Peter Robb, “Richard Blechynden’s Calcutta Diaries, 1791-1822” (Oxford UP, 2011)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Apr 18, 2012 · 1h 6m

Richard Blechynden came to Calcutta in 1782 as a twenty two year old, and stayed there for the rest of his life, working as a surveyor and architect. From 1791 he maintained daily diaries, and it is these that Peter Robb has so magnificently re-worked as Richard Blechynden’s Calcutta Diaries, 1791-1822 (Oxford University Press, 2011, 2 vols). Richard’s diaries are quite literally a chronicle of the everyday and the ordinary, what might even be called mundane and the petty, in Calcutta in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In these diaries Richard talks about his children, his…