ABSTRACT
Samuel Sloper’s introduction to his only known literary work, The Dacoit, and Other Poems, represents its author as a disappointed man. Some of its contents were written during Sloper’s service overseas, during which he experienced ‘storm, the wreck, battle, and captivity, and every privation of a military and naval life in hostile countries’; the rest in England, overshadowed by unspecified ‘tribulations and disasters’. Sloper identifies himself as a member of the Honourable East India Company’s European Regiment, at the British forces’ successful attack on the supposedly impregnable fortress of Bharatpur in 1826; the poem ‘Bhurtpoor’ takes this event as its subject. ‘The Dacoit’ is a long verse narrative about the exploits of the outlaw chief Amhru, a Byronic figure who is finally defeated by a British force, killing many of his enemies on his way to a valiant death. While the poem celebrates Amhru’s courage and generosity, it falls short of representing him as a heroic or exemplary individual.
