Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900 [1st ed.] 9783030361457, 9783030361464

Citation preview

Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900 Edited by Benjamin Colbert · Lucy Morrison

Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900

Benjamin Colbert · Lucy Morrison Editors

Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900

Editors Benjamin Colbert University of Wolverhampton Wolverhampton, UK

Lucy Morrison University of Nebraska at Omaha Omaha, NE, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-36145-7 ISBN 978-3-030-36146-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36146-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: The History Collection/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This book originated at the NASSR conference Romantic Prospects in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where the co-editors met in person for the first time, having worked previously on nineteenth-century travel editions together virtually. It was a fitting beginning and we are grateful to the organizers for the beautiful and lively setting in which those conversations took place: we had traveled there from different countries, were different nationalities, and both lived many, many miles from where we had originated. Our shared interest in travel persisted and evolved; we both nurtured ideas for extending beyond the “prospects” of that conference encounter to a broader view of the long nineteenth century. We thank all our contributors for their trust and patience in preparing this collection. We are also grateful to Ben Doyle for encouraging and commissioning the work before his departure from Palgrave, to Shaun Vigil for moving it forward, and to Lina Aboujieb for bringing it to completion. Our anonymous reader helped us shape an earlier conception into a collection more focused and substantial, for which we are also grateful. We thank our supportive institutions, the Universities of Wolverhampton and Nebraska at Omaha, for their investment in the undertaking of such scholarly efforts. In addition, the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, the London Library, the Beinecke Library, and the Yale Center for British Art at Yale University have provided generous permission to share images in this collection. Student Bailey Hoffer was consistently hardworking and

v

vi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

patient with the compilation of the details of this collection, and we extend our gratitude to her for her commitment and efforts. We both offer our deepest thanks to our families for their unstinting love, support, patience, and shared vision of an internationalism that gains strength through difference. Ben is particularly grateful to his wife, Hilary, best travel companion these last thirty years. Lucy is grateful to her parents, Carolyn and John, for inspiring her love of and interest in travel, for showing her so much of the world and always encouraging her to go further and to her brother, Steve, her travel companion for many trips. Her children, Caelan and Alice, and husband, Ivan, have been instrumental in her journeys too—thanks for being willing to go with her along all the different roads available.

Contents

1

Introduction Benjamin Colbert and Lucy Morrison

2

Ephemeral Entertainment: Montagnes Russes and Movement in Paris Lucy Morrison

3

4

5

The Album of the Fathers and the Father of All Albums: Inscribing Wonder and Loss in the Grande Chartreuse Kevin J. James

1

15

41

“Dieting with Antiquity”: Eating and Drinking with the Ancients at Pompeii Chloe Chard

61

“Raw Productions … Exported in Abundance”: Continental Tourism in Satire, 1815–1828 Benjamin Colbert

95

vii

viii

CONTENTS

6

Ruskin in the 1830s: Emerging Authorship and the Print Culture of Travel David C. Hanson

7

8

9

10

11

Upper-Class Travel with a Political Slant: The Destinies of Nations and Empires through the Eyes of Lord and Lady Strangford Ludmilla Kostova

119

177

Beyond the Grand Tour: Norway and the Nineteenth-Century British Traveler Kathryn Walchester

201

Grand Tourists, Missionary Travelers, and Frances Stenhouse Jeanne Moskal

219

Gender, Genre, and Geography in Ménie Dowie’s A Girl in the Karpathians Katarina Gephardt

243

Travelers in the Wilderness: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Transformative Travels Jennifer Hayward

269

Bibliography

299

Index

329

Notes on Contributors

Chloe Chard is a freelance writer and lecturer based in London. She has published widely on imaginative geography, travel literature, and art criticism, and also has an interest in the cultural history of food and drink; she is currently writing a book on travel and laughter. Chard has been a fellow at numerous research institutes and universities in Europe, North America, and Australia. Her books include Tristes Plaisirs: A Critical Reader of the Romantic Grand Tour (2014), Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour (1999), and a co-edited collection of essays, Transports: Travel, Pleasure and Imaginative Geography (1996). Benjamin Colbert is Reader in English Literature at the University of Wolverhampton, where he specializes in travel writing, Romantic period literature, and bibliography. His publications include: (ed.) British Satire 1785–1840 (2003), Shelley’s Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision (2005), (ed.) Post-Napoleonic Womens’ Travel Writing (4 vols., 2012), and (ed.) Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ireland (2012). He is the author of the online, open-access, bio-bibliographical database, Women’s Travel Writing 1789–1840 (2014–2020), and currently serves as co-editor for European Romantic Review. Katarina Gephardt is Professor of English at Kennesaw State University. She has published essays on nineteenth-century British literature and travel writing. Her book The Idea of Europe in British Travel Narratives, 1789–1914 (2014) examines the imaginative polarization of Europe in

ix

x

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

nineteenth-century fiction and travel writing. She is currently working on a new book project on late nineteenth-century British women travellers in Central and Eastern Europe. David C. Hanson is Professor of English and Department Chair at Southeastern Louisiana University with a primary focus on longnineteenth-century literature. He is co-editor of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association’s interdisciplinary journal Nineteenth Century Studies and editor of the digital archive, The Early Ruskin Manuscripts, 1826– 1842. Recent articles include “Sentiment and Materiality in Late-Victorian Book Collecting” for Victorian Literature and Culture, and “Ruskin, Dante, and the Dark Waters of the Praeterita” for Nineteenth-Century Prose. Jennifer Hayward received her Ph.D. from Princeton and is Virginia Myers Professor of English and Global Media and Digital Studies at the College of Wooster. A Fulbright scholar in Chile 2016–17, she is author of Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions (1997), and editor of scholarly editions of Maria Graham’s 1824 Journal of a Residence in Chile (2003) and Journey of a Voyage to Brazil (2011, with Soledad Caballero). She has published widely on nineteenth-century Scottish travelers and is currently writing on, and building a digital archive of, the nineteenth-century Anglophone newspapers published in Chile. Kevin J. James is Professor of History at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, and founder of the Tourism History Working Group. He has published widely on tourism history in the United Kingdom, including Tourism, Land, and Landscape in Ireland: The Commodification of Culture (2014). His current research explores the social and cultural history of the modern hotel, and uses of the visitors’ book in nineteenthand early-twentieth-century travel culture. Ludmilla Kostova is Professor of British literature and cultural studies at St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria. She has published extensively on eighteenth-century, Romantic, and modern British literature, as well as on travel writing and representations of intercultural encounters. Her books include Tales of the Periphery: The Balkans in Nineteenth-Century British Writing (1997), frequently cited by specialists in the field, and, with Charles Forsdick and Corinne Fowler, she edited Travel Writing and Ethics: Theory and Practice (2013). She is also

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

xi

editor of the academic journal VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Lucy Morrison is Professor of English and Director of the University Honors Program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where she specializes in British Romantic literature. She co-authored A Mary Shelley Encyclopedia (2003) and co-edited the following books: (ed.) PostNapoleonic Womens’ Travel Writing (4 vols. 2012) and Mary Shelley: Her Circle and Her Contemporaries (2010). Her co-edited Charlotte Brontë from the Beginnings: New Essays from the Juvenilia to the Major Works was published in 2016. She also serves as co-editor of the European Romantic Review. Jeanne Moskal is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her books include Blake, Ethics, and Forgiveness, the Travel Writing volume of The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, and Teaching British Women Writers, 17501900. She edited the Keats-Shelley Journal 2005–18 and has won UNC’s Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement. Her book-in-progress concerns twentieth-century adaptations of Jane Eyre. Kathryn Walchester is Subject Leader for English Literature at Liverpool John Moores University. She has published widely on European travel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her books include ‘Our Own Fair Italy’: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Writing and Italy 1800–1844 (2007), Gamle Norge and Nineteenth-Century British Women Travellers and Norway (2014), and, most recently, Servants and the British Travelogue 1750–1850 (2019) and a co-edited collection, Keywords for Travel Writing Studies: A Critical Glossary (2019).

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6

Fig. 4.7 Fig. 4.8

La Course des Montagnes Russes à Paris—Le Suprême Bon-Ton, no. 29. National Gallery of Victoria, Australia Joseph T. Willmore, engraver, after J. W. M. Turner, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 1859–1879. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection (B1977.14.13866) “Amphorae” from “the Thermopolium, or wine-shop,” in George Clarke, Pompeii, 2 vols. (London: Charles Knight, 1831–1832), 2:193. London Library “Bronze pastry-mould” and “Bread, from a painting on the walls of the Pantheon [at Pompeii],” in Clarke, Pompeii, 1:114. London Library “Bread discovered in Pompeii,” in Clarke, Pompeii, 2:143. London Library “From the paintings on the walls of the Pantheon [at Pompeii],” in Clarke, Pompeii, 1:117. London Library “Pompeii: Oven and Mill in the House of Pansa,” engraved by Charles Heath, in Sir William Gell and John P. Gandy, Pompeiana: The Topography, Edifices, and Ornaments of Pompeii (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1817–1819), plate 37. London Library “View of the Baker’s Shop and Mill,” in Clarke, Pompeii, 2:136. London Library “Glass bottle, partially destroyed by the heat of the lava, found in Herculaneum,” in Clarke, Pompeii, 1:6. London Library

31

64

65

72 73 74

76 77

78

xiii

xiv

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 4.9 Fig. 4.10 Fig. 4.11 Fig. 4.12 Fig. 4.13 Fig. 4.14 Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2

Fig. 6.3

“Drinking Scene,” after a painting in the Thermopolium, in Clarke, Pompeii, 2:194. London Library “Picture representing a domestic Supper-party,” in Clarke, Pompeii, 2:89. London Library “Stove in the Kitchen of the House of Pansa,” in Clarke, Pompeii, 2:106. London Library “View of a Cook’s Shop restored,” in Clarke, Pompeii, 2:82. London Library “Flat drinking-cup,” in Clarke, Pompeii, 1:205. London Library “Ornamental drinking-glasses, cast in a mould,” in Clarke, Pompeii, 2:31. London Library John Ruskin, untitled pen-and-ink drawing, copied after Liège by Samuel Prout, Facsimiles of Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany (1833), from “The Meuse” in “Account of a Tour on the Continent,” MS IX. John Ruskin Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Ruskin, untitled pen-and-ink vignette in the manner of Samuel Prout, from “Lille” in “Account of a Tour on the Continent,” MS IX. John Ruskin Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University William Purser, Saltzburg, engraved by Edward Goodall, in Friendship’s Offering; and Winter’s Wreath: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for MDCCCXXXV (London: Smith, Elder, 1835 [ca. 1834]), 37 opp. From the collection of the author (Photo Jessica Firmin)

79 81 82 83 88 89

131

132

144

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Benjamin Colbert and Lucy Morrison

… I went to France, alone, in 1819. I was then unacquainted with any of the continental languages. On this occasion I made, what used to be called, the Grand Tour, so celebrated in the comedies of the last century as the preparatory education of young diplomatists and men of fashion. At that time such a tour was a matter of serious importance and was entered upon with a feeling of gravity, that in these days appears somewhat ludicrous. The experimental citizen who brought away a snuff box from the lava of Vesuvius, was then considered a sort of miracle of a man—he is now a mere person of pleasure, who is looked upon as having visited the continent as a matter of course. James Holman, A Voyage round the World 1

In August 1840, the Scottish traveler Andrew Archibald Paton, resident in Belgrade, encountered an unexpected English traveler in a part of

B. Colbert (B) University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK e-mail: [email protected] L. Morrison University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Colbert and L. Morrison (eds.), Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36146-4_1

1

2

B. COLBERT AND L. MORRISON

Europe then little frequented: “One day I was going out at the gateway, and saw a strange figure, with a long white beard and a Spanish cap, mounted on a sorry horse, and at once recognized it to be that of Holman, the blind traveller.”2 James Holman had earned a substantial readership through his first book, Narrative of a Journey (1822), recounting a tour through France, Italy, Savoy, Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands, a feat he recalled in his Voyage round the World (1835) as a “Grand Tour,” the first leg in what would prove to be an extensive program of travel well beyond the Continent. In his account of their meeting, Paton recalled taking Holman into Belgrade the next day and describing the sights for him (“I turned his face to the cardinal points of the compass, successively explaining the objects lying in each direction”) and responding to Holman’s “cross questions.”3 This choreography and dialogue answered well to Holman’s method, which he describes in Voyage as a “pleasure I derived from the active employment of my faculties”; a blind traveler, according to Holman, feels “the general effects of travelling … more sensibly.”4 “Undistracted by recollections of visual objects” and “[u]nacquainted with local details,” Holman professes to have “a clearer view of the great points” and to have fixed “geographical situations” indelibly in his mind like “a sort of map.”5 Holman’s reference to the Grand Tour as an outdated phrase, the stuff of eighteenth-century comedic send-ups of “young … men of fashion,” anticipates a modernization of continental travel in the nineteenth century that the figure of Holman himself embodies. His sense that by 1835 the objects of tourism have been transformed into simple “matter of course” pleasures indicates both a democratization of travel as well as a shift in its emphasis from ideological fashioning to personal gratification, from the ends of travel to its means, from visualization to totality of experience. In the earlier Narrative, Holman describes himself giving in to the rhythms of travel, physically and emotionally, spending some of the arduous journey walking alongside his carriage, loosely tied to it by a guide-rope.6 Traveling unprepared and without linguistic attainment, he yields himself to the kindness of strangers, innkeepers, and bankers. Thoroughly modern, he is in the vanguard of touristic infrastructures and material culture, one of the first to dispense with letters of credit in favor of Herries and Farquhar notes, proto-traveler’s checks that “supply travellers with money, whenever they may require it, without there being any necessity of determining the route beforehand.”7 For writing, Holman relies on a noctograph, a device used to guide his pen between charges of ink; the author’s

1

INTRODUCTION

3

portrait with noctograph forms the Narrative’s frontispiece and fittingly emblematizes the travel technologies that liberate the disabled subject. The text itself draws considerable material from other writers, acknowledged and unacknowledged, interweaving visual descriptions that invoke the traveler’s eye even under the sign of blindness. In this metatextual way, Narrative draws attention to the textuality of travel writings, the interdependency and repetition of texts (and images) that over-determine wellknown places in much of the literature describing the continental tour. The tourist itinerary becomes re-invented in guidebooks, new narratives, and hybrid forms, such as the letterpress plate book and keepsake albums, that all formed part of the growing commercialization of tourism.8 As Chloe Chard remarks, the Grand Tour’s route is unfixed, but customarily involves a northern traveler moving south, arriving in the classical world of Italy or sometimes Greece, whether by crossing the Alps or voyaging by sea.9 While Chard configures the tour as an imaginative geography invoking rhetorical responses from travel writers, social historians have considered the Tour in terms of its social, political, and educative values (what Holman alludes to in his quip about the “preparatory education of young diplomatists and men of fashion”). Jeremy Black argues that this “classic [educational] mould” declined over the course of the eighteenth century, with leisure emerging alongside “social finishing” as motives for those undertaking the Tour.10 Even into the early nineteenth century, however, popular associations of the Grand Tour with gentlemen’s “sons” and their tutors (or “bear-leaders”) retained a currency, notwithstanding what Katherine Turner describes as an increasingly middle-class orientation of travel writing and the publishing market, in which the bear-leaders were more likely than their pupils to publish travel accounts.11 As Yaël Schlick reminds us, the Grand Tour and “the activity of travel itself was insistently gendered as male,” a critical prejudice that persisted well into the nineteenth century even as greater numbers of women now represented continental tourism in their own voices.12 The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars (1789–1815) are often regarded as the end of the Grand Tour—or at least the dividing line between a moribund aristocratically inflected tourism and the rise of mass tourism. According to Brian Dolan, military zones during the war years deflected would-be Grand Tourists to European peripheries, introducing them thereby to new methods of comparative ethnography, and re-conceptualizing the notion of Europe itself. For Dolan, as for Angela Byrne in her study of British scientific travel to north Europe,

4

B. COLBERT AND L. MORRISON

the emblematic figure is Edward Daniel Clarke, the Cambridge don whose Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa (1810– 1819) did for Europe what Alexander von Humboldt’s Travels to the Equinoctial Regions (1807) did for South America. Clarke made the case for a new understanding of modern (as opposed to classical) Europe, a departure from Grand Tourist ideals radical enough to be interpreted by Dolan as “the death of the Grand Tour.”13 Conversely, James Buzard argues in his influential survey of nineteenth-century tourism, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800– 1918 (1993), that the Grand Tour became refigured as a mode of modern tourism, opening established travel networks to all classes. Middleand then working-class travelers treated the Tour as a form of “cultural accreditation” that would identify them as full participants in a European modernity. Yet tourists were simultaneously haunted by “belatedness,” a sense that others had always been there before, and they responded with the reflex attitude of anti-tourism, mocking or belittling tourists on familiar routes by claiming a more authentic experience (the beginnings of the tourist/traveler opposition).14 Turner has criticized Buzard for “overemphasiz[ing] the Grand Tour component” in eighteenth-century culture, and the essays in our collection take heed of the warning when analyzing cultural configurations in the ensuing century.15 The essays at once acknowledge the Grand Tour’s power as a metaphor, a mode of nostalgia, a comic motif, a rite of passage, almost, but also consider new paths of tourism, a growing sense of tourism’s modernity beyond the Grand Tour, and, at times, an ontological shift in self-consciousness and subjectivity (Wordsworth’s gnomic assertion, “A traveller I am, / And all my tale is of myself,” comes from his autobiographical account of domestic and continental travels in The Prelude).16 The essays also shift focus from the “ways to culture” to the nature of consumption within cultures. Tourism and travel increasingly become overwritten onto other cultural forms, such as leisure activities (involving but not limited to tourism itself), food, print culture, art, and illustration. The essays recognize how “geographic displacement seems to loosen the grip of familiar cultural orderings just enough” to enable “traveling theorists” to determine new authorial identities and opportunities.17 The possibilities are many. Beyond the Grand Tour and its call to Italy and classical European sites, nineteenth-century travelers roamed more widely around Europe, exhibiting, as Nigel Leask puts it, “uninhibited

1

INTRODUCTION

5

energy … across modern disciplinary boundaries.”18 Travelers expanded their readers’ knowledge with accounts of travels further north, east, and south than had been published previously. In 1821, a reviewer could remark that, of travel narratives appearing after the Continent reopened in 1814, “hardly … two or three … have been written upon any thing beyond the limits of the Grand Tour.”19 By the 1840s the publishing landscape had completely altered. In 1840, for example, there were no less than four accounts of Russia, Norway, and Sweden; three from Austria, Germany, and Hungary; and four more tracing the peripheries of southern Spain, Portugal, and the Mediterranean coasts.20 Even narratives concerning France and Italy often sought a new angle or specificity, as their titles indicate, such as Louisa Costello’s A Summer amongst the Bocages and Vines (1840); Elizabeth Gray’s Tour to the Sepulchres of Etruria (1840); and Thomas Adolphus Trollope’s A Summer in Brittany (1840), ostensibly edited by his more successful mother, Frances Trollope, whose name also appears on the title page. As Katarina Gephardt shows in her study of the developing idea of Europe in the long nineteenth century, such accounts embodied a rhetorical “identification and differentiation” that repositioned Britain as “an integral yet potentially peripheral part of the continent” (laying the foundations for ongoing British angst over the nation’s relationship with continental Europe).21 With the pathways through Europe beaten into familiarity, new developments in transportation (steamships and railways) enabled would-be European explorers to extend their visits further afield in relative comfort. More travelers became tourists. With the advent of mass tourism, the nature of travel itself and the experiences sought shifted. As Lucy Morrison shows in the essay opening our collection, an influx of visitors could empower cultural opportunism and redirect fashionable health tourism from the spa to the leisure park. Immediately after the end of the Napoleonic wars, the proprietors of Paris’ pleasure gardens capitalized upon Parisians’ desire for entertainment by constructing montagnes russes or roller coasters, translating the idea of a northern travel practice, open to few, into a travel experience, an artificial venture accessible to all levels of society.22 The ride attracted visitors wanting a “local” thrill, so that tourists and Parisians rode together, as did kings and servants, single ladies and married lords. This activity persisted for just over a decade in Paris but prefigures the promise of postwar European travel and serves as a metaphor for the thrill of new discoveries opening on the Continent. The rides offer physical and social

6

B. COLBERT AND L. MORRISON

engagements that transgress borders of class and gender, geography and national identities. The heart of the ride is the exhilarating freedom of speed; riders embrace the moment, living for the present and the future instead of clinging to the past. The past nevertheless asserts its own appeal within a consumerist culture. In his essay on the lost visitor’s album of the Grande Chartreuse, Kevin J. James elucidates how an unobtainable artifact coterminous with the Grand Tour’s heyday becomes a sought-after commodity. Before the French Revolution, the extant album recorded the thoughtful responses of esteemed eighteenth-century British men of letters. Adding one’s inscription therein or copying those of celebrated guests (Thomas Gray, chief among them) became a rite of passage, a sign of travelers’ inclusion in a British community of cosmopolitan taste. For post-Revolutionary travelers, the lost “album of the fathers” thus came to symbolize nostalgia for a former period and its travel nostrums, while efforts to revive the album tradition foundered in the face of the Carthusian monastery’s own declining fortunes and the changing tastes of Alpine tourists. Album elegists inevitably drew comparisons with contemporary forms of literary inscription, including the “oft-derided ladies’ albums.” Nineteenthcentury travelers both lamented the missing album and attempted unsuccessfully to preserve treasured travel practices. Considering a wide range of authors’ texts, James catalogues Romantic-era mourning for cultural losses. But his essay also underscores a turn toward consumerism since the album as commodity, in Dean MacCannell’s formulation, becomes “a symbolic representation … of itself which both promises and guides experience in advance of actual consumption.”23 Chloe Chard highlights how another nineteenth-century practice, open-air picnicking at Pompeii, links early-nineteenth-century visitors to dead civilizations; eating al fresco (and all its attendant rituals) mirrors ancient gastronomy. Chard examines the rhetoric of picnicking in travel books by Marianna Starke, Anna Jameson, the Shelleys, and others. Nineteenth-century visitors’ consumption of frugal fare in situ, argues Chard, bespeaks their assumption of cultural authority over the foreign country and its past. Visitors nurture the conceit that their plain fare connects them to that past, and the practice of picnicking crucially gestures to the Pompeians, whose simple meals were never consumed. The picnic thus becomes a commemoration, a tribute to a lost time and its lost people, a way of “shifting historical time into the ambit of personal time.” Both James and Chard examine nostalgia for various moments of the

1

INTRODUCTION

7

past, but both suggest how travel as homage is transformed into travel as intimacy and self-gratification. Like Morrison, James and Chard emphasize crafted practices that invest in new opportunities for those willing to journey. “Newness” is perhaps inevitably accompanied with anxiety, which Benjamin Colbert finds expressed through travel satire after Waterloo. Colbert examines under-considered satires and satirical polemics, especially the book-length Continental Traveller’s Oracle by the Irish writer and politician, Thomas Wyse. Those works exhibit persistent anxieties over mass tourism, consumer culture, and national identity in the two decades following Napoleon’s defeat. As the Grand Tour’s social elitism gives way to mass participation, writers address emerging questions about “authorial agency, national identity, and … social, political, and economic relations.” However, apprehensions about disrupted class and social distinctions are counterbalanced by acceptance of travel’s potential for offering personal refreshment and uncomplicated experience. Assertions of British exceptionalism in early post-Napoleonic satires similarly underscore the extent to which travel had already saturated British cultural life. With James and Chard, Colbert finds Grand Tourist nostalgia repurposed. Extended and often repetitive satirical critique of “modern travel” paradoxically helps travelers and travel writers relinquish Grand Tourist class, gender, and motivational constraints. Each of the essays introduced so far analyzes travel practices and travel writings that expand the potentials of continental travel, whether as experience (on a roller coaster, seizing the fashionable moment), as commodity (re-envisioning inscriptions), as consumption (performing a picnic homage at an ancient site), or as routine (demonstrating the ordinariness of travel through satire designed to soothe Britons’ apprehensions). Up-and-coming cultural arbiters also responded imaginatively to burgeoning forms of print culture, both textual and visual, that accompanied the commercial expansion of travel in the 1830s. In his essay, David C. Hanson reconstructs the Ruskin family’s 1833 tour of the Continent and the impact of previously published multi-media travel works, such as Samuel Rogers’s illustrated topographical poem, Italy, on John Ruskin’s understanding and experiences of the journey. Ruskin developed his own multi-media “Account of a Tour on the Continent,” which, Hanson argues, is foundational to Ruskin’s authorial identity. Ruskin’s “Account” wrestles science, illustration, and text into a narrative, self-consciously negotiating disjunctions between representation and experience. Hanson

8

B. COLBERT AND L. MORRISON

draws attention to travel narratives as material culture and to the interart ekphrastic dimensions of touristic consumption in which “word and image … work as complements rather than as competitors.” Hanson shows Ruskin emerging as a writer from the shadows cast by John James Ruskin and other fathers, such as Samuel Prout. By contrast, Ludmilla Kostova’s essay in part concerns the persistence of gender ideology affecting the figure of Emily Beaufort, author of Egyptian Sepulchres and Syrian Shrines (1861), a travelogue reviewed critically by her husband-to-be, Viscount Strangford, for its encroachment on masculine territory, its handling of the sharp “edge-tools” of philology and science. After her marriage, Lady Strangford collaborated with her husband on The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic (1863), in which her chapters conform to the modest decorum and suitable subject matter her husband had enjoined.24 Kostova’s larger analysis of Lord Strangford’s works about south-east Europe, endorsed by Lady Strangford as his posthumous editor, reveal how his linguistic and ethnographic explorations of culture underscore modern notions of nationhood as a construct, rather than as the product of a Romantic or Hegelian national spirit. Both Strangfords were interested in Bulgarian independence and, in England, Lady Strangford was recognized as a Balkan expert. In the region itself, however, gender hegemonies reasserted themselves. Lady Strangford became chiefly remembered for philanthropic works and the Bulgarian literary imagination transformed her into the feminized “comforting angel.” Authorial and gender identity in the second half of the century inform elements of other essays in our collection. Kathryn Walchester details gendered practices in travels to Norway, an emerging destination after the 1820s that reached the peak of its popularity by century’s end. While Norway’s reputation as a hunting and fishing paradise attracted sporting enthusiasts, chiefly men, the region gradually earned the soubriquet of “northern playground” for both sexes. Walchester charts this touristic expansion by showing how developing internal transportation systems enabled diversification. She details cultural changes that broadened the region’s appeal: Romantic aesthetic interest in mountains and “wild” landscapes; the lack of cultural set-pieces that would exclude all but the classically educated; and the potential for Britons to identify with a northern cultural past in “Old Norway” and “Viking Norway.” Above all, tourists enjoyed the sense of being in an undiscovered land vast enough to resist the possibility of ever being “overrun” by other

1

INTRODUCTION

9

tourists. Inevitably, Walchester argues, the commercial side of aesthetic enjoyments asserted itself, as tourists sought tokens and souvenirs that could recall their “pristine” adventure when they returned home. The commercial dynamic between experience and home, mediated by memory, artifacts, and writing, is a persuasive paradigm for nineteenthcentury mass tourism in general, but Jeanne Moskal directs our attention to an important vein of travel characterized by conversion rather than consumption. Moskal addresses the high seriousness of continental missionaries, their efforts to address ritual, renunciation, and codes of life in place of leisure, enjoyment, and touristic recollections. Her subject is the life and career of Frances Warn Stenhouse, a British-born Mormon missionary whose Tell It All (1874) recounts her 1850s missions in Switzerland and the Piedmont. These are regions in which Calvinism and Waldensian conflicts with Catholicism had led to fragmented sects ripe for restoration to apostolic faiths, and Mormon missionaries hoped to harvest their share of waverers. Stenhouse’s text outlines Mormonism’s palpable success in establishing continental footholds, including the establishment of Le Reflecteur (1853), Switzerland’s first LDS newsletter. But Tell It All is part exposé, too, revealing the deleterious effects of polygamy on converts when first introduced doctrinally in 1853, not to mention Stenhouse’s own repulsion when she is compelled to tolerate it. As Moskal argues, Stenhouse creates another map of the Continent in the post-polygamy sections of Tell It All , one in which characters stand in for nationalities, and in which the plenitude of European conversion fantasies is replaced by the suffering realities of women and men. Katarina Gephardt’s essay addresses a female travel writer at quite the other end of the spectrum from Stenhouse. Muriel Ménie Dowie depicts herself as a free spirit, unconstrained by contemporary social expectations (one can be sure that Dowie would have seized the opportunity to ride the montagnes russes in Paris—and would have enjoyed it repeatedly). Her hugely successful travelogue, A Girl In The Karpathians (1892), marketed her in this way: a young, adventuresome, and unconventional Scottish woman who “rode cross-saddle, wore knickerbockers, smoked cigarettes, climbed mountains, bathed nude in streams, [and] slept in peasants’ huts.” Place of travel too makes a difference; Dowie’s exploration of gender is complemented by the liminal hinterlands of Galicia, a “borderland province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.” Gephardt considers how Dowie’s gender performance coincides with the New Woman

10

B. COLBERT AND L. MORRISON

movement with which Dowie is associated, and how it more immediately bestows an anti-travelogue shape on a text that seems untroubled by planning, direction, or reaching a destination. Moreover, Dowie very carefully embraced and manipulated her titular “girl” image over the different editions of the text, positioning herself as the text’s chief commodity. The first edition foregrounds geographical, historical, and imperial research that, in later editions, increasingly mingles with personal observation, shifting the text’s focus from travel to traveler. In our collection’s final essay, the traveler loads his belongings on a donkey and pursues a pilgrimage through the relatively unknown south central Cévennes region of France. Traveling alone and often without bearings, Robert Louis Stevenson finds himself out of step both with his slow companion and with an era increasingly characterized by locomotion, easy mobility, popular destinations, and pleasurable company. The situation, as Jennifer Hayward argues in her reading of Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey (1878), favors literary experimentation. Stevenson selfconsciously constructs an interior journey paralleling the exterior, one that remaps his own subjectivity onto a transnational and transhistorical backdrop. At stake is Stevenson’s Scottishness, his sense of always being a foreigner at home, and his desire to construct a Scottish literary heritage with him and his book at the forefront. Travels explores these ideas with reference to the region’s national and religious associations, and thus aligns Scottish Convenanters with French Camisards. Hayward’s discussion here recalls Moskal’s contention that nineteenth-century travel retains at least vestiges of the religious preoccupations that suture the century, as well as Walchester’s descriptions of a British subjectivity that seeks out echoes of itself in foreign histories. Like Gephardt, Hayward challenges reductive genre classifications. Stevenson’s account of his ten-day excursion mixes an internal, reflective personal narrative with historical, geographical, and literary narratives, all infused with an allegorical scaffolding signaled by his references to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The essays of our collection interrogate how continental travel opened up to new ways of understanding experience, as the rituals of the Grand Tour gave place to pursuits of pleasure, or merged into a more modern desire for original or even unique activities. The montagnes russes reveal how travel, even the idea of travel, might be transformed, recontextualized, and commodified into a cultural entertainment distanced from actual travel, except insofar as travelers co-opt the attraction into their tours and travel accounts. Similarly, even in its absence the visitor’s album

1

INTRODUCTION

11

becomes a measure of ideal encounter, as does the picnic on the grave of a civilization commemorating a meal never consumed. Satire scourges the shallowness of touristic reflexes, yet exhausting its own critique clears a space for more authentic engagement. Experimenters with genre like Ruskin, the Strangfords, Dowie, and Stevenson approach the problem from another angle, exploring the extent to which applying literary filters and not-being-there unfold an imaginative freedom unavailable to those on the spot, or empower tourists to see through others’ eyes without feeling belated. There are also those who map new identities over new places, the sporting tourists in Norway, Protestant missionaries in the Alps, and the many women who pushed the boundaries of where, how, and with whom they might travel in a century that assured their presence in the travel writing marketplace. In this introduction’s epigraph, Holman’s “experimental citizen” appears at the dawn of commodity culture. His snuff box brings home and domesticates “the lava of Vesuvius” from which it is fashioned. His commercial counterpart in the nineteenth century, “the mere person of pleasure,” enjoys a new consumable: tourism itself. Although Holman pokes fun at this transformation, the essays in this collection show that “experiment” and “experience,” terms that share an etymological root, were never really so very far apart.

Notes 1. James Holman, A Voyage round the World, 4 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1835), 4:513. 2. Andrew Archibald Paton, Servia, the Youngest Member of the European Family: Or, a Residence in Belgrade and Travels in the Highlands and Woodlands of the Interior, During the Years 1843 and 1844 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1845), 75. 3. Ibid., 76. 4. Holman, A Voyage round the World, 4:517. 5. Ibid. 6. James Holman, The Narrative of a Journey Undertaken in the Years 1819, 1820, & 1821, through France, Italy, Savoy, Switzerland, Parts of Germany Bordering on the Rhine, Holland, and the Netherlands; Comprising Incidents that Occurred to the Author, Who Has Long Suffered under a Total Deprivation of Sight; with Various Points of Information Collected on His Tour (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1822), 32. 7. Advertisement for Herries and Farquhar, quoted in Holman, Narrative of a Journey, 51. A full-length version of the advertisement may be found in Henry Coxe [John Millard], The Gentleman’s Guide in His Tour through

12

B. COLBERT AND L. MORRISON

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

France (London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1817), liii–lvi, including a list of 195 cities throughout Europe where the notes were accepted. Two recent collections attentive to the diversification of genre and the material culture of nineteenth-century travel in its global contexts are Mary Henes and Brian H. Murray, eds., Travel Writing, Visual Culture, and Form, 1760–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); and Kate Hill, ed., Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century: Texts, Images, Objects (London: Routledge, 2016). Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 14–15. Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (London: Sandpiper Books, 1999), 303. See also Edward Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations Since the Renaissance (London: Routledge, 2000), including Chaney’s entertaining “Bibliography: A Century of British and American Books on the Evolution of the Grand Tour, 1900–2000” (ibid., 383–404). Katherine Turner, British Travel Writers in Europe 1750–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 16–17. Turner goes on to describe how contemporary writers attacked “the unpatriotic cosmopolitanism of the aristocracy” on the Grand Tour. Yaël Schlick, Feminism and the Politics of Travel: After the Enlightenment (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2012), 8. For the increasing presence of women in the British travel writing marketplace, see Benjamin Colbert, “British Women’s Travel Writing, 1780–1840: Bibliographical Reflections,” Women’s Writing 24, no. 2 (2017): 151–69. Brian Dolan, Exploring European Frontiers: British Travellers in the Age of Enlightenment (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), chap. 1, passim; Angela Byrne, Geographies of the Romantic North: Science, Antiquarianism, and Travel, 1790–1830 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 97–107. Lynne Withey argues that, as mass travel developed, “tourism became organised increasingly along class lines,” with growing opportunities for the wealthy to opt for luxury amenities and extended stays abroad. See Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750– 1915 (London: Aurum Press, 1997), 103. Turner, British Travel Writers, 17. William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), bk. 3, lines 196–97 [1805].

1

INTRODUCTION

13

17. Elizabeth A. Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 13 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 17. 18. Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1. 19. Unsigned review of A Tour through the Southern Provinces of the Kingdom of Naples, by Richard Keppel Craven, Edinburgh Review 36 (October 1821): 154. 20. For accounts of northern Europe first published in 1840, see James Stanislaus Bell, Journal of a Residence in Circassia; William Bilton, Two Summers in Norway; Robert Bremner, Excursions in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; Arthur Dillon, A Winter in Iceland and Lapland; and Robert Latham, Norway and the Norwegians. For accounts of central and eastern Europe, see Julia Pardoe, The City of the Magyar, or Hungary and Her Institutions; Adolphus Slade, Travels in Germany and Russia; Including a Steam Voyage by the Danube and the Euxine; and Peter Evan Turnbull, Austria. For accounts of Portugal, Spain, and the Mediterranean, see William White Cooper, The Invalid’s Guide to Madeira, with a Description of Teneriffe, Lisbon, Cintra, Mafra, etc.; Frank Standish, Seville and Its Vicinity; Charles Stewart, Journal of a Tour in the Southern Part of Spain; and Sir William Robert Wills Wilde, Narrative of a Voyage to Madeira, Teneriffe, and along the Shores of the Mediterranean. 21. Katarina Gephardt, The Idea of Europe in British Travel Narratives, 1789– 1914 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 10; 64. 22. The montagnes russes and tourist attractions in general are what Dean MacCannell calls “cultural experiences.” See The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 23–39. 23. Ibid., 22. 24. For more on husband-wife collaborations, see Benjamin Colbert, “‘Our Observations Should Not Be Disunited’: Collaborative Women’s Travel Writing, 1780–1840,” Viatica, no. 3 (March 2016): http://revues-msh. uca.fr/viatica/index.php?id=553.

CHAPTER 2

Ephemeral Entertainment: Montagnes Russes and Movement in Paris Lucy Morrison

In a lengthy reflection upon the arrival of spring in 1854, Albéric Second laments: Hélas! Pourquoi faut-il que la mode inconstante ait détrôné les montagnes russes, cette fête de nos pères, ce joyeux souvenir de notre jeunesse? Exilée peu à peu de tous les lieux où l’on danse, la dernière montagne russe s’est réfugiée à la Grande-Chaumière. Est-il à cette heure en France un procureur impérial, un avocet, un avoué, un notaire, un médecin, un substitut, un magistrat, qui ne se souvienne encore, avec un vif battement de coeur, des courses rapides dans les chars? Une émotion, une épouvante, un bonheur! C’était le bon temps, celui-là! On avait vingt ans; on venait tout seul, et le plus souvent on s’en retournait deux.1 Alas! Why did inconstant fashion have to dethrone the montagnes russes, our fathers’ festival, the happy memory of our youth? Exiled little by little from all the dancing places, the last montagne russe is at GrandeChaumiere. In France at this hour, is there a prosecutor, a lawyer, attorney,

L. Morrison (B) University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Colbert and L. Morrison (eds.), Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36146-4_2

15

16

L. MORRISON

doctor, public prosecutor, magistrate who does not still remember, with a rapid heartbeat, the speedy ride in the carriages? Emotion, terror, happiness! Those were good times! We were twenty years old; we went alone and more often than not returned in pairs.

For Second, the memory of his youthful ride on the montagnes russes (literally “Russian mountains” or roller coaster) is tied to the arrival of spring, the season of renewal and rebirth. He might have ventured out to ride alone, heart pounding, but more often than not, he returned to ride with a friend—or possibly even a lover. As is evident from the middleclass list of occupations he presents, those who ventured upon the ride were professionals embracing a thrill akin to danger. But now he finds “inconstant fashion” has relegated this activity to oblivion; his memory of the experience is mixed with a sense of nostalgic loss. Fashion and amusements, of course, reveal the culture and desires of the people interested in them; they are transitory and temporal. Nowadays, the commercial vacation industry transforms physical tourism into cinematic or televisual spectatorship, merging into immersive virtual reality devices. But similar opportunities for leisure already abounded in the early nineteenth century, many involving the circulation of images and representations of travel, itself a burgeoning leisure activity. Demanding work weeks were tempered with a day devoted to God, perhaps, but days involving non-working time were filled with other activities.2 For the wealthy, time was abundant and leisure fashionable. Besides ordinary pastimes (such as walking or visiting), city dwellers could expect an everchanging diet of shows and displays: panoramas and dioramas, exhibitions of miniature archeological sites of Rome or Naples, exotic menageries, and the like. To some extent, then, the world traveled: artists, for example, conducted sketching tours and brought their works to different countries, contributing to the circulation of foreign imagery that in part constitutes a culture of travel in the nineteenth century. In the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, Paris-bound travelers were eager for a unique experience, checking off sites recommended from travels past with reluctant acquiescence but searching for that which would reward their adventurous desire for the next novelty. They did not have to go far—but they did have to be willing to travel at speeds and angles previously unexplored. This essay focuses upon a brief window of entertainment in Paris and how travelers embraced the opportunity of the

2

EPHEMERAL ENTERTAINMENT: MONTAGNES RUSSES …

17

new that enabled different experiences of travel than those of their predecessors. Their doing so exemplified, for the decades to follow, ways travelers could expand what travel meant in new and often exciting ventures across the Continent. The trend of montagnes russes in Parisian gardens immediately after the cessation of hostilities addresses the beginnings of a consumerist experience of travel-as-motion and travel-as-feeling. Montagnes russes encapsulated the physical and emotional embodiment of the exotic imaginary with the controlled manifestation of sublimity associated with northern landscapes and slippery slopes. While the late eighteenth century saw the rise of the panorama as virtual travel (visual aesthetics in the reproduction of reality predominating), the montagnes russes of Parisian pleasure gardens brought the whole body of the traveler into play, transforming travel sensations into a new type of attraction. Such activity appeared to disregard, for a heart-stopping downward ride of a few seconds, societal restrictions on class and gender interactions. The phenomenon of the montagnes russes thus prefigures and reconfigures nineteenth-century gender roles in travel by expanding beyond the fixed oppositional binaries of the Grand Tour, revealing new possibilities in the configuration of authorial identity, society, border transgressions, and consumer thrills. This essay begins by establishing the history of montagnes russes, their prevalence and growth in Paris, before examining how these new entertainments propel and shape concepts of travel throughout the century. The brief ride on a roller coaster in many ways captures in a micro-burst the excitement various British travelers recorded at length as they discovered the “new” of the Continent at a macro level. Liberated from the proscriptive itineraries of the Grand Tour and its quasi-educational framework, travelers after the Napoleonic wars spread out across the Continent in search of the novel, the unique, the facet of a country missed by visiting only mainstream sites. Taking the risk of a ride in a Parisian garden is thus akin to a traveler venturing far off the beaten path and sharing insights into other aspects of culture or nationality hitherto unremarked. Studying this Parisian phenomenon serves to predict and further our understanding of innovative developments in travel that followed throughout the century, whether it was seeking new locations, or practices, or participation. Such rides affect the body. Riders record physical and physiological sensations of sharp enjoyment, as the speedy descent liberates them from both bodily restraint and control, from society’s rules and regulations, and

18

L. MORRISON

from conformity, even for a few brief seconds. The aesthetics of this fashionable craze challenge Edmund Burke’s ideas of the sublime: the montagnes russes may cause momentary pain but that sensation quickly adjusts to pleasure, while self-preservation dissipates in riders’ eagerness to repeat the experience. The development of pleasure gardens in the decade after the end of the Napoleonic wars prefigures new physical, aesthetic, travel and tourist possibilities that unfold throughout the century. In addition, the attraction of the montagnes russes phenomenon for women challenged gender conventions and gender roles, much as their embrace of travel writing itself would do for women authors.

Montagnes Russes The origin of the phrase used for the experience, “les montagnes russes,” is obscure, but not completely in shadow. Colette Dio remarks, les montagnes russes: un manège qui maintenant s’appelle le Grand Huit3 (roller coaster) dont l’origine remonte loin dans le temps et né probablement à Saint Petersbourg. On parle aussi de montagnes russes: au sens figure lorsque une route étroite offer une suite de montées et de descentes rapides. Montagnes russes: an amusement we now call Big Eight [roller coaster] originating long ago probably in Saint Petersburg; also in the sense of a narrow road with a series of mountains and speedy inclines.4

Most sources attribute montagnes russes of post-Revolutionary France to Catherine the Great, who reigned in Russia until 1796. Although cold, lightless, Russian winters excluded many outdoor activities, the Empress nonetheless demanded entertainment. This led her court to construct well-built ice slides, “wooden structures with steep ramps thickly coated with ice,” in which “passengers took turns sliding down aboard sleds fitted with runners.”5 The mechanics of the vehicle varies: Martin Easdown notes that riders traveled on “a block of ice with wood and wool for comfort, or on a wooden box, steering it by means of a rope.”6 Other historians claim such slides had existed since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; Suzanne Massie highlights how, “In a flat country such as Russia, hills are a sensation; Russians of all ages loved whizzing down these artificial ice mountains, a sport at which, having practiced from childhood, they were very proficient,” but she illustrates this assertion with

2

EPHEMERAL ENTERTAINMENT: MONTAGNES RUSSES …

19

both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts, so an exact origin must remain imprecise.7 It should not surprise us that this form of entertainment was welcomed by Russian soldiers stationed in France in March 1814 and again from 1815 to 1818.8 Russian ice slides were well-established sources of recreation, with less wealthy passengers putting straw on blocks of ice before launching themselves down into the piles of sand needed at the end of runs to slow down or halt the speeding sleds. The montagnes russes of Catherine the Great’s era were quite an advance on more familiar sledding slopes; indeed, the Gardens of Orienbaum in St. Petersburg had a pleasure palace called Katalnaya Gorka by 1784, a “switchback-type gravity railway”9 wherein the undulating hills were traveled by carriages with wheels. A “rope drawn by a windlass” would bring the carriages back for the next passengers.10 Various accounts of these structures in Russia range from the very basic, with traditional sled or even sheets of wood, to more sophisticated vehicles on wheels or runners that could be steered. The end of the eighteenth century marks progress in the passenger devices from flat surfaces dependent upon smooth ice to trolleys on wheels. Audrey Kennett details how the velocity down one hill would take riders to the top of the next in sequence, while there were seats at the top of the “flying mountain” for members of the Russian court to assume while they watched (and waited their turn).11 The transformation of a fast ride down a winter slope into a year-round activity drove the evolution of our modern-day roller coaster. Robert Ker Porter describes the ice slides he encountered in Saint Petersburg in January 1806: A temporary stage of wood is erected, about forty or fifty feet from the surface of the river; from the perpendicular height of which is a steep descent like the side of an abrupt rock: against this is laid blocks of ice, that soon become an united mass, by means of torrents of water which are thrown along them, and that harden in a few seconds. On the level, at probably two hundred and fifty, or three hundred yards, stands a similar erection; only placed a little on one side, in order to clear the glassy road for the sledges darting from the summit of its opposite neighbor. This they mount by means of a flight of stairs in its rear.12

Porter notes the careful construction and the angles involved to allow people from opposite ends venturing toward each other at a speed great

20

L. MORRISON

enough to propel them “a far greater distance than that which lies between each icy pyramid.”13 In his diagram of the structure, Porter adds the detail that there are “fir-trees … on the top of the hills to give them a cheerful and pretty effect,”14 and his language throughout merges the technological with the loco-descriptive (“perpendicular height,” “abrupt rock,” “torrents of water”). These structures are carefully built for amusement and profit as well as aesthetically crafted to imitate or proffer the appearance of a natural design. Porter goes on to detail the “native” who guides the “person to be conveyed” down the hill on a “sort of sledge.”15 The setup is fairly basic: the Russian guide sits at the back and the guest rides in front, trusting the Russian’s ability to use his hands to direct the vehicle safely down the slope. Porter seizes the nationalistic opportunity to note that English skaters at Hyde Park are more elegant and more fluid in their movements on ice when compared to the rigid Russians, and he also finds the feeling of the experience alters with repetition: “The sensation excited in the person who descends in the sledge, is at first extremely painful; but after a few times passing through the cutting air, it is exquisitely pleasurable. This seems strange, but it is so: as you shoot along, a sort of ethereal intoxication takes hold of the senses, that is absolutely delightful” and well worth a few kopecks.16 Interestingly, he moves here from pain at the novelty to enthusiastic pleasure but stays focused upon the senses rather than detailing the physical impact more specifically, even though the “cutting air” would seem to connect to a bodily experience. Of course, the water freezing so quickly in the construction also underscores the extreme cold. But the fear of the new, the pain, transforms and even seduces the rider into an otherworldly, “ethereal” experience of the senses, a physical rush of adrenalin. Many considerations needed to be worked out for this entertainment, from the transformation of the practice from ice slide to wheeled track, to the ways in which people could be moved through the process with maximum thrill and minimum effort. The ride seems to have served all classes and both sexes from the outset of their being used for entertainment. Many accounts mention waiting to gain access, but, as with Second’s recollection, people from all ranks mingle freely and pay the same charge after standing in a shared queue to board. Nonetheless, F. F. Cotterel reveals some accommodation to rank: at Beaujon, “une entrée particulaire … est spécialement destinée aux personnages les plus distingués qui veulent garder l’incognito, et á ceux qui arrivent á cheval” (a particular

2

EPHEMERAL ENTERTAINMENT: MONTAGNES RUSSES …

21

entrance is specially designed for the most distinguished people who want to stay unrecognized, and for those who arrive on horseback).17 A desire to conceal one’s identity and arrival on horseback would seem distinct, and other authors do not mention such a setup. While the absolute origins are obscure (as with most origins), it would seem that roller coasters probably spread west across the Continent even before Napoleon’s downfall. David Bennett asserts: It is alleged that during the Napoleonic Wars, returning French soldiers, having spent many months enduring a typical Russian winter and no doubt enjoying Russian ice slides, introduced the idea into French society. But instead of building ice slopes, French entrepreneurs built dry slides probably because the French winter was a short season and it made commercial sense to stretch the season into summer. Sitting on small wheeled boards, the riders were hurtled dangerously along a wooden track that dipped up and down on the way to the bottom.18

This was very much a commercially driven venture, and it moved from a practice associated with nature and its seasons (since the Russian ice slides could not exist beyond winter) to an all-year and even all-weather opportunity with wheels. “Dangerously” should be underscored here. There seems to be little control in many of the early versions of these rides. Side-by-side tracks introduced the idea of racing and thus the competitive spirit entered in and made the whole event far more entertaining. The premise that early roller coasters in Western Europe developed in Paris from the experience of Napoleonic soldiers in Russia seems probable; the fact that thrill seekers from both France and abroad had multiple options for their ride in the city suggests innovations in choice beyond Russian design.19 John Grand-Cartaret’s 1891 survey of Russia gives Charles Ruggieri’s history: “c’est ce plaisir de Russes qui a été importé à Paris en 1816 … de sorte qu’en 1818 il y avait à Paris sept établissements de montagnes russes, ensuite françaises, égyptiennes, américaines, suisses, lilliputiennes, etc.”20 (The Russian pleasure activity had been imported to Paris in 1816 … so that by 1818, there were seven roller coasters in Paris, called Russian, French, Egyptian, American, Swiss, Lilliputian, etc.). As Grand-Carteret notes, the 1817 Belleville version had five side-by-side tracks for one person at a time to enjoy; there were variants in terms of their decoration and track design across the different gardens. Christine Haynes details

22

L. MORRISON

the entrepreneurs erecting these structures also orchestrated a “publicity blitz” in July 1817, inviting “all journalists and playwrights in the capital” to ride montagnes russes for free and staging a banquet for them.21 Dana Anderson suggests such “attempts by various entrepreneurs to market the sensation in Paris gardens … failed,” but rival montagnes russes nevertheless sprang up quickly, giving riders both the thrill of descent but also the possibility of great vistas across the city as they waited to board.22 Such a delay at the top of the structure before starting the ride itself was carefully orchestrated to heighten anticipation as well as to enable socialization. Montagnes russes thus appealed “to people of every age, sex, and nationality, if not—depending on the fees of each garden—class.”23 With fees varying, people across societal ranks could afford the experience while those with the most money could, of course, repeat and vary the tracks on which they chose to ride. The accessibility of the activity straddled customary barriers, flattening gender and cultural difference as riders boarded with strangers. Many travel narratives detailing experiences in Paris after Napoleon’s fall mention their encounters with this new French activity, one which seems not yet to have crossed the English Channel, understandably (though versions did appear later in the century in England). Indeed, it could be that the post-Napoleonic Russian occupation of Paris also spurred on such development. Many of these entertainments seem to have been part of the development of public gardens, which also offered more conventional entertainments, such as fireworks and carousels.24 The principal roller coasters were called, quite simply, les montagnes russes in Belleville and les promenades aériennes (opened in 1817) in Beaujon Gardens. As Bennett details, these two magnificent wheeled coaster rides … contained many features that are seen on today’s roller coasters. The wooden cars—which could reach speeds in excess of 30 m.p.h.—were locked to the tracks by the wheel axles projecting into grooves cut in the walls of the wooden guide rails. The ride itself consisted of two parallel but separate tracks with the wooden cars leaving in pairs from the top of the slope and circling to the left or right on reaching the bottom. Attendants would then push the cars back to the top.25

Robert Coker confirms that “Les Montagnes Russes at Belleville utilized carts with wheel axles that extended into grooved tracks, keeping the

2

EPHEMERAL ENTERTAINMENT: MONTAGNES RUSSES …

23

wheels locked safely onto the ramps. A primitive cable system to pull cars to the peak, a forerunner of the chain lift, was introduced on the Promenades Aériennes,”26 though many might still liken these rolling cars to slides as much as to roller coasters. But Parisian ingenuity adapted Russian beginnings and made the ride more permanent, perhaps, with structures built of wood and carriages with wheels, though such all-season modification removed the seasonal thrill of self direction down a wider slope. The seven mountains competed for customers, both citizens of and visitors to Paris, and the different rides themed themselves strategically. As Susan Hiner outlines in her fascinating article, “Monsieur Calicot: French Masculinity between Commerce and Honors,” “a visible and exaggerated symbol of speed and mobility, the montagnes russes captured the spirit of modernity; with its attendant dangers and precipitous directional changes, it also served as an appropriate metaphor for the chaotic social landscape of nineteenth-century France.”27 The “spirit of modernity” encompasses the risk of such travel and its invitation to cross class and social boundaries to spend a few seconds in the fast company of a stranger. Hiner thus suggests roller coasters predict the speed at which national control and leadership continue to change following the apparent return of the Bourbons; the challenges of the last few decades had not yet been put to rest and society continued to seek such tumult in their own experiences of leisure. Montagnes russes serve as a metaphor throughout Eugène Scribe’s Le Combat des montagnes, ou La Folie Beaujon (1817), as Hiner details, but they also propel a new understanding of tourism and travel in the nineteenth century. The garden scenes served satire well, peopled as they were by all types and levels of society. Montagnes russes ’ settings and activity lent themselves somewhat obviously to facile comedy and melodrama. Cotterel details poems on the topic by the Duchess of Angoulême and Madame la Duchesse de Berry,28 while J.-Bapt. Claray includes “Hymne. Les Montagnes Françaises, ou Promenades aériennes” in his 1818 work.29 There was also a serious side to creative expressions insofar as they addressed the mingling of genders, tourists and citizens, lords and servants. In such suspension, even for a few seconds, of traditional societal structures, the rides pre-figured the internationalization that would follow throughout the nineteenth century as consumers and tourism intersected.

24

L. MORRISON

Visiting the Montagnes Russes For Napoleon to invade and take a cultural icon was nothing unusual. Just as he took Switzerland’s Bernese bears back to Paris to ornament his own gardens there, so it would seem his troops took ideas about the entertainments they had experienced in their travels back to France. The montagnes russes appealed to popular culture, too, intimating that the adventure of these pleasure-garden fixtures became well known to travelers who disseminated their encounters widely. In fact, the references to montagnes russes across multiple forums and genres suggest the phenomenon of the rides was quickly and widely recognized, inspiring songs and hymns, for example. In Henry Luttrell’s Letters to Julia, in Rhyme (1820), the narrator paints the noise of the roller coasters as a calling to visitors: Hark! ’Tis a summons to The Mountains! Those mimic thunders in the air Portend a fête extraordinaire At Beaujon or Tivoli. There, reckless of a double fee, He greets some “goddess fair and free,” And with her headlong in a car Shoots downward, like a falling star. Fresh candidates behind them follow In snug duet or selfish solo, Descend, and up are dragged again By rope and windlass from the plain.30

A helpful note clarifies that “you may be shot down, from a certain height, with considerable rapidity, and at very little risk. The fee for each descent is ten soûs a head, and many amateurs indulge in them to the amount of several francs a night.”31 The poem suggests riders are extravagant with their money, even “reckless,” and the language of motion is violent as they “shoot” down and are “dragged” back to proprietary starting points.32 Interestingly, it is gallant to assume the “double fee” for a ride of a “snug duet” rather than a “selfish solo,” and the “falling star” perhaps intimates the social danger of such a ride with a stranger. Judgments of such transgressions of accepted behavior abound in works of the era, as the “taste for mountains is gaining ground even among the lower classes of society.”33 But the thrills extended to aristocrats too. The accessibility for a few sous, perhaps as well as the possibility of sharing such an experience with

2

EPHEMERAL ENTERTAINMENT: MONTAGNES RUSSES …

25

a stranger, appeals across society; the potential risk of descent is physical and sensual simultaneously. In such a brief opportunity, there can be no formal social interaction both because of the speed and breathlessness of the ride but also because that descent removes the possibility of (or liberates one from) polite social conversation. Only the actuality of the self and one’s physical and emotional being are extant for those few seconds— but the partnership of anticipation and recovery (before and after the ride, respectively), possibly with a stranger and certainly with a friend, just enhances the thrill. And the memory of those brief moments lingers. The impact of the experience extends beyond its heyday in Paris too. The concluding volume of the Countess of Morley’s Dacre; a Novel (1834) opens with a dialogue regarding the physical challenge of descending a mountain by foot, but for true danger, the questioner is directed to the montagnes russes in Paris: “‘c’est une chose à voir, cela; parlez moi de c’a en fait de descente! Je parie qu’ici on ne trouve rien de pareil ’” (it is something to see, that; tell me about that descent! I bet you don’t find anything like that here).34 The recollection of that descent persists for the speaker, obviously. The rides drew significant crowds of spectators as well. In October 1821 in Paris, Lady Blessington “was much amused by seeing the carts descend” in the Beaujon gardens, “with a velocity truly surprising. People in them seemed to enjoy it very much, but I confess that I felt no inclination to partake in the amusement.”35 She would seem to be in the minority in not attempting a ride herself, although her self-positioning as a marveling witness may be in accordance with the projected persona narrating the travel work. Lady Blessington’s perspective changed when she had a companion with whom to ride. Danger emerges as the central appeal, one she enjoyed in person while in Paris in 1822, as R. R. Madden notes: she “descants on the agreeable excitement of the extreme velocity of this locomotive amusement.”36 Interestingly, Lady Blessington enjoys repeating the experience and indulging in it with friends; she “greatly enjoyed her descent” and rode the montagnes several times, often with Thomas Moore.37 He mentions the montagnes russes more than once in The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), assuming readers’ familiarity with the “cars” that “rattle you down” in a “delightfully dangerous journey.”38 The appeal of risk is again dominant, but the fact that the cars hold “two” is even more enticing for Biddy Fudge, and she describes the man who asks her to ride with him as “Werter-fac’d,” with a “dear Corsair expression, half savage, half soft,” or “something between ABELARD and old BLUCHER!”39

26

L. MORRISON

Obviously these characters reflect Biddy’s immersion in popular culture; they are heroic and tragic and enticing and the female speaker seizes the opportunity to ride with him even while “I hardly knew whether / My head or my heels were the uppermost then, / For ’twas like heaven and earth, DOLLY, coming together” in the “danger” of the ride they take more than once.40 (Indeed, the sensation of the ride disrupts physical and societal behaviors as well as clothing.) She imagines their ride to be like a fall over Niagara (one of the roller coasters approximated such a water feature), like that of a “pair / Of unhappy young lovers,” as she rhymes the danger into drama and imagines her strange companion to be the King of Prussia.41 As Moore notes, the “King of Prussia … is known to have gone down the Beaujon very frequently.”42 Biddy explains that the ride serves to alleviate the King’s “grief for his Queen” as it “requires such a stimulant dose as this car is.”43 The actual experience of the ride has a definite and emotional—even prescribed—impact on its rider; Miss Biddy can fly down the track next to a king. Such impacts upon health and mind were also touted, so that a ride on montagnes russes becomes a version of the “cures” sought so widely in leisure spas across Europe. John Abernethy’s Surgical Works (1815) touted the need of exercise to facilitate good digestive practices, while F. F. Cotterel’s Promenades aériennes ou Montagnes françaises, considérées sous la rapport de l’agrémens et de la santé, contenant la description de l’éstablissement Beaujon (1817) recommends such a curative effect from the ride experience (as Moore also notes). A review of Cotterel’s work in The Literary Gazette, “Les montagnes françaises,” mocks his recommendation to “drink air” as a cure for a variety of ills that befall people, and the reviewers diminish the text as having any credible health value; it lacks “Latin and Greek quotations” because Cotterel feels “the pulse of the age he lives in.”44 The review itself proves the power of that pulse, demonstrating that British readers were so familiar with the montagnes russes in Paris that they might join in a mockery of a doctor recommending them for health.45 Cotterel promotes montagnes russes for many health benefits in an interesting precursor to today’s slogans encouraging people to move around and get outside (Cotterel pins all manner of disorders, from vaginal discharge to hypochondria to gout, on “les tristes effets du défaut de movement et d’activité en plein air” [the sad effects of a lack of movement and activity outside]).46 Cotterel claims riding a roller coaster cleanses lungs and “les organs digestifs et générateurs acquièrent plus d’énergie” (the digestive organs gain more energy).47 He even recommends the ride

2

EPHEMERAL ENTERTAINMENT: MONTAGNES RUSSES …

27

for “nervous women” who can barely manage a walk, since the “passive exercise” may encourage them to let go of their “melancholy”; modernday roller-coaster riders can attest to the impact of such an adrenalin rush upon a body’s inner workings.48 Not all readers were skeptical: Moore somewhat drily endorses such physical recommendations as his poem continues: Once more, then, we saunter forth after our snack, or Subscribe a few francs for the price of a fiacre, And drive far away to the old Montagnes Russes, Where we find a few twirls in the car of much use To regen’rate the hunger and thirst of us sinners, Who’ve laps’d into snacks—the perdition of dinners. And here, DICK—in answer to one of your queries, About which we, Gourmands, have had much discussion— I’ve tried all these mountains, Swiss, French, and Ruggieri’s,49 And think, for digestion, there’s none like the Russian; So equal the motion—so gentle, though fleet— It, in short, such a light and salubrious scamper is, That take whom you please . . . ......................................... The fiend, Indigestion, would fly far away.50

Moore combines the constant eating of meals and snacks in Paris with its invitation to varieties of different rides, suggesting that the ride speeds up internal processes so as to promote better bodily digestion of food. At the start of the nineteenth century, as Denise Gigante reminds us, “the manner in which the sentient being processes the world was far from clear.”51 Of course, it is gastronome Bob Fudge speaking in Moore’s text here, so likely as satirical as descriptive.52 Bodily discipline and regulation can hardly be maintained or depended on during a ride at forty-eight miles per hour. Moore footnoted the digestive reference, remarking that “Doctor Cotterel recommends, for this purpose [indigestion], the Beaujon or French mountains.”53 Moore also suggests riding multiple versions of montagnes russes so as to discriminate as to which ride is superior (much as today’s enthusiasts seek the best rides at different amusement parks). While riders obviously enjoyed the experience of descent and recognized its physical impact, others were far more skeptical of the new entertainment. Another 1818 work, Annales des Bâtiments et des Arts, de la Littérature et de l’Industrie, authored “par un Société d’Artistes et de

28

L. MORRISON

Gens de Lettres,” and with the royal family’s subscription, uses montagnes russes as an example of the ways in which misery will always accompany luxury. The authors claim the history runs thus: Un homme a donné, comme invention nouvelle, un jeu que les enfants avaient depuis des siècles imaginé dans leurs écoles. Un banc obliquement placé sur une table élevée leur sert de Montagnes. Paris a couru aux Montagnes Russes, et les hommes qui passaient pour les plus sages ont fait comme les enfants. La mode a donné à l’enterprise une vogue prodigeuse. Aussitôt des caricatures ont paru où les Montagnes étaient représentées. Des pièces ont été jouées où les Montagnes parlaient et chantaient: l’industrie a fatigué ce sujet.54 A man has claimed to devise a new invention, which is a game children have been dreaming of in their schools for centuries. A slanted bench resting on a table gives them a mountain. Paris is full of roller coasters and supposedly wise men are like children. Fashion has a tremendous impact. And so there are caricatures of these roller coasters. Performances have been staged where these roller coasters talk and sing; we are tired of this topic.

The tone here is one of frustration at adults playing a children’s game, at “fashion” masquerading as “new.” Indeed, the speaker finds the concept anything but new and despairs of a culture that celebrates a child’s pastime and allows or even enables it to dominate Parisian society. The speaker confirms the “vogue” for montagnes russes is to be short-lived, though many tried to capitalize on the astonishing impact of this new attraction. S. G. Goodrich furthers our understanding of the development of this phenomenon with such details as how “cars were drawn up to the summit, by means of ropes … and pulled round a wheel by horses … the smallest obstruction, a pebble or a piece of wood, on the road, occasioned their overturn,” which makes the ride even more attractive, it seems.55 Accounts in travel books tend to be very particular, minutely detailing external specifics of the ride as well as the individual experience of it. Given the apparently fashionable thrill of riding these mountains, it is not surprising that so many travelers to Paris should record their own engagement on them as part of their travel narratives. Frances Jane Carey’s Journal of a Tour in France in the Years 1816 and 1817 (1823) remarks that “a new amusement has been invented lately of surprising fascination and popularity”56 :

2

EPHEMERAL ENTERTAINMENT: MONTAGNES RUSSES …

29

In the centre of the garden are two square buildings, similar to the stands on a race-ground, but much higher; these are called les montagnes Russes. The ascent is by a flight of steps behind. In front a platform slopes to the bottom, wide enough to admit abreast three carriages, resembling armchairs, with wheels, which go in grooves, like the carts in the rail-ways in many parts of England. Three chairs descend together, with a velocity frightful to behold. The ladies and gentlemen pressed forwards in such crowds to obtain a place, that I concluded the inventor would have been entitled to the reward from the Roman emperor for the discovery of a new pleasure, had he been so fortunate as to have lived in those liberal times. At length my turn came. I seated myself in one of the chairs, and holding fast by its arms, I was pushed off with the rest. The descent at first is almost perpendicular, and I gasped for breath with a disagreeable sensation, which gave me the idea of falling from a window; I seemed to suffer a momentary suspension of the powers of life. I was, however, so fortunate as to experience one great pleasure—the pleasure of finding myself safe at the bottom. Before we left Paris, rival mountains rose on all sides— French mountains, and Swiss mountains; but I was quite satisfied with my expedition down the Russian mountains, and could not but wonder at the rage which prevailed for such extraordinary pastimes.57

One ride is enough for her, but she details the experience so thoroughly that her readers are almost as breathless at the bottom of her page as she is following her ride. The people press in, but the ride is an arm-chair’s embrace. She notes the attraction’s overwhelming draw, the crowds and their enthusiasm, as well as her dislike for the sensation of momentarily losing the feeling of gravity. For Carey, it is a “disagreeable sensation,” though she lessens its height with her comparison to falling from a window. The use of first person voice here anchors the experience; the individual “suspension of the powers of life” has a strong impact on her recollection and account, even while she recognizes the ride as a “vogue” for “extraordinary pastimes,” and, almost begrudgingly, a “new pleasure.” But perhaps this cultural moment was ripe for new adventures and new dissolutions of class and gender lines that were otherwise still dominant, certainly, at home in England, but also across the Continent. An earlier volume, Letters Written During a Tour of Normandy, Brittany, and Other Parts of France, in 1818: Including Local and Historical Descriptions; with Remarks on the Manners and Characters of the People, by Mrs. Charles Stothard [Anna Eliza Bray] (1820), remarks upon

30

L. MORRISON

montagnes russes in Tivoli as “perhaps the only thing [Napoleon] gained from” his “expedition to Russia.”58 Bray attempts to describe this amusement as well as I am able, although I can convey but an imperfect idea of the velocity of motion with which you are whirled along. A sort of inclined plane is erected, upon which is fixed an iron rail-way, exactly adapted to the wheels of the car that descends. From the summit of the declivity (which towards the top is very steep) the car is turned off, by merely shoving it forward, and it runs down with an inconceivable velocity. I can compare its motion to nothing but the idea of being shot from a gun. In descending, the car passes under some artificial rocks, that are illuminated; which, although far above the head, appear, in the velocity of the descent, as if they would dash out your brains. I do not know the exact distance you are carried in these cars; but I should think about six or perhaps seven hundred feet: eleven seconds is the time occupied in the descent; and I hear it is computed the cars go at the rate of forty-eight miles within the hour.59

Sandwiched between descriptions of waltzing in the open air at Tivoli and watching Talma on stage, this description is striking in its empirical precision. It is also striking in its masculine imagery of shooting and in the details of the illusion of being hurtled toward an object only to go under it. Clearly then, this 1818 moment reveals that montagnes russes had already progressed from sliding on wheels down a slope to hurtling with the added threat of destruction en route—and all in eleven seconds. The track here is iron, so more permanent than wood, but the additional illusion of potential beheading seems not ironic but rather arouses and heightens the sensation of danger. Such arousal perhaps accounts for most images of riders featuring women, and maybe that is, as Hiner remarks, part of the attraction: “the spectacle of ladies dressed in the latest fashions flying wildly and risking the loss of their garments also drew a crowd” (Fig. 2.1).60 The thrill of dress in disarray is evident in “La course des Montagnes Russes à Paris,” in which the lady standing up toward the end of the ride in pink is busting out the top of her dress while her genital area is darkened, drawing attention to her body and its sexual features particularly. She is smiling brightly, holding a multi-colored sail as she comes to rest in front of the male viewer clasping his hands eagerly, while the female viewer in the front left of the image reaches out in alarm as though to catch and protect the woman in the pink dress. The two male companions at front

2

EPHEMERAL ENTERTAINMENT: MONTAGNES RUSSES …

31

Fig. 2.1 La course des Montagnes Russes à Paris—Le Suprême Bon-Ton, no. 29 (National Gallery of Victoria, Australia)

left share expressions balanced between concern and laughter. The other female rider, on the right side of the picture, looks alarmed (with her mouth open) and reaches across to the lady in the pink dress, even while she remains fully clothed (and covered) but is blown in the illustration to lean toward the lady in pink. She entered the ride more prepared, as is evident by the umbrella she still clutches; the male observers at front right of the picture also lean with concern toward the lady in pink. All these figures are, of course, a backdrop to the figure in the center of the image, who “hogs” viewers’ attention with his upturned pig-like nose as he clutches his top hat and rides directly toward the viewer. Wider than the carriage upon which he has descended, he seems to be directly enjoying the ride as he approaches its end. As this figure shows, the most intriguing phenomenon of these early roller coasters is that they enable bodily thrill in public in ways other

32

L. MORRISON

entertainments might not provoke so viscerally. Mixing together in an entertaining public social space breaks down the invisible barriers that are in place before riders get on and which resume when they get off the rides themselves. Not only does the experience challenge physical gravity, but it also lifts the weight of behavioral expectations. But such a speedy ride, seductive because of its very danger, was also short-lived. Its popularity surged upon its founding immediately after the king’s restoration (and, in fact, the king visited the gardens at Beaujon to see the ride for himself in August 1817), but most of the rides in Parisian gardens had closed by the end of the decade or so following the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars. The proliferation of such rides probably did not help their survival. Galignani’s 1825 History of Paris remarks upon the “astonishing velocity” with which “cars descend” down “artificial mountains bearing various names,” and notes that “[T]he first speculators in this novel amusement made immense fortunes: hundreds were seen waiting for their turn to descend, and several thousand francs were daily received; but others who have since formed similar establishments, have not been equally successful.”61 Frederick Marshall discusses an incident in Beaujon, in whose gardens the first structure appeared: For several seasons everybody was mad about the incomparable delight of slipping down an imitation hill; but the accidental death of one of the commisaries of the army, by the upsetting of his car during a slide, caused the interference of the police, and the Montagnes Russes were forbidden. After a time the interdict was removed; but meanwhile the novelty and excitement had died away.62

Marshall claims that, with the loss of this major attraction, interest in the gardens died down too.63 The passing vogue is confirmed in the December 1830 Gardener’s Magazine, which includes excerpts from “Notes and Reflections during a Tour through Part of France and Germany, in the Autumn of the Year 1828.” The author praises Tivoli and notes the “principal attraction used formerly to be the montagnes russes,” with the past tense suggesting a new attraction is dominant toward the end of the 1820s—and then the author moves swiftly on to detail fireworks and ices.64 In Paris, then, this entertainment seems to have had its climax in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, as the 9 September 1821 Morning Post asserts: “The changes of attraction at the Parisian gardens

2

EPHEMERAL ENTERTAINMENT: MONTAGNES RUSSES …

33

are incessant. The Montagnes Russes are succeeded this year by Military fêtes of a magnificent kind.”65 The Tsar of Russia “used to make frequent journeys over the Montagnes Russes,” while “[n]othing could exceed the enthusiasm of the Parisians for this amusement. The cars were engaged for hours before the fête began, and anxious crowds stood waiting for their turn, with breathless anxiety.”66 When this feature of Parisian gardens is discussed, there is wonder expressed both at the thrill of the speed and at the bodily impact (“breathless anxiety”), as well as the huge attraction it had for all sorts of different people. The press of people waiting is almost more significant than the ride itself, a phenomenon that hasn’t changed even while the technology has. The craze may have lasted only a few years, but it was a different kind of liberation for Paris’s citizens and guests. With so many competing establishments available to the public, riders could be assured an engaging activity. The hierarchy and rules of society were abandoned in a powerful and exciting freefall that enabled a breathtaking physical sensation and a moment of liberty. The trend crossed society in other ways too, generating a proliferation of poems and plays, mostly vaudeville, exploring this opening view of attainment for all. But a negative portrayal of a calicot ripping up the very outfit he was supposed to be tailoring (connected to montagnes russes in terms of the speed of costume removal) caused riots across the city as calicots protested in 1817.67 The last such edifice vanished in Paris by 1829 after “la suite des accidents assez sérieux” (the series of serious enough accidents) but not before having an impact upon theater and culture.68 With several patrons suffering injury, maybe we should not be surprised that most of these Parisian novelty rides closed relatively soon after their erection. The sixth edition of Galignani’s Picture of Paris (1818) lists six different montagnes russes, remarking that “several others are now erecting, which will be ready this summer.”69 By the 17th edition (1830) we learn that “the artificial mountains are now combined with the other amusements of the public gardens,” confirming the decline of their attractiveness to tourists.70 With them, the view of brief liberation was abandoned and the barriers of social distinctions restored. But a chance to risk life and experience weightlessness challenged world views. The history of the montagnes russes craze in Parisian gardens immediately after the end of the Napoleonic wars shows that we have much still to learn about the thrill of travel—and how travel as cultural experience shifted as the continent reopened. The emphasis moves from cultural checklists of educational sites to individual pleasure and the very physical

34

L. MORRISON

experience of travel. Though neither seemly nor terribly safe, the montagnes russes offered fleeting seconds tempting death in a wooden cart, traveling at velocities that exceeded all known modes of transportation. As Carey admitted, this was a “new pleasure” that usurped more sedate notions of mobility, motion, and speed even as it helped develop travelers’ appetite and appreciation for ever newer thrills. The adventure of “petite mort … les plus divertissantes du monde” (little death … the most entertaining of the world) on the rides has persisted until our current times.71 But the vogue for montagnes russes was impactful enough upon culture at the time that comprehension of what montagnes russes were was assumed in both literary and nonfiction references of the era—and preserved throughout the century. In 1840, John Barrow describes descending into the salt-mines of Hallein as comparable to the experience of riding the montagnes russes, as he slides on a contraption of poles designed to move him down quickly; he has to change structures “four or five” times, but finds “all with equal velocity and equally in the dark.”72 He then sees his friends climb back up the steps for “the mere pleasure” of repeating the activity, as the draw of rapid mobility persists.73 John Murray III describes gliding down a glacier on 8th September 1841 “in the fashion of a montagne russe, resting on our spiked staffs to check the rapidity of our progress.”74 Murray’s guides also use the term to describe a Stirling hillside “in fashion among the gallants for sliding down … on horses’ skulls after the style of a Montagne Russe.”75 Punch could assume readers in 1874 would understand how a couple’s course together in life should go: “À la Montagne Russe prepare: / Easy climb and smooth descending, / No upset to make an ending, / En eulbute, for this young pair.”76 The attraction spread across France and Europe too, even returning to Paris in 1888.77 In the Tivoli in Copenhagen in 1882, a rider details the (by now) familiar wood structure and thundering roar: If I live to the age of Methuselah, which is not likely, I shall never forget the sensation. The sense of utter helplessness, and sickness, as if a blow had been delivered in that portion of the chest familiarly known as the “wind.” A person with his mouth open would be nearly suffocated with the rush of air. In a second we had shot down the slope, feeling we must go out, head first, or die. But we did neither.78

2

EPHEMERAL ENTERTAINMENT: MONTAGNES RUSSES …

35

The language here recalls earlier accounts of being violently “shot.” Having paid for the activity and their carriage having been slowed at the end by the workers stationed there, the riders descend the stairs and leave opportunity behind as none carried money to pay for a return. It would seem that many entrepreneurs tried to capitalize on the astonishing impact of this new attraction. Today’s fashion for thrill-seeking experiences, such as bungee cord jumps, are not, then, such a leap, as tracing the history of the movement of roller coasters suggests travel and thrills are born from war—and peace. In the immediate post-Napoleonic period, the montagnes russes reveal much about the opening of the Continent to new forms and modes of travel and tourism. The vogue is the first of many to ripple down the century; the thrill of a ride that breaks physical and sensual barriers is a novel enticement to Parisian visitors to extend their exploration far beyond the traditional “lions” (traditional tourist spots) of the Grand Tour of the previous century. Travelers thus become consumers and the old borders, usurped and redrawn by recent wars, are now usurped and redrawn as women travelers, in particular, embrace opportunities to explore worlds more traditionally closed to their sex. Its dissemination across travel collections, journals, periodicals, and literature affirms the vogue for montagnes russes penetrated popular culture and challenged expectations of what Paris could be in terms of monuments to visit and places to dine. Instead, Paris becomes a cutting edge destination for adventure, and the montagnes russes paved the way for the many diverse (and often fleeting) “experience” opportunities that persist for travelers today.

Notes 1. Albéric Second, “Idylle,” Le Bon Ton 2, no. 15 (15 October, 1854): 12. All translations are mine. 2. One visitor to Paris remarked on 2 May, 1814, that “religion in France is quite obsolete and unfashionable … Sunday in Paris, instead of being devoted to the more solemn service of God, appears to be given up to every species of gaiety and dissipation.” Anne Carter, Letters from a Lady to Her Sister During a Tour to Paris (1814), ed. Lucy Morrison, in Women’s Travel Writings in Post-Napoleonic France, 4 vols., Chawton House Library Ser. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 4:52–53. 3. “Big Eight” suggests, perhaps, the expected curves or slopes of a contemporary roller coaster.

36

L. MORRISON

4. Colette Dio, “La Vie des Mots,” The French Review 80, no. 5 (April 2007): 1109. 5. Steven J. Urbanowicz, The Roller Coaster Lover’s Companion: A Thrill Seeker’s Guide to the World’s Best Coasters, rev. ed. (New York: Citadel Press, 2002), 3. 6. Martin Easdown, Amusement Park Rides (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 7. 7. Suzanne Massie, Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), 363–64. 8. Maya Goubina surveys alignments between the two nationalities in the immediate post-war period; see “Les Vaiqueuers et les vaincus découverte mutuelle les Russes en France (1814–1818),” Revue des études slaves 83, no. 4 (2012): 1011–22. 9. Easdown, Amusement, 7. 10. Robert Cartmell, The Incredible Scream Machine: A History of the Roller Coaster (Fairview Park: Amusement Park Books, 1987), 20. 11. Audrey Kennett, The Palaces of Leningrad (New York: Putnam, 1973), 252. 12. Robert Ker Porter, Travelling Sketches in Russia and Sweden. During the Years 1805, 1806, 1807, 1808 (Philadelphia: Hopkins and Earle, 1809), 125. 13. Ibid., 125. 14. Ibid., 126. 15. Ibid., 127. 16. Ibid. 17. F. F. Cotterel, Promenades aériennes ou Montagnes françaises, considérées sous la rapport de l’agrémens et de la santé, contenant la description de l’établissement Beaujon (Paris: A. Belin, 1821), 14. 18. David Bennett, Roller Coaster: Wooden and Steel Coasters, Twisters, and Corkscrews (Edison: Quintet, 1998), 10. 19. Napoleon’s war on the Russian front is, arguably, the turning point in the European conflict. French losses after the single bloodiest day in battle, the Battle of Borodino outside Moscow in September 1812, led to France’s eventual retreat from the front and to the beginning of the end for the Emperor; Napoleon was in Russia less than six months in person and left his retreating troops there in November to return to the capital and try and shore up his position: he left 380,000 men dead and another 100,000 taken prisoner. 20. John Grand-Carteret, “La Caricature & l’imagerie russes,” in La Russie géographique, ethnographique, historique, politique, administrative, économique, littéraire, artistique, scientifique, pittoresque, etc., no. 24 (1 December 1891), 774.

2

EPHEMERAL ENTERTAINMENT: MONTAGNES RUSSES …

37

21. Christine Haynes, Our Friends the Enemies: The Occupation of France After Napoleon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 199. 22. Dana Anderson, “Sign, Space and Story: Roller Coasters and the Evolution of a Thrill,” Journal of Popular Culture 33, no. 2 (1999): 4. 23. Haynes, Our Friends, 200. 24. The Tivoli gardens in Paris, for example, which had reopened under that name in 1794 after the Reign of Terror had shut them down, embraced a new role as an open space for all people to visit. They stayed open until, having been damaged by Napoleon’s troops staying there before leaving for Spain, they closed in August 1810. 25. Bennett, Roller Coaster, 10–11. 26. Robert Coker, Roller Coaster: A Thrill Seeker’s Guide to the Ultimate Scream Machines (New York: Metrobooks, 2002), 15. 27. Susan Hiner, “Monsieur Calicot: French Masculinity Between Commerce and Honor,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 19, no. 1 (2012): 36. 28. Cotterel, Promenades aériennes, 64–66. 29. J.-Bapt. Claray, Chansons et hymnes nouveaux (Paris: Scherff, 1818), 3. 30. Henry Luttrell, Letters to Julia in Rhyme, 3rd ed. (London: John Murray, 1822), 91–92. 31. Ibid., 210. 32. The language also maintains the military feeling immediately following the cessation of hostilities across Europe; Russian soldiers are still stationed in Paris. 33. “Parisian Manners. The Mountains,” The Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, no. 31 (Saturday, 23 August 1817): 124. 34. Countess of Morley [Frances Talbot], Dacre: A Novel, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman, 1834), 3:8. 35. Lady Blessington, Journal of a Tour through the Netherlands to Paris, in 1821 (London: Longman: Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1822), 125. 36. Richard Robert Madden, The Literary Life and Correspondence of the Countess of Blessington, 3 vols. (London: T. C. Newby, 1855), 1:77. 37. Ibid. 38. Thomas Moore, The Fudge Family in Paris, 6th ed. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818), 44. 39. Ibid., 44–45. 40. Ibid., 46. 41. Ibid., 46–48. 42. Ibid., 48; see also Haynes, Our Friends, 200. 43. Moore, Fudge Family, 48. 44. “Les Montagnes françaises,” The Literary Gazette; and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Politics, &c., no. 29 (9 August 1817): 90; 89.

38

L. MORRISON

45. The authors outline the ways in which a medical doctor capitalized on the popularity of this form of entertainment by writing a treatise on the health benefits of riding roller coasters. 46. Cotterel, Promenades aériennes, 48. 47. Ibid., 54. 48. Ibid., 56–57. 49. Ruggieri’s gardens, established in the eighteenth century, were famous particularly for their fireworks. 50. Moore, Fudge Family, 88–90. 51. Denise Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 12. 52. I am grateful to Ben Colbert for this point. 53. Moore, Fudge Family, 88. 54. Annales des bâtiments et des arts, de la littérature et de l’industrie (Paris: Bureau des Annales, 1818), 2:232. 55. S. G. Goodrich, A Pictorial Geography of the World, Comprising a System of Universal Geography, Popular and Scientific (Boston: C. D. Strong, 1832), 615. 56. Frances Jane Carey, Journal of a Tour in France in the Years 1816 and 1817 (1823), ed. Lucy Morrison, Women’s Travel Writings in PostNapoleonic France: Part One, 4 vols., Chawton House Library Ser. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 2:478. 57. Ibid., 478–79. 58. Mrs. Charles Stothard [Anna Eliza Bray], Letters Written during a Tour of Normandy, Brittany, and Other Parts of France, in 1818: Including Local and Historical Descriptions; with Remarks on the Manners and Characters of the People (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820), 54. 59. Ibid., 54–55. 60. Hiner, “Monsieur Calicot,” 35. 61. The History of Paris, from the Earliest Period to the Present Day, 3 vols. (Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1825), 2:525. 62. Frederick Marshall, “The Champs Elysées. From the French,” Ainsworth’s Magazine: A Miscellany of Romance, General Literature, and Art 22 (1852): 401. 63. Ibid., 401. 64. “Notes and Reflections during a Tour through Part of France and Germany, in the Autumn of the Year 1828,” The Gardener’s Magazine 5, no. 23 (December 1830): 648. 65. Morning Post (9 September 1821). 66. Goodrich, Pictorial Geography, 615. 67. See Hiner. 68. Grand-Carteret, Russie geographique, 775.

2

EPHEMERAL ENTERTAINMENT: MONTAGNES RUSSES …

39

69. Galignani’s Picture of Paris, 6th ed. (Paris: Galignani, 1818), 614. 70. Galignani’s New Paris Guide, 17th ed. (Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1830), 20. 71. Bulletin de la sociètè de l’histoire du théâtre, revue trimestrielle NovembreJanvier (Paris: L. M. Fortin, 1907–1908), n.p. 72. John Barrow, A Tour in Austrian Lombardy, the Northern Tyrol, and Bavaria in 1840 (London: John Murray, 1841), 301. 73. Ibid. John Murray uses the same montagnes russes metaphor to describe a similar descent into salt-mines (A Handbook for Travellers in South Germany and Austria, 14th ed. [London: John Murray, 1879], 171). 74. John Murray IV, John Murray III, 1808–1892: A Brief Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920), 93. 75. Handbook for Travellers in Scotland (London: John Murray, 1867), 143. 76. “New Russian Bonds,” Punch, or the London Charivari 46 (24 January 1874): 34. 77. “Russian Mountains at Paris,” Scientific American 648 (2 June 1888): 338–39. 78. “A Holiday Trip in Norsemanland,” Routledge Every Boy’s Annual (Bradley: Agnew, 1882), 111.

