British Travellers to Calabria from 1779 to 1915

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‘Horrors and Magnificence without End’ British travellers to Calabria from 1779 to 1915

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Masters by Research of the University of New South Wales by

Elida Meadows

Social School of Humanities and Languages

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

University of New South Wales

Sydney, Australia

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Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname/Family Name : Meadows Given Name/s : Elida Catherine Abbreviation for degree as give in the University calendar : MA (Masters by Research) Faculty : Arts and Social Sciences School : Humanities and Languages

Thesis Title : ‘Horrors and Magnificence without End’: British travellers to Calabria from 1779 to 1915

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE) This work explores the transmission and influence of travel literature by British travellers to Calabria over a long century of change: industrial development, empire and nation-building. Travel literature both reflects and influences ideas about places and cultures, and provides the opportunity to observe contemporary reactions and understandings of society, politics and religion. This work examines the notions of Italy, and especially Calabria, constructed by British people since the earliest days of travel to the continent. The central argument of this work is that travel, particularly from the time of the Grand Tour onwards, influenced the construction of the idea of Italy and Calabria.

Italy has for a very long time been a place of English “desiring”, but what constitutes this Italy that is desired? One might assume from the literature available that this was a place to be found only north of Naples. Looking at publications, websites and other representations today, it appears that this may still be the case. I argue that the itineraries of the eighteenth-century Classical Grand Tour and the nineteenth-century Romantic Grand Tour created an imaginative geography of Italy based on the desire for classical and Renaissance sites. This research will reflect the work already done on imaginative geography. I argue that the construction of an imaginative geography of Italy constructed by the Grand Tour itinerary, still means “Italy” today. The “crystallisation” of travel paths and writings into an imaginative geography of Italy, produces, in turn, a number of facets, a proliferation of imaginary geographies of the various Italies of the travel literature.

The work describes the changing nature of the traveller’s “gaze” through which difference and the Other is viewed; the consequences for Calabrians of representations that firmly place them and their region as part of a pre- European past; and the development of the British identity in contrast to British perceptions of Italian, and particularly Calabrian, identity, during a period that saw the rise of the British Empire.

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Contents

Declaration ...... ii

Abstract ...... iii

Acknowledgments ...... v

List of Illustrations ...... vi

Chapter 1: Introduction, ‘Horrors and Magnificence without End’: British travellers to Calabria from 1779 to 1907 ...... 1

Chapter 2: The Grand Tour representation of Italy and the imaginative geography of the South...... 37

Chapter 3: Beyond the Grand Tour: “Henry Swinburne the Traveller” ...... 66

Chapter 4: The lone traveller: the “wanderings” of Craufurd Tait Ramage in Southern Italy in 1828 ...... 99

Chapter 5: Edward Lear: Through a (Claude) glass, darkly ...... 123

Chapter 6: Unprotected females on tour: Emily Lowe and her mother in Calabria ...... 153

Chapter 7: George Gissing by the Ionian Sea ...... 194

Chapter 8: Norman Douglas and the (re)Orientalisation of Calabria ...... 226

Chapter 9: Epilogue ...... 260

Bibliography ...... 287

Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

ii Candidate’s Statement

I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, it contains no material previously published or written by another person nor material which to a substantial extent had been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma of a university or other institute of higher learning, except where due acknowledgement is made in the text.

Elida Meadows

Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

iii

Abstract

This thesis explores the transmission and influence of travel literature by British travellers to Calabria over a long century of change: industrial development, empire and nation-building. Travel literature both reflects and influences ideas about places and cultures, and provides the opportunity to observe contemporary reactions and understandings of society, politics and religion. This work examines the notions of Italy, and especially Calabria, constructed by British people since the earliest days of travel to the continent. The central argument of this work is that travel, particularly from the time of the Grand Tour onwards, influenced the construction of the idea of Italy and Calabria.

The goals of this work are: 1. To reveal the Italy which is the site of English “desire” and which led to the construction of an imaginative geography of Italy which remains the same today.

Italy has for a very long time been a place of English “desiring”, but what constitutes this Italy that is desired? One might assume from the literature available that this was a place to be found only north of Naples. Looking at publications, websites and other representations today, it appears that this may still be the case. I argue that the itineraries of the eighteenth- century Classical Grand Tour and the nineteenth-century Romantic Grand Tour created an imaginative geography of Italy based on the desire for classical and Renaissance sites. This research will reflect the work already done on imaginative geography. I argue that the construction of an imaginative geography of Italy constructed by the Grand Tour itinerary, still means “Italy” today. The “crystallisation” of travel paths and writings into an imaginative geography of Italy, produces, in turn, a number of facets, a proliferation of imaginary geographies of the various Italies of the travel literature.

2. To examine the development of the traveller’s gaze in relation to how Calabria is “constructed” by the accounts of British travellers to the region. In particular, departing from the work of Michel Foucault and Edward Said, I note the changing nature of the “gaze” through which difference and the Other is viewed and the consequences for Calabrians of representations that firmly place them and their region as part of a pre-European past. Each traveller brought the ideas of their particular age to their

Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

iv accounts of Calabria. The late seventeenth century work of Swinburne reflects the Restoration ethos of order and productivity. Those travelling in the mid nineteenth century, including Edward Lear and Emily Lowe were motivated by the search for the picturesque and the desire to find “fresh fields” to tap for the production and sale of paintings and books. In relation to Lowe will questioning the existence of a “female gaze.” Issues of industrialisation and urban alienation were felt most keenly by George Gissing and Norman Douglas who travelled to Calabria in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

3. To demonstrate the contribution of the travellers’ accounts in the creation of imaginative geographies of the South, in particular Calabria. I will examine the works of these travellers to reveal how they were received and how they contributed to stereotypes of Calabria that are still evident today. How did their work help create an imaginative geography of Calabria? By examining the texts of British travellers to Calabria, from 1779-1914, I look at the discourse of travel writing, the construction of the “Calabrian” as opposed to ideas of both “Italian-ness” and “British-ness” and the consequences for Calabrians of these kinds of cultural imaginings and representations.

In the accounts written by these travellers it is not unusual to find traces of Northern Italian constructions of the South and indeed, the hierarchy evident within the South itself – Neapolitans, for example, often openly regard themselves as superior to Calabrians. Unpacking these Italian ideas about the South I will examine what purposes they served and how they may have influenced a more general European, but particularly British, ideas about the people of Calabria.

These issues will be viewed in a context of wider political implications and turmoil, including the French occupation and its aftermath, the movement from a feudal system and its impact on the peasantry, the desire for the establishment of a modern European country and the conflicts of the struggle for Unification. For the British, issues like anti-Catholicism, the Act of Union and the loss of the American colonies in the eighteenth century add to this context.

Finally, the work reviews how the travel accounts of these travellers have been reappropriated by the Calabrians of today to promote their region.

Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

Acknowledgments

Firstly, I would like to express my gratitude to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales for giving me the opportunity to complete this work over a longer period of time than I first anticipated. Life, as they say, is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.

This work was inspired by the stories I heard growing up in Australia from my Calabrian family and I dedicate it in particular to my grandmother and my father, both deceased but still very much part of my world view.

I am grateful for the support of my family, and my stalwart partner Alan Meadows who took up much of the burden of keeping me fed and nurtured throughout this process and who was always happy to proofread the drafts and give me feedback. I would also like to thank those friends who read chapters, gave me feedback and whose support helped me stay on track. I would especially like to thank Melissa Iocco and Linda Snook both great friends and mentors, and my supervisors, Professor Martyn Lyons and Associate Professor Nicholas Doumanis for their patience but mostly for their input and support.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge all those people who have managed to complete large pieces of research and writing while struggling with their own mental illness or that of family members, sometimes both.

Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

List of Illustrations

Illus. 1: Map of Calabria ...... vii www.big-italy-map.co.uk

Illus. 2: Map of Calabria Ramage in South Italy, 1868 ...... vii

Illus. 3 Tropea, Calabria, Henry Swinburne ...... 97 Travels in Two Sicilies 1777-1780.

Illus. 4 Landscape with a Hermit, Salvator Rosa ...... 127 c.1662, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Illus. 5: Pentedattilo, Edward Lear ...... 130 1847,

Illus. 7: Wives of the brigands visiting their husbands in prison, Arthur Strutt ...... 135 1842, Frontispiece of A Pedestrian Tour in Calabria and Sicily.

Illus. 8: Paola, Emily Lowe ...... 181 1959, Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and on the Top of Mount Aetna.

Illus 9: Ladies on horseback, [Emily Lowe]...... 190 1857 Unprotected females in Norway, or the pleasantest way of travelling there, passing through.

Illus. 10: Stele Edward Lear, Montebello Ionico, Nicola e Pina ...... 275

Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

vii

Illus. 1:Map of Calabria

Illus. 2: Map of Calabria Ramage in South Italy: the nooks and by-ways of Italy: wanderings in search of its ancient remains and its modern superstitions. Longmans, London, 1868.

Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

Chapter 1: Introduction, ‘Horrors and Magnificence without End’: British travellers to Calabria from 1779 to 1915 ‘Calabria! – no sooner is the word uttered than a new world rises before the mind’s eye, - torrents, fastnesses, all the prodigality of mountain scenery – caves, brigands, and pointed hats – Mrs. Radcliffe and Salvator Rosa, - costumes and 1 character – horrors and magnificence without end.’

The quote from Edward Lear, one of the travellers whose work is examined in this study, encapsulates the romantic sublime reading of Calabria which contributed to the creation of an imaginative geography of that region. Over the period of travel covered by this thesis, Calabria was part of the Kingdom of Naples which, for much of its existence, was contested between French and Spanish dynasties. In 1816, it was merged with the island realm of Sicily to form the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Travellers and other visitors during this period contributed to an aggregation of elements that add up to the stereotypical perception of Calabria that exists to this day.

Destination Calabria In 2006 a house music track called “Destination Calabria” was playing regularly on the radio. I remember experiencing a small frisson upon first hearing it named, not only because it was the topic I was researching and but also because Calabria does not seem to figure at all in the popular imagination, let alone as a travel destination. Indeed, the song’s content turned out to have nothing to do with Calabria and had been originally called “Destination Unknown.” This is a fair description of Calabria as a place where few have ventured over a long period of leisure travel. In fact, there were few travellers to the Italies south of Naples until well into the twentieth-century, and not many of these produced accounts of their journeys.

This research has its genesis in three of my personal interests: I am a collector of travel books to Italy, the Italian South in particular; I grew up in Australia during a period of strong national identification with England and all my imaginings as a child and a young woman were of a place that had no connection to my ethnic background; I am the daughter of Calabrian parents who, once I became interested in my Italian heritage, discovered that to be Calabrese was, in effect, to be an inferior kind of Italian. Why and how did notions of southern Italians as ‘not real’ Italians at best, or as a base and criminal group at worst make it to this new south, Australia?

1 Edward Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria &c, Richard Bentley, London, 1852, pp. 2-3.

Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

There are many examples of an Australian official discourse of the inferiority of southern Italians over different periods of European migration to this country. The idea of the “superiority” of the Northern Italian has been reinforced over time through a variety of sources and is not simply evident in documents relating to official government immigration policy. It was even reflected in Australian fiction, as documented by Roslyn Pesman Cooper. In an article which examined the period from 1900 to 1950 she wrote:

….everywhere, including in writing where racist attitudes are parodied and criticised, it is taken as unquestioned dogma that there are two kinds of Italian, 2 northern and southern, and that the latter are not acceptable.

But where did these ideas originate, and how were they disseminated throughout the world? It is highly probable that the origin of ideas about what were, for a long period, remote and inaccessible regions of Italy began with official records: those of governing bodies, landowners and other privileged groups. But my contention is that, with the onset of the period of the publication boom, these ideas became widespread through popular writings including novels, magazine articles and travel literature. Ideas travel where people travel. Furthermore, it is not uncommon that the same or similar ideas are circulated in each travel account. In his article ‘If it’s 1815, this must be Belgium: The origins of the modern travel guide,’ Pieter François posits that English travel accounts and guidebooks are excellent sources for the analysis of intercultural perceptions and stereotypes, due mainly to the level at 3 which these texts copied from each other.

For the purposes of this study, it is reasonable to state that the accounts of British travellers played a major role in transmitting ideas about Italy and Italians throughout the English-speaking world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, travel was a way of “knowing” and “informing” in an era before the mass communication explosion of the twentieth century and Italy was a very popular destination for travellers from northern Europe. There are by now many studies that identify Italy as a site of English “desiring” from before the age of mass travel to the Victorian era.4 In 2000 Clare Hornsby edited a book entitled The Impact of Italy: The Grand Tour and Beyond5 which, amongst a richness of

2 Roslyn Pesman Cooper, ‘Italian immigrants in Australian fiction 1900-1950,’ Australian Literary Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, 1993, p. 69. 3 Pieter François, ‘If it’s 1815, this must be Belgium: The origins of the modern travel guide,’ Book History, vol. 15, 2012, p. 71. 4 Susan Cahill (ed), Desiring Italy, Fawcett Columbine, New York, 1997. This volume examines the writings of women who travelled to the peninsula, referring again and again to the English love affair with Italy. 5 Clare Hornsby (ed), The Impact of Italy: The Grand Tour and Beyond, The British School at Rome, London, 2000.

Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

3 approaches and contexts, seeks to shed light on the relationship of British tourists to Italy.

Nonetheless, in reading this and other studies, I am still left wondering what exactly constitutes this Italy that was desired. One might assume from the literature available that this was a place to be found from Naples upwards. Why have the accounts of British travellers further south been largely omitted? Compared to the large numbers of British people who took the well-trodden path, travellers to Calabria, in particular, were small in number. Nonetheless, their accounts were and are readily available – why have they been left out of these studies of travel to Italy? In recent times, it seems that the examination of any travel south of Naples is confined to another discourse altogether – that of the Southern Question. The study of the accounts of British travellers to Calabria provides at the very least a fresh look at the construction and dissemination of what has become a popularly accepted Calabrian identity.

Another reason for choosing Calabria is that it has not attracted the level of scholarly or popular interest that has been given to Sicily or Naples and I believe it is time to unpack it from the larger Southern discourse. I will situate this part of my thesis within a postcolonial theoretical framework departing from Edward Said’s notion of imaginative geography as expounded in his seminal work Orientalism.6 In her essay ‘Nothing like the real thing: (post) colonialism and travelling’, Janine Little quotes Peter Hulme ‘who argues for “more analyses of the different forms of imperialism and colonialism,” as well as “of different local situations.”’7 Calabria was colonised continually from ancient times to Unification, when, it has been argued (not unconvincingly), the north of Italy made a colony of the South.

In the introduction to his work, Darkest Italy, John Dickie describes an orientalist view of southern Italy, ‘a place of illiteracy, superstition, and magic; of corruption, brigandage, and cannibalism; of pastoral beauty and tranquillity admixed with dirt and disease; a cradle of Italian and European civilization that is vaguely, dangerously, alluringly African or Oriental.’8 Edward Said identifies a Western inclination to create, in representations of the East, a story of despotism, sensuality, backwardness and barbarity which is not dissimilar to representations of the southern regions of Italy. But Dickie is not entirely convinced of Said’s

6 Edward Said, Orientalism, Penguin, London, 1985. 7 Janine Little, ‘Nothing like the real thing: (post) colonialism and travelling,’ Hecate, vol. 24, no.2, 1998, p. 78. 8 John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860 – 1900, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1999, p. 1.

Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

4 discourse of orientalism, identifying in Said’s theory, ‘a central weakness’ which is ‘that it relates to cognitive rather than noetic processes.’9 He also notes that Said ‘fails to analyze the difficult construction of the position of the western observer, or of ideas of the West, in the process of representing the Orient … the Orientalists “essentialized” the Orient is itself exposed as an argument dependent on an “essentialized” portrayal of the West.’10 The situation is far more complex. Judging by a plethora of Calabrian websites today, for many people of the Calabrian region, works by the travellers to Calabria were sometimes (and continue to be) the only source of information for understanding large parts of their own history, particularly in terms of images. I agree with Dickie that while Said charges the entire tradition of European and American Oriental studies with the sins of reductionism and caricature, he commits precisely the same mistake.

Nonetheless Said’s work illustrates how the people of the East have consistently been portrayed as a non-individuated mass, driven by instinctive emotions like lust, terror, or fury rather than by rational thought. The “backwardness” of their societies is directly related to the 11 nature of the people themselves, because they are Asiatics or blacks or Orientals. Or terroni - it is remarkable how southern Italians have been similarly popularly portrayed. I propose that by using Said’s theory of imaginative geography, the imaginative boundaries of an “other Europe”, a European “Southernism”12, as described by Roberto M Dainotto, can be explored relating to, in this case, Calabria, a part of Europe that does not fit within Said’s notion of Eurocentrism.

The major part of this project will involve the examination of the works of British travel writers focusing on the period from 1777 to the early part of the twentieth century - a period when Calabria was a remote and barely accessible corner of Europe. It is with these early travellers, and the few who followed them before the region was opened up by road to the rest of Italy and therefore to Europe, that ideas about Calabria – ideas that had germinated in Italy itself - were disseminated to a wider English-speaking world. These are ideas that are

9 Dickie, Darkest Italy, p.94. 10 Dickie, Darkest Italy, p.153. 11 In his article ‘Terroni di mezzo: Dangerous physiognomies,’ in Grace Russo Bullaro (ed), From Terrone to Extracomunitario: New Manifestations of Racism in Contemporary Italian Cinema, Troubador, Kibworth, Leicester, 2010, p. 180, Gregory Pell defines terrone as an ‘agrarian rube, synonymous with a subaltern human being. Pell places its emergence in the 1950s. ‘The term,’ he writes, ‘implies backwardness and primitiveness…it alludes to a notion of the South being a third-world culture, as compared to the first-world industrial society of northern Italy,’ pp. 179-180. 12 Roberto M Dainotto, ‘A South with a view: Europe and its Other,’ Neplantla: Views From the South, vol. 1, no. 2, 2000, p. 379.

Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

5 familiar to me because they persist to this day. Basing my analysis on the accounts of these travellers, I will attempt to separate representations of Calabria from those of an amorphous South. Is there anything in these travellers’ tales that attests to a differentiated South or do they also ultimately only serve to reinforce a “Southernist” discourse?

Any investigation of developing ideas of southern Italian, particularly Calabrian, characteristics in popular British literature cannot be undertaken without a concurrent review of the construction of English and British identity. Particularly an English and Scottish identity in opposition to both the emerging British identity and to a Calabrian one such as it is revealed by the travellers and how it relates to the identity of the traveller. In other words, how identifying as British or as English, Scottish, etc, and how the national traits claimed for the various British identities can be heightened or at least mediated by the experience of travel in a foreign land.

The notion of eccentricity, for example, refers to an attribute accorded to most of the travellers in this study, and can serve to promote an individualistic, liberal view of the Englishman as opposed to the undifferentiated mass of the Calabrian peasantry. At the very least travellers to Calabria were all considered eccentric in their choice of travel destination. Indeed, this sense of travelling to an outlandish space is so much a part of the experience that the later travellers always refer to those who had gone before, giving the impression of some kind of esoteric travel club. There seems to be, in many cases, more discussion on the journeys and observations of earlier travellers to Calabria than there is any original observation of their own. This tendency co-opts the reader into a vicarious Calabrian travel “circle” wherein one begins to know more about the British characters who went there than about Calabria itself.

A study by Marjorie Morgan examines the construction of national identity through travel in Victorian England.13 Morgan argues that ‘middle-class men and women exhibited a flexible repertoire of national identities rather than a single one as marked on their passports.’14 Morgan’s work provides a detailed and compelling examination of the implications of travel in the discourse of national identity. The point being that British travellers reinvented their own national identities through travel while still holding (and often

13 Marjorie Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain, Palgrave, London, 2001. Morgan’s first chapter, ‘The meaning and mechanics of travel in the Victorian age’ is particularly useful for any study of travellers to Calabria – a region known for its difficulty of access. 14 Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain, p. 217.

Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

6 reinforcing) stereotypical notions of continentals. Travel became a medium through which the traveller could reflect on both his/her own culture and that of the “foreign”, consolidating the former and accentuating stereotypes of the latter. Tourism scholar, Professor John Urry also notes ‘how travel was expected to play a key role in the cognitive and perceptual education of the English upper class.’15

The study of British identity and its relation to the various identities of the United Kingdom is one that has engaged many historians in recent years. These include Linda Colley whose seminal work Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-183716 posits a British Protestant national identity which was forged in contrast to Catholic France and the long wars of the 18th century. Krishan Kumar, the author of The Making of English National Identity17 sees the problem of identifying the English identity as not so much one of defining an inventory of self-conceived differences, but of ‘examining how much any (changing) notion of Englishness depends on reactions to, and contrasts with, the strong identities of the other nations in the British Isles. For while the Scottish, Welsh and Irish have had, for a long time, a 18 formidable literature of nationalism, Kumar contends, the English strangely have not.’

Some commentators, including archaeologist David Miles, have argued that English national identity is inward looking and is attached to local place and characteristics like a sense of fair play, individual freedom and honesty. Miles notes that the Census of 1871 demonstrates that, despite urbanisation and industrialisation, almost half of the English and Welsh population lived in the countryside, and that even with those who lived in cities or towns, most of them migrated from the immediate hinterland.19 British identity, on the contrary, is regarded as outward looking and relates to the growth of empire and the creation of the Other. However, it is viewed and constructed, national identity is contingent and relational and strong identification with local and regional identities existed in Britain just as they did on the Italian peninsula. During the period covered by this thesis, the peoples of the British Isles were engaged in a project of empire and while their national identities may have remained intact, a British identity which was tied to empire developed. At the same time, the development in Italy of a nation-building project driven by the liberal elites sought to knit

15 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: SAGE Publications, 2011, p.4. 16 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2012. 17 Kumar Krishan, The Making of English National Identity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003. 18 Bernard Crick, The friendly face of nationalism, The Guardian, 27 April 2003, , accessed 21 May 2014. 19 David Miles, The Tribes of Britain: Who Are We? And Where Do We Come From? London, Phoenix, 2006, p. 432.

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7 together disparate regional, indeed local, identities into a cohesive national one. It is within this context of competing identities that I will situate the examination of the creation of an Italian South and of Calabria in particular.

There were few travellers to the Italies south of Naples until well into the twentieth century, and not many of these produced accounts of their journeys. This study will examine accounts of travellers which are readily available and of these there are a series which form the basis of what I have described above as a Calabrian travel “circle” – a chain of travellers who progressively refer to the ones who went before them. They are also the travellers most quoted by modern commentators and by Italians themselves. These include Henry Swinburne in 1777-1780; Craufurd Tait Ramage in 1828; Edward Lear in 1847; George Gissing in 1897; and Norman Douglas in 1907. I will also be examining the work of Richard Keppel Craven in 1821; Arthur Strutt who in 1842 undertook a “pedestrian” tour of the region and describes his attack by brigands, Augustus Hare who went through Calabria in 1882 on his way to Sicily and other, more recent travellers, with regard, in particular, to their reference to the earlier travellers and their reliance on the same notions of Calabria disseminated by these earlier visitors. The exception is Emily Lowe who travelled to the south in 1858 and wrote an “anonymous” narrative which, perhaps because of its anonymity or because the title clearly identifies the writer as a woman, is not referred to at all by subsequent travellers to Calabria.

The context in which these men (and woman) travelled is somewhere between the ritualistic opulence of the Grand Tour – vestiges of which remained, and indeed still remain – and the mundane circumscriptions of the Cook’s Tour, which was the prototypical package tour, representing the beginning of large-scale travel by the British middle classes. In 1855 Thomas Cook, a zealot Baptist teetotaller, offered a trip from Leicester to Calais for the very moderate sum of thirty-one shillings after he had already established a thriving mass tourism business within England. In the following year, he advertised a ‘grand circular tour of the Continent’. By the late 1860s, Cook & Son had achieved a national reputation as a pioneer in travel. Apparently, Thomas Cook himself boasted of having arranged travel for two million people.20 According to historian Richard Mullen, numbers increased rapidly, going from about 10,000 annually mid-century to over one million in the years before the First World War. Families and women began travelling in growing numbers with some women venturing abroad on their own as “unprotected females”. Mullen asserts that the Cook tours allowed

20 F Robert Hunter, ‘Tourism and empire: The Thomas Cook &Son enterprise on the Nile, 1868-1914, Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 40, no. 5, 2004, p. 31.

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8 people with less money, including the lower-middle classes and some working people to take package holidays. He notes that ‘by the 1880s a group of east end art students could have a 17-day tour to Italy for about [pounds sterling] 12 each while a weekend in Boulogne could 21 cost under [pounds sterling].’

Although mass tourism did not meet with universal approval, James Laver assures us that ‘the average middle-class Englishman was…in little danger of being corrupted by Continental habits; indeed he intended to return from his “Cook’s Tour” more insular than ever and firmly convinced that all Frenchmen were immoral and all Italians lacking in hygiene.’22 The travellers in this study were not interested in the itineraries of the Grand Tour or the Cook’s tour. A few of these travellers, two of whom toured the region unaccompanied for the greater part of their journeys, a third making a similar tour accompanied by one single companion, could even be seen as the precursors to modern backpackers since adventure and discovery, rather than comfort and ease of travel, were their chief preoccupations. Like many adventure travellers of today, these individuals demonstrated a similar desire to discover places that remain for the most part uncovered, that is, not fully explored or in a kind of pre- modern state. This desire to have an “authentic” travel experience involves a movement from the developed world to an archaic space and reinforces the sense of identity of the traveller as belonging to the progressive, modern world which the travellers often romantically decry as having lost authenticity.

Nonetheless, the project of uncovering Calabria for a British market is very real to the travellers and the kinds of accounts they produced were second only to fiction in popularity. One modern-day travel writer asserts that ‘We read travel books in order to be given a better sense of what is strange in the world’.23 Peter Quennell, in his introduction to Edward Lear’s Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria and the Kingdom of Naples, declares that Calabria ‘was then - indeed it is still - one of Europe’s strangest corners.’24 It was precisely because of its “strangeness” that the British travellers were attracted to Calabria. A Geographical Magazine article of 1961 makes the point:

21 Mullen, Richard, ‘The British invention of modern tourism,’ Contemporary Review, vol. 291, no. 1695, 2009, p. 468, , accessed 26 February 2014. 22 James Laver, Manners and Morals in the Age of Optimism: 1848-1914, Harper & Rowe, New York, 1966, p. 171. 23 Noel Malcolm, ‘The lost art of travel writing,’ Philip Marsden-Smedley & Jeffrey Klinke (eds.), Views from Abroad: The Spectator Book of Travel Writing, Grafton, London, 1988, p. 39. 24 Lear, Edward Lear in Southern Italy, p. 9.

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Journeying through Calabria is not the ideal holiday, as we find when reading Edward Lear's Journals or Gissing and Norman Douglas. Its harshness, which promises yet even more beauty beyond, attracts the Englishman; he wants to prise open this oyster, however laborious it may be, and experience both the hostility and the hospitality of a remote country at first hand. They continually complained 25 about Calabria, yet, as continually, they returned to it.

The notion of the “difficulty” of travel in Calabria is one that the writers whose works are examined in this thesis themselves refer to often. The idea that English travellers would be attracted to a place that could be hostile and laborious, a place they complained about but continued to visit, indicates something about the author’s construction of the English. To endure harshness in the quest for the discovery of “yet more beauty”, seems to indicate a strength of character, the legendary stoicism and fortitude of the British, particularly the English, people. It is also interesting to note that in 1961, Calabria was still being referred to as a “remote country”. This sense of remoteness is also one that the travellers refer to and perhaps they do not mean remoteness in terms of distance but in relation to difficulty of access and distance from the modern world that they are travelling from. These ideas of a hostile, difficult and remote region serve to set up a contrast with the modern, comfortable, and convenient societies of the British homelands.

Looking at the British travellers who passed through Calabria in the nineteenth century, it is clear that they were not aware of their points of view as anything other than the norm. Craufurd Tait Ramage, for example, may have celebrated his own “eccentricity”, Edward Lear may have seen himself as an unattractive object of fun and George Gissing may have attributed to himself the highly romantic self-image of an outsider but all three were very sure of their position in the world as the representatives of ‘civilisation’. As modern travel writer Jonathan Raban puts it:

Four hundred years of imperial experience had given the travelling Englishman a very clear idea of where he stood in the world – bang at the moral centre. Foreigners, by definition, were funny untrustworthy and childlike…Snobbishly alert to the small nuances of social behaviour, quick to spot ‘anomalous’ details which form the basic grist of travel writing, the Englishman was, in more senses 26 than one, a privileged observer.

25 Michael Swan, ‘Magna Graecia: The Calabrian scene,’ The Geographical Magazine, vol. 23, 1961, p. 476. 26 Jonathan Raban, For Love or Money: Writing Reading Travelling 1968-1987, Pan, London, 1988, pp. 254-5.

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Why travel literature? Why travel literature? Firstly, because I am interested in how ideas about people and place are disseminated at a popular level. Since the beginning of mass popular publishing, more and more ideas have been disseminated by these kinds of popular texts: magazine articles, popular literature and travel books. Travel writing is a type of popular literature that is ostensibly based on fact, although it often seems to have more in common with literature than ethnography or history, which probably makes it more accessible to a wider audience.

A lot of work has been done linking travel literature to the development of the novel. Kai Mikkonen reminds us that ‘in narrative and literary studies, it is a kind of commonplace to suggest, with Michel de Certeau, that “every story is a travel story—a spatial practice.”’27 This argument says that all writing is travel writing, even if the journey is a psychological one. Certainly, travel writing informed the genre of the gothic novel with its sublime reading of the foreign landscape and its exoticisation of the people of the remote corners of Europe. Novels like The Castle of Otranto, attributed as the first gothic novel and Dracula, a later example, drew on prevailing ideas about the European south and east (the former partly set in Southern Italy and the latter in Eastern Europe). These were ideas that had been disseminated to a large degree by travellers and in turn, these novels reinforced stereotypes of the foreign.

The kind of literary travel book that evolved and proliferated from the eighteenth century onwards fluctuates between “facts” and opinion and is probably more akin to memoir than anything else. Indeed, travel literature collapses the difference between fiction and non- fiction. While - for the greater part - still employing the same literary devices, travel writers today may be more openly aware of this artifice. As noted travel writer, Jonathan Raban, admits with regards to his own craft:

It accommodates the private diary, the essay, the short story, the prose poem, the rough note and polished table talk with indiscriminate hospitality. It freely mixes narrative and discursive writing. Much of its ‘factual’ material…is there to authenticate what is really fiction; while its wildest fictions have the status of 28 possible facts.

However, its position as an “eyewitness” account means that the travel book has an aura of authenticity, although it is generally recognised that the travel narrative is less about place

27 Kai Mikkonen, ‘The “narrative is travel” metaphor: Between spatial sequence and open consequence,’ NARRATIVE, vol. 15, no. 3, 2007, p. 287. 28 Raban, For love or money, pp. 253-254.

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11 than a personal response to place. The notion of an “eyewitness” account also incorporates the idea of a privileged “gaze” because the eyewitness in question is linked to the evaluating and systemising British traveller viewing, in contrast to the upper and middle-class “ordered” landscape and social mores of the British, what is often the “chaotic” nature of the land and people observed. This traveller’s gaze reveals all that is different and strange and in contrast to the “normal” British modality. It is also clear that readers responded to these travel memoirs because, to some extent, travel literature placed them in the position of privileged regard. For whatever reason, however, it is well documented that there has been a large market for these accounts from the very beginning of the genre of the literary travel book.

In his article on British publishing in the eighteenth century, John Feather refers to the rise of the popularity of the travel genre. 29 This is corroborated by Giovanna Summerfield and Lisa Downward who note that, ‘Travel narratives became one of the most popular and respected European literary genres during the eighteenth century … The sheer number of books published about foreign travel far surpassed those of previous centuries, outselling all other published works in England with the exception of the novel.’30 Margaret Hunt quotes circulating library collections to demonstrate the growth of travel books as a proportion of books in collections, noting that, ‘in the 1770s, because of the chance survival of library borrowing statistics from the town of Bristol for the years 1773-84, we can describe reading tastes with some precision. Among middling Bristol readers, “History, Antiquities and Geography” (the bulk of the latter being travel) stood far ahead of any other category in popularity: 6,121 people borrowed 283 titles in this category during this eleven-year period. “Belles Lettres” was a distant second with 3,313 borrowings of 238 titles, and theology and ecclesiastical history a dismal fifth, with only 606 borrowings of 82 titles. Three out of the ten most borrowed books, including the most popular book of all, were travel or exploration books.’31 By the late 1700s, travel books enjoyed a rapid rise in popularity as demonstrated by Hunt who also noted that:

The form of the travel narrative in fact deliberately collapsed the difference between writer and reader (often in ways that paralleled the contemporary novel), and it did so during a period when roads were improving, canals and coach roads

29 John Feather, ‘British publishing in the eighteenth century: A preliminary subject analysis,’ Library, vol. s6- VIII, no. 1, 1986, pp. 32-46. 30 Giovanna Summerfield and Lisa Downward, New Perspectives on the European Bildungsroman, Continuum International, London, 2012, p. 81. 31 Margaret Hunt, ‘Racism, imperialism, and the traveler's gaze in eighteenth-century England,’ The Journal of British Studies, vol. 32, no. 4, 1993, p. 336.

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were improving in number, and more and more English people were for the first time taking up real as opposed to vicarious travelling both for business and out of 32 simple curiosity.

A recent work by Giovanna Ceserani refers to the rise of interest in the late eighteenth century in Greek southern Italy in both travel accounts and in narrative historiography. Ceserani notes that it is not surprising that these two genres should influence each other ‘in an age when travel across space became entwined with movement back in time.’ She goes on to note that, both genres were ‘reviewed in the same sections of contemporary magazines’, both drew on the same literary modes and both enjoyed equal success with the reading public of the time. 33 A large amount of historical detail went into many of the travelogues of the period, including that of Henry Swinburne in the late 1770s in which he created an account that clearly had features of both genres. Swinburne provided the historical narrative which gave authority to his account within the context of his personal perspective.34 I will return to the subject of Swinburne’s travel account in Chapter Three of this work.

The blending of factual information with literary content could be described as a characteristic of eighteenth-century travel narratives. In order to gain critical praise a travel account needed to record facts about the culture and production of the lands travelled through but to achieve popular success something more was required. In his account of travels through Sicily in 1770 Patrick Brydone provided readers with something more than a dry factual narrative - in essence, literary flair.35 Brydone’s A Tour Through Sicily and Malta was the first popular travel account of Sicily in the English language and although it is little known today it achieved considerable success after its release both in Europe and in North America. It was not only generally favourably reviewed, but it was popular with the reading public, so much so that it went through seven or eight editions in England during Brydone’s lifetime (over 20 editions overall), and was also translated into French and German. In 1773, it was serialised in the Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal, and in Italy, nine years after it was first in print, Count Michel Jean Borch published a supplement to Brydone’s Journal. Brydone’s

32 Hunt, ‘Racism, imperialism, and the traveler’s gaze,’ p. 338. Hunt goes on to explain that a corollary of all this travel and reading of travel literature was that significant numbers of ordinary people began to write up journals of their own travels and that many of these lie, unread, in eighteenth-century archives. 33 Giovanna Ceserani, Italy’s Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012, p. 98. 34 Henry Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies in the Years 1777, 1778, 1779, and 1780, Volume I, J Nichols for T Cadell and P Elmsly, London, 1783. 35 Patrick Brydone, A Tour Through Sicily and Malta: In a Series of Letters to William Beckford, Esq. of Somerly in Suffolk, W Strahan and T Cadell, London, 1773, , accessed 21 July 2013.

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13 work was popular for its descriptions, often referred to as “lively” and “elegant” in style. The following is a typical example of review of Brydone’s work:

His style is natural and easy, his language free and flowing (though not always correct), and his manner cheerful and lively; yet properly varied to suit the several subjects, whether gay or serious, as they occur in the course of the traveller’s adventures. Of this happy cast are the travels of Captain Brydone; whose letters prove him at once the gentleman, the scholar, and the man of science; a rational 36 observer, a philosophical enquirer, and a polite and pleasing companion.

The statement above describing Brydone’s work not as always being correct is one that will be touched on in the chapter on Swinburne where the idea of the authenticity of the travel narrative will be examined in the context of Enlightenment attitudes. Indeed, as it evolved from pilgrim and exploration narratives to the more subjective style which began with the early modern period, travel literature was regarded less and less as a serious genre.

This lack of credibility allowed it to be increasingly considered a genre which was acceptable as a vehicle for women writers who were generally conceived as less scientific and rigorous in their work. In her review of two recent books on the genre of travel, Jeanne Dubino notes Barbara Korte’s idea that subsequent to the perceived lack of credibility or consequence of travel writing, ‘the travelogue as a genre was open to women writers. However, unlike their male counterparts, middle-class women, living in an era that assigned them the role of the angel in the house, had to defend their travels. Thus, the genre of women's travel writing tended to contain self-deprecating and self-effacing features, including apologies for what women travelers claim to be the amateurish nature of their work and justifications for why they traveled at all.’37 They adopted conventions which allowed them to navigate, in Kristi Seigel’s words, the ‘decorum of indecorum,’38 including apologies for the trivial nature of their work, referring to the more “scientific” writings of male travellers or deferring to their husbands, thereby reassuring readers that these women travel writers were not attempting to compete with men.

36 ‘A Tour through Sicily and Malta. In a Series of Letters to William Beckford, Esq; of Somerly, in Suffolk; from Patrick Brydone, F.R.S. Two Vols, Cadell,’ 1773, The Monthly Ledger or, Literary Repository, issue 1, January 1773, p. 16, , accessed 12 February 2015. 37 Jeanne Dubino, ‘Literary criticism goes global: postcolonial approaches to English modernism and English travel writing,’ MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 48, no. 1, 2002, pp.224. 38 Kristi Seigel (ed.), Gender, Genre & Identity in Women’s Travel Writing, Peter Lang, New York, 2004, p. 3.

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Constrained by the accepted social boundaries of the times, especially during the Georgian period, women travellers found other ways to blur the boundaries and remain within the constrictions of the gender roles of the times. Elizabeth Zold, Assistant Professor of English at Winona State University and eighteenth-century travelogue researcher, proposes that women travellers, including Lady Montagu and Lady Craven39, maintained an illusion of a “private audience” through the use of private letters to record their journeys. This allowed them ‘to remain within the proper societal bounds while traveling and writing.’ She proposes that the genre of the letter became an “emblem of the private” in the early part of the eighteenth century, while at the same time ‘keeping its actual function as an agent of the 40 public exchange of knowledge.’

Travel accounts by both men and women provided, especially in their early forms, factual, empirical, scientific information about the world. In the period of the Cook’s tour and popular mass travel, accounts of travel journeys became the literature of leisure, of aesthetic appreciation of new landscapes and continued to provide a point of comparison between “us” and “them”. Travel accounts were vehicles for constructions of the world over a significant period from the earliest pilgrimages and voyages of discovery to early modernity and the foregrounding of the subject. It is a genre that, as it developed, became less and less an attempt at an encyclopaedic dissertation of place and became more and more a reflection of the relationship of the self to the world. The reader is as much a part of this dynamic as is the author, participating vicariously as the subject. Jeanne Dubino expounds:

Reading accounts of travel, then, lets us participate in acts of (inter)cultural perception and cultural construction, in processes of understanding and misunderstanding. The form of the “omnium-gatherum”, a flexible mode that includes a multiplicity of forms such as the essay, letter, reportage, sketch, anecdote, treatise among others, gives a wide scope to the ways in which a narrating subject can translate experiences with the world, with the other. Clearly, 41 then, travel writing in any age can accommodate many shapes.

The “omnium-gatherum” also includes, within the travel account itself, pieces of information taken from previous travellers’ accounts, guidebooks, history and geographical books as well as personal reactions and constructions. The travel narrative thus becomes an

39 Lady Craven was the mother of Richard Keppel Craven who published in 1821 A Tour through the Southern Provinces of the Kingdom of Naples and in 1838 Excursions in the Abruzzi and Northern Provinces of Naples. 40 Elizabeth Zold, ‘Virtual travel in second life: Understanding eighteenth-century travelogues through experiential learning,’ Pedagogy, vol. 14, issue 2, Spring 2014, p. 235. 41 Dubino, ‘Literary criticism goes global,’ p. 222.

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15 opaque pastiche of opinion, fact and imagination, at the same time “informing” readers about a place or space they may never themselves experience and who “take the writer’s word for it”. But travel narratives do not only reveal subjective constructions of the places travelled through, they also reveal something about those who wrote them and give clues about their own spaces – the spaces they travelled from as well as the spaces they travelled to - in a proliferation of points of view.

The popularity of travel literature and its position between fiction and non-fiction, has resulted in it having a strong hold on the cultural imaginary and becoming a major source and disseminator of representations of different people and places, at least at the popular level. The travel book both presents data and history and social customs and dramatises the connection between the traveller and the Other in a way that is easily accessible and engaging. Travellers themselves also represent their places of origin to the peoples living in the destination places, and this was especially significant where these were places cut off from the mainstream. In travel accounts, the interaction between traveller and “native” and the intersection of two worlds, especially where significantly culturally different, is part of the appeal. In a sense, travellers are carriers of culture, bringing the world of the Other back home and taking their home out to the world beyond.

Italy had been a destination of choice for secular British travellers since the onset of leisure travel in the seventeenth century. By the time of its heyday in the eighteenth century, what was described as the Grand Tour had been evolving for at least a century. Sir Philip Sidney made such a journey as early as 1572, although it was Richard Lassels who made the first traceable reference to the Grand Tour in his book, An Italian Voyage, or a Compleat Journey Through Italy, published in 1679.42 Contrary to the portrayal of travel as an enterprise solely for the upper classes, the kinds of travellers and their reasons for going on the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century were various and authors like Trease remind us that the Tour was undertaken by men from the middle class as well as the aristocracy, ‘the eccentric individualist and the conforming trend-follower, the scholar, the satyr, the snob. To some it was a serious preparation for a career, to others a pleasure jaunt, to others again a 43 boring but obligatory finish to a gentleman’s upbringing.’

42 Lassels wrote ‘No man understands Livy and Caesar like him who hath made exactly the Grand Tour of France and the Giro of Italy,’ cited in Geoffery Trease, The Grand Tour, Heinemann, London, 1967, p. 1. 43 Trease, The Grand Tour, p. 3.

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In his book, The Tourist Gaze, John Urry describes how, by the end of the seventeenth century, the Grand Tour had become firmly established for the sons of the aristocracy and gentry, and by the late eighteenth century for the sons of the professional middle class. Urry states that over this period, between 1600 and 1800, travel accounts shifted from an emphasis on touring as an opportunity for informative discourse, to travel as eyewitness observation. New ways of seeing and the development of the “tourist gaze” were aided and assisted by the growth of guidebooks which promoted the visualisation of the travel experience. Urry notes that ‘the character of the tour itself shifted, from the earlier “classical Grand Tour” based on the emotionally neutral observation and recording of galleries, museums and high cultural artifacts, to the nineteenth-century “romantic Grand Tour” which saw the emergence of “scenic tourism” and a much more private and passionate experience of beauty and the 44 sublime.’

The Grand Tour satisfied the desire for classical and Renaissance remains and while it may have been seen as a kind of “finishing school” for young men of the upper classes, it was also another way of reinforcing the superiority of the British way of life. This superiority is underpinned by the concept of the gaze, as described by Urry based on the work of Foucault. The gaze illustrates a dynamic which involves the power to watch and judge by members of a group who can make statements about the objects of the gaze that are taken as truth by those outside the group who are the recipients of this “truth”. The travellers’ gaze was not only directed at scenery but at the inhabitants of the lands travelled through. Scenically, British tourists “saw” an idealised Arcadian past, traces of a glorious imperial history and natural features which they described as picturesque or sublime. The people they saw, by contrast, were not so inspiring, praiseworthy or noteworthy mainly for their perceived degradation. Italians were constructed as irrational and childlike, their customs and systems contrasted with the British social order which was thrown into relief as the natural, rational way of things. Very few British travellers of the times ever had much good to say of ‘foreigners’, however much they may have admired the landscape, art and antiquities of Italy.

Italian centres on the Grand Tour remained on the touring map because they provided classical antiquities, Renaissance and medieval architecture. Many foreign writers believed, moreover, that Italy's monumental past (especially that of Rome) represented the privileged historical source of their own individual nations and cultures. Joseph Luzzi points out that, ‘In

44 Urry, The Tourist Gaze, p.4.

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17 linking themselves to this storied Italian past, authors tended either to ignore or to dramatize the shortcomings of contemporary Italy, which emerged paradoxically in the Romantic age as the culturally impoverished antithesis of its own illustrious heritage.’45 It was this many layered, storied past that attracted the tourists to Italy and which kept them travelling along virtually the same routes over centuries.

John Towner provides a good analysis of Grand Tour itineraries and how little they changed over the period of the Classical and Romantic Grand Tours despite the changing emphasis of travellers. ‘In Italy,’ he informs us, ‘the pattern remained much as before, except that the circuit to Rome was generally via the picturesque medieval towns of central Italy, Including Arezzo and Perugia, rather than traveling along the Adriatic coast through Ancona and Loreto. The sites of classical antiquities and Renaissance treasures still dominated the pattern, but the tourists were more concerned with the picturesque aspects of the ruins and the 46 emotional effect of scenes on their own feelings.’

It can be argued therefore, that while the gaze of the Grand Tourist changed over the two periods, the Classical Grand Tour of the eighteenth century and Romantic Grand Tour after the defeat of Napoleon, the Italian route of both periods was almost without exception a clearly defined one. Eighteenth-century British Grand Tourists to Italy generally followed a conventional itinerary travelling from London, crossing the English Channel to Calais, and continuing across France, usually with a lengthy stop in Paris and continuing from there to Lyon. Most travellers crossed the Alps at the Mont Cenis Pass into Italy or went by sea from Marseille to Leghorn (Livorno). On the return to England, tourists often travelled to the Low Countries and through Germany, including visits to Berlin, Dresden and Vienna. It was not unusual for these European tours of this sort to last a year or more. The eighteenth-century itinerary remained popular well into the nineteenth century, when mass tourism in the form of the Cook’s Tour also stuck, by and large, to the well-known route of the Grand Tour.

But what about the multiplicity of identities the tourists encountered amongst the people of Italy? In the mid nineteenth century Italy was split into several parts. In the north, the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia was a constituent land of the Austrian Empire. It was created in 1815 by resolution of the Congress of Vienna in recognition of the Austrian House of

45 Joseph Luzzi, ‘Italy without Italians: Literary origins of a romantic myth,’ MLN: Modern Language Notes, vol. 117, no. 1, 1996, p. 50. 46 John Towner, ‘The Grand Tour: a key phase in the history of tourism,’ Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 12, 1985, p.314.

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Habsburg-Lorraine's rights to Lombardy and the former Republic of Venice after the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, proclaimed in 1805, had collapsed. It was finally dissolved in 1866 when its remaining territory fell to the Kingdom of Italy. To the west was the rival Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, consisting of the mainland territories of Piedmont, Nice, and Savoy, plus the island of Sardinia. The Kingdom was ruled by King Victor Emmanuel II (1849-1861) from the Savoy dynasty and the only ruler from a native Italian family. South of Lombardy were the duchies of Parma, Modena, and Tuscany. In the middle of Italy, along both coasts, were the Papal States ruled by the Pope. South of the Papal States was the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the state that united the southern part of the Italian peninsula with the island of Sicily between the mid-15th and the mid-19th centuries. United by the Normans in the 11th century, the two areas were divided in 1282 between the Angevin (French) dynasty on the mainland and the (Spanish) dynasty on the island, both of which claimed the title of king of Sicily. In 1443 Alfonso V of Aragon, on reuniting the two portions, took the title of rex Utriusque Siciliae (King of the Two Sicilies). This title was sometimes used during the Spanish and Bourbon rule of the two areas, from the 16th to the 19th century, becoming official in 1815, when the administration of both areas was combined, and Sicily lost its autonomy.

The many different powers which have occupied Italy over the centuries left physical, linguistic and cultural traces in the people of the various regions. For example, many customs in Sicily and Calabria are of Spanish origin and there are many Spanish words in the various Sicilian and Calabrian dialects. Italians also assimilated a number of people within their culture including Saracens, Albanians, French, Austrians, Greeks, as well as more ancient tribes including Latins and Etruscans. Clearly, the Italian peninsula had for a long time been a patchwork of dominions and peoples but eventually Italian difference became mired within the North/South dichotomy, as indeed, it has largely remained to the present.

Of the many travellers following the Grand Tour route, both in its classical or romantic manifestation, very few ventured on to the remoter, wilder corners of Europe, the southernmost parts of Italy, for instance. The regions south of Naples, Calabria included, were not part of the Grand Tour route. The cultural theorist Iain Chambers asserts that Naples was regarded as ‘the edge of southern Europe’ and as such ‘it has often provided a favourite site for examining the loose ends of European society, where civil society and the state apparently

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47 wither away.’

Travellers who did venture south of Naples, to Calabria in the toe of Italy for instance, were few and far between and took many precautions, treating the journey as if they were travelling to Africa or Arabia – often with a full complement of guards and attendants. The rare lone travellers often produced accounts of these journeys which document their observations from the point of view of amateur ethnologists or anthropologists – unique individuals documenting the peculiarities of little known cultures. Inherent in this attitude is the assumption of the superiority of the traveller.

There is clearly no ground of equivalence between the travellers – always in the position of the “insider” despite being outside their usual milieu – and those observed who remain “outside” normal understanding (the norm being the English upper or middle-class male) and whose lives require interpretation by the few intrepid souls who undertake the great task of explaining the world to their countrymen. An examination of the British travellers’ accounts reveals a construction of true-to-life notations of what is observably there; an unawareness of or unwillingness to admit to subjectivity.

It is important to note that these travel narratives, although largely based on diaries, letters, and first-hand notes, are also informed by the works of previous travellers and guide books. Furthermore, they are the result of very short stays, sometimes less than a few hours which resulted in desultory judgements and comments largely based on preconceptions and which owe much to similar comments of those who went before. For all their efforts, Calabria remained relatively unknown, little more than an exotic name well into the twentieth century.48 Today many blogs and travel websites, both within and outside of Italy, refer to these early narratives and I will be referring to some of these in the final chapter.

Lastly, I will argue that travel is not only about identity but also a context within which the insatiable desire for the products and artifacts of the Other can be exchanged and consumed. The travellers to Calabria in the period when it was one of the remotest corners of Europe brought back accounts and depictions which were highly marketable at a time when

47 Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity, Routledge, London, 1994, p. 104. 48 Perhaps even into the twenty-first century. At the website, VisitsItaly.com, Jesse Andrews describes Calabria as a place yet to be frequented by the English. She writes ‘of the 10 million or so English-speaking travellers who visit Italy every year, not many make it this far south. But Calabria is in the process of being “discovered” by the “inglese”, , accessed 12 April 2012.

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20 the British market for new pictures and new stories was peaking with the growth of popular publishing and the production of cheap prints. Many of these early travellers were driven not simply by a sense of adventure but also by an economic imperative. The Italy of the Grand Tour was a well-explored territory but the deep South of the country was fertile ground for new explorations. Without going too far afield these travellers could still bring back marketable stories and pictures of a remote and savage land. Edward Lear, for instance, was always looking for new landscapes, producing his highly successful drawings and paintings for sale back in England. George Gissing (an often impoverished but never well-to-do late Victorian novelist) went to Calabria, he stated, on the quest for the classical past. But, even before leaving on his trip, he also privately referred to his proposed book of the journey as possibly something that could earn him a good sum of money.

Why Calabria? By examining the texts of British travellers to Calabria, this project attempts to unravel the discourse of travel writing, the construction of the “Calabrian” as opposed to ideas of both “Italian-ness” and “European” and the consequences for Calabrians of these kinds of cultural imaginings and representations. Why have I chosen Calabria and not Naples, Abruzzi, Apulia (Puglia), Basilicata or the islands of Sicily and Sardinia for my focus? Firstly, because, as I have previously stated, I am the daughter of Calabrian parents who migrated to Australia in the post-war period. I was brought up on a steady diet of English stories and history and one of my pleasures has been to read the travel books of foreign commentators who have been to Southern Italy. One such, by Peter Nichols, in a book that I recently acquired, muses: ‘What, one constantly hears, has a Milanese in common with a Neapolitan? The answer is: a great deal more than they will ever admit.’49 This may well be so, but it nonetheless raises the vexed issues of representation and identity.

In an article published in 1948, Howard R Marraro demonstrates how knowledge of Italy in the America of the 1700s was principally gleaned from English sources, mostly the work of travel writers.50 He cites many examples which were published in American magazines including an article by Patrick Brydone, ‘whose Tour Through Sicily won for him membership in the Royal Sciences of London and Edinburgh and in the Society of Antiquaries [and who] was also impressed by certain peculiar social conditions in the

49 Peter Nichols, Italia, Italia, Macmillan, London, 1974, p. 21. 50 Howard R. Marraro, ‘Interpretations of Italy and the Italians in eighteenth century America,’ Italica, vol. 25, no. 1, 1948, pp. 59-81.

