Little Dorrit – Cagliari lecture resources

Following on from the previous Bleak House post, here are links and images from the Little Dorrit class this week.

We started off with some context on the 18th century Grand Tour, and these two images as indicative of the sites and ideology behind the Grand Tour. The first image is by Pompeo Girolamo Batoni, who painted many Grand Tourists and this is typical of such paintings.

This second image is “Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome” by Giovanni Paolo Pannini (1759) and shows many of the popular sites of Rome that would be visited by tourists.

The travel guidebook that I showed in the lecture was a 1912 Baedeker’s Guide to Southern Italy, which I have blogged about here (and have another post on the Sardinia sections forthcoming) and there is information on the history of the guides here. I also showed this image of Cook’s tours and there’s some interesting history to the firm and you can also view some more images here.

The image of the Alps is an 1862 painting by Russian painter Alexei Kondratyevich Savrasov, and I mentioned Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” (1817)as an indicative response to the Alps landscape.

The final two images of Venice and Rome are a 19th century view of Venice (anonymous) and an 1823 engraving of St Peter’s Basilica and Castel Sant’ Angelo by Rossini. In the extract on Rome, Dickens refers to “the celebrated Mr Eustace”, writer of A Classical Tour through Italy.

 

Finally, I have recorded a podcast about travel in Little Dorrit which is available here.

Mapping the past, today: TV’s trend for treading the historical beaten track

I’ve been catching up on some TV this week, with two historical travel programmes that caught my eye. Firstly, there’s been a new series of BBC2’s Great British Railway Journeys, the show in which Michael Portillo set off on the train with a copy of Bradshaw’s Victorian railway guide under his arm, using the text as a lens through which to explore the railway route then and now and stopping at various sites of Victorian interest along the way. This series has been of particular interest to me as the starting point for this route was High Wycombe, a stop on from my hometown of Beaconsfield (where the station wasn’t built until 1906), and the first episode saw Portillo travel to Leamington Spa and then on to Stratford-upon-Avon, stopping along the way to visit the Leamington Pump Rooms, Tennis Court Club, and Shakespeare’s Birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon (alas, no mention of one eminent Victorian’s visit to the area in 1838!).

There’s also a brand new series on BBC 2 called Map Man – in which as the website blurb says,

Modern explorer Nicholas Crane travels across eight maps that changed the face of Britain in a series of geographical challenges through some of today’s wildest landscapes, telling the story of British mapmaking from the time of Chaucer through to the current generation of cyber-mappers.

In episode 2, Nicholas Crane set off with John Ogilby’s 1675 road map, the first of its kind to trace a route as a linear journey (as it happens, I blogged about this map after seeing it at a V&A exhibition back in 2008).

Ogilby’s 1675 road map

Crane’s journey of the trans-Pennine pass from York to Lancaster was fascinating in revealing many changes to the landscape that have occured in the intervening years: some of the route is now the course of the major A-road, but substantially diverged for much of the way; we saw how a river had been re-routed as a result of the coming of the railway in later years; and Crane searched for telling traces of the old roads that still remain alongside muddy paths and wooded undergrowth. I’m very much looking forward to subsquent episodes, and can’t wait to see which maps have been chosen.

Watching these programmes back-to-back led me to reflect on the use of maps or guides as a basis for a tv series, which seems to have become a bit of a trend in recent years: Julia Bradbury’s Canal Walks, Wainwright’s Walks, and Portillo’s Great Continental Railway Journeys are a few other examples that come to mind, but I’m sure there have been others in a similar vein. Each of these takes a historical map or guide book and sets out to explore the route in its present form, using the map as a focal point through which to read and interpret the current landscape and open up discussion around points of similarity and change between then and now.

But why the fascination with the guide book? What is it about the old mapped route that is of such interest to us now?

Baedeker’s Southern Italy,1912 ed.

On the surface, the appeal is easy to see: these routes give the perfect structure for a tv series, carving out linear yet episodic paths that develop nicely over a long series and work equally well as stand-alone episodes, bringing in multiple points of interest while maintaining a focused narrative. But there’s also something important here in having the map or guide as a locatable route which can be plotted onto the present landscape, and, vice versa, of using the guide as a means through which to read that landscape for its historical traces; there’s something in being able to directly plot past onto present, and experience space as a site of continuity with the past. And perhaps more importantly, there’s something in the process of following a mapped historical route as a mobile experience, of putting oneself into the shoes of a historical traveller in a way that seemingly validates or authenticates the journey and that seemingly brings one into closer contact with the historical site, following in the footsteps of those that have tread the same path – a point which interestingly resonates with the original use of guidebooks in the nineteenth century as a form of touristic authentification that gave security and satisfaction from the knowledge that you were following the same beaten track that every other tourist before you had trodden, seeing every important site through the interpretative lens of the guidebook.

