Eothen or Traces of Travel Brought Back for the East
by
Phyllis LaVergne
INTRODUCTION
In 1834, twenty-five year old, British born Alexander Kinglake embarked on a trip to the Near East. He traveled from Belgrade to Constantinople, Smyrna, Cyprus, Beirut, Jerusalem and Cairo, then returned by way of Suez, Gaza, Nablous, Damascus, Lebanon and Satalieh (Attalia) in Turkey. This was his version of the Grand Tour that well-to-do young men of that era ventured on before settling into a profession. Kinglake's book Eothen recounts this journey.
Kinglake said in the preface of Eothen that he was unhappy with the first two drafts and this was his third, which is why it wasn't ready for publication until 1844. He writes it as to a friend contemplating a similar journey.(1) The book was rejected by most publishers and was finally accepted by a friend, John Ollivier, with Kinglake paying fifty pounds to cover printing expenses.(2)
Eothen was an immediate success and became a tremendously popular travel book. Originally published anonymously, it's author soon became known. It was reprinted many times during Kinglake's lifetime, and included in literary series such as the Temple Classics, 1895; the World's Great Books, 1899; and Everyman's Library, 1914. The latest edition, l996, is published by Marlboro Press/Northwestern.(3)
Kinglake's style was to change the tone of many of the travel works that followed his book. It was written not as a guide to the scenic and monumental spectaculars of the area being visited. Instead it recalled his impressions of what he was seeing and feeling at a specific time. His successors might imitate him, but none were as successful as Kinglake in this genre. For instance, William Thackeray's Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo was not well received. It was not written in Thackeray's usual style and suffered because of this. Also, it paralleled Eothen too closely.
Eliot Warburton's The Crescent and the Cross was well received. However, it was more conventional and in greater detail. Warburton traveled the same area as Kinglake, but in 1843.
Eothen was originally written for Warburton as a travel guide but he had not waited for Kinglake to finish Eothen before he went on his trip. His book was published in 1844.
Warburton reviewed Eothen favorably for the Quarterly Review. His one criticism was Kinglake's
reaction to Jerusalem. Although in later life Kinglake was inclined toward atheism, at this time he
still was calling himself a Protestant, and was appalled with the hustle and bustle of the people.
He had expected "solemn gloom and the deep stillness rightfully belonging to the Holy City".(4)
He was there at the "height of the season".(5) It was Easter and Pilgrims from all religions were
there to acknowledge the event. Kinglake was not impressed by most of the sacred sites,
questioning their veracity, which was one of the few criticisms of the book.
THE LIFE OF ALEXANDER WILLIAM KINGLAKE 1809-1891
Alexander Kinglake was born in Somerset, England in August, 1809, into an affluent family. He was one of six children, the second child and the oldest son, of William Kinglake and Mary Woodforde.(6)
His early schooling was by his mother, who had him reading Homer's Iliad and Odyssey at the age of six. Also he learned another of his mother's skills, horseback riding. At twelve, he became a boarder at Ottery St. Mary in Devon, the headmaster being Rev. George Coleridge, the older brother of Samuel Coleridge.
In 1823, Kinglake went to Eton. It was here he met and became very good friends with Eliot Warburton and John Savile. Warburton was apparently the "friend" to whom Eothen was written and John Savile was "Methley", his traveling companion in Eothen.
By 1828 at Cambridge, his fellow students included Alfred Tennyson, Richard Monckton Milnes and William Thackeray. Kinglake spoke at debates and was remembered as a good speaker. In January, 1832, he received his B.A. degree.
Because of poor eyesight, his wish for an army career was impossible and he studied law instead. Kinglake began reading for the Chancery bar with Bryan Procter, also known as Barry Cornwall, a published poet. His friend Eliot Warburton also was reading with Procter. Proctor's wife was hostess to many of the writers of the day where students met such people as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning and W.E.Forster.(7)
During the next two years, Kinglake seems to have taken off on short vacations, to Devon, to Wales and to Brittany, writing to his family his pleasure in traveling.
The summer of 1834, he again met John Savile. He had just returned from a trip to Russia, the Caucasus, Persia, and India. How it was decided they would go together to the Near East is not known. At that time little was known of Ottoman Turkey and both were admirers of Homer and somehow it was decided. This adventure would interrupt Kinglake's law studies.
