Rambles Through England: Isle of Wight

Rambles Through England: Isle of Wight is a rather idealised description of an 1890s Isle of Wight visit by the uncredited correspondent of the Fleet Street based Ludgate Monthly - launched in 1891 as "a new illustrated threepenny magazine". A deal of it is pretty standard stuff - feel free to skim - but it's a pleasant account of touring the Wight in more genteel days, with a few topics worthy of commentary, such as the uncommon account of the decor of Mrs Harvey's Home of Rest in Shanklin, and the procedures for getting to visit Osborne House when Queen Victoria was alive.

The South Devon Coast: #2 of 3

"Du Zummat"

Continuing the gallery of the 70+ images from The South Devon Coast (Charles G Harper, London: Chapman & Hall, 1907, Internet Archive ID southdevoncoast00harpgoog), a travelogue that's refreshing in giving a rather more personal set of impressions than the usual run of such books. I'll quote a few more highlights en route.

Across Europe and Asia, by John Milne, Esq.

In 1875, the geologist and mining engineer John Milne had to travel to Japan to take up an appointment as an academic foreign adviser at the at the Imperial College of Engineering, Tokyo. Instead of taking the obvious option of going by ship, he decided to travel overland.

... in the Isle of Wight #2

I previously mentioned two of a quartet of unfamiliar travelogues of the Isle of Wight: see ... in the Isle of Wight #1 for the 1884 Rambles in the Isle of Wight by John Gwilliam, and the 1846 Owen Gladdon's wanderings in the Isle of Wight by "Old Humphrey" (George Mogridge). Now on to the second pair.

Days in the Isle of Wight (Paul Bourget, trans. MC Warrilow, pub. HW Bell, 1901, Internet Archive ID daysinislewight00bourgoog) is a quite short book - "a set of prose pieces written mainly in Shanklin, August 1880".

As an 'outsider view' by a French novelist and critic taking his first visit to England, it makes an interesting contrast to the majority of accounts, which tend to filter the experience of the Isle of Wight through the cultural assumptions of English life. Bourget notices different things: he likens Shanklin, for instance, to a watered-down Deauville, noting the lack of a casino, and the solemnity of Sunday religious observance compared to his own country ...

Not a whisper, not a smile, nothing of that mundane character, half-decorous, half-sceptical, to be found in a similar ceremony in a seaside town in France.

His observations include the initial crossing from France to England, and then on to Ryde; observations of Shanklin; a train trip to Ryde ("a Dieppe without its port") and a visit to a charity bazaar at Quarr Abbey; a trip to Portsmouth ("the English Toulon") to see troops embarking for Afghanistan - how little has changed - on the HMS Jumna; and attending a cricket match at Shanklin. There may be more; the Internet Archive copy is truncated.

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And finally: A Driving Tour in the Isle of Wight: With Various Legends and Anecdotes; Also a Short Account of George Morland and his Connection with the Island (Hubert Garle, IOW County Press, 1905, Internet Archive ID adrivingtourini00garlgoog).

As the cover shows, this wasn't a motor tour, but one by gig, Garle exploring the Island with an antiquarian friend, just called Miller. Like Bourget's, Garle's account is drawn from his diaries of a couple of decades earlier. It's extremely heavily padded with Isle of Wight historical anecdote, and it was an exercise in nostalgia (Garle's other book was the 1896 Hunting in the Golden Days) even at the time it was written:

The days I am writing of were before the shrill scream of the railway-engine and its foul smoke were known in the Isle of Wight, and when all was peaceful solitude compared to the present times of noise and bustle.

(It's fascinating how the modern horrors of yesteryear become the nostalgia of today; now many people yearn for the days when the Isle of Wight had a full rail network, and steam rail at that).

There is some interest in the historical detail in Garle's book - for instance, the account of Portsmouth when it was still heavily militarised, and the difficulties in getting a "horse-boat" to the Island - but personally I found most of his own account of his visit pretty dull. The illustrations, however, pleasant watercolours by E Hadfield, are lovely, if unrealistically 'warm'; the section about the artist George Morland is very good; and there's an appendix about Isle of Wight shipwrecks, and a nice selection of adverts at the end.

