The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan | Page 4

names, with whom
Morier was brought daily into contact while at Tehran. The majority of
the incidents so skilfully woven into the narrative of the hero’s
adventures actually occurred, and can be identified by the student who
is familiar with the incidents of the time. Above all, in its delineation of
national customs, the book is an invaluable contribution to sociology,
and conveys a more truthful and instructive impression of Persian
habits, methods, points of view, and courses of action, than any
disquisition of which I am aware in the more serious volumes of
statesmen, travellers, and men of affairs. I will proceed to identify some
of these personages and events.
No more faithful portrait is contained in the book than that of the king,
Fath Ali Shah, the second of the Kajar Dynasty, and the
great-grandfather of the reigning Shah. His vanity and ostentation, his
passion for money and for women, his love of flattery, his discreet
deference, to the priesthood (illustrated by his annual pilgrimage, in the
garb of penance, to the shrine of Fatima at Kum), his royal state, his
jewels, and his ambrosial beard, form the background of every
contemporary work, and are vividly reproduced in these pages. The
royal processions, whether in semi-state when he visited the house of a
subject, or in full state when he went abroad from the capital, and the
annual departure of the royal household for the summer camp at
Sultanieh, are drawn from the life. Under the present Shah they have
been shorn of a good deal of their former splendour. The Grand Vizier
of the narrative, ‘that notorious minister, decrepit in person, and
nefarious in conduct,’ ‘a little old man, famous for a hard and
unyielding nature,’ was Mirza Sheffi who was appointed by Fath Ali
Shah to succeed if Ibrahim, the minister to whom his uncle had owed
his throne, and whom the nephew repaid by putting to death. The
Amin-ed-Dowleh, or Lord High Treasurer, ‘a large, coarse man, and
the son of a greengrocer of Ispahan,’ was Mohammed Hussein Khan,
the second personage of Court. Only a slight verbal change is needed to
transform Hajji Baba’s master, Mirza Ahmak, the king’s chief
physician into Mirza Ahmed, the Hakîm Bashi of Fath Ali Shah.

Namerd Khan, the chief executioner, and subsequent chief of the hero,
whose swaggering cowardice is so vividly depicted, was, in actual life,
Feraj Ullah Khan. The commander of the King’s Camel Corps, who
had to give up his house to the British Elchi, was Mohammed Khan.
The Poet Laureate of the story, Asker Khan, shared the name of his
sovereign, Fath Ali Khan; and the story of his mouth being filled on
one occasion with gold coins, and stuffed on another with sugar-candy,
as a mark of the royal approbation, is true. The serdar of Erivan, ‘an
abandoned sensualist, but liberal and enterprising,’ was one Hassan
Khan; and the romantic tale of the Armenians, Yûsûf and Mariam,
down to the minutest details, such as the throwing of a hand-grenade
into one of the subterranean dwellings of the Armenians, and the
escape of the girl by leaping from a window of the serdar’s palace at
Erivan, is a reproduction of incidents that actually occurred in the
Russo-Persian war of that date. Finally, Mirza Firouz Khan, the Persian
envoy to Great Britain, and the hero of “Hajji Baba in England”, is a
portrait of Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, a nephew of the former Grand
Vizier, who visited London as the Shah’s representative in 1809-10,
and who was subsequently sent on a similar mission to Petersburg. This
individual made a considerable sensation in England by his excellent
manners and witty retorts, among which one is worthy of being quoted
that does not appear in Morier’s pages. When asked by a lady in
London whether they did not worship the sun in Persia, he replied, ‘Oh
yes, madam, and so would you in England too, if you ever saw him!’
The international politics of the time are not without their serious place
in the pages of “Hajji Baba.” The French ambassador who is
represented in chapter lxxiv. as retiring in disgrace from Tehran, was
Napoleon’s emissary, General Gardanne, who, after his master had
signed the Peace of Tilsit with the Tsar, found a very different estimate
of the value of the French alliance entertained by the Persian Court.
The English embassy, whose honorific reception is described in chapter
lxxvii., was that of Sir Harford Jones. The disputes about hats, and
chairs, and stockings, and other points of divergence between English
and Persian etiquette, are historical; and a contemporary oil-painting of
the first audience with the Shah, as described by Morier, still exists on
the walls of the royal palace of Negaristan in the Persian capital. There

may be seen