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21 southern part of Italy.’51 Marraro also makes reference to an account by Henry Swinburne (one of the travellers whose work I will be examining) of the Fata Morgana52.

It was from these travel narratives and magazine articles, focusing on themes of adultery, criminality, superstition and earthquakes that the new world took its cue – Calabria as a place that is Other: dangerous, non-white, Catholic, superstitious, enslaved and therefore having more in common with Africa than Europe - an atavistic space, in effect, of “primitive” Europeans. This sense of “uncovering” a primitive space is palpable in the travel narratives I will be examining and often seems to mirror a dark space in the travellers themselves – many of whom were (or felt they were) outsiders in their own lands. This alienation is evident in the writings of individuals like Edward Lear and George Gissing, both of whom will be examined further in this work, in flight from a sense of their own shortcomings and failure to fit comfortably into their own societies. Michael Mewshaw refers to Sigmund Freud in describing this kind of traveller:

...Sigmund Freud speculated that “a great part of the pleasure of travel lies in the fulfilment of these early wishes to escape the family and especially the father”. In that sense, travel may be viewed as a rebellious, even a subversive act, part of the process of self-actualization. I travel to define and assert my existential identity. I 53 travel. Therefore I am.

If not strictly an act of “rebellion”, choosing Calabria as a destination was at the very least unorthodox, for this was not a region automatically connected to the idea of “Italy”. It was a place apart, not quite “Europe” and not anywhere else either - a place of renegades, brigands and secret societies. It seems that the modern examination of travel south of Naples has been confined to another discourse altogether – that of the Southern Question / Mezzogiorno. But I believe that to leave out the accounts of British travellers to Calabria entirely and to conflate regions of southern Italy as if the South was one undifferentiated mass, is to be unwittingly complicit with a reading of Italy that is defined solely by its connection to the north and therefore to Europe.

As a place that was hard to access and to which few ventured, Calabria was not the subject of a proliferation of representations like Naples or Sicily. The usual British traveller

51 Marraro, ‘Interpretations of Italy,’ p. 64. 52 Marraro, ‘Interpretations of Italy,’ p. 78. 53 Michael Mewshaw, ‘Travel, travel writing, and the literature of travel,’ South Central Review, vol. 22, no. 2, 2005, pp. 2-3.

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22 to Italy might have found that his biggest problem was with the language, even if he/she had some knowledge of Italian since most of the dialects spoken in the cities on the circuit, although very close to classical Italian, did vary in pronunciation. Calabria was a different matter. All accounts of journeys through the region emphasise not only the difficulty of the language - for the dialects spoken here were significantly distinct from those of the north - but also the scarcity and poor quality of the food and the dereliction of the accommodation. Calabria, even up to the post-war period, was a remote and insular place where notions of forestieri (foreigners) began with the next village. The likelihood, therefore, of encountering the exotic and strange was very high. Accordingly, the travellers’ accounts were full of – what to them translated as – the bizarre. And there was definitely a market for the bizarre. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century there developed a burgeoning market for exotic images. Ellen Strain notes that ‘The sights of the world, converted into spectacle by artists and photographers, could be purchased by Europeans and Americans in the comfort of their own cities. Such purchasable images were ubiquitous.’54 Consequently, the descriptions and depictions of the Calabrian cities, towns and villages of these travellers have been subsumed into the official Calabrian histories of these cities, towns and villages.

Eurocentric universalism, as described by many postcolonial theorists, takes for granted the superiority of the West, while rendering inferior that which is not. The Italian South – the deep South in particular - is too close to this Other identity to be accepted as part of “civilised” Europe. As late as 1968, travel writer Leslie Gardiner observed:

And still you cannot escape the sensation, when you venture towards Calabria, of straying into lost territory, of crossing an invisible frontier into a land which 55 breathes the perfumes of Arabia, or at least a bouquet d’Afrique.

The published accounts of those British who ventured to Calabria give some clues to the lines of intersection – England / Britain, Britain / Italy, North / South, Northern Italy / Southern Italy, Italy / Calabria, Calabria / Mezzogiorno, Calabria / Africa, whiteness / blackness.

Lines of intersection The travellers in this study published their journals during a period of great change for Britain and also for the various states and kingdoms of Italy. This study begins just before the loss of

54 Ellen Strain, ‘Exotic bodies, distant landscapes: touristic viewing and popularized anthropology in the nineteenth century,’ Wide Angle, vol. 18, no. 2, 1996, p. 76. 55 Leslie Gardiner, South to Calabria, William Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1968, p. 2.

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23 the American colonies in 1783, encompasses the Napoleonic wars and occupation of Italy, the 1848 revolutions, the struggle towards unification and beyond. England continued to amass colonies and redefine itself as part/the heart of Great Britain, the inheritor of the glorious Roman tradition of empire. As Linda Colley, who has written extensively on British national identities, points out:

But what most enabled Great Britain to emerge as an artificial nation, and to be super-imposed onto older alignments and loyalties, was a series of massive wars between 1689 and 1815 that allowed its diverse inhabitants to focus on what they had in common, rather than on what divided them, and that forged an overseas empire from which all parts of Britain could secure real as well as psychic 56 profits.

Colley contends that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britons defined themselves in terms of their common Protestantism constructed in contrast to the Catholicism of continental Europe. Indeed, the Catholicism of the Calabrians was an issue for many of the travellers featured in this study. For Swinburne, himself a Catholic, the nature of Catholicism encountered in the south of Italy caused him to retreat into his very English rationality, decrying the paganistic version of Catholicism that he witnessed on his journey. For others, the notion of the “superstitious” nature of belief in Calabria reinforced a sense of northern European judgement and reason. In her new introductory essay to the revised edition of Britons: Forging the nation 1707 – 1837, Colley explains that she seeks to demonstrate in Britons how elements including ‘majority Protestantism, fear and self-definition in the face of the Catholic “Other” [but by no means restricted to these] … helped to forge an over-arching British identity that co-existed with, and sometimes appeared more important than the

57 particularities of being English, Welsh or Scottish (or Cornish, or Yorkshire or Orcadian).’

For the people of Calabria, the inverse may be said to be true, and there is little evidence that they defined themselves as Italian even as an over-arching concept. What was their perception of what it meant to be “Italian”, “Calabrian” or indeed “European”? Italy was, and appears to remain, a land and people defined enduringly by campanilismo (literally, “within the sound of the church bell tower”) indicating a communal loyalty and identification and little interest in a regional let alone a national identity except in exceptional circumstances. This Italian fragmentation into a number of local realities in which Italians identify

56 Linda Colley, ‘Britishness and Otherness: An argument,’ The Journal of British Studies, vol. 31, no. 4, 1992, pp. 316. 57 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707 – 1837, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2012, p. xxvi.

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24 themselves was the result of a long history of diverse rule until the relatively recent unification. Thus, many of the pre-unification local jealousies, grievances and feuds remained an active part of contemporary Italian life. Italian borders were, and seem to remain, not only between Italy and other European states but were, and in many cases remain, not only between Italy and other European states but between Italian regions and sometimes between, or even within, parts of Italian towns and their people.

Unification was perceived by many in the South as a mere change of rulers, and many scholars have noted the brigandage and insurrection that followed. For many people in the South, the new Italian government was probably as unpopular as that of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had been. Jonathan Dunnage, lecturer in the Italian Department (School of European Languages) at the University of Wales, Swansea, notes that in 1861 there were only an estimated 2.5 to 10 percent of the population who understood and were able to use standard Italian, speaking only their local dialects. He observes that the peasant peoples of Italy had little sense of national consciousness and were not greatly occupied by the Risorgimento. The loyalties of the common people often varied, Dunnage reports, ‘according to region or province and on occasion veered between support for progressive and reactionary forces, particularly in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies .... Calabria, for example, was the centre of anti-Bourbon risings in 1848 but following unification gave strong support to counter- 58 revolutionary brigandage.’

This strong local identification and lack of national feeling has had ramifications up to the present time. Evidence of a kind of “othering” existing between the different regions of the south of Italy is interesting because it provides a hint of the popular barriers to the creation of a national identity which became the project of the nineteenth century. Campanilismo alone does not account for this apparent desire for some regions of the south to disassociate themselves from other places in the south and to associate themselves with the dominant culture. As long as there is somewhere further south to point to, people from these regions serve to maintain tensions between southern regions, tensions that work to dissipate resistance to the dominant stereotypes of the deep south. In other words, southern Italians themselves perpetuate the idea that the further south you go, the more base, uncivilised and untrustworthy the people. And when there is nowhere further south? Today the southern Italian peasant has

58 Jonathan Dunnage, Twentieth-Century Italy: A Social History, Routledge, London, 2002, p. 4. Dunnage refers to the work of Adrian Lyttelton, ‘Landlords, peasants and the limits of Liberalism,’ John A Davis (ed.), Gramsci and Italy’s Passive Revolution, Croom Helm, London, 1979, pp. 123.

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25 been joined in the northern Italian imagination by the, often Muslim, African refugee. These refugees, who arrive from North Africa by boat, provide the new agricultural labour force for southern Italy and are also easy fodder for the platform of the Lega Nord, a far-right anti- South secessionist party which also emphasises the threat of immigration to the northern Italian identity.

In his much-quoted work, Mythologies, the French philosopher Roland Barthes asserts that ‘myth transforms history into nature.’59 Throughout its modern history, the South has remained poverty and crime ridden. Many analysts have suggested causes, both geographical and historical for this situation, but it is in the reductionist character of the national myth to ignore all of these and to assert that the South is in such a condition because Southerners are by nature “inferior”. They are therefore not “real Italians”. From the Northern Italian perspective, the claim of being “real Italians” is a way of claiming an identity that is European rather than Mediterranean. But is Europe itself an uncontested site? What is Europe? In a recent article asking if Britain is European, Timothy Garton Ash60 describes an archaic understanding of Europe as white and Christian, and this construction would certainly apply to the period covered by this study. Within this perception, the far south of the Italian peninsula is situated between Africa and Europe and by extension between the poles of black and white, Christian and heathen.

This may well be part of the answer to the kind of “border panic” which is engendered in the North by characteristics of the South which seem to have more in common with Africa or the Levant than Europe. Many theorists including Joseph Luzzi61 have demonstrated how nineteenth-century northern European authors constructed the whole of the Italian peninsula as the South - an irrational, more backward continental neighbour in opposition to their own rational progressive northern nations. All the more reason for northern Italians to “cringe” at their “primitive” southern citizens and to try to distance themselves from a Mediterranean identity by creating and maintaining a distinction between the North and South of Italy. The discourse of the Southern Question which began with the project of nation building in the 1870s became, in some part, a manifestation of this drive to dislocate Northern Italy from an “inferior” southern history and rehabilitate the North as part of Europe.

59 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Granada, London, 1981, p. 129. 60 Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Is Britain European?’ International Affairs, vol. 77, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1-13. 61 Luzzi, ‘Italy without Italians,’ pp. 48–83.

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Edward Said postulates a European imaginative geography – ‘a line is drawn between two continents. Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant.’62 But how defined is that line? On closer inspection, European becomes a problematic label – Norwegian writer Eydun Andreassen has noted that the Reindeer Lapps and ‘the poor peasants of Calabria will probably have some difficulty in identifying themselves as “ordinary Europeans.”’63 Roberto M Dainotto has attempted to trace the imaginative boundaries of this “other Europe” that do not fit within the line proposed by Said. In an article which I believe is a good starting point for talking about southern Italy, he argues that ‘Orientalism, in a way, prepares the discourse of European “Southernism” and almost fades into it…The genealogy of Orientalism reconstructed by Said climaxes, then, in the European postulation of the superfluity or translatability of “the Orient” into a European South.’ Thus, the northern 64 countries of Europe ‘can now find in southern Europe their own internal “other” space.’

Nelson Moe’s study, The View from Vesuvius, continues the examination of how the “Southern Question” evolved through the analysis of textual and visual representations. Moe follows on from and elaborates on the work of John Dickie.65 Both studies look at the way Italians constructed the Italian South. I’m more interested in situating the question within the larger context of Europe and the European North/South divide and my main interest in Moe’s work is his discussion of ‘The division between north and south, which structured the European imagination in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries [and which] has received remarkable little attention.’ His contention that ‘Like Eastern Europe and the Balkans, Italy’s Mezzogiorno constitutes an alternately fascinating and troubling border zone between Europe and its Others’66, is a trope that I would like to elaborate. Furthermore, I will be attempting to uncover the effects of representations by travel writers on the formation of ideas of the South at the popular level and the ramifications for Calabrians of these representations which created the South as ‘a charged imaginative terrain in the consciousness of Italians.’67 For the consequences of this kind of partial exclusion from a European identity are evident even today. Many young southern Italians appear to have turned their backs on their Southern

62 Edward W Said, Orientalism, Penguin, London, 1985, p. 57. 63 Eydun Andreassen, cited in Jo Ann Conrad, ‘Making Europe in Nordic contexts,’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 112, no. 443, 1999, p. 94. 64 Roberto M Dainotto, ‘A South with a view: Europe and its Other,’ Neplantla: Views From the South, vol. 1, no. 2, 2000, pp. 379–380. 65 John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860 – 1900, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1999. 66 Nelson Moe, The View From Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000, p. 2. 67 Moe, The View From Vesuvius, p. 294.

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27 roots and embraced the ideology of the federalist - and at worst, secessionist – extremists of the industrial North. One journalist describes the new world view as:

The East-West conflict is over, and the centralized state’s role as protector of the nuclear peace has withered. These are the new European faultlines: North versus 68 South. Rich versus poor. Old versus new.

Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One Country edited by Jane Schneider is an interdisciplinary collection of articles which examines the issue within this framework.69 One essay by Marta Petrusewicz demonstrates the contribution of Southerners themselves to the construction of the South as a question. She also points out that ‘numerous studies have shown that there was not one South, nor even two, as in Manlio Rossi Doria’s famous L’osso e la polpa, but many.’70 These studies are Italian and by and large the idea of many “souths” has not taken up by scholars outside the country and remains still to be elaborated. I believe that this is an important project and one which this study will address. Celia Applegate notes the emergence of foundation histories of European nations of the nineteenth century, observing that during this period regions and their histories were devalued and that, instead national historiographies ‘drew on a rich vocabulary – common to all European bourgeois elites since the Enlightenment – stigmatizing the provincial, the particular, and the parochial. The study of regions, provinces, and local places did not disappear, but it became subordinate 71 to the national history project.’

The denial of the particular leads to an interpretation of national identity that becomes orthodox, it is an identity that is either authentic or not. For the modern Italian state, to be Italian is to be European, and that which does not fit into the European framework is therefore not only not European but also not Italian. With regards to creating a national identity, from the 1830's the idea of a more politically integrated “Italia” began to gain the interest of the upper and middle-classes. However, there remained not only the issues related to language and culture but also the not insignificant problems of establishing a shared “Italian” civic

68 Frank Viviano, ‘The fall of Rome,’ Mother Jones Interactive: Daily News for the Sceptical Citizen, , accessed 3 November 2008. In the same article Viviano quotes Romano Fattorossi, an Italian colleague who asserts that ‘no one is more fanatic about supporting the Lega [the Northern League] than the children of the southern immigrants.’ 69 Jane Schneider (ed.), Italy’s Southern Question: Orientalism in One Country, Berg, Oxford, 1998. 70 Marta Petrusewicz, ‘Before the Southern Question: “Native” ideas on backwardness and remedies in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, 1815 – 1949,’ Jane Schneider (ed.), Italy’s Southern Question: Orientalism in One Country, Berg, New York, 1998, p. 28. 71 Celia Applegate, ‘A Europe of regions: reflections on the historiography of sub-national places in modern times,’ The American Historical Review, vol. 104, no. 4, 1999, p. 1160.

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28 consciousness and sense of identity. For the peasant class, this presented a huge obstacle against the background of a multiplicity of former states administered by reactionary statesmen and clerics where the majority of the people had lived impoverished rural lives. In Sicily and Naples, the positive vote in favour of association in the Italian Kingdom was at least partly due to the lack of a more locally acceptable alternative.

Thus, the project of nation building created contested, marginalised sites which, referring specifically to Michael Hechter’s description of a centre–periphery model, Applegate claims, ‘took on a distinctly sinister cast: Hechter’s signature phrase, “internal colonialism”, denoting a process, essential to industrialization and nation-building, of 72 producing ever more intense regional inequalities within the nation-state.’

Representing Calabria Calabria’s administrative divisions were created in the late Middle Ages and were maintained right through to unification. These were Calabria Citeriore (or Latin Calabria) in the northern half and Calabria Ulteriore I and Calabria Ulteriore II (or Greek Calabria) in the southern half. By the end of the Middle Ages, large parts of Calabria continued to speak Greek as their mother tongue but by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Greek spoken in Calabria was rapidly replaced by Latin, the dominant language of the Italian peninsula. Today, the last remnants of the Greek formerly spoken widely throughout Calabria can still be heard amongst 73 the ethnically Greek Griko people of the Aspromonte mountains of southern Calabria.

By the nineteenth century, Calabria had had a long history of domination by a number of different rulers. Under the leadership of Robert Guiscard's brother Roger, the Normans established a government along Byzantine lines in the 1060s which was run by the local Greek magnates of Calabria. From the period of the Angevin control of the southern regions in 1266 onwards Calabria was ruled from Naples right up until unification. The Kingdom of Naples was governed by the Angevins until 1442, at which time it was taken by Alfonso V of Aragon, who ruled what was then named the “Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.” Calabria also came under the dominion of the Habsburg dynasties of both Spain and Austria, with the Austrian Hapsburgs coming into control in the early 1700s. Their rule was short-lived and, in 1735, they ceded the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to the Bourbons, the Franco-Spanish

72 Applegate, ‘A Europe of regions,’ p. 1166. 73 Calabrian history, Calabria Now website, , accessed 14 November 2015.

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Bourbon dynasty which created the Kingdom of Two Sicilies. In 1759, Ferdinand IV of Naples became king. His was a repressive rule and many Calabrian dissenters were killed during his reign.

At the end of the 18th century, the French invaded Italy and in 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte became President of the Italian Republic. A few years later, he declared his brother Joseph as its king of the now independent Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. In 1808, Joseph left to assume the Spanish throne and Napoleon gave the Kingdom of Naples to his brother-in-law Joachim Murat who instituted the French Civil Code. His reforms in public infrastructure were undone when the Bourbons returned with the help of the British in 1815. Murat tried to reclaim his throne, but he was captured in Pizzo, held prisoner and shot.

The Calabrian people became increasingly discontented during the rule of the Bourbons, resulting in several insurrections to which the regime responded with executions or life imprisonment. British newspaper articles of the times recorded these. The following appeared in several newspapers in 1844.

The Mediterranean of Malta, of the 29th, states that accounts had been received there of fresh disturbances in Calabria on the 20th. The insurrection is described as being more powerful than ever, and it even said that the insurgents had beaten 74 battalion of the King’s troops near Paola.

These insurgents began to band together to form secret societies, some of which could be loosely described as the precursors to organised crime, with rules enforced by brigands and bandits. As some groups became more organised, they joined a larger movement, “La Giovane Italia” (Young Italy), founded by Giuseppe Mazzini, which in its oath called for ‘Italy, one free, independent republican nation.’75 The movements of this organisation were also documented in British newspapers. A typical article of the time describes the punishment metered out to insurgents in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies:

ITALY. We give below some sanguinary details of the executions which have followed upon the recent abortive descent upon Calabria. The following extract, which we take from the Morning Herald, proves that the betrayal of those unhappy young men was effected through the espionage in the English Post-

74 ‘Insurrection Calabria,’ Dublin Evening Post, 08 June1844, , accessed 14 May, 2014. 75 ‘Giuseppe Mazzini Biography,’ Biography Online, https://www.biographyonline.net/politicians/europe/giuseppe-mazzini.html, accessed 27 November 2014.

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office, and lays their blood at the door of the country which suffers that espionage. It is horrible to contemplate the butchery of those miserable dupes, for they have been the dupes of England which, exposing their plans enabled their governments to circumvent them in their preparations, and to cut them off by executions and the sword. If the ministry of England were actuated by humane motives they would have made known to “Young Italy” that its schemes had been denounced to the powers of that distracted land; not doing that, but permitting them blindly to rush into the pitfall prepared for them, how can the country which those ministers govern be cleansed of the blood of the slain?... The excessive rigour of these reprisals will be severely condemned in all free countries. Governments gain nothing by changing justice into vengeance; and blood uselessly spilt after a victory has never procured security. In our times and with our morals, such acts 76 are deplorable anachronisms.

This article is particularly interesting as it refers to the role the English played in the apprehension of the insurgents which led to an “excessive” punishment which “free countries”, presumably including England, would deplore. It also gives some idea of the level of intrigue and the official British support of the Bourbon government but also hints at general English sympathy for “La Giovane Italia”. Accounts in British newspapers and periodicals of rebel movements in Calabria continued from the restoration to the unification periods. An article from 1860 noted that, ‘A number of Garibaldians have from time to time been landed in Calabria, where the mountains are natural fortresses near at hand for the insurgents.’ 77 The Calabrian mountains had long been the destination of rebels, fugitives and brigands.

Calabria is a highly mountainous region - the area around Pollino, is a rocky and steep massif on the border between Calabria and Basilicata, La Sila is a vast mountainous plateau, a highland of rolling plains which occupies part of the provinces of Cosenza, Crotone and Catanzaro, which is in turn very dissimilar to the Aspromonte in the province of Reggio Calabria, which rises high above the ocean in giant terraces separated by steep cliffs. The qualities of mountains and of the people who live in mountainous regions have long been a subject of interest to cultural commentators. In his seminal work on the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, Fernand Braudel examines the way in which the landscape has helped to shape the lives and histories of its inhabitants. Braudel describes the mountains of the Mediterranean as ‘a world apart from civilizations where society, civilization, and economy

76 Freeman's Journal, 15 August 1844, p. 2 , accessed 15 May 2014. 77 Norfolk News, 25 August 1860, , accessed 15 May 2014.

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31 all bear the mark of backwardness and poverty.’78 Mountains can certainly be barriers that make travel and communication difficult but as archaeologist Lawrence Barfield has noted ‘the great arc of the Alps to the north, as much as one would expect to the contrary, seems to have been a negligible barrier to communication and trade.’79 In fact, the mountains of the South presented a barrier not only because they were mountains but because they were at the very end of the peninsula, in regions that were unconnected by land to any other country.

Mountains, too, are associated with the notion of the sublime. Edmund Burke’s essay, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful published in 1757 distinguishes the sublime from the beautiful by claiming that the former applies to the former applies to large, grand manifestations of nature while the beautiful is evident in small parts. Burke associates the fear of death, dismemberment, terror, and darkness (e.g., a howling wilderness) with feelings of the sublime. He states:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more 80 powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure.

Burke cites ‘vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence’ as essential to bringing about feelings of the sublime.81 However, the notion of the sublime is more than a two-dimensional horror show, it is layered with cultural significance. According to George P Landow, it is also a gendered concept:

... the enjoyer of the sublime, who is often described as being "ravished" by the experience, takes an essentially feminine role. Under the influence of Edmund Burke who contrasted the bracing sublimity of masculine power to the relaxing effects of feminine beauty, sublimity became an explicitly gendered aesthetic 82 category. Nonetheless, both men and women experienced it in the same way.

78 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol. I, Collins, London, 1972, p. 33. 79 Lawrence Barfield, Northern Italy Before Rome, Thames and Hudson, London, 1971, p. 9. 80 Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Vol. XXIV, Part 2, The Harvard Classics, P F Collier & Son, New York 1909–14, Bartleby.com, 2001, , accessed 16 August 2009. 81 Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful, no page numbers. 82 George P Landow, ‘Sublimity and questions of power,’ The Victorian Web: Literature, History & Culture in the Age of Victoria, 2001, , accessed 16 August 2009.

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The regions of the south, virtually unknown at the beginning of the eighteenth century, became increasing identified as a landscape of the sublime as the century progressed. This was influenced by the presence of active volcanoes and devastating earthquakes in these regions and an increasing interest in and reporting of these natural phenomena. In his book The Landscapes of the Sublime 1700-1830: Classic Ground83 Cian Duffy notes Patrick Brydone’s reference to ‘the ascent of Etna as one of the greatest objects of our expedition.’ Brydone, as previously noted, had written Tour Through Sicily and Malta, a popular travel book published in 1773 which was one of the first which highlighted the southern part of Italy.84 Duffy also quotes Joseph Addison, whose Remarks on Several Parts of Italy85 has consistently been described as a vade mecum for the traveller to Italy.86 Duffy notes that Addison’s idea of “classic ground” is ‘the amalgamation of physical and imaginative geography’. Addison, according to Duffy, gave the British public one of the earliest descriptions of looking into the crater of Vesuvius and although he did not witness an eruption, he offered ‘one of the earliest eighteenth-century imaginings of what an eruption might look like.’

In 1755 a massive earthquake hit Lisbon and it had a profound effect on Europe. According to Dr Jacky Bowring of the Lincoln University NZ, School of Landscape Architecture, ‘Already an emerging concept, the Sublime was amplified and moulded by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, providing a frame for the terror and strange beauty of the earthquake’s power and devastation.’87 British newspapers and periodicals were full of accounts of the devastating nature of the earthquake, one typical example in the Universal Magazine, described the “awful” and “terrifying” events and asked readers, ‘Can we behold, without horror, the most lofty structures tumbling from their bases, the mountains rending and

83 Cian Duffy, The Landscapes of the Sublime 1700-1830: Classic Ground, New York,Springer, 2013. 84 Patrick Brydone, A Tour Through Sicily and Malta: In a Series of Letters to William Beckford, Esq. of Somerly in Suffolk, W Strahan and T Cadell, London, 1773, , accessed 21 July 2013. 85 Joseph Addison, Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, &c: In the Years 1701, 1702, 1703, J Tonson, London, 1718. 86 References for this description including: Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, edited by Michel Delon, London, Routledge, 2013, p.625; and Susanna Corradi, Joseph Addison, Viaggi e viaggiatori del Settecento in Emilia e in Romagna, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1986, vol. II, pp. 436-438, wrote ‘e diventò subito un classico del genere, punto di riferimento obbligato e vademecum di molti autori e viaggiatori successive.’ [it became an instant classic of the genre, point of reference and vade mecum for many successive travellers]. 87 Jacky Bowring, ‘The Legacy of the Seismic Sublime: Draft Conference Paper,’ 3rd Global Conference: Monstrous Geography, Places and Spaces of Monstrosity, Wednesday 14th May – Friday 16th May 2014, Lisbon, Portugal Inter-disciplinary.net 2014, p. 1,< www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the- interface/wp.../bowringmonpaper.pdf>, accessed 15 January, 2015.

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33 falling into ruins, the earth itself either so widely gaping, or so violently agitated, as to prevent 88 our flight from the horrors that surrounds us?’

A survey of British newspapers of the eighteenth century also reveals regular reporting of earthquakes in Calabria and surrounding regions. In 1733, for example, the Derby Mercury noted an earthquake which created ‘Devastation in the two provinces of Calabria, particularly in the Town of Ariano, and the Districts of Mirabello, Tuffo, and Bonia, where a great Number of People lost their Lives.’89 Whole periodical articles were dedicated to Calabria’s earthquakes. The New London Magazine of November 1786 published an article which expounded on the earthquake of 1783 after a giving an account of earlier earthquakes in that region:

Calabria, in the kingdom of Naples, formerly possessed by the Brutii, and other Greek colonies, has been at all times exposed to terrible convulsions. The earthquakes in 1638 and 1659, by which the two provinces of Calabria were almost utterly destroyed, as fresh in everyone’s mind, as well as the year 1743-4... Reggio, and the countries near it, are, exposed to earthquakes almost every year, and if we look back to the highest antiquity we shall find that all Italy, but particularly this country, has been subject to various catastrophes in consequence 90 of volcanoes and subterraneous fires.

These articles contributed to a representation of Calabria as a place fraught with natural dangers and a landscape of the sublime. The sublime romantic reading of Calabria arises again and again in travel literature and is encoded into illustrations of the region, rendering the landscape overpowering and fearful and “feminising” its inhabitants who are powerless in the face of a hostile nature. Calabria has been described poetically in travel accounts as the cradle of Magna Graecia and balcony on the Mediterranean Sea,91 but the mountainous region of Calabria and in particular, the Aspromonte, is more often characterised as a rocky chaos ‘torn into gullies by earthquakes and other cataclysms of the past.’92 Chaos is a term often

88 The New Universal Magazine [previously Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure], London, J Hinton, v.17, 1755 Jul-Dec., 1804-1814, p. 279, 89 Derby Mercury, vol. I, no. 41, 4 January 1733, p.1, , accessed 15 January, 2015. 90 ‘A circumstantial account of the late great Earthquake in Calabria, in the Kingdom of Naples,’ New London Magazine, issue 18, November 1786, pp. 563-566, , accessed 15 January, 2015. 91Examples of this kind of characterisation can be found at many websites, including: ; http://www.soloitalia.no/en/regions-in- italy/calabria/; and . 92 Norman Douglas, Old Calabria, Century Publishing, London, 1983, p. 270.

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34 used in relation to the terrain of the southernmost part of the region and seems to imply both a difficulty of representation – the glorious classical past cannot be “read” as easily as is the case with Sicily and Naples - and the anarchy of its inhabitants. Unlike these other, more emblematic, parts of the South, the mountainous terrain of Calabria is still relatively unknown and has been characterised time and time again as unknowable. The issue of what is knowable and what is represented is indeed fraught with difficulty. All territory and its people can be said to be unknowable in the absolute sense. What is known is, in the end, what is perceived. An interesting quote by Adrian Martin which is curiously apt for an earthquake-torn region, postulates that:

What is captivating in a representation of any sort is rarely the external, commonsense particulars (however well crafted) but a deep, phantasmatic logic that can only be fleetingly glimpsed as it churns and spits up hard fragments of 93 its vision.

Some of these fragments emerge in the accounts of travellers to the region, often seemingly unrelated to the intentions, as stated, of the chronicler. In particular, traces of the noble savage/brute primitive dichotomy exist in the travel writings of the British travellers to Calabria examined in this study. More often than not, the Victorian travellers, in particular, compared a rural unsophisticated Calabria favourably to their own industrialised, modern cultures.

However, it is safe to assume that most of the travellers embellished or at the very least, edited, their accounts to heighten the exotic content. This is particularly the case for those who already had the market back home in mind when they chose Calabria as a destination. For example, for Edward Lear, the primary motive for travel was to paint the landscapes which had become his main source of income, selling them both from his foreign studios and to patrons in England. There had been, since the early days of the Grand Tour, a growing demand for landscape paintings of exotic places and a concomitant industry in souvenirs which has grown to this day. It could be concluded by observing significant differences between the published work By the Ionian Sea and his diary entries of the time that George Gissing, ever more conscious of the need to turn a profit, was attempting to forge the best possible finished product from his raw diary material. H V Morton describes the Gissing of this period as ‘already showing the signs of that commercial acumen which he deplored in

93 Adrian Martin, Phantasms: The Dreams and Desires at the Heart of Our Popular Culture, McPhee Gribble, Ringwood, Victoria, 1994, p. 198.

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35 others.’94 In fact, Gissing’s collected letters show that he was much more commercially minded than the popular picture of him allows.

But whether they presented favourable or negative views of Calabria, the British travellers interpreted cultural differences in religion, manners and diet as well as climate and landscape, as signifiers of a difference in national character between what Donald Uln depicts as the ‘innocence, honesty, originality, frankness and moral independence’ of the English and ‘the artful, deceptive, conventional, imitative qualities thought to characterize Continental Europeans.’95 A major “difference” between the English traveller and the native Calabrian (taken directly from the “Southern Question” discourse) commented upon by British travellers was the perceived criminality of Calabria. One of the tropes that I will investigate in this examination of representations of Calabria will be that of brigandage. This too was a theme that could be viewed in both a negative and a positive way. The kind of legendary lawlessness many people associated with Calabria was often of a highly romantic nature – the brigands and rebels who came out of the inevitable popular struggle against firstly foreign domination and later against the central government established after unification. The truth is that the mountains of the region had always sheltered renegades. In the past, some of them became the stuff of legend like the Brigante Musolino and Mammone, local ‘Robin Hoods’ - heroes of the peasant class protected by villagers from the army and the carabinieri. But it would seem that, as John Dickie, in his work on southern stereotypes has shown:

…brigandage exercised analogous kinds of fascination over both the peasantry and the bourgeoisie. For the patriotic classes, banditry was a powerful stereotype of the South because its combination of romanticism and brutality, of exoticism and squalor, encapsulated the Mezzogiorno’s own ambivalent position between 96 the Italian national space and the badlands beyond.

In time, brigandage became symbolic of a southern primitive violence, as alien to the rest of Italy as it was to Britain, and an easy trope around which to build representations of the South. The accounts of the travel writers featured in this work abound with stories of brigandage and criminality and cumulatively paint a picture of a world lost in a lawless past. I will be unpacking these ideas to demonstrate how they contribute to the discourse of civilisation versus savagery which underlies the construction of an abject South.

94 H V Morton, A Traveller in Southern Italy, Methuen, London, 1969, p. 383. 95 Donald Ulin, ‘Review: National identities and travel in Victorian Britain,’ Victorian Studies, vol. 44, no. 2, 2002, pp. 307-309. 96 John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860 – 1900, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1999, p. 51.

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In the next chapter, I will explore how the Grand Tour created a representation of Italy and the imaginative geography of the South. In Chapter 3 I will examine the Enlightenment discourse of Henry Swinburne. Chapter 4 examines the travel narrative of lone traveller Craufurd Tait Ramage who displays the beginnings of a modern voice in travel writing with a much more subjective account of his journey. Chapter 5 centres around the work of Edward Lear, landscape artist in search of the picturesque. In Chapter 6, the anonymous work of Emily Lowe, “unprotected female on tour” will include an examination of the “female gaze” and the role of women in Victorian England. Chapter 7 examines the work of George Gissing and his search for a lost classical world. Chapter 8 looks at how Norman Douglas, the most recent of the writers in this study, takes us back to nineteenth-century “Orientalism” in his view of Southern Italy.

Throughout these chapters I will be investigating how these travellers defined themselves and their countries of origin against the Calabrian Other. I will examine the construction of Calabria, both within and without Italy, as a place that is not quite Europe and at the same time a “pre-Europe”, mired in a primitive past. I will seek to uncover how the stereotypes of the Calabrian were perpetuated through the various periods of travel and through the lens of the various themes of the day, including the desire for the classical, the picturesque, the Gothic sublime, the romantic and other modalities employed by the travellers. I will be looking at the work of a female traveller to examine the idea of a “female gaze”. In conclusion, I will be looking at the proliferation of websites and blogs that refer to the works of British travellers to Calabria to demonstrate how modern Calabrians have made use of these narratives to promote their region, despite the way in which it was constructed as Other within these texts.

But before I can elaborate on how Calabria became emblematic of the Other both within and outside of Italy, I will examine how notions of Italy were constructed during the period of travel that concluded with the Grand Tour.

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37 Chapter 2. The Grand Tour representation of Italy and the imaginative geography of the South

The Grand Tour of Europe of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and its evolution into the so-called Romantic Grand Tour of the nineteenth century has been the subject of countless books, commentaries and journal articles. There is little doubt that this was a significant period in the history of travel and that it has had a profound impact on the construction of a touristic canon of “must see” European places to this day. If nothing else, the term “grand tour” has become part of everyday vocabulary but there is by now enough accumulated evidence to assert, as does Kay Dian Kriz, Professor Emerita of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University, that ‘the Tour was a highly significant phenomenon within Western culture, shaping artistic tastes, forming political subjects, and profoundly affecting social memory.’1. In this chapter, I will be examining the Grand Tour –both the Classical and the Romantic Grand Tour - to demonstrate how it contributed to creating a concept of Italy and Italians which persists to a large degree today; a concept that for the most part does not include the south of Italy. I will explore how over time southern Italy came to be interpreted as a deeper south, an exotic internal land of the Other, inhabited by people who were represented as anything but Italian.

There were few northern travellers who went beyond the Grand Tour route mapped out for the Italian peninsula. This route was a touring circuit which had, in fact, been set prior to the Grand Tour and described a map of Italy which has remained the basis of an imaginative geography of the country as indicated above.2 Naples was the southernmost stop of the Tour, particularly during the period of the ambassadorship of William Hamilton from 1764 to 1800. After the Napoleonic period, an enticement for the Grand Tourists to extend their itinerary as far south as Naples was the discovery of classical remains at Paestum, Herculaneum and Pompeii. A few travellers even went as far as Sicily by boat to view the significant classical ruins there.

Very few, however, ventured as far south on mainland Italy as Calabria, a place considered an eccentric choice of destination by British and Italians alike. Historians and commentators including Christopher Hibbert have noted that, for the British tourist, places

1 Kay Dian Kriz, ‘Introduction: The Grand Tour,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, 1997, p. 89. 2 There are many works which detail this consistency of itinerary, including John Towner, ‘The Grand Tour: a key phase in the history of tourism,’ Annals of Tourism Research, 12, 1985, p. 313.

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38 like Calabria were primitive and uncomfortable without the amenities the British traveller was accustomed to and where, to all intents and purposes ‘there were no sights or artistic treasures worth the exhausting effort of reaching them.’3 Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter, also refers to the poor quality of the accommodation and the roads south of Naples and quotes Sir Philip Francis, who planned in 1772 to travel down the east of coast of Italy and across Calabria but was deterred when, ‘upon inquiry we found that the roads were impracticable, without posts or inns, and the people to the last degree brutal and barbarous. So we took the high road to Rome.’4 Patrick Brydone, in his pioneering book on Sicily, noted that he avoided travelling through Calabria because of ‘the danger from banditti’ as well as the ‘wretched’ accommodation and ‘inconveniences of every kind, so numerous without any consideration whatever to throw into the opposite scale.’5 Clearly it was not just the roads and accommodation that prevented travellers from including the South in their journeys - significantly, Francis refers to the brutality and barbarity of the people and Brydone to “banditti”.

This latter part of the peninsula, the abject south, became the repository of all the negative attributes and stereotypes of the south which had already been bestowed on the entire country by northern travellers. Immorality, dishonesty, sloth, - these were all were considered characteristics of the people south of the Alps. Italy, including northern Italy, was the south and northern European travellers often felt that they were crossing the border into a transgressive space as they travelled over the Alps onto Italian soil. In her study Italian Vices, Silvana Patriarca notes that ‘negative representations of the Italians have been circulating in Europe at least since the late Middle Ages’6, and that the sense of the poor view of the Italian character and the need to redeem this ‘permeated the national-patriotic discourse during the 7 central years of the Risorgimento (c. 1815-60).’

Over time southern Italy came to be interpreted as a deeper south, an exotic internal land of the Other, inhabited by people who were represented as anything but Italian. According to Nelson Moe, ‘From the eighteenth century forward, “Africa” became the worst

3 Christopher Hibbert, The Grand Tour, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1969, p. 25. 4 Jeremy Black, Italy and the Grand Tour, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2003, p. 59. 5 Patrick Brydone, A tour through Sicily and Malta : in a series of letters to William Beckford, Esq. of Somerly in Suffolk, W Strahan and T Cadell, London, 1773, p. 3, , accessed 21 July 2013. 6 Silvana Patriarca, Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010, p. 20. 7 Patriarca, Italian Vices, p. 22.

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39 that could be said about the south, one of the preferred ways to mark its difference from both Europe and Italy.’8 This became increasingly the case after the unification of Italy which brought with it a strengthened resolve for northern Italians to identify as European: modern, forward thinking and unambiguously white. The notion of “whiteness” as an indicator of moral superiority is one that Joseph Pugliese takes up in his work on the post-unification conflicts between north and south and the struggle to create a nation. Pugliese posits that before Unification the South was viewed as a terra incognita, but that after unification, it become the Other, savage, uncivilised and, most importantly, non-European. He argues that:

The deployment of the loaded signifier “Africa”, as the lens through which the South was rendered intelligible for Northerners, marks how the question of Italy was, from the very moment of unification, already racialised by a geopolitical fault line that split the peninsula and its islands along a black/white axis. From the beginning, then, the so-called questione meridionale (Southern question) encoded a set of racialised presuppositions in which the whiteness of the North operated as an a priori, in contradistinction to the problematic racialised status of the South, 9 with its dubious African and Oriental histories and cultures.

This throws into question Edward Said’s description of a monolithic Europe as the basis of his critique of the discourse of Orientalism. ‘Orientalism’, Said proposes, ‘is never far from …a collective notion identifying “us” Europeans as against all “those” non-Europeans, and indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures.’10 It seems apparent that there is not a seamless, coherent Europe and that the margins, in particular, of the continent cannot be comfortably placed within this notion of a superior European culture. In fact, in the eighteenth century the Other against which a British identity was constructed was more likely to be the people of the northern, eastern and southern margins of Europe than those of the Orient. Margaret Morgan points out, ‘It is also true that the discourse known as “colonial” 11 first emerged in Europe to describe other Europeans.’

8 Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2002, p. 57. 9 Joseph Pugliese, ‘Whiteness and the blackening of Italy: La guerra cafona, Extracommunitari and provisional street justice,’ PORTAL, vol. 5, no. 2, 2008, p. 3. 10 Edward Said, Orientalism, Penguin, London, 1995, p. 7. 11 Marjorie Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain, Palgrave, London, 2001, p. 199.

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40 These margins include the south of Italy. Katarina Gephardt examines the perception of Europe’s southern periphery as a culturally blank space although both central and marginal in the minds of British travellers. Gephardt claims that this peripheral blank space ‘draws more directly on colonial discourses, particularly the tropes of Orientalism and Said’s idea of an 12 imaginative geography.’

I agree that there are clear parallels in the way of the South is imagined and represented by British writers with the characteristics of colonial discourse, but I also propose that, as far as Italy is concerned, the South referred to here, is the far south of Italy which has been all too often represented as an undifferentiated region, the imaginative geography of Magna Graecia.

Early travellers Travel to Italy from Britain did not begin with the Grand Tour. Indeed, there had been a pilgrimage route to Italy since the early Middle Ages. Pilgrims travelled to Rome and other sites associated with the Apostles, saints and martyrs, as well as to places where there were said to have been apparitions of the Virgin Mary. The main pilgrimage route, the Via Francigena, was a broad network of Roman and medieval trails originating in ancient Francia (now France) and leading to Rome. Like the Grand Tour itinerary of the seventeenth century it crossed the Alps into Italy where it proceeded south before finally arriving in Rome.

Modern literature of Italian travel began in England in 1547 with Andrew Boorde’s book, The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge,13 which included his description of the characteristics, physical and cultural, of European and as well as a few Asian countries and their inhabitants. Amongst the people he attempted to depict were those of the different regions of Italy. He was followed by William Thomas, a Welshman in the English civil service, whose book The History of Italy was published in 1549. In his preface to the 1963 edition, George B Parks describes the volume as the first book by an Englishman on Italy, both reflecting and reinforcing a time of renewed English interest in Italian culture. A time, which he notes, ‘paradoxically enough, saw the definitive separation of England from the

12 Katarina Gephardt, ‘Imagined Boundaries: The Nation and the Continent in Nineteenth-Century British Narratives of European Travel,’ unpublished PhD thesis, Ohio State University, 2003, p. 15. 13 Andrew Boorde, The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge Made by Andrew Borde, of Physycke Doctor: A Compendyous Regyment; Or, A Dyetary of Helth Made in Mountpyllier, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, London, 1870, Early English Text Society, , accessed 14 August 2009.

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41 Church of Rome, but the repulsion seems not to have reduced the attraction. Perhaps the 14 cultural appeal of Italy was an essential compensation for the loss of the religious tie.’

Indeed, the cultural appeal of Italy attracted British visitors consistently even during times when the familiar paths to and through Italy were not always smooth and events on the continent - wars, religious conflict– meant that routes and destinations changed from time to time. The Italian Wars saw 65 years of French attacks on the Italian states, starting with Charles VIII's invasion of Naples in 1494. In 1559 after peace was declared, almost all of Italy came under the direct or indirect control of the Spanish during which period, from 1559 to1714, it was considered dangerous for Protestants to travel through much of the peninsula. Nonetheless, in 1596, Sir Thomas Chaloner noted in a letter that ‘such a rabble of English roam now in Italy.’15 Later, the English government was so concerned with the subversive dangers of Catholicism that Rome was excluded from travel licenses issued to English people travelling to Italy until well into the seventeenth century.

As for Calabria, the Renaissance did not reach that region but the Spanish Inquisition did. In 1560, the village of Guardia Piemontese in the province of Cosenza was the site of a massacre of Protestants, known as Waldensians, who had fled from the Alps. This event is memorialised in the Piazza della Strage (Square of the Slaughter) and with the 14th-century main gate in the historical centre of Guardia Piemontese, the Porta del Sangue (Gate of Blood).

Nonetheless, Thomas Hoby, another 16th-century traveller to Italy, went as far south as Sicily and Calabria which was virtually unheard of at this time and he gives as one of his main reasons a desire to get away from other Englishmen. ‘After I had well viewed whatsoever was to bee seene bothe within the citie of Naples and in the countrey abowt the same,’ he writes, ‘I tooke a journey upon me to goo throwghe the dukedom of Calabria by land into Cicilia, both to have a sight of the countrey and also to absent my self for a while owt of Englishemenne's companie.’16 The complaint about the number of countrymen in Italy became an often repeated comment, along with the need to get away from them and Hoby’s

14 William Thomas, The History of Italy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1963, p. ix. 15 Sir Thomas Chaloner, ‘Letter to the Earl of Essex, Salisbury (Hatfield),’ HMC: Historical Manuscript Collection, vol. vii, 1597, p. 10. 16 Thomas Hoby, The Travels and Life of Sir Thomas Hoby, 1547-1564, Edgar Powell (ed.), Royal Historical Society, London, 1902, p. 37.

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42 diary draws our attention to the increasing numbers of Englishmen in Italy from 1550 onwards.

It is remarkable that Hoby made this tour at this time, travelling by land from Naples to Reggio unharmed when, as late as 1770 Patrick Brydone was dissuaded by the Neapolitans from making a similar journey for fear of brigands. Of Calabria Hoby wrote briefly, highlighting, as did the many travellers who followed him, the sinister nature of the residents as opposed to the beautiful landscape of the region:

Before we cum to Biasi wee ride throwghe a woode verie thick and jeopardous to passe called Bosco di Santo Mazzio, whiche hathe bine most famous for robberies and murtheres committed in yt, of all the rest within the realm. For the theves did not onlie robb in great companies within yt, but also yf they sawe a number ride so stronglie together that they thowght not themselves able to mak their part in good, they had emong the trees certain peices of artillarie to discharg at them, whiche were the deathe of manie a man. But now all the wood that was anie thing nige unto the high waye is burnt downe, and the trees remaine full of coles17, withowt eyther leaf or bowe abow them, and some lying upon the earthe half burnt. This was done by th' Emperor's commandment when he passed bye there. At owr cuming owt of this wood we may descern a faire plaine and a bewtiful countrey, full of plesant places abundant with sundrie kindes of frutes. And on the left hand we may see the towne of Nicastro with the countrey abowt yt well tilled 18 and verie plentifull, which is a great delite to beholde.

Hoby also referred to the produce of the region, including manna, the sweet sugary sap of the South European flowering ash which is extracted by making a cut in the bark, and which Hoby called a ‘verie rare thing and precious’. Commenting on the abundance of produce, he noted that this was despite that ‘by the reason of so manie sharpe hige hilles and stonie rockes [Calabria] is communlie adjudged the worst and barronest part of the realm.’19 This is also an observation which would be made by many of the travellers that followed him.

The period of French occupation effectively closed off the country between 1796 and 1815 but travel resumed quickly afterwards and northern visitors set out in significant numbers once again to visit the Italy constructed through the period of the 18th-century Grand 20 Tour.

17 Middle English for stems or stalks. 18 Hoby, The Travels and Life of Sir Thomas Hoby, p. 43. 19 Hoby, The Travels and Life of Sir Thomas Hoby, p. 56. 20 The Grand Tour was not an exclusively British phenomenon. Italy was always a magnet to other northerners, including Goethe.

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Shaping Italy Travel shapes, and is shaped by its participants and their strategies of interaction with the foreign and Italy was to a large extent a creation of these earlier travellers, a product of their expectations, stereotypes and prejudices which, Manfred Pfister, Professor of Philology, English Literature at the Free University of Berlin, informs us, ‘articulate themselves in … “discourses”, and are enacted in social practices such as the Grand Tour…’21 Much of the reality of the tour was filtered by what had been read – a mythology of Italian cities was already in place through texts including classical history and mythology, travellers’ tales, 22 guides, literature, and statistical surveys.

The shape of the tour, what was included but also what was excluded, created a general perception of Italy which was largely based on art and architecture and Roman and Renaissance remains. During the eighteenth century, the object of the tourist was the evidence and remnants of the classical world of Rome and the neo-classical Renaissance. However, well into the nineteenth century Rome represented far more than one of the stops of the Tour or the home of classical and Renaissance monuments – along with Greece, it represented the ethos of western heritage. This construction of Italy has remained almost without exception the Italy travelled to and commented on during the twentieth century and up to the current period.

Based on the desire for classical and Renaissance sites an itinerary was set that changed very little as it developed over two centuries and was itself modelled on earlier patterns of travel to Italy. If routes remained remarkably similar, cultural orientation changed significantly between the two periods of the Grand Tour. Judith Adler points out that, ‘Grand Tourists visiting Rome during the eighteenth century carried on much of the program established by pre-Renaissance pilgrimage continuity of destination carried with it considerable continuity in travel design’ and that although there were significant changes in the cultural orientation of the travellers, their routes remained strikingly similar.

21 Manfred Pfister (ed), ‘Introduction’, The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of the British Travelers: An Annotated Anthology, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1996, p. 4. 22 In his article ‘From Georgic poetry to statistics and graphs: Eighteenth-century representations and the “State” of British Society,’ The Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 17, no. 1, 2005, pp. 107–139, Frans De Bruyn examines the ‘emergent science of statistics in eighteenth-century Europe as a mode of representation and to explore its links with more conventionally literary modes of representation in the period.’ He argues that the use of graphs and charts during this period bears significant affinities with some of the major literary forms in the period including the proliferating genre of travel books.

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44 These changes in cultural orientation have been largely divided into the two periods of the Grand Tour. The character of the Classical Grand Tour was based on the scientific observation and recording of galleries, museums, architecture and cultural artifacts as well as, in many cases, flora, fauna and farming and production methods. The English traveller of the period was interested in the urban setting of museums and architecture and classical sites of significance, largely ignoring the natural landscape – deeming it too mountainous and “irregular”. It was during this period that mountains were generally considered blots on the landscape.23 Although the most admired landscape was that of the fertile plain of Lombardy, for the most part, travellers moved through the countryside paying scant attention to the landscape, often with the drapes down in their carriage windows. The Classical Grand Tour was not about landscape and, as Paul Langford notes, ‘English Grand Tourists acquired a bad name with many of their hosts for their habit of covering enormous distances without taking more than a nominal interest in the places through which they passed.’24 The Classical Grand Tour was characterised by its attention to classical ruins and artifacts of the Roman Empire as well as the buildings and art of the Renaissance.

This changed during the period of the Romantic Grand Tour when the object of travel became less about the scientific gaze and more about the scenic. The picturesque, sublime nature of southern Europe privileged and developed the “gaze” as the basis of this new scenic tourism. John Urry describes the evolution of the Grand Tour as shifting from ‘a scholastic emphasis on touring as an opportunity for discourse, to travel as eyewitness observation.’ 25 This latter manifestation, Urry affirms, relied on the ‘visualization of the travel experience, or the development of the “gaze”, aided and assisted by the growth of guidebooks which 26 promoted new ways of seeing.’

Aaron Santesso’s analysis of the socially constructed tourist impulse to gaze at what is encountered has its genesis in Foucault’s concept of the “clinical gaze” which argues that the gaze is necessarily hierarchical. 27 Santesso states that the tourist gaze, too, ‘both depends

23 Guy Mièrge, quoted in Frans de Bruyn, p. 116, referred to England ‘being generally a flat and open Country, not overgrown with wild and unwholsom [sic] Forests, nor dreadful high Mountains.’ 24 Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character 1650-1850, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, pp. 37-38. 25 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies, SAGE Publications, London, 1990, p. 4. 26 Urry, The Tourist Gaze, p. 4. 27 Aaron Santesso, ‘The birth of the birthplace: Bread Street and literary tourism before Stratford,’ ELH: English Literary History, 2004, pp. 384-386.

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45 upon and establishes a hierarchy. Not only do tourists raise their cultural status (Johnson said that “[a] man who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority”), they also gain a feeling of mastery over foreign objects arranged for their surveillance.’28 This mastery involves a reinforcement of what is already known, a “recognition” to use Foucault’s term. ‘In fact,’ Santesso elaborates, ‘the gaze is designed to bring its object into agreement with a familiar discourse’, 29 and is integral to systems of power and ideas about knowledge. Theorist E Ann Kaplan refers to a concept of the imperial gaze, which reflects the assumption that the white western subject is central and the Other is defined in terms of the privileged observer's own set of values and preferences. Kaplan proposes that ‘looking relations are determined by history, tradition, power hierarchies, politics, economics. Mythic or imaginary ideas about nation, national identity and race all structure how one looks, but these myths are 30 in turn linked to class, politics and economic relations.’