According to Eothen, Kinglake starts his journey in Belgrade. Actually Kinglake and Savile met in Hamburg and went on to Berlin, Dresden, Prague, and Vienna, and then to Semlin on the Save, across the Danube from Belgrade, Ottoman territory. Savile ("Methley") was accompanied by his servant Steele. They took an interpreter, Mysseri, who spoke seven languages, but not Arabic, and a Tatar, Moostapha, who was in charge of the baggage handling and the horses. Belgrade, as other cities in the Ottoman territories, had the plague which they would encounter throughout the trip. Methley and Steele were ill with fever by the time they reached Constantinople, where all remained until they recovered.
Kinglake and Methley rode to Smyrna through western Turkey, the scenes of Homer's epics. At Smyrna, Methley received letters recalling him to London. Kinglake went on to Cyprus and then Beirut. In Beirut he hired an additional interpreter, one who spoke Arabic, Dthemetri, who spoke to Kinglake in Italian.
Kinglake visited Lady Hester Stanhope who lived near Sidon, outside Beirut, in a ruin of a convent. She had been a childhood friend of his mother. Hester Stanhope, the niece of William Pitt, had been his secretary and had served as his hostess. She had left England in 1800 after the deaths of her uncle, her brother and a friend, Sir John Moore. She adopted the dress and customs of the Levant and was thought to be a prophetess by the tribes living around her in the desert.(8)
Kinglake went on into Palestine, to Jerusalem, crossed the Sinai desert and in April 1834 was in Cairo where the plague was at devastating proportions.
Leaving Cairo and after seeing the pyramids and the sphinx, he, Mysseri and Dthemetri, crossed the desert again, went to Damascus and returned to Turkey.
Kinglake was "called" to the Chancery bar and began his practice of law in 1837. By 1844 he had finished his third draft of Eothen. Although anonymous, it became known that Kinglake had written Eothen, and he always felt it hurt his reputation among his fellow solicitors.
In August of 1845, Kinglake visited Algiers, probably because he was interested in military matters. He obtained permission to accompany the French army which was trying to subdue the natives in the interior of Algiers. Originally, he was to join the army at Medea, but on arriving there found the army not prepared to move. He returned to the coast and joined Colonel St-Armaud in Orleansville. The Colonel explained their objective and invited Kinglake to ride along. He had already lost time on the delayed drive from Medea, and he had not come prepared to bivouac and lacked time and money. Consequently, he was unable to do so. He did watch the expedition depart, riding with them for an hour. Kinglake was impressed with St-Arnaud, but later revised his opinion when he learned to the atrocities of the French against the native tribes. Kinglake kept a journal of this journey, but did not plan publication.
In 1854, Great Britain and France declared war against Russia which had invaded Turkey and destroyed their fleet. Because the Ottoman Empire was declining in strength, Russia saw an opportunity to take over at least part of the territory. Britain and France recognized this as a threatening situation, and joined with Turkey to defend their country. A force was sent into Turkey from the Black Sea to force the Russians to withdraw. John Delane, editor of the London Times, and critical of the war, Henry Layard, a member of Parliament against British participation in the war, and Kinglake who was interested in anything military, decided to go together to see the army in action.
They joined the army at Alma in September. Here the combined armies of the English and French were landed and would proceed towards Sebastopol. Lord Raglan, Commander in Chief of the British forces in Turkey had met Kinglake previously in England, and on recognizing him in the field, allowed him to remain nearby as a "T.G.". a "Travelling Gent" a name for newsmen given permission to accompany the army. Kinglake stayed for a month before he became ill in October and he left the war front for Malta, where he recovered enough to return to England.(9)
Lord Raglan died suddenly in the spring of 1855 in the Crimea. Although he had wished all his papers destroyed, Lady Raglan gave them to Kinglake for him to use when he began his research for his books on the Crimean War. The first volume was published in 1863.
During this writing, Kinglake was elected to Parliament for Bridgewater in Somerset in 1857. He was actively involved in all the activities, but did not speak very much because of a weak voice. He was unseated in 1868, when a defeated candidate filed charges of bribery of the election. This had been a wide spread practice. Kinglake apparently had had no knowledge of this and was found guiltless. His agent, however, was found guilty.
