‘Beautifully situated on the banks of the Hoogly’: Maria Graham’s account of travel and the gardens of India (1809-1811)

Our theme for the autumn and winter terms is ‘An Open Book: Gardens in Literature and Letters’.

In May 1809, Maria Dundas arrived in Bombay with her father on the HMS Cornelia. Amongst the other passengers were Dundas’s siblings and a naval officer, Thomas Graham, who was to become her husband. The almost two-year journey around India by Maria Graham, as she was to become, developed the twenty-four-year-old’s knowledge of botany and interest in gardens, which was to continue throughout her life. Gardens, as Betty Hagglund notes, ‘form[ed] a significant element in her writing and shap[ed] her activity when travelling’. Travelling and writing, along with gardens, are the focus of this paper, with Maria Graham’s 1812 travel text, Journal of a Residence in India (Edinburgh: Constable and Company, 1812) at its core. The paper will explore the representation of both domestic and botanical gardens, examples of stasis and settlement, alongside Graham’s mobility and her status as a privileged British traveller.

Dr Kathryn Walchester is Reader in English Literature and Subject Leader at Liverpool John Moores University. She has published widely on women’s European travel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, northern travel and mountaineering. Her recent publications include Microtravel: Confinement, Deceleration, Microspection (London: Anthem, 2024), co-edited with Charles Forsdick and Zoë Kinsley. She is currently working on her fourth monograph, Gardens in British Travel Writing about Europe 1700-1830. Roots and Mobility (London: Palgrave, forthcoming 2025).