Brading Church

The Crab Inn, Shanklin Old Village

Shanklin Chine

Brading Old Church

Godshill

Carisbrooke Castle

- Ray

Prams of one sort or other

Further to Bayan time (16): Strange moments (concerning the use of a pram to transport my bayan), "Trebots" from kalebeul drew my attention to a band of Birmingham origins called Pram.

From their sampler on MySpace -  they describe themselves as Alternative / Experimental / Progressive - they're very good. They remind me a lot of the Icelandic group múm I mentioned a while back. Their official website - www.pram.uk.net - which particularly accompanies their 2007 album The Moving Frontier,  is a work of art as Flash animation, presenting the album contents and band details as flippable pages in a quaintly archaic book.

It begins with a series of definitions of "pram",  including one I didn't know. From the OED:

pram (noun)
1.
a. An open, flat-bottomed boat or lighter, used esp. in the Baltic and the Netherlands for shipping cargo.
b. A large, flat-bottomed boat mounted with guns and used as a floating battery. Now hist.
2.
a. A ship's boat. Now rare.
b. Chiefly U.S. A very small, flat-bottomed, square-bowed boat, used with sails or oars, esp. as a fishing boat
- Oxford English Dictionary, Third edition, March 2007; online version March 2012

The OED tracks the etymology back to Czech prám ("The term was perhaps originally borrowed from Czech by sailors on the upper Elbe") from which cognates spread all across seafaring nations in north-west Europe, and eventually to Dutch and English.

Although "pram" in the sense of "baby carriage" is generally accepted as being an abbreviation of "perambulator" (including by the OED) the similarity of function - a flat-bottomed transportation device - does make me suspect that "pram" in the nautical sense helped the abbreviation into existence. The Online Etymology Dictionary agrees about this possibility:

pram
baby carriage, 1884, shortening of perambulator, perhaps influenced by pram "flat-bottomed boat" (1540s), from O.N. pramr, from Balto-Slavic (cf. Pol. prom, Rus. poromu "ferryboat").

There can't be many writers who have explored the analogies between the two kinds of pram, but the traveller James Arthur Lees did:

They went to sea in a sieve, they did,
In a sieve they went to sea.
In spite of all their friends could say,
On the shortest night and the longest day,
They sailed away from Christiansand
To Flekkefjord and Listerland,
And the place where the Fiske be.
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lakes where the Fiske live.
The trout are pink, and the waters blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve.
- Old Ballad.

So we walked down to the harbour-side, and bought a pram. Now the pram of Norway must by no means be confounded with the English vessel which bears the same name. This, as every one knows, is generally to be found cruising in Kensington Gardens, or anchored bow and stern on the pavement in front of any bonnet shop, and is navigated by a mixed crew of nursemaid, life-guardsman, and—when it has not fallen out unobserved—the baby; the last-named being the most energetic of the three.

The Norwegian pram, on the contrary, is usually mannned by a woman with a pair of sculls, and is kept afloat by the strenuous exertions of two or three males, armed with hats or boots or any other handy substitutes for the forgotten baling- tin. It is built entirely of wood, the boards being fastened with rough pegs instead of nails ; there is no keel, but the bottom is rounded rather like an English "whisket " or garden basket, and it slopes upwards to a high flat-nosed bow overhanging the water something after the fashion of a Thames punt. The joints are at first a little defective, and it is likely that if you drop your knife or sketch-book, it may fall through one of the chinks ; but after filling up the worst places with your handkerchief and socks and pieces of moss, it becomes fairly watertight, and can be used with comparative safety by any expert swimmer.

- Chapter 1, The Voyage of the “Pram”, Peaks and Pines: another Norway book, James Arthur Lees, 1899

It's an interesting passage, both for its paraphrase of Edward Lear's The Jumblies and its use of the introductory "So" (commonly maligned, by people who don't read older books, as some modern barbarism) and Lees looks an interesting writer. While I had to hack the above extract from Google Books snippet view, two other of his late-1800s comic travelogues, co-written with Walter J Clutterbuck, are available in full on the Internet Archive: Three in Norway by Two of Them (ID threeinnorwayby00clutgoog); and B. C., 1887. A Ramble in British Columbia (ID bc1887rambleinbr00lees). They read rather like Three Men in a Boat - if the three men were self-deprecating confident adventurers (sailing from Hull) exploring northern wildernesses rather than the Thames.

