Tennent: Some curious facts
In 1804, James Emerson was born in County Down, Northern Ireland, the son of a Belfast tobacco merchant, William Emerson. He attended Trinity College, Dublin, but abandoned his studies to journey east to support the Greeks in their war against the Ottoman Empire. In the mid-1820s he returned to Britain - London not Belfast - and pursued a modest literary career. In June 1831 he married Letitia, daughter of William Tennent, a wealthy Belfast banker. He assumed by royal licence the Tennent name and coat-of-arms in addition to his own. Therefore he had a double-surname, Emerson Tennent, though unhyphenated, so he is commonly and simply referred to as “Tennent”. He was elected as a Whig Member of Parliament for Belfast in 1832 and quickly gained a reputation as a diligent MP and an able speaker. He became a Tory in 1836, which drew many to believe he was an opportunist. Tennent held the office of Secretary to the Board of Control for India from 18413, and remained an MP until July 1845, when he was knighted on accepting the position of Colonial Secretary of Ceylon. His tenure proved to be problematic. Ceylon civil servants were resentful an outsider should land this coveted position. Economic depression in Britain severely affected the coffee and cinnamon industries, so export duties were relaxed and direct taxation imposed on the people, which led to the Matale Rebellion of 1848. The suppression of the uprising and martial law that followed led to Tennent being recalled from the colony in 1850.
Back home Tennent returned to parliament as MP for Lisburn and served as Secretary to the Board of Trade from 1852. On his retirement in 1867, he was created a baronet. He died in London in 1869.
What has not been mentioned is that he became a prolific, wide-ranging author, who wrote one seminal and several other notable books on Ceylon.
During the first half century of British rule, which saw part possession then full possession of the island, numerous descriptive books were published, especially in London, to explain the new, exotic colony. The final examples of these accounts began to suggest commercial opportunities for the aspiring colonist.
Mainly written by resident military personnel or civil servants, books concerning this colonial initiation start with Captain Robert Percival’s An Account of the Island of Ceylon: its history, geography, natural history, with the manners and customs of its inhabitants (1803), and end with Sir James Emerson Tennent’s Ceylon: an account of the island, physical, historical, and topographical with notices of its natural history, antiquities and productions (1859).
Tennent’s book, although the last of this era of discovery and documentation, is the finest, described by the Edinburgh Review, a cultural magazine published from 1802 to 1929, as “the most copious, interesting, and complete monograph which exists in our language or any of the possessions of the British Crown”.
Three books have dominated my research on the British colony of Ceylon, a ‘literary triumvirate’ which happens to mirror that of E.F.C. Ludowyk. In the Ceylon Observer Annual, 1949 - the reputed newspaper the annual supported was published between 1834 and 1982 - he writes: “Of all the records in English the most impressive is [Robert] Knox’s book [ An Historical Relation of Ceylon, 1681)]. What have we to place beside it? Only Tennent’s omniscience and [Leonard] Woolf ’s sensitiveness [in The Village in the Jungle (1917)].”
Knox takes pride of place having written the first comprehensive description of the island in English. But close behind due to his “omniscience”, as Ludowyk rightly claims, is Tennent. Ceylon, consisting of two volumes with a total of 1,094 pages, was an immediate success being the most exhaustive book on the island for colonists, researchers and collectors. No less than five editions were published in the space of eight months, and in all, 39 English editions appeared between 1859 and 2015.The fate of Tennent’s immense and invaluable research for such an exhaustive book was determined on June 7, 2002. Bonhams Auctioneers of London sold two albums - everything had been pasted onto leaves - titled Notes and Drawings of Ceylon (by) Sir James Emerson Tennent, Bt. (Baronet). Auctioned on behalf of family descendents, Lot 67, described via the title, fetched £188,000. The estimated price was put at £110,000-£130,000.
