Author: Edward Sellon

Edward Sellon went out to India as an army cadet at sixteen and came back a decade later with a taste for the kind of writing that could not carry his name. The New Epicurean, printed by William Dugdale in 1865, is explicit fiction dressed as an eighteenth-century pastiche: a run of letters falsely dated 1740 and addressed to young women of quality. Dugdale published most of what Sellon wrote in that line, including a memoir of his Indian years that appeared after his death. The odd thing about him is the other half of the output. He read papers to the Anthropological Society of London on Indian religious iconography and produced annotations on Hindu sacred texts that scholars of the day took seriously, and he drew and translated as well. Born in Brighton in January 1818, he died in London in 1866, by his own hand, at a hotel off Piccadilly.