Travels in India, During the Years 1780, 1781, 1782 & 1783

William Hodges, Travels in India, During the Years 1780, 1781, 1782 & 1783, London: Printed for the Author, and sold by J Edwards, 1793

vi + [1] + 156 pages including 14 engraved plates by Medland, Byrne, Angus and others after Hodges + large folding engraved map of part of Bengal and Bihar + table of the Plates (with advertisement on verso for Hodges' Views in India drawn on the spot, in the years 1780, 1781, 1782 and 1783); later half calf with marbled paper boards
11.81 x 9.65 x 0.98 in (30 x 24.5 x 2.5 cm)

PROVENANCE
From the Library of Sir George Chetwynd, 4th Baronet of Brocton Hall

Observation, Landscape, and Empire — William Hodges, R.A., Travels in India (1794)

Published in 1794, this corrected second edition of William Hodges’s Travels in India represents one of the most perceptive artist-authored accounts of the subcontinent produced in the late eighteenth century. Hodges was already a figure of distinction within British artistic and exploratory circles, having served as the official artist on Captain Cook’s Second Voyage (1772–1775), for which he later executed a celebrated series of large-scale paintings commissioned by the Admiralty. In 1778 he travelled to India under the patronage of Warren Hastings, then Governor-General of Bengal, remaining there for several years and recording landscapes, monuments, and sites of political and cultural significance during a formative phase of East India Company rule.

The experiences of this period formed the basis of Travels in India, first published in 1793 and revised here in the author’s corrected second edition. Unlike administrative or missionary travel literature, Hodges’s narrative is shaped by an artist’s eye, attentive to light, spatial scale, climate, and the material presence of architecture and terrain. His observations occupy a position between picturesque travel writing and emergent colonial documentation, without claiming scientific or cartographic authority.

Hodges’s Indian work—both visual and textual—was widely circulated and discussed in European intellectual circles; Alexander von Humboldt later acknowledged the impact of Hodges’s Indian views on his own conception of travel and landscape. Offered here in a later binding, the present volume remains a desirable and historically grounded cornerstone for collections concerned with early British artistic encounters with India and the literature of empire.

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