At around the time the Elphinstone Mission was setting off for Afghanistan from Delhi, William Hickey was in Calcutta writing in his diaries about the excesses he saw around him every day in the taverns
and dining rooms of the city. He depicts a grasping, jaded, philistine world where bored, over-paid ‘Writers’ (as the Company called its clerks) would amuse themselves in Calcutta punch houses by throwing half-eaten chickens across the tables. Their womenfolk tended to throw only bread and pastry (and that, he said, only after a little cherry brandy), and this restraint was regarded as the highest ‘refinement of wit and breeding’. Worse still was ‘the barbarous [Calcutta] custom of pelleting [one’s dining companions], with little balls of bread, made like pills, which was even practised by the fair sex. … Mr. Daniel Barwell was such a proficient that he could at the distance of three or four yards snuff a candle, and that several times successively.’