Global Encounters and the Archives: Britain’s Empire in the Age of Horace Walpole

A Lady's Dressing Room in Calcutta, 1813

A Lady's Dressing Room in Calcutta (1813) advertises Holland's "humorous Collection of East & West India Caricatures," further gesturing toward the blurring of "East" and "West" in British print culture of the period. Not unlike the white creole woman in West India Luxury!!, here, a woman of indeterminate racial/ethnic background is waited upon by one of six very dark-skinned women in her "dressing room." The print's title likely recalls Jonathan Swift's satirical poem "The Lady's Dressing Room" (pub. 1732), in which a woman's lover has a disturbing "behind-the-scenes" experience of her private chamber. The textual reference suggests pollution –here, perhaps, as a metaphor for racial mixing. Catalog Record

Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University Library

Anonymous