Curiosities and Splendour

An anthology of classic travel literature

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• Publisher: Lonely Planet
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788685146
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Collezioni letterarie

Journey back in time with this collection of classic travel writing from great authors and adventurers. These extraordinary odysseys over land and sea captivated audiences and gave them a glimpse into countries, cities and cultures like never before. Tales include Robert Falcon Scott's doomed Antarctic expedition of 1910-13; Robert Byron's ten-month journey through Persia to Afghanistan in the early 30s; Jack London's 1907 sailing adventure across the south Pacific; and Teddy Roosevelt's scientific exploration of the Brazilian jungle's exotic flora and fauna. Each author and their piece of writing is introduced by editor Mark Mackenzie, who gives context to the work and provides an insightful look into how travel has changed since they were originally published. Features extracts from: The Worst Journey in the World - Apsley Cherry-Garrard The Road to Oxiana - Robert Byron Sea and Sardinia - DH Lawrence Cruise of the Snark - Jack London American Notes - Charles Dickens Through the Brazilian Wilderness - Teddy Roosevelt Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain Letters Written During a Short Residence in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark - Mary Wollstonecraft In Morocco - Edith Wharton Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - David Livingstone The Histories - Herodotus South: The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition 1914-1917 - Ernest Shackleton About Lonely Planet: Lonely Planet is a leading travel media company and the world's number one travel guidebook brand, providing both inspiring and trustworthy information for every kind of traveller since 1973. Over the past four decades, we've printed over 145 million guidebooks and grown a dedicated, passionate global community of travellers. You'll also find our content online, on mobile, video and in 14 languages, 12 international magazines, armchair and lifestyle books, ebooks and more.Important Notice: The digital edition of this book may not contain all of the images found in the physical edition.

CHARLES DICKENS

INTRODUCTION

‘My readers have opportunities of judging for themselves whether the influences and tendencies which I distrusted in America had, at that time, any existence but in my imagination.’ So wrote Charles Dickens in his preface to American Notes, his account, published in October 1842, of a publicity tour to the United States that same year. Dickens already enjoyed a large American readership, his work serialised on both sides of the Atlantic. When Little Nell lay grievously ill towards the end of The Old Curiosity Shop, fans on the New York dockside, yet to receive the relevant instalment, called out to arriving ships as to her fate.

Dickens considered himself an honorary American, an admirer of the republican project, and took ‘a grateful interest’ in a nation that placed such value on individual liberty. When he arrived in Boston, his admirers, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow among them, renamed it ‘Boz-town’ in his honour. Dickens found the city to his liking, noting an ‘intellectual refinement and superiority’.

New York agreed with Dickens too. ‘Was there ever such a sunny street as this Broadway,’ he noted, ‘the pavement stones are polished with the tread of feet until they shine.’ A dedicated social commentator, Dickens’ itinerary also took in the infamous Five Points. Here things assumed a different tone. The ‘hideous tenements’ that stood before him ‘take their name from robbery and murder: all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here’.

This became the lens through which, gradually, he began to view the whole nation. Dickens was certainly unprepared for the level of public attention that followed him, an example, he believed, of America’s inherent vulgarity. He considered one fellow traveller ‘the most inquisitive…that can possibly be imagined. He never spoke otherwise than interrogatively. He was an embodied inquiry…with a great note of interrogation in each eye, two in his cocked ears, two more in his turned-up nose and chin, at least half a dozen more about the corners of his mouth’.

In Washington, he found the Senate a ‘dignified and decorous body…its proceedings conducted with much gravity and order’. Until, that is, he encountered his least favourite American custom, tobacco, and ‘the universal disregard of the spittoon… I strongly recommend all strangers not to look at the floor’.

On its publication, American Notes received a critical mauling. It was perceived as a condescending rant, the bilious mutterings of old Empire. Edgar Allan Poe described it as ‘suicidal’. The American press labelled Dickens a mercenary, concerned more with money – and melodrama – than facts.

Dickens’ attitude was cultivated partly from indignation. His books were not covered by international copyright, and, for all the copies that flew off shelves, he made little in royalties. Yet some of his insights, on the deprivations in the prisons he visited in Philadelphia and New York for instance, seem justified. Dickens appended American Notes with a coruscating chapter on slavery, ‘that most hideous blot and foul disgrace’.

‘The problem,’ the Harvard historian Jill Lepore has observed, ‘wasn’t that Dickens’ America was inaccurate: it is, and it isn’t. The problem was that it was vicious.’ US readers concurred, with copies of both American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit, whose serialisation began in 1842, burned in the streets.

Dickens was unrepentant. ‘I have nothing to defend,’ he wrote, ‘or to explain away. The truth is the truth; and neither childish absurdities, nor unscrupulous contradictions, can make it otherwise. The earth would still move round the sun, though the whole Catholic Church said no.’

