Letters of a Mussoorie Merchant

Mauger Fitzhugh Monk was born in the British Channel Island of Guernsey. Forced to leave England after a financial scandal, he departed for India, where, under an assumed name, he enlisted as a gunner in the East India Company’s 4th Battalion of Artillery. He served as a soldier but soon made his way up to the Himalayan hill station of Mussoorie, which had only recently been established, and took up work there, initially as a teacher. He supplemented his teaching work with various commercial ventures, the failure of which nearly pushed him to the edge of bankruptcy. After a highly eventful career in Mussoorie, he finally decided to return to England, but sadly died suddenly in 1849, at Meerut. He recorded the details of his extraordinary life in India, in a long series of letters, written to his father and other family members in England, between 1828 and 1849. They record his army life in the late 1830s and then go on to provide a fascinating and previously unknown insight into everyday life in Mussoorie and Landour during the 1840s. The collection is an invaluable resource for all interested in the social life of 19th-century British India and in discovering new aspects of Mussoorie’s history from its earliest days.