Superior Persons

E.S. Turner

• Travels with a Superior Person by Lord Curzon, edited by Peter King
  Sidgwick, 191 pp, £12.95, October 1985, ISBN 0 283 99294 8
• The Ladies of Castlebrae by A. Whigham Price
  Alan Sutton, 242 pp, £10.95, October 1985, ISBN 0 86299 228 1
• Lizzie: A Victorian Lady’s Amazon Adventure by Tony Morrison, Anne Brown and Ann Rose
  BBC, 160 pp, £9.95, November 1985, ISBN 0 563 20424 9
• Miss Fane in India edited by John Pemble
  Alan Sutton, 246 pp, £10.95, October 1985, ISBN 0 86299 240 0
• Explorers Extraordinary by John Keay
  Murray/BBC Publications, 195 pp, £10.95, November 1985, ISBN 0 7195 4249 9
• A Visit to Germany, Italy and Malta 1840-41 by Hans Christian Andersen, translated by Grace Thornton
  Peter Owen, 182 pp, £12.50, October 1985, ISBN 0 7206 0636 5
• The Irish Sketch-Book 1842 by William Makepeace Thackeray
  Blackstaff, 368 pp, £9.95, December 1985, ISBN 0 85640 340 7
• Mr Rowlandson’s England by Robert Southey, edited by John Steel
  Antique Collectors’ Club, 202 pp, £14.95, November 1985, ISBN 0 907462 77 4

‘We travellers are in very hard circumstances,’ said Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. ‘If we tell anything new we are laughed at as fabulous.’ This mistrust of the footloose is endorsed by the trenchant definition of ‘traveller’s tale’ in Chambers’ Dictionary: ‘an astounding lie about what one professes to have seen abroad’. To be sure, this batch of 19th-century travellers’ tales features some astounding liars, but there are also some reasonably honest witnesses. These include the stiff-backed statesman whom Max Beerbohm called ‘Britannia’s butler’, two twin widows on a Gospel quest, a get-rich-quick bride in Amazonia, a caustic spinster in India, a writer of fairy-tales, a future poet laureate teamed with a leading delineator of bosoms and bums, and a respected novelist earning his crust in Ireland. ‘No one expects literature in a work of travel,’ said Mary Kingsley (she who was saved from the spikes of the leopard pit by her thick, sensible skirt), but many Victorian travellers had an eye on the popular magazines and lecture platforms. The sheer profusion of outlets, at the century’s end, probably tempted fabulists.