In 1869, Kinglake returned to the Crimea to revisit scenes of the war, and thereafter concentrated on the remaining volumes of his book, Invasion of the Crimea, written between 1863 and 1887, a total of eight volumes. These were written as a careful historian, not the pleasant, charming style of Eothen.
Its reception was varied. The publisher, John Blackwood was elated. It was accurate and vivid, but many felt it too detailed and frequently prejudiced. He seemed less than objective about people he obviously detested. That he was conscientious and attempted togive a full account of the subject was acknowledged by all his critics. There is no mention of Kinglake's reaction to their comments, perhaps because of his private nature. He seldom responded to attacks, never answering the London Times which became his enemy after his Crimea books started to appear with his censures against the paper for publishing information of use to the Russians during the war.
Kinglake had many friends and many correspondents, although he wrote only short letters because, he said, he wrote letters badly. He never overcame his shyness and was at ease only with intimate friends. As he became older, he dined at the Athenaeum Club every evening, until as he became deaf, he wasn't able to enjoy conversations with his friends. On New Years Day, 1891, he died of gout and cancer of the throat. He was cremated, unusual for that era, and his ashes taken to Pitminster in Somerset to be with his family.
A young friend wrote "his book Eothen will live forever and some parts of his history of the Crimea will be a classic as long as our language lives. But he himself, that marvelous mixture of pride, of humility, of daring and intense shyness, of affection and cynicism, the brilliant talker who often never spoke, the most lovable of men,will never be known."(10)
The Book: Eothen or Traces of Travels Brought Home from the East
At Semlin I was still encompassed by the scenes and the sounds of familiar life; the din of a busy
world still vexed and cheered me; the unveiled faces of women still shone in the light of day. Yet,
whenever I chose to look southward, I saw the Ottoman's fortress--austere, and darkly impending
high over the vale of the Danube--historic Belgrade. I had come, as it were, to the end of this
wheel-going Europe, and now my eyes would see the Splendor and Havoc of The East.
The two frontier towns are less than an gun-shot apart, yet their people hold no communion. The
Hungarian on the North, and the Turk and the Servian on the Southern side of the Save, are as
much asunder as though there were fifty broad provinces that lay in the path between them. Of
the men that bustled around me in the streets of Semlin, there was not, perhaps, one who had ever
gone down to look upon the stranger race dwelling under the walls of that opposite castle. It is
the Plague, and the dread of the Plague, that divide the one people from the other. All coming
and going stands forbidden by the terrors of the yellow flag. If you dare to break the laws of the
quarantine, you will be tried with military haste; the court will scream out your sentence to you
from a tribunal some fifty yards off; the priest instead of gently whispering to you the sweet hopes
of religion, will console you at dueling distance, and after that you will find yourself carefully shot
and carelessly buried in the ground of the Lazaretto.
These are the opening lines of Eothen. The very real menace, plague, is to be mentioned often during Kinglake's journey of 1834 and 1835. Constantinople, the first city he reached after fifteen days and one thousand miles of horseback riding, had plague. It was here, that if not aware of it before, he learns Europeans believed the disease was transmitted by contact with clothing, and they were very careful not to touch or be touched by people in the streets and alleys.
There is no mention of a quarantine in Constantinople, nothing to prevent him from leaving. Nor is there mention of plague at Smyrna, Cypress or on entering Beirut. Kinglake does mentio three months after he left Palestine, the plague had arrived.
Kinglake says "Cairo and Plague! During the whole time of my stay, the Plague was so master of the city, and showed himself so staringly in every street and every alley, that I can't now affect to dissociate the two ideas."
Approaching Cairo, Kinglake was warned in the desert by a passing Englishman, that there was plague in the city. He went anyway and found himself to be the only European traveler there. He says in a footnote that there is "bravado" in his writing at this time and he wrote he "lived in perpetual apprehension", but it affected him with excitement.(11)
In Cairo, Kinglake was provided an apartment by Osman Effendi, a transplanted Scotsman, who lectured him frequently on his lack of care because of the plague. He traveled around Cairo on a donkey, with a boy running before him shooing people out of his way. He didn't think much of the city, saying there were few public buildings. He mentions only a mosque built by a "Hindostance" merchant. He mentions also ascending the Citadel and seeing the pyramids in a distance.(12) He also mentions the funeral processions passing his apartment everyday, between dawn and noon, and how they increased during his stay.(13)
Europeans in the first half of the Nineteenth Century, thought Egypt was the home of the plague. In some years the plague arrived in the Nile valley with the annual flooding of the Nile, and left when the water started to recede.
