The Family of Sir Stamford Raffles by John Bastin

Author:John Bastin [Bastin, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789810972363
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Title-page of Lady Raffles’s Memoir of her husband, 1830

Despite these distractions, Sophia continued to work on her monumental account of her husband’s life and career in Asia. Initially, she had hoped that the Revd. Dr. Thomas Raffles would write the book, but when he declined she undertook the task herself, even though she believed that she was ill-equipped to do so. She succeeded so well that her large quarto volume soon became the acknowledged primary source of information on Raffles’s life.20 She contracted with John Murray to publish the book in 1830, together with a second edition of Raffles’s History of Java, but she had to meet the printing costs, which amounted to the large sum of £1,700.21 She also paid substantial fees to Sir Francis Leggat Chantrey (1781–1841) to have a statue of Raffles erected in Westminster Abbey, despite the fact that her financial resources were under severe strain.22 She repaid £10,000 to the East India Company in settlement of Raffles’s debt, and continued to meet the heavy burden of retaining both her London and country houses. In April 1829 she decided to place ‘High Wood’ on the market, but it failed to sell,23 and in the same month she invited Mary Anne Flint and her daughter Sophia to stay with her when they arrived from Singapore,24 following the death of Captain Flint from dysentery in the previous year.25 Mary Anne had been left virtually destitute and she moved with her daughter to Blois in France, where living costs were much lower than in England.

Faced with her own financial problems, Sophia decided to adopt a similar solution and live abroad. By good fortune, she was able to rent ‘High Wood’ in April 1830 on a three-year lease, and she immediately set off for the Continent with Ella, William Charles Raffles Flint, her brother Captain William Hollamby Hull, and his wife Jane Charlotte, travelling from Dover to Calais in HM packet Crusader. In Bonn she spent two days in the company of the Sanskrit scholar, August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767–1845),26 and then proceeded to Basel, where she stayed in the room she had shared with Raffles 13 years previously, resulting, as she wrote, in ‘many painful thoughts’.27 From Basel, she proceeded by way of Biel, Neuchatel and Lausanne to Geneva. During the summer, she travelled to Bern, Zurich and Interlaken, and in the spring of 1831, having left Charles with a tutor at Geneva, she travelled with Ella to Milan and Genoa, and then on to Pisa and Florence. She returned to Geneva in June and remained there during the winter, her name and sorrows, as she wrote, having won for her ‘the kindness & interest’ of the inhabitants.28 She had also by this time formed a close relationship with Adélaide (Adele) de Staël (née Vernet), the widow of Auguste, elder son of the French woman of letters, Madame de Staël (1766–1817), their only son surviving long enough to give her, by the laws of Geneva, the inheritance of Coppet, where Sophia often stayed in the room of the late Madame de Staël.

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