CHAPTER 3

The Album of the Fathers and the Father of All Albums: Inscribing Wonder and Loss in the Grande Chartreuse Kevin J. James

In 1850, Charles Weld, assistant secretary and librarian to the Royal Society, published a book that recounted a “summer ramble” through Alpine regions, incorporating a discussion of his visit to the Dauphiné that had appeared in Fraser’s Magazine the previous year. He described his touring party’s “tedious and difficult” ascent toward the Grande Chartreuse—a venerable monastery nestled amidst the rugged grandeur of the French Alps, oftentimes wrapped in impenetrable mist.1 Likening the travelers’ progression to that of pilgrims and extolling the astonishing landscape,2 Weld extensively employed the vocabulary of the sublime as he remarked upon the “many and beautiful workings of an Almighty Creator, which strike forcibly on the senses during Alpine wanderings, bringing man into closer communion with his God.”3 Reaching the remote monastery, he was warmly greeted by a monk: “‘I have come,’ said I, ‘a long way to see you—from England.’ The Carthusian seized my hand. ‘We are

K. J. James (B) University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Colbert and L. Morrison (eds.), Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36146-4_3

41

42

K. J. JAMES

always glad,’ he replied, ‘to welcome your countrymen to the Grande Chartreuse.’” Weld’s party was received into an illustrious place, now “fallen to a low estate” where, like other travelers, its members were invited to taste its eponymous liqueur and were then “conducted over the gloomy wonders of the Grande Chartreuse.”4 After a tour and meagre dinner, Weld put a familiar question to the monks relating to the “Alcaic Ode” penned by Thomas Gray in 1741: Having read in one of Gray’s letters, in which he gives a very brief account of his visit to the Grande Chartreuse in 1791 [sic], that an album was then in existence containing various effusions, in all languages, of prose and poetry, by different travellers, the perusal of which amused his evening hours, we asked the handsome monk who waited on us if such a book existed. He answered that the album, consisting of four volumes, had been destroyed at the Revolution of 1792. This was a great disappointment, for the reader who has spent a night at the Great St. Bernard, will remember how interesting the numerous albums in that convent are, and how well they serve to while away an hour.5

Much to his regret, Weld discovered not only that the album had been lost, but that the Carthusians were ill-inclined toward opening a new one, “[t]he present race of monks” being, in Weld’s view, “much stricter than their predecessors in Gray’s time.”6 The order had forsaken the rituals of inscription and inspection that had earned its lost codex an illustrious place in the British imagination. And so Weld’s efforts to emulate the Grand Tourist came to a jarring end—foreshadowed, perhaps, by the diminished resources of his hosts, but boldly proclaimed by the absence of an album which for generations had been a signifier of a particular style of travel, one linked since the seventeenth century with the route of the Grand Tour, on which the Grande Chartreuse offered an enticing day’s journey from Grenoble. It beckoned many British visitors to a set of buildings that were characterized as irregular and austere, but which housed the celebrated tome that Weld sought on his journey, and nourished narratives of intriguing, if sometimes mystifying, monastic regimes that were as detailed as accounts of awe-inspiring scenery. For many nineteenth-century British writers, an admixture of romance and lamentation centered on the monks’ old album, whose loss during the French revolutionary period was a focus for narratives that

3

THE ALBUM OF THE FATHERS AND THE FATHER …

43

were crafted around complex and interrelated incentives. Its disappearance supplied a trope in accounts of revolutionary tumult in which the rabidness of radical violence sent not only an ancient order into scattered exile, but also, even more pertinent to the British traveler, extinguished a touchstone of Anglophone literary culture. Nineteenth-century cultural appraisals of monasticism, revolution, and literature forged the album as a politically potent symbol of a world that British travelers had lost. As writers mourned the book’s fate, they conflated it not only with an act of fearful destruction visited upon a centuries-old order, but also with a parallel literary extinction. The remnants of this once-vibrant culture of inscription endured only in remote hostelries such as the Grand St. Bernard in Switzerland.7 Travel writers in the nineteenth century charted the decline of the album genre from pinnacles of literary inspiration that were as high as Alpine summits to a wash of drivel and self-indulgent fripperies found in nineteenth-century ladies’ albums and hotel visitors’ books. These dual concerns nourished a third, implicit, elegy for codes of tasteful and cosmopolitan travel. A profusion of publications offered nineteenth-century readers glimpses into the contemporary monastery, evaluations of the old album, and suggestions of the lost world in which it was produced.8 Sketches of the monastery’s history that circulated in periodicals and book-length travelogues were redolent with the vocabulary of the Alpine sublime. Readers learned of St. Bruno, the eleventh-century founder of the Carthusian order (whom William Beckford of Fonthill embraced as “my saint” in his account of an excursion to the monastery9 ) and of the order’s observances and its hospitality (which was extended to travelers even in times of comparative hardship for the monks). They were also schooled in the contours of the Grand Tour, now mourned as being in permanent eclipse. No account of the order’s illustrious history and of the cavernous monastery’s current reduced state elided the visitors’ book. To many British travelers, the album materialized an esteemed, transnational community of eighteenth-century men of letters, among whom famous countrymen drew particular praise—none more so than Thomas Gray. Rev. William Mason, Gray’s eighteenth-century biographer, meticulously excavated the circumstances under which Gray’s famous Latin stanzas, for which he adopted an ancient Greek metrical form, were penned. The Ode, tapping the sublime (before Edmund Burke famously codified it in 1757), had been entered into the album during Gray’s second visit there in 1741,10 which occurred less than two years after he parted company, in

44

K. J. JAMES

acrimony, with his traveling companion Horace Walpole. The verses were subsequently transcribed by Gray (into his commonplace book), and by other visitors to the monastery.11 Edmund Cartwright offered his version in 1803: FROM THE LATIN OF MR. GRAY. WRITTEN AT THE GRANDE CHARTREUSE. O THOU, the genius of this wild retreat, This rude magnificence of Nature’s reign! O grant me, if thine ear I rightly greet, The calm repose I long have lov’d in vain! The splendid wonders of the scene declare No trivial Deity’s presiding care. Deriding Phidian art and burnish’d gold, A shrine how vast, how rich, how grand, supply The awful precipice, abrupt and bold, The cliff sublime, that leaves the wearied eye, Forests, no human footstep can pervade, The torrent’s thunder, and the night of shade! For me, tho’ fate forbid me to assuage In kindred glooms the pangs that youth annoy, Be mine at least, to sooth the hours of age, These scenes of silent solitary joy!. [sic] Secluded and secure from vulgar strife, Here let me end the toil, and lose the cares of life!12

The scenic region that Gray extolled—whose deep chasms, rugged peaks, and gloomy ambience were complemented by the simplicity and sparseness of the old monastery itself—inspired many paeans. It had received legions of medieval Catholic pilgrims, and in the eighteenth century also welcomed a number of celebrated British visitors, including John Wilkes and Countess Spencer, who had made her way into the venerable place in the disguise of a man, and had surreptitiously affixed her name to the album. This feat was apparently repeated, with success, by other women,13 and was recounted by travel writers with some degree of admiration.14 Narrators often established a calculated aloofness from Carthusian religious practices, explicitly forsaking Roman devotions. But they found in the sublime natural surroundings an object of reverence that they extolled on their own terms, usually in their own language (though the ancient languages tempted writers such as Gray). They also forged a literary fraternity through rituals of inscription and inspection.

3

THE ALBUM OF THE FATHERS AND THE FATHER …

45

To these comparatively few and privileged visitors, traveling before the cataclysm of 1789, the opportunity to examine a prized leaf in the old album rewarded the arduous Alpine trek. So did occasions to affix their names to a book that contained the autographs of famous members of the transnational literati such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They joined a relatively small number of British travelers who had made the journey to the site, and thereby engaged in a complex act of self-authentication as they united in a chorus of Romantic scenic appraisal: eighteenth-century examples, excerpted by the Roman Catholic periodical Catholicon in 1816, and tellingly attributed exclusively to Protestant travelers, revealed a strong interest in sublime and picturesque categories that bridged the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and supplied dominant framing devices for narrations of the landscape of the Dauphiné.15 Such thematic material was not limited to the eighteenth-century traveler. Famous nineteenth-century minds also found inspiration among the grandeur of the Dauphiné region, and formed a literary corpus that centered on narrating responses to its Alpine heights.16 After all, the monastery was the same site employed by Matthew Arnold as a foil for overbearing, mechanistic modernity in his famous 1855 poem “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” in which he declared himself to be “[w]andering between two worlds, one dead / The other powerless to be born.” And it was the place about which Wordsworth, wrestling with and revising the passage over many years, had written in book 6 of his 1850 Prelude. In that work, the monastery was emplaced within a narrative of layered time and narrative positions as Wordsworth’s persona vacillated between admiration and disillusionment.17 Wordsworth’s stanzas expressed evolving appraisals of Catholic monasticism; the way in which the potential for communion with nature through the sublime quiet of the landscape was broken by the call to arms; and the ugly decline of the revolutionary impulse from an expression of inspired Enlightenment ideals to a force of Terror. Although neither Arnold nor Wordsworth alluded to the album in their poems, in other narratives it signified virtues that were lost amidst the tumult of revolution: the codex opened in its place was marred by impieties and insults toward the monks.18

46

K. J. JAMES

Facsimile, Transcription, and Transmission Reading and inscribing in the “album of the fathers” (as it was often described)19 was bound with acts of Alpine travel, and these became literary rituals that were as essential for eighteenth-century British travelers as matins and vespers were for their hosts. One way to ritually join the fraternity of intrepid travelers and commemorate the journey was to attempt a faithful replication of original album autographs. Often facsimiles were inscribed and arranged within the traveler’s notebook with excerpts from other sources, and indexed in the manner of a commonplace book, producing a complex textual matrix reflecting the priorities of the compiler. As they inscribed facsimiles into their private albums to commemorate the journey, travelers participated in a culture of literary excerption and dissemination that conveyed autographs and inscriptions beyond the walls of the venerable monastery. Through this process, the words themselves traveled, breaching the walls of the mountain sanctuary and circulating in new forms beyond the borders of the Dauphiné. They were then re-transcribed or typeset for wider dissemination in published works. In 1789, for instance, the London newspaper The World advertised a subscription for a volume of inscriptions from the album, with “Inscriptions also, and Memorabilia of Arts from an OTHER COLLECTION in France,” and a supplement of sporting anecdotes and a history of game “from the Household Book of the first establishment of FIELD SPORTS on the continent of Europe,” at a cost of 5s. on subscription and 2s. 6d. on publication. It promised “literal Copies from the hand-writing of the FIRST PEOPLE OF FASHION in England, and other countries” and enumerated forty-two famous people who had affixed their names to the album, including the Duke of Gloucester and William Beckford.20 Printed extracts were subsequently issued in the press through August 1789.21 The proposed publication of these inscriptions signaled not only the album’s literary prestige, but also the superior status attributed to facsimile, in contrast to the printed form. And it highlighted the cachet of possessing the texts in such forms, even if the owner had not ventured to the Grande Chartreuse to read Gray’s Ode in situ. (As it happens, Gray had recorded a copy of the Ode under the title “In the Book at the Grande Chartreuse among the Mountains of Dauphiné” in his commonplace book, now held at Pembroke College, Cambridge—a manuscript whose existence was likely unknown to many travelers and writers.)

3

THE ALBUM OF THE FATHERS AND THE FATHER …

47

If there was social capital to be accrued in possessing and displaying facsimiles as ways of authenticating personal travel, the late eighteenth century was also a propitious time for travelers and publishers to seize on the album’s popularity. Indeed, the disappearance of the album amidst the Revolution coincided with what some critics regarded as the continued diminution of the genre more generally, while the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy also transformed the landscape of continental travel. After 1815, the restoration of literary practices associated with the album was regarded as being as impossible as recovering the ethos of the Grand Tour, and as incomplete as the order’s own return to prosperity and influence.

Revolution, Dispersal, and Textual Destruction Charles Weld’s description of the Grande Chartreuse reads in many ways like a litany of travesties that had been visited upon St. Bruno’s venerable order. To this list, many contemporaries enumerated ways in which the literary standards epitomized by noble albums had been debased in their own age, as the chronology of the two narratives of political violence and generic decline neatly converged. In reviewing the Carthusians’ long history, Weld contended that the Grande Chartreuse’s frequent devastation by fire paled beside the even more grievous damage wrought by Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, who had deprived the monasteries of their revenues in favor of parish clergy. But, he remarked, “[t]he Revolution of 1792 finally completed the spoliation of the Chartreuse.”22 In a narrative familiar to Victorians—for it featured in almost every account of travel to an order now in much-reduced circumstances—Weld condemned this era of tumult and turmoil, when the Carthusians were stripped of buildings and land. Their library was confiscated and their famous album lost. The English Anglican clergyman George Musgrave, echoing Weld’s evaluations, remarked that he could not “recall to mind any tract of European mountain scenery more forlorn in its solitudes, more sublime in its beauty, or more impressive in its natural features and moral and religious associations” as he ascended to the famous monastery.23 The dramatic arc of his scenic and historical narrative crested with an account of the French Revolution: The great Revolution, however, breaking forth in 1789, left not unscathed the home and successors of St. Bruno in the wilderness:—

48

K. J. JAMES

“Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris!” might truly be said of the work of havoc executed by the frantic legions of democratic France. The horrified and despairing monks pleaded the inoffensive tenor of their lives, and their non-participation in the abuses or delinquencies of many other large ecclesiastical fraternities; and besought the clemency and forbearance of the new rulers of the nation, praying to be left undisturbed in their sad and unobtrusive retirement: but the fiat was gone forth: Monkery, of all institutions, perhaps, was the “Carthago delenda” of those days of root and branch extirpation of abuses and superstitious vanities; and in October 1792, after upwards of seven centuries of eventful destiny, the brotherhood were compelled to share the fate of all other monastic establishments, and were cast upon the wide world, scattered and proscribed, thrown into prison, transported to remote countries, or slaughtered on the scaffold, till persecution and misery, in every form of suffering, had left them neither a local habitation nor a name.24

In this formulation of the order’s travails, the album’s disappearance served as a clever literary device, first to furnish the writer with an instrument with which to castigate the fanatical iconoclasm of the Revolution, and then to emphasize how its destruction reached beyond the realm of Catholic France to touch, and destroy, a treasure of the British literary canon. To Musgrave, with the keenness of a Victorian observer schooled in the culture of the amateur appraiser and writing at a time when autographs were prized as commodities as well as for their intangible value, the lost album “must have been a highly interesting tome, and would realize an immense price if produced at the present day,” for it boasted not only the signatures of esteemed visitors, “but, also, the reflections penned by them in their several capacities as divines, statesmen, philosophers, wits, and authors.”25 This compounded the tragedy of its disappearance. Another Victorian, this time a correspondent to Notes and Queries, writing only two years after a very different set of revolutions befell Europe, evocatively described the upheaval that had claimed the old tome as “that whirlwind which swept from the earth all that came within its reach and seemed elevated enough to offer opposition.”26 A revolutionary rabble from Grenoble had “attacked the monastery; burnt; plundered, or destroyed their books, papers, and property; and dispersed their inmates.”27 While touring Europe in 1817, as the order was regrouping, the writer spoke to two clergymen. One confirmed that the album containing Gray’s original Ode was lost, and remarked that several travelers

3

THE ALBUM OF THE FATHERS AND THE FATHER …

49

had been attempting to restore it to a new album by contributing what lines or stanzas they recalled. While such piecemeal efforts, undertaken by travelers intent on emplacing the Ode within textual and physical environments most approximating its original contexts, were motivated by a “laudable desire of diffusing information[,] … this pic-nic composition was not exactly what Gray wrote.”28 The correspondent suggested that a translation by James Hay Beattie (son of a famous professor and poet) should be offered to the order’s library, where a “regular Album” now afforded an opportunity for inscription to “those who, in this age of ‘talent’ and ‘intelligence,’ consider themselves able to write better lines than Gray’s.”29 Such comments reiterated a common evaluation of the banality and derivative character of contemporary inscriptions, which served as foils for the inspired poetry and prose that had been thoughtfully entered within the old tome at the Grande Chartreuse.

Imperfect Restorations The loss of the celebrated text was mourned as a misfortune that could be only partly mitigated by its survival in facsimile, transcription, and print. However faithfully travelers endeavored to reproduce the stanzas’ original penmanship, language, and form, and even with the Ode preserved in Gray’s own hand and in circulation in print decades before the album was lost,30 the stanzas could not be restored to the original album, or to the contexts of pre-revolutionary continental travel—an era during which an Alpine ascent to the Carthusian monastery had served as a touchstone of a peculiar form for self-authentication in a region that was now awash with tourists. They were drawn from an expanding socio-economic base and embraced new practices of travel, from the working-class holiday-maker to the middle-class mountaineer, all conveyed to the region by a developing infrastructure and spurred on by an energetic popularizer in Albert Smith. His mid-century performances on his ascent of Mont Blanc contributed to what Peter Hansen has identified as an eclipse of the “cultural authority of the picturesque and sublime in the Alps.”31 But writers who clung to those august aesthetic codes found instrumentality in eulogizing their decline, thereby setting themselves apart from the “new” brand of tourists who were redefining the meaning of the landscape and the practices of Alpine travel,32 and who were tutored in the history of the monastery through guidebooks which extolled its eponymous liqueur and

50

K. J. JAMES

detailed the devotional practices of the monks, often finding little of architectural merit in the agglomeration of buildings. Murray’s guidebook, for example, hailed the scenery surrounding the nearby village of St. Laurent as “not exceeded for picturesque grandeur among the Alps,” but, as travelers neared the Grande Chartreuse, dismissed the convent as a “huge unpicturesque pile” and even the situation of the Grande Chartreuse itself as “not grand, but solitary, desolate, and monotonous, from the confined prospect.”33 It also advised travelers that they might wish to supplement the simple Carthusian fare with their own cold meat and wine,34 noted that the clergy appeared less stringent than formerly in their observation of codes of silence, and characterized the conditions of the 33 remaining fathers and 18 brothers as distressed (as Richard Weld would do not long after), in contrast with the prosperity that they had enjoyed before the Revolution.35 The monastery’s reduced circumstances, despite the lucrative market in a liqueur whose recipe had survived the ravages of revolution and expulsion, provided a fitting complement to a sweeping declensionist narrative. In Protestant Britain, it promoted a measure (albeit qualified) of sympathy for the Carthusians alongside critiques of their peculiar devotional practices, and, even more poignantly and pertinently, lamentations upon the destruction of an album containing “a large proportion of names which have earned themselves immortality.”36 The Victorian imagination was fired with indignation by the idea of the old monastery being converted into an arsenal, completing a process of physical despoilment.37 But a more subtle strain of regret at the condition of the monastery expressed disappointment at the erosion of the Grand Tour’s features and constituency. As the era of mass travel opened, tourists were reminded of the order’s history, and offered short, translated excerpts of Gray’s Ode in guidebooks to the region.38 This narrative of institutional decline was crafted by nineteenth-century writers who adopted critical stances toward both the devotions of the Roman Catholic Church and France’s unstable social and political climate after 1789. But in castigating revolutionary fervor and also lamenting the eclipse of a refined travel culture, they elided accounts of the old album that predated the order’s expulsion and the arrival of large numbers of tourists in the district. In 1790, “Monaco,” a pseudonymous correspondent to “Sylvanus Urban,” the fictional persona adopted by successive editors of the Gentleman’s Magazine, described a landscape that would appeal to Salvator Rosa and

3

THE ALBUM OF THE FATHERS AND THE FATHER …

51

depicted the monastery’s remote and concealed situation, which nourished the unchanging practices within its walls. Yet “Monaco” recounted how the old album that had once received, in prose and verse, the indelible imprint of so many great minds, was now “disused”; some guests had adopted it for the purposes of insulting their hosts (censuring the “superstitions of Popery, through zeal surely much misplaced”), while others parodied in English the expressions of French politesse found within it.39 These comments suggest that even before revolution gripped France and tore the book from its mountain home, it had been marred by the hands of callous inscribers. The Carthusians produced a new album for the inspection and inscription of the growing number of British tourists after the Battle of Waterloo, armed not with the guns of the French revolutionaries or the British combatants of the French wars, but with impedimenta of commercial travel, including guidebooks that painted the site in the bleak manner of Murray’s. But the monks were now compelled to closely superintend the album. Despite evidence that contradicted its association with nineteenth-century tourists, surveillance was a trope that reflected writers’ disdain for the demotic character of continental travel, and the risks now associated with leaving an album open for travelers to record uninspired and even malicious entries. Indeed, mischievous and muchderided conventions of inscription apparently led the monks to remove their new album altogether: Musgrave remarked that an album that had been opened in 1817 was later withdrawn, “some persons having, with execrably bad taste and feeling, penned observations derogatory to the Roman Catholic religion and to the Carthusian Order.”40 Musgrave was an Anglican clergyman and inveterate traveler whose accounts of continental journeys resonated with the evangelical Protestant mindset of Victorian Britain, and the more general climate of misapprehension and mistrust that followed the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England in 1850. He professed no admiration for the observances and parsimonies of the “perseveringly eccentric and exclusive community” he visited,41 where he encountered Spartan accommodation and unappetizing fare. Musgrave mocked the monks’ miserliness and was critical of their devotions. Their asceticism and monasticism struck him as hostile to Christian imperatives to engage with the world, and thereby fulfill a duty to “fill up their stations in families, in mixed communities, in civil society and in the church.”42 This critique of the order’s practices was echoed by others who, while praising the district’s

52

K. J. JAMES

scenic splendor, admonished the monks’ seclusion and their miserable poverty. A writer in The Visitor gave expression to these entwined observations, castigating the era of the French Revolution “when infidelity, as it may probably do again, though by quieter means, threw popery and superstition to the earth, despoiled the Grand Chartreuse, and alienated its wealth, and lands, and power.”43 The unnaturalness of the Carthusians’ self-imposed isolation was signaled by the order’s insistence that female travelers remain outside the precincts of the monastery. Even if earlier visitors had abided by this principle of segregation, accounts of efforts to subvert the regime reflected a degree of distance from, and disdain for, the imposition. Even to travelers accustomed to the rigid segregation of the sexes in Victorian Britain, the Carthusians’ regimes heightened the peculiarity of the monastery. They nourished the critiques of Musgrave, who took a jaundiced view of the order’s “hospitality,” given the meagerness of the soup on offer, and their Spartan guest quarters. Yet even as fierce a critic as Musgrave adopted a wistful tone in describing an album that recorded Countess Spencer’s subterfuge in the preceding century. It stood outside the foreign devotional regimes of the monastery: the invitation to peruse and write in such a book recalled practices in stately homes, inns, and other secular sites in the era of genteel travel. Indeed, the monastery’s book became enshrined in elite, masculine discourse as the purest form of a genre that had lost its moorings and was no longer a medium for elegant, erudite self-expression. In contrast, the nineteenth-century “sentimental album,” now the prevailing form, was mocked for being awash with insipid, effeminate effusions in emerging master-narratives that traced album history. The old album acquired potency and accrued even greater esteem in the context of ruminations on the genre’s decline.

Generic Genealogies In 1813 (Victoire-Joseph) Étienne de Jouy accorded the Grande Chartreuse album privileged status as he playfully traced the lineage of the genre—and charted its descent—under the nom-de-plume “l’Hermite de la Chaussée-d’Antin.” His musings, and their resonance, must be understood as part of a wider effort to grapple with the emergence of new genres, literary practices, readers, and writers, and also as part of critical responses to these developments that asserted that the contemporary genre had been decoupled from its superior, historical form. In sketching

3

THE ALBUM OF THE FATHERS AND THE FATHER …

53

a generic history, Jouy offered a suite of album types, each distinguished by the surface of inscription, as well as the motivation of the inscriber. The lost album figured prominently in this album genealogy. When people reached destinations after strenuous physical effort and fervent intention, it seemed natural to Jouy that they wished to leave their names upon some physical surface to mark the endeavor. The accretion of these names over time produced an exclusive, masculine fraternity who had made a pilgrimage to a place of shared importance. Jouy offered as examples the visitation of Rousseau’s tomb, the perilous ascent of the steeple at Strasbourg, and the album of the polar circle.44 As one 1824 reference work explained, variously paraphrasing and translating Jouy: It was very natural for those who mounted the steeple of Strasburgh [sic], to wish to leave their names. When a man chooses to encounter a great danger, from the sensible and satisfactory cause that he may have to boast of it afterwards, he is never backward in giving every possible publicity to his achievement … Those who survive the ascent, naturally wish to leave a proof of their having firmness of foot and hand, nicety of eye, and steadiness of brain sufficient to carry them up a place from which the nerves of a maintop-man of a seventy-four would almost shrink. The weather-cock on the steeple of Strasburgh is therefore an Album.45

Such a heavily inscribed surface constituted to Jouy l’Album à plein-vent (the Outdoor Album). A second, and in some respects similar, species of album supplied an “even richer” form,46 and contrasted in quality and value to the vainglorious stamps of modern travelers upon ancient sites. In his view, Hippocrates’s textual aggregation of individual ailments and cures that various sufferers had scrawled on the walls of the temple of Esculapius constituted a landmark creation: the medical album of crude wall etchings furnished Jouy with one species of album—l’Album des murailles (the Wall Album).47 Cacoethes scribendi (insatiable desire to write) could not be altogether extracted from the wall, even in the age of paper: the propensity for visitors to inscribe on the walls of the great hall at the Grande Chartreuse led the Carthusians to introduce a tome after peace in 1815, according to Musgrave, in a précis of the album’s evolution that fit neatly with Jouy’s typology.48 After the wall, perhaps the most famous alternative to the page was the windowpane, onto which

54

K. J. JAMES

inscribers were wont to etch, usually with a ring. In the nineteenth century, however, some writers began to re-evaluate such inscriptional practices, conflating the hand of the writer with the body of the unreflexive tourist. Thereafter, scrawlings on walls, chimney-pieces, timbers, and windowpanes became instrumental in narratives of travel to stake out a position of unequivocal distance from, and to condemn desecrations performed by, common travelers. These critics also condemned the inscriptions they discovered within the covers of a visitors’ book. In contrast to the material alterations effected by l’Album à plein-vent and l’Album des murailles, the codex form of the visitors’ book was most recognizable to nineteenth-century Britons, and in the narrative of album history it found its most dignified expression at the Grande Chartreuse. Conveniently for album elegies, the original book could not even be produced to bear witness to its esteemed place and receive the veneration it was due, so thoroughly had the ravages of the Terror been visited upon it. The broader album type constituted Jouy’s l’Album vulgaire (the Common album): a portfolio of pages for inscription and reading, “consisting of fragments written in a blank book by various persons.”49 The nineteenth-century Album vulgaire was also part of a distinctively feminine literary culture, whose incarnations included popular, if oft-derided, ladies’ albums, which girls and young women carried with them to collect friendly sentiments and autographs.50 They signified a new, demotic album form, which had esteemed forebears. The most illustrious was the lost book at the charterhouse in the Dauphiné. As a distant and esteemed forebear, it served as a foil for critics to disparage modern album culture. Jouy lamented its eclipse: Let us now turn to the Album vulgaire, that is, to that which consists of a blank volume, and which requires the concurrence of two wills. Its origin is noble, holy, majestic. Saint Bruno had founded in the Alps the cradle of his order. Every traveler was to be received there for three days, with a grave and decent hospitality. At the moment of departure, a register was presented to him, inviting him to write his name, which he would ordinarily accompany with some inspired phrases. The aspect of the mountains, the roar of the torrents, the silence of the monastery, the great and formidable religion, the humility of the lean monks, with time itself being despised and eternity present everywhere, could not but give birth, under the nib of all the guests who came in these august dwellings, elevated thoughts and touching expressions. As a result, living poets have entered famous verses in this repository. What has become of this singular and precious

3

THE ALBUM OF THE FATHERS AND THE FATHER …

55

register? Have the recluses carried it with them in their emigration? Is it buried in some obscure archives in the city of Grenoble? Be not surprised at my anxiety over its fate; for the Album of the Grande Chartreuse is unquestionably the father and model of all of our albums. Your correspondent must not fail to say that the progeny of the grand Album has very much degenerated.51

In tracing generic descent, both genealogical and qualitative, Jouy’s arc of album history charted an unmistakable decline from the repository of genius at the Grande Chartreuse, the “father and model of all of our Albums,”52 as travelers in the nineteenth century marveled at how the ravages of revolution had reduced the prosperity of a venerable monastery. They entwined to dramatize the ways in which the disappearance of the “father” of all albums signified the loss of dignified literary and travel cultures.

Conclusion In the years following the French Revolution, the old album at the Grande Chartreuse vanished in physical form, but rematerialized in potent new ways through the medium of nineteenth-century travel writing and album genealogy. The album’s very absence became the subject of intense interest and a focus for wider evaluations in which the politics of revolution, genre, and travel entwined. Mourning its fate was a way in which some travel writers articulated a calculated detachment from popular literary culture, travel codes, and travelers in the nineteenth century, and other writers concerned with the album genre explicated its diverse forms and qualities, even if it involved an elision of the pre-revolutionary album’s apparent withdrawal from inscription amid anxiety over the preservation of its contents in the face of their despoilment. The rhetorical pedigree of this anxiety surrounding album practices had predated the Revolution and its aftermath, which gave it new incentives and contexts. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Étienne de Jouy’s writing resonated with more snobbish assessments by British critics of the album’s decline, and Esprit-François-Marie Dupré de Loire’s account of his 1822 travels to Chartreuse was replete with commentary and extracts as extensive as, if not more so than, those of many British contemporaries.53 But to many nineteenth-century British travel writers who expounded on the history of the Dauphiné, the old album was bound with positive assessments

56

K. J. JAMES

of Romantic aesthetics and codes of travel, vilifications of revolutionary destruction, critiques of Roman Catholic practices, and lamentations for a generic form whose pinnacle was firmly in the past. To them, the 1815 restoration in France failed to reinstate the Carthusians’ resources, or re-establish elite, masculine travel practices associated with an album whose inscribers extolled the seclusion and sublimity of the Dauphiné. The late Romantics had the same glorious scenery at their disposal, but they despaired of sharing it with others. Moreover, the album that credentialed their travel connoisseurship had disappeared just as surely as the codes of travel that they eulogized. Both now belonged to a lost world that was as unreachable as the mists that clung to the mountain fastnesses of the Dauphiné.

Notes 1. Charles Richard Weld, “A Visit to the Grande Chartreuse,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 40, no. 240 (December 1849): 623–36; Charles Richard Weld, Auvergne, Piedmont, and Savoy: A Summer Ramble (London: John W. Parker, 1850), 234. 2. Ibid., 225. 3. Ibid., 226. 4. Ibid., 228; 229; 230. 5. Ibid., 234–35. Weld alludes later in the travelogue to Thomas Gray’s journeys in the district in more specific detail, suggesting that the reference here is indeed to Thomas Gray. However, Gray visited the Grande Chartreuse in 1741, not 1791. 6. Ibid., 235. 7. Ibid. 8. See “Alpine Albums,” in The Gentleman’s Pocket Magazine; and Album of Literature and Fine Arts. By the Editor of “The Ladies’ Pocket Magazine” (London: Joseph Robins, 1829), 250–51; see also A. E. Rodd, “The Grande Chartreuse,” Outing 11, no. 6 (March 1888): 550–55. Rodd curiously refers to the album as extant. 9. William Beckford, of Fonthill, “An Excursion to the Grand Chartreuse, in the Year 1778,” in Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, ed. Robert J. Gemmett (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971), 261– 84. Gemmett supplies what he characterizes as “practically a verbatim imprint of the suppressed edition of 1783” (11). 10. W. Mason, Poems of Mr. Gray. To Which Are Prefixed Memoirs of His Life and Writing by W. Mason, M. A. (York: Printed by A. Ward; and Sold by J. Dodsley, London; and J. Todd, York. 1775), 116–18. For a detailed

3

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

THE ALBUM OF THE FATHERS AND THE FATHER …

57

discussion of Gray’s visits to the Dauphiné, see Robert L. Mack, Thomas Gray: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 226–32; 262– 70. For precise bibliographic details of the first publication of the Ode in 1775, and the location of the commonplace book at Pembroke College, Cambridge, see Margaret M. Smith, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, Vol. III, 1700–1800, Part 2: John Gay–Ambrose Philips with a First-Line Index to Parts 1 and 2 (London: Mansell Publishing Limited, 1989), 71– 79. Mack, Thomas Gray: A Life, 264–70. Edmund Cartwright, Armine and Elvira. A Legendary Tale. With Other Poems, 9th ed. (London: Printed for John Murray and John Harding by C. Whittingham, 1803), 91–92. Rev. George M. Musgrave, Pilgrimage into Dauphiné; Comprising a Visit to the Monastery of the Grande Chartreuse; with Anecdotes, Incidents, and Sketches from Twenty Departments of France, vol. 2 (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1857), 244. See the issues of the European Magazine and London Review in which the monastery was discussed under the title “La Grande Chartreuse”: 16 (September 1789): 190–94; cont. (October 1789): 294–95; cont. (December 1789): 448; cont. (September 1791): 168. “La Grande Chartreuse: Inscriptions from the Album of the Fathers, Written by Visitors,” Catholicon: Or, the Christian Philosopher: A Roman Catholic Magazine 1, no. 4 (1815): 186–88. A good empirical review remains Madeleine Dempsey, “The Grande Chartreuse in Literature,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 18, no. 71 (1929): 476–86. See also D. S. Neff, “Phidias and the ‘Runic Stone’: Gray’s ‘Alcaic Ode’ and ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,’” Victorian Poetry 35, no. 4 (1997): 543–50; Duncan Wu, “The Grande Chartreuse and the Development of Wordsworth’s Recluse,” Bulletin of the Charles Lamb Society 71 (1990): 235–46. See Stephen Gill’s illuminating study, Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 107–22; also see Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 166–75. Un Chartreux [Cyprien-Marie Boutrais], La Grande Chartreuse, 3rd ed. (Grenoble: Auguste-Côte, 1884), 304. The first edition was published in 1881. Often this term is capitalized in the nineteenth century; it is not always in earlier references, such as the short account of the Ode’s creation and publication in J. Carver, The New Universal Traveller (London: Printed for G. Robinson, 1779), 288. “La Grande Chartreuse” [Advertisement], The World, no. 628 (2 January 1789): 5.

58

K. J. JAMES

21. “La Grande Chartreuse” [Advertisement], The World, no. 815 (14 August 1789): 2; “La Grande Chartreuse,” Whitehall Evening Post, no. 6592 (13 August 1789): 3. 22. Weld, Auvergne, Piedmont, and Savoy, 243. 23. Musgrave, Pilgrimage into Dauphiné, 156. 24. Musgrave, Pilgrimage into Dauphiné, 177–78. Musgrave’s footnote to page 177 translates the quotation from Aeneid 1.460 as “What realm on earth tells not of our work!” 25. Ibid., 223. 26. “Replies. Gray’s Alcaic Ode,” Notes & Queries 1, no. 26 (27 April 1850): 416. The original appeal for details of the album’s fate had appeared in C. B., “Gray’s Alcaic Ode,” Notes & Queries 1, no. 24 (13 April 1850): 382. 27. “Replies,” Notes & Queries, 416. This account resembles many other brief notes that appear in published versions of the poem, including an assertion that “In 1789, a French visitor found the Album in the Chartreuse, and copied this ode from it. Not long afterwards, a mob of ruffians from Grenoble broke into the monastery and destroyed the books.” See Epes Sargent, ed., The Complete Poetical Works of William Collins, Thomas Gray, and Oliver Goldsmith, with Biographical Sketches and Notes (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company; New York: J. C. Derby, 1854), 139. 28. “Replies,” Notes & Queries, 416. 29. Ibid. 30. See for instance the note underneath the translated poem’s title: “This ode was written in the album of the Grande Chartreuse, in Dauphiny, in August 1741. The original, which was much valued by the monks, was destroyed during the French Revolution by a mob from Grenoble. It is here printed from a copy in the poet’s handwriting existing among the Stonehewer MSS.—ed[.]” in Edmund Gosse, ed., The Works of Thomas Gray, in Prose and Verse, vol. 1 (New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1885), 182. In relation to the Grenoble mob, Robert Aris Wilmott (in his edition of The Poetical Works of Thomas Gray, Thomas Parnell, William Collins, Matthew Green, and Thomas Wharton [London: George Routledge and Sons, n.d.]) noted, “An amusing story is told by an English lady (‘Notes and Queries,’ ii.31) who was arrested during the reign of terror. The Jacobins, in their search among her books, happened to see the line in Gray’s Ode,—Oh! tu severi religio loci, and said,—‘Apparemment ce livre est quelque chose de fanatique’” (116). 31. Peter H. Hansen, “Albert Smith, the Alpine Club, and the Invention of Mountaineering in Mid-Victorian Britain,” Journal of British Studies 34, no. 3 (1995): 308. Hansen elaborates on his analysis in The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). See also Ann C. Colley, “Class Pollution in

3

32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

THE ALBUM OF THE FATHERS AND THE FATHER …

59

the Alps,” Victorian Review 36, no. 2 (2010): 36–40; Colley, Victorians in the Mountains: Sinking the Sublime (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); and R. D. Eaton, “In the ‘World of Death and Beauty’: Risk, Control, and John Tyndall as Alpinist,” Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 1 (2013): 55–73. A classic account of this phenomenon is James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Hand-Book for Travellers in France (London: John Murray, 1843), 495. This hand-book was described as the “result of four or five journeys undertaken at different times between 1830 and 1841,” including a route from “Grenoble and the Grande Chartreuse through Aubenas and Aurillac to the Port de Venasque” (v). An instructive contrast can be drawn with the description of the convent and surroundings in “Account of the Grand Chartreuse,” The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany 10, no. 58 (October 1780): 227–29. Ibid., 494. Ibid., 495–96. “Origin of Albums,” The Idler; and Breakfast-Table Companion 2, nos. 66–67 (14 April 1838): 134. G. W., “La Grande Chartreuse,” Historical Magazine 30 (April 1791): 109. Hand-Book for Travellers in France, 494–97. “Monaco,” letter dated 12 April in The Gentleman’s Magazine (May 1790): 394–96. Musgrave, Pilgrimage into Dauphiné, 225. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 230. S. B., “La Grande Chartreuse,” The Visitor, or Monthly Instructor, for 1848 (February 1848): 42. L’hermite de la Chaussée-d’Antin [Victoire-Joseph Étienne de Jouy], L’hermite de la Chaussée-d’Antin, ou observations sur les mœurs et les usages Parisiens au commencement du XIX e siècle, vol. 1 (Paris: Chez Pillet, Imprimeur-Libraire, 1813), 167–68. A Library Antiquary [pseud.], “Albums,” The History of Origins: Containing Ancient Historical Facts, with Singular Customs, Institutions, and Manners of Different Ages (London: Sampson Low, 1824), 133. See also “On Albums,” The Album 1, no. 1 (1822): 4. [Jouy], L’Hermite de la Chaussée-d’Antin, 168 [my translation]. Ibid., 168–69. Musgrave, Pilgrimage into Dauphiné, 223. A Library Antiquary [pseud.], “Albums,” 133–34.

60

K. J. JAMES

50. Justyna Beinek, “‘Portable Graveyards’: Albums in the Romantic Culture of Memory,” Pushkin Review 14, no. 1 (2011): 35–62; Patrizia Di Bello, “Mrs Birkbeck’s Album: The Hand-written and the Printed in Early Nineteenth-Century Feminine Culture,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 1 (2005): n.p.; Cindy Dickinson, “Creating a World of Books, Friends, and Flowers: Gift Books and Inscriptions, 1825–60,” Winterthur Portfolio 31, no. 1 (1996): 53–66; Katherine D. Harris, “Borrowing, Altering and Perfecting the Literary Annual Form––Or What It Is Not: Emblems, Almanacs, Pocket-books, Albums, Scrapbooks and Gifts Books,” Poetess Archive Journal 1, no. 1 (2007): 1– 30; Thomas Lawrence Long, “Documents of Performance: James Sheridan Knowles’s Gift Album to Jemma Haigh: A Glimpse of Victorian Social Networks and Cultural Practices,” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40, no. 2 (2013): 125–32; Samantha Matthews, “Album,” Victorian Review 34, no. 1 (2008): 13–17; Samantha Matthews, “Albums, Belongings, and Embodying the Feminine,” in Bodies and Things in NineteenthCentury Literature, ed. Katharina Boehm (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 107–29; Lisa Reid Ricker, “(De)Constructing the Praxis of Memory-Keeping: Late Nineteenth-Century Autograph Albums as Sites of Rhetorical Invention,” Rhetoric Review 29, no. 3 (2010): 239–56; and Jane Rutherston, “Victorian Album Structures,” The Paper Conservator 23 (1999): 13–25. 51. [Jouy], L’Hermite de la Chaussée-d’Antin, 170–71 [my translation]. The author is grateful to Professor Sofie Lachapelle and Vincent Roy-Di Piazza for their assistance in translation. 52. Ibid., 171 [my translation]. 53. E.-F.-M. Dupré Deloire, Voyage à la Grande-Chartreuse (Valence: L. Borel, Éditeur, 1830), 274–302; see also M. Auguste Bourne, Description pittoresque de la Grande-Chartreuse, souvenirs historiques de ses montagnes et de son couvent (Grenoble: Prudhomme, Imprimeur-Éditeur, 1853), 87– 102.

CHAPTER 4

“Dieting with Antiquity”: Eating and Drinking with the Ancients at Pompeii Chloe Chard

Picnics at Pompeii Mariana Starke, in her Travels in Italy (1800), heads a portion of a letter from Naples “Excursion to Pompeii, Herculaneum and Portici,” and begins her narrative with a sentence that sounds as though it is obliquely proffering practical advice: We hired a carriage for the whole day, took a cold dinner, bread, wine, knives, forks, and glasses, and set out at seven in the morning for Pompeii, bargaining, however, with our Voiturin to stop two or three hours at Portici on our return.1

A reading of this narrative as practically oriented, in the manner to be expected of a guidebook, is encouraged some pages later: the party dine at “the excavated Villa,” at the opposite side of the town to “the Soldiers’ Barracks,” where they alight from the carriage, and Starke includes

C. Chard (B) London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Colbert and L. Morrison (eds.), Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36146-4_4

61

62

C. CHARD

in her summary of the costs of the excursion: “to the Boy who carries your dinner to the Villa it is usual to give two carlini.”2 Many other travelers visiting the buried city, she implies, will consider dining there as an integral part of the experience, and might welcome some hints as to how to manage the combination of food and sightseeing. Anna Jameson, in her Diary of an Ennuyée (1826), also presents eating in the open air as an element in a visit to Pompeii; like Starke, she sees a picnic there as an occasion that demands some thought and planning. Her analysis of how to use gastronomy to heighten the pleasures of the excavated ruins, however, is far more elaborate than Starke’s. She observes: “Our excursion to Pompeii yesterday, was ‘a Pic-nic party of pleasure,’ à l’Anglaise.” After an account of viewing wall paintings in a newly excavated building, Jameson continues: Hurried on by a hungry, noisy, merry party, we at length reached the Caserna, (the ancient barracks, or as Forsyth will have it, the Prætorium). The central court of this building has been converted into a garden; and here, under a weeping willow, our dinner table was spread. Where Englishmen are, there will be good cheer if possible; and our banquet was in truth most luxurious. Besides more substantial cates, we had oysters from Lake Lucrine, (or Acheron), and classically excellent they were; London bottled porter, and half a dozen different kinds of wine. Our dinner went off most gaily, but no order was kept afterwards: the purpose of our expedition seemed to be forgotten in general mirth: many witty things were said and done, and many merry ones, and not a few silly ones.3

The “luxurious” banquet, here, is implicitly presented as the effect of the same disorderly approach as the “general mirth” that induces an impoverished experience of the buried city: Jameson goes on to argue that the way in which the picnic has been arranged detracts from the experience of wonder and enthrallment that the traveler expects and desires. After describing one of the party mounting the rostrum of “the School of Eloquence” and giving “an oration extempore; equally pithy, classical and comical,” she reaffirms that she is capable of responding to the sights of the warm South with an enraptured intensity, undiminished by such frivolity: “of all the lovely scenes I have beheld in Italy, what I saw to-day has most enchanted my senses and imagination.” At the same time, however, the traveler explains that gastronomy, better managed, might have been recruited in the service of yet greater enchantment:

4

“DIETING WITH ANTIQUITY”: EATING AND DRINKING …

63

Thus ended a day which was not without its pleasures:—yet had I planned a party of pleasure to Pompeii, methinks I could have managed better. Par exemple, I would have deferred it a fortnight later, or till the vines were in leaf; I would have chosen for my companions two or at most three persons whom I could name, whose cultivated minds and happy tempers would have heightened their own enjoyment and mine. After spending a few hours in taking a general view of the whole city, we would have sat down on the platform of the old Greek Temple which commands a view of the mountains and the bay; or, if the heat were too powerful, under the shade of the hill near it. There we would make our cheerful and elegant repast, on bread and fruits, and perhaps a bottle of Malvoisie or Champagne: the rest of the day should be devoted to a minute examination of the principal objects of interest and curiosity: we would wait till the shadows of evening had begun to steal over the scene, purpling the mountains and the sea; we would linger there to enjoy all the splendours of an Italian sunset; and then, with minds softened and elevated by the loveliness and solemnity of the scenes around, we would get into our carriage, and drive back to Naples beneath the bright full moon; and, by the way, we would “talk the flowing heart,” and make our recollections of the olden time, our deep impressions of the past, heighten our enjoyment of the present; and this would be indeed a day of pleasure, of such pleasure as I am capable of feeling—of imparting—of remembering with unmixed delight. Such was not yesterday.4

Jameson, then, like Starke, pays close attention to practicalities: she not only specifies her preferred choice of site (“the old Greek Temple” rather than the barracks), but also itemizes the bill of fare. At the same time, she differs from Starke in emphasizing how closely the practical aspect of a picnic is enmeshed with its imaginative dimension, and how readily experience of food and wine assumes a central role within the experience of antiquity: pleasurable “recollections of the olden time” and “deep impressions of the past” are made possible, in part, by a “cheerful and elegant repast” (Fig. 4.1). The assumption that a meal in the open air is an unremarkable and almost routine element in a visit to Pompeii, allowing the traveler a kind of enhanced access to the ancient past, is evident even in writings that are not particularly concerned with how such an occasion should be managed. J. M. Le Riche, in his Antiquités des environs de Naples, et dissertations qui y sont relatives (1820), uses a vignette of a “collation” near the cellar containing amphorae in the buried city as a starting point for a scholarly disquisition about the storage of wine in antiquity (Fig. 4.2). A

64

C. CHARD

Fig. 4.1 Joseph T. Willmore, steel engraving, after J. W. M. Turner, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, exhibited 1832. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection (B1977.14.13866). The engraving shows people eating in the open air in a landscape full of ruins, implicitly evoking the Bay of Naples, despite the fact that this part of Italy does not play a part in the poem by Byron to which the title refers

spirited young woman light-heartedly elicits from a scholarly abbé some information about the uses of such vessels: Après une légère collation à laquelle tous les voyageurs avaient pris part, Mademoiselle Hortense … se tournant en riant vers l’abbé, lui dit: mais M. l’abbé, croyez-vous qu’avec vos amphores, l’on pouvait conserver le vin aussi bien et aussi long-tems que dans nos bouteilles? After a light collation in which all the travelers participated, Mademoiselle Hortense … turning laughingly towards the abbé, said to him: but, Monsieur l’abbé, do you believe that it is possible to keep wine in your amphorae as well and as long as in our bottles?5

4

“DIETING WITH ANTIQUITY”: EATING AND DRINKING …

65

Fig. 4.2 “Amphorae” from “the Thermopolium, or wine-shop,” in George Clarke, Pompeii, 2 vols. (London: Charles Knight, 1831–1832), 2:193. London Library

The abbé responds robustly: “Je suis persuadé, Mademoiselle … que mes amphores valaient au moins nos bouteilles” (I am convinced, Mademoiselle … that my amphoræ were worth at least as much as our bottles). After citing “un certain vin nommé opimianum, parce qu’il datait du Consulat de L. Opimius” (a certain wine called opinianum, because it dated from the consular year of Lucius Opimius), he notes that “il était en vogue du tems de Pline le naturaliste, qui me fournit ce fait: conséquemment il avait près de deux siècles” (it was fashionable at the time of Pliny the naturalist, from whom I derive this information: consequently it had lasted nearly two centuries). After this lapse of time, the abbé explains, the wine had developed quite striking qualities: Ce vin avait acquis la consistance du miel et une telle amertume, qu’on ne pouvait en boire qu’une très petite quantité dans beaucoup d’eau. Il ne

66

C. CHARD

servait le plus souvent que pour donner de la qualité aux autres vins dans lesquels il n’entrait qu’en très petite dose. Ajoutez à cela que le prix en était si excessif, que du tems de Pline, il coûtait 96 francs l’once. J’espère qu’après un fait si saillant, une autorité si incontestable, vous ne serez pas anti-amphoriste.6 This wine had acquired the consistency of honey, and such a bitter taste that it was only possible to drink a very small quantity of it, in a large amount of water. Most often, it was only used to improve the quality of other wine, and only in very small doses. Add to that that its price was so excessive, that at the time of Pliny it cost 96 francs an ounce. I hope that after so salient a fact, attested to by such undoubtable authority, you will not be anti-amphorist.

Other eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century travelers mention meals in Pompeii as a part of the visit to the site. Percy Bysshe Shelley, who uses the expression “dieting with antiquity” in order to convey the pleasures of viewing the ruins of Rome, literalizes this metaphor when he mentions the Temple of Jupiter in the city disinterred from the ashes: “Under the colonnade of its portico we sate & pulled out our oranges & figs & bread & [?soil] apples (sorry fare you will say) & rested to eat.”7 The poet Samuel Rogers notes tersely in his journal: “Took some refreshment in the Basilica.”8 Sydney Morgan, in Italy (1820), describes a meal enjoyed not by herself but by others: she finds in one of the fora at Pompeii “the workmen seated on blocks of marble or little wheel-barrows: it was their dinner-hour, and they were eating some fruit and bread.”9 A. A. Lheureux and Ambroise Richard, in their Voyage de deux amis en Italie par le midi de la France, et retour par La Suisse et les départemens de l’est (1829), describe a similarly simple meal that precedes their departure from Herculaneum: “Après nous être reposés, et restaurés d’un repas frugal dans un jardin, sous une tente, nous nous mîmes en route pour le Vésuve” (After resting, and revived by a frugal meal in a garden, under a canopy, we set out for Vesuvius).10 Travelers do intermittently describe eating in other ruins. Stendhal mentions an English couple who come to grief at Paestum when their banquet in the Temple of Neptune attracts the attention of the local banditti.11 Rogers comments on a visit to Baiae: “Sat & ate grapes & oranges, borrowing a knife from some men singing in the vineyards—a delicious hour—.” On another occasion at the same part of the Bay of Naples: “—Eat Grapes & oranges & biscuit in the Octagon temple of Venus.”12

4

“DIETING WITH ANTIQUITY”: EATING AND DRINKING …

67

Pompeii, however, prompts accounts of picnicking more often than most. In considering these accounts of eating in the buried city, this essay addresses two questions. First, what are the rhetorical uses of describing the ruins as a place to consume food and wine? Secondly, is there some particular sub-text to be discerned when the traveler declares that the food is—or should be—simple? As the examples already cited demonstrate, Jameson is not alone in taking the view that Pompeii does not demand any great gastronomic luxury. Rogers’s brief mention of “some refreshment” is especially telling for a man whose reputation as an epicure is often noted at the time (among others, by Jameson, who meets him in Florence), and who, in Rome, describes dining on “a fricassee of frogs & Porcupine in sweet sauce.”13

The Practicalities of Picnicking Some scholars might take a down-to-earth view of these accounts of eating in the open air at Pompeii, and suggest that a picnic must simply have been regarded as a necessary practical part of viewing the city, given that, as Gérard de Nerval later puts it, before the construction of the railway from Naples to Resina in 1838, “une course à Pompéi était tout un voyage” (a trip to Pompeii was quite a journey).14 Starke, in fact, supplies a timetable for a day trip from Naples, returning via Portici: “The time usually employed in going is two hours—in seeing Pompeii four hours— and in returning to Portici one hour and a half.”15 A hint that a visit to the buried city might be difficult to organize in terms of catering is found in Lewis Engelbach’s Naples and the Campagna Felice (1815), when he describes himself, in the Street of the Tombs, as “overpowered … by the heat, muffeta, and want of food of any kind for many hours.”16 Andrea De Jorio, in his Plan de Pompéi (1828), defines the consumption of food as a matter of practical planning, and notes, like Jameson and (more mutedly) Starke, that it is a matter of some importance where precisely the meal is consumed: Comme il faut plusieurs heures pour visiter Pompéi; il est bon d’avoir la precaution de porter de Naples de quoi y faire un déjeuner, qui est encore plus agréable, si l’on s’arrête au milieu de ses ruines, au lieu de se rendre pour cet effet à la Torre dell’Annunziata, comme le font beaucoup d’étrangers mal informés des localités.17

68

C. CHARD

Since several hours are needed to visit Pompeii, it is a good idea to take provisions from Naples for a light meal, which is even more agreeable if one stops in the middle of the ruins of the town, instead of going to Torre dell’Annunziata to eat, as lots of foreigners who are badly informed about these localities do.

There are at least two objections, however, to the view that travelers are merely taking for granted that simple meals at Pompeii are a matter of practical necessity. First, there is no organizational reason why the food taken to the ruins should be especially frugal, as Jameson’s account of the “most luxurious” banquet consumed there indicates.18 Starke’s account of preparations for dinner, while observing that the meal is cold, suggests that some attention is being paid to comfort and convenience: there is a “Boy” to carry the food to the chosen spot.19 To cite an account of another ruin to which travelers venture from Naples, Stendhal’s sad tale of the English couple killed by banditti as they leave Paestum affirms that, even in isolated ruins, banquets could be arranged with some show of opulence; it is the numerous servants and the silver plate, as well as the rings worn by the woman, that attract the attention of the brigands.20 The second objection to the view that picnics are assumed to be a practical necessity is that some travelers do in fact mention meals at relatively nearby inns.21 Goethe, in his Italienische Reise, describes two interludes of this kind as such integral parts of his experience of Pompeii that they function, symbolically, almost as displaced versions of the picnic on the spot. The first, on 11 March 1787, presents the meal as softening the effects of the buried city: Den wunderlichen, halb unangenehmen Eindruck dieser mumisierten Stadt wuschen wir wieder aus den Gemütern, als wir in der Laube, zunächst des Meeres, in einem geringen Gasthof sitzend ein frugales Mahl verzehrten und uns an der Himmelsbläue, an des Meeres Glanz und Licht ergötzen, in Hoffnung, wenn dieses Fleckchen mit Weinlaub bedeck sein würde, uns hier wieder zu sehen, and uns zusammen zu ergötzen. The mummified city left us with a curious, rather disagreeable impression, but our spirits began to recover as we sat in the pergola of a modest inn looking out over the sea, and ate a frugal meal. The blue sky and the glittering sea enchanted us, and we left hoping that, on some future day, when this little arbor was covered with vine leaves, we would meet there again and enjoy ourselves.22

4

“DIETING WITH ANTIQUITY”: EATING AND DRINKING …

69

On another visit (13 March 1787), the strange impression made by the ruins is not mentioned, but a meal at an inn once more supplies an element of animation, heightened by a convivial atmosphere: “Wir fanden gute muntere neapolitanische Gesellschaft daselbst. Die Menschen sind durchaus natürlich und leicht gesinnt. Wir aßen zu Torre dell’Annunziata, zunächst des Meeres tafelnd. Der Tag was höchst schön, die Aussicht nach Castello a Mare und Sorrent nah und köstlich” (“We met a company of lively Neapolitans, who were as natural and lighthearted as could be, and we all ate at the Torre dell’Annunziata. Our table was set close to the shore with a delightful view of Castellammare and Sorrento”).23 Engelbach describes a dinner in an inn at Resina after viewing Pompeii: “The bon pranzo (upon which many an Englishman might have starved) consisted of a tolerable vermicelli soup, a pork fry, a dish of delicate little fish, unluckily fried in oil, and a good salad. To us, however, all was manna in the desert.” In contrast, he does in fact describe taking provisions to another ancient destination—the island of Capri. “Suspecting that so sequestered a spot would offer little or no accommodation to a traveller,” he sets out with not only “my cot” to sleep in, but also “a pigeon pie of respectable dimensions, which, together with a Bologna sausage and some wine, ground coffee and sugar, were stowed in a small hamper.”24

The Uses of Simplicity Both Goethe, after his first visit, and Engelbach, at Resina, make a point of noting the frugality of their fare—quite as much so as most travelers eating on the spot—yet, at the same time, mention the absence of culinary sophistication without serious complaint. Goethe, in the passage just quoted, describes his frugal meal at an unpretentious inn as actually reviving the spirits of his party, while Engelbach takes a lighthearted, almost jocular approach to the fish “unluckily fried in oil,” and describes “the Lachrime Christi” that he and his traveling companion are served (“our host asked, Bulite roba buona? which of course was answered in the affirmative”) as “so delicious, that, in spite of my physician’s injunctions, the second bottle soon became a desideratum.”25 Simple food and wine, then, it seems, are viewed as worth mentioning as an element in a visit to Pompeii whether they are consumed on the spot or at an inn in the region; they assume a symbolic and rhetorical function that goes beyond a mere attention to practical constraints. What are the

70

C. CHARD

preconditions for this emphasis on simplicity? To begin with, laying claim to an ability to subsist on modest fare, not just in the buried cities but in foreign places in general, provides a useful way for travelers to draw attention to their ability to adapt to changing circumstances with ease and grace, qualities that affirm their authority to speak as a participant in the mode of travel associated with the Grand Tour. Byron, in a letter of 1811 from Athens, regrets the “perpetual lamentations after beef and beer” of his servant William Fletcher, and links these to a complete failure to derive pleasure and benefit from the foreign (the crucial qualifications for this mode of travel): a “stupid bigotted contempt for every thing foreign, and insurmountable incapacity of acquiring even a few words of any language.” As he enlarges on the fussiness (gastronomic and other) of the hapless Fletcher, he slips in an allusion to his own comparative flexibility: “I do assure you that the plague of speaking for him, the comforts he required (more than myself by far) the pilaws (a Turkish dish of rice and meat) which he could not eat, the wines which he could not drink, the beds where he could not sleep, & the long list of calamities such as stumbling horses, want of tea!!! &c. which assailed him, would have made a lasting source of laughter to a spectator, and of inconvenience to a Master.”26 Engelbach, at Pompeii, makes similar use of an inadequate traveler, his companion Don Michele, to emphasize by contrast his own ability to face a certain degree of hardship with ease. Some pages before mentioning his own sufferings from “want of food,” he sets his enthusiasm for “feasting” on antiquities in opposition to the less cerebral “cravings” of his friend (“Don Grumble,” as he later terms him), as the cicerone leads the two of them to further sights: Rejoiced at the idea of feasting my classic eyes on new objects of admiration, I hastened after him with renovated strength and spirits; but Don Michele, who, in addition to other grievances, now also pleaded the cravings of his unclassic stomach, brought up the rear with as good a grace as I have seen a poor deserter descend the gloomy steps of the Savoy. To set his latter plea aside, and to invigorate him for new exertions, it was of no avail to promise him as good a dinner as the best inn at Resina could afford; he coldly replied, Sara una cena, se pur troviamo da mangiare.27

Simple food in relatively remote spots, moreover, affirms that the traveler has sallied forth and survived an adventure in which he or she has come

4

“DIETING WITH ANTIQUITY”: EATING AND DRINKING …

71

back (if only to Naples) after taking risks and facing danger (if only the danger of plain or ill-prepared food). Engelbach, in the passage quoted above, is at pains to boast that he has managed to find “manna in the desert” in fare “upon which many an Englishman might have starved.”28

Food, Wine, and Ancient History In taking the trouble to affirm that they have consumed food and wine at or near Pompeii, could travelers also be implying that they have in some way been aligning themselves with the ancients who lived and died in the city—or, at least, that they have forged some sort of intimate relationship with these Pompeians? This might seem an odd way of viewing accounts of simple food, since the Romans are routinely presented as lovers of extraordinarily elaborate fare, both at this period and at others. Ancient Pompeii, however, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, is not usually described as the site of the sophistication and luxury evoked in later writings such as Gautier’s Arria Marcella, and routinely allotted to the antique past of other parts of the Bay of Naples in works of all periods.29 Engelbach explicitly argues that “it is in their temples and public buildings only, that the ancient Romans and Greeks displayed the grandeur and costliness we still admire,” and suggests that “in the country towns, the extravagance of the metropolis would in all probability find few admirers or imitators.”30 Both in Pompeii itself and in the museum at Portici, moreover, (and later in the Museo Borbonico and Museo degli Studi in Naples, to which art and artifacts from Portici were taken) visitors refer to ancient foodstuffs of a fairly simple kind, such as fruit, raw cooking ingredients, bread, and wine (Figs. 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5). When Jameson dreams of consuming “bread and fruits” on “the platform of the old Greek Temple,” she is naming food that (apart from its rather fresher condition!) is similar to the fare that she later views at the museum: “loaves of bread, reduced to a black cinder, figs in the same state, grain of different kinds.”31 Madame du Boccage, traveling in the late 1750s and viewing only Herculaneum, sees at Portici “œufs, noix, le tout avec leurs couleurs, bled, pain réduit en charbon sans avoir perdu sa forme” (“Eggs, nuts, all in their natural colors, corn, bread reduced to a coal without losing its form”).32 Starke speculates about the “awful” spectacle that those who first rediscovered Pompeii must have encountered, “when all the utensils, and even the bread of the poor suffocated Inhabitants, were discernible”; at Portici,

72

C. CHARD

Fig. 4.3 “Bronze pastry-mould” and “Bread, from a painting on the walls of the Pantheon [at Pompeii],” in Clarke, Pompeii, 1:114. London Library

4

“DIETING WITH ANTIQUITY”: EATING AND DRINKING …

73

Fig. 4.4 “Bread discovered in Pompeii,” in Clarke, Pompeii, 2:143. London Library

she describes “various eatables retaining their form though scorched to a cinder, namely, corn, flour, bread, a pye in it’s [sic] baking-pan, wheat, peas, almonds, dates, beans, nuts, figs, grapes, eggs, fish, oil, and wine.”33 Rogers observes in the ruins “the smokiness of the baker’s oven, the stain of the liquor-glasses.”34 In the villa’s wine cellar, Engelbach finds “at the bottom of some of the jars, a residuary crust … resembling the coke of a burnt resinous substance,” which he identifies as “evidently the caput mortuum of the former grape juice.” (He tries to steal some of this—for chemical analysis, he tells us—but the guide is too sharp-eyed for him.)35 Henry Sass, in A Journey to Rome and Naples (1818), views at Portici “samples of beans, barley, and different sorts of corn, all burnt by the heat of the lava, which overran the cities.”36 Lheureux and Richard, in their Voyage de deux amis en Italie (1829), find similar objects in what has now become “ce vaste musée des Studj” (this vast Museo degli Studi), in Naples: “des cendres restées dans des tourtières, des aliments, des coquilles d’œufs, du pain, des fruits (figues, prunes, olives, châtaignes); du froment, du millet” (ashes left in pie tins, foodstuffs, eggshells, bread, fruits—figs, plums, olives, chestnuts—wheat, millet).37 Henry Matthews,

74

C. CHARD

Fig. 4.5 “From the paintings on the walls of the Pantheon [at Pompeii],” in Clarke, Pompeii, 1:117. London Library

4

“DIETING WITH ANTIQUITY”: EATING AND DRINKING …

75

in his Diary of an Invalid (1820), comments on food at both the city itself and the museum (the items in question are still at Portici at this point). Among the ruins: “A baker’s shop is as plainly indicated, as if the loaves were now at his window” (Figs. 4.6 and 4.7). At Portici: “Many articles, even of food, are to be seen preserved in a charcoal state. There is a loaf of bread on which the baker’s name is still visible. It is easy to recognise the different fruits and vegetables, corn, rice, figs, almonds, walnuts, beans, lentils, &c.”38 Such references to vestiges of wine and basic foodstuffs play a part in bringing the traveler into a close relationship with the ancient city: the remains of everyday life in antiquity are, as Matthews says, “easy to recognise.”39 William Beckford touches on this conviction that Pompeii allows a close connection to be forged with day-to-day life in the ancient past when he presents the villa just outside the city limits as happily affirming the themes of Latin literature: “As Horace, and most of the old Latin Poets, dwell much on the praises of antient conviviality, and appear to have valued themselves considerably on their connoisseurship in wine, it was with great pleasure I descended into the spacious cellars, sunk and vaulted beneath the arcade above mentioned.”40 Everyday items, in a blackened state or surviving as mere traces, play a central part in the narrative of daily life suddenly interrupted that the town sets in motion (Fig. 4.8). Hester Piozzi, in her Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy and Germany (1789), assigns food and wine a climactic role in her tale of horror: But it is time to tell of Herculaneum, Pompeia, and Portici; of a theatre, the scene of gaiety and pleasure, overwhelmed by torrents of liquid fire! The inhabitants of a whole town surprised by immediate and unavoidable destruction! Where that very town indeed was built with the lava produced by former eruptions, one would think it scarce possible that such calamities could be totally unexpected;—but no matter, life must go on, though we all know death is coming;—so the bread was baking in their ovens, the meat was smoking on their dishes, some of their wine already decanted for use, the rest in large jars (amphora), now petrified with their contents inside, and fixed to the walls of the cellars in which they stand.—How dreadful are the thoughts which such a sight suggests!41

Germaine de Staël, too, in Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807), places food and wine at the center of the scene of sudden catastrophe: “Les amphores

76

C. CHARD

Fig. 4.6 “Pompeii: Oven and Mill in the House of Pansa,” engraved by Charles Heath, in Sir William Gell and John P. Gandy, Pompeiana: The Topography, Edifices, and Ornaments of Pompeii (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1817–1819), plate 37. London Library

4

“DIETING WITH ANTIQUITY”: EATING AND DRINKING …

77

Fig. 4.7 “View of the Baker’s Shop and Mill,” in Clarke, Pompeii, 2:136. The baker’s shop in question is not the one in Fig. 4.6, but a shop “next to the house of Sallust, on the south side, being divided from it only by a narrow street” (Clarke, Pompeii, 2:135). London Library

sont encore préparées pour le festin du jour suivant; la farine qui alloit être pétrie est encore là” (“The amphoras are still decked for the morrow’s festival. The flour that was to have been kneaded into cakes is yet there”).42

78

C. CHARD

Fig. 4.8 “Glass bottle, partially destroyed by the heat of the lava, found in Herculaneum,” in Clarke, Pompeii, 1:6. London Library

The most striking element in this narrative is, of course, the cataclysm that destroys the city, but the very untroubled quality of the life that is laid waste supplies an element of contrast that is essential to the drama. References to food and wine both serve to heighten this contrast, since they suggest a daily routine of commensality; the Latin term convivium, which Katherine Dunbadin, in The Roman Banquet, defines as conveying “associations of festivity … with the consumption of food and wine implicit but not overtly stressed,” is directly invoked by both Beckford and Matthews when they describe the cellars of the villa, with their amphorae, as the relics of past “conviviality” (Fig. 4.9).43 These two writers implicitly trace out the same narrative as Piozzi when they move straight from the amphorae to the skeletons found in the same space.44 Beckford emphasizes the brutal interruption of convivial life especially strongly when he muses on how easily the “stoppers” to the amphorae, whether or not the wine was sealed only with “oil instead of corks” (a debate to which he glancingly refers), allowed earth and ashes to displace “the Massic and Falernian, with which they were once stored.”45

Accessible Antiquity In reflecting upon the gastronomic life of the ancient inhabitants before the eruption of Vesuvius, then, travelers find a way of shifting historical time into the ambit of personal time—a task that travel writing of this period repeatedly sets itself. In other ancient places—where, as already noted, eating and drinking intermittently play a part in the commentary— food and wine also, at times, help to accomplish such a shift. Rogers, in

4

“DIETING WITH ANTIQUITY”: EATING AND DRINKING …

79

Fig. 4.9 “Drinking Scene,” after a painting in the Thermopolium, in Clarke, Pompeii, 2:194. London Library

a prose section of his travel book, Italy, a Poem (1822–1828), explicitly charts the way in which the fare on offer—of however unlikely a nature—can forge connections with antiquity. Sitting down “in a splenetic humour” to “scanty fare” at Terracina, he contemplates “the lean thrushes in array before me”; a cloud of smoke from the fire jolts him first into a cry of despair and then, in reaction, into a sense of affinity with the ancients. The very meager quality of his surroundings and his food emphasizes all the more strongly the power of imagination that allows him to recruit antiquity on the side of pleasure: “Why,” I exclaimed, starting up from the table, “why did I leave my own chimney-corner?—But am I not on the road to Brundisium? And are not these the very calamities that befell Horace and Virgil, and Mæcenas, and Plotius, and Varius? Horace laughed at them—Then why should not I? Horace resolved to turn them to account; and Virgil—cannot

80

C. CHARD

we hear him observing, that to remember them will, by and by, be a pleasure?” My soliloquy reconciled me at once to my fate; and when, for the twentieth time, I had looked through the window on a sea sparkling with innumerable brilliants, a sea on which the heroes of the Odyssey and the Eneid had sailed, I sat down as to a splendid banquet. My thrushes had the flavour of ortolans; and I ate with an appetite I had not known before. “Who,” I cried, as I poured out my last glass of Falernian, (for Falernian it was said to be, and in my eyes it ran bright and clear as a topaz-stone) “Who would remain at home, could he do otherwise? Who would submit to tread that dull, but daily round; his hours forgotten as soon as spent?”46

In Pompeii, however, food and wine assume a topographical specificity, for at least two reasons. First, the daily life that is interrupted is characterized as one of domesticity—a domain in which the provision of nutriment might be assumed to play a part. In the buried city, as Matthews puts it, “you are admitted to … the domestic privacy of a people who have ceased to exist for seventeen centuries.”47 De Staël sets the amphorae prepared for a feast and the flour ready to be kneaded into dough in the context of a mise-en-scène in which “tout ce qui peut servir aux usages domestiques est conservé d’une manière effrayante” (“all domestic implements remain in overawing perfection”). She emphasizes that it is this glimpse of domestic life that makes Pompeii “la ruine la plus curieuse de l’antiquité” (“the most curious ruin of antiquity”): “À Rome, l’on ne trouve guère que les débris des monumens publics, et ces monumens ne retracent que l’histoire politique des siècles écoulées; mais à Pompéia, c’est la vie privée des anciens qui s’offre à vous telle qu’elle étoit” (“In Rome one hardly finds any wrecks, save those of public works, associated with the political changes of bygone centuries. In Pompeii, you retrace the private life of the ancients”) (Figs. 4.10 and 4.11).48 In Pompeii, moreover, antiquity is seen as offering itself up not merely to the work of scholarship but to instinct: as Stendhal puts it in Rome, Naples et Florence (1817/1826): at Pompeii, not only does one feel “transporté dans l’antiquité” (transported into antiquity), but “on en sait sur-le-champ plus qu’un savant” (one immediately knows more than a scholar). He adds, “C’est un plaisir fort vif que de voir face à face cette antiquité sur laquelle on a lu tant de volumes” (It is a very lively pleasure to see face to face that antiquity about which one has read so many volumes).49 Matthews, too, defines his experience of the city through an opposition to scholarship: “a morning’s walk through the solemn silent

4

“DIETING WITH ANTIQUITY”: EATING AND DRINKING …

81

Fig. 4.10 “Picture representing a domestic Supper-party,” in Clarke, Pompeii, 2:89. London Library

streets of Pompeii, will give you a livelier idea of their modes of life, than all the books in the world” (Fig. 4.12).50 The walk becomes an evocation of the ancient past, summoning it into presence. Food and wine, then, when consumed by the traveler in such a spot, serve as metonyms for intimate and instinctive access to the ancient past. They evoke this past all the more readily, moreover, because they are often implicitly classified as the product of the natural fertility and abundance of the city’s surroundings, rather than of cultural elaboration and sophistication. Travelers to the buried city describe the vineyards and cornfields around the ancient sites, as though to establish a sense of continuity

82

C. CHARD

Fig. 4.11 “Stove in the Kitchen of the House of Pansa,” in Clarke, Pompeii, 2:106. London Library

with the terrain that supplied the Pompeians with the fare that they were so dramatically prevented from enjoying. Starke mentions, on arrival, “a large vineyard, under which is the central part of the Town,” and Jameson observes how much better it would have been to have waited until the vines were in leaf.51 While John Chetwode Eustace, in his A Tour through Italy (1813), emphasizes the “thoughts and emotions solemn and melancholy” that Pompeii induces, he nonetheless includes three types of vegetation productive of food in his list of the four plants that adorn the “gentle swell” of ground above the ancient buildings: “It is clothed with corn, poplars, mulberries, and vines in their most luxuriant graces, waving from tree to tree.”52 Eating at the inn at Resina after his visit, Engelbach insists on the need to drink topographically specific wine: “To dine at the very foot of Vesuvius, and not drink Lachrime Christi, would have been worse than being at Rome and not seeing St. Peter’s.”53 Shelley, shortly after describing his picnic, accentuates the sense of the pleasures of the natural world—and metaphorically elides them with nourishment—by observing: “I now understand why the Greeks were such great Poets, & above all I can account, it seems to me, for the harmony the unity the perfection

4

“DIETING WITH ANTIQUITY”: EATING AND DRINKING …

83

Fig. 4.12 “View of a Cook’s Shop restored,” in Clarke, Pompeii, 2:82. London Library

the uniform excellence of all their works of art. They lived in a perpetual commerce with external nature and nourished themselves upon the spirit of its forms.”54 As delights aligned with the pleasures of nature, food and wine supply metaphors for reanimation: the buried past, in commentaries on Pompeii such as Stendhal’s and Matthews’s, is implicitly presented as antiquity once lost but now revived, and the restorative powers of food gently introduce another narrative of revival as a reminder of the first. For Goethe, the reviving and animating powers of nature are explicitly described as crucial to the experience of eating after viewing the city. After the earlier visit, he explicitly notes, in the description quoted above, that the spirits of the party begin to recover in response both to their meal and

84

C. CHARD

to the enchantment of sky and sea; in remarking that they look forward to returning once the vines are in leaf, he registers a further anticipation of renewed life. On the next visit, the imaginative power of the view of Castellamare and Sorrento from the table where Goethe’s party of travelers and Neapolitans are eating is emphasized by the responses that it induces: Die Gesellschaft fühlte sich so recht an Ihrem Wohnplatz, einige meinten, es müsse ohne den Anblick des Meers doch gar nicht leben sein. Mir ist schon genug, daß ich das Bild in der Seele habe, und mag nun wohl gelegentlich in das Bergland zurückkehren. [The company felt so at ease in their situation that] one of the Neapolitans declared that, without a view of the sea, life would not be worth living. Personally, it is enough for me that I now carry this picture in my memory and I shall quite happily return to the mountains, when the time comes.55

Defiant Eating There is at the same time another role that it is possible to see simple food and drink as playing in the symbolics of “dieting with antiquity” at Pompeii. In a city in which daily life—including gastronomic life—has been violently disrupted by natural forces, accounts of consuming modest refreshment allow the traveler to affirm that he or she is committed to carrying on with mundane existence. Simplicity of fare, perhaps, registers a discreet recognition that Pompeii is not a place in which to indulge in hubris: any account of eating, in a city presented as both destroyed and preserved, risks invoking Ovid’s expression Tempus edax rerum—“time eats all things.”56 Travelers allude to the vulnerable state of the ruins, eaten away, as Matthews observes, first by “the earthquake, which, as we learn from Tacitus, had already much damaged this devoted town, before its final destruction by the eruption of Vesuvius,” and then by the eruption itself: the traveler notes that the roofs of the buildings “have been broken in, by the weight of the shower of ashes and pumice stones, that caused the destruction of the town.”57 Just before this, Matthews expresses his awareness that foreign visitors themselves are, metaphorically, eating away at the ruins to an alarming extent (as Engelbach is when, in the account of the wine cellar already cited, he tries to take away a sample of the “burnt resinous substance”

4

“DIETING WITH ANTIQUITY”: EATING AND DRINKING …

85

in the amphorae): “It is a pity that the contents of the houses could not have been allowed to remain in the state in which they were found;— but this would have been impossible. Travellers are the greatest thieves in the world. As it is, they will tear down, without scruple, the whole side of a room, to cut out a favourable specimen of the stucco painting. If it were not for this pilfering propensity, we might have seen every thing as it really was left at the time of this great calamity.”58 Piozzi, immediately after her vision of bread baking, meat smoking and wine already decanted, uses her exclamation of horror, at the end of this evocation of sudden disaster, to unleash a new narrative, in which an allusion to the “pilfering propensity” of travelers merges with a reflection that travelers themselves share in the vulnerability of both the ruins and the ancient inhabitants, and may in fact be closer to the latter than they imagine —How dreadful are the thoughts which such a sight suggests! how very horrible the certainty, that such a scene may be all acted over again tomorrow; and that we, who to-day are spectators, may become spectacles to travellers of a succeeding century, who mistaking our bones for those of the Neapolitans, may carry some of them to their native country back again perhaps; as it came into my head that a French gentleman was doing, when I saw him put a human bone into his pocket this morning, and told him I hoped he had got the jaw of a Gaulish officer, instead of a Roman soldier, for future recollections to energize upon.59

Such a context of danger and potential destruction, in which travelers are aligned all the more closely with the ancient Pompeians who carry on baking their bread, cooking their meat and decanting their wine as their city is about to be covered in ashes, allows gustatory interludes, of the various degrees of simplicity described by Starke, Shelley, and Rogers— and wistfully imagined by Jameson—to function as a form of defiance: in maintaining a commitment to calmly consuming “some refreshment” in such a spot, travelers proclaim their determination to carry on with a form of day-to-day life in the very place where both domesticity and conviviality were so horrifically overthrown.60 At the same time, a pleasure in food and wine—especially when such fare is unelaborated, and presented as the product of natural fertility—is presented as an innocent pleasure, untainted by the burden of guilt borne by those travelers whose pilfering

86

C. CHARD

propensities accelerate the work of time. Nibbling at simple fare assumes a relationship of opposition to nibbling away at the ruins.61

Delusion, Confusion, Illusion Food and wine, then, enter into the relation between the traveler and the ancients in a series of equivocal ways: they allow a form of access to antiquity, yet fend off some of the more disturbing implications of affinities with the Pompeians. They promise to revive the ancient world, and elide ancient gastronomy with enduring natural abundance, yet serve as reminders of the cataclysm that left food and wine behind, unconsumed. Further equivocations about the relation between the ancient past of the buried city and contemporary experience of it are found in an account of a picnic at Pompeii in a well-known, much later work: Freud’s “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva” (1907), which examines the depiction of a blurring of boundaries between antique and personal pasts in Wilhelm Jensen’s novella Gradiva: Ein Pompejanischen Phantasiestück (1902). The erotic charge that drives the traveler’s attempts to make sense of the relation between past and present, both in the novella and in Freud’s summary and analysis of it, invests the picnic with much greater drama than those in the travel commentaries considered so far. The sharing of food amid the ruins in “Delusions and Dreams” nonetheless maps out ramifications of eating and drinking in ancient places that can also be identified, in less overt and conspicuous forms, in late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century writings. The informal meal at Pompeii in this narrative is shared by a young German archeologist, Norbert Hanold, and a young woman whom he sees as perhaps a ghost—a rediviva—since she greatly resembles the woman portrayed in an ancient bas-relief to which he is greatly attracted. He terms the woman in the relief Gradiva—“the girl who stops along”— because of her distinctive gait. After a terrifying dream, in which he sees Gradiva in Pompeii on the day of the city’s destruction, he feels an impulse to travel down from his German university town to Italy. In the buried city, he sees Gradiva “at the ‘hot and holy’ mid-day hour, which the ancients regarded as the hour of ghosts,” and, addressing her in Greek and then Latin, gets an unexpected reply: “If you wish to speak to me,” she said, “you must do so in German.” Their brief conversation leaves him in a state of extreme uncertainty:

4

“DIETING WITH ANTIQUITY”: EATING AND DRINKING …

87

After Gradiva’s disappearance our hero had a careful look at all the guests congregated for their mid-day meal at the Hotel Diomède and went on to do the same at the Hotel Suisse, and he was then able to feel assured that in neither of the only two hotels known to him in Pompeii was there anyone bearing the remotest resemblance to Gradiva. He would of course have rejected as nonsensical the idea that he might actually meet Gradiva in one of the two inns. And presently the wine pressed from the hot soil of Vesuvius helped to intensify the whirl of feeling in which he spent the day.62

A meeting the next day leaves him still confused, but on the following day, the young woman, who is gradually revealed to be a childhood friend, Zoe Bertgang (he has, it soon becomes clear, transferred his erotic attraction toward her onto a woman of marble) uses simple food to bring him toward a resolution of his confusion: He admitted that he was feeling dizzy in his head, and she suggested as a cure that he should share her small picnic meal with her. She offered him half of a roll wrapped up in tissue paper and ate the other half herself with an obviously good appetite. At the same time her perfect teeth flashed between her lips and made a slight crunching sound as they bit through the crust. “I feel as though we had shared a meal like this once before, two thousand years ago,” she said; “can’t you remember?” He could think of no reply, but the improvement in his head brought about by the food, and the many indications she gave of her actual presence, were not without their effect on him.63

Seeing a fly alighting on Gradiva’s hand, Hanold gives it “a vigorous slap,” and feels “a joyful conviction that he had without any doubt touched a real, living, warm human hand.” The reader comes to see “that the young archaeologist’s phantasies about his Gradiva may have been an echo of his forgotten childhood memories”: “What now took place in him was a struggle between the power of erotism and that of the forces that were repressing it; the manifestation of this struggle was a delusion.”64 Wine, then, for Hanold, intensifies his vacillation between delusion and reason, ancient past and personal memory, and food helps him to resolve his uncertainty. The picnics in travel writings include no such metaphorical elisions between the buried city that has been revived and personal memories rising to consciousness, and entail no intense struggles with outright delusion, but they do present eating and drinking as strategies

88

C. CHARD

for managing encounters with an ancient past that is confronted, as Stendhal puts it, not at a distance, mediated by “tant de volumes,” but “face à face.”65 The possibility of delusion is explicitly recognized, moreover, in two of the travel writings considered here, in the context of the remains or traces of ancient wine. Engelbach includes in Naples and the Campagna Felice a long narrative, eventually revealed as a dream, in which he visits the wine cellar at Pompeii with a group of travelers, and a French artist busies himself “in detaching a fragment of the dried wine-cake, in order to deposit it in the Musée Napoleon at Paris.” A dramatic sequence of events leads to the discovery of a marble sarcophagus containing the perfectly preserved body of an ancient Roman “in the attitude of sleep.”66 The Roman comes to life and calls out in Greek “Mnestheus! Mnestheus! Give me some drink,” at which the travelers contrive “to pour down his throat a small dose of water, mixed with some vitriolic elixir,” which one of them, a Russian surgeon, “happened to have by him”; their efforts seem “to refresh and revive him.” Rogers, at Pompeii, recounts a more muted resurgence of the ancient past. On successive visits to the buried city, he repeatedly mentions the traces of ancient life that appear first as “the circular stains of the cups on the marble slab in the liquor store,” then as “the stain of the liquorglasses” and—twice—as “the stains of the cups” (Figs. 4.13 and 4.14). In the sentence that follows his second sighting of these stains, the traveler incorporates a haunted, delusory moment: “As we looked down into the vintner’s-shop & on the jars enclosed in the counter cased with various

Fig. 4.13 “Flat drinking-cup,” in Clarke, Pompeii, 1:205. London Library

4

“DIETING WITH ANTIQUITY”: EATING AND DRINKING …

89

Fig. 4.14 “Ornamental drinking-glasses, cast in a mould,” in Clarke, Pompeii, 2:31. London Library

bits of Marble, I thought I saw the man serving his customers - & as the shadows of evening came on, & standing alone, I looked up the street of tombs towards the city-gate, the strange silence & deserted air of the place almost overcame me.”67 In his next comment, the traveler seems to naturalize delusion as a positively commendable way of experiencing Pompeii: “My companions were gone into the villa, & my time was wellspent.” It is just after this that he makes his observation: “Took some refreshment in the Basilica.”68 Both these passages draw on the assumption that delusion is intrinsic to the experience of Pompeii: its very atmosphere of intimacy draws the traveler into a relationship with antiquity that sets aside the passing of centuries, as Norbert Hanold does when he is convinced that Zoe Bertgang is the same person as a woman in a Roman bas-relief. Most picnics at Pompeii in travel writings are not directly concerned with delusion; in however brisk and practical a manner they are described, however, they form part of a project in which an element of illusion may well play a part: as Jameson puts it, a day of picnicking in the buried city should allow us to “make our recollections of the olden time, our deep impressions of the past, heighten our enjoyment of the present.” One reason that simple food and drink is best suited to this project is that any items too insistently contemporary or alien to the spot, such as “London bottled porter, and

90

C. CHARD

half a dozen different kinds of wine” are, it is suggested, liable to distract the traveler from the sense that he or she is being imperceptibly absorbed into a mise-en-scène of ancient life. Jameson is a great deal less critical when she describes “a luxurious dinner, washed down by a competent proportion of Malvoisie and Champagne,” in the less haunted and heady atmosphere of the Pamfili Gardens, in Rome; she remarks tolerantly that “considering the style and number of our party it was all consistently and admirably managed.”69 Acknowledgements I first gave a version of this essay as a paper at the conference “Seeing the Non-Existent,” organized by Victor Plahte Tschudi, at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in September 2013, and I delivered another version at “Temporality in European Travel Writing,” organized by Paula Henrikson and Christina Kullberg, at the University of Uppsala, in October 2015. I am grateful for comments and suggestions made by the organizers and participants at these conferences. I am also much indebted to Elena Fateeva for her expert help in scanning and formatting images from books, and I should like to thank the London Library for allowing me to use material in their collection for illustrations.

Notes 1. Mariana Starke, Travels in Italy, Between the Years 1792 and 1798, 2 vols. (London: R. Phillips, 1802 [1800]), 2:97. 2. Ibid., 2:109. 3. Anna Jameson, Diary of an Ennuyée (London: Henry Colburn, 1826), 241–42; 245–46. The reference at the beginning of this passage is to Joseph Forsyth, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy in the Years 1802 and 1803 (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1813), 302. My own essay “Picnic at Pompeii: Hyperbole and Digression in the Warm South,” in Antiquity Recovered: The Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum, ed. Victoria C. Gardner Coates and Jon L. Seydl (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007), 115–32, adopts this passage of Jameson’s Diary as its starting point, but is otherwise very different in focus from the present study of picnics at Pompeii and meals nearby. 4. Jameson, Diary, 246; 246; 247–48. The expression “talk the flowing heart” is possibly adapted from Alexander Pope, “The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated” (line 65): “My head and heart thus flowing thro’ my quill.”

4

“DIETING WITH ANTIQUITY”: EATING AND DRINKING …

91

5. J. M. Le Riche, Antiquités des environs de Naples, et dissertations qui y sont relatives (Naples: Imprimerie française, 1820), 31. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 6. Ibid., 31; 31; 31–32. Lucius Opimius was consul in 121 BCE. The Oxford Companion to Wine, ed. Jancis Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 500, suggests that Petronius and Martial “treat Opimian as a literary commonplace rather than a real wine: drinking Opimian in large quantities is what the nouveaux riches do to flaunt their wealth, but this is satire, not fact.” 7. P. B. Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock, 23 March 1819, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 2:73. See Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock, 23–24 January 1819: “you know not how delicate the imagination becomes by dieting with antiquity day after day” (ibid., 2:88). 8. Samuel Rogers, The Italian Journal of Samuel Rogers, ed. J. R. Hale (London: Faber and Faber, [1956]), 259. 9. Sydney Morgan, Italy, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1820), 2:346n. 10. [A. A. Lheureux and Ambroise Richard], Voyage de deux amis en Italie par le midi de la France, et retour par La Suisse et les départemens de l’est (Paris: Imprimerie de H. Fournier, 1829), 43. 11. Stendhal [Henri-Marie Beyle], Promenades dans Rome [1830], in Voyages en Italie, ed. V. del Litto (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 1243. 12. Rogers, Italian Journal, 255; 268. 13. Jameson, Diary, 94: “He talked long, et avec beaucoup d’onction, of ortolans and figs: till methought it was the very poetry of epicurism: and put me in mind of his own suppers”; Rogers, Italian Journal, 234. 14. Gérard de Nerval, “Isis,” first published as “Le Temple d’Isis: Souvenir de Pompéi,” in Œuvres Complètes, ed. Jean Guillaume and Claude Pichois, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1993), 3:612–23; 3:612. 15. Starke, Travels in Italy, 2:109–10. 16. [Lewis Engelbach], Naples and the Campagna Felice. In a Series of Letters Addressed to a Friend in England, in 1802 (London: R. Ackermann, 1815), 125–26; in a footnote, the traveler defines muffeta as: “A name given to the noxious vapours which, more or less, are felt on this side of Mount Vesuvius.” 17. [Andrea] De Jorio, Plan de Pompéi, et remarques sur ses édifices, par le chanoine de Jorio (Naples: De l’imprimerie française, 1828), vi. 18. Jameson, Diary, 245. 19. Starke, Travels in Italy, 2:109. 20. Stendhal, Promenades dans Rome, 1243. 21. See Ingrid Rowland, From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 89. Rowland gives an account of the Rapillo inn, “just outside the perimeter of the ancient city,” and

92

C. CHARD

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35.

describes its conversion into a more comfortable and pleasant building in the late eighteenth century. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italienische Reise, edited by Ernst Beutler, in Annalen, vol. 11 (Zürich: Artemis Verlag, 1962), 218; Italian Journey [1786–1788], trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 199. Goethe, Italienische Reise, 224; Italian Journey, 204. [Engelbach], Naples and the Campagna Felice, 132; 210. Ibid., 132. The author’s translation is “Would you have capital stuff?” [George Noël Gordon, Lord] Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (London: John Murray, 1973), 2:34, emphasis added. [Engelbach], Naples and the Campagna Felice, 125; 123. In a footnote, the traveler translates Don Michele’s words as: “It will be a supper, if we find any thing to eat at all.” The hungry Neapolitan cheers up considerably on eating at the inn and drinking the Lachrymae Christi there (132). Ibid.‚ 132. Théophile Gautier, Arria Marcella: Souvenir de Pompéi, in Un trio de romans (Paris: Victor Lecon, 1852), 346. For an earlier, generalized account of Roman gastronomic luxury, see Henry Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, in the Years 1777, 1778, 1779, and 1780, 2 vols. (London: P. Elmsly, 1783–1785), 1:117. [Engelbach], Naples and the Campagna Felice, 119. Jameson, Diary, 259. The history of the museums in which travelers viewed the remains of food is a complex one; I am grateful to Kenneth Lapatin for clarifying it for me. Most of the travelers quoted here see the foodstuffs at the royal palace at Portici, but Lheureux and Richard observe them in the Palazzo degli Studi in Naples (now the Museo Archeologico Nazionale). Ferdinand IV converted this latter building into a museum in 1777, but it took a while for the objects at Portici to be moved. Ferdinand seems to have begun this transfer in 1805, and it continued under Joseph Bonaparte and Joachim Murat, and then after Ferdinand’s return from exile in 1816, when the museum was renamed the Real Museo Borbonico. The transfer is thought to have been complete by 1822; Jameson, traveling in 1821–1822, saw the bread, figs, and grain while they were still at Portici. [Marie Anne Fiquet] du Boccage, Recueil des œuvres de Madame de Boccage, 3 vols. (Lyon: Chez les frères Perisse, 1762), 3:284; Madam du Bocage [Marie Anne Fiquet du Boccage], Letters Concerning England, Holland and Italy, 2 vols. (London: E. and C. Dilly, 1770), 2:87. Starke, Travels in Italy, 2:109; 2:121. Rogers, Italian Journal, 259. [Engelbach], Naples and the Campagna Felice, 127; 127; 127–28.