There was controversy about the best way to contain the disease. One group of doctors, and the Governor, Muhammad Ali, thought it contagious and advocated quarantine. So strict was this order, that to not abide by it, meant execution. Some doctors thought it was the flat humid land and improper burial of the dead. "Meterological circumstances peculiar to the country endowed it with a pestilential constitution" was one suggestion.(14)Another theory, "the frightful state of slavery in which they (the Egyptian people) lived, the abominable despotism which weighs on them, the vexations which they must suffer and the lack of the authorities of improving the lives of the inhabitants."(15)
Egyptian Muslims, as a group, did not fear the plague. They considered it one of the complications of life.
In the last decade of the Nineteenth Century, the cause of plague was discovered by Alexander Yersin; a bacteria from a rat, which is carried to humans by fleas. Rats have been carried in cargo holds of ships unintentionally for hundreds of years, carrying the disease around the world. Alexandria, Egypt, was a large merchant city in the early 1800s. Escaping from the ships, the Nile flooding carried the rats to Cairo, and then into the irrigated areas south of the city, causing the devastation and horror of an epidemic.
Bubonic plague is not contagious, but pneumonic plague is.(16) However, with present day antibiotics, the infectious state only lasts about three days.
Kinglake stayed nineteen days in Cairo, although he had wished to leave earlier. Mysseri, his interpreter, became ill, and he himself was not feeling well. He found a foreign doctor who treated him, but two days later the doctor was dead. Kinglake became very ill and he was sure the plague had caught up with him. Finding that the Pasha had an English doctor, Kinglake prevailed upon him to attend Mysseri and himself, and they soon recovered.(17)
The problem then became the difficulty of acquiring a means of transportation from the city. The Pasha was assembling camels for military purposes and few were available on the market.(18)
Returning from Cairo by way of Gaza, Kinglake was supposed to be quarantined there, but the governor made an exception and let him go on. Damascus did not have plague or a quarantine.
Kinglake returned to Smyrna from Syria,.joining up with a Russian General who was also going to Turkey. Because the ship was slow, becalmed some of the time, they decided to disembark at Sitalich and go overland. When the ship dropped anchor for them to go ashore, a boat came out to tell them there was a three week quarantine. The Pasha would not relent the order. The General and Kinglake were determined to land, and Kinglake got creative.
Carrying a Russian flag, with several sailors, they were rowed ashore. As they landed, the ship fired its canons. Kinglake and the General marched up to the citadel and into the audience hall of the Pasha. They joined him uninvited on his divan. The General accused the Pasha of insulting Russia and worked himself up to genuine indignation. Kinglake describes the dialogue, the General speaking Italian because that was the interpreter's language; the interpreter getting upset because of the lack of respect for the Pasha; the General resorting to French, shaking his passport at the Pasha who couldn't understand a word being said.
Eventually the Pasha allowed them to stay ashore, gave them dinner, horses, and they rode off into Turkey.
Thus ended Kinglake's recounting of his journey.
Jan Morris, in the introduction to the Oxford University Press 1982 edition of Eothen says "Such was the journey this book describes--or rather, does not describe, for there was never a travel book more intensely subjective and selective, more immune to the orthodox demands of descriptive reportage...Eothen is sub-titled Traces of Travel, but it is not the travel that is important in this work, only the traces it left upon its author's very particular sensibility."
Sources Consulted
Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Cairo-1001 Years of City Victorious. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1971.
Biel, Timothy. The Black Death. San Diego: Lucent Books, 1989.
Collins, Robert O. and Robert Tignor. Egypt and the Sudan. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall,
1967.
Creasy, Edward S. History of the Ottoman Turks. Beirut: Khayats, 1961.
Davis, William Stearns. A Short History of the Near East. New York: MacMillan Company,
1922.
de Gaury, Gerald. Travelling Gent. The Life of Alexander Kinglake (1809-1891). London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.