The Notes and Drawings of Ceylon albums are multi-faceted. There are many drawings by the established British artist Andrew Nicholl, watercolours by leading local painters J.L.K. van Dort and Hippolyte Silvaf, and photographs by one of the earliest practitioners in the field, Frederick Fiebig. These albums were the source of the vast majority of the illustrations engraved for Tennent’s Ceylon. In addition there is a raft of related research correspondence, manuscripts and printed ephemera. Some of the manuscripts are quoted within Tennent’s work, while others have remained unpublished.
Today, 15 years later, the albums are for sale once again, not by auction but by an antiquarian bookshop that owns them, one of the oldest in London, indeed the world. Maggs Brothers, formed in 1853 soon after Tennent rejoined the metropolis after his spell in Ceylon, has experienced an extraordinary literary adventure with some of the rarest books.
Of the Maggs Brothers many bookselling coups, the most significant happened in 1932 when they successfully negotiated with the government of Soviet Russia to acquire not only a Gutenberg Bible but also the celebrated treasure, the Codex Sinaiticus. This is a handwritten copy of the Greek Bible, written circa 330-360, which was not discovered until the 19th century in a monastery in the Sinai desert.
More recently, in 1998, the firm obtained a copy of the first book printed in England, William Caxton’s The Canterbury Tales, for £4,200,000. This price remains the record paid for a printed book.
Forged a friendship with Charles Dickens and his biographer John Forster. Tennent was the dedicatee of the novelist’s last complete work, Our Mutual Friend (1865)
The Oxford English Dictionary contains 111 quotes by Tennent, mainly from Ceylon, to illustrate usage of defined words; he coined “leaping-fish”, “nooser” (one who captures elephants with rope) and “tuskless”.
Anthony Trollope read Ceylon while visiting the island en route to Australia, regularly citing Tennent in relevant chapters of The Tireless Traveler: Twenty Letters to the Liverpool Mercury (1875)
An endangered Sri Lankan lizard has borne the scientific name Ceratophora tennenti
However, the most controversial purchase by Maggs was not a literary wonder but, in 1916, the desiccated penis of Napoleon Bonaparte. Sold in 1924 to a private collector, who mounted it in a velvet case, it was later exhibited at the Museum of French Art.
Maggs headed the sale of Tennent’s albums by dispensing with the title Notes and Drawings and focusing attention on the core subject: “The original manuscript and papers concerning: Ceylon: An account of the island physical, historical and topographical”.
These handsome albums of small folio size (12 1/2 x 8 inches) have half vellum binding that covers the spine and corners. The spines are flat with the title in gilt on black morocco labels. The price: £245,000 or approximately LKR 50 million.
Tennent provides a list of contents at the start of each album. The total items exceed 300 (the exact number depends on methodology) and cover the period 18381855.As Tennent’s baronetcy is mentioned in his credit, the binding of this material would have been post-1867. There are 156 drawings, including some that illustrate Ceylon. Fifty-seven are by Andrew Nicholl - of the book’s 91 illustrations nearly a third are his - some inclusions being “Fortified Rock of Sigiri”, “Sacred Bo Tree”, “Temple of the Tooth at Kandy” and “Round Temple”.
Tennent had met the talented artist, fellow Ulsterman Andrew Nicholl (18041886), in the 1830s, and became his patron. After being appointed Colonial Secretary, Tennent secured for Nicholl, the son of a bootmaker, employment as teacher of landscape drawing, painting and design at the Colombo Academy, now Royal College, Colombo. This explains Nicholl’s predominance regarding the illustrative content. It probably helped that Queen Victoria had purchased a number of his drawings.
But the significance of these albums is the considerable number of drawings and paintings by Nicholl and others that weren’t published in Ceylon. Few have been reproduced in any form, thus they since1861; known in Sinhala as pethi angkatussa, “leafnosed lizard”, also referred to as “Tennent’s leaf-nosed lizard”.
Tennent was a prolific and diverse author, writing on everything from guns to wine; his other local subjects include Christianity in Ceylon (1850) and Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon (1861). remain a vital but unknown collection of nineteenth-century Ceylon art.