4

“DIETING WITH ANTIQUITY”: EATING AND DRINKING …

93

36. Henry Sass, A Journey to Rome and Naples , Performed in 1817 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1818), 192. 37. Lheureux and Richard, Voyage de deux amis en Italie, 50–51. 38. Henry Matthews, The Diary of an Invalid, Being the Journal of a Tour in Pursuit of Health in Portugal Italy Switzerland and France in the Years 1817, 1818 and 1819, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1820), 182; 216. 39. Ibid., 216. 40. William Beckford, The Travel Diaries of William Beckford of Fonthill [1783], ed. Guy Chapman, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Constable and Houghton Mifflin, 1928), 2:228. 41. Hester Lynch Piozzi, Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy and Germany, 2 vols. (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1789), 2:34–35. See also Piozzi’s account of this same sudden catastrophe in a letter to Samuel Lysons, dated 31 December 1785: The Piozzi Letters: Correspondence of Hester Lynch Piozzi, 1784– 1821 (Formerly Mrs. Thrale), ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, 3 vols. (Newark: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 1989–1996), 1:182. 42. Madame de Staël [Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein], Corinne, ou l’Italie [1807], ed. Claudine Herrmann, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions des femmes, 1979), 2:21; Madame de Staël, Corinne; or, Italy, trans. Isabel Hill (London: Richard Bentley, 1833), 190. 43. Katherine Dunbadin, The Roman Banquet: Images of Conviviality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4; Beckford, Travel Diaries, 228 and Matthews, Diary of an Invalid, 183 (for the term conviviality). 44. Beckford, Travel Diaries, 229; Matthews, Diary of an Invalid, 183. 45. Beckford, Travel Diaries, 228–29. 46. Rogers, Italy: A Poem [1822–1828] (London: T. Cadell, Jennings & Chaplin and E. Moxon, 1830), 169–70. 47. Matthews, Diary of an Invalid, 177. 48. Staël, Corinne, ou l’Italie, 2:21–22, 2:21, 2:21; Corinne; or, Italy, 190. 49. Stendhal, Rome, Naples et Florence [1826], in Voyages en Italie, ed. V. del Litto (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 535. The book was originally published in an earlier version in 1817. 50. Matthews, Diary of an Invalid, 177. 51. Starke, Travels in Italy, 2:98; Jameson, Diary, 247. 52. John Chetwode Eustace, A Tour through Italy, 2 vols. (London: J. Mawman, 1813), 2:600. 53. [Engelbach], Naples and the Campagna Felice, 132. 54. Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock, 23–24 January 1819, in Shelley, Letters, 2:74. Nourishment is not the only metaphor that invests the terrain with gustatory delights, even when these are not directly relevant. The term delicious is often applied to the climate, landscape and atmosphere

94

C. CHARD

55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

of the whole region around Naples. Jameson, describing the construction of the houses at Pompeii, observes: “the grand object was to exclude the sunbeams, and this which gives such gloomy and chilling ideas in our northern climes, must here have been delicious” (Diary, 245). Piozzi, in a letter of 1 March 1786 to Samuel Lysons, writes of Naples: “I was loth to leave that delicious Spot for all the Shows of Rome” (Piozzi Letters, 1:182). See also, for example, Rogers’s description of Baiae, quoted above: “a delicious hour” (Italian Journal, 255). Goethe, Italienische Reise, 218; 224; Italian Journey, 199; 204. The two diary entries are for 11 and 13 March 1787, respectively. The translation quoted leaves out the first part of the passage in German, supplied here between square brackets. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 15.234–36. I am grateful to Frédéric Tinguely for suggesting to me that this expression might be relevant to a study of eating and drinking at Pompeii. Matthews, Diary of an Invalid, 179; 179. [Engelbach], Naples and the Campagna Felice, 127; Matthews, Diary of an Invalid, 178. Piozzi, Observations, 2:35–36. Starke, Travels in Italy, 2:97; Shelley, Letters, 2:88; Rogers, Italian Journal, 259; Jameson, Diary, 247–48. For an account of the uses of food and wine as a domain of innocent pleasure in travel writing of this period, see my Critical Reader of the Grand Tour: Tristes Plaisirs (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 230–31. Sigmund Freud, “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva” [1907], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. under the general editorship of James Strachey, vol. 9 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1959), 1–95; 11; 16; 18; 19–20. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 27; 27; 31; 49. Stendhal, Rome, Naples et Florence, 535. [Engelbach], Naples and the Campagna Felice, 272; 275; 279. Rogers, Italian Journal, 254; 259; 260; 267; 259. Ibid., 259. Jameson, Diary, 248; 246; 280; 280.

CHAPTER 5

“Raw Productions … Exported in Abundance”: Continental Tourism in Satire, 1815–1828 Benjamin Colbert

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “tourism” first appears in 1811, a fact frequently cited by historians of travel when accounting for the modernity of the institution. Less remarked is the provenance of the reference, a spoof printing in The Sporting Magazine of “a specimen of an intended publication, to be called ‘Sublime Cockney Tourism; or, the Journal of a Journey from Gray’s Inn Gate to Bagnigge Wells; performed by Peter Pattypan, Soupagrapher to his Majesty … Embellished with a View of the Post which determines the Liberties of the City; a Map of the Route; a View of Huntington’s Chapel, as it is building; and an Elevation of the late Cow-keeper’s shed.’”1 After mocking the portmanteau titles of contemporary travel accounts, and the vanity of authorial credentials and qualifications, the satire itself makes

B. Colbert (B) University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Colbert and L. Morrison (eds.), Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36146-4_5

95

96

B. COLBERT

fun of antiquarian investigation, picturesque appreciation, and the accumulation of eccentric observation amounting to an author’s own hobbyhorse. Microspection underscores the absurdities of travel pretensions, the inability of tourist subjectivities to expand beyond inherent capacities or to separate essential from inconsequential detail. Other travel satires of the period frequently belittle the habitual exercise not only of the Englishman’s desire for “itinerary fame” through writing accounts, however nugatory, but also his “traveling propensity,”2 as it was frequently deemed, farther afield than the “Liberties of the City.” “At the close of every term,” notes the Edinburgh Review in 1806, “our universities send forth their raw productions to be exported in abundance to the Continent; and no sooner is the season of fashionable gayety concluded in London, than the roads are covered with tourists and travellers, who issue from the metropolis in every direction.”3 Robert Southey labeled the phenomenon oikophobia: fear of home.4 With the re-opening of the Continent to British tourism after Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815, conservative satire and social critique found materials ready made: the precedence of Grand Tourism giving way to consumerist indulgence, the privileges of masculine aristocratic ideals diluted by the opening of tourism to women and the “lower orders,” and the continental tour’s educative motives overcome by speed and superficial observation—not to mention the pretensions of the tourists themselves, the shortcomings of foreign hosts, and the expected accumulation of written accounts of indifferent quality. In his 1826 satire, “The Press, or Literary Chit Chat,” the elusive James Harley looks back on the previous decade of European travels through a dialogue between Hocus and Jocus. “Out on the travelling mania,” cries Hocus, that pervades Both wives and husbands, bachelors and maids! When will thy torrent, Exportation, cease, And Britons their own mutton kill in peace?5

The same year, the Retrospective Review found the rise of Samuel Leigh’s guidebook empire cause for a lament resonant of Edmund Burke’s on the passing of the age of chivalry in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1792): “Alas! the Grand Tour has lost all its grandeur. Its glory is vanished—its honours are in the dust—run down by strings of diligences and the Mail Poste—trampled under foot by crowds of pedestrian, equestrian,

5

“RAW PRODUCTIONS … EXPORTED IN ABUNDANCE” …

97

and vehicular vagabonds, making their way by means of a guide-book and a vocabulary. If any man wants ‘instruction for forreine travell’ at this time of day, let him call at Mr. Leigh’s shop in the Strand.”6 Similar vignettes are found embedded in travelogues, periodical reviews, and magazine series, such as the New Monthly Magazine’s “Travelling Troubles” that ran from 1829 to 1830.7 All identify the cultural phenomenon of tourism with the proliferation of consumer tastes and products, the generation of fads and fancies, and, more seriously, with an imbalance of trade between Britain and its continental neighbors. As early as 1815, in the immediate post-war climate of high prices and privation at home, the export of spending power to the Continent was represented as a serious dereliction of patriotism, helping to bolster foreign economies at the expense of Britain’s own, and ill-compensated by the import of post-Revolutionary manners and suspect political and religious ideas. As a genre, early-nineteenth-century travel satire has received scant scholarly attention. We as yet know little about the characteristics, forms, and targets of this satire, or much about the travel satirists themselves, notwithstanding the keen interest in travel lies and imaginary voyages of the eighteenth century, such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) or Rudolph Erich Raspe’s Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of His Marvellous Travels (1785).8 To be sure, Gary Dyer has included selected travel satires in the chronological checklist accompanying his British Satire and the Politics of Style, and he discusses William Combe’s three tours of Doctor Syntax and Benjamin Disraeli’s Voyage of Captain Popanilla (1828) as books implicated in the decline of satire as a popular genre, but not as travel satire per se.9 Travel satire plays no role in Steven Jones’s Satire and Romanticism or his 2003 collection, The Satiric Eye, and after such promising starts as this and the five-volume Pickering & Chatto edition, British Satire 1785–1840, also in 2003, the years since have been somewhat fallow ones in the study of Romantic-period satire more generally, excepting important work by John Strachan on advertising and Ian Haywood on caricature.10 Yet, as the Sporting Magazine’s coining of the word “tourism” suggests, travel satire plays an important role in reflecting, and reflecting on, the transition from Grand Tourism to mass tourism in the nineteenth century. This satire is also fruitful ground for analyzing authorial agency, national identity, and the social, political, and economic relations that underlay travel writing’s claims to register a post-Napoleonic modernity-in-action during the long

98

B. COLBERT

nineteenth century. My focus here is continental travel, where that particularly Romantic export and import, the tourist, becomes a figure of transgression, danger, and humor, but one also implicated in perceptions about the health of the economic nation in a post-Napoleonic consumption-driven Europe. The “export/import” idiom is never far from the surface of continental travel satire and reflects a growing cultural unease about the moral, political, and cultural price of commercialized leisure. Against the tide of a burgeoning tourist economy, conservative satires hold out for a Grand Tourist ethos in which class loyalty holds sway, but in doing so evince an anxiety over the disruptions to that class identity and authority introduced by continental travel in the post-Napoleonic era. In her treatment of non-fictional travel accounts (paralleling this body of satirical texts), Victoria Thompson has argued that such anxieties bubble up in the bodily discomfort and distress travelers find in negotiating unfamiliar European (particularly French) destinations and social interactions; in turn, these call attention to travelers’ self and national identity in uncomfortable ways. Their accounts, Thompson notes, “undermined their authority as outside observers.”11 Satirists attempted a rear-guard defense of British national identity while at the same time recognizing via their satiric vehicles that this identity was under threat from within as well as from without. The protection of the cabriolet may have worked as a useful narrative device in some verse satires (see my discussion of George Croly, below, for example), but satirists recognized too that travelers stepped out and often into social interactions in which they played only a supporting role. Itself a branch of polemic, satire was underpinned and echoed by polemicists in the period, including Thomas Bowdler, the Reverend John Marriott, and the Reverend John William Cunningham, who all engaged in earnest arguments against the implications of mass tourism.12 These polemics at times achieve the vitriolic tone of Juvenalian excoriation, although they cannot strictly be called satires. However, they sum up much of the critique in the satires themselves, and more thoroughly underline the means by which touristic ignorance and superficiality become transmuted into social ill. Bowdler, the earliest contributor to this debate, published A Postscript to the Letters Written in France in 1814 (1815), the same year in which Paul Gerbod estimates that in excess of 13,822 Britons visited or resided in Paris alone.13 Bowdler’s Postscript was based on his first-hand experience in France during the period following Napoleon’s first defeat. A second edition, Observations on Emigration to France (1815), appeared after Waterloo and affirms rather than updates

5

“RAW PRODUCTIONS … EXPORTED IN ABUNDANCE” …

99

his earlier warning in the face of “an immense number of persons of different age, sex, and condition, who are preparing to visit France, where many express an intention of fixing their residence.”14 Bowdler’s position is in many respects unremarkable, a reprise of Richard Hurd’s popular argument for British exceptionalism and against heterodox tourism, On the Uses of Foreign Travel (1764). Continental travel, perfectly commendable for single young men to satisfy their curiosity, teaches as it should to Bowdler “the inferiority of almost every thing that they will find in that kingdom, to what they have left in their own.”15 His anxiety heightens however at the prospect of families proposing semipermanent residences in France, particularly out of motives of economy and for the education of children. Bowdler addresses fathers of the lower gentry fleeing the burden of taxation and inflation at home for a cheaper residence abroad, and argues that the prospect of economy is an illusion, owing to the extra expense of travels, goods, and services, as well as exposure to disinformation and imposition by local tradesmen seeking the greatest advantage from their many foreign customers.16 The possibility of attractive locations being “spoilt” by the formation of expatriate communities, where “some … are not of the most respectable class,” also figures in Bowdler’s argument, anticipating a perennial complaint in the history of modern tourism.17 However, Bowdler’s measured tones desert him when he speaks of education. The French are fit only for teaching dancing, rather than “manly” subjects. Worse, instructors qualified as tutors for sons and daughters are of an age to have imbibed in their youth the anti-religious and anti-matrimonial revolutionary ideologies that they would secretly or unconsciously impart to impressionable youth; even returned émigré Catholic priests could not be trusted to separate religious instruction from subtle attacks on Protestantism and attempts to convert their foreign pupils.18 Summing up, Bowdler warns his readers that French gratitude to Britain for defeating Napoleon was limited to “the Court, its immediate dependents, and a few emigrants, particularly the clergy”; “The great body of the French nation is at present actuated towards our countrymen by a degree of hatred, which I believe has seldom been equalled, and is not easy to be expressed.”19 Money alone is the motive of any kindness the English visitor might experience; the English in France thus live precariously, their national identity always under attack, and most so the longer their residence continues. Marriott’s contribution to this collective voice of admonition, Hints to a Traveller into Foreign Countries (1816), focuses on what he perceives as

100

B. COLBERT

a Sabbatarian crisis precipitated by tourists’ self-indulgence, their propensity to imitate the religious and social practices of hosts rather than uphold their own exceptional values. For Marriott, Sabbatarianism tests not only Britons’ own religious dedication, but also their national character, particularly as representatives of a nation in high estimation as the liberators of Europe.20 Personal “disgrace … will attach to your country,” he argues, enjoining his readers to remember that pleasure tourism is always political; that one travels in both a private and public capacity; and that the future of Protestantism and civil order are at stake.21 Employing a diction common to satirists and travel writers such as John Scott, whom Marriott quotes, Marriott draws on the pharmacopoeia of disease and intoxication. French secularism and southern Catholicism have introduced “infectious particles” that threaten the health of the tourist while weakening peace and security in Europe.22 Inevitably, Marriott considers the danger of contagion in terms of class, and his apostrophe to genteel tourists glosses Juvenal’s eighth satire against debased nobility.23 If the tourist is “freed by an inoculating process from the prejudices of a British education,” he will return to “sap the pillars” of “this goodly constitution in church and state.”24 In an age of general intellectual enlightenment, Marriott argues, nobility must attain higher standards of morality if it is to maintain its order by attracting respect from the “lower orders.” Publishing his Cautions to Continental Travellers (1818) after the first wave of travel to France, Cunningham enlarges this purview to consider the effects of continental travel in general on British national character. His epigraph from Milton’s Paradise Lost, the scene in which Adam repudiates Eve for her “strange / Desire of wandering, this unhappy morn,” encapsulates his own predilection for the masculine values of Grand Tourism, his belief “that females are … more susceptible of impression than males.”25 For Cunningham, as for Marriott, the danger lay in susceptible types of travelers opening themselves to foreign influence: women, the young, the bored, the restless, those who go because “every body travels,” and the “subordinate classes.”26 Ill-equipped to withstand the “contagion” of foreign manners, these travelers threaten in his view to enervate British national character by weakening its domestic and commercial foundations. Cunningham compares them to the chameleon, “a certain sensitive little animal” that “take[s] the complexion of every object which they approach.”27 To Bowdler’s arguments against foreign education of British children, Cunningham adds the danger of peer pressure exerted by the greater numbers of continental schoolchildren and

5

“RAW PRODUCTIONS … EXPORTED IN ABUNDANCE” …

101

their educational establishments on the child: “How can it be expected, that … he shall come back to us without a new image stamped on him, after passing through this foreign mint.”28 Cunningham extends the coining metaphor to the plight of the equally susceptible middle classes, who might “transplant to the desk and the counting-house the habits of those … whose empty heads, and hollow hearts, and sceptical opinions, have assisted to hurry on the storm [of] anarchy and irreligion.”29 It is “the controul exercised by the travelled over the untravelled” that gives the returned traveler her or his moral force, a recognition that in itself suggests the transformative nature of continental travel to modern selfhood. As they mature, Cunningham argues, the young will spread early impressions formed on the continent among “the circles in which they move”; traveled women holding sway over the domestic affections will change “the tone and complexion” of society “with large results to the national character”; and, more generally, continental travelers of all walks of life will return to “inoculate their respective classes,” a use of metaphor that Cunningham shares with (or borrows from) Marriott, identifying inoculation with the spread of the disease it would control.30 Cunningham follows Bowdler and Marriott in identifying French revolutionary influence as the abiding danger, the destructive germ that might re-infect Europe in general and Britain in particular unless resisted consciously and by policy.31 Yet while he pits Grand Tourism against its degenerate successor, what he calls “modern travelling,”32 Cunningham does not propose an outright return to a past, exclusive mode of tourism, but advocates a tourism reinvigorated by older values, and leaves open the possibility that travel in itself might serve a useful function so long as its purpose is purely leisure, and its duration short. In his preface, Cunningham addresses himself “not so much to the class of Travellers who merely snatch from the toils of a busy and anxious life a few weeks or months to refresh themselves … as to those who either domesticate themselves and their families in foreign countries, or so protract their Continental visits.”33 Here the possibility of “refreshment,” a mode of consumption in which superficial enjoyments do not deepen into imitation or infection, anticipates a tourist industry that premises itself on the inviolability and reproducibility of the tourist subject. For Cunningham, refreshment preserves national feeling without compromising Protestantism, work, or domestic relations. Notwithstanding this possible future, most satirists responding to the first wave of continental tourism drew on, echoed, and heightened the

102

B. COLBERT

more negative arguments of Bowdler, Marriott, and Cunningham, depicting a tourism replete with snares and dangers to the tourist that might have repercussions at home. Such satirists offer a notion of transnational encounter that is less negotiation than imposition, where the tourist cannot purchase security with spending power, but instead lays him or herself open to a new insidious cultural warfare exploiting touristic ignorance, naiveté, moral weakness, and other character susceptibilities. Like the polemicists, the satirists represented this state of affairs in terms of contagious disease: germs of foreign conduct that threaten the well-being not only of the tourist, but, more importantly, that of the British body politic via the influence of returned tourists who take up their place in society. However, whereas the polemicists urged caution through expository argument, the satirists explored a range of genre forms, upping the emotional register with Juvenalian verses excoriating foreign values, or lowering it to milder caricature in the miscellaneous essay. The satiric novel, too, adopts the topic, playing out the dangers of tourism though intricate plots that at once engage in the discourses of travel description and reveal the subtle impositions at work beneath surfaces. The first of these works to take notice of continental tourism as a threat to national well-being was a blank-verse satire by Samuel Charles Wilks, Emigration; or, England and Paris , published anonymously in 1816. The poem does not spare English watering-places for concentrating economic well-being and immorality within specific locales at home, rather than distributing the tourist guinea more widely and thus mitigating its deleterious consequences. But the chief target of attack is the self-export of continental tourists at a time of economic crisis at home, and the consequent import of corrupt French values by returning hordes, the “moral contagion” emanating from France’s “poisonous atmosphere” (as the author deems it in a preface).34 Paris is the chief sink of iniquity: politically, culturally, and religiously. It is the “foul spoiler of unnumber’d realms, / The curse of nations”; the location of “riot” and “sleek urbanity”; and “knows no God / But pomp and pleasure,” a combination of attributes that pathologizes contemporary representations of the French as superficial and theatrical, obsessed with the play of appearances at the expense of morality and social cohesion.35 In Emigration, young Englishwomen are especially at risk from their French counterparts: Vivacious daughters of Parisian clime, Sages of fashion, priestesses of love,

5

“RAW PRODUCTIONS … EXPORTED IN ABUNDANCE” …

103

Assume the task to bend our pliant fair To Southern arts.36

Young gentlemen, the poet urges, should remain at home rather than finishing their education abroad; the English public schools and universities must be reformed to reduce the temptation or the necessity of foreign educational schemes. In this and in much else the satire reflects Hurd’s by then widely known argument in his dialogue On the Uses of Foreign Travel (1764), reprinted in 1811, in which the character “Locke” argues contra “Shaftsbury” that “unpolished integrity” alone constitutes the gentleman, and that foreign travel was largely irrelevant for the generality of would-be travelers.37 Reviews of Emigration took sides, testimony to the revived currency of this debate. The Gentleman’s Magazine “admire[d] its manly indignation,” and The Amusing Chronicle concurred that “the number of individuals from England who … think a visit to Paris as essential as the Mahometans deem a journey to Mecca, have at last awakened the muse of Indignation.” The Monthly Catalogue, however, lamented its “venom of scurrility”: “Neither are we of opinion that the English … when they were excluded from the Continent, were a more moral people than they are likely to become since a free communication has opened between them and their neighbours.”38 The tension here between an ideal of national self-sufficiency and a transnational experiential educational value is one played out in much of the satire of the period. Hurd’s notion that, for most, on-the-spot information gathering can be compensated by attending to the best travel writings of the best travelers, however, could not long survive an expansion of the means of travel and leisure time to include the middle classes. Emigration was followed by George Croly’s part-Rabelaisian satire, Paris in 1815, published by John Murray in 1817, which similarly represents Paris as a cesspool of human wretchedness and contagion.39 Dedicated to John Wilson Croker, whose wildly intemperate review of Lady Morgan’s radical travelogue France (1817) appeared in Murray’s Quarterly Review the same year, Croly’s satire arranges itself in opposition to travel writers like Anne Plumptre, Morris Birkbeck, and Morgan who argued that the French Revolution had produced a net benefit on French economic growth, social equality, and moral improvement.40 Croly’s approach is retrospective, painting a scene of squalor directly rooted in revolutionary and Napoleonic values. From the window of a cabriolet— a suitable framing device that both allows observation yet protects the

104

B. COLBERT

traveler within—all appears “a mass of folly, filth, and strife, / Of heated, rank, corrupting, reptile life.”41 Mixing Juvenalian satire in heroic couplets with earnest sententiousness in Spenserians, the poem reads Paris as a series of monuments to “revolutionary frenzy,” yet hints at a general amelioration in which tourism might flourish, a future in which restored monarchy and courtly society have had time to work on these materials of destruction: “[The traveller] stood beside the grave of Europe, and was a witness of her resurrection.”42 However, in the Paris of 1815, Croly’s satire makes clear, tourists who sought pleasure found only its distorted mask. William Jerdan’s satiric novel, Six Weeks in Paris, or a Cure for the Gallomania (1817), similarly highlights how the surface pleasures that Paris seems to offer its gentlemen and lady tourists conceal a choreographed “vortex of irretrievable ruin” that would draw in the unwary, a tourist industry modeled on the surveillance system of Joseph Fouché, Napoleon’s ex-minister of police.43 While Lord Beacon, “piping hot from the University of Oxford,”44 successfully negotiates these pitfalls, modeling (after Hurd) how the modern Grand Tourist alone has sufficient taste and discernment to do so, Jerdan crowds the novel with other, more compromised tourist types—Sir Humphrey Homespun and his Frenchified wife, the John Bullish merchant critical of all things foreign, the Greeks and pigeons (cardsharps and embezzlers on the run)—at times gesturing to a moral laxity emanating as much from England as from France. This dual concern is picked up three years later in a milder vein by Doctor Syntax in Paris, or a Tour in Search of the Grotesque (1820), an anonymous satire counterfeiting William Combe’s creation and Thomas Rowlandson’s engravings, consisting of comic tetrameter couplets accompanied by descriptive and not altogether critical travel notes. Like Wilks’s Emigration and Croly’s Paris, these verses caricature and dehumanize France and the French, yet also direct much of the fun at Syntax’s touristic habits, desires, and presumptions, with passing glances, for example, at the disreputable “scandal-mongering” among English exiles at Boulogne.45 This theme recurs as late as 1829 in a satire published in Paris, Letters from the Bull Family in Boulogne, which describes the town as “the most lively, sociable, convenient, gay, musical, card-playing, gambling, funny, scandalous, love-making place, out of Paris”: “In short,” it concludes, “Boulogne is English.”46 The shift here from a satire dependent on the perceived threat of the foreign to one that uses foreign

5

“RAW PRODUCTIONS … EXPORTED IN ABUNDANCE” …

105

locales to direct critique at home values and faults marks a maturation of travel satire, one I shall return to again. Among the milder mixed-form or Menippean satires is Felix M’Donough’s The Hermit in London (1819), a spinoff of Jerdan’s translation of Victoire-Joseph Étienne de Jouy’s L’hermite de la Chausséed’Antin (1813). M’Donough includes a sketch of an English “gallomaniac,” “Charles Beverley,” who announces himself as just “imported from France.”47 Beverley’s economic reasons for eschewing his native land— its national debt, sluggishness of trade, tax burden, credit crisis, and high prices—purport to champion the rights of citizens, but become transparent cover for his own cowardice and moral turpitude; the true patriot stays at home and uses his efforts and estates to help the nation in its recovery. Like Jerdan, and the other satirists already mentioned, M’Donough indicts the casual émigré for being as much the problem as the solution; the sheer numbers of tourists draining the economy create the conditions that Beverley bewails. But M’Donough also chastises Beverley as “Gallo-Briton, an unnatural mixture,” acting “from pure selfishness or from the spirit of contradiction.”48 Like Hurd, M’Donough counters this kind of Gallomania with a picture of aristocratic Grand Tourist values: the just and measured incorporation of foreign pleasures into the texture of English life, rather than the adoption of foreign over native manners. The satire thus criticizes the democratization of tourism as an inevitable means by which mere pleasure-seeking occludes instruction and patriotism as motives for travel; the inauthentic tourist emigrates “to satiate his brutal appetite” or is driven on by the exigencies of “debt, misdemeanor, disease, and discontent.”49 It would be a mistake to consider conservative and Tory satirists as the most influential voices of the period, for a more politically radical version of the travel satire genre, Thomas Moore’s The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), achieved a sophistication and popularity that eluded the others, reaching a ninth edition within a year, and inspiring sequels and spinoffs.50 The Fudge Family employs many of the same motifs that I have been discussing but manipulates them for different ends. These are largely political, as Moore dwells less on the details of travel experience as on the reactionary forces at work in post-Napoleonic Europe, particularly resurgent Royalism concentered in the Congress of Vienna as well as the personalities of Tory ministers whose policies in Europe parallel their repressive actions

106

B. COLBERT

against Ireland, Moore’s ultimate frame of reference. The satire comprises a series of verse letters written by members of a genteel Anglo-Irish family visiting Paris. Phil Fudge, Esq., a radical apostate turned sycophant writes to his patron, the Tory minister, Lord Castlereagh. Phil’s children, Bob and Biddy, ride their hobby-horses in letters to friends; Bob boasts his feats of feasting, while his romance-addled seventeen-year-old sister retails a love affair with a mysterious foreign stranger. Her traveling tutor (Phelim Connor), meanwhile, reveals his naked Irish republicanism in an anti-monarchical diatribe that is rendered fragmentary by a censoring “editor.” Like Jerdan’s cast of characters in Cure for the Gallomania, Moore’s in part sends up the “groups of ridiculous English who were at that time swarming in all directions throughout Paris,” as Moore later recalled in a preface to his Works (1840–1841).51 While his political attack on Tory ministerial hypocrisy and colonialism in Ireland informs the bulk of the satire, Moore also takes on tourism’s neo-consumerist ideology. Phil Fudge plans his visit around a travel writing project foisted on him by Castlereagh: “a good orthodox work” to “prove to mankind that their rights are but folly.” Fudge’s “Travels in France,” as Biddy narrates, thus precede and dictate his travels in France: The matter’s soon settled—Pa flies to the Row (The first stage your tourists now usually go) Settles all for his quarto—advertisements, praises— Starts post from the door, with his tablets—French phrases— Scott’s Visit, of course …52

“Scott’s Visit ” is John Scott’s A Visit to Paris (1815), a touchstone for Marriott, as we have seen, for Scott promotes British exceptionalism and popularizes a vision of French superficiality and moral corruption.53 Secure in the knowledge that his book has been well puffed in advance, Phil Fudge makes a virtue of following in Scott’s footsteps, of knowing little French, and of judging “men and manners” from his carriage. Bookmaking is a mere transaction, selling a version of polity on the back of popular interest in liberated France. But it is Bob Fudge’s comic obsession with eating France that fuels Moore’s more direct attack on consumerism, its emphasis on self-gratification at the expense of moral or political authenticity. Everything Bob does in the name of tourism involves consumption: breakfast at “old Café Hardy,” dinner at “Beauvilliers,” a sampling of “the Carte [menu] at old Very’s.”54 Even the “Montagnes

5

“RAW PRODUCTIONS … EXPORTED IN ABUNDANCE” …

107

Russes”—the popular new roller-coaster rides to which tourists and locals alike flocked—are judged by Bob as aids to digestion.55 For Moore, Bob epitomizes British chauvinism, inoculated against sympathy with the foreigner. Although Bob knows that the British “cram down [French] throats an old King for their health,” he judges such force-feeding necessary, and is caught off guard by the French response: “Yet, spite of our good-natur’d money and slaughter, / They hate us.” Echoing Bowdler’s judgment of the “degree of hatred” felt outside court circles, Moore’s point here is that consumption and royal legitimacy are bed-fellows born of self-delusion. “But who the deuce cares,” concludes Bob, “as long as they nourish us / Neatly as now, and good cookery flourishes.”56 The matter of France might be traced in other satires: for example, the anonymously authored The Englishman in Paris, a Satirical Novel (1819), and, in the same genre, Harriet Wilson’s popular Paris Lions and London Tigers (1825).57 From the early 1820s, however, France exerted less of a pull on travel satire as tourists turned their attentions to Italy and to destinations even farther afield. Satire begins to shift toward the matter of tourism itself as a state of transnational and transcultural formations, where older Grand Tourist motifs of instruction, patriotism, aesthetic autonomy, and class distinction come up against the exigencies of commercial tourism, cosmopolitanism, residence abroad, and travel as self-identity. This question of touristic identity and self-fashioning, however, is raised most entertainingly by another Irish-inflected satire, The Continental Traveller’s Oracle; or, Maxims for Foreign Locomotion. By Dr Abraham Eldon. Edited by His Nephew (1828), a satiric retrospective on travel, travelers, travel writing, and social attitudes to travel over the post-war period, whose narrator is presented as a long-time resident in Italy. Its author, Thomas Wyse (1791– 1862), was an Irish peer who set off on his Grand Tour in 1815 and spent the next ten years abroad, traveling as far as Constantinople and Asia Minor. In Italy he befriended Napoleon’s brother Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Canino, and married his sixteen-year-old daughter Letitia Bonaparte in 1821. In 1825, while the marriage unraveled, Wyse returned to Ireland. From his Italian travel journals, he published subsequently twenty unsigned articles (“Walks in Rome and Its Environs”) in The New Monthly Magazine from 1826 to 1829, and The Continental Traveller’s Oracle in 1828. A moderate Whig in politics and himself a Roman Catholic, he supported Catholic Emancipation and the Reform

108

B. COLBERT

Bill, but was too much a Unionist to defeat Daniel O’Connell, with whom he contested Co. Waterford in the 1830 elections.58 In his Oracle, however, Irish politics are treated obliquely and Wyse snipes from the side lines; Abraham Eldon is an Englishman abroad, promoting English attitudes that reveal the arrogance of patriotism and imperialism. With a sly glance at Benjamin Brevity’s Winter Evenings in Paris (1815), which recommends “the judicious use of violence”59 as the right of Englishmen abroad, Wyse’s mouthpiece writes: “abroad you are the representative of your country, and unite in your own person, all that she has of great or good. … Any doubt thereon is an insinuation upon your honesty, and the doubter should be immediately refuted and knocked down.”60 Elsewhere in the volumes, he generalizes further: “Every Englishman has an indefeasible title to the heart of the whole Continent, and wherever he travels, ought to find himself at home … Europe is his slave-market—and he, as he well knows it, her only legitimate sultan.”61 The Continental Traveller’s Oracle comprises an editor’s preface and notes, ostensibly by the late Abraham Eldon’s traveling nephew; Eldon’s autobiography (filling half of the first volume); and 268 maxims or dicta. These last are arranged under “three parts:—The Preparation, the Performance, the Result:—or, 1st, what should be done before setting out; 2nd, what should be done when out; and 3rd, how to employ what hath been done whilst out.”62 The volumes allude to, rather than parody, William Kitchiner’s sprawling Traveller’s Oracle; or, Maxims for Locomotion: Containing Precepts for Promoting the Pleasures and Hints for Preserving the Health of Travellers (1827), also published by Colburn. Kitchiner’s digressive book mixes observations on traveling and travel narratives with songs, medical advice, and mini-advertisements for proprietary medicines and travelers’ aids such as “Patent hoop tires,” “Collinge’s Patent Axles,” “Cook’s Patent Life Preserver for Carriages,” “patent Leather Waterdecks,” “Patent Lamps,” “Pratt’s Patent Folding Bedstead,” not to mention “Pocket Door Bolts” (especially “The Corkscrew Door Fastener”), “Dr Kitchiner’s feet Preservers” and “Nail Nippers.”63 Through the mask of Eldon, Wyse wryly records his response to this attention to tourism’s minutiae: “There are a thousand little secrets known only to the inquisitive and the endurer; and though I have no sinister hope of a patent, I think that a little of that favour, which of late years seems to have been lavished upon gas, Mechanics’ Institutes, and what not, should be extended to improvements … in matters of intellect,—discoveries which, if well managed, may in process of time turn out to mind, what gas has

5

“RAW PRODUCTIONS … EXPORTED IN ABUNDANCE” …

109

turned out to body.”64 While Kitchener promotes and puffs the pleasures of middle-class travel and the commercial age that grows around it, Wyse balances the figure of Abraham Eldon between Grand Tourist subjectivity and that of an emerging travel culture. Eldon recognizes travel as a modern condition implicated in what Cunningham, as we have seen, calls “the controul exercised by the travelled over the untravelled.” For Eldon, the percolation of travel into wider culture is near complete: he dedicates his volumes “To the yet untravelled portion of the British nation (if such there be)” and argues later on: “That a man travelleth to talk of his travels is an axiom which can scarcely be disputed in the nineteenth century; but that a man cannot talk without travelling, … is one not a whit less true.”65 At the same time, and despite the inclusivity of his dedication, Eldon promotes in a last ditch effort a revitalization of gentlemanly travel by rule and maxim. His maxims focus on the higher classes, both tourists and residents abroad; they largely address men as solo travelers or leaders of family groups; and he has little to say about female travelers outside domestic contexts. In the end, Wyse turns the satire against Eldon. Like Gulliver who must stuff his nostrils with stable straw to bear human companions, Eldon develops a comitatus with Italian asses meant for the sausage trade, and, in later life, prefers cats as traveling companions. His prescription for professionalizing the new traveler, couched in the philosophical terminology of what has always been, proves that his self-professed “art of travel,” for all he says to the contrary, eludes him. The gentleman traveler residing abroad, it would appear, comes to appreciate the past rituals of travel so well that he becomes a modern exile. Wyse’s recycling of Benjamin Brevity, cited above, for purposes of critiquing the exceptionalist-imperialist stance of continental travelers, also exemplifies a more thorough engagement with other travelers and travel writings underpinning the Oracle. Eldon’s long autobiographical opener, for example, recalls Henry Digby Beste’s self-presentation in his Four Years in France; or, Narrative of an English Family’s Residence There during that Period; Preceded by Some Account of the Conversion of the Author to the Catholic Faith (1826), another of Colburn’s publications. Beste’s memoir occupies the first seventy-one pages of his volume and accounts for the conversion emblazoned in the title, but only to disarm readers from assuming his prepossessions stand in the way of his objectivity as a travel companion (Wyse’s persona, Eldon, similarly establishes his credentials as guide by self-portraying the growth of his disposition to travel). Popular travelers’ aids are

110

B. COLBERT

also among Wyse’s targets. The Paris-based English Galignani guidebook series (which included Brevity’s Winter Evenings ) and the annotated postbook (with distances marked out between “sights”) inform Eldon’s dictum: “The great art of travelling is knowing what you are not to see.”66 John Chetwode Eustace’s A Tour through Italy (1813), meanwhile, is chided for its anti-Gallican partiality, a common critique of this popular work; and Marianne Starke’s Travels on the Continent (1824) for its overemphasis on the minutiae of traveling expenses, expenditure, inns, dining, and the like.67 Wyse’s persona early on warns us that “reading and seeing are not always the same”68 and this is the thrust of much of Wyse’s satire on this popular literature of travel. Factual and corrective travel writing stands in for a kind of egotism insofar as it channels prescription, the dicta of what can be seen, felt, tasted, or, in Eldon’s case, how one should produce one’s own reputation as a traveler. While continental travel writing remains Wyse’s principal frame of reference, he also moves deftly beyond it. When recommending appropriate attitudes that travelers in Switzerland’s Alpine regions should assume, Eldon writes: “When lying on the ice at night, how you may look down upon the ‘Gentleman of England who live at home at ease,’ and despise them! Little do they know of the sublime consolation of suffering in the cause of science and humanity.”69 The quotation points toward an article by Barron Field in the London Magazine, “Narrative of a Voyage from New South Wales” (1824), in which the author describes at length the scientific causes of a stench on board vessel: “Scouring was useless … and without going so far as to feel a stain (as Burke says) like a wound, it is not to be conceived by the ladies and gentlemen of England, who live at home in ease, how distressing is the constant sense of uncleanliness.”70 The alpine tourist does not suffer, of course; so well catered for are his needs that scientific investigation is reduced to one-upmanship, disagreement for the sake of drawing attention to one’s presence on the spot, and the credentials for having visited where others have not. At the same time, the allusion destabilizes its source text. Field’s observations (and his own allusion to Burke) reduce science to scrubbing, reminding readers in a different way that reading and being there are not the same. In one of Wyse’s most lively sketches, Eldon takes as his subject Pulcinella, the Neapolitan version of Punch, many of whose traits parallel those of the continental tourist emerging from the pages of Wyse’s book. He is “a grievous talker,” “a scolding dogmatiser, a random morality man,” “a liar par état,—a professional fool,” “an eater and drinker as

5

“RAW PRODUCTIONS … EXPORTED IN ABUNDANCE” …

111

if he worked for his salvation,” “a tyrant wherever he can find a slave,— and a slave whenever he stumbleth upon a tyrant: but withal, a charitable railer against others,—a prudent lover of himself.”71 Notwithstanding, the enthusiastic portrait also lifts Pulcinella above the tourist to the level of the satirist himself, the performances of which include “supprest yet intelligible hints” and “prodigality of allusion—doing and not speaking [his] … thoughts.” In this context, Eldon’s next dictum concerning tourists’ attentions to Pulcinella’s “cousin-german,” the King of Naples, also achieves the status of meta-commentary, this time via a footnote vaguely citing “Forsyth, vol. ii. 201,” without a supplementary text.72 The passage in question, from Joseph Forsyth’s Remarks on Antiquities, Arts & Letters during an Excursion in Italy (1813), concerns what Forsyth calls “worshipping nobility,” an anecdote on superstitions ascribing the transfer of the king’s essence through touching and kissing. In one sense, Wyse modulates Forsyth’s factual reportage of Neapolitan customs into satire by adjusting the viewpoint from the customs themselves to those participating in them, the desire of travelers to have some of those customs rub off on them, their own blind “worshipping of nobility.” In another sense, Wyse calls attention to Forsyth’s own Menippean technique of blending the factual with the satiric. Forsyth’s account of Neapolitan society begins fittingly with an epigraph from Horace’s Ars Poetica—“Spectatum admissi, risum teneatis, amici?” (Could you, my friends, if favored with a private view, refrain from laughing?)—and the subsequent account of the “Bacciamano, or birth-day” pokes fun at the king’s hangers-on, including a postilion described as a “hybrid figure, the upper half covered with a judge’s wig, the lower cased up in boots and buckskin,” not to mention the princes who touch the king, kiss their hands, and “distribute the emanation of majesty to their neighbours, in the same easy manner as gentlemen at church impart holy water to the ladies.”73 Forsyth’s facetiousness and Wyse’s own come into propinquity and call generic conventions into question. Satire may offer a “private view” of travel writing, but travel writing itself, read rightly (as Wyse implicitly argues), can deconstruct its own self-importance.74 The subtlety of Wyse’s performance has rarely been noticed, but it does deserve more attention, not least since Dyer, for one, has singled out 1828 and Disraeli’s Voyage of Captain Popanilla (also published by Colburn) as marking the decline of British satire. For Dyer, Disraeli’s effort was half-hearted, bound by convention, and began to divorce satire from

112

B. COLBERT

conviction and corrective, opening up the space for the novel more generally to be the bearer of social critique as the century progressed. Yet 1828–1829 were bumper years for travel satire, and in France, C. W. Thompson observes, there was “a noticeable increase in satirical and selfconscious humour” after the July Revolution.75 Whether the upsurge in Britain was sustained requires further bibliographical investigation, not least among periodical sketches where so much travel critique resides, but Wyse looks forward to the kind of comic-satiric treatment we find in William Makepeace Thackeray’s mid-century exposé of motiveless, consumer-driven tourism in The Kickleburys on the Rhine. By Mr. M. A. Titmarsh (1850). For Thackeray, Rhine tourism had become an industry, supported by steamship companies and Murray’s guidebooks. His portrait of tourists “asleep in the cabins at the most picturesque parts” of the journey, or, on deck, looking up only when “told in Murray to look” bespeaks a traveling experience that has become fully mechanized, textualized, and mediated, and the satire calls softly for a reinvestment of emotion and interest.76 For both Wyse and Thackeray, however, nostalgia for the Grand Tour was as much a reflex as superficial travel itself. Both dispense with fears of contagion and of social transformation by the foreign, and they dispense too with the Protestant imperial dream of recolonizing Europe with British morality. Instead, they trade the Juvenalian admonition of their immediate post-Napoleonic forbears for a milder embrace of tourism as a condition of culture. They may find faults with individuals and even classes of tourists, but they also recognize in tourism itself the potential for authentic experience to expand and flourish.

Notes 1. “A New Work,” The Sporting Magazine 38, no. 228 (1811): 251. 2. John Scott, A Visit to Paris in 1814, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815), 13; cf. Henry Digby Beste, Four Years in France; or, Narrative of an English Family’s Residence There during that Period (London: Henry Colburn, 1826), 83, where the English are said to exhibit “a certain restlessness and locomotive propensity.” 3. Unsigned review of Travel in Europe, Asia Minor, and Arabia, by J. Griffiths, Edinburgh Review 8 (April 1806): 35. 4. Robert Southey, Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, ed. Carol Bolton (London: Routledge, 2016), 188. 5. James Harley, “The Press, or Literary Chit-Chat. A Satire,” in British Satire 1785–1840, gen. ed. John Strachan, vol. 3, Collected Satires III:

5

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

“RAW PRODUCTIONS … EXPORTED IN ABUNDANCE” …

113

Complete Longer Satires, ed. Benjamin Colbert (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), 368. Unsigned review of Instructions for Forreine Travell, by James Howell, Retrospective Review 13 (1826): 19. The review concerns a reprinted edition of a Grand Tourist vade mecum, James Howell’s “Instructions for Foreign Travel” (1642). The reviewer invokes Edmund Burke’s lament about the passing of a European order upon the outbreak of the French Revolution: “But the age of chivalry is gone … and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.” See Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), 66. The series ran for three numbers in October and December 1829, and February 1830, and is attributed to T. Morgan. See Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1991), 11. See also James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 83. See Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962); and Philip Babcock Gove, The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction: A History of Its Criticism and a Guide for Its Study, with an Annotated Check List of 215 Imaginary Voyages from 1700 to 1800 (London: Holland Press, 1961). See Gary Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 127–38 (for Disraeli) and 143–45 (for Combe). Steven E. Jones, Satire and Romanticism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Steven E. Jones, ed., The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and John Strachan, ed., British Satire 1785–1840, 5 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003). For more recent developments, see John Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Lisa M. Wilson, “British Women Writing Satirical Works in the Romantic Period: Gendering Authorship and Narrative Voice,” Romantic Textualities 17 (Summer 2007), http://www.romtext. org.uk/articles/rt17_n02/; and Ian Haywood, Romanticism and Caricature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Haywood identifies only two potential satiric travel novels by women, Harriet Wilson’s Paris Lions and London Tigers (1825) and Alicia Wyndham’s Harold the Exile (1819), the last of which seems to me too sympathetic to constitute satiric censure even of the mildest Horatian vein. Victoria E. Thompson, “Foreign Bodies: British Travel to Paris and the Troubled National Self, 1789–1830,” Studies in Travel Writing 15, no. 3 (2011): 259.

114

B. COLBERT

12. See Thomas Bowdler, Observations on Emigration to France, on Account of Health, Economy, or the Education of Children, Being a Postscript to the Letters Written in France, in 1814, 2nd ed. (Bath: Richard Cruttwell; London: Robinson, 1815); John Marriott, Hints to a Traveller into Foreign Countries (London: J. Hatchard, 1816); and John William Cunningham, Cautions to Continental Travellers (London: J. Hatchard, 1818). 13. Paul Gerbod, Voyage au pays des mangeurs de grenouilles: La France vue par les Britanniques du XVIII e siècle à nos jours (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), 90. By 1820, this number had risen to 19,020. 14. Bowdler, Observations, 4. 15. Ibid., 5. 16. Ibid., 14. 17. Ibid., 20. 18. According to Bowdler, French masters “were boys, or very young men, when the Revolution began. The first impressions on their minds were seeing churches destroyed; priests banished, or slaughtered, or hunted down like wild beasts; the observance of Sunday prohibited by a national law, which established the Decade” (Observations, 24). 19. Bowdler, Observations, 27; 29. 20. Marriott concludes his polemic with a snipe at a “Journal lately published” by “a Frenchman” who “confesses that the sight of some Highlanders on their way to church made him … feel ‘rather ashamed of their Sunday Travelling’” (Hints, 75). If English tourists “abstain” from breaking the Sabbath they might make the French “‘rather ashamed’ of their Sunday opera, their Sunday theatre, and their Sunday redoute” (76). The “Frenchman” is Louis Simond; see his Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain, during the Years 1810 and 1811, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1815), 1:306. 21. Marriott, Hints, 11. 22. Ibid., 20. 23. Ibid., 78. 24. Ibid., 76. 25. Cunningham, Cautions, 16. 26. Ibid., 9–19 passim. Cf. Marriott, Hints, 8, where Marriott argues that those motivated to travel by fashion rather than religion will find that their “powers of resistance, like those of the fabled Antæus, will diminish in proportion to your removal from the soil which gave you birth.” 27. Ibid., 11. 28. Ibid., 14. 29. Ibid., 19. 30. Ibid., 29; 26; 27; 29. 31. Ibid., 23; 33ff. 32. Ibid., 15.

5

“RAW PRODUCTIONS … EXPORTED IN ABUNDANCE” …

115

33. Ibid., v–vi. 34. [Samuel Charles Wilks], Emigration; or, England and Paris, a Poem (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1816), vii, also quoted in The Gentleman’s Magazine (November 1816): 437. 35. Wilks, Emigration, 13, lines 227–28; 16, line 303; 31, line 588; 40, lines 762–63. 36. Wilks, Emigration, 5, lines 85–88; also quoted in Monthly Review 82 (February 1817): 210. See also “The Spirit of the Times. Travellers on the Continent” in the satiric periodical, The Scourge and Satirist (1 November 1816): 368–69, which mocks “such of our nobility and gentry as have had the fortitude to endure the misery of staying at home in these hard times” with extracts from Robert Burns’s travel satire, “Twa Dogs” (an imaginary conversation between the dog of a Laird and a cotter’s dog, the former fresh from travels on the Continent). 37. Richard Hurd, “On the Uses of Foreign Travel,” in The Works of Richard Hurd, vol. 4 (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1811), 201. “Locke” concludes that “my … advice is, that he stay at home: read Europe in the mirror of his own country, which but too eagerly reflects and flatters every state that dances before its surface; and, for the rest, take up with the best information he can get from the books and narratives of the best voyagers” (4:198). See also Michele Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2002), 100. 38. The Gentleman’s Magazine 86 (November 1816): 438; Amusing Chronicle 1, no. 4 (1816): 60; and Monthly Review 82 (February 1817): 209. See also the review of the poem in The Scourge and Satirist (1 December 1816): 445–49. 39. See also my discussion of Croly’s poem in Benjamin Colbert, “New Pictures of Paris: British Travellers’ Views of the French Metropolis, 1814– 1816,” in Seuils et traverses: Enjeux de l’écriture de voyage, ed. Jean-Yves Le Disez, vol. 1 (Brest: Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique, 2002), 48–49. 40. See Anne Plumptre, A Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in France, Principally in the Southern Departments, from the Year 1802 to 1805 (London: J. Mawman, 1810); Morris Birkbeck, Notes on a Journey through France, from Dieppe through Paris and Lyons, to the Pyrennees, and back through Toulouse, in July, August, and September, 1814 (London: W. Phillips, 1814); and Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, France, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1817). 41. George Croly, Paris in 1815. A Poem (London: John Murray, 1817), 14. 42. Ibid., x. 43. [William Jerdan], Six Weeks in Paris; or, a Cure for the Gallomania. By a Late Visitant, 3 vols. (London: J. Johnston, 1817), 1:vii. Lord Beacon is

116

44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

B. COLBERT

accompanied by his tutor, Dr. Ferret, and ciceroné, M. Fanfaron (a French vicar of Bray, former spy for Fouché, out to fleece the English). Other characters include Sir Humphrey Homespun (the aristocratic sportsman); Major O’Halloran (an Irish officer); and Mr. Parsons (an English pedestrianist). Ibid., 1:3. Doctor Syntax in Paris, or a Tour in Search of the Grotesque: A Humorous and Satirical Poem (London: Printed for W. Wright, 1820), 39. Letters from the Bull Family at Boulogne (sur mer.) (Paris, 1829), 1; 3. See also James Gilray’s early engraving on which the Bull conceit is based, “The landing of Sir John Bull and his family, at Boulogne sur Mer,” May 1792 (National Portrait Gallery D13078). Felix M’Donough, The Hermit in London; or, Sketches of English Manners, vol. 3 (London: Henry Colburn, 1819), 113. For the whole sketch, “Gallomania,” see ibid., 111–24. M’Donough’s hermit is indebted to VictoireJoseph Étienne de Jouy’s The Paris Spectator; or, l’Hermite de la Chausséed’Antin, trans. William Jerdan, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815). M’Donough, The Hermit, 3:116; 117. Ibid., 3:123. Further editions of the poem appeared after 1818 among Moore’s collected works. Moore himself capitalized on the success of the volume with his subsequent The Fudges in England (1835). Other responses include: Replies to the Fudge Family in Paris (1818); The Fudger Fudged (1819); William Russel MacDonald, Fudge in Ireland (1822); and Letters from the Bull Family at Boulogne (1829). Thomas Moore, preface to Poetical Works (1840–1841), quoted in British Satire 1785–1840, 5:460n. Thomas Moore, The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), British Satire 5:128 (letter 1, lines 87–91); hereafter cited by letter and line number only. See John Scott, A Visit to Paris in 1814; Being a Review of the Moral, Political, Intellectual, and Social Condition of the French Capital, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815). Scott’s chapter on Parisian pleasures, particularly those of the Palais Royal (ibid., 116–38), interweaves lively description and satire (“Such is the Palais Royal;––a vanity fair––a mart of sin and seduction!”) in an effort to warn tourists against those pleasures that “corrupt the heart by making the senses despotic” (ibid., 137). However, his satiric vignette of a British shopkeeper-cum-tourist’s simple jingoism (ibid., 42–47) may laugh at his one-dimensional criticism of all things French, yet it also applauds a mental activity and depth that belies his traveling persona (“he would after his return, ponder upon what he had seen in a more impartial spirit than that in which he had observed” [ibid., 47]).

5

54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73.

“RAW PRODUCTIONS … EXPORTED IN ABUNDANCE” …

117

Moore, Fudge, 3.41; 3.97; 3.6. Ibid., 8.103. Ibid., 8.40–41. For Wilson’s satiric novel, see Lisa M. Wilson, “British Women Writing Satirical Novels,” 35–36. For Wyse’s biography I am indebted to D. G. Paz, “Wyse, Sir Thomas (1791–1862),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), https:// doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/30176. Thompson, “Foreign Bodies,” 252. Sir Thomas Wyse, The Continental Traveller’s Oracle; or, Maxims for Foreign Locomotion. By Dr. Abraham Eldon. Edited by His Nephew, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), 2:78; cf. Benjamin Brevity, Winter Evenings in Paris, or an Account of the Various Amusements of this City (Paris: Galignani, 1815), 66, quoted in Thompson, “Foreign Bodies,” 252: “If wantonly insulted or molested in the street, knock the party down and in nine instances out of ten, you will walk on unmolested.” Material from Winter Evenings appears in Francis Coghlan’s A Visit to Paris; or, the Stranger’s Guide (London: J. Onwyhn, 1830), suggesting Coghlan’s potential authorship or appropriation of the earlier Galignani publication. Wyse, Continental, 2:210. Ibid., 1:106. William Kitchiner, The Traveller’s Oracle; or, Maxims for Locomotion: Containing Precepts for Promoting the Pleasures and Hints for Preserving the Health of Travellers (London: Henry Colburn, 1827), 16; 17; 51; 97–98; 77; 120; 63; 107; 79. Wyse, Continental, 1:23. Ibid., 1:103, original emphasis. Ibid., 1:270, original emphasis. See Wyse, Continental, 2:114, on this aspect of Starke: “The burialground, I rejoice to say, is very smart, and one of the gayest and bestfurnished hotels of the kind. This I like––it shows travelling prospers: if many die, how many more must live the exact proportion I hand over for her dissection, (when next she travels and writes,) to Mrs. Starke.” Ibid., 1:72. Ibid., 2:152. B[arron] F[ield], “Narrative of a Voyage from New South Wales,” London Magazine 10 (September 1824): 254. The “Narrative” is printed again in Geographical Memoirs on New South Wales; by Various Hands, ed. Barron Field (London: John Murray, 1825), 470–84. Wyse, Continental, 2:173–74. Ibid., 2:178n. Joseph Forsyth, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy, in the Years 1802 and 1803, ed. Keith Crook (Newark:

118

B. COLBERT

University of Delaware Press, 2001), 222. The translation of Horace is Crook’s (ibid., 222n486). 74. Cf. Wyse, Continental, 2:180: “A comedy may be a sermon, or a sermon a comedy; but you must take things by their proper names,––by what they are said to be, not by what they are. There would be a fine confusion in society, if persons were to insist on realities.” 75. C. W. Thompson, French Romantic Travel Writing: Chateaubriand to Nerval (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 93. 76. [William Makepeace Thackeray], The Kickleburys on the Rhine. By Mr. M. A. Titmarsh (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1850), 43; 41.

CHAPTER 6

Ruskin in the 1830s: Emerging Authorship and the Print Culture of Travel David C. Hanson

In summer 1833, when John Ruskin was fourteen, his family embarked on their first extensive tour of the Continent.1 Decades later, in Praeterita (1885–1889), Ruskin would remember this tour as marking his first sighting of the Alps, which he characterized as a spiritual awakening. Even in that visionary account, however, he credits the adventure to the promptings of material print culture—the topographical poem Italy by Samuel Rogers, as illustrated by J. M. W. Turner and Thomas Stothard (1830), and the Facsimiles of Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany by Samuel Prout (1833).2 These publications exhibited Continental scenery by means of recent innovations in mass-producible illustration: steel-engraved vignettes in Italy and lithography in the Facsimiles. After the family returned home, Ruskin drew on these and other publications to model his own hand-illustrated travel narrative, the so-called “Account of a Tour on the Continent” (1833–1834).3 In Praeterita, the “Account” is dismissed as an “unfinished folly,”4 but scholars since the

D. C. Hanson (B) Department of English, Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond, LA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Colbert and L. Morrison (eds.), Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36146-4_6

119

120

D. C. HANSON

1890s have rescued the project as adumbrating Ruskin’s critical aims in the 1840s, the first evidence of his obsession with Turner. In this essay, I treat the “Account” as more aptly viewed in terms of Ruskin’s keen engagement with 1830s print culture: its drawings explore the media not only of Turner’s steel-engraved vignettes but also of Prout’s lithographs, and the text echoes not just Rogers’s topographical verse but also the period’s prose letterpress for the landscape annuals. Moreover, Ruskin’s self-irony in Praeterita about his having “spent [his] fervour” before completing the project has deflected inquiry about why he abandoned it.5 I show that Ruskin abruptly terminated work on the “Account” in order to parlay his self-apprenticeship in contemporary book arts into his debut as the topographical and ekphrastic poet, “J. R.,” commissioned to write for precisely the kind of publication he had been imitating—the annual Friendship’s Offering . Thus, I reconnect Ruskin’s “Account” to his emergence in the 1830s as a contributor to illustrated travel literature; in particular, I consider how these publications influenced Ruskin’s developing approach to the sister arts. By tradition, writers and artists were pitted against one another as rivals; I find 1830s print technologies encouraged Ruskin to treat the sister arts as equals in the representation of the continental tour. Before he could become fluent in traditional sister-arts theory, the anthology-like annuals modeled a cumulative approach, allowing word and image to work as complements rather than as competitors. Even with this capacious approach to the sister arts, however, this young British Protestant traveler encountered sights that he thought could or should not be represented. In Ruskin’s later writing about art and architecture, Lindsay Smith has argued, he incorporated “aberrant” vision by employing discourse associated with photography.6 In the 1830s, before photography, yet a time of burgeoning technologies for the sister arts, Ruskin’s models of illustrated travel publication both compelled his attention to what might trouble the eye of the English continental traveler and lent strategies for occluding disturbances to touristic viewing.

I As representations of the Continent, Rogers’s 1830 Italy and Prout’s 1833 Facsimiles presented the Ruskins with dramatic contrasts both in content and as physical objects. Prout’s large lithographic plates (22 ×

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

121

15 inches) printed in the watery medium on gray paper seem the opposite of the exquisite vignettes (2 × 4 inches or smaller) by Rogers’s artists, printed in the fine, sharp intaglio line of steel engraving on white paper. In the books’ itineraries, Rogers leads the reader on the traditional Grand Tour to the classical south, whereas Prout exhibits scenes from the more recently explored Gothic north. As sister-arts productions, the illustrations in Rogers are paired with topographical and narrative verse, whereas Prout’s portfolio dispenses with letterpress: only the place-names lettered directly on the lithographic stones identify the locations of these northern Gothic and Renaissance market squares and cathedrals, scenes that seem busied in telling their own stories. In 1833, the Ruskins combined suggestions of these two productions to form an itinerary starting in northern France and Belgium, leading down the Rhine to northern Italy, and circling through Switzerland. They first sighted the Alps from Schaffhausen, near the Rhine Falls, and crossed into Italy through the dramatic Via Mala. After touring the Italian lakes and Milan, they headed south to Genoa and the Mediterranean and then turned back toward Savoy, entering Switzerland via Napoleon’s improved carriage road over the Simplon. On the Swiss side, they climbed the Great St. Bernard, rode to Geneva along the north (Swiss) side of its lake, and toured several major Swiss towns. They ended in Chamonix, admiring the contrasts between the habitable valley and Mont Blanc and its glaciers. The journey extended from May through September, and the party included, besides the Ruskins, John’s eighteen-year-old cousin Mary Richardson, his nurse, Anne Strachan, and a cicerone, Salvador.7 Mary and Ruskin’s father, John James, documented day-to-day progress in their diaries, while John apparently devoted his pencil more to drawing than to writing.8 It was largely following their return that he began drafting and fair-copying the “Account,” from autumn 1833 through spring or summer 1834. Ruskin’s fair copy of the work—in what is now known as MS IX— extends only through northern France, Belgium, and part of the Rhine journey, breaking off midsentence in a description of Heidelberg. Additional rough drafts of verse and prose about the Black Forest and the Alpine crossing, Italy, and Switzerland survive in MS VIII as well as in some other scattered manuscripts. When Ruskin turned aside from the “Account” to compose his poems for Friendship’s Offering , he used the endpapers of MS VIII to list a detailed plan for composing and illustrating the remainder of the “Account,” starting roughly from where he broke

122

D. C. HANSON

off the MS IX fair copy; if realized, the scope of the illustrated travelogue would have been enormous.9 This plan was deflected, in spring or early summer 1834, by the commission to revise extracts from the “Account” for publication in Friendship’s Offering … for MDCCCXXXV as “Fragments from a Metrical Journal.” Even more auspiciously, for the same volume Ruskin was assigned the composition of a new poem, “Saltzburg,” an ekphrastic travel poem describing an accompanying steel-engraved view of the city.10 Documentary evidence of this change of plan is apparent in MS VIII, where the draft of “Saltzburg” immediately follows the last-composed item for the “Account.” Yet the editor of Ruskin’s Poems (1891), W. G. Collingwood, explained away this physical evidence, attributing the composition of “Saltzburg” to more than one year later, in December 1835, disconnecting the poem from its relation to the “Account.”11 His rationale assumed that Ruskin could not have composed a poem about a place that he had never seen. (The family first visited Salzburg toward the end of their continental tour of 1835.) For Collingwood, J. R., the poet of Friendship’s Offering , was already the “Graduate of Oxford,” the author of Modern Painters , who went only to “nature” for truth—not to an engraving. Thus, having twisted the bibliographic evidence to accommodate this false assumption, Collingwood went on in his biography, The Life and Work of John Ruskin (1893), to invent a narrative that pushes forward Ruskin’s debut in Friendship’s Offering to December 1835, following the visit to the Tyrol. Were this chronology accurate, “Saltzburg” and “Fragments” would have to have been published in the Friendship’s Offering for 1836, not 1835, since annuals were always published in October or November previous to the New Year for which they were meant to serve as gifts.12 What is more, the editor of the volume for 1835, Thomas Pringle, died in December 1834,13 so he must have communicated from beyond the grave when, according to Collingwood, he recruited Ruskin by letter in autumn 1835 to make poetic observations about Salzburg to pair with the veduta he happened to have in hand—a picture that, in this version of events, Ruskin apparently would not have seen, unlike the city itself, distancing him even more remotely from the print culture with which his poem “Saltzburg” is crucially involved.14 The invention of J. R. and his first published poems in the steelengraved annual was the result, not of going to nature, but of Ruskin’s self-instruction in the technologies of the print culture of travel. With this preparation, Ruskin underwent the process of coming forward into

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

123

print, the “act by which a writer became an author” in the 1830s. As Carol Bock explains, the process was conceived in terms of “metaphors of place,” whereby the young author leaves “behind the retired, pastoral places of youthful innocence, private life, and poetic inspiration in order to enter the urban ‘place of [literature’s] embodied coming forth in hotpress and letter press, for trial before the critical press’ and the reading public.” Bock shows how the young Brontës, in their remoteness from London, gathered such advice from Fraser’s Magazine.15 Ruskin, as a suburban youth embowered in semirural Camberwell, trained himself in contemporary print culture by imitating illustrated picturesque annuals, as did the Brontës. He was also in a position, however, to be brought forward by his father, whose city acquaintances included the proprietors of Smith, Elder, and Company, who published Friendship’s Offering , and the annual’s editor, Pringle.16 Further advice was sought from experienced authors: James Hogg, whose opinion of John’s incipient career John James Ruskin solicited by letter; and Samuel Rogers, into whose august presence Pringle introduced Ruskin. Hogg and Rogers presented opposite personae: Hogg affected the unsophisticated, inspired georgic poet of the Scottish Borders; Rogers commanded the urbane role of collector and man of taste, perpetually revising and polishing his verse. Both writers were shrewd entrepreneurs who adapted to current trends in illustration and mass publication to enhance and promote their compositions. From the range of genres and styles that the two writers represented, Ruskin eclectically took what he wanted. From Hogg, he drew on a myth of poetic inspiration in pastoral surroundings, as if innocent of print technology. From Rogers, he acquired the finesse of illustrated book design, and he mined Italy for strategies to impose organization on his own sprawling imitation of modern sister-arts publications in the “Account.”

II Prior to Ruskin’s coming forward as J. R., the manuscripts of the “Account” reveal a succession of models. At first, Ruskin conceived of the travelogue solely in verse, hearkening less to his own time than to the eighteenth century.17 As represented by MS IA, g.1,18 this stage of the work describes the journey through northern France and Belgium in the poems “Calais,” “Cassel,” “Lille,” “Brussels,” and “The Meuse,” which the manuscript stacks in columns. Arrestingly, “Calais” and the first half of the second poem, “Cassel,” are written in the hand of Ruskin’s

124

D. C. HANSON

father, John James, with interlinear revisions in John’s hand. To some extent, therefore, father and son collaborated on this stage of the project, and Ruskin’s initial influence was the taste of his father’s generation. This version of the “Account” observes a decorum typical of the eighteenth-century travelogue, which Charles Batten characterizes as minimizing personal commentary. To offset the inevitably first-person, experiential form of the travel narrative, the eighteenth-century travelogue used depersonalizing figures and appeals to shared authority.19 The Ruskins’ “Calais” opens with a description of the town’s beach and pier that was indeed based on experience—the young people did stroll here, accompanied by Anne and Salvador20 —but the poem takes an abstract view of the horizon over the Channel, as forming a “Barrier” between the British and the French, separating the “wide distinction” between “Man & Man twixt Race & Race.”21 By the 1830s, this perspective was somewhat dated, more typical of British travelers who arrived shortly after the reopening of the Continent, like the Liverpool Congregational clergyman Thomas Raffles, whose culture shock in 1817 over the behavior, language, and religion of the men and women of France made it “scarcely conceivable” to him “that so few miles and hours should make so vast a difference in one’s feelings,” rearing “the word foreigner in the bosom.”22 In an interlinear insertion, John lowers the perspective from the horizon to a child’s viewpoint, watching the waves “from the sand the impression sweep” of “playful Childhoods daring feet”23 —an image suggesting either that child’s play on the margins of such vast differences is erased or that the differences themselves are erased when colliding with the innocent impressions belonging to childhood. In either case, national difference is reasserted in “Cassel”—written in both father’s and son’s hands—which relies on the superiority of British Protestantism to spy out the “serpent folds” beneath Catholic priests’ vestments in a holy-day procession.24 At the same time, for all its neoclassical restraint and post-Waterloo naïveté, this all-verse version of the “Account” reflects the reorientation of the Grand Tour to the Gothic north, a precedent set by Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, whose canto 3 account of Waterloo Ruskin echoes in his poem “Brussels.” Whereas Byron’s Harold rushes impulsively down the Rhine in twenty stanzas, however, Ruskin’s narrator lingers along the picturesque route from Calais to Namur on the Meuse. The Ruskins’ northern itinerary almost exactly matches the route of the 1821 sketching tour mapped by Prout, who led the way in British artists’ exploration of northern Gothic and Renaissance town centers.25 As Ruskin’s observer

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

125

approaches Brussels, he views the outline of the distant city silhouetted against the horizon’s “paly light” of “parting day”—a Claude-like vista, framed by coulisses formed from “heaped and darkling clouds”— but drawing nearer, he emphasizes the “dark relief” of the skyline against “western fire,” resolving into the textures of Prout’s picturesque, the “Gothic tracerie” of the Hôtel de Ville’s spire and the cathedral’s towers.26 The first version of the “Account” reflects a transitional period in travel publication. During their tour, the Ruskins relied on guidebooks that blended an older, eighteenth-century observer’s travel “account” with the newer practical and informational travel “guide” for tourists.27 An 1833 guidebook by Mariana Starke, which the Ruskins probably consulted,28 still advised travelers to head straight for Paris and then south, offering only very limited information about sights in northern France and Belgium.29 More persuasive for the Ruskins were landscape annuals such as Prout’s 1832 Continental Annual, and Romantic Cabinet , which featured the artist’s drawings of landscape and architecture in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, and even Prague, while taking in only the north of Italy. Its letterpress writer, William Kennedy, puffed the novelty of this northern focus, deploring the tendency of competing annuals to bear “too uniform a resemblance to each other.”30 Another writer for the landscape annuals, Leitch Ritchie, promoted his Travelling Sketches in the North of Italy, the Tyrol, and on the Rhine on the grounds that guidebooks may be “most useful ” and reprintings of “the experience of former travellers” an “expedient,” but more “bona fide” were his own original “sketches … the result of impressions made upon his mind on the spot”— taken both by himself in prose, and by the illustrator Clarkson Stanfield in pictures.31 Given this transition away from the traditional Grand Tour, Ruskin could imitate Rogers’s Italy without adhering in “too uniform a resemblance” to its intentions. For example, as Rogers’s most significant influence on the “Account,” Ruskin imitates a poem, not about Italy, but about Switzerland (Rogers’s “The Alps,” the basis for Ruskin’s “Passing the Alps,” a pivotal poem about the experience of crossing between Germany and the Italian lakes). Further gothicizing his tour poem, Ruskin exchanges Rogers’s poised blank verse for octosyllabic couplets based on Walter Scott’s Gothic narrative poems. As Ruskin developed the “Account” beyond this first version, he layered in the voices and images of his own decade, the 1830s. The work became a multi-genre compilation, increasingly resembling the literary

126

D. C. HANSON

and landscape annuals, in which he would soon debut as J. R. First to appear in the next stage of development was a commentary on “Calais” in prose. Like Ritchie’s “bona-fide” sketches, Ruskin’s prose essay adds on-the-spot observation to the earlier picturesque poems. The prose commentary is self-consciously meta-discursive, aware of retreading Calais as a port of entry: “How much has been said of Calais. Every one who has ever set foot on the French shore, from poor Yorick, to the veriest Scribbler ever blotted paper, has written half a volume upon Calais.” Yet the newcomer can use his own eyes: “Stand on the pier and look round you. … Look at the fishing boats. … Look at the town.”32 At about the same stage of producing this manuscript, which also contains the first surviving drafts of poems about places along the Rhine and in Italy,33 Ruskin simultaneously began fair-copying the “Account” in MS IX, in which the title “Calais” becomes a section header for the prose essay, the earlier poem, and now illustrations as well. Thus, the evolution of the “Account” to this multi-genre version from its first, all-verse version exactly mirrors the textual history of Rogers’s Italy. Throughout the 1820s, Italy appeared in parts, like Byron’s Pilgrimage, in small volumes decorated at most with simple, linear engravings.34 Since the part-publications achieved only modest success, Rogers boldly bought up remaining copies, destroyed them, and repackaged Italy as an illustrated travelogue. At unheard-of expense, he commissioned artists for designs; engaged engravers skilled in the mass-producible but stubborn and lengthy process of steel engraving; and subsidized publication by the established firm of Thomas Cadell, partnered with an idealistic aspiring publisher, Edward Moxon, who upheld a faith in poetry despite the utilitarianism of the age. Since the Ruskins numbered among the comparatively few owners of an earlier version of Italy (probably the 1828 version, if not others), they were well-positioned to compare the work’s transformation into an artifact that, as T. B. Macaulay boasted, “would give to posterity a higher idea of the state of the arts amongst us than anything else which lay in an equally small compass.”35 In its fair-copy (MS IX) version, the composite-genre “Account” closely imitates the 1830 Italy in illustration and layout. Rogers based his design on the Bulmer editions of English poets, which the Bewick brothers embellished with wood-engraved vignettes set at the heads of poems’ title pages.36 To make this elegant design replicable in mass production required the substitution of durable steel engraving for wood, as well as innovation in press to accommodate the intaglio steel plates.37 Rogers

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

127

also elaborated the Bulmer design by bracketing text with vignettes at the end as well as the head, with most headers featuring landscapes after Turner, while the tailpieces reflected the poems’ narratives with figure groups, most of them designed by Stothard. In concept, the paired illustrations merely extended the time-honored academic convention of matching historical landscape with genre. As Jan Piggott comments, however, Turner’s execution—imparting a sense of motion and luminosity— reanimated the exhausted form of the vignette for its use in Italy.38 Ruskin made his way gradually to recognizing the special qualities of Turner’s execution; at first, he seems most excited by Rogers’s plan as an opportunity to compile multiple genres and embellishments. Like Rogers, he identifies each section by a place-name to mark a sequential stage of the journey (lettered in imitation of the display type in Italy); and above this title, at the head of a section, as well as at the end of the section, he pastes in illustrations drawn in the manner of engraved vignettes. Extending even beyond Rogers’s enhancements, he pairs each topographical poem about a place with an anecdotal prose piece in the style of the letterpress for landscape annuals, thus supplying a textual complement to the tailpiece vignettes. Finally, for good measure, in several sections he inserts vignettes between verse and prose as well. For example, in the MS IX section on “Calais,” the topographical poem is framed by vignettes showing observers taking in picturesque views; and the prose commentary, which urges the reader to “look at the people, the countenance, the costume … altogether different from any thing you ever saw in England,” is appropriately complemented by a tailpiece vignette showing a figure group—one that teasingly swivels the scrutiny from the scenery onto the English traveler, by presenting a portly, overdressed British family expressing astonishment at the quaint architecture while a skinny French porter loaded with their luggage gapes back at them. Taking the composite form of sister-arts publications to extremes, Ruskin does not merely imitate but playfully experiments with his models. Scholarship has treated Ruskin’s introduction to the sister arts more conventionally, assuming as point of departure the Renaissance and eighteenth-century tradition of the paragone, the rivalry between painters and poets over the respective powers of their arts—that of painting, to imitate outward nature accurately, and that of poetry to convey inward ideas and emotions abstractly.39 Later, Ruskin did of course become conversant with the competitive and hierarchical argumentation used in such treatises, but not before his response to the print culture

128

D. C. HANSON

of the 1830s laid the basis for a more eclectic approach to the sister arts, which in his mature thought Alexandra Wettlaufer characterizes as “a superior form of expression in a synthetic hybrid that combines the abstract qualities of words with the concrete attributes of images.”40 This concrete abstraction is how Ruskin characterized Turner’s vignettes for Rogers’s Italy in later years—“simply,” he wrote in 1878, the artist’s “own reminiscences of the Alps and the Campagna, rapidly and concisely given in right sympathy with the meditative poem they illustrate.”41 But in the mid-1830s, as well, reviewers praised sister-arts arrangements that were parallel and complementary, rather than subordinating. While the fashion for literary annuals depended heavily on their illustrations’ appeal, leaving writers to compete for the lesser recognition of setting words to the image,42 the Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction advocated “what the Annuals of late years have taught us to look for—the union of literature and art, so as not to lead the reader to suspect that the plates were engraved for the letter-press, or the letter-press written for the plates. In a word,” the review concluded, the text and illustrations should each be “unique.” The Athenaeum concurred that the artist and writer, while “independent,” should each “illustrate the same subject by their own peculiar poetry.”43 A publication of the period that was praised for this union of equals was The Pilgrims of the Rhine (1834) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, which the Ruskins acquired in June 1834. It is a whimsical and sentimental concoction, yet with an ambitious and complicated sister-arts structure: a doubleframe tale follows the Rhine journeys undertaken, respectively, by two sets of English travelers, a troupe of English fairies, and a mortal trio (a heroine perishing from consumption, her lover, and her father). Their paths intersecting, the passing sights along the Rhine inspire the two groups to relate a multi-genre collection of tales and legends in prose and verse. The book is liberally enhanced with steel-engraved illustrations, arranged according to the design of Rogers’s 1830 Italy, with the chapters headed by landscape and architectural vignettes in the manner of both Prout and Turner, drawn by Prout’s friend David Roberts, and footed by figure vignettes in the manner of Stothard—here, scenes of fairy romps alternating with tableaux of medieval chivalry, drawn, respectively, by Daniel Maclise and E. T. Parris.44 Besides its material presentation, Pilgrims of the Rhine is a Carlylean period piece: Bulwer-Lytton treated the work as a Goethean bildungsroman, boasting that it justly earned a place among “popular guide-books” to the Rhine (despite his having never set foot in

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

129

Germany when he wrote it), since its philosophical idealism provided a superior entrée to German scenery. For all its solemnity, Pilgrims encapsulates the composite-genre exuberance of sister-arts travel publications that Ruskin was imitating in the “Account” and that he would soon condense into his own ekphrastic travel poems for publication.45 Its whimsy and supernaturalism answer to the playfulness of Ruskin’s experimentation with book arts in the “Account”; its complicated double-frame literary design matches Ruskin’s tendency to extravagance in his formal structures for organizing his diverse materials; and the seriousness of its bildung points to the issues of identity formation that will prove to be at stake when Ruskin attempts to carry forward his ekphrastic experiments into print for Friendship’s Offering.

III Ruskin’s homemade book, the “Account,” was his venue for experimentation with mixed styles. Changefulness is especially marked in the prose, which reflects the first-person, strident egotism that was characteristic of journalism in the period.46 Ruskin’s narrator mocks letterpress writers who affect a solemn antiquarianism, like Thomas Roscoe in the Jennings’ Landscape Annual series, which the Ruskins owned.47 “Saw Charlemagnes easy chair,” the narrator quips in “Cologne”: “Arms stone, back stone…. Very ancient affair, product of the dark ages I suppose.”48 Ruskin’s prose narrator is closest to the rebarbative Leitch Ritchie, who wrote for Clarkson Stanfield’s landscape annuals, the Travelling Sketches (1832–1834), which the Ruskins also collected,49 and which covered points along their northern European itinerary. Ritchie, like his friend Pringle, was an editor of Friendship’s Offering and one of the fellow Scots connected to the firms of John Murray and Smith, Elder.50 Reviewers praised Ritchie’s variety: he seemed “at once a picturesque, a sentimental, and a graphic traveller,” who interwove “stories, comic or romantic, and observations historical and sentimental.” Some censured him for lack of solemnity and “continual efforts … at smartness and point,” and chastised his proneness to politics “not … of the gentlest” and for his tendency to wax “a little too assuming, too dogmatical, too self-sufficient.” These traits could be forgiven, however, for his “warmth of feeling, … fervour and force and even grandeur of imagination.”51 Ruskin’s narrator resembles Ritchie in opinionated swagger. “I hate fortified towns,” he

130

D. C. HANSON

complains in “Lille”: “[T]heir houses, are like barracks, their public buildings, like prisons, their population, like so many rats in a rat trap.”52 He is also facetious. In “Aix la Chapelle,” the narrator itemizes a “treaty” (the preeminent document of post-Napoleonic Europe),53 this one negotiated by French postilions to ensure time for naps along the road. In the same essay, Ruskin’s narrator, like Ritchie, abruptly switches register from the Dickensian to the Romantic, painting a word picture of Aachen Cathedral by moonlight, the chequered light filtering through the Gothic windows seeming to bring the stone effigies to life, as if “rallying again around their monarch.”54 Contrasts of style and medium also carry through the drawings. In Praeterita, Ruskin characterizes his purpose in the drawings for the “Account” as more single-minded: “I had no sooner cast eyes on the Rogers’ vignettes”—meaning solely those by Turner—“than I took them for my only masters, and set myself to imitate them … by fine pen shading.”55 Accordingly, scholars have commented on the mimicry of finelined engraving in the drawings and repeatedly reproduced as an example the distinctly Turneresque vignette that heads “Ehrenbreitstein.”56 Left unnoticed, however, is the equal attention that Ruskin gave to the effects of Prout’s lithography (Fig. 6.1). His “Liège,” copied from the Facsimiles,57 works as a foil to his vignettes in Turner’s manner: set broadside like the original in Prout’s folio, the drawing takes up a full page, as large as the MS IX ledger would accommodate. Ruskin captures the watercolorlike texture of the lithograph, using broad ink strokes and washes, a contrast with the fine lines imitating engraving in the vignettes.58 Ruskin is interested not only in contrasts of reproductive media but also in how Turner’s, Prout’s, and Stothard’s respective styles could be contained within a page layout. In “Aix la Chapelle,” a drawing of Aachen Cathedral in Prout’s style almost fills a vertical page, towering over its section heading and the few lines of text squeezed into the bottom.59 In “Lille,” he playfully reverses the scale, shrinking the Proutesque street scene to a vignette (Fig. 6.2).60 The postage-stamp-sized image suggests a Lilliputian Lille, thus playing a joke on what the accompanying prose essay describes as the “massive magnificence of [Lille’s] edifices”—a fit retribution for the annoyance caused by a sentinel who examined the Ruskins’ passports with “provoking minuteness.”61 Ruskin also subjects Turner’s vignettes to playful manipulation like Prout’s, but here he may have perceptively reflected Turner’s own ironies, which, as Cecilia Powell argues, problematize the picturesque historical

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

131

Fig. 6.1 John Ruskin, untitled pen-and-ink drawing, copied after Liège by Samuel Prout, Facsimiles of Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany (1833), from “The Meuse” in “Account of a Tour on the Continent,” MS IX. John Ruskin Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

landscapes.62 In Italy, for example, a facing-page spread shows, on the verso, Turner’s tailpiece vignette of the Alpine Hospice of St. Bernard in which monks carry the corpse of a traveler to the charnel house and, on the recto, Turner’s header vignette of the Battle of Marengo in which Napoleon rears his steed, an allusion to J.-L. David’s heroic equestrian portrait.63 The humble death on the St. Bernard (where Napoleon erected a hero’s tomb for his general, Desaix, slain at Marengo) undermines Napoleon’s triumph in crossing the Alps to defeat the Austrian forces, just as Rogers’s title for the Marengo poem, “The Descent,” adds an ironic moral connotation to its geographic meaning. Ruskin replicates and develops these ironies in his own Napoleon vignette. Copying Turner’s equestrian figure, he transfers the surrounding landscape from Marengo to Waterloo (the vignette heads the “Brussels” prose section and

132

D. C. HANSON

Fig. 6.2 Ruskin, untitled pen-and-ink vignette in the manner of Samuel Prout, from “Lille” in “Account of a Tour on the Continent,” MS IX. John Ruskin Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

shows the city’s distant skyline in place of Turner’s mountains). Exhibiting Napoleon in defeat (or possibly Wellington in victory—it is difficult to tell), he juxtaposes on the facing verso a scene at a quiet wayside cross where a figure prays, perhaps in mourning.64 In these ironic manipulations of differing writing styles and reproductive visual media, Ruskin exhibits perhaps a more marked awareness of 1830s print culture as such than do other early Victorian young people

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

133

who imitated print culture. The Brontës, for example, may have been less interested in exploring kinds of reproductive technology than in reversing its effects by using watercolor or oils to recreate the original history painting or portrait from which an engraving was taken.65 In the “Account,” Ruskin trains his copying less on the original artwork or natural object than on the varying qualities of reproductive media and their relation to book design. In this respect, the project advanced beyond his embellishment of his earlier picturesque travel poem, Iteriad, which he completed in January 1832, based on an 1830 family tour of the Lake District. For this fair copy, he lettered its title page and “finis” in an ornate style, which is arguably suggestive of early Victorian engraved title pages or fancy display type, but which in fact he copied from a handwriting manual. His purpose here, it seems, was merely to show off his dexterity.66 Thus, in the “Account,” Ruskin explores how text and image comment on one another, but he does not make them competitors for meaning. In fact, his cumulative approach tends to buffer challenges that might otherwise arise within and between the respective poetic and pictorial modes. He compartmentalizes the picturesque and the satirical, even falsifying information to maintain their separate integrity: according to the draft version of the “Calais” prose essay, a figure “stand[s] on the pier” and searches the horizon “for the french steamboat,” but, in the fair copy, Ruskin removed the incongruous steamer, allowing his observer to gaze only at the antique and “peculiarly” picturesque character of the lumbering French fishing boats.67 Similarly, in “Lago di Como,” the speaker hears only the “light sound of the oars dash,”68 contradicting Mary Richardson’s testimony that the family crossed the lake by steam.69 Keeping modes distinct, he does not extend his experimentation to the effects of technology on poetic diction and form, as does the young D. G. Rossetti in A Trip to Paris and Belgium (1849).70 While Ruskin chooses lively words to describe motion—the family carriage comes “thundering down” a steep street in Brussels, “rapidity increasing every instant, … lurching tremendously like a ship in a swell, jerk, jerk, jerking”—his only point is the travail of seeking the “picturesque” in “cities … built upon hills.”71 In compounding and multiplying kinds of text and image, Ruskin conceived his chief aesthetic problem to lie, not in pushing the boundaries of given modes of representation, but in organizing the abundance. For structural solutions, he turned to Rogers’s Italy, which taught him how to impose order on his growing accumulation of sister-arts materials.

134

D. C. HANSON

Ruskin’s ordering principle for his most elaborate structures is complementary contrast. The method is encapsulated in the work he drew from the “Account” for publication in Friendship’s Offering , “Fragments from a Metrical Journal.” Consisting of two Rhine poems, “Andernacht” and “St. Goar,” the lyrics form a balanced, complementary pair, with the former depicting a night scene of “grim ruins” towering over the Rhine, and the latter a domestic “live-long summer day” in which the river is enticed to forget his “onward way” and to “relax his angry frown” like a “giant” lying down amid “vine-clad banks, that lave / Their tresses in his placid wave.”72 Comparison of the published with the original versions of these poems shows that Ruskin essentialized these complementary contrasting scenes by eliminating the speaker’s nominative first-person plural and condensing the respective Gothic and domestic imagery. In the original “Account” versions, Ruskin used complementary contrast to maintain symmetrical organization while exploiting an opportunity to expand and attenuate his topographical descriptions. Between the two composite sections, “Andernacht” and “St. Goar” (i.e., not just the poems, as published in “Fragments,” but also the associated prose and illustrations), he inserted a middle section, “Ehrenbreitstein,” which treats its landscape features as synecdoche for the trope of juncture that defines the purpose of the section. At Koblenz, the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein stands at the confluence of two rivers, the Rhine and the Moselle, a juncture that Ruskin figures as a marriage of two “lovers.” Marrying the Gothic grimness of Andernach and the domestic sweetness of St. Goar, “on the one side” the “impetuous flood, / … washed the wall, / Of Gothic mansion fair and tall,” and “on the other” the flood was “Checked by broad meadows rich and green.”73 When revised for the “Fragments,” this middle section was discarded and the redundancy boiled down to the more essential complementary contrast of just the two poems.74 As suggested by the main title of the published poems, which imposes a fiction that the original work was a “metrical journal”—effectively reverting to the first, all-verse version of the “Account”—revision for publication tended to strip away Ruskin’s layers of sister-arts invention, leaving starker structures.75 Ruskin learned both techniques—expansion as well as contraction within a symmetrical frame—from Italy, in which Rogers draws cues from the landscape to impose structure on the seemingly digressive narrative. Rogers’s poems about mountain crossings, “The Alps” and “The Descent,” provide pivotal, overarching views, while, in the space between

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

135

those two poems, Rogers inserts a pleasurable digression—a pair of complementary contrasting narrative poems, “Jorasse,” a tale set in the Swiss heights, and “Marguerite de Tours,” a tale set in an Italian valley.76 In the “Account,” Ruskin follows suit by positioning his sole attempt at a narrative poem—a Lakeland tale of the unfortunate traveler Gough and his loyal dog—between descriptions of mountain crossings, “The Summit” and “The Descent.”77 The balance of these elaborate sister-arts structures depends on weight being equally distributed among the diverse materials. The structures falter where, as critics have argued about the double-frame tales in Pilgrims of the Rhine, a greater urgency of vision presents itself, as when Bulwer-Lytton abandons his episodic tales in order to complete his attempt at a bildungsroman.78 In the “Account,” Ruskin’s confluence of the sister arts is thrown off-center by what a British education on the Continent deems must not be said or seen.

