Grove Koger

My book When the Going Was Good is now out of print, and until I complete a second edition, I plan to post revised and updated sections here. Today’s entry deals with a classic by Alexander Kinglake, who was born on August 5, 1809. 

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Eothen: or, Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East. John Ollivier, 1844

Scion of a well-placed English family, Kinglake attended Eton and Trinity College, Oxford. Drawn to the army but disqualified because of poor eyesight, he turned to the law, but interrupted his studies for a more exciting enterprise. Kinglake’s friend John Savile had lately returned from Russia and Asia, and now he and Kinglake proposed another trip, this one together.

The two planned to travel through the Ottoman Empire, which stretched in a crescent from southeastern Europe through Asia Minor and the Middle East and westward again into North Africa. Setting out in late 1834 with a handful of attendants and an interpreter named Mysseri, Kinglake and Savile traveled from Belgrade to Constantinople and Smyrna. When Savile was forced to quit the expedition, Kinglake continued on to the island of Cyprus, the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, Egypt, and Syria. Retracing part of his route, Kinglake returned home fifteen months after starting out.   

     

Eothen (“From the Early Dawn” or “From the East”) is one of the most engaging travel books ever written. Kinglake intended it to be “quite superficial” in character, by which he meant that he had left out the many pages of  “improving” information and passages of description that other authors inserted in their travelogues. He instead recorded only what was perceived by “a headstrong and not very amiable traveller.” (In the book’s comic highpoint, Kinglake and another Englishman meet each other crossing the Egyptian desert by camel in opposite directions, but the two merely raise their hands in greeting and proceed phlegmatically; only their servants’ refusal to stand on ceremony allows them eventually to exchange a few words.) It is this unabashed irreverence that has kept the book fresh, although the same quality put off publishers in Kinglake’s own time, making it necessary for him to subsidize its eventual appearance in 1844.

There are a number of editions of Eothen available. The one whose cover is illustrated above is from Century (London, 1982) and includes an introduction by well-known travel writer Jonathan Raban. The Oxford University Press edition (Oxford, 1982) includes an introduction by another well-known figure in the field, Jan Morris.

For further information about Kinglake, I recommend Gerald de Gaury, Travelling Gent: The Life of Alexander Kinglake (1809–1891) and Iran Banu Hassani Jewett, Alexander W. Kinglake (Boston: Twayne, 1981).

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