaarmilla refers to as the Shaster. Assuming that the Shaster is not only prescriptive but descriptive and therefore an accurate representation (in addition to his other qualities he is marvellously literal-minded), he longs to visit a country where all human beings are equal, the gods are reverenced, women are educated as well as men, and no one is in want. Although he is warned by his friends, one of whom, having visited England, is convinced that the Shaster Zaarmilla describes cannot possibly exist, he makes the voyage to the place he assumes is a utopia. On his way, he stops in Calcutta, where he becomes suspicious after observing the behaviour of the English there, but he continues optimistic, assuming that the absence of any apparent religious observance is a result of their taking seriously the biblical command to `pray in secret.' Once in England, however, he discovers not a pious community, but `the Poojah of cards,' a society in which women are foolish because of `the pains taken, from earliest infancy, to sap the foundation of every solid improvement.' Hamilton's devotion to her brother, and her interest in his pursuits...