IV In his 1817 epistolary travelogue, the Reverend Thomas Raffles was so moved by the first sight of Mont Blanc rising beyond the French Jura that he promised his correspondent to memorialize the moment with “a sketch … committed immediately to paper, while the outline was before me.” Raffles sketches using only words, however, a poem that describes the peak as an “amazing barrier,” dividing the “aerial regions betwixt earth and heaven.”79 In the “Account,” Ruskin likewise failed to produce a graphic sketch for his transformative first sighting of the Alps. He finds words enough, one crucial phrase being borrowed from Rogers—the only direct quotation from Italy contained in the “Account.” In Rogers’s “The Alps,” the first sight of the mountains moves the speaker to “A sense, a feeling he loses not,” of this transformative experience in an “hour / Whence he may date henceforward and forever.”80 In the “Account,” Ruskin echoes this line, combining declaration and exhortation: “But look once on the Alps … / And think on the moment thenceforward for ever.”81 Characteristically elaborating on his source, Ruskin extends the figure of first encounter of the Alps over several poems (“Schaffhausen,” “The Alps,” “Passing the Alps”). He was at a loss, though, how to illustrate this trope of commemorating future memory in a picture. In MS IX, he never got so far as fair-copying and illustrating this cluster of poems about crossing the Alps, and he drafted no corresponding prose essays that survive. But in the plan for completing the “Account” listed on the

136

D. C. HANSON

back endpapers of MS VIII, a table identifies pictures that he proposed to copy from published sources to illustrate each of the eighty odd sections remaining to be fair-copied (or even drafted): in this list, the title “Schaffhausen” stands out as lacking a named source; only the numeral “4” is given, apparently referring to four images, but with no identification. Following “Schaffhausen” in this list, “The Alps” is assigned “My own—3,” probably meaning three images of his own invention rather than published sources, but again no evidence survives of what he had in mind.82 To illustrate the transformation of vision, Ruskin reached a limit in the visual culture available to him. For him as for Raffles, the check on the sister arts in the burgeoning print and visual culture of the 1830s lay in the Protestant authority of the word over the image. In Italy, Rogers’s “The Alps” did readily suggest an image to Turner. For Rogers’s speaker, the first sighting of the Alps prompted a visual metaphor for the mountains as “the barriers of a World.”83 Raffles uses a version of this paradoxical phrase to refer to Mont Blanc as a barrier dividing earth from heaven. Rogers means a barrier between civilizations: the poem proceeds to rehearse crises in history when invaders overcame the obstacle of terrain—a topic that, for British readers, would inevitably have brought to mind Napoleon daringly leading his army across the Great St. Bernard to defeat the Austrians on the plain of northern Italy (an event specifically addressed in Rogers’s “The Descent”). Turner’s vignette for “The Alps” depicts the ancient analogue of Napoleon’s feat, the crossing by Hannibal to defeat the Roman Empire, a scene that Turner makes vivid with Hannibal’s archers and incongruous elephants engaged in a battle against resistance encountered in the mountains. In Rogers’s poem, these overreaching labors are contrasted with the present-day “path of pleasure” through the mountains—the Simplon road enjoyed by the modern tourist, which now connects civilizations with a “fairy-course” of wonder (engineered, ironically, under Napoleon’s direction for easier transport of artillery).84 For Ruskin, as for many British tourists, however, this ease of movement in peacetime had not overcome a cultural division that clung to the metaphor of mountains as a barrier dividing religions. In the “Account,” Ruskin invoked the term barrier at each of the stages of composition, when describing the family’s crossing political and cultural borders—the Channel at Calais, the Ardennes along the Meuse, the Alps into Italy, the Alps into Savoy at Chamonix.85 For British UltraProtestants, despite the victory over France, the influence of the Roman

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

137

church on the Continent continued to pose a threat to the British constitution, a threat only confirmed for some by the Catholic Emancipation Act. As Michael Wheeler explains, the fears of the Ultras were stoked by millenarian prophecies like those published by George Croly— a writer and clergyman who became a mentor of Ruskin’s in the later 1830s and the 1840s. Croly popularized a notion of England as a solitary “fortress” of Christianity, an image that reassured conservative British travelers when confronting Roman Catholic “idolatries” across the Channel.86 In Ruskin’s “Account,” the metaphor of a barrier accompanies a faltering of the sister arts, not only in the prohibition to depict wonders that must be viewed only with the spiritual eye, but also in the avoidance of depicting idolatries that the traveler wished to shut from the bodily eye. In Cologne, according to both the “Account” and Mary Richardson’s diary, the family experienced a particularly troubling confrontation with Catholic visual art. Although the Ruskins were impressed by the Gothic architecture of Aachen Cathedral, which incorporates the Palatine Chapel of the Holy Roman Emperor, certain objects of Catholic worship, such as the cathedral’s precious relics, the gold-encased skulls of the three Magi, affronted their Protestantism. More endearing was the city’s claim as the birthplace of an Old Master, Peter Paul Rubens, a favorite with British collectors. Even Rubens’s art tested the Ruskins’ tolerance, however. His Crucifixion of Saint Peter (ca. 1637), which hung above the cathedral’s high altar, was, on the one hand, connected with an affecting story. Toward the end of his life, Rubens created the work for the cathedral dedicated to his namesake, St. Peter, where he had been confirmed as a boy and his father was entombed.87 But on the other hand, the work had a disorienting recent wartime history. Stolen by the French and then returned after the fall of Napoleon, the painting’s repatriation presented British Protestant viewers with an enigma, since its justifiable return also represented the authority reclaimed by the Church of Rome—an authority made particularly vivid by the martyrdom of St. Peter, the “rock” on whom Jesus founded his impregnable church.88 For tourists, these ironies were jarringly reenacted by the arrangements for the picture’s restoration since, according to several British travel accounts, what was commonly exhibited was “a most wretched copy” that had been “painted at the time when the original … was carried away to Paris,” while “for a small fee” paid to the sacristan, the tourist could watch the copy being replaced by Rubens’s original, as if by sleight of hand, as the frame was rotated to

138

D. C. HANSON

display the genuine Crucifixion mounted behind the copy.89 In his essay “Cologne,” Ruskin reacts to this challenge to English Protestant perceptions of spirituality and authenticity by omitting description, not just of the copy, but even of the original, imagining instead a more spiritualized image. A sheltered English youth like Ruskin may well have found Rubens’s image unsettling since it shows the apostle violently nailed to a cross upside down, as Peter desired, according to church tradition. Mary Richardson considered the painting “wonderfully done” for the “expression of agony and resignation of St. Peter’s face and the indifference in those of the executioners”—a curious observation, which ignores the expression of demonic viciousness that Rubens limns in the face of the executioner turned directly to the viewer.90 For John’s part, according to “Cologne,” he (or his persona) was too ill to “stir out,” so he witnessed neither Rubens’s birthplace nor this “last” painting. According to Mary’s diary, in which she was usually careful to record illnesses as well as the various family members’ attendance on excursions,91 the arrangements that day were curiously complicated. Prior to visiting the cathedral, the family toured “a private collection of pictures belonging to a Mr. Wallrof.” This was the Wallrafianum, the art collection of Ferdinand Franz Wallraf, which he had willed to his native city of Cologne for public exhibition, and which contained an unusually large and representative collection of Gothic and early Renaissance sacred art.92 After viewing this collection, which probably presented the Ruskins with their first appreciable exposure to early Christian art on the Continent, John was sent home to draw. Mary gives no reason for this separation, while the rest of the family went on to the cathedral and viewed Rubens’s Crucifixion, passing by Rubens’s birthplace along the way. Then, they retrieved John from the hotel and returned to the cathedral, where they visited at least the treasury containing the sacred relics.93 Exactly what Ruskin saw, then, remains obscure, while the family party’s maneuvers could indicate either that John was indeed indisposed (or just bored) or that his parents were filtering his exposure to an unexpected profusion of Catholic art that day. Mary, for her part in viewing the Wallrafianum, could be relied on to fixate on the Last Judgement, in which she could pick out “several Roman Catholic priests and cardinals” being dragged to “everlasting punishment.”94 In the “Account,” Ruskin’s strategy for what may have been his first formal exercise in ekphrasis was to construct a description of what he did not

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

139

see—or says he did not see—a narrative compounded from the elements of high art, art theft, and tourism. In the essay, Rubens’s Crucifixion is displaced by a description of another painting by Rubens that the narrator says he definitely has never seen: “I neither know where it is, nor what it is,” he admits, “but there is a picture, curtained up in one of the royal palaces of France, the St Ambrosius, I think, kneeling before a crucifix.” The speaker knows little about this painting since “it is impossible to see,” but its recommendation lies precisely in its obscurity, which therefore presents “nothing to disturb”: There is one single ray of yellow light falling faintly upon the grey hairs and holy features of the venerable saint the rest is in obscurity, there is nothing more, nothing to disturb either the eye or the mind, and you feel calmed and subdued when you look upon that one solitary figure, as if in the presence of a superior being. It is impossible to see that picture, the reality is too striking, and a reality so hallowed and so beautiful, that when the curtain is again drawn over the picture, you feel as if awaking from a dream of heaven. It is by such pictures as this that Rubens has gained his immortality, and it was, I believe such a picture as this that I did not see at Cologne.95

Collingwood was wrong to assume that Ruskin was incapable of composing the poem, “Saltzburg,” about a city he had never seen—not just because the poet J. R. had yet to evolve to the naturalism of the Graduate of Oxford, but also because he had already essayed to describe what he “did not see” as a strategy for ekphrasis, lest unmediated sight “disturb either the eye or the mind.” The strategy arose not so much from an academic exercise of ranking the sister arts, as from a selective eclipse of the visible, when circumstances call for a defensive barrier or fortress. The defensiveness in this curious passage may have sprung from reaction to a Counter-Reformation image. At the Wallrafianum, Ruskin probably viewed Rubens’s The Stigmatization of Saint Francis (ca. 1616), which dramatizes the legend of St. Francis’s vision of the crucified Christ in the form of a six-winged seraph, with the brilliant light emanating from the vision appearing to drive the stigmata into the saint’s hands.96 Mary described the picture as “very fine and rather different from [Rubens’s] usual colouring.”97 The observation, which is

140

D. C. HANSON

accurate to an extent but ignores the drama of the blazing vision, corresponds to Ruskin’s moderating of emotional effect in his imagined picture, by dimming the light to a “faint” illumination of a solitary venerable figure. (In Rubens’s composition, the St. Francis is dominant, but a prone figure of Brother Leo relays the reaction by ordinary humanity to the vision.) The subject of his imaginary picture, “St Ambrosius,” may derive from the monk’s name of the eponymous character in Walter Scott’s The Abbot (1820), a sympathetically portrayed Catholic churchman who exhibits measured reason when faced with the extremes of Reformers’ zeal. Thus, as a defensive reaction to the dramatics of Counter-Reform imagery, Ruskin’s narrative combines suspicion, by drawing on the circumstances surrounding the theft of Rubens’s Crucifixion of Saint Peter and its tricky exhibition, with apprehension of the forbidden, by concealing the image behind a curtain, but also with moderation rather than reactionary zealotry by toning down the emotional drama of the picture so that it becomes “impossible to see” except with spiritual sight, like Raffles’s aerial Mont Blanc, suggesting the veil between the worshiper and the “dream of Heaven.” Compared with this ekphrasis of the not-seen, Ruskin’s strategy for distancing encounters with poverty and disease on the Continent were even more drastic. In the continental landscape annuals, such distress was mentioned only in passing, but a more specialized genre, the illustrated scientific tour, did address disease by speculating about environmental causes. Ruskin received two such books for his fifteenth birthday, in February 1834: William Brockedon’s Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps (1828– 1829), and H. B. de Saussure’s Voyages dans les Alpes (1786–1796). In the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-centuries, publications like these rose in status over the formerly “low” position accorded to topographical description, because, as Barbara Maria Stafford argues, they pitted their observational methodology against the emotiveness of the picturesque tour.98 Ruskin was as committed to coming forward as an author in these scientific publications as in literary annuals: his occasional geological observations made during the 1833 tour yielded his first publication in prose, which appeared in J. C. Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History in September 1834; and the scientific tour would become a model for his next travel diary, kept for the continental tour of 1835.99 Ruskin’s turn to this approach is evident in the plan for completing the “Account” listed in the back of MS VIII. In a table of proposed illustrations, while picturesque sources by Prout and Turner persist as a

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

141

resource throughout, engravings from Brockedon dominate many of the planned scenic representations. The list shows Ruskin adopting a method of parataxis, which Brockedon himself followed—that is, setting scenes sequentially side by side to illustrate what a keen observer should see along a route through the Alpine passes, a sequence closely matched by Brockedon’s narrative text. (Even Brockedon, however, reserves one scene apart from the sequence to serve as a header vignette illustrating a route as a whole.) Stafford highlights paratactic illustration as the preferred rhetorical mode of the scientific tour, because the methodical approach was “suitable to the ‘truthful’ declaration of the world’s plentitude,” as opposed to the irregular and “obtrusive flourishes of poetic color” typical of the picturesque tour.100 In his plan for illustrating the “Account,” the method required Ruskin to document the routes from the 1833 tour by cutting and pasting, not just picturesque highlights, but a sequence of plates selected from Brockedon and other sources, thereby dovetailing representations of landmarks the Ruskins viewed along their itinerary—an exacting exercise that Ruskin could have puzzled out only by careful study of Brockedon’s images and texts.101 Bound by such precision, Ruskin’s only recourse when encountering a religious or cultural barrier was to eclipse the undesirable object altogether, since the scientific tour did not allow for deviating from the scene. Thus, Ruskin’s tables in MS VIII omit Sion in the Rhône valley, the chief town of canton Valais, where the Ruskins spent two nights and a Sunday. The city’s place in the tables is given instead to Turtmann, a village at the opening of a side valley between Brig and Sion, which Mary does not mention in her diary, and which guidebooks (when remarking on the place at all) noted for the single attraction of a waterfall that was deemed less spectacular than better known cascades farther down the Rhône valley.102 A reason for this substitution can be readily inferred from Mary’s and John James’s diaries—the Ruskins’ disturbing encounter with disorders of hypothyroidism endemic to this region of the Rhône valley, including cretinism, as the condition was then named. After a walk in Sion with John and John James, Mary recorded her impression of Sion as “dirty and desolate looking, and the people all miserable creatures, two out of three” suffering “very bad” with goiter, and “many of them … idiots.”103 John James’s direct account of Sion is missing, but he later summarized his “Impressions seen & received in the Town & vale of Sion” by wishing he “could forget them totally.” By entering Switzerland via the Simplon and forced to traverse Valais, he advised, travelers would

142

D. C. HANSON

only be “wishing themselves at home if they be English.” The dreary habitations and flood-ravaged landscape “might be redeemed by the glimpses of rich & luxuriant Vegetation, by the grandeur of alpine height, by castled steep, & cascades but it is the aspect of Man that appals & distresses us & proves by the Impression it makes that our Sympathies are with our own species, that the world is destitute of half its beauty where these Sympathies are disturbed.” Since, as John James concludes, signs of cretinism in the “Inhabitants of the Valais deprived every Scene even of great natural Beauty of its Interest,”104 Ruskin’s only solution for maintaining beauty in his paratactic travelogue was to arrest the eye before coming to Sion, by taking a wayside excursion to Turtmann, in the relatively healthier Haut Valais. (For their actual Sunday in Sion, the Ruskins visited a hermitage in the cliffs above Sion, where the “clean” hermits gave them carnations to preserve as tokens of their visit.)105 A century would pass before the discovery that the cause of these disorders lay in environmental iodine deficiency, leading to a program for prophylaxis in Switzerland. Meanwhile, the recognition that goiter and cretinism were endemic to certain valleys prompted travel writers to theorize about the localized mapping of the disorders by proposing a combination of environmental and moral causes.106 Saussure attributed the cause to climactic factors, while Brockedon blamed the “dirty habits” of inhabitants of the lower valley, the Bas Valais, as compared with the “clean and healthy mountaineers”—a common inference.107 Yet, for the Simplon chapter of Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps, while dropping his brutal discussion of cretinism into a note to the text, Brockedon, too, sidesteps picturing the unpleasantness graphically. Keeping his text trained on the unhealthy marshes from Martigny to Sion (traveling the opposite direction from the Ruskins), the closest he approaches to picturing Valais is to choose, like Ruskin, a cascade—the Pissevache, the last “sublime” feature he describes before coming to Martigny. He reserves this scene, moreover, for the chapter vignette—out of sequence with the plates accompanying the tour itinerary—which foregrounds healthy peasants among their chalets, with the waterfall in the distance.108 For Martigny itself, which had been ravaged by flooding in 1818, and which was notorious for cretinism, the text of the Simplon chapter cross-references a plate for the chapter on the Great Saint Bernard. In this plate, which Ruskin listed for copying in his section on Martigny, a view of the Rhône valley of Valais recedes as far from the towns (and people) as possible. Its

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

143

foreground is dominated by the castle ruin at Martigny (La Bâtiaz), surrounded only by goats and wild vegetation, while the vista of the eastern expanse of the valley leads the eye from the Bas Valais to the Haut Valais and on to the source of the Rhône in the glaciers of the Saint Gotthard that closes the vista—a “very fine” view, Brockedon’s text comments.109 In this final stage in composition of the “Account,” its refiguring as scientific tour (albeit extant only in outline), Ruskin’s evasion prevents what he would later call the “serious play” of the “grotesque” or “noble picturesque” in dealing with human misery. By contrast, Turner devised a vignette for Rogers’s “Martigny” in Italy,110 which encodes a remembrance of a beloved innkeeper drowned in the recent disastrous floods. This message would have been decipherable only by the canniest readers111 ; however, for Ruskin in spring 1834, as he interrupted his composition of the “Account” to take up his exciting commission of “Saltzburg” for Friendship’s Offering , Turner’s vignettes did at least suggest a sister-arts model that could transform without entirely eclipsing troubling aspects of the continental landscape.

V “Saltzburg” was commissioned to accompany a steel engraving after a view of Salzburg by William Purser (ca. 1790–1852) (Fig. 6.3).112 In the MS VIII draft of the poem, Ruskin broaches the image with tropes of ekphrasis and travel, describing the scene both as if reading the surface of the engraving and as if traveling to the place. Indecision over these two approaches is suggested by his writing initially in the present tense, as if gazing at Purser’s picture, and then overwriting in the past tense, as if reflecting on past experience of travel. Secure in his strategies for organization, however, he at first surveys the “moveless” picture in an orderly, albeit rigidly schematic fashion. The description begins anchored in water, which floods the middle ground of Purser’s scene: “the sun is was low on Salzas silver deep,” the color silver suggesting both the real Salzach River and an engraved view. The eye moves along the horizontal axis, “low” and “broad,” and then looks upward to where the “Fortress [the Hohensalzburg] reared its dark and huge ascent / … lifted like a cloud” above the “lofty city.” Outlines of buildings that overlap suggest recession: “Dome over dome in arched array … / Spire over spire and sparkling minaret,” including the “mighty marble shrine” of St. Rupert’s Cathedral. To advance beyond this static description, the speaker queries

144

D. C. HANSON

Fig. 6.3 William Purser, Saltzburg , engraved by Edward Goodall, in Friendship’s Offering; and Winter’s Wreath: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for MDCCCXXXV (London: Smith, Elder, 1835 [ca. 1834]), 37 opp. From the collection of the author (Photo Jessica Firmin)

“what can break the still,” a move that returns the description to the picture’s foreground, now adding sound to sight with “murmuring voices … along the shore,” attributed to the foreground figures.113 As Ruskin learned from Rogers in structuring the “Account,” he maintains symmetry while piling one sensation cumulatively atop another. Apart from this grid-like structure, however, the draft also contains a Turneresque effect of atmosphere that suffuses the linear axes with more subtle gradations of depth: “Shadow imbued with sunbeams like a veil, / Clasps the wide city, wreathes its outlines pale / And mingles roof with roof and tower with towr.”114 In the revised and published poem, this atmospheric “veil” overtakes the schematic, linear movement of the eye, and the first stanza now advances through stages of time and transformation. Marked by a temporal refrain of “a moment since,” colors deepen as “twilight’s mystic woof” is woven over the city, and participles carry forward the “westering sun,” “lengthening shadows,” “chequered

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

145

… streaks,” and “flung … glow.”115 Along with the substitution of atmospheric transformation for linear survey, the “dim tissue” seems to spiral as it “Wraps the proud city.” Ruskin’s achievement in the revised version is, in effect, to convert Purser’s rectangular plate into a vignette. In Ruskin’s ekphrasis, the scene becomes “dense at its center, tenuous on the periphery,” as Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner say of the vignette form, a “naïve but powerful metaphor of the infinite.”116 Ruskin’s Turneresque performance implicates him in a probably unconscious paragone, a contest with Purser’s conventional scene (one shared with the engraver, Edward Goodall, whose subtle touch made him Turner’s choice to engrave the Italy vignettes and many other of his works), but the rivalry is supported less by sister-arts theory than by the Romantic ideology of the solitary “Creative Genius” apostrophized in the second half of the poem, anticipating the elitism of artist and critic pervading the rhetoric of Modern Painters I.117 The exchange of linear organization for luminescent transformation is accompanied by a reflexive observation, however, which simultaneously plunges into deeper relief the “shadows from yon ancient fortress cast.” The fortress, which was already present in the draft, looming “dark and huge” on the hill above the city, in revision stretches its shadows like a “leaden empire,” and, in place of the draft’s vaguely Oriental “minarets” lined up “Spire over spire,” the fortress more menacingly seems to shadow the vortex of Ruskin’s ekphrastic vignette with a curving “grasp of some barbaric power.”118 Transformative vision prompts awareness of a “barrier”: as the “dim tissue” becomes suffused with “golden glow,” the transformation seems reflexively to raise a fortress that suggests both defense against the other and an embodiment of the other, looming on the height over the city. The poem moves past this tension, as does the essay “Cologne,” by turning inward, the speaker swerving away from the surface of the engraving to penetrate imaginatively into the invisible interior of the cathedral: “through St. Ruperts massive portal [I] wend.” Here, poetic identity forms around oppositions. The interior of the cathedral first discloses lurid signs of Romanist worship: “successive altars lit with incensed flame / Rose through the chapels, none without a name,” and all with signs of “long devotion.” Despite fear of idolatry, the narrator admits to admiration for art that is “nobly wrought,” with the caveat that such art is “Planned by … master minds, that ever stand / The life, the glory, of

146

D. C. HANSON

their native land.” Here, Ruskin again takes up the topos of Napoleonicera art theft and repatriation, but instead of deploying that topic in a riposte to Counter-Reform theatricality, he quells anxiety over idolatry by crediting art to “native” genius. The art treasure inside the cathedral is purloined—“from the southward brought” (or in the revised poem, “from Ausonia [i.e., Italy] brought,” a borrowing from Felicia Hemans’s The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy: A Poem [1816])—but despite this violation, native genius will stand “as hard rock,” a “bulwark, rear[ing] its iron strength for aye.” The art may be native to Italy, but the rhetoric suggests the British fortress of Protestant Christianity.119 The genius is also Byronic, “Stand[ing] from the rest, unbuttressed, & alone,” after the surrounding “softer stone” has eroded away. Ruskin is, after all, crafting a poetic identity for J. R. at age fifteen, already a fervent adolescent admirer of Byron. In draft, however, in a distinct passage in darker ink, Ruskin excitedly added another persona that seems both more authentic and more vulnerable. Beneath the dome of the cathedral, there “slumbers Scotlands child / The Good St Rupert.” It matters little where Ruskin obtained the dubious information that the founding saint of Salzburg had Scottish origins.120 What mattered to him, first, was to nationalize native “master minds” as Scottish, like his father, his editor, and many of the writers on which he modeled the “Account”; and, second, to invest this native genius in the figure of a child with whom Ruskin could identify, albeit an effigy, a stone child, likewise unbuttressed and alone. The emotions compelling this identification are suggested by draft of the “Account,” in which there is likewise found a fragment about a slumbering child next to writing about towering genius. In a poem that cannot be pinned down to a particular topographical cluster, but that is composed adjacent to another poem about a native hero associated with lonely, rocky heights—Jacques Balmat, the native of Chamonix who first scaled the peak of Mont Blanc121 —a boy yearns for transformative yet protective submersion. This whirling vignette contains no darkness at its core: The lake smiled sweetly, and the boy, Who lay upon its border sleeping, Dreamed that he plunged beneath with joy, And heard a sound like billows beating Or like the angels hymns that rise, From the high thrones of Paradise, And, as he woke him from his sleep,

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

147

(The vision floats before him) High oer his head the waters leap And voices murmured from the deep. “I snatch the sleeper into sleep) And whirl my white waves oer him.122

The boy is submerged in what seems a feminine embrace, suggesting Ruskin’s religious mother, Margaret, while the enfolding “white waves” also allude to the White Lady, the spectral guardian of the Protestant word in Walter Scott’s The Monastery.123 Balmat, in the adjacent poem, is likewise wrapped in a white “winding sheet” of Alpine snow, but he emerged and “stood alone” on the mountain.124 The masculine adventurer (and protector?) striding the mountain barrier is tied to the rhapsodic (and protected) child—in “Saltzburg,” the Good St. Rupert, Scotland’s child, sleeping surrounded by the art treasures of the cathedral, yet indurated against the dangers of idolatry and exposure to suffering. The problem with this draft conclusion of “Saltzburg” is that it thwarts the ekphrastic purpose of the poem, by obeying the Protestant imperative to melt away the visible materiality of the cathedral dome. Rapt in gazing at the stars, the speaker “forgot the city” and, like the boy sleeping by the lake, “held … commune with the heaven.”125 In the published poem, this contradiction with the first half of the poem was avoided, and the mention of the saint’s supposed Scottish origins relegated to a footnote. In draft of the “Account,” however, Ruskin went on to pursue the theme of a genius child seeking the origins of imagination in a native place, which was also an etherial place that could be figuratively discovered in or transplanted onto the Continent as a spiritual home. In early 1834, this theme was suggested to Ruskin by a mentor who was known for scarcely ever traveling beyond his Scottish pastoral enclave, James Hogg.

VI In January 1834, John James Ruskin wrote to James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, with whom the family was slightly acquainted, to request an appraisal of John’s “unbounded” and facile “faculty of composition” (“check him as we will”). The timing of the letter suggests that John James was already arranging with Smith, Elder for publication of John’s poetry or considering doing so. But he was apprehensive, “dread[ing] the sacrifice of our offspring … to a thankless world, who read, admire, and

148

D. C. HANSON

trample on the greatest and the best.” He therefore looked to Hogg as an adviser, confiding: “there are many to whom I would never name [John] or his pursuits; but to men of talent and of heart I find I can say many things that I dare not tell the world at large.” Distrusting “the world,” and seeking reassurance in the religion of the “heart,” the Evangelical Ruskins turned to the ostensibly unworldly Ettrick Shepherd. The appeal resulted in the offer of another home: Hogg invited John to stay at his Altrive farm in the Border hills. In February, John declined, reluctant “to leave [his] parents even for a short time,” just as they were “equally tenacious of [him].” While declining, however, Ruskin fantasized about “wander[ing] among the holmes and hills of lovely Ettrick” in the company of his adopted “sisters and brothers,” the Ettrick Shepherd’s bairns.126 A poet for an adoptive father and a native pastoral for a home would calm the Ruskins’ worries by embowering the young writer in the fantasy of a Scottish Hippocrene (and touchingly, award him siblings in place of the stony solitude he would soon inscribe into J. R.). But John James Ruskin did not want his son to remain in pastoral retirement, unheard by the world, nor did he wholly appeal to Hogg as set apart by his georgic persona from the contemporary material culture of publishing. The Ruskins became acquainted with Hogg during the writer’s 1832 visit to London—his first and only trip to the metropolis, but with the up-to-date purpose of republishing his works in a collected and illustrated edition, like the recent editions of poems and novels by his friend, Scott, and others. John James Ruskin very generously backed this effort with twenty pounds—donated on the day of John’s thirteenth birthday—bidding to be named the first subscriber of a deluxe giftbook of Hogg’s The Queen’s Wake. The volume was to be “modelled on one of the fashionable literary annuals” and illustrated by John Martin.127 The giftbook was never produced, and Hogg ultimately had little success in the uncertain market for illustrated reprints. Yet he was saleable as a persona ostensibly unsophisticated in the material book production of the 1820s– 1830s, as when Pringle commissioned Hogg for Friendship’s Offering in 1829, asking for a poem that would convey the Ettrick Shepherd’s poetic life in the Border hills: “Give me some of the glorious romance of your own boyhood when the spirit of poetry & romance first began to pour over you the visions of fairyland.” The poem was meant to accompany a plate, The Minstrel Boy, showing, in Pringle’s description, “a boy of perhaps 7 or 8 years of age with a shepherds pipe … & a highland bonnet & plaid … lying in the midst of a scene of wild magnificence—woods,

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

149

hills and waterfalls.”128 In the “Account,” Ruskin constructs such a place in Chamonix, conceived as a bourne of poetic inspiration in “fairy land,” signifying a place that could be circumscribed and possessed, embodied like an illustrated giftbook, yet also disembodied and not subject to disturbances of the eye and mind of the tourist. In February 1834, at about the same time that he sent his wistful refusal of Hogg’s invitation to Altrive Farm, Ruskin transplanted the fantasy of a native pastoral Hippocrene to the Continent by bounding forward in draft for the “Account” to its planned concluding section, “Chamouni.” At that stage of composition, he was still drafting prose to fold into the MS IX fair-copy opening sections set in the plains of northern France and Belgium, but prompted by Hogg’s invitation to Scottish hills as well as by the recent gift of Brockedon’s and Saussure’s books about the Alps, he initiated the body of the draft in MS VIII with a prose “reverie,” “Source of the Arveron,” which describes the end of the tour at the base of Mont Blanc.129 The reverie relates a simplified version of a true story, the Ruskins’ excursion, led by child guides, to a popular tourist sight in the Chamonix valley, the glacier source of the Arveyron River.130 The speaker begins by defining the reverie in the manner of Ruskin’s fantasy recently penned for Hogg, a “stilly dreamy waking vision.” Echoing John James’s phrase in reaction to the misery of the Rhône valley—wishing yourself at home, if you be English—the vision posits an escape without a motive, “that places you where you are not, that carries where you wish to be,” by lending “the vivid, the magic colouring of the dream” to a “defined and distinct recollection of … reality.” The young guides are idealized, presenting “varieties of childish beauty,” “every little … mountaineer” making “a perfect picture.” The trope of guardian mountain barrier, Mont Blanc, combines with the trope of poetic source, the Arveyron. At the excursion’s goal, the speaker observes a liminal phenomenon similar to the spreading color of mist in “Saltzburg”—“the blue rigidness of the transparent cavern” of ice that surrounds the river’s fountain becomes suffused with light by the rose-colored “kiss of the departing sun.”131 The cavern is free from the ominous shadows that, in “Saltzburg,” are reflexively lengthened by extending the veil of Turneresque atmosphere. Here, among these perfect pictures of child mountaineers, there need be no indurating of the self. A poem drafted immediately following this reverie echoes the security of “The lake smiled sweetly”: “I woke to hear the lullaby / Of the swift river rolling by.”132

150

D. C. HANSON

In MS VIII, “Source of the Arveron” is immediately preceded by a brief lyric that, like “The lake smiled sweetly, and the boy,” cannot be anchored topographically, and cannot even be definitively attributed to the “Account.” If it does belong to the project, the lyric sets as a keynote for the MS VIII draft a rumination on the existence of fairyland: Oh are there spirits, can there be Things of such wondrous mystery Oh are there spirits, can a mind Float bodiless and unconfined ........................... If there be sprites in earth or air They surely have their dwelling there.133

Where “there” is remains unidentified, but in a poem and essay, each entitled “Chamouni” for the “Account,”134 the mountain valley is said to be haunted by “Spirits.” The speaker comes suddenly upon this “fairy land” when “dreaming of home,” and, as in “Source of the Arveron,” “think[ing] it would be very pleasant, to be where you are not.”135 This sense of home yet not home, and being where one is not, but wishes to be, is typical of a “mirroring process” that Nicola Brown finds in Victorian fairy art and writing in the Arcadian mode. Industrial Britain is represented as if in a “dream, in which feelings are displaced from painful objects onto harmless ones metaphorically connected with them.”136 Ruskin, along with other British tourists, hailed Chamonix as a “friend in a foreign land” in the belief that the valley had been discovered only in the last century by a British traveler—a story that retained the stubborn hold of a fantasy despite being discredited.137 By mirroring modern Britain in the Chamonix valley, the English traveler appropriated the supposed primitive spirituality of the place—the recovery of belief in fairies that, as Brown points out, was widely characterized as having been suppressed in Britain by industrialization.138 As a haven for displaced spirits, Chamonix could be deemed as vesting such beliefs in a semiliterate yet heroic peasantry who, according to Ruskin, “lived within that world alone,” “contented,” “secluded from mankind,” and breathing an “air … full of spirits.”139 The Chamonix valley itself, lying at the very foot of the glaciers of Mont Blanc, seemed an enchantment, “a child / Of beauty in the desert wild / … / Full strange … that thing so fair / So fairy like could harbour there.”140

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

151

In the essay on “The Meuse” for the “Account,” in which the speaker for the first time on the Continent confronts a mountain “barrier,” the Ardennes, Ruskin declares his aesthetic creed to lie in the “fairy vision of a dream,” a form of “romantic and picturesque beauty,” which he considers “superior” and “infinitely preferable” to “sublimity or beauty.”141 In the essay on “Chamouni,” the speaker looks back on his initial discovery of that “fairy vision” sister-arts aesthetic in the family library: “[b]efore we left home, I had read of Chamouni, heard of Chamouni, & seen some few drawings of Chamouni, but never so much as dreamed of going to Chamouni, it seemed so uncome-at-able, … in another world, in fairyland.”142 This print-culture version of Chamonix occupies both sides of the mirror of Britain. It is the industrial and professional world in which the adolescent Ruskin came forward as an author, and it is the fairy dream that displaces this reality with a place of domestic peace for the imagination, even in a foreign land.

VII In 1845, while traveling the Continent to study art history in preparation for Modern Painters II, Ruskin sent his father a poem, which was promised to Lady Blessington for the Book of Beauty—among the last of the commissions for annuals he would accept. “Written among the Basses Alpes” is the opposite of a reverie or fairy writing, since, instead of displacement, the poem openly expresses Ruskin’s disgust over the “vicious idleness” he perceived in the inhabitants of Conflans in Savoy, along with “a good deal of cretinism besides,” as he confided to his father, “but apparently more owing to dirt and laziness than to anything in the climate.”143 Arbitrarily rejecting Saussure’s climatic explanation for cretinism in favor of Brockedon’s uncleanliness theory, which better fitted his mood, Ruskin echoes the indignation of other British travelers over the supposed indolence of the cretin. As John Murray III comments in A Hand-book for Travellers in Switzerland, “there is scarcely any work which [the cretin] is capable of executing,” so he “spends his day basking in the sun, and, from its warmth, appears to derive great gratification,” but “[w]hen a stranger appears” he suddenly becomes active. Now “a clamorous and importunate beggar,” the cretin “assail[s]” the newcomer with “ceaseless chattering” until the traveler “is glad to be rid of his hideous presence at the expense of a batz.”144 Murray’s distaste corresponds to the negative response to painters of the English rural poor

152

D. C. HANSON

who, like George Morland, refused to conceal the disturbing actualities of rural life even as changing taste called for greater fidelity to the facts of their existence. As John Barrell comments, Morland’s engravers were compelled to reverse the expression of a listless family that included a boy shown “to be almost an idiot” with “nothing made of the comic possibilities of this,” along with another child shown “with an entirely inscrutable expression.” By contrast, an 1815 depiction of adult male laborers, likewise shown unoccupied, could be read as the well-earned liberty “of the bold peasantry from which were recruited the victors of Waterloo.”145 Unlike Morland’s engravers, Ruskin dwells on the allegedly undeserving poor in his poem for the Book of Beauty, thus subverting the picturesque and fairy aesthetics with which he had first come forward as an author. The poem rails against “ye things of stye and stall, / That congregate like flies, and make the air / Rank with your fevered sloth.” With the latter phrase all but naming cretinism by connecting indolence with disease, the speaker invokes “The Sun, which should your servant be” for cheerful labor, to “bear / Dread witness on” the peasant’s “slumber.” Fairy art and writing mirrored industrial labor in the magic of spirits, which the factories have driven away. Ruskin inverts this equation in a note to the poem, by mirroring the squalor of Conflans in “the most debased cities of Europe,” which have infected even the “seclusion of mountain-life.” Only a “few rock fragments of manly character” remain “free from … over civilization,” the note warns. Ruskin himself was put off by the poem’s “moral turn,” which he admitted sounded “nasal” like a vulgar preacher,146 but he had nothing to lose by ruffling the complacency of Lady Blessington’s readers with his grating tone: he had already put his parents on notice that he would give up poetry writing. His subversive stance in this poem made way for a more critical approach to the sister arts, which developed during the continental tour of 1845. He no longer treated the sister arts as mere accumulation; at the same time, his touristic responses remained entangled in metaphors that had structured his approach to the Continent in the 1830s. As his poem indicates, Ruskin was now prepared to confront subjects that he had formerly spiritualized or distanced: “All the romance … is gone, and nothing that I see ever makes me forget that I am in the 19th century,” he explained to his father. Since the tour of 1845 was his first return to the Continent unaccompanied by his parents, Ruskin self-consciously framed the failing romance of his vision in terms of Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode: he had lost the “blessed imaginative

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

153

power of childhood,” its “energy & joyousness,” settling instead for “a far less imaginative” and more critical and multi-sided view of Italy—“a book to be worked through,” and “not as a dream to be interpreted.” Consequently, he admitted to experiencing conflict in pursuit of the sister arts. “[I]n matters poetical,” he saw “two sides of a thing at once, now,” where he formerly strove for convergence. In his drawing, while continuing to copy in order to “learn [the Old Masters’] differences of manner,” just as he had once imitated the contrasting styles of Prout and Turner, he now found himself thwarted by cross-purposes: Giotto’s figures were “badly drawn” yet “full of life and feeling,” so, if he copied a figure’s hand “as well as [he could], it isn’t like,” but, “if [he drew] it rudely and badly,” it was “all mighty like, but the feeling … all gone.”147 Yet, as Ruskin reflects on his changing critical approach to the sister arts, his behavior as a tourist reenacts the metaphors structuring his perceptions in the 1830s. The linked tropes of barrier and origin recur in his letters from the Anzasca valley in the Italian Alps, where he retreated from the summer heat, along with his Alpine guide, Couttet, and his valet, Hobbs. Brockedon singled out this valley with its “race of fine men and beautiful women” as proof that cretinism in the “nearly parallel” Aosta valley must result from its people “sty[ing] … with their cattle,” since both valleys depend on the same glacier source for water.148 In one of his few letters written during the 1845 tour specifically for his mother, Ruskin reassured her of the valley’s safety and cleanliness, describing the valley’s “semi-circle of … rocks & waterfalls” and “the peaks of the Monte Rosa all round,” just as in the “Account” the isolated valley of Turtmann and its waterfall diverted from the horrors of Sion and Martigny, and the “white waves” were “whirl[ed]” over the boy in “The lake smiled sweetly.” He calls his chalet in the Anzasca “my cottage” around which the brooks “sing to me all night” like a lullaby. Alternatively, writing to his father, Ruskin characterizes this “realization of all my childs ideas of felicity” in terms of the isolated, masculine “hermit’s life” he and his male companions established among the “chalets and rocks” with only “soup” to eat, keeping guard against an invading “party” of English tourists (“I shall buy up the meat in the valley & starve them out”). Yet, while Ruskin remains divided between upholding the masculine rock fortress and immersing in feminine protection, he did not confuse the “charm of early association” and “home feeling that I have at Chamonix” with the Anzasca valley, on which he turned a more critical eye. He had “fancied it a kind of Rasselas place,” but found it merely “commonplace,” and “[a]s for the beauty of

154

D. C. HANSON

the inhabitants, poverty & labour set the same marks pretty fairly all over the world.” A purpose in coming here was to compare a Turner watercolor, The Pass of St. Gotthard, near Faido, against the actual site. Taking a strictly paratactic approach to the terrain, he discovered that, “compared with Turner’s colossal conception,” the real mountains seemed “pigmy & poor.”149 Likewise when Ruskin was at work in the Italian cities, boyhood tropes structured his response to the people, even as he struggled toward inviting aberrant vision by “seeing two sides.” He gloried in “church fronts charged with heavenly sculpture and inlaid with whole histories in marble,” while raging against the perceived neglect of these monuments by a people he prophetically denounced as “bad enough for anything … nothing done or conceived by man but evil.” As in “Saltzburg,” he turned inward from this conflict to contemplate a self both hard as stone and permeable as spirit. Each day at Lucca, he entered the cathedral at the ephemeral hour of dusk to watch the light steal over Jacopo della Quercia’s effigy of Ilaria di Caretto. Another stone child who “died young,” Ilaria slept like Scotland’s child. “[L]eaning on the [stone] pillow,” Ruskin watched the “twilight fade over the sweet, dead lips and arched eyes in their sealed close,” his gaze dematerializing the statue. As “art,” the statue seemed “in every way perfect”—“truth itself”—but his gaze subjected its truth to the mode of reverie, as at Chamonix watching the ice cavern at the source of the Arveyron become suffused by the setting sun. Similarly shadowless, Ilaria was perfectly accessible and safe: “[t]here is no decoration nor work about [the effigy], not even enough for protection.” Yet, as a more critical perception, just as in Anzasca he bound his picturesque viewing by commonplace truth, here he bound spiritual sight by a human history (albeit mythologized) of civic order and law. Ilaria’s husband, Ruskin explained to his father, “left the Lucchese several good laws which they have still”; his “palace-fortress” can still be seen.150 Eventually, Ruskin reflected on and overcame these tropes. In Modern Painters II, he categorized the effigy of Ilaria as an example of “typical beauty,” which he persisted in framing in terms of the Intimations Ode as a survival from childhood—that which remains behind, from the lost sacred types of youth, such as “infinity,” “unity,” and “repose.”151 In later years, addressing the young men of Oxford, Ruskin would reject this nostalgic reading and contrast Quercia’s sculpture with the art of Nicola Pisano—a “boyish soul … set on” a single-minded artistic aim in

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

155

all its “insufficiency, childishness, and unfeelingness,” whereas Quercia’s achievement lay in many-sidedness: the Ilaria statue was “the only piece of monumental work … which unites in perfect and errorless balance the softest mysteries of emotion with the implacable severities of science.”152 Similarly, Ruskin rejected the stiff and fictitious distinction between the alleged cleanliness and virtue of mountaineers versus the filth and disease among dwellers in (some) valleys. In the “Mountain Gloom” chapter of Modern Painters IV, he leads the reader into the heights connecting Martigny with Chamonix to discover the benefit of mountain beauty on the inhabitants, but he finds only bleak labor, “neither hope nor passion of spirit; … neither advance nor exultation.” Turning in the other direction to descend into the Aosta valley, whose inhabitants were often disadvantageously contrasted with mountaineers, Ruskin finds the same “gloom of spirit” in the “endurance … of disease,” which is “independent of mere poverty or indolence” and not essentially different from the “plague-like stain” attendant on the “honest Savoyard” in the heights.153 Ruskin’s prophetic lawgiving in “Written among the Basses Alpes” yields to Joblike questioning in “The Mountain Gloom,”154 resistant either to categorical denunciation or to the lure of reverie and displacement. In the late 1840s, as Ruskin was complicating the approach to the Continent associated with the illustrated travel publications of his youth, his father launched a project to preserve his son’s boyhood poetic responses. For years, John James had carried copies of John’s poems on his business travels. One form of these copies, according to Cook and Wedderburn, was a bound set of proofs of poems for the annuals, collected by John James’s friend and the erstwhile editor of Friendship’s Offering , W. H. Harrison.155 Now that Ruskin declared an end to his verse composition, John James enlisted Harrison’s assistance to compile a more formal anthology for private publication and circulation, the Poems by J. R. (1850). Surprisingly, despite the attribution of Poems to J. R., the opening selections in the anthology omit “Fragments from a Metrical Journal” and “Saltzburg,” thus passing over the process of Ruskin’s debut as that persona in Friendship’s Offering .156 Instead, the opening selections construct a narrative that draws the poetry directly from pastoral, mountain travel, much like the myth of the Ettrick Shepherd’s inspiration. The first poem selected was a previously unpublished “Song” (ca. 1833) of yearning for the Lake District mountains, which, in context

156

D. C. HANSON

of the anthology, suggests both an elegy for Ruskin’s poetic persona— “My muse is on the mountain sleeping, / My harp is sunk to rest”— and a remembrance of his first mountain sightings: “There is a thrill of strange delight / … / When blue hills rise upon the sight.” This poem, which Ruskin wrote probably shortly before the family’s departure for the Continent in 1833,157 is followed by a cluster alluding to the published “Fragments from a Metrical Journal,” but only by resituating that project in the “Account” rather than in Friendship’s Offering . Instead of reprinting “Andernacht” and “St. Goar” as revised for “Fragments,” like the other texts in the anthology which are taken from the published annuals, the Poems rescues the unpublished poem linking “Andernacht” and “St. Goar” in the “Account,” “Ehrenbreitstein,” which is subtitled in Poems as a “Fragment from a Metrical Journal.” Perceptively, the editors surrounded this selection with two previously unpublished poems that supply the place of the complementary contrasted pair of poems in the “Account”—“The Avalanche,” which takes the place of the Gothic “Andernacht,” and “The Emigration of the Sprites,” which fills in for the domestic “St. Goar.” The difference in these replacements is that the poems transfer their respective Gothic and domestic tropes to a mountain fairyland: “The Avalanche,” tells of a “superstition very prevalent among the Swiss” that climbers lost on Mont Blanc will “rift their mountaintomb / … / To come and ask a sepulchre”; and “The Emigration of the Sprites” borrows the conceit of Pilgrims of the Rhine to tell how the fairies “in Anglo land” were driven away by disbelief, and “invited” by the “native fairies” of Germany “On top of Drachenfels to dine.” Thus, in this final tribute to J. R., Ruskin’s process of coming forward as—and turning away from—that persona is erased, and his poetry is fixed in a cumulative (in fact, anthologized) approach to the sister arts, here naturalized as if arising organically from a reverie “of strange delight” in the mountain barrier. Although for Ruskin “The soul of Poesie … [was] fled, / And fancy’s sacred fire … dead,” as concluded in “The Emigration of Sprites” poetry could live on, at least in private publication, to domesticate the Continent as an English fairyland, free of any disturbance to the eye and mind of its visitor.158

Notes 1. For an earlier, briefer family tour, see “Tour of 1825” in Early Ruskin Manuscripts (hereafter ERM ), ed. David C. Hanson, https://erm.selu.

6

2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

157

edu/notes/tour_of_1825_note. Throughout this essay, I refer readers to this electronic archive for bibliographic and contextual evidence that is too lengthy to repeat here. Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, Library Edition, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), 35:112– 19; 79–81. The title is editorial, first bestowed by W. G. Collingwood in Ruskin, Poems of John Ruskin, ed. Collingwood, 2 vols. (London: George Allen, 1891), 1:119. See ERM, “Account of a Tour on the Continent” (hereafter “Account”), apparatus, “Title,” https://erm.selu.edu/apparatuses/ account_of_a_tour_on_the_continent_apparatus#TITLE. Ruskin, Works, 35:81. Ibid. Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, Painting, and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris, and the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 53–92. See ERM, “Tour of 1833,” https://erm.selu.edu/notes/tour_of_1833_ note. The itinerary given in Works states incorrectly that the family entered Switzerland by way of the Great St. Bernard (2:340n). Ruskin’s cousin, Mary Richardson, explains that, after crossing the Simplon, they stopped at Liddes to ascend the St. Bernard (Diary, 9–10 July 1833, RF T48, The Ruskin, Lancaster University, 71–76; subsequent quotations from the diary ©The Ruskin, Lancaster University). See John Hayman, John Ruskin and Switzerland (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990), 18–19; Works, 35:111; and https://erm. selu.edu/notes/drawings_1833_note. In addition, isolated items belonging to the “Account” are found in MS IA, MS VII, and MS XI. For the naming conventions of these manuscripts, see ERM, “The System of Title Citation for Manuscripts,” https://erm.selu.edu/notes/title_citation_for_major_ mss_note. ERM will contain apparatuses describing each of these manuscripts, which are held in the John Ruskin Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. For Ruskin’s plan for the continuation of the “Account,” listed on the endboards of MS VIII, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/account_ of_a_tour_on_the_continent_toc_msviii.php. In ERM, I reconstruct and annotate for the first time the completed arc of the “Account,” incorporating Ruskin’s unrealized plans, and I compensate for omissions, misplacements, and mistranscriptions of text and image in the versions of the “Account” edited by Collingwood in Poems, 1:119–63, and by Cook and Wedderburn in Works, 2:340–87. “Fragments from a Metrical Journal” and “Saltzburg,” Friendship’s Offering; and Winter’s Wreath … for MDCCCXXXV (London: Smith,

158

D. C. HANSON

Elder, 1835 [ca. October–November 1834]), 317–19; 37–38. Previously, Ruskin’s very first publications were the poems “Lines Written at the Lakes in Cumberland. Derwentwater” and “On Skiddaw and Derwent-Water,” published in August 1829 and February 1830, respectively, in the Spiritual Times. See ERM, https://erm.selu. edu/apparatuses/on_skiddaw_and_derwentwater_apparatus. While publication in this short-lived magazine—edited by Reverend Edward Andrews, the family clergyman and Ruskin’s tutor—was flattering, it could not compare with the exposure afforded by a debut in Friendship’s Offering . Ruskin’s father apparently regarded the earlier publication as a family affair more than a professional debut. 11. The draft of “Saltzburg” (MS VIII, 81r–v) follows “Villa Pliniana” (80v), the last-composed item for the “Account” in MS VIII, with no change in handwriting or ink. Nevertheless, Collingwood’s description of MS VIII in “Preliminary Note on the Original MSS. of the Poems” assumes that “Saltzburg” is “descriptive of a new Tour—that of 1835” (Poems, 1:266). 12. Randolph Vigne notes that the deadline for the editor, Thomas Pringle, to deliver completed copy for the 1835 Friendship’s Offering to the printer was August 1, 1834 (Thomas Pringle: South African Pioneer, Poet, and Abolitionist [Woodbridge: James Currey, 2012], 244). This date would have required Ruskin to start work on his contributions by spring or early summer of that year. In Ruskin’s 1835 diary, the entries end in September, prior to the family’s visit to Salzburg (see the John Ruskin Digital Archive, Victorian Lives and Letters Consortium, http://digital.tcl.sc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/vllc/ id/958/rec/1). At the Ruskin Library, an itinerary shows the Ruskins departing from Venice in October 1835 by way of the Brenner Pass for Innsbruck, where they turned northeast to Salzburg and then northwest to Munich. (I am grateful to Stephen Wildman for this information.) Such a circuitous route was perhaps motivated specifically by the attraction of Salzburg, deemed worth a detour since Ruskin had already published a poem about the city. 13. On Pringle’s decline and death, from September to December 1834, see Vigne, Thomas Pringle, 245–47. Diagnosed with tuberculosis in June 1834, Pringle continued to work throughout the second half of 1834, as indicated by his letters appealing to patrons for help since he “was utterly … without income, except what depended on [his] pen” (Leitch Ritchie, “Memoirs of Thomas Pringle,” Poetical Works of Thomas Pringle [London: Edward Moxon, 1838], cxix). The Poetess Archive (ed. Laura Mandell, http://www.poetessarchive.org/creators/index.php) identifies the editor of the 1835 Friendship’s Offering as Henry D. Inglis, but, for

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

159

most of 1834, Inglis was abroad, preparing Ireland in 1834: A Journey throughout Ireland, during the Spring, Summer, and Autumn of 1834, 2 vols. (London: Whittaker, 1834), and he dated that book’s dedication from London, November 1834. He did step into the breach at some point and “assisted” Pringle “in the last year” of his editorship, according to W. H. Harrison, who took over the editorship of the annual following Inglis’s own death in March 1835 (Friendship’s Offering; and Winter’s Wreath … for MDCCCXXXVI [London: Smith, Elder, 1836], v); however, since the 1835 volume was due to the printer in August 1834, Inglis’s assistance must have been confined to final proof correction or to starting preparations for the subsequent volume for 1836. It is tempting to conjecture that Inglis played some part in editing Ruskin’s “Saltzburg” since he wrote about the city in The Tyrol; with a Glance at Bavaria (2nd ed., 2 vols. [London: Whittaker, Treacher, 1834], 1:269– 73), but nothing in that book corresponds to details in Ruskin’s poem. 14. According to Collingwood’s story, Pringle “came out to Herne Hill,” the Ruskins’ home, where he “was hospitably entertained as a brother Scot,” and, as a “return for this hospitality,” the editor “gave a good report of John’s verses” to Smith, Elder, the publisher of Friendship’s Offering . “After getting [Ruskin] to rewrite two of the best passages in the last [i.e., 1833] Tour” (i.e., the poems “Andernacht” and “St. Goar” in the “Account,” revised to form “Fragments from a Metrical Journal”), Pringle “carried them off for insertion in his forthcoming number” of the annual. Collingwood does not specify when all this happened, but he knows that Ruskin contracted pleurisy in 1835, causing his parents to take him abroad in April of that year. During this journey, Collingwood concludes: Mr. Pringle had a plate of Salzburg which he wanted to print in order to make up the volume of “Friendship’s Offering” for the next Christmas. He seems to have asked John Ruskin to furnish a copy of verses for the picture; and at Salzburg, accordingly, a bit of rhymed description was written, and rewritten, and sent home to the editor. Early in December the Ruskins returned; and at Christmas there came to Herne Hill a gorgeous gilt morocco volume “To John Ruskin, from the Publishers.” On opening it, there were his “Andernach” [sic] and “St. Goar,” and his “Salzburg” [sic], opposite a beautiful engraved plate, all hills and towers and boats and picturesquely moving figures under the sunset, in Turner’s manner more or less,—really by Turner’s engraver [Edward Goodall]. It was almost like being Mr. Rogers himself. (The Life and Work of John Ruskin, 2 vols. [London: Methuen, 1893], 1:50; 50–52)

160

D. C. HANSON

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

By eliding events of winter 1833–1834 with those of autumn and winter 1835, Collingwood collapses the two volumes of Friendship’s Offering published during that period. In Friendship’s Offering; and Winter’s Wreath … for MDCCCXXXVI, published in October or November 1835, Ruskin’s contribution as J. R. is “The Months.” This threestanza poem, which is unaccompanied by illustration—a considerably more modest effort compared with the dazzling opportunity presented by the previous volume, perhaps enforced by the illness and long journey throughout 1835—is a revision of a longer poem composed as a New Year’s gift for Ruskin’s father on January 1, 1835; see https://erm.selu. edu/apparatuses/the_months_apparatus. Carol A. Bock, “Authorship, the Brontës, and Fraser’s Magazine: ‘Coming Forward’ as an Author in Early Victorian England,” Victorian Literature and Culture 29, no. 2 (September 2001): 246. See Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years, 1819–1859 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 29–30. For a detailed analysis, see ERM, “Account” apparatus, “Composition and Publication.” In ERM, see “Account” apparatus, “The Verse Travelogue (MS IA, g.1).” Although undated, MS IA, g.1, must have preceded the MS IX fair copy since its interlinear revisions are incorporated into the latter’s text. Charles L. Batten Jr., Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 9–46. Richardson, Diary, 15 May 1833, 2. Ruskin, “Calais” (poem), in “Account,” MS IA, g.1, 1r. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/calais_poem_msia_g1.php. Thomas Raffles, Letters, during a Tour through Some Parts of France, Savoy, Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands, in the Summer of 1817, 2nd ed. (Liverpool: Thomas Taylor, 1819), 3–4. Ruskin, “Calais” (poem), in “Account,” MS IA, g.1, 1r. Ruskin, “Cassel” (poem), in “Account,” MS IA, g.1, 2r. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/cassel_poem_msia_g1.php. For Prout’s 1821 itinerary, which resulted in Illustrations of the Rhine (1822–1826) as well as the Facsimiles, see Richard Lockett, Samuel Prout, 1783–1852 (London: B. T. Batsford, 1985), 50. Lockett regards Prout as a pioneer both in British artists’ exploration of northern continental scenery and in media—“the first important lithographic artist in England” (47–59; 45). See also Keith Hanley and John K. Walton, Constructing Cultural Tourism: John Ruskin and the Tourist Gaze (Bristol: Channel View, 2010), 43–44. In 1834, John James augmented the family’s heretofore humble art collection with a northern European scene

6

26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

161

by Prout—the Old Street, Lisieux, Normandy, exhibited that year at the Old Water Colour Society; see Robert Hewison, Ian Warrell, and Stephen Wildman, Ruskin, Turner, and the Pre-Raphaelites (London: Tate Gallery, 2000), 46. Ruskin, “Brussels” (poem), in “Account,” MS IA, g.1, 2v. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/brussels_poem_ msia_g1.php. Pieter François, “If It’s 1815, This Must Be Belgium: The Origins of the Modern Travel Guide,” Book History 15, no. 1 (2012): 71–92. As Van Akin Burd notes, John James purchased a work by Mariana Starke in 1833, but its title is unknown. He also provided the family with a German grammar (The Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 2 vols. [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973], 1:286n1). In 1833, John Murray published the eighth edition of Starke’s Travels in Europe, for the Use of Travellers on the Continent; and Benjamin Colbert informs me that, by 1832, the eighth edition of Starke’s Travels on the Continent was also available under the title Information and Directions for Travellers on the Continent; see also Hanley and Walton, Constructing Cultural Tourism, 27. The family may also have used at this time M. Reichard, Itinerary of Italy; or Traveller’s Guide through that Interesting Country (London, n.d.), which Nicholas T. Parsons says was reissued in an 1816 English translation shortly after the reopening of the Continent, and that was updated in the 1820s with particularly thorough practical and financial information (see Parsons, Worth the Detour: A History of the Guidebook [Stroud: Sutton, 2007], 220; Stephen Wildman, Ruskin and Switzerland, part 1, 31 March–1 July 2001, Ruskin Library, Lancaster University [exhibition catalogue] [9]). On the transitional character of Starke’s work, still shaped by the Grand Tour but updated with new routes, timetables, and other advice, see Parsons, Worth the Detour, 180–82; 337n20; and James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 68–70. John James acquired Starke’s earlier Letters from Italy in 1840 (James S. Dearden, The Library of John Ruskin [Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 2012], 326–27). Starke, Travels in Europe, for the Use of Travellers on the Continent …, 8th ed., “considerably enlarged” (London: John Murray, 1833), 5, and see 532–36. William Kennedy, ed., preface to The Continental Annual and Romantic Cabinet, for 1832, with Illustrations by Samuel Prout, Esq., F.S.A. (London: Smith, Elder, 1832), v. Leitch Ritchie, “A Word Prefatory,” in Travelling Sketches in the North of Italy, the Tyrol, and on the Rhine …, from Drawings by Clarkson Stanfield (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1832), iv.

162

D. C. HANSON

32. Ruskin, “Calais” (essay), in “Account,” MS IA, g.2, 1r. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/calais_prose_msia_g2.php. 33. See ERM, “Account” apparatus, “The Composite-Genre Travelogue (MS IA, g.2).” 34. Along the way, although consistently subtitled A Poem, Rogers’s Italy did accrue a small number of prose pieces. Part 1 (as published by Murray in 1823) contained no prose, part 2 (published in 1828) included four brief prose pieces, and the 1830 version, with the two parts combined, added one more, making a total of five prose pieces scattered among its forty-four poems. 35. Macaulay quoted in J. R. Hale, introduction to The Italian Journal of Samuel Rogers (London: Faber & Faber, 1956), 111 (see also 109–11). Cecilia Powell cautions that the apparent drama of Rogers’s reinvention should be tempered by facts concerning the sales of earlier editions of Italy (recorded in a ledger belonging to the publisher, John Murray), which were not meager, albeit no match for the success of the 1830 edition. Also, Rogers was prone on other occasions to stop press and make revisions, owing not to chagrin over weak reception but to an obsessive perfectionism that his wealth enabled him to indulge (“Turner’s Vignettes and the Making of Rogers’ ‘Italy,’” Turner Studies 3, no. 1 [1983]: 2–3; 11–12n13; 16; also on the persistent appeal of Rogers’s verse, along with the popularity of the 1830 illustrated Italy, see Jan Piggott, Turner’s Vignettes [London: Tate, 1993], 35). Since John James Ruskin purchased Italy in 1828 (Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 1:188n4), he probably acquired at least part 2, which was published by Murray that year. Part 1 was first published by Longman in 1821–1822, with three new editions appearing from Murray between 1823 and 1824. The fourth edition of part 1 contained very slight decorative illustrations by Thomas Stothard, as did part 2. Prior to 1830, part 1 of the poem appeared in an illustrated edition of sorts—the Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas for 1825 (i.e., published in late 1824). This was not a complete edition but a series of brief extracts from the poem used to embellish the otherwise blank diary pages along with copper-engraved vignettes by Stothard. See Powell, “Turner’s Vignettes,” 2; J. S. L. Gilmour, “The Early Editions of Rogers’s Italy,” The Library, 5th ser., 3 (September 1948): 137–40. 36. Piggott, Turner’s Vignettes, 20. 37. Since, unlike wood, steel engraving is intaglio and cannot be set in the same frame with relief type, the printer had to devise a costly method of sending the sheets through the press twice—once for the intaglio impression from the plate and once again for the relief impression from the letterpress—while maintaining precise registration, an achievement that drew admiring comment in the press about Italy. See Piggott, Turner’s

6

38.

39.

40.

41.

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

163

Vignettes, 19, and the reviews quoted in Powell, “Turner’s Vignettes,” 3. From the vantage of late-nineteenth-century book design, the relation between type and vignette in the 1830 Italy seemed unsuccessfully integrated (Powell, “Turner’s Vignettes,” 6–8; Basil Hunnisett, SteelEngraved Book Illustration in England [London: Scolar, 1980], 7; 9). As a comparison with this perspective, see Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner’s history of the Romantic vignette up to the 1830s, which they trace mainly in French art (Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art [New York: W. W. Norton, 1984], 74–84). Piggott, Turner’s Vignettes, 13–16. For Ruskin’s imitation of this layout, including vignettes, for “Calais” (corpus) in MS IX, see in ERM https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/corpuses/account_of_a_tour_ on_the_continent_msix_corpus_calais.php. See, e.g., John Dixon Hunt, “Ut Pictura Poesis, the Picturesque, and John Ruskin,” Modern Language Notes 93, no. 5 (December 1978): 794–818; George P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 43–53; and Alexandra K. Wettlaufer, “The Sublime Rivalry of Word and Image: Turner and Ruskin Revisited,” Victorian Literature and Culture 28, no. 1 (2000): 149–52. Wettlaufer, “The Sublime Rivalry,” 160. At the same time, Ruskin was taught to uphold traditional, hierarchical forms of knowledge over the more extreme effects of miscellaneity in the 1820s–1830s, as manifested in some early Victorian forms of publication—e.g., in the declining status of poetry compared to the more rapidly consumed prose and heterogeneous knowledge gathered in magazines. See Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); David Stewart, Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Ruskin, Works, 13:445. Even in our time, the question of the creative relationship between Turner and Rogers has turned on the question of whether the artist was too compliant with the poet’s tastes rather than competitive with them. Piggott comes down on the side of a “fertile conjunction” between artist and poet: Turner lends “the pleasure of recognition” to the vignettes by adding specific details that reference the poems, all the while eschewing “Rogers’s dramas of love and death” for his own “poetic meditation on the Italian journey”—a parallel meditation “conceived as an artistic unity” (Turner’s Vignettes, 35–39). Piggott disagrees with Adele M. Holcomb, who argues that Rogers’s traditionalism and classicism set a drag on Turner’s imagination, causing the artist to relinquish for Rogers’s sake “the most salient tendencies of his style,” his “instinct for drama, contrast and variety.” Holcomb points out

164

D. C. HANSON

42.

43.

44.

45.

that Turner’s taste for eighteenth-century topographical poets such as James Thomson would have made him sympathetic to Rogers’s neoclassical, learned verse, whereas Rogers, whose art collection included little Turner and who probably shrank from the painter’s more confusing sublime scenes, was impressed by the delicacy of Turner’s designs for steel. Accordingly, in Holcomb’s view, Turner compromised the dynamism of his initial sketches for the vignettes, and instead adopted “clarity and … formality” to match the poet’s verse (“A Neglected Classical Phase of Turner’s Art: His Vignettes to Rogers’s Italy,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 [1969]: 406; 408). In 1833, exasperation over such an assignment drove Letitia Landon to contribute a poem about her inability to summon any sympathetic ideas in response to an engraving of a Chinese pagoda; see Katherine D. Harris, Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823– 1835 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), 183–87. Reviews of The Pilgrims of the Rhine by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 23, no. 651 (8 March 1834): 156; Athenaeum, no. 330 (22 February 1834): 141. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Pilgrims of the Rhine (London: Saunders & Otley, 1834). In his personal account ledger, John James Ruskin recorded purchase of a “P. Rhine” for 30 shillings in June 1834 (Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 1:286n1). This abbreviated title is confirmed to have been Bulwer-Lytton’s Pilgrims by the provenance of a first edition that remained at Brantwood (Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 212). For Prout’s influence on Roberts’s architectural drawing, see Lockett, Samuel Prout, 77; 92. Bulwer-Lytton’s project in the novels of the 1830s, according to Margaret F. King and Elliot Engel, was to transform “his earlier prototypes of the romantic alien [in his Byronic novels of the 1820s] into the Carlylean romantic hero, who while maintaining his transcendent antimaterialist vision is able to translate that vision into effective social action” (“The Emerging Carlylean Hero in Bulwer’s Novels of the 1830s,” NineteenthCentury Fiction 36, no. 3 [December 1981]: 280). King and Engel do not mention Pilgrims, but this transformative bildung is the Rhine journey’s goal for the hero, Trevylyan, with the river serving as an “emblem” of German literature, “its luxuriance, its fertility, its romance” (Pilgrims, 101). In the mixed form of Pilgrims —just as in its less philosophical cousins, the illustrated landscape and literary annuals—this idealism was attained by putting the characters through a “good representative anthology” of “various types of German tales,” which are enumerated by Edwin M. Eigner (“The Pilgrims of the Rhine: The Failure of the German Bildungsroman in England,” Victorian Newsletter 68 [Fall 1985]: 20). The quest is also pursued through inter-related arts in the illustrations;

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

165

nonetheless, Bulwer-Lytton’s idealism favors academic hierarchies in the arts, as suggested by an engraving of “The Author of Pelham” as a classical bust, which faces the “Prefatory Poem: ‘To the Ideal’” in the first edition of Pilgrims. As Michael Lloyd notes concerning Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, Zanoni (1842), a sculptor is chosen to share in the idealizing principle with the “Artist in words” (“Bulwer-Lytton and the Idealizing Principle,” English Miscellany 7 [1956]: 25–39, partly reprinted in Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism, ed. Joann Cerrito [Detroit: Gale, 1994], 45:3). Given this emphasis on idealism in Pilgrims, the author apparently felt it unnecessary to mention the fact that he wrote the book (in 1832) without having actually visited the Rhine, while boasting in the preface to an 1849 edition that the “descriptions of the Rhine have been considered by Germans sufficiently faithful to render this tribute to their land and their legends one of the popular guide-books along the course it illustrates.” After all, “[h]e little comprehends the true charm of the Rhine, who gazes on the vines on the hill-tops without a thought of the imaginary world with which their recesses have been peopled by the graceful credulity of old” (reprinted in Leila, or the Siege of Granada; Calderon the Courtier; and the Pilgrims of the Rhine [London: George Routledge & Sons, 1878], 253–54). 46. See Richard Cronin, Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 50. 47. Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 282. 48. Ruskin, “Aix la Chapelle” (essay), in “Account,” MS IX, 30v. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/aix_la_chapelle_ prose_msix.php. Ruskin refers to the ancient throne used for German coronations in Charlemagne’s Aachen Cathedral. Antiquarianism was also Rogers’s forte, and his preference for history over landscape description was felicitously counterweighted by Turner’s evocative vignettes, as Cecilia Powell comments (Turner in the South: Rome, Naples, Florence [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987], 133–34). Ruskin borrows some historical references from Rogers, especially Hannibal’s crossing the Alps, but his preference for landscape description in both the prose and poems was largely necessitated by his weak knowledge of history. Had he chosen, he could have gleaned historical details from guidebooks and valets-de-place, as did his industrious cousin, Mary Richardson, for her travel diary. It is possible that he borrowed some details as well as the mocking tone in the prose commentary from his father’s diary, for which the evidence is lost, since the surviving portion of John James’s 1833 tour diary starts on 20 July 1833 and covers only Switzerland (RF MS 33A, The Ruskin, Lancaster University). Remarks in the surviving portion indicate that a first half did exist, which probably recorded the

166

D. C. HANSON

49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

itineraries in northern Europe and Italy, and one might speculate that it went missing because John mined it for garrulous commentary in his prose pieces, while the surviving portion remains since Ruskin never got round to writing prose sections for most Italian and Swiss destinations. Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 278–79. Ritchie edited Friendship’s Offering starting with the volume for 1842, of which he characteristically declared “the great object in the compilation” to be “variety.” This volume contains poetry by “J. R. of Christ Church, Oxford” (Friendship’s Offering; and Winter’s Wreath … for MDCCCXLII [London: Smith, Elder, 1842], v; 48–56; 178–80). Ritchie’s earlier Travelling Sketches for 1832 covered northern Italy, the Tyrol, and the Rhine; for 1833, the Rhine, Belgium, and Holland; and for 1834, the French seacoast. Reviews, respectively, of The Picturesque Annual: Travelling Sketches in the North of Italy, the Tyrol, and the Rhine, by Clarkson Stanfield and Leitch Ritchie (1832), in the London Literary Gazette, no. 771 (29 October 1831): 697; Heath’s Picturesque Annual for 1832, by Clarkson Stanfield and Leitch Ritchie et al., in the Eclectic Review, 3rd ser., 6 (December 1831): 509; Wanderings by the Seine (1834), by J. M. W. Turner and Leitch Ritchie, in “Literature of the Month: The Annuals,” Court Magazine and Belle Assemblée 3 (December 1833): 262; and again Wanderings by the Seine, in the Court Journal 5, no. 244 (28 December 1833): 873. Ruskin, “Lille” (essay), in “Account,” MS IX, 20r. In ERM, see https:// erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/lille_prose_msix.php. Treaties preoccupied merchants like John James Ruskin, who after the war looked to government to reestablish stable conditions favoring trade (Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707 –1837 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992], 64–71). Ruskin, “Aix la Chapelle” (essay), in “Account,” MS IX, 29r–30r. Ruskin, Works, 35:79. The first page of the section, “Ehrenbreitstein,” which shows a vignette in Turner’s style, followed by the section title and some opening lines of verse, is the sole image from the MS IX fair-copy “Account” reproduced in Works (2:356 opp.; in ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/corpuses/account_of_a_tour_on_ the_continent_msix_corpus_ehrenbreitstein.php). The image is also reproduced, e.g., in Paul H. Walton, The Drawings of John Ruskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 17; Jeffrey L. Spear, “Ruskin’s Italy,” in Italy and the Victorian Imagination, ed. William S. Peterson (Browning Institute Studies: An Annual of Victorian Literary and Cultural History, vol. 12 [New York: Browning Institute/City University of New York, 1984]), 84; and Hewison, Warrell, and Wildman, Ruskin,

6

57.

58.

59.

60.

61. 62.

63. 64.

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

167

Turner, and the Pre-Raphaelites, 45. Ruskin based the vignette on the engraving after Turner, Ehrenbreitstein, for The Keepsake for MDCCCXXXIII (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1833), 84 opp. To get the effect of a vignette, Ruskin rounded the corners of Turner’s rectangular image. How Ruskin achieved the effect of a steel-engraved vignette from one of his own drawings can be studied by comparing a drawing made during the 1833 tour, Ancient Fortress and Rocky Peak, above the Vale of Balstall, Jura (Hayman, John Ruskin and Switzerland, 19), with the vignette he based on the drawing (MS IX, 51r; in ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/figures/ balstall_drawing_msix.php). For the spare pen outline that characterizes the travel sketch, Ruskin substitutes hatching, and he softens the borders of the dark foreground of foliage in the sketch. Ruskin, “The Meuse” (figure), in “Account,” MS IX, 28r. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/figures/the_meuse_liege_ drawing_msix.php. Prout’s “Liège” depicts the Renaissance arcade (the “Court of Honor”) of the Palais des Princes-Évêques. The picturesque appeal of this site in the 1820s was described by the naval official, Sir John Barrow: “The columns supporting the arcade are short and thick, having very much of the Moorish character. Under the arcade are little cells or shops, in which small articles of daily use of every description are exposed for sale” (A Family Tour through South Holland; up the Rhine; and across the Netherlands, to Ostend [London: John Murray, 1831], 239). Ruskin, “Aix la Chapelle” (corpus), in “Account,” MS IX, 29r. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/corpuses/account_of_a_tour_on_ the_continent_msix_corpus_aixlachapelle.php. Ruskin, “Lille” (corpus), in “Account,” MS IX, 18v. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/corpuses/account_of_a_tour_on_ the_continent_msix_corpus_lille.php. Ruskin, “Lille” (essay), in “Account,” MS IX, 20v, 20r. Cecilia Powell, “On the Wing through Space and Time: The Dynamics of Turner’s Italy,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 39, no. 2 (April 2003): 190–201. Samuel Rogers, Italy: A Poem (London: T. Cadell; Jennings & Chaplin; E. Moxon, 1830), 16–17. Ruskin, “Brussels” (figures), in “Account,” MS IX, 22v–23r. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/figures/brussels_waterloo_ drawing_msix.php. Ruskin’s equestrian figure appears, like Wellington, to wear his bicorn with the points fore and aft, rather than parallel with the shoulders in Napoleon’s signature manner. Along with suggesting the fall of pride, Ruskin may also intend the juxtaposition with the scene

168

D. C. HANSON

65.

66.

67.

68.

69. 70.

71. 72.

73.

74.

75.

of the wayside worshipper to point to the ultimate defeat of continental Catholicism by British Protestantism. See Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars, The Art of the Brontës (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 15; 208–10. Charlotte Brontë copied her 1833 Hartlepool Harbour and Cockermouth from steel engravings, leaving these drawings in pencil; in other drawings after engravings, she added colors that she imagined were used in the artists’ original drawings. Branwell copied a work by John Martin after an engraving by the Finden brothers in the Forget Me Not for 1831, and added colors used in the original painting by following a description in Fraser’s Magazine (ibid., 20). In January 1832, Ruskin reported “put[ting] such a finis” to Iteriad, using “innumerable flourishes” drawn from “Mr Butterworth,” referring to Butterworth’s Young Arithmetician’s Instructor, Containing Specimens of Writing with Directions (1815), which John James Ruskin had purchased in 1827, the year John started using ink to write (Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 1:259; 168n1). Ruskin, “Calais” (essay), in “Account,” MS IA, g.2, 1r; “Calais” (essay), in “Account,” MS IX, 14v (in ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/ pages/witnesses/calais_prose_msix.php). Ruskin, “Lago di Como” (poem), in “Account,” MS VIII, 64r. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/lago_di_como_ poem_msviii.php. Richardson, Diary, 15 June 1833, 41. See, e.g., “Boulogne to Amiens and Paris,” in which Rossetti experiments with poetic form and language to reflect the effect on and reliability of human vision when subjected to the speed of rail travel (Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003], 347–49). Ruskin, “Brussels” (essay), in “Account,” MS IX 23v–24r. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/brussels_prose_msix.php. Friendship’s Offering … for MDCCCXXXV, 317–19. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/corpuses/account_of_a_tour_on_ the_continent_fo_corpus.php. Ruskin, “Ehrenbreitstein” (poem), in “Account,” MS IX, 38r–v. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/ehrenbreitstein_ poem_msix.php. As discussed at the end of this essay, in 1850 the missing link was effectively restored by printing “Ehrenbreitstein” with the subtitle “Fragment from a Metrical Journal” in the privately printed Poems by J. R. (8–12). See ERM, “Account” apparatus, “Publication—Friendship’s Offering (November 1834).

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

169

76. Ruskin’s adoption of Rogers’s poetic methods casts doubt on the anecdote about his entrée to the great man’s palace of art in St. James. Ruskin remembered committing the contretemps of congratulating Rogers more on Italy’ s vignettes than on its poetry (Works, 34:96; 35:93). In fact, he carefully studied Rogers’s poetic technique. As a keen observer of material culture, he may have meant to compliment Rogers on the elegant structures of balance and contrast in the graphic as well as poetic designs. 77. Ruskin, “The Summit” (poem), in “Account,” MS VIII, 59r–60r. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/the_summit_ poem_msviii.php. In his version of the “Account,” Collingwood excised the tale of Gough, apparently irritated by the digression from the Alps to the Lake District (Poems, 1:147), but Cook and Wedderburn restored the cut (Works, 2:372). 78. In Pilgrims, Eigner analyzes this structural failure in terms of what “promises to be a book of short stories … end[ing] up as a novel,” as Bulwer-Lytton strove to swerve the work at the end toward the transformative conclusion of bildungsroman (“The Pilgrims of the Rhine: The Failure of the German Bildungsroman in England,” 20–21). 79. Raffles, Letters, during a Tour, 155. 80. Rogers, Italy [1830], 29–30. The borrowing is noticed also by C. Stephen Finley, in Nature’s Covenant: Figures of Landscape in Ruskin (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 117. 81. Ruskin, “There is a charmed peace that aye,” in “Account,” VIII, 57v. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/there_is_ a_charmed_peace_that_aye_poem_msviii.php. 82. See “Schaffhausen” and subsequent listings in “List of Proposed Additional Contents for the ‘Account,’” https://erm.selu.edu/web/ pages/witnesses/account_of_a_tour_on_the_continent_toc_msviii.php# ACCOUNTTOCSCHAFFHAUSENILLUS. 83. Rogers, Italy, 30. 84. Rogers, Italy, 30–31. Rogers ties up his persona in knots in order to place him on both the Simplon and the Great Saint Bernard: “Not such my path!” the speaker exclaims about the Simplon Road in “The Alps” (31), and returns to contemplating the historic road over the Great Saint Bernard Pass, which he has already crossed in the poem of that title and in “The Descent.” Presumably, Rogers wanted to be able to describe the Napoleonic achievements respecting both passes into Italy. At the end of the work, in “A Farewell,” the speaker departs Italy at Susa, now apparently pursuing the road to the Mont Cenis Pass, a traditional route for the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century (233). In fact, on his first tour of Italy, which he took in 1814–1815 during the temporary peace, Rogers entered Italy by the Simplon and departed via the Brenner Pass;

170

D. C. HANSON

85.

86.

87.

88. 89.

90. 91.

92.

93.

and on a second tour in 1821–1822, he traveled the Mont Cenis (Hale, introduction to The Italian Journal of Samuel Rogers, 82). Ruskin, in the “Account,” “Calais” (poem), MS IA, g.1, 1r; “The Meuse” (poem), in “Account,” MS IA, g.1, 2v (in ERM, https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/the_meuse_poem_ msia_g1.php); “Passing the Alps” (poem), in “Account,” MS IA, g.2, 1r (in ERM, https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/passing_the_ alps_poem_msia_g2.php); “Chamouni” (poem), in “Account,” MS VII, 160v (in ERM, https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/chamouni_ poem_msvii.php). Michael Wheeler, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 148; 151; 25. Willibald Sauerländer, The Catholic Rubens: Saints and Martyrs, trans. David Dollenmayer (Los Angeles: Getty Research Center, 2014), 220. Carl Van de Velde and Prisca Valkeneers explain that, while Rubens spent his boyhood in Cologne, he probably was not born there. In the nineteenth century, Cologne and Antwerp vied for the claim to have been his birthplace, while modern scholarship has all but confirmed Siegen, in Westphalia, as the likelier location (The Birth of Rubens, trans. Jantien Black [Ghent: Snoeck, 2013]). Matt. 16:18. See John Murray III, A Hand-Book for Travellers on the Continent (London: John Murray, 1836), 208; James Leigh Mathews, The Rhenish Album; or, Scraps from the Rhine (London: Leigh & Son, 1836), 103; and Starke, Travels in Europe, 677. According to Murray’s Hand-Book, Rubens’s original was regularly on view on Sundays and during festivals, with viewings on other days requiring a fee paid to the sacristan. In 1833, the Ruskins visited the cathedral on a Monday, but Mary Richardson reports that the day was a church holiday, with the churches filled and processions in the streets (Diary, 27 May 1833, 18). Richardson, Diary, 27 May 1833, 19–20. Ruskin, “Cologne” (essay), in “Account,” MS IX, 32v. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/cologne_prose_msix.php. According to Mary’s diary, the only instance of John’s being kept bedridden occurred two months after the visit to Cologne, in Rapperswil and Zurich (ibid., 27 July–4 August, 100–09). Richardson, Diary, 27 May 1833, 18; and see Rainer Budde, “The History of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum and Its Collections,” and Frank Gunter Zehnder, “Introduction to the Collection of Medieval Art,” in Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, ed. Budde et al. and trans. Elizabeth Thussu (London: Scala, 1992), 6; 16. Richardson, Diary, 27 May 1833, 19–20.

6

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

171

94. Ibid., 19. The painting was almost certainly the Last Judgement (ca. 1435) by Stefan Lochner, which matches Mary’s detailed description, and which was included in the original Wallraf collection; see Frank Gunter Zehnder, “Gothic and Early Modern Painting in Cologne,” in Wallraf-Richartz Museum, ed. Budde et al., 30. 95. Ruskin, “Cologne” (essay), in “Account,” IX, 32v–33r. 96. Rubens’s Stigmatization of St. Francis (ca. 1616) was included in the original Wallraf collection; see Ekkehard Mai, “Flemish Painting in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Wallraf-Richartz Museum, ed. Budde et al., 54. For the Counter-Reformation program in the painting, see Thomas L. Glen, “The Stigmatization of St. Francis by Peter Paul Rubens,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahbuch 42 (1981): 133–42. I have located no reference to a solitary figure of St. Ambrose by Rubens. At least among pictures currently attributed to the painter, the saint was depicted only among groupings of figures. 97. Richardson, Diary, 27 May 1833, 19. 98. Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 2–7. 99. “Enquiries on the Causes of the Colour of the Water of the Rhine,” Magazine of Natural History 7, no. 41 (September 1834): 438–39, in Works, 1:191–92; and for the diary, see John Ruskin’s Continental Tour 1835: The Written Records and Drawings, ed. Keith Hanley and Caroline S. Hull (Cambridge: Legenda, 2016), 27–28. 100. Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 48. 101. For example, to illustrate his proposed section, “Domo d’Ossola,” Ruskin does not choose the plate in Brockedon that most obviously depicts the route taken by the Ruskins across the Simplon Pass (i.e., the plate, Val d’Ossola from the Defile of the Dovedro, which Ruskin applies more aptly to his section, “Farewell to Italy”); rather, he chooses Brockedon’s Domo d’Ossola, from Saint Marco from the illustrations to the Gries Pass. That route was inaccessible to the Ruskins and entirely out of their way, but its termination on the Italian side did intersect precisely where “the road … falls into the great route of the Simplon”—hence, in the plate, providing the view of Domo d’Ossola that the Ruskins left behind them as they climbed the Simplon Road (Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps, 2 vols. [London: Printed for the Author, 1828–1829], vol. 2, “The Grimsel and the Gries,” 12). For another example of Ruskin’s accurately sequencing plates from differing routes in Brockedon, see “Brieg” in ERM, https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/account_of_a_tour_ on_the_continent_toc_msviii.php#ACCOUNTTOCBRIEGILLUS. 102. As a guidebook for Switzerland in 1833, the Ruskins used an English translation by Daniel Wall (first published in 1817) of a guidebook by

172

D. C. HANSON

103. 104.

105. 106.

107. 108. 109.

110. 111.

112.

J. G. Ebel. This guide merely mentions a “torrent” issuing from the valley at “Tortman or Tourtemagne” (The Traveller’s Guide through Switzerland [London: Samuel Leigh, 1820], 352). John Murray III pronounces the waterfall “inferior to the fall of the Sallenche at Martigny” but “interesting on account of its entire seclusion” (A Hand-book for Travellers in Switzerland and the Alps of Savoy and Piedmont [London: John Murray, 1838], 157). Richardson, Diary, 6 July 1833, 69. John James Ruskin, Diary, 20 July 1833, RF MS 33A, Ruskin Library, Lancaster University, 1–3 (John James’s page numbering); quotations from the diary ©The Ruskin, Lancaster University. Summarizing on this date his impressions about Switzerland, John James explains, “I have already said enough of the disagreeable sights & Impressions seen & received in the Town & vale of Sion” (1). Richardson, Diary, 7 July 1833, 70–71. See Franz Merke, History and Iconography of Endemic Goitre and Cretinism, trans. Dennis Q. Stephenson (Lancaster: MTP Press, 1984), 219– 21; 225–27. While Merke identifies records of cretinism as early as the thirteenth century in connection with the Great Saint Bernard, he suggests that the cretins of Valais were, “so to speak, ‘rediscovered’” by travelers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (225). Ibid., 207; Brockedon, Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps, vol. 2, “The Pass of the Simplon,” 4–5n. Ibid., 4 and vignette, The Pisse-vache, from the Village of Mieville. Ruskin lists this plate for use in his section on Saint Maurice. Ibid., “Pass of the Great Saint Bernard,” 1:2, and plate, The Valley of the Rhone, above Martigny. In this chapter, Brockedon avoids mention of cretinism, except perhaps indirectly by regretting that, to reach the road leading to the pass, travelers must traverse the “narrow dirty village” of Bourg de Martigny and the “malediction” of ruin remaining from the disastrous flood of 1818 (2–3). Rogers, Italy, 28. See Piggott, Turner’s Vignettes, 37. Ruskin could have read about this tragedy in Thomas Roscoe, The Tourist in Switzerland and Italy, Illustrated from Drawings by S. Prout, Esq. (London: Robert Jennings, 1830), 77. However, the plate of Martigny by Prout (73 opp.) shows contented peasants among their chalets beneath the ruin of La Bâtiaz, similar in effect to Brockedon’s Pisse-vache. For Ruskin’s theory of the grotesque, see Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 123–30. Purser was an architect and painter who exhibited landscapes and architectural subjects at the Royal Academy between 1805 and 1834. He

6

113. 114. 115. 116. 117.

118. 119.

120.

121.

122.

123.

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

173

traveled in Greece with the architect George Ledwell Taylor in 1817– 1820, and he traveled in the Near East in the 1820s–1830s. The Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum hold numerous Orientalist watercolor drawings and prints by or after Purser of subjects set in Turkey and India. Ruskin, “Saltzburg,” in “Account,” MS VIII, 81r. In ERM, see https:// erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/saltzburg_msviii.php. Ibid., MS VIII, 81r. Friendship’s Offering … for MDCCCXXXV, 37. In ERM, see https:// erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/saltzburg_fo.php. Rosen and Zerner, Romanticism and Realism, 81. Friendship’s Offering … for MDCCCXXXV, 38. For Goodall, see Hunnisett, Steel-Engraved Book Illustration in England, 101–02. For Ruskin’s unintended rhetorical rivalry as a critic with his subject, Turner, in Modern Painters I, see Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder, 16–19. Friendship’s Offering … for MDCCCXXXV, 37. Ibid., 38; “Saltzburg,” MS VIII, 81v. Despite this ringing narrative of repatriating the works of genius to their native land, the most lucrative beneficiaries of Napoleonic-era displacement of continental art were British collectors; see Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion, and Collecting in England and France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), 39–84. Collingwood attempted without success to account for the claim about the saint’s Scottish origin (Poems, 1:290). A possible source is Thomas Dempster, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Scotorum (1627), which had been reprinted in 1829 by the Bannatyne Club, a society founded by Walter Scott in 1823 to publish Scottish antiquities. If this was Ruskin’s source, whoever pointed out the information to him may have confused two separate figures in Dempster—a St. Rupert of Deutz, who was credited with writing A History of the Church of the Scottish People, and the St. Rupert of Salzburg. I am indebted to my colleague Joel Fredell for assistance with this source. On Balmat, see Peter H. Hansen, The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 90–117. Ruskin, “The lake smiled sweetly and the boy,” in “Account,” VIII, 70v–71r. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/the_ lake_smiled_sweetlly_and_the_boy_poem_msviii.php. Both the lake poem and the draft conclusion of “Saltzburg” intriguingly echo scenes in the novel: the White Lady retrieves Lady Avenel’s bible from Father Philip, who has confiscated it, by dunking him in the Tweed while singing; and she bestows the book on Halbert Glendinning, by

174

D. C. HANSON

124.

