Alexander William Kinglake (1809–1891)

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 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.… (more)

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 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!… (more)