The “gaze” allows the tourist a feeling of ownership which is indeed a common trope in British travellers’ writings about the Roman Empire which they claimed for themselves, not the Italians, as the natural inheritors. The cultural gaze with which northern European men like Johnson related to the Mediterranean was representative of a modern, progressive civilisation viewing its pre-industrial past. With particular reference to Italy, this site is at the same time a space of shared past and an untamed pre-modern present, or a place where the ruins of a common classical past shares space with the sublime ruin of current Italian society whose people are infantilised and trivialised in the process.

During the period of the Romantic Grand Tour travellers increasingly went off the beaten track beyond Naples to the wilder parts of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in search of more sublime landscapes. It was also with the advent of the Romantic period that English travellers became interested in places further afield, in particular, Greece. During the Napoleonic period travellers in search of classical remains increasingly journeyed to Greece which came to be identified as the true source of European culture.

This shift has been described by some commentators as accompanied by a declining interest in Italy and its Roman remains. The Grand Tour with Italy as its goal has been considered by many to have ended with the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars as the

28 Santesso, ‘The birth of the birthplace,’ p. 384. 29 Santesso, ‘The birth of the birthplace,’ p. 385. 30 E Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze, Routledge, London, 1997, p. 4.

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46 widening boundaries of travel and interest undermined the primacy of Italy’s Roman past. However, there are many researchers who have demonstrated the opposite. John Wilton-Ely refers to the continuing significance of Italy, and Rome in particular, during the early decades of the nineteenth century, demonstrating that British travellers continued to visit Italy during the French occupation of Italy from 1796 to 1814 – a period that has been largely neglected in writings about the history of travel to Italy. Wilton Ely points out that Forsyth’s Italy31 was ‘one of the most widely-used guide books of its time.’ 32 Joseph Forsyth, a Scot, was imprisoned by Napoleon for eleven years and wrote about his stay in Italy for the eighteen months of peace between the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1802–3), a period during which first-hand British travel accounts were very few. Forsyth made close contact with Italians living under French occupation including social leaders, professionals, artists, writers, and scientists and found a society which was intellectually rich, attentive to its foreign masters but nonetheless waiting to reassert power in its own right.

For the tourist of the Romantic period, despite a new interest in Greece, Italy remained arguably the prime site of desiring. As Maxine Feifer puts it:

Greece represented one extremity of Romantic tourism; Switzerland the other. But the ripest place to visit, where feelings swelled to operatic heights, was Italy – north of one, south of the other. Italy had everything the Romantic was looking for: a blithe southern innocence, artistic refinement, dark-eyed passionate lovers, 33 “beautiful crimes” and voluptuous death. There, the Romantic circle closed.

Within Italy, as has been demonstrated, the routes these travellers followed remained almost exactly as they had been during the eighteenth century. What were the major centres of attraction in Italy during the centuries of the Grand Tour? In fact, they were almost the same as they are today when these sites of desiring resonate with similar significations.34 The tourists crossed the Alps, travelled to Turin and, less often, Milan, Florence with side trips to Pisa, then Padua, Bologna, and Venice followed by Rome. Some travellers also visited

31 Joseph, Forsyth, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters, During an Excursion in Italy, in the Years 1802 and 1803, 2nd edn, J Murray, London, 1816. 32 John Wilton-Ely, ‘“Classic ground”: Britain, Italy, and the Grand Tour,’ Eighteenth-Century Life, vol. 28, no. 1, 2004, p. 161. 33 Maxine Feifer, Tourism in History: From Imperial Rome to the Present, Stein and Day, New York, 1986, p. 155. 34 There are hundreds of travel websites today that illustrate the basic Grand Tour itinerary on offer for travellers to Italy. These include: ; ; capri-assisi- montecatini-venice-italy-vacations>. As far as the deep south of Italy is concerned there are many less packaged or promoted tours.

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47 Naples, which became more popular after the mid-eighteenth century, for the recently- discovered archaeological sites of Herculaneum and Pompeii. At this stage Naples - or later Paestum further south - was the usual terminus.

Crossing the Alps In Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing, Dennis Porter notes that travel caters to desire, especially the desire for that which cannot be obtained or easily obtained at home. ‘As a result,’ he elaborates, ‘not only is travel typically fueled by desire, it also embodies powerfully transgressive impulses. If, as anthropologists have long since taught us, borders of all kinds are perceived as dangerous as well as exciting places, and are associated with taboos, this is no less true of territorial borders, of tribal or national 35 frontiers.’

In the pre-Napoleonic period, the main route to Italy was by way of the Alps with an often difficult crossing at Mont Cenis. It became easier to reach Italy from Switzerland after 1805 after Napoleon had ordered that a wide, well-paved road be blasted through the mountains and across the Simplon Pass. There remained, nonetheless, a definite feeling of ‘crossing’, a strong sense of moving from one space to another and of the Alps as a ‘liminal space’ with, as described by Chloe Chard, a sense that the traveller was ‘traversing a major 36 geographical and symbolic boundary.’

This symbolic boundary is not least to do with going from the familiar to the foreign - going from the north to the south with all its connotations of difference and Chloe Chard notes that it is not only personal desires that drive the impulse to travel to foreign places but also a ‘striving to pronounce on the spectacle of foreignness, and to compare it with the spectacle of the familiar, from the viewpoint of an observer able to achieve a sense of distance from both domains.’37 This ‘sense of distance from both domains’ is, however, an illusion, for although the traveller is away from home and may feel that this allows for some sense of perspective, his/her attitude towards the foreign will always be coloured by the culture of origin. For many British travellers, as already noted, there was often the sense of going from a dehumanising modern industrial world with all its stresses to an idealised past. This was

35 Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1991, p. 9. 36 Chloe Chard, ‘Crossing boundaries and exceeding limits: destabilization, tourism and the sublime,’ Chloe Chard & Helen Langdon (eds.), Transports: Travel, Pleasure and Imaginative Geography, 1600-1830, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 1996, p. 117. 37 Chard, ‘Crossing boundaries and exceeding limits,’ p. 127.

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48 certainly the case for George Gissing, whose journey will be examined in a later chapter. The poet Shelley described this sense of moving from an industrial north to a southern Garden of Eden in one of his letters:

Milan, April 1818: …Our journey was somewhat painful from the cold - and in no other manner interesting until we passed the Alps: of course I except the Alps themselves; but no sooner had we arrived at Italy, then the loveliness of the earth and the serenity of the sky made the greatest difference in my sensations. I depend on these things for life; for in the smoke of cities, and the tumult of human kind, and the chilling fogs and rain of our own country, I can hardly be said to live. What with delight did I hear the woman, who conducted us to see the triumphal arch of Augustus at Susa, speak the clear and complete language of Italy, though half unintelligible to me, after the nasal abbreviated cacophony of the French! A ruined arch of magnificent proportions in the Greek taste, standing in it a kind of road of green lawn, overgrown with violets and primroses, and in the midst of stupendous mountains, and a blonde woman, of light and graceful manners, 38 something in the style of Fuseli's Eve, were the first things we met in Italy.

Shelley has certainly applied the Romantic lens to this description of his arrival in Italy, and from the letters and accounts of other Grand Tourists, it is clear that there was also a sense of crossing a boundary from repression into freedom, from conformity to transgression. To many travellers Italy represented a loosening of conventional mores and sexual freedom. Patrick Anderson points out the many ways in which crossing the Alps represented, ‘an ecstasy of escape. Reactionary governments, the spread of industrialism, the dominance of a philistine middle-class drive the lonely, the spirited, the maladjusted, the sentimental, the 39 sexually peculiar to the sunshine of Italy.’

The sense of loosening English strictures of behaviour, of moving towards a freer way of being increased as time went on. And the behaviour of the tourists deteriorated – as modern travel writer Tim Moore humorously puts it, ‘What had been intended as a gilded academy of cultural betterment had somehow descended into every gondolier’s worst nightmare…Even a cursory glance at the literature unearthed depravity on a scale to shame the worst excesses of today’s ’ere-we-go Brits on the piss.’40 Indeed many Grand Tour historians describe drunken incidents including urinating off balconies, drunken brawling, crude disruptions of masses

38 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Letter II to T L P Esq.,’ Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, Vol. II, 1840, , accessed 17 August 2010. 39 Patrick Anderson, Over the Alps: In the Steps of Boswell, Beckford and Byron, Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1969, p. 34. 40 Tim Moore, Continental Drifter: Taking the Low Road with the First Grand Tourist, Abacus, London, 2001, pp. 5-6.

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49 and church gatherings and, according to Paul Langford, ‘the undisciplined and often violent behaviour of the English, especially the young English’41 which apparently did not improve with the advent of middle-class family travel. Other commentators have described the high and base attractions of the Grand Tour. Dr Iain Gordon Brown, Principal Curator of Manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland, who has written many articles on British travel abroad, especially Italy, notes that:

Seduction by … an Italian contessa seems to have been as much an accepted part of the Grand Tour experience as seeing the Colosseum, climbing Vesuvius, sitting to Pompeo Batoni, or buying a fake classical gem. Sex and shopping alternated 42 with connoisseurship and archaeology.

Part of the allure of the south was the warm climate which was closely linked to relaxed morals and transgression. Discussions of the arts from the mid eighteenth century onwards regularly establish oppositions between the cold north and the warm south, often, as Chloe Chard has noted, with direct or indirect reference to the role of the warm south as a more congenial setting for nakedness.43 In describing this topography of the warm south, the travel and art literature of the seventeenth century pointed out, when referring to classical statuary, that warmer climates allow for the study of the nude. During the period of Sir William Hamilton’s ambassadorship in Naples, the “performance art” of his wife, Emma, was one of the chief attractions for Grand Tourists. Emma indulged in what might now be described as a version of “voguing” - striking poses (or ‘attitudes’ as she styled them), scantily clad in classical costumes based on the imagery on ancient vases. This would have been totally unacceptable back home in England, but somehow, in Naples where lazzaroni – the urban poor – were regularly seen walking naked on the shore after taking their morning “bath”, this may have been seen as an extension of the idea of a transgressive south and the looser morals of warmer climes.

Clearly the cities of the Grand Tour provided more than classical ruins and high art. A quick examination of common perceptions of some of the main centres of attraction reveals a great deal about how Italy as a whole was perceived by the British.44 Although travel was

41 Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character 1650-1850, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, p. 24. 42 Iain Gordon Brown, ‘Water, windows, and women: the significance of Venice for Scots in the age of the Grand Tour,’ Eighteenth-Century Life, vol. 30, no.3, 2006, p. 19. 43 Chloe Chard, ‘Nakedness and tourism: classical sculpture and the imaginative geography of the Grand Tour,’ Oxford Art Journal vol. 18, no.1, 1995, p. 21. 44 Rosemary Sweet provides an overview of these perceptions in her article ‘British perceptions of Italian cities

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50 regarded as providing educational opportunities, it was also often perceived as presenting numerous temptations to vulnerable young men. Gambling, drinking, liaisons with Italian women and the perils associated with all these, including losing their money, contracting venereal disease, or marrying against their family's wishes were all things that could happen in England, but the stereotype of Continental, and in particular, Italian, vices located more corrupting influences and opportunities for misconduct in this foreign land. It was this stereotype which became so galling to northern Italians who increasingly located the same corrupting elements to the south of the country.

The Brothel of Europe Well before the nineteenth century, Venice was regarded as the brothel of Europe.45 This perception of Venice was one of degree, however – Venice was represented as the most immoral city of a country notorious for its immorality. It was characterised as a place of darkness, decay, voluptuous filth, languor, surrender, sorrow, death and secrets with Carnevale as the emblematic festival of erotic intrigue. Iain Gordon Brown describes Venice as an ‘extraordinary political system and social structure, a far-flung trading empire, the mystery of a gateway to the East, high cultures, fabulous luxury, great opulence, and excitingly dangerous decadence.’46 Venice had no ancient past to attract the classicist, but it was notable for the curiosity of its spectacle - a city afloat - and for its remarkable recent past and present, a space John Ely-Wilton describes as place of ‘manifold attractions, from brothels and ridotti (gaming houses) to opera houses and theaters…an outstanding center of 47 contemporary art and music.’

In terms of naval power and trading primacy, these Venetian glories had passed but served as reflections for modern empires. In her review of John Elgin’s Venice Transfigured: The Myth of Venice in British Culture, 1660-1797, Adrienne Ward notes that in Britain from the seventeenth to the first part of the eighteenth century images of ‘Venice’s contemporary decay’ were used ‘as a foil’, aligning Britain with the Italian city’s illustrious past, and

in the long eighteenth century,’ British History 1600-2000: Expansion in Perspective, Institute of Historical Research, London, 2010, pp. 153-176. 45 There are many references to the promiscuity of British travellers in Venice. In The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-183, Phoenix, London, 1991, p. 507, Paul Johnson refers to Byron’s claim that ‘he had slept with about 200 Venetian women, perhaps more, in the space of two-and-a-half years, at a total cost of £2,500.’ 46 Iain Gordon Brown, 'Water, windows, and women: the significance of Venice for Scots in the age of the Grand Tour,’ Eighteenth-Century Life, vol. 30, no. 3, Summer, 2006, p. 2. 47 Wilton-Ely, ‘Classic ground,’ p. 156.

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51 constructing ‘Settecento Venice as a cautionary tale.’48 Unsurprisingly the British claimed inheritance of an erstwhile Italian empire while Italians of the day were seen to have sunk into iniquity and decay. By the end of the eighteenth century, Ward maintains, British perceptions of Venice changed and the Venice metaphor had declined. This was related to the decline of the independent republic with the Napoleonic invasion and the growth of Britain as a global power, a growing interest in Rome, ‘along with the sense that imperial Rome was a more apt 49 model for Britain’s international position than Venice had been.’

The main object of the tour remained Rome and as soon as the Napoleonic Wars were over, the English tourists reappeared in their masses. There was much that could trigger a frisson of horror in the English tourist in modern day Rome. The drama and horror of spectacles like public executions were noted by romantic poet Byron. But mostly, Rome bore the weight of its history. As the home of classical antiquity, Byron’s friend and fellow poet Shelley was not the first to have classified it a city of the dead ‘or rather of those who cannot die, and who survive the puny generations which inhabit and pass over the spot which they have made scared to eternity.’50 Shelley’s categorisation of a modern population unworthy of Rome’s glorious past was a common trope with travellers who could place themselves into the historical context of the city while still decrying what was perceived as its current decline. For although Rome was perceived the centre of a common European heritage, its modern society became, for many northern visitors, part of a cautionary tale.

The modern Italians, members of the “puny generations” as characterised by Shelley, were more or less ignored by the British tourists who developed a hectic social life amongst compatriots. They maintained their social customs, read English papers and set up their own clubs and social scenes. Indeed, Lord Byron complained that in post Napoleonic Italy, the English were eliminating Italians and art from view.51 And this is precisely what was intended – the English recreated their own space and their own comforts in a place that they considered theirs by right.

To the British the Rome of the present reflected all the worst excesses and debasement of modern times. However filthy, however debased the poorest parts of Great Britain, these

48 Adrienne Ward, ‘Reflections and refractions of Italy in Britain: book review,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 35, no.4, 2002, p. 657. 49 Ward, ‘Reflections and refractions of Italy in Britain,’ p. 658. 50 Luzzi, ‘Italy without Italians,’ p. 51. 51 George Gordon Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals VII: ‘Between Two Worlds, 1820, edited by Leslie A Marchand, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1978, p. 65.

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52 places were seen as nothing in comparison to what could be seen in Italy. According to Smollett, Rome, in particular, was notable for having once been so great and now sunk so low. Terence Bowers refers to Smollett’s vision ‘of the great city clogged with human waste and broken lives and virtually choking on its own filth [which] presents a vivid image of a collapsing civilization, and speaks volumes about why Rome fell and how England might fall 52 if it does not clean house and put things in order.’

However, there was a stop on the Grand Tour which far exceeded Rome in descriptions of human misery and abjectness. David D Nolta reminds us that the negative view of Naples dated well before the onset of the Grand Tour and was confirmed and embellished by a long line of English travellers up to that time. This ‘paradoxical and prejudicial view was of “a paradise inhabited by demons”, a lush, almost tropical zone of plenty which should be conducive to human life and happiness, and yet is actually a place of danger, especially to 53 foreigners.’

Prolific commentator on the Grand Tour, Chloe Chard, describes shock as one means of registering the unease largely born of ‘the refusal to condone particular aspects of the foreign’. She goes on to note that ‘accounts of the unbounded excesses of the Neapolitans, for example, are used in many travel writings as echoes of the immoderation and the disregard of limits displayed by the local wonder, Vesuvius.’54 Thus Naples is characterised as earthy, passionate and vivid but also as being as dramatic and unpredictable as Vesuvius and its citizens as impulsive, capricious and dangerous. Travellers were fascinated by Vesuvius and with its dramatic volcanic eruptions and representations of the volcano became amongst the most prolific mementoes of the Grand Tour. Sir William Hamilton was British ambassador to Naples from 1764 to 1800, during the rule of Spanish Bourbon dynasty in the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily. Hamilton had a passion for volcanoes and wrote extensively on the subject and during this time a steady stream of British visitors were drawn to Hamilton’s residence mainly by the opportunity to view or climb Vesuvius. Hamilton had written extensively on Vesuvius and its eruptions and his accounts appeared in multiple British newspapers and periodicals along with many other articles written by other authors. One account by Hamilton in a letter to Joseph Banks was published in 1780 in the Westminster Magazine in which he

52 Terence Bowers, ‘Reconstituting the National Body in Smollett's Travels through France and Italy,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, 1997, p. 12. 53 David D Nolta, ‘The body of the collector and the collected body in William Hamilton’s Naples,’ Eighteenth- Century Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, 1997, p. 108. 54 Chloe Chard, ‘Introduction,’ Chloe Chard & Helen Langdon (eds.), Transports: Travel, Pleasure and Imaginative Geography, 1600-1830, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1996, p. 12.

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53 described the eruption as ‘very violent and alarming.’ He also noted that ‘Since the eruption of 1767, of which I had the honour of giving a particular account to the Royal Society, Vesuvius has never been free of smoke, nor ever many months without throwing up red-hot scoriae, which increasing, to a certain degree, were usually followed by a current of liquid 55 lava.’

Naples was also as far south as the Tour went and, as such, became a synecdoche for the south – according to Susan Noakes, for the entire Mediterranean, ‘the liminal space between what was European and what was not.’ In effect, Noakes contends, Naples came to represent the entire Mediterranean world, and more than that, a gateway to Asia and Africa. ‘Many authors who never had the opportunity to see either of those continents,’ she points out, 56 ‘described the change in landscape approaching Naples from Rome as suggestive of Africa.’

Before the official advent of the “Southern Question” in Italy, any place further south of Naples was not considered part of civilised Europe. Reflecting common perceptions as early as the mid seventeenth century, John Evelyn, who travelled in Italy in 1644-1646, wrote:

This [Naples] I made the non ultra of my travels, sufficiently sated with rolling up and down, resolving within myself to be no longer an inviduum vagum [roamer], if ever I got home again; since, from report of divers experienced and curious persons, I had been assured there was little more to be seen in the rest of the civil world, after Italy, France, Flanders, and the low Countries, but plain and 57 prodigious barbarism.

South of the South Long before the south of Italy became the South, the Italian peninsula as a whole was positioned from the earliest days of travel as a liminal space between Europe and the Mediterranean. With the formalisation of travel to Italy into the Grand Tour of the seventeenth century the Italian peninsula was increasingly portrayed as a morally deficient, politically unstable southern backwater of Europe. This southern space originally referred to the whole of Italy. Italy was the south and the south had begun its decline by the end of the

55 William Hamilton, ‘An account of an eruption of Mount Vesuvius which happened in August 1779 in a letter from Sir William Hamilton to Joseph Banks,’ The Westminster Magazine, September 1780, p. 475, , accessed 16 May 2014. 56 Susan Noakes, ‘The rhetoric of travel: the French Romantic myth of Naples,’ Ethnohistory, vol. 33, no. 2, 1986, p. 146. 57 From John Evelyn’s diary, first published in 1818, cited in Manfred Pfister (ed.), The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of the British Travelers: An Annotated Anthology, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1996, p. 81.

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54 sixteenth century with the rise of the northern European states as the dominant regions of the continent. Jorge Correia Jesuino points out that,

Starting in the 16th century, England, France and the German states were to become the main centres of Europe, if not the world. The South was looked down at, with suspicion, the “soft belly” as dubbed by Churchill during the Second World War. This derogatory stereotype can also be observed within nations: the Midi (south) in France, the Italian south (Sicily and Calabria) and the Spanish south (Andaluzia). In the same vein and using the same geographical metaphors, cities like Barcelona (Spain) or Milan (Italy) dispute their role as the “capital of 58 North of the South.”

The works of foreign writers reveal an attitude towards Italians of the period as unworthy of the country’s ancient splendour although at the same time acknowledging the cultural debt owed to the peninsula. Joseph Luzzi unpacks the works of nineteenth-century foreign authors to reveal how they constructed the following categories for describing Italy and the Italians:

Firstly, Italy’s magnificent cultural residue from Antiquity and the Renaissance overwhelmed any signs of cultural activity in modern Italy, which assumed the didactic function of the world’s university (Goethe) … Second, Italy and its people were effeminate, a gender characteristic that helped explain their prowess in the imaginative arts and their role in providing cultural access and opportunities … Third, Italians were primitive and violent, often to the point of being murderous; yet this same primitive violence also contributed to their creative accomplishments. Last, and most important, Italian society and public order 59 basically did not exist.

As described above, constructions of an Italy which is the repository of a monumental past handicapped by the shortcomings of its modern society were prevalent and disseminated by such prominent writers as the romantic poet Shelley.60 Indeed, this notion was so taken for granted that it must have impacted on the already existent “cringe” felt by Northern Italians towards the southern part of the peninsula. In time, the travellers’ negative construction of modern Italy came to be transferred by northern Italians to those parts of Italy below Rome whilst a European identity was claimed for the north. After centuries of enduring slights

58 Jorge Correia Jesuino, ‘Latin Europe cluster: from South to North,’ Journal of World Business, vol. 37, no. 1, Spring, 2002, p. 81. 59 Luzzi, ‘Italy without Italians,’ p. 51. 60 ‘There are two Italies’, Shelley wrote, ‘one composed of the green earth and transparent sea and the mighty ruins, and the warm and radiant atmosphere … The other consists of the Italians of the present day, their work and ways. The one is the most sublime and lovely contemplation that can be conceived by the imagination of man; the other the most degraded, disgusting and odious,’ cited in Manfred Pfister (ed), The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of the British Travellers, p. 294.

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55 against their country and of Italians, descriptions of disgust, abhorrence at dirt, immorality, vice, hedonism – all this came to be assigned increasingly to the south by northern Italians. Joseph Luzzi describes this as ‘a situation that has been described as ‘Orientalism in one country.’ Luzzi elaborates, claiming that just as Said demonstrates that Westerners constructed a primitive and archaic Muslim Middle-East in contrast to the supposedly more modern and ordered Occident, students of the Mezzogiorno show that northern Italians promoted their industriousness and “European” character by distinguishing themselves from a 61 “backward” and provincial South.

In time, particularly after unification in 1860, this role of a backward south was assigned more and more to the southernmost regions of the country. After unification, with the new centralised government, the South developed into the Southern Question and as Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Maurizio Albahari points out, ‘“Backwardness” tended therefore to be governmentally attributed to and localized in southern Italy only, and the “South” became a bounded object of 62 governmental knowledge, measurement and concern.’

The construction of the South as primitive baggage keeping the country from its true position as a modern western nation began long before there was a nation. The marginalisation of the Italian South may have happened for a number of reasons and has been explored in great detail by many commentators. Nonetheless, it would not be an exaggeration to assert that a major reason for the development of the South as a backwater of Europe was because it was at the margin; and not only at the margin but with a complex and layered history of conquests and colonisations. There were those who also believed, even before unification, that this problem could be resolved by the colonisation of Africa. After unification, calls for colonisation were based on the idea that this would not only guarantee Italy a place amongst the European powers, but it was also seen as a solution for the ‘problem of the South,’ as Athanasios Moulakis points out, ‘to compensate structural weaknesses, such as chronic underemployment, by colonization and settlement…The enterprise is justified here as in France in terms of historical evocation, which is, inevitably and above all, evocation of

63 Rome.’

61 Luzzi, ‘Italy without Italians,’ pp. 48-49. 62 Maurizio Albahari, ‘Between Mediterranean centrality and European periphery: Migration and heritage in Southern Italy,’ International Journal of Euro-Mediterranean Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 2008, p. 143. 63 Athanasios Moulakis, ‘The Mediterranean region: Reality, delusion, or Euro-Mediterranean project?’ Mediterranean Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 2, 2005, pp. 35-36.

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56 Thus, the desire for its own empire related to reclaiming the glorious Roman heritage but this was also connected to becoming part of the colonial enterprise of the West and thereby, truly being a part of Europe. For Italy, the choice of Europe over the Mediterranean was clear and it contributed to the demonisation of the South. Furthermore, suspicion of the South and recognition of the importance of a European identity as opposed to a Mediterranean one has continued well into the twenty-first century. Back in 1973, Peter Nichols wrote (and this also applies today):

The two types of Italy are not just one in the north and one in the south. That would be too simple an approach. Most of Italy belongs geographically to the Mediterranean more than to Western Europe… Social advance has since become identified with Italy’s European vocation. There is a fear among Italy’s more modern-minded politicians of the Mediterranean element in the country’s 64 character.

The most interesting thing about this statement is that the author has “bought into” the notion of two types of Italy. North / South; European / Mediterranean, is this the sum total of Italy? Rightly, Nichols identifies the fear of the Mediterranean character but this fear has existed for much longer than he allows for and is at the basis of a continuing geographical representation of the Italian ethos. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to acknowledge that concepts of what constitutes Southern Italy and the regions of the Mezzogiorno after unification, have changed.

The Mezzogiorno encompasses the southern section of the Italian peninsula including the administrative regions of Basilicata, Campania, Calabria, Puglia, Abruzzi, Molise and Sicily. The island region of Sardinia, with little cultural and historical commonalities with the aforementioned regions, is included for statistical and economic reasons. At times, the most southern and eastern parts of Lazio (Sora, Cassino, Gaeta, Cittaducale and Amatrice districts) have been included within the Mezzogiorno, chiefly because these territories were part of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, along with those listed above.

Regardless of changes to its borders, the concept of the Mezzogiorno referred to an area of the geographical south and as time went on acquired an economic connotation, synonymous with backwardness and slow economic and social development. Ugo Leone has noted that the regions which were, but may no longer be, included in the Mezzogiorno ‘were

64 Peter Nichols, Italia, Italia, Macmillan, London, 1973, p. 27.

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57 part of an area of poverty and underdevelopment that (in Italy as well as anywhere in the world) was a synonym for “Mezzogiorno” or “South”, as opposed to advanced and developed 65 “North”.

The Imaginative geography of the South Mezzogiorno translates literally as midday, and this connection to the sun fits neatly with Hegel’s schema of history as a movement from east to west (the dawn of civilization in the east and so forth) and from there to the ‘inner sun of self-consciousness, which emits a higher radiance’ and ‘makes its further ascent’ in the west.66 Clearly, the way in which these geographical elements have been extrapolated to regional character contributes to a restricted stereotypical definition of the southern Italian. Geographical definitions are contestable. They are discourses as much as are historical or sociological definitions of a place or a people. Joep Leerssen67 elaborates on the North / South opposition, demonstrating the more “evolved” characteristics attributed to the North.

The oppositional pattern “cool North/warm South” further involves characteristics such as a more cerebral, individualist, more rugged, less pleasing but more trustworthy and responsible character for the northern party, as opposed to a more sensual, collective, more polished, more pleasing but less trustworthy or responsible character for the southern party. Democracy, egalitarianism, a spirit of business enterprise, a lack of imagination and a more introspective, stolid attitude are northern; aristocracy, hierarchy, fancy, and extrovert spontaneity are 68 characteristic of the South.

This opposition depends on perspective and works within intranational, regional spaces as well as between countries. Thus, from the point of view of the English, Italy is the south; for the Milanese, Rome is the south; for Neapolitans, Calabria is the south, for northern Calabrians, the absolute limit is Reggio Calabria. Leerssen also describes how places constructed as central or peripheral activate specific sets of attributes. For instance, ‘Centrality carries with it the connotation of historical dynamism and development, whereas peripheries are stereotypically “timeless”, “backward”, or “traditional”. It is a commonplace

65 Ugo Leone, ‘Development, the “mezzogiorno” and southern attitude,’ Proceedings of The Cultural Turn in Geography Conference, Gorizia Campus University of Trieste, Gorizia Campus, 2003, p. 263. 66 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, p. 197. 67 Joep Leerssen, ‘The rhetoric of national character: A programmatic survey,’ Poetics Today, vol. 21, no. 2, 2000, pp. 267-292. 68 Leerssen, ‘The rhetoric of national character,’ p. 276.

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58 to say of remote corners that they have been “bypassed by history” or that time has stood still here.”’69 To move away from the centre of activity is to move, metaphorically, back in time. For the north of Italy, bordering the countries of central Europe - Switzerland, France and Austria - means being closer to a European identity. The cross-national, cross-cultural influences on the far north of Italy tended to produce the kind of prestige that allows it to see itself (and to be seen as) the “true” Italy. The far South, conversely, could be said to suffer from the fact that it is further away from the countries of central Europe and closer to Africa and the Middle East.

In Italy, alternative names for northern Italy, alta Italia or high Italy, and Italia bassa, low Italy, bring with them connotations of the former as the repository of enlightenment and the latter as a base backwater, which have been, and continue to be, used by Italians metaphorically as well as literally. In 1836, Carlo Cattaneo made the following comparison of cities in the north and south: In ciò consiste tutta la differenza fra i numerosi e magnifici municipi dell’alta Italia e le povere città provinciali dell’ Italia bassa [In this is demonstrated all the difference between the numerous and magnificent towns in high Italy and the impoverished provincial cities of low Italy].70 A more recent example from a blog site notes, ‘My father knew that my mother's attitude was that his people were from bassa Italia, "lower" 71 Italy. This and other factors contributed I think to my father's sense of inferiority.’

The divisions between the north and the south of Italy have produced the conceptually bounded spaces of the Settentrionale (North) and the Mezzogiorno (South). Conceptually bounded spaces, the result of presumptions (e.g. decadent south, progressive north) which affect things like travel, have vaguely defined borders which can change and have changed over time, as has been shown with the Mezzogiorno. Nonetheless, if geographical determinism is no longer given the credence it had in the late eighteenth century, one cannot discount the role that geography played in creating barriers between regions. A highly mountainous country, making communication between north and south difficult, and national unity may have been hindered by Italy’s forbidding natural barriers.

69 Leerssen, ‘The rhetoric of national character,’ p. 277. 70 Carlo Cattaneo, Ricerche Economiche Sulle Interdizione Imposte dalla Legge Civile agli Israeliti, Presso l'editore, Milano, 1836, p. 79. 71 ‘Sicilians, blacks, Italians - memories of race,’ Daily Kos, 9 June 2012, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/06/29/1104397/-Sicilians-blacks-Italians-memories-of-race#, accessed 15 January 2015.

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59 For most of its history, the Italian peninsula was subject to invasions and foreign rule. This history of foreign rule also served to reinforce regional customs as a way of preserving a local identity – in the South these elements together with a difficult terrain and terrible roads, created an insularity that only began to be dissipated in the post-World War II period with the completion of the highway linking north to south, the Autostrada del Sole – the highway of the sun.

Northern Italy has been described as having developed the first urban civilisation in Europe. This could be one of the reasons northern Italians imagine the North as the true Italy, a civilised and sophisticated part of the ordered and industrial Europe beyond the Alps. The opposite to all of this ordered European enterprise is the underlying shadow of its clandestine counterpart, organised crime, the southern response to an indifferent state. The South is perceived as a dead weight dragging Italy down and keeping it from taking its rightful place as an effective, innovative and enterprising nation in the modern world. Even into the early decades of the twentieth century, Timothy Brennan reminds us, ‘Southern Italy bore many of the marks of dependency familiar to the third world: illiteracy, peonage, and bullying by an industrialized North acting, domestically, like a foreign country.’72 The North, with its proximity to central Europe and the regions of the sunset, Hegel’s ‘absolute end of history’73, developed a more European outlook – for the Alpine passes facilitated not only invasion but also trade and communication from the north. For much of its history, it was easier to communicate with its northern neighbours than with the southern-most inhabitants of the peninsula. Archaeologist Lawrence Barfield emphasises the point that ‘the great arc of the Alps to the north, as much as one would expect to the contrary, seems to have been a 74 negligible barrier to communication and trade.’

All this emphasis on the importance of a European identity begs the question, what is Europe? The answer is not as clear as it may at first appear to be. This is a question that has particular significance in the era of the European Union. Professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Valdimir Baranovsky, makes the point that establishing the border between Europe and non-Europe can be confusing. He suggests that, ‘If we use the civilization criterion, the question “where does Europe end?” would bring about even more

72 Timothy Brennan, ‘Literary criticism and the Southern Question,’ Cultural Critique, no. 11, 1988-1989, pp. 89-114. 73 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, p. 197. 74 Lawrence Barfield, Northern Italy Before Rome, Thames and Hudson, London, 1971, p. 9.

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60 Kafkian answers: it ends thousands of miles away from Europe (somewhere in the southern hemisphere, in Australia) and at the same time within Europe itself (in some remote villages 75 in the middle of Kosovo or Transylvania). In this regard, Europe is fluid.’

Identity, personal and social, is also fluid and contextual and is, by nature, constantly contested and recontested, negotiated and renegotiated. The Grand Tour travellers kept mainly to the centre and north of Italy. They certainly did not travel to the “wilder” parts of the peninsula south of Naples. Their commentary was directly related to what they experienced in what were the central and northern regions of the peninsula and it was not flattering to the modern inhabitants of the great centres of Italy. Anne O’Connor documents an interesting case which demonstrates the reaction of Italians to negative foreign representations of their land. 76 In 1826 Gabriele Pepe, soldier and Neapolitan exile and Alphonse de Lamartine, poet and French diplomat, both resident in Florence, fought a duel in defence of Italy’s honour. ‘In his work’, O’Connor informs us, ‘Lamartine presented Italy as a place asleep in the midst of a universe in motion. He called the country a land of the past and called Italians a shadow of a 77 people who had slumped to insignificance.’

Lamartine had written a final stanza to Byron’s Childe Harolde in which he represented Italy as a terra dei morti (land of the dead). This was by no means an uncommon idea – see the aforementioned classification of Rome as a city of the dead by the poet Shelley – but it created an outrage in Italy. It could be that Italians had heard and read enough negative commentary about their country. O’Connor reminds us that, despite Italy being the foremost tourist attraction in Europe, educated Italians were constantly appalled by the negative observations made about their country, particularly comments about the underdevelopment of their state, and the immoral nature of Italian women. It was common for travel writers to remark on ‘the lowly state of Italy and the poor condition of its contemporaries when 78 compared with their illustrious forefathers.’

Increasingly, the North of Italy consigned these representations to the South of Italy and in the Italian nation-making project, the southern parts of Italy were cast as problematic, primitive, African or Arab, and non-white with all that implied. This was the “unmade” Italy,

75 Vladimir Baranovsky, ‘Russia: part of Europe or apart from Europe?’ International Affairs, vol. 76, no. 3, 2000, p. 443. 76 Anne O’Connor, ‘L’Italia: La terra dei morti?’ Italian Culture, vol. 23, 2005, pp. 31-50. 77 O’Connor, ‘L’Italia: La terra dei morti?’ p. 32. 78 O’Connor, ‘L’Italia: La terra dei morti?’ p. 35.

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61 unruly and needing to be “civilised” because, increasingly, the southerner was viewed as being of a different or inferior race. This strengthening of the perception of southern Italy as a non-Italy, as Other in the ways in which northern Italians imagined and represented the South shared some of the modes of representation characteristic of colonial discourse. Joseph Pugliese describes the process of “othering” the South in the post-unification period. He refers to the writings of Northern Italian commentators who referred to the “burdensome task of civilizing the South” in rhetoric not dissimilar to that of Kipling’s White Man’s Burden, with frequent exhortations to take civilisation to a primitive, backward South. Pugliese notes that the proposal for a system of encouraging ‘northern bureaucrats, academics, engineers and so on to take up positions in the South’ was based on a colonial model similar to the House for Indian Affairs in England. He refers to the analysis of Antonio Gramsci and his claim that ‘Italian unification was not “built on a base of equality, but on the hegemony of the North over the South” ... [securing] this hegemony and its economic-industrial expansion through

79 the direct exploitation and impoverishment of the South.’

Studies like those of Nelson Moe and John Dickie examine how the “Southern Question” evolved through the analysis of textual and visual representations and elaborate on the way Italians constructed the Italian South.80 But the southern question is situated within the larger context of Europe and the European North/South divide as well as the growing tide of Italian nationalism which culminated in unification. Nelson Moe describes the desire of liberal elites in northern Italy to be part of modern Europe. ‘Simply put,’ he asserts, ‘Italy was a southern country in a century when the superiority of “the north” was virtually beyond dispute…In the context of the drive to make Italy a more northern nation, the southern part of the country was identified as different. When, in the fall of 1860, a northern general reported back to Count Cavour in Piedmont about the conditions in the south, he put it quite 81 succinctly: “This is not Italy! This is Africa!”’

This notion of the South as not Italy began within Italy itself and was created by both Italians and foreign commentators. The notion of “European” stands juxtaposed to the category of non-European Other. What is not Europe is not Italy. What is not Italy but is the

79 Joseph Pugliese, ‘White historicide and the returns of the souths of the South,’ Australian Humanities Review, Issue 42, 2007, , accessed 5 February 2010. 80 John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860 – 1900, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1999. 81 Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question, University of California Press, Berkeley 2002, p. 2.

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62 South becomes an imaginative geography of a space mired in the past, uncivilized, exotic and dangerous, a liminal zone between European civilization and the world beyond. The French traveller and Napoleonic administrator Augustine Creuzé de Lesser wrote in his Voyage en Italie et Sicile of 1806, that ‘L’Europe finit à Naples, et meme elle finit assez mal. La Calabre, la Sicile, tout le reste est de l’Afrique!’ (Europe ends at Naples and ends there quite badly. Calabria, Sicily, all the rest belongs to Africa).82 Joseph Pugliese claims that, ‘This observation reflects the emergence of a new geographical mode of conceptualizing southern Italy’s difference with respect to the rest of Europe. And this spatial-geographical perspective is often linked to a new temporal perspective. The farther south one travels, the farther away 83 from the contemporary moment one moves as well.’

Off the beaten track During the nineteenth century, as the established routes of the Grand Tour became the stomping grounds of the new middle-class tourist, the desire for difference grew. The introduction of the Cook’s package tours of Europe meant that tours of Italy became commonplace and available to the masses. A small number of British travellers abandoned the Grand Tour route and decided to go “off the beaten track” to find new regions which were not overwhelmed with English tourists.

Travel to the South of Italy was considered the province of the intrepid, foolish and eccentric. It had long been perceived as a “badlands” infested with malaria and brigands. To go south was to go back in time, to visit an archaic part of the continent - prehistoric, Greek, Etruscan or medieval and baroque Italies. Previously, the Italy of the Tour provided enough exotic and fascinating spectacle and experiences for the traveller – Venice, Pompeii, the Coliseum, volcanoes, Salvator Rosa, Emma Hamilton, Carnevale, the miracle of San Gennaro, architecture, art and music to name some - but as the country became so well known, especially after the advent of mass tourism, where could travellers go for something different? The mysterious alterity of the South attracted travellers who longed for difference and didn’t want to go half way around the world to find it. Chloe Chard notes that:

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, vestiges of the classical past supply metaphors for both the two qualities demanded of the foreign: mystery, on the one hand, and relative accessibility, on the other. Ruins and

82 Creuze de Lesser, Voyage en Italie et en Sicile: Fait on 1801 et 1802, Didot, Paris, 1806, p. 96. 83 Moe, The View from Vesuvius, p. 37.

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63 antiquities are assumed to be resistant to understanding by virtue of their origins in a remote past; they are also, however, defined as objects that are not entirely 84 beyond the reach of the traveler’s efforts to understand and assimilate them.

Stories depicting the South as a “barbarous” region had been in circulation for some time and this destination suited those who longed for travel to “savage” “primitive” lands but didn’t want to travel too far to find them. According to John Dickie:

… few geographical notions can have had such persistent stereotypical associations: the South is where Italians, to say nothing of foreign travelers have often found their favourite hackneyed images of exotic and / or primitive peasant cultures, dangerous and / or mysterious criminal practices. The South has been made into a theatre for the “shock of diversity”, whether provoking moral 85 indignation in the spectator, or a fascination for the picturesque.

The desire to produce an account that was fresh and original was also an important consideration, especially for literary travellers and it became more pressing with the advent of mass tourism. During their Grand Tour of 1739 Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray both reveal their fear of reproducing the guidebooks. Horace Walpole wrote:

One hates writing descriptions that are to be found in every book of travels; but we have seen something to-day that I am sure you never read of, and perhaps never heard of. Have you ever heard of a subterranean town? a whole Roman town, with all its edifices, remaining under-ground?...You remember in Titus’s time there were several cities destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius, attended with an earthquake. Well, this is one of them, not very considerable, and then called Herculaneum…This under-ground city is perhaps one of the noblest curiosities 86 that ever has been discovered.

Those seeking difference eventually had to travel further afield for “fresh” topics and with regards to Southern Italy, this became easier as the nineteenth century progressed when travellers like Craufurd Tait Ramage, Edward Lear and George Gissing took to the road less travelled. These travellers were crossing a new boundary, one more dangerous and thrilling than the one crossed by the northern European travellers into the warm south during the eighteenth-century Grand Tour. According to Chloe Chard part of the approach to travel

84 Chloe Chard, ‘Grand and ghostly tours: the topography of memory,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, 1997, p.101. 85 John Dickie, ‘Imagined Italies,’ David Forgacs & Robert Lumley (eds.), Italian Cultural Studies: An Introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996, p. 28. 86 Manfred Pfister, (ed.), The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of the British Travelers: An Annotated Anthology, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1996, p. 145.

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64 during this period was ‘the view of travel as transgressive and destabilizing…Early nineteenth-century writings define travel, much more frequently and explicitly than earlier 87 writings, by reference to traversals of limits – geographical, behavioural, and symbolic.’

The significant limit crossed here - after centuries of ignoring the south almost entirely as a part of Italy - is the limit which was viewed as the edge of civilization, of Europe itself. The bypassing of the deep south of Italy was so successful that travel guides well into the twentieth century left the South out of their guides altogether and that for much of this period, European travel continued to be defined by the Grand Tour of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his study of Satchel Guide books from 1877 to 1912, Jozsef Borocz notes:

The guide suggests that European international tourism is, or should be largely confined to a stripe approximately one thousand miles wide crossing the continent between Britain and Italy from the northwest to the southeast, an area remarkably similar to that used for the typical itinerary of the British Grand Tour from two to 88 three hundred years before.

Those travellers who went beyond the well-trodden paths of the Grand Tour and whose travels will be taken up in following chapters were considered eccentric, merely for choosing to travel to what was considered an outlandish “un-Italian” place to visit, fraught with barbarism and difficulties. These travellers also contributed to an imaginative geography of the South, a South which was increasingly seen as marginal to the rest of Italy, almost another country, closer to Africa or the Levant. Silvana Patriarca notes that ‘in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies ... Giuseppe Palmieri complained in the 1780s about the “inertia”, the “deadly torpor”, the atmosphere of “negligence” and “indolence” which hung over the whole country.’89 More broadly, Mediterranean Italy as a whole was increasingly seen as peripheral to Europe both in location and in culture.

Those travellers who chose to go beyond these imaginary boundaries were characterised and, indeed, positioned themselves as making thrillingly adventurous choices. Travel to the southernmost parts of Italy was not part of the Grand Tour itineraries of the Classical and Romantic periods. Nor did it become the province of the masses with the growth of group package tours introduced by Thomas Cook in the 1860s. These regions remained off the

87 Chard, ‘Crossing boundaries and exceeding limits,’ p. 126. 88 Joszef Borocz, ‘Travel-capitalism: The structure of Europe and the advent of the tourist,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol.34, no.4, 1992, p. 726. 89 Silvana Patriarca, Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010, p. 21.

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65 beaten track and certainly outside the boundary of the “Italy” which was shaped by the Grand Tour well into the twentieth century. This chapter has attempted to demonstrate how Italy was perceived and constructed from the earliest periods of travel to the early decades of the nineteenth centuries. Beginning with Henry Swinburne, I will be examining how the imaginative geography of Calabria was constructed from ideas both internal and external to Italy and reinforced from 1777 to 1915 by a number of travellers who published accounts of their journeys. The following chapter will go beyond the Grand Tour with Henry Swinburne to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

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66 Chapter 3. Beyond the Grand Tour: “Henry Swinburne the Traveller”

As demonstrated in the previous chapter, the itinerary of the British Grand Tourists may have varied over the course of two centuries but the places visited in Italy remained, almost without exception, the same. One of the intrepid few to travel to the far south of Italy was Henry Swinburne and this chapter will examine the account of his journey to uncover traces of eighteenth-century discourses of place – exploration, exploitation, improvement and aesthetics, described by Charles Withers as the four categories of ‘the Eurocentric expansion of knowledge that characterised the Enlightenment.’1 This chapter will examine, in particular, how this discourse of the Enlightenment impacted on Swinburne’s construction of Calabria, with its emphasis on perceived areas with potential for improvement and the disorder of the places seen and the people encountered.

These discourses are evident in Swinburne’s account of his journey through the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies – the sense of travelling through a space little explored; the commentary on how natural resources could be exploited; the perceived capacity for the improvement of the region and its people; and the aesthetic value placed on the landscapes and people. These themes reveal the people and places of the South of Italy measured against the Enlightenment emphasis on reason, analysis, and individualism rather than superstition, oppression and traditional lines of authority, ideas that were not generally associated with southern Italy.

This chapter will also begin to examine the notion of national identity, Englishness and Britishness, and the comparisons made between the people and culture of Calabria with other parts of Europe and, in particular, the countries of Great Britain.

Henry Swinburne was born in Bristol on 8 July 1743. He was the fourth son of Sir John Swinburne of Capheaton, Northumberland, third baronet and head of an old Roman Catholic family. Like many Catholic gentlemen of his time, Swinburne completed his studies on the continent – in his case the monastic seminary of Lacelle in France, with further study in Paris, Bordeaux, and in the Royal Academy at Turin, where he devoted much of his time to the study of literature and art. His inheritance of a small estate at Hamsterley in Durham allowed him enough independence to travel extensively, completing a Grand Tour of the continent

1 Charles W J Withers, ‘Geography, natural history and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment: Putting the world . in place,’ History Workshop Journal, 39, 1995, p. 141.

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67 during which he visited the major centres of Italy. In Paris, on his way home from this tour, he met his future wife Martha, daughter of John Baker of Chichester, the then Solicitor-General for the West Indies. Swinburne travelled a great deal during his lifetime – in 1928 Robert Bracey published an article entitled ‘Henry Swinburne the traveller’ claiming that this was what Swinburne was called by his own generation.2 Indeed, following their marriage, the Swinburnes did not remain long on their Hamsterley estate, travelling as a family to Europe and spending some time at the court of Ferdinand in Naples.

The discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii in 1739 and 1748 respectively had added considerably to the cultural prestige of the newly established royal Neapolitan court, which regulated access to the ancient sites. The kingdom of Naples was at this time, according to Sir William Hamilton, George III’s ambassador to Naples, a ‘remote & indolent quarter of the World.’3 Remote or not, in the 1770s there were always a number of English in residence and sojourning in Naples. David Constantine, writing about the period of the Hamiltons, informs us that there were usually sixty or more English in town.4 Henry Swinburne was friendly with the Hamiltons – he and his wife socialised with them while the family were in Naples in the 1770s and later, in 1793, before which time his son had been a page with the French Royal Family. In his letters to his brother, Swinburne lists the royalty dignitaries and aristocrats he met and interacted with throughout the continent, confirming his place amongst the upper echelons of society. He referred to the Hamiltons several times during his stay in Naples, writing at one stage, ‘Sir William and Lady Hamilton are very civil to us, and we live on the 5 most intimate terms with them.’

From the court in Naples Swinburne travelled extensively through the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies between 1776 and 1779. In 1776, he made a tour from Naples through Puglia, Basilicata and Calabria, returning to Naples but missing Sicily on this particular trip because, ‘The heat I had experienced in Calabria determined me to defer my voyage to Sicily till the ensuing winter.’6 His second trip through Calabria was unplanned, resulting from a spontaneous decision to return to Naples from Sicily by land and not by sea.

2 Robert Bracey, ‘Henry Swinburne the traveller,’ New Blackfriars, vol. 9, no. 100, 1928, p. 403. 3 David Constantine, Fields of fire: A life of Sir William Hamilton, Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2001, p.84. 4 Constantine, Fields of fire, p.84. 5 Henry Swinburne, Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: Letters Written at the End of the Eighteenth Century, Volume 1, George Barrie & Sons, Philadelphia, 1841, p. 201. 6 Henry Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies in the Years 1777, 1778, 1779, and 1780, Volume I, J Nichols for T Cadell and P Elmsly, London, 1783, p. 368.

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68 Apart from his Travels in the Two Sicilies Swinburne published the account of a previous journey through Spain in 1787. In 1841 (well after his death) two volumes were published entitled The Courts of Europe at the Close of the Last Century: Letters Written at the End of the Eighteenth Century in Two Volumes, which consisted of his letters mostly on foreign life dating from March 1774, which were chiefly addressed to his brother, Sir Edward Swinburne. These two volumes were reprinted in 1895 and confirm Swinburne’s position as a gentleman of the English upper-class and the great store he set on being received at the royal courts of Europe.

In 1783 published the first volume of his Travels in the Two Sicilies 1777-1780 with the second coming out in 1785, including plates from Swinburne's drawings. A second edition appeared in 1790; a French translation of both volumes by La Borde was issued in 1785, and in the same year a German translation by J R Forster was published in Hamburg. Francesca Amoroso reminds us that another five-volumed French edition was published in 1787.7 This edition had footnotes and the text of his own journey to Sicily in an appendix by Dominique Vivant, Baron de Denon, French artist, writer, diplomat, author, and archaeologist. Vivant was appointed first director of the Louvre Museum by Napoleon after the Egyptian campaign of 1798-1801. He was a friend of Swinburne who was apparently highly regarded in the French court for his intellect and good humour.

Well received on the whole, there were nonetheless criticisms of Swinburne’s style and the large amount of detail in his account. The following are two representations of critical reaction of the time:

The Reader will also have excused Mr. Swinburne if he had omitted many of his descriptions of churches, abbeys, convents, and other edifices... At the same time that just criticism censures the vast collection of solemn trifles which swell this volume, it is but justice also to acknowledge that Mr. Swinburne has not omitted to take notice of what commerce there is in Sicily, and of its natural productions. He has also occasionally described the condition and the manners of the people. 8 For example he compares the character of the ancient and modern Neapolitans.

Mr. Swinburne is capable of just and even deep observation, but that, either from a deficiency of taste, or from a desire to swell his volume has intermixed with

7 Francesca Amoroso, ‘Henry Swinburne alla scoperta della Sicilia,’ Rivista Online del Dipartimento di Letterature e Culture Europee, Università degli Studi di Palermo, anno I, n. 0, 2007, p. 124. 8 ‘Travels in the Two Sicilies, by Henry Swinburne, Esq. in the years 1777, 1778, 1779, and 1780,’ English Review, or, An Abstract of English and Foreign Literature, vol. 6, August 1785, p. 87, , accessed 16 May 2014.

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69 some curious and important, a great deal of trifling and unimportant matter. He is a naturalist rather than a moralist and a landscape painter still more than a naturalist. He is well versed in ancient literature, and capable of tracing the remains of antiquity amidst the ravages of time. He has a turn too for such researches; but this turn often degenerates into puerility, and indicates in general, 9 not the philosopher, but the virtuoso.

Both reviews refer to the “trifling” nature of much of Swinburne’s content, revealing a more serious expectation of travel literature of the time. In one review praise is given for his economic observations and this accords with the Enlightenment preoccupation with production and commerce, the other acknowledges that he does refer to some important matters.