Addendum: I find on further reading that the works of Clutterbuck and Lees have been credited (see the Wikipedia citation #3) as an inspiration for Jerome's book. And they have British Columbian mountains named after them: see The Clutterbuck Blog.

- Ray

The Stream of Pleasure

 

Henley - from The Stream of Pleasure, 1891

This afternoon - it was very quite in the the shop - I was reading a very nice book: The stream of pleasure. A narrative of a journey on the Thames from Oxford to London (1891, Joseph Pennell & Elizabeth Robins Pennell, illustrated Joseph Pennell, Internet Archive streamofpleasure00penn).

As I mentioned previously (see Elizabeth Robins Pennell on Margate and London at play: on Margate's sands) ERP was an American journalist, writer and critic whose work in the late 19th and early 20th century including affectionate portraits of London life and leisure for the US market. The Stream of Pleasure is an evocative account, co-written with her artist husband Joseph (who also produced the illustrations), of a trip down the Thames, from Oxford to Richmond, in the Rover, a Thames camping skiff:

It was only a pair-oared skiff, shorter and broader than those generally seen on the Thames — "a family boat," an old river man called it with contempt ; but then it had a green waterproof canvas cover which stretched over three iron hoops and converted it for all practical purposes into a small, a very small, house-boat. By a complicated arrangement of strings the canvas could be so rolled up and fastened on top as — theoretically — not to interfere with our view of the river banks on bright days ; or it could be let down to cover the entire boat from stern to bow — an umbrella by day, a hotel by night.

Under it we could camp out without the bother of pitching a tent. We had already talked a great deal about the beautiful nights upon the river, when we should go to bed with the swans and rise up with the larks, and cook our breakfast under the willows, and wash our dishes and ourselves in quiet clear pools. What if river inns were as extortionate and crowded as they are said to be ? we should have our own hotel with us wherever we went. In the midst of a weak and damp hurrah from one ancient boatman, and under a heavy baptism not of champagne, but of rain, the Rover was at last pushed off her trestles and with one vigorous shove sent clean across the Thames to the raft where we stood under umbrellas, while Salter's men at once began to load her with kitchen and bedroom furniture. They provided us with an ingenious stove with kettles and frying-pans fitting into each other like the pieces of a Chinese puzzle, a lantern, cups and saucers and plates, knives and forks and spoons, a can of alcohol, and, for crowning comfort, a mattress large enough for a double bedstead. It filled the boat from stern to bow, covering the seats, burying the sculls and boat hooks, bulging out through and over the rowlocks. It was clear if it went we must stay, and so we said, as if we rather liked the prospect of roughing it, that we could manage just as well and be just as comfortable if we slept on our rugs ; for we carried all the Roman blankets and steamer rugs we possessed, together with a lot of less decorative blankets borrowed from our landlady in London, and the bundle they made took up the place of two people in the boat. The locker was stored with our supply of sardines, jam, chocolate, tea, sugar, biscuits, towels, and tea-cloths. Our bags were stowed away with the kitchen things. And then at last we crawled into the long green tunnel.

Despite all these mod cons, on the first night the Pennells went all nesh and stayed in an inn because it was raining, and thereafter abandoned the option of camping out in the skiff. Nevertheless, it's still an interesting journey, a genteel account of the inns, villages and towns they visit en route during their month-long trip. The book could be viewed as a serious countertext to Jerome K Jerome's 1891 Three Men in a Boat (which also involved a skiff holiday on the Thames, between Kingston and Oxford). Both books were written in the same time-slot, when commercial traffic on the upper Thames had ceased, and boating holidays had become a Victorian craze.

Much of the flavour of the Thames of the time is captured in the works of the Oxford photographer Henry Taunt, who was both a documenter and populariser of the upper Thames, chiefly through his guidebook Taunt's Illustrated Map of the Thames, which in the 1875 fifth edition covered the whole river from Thames Head to the Houses of Parliament. Another, later, good guide is the 1897 The Thames Illustrated: a picturesque journeying from Richmond to Oxford (Internet Archive thamesillustrate00leylrich), which is copiously illustrated with high-quality photos.