Despite having all the makings of a diplomatic incident, the great man’s reputation in the US survived. His novels continued to sell in vast numbers, and Dickens returned to America a quarter of a century later, in 1867, to discover all had been forgiven.

He gave a six-month speaking tour. Many in his audiences were too young to recall his damning assessment of their country. New Yorkers who had sent his work up in flames 25 years previously now queued around the block; some reports claimed, fancifully, for up to a mile. And the royalties improved. From around 80 appearances, Dickens was remunerated to the tune of $228,000, equivalent to $3m today. Mark Twain was among those who paid homage, describing the talks as ‘glittering frostwork’.

In April of 1867, at a dinner given by New York’s press corps, Dickens set the record straight, announcing he would amend subsequent editions of American No. This, in turn, came to be known as the official ‘Dickens edition’. ‘Prejudiced, I am not,’ he wrote in the updated version, ‘and never have been, otherwise than in favour of the United States.’

AMERICAN NOTES

BY CHARLES DICKENS

We reached Washington at about half past six that evening, and had upon the way a beautiful view of the Capitol, which is a fine building of the Corinthian order, placed upon a noble and commanding eminence. Arrived at the hotel, I saw no more of the place that night; being very tired, and glad to get to bed.

It is sometimes called the City of Magnificent Distances, but it might with greater propriety be termed the City of Magnificent Intentions; for it is only on taking a bird’s-eye view of it from the top of the Capitol that one can at all comprehend the vast designs of its projector, an aspiring Frenchman. Spacious avenues that begin in nothing and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete; and ornaments of great thoroughfares, which only lack great thoroughfares to ornament – are its leading features. One might fancy the season over, and most of the houses gone out of town forever with their masters. To the admirers of cities it is a Barmecide Feast: a pleasant field for the imagination to rove in; a monument raised to a deceased project, with not even a legible inscription to record its departed greatness.

Such as it is, it is likely to remain. It was originally chosen for the seat of Government, as a means of averting the conflicting jealousies and interests of the different States; and very probably too, as being remote from mobs: a consideration not to be slighted, even in America. It has no trade or commerce of its own: having little or no population beyond the President and his establishment; the members of the legislature who reside there during the session; the Government clerks and officers employed in the various departments; the keepers of the hotels and boarding houses; and the tradesmen who supply their tables. It is very unhealthy. Few people would live in Washington, I take it, who were not obliged to reside there; and the tides of emigration and speculation, those rapid and regardless currents, are little likely to flow at any time towards such dull and sluggish water.

The principal features of the Capitol, are, of course, the two houses of Assembly. But there is, besides, in the centre of the building, a fine rotunda, ninety-six feet in diameter, and ninety-six high, whose circular wall is divided into compartments, ornamented by historical pictures. Four of these have for their subjects prominent events in the revolutionary struggle. They were painted by Colonel Trumbull, himself a member of Washington’s staff at the time of their occurrence, from which circumstance they derive a peculiar interest of their own. In this same hall Mr Greenough’s large statue of Washington has been lately placed. It has great merits of course, but it struck me as being rather strained and violent for its subject. I could wish, however, to have seen it in a better light than it can ever be viewed in, where it stands.

There is a very pleasant and commodious library in the Capitol; and from a balcony in front, the bird’s-eye view, of which I have just spoken, may be had, together with a beautiful prospect of the adjacent country. In one of the ornamented portions of the building, there is a figure of Justice; whereunto the Guide Book says, ‘the artist at first contemplated giving more of nudity, but he was warned that the public sentiment in this country would not admit of it, and in his caution he has gone, perhaps, into the opposite extreme’. Poor Justice! she has been made to wear much stranger garments in America than those she pines in, in the Capitol. Let us hope that she has changed her dressmaker since they were fashioned, and that the public sentiment of the country did not cut out the clothes she hides her lovely figure in just now.

The House of Representatives is a beautiful and spacious hall, of semicircular shape, supported by handsome pillars. One part of the gallery is appropriated to the ladies, and there they sit in front rows, and come in, and go out, as at a play or concert. The chair is canopied, and raised considerably above the floor of the House; and every member has an easy chair and a writing desk to himself: which is denounced by some people out of doors as a most unfortunate and injudicious arrangement, tending to long sittings and prosaic speeches. It is an elegant chamber to look at, but a singularly bad one for all purposes of hearing. The Senate, which is smaller, is free from this objection, and is exceedingly well adapted to the uses for which it is designed. The sittings, I need hardly add, take place in the day; and the parliamentary forms are modelled on those of the old country.

