ABSTRACT
In 1787, Charles Hamilton published An Historical Relation of the Origin, Progress, and Final Dissolution of the Government of the Rohilla Afghans, which justified British intervention in India as an attack on decadent courtly society, both in India and at home. In the following year, he returned to England on leave to translate a commentary on the Islamic law code, and Elizabeth Hamilton visited him in London. Elizabeth Hamilton’s first novel, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, reflects the interests of Charles Hamilton and his fellow-Orientalists, who sought through their scholarship to increase knowledge of Indian culture among British politicians and administrators. Following eighteenth-century predecessors such as Montesquieu and Goldsmith, Hamilton satirises European society through the device of letters from apparently naïve Oriental visitors. While her criticism of aristocratic society gives the novel a reformist edge, she also includes an attack on the middle-class radicals of Godwin’s circle and their proletarian sympathisers.