As for the Italians themselves, references to Swinburne’s account appeared as an Italian publication of 1844 - Della Magna Grecia e Delle Tre Calabrie: Ricerche etnografiche, etimologiche, topografiche, politiche, morali, biografiche, letterarie, gnomologiche, numismatiche, statistiche, itinerarie [Of Magna Graecia and the Three Calabrias: Ethnographical, Etymological, Topographical, Political, Moral, Biographical, Literary, Gnomical, Numismatical, Statistical and Itinerary Researches] by Nicola Leoni. If references by future travellers are anything to go by, this work received wide coverage and informed opinion on the regions concerned for many years. In many ways Swinburne was a pioneer, one of a very small number of British people who had seen places like Puglia, Basilicata and Calabria and certainly one of the very first to write in any detail about them. These were places very few British had ever heard of and could be categorised as exotic, remote dominions within the continent of Europe – places that seemed savage and outlandish by European standards.

Based on the accounts of Grand Tourists, it would be fair to say that, to some degree, the British viewed the people of the whole of the Italian peninsula as somewhat peculiar in their customs and practices. By the 1770s large numbers of British tourists had travelled the Grand Tour itinerary of the continent. The mid to late eighteenth century was a period of British reflection on national identity and empire and comparison with other empires and nations was common even in the writings of travellers to Europe. Typical of comments made by travellers was the following concluding remarks in the account of his journey to Sicily and Calabria in 1791, by the Reverend Brian Hill:

Nothing now remains for me to add, but my sincere wishes, that if any of my countrymen, who may take the trouble of reading this work, shall think proper to

9 ‘Travels in the Two Sicilies, by Henry Swinburne, Esq. in the years 1777, 1778, 1779, and 1780,’ p.89.

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70 visit either Sicily or Calabria, they may gather from it some hints which may prove useful to them in their tour, and some precautions which may tend to preserve them in safety ... till they return to their native isle, to enjoy those constitutional blessings of liberty and order under the benign auspices of the best of MONARCHs, which absence from it must only the more endear to them, and 10 cause them to taste with double relish.

Kumar Krishnan refers to George Orwell’s volume on national character published in 1941 in which Orwell referred to the confusion felt when presented by the different names given to his country of birth, including ‘England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the United Kingdom and, in very exalted moments, Albion.’ Orwell, Kumar informs us, admitted that ‘the so-called races of Britain feel themselves to be very different from one another, and that even the differences between the north and south of England were significant. He consoled himself with the observation that “somehow these differences fade away the 11 moment that any two Britons are confronted by a European.”’

Anxiety over empire and core British myths about national identity may have been concerns for some Britons, notably Tobias Smollett who feared that Britain too could decline, as had these earlier empires, into degradation and disorder. But travellers like Swinburne were busy illustrating through comparison the glaring differences between the people of Great Britain and those of Italy, differences that were significant enough to preclude any degeneration of the Briton as was evident in the people of the Italian peninsula, despite practices such as the Grand Tour which Smollett had claimed as a weakening influence on young travellers.

When Henry Swinburne began his tour throughout the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1777, Edward Gibbon had already published the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire which was issued in February 1776. Jennifer Summit notes that, ‘For Gibbon, Great Britain’s imperial crisis, coming to a head with the 1776 loss of the American colonies, called for a long perspective on empire of the sort that the history of Rome could provide.’12 Gibbon was aware, unusually for his time, of the importance of the writer’s perspective and we

10 Brian Hill, Observations and Remarks in a Journey Through Sicily and Calabria, in the Year 1791: With a Postscript, Containing Some Account of the Ceremonies of the Last Holy Week at Rome, and of a Short Excursion to Tivoli, John Stockdale, London, 1792, pp. xv-xvi. 11 Kumar, Krishan, The Making of English National Identity, Cambridge Cultural Social Studies, Kindle Edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013, Kindle Locations 427-431. 12 Jennifer Summit, ‘Topography as historiography: Petrarch, Chaucer, and the making of medieval Rome,’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 30, no .2, 2000, p. 212.

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71 are reminded by Christopher Kelly that, ‘Gibbon's striking editorial presence forces the reader to recognize that any version of the past - like any Grand Tour itinerary - is indelibly marked by the preferences, prejudices, and experiences of the author.’13 Like Gibbon, Swinburne was, to some extent, also aware of the various points of view of different travellers. In the preface to his first volume of Travels in the Two Sicilies he writes:

Part of my route is fresh land; and where I shall be under the irksome necessity of treading in the footsteps of preceding authors, I hope something will be struck out that has escaped their penetration. Far be it from me, wantonly, to impugn their authority, or detract from their merits, I only wish to insinuate, that, as two persons seldom consider an object in the same point of view, and are still more rarely led by their perceptions to a combination of ideas exactly similar, it is but reasonable to hope that many openings may be left for the remarks of subsequent 14 observers.

Nonetheless, in this era of reason and the rise of empiricism, it was a given that the truth would always be the primary goal and Swinburne himself made much of his “reliable” observation. An interesting example of this is how Swinburne positioned his work against that of fellow traveller Patrick Brydone. Brydone’s book was one of the first English- language volumes on the islands of Malta and Sicily which were almost unknown to the English of the time. It was described as ‘one of the most entertaining works in the language ... not only a most original and amusing narrative, but it contains a great deal of scientific knowledge.’15 As demonstrated in the first chapter of this work, there is strong evidence that travel literature was very popular throughout the eighteenth century. Margaret Hunt claims that, from the surviving borrowing statistics of the Bristol Library for 1773-84, reading tastes can be extrapolated with some accuracy.16 These show that among the top ten books borrowed 17 in Bristol during this period was Patrick Brydone’s Tour through Sicily and Malta, 1773.

13 Christopher Kelly, ‘A Grand Tour: Reading Gibbon's “Decline and Fall,”’ Greece & Rome, Second Series, vol. 44, no. 1, 1997, pp. 53-54. 14 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies Volume I, pp. iii-iv. 15 ‘Significant Scots,’ Electronic Scotland, , accessed 24 May 2011. 16 Margaret Hunt, ‘Racism, imperialism, and the traveler's gaze in eighteenth-century England,’ Journal of British Studies, vol. 32, no. 4, 1993, p. 336. 17 Patrick Brydone, A Tour Through Sicily and Malta: In a Series of Letters to William Beckford, Esq. of Somerly in Suffolk, W Strahan and T Cadell, London, 1773, , accessed 21 July 2013.

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72 Reliability and authenticity In fact, both Patrick Brydone’s Tour Through Sicily and Malta and Swinburne’s Travels in the Two Sicilies 1777-1780 were recognised as significant sources of information on little known areas. In 1788, The Present State of Sicily and Malta Extracted from Mr Brydone and Mr Swinburne and other modern travellers18 was published and draws on the works of these and other authors. The publisher’s preface states:

The following work was originally compiled by a person of distinguished abilities, for the use of some young people, and contains all that is interesting in Mr Brydone’s tour, and Mr. Swinburne’s travels; the very curious observations of Sir W. Hamilton, on the earthquake at Messina ... The publisher flatters himself that it will be found not only one of the most entertaining books for young persons, but a complete guide to the curious traveller who intends to visit those 19 regions, so remarkable for all the wonders of art and nature.

Indeed, one of the functions of the travel narrative was to reveal places unknown or little known to the British reading public. Published travel books included a compendium of facts - history, landscape, botany, and industry, description of the natives, their custom, and their dress - for the armchair explorer. In this case, the book is intended for ‘young persons’, in a version of the two works deemed suitable for tender but curious minds. This kind of reframing remained popular in a long period when there was no specifically children’s literature published. Craufurd Tait Ramage, whose travel account is the subject of the following chapter, was the author of several books which were based on classics modified for the consumption and “improvement” of young people.

Whoever the intended audience, there was an understanding that the works were based on fact and observation and there was some expectation of authenticity. Brydone’s book was subject to some criticism as to its veracity which indicates that late eighteenth century consumers of travel literature were as sceptical as the modern reader, especially where travel to little known regions was concerned .20 In his introduction to Swinburne’s Secret Memoirs of Courts of Europe Charles White refers to Brydone’s “inaccurate” work on Sicily.21 Swinburne himself referred twice to Brydone’s work in his letters to his brother, making it

18 [Anon], The Present State of Sicily and Malta: Extracted from Mr Brydone and Mr Swinburne and Other Modern Travellers, J Kearsley, London, 1788. 19 [Anon], The Present State of Sicily and Malta, p. A2. 20 Apart from Swinburne’s references to Brydone’s “inaccuracies”, other commentators of the time make references to his errors and exaggerations. John Macray, writing to the journal, Notes and Queries in 1854 refers to ‘the hostile criticisms that had appeared at different times on that once popular work,’ , accessed 12 May 2011. 21 Swinburne, Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe, p. xix.

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73 plain that the reputation of unreliability of that writer had been conferred on him by other, presumably more dependable, travellers to Sicily. It is ironic, then, that Swinburne features in the book on Sicily and Malta referred to above – the anonymous volume published in 1788, The Present State of Sicily and Malta: Extracted from Mr Brydone and Mr Swinburne and Other Modern Travellers – which gives equal weight to both his work and that of Brydone.

Swinburne goes to great pains to defend the reliability of his own work and this may be because he received some criticism of his first book which was an account of his journey through Spain. It appears that his strict adherence to unembroidered facts had come at the cost of creating an interesting travel narrative. In the preface to Travels in the Two Sicilies 1777- 1780, he justifies his unembellished style, stating:

Some Critics, I am told, have imputed as a blemish to my Letters on Spain, that I was rather an exact describer of still life, than an acute delineator of characters and manners. To this charge I can only answer, that having detected former writers in many errors, which they had fallen into through hastiness, misconception, or credulity, it was natural I would give into the opposite extreme, and, by advancing nothing but what I had vouchers for, lay myself open to an accusation of excessive caution, and consequently dullness ... I am apprehensive the same censure will be passed upon my present publication; but I choose to imitate the satisfactory dryness of an authentic Gazette, rather than, like a sprightly Morning-Paper, amuse and mislead, by interweaving a thousand pleating 22 impostures with half a dozen real facts.

While Swinburne explains his plain style as a result of presenting unembellished facts, Brydone’s Tour, as described in the previous chapter, was exceedingly popular because it was generally viewed as original and amusing if somewhat unreliable. Nonetheless, there were those who viewed it as a true and honest as well as a “lively” account, as an excerpt from the following review of the time demonstrates:

From the specimen we have given of these Letters, our readers will be enabled to observe, that they are written in a lively and entertaining manner. They appear to contain a faithful account of whatever is most remarkable in the countries of which the traveller writes; and to a classical scholar, his descriptions will be 23 rendered still more agreeable, by his descriptions of the ancient poets.

22 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, pp. vi-vii. 23 The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature (London), April, 1773, p.301, , accessed 12 February 2015.

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74 The continual reference to “true” accounts in reviews of travel books of the period, including those of Swinburne and Brydone, and Swinburne’s positioning himself as an honest if somewhat dull recorder of what he saw in southern Italy, highlights the dilemma of the travel book which began to emerge during this period. That is, of the tension between providing a “plain truth” account and creating an exciting narrative. Comparing the works of Brydone and Swinburne on Sicily, Francesca Amoroso writes:

Dopo Brydone, insomma, l’isola restava ancora da scoprire. Proprio a questo proposito non si potrebbe pensare a un contrasto più perfetto tra l’immaginoso, mondano, divertente Brydone, che manipola le sue impressioni di viaggio quasi come un romanzo, e il grave, scrupoloso, fedele Henry Swinburne, che ha il senso e il rigore della verità e bandisce di proposito ogni abbellimento, proponendosi di intrattenere il lettore con la nuda, disadorna realtà delle cose. [After Brydone, in short, the island still remained to be discovered. For this purpose, one couldn’t think of a more complete contrast between the imaginative, worldly, entertaining Brydone, who handles his travel impressions almost like a novel and the grave, scrupulous, faithful Swinburne, who has the rigour of truth and banishes every embellishment from his work, proposing to engage the reader with the naked 24 unadorned reality of things.]

In a letter to his brother, Swinburne writes, ‘You must not be in expectation of anything romantic, a la Don Quixote or Gil Blas, for I am ashamed to say neither accident nor adventure befell me during the whole of my absence; so, if I wish to excite your wonder, I must make up a pack of lies and nonsensical froth, like Brydone.’25 Increasingly, from this period, travel narratives would become more personal and full of incident to satisfy the reader’s expectation of the exotic space of Southern Italy and specifically, Calabria.

Stressing Swinburne’s veracity, in his introduction to Travels in the Two Sicilies, Charles White makes reference to the eighteenth-century traveller to Italy, John Chetwode Eustace, who, with regards to Swinburne, wrote, ‘I quote this traveller with pleasure, because my observations enable me to bear testimony to his accuracy.’26 Travellers often referred to the work of those who had gone before them, confirming or negating their observations. Over time, a kind of “tag team” of travellers to Calabria developed, many of them more intent on commenting on their predecessors than on the place itself. Swinburne himself is mentioned again and again in the works of travellers who followed in his footsteps, perhaps the earliest being Richard Keppel Craven, who began his travel south of Naples in 1818 and whose book,

24 Amoroso, ‘Henry Swinburne alla scoperta della Sicilia,’ p. 119. 25 Swinburne, Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe, p. 186. 26 Cited by Charles White, ‘Introduction’, Swinburne, Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe, p. xv.

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75 A Tour Through the Southern Provinces of the Kingdom of Naples was published in 1821. In this book Craven mentions Swinburne so frequently that it almost seems that his own book is a commentary on Swinburne’s. Usually, he concurs with Swinburne’s analysis of some classical site, but at one stage he writes, ‘Swinburne, generally so exact in his observations, 27 and so satisfactory in their results, has committed a double error in adopting this opinion.’

Swinburne’s emphasis on and claim to authenticity is curious given that he has already noted in his preface that the traveller can only record what he experiences from his own point of view. There can be no underlying objective truth, then, but only a series of perceptions. However, it is entirely consistent with the practices of the scientific travellers of the period, travellers who according to Judith Adler ‘... sought to distinguish themselves from purveyors of hearsay by strenuously emphasizing their curiosity, a passion that had been rehabilitated to connote scrupulous care for truth.’28 This “scrupulous care for truth” is also symptomatic of a period which sought to represent, classify and order the world with the discipline of realistic, systematic description and the methodology of comparison.

Ordering the world The natural diversity of the space travelled through, its agriculture and produce and the occupations of the native people were very much part of the travel narrative of the period. Printed instructions for the observation of foreign spaces were not uncommon. Charles Withers describes how the taxonomic Reverend John Walker ‘produced in 1793 a set of instructions on the proper ways in which travellers to foreign countries should engage in natural history as a visual and empirical practice.’29 Withers asserts that ‘the ordering and representation of nature itself becomes geographical’30 during this period and cites as an example of this, the practice of displaying paintings by schools – for example as being of the French, German or Italian school. It was also during the late eighteenth century that many artists travelled to Rome in search of classical inspiration. In fact, as attested by Michael Liversidge, by this stage, Rome was not lacking in Italian and English painters supplying the 31 large numbers of Grand Tourists with picturesque views of ruins.

27 Richard Keppel Craven, A Tour Through the Southern Provinces of the Kingdom of Naples: To Which is Subjoined a Sketch of the Immediate Circumstances Attending the Late Revolution, Rodwell and Martin, London, 1821, p. 221. 28 Judith Adler, ‘Travel as performed art,’ American Journal of Sociology, vol. 94, no. 6, 1989, p. 1374. 29 Charles W J Withers, ‘Geography, natural history and the eighteenth-century enlightenment: Putting the world in place,’ History Workshop Journal, vol. 9, 1995, p. 150. 30 Withers, ‘Geography, natural history and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment,’ p. 149. 31 Michael Liversidge, ‘“ ... a few foreign graces and airs ...”: William Marlow’s Grand Tour landscapes,’ Clare Hornsby (ed.), The Impact of Italy: The Grand Tour and Beyond, British School at Rome, London, 2000, p. 92.

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76 Henry Swinburne was also greatly interested in the classical past, describing the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies as a heavily inscribed space, referring in particular to the period of Magna Graecia when ancient Greek colonies were established in the region.

I cannot presume to print a Tour through the Two Sicilies, without offering an apology for its appearance, they have been so often described, that nothing but novelty of matter can excuse a fresh attempt. Our earliest education has made us acquainted with those classic regions; Poetry and History have rendered their topography familiar to us, and every school-boy can point out the ruins of Magna Graecia and Sicily. No country, Latium alone excepted, has so frequently employed the pen of the antiquary; and the observations made by travellers of a political turn may be supposed to have canvassed sufficiently the advantages as 32 well as inconveniences of its present situation.

Swinburne’s classical education, typical of his time and class, rendered the sites of Magna Graecia familiar to the British scholar through the works of ancient poets and writers. This kind of study of the classics persisted in private academies and the public school system well into the twentieth century. As will be expounded in the chapter on late nineteenth-century traveller George Gissing, the study of the classics was a way of reinforcing and preserving elitist pre- modern values and styles of life. Nonetheless, however much the ancient history of the southern Italian space had made it familiar to those of Swinburne’s class, the idea of “uncovering” a region little known to the people of England is also clearly stated in Swinburne’s preface. Ultimately, Swinburne states that more recent travellers, mainly ‘the later Latin and Italian authors’ whose works are little known in England, cannot do justice to the project because they are not rigorous enough in their observations:

In the course of seventeen centuries, the face of things has been so much altered, that the descriptions given by the ancient classics can seldom interfere with those of a modern writer. The later Latin and Italian authors, who have treated these subjects, are but little known or read in England, and most of them are rather discussers of detached points of history and geography, than general circumambulatory observers. They were too little acquainted with the laws and customs of foreign nations, to be able to form just criticisms upon those of their own country; and without some solid grounds for comparison, a writer will bewilder himself in his reasonings, and betray in each page that he is blinded and 33 milled by ignorance and vanity.

32 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, p. viii. 33 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, pp. iv-v.

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77 Here Swinburne makes clear the project of defining self against the Other. With this assertion, he privileges the work of the foreign traveller, the “general circumambulatory observer”, like himself presumably, who has the benefit of acquaintance with the laws and customs of his own country from which to make more solid comparisons. The implication is that the uncivilised world of the Other, represented by Southern Italy in this instance, can only be explained through the filter of the civilised world represented by travellers from England. Regarding Calabria, in particular, this notion of a wild and primitive space within Europe but not identifiably Europe was not a new one.

As discussed in the previous chapter, Naples was in many cases the final destination of the Grand Tour. Nonetheless, Sicily was a destination that a few northern European classicists were drawn to chiefly for its Greek remains. These travellers usually made the journey from Naples to Sicily by sea to avoid traversing Calabria which had the reputation of a kind of “badlands” – a frontier space rife with bandits and savage in its lack of any comfort and amenity. Italian commentator, Rosanna Curci, describing this avoidance of a long and difficult journey through Calabria, maintains that for seventeenth century travellers this region was the ‘ultima propaggine d’Europa’ [the last offshoot of Europe] seeming, for these travellers, as ‘il luogo lontano più prossimo, un intervallo opaco tra due grandi civiltà come Napoli e Palermo.’ [the closest distant place, an opaque interval between two great centres of civilization like Naples and Palermo].34 Swinburne, with his avowed intent to tell the truth of what he observes, however dull, might well have believed that he was in the position to make this “opaque interval” transparent.

Curci goes on to refer to Calabria as a region generally perceived as remaining in a primitive state within the heart of civilisation, Europe. That is, as ‘terra dalla natura indomita e selvaggia, regno di tutte le forze più terrifiche e spettacolari’ [land of indomitable and savage reign of all the most terrifying and spectacular forces of nature] contending that a stronger desire for adventure was needed to make the decision to undertake a tour through the most savage land of Europe.35 In short, Calabria was a place to be feared and avoided but at the same time, a relatively accessible “wilder” place because it was within Europe.

34 Rosanna Curci, ‘I viaggi nel Sud: esploratrici in terra di frontier,’ La Capitanata, no. 13, 2003, pp. 263, , accessed 10 February 2011. 35 Curci, ‘I viaggi nel Sud,’ p. 263.

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78 From the earliest period of travel, any traveller to Calabria referred to it in the terms described by Curci. In 1791 Reverend Brian Hill, youngest son of a Baronet and Chaplain to the Earl of Leven and Melville, described Calabria as ‘surely the most savage country in Europe’36 and ‘a country, which though scarcely inferior to any other in climate and productions, and which for its sublime and magnificent views, forests of immense chestnuts, and stately oaks which flourish to the summits of the highest mountains, perhaps exceeds every other, yet affords for travellers no one convenience whatever; but on the contrary, they have every real danger and misery to encounter, and that in a much greater degree than in 37 Sicily; especially from the gangs of banditti.’

Calabria’s reputation as a land of thieves and cut throats was already well entrenched by the late eighteenth century and Swinburne was not quarantined from this knowledge. His second trip to Calabria in early 1778 was unplanned – he had finally made his trip to Sicily and was delayed from returning by sea to Naples and so chose to ride north through Calabria – despite warnings about the lawlessness of that region. But, as he already had some knowledge of Calabria from his previous trip and having suffered no ill consequences, save the heat, which, found oppressive, he decided to proceed after some consideration, mostly to do with having dismissed his attendants and horses in anticipation of a sea voyage:

I had had thoughts of it while at Messina but was dissuaded from the project by the persons I consulted; they gave such an account of the lawless country I had to pass through, that they made a profound impression upon the servants; but I had seen too much of Calabria already to be so easily alarmed, and that consideration would have had little weight with me, if my faithful campiere and muletier had not set off for Palermo upon my engaging with the French captain. I did not choose to trust myself with untried men and horses, especially as the Sicilians, though very fit guides to travel within their own country, are not so proper for that 38 purpose in Calabria, where they are looked upon with an evil eye.

That the Sicilians warn Swinburne about the lawless Calabrians and the Calabrians view the Sicilians as bearers of the evil eye is unsurprising. Despite James Walston’s assertion that ‘Italy was not just Metternich’s “geographical expression”, it was also a culture despite the massive differences across the peninsula and for the educated classes in Italy and abroad,

36 Hill, Observations and Remarks in a Journey Through Sicily and Calabria, p. 250. 37 Hill, Observations and Remarks in a Journey Through Sicily and Calabria, p. xii. 38 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies in the Years 1777, 1778, 1779, and 1780, Volume IV, J Nichols, for T Cadell and P Elmsly, London, 1790, p. 242.

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79 something called ‘Italy’ existed long before 1861,’39 there remained a strong loyalty to the one’s own town and region and a sense that even people in a neighbouring village might be “outsiders”. For the British travellers of the period the southern regions of Italy were, despite some comparisons between them made in their accounts, more about the area of Magna Graecia. During the period of Swinburne’s trip, there was, as described by Giovanna Ceserani ‘a new interest in ancient colonization’, triggered by the debates on taxation in America. These debates led to the loss of the American colonies.40 Furthermore, Ceserani notes that:

References to the Americas had long appeared in impressions of South Italy, but it was more likely ... an echo of these turbulent contemporary events that inspired a host of Swinburne’s, a priest in the Calabrese town of Roseto, to “ply” him “with many questions concerning” – besides Naples and England – “America”.

The references to the Americas Ceserani notes are those which compare the people of Calabria to the Indians of America. Since the European discovery of America, commentators had observed similarities between European peasants and the Indians of the New World. Peter Mason quotes Anthony Pagden’s work on comparative ethnology which informs us that, ‘The word “Indies” soon became a term to describe any environment in which men lived in ignorance of the Christian faith and of the proper modes of human life. Jesuit missionaries spoke constantly of “these Indies” of Asturias, of Calabria and Sicily, of the Abruzzi, regions where, they claimed, the country people lived like “savages”.41 That these regions are in southern Europe is of little surprise. The turbulent times that Ceserani refers to concluded in the American war of Independence and the loss of the British American colonies.

As noted, in the late eighteenth century, Britain was going through a period of crisis of identity with the British Empire facing the loss of the thirteen American colonies. Nonetheless, there was a sense of Britain as a dynamic power moving to the future, far ahead of any continental nation in its industrial progress and parliamentary system of government. There has been much debate about what constituted “Britishness” or “Englishness” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and I will take up this theme further in the chapter on Craufurd Tait Ramage.

39 James Walston, ‘Introduction: Italy’s 150th Anniversary,’ Bulletin of Italian Politics, vol. 3, no. 2, 2011, pp. 217-224, < http://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_224795_en.pdf>, accessed 27 February 2015. 40 Giovanna Ceserani, Italy’s Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012, p. 107. 41 Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man. The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1982, p. 97, quoted in Peter Mason, ‘Seduction from Afar: Europe's Inner Indians,’ Anthropos, vol. 82, no. 4./6, 1987, pp. 581-601,< http://www.jstor.org/stable/40463481>, accessed 27 February 2015.

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80 There is nonetheless general consensus that national identity was constructed in opposition to the Other, and, as previously noted, the project of the eighteenth-century traveller was to make comparisons between the nation of origin and the places visited. Rosemary Sweet observes that one major point of difference much commented upon by these travellers was the form of government found in different countries across Europe thereby confirming the superiority of the English constitution. Sweet quotes the Earl of Corke and Orrery who wrote,

Let them travel abroad, not to see fashions, but states, not to taste different wines, but different governments; not to compare laces and velvets, but laws and politics. They will then return home perfectly convinced that England is possessed of more freedom, justice and happiness, than any other nation under heaven. With these 42 advantages it will be our own fault if we sink into desolation and ruin.

Sweet goes on to assert that, as Italy was not yet a nation but a diverse collection of political structures, it provided an interesting array of constitutional systems for comparison. British travellers, she asserts, ‘were particularly suspicious of the involvement of the Roman Catholic Church (the archetypal absolute monarchy) in secular affairs and they were quick to look for signs of economic malaise and physical decline in cities such as Ferrara which had fallen under Papal authority.’ Ferrara was described in the most negative terms, and Sweet points out the examples of Richard Chiswell, who described it as ‘a lamentable spectacle of eclesiastick Government’ and Andrew Mitchell who wrote of it that it was ‘the most desolate city’ he had ever seen. It was not uncommon for travellers to describe the Papal States as the most misgoverned in the peninsula.43 The Papal States in the post-Napoleonic period were notorious for their resistance to progress, including regarding street lighting, vaccination and railways as the work of the devil.44 The issue of religion and rule by clerics was clearly a major negative point in the way the English viewed Italy. Eventually, the notion of the worst excesses of Catholicism became relegated to the South.

42 John Duncombe (ed.), Letters from Italy in the Years 1754 and 1755 by the Late Right Honourable John Earl of Corke and Orrery, Printed for E White, London, 1773, p. 246 cited in Rosemary Sweet, ‘Cities of the Grand Tour: Changing perceptions of Italian cities in the long eighteenth century,’ Adam Matthew Digital Ltd, 2009, p. 2. 43 Rosemary Sweet, ‘Cities of the Grand Tour: Changing perceptions of Italian cities in the long eighteenth century,’ The Grand Tour digital Collection, Adam Matthew Digital Ltd, 2009, p. 2, , accessed 23 March 2013. 44 David Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples, Penguin, London, 2011, p. 139.

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81 Catholics It is well-documented that aversion to the papacy was rife in eighteenth-century England. In Travels in the Two Sicilies, Henry Swinburne relates the “slavishness” of the Italians to the machinations of the papacy, at one stage noting, ‘Giannone wrote his “Storia d’Italia” with an eye to the papal and other ecclesiastical vexations, and it has been thought to have contributed to deliver his nation from its slavish veneration and terror for all papal measures.’45 This is by no means Swinburne’s only reference to the oppressiveness of the papacy in the South and in this and similar passages, he positions himself as a “learned and sensible” Catholic, thus distancing himself from the extremes of the religion in Calabria, and indeed, the Catholic countries of Europe. Swinburne also decries the way the priests of these places have allowed pagan practices to continue in the interests of expanding the reach of the church, to which expedient, he writes:

... must be ascribed many strange devotions and local superstitions, still prevalent in Roman Catholic countries, which ought not to be confounded by the adversaries of that church with its real doctrines. All the truly learned and sensible persons of that communion reject, abhor, and lament such depravation; and, were it possible to reason rude minds out of hereditary prejudices, would long since 46 have abolished them.

This strategy of distancing serves to differentiate Swinburne from the superstitious Catholics of the continent and identifies him more closely with the rational and free-thinking British. In effect, he is privileging his Britishness and downplaying his Catholicism and this allows him to maintain a persona that his readers could easily relate to. Although clearly Catholic, Calabria was a space of perceived primitivism and superstition and barely concealed paganism. This paganism was seen as the deeper vein under the surface veneer of Catholicism. Swinburne certainly thought so, even making the link between an ancient Appenine word for ‘villages’ and the term paganism:

Long after Christianity had seated itself on the throne of the Caesars, long after the inhabitants of most cities had conformed to the sovereign's mode of worship, the wild mountainous parts of Italy remained obscured by the clouds of idolatry. The Apennine was full of heathens, and from their residing in pagi, or villages, the name of Pagani came to be synonymous to that of Believer in the ancient deities of the empire. The missionaries sent among them to preach the faith of Christ, found no means of conversion so easy and efficacious as those of admitting some of the names and ceremonies of the old church into the ritual of

45 Swinburne, Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe, p. 176. 46 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, p. 123.

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82 the new one. By thus adopting many tenets and forms of Paganism, they reconciled their proselytes to the idea of exchanging Jupiter for Jehovah, and their 47 48 lares and penates for saints and guardian angels.

No doubt Swinburne may have been particularly sensitive to this more pagan side of Calabrian Catholicism given that in his own country, Catholicism in general was often considered a religion of strange devotions and superstitious practice. ‘To this expedient of priestcraft,’ he instructs us, ‘must be ascribed many strange devotions and local superstitions, still prevalent in Roman Catholic countries, which ought not to be confounded by the adversaries of that church with its real doctrines. All the truly learned and sensible persons of that communion reject, abhor, and lament such depravation; and, were it possible to reason rude minds out of hereditary prejudices, would long since have abolished them.’49 Clearly Swinburne did not wish the largely Protestant English reading public to confuse his kind of rational Catholicism with that of the almost pagan Calabrians.

In view of Swinburne’s Catholicism, it might seem apposite to reflect on the class-based nature of anti-Catholicism in late eighteenth century Britain. By this time there was still some strong anti-Catholic feeling amongst the lower classes which may have been exacerbated by increased Irish immigration and competition for work. Robert Kent Donovan notes that of England's population of 6,000,000, Catholics ‘numbered perhaps 80,000 in the 1770s…few of them occupying society's middle and upper ranks.’50 In the case of the ruling classes, anti- Catholicism had long since been out of fashion although the government held out every temptation to induce Catholic gentlemen to conform and convert.

The general feeling in the county seats was to let sleeping dogs lie but there was still some residual prejudice against Catholicism and Catholics. Whether they were powerful parish squires or landed gentry, Catholics still had to be careful and quiet. It is clear from the literature of the day that there were some radical anti-Catholics willing to keep a focus on their target. In 1813, for example, the Protestant Advocate published the names and histories of prominent Catholic families, commenting, ‘Amongst the English Roman Catholics are

47 Lares were guardian deities in ancient Roman religion, believed to observe, protect and influence all that happened within the boundaries of their location or function. The statues of domestic Lares were placed at table during family meals; their presence, cult and blessing seem to have been required at all important family events. 48 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, pp. 122-123. 49 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, pp. 123-124. 50 Robert Kent Donovan, ‘The military origins of the Roman Catholic Relief Programme of 1778,’ Historical Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, 1985, p. 83.

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83 many ancient families of name and renown in English history. Their present heads are mostly 51 country gentlemen, of retired, reserved, or sedentary, and nearly secluded, habits of life.’

Despite most Catholics of all classes leading unassuming lives, the Gordon riots of 1780 demonstrated, in the words of Nancy Lo Patin, that ‘the chasm between the “enlightened patricians” of the government and Parliament and the prejudices of public opinion, fueled by what the people saw as a betrayal of the English constitution and the English nation, made the Catholics victims once again.’52 The Gordon riots were inflamed by the fanatical anti-Catholic Scot, Lord George Gordon against proposals for Roman Catholic relief. They raged through London for over a week in June 1780 despite the fact that, as Donovan points out, the proposal and enactments were of a very modest nature, resulting in changes to legislation for 53 England and Ireland alone. Relief for Scottish Roman Catholics was not achieved.

According to Paul Langford, by the early nineteenth century, beginning with the loosening of strictures against them in the late eighteenth century, Catholics ‘were unquestionably candidates for eccentricity. Quixotic loyalty to an ancient creed came to seem increasingly English, provided one was not Irish.’54 And he goes on to quote a remark attributed to Graham Greene which claims Roman Catholicism as ‘a great breeder of eccentrics in England.’55 Swinburne, who may have been considered eccentric as an upper- class English Catholic, certainly made the eccentric choice of Calabria as a travel destination. Travel to Italy and the Grand Tour circuit, which Swinburne also undertook, was entirely within the sphere of activity of the English gentleman. Going to Calabria was like going to Africa, which meant that travel there was almost within the scope of exploration and certainly well outside the realm of leisure or cultural travel which was the fundamental premise of the Grand Tour.

With the growth of the British Empire, the British not only travelled to Catholic countries but also ruled over territories which included Catholic populations. In his essay on

51 [Anon],‘Papists in England and Wales,’ The Protestant Advocate: A Review of Publications Relating to the Roman Catholic and Repertory of Protestant Intelligence, Vol. II, Printed for J. J. Stockdale, London, 1813, p. 528. 52 Nancy Lo Patin, ‘Reviewed work: Anti-Catholicism in eighteenth-century England, c. 1714-80: A Political and social study by Colin Haydon,’ Journal of Modern History, vol.68, no.1, 1996, p. 176. 53 Donovan, ‘The military origins of the Roman Catholic Relief Programme,’ p. 79. 54 Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character 1650-1850, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, p. 307. 55 Langford, Englishness Identified, p. 307.

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84 the travels of Tobias Smollett through France and Italy, Terence Bowers suggests that this engendered some kind of identity crisis amongst the British elite. Bowers postulates that Britain had trouble sustaining its core myths that it was a Protestant nation and a land of liberty founded on peaceful commerce.56 The Empire stitched together a number of diverse territories which included regions of predominantly non-Christian populations as well as some with Catholic inhabitants. This would have served to further exoticise Catholicism as Other and motivate British travellers like Smollett to emphasise the difference between countries like Italy and Great Britain, lest young British travellers be tainted by contact.

Monika Mazurek offers another perspective on English perceptions of Catholic countries and this is that they are a mirror of the English past. She writes that ‘Since Britain itself used to be Catholic in the past, Catholic countries appeared to be stuck in the past themselves, like flies in amber.’ Mazurek connects this to the fashion for the Gothic novel which started in the eighteenth century, noting that ‘classical Gothic novels are almost invariably set in Catholic countries not only because these provided an ample opportunity of presenting harassed heroines in the setting of mysterious castles and monasteries, but also 57 because they were in English imagination a kind of portal to the past.’

Portals to the past The Gothic novel, as will be examined further in the chapter on Edward Lear, was informed by travel and travel writing and along with these other forms of writing helped to create an exotic reading of Italy, the southern regions in particular. Other commentators have noted the importance of travel writing in creating a sense of place – Richard Norton suggests that descriptions of Italy in travel books helped shape Ann Radcliffe’s evocation of an exotic past.58 It is clear that Radcliffe had read Swinburne’s Travels in the Two Sicilies as it is cited in a footnote to her posthumous poem ‘A Sea View’ with regards to the Fata Morgana, an optical illusion purported to be observed in the strait between Sicily and Calabria. Interestingly, Swinburne’s account of the “curious phenomenon” was published in the 59 American journal Literary Museum Monthly Magazine in the early 1880s.

56 Bowers, ‘Reconstituting the National Body in Smollett's Travels through France and Italy,’ p. 3. 57 Monika Mazurek, ‘The Catholic as ‘The Other’: Forging British national identity,’ Susana Gonçalves (ed.), Identity, Diversity and Intercultural Dialogue: Proceedings, 5th International Week of ESEC (Escola Superior De Educação), ESEC, Coimbra, Portugal, 2008, p. 32. 58 Richard Norton, The Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe, Leicester University Press, London, 1999, p. 73. 59, Howard R Marraro, ‘Interpretation of Italy and the Italians in Eighteenth Century America,’ Italica, vol. 25, no. 1, 1948, p. 79.

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85 Both Swinburne and Patrick Brydone before him introduced this phenomenon to the English-speaking world. But Swinburne’s description of the mirage, said to appear under certain atmospheric conditions in the Straits of Messina, is the one that captured the imagination of the reading public and was broadly disseminated. Swinburne gives instructions on how to see a Fata Morgana, based on the account of Father Angelucci’s experience in 1643, but he doesn’t appear to have witnessed the phenomenon himself. Indeed, there are no more recent accounts of anyone actually experiencing the Fata, which puts it in the same league as George Gissing’s dream world of antiquity during his journey through Calabria at the end of the nineteenth century. I will take this up in a later chapter but, with regards to the spirits and illusions within the logic of the Gothic novel, there could be no more evocative place than the far south of Italy.

Travellers like Swinburne who published accounts of their journeys expounded on historical sites, matching the landscape to the accounts of classical literature. This exegesis forms the basis of Swinburne’s Travels and there are many examples of this within the account. The following description sets the scene for many further expositions of the Greek history of Calabria which seek to demonstrate that in the far distant past, what was considered by early British travellers as a wreck of a place, was then part of the Hellenic empire which gave rise to the culture of the west. The private buildings of Crotone, he informs us:

...are poor and sordid; the streets dismal and narrow; ill-humour, misery, and despondency were strongly depicted in the countenance of every inhabitant I met. This being the actual state of the town, let us cast a view back upon its situation in those ages, when four republics, founded by Grecian refugees, gave the law to the shores of the Tarentine, Ionian, and part of the Tyrrhenian seas ...... and that their posterity rose by virtue and valour to the highest eminence of fame among the sons of Greece. But this valour, this virtue, appear to have been called forth by the wholesome precepts and severe institutes of the Pythagorean school. Pythagoras ... spent the latter part of his life in training up disciples to the rigid exercise of sublime and moral virtue, and instructing the Crotoniates in the true arts of 60 government, such as alone can insure happiness, glory, and independence.

The reference to the ‘true arts of government’ as the key to an independent and flourishing land is an intentional link to the British system which, as has already been noted, was then considered (above all by the British themselves) as the finest modern example. It was this kind of reinforcement of his erudition and knowledge that linked a traveller like

60 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, pp. 315-316. Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

86 Swinburne – and by extension, the British as a whole - to the heritage of a glorious past and connected him and his race as natural successors to the ancients.

Classical remains seemed to northern travellers to be at odds with the Italy of the present-day and amongst British travellers to Italy there was much discussion on the obvious decline of Rome since its heyday from which it was not a great leap to assert the British as the natural inheritors of the classical past. But what about the current day inhabitants of these regions? Swinburne finds traces of the ancients in the present-day Calabrians:

Experience has taught me to discover many traces of ancient customs in the modes and habits of the modern Italians. Attentive observation will make a person, to whom the classic writings are familiar, sensible of this resemblance every day he passes in the southern parts of Italy, especially if he has opportunities of studying the manners of the lower class of inhabitants, whose character has as yet received but a slight tinge from a mixture with foreigners. He will recognize the Praeficae of the ancients, in the appearance and actions of old women that are hired in Calabria to howl at burials. The funeral behaviour and measure of grief in the Calabrese are regulated by the strictest etiquette. The virtues as well as vices of a deceased father of a family are recapitulated by the oldest person in company. The widow repeats his words, adds comments of her own, then roars out loudly, and plucks off handfuls of her hair, which he strews over the bier. Daughters tear their locks, and beat their breasts, but remain silent. More distant relations repeat the oration coolly, and commit no outrage upon their persons. When the kinsman of a baron or rich citizen dies, a number of old women 61 are hired to perform all these ceremonies for the family.

In the passage above, Swinburne clearly positions himself as the expert in an interesting precursor to the modern anthropologist stance – the objective observer presenting facts supported by evidence. In the next passage, which compares the “vacant” Calabrian swineherd to the most primitive savages of more distant lands, he quotes another “exact observer”, Polybius, the Greek historian who, under the patronage of Scipio the Younger, wrote a history of Rome from 264 to 146 BC in 40 volumes. Again, this ties Swinburne to a noble heritage – any resemblance the Calabrians of the time have to this glorious past is to the basest echelons.

We travelled some miles by the sea through a marshy country. It is stocked with swine, of which I saw many very large herds attended each by one or two youths: they conduct their hogs by the sound of a great bagpipe, playing just what notes their imagination suggests. The excentric wildness of their musick, their simple

61 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, pp. 113-114. Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

87 attire, long shaggy locks, and unconcerned vacant countenances, gave me the idea of beings as near the state of primitive nature as any savage in the most unfrequented deserts of the globe. I am persuaded the Calabrian swineherds of these days are exact copies of the ancient ones; and also that their mode of managing the stubborn animals entrusted to their care has been transmitted to them by a regular tradition: Polybius, who was an exact observer, says, that the Italians do not pen their swine up in sties, but lead them abroad to seek provender on the waste and in the forest; the keeper does not, as in Greece, follow and whip them on, but walks before them, and occasionally sounds an instrument to call 62 them forward.

Swinburne’s description of the swineherdsmen echoes a number of descriptions of abject peoples disseminated in the eighteenth century which included terms like naked, thievish, slothful, vengeful, superstitious, cunning, treacherous, brutish and slavish and were applied to the Irish and Italians amongst others. Margaret Hunt gives the example of ‘Edward Long, the arch racist of the late eighteenth century [who] produced, as part of his influential apologia for slavery, an almost identical list of the “traits” of Africans, whom he charged with being “a brutish, ignorant, idle, crafty, treacherous, bloody, thievish, mistrustful, and superstitious people.”’ Hunt asserts that with very few changes of derogatory descriptors, these slurs could be made to apply to a number of peoples and races, even, ‘for that matter, the English poor (base, factious, promiscuous, superstitious, indolent, alcoholic, disobedient, thievish, and grasping)’63.

These derogatory terms are seen to be the exact opposite of what became the mythology of British identity. Freedom, in particular, was seen as a foundation stone of the British ethos. In this context, “slavish” was a particularly significant term and was used to describe, as noted by Hunt, to most people outside of Britain, Catholics, actual slaves or serfs and included ‘the French, Italians, Irish, Spanish, Portuguese, Russians, and Turks, among others.’ It also referred to those who came from countries which had monarchies that were more autocratic 64 than that of the British or that placed a ‘heavy tax or labor exactions on its peasantry.’

However, at this stage most Britons were not as free as may be supposed by frequent references to their superior society, especially in contrast to that of Italy. In particular, there was no universal vote and social, cultural, and political supremacy was still firmly in the

62 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, p. 255. 63 Margaret Hunt, ‘Racism, imperialism, and the traveler's gaze in eighteenth-century England,’ Journal of British Studies, vol. 32, no. 4, 1993, p. 339. 64 Hunt, ‘Racism, imperialism, and the traveler's gaze,’ p. 343. Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

88 hands of a hereditary ruling elite. In the British colonies, there was even less freedom with large tracts of land ceded to the Empire and, in many cases, worked by slaves who were deemed to be so dependent and infantile, so slavish that it would be an act of dereliction to emancipate them.

Superstition, “slavishness” and criminality Southern Italians considered by the Northern Italians and British alike as primitive and savage are also often categorised as “criminal” and Swinburne does not fail to describe the Calabrians in those terms. As will be seen time and time again, he conflates the nature of the countryside with the nature of the people, in this case ‘great ferocity of character and wildness of manner’ relate to mountainous landscape. However, he does suggest that one of the main causes of criminality amongst the peasantry is the oppression of the ruling classes, elaborating:

It would require a prudent, inflexible, and long exertion of impartial criminal justice, to reduce to order the fierce untraceable assassin of the mountainous regions of Calabria, who being driven by the oppression of the barons and officers of the revenue to penury and despair, lets little value upon his life, and braves danger to the last drop of his blood. The execution, however cruel, of a few banditti would strike but little terror into their associates, and produce no effect but that of ridding society of one or two bad members ; nor will any measures of police ever prove effectual, unless government adopt and pursue, with steadiness, a system that may lessen the grievances of the poor, restrain the despotism of the petty tyrants, and, by providing the peasant with more means of supporting himself and family by honest labour, guard him against the temptation of taking 65 up a lawless line of life.

Again, Swinburne infers the superiority of the British system and the reader would immediately understand that this impartial criminal justice could only refer to British rule of law. Swinburne also makes comparisons between the outlaws of Calabria with those of Sicily, with the latter coming off worse. ‘In actual service of danger,’ he writes, ‘the Calabrian outlaw is an over-match for the Sicilian; but his thoughts are not at all times equally bent upon mischief; the Sicilian on the contrary, has no interval of humanity, when once he has abandoned himself to wickedness.’66 It is difficult to reconcile this kind of stereotyping with Swinburne’s claims of honest observation. This kind of “rating” is not even backed up by experience, for Swinburne’s journeys through these regions are uneventful. It could be,

65 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, p. 63. 66 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, p. 244.

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89 perhaps, something that Swinburne has heard during his travels and if so, could imply that the further south one went on the peninsula, the more the native peoples were demonised. Swinburne does make a similar assumption based on his own experience when he notes that ‘None of the country people or travellers I met on the road from Tropea carried any arms; and yet, if credit is due to the repeated accounts I was stunned with, there are more occasions for them here than in Sicily, where every body travels armed.’67 This observation reinforces the previous statement and could possibly have resulted in Swinburne feeling justified in his judgement on the Sicilian character.

What is intriguing in the two passages above is that they illustrate some of the stereotypes of the South. Although Swinburne appears to have some insight into how the Calabrian peasant can be driven to criminality, he nonetheless displays throughout the Travels and his letters a ready acceptance of these stereotypes. At one stage in a letter to his brother he repeats an anecdote told to him by a priest which shows how the Calabrian is widely viewed as a primitive:

A Calabrese beggar being ready to die with hunger at Rome, as no one gave him a farthing, applied for advice to a countryman of his, a beggar also, whose stand seemed to produce a comfortable maintenance. His friend told him he must use a little art, and, if he did not excite compassion, he must do as he did, put on a kind of Jewish habit, and pretend to be a “povero Ebreo fatto Cristiano”, [poor Jew converted to Christianity] and for that reason ejected from the synagogue. Approving of this counsel, the other prepared his dress in such a manner as to have a very Jewish appearance. Thus accoutred, and sure of success, he repaired to the corner of a street but in going he totally forgot the word “Ebreo”, and attacked the compassionate passengers with, “Fratelli, la carita per 1'amor di Dio un poco di limosina a un povero Calabrese fatto Cristiano.” [“Brothers, for the love of God, some charity for a poor Calabrian converted to Christianity.”] Although this blunder excited the laughter rather than the pity of the gentry, yet they could not help, in the fullness of their merriment, opening their purse-strings 68 to the beggar.

This anecdote is also interesting because in many Calabrian dialects cristiano means person or human being and it may be that double meaning that generates the humour. Swinburne also comments frequently on the superstitious nature of the people he meets in a way which seems to imply that superstition is peculiar to them. Referring to Calabrian beliefs regarding the moon, Swinburne remarks:

67 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, pp. 259-260. 68 Swinburne, Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe, pp. 167-168.

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I know the Italians are apt to attribute to the baneful influence of the moon many strange effects, which philosophers of other nations do not ascribe to it. No Italian 69 will lie down to sleep, where moonshine can reach him.

The Enlightenment, however one defines it, was by no means a sudden general acceptance of scientific reason with a simultaneous turning away from superstition and traditional practices and beliefs. Perhaps, not having had much to do with the lower classes of his own country, Swinburne has no idea of the belief systems they might espouse. However, this is another example (and there are many more), in which British travellers comment on Calabria and Calabrians generally as if they and their beliefs are extraordinary, ignoring the similarities with lower classes everywhere, including Britain. Indeed, who is to say that some irrational beliefs did not persist amongst those of the higher classes of Europe?

Swinburne himself, in his tour of the courts of Europe, was privy to many eccentric practices amongst the aristocracy of various countries. In Vienna court Swinburne describes his encounters with Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor from 1765 to 1790 and ruler of the Habsburg lands from 1780 to 1790. The Emperor was the eldest son of Empress Maria Theresa and her husband, Francis I, and the brother of Marie Antoinette, and Swinburne writes of him that ‘One is apt to expect more from an Emperor and to forget that he is one. His accent is rather harsh and nasal. His French is very good, except a few Germanisms.’ Apparently ‘He sometimes puts on his field-marshal's coat, often drives himself in a low phaeton with a pair of English horses, and two servants behind in gray coats turned up with yellow, and silver-laced waistcoats and hats.’70 It could be that such behaviour by the aristocracy would be characterised as “eccentric” by people of Swinburne’s class, whereas an Italian choosing not to sleep in the moonlight is mere pagan superstition.

Exploitation and improvement Swinburne was a man of his time and class, and in his adult life became deeply immersed in the culture of empire. He married a woman with estates in Jamaica, and after this property was laid waste Swinburne obtained a grant, in 1783 (through Marie-Antoinette’s influence), of all uncultivated crown lands in the island of St. Vincent (valued at £30,000). However, this land also came to very little in the end. In February 1785 William Pitt offered half its worth for the grant, which offer Swinburne refused. Subsequently, a bill was passed through

69 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, p. 244. 70 Henry Swinburne, Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: Letters Written at the End of the Eighteenth Century Vol 1, George Barrie & Sons Philadelphia, 1840, p. 351.

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91 parliament which imposed heavy taxation upon “unproductive” lands in the West Indian islands. This forced Swinburne to part with his interest for £6,500. In December 1801 Swinburne took the lucrative post of vendue-master in the newly-ceded settlement of Trinidad. The role of the vendue-master was basically that of auctioneer, authorised to sell any property including slaves.

In view of his colonial enterprise it is not surprising that, after the classical references in the texts, Swinburne’s work is most preoccupied with the produce of the regions he visited. This is in keeping with the other travel writing of the period. As Hunt has noted, ‘eighteenth- century travel writing reflected the ethos of the capitalist more than it did either the Orientalist scholar or the colonial bureaucrat.’71 This is the discourse of progress and betterment that features in Swinburne’s account.

One of the products Swinburne comments on is the bergamot and his exhaustive description of the uses of this unique citrus fruit and processes associated with the product is typical. Bergamot has been grown for 600 years in Calabria which remains the world’s main source of bergamot oil used primarily in the perfume industry and to flavour Earl Grey Tea. Grown on an 80-kilometre-long strip of land between the Ionian Sea and the Aspromonte, the first commercial bergamot orchard was planted near Reggio Calabria in 1750 to meet the demands of a new fragrance, Eau de Cologne, created by an Italian emigrant to France, Gianpaolo Feminis. Swinburne informs us that:

The Rheggians carry on a lucrative traffic with the French and Genoese in essence of citron, orange, and bergamot. This spirit is extracted by paring off the rind of the fruit with a broad knife, pressing the peel between wooden pincers against a spunge; and, as soon as the spunge is saturated, the volatile liquor is squeezed into a phial, and sold at fifteen carlines an ounce. The caput mortuum is eaten by oxen, and the pulp serves to make syrup. There is a small sort of citrons set apart for the Jews of Leghorn, who come every year to buy them for three tornesi a piece. As they are destined for some religious ceremonies, the buyers take great care not to 72 pollute them by a touch of the naked hand.

This sounds like a good commercial proposition and indeed, Swinburne makes an extensive and detailed list of the products exported from Calabria and he is, according to John Davis ‘struck by what he believed to be the potential fertility and wealth of the Mezzogiorno

71 Margaret Hunt, ‘Racism, imperialism, and the traveler's gaze in eighteenth-century England,’ Journal of British Studies, vol. 32, no. 4, 1993, pp. 356-357. 72 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, p. 360.

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92 and Sicily as he travelled through the regions, reporting that only priestly obscurantism prevented their proper development.’ Although this appraisal proved optimistic, even in the remotest Southern provinces Swinburne was ‘apt to find and approve examples of improving and progressive landlords.’73 Nonetheless, there was no escaping the fact that the region was impoverished and that this was due in large part to oppressive landowners and high taxes and that Swinburne was aware of this.

The common mode of letting farms of baronial or ecclesiastical estates throughout Calabria, is by a lease of two years, with many clauses and restrictions. Proprietors of land of plebeian rank extend the term to six years, and allow the tenant the liberty of cutting a stipulated quantity of wood, on condition of his fencing off an equal portion to spring up again. The Barons are in general very far from considering themselves as the protectors, the political fathers of their vassals, but encroach so much on the commons and the cultivated grounds … that the peasants have neither room nor opportunity to raise sufficient food for their support; they therefore fly to the mendicant and other orders of friars, and take the religious habit to procure a subsistence. The father of a family, when pressed for the payment of taxes, and sinking beneath the load of hunger and distress, va alla montagna, that is, retires to the woods, where he meets with fellow-sufferers, 74 turns smuggler, and becomes by degrees an outlaw, a robber, and an assassin.

As a landowner himself and a member of the gentry in his own country, Swinburne would have felt justified in decrying the practices of the Italian landowner class. The plight of the British poor, the Irish, the Scottish highlanders were not subjects of comparison. This implied position of the moral high ground was not uncommon for travellers of Swinburne’s class and is also evident also in his exhaustive display of knowledge, not only of the classics and farming but also of the natural world itself.