I was sometimes asked, in my progress through other places, whether I had not been very much impressed by the heads of the lawmakers at Washington; meaning not their chiefs and leaders, but literally their individual and personal heads, whereon their hair grew, and whereby the phrenological character of each legislator was expressed: and I almost as often struck my questioner dumb with indignant consternation by answering, ‘No, that I didn’t remember being at all overcome’. As I must, at whatever hazard, repeat the avowal here, I will follow it up by relating my impressions on this subject in as few words as possible.

In the first place – it may be from some imperfect development of my organ of veneration – I do not remember having ever fainted away, or having even been moved to tears of joyful pride, at sight of any legislative body. I have borne the House of Commons like a man, and have yielded to no weakness but slumber in the House of Lords. I have seen elections for borough and county, and have never been impelled (no matter which party won) to damage my hat by throwing it up into the air in triumph, or to crack my voice by shouting forth any reference to our Glorious Constitution, to the noble purity of our independent voters or the unimpeachable integrity of our independent members. Having withstood such strong attacks upon my fortitude, it is possible that I may be of a cold and insensible temperament, amounting to iciness, in such matters; and therefore my impressions of the live pillars of the Capitol at Washington must be received with such grains of allowance as this free confession may seem to demand.

Did I see in this public body an assemblage of men bound together in the sacred names of Liberty and Freedom, and so asserting the chaste dignity of those twin goddesses in all their discussions, as to exalt at once the Eternal Principles to which their names are given, and their own character and the character of their countrymen, in the admiring eyes of the whole world?

It was but a week, since an aged, grey-haired man, a lasting honour to the land that gave him birth, who has done good service to his country, as his forefathers did, and who will be remembered scores upon scores of years after the worms bred in its corruption are but so many grains of dust – it was but a week since this old man had stood for days upon his trial before this very body, charged with having dared to assert the infamy of that traffic, which has for its accursed merchandise men and women, and their unborn children. Yes. And publicly exhibited in the same city all the while; gilded, framed and glazed hung up for general admiration; shown to strangers not with shame, but pride; its face not turned towards the wall, itself not taken down and burned; is the Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America, which solemnly declares that All Men are created Equal; and are endowed by their Creator with the Inalienable Rights of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness!

It was not a month since this same body had sat calmly by, and heard a man, one of themselves, with oaths which beggars in their drink reject, threaten to cut another’s throat from ear to ear. There he sat, among them; not crushed by the general feeling of the assembly, but as good a man as any.

There was but a week to come, and another of that body, for doing his duty to those who sent him there; for claiming in a Republic the Liberty and Freedom of expressing their sentiments, and making known their prayer; would be tried, found guilty and have strong censure passed upon him by the rest. His was a grave offence indeed; for years before, he had risen up and said, ‘A gang of male and female slaves for sale, warranted to breed like cattle, linked to each other by iron fetters, are passing now along the open street beneath the windows of your Temple of Equality! Look!’ But there are many kinds of hunters engaged in the Pursuit of Happiness, and they go variously armed. It is the Inalienable Right of some among them to take the field after their Happiness equipped with cat and cartwhip, stocks and iron collar, and to shout their view halloa! (always in praise of Liberty) to the music of clanking chains and bloody stripes.

Where sat the many legislators of coarse threats; of words and blows such as coalheavers deal upon each other when they forget their breeding? On every side. Every session had its anecdotes of that kind, and the actors were all there.

Did I recognise in this assembly a body of men, who, applying themselves in a new world to correct some of the falsehoods and vices of the old, purified the avenues to Public Life, paved the dirty ways to Place and Power, debated and made laws for the Common Good and had no party but their Country?

I saw in them the wheels that move the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought. Despicable trickery at elections; underhanded tamperings with public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers; shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves, whose claim to be considered is that every day and week they sow new crops of ruin with their venal types, which are the dragon’s teeth of yore, in everything but sharpness; aidings and abettings of every bad inclination in the popular mind, and artful suppressions of all its good influences: such things as these, and in a word, Dishonest Faction in its most depraved and most unblushing form, stared out from every corner of the crowded hall.

Did I see among them the intelligence and refinement: the true, honest, patriotic heart of America? Here and there were drops of its blood and life, but they scarcely coloured the stream of desperate adventurers which sets that way for profit and for pay. It is the game of these men, and of their profligate organs, to make the strife of politics so fierce and brutal, and so destructive of all self-respect in worthy men, that sensitive and delicate-minded persons shall be kept aloof, and they, and such as they, be left to battle out their selfish views unchecked. And thus this lowest of all scrambling fights goes on, and they who in other countries would, from their intelligence and station, most aspire to make the laws, do here recoil the furthest from that degradation.