Drobble, Margaret. ed. Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1985. (Printed 1988 after revision).
Ince, Richard B. Calverley and Some Cambridge Wits of the Nineteenth Century. London: Grant
Richards and Humphrey Toulmin. 1929.
Jewett, Iran B. Hassani. "Kinglake and the English Travelogue of the Nineteenth Century".
Ph.D. diss. University of Maryland, 1964.
Kinglake, Alexander William. Eothen or Traces of Travel Brought Home From The East.
London: J. Ollivier, 1844.
Eothen, Traces of Travel Brought Home From The East. introduction by Jan Morris.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Kuhnke, Laverne. Lives at Risk. Public Health in Nineteenth -Century Egypt. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990.
McNeill, William H. Plagues and People. History Book Club edition. New York: Doubleday,
1976.
Moulton, Charles Wells, ed. Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors.
Vol.8, 1891-1904. Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1959.
Osband, Linda, ed. Famous Travellers to the Holy Land. London: Prion. 1989.
Tuckwell, William. A. W. Kinglake, a biographical and literary study. L902. Champaign, Il:
Project Gutenberg, 1996. Available internet.
ftp://uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/etext/gutenberg/etext96/awkbi10.txt
`
2. John Murray, who had been offered the manuscript first and rejected it, said it was the greatest blunder of his professional life. He later purchased the copyright.
3. Biographer Gerald de Gaury said in 1972, there had been thirty-six editions printed, and there have been at least seven more editions printed since then.
4. Alexander Kinglake, Eothen or Traces of Travel Brought Home from The East.London:J.Ollivier. 1844. Page 118.
5. Kinglake, 118
6. Sophia was the oldest, then Alec, as his family called him. The other siblings were Christina, Arthur, Jonathan and "Bob", probably Hamilton, who was Robert Hamilton Kinglake
and as an adult called Hamilton perhaps to avoid confusion with his uncle of the same name.
7. In the preface of Eothen, Anne Procter is referred to as "Our Lady of Bitterness" because of her sharp tongue and acid wit.
8. This chapter of Eothen was also published separately because of the interest in England of Lady Hester.
9. He was diagnosed as having Crimean fever.
10. Travelling Gent, pages 144,145. Janet Ross to Mrs Hamilton Kinglake, Alexander Kinglake's sister-in-law.
11. Kinglake, page 154
12. Benjamin Thomas, "Cairo, Egypt", in Encyclopedia Americana, 1996. Kinglake seems to have missed the Polytechnic Institute, the Naval docks, Arsenal and palaces of Muhammad Ali and his family. He does mention the citadel build by Saladin in the twelfth century, and I imagine the Byzantine Mosque of Muhammad Ali, built in conjunction with the citadel, is the one Kinglake is referring to, tongue in cheek, "built by a Hindostance merchant" not identified.
Also, in the old section of Cairo, there is one of the greatest collection of Arab architectural buildings in the world, and the mosque of Ahmid ibn Tutum, built in 876; the University mosque of al-Azhar, built in 970; and the mosque of Sultan Hasan, built in 1361.
13. LaVerne Kuhnke, Lives at Risk, Public Health in Nineteenth Century Egypt."Kinglake must have stayed in Cairo at the very peak of the epidemic for he observed that during the nineteen days he spent in the city, mortality rose from 400 to 1,200 a day...One of the features of the epidemic that he found most disquieting was the steady procession of funerals every day from dawn until noon; the passing of howling mourners was so incessant the Kinglake believed one-half of the inhabitants of Cairo must have perished."
14. Kuhnke, page 70.
15. Kuhnke, page 71.
16. Kuhnke, page 72.
17. Kinglake had been out in what was called the Khamsin, a hot, dry, violent, dustladen wind off the Sahara, thought to cause illness.
There was a scarcity of doctors in Egypt. The first Western medical school was started in 1827 by Antoine Barthelme Clot, a French educated doctor. Muhammad Ali, governor of Egypt , was concerned with the high death rate of soldiers in training and the hospital was a permanent military facility. The three principle endemic diseases were ophthalmia (trachoma), dysentery, and the plague.
18. This was probably in preparation for a second war between Muhammad Ali and the Sultan Mahmud , which occurred in 1839.