Today we have a story from guest blogger Jocelyn Watson about how the British Library collections have helped her to write a play based on the life of Cornelia Sorabji.

For Christmas 2011 my brother gave me a present of a book.  I unwrapped it to discover An Indian Portia by Kusoom Vadgama.  I had never heard of the book before and I looked at my brother quizzically; his response was:  ‘Believe me, you’ll find it fascinating’.  Sure enough, I was gripped.  The book was the diligent compilation of the letters, diaries and articles of Cornelia Sorabji, the first woman in history to read law at Somerville College and one of India’s first female barristers.

From Cornelia Sorabji, India Calling (1934)    

Before becoming a writer, I was a lawyer and had studied law at Somerville’s sister college in Cambridge, Girton.  As my interest grew I began trawling the British Library archives.  The staff were so helpful and supportive and I was delighted to discover a wealth of material about this extraordinary woman.  I came across the law paper that she sat in 1889 and looked through it wondering how I would have managed.  The Master of Balliol College had obtained congregational consent for Cornelia to be able to sit the examination; the sole woman in a hall full of male students many of whom disapproved.

IOPP/MSS Eur F165/118

My Mother is Indian and my father English and when I asked family and friends in India, none of them had heard of Cornelia.  Similarly in England when I asked friends, former law students, they too knew nothing about her.  The more I delved into the rich resources that the British Library holds, the more I learnt and understood how invisible women’s histories can become, and how important it is that we acknowledge the women who have gone before us.  I was so grateful that the British Library had so carefully preserved all this valuable material.  

As a result I wrote Cornelia Calling and with the help and support of Kali Theatre Company, a charity that supports and encourages South Asian women to write, I was able to bring Cornelia Sorabji, a lawyer, a social reformer, an author, an extraordinary woman, to life.   The play is to be performed in London at the Tristam Bates Theatre on Friday 13 December at 7.30pm as part of the Kali Talkback 2013.

Jocelyn Watson

 

The cinchona plant was introduced from South America to India in 1860: a response to urgent need.  The Government of India was in search of a cheap drug for malaria, a disease that killed millions of people in India every year.  The most effective treatment was quinine, a chemical compound found in cinchona bark.

“Chinchona plants at Ootacamund”: frontispiece to Clements R Markham, Travels in Peru and India (London, 1862)

Cinchona plantations were established across the Nilgiri Hills in southern India, where they quickly flourished.  By the end of 1866 the superintendent of plantations, William McIvor, was able to report a total of 1,785,303 plants under cultivation.

But McIvor came into conflict with his employers.  He had devised a technique to increase the quinine yield, known as ‘mossing’.  Under this system, strips of bark were carefully removed and the exposed trunk was swaddled in moss (see illustration).  When the bark grew back again, it produced more quinine because it was thicker than before.

'Mossing’ from Parliamentary Papers 1866: 53 (“Papers relating to the introduction of the Chinchona Plant into India”, p. 500)

McIvor tried to patent the technique.  Aggrieved by his appointment as a mere cultivator rather than as a scientist, he argued that Government had no claim over his scientific expertise. It was this, he insisted, that had enabled him after many long experiments to ‘render this great natural process entirely subservient to my will’. With quinine increasingly in demand on the London markets, he had a clear incentive to make the claim.

Government officials disagreed. They argued that what McIvor was trying to patent was a process of nature. In summing up the case, they raised the wider and ever-pertinent question: was drug research being conducted for private profit or the public good?  Their answer was emphatic:
Prejudice to the public would be caused by enabling a public servant, employed for the special purpose of increasing and cheapening the supply to the public of a rare and costly drug, to use the information and experience which he had acquired in the public service and at the public cost for his individual benefit and to the public detriment, by making his charge for the use of his patent an element in the market price of the medicine, and tending to restrict the use of the medicine by adding to its cost.

The India Office Records holds several files on the Nilgiri cinchona experiment, as it was known.  These are on-line (search under ‘cinchona’).

Antonia Moon
Curator, post-1858 India Office Records 

Further reading:
Clements R Markham, Peruvian Bark: a popular account of the introduction of chinchona cultivation into British India, 1860-1880 (London, 1880)

The author and actress Mary Robinson (1758-1800) became known as ‘Perdita’ following her appearances in that role in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at Drury Lane in 1779.  She was briefly the mistress of George, Prince of Wales (later George IV), a liaison which gave her lasting notoriety. ‘The Perdita’ (as newspapers routinely styled her) was one of London’s leading celebrities during the 1780s.  She was also a fashion icon, as newspaper reports of the time attest.

Frontispiece from Mary Robinson. Poems. London, 1791.  

The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser of 11 June 1781 recorded her ‘in a most becoming military attire (scarlet faced with apple green)’.  In the autumn of 1781, ‘Perdita’ went to Paris (the centre of the fashionable world) for the first time.  On 15 October 1782, the Morning Herald reported ‘The Perdita has received a dress from Paris, which was introduced this Autumn by the Queen of France’.  The same paper on 21 November 1782 identified it as the ‘Chemise de la Reine’, worn by Perdita to the opera.  The chemise de la reine was a flowing muslin gown without hoops, fastened with a silk sash, suitable for private and country wear – Marie Antoinette was portrayed wearing it by the painter Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in 1783.  Was this indeed the fashion in which Mrs Robinson appeared at the opera? Or was it, perhaps, closer to the ‘morning dress’ worn by the Queen of France at Versailles, as described in some detail in the Lady’s Magazine for April 1782:

The robe is made of plain sattin, chiefly white, worn without a hoop, round, and a long train.  It is drawn up in front, on one side, and fastened with tassels of silver, gold, or silk, … this discloses a puckered petticoat of gauze or sarsenet, of a different colour. …

Such a gown was surely more suitable for an appearance at one of London’s most elite entertainment venues.  The use of satin and the elaborate trimmings of this gown distinguish it from the chemise de la reine, except that the Lady’s Magazine also tells readers that ‘the dress, … it is said, will be worn throughout the summer, made of lighter material’ suggesting that it might have been an earlier version of Marie Antoinette’s informal dress.

Moira Goff
Curator Printed Historical Sources 1501-1800 

Further reading:
Claire Brock. “Then smile and know thyself supremely great”: Mary Robinson and the “splendour of a name”. Women’s Writing, 9.1 (2002), pp. 107-124
Paula Byrne. Perdita: the life of Mary Robinson. London, 2004
Aileen Ribeiro. The art of dress: fashion in England and France 1750-1820. New Haven & London, 1995

Visit our new exhibition Georgians Revealed