125.

126.

127. 128.

129. 130.

131.

132.

133.

134.

magically descending with him through the earth to a “round” crystalinlaid grotto, its roof “resembling … the dome of a cathedral,” where she has enshrined the book (Walter Scott, The Monastery, ed. Penny Fielding [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000], 66; 116). Ruskin’s juvenilia includes a verse transcription of the novel: see https://erm.selu. edu/apparatuses/monastery_apparatus. Ruskin, “Not such the night whose stormy might,” in “Account,” VIII, 71r. In ERM, https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/not_ such_the_night_whose_stormy_might_poem_msviii.php. Ibid., “Saltzburg,” MS VIII, 81v. Ruskin’s contemplation of a “thousand worlds [that] through all the midnight blazed” is reminiscent of Mrs. Barbauld’s gaze on “one boundless blaze; ten thousand trembling fires” in “A Summer Evening’s Meditation” (1773). Memorials of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, ed. Mrs. [M. G.] Garden, 3rd ed. (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1903), 274–77. Hogg invited other children of his London acquaintances to holiday at Altrive Farm, as well (Gillian Hughes, James Hogg: A Life [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007], 244), but he was particularly taken with John Ruskin. “Though I am not very fond in general of precocity of talent,” he admitted to Alexander Elder in a January 1833 letter, which Elder probably shared with John James, “yon is the most extraordinary callan I ever met with” (The Collected Letters of James Hogg, ed. Gillian Hughes, 3 vols. [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008], 3:119). Collected Letters of James Hogg, 3:32n.; Hughes, James Hogg, 251–52. Quoted in Hogg, Contributions to Annuals and Gift Books, ed. Janette Currie and Gillian Hughes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 313; see also 126–31. See ERM, “Account” apparatus, “Date of Composition.” Mary Richardson’s diary corroborates the excursion guided by children (130–31). Ruskin’s reverie conflates two separate excursions to the cavern source of the river. Ruskin, “Source of the Arveron,” in “Account,” MS VIII, 54–55. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/source_of_the_ arveron_prose_msviii.php. Ruskin, “I woke to hear the lullaby,” in “Account,” MS VIII, 55. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/i_woke_to_ hear_the_lullaby_poem_msviii.php. Ruskin, “Oh are there spirits, can there be,” in “Account” MS VIII, 53. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/oh_are_ there_spirits_can_there_be_poem_msviii.php. These isolated manuscripts, which are copied in an unidentified hand, are dated 1833, probably referring to the visit to Chamonix during the family tour, not to the dates when the poem and essay were composed or

6

135.

136.

137. 138. 139. 140.

141.

142. 143. 144. 145.

RUSKIN IN THE 1830S: EMERGING …

175

fair copied. The essay is signed in John James’s hand (in a different ink from the copyist’s) “J. R. / fragment from a Journal / 1833,” suggesting that the father may have considered it for Friendship’s Offering or (much later) for Poems by J. R. (1850). See sect. 7 of this essay, below. Ruskin, “Chamouni” (essay), in “Account,” MS XI, 2v, 1r, 2r. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/chamouni_ prose_msxi.php. Nicola Brown, Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 91. In his 1884 lecture, “Fairyland,” Ruskin employed the common notion that factories had driven fairies out of England as a metaphor for industrialization’s despoliation of the environment (40–41). Ruskin, “Chamouni” (essay), in “Account,” MS XI, 1r; Hansen, The Summits of Modern Man, 33. Brown, Fairies, 39–40. Ruskin, “Chamouni” (poem), in “Account,” MS VII, 160r; “Chamouni” (essay), in “Account,” MS XI, 2v. Ruskin, “Chamouni” (poem), in “Account,” MS VII, 160r. One of these mountaineers, Joseph Couttet, later became Ruskin’s regular Alpine guide; see Hilton, John Ruskin, 80. Ruskin, “The Meuse” (essay), in “Account,” MS IX, 25v, 27r. In ERM, see https://erm.selu.edu/web/pages/witnesses/the_meuse_ prose_msix.php. As a possible source for this aesthetic, see Scott, The Monastery, in which the valley of Glendearg is described as “a scene [that] could neither be strictly termed sublime or beautiful, and scarcely even picturesque or striking” but that “pressed on the heart” with its “extreme solitude” and struck “on the imagination” of the traveler with its “uncertainty whither he was going, or in what so wild a path was to terminate,” with the result that “superstition … had peopled its recesses with beings belonging to another world” (37 [vol. 1, chap. 2]). As published illustrations of this aesthetic, Ruskin might have thought of the haunted glens in Turner’s vignettes for Scott’s Poetical Works (1833– 1834). Ruskin, “Chamouni” (essay), in “Account,” XI, 1r. John Ruskin, Ruskin in Italy: Letters to His Parents, 1845, ed. Harold I. Shapiro (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 22–23. Murray, A Hand-book for Travellers in Switzerland, and the Alps of Savoy and Piedmont, lviii. John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 16; 114–22. Barrell is comparing Morland’s The Door of a Village Inn (undated, Tate Britain, London) and G. R. Lewis’s Hereford, Dynedor,

176

D. C. HANSON

146.

147. 148. 149.

150. 151. 152. 153. 154.

155. 156.

157. 158.

and the Malvern Hills, from the Haywood Lodge, Harvest Scene, Afternoon (1815, Tate Britain, London). Ruskin in Italy, ed. Shapiro, 69–70; 156; and see Works, 2:238–39. Ruskin sent the poem’s note “for Lady B”—i.e., Lady Blessington—later in the summer’s tour, the idea for the note apparently having originated with the editor (Ruskin in Italy, ed. Shapiro, 154, and see 149). The placement of the poem with the Book of Beauty was arranged by the Ruskin family’s house editor, W. H. Harrison. Ruskin reacted to these arrangements dismissively: “Of course do all that you like with poems. Lady B just as good as any one” (ibid., 112, and see letter by John James to Ruskin, 244). Ibid., 143; 149; 143; 57; 68; 70. Brockedon, Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps, vol. 2, “The Pass of the Simplon,” 5n. Ruskin in Italy, ed. Shapiro, 160–61; 163; 172. On Ruskin’s study of how Turner’s picture transformed the actual site, which he resumed in Modern Painters IV, see Robert Hewison, Ruskin on Venice: “The Paradise of Cities” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 86; 97–98. Ruskin in Italy, ed. Shapiro, 51; 55. Ruskin, Works, 4:122–23; 79; see also 76–124. Ibid., 23:227; 222–23. Ibid., 6:388; 395; 396; 389, emphasis added. On the spirit of the Old Testament prophets in Modern Painters IV, see Paul L. Sawyer, Ruskin’s Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 156. Ruskin, Works, 2:xxxiv. “Fragments” and “Saltzburg” are exactingly fair-copied from their published texts in a surviving bound manuscript, “Poems / J. Ruskin,” formerly in the collection of John Philip Edmond (1850–1906), and now held in a private collection. The manuscript is devoted to Ruskin’s Friendship’s Offering poems, but the copyist’s hand is unidentified, and it is not known whether the manuscript once belonged to John James Ruskin. Ruskin, “Song,” in J. R., Poems (Collected, 1850), 3; 4. J. R., Poems, 8; 7; 13; 19.

CHAPTER 7

Upper-Class Travel with a Political Slant: The Destinies of Nations and Empires through the Eyes of Lord and Lady Strangford Ludmilla Kostova

The tendency to recover and reinterpret neglected texts from the past and thus rescue their authors from oblivion has long shaped the study of travel writing and other research areas concerned with changing cultural practices and representations. Unfortunately, Percy Ellen Algernon Frederick Smythe, eighth Viscount Strangford (1825–1869), and Emily Anne Beaufort Smythe, Viscountess Strangford (1826–1887), and their oeuvres have not benefited from this scholarly trend. By and large, they have been overlooked by latter-day scholarship in English-speaking countries. The Strangfords have received more attention from Bulgarian scholars on account of their connection with the country at a time when a national consciousness was being forged, as well as with individual Bulgarians, most of whom played an important role in the process of forging it, but even in the Bulgarian academic context there is no in-depth study

L. Kostova (B) Department of English and American Studies, University of Veliko Tarnovo, Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Colbert and L. Morrison (eds.), Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36146-4_7

177

178

L. KOSTOVA

of their thought-provoking texts and eventful lives.1 On the other hand, they have played a certain role in the Bulgarian cultural and political imaginaries, as is borne out by a poem produced in the 1870s and a historical novel initially released in 1962, which has been repeatedly republished since then and was even adapted as a television series in 1987. This chapter aims at writing the Strangfords back into the history of Anglophone travel writing about south-east Europe and, particularly, into the debates over the destinies of “old” empires and emerging nations, which were often part of books of travel about the region.2 Attention will focus on their jointly written travelogue The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic in 1863: With a Visit to Montenegro (1864). Significantly, political debates at the time were frequently linked to the ethnological categorization of peoples and the comparative study of their languages; some of Lord Strangford’s philological and ethnological writings will therefore also be addressed. Most of those were collected by his wife and published posthumously in A Selection from the Writings of Viscount Strangford on Political, Geographical, and Social Subjects (1869) and Original Letters and Papers upon Philological and Kindred Subjects (1878). References will likewise be made to her 1861 travelogue Egyptian Sepulchres and Syrian Shrines , Including Some Stay in the Lebanon, at Palmyra, and in Western Turkey, which was reviewed by Lord Strangford in The Saturday Review (3 August 1861), and to her philanthropic activities in the 1870s, documented in Report on the Bulgarian Peasant Relief Fund: With a Statement of Distribution and Expenditure, which she published in 1877. In the closing part of the chapter I will dwell on representations of the Strangfords within the Bulgarian context. Such an “excursion” should shed additional light on the role that their writing and activities played in the construction of a Bulgarian national identity and the shaping of Bulgarian perceptions of the West. The Strangfords were an impressive Anglo-Irish couple3 with a taste for travel and a keen interest in history and politics. In the mid-1840s and most of the 1850s, Lord Strangford was, in the words of his friend and fellow Orientalist Arminius Vambery, “the soundest of all the diplomatists of the period.”4 What made him superior to other British “diplomatists,” according to the same authority, was his “rare learning and marvellous intellectual powers.”5 Lord Strangford’s multilingualism appears truly remarkable even today: as a child he learned Russian from his nurse during his father’s diplomatic mission in St. Petersburg, and later became proficient in French, German, Italian, some of the Celtic tongues,

7

UPPER-CLASS TRAVEL WITH A POLITICAL SLANT …

179

Ottoman and colloquial Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Urdu, and “the language of the Afghans.”6 In 1938 one eminent Bulgarian writer, historian, and diplomat described him as “the first Englishman to have learned Bulgarian.”7 His writing indicates that he was also familiar with other Slavonic languages, apart from Russian and Bulgarian.8 Lord Strangford was undoubtedly taught Latin and Ancient Greek at Harrow and Oxford, but there is substantial evidence in his writing of his proficiency in Modern Greek and his interest in the culture and political choices of Greeks both in the independent Greek state and within the Ottoman Empire.9 Significantly, he described himself in a letter as an “antiphilhellene” but a “prophiloromaios,”10 thus stressing his concern with the modern “Romaic” nation rather than with its imagined ancient “progenitors.” His writing is by and large informed by a concern with the “young” nations of Europe, that is, nations that were in the process of defining their modern identities and seeking political self-determination within the nineteenthcentury geopolitical context. Lord Strangford’s exceptional multilingualism was combined with upto-date knowledge of comparative philology, a field which was in the forefront of nineteenth-century learning. He also advocated the study of ethnology for British diplomats stationed abroad. In nineteenth-century French and British contexts, ethnology was predominantly defined as the study of “human races11 according to the historical tradition, the languages and the physical and moral characteristics of each people.”12 While Lord Strangford apparently accepted this view, he also made a point of distinguishing between ethnology and philology. In one of his journalistic pieces he remarks that whereas the latter is “science, not guesswork,” the former could not be defined as “an exact science” but rather as an “inexact and tentative” one.13 According to him, ethnologists should base their work on “inductive reasoning” and “the accumulation of authentic facts,”14 and should definitely guard themselves against the politicization of their field for the purpose of privileging certain ethnic groups over others.15 On the whole, Lord Strangford’s intellectual agenda shows the influence of nineteenth-century positivist thought,16 and this is a point which will be taken up again further on in this text. In addition to expert knowledge of philology and ethnology, Lord Strangford was an authority on the political intricacies of the “Eastern Question,” as the preoccupation of the time’s “Great Powers” with the fate of the Ottoman Empire and the consequences of its potential dissolution was generally called.

180

L. KOSTOVA

Lady Strangford’s accomplishments appear modest in comparison with those of her husband, and this undoubtedly reflects the fewer opportunities for intellectual development that women had in the nineteenth century. Born Emily Anne Beaufort, she was the youngest daughter of Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, “an Irishman of Huguenot descent, the famous inventor of the wind force scale, an explorer and geographer, a friend of Charles Babbage and Charles Darwin.”17 As already remarked, Lady Strangford was a traveler and a writer in her own right, as well as the editor of her husband’s work. Significantly, she was recognized as an expert on south-east Europe by no less a personage than the Liberal leader William Ewart Gladstone, who sought an interview with her while he was working on his ground-breaking pamphlet Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East (1876).18 Lady Strangford was an eminent philanthropist who did not merely administer the funds that she collected but did some nursing herself and developed important schemes to encourage female war nursing.19 While being in many ways exceptional, the Strangfords were also typical products of their time and social milieu; in what follows attention will be drawn to, among other things, the husband’s tendency to look down on women travelers and their writing and the couple’s denigrating attitudes to social “inferiors.”

The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic: The Strangfords as an Upper-Class “Writing Couple”20 The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic is very much the outcome of upperclass Victorian travel: signs of social privilege abound in the text, and it is surprising that David Hosaflook has seen Lady Strangford and her party of five other British fellow travelers as the nineteenth-century equivalents of today’s backpackers.21 In the opening chapter of the book the reader is informed that Lord Strangford had to be in Istanbul on business, and for this reason his wife left the British dependency of Corfu, which was soon to be ceded to the independent kingdom of Greece, in the company of two other upper-class British women and three men.22 Lord Strangford would join her later in the journey. The six British travelers were initially accompanied by two servants and a cook, but the Ottoman authorities on the mainland subsequently provided them with an Albanian Muslim zaptieh, whose business it was to find good horses, “to engage guides …

7

UPPER-CLASS TRAVEL WITH A POLITICAL SLANT …

181

and to force peasants to provide all that [was] require[d] in the way of food and forage at proper prices.”23 Prior to leaving for Montenegro, Lady Strangford hired one more “man-servant” who served as an interpreter. We are not told if the interpreter possessed any education or whether his duties as a language mediator were also combined with the usual obligations of a servant. Throughout their journey, Lady Strangford and her party were entertained by Ottoman beys, European consuls, and Habsburg officials. They sailed to Montenegro on the ship of an Ottoman pasha, who was on his way to his pashalik in Mostar.24 In Montenegro Lady Strangford was repeatedly in the company of the reigning Prince Nikola (called “Nicholas” in the book) and his family and was thus able to judge the miniature principality’s level of “progress” by the manners of its court.25 Throughout the book, advantages resulting from the British nationality and upper-class status of the Strangfords and their fellow travelers are taken for granted; as is the idea that the “lower orders” should know their place. The latter assumption is well illustrated by an incident which Lady Strangford recounts in Chapter 1. It involves a recalcitrant local guide, who had to be punished for having misled the British party and not taken them to “monastic Zitza,” pronounced by Byron in a letter to be “the most beautiful Situation … I ever beheld”26 : “Remembering the useful Arabic proverb, that ‘the stick descended from heaven, a blessing from God’, I recommended an immediate application of the heavenly blessing; the man got a blow or two, which I fear only made him laugh in his sleeve at the gentleness of our champion.”27 Apart from providing instances of uncontested class privilege, The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic is an example of gendered travel writing. In her preface, Lady Strangford adopts the stance of a modest female traveler, who merely wishes to share her impressions of “a summer’s journey” along “the eastern shores of the Adriatic” and into the Balkan interior. She further adds that the travelogue does not “contain[] any very new or important information” but “the ground [that is covered in it] is not as yet hackneyed.” Her portrayal of her travel experiences could therefore be of interest to readers at home because of its relative originality. On the other hand, “those [readers] who seek for something better and more solid” could benefit from the chapters added by her husband.28 The chapters authored mostly or exclusively by Lord Strangford are “A Few Words on Corfu Politics,” “A Few Words on Northern Albania,” and “Chaos.” They are commentaries on current political, cultural, and

182

L. KOSTOVA

economic problems in south-east Europe and aim at introducing order, through careful philological and ethnological analysis, in what must have appeared to outsiders to be a veritable chaos of diverse populations speaking a wide variety of languages. The chapters also discuss the rise of ethnic nationalisms and transnational ideologies such as Panslavism. Special attention is paid to the chances of different peoples in the region for political self-determination and effective self-governance. In her commentary on travelogues by two other nineteenth-century “writing couples,” Isabel and Richard Burton and Anne and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Julia Kuehn suggests that such texts “need to be reassessed in the context of co-writing, editing, and possible censorship.”29 The Strangfords’ joint travel book presents an interesting case: it should be read in the context of Lord Strangford’s very critical review of Emily Anne Beaufort’sSmythe, Emily Anne Beaufort 1861 book Egyptian Sepulchres and Syrian Shrines . The review was produced before the couple’s marriage. It is an expression of Lord Strangford’s views on people undertaking what he calls “the normal Oriental Grand Tour,”30 which combined religious travel to the Holy Land with visits to other historically renowned sites such as Palmyra and the Egyptian Pyramids. He writes of the new “Grand Tourists,” a great number of whom were women, with undisguised irony. Lord Strangford notes the repetitiveness of their itineraries: according to him, they all went on excursions to Palmyra “under the guidance of Sheikh Mijwel [sic], of the Anazeh tribe”31 (that must have been intended as a piquant detail since the Bedouin Sheikh Medjuel el Mezrab was the last husband of the notorious courtesan Jane Digby32 ), “[got] wet with the dew of Hermon,” and “lunch[ed] off fish from the sea of Galilee.”33 For him, the worst consequence of the journeys of “the tourist herd,” as he calls them, is that they “were described every year”34 and, to the irritation of learned gentlemen such as himself, published and made available to the reading public. Although he explicitly states that Beaufort’s book is better than most other travel accounts by women tourists, he cannot refrain from listing certain mistakes that she made as she attempted to lend local color to her account by including in it words and phrases in Arabic. Besides, Lord Strangford takes her to task for “overflow[ing] into verse [at Palmyra] under the influence of the desert air and the animating recollections of Zenobia, with whom, as a ‘representative’ woman and champion of her sex, she loves to identify herself.”35 Beaufort’s account of her travels is also said to be “almost stifled with lore,” that is, full of references to the work of other travelers and

7

UPPER-CLASS TRAVEL WITH A POLITICAL SLANT …

183

particularly, to the texts of archeologists, as well as replete with “religious sentimentality and Scriptural quotation.”36 Beaufort is castigated by Lord Strangford for her female presumption in assuming that she could “handl[e] such edged-tools as archeology and Oriental languages.”37 He also seems to resent her identification with Queen Zenobia as “a champion of her sex.” On the other hand, Lord Strangford praises her for her “fresh and graphic… personal narrative” and the “minute and unusual accuracy” of her observations. He also notes that whenever she “allows herself to venture” upon the male preserve of politics, she does so “with moderation.”38 Lord Strangford considers his criticism of the book useful to the public; in this way readers are protected from “imperfectly digested and illusory learning.”39 However, it should also be beneficial to the travel writer herself: he considers her book to be “good enough to be worth correcting.”40 Lady Strangford’s chapters in The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic show that she took her learned husband’s criticism seriously and went on to alter her approach to travel and its representations. They also indicate that she accepted his views on the ethnic composition of south-east Europe and the political problems faced by different peoples in the region. When considering Lady Strangford’s changed mode of travel writing, we should also acknowledge the fact that her chapters in The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic are concerned with a geographical region that differed markedly from the parts of the Middle East which she had portrayed in her earlier book. Jerusalem, Palmyra, or Bethlehem called up many historical, cultural, and literary associations, and for this reason inspired the lyrical rhapsodizing and wealth of “lore” that Lord Strangford found so objectionable. Only some of the places represented in The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic could be linked to ancient classical history or literature. Most of the south-east European geographical terrain, covered in the later book, retained memories of more recent events, such as the tyrannical rule of Ali Pasha of Ioannina, to whom Byron and John Cam Hobhouse paid a visit in 1809, or the struggle of the inhabitants of the mountainous region of Suli against him. On the whole, Lady Strangford disavows associations with ancient history or literature. For instance, she declares that when visiting the Ionian Islands, of which Odysseus’s Ithaca is one, she and her fellow travelers were “so oppressed and selfish with the realities of our own case, that we neither quoted nor even thought of the Odyssey.”41 Throughout her narrative Lady Strangford appears preoccupied with the modern world

184

L. KOSTOVA

and the “young” nations inhabiting it. Significantly, the opening chapter of The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic is titled “Southern Albania,” thus showing a predilection for the Albanians over the Greeks who also lived in the area between the Adriatic coast and the town of Ioannina through which she and her party traveled. In this respect Lady Strangford was guided by her husband, who considered the Albanians to constitute the bulk of the population of Epirus and even Thessaly.42 While refraining from quoting the Odyssey, Lady Strangford does not exclude all literary references from her text. There are quotations from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in Chapter 1.43 Obviously, as a notable precursor who had also visited Albania, the poet could not be ignored. Although Lady Strangford could not be described as a tourist walking in Byron’s footsteps, she writes about localities and people that are also mentioned in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the poet’s letters.44 Thus, apart from providing details about her own stay in Ioannina, she recounts the story of Ali Pasha’s death.45 When traversing the Pindus Mountains, Lady Strangford makes a brief reference to “the sufferings of the unfortunate Suliotes” on the assumption that her readers would be familiar with the whole story of the mass suicide of the Suliote women, which had been “made the subject of a hundred romances in prose and poetry.” A footnote, possibly added by Lord Strangford, identifies the Suliotes as “Albanians pure and simple,” despite attempts to “Hellenize” them.46 More instances of ethnological categorization can be found in the three chapters he authored. The chapters and this footnote are among the signs of the gendered division of labor that structures the book. In compliance with her husband’s advice Lady Strangford refrains from “stifling” her readers with “lore,” and repeatedly focuses attention on the practical aspects of travel. She alerts prospective travelers to the difficulty of crossing the mountains of Epirus, which seem so different from “the bright mountains of Lebanon and the beautiful hills of Syria.”47 In addition, she counsels ladies traveling through the region to opt for the local wooden saddle rather than be tempted by its technologically more advanced English counterpart. The square “Turkish” saddle, she explains, could be rendered “perfectly comfortable” by tying “a shawl or pillow” tightly to it.48 Travelers are further instructed not to travel without tents as “the khans,” i.e., local inns, are “filthy and abominable”; for the same reasons portable bedsteads are “indispensable for ladies and advisable for gentlemen.”49 Good housekeeping is evidently the wife’s

7

UPPER-CLASS TRAVEL WITH A POLITICAL SLANT …

185

province whereas the husband is to “handle such edged-tools” as politics, philology, and ethnology.

Lord Strangford as a “Destroyer of Ideals” and Lady Strangford as an Observer of the Ways of Nations and a Philanthropist Lord Strangford’s chapters in The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic and his journalistic work, which was posthumously collected and edited by Lady Strangford, remind me of the definition of a “realist” proposed by the playwright and essayist George Bernard Shaw. In his 1891 essay, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw suggests a threefold division of humanity into Philistines, idealists, and realists.50 For him realists are essential to human progress insofar as they believe in “the unflinching recognition of facts, and in the abandonment of the conspiracy to ignore such of them as do not bolster up … ideals.”51 From a Shavian perspective ideals are “masks” which are put on “the unbearable faces of truth.”52 As “destroyer[s] of ideals” in this sense of the word, realists are “sweeping the world clear of lies.”53 Shaw’s reasoning is informed by a strong belief in the power of facts and this points to the continuing influence of positivist thought in the later nineteenth century. As already indicated, positivism was also part of Lord Strangford’s intellectual and cultural conditioning. One suspects that the idea of “sweeping the world clear of lies” would have appealed to him strongly: in her preface to Original Letters and Papers upon Philological and Kindred Subjects , Lady Strangford explains that he used to call himself “the Literary Detective” and “the Chronicler of Current Error.”54 Confronted with the volatile political atmosphere of central and southeast Europe in the 1860s, Lord Strangford appears determined to tear off diverse false “masks” and correct errors connected with British perceptions of the ethnic groups living in those regions and the languages which they spoke as well as with some of the excesses of local nationalism. Like a lot of educated Victorians, he took a keen interest in the march of political and cultural progress through different parts of the “old” continent. His views on progress, which his wife seems to have also shared, are in many ways typical of nineteenth-century western European historiography and political thought. Following Enlightenment philosophes, nineteenth-century savants tended to view the parts of Europe, which

186

L. KOSTOVA

were categorized as “eastern,”55 “not as the antipode[s] of civilization” but as intermediate cultural-geographical areas located “somewhere along a developmental scale that stretched from civilization at one end to barbarism at the other.”56 Moreover, they “envisaged the progress of civilization as the imitation of … vanguard nation[s]” by emergent ones.57 Emphasis was thus laid on the superiority of “‘established’ nations” in the “old” continent’s western half, such as Britain and France, which “were confident of their leadership in Europe and beyond.”58 According to this scheme, the development of “young” nations took the form of (self-)occidentalization. Getting rid of whatever “oriental” burden history might have imposed on some of them was therefore of paramount importance. The Strangfords seem convinced of the inevitability of this process of change but repeatedly express disapproval of some of its results. In the manner of other Victorians, Lady Strangford singles out cultural mimicry as one of its worst consequences.59 In Egyptian Sepulchres and Syrian Shrines she is particularly resentful of the ways of (semi-)occidentalized Romanians, or Vallachs, as she calls them. In her opinion, underneath their sophistication, which is signaled by, among other things, their high proficiency in western European languages such as French and German, they remain devious “Orientals.” She recounts that the captain of the ship on which she sailed with her sister warned both of them “to keep a sharp eye on [their] small goods” as “a host of Vallach ladies and gentlemen” had come on board.60 For Lord Strangford cultural mimicry is above all exemplified by Greek mores and manners. He even goes so far as to liken urban Greeks to “Calcutta Baboo[s],” that is, native administrators on the Indian subcontinent, who were represented as inept imitators of western ways.61 As already remarked, Lord Strangford tended to be very critical of the tendency to view modern Greeks through Philhellenic spectacles. He saw Philhellenism as a western project premised on the false ideal of the identity of ancient Hellenes and modern (“Romaic”) Greeks. It was an instance of occidentalization gone totally wrong insofar as it involved the imposition of an image of “ancient Hellas,” shaped by western European academic institutions and art media, upon modern Greece. Lord Strangford repeatedly draws attention to what we would see today as the modern Greek internalization of the image: for instance, he views the educational system in the independent Greek kingdom as an instrument for “turning

7

UPPER-CLASS TRAVEL WITH A POLITICAL SLANT …

187

good Romaic Greeks, earning liberty by patient work, into spurious Hellenic Greeks, incapacitated by that very system from rendering any service of good citizenship.”62 In his opinion, “Romaic traditions and feelings,” are “natural” to modern Greeks, and the Philhellenic and Neo-Hellenic insistence on the uninterrupted continuity of the newly established Greek state with ancient Greece is nothing but a dangerous delusion.63 On the other hand, in The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic he stresses the good intentions of western Philhellenes,64 and his chapter on Corfu politics in particular shows considerable sympathy for Gladstone, whose term as High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands in the late 1850s was much criticized in Britain on account of his pronounced Philhellenism.65 However, despite his recognition of western Philhellenes’ commendable motives, Lord Strangford appears convinced of the negative effect of Philhellenism on modern Greeks. In addition to the negative consequences listed above, it prevents them from acquiring the level of political maturity that would enable them to set up an “orderly government” guaranteeing their “steady political improvement [as] a free people.”66 Besides, Philhellenism has fostered undue reliance on Europe, with the Greeks themselves showing little appreciation for the efforts of that “friendly Hercules.”67 Lord Strangford further maintains that the attempts of western Philhellenes to deal with the Greek situation were doomed to failure from the very beginning on account of their lack of knowledge of “the living speech” of the south-east European nation, whom they favored above all others, as opposed to the language of its presumed classical progenitors.68 As will be seen, he never tired of stressing the importance of good philological skills for the understanding of complex political and cultural phenomena. Lord Strangford’s comments on modern Greeks shed light on his perceptions of nationality and nation-building. Other nineteenth-century travel writers similarly engaged with those issues. The British Germanist Charles Boner, author of Transylvania; Its Products and Its People (1865), claims to have been surprised by the susceptibility of certain ethnic groups within the Habsburg Empire to “the malignant epidemic, ‘the nationality fever.’” He avers that until recently “the Servians were called ‘Ratzen’ [sic]” and “the present Rumains [sic] were… called Wallacks.” But “since the malignant epidemic, the ‘nationality fever’, has raged in Europe, both have changed their appellation, and the word ‘Ratzen’ is now considered by every Servian an insult.”69 For Boner what we would call “nationalism” has taken the form of a contagious disease which has

188

L. KOSTOVA

spread throughout Europe, and some of the “lesser” peoples of the “old” continent are among its “victims”: in his book, Serbs and Romanians are compared unfavorably with Transylvanian Saxons by whose dialect and lifestyle Boner seems intrigued.70 Boner views the rise of local nationalisms as detrimental to the multiethnic Habsburg Empire, which he represents in his travelogue as changing for the better in the sense of becoming less politically repressive.71 The general tenor of his book indicates that he favors the preservation of empires that have endured for centuries over the emergence of smaller nation-states. Among other things, smaller nation-states could upset the so-called Concert of Europe, the precarious balance between powerful states that had dominated the European political arena since the late eighteenth century.72 Predictably, Lord Strangford is not content with the mere diagnosis of the susceptibility of some ethnic groups to “the nationality fever.” Nor does he consider it reprehensible for an ethnic group to aspire to a national status. What he is concerned with as a philologist, ethnologist, and competent observer of political changes is the process through which a stateless people can achieve such a status. As already shown, Lord Strangford is critical of the way in which a Neo-Hellenic identity was imposed on “Romaic” Greeks. Intervention from the outside could impair the process of national self-definition. On the other hand, a foreign influence of one kind or another was usually impossible to avoid. Commenting on the forging of a modern Bulgarian identity, Lord Strangford ironically remarks that the ethnic group’s attempts at self-determination may be “subject … to the final and superhuman authority of the lords of the world, the Emperors of the East, the West, and the Centre,”73 that is, the Russian Tsar, Emperor Napoleon III of France, and the Habsburg Emperor. In more general terms, Lord Strangford distinguishes between nationality as defined by “non-political ethnologist[s]” and nationality as shaped in practice by political, religious, and other “non-scientific” factors. He is convinced that “the non-political ethnologist must keep from political questions, and must deal with his facts in as strictly abstract and scientific a spirit as he can.”74 However, given Lord Strangford’s definition of ethnology as an “inexact and tentative science,” such objectivity would seem difficult to maintain. Besides, how were nineteenth-century ethnologists to determine “ethnological descent”75 so that they could produce a truly reliable classification of “races”? Lord Strangford highlights the tendency of using “language as an absolute test of race.”76

7

UPPER-CLASS TRAVEL WITH A POLITICAL SLANT …

189

This tendency could be traced back to writings produced during the German Enlightenment and the Romantic period.77 However, in the second half of the nineteenth century, doubts began to be cast on this assumption, and Britain’s foremost comparative philologist Friedrich Max Müller “warned against the equation of a linguistic identity with a racial one: ‘if we speak of Aryan and Semitic families … the ground of classification is language, and language only.’”78 Lord Strangford mentions the possibility of physiologists stepping in to help with the production of a taxonomy of “races” but apparently his chief preoccupation in his texts is with practical issues rather than with the methodology of ethnology as a “non-political science.”79 Despite Müller’s pronouncements, the assumption that cognate languages denoted shared ethnic origins did not become extinct and this was borne out by the continuing influence, in the second half of the nineteenth century, of multinational ideologies with distinct political implications, such as Panslavism. Given the impossibility of defining national identity in a purely theoretical and nonpolitical way, Lord Strangford focuses on specific examples of actual or prospective nation-building both in his chapters in The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic and his journalistic writing. In the chapter “A Few Words on Northern Albania,” he examines the possibility of the emergence of an Albanian nationality: There is no doubt that the Albanians have a distinctive, physical, and mental character strongly marked.… They think of themselves and magnify themselves in common as Albanians, in contrast to their neighbours; they all speak one language, or rather one group of unwritten dialects full of foreign importations, and in extreme forms, north and south, shading off into all but mutual unintelligibility. Money, force, or dexterous intrigue can unite any or all of them against any part of themselves or any of their neighbours for the purpose of mere depredation, war for war’s sake, or pulling down a government.80

What seems most striking about this passage is the lack of romantic idealism of any kind. The Albanian language is not glorified as the verbal expression of the unique spirit of an emergent nation in the manner of German thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt, with whose work Lord Strangford must have been familiar.81 At the point of the writing of the chapter, that language was comprised of a number of “unwritten dialects,” which (rather than being

190

L. KOSTOVA

“pure”) included foreign borrowings. In addition, not all of the dialects are described by Lord Strangford as being mutually comprehensible. He therefore concludes that speakers of all, or some, of the Albanian dialects might be able to imagine 82 a shared Albanian identity for themselves either under the influence of external compulsion (“force”) or for actual or prospective material gain (“money” and “depredation”). For Lord Strangford a nationality is above all a construct, and in this respect he appears to be very much ahead of his own time, and close to our own. The issues of nationality and nation-building are discussed in greater detail in the chapter titled “Chaos,” which also provides many examples of Lord Strangford’s philological expertise and familiarity with the numerous languages and key political problems of the Habsburg Empire, “Turkey-in-Europe,” as the European part of the Ottoman Empire was styled, the independent Greek kingdom, the autonomous Serbian principality, Montenegro, and the two trans-Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, which would unite in 1866. He begins his commentary on what we may describe as mid-nineteenth-century entanglements of language, ethnicity, and politics with a description of the reactions of a “plain Englishman,” who is visiting the Habsburg Empire and has had “to exchange his good metal for unmanageable bundles of frail, and not often clean, bank-notes.”83 The visitor is puzzled by the sheer number of alien tongues in which the value of each bank-note is stated, and this brings home to him the idea of the Habsburg Empire as “a composite body, formed of twenty nations and more” with all of those “standing towards one another in every conceivable variety of mutual attraction and repulsion, accord and discord.”84 As we read through the chapter, we realize that for Lord Strangford “attractions” and “repulsions” between nations are above all the outcome of historical circumstances rather than being caused by “natural” antipathies or sympathies between representatives of different ethnicities. Nevertheless, would “a composite body,” such as the Habsburg Empire, be able to endure in the conditions of rising “attractions” and “repulsions” between its numerous ethnic populations? What state(s) could it be replaced by and would the change be for the better? Lord Strangford considers the possibility of parts of the Habsburg Empire and Turkey-in-Europe being incorporated into a multinational federation called Yugoslavia, which he ironically translates into English as South-Sclavonia.85

7

UPPER-CLASS TRAVEL WITH A POLITICAL SLANT …

191

The anti-idealistic and, as we would say today, anti-essentialist thrust of Lord Strangford’s writing becomes apparent in his comments on current attempts to implement the Yugoslav project. He explains that those, who are planning to form such an “aggregate body” as the federation, would wish to include in it some of the subjects of the Habsburg Empire, “the Dalmatians, the Croatians, and the Rascians, or Hungarian Serbs” as well as “Servians,” as he calls the denizens of the Principality of Serbia, Montenegrins, and Bulgarians.86 Lord Strangford draws attention to certain significant differences between these ethnic groups, such as religion, sociopolitical conditioning, specific cultural traits, and historically and geographically determined occupations.87 He concurs that the subjects of the prospective federation speak Slavonic languages, but remarks that the assumption that these languages are practically identical is erroneous. Lord Strangford further explains that this would be “equivalent to saying that all the people of Dorsetshire, Yorkshire, Massachusetts, and the Tyrol, speak the same language.”88 Relying on what had become a standard procedure within comparative philology of tracing cognate languages back to an extinct “grandparent” tongue,89 he declares that “it is one thing to be cousins descended from a common grandparent, and another to be sisters born from a common parent.”90 Lord Strangford is not unduly influenced by the familial lexicon employed in comparative philology (language families and kinship). For him a project about a multinational federation such as Yugoslavia masks a desire for political domination on the part of at least one of the prospective “partners”: “The Servians, or certain parties in Servia, believe, and wish us to believe, that they have both the power and the moral right to annex to their own rule some, if not all, of the country inhabited by Bulgarians; they are sparing no effort to work on the Bulgarians … [and] seek to represent the relationship of the Bulgarians with themselves as a ready-made kinship, already existing, and amounting to virtual identity.”91 The Serbian approach would seem to be an example of politicized philology. Despite the fact that Lord Strangford regards philology as more “scientific” than ethnology, he does not exclude the possibility of the discipline being utilized for political purposes. Another example of politicized philology was provided by the transnational ideology of Panslavism, which similarly masked a desire for political domination under the veneer of all-Slavic kinship. Panslavism is among the targets of Lord Strangford’s criticism in his journalistic writing.92

192

L. KOSTOVA

In both his articles and the chapter “Chaos,” Lord Strangford repeatedly draws attention to the Bulgarians whom he estimates to be the most numerous Christian population within the European part of the Ottoman Empire. According to his friend Vambery, “the Bulgarian [was] his favourite child in the family of Eastern Christians.”93 That the emergent Bulgarian nation is represented as a “child” is quite significant. In “Chaos” Lord Strangford speaks of the “youth” and “primitiveness” of the Bulgarians, who have “learned nothing” and therefore have “nothing to unlearn.”94 Rather than being an unproblematic instance of denigration, this statement indicates that the Bulgarians have not experienced any of the bad effects of what was earlier called “occidentalization.” For this reason, unlike “Romaic” Greeks, they should be able to forge their modern national identity without any restricting foreign influence. That explains Lord Strangford’s interest in them. He focuses attention on their pragmatism and imperviousness to external political propaganda: the emerging nation’s educated elite “makes use of the cognate Russian language as a means and a standard whereby to cultivate [its] own [but] refrains from Russian political work, and dances but sluggishly to the piping of Panslavists and Yugoslavists.”95 In addition, the Bulgarians are in the process of emancipating themselves from the religious authority of the Constantinopolitan Phanariot Patriarchate, and are struggling to obtain autonomy in church affairs.96 On account of their “numerical preponderance” in Turkey-in-Europe and qualities such as “industry,” “thrift,” and “sobriety of character,” Lord Strangford pronounces them to be “the most … promising body of Christians” in that part of the world.97 Rather like Gladstone, he believes in the need of emergent nations to achieve a certain level of “maturity” before full independence.98 The Bulgarians are represented by him as steadily moving in that direction. The chapter “Chaos” is also concerned with the future of most of the other populations of south-east Europe and with the role that Great Britain could play in that part of the “old” continent. Lord Strangford regards the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire as a distinct possibility, and the title of his chapter in part refers to the chaos that might ensue in the aftermath of such a disintegration. For the worst possible consequences of the state of disorder and anarchy to be avoided, the region’s young nations should look for a positive example within a regenerate diplomatic corps made up of “English gentlemen of the true kind.” They would learn from such gentlemen that there could be “a greater idea in the world than imperial power for power’s sake.”99 Such a view of

7

UPPER-CLASS TRAVEL WITH A POLITICAL SLANT …

193

the future of south-east Europeans appears irredeemably paternalistic by present-day standards but reconciliation between Lord Strangford’s fascination with the linguistic and cultural diversity of south-east Europe and his status as the representative of an imperial power was evidently impossible to achieve. Lady Strangford accepted his assessment of the complex situation in south-east Europe, and shared his interest in the emergent Bulgarian nation. She visited Bulgaria in the aftermath of the brutal suppression of the ill-fated April Rising against the Ottoman Empire in 1876. Her charitable work won her the admiration of the local people, and a poem was written in her praise by “the best living Bulgarian poet” Ivan Vazov.100 Lady Strangford’s commentary on her philanthropic work clearly reflects her husband’s ideas on the need of the young Bulgarian nation to achieve maturity and practice self-reliance rather than depend on the goodwill of some “friendly [foreign] Hercules.” She writes: I believed the truest kindness was to encourage them in self-improvement, not to force them into it;—I wanted to replace them where they were previously, and so assist them to develop their own advancement from within—not to clothe them with a false sense of advancement from without … I resolved firmly that the money I had brought should not be given in alms if it could be avoided; the people should be enabled to help themselves—that is, those who were better off should help those below them—they should work for each other.101

The Strangfords and the Bulgarian Literary Imagination As already remarked, the Strangfords appealed to the Bulgarian literary imagination. Ivan Vazov (1850–1921), celebrated as a Bulgarian national poet, dedicated a poem to Lady Strangford during her charitable mission in 1876. The poem was translated into English by Ivan Gueshoff (1849– 1924), who studied at Owens College in Manchester, and went so far as to challenge Lord Strangford’s view of the “fluid and half-consolidated state” of Bulgarian national identity in the 1860s102 by insisting that the Bulgarians already had a fully formed sense of nationality.103 In Vazov’s poem Lady Strangford is represented as a figure of feminine purity, maternal virtue, and benevolence. Lord Strangford is opposed to Benjamin Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield) and other pro-Ottoman British

194

L. KOSTOVA

politicians of the 1870s by being endowed with all the virtues of a noble Christian crusader. In fact, Vazov’s description of the Strangfords totally conforms to what scholars of the nineteenth century would generally recognize as a Victorian model of prescribed ideal roles for men and women: Lady, he [i.e. the late Lord Strangford] was our champion, a pillar of our rights; You are a comforting angel that has come to us in our worst woe …104

Interestingly, the roles, which the Strangfords adopted in The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic, reflect the same model. In the poem, the Strangfords’ noble deeds ally them with a far more famous figure in British political life, Disraeli’s opponent Gladstone. Patyat kam Sofia (The Road to Sofia), a Bulgarian novel first published in 1962, presents a rather different picture of Lady Strangford. Lord Strangford is not even mentioned in the text. Patyat portrays a key phase of the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–1878, generally known in Bulgaria as the “War of Liberation,” as it put an end to the country’s long-term domination by the Ottoman Empire (1390s–1870s): the taking, or “liberation,” of the strategically important town of Sofia by the Russian army. The text exemplifies the nationalist turn in Bulgarian cultural politics under state socialism: mixing strong doses of “patriotism” with pro-Russian feelings and anti-western bias, it purports to produce an epic picture of life in Bulgaria’s future capital. Patyat portrays Sofia, which many nineteenth-century foreign travelers perceived as a rather unremarkable Oriental town,105 as a decidedly cosmopolitan place. In it Bulgarian, Ottoman Turkish, and Russian characters rub shoulders with British, American, French, Italian, Austrian, and German dramatis personae. While a lot of characters are invented, several are fictionalized versions of nineteenth-century diplomats, travelers, philanthropists, journalists, political adventurers, and army officers. Western characters are split into two diametrically opposed camps as supporters of Ottoman Turkey and its continued domination over the Bulgarians are contrasted with a small minority of advocates of Bulgarian independence. The text’s British characters predominantly belong to the first group and this was evidently intended to illustrate the west’s negative role at a crucial juncture in Bulgarian history.

7

UPPER-CLASS TRAVEL WITH A POLITICAL SLANT …

195

Foremost within the British contingent is Stanislas St. Clair (1835– 1887), an adventurer of Scottish-Polish descent, who has been aptly described by the Italian writer and literary critic Claudio Magris as a “mixture of Conrad’s Kurtz, Kipling’s man who would be king, and Lawrence of Arabia.”106 Hardly a politically important figure at the time, St. Clair is portrayed in the novel as a British spymaster who has absolute power over top-ranking officers in the Ottoman army and police force and easily bends them to his will. He hates the Bulgarians, suspects them of working for the Russians, and aims at extracting their secrets with the help of a sinister British physician whose unscrupulous experiments with new drugs put one in mind of Josef Mengele. Valentine Baker (1827–1887), brother of the explorer and big game hunter Sir Samuel White Baker, is a general in the Ottoman Army whereas his friend Frederick Gustavus Burnaby (called “Barnaby” in the novel) (1842–1885), noted for his physical strength, love of adventure, and determination to penetrate into Russianoccupied Central Asia,107 is portrayed as a bored aristocrat intent upon “turning war into a sport”108 and looking for thrills. The book’s narrator pays relatively little attention to Emily Anne Smythe, Viscountess Strangford. Represented as a small, pale-faced woman in a nurse’s uniform, she is called “the compassionate lady” (milostiva ledi) by most Bulgarian characters,109 an appellation which, according to the narrator, is underserved. Her charitable work is thus minimized in a text that fully reflects the political climate of the Cold War era. Curiously, no further attempts have been made at representing the Strangfords in Bulgarian literature, despite the fact that historical fiction seems to be experiencing a revival at present, and Januarius Aloysius McGahan, an Irish-American journalist who covered the atrocities following the suppression of the April Rising and whom Lady Strangford may have met in the course of her charitable mission in 1876, has become the central character of a contemporary Bulgarian novel.110 On the other hand, streets have been named after her in Bulgaria’s capital and in Plovdiv, the country’s second largest city. A monument in memory of “the compassionate lady” has been erected in the town of Batak, site of some of the worst atrocities covered by McGahan. All of these signs of remembrance indicate that the Strangfords have played a significant role in the Bulgarian cultural imaginary, with the wife being given pride of place in an interesting reversal of Victorian gender standards.

196

L. KOSTOVA

Notes 1. The Bulgarian historian Roumen Genov is the author of a short academic study titled Iztochniyat vapros, Aprilskoto vastanie i angliiskata filantropiya: semeistvo Strangford i balgarite [The Eastern Question, the April Rising, and English Philanthropy: The Strangfords and the Bulgarians ] (Sofia: Glavno upravlenie na arhivite kam Ministerskiya savet, 2007) and a number of articles published in journals and edited volumes. The linguist Snezha Tsoneva-Mathewson is the author of a wellresearched article dealing with Lord Strangford’s philological pursuits: “Lord Strangford, or There Are No Routes without Roots,” in Trees of Knowledge: Roots and Routes, ed. Snezha Tsoneva-Mathewson, Yana Rowland, and Vitana Kostadinova (Plovdiv: Plovdiv University Press, 2016), 166–74. 2. See, among others, Charles Boner, Transylvania; Its Products and Its People (London: Longman, 1865); G. M. Mackenzie and A. P. Irby, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe (London: Alexander Strahan, 1866). 3. On biographical details on the Strangfords, see E. Barrington de Fonblanque, The Lives of the Lords Strangford (London: Cassell Petter & Galpin, 1877), 250–94. 4. Arminius Vambery, “To the Memory of Lord Strangford,” in Original Letters and Papers of the Late Lord Strangford upon Philological and Kindred Subjects, ed. Viscountess Strangford (London: Trübner & Co., 1878), xvii. 5. Ibid., xviii. 6. “On the Language of the Afghans” is the title of one of Lord Strangford’s scholarly papers. Originally published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1863, it was subsequently included in Strangford, Original Letters, 50–68. 7. Quoted in Genov, Iztochniyat vapros, 5. 8. See the chapter “Chaos” in Strangford, The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic: With a Visit to Montenegro (London: Richard Bentley, 1864), 295–382. 9. See “Sham Hellenic and True Romaic Greeks,” in A Selection from the Writings of Viscount Strangford, ed. Viscountess Strangford (London: Richard Bentley, 1869), 1:331–34. 10. De Fonblanque, Lives of the Lords Strangford, 268. See also Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 99. 11. On the variety of meanings of the word “race” in nineteenth-century contexts, see Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960 (Hamden: Archon Books, 1982).

7

UPPER-CLASS TRAVEL WITH A POLITICAL SLANT …

197

12. Han F. Vermeulen, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 8. 13. “Popularised Ethnology,” in Strangford, Original Letters, 215. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 218. 16. On the intellectual history of positivism and varieties of positivist thought, see The Worlds of Positivism: A Global Intellectual History, 1770–1930, ed. Johannes Feichtinger, Franz L. Fillafer, and Jan Surman (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 17. Tsoneva-Mathewson, “Lord Strangford,” 166. 18. On Gladstone’s interview with Lady Strangford, see Rebecca Gill, Calculating Compassion: Humanity and Relief in War, 1870–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 85. On Gladstone’s pamphlet and its significance, see Ludmilla Kostova, Tales of the Periphery: The Balkans in Nineteenth-Century British Writing (Veliko Tarnovo: St. Cyril and St. Methodius University Press, 1997), 161–74. 19. Gill, Calculating Compassion, 100. 20. On “writing couples,” see Julia Kuehn, A Female Poetics of Empire: From Eliot to Woolf (London: Routledge, 2014), 93–95. 21. David Hosaflook, “Emily Strangford: British Lady in Albanian Lands before Edith Durham” (Universiteti i Prizrenit: Konferencë shkencore për nder të Akademik Idriz Ajetit, 2014), 5. 22. Vicountess Strangford, Eastern Shores, 2. 23. Strangford, Eastern Shores, 35, emphasis added. 24. Ibid., 131–32. 25. Ibid., 145–50. 26. Byron to Mrs. Catherine Gordon Byron, Prevesa, 12 November 1809, in “In My Hot Youth”: Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1973), 226. 27. Strangford, Eastern Shores, 17. 28. Ibid., i. 29. Kuehn, A Female Poetics, 94. 30. Lord Strangford, “Egyptian Sepulchres and Syrian Shrines,” The Saturday Review 12, no. 201 (3 August 1861): 123, emphasis added. 31. Ibid. 32. See Mary S. Lovell, A Scandalous Life: The Biography of Jane Digby (London: Fourth Estate, 1996). 33. Lord Strangford, “Egyptian Sepulchres,” 123. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid.

198

L. KOSTOVA

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61. 62.

Ibid., 124. Ibid., 123. Ibid., emphasis added. Strangford, Eastern Shores, 56. Ibid., 204. Ibid., 14; 15; 18. On Byron’s influence on post-Byronic travel writing and literature in English, see David Roessel, In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Strangford, Eastern Shores, 30–31. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 61. George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (New York: Brentano, 1928), 24–26. Ibid., 87. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The One-Volume Definitive Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), 121. Shaw, Quintessence, 48. Strangford, Original Letters, ix. On European symbolic geography and the relative character of categorizations along the east-west axis, see Milica Bakic-Hayden and Robert M. Hayden, “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans’: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics,” Slavic Review 51, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 1–15. Monika Baár, Historians and Nationalism: East Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 62. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 62. Mimicry has been theorized by Homi K. Bhabha in his seminal book The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). On cultural mimicry and attitudes to it, also see Anne P. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995), 66–68. Emily A. Beaufort, Egyptian Sepulchres and Syrian Shrines Including Some Stay in the Lebanon, at Palmyra, and in Western Turkey, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1862), 2:441. Strangford, Eastern Shores, 351. On the babu in Kipling’s Kim as “a risible mimic-man,” see McClintock, Imperial Leather, 70. Viscount Strangford, A Selection from the Writings of Viscount Strangford on Political, Geographical, and Social Subjects , ed. Viscountess Strangford (London: Richard Bentley, 1869), 332.

7

UPPER-CLASS TRAVEL WITH A POLITICAL SLANT …

199

63. Ibid., 334. 64. Strangford, Eastern Shores, 84. 65. For details see C. Brad Faught, “Gladstone and the Ionian Islands,” in William Gladstone: New Studies and Perspectives, ed. Ronald Quinault, Roger Swift, and Ruth Clayton Windscheffel (London: Routledge, 2016), 219–34. 66. Strangford, Eastern Shores, 85. 67. Ibid., 84. 68. Ibid. 69. Boner, Transylvania, 6. 70. Ibid., 480; 559. 71. Ibid., 2. 72. On the idea of a Concert of Europe and the different stages through which it went, see Norman Davies, Europe East & West (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), 22. 73. Strangford, Original Letters, 254. 74. Ibid., 255. 75. Ibid., 253. 76. Ibid. 77. On German ideas about nationality and language, see Serhiy Bilenky, Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 1–2. 78. Haruko Momma, From Philology to English Studies: Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 151. 79. Strangford, Original Letters, 253. 80. Strangford, Eastern Shores, 207–08. 81. Lord Strangford repeatedly urges his contemporaries to read the texts of German philologists and other savants. See Strangford, Original Letters, 2; 8; 10; 121. 82. My reference is to Benedict Anderson’s ground-breaking book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006). 83. Strangford, Eastern Shores, 295. 84. Ibid., 296. 85. Ibid., 309. 86. Ibid., 310. 87. Ibid., 310–11; 314. 88. Ibid., 315. 89. See James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 132. 90. Strangford, Eastern Shores, 315.

200

L. KOSTOVA

91. Ibid., 311. 92. See “Modern Panslavonic Eisteddfods,” A Selection From the Writings of Viscount Strangford, 171–76. 93. Strangford, Original Letters, xvi, emphasis added. 94. Strangford, Eastern Shores, 321. 95. Ibid., 320. 96. Ibid., 318. 97. Ibid., 321. 98. On Gladstone’s view of “maturation,” see C. Brad Faught, “Gladstone and the Ionian Islands,” 231. 99. Strangford, Eastern Shores, 381; 382. 100. The Right Honble. Viscountess Strangford, Report on the Bulgarian Peasant Relief Fund: With a Statement of Distribution and Expenditure (London: Hardwicke & Bogue, 1877), 37. 101. Ibid., 32. 102. Strangford, Original Letters, 254. 103. I. E. Gueshoff, preface to The Balkan League, trans. Constantin C. Mincoff (London: John Murray, 1915), v–vi. 104. Ivan Vazov. Palni sabrani sachineniya [Complete Works ] (Sofia: Balgarski pisatel, 1974), 88, my translation. 105. Traveling through the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire in 1829–1830, George Keppel, future Earl of Abermarle, remarks that he has chosen to say nothing of the town of Sophia “as nothing can be said” about it (Narrative of a Journey across the Balcan, 2 vols. [London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831], 1:449–50). Writing in the 1840s, Andrew Archibald Paton claims that on account of the introduction of steam navigation on the Danube, Belgrade, Sofia, Philippopoli (present-day Plovdiv), and Adrianople (present-day Edirne) got fewer foreign visitors than previously. See Paton, Servia, the Youngest Member of the European Family: Or, a Residence in Belgrade, and Travels in the Highlands and Woodlands of the Interior, during the Years 1843 and 1844 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1845), 74. 106. Claudio Magris, Danube, trans. Patrick Creagh (London: The Harvill Press, 1986), 346. 107. See Fred Burnaby, A Ride to Khiva: Travels and Adventures in Central Asia (London: Cassell Petter & Galpin, 1876). 108. Stefan Dichev, Patyat kam Sofia (Plovdiv: Zhanet, 2010), 45; 145. 109. Ibid., 85. 110. Zahari Karabashliev, Havra (Sofia: Ciela, 2017).

CHAPTER 8

Beyond the Grand Tour: Norway and the Nineteenth-Century British Traveler Kathryn Walchester

Peter Fjågesund and Ruth Symes argue that “there is no doubt that the discovery of Norway as a destination of leisure travel can be dated roughly to the 1820s” and point to evidence from travelers William Rae Wilson and Thomas Forester that this expansion in tourism can be identified even more precisely to 1824, when “the first names of English visitors were discovered” in visitors’ or dag books at the station in Dal, Telemark.1 Before this, only a handful of British people traveled to the region, often for business or from scientific interest.2 These early travelers, in the final decades of the eighteenth and first twenty years of the nineteenth century, were largely from the upper-classes, predominantly male, and were drawn by Norway’s wild landscapes as a backdrop to outdoor activities and science. Norway’s late entry into the Napoleonic conflict facilitated it as an alternative to continental travel from the second decade of the nineteenth century. To Norway and its northern region of Samiland, or

K. Walchester (B) Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Colbert and L. Morrison (eds.), Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36146-4_8

201

202

K. WALCHESTER

Lapland as it was then known by the British, larger numbers of travelers went, mostly to hunt and fish.3 During the middle years of the century, advances in tourist infrastructure resulted in a part democratization of travel to Norway, with larger parties of middle-class travelers and an expansion in the numbers of women travelers.4 The increased numbers of texts written about the region by travelers in the second half of the century illustrate the versatility of various constructions of the region as “playground,” “old Norway,” and “Viking Norway” and show how Norway was also re-presented in relation to life at home in Britain for a diverse range of travelers. This essay outlines Norway’s attractions and its association with nature and traditional rural values for the British visitor, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the height of its popularity, in terms of traveler numbers, in the century’s final decades. “Norway was visited by very few,” states Jeremy Black in his account of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour.5 His assertion is in part supported by H. Arnold Barton, who remarks that “the Nordic lands were long almost terra incognita in the European consciousness, where they were pictured as a cold Hyperborean wilderness.”6 Norway’s fortunes as a destination were to change in the early decades of the following century, prompted by a late-Romantic interest in wild and mountainous landscapes and by the abundance of game and fish which those landscapes contained. Those travelers who did visit Norway in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were largely scientists and commercial travelers making journeys associated with trade.7 For example, Edward Daniel Clarke, tutor to John Marten Cripps and accompanied by Thomas Robert Malthus and William Otter, explored Scandinavia in 1799. However, the focus of these early travelers was also prompted by an interest in Norway’s landscape; Clarke’s emphasis on Norway’s natural history is evident in his Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa and in his considerable collections of specimens of minerals and plants, while Malthus’s interest in the Scandinavians’ use of natural resources and land informed his influential Essay on the Principle of Population.8 The Napoleonic Wars did not affect travel to Norway as extensively as they had Continental Europe. Sweden became involved in the Napoleonic conflict in 1805 and Denmark in 1807; Norway was at this point part of Denmark until its dynastic union with Sweden in 1814. Barton explains that during the early years of the Napoleonic Wars, the “Nordic lands”

8

BEYOND THE GRAND TOUR: NORWAY …

203

were seen as “an oasis of peace and tranquility,” until these lands themselves were drawn into the conflict.9 During the early part of the conflict Norway may have seen an increase of travelers, according to Italian traveler, Joseph Acerbi. In his account of travels from Italy to Norway in 1798 and 1799, Acerbi wrote, “Fashion, which extends its influence over everything, appears in our day, to favour travels and expeditions to the North: and the prevalence of this may, perhaps, have been increased by the political troubles in the South of Europe.”10 Angela Byrne, in her discussion of scientific travel during the period, suggests that “political strife [with France] also played a part in contemporary interest in Northern Europe.”11 Norway and her neighbors Sweden and Denmark offered British travelers an alternative to the south from several perspectives. First, they did not rely on the same classical frame of reference; without sites of Greek and Roman history, little classical knowledge was required to travel to and write about the region. Second, the Grand Tour was an “ameliorative adventure,” in James Buzard’s words, “cultivating young men of property” to produce “better statesmen and masters of estates.”12 Travelers did not visit Norway for education in the same way that they had France, Italy, and Greece (although, as Andrew Wawn has shown, northern antiquity was of significant scholarly interest from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries).13 Third, while Switzerland and Italy possess equal attractions for tourists of the sublime and picturesque as well as those seeking the ruins of empire, Norway’s fascination was linked primarily to nature and its scenery, an interest prompted by Romantic concerns with aesthetics. From the 1790s, Norway saw its first peak in interest from British visitors, inspired by what Barton refers to as a “vogue of nature” which “glorified wild, untamed nature in all its grandeur and idealized the sturdy virtues of the simple peasants in reaction against the overrefinement and corruption of the cities and luxury-loving elite.”14 In an account published in 1821 by the German traveler Baron von Hallberg, who had traveled in Scandinavia in the 1790s, the wildness of the landscape was an important part of the region’s charm: “There is no country which accords better with my taste than Norway, nor is there any cast of inhabitants or people that I have visited whom I esteem more. Here at least are the true haunts of simple nature, and it has been one of the pleasantest passages of my life to dwell among the mountains.”15 Like

204

K. WALCHESTER

many other accounts later in the century, Hallberg emphasizes a refreshing “simplicity” in terms of both the people and their mode of living, alongside an appreciation of the natural landscape. Travelers in the nineteenth century continued to be attracted by Norway’s landscape, and writers highlighted a contrast between southern culture and northern wilderness. Citing Arthur de Capell Brooke’s travels to Norway in 1820, and describing the enormous shift in the perception and appreciation of landscape which had occurred from the late eighteenth century, Fjågesund and Symes note, “Paradoxically, it is precisely the aesthetic qualities which have hitherto made Norway unattractive to British travelers that are being used to rouse the curiosity of the readers.”16 Henry David Inglis, writing under the pseudonym Derwent Conway in the 1820s, differentiates the focus of his tour of Norway from what might have been his focus on a southern tour: “France has her Paris, and Paris her Palais-Royale; Italy has her Rome, and Rome her monuments; but Norway has only her dim mountains, her silent forests, and her lonely lakes.”17 Later, Inglis sharpens his contrast between travelers to Norway and those to Italy, the one exploring the landscape on their own impulse, the other only with the aid of guides: “Norway is not like Italy, where the services of a cicerone are constantly required; without whom, indeed we might pass by the Coliseum, and not know what stupendous monument cast its shadow across our path. But, in Norway, our guide is the sun; by his help, we scale the rocks and penetrate the forests; and aided by him only, we enjoy the sublime glories of the Dovre Field, or the minute beauties of the changing leaf and forest flower.”18 Many other travelers, in addition to Inglis, expressed relief at the absence of famous cultural landmarks in Norway. On her 1827 tour of Norway with her husband, Lady Grosvenor writes about Christiania, now Oslo: “There is nothing to be seen or done in this town; but that is lucky, as these three o’ clock dinners—a few miles from the town—leave one time for nothing.”19 Thus Norway, at least in the first part of the century, became associated with cultural absence and as a place of touristic freedom from the constraints of monuments and museums. Increasing numbers of British travelers were attracted by what Fjågesund and Symes refer to as “empty wilderness,” and nineteenth-century travel writings repeatedly figure Norway as wild and desolate.20 In Boydell’s Picturesque Scenery of Norway (1820), for example, the note attached to the first plate reads, “The awful sublimity of the coast fills the imagination with ideas of desolation and horror; the rocks dreadfully

8

BEYOND THE GRAND TOUR: NORWAY …

205

shattered by the impetuous billows of the great Northern Ocean.”21 The desirability of this trope of Norway’s wildness came out of “the exaggerated perception that the Continental tour was becoming more accessible than ever.”22 In contrast to regions perceived as being over-stocked with tourists by the early 1820s (Inglis, for example, claims that “all the world had gone to France”), Norway was protected from large numbers of visitors by the North Sea and was composed of hundreds of miles of countryside accessible only by foot or the two-wheeled cariole.23 The first considerable numbers of travelers to Norway from the 1830s onwards were aristocratic and upper-class men visiting the region for sport, either to fish or hunt. Wawn explains how these early visitors were instrumental in the construction of a recognizable tourist infrastructure, with hotels built to accommodate them and guides found to accompany and row sportsmen along rivers and fjords.24 In Journal of a Residence in Norway, Samuel Laing gives a sense of the remarkable conditions for fishing in Norway: “One of the English gentlemen whom I met at Jerkin gave me a fishing-rod with which he did not wish to be encumbered. He caught trout until he has actually tired, having killed above three hundred in a very few days. Having fortunately brought with me some flies and tackle, I went out this forenoon…. Although I had never fished trout before, I caught above six dozen between breakfast and dinner: this will give some idea of what fishing is in Norway.”25 After three decades, the numbers of British sporting travelers had increased considerably. In the December 1868 issue of Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, the magazine’s Norwegian correspondent on fishing, “Norvagus,” observes that British travelers visiting Norway to hunt and to fish “increase by scores—perhaps hundreds—every year.”26 Writing in the early 1850s, Irishwoman Selina Bunbury reported a less than favorable account of these English visitors: ‘“And fish,’ said one of the men; ‘yes, they like that. Do they not come over here and risk their lives, and spend heaps of gold, for nothing else but to catch a fish? Englishmen do nothing more. To eat, to drink, to fish; that is all the life of Englishmen.’”27 In their accounts throughout the century, these “sporting” travelers continue to represent Norway as wild and remote, providing a suitable landscape for the activities that they enjoyed. Frederick Metcalfe highlights the dominance of nature for the “Sporting Englishman”: “But if you are a lover of wild and savage nature, whether as a sketcher, botanist, geologist, or sportsman, especially the last, then go by all means. You will have a regular shooting coat life of it; no conventional bother, no fuss about external

206

K. WALCHESTER

appearance, and you will have much that goes to the heart of an adventurous Englishman.”28 Accounts by sportsman travelers repeatedly construct Norway as a “playground.” Joseph Phythian claims in 1877, “Surely Norway has been made as a playground … especially for Englishmen.”29 This imperialist discourse assumes hierarchy and domination, in which the Norwegian panorama is cleared of its people. For Martin J. Daunton and Bernhard Rieger, the rhetoric “depopulated the landscape and redefined the complex societies that they had invaded for their pleasure.”30 This construction of Norway is also used by the acknowledged “father” of Norwegian mountaineering,31 Cecil Slingsby, in his Norway, the Northern Playground (1904). This title nods toward other texts about mountaineering in areas of Europe such as the Alps, including Leslie Stephen’s The Playground of Europe about climbing in Switzerland.32 In an even earlier article from the Alpine Journal of 1865, H. B. George lamented that it was a pity that Norway, “a country so admirably suited for the playground of Englishmen,” was beginning to be explored by climbers from other nations.33 Travelers were forced to go further north to escape the crowds. By contrast, in her climbing memoir and travelogue from 1908, Elizabeth le Blond considers the isolation of Arctic Norway unchallenged: “At no time is our northern playground likely to become overrun. The long journey—it took us quite three weeks to go and return—the absence of hotels and guides, and the difficulties of the language, where none speaks English, all serve to protect it from invasion by tourists. Yet the climber who is undeterred by these obstacles can still find innumerable virgin peaks and mighty cataracts of ice awaiting the foot of the explorer.”34 If one travels far enough north, Le Blond shows, the belated English visitor in the early part of the twentieth century can still find a wilderness to explore and in which to play. While the numbers of aristocratic travelers in the late nineteenth century declined, the patterns of tourism they established persisted. Writing of her 1885 trip to Norway, aboard a private yacht and accompanied by the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, Lady Annie Brassey describes several fishing trips made by the party. One of the excursions was to a river near to Eidfjord, “lead by Mr. Walters and his son, who also have another river above the lake. They were extremely kind in giving the whole of our party free permission to fish, as well as sending some excellent salmon on board.”35 In addition to detailing some of the stretches of rivers whose fishing rights were owned by members of the English aristocracy, Brassey

8

BEYOND THE GRAND TOUR: NORWAY …

207

also describes dinner parties on their yachts, one of which was hosted by the Prince of Wales during his sojourn at Molde.36 Despite the elevated circles of these groups of travelers, their journeys continued to inform the way in which Norwegians understood British tourism. As Knut Marhus notes, middle-class travelers later in the century taking a “Sporting Tour” were situated among the class of these early travelers: “among the first Britons who visited Hardanger in Norway in the nineteenth century were rich people who crossed the North Sea on their luxurious yachts. As a result, all British travelers to Hardanger were referred to by local people as ‘lords’ and their boats as ‘boats of lords.’”37 From the mid-century, mass tourism in Norway began to be established, and larger numbers of middle-class travelers visited the country. Regular steamship crossings and improved tourist infrastructure, established by the aristocratic “salmon lords,” encouraged larger groups of visitors. An anonymous travelogue from the mid-century anticipated this progress: “The steamers which run between Hull and Christiania are too small to encounter comfortably the North Sea, which is generally in a turbulent state. When Norway becomes a more familiar country to tourists, which it promises soon to be, I hope larger steamers may be provided for them.”38 The author was keen for such advances, noting the “miserable” station-houses for tourist accommodation where there was an absence of “English fishermen.”39 From the 1850s, Thomas Bennett’s travel agency in Christiania provided travelers with a range of services to facilitate their tours of the region. Mary Spence, who traveled with her brother and sister in 1867, noted the centrality of Bennett’s place in the Norwegian tourist infrastructure: “Bennett came to us that night to help us to make our arrangements for proceeding northwards. Bennett is a great man in Norway, and is well known by tourists, as they mostly apply to him for information and advice. He belongs to the Cariole Company, has a literary store, is the compiler of the guide book, which is annual and invaluable, and is supposed to be the person, whom all Englishmen would do well to consult before buying even a cigar in Norway.”40 In her 1853 travelogue, Bunbury observed “the ‘turning of the sod’ for the first railroad” to run from Christiania to Lake Miösen.41 By the 1890s, Alice Ogilvie’s account shows considerable advances in the accommodation and transport for tourists in Norway. At Vossevangen, she writes, “My brother was astonished to find such a large hotel replacing the modest inn he had formerly known” and that “until last year, when the Summer-Home was built, there was no accommodation except at rather poor stations on the

208

K. WALCHESTER

route; but now no lady need be deterred from taking a trip as far as Viken, and thence crossing over the mountains to Thelemarken [sic].”42 The trajectory by which Norway became a focus for women’s travel during the nineteenth century is particularly striking.43 Women constituted few of the travelers to the region before 1850 and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters from a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), itself descriptive of a journey prompted by commercial factors rather than leisure travel, is the first published account by a woman traveler to the region. In the 1850s there was some debate about whether Norway was a suitable destination for women travelers. In 1858, Edmund Spender discussed how, “About four years ago an experienced Norwegian traveller asked the question, and asked it in print, ‘How far is it practicable for ladies to travel in Norway?’ … and, after weighing these and the like hindrances against the spirit, energy, and courage of English ladies, answers his own question, and decides against their attempting such a tour at present.”44 However, by the 1880s, as Violet Crompton Roberts confirms, it was, “all the rage.”45 According to Thomas Forester, from whose text Spender had quoted, the principal deterrents for women anticipating “an extensive trip” to Norway were “the open vehicle,” “the uncertainty of the climate,” and “the scarcity of good accommodation on unfrequented roads.”46 Jean A. Mains concurs that the lack of adequate accommodation was the main reason that more women did not travel into the interior of Norway before the 1850s.47 As more women traveled to Norway, the focus of travelogues began to alter. From the late 1850s, women authors began to encourage others to visit the region. The anonymous “Lady” author of My Norske Note Book exemplified this trend, writing: “I trust that the plain account it gives of the many pleasures, and the few difficulties we encountered, may induce more English Ladies to travel in Norske Land than has yet been the case.”48 Some travelogues, such as those by Crompton Roberts and Edith Rhodes, addressed specific information and advice to female tourists, for example, on clothing. From her list “of things to take, were we going the same trip again,” Crompton Roberts informs prospective travelers that they need: “One dress, serge. One dress, dust color. One warm cloak, with close fitting cap to match. One shady hat.”49 Crompton Roberts emphasizes the practical rather than fashionable and highlights the necessity of clothing suitable for the environment in Norway, such as dusty roads and cold weather.

8

BEYOND THE GRAND TOUR: NORWAY …

209

In the second half of the century, while travelogues about Norway still highlighted the connection between Norway and nature, two other versions of the nation are evident: Gamle Norge or “old Norway” and “Norway, Land of the Vikings.” The prevalence of the image of Gamle Norge illustrates the way in which travelers found in the region a counterpoint to British industrialism and technological advances. The image of the region as “old Norway” is especially evident in travelogues by women, seemingly offering a particular resonance for female authors in which they saw women’s active participation in rural communities from the interior of the country, most often the Dovrefjeld area. Encouraged to spend time in domestic interior spaces by their Norwegian counterparts, women travelers often commented on domestic life in the saeters or mountain huts, which had remained largely untouched for several centuries. Emily Lowe delights in being dressed up “as a Dovre-Fjeld peasant for the day” by an old lady and observing a “peasant” dance in a room that she has to climb up to “partly by ladders and partly by pulls.”50 Spence tells of her enthusiasm about visiting “old Norway,” which “might have appeared absurd to anyone who had not breathed the mountain-air of Gamle Norge,” asserting that the purity of nature in the region would win over any traveler to its rural simplicity, which she associates with an unchanging natural landscape.51 Irishwoman Maria Dickson was caught looking inside a Norwegian house while stopping to change horses and describes an exchange between the Norwegian women and herself, equally interested in each other’s clothing; “but this is only in the wild district,” she adds.52 Such quests for an authentic “old Norway” or Gamle Norge are evident in many travelogues of the period. As well as being the title of books published by Isabella Frances Blundell in 1862 and Robert Taylor Pritchett in 1879, these phrases are repeated throughout the travel accounts and fiction of the period.53 Blundell’s text abounds with references to “old Norway” and when she travels through the Telemark area it seems that she too has been transported back in time. There she speculates on whether women’s seemingly “influential position” in Norwegian society has anything to do with “the respect once paid to the Alruna wives and Maidens, the Scandinavian sibyls.” “I don’t suppose it has,” she concludes, “only one is carried back so many hundreds of years by the primitive life one meets here, that when on the spot the idea does not look so wild as it does in our practical, modern, English life.”54 The trope of Gamle Norge enabled travelers to use their journeys to Norway to make comparisons

210

K. WALCHESTER

with life in England on a number of levels, for example in terms of economy, traditions, and household organization. For some female travelers like Blundell, it offered an alternative perspective on their own restricted position as women in Victorian society. Later writers, Le Blond and Mrs. Alec Tweedie, in 1908 and 1894, respectively, would highlight the way in which traditional Norwegian communities encouraged women’s participation and education, with Le Blond using the contrast to reflect on the development of the British suffragette movement.55 By presenting herself and her mother as “unprotected females,” Lowe attempted to offer a more novel version of the Norway tour than those written by increasing numbers of travelers to the region in the 1850s. Part of Lowe’s construction of her narrative persona relied on the depiction of their journey as being “off the beaten track” into “old Norway”: “To the real traveller an unexplored country has the most enticing charms; but where is such a country to be found—where? A distant voice answers— Here. The little word comes to us from the Dovrefjeld in the middle of Norway, and travels more than 1,000 miles ere it reaches us: but distance does not lessen its truthful sound; and confiding in that simple promise, we prepare to leave for the wildest part of Scandinavia.”56 Lowe’s assertion of herself as a “real traveler” is evident on her journey to the Dovrefjeld as she dismisses an inn because it is “not rustic enough to please [her]” and complains about other British travelers who do “not imitate the pleasing customs of a nation” when they fail to acknowledge other people on the road.57 She draws attention to the contrast between “wild Norway” and the urban life of England, writing how “this picturesque structure” of a wooden farm building “was in the foreground; hills of delicate colour succeeded one another into the far distance; the only sound was now and then of a fish turning in the water. It was ten o’clock at night; I was standing in wild Norway—how many young ladies were standing in towns hearing the street organs play ‘La Donna è mobile’ for the six-thousandth time!”58 Lowe’s presentation of the opposition between rural Norway and British towns, or between natural sounds and popular tunes, draws attention to Norway’s wildness, authenticity, and freshness in contrast to the hackneyed repetition of city life. By the 1870s, Gamle Norge frequently becomes associated with commercialism and the purchase of representative souvenirs. Such searches for “authenticity” through appropriate objects recall Dean MacCannell’s work on the tourist industry.59 In her account of her visit to Bergen with her sister, Spence describes how “One great duty in Bergen appeared to

8

BEYOND THE GRAND TOUR: NORWAY …

211

be to spend money. We successively patronized the silver-smiths, the glove shops, the furriers.”60 Pritchett provides a satirical depiction of three English travelers to Norway, in which he describes “No. 2”’s passion for Norway as categorized by “Reindeer, salmon, and Gamle Norge— these he had chronically on the brain, mixed up with a great love of old tankards and a yearning for silver belts and gammelt sölv [old silver].”61 In The Adventures of Five Spinsters in Norway (1887), Rhodes describes her party’s shopping trip in Bergen, where they bought “Two sets of lovely old buttons, that had been Danish coinage in 1773, for three krones each; some dear little Norwegian peasant-rings, two and a half ore each … [W]e bought Riga spoons, knives; and I finally, to my immense delight, picked out an old box, crammed with old silver, [and] a silver ring, very ancient, with hands clasping each other firmly.”62 Norwegian silver was the most sought-after souvenir by nineteenth-century tourists to Norway. Pritchett, after his visit to the silver mines at Kongsberg, notes that “Interesting specimens of this class of work are to be found in England, souvenirs of travel which are highly prized by the happy possessors and their friends also. The silver is not considered very pure, but the old designs are very grand and admirable.”63 The threat to the traditions of “old Norway” and the elusiveness of the “authentic” is marked at the end of Pritchett’s text when he laments that “in fact, electro-plate is now invading Gamle Norge.”64 The other dominant image of Norway in travel texts from the second half of the century was that of “Viking Norway.” After the discovery of the Viking long-boat in 1867 at Tune on the eastern side of the Oslofjord as part of a burial mound, many travelers who arrived at the port of Christiania by steam ship visited the museums and the Viking artifacts before heading north. Another Viking burial ship, the Gokstad, was excavated on the opposite side of the fjord in 1880.65 These discoveries instigated a renewed interest in Viking history in Britain, which from the 1820s had been sustained by excavations of burial mounds at Jellig, and Uppsala and Birka.66 As Wawn has shown, the vast literature pertaining to the Vikings published in Britain in the nineteenth century constructed various versions of “Vikingism,” significant to a Victorian audience making sense of its position as an expanding global imperial power in terms of its history as the descendant of the former Viking empire: “If Athens and Rome were fit destinations for the serious traveller, why not Sognefjord and Hlíðarendi? Late-nineteenth-century travellers undertook pilgrimages (the word is frequently invoked) to the Viking-age sites of sagas

212

K. WALCHESTER

highlighted by text, tradition and eventually travel agent.”67 The publication of texts addressing the region’s Viking heritage both came out of and encouraged travel to Norway. One of the most influential books was Laing’s 1844 translation of the Heimskringla; or Chronicle of the Kings of Norway. Laing had visited Norway in 1834, staying for three years on the northern shores of Trondheimsfjord. The other main text to which many travelers refer is the Friðþjófs Saga, a tale whose provenance dates to the fourteenth century but which was first translated into English in 1839 by George Stephens. In her 1889 travelogue, Olivia Stone enthusiastically describes her visit to see a Viking ship displayed in a building near to the university at Christiania: “We touch shrinkingly the sword-hilt which a hand, now mouldered into dust, once grasped firmly. With a similar feeling—but ten times intensified—we stood beside the Viking ship. Not only were we awe-struck by its form and workmanship, but the past warriors filled it from beam to beam; the forms of our—in part, at least—progenitors.”68 Not only did travelers highlight the connection between the Vikings and themselves, but many, like Stone, described Britain’s Viking inheritance as a key to her imperial success. Stone asserts that, “England would not now be at the head of the nations had not her sons inherited the blood of these Vikings.”69 Likewise, Frederick Metcalfe asserts that “Norway is not only interesting for its unique scenery, but also for its blood-relationship with Great Britain.”70 “Remember too,” he continues, “that this is the country of men whose blood flows in your veins, to whom, perhaps we owe the best and most adventurous part of our character; the Viking spirit which makes us masters of the sea, and which we should utterly have wanted, had Saxon slowness received no infusion of Scandinavian daring.”71 By the final years of the century, as imperial fortunes began to diminish, journeys to Norway became invoked with a need for the British character to be replenished with Viking spirit; this was seen in much popular fiction of the period, such as that by Marie Corelli and Edna Lyall.72 By the end of the century, the extent of Norway’s popularity is clear from the revised eighth edition of Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Norway, published in 1892, the first edition having been published in 1839. Noting the presence of the “now ubiquitous tourist,” the preface describes how “The development of tourist traffic in recent years has wrought such changes in communications by land and water and, generally, in facilities for visiting every part of Norway, a country of unequal

8

BEYOND THE GRAND TOUR: NORWAY …

213

attraction in Europe, that it has been found necessary to re-write and reconstruct almost the entire work.”73 The previous edition had been published in 1880, but four further editions had been revised in the 1870s, indicating the changes which took place during this period. In addition to the ameliorations in routes across Norway, tourists had begun to travel north to more remote parts of the region. In his 1906 book, Adelaide M. Gerrard describes how, “Until comparatively recently it was not possible for the average tourist to [visit the Spitsbergen archipelago]; but now, owing to the occasional running of special steamers—the pioneer in which enterprise was Captain Bade—it has become an easy matter for anyone to penetrate these high latitudes.”74 Despite the movement of mass tourism northwards and inland, some groups of travelers insisted that they could still escape the presence of tourists. Beatrix Jungman emphasizes the remoteness of the majority of Norway, and how, even in the early years of the twentieth century, it was still possible for the traveler to find herself off the map (1905). For travelers such as Jungman, this search for places “off the beaten track” corresponds to what Buzard and others have discussed as a sense of “belatedness” by the travel writer.75 However, in her text and others of this period by Ethel Tweedie, there is a Janus-faced quality about the depiction of Norway. The region continues to be described both in terms of “old Norway” and its Viking heritage, but all three travelers refer to the presence of many other British and German visitors (an “immense influx of visitors” for Jungman) and refer to important contemporary figures in the arts and politics of the time, such as Ibsen, Bjornsen, and Frithjof Nansen.76 The representation of Norway, by the turn of the twentieth century, was beginning to turn toward its contemporary achievements. Norway’s rise in popularity for travelers in the nineteenth century was relatively rapid. From the 1820s the region went from being a fairly littleknown and scarcely chronicled destination, even among aristocratic travelers, to a country which seemed to infect the British traveler with, as Stone describes in 1889, a “Norway mania.”77 The paucity of eighteenthcentury representations of Scandinavia, as a result of the difficulty of arriving there by sailing ship and traveling around its mountainous interior, as well as its apparent lack of cultural artifacts, allowed for a sense of freedom for the early travelers in their textual imaginings of the region. Norway also offered a place in which new understandings of Britishness could be considered. In one of these versions, for example, Gamle Norge, the traveler re-imagined life at home in urban, industrial Britain in counterpoint

214

K. WALCHESTER

to that of rural, ancient Norway. During the nineteenth century, Norway’s tourist infrastructure grew and more became known of its heritage as Viking remains were discovered and ancient texts such as The Heimskringla were translated into English.78 In some travelogues the identity of the traveler was re-cast with reference to their relationship to Viking forefathers and in terms of British imperial strength. Thus, as a case-study for nineteenth-century developments in travel, Norway presents a remarkable example, moving rapidly from its primary representation as terra incognita, toward providing a particularly rich space for a wide range of late-nineteenth-century travelers.

Notes 1. Peter Fjågesund and Ruth Symes, The Northern Utopia: British Perceptions of Norway in the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 64; 41–50. 2. Early travelers to the region included Joseph Acerbi, Travels through Sweden, Finland, and Lapland to the North Cape in the Years 1798 and 1799, 2 vols. (London: Mawman, 1802); Leopold von Buch, Travels through Norway and Lapland, during the Years 1806, 1807, and 1808, trans. John Black, with notes and illustrations chiefly mineralogical, and some account of the author, by Robert Jameson (London: Henry Colburn, 1813); Edward Daniel Clarke, Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa, vol. 10, pt. 3: Scandinavia (London: T. Cadell, 1810); Matthew Consett, A Tour through Sweden, Swedish-Lapland, Finland and Denmark (London: J. Johnson, 1784); William Coxe, Travels in Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark: Illustrated with Charts and Engravings, 5th ed., vol. 5 (London: T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1802); Andrew Swinton, Travels into Norway, Denmark, and Russia in the Years 1789, 1790, and 1791 (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1792); Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (London: J. Johnson, 1796); and Jens Wolff, Sketches on a Tour to Copenhagen, through Norway and Sweden (London: n.p., 1814). 3. Pia Sillanpää, The Scandinavian Sporting Tour: A Case Study in Geographical Imagology (Örnsköldsvik: Ågrens Tryckeri, 2002), 2. 4. Kathryn Walchester, Gamle Norge and Nineteenth-Century British Women Travellers in Norway (London: Anthem Press, 2014). 5. Jeremy Black, The British and the Grand Tour (London: Routledge, 1985), 21. 6. H. Arnold Barton, “The Discovery of Norway Abroad, 1760–1905,” Scandinavian Studies 79, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 25–40; 25.

8

BEYOND THE GRAND TOUR: NORWAY …

215

7. Fjågesund and Symes note that, before the 1820s, Norway “has hitherto been largely ignored by other than merchant travelers” (The Northern Utopia, 64). 8. Edward Daniel Clarke, Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa, 6 vols. (London: 1810–1823); Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 2 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1803). 9. H. Arnold Barton, Northern Arcadia: Foreign Travelers in Scandinavia 1765–1815 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 4. For a detailed account of the roles of Sweden and Norway in the Napoleonic conflict see also H. Arnold Barton, Sweden and Visions of Norway (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 10–12. 10. Acerbi, Travels through Sweden, x. 11. Angela Byrne, Geographies of the Romantic North: Science, Antiquarianism, and Travel, 1790–1830 (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2013), 23– 24. 12. James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 102. John Towner has argued that the Grand Tour extended to members of classes other than the aristocracy and gentry (“The Grand Tour; A Key Phase in the History of Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 12 [1985]: 297– 333; 301). 13. Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), ix; 34–59. 14. Barton, “Discovery of Norway Abroad,” 26. 15. Baron von Hallberg, Sentimental Sketches Written during a Late Journey through the North of Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway in New Voyages and Travels, vol. 5 (London: Sir Richard Philips, 1821), 55. 16. Fjågesund and Symes, Northern Utopia, 38–39. 17. Derwent Conway, pseud. [Henry David Inglis], A Personal Narrative of a Journey through Norway, Part of Sweden, and the Islands and States of Denmark (London: Hurst, Chance and Co., 1829), 2. 18. Ibid., 9. 19. Lady Elizabeth Grosvenor, Diary of a Tour in Sweden, Norway and Russia in 1827 with Letters (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1879), 59. 20. Fjågesund and Symes, Northern Utopia, 23. Although figures for individual journeys to Norway during this period are difficult to ascertain, an increased number of publications addressed Norwegian travel from the 1820s, including John William Edy, Boydell’s Picturesque Scenery of Norway (London: Hurst, Robinson, and Co., 1820); Arthur de Capell Brooke, Travels through Sweden, Norway and Finmark to the North Cape in the Summer of 1820 (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1823); Conway, Personal Narrative; Rev. Robert Everest, A Journey through Norway, Lapland, and Sweden: With Some Remarks on the Geology of the Country

216

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

K. WALCHESTER

(London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1829); and George Matthew Jones, Travels in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, and Turkey; also on the Coasts of Azof and of the Black Sea; with a View of Trade in Those Seas, and of the Systems Adopted to Man the Fleets of the Different Powers of Europe, Compared with that of England, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1827). Edy, Boydell’s Picturesque Scenery, 5. Buzard, Beaten Track, 6. Conway, Personal Narrative, 2. Wawn, Vikings and the Victorians, 127; see also Sillanpää, Scandinavian Sporting Tour. Samuel Laing, Journal of a Residence in Norway during the Years 1834, 1835, and 1836; Made with a View to Inquire into the Moral and Political Economy of that Country (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, 1836), 58. Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle 2, no. 2 (30 December 1868): 437; 8. Selina Bunbury, Life in Sweden with Excursions in Norway and Denmark, 2 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1853), 1:141. Rev. Frederick Metcalfe, The Oxonian in Norway; or, Notes of Excursions in that Country (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1856), 5. Joseph Phythian, Scenes of Travel in Norway (London: Cassell and Co., 1877), 113–14. Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger, Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late Victorian Era to World War II (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 90. See Simon Thompson, Unjustifiable Risk? The Story of British Climbing (Cicerone: Cumbria, 2010), 70. Switzerland and the Alps are likewise cast as a “playground,” in Jane Quintin Freshfield’s Alpine Byways or Light Leaves by a Lady (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1861), 2, and in Leslie Stephen’s The Playground of Europe (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1871). H. B. George, “Mount Elbrouz, and the Attempted Ascent of It by a Russian Expedition,” Alpine Journal 2 (1865): 169–77; 169. Mrs. Aubrey [Elizabeth] Le Blond, Mountaineering in the Land of the Midnight Sun (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), 8. Lady Annie Brassey, “Mr. Gladstone in Norway,” The Contemporary Review (October 1885): 480–502; 487. Ibid., 500. Knut Marhus, Den Magiske Fjorden. Hardanger i Engelskereisebidringar, 1820–1914 (Bergen: Historisk Intitutt, Bergen University, 1996), 3. [Anon], My Norske Note Book by a Lady (London: Charles Westerson, 1859), 5.

