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Lieutenant Clifford Henry Mecham, Sketches and Incidents of the Siege of Lucknow: From Drawings made during the Siege by Clifford Henry Mecham with Descriptive Notices by George Couper, Esq. late Secretary to the Chief Commissioner of Oude, London: Day and Son, 1858

[12] pages; later hand-coloured tinted lithographed title page with vignette and 26 later hand-coloured fine tinted lithographed views on 17 plates, with tissue new guards; publisher's dark brown cloth-covered boards, tooled in blind and title embossed in gilt on the boards with fresh spine
22.5 x 15 x 0.5 in (57 x 38.5 x 1.2 cm)

LIST OF PLATES
1. Title page. Baillie Guard Gateway / 2. The Baillie Guard Gateway from the Nobut Khana (Music Hall) / 3. The Residency from the Water Gate / 4. Mr. Gubbins's House / 5. Sander's Post / 6. Front view of the Residency / 7. The Church / 8. The Redan Battery / 9. The Baillie Guard Battery and Hospital / 10. The New Cawnpore Battery / 11. The Judicial Commissioners' Kutchery (Court House.) / 12. Rear view of the Residency from the Churchyard / 13. The Seikh Yard Breach / 14. Interior of the Residency Billiard Room / 15. View from Residency Look Out Tower / 16. The Seikh Yard Battery / 17. The Nobut Khana Gateway / 18. The Clock Tower Gateway / 19. View from the Highlanders' Post / 20. Anderson's Battery / 21. Havelock's Grave, and the Alumbagh Picket-House / 22. Interior of Alumbagh / 23. Jellalabad / 24. Listening for Miners / 25. The Mosque Picket / 26. Lying in Wait / 27. Sinking a Shaft.

LUCKNOW UNDER FIRE: MECHAM’S EYEWITNESS DRAWINGS FROM THE SIEGE OF 1857

Published scarcely a year after the Siege of Lucknow, this large-format portfolio documents one of the most iconic and brutal chapters of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 through a compelling combination of eyewitness illustration and civil commentary.

The drawings were executed on-site by Lieutenant Clifford Henry Mecham, an officer in the Bengal Army who survived the siege and visually chronicled its harrowing conditions. The 26 scenes are reproduced as tinted lithographs by Day & Son, lithographers to the Queen, and are accompanied by explanatory notices penned by George Couper, then Secretary to the Chief Commissioner of Oude and later a high-ranking British administrator.

As both reportage and homage, the work combines aesthetic precision with imperial narrative—depicting not only architectural devastation but the moral heroism projected by the British press and public in the uprising’s aftermath. The collaboration between Mecham and Couper reflects a Victorian desire to not just record but memorialise colonial trauma through print and image.

This portfolio belongs to a small group of visual accounts published within a year of the events, alongside works by Felice Beato, Captain George Atkinson, and William Simpson. Mecham's images, produced on location and under fire, offer a rare immediacy and dramatic tension, unlike Beato's photography or Simpson's later reconstructions.

The collection is also one of the earliest known attempts at a cohesive visual chronicle of a modern urban siege, predating the photographic albums of Felice Beato and others who arrived after the city had fallen.

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