Indeed, the eighteenth century was an era of great proliferation of knowledge and travellers were involved in the project of “classifying” all that they saw. On one occasion Swinburne himself refers to Linnaeus - Linnaean natural history is described by Charles Withers as a way of ordering the world and its geographical and material networks to create ‘a system of nature which overwrote local and peasant ways of knowing within Europe just as it did local indigenous ones abroad.’75 The Linnaean ordering of the natural world, Withers tells us, ‘legitimated one discourse as it helped replace others in the form of local plant names,

73 John Davis, Conflict and Control: Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Italy, Macmillan, London, 1988, p.18. 74 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, pp. 282-283. 75 Withers, ‘Geography, natural history and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment,’ p. 143.

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93 non-scientific indigenous knowledges and meanings in nature and place.’76 This taxonomic project filtered and transposed local knowledge and concepts into a seamless western discourse, a retelling that displaced the local and helped create a European version of the space and history traversed. Swinburne does not disappoint, giving a detailed running commentary on the natural world as he moves across the countryside. At one stage, describing the fish of an area, Swinburne compares Linnaeus’ description with that of a Dominican priest and Calabrian naturalist, Antonio Minasi. But by privileging the description of the local, Minasi, over that of Linnaeus, Swinburne would seem to put paid to Withers’ assertion.77 Nonetheless by referring to Linnaeus and Minasi, Swinburne is positioning himself as a man knowledgeable of the scientific ordering of the world; a man of the Enlightenment, rational, objective – he describes his own style, although ‘deficient in 78 elegance and refinement’ as being one of ‘truth, perspicuity, and common sense.’

In an essay on images of race, H L Malchow names the relationship of man to creation and people to other races as the classification project of the Enlightenment. This concept of race in the eighteenth century, he informs us, ‘acquired a greater “presence” or centrality in the European mind as a result of informal travel, scientific or scholarly investigation and imperial conquest.’ Malchow further asserts:

As the fantastic was exchanged for a natural science of plants, animals and foreign peoples,’ he argues, ‘there was an inevitable compulsion to rank not only cultures but also types of people. This in turn encouraged the construction of a system of “races” of men in parallel with the genera and species laid down by Linnaeus for the biological world as a whole. This search for an ordering of Nature by rank no doubt reflects a hierarchical mentality inherent to the aristocratic European 79 tradition.

Within the framework of this tradition, Swinburne characterises the people of the south by their racial type, at one stage providing the authority of a “learned” Italian friend:

A learned friend of mine, a native of Italy, and long resident in various parts of the Two Sicilies, thinks the Sicilians even now betray strong marks in their character of their ancient connections with the Africans; that the North Calabrese have a great deal of German solidity in their disposition, arising perhaps from colonies

76 Withers, ‘Geography, natural history and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment,’ p. 160. 77 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, p. 235. 78 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, p. viii. 79 H L Malchow, ‘Frankenstein's monster and images of race in nineteenth-century Britain,’ Past and Present, no. 139, 1993, p. 93.

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94 transplanted thither by the Swabian princes: he finds the most evident traces of Grecian manners and turn of mind in the southern Calabrese and in the Neapolitans; but much more evident in the latter. He looks upon the Abruzzese as little altered from the appearance and character of their Samnite ancestors except 80 the slight change operated by a mixture of Lombard blood.

Aesthetics and the Gaze In the eighteenth century landscape art became increasingly important in helping the British readership to visualise not only the exotic spaces of their empire but also those places visited by the independent travellers of the period. Swinburne was himself responsible for almost all the illustrations in his Travels in the Two Sicilies and, according to Maria Toscano, made a good fist of it. She asserts:

Very often the English travellers sketched or painted the landscapes themselves, having taken lessons in drawing and painting for this purpose. The results were frequently admirable, not only in technical terms as regards the reproduction of a site’s geological characteristics but also in terms of the beauty of the landscape 81 depicted, as in the case of Henry Swinburne.

Illus. 3: - Tropea, Calabria By Henry Swinburne, Travels in Two Sicilies 1777-1780, 1783. Print by Peter Mazel. http://www.tropeamagazine.it/iconografia/

These illustrations are executed within the conventions of the day. They are panoramic views giving a sense of the vastness of nature; they are detailed and they eschew human figures except as small elements in the landscape. Swinburne’s illustrations are well within

80 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, pp. 290-291. 81 Maria Toscano, ‘The figure of the naturalist – antiquary in Kingdom of Naples: Giuseppe Giovene (1753–1837) and his contemporaries,’ trans. Mark Weir, Journal of the History of Collections, vol. 19, no. 11, 2007, p. 227.

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95 the aesthetics of the picturesque which developed in the second half of the eighteenth century and which favoured the different, the strange and the exotic, informed by the works of Claude Lorraine and Salvator Rosa. Swinburne’s work is not dissimilar to that of others of the period. In fact, it was the mode of representation also used by British travellers in their depictions of the diverse regions of Britain’s far-flung empire, creating a difference which was, in effect, the same – a kind of homogenised exoticism. In the print above, depicting Tropea, Swinburne presents us with a hill village on rocky cliffs above a rippled ocean overshadowed by a dark cloudy sky. This composition is picturesque in the framework of thinking at the time.

William Gilpin (1724-1804) was a significant theorist of the ‘Picturesque’, his ideas of which were exemplified in the landscape paintings of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. His theory formed one of the bases for the late eighteenth-century theories of the landscape architects Sir Uvedale Price and Humphry Repton. Swinburne’s illustrations combine William Gilpin’s characteristics of the picturesque of roughness (which includes textured or variegated 82 surfaces), distance, light and shadow, perspective, united in ‘one whole a variety of parts.’

Calabria was renowned for its wild beauty as many travellers had already commented on, including Reverend Hill as noted previously in this chapter. Swinburne, for all his pragmatic listing of facts, is not immune to the beauty of the landscape, although he reserves his highest praise for land that is productive. The flowing passage illustrates this nicely:

For the next three miles, our evening ride was up a most beautiful sloping hill, thickly planted with orange, lemon, citron, olive, almond, and other fruit-trees, which, by their contrasted shades of green, and the variety of their size and shape, composed one of the richest prospects I ever beheld, even in Italy, that country of enchanting landscape. I was enraptured with the beautiful scene, and almost intoxicated with perfumes. The river Crati issues out of a chasm in the chain of mountains, forcing its boisterous way to the Ionian Sea, which, though four miles from the place where I stood, appeared, in that bright atmosphere, to lie close to 83 the foot of the hill, just edged with a strip of verdant pasture.

Nearly 30 years later, Richard Keppel Craven journeying through Calabria demonstrated that British travellers remained enamoured of productive landscapes whilst

82 William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty, on Picturesque Travel and on Sketching Landscape: To Which is Added a Poem, on Landscape Painting, Blamire, London, 1792, p.19, , accessed 12 August 2014. 83 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, p. 298.

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96 writing of the picturesque and the sublime. Craven was also seemingly intent to display his knowledge of diverse countries, writing:

Several small towns, beautifully situated between the extensive plain of Gioia or Monteleone and the higher mountains, showed themselves, emerging from the woody declivities around their base, and every step which brought me nearer to those regions displayed the operations of a more genial temperature. The gloomy pines, feathering beech, and spreading oak, had shaded my progress for the three last days, over tracts of the finest turf, or through divisions of green wheat but now the grain was golden and heavy, the vine re-appeared, succeeded by the olive, while myrtles in full bloom, and orange trees loaded with green fruit, greeted my return to these smiling plains. A transition of this kind, which in one short hour appears to convey the traveller from the wilds of Switzerland to the smooth luxuriant valleys of Asia Minor, is peculiar to almost all mountainous 84 countries under a southern latitude.

Swinburne also turns his gaze to the women of the regions he visits, usually finding them wanting, especially in character. In Naples, he describes the women as seeming ‘to give avarice and vanity the first rank among their passions.’85 At another stage, he describes their physical attributes as one might describe livestock, finding them ‘in general, far from handsome, although they have fine eyes and striking features. Their hands and feet are clumsy, their napes neglected, their necks flabby, and their skins discoloured by living so much in the sun without bonnets. Amongst them we may find almost every mode of 86 hairdressing seen on the Greek and Roman coins.’

Often, when referring to the attractiveness of the women he sees, he is typically blunt. To his brother he writes, ‘I never beheld such an ugly race as the Palermitan ladies - quite monsters. The only tolerably pretty woman is the young Princess of Villafranca.’87 Although Swinburne continues to portray Brydone as an unreliable source, somehow the earlier writer gets it right when it comes to the women of Sicily.

I went to a soirée at the Prince of Patagonia's country-house, where was assembled a collection of frightful women, being the principal belles of Palermo. I am sorry I left Brydone's book at Naples by mistake, for it would have amused me on the road, and I should be glad to see how far he deserves the reputation of lying

84 Craven, A Tour Through the Southern Provinces of the Kingdom of Naples, p. 271. 85 Swinburne, Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe, p. 159. 86 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, p. 60. 87 Swinburne, Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe, pp. 182-183.

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97 that most travellers have bestowed on his work. However, he is certainly right in 88 what he says of the scarcity of female beauty in this part of the world.

Swinburne refers to Calabrian women as forces of nature, along the lines of the “noble savage”, endowed ‘with sufficient fecundity [to] bring forth their offspring almost without a groan. It is a common thing for a woman, far gone with child, to go up to the forest for fuel, and to be there surprised with the pains of childbirth, perhaps battened by her toil: She is nowise dismayed at the solitude all around her, or the distance from home, but delivers herself of the infant, which she folds up in her apron, and, after a little rest, carries to her cottage. It is a proverb much in use in the neighbouring provinces, Che una serva Calabrese piu ama far un figlio che un bucato i.e. “A Calabrian maid-servant prefers the labour of childbirth to that of a wash.”’89 Lest there be any confusion bucato refers to clothes washing not bathing.

Swinburne’s opinion of Calabria is reflected in a letter to his brother from Naples and is positive enough that it may have served to encourage further travel to the area by future intrepid travellers. On 22 February 1778, he wrote:

I have accomplished the tour of Sicily, and returned on horseback through the whole length of Calabria, arriving here on the I3th of February, exactly two months from the day I left Naples. The journey might have been made much shorter, had I not been delayed by rivers, and want of resolution in quitting Messina. Not that the charms of that place detained me, but the impossibility to come home by land, and the want of a ship to bring me by sea. Luckily I overcame my own backwardness, and all the sinister ideas put into my head about roads and robbers, and have had reason to rejoice at my courage, for the journey amply repaid my trouble. I met with no accident of any kind, performed the route 90 in eight days, and had the finest weather through the finest country.

In the accounts of his journeys to the southern-most parts of the Kingdom of the two Sicilies Swinburne demonstrates the Eurocentric Enlightenment agenda of his day. His concerns mirror those described by Charles Withers as the four areas of expansion of the Enlightenment - exploration, exploitation, improvement and aesthetics. Swinburne’s example demonstrates the complexity of British views and impressions at a distinctive moment in the development of Enlightenment knowledge, a period that includes the loss of major colonies, the beginnings of a new acceptance of British Catholics and the emergence of a tourist gaze. Travels Through the Two Sicilies is an extraordinarily detailed work covering ancient and

88 Swinburne, Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe, p. 183. 89 Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, Volume I, pp. 283-284. 90 Swinburne, Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe, p. 186.

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98 recent history, folklore, economics and trade and natural history. It was a product of its times and reflects the preoccupations of the eighteenth-century traveller. It also marks the end of a period – travel to Italy was disrupted by the Napoleonic wars, and when it recommenced was of a different ilk, one in which the travellers themselves became a subject of their narratives. Swinburne’s work also introduces the major themes relevant to travel to Calabria which will inform the following chapters in this work, including national identity and the development of the traveller’s gaze.

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99 Chapter 4. The lone traveller: the “wanderings” of Craufurd Tait Ramage in Southern Italy in 1828

The journey of Craufurd Tait Ramage through the Kingdom of Naples in 1828 is interesting for several reasons, not least because it exemplifies a new kind of travel literature on the region which delivers a more subjective narrative voice. Of interest, too is that the account of this journey, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy: Wanderings in Search of Its Ancient Remains and Modern Superstitions,1 was not published until 1868 during the post-unification period when interest in Italy was high. The period between Swinburne’s and Ramage’s journeys was one of rapid change. The French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the French occupation of southern Italy and the ensuing political and social turmoil, served as the background for Romanticism, a movement that stressed individualism and the individual imagination. Romanticism emphasised emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience and placed new emphasis on the sublimity and beauty of nature.

This chapter will examine the way Ramage constructed himself as a British man of his times through his mode of travel and his reaction to the sights and experiences of the south which in turn informs a particular and enduring construction of Calabria and Calabrians. As Edward Chaney points out, Ramage’s Nooks and By-Ways of Italy represents a significant departure from the travel literature of the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century. Chaney classes it together with Keppel Craven’s Excursions in the Abruzzi (1838) and Arthur Strutt’s Pedestrian Tour in Calabria and Sicily (1842), all works within the Romantic tradition of individualistic yet erudite travellers, in this case steeped in the Magna Graecia which was at

2 the heart of their interest.

Unlike Swinburne, and the others who came before him, Ramage’s account is much more personal and subjective. The emphasis Ramage places on making the journey alone and his constant stress on the danger he perceives around every corner is indicative of a particular positioning which is almost that of an intrepid explorer. While exploration was one of the underlying themes identified in the work of Swinburne, he did not position himself in his own account as an “action man”. He sought to extract himself from the text, whereas Ramage is clearly in the foreground of his account. Swinburne nonetheless is obviously an English

1 Craufurd Tait Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy: Wanderings in Search of Its Ancient Remains and Modern Superstitions, Edward Howell, Liverpool, 1868. 2 Edward Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations Since the Renaissance, Routledge, London, 2000, p. 127.

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100 gentleman. Ramage’s self-conscious Scottishness often slips into Englishness, throwing into relief the multiple identities of the Union and how they functioned within an encompassing construction of Great Britain. In particular, this is opposed to Italy’s lack of unity during the period in the South which saw the struggle against the French occupation evolve into continuing rebellion against the restored Bourbon dynasty.

For the British, maintaining the appearance of a cohesive national identity to the world, however many and deep divisions were apparent in its social and political fabric, involved sublimating internal differences and creating a strong sense of what Britishness entailed. This construction involved, amongst other things, identifying traits that were not perceived as evident amongst the people of southern Italy. Some of these will be elaborated upon in this chapter as they are integral to any discussion of Ramage’s work. These include the notion of eccentricity in a culture accepting of highly individualistic behaviour that is denied other cultures - from the English point of view - and is therefore a symptom of a high degree of civilisation. Thus, the Englishman can be eccentric while still remaining a cut above people from other cultural or national groups.

Another underlying theme of Ramage’s work is that of Protestantism, its relationship to the notion of Britishness and its opposition to Catholicism, especially the paganist Catholicism of the Italian South. It has been argued, particularly by Linda Colley in her seminal work Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-18373, that one of the key factors contributing to the emergence of a British identity after the Act uniting Scotland with England and Wales in 1701 was a shared Protestantism which, contrasted to a continental Catholicism, helped to create an identity that was Other. This in turn influenced the way in which British travellers interpreted and represented the country, customs and lives of the people of Italy, in this case southern Italy and specifically, Calabria.

Alone In 1828, ten years after Hon Richard Keppel Craven had made a tour of the Kingdom of the Two Naples, Craufurd Tait Ramage followed in his footsteps, travelling through the southern regions of Italy. Keppel Craven’s account of his journey, published in 1821, was comprehensive and detailed and covered a great number of topics. He gave the population of each town he visited, described industry, botany, farming and horticulture in some detail,

3 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2012.

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101 including the difference in appearance and height of the olive trees, producing an almost encyclopaedic work on the region. This contrasts with Ramage’s account, particularly with regard to narrative voice. In terms of travel literature to Calabria, Ramage’s account is the first to display the modern approach of inserting himself as subject in the book. For Ramage, though, the major difference, which he stresses again and again, is the fact that he chose to make the journey alone.

Although generally the period of the restoration of the Bourbon rulers after the defeat of the French brought with it some stability, Calabria remained a land of turmoil, rife with secret societies and brigands. In fact, as research by John A Davis attests, the region of Calabria was a particularly turbulent one. Of the Sila in northern Calabria, Davis states that ‘this region had from the end of the 18th century become the theatre for some of the most persistent conflicts in the whole of the Mezzogiorno, whose violence was matched only by their complexity.’4 Nonetheless, Ramage, twenty-four-year-old pastor and tutor to the sons of the British consul in Naples, decided to make a solitary tour of the region. Henry Swinburne and Keppel Craven, he tells us:

… had gone pretty much over the same ground; but they travelled with all the attendance of high rank, and protected by a constant guard of soldiers. I went alone, often on foot, without a guard, always unarmed, and only once with a guard 5 of armed men across a dangerous pass of the Southern Apennines.

So why travel alone? Ramage makes the point that to travel alone is to be more in touch with the land and people he meets. This is an idea that has retained its currency within the genre of travel writing and is a variant of the “tourist” versus “traveller” debate, touching on the notion of authenticity. In his book A Taste for Travel, John Julius Norwich makes the same assertion for the lone modern traveller:

They may hire guides, porters or camel-drivers; they may join caravans or other groups of local people, either for safety, or for greater economy or to keep them company along the way; but they bring no fellow-countryman with them, believing, rightly – that such a companion would come between themselves and the land through which they are passing, cushioning them from its impact and, as 6 it were, desensitising their antennae.

4 John A Davis, Conflict and Control: Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Italy, Macmillan, London, 1988, p. 48. 5 Craufurd Tait Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. vi. 6 John Julius Norwich, A Taste for Travel, Macmillan, London, 1985, p. 211.

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102 For Ramage, however, when he describes himself as travelling alone, he does mean without the assistance of guides, or porters or indeed any company at all. Despite the Governor of the province’s attempts to dissuade Ramage from proceeding on foot, begging him to at least take a muleteer, he declines, giving as his reason that, ‘such a mode of travelling indicated the possession of money, whereas a traveller on foot drew no attention.’7 At the outset Ramage is concerned that the locals, finding him to be an Englishman, and ‘having exaggerated notions of the riches of that nation…should demand a ransom, which would prove a serious inconvenience.’8 He suggests that by travelling alone he will circumvent this perception, or at the very least not draw attention to himself which is astonishing given the nature of his dress which will be discussed later in this chapter. He does admit to some misgivings himself as evidenced by his declaration to the reader that:

I do not mean to conceal from you that I have some misgivings as to the wisdom of my present proceedings, and feel considerable alarm from the reports that have reached me from all quarters respecting the unsettled state of the country. Be assured, however, that I shall take every precaution that prudence may dictate, 9 except giving up my onward movement.

In spite of his own declared fears, Ramage would not be deterred from his stated objective of visiting every classical site on the Italian peninsula including those within the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. During the period in which Ramage made his journey through Calabria, the idea of a man travelling alone to “dangerous” places could have been considered foolhardy but nonetheless courageous and character-building. Indeed, even modern reviews of Ramage’s account remark on Ramage and his trip approvingly as a remarkable example of what a man of spirit, honesty and commonsense can achieve.10. To make such a journey as a woman unaccompanied by a man would have been an entirely different matter as Chapter 7 will demonstrate. Ramage asserts at the beginning of his book that, ‘I believe that I accomplished what had never, so far as I am aware, been attempted before.’11 It is not unreasonable, then, to assume that Ramage, like the anonymous female author whose work is discussed in Chapter 7 (who was in fact Emily Lowe), seized upon an idea that would set him apart from other travellers to Calabria. To go “alone” would have appeared just as reckless as going there as an “unprotected” female. Furthermore, stressing Calabria as a land of

7 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 83. 8 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 70. 9 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 83. 10 Laurence Collier, ‘Review: Ramage in South Italy: The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy by Craufurd Tait Ramage,’ The Geographical Journal, vol. 132, no. 2, 1966, p. 281. 11 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. vi.

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103 brigandism may have seemed to him a way to make his story more compelling and himself, more adventurous.

The trope of brigands and danger and blood-curdling tales were to become more and more a feature of the narratives of travellers who followed Ramage. Although Ramage did not publish the account of this journey until 40 years after the event, it seems clear that he did intend to publish. A review from The Spectator of 1868 notes Ramage’s own reason for being deterred from publishing as his for ‘fear of bringing trouble on some of his friends at the hands of a suspicious government.’12 The same article makes the point that nothing had changed in the years between Ramage’s journey and the publication of his account confirming the idea of a place lost in time, so that it can be provide useful information to the current-day traveller. ‘Of any other country, the impressions recorded so long ago would probably be of little value at the present time,’ the article claims, ‘but the traveller of to-day in Apulia and Calabria would find the inhabitants of those seldom-travelled regions totally un-changed. Dr. Ramage's descriptions of scenery and localities are very vivid, and his book will be found both interesting and valuable to the antiquary, the lover of nature, and the more travelling idler.’13 This denotation of a travelling idler brings to mind the armchair traveller who can vicariously experience with the dangers that Ramage described in his account without leaving home. These dangers were reinforced by newspapers and periodicals of the period following French occupation which were full of tales of the brigands of the southern regions like the following published in 1821:

The brigands of Calabria, as well as those on the road from Rome to Naples, are the real masters of the country. These bands are chiefly composed of inhabitants of those countries, or disbanded soldiers who were first driven to- this course by want of employment and extreme distress, but who now find it a trade, which from day to day grows more and more lucrative ... Concealed within the mountains bordering upon the great roads, the intrepidity, the coolness, and above all the tactics of these men too plainly betray the former profession of their 14 leaders.

Throughout his account, Ramage continues to take great pains to make the reader aware of the courageousness of his undertaking, stressing the danger of his activity and setting

12 ‘Current literature: The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy by Craufurd Tait Ramage,’ The Spectator, 31 October 1868, p. 21, , accessed 4 June, 2010. 13 ‘Current literature: The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy by Craufurd Tait Ramage,’ p. 21. 14 ‘The Banditti of Calabria and the Roman States,’ Royal Cornwall Gazette, 13 January 1821, p. 4, , accessed 12 August 2014.

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104 himself up as an intrepid adventurer placing his life in constant danger. Like most travellers to Calabria, the folly and danger of his endeavour was impressed upon him in Naples before setting out:

…and passing into the country of the Bruttii, the modern Calabria, said to be the native country of brigands. Of course, I cannot altogether divest myself of this idea, which was so impressed upon me before I left Naples, and I feel not 15 altogether at my ease.

In fact, he feels so ill at ease that, on leaving a village and travelling through a lonely spot, he immediately fears the worst when sensing someone nearby:

I regretted that I had no weapon of defence, as it was disagreeable thus to be at the mercy of a single man. However I had no alternative except to advance, and on approaching nearer, my anxiety was relieved as I saw that he was a man far advanced in years, with whom I could have no difficulty in coping, even if he 16 were armed.

At this stage Ramage does not think to brandish his trusted umbrella – an object he claims might protect him should he face danger. He makes similar declarations of perceived or impending danger regularly throughout the text. ‘Thank God,’ he writes at one stage, ‘I was neither robbed nor murdered last night, though I had some doubts whether I should again see the light of day.’17 On another occasion he tells us ‘...and then I intend to strike into the centre of Calabria, said to be, so far as I can understand, a rather dangerous enterprise.’18 In this way Ramage positions himself alongside travellers to more exotic and less known territories, creating a simultaneous perception of himself as a valiant explorer of a savage region and Calabria as a land akin to those of Africa.

Ramage’s constant references to criminality confirm the stereotypes of Calabria which circulated within Italy and had spread to England through stories of brigands and depictions of a fearsome people like those of Salvator Rosa which had originated in the previous century. It is not long into his account that Ramage introduces us to ‘several Salvator Rosa looking men, their countenances exhibiting the same angular form and the same dark eye piercing eye. Some had evidently drunk a sufficient quantity of my host's wine, and were very boisterous in

15 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 55. 16 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 55. 17 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 44. 18 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 58.

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105 their mirth; but, as I was aware of the excitable temperaments of the southern Italian, I did not 19 know how soon their knives might be at each other's throats.’

Charles MacFarlane who published a book in 1833 on the lives and exploits of banditti and who describes Calabria as the ‘land of brigandism par excellence,’20 claims that his interest in this subject was ‘strengthened and prolonged by the pictures of Salvator Rosa.’21 Salvator Rosa was born in Naples in 1615. He was renowned for his brooding dark canvases, featuring ruins and brigands and was even claimed by some sources to have spent time living with brigands in the mountains of the Abruzzi. The influence of Rosa and the continuing association of his work and the Calabrian character and landscape lasted well into the Victorian period and the chapter on Edward Lear will explore this connection in more detail. There are many instances of the wild Salvator Rosa type in Nooks and By-Ways including the following:

On the sand, in various picturesque postures, lay the boatmen, with their long coal-black hair flowing negligently over their shoulders, a custom which they have inherited from their Bruttian ancestors. In the back sat a wild Calabrian peasant from the lofty mountains of the Silla ... His jacket was of sheepskin, on which the wool still hung, and which, he told me, was turned inwards during the severity of the winter; the lower part of his dress was of goat-skins; his feet were protected by a kind of sandal, which was strapped by a cord made of goat's hair. I do not think that he was a good specimen of the virile Calabrese peasant, as he had none of the boldness and independence of gait which I had expected to find. There was a low cunning in his eye, which augured that he was ready for any mean act of treachery; but for a valorous deed of lawless violence little 22 dependence could be placed on him.

Dressed almost entirely in animal skins, this depiction of a “wild” mountain man serves to reinforce an image of a land lost in time. The man Ramage describes is barely human with the cunning and treachery of a predator. It is with images like these that Ramage heightens the sense of danger and creates drama even where none may exist.

Umbrella eccentricity Ramage was the author of several books, among them Beautiful Thoughts from Greek Authors, 1864; Beautiful Thoughts from Latin Authors, 1864; Beautiful Thoughts from French

19 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, pp. 13-14. 20 Charles MacFarlane, The Lives and Exploits of Banditti and Robbers in All Parts of the World, Vol. I, Edward Bull, London, 1833, p. 5. 21 MacFarlane, The Lives and Exploits of Banditti, p. 8. 22 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, pp. 68-69.

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106 and Italian Authors, 1865 and Beautiful Thoughts from German and Spanish Authors, 1868. These titles were obviously popular enough for Ramage to produce a whole series and in the preface to Beautiful Thoughts from French and Italian Authors, he writes:

The Editor is glad to know, by the favour with which his two former works from Latin and Greek Authors have been received, that he was not mistaken in thinking that there must be a large number of readers whose tastes were so far uncorrupted by the frivolous literature of the day, that they could still enjoy the 23 more substantial and simple food which the earlier ages supply.

While they may sound like precursors to the New Age publishing phenomenon, these titles were in the tradition of the mid-to-late nineteenth century literature of “improvement”. Uneasy with the unexpurgated originals of the Latin, French, and other “classics” and fearful that they may fall into the hands of the impressionable young, many such texts as Ramage’s were produced which extracted what was deemed valuable in the classics, whilst ditching all that would be considered unsuitable. Ramage, a dominie, was clearly a man of faith and a “right-minded” British citizen of his times and as a classicist was invested in bringing timeless works of the past to a young readership. Provided, of course, that these texts were rendered appropriate. His Nooks and By-Ways was clearly intended for a different audience and displayed no effort to protect the reader from the fearful “truth” of life in Calabria. Quite the opposite.

Ramage could also be described as eccentric in the classic English mould. Originality of character was tolerated amongst the British because it was a fundamentally conservative trait which did not challenge the status quo while at the same time symbolising individual freedom. This idea of freedom is one of the concepts which underpins the construction of the English identity. Eccentricity in the English model is also a declaration of independence, an assertion of the English person's right to be an individual, particularly if one is a member of the upper classes while never translating into the revolutionary spirit so abhorred in the French and other continentals. 24 However, as Isabel Taylor points out, it is a trait that is almost never admired ‘in foreigners, in whom eccentric behaviour is often written off as 25 “peculiar”, which is certainly not a compliment.’

23 Craufurd Tait Ramage, Beautiful Thoughts from French and Italian Authors: With English Translations and Lives of the Authors, an English Index of Subjects Analytically Arranged, Also Numerous References to Parallel Passages from Latin, Greek, and English Authors, E. Howell, London, 1866, p. xi. 24 Paul Langford, ‘Chapter six: Eccentricity,’ Englishness Identified: Manners and Character 1650-1850, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, pp. 267-311. 25 Isabel Taylor, ‘Exploring Englishness Part 6,’ Albion Magazine Online: Exploring English Identity and the

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107

The English were renowned for eccentricity both at home and abroad. In Italy, as well as other whistle stops on the Grand Tour, English travellers had acquired a reputation for eccentricity long before the onset of mass tourism in the Victorian period. In his book, Englishness Identified, Paul Langford asserts that the term “eccentricity” came into vogue after the 1790s and is no older than the 1770s.26 Paul Langford quotes Hazlitt who wrote, ‘An awkward Englishman has an advantage in going abroad. Instead of having his deficiency 27 more remarked, it is less so; for all Englishmen are thought awkward alike.’

Although a Scot, Ramage was clearly comfortable to be identified as English by the Italians. From the outset of his tour, Ramage describes himself as an Englishman – and suggests that this is for ease of understanding. The Calabrians he meets accept him, and indeed welcome him as an Englishman and are curious about England, but there is nothing to indicate that they would not have been equally welcoming and curious about a Scotsman. The conflation of Scottishness with Englishness was a trend amongst men of Ramage’s class in the service of the British identity. Scots travel writer Samuel Laing produced five volumes of European travel writing published between 1836 and 1852. His stance was not dissimilar to Ramage’s as Peter Mandler illustrates:

Laing’s Scottishness did not inhibit him from pronouncing upon the superiority of the English national character. He did this alternately by subsuming the Scottish within the English character – a common practice among Scottish writers on national character keen to obscure the more barbaric aspects of pre-union Scottish society – and, occasionally, by differentiating the Scottish character where it had 28 some credible claim to superiority – for instance, in the diffusion of education.

Looking for accommodation on the first night of his journey, Ramage arrives at 10pm at a locanda [inn]in Paestum which is closed. He knocks anyway and a voice asks ‘Chi è?’ [who is it?] He replies, ‘un inglese’ - an Englishman. 29 South of Naples, in Agropoli, great interest is shown in him by the peasants who are possibly taken aback by his appearance as much as his Englishness. Ramage chooses to believe that it is the latter reason that attracts their

Highways and Byways of English Culture Since 2004, 2006, , accessed 4 June, 2010. 26 Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character 1650-1850, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, p. 301. 27 Langford, Englishness Identified, p. 287. 28 Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2008, p. 48. 29 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 7.

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108 attention. He writes, ‘The door was crowded, and they were climbing on each other’s backs to look in at the windows. I was, no doubt, regarded as a great curiosity as no Englishman had ever probably passed through the village before. I may tell you, that to declare yourself an inglese secures respect wherever you go, and I am sorry to think that a scozzese [Scotsman] 30 would not sound so important in their ears.’

Ramage’s “English” eccentricity is evidenced not only by virtue of the series of “Beautiful thoughts” titles – in his trip to Calabria, alone and on foot, he describes his mode of travel dress thus:

I have a white merino frock-coat, well furnished with capacious pockets into which I have stuffed my maps and note-books: nankeen trousers, a large-brimmed 31 straw hat, white shoes and an umbrella.

This last object was not taken to protect him from the fierce southern sun, but, as he explains, in the event of an encounter with brigands,

As for myself, my only weapon of defence, if weapon it could be called, was my dilapidated umbrella, which I fear the Italian brigands would not be inclined to consider very formidable. If we met them, however, I intend to flourish it in the way we sometimes alarm cattle; and as they are probably unacquainted with such 32 an article, they might imagine it some deadly weapon of war, and take to flight.

Fortunately, he met no brigands. Again, it seems that Ramage is constructing himself as a British adventurer into “darkest Calabria” where the natives are so unexposed to civilised amenities that they wouldn’t recognise an umbrella and indeed may even be threatened by one. It is highly likely that Ramage is self-ironising here, however, the likening of native Calabrese with cattle also highlights the way in which the privileged British traveller viewed the lower classes of Calabria as fauna or background colour and I will return to that theme later in the chapter.

I stress the umbrella because it does seem to become emblematic of the way Ramage positions himself throughout the work – as an eccentric Englishman; as a man from a more civilised place travelling through a pre-modern space. Norman Douglas, another Scot who

30 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 14. 31 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 8. 32 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 119.

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109 travelled to Calabria and whose work, Old Calabria,33 will be examined later in this study, wrote fondly of Ramage in his autobiographical work Alone.34 One of the things he referred to was the umbrella, noting that ‘It pervades the volume like a leitmotif.’35 At one stage, Ramage uses it to defend himself against a pack of dogs:

The inhabitants were nowhere to be seen, while it swarmed with dogs, who commenced a fierce attack, and whom I kept at bay as well as I could with my umbrella, roaring lustily for assistance. This brought out several of the 36 peasants…

Douglas also makes reference to Ramage’s choice of white frock coat – he notes that although this was a popular choice with English travellers of the period, ‘it must have inspired feelings akin to awe in the minds of the natives, for white is their bête noire[sic]. They have a rooted aversion to it and never employ it in their clothing, because it suggests to their fancy the idea of bloodlessness – of anaemia and of death.’37 This aversion may be more to do with the fact that one of the daily struggles was against dirt in Calabria, especially in remote mountain towns. In many places in Calabria, the word for pretty is pulita, meaning clean. Perhaps they didn’t wear white coats for practical rather than superstitious reasons. Likewise, Ramage’s white outfit wouldn’t have stayed pristine for very long on a pedestrian tour of a largely rural south.

A choice of white coat would indeed have seemed a strange choice for pedestrian travel but on the whole, though perplexed about his reasons for travelling through their region, the people of Calabria seem to react with equanimity to the presence of a strangely clothed foreigner in their midst. Early on in his journey near the town of Nocera, humble shepherds allow him to ‘breakfast on excellent curds.’38 This follows an incident where Ramage, ‘meditating on the follies and superstitions of mankind ... was brought with great violence to the floor’, his head saved by his knapsack but his clothes became ‘covered with green moss, 39 so that, he tells us, he had ‘more the appearance of a merman than of the human being.’

Douglas does have much in common with Ramage, both of them constructing a

33 Norman Douglas, Old Calabria, Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1962. 34 Norman Douglas, Alone, The Project Gutenberg EBook, 2005, no page numbers, , accessed 28 June 2010 35 Douglas, Alone, no page numbers. 36 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 20. 37 Douglas, Alone, no page numbers. 38 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 90. 39 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p.57.

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110 Calabria as unchangeable, a place lost in time like Brigadoon, which is not uncommon to the accounts of many of the other British travellers through the region. It is interesting to note, too, that both Scotsmen use the word “alone” to symbolise individuality, positioning themselves as having taken “the road less travelled.”

Identities The question of British identity is an underlying theme in Nooks and By-Ways and the Italian people of southern Italy and their country are constructed in contrast to the British and Great Britain. At one stage Ramage recounts an incident during his stay in Maida where he passes the time with a judge and his associates – one of whom remarks ‘that he was afraid that the Italians had changed places with the Ultimi Britanni, and that high civilisation had passed from Italy to Great Britain, which now occupied the noble position in the world which their ancestors had maintained in former times.’40 This claim for Great Britain as inheritors of the Roman Empire is stirring stuff indeed and not uncommon for the period and has been elaborated upon in a previous chapter on the Grand Tour. However, it was usually propounded by the British themselves as well as travellers from other northern European countries.

Many foreign commentators depicted Italians as primitive and violent, with no public order, sense of structure or morality and with no recourse to the written laws and public institutions of Northern European countries. Northern Italians, in turn, depicted Southern Italians as lacking in civilisation and within the South, as evidenced by the warnings about travelling to Calabria given by Neapolitans to English travellers, there existed a hierarchy which placed the people of the southernmost part of the peninsula as the barbarous Other within.

However, Linda Colley points out that Britons had their own internal divisions and there were cultural splits among the English, Irish, Scots, and Welsh. There were also cultural and experiential gaps along class, regions, religious and gender lines. According to Colley, the empire was the glue that served as a powerful distraction from points of dissimilarity and which provided a cause in common. Colley claims that ‘It was no coincidence at all that the

40 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 100.

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111 period of British imperial takeoff and success also witnessed the forging of an authentically 41 British governing elite.’

These divisions and differences were subsumed into a discourse of civilisation – that the British identity was a product of civilisation even though there were clearly no ideal racial types and no real common ancestry or history as exemplified, for example, by the German model. The privileged position conferred by having a British identity is clearly one that Ramage claims himself for Britain and is highlighted throughout the text. ‘I would have been arrested by his excellency,’ he asserts at one point, ‘if I had been a native of any other country but Great Britain.’42 Interestingly, this episode is left out entirely in Edith Clay’s edited version of Nooks and By-Ways. Indeed, Clay bowdlerises Ramage’s text in much the same way the author of Beautiful Thoughts aimed to highlight what was “acceptable” in the texts he quoted and hide what he considered less suitable.

In contrast to the way Ramage privileges his British identity, the people he encounters in the South are positioned as belonging to a vastly inferior society. At one point he holds forth about the lack of Italian patriotism:

I have been surprised to hear the bitterness with which the inhabitants speak of their countrymen in other parts of Italy, even of those of another province. Imagine a Lancashire man looking upon a man of Yorkshire as scarcely belonging to the same country, and you will have some idea of the feelings that prevail here. It is this that will always render it difficult to unite Italy into one homogenous nation, and make it anything else than a “geographical expression”. When they come to understand the meaning of the word patriotism, and the sacrifices it imposes; when they shall be persuaded that their country can only be freed by subordinating their individual interests to those of the national unity – it is then 43 only that Italy will be ripe for freedom.

It is interesting that Ramage makes reference to two rival English counties, which again emphasises the slippage of his identity from Scottish to English. Given the significant differences and divisions between the English, Scots and Welsh, as discussed above, as well as the general attitude toward the Irish, this is a remarkable statement. What might seem even more remarkable about this stirring call to patriotism is the assumption by the author that his own country is “one homogenous nation”, particularly as he is a Scotsman. By the mid-

41 Linda Colley, ‘Britishness and Otherness: An argument,’ The Journal of British Studies, vol. 31, no. 4, ‘Britishness and Europeanness: Who Are the British Anyway?,’ 1992, pp. 325-26. 42 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 188. 43 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 118.

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112 eighteenth century there were in effect two Scotlands, and as commentator Robert Gunn makes clear, the Highlander and Lowlander Scots were almost completely different people. To the Highlander, the Lowland Scot was more English than Scot, ‘however, the Lowlander of this time saw the Highlanders as even worse; as tribal barbarians … odd, barbaric and 44 “clannish” … more like “wild Irish” …’

In fact, Ramage compares the mass of southern Italians he has met during this trip with the Highlanders of the past. He sums up, ‘They seem now to be in the state that the Highlands of Scotland were some five hundred years ago.’45 Again, he perpetuates a notion of Calabria as a journey back into a past, a pre-modern, primordial state of stagnation that even the most barbaric of the peoples of the British Isles had long left behind. However, Linda Colley demonstrates that far from this notion of a wild and barbarous Highland being a perception that was locked in the dim dark past, this representation of Highland Scots continued into the early nineteenth century when ‘despite the enormous impact of Sir Walter Scott's heroic evocation of the lochs and glens of the North, some Lowland Scots still automatically referred to their Highland neighbours as savages or as aborigines. They regarded them, as they had traditionally done, as impoverished and violent, as members of a different and inferior race, rather than as fellow Scots ... Quite logically in ethnic terms, Highlanders could view both Lowland Scots and the English as foreigners.’46 In fact, although by the time of Ramage’s journey to Calabria there was a slow-down in the Highland clearances, the issues remained and conflict continued. In an article on the Highland clearances and their aftermath, Juliet Shields notes that thousands of highlanders were driven from their homes to become a major 47 source of manpower in the imperial enterprise.

In Britain, the Highlanders were considered in a similar fashion as northern Italians viewed the Calabrians. The Highlanders, Kathleen Wilson tells us, ‘became the objects of much discussion in popular periodicals, travel literature and scientific journals in these decades as atavistic survivors of an earlier age, whom the march of modernity could not extinguish.’48 For Ramage to compare the Calabrians to the Highlanders of 500 years before was not only an emotive representation of the Calabrians as beyond primitive but it also

44 Robert M Gunn, ‘The Highland clearances,’ 1999, , accessed 6 August 2012. 45 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p.151. 46 Colley, ‘Britishness and Otherness: An argument,’ pp. 314-315. 47 Juliet Shields, ‘From family roots to the routes of Empire: National tales and the domestication of the Scottish Highlands,’ ELH, vol. 72, no. 4, 2005, pp. 919-940. 48 Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century, Routledge, London, 2003, p. 87.

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113 demonstrated his self-conscious distancing of himself from the Highlanders and his relief to be able to point to people he depicted as far worse. Peter Mandler contends that much of the English Enlightenment was Scottish and that:

The Scottish Enlightenment, far from being proud of its national past, was highly censorious about it. Compared to the English, the Scottish constitution looked like an institutional failure and the ethnic history of the Scots was mixed, even their language highly ambiguous, and their historical and cultural traditions appeared to educated men in Edinburgh and Glasgow to be barbarically clannish and fortunately nearing extinction. The Act of Union offered Scottish intellectuals the chance to ditch…‘Scotland’s unusable past’ and throw in their lot with the 49 English.

Ramage can gloss the British “unification” in a way that constructs Italy as a dark foil to the perceived cohesiveness of imperial Britain precisely because he subsumed the Scottish within the English character which reveals him, like others of his class, as somewhat of a Scottish apostate, writing himself as an exemplary Englishman. For what Ramage doesn’t acknowledge is what is occurring in Scotland within his own times and which continued for quite some time after. The history of nineteenth century Scotland was characterised by the brutal clearing of the Highlands and the appropriation of a highly romanticized version of the region by the English aristocracy - led by Queen Victoria and her consort. There were forces at play throughout the Scotland of his time, and indeed throughout Britain, that Ramage ignores in his castigation of the Italians and their disunity.

Anti-Catholicism Ramage’s passing comments on the unity of Britain not only elide the drama of the Highland clearances but they do not take into account the true anomaly of the Union - the experience of Ireland which was predominantly Catholic and poor and virtually disempowered by England. Mary J Hickman and Bronwen Walter refer to the “imagined community” of the British as ‘a Protestant community Within the Irish population in Britain it was “Irish Catholics” who, 50 historically, were problematized as a social and political threat.’

Linda Colley has argued that Protestant Christianity was an important component of national identity. In her book Britons: Forging the Nation51 and related journal articles,

49 Peter Mandler, The English National Character, pp. 21-22. 50 Mary J Hickman and Bronwen Walter, ‘Deconstructing whiteness: Irish women in Britain,’ Feminist Review, The Irish Issue: The British Question, no. 50, Summer, 1995, p. 9. 51 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the nation 1707 - 1837, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2012.

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114 Colley makes a strong case for the centrality of Protestantism in the British national identity. This centrality, she contends, despite ‘the more subtle divisions that existed within the Protestant community itself, ...the tensions between Anglicans and nonconformists in England and Wales, between Presbyterians and Episcopalians in Scotland, and between the older forms of Dissent and newer versions such as Methodism... internal rivalries [which] were abundant and serious... should not obscure what remained the towering feature in the religious 52 landscape, the gulf between Protestant and Catholic.’

It was only in 1829, a year after Ramage’s tour, that Catholic Emancipation allowed Roman Catholic males who met the requisite property qualifications to enter Parliament. This action resulted in the first instance of Welsh petitioning of Parliament in large numbers demonstrating overwhelming hostility to the measure. Colley notes that large numbers of anti- Catholic petitions came from even normally quiet and rural areas like Anglesey. Scottish intolerance was more pronounced, particularly with the substantial Catholic presence in the Highlands and the Ulster connection. As in Wales, this intolerance persisted far into the nineteenth century with no Scottish constituency willing to elect a Catholic representative 53 until the 1890s.

Colley asserts that Catholicism was a powerful negative which helped to define the Other and that ‘in response to sermons, ballads, and folklore, Britons were encouraged to look through the Catholic glass darkly so as to see themselves more clearly and more complacently.’54 In southern Italy, Ramage is a perfect ambassador for the imagined community of the Protestant British. He takes every opportunity to point out the “pagan” nature of Calabrian Catholicism and declares his aversion to it very clearly. At the outset he asserts, ‘I know not how to account for this devotion of the Italians to the worship of the Virgin Mary, but it strikes an ultra-Protestant from Scotland very forcibly.’55 In Pizzo he is 56 nearly arrested for his “defamatory” comments on Catholicism.

The Catholicism Ramage observes in Calabria is typically practiced in mountainous and rural areas, a mixture of pre-Christian elements with a dose of Roman Catholicism, while remaining relatively resistant to aspects of official church doctrine. Because the church was

52 Colley, ‘Britishness and Otherness: An argument,’ pp. 316-317 53 Colley, ‘Britishness and Otherness: An argument,’ p. 318. 54 Colley, ‘Britishness and Otherness: An argument,’ p. 319. 55 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 86. 56 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 105. Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

115 allied with the elite political and economic classes, it was seen as collaborating with the cultural and economic oppression of the Calabrian peasants. This might explain the fact that anti-clericalism has remained rife in Italy. Commenting on this phenomenon, Ramage is perplexed, or perhaps being ironic:

I begin to be alarmed respecting the result of my journey, as I have three times met one of those omens which the Italians consider of dire import. You will laugh when I tell you that this is the third morning that I have had a priest in his canonicals crossing my path, but I assure you that the people of this country look upon such an event as “no canny.” Why they should regard the priest in this light, 57 to whom they are so subservient, I know not, yet such is the case.

Ironic or not, this observation is typical of the way the way British travellers gloss over the phenomena and practices observed on their travels. Ramage has already noted the anti- clericalism of the Calabrians, why would he not then understand their distrust of priests? If, as he notes, the oppression of the peasants is carried out by the elite classes, hand-in-glove with the church, then it follows that the lower classes are both subservient and subversive towards both their material and spiritual rulers. Whilst Ramage and other British travellers can give a detailed exegesis on the ancient world, they do not, on the whole, attempt any real examination of what is happening in their current era, mostly ignoring any detailed analysis in favour of making the foreign “foreign” and inexplicable or barbarous and primitive.

Typical of travellers of the time, Ramage positions himself as the norm, categorizing the locals as strange and alien, despite that the fact that he was, with his white clothes and his umbrella, clearly the strange “alien” in Calabria. In particular he marginalises the Calabrian people as “superstitious” – in Gerace, for instance, he is denied the request to view silkworm cocoons because the locals ‘are afraid to expose the silkworm to the gaze of a stranger lest an ill-omened look should destroy them’ – a reaction that he felt was ‘not particularly flattering’ to him.58 More often this superstition is related to their Catholicism, and perhaps also to their climate which is an idea that Ramage propounds again and again. At one stage he writes:

I was present at mass this evening, and everywhere I can see that the Calabrese are urgent in their demands on Heaven. If drought desolates their fields, and no attention is paid to their prayers, it is said that they proceed to put the statues of their most revered saints in prison, hoping that this humiliation may make their intercession more effective. What can be done with a people in this abject state of

57 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 20. 58 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 115.

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116 superstition? What effect would a more spiritual form have upon them? Their belief seems to be in harmony with their impressionable character, and I sometimes doubt whether the exterior form of religion may not depend a good deal on climate and the constitutional temperament of a nation; yet I have found men of the highest intelligence in this remote district, and who felt the necessity of 59 something better and more ennobling in religion, but what could they do?

By referring to the “impressionable character” of the Calabrians, Ramage is attributing a childish naivety to their character, especially in view of their spiritual beliefs. To be a Calabrian Catholic is to be mired in childish superstition. Nonetheless, Ramage does note that there are indeed men of “the highest intelligence” in the region who are powerless to change the less than noble aspects of local beliefs.

Nooks and By-Ways Commenting on travel books in his work Along the Road, Aldous Huxley makes the point that those written before the “age of railways and Ruskin” are interesting precisely because they illustrate the tastes and beliefs of their age. ‘These old books’, he writes, ‘teach us not to be too arrogant and cocksure in our judgments. We too shall look foolish in our turn.’60 In fact, Ramage’s work reveals quite a lot about the man himself, his tastes, his prejudices – he pronounces his opinion on a wide range of topics – amongst them: his dislike of garlic and of kissing “all the males of the family” farewell, his belief that the climate of the south creates “excessive languor of mind and body”. It is this self-revelation, perhaps, that has made him such a likeable character to those who reviewed his book, including Norman Douglas.

His account is written in diary form and as such offers the reader a sense of verisimilitude, of being there as the events unfold. This is somewhat misleading as diary entries are surely written after the event, before bed perhaps, when the author, relaxing in private, can compose his thoughts into a coherent and interesting shape on paper. Some of these entries may have been elaborated or edited weeks, months, even years after the event because Nooks and By-Ways of Italy was published in 1868, forty years after Ramage had returned from that country. As noted above, Ramage claims that he was prevented from publishing earlier for ‘fear that some inadvertent expression might draw the attention of a suspicious government to some kind friend, who had received me with hospitality, and poured

59 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 113. 60 Aldous Huxley, Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist, Chatto & Windus, London, 1948, cited in Abroad: A Book of Travels, Jon Evans (ed.), Victor Gollancz, London, 1968, pp. 27-29.

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117 his grievances into my ear.’61 It is more likely that he was waiting to complete his project of visiting every site of ancient Greek remains which did not eventuate. The fact that the book was published so long after the journey was taken makes it more likely to have been “re- shaped” to some degree for mass consumption.

In the end Ramage’s “foolishness” is a symptom of his age and his background. He is obviously much concerned with pronouncing judgement on just about every superficial aspect of the people and places he encounters – appearance, intelligence, character; he even attributes motivation in situations where he can have no idea of what may really be happening. But that is the nature of the travel book, to be present for a short while in a region and to comment on these regions and their people with seeming authority. For instance, arriving by row-boat in Paola, Ramage comments that the boatmen are singing ‘some wild and melancholy air of their country,’62 assuming that the men are unconscious of fatigue, merely because they sing. It may be that by singing they keep each other awake but that evokes a less picturesque image. On another occasion he remarks upon the manners of the women of the region:

Their manners, however, are pleasing from their simplicity, and I was often astonished to observe with what perfect nonchalance they talked on subjects which are not usually introduced by us in the presence of ladies, and I felt at times rather out of countenance, while they evidently were not aware that they were 63 doing anything of which they need feel ashamed.

This highlights the issue of the traveller as observer who does not clearly understand that he is the outsider in the situation. The women Ramage describes are acting according to the standards of their own culture and are not aware of doing anything of which they need feel ashamed precisely because they are not doing anything of which they need feel ashamed. But perhaps he is being disingenuous for the sake of a good story. Modern travel writer Charles Lister notes that:

As Ramage was used to life in Naples – that cosmopolitan beehive of copulation and cuckoldry, where balls ended only at dawn...I can’t imagine that these ‘damsels of Ciro’ told him anything he didn’t already know, though they were probably more demonstrative and explicit than he was used to. Being a staunch

61 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 1. 62 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 66. 63 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 146.

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118 64 Scottish Presbyterian, their directness might have surprised him.

Ramage travels from one dignitary to another, bearing letters of introduction to high ranking officials including the Provincial Governor, landowners and local aristocracy. At Monteleone, he is welcomed in the palace of the palace of the Marquis Gagliardi, by whom he was received with the utmost kindness, declaring that the Marquis ‘is one of the most influential proprietors in this part of Italy, and prefers to spend his time in the improvement of his property to a useless life in the city of Naples. His manners are those of a polished gentleman, and the marchioness is a lady, who would be an acquisition to the most brilliant court circle.’65 Ramage’s most positive comments are for the people of this class.

Indeed, the issue of class should not be overlooked. For Ramage, as with Craven before him and Lear and Lowe after him, the working classes of Calabria are virtually background colour. It is interesting that Theodore Koditschek makes this a point of major difference in his argument with Linda Colley’s examination of Britishness. For Colley, Britons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ‘defined themselves in terms of their common Protestantism as contrasted with the Catholicism of Continental Europe. They defined themselves against France throughout a succession of major wars with that power. And they defined themselves against the global empire won by way of these wars. They defined themselves, in short, not just through an internal and domestic dialogue but in conscious opposition to the Other beyond their shores.’66 Koditschek claims that Colley ‘neglects the simple fact that the “other” against whom [Britishness] was most enduringly constructed was not Catholic France, but ‘the English pauper, the feckless Irishman’ and women.67 This is notable in the accounts of nineteenth-century travellers like Ramage because they display obviously elitist ideas, attesting to a view of the world where those that matter are the educated classes.

