Charles D’Oyly’s Lost Satire of British India

Book excerpt: This book brings to light an extraordinary satiric epic on Britain’s empire, one suppressed right after its publication in 1828. Tom Raw, the Griffin, written and illustrated by the Romantic artist Charles D’Oyly, is vital, engaging, morally earnest, and trenchant in its critique—and wickedly funny in its observations and depictions of British India. Known in art circles for his Indian landscapes, D’Oyly was born in Bengal; he returned there from England at age 16 to serve in increasingly titular posts in the occupying government; by 1818, he was a full-time artist in Patna. In his story of a young English cadet serving his country in India, D’Oyly writes and draws as an outsider to Britain’s imperial project abroad—but with the knowledge of an insider. His epic poem traces the political and cultural fault lines of Britain’s nascent empire. Like Lord Byron’s Don Juan (1819-24), Tom Raw is exuberantly comic and terrifyingly serious in its prescience on the prospects of nineteenth-century Britain and future world empires. Tom Raw has a real, original place in the literature, art and culture of its age, and is a key entity in the study of global Romanticism.