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“BLACK HOLES” OF CALCUTTA AND LONDON: INTERNAL COLONIES IN VANITY FAIR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2007

Corri Zoli
Corri Zoli
Affiliation:
Syracuse University
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Extract

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY'SVanity Fair (1847–48) makes a passing reference to a seemingly insignificant trope, the “Black Hole of Calcutta.” Part of an eighteenth-century legacy of unofficial rule in India by the East India Trading Company, this reference to a prison incident in June 1756 rehashes the event that occurred there – nearly one hundred years before the novel was published. The name, the “Black Hole,” evokes the prison itself: an enormous pit dug deep into the ground “eighteenth feet long by fourteen feet, ten inches wide,” according to social historian Brijen K. Gupta. It was “British” in the sense that East India Company agents stationed on-the-ground in Calcutta controlled this makeshift dungeon, using it to enforce local trade agreements with native authorities. Those who intervened were deemed traitors, the worst offenders of state.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , September 2007 , pp. 417 - 449
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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