AustLit

'The former British hill station of Mussoorie, in the foothills of the Himalayas, affords the visitor two extraordinary views. Facing south, one takes in the seemingly endless Doon Valley, lit up at night by the city of Dehradun. That city is only 36 kilometres away as the crow flies, but it’s also several thousand metres below, should the crow in question plummet. Turn north and the mountains predominate. Indeed, from a certain vantage on Camel Back Road, snow-capped peaks can be glimpsed, several sources of the Ganges among them, through trace elements of cloud.' (Introduction)

'As Victor Crittenden’s painstaking research (Crittenden 2005) has established, the Australian-born writer John George Lang published, either in serial or book form, more than 20 novels, several volumes of short stories, four volumes of poetry and at least two plays. Lang also published Wanderings in India (1859), sometimes called ‘a travel book’, and, according to Rolf Boldrewood (Thomas Alexander Browne), one of the best of the lighter descriptions of Indian life ever published. Most of the chapters in Wanderings in India first appeared in Lang’s English-language newspaper Mofussilite in the mid- to late-1840s in India; when they were republished between November 1857 to February 1859 in Charles Dickens’ Household Words, the travel sketches were offered in eleven parts, with the running title ‘Wanderings in India’. In 1857 Lang was living in London and, with the Indian Mutiny very much in the news, Dickens was eager to publish as much background material as he could find about India While a number of Lang’s pieces had appeared in Household Words as early as 1853, the majority were published just after the Sepoy Rebellion, allowing readers to set his sketches and stories against the evolving narrative of India’s first war of independence.In the complete collection that appeared in the 1859 Routledge edition, Lang used many of his Household Words pieces and added two new sketches written specifically for the volume, both of which say something about the Sepoy Rebellion and its aftermath.'  (Introduction)