The riverscape has changed remarkably little since these books were written. In 2010, a Millennium Project by photographers Jeff Robins and Graham Diprose, In the footsteps of Henry Taunt, revisited and rephotographed Taunt's locations; the English Heritage Viewfinder site has a 22-page photo-essay, In the footsteps of Henry Taunt, with a number of comparison images such as Salter's boatyard in Oxford, the Beetle & Wedge pub, and the church of St Thomas of Canterbury at Goring.

You can even still  take Thames skiff holidays - though personally, being in a shallow-draft rowing boat alongside powered river traffic doesn't sound my idea of a relaxing holiday. I may be wrong - see How three women in a boat took a trip back in time (Joanne O'Connor, The Observer, 2 July 2006). But the Thames Path National Trail looks more to my taste.

Related further reading:

• The book of the Thames : from its rise to its fall (Samuel Carter Hall, 1859, Internet Archive bookofthamesfrom00hall).
• Evenings on the Thames; or, Serene Hours, and what they require, Volume 2 (Kenelm Henry Digby, 1864, Google Books)
• Dickens's dictionary of the Thames, from its source to the Nore: an unconventional handbook (Charles Dickens, 1883 and other eds., Internet Archive dickenssdictiona1885dick).

- Ray

Magical trains and London

Via Ansible #264, news of yet another tenuous plagiarism claim against JK Rowling: see Harry Potter publisher denies plagiarism (The Telegraph, 16th June), concerning a lawsuit on behalf of the late Adrian Jacobs, alleging that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire plagiarised Jacobs' 1987 The Adventures of Willy the Wizard No 1: Livid Land.

The Willy the Wizard title in question is a 36-page illustrated book; it has a website, with extracts apparently chosen to highlight the claimed resemblances such as "Strange Eye Wizard", "Wizards Prisons", "Wizard Goverment" and "Wizard Trains".

As to Wizard Trains, Ansible asks "did Jacobs nick the train concept from Susan Cooper's Silver on the Tree (1977)?" Actually you can track the magical train motif even further back, particularly to Lord Dunsany's Edge of the World mythos, where the magical lands bordering the edge of the world can be reached by train from London by getting a special ticket:

So Neepy Thang set out. He bought the purple ticket at Victoria Station. He went by Herne Hill, Bromley and Bickley and passed St. Mary Cray. At Eynsford he changed and taking a footpath along a winding valley went wandering into the hills. And at the top of a hill in a little wood, where all the anemones long since were over and the perfume of mint and thyme from outside came drifting in with Thang, he found once more the familiar path, age-old and fair as wonder, that leads to the Edge of the World.
- The Bird of the Difficult Eye, Tales of Wonder, 1916

The ways to that town are winding; he took the ticket at Victoria Station that they only give if they know you: he went past Bleth: he went along the Hills of Neol-Hungar and came to the Gap of Poy. All these are in that part of the world that pertains to the fields we know; but beyond the Gap of Poy on those ordinary plains, that so closely resemble Sussex, one first meets the unlikely.
- The Long Porter's Tale, Tales of Wonder, 1916

In Dunsany, the train isn't the only way to the magical. Another route, in some of his stories, is the shop in Go-by Street, which leads through to The Lands of Dream. There's an evocative section in The Avenger of Perdondaris where the narrator, returning through the wrong portal, finds himself in a far-future London and is baffled by the language until he realises a stallholder is trying to sell him a cake:

...The door opened, and to my surprise I found myself in what seemed like a shepherd's cottage; a man who was sitting on a log of wood in a little low dark room said something to me in an alien language, I muttered something and hurried through to the street. The house was thatched in front as well as behind. There were no golden spires in front, no marvellous birds; but there was no pavement. There was a row of houses, byres and barns but no other sign of a town. Far off I saw one or two little villages. Yet there was the river; and no doubt the Thames, for it was of the width of the Thames and had the curves of it, if you can imagine the Thames in that particular spot without a city round it, without any bridges, and Embankment fallen in. I saw that there had happened to me permanently and in the light of day some such thing as happens to a man, but to a child more often, when he awakes before morning in some strange room and sees a high, grey window where the door ought to be and unfamiliar objects in wrong places and though knowing where he is yet knows not how it can be that the place should look like that.