One of Ramage’s recurring concerns is with the “intelligence” of those he encounters on his tour. Early on in his journey, in Paola, he makes one of many comments on the intelligence of the locals:

I spent a delightful evening with my host, who had assembled a large number of

64 Charles Lister, Heel to Toe: Encounters in the South of Italy, Secker & Warburg, London, 2002, pp. 170- 171. 65 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 110. 66 Colley, ‘Britishness and Otherness: An argument,’ pp. 316. 67 Theodore Koditschek, ‘The making of British nationality,’ Victorian Studies, vol. 44, no. 3, 2002, p. 6.

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119 his friends to meet me. Many of them were intelligent, and showed some 68 knowledge of England and its institutions which surprised me.

That Ramage is surprised by knowledge of England amongst the Calabrians is hardly astonishing given that Calabria is so much situated in the “past” by travellers and writers, so that it might seem to have no connection to the modern world outside its borders. Throughout Nooks and By-Ways Ramage continues to make much of the intelligence (and the lack thereof) of the people he meets. ‘My companion I found to be highly intelligent’ he notes at one stage. Another time he describes a Signor Capialbi – who turns out to be a Count – as ‘one of the most intelligent and best educated gentleman in the south of Italy.’69 It is clear that, for Ramage, intelligence resides with the aristocracy and the landowner class. As for the ordinary people, Ramage expects very little, concluding:

I met men of the highest intelligence and polish, that would have done honour to any country, and, at the same time, the mass of the population sunk in rudeness 70 and ignorance.

Even intelligent Italians, he claims, are lacking in accomplishment, blaming their lack of activity on the climate and comparing himself as an example of fortitude and resolve.

I have learned, however, to look with considerable scepticism on the reports of even the most intelligent Italians as to difficulties; they are so little accustomed to exertion, and the climate makes them so unwilling to move, that they cannot understand what a resolute spirit can accomplish, who refuses to introduce into his vocabulary the word "impossible." Onward I was resolved to go, till I knocked my head against an impenetrable wall, and you will be amused to see how gradually 71 one difficulty after another disappeared.

Nonetheless, he is magnanimous despite this harsh appraisal. ‘Whatever fault we may find with this people for their superstition and ignorance,’ he tells us, ‘there is a loveableness in their character which I am not utilitarian enough in my philosophy to resist.’72 With these words he puts a seal on further efforts at understanding or encounter. In this most quintessential example of travel writing, Ramage has the last word on Calabrians – they are “loveable”.

68 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 75. 69 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 112. 70 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 151. 71 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 159. 72 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 126.

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120

The (Scottish) male gaze For all his identification as an Englishman, Ramage nonetheless finds many points of comparison with his homeland, Scotland, as travellers tend to do even when such comparisons may not always be logical or meaningful. At one stage he observes, ‘I saw in the distance some of the young damsels of Agropoli, employed in the same way as our Scottish lassies may often be observed by the traveller.’73 Although he finds a few points of similarity, he also makes reference to areas where there is clear difference between Calabria and Scotland. On one occasion, he compares the stale bread and cheese which is offered to what he may expect in Scotland, declaring, ‘if this may be taken as a sample of their mode of diet, I would back Scotland against Italy, even with her oat-cakes and porridge.’74 Forgetting that the food he gets in Scotland, for all that it is plain fare, may be somewhat different to the food the really poor people of that country might expect.

There are, however, some real points of comparison between Calabria and Scotland and one of these is bagpipe playing. At one stage Ramage ‘was not a little surprised to hear approaching the sounds of the spirit-stirring bagpipes. For an instant I thought myself in some remote glen of my native country, and expected to see a Highlander in full costume appear.’75 This is an interesting parallel with those Highlanders who represent a more primitive past in Scotland. There are occasions, too when the landscape recalls Scotland as in Paola where Ramage notes a monastery which is ‘in a picturesque situation, at the mouth of a beautiful 76 glen’ reminding him ‘forcibly of Drumlanrig Castle.’

Not only alert to similarities or disparities with Scotland, Ramage also displays the standard interest in the women, and he makes constant comments on the appearance of the women he encounters, referring to “beautiful girls” and at one stage noting the “particularly pleasing” appearance of the lady of the house – in fact, Ramage cannot refer to a woman without commenting on her appearance. Women, like the landscape, are described in relation to their aspect, and desirability. Like other male travellers he describes details of costumes, hairstyle and anything that could be viewed as traditional. These are constructed from an ethnological perspective, similar to narratives of “natives” in other undeveloped regions of the world. This is a culturally constructed Eurocentric gaze focused on difference and distancing,

73 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 12. 74 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 12. 75 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 40. 76 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 72.

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121 including the distancing of the modern world of the traveller from the ancient or archaic world of the land travelled through.

Thus, ruins are of particular significance and certainly ruins of the classical past are of great interest to Ramage - his stated goal is to visit every classical site in Italy. In this desire Ramage is enacting common practice in the two periods of the Grand Tour. Unlike Grand Tour travellers, however, Ramage goes beyond the usual “tried and tested” itinerary to locate ruins and traces of the classical past. He positions himself as a lone pilgrim willing to travel to the most dangerous places to uncover the great classical past. Nonetheless, the relative accessibility of the southern regions of the Kingdom of Naples allows him to begin his project of interpreting the classical past through a journey around its ruins with little difficulty, despite his “perilous” method of choosing to travel alone.

With his knowledge of ancient languages and grasp of classical history, which he demonstrates on every page of his account, Ramage clearly defines himself as a disseminator of knowledge. He was a teacher himself and his work is self-consciously instructive. Much as he did in his series of Beautiful Thoughts – which were all published before the Nooks and By-Ways – Ramage seeks to unlock the mystery of the foreign for fellow Britons, aiming to visit all the regions of classical interest. Unfortunately, he did not complete the project and the travel narrative of his journey through southern Italy was the only tour of classical ruins published.

Ramage is free to travel independently as observer, commentator and academic interpreter of a classical past because he is of a place, gender and background that allow him this luxury. The Calabrians themselves question why he ‘should undergo all this danger and fatigue for what they considered such a very inadequate object.’77 But far from placing himself in real danger, he is a solitary traveller who is protected by his letters of introduction and the possibility, always, of escort – at one stage a Marquis provides a guard of four armed men for the mountain passage leading to Casal Nuovo. Ramage’s Nooks and By-Ways, delivered forty years after the event, present a familiar tale of Calabria, its people and its ruins, following in the wake of Swinburne and Craven’s detailed accounts. But what Ramage does differently is to give us more than a glimpse into his own world and character. For a start, his account is peppered with quotations as you would expect from the author of

77 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 94. Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

122 Beautiful Thoughts, many of them from Dante and quite sentimental and almost incongruous in light of the harsh, dangerous environment he is at pains to project. The following is one example:

Qual lodoletta che'n acre si spazia Prima cantando, e poi tace contenta Dell' ultima dolcezza che la sazia.

Dante, Paradiso, xx. 73,

“Like to the lark that, warbling in the air, expatiates long, then trilling 78 out her last sweet note, drops satiate with the sweetness.”

Ramage is a very real character in his account and the sense of the author is ever- present. This work heralds a new era of travel writing, one that, rather than seeking to merely present an objective, “true” account, is much more obviously the subjective work of (an at least partially) knowable author. In terms of depiction of Calabria, Ramage’s Nooks and By- ways reinforces the picturesque sublime reading of Calabria, both with his words and his illustrations, even if this is mediated by his humour and engaging writing. Ramage presents us with an account that epitomises the Romantic themes of individualism, aesthetic appreciation of nature and sense of adventure. As with Nooks and By-ways the accounts of other travellers to Calabria in the nineteenth century also include the familiar themes of brigandage and criminality, primitivism and savagery, and the contrast between beautiful nature and a degraded and impoverished people. Like Ramage, these nineteenth century travellers present their work in an increasingly personal style, reflecting the writers’ own idiosyncrasies and life journeys.

78 Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy, p. 77.

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123 Chapter 5 Edward Lear: Through a (Claude) glass1, darkly

In 1847 another eccentric Englishman made the journey to Calabria, perhaps the most famous of the nineteenth-century travellers to the region, nonsense poet Edward Lear. Lear’s account, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria,2 published in 1852, is singular in its almost total immersion in his landscape painter’s world and the traces of the nonsense writer in his depiction of the characters he encounters. The journey was made just prior to the 1848 revolution, an event that results in the necessity to cut short his journey. In his preface to the first edition Lear refers to those who had covered similar ground:

Few places visited by the author have not already been fully described in the accurate and interesting travels of the Hon. Keppel Craven. Mr. Swinburne has written a notice of many places in Calabria, though his observations are principally confined to the coast; and the western road by the sea has been well and amusingly treated of in a little book called “A Tour in Calabria” by Arthur 3 Strutt.

Lear’s ultimate goal is to find a new source of landscapes to paint and sell and he quickly points out that there are indeed places in the southernmost tip of the peninsula that have not been visited by an Englishman and views that have not been illustrated by others. Lear makes it clear that his intention is to present his readers with a landscape artist’s guidebook illustrating the lesser known parts of the kingdom, emphasising that he does not intend to replicate the work of those who went before him and apologising for any perceived shortcomings in his own work.

Like Gissing after him Edward Lear felt himself an outsider in his own country. Harvard librarian, book collector and art historian Philip Hofer contends that partly because of the conventional character of Victorian society, but also because the damp, cold winters had a bad impact on his health, Lear was never entirely comfortable in England. ‘He began to chafe

1 A Claude glass is a small mirror, slightly convex in shape, with its surface tinted a dark colour, used by artists, travellers and connoisseurs of landscape and landscape painting. Claude glasses were famously used by picturesque artists in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a frame for drawing sketches of picturesque landscapes. The user would turn his back on the scene to observe the framed view through the tinted mirror—in a sort of pre-photographic lens—which added the picturesque aesthetic of a subtle gradation of tones to create a painterly quality. Edward Lear, however, did not make use of one but, given his frequent references to Claude, one could argue that metaphorically he did use a Claude lens when viewing landscapes during this trip. 2 Edward Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria &c, Richard Bentley, London, 1852. 3 Edward Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, pp. v-vi.

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124 at society’s demands, at boredom, at those “swells” he grew to call “brutes, porchi, apes and owls.”’4 Lear subsidised his simple life on the continent and his many travels by selling paintings from 1836 when he was only twenty-four. He discovered Italy in 1837 and returned there throughout his life including his final years at San Remo where he is buried.

In this chapter, I will be examining Lear’s artistic gaze and his sense of the absurd to unravel the way in which these obscure the human landscape of people, their concerns and ultimately, their rebellion. Lear uses the language of the picturesque as well as his brand of absurd nonsense to create a Calabria that although replete with picturesque marketable landscapes is also full of entertaining and grotesque characters.

I will compare Lear’s approach to the work of Arthur Strutt,5 who undertook a painting trip to Calabria in 1839, to uncover an alternative approach, one still within the frame of the picturesque but with far more emphasis on the human element. The aesthetic appreciation of landscape began as a new way of seeing the natural world in the eighteenth century with the exposure of Grand Tour travellers to the works of continental landscape painters, most prominently Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Poussin. Earlier travellers described mountains as chaotic, inconvenient and dangerous blots on the landscape. In her seminal study on the development of an aesthetics of mountains, Marjorie Hope Nicolson notes that: Beginning with the eighteenth century, the new way of seeing described mountains as sublime or picturesque, fitting subjects for works of art. The sublime retained the idea of danger and this was juxtaposed to the notion of beauty, with its connotations of purity, while the picturesque arose as a concept somewhere between the two. Lear’s style was well within that of the picturesque tradition but this chapter will also reflect on the continuing influence of the Gothic and Radcliffean portrayal of the Italian south.

Although a nonsense writer often described as eccentric and usually painfully aware of his own social shortcomings, Lear was, when it came to art, a profoundly conventional man. It is clear that he was influenced by the prevailing art fashions of the day but this could also be related to his need to deliver a commercial product as he lived on earnings from his production of saleable prints. Accordingly, Lear’s work falls within the romantic tradition of

4 Philip, Hofer, Edward Lear as a Landscape Draftsman, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1967, p. 3. 5 Lear appears to have known Strutt and refers to him in his diaries. 6 Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite, (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics), University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1997, p. xiv.

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125 the period which was fed by other traditions including the Gothic. One critic maintains that ‘gothic – as historical discourse, as architecture, as literature - [I would add here, as art] - was 7 an originating and shaping force of the Romantic Movement.’

Gothic sublime Horace Walpole wrote in a letter during his tour with Thomas Gray as far back as 1739, ‘Precipices, mountains, torrents, wolves, rumblings, Salvator Rosa!’8 Over one century later Lear, like Walpole, was also driven to the heights of the Gothic sublime by his imaginings of Calabria, beginning his journal with the outpouring: ‘Calabria! – no sooner is the word uttered than a new world rises before the mind’s eye, - torrents, fastnesses, all the prodigality of mountain scenery – caves, brigands, and pointed hats – Mrs. Radcliffe and Salvator Rosa, - 9 costumes and character – horrors and magnificence without end.’

Ann Radcliffe was the author of six early English Gothic novels, the most successful of which was The Mysteries of Udolpho. In an essay examining Radcliffe’s novel, The Italian,10 Diego Saglia notes that a tradition of critical opinion on the Gothic genre has established that one of its main features is its repertoire of landscape motifs. He argues that this ‘has impoverished the significance of place in Gothic writing.’ He quotes what he calls ‘an ironic list of Gothic spatial elements’ by the poet Keats:

I am going among Scenery whence I intend to tip you the Damosel Radcliffe--I'll cavern you, and grotto you, and waterfall you, and wood you, and water you, and 11 immense-rock you, and tremendous sound you, and solitude you.

Saglia refers to the fact that on the whole critical opinion has not yet seen fit to address the cultural specificity of the Gothic landscape. It is as if place is an almost transparent element of the text, with no possible significance other than as an empty descriptor, a background without any framework. Why is there a preference for Mediterranean settings? According to Saglia, Keats’ amusing list of essential Gothic scenic elements ‘illustrates how both readers and critics have continuously considered this landscape as a mass of scattered

7 Christopher Hibbert, The Grand Tour, Thames Methuen, London, 1987, p. 121. 8 Horace Walpole, Letters of Horace Walpole, selected by W S Lewis, The Folio Society, London, 1951, p. 39. 9 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, pp. 2-3. 10 Diego Saglia, ‘Looking at the Other: cultural difference and the traveller's gaze in The Italian,’ Studies in the Novel, vol. 28, no. 1, 1996, pp. 12-37. 11 Hyder Edward Rollins (ed.), The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821, edited by, 2 vols, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, vol. 1, 1958, p. 245, cited in Diego Saglia, ‘Looking at the other: cultural difference and the traveller's gaze in The Italian,’ Studies in the Novel, vol. 28, no. 1, 1996, p.12.

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126 and, needless to say, ruined fragments.’12 It also suggests how familiarity with this concept has bred a derisive attitude that may have spilled over onto how the Mediterranean environment and people are generally viewed. That is to say, not only is the landscape a wreckage of past ages but the people themselves live like the remnants of an earlier, cruder race among the ruins of once great civilisations, subdued by a harsh sublime nature, unable to progress beyond this rubble of ancient times.

Like Keats, Lear gives us a list codifying exotic savagery and wild beauty alike, invoking Radcliffe. Saglia makes the point that ‘British travellers moving South to Italy in the first decades of the nineteenth century inevitably looked for Radcliffe's Italy’13 and Lear was obviously not immune to her influence. At one stage, describing an incident in the night when he is awoken from sleep by a “singular noise”, Lear builds suspense:

After all, thought I, I am to encounter some real Calabrian romance, and as I sat up and listened the mysterious noise was again repeated. It proceeded from under my bed, and resembled a hideous gurgling sob four or five times reiterated. Feeling certain that I was not alone, I softly put out my hand for that never-to-be- omitted night companion in travelling a phosphorus box, when before I could reach it my bed was suddenly lifted up by some incomprehensible agency below, and puffing and sobs, mingled with a tiny tinkling sound, accompanied this Calabrian mystery. There was no time to be lost, and having persevered in obtaining a light in spite of this disagreeable interruption, I jumped off the bed, and with a stick thrust hastily and hardly below the bed, to put the intruder, ghostly or bodily, on to fair fighting ground, Baa aa a! Shade of Mrs. Radcliffe! it was the large dirty tame sheep ! So I forthwith opened a door into the next room, 14 and bolted out the domestic tormentor.

Kathryn Walchester describes this as a structure ‘reminiscent of travel writers earlier in the century such as Charlotte Eaton and Anna Jameson and their use of similar Radcliffean anti-climaxes.’15 But Lear does not stick to Radcliffe as the only signifier of the Gothic. Like Walpole, he also refers to seventeenth-century artist Salvator Rosa. As noted in the previous chapter, the origins of Gothic sensibility have been located in Rosa who painted atmospheric pictures of ruins in landscapes, many of them inspired by the devastation wrought by the eruption of Vesuvius in 1631. As a landscape artist, he was admired by the British equally with Poussin and Claude, particularly for his wildness and grandeur, and was often described

12 Saglia, ‘Looking at the Other,’ p. 13. 13 Saglia, ‘Looking at the Other,’ p. 37. 14 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 189. 15 Kathryn Walchester, ‘“Non vedete. È un rivoluzione”: [You don’t see. It’s a revolution] Edward Lear landscape painter and Italy,’ Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice, vol. 1, no. 1, 2009, p. 70.

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127 by them as “savage” Rosa and his work sublime.

Illus. 4: Landscape with a Hermit, Salvator Rosa, c.1662, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

The Rosa painting above features elements adopted by Lear in his own work, in particular a dark, brooding nature overwhelming the small human figure in the foreground. The picture is imbued with a feeling of foreboding - it seems almost as if nature itself is menacing. As in the Rosa painting, Lear located the Gothic in the mountains, in the case of Calabria, the Aspromonte, as the following passages demonstrate:

What will Sta Maria di Polsi be like? On the map it is most inviting black and 16 deep among the horrors of Aspromonte.

As we proceeded up the stream, the rocks began to close in nearer and nearer, till above the high-cliffed gorge, the towering forms of Aspromonte seemed to shut out the sky, the long furrows in the mountain-sides clothed with the densest 17 wood.

True to the Gothic tradition of the romantic sublime, Edward Lear was attracted to Calabria’s mountainous hinterland to paint his landscapes. This could well be because it offered more opportunities to capture views that had not been seen by many British travellers before him. Lear himself notes that, ‘It is probable that no stranger had ever visited these wild and unfrequented nooks of a province, the great towns of which are themselves out of the route of travellers.’18 But in her essay, Gender, nation and the tourist gaze in the European

16 Lear Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 58. 17 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 70. 18 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 101.

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128 “Year of Revolutions”19 Brigitte Bailey suggests another reason for choosing this kind of space, describing mountain vistas as providing, ‘a thrilling release from bodily limitations through the eye’ referring to ‘Michel Foucault’s equation between vision and power,.. the “panoptic sublime”: an experience of the “sudden access of power” offered by landscape views that were at once totalizing and “telescopic”, that “aspired to control every element 20 within the visual field.”’

It is particularly apt, this notion of “release from bodily limitations” when referring to Lear who began travelling for health reasons. Lear’s health had always been fragile, he suffered from epilepsy which he referred to as “the Demon”, and endured frequent bouts of asthma and bronchitis, while also being subject to depression which he called “the Morbids.” Another issue for Lear was his inability to form a romantic relationship, partly due to his financial insecurity but also because he did not believe himself to be attractive enough. This lack of intimate connection allowed him to travel almost constantly. Joanna Richardson refers to Lear’s abundant ‘determination, courage, energy,’ going on to state that:

Nothing but the fear of fever (perhaps his epilepsy) prevented him from setting out on a journey. There is, perhaps, something desperate about this constant moving, this perpetual restlessness. It is a sign of Lear's immense unhappiness. ‘If you have a wife or are in love with a woman,’ he had written to his friend, Chichester Fortescue, ‘then you may stay in any place and in any circumstance .... But if you are absolutely alone in the world, and likely to be so, then move about 21 continually, and never stand still.’

Perhaps it was not only current fashion but also Lear’s own nature and his sense of a self frequently betrayed by an epileptic body and depression that attracted him to the Gothic landscape as exemplified by Salvator Rosa and to Calabria, a region of frequent and devastating earthquakes, replete with ruins and shattered nature. One typical example is the village of Gerace which Lear describes as:

… a large cathedral town, full of beautifully-placed buildings, situated on a very narrow ridge of rock, every part of which seems to have been dangerously afflicted by earthquakes. Splits, and cracks, and chasms, horrible with abundant crookednesses of steeples, and a general appearance of instability in walls and houses. Towards the north-west, the sharp crest of rock ends abruptly in a

19 Brigitte Bailey, ‘Gender, nation, and the tourist gaze in the European “Year of Revolutions”: Kirkland’s Holidays Abroad,’ American Literary History, vol. 14, no. 1, 2002, pp. 60-82. 20 Bailey, ‘Gender, nation, and the tourist gaze,’ p. 71. 21 Joanna Richardson, ‘Edward Lear: Man of letters,’ Ariel, vol. 1, no. 4, 1969, p. 21.

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129 precipice, which on three sides is perfectly perpendicular. Here are the dark and crumbling ruins of a massive Norman castle, from which, by a scrambling path, 22 you may reach the valley below.

As previously noted, earthquakes are a common trope in Calabrian travel literature and the idea of ‘a mass of scattered and, needless to say, ruined fragments,’23 in Saglia’s words, runs through descriptions of the region in Lear’s account. He devotes four pages quoting from Richard Keppel Craven’s account from his travel book, A Tour Through the Southern Provinces of the Kingdom of Naples,24 of the earthquake of 1783.25 Lear concludes that as a result of this earthquake ‘all this fair western coast of Calabria became one great sepulchre.’26 This certainly gels with the notion of Italy as land of the dead as described in the chapter on the Grand Tour with reference to Alphonse de Lamartine, poet and French diplomat, who in 1826 wrote a final stanza to Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgimage27 in which he represented Italy as a terra dei morti (land of the dead), reflecting an idea that was already in circulation.

Lear’s strongest evocation of the Gothic sublime occurs when he travels to Pentedàtillo. He writes, ‘On advancing, the views of the wondrous crags of Pentedàttilo become astonishingly fine and wild, and as the sun set in crimson glory, displayed a truly magnificent scene of romance – the vast mass of pinnacled rock rearing itself alone above its neighbour hills, and forming a landscape which is the beau-ideal of the terrible in Calabrian scenery.’28 This description evokes a landscape that is alive with menace, the rock that “rears” within the “terrible Calabrian scenery”.

Indeed, the illustration of this scene (below) displays a group of people cowed by the dark rocky landscape, with beside them a cross which recalls Lear’s description of the land as a sepulchre. It seems that this illustration depicts another world, outside of history, and like all the other Calabrian paintings could be anywhere in the south or east except for the Italy that has been created by the Grand Tour travellers and those before and after them - a land rich with Roman and Renaissance remains and monuments.

22 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 91. 23 Saglia, ‘Looking at the Other,’ p. 13. 24 Richard Keppel Craven, A Tour Through the Southern Provinces of the Kingdom of Naples, Rodwell and Martin, London, 1821, pp. 276-278. 25 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, pp. 149-152. 26 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 149. 27 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a lengthy narrative poem in four parts written by Lord Byron and published between 1812 and 1818. The poem describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands. Canto IV describes Harold's travels in Italy. 28 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 149. Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

130

Illus. 5: Pentedàtillo, Edward Lear, 1847 http://www.viaggioincalabria.it/luogo/provincia-di-reggio-calabria/pentedattilo/ci-siamo-incamminati- il/

In Pentedàtillo, not only does Lear describe a sublime landscape, accompanied by an illustration to match, but he also recounts a tale straight out of a Gothic romance, describing a terrible story of vendetta between the families of the Baron of Montebello and the Marchese Pentedàtillo. The narrative is full of dramatic and blood-thirsty images such as ‘the Marchese falls forward on the wall, and his five blood-stained fingers leave traces, still shown, on part of the ruined hall, a horrible memorial of the crime, strangely coincident with that of the form and name of the rock.’29 He finishes the tale with a flourish half Shakespearean, half Fall of the House of Usher,30 ‘Finally, as if it were ordered that the actors in such a wholesale domestic tragedy were unfit to remain on earth, the castle of Pentedàtillo fell by the shock of an earthquake, crushing together the Baron and Marchese, with the nurse, and every other agent in this Calabrian horror!’31 Lear literally paints a dark picture of Calabria, but his

29 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 196. 30 Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ was first published in September 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. It is written in the genre of American Gothic. The theme of the crumbling, haunted castle is a key feature of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), which largely contributed in defining the Gothic genre. 31 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 198. Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

131 account is leavened by a healthy dose of what Kirby Olsen describes as the “comic picturesque”, on which subject I will return later in this chapter.

Picturesque While the sublime is “concomitant with terror” according to Burke, 32 the picturesque evokes a pleasurable emotion that brings to mind the (seeming) simplicity of rustic life. In his theoretical works, William Gilpin – referred to in a previous chapter - defined the picturesque using the words “roughness” and “ruggedness”. He posited that the smoothness of the beautiful soothes the imagination, but that picturesque effects including irregular outlines and contrasting light and shade excites the imagination by just the right amount of asymmetry and variety, pictorial qualities that authenticate and invite the contemplation of landscape as an aesthetic object. Gilpin clearly distinguished the picturesque not only from the beautiful, but also from the sublime. He wrote that the ‘picturesque eye would range with supreme delight among the sweet vales of Switzerland; but would view only with a transient glance the 33 Glaciers of Savoy.’

Lear may have referred to Rosa at the beginning of his traveller’s journal, but his own preference was for the work of the French artist Claude Lorrain, the seventeenth-century master of the picturesque, which, according to the conventions of Gilpin contained features such as ruins, peasants and brigands, mountains and forests. Clearly informed by the Gothic tradition of the romantic sublime, the picturesque framed the view to produce a perfect composition of distance, overwhelming height, rough, broken and carefully contrived nature. Gilpin himself intimated that perspective is perhaps a key difference between the picturesque 34 and the sublime. ‘A few paces to the right, or left, makes a great difference,’ he wrote.

Indeed, throughout his account Lear makes frequent references to Claude. ‘Claude-like richness of distance,’ he writes at one point, ‘some line of Claude-like simplicity,’ he writes at another. He also uses the term “Poussinesque” several times, “beautiful” occurs on almost every page, “irregularity” is a regular term and “grand” is another. However, by far the word which occurs most frequently and which seems to have the most resonance is “picturesque”. William Michael Rossetti described Lear as ‘a very agreeable and efficient landscape

32 Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Vol. XXIV, Part 2, The Harvard Classics, P F Collier & Son, New York 1909–14, Bartleby.com, 2001, , accessed 16 August 2009. 33 William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: To Which is Added a Poem, on Landscape Painting, R Blamire, London, 1792, pp. 43-44. 34 Gilpin, Three Essays, p. 63.

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132 designer who had been rather far afield in his quest for the picturesque - Albania, Calabria, Syria, etc.’35 Another source, Brian Reade, describes Lear’s work as ‘based on the transitional Neo-Classical-Romantic conventions applied to “dramatic” or “picturesque” landscape.’36 Clearly, the desire for picturesque is the key to Lear's motivation. Lear, like other travel writers as described by Roland Barthes, ‘hardly knows the existence of scenery 37 except under the guise of the picturesque [which] is found any time the ground is uneven.’

Landscape painting is Lear’s stated reason for the trip to Calabria - a trip that he makes with a companion, Lord John Proby, heir to the Earl of Carysford. According to Kirby Olson, ‘Whatever else the picturesque may have meant to an earlier generation, to Edward Lear (1812-88) it was a meal ticket, a “line of flight” (in Gilles Deleuze's phrase), and a lifelong aesthetic preoccupation.’38 A line of flight is precisely what motivated many of the travellers before and after Lear - flight from domesticity, sexual constraints and indeed, the industrialised world of England. There is something old-fashioned and quaint about Lear’s work and a tradition which dates back to a French artist of the seventeenth century.

Kathryn Walchester describes how, by the nineteenth century, such aesthetic terms as “picturesque” had become “outmoded” or even “ridiculously hackneyed” and questions why ‘in the thick of Italian unrest, Lear chooses to represent the country in terms of an outmoded rhetoric, that of the picturesque, in an attempt to construct a version of Italy which is static, silent and denies its people any agency.’39 However, there is enough evidence to show that the picturesque was not quite as outmoded as Walchester proposes. In fact, the picturesque remained, as it had done for a long period of time, the mode du jour and it made sense for Lear to produce paintings that would be saleable. In fact, it is clear from his correspondence and journal entries that he had grown tired of the genre himself but persevered for the sake of maintaining an income. According to Kirby Olson:

Landscape is the artistic legacy into which Lear was born, but he explodes in disgust from time to time, writing for example, "How could I ever have looked

35 William Michael Rossetti, The Pre-Raphaelites and Their World: A Personal View, The Folio Society, London, 1994, p. 103. Rossetti met Lear in 1852 while the painter was placing himself under the tutelage of Holman Hunt. 36 Brian Reade, Lear Exhibition Catalogue, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1958, cited in Philip Hofer Edward Lear as a Landscape Draughtsman, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1967, p. 6. 37 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Granada, London, 1981, p. 74. 38 Kirby Olson, ‘Edward Lear: Deleuzian landscape painter,’ Victorian Poetry, vol. 31, no. 4, 1993, p. 347. 39 Walchester, ‘Non vedete. È un rivoluzione,’ p. 56.

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133 with delight on Gaspar Poussin, or S. Rosa?" … Although he was an assiduous worker in the landscape field, he slowly lost interest in the orthodox aspects of it … The mercenary character of much of Lear's art in the landscape tradition is necessitated by the difference between Lear's aesthetic predilection for Dürer's simplicity, against the prevailing preference for intricacy, roughness, and 40 grandeur.

Like Strutt before him and both Gissing and Douglas later, Lear was driven by his need to make a living. Lear must have been aware of the popularity of the work of David Roberts whose picturesque volume of lithographs Sketches in Spain was published in 1837 and enjoyed extraordinary success. Shortly afterwards Lear produced the tinted lithographs for the first of his own landscape painter’s travel books, Rome and Its Environs which was published in 1841. Indeed, the picturesque was so pervasive that Lear described himself as a topographical artist, ‘reflecting his need’, as Scott Wilcox puts it, ‘to find a niche for his work within the ever-growing library of travel literature, much of it lavishly illustrated, available to 41 the British public in the nineteenth century.’

Nonetheless, the idea of a region and its people represented as an outmoded past and the characterisation of the inhabitants of Calabria as having a lack of agency is something that Lear does as much as any traveller who went before him. The places and people in Lear’s narrative and art are constructed as Other in juxtaposition to the industrialised West. In his article, The picturesque and the homogenisation of Empire, Jeffrey Auerbach suggests that the picturesque is a homogenizing technique, blurring ‘all sorts of boundaries between Britain and 42 its empire, between home and abroad, métropole and periphery, even self and other.’

It may well be that place and landscape are factors that interact with a personal sense of identity but in terms of blurring boundaries between home and abroad, Lear’s picturesque landscapes exoticise the Calabrian people and their land. Lear actively distances the viewer from the people and the chief component of most of the works is “horrible” nature. There is a sense of danger and threat in many of these illustrations; they are not cosy chocolate box representations. However, the picturesque does tend to homogenise landscape by forcing everything to fit a particular framework. This is exemplified by the Claude glass which, because it is tinted a dark colour, reduces the tonal values of the landscape it is directed at, while its convex shape simultaneously brings more of the scene into a single focal point.

40 Olson, ‘Edward Lear: Deleuzian landscape painter,’ pp. 349-350. 41 Scott Wilcox, Edward Lear and the Art of Travel, Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, CT, 2000, p. 13. 42 Jeffrey Auerbach, ‘The picturesque and the homogenisation of Empire,’ The British Art Journal,’ vol. v, no. 1, 2004, p. 51.

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134

Although Lear did not use a Claude glass, he certainly applied the Claude lens to his view of the Calabrian landscape. The mere fact of the Claude glass reinforces the idea of the picturesque as a framing technique, containing and literally capturing the landscape, suggesting that, in Kathryn Walchester’s words, it ‘is inherently a stance of appropriation. It assumes possession of prominent spaces and at least partial control of the space between the viewer and the horizon. It is characteristic of early colonists in a new landscape, who marvel 43 at the (to them) exotic quality and delight in their control of so much land.’

The issue of travelling through the space of the Other may have been merely a question of curiosity or hunger for new vistas or ancient pasts in the minds of British travellers like Lear, but to the Calabrians of the period this interest was a matter for concern. Travellers were often asked what they were doing in this place or why they chose to travel there at all. Certainly, in Lear’s case, with the unease felt by many Calabrians on the eve of the 1848 uprising, the question of who was traversing their space and what these foreigners wanted seemed to have caused heightened apprehensiveness, judging by Lear’s description of the suspicion he was subjected to throughout his journey. But Lear’s is a picturesque sensibility, concerned mainly with “capturing” a saleable landscape for mass consumption and he might have assumed that the wariness and curiosity of the people of Calabria may have been part of their “picturesque” nature.

Lear’s primary aim is the production of his picturesque landscapes and although he does occasionally describe the landscape, sometimes the people and more often their costume as picturesque, his focus remains on the scenery and raw nature around him. He observes suspicion but he does not connect it to what might be happening in the region until the unrest grows and he is forced to cut his journey short.

Although, on the whole, there are great similarities in the genre of the picturesque, there are nonetheless, different interpretations of the picturesque. There is for instance a difference between the work of Arthur Strutt and Lear. Artist Arthur Strutt made his Pedestrian Tour in Calabria & Sicily in 1839 at the age of 23. Like Lear Strutt uses the word “picturesque” on almost every page of his account,44 but unlike Lear, he does not refer to other artists. Also in contrast to Lear, Strutt’s picturesque is more focused on people and in particular women’s

43 Walchester, ‘Non vedete. È un rivoluzione,’ p. 54. 44 Arthur John Strutt, A Pedestrian Tour in Calabria & Sicily, T C Newby, London, 1842.

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135 costumes, than scenery. Indeed, although he is a landscape painter, the only illustration in Strutt’s printed travel narrative is one showing wives of brigands, visiting their husbands in prison, barefoot and in all their colourful medieval-style costumed glory (see below).

Illus. 7: Wives of the Brigands visiting their husbands in prison, Arthur Strutt 1842, Frontispiece of A Pedestrian Tour in Calabria and Sicily, London: Newby.

While Lear does refer to costumes, he more often laments the lack of them, for example, in his description of Ciccio, his guide, he notes that:

Ciccio carried a gun, but alas! wore no pointed hat; nothing but a Sicilian long blue cap. Our minds had received a fearful shock by the conviction forced on them during our three days' stay at Reggio, namely, that there are NO pointed hats in the first or southern province of Calabria. The costume, though varying a little in different villages, is mainly the same as that throughout Sicily, and it is only in the provinces of Catanzaro and Cosenza where the real (and awful) pyramidal 45 brigand's hat is adopted.

Strutt, on the other hand, seems obsessed by costume, going into great detail throughout his journey as the following extract exemplifies:

45 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, pp. 12-13.

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136 The women here begin again to wear a rather picturesque costume — their tight boddices [sic] are laced in front, their heavy blue dresses, too long for the activity of household enjoyment, are generally tightened, or looped up with a crimson cord, the ends of which, adorned with tassels, hang down on one side — The skirts, thus shortened, expose to view the legs, adorned with scarlet stockings, if such they may be called, reaching only to the ankles, and leaving the feet bare — a custom equally picturesque and economical, as both shoes and stockings 46 undergo great wear and tear in these stony parts.

The focus on costumes is not only about picturesque difference but also about authenticity - the “authentic experience” of observing the natives and in Strutt’s case it is not merely about describing them in words but also illustrating them with his frontispiece. He represents the Calabrians as a colourful species mired in the past, looking like characters out of a child’s book of fairy tales set in some far-away medieval kingdom. This desire for the authentic underlies travel literature featuring exotic places, which nowadays has become more and more difficult to satisfy.

A new form of tourism has emerged called “slum tourism” where gazing at people living in extreme poverty is part of the itinerary. Somehow this does not seem too different from the journeys made by British travellers to Calabria like Strutt and Lear. Modern travel companies and apologists for slum tourism couch the experience in the terms of “immersion,” and “poverty awareness,” related to some travellers’ desire for authenticity. For all its picturesque trappings, the work of men like Lear, Strutt, and Gissing after him is akin to a similar notion of the human zoo. In fact, despite claims that Lear “cares” about the people of Calabria (particularly in the work of Walchester), there are many instances that demonstrate the opposite.

“Dighi, doghi, daghi, da” - Lear’s representation of the people of Calabria Edward Lear is best known for his nonsense poems and limericks and this humorous side of his nature is evident in his travel writing. Sometimes he comes across like a Doctor Syntax47 travelling in search of the picturesque, unaware for the most part of what is going on around him except for those scenes which he perceives as picturesque enough to paint. The Calabria he describes veers between the picturesque landscape and the Gothic sublime which includes not only the bizarre human characters that populate this strange land but also some truly

46 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 69. 47 Doctor Syntax was the fictitious schoolmaster hero of three very popular books in verse form written by William Combe and illustrated by Thomas Rowlandson and published between 1812 and 1821. The first volume follows the Doctor's misadventures in search of the picturesque.

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137 barbarous human tales. At times, he might be describing an alternate universe with himself as a somewhat eccentric traveller through his own nonsense world or even that of his rival Lewis Carroll. To begin with, Lear introduces us to Ciccio, guide and muleteer, who answers everything with:

… a short sentence ending with “Dogo, dighi, doghi, daghi, da” - a collection of sounds of frequent recurrence in Calabrese lingo, and the only definite portion of that speech we could ever perfectly master. What the “Dogo” was we never knew, though it was an object of our keenest search throughout the tour to ascertain if it were animal, mineral, or vegetable. Afterwards, by constant habit, we arranged a sort of conversational communication with friend Ciccio, but we never got on well unless we said “Dogo si”, or “Dogo no” several times as an ad libitum appoggiatura, winding up with “Dighi, doghi, daghi, da”, which seemed to set all 48 right.

“Dighi, doghi daghi da” becomes a refrain throughout the work and some people claim that it may be the origin of the name of the character in Lear’s nonsense poem, The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo. Indeed, constant repetition confers a sense of the ridiculous on the proceedings, like a repeated refrain from a nonsense poem. An anonymous author of a recent article on an Italian website notes that:

Il “Dogo, dighi, doghi, daghi, da” con cui si esprimeva Ciccio, una sorta di scioglilingua, doveva essere apprezzato da chi, come Lear, in più d’una occasione aveva fatto uso di simili “suoni” per i suoi versi “non sense”. [The “Dogo, dighi, doghi, daghi, da” with which Ciccio expresses himself, a kind of tongue-twister, would have been appreciated by someone who, like Lear, has made use of similar 49 sounds in his nonsense verses on more than one occasion.]

But this is not the only example of Lear’s ability to perceive the ridiculous in everything. In Staiti, in a dirty, disordered house he tells us that despite the uninviting, odiferous and annoying place where dinner was accompanied by ‘a tribe of spoiled children and barking dogs ... the ‘vermi di seta’ were our chief horror; and so completely did silkworms seem the life and air, end and material, of all Staiti, that we felt more than half sure, on contemplating three or four suspicious-looking dishes, that those interesting lepidoptera formed a great part 50 of the groundwork of our banquet silkworms plain boiled, stewed chrysalis, and moth tarts.’

48 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 12. 49 ‘Reggio: il prossimo appuntamento dell'Anassilaos,’ Strill.It: Quotidiano in tempo reale, 2012, , accessed 26 February 2012. 50 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, pp. 53-54.

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138

Then there is the unforgettable character of Count Garrolo whose name, according to Walchester ‘is most likely an example of Lear’s license to alter the details of his travels for dramatic effect; garrolo meaning talkative.’51 This does seem highly likely. Lear describes the Count as a ‘good-natured and fussy little man, excessively consequential and self- satisfied, but kind withal, and talking and bustling in the most breathless haste, quoting Greek and Latin, hinting at antiquities and all kinds of dim lore and obscure science, rushing about, ordering his two domestics to and fro, explaining, apologising, and welcoming, without the least cessation.’52 Garrolo’s refrain is ‘Garrolo, Garrolo, Garrolo, Garrolo-tutto-tutto- tutto’.53 Garrolo’s wife, Lear tells us, says ‘nothing in the world but “Nirr si” or “Nirr no”, which smallest efforts of intellectual discourse she continued to insert between the Count's sentences in the meekest way, like Pity, between the drummings of despair in Collins’ Ode to the Passions54 … It was a most trying and never-ending monologue, barring the choral nirr si and no, and how it was we did not go off improperly into shrieks of laughter I cannot tell, 55 unless that the day's fatigue had made our spirits tractable.’

It becomes apparent throughout the work that one of Lear’s weapons in the arsenal of the comic picturesque is the refrain, the repetition of which characterises many of the more eccentric people that he meets. The work moves backwards and forwards from a gloomy, Gothic portrayal of a land of brigands, dark forests and mountains, deep in pre-revolution suspicions to a place of nonsensical and comical human interaction. Kirby Olson describes this as ‘a new comic picturesque [forged] out of the tension between the picturesque and the comic picturesque’56 and this is certainly an apt description of Lear’s work.

In Gioiosa a ‘globose little Baron’ repeats the mantra perché [why]. Every movement, every conversational gambit by the tourists is followed by a “why”, even following them as they go on their way:

51 Walchester, ‘Non vedete. È un rivoluzione,’ p. 64. 52 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 82. 53 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 88. 54 This is a reference to ‘And, though sometimes, each dreary pause between, / Dejected Pity at his side / Her soul-subduing voice applied, / Yet still he kept his wild unalter’d mien’, William Collins, ‘The Passions: an Ode for Music,’ Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects, Millar, London, 1747, p.46, , accessed 18 January 2013. 55 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, pp. 84-85. 56 Olson, ‘Edward Lear: Deleuzian landscape painter,’ p. 350.

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139 “Perche ucelli? Perche disegni? Perche confetti? Perche, perche, perche, perche?” [Why birds? Why drawings? Why sugarplums? Why, why, why, why?] till the last “perche” was lost in distance as we passed once more round the rock, and crossed the river Komano. Long did we indulge in merriment at the perturbation our visit had occasioned to our host, whom we shall long remember as “Baron Wherefore.” Nevertheless, a certainty impresses me that so much 57 timidity is occasioned by some hidden event or expectation.

Here at last Lear drops the humour and alludes to coming events as he does more frequently towards the end of the book because by the time he publishes it, he of course knows what all the suspicion is leading up to. In an attempt to build some suspense himself and to ensure that he doesn’t come across as quite so unconnected with the human drama which is evolving, he plants allusions to suspicion from the Calabrians and a growing tension in his interactions with them.

Unlike many of his fellow travellers, Lear is not concerned with the classics or subject to the lure of antiquity, he has no interest in Calabrian history and is not really concerned with current events and politics, giving no useful information about the land he travels through. The comedy goes on because Lear’s interest is not in the reality of life for the Calabrians, he is only concerned with finding picturesque landscapes to paint and amusing vignettes to write about. As Ernest Falbo points out, ‘Lear's journal is unique in having found in Calabria a kind of never-never land, a land of poetic nonsense.’58 So it is that we read about people who cannot believe that fruits are grown in England, especially ones that the Calabrians have not heard about:

“E che cosa sono Gooseberries e Gringhegi?” [What are gooseberries and greengages] said the whole party, in a rage, “non ci sono queste cose, sono sogni.” [these things do not exist, they are dreams] So we ate our supper in quiet, convinced almost that we had been telling lies; that gooseberries were unreal and fictitious; greengages a dream.

We meet the Carista family who ‘when they do not catechise, they stand in a row and stare at us with all their might,’59 and the Carista infant ‘who, during the mid-day meal, climbed abruptly on to the table, and before he could be rescued, performed a series of struggles among the dishes, which ended by the little pickle's losing his balance and

57 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 133. 58 Ernest S Falbo, ‘Review: Edward Lear in Southern Italy, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria and the Kingdom of Naples by Peter Quennell,’ Italica, vol. 45, no. 1, 1968, p. 118. 59 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 108.

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140 collapsing suddenly in a sitting posture into the very middle of the maccaroni dish, from which P and I rejoiced to think we had been previously helped. One sees in valentines Cupids on beds of roses, or on birds' nests; but a slightly clothed Calabrese infant sitting in the midst of a hot dish of maccaroni appears to me a perfectly novel idea.”60 We also read about the irascible Nonno Asciutti from Castel Vetere who declares that:

“No good Christian ought to eat flesh and why? The quadruped works for man while alive, and it is a shame to devour him when dead. The sheep gives wool, the ox ploughs, the cow gives milk, the goat cheese." “Cosa fanno per noi i lepri?” [what do hares do for us?] whispered one of the grandsons. “Statevi zitt'!” [Be quiet!] shouted the orator. “But fish,” continued he, “what do they do for us? Does a mullet plough? Can a prawn give milk? Has a tunny any 61 wool? No. Fish and birds also were therefore created to be eaten.”

The same Asciutti Nonno becomes infuriated when Lear and Proby go to leave, screaming at them “in a paroxysm of rage”:

“Cielo! O rabbia! O che mai sento? O chi sono? O chi siete? [Oh heavens! Oh rage! Oh what do I hear? Oh who am I? Oh who are you?] … What have I done that you will not stay? How can I bear such an insult! Since Calabria was Calabria, no such affront has ever been offered to a Calabrian! Go, why should you go?” In vain we tried to assuage the grandsire's fury. We had staid three days in Gerace, three in Reggio, two in Bova and in Stilo, and not one in Castel Vetere! The silent father looked mournful, the grandsons implored; but the wrathful old gentleman, having considerably endangered the furniture by kicks and thumps, 62 finally rushed down stairs in a frenzy, greatly to our discomfiture.

The old Asciutti sounds very much like an irascible character from one of Lear’s limericks. Kathryn Walchester claims that ‘the descriptions of Ciccio and Count Garrolo illustrate Lear’s affection for the Italian people.’63 Perhaps, but I am more inclined to infer that Lear’s humour is less about affection and more about the way he deals with discomfort. Lear himself writes, on leaving the family of Don Peppino Rapolla at the castle of Venosa, that it is ‘With great regret’, that he left Venosa and the ‘pleasant family we had staid with, the only people one has greatly cared for in all this tour.’64 This could, of course be due to the fashionable sophistication and wealthy abundance of that family, the members of which were

60 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 109. 61 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 120. 62 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, pp. 120-121. 63 Walchester, ‘Non vedete. È un rivoluzione,’ p. 64. 64 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 262.

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141 able to converse fluently and knowledgeably about European and English literature. The family of Don Peppino stands out amongst the plethora of eccentric caricatures that make up the bulk of those with whom Lear and Proby stay in Calabria.

The “close-up” comical representations of individuals are directly opposite to the Calabrian paintings themselves. In the end, for all his sense of the ridiculous, as Ernest Falbo reminds us, ‘amid the varied panoramas of mountains and sea, fig gardens and “deceitful ravines”, hidden valleys and oak forests and “interminable olive woods - high, gray, filmy, feathery olives,” Lear found a landscape that appealed to his melancholy nature just as it did to another English traveler, George Gissing, later in that century.’65 In Lear’s paintings, his depiction of people is devoid of humour; usually showing a very small group of peasants in the middle distance, tiny creatures overwhelmed by the grandeur of the mountain scenery. Paul Duncan who wrote a book on the hill towns of Italy, refers to how ‘the hill towns of the Ionian coastline – Pentedàtillo, Bova, Gerace and Stilo – which populate [Lear’s] paintings are dwarfed by their menacing surroundings and his people seem small and helpless in a 66 landscape of such savagery.’

It may be that Lear paints the people in the Calabrian landscapes in such a way because of his self-confessed inability to paint the human figure but I believe that Lear's reasons run deeper than this. He could, after all, have chosen to leave people out of the landscapes altogether. There is, as previously noted, something Gothic about these paintings. Peter Whitfield, in his history of travel notes that ‘in works like Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) full use is made of atmospheric landscapes: mountains, gorges, forests, waterfalls – all serve to create the settings in which the characters are solitary, tragic, helpless or threatened.’67 It is this sense of threat and helplessness that Lear creates with his tiny people positioned against immense nature.

Lear himself professed to do nothing more than portray what he saw. In her biography of Lear Susan Chitty quotes Lear’s friend Charles Church who wrote of Lear that his ‘description of himself as the Topographical Artist marked his purpose of making truth and fidelity the special object in his work, without attempting to “make fiction for the delight of those who prefer prettiness to the truth.”’68 This brings to mind eighteenth-century writer

65 Falbo, ‘Review: Edward Lear in Southern Italy,’ p. 117. 66 Paul Duncan, ‘Calabria’, in Discovering the Hill Towns of Italy, Pavilion, London, 1990, p. 32. 67 Peter Whitfield, Travel: A literary History, Bodleian Library, Oxford, 2011, p. 183. 68 Susan Chitty, That Singular Person Called Lear, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1988, p. 9.

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142 Henry Swinburne, the subject of a previous chapter, who was often described, and indeed, described himself as blunt but faithful to reality. But although this may have been Lear’s intention it is clear that he framed his views with a mind to delight potential buyers. After all, the underlying reason for his trip was economic and the English market of the period was hungry for the landscapes of ever more exotic places. Nonetheless, in these works Lear seems also to be making some point about the insignificance of human endeavour - in the Aspromonte at least - when faced with the enormity of nature. There is that sense of capturing something that is beyond the reach, the understanding, of those that are native to it. So strong is this impression of uncomprehending humanity before the works of “divine” nature that these mountain paintings might serve as ideal illustrations to Dante’s Purgatorio.

There is more to Lear's representation of the Calabrian peasants than these depictions of people cowed by the landscape - there is the journal and his verbal descriptions of the people he encounters. The essence of travel literature is to create visual imagery, the travel writer seeking to “paint a picture” with his/her words. In his illustrated journal, Lear does not just literally paint a picture of a romantic sublime landscape, he gives us his “take” on the locals. In one scene from Lear's journal he offers sugar plums to a group of naked peasant children, describing ‘five others in similar undress perversely crawling about the floor like so many brown spiders.’69 This image from Lear’s pen is particularly jarring, especially as his usual tone, evident in his letters and nonsense works and throughout much of the Journal is that of an easy-going, jocular wit. In fact, these small eruptions of distaste that are dotted in the text are quite disturbing in their revelation of an underlying disgust with the people he encounters. At times, he is openly “disgusted” by someone and often combines this with a mocking humour as in his encounter with a suspicious older woman at Tropea:

We stood humbly on the steps of the old lady's house, and entreated her only to read the letter we had brought but she would have nothing to say to us. “Sono femmina. Sono femmina”, she constantly declared a fact we had never ventured to doubt, in spite of her immoderate size and ugliness. “Sono femmina, e non so niente.” [I am a woman, I am a woman, and know nothing about anything] No persuasions could soften her, so we were actually forced to turn away in hunger 70 and disgust.

We had not gone far, before a chuckling sound was heard to proceed from the hitherto imperturbable Ciccio, who presently went into convulsions of suppressed laughter, which continued to agitate him for more than an hour, only broken by

69 Chitty, That Singular Person, p. 91. 70 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, pp. 29-30.

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143 the words, “Sono femmina, e non so niente, dighi, da,” by which we were led to perceive that the rude reception given us by Mrs. Tropaeano had made a forcible 71 impression on our quaint quiet guide's imagination.

Lear's account contrasts the sublime mountainscape - replete with its thrilling terrors and horrors - and the human landscape which is, at times, simply horrifying. In her examination of nineteenth-century travellers’ opinions of the Mediterranean peasant, Caroline Brettel notes:

Travelers were especially obsessed and disgusted by the extent to which peasants lived among animals and therefore like animals. The English writer and painter Edward Lear, voyaging in Italy in the 1840s, expressed horror at peasant living 72 conditions in a way characteristic of countless similar texts.

There are many instances in Lear's account illustrating his disgust and horror at peasant life. At one point he writes, ‘So in the palpable obscurity I sat down on a large live pig, who slid away to my disgust from under me, and made a portentous squealing.’ The disgust displayed by the author is, in its own way, part of the thrill of reading travel literature - eliciting a certain schadenfreude in the consumer which reinforces difference. Difference is the underlying element in the entertainment value of travel books. As for disgust, William Miller tells us that ‘It is culture, not nature that draws the lines between defilement and purity, 73 clean and filthy, those crucial boundaries disgust is called on to police.’

Within these other worlds described by travellers like Lear there are, however, diverging boundaries based on difference within. The Calabrian peasants are not all cut from the same cloth however similar they may seem to Lear. Preoccupied, evidently, by his main aim of painting pictures, Lear tends to skate along the surface of things, to generalise, to be impressed only by the picturesque or by superficial appearances. He has no time for the curiosity of the people he encounters, except to parody them. Consumed as they are by the need to produce food, the peasants ask questions about English produce; Lear is intent only on producing his pictures. At one point, he praises “the peasantry” for being ‘perfectly quiet and well-behaved, because they nowise persecuted’ him and his companion during their “drawing excursions.”74 Like Ramage and other travellers before him, Lear promotes the idea of the Calabrian peasant as childlike, unable to be quiet or resist asking a stream of questions.

