Helen C Mackenzie (Mrs. Colin Mackenzie)
(1819 - 1910)
Illustrations of the Mission, the Camp, and the Zenána, together with Life in the Mission, the Camp, and the Zenána; or, Six Years in India, in three volumes
Helen C Mackenzie (Mrs Colin Mackenzie), Life in the Mission, the Camp, and the Zenána; or, Six Years in India, London: Richard Bentley, 1853
3 volumes
Volume I: viii, 359 pp.; Volume II: vi, 307 pp.; Volume III: vi, 336 pp.;
bound in contemporary red half morocco over marbled boards, spines with gilt titling and volume numbers (each)
7.75 x 5 in (20 x 12.5 cm) (each)
[Together with:]
Helen C Mackenzie (Mrs Colin Mackenzie), Illustrations of the Mission, the Camp, and the Zenána, London: R. Appel, Anastatic Printer, 43, Gerrard Street, Soho, 1854
Lithographed title page along with 11 plates, making it a total of 12 of 20 lithographed plates by Mrs. Mackenzie after her original sketches (some annotated in the stone); original publisher’s textured blue cloth-covered portfolio boards, gilt-lettered on upper cover and spine, spine titled: “Illustrations of the Mission, the Camp & the Zenána, Mrs. Colin Mackenzie.” The upper board is gilt-lettered with the title; brown glazed endpapers.
17.75 x 13 in (45 x 33.5 cm)
LIST OF PLATES
1. Muhammad Hasan Khan Afghan / 2. Tartar Men / 3. Two Afghans / 4. An Afghan Lady / 5. A Parsi and His Son / 6. Maharajah Dhuleep Sing[h] / 7. Four Native Officers / 8. Tartar Women / 9. A Sikh Orderly and Gardener / 10. A Group of Afghans, Sikhs, and Others / 11. An Arab and an Arab Jew / 12. A Bedouin Arab / 13. Bombay People / 14. Mahratta Converts / 15. A Mahratta Brahman / 16. The Revs. Hormazdji Pestoonji and Narayan Shishadri / 17. The Queen of Delhi / 18. Biluchis / 19. Cingalese and Malabar Women / 20. A Group of Converts. Plates 1, 3, 6, 9, 10, 12, 14, and 17 are missing.
FAITH, FEMININITY & THE COLONIAL FRONTIER: HELEN MACKENZIE’S WITNESS TO MISSIONARY LIFE IN 19TH-CENTURY INDIA
Published in 1853, Helen Douglas Mackenzie’s Life in the Mission, the Camp, and the Zenána; or, Six Years in India offers one of the earliest and most sustained reflections by a British woman on the gendered, religious, and domestic dimensions of colonial life in India. Spanning three volumes, the work moves between the observational, the evangelical, and the autobiographical—charting Mackenzie’s travels through mission stations and military cantonments across the Punjab, North-West Provinces, and Bengal Presidency between 1846 and 1852. As the wife of Captain Colin Mackenzie, a Christian missionary and officer in the Madras Army, she was both a participant in and chronicler of a period marked by the annexation of Punjab, the aftermath of Sikh resistance, and the expanding reach of evangelical reform.
What distinguishes Mackenzie’s account is her unique access to zenanas—Indian women’s inner quarters—ordinarily closed to British men. These rare cross-cultural interactions, often mediated by translators and filtered through her Christian moral lens, combine a nuanced curiosity with the cultural paternalism typical of mid-Victorian missionary writing. Unlike many male contemporaries, however, Mackenzie does not reduce Indian women to caricature or passive subjects. Her narrative blends intimate, often sympathetic scenes of female sociability with broader reflections on language, education, custom, and faith—vividly rendered through proximity and lived experience.
In this, she both resembles and diverges from a distinguished lineage of British women writers on India. Fanny Parkes’s Wanderings of a Pilgrim (1850) radiates personal enchantment and Orientalist delight, while Emily Eden’s Up the Country (1866) offers courtly observation with ironic detachment. Flora Annie Steel, writing later, brought bureaucratic insight and literary polish to her depictions of Indian society. Mackenzie, by contrast, stands apart for the evangelical framing of her ethnographic sensibility and for her narrative’s moral clarity—intimate, immersive, and ideologically charged.
The present lot unites this landmark three-volume memoir with the rarely encountered folio of lithographic plates, Illustrations of the Mission, the Camp, and the Zenána (1854), issued after one year by anastatic printer R. Appel of Soho. Likely based on Mackenzie’s original field sketches, the lithographs depict Indian families, missionaries, converts, and military figures—each plate rendered in a refined black-and-white line style with tonal washes. Though uncoloured and spare, the images deepen the emotional and cultural texture of the textual volumes, adding visual witness to her verbal testimony. Captions and notations on select plates lend further authenticity, revealing the ethnographic immediacy of scenes encountered.
Together, the memoir and the illustrative volume form a rare and powerful testimony of one woman’s attempt to understand, evangelise, and represent India from within its domestic spaces. Whether viewed as a moral tract, a proto-ethnographic study, or a gendered chronicle of imperial encounter, Mackenzie’s project remains a cornerstone contribution to colonial women’s writing and the history of cross-cultural engagement in the British Empire.
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