A flock of sheep came by me presently looking the same as ever, but the man who led them had a wild, strange look. I spoke to him and he did not understand me. Then I went down to the river to see if my boat was there and at the very spot where I had left it, in the mud (for the tide was low) I saw a half-buried piece of blackened wood that might have been part of a boat, but I could not tell. I began to feel that I had missed the world. It would be a strange thing to travel from far away to see London and not to be able to find it among all the roads that lead there, but I seemed to have travelled in Time and to have missed it among the centuries. And when as I wandered over the grassy hills I came on a wattled shrine that was thatched with straw and saw a lion in it more worn with time than even the Sphinx at Gizeh and when I knew it for one of the four in Trafalgar Square then I saw that I was stranded far away in the future with many centuries of treacherous years between me and anything that I had known. And then I sat on the grass by the worn paws of the lion to think out what to do. And I decided to go back through Go-by Street and, since there was nothing left to keep me any more to the fields we know, to offer myself as a servant in the palace of Singanee, and to see again the face of Saranoora and those famous, wonderful, amethystine dawns upon the abyss where the golden dragons play. And I stayed no longer to look for remains of the ruins of London; for there is little pleasure in seeing wonderful things if there is no one at all to hear of them and to wonder. So I returned at once to Go-by Street, the little row of huts, and saw no other record that London had been except that one stone lion. I went to the right house this time. It was very much altered and more like one of those huts that one sees on Salisbury plain than a shop in the city of London, but I found it by counting the houses in the street for it was still a row of houses though pavement and city were gone. And it was still a shop. A very different shop to the one I knew, but things were for sale there shepherd's crooks, food and rude axes. And a man with long hair was there who was clad in skins. I did not speak to him for I did not know his language. He said to me something that sounded like "Everkike." It conveyed no meaning to me; but when he looked towards one of his buns, light suddenly dawned in my mind and I knew that England was even England still and that still she was not conquered, and that though they had tired of London they still held to their land; for the words that the man had said were, "Av er kike," and then I knew that that very language that was carried to distant lands by the old, triumphant Cockney was spoken still in his birthplace and that neither his politics nor his enemies had destroyed him after all these thousand years. I had always disliked the Cockney dialect and with the arrogance of the Irishman who hears from rich and poor the English of the splendour of Elizabeth; and yet when I heard those words my eyes felt sore as with impending tears it should be remembered how far away I was.
- The Avenger of Perdondaris, Tales of Three Hemispheres, 1919 (Gutenberg E-text No. 11440)

I must pass this example on to David Platt, who just contacted me with news of current updates of his Where London Stood project, which explores the meme of ruins in art and literature, particularly visions of the ruins of contemporary cities such as London.
- Ray

The Clumsiest People in Europe and other slurs

Via Metafilter, I just ran into the works of Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer. A Norfolk-based evangelical children's author who died in 1878, she wrote prolifically about worldwide travel and culture. The only problem was that she had never been further than Brussels, and appears to have disliked nearly everyone and everywhere. Generally, the nearest she gets to liking something is disliking it the least (e.g. "All the religions of China are bad, but of the three the religion of Confucius is the least foolish"). Her details of local colour are essentially accurate, but seen through a filter of Victorian prejudice - with the faint mitigation that she was a product of her time and suffered from depression, which might account for her jaundiced view of the world.

Todd Pruzan reissued some of her work in 2005 as The Clumsiest People in Europe: Mrs. Mortimer's Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World after finding a copy in a secondhand bookshop. You can read some samplers at 'The Clumsiest People in Europe' and the The rudest travel book ever written.

Addendum: Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer's original books are now online at the Internet Archive. The pertinent ones are:

• Far off; or, Africa and America described (1854)
• Far Off, Or, Asia and Australia Described (1856)
• Near Home, Or, The Countries of Europe Described: With Anecdotes and Numerous Illustrations (1866)

- Ray