Alexander William Kinglake (1809–1891)

An astonishingly ballsy trip by a relatively well-off gentleman of the day into plague-ridden lands, at a time when the causes of the black plague were not understood. Choosing to ignore the advice of countrymen who believed the source of the disease was in the water, Kinglake chose to rub shoulders with the swarthy people in these new lands--just the way, it turns out (as we now know) to get the dreaded and terminal disease. He lived, as his record in this book attests. Heads on spikes at show more gates, misguided sojourns in unfavourable directions, and odd camel rides are all described in fascinating detail. Even such fine contemporary books as Places in Between pale in comparison to this courageous and inconveniencing trip. Of particular fascination for this reviewer was the odd appearance of Lady Stanhope, as if a distaff (and not THAT weird) model for Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. --MM show less

Eccentric, endearing, and tremendously English account of travel in the Middle East around the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign. This is one of those books that I was long put off reading by a completely mistaken idea of what it was about: from a false association with the title I somehow got it into my head that it was some sort of whimsical tolkienesque thing about elves and trolls. As I should have known, Eothen is supposed to be the Greek word for "dawn".
Having sorted that little show more misunderstanding out, I realise why Jan Morris was so keen on Kinglake. As a writer, he's splendidly inconsequential, telling us nothing whatsoever about tourist sites, monuments, landscape, or history, but sticking firmly to the things he found entertaining or bizarre about the business of traveling. I enjoyed the little details, like the Greek sailors' St Nicholas hung up in the cabin "like a barometer", or the wonderful scene where Kinglake, on a camel in the middle of the Sinai desert, meets another Englishman heading in the opposite direction. Neither is willing to be the first to break the silence, so they pass without speaking, touching their hats to each other. It's only when their respective escorts get into conversation that they turn round and exchange a few phrases. His description of a visit to his mother's cousin, the famous Lady Hester Stanhope (Regency political hostess turned Lebanese warlord, part-time religious leader and amateur archaeologist) is another classic. I was interested by his reactions to the various religions of the region: unlike most (male) British travellers, he doesn't seem to be either seduced by virile Islam or thrown into proper Protestant indignation by the "unbiblical" Christianity of the Holy Land: he goes into a weird, Mariolatrous ecstasy in Nazareth, but then a few pages later he's being worldly and pleasantly cynical about the monks and their wine cellars. Odd, for a British writer who was more-or-less a contemporary of George Borrow.
As a traveller, though, Kinglake is every inch the "civis Britannicus sum" of the era when any act of disrespect by a foreigner stood a good chance of provoking Lord Palmerston into sending the boys round with a gunboat or two. He usually travels in perfect solitude, escorted only by a couple of servants, some interpreters and guides, a few porters, and a varying population of camel proprietors, armed guards and the like. Life was simple in those days! show less

What a wonderful work of travel. Here Kinglake approaches the land of the Bedu as he looks over the banks of the River Jordan to the east:

If a man, and an Englishman, be not born of his mother with a natural Chiffney-bit in his mouth, there comes to him a time for loathing the wearisome ways of society; a time for not liking tamed people; a time for not dancing quadrilles, not sitting in pews; a time for pretending that Milton and Shelley, and all sorts of mere dead people, were greater in show more death than the first living Lord of the Treasury; a time, in short, for scoffing and railing, for speaking lightly of the very opera, and all our most cherished institutions. It is from nineteen to two or three and twenty perhaps that this war of the man against men p. 129is like to be waged most sullenly. You are yet in this smiling England, but you find yourself wending away to the dark sides of her mountains, climbing the dizzy crags, exulting in the fellowship of mists and clouds, and watching the storms how they gather, or proving the mettle of your mare upon the broad and dreary downs, because that you feel congenially with the yet unparcelled earth. A little while you are free and unlabelled, like the ground that you compass; but civilisation is coming and coming; you and your much-loved waste lands will be surely enclosed, and sooner or later brought down to a state of mere usefulness; the ground will be curiously sliced into acres and roods and perches, and you, for all you sit so smartly in your saddle, you will be caught, you will be taken up from travel as a colt from grass, to be trained and tried, and matched and run. All this in time, but first come Continental tours and the moody longing for Eastern travel. The downs and the moors of England can hold you no longer; with large strides you burst away from these slips and patches of free land; you thread your path through the crowds of Europe, and at last, on the banks of Jordan, you joyfully know that you are upon the very frontier of all accustomed respectabilities. There, on the other side of the river (you can swim it with one arm), there reigns the people that will be like to put you to death for not being a vagrant, for not being a robber, for not being armed and houseless. There is comfort in that—health, comfort, and strength to one who is dying from very weariness of that poor, dear, middle-aged, deserving, accomplished, pedantic, and painstaking governess, Europe. show less

It is almost 200 years since William Kinglake went travelling about the Ottoman Empire on the Balkan fringes before heading to Constantinople, Smyrna, Cyprus, Jerusalem, Cairo and Damascus. It is a world that has changed irrevocably since then; however, there are elements of that world still visible in ours. This almost wasn’t a book either, Kinglake had scribbled a few notes down on the back of a map for a friend who was considering taking a year off to travel too. Seven years later he show more had written this book.

This is not really about the places that he travels through on his journey. It is more about the people that he meets of his travels and his experiences which were quite varied from charging across a desert alone on a camel, being in a city whose population is dropping like flies with the plague, meets with an ex-pat called Lady Hester Stanhope, that knew his mother, see the Pyramids for the first time and marvels at the Sphinx.

This is the time when there are no cars or other mechanised transport so the art of travelling is a much drawn-out process. The language is quite different from our modern phrasing, but then it was written over 150 years ago. It took me a few chapters of the book to get into his style, but when he reached the desert I found that the writing was vastly better. He is a strange character in lots of ways, he has some respect for some of the people that he meets and for others, he can be quite condescending to the people he is travelling with as companions and those that he has employed to help him. Even though some of his attitudes are very alien from a modern perspective, I did like this and I can see why it is seen as a classic of travel writing. show less