71 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, pp. 31-32. 72 Caroline B Bettell, ‘Nineteenth century travelers' accounts of the Mediterranean peasant,’ Ethnohistory, vol. 33, no. 2, 1986, p. 162. 73 William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1997, p. 15. 74 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 119.

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144 The idea that the Calabrians may be as interested in him as he is in their lives - at least superficially - does not impress Lear. He does not wish to be bothered with their questions which may be tiresome because they are so basic. Mainly, they want to know why he is there.

Apparently concerned throughout his life with his own appearance, with his perception of his own physical shortcomings, indeed, as one writer put it, ‘morbidly conscious of his own plainness of feature,’75 Lear makes much of the appearance of others. Mostly, he comments on the “plain”, the “homely” or the “very ugly” with the occasional reference to a “pretty” or “handsome” woman. ‘Lear's philanthropy’, notes biographer Susan Chitty, ‘stopped short at ugliness.’76 In Palmi looking for accommodation, Lear and Proby arrived at one place where the upper part of the staircase, ‘was filled up by the most Brobdignagian of living landladies: moreover, this enormous woman was peculiarly hideous, and clad in the slightest and most extraordinary of simple costumes … had evidently been sacrificing earnestly to Bacchus, and was as unsteady on her feet as clamorous with her tongue.’77 When they turned away to try another place to stay, she called out to them ‘but seeing that her invitation made no impression “Andatevi al diavolo nero,” [Go to the black devil] quoth she, accompanying her words with a yell, and an abrupt ejection of a large broom from her right hand down the staircase, so that we fairly fled without further discussion, and followed the silent but grinning 78 Ciccio to another locanda [inn].’

In Gioia Lear creates a picture of poverty and despair. He notes the “melancholy” of a group of workmen, a “few poor wretches” with ‘malaria-fever79 being written on every line of their face and form. Here were on every side the emaciated limbs, the skin contracted closely to the bones of the face, the yellow complexion, the swollen stomach, the harsh and grating voice all unerring signs of the nature of the air in such localities.’80 However, unlike other travellers, including Swinburne before him and Gissing after him, Lear does not attempt to

75 Angus Davidson, Edward Lear: Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet, John Murray, London, 1968, p. 32. 76 Chitty, That Singular Person, p. 91. 77 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, pp. 169-170. 78 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, pp. 169-170. 79 In Italy, malaria was an endemic disease that was only eradicated by the mid-20th century. Among the southern regions of Italy, Calabria was one of the regions that was most affected by malaria. The disease was prevalent in 52% of the Calabrian territory and endemic along its coasts, its most important rivers and within the valleys of its broad streams. Calabria showed both natural (including seismic phenomena) and antropic factors (latifundia, deforestation and the very poor social and economic conditions of the rural Calabrian people) that favoured the spread of Plasmodium, transmitted via the Anopheles mosquito, as well as the endemic and century-old presence of malaria in its territory. 80 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, pp. 166-167.

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145 link this extreme poverty to the practices of the government or landowning classes. He is not interested in politics or social systems in general, as far as the people he meets are concerned his interest is mainly in what may be amusing in their aspect and attitudes.

Revolution A growing tension is evident throughout Lear’s Journal and almost at the outset the locals find it hard to believe that he and Proby are travelling just to paint landscapes and seem suspicious of their motives. One biographer, Peter Levi, notes that ‘It was Proby…and Lear…who appeared abnormal. It was abnormal to be travelling at all.’81 This was especially so because they were travelling through a region on the brink of turmoil – just before the uprisings of 1848. But Lear continues, viewing everything and seeing nothing, listening leisurely to his hosts without hearing anything much at all. Levi goes on to describe this selective unseeing deafness:

He sounds far more like a landscape painter than anything else. He is scholarly, but only in marshaling all resources for the most frivolously aesthetic purposes. 82 He is very like a modern traveller, in fact.

And so he is like the traveller to ‘exotic, faraway places’ today, unaware for the most part, of any undercurrents or the struggles of the indigenous people, keen only to get that perfect shot or take home a great bargain of “ethnic” craftsmanship. Like the modern traveller - a writer for Lonely Planet or Rough Guide, for example - Lear glosses over the land he is visiting, producing a pastiche of quaint customs, a trace of history, amusing anecdotes, salutary warnings, ratings on food, accommodation and the hospitality and friendliness of the “natives”. This is the kind of travelling which masquerades as “immersion” into a culture “off the beaten track” - the opposite to the package tour. However, given the short length of his stay in Calabria it is hardly surprising that Lear remained for the most part unaware of the political situation in the region.

Lear’s immersion is in his landscape-painter’s world. After all, Lear's primary motive for travel is to paint the landscapes which had become his main source of income, selling them both from his foreign studios and to patrons in England. There had been, since the early days of the Grand Tour, a growing demand for landscape paintings of exotic places which spurred an industry in souvenirs - an industry which has grown to this day. Intent on his

81 Peter Levi, Edward Lear: A Biography, Macmillan, London, 1995, p. 103. 82 Peter Levi, Edward Lear: A Biography, p. 95.

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146 mission to complete a number of drawings which would become saleable paintings, Lear is made impatient by the questions and suspicions of the people he meets. At Palizzi, Lear voices his frustration,

I sate exhibited and displayed for the benefit of the landlord, his wife, and family, who regarded me with unmingled amazement, saying perpetually, “O donde siete? O che fai? O chi sei?” [Oh where do you come from? Oh what are you going to do? Oh who can you be?] And, indeed, the passage of a stranger through these outlandish places is so unusual an occurrence, that on no principle but one can the aborigines account for your appearance. “Have you no rocks, no towns, no trees in your own country? Are you not rich? Then what can you wish here? here, in this place of poverty and incommodo? [discomfort] What are you doing? Where are you going?” You might talk for ever; but you could not convince them you are not a political agent sent to spy out the nakedness of the land, and masking the intentions of your government under the thin veil of portraying 83 scenes, in which they see no novelty, and take no delight.

Lear easily dismisses this as being due to the locals never having before seen an Englishman within their village. Nonetheless, the tension continues to grow until finally, at the house of Don Pietro in Tropea he notes that ‘it appeared to me that some evil, general or particular, was brooding over the household.’84 He is subjected to a rapid succession of questions as to what he knows of political changes about to take place. Finally, ‘“È già principiate la revoluzione!” [The revolution has already started] shrieked aloud Don Pietro; sobs and groans and clamour followed, and the moaning hostess, after weeping frantically, fell into a violent fit, and was carried out, the party breaking up in the most admired disorder.’85 Lear paints a picture of chaos, with the Calabrian people acting like pantomime characters, overly emotional and overly dramatic, his own attitude remaining distanced and tinged with typical amusement.

His visit cut short by revolution, Lear concludes – again sounding very much like a modern traveller – that he ‘can’t claim to have “done” Calabria by travelling in a carriage from Naples to Reggio.’86 Lear had intended originally to visit all three provinces of Calabria but in the end only managed the southern-most and even then he kept mostly to the Aspromonte. Of the Aspromonte, a recent English travel writer notes:

83 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, pp. 47-48. 84 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 186. 85 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 188. 86 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 137.

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147 In Greek, Aspromonte means white mountain, because its peaks are often covered with snow. But it also means the harsh mountain, the deserted mountains. For since the time of Homer it has been a vast emptiness, where only the intrepid or 87 foolhardy dare tread alone.

Sparsely populated, yes, but hardly “a vast emptiness”, and while “aspro” certainly means “harsh” in Italian, there is no reason to extrapolate that it must also mean “deserted”. There is clearly a desire here to make the landscape fit a particular vision, as is, indeed, the case with Lear. Prolific travel writer H V Morton is not alone in claiming that Lear ‘romanticized and exaggerated everything he drew in the South.’88 However, a more recent visitor to Calabria, Charles Lister counters, revealingly,

A number of people say he's guilty of artistic license; that he took liberties with scenery and his illustrations are only his impressions of what was there. I don't think it matters; he's very probably guilty of literary license as well, but what 89 travel writer isn't?

Of course, Lear is not alone. There is a general tendency in travel literature to exaggerate the difficulties and the attractions of a place. Edward Lear began his journal with an evocation of the Gothic sublime and what he delivered was indeed sublime but also comically picturesque. It makes good economic sense to present a place more mysterious, more colourful, more dangerous, more hilarious, more everything than it actually might be. Vivien Noakes reminds us that it was ‘on the basis of Lear's completed travel drawings that clients placed commissions for highly finished watercolours and for oils.’90 Moreover, Lear’s representation of the Aspromonte followed other accounts which had already set up certain expectations.

More recent travellers have sometimes sought to distance themselves from nineteenth- century representations. Bryn Gunnell, an Englishman who made the journey to Calabria with his wife in the early 1960s, wrote of his journey, ‘I hope I have done nothing to confirm popular impressions which still smack of the nineteenth century.’91 But the accounts of famous nineteenth-century English precursors to the Gunnells like Edward Lear seem to have found favour with Italians. Apparently, Lear’s book has ‘been highly esteemed in Italy, and

87 Charles Richards, The New Italians, Michael Joseph, London, 1994, pp. 93–94. 88 H V Morton, A Traveller in Southern Italy, Methuen, London, 1969, p. 352. 89 Charles Lister, Heel to Toe: Encounters in the South of Italy, Secker & Warburg, London, 2002, p. 232. 90 Vivien Noakes, The Painter Edward Lear, London: David & Charles, London, 1991, p. 12. 91 Bryn Gunnell, Calabrian Summer, Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1965, p. 176.

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148 the editors of La Patria: geografia dell’Italia (a serious and exhaustive guide-book published in twenty-nine volumes between 1890 and 1903) quote largely from it in the volume dealing with Calabria.’92 In 1973 Lear’s account of his journey was translated into Italian and Diario di un Viaggio a Piedi - Calabria went on sale in Italy.

In the 1990s an EEC funded project to encourage sustainable development in the sparsely populated areas of Europe resulted in the construction of walking tracks in the relatively new national park of the Aspromonte. This construction included a track named the “English Man’s Trail” for Lear. Monuments and plaques have also been built in the Aspromonte with the input of Calabrian communities as evidence of Lear's passage. It would appear from this that the Calabrians of the southern-most province are happy to celebrate the account of this erstwhile visitor to their region.

There are references in many of the works by English travellers to a general Calabrian respect of the English. English support for the Calabrians against the French is well- documented and a famous battle of the English against Napoleonic forces was fought near the Calabrian village of Maida. As for the new tourist trail and monuments, any residual good feeling towards the English notwithstanding, I suspect that what made good economic sense to Lear makes good economic sense to the Calabrians as well. The pressures of a competitive global economy, especially for areas of natural beauty or some historical interest that remain largely underdeveloped, mean that there is logic in rendering a place attractive to tourists.

Nonetheless, that Lear’s journey is now inscribed into the Calabrian landscape to some degree by the Calabrians themselves – mainly for the purpose of promoting the region to tourists – indicates that some sort of cultural transformation has taken place. The Calabrians have, at the very least, recognised that there is something to be gained by adopting an Englishman’s representation of them and their region and their reasoning may be more complex than that of the purely entrepreneurial. “The Englishman's Trail” inverts the nature of the encounter between Lear and Calabria as described in his journal - its creation exoticizes English culture and reframes it as Calabrian heritage.

The irony of Lear's commemoration by the people of the Aspromonte is that an account that in the past contributed to a general stereotype of Calabrians as a people who were seen as

92 Angus Davidson, Edward Lear: Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet (1812-1888), John Murray, London, 1968, p. 47.

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149 the Other of Europe, of Italy in fact, is now the basis for a positive promotion of the region. Tourist artifacts such as “The Englishman's Trail” may also unintentionally, according to Franklin and Crang, ‘intervene in the construction of local identity: to constantly create and 93 recreate a sense of belonging, past, place, culture and ownership.’

Travel literature’s reductionist discourse continues to make much of the wildness of the Aspromonte, describing it as a rocky chaos, which, in the words of Norman Douglas is ‘torn into gullies by earthquakes and other cataclysms of the past.’94 As noted previously chaos is frequently used in representations of the Aspromonte. It may be that the chaotic “danger” of the Aspromonte has been exaggerated by travellers for their own purposes but what might be the underlying logic beneath Lear's journey to Calabria? He was, after all, a man who suffered from various physical ailments. Many commentators have remarked upon the incongruity of someone of such a delicate constitution undertaking such a difficult journey. The editor of his Indian journal, Ray Murphy, remarked on Lear's ‘magnificently complex mass of contradictions’95, describing him as a man who was ‘so physically weak and 96 emotionally vulnerable yet so intrepid an “explorer.”’

Apart from his poor health, Philip Hofer provides a list of other reasons that would have prevented someone like Lear at that particular period from undertaking such a widely- travelled, adventurous life. These include ‘his family's middle-class origin, its financial trials, and his lack of formal education which may have been the main cause of his continual anxiety, his need to dramatize his problems, his lack of confidence, and, above all, his consistent, wistful loneliness. Murphy suggests that Lear travelled to escape his feeling of social discomfort.’97 Not the least of this discomfort would have been the result of his sexuality, if, as some commentators claim, he was a repressed homosexual, particularly with 98 what Susan Chitty has described as the “fearful” loneliness of Victorian homosexuals.

Certainly, travel may have satisfied a need to feel empowered - like the acrophobic that climbs a mountain, Lear's travel to the “wilder” extremes of Europe and beyond may have helped him gain a certain confidence. Lear was rewarded for his adventures, not just through

93 Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang, ‘The trouble with tourism and travel theory?’ Tourist Studies, vol.1, no.1, 2001, p. 10. 94 Norman Douglas, Old Calabria, Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1962, p. 282. 95 Edward Lear, Indian Journal: Watercolours and Extracts from the Diary of Edward Lear (1873-1875), edited by Ray Murphy, Jarrolds, London, 1953, p. 9. 96 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 10. 97 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, p. 10. 98 Chitty, That Singular Person, p. 215.

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150 sales of his art works. On the strength of his 2-volume Illustrated Excursions in Italy, published in 1846 and focusing on the Abruzzi and the Papal States, Queen Victoria sent for Lear and commissioned him to give her a course of twelve drawing lessons. This was just before his trip to Calabria and may have encouraged him to continue his exploration of the largely unvisited parts of Italy. A Geographical Magazine article of 1961 makes the point:

Journeying through Calabria is not the ideal holiday, as we find when reading Edward Lear's Journals or Gissing and Norman Douglas. Its harshness, which promises yet even more beauty beyond, attracts the Englishman; he wants to prise open this oyster, however laborious it may be, and experience both the hostility and the hospitality of a remote country at first hand. They continually complained 99 about Calabria, yet, as continually, they returned to it.

There has been a long tradition of the independent English traveller. Indeed, after Thomas Cook introduced group travel in the 1860s, many who considered themselves above such an enterprise were deeply critical of it. Charles Lever, for one, wrote in Blackwood's Magazine in 1865:

I imagined that the characteristic independence of Englishmen would revolt against a plan that reduces the traveller to the level of his trunk and obliterates 100 every trace and trait of the individual.

Instead, the independent English traveller like Lear tended to obliterate every trace and trait of the individual “native”, particularly of the peasant variety, whom he encountered on his journey. The English traveller to Calabria can be seen to belong to a tradition that defines, in a way, Englishness itself. Other enterprises defining nationality could be said to be the Romantic Movement and the Gothic tradition which preceded it. Cannon Schmitt writes about the domestic literary concerns which underlie Gothic novels such as The Castle of Otranto and Anne Radcliffe's The Italian, concluding that thereby ‘a text that seems to hold out to its late eighteenth-century English readers the pleasures of a pure exoticism actually 101 involves them as much in modern Englishness as Ancient Italianness.’

So it can be said of Edward Lear in his own times, viewing the Calabrian landscape and people through the filters of his own aesthetic and personal concerns – financial and otherwise. He positions himself from the outset - with his evocation of Mrs Radcliffe - as the

99 Michael Swan, ‘Magna Graecia: the Calabria scene,’ The Geographical Magazine, 1961, p. 476. 100 Jon Evans (ed), Abroad, Gollancz, London, 1968, p. 23. 101 Cannon Schmitt, ‘Techniques of terror, technologies of nationality: Ann Radcliffe's The Italian,’ ELH: English Literary History, vol. 61, no. 4, 1994, p. 853.

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151 individualistic and intrepid English traveller against an alien backdrop of child-like peasants and irrationally behaved aristocrats in a barely civilised land much as Emily Lowe does after him. Lear’s work reflects the Romantic preoccupation with nature and the lure of the exotic landscape.

It is interesting that Lear gives the impression that he and Proby were the only Englishmen in Calabria at the time, and certainly they were alone in visiting the more remote villages of the Aspromonte, if not the whole province of Reggio Calabria. It suits Lear to make this claim – like the other writers dealt with in this work, he needs to reinforce the idea of Calabria as a place where only the most daring traveller sets foot. However, Susan Chitty reminds us of an anecdote Lear recounts in his correspondence of overhearing the conversation of two Englishmen staying at the Hotel Giordano in Reggio where one tells the other, ‘that fellow [they were] talking to last night [is] nothing but a dirty landscape painter.’ This obviously appealed to Lear’s sense of humour and from that time onward, apparently, he referred to himself as a “Dirty Landscape Painter.”102 Indeed, Lear’s humour and adoption of a “comic picturesque” style serves to alleviate the dark melancholy of the Claude lens of his art.

For the people of Calabria today, Lear’s work is important as a representation of their region in an era where such representations, especially pictorial ones, were rare. As one Calabrian website puts it,

Gli scritti e soprattutto i disegni che Lear ci ha lasciato, rappresentano per la Calabria una documentazione di incomparabile valore storico. [The writing and above all, the pictures that Lear has left us represent a documentation of Calabria 103 of incomparable historical value.]

Lear is unique amongst the travellers whose works are examined in this study – he has very little interest in revealing Calabria to an English readership. His main concern is to describe and paint landscapes and it is the production of these that informs the journey and the text. However, he still manages to reinforce a Gothic sublime reading of Calabria and its people and he gives us an insight into the aesthetics of the Romantic period. It is interesting to ponder whether this is representation is limited to the male gaze. Emily Lowe, who follows

102 Chitty, That Singular Person, p. 88. 103 Le illustrazioni stupende dei luoghi della Calabria che il grande Edward Lear realizzò nel 1847, La nostra Calabria website, January 25, 2016,< http://calabrianostra.blogspot.com.au/2016/01/le-illustrazioni-stupende- dei-luoghi.html>, accessed 15 November, 2011.

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152 Lear, has more than enough confidence to go beyond the traditional role of women in Victorian England, but is her portrayal of Calabria significantly different than that of the men who travelled there? The next chapter will explore Lowe’s perspective.

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153 Chapter 6: Unprotected females on tour: Emily Lowe and her mother in Calabria

In the year preceding the Unification of Italy, Routledge published the anonymous travel 1 volume Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria and on the Top of Mount Aetna (1859). Italy at this time was perceived as a place rife with unrest characteristic of the struggle of the Risorgimento, and would have been seen as a challenging place to visit at the very least. The South was not at this stage the centre of unification struggles but there existed continuing discontent and unrest due to opposition to the reign of Ferdinand II. Although he had been successful in putting down the insurrections of 1848, the restoration of the old regime in the south by no means put an end to conspiracies and uprisings against Ferdinand II, and there was an assassination attempt on the King's life in 1856. The savage repression which followed the defeat of the liberals had by 1850 earned Ferdinand the condemnation of many, including the British liberal statesman William Gladstone, who famously described Ferdinand's regime 2 as ‘the negation of God erected into a system of government.’

Regardless of actual risks, the idea of turmoil in the South, if not the reality, would have resulted in a perception that travel to the region certainly offered some jeopardy during this period. That two English women made the journey unaccompanied by men is extraordinary by any standards. But how much at risk were they, and were they really unprotected? This chapter places the travel volume of Emily Lowe, author of Unprotected Females, in the context of the final days of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, reflected through the lens of a gentlewoman with a taste for adventure.

The appetite for the romantic sublime in the popular press created a seemingly endless desire for the dangerous, the irregular and the exotic and, with the flux of travel literature on the market, a clever choice for travel was one that satisfied this desire. Certainly, Emily Lowe played to this desire for adventure travel by highlighting perceived risks and then demolishing them as something that two “feeble” women could easily overcome without the assistance of a male travel companion although she does acknowledge the help of men encountered on her journey. Indeed, she describes how easily these men can be manipulated by women’s perceived helplessness.

1 [Emily Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and on the Top of Mount Aetna, Routledge, Warnes & Routledge, London, 1859. 2 Ian St John, Gladstone and the Logic of Victorian Politics, Anthem Press, London, 2010, p. 42.

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154 During this period, the role of women was beginning to be debated in the public arena of the popular press. Periodicals like The Queen3 began to deal seriously with the role of middleclass women in society, not only in politics, but also in higher education and employment. This was a question which also underlined much of the writing of George Gissing, whose travel book to Calabria will be examined in the next chapter. Books like Unprotected Females impacted on this question of what was suitable for a woman by disrupting the normative female position and breaking away from what was deemed proper conduct for a lady. In particular, this chapter will examine the ambiguities and contradictions in the lives and works of women writers like Emily Lowe and the conflicting discourses of Unprotected Females to pose the question, what is different about the female gaze and how is that difference evident in this book?

Emily Lowe was an object of much attention in the press of her day for her two travel books which were mostly received with apparent delight as the following examples demonstrate:

By a magic of its own, it holds us over a well-told tale from first page to last – like its predecessor among the fields and fjords of the snowy North. The writer has an eye for form, character, and colour, a lady-like sense of the humorous and the chivalric, a teasing, laughing buoyancy of spirit, above all an original grace and freshness in her style, that shifts her volume from the common ground of the publisher’s parlour to the more airy region of society. She does not so much write 4 as talk.

“The Unprotected Female” is unquestionably I the most pleasing and vivacious of modern tourists ... To perpetual buoyancy of spirits, the fair traveller adds a resolute determination to be stayed by no difficulties, and arrested by no ordinary obstacles, in the pursuit of any object of interest upon which she has set her mind ... "The Un- protected Female " clambered up Etna, and solved the question as to the flirtation of monks ...... A more pleasant book of travel has not been given to the public for many a day, and we know not which most to admire, the genuine English "pluck" of these courageous ladies, or the graceful, humorous, and 5 genuine womanly tone in which the narrative is written.

3The Queen was edited for a time by a woman named Helen Lowe, which was the name of Emily’s mother. 4 ‘Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and on the Top of Mount Aetna,’ The Athenaeum Jan 8, 1859, p 44, , accessed 12 August 2014. 5 ‘Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and on the Top of Mount Etna,’ Morning Chronicle (London), 20 January 1859, p. 6, , accessed 12 August 2014.

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155 On the whole, the articles of the times attest to the general reception of Unprotected Females as original and entertaining. As Elizabeth Zold points out, many people welcomed the new perspectives brought by women in their travel narratives. These narratives were often considered, as in the extract above, to be fresh and engaging additions to the travel genre.6 This calls into question the idea that the place of women in Victorian society was viewed solely as being in the domestic sphere and I will return to this issue later.

However, although clearly a work that challenges the role of women in Victorian society, modern examinations of the writings of female travellers don’t include Lowe’s work in their analysis, and she is rarely alluded to at all, except for the often quoted declaration, made in her Norwegian travel book of 1857:

The only use of a gentleman in travelling is to look after the luggage, and we take care to have no luggage. “The Unprotected” should never go beyond one portable 7 carpet-bag.

What little available information there is about Emily Lowe has been unearthed by Stefania Arcara, a scholar specialising in Victorian cultural studies, for an article which was published in the feminist journal Venus’s Squint in 1998. In this article Arcara notes that, apart from the house in Kensington which Lowe herself designed and the travel books written by her, the only other source of information about her can be found in a biographical dictionary of the time, People of the Period, which was published in 1897. The short but informative entry includes the facts that Lowe became Lady Spencer Clifford, wife of the late Sir Spencer Clifford the Yeoman Usher of the Black Rod, to whom she was married in 1869; that she was daughter of the late R A Lowe, an Indian judge; that she was the first woman to 8 obtain a Captain’s certificate; and that she was a frequent contributor to the Athenaeum.

One interesting piece of information I discovered from a newspaper article of 1884 was that Lady Spencer Clifford received the Maori Chief Tawhioa and others in his entourage at her home Rutland House in Knightsbridge during his trip to plead the case of the Maori land rights to Queen Victoria. According to the journalist, “I need hardly say that he was not only

6 Elizabeth Zold, ‘Virtual travel in second life: Understanding eighteenth-century travelogues through experiential learning,’ Pedagogy, vol. 14, issue 2, Spring 2014, p. 235. 7 [Emily Lowe], Unprotected Females in Norway; or the Pleasantest Way of Travelling There, Passing Through Denmark and Sweden, Routledge, London, 1857, p. 3. 8 A T C Pratt, People of the Period: Being a Collection of the Biographies of Upwards of Six Thousand Living Celebrities, Neville Beeman London, 1897, cited in Stefania Arcara, ‘“The serpent and the dove”: Emily Lowe, an unprotected Victorian traveller in no need of protection,’ Venus’s Squint, no. 37-38, 1998, pp. 112-3.

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156 courteously received but very hospitably received. What the outcome of all this display will 9 be, so far as the Maoris are concerned, I cannot divine.”

It is obvious from this information that Lowe was an accomplished and well-connected woman but somehow there has remained very little of her history. There are other, better known women travellers than Emily Lowe and well-documented studies of eighteenth and nineteenth-century women who defied their domestic space and travelled to places no “lady” was expected to contemplate, women who craved adventure and took risks. Women like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lady Hester Stanhope and Isabella Bird found freedom in their travels to places where they could feel unconstrained by the suffocating mores of English society. Cultural historians Marguerite Helmers and Tilar Mazzeo write of such women that:

Speaking in particular about the rather drab domestic lives of British travelers Isabella Bird and Mary Kingsley, for example, Susan Bassnett observes that “the woman at home appears barely recognizable as the woman abroad”, it was travel itself that afforded “the space necessary for them to assert themselves, to re- fashion themselves and their life stories as assertive, inquisitive, and 10 adventurous.”

Clearly Emily Lowe did not fit this category, happy as she was to go beyond the typical lady’s boundaries on home soil. Nonetheless, both at home and abroad, she remained aware of just how far to go and where to draw the line lest she be completely ostracized. It appears that she was able to juggle the two opposite agendas of satisfying her adventurous spirit and remaining a lady.

A woman’s place Although British travel to the continent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has often been characterised as an aristocratic pursuit, this was not really the case as the chapter on the Grand Tour demonstrated. Middle class travellers, adventurers, tutors, religious pilgrims and women also made the journey, even during the period of the Classical Grand Tour. But while women did travel, it was difficult to make this journey except under the “protection” of a man – father or husband - as travel was still viewed very much as a male endeavour. For women, travel was usually limited to accompanying their husbands on their

9 ‘Tawhiao in England,’ Otago Daily Times, Issue 7047, 16 September, 1884, p.3, http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=ODT18840916.2.24, accessed 27 June 2014. 10 Marguerite Helmers and Tilar Mazzeo, ‘Unraveling the traveling self,’ The Traveling and Writing Self, Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle UK, 2007, p. 8.

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157 cultural tours or on diplomatic missions.11 Jane Robinson, prolific writer of women’s history, notes that, ‘Only the odd accompanied tourist carried along the elegant routes of the European Grand Tour could ever be expected both to travel and maintain her reputation as a Lady of Quality’, for the rest, going where few visitors had gone before was a long, fearful, and 12 vaguely vulgar business.’

Mass tourism to the continent was made possible by the easing of travel conditions during the early Victorian period and tourism to Italy, in particular, was made possible by the defeat of the Napoleonic occupation. Attitudes to women travelling had also relaxed to some extent with the introduction of the Cook’s Tour, which, as travel writer, Mary Russell explains allowed women to travel in relative comfort and even unaccompanied, they were nonetheless protected by a group and a guide. The Cook’s tour was in effect the beginning of mass tourism as described in Chapter One and thereafter, the distinction between “tourist” and “traveller” became an increasingly notable one. To this day, it is common to find arguments and discussion about the difference in travel books and online.13 Russell goes on to note that:

Women travelling alone were otherwise considered "unprotected". A rigid code of behaviour existed for women while travelling to a destination: According to Etiquette: Rules and Usages of the Best Society, first published in 1866, the preferable way for a lady to travel was with an escort. The duties of an escort included attending to the lady’s baggage, procuring her tickets, ensuring to the best of his ability that her surroundings and her journey be agreeable to her. In turn, a lady might supply her escort with ample money to pay for the expenses of the journey. As a result, Cook's excursions became a reasonable alternative to the 14 escort, and a large percentage of Cook's excursionists were women.

There were many who felt that mass tourism was “a vulgar business” and there were women who, like their male counterparts, desired a less “organised” journey. As Russell points out, ‘There was nothing new about women travelling the highways of the world...[and] by the middle of the nineteenth century...the young Victorian miss – middle-class and

11 Mary Russell, The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt: Women Travellers and Their World, Collins, London, 1986, p. 39. 12 Jane Robinson, Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travellers, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991, p. 1. 13 ‘What’s the Difference Between A Traveler and ATourist?’ Investment Backpacker, December 28, 2013. The blogger notes that: ‘I like to think of myself more as a traveler. An adventurous, fearless, intrepid nomad that goes against the tide. A roaming maverick, wandering the unfamiliar paths of danger through the unforgiving wilderness. An enigmatic master of disguise, immersing myself into local culture whilst frightened Western tourists lock themselves away in expensive hotels and overpriced restaurants.’ , accessed 23 June 2014. 14 Russell, The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt, p. 21.

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158 energetic – was starting to travel on her own, savouring the freedom of climbing in the Alps or walking in Italy.’15 These women considered themselves travellers, not tourists and their preference was for independent, explorative, and adventurous travel despite, or maybe because there were still places on the continent considered too dangerous, lawless, wild or “savage” for women to travel to alone. Although little known and not much studied, Emily Lowe is a good example of the most independent of travellers. Janice Schroeder, a professor of English who has written extensively on Victorian culture, particularly with relation to the roles of women, notes the world increasingly was viewed ‘as a series of available tourist 16 destinations for the consuming gaze of the British lady traveller who seeks novelty.’

That the works of women travel writers have only been the subject of study in recent years and that there are many writings still to be explored is evidence of the way works by women travellers have been sidelined. Men’s writing is often considered to be the standard here; it is significant that there are many surveys of travel literature which contain reference to few or no women writers.

Nonetheless, when it came to travel to Italy, very few of these Victorian women, like their male counterparts, travelled further south than Naples. Their itineraries were as constrained as that of most British travellers to Italy which were for the most part confined to the route established by the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century. In my research on British travellers to Calabria, I found no women who had made that journey and written about it until I came across Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria and on the Top of Mount Aetna. Subsequently I encountered Calabria and the Liparian Islands in the Year I860, by Elpis Melena, which I will elaborate on further in this chapter. These works are barely mentioned in books on the history of travel, have not been featured in the canon of travellers to Calabria as far as I am aware and unlike the male travellers, they do not appear on Calabrian websites which refer to British travel writing on that region.

Emily Lowe published Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria and on the Top of Mount Aetna anonymously but this does not explain the lack of attention it has received in modern times. It is remarkable that in as little-visited a place as Calabria, with its small canon of British travel writers who constantly refer to the works of their predecessors, at least two

15 Russell, The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt, p. 22-23. 16 Janice Schroeder, ‘Strangers in every port: Stereotypes of Victorian women travellers,’ Victorian Review, vol. 24, no. 2, 1998, pp. 120.

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159 English women, independent of men, travelled there in the period before unification and wrote of their experiences and yet there is very little trace of their account in the studies on women’s travel writing that have proliferated in recent times. That Unprotected Females has sunk into oblivion is probably not as noteworthy as it seems, considering that in all of the myriad of studies on British travellers to Italy, very little has been written about Calabria or travellers to Calabria. As for women travellers in general, although on the whole women’s contribution to the history of travel and travel literature has only recently begun to be examined, there has developed a stereotype of independent women travellers beginning with the golden age of Victorian travel which Janice Schroeder describes as follows:

…the single, travelling, middle class woman is known variously as a Spinster Abroad, an Adventuress, a Lady on the Loose, a Globe Trotress, or a Fair Amazon. She is eccentric, improper, and may be mildly embarrassing to the other travellers whom she encounters abroad. If she writes travel books, and she frequently does, they are usually verbose, unnecessary, heretical and untruthful, with much trivial detail. Like men, the Spinster Abroad may travel with an agenda of overt social or political significance, or she may do such un-lady-like things as 17 climb mountains or cross shallow rivers on foot.

This description would certainly place Emily Lowe into the stereotype: single, middle class, adventurous and given to unlady-like pursuits. Emily Lowe goes beyond the limitations of her nineteenth-century British lady’s world. She nonetheless goes to great pains to construct herself as an English lady, setting herself up as a strong woman bent on adventure yet does not hesitate to fall back on the stereotype of feminine frailty when it suits her – she “trembles”, she is “delicate”, she flirts and speaks of “romance” and the romantic on nearly every page. Clearly the heroine of the piece, her model at times seems to be the Gothic heroine adrift in a dangerous, alien and perplexing space as the following extract exemplifies:

… and losing my way in the long passages, came upon an unparalleled sight: the whole house was hollow beneath, and rested on interminable arches, under each of which was slumbering peasant with his horse! In the dim light they looked like dead heroes waiting to be called to the halls of Walhalla. I ran off, dreadfully frightened, and stumbled against a boy bearing an enormous dish of fancy cream, sprinkled over with minute rainbow-coloured sugar-plums; this was a present just arrived from our unseen lady acquaintance, who soon followed herself, and was as 18 handsome as her gift: I shall call her Donna Bella.

17 Schroeder, ‘Strangers in every port,’ p. 121. 18 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and on the Top of Mount Aetna, pp. 229-230.

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160 Here the reader is witnessing Lowe at her most tremulous - fearful but girlishly distracted by “fancy cream” and sugar plums. Lowe’s books were not received positively by everyone and there is enough evidence of condescending and sometimes scathing critiques. The following are examples of reviews of the day which advance the idea of the “feeble” nature of Lowe’s work:

The book by the Unprotected Females is at once feeble and flippant. Its only value is the insight it affords into the social life in Sicily. Murray has not yet published a 19 handbook to the island.

The perseverance displayed by the two ladies who have described their ascent, is worthy of all praise; and we congratulate them on the successful issue of their attempt. But our compliments are almost stifled by the feeble and twaddling sentimentality in which the fair authoress has described her emotions on the 20 occasion.

We cannot say much in commendation of this book. It is a feeble and unsatisfactory composition. Large discount is sometimes claimed from reviewers when a work is the production of a feminine pen. It is certainly no compliment to the sex to be offer this privilege, even if it should be desired; but, make whatever allowance we may on this score, there is something so loose and slipshod in this 21 book that we must assign it a very low literary rank.

It is interesting that all three reviews quoted above refer to Lowe’s work as “feeble”. During the period women’s bodies were often described as feeble as were their minds. Women themselves, as did Lowe refer to their work as feeble, often ironically. However, although Lowe does not hide her feminine persona from the reader, she also demonstrates another side to her nature and that is of a bold and capable adventurer. This confusion of narrative positions reveals, as Stefania Arcara points out,

... that the choice of a narrative persona was extremely problematic for her. There were, in fact, a number of constraining factors at the time she was writing which were not within her control. Besides the conventions of travel writing in general, a woman writer had to take into account other elements. The emphasis on the opposition male/female, and the designation of femininity as associated with

19 London Review, vol.15, issue, 29, 13 Oct 1860, pp. 185, , accessed 12 August 2014. 20 London Review, p. 202. 21 Vaughan, Robert, ‘Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and on the Top of Mount Etna,’ The British Quarterly Review, issue 58, Apr 1859, pp. 548-549, , accessed 12 August 2014.

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161 weakness, frailty, and the flow of emotions exercised strong pressures on a woman 22 writer.

Women who chose to travel “unprotected” by male companions to places and landscapes which were considered dangerous and risky were likely to be considered transgressive of the Victorian feminine ideal which was based on the domestic sphere. Over more than a century of reportage on the southern parts of Italy, there had been established a history of earthquakes, political turmoil, poverty, backwardness and criminality.

Unprotected Females Of the women who made the choice to travel without the protection of a man, most of them were in fact accompanied by an entourage of servants and luggage bearing the comforts of home. However, there were those who made their journeys alone or with just one solitary companion and Emily Lowe and her mother travelled without the protection of servants and attendants and did not believe in the need for luggage. Although her travel writing is largely neglected in studies of women travel writers, Emily is famously quoted in almost any book touching on women travellers for her statement, already cited, about the only use of men when travelling being to look after the luggage.

Lowe appears quite complacent and pleased with herself when describing her mode of travel as well she might be, referring often to her practicality and independence. At one stage of her southern journey she illustrates her organisation and self-sufficiency by informing the reader that she and her mother were carrying:

A plaited grass basket full of cold chickens, cakes, wine, and little niceties to be had in Palermo, our two waterproof bags, and several warm shawls, were the travelling kit stowed away under the seat; our dresses were of cotton, (strong enough to be constantly washed), over warm petticoats, and as hats are not comfortable for leaning back in carriages, Mamma had an elastic fancy straw bonnet. From my side hung an infallible defence against being touched by dirty beggars and children, — a stuffed fox's head, with brilliantly cunning eyes, which also made a pocket for my paints; and as danger signal, a little chamois-foot 23 whistle.

The juxtaposition of ‘dirty beggars’ and ‘children’ is interesting and calls to mind Edward Lear’s barely concealed disgust with dirty people and naked brown children. It is also

22 Stefania Arcara, ‘“The serpent and the dove”: Emily Lowe, an unprotected Victorian traveller in no need of protection,’ Venus’s Squint, no. 37-38, 1998, pp. 114-5. 23 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and on the Top of Mount Aetna, pp. 41-2.

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162 a testament to the traveller’s belief that Calabrians are totally given over to superstition, if foxes heads and umbrellas (referring back to Ramage) can be used as talismans to ward off unwanted attention. Dirt, with its connection to manual labour, it seems, was a particular anathema for the Victorian middle class. According to Anne McClintock, in Victorian culture dirt was a signifier of social boundaries and of their transgression.24 True to her class, Emily Lowe does use dirt as an indicator of social superiority. On the eve of her travel to Calabria from Sicily she proclaims:

The merchants bring up their daughters entirely in the English way, and are not anxious they should have Sicilian companions, which does not speak favourably for the natives, as there is no prejudice in the case; and on comparing the dirty bare walls of the houses of the nobility (always excepting one or two families who have travelled) and their ragged ignorant inmates, the creatures of impulse, to the clean elegant style of residence and independence of conduct of the English settled at Messina, one can understand why no intimacy exists between 25 them.

She emphasises dirt as a signifier of un-English difference, just as Norman Douglas does after her. ‘Pastoral life in the south has around it an armour of dirt, impenetrable to an Englishman’26, she tells us, condemning the entire region as ‘a dirty country’ where ‘a snug corner seat in a carriage is far better than a night at a poor inn.’27 It is interesting that she should choose “Englishman” and not “English” or indeed, “Englishwoman”, since it is she who is experiencing and reacting to the dirt. There is a feeling of deference, here, to the male sex as well as the clear implication that she is part of a superior race. For Lowe, the tension is between the traditional female role of a woman of her class and her own adventurous spirit. In their volume on British perceptions of Norway in the nineteenth century Peter Fjågesund and Ruth A Syme refer to Lowe’s stated ideas about women’s role in that country. Lowe describes the Norwegian women as far too domestic and looking upon their husbands with awe. ‘This may sound too enchanting to the gentlemen’, Lowe writes, ‘but, being the general custom, it 28 is not the least complimentary, and one wants a wife for a companion, not a head servant.’

24 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest, Routledge, New York, 1995, p. 153. 25 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and on the Top of Mount Aetna, pp. 197-198. 26 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and on the Top of Mount Aetna, p. 82. 27 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and on the Top of Mount Aetna, p. 89. 28 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Norway, p. 158.

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163 Lowe reveals her independence and modern thinking in a way could jeopardise her position of lady. But times are changing and as Fjågesund and Syme note, ‘the idea of the ‘companionate’ marriage was key to discussions about the role of women in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century and this remark establishes Lowe as a participant in that debate.’29 A decade earlier in an article on “lady travellers”, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake makes much of the domestic character of the English lady traveller, positioning the home sphere as the particular province of the female and arguing for the necessity of lady travel writers to provide a “domestic” perspective to the foreign lands travelled through.

Every country has a home life as well as a public life, and the first quite necessary to interpret the last. Every country therefore, to be fairly understood, requires 30 reporters from both sexes.

In truth, travel for these women was probably an escape from the stifling proscriptions of domestic Victorian womanhood. In A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England, Maria H Fawley argues, ‘In Victorian literature as a whole, travel frequently functions as a means to place a narrative of female energy and control somewhere outside of England.’31 Fawley furthermore considers the woman's return to England often signalled her return to domestic conformity and emotional lethargy and that women who travelled and wrote travel accounts often felt a sense of empowerment in defying their domestic space. In the case of Emily Lowe, her return to England did signal, in a sense, a return to the domestic space, particularly as she married after her journeys abroad.

Although women travellers were not especially rare during the period that Lowe and her mother made their journeys, they were still subject to lampooning by journals like Punch, which characterised them foolishly juggling various female accoutrements as they clambered over rocks and ruins, as they strove to note their impressions in words or sketches of places no respectable woman should be. Referring to this phenomenon, Barbara Hodgson quotes a description from Punch of women travellers as ‘those ladies who will travel where they have no business to travel, who will wear costumes which they have no business (in those latitudes)

29 Peter Fjågesund and Ruth A Syme, The Northern Utopia: British Perceptions of Norway in the Nineteenth Century, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2003, p. 226. 30 Lady Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake, ‘Lady travellers,’ Quarterly Review, vol. 76, 1845, pp. 98-137. 31 Maria H Frawley, A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England, Associated University Presses, London, 1994, p. 11.

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164 to wear; who will go “unprotected”; who will choose their dragoman by physiognomy, as 32 romance suggests, and not by advice of friends as common sense would dictate.’

An American commentator in an 1859 article gives an entirely different perspective of English “unprotected ladies” travelling in trains, writing:

I find it no uncommon thing in England to meet unprotected females in the cars, and the higher the social position of the ladies the greater is the simplicity and affability of manner. As far as health, comfort, and fitness is concerned, the American ladies have much to learn from the English, especially in their travelling costume. We see no finery or frippery here in the railway carriage, and silks and 33 satins in the street are apt to excite uncomplimentary suspicions of the wearers.

Nonetheless, the precariousness of women travelling alone, even in the domestic sphere, was highlighted by an article that was repeated in a large number of British newspapers in November 1859 reporting that, ‘The attention of the authorities having been called to the frequent outrages on unprotected females travelling by railway, they have in contemplation, it is said, to compel all the companies to have in every train carriages of each class into which

34 only females shall be admitted.’

A woman travel writer, especially one who travelled unaccompanied, may have been a rare thing in the eighteenth century, but by as early as 1817, they were so common they were no longer remarkable merely by the fact of being women. Hodgson reminds us that nonetheless, ‘it wasn’t something everyone wished to put her name on, so dozens of books appeared anonymously, under the rubrics of “A Lady”...or “A Resident”’.35 In her review of Victorian women’s travel writing, Catherine Barnes Stevenson highlights the questions of how these books managed to get published and how they were received. 36 Anonymity may have had some bearing on the former, giving the author some license to include things that an authored book might leave out as ‘most women refrained from including details that might cast themselves in a bad light.’37 An anonymous book was thus a potentially thrilling read and

32 Barbara Hodgson, No Place for a Lady: Tales of Adventurous Women Travellers, Greystone Books, Vancouver, 2002, pp. 7-8. 33 ‘American's Description of English Women,’ Westmorland Gazette, (Cumbria), 10 September 1859, p. 3, , accessed 4 July 2013. 34 These articles include: Belfast News-Letter, 18 November 1859, p. 3; Western Daily Press (Bristol), 15 November 1859, p. 4. London Standard, 16 November 1859, p. 2; The Era (London), 20 November 1859, p. 14; Bucks Herald, 19 November 1859, p. 7; Chelmsford Chronicle (Essex), 18 November 1859, p. 4; Essex Standard, 23 November 1859, p. 4; Grantham Journal (Lincolnshire), 19 November 1859, p. 4. 35 Hodgson, No Place for a Lady, pp. 4-5. 36 Catherine Barnes Stevenson, ‘“That ain’t no lady traveller...It’s a discursive subject”: Mapping and remapping Victorian women’s travel writing,’ Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 24, 1996, p. 422. 37 Hodgson, No Place for a Lady, p. 6.

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165 a good marketing ploy. The following extract from a review of Unprotected Females in 1860 makes the point that the notion of anonymous “unprotected females” is an inducement to further exploring the book:

Why should we look beyond the title-page of the book before us? Because two “unprotected females” are doing the journey. Two ladies – mother and daughter – strong-minded – not particularly able-bodied – a little masculine, perhaps – the youngest good-looking (so we gather slyly from the pages) – having tried the inhabitants of the snowy North, and finding them attentive but not rude, go boldy to the other extreme of European civilisation – even into the veritable camp of Don Giovanni himself – and met with nothing more dreadful than only one offer of marriage! ...In sight of the Barbary coast and no interesting pirates to carry them off ... May the old lady, after this, retire upon her well-earned traveller’s laurels; and the young lady take her next journey in the company of a lawful 38 protector!

In the late 1850s, when Emily Lowe travelled to Calabria accompanied by her mother as part of a trip which included Sicily and a climb to the top of Mount Etna, the notion of conducting oneself in a lady-like manner and the rigid code of behaviour that informed this status was at its height in polite society. Indeed, as noted in the 2002 An Anthology of Women’s Travel Writing, ‘... the emphasis on morality and propriety contingent on “being a lady”, so influential in mid-Victorian Britain, necessitated a similar insistence on socially acceptable gendered behaviour even for the most adventurous and apparently iconoclastic 39 female travellers.’

However, this attitude was by no means universal and there is evidence that this perception of role of women was beginning to shift. As noted, the intrepid Emily Lowe had already made a trip to Norway with her mother and anonymously produced the book Unprotected Females in Norway published in 1857, which would certainly have set up particular expectations in the minds of her readers. Apart from sketching and fishing their way around Norway, Lowe and her mother found plenty of novelty and hardships, seemingly undaunted as they travelled through wilds where English ladies were unknown. At one stage, the two women take saddle horses on a steep narrow ledge along the face of rocks which was agreeable enough in full daylight. However, the novelty of the adventure lost its appeal when fatigue coincided with twilight. For once Lowe had to look elsewhere to ensure the safety of

38 ‘Unprotected Females in Sicily,’ Leader and Saturday Analyst, vol. 10, issue 464, Feb 12, 1859, p. 207, http://search.proquest.com/docview/4974669?accountid=12694, accessed 12 August 2014. 39 Shirley Foster & Sara Mills (eds.), An anthology of women’s travel writing, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2002, p. 2.

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166 herself and her mother, and luckily her guide was able to catch the attention of a boat passing by. He carried the women down the steep cliff in his arms, putting them safely on board. Clearly, there was some use for gentlemen while travelling after all.

As far as Sicily, Calabria and the top of Mount Etna are concerned, these names could only add to the creation of high expectations of romance and exciting adventure. The south of Italy was renowned, if at all, as a place teeming with brigands and Etna was, after all, an active volcano. In 1790 Ann Radcliffe had published the gothic novel A Sicilian Romance which presented the island as rife with strong passions, brigands, evil deeds and wild nature. This idea of Sicily and the far south of the peninsula was the same one that had featured in the writings of the earliest travellers to the region and may have become a bit stale by the time Emily Lowe travelled there if reviews of the times are anything to go by. Just two examples of these indicate that this was a road far more travelled than some commentators have given credit to – in one newspaper article of the times, the author claims that, ‘The road is so well worn by tourists feet, that one opens a volume on it in dismay.’40 This road well-travelled was almost certainly a reference to Sicily, not Calabria. There were, as Diletta D’Andrea has pointed out, large numbers of British travellers to Sicily following Patrick Brydone’s landmark volume. She notes that,

If British travellers in Sicily were still a minority in the second half of the eighteenth century (John Dryden, Patrick Brydone, Richard Payne Knight, Henry Swinburne, etc., being among the most famous), this situation completely changed from the early years of the following century, for an obvious reason. During the Napoleonic Wars and, most of all, during the British Decade in Sicily (1806- 1815) Messina, in particular, became the site of the British military head-quarters in the Mediterranean. This special historical juncture was the starting point for a new flow of British travellers: soldiers and politicians on the one hand, merchants 41 and simple travellers on the other.

Another article confirms the allure of the anonymous volume, declaring that, although the region had been ‘done to death before … we have from the “Unprotected Females” not the

40 ‘Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and on the Top of Mount Aetna,’ The Athenaeum, Jan 8, 1859, p.44. 41 Diletta D’Andrea, Travel Books and Urban Identity. British Travellers in Messina, 1770-1815: A Preliminary Study, Mediterranean Review, Vol. 7, No. 1, June 2014, p. 41, https://www.academia.edu/7604333/Travel_Books_and_Urban_Identity._British_Travellers_in_Messina_1770- 1815_a_Preliminary_Study_Mediterranean_Review_vol._7_n._1_June_2014_pp._39-55?auto=download, accessed 15 March 2017

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167 stereotyped handbook facts of these well-trodden districts, but their own vivid impressions 42 and pleasant adventures it thereof and therein.

Despite the pleasantness and humour of her approach, Lowe makes much of the Radcliffean reading of the south and indeed leverages this sense of a sinister and dangerous place to travel “unprotected” to her advantage. Choosing a destination which was considered risky or dangerous or not the sort of place a lady should visit, especially unaccompanied by a man, was not a bad tactic to secure sails of one’s account. ‘Then, as now’, Barbara Hodgson notes, ‘the more exciting the trip, the better the sales of the book.’43 Italy was not by this stage considered such a place. It had been the destination of choice for British travellers for at least a century and the subject of many books of travel, art and architecture. But the Italy that was familiar to the British middle classes was the Italy that had been defined by the Grand Tour. Travelling to some parts of the peninsula were still considered hazardous and daring as was making longer journeys to other less well-known parts of the world. While Sicily was considered well-trodden ground, Calabria was one place still tinged with the aura of danger, if the male travellers who went there were to be believed, and every bit as exotic as Africa or the far east.

Nonetheless, Lowe did take a risk in describing herself as an “unprotected female.” In the mid to late Victorian period, “unprotected females” could mean anything from army widows, to ladies down on their luck, to prostitutes, 44 or to gentlewomen who were unchaperoned and widely parodied. Anthony Trollope made satirical reference to “unprotected females” in his 1860 short story ‘An unprotected female at the pyramids’45 wherein it seems obvious that Trollope is not only sending up the unprotected woman traveller but also the term itself. Indeed, it seems such a contrivance to entitle a book Unprotected Females that it could only have been a clever way to give the volume some aura of recklessness.

42 ‘Sicily, Calabria, and Mount Etna by the “Un-Protected Females”,’ London Daily News, 05 January 1859, p. 2. 43 Hodgson, No Place for a Lady, p.6. 44 A letter to the editor of the Evening News London, on 9 October 1888 from ‘an Ex-Superintendent of Special Constables and a Volunteer Officer,’ refers to ‘the horrible atrocities which have been perpetrated lately upon unprotected females,’ , accessed 12 August 2012. 45 Originally published in 1860 but available online as an e-text on The Project Gutenberg website. Of his character, Miss Dawkins, Trollope writes: ‘She was, in the first place, an unprotected female of about thirty years of age. As this is becoming an established profession, setting itself up as it were in opposition to the old world idea that women, like green peas, cannot come to perfection without supporting-sticks, it will be understood at once what were Miss Dawkins's sentiments.’

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168 It does not seem too far-fetched to extrapolate that the titles of Lowe’s books, together with the anonymity of the author, were choices calculated to heighten expectation of the content, promising an exciting read – perhaps even transgressive disclosures. Both titles did well and it is clear that Unprotected Females in Norway was successful enough to persuade Lowe’s publisher to issue Lowe’s second Unprotected Females title. One review makes it clear that Unprotected Females in Norway was quite a hit and goes on to praise Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and Mount Etna:

Our fair friends the “Unprotected Females,” who had already taken the public by storm with their spirited narrative of what had befallen them during their descent upon the Scandinavian races, have since, it appears, been testing the gallantry and a politeness of another and far different variety of the human family. This time their visit, paid in their own, original “unprotected” manner, has been to the shores of the Mediterranean, and as if to prove t that the sight of unprotected British females in rather strong boots and with very small travelling bags is a “touch of nature” that makes the whole world “kin,” their reception in the sunny south has gone far beyond that into which the frozen north had been previously dissolved by their agreeable manners, and, we dare be sworn, interesting 46 appearance.