It’s an act that resonates strongly with literary tourism, yet the guidebook/map offers a slightly different manifestation of this process, with a different set of interpretative possibilities and spatial/historical relations. There seems to be more to be said about how these journeys might allow us to re-read not just the sites described in the guidebooks for their historical resonances, but also of how the guidebooks might be re-read as texts through reference to the sites they depict. It’s a process about which I have more questions than answers at the moment, but fortuitously will have the opportunity to explore further – when I travel to Sardinia in April I’ll almost certainly be taking my 1912 Baedeker’s Southern Italy along to think more about how the guidebook-as-text might be repositioned within this set of spatial-historical-geographical relations that arise from the contemporary re-treading of its tourist tracks.

Baedeker’s Southern Italy

One of my favourite things to do of a weekend is browse the shelves of secondhand bookshops and I’ve been on a bit of a roll with old travel books in Leamington’s Oxfam Books & Music in recent weeks, which I’ll be blogging in the next few posts.

The first of my finds is a 1912 edition of a Baedeker’s handbook to Southern Italy and Sicily

Full title: Southern Italy and Sicily, with Excursions to Sardinia, Malta, and Corfu; Handbook for Travellers, with 34 Maps and 34 Plans, Sixteenth Revised Edition.

Baedeker’s handbooks, along with Murray’s Guides, were the key tourist handbooks of the 19th century, accompanying many a tourist on their travels across the continent and beyond. Although the “guidebook” had long been used to advice travellers about their journeys, the Handbook was a slightly different genre, designed as a compact edition to be carried by the traveller on their journey. The Handbook included practical information to prepare the traveller, but also set out a planned series of routes to be followed.

This is the first edition that I’ve seen up close, and it’s fascinating to see just how detailed the guide is as well as to read the surrounding material; between the two, there’s a clear tension between being a “true” independent traveller as opposed to a mere “tourist” (I am of course drawing here on James Buzard’s discussion in The Beaten Track¹). The Preface informs the traveller that the aim of the Handbook is to “supply the traveller wtih some information regarding the culture, art and character of the people he is about to visit” in order to “render him as independent as possible of the services of guides and valets-de-place”.

But whilst the emphasis here is on a certain mode of “independence”, the heavily prescriped form of the Handbook is also hinted at: it is “in every way to aid him in deriving enjoyment and instruction from his tour”. The Handbook’s purpose is not just to set out the correct path to follow, but to aid the traveller in deriving the correct enjoyment from each sight – to give the traveller the lens through which to view all that he sees. As Buzard writes, handbooks “preceded the tourist, making the crooked straight and the rough places plain for the tourist’s hesitant footsteps; they accompanied the tourist on the path they had beaten, directing gazes and prompting responses” (75); Dickens’s depiction of tourists in Italy in Little Dorrit satirises the tourist’s reliance on the handbook, describing masses of tourists “walking about St. Peter’s and the Vatican on somebody else’s cork legs, and straining every visible object through somebody else’s sieve” (428).

Thus what follows are routes detailing exactly where to walk, what to look at, and even the timings of each stage: “from the piazza in front of the cathedral we proceed to the S. straight through a gateway, then ascend through the porch of the church of Sant’Antonio, pass the portal of the church of Santa Chiara to the left, and reach (8 min.) a door giving on the road.” This level of detail constitutes most of the book’s 500 pages, such that there almost seems little point to actually visiting the place itself!

The same can be said of the cultural attitudes of the English towards foreigners displayed throughout. The particular strength of feeling against Italians is demonstrated right from the start: the first paragraph of the Preface ends by stating “the Handbook will also, it is hoped, save the traveller many a trial of temper; for probably nowhere in Europe is the patience more severely taxed than in some parts of Italy.” In the section giving practical advice, stereotypes of Italians abound: it is noted that begging “has in Italy been regarded from time immemorial as a legitimate mode of earning one’s daily bread”, reference is made to the “insolence and rapacity” of cab-drivers, and we are warned that “the popular idea of cleanliness in Southern Italy is behind the age, dirt being perhaps neutralized in the opinion of the natives by the brilliancy of their climate”. The travellers’ health is of great importance, with strict instructions on what to eat and drink (avoid “free indulgence” in most foods) and what to wear when: “always be provided with a greatcoat or shawl …. Woollen underclothing is indispensable.” No detail is left out, even the traveller’s body incorporated into the institutionalisation of travel.

This edition has certainly seen a few travels in the last 100 years, although it’s in good condition and the colour maps and plans (as above) are still vibrant (and notably, all details in Italian). The next book I’ll be blogging about is slightly different in focus and purpose, recounting a visit to Morocco in the 1920s.