That there are, among the representatives of the people in both Houses, and among all parties, some men of high character and great abilities, I need not say. The foremost among those politicians who are known in Europe have been already described, and I see no reason to depart from the rule I have laid down for my guidance, of abstaining from all mention of individuals. It will be sufficient to add that to the most favourable accounts that have been written of them, I more than fully and most heartily subscribe; and that personal intercourse and free communication have bred within me, not the result predicted in the very doubtful proverb, but increased admiration and respect. They are striking men to look at, hard to deceive, prompt to act, lions in energy, Crichtons in varied accomplishments, Indians in fire of eye and gesture, Americans in strong and generous impulse; and they as well represent the honour and wisdom of their country at home, as the distinguished gentleman who is now its Minister at the British Court sustains its highest character abroad.

I visited both houses nearly every day during my stay in Washington. On my initiatory visit to the House of Representatives, they divided against a decision of the chair; but the chair won. The second time I went, the member who was speaking, being interrupted by a laugh, mimicked it, as one child would in quarrelling with another, and added, ‘that he would make honourable gentlemen opposite sing out a little more on the other side of their mouths presently’. But interruptions are rare; the speaker being usually heard in silence. There are more quarrels than with us, and more threatenings than gentlemen are accustomed to exchange in any civilised society of which we have record: but farmyard imitations have not as yet been imported from the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The feature in oratory which appears to be the most practised, and most relished, is the constant repetition of the same idea or shadow of an idea in fresh words; and the inquiry out of doors is not, ‘What did he say?’ but, ‘How long did he speak?’ These, however, are but enlargements of a principle which prevails elsewhere.

The Senate is a dignified and decorous body, and its proceedings are conducted with much gravity and order. Both houses are handsomely carpeted; but the state to which these carpets are reduced by the universal disregard of the spittoon with which every honourable member is accommodated, and the extraordinary improvements on the pattern which are squirted and dabbled upon it in every direction, do not admit of being described. I will merely observe that I strongly recommend all strangers not to look at the floor; and if they happen to drop anything, though it be their purse, not to pick it up with an ungloved hand on any account.

It is somewhat remarkable too at first, to say the least, to see so many honourable members with swelled faces; and it is scarcely less remarkable to discover that this appearance is caused by the quantity of tobacco they contrive to stow within the hollow of the cheek. It is strange enough too to see an honourable gentleman leaning back in his tilted chair with his legs on the desk before him, shaping a convenient ‘plug’ with his penknife, and when it is quite ready for use, shooting the old one from his mouth, as from a pop-gun, and clapping the new one in its place.

I was surprised to observe that even steady old chewers of great experience are not always good marksmen, which has rather inclined me to doubt that general proficiency with the rifle, of which we have heard so much in England. Several gentlemen called upon me, who, in the course of conversation, frequently missed the spittoon at five paces; and one (but he was certainly shortsighted) mistook the closed sash for the open window at three. On another occasion, when I dined out, and was sitting with two ladies and some gentlemen round a fire before dinner, one of the company fell short of the fireplace six distinct times. I am disposed to think, however, that this was occasioned by his not aiming at that object, as there was a white marble hearth before the fender, which was more convenient, and may have suited his purpose better.

The Patent Office at Washington furnishes an extraordinary example of American enterprise and ingenuity; for the immense number of models it contains are the accumulated inventions of only five years; the whole of the previous collection having been destroyed by fire. The elegant structure in which they are arranged is one of design rather than execution, for there is but one side erected out of four, though the works are stopped. The Post Office is a very compact and very beautiful building. In one of the departments, among a collection of rare and curious articles, are deposited the presents which have been made from time to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction – Mark MacKenzie
• Station Life in New Zealand – Mary Anne Barker
• A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains – Isabella Bird
• The Road to Oxiana – Robert Byron
• The Worst Journey in the World – Apsley Cherry-Garrard
• Voyages – James Cook
• The Voyage of the Beagle – Charles Darwin
• American Notes – Charles Dickens
• The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon – Henry Fielding
• Summer on the Lakes – Margaret Fuller
• The Histories – Herodotus, trans. by George Rawlinson
• Tales of the Alhambra – Washington Irving
• English Hours – Henry James
• A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland – Samuel Johnson
• Sea and Sardinia – DH Lawrence
• Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa – David Livingstone
• The Cruise of the Snark – Jack London
• Letters – Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
• My First Summer in the Sierra – John Muir
• Farthest North – Fridtjof Nansen
• Travels in the Interior of Africa – Mungo Park
• Discovery of a North-West Passage – William Edward Parry
• The Travels of Marco Polo – Marco Polo
• With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple – Susanna Carson Rijnhart
• Through the Brazilian Wilderness – Theodore Roosevelt
• South – Ernest Shackleton
• Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes – Robert Louis Stevenson
• Life on the Mississippi – Mark Twain
• In Morocco – Edith Wharton
• Letters Written during a Short Residence in Norway, Sweden and Denmark – Mary Wollstonecraft
• Copyright