8

BEYOND THE GRAND TOUR: NORWAY …

217

39. Ibid., 23. 40. Mary Spence, A Glimpse of Norway (Manchester: Certified Industrial Schools, 1868), 19. 41. Bunbury, Life in Sweden, 1:194. 42. Alice Ogilvie [with an introduction by R. M. Ballantyne], A Visit to the Summer Home in the Sætersdal and Southern Norway (Edinburgh: Macniven and Wallace, 1891), 87; 26. 43. There is little evidence of women traveling to Norway before Mary Wollstonecraft’s journey of 1796, detailed in her account published the same year. Wollstonecraft was followed by Elizabeth Mary Grosvenor (later Marchioness of Westminster) in 1827, although her account was not published until 1879. See also Jean A. Mains, “British Travellers in Norway in the Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of Edinburgh, 1989), 21– 22; and Walchester, Gamle Norge, 17–46. 44. Edmund Spender, “Lady Travellers in Norway,” The London Review (April 1858): 136–55; 142. For a more detailed account of this debate see Fjågesund and Symes, Northern Utopia, 57–60. 45. Violet Crompton Roberts, A Jubilee Jaunt to Norway by Three Girls (London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden and Welsh, 1888), 92. 46. Thomas Forester, Norway and Its Scenery (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853), 79. 47. Mains, British Travellers in Norway, 21–22. 48. [Anon], My Norske Note Book, preface. 49. Crompton Roberts, Jubilee Jaunt, 94. 50. Emily Lowe, Unprotected Females in Norway; or, the Pleasantest Way of Travelling There, Passing through Denmark and Sweden, with Scandinavian Sketches from Nature (London: Routledge, 1857), 78; 83. 51. Spence, Glimpse of Norway, 80. 52. Maria Dickson, Norway and the Vöring Fos (Dublin: McGlashan and Gill, 1870), 120. 53. Isabella Blundell, Gamle Norge; (Old Norway) or, Our Holiday in Scandinavia (London: Hamilton, Adams and Co., 1862). Blundell refers to “dear Old Norway” (243); Robert Taylor Pritchett, “Gamle Norge”: Rambles and Scrambles in Norway (London: Virtue and Co., 1879). See also Lady Di Beauclerk, A Summer and Winter in Norway (London: John Murray, 1868), 145; 433; and Bunbury, Life in Sweden, 184. 54. Blundell, Gamle Norge, 100. 55. Le Blond, Mountaineering in the Land of the Midnight Sun, 268; Mrs. Alec [Ethel Brilliana] Tweedie, A Winter Jaunt to Norway (London: Bliss, Sands and Foster, 1894), 193. 56. Lowe, Unprotected Females, 1–2. 57. Ibid., 41; 65. 58. Ibid., 74.

218

K. WALCHESTER

59. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 159. 60. Spence, Glimpse of Norway, 54. 61. Pritchett, Gamle Norge, 26–27. 62. Edith Rhodes, The Adventures of Five Spinsters in Norway (London: John and Robert Maxwell, 1886), 47. 63. Pritchett, Gamle Norge, 23. 64. Ibid., 210. 65. See, for example, F. Donald Longan, The Vikings in History (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1983), 29. 66. Julian D. Richards, The Vikings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 118. 67. Wawn, Vikings and the Victorians, 8. 68. Olivia M. Stone, Norway in June (London: Marcus Ward and Co., 1889), 4. 69. Ibid., 5. 70. Metcalfe, Oxonian in Norway, vi. 71. Ibid., 7. 72. Marie Corelli, Thelma; A Society Novel (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1887); Edna Lyall, A Hardy Norseman (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1883). 73. John Murray, Handbook for Travellers in Norway (London: John Murray, 1892), preface. 74. Adelaide M. Gerard, Et Nos in Arctis (London: Ballatyne and Co., 1913), 9. 75. Buzard, Beaten Track, 110; see also Ali Behdad, Belated Travellers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994); Pere Gifra-Adroher, Between History and Romance: Travel Writing on Spain in the Early Nineteenth Century (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000). 76. Nico and Beatrix Jungman, Norway (London: A. & C. Black, 1905), 54; Tweedie, A Winter Jaunt to Norway; Marion Amy Wyllie, Norway and Its Fjords (London: Methuen, 1907). For references to contemporary events and figures, see in particular the final chapters of both Jungman and Tweedie and Chapter 8 of Wyllie. 77. Stone, Norway in June, 3. 78. Samuel Laing, trans., The Heimskringla; or Chronicles of the Kings of Norway (London: Longman, Grown, Green, and Longmans, 1844).

CHAPTER 9

Grand Tourists, Missionary Travelers, and Frances Stenhouse Jeanne Moskal

In the 1840s, the widowed Mary Shelley accompanied her adult son on an abbreviated version of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour.1 Shelley claims to find “the bourne of [her] pious pilgrimage” in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery, where her husband and other son are buried.2 Her mourning follows a concentric pattern (in which Catholicism’s capital city surrounds a Protestant graveyard, where rests a notorious atheist) that rings changes on the familiar cultural work of the Grand Tour so as ritually to contain Catholicism’s attractions within firm Protestant bounds. Grand Tourists immersed themselves in Catholic art as they made obligatory church visits; to contain the danger, the Reverend John William Cunningham prescribed repetitive Protestant rituals. As Brian Dolan puts it, Cunningham urged travelers to “Read and re-read the Scriptures … and never … neglect the Sabbath.”3 Protestant Grand Tourists routinely viewed Catholic liturgies as theater, not as worship.4 During the pageantry of Holy Week, admission by tickets reinforced this

J. Moskal (B) Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Colbert and L. Morrison (eds.), Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36146-4_9

219

220

J. MOSKAL

view. The Vatican printed them, the British ambassador distributed them, and visiting Britons showed them at the Basilica’s door. Tickets epitomize tourists’ efforts to contain devotional feelings by aesthetic detachment from Catholic liturgy and their Catholic fellow-congregants. Charles Dickens’s Pictures from Italy (1846) almost cements the Grand Tour’s prejudices against Catholic Rome; Dickens follows the perhaps traditional map of Roman sites but finds St. Peter’s to be “immense in the distance, but distinctly and decidedly small” in fact, inspiring less “emotion” than “many English cathedrals.”5 The present essay attends to a contemporaneous—but less familiar— religious map used by some British travelers to the Continent. This map, anchored not in Rome but in Switzerland, imparts an imaginative unity to regions divided by unstable national boundaries, an imaginative unity elsewhere expressed by the authoritative travel publisher John Murray, who unites in one volume his advice for Switzerland, Savoy, and Piedmont.6 This map guided Protestant evangelicals and members of the newer restorationist churches, such as Disciples of Christ, Seventh-Day Adventists, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On this map, the Alps mattered because of their Waldensian inhabitants, supposedly a remnant of apostolic Christianity. Geneva was even more highly cathected. It prompted the ambivalence of evangelicals, who idealized Calvin and wept over its current Unitarianism. It prompted restorationists’ slightly different ambivalence: they welcomed Switzerland’s Protestantism as the enemy of their own enemy, Roman Catholicism, while maintaining a rivalry that matches in intensity the Protestant–Catholic rivalry ritualized in the Grand Tour. Recent scholars of travel and travel literature, Rosemary Sweet, Gerrit Verhoeven, and Sarah Goldsmith, claim that, by raising the eighteenthcentury Grand Tour—the educational capstone journey of a young British aristocrat consuming Italian antiquities, history, and art—to paradigmatic status, scholars have blinded themselves to non-Italian itineraries, to nonaristocratic travelers, and to motives other than conspicuous consumption and aesthetic education.7 They issue a call to break free of Grand-Tourist assumptions when considering early modern travelers. Can a similar argument be made for the nineteenth century? In keeping with Sweet, Verhoeven, and Goldsmith’s call to consider travelers motivated otherwise than by Grand Tourists’ signature consumerism and aestheticism, the present essay analyzes the writings of Frances Warn Stenhouse (1829–1904), a

9

GRAND TOURISTS, MISSIONARY TRAVELERS …

221

British-born Mormon missionary to Switzerland and, later, one of Mormonism’s most notorious apostates.8 For missionaries of the 1840s, after all, Britain was both metropole and periphery. The decade’s most famous missionary, St. John Rivers of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), like scores of real-life British proselytizers, took to heart a scriptural verse long known as The Great Commission, which enjoined “Go … therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”9 A much-anthologized hymn specified a few locations on the periphery that these proselytizers should reach—“Greenland’s icy mountains,” “India’s coral strand,” and “Afric’s sunny fountains”—as they sought to spread Protestant Christianity “from pole to pole.”10 In 1837, mission-minded Britons began to accept this challenge with particularly high enthusiasm. Monetary donations increased sharply as new mission fields beckoned: the West Indies, where slavery had been abolished in 1834 and the apprenticeship system for the formerly enslaved expired in 1838, and inland China, opened to evangelization in 1842 by the Treaty of Nanking. This enthusiasm was abetted when celebrity missionaries came home on furlough: Robert Moffat, who recruited David Livingstone for southern Africa, and John Williams, author of A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands , who was later martyred in November 1839. With bigger budgets, missionary societies finally raised recruits’ salaries enough that they could afford to marry (as the societies required them to do) and to start families. The intensity of these years waned considerably after 1843, due in general to the financial constraints of the Hungry Forties and specifically to supporters’ anger over the high mortality rate of missionary wives. Not for nothing did Jane Eyre fear a “premature death,” perhaps by being “grilled alive in Calcutta,”11 that would make her collateral damage of this missionary exodus from a British center. Contemporaneously, the new Latter-day Saints movement applied the same Great Commission to a different religious map with America at the center and Britain at the periphery. In fact, Mormonism’s Americacenteredness was for many the only feature that distinguished it from other restorationists, such as the Disciples of Christ. Accordingly, in 1837 Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith began to send his followers to the British mission field, where, by 1851, they converted some 24,000 souls. These converts, indeed all converts to Mormonism, were enjoined to leave their peripheries in order to join the “Gathering of the Saints” in Mormonism’s American center, which because of persecution, migrated

222

J. MOSKAL

from upstate New York to Nauvoo, Illinois (where Smith died), and then to Utah in the intermountain West.12 But before the turn to America came the European map. It is a truism that postwar British tourists hungered for the continental art so long denied them.13 It is less known that some also hungered for souls. During the war, a dozen new missionary societies had been founded, whetting the British public’s appetite for global conversion.14 During the continental blockade, the French could be reached only indirectly, by, say, giving Bibles to French prisoners of war, as did the London Missionary Society (founded 1795) and the British and Foreign Bible Society (founded 1804). Postwar access to the Continent inspired some tourists to moonlight as evangelists. Shortly after the First Treaty of Paris (1814), Mary Ann Greaves (1779–1846), who was loosely associated with the Bible Society, embarked with her brother on a continental tour. In March 1815 they visited Lausanne, whose Calvinism had become legendary for curing the teenage Edward Gibbon’s bout with Catholicism, where they learned that Napoleon—and war—had returned to Europe. Her brother returning home, Greaves remained, mounting an eight-year mission to re-Calvinize local clergy and seminarians.15 By 1822, her interference with duly-constituted ecclesiastical authority resulted in expulsion from Lausanne. Along similar lines, during a short continental tour after the Second Treaty of Paris (1815), Scotsman Robert Haldane (1764–1842) and his wife visited Geneva, where they found local seminarians, trained in a Unitarian-leaning theology and a rationalist method, captivated by the réveil, a nineteenth-century renewal of Francophone Protestantism that stressed emotion and mystery.16 Here Haldane channeled his previously diffuse conversionist hopes.17 From January to June 1816, he informally taught local seminarians an updated Calvinism, proven directly from scripture rather than through Calvin’s Institutes, and open to mystery, particularly the knottiest mystery of all, the Trinity.18 Genevan successes spurred Haldane to co-found, in 1819, a new British missionary society, the Continental Society for the Diffusion of Religious Knowledge over the Continent of Europe.19 The Continental Society institutionalized postwar British evangelicals’ conviction that, by rescuing Europe from Napoleon, Britons had incurred a further obligation to European Protestantism: not just to repair its wartime wounds, but to transform it into something rather different, “scriptural Christianity.”20 Nineteenth-century Britain not only sent missionaries; it also received them. Mormon missions to Britain between 1837 and 1851 converted

9

GRAND TOURISTS, MISSIONARY TRAVELERS …

223

an estimated 24,000 souls.21 Among them was Scotsman Thomas Brown Holmes Stenhouse (1824–1882), who preferred to be called T. B. H.22 Considering T. B. H. “the most promising elder in Britain” while he was still in his twenties,23 the LDS leadership assigned him to lead a two-year mission in Southampton. There T. B. H. converted many, including the Baptists John and Elizabeth Warn, former Channel Islanders, while their daughter sojourned in France with her fiancé, Constant de Bosque.24 Upon her return, the daughter, Frances, was so impressed by her parents’ joy that she was baptized two weeks later; forsaking de Bosque, she married T. B. H. the next year. Decades later, as a Mormon apostate, Frances Stenhouse published “Tell It All”: The Story of a Life’s Experience in Mormonism (1874),25 riddled through with the ambivalence of a divorcée contemplating her wedding pictures. In recounting the couple’s 1850s missions to Switzerland and Piedmont, Frances demonstrates the usefulness of this alternate religious map for negotiating her own conflicts. The Piedmont’s religious meaning would have been known even to secular travelers interested primarily in Alpine mountaineering, in the aesthetics of the sublime, or in the Piedmontese capital Turin (long an obligatory stop on the Grand Tour). From 1838 to 1842, Murray’s Handbook reminded them, in its subtitle, of the nearby Protestant Valleys of the Waldenses.26 That sect, named for founder Peter Waldo (c. 1140–c. 1205), intrigued missionary travelers persuaded that the Waldensians had inherited and preserved an apostolic Christianity that predated Catholicism and its corruptions. This origin story was chiefly circulated via a much-reprinted 1832 memoir of Félix Neff, a réveil-inspired missionary to the French Waldensians, advertised as “a remnant of the primitive Christians of Gaul.”27 It was echoed in pamphlets and, by 1858, in Murray’s dating Waldensian worship “from time immemorial.”28 Reformed Protestants idealized the Waldensians as their own “hypothetical antecedents.”29 The more ambivalent restorationists praised the Piedmontese sect insofar as Waldensians resembled themselves, with a simplicity that rebuked Rome and Geneva alike and with beliefs that lacked only the finishing restorationist touch. In some moods, restorationists saw Waldensians as uniquely teachable potential converts; in others, as no better than other unbelievers. LDS Apostle Lorenzo Snow (in prospect) praised the Waldensians as “a rose in the wilderness” while calling their “apostasy” as old as Rome’s.30 Soon after, Snow organized a mission to the Waldensians as his contribution to Brigham Young’s project of evangelizing the Continent in

224

J. MOSKAL

hopes that Europeans weary from the 1848 revolutions would welcome Mormonism—and emigration.31 Snow drafted the promising T. B. H. Stenhouse as one of its leaders. Frances, by this time pregnant, stayed home, according to Mormon custom, which departed from the then-unanimous practice, among Protestants, of sending married couples together to the mission field.32 Within the Baptist community she knew best, mandatory marriage was enforced so strictly that unhappy missionary spouses were bullied into keeping up appearances.33 In recounting the Waldensian mission, Frances registers the alternative religious map and her own resistance to the LDS preference, then, for solo-practitioner missionaries. She insists that her husband’s target is not a region but a religious group, “the Waldenses—those brave old Protestants of the dark ages, who so manfully suffered, even unto death, for conscience sake.”34 Her phrasing, “even unto death,” echoes a biblical characterization of Christ’s death in Philippians 2:8, underlining the idealization of the Waldensians. In the event, the Waldensians proved less teachable than expected. In Frances’s view, the fault lay with poor language skills. She herself was bilingual, as was common among Channel Islanders,35 and hence understandably skeptical of T. B. H.’s expectation of receiving the French language with Pentecostal swiftness; accordingly her account betrays some Schadenfreude when describing her husband’s back-up plan: “for a whole winter, he sat shut up in his room poring over a French grammar.”36 She thus backhandedly highlights her own qualifications for missionary work. Geneva provoked a stronger, more ambivalent cathexis from missionary travelers than the Piedmont.37 Surprisingly, the Geneva sections of Murray’s Handbook allocate to John Calvin four times more space than to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the “Citizen of Geneva” whose influence on travel has long been recognized.38 Protestant travelers generally respond with deep ambivalence to Calvin and to Geneva, his “Protestant Rome.”39 On the positive side, almost all revere Geneva for succoring Protestants fleeing Queen Mary, actively combating Catholic Rome’s superstition and despotism. Calvinist theology, too, counted among Geneva’s advantages. Blackwood’s, in 1842, lauds Calvin for “first form[ing] into a coherent system of theology the doctrines which his predecessors had taught separately and less distinctly, as detached truths.”40 The 1858 Handbook asserts that “from Geneva emanated those religious doctrines” that shaped Protestant Europe and even “the opposite shores of the Atlantic.”41 These images of Genevan gathering and emanating

9

GRAND TOURISTS, MISSIONARY TRAVELERS …

225

draw from the proverb that all roads lead to Rome, though Geneva is generally characterized as the more benevolent religious hub. Yet Protestant travelers simultaneously mistrusted Geneva because there Calvin’s “despotic” surveillance “exercis[ed] the power of an inquisition”42 and because he “indoctrinate[d] the whole Reformation from … the protestant [sic] popedom of Geneva.”43 Unlike Catholic Rome, “Protestant Rome” had few relics to anchor religious sites for tourists. The chief touristic obligation was a trip a few miles outside the city wall to Geneva’s longtime place of execution, the Hill of Champel.44 Its most lamented victim was Unitarian Michael Servetus (1511–1553), who sought refuge in Geneva from the Inquisition. There he was arrested for heresy, tried, convicted, and burned at the stake.45 Strictly speaking, Calvin was not Servetus’s prosecutor but an expert witness in theology, who identified Servetus’s heresy. But because of Calvin’s unmatched influence, nineteenth-century commentators found this a distinction without a difference. What troubled them was the specter of Protestants vying with Catholics as religious persecutors. Voltaire articulated an emerging ethic of religious tolerance in castigating Servetus’s arrest as “unjustifiable,” an act of “barbarism and an insult to the rights of nations.”46 U.S. President John Adams opined that, in general, Calvin fostered the cause of religious freedom despite the Servetus affair; in the same vein, Protestants have long regarded the Servetus affair as “an unfortunate stain in their otherwise exemplary history.”47 For missionary travelers, doctrine mattered as much as conduct: Calvin’s battle with Servetus instantiates Trinitarians’ battle with Unitarianism (also known as Socinianism). In the 1740s, the French Encyclopédie had lauded Geneva’s renunciation of Calvinist Trinitarianism by celebrating the “perfect Socinianism” of “many of the pastors of Geneva, rejecting all that they call mysteries,” such as the Trinity.48 Geneva’s perceived drift to Unitarianism, as we saw, inspired missionary travelers Greaves and Haldane to hector Geneva’s clergy. This view had considerable traction for some time. In 1842, Blackwood’s considered that Geneva’s then-current rationalism made it “the pet city of the French philosophers.”49 That same year, the anonymous novel Father Oswald dramatized its “appalled” hero’s dismay over his Genevan hosts’ contention that “no rational Protestant” can believe in the Trinity.50 In this theological light, Protestant commentators had to tread carefully concerning Servetus, lest their loving the sinner be misconstrued as loving the sin. Restorationist missionaries weighed Geneva’s faults more heavily. Despite valuing the Reformers’

226

J. MOSKAL

“battling with Rome,”51 restorationists’ felt superiority over reformers prevailed,52 to be re-enacted at tourist sites in the manner of Protestant Grand Tourists in Rome. This is the pattern of Frances Stenhouse’s commentary on Geneva, where, in November 1850, T. B. H. began his new ministry as President of the Swiss and Italian mission. It is more precise to say that then the Stenhouses began their ministry; Frances writes to her sister that she and T. B. H. were together “ordained and set apart” as missionaries by four of the Twelve Apostles, including Snow.53 Frances was apparently the first Mormon woman to be so ordained. Thus the Stenhouses, anomalously for Mormons, arrived in Switzerland conforming to the Protestant model of a married couple’s joint mission.54 Her understandable pride in being what Mary Wollstonecraft would call the first of a new genus probably accounts for her exultant, almost jocular tone: at Geneva “we three—my husband, my babe, and myself—set forth on our pilgrimage to convert the Swiss.”55 Indeed, Frances’s groundbreaking Swiss career was celebrated in a poem written in 1853 and published in 1856. Eliza Roxy Snow, Lorenzo’s sister, wrote “To Mrs. Stenhouse, Switzerland,” celebrating that Frances is “counted worthy” to partake in her husband’s missionary “toils and sufferings.”56 Frances declares that she entered Calvin’s city “with no ordinary feelings.” Her comments as tourist and as missionary traveler supplement stock Protestant responses with pointed restorationist observations. She expresses the customary respect for Geneva’s hospitality to English Protestants “during the fiery days of Queen Mary,” though the word “fiery” is not customary in this context. But her highly atypical addition—that during the French Revolution, Geneva also succored “infidel and Papist”—undercuts her past praise. In restorationist fashion (where Protestants are little better than Catholics), she demotes Geneva from Protestant bastion to an imprudent, undiscriminating innkeeper. To the common Protestant complaint about surveillance in Calvin’s time, she adds that it is still in force, prohibiting “the missionary from preaching publicly.” Conveniently, “the missionary” could designate either Stenhouse.57 Her restorationism erupts most strongly in commenting on the Hill of Champel, the place of execution. “There,” she writes, “Servitus [sic], the Unitarian, was condemned to be roasted alive as a heretic.”58 Unlike her fellow-travelers, Stenhouse goes for the Protestant jugular in the phrase “roasted alive,” thereby likening Calvin (the roaster, so to speak) to the

9

GRAND TOURISTS, MISSIONARY TRAVELERS …

227

“fiery” Catholic queen. Stenhouse continues: “there we expected in our own humble way to be able to testify, by our suffering and patience, to what we firmly believed was the truth.”59 Unlike advocates of freedom of conscience, Frances foregrounds Servetus’s doctrine. Finally, unlike the cautious condemnations of Protestants, Stenhouse’s anaphora (“there he was … roasted alive,” “there we expected”) raises the emotional intensity and suggests a strong identification. Most educated restorationists would share this solidarity: after all, Servetus authored a treatise entitled The Restoration of Christianity (1550), which was “condemned as blasphemous and heretical by Protestants and Roman Catholics alike.”60 Stenhouse’s response, however, is specifically Mormon rather than generically restorationist: the LDS church rejects Trinitarianism in favor of tritheism, often adopting non-Trinitarians of the past as their spiritual ancestors, a particularly important strategy when persecuted, as Mormons then frequently were. This theological context explains Frances’s pledge to imitate Servetus, if needed, “in our own humble way.” Contrary to this expectation, the Stenhouses’ three-year Swiss mission proved quite successful: six cantons were reached, three hundred converts were baptized, and the nation’s first LDS newspaper, Le Reflecteur, was started.61 They found particular success with clergy.62 Their tiny congregation at Lausanne (to which they moved in 1852) included two exclergymen of the Swiss Reformed Church. The more steadfast one was the wealthy Serge Louis Baliff (1821–1901), who financed Le Reflecteur. Here Frances found her métier. When T. B. H. was absent, Frances answered the call “to lead the singing, to pray, to preach, in fact, to do everything.”63 When T. B. H. was present, preaching “in very bad French,” Frances exhorted after the conclusion of the service proper, “when I might speak.”64 Then, “aroused to eloquence,” “my missionary labors began.”65 She taught salvation by faith, “love and peace for this world … everlasting joy in the world to come” and, because she herself believed these doctrines whole-heartedly, her early “work as a Missionary [was] very pleasant.”66 Frances lived with the Baliffs during T. B. H.’s three-month fundraising trip to England.67 Frances had the satisfaction of converting Serge’s wife, Elise LeCoultre Baliff (1824–1872).68 In fact, the two families were so close that the Stenhouses named their second son Serge.69 With the emergence of Madame Baliff as a character in Tell It All , Stenhouse shifts from a religiously inflected map to a religiously inflected

228

J. MOSKAL

cast of characters, chiefly the narrator herself flanked by her European foils, fellow Briton Mary Burton and Madame Baliff. “Mary Burton”—one of Stenhouse’s few pseudonymous characters—traces the arc of one possible response to polygamy: from revulsion, through submission for faith’s sake and an intense fanaticism, to disillusion and suicide. Madame Baliff exemplifies another arc: from revulsion, through submission for marital love’s sake,70 to post-traumatic apathy: “though I suppose I shall remain a Mormon till the day of my death I have learned to hate Mormonism.”71 While Tell It All appears to be a Jamesian “large, loose, baggy monster,” Stenhouse’s extensive revision of its predecessor, Exposé of Polygamy: A Lady’s Life among the Mormons (1872), suggests that she worked particularly on character development. In the earlier work, the Swiss are a largely undifferentiated background to the Stenhouses’ agency; Madame Baliff is not named, her comments are unattributed, and her husband is simply “Mr. B.”72 Tell It All improves the sense of distinct, personalized characters. This evidence of Stenhouse’s craft suggests the possibility that the characters serve representative functions. Along this line, the watershed moment when polygamy is revealed brings the narrative to a representational juncture: Stenhouse shifts from localizing the Swiss Reformation in Geneva to personifying it in Madame Baliff, who becomes, in effect, a portable Switzerland. Madame Baliff enters the narrative just before the promulgation of celestial marriage. Her “Before Polygamy” portrait shows “a high-spirited, impulsive woman, and devotedly attached to her husband; I never saw a woman more so”; in fact, “she impressed me as being one of the happiest of wives; he one of the best of husbands.”73 As such, she defies our usual caricature of Calvinism as “a pitilessly rigorous, cold, and inhuman religion.”74 But Stenhouse has a different set of Calvinist associations, which she repeatedly invokes by placing “Swiss” near most references to Madame Baliff. More support comes from Stenhouse’s invariable references to her “Madame Baliff”; no other woman in the text is called “Madame.” This Swiss friend thus always stands apart from the female characters Stenhouse designates by given name only, given name plus surname, or “Sister” plus surname, the customary Mormon honorific. These ritual references to Madame Baliff’s Swiss, Francophone identity mark her as always unassimilated. Historical context bears out these verbal cues. Stenhouse first met Elise Baliff as a Swiss Reformed clergyman’s wife: first impressions, as Frances

9

GRAND TOURISTS, MISSIONARY TRAVELERS …

229

wrote in her old age, “make the most profound impression on the mechanism of the memory.”75 Many nineteenth-century Protestants regarded the minister’s wife as the assistant minister.76 Moreover, nineteenthcentury Protestants revived the Reformation-era issue of clerical marriage when codifying its expectations for missionaries. In 1836, one of America’s most respected missionary leaders, Rufus Anderson, had argued for continuing the mandatory-marriage rule, which had recently come under fire. In his view, an effective (male) missionary should not just preach, but should also model “a Christian home.”77 Conceding that celibacy had practical problems—fewer applicants, the potential of scandal with indigenous women—Anderson pinpointed the chief difficulty as ideological, or what we might think of as protecting the Protestant brand: “the holy and blessed enterprise of protestant missions must not be spoiled by introducing into it the monastic principles of the Romish church.”78 Anderson insists that he is simply applying to missionaries abroad the wellaccepted norms that “make it proper and expedient for ministers at home to marry.”79 The reader disinclined to theology might find the same message in the priestly villains of countless Gothic novels.80 And what was that message? In 1940s language, it is that “the Parson’s Wife is the child of the Reformation.”81 Or, as present-day scholars might say, it is that clerical marriage upholds Protestant identity.82 Wealth joins clerical marriage on our list of Madame Baliff’s associations with a distinct Swiss Protestantism. The Baliffs’ wealth recurs throughout the Swiss mission section. Serge Baliff subsidizes Le Reflecteur; the Baliffs offer their extended hospitality to Frances. The specifically Calvinist link to prosperity can be pinpointed, historically, to the rise in Geneva’s fortunes at the Reformation, when merchants and tradesmen flocked there.83 Calvin’s redefinition of usury allowed more profitable banking, inaugurating that cinematic staple of criminals’ Swiss bank accounts. And, most famously, Max Weber characterized the Protestant—chiefly Calvinist—ethic as a “worldly asceticism” that transferred the single-mindedness previous generations had reserved for monasticism to the secular professions.84 Thus, Madame Baliff’s un-Calvinist flightiness is overridden by her association with the Swiss cultural motifs of wealth and clerical marriage. Madame Baliff’s “After Polygamy” portrait anchors Stenhouse’s account of the changes to her missionary career, and to her own faith, after the open promulgation of plural marriage in January 1853. In addition to her revulsion at the doctrine, Frances (with considerable justice)

230

J. MOSKAL

felt betrayed by the LDS leadership, who had previously denied rumors of polygamy85 ; she (also with considerable justice) felt that she had signed up under false pretenses. At the time of her baptism, polygamy “would have appeared to the European Saints beyond the wildest fancies of a dream.”86 She is further aggrieved that “the Elders”—significantly, she does not blame T. B. H. specifically—“assured me that it was my duty to teach Polygamy to the women of Switzerland,” ending her pride in inaugurating the role of the Mormon woman missionary, and ushering in “a new phase of my Missionary life.”87 The announcement about polygamy divided Frances’s loyalties as well as those of the Swiss congregation. T. B. H. later wrote that the promulgation, like a “thunderbolt” “fearfully shattered the [Swiss] mission.”88 The male congregants by and large accepted the doctrine, some taking non-monogamous sexual practices as “a sign of advancing intellectual supremacy.”89 If male congregants left in protest, largely their wives were responsible. Polygamy was a much harder sell to the wives Frances was duty-bound to persuade. The Elders engineered a one-on-one meeting for Frances to persuade Madame Baliff, whose first response is contempt: “Oh, my God, what a beastly religion! How dared your husband and you come to us Swiss with such a religion as that?”90 Naming the Stenhouses’ target as “us Swiss” rather than Madame Baliff individually summons a Calvinist cloud of witnesses, including the Swiss Reformed Church that ordained Serge Baliff and that granted his wife a leadership role. Frances’s sense of religious duty overcomes her revulsion; Madame Baliff’s love for her husband outweighs her revulsion, and together they persuade the other women. Frances concludes: “Of my missionary work in Switzerland subsequent to the introduction of Polygamy I will say but little, except that it was too successful. The same sorrow and indignation which Madame Baliff had so forcibly expressed, were shown by almost every new convert, and I had to bear the blame for teaching such a doctrine. The sisters became unhappy, and wished that they had died in ignorance of Mormonism; and I felt humbled to the dust that I should be the innocent cause of so much misery to others.”91 I will postpone for the moment discussion of Stenhouse’s protestations here of her own humiliation to conclude my observations on Madame Baliff in Switzerland. We can see that the thunderbolt announcement induces a psychological split. As in a Gothic novel, where characters represent portions of a single self (most famously, in Frankenstein), so here the character of Madame Baliff

9

GRAND TOURISTS, MISSIONARY TRAVELERS …

231

becomes the repository of the Protestant tradition of monogamous love repressed by Frances’s duty to teach Mormon polygamy. For some time thereafter, Tell It All falls silent about Madame Baliff as Frances recounts the Stenhouses’ departure from their angry Swiss congregation and their services to the LDS church in Liverpool and New York (T. B. H. proving his worth at every turn) on their way to Salt Lake City, where they arrive in 1859.92 T. B. H. thrives as a journalist and Frances as a milliner and the mother of, eventually, ten children. Their ecclesiastical ascent is marked by adopting polygamy, generally a minority practice even among Mormon pioneers, though necessary for advancement among the elite, particularly after the Mormon Reformation of 1856–1857.93 T. B. H. takes as his second wife Belinda Pratt, a daughter of Apostle Parley P. Pratt, and courted Brigham Young’s daughter Zina as a prospective third wife. Two Stenhouse children married children of Brigham Young. Increasingly unhappy as polygamous doctrine became polygamous reality in her own family, Frances longs to see “other friends” from England, “and dear Swiss friends, not a few.”94 The Baliffs had emigrated in 1854, and Madame Baliff’s is one of the “two faces I [most] longed to see … poor, dear Madame Baliff—my old Swiss friend, who in past days had shown me so many kindnesses and whom I had so tenderly loved—where was she? Somewhere, I knew, in Zion, but not in Salt Lake City.”95 Serge Baliff’s unexpected visit to the Stenhouses’ Salt Lake home, probably in 1860,96 acquainted Frances with the news that, during the Mormon Reformation, he too had taken a second wife, Harriette Vuffrey, the nursemaid who accompanied the Baliffs from Switzerland. Soon afterward, Frances visited the Baliff home in Cache Valley, about seventy miles north of Salt Lake City,97 to reunite with her beloved friend. Each of the first two sentences in Stenhouse’s account of their reunion invokes Switzerland: Stenhouse wants to hear about her “Swiss friend[’s]” life “since we parted in Geneva…. I found her in a little log-cabin of two rooms, with bare walls, bare floor, and miserably furnished; and in this wretched abode Poverty and Polygamy had wrecked the life of my poor friend, whom I had known under such different circumstances. Here, together with their five children, lived also the second wife, with her two children.”98 One rarely-mentioned fact may underline Frances’s pain at that moment: the Stenhouses, like the Baliffs, had brought the children’s Swiss caregiver with them to Utah.99 In this light, Serge’s marriage to Harriette could have pained Frances for her own sake as much

232

J. MOSKAL

as for the sake of her Swiss friend, who recounts the sorry tale of her husband marrying the babysitter under duress of the Mormon Reformation: “In our household arrangements, of course it made very little difference, but it was inexpressibly painful to me.”100 We understand part of Stenhouse’s dismay from the text, which recounted the thenwealthy Baliffs’ generosity to the Swiss LDS mission. Historical context further explains her dismay: very few plural wives continued to share a single home after they began their families.101 Madame Baliff has fallen well below the Saints’ poverty line. Also historically significant are Stenhouse’s alliterative personifications—“Poverty and Polygamy had wrecked [Madame Baliff’s] life.” Economics lay at the heart of Mormon dissent, pitting Young’s agrarian isolationism against a mercantile desire to capitalize on the advent of the Transcontinental Railway (completed 1869). Madame Baliff is prima facie proof of her cause: Young’s policies impoverish even the wealthy Swiss: It was with difficulty that I could recognise in the poor, careworn, brokenspirited, and ill-clad woman who stood before me, the once gay, lighthearted, happy, and elegantly-dressed lady whom I had known in Switzerland. Mormonism had in her case utterly blighted her existence…. What suffering she must have endured, I thought, what mental agony, what physical pain, to write those wrinkled lines of care upon her once handsome face…. In temper and disposition she was, however, just the same; her affectionate nature was unchanged…. she met me with not a single word of reproach for my being the cause of her leaving her own dear country.102

The reader may well pause over Stenhouse’s moral inventory in reuniting with Madame Bailiff: “Ah! what a pang I felt at the remembrance that I myself had been instrumental in leading her into Mormonism and Polygamy. Self-reproach I did not feel, but sorrow I did. I had thought to lead her into the way of holiness and heavenly peace.”103 To lack selfreproach is to deny one’s own guilt. This assertion protests too much against the recollection of the Swiss mission, that she violated her own sense of rectitude in teaching polygamy. Though Stenhouse asks the question clearly—“[H]ow could I teach [the Swiss sisters] that which my heart abhorred, a doctrine which I hated with my whole soul!”—she makes no satisfactory answer.104 Stenhouse may evoke our non-sectarian compassion as one who discovers, in her fifties, that she has lived what George Eliot called “a life of mistakes.”

9

GRAND TOURISTS, MISSIONARY TRAVELERS …

233

There is no need for me to rehearse the solid scholarly accounts of “the famous Mrs. Stenhouse,” Mormon apostate, author of two bestselling books, and anti-polygamy campaigner.105 By 1896, when Utah statehood signaled the end of polygamy, Frances had long since moved to California, where T. B. H. died in 1882 and Frances in 1904.106 Accordingly I will close my analysis of Swissness, Protestantism, and Madame Baliff with Stenhouse’s summoning the ghost of her Swiss friend. Some hundred pages after Frances receives news of the death of Madame Baliff, “worn out and weary of life” and “thanked God that at last, poor soul, her days of trial were forever over,”107 is inserted a page with two illustrations, “Polygamy in Low Life:–The Poor Man’s Family” and “Polygamy in High Life:–The ‘Prophet’s’ Mansion.” “Poor Man’s Polygamy” is a visual recapitulation of the narrator’s verbal description of the Baliff home in Cache Valley: two wives and their children, hungry and ragged, crammed into a small, rude house. Its layout on the page, above an image of Young’s “Mansion” and “High-Life” polygamy, makes an ally of the ghost of Madame Baliff, the figure of Swiss wealth and Swiss Protestantism, in Frances’s rebuke to the Mormonism that oppressed them both. My reflections here have several applications. First, by examining Stenhouse within British travel to the Continent, I extend recent efforts by historians of the LDS church to move beyond the assumption of Mormonism’s unproblematic American identity in favor of recognizing other national identities.108 Second, by analyzing Stenhouse as a stylist of exposé, I depart from previous scholars’ nearly unanimous stress on her career as a controversialist.109 We can now summon Stenhouse to help us understand a vexing generic problem: how might exposés catalogue a social evil’s ill effects without exceeding the reader’s tolerance? To take just one example, Wollstonecraft’s Maria: Or, the Wrongs of Women (1798) may fruitfully be read alongside Stenhouse to sift how they employ generic strategies to avoid overwhelming the reader. Finally, my work here invites scholars of travel literature to reconsider their reliance on the secularization thesis, which holds that as societies modernize, they secularize. The social sciences have largely discarded this long-dominant assumption.110 The secularization thesis would have us believe that religious medieval travel was by-and-large replaced by modern secular travel, at least by the travelers who really count. A more nuanced view would take seriously the evidence presented here as well as Murray’s Swiss recipe: one part Rousseau to four parts Calvin. In short, travelers’

234

J. MOSKAL

religious motives were supplemented, not replaced, by secular ones. It oversimplifies matters to assume, as the secularization thesis tends to do, that the more recently originated ideas count more than the older ones. Even for travelers less devout than the Stenhouses—that is, almost all of them—religion continued to structure the experience of travel.

Notes 1. On the Grand Tour, see particularly Rosemary Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour: The British in Italy, c. 1690–1820 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Brian Dolan, Ladies of the Grand Tour: British Women in Pursuit of Enlightenment and Adventure in EighteenthCentury Europe (New York: HarperCollins, 2001); Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Jeremy Black, The British and the Grand Tour (London: Croom Helm, 1985); Christopher Hibbert, The Grand Tour (London: Thames Methuen, 1987); and C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1957). 2. Mary Shelley, Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844), in The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, ed. Nora Crook, vol. 8, Travel Writing, ed. Jeanne Moskal (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996), 348; see also Jeanne Moskal, “Speaking the Unspeakable: Art Criticism as Life-Writing in Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy,” in Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives, ed. Helen M. Buss, D. L. Macdonald, and Anne McWhir (Waterloo: Wilfrd Laurier University Press, 2001), 189–216. 3. Dolan, Ladies, 231–32. See John William Cunningham, Cautions to Continental Travellers (London, 1818). 4. Sweet, Cities, 148–49. 5. Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1846), 166. 6. John Murray, A Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland and the Alps of Savoy and Piedmont, 8th ed. (London: John Murray, 1858). 7. Rosemary Sweet, Gerrit Verhoeven, and Sarah Goldsmith, eds., Beyond the Grand Tour: Northern Metropolises and Early Modern Travel Behaviour (London: Routledge, 2017). 8. For a brief history of Mormon apostates, see Polly Aird, Jeff Nichols, and Will Bagley, “Introduction: Tracing a Shadow,” in Playing with Shadows:

9

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

GRAND TOURISTS, MISSIONARY TRAVELERS …

235

Voices of Dissent in the Mormon West, ed. Polly Aird, Jeff Nichols, and Will Bagley, vol. 13, Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier Ser., ed. Will Bagley (Norman: Arthur H. Clark, 2011), 23–60. Matthew 28:19. Reginald Heber, “A Missionary Hymn,” Evangelical Magazine 29 (July 1821): 316. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Richard Nemesvari (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2000), 504; 515. These contrary missionary winds blew especially hard on the family of William Wordsworth, Britain’s poet laureate. Throughout the 1840s, the poet’s nephew Christopher Wordsworth, an Anglican priest, repeatedly visited France and Italy to observe the inhabitants’ religious condition. These visits culminated, in 1847, with his polemical Letters to M. Gondon … on the Destructive Character of the Church of Rome, Both in Religion and Polity (London: Francis and John Rivington, 1847), which challenged Anglicans to Protestantize—and thereby rescue—these nations’ Catholic populations. Christopher Wordsworth also led the Anglo-Continental Society, founded in 1853 to disseminate the Church of England’s principles among European Catholics, in hopes they would imitate Britain in founding their own non-papal, national churches. In addition to Buzard, see Sir Gavin de Beer, Early Travellers in the Alps (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1930). Two standard accounts are Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions (New York: Penguin, 1986); Brian Stanley, The Bible and Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester: Apollos, 1990). Jackie E. M. Latham, “A Zealous Evangelical Missionary: Mary Ann Greaves in Europe 1814–1824,” Journal of Religious History 34, no. 2 (2010): 142–57. On the Réveil, see Timothy C. F. Stunt, From Awakening to Secession: Radical Evangelicals in Switzerland and Britain, 1815–35 (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 2000); Kenneth J. Stewart, Restoring the Reformation: British Evangelicalism and the Francophone “Réveil,” 1816–1849 (Waynesboro: Paternoster, 2006). See Deryck W. Lovegrove, “‘The Voice of Reproach and Outrage’: The Impact of Robert Haldane on French-Speaking Protestantism,” in In Divers Manners: A St. Mary’s Miscellany, ed. D. W. D. Shaw (St. Andrews: St. Mary’s College, 1990), 73–83. Helena Rosenblatt makes the case for distinguishing among historical and doctrinal variants of Calvinism in Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749–1762 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 11–12; see also Carl R. Trueman, “Calvin and

236

J. MOSKAL

19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

Calvinism,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 225–44. Stewart, Restoring, 160–92. For the Continental Society and “scriptural Christianity,” see Stewart, Restoring, 90; 202. See Claudia Lauper Bushman and Richard Lyman Bushman, Mormons in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 123– 226; and Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1995). Extremely helpful, also, is David J. Whittaker, “Mormon Historiography,” in American Denominational History: Perspectives on the Past, Prospects for the Future, ed. Keith Harper (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008), 146– 72. Alexander L. Baugh estimates that 52,000 British-born converts left their homeland between 1840 and 1913; see “The Church in TwentiethCentury Great Britain: A Historical Overview,” in Regional Studies in Latter-Day Saint Church History, ed. Donald Q. Cannon (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2007), 237–38. Linda Wilcox DeSimone, “Introduction: Reckoning with Fanny Stenhouse,” in Exposé of Polygamy: A Lady’s Life among the Mormons (1872), by Mrs. T. B. H. Stenhouse, ed. Linda Wilcox DeSimone, vol. 10, Life Writings of Frontier Women, ed. Maureen Ursenbach Beecher (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2008), 10. Biographical information comes from Davis Bitton, Guide to Mormon Diaries and Autobiographies (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1977); Ronald W. Walker, “The Stenhouses and the Making of a Mormon Image,” in Mormon Mavericks: Essays on Dissenters, ed. John Sillito and Susan Staker (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002), 101–29; and Ronald W. Walker, Wayward Saints: The Social and Religious Protests of the Godbeites against Brigham Young (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2009), 16–19; 52–58; 294–306. DeSimone, “Reckoning,” 183n2. Mrs. T. B. H. Stenhouse, “Tell It All”: The Story of a Life’s Experience in Mormonism. An Autobiography (Hartford: A. D. Worthing & Co., 1874). For Tell It All ’s textual history, see A Mormon Bibliography, 1830–1930, ed. Chad J. Flake and Larry W. Draper, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Provo: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 2004), 2:328–30. According to WorldCat, this title was used from 1838 to 1842, when the phrase about the Waldensians was dropped. In 1886 the title was changed to A Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland, the Alps of Savoy and Piedmont, the Italian Lakes, and Part of Dauphiné.

9

GRAND TOURISTS, MISSIONARY TRAVELERS …

237

27. See William Stephen Gilly, Memoir of Felix Neff, Pastor of the High Alps; and of His Labours among the French Protestants of Dauphiné, a Remnant of the Primitive Christians of Gaul, 2nd ed. (London: J. G. and F. Rivington, 1832). For this book’s popularity, see Stewart, Restoring, 203. For LDS missions there, see James R. Christianson, “Early Missionary Work in Italy and Switzerland,” Ensign 12, no. 8 (August 1982), https://www.lds.org/study/ensign/1982/08/early-missionarywork-in-italy-and-switzerland?lang=eng; and Dale Z. Kirby, “The History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Switzerland” (masters thesis, Brigham Young University, 1971). 28. Murray, Handbook, 401. For its life in pamphlets, see Michael W. Homer, “Seeking Primitive Christianity in the Waldensian Valleys: Protestants, Mormons, Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses in Italy,” Nova Religio 9, no. 4 (May 2006): 5–33. 29. Euan Cameron, Reformation of the Heretics: The Waldensians of the Alps, 1480–1580 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 237. 30. Michael W. Homer, “Seeking Primitive Christianity,” 6. 31. Ibid., 11. For the importance of emigration in Mormonism’s appeal to Scots, see Polly Aird, Mormon Convert, Mormon Defector: A Scottish Immigrant in the American West, 1848–1861 (Norman: Arthur H. Clark, 2009), 71–72. 32. On the importance of this change, see Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise Since 1700 (New York: Routledge, 2008), 111–13. 33. See James R. Beck, Dorothy Carey: The Tragic and Untold Story of Mrs. William Carey (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1992). 34. Stenhouse, “Tell It All,” 107. 35. DeSimone, “Reckoning,” 180n7. 36. Stenhouse, “Tell It All,” 109. 37. Present-day scholarship on Geneva’s relation to Calvin includes Philip Benedict, “Calvin and the Transformation of Geneva,” in John Calvin’s Impact on Church and Society, 1509–2009, ed. Martin Ernst Hirzel and Martin Sallman (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2009), 1–13; William G. Naphy, “Calvin’s Geneva,” in Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. McKim, 25–37. 38. For the Handbook’s shifting portrayal of Calvin, see James Rigney, “Shadow on the Alps: John Calvin and English Travellers in Geneva,” in Sober, Strict, and Scriptural: Collective Memories of John Calvin, 1800– 2000, ed. Johan de Niet, Herman Paul, and Bart Wallet (Boston: Brill, 2009), 329–33. On Rousseau’s pen-name, see Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva, 3. Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) guided generations of visitors; for Rousseau’s influence on travel, see the essay collection Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland: New Prospects, ed. Angela

238

J. MOSKAL

39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

Esterhammer, Diane Piccitto, and Patrick Vincent (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). See Murray, Handbook, 148; S. H. M. Byers, Switzerland and the Swiss (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1875), 2. “Protestantism in Geneva. A Retrospect,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 51, no. 316 (February 1842): 162. Murray, Handbook, 146. For the history behind this generalization, see Andrew Pettegree, “The Spread of Calvin’s Thought,” in Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. McKim, 207–24. Murray, Handbook, 147. Byers, Switzerland, 2–3. John Witte Jr. and Robert M. Kingdon, Sex, Marriage, and Family in John Calvin’s Geneva (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2005), 70. On the much-vexed matter of Calvin’s responsibility in the Servetus affair, see Christoph Strohm, “Calvin and Religious Tolerance,” in John Calvin’s Impact, ed. Hirzel and Sallman, 175–91; Valentine Zuber, “Servetus vs. Calvin: A Battle of Monuments During the Secularization of the French Third Republic,” in Sober, Strict, and Scriptural, ed. De Niet, et al., 167–94. These words are found on the side of the Annemasse (1902–1908) monument; see Zuber, “Servetus vs. Calvin,” 171–73. Ibid., 173; 168. For a summary of John Adams’s position, see Strohm, “Calvin and Religious Tolerance,” 176. Lovegrove, “Voice of Reproach and Outrage,” 76. “Protestantism in Geneva,” 166, original emphasis. Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York: John Murray, 1977), 36. Stenhouse, “Tell It All,” 112. Stephen S. Francis, “The Image of Calvin within Mormonism,” in Sober, Strict, and Scriptural, ed. De Niet, et al., 294. DeSimone, Exposé of Polygamy, 184n1. An additional reason was Snow’s compassion for the then-pregnant Frances’s poverty in Southampton during her husband’s Piedmontese mission. Stenhouse, “Tell It All,” 112. Eliza R. Snow, “To Mrs. Stenhouse, Switzerland,” in Poems, Religious, Historical, and Political, vol. 1 (Liverpool: F. D. Richards, 1856), lines 1–2. Stenhouse, “Tell It All,” 112. Ibid. Ibid. Richard C. Gamble, “Calvin’s Controversies,” in Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. McKim, 197.

9

GRAND TOURISTS, MISSIONARY TRAVELERS …

239

61. Walker, “Stenhouses,” 102–03. Anglophone Mormons consistently omit French diacritical marks. 62. However, unlike Greaves and Haldane, the Stenhouses did not target clergy specifically (Stenhouse, Tell It All , 115). 63. Ibid., 123. 64. Ibid., 116. 65. Ibid., my emphasis. 66. Ibid., 116; 142. Exposé of Polygamy is more poignant on this period: during T. B. H.’s three months fundraising, “I had not much, it is true, but then a very little sufficed for my wants. I had that, and I was satisfied and happy; for this Mr. B. and his family were very kind indeed to me, and even now, as I review the past, I can say, with all truthfulness, that from the commencement of my missionary life—now over twenty years ago—till I left Mormonism, that brief period in Switzerland was the only happy time I ever knew” (Stenhouse, Exposé, 46). Significantly, her eloquence is inspired by doctrines shared by Mormonism and Protestantism. Since, at the time of writing (1874), Frances was an apostate Mormon addressing an overwhelmingly Protestant audience, the possibility that she distorted the events of twenty years earlier cannot be dismissed. 67. DeSimone, Exposé of Polygamy, 185n4. Stenhouse sometimes writes “Balif.” 68. On Serge and Elise Baliff, and on their servant Harriette Jeanette Vuffrey, Serge’s second wife, see “Serge Louis Baliff,” in Andrew Jenson, Latterday Saint Biographical Encyclopedia, 4 vols. (Salt Lake City: Andrew Jenson History Company, 1901–1936); and Jae R. Baliff, “Serge Louis Baliff: A Swiss American,” Swiss-American Historical Society Newsletter 34, no. 1 (February 1998): 11–22. My thanks to Thomas J. Nixon for reference assistance. 69. DeSimone, Exposé of Polygamy, 185n1. Stenhouse sometimes writes “Balif.” 70. Frances had elsewhere probed the theological implications: “Why did the Lord implant this [monogamous] love in my nature? Was it for the pleasure of torturing his daughters that this [polygamy] was done?” (DeSimone, “Reckoning,” 8). 71. Stenhouse, “Tell It All,” 408. 72. Stenhouse, Exposé, 43–46. 73. Stenhouse, “Tell It All,” 122. 74. Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva, 12. 75. DeSimone, “Reckoning,” 20. 76. See Leonard I. Sweet, The Minister’s Wife: Her Role in NineteenthCentury American Evangelicalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 76–106. For domestic English clergy marriage, see Jill

240

J. MOSKAL

77.

78. 79. 80.

81. 82.

83. 84.

85.

86.

87. 88.

89. 90.

91.

Felicity Durey, Trollope and the Church of England (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 111–16. Rufus Anderson and William Ellis, “Introductory Essay: On the Marriage of Missionaries,” in Memoir of Mrs. Mary Mercy Ellis, Wife of Rev. William Ellis (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1836), viii; x. For the American missionary context, see Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1997), 92–93. Anderson and Ellis, “Introductory Essay,” x. Ibid., viii. See Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010). Margaret H. Watt, The History of the Parson’s Wife (London: Religious Book Club, 1945), 7. This phrasing is particularly indebted to Linda Colley’s influential Britons: Forging the Nation 1707 –1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Jane Dempsey Douglas, “Calvin in Ecumenical Context,” in Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. McKim, 305–16. For a conspectus of Weber’s use of Calvin, see Ulrich H. J. K˝ ortner, “Calvinism and Capitalism,” in John Calvin’s Impact, ed. Hirzel and Sallman, 159–74. Foster concludes that polygamy served to centralize authority so as to organize sexual pleasure (Religion and Sexuality, 207). Historians agree that polygamy was practiced by only a minority of Mormon pioneers, and that most polygamous marriages involved two wives. See, for example, Jessie L. Embry, “History of Polygamy,” Utah History Encyclopedia, 1994, https://historytogo.utah.gov/history-polygamy/. Stenhouse, “Tell It All,” 47; 141. Godbeites often expressed nostalgia for British Mormonism’s early days; see Walker, Wayward Saints, xvii; 72–78. Stenhouse, “Tell It All,” 142. T. B. H. Stenhouse, The Rocky Mountain Saints: A Full and Complete History of the Mormons, from the First Vision of Joseph Smith to the Last Courtship of Brigham Young (London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler, [1873]), 201. Stenhouse, “Tell It All,” 145. Ibid., 147. See Jessie L. Embry and Lois Kelley, “Polygamous and Monogamous Mormon Women: A Comparison,” in Women in Utah History: Paradigm or Paradox? ed. Patricia Lyn Scott and Linda Thatcher (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2005), 1–35. Stenhouse, “Tell It All,” 156–57.

9

GRAND TOURISTS, MISSIONARY TRAVELERS …

241

92. The Baliffs emigrated in 1854 (DeSimone, Exposé of Polygamy, 185n4). Stenhouse, oddly, omits the death of one-year-old daughter Helene from her long catalogue of her Swiss friend’s troubles (for Helene, see Baliff, “Serge Louis Baliff,” 17). Perhaps Stenhouse avoided a painful subject; perhaps Madame Baliff was less candid than Stenhouse presumed; or perhaps Stenhouse, mother of ten, had little energy to remember Helene, who was born after the Stenhouses left Lausanne. 93. For widely divergent interpretations of the Mormon Reformation, see Aird, Nichols, and Bagley, introduction to Playing with Shadows, 49–57; and Paul H. Peterson, “The Mormon Reformation of 1856–1857: The Rhetoric and the Reality,” Journal of Mormon History 15, no. 1 (1989): 59–88. 94. Stenhouse, “Tell It All,” 379. 95. Ibid., 379. 96. DeSimone, Exposé of Polygamy, 187n1 Stenhouse sometimes writes “Balif.” 97. For location of the Baliff home, see Jae R. Baliff, “Serge Louis Baliff,” 18–19. 98. Stenhouse, “Tell It All,” 405, original emphasis. 99. DeSimone, “Reckoning,” 11. 100. Stenhouse, “Tell It All,” 408. 101. Embry and Kelley, “Polygamous and Monogamous,” 16. 102. Stenhouse, “Tell It All,” 405–06. 103. Ibid., 406. 104. Ibid., 142–43. 105. “Brigham Young’s Heirs,” New York Times (10 March 1879); DeSimone, “Reckoning,” 15. 106. See Aird, Mormon Convert, 231. 107. Stenhouse, “Tell It All,” 409. 108. Jan Shipps, foreword to Walker, Wayward Saints, xi–xii. Harold Bloom advocates the older view in The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 112–28; it has been satirized by Matt Stone and Trey Parker in the song “All American Prophet” from the 2011 musical The Book of Mormon. 109. The exception is Timothy Marr, who comments on Stenhouse’s resistance of the conventional equation of Mormon and Muslim polygamy in The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 213. On journalistic exposés, see Jean Marie Lutes, Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Cecelia Tichi, Exposés and Excess: Muckraking in America, 1900–2000 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); and Judith Walkowitz, City of

242

J. MOSKAL

Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 84. 110. One influential critique of the secularization thesis is José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

CHAPTER 10

Gender, Genre, and Geography in Ménie Dowie’s A Girl in the Karpathians Katarina Gephardt

In 1890, Ménie Dowie, a single young woman of Scottish descent, traveled from England to Galicia, a borderland province of the AustroHungarian Empire. Unchaperoned and accompanied by local male guides, she rode cross-saddle, wore knickerbockers, smoked cigarettes, climbed mountains, bathed nude in streams, slept in peasants’ huts, and ate their food. She did not know anything about Galicia when she left home, but earlier schooling in German and the rudimentary Polish that she learned on the way helped her communicate with the locals and learn about their lives. After returning to England, she did some research on the region at the British Museum and published a travel narrative entitled A Girl in the Karpathians in 1891. The book became an immediate sensation and appeared in five British and four American editions within a year.1 A Canadian edition, entitled A Girl in Trousers: Being a History of a Young Girl’s Adventures in the Karpathians, was also published in

K. Gephardt (B) Department of English, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Colbert and L. Morrison (eds.), Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36146-4_10

243

244

K. GEPHARDT

Toronto in 1891, its alternative title underscoring a key contributing factor in the book’s success: Dowie’s rhetorically sophisticated performance of gender. In 1894, Sarah Grand coined the term, New Woman, to describe the late Victorian movement that challenged restrictive gender norms. However, the debate on Victorian gender roles had already been underway when Dowie published A Girl in the Karpathians , and the book’s success indicates that it accomplished the rhetorical feat of popularizing the key themes of the debate without offending the public. Dowie later became associated with the New Woman movement through her novel Gallia (1895), which scandalized the late Victorian reading public by its unconventional treatment of sexuality and inversion of gender norms.2 The protagonist, Gallia, champions a eugenic approach to marriage and selects her partner, Mark Gurdon, for his ability to procreate, a fact confirmed by news of his mistress’s abortion. Beth Rogers examines the reasons why A Girl in the Karpathians , unlike Gallia, “was deemed to be so acceptable despite its depiction of unconventional femininity” and situates the book as a part of the history of early New Woman writing.3 In particular, she focuses on the implications of the “girl” of the title and argues that Dowie “knowingly exploits … her own status as a ‘girl’ to her own commercial and political advantage.”4 According to Rogers, the book resonated with late-nineteenth-century debates on “girlhood” and received favorable reviews in popular girls’ magazines. Defining girlhood broadly to include young women in their twenties, Rogers claims that “Dowie’s success lies in her ability to tap into the versions of modern girlhood” and in her appeal to women readers’ desire for more personal freedom.5 While reviewers did emphasize the narrator’s gender performance, some reviews also reveal shifting expectations for the travel narrative as a genre. In the words of one representative reviewer, “the chief interest of the book is ‘the Girl’ and not the ‘Karpathians,’” given that the author’s “bright and humorous perception … does much to lighten the monotony of her surroundings” and the “dull and uninteresting” peasants of Ruthenia.6 The reviewer’s comment indicates that Dowie’s subjective “perception” refreshingly conveyed more than mere information. The tension between the focus on “the Girl” and on the Carpathians raises questions about the correlations among Dowie’s generic innovation, her treatment of the Carpathians, and her performance of gender. In this essay, I argue that the destination, however apparently insignificant

10

GENDER, GENRE, AND GEOGRAPHY …

245

to some reviewers, is essential to the appeal of Dowie’s book. The liminality and unfamiliarity of the Eastern Carpathians make it possible for her to produce an anti-travelogue that self-consciously subverts the conventions of both imperial and tourist travel writing, which in turn contributes to the perceived originality of the text among contemporary readers. Dowie traveled to Central Europe during a time when the British still perceived the region as exotic and wild, even though developments in local tourist infrastructure made it possible for an unchaperoned single British woman such as Dowie to travel there with relative safety. British travel narratives on Central and Eastern Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century reflect the uneven development of trade and tourism across the continent that informed the British imaginative geography of Central and Eastern Europe. Jósef Böröcz demonstrates that guidebooks constructed polarized “mental maps” of Europe in the period from 1870 to 1925 and he notes that they privileged Western European destinations (particularly Britain and Italy) over Eastern European ones.7 This underrepresentation of the region led to a scramble to document Central and Eastern Europe.8 Bram Stoker’s reading of these travel narratives at the British Museum inspired the influential stereotypes of Eastern Europe in Dracula (1897). His sources present the region as either idyllic or threatening, employing the conventions of imperial travel writing, particularly Orientalist paradigms. Representative examples of differentiation and exoticization may be found in one of Stoker’s principal sources, Charles Boner’s Transylvania: Its Products and Its People (1865): Belgrade is worth all you see between it and Vienna, from the perfect novelty of everything. The population is very mixed, but still unlike what is met with in Western Europe. The water-carriers, the curious arrangements of the shops, all told of life belonging to the East. The dress of the Servian women is extremely beautiful, and that of a group of ladies returning to Belgrade in the evening was costly beyond description. As a necklace they wore a row of ducats overlapping each other like the buttons on the peasants’ coats in Bavaria, and in their dark hair wore rings and gold coin.9

Boner contrasts Belgrade with Vienna, which most British travelers considered the last outpost of Western European civilization, and Serbian peasants with their Bavarian counterparts. He associates features of city life in Belgrade with the East, and emphasizes the valuable jewelry of the Serbian women, a reminder of the book’s emphasis on the “products,” or

246

K. GEPHARDT

natural resources of the region, which aligns Boner’s account with narratives of exploration in potential colonial territories. While Boner subjects the women to an imperial gaze (numerous passages describe Central and Eastern European women’s “exotic” attire), he finds the men somewhat threatening, noticing their “long Oriental-looking pistols.”10 On board a boat that takes him down the Danube, he imagines that “one or two” men have “a sinister air; and had we met in a forest, the long knife would, I think, have been unsheathed, unless my quicker hand had shown the revolver ready for instant use.”11 Boner imagines fending off a potential attack with the use of superior Western technology, which is analogous to the strategy adopted by the fictional crew that pursues Count Dracula back to Transylvania. Boner traveled before the development of tourist infrastructure in the region, but later British travel narratives, such as Nina Mazuchelli’s Magyarland (1881), find that the Orientalist paradigm backfires in areas where Eastern Europeans adopt Western manners after being exposed to tourists. Mazuchelli initially celebrates places off the beaten track as a refuge from the encroachments of Western civilization, avoiding Budapest “hotels recommended by either Murray or Bradshaw.”12 However, as it turns out, “even in the seclusion of a Magyar hotel, where English persons so rarely come,” a waiter reminds her of her nationality by offering her a “ros-bif” or “bif-stek.”13 Mazuchelli also laments that railways are eliminating the picturesque national “costumes” of the region and “have done so much to rob Switzerland and old Tyrol of their charm [and] are slowly but surely doing their work here. The so-called civilization of the West is likewise toning down not only the costumes, but the primitive customs of this part of Eastern Europe.”14 Mazuchelli resigns herself to the role of a tourist, and by the time she reaches the Tatras, the Western Carpathians, she registers ample evidence of developing tourism without much complaint. She also mentions the founding of the Carpathian exploration society in 1873, which has been “making and improving paths” and “erecting places of refuge for travellers,” and describes chalets, spas, and “little temples and kiosks erected for the comfort and enjoyment of tourists.”15 Dowie’s successive reframing of her travel experience in the Eastern Carpathians is informed by the shift from imperial to tourist paradigms in British travel writing on Eastern Europe as represented by these examples from Boner’s and Mazuchelli’s books. Dowie’s first publication on the

10

GENDER, GENRE, AND GEOGRAPHY …

247

journey, an essay entitled “In Ruthenia,” reflects the tension between geographical information and subjective perception that later shapes the production and the reception of the book. Conscious of her limited authority on Ruthenia, Dowie promises that “before my little book appears in the spring, I shall have burrowed to the very root of the question in the British Museum, and read everything I can lay my hands on which will help me to understand the past history of the country whose present one has so much interested me.”16 We do not know the extent to which Dowie fulfilled this promise and what exactly she read, but it is highly probable that she covered some of the same travel narratives on Eastern Europe as Stoker, and that A Girl in the Karpathians includes background on the region’s history and language that she could not have learned in the course of her travels. “In Ruthenia” shows evidence of preliminary reading and offers a brief overview of Ruthenia’s location in the borderlands of Austria, Poland, and Russia, describing it as “a country that has never belonged to itself.”17 In accordance with the tradition of imperial travel writing, she catalogues the human and natural resources of Galicia (cognate with Ruthenia in her discussion), concluding that “there is a future for Galicia,” perhaps as a part of reunited Poland.18 The geopolitical and ethnographic contexts dominate the essay, but an embryonic version of the persona that contributed to her book’s popular success emerges in passages that interrupt the essay’s informational focus. In one such passage, she addresses her purpose for the journey and deflects possible questions regarding the safety and wisdom of a single woman traveling in this part of Eastern Europe: “There are lux-cats, bears, and wolves in the Carpathians, and I know that everybody will think there are other obstacles for a girl travelling alone; but that isn’t the case. I cannot waste the space of this Review by explaining why there are no obstacles, why from London to the Russian frontier and back I met with no inconvenience. But of course I know why, and in another quarter I shall be very happy to give my reasons.”19 Dowie withholds more than she reveals, possibly alluding to the tourist infrastructure that facilitated her journey, while also advertising her forthcoming book. She does not explain why she chose Galicia in particular, but the following description of her conduct indicates that Galicia provided space for temporary escape from the constraints of Victorian femininity: “The one gown I wore had a short skirt that unhooked in a second and left me in all the freedom of knickerbockers. My saddle-bag held a couple of clean shirts, and not being

248

K. GEPHARDT

afflicted with the hesitations of Hyde Park, I rode cross-saddle or bareback upon the little Hutzul horses.”20 The paragraph highlights Dowie’s gender performance, and the contrast between the East Carpathians and Hyde Park anticipates the opposition of nature and civilization, one of the key themes of the book, while also suggesting that gender is a culturally determined construct. The essay as a whole reflects Dowie’s awareness of two different audiences, one interested in the information that she provides and the other entertained by her personal travel experience off the beaten track and her subversion of gender norms. Dowie concludes the essay with a reflection that illustrates her audience awareness: I hope nothing I have said will induce anybody else to come. I should be, indeed, to blame if any word of mine should have aroused the baneful curiosity of the tourist. But I don’t think anybody will go there. I was very uncomfortable according to Western notions. … This remark does not refer to men of science. I want somebody to tell me what the hills are made of, and I want some one else to explain why the water is so horrid. All that I do not want is that some one should build a hotel.21

On the one hand, Dowie envisions the audience of tourists, ones who use her writing as a form of armchair travel and might consider following in her footsteps. On the other hand, she envisions an audience of scientists and entrepreneurs, ones who may benefit from and contribute to the information on Galicia that she provides in the essay. “In Ruthenia” thus anticipates Dowie’s engagement with the discourses of tourism and exploration in A Girl in the Karpathians , but unlike the book, envisions an audience primarily interested in geography rather than the narrator’s persona or her gender. The framing of the first edition of A Girl in the Karpathians also aligns the book with the tradition of imperial travel writing in the vein of Boner’s Transylvania, communicating an ostensible focus on providing information, but its reframing in the fourth edition indicates a shift in focus from geography to the narrator’s persona. The first edition opens with a chapter surveying the history of Galicia and includes a fold-out map of partitioned Poland. The brief notice in the Review of the Reviews calls it “the most noticeable book of the month.”22 Although reproducing “a picture of Miss Dowie in her Karpathian costume” and praising the “sunny and impudent audacity that charmed the reviewers,” the notice

10

GENDER, GENRE, AND GEOGRAPHY …

249

also points out that the narrator’s appealing persona has deflected attention from the book’s “solid value.”23 For instance, the “map which she gives of the territorial dismemberment of Poland is as serious a contribution to the understanding of the tragedy of history as has been published this year.”24 Even though some reviewers appreciated the geographical information that the book offered, the fourth and fifth editions of the book include a preface in which Dowie describes the book as a kind of an anti-travelogue and eliminates the map. The reviews’ fascination with the woman adventurer’s exploits and the “girl’s” gender-bending ways made Dowie a celebrity. Rogers speculates that Dowie and her publisher reframed the book and shifted its focus from travels to traveler in response to such reviews. However, the preface does more than highlight Dowie’s performance of gender and her qualities as a woman adventurer: it reframes the genre of the book in a way that both draws on and resists imperial and tourist modes of mapping as represented by Boner’s Transylvania and Mazuchelli’s Magyarland. Emboldened by the favorable reviews, Dowie uses the preface to highlight the originality of her representation of the Carpathians. She claims that the book belongs to “no distinct literary category” and emphasizes that it is “not a ‘Tale of Adventure,’” but “merely a record of a girl’s summer roaming and a girl’s summer thoughts, told in her own way, and with a disregard of conventions she saw no reason to respect.”25 She also claims to have removed the map because it “seems to have supported the idea that I had geographical or other information to offer” and claims that any information included in the book was overheard accidentally “in a railway carriage.”26 Even though Dowie underplays the geographical information that the book provides, I argue that her generic innovation and experimentation with travel writing conventions was made possible by the doubly liminal location of the East Carpathians as a borderland provincial region with an emerging tourist infrastructure, still comparatively uncharted by British guidebooks and travel writers. The analysis that follows draws on examples from Dowie’s travel narrative to identify and define three key strategies that she uses to test the limits of the genre: interrogating the Western concept of travel as a linear progress toward a predetermined destination, adapting ways of seeing characteristic of explorers and tourists, and foregrounding the traveling body. The illusion of personal freedom that the book creates is a result

250

K. GEPHARDT

not only of the narrator’s escape from late-Victorian middle-class gender constraints, but also of the carefully crafted impression that travel in Galicia emancipates the traveler from obligatory itineraries, customary perspectives, and conventional purposes.

“No Builded Schemes”: Plotting an Apparently Random Itinerary In a gesture that disavows the customary focus of explorers and tourists on particular destinations, Dowie insists on the randomness of her journey, which reinforces the impression that she was traveling off the beaten track without a specific purpose. In the preface, Dowie presents the book as an anti-travelogue, denying its status as a “book of travel,” since the entire journey “covered, at the outside, some eighty miles,” although later in the book she admits that her goal all along was to reach the peaks of the Eastern Carpathians.27 Dowie presents her choice of destination as original and whimsical, even though she actually follows the prevailing trend among mountain-loving late-nineteenth-century travelers. She initially acknowledges her strategic avoidance of the Western Carpathians (Tatras) because of the encroachment of the tourist industry there: “At the north-western end of the Karpathian chain, the show-end, called the Tatra Mountains, there are beautiful lakes, immense waterfalls, and, in fact, if rumour speaks true, the regulation ‘grand’ sort of scenery. Also there are health resorts, troops of lungy invalids, healthy climbing tourists, guides, and carved paper-knives. On the whole, I preferred to dispense with the lakes rather than have them and suffer their accompaniments.”28 Like the tourists who had transferred their attention from the grandeur of the Alps to the smaller-scale peaks of the Tatras, Dowie chooses to sacrifice the conventional forms of the sublime and travel even farther in order to escape tourist crowds. In The Beaten Track, a study of nineteenth-century British tourism in Western Europe, James Buzard critically considers the false dichotomy of the traveler “who exhibits boldness and gritty endurance under all conditions” and the tourist who “is the cautious, pampered unit of a leisure industry.”29 While these attitudes are not mutually exclusive, the traveler/tourist distinction does help account for Dowie’s careful avoidance of the more tourist-ridden Western Carpathians, her emphasis on destinations off the beaten track, and her anti-tourist attitude. The Eastern Carpathians are much less conventionally sublime because their summits are rounded and mostly covered with

10

GENDER, GENRE, AND GEOGRAPHY …

251

vegetation in contrast with the bare, rugged, rocky peaks of the Alps and the Western Carpathians. There are virtually no references to the developing tourism in the Eastern Carpathians in the book, which reinforces the narrator’s assumed image as a pilgrim in a wilderness. In a rare reference to the tourist infrastructure, the narrator complains, with anti-tourist revulsion, that she is forced to stay at a tourist lodge of the Alpenverein ´ in Zabie for lack of more authentic accommodation and regrets that she has been “so English” as to stay in such a ridiculously luxurious place.30 By the time of Dowie’s journey, the trail-blazing work of the Tatra Society (Towarzystwo Tatranske), “Galicia’s first Alpine club,” founded in 1873, had already contributed toward the “discovery” of the highland cultures of the so-called Gorale in Western Carpathians, and Hutzuls in Eastern Carpathians (Eastern Beskids or Czarnohora region).31 The club inspired events such as the ethnographic exhibition in Kolomya, attended by the Emperor Franz Joseph in 1880, which put the region on the Austro-Hungarian and possibly European map a decade before Dowie’s visit.32 By 1890, summer resorts with tourist facilities had already been well developed in the Western Carpathians, especially the Tatras. The village of Zakopane, for example, functioned as a “holiday ‘capital’ to which Poles from the three empires flocked” in order to connect with what they perceived as authentic Polish culture.33 Even in the Eastern Carpathians, the regional branch of the Tatra society based in Kolomya marked trails and established mountain lodges, including the “alpine base ´ camp of sorts” in Zabie that attracted Dowie’s anti-tourist chagrin, so the region was already “destined to make the transition from terra incognita to tourist destination.”34 The development of local tourism was driven by Central Europeans’ growing patriotic awareness of the unique significance of the mountains and the value of their peasant cultures. Patrice Dabrowski’s study of the Central European lowlanders’ fascination with the Carpathians and their inhabitants points out that unlike foreign visitors such as Dowie, local lowlanders, especially Poles, were interested in shaping rather than escaping the inevitable process of modernization. The region, in Dabrowski’s words, was “one of the most backward and isolated parts of one of the most backward and isolated Habsburg provinces” but “it abounded in natural beauty” that attracted tourists.35 Also, competing national interests made it the focus of Polish nationalist art and scholarship.36 Dowie’s conversations with educated Poles, including teachers, priests, and artists, in the course of her journey must have informed her of

252

K. GEPHARDT

this process of nationalist mapping of the Eastern Carpathians, and their enthusiasm most likely inspired the inclusion of the map of partitioned Poland in the first edition of A Girl in the Karpathians . A representative example among the Polish patriots who informed Dowie’s perspective on Galicia is the narrator’s fellow guest in Mikuliczyn, a Polish painter. Unlike the narrator’s peasant hosts and guides, he is not named, which makes him appear mysterious. The narrator describes his purpose for visiting the mountains as rather eccentric and random, just like hers: “It was his habit to come into the mountains every summer, so he was well known, could speak the Ruthenian language as well as his own, and was much loved and looked up to by the peasants.”37 She does not provide any context for his role as one of the lowland patriots participating in the discovery of the Carpathians and presents his penchant for painting and educating peasants in folk costumes as a virtuous but eccentric oddity rather than a form of political activism. Such avoidance of contexts enhances Dowie’s construction of Galicia as an uncharted space and underplays its geopolitical significance. The apparent randomness of the itinerary also highlights the authenticity and free agency of Dowie’s persona. She does not provide any rationale for her choice of destinations or stopping points. After a brief hotel stay in Kolomya, where she battles with fleas, she announces her departure for the mountains. However, instead of heading directly toward the mountains, she spends considerable time lingering in the villages along the way, creating the impression of a happy serendipity that is superior to the time-shackled lifestyle in Britain. Using travel in the liminal space of Galicia to escape middle-class English conventions and disavowing any particular purpose, she extols “the beauty of doing something which neither duty, necessity, nor pleasure distinctly demands.”38 Galicia is presented as an ideal space for a woman traveler, civilized just enough to keep her safe, yet not so much as to restrict her conduct: “You are so out of your usual rut that legions of nameless adventures crowd indefinitely upon the immediate horizon. It does not matter if none of them ever come off. After all, adventure is not everything; there is incident and the next half-hour must always bring that with it.”39 By highlighting the randomness of incidents that happen to her rather than the adventures she seeks, Dowie emphasizes the unavoidable experience of time rather than intentional movement in space. The rhetoric of anti-climax undercuts readers’ expectations for an account of travel off the beaten track and both anticipates and preempts their perception of Dowie as a woman

10

GENDER, GENRE, AND GEOGRAPHY …

253

adventurer. In yet another disavowal of purpose, Dowie relishes the “anticipation of I knew not what—just what chanced to happen, since I had no builded schemes, would be sure to please me, I thought.”40 In their discussion of the connections between adventure and gender in women’s travel writing, Shirley Foster and Sara Mills examine the uneasy relation of women travelers with the figure of the archetypally masculine adventure hero, whose characteristics included “the risking of one’s own life to perform heroic deeds of national significance, the outwitting of enemies, and the overcoming of physical difficulties and obstacles.”41 Dowie’s strategy is in line with the approach of those women who “adopt these narrative positions [associated with the adventure hero] only to mock them or to subvert them” using “self-deprecating humour,” since “the fact that it is difficult to adopt this position becomes a source of humour at the narrator’s expense.”42 The incident that comes closest to adventure occurs when Dowie loses her grandmother’s watch and has to crawl on all fours up a mountainside looking for it. In her response to the experience, Dowie once again uses the rhetoric of anti-climax by borrowing lines from Othello: “Hairbreadth ’scapes are unknown to me, likewise moving accidents by flood and field. This is very disappointing, and would always stand in my light if I did aspire to be a traveller.”43 In these lines, Othello recounts his “travailous history”; Dowie’s use of them positions the narrator in relation to a long tradition of masculine and adventure-driven travel writing.44 The construction of the narrator as an anti-hero, a counterpoint to the masculine adventure hero, is evidently strategic because “In Ruthenia” actually lists a number of incidents that could be considered “hairbreadth ’scapes”: “I had in all the time I was away, a fair share of accidents: bathing in unknown rivers I was twice almost drowned; a fall very nearly put out my shoulder, and it isn’t right yet, and I did something inexplicable to a rib by falling into a river and striking on a sunken pine-tree. I got a good deal cut one way and another, had sunstroke pretty badly, and so on—but you can do that anywhere.”45 Some of these incidents could have produced good stories of adventure, but Dowie does not include them in the book. If she just wanted to underplay the dangers of traveling as a single woman, she would not have included this list in the essay. It appears that in the book, her insistence that Galicia is the same as any other place and her self-deprecation underscore the originality of her approach to travel, thwarting conventional Victorian expectations of what a travel narrative should offer, while also negotiating the discursive

254

K. GEPHARDT

constraints for women’s travel writing by underplaying the hazards of the journey. Instead of presenting her experience as adventurous, the narrator celebrates her participation in the routine and monotony of “authentic” village life. Prefacing the account of her stay in the village of Mikuliczyn, which occupies as least a third of the book, Dowie declares that she cannot recollect why she chose to stay there: “It seems possible, however, that I may have wished to rest after my rush across Europe, or to learn the Ruthenian language, or to observe the habits of the peasants, &c. Any of these excuses will serve to explain my four weeks’ tarrying in this somewhat plain village of all the lovely ones I might have found.”46 In order to enjoy East European life untarnished by civilization in Mikuliczyn, she is willing to lodge in “a little outhouse flanked by the cowshed and the ashpit.”47 However, Mikuliczyn was in fact “one of the region’s largest villages” with developing tourism, and therefore far from an obscure and random stopping point, which the narrator’s remarks indicate.48 Her ostensible lack of purpose presents the village as far off the beaten track and parodies the conventions of both imperial and tourist travel writing. The space devoted to the narrator’s stay in Mikuliczyn, filled with “the dull and pleasant pattern” of daily life, including leisurely reading, bathing, horse riding, and interaction with the hosts, servants, and other guests at the farm where she is lodged, defies the conventional fastmoving pace of the late-Victorian travel narrative.49 Dowie’s travelogue fits the category of travel writing that Peter Hulme describes as a record of “traveling on the spot,” which combines slow movement, reflexive preoccupation with the self, and an extended stay in one place.50 Chapter 5, devoted to Mikuliczyn’s cumulative daily routine, opens with yet another contrast between adventure and incident: “Experiences of the mild and quiet nature that always occur to persons who go in search of adventure these unknightly days, heaped themselves upon me.”51 While adventure-driven travel narratives tend to emphasize the otherness of the destination, Dowie domesticates the Carpathians through frequent comparisons to Scotland, her home country: “The dark hills; the constant blue mists that stole among them; the sudden suns that burst out and swiftly laid each pine-tree’s arm with silver; … the trout in the river—they are all—it is all so Scotch, that my heart literally glowed with love of it, and I twisted my tartan cloak, plaid fashion, round me.”52 Travelers conventionally use contrasts with home as a way of assessing

10

GENDER, GENRE, AND GEOGRAPHY …

255

continental places, and Dowie often does so when she presents Galicia as a counterpoint to industrialized parts of Britain. However, her parallels between Galicia and Scotland have the opposite effect of collapsing the distinction between home and abroad. Nature is universal, Dowie suggests, and thus travel can serve as a means of discovering home through leisurely contemplation of natural scenes. In her response to nature, Dowie cites Thoreau’s Walden (1854), and her focus on the self within the confines of a single place resembles the American writer’s attempt to escape from civilization through communion with nature. Reflecting on the repetitive patterns of peasant music, Dowie celebrates monotony as more “natural” than the distractions of civilization, and her passage resonates with Thoreau’s philosophy: “It will be noticed that in Nature and all things near her, monotony means rest, not boredom. With artificial matters, it is the reverse. Who gets tired of the delicate monotony of sounds? What eye wearies of the endless ranks of daisies by the wayside? Surely no one’s. Thus with my peasant’s tunes it was the variation I resented, and there was very little to resent!”53 Instead of variety and novelty, which she associates with Western civilization and its hunger for adventure, the narrator emphasizes sameness and routine. In order to paint the peasants’ lifestyle as an alternative to British civilization and its attendant “anxiety, and worry, and responsibility,” Dowie associates the “condition of the peasants, physical and moral” with nature rather than culture.54 This may be yet another reason why she provides so little context for their national affiliation, which was certainly important to her friend, the Polish painter, and other nationalists like him. Dowie idealizes the peasants’ social conditions by underplaying their poverty and underlining the absence of an oppressive “landlord class.” She goes so far as to excuse the peasants’ moral failings: if “there is no such thing as a moral standard in any Ruthenian village … and where nothing is aimed at, who can be said to fall short of the mark?”55 Although this rhetorical question is tinged with irony, Dowie’s overall idealized portrayal of the peasants’ lives draws on the conventions of imperial travel writing in its representation of peasant culture as static. However, her underlying purpose is not to justify a civilizing mission, but to strategically and problematically imagine the peasants’ “liberties” as parallel to her own emancipation from gender constraints and tourist itineraries.

256

K. GEPHARDT

“The Gauntlet of Their Eyes”: Editing the Traveler’s Gaze Describing a journey to a mountainous “uncharted” territory forces Dowie to negotiate a web of gendered discourses related to landscape aesthetics and exploration. These discourses are anchored in the Romantic concept of self, which, according to John Whale, has “the capacity to double between weakness and power, violence and annihilation.”56 Adapting this conception of Romantic subjectivity, Dowie’s landscape descriptions sometimes deliberately avoid and sometimes mock the attitudes associated with “power” and “violence,” which underpin the role of the explorer that Mary Louise Pratt describes as “the monarch of all I survey.”57 According to Pratt, an explorer, motivated by the colonial enterprise, imaginatively appropriates the landscape by presenting sweeping, sublime views and broad panoramas that typically seem empty of human presence. In contrast, Dowie seeks alternative experiences of the sublime that remind her of her vulnerability (“weakness” and “annihilation”). This sense of vulnerability corresponds with the patterns of anticlimax in the book, which highlight Dowie’s frustrated attempts at consummation of her desire to connect with Galicia’s landscape and people. The underlying motive for Dowie’s interrogation of colonial discourse, however, is not so much a critique of imperialist ideology, as Dowie’s later writing indicates, but an adaptation of the Romantic search for authentic self and the sacred in natural scenes and peasant cultures.58 She ultimately seeks moments of spiritual connection, in which she seems to transcend both time and space through the medium of the Carpathians. The narrator’s desire to connect with the place and the people suggests that Dowie plots the journey as a type of a secular pilgrimage. John Urry’s description of the spiritual dimension of the tourist experience captures Dowie’s implicit purpose for travel in Central Europe: “All tourists … embody a quest for authenticity, and this quest is a modern version of the universal human concern with the sacred. The tourist is a kind of contemporary pilgrim, seeking authenticity in other ‘times’ and other ‘places’ away from that person’s everyday life. Tourists show particular fascination in the ‘real lives’ of others that somehow possess a reality hard to discover in their experiences.”59 Dowie’s approach to both Carpathian scenery and peasants is similarly motivated as a quest for an unattainable object, an alternative to Western civilization conceived as a place of imaginative unity or communion between humans and nature.

10

GENDER, GENRE, AND GEOGRAPHY …

257

In her account of the secular pilgrimage that she pursues in search of this unattainable goal, Dowie substitutes prayer with forms of aesthetic appreciation. In The Rhetoric of Empire, David Spurr defines “aestheticization” as one of the rhetorical modes of colonial discourse and associates it with “distantiation, … privilege, consumption, and alienation.”60 Some of Dowie’s descriptions of Ruthenian peasants certainly reflect her privileged consumer mentality, and sense of alienation. Nevertheless, the most striking instances of Dowie’s contemplation of the beauty of the peasants diminish the distance between herself and the objects of her gaze, or the distance just seems to collapse, as in the following example of her observation of a crowd of peasants dressed up for church on Sunday: That church … was surrounded by some hundreds of brilliantly dressed peasants, all talking and posing in most picturesque groups. At first I just feasted my eyes upon them as if they’d been a bed of annuals; but when it came to going up among them I felt vaguely in my eight pockets for a rag of courage, …and found nothing. Positively, it could not be done. Would any humble cockchafer, all cased in dull and dusty browns, care to alight upon a patch of poppies white and red? … What costumes, what colours, what appearances, what groups, what poses, what figures, what heads! Though with no one to speak to, I felt myself both exclamatory and ecstatic—inside; it was quite uncomfortable! But I had approached a bit, and they had seen me, and after that it didn’t matter what bell rang, what antimacassar the Pope wore, or what tenor Gregorians were warbled … They moved slowly towards me, first single flowers, then, slowly still, but in fearful mass, the whole poppy-bed. It was a terrible sort of moment … They made a pathway for me, and I ran the gauntlet of their eyes ….61

While the passage begins with aestheticization in the vein of Boner’s exoticism, Dowie moves from consumption or “feasting” on the sight at a distance and the objectification of the group as “a bed of annuals” to an awareness of herself as an unworthy object of the peasants’ gaze, which is suggested by her analogy to a subhuman “humble cockchafer.” Her first impulse is to evade discomfort through analysis, by parsing beauty into its components, but once the group approaches her, such distantiation is no longer possible. The approach of the “fearful” mass and Dowie’s use of the word “terrible” to describe it evoke the sublime, which collapses the distance between the viewer and the view by posing a perceived danger. The aesthetic appreciation metamorphoses into a spiritual experience that is frightening, uncomfortable, but powerful in a way that cannot match

258

K. GEPHARDT

the vestiges of Christian belief, even ones as aesthetically pleasing as Gregorian chants. Dowie never enters the church and instead escapes into the woods to contemplate nature. While this example illustrates Dowie’s revision of the sublime in an instance of transfer from natural scenery to people, her descriptions of nature also challenge the stance of the stereotypically masculine explorer and his reliance on both sweeping panoramic views and scientific rationality through her focus on minutiae. Dowie’s foregrounding of the minute suggests resistance to the tendency to encompass the foreign culture as a whole typical of imperial travel writing as represented by Boner’s Transylvania. She rejects the customary panoramic view, the perspective of the telescope, which Pratt attributes to the “imperial eye.” This is a gendered opposition to conventional ways of seeing on the part of Dowie. Pratt identifies the panoramic view with “the figure of the ‘seeing man,’ [which is] an admittedly unfriendly label for the European male subject of European landscape discourse—whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess.”62 Instead of panoramic views, Dowie zooms in on “microscopic” details. Her drawings from the journey reflect this aesthetic, typically appearing as tiny illustrations embedded in the text focused on details of flowers such as “orchis-spires,” which she finds both “graceful” and “Gothic.”63 Foster and Mills point out that women travelers who adopted scientific language and methods had to do so cautiously, often presenting themselves as amateurs and hobbyists.64 Dowie’s descriptions are poetic rather than scientific, and, adopting an ostensibly amateurish and anti-scientific pose, she refuses to insert herself into the typically masculine pursuit of exploration as a means of gathering knowledge. Adapting another high status discourse, the language of aesthetics, Dowie resists the empiricist urge to classify beautiful things, claiming that she is “always glad to not know what a flower is,” and wondering: “Why should I wish to class them, to press them, or to tell exactly what they were?”65 She pays special attention to “tadpoles, frogs, waterworms, and newts of every description with little black hands, daintier than a lady’s” and devotes several pages to accounts of fleas.66 She maintains that the “Kolomyja flea deserves a paragraph” for it is “large and well-built, of a finer growth altogether than its western brother.”67 In this ultimate ironic inversion of travel writing conventions, the flea, the virtually invisible nemesis of Grand Tour travelers, mostly perceived through senses other than sight and through its effects on the body, is worthy of aesthetic appreciation and superior to its Western counterparts.