¹James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Dickens, Travel and Little Dorrit

This week the Knowledge Centre have published a second piece based on my podcasts, “Dickens, Travel and Little Dorrit“:

“Charles Dickens was fascinated with travel, and this is reflected in Little Dorrit which features continental locations such as Marseilles, Rome and the Alps. Yet why did he represent Europe as a hostile place in this novel, and what can we glean from him about British tourists of the period”

Travel in the 19th Century @ University of Lincoln, 13–15th July 2011 (part 1: Europe)

Travel in the Nineteenth Century: Narratives, Histories and Collections proved to be a highly enjoyable conference, really demonstrating the true value of interdisciplinary interactions: papers covered a diverse range of travellers, travel narratives and research approaches, whilst threads of continuity came through in intersecting themes, contexts, paradigms and questions that opened up often unexpected areas of discussion.

My write-up of the conference became rather long, so I’ve split this into 2 parts: this post focuses on the issues surrounding Europe, whilst in part 2 I look at discussions of intra-national mobilities and the novel.

The value of the interdisciplinary context were for me drawn out right from the very beginning of the conference in the panel “The Idea of Europe” in which I presented along with Paul Stock from LSE, and we were very fortunate to be chaired by James Buzard (MIT, and keynote presenter). Speaking on European journeys in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, I contextualised the fictional travel narrative within the complex and often contradictory relationship between Britain and Europe which is particularly acute in the mid-nineteenth century. I suggested that, along with factors such as imperial rivalry and economic competition, changing travel practices played a huge role in Britain’s tensions with Europe at this time, not just by increasing contact with the foreign “other” but also through the reshaping of global space that travel technologies facilitated: the (perceived) proximity and openness of European space afforded through developments in transport technologies interplayed with existing anxieties about cultural difference and national identity, suggesting the potential collapse of the spatial distances that kept the foreign (European) “other” at a safe remove. My discussion centred around the text’s representation of the British body in European space, working out to the wider movements between different locations of the novel: I argued that the novel plays out familiar discourses about Europe through representational modes which also register the encroaching proximity of Europe and the potential for collapse of the certainties of space-time-distance relationships; the British body, surrounded by “a formation of a surface”, provides a representational locus for these concerns in the novel.

This 1820 map by William Woodbridge, “Moral and Political Chart of the Inhabited World”,displays the tensions between Europe as a space unified against “the rest of the world” as well as riddled with internal hierarchies that problematise the coherence of European identity.

In the discussion that followed I also talked about the function of the English Channel as border-zone and its representation in the novel (something I’m currently writing about in research on Bleak House); the problem of definition – “what is Europe?” in the nineteenth century/ Victorian novel?; and how the British-European tensions still resonate in contemporary socio-political debates. I have yet to decide how my Europe chapter fits into the future development of my research but I’ve come away with a renewed interest in pursuing this work into the representation of Europe in the Victorian novel.

This was nicely accompanied by Paul Stock’s paper “Travel on the Edges of Europe: Greece and the Philhellenes in the 1820s”. Stock’s work focuses on the idea of Europe in the early nineteenth century, and in this paper he suggested that debates over Greece’s position on the borders of Europe provide the locus for wider questions about the meanings of Europe in this period. Greece and Europe function as self-reflexive concepts, and Greece forms the site of an idealised Europe and brings into play the problematic impulses surrounding this idealised concept. The overlapping frameworks and ideas of Europe between our papers provided me with some useful context for my research into the later part of the century, and I was particularly interested to learn about Greece’s position in these debates (I’ve previously come across similar mid-Century debates focused around Turkey but not Greece).

Ulrike Spring’s paper “Northern Tours: collecting culture and nature in 19th century Scandinavia” also brought up similar questions in her focus on travel to northern Norway in the period. Norway similarly occupied a border-position on the geographical edges of European space; a North-South divide enabled the southern portion to be more easily ideologically incorporated into Europe (in reverse to the North-South axis of Italy which played a similar role). Spring’s paper focused on the town of Tromso, located in the far northof the country, and discussed how the practice of travel helped to imaginatively incorporate Norway into the idea of Europe. Referring to maps of tours to the area, ideas about linearity were raised: the tours followed a set route visiting coastal ports in quick succession, visually constructing a strictly linear route that stands in stark contrast to the coastal geography of the region, and creates a sequential understanding of places, as well as demarcating only these areas as tourist sites – tours never ventured far inland. This really emphasised the extent to which touristic sites are produced as such through the practices of travel and, in particular, through the spatial selectivity of those practices. By way of this process the North gradually became ideologically encompassed in the idea of Europe because it was produced as a certain kind of “European” site – tellingly, Tromso is known as “the Paris of the North”. There’s also an interesting issue to do with linearity in designating a direct route which plays out a compressing space-time relationship and thus brings Norway into a perceived closer proximity with the “centre” of Europe.