Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 01.djvu/401

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culty in securing the attendance of girls of the lower castes; but in the case of native caste girls the difficulty was, and still is, very great. Indian girls marry early, and native parents see none of the material benefits to be derived from their education, which induce them to send their sons to mission schools, even at the risk of their being led to change their religion. But these obstacles were gradually overcome in some measure, and before Anderson's death seven hundred Hindu and Mohammedan girls, the majority of the former belonging to families of good caste, were under instruction in the schools of the mission. In this branch of his work Anderson was greatly helped by Mrs. Anderson. Anderson died at Madras in March 1855, after a short illness. He had laboured indefatigably for eighteen years at the work for which he had been set apart; only once during that period revisiting his native land, whither he was accompanied by the Rev. P. Rajahgopál, one of his first converts. His constitution, naturally strong, had become enfeebled by his incessant toils and anxieties in a debilitating climate.

[Braidwood's True Yokefellows in the Mission Field, Nisbet, 1862; Madras Native Herald.]

ANDERSON, JOHN HENRY (1815–1874), conjuror and actor, was known as Professor Anderson, the Wizard of the North, and during many years appeared before the public as a performer of feats of legerdemain. For brief periods he tenanted in turn several of the London theatres, and travelled with his exhibition and apparatus through the provinces, to the colonies and America. His ‘great gun trick’—in which he pretended to catch in his hand a bullet from a musket discharged by one of his audience—was at one time a much-admired illusion. He occupied Covent Garden Theatre for some months at the close of 1855 and the beginning of 1856, performing his conjuring tricks, producing a Christmas pantomime, and attempting the personation of William in ‘Black-eyed Susan,’ and Rob Roy in the melodrama of that name. His season closed with an entertainment described as a ‘Grand Carnival Complimentary Benefit and Dramatic Gala, to commence on Monday morning and terminate with a bal masqué on Tuesday.’ The bal masqué was ‘a scene of undisguised indecency, drunkenness, and vice.’ Between four and five o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, 5 March, Anderson ordered the National Anthem to be played and the gas to be lowered, to warn the revellers to depart. Suddenly the ceiling was discovered to be on fire. The masquers had barely time to escape. In half an hour the destruction of the building was complete. Anderson is chiefly memorable from his connection with this catastrophe.

[Morley's Journal of a London Playgoer, 1866; Irving's Annals of Our Time, 1871.]

ANDERSON, JOSEPH (1789–1877), lieutenant-colonel, a veteran officer and leading colonist in Victoria, was born in 1789, and in 1805 was appointed to an ensigncy in the new 2nd battalion (since disbanded) of the 78th Highlanders, with which he served in Sicily, in the descent on Calabria and the battle of Maida in 1806, and in the luckless expedition against the Turks in Egypt in 1807. As a lieutenant in the 24th foot he fought in the Peninsular campaigns between 1809 and 1812, at Talavera, where he was wounded, at Busaco, at the defence of Torres Vedras, at Fuentes d'Onor, and in many minor engagements. In 1812 he was promoted to a company in the York chasseurs, a corps for West India service recruited chiefly from foreigners, and with it he was present at the recapture of Guadaloupe in 1815. The island had hoisted the tricolor on receipt of the news of Napoleon's return from Elba, and as the garrison refused to treat, the place was attacked and taken, after some sharp fighting, by a British force under General Sir J. Leith, seven weeks after the battle of Waterloo. Lieutenant-colonel Anderson was subsequently in the 50th foot, with which he served long in Australia and India. He was many years military commandant and civil governor of the penal settlement at Norfolk Island, and commanded a brigade in the Gwalior campaign of 1843, where he was wounded at the battle of Punniar. After forty-three years' hard service he retired from the army in 1848, and became a squatter on the Goulburn river soon after the erection of Victoria into a separate colony in 1850, and was made a member of the legislative council of Victoria in 1852. He died at his residence, Fairlie House, South Yarra, on 18 July 1877. His son, Colonel William Acland Anderson, C.M.G., who was once a subaltern in his father's regiment, was for some time commissioner at the Gold Fields, and succeeded the late Major-General Dean Pitt as commandant of the volunteer forces of Victoria.

[Hart's Army Lists; Heaton's Australian Dictionary of Dates.]

ANDERSON, LIONEL, alias Munson (d. 1680), Roman catholic priest, was tried with seven others for high treason under the statute 27 Eliz. c. 2, which banished from