10

GENDER, GENRE, AND GEOGRAPHY …

259

“Those Elemental Bannocks”: Foregrounding the Traveling Body Dowie’s unorthodox narrative treatment of encounters with fleas is also a part of her strategy of foregrounding the traveling body, one that highlights her role as a participant observer who wishes to connect with the peasants. Foster and Mills suggest that women travelers’ awareness of the constraints on feminine conduct often called attention to the logistics associated with physical movement.68 Although Dowie’s text manifests some of these concerns, as for example in her references to wearing the detachable skirt, her attention to the body focuses less on movement than multi-sensory experience. As an alternative to visual representation, Dowie offers a record of tactile and olfactory experiences. Her account of embodied travel supplants the disembodied views of colonial discourse by noting the traveler’s engagement with or dependence on both the natural environment and local communities. Swimming in cold water leads her to a bank “sweet with wild strawberries.”69 She relishes a visit to a Ruthenian hut “where the atmosphere is fœtid—you have to smoke all the time.”70 Even the bloody details of poultry killing, the unattractive “drama of the yard” outside her window, awaken her instinctive desire for the primitive.71 One also suspects that her inexplicably long sojourn in the village of Mikuliczyn is partly motivated by her Polish landlady’s “genius for cookery,” which produces flavors “reminiscent of the French cuisine, [but] cleaner, not so greasy and thick-saucy; more refined than German, and very naturally, lengths ahead of the average in England.”72 The reader is always aware of whether the traveler has dined or not, and while such concerns may seem rudimentary, the act of sharing peasant food takes on a symbolic dimension. While visiting a cottage, Dowie observes a peasant girl’s cooking of “bannocks,” cakes made of potato dough, finding the sublime in a daily household ritual: “My whole soul swelled with the poetry of this process—the manner of it, the girl’s direct way, the ingredients, the tools, the delicate rose-grey flakes of the woodash;—all seemed epic to me, and I sat watching the steam drying off those ideally real bannocks, as the heat stole into them, I hardly daring to breathe.”73 Underscoring her vulnerability and the passivity as the observer, Dowie uses the language of Christian communion to describe her anticipation of the taste: “For my part, I was wondering that some noble line of verse or Scripture did not come to me as I held the bit of bannock. None occurring, nor yet a grace, I conceived eating to be in

260

K. GEPHARDT

itself a sacrament, and essayed a bite.”74 However, the “prayerful ecstasy” of the eye turns into “a bitter sorrow” of the tongue, when she realizes that the “bannock was not nice.”75 Moreover, as Dowie suggests in an enigmatic sentence, her inability to appreciate the bannock symbolically represents her failure to connect with her host family: “I tried a second bit; but no, I could not eat it; and from that moment the communion of this charming family went by me and said no word.”76 Her disappointment is so bitter that she recalls it again when she is served “the elemental bannock of my lost dreams and dead enthusiasm,” which reinforces the impression that Dowie failed to attain the desired spiritual connection with Ruthenian culture in spite of the physicality of the experience.77 Urry describes the tourist adaptation of the pilgrimage as a search for an “anti-structure” beyond place and time “where conventional social ties are suspended, an intensive bonding ‘communitas’ is experienced, and there is direct experience of the sacred or supernatural.”78 This is the experience that Dowie seeks during her visit to the peasant cottage, but she is also very honest about the impossibility of achieving it. Following the pattern of anti-climax that structures the book as a whole, Dowie presents the degustatory experience as a failed attempt at communion with Ruthenian culture, so the quest for a sacred alternative to Western civilization, in this instance represented as a substitution of potato bannocks for bread, is ultimately frustrated.79 The final destination of the journey, the peaks of the Eastern Carpathians, produces a similar effect. Dowie’s description of ascent to the peaks of the Eastern Carpathians, which is the ultimate destination of her apparently random itinerary, combines the three strategies that challenge the conventions of imperial and tourist travel writing in a final failed attempt at experiencing the sublime. Through an inversion of the tradition of landscape aesthetics, the episode channels the frustrated desire to attain the journey’s object of desire, a spiritual refuge from Western civilization and a unique place beyond the scope of tourist itineraries. Dowie describes mountain climbing as a monotonous routine rather than an exciting adventure: “Speaking largely, there is a similarity in mountains and in mountain-climbing. Conscious that I do not speak with the knowledge of an experienced, nor yet with the enthusiasm of an instinctive climber, I propose to mass the records of the next few days regardlessly together, and say that I went up some six different points.”80 The book’s descriptions of the Carpathians deflate the readers’ expectations for conventional sublime views created by more standard Western alpine tourist destinations: “Any likeness to Scotland

10

GENDER, GENRE, AND GEOGRAPHY …

261

and to Switzerland, to the Austrian Tyrol, to any high places I have seen, was left out of the landscape, and I was glad. Karpathian scenery in all its rough disregard of the canons of beauty elected by the tourist swelled round me in a sea of grey-green mountain waves.”81 The monotony of the flora, consisting of only two species, the “creeping fir” and “the littlerose-flowered rhododendron,” thus serves as an antithesis of the sublime one can enjoy in Switzerland.82 Violating the conventions of the imperial gaze, Dowie refuses to offer “views” of the sublime and calls attention to her avoidance of the panoramic mode. She re-emphasizes the ordinariness of the Eastern Carpathians: “If, perforce, I must talk of scenery, I would say that what met the eye—(it is thus that one may write around the word ‘view’ when he will not employ it)—from the top of Szpyci was most characteristic in that it differed most from all rock I have seen elsewhere.”83 The moment of reaching the summit is represented parenthetically: “(summits are all so round! there is too much of them; the ideal summit will have room for but two feet at once).”84 The anticlimax recalls Wordsworth’s disappointment upon crossing the Simplon Pass in book 6 of The Prelude, which Alan Liu characterizes as “the discovery that verticality is itself simply a disguised form of flat repetition.”85 Failing to achieve the mastery of the landscape that is possible for the disembodied eye in travel narratives of exploration, Dowie embraces an alternative version of sublime experience that stems from vulnerability when she calls attention to her dire physical condition: “I flung myself down, very hot and curious feeling. There was a searching, skinning wind which nowise cooled me; my blood boiled, but my skin was dry, as though scratched over with a red-hot curry comb.”86 It turns out that Dowie suffers from what she describes as “blood fever” that she attributes to fleabites. However, the symptoms pass rather quickly when she cools her body with snow, so one suspects that she suffered from heat stroke or altitude sickness. Instead of representing the ascent as transcending the physical limits of the body, Dowie calls attention to the fragility of the human existence. She imagines her body as integral to Nature and envisions dying where “everything would have decayed in due order, clothes too; finally, my sleeve-links, sparkling still, would have fallen through my bare ribbones, and be lying in the crevices of my vertebrae as though it had been mended with gold.”87 Dowie’s vision of imaginative unity with nature is in line with Gillian Rose’s argument that women do not typically see landscapes from the “domineering view of the single point of the omniscient

262

K. GEPHARDT

observer of landscape,” but in relational terms.88 Although Rose mentions interaction with a community as the counterpoint of this domineering gaze, Dowie’s image suggests an alternative relationship with Nature as mother, every traveler’s place of origin and final destination. Interestingly, even the extreme image of the annihilated self still highlights the narrator’s body as a spectacle in the eyes of outside observers who may stumble upon it, and the sleeve links remain as a reminder of the artifice of civilization that the traveler strives to escape. This fantasy, which ultimately rejects power and distance for the sake of desire for connection and vulnerability, also suggests a spiritual insight indicating that the prize of transcending the terms of tourist or explorer modes of engagement comes at the cost of death, or at least dissolution of one’s identity. Following this anti-climactic moment, the rushed conclusion of the book mirrors the culture shock associated with Dowie’s reentry into the Western regime of temporal order and gender constraints. She indirectly expresses the pain of disengagement from Galicia when she describes her change of clothes and shoes. Postoli, the Ruthenian peasants’ leather shoes, are especially difficult to give up, and Dowie dwells not so much on their comfort, but on the ritual of tying, re-threading, or soaking them that made her slow down, since “quite twenty minutes could be agreeably passed in this way.”89 In contrast, putting on even “the lightest, prettiest French shoes,” which takes only “four turns of a button-hook,” seems “commonplace” and “unimaginative.”90 Once she suffers the final “hardship” of “having to pin a hat to [her] head and keep it there” instead of “let[ting] the noonday sun simmer and shimmer in [her] hair,” she retreats rather quickly via train to Krakow, and after sharing a few impressions of the city, announces her departure for Vienna and London.91 The last portion of her return journey through Central Europe is not recorded, but the first edition of the book includes two additional, highly self-conscious paragraphs in which Dowie seems to acknowledge that the construction and appeal of her persona is closely tied to her destination, the borderland province: “With this superficial last impression of Cracow I propose to close my chronicle: there is nothing further to say. If some amusing things occurred upon the journey, and things more amusing still in Vienna, I am not called upon to describe them, for I have been writing of Ruthenia and my experiences among the peasant folk, and having quitted that milieu, my doings cease to be of any import.”92 The rhetorically complex statement indicates that Dowie was aware that expanding the boundaries of the European tour to an unfamiliar location was a key

10

GENDER, GENRE, AND GEOGRAPHY …

263

selling point when she first published the book. While Vienna had already been mapped by guidebooks, Ruthenia could still be “discovered” for the benefit of the British public. She also realized that the gender-bending persona that she created in the book depended on the “large disregard of ordinary custom” that was possible in Ruthenia, but not in Vienna or London.93 However, the construction of the persona also requires selective representation that makes Galicia appear as a backdrop rather than the subject of the narrative. To accentuate further the centrality of “the Girl” in the fourth edition, Dowie and her publisher cut this concluding acknowledgment of Ruthenia as a selling point, removed the map of Poland, and added a preface that foregrounded Dowie’s persona and gender performance. Dowie’s selective erasure of cultural and historical contexts in order to “discover” Galicia not only carves out an imagined space for increased female agency, but also allows for generic innovation that anticipates the twentieth-century evolution of travel writing. A Girl in the Karpathians bridges the gap between Victorian travel writers, who were preoccupied with imperial or tourist mapping of the world, and their Modernist counterparts, who cultivated self-conscious, subjective modes of representation in the face of the rapid loss of uncharted destinations and in reaction to the rise of mass tourism. Paul Fussell’s characterization of twentiethcentury “travelers” and their conception of “the travel book as a record of an inquiry and a report of the effect of the inquiry on the mind and imagination of the traveler” also describes A Girl in the Karpathians and its adaptation of nineteenth-century travel writing conventions.94 However, the liminal status of Galicia enables Dowie to position herself as a traveler between “the two poles that the traveler mediates, retaining all he can of the excitement of the unpredictable attaching to exploration, and fusing that with the pleasure of ‘knowing where one is’ belonging to tourism.”95

Notes 1. Helen Small, introduction to Gallia, ed. Small (London: Everyman, 1995), xxvii–xxviii, outlines the information about the book’s publication and reception. 2. For a broader context for the connection between A Girl in the Karpathians and Dowie’s other writing, as well as for Dowie’s place in the fin-de-siècle feminist movement, see Gail Cunningham, “‘He-Notes’:

264

K. GEPHARDT

3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Reconstructing Masculinity,” in The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, ed. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 94–106; and Molly Youngkin, Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Women’s Press on the Development of the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2007). Beth Rogers, “Ménie Muriel Dowie’s A Girl in the Karpathians (1891): Girlhood and the Spirit of Adventure,” Victorian Literature and Culture 43 (2015): 842. Ibid. Ibid., 845. L. T. Meade, “The Brown Owl,” Atalanta 4, no. 46 (1891): 667, Google Books. Rogers identifies the author as the editor of Atalanta, L. T. Meade, who signed “The Brown Owl,” a recurring column in which this review appeared. Jósef Böröcz, “Travel–Capitalism: The Structure of Europe and the Advent of the Tourist,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 4 (1992): 717. I discuss the construction of Central and Eastern Europe in late Victorian British travel writing in Chapter 4 of The Idea of Europe in British Travel Narratives, 1789–1914 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), and in an earlier essay, “‘The Enchanted Garden’ or ‘the Red Flag’: Eastern Europe in Late Nineteenth-Century British Travel Writing,” Journal of Narrative Theory 35, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 292–306. Charles Boner, Transylvania: Its Products and Its People (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1865), 7. Ibid., 5. Ibid. Nina Mazuchelli, Magyarland, vol. 1 (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881), 126. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 132. Ibid., 204; 202. Ménie Muriel Dowie, “In Ruthenia,” Fortnightly Review 48 (1890): 520, Google Books. Ibid. Ibid., 530. Ibid., 520–21. Ibid., 521. Ibid., 529. “Some Recent Books by Women,” Review of Reviews and World’s Work 3 (1891): 677, Google Books. Ibid. Ibid.

10

GENDER, GENRE, AND GEOGRAPHY …

265

25. Ménie Muriel Dowie, A Girl in the Karpathians, 5th ed. (London: George Philip, 1892), v, Google Books. 26. Ibid., vi; vii. 27. Ibid., vi. 28. Ibid., 31. 29. James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 2. 30. Dowie, Girl in the Karpathians, 5th ed., 181. 31. Patrice Dabrowski, “‘Discovering’ the Galician Borderlands: The Case of the Eastern Carpathians,” Slavic Review 64, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 386, Galileo. 32. Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 6, describes another ethnographic exhibition that took place in Lviv in 1894 and was also visited by Franz Joseph. 33. Dabrowski, “‘Discovering’ the Galician Borderlands,” 386. 34. Ibid., 400. 35. Ibid., 383. 36. Ibid. 37. Dowie, Girl in the Karpathians, 5th ed., 59–60. 38. Ibid., 9. 39. Ibid., 9–10. 40. Ibid., 10. 41. Shirley Foster and Sarah Mills, eds., An Anthology of Women’s Travel Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 252. 42. Ibid., 255. 43. Dowie, Girl in the Karpathians, 5th ed., 168. Dowie borrows from the following lines from Othello: “Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances: / Of moving accidents by flood and field / Of hair-breadth ’scapes i’ th’ imminent deadly breach” (William Shakespeare, Othello: The Moor of Venice, ed. Michael Neill [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006], 1.3.134–36, p. 223, emphasis added). 44. Shakespeare, Othello, 1.3.139, p. 223. 45. Dowie, “In Ruthenia,” 529. 46. Dowie, Girl in the Karpathians, 5th ed., 44. 47. Ibid., 43. 48. Dabrowski, “‘Discovering’ the Galician Borderlands,” 400. 49. Dowie, Girl in the Karpathians, 5th ed., 65. 50. Based on his analysis of Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth, Peter Hulme categorizes travel writing based on the axis of movement (horizontal versus vertical) and relative preoccupation with self and place. See Hulme, “Deep Maps: Travelling on the Spot,” in Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility, ed. Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst (New York; London: Routledge, 2009), 132–47.

266 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

K. GEPHARDT

Dowie, Girl in the Karpathians, 5th ed., 52. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 90; 86. Ibid., 86; 91. John Whale, “Romantics, Explorers, and Picturesque Travellers,” in The Politics of the Picturesque, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 174. See Chapter 4, pages 201–08, in Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), for discussion of British travelers in Africa. Dowie’s later travel piece, “In the Haunted Crimea,” Contemporary Review (July 1900): 39–51, presents a conventionally patriotic and imperialist response to sites associated with the Crimean War. Lily Ford’s essay, “Relocating an Idyll: British Travel Writers Presented the Carpathians, 1862–1912,” Journeys 2, no. 2 (December 2001): 50–78, recognizes this discrepancy between the ideological perspectives on foreign spaces presented in A Girl in the Karpathians and Dowie’s other writing, pointing out that Dowie later “exhibit[s] a sense of pride and involvement in the imperial project that appears nowhere in the book” (65). John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2002), 9. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 59. Dowie, Girl in the Karpathians, 5th ed., 153–54. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7. Dowie, Girl in the Karpathians, 5th ed., 56. Foster and Mills, Anthology of Women’s Travel Writing, 89–90. Dowie, Girl in the Karpathians, 5th ed., 42–43. Ibid., 56. Ibid., 10. Foster and Mills, Anthology of Women’s Travel Writing, 8–9. Dowie, Girl in the Karpathians, 5th ed., 53. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 226. Ibid., 227–28. Ibid., 227; 228. Ibid., 228. Ibid., 236. Urry, Tourist Gaze, 11.

10

GENDER, GENRE, AND GEOGRAPHY …

267

79. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, itself inspired by travel writing, parodies this tendency of British travelers to focus on the peculiarities of cuisines in Central Europe when he describes Harker’s commentary on Hungarian dishes and recording of recipes. The irony is that this consumption of the “other” leads to Harker almost serving as a meal for vampires. 80. Dowie, Girl in the Karpathians, 5th ed., 248. 81. Ibid., 233. 82. Ibid., 234. 83. Ibid., 252. 84. Ibid., 249. 85. Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 21. 86. Ménie Muriel Dowie, A Girl in the Karpathians, 1st ed. (New York: Cassell Publishing Company, 1891), 250, HathiTrust. 87. Dowie, Girl in the Karpathians, 5th ed., 251. 88. Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 112. 89. Dowie, Girl in the Karpathians, 5th ed., 284–85. 90. Ibid., 284; 285. 91. Ibid., 285. 92. Dowie, Girl in the Karpathians, 1st ed., 300. 93. Dowie, Girl in the Karpathians, 5th ed., 283. 94. Paul Fussell, Abroad: Literary Traveling between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 39. 95. Ibid., 39.

CHAPTER 11

Travelers in the Wilderness: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Transformative Travels Jennifer Hayward

In dedicating his 1879 Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes to his longtime friend Sidney Colvin, Robert Louis Stevenson highlights the text’s difference from most travel narratives of its time: “We are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world—all, too, travellers with a donkey.”1 Signaling the narrative’s allegorical scope, this dedication also proclaims Stevenson’s iconoclasm. His first published book, An Inland Voyage (1878), was more conventional, describing the leisurely tour of two well-to-do young British men through Belgium and France. For this second book, by contrast, Stevenson chose a peripheral locale, the French Cévennes, and a still more peripheral companion: a donkey. The remote Cévennes mountains of south central France were known for their rugged landscape, their self-contained and stubbornly independent inhabitants, and a long history of political insurgency. Their geocultural location is, in other words, very much like that of Scotland within

J. Hayward (B) College of Wooster, Wooster, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Colbert and L. Morrison (eds.), Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36146-4_11

269

270

J. HAYWARD

Great Britain: isolated, difficult terrain, saturated with a powerful mythology. Because Stevenson was actively engaged with both Scottish history and his own Scottish identity during this time period, he chose the location for its historical parallels with Scotland. When staying in the small town of Le Monastier, France, in the autumn of 1878, Stevenson finished up several writing projects while planning a walking tour to serve as the basis for a new book.2 Writing to his friend, Charles Baxter, he implies the tour’s significance in the larger plot of his life: “I shall soon go off on a voyage … out of which, if I do not make a book, may my right hand forget its cunning.”3 By riffing on Psalm 137, in which Jewish captives refuse to sing their holy songs when far from Jerusalem lest they forfeit their role as guardians of cultural memory, Stevenson reveals that already he had begun to think of himself as the exiled bard of Scotland, a role that would prove paradoxically liberating for an author who would spend most of his life in exile, singing “the Lord’s song in a foreign land.”4 As we will see, Stevenson wove his religious and national preoccupations into the fabric of Travels with a Donkey. Stevenson’s French “voyage” lasted just twelve days—from 22 September through 2 October 1878—and 125 miles, most of them in a southerly direction, before Stevenson packed it in.5 Back in Edinburgh over the following winter, revising the journal he had written up during the tour itself, he polished the prose, streamlined the narrative, expanded on notes scribbled hastily during the journey, and excluded some of the more personal passages. But the major focus of his revisions came in researching the history of the French Camisards, identifying parallels between the Camisards and the Scottish Covenanters, and honing the narrative. The resulting text, published as Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes by Kegan Paul in June of 1879, would help to launch Stevenson’s literary career. In this essay, I will examine the generic, formal, and thematic innovations of Travels with a Donkey, arguing that the book marks a turning point for Stevenson while illuminating mid-century shifts in the travel genre. Considering Stevenson’s literary experimentation, Oliver Buckton argues that the author should become central to our reassessment of late Victorian modes of literary production: “his position is best understood not as a refutation of realism, as such, but as a rejection of the system of generic classifications.”6 In Travels, Stevenson began his lifelong practice of challenging generic conventions; he worked to articulate a new

11

TRAVELERS IN THE WILDERNESS …

271

spirituality to replace the Scots Presbyterianism he had long resisted; and he explored the Scots history and national identity that would become a major theme in his later works. In paralleling an interior to the exterior journey, the text hearkens back to Romantic-era lyric poetry like Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey (1798) and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818). But Stevenson also added proto-Modernist elements by scaffolding his text on the timeworn pilgrimage (used as a structural device for travel writing since the Middle Ages), and then adding metatextual commentary to call attention to his literary appropriation as well as to his narrator’s subjectivity. As Stevenson himself explained, in a phrase that neatly fuses the text’s allegorical and self-reflexive purposes, “A voyage is a piece of autobiography at best.”7 Critics have emphasized the aesthetic context and proto-modernist concerns of Stevenson’s early travel book, An Inland Voyage (1878). In Travels with a Donkey, Stevenson developed a specifically Scottish perspective that would shape the global wanderings to come. In the course of his pilgrimage—which is at once physical, spiritual, literary, and political—Stevenson deepened and darkened his writing voice as he began to map the contours of individual and national identity. Stevenson anticipates, then, both the consumerist itineraries and the nationalist debates of the future. In what follows, I will first introduce the context in which Stevenson published this travel text and situate it within the generic development of travel literature. Next, I will discuss Stevenson’s innovations, following the text’s structural division into two distinct halves: first the pilgrimage, during which the narrator resolves religious and spiritual conflicts, and second an extended history of the Camisards in the Cévennes, which serves as a meditation—sometimes implicit, other times explicit—on Scottish identity.

Author as Traveler For a young writer seeking publication, travel writing was a likely route to success8 ; the genre had become so popular and profitable by the midVictorian era that even well-established writers like Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope tried their hands at it.9 The genre’s viability as a literary mode spurred Stevenson to turn his excursions in France to good account, particularly since several of his earliest acceptances were for travel

272

J. HAYWARD

essays, including “Roads” (1873), “Ordered South” (1874), and “Walking Tours” (1876), that appeared in popular magazines like Macmillan’s and Cornhill.10 Moreover, the genre is innately hybrid, closely related to other genres that developed during the same time frame, including the autobiography and the pilgrimage, and it strongly influenced the development of the novel.11 Stevenson’s cousin Graham Balfour emphasizes Stevenson’s early love for travel, generally in the form of the walking tours so popular among young men in the mid nineteenth century; Stevenson counted “the towns in which he had slept,” some 210 in all, across England, Scotland, France, and Europe more generally.12 That Stevenson made a point of keeping records indicates both the importance of travel to his sense of self and the fact that he saw travel sites as something worth tallying up. But with travel writing’s many advantages for writers came a number of disadvantages, chief among them being the rise of the tourist industry and consequent decrease in the genre’s prestige. Travels in Europe had become a literary cliché for the well-heeled British since the heyday of the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century. Stevenson responded to this malaise by spending considerable time in Europe in bohemian milieus like artists’ colonies in the French countryside and haunts of the avant-garde in Paris and by publishing travel essays in magazines. When publishing his first books, he set out to explore new mobilities and unfamiliar territory, both geographically and generically: a barge on the Oise River in Belgium and France in An Inland Voyage, and a donkey in the remote Cévennes mountains of south central France in Travels with a Donkey. Part of the impetus for Stevenson’s walking tour was, doubtless, to distract himself from the difficulties of his situation. He was in love with Fanny Osbourne, who had just returned to her husband in California; his parents’ continued opposition to the relationship spurred Stevenson to achieve financial independence. Although An Inland Voyage had not sold as well as he had hoped, Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes moved him a little closer to his goal: he received £30 at publication, with promise of royalties of four shillings per copy after the first 700 copies, and Kegan Paul reported sales of over half of the initial run of 750 copies within the first week. A second edition of 500 copies was issued in the autumn of 1879.13 A month after publication, Stevenson reported jauntily to his mother that he had been told “it was the only book of theirs that was selling at all” and that its success had already equaled that of Inland Voyage, which “has only sold 485 altogether.”14

11

TRAVELERS IN THE WILDERNESS …

273

For the time, these sales figures are far from impressive—but for a writer just starting out and still unsure of his professional viability, even the slight boost in sales, together with positive reinforcement from his publisher, marked important milestones. Although the book’s initial earnings were modest, Travels with a Donkey proved influential. Still today, hikers can follow the “Stevenson Trail” through south-central France, guided by tourist brochures and a website touting Stevenson’s “ground-breaking novel [sic] and classic of outdoor literature that set the standard for travelogues thereafter” and calling the author “the pioneer of the modern hiking movement.”15 And contemporary recreations of that original tour—both with and without donkey—are legion. As Lesley Graham puts it in tracing the phenomenon of “in the footsteps” followers of Stevenson in the Cévennes, “The flow of pursuers has continued unabated [from early last century] until today. Some have travelled on foot … some by bike, others by car. With titles like ‘In the Track of Stevenson,’ ‘On the Trail of Stevenson’ [and] … ‘Dans les Pas de Stevenson,’ their written trails are littered with questions about empathy, the nature of biography and autobiography, mortality, the uncanny, and one of Stevenson’s own favorites, duality.”16 Despite—or perhaps because of—this popular influence, Travels with a Donkey has received relatively little critical attention. Several excellent essays analyze Stevenson’s European travels, but generally in relationship to aesthetic movements or to the larger trajectory of Stevenson’s literary career rather than as a travelogue.17 Caroline McCracken-Flesher situates An Inland Voyage, Stevenson’s first book-length narrative, squarely in the history of the genre,18 as does Lesley Graham, who is unusual in focusing specifically on Travels with a Donkey. Buckton offers a brief but insightful outline of Travels in relation to biographical and generic questions; and Sue Zlosnik and Roslyn Jolly both examine Stevenson’s early travel texts in relation to nineteenth-century travel discourse.19 But none of these readings connect Stevenson’s writing to his Scottish identity in any sustained way. In fact, apart from Jolly’s Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific and Buckton’s Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson, less sustained attention has been paid to Stevenson’s travel writing in general than one would expect.20 This gap is all the more striking because scholars who do focus on the early travels agree that An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes enabled Stevenson to make transitions both personal and professional: he used these publications to situate his craft within the

274

J. HAYWARD

late-nineteenth-century aesthetic movement; to develop the Gothic dualism that would haunt most of his future novels, most obviously Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)21 ; and to achieve his first publications in book form. He had previously published essays—many of them on travel—but these books gave him the confidence to take the plunge into supporting himself through writing, while providing space for literary experimentation.

Travel and Tourism: Generic Transitions By the time Stevenson began writing his transformative travel texts, the genre had long since developed clear conventions. From its beginnings in the eyewitness accounts of the Age of Discovery, British travel writing came, during the Enlightenment, to privilege scientific frames of reference, often focusing on geographical, mineralogical, botanical, or other “discoveries” in addition to the economic imperatives of trade and expansion that had long been its purview, and on regions newly opened to British trade and exploration. These early conventions gave way to the very different aesthetic and class codings of the Grand Tour, the aristocratic tradition that saw travel as the capstone of a gentleman’s education, which began in the seventeenth century and reached its apex in the eighteenth: by 1785, according to one observer, some 40,000 British citizens, mostly men, toured the Continent.22 After an enforced hiatus in tourism during the Napoleonic Wars, the tradition of continental travels returned, but in dramatically different form owing to the steady rise in mass tourism. By 1873, when Stevenson published his first essay-travelogue, “Roads,” in The Portfolio magazine, the “traveller-tourist” distinction emphasized by Paul Fussell was already well established.23 As James Buzard points out, the distinction takes on a class valence as technologies of transportation make mass tourism increasingly accessible; while eighteenth-century young men on the Grand Tour had viewed their travels as an adventure as well as a means of further education and acculturation, nineteenth-century tourists were not seen (by upperclass visitors) as pursuing the same lofty goals, but rather as seeking a safe, predictable entertainment or commodity.24 Because these very different goals both imply and produce a different relationship to sites on the traveler’s or tourist’s itinerary as well as to information about those sites, the traveler/tourist distinction also resulted in changes to the travel-writing

11

TRAVELERS IN THE WILDERNESS …

275

genre. For example, as exploration of new locations was replaced by carefully orchestrated visits to sites already designated as worthy of aesthetic or other appreciation, the growing tourist industry produced demand for “objective,” goal-oriented handbooks listing the most important sights, travel routes, and accommodations. As a result, by the time Stevenson began publishing, travel literature had become thoroughly commodified, with “travel writer” an established profession and subgenres that ranged from adventure travel to the tourist guidebook. Meanwhile, more independent travelers of Stevenson’s time stepped in to fill the void left by guidebooks, writing accounts of less-frequented regions for the benefit of like-minded travelers. To set themselves apart from these tourists, many travel writers began to echo Romantic-era travel texts in emphasizing personal reactions and subjective rather than objective experiences. Although his became by far the bestknown account of the Cévennes in his time, Stevenson was not alone in seeking to break new ground. Other writers had the same publishing strategy: broadening the acceptable aims and range of travel literature by emphasizing their departure from the conventions of a tourist-driven Murray’s or Baedeker guide. One popular subgenre might be dubbed the neo-tour narrative: mid-Victorian, middle-class echoes of the Grand Tour written from the perspectives of privileged young men rambling through picturesque locations.25 Another subgenre seeking to distinguish itself from the tourist guidebook might be dubbed “off the beaten track.” Just one instance is English novelist and travel writer Matilda Betham-Edwards’s Holidays in Eastern France, which ran in Frazer’s Magazine in 1878—the year of Stevenson’s own journey.26 By the late nineteenth century, in reaction to the rise of the Baedeker generations, travel writers often signaled their non-tourist status overtly, as Betham-Edwards does in her introduction: “‘Travelling in France without hotels, or guide-books,’ might, with very little exaggeration, be chosen as a title to this volume, which is, indeed, the record of one visit after another among charming French people, and in delightful places, out of the ordinary track of the tourist ….it was my good fortune … to be no tourist indeed, but a guest, welcomed at every stage.”27 Betham-Edwards accomplishes several key goals in these first pages: she establishes both authenticity and authority as one who has traveled “out of the ordinary track of the tourist”; she sketches her itinerary; and she establishes a quick, enthusiastic, and rather breathless narrator.

276

J. HAYWARD

Just as Betham-Edwards sets herself apart from the “ordinary … tourist,” so Stevenson establishes a distinctive voice and persona to set himself apart from contemporary writers. In Travels with a Donkey, Stevenson decenters the journey itself, building on—but transforming—earlier conventions. These include the authorial self-reflexivity of eighteenth-century travel tales; the Romantic heightening of the sentimental tradition in transforming the narrator into shifting subject, so that the interior journey becomes as important as, and proceeds in relation to, the exterior movement through space28 ; and the time-honored structure of the pilgrimage, as will be discussed in more detail shortly. Stevenson’s debts to literary precursors were remarked on in his own time. One contemporary reviewer of An Inland Voyage noted, “we have travellers a-many, but since the days of Laurence Sterne we have had no such travellers as this.”29 A contemporary review of Travels with a Donkey similarly compared Stevenson to Sterne,30 who himself both established and mocked Grand Tour conventions in his fictional Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). Stevenson’s revisions of eighteenthcentury and Romantic modes here can also be seen to prefigure modernist concerns: the author’s interior explorations merge with, or even supersede, his voyages through external spaces, allowing him freedom to experiment with new literary forms, reconfigure the eighteenth-century picaresque while appropriating its emphasis on the sentiments of the traveler, break the boundaries of the traditional travel essay by incorporating fictional techniques to the essay, and interrogate the interrelationships between individual and national identities and the stories we tell about them.

Travels with a Donkey Travels with a Donkey’s two distinct parts signal its formal and thematic divisions. The first section, which takes up some two-thirds of the total text, is the pilgrimage itself, divided into four parts that trace the narrator’s journey from purgatory to spiritual certainty; the chapters here are Velay, Upper Gévaudan, Our Lady of the Snows, and Upper Gévaudan (Continued). The book’s final section, The Country of the Camisards, moves into much different territory both geographically and thematically, focusing on the region’s history of religious dissent and persecution, with explicit parallels to the history of the Scots Covenanters.

11

TRAVELERS IN THE WILDERNESS …

277

In choosing the Cévennes, Stevenson set out to explore a less frequented region, and one located both in the metaphorical stadial past—an earlier, more “primitive” stage of human existence—and on the margins of the metropole. Situated in south-central France, east of the Pyrenees and west of Avignon and Nimes, the Cévennes are a rugged and littlevisited part of the Massif Central mountain range with a reputation for wildness and isolation. With no major cities, well-known ruins, or renowned artists, the region was beyond the pale of tourism. When Stevenson wrote his narrative, even the ubiquitous Baedeker and Murray guides, with their practical emphasis on accommodations and itineraries, did not venture to cover the Cévennes. Baedeker’s Handbooks for Travelers series initially focused on the Rhine region and Italy, only later branching out into other major tourist sites including Paris and London. It was almost entirely uninterested in the Cévennes, avoiding the region entirely in the 1860s and early 1870s and adding only a brief mention in its 1878 guide, Paris and its Environs, with Routes from London to Paris, and from Paris to the Rhine and Switzerland. The closest to the region that Murray ventured, in its 1878 edition of the Hand-book for Central, Southern and Eastern France, was in the subsection on Eastern France, where the Hand-book includes a passing reference to the Cévennes: “Bordering upon the Ardèche to the S. extends the wild mountain system of the Cévennes, which may be termed a moral extinct volcano, the last stronghold of persecuted Protestantism in France, ‘Le Désert,’ as its own inhabitants called it, while, further in allusion to the children of Israel, they styled themselves ‘Les Enfans de Dieu.’”31 The metaphor of a “moral volcano” is particularly curious, implying as it does a confluence of moral and geographical characteristics—and was Stevenson thinking of this odd reference to “the children of Israel” when referring to Jewish exiles in his letter to Baxter? In any case, the Murray Hand-book’s dismissive summary emphasizes the Cévennes as “wild,” dangerous, and prone to an excessive religious zeal antithetical to “civilized” culture, a geo-temporal location very similar to that of popular representations of the Scottish Highlands. Like the Cévennes, Scotland was often depicted as a liminal zone in both travel literature and popular representations.32 In addition to choosing an unlikely spot for a tourist to visit, Stevenson develops a distinctive form for Travels with a Donkey. Right from the start, Travels claims allegorical resonance not only in its epigraph but in its structure. Consciously interweaving interior and exterior exploration, the

278

J. HAYWARD

book’s architecture successfully captures its narrator’s psychological journey while meditating on place, persona, and national identity. To emphasize the primacy of the interior journey, Stevenson offers no clearly labeled maps, routes, directions, or lists of the best hotels. Instead he emphasizes his deviations from the planned itinerary—as when he misses a turning, or follows incorrect directions given by a local, and then stumbles about, lost in the darkness. He provides far more elaborate descriptions of nights spent alone under the stars than of the inns along the route, and rarely offers names or identifying markers for the latter. As he develops his post-Romantic emphasis on interiority, too, Stevenson draws attention to his literary persona, a writer and artificer throughout the book.33 He does this through brief reminders, as when he comments occasionally that he has delayed his departure, of a morning, to “write up” his travel journal, or otherwise draws attention to the text in our hands as the product of his labor.34 He also draws attention to the low status of a writer, as when he humorously recounts the eagerness of a monk to introduce Stevenson as a geographer, rather than an author, to ensure him a warm welcome at Our Lady of the Snows monastery.35 Perhaps most explicitly and entertainingly, Stevenson deliberately contrasts his own book with the travel guides discussed above by means of playful metatextual commentary. The distinction between tourist and traveler is of course a timeworn one that “literary” travel writers continually enforced, a fact that underlines this time period as one of rapid transition and still undefined subgenres. In his first book, An Inland Voyage, Stevenson had explicitly distinguished his narrator from the tourist crowd, but in a self-consciously mannered way, as when the narrator mocks the “the ruck and rabble of British touristry … Murray in hand” and takes care to emphasize his own difference: “I might come from any part of the globe, it seems, except from where I do.”36 Stevenson is subtler in his second book, focusing on generic convention rather than on essentialist identity. For example, at the beginning of Travels with a Donkey, Stevenson overtly draws attention to readers’ expectations by recording a conversation with the innkeepers of the auberge at Bouchet St. Nicolas, during which his hostess summarizes key conventions of the “manners and mores” subgenre of travel writing and anticipates the content and generic origins of the travel text Stevenson has yet to write:

11

TRAVELERS IN THE WILDERNESS …

279

I was tightly cross-examined about my journey; and the lady understood in a moment, and sketched out what I should put into my book when I got home. “Whether people harvest or not in such or such a place; if there were forests; studies of manners; what, for example, I and the master of the house say to you; the beauties of Nature, and all that.” And she interrogated me with a look. “It is just that,” said I. “You see,” she added to her husband, “I understood that.”37

And indeed, this woman’s predictions prove accurate: the published book in the reader’s hands does mention what is harvested in each location (walnuts and chestnuts near the Tarn, chestnuts in the Mimente valley). It does describe the beauties of nature and celebrates the presence, or bemoans the absence, of forests. It does depict typical travelnarrative “manners and mores” of the French of all walks of life. Most directly metatextual, the book in our hands does indeed recount what the innkeeper and her husband say to Stevenson, and he to them. By including a laundry-list of travel-text expectations in the book’s opening pages, Stevenson underscores the genre’s hardened conventions. By putting that list in the voice of a conventional kindly innkeeper in rural France, he implies the genre’s ubiquity across lines of region and class. And by playfully conforming to—even as he calls attention to—that list, he gives an early modernist twist to the genre, both following and challenging its conventions. “Manners and Mores” travelogues often touch not only on the conventional topics outlined above, but also on more complex issues like history, national identity, and the intertwining of a specific geo-cultural locale with the character of its inhabitants. So Stevenson is not unique in addressing these subjects. The difference comes in the narrator’s restless, self-questioning, meditative voice. Travels with a Donkey is a lyrical narrative that simultaneously comments on and departs from generic conventions of its day. Ian Duncan argues that Stevenson “did not write ‘novels’ according to the ways in which the genre came to be defined, and its aesthetic norms established, in the retrospective view of twentieth-century criticism.”38 Duncan’s analysis can be extended to Stevenson’s travel writing, which challenges generic boundaries even more fluidly. Just as, in Duncan’s view, Stevenson’s departures from convention are most productively read not as lapses in authorial control but as a deliberate strategy, part of a larger critique of the novel itself, so too

280

J. HAYWARD

his travel writing experiments with generic expectations—a technique that he will ultimately transfer to expectations about national identity.

Pilgrim’s Progress In Travels with a Donkey, then, Stevenson set out to redefine the travel genre in order to move toward a deeper exploration of interiority that hearkens back to its Romantic predecessors while adding a new selfconsciousness for a new era. At the same time, Stevenson uses his narrative to establish a stronger moral vision that builds on the Christian tradition but also moves beyond it as the narrator develops a new spiritual awareness. Perhaps responding to critiques that Inland Voyage’s narrative persona was a mere dilettante or flaneur, Stevenson abandoned overt philosophical musings; instead, anticipating the modernist textual appropriations of Joyce, Eliot, and others, Stevenson built his second book on the strong scaffold of John Bunyan’s 1678 The Pilgrim’s Progress, a core Scots Presbyterian text.39 This structure would allow him to develop a new spiritual awareness slowly, in tandem with his journey, and to resolve the text’s religious questions in ways that resonate personally, and later politically as well. Bunyan’s was a central text in Stevenson’s childhood, as it was for most Scottish children of his generation; as early biographer John Kelman tells us, “Stevenson’s works are full of references to and quotations from the great allegory with which his mind had been familiarised in childhood.”40 Walter Crane’s frontispiece for the 1892 Chatto & Windus edition of Travels with a Donkey imagines Stevenson himself as a Bunyanesque “ingenious dreamer” and depicts his journey, in foreshortened and allegorical form, in ways that echo popular visual mappings of The Pilgrim’s Progress . In addition to the dedication, which alludes to “what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world,” as discussed above, Stevenson makes both his thematic debt to Bunyan and his allegorical intentions clear by using the iconic book as a touchstone throughout the text. Thus he compares himself ironically to Christian as he wrestles with his pack,41 and later, perhaps more seriously, parallels himself and his companion to Christian and Faithful as he exchanges views on religion with the man he calls the “Plymouth Brother.”42 In what seems, again, a proto-modernist technique, Stevenson uses the teleological structure of The Pilgrim’s Progress to add backbone to what is otherwise a fairly episodic narrative, and moreover

11

TRAVELERS IN THE WILDERNESS …

281

one divided into distinct halves, the pilgrimage and the comparison of Scotland and the Cévennes. For the first four chapters, Stevenson relies on the forward momentum of the pilgrimage to add purpose and direction to his philosophical and spiritual musings. Most centrally, Stevenson’s Travels maps the journey of a complex and ambivalent consciousness seeking answers to some of the central conundrums of his day, particularly the divided consciousness Stevenson feels as both a Scotsman and a traveler in France, presumed to be English by most of the people he meets along the way, but excluded from a comfortable English identity by both personal and historical conflict, both Presbyterian and Catholic sympathies and revulsion. Stevenson recreates the sin-to-salvation structure of the pilgrimage in geographical terms, so that his journey moves through stages carefully arranged to follow a pilgrim’s progress from a dark purgatory, through a slough of despond, to the light of a resolution that fuses a paradisiacal natural landscape with a new spiritual harmony. This structure necessarily strengthened the narrative’s own allegorical form, its spiritual progress from initial despair at wrestling with the allegorical donkey through final epiphany, by connecting the spiritual journey to a difficult geo-historical landscape that inspires interrogation of religious belief and national identity. In Travels with a Donkey, Stevenson, the supplicant, sets out with his faithful retainer, Modestine, to learn the lessons of the landscape, weather, and open road. Along the way, he wrestles with religious questions (a subject that, probably not incidentally, underlay the ongoing battle then raging between Stevenson and his father). The first chapter’s early stages are purgatorial, albeit humorously so, as Stevenson adjusts to dragging his reluctant donkey (often seen as metaphorically standing in for Fanny, or at least for some anticipated human companion43 ) with him through life. Even after the keeper of the auberge in Bouchet St. Nicolas, where he stops after his first day’s journey, makes him a goad to drive his donkey more effectively, his trek through the Upper Gévaudan is described in nightmarish terms. Wrestling with his unfamiliar companion, her unwieldy pack, unaccommodating weather, and an uncompromising landscape, Stevenson flounders: It was not only heavy thoughts about Modestine that weighted me upon the way; it was a leaden business altogether. For first, the wind blew so rudely that I had to hold on the pack with one hand from Cheylard to

282

J. HAYWARD

Luc; and second, my road lay through one of the most beggarly countries in the world. It was like the worst of the Scottish Highlands, only worse; cold, naked, and ignoble, scant of wood, scant of heather, scant of life. A road and some fences broke the unvarying waste, and the line of the road was marked by upright pillars, to serve in time of snow.44

This opening is haunted by echoes of the first chapter Stevenson originally planned, which was to have paralleled the Cévennes with the Scottish Highlands in ways that will be discussed at the end of this essay. Perhaps with the ghost of that chapter in mind—it would be published only after his death45 —Stevenson personifies the landscape by using the same adverbs and adjectives he also used in his travelogue on Edinburgh, Picturesque Notes, published just the year earlier in 1878. These descriptors include “worst,” “rudely,” “cold, “naked,” and “scant”; the narrator clearly wonders why he has undertaken this “leaden” journey that provides no wings to his thought, no inspiration for his writing.46 The landscape in this first stage of the journey furthers the purgatorial tone of the text; in a passage that again echoes Picturesque Notes,47 Stevenson describes the populated uplands as characterized by inhabitants who are sometimes “rude and forbidding,” along with weather that is often “perishing cold” and a landscape depicted as a purgatorial “grey … naked platform.”48 Altogether, the land holds little prospect of the adventures that Stevenson, who had already made clear to his readers that he is quite familiar with key conventions of the travel genre, needs to supply. But with an unerring sense of pacing, he soon heartens both his readers and himself with a surge of suspense: “the clouds shed a uniform and purplish shadow, sad and somewhat menacing, exaggerating height and distance, and throwing into still higher relief the twisted ribbons of the highway. It was a cheerless prospect, but one stimulating to a traveller. For I was now upon the limit of Velay, and all that I beheld lay in another county—wild Gévaudan, mountainous, uncultivated, and but recently disforested from terror of the wolves.”49 Setting the stage for the second part of his pilgrimage, Stevenson stirs hopes of narrative adventure by metatextually zooming out of the narrative once more to comment on the disappointing predictability of late-nineteenth-century travel: “Wolves, alas, like bandits, seem to flee the travellers’ advance; and you may trudge through all our comfortable Europe, and not meet with an adventure worth the name. But here, if anywhere, a man was on the frontiers of hope.”50 Drawing our attention to the “wild” and “primitive”

11

TRAVELERS IN THE WILDERNESS …

283

nature of the Cévennes, here depicted as a remote region where a traveler might finally encounter adventures worthy of a travel text, Stevenson ends the chapter with a suitably suspenseful and symbolic crossing: “I crossed the bridge and entered the county of Gévaudan.”51 Just as the narrator’s deliberate building of suspense draws attention to travel conventions, the thematic emphasis on crossing physical frontiers speaks to the exterior and interior journeys simultaneously, reminding us of the pilgrim’s progress through spatial stages even while emphasizing the narrator’s movement from the known to the unknown. The second stage of the journey continues the allegory of a pilgrim’s progress. Indeed, the epigraph of this section comes direct from Bunyan: “The way also here was very wearisome through dirt and slabbiness; nor was there on all this ground so much as one inn nor victualling-house wherein to refresh the feebler sort.”52 Stevenson, noting his own increasing ill-health (physically he was certainly one of “the feebler sort”), structures his progression to parallel a pilgrim’s symbolic movement through a series of trials. The narrator’s physical and moral strength diminishes until ultimately he gives up all hope of reaching his immediate destination, the village of Cheylard, and sleeps in a wet wood, where he falls asleep to the realization that the landscape has become different, strange, other: even the wind “sang to a different tune among these woods of Gévaudan. … [M]y last conscious state was one of wonder at the foreign clamor in my ears.”53 Fresh from this disorienting experience, having become truly the “foreigner at home,” as he would describe himself in a later essay,54 Stevenson is primed for his next and darkest trial: a stay in a Trappist monastery, Our Lady of the Snows. Stevenson heightens the irony of this site of religious pilgrimage as the low point of his pilgrim’s progress, self-reflexively emphasizing his dread of the monastery, announcing that he approached it with “unaffected terror,” and commenting drily, “This it is to have had a Protestant education.”55 Interestingly given his ongoing religious battle with his father, he also plays with distinctions among sects of Christianity, neatly reversing the typical Protestant condemnation of Catholic “superstition” and idolatry in noting his own “slavish superstitious fear” and approaching the first monk he encounters with “a far-away superstitious reverence.” In this section, too, he heightens the connection between this remote region of France and a geo-temporal past: he is unsure how to address the monk because he perceives him as temporally other, “a

284

J. HAYWARD

medieval friar” who “might have been buried any time these thousand years.”56 During his time in the monastery, Stevenson wrestles with other travelers who attack his country’s Protestant faith as heresy, asking him “many questions as to the contemptible faith of my fathers,” urging him to convert his own father (a new level of irony not lost upon Stevenson the heretic son), and asking him whether he does not fear for his mortal soul.57 The encounters, first with the monk and then with these new interlocutors, spur Stevenson to interrogate national identity, as we will see shortly. Here, in relation to Bunyan’s archetypal narrative, it is intriguing to note the extent to which Catholic zealots are constructed as trials to be surmounted, although he ultimately decides that his principal challenger, a priest also visiting the monastery, “was no dangerous deceiver; but a country parson, full of zeal and faith.”58 At the end of the chapter, in which the narrator’s faith is most directly challenged, Stevenson at last articulates his own spiritual beliefs: like a good pilgrim, he gives thanks for being “free to wander, free to hope, and free to love.”59 Having developed a clearer spiritual vision, Stevenson’s persona enters the final phase of his pilgrimage: the progression from darkness to light. Stevenson emphasizes the transition sharply, using literary strategies he would wield even more effectively in his next travel narratives, Amateur Emigrant ([1880] 1895), Across the Plains (1882), and Silverado Squatters (1884). As he reaches the highest point of Gévaudan, the Pic de Finiels as he calls it, Stevenson eagerly anticipates his descent into the Promised Land spread out below: his altitude “commands a view over all lower Languedoc to the Mediterranean Sea.”60 Stevenson divided his pilgrimage into distinct realms to emphasize the geo-cultural divide between the bleaker northern part of his journey and the lushly described, picturesque southern half. Jolly notes that “Stevenson twice makes the point that his journey through the Cévennes fell into two distinct parts, a northern and a southern”; that he uses this geographical divide to develop larger thematic fissures; and that the narrative tone becomes increasingly dark as the journey progresses.61 Thus, the northern realm is characterized by bleakness, decline, and absence: “Behind was the upland northern country through which my way had lain, peopled by a dull race, without wood, without much grandeur of hill-form, and famous in the past for little beside wolves.”62 By contrast, the southern lands are described as rich in plenitude and possibility: “in front of me, half veiled in sunny haze, lay

11

TRAVELERS IN THE WILDERNESS …

285

a new Gévaudan, rich, picturesque, illustrious for stirring events”63 (88– 89). With the move into the sunny realm of the south, Stevenson also moves the narrative from an emphasis on the individual pilgrim’s progress to a larger geo-cultural examination of the interconnections between a specific landscape and its people. Before doing so, his pilgrim-protagonist must resolve the spiritual crisis that keeps dragging his attention back to the individual self. Given the text’s allegorical framework, the first stage of the journey takes on the resonance of metaphor as Stevenson finally acknowledges that he has little interest in the part of the world he has chosen to visit, instead highlighting the narrator’s subjectivity or interior travels, in a move that simultaneously echoes Romantic-era sentimental travels and looks forward to the genre of extreme or adventure travel: “Why any one should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more than my much-inventing spirit can suppose. For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.”64 This passage entangles interior and exterior journeys through its vivid, physical language contrasting the “feather-bed of civilisation” with the concrete manifestations of Stevenson’s journey: the actual hard traveling surface. Here, the spiritual journey not only mirrors but is virtually dependent upon the physical one for forcing what today we would term mindfulness. Decentering the tourist itinerary and picturesque sights of the stereotypical travel writer, Stevenson continues to enforce readers’ attention to the meditative function of the physical experience: “To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?”65 Like the paddle-induced trance described in An Inland Voyage, the repeated physical actions demanded by the pack-saddle enable Stevenson to quiet his mind. This shift in emotional register marks the turning point in the pilgrimage, just as Travels with a Donkey itself marks a shift in Stevenson’s sense of himself as both a writer and a Scotsman. In the euphoric chapter, “A Night among the Pines,” Stevenson finally achieves both aesthetic and spiritual expansion, transforming his experience of both self and landscape, or rather of self in relation to and inseparable from the landscape:

286

J. HAYWARD

A faint wind, more like a moving coolness than a stream of air, passed down the glade from time to time; so that even in my great chamber the air was being renewed all night long. I thought with horror of the inn at Chasseradès and the congregated nightcaps … I have not often enjoyed a more serene possession of myself, nor felt more independent of material aids. The outer world, from which we cower into our houses, seemed after all a gentle habitable place; and night after night a man’s bed, it seemed, was laid and waiting for him in the fields, where God keeps an open house. I thought I had rediscovered one of those truths which are revealed to savages and hid from political economists: at the least, I had discovered a new pleasure for myself.66

The narrator’s epiphany concludes in a merging of the physical and spiritual, self and landscape. The structure of pilgrimage has also allowed Stevenson to blur the boundaries between travel text and autobiography: after battling through the stages of the journey, he arrives at a spiritual understanding. Note that this “truth” is not new, but “rediscovered”; note that it is ancient rather than modern, owned by the “savage” rather than the “economist”; note, finally, that while God enters the spiritual resolution, it is only through acting as nature’s innkeeper. The text’s allegorical and personal functions fuse in this passage. This rapt moment is not, however, the end goal of Stevenson’s pilgrimage. Instead, his new spiritual awareness—one that is, crucially, founded on a clearer understanding of the relationship between the human and the natural that he would take with him into his future career—frees him to pursue his true subject with the depth and passion it deserves. In the book’s final phase, Stevenson transforms the allegorical architecture he has used thus far. In establishing the first four major divisions of the book—each titled after the geographical region it covers—he adapted the traditional structure of a pilgrim’s progress to chart his own spiritual growth away from a specific creed and toward a larger existential harmony with the universe and with himself. By contrast, the book’s final division, titled “The Country of the Camisards,” adapts an allegorical architecture that connects a specific landscape to the people who inhabit it and charts national rather than personal transformation.

Cévennes and Scotland In this final section, Stevenson represents the Cévennes as France’s past. At the same time, he draws larger parallels between the Cévennes and Scotland in telling the story of marginalized peoples’ long struggle for

11

TRAVELERS IN THE WILDERNESS …

287

religious and political freedom. Thus, Stevenson’s interior and exterior explorations double as his journey enters its final phase: having reached a spiritual epiphany that quiets his personal religious divisions, he broadens his exploration into the religiously fraught history of the region through which he travels. The individual pilgrim seeking unity and healing thus stands in, metaphorically, for the divided nation seeking peace and unity despite the historical and religious conflicts that tear it apart. By means of these two halves of his text, as yet imperfectly connected, Stevenson begins to develop the distinctly Scottish perspective that would shape the historical and adventure novels to come. One motive for the author’s choice of the Cévennes was that the region’s cultural location in France parallels Scotland’s in Great Britain: both were depicted as remote, rough, difficult to traverse, and temporally distinct, and either charmingly primitive or scarily backward, depending on one’s perspective. In addition to noting these parallels between the Cévennes’ geographical and cultural otherness within France and Scotland’s within Great Britain, Stevenson was fascinated by historical parallels between the two cultures. Writing to his mother from France just before he set out on his tour, he explained, “I am reading up the Camisards and shall go a walk in the scene of their wars, the Hautes Cevennes. … I shall ask you to send me at once [two biographies of the Scottish protestant protesters, the Covenanters, titled] Patrick Walker’s Lives … and Howie’s Worthies … as I want them badly for work.”67 In fact, Stevenson had originally intended to open the book by explicitly paralleling France and Scotland in a first chapter titled “Travels with a Donkey in the French Highlands,” to provide a historical and cultural overview of the region. Although he later abandoned that plan, preferring instead to launch readers directly into the narrative momentum of a pilgrimage, he did develop the parallel with Scotland at the end of the book. He interweaves a history of the Camisards, the early-eighteenth-century French Huguenot movement pitting Protestants against Catholics, with parallels and allusions to the Covenanters, the seventeenth-century Scottish religious movement pitting zealous Presbyterians against the threat of a Catholic resurgence. As Jenni Calder observes, Stevenson’s very Scottish “fascination with fanatical guerrilla war breaks out, a fascination with a dedicated, heroic minority in a struggle against established power.”68 Ellen Lévy summarizes the geographical, cultural, and historical parallels “that will preoccupy [Stevenson] throughout his tour: it was here that in the years 1702-1705 the Protestant Camisards rose up against their

288

J. HAYWARD

persecutors, just as in a previous century the Scottish Covenanters had rebelled against Charles II as head of the church—breaking away—and being persecuted for it—to form the Church of Scotland.”69 The historical parallels between the two movements are clear. Perhaps less apparent are the thematic dualities encapsulated in their struggles: between Protestants and Catholics, persecuted and persecutors, the margins and the center. In one of this final section’s last chapters, “The Heart of the Country,” Scotland’s religious fissures come explicitly to the fore. Stevenson sets out the divisions among the Camisards themselves, and then stages a “religious controversy” spurred by two Catholic visitors with whom he dines. “The whole discussion was tolerantly conducted,” our narrator notes, which “surprised a man brought up among the infinitesimal and contentious differences of Scotland.” Praising the courage and respect that permits these men to “differ in a kind spirit,” Stevenson concludes the discussion with a further thought for his country’s national identity: “The true work of Bruce and Wallace was the union of the nations; not that they should stand apart a while longer, skirmishing upon their borders; but that, when the time came, they might unite with selfrespect.”70 As Stevenson here interrogates the historical oppositions that gave rise to political struggles, the binaries begin to blur, resulting in a deconstruction of accepted “truths” about the historical and cultural location of the Cévennes and Scotland alike. Contemporary reviewers of Travels with a Donkey also noted Stevenson’s many parallels between Scotland and France. Less interested in Scottish national character than in distinguishing the British from the French, however, they tended to focus on moral and aesthetic questions. For example, the Spectator fixated upon Stevenson’s supposedly un-British cruelty to his donkey Modestine, driving home the point with a dig against the French: “It is as if Mr. Stevenson were rather a Frenchman born out of place, than a Scotsman of the Scots.”71 But this reviewer unintentionally pinpoints the great difference between Travels with a Donkey and Stevenson’s earlier works: here, for the first time, Stevenson draws attention to the ways that he—a true Scotsman of the Scots—can, by virtue of his own position on the margins of history, empathetically inhabit the subject position of a Frenchman born out of place. One factor shaping Stevenson’s sense of difference from other travel writers was that, as a middle-class Scotsman, he was both part of and excluded from the growing sense of British imperial power. Of course,

11

TRAVELERS IN THE WILDERNESS …

289

Scots signed the 1707 Act of Union precisely to gain access to the English empire, an act that dramatically increased the percentage of Scots serving in both military and civil networks abroad. One might, then, expect Stevenson to follow the lead of many nineteenth-century Scottish travelers, for example Maria Graham, Frances Erskine Inglis, and Thomas Cochrane, who tended to elide their national identity when traveling abroad, often passing as English. Indeed, in An Inland Voyage, Stevenson’s narrator follows this tendency in calling himself Scottish only once— and that in passing—while explicitly claiming English identity at several points in the text. By contrast, Stevenson’s self-representation in Travels with a Donkey is quite different. The narrator refers to himself as a Scotsman on several occasions, even asserting an embodied dimension of national identity in claiming “Scottish eyes” and a “Scottish body.” And in the last section of his book, Stevenson brings his Scots identity to the fore in emphasizing the interrelations among place, history, and national character. As Buckton notes, Stevenson develops an extended historical parallel between “the Camisards of the Cévennes and the Covenanters in his native Scotland,” as well as noting the topographical similarities between the two regions.72 Both, Stevenson explains, are peripheral and often ignored regions within larger nations, and both suffer as a result of geographic and political marginalization. Why this dramatic shift toward an overt examination of Scots identity? Perhaps because the young writer was gaining confidence; perhaps because his planned writing projects at the time included Scottish histories and other themes closely connected to national identity; perhaps because he had begun to see himself as joining a long lineage of Scottish writers whose vocation was to provide a voice, and a narrative, for Scotland. From the 1870s onward, Stevenson began to consciously align himself with the tradition Katie Trumpener has termed bardic nationalism, that movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in which Scottish, Irish, and Welsh authors worked to recover and revitalize national histories by hearkening back to the ancient Gaelic tradition of the bard, thus implicitly fighting for cultural specificity and against what is now termed internal colonization.73 So he published an essay titled “Some Aspects of Robert Burns” in Cornhill Magazine in 1879, the same year he published Travels with a Donkey,74 and, as late as 1891, Stevenson pleads with an influential Scottish book collector to save any relics of his fellow bards Robert Burns and Robert Fergusson, explaining, “we are three Robins who have touched the Scots lyre this

290

J. HAYWARD

last century. … You will never know, nor will any man, how deep this feeling is: I believe Fergusson lives in me.”75 Finally, in Travels with a Donkey, Stevenson actually invents a new Scottish bard named W. P. Anatine, attributing to him a fragment of a poem on Scotland’s violent and divided past that was actually written by Stevenson himself.76 Following the tradition of the bard, then, Stevenson sought to develop a literary voice and form that both thermalized and interrogated extant models of national identity while contributing to the discursive formation of a national memory that was distinctively Scottish. Given Stevenson’s self-positioning as the last of the “three Robins” as well as literary heir to Sir Walter Scott, we can see Travels with a Donkey as a first step toward the author’s long-term ambition of creating a national literature to forge the unification of Scotland. As he wrote up his travels in France for consumption by a British audience, Stevenson simultaneously worked to craft a flexible architecture for the travel work, one that allowed him to communicate the uneasy subject position he inhabited as, in his own perfectly unhomely phrase, a “foreigner at home.” Along the way, he successfully challenged, and then crossed, generic, conventional, and national boundaries, while expanding his narrative and thematic possibilities. Stevenson’s travel texts, then, prepared the way for his future explorations of uncharted territory: the alienated wanderers, unfamiliar landscapes, and uncanny doubles of the novels to come. Today’s trekkers who follow in Stevenson’s footsteps and write up their journeys generally pay homage to their progenitor’s merging of exterior and interior landscapes, which they often dub either neo-Romantic or proto-Modernist. Both terms acknowledge the continued relevance of exploring new territories as a means to the exploration of self. Today’s travelers are less interested in his interrogation of the specific historical, cultural, and geographical determinants of the Cévennes and its citizens. But some locals know exactly what he attempted to do for their culture— and for his own. Asked why this “Ecossaise veritable” continues to have such an impact on the identity of the people of the Cévennes today, a local politician and historian in St. Germain de Calberte told the contemporary Scottish writer Alastair McIntosh, “We revere Stevenson because he showed us the landscape that makes us who we are.”77 Stevenson similarly revealed the interior landscape that made the Scottish who they were—and through his literary pilgrimage, Stevenson makes travel itself transformative, creating “foreigners at home” who cross national boundaries and gain tolerance and sympathy for others, no matter how different

11

TRAVELERS IN THE WILDERNESS …

291

in race or religion. We today, in an increasingly intolerant and nationalist era, should pay attention.

Notes 1. Frontispiece to Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey and An Inland Voyage, ed. Wilbur L. Cross (New York: Macmillan, 1915). 2. These writing projects included “Latter-Day Arabian Nights” as well as another book that fit loosely into the travel genre: the essays of place shortly to be published as Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes (1878). 3. Quoted in Roger Swearingen, The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide (Hamden: Archon Books, 1980), 35. 4. Stevenson went on to parallel the Scottish and Jewish diasporas explicitly in his California travel text, The Silverado Squatters (1883), where he also continues the theme of the exile keening for the homeland, echoing Robert Gilfillan’s “The Exile’s Song”: “Oh, why left I my hame?” (Robert Louis Stevenson, From Scotland to Silverado, ed. James D. Hart [1884; Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966], 210). 5. According to his Travels, Stevenson ultimately abandoned the tour when his donkey, Modestine, was pronounced “unfit for travel.” According to a condescending review in the Spectator, by contrast, he abandoned it when “the delights of social life and the prospect of letters become too alluring for Mr. Stevenson to bear further delay” (“Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes,” The Spectator 52 [27 September 1879]: 1225). 6. Oliver S. Buckton, Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2007), 38. 7. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Cévennes Journal: Notes on a Journey through the French Highlands, ed. Gordon Golding (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1978), 68. 8. For a discussion of both the importance and the disadvantages of the “minor” travel genre for young writers seeking entry into print, see Paul Fisher, “The Travel Writer as Pilgrim: Career Beginnings, Initiation, and the High-Culture Mapping of Europe, 1865–1875,” in Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory, ed. William E. Cain (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 3–7. 9. Anthony’s mother Frances achieved her first success with Domestic Manners of the Americans in 1832. Dickens published American Notes for General Circulation in 1842 and Pictures from Italy in 1846 when still quite a young writer, in addition to a number of travel essays. Although Anthony Trollope preferred to use his travels to add local color to his novels, he also published five travel books, including The West Indies and the Spanish Main, written to capitalize on a voyage taken for his postoffice position, in 1859. Popular travel authors of Stevenson’s own time

292

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

J. HAYWARD

included Mark Twain (Roughing It, 1872; A Tramp Abroad, 1880); Annie Brassie (Around the World in the Yacht “Sunbeam,” Our Home on the Ocean for Eleven Months, 1879; In the Trades, the Tropics, & the Roaring Forties, 1885); Isabella Bird (A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 1879; Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, 1881); Lady Florence Dixie (Across Patagonia, 1880); and Stevenson’s friend Henry James (A Little Tour in France, 1884). Stevenson read and admired many of his peers’ travel texts; for instance, in his essay “The Foreigner at Home,” first published in Cornhill M agazine 45 (1882), 534–41, he refers to “Miss Bird” as “an authoress with whom I profess myself in love” (535). For more on the importance of travel writing to the careers of both established and new writers in the Victorian era, see Carl Thompson, Travel Writing (New York: Routledge, 2011), 52–56. “Roads,” The Portfolio 4 (December 1873): 185–88; “Ordered South,” Macmillan’s Magazine 30 (May 1874): 68–73; “Walking Tours,” Cornhill Magazine 33 (June 1876): 685–90. “Ordered South” and “Walking Tours” were included in Stevenson’s Virginibus Puerisque (1881). The hybrid nature of the travel genre is discussed by many critics; see for example Jan Borm, “Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and Terminology,” in Perspectives on Travel Writing, eds. Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 14-17; and Paul Fisher, “The Travel Writer as Pilgrim: Career Beginnings, Initiation, and the High-Culture Mapping of Europe, 1865–1875,” in Cain, Literary Criticism, 6. Graham Balfour, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, 2 vols. (London: Methuen, 1909), 1:126n1. Swearingen, Prose Writings, 35. Robert Louis Stevenson to Margaret Stevenson, July 1879, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 326. The canoe trip described in An Inland Voyage was completed (with Stevenson’s friend Walter Simpson) in the late summer of 1876; Stevenson revised his travel journal in the late fall of 1877 and early 1878, and Kegan Paul published the text in an edition of 750 copies in April 1878 (Swearingen, Prose Writings, 29). “Stevenson Trail,” The Enlightened Traveller, PDF brochure, https:// walking-holidays-france.com/self-guided-walking-tours-in-france/. Lesley Graham, “I Have a Little Shadow: Travellers After Stevenson in the Cévennes,” in European Stevenson, ed. Richard Ambrosini and Richard Drury (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 91. Essays that devote critical attention to Travels with a Donkey include Sue Zlosnik, “‘Home Is the Sailor, Home from Sea’: Robert Louis Stevenson and the End of Wandering,” Yearbook of English Studies 34 (2004): 240– 52, and the following essays, all from Ambrosini and Drury: European

11

18.

19. 20.

21.

TRAVELERS IN THE WILDERNESS …

293

Stevenson: Roslyn Jolly, “Stevenson and the European South” (19–35); Laurence Davies, “The Time of His Time: Travels with a Donkey and An Inland Voyage” (73–89); Lesley Graham, “I Have a Little Shadow: Travellers After Stevenson in the Cévennes” (91–107); and Morgan Holmes, “Donkeys, Englishmen, and Other Animals: The Precarious Distinctions of Victorian Interspecies Morality” (109–25). Caroline McCracken-Flesher, “Travel Writing,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Penny Fielding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 86–102. Graham, “Travellers after Stevenson”; Buckton, Cruising; Zlosnik, “‘Home Is the Sailor’”; Jolly, “Stevenson and the European South.” Several recent studies contextualize Stevenson’s writing within the larger history of travel literature, but they emphasize Stevenson’s later works. Thus Roslyn Jolly, Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession (New York: Routledge, 2009), draws on biographical materials as well as responses from contemporary readers to establish the transformative effect of Stevenson’s life in the Pacific on the author’s literary forms, style, subject matter, and philosophy of writing; Buckton, Cruising (2007), connects Stevenson’s modes of travel to his portrayal of the colonized body as well as his development of newly fragmented and interrupted narrative forms; and Catherine Jones, “Travel Writing, 1707–1918,” in The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol. 2, Enlightenment, Britain and Empire (1707 –1918), ed. Ian Brown, et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 277–85, sees Stevenson as primarily concerned with the psychological and bodily effects of travel: “travel is crucially about disorientation; travel writing allows [Stevenson] to easily adopt the different personas, because it does not require a unifying perspective” (283–85). Zlosnik, “‘Home Is the Sailor,’” argues that these two early travel texts predict the extent to which the writer would later explore the interior landscape of the Gothic self; Gordon Hirsch, “The Travels of Robert Louis Stevenson as a Young Man,” The Victorian Newsletter 99 (Spring 2001): 1–7, discusses the ways that travel writing allowed Stevenson to explore possible identities while shaping his craft; Liz Farr, “Stevenson’s Picturesque Excursions: The Art of Youthful Vagrancy,” NineteenthCentury Prose 29, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 197–225, explores Stevenson’s reconfiguration of the late-eighteenth-century picturesque as a means of contributing to the growing later-nineteenth-century aesthetic movement and, simultaneously, adopting a bohemian pose as part of his rebellion against conventional middle-class respectability; and Stephen Arata, “On Not Paying Attention,” Victorian Studies 46, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 193– 205, develops this line of inquiry into Stevenson’s aestheticism by connecting the writer’s expressed views on the importance of “idleness” and

294

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

J. HAYWARD

pleasure to William Morris’s aesthetic principles, thus situating Stevenson firmly in the aesthetic—and therefore the political—debates of his day. Lynn Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750–1915 (New York: William Morrow, 1997), 6. Paul Fussell, Abroad: Literary Traveling Between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Examples of this subgenre published in the same decade as Stevenson’s early travels include Thomas Rolls Warrington and George Smyth Baden Powell, “The Log of the ‘Nautilus’ and ‘Isis’ Canoes,” Cornhill Magazine 22, no. 180 (1870): 457–69; James Lynam Molloy, Our Autumn Holiday on French Rivers (London: Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., 1874); and William Moëns, Through France and Belgium, by River and Canal, in the Steam Yacht “Ytene” (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1876). Matilda Betham-Edwards, “Holidays in Eastern France,” Frazer’s Magazine 98 (September 1878): 362–80; cont. (October 1878): 516–29; cont. (November 1878): 631–46; cont. (December 1878): 737–57. “Holidays” is an odd merging of the “off the beaten track” genre and the guidebook—unsurprisingly, since Edwards was also commissioned to update Murray’s Handbook on France. See her Mid-Victorian Memories (London: John Murray, 1919), 156–57. Matilda Betham-Edwards, preface to Holidays in Eastern France (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1879), v–vi. As did many other Romantic-era travelers, Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Graham both used this type of narrative persona in their travel writing. The subjectivity of the narrator is, of course, also a hallmark of Romantic poetry, for example, Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818), though the tradition hearkens back at least to Lawrence Sterne’s novel, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). Unsigned review, “An Inland Voyage,” London (25 May 1878): 403–04. This review was possibly written by Stevenson’s good friend W. E. Henley. The comparison to Sterne comes in an unsigned review, “Current Literature,” Academy (28 June 1879): 563. John Murray, Murray’s Hand-book for Central, Southern and Eastern France (London: John Murray, 1878), 3. Just one of many recent studies of popular representations of Scotland as other is Silke Stroh, Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination: Anglophone Writing from 1600 to 1900 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017). For clarity, I will refer to this narrative persona as “Stevenson” throughout, although of course this persona is a self-consciously fictionalized version of Stevenson himself.

11

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

TRAVELERS IN THE WILDERNESS …

295

Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey, 31; 44; 94. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 166–67. Ibid., 22–23. Ian Duncan, “Stevenson and Fiction,” in Fielding, Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson, 11. For a full discussion of Bunyan’s importance in the Scots’ religious tradition, see Donald E. Meek, “John Bunyan in the Kilt: The Influence of Bunyan Texts on Religious Expression and Experience in the Scottish Highlands and Islands,” Scottish Studies 37 (2017): 155–63. https://doi. org/10.2218/ss.v37i0.1805. John Kelman, The Faith of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1908), 83. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey, 8. Ibid., 110–26, passim. In his biographical sketch of Stevenson in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985), 11–69, Richard Holmes sees Fanny as haunting the text throughout, citing for example Stevenson’s remark that Modestine (whom he has just beaten, in a controversial passage) “had a faint resemblance to a lady of my acquaintance who once loaded me with kindness,” as well as the conclusion to Stevenson’s epiphany under the stars: “I ... wished for a companion, to be near me in the starlight … And to live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most complete and free” (20; 54). Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey, 46. Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Mountain Town in France,” The Studio (Winter 1896/1897): 3–17; also published as A Mountain Town in France (New York: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1897). Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey, 45. Stevenson’s hyperbolic description of Edinburgh’s climate in that book is justly famous: “The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological purgatory in the spring. The delicate die early, and I, as a survivor, among bleak winds and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to envy them their fate. For all who love shelter and the blessings of the sun, who hate dark weather and perpetual tilting against squalls, there could scarcely be found a more unhomely and harassing place of residence” (Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes [1878; London: Seeley & Co. Ltd., 1903], 2). Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey, 21; 24. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 29.

296

J. HAYWARD

53. Ibid., 40. 54. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Foreigner at Home,” in Memories and Portraits (1887; repr. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 1–23. 55. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey, 53. 56. Ibid., 53–54. 57. Ibid., 72; 69. 58. Ibid., 72. 59. Ibid., 65. 60. Ibid., 88. 61. Jolly, “Stevenson and the European South,” 23. 62. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey, 88. 63. Ibid., 88–89. 64. Ibid., 46. 65. Ibid., 46. 66. Ibid., 81–82. 67. Robert Louis Stevenson to Margaret Stevenson, 1878, in Booth and Mehew, Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 264. Other central sources included Napoléon Peyrat’s Histoire des pasteurs de désert (1842), as well as a range of books he read in the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh while writing up the final version of Travels with a Donkey, including Jean Cavalier’s Memoirs of the War of the Cévennes, 2nd ed. (1727) and Antoine Court’s Histoire des troubles de Cévennes (1760). He also owned a range of sources on the region, including Misson’s Histoire des Camisards (1744) and Eugène Bonnèmere’s Histoire des Camisards (1869) (Swearingen, Prose Writings, 35–36). 68. Jenni Calder, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 120–21. The history of the Covenanters had preoccupied Stevenson for years. As Laurence Davies notes, “it scarcely needs documenting that from his nursery days he had been enthralled by Covenanter history” (“The Time of His Time,” 81). His first “published” essay, The Pentland Rising (written in 1866 at the age of 16 and privately published by his father) focused on the topic, and, from 1868, he kept a running list of titles for planned short stories to be collected as “A Covenanting Story-Book,” although only “The Story of Thrawn Janet” was published, in 1881 (Swearingen, Prose Writings, 6). And in the summer of 1878, shortly before his travels in the Cévennes, Stevenson jotted tentative plans for a book to be called “Covenanting Profiles” and to include chapters on Walter Pringle, Patrick Walker, and other major figures in the movement (ibid., 33). 69. Ellen Lévy, “In the Footsteps of Footsteps: Holmes and Stevenson in the Cévennes,” in Mountains Figured and Disfigured in the English-Speaking World, ed. Françoise Besson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 453.

11

TRAVELERS IN THE WILDERNESS …

297

70. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey, 125; 126. 71. Grant Allen, review of Travels with a Donkey, by Robert Louis Stevenson, Spectator (1879), quoted in Holmes, “Donkeys, Englishmen, and Other Animals,” 114–15. 72. Oliver Buckton, “Travel Writing,” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Carolyn McCracken-Flesher (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2013), 106. 73. See Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 74. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Some Aspects of Robert Burns,” Cornhill Magazine 40 (October 1879): 408–29. 75. Robert Louis Stevenson to William Craibe Angus, April 1891, Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Sidney Colvin (London: Methuen, 1911), 3:257. 76. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey, 85. 77. Alastair McIntosh, quoted in Roger St. Pierre, “Leisure in Lozère, off the beaten track in France,” http://www.thegoodlifefrance.com/leisurein-lozere-off-the-beaten-track-in-france.

Bibliography

Primary Sources “Account of the Grand Chartreuse.” The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany 10, no. 58 (October 1780): 227–29. Acerbi, Joseph. Travels through Sweden, Finland, and Lapland to the North Cape in the Years 1798 and 1799. 2 vols. London: Mawman, 1802. “Albums.” In The History of Origins: Containing Ancient Historical Facts, with Singular Customs, Institutions, and Manners of Different Ages. London: Sampson Low, 1824. 131–36. “Alpine Albums.” In The Gentleman’s Pocket Magazine; and Album of Literature and Fine Arts. By the Editor of “The Ladies’ Pocket Magazine.” London: Joseph Robins, 1829. 250–51. Annales des bâtiments et des arts, de la littérature et de l’industrie. Paris: Bureau des Annales, 1818. B., C. “Gray’s Alcaic Ode.” Notes & Queries 1, no. 24 (13 April 1850): 382. B., S. “La Grande Chartreuse.” The Visitor, or Monthly Instructor, for 1848 (February 1848): 41–44. Barrow, John. A Family Tour through South Holland; up the Rhine; and across the Netherlands, to Ostend. London: John Murray, 1831. ———. A Tour in Austrian Lombardy, the Northern Tyrol, and Bavaria in 1840. London: John Murray, 1841. Beauclerk, Lady Diana de Vere. A Summer and Winter in Norway. London: John Murray, 1868.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 B. Colbert and L. Morrison (eds.), Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36146-4

299

300

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beaufort, Emily A. Egyptian Sepulchres and Syrian Shrines Including Some Stay in the Lebanon, at Palmyra, and in Western Turkey. London: Longman, Green, Longman, & Roberts, 1862. Beckford, William. “An Excursion to the Grand Chartreuse, in the Year 1778.” In Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents. Edited by Robert J. Gemmett. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971. 261–84. ———. The Travel Diaries of William Beckford of Fonthill. 1783. Edited by Guy Chapman. 2 vols. Cambridge: Constable and Houghton Mifflin, 1928. Bell, James Stanislaus. Journal of a Residence in Circassia during the Years 1837, 1838, and 1839. London: Edward Moxon, 1840. Beste, Henry Digby. Four Years in France; or, Narrative of an English Family’s Residence There during that Period. London: Henry Colburn, 1826. Bilton, William. Two Summers in Norway. By the Author of “The Angler in Ireland.” 2 vols. London: Saunders and Otley, 1840. Birkbeck, Morris. Notes on a Journey through France, from Dieppe through Paris and Lyons, to the Pyrennees, and back through Toulouse, in July, August, and September, 1814. London: W. Phillips, 1814. Blessington, Marguerite, Countess of. Journal of a Tour through the Netherlands to Paris, in 1821. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1822. Blundell, Isabella. Gamle Norge; (Old Norway) or, Our Holiday in Scandinavia. London: Hamilton, Adams and Co., 1862. Bocage, Madam du [Marie Anne Fiquet du Boccage]. Letters Concerning England, Holland and Italy. 2 vols. London: E. and C. Dilly, 1770. ———. Recueil des œuvres de Madame de Boccage. 3 vols. Lyon: Chez les frères Perisse, 1762. Boner, Charles. Transylvania: Its Products and Its People. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1865. Bourne, Auguste. Description pittoresque de la Grande-Chartreuse, souvenirs historiques de ses montagnes et de son couvent, et receuil des pensées inscrite sur son album par Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Mme de Stael, etc. etc. Grenoble: Prudhomme, Imprimeur-Éditeur, 1853. [Boutrais, Cyprien-Marie]. “Un Chartreux.” In La Grande Chartreuse. 3rd ed. Grenoble: Auguste-Côte, 1884. Bowdler, Thomas. Observations on Emigration to France, on Account of Health, Economy, or the Education of Children, Being a Postscript to the Letters Written in France, in 1814. 2nd ed. Bath: Richard Cruttwell and Robinson, 1815. Brassey, Lady Annie. “Mr. Gladstone in Norway.” The Contemporary Review (October 1885): 480–502. Bremner, Robert. Excursions in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; Including Notices of the State of Public Opinion in Those Countries, and Anecdotes of Their Courts. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1840.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

301

Brevity, Benjamin [pseud.]. Winter Evenings in Paris, or an Account of the Various Amusements of this City. Paris: Galignani, 1815. Brockedon, William. Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps. London: Printed for the Author, 1828–1829. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Edited by Richard Nemesvari. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2000. Buch, Leopold von. Travels through Norway and Lapland, during the Years 1806, 1807, and 1808. Translated by John Black, with notes and illustrations chiefly mineralogical, and some account of the author, by Robert Jameson. London: Henry Colburn, 1813. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. The Pilgrims of the Rhine. London: Saunders & Otley, 1834. ———. “Preface to The Pilgrims of the Rhine.” 1849. In Leila, or the Siege of Granada; Calderon the Courtier; and The Pilgrims of the Rhine. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1878. 253–54. Bunbury, Selina. Life in Sweden with Excursions in Norway and Denmark. 2 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1853. Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edited by J. G. A. Pocock. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987. Burnaby, Fred. A Ride to Khiva: Travels and Adventures in Central Asia. London: Cassell Petter & Galpin, 1876. Byers, S. H. M. Switzerland and the Swiss. Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1875. Byron, George Gordon, Lord. Byron’s Letters and Journals. Edited by Leslie A. Marchand. 13 vols. London: John Murray, 1980–1992. Capell Brooke, Arthur de. Travels through Sweden, Norway and Finmark to the North Cape in the Summer of 1820. London: Rodwell and Martin, 1823. Carey, Frances Jane. Journal of a Tour in France in the Years 1816 and 1817. Edited by Lucy Morrison. In Women’s Travel Writings in Post-Napoleonic France. Vol. 2. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011. Carter, Anne. Travel Writings in Post-Napoleonic France. Edited by Lucy Morrison. In Women’s Travel Writings in Post-Napoleonic France. Vol. 4. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011. Cartwright, Edmund. Armine and Elvira. A Legendary Tale. With Other Poems. 9th ed. London: Printed for John Murray and John Harding by C. Whittingham, 1803. Carver, J. The New Universal Traveller. London: Printed for G. Robinson, 1779. Claray, J.-Bapt. Chansons et hymnes nouveaux. Paris: Scherff, 1818. Clarke, Edward Daniel. Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Vol. 10, pt. 3: Scandinavia. London: T. Cadell, 1810. Coghlan, Francis. A Visit to Paris; or, the Stranger’s Guide. London: J. Onwyhn, 1830.

302

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Consett, Matthew. A Tour through Sweden, Swedish-Lapland, Finland and Denmark. London: J. Johnson, 1784. Cooper, William White. The Invalid’s Guide to Madeira, with a Description of Teneriffe, Lisbon, Cintra, Mafra, etc; and a Vocabulary of the Portuguese and English Languages. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1840. Corelli, Marie. Thelma; a Society Novel. London: Richard Bentley, 1887. Costello, Louisa Stuart. A Summer amongst the Bocages and the Vines. 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1840. Cotterel, F. F. Promenades aériennes ou Montagnes françaises, considérées sous la rapport de l’agrémens et de la santé, contenant la description de l’établissement Beaujon. Paris: A. Belin, 1821. Coxe, Henry [John Millard]. The Gentleman’s Guide in His Tour through France. London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1817. Coxe, William. Travels in Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark: Illustrated with Charts and Engravings. 5th ed. Vol. 5. London: T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1802. Croly, George. Paris in 1815: A Poem. London: John Murray, 1817. Crompton Roberts, Violet. A Jubilee Jaunt to Norway by Three Girls. London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden & Welsh, 1888. Cunningham, John William. Cautions to Continental Travellers. London, 1818. De Jorio, [Andrea]. Plan de Pompéi, et remarques sur ses édifices, par le chanoine de Jorio. Naples: De l’imprimerie française, 1828. [De Jouy, Victoire-Joseph Étienne]. L’Hermite de la Chausée d’Antin, ou Observations sur les moeurs et les usages français au commencement du XIX e siècle. Vol. 1. Paris: Chez Pillet, Imprimeur-Libraire, 1813. ———. Paris Spectator; or, l’Hermite de la Chaussée d’Antin. Translated by William Jerdan. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815. Deloire, E.-F.-M. Dupré. Voyage à la Grande-Chartreuse. Valence: L. Borel, Éditeur, 1830. Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1846. Dickson, Maria. Norway and the Vöring Fos. Dublin: McGlashan & Gill, 1870. Dillon, Arthur Edmund Denis, Viscount Dillon. A Winter in Iceland and Lapland. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1840. Doctor Syntax in Paris, or a Tour in Search of the Grotesque: A Humorous and Satirical Poem. London: Printed for W. Wright, 1820. Dowie, Ménie Muriel. Gallia. Edited by Helen Small. London: Everyman, 1995. ———. A Girl in the Karpathians. New York: Cassell Publishing Company, 1891. ———. A Girl in the Karpathians. 5th ed. London: George Philip, 1892. ———. A Girl in Trousers: Being a History of a Young Girl’s Adventures in the Karpathians. Toronto: Bryce, 1891. ———.“In Ruthenia.” Fortnightly Review 48 (1890): 520–30.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

303

———. “In the Haunted Crimea.” Contemporary Review (July 1900): 39–51. Ebel, J. G. The Traveller’s Guide through Switzerland. Translated by Daniel Wall. London: Samuel Leigh, 1820. Edy, John William. Boydell’s Picturesque Scenery of Norway. London: Hurst, Robinson and Co., 1820. [Engelbach, Lewis]. “Naples and the Campagna Felice.” In A Series of Letters Addressed to a Friend in England, in 1802. London: R. Ackermann, 1815. Eustace, John Chetwode. A Tour through Italy. 2 vols. London: J. Mawman, 1813. Everest, Rev. Robert. A Journey through Norway, Lapland, and Sweden: With Some Remarks on the Geology of the Country. London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1829. F[ield], B[arron]. “Narrative of a Voyage from New South Wales.” London Magazine 10 (September 1824): 251–56. ———, ed. Geographical Memoirs on New South Wales; by Various Hands. London: John Murray, 1825. Forester, Thomas. Norway and Its Scenery. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853. Forsyth, Joseph. Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy, in the Years 1802 and 1803. Edited by Keith Crook. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Freshfield, Jane Quintin. Alpine Byways or Light Leaves by a Lady. London: Longman, Green, Longman & Roberts, 1861. Friendship’s Offering; and Winter’s Wreath: A Christmas and New Year’s Present, for MDCCCXXXV. Edited by Thomas Pringle. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1835. Friendship’s Offering; and Winter’s Wreath: A Christmas and New Year’s Present, for MDCCCXXXVI. Edited by W. H. Harrison. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1836. Friendship’s Offering; and Winter’s Wreath: A Christmas and New Year’s Present, for MDCCCXLII. Edited by Leitch Ritchie. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1842. Galignani’s New Paris Guide. 17th ed. Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1830. Galignani’s Picture of Paris. 6th ed. Paris: Galignani, 1818. Gautier, Théophile. Arria Marcella: Souvenir de Pompéi. In Un trio de romans. Paris: Victor Lecon, 1852. 313–53. George, H. B. “Mount Elbrouz, and the Attempted Ascent of It by a Russian Expedition.” Alpine Journal 2 (1865): 169–77. Gerard, Adelaide M. Et Nos in Arctis. London: Ballantyne & Co., 1913. Gilly, William Stephen. Memoir of Felix Neff, Pastor of the High Alps; and of His Labours among the French Protestants of Dauphiné, a Remnant of the Primitive Christians of Gaul. 2nd ed. London: J. G. and F. Rivington, 1832.