Tennent’s contents contain some unseen Nicholl titles of interest: “Dance of Veddahs”, “Steps to Ascend the Sacred Mountain; View from the Summit with Anarajapoora [Anuradhapura] in the distance”, “Elephant Trough” and “Baobab Tree at Pullam [Puttalam]”. Some have no direct relevance to Ceylon, but provide informative visuals of the ports Nicholl encountered en route to the island in 1846: Lisbon, Gibraltar, Cairo and Alexandria for instance.
Nicholl’s style was to use pencil and chalk in his drawings, which were invariably created on different hues of buff paper, producing a fine overall effect. The artist’s relationship with the Colonial Secretary was such that he was employed as draughtsman on Tennent’s official tour of the interior of the island in 1847. Many of Nicholl’s drawings in the albums relate to this tour.
Other artists of note contribute to the albums but not the book. There are several striking watercolours by Hippolyte Silvaf (1801-1879), a French-Indian from Pondicherry who settled in Ceylon and is considered one of the island’s leading nineteenth-century artists. Examples from the albums include the maritimeorientated “Colombo view” (of the harbour) and “Return of the fishing boats from the Pearl Banks at Aripo”.
Mary Brunker, wife of the Deputy Adjutant General of the British Regiment in Ceylon, created about 70 colour-wash sketches, including traditional costumes such as that of the local chief, the mudaliyar. Fortunately Brunker’s work is preserved at the University Library at Peradeniya.
Of consequence are 49 salt paper print photographs (two hand-coloured), among the earliest taken in Ceylon. “Depicting topographical views, tribal objects, and portraits of native peoples, the photographer of many of the images has been attributed to Frederick Fiebig,” Maggs reports.
Photo historian Ismeth Raheem writes of Fiebig, a German national, in Images of British Ceylon: Nineteenth Century Photography of Sri Lanka (2000): “Although a pivotal figure in the early history of photography in Ceylon and India, [he] remains an elusive figure. His is a classic example of a mid-nineteenth century itinerant photographer, travelling in India, Singapore and Ceylon.”
Of great importance to the island’s photographic history are the albums’ two hand-coloured prints by Fiebig, one a portrait of Lokubanda Dunuwila, Dissava of Uva Province and the first Ceylonese appointed Superintendent of Police for Kandy. The other is of the Dissava’s wife.
A specialist in architectural scenery, Fiebig, employed calotype, an early photographic process using paper coated with silver iodide, to capture during 1852-3 the only known studies of urban settlements, street scenes and buildings of nineteenthcentury Ceylon. They form the oldest surviving photographic record of the country. In 1856 Fiebig sold an album of 70 handcoloured salt prints of Ceylon to the East India Company library, the prime collection of his local images.
The albums contain 116 manuscripts and documents which include curious items such as an “Official report from Henry Pole at Jaffna, reporting the witchcraft of using a male child’s skull to invoke the death of a person, with a supporting statement from a native police chief”, “Prophecies relative to the [Matale] rebellion of 1848, in Singhalese on bark strips, with associated papers”, “Official letters regarding the prospects for a new pearl fishery based at Trincomalee”, the related “Signed copy of Tennent’s letter to Sir Robert Peel in defence of Lord Torrington [the Governor]” and “official letters regarding the prospects for a new pearl fishery based at Trincomalee”.
Finally, there are pamphlets and ephemera, examples being: “Large printed form in the name of Lord Torrington, partly filled out by hand for the appointment of the Head Moorman of Colombo”, “Mawanella Bridge, lithograph view by W. Purser after Braybrooke, creased”, and “Gampola Store, 22nd April, 1849, two copies of an order form with current prices, one filled out with an order in manuscript”.
From this albeit concise account of the contents of Tennent’s brace of albums it is evident there is a wealth of material of vital importance to the history of the nineteenth-century visual arts of the island. Ideally, Sri Lanka’s government should acquire this national treasure to be displayed at the National Museum, preferably viewable in its entirety through whatever means, but most crucially to be reproduced, to provide the public, researchers and scholars with further knowledge of the conception of the classic Ceylon, and of diverse aspects of that period in the island’s history.