ABSTRACT
One of the British Library’s copies contains a handwritten note to the effect that ‘D. M.’ is ‘Dinah Mulock’; there is no other evidence for this attribution, but Dinah Mulock, later Mrs Craik, did write poetry as well the novels for which she is better known: her poems appeared over the initials ‘D. M. M’ in Chambers’s Edinburgh Magazine in the 1840s. Nothing is known of ‘D. M.’, an author who appears to have published one work, Scenes from the Late Indian Mutinies. This publication, an eighteen-page pamphlet, was to be sold in aid of the Delhi Mission Fund, established in 1850 by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. One substantive review of the work appeared, in the Calcutta Review: it quotes ‘The Boy Soldier’ in full, and points out some errors of fact in the narrative; the work is adjudged to have ‘no great poetic power’, being ‘mediocre and somewhat of the usual character of religious verse’.