304

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Italian Journey [1786–1788]. Translated by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970. ———. Italienische Reise. In Annalen. Vol. 11. Edited by Ernst Beutler. Zürich: Artemis Verlag, 1962. Goldsmith, Rev. J. [Sir Richard Phillips]. Geography, Illustrated on a Popular Plan; for the Use of Schools and Young Persons. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, & Green, 1820. Goodrich, Samuel Griswold. A Pictorial Geography of the World, Comprising a System of Universal Geography, Popular and Scientific. Boston: C. D. Strong, 1832. Gray, Elizabeth Caroline (Johnstone). Tour to the Sepulchres of Etruria, in 1839. By Mrs. Hamilton Gray. With Numerous Illustrations. London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1840. Gray, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Gray, in Prose and Verse. Edited by Edmund Gosse. Vol. 1. New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1895. Grosvenor, Elizabeth Mary, Marchioness of Westminster. Diary of a Tour in Sweden, Norway and Russia in 1827 with Letters. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1879. Hallberg, Baron von. “Sentimental Sketches Written during a Late Journey through the North of Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.” In New Voyages and Travels. Vol. 5. London: Sir Richard Philips, 1821. Harley, James. “The Press, or Literary Chit-Chat: A Satire.” In British Satire 1785–1840. Vol. 3. Collected Satires III: Complete Longer Satires. Edited by Benjamin Colbert. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003. 235–383. Heber, Reginald. “A Missionary Hymn.” Evangelical Magazine (July 1821): 316. History of Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day, The. Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1825. Hogg, James. The Collected Letters, 1832–35. Vol. 3. Edited by Gillian Hughes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. ———. Contributions to Annuals and Gift Books. Edited by Janette Currie and Gillian Hughes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. ———. Memorials of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. Edited by Mrs. [Mary Gray] Garden. 3rd ed. Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1903. “Holiday Trip in Noresmanland, A.” In Routledge Every Boy’s Annual. London, 1882. Holman, James. The Narrative of a Journey Undertaken in the Years 1819, 1820, & 1821, through France, Italy, Savoy, Switzerland, Parts of Germany Bordering on the Rhine, Holland, and the Netherlands; Comprising Incidents that Occurred to the Author, Who Has Long Suffered under a Total Deprivation of Sight; with Various Points of Information Collected on His Tour. London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1822.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

305

———. A Voyage round the World. 4 vols. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1835. Hurd, Richard. “On the Uses of Foreign Travel.” In The Works of Richard Hurd, D. D. Lord Bishop of Worcester. Vol. 4. London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1811. 85–230. Inglis, Henry David. Ireland in 1834: A Journey throughout Ireland, during the Spring, Summer, and Autumn of 1834. 2 vols. London: Whittaker, 1834. ———. [Derwent Conway, pseud.]. A Personal Narrative of a Journey through Norway, Part of Sweden, and the Islands and States of Denmark. London: Hurst, Chance and Co., 1829. ———. The Tyrol; with a Glance at Bavaria. 2nd ed. 2 vols. London: Whittaker, Treacher, 1834. [Jameson, Anna]. Diary of an Ennuyée. London: Henry Colburn, 1826. [Jerdan, William]. Six Weeks in Paris; or, a Cure for the Gallomania. By a Late Visitant. 3 vols. London: J. Johnston, 1817. Jones, George Matthew. Travels in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, and Turkey; also on the Coasts of Azof and of the Black Sea; with a View of Trade in Those Seas, and of the Systems Adopted to Man the Fleets of the Different Powers of Europe, Compared with that of England. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1827. Jungman, Nico, and Beatrix [Jungman]. Norway. London: A. & C. Black, 1905. Keepsake for MDCCCXXXIII, The. Edited by Frederic Mansel Reynolds. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1833. Kennedy, William, ed. The Continental Annual and Romantic Cabinet, for 1832, with Illustrations by Samuel Prout, Esq., F.S.A. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1832. Keppel, George. Narrative of a Journey across the Balcan. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831. Kitchiner, William. The Traveller’s Oracle; or, Maxims for Locomotion: Containing Precepts for Promoting the Pleasures and Hints for Preserving the Health of Travellers. London: Henry Colburn, 1827. “La Grande Chartreuse.” European Magazine and London Review 16 (September 1789): 190–94; cont. (October 1789): 294–95; cont. (December 1789): 448; cont. (September 1791): 168. “La Grande Chartreuse.” Whitehall Evening Post, no. 6592 (13 August 1789): 3. “La Grande Chartreuse” [Advertisements]. The World, no. 628 (2 January 1789): 5; cont. no. 815 (14 August 1789): 2. “La Grande Chartreuse: Inscriptions from the Album of the Fathers, Written by Visitors.” Catholicon: or, the Christian Philosopher: A Roman Catholic Magazine, &c. &c.1, no. 4 (1815): 186–88. Laing, Samuel. The Heimskringla; or Chronicle of the Kings of Norway. London: Longmans, 1844. ———. Journal of a Residence in Norway, during the Years 1834, 1835, and 1836; Made with a View to Inquire into the Moral and Political Economy of

306

BIBLIOGRAPHY

that Country. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1836. Latham, Robert Gordon. Norway, and the Norwegians. 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1840. Le Blonde, Mrs. Aubrey [Elizabeth]. Mountaineering in the Land of the Midnight Sun. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908. Le Riche, J. M. Antiquités des environs de Naples, et dissertations qui y sont relatives. Naples: Imprimerie française, 1820. “Les Montagnes françaises.” The Literary Gazette; and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Politics, &c., no. 29 (9 August 1817): 89–90. Letters from the Bull Family at Boulogne (sur mer.). Paris: J. Smith, 1829. [L’heureux, A. A., and Ambroise Richard.]. Voyage de deux amis en Italie par le midi de la France, et retour par La Suisse et les départemens de l’est. Paris: Imprimerie de H. Fournier, 1829. “Library Antiquary, A.” In The History of Origins: Containing Ancient Historical Facts, with Singular Customs, Institutions, and Manners of Different Ages. London: Sampson Low, 1824. 131–36. “Literature of the Month: The Annuals.” Court Magazine and Belle Assemblée 3 (December 1833): 260–62. Lowe, Emily. Unprotected Females in Norway; or, the Pleasantest Way of Travelling There, Passing through Denmark and Sweden. With Scandinavian Sketches from Nature. London: Routledge, 1857. Luttrell, Henry. Letters to Julia in Rhyme. London: John Murray, 1822. Lyall, Edna. A Hardy Norseman. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1883. Mackenzie, Georgina Muir, and Adeline Paulina Irby. Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe. London: Alexander Strahan, 1866. Madden, Richard Robert. The Literary Life and Correspondence of the Countess of Blessington. London: T. C. Newby, 1855. Marriott, John. Hints to a Traveller into Foreign Countries. London: Hatchard, 1816. Marshall, Frederick. “The Champs Elysées: From the French.” Ainsworth’s Magazine: A Miscellany of Romance, General Literature, and Art 22 (1852): 401–03. Mason, William. Poems of Mr Gray: To Which Are Prefixed Memoirs of His Life and Writing by W. Mason, M. A. York: Printed by A. Ward, Sold by J. Dodsley and J. Todd, 1775. [Mathews, James Leigh]. The Rhenish Album; or, Scraps from the Rhine. London: Leigh & Son, 1836. Matthews, Henry. The Diary of an Invalid, Being the Journal of a Tour in Pursuit of Health in Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, and France in the Years 1817, 1818, and 1819. 2nd ed. London: John Murray, 1820.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

307

Mazuchelli, Nina. Magyarland. Vol. 1. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881. M’Donough, Felix. The Hermit in London; or, Sketches of English Manners. 5 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1821. Meade, L. T. “The Brown Owl.” Atalanta 4, no. 46 (1891): 665–70. Metcalfe, Rev. Frederick. The Oxonian in Norway; or, Notes of Excursions in that Country. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1856. Moore, Thomas. The Fudge Family in Paris. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818. Morgan, Sydney Owenson, Lady. France. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1817. ———. Italy. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1821. Murray, John. Hand-Book for Travellers in France. London: John Murray, 1843. ———. Handbook for Travellers in Norway. London: John Murray, 1892. ———. Handbook for Travellers in Scotland. London: John Murray, 1867. ———. A Handbook for Travellers in South Germany and Austria. 14th ed. London: John Murray, 1879. ———. A Hand-book for Travellers in Switzerland and the Alps of Savoy and Piedmont. London: John Murray, 1838. ———. A Hand-book for Travellers on the Continent. London: John Murray, 1836. ———. Murray’s Hand-book for Central, Southern and Eastern France. London: John Murray, 1878. Musgrave, George M. A Pilgrimage into Dauphiné; Comprising a Visit to the Monastery of the Grande Chartreuse; with Anecdotes, Incidents, and Sketches from Twenty Departments of France. Vol. 2. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1857. My Norske Note Book, by a Lady. London: Charles Westerson, 1859. Nerval, Gérard de. “Isis.” In Œuvres Complètes. Vol. 3. Edited by Jean Guillaume and Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1993. 612–23. “New Russian Bonds.” Punch, or the London Charivari 46 (24 January 1874): 34–37. “New Work, A.” The Sporting Magazine 38, no. 228 (1811): 251–53. “Notes and Reflections during a Tour through Part of France and Germany, in the Autumn of the Year 1828.” The Gardener’s Magazine 5, no. 23 (December 1830): 641–49. “On Albums.” The Album 1, no. 1 (1822): 4. “Origin of Albums.” The Idler; and Breakfast-Table Companion 2, nos. 66–67 (14 April 1838): 114. Ogilvie, Alice. A Visit to the Summer Home in the Sætersdal and Southern Norway. Introduction by R. M. Ballantyne. Edinburgh: Macniven and Wallace, 1891. Pardoe, Julia Sophia H. The City of the Magyar, or Hungary and Her Institutions in 1839–40. 3 vols. London: George Virtue, 1840.

308

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Parisian Manners: The Mountains.” The Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, no. 31 (23 August 1817): 123–25. Paton, Andrew Archibald. Servia, the Youngest Member of the European Family: Or, a Residence in Belgrade, and Travels in the Highlands and Woodlands of the Interior, during the Years 1843 and 1844. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1845. Phythian, Joseph. Scenes of Travel in Norway. London: Cassell & Co., 1877. Piozzi, Hester Lynch. Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy and Germany. 2 vols. London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1789. ———. The Piozzi Letters: Correspondence of Hester Lynch Piozzi, 1784–1821 (formerly Mrs. Thrale). Edited by Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom. 3 vols. Newark: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 1989–1996. Plumptre, Anne. A Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in France, Principally in the Southern Departments, from the Year 1802 to 1805. London: J. Mawman, 1810. Poetess Archive, The. Edited by Laura Mandell. http://idhmcmain.tamu.edu/ poetess. Porter, Robert Ker. Travelling Sketches in Russia and Sweden. During the Years 1805, 1806, 1807, 1808. Philadelphia: Hopkins and Earle, 1809. Pritchett, Robert Taylor. “ Gamle Norge”: Rambles and Scrambles in Norway. London: Virtue & Co., 1879. “Protestantism in Geneva: A Retrospect.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 51, no. 316 (February 1842): 162. Prout, Samuel. Facsimiles of Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany and Drawn on Stone. London: Chullmandel’s Lithography, 1833. Raffles, Thomas. Letters, during a Tour through Some Parts of France, Savoy, Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands, in the Summer of 1817. 2nd ed. Liverpool: Thomas Taylor, 1819. “Replies: Gray’s Alcaic Ode.” Notes & Queries 1, no. 26 (27 April 1850): 416. Review of Heath’s Picturesque Annual for 1832. By Clarkson Stanfield and Leitch Ritchie et al. Eclectic Review, 3rd ser., 6 (December 1831): 508–29. Review of The Picturesque Annual: Travelling Sketches in the North of Italy, the Tyrol, and the Rhine. By Clarkson Stanfield and Leitch Ritchie. London Literary Gazette, no. 771 (29 October 1831): 697. Review of The Pilgrims of the Rhine. By Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Athenaeum, no. 330 (22 February 1834): 141–43. Review of The Pilgrims of the Rhine. By Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 23, no. 651 (8 March 1834): 156–60. Review of Wanderings by the Seine (1834). By J. M. W. Turner and Leitch Ritchie. Court Journal 5, no. 244 (28 December 1833): 873.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

309

Rhodes, Edith. The Adventures of Five Spinsters in Norway. London: John and Robert Maxwell, 1886. Richardson, Mary. Diary (14 May–25 August 1833), RF T48. Typescript, transcribed by Gertrude Atthill. Ruskin Library, Lancaster University, Lancaster, Lancashire. Ritchie, Leitch. “Memoirs of Thomas Pringle.” In Poetical Works of Thomas Pringle. London: Edward Moxon, 1838. ix–cxlix. ———. Travelling Sketches in the North of Italy, the Tyrol, and on the Rhine. With Twenty-Six Beautifully Finished Engravings, from Drawings by Clarkson Stanfield. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1832. Rodd, A. E. “The Grande Chartreuse.” Outing 11, no. 6 (March 1888): 550–55. Rogers, Samuel. The Italian Journal of Samuel Rogers. Edited by J. R. Hale. London: Faber and Faber, 1956. ———. Italy: A Poem. Pt. 2. London: John Murray, 1828. ———. Italy: A Poem. London: T. Cadell, Jennings & Chaplin and E. Moxon, 1830. Roscoe, Thomas. The Tourist in Switzerland and Italy, Illustrated from Drawings by S. Prout, Esq. London: Robert Jennings, 1830. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Jerome McGann. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Ruskin, John. The Early Ruskin Manuscripts. Edited by David C. Hanson. http://english.selu.edu/humanitiesonline/ruskin. ———. “Enquiries on the Causes of the Colour of the Water of the Rhine.” Magazine of Natural History 7, no. 41 (September 1834): 438–39. ———. “Fragments from a Metrical Journal.” [By “J. R.”] In Friendship’s Offering; and Winter’s Wreath: A Christmas and New Year’s Present, for MDCCCXXXV. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1835. 317–19. ———. John Ruskin’s Continental Tour 1835: The Written Records and Drawings. Edited by Keith Hanley and Caroline S. Hull. Cambridge: Legenda, 2016. ———. “Lines Written at the Lakes in Cumberland. Derwentwater.” [By “R–.”] Spiritual Times (August 1829): 150. ———. MSS IA, VII, VIII, IX, XI. New Haven: Beinecke Library, Yale University. ———. Poems. J. R. Collected 1850. Edited by John James Ruskin and W. H. Harrison. London: For private circulation, 1850. ———. Poems of John Ruskin. Edited by W. G. Collingwood. 2 vols. London: George Allen, 1891. ———. Ruskin in Italy: Letters to His Parents, 1845. Edited by Harold I. Shapiro. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.

310

BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. “Saltzburg.” [By “J. R.”] In Friendship’s Offering; and Winter’s Wreath: A Christmas and New Year’s Present, for MDCCCXXXV. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1835. 37–38. ———. “The Months.” [By “J. R.”] In Friendship’s Offering; and Winter’s Wreath: A Christmas and New Year’s Present, for MDCCCXXXVI. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1836. 290–91. ———. The Ruskin Family Letters: The Correspondence of John James Ruskin, His Wife, and Their Son, John, 1801–1843. Edited by Van Akin Burd. 2 vols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973. ———. Works of John Ruskin. Edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. Library Edition. 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1902–1912. Ruskin, John James. Diary (20 July–19 September 1833). RF MS 33A. Ruskin Library, Lancaster University, Lancaster, Lancashire. “Russian Mountains at Paris.” Scientific American, no. 648 (2 June 1888): 338–39. Sargent, Epes, ed. The Complete Poetical Works of William Collins, Thomas Gray, and Oliver Goldsmith, with Biographical Sketches and Notes. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company and J. C. Derby, 1854. Sass, Henry. A Journey to Rome and Naples, Performed in 1817. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818. Scott, John. A Visit to Paris in 1814; Being a Review of the Moral, Political, Intellectual, and Social Condition of the French Capital. 3rd ed. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815. Scott, Walter. The Monastery. Edited by Penny Fielding. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Second, Albéric. “Idylle.” Le Bon Ton 2, no. 15 (15 October, 1854): 7–14. Shakespeare, William. Othello: The Moor of Venice. Edited by Michael Neill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Shaw, George Bernard. The Quintessence of Ibsenism. New York: Brentano, 1928. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Travel Writing. Edited by Jeanne Moskal. Vol. 8. The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley. Edited by Nora Crook. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Frederick L. Jones. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. Simond, Louis. Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain, during the Years 1810 and 1811. 2 vols. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1815. Slade, Adolphus. Travels in Germany and Russia; Including a Steam Voyage by the Danube and the Euxine from Vienna to Constantinople, in 1838–39. London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1840. Slingsby, W. Cecil. Norway: The Northern Playground. Edinburgh: Douglas, 1904.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

311

Snow, Eliza R. “To Mrs. Stenhouse, Switzerland.” In Poems, Religious, Historical, and Political. Liverpool: F. D. Richards, 1856. 223–24. “Some Recent Books by Women.” Review of Reviews and World’s Work 3 (1891): 667–68. Southey, Robert. Letters from England. By Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella. Edited by Carol Bolton. London: Routledge, 2016. Spence, Mary. A Glimpse of Norway. Manchester: Certified Industrial Schools, 1868. Spender, Edmund. “Lady Travellers in Norway.” The London Review 10, no. 19 (April 1858): 136–55. “Spirit of the Times: Travellers on the Continent, The.” The Scourge and Satirist (1 November 1816): 368–69. Staël, Madame de [Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein]. Corinne; or, Italy. Translated by Isabel Hill. London: Richard Bentley, 1833. ———. Corinne: ou l’Italie: une edition féministe. 1807. Edited by Claudine Herrmann. 2 vols. Paris: Éditions des Femmes, 1979. Standish, Frank Hall. Seville and Its Vicinity. London: Black and Armstrong, 1840. Starke, Mariana. Travels in Europe, for the Use of Travellers on the Continent. 8th ed. London: John Murray, 1833. ———. Travels in Italy, Between the Years 1792 and 1798. 2 vols. London: R. Phillips, 1802. Stendhal [Henri-Marie Beyle]. Promenades dans Rome. 1830. In Voyages en Italie. Edited by V. del Litto. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. 593–1291. ———. Rome, Naples et Florence. 1826. In Voyages en Italie. Edited by V. del Litto. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. 285–592. Stenhouse, Frances Warn. Exposé of Polygamy: A Lady’s Life among the Mormons. Edited by Linda Wilcox DeSimone. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2008. ———. “Tell It All”: The Story of a Life’s Experience in Mormonism: An Autobiography. Hartford: A. D. Worthing & Co., 1874. Stenhouse, Thomas B. H. The Rocky Mountain Saints: A Full and Complete History of the Mormons, from the First Vision of Joseph Smith to the Last Courtship of Brigham Young. London: Ward Lock & Tyler, 1873. Stephen, Leslie. The Playground of Europe. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1871. Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Cévennes Journal: Notes on a Journey through the French Highlands. Edited by Gordon Golding. Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1978. ———. Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes. 1878. London: Seeley & Co., 1903. ———. From Scotland to Silverado. 1884. Edited by James D. Hart. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966.

312

BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Edited by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew. Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. ———. Travels with a Donkey and An Inland Voyage. 1878–1879. Edited by Wilbur L. Cross. New York: Macmillan, 1909. Stewart, Charles William. Journal of a Tour in the Southern Part of Spain, Including Tangier, Ceuta, and Tetuan: Performed in the Autumn of 1839. London: Printed by C. Roworth & Sons, 1840. Stone, Olivia M. Norway in June. London: Marcus Ward & Co., 1889. Stothard, Mrs. Charles [Anna Eliza Bray]. Letters Written during a Tour of Normandy, Brittany, and Other Parts of France, in 1818: Including Local and Historical Descriptions; with Remarks on the Manners and Characters of the People. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820. Strangford, Emily Anne Beaufort Smythe, Viscountess. The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic in 1863, With a Visit to Montenegro. London: Richard Bentley, 1864. ———. Report on the Bulgarian Peasant Relief Fund. With a Statement of Distribution and Expenditure. London: Hardwicke & Bogue, 1877. Strangford, Percy Ellen Frederick William Smythe, eighth viscount. Review of Egyptian Sepulchres and Syrian Shrines. By Emily A. Beaufort. The Saturday Review 12, no. 201 (1861): 123. ———. “On the Language of the Afghans.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 20 (1863): 52–66. ———. “Popularised Ethnology.” In Original Letters and Papers of the Late Viscount Strangford Upon Philological and Kindred Subjects. Edited by Viscountess Strangford. London: Trübner & Co., 1878. 214–18. ———. A Selection from the Writings of Viscount Strangford on Political, Geographical, and Social Subjects. Edited by Viscountess Strangford. 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1869. Swinburne, Henry. Travels in the Two Sicilies, in the Years 1777, 1778, 1779, and 1780. 2 vols. London: P. Elmsly, 1783–1785. Swinton, Andrew. Travels into Norway, Denmark, and Russia in the Years 1789, 1790, and 1791. London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1792. Talbot, Frances, Countess of Morley. Dacre: A Novel. 3 vols. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman, 1834. Tegner, Esaias. Frithiof’s Saga, a Legend of Norway. Translated by George Stephens. Stockholm: A. Bonnier, 1839. Trollope, Thomas Adolphus. A Summer in Brittany. Edited by Frances Trollope. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1840. Turnbull, Peter Evan. Austria. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1840. Tweedie, Ethel Brilliana. A Winter Jaunt to Norway. London: Bliss, Sands and Foster, 1894. Vambery, Arminius. “To the Memory of Lord Strangford.” In Original Letters and Papers of the Late Viscount Strangford upon Philological and Kindred

BIBLIOGRAPHY

313

Subjects. Edited by Viscountess Strangford. London: Trübner & Co., 1878. xiii–xviii. Weld, Charles Richard. “A Visit to the Grande Chartreuse.” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 40, no. 240 (December 1849): 623–36. ———. Auvergne, Piedmont, and Savoy: A Summer Ramble. London: John W. Parker, 1850. Wilde, Sir William Robert Wills. Narrative of a Voyage to Madeira, Teneriffe, and along the Shores of the Mediterranean, Including a Visit to Algiers, Egypt, Palestine, Tyre, Rhodes, Telmussus, Cyprus, and Greece. 2 vols. Dublin, 1840. [Wilks, Samuel Charles]. Emigration; or England and Paris, a Poem. London: Baldwin & Co., 1816. Willmott, Robert Aris, ed. The Poetical Works of Thomas Gray, Thomas Parnell, William Collins, Matthew Green, and Thomas Wharton. London: George Routledge and Sons, n.d. Wolff, Jens. Sketches on a Tour to Copenhagen, through Norway and Sweden. London: n.p., 1814. Wollstonecraft, Mary. Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. London: J. Johnson, 1796. Wordsworth, Christopher. Letters to M. Gondon . . . on the Destructive Character of the Church of Rome, Both in Religion and Polity. London: Francis and John Rivington, 1847. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850. Edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Wyllie, Marion Amy. Norway and Its Fjords. London: Methuen and Co., 1907. [Wyse, Sir Thomas]. The Continental Traveller’s Oracle; or, Maxims for Foreign Locomotion. By Dr. Abraham Eldon. Edited by His Nephew. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1828.

Secondary Sources Adams, Percy G. Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660–1800. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962. Aird, Polly. Mormon Convert, Mormon Defector: A Scottish Immigrant in the American West, 1848–1861. Norman: Arthur H. Clark, 2009. Aird, Polly, Jeff Nichols, and Will Bagley. “Introduction: Tracing a Shadow.” Playing with Shadows: Voices of Dissent in the Mormon West. Edited by Polly Aird, Jeff Nichols, and Will Bagley. Vol. 13. Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier Ser. Norman: Arthur H. Clark, 2011. 23–60. Alexander, Christine, and Jane Sellars. The Art of the Brontës. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

314

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ambrosini, Richard, and Richard Dury, eds. European Stevenson. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006. Anderson, Dana. “Sign, Space and Story: Roller Coasters and the Evolution of a Thrill.” Journal of Popular Culture 33, no. 2 (1999): 1–22. Baár, Monika. Historians and Nationalism: East Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Bagley, Will, ed. The Kingdom of the West: Mormons and the American Frontier. Norman: Arthur H. Clark, 2011. Bakic-Hayden, Milica, and Robert M. Hayden. “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans’: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics.” Slavic Review 51, no. 1 (1992): 1–15. Baliff, Jae R. “Serge Louis Baliff: A Swiss American.” Swiss-American Historical Society Newsletter 34, no. 1 (February 1998): 11–22. Barrell, John. The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Barrington de Fonblanque, Edward. The Lives of the Lords Strangford. London: Cassell Petter & Galpin, 1877. 250–94. Barton, H. Arnold. “The Discovery of Norway Abroad, 1760–1905.” Scandinavian Studies 79, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 25–40. ———. Northern Arcadia: Foreign Travelers in Scandinavia, 1765–1815. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. ———. Sweden and Visions of Norway. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. Batten, Charles L., Jr. Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Baugh, Alexander L. “The Church in Twentieth-Century Great Britain: A Historical Overview.” In Regional Studies in Latter-Day Saint Church History: The British Isles. Edited by Cynthia Doxey, Robert C. Freeman, Richard Neitzel Holzapfel, and Dennis A. Wright. Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2007. 237–59. Beck, James R. Dorothy Carey: The Tragic and Untold Story of Mrs. William Carey. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1992. Behdad, Ali. Belated Travellers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. Beinek, Justyna. “‘Portable Graveyards’: Albums in the Romantic Culture of Memory.” Pushkin Review 14, no. 1 (2011): 35–62. Benedict, Philip. “Calvin and the Transformation of Geneva.” In John Calvin’s Impact on Church and Society, 1509–2009. Edited by Martin Ernst Hirzel and Martin Sallman. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2009. 1–13.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

315

Bennett, David. Roller Coaster: Wooden and Steel Coasters, Twisters, and Corkscrews. Edison: Quintet, 1998. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bilenky, Serhiy. Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. Bitton, Davis. Guide to Mormon Diaries and Autobiographies. Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1977. Black, Jeremy. The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century. London: Sandpiper Books, 1999. ———. The British and the Grand Tour. London: Routledge, 1985. Bloom, Harold. The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. 112–28. Bock, Carol A. “Authorship, the Brontës, and Fraser’s Magazine: ‘Coming Forward’ as an Author in Early Victorian England.” Victorian Literature and Culture 29, no. 2 (September 2001): 241–66. Bohls, Elizabeth A. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716– 1818. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 13. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Böröcz, Jósef. “Travel–Capitalism: The Structure of Europe and the Advent of the Tourist.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 4 (1992): 708–41. Brand, C. P. Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-Century England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1957. Brendon, Piers. Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism. London: Secker & Warburg, 1991. Breton, Rob. “John Ruskin’s Juvenilia and the Origins of the Pathetic Fallacy.” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, n.s., 22 (Spring 2013): 17–36. Brodie, Fawn M. No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith. New York: Vintage, 1995. Brown, Nicola. Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Buckton, Oliver S. Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2007. ———. “Travel Writing.” In Approaches to Teaching the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. Edited by Carolyn McCracken-Flesher. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2013. 105–10. Budde, Rainer. Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne. Translated by Elizabeth Thussu. London: Scala, 1992. Bulletin de la sociètè de l’historie du théâtre, revue trimestrielle Novembre-Janvier. Paris: L. M. Fortin, 1907–1908. Bushman, Claudia Lumper, and Richard Lyman Bushman. Mormons in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

316

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Byrne, Angela. Geographies of the Romantic North: Science, Antiquarianism, and Travel, 1790–1830. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Cameron, Euan. Reformation of the Heretics: The Waldensians of the Alps, 1480– 1580. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Cartmell, Robert. The Incredible Scream Machine: A History of the Roller Coaster. Fairview Park: Amusement Park Books, 1987. Casanova, José. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Chard, Chloe. A Critical Reader of the Grand Tour: Tristes Plaisirs. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. ———. “Picnic at Pompeii: Hyperbole and Digression in the Warm South.” In Antiquity Recovered: The Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Edited by Victoria C. Gardner Coates and Jon L Seydl. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007. 115–32. ———. Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Chaney, Edward. The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations Since the Renaissance. London: Routledge, 2000. Christianson, James R. “Early Missionary Work in Italy and Switzerland.” Ensign (August 1982). https://www.lds.org/study/ensign/1982/08/earlymissionary-work-in-italy-and-switzerland?lang=eng. Cohen, Michele. Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge, 2002. Coker, Robert. Roller Coaster: A Thrill Seeker’s Guide to the Ultimate Scream Machines. New York: Metrobooks, 2002. Colbert, Benjamin. “British Women’s Travel Writing, 1780–1840: Bibliographical Reflections.” Women’s Writing 24, no. 2 (2017): 151–69. ———. “‘Our Observations Should Not Be Disunited’: Collaborative Women’s Travel Writing, 1780–1840.” Viatica, no. 3 (March 2016). http://revuesmsh.uca.fr/viatica/index.php?id=553. ———. Women’s Travel Writing, 1780–1840. Designer Movable Type Ltd. http://www4.wlv.ac.uk/btw/. Colley, Ann C. “Class Pollution in the Alps.” Victorian Review 36, no. 2 (2010): 36–40. ———. Victorians in the Mountains: Sinking the Sublime. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Collingwood, W. G. The Life and Work of John Ruskin. 2 vols. London: Methuen, 1893.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

317

Cox, Jeffrey. The British Missionary Enterprise Since 1700. New York: Routledge, 2008. Cronin, Richard. Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Cunningham, Gail. “‘He-Notes’: Reconstructing Masculinity.” In The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms. Edited by Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. 94–106. Dabrowski, Patrice. “‘Discovering’ the Galician Borderlands: The Case of the Eastern Carpathians.” Slavic Review 64, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 380–402. Daunton, Martin, and Bernhard Rieger. Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late Victorian Era to World War II. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Davies, Norman. Europe East & West. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006. De Beer, Gavin. Early Travellers in the Alps. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1930. Dearden, James S. The Library of John Ruskin. Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 2012. Dempsey, Madeleine. “The Grande Chartreuse in Literature.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 18, no. 71 (1929): 476–86. DeSimone, Linda Wilcox. “Introduction: Reckoning with Fanny Stenhouse.” In Exposé of Polygamy: A Lady’s Life Among the Mormons. By Frances Warn Stenhouse. Edited by Linda Wilcox DeSimone. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2008. 1–21. Di Bello, Patrizia. “Mrs Birkbeck’s Album: The Hand-Written and the Printed in Early Nineteenth-Century Feminine Culture.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 1 (2005): n.p. Dichey, Stefan. Patyat kam Sofia. Plovdiv: Zhanet 45, 2010. Dickinson, Cindy. “Creating a World of Books, Friends, and Flowers: Gift Books and Inscriptions, 1825–60.” Winterthur Portfolio 31, no. 1 (1996): 53–66. Dio, Colette. “La Vie des Mots.” The French Review 80, no 5. (April 2007): 1109. Dolan, Brian. Exploring European Frontiers: British Travellers in the Age of Enlightenment. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. ———. Ladies of the Grand Tour: British Women in Pursuit of Enlightenment and Adventure in Eighteenth-Century Europe. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Dunbadin, Katherine. The Roman Banquet: Images of Conviviality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Durey, Jill Felicity. Trollope and the Church of England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Dyer, Gary. British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Easdown, Martin. Amusement Park Rides. London: Bloomsbury, 2012.

318

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eaton, R. D. “In the ‘World of Death and Beauty’: Risk, Control, and John Tyndall as Alpinist.” Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 1 (2013): 55– 73. Eigner, Edwin M. “The Pilgrims of the Rhine: The Failure of the German Bildungsroman in England.” Victorian Newsletter 68 (Fall 1985): 19–21. Embry, Jessie L. “Polygamy.” Utah History Encyclopedia. Salt Lake City: Utah Education Network, n.d. https://www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/ p/POLYGAMY.shtml. Embry, Jessie L., and Lois Kelley. “Polygamous and Monogamous Mormon Women: A Comparison.” In Women in Utah History: Paradigm or Paradox? Edited by Patricia Lyn Scott and Linda Thatcher. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2005. 1–35. Erickson, Lee. The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Esterhammer, Angela, Diane Piccitto, and Patrick Vincent, eds. Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland: New Prospects. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Faught, C. Brad. “Gladstone and the Ionian Islands.” In William Gladstone: New Studies and Perspectives. Edited by Ronald Quinault, Roger Swift, and Ruth Clayton Windscheffel. London: Routledge, 2016. 219–34. Feichtinger, Johannes, Franz L. Fillafer, and Jan Surman, eds. The Worlds of Positivism: A Global Intellectual History, 1770–1930. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Fjågesund, Peter, and Ruth Symes. The Northern Utopia: British Perceptions of Norway in the Nineteenth Century. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. Flake, Chad J., and Larry W. Draper, eds. A Mormon Bibliography, 1830–1930. Provo: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 2004. Ford, Lily. “Relocating an Idyll: British Travel Writers Presented the Carpathians, 1862–1912.” Journeys 2, no. 2 (December 2001): 50–78. Foster, Lawrence. Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Foster, Shirley, and Sarah Mills, eds. An Anthology of Women’s Travel Writing. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Francis, Stephen F. “The Image of Calvin within Mormonism.” In Sober, Strict, and Scriptural: Collective Memories of John Calvin, 1800–2000. Edited by Johan de Niet, Herman Paul, and Bart Wallet. Boston: Brill, 2009. 293–315. François, Pieter. “If It’s 1815, This Must Be Belgium: The Origins of the Modern Travel Guide.” Book History 15, no. 1 (2012): 71–92. Frank, Alison. “The Air Cure Town: Commodifying Mountain Air in Alpine Central Europe.” Central European History 45, no. 2 (June 2012): 185–207. Freud, Sigmund. “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva.” 1907. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 9.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

319

Translated under the General Editorship of James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press. 1966–1974. 1–95. Fussell, Paul. Abroad: Literary Traveling Between the Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Genov, Roumen. Iztochniyat vapros, Aprilskoto vastanie i angliiskata filantropiya: semeistvo Strangford i balgarite. Sofia: Glavno upravlenie na arhivite kam Ministerskiya savet, 2007. Gephardt, Katarina. “‘The Enchanted Garden’ or ‘the Red Flag’: Eastern Europe in Late Nineteenth-Century British Travel Writing.” Journal of Narrative Theory 35, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 292–306. ———. The Idea of Europe in British Travel Narratives, 1789–1914. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Gerbod, Paul. Voyage au pays des mangeurs de grenouilles: La France vue par les Britanniques du XVIII e siècle à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1991. Gifra-Adroher, Pere. Between History and Romance: Travel Writing on Spain in the Early Nineteenth Century. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000. Gigante, Denise. Taste: A Literary History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Gill, Rebecca. Calculating Compassion: Humanity and Relief in War, 1870–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Gill, Stephen. Wordsworth’s Revisiting s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Gilmour, J. S. L. “The Early Editions of Rogers’s Italy.” The Library, 5th ser., 3 (September 1948): 137–40. Goubina, Maya. “Les Vaiqueuers et les vaincus découverte mutuelle les Russes en France (1814–1818).” Revue des études slaves 83, no. 4 (2012): 1011–22. Gove, Philip Babcock. The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction: A History of Its Criticism and a Guide for Its Study, with an Annotated Check List of 215 Imaginary Voyages from 1700 to 1800. London: Holland Press, 1961. Grand-Carteret, John. “La Caricature & l’imagerie russes.” La Russie géographique, ethnographique, historique, politique, administrative, économique, littéraire, artistique, scientifique, pittoresque, etc., no. 24 (1 December 1891): 768–75. Grosholz, Emily R. “The Modern Essay, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Hudson Review.” PN Review 37, no. 195 (2010): 31–34. Gueshoff, I. E. The Balkan League. Translated by Constantin C. Mincoff. London: John Murray, 1915. Hanley, Keith, and John K. Walton. Constructing Cultural Tourism: John Ruskin and the Tourist Gaze. Bristol: Channel View, 2010. Hansen, Peter H. “Albert Smith, the Alpine Club, and the Invention of Mountaineering in Mid-Victorian Britain.” Journal of British Studies 34, no. 3 (1995): 300–24.

320

BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Harris, Katherine D. “Borrowing, Altering and Perfecting the Literary Annual Form—Or What It Is Not: Emblems, Almanacs, Pocket-Books, Albums, Scrapbooks and Gifts Books.” Poetess Archive Journal 1, no. 1 (2007): 1– 30. ———. Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823–1835. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015. Haskell, Francis. Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion, and Collecting in England and France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976. Hayman, John. John Ruskin and Switzerland. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990. Haynes, Christine. Our Friends the Enemies: The Occupation of France after Napoleon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. Haywood, Ian. Romanticism and Caricature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Helsinger, Elizabeth K. Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Henes, Mary, and Brian H. Murray, eds. Travel Writing, Visual Culture, and Form, 1760–1900. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Hewison, Robert. Ruskin on Venice: “The Paradise of Cities.” New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Hewison, Robert, Ian Warrell, and Stephen Wildman. Ruskin, Turner, and the Pre-Raphaelites. London: Tate Gallery, 2000. Hibbert, Christopher. The Grand Tour. London: Thames Methuen, 1987. Hill, Kate, ed. Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century: Texts, Images, Objects. London: Routledge, 2016. Hilton, Tim. John Ruskin: The Early Years, 1819–1859. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Hiner, Susan. “Monsier Calicot: French Masculinity Between Commerce and Honor.” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 19, no. 1 (2012): 32–60. Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010. Holcomb, Adele M. “A Neglected Classical Phase of Turner’s Art: His Vignettes to Rogers’s Italy.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969): 405–10. Holroyd, Michael. Bernard Shaw: The One-Volume Definitive Edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Homer, Michael W. “Seeking Primitive Christianity in the Waldensian Valleys: Protestants, Mormons, Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses in Italy.” Nova Religio 9, no. 4 (May 2006): 5–33.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

321

Hosaflook, David. “Emily Strangford: British Lady in Albanian Lands Before Edith Durham.” Universiteti i Prizrenit: Konferencë shkencore për nder të Akademik Idriz Ajetit, 2014. Hughes, Gillian. James Hogg: A Life. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Hulme, Peter. “Deep Maps: Travelling on the Spot.” In Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility. Edited by Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst. New York: Routledge, 2009. 132–47. Hunnisett, Basil. Steel-Engraved Book Illustration in England. London: Scolar, 1980. Hunt, John Dixon. “Ut Pictura Poesis, the Picturesque, and John Ruskin.” Modern Language Notes 93, no. 5 (December 1978): 794–818. Jenson, Andrew. “Serge Louis Baliff.” Latter-Day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia. Salt Lake City: Andrew Jenson History Company, 1901–1936. Jolly, Roslyn. Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession. New York: Routledge, 2009. Jones, Catherine. “Travel Writing, 1707–1918.” In The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature. Vol 2: Enlightenment, Britain and Empire (1707–1918). Edited by Ian Brown et al. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. 277–85. Jones, Steven E. Satire and Romanticism. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. ———. ed. The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Karabashliev, Zahari. Havra. Sofia: Ciela, 2017. Kelman, John. The Faith of Robert Louis Stevenson. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1908. Kennett, Audrey. The Palaces of Leningrad. New York: Putnam, 1973. King, Margaret F., and Elliot Engel. “The Emerging Carlylean Hero in Bulwer’s Novels of the 1830s.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 36, no. 3 (December 1981): 277–95. Kirby, Dale Z. “The History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Switzerland.” MA thesis, Brigham Young University, 1971. Kostova, Ludmilla. Tales of the Periphery: The Balkans in Nineteenth-Century British Writing. Veliko Tarnovo: St. Cyril and St. Methodius University Press, 1997. 161–74. Kuehn, Julia. A Female Poetics of Empire: From Eliot to Woolf. London: Routledge, 2014. Landow, George P. The Aesthetic and Critical Principles of John Ruskin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Latham, Jackie E. M. “A Zealous Evangelical Missionary: Mary Ann Greaves in Europe 1814–1824.” Journal of Religious History 34, no. 2 (2010): 142–57.

322

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Leask, Nigel. Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lévy, Ellen. “In the Footsteps of Footsteps: Holmes and Stevenson in the Cévennes.” In Mountains Figured and Disfigured in the English-Speaking World. Edited by Françoise Besson. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. 451–62. Liu, Alan. Wordsworth: The Sense of History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. Lloyd, Michael. “Bulwer-Lytton and the Idealizing Principle.” English Miscellany 7 (1956): 25–39. Lockett, Richard. Samuel Prout, 1783–1852. London: B. T. Batsford, 1985. Long, Thomas Lawrence. “Documents of Performance: James Sheridan Knowles’s Gift Album to Jemma Haigh: A Glimpse of Victorian Social Networks and Cultural Practices.” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40, no. 2 (2013): 125–32. Longan, F. Donald. The Vikings in History. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1983. Lovegrove, Deryck W. “‘The Voice of Reproach and Outrage’: The Impact of Robert Haldane on French-Speaking Protestantism.” In Divers Manners: A St. Mary’s Miscellany. Edited by D. W. D. Shaw. St. Andrews: St. Mary’s College, 1990. 73–83. Lovell, Mary S. A Scandalous Life: The Biography of Jane Digby. London: Fourth Estate, 1996. Lutes, Jean Marie. Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken Books, 1976. Mack, Robert L. Thomas Gray: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Magris, Claudio. Danube. Translated by Patrick Creagh. London: Harvill Press, 1986. Mains, Jean A. “British Travellers in Norway in the Nineteenth Century.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1989. Marhus, Knut. Den Magiske Fjorden. Hardanger i Engelskereisebidringar 1820– 1914. Bergen: Historisk Intitutt, Bergen University, 1996. Marr, Timothy. The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Massie, Suzanne. Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980. Matthew, Samantha. “Album.” Victorian Review 34, no. 1 (2008): 13–17. ———. “Albums, Belongings, and Embodying the Feminine.” In Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Edited by Katharina Boehm. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 107–29.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

323

McClintock, Anne P. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. London: Routledge, 1995. McCracken-Flesher, Caroline. “Travel Writing.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson. Edited by Penny Fielding. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. 86–101. Merke, Franz. History and Iconography of Endemic Goitre and Cretinism. Translated by Dennis Q. Stephenson. Lancaster: MTP Press, 1984. Mills, Sara. Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism. London: Routledge, 1991. Momma, Haruko. From Philology to English Studies: Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Moskal, Jeanne. “Speaking the Unspeakable: Art Criticism as Life-Writing in Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy.” In Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives. Edited by Helen M. Buss, D. L. Macdonald, and Anne McWhir. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001. 189–216. Murray IV, John. John Murray III, 1808–1892: A Brief Memoir. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920. Naphy, William G. “Calvin’s Geneva.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin. Edited by Donald K. McKim. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2009. 25–37. Neff, D. S. “Phidias and the ‘Runic Stone’: Gray’s ‘Alcaic Ode’ and ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse.’” Victorian Poetry 35, no. 4 (1997): 543–50. Neill, Stephen. A History of Christian Missions. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Parsons, Nicholas T. Worth the Detour: A History of the Guidebook. Stroud: Sutton, 2007. Paz, D. G. “Wyse, Sir Thomas (1791–1862).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/30176. Peterson, Paul H. “The Mormon Reformation of 1856–1857: The Rhetoric and the Reality.” Journal of Mormon History 15, no. 1 (1989): 59–88. Pettegree, Andrew. “The Spread of Calvin’s Thought.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin. Edited by Donald K. McKim. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2009. 207–24. Piggott, Jan. Turner’s Vignettes. London: Tate, 1993. Powell, Cecilia. “On the Wing through Space and Time: The Dynamics of Turner’s Italy.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 39, no. 2 (April 2003): 190– 201. ———. Turner in the South: Rome, Naples, Florence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. ———. “Turner’s Vignettes and the Making of Rogers’ ‘Italy.’” Turner Studies 3, no. 1 (1983): 2–13. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.

324

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Richards, Julian D. The Vikings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Ricker, Lisa Reid. “(De)Constructing the Praxis of Memory-Keeping: Late Nineteenth-Century Autograph Albums as Sites of Rhetorical Invention.” Rhetoric Review 29, no. 3 (2010): 239–56. Rigney, James. “Shadow on the Alps: John Calvin and English Travellers in Geneva.” In Sober, Strict, and Scriptural: Collective Memories of John Calvin, 1800–2000. Edited by Johan de Niet, Herman Paul, and Bart Wallet. Boston: Brill, 2009. 329–33. Robert, Dana L. American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1997. Robinson, Jancis, ed. The Oxford Companion to Wine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Roessel, David. In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Rogers, Beth. “Ménie Muriel Dowie’s A Girl in the Karpathians (1891): Girlhood and the Spirit of Adventure.” Victorian Literature and Culture 43 (2015): 841–56. Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Rosen, Charles, and Henri Zerner. Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. Rosenblatt, Helena. Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749–1762. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Jerome McGann. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Rowland, Ingrid D. From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. Rutherston, Jane. “Victorian Album Structures.” The Paper Conservator 23 (1999): 13–25. Sauerländer, Willibald. The Catholic Rubens: Saints and Martyrs. Translated by David Dollenmayer. Los Angeles: Getty Research Center, 2014. Sawyer, Paul L. Ruskin’s Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Schlick, Yaël. Feminism and the Politics of Travel: After the Enlightenment. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2012. Sillanpää, Pia. The Scandinavian Sporting Tour: A Case Study in Geographical Imagology. Örnsköldsvik: Ågrens Tryckeri, 2002. Smith, Margaret M. Index of English Literary Manuscripts. Vol. III, 1700–1800, Part 2: John Gay—Ambrose Philips with a First-Line Index to Parts 1 and 2. London: Mansell Publishing Limited, 1989. Spear, Jeffrey L. “Ruskin’s Italy.” In Italy and the Victorian Imagination. Edited by William S. Peterson. Browning Institute Studies: An Annual of Victorian

BIBLIOGRAPHY

325

Literary and Cultural History. Vol. 12. New York: Browning Institute and City University of New York, 1984. 73–92. Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Stafford, Barbara Maria. Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984. Stanley, Brian. The Bible and Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Leicester: Apollos, 1990. Stepan, Nancy. The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960. Hamden: Archon Books, 1982. Stevenson, Catherine Barnes. “Review: ‘That Ain’t No Lady Traveler … It’s a Discursive Subject’: Mapping and Remapping Victorian Women’s Travel Writing.” Victorian Literature and Culture 24 (1996): 419–31. Stevenson, Robert Louis. “The Foreigner at Home.” Cornhill Magazine 45 (1882): 534–41. Stewart, David. Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Stewart, Kenneth J. Restoring the Reformation: British Evangelicalism and the Francophone “Réveil,” 1816–1849. Waynesboro: Paternoster, 2006. Strachan, John. Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ———. gen. ed. British Satire 1785–1840. 5 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003. Strohm, Christoph. “Calvin and Religious Tolerance.” Translated by David Dichelle. In John Calvin’s Impact on Church and Society, 1509–2009. Edited by Martin Ernst Hirzel and Martin Sallmann. Grand Rapids: William B. Ferdmans Publishing Co., 2009. 175–91. Stunt, Timothy C. F. From Awakening to Secession: Radical Evangelicals in Switzerland and Britain, 1815–35. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 2000. Swearingen, Roger G. The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide. Hamden: Archon Books, 1980. Print. Sweet, Leonard I. The Minister’s Wife: Her Role in Nineteenth-Century American Evangelicalism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983. Sweet, Rosemary. Cities and the Grand Tour: The British in Italy, c. 1690–1820. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Sweet, Rosemary, Gerrit Verhoeven, and Sarah Goldsmith, eds. Beyond the Grand Tour: Northern Metropolises and Early Modern Travel Behaviour. London: Routledge, 2017. Thompson, C. W. French Romantic Travel Writing: Chateaubriand to Nerval. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Thompson, Carl. Travel Writing. New York: Routledge, 2011.

326

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Thompson, Simon. Unjustifiable Risk? The Story of British Climbing. Cicerone: Cumbria, 2010. Thompson, Victoria E. “Foreign Bodies: British Travel to Paris and the Troubled National Self, 1789–1830.” Studies in Travel Writing 15, no. 3 (2011): 243– 65. Tichi, Cecelia. Exposés and Excess: Muckraking in America, 1900–2000. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Towner, John. “The Grand Tour: A Key Phase in the History of Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 12 (1985): 297–333. Trueman, Carl R. “Calvin and Calvinism.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin. Edited by Donald K. McKim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 225–44. Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Tsoneva-Mathewson, Snezha. “Lord Strangford, or There Are No Routes Without Roots.” In Trees of Knowledge: Roots and Routes. Edited by Maksim Stamenov and Ivo Panchey. Plovdiv: Plovdiv University Press, 2016. 166–74. Turner, James. The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Turner, Katherine. British Travel Writers in Europe 1750–1800. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Urbanowicz, Steven J. The Rollarcoaster Lover’s Companion: A Thrill Seeker’s Guide to the World’s Best Coasters. New York: Citadel Press, 2002. Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2002. Van de Velde, Carl, and Prisca Valkeneers. The Birth of Rubens. Translated by Jantien Black. Ghent: Snoeck, 2013. Vazov, Ivan. Palni sabrani sachineniya. Sofia: Balgarski pisatel, 1974. Vermeulen, Han F. Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Vigne, Randolph. Thomas Pringle: South African Pioneer, Poet, and Abolitionist. Woodbridge: James Currey, 2012. W., G. “La Grand Chartreuse.” Historical Magazine 30 (April 1891): 109–10. Walchester, Kathryn. Gamle Norge and Nineteenth-Century British Women Travellers in Norway. London: Anthem Press, 2014. Walker, Ronald W. “The Stenhouses and the Making of a Mormon Image.” In Mormon Mavericks: Essays on Dissenters. Edited by John Sillito and Susan Staker. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002. 101–29. ———. Wayward Saints: The Social and Religious Protests of the Godbeites against Brigham Young. Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2009.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

327

Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Walton, Paul H. The Drawings of John Ruskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Watt, Margaret H. The History of the Parson’s Wife. London: Religious Book Club, 1945. Wawn, Andrew. The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000. Wettlaufer, Alexandra K. “The Sublime Rivalry of Word and Image: Turner and Ruskin Revisited.” Victorian Literature and Culture 28, no. 1 (2000): 149– 69. Whale, John. “Romantics, Explorers, and Picturesque Travellers.” In The Politics of the Picturesque. Edited by Stephen Copley and Peter Garside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 175–95. Wheeler, Michael. The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in NineteenthCentury Print Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Whittaker, David J. “Mormon Historiography.” In American Denominational History: Perspectives on the Past, Prospects for the Future. Edited by Keith Harper. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008. 146–72. Wildman, Stephen. Ruskin and Switzerland, part 1, 31 March–1 July 2001; part 2, 3 July–30 September 2001. Ruskin Library, Lancaster University, Lancaster. Exhibition catalogues. Wilson, Lisa M. “British Women Writing Satirical Works in the Romantic Period: Gendering Authorship and Narrative Voice.” Romantic Textualities 17 (Summer 2007). http://sites.cardiff.ac.uk/romtextv2/files/2013/02/rt17_ n02.pdf. Withey, Lynn. Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750– 1915. New York: William Morrow, 1997. Witte Jr., John, and Robert M. Kingdon. Sex, Marriage, and Family in John Calvin’s Geneva. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2005. Wolff, Larry. The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. Wolff, Robert Lee. Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England. New York: John Murray, 1977. Wu, Duncan. “The Grande Chartreuse and the Development of Wordsworth’s Recluse.” Bulletin of the Charles Lamb Society 71 (1990): 235–46. Youngkin, Molly. Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the LateVictorian Women’s Press on the Development of the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University, 2007. Zlosnik, Sue. “‘Home Is the Sailor, Home from Sea’: Robert Louis Stevenson and the End of Wandering.” Yearbook of English Studies 34 (2004): 240–52.

328

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Zuber, Valentine. “Servetus vs. Calvin: A Battle of Monuments during the Secularization of the French Third Republic.” In Sober, Strict, and Scriptural: Collective Memories of John Calvin, 1800–2000. Edited by Johan de Niet, Herman Paul, and Bart Wallet. Boston: Brill, 2009. 167–94.

Index

A Aachen Cathedral, 130, 137, 165n48 Act of Union, 289 Adams, John, 225 Adriatic Sea, 184 adventure hero, 253 aesthetics, 9, 18, 49, 56, 107, 133, 151, 175n141, 203, 204, 220, 223, 256–258, 260, 271, 273– 275, 279, 285, 288, 293n21, 294n21. See also sublime; picturesque Age of Discovery, 274 Aix la Chapelle, 130 Albania, 184, 189, 190 Muslims in, 180 albums, 3, 6, 42–47, 49–53, 55, 56, 58n26, 60n50 autographs in, 46, 48, 54 allegory, 280, 283 Alpine hospice of St. Bernard, 131 Alps, 3, 11, 41, 49, 50, 54, 119, 121, 125, 131, 134–137, 140, 142, 149, 153, 165n48, 169n77,

169n84, 170n85, 171n101, 206, 220, 250–251 Great St. Bernard Pass, 169n84, 251 Mont Blanc, 121, 135–136, 140, 150, 156 Mont Cenis, 169n84 America, 221, 222, 229 Andernacht, 134, 156, 159n14 animals, 100. See also fleas bear, 24, 247 donkey, 10, 269, 272, 273, 281, 288 fish, 202, 205, 206, 210 horse, 2, 28, 34, 70, 180, 209, 248, 254 annuals, 120, 122, 123, 125, 128, 140, 151, 155, 156, 159nn13–14, 164n45, 207 antiquarianism, 129, 165n48 anti-travelogue, 10, 245, 249, 250 Anzasca, 153, 154 Arabic, 179, 181, 182 Arctic Norway, 206

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 B. Colbert and L. Morrison (eds.), Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36146-4

329

330

INDEX

Arnold, Matthew, 45 “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”, 45 art, 4, 46, 71, 83, 126–129, 150–152, 154, 160n25, 163n37, 164n41, 169n76, 186, 213, 220, 222, 251 Catholic, 137, 138, 219 early Christian, 138 theft and repatriation of, 146 Arveyron, 149 Austria, 5, 247 authenticity, 106, 138, 210, 252, 256, 275 autobiography, 108, 271–273, 286 B Baedeker guides, 275 Balfour, Graham, 272, 292n12 Baliff, Elise LeCoultre, 227, 228, 239n68 Baliff, Serge Louis, 227, 229–231 Balkan interior, 181 Balmat, Jacques, 146, 147, 173n121 Baptists, 223, 224 Batak, 195 Battle of Marengo, 131 Bavaria, 245 Beaconsfield, Lord, 193 Beaufort, Admiral Sir Francis, 180 Beaufort, Emily Anne, 8, 177, 180, 182, 183, 198n60. See also Smythe, Emily Anne Beaufort Egyptian Sepulchres and Syrian Shrines , 8, 178, 182, 186 Beaujon gardens, 22, 25, 32 Beckford, William, 43, 46, 56n9, 75, 78, 93 Belgium, 121, 123, 125, 149, 166n50, 269, 272 Belgrade, 1, 2, 200n105, 245 Belleville, 21, 22

Bergen, 210, 211 Betham-Edwards, Matilda, 275, 276, 294n26 Holidays in Eastern France, 275, 294n26 Bethlehem, 183 Bewick brothers, 126 Bible, 173n123, 222 Psalms , 270 Bird, Isabella, 292n9 Birkbeck, Morris, 103, 115n40 Black Forest, 121 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 238n40 Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of, 25, 37n35, 151, 152, 176n146 Book of Beauty, 151, 152, 176n146 body, 17, 27, 30, 54, 88, 99–100, 102, 192, 249, 258–259, 262, 289 adrenalin rush in, 27 as spectacle, 262 sexuality of, 244 traveling, 249, 259 Bonaparte, Napoleon (emperor of France), 7, 21, 22, 24, 30, 36n19, 96, 98, 99, 104, 107, 121, 132, 136, 137, 167n64, 222 Boner, Charles, 187, 188, 199n69, 245, 246, 248, 249, 257, 258 Transylvania: Its Products and Its People, 187, 196n2, 245, 264n9 book design, 123, 133, 163n37 borders, 17, 46, 136, 148, 167n56, 288 Bourbon dynasty, 23, 47 Bowdler, Thomas, 98–102, 107, 114n12

INDEX

Observations on Emigration to France, 98, 114n12 Postscript to the Letters Written in France in 1814, A, 98 Boydell’s Picturesque Scenery of Norway, 204, 215n20 Brassie, Annie, 292n9 Brevity, Benjamin, 109 Winter Evenings in Paris , 108, 110, 117n60 Britain, 5, 97, 99, 101, 112, 150, 151, 186, 187, 189, 202, 211–213, 221–223, 235n12, 245, 252, 255 British and Foreign Bible Society, 222 British exceptionalism, 7, 99, 106 Brockedon, William, 141–143, 149, 151, 153, 171n101, 172n107, 172n109, 172n111 Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps , 140, 142, 171n101, 172n107, 176n148 Brontë, Charotte, 168n65 Jane Eyre, 221, 235n11 Brussels, 123–125, 131, 133 Bulgaria, 193–195 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 128, 135, 164nn43–44, 165n45, 169n78 Pilgrims of the Rhine, The, 128, 164n43 Bunyan, John, 269, 280, 284, 295n39 Pilgrim’s Progress , 10, 280 Burke, Edmund, 18, 43, 110, 113n6 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 96, 113n6 Burns, Robert, 115n36, 289 Burton, Mary, 228 Buzard, James, 4, 12n14, 59n32, 113n7, 161n28, 203, 213, 215n12, 216n22, 218n75, 234n1, 235n13, 250, 265n29, 274, 294n24

331

Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 64, 70, 92, 126, 181, 183, 197n26, 198n44 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 124, 184, 271, 294n28 Byronic posturing, 146, 164n45

C Cadell, Thomas, 126 Calais, 123, 124, 126, 127, 133, 136 California, 233, 272, 291n4 Calvinism, 9, 222, 228, 235n18 Calvin, John, 220, 222, 224–226, 229, 233, 237n37 Camisards, 271, 287, 288 parallels with Scottish Covenanters, 270, 288 Campagna, 128 Carey, Frances Jane, 29 Journal of a Tour in France in the Years 1816 and 1817 , 29, 38n35 Carpathian Mountains, 250 Carter, Anne, 35n2 Letters from a Lady to Her Sister during a Tour to Paris , 35n2 Carthusian monasticism, 6, 49 Cartwright, Edmund, 44, 57n12 Catherine the Great, 18, 19 Catholic Emancipation Act, 137 Catholicism, 9, 100, 219, 222, 223. See also art Catholic liturgy as theatre, 219 cavern, 149, 174n130 Cévennes, 10, 271, 273, 275, 277, 281–284, 286–290, 296n68 mountains of, 269, 272, 277 Chamonix, 121, 136, 146, 149–151, 154, 155, 174n134 Channel Islanders, 223, 224

332

INDEX

children, 28, 99, 100, 101, 106, 124, 146, 152–155, 174n126, 231, 233, 277, 280 China, 221 Christiania, 204, 207, 211, 212 Christianity, 137, 220, 223, 283. See also individual denominations civilization, 6, 11, 136, 152, 186, 245, 246, 248, 254–256, 260, 262 clothing, 26, 208, 209 Cochrane, Thomas, 289 Colburn, Henry, 108, 109, 111 Collingwood, J. R., 122 Collingwood, W. G., 122, 157n3 Cologne, 129, 137–139, 145, 170n87 colonial discourse, 256, 257, 259 Comb, William, 97, 104 commodification, 11, 275 commonplace books, 44, 46, 57n10 Constant de Bosque, 223 consumer, 23, 35, 97, 112, 257 consumerism, 6–7, 17, 96, 106, 220, 271 consumption, 4, 6–9, 11, 67–70, 78, 98, 101, 107, 220, 257, 267n79, 290 Continent, the, 2, 5, 7, 9, 17, 21, 29, 33, 35, 46, 96, 97, 103, 108, 115n36, 119, 120, 124, 135, 137, 138, 140, 151, 152, 156, 161n28, 185, 186, 188, 192, 220, 222, 223, 233, 245, 274 as pastoral Hippocrene, 149 scenery of, 119, 160n25 continental blockade, 222 Conventional Society for the Diffusion of Religious Knowledge over the Continent of Europe, 222 Copenhagen, 34 Corfu, 180, 187 cosmopolitanism, 12n11, 107

Cotterel, F.F., 20, 23, 26, 37n28, 38n46 Promenades aériennes ou Montagnes françaises , 26, 36n17 Counter-Reformation, 139, 171n96 Countess of Morley, 37n34 Dacre; a Novel , 25 Cracow.. See Krakow Crane, Walter, 280 cretinism. See hypothyroidism Croly, George, 98, 104, 115n41, 137 Paris in 1815, 103, 115n41 Cunningham, Gail, 263n2 Cunningham, Rev. John William, 98, 100, 101, 114n12, 219 Cautions to Continental Travellers , 100, 114n12, 234n3

D Danube, 200n105, 246 De Jorio, Andrea, 67, 91n7 Plan de Pompéi, 67, 91n17 De Loire, Esprit-François-Marie Dupré, 55 Denmark, 202, 203 Dichev, Stefan, 200n108 Patyat kam Sofia (The Road), 194, 200n108 Dickens, Charles, 220, 271, 291n9 Pictures from Italy, 220, 234n5, 291n9 Digby Beste, Henry, 109, 112n2 Four Years in France, 109, 112n2 Disciples of Christ, 220, 221 disease, 100–102, 105, 140, 152, 155, 187 Disraeli, Benjamin, 113n9, 193, 194 Voyage of Captain Popanilla, 97, 111 Dixie, Lady Florence, 292n9

INDEX

Doctor Syntax in Paris, or a Tour in Search of the Grotesque, 104, 116n45 Dowie, Ménie Muriel, 243–263 Girl in the Karpathians, A, 9, 243, 244, 247, 248, 252, 263, 263n2, 265n25, 265n30, 265n37, 265n43, 265n46, 265n49, 266n51, 266n58, 266n61, 266n63, 266n65, 266n69, 267n80, 267nn86–87, 267nn92–93 Gallia, 244 “In Ruthenia”, 246–248, 253, 264n16, 265n45 “In the Haunted Crimea”, 266n58 E Egyptian pyramids, 182 Ehrenbreitstein, 130, 134, 156, 166n56, 168nn73–74 ekphrasis, 138–140, 143, 145 Engelbach, Lewis, 69–71, 73, 82, 84 Naples and the Campagna Felice, 67, 88, 91–94 Englishman in Paris, a Satirical Novel, The, 107 Epirus, 184 ethnology, 179, 185, 188, 189, 191 European Protestantism, 222 Eustace, John Chetwode, 82, 93 Classical Tour through Italy, 110 evangelicals, 51, 136, 220–223 exile, 43, 92, 104, 109, 270, 277, 291n4 experience, 2, 4–7, 9–11, 16–18, 20–23, 25–29, 32–35, 62, 63, 68, 80, 83, 86, 89, 98, 99, 105, 112, 124, 125, 135, 143, 181, 234, 246, 248, 252–254, 256, 260–262, 275, 283, 285 aesthetics of, 18, 257, 285

333

multi-sensory, 259 exploration, 8, 9, 35, 124, 160n25, 246, 248, 256, 258, 261, 263, 274–277, 280, 287, 290 exportation, 96–98 F fairy, 128, 150, 151 Father Oswald, 225 Fergusson, Robert, 289 Field, Barron, 110, 117n70 fishing, 8, 133, 205, 206 fleas, 252, 258, 259 food, 4, 27, 62, 63, 67–71, 75, 78–87, 89, 92, 94, 181, 243, 259. See also gastronomy foreigners, 10, 68, 107 Forsyth, Joseph, 90, 111, 117n73 Remarks on Antiquities, Arts & Letters during an Excursion in Italy, 111 Fouché, Joseph, 104, 116n43 France, 2, 5, 10, 19, 23, 24, 32, 34, 50, 56, 98–100, 104, 106, 107, 121, 123–125, 136, 139, 149, 186, 203, 205, 269–273, 275, 277, 279, 281, 283, 286–288, 290 Gallomania and, 105 people of, 124, 286 Revolution in, 18, 51 Stereotypes, 245 See also individual places Freud, Sigmund, 86, 94 “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva”, 86 Friendship’s Offering , 120–123, 129, 134, 143, 144, 148, 155, 156, 157n10, 158nn12–13, 159n14, 166n50, 168n72, 173n115, 173nn117–118, 175n134, 176n156

334

INDEX

G Galicia, 9, 243, 247, 248, 250, 252, 253, 255, 256, 262, 263 Galignani, 32, 33, 39nn69–70, 110, 117n60 Galilee, 182 Gamle Norge (Old Norway), 209– 211, 213, 217n43, 217nn53–54, 218n61, 218n63 garden, 17, 21–23, 32, 33, 66, 90. See also Beaujon gardens Gardens of Orienbaum, 19 gastronomy, 6, 27, 62, 86. See also food gender, 7, 8, 17, 18, 22, 23, 29, 195 as performance, 9, 244, 248, 249, 263 Geneva, 121, 220, 222–226, 228, 229, 231, 237n37 Genoa, 121 German language, 186, 199n77 Germany, 2, 5, 32, 125, 129, 156 Gibbon, Edward, 222 Giotto, 153 glaciers, 34, 121, 143, 149, 150, 153 Gladstone, William Ewart, 180, 187, 192, 194, 197n18, 206 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 69, 83, 84 Italienische Reise, 68, 92, 94 goiter, 141, 142 gothicism, 125, 130, 134, 137, 138, 156, 230, 258, 274 and the north, 121, 124 Graham, Maria, 289, 294n28 Grande Chartreuse, Monastery of the, 41–60. See also Arnold, Matthew; Weld, Charles Richard Grand, Sarah, 244 Grand Tour consumerism and aestheticism, 220 decline, 50

itineraries, 17, 121, 182 nostalgia, 4, 6, 7, 112 Protestant–Catholic rivalry, 220 and Protestant containment of Catholicism, 219, 220 tropes, 42 Gray, Thomas, 6, 42–44, 46, 49, 56n5 “Alcaic Ode”, 42, 57n16 Great Commission, The, 221 Great St. Bernard Pass.. See Alps Greaves, Mary Ann, 222, 225 Greece, 3, 173n112, 180, 187, 203. See also Hellas Greeks, 43, 71, 82, 86, 88, 104, 179, 184, 186–188, 190, 192, 203 Gregorian chants, 258 Gueshoff, Ivan, 193, 200n103 guidebook, 3, 49–51, 61, 96, 110, 112, 125, 141, 165n48, 171n102, 245, 249, 263, 275, 294n26 guides, 2, 20, 34, 73, 109, 125, 149, 153, 172n102, 175n140, 181, 204–206, 243, 250, 252, 277, 278

H Habsburg, 181, 187, 188, 190, 191, 251 Haldane, Robert, 222, 225, 235n17, 239n62 Hannibal, 136, 165n48 Hansen, Peter, 49, 58n31, 173n121, 175n137 Harley, James, 96, 112n5 Press, or Literary Chit Chat, The, 96, 112n5 Harrison, W. H., 155, 159n13, 176n146 Harrow, 179

INDEX

health, 5, 26–27, 38n45, 98, 100, 107, 141–142, 250. See also medicine Heidelberg, 121 Hellas, 186. See also Greece Herder, Johann Gottfried, 189 hermitage, 142 Hindi, 179 Hobhouse, John Cam, 183 Hogg, James, 123, 147–149, 174n126, 174n127–128 Holy Land, 182 Holy Week, 219 Horace, 44, 75, 79, 111, 118n73 hospitality, 43, 52, 54, 159, 226, 229 hostelries, 43 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 4, 189 Hungry Forties, 221 Hurd, Richard, 99, 103–105, 115n37 On the Uses of Foreign Travel , 99, 103, 115n37 Hyde Park, 20, 248 hypothyroidism, 141

I identity, 4, 7, 8, 17, 21, 98, 107, 129, 145, 146, 179, 186, 188–191, 214, 228, 229, 233, 262, 278, 290, 293 English, 99, 281, 289 national, 7, 97–99, 178, 189, 192, 193, 271, 276, 278–281, 284, 288–290 Scottish, 270, 271, 273 illustration, 4, 7, 31, 119, 121, 123, 126–128, 134, 140, 141, 160n14, 162n35, 165n45, 171n101, 175n141, 2142n, 233 in travel writing, 258 See also ekphrasis; letterpress; lithography; steel engraving

335

image, 3, 10, 16, 30, 101, 120, 124, 125, 128, 130, 133, 136–141, 143, 166–167n56, 186, 209, 211, 224, 233, 251, 262 imperialism, 108 industrialization, 150, 175n136 Inglis, Frances Erskine, 289 Inglis, Henry D., 158–159n13, 204, 205, 215n17 Ireland in 1834, 159n13 Inquisition, 225 Ioannina, 183, 184 Ionian Islands, 183, 187 Ireland, 106, 107 Istanbul, 180 Italy, 2–5, 62, 64, 86, 107, 121, 125, 126, 136, 146, 153, 166n48, 166n50, 169n84, 203, 204, 235n12, 245, 277. See also individual places J James, Henry, 292n9 Jameson, Anna, 6, 62, 63, 67, 68, 71, 82, 85, 89, 90n3, 91n18, 92n31, 93n51, 94n54 Diary of an Ennuyée, 62, 90 Jensen, Wilhelm, 86 Gradiva: Ein Pompejanischen Phantasiestück, 86 Jerdan, William, 104–106, 116n47 Six Weeks in Paris, or a Cure for the Gallomania, 104 Jerusalem, 183, 270 Jews, 270, 277, 291n4 Joseph, Franz (emperor of Austria), 251 journalism, 129 Jouy, (Victoire-Joseph) Étienne de, 53–55, 59n44 L’Hermite de la Chaussée-d’Antin, 59n44, 60n51

336

INDEX

K Kennedy, William, 125, 161n30 Kitchiner, William, 108 Traveller’s Oracle; or Maxims for Locomotion, 108, 117n63 Koblenz, 134 Krakow, 262 L Lago di Como, 133 Laing, Samuel, 212, 218n78 Journal of a Residence in Norway, 205, 216n25 Lake District, 133, 155, 169n77 landscape, 5, 8, 23, 47, 49, 50, 64, 93, 125, 127, 128, 131, 134, 142, 165n48, 172n112, 201–206, 209, 256, 258, 260, 261, 269, 281–283, 285, 286, 290, 293n21 landscape annuals, 120, 125–127, 129 Lapland, 202 Latin, 26, 43, 75, 78, 86, 179 Latter-day Saints, Church of Jesus Christ of, 220, 221 Lausanne, 222, 227, 241n92 Lebanon, 184 Leigh, Samuel, 97, 172n102 Retrospective Review, 96 Le Reflecteur, 9, 227, 229 Le Riche, J. M. Antiquités des environs de Naples , 63, 91n5 letterpress, 3, 120, 121, 125, 127, 129, 162n37 Letters from the Bull Family in Boulogne, 104 Lévy, Ellen, 287, 296n69 Lille, 123, 130, 132 lithography, 119, 130 Liverpool, 124, 231 Livingstone, David, 221

London, 46, 65, 76, 96, 123, 144, 148, 247, 262, 263, 277 London Missionary Society, 222 Luttrell, Henry, 24, 37n30 Letters to Julia in Rhyme, 24, 37n30 M Macaulay, T. B., 126, 162n35 Maclise, Daniel, 128 maps, 2, 9, 11, 86, 95, 213, 220–224, 227, 248, 249, 251, 252, 263, 271, 278, 281 Marriott, John, 98, 100, 102, 106, 114n12 Hints to a Traveller into Foreign Countries , 99, 114n12 Martigny, 142, 143, 155, 172n102 Mary I, queen of England and Ireland, 224 mass production, 126 mass tourism, 3, 5, 7, 9, 97, 98, 207, 213, 263, 274 Matthews, Henry, 75, 78, 80, 83, 84 Diary of an Invalid, 75, 93n38, 94n57 Mazuchelli, Nina, 246 Magyarland, 246, 249, 264n12 McGahan, Januarius Aloysius, 195 M’Donough, Felix, 105, 116n47 The Hermit in London, 105, 116n47 Meade, L. T., 264n6 medicines, 108. See also health Mediterranean region, 5, 13n20, 121 Middle East, 183 Milan, 121 missionaries, 9, 11, 221–227, 229, 230, 235, 239, 240 mobility, 10, 23, 272 physical, 34 Modernism, 263, 276, 279, 280

INDEX

modernity, 4, 45 and travel, 95 Moffat, Robert, 221 Moldavia, 190 “Montagnes Russes”.. See rollercoaster Mont Blanc. See Alps Montenegro, 181, 190 Moore, Thomas, 26, 27, 37n38, 38n50, 105–107, 116n51, 117n54 The Fudge Family in Paris , 25, 37n38, 105, 116n50 Morgan, Sydney (Owenson), Lady, 103 France, 103, 115n40 Italy, 66, 91n9 Morland, George, 152, 175n145 Mormons. See Latter-day Saints, Church of Jesus Christ of Moselle, 134 mountaineers, 49, 149, 155, 175n140 mountains, 8, 9, 18, 23, 25, 28, 33, 46, 47, 51, 56, 132, 135, 136, 147, 149–151, 154–156, 184, 203, 204, 208, 209, 243, 251, 252, 261, 277 climbing of, 260 crossing of, 134, 135, 184, 208 See also Alps; Cévennes; Carpathian Mountains Moxon, Edward, 93n46, 126, 158n13, 167n63 Müller, Friedrich Max, 189 Murray III, John, 34, 151, 170n89, 172n102 Handbook for Travellers in France, 59n33 Handbook for Travellers in Scotland, 39n75 Handbook for Travellers in South Germany and Austria, 39n73

337

Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland, 151 Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland and the Alps of Savoy and Piedmont , 172n102, 234n6 Musgrave, George, 47, 48, 51–53, 57n13, 58n23, 59n40 N Naples, 16, 61, 64, 66–68, 71, 73, 94n54, 111 Napoleon III (emperor of France), 188 Napoleonic Wars, 3, 5, 16, 17, 32, 33, 202, 274 nature, 4, 5, 21, 45, 79, 83, 101, 122, 127, 202, 203, 205, 209, 248, 254–256, 258, 261, 262, 273, 279, 283, 286, 292n11 Netherlands, 2, 125 New Woman, 9, 244 New York, 222, 231 Norway, 5, 8, 11, 201–214, 214nn1– n2, 214n4, 215n7, 215n9, 215n15, 215n17, 215nn19–20, 216n25, 216nn27–29, 217n43, 217nn45–47, 217nn50–53, 217n55, 218n60, 218n62, 218n68, 218n70, 218n73, 218n76, 218n77 Norwegian silver, 211 O Odysseus, 183 Odyssey, The, 80, 183 Orientalism, 173n112, 245, 246 Oslo, 204 Oslofjord, 211 Ottoman Empire, 179, 190, 192–194, 200n105 Oxford, 104, 122, 139, 154, 179

338

INDEX

P page layout, 130, 233 Palmyra, 182, 183 panorama, 16, 17, 206, 256 Panslavism, 182, 189, 191 parataxis, 141 Paris, 5, 16, 17, 21–28, 32–35n2, 37n32, 98, 102–104, 125, 204, 272, 277 parody, 108 Parris, E. T., 128 Pasha, Ali, 183, 184 patriotism, 97, 105, 107, 108, 194 peasantry, 150, 152 Persian, 179 philhellenism, 186, 187 picnicking, 6, 67, 89 picturesque, 45, 49, 96, 112, 123, 124, 126, 127, 129, 130, 133, 140, 141, 151, 152, 154, 163n39, 167n58, 175n141, 246, 275, 284, 285, 293n21. See also aesthetics; tourism Piedmont, 9, 220, 223, 224 pilgrimage, 10, 53, 211, 226, 256, 257, 271, 272, 276, 281–287, 290. See under tourism Pindus, 184 Pisano, Nicola, 154 pleasure, 2, 5, 10, 18–21, 33, 62, 66, 70, 75, 80, 82, 83, 85, 94n61, 100, 104, 105, 109, 116n53, 208, 239n70, 240n85, 252, 263, 294n21 Plovdiv, 195, 200n105 Poland, 247–249, 252, 263 Pompeii, 6, 61–63, 66–71, 75, 80–84, 86, 88–90n3, 94n54 poverty, 52, 140, 154, 231, 232, 238n54, 255 Prague, 125 Pratt, Belinda, 231

primitivism, 23, 150, 192, 209, 223, 246, 259, 277, 282, 287 Prince Nikola, 181 Pringle, Thomas, 122, 123, 129, 148, 158n12, 159n14 print culture, 4, 7, 119, 122, 123, 127, 132, 133 Protestantism, 99–101, 137, 239n66, 277. See also Catholicism; religion Prout, Samuel, 120, 121, 124, 125, 128, 130–132, 140, 153, 160n25, 164n44, 167n58 Continental Annual, and Romantic Cabinet , 125 Facsimiles of Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany, 119, 131 Pulcinella, 110, 111 Punch, 34, 110 Purser, William, 143, 145, 172n112 R Raffles, Thomas, 124, 135, 136, 140, 160n22, 169n79 railways, 5, 67, 246 Raspe, Rudolph Erich, 97 Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of His Marvellous Travels , 97 refreshment, 7, 84, 101 religion, 51, 114n26, 124, 148, 191, 228, 230, 234, 280, 291 asceticism, 51 prayer, 257 Sabbatarianism, 100 See also individual denominations Renaissance, 121, 124, 127, 138, 167n58 reproductive media, 130, 133 residence abroad, 99, 107 restlessness, 100, 279 restoration churches. See Disciples of Christ; Seventh-Day Adventists;

INDEX

Latter-day Saints, Church of Jesus Christ of Rhine, 112, 121, 124, 126, 128, 134, 165n45, 166n50, 277 Rhône, 141–143, 149 Richardson, Mary, 121, 133, 137, 138, 157n7, 165n48, 170n89, 174n130 Ritchie, Leitch, 125, 126, 129, 130, 158, 161n31, 166n50 Travelling Sketches , 129 Rivers, St. John, 221 Travelling Sketches in the North of Italy, the Tyrol, and on the Rhine, 125, 161n31 Rogers, Beth, 244, 264n3 Rogers, Samuel, 7, 66–67, 73, 78, 85, 88, 91n8, 92n34, 93n46, 94n54, 94n60, 94n67, 119–121, 123, 125–128, 130–131, 133–136, 143–144, 159, 162n34, 163n41, 165n48, 167n63, 169n76, 169n80, 172n10 “The Alps”, 125, 134–136, 169n84 “The Descent”, 131, 134–136, 169n84 Italy, 7, 66, 79, 119, 120, 123, 125–128, 133–136, 143, 162n34, 169n84, 172n110 roller coaster, 16, 17, 19, 21–24, 26, 27, 31, 35, 107 Roman Catholicism, 220. See also Catholicism Romanians, 186, 188 Romanticism, 97 and concept of self, 256 and satire, 97 Rome, 16, 66, 67, 80, 82, 90, 204, 219, 220, 223, 225 Rosa, Salvator, 50 Roscoe, Thomas, 129, 172n111 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 168n70

339

Trip to Paris and Belgium, A, 133 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 45, 53, 224, 233, 237n38 Rubens, Peter Paul, 137–140, 170n87, 171n96 Crucifixion, 138, 139 Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 137, 140 Ruskin, John James, 7–8, 11, 119– 156, 160n25, 161n28, 165n48, 172n104, 174n126, 175n134, 176n146 “Account of a Tour on the Continent”, 7, 119, 131, 132, 157n3 “Cassel”, 123, 124 “Fragments from a Metrical Journal”, 122, 134, 155, 157n10, 159n14 Iteriad, 133, 168n66 Modern Painters , 122, 151, 154, 155, 176n149 Praeterita, 119, 120, 130 “Saltzburg”, 122, 139, 143, 144, 149, 154, 155, 157–159n13, 176n113 Stigmatization of Saint Francis, The, 139 Ruskin, John James, 8, 123, 147, 148, 153, 162n35, 164n44, 166n53, 168n66, 172n104, 176n156 Russia, 5, 18, 19, 21, 36, 247. See also Tsar of Russia; individual places Ruthenia, 244, 247, 262, 263

S Sabbatarianism, 100. See under religion Salt Lake City, 231 Salzburg, 122, 143, 146, 158n12, 159n14, 173n120 Sass, Henry, 73, 93n36

340

INDEX

Journey to Rome and Naples , 73, 93n36 satire, 7, 11, 23, 91n6, 95–98, 100, 103–107, 109–112, 116n53 Saussure, Horace Benedict de, 142, 149, 151 Voyages dans les Alpes , 140 Savoy, 2, 70, 121, 136, 151, 220 Scandinavia, 202, 203, 210, 213, 214n2 Schaffhausen, 121, 136, 169n82 scientific causes, 110 scientific tourism, 140, 141, 143 Scotland, 147, 154, 254, 255, 260, 269, 270, 272, 277, 281, 286–290, 294n32 Scottish Covenanters, 270, 288 Scottish Highlands, 277, 282, 295n39 Scottish Presbyterianism, 271, 280 Scott, John, 100 A Visit to Paris , 106, 112n2, 116n53 Scott, Sir Walter, 125, 147, 173n120, 174n123, 290 Second, Albéric, 15, 35n1 self-reflexivity, 276 Serbia, 191 Serbs, 188 Servetus, Michael, 225, 238n45 The Restoration of Christianity, 227 Seventh-Day Adventists, 220 Shakespeare, William, 265n43 Othello, 253, 265n43 Shaw, George Bernard, 185, 198n50 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 219, 234 Frankenstein, 230 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 66, 91n7 ship, 133, 181, 186, 211–213. See also steamship Simplon, 121, 136, 141, 142, 157n7, 169n84, 171n101, 261

Sion, 141, 142 Sister arts, 120, 121, 123, 127, 128, 129, 133–137, 139, 143, 145, 151–152, 153, 156 Slavery, 221 Smith, Albert, 49, 58n31 Smith, Joseph, 221 Smythe, Emily Anne Beaufort [Viscountess Strangford], 177, 195 The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic in 1863. With a Visit to Montenegro, 8, 178 Report on the Bulgarian Peasant Relief Fund, 178, 200n100 Smythe, Percy Ellen Algernon Frederick [Viscount Strangford], 177 Original Letters and Papers of the Late Viscount Strangford upon Philological and Kindred Subjects , 178, 185, 196n4 A Selection from the Writings of Viscount Strangford on Political, Geographical, and Social Subjects , 178, 198n62 Snow, Eliza Roxcy, 226, 238n56 Snow, Lorenzo, 223 Sofia, 194, 200n105 Southey, Robert, 96, 112n4 spirituality, 138, 150, 271 crisis in, 285 journeys and, 281, 285 sporting, 8, 11, 46, 205 Staël, Germaine Louise Necker, Madame de, 75, 80, 93n42 Corinne, 75, 93n42 Stanfield, Clarkson, 125, 129, 166n51 Starke, Marianna, 6, 61–63, 67, 68, 71, 82, 85, 91–94n60, 110, 125, 161n28 Travels in Italy, 61, 90–94n60

INDEX

Travels on the Continent , 110, 161n28 St. Clair, Stanislas, 195 steamship, 5, 112, 207. See also ship steel engraving, 64, 121, 126, 143, 162n37, 168n65 Stendhal (Henri Marie Beyle), 66, 68, 80, 83, 88, 91n11, 93n49, 94n65 Stenhouse, Frances Warn, 220, 226 Exposé of Polygamy: A Lady’s Life among the Mormons , 228, 236n22 Tell It All: A Woman’s Life in Polygamy, 9, 227, 228, 231, 237–241n91 Stenhouse, Thomas Brown Holmes (T. B. H.), 223, 224 Stephen, Leslie, 206, 216n32 Playground of Europe, 206, 216n32 Sterne, Laurence, 276, 294 Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), 276, 294n30 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 10, 11, 268–291 Across the Plains , 284 Amateur Emigrant , 284 Inland Voyage, An, 269, 271–273, 276, 278, 285, 289, 291n1, 292n14, 294n29 “Ordered South”, 272, 292n10 “Roads”, 272, 274, 292n10 Silverado Squatters , 284 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 274 Travels with a Donkey, 10, 269–273, 276–281, 285, 288–291n1, 295–297n76 “Walking Tours”, 272 Stevenson Trail, 273, 292n15 St. Goar, 134, 156, 159n14 Stoker, Bram, 245, 247, 267n79

341

Dracula, 245, 267n79 Stothard, Mrs. Charles (Anna Eliza Bray), 29, 38n58 Stothard, Thomas, 119 St. Petersburg, 18, 19, 178 Strangford, Viscount. See Smythe, Percy Ellen Algernon Frederick [Viscount Strangford] sublime, 18, 41, 43–45, 47, 49, 95, 110, 142, 164n41, 203–204, 223, 250, 256–261 in household ritual, 259 landscape, 17, 41, 45, 256, 261 motion, 17 pleasure, 17 terror, 45 vulnerability, 256, 261 suffrage, 210 Suli, 183 Suliote, 184 Sweden, 5, 202, 203, 215n9 Swift, Jonathan, 97 Gulliver’s Travels , 97 Swiss Reformed Church, 227, 230 Switzerland, 2, 9, 24, 43, 110, 121, 141, 142, 165n48, 171n102, 203, 206, 216n32, 220, 221, 226, 228, 230, 231, 246, 261. See also individual places Syria, 184 T Talbot, Frances. See Countess of Morley Tatra Society (Towarzystwo Tatranske), 251 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 112, 118n76 The Kickleburys on the Rhine, 112, 118n76 Thessaly, 184 Thoreau, Henry David, 255

342

INDEX

Walden, 255 Tivoli, 30, 32, 34, 37n24 topographical description, 134, 140 tourism, 2–4, 11, 12, 23n14, 35, 95–97, 100–102, 104–107, 112, 139, 201, 206, 207, 213, 245, 248, 246, 250, 251, 254, 274, 277 picturesque, 203, 285 pilgrimage as, 260 trade, 97, 105, 109, 112, 166, 202, 245, 274 Transcontinental Railway, 232 Transylvania, 187, 246 travel aesthetics, 18, 56 codes of, 43, 56 continental, 2, 4, 7, 10, 47, 49, 51, 98, 99, 110, 201, 222, 274 demotic character of, 51 historical periods of, 10, 78 interior vs. exterior, 10, 271, 276, 277, 285, 287 mass, 12n14, 50 scientific, 3, 203 travelers, 1–7, 10, 16–17, 24, 28, 35, 41–55, 62, 63–64, 66–71, 75, 78, 81, 84–86, 88–90, 92n27, 92n31, 98, 100–101, 103–104, 107–111, 120–121, 124–125, 127–128, 131, 135, 137, 141, 150–151, 172n109, 175n141, 180–184, 194, 201–214, 219–221, 223–226, 233–234, 245, 249–254, 258–260, 262– 263, 267n79, 274–278, 281, 283–284, 289–290, 294n28 new types of, 17, 100 mountaineer, 49, 223 working-class holiday maker, 49

women, 11, 35, 101, 180, 202, 208, 209, 253, 258, 259 traveler-tourist distinction, 250, 274 travel writing conventions, 18, 245, 249, 254, 255, 258, 260, 263, 274, 278 fictional techniques, 276 genres, 55, 275 imperialism and, 107 tourists in, 3, 11, 245, 254, 260, 272, 274, 285 Treaty of Paris (1814/1815), 222 Trinitarianism, 225, 227 Trollope, Anthony, 271, 291n9 Trollope, Frances, 5 Tsar of Russia, 33, 188 Turin, 223 Turkey, 173n112, 194 Turner, J. M. W., 64, 119, 166n51 Twain, Mark, 292n9

U Unitarianism, 220, 225 Urdu, 179 Utah, 222, 231, 233

V Valais, 141–143, 172n106 Vallachs, 186 Vatican, 220 Vazov, Ivan, 193, 194, 200n104 Vienna, 105, 245, 262, 263 Viking, 211–214 village, 50, 141, 251, 252, 254, 255, 259, 283 visitors’ books, 43, 54, 201 Vuffrey, Harriette, 231

W Waldensians, 223, 224, 236n26

INDEX

Waldo, Peter, 223 walking tour, 270, 272 Wallachia, 190 Wallraf, Ferdinand Franz, 138, 171n94 Walpole, Horace, 44 Waterloo, battle of, 51 Weld, Charles Richard, 41, 42, 47, 50 Auvergne, Piedmont, and Savoy, 56n1, 58n22 “Visit to the Grande Chartreuse”, 56n1 Wellington, 132, 167n64 West Indies, 221 wilderness, 47, 202, 204, 206, 251, 269, 280 Wilks, Samuel Charles, 102, 104, 115n34 Emigration, or England and Paris: A Poem, 102 Williams, John, 221 Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands , 221 Wilson, Harriet, 107, 113n10

343

Paris Lions and London Tigers , 107, 113n10 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 208, 214n2, 217n43, 226, 294n28 Maria: or, the Wrongs of Women, 233 Wordsworth, William, 4, 235n12, 271 Intimations Ode, 152, 154 Prelude, The, 4, 12n16, 45, 261 Wyse, Thomas, 107, 109–112, 117n58, 118n74 Continental Traveller’s Oracle, 7, 107, 108 “Walks in Rome and Its Environs”, 107 Y Young, Brigham, 223, 231–233, 236n21, 241n105 Yugoslavia, 190, 191 Z Zenobia, queen of Palmyra, 183