Fjågesund and Symes demonstrate that Lowe was known in her time and did have a reputation of sorts, in short that her books were ‘treated with considerable scepticism by other writers.’ They quote from a book on Norway, published two years after Lowe’s Norway volume, written by husband and wife John Benjamin and Sarah Popplewell that demonstrates the kind of general impression of Emily Lowe amongst people of her own background and class:

Mr A- saw a great deal of Miss Lowe (the unprotected female) in Christiana, and told us many amusing things about her. There is no doubt her book is an entirely made-up thing, and she writes of many things as having happened to herself which had been told to her by fellow travellers, some of them having taken place years ago. Mr A- took her to dine with a friend of his in Christiana. The gentleman said of Miss Lowe, “Well, I am very glad indeed to have spent an hour with such a woman, it is quite a treat, but heaven defend me from such a woman 47 as a wife!”

The authors of Lindesnes to the Midnight Sun obviously take great pleasure in ascribing lack of veracity to Lowe’s account and relaying an anecdote that questions her personal

46 ‘Sicily, Calabria, and Mount Etna by the "Un-Protected females”,’ London Daily News, 05 January 1859, p. 2. 47 Fjågesund and Syme, The Northern Utopia, p. 62.

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169 qualities. Back as far as Swinburne’s time the issue of the truthfulness of the travel book was questioned and much significance was placed upon it, probably because the genre never had the gravitas of the history book. As to the character of Emily Lowe, this extract certainly confirms the eccentricity and boldness of her character, that she is indeed entertaining and interesting but not “marriage material”. One review of the times also makes comment on Lowe’s strong, adventurous personality but also her humour and the appeal of her account:

Where next are we to meet with these “Unprotected Females ?” mother and daughter. We last accompanied them through Sweden and Norway, the extreme north - and now we are called upon to accompany them through Sicily and Calabria, the extreme south - of Europe. It is to be presumed that their next whereabouts will be the River Don and the Ural Mountains. All, however, seems to depend upon the whims of the daughter, who has acquired the happy knack of “talking over the mother” to do just as she (the daughter) pleases ... The book is a pleasant description of all that this adventurous young lady has seen during her southern excursion; and as her prejudices do not appear to have got the ascendancy of her good sense, her descriptions of the inhabitants may be deemed as correct as it was possible for a galloping excursion to enable her to convey ... In the Ural Mountains’ trip, however, we would strongly advise an escort, or it may 48 be our misfortune to have seen the last of the “Unprotected Females.”

There are in fact quite a number of reviews of the time that make much of the “female” nature of Lowe’s work, considering it a refreshing change to the usual run of travel books, which impacted, positively, no doubt, on the impact on the success of the Unprotected Female travel narratives. As Catherine Barnes Stevenson suggests, there is evidence that travel books by women which highlighted ‘the novelty of the women traveller and her femininity’49 were more likely to be well received in Victorian Britain and that reviewers were less likely to be well-disposed towards more scientific travel books from female writers. Science was apparently in the province of male travellers. Unprotected Females is certainly not in any way scientific, being more in the vein of light-hearted entertainment and what could be more targeted to a readership of female armchair travellers than this title with its Gothic sublime evocations? All the elements are there – unprotected females, a land of brigands, a volcano and an author deliciously transgressive but nonetheless protective enough of her reputation to conceal her name.

48 ‘Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Etna,’ Morning Post, (London), 20 January 1859, p. 3, , accessed 16 May 2014. 49 Stevenson, ‘“That ain’t no lady traveller...It’s a discursive subject”,’ p. 424.

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170 In her first book Lowe makes much of being “unprotected”, referring often and ironically to “the unprotected” as, for example:

… and stumbling over rocks into pools, with the fear of slipping into the lake beneath, and a prospect of seven miles more of the same kind, was such dreary work, that for once we foolishly felt as if the Providence of the “unprotected” were failing, when, through an opening in the wood, a boat was seen to shoot suddenly from the shore; our guide hallooed, struck a bargain, carried us down the 50 steep cliff in his arms.

… for once we foolishly felt as if the Providence of the “unprotected” were 51 failing…

“Unprotecteds” cannot do better than keep firm to the old combination of the 52 qualities of the serpent and the dove.

By the second book, it seems that Lowe may have realised that she had made her point and that constantly referring to herself as “unprotected” would grow tedious for her readers so she found other ways of emphasising her derring-do. But for all her spirited independence and capability, Lowe does not stop short of relying on her femininity to secure assistance when required. She states this tactic clearly in her volume on Norway:

The reader will begin to wonder how we managed about the language. Our supply of Swedish was certainly very limited, but there was a native gentleman on board who had let himself be most willingly victimized as interpreter at the hotel. It is astonishing, if ladies look perfectly helpless and innocent, how people fall into the 53 trap, and exert to serve them.

There is some justification for Lowe’s tactic because more often than not her gender and class do afford her offers of assistance and special treatment. This is not to deny that women who travelled alone in the nineteenth century risked not only their reputations but also difficulties in just getting by and the threat of harassment from men. Regardless of whether they were unaccompanied by men, genteel women of the middle classes did expect to be protected by the very fact of being gentlewomen. But there were places and occasions where this may not have been enough, or, more importantly, perceived as not being enough. Emily Lowe’s account describes her journey through one such place, and her narrative is

50 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Norway, p. 91. 51 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Norway p. 91. 52 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Norway, p. 20. 53 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Norway, p. 20.

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171 recognisably feminine. But does Lowe’s representation of Calabria differ greatly from that of the British men who travelled there?

The female gaze There seems little doubt that there is a difference in the way that the female traveller was perceived. Jane Robinson asserts:

A woman traveler appeared a (fascinating) creature apart, whose voice was easily recognizable in her writing. That voice would be ingenuous, perhaps even apologetic; it would use mild humor to engage, mild sensationalism to entertain, and rely on the inherent perceived improbability of an independent woman 54 travelling at all (and then writing about it) to make its literary mark.

But how was a woman traveller’s voice different from that of the men who travelled through the same regions? Is there a specific female gaze? Many feminist critics have described the danger - in the words of Shirley Foster and Sara Mills in their introduction to an Anthology of Women Travel Writers - of ‘forcing all data into one or other of the gendered categories (such a language, subject-matter or narrational position), ignoring all material that cannot be fitted into these categories.’55 They argue that an essentialist reading of women’s travel writing does not do justice to the work and does not allow for productive analysis of it. According to Indira Ghose, ‘By privileging gender and constructing woman as an ahistorical, transcendent category, critics only serve to confirm traditional male notions of women as inherently different – more intuitive, etc.’56 Women travellers were also products of their times, class, education, political and religious ideals, age, race and places of origin and these factors had as much impact on their writing as gender did. Foster and Mills note that:

...women’s travel writing is very varied, both partaking in high status, masculine discourse of aesthetics, imperialism and informative authority when those served the women’s overall aims, and drawing on more feminine discourses of care for others, domesticity and impressionistic responses when those also served a 57 purpose.

Lowe herself is well aware of this polarisation of stereotypical masculine and feminine perspectives. By advising her readers to ‘keep firm to the old combination of the qualities of

54 Jane Robinson, ‘The art of listening: Nineteenth- and twentieth-century women travelers and their work,’ Journal of Women’s History, vol. 16, no. 1, 2004, p.166 55 Foster and Mills (eds), An Anthology of Women’s Travel Writing, p. 4. 56 Indira Ghose, Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, p. 5. 57 Foster and Mills (eds.), An Anthology of Women’s Travel Writing, p. 11.

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172 the serpent and the dove,’58 she is describing the duality of the position she is in – capable, practical but to be accepted in Victorian society she must not abandon entirely the traditional feminine role. Lowe sticks to this modus operandi and constantly switches between a “masculine” voice of arrogant authority, a “naughty but nice” voice of impropriety and one that is often coquettish and feminine in the extreme, resulting in a strange and often contradictory mix of different stances. But although in much of the narrative she presents a voice transgressive of contemporary standards for women of her class, ultimately, her narrative is coloured by her class position and the “perceived realities” of the period in which she wrote.

Lowe clearly casts herself in the role of an adventurer, but she also focuses on more domestic detail than can be found in the works of male travellers of the time. However, like her male compatriots, she inserts herself into the text as the authority, expressing the superiority of the British over the child-like, emotional and feminised Italians – in this case Sicilians and Calabrians whom she describes as foreigners, although clearly it is she and her mother who are the foreigners in their land. It is also important to note that when she speaks of the English, Lowe is speaking as a representative of the middle class. Her comparisons therefore do not take into account the large numbers of English poor and marginalised. She does compare the English middle class to the Calabrian middle and ruling classes. Leaving Calabria, she writes:

...and though feeling deeply the thousand delicate kindnesses of these foreigners towards us, I cannot be blind to the fact that, in the great test of character – truth – the English stand pre-eminent: not but that in great matters, where their honour has been engaged, they may be trusted; but in the little every-day passengers of life, partly from volubility, and partly from a good-natured wish to say what is pleasing, they are liable to slips of the 59 tongue which would degrade an English gentleman.

Again, in the passage above, Lowe refers to the “English gentleman” as the highest example of noble thought and character. When it comes to the lower classes, in Lowe’s book peasants operate as colourful spectacles, picturesque creatures forming a backdrop to a blissfully bucolic Calabrian scene. While elite Calabrian men and women can create the basis for participation in a “national” culture, the lower classes remain merely representational,

58 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Norway, p. 5. 59 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Norway, pp. 247-248.

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173 two-dimensional creatures who have no role except to add local colour. Lowe’s description of the processing of bergamot is typical of her picturesque depiction of peasants and their work:

Peasants in the national dress of the province (long hanging caps, velvet jackets, and nether clothes of which three buttons opened at the knee and let white frills cover it) were throwing them into baskets held by graceful girls in many colours, 60 who bore them to the cottages.

This is by no means the only similar passage in the book and what is extraordinary about them is that there is little approaching this kind of description in the travel narratives of male writers. On the whole, the men describe a bleak peasantry worn down by poverty and “superstition” – they may write about colourful costumes although, as in the case of Edward Lear, often in terms of not having been successful in finding costumed peasants. This constant reference to costume places the Calabrian peasant firmly in the past – a quaint oddity, an anachronism.

Lowe, like Arthur John Strutt61 finds and describes colourful costumes throughout her journey. Like Strutt, who made much of the colourful, “well-shaped” peasant girls amid descriptions of their activities, Lowe adopts the privileged male gaze as she regards the peasants and their activities and there is no evidence of her displaying any special female bond with the peasant women she encounters. They remain picturesque elements in the landscape. That Lowe has little understanding of peasants and their lives is evidenced by the fact that although she recognises that there is a link between poverty and brigandage – ‘the peasants generally acting under the pressure of want’62 - she totally misreads their interaction with their landlord:

All the peasants on the Cavaliere Monsolini’s estates received him like a father, and treated him with as much respect, but more affection, than an English gentleman of his position would experience from his tenantry. “La bacio la mano” 63 (I kiss your hand) was their salutation.

The system of patronage in Calabria at the time required that peasants maintain a public position of obsequiousness towards their landlords and the upper classes in general. But while they were calling their “betters” Don or Cavaliere or Signore to their faces, things might have been much different behind their backs.

60 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Etna, p. 207. 61 Arthur John Strutt, A pedestrian tour in Calabria and Sicily, Newby, London, 1842. 62 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Etna, 1859, p. 237. 63 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Etna, p. 209.

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In general Lowe’s portrayal of Calabria, in comparison to contemporary portrayals by men, seems to be less about harsh reality and more about the pleasant aspects of her journey. The men paint a darker picture – they stress the hardships, the difficulties, the ugliness and the criminality. Lowe makes reference to these as well but still manages to describe a less stark Calabria. She attends the opera, she spends time in villas in beautiful gardens being wooed by the odes written in her honour by young men, she is showered with sweets and fruit and yes, she and her mother are “protected” from brigands at every turn by armed gentlemen and envoys happy to be of service. Lowe does not, however, resist recounting tales of bloodthirsty villainy. At one stage, visiting the estates of a Calabrian monastery, the manager regales Lowe and her mother with stories of bandits and horror, and she immediately appeals to the feminine sensibility, ‘...with rolling eyes of wildest Calabrian expression,’ she informs the reader, ‘despite his kindnesses, Mamma was always afraid of him; which fear was not decreased by his saying, in a state of excitement, “there were people whose blood he could 64 drink”’.

The “brigand” situation in Calabria was much more complex than these kinds of two- dimensional stories illustrate. As John Dickie has demonstrated, the struggles for power following the breaking down of the feudal system resulted in a confusion of issues related to those who, having lost the struggle, resorted to criminal activity ‘or indeed be branded as criminals by those able to establish private control over law enforcement. But it was not as simple as this, as the winners too resorted to violence directly or indirectly to achieve and maintain control. Dickie goes on to note that:

Threats, smuggling, vandalism, armed robbery, hostage-taking, livestock-rustling, and murder were an extension of normal power-relations in some areas. At certain times, the relationship between the bands and their protectors might break down, and the bandits would operate in their own interests. The central state was an important factor in these conflicts: brigandage, which everywhere in preunification Italy was taken to connote barbarism and backwardness, provided a good pretext for the extension of central control. Yet, at the same time, by signaling their loyalty to the state through their cooperation in its fight against “lawlessness,” factions in the countryside would attempt to enlist the help of the 65 authorities in tipping the local balance of power their way.

64 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p. 245. 65 John Dickie, Darkest Italy The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1999, pp.29-30.

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175 Lowe does not attempt to evaluate complex situations, and has little to add to the political situation in the South. However, before stepping into the “badlands” of the far south of Italy, Lowe sets the scene for her journey through the wild and romantic land of revolution at the beginning of her account by describing a political drama called “The Dream of an Exile” on the grand opera stage in Genoa, the hero of which is “portrayed as Garabaldi” [sic]66. This drama depicts the odium of the Italian people for Hapsburg rule and is not the only time Lowe refers to the struggle for nationhood in the book. The period of striving for unification led to vigorous debates in England on the “Italian Question”67 and there was much popular support for what were seen as the heroes of the Risorgimento.. Perhaps some of this support could be attributed to the general anti-Catholicism of the British, reflecting a desire for the defeat of the Papal States. John A Davis informs us that ‘despite the growing sympathy on the part of English public opinion for the cause of Italian independence, down to 1859 British governments remained unswerving in their support for the political status quo in 68 Italy.’

Lowe does not display overt support for the unification project but she does often refer to the “revolution” or the “former revolution”, making much of the past and current turmoil. Most of the current revolutionary fervour seems to be based in Sicily; indeed, Lowe paints the Sicilians as revolutionaries and the Calabrians as brigands. Beyond their sheer entertainment value, brigands also began to acquire a heroic status and there was a tendency among politically liberal British Romantics to see brigands in terms of the Robin Hood myth.

The romanticisation of figures like Mazzini, Cavour and Garibaldi sometimes spilled over into a romantic view of brigands who were often depicted as revolutionaries (which in many cases they were) and not as bandits and desperadoes. In 1851, de Tavel, a French Aide- de camp, wrote of the British defeat of Napoleon’s troops in Calabria in 1808 which documented battles such as that of Maida (after which London’s Maida Vale is named).69 His

66 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p.3. 67An example of the two opposing views, one for, one against supporting the revolution are the treatises Italy: its condition. Great Britain: its policy: a series of letters addressed to Lord John Russell MP by an English Liberal, London: James Ridgway, 1859 and Queen Victoria and Italy by Sir Henry Winston Barron Bart, London,: Ridgway, 1859. 68 John A. Davis, Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions, 1780-1860, (Kindle Locations 4681-4682). Kindle Edition. 69 [Duret de Tavel], Calabria During a Military Residence Three Years in a Series of Letters: A General Officer Of The French Army from The Original Ms, Effingham Wilson, London, 1832, , accessed 5 June 2012.

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176 account was published in two volumes. This book, one of many which helped create a romantic sublime reading of Calabria, represented brigands as sinister but brave outlaws in descriptions such as ‘fierce looking fellows, wearing the picturesque Calabrian garb, of whose occupation we had little doubt; the gaiety of their attire, the long dagger gleaming in their sashes, the powder horn, and the well-oiled rifle slung across the back in a broad leather sling proclaimed them brigands; who came crowding among their honester countrymen to hail and 70 bid us welcome as allies and friends.’

Another woman traveller to Sicily and Calabria during the revolutionary period was Elpis Melena, an Anglo-German writer whose real name was Marie Espérance von Schwartz She was born in England, the daughter of a Hamburg banker, who spent much of her early life in Italy and England. Elpis Melena was one of the women connected with the movement for Italian unity and freedom. She was a close friend of Garibaldi (he went as far as proposing marriage to her which she declined) who edited the first version of his memoirs in German. These memoirs were published in English in 1887. In 1862, she published Calabria and the Liparian Islands in the Year I86071 Unlike Lowe, Melpis was deeply interested in the revolution, referring to it constantly throughout her work which is characterised by excited hyperbole and lionisation of Garibaldi – the following is but one example among many:

Was there a heart that had not leapt with joy? Was there an eye that had not moistened at the thought that this miracle had been wrought by the power of one man? a man before whose moral greatness armies had fallen back, and whose sole impulse had brought mightier things to pass, than all the tricks and intrigues of 72 modern politics!

In the struggle for unification, Garibaldi played a major role in bringing the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies into the union. By 1860, there were five remaining states in Italy - the Austrians in Venetia, the Papal States, the new expanded Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, San Marino and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.73 On 6 May 1860, Garibaldi and his troop of around a thousand Italian volunteers (i Mille) landed near Marsala on the west coast of Sicily, attracting scattered bands of rebels. The combined forces successfully fought a number of battles, which culminated in a siege to the Porta Termini of Palermo, while at the same time a mass uprising of street and barricade fighting broke out within the city. Around 25,000 troops

70 [de Tavel], Calabria During a Military Residence, p.3. 71 Elpis Melena, Calabria and the Liparian Islands in the Year I860, Saunders, Otley, and Co, London, 1862. 72 Melena, Calabria and the Liparian Islands in the Year I860, p. 3. 73 Italian Unification, Wikipdedia, en,Wikipedia,org/wiki/Italian_unification

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177 arrived in Sicily from Naples but with an armistice declared with the intervention of a British admiral, the Neapolitan troops departed and surrendered the town to Garibaldi and his much 74 smaller army. Six weeks later, Garibaldi took Messina.

Melpis Melena questions the understanding of Sicilians of the “blessing” that Garibaldi has conferred on them, putting it down to “ignorance”.

I question whether the blessing of freedom which Garibaldi had bestowed on Sicily, much interested these people, whose ignorance is so great that perhaps few of them had ever heard of him, and still fewer understood what he had done for Italy; and yet I was told that their strange behaviour and inhospitable reception of us at our landing was to be attributed to an idea they entertained that my friend 75 was Garibaldi, and I his daughter.

Like others before her and many who followed, she demonstrates little understanding of the lives of the people she describes as lacking the capability to comprehend what, to her, are critical events of great import. And though, they are, for the majority of people of the South, day to day survival might take precedence over other affairs.

Having conquered Sicily, Garibaldi crossed the Strait of Messina to the mainland where the garrison at Reggio Calabria promptly surrendered. As he marched northward, he was hailed has a hero. Basilicata and Apulia also independently declared their annexation to the Kingdom of Italy. Having declared a state of siege, the King of Naples gathered the 4,000 troops still faithful to him and retreated across the Volturno River. On entering the city, Garibaldi was welcomed openly by the people, in contrast to the apparent indifference Elpis Melena described in the people of Sicily.

Francis II mounted a defence that lasted three months during which he was refused aid by European allies, food and munitions became scarce, disease set in, and finally the garrison was forced to surrender. Nonetheless, motley groups of Neapolitans loyal to Francis fought on against the Italian government for years to come. With the fall of Gaeta in 1861, the Kingdom of Naples was finally brought into the union by Giuseppe Garibaldi. The Aspromonte in Calabria was the scene of a famous battle of the unification of Italy, in which Garibaldi was 76 wounded.

74 Italian Unification, ibid. 75 Melena, Calabria and the Liparian Islands in the Year I860, p. 3. 76 Italian Unification, Wikipdedia, en,Wikipedia,org/wiki/Italian_unification

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In contrast to her description of the Sicilian people as ignorant of the revolution and indeed, the identity of Garibaldi, Elpis Melena connects the Calabrians to brigandage and brigandage to heroism and ultimately revolution, especially in her account of Giosofatto Talarico, a brigand from the neighbourhood of Cosenza who ‘bestowed “noble-minded protection” on the poor and oppressed’77, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Melena reinforces the romantic view of the brigand as does Lowe. Like Lowe and in common with most travellers to Calabria in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Melena makes much of the brigands’ dress, reminding the reader that despite its natural beauty, ‘this was the old robbers' nest, the widely abused Calabria, which lay before me, whose very mention conjures up the well-known bandit, the cone-shaped hat, the embroidered jacket, the pistols, the dagger, and the long flint-lock, with which he plays his half-knightly, half-rascally part in 78 opera and ballet.’

“Half-knightly, half-rascally” in a theatrical mode is exactly the point of view evident in Lowe’s work and not reflected in the writings of male travellers to Calabria and the south, who, although they may refer to picturesque mode of dress, usually exaggerate the fierceness and savagery of the brigand, the better to make heroes of themselves, brave travellers in a lawless land. The women are much more ironic about the perceived dangers of the trip altogether which is understandable given that one of their objectives is to position themselves as being as capable as men are of travelling through risky territory. Lowe is clearly much more aware of the political situation than Edward Lear was before her but her interests lie elsewhere, and this is one area of traditionally male interest that does not overly occupy her attention. Although she does apply a romantic lens to revolution and brigandage, Lowe’s main interest centres on herself and her transgression of the boundaries of normative female travel.

Nonetheless, Lowe adopts the picturesque style and uses it to describe both beauty and danger as did Lear before her. The following scene could be a description of a typically picturesque painting:

Morning rose to show the road poised high between two seas. Here Calabria contracts her lands from the pressure of the Adriatic on the one side, the Mediterranean on the other, till she forms a lofty bridge between them. A rainbow

77 Melena, Calabria and the Liparian Islands in the Year I860, p. 50. 78 Melena, Calabria During a Military Residence, pp. 46-47.

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179 arched over each ocean, —the noble country was piled up with wildest nature — all was grand around — save the plague-spot crosses which marked Murder! o'er the scene. Each small crucifix, and they were thick as milestones, stood where a dagger had been thrust through some heart, mostly in sudden fury, though revenge claims largely her bloody share. In this land of quick feelings, love and hate are 79 fearfully neighbouring.

The “land of quick feelings” is a common trope –when she refers to the opera she attends in Reggio, the Trovatore, she writes, that it is ‘sung with a completeness and feeling which told Calabria was the native land of the dark passions its music so fearfully unfolds.’80 Like Strutt and Lear before her Lowe’s depiction is picturesque in style but sufficiently different from theirs to suggest a “female gaze”. Her references to hot southern passions are the background to her narrative but she often leavens this with comedy, frequently at her own expense. At another stage of her journey she describes the following not untypical incident:

The last chords of the mandoline had hardly struck, when a fearful noise of human rage filled the house, and the host was found to have slipped away unperceived. We flew to our room, trembling midst this crashing storm of boiling southern blood. Some one knocked at the door, and silence bespeaking our terror, they said, “We are friends.” It was the voice of the gentlemen who had been singing, — come to reassure us. A quarrel was going on in the posada below, but without danger to us; they then wished “felice note” (happy night) saying we should not want protectors, come what might; and chose a most delicate way of calming us by walking up and down the passage singing soft tunes to the mandoline, which, as the fury below wore itself away, soothed us soon to sleep. They were civil engineers, sent to superintend some constructions to the neighbourhood, and 81 conversed most intelligently.

Unprotected Females disrupts what are considered suitable targets and situations for a Victorian woman’s gaze. Aesthetic spectatorship is connected with masculine authority and operating within the aesthetic discourse connects Lowe and her readers to a variant of the gaze to which women themselves are subjected. This results in conflicted and ambiguous narrative positions revealing the instabilities in gender and power constructions. In her seminal study of 1991 Sara Mills unpacked ideas of the aesthetic discourse and the picturesque in women’s travel writing of the nineteenth century. She identified the application of aesthetic knowledge with the Grand Tour with its ‘foregrounding of the cultural and environmental riches of southern Europe’ which ‘established an essentially male tradition

79 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p. 219. 80 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p. 306. 81 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p. 52.

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180 of artistic and geographical experience.’82 Mills contends that when nineteenth century women travelled to Italy, they replicated what was ‘a male model of itinerary and 83 discourse.’

What is particularly interesting in Sara Mills’ expurgation of the male discourse of aesthetic familiarisation is her reference to “a male itinerary”. It has been my contention that the Grand Tour defined a perceived geography of Italy which reinforced the idea of the South as being “outside” this boundary – a kind of pre-Italy which became the repository for all the negative ideas of the South which Italians of the north of the peninsula wanted to lose. It is reasonable to name this as a male itinerary but any trip to the south of Italy was also part of a male project. This kind of travel was most often couched, in the writings of male travellers, as an exploration of a dangerous and savage land – almost as if one were going to Africa or the Levant is the way most travellers put it. Because this kind of travel was not considered suitable for ladies, those few adventurous women who travelled to such places adopt conciliatory, self-deprecating tones in their accounts. There is often a tension in these accounts between maintaining one’s position as a lady whilst describing events and places outside the scope of lady-like behaviour. This is certainly the case with Emily Lowe, without the self-deprecation.

Although the source of their knowledge was male, women like Lowe were predisposed to “seeing” nature through an artistic medium, because they grew up with painting and drawing as part of the feminine inventory of accomplishments. Certainly, Emily Lowe illustrated her volume with her own watercolour illustrations which are competent yet uninspiring but interesting for their conventional style – given that she was a most unconventional woman.

82 Sara Mills, Discourses of Differences: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialisation, Routledge, London, 1991, p. 92. 83 Mills, Discourses of Differences, p. 92.

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181

Illus. 8: Paola, Emily Lowe, from Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and on the Top of Mount Aetna, 1859.

The aesthetic discourse clearly placed the woman traveller in a class position since it was indicative of the education and leisure time necessary to acquire the knowledge and vocabulary of the picturesque. Throughout the book Emily Lowe places herself as a subject firmly within the leisured classes and we are always aware of her as a lady, albeit of a somewhat eccentric kind. She goes further, however, stressing her qualification for the role of expert on the etiquette of the upper classes, making pronouncements such as the following:

We thought we would take the letter to the Baron first, as we heard he was a liberal-minded man, had been in England, of which his family spoke the language, and had learned there some notions of the way in which a gentleman ought to live; for the reader must know that abroad, it is only the tip-top nobility, with immense fortunes, who approach in the least to the style of the simple English gentry; when in more northern Italy I have seen them puffing in all the pomp of their titles, and thinking they were conferring an honour in mixing with plain English commoners, I have inwardly laughed at how much more an English girl thought of the 84 attention of a real English gentleman, so superior in finish and mind.

In the extract above Lowe not only demonstrates her knowledge of English gentry and their customs, she is clearly claiming that even the titled people of northern Italy (the “real” Italians by implication) are inferior to the English nobility. Emily is most concerned to ensure that her readers do not mistake her for a lower-class traveller and she reinforces her social

84 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p. 95.

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182 position frequently at the expense of those people who make her stay in Sicily and Calabria comfortable and pleasant. Even the best of southern Italian society, it seems, do not match up to “simple English gentry.”

Despite Lowe’s conventional snobbery and stereotyping of the southern Italians, Bonnie Borenstein describes Unprotected Females as an example of:

...memoirs that encourage rebellion and independence... in Unprotected Females, Emily Lowe proudly champions the capabilities of women to travel unchaperoned by men and to mountaineer, regardless of the Victorian social discouragement for both of these activities. Lowe encourages her female readership to follow her lead and defy spatial restrictions imposed on women by Victorian social codes 85 described in the suggestions of other guide and etiquette books.

In Unprotected Females, Lowe urges women to experience travel for themselves. ‘So, adventurous young ladies’, she exhorts, ‘fear not to follow our steps.’86 This fits with Joyce Kelley’s idea that a structural difference between Victorian men’s and women’s travel writing is that many women ‘concerned themselves with a smaller mapping of space; often their quests were less about opening new territories for their country and more about opening new spaces for themselves and their readers at home.’87 Kelley refers to Catherine Barnes Stevenson who ‘theorizes that men are more likely to structure their works as “quest- romances or tragedies” while women more often produce exploratory “odysseys” centering on “the experience of travel itself.”88 However, in Lowe’s case there is a little of both.

Borenstein’s “heroic” protofeminist reading of Unprotected females elides the fact that the work represents a complex confusion of discourses – yes, Lowe boldly encourages women to go beyond the limits of their gender but then with equal alacrity she reverts to a traditional female persona. This is the real difference between Lowe’s work and that of male travellers to Calabria and for all the fascination of this incredible woman and her idiosyncratic travel memoirs, as far as a representation of Calabria is concerned, Emily Lowe presents the same kind of sublime romantic version of the place as that of Edward Lear before her. She validates the general contemporary readings of Calabria as Other to Italy and Europe and serves up to the reader an exotic land of robbers, peasants and picturesque scenery.

85 Bonnie Jill Borenstein, Perspectives on British middle class pleasure travel to Italy and Switzerland 1860- 1914, unpublished MA thesis, McGill University, Montreal, 1997, pp. 78-79. 86 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p. 148. 87 Joyce Kelley, ‘Increasingly “imaginative geographies”: Excursions into otherness, fantasy, and modernism in early twentieth-century women’s travel writing,’ JNT: Journal of narrative theory, vol. 35, no. 3, 2005, p. 357. 88 Kelley, ‘Increasingly “imaginative geographies”,’ p. 357.

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183

In her ascent of Mount Etna Lowe conquers territory both physically and symbolically – she is going beyond the mere liberating experience for normally house-bound Victorian women of travel itself - she is exceeding the boundaries and expectations of her gender and social class. But she constantly reminds us of her position as an English lady. Above all, Lowe’s book reveals her investment in both notions of what is considered proper behaviour for a lady and her implied and often ironic critique of the gendered structures of the normative gaze. This tension between her own voice and the conventional Victorian middle-class point of view is what makes her work significantly different to those of male travellers, who, however “out of sorts” they are with their time and place, are always aware of being in an “authentic” authorial position. As Janice Schroeder puts it:

The sight of the woman in the public context of “abroad” directly challenges the notion that women are to remain content as the unseen, unseeing objects of male desire within the private, domestic space. Tourism contradicts domestic ideology by presenting women as travellers and as the subjects (as opposed to the objects) 89 of the gaze.

However, although I would agree that travel represented liberation from the domestic, how much women were able to escape being objects of the gaze by travelling is debatable. It is probably truer to say that women remained the object of the gaze wherever they were, and at the same time travel allowed them to be the subject of the gaze. Indira Ghose makes the point that ‘The constitution of self also always hinges on the setting-up of a “self- consolidating Other”, which in the case of women travellers was particularly represented by the “other” woman – less “free” than the Western woman.’90 Throughout Unprotected Females, Lowe also comments on the women she encounters. She comments on their looks, their dress, their manners and their ignorance in ways that imply that she represents not only a more “free” model of womanhood but also a more sophisticated, civilised and therefore superior one. At one stage, at the opera, she observes that ‘...the ladies did not go in full dress, which generally sets off the sallow Italians, who are inclined to look commonplace in 91 simple attire.’

It may be considered that critique of women’s appearance and dress is well within the “feminine” sphere and certainly there is no real reason to suppose that it is not. Except that,

89 Schroeder, ‘Strangers in every port,’ p. 123. 90 Ghose, Women Travellers in Colonial India, p. 8. 91 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p. 206.

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184 within the parameters of travel abroad where the traveller sets herself up as an authority, this kind of commentary is beyond idle female observation. Although Arcara states that, ‘Lowe also dwells on the most traditional feminine themes in travel writing, such as the local women’s appearance and fashion, domestic habits, interiors of dwellings, furniture, ways of cooking, etc.’ Lowe goes beyond this, describing women as men might do, for example in the following passage where she refers to the ‘two charming Signore de Rosas ... romantic as the view their pretty eyes gazed upon through the portico’,92 it may just as well have been a man making the observation.

Ghose reminds us that, ‘The traveller was also of course, the object of observance by the observed – a fact either effaced or registered with various emotions, ranging from detached amusement or rage and fear.’93 Lowe is well aware that the people of Calabria are observing her and her mother even as they both observe and her account is full of self- conscious references to how she, a “lively English girl” is being perceived. The following is a typical example. Lowe and her mother are about to leave Reggio and are being attended by envoys and a young merchant and his brother, each with ‘a new sonnet and a bottle of bergamot.’ The envoys undertake to read the sonnets during the trip which incidence Lowe describes as follows:

Mamma was malicious enough to laugh heartily in both sleeves; I, being the Muse on the altar to whom the adulation was addressed, felt inclined to be slightly blinded by the incense, and indulgently listen to what they sung about Donna Emilia...but if they could be so poetical on merely a lively English girl, to what strains would one of our classic beauties rouse them? I should be quite content to 94 play second fiddle for the amusement of watching their novel excitement.

Lowe is often at the centre of this kind of attention in Unprotected Females. How could she have expected anything different, unaccompanied as she was by a male protector in a place where it was unheard of for women to place themselves in what the locals considered so vulnerable a position? Lowe is aware that she herself is considered a foreign body and is being observed by the people she is observing as she travels through their country and she makes frequent reference to the figure she cuts in Calabrian society. At one point she makes an overt reference to how the presence of two unaccompanied English ladies literally “stopped traffic”, noting:

92 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p. 246. 93 Ghose, Women Travellers in Colonial India, p. 8. 94 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p. 246. Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

185

Our style must equally have astonished them, judging by the cessation of business it caused; the violent efforts of the “Urban Guard” to prevent a crowd following us. ... “Do not let the ladies think they are in Africa!” 95 though there never was a scene less desert-like.

It is notable that a local should make the comparison with Africa. In this sense Africa signifies most barbaric and is precisely how northern Italians came to characterise southerners. But this extract also demonstrates how southerners automatically “other” those further south, i.e. Africans. Lowe’s recounting of the incident reminds the reader of how close southern Italy is to Africa both geographically and in essence. While the incident described holds no risk for Lowe – quite the contrary – she reminds us that she is in a space widely considered a primitive backwater of Italy, a remote “non- European” corner of Europe. Joyce Kelley asserts that:

Travel to remote regions was especially transgressive for many Western women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who sought both escape and pleasure abroad. These women, themselves “Other” to masculine concepts of biology, thought, emotion, and sexuality, found the authority they were denied at home by becoming experts of an exotic area. The Otherness they found served as a vehicle for inscribing something new, even something unspoken about themselves. Writing about foreign bodies in a strange land compelled a woman writer to consider the position of her own body as a foreign object and to make 96 choices about the presentation of that body on paper.

Certainly, for Emily Lowe, her successful climb to the top of Mount Etna presents the bourgeois Victorian woman’s body in a way that was not usual at home or in a foreign space.

A woman’s own adventure Men’s adventure travel is full of character-building descriptions of dangers, privations and difficulties. In many respects men were required to cross the boundaries from safe to perilous landscapes, to conquer new territories. For women to place themselves in similar positions was historically seen as foolhardy and many endeavours like mountain-climbing were considered off-limits for women.

Very early in Unprotected females, Lowe mentions her firm determination to ascend the volcano Etna, and throughout the first half of her narrative she emphasizes the scornful

95 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p. 229. 96 Kelley, ‘Increasingly “imaginative geographies”,’ p. 357.

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186 scepticism of the locals when she expresses her decision to climb the mountain (‘a hint at the ascent of Etna put them into a fury of “Impossible!”’); she also proudly underlines her resolve and conviction that she (and her mother) are capable of success in such an enterprise. Finally, in the chapter “Ascent of Mount Aetna”, the triumphal climax of her narrative, Lowe's self- celebration is most evident:

And then felt the moment was come when two of the wonders of creation, a snowy volcano and a woman's curiosity, were to try their ardour against 97 each other.

Indeed, the centrepiece and climax of Lowe’s tale, her ascent of Mount Etna in Sicily which was certainly a place that would have been considered off-limits for women of both cultures, is a transgressive act by the standards of both her own culture and that of the Italians. She describes the reaction of the Sicilians to their “unprotected” status, and her decision to climb Mount Etna:

Till fairly inside the carriage, no one believed we would start, as to see ladies travel alone in Sicily is as uncommon as in Norway; the countenance of a native alone could express the dismay at women who “Girare senza esser Accompagnate!!!” Travel unaccompanied!!! - that is the sum of horror, an escort being as indispensable as money to an Italian lady unhappy enough to be obliged to travel twenty miles; and a hint at the ascent of Aetna put them into fury of “Impossible!” which encouraged expression accompanied us to the foot of the 98 mountain.

Lowe and her mother set out, following local protocol by employing one guide each to accompany them and make their ascent generally more comfortable. On completion Lowe informs us, these guides ‘were in tremendous spirits; could hardly believe the whole thing real; half feared to triumph ... Never, never, had they dreamt of taking ladies through such snow; of the very few men who try it hardly one in a winter reaches the forge.’99 It is evident that with every “conquering step” Lowe and her mother took in their ascent up Mount Etna that the women were successfully conquering territory physically as well as socially. Their success is reinforced through Lowe's encouragement for other women to conquer a space for themselves as she had, to not fear defying the overprotection of women and breaking conventions for women travellers. It is clear that this was no mean feat, travel websites today advise that this is a difficult endeavour. One typical warning reads:

97 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p. 129. 98 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p. 41. 99 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p. 142.

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187

Climbing Mount Etna is a demanding challenge, but one that is very achievable with the correct training. It requires a reasonable level of strength, stamina and determination. Your training should incorporate aerobic (endurance building), anaerobic (strength building) exercises and some good long walks! It is important to include some steep climbs in your training to help mimic the conditions of your 100 challenge.

Lowe stresses how she and her mother succeeded perfectly by bravely enduring the toil of the interminable ascent, despite little incidents such as having to take the coffee cold as the guides did not bring the charcoal for warming it, because ‘they never expected we could possibly reach the column’. In the end, after ‘seventeen hours, from six o'clock in the morning till eleven at night, thirteen of which were passed in the snow’, she could truly say that they ‘did not feel one tenth part of that fagged sensation a good day's shopping gives in a noisy town’.

Elpis Melena also climbed a volcano on the nearby island of Stromboli and she also met with incredulity.

Stromboli - When we got to the shore, we apprized some of the people there of our intention of ascending the mountain on the morrow. Their astonishment was boundless, and, with a shrug of the shoulders, one of the most intelligent of them assured us that we should find it impracticable, inasmuch as the top was 3,000 feet high, and could only be reached by a most fatiguing process of wading through the deep ashes, and climbing over large and rough blocks of lava, and by dangerous passages over chasms and rifts, and, lastly, that few, even of the in 101 habitants of the island, had ever ventured on the undertaking.

Her description of the event, like that of Lowe, stresses the difficulty, underlining her own bravery and derring-do, a mere woman conquering a mountain that few local men attempted to climb.

Every shower was accompanied by a tremendous burst of flame, which some times 1 lasted for several minutes, and at others subsided at once. A heavy sound, like the explosion of a distant mine, was heard after the outbreak of stones and flame. It appears that the eruptions are much more violent in stormy weather than they are in summer and under bright skies, and thus, at the time when the old

100 ‘Climb Mount Etna,’ Action Challenge website, , accessed 16 May 2014. 101 Melena, Calabria and the Liparian Islands in the Year I860, p. 152.

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188 poets as signed the mountain as the dwelling-place of Aeolus, the volcano seemed as a kind of barometer to the inhabitants, who prophecied from the state of its activity which way the wind would blow, and every change of weather, some days 102 before they occurred.

Lowe also contrasts her personal achievement with the experience of an English gentleman who, some time before, ‘when he attempted the great ascent, could never get 103 beyond the Montagnuolo’.

It is this assertive voice of the determined, often aggressive Englishwoman which prevails in the book. Lowe's personality was obviously one of great tenacity, as we can gather from the biographical information (especially her achievement of remarkable recognition in the public “masculine “area of navigation), and this is reflected in her adoption of a strong narrative voice and in her frequent insistence on her personal qualities of self-confidence and determination. The ascent to Etna is not only the climax of her account but demonstrates the crux of her conflicting gender-related discourses. Before the ascent, she is concerned with the feminine issues of food and dress. She notes the distrust of the two male guides and describes herself and her mother as ‘deceitfully delicate looking’. But as she ascends she sheds her feminine persona as she sheds her clothes. ‘The shawls one by one were thrown off; handkerchiefs followed; the heavy cloth petticoats next, till the poor guides were quite disguised with bearing the extra garments.’104 All these were left behind with mamma at a point where a ramshackle climber’s hut aptly named “Casa degli Inglese” (The Englishmen’s house) stood.

The matter of dress is emblematic of the limitations placed on women in the Victorian period. Victorian women’s dress involved layers of clothing and binding garments like corsets. To achieve her goal of reaching the summit of Mount Etna, Lowe has to shed the socially acceptable gendered behaviour and propriety contingent on “being a lady” – the dropping of various garments is symbolic of her shedding the feminine persona. Finally, at the summit she reverts to the all-conquering discourse of the male adventure traveller – she is 105 ‘throned above the clouds.’

102 Melena, Calabria and the Liparian Islands in the Year I860, p. 154. 103 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p. 147. 104 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, pp. 131-132. 105 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p. 139.

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189 Marni Stanley writes about the difficulty in sustaining ‘the performance of femininity in the face of the action of travel … and the debate between dress reformers and traditionalists’, pointing out that ‘It was one thing to praise the health benefits of hiking and climbing, but quite another to suggest engaging in these practices without benefit of corsets and petticoats and ankle-length skirts.’106 Women’s dress of the Victorian period was particularly cumbersome and restrictive and played a significant role in preventing women from travel, especially to anywhere free of the comforts of home. There was at the time considerable debate about dress reform in general. According to Stanley:

While many took advantage of the changed conditions and expectations of travel to leave their corsets and petticoats at the border, others argued that a lady should 107 always dress like a lady even when alone in the middle of a jungle.

Because the dress reform debate was part of a larger political struggle for feminists of the period, it was largely ignored in the writings of women travellers. As Stanley rightly points out ‘Most of the women travellers carefully kept themselves on the unthreatening “well-behaved” side of the debate. To be a traveller and a reformist as well would be to risk alarming the watchful readers.’108 Lowe does not comment on the rights and wrongs of conventional women’s dress but she does make reference to practical matters, making it clear that comfort is an issue for her and she does quite gleefully describe divesting herself of extraneous clothes during her ascent of Etna. Lowe asserts her right to negotiate her femininity in a way that suits her and makes no excuse or apology. She straddles the fine line between female modesty and an almost masculine pride in her achievements. As Stanley states:

Competing conceptions of the feminine play themselves out in the conflict between modesty and pride in the author's portraits of themselves as writers and travellers, and in the debate between safe, practical dress and clothes which sign the feminine by assuring modesty and limiting movement. Even those women who chose conventionally feminine self-representations contributed new voices to the public debate from the world which systematically disadvantaged women. While striking a blow, even if unintentionally, against that one injustice, women participated in and exploited many others; nevertheless, their struggles to position themselves as speaking subjects remain among the most positive legacies of their

106 Marni Stanley, ‘Skirting the issues: Addressing and dressing in Victorian women's travel narratives,’ Victorian Review, vol. 23, no. 2, 1997, p. 149. 107 Stanley, ‘Skirting the issues,’ p.160. 108 Stanley, ‘Skirting the issues,’ p. 163.

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190 travel literature. They provide us with another reminder that gender may be 109 inescapable, but it's not unnegotiable.

Lowe’s negotiation includes a sketch of herself and her mother on horseback in the Norway narrative. She is pictured with her hair loose and wild and definitely not riding side- saddle. There were many drawbacks to riding side-saddle including riding habits with immense riding skirts and special corsets which kept the rider erect, rigid and uncomfortable and dangerously disadvantaged both horse and rider. Despite these negative consequences and also the fact that the side-saddle was labour intensive - usually taking two men to help one lady get onto her side-saddle - public etiquette, especially amongst the upper classes, demanded that women rode in this manner.

Illus. 9: [Emily Lowe], Ladies on horseback 1857 Unprotected females in Norway, or the pleasantest way of travelling there, passing through ... London: Routledge, p.220.

At the top of Mount Etna, a triumphant Lowe undermines the traditionally male gaze of the panoptic sublime, exclaiming, ‘How dizzy being at the summit of one’s ambition makes one feel! But we will be queenly as the altitude, and survey with calm the earth beneath.’110 Mary Louise Pratt has noted that, ‘It is hard to think of a trope more decisively gendered than the monarch-of-all-I-survey scene’111 but in Lowe’s case the monarch is a queen and she is queen of all she surveys. Historian James Clifford has written of women travellers of this period that they:

… were forced to conform, masquerade, or rebel discreetly within a set of

109 Stanley, ‘Skirting the issues,’ p. 164. 110 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p. 126. 111 Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Imperial eyes: Travel writing and subculturation,’ Routledge, London, 2007, p. 213.

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191 normatively male definitions and experiences … The discursive/imaginary topographies of Western travel are being revealed as systematically gendered: symbolic stagings of self and other that are powerfully institutionalized … While there are certainly exceptions, particularly in the area of pilgrimage, a wide predominance of male experiences in the institutions of ‘travel’ is clear – 112 certainly in the West and, in differing degrees, elsewhere.

Lowe does not disappoint, destabilising the male gaze and claiming the power of the gaze for herself. She goes on at length describing all she sees with numerous classical allusions, for a long moment immersing herself into a classical past of both mythological and historical figures. According to Marguerite Helmers and Tilar J Mazzeo, this attraction to ‘history and to the powerful allure of the past, to an imagined geography of exoticism and desire … allows [travellers] to construct themselves as agents in a historical drama.’113 Judging by her many accomplishments, Lowe was certainly a woman determined to have some agency in the world.

Other elements of Lowe’s narrative, which seem to result in particular from a more specific feminist kind of discourse, such as the emphasis on her “unprotectedness” and independence as a lady traveller, her transgressive behaviour towards the other sex, implies a questioning of contemporary sexual morals for women. For instance, Lowe reports the text, both in Italian and in English, of a love letter written to her by a local gentleman who had seen her during her visit to a church; she also writes of her open flirting with nearly every male character she comes across in Sicily and Calabria, among whom are members of religious orders:

Having heard so much of the monks' gallantry, I had the curiosity to try very mildly if they really could flirt a little; and having cleared up the point, no young 114 ladies need in future take the trouble of trying the experiment.

Throughout her tale, Lowe makes the reader conscious of her body - mainly she wants us to know that she has the strength for endurance and travel, but also that a female body captures the attention of men and they can be beguiled by it. This theme in the work certainly captures the essence of the female dilemma – to be at once strong and healthy and therefore capable and to be at the same time the embodiment of female tenderness, fragility and therefore alluring. The female gaze Lowe embodies is one of smoke and mirrors. She can

112 James Clifford, ‘Traveling cultures’, Cultural Studies, Routledge, New York, 1992, pp. 105-106. 113 Marguerite Helmers and Tilar J. Mazzeo, ‘Introduction: Travel and the body,’ JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 35, no. 3, 2005, p. 272. 114 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p.123. Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

192 view the world as a man does, conqueror of all she surveys but she knows how it is to be the object of the gaze. This knowingness leads her to play with femininity when it suits her, but she remains always in control of her destiny, even making her mother bend to her will:

I must here exculpate Mamma entirely from any willing share in the adventure; she was always for Monte Vittorì, and it was only by immense perseverance in the process known as “talking over” I got her to try the real mountain. Had she not consented, how much she would have missed, and without any unpleasant 115 consequences!

Unlike other more famous travel writers of the period Lowe did not resort, in Marni Stanley’s words, to prefacing her account, as other women travellers did ‘with ritual apologies which others, as ably, parodied… in a few of their introductory passages there is a note of real apology as if the writer were genuinely afraid that she might be accused of having usurped some sphere not hers by right. Alongside the feeling of triumph that comes from achieving a long dreamed of prospect is the sensation that the victory has been purchased by some transgression.’116 Lowe seems to revel in her transgression and mostly eschews any strategy of self-erasure. Her way is to do as she wishes, to affirm traditional sex roles while she herself transcends them, to rely on her femininity when it suits her and to mask rebellion with charm. As for being “unprotected” she is hardly that, moving amongst the gentry and partaking of their hospitality and, yes, protection. Her gender, her class and, perhaps, travelling with her mother does, in reality, afford her protection.

Examples of the highly conflicting and at times utterly incompatible attitudes Lowe alternatively adopts are scattered throughout Unprotected Females. But despite veering from one extreme to another in her narrative voice and representation of herself, it is the Calabrians and their country that she describes as extreme:

...true specimen of the national character! All extremes, like their rivers, which either rush in impetuous torrents, to dry up and have a harsh, arid bed, but never 117 flow calmly enough to reflect.

In this, her work does not differ from that of male travel writers. However, unlike in most Calabrian travel accounts by men, Lowe does not feel that she is required to refer to earlier travellers in her account, and indeed she only ever refers to “travellers” in the vaguest

115 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p.110. 116 Stanley, ‘Skirting the issues,’ p. 164. 117 [Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and the Top of Mount Aetna, p. 246.

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193 terms. There is no self-congratulatory excess of information and reference to the Calabrian canon of travel writings in her account.

Ultimately, Unprotected Females does display a female gaze even though Emily Lowe is not the average Victorian woman as the following newspaper excerpts demonstrate:

Before her marriage Lady Cifford, then Miss Lowe, was already a pioneer. With her mother, whose only child she was, Miss Lowe was the first lady to explore Norway in carrioles - Norway was then almost a terra incognito, and women were less accustomed to travel any where and to travel in a similar way all over Sicily, 118 where they mounted Etna on December 21.

Lady Clifford made several cruises to Norway and Sicily in her yacht, commanded by a competent captain; but, as many women have found in other circumstances, she found the divided authority of the owner and the captain hardly worked well. “If you want a thing done, do it yourself,” reflected Lady Clifford, 119 who was not a woman to put up with nonsense.

Unprotected Females concerns itself with domestic details, relationships and diversions and avoids for the most part the kind of historical exegesis that the books by male travellers are replete with. More like Lear’s work than that of Swinburne, Ramage and Douglas, due mainly to a refusal to take herself too seriously, Lowe’s work, in the words of an anonymous online article on an Italian website:

Insomma quello di Emily Lowe è il racconto ancora fresco e vibrante di una donna che seppe vivere il viaggio al Sud senza erudite pedanterie o preoccupazioni di filologica precisione nel riportare fatti e situazioni, ma piuttosto con l’emozione di chi concepisce il viaggio come un esperienza nella quale ciò che conta è l’incontro con la gente, con i suoi costumi, con quelle peculiarità che la rendono unica e diversa in ogni luogo che si abbia occasione di attraversare. [In summary, Emily Lowe’s book remains the fresh and vibrant account of a woman who knew how to experience the journey to the South without erudite pedantry or preoccupations with philological precision in the reporting of facts and situation, but rather with the emotion of someone who conceives the journey as an experience in which what counts is the encounter with people, their costumes, with an individuality which makes her unique and 120 different in every place she has occasion to visit].

118 ‘Women and home,’ The Uttica Journal, Sunday, March 10. 1895, p. 7. 119 Hampshire Advertiser, Wednesday 31 July 1895, p. 3. 120 ‘Una spericolata inglese e sua madre a spasso per la Sicilia e la Calabria nel 1857,’ Fame di Sud, , accessed 16 May 2014.

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194 Chapter 7: George Gissing by the Ionian Sea

George Gissing, minor late Victorian novelist, was born in 1857, the son of a pharmaceutical chemist. In November 1897 he travelled to Calabria, publishing his account of that journey, By the Ionian Sea1 in 1901. The trip to Calabria was accomplished with the self-stated desire to satisfy Gissing’s longing for the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans. In Calabria, he expected to find a poetic blending of the two ancient cultures, writing, ‘In Magna Graecia the waters of two fountains mingle and flow together; how exquisite will be the draught!’2 But the published result of his trip – described as his greatest work by some critics – reveals less about the classical world and more about Gissing and his view of his world.

In this chapter, I will compare By the Ionian Sea with Gissing’s diary entries of the time to demonstrate the construction of the travel book. I will also be examining ideas about Italians, and particularly southern Italians as revealed by Gissing’s book and other publications back in England. Gissing frequently compares Calabrians to the urban poor of London, revealing something about how identity is manufactured. Like Lear and Strutt before him, George Gissing frequently uses the term picturesque in his travel book. Emily Lowe’s account is full of details and scenes that would be described as picturesque although she resorts to this term in only three instances in her book. It would be interesting to know what Gissing would have made of Lowe given his ambivalent attitude to the “woman question” of 3 his times.

By the Ionian Sea was serialised by the Fortnightly Review from May 1899 before being published by Chapman & Hall in 1901. Gissing’s friend, science-fiction writer H G Wells, was very supportive of the work, writing in a letter to Gissing:

I do really admire and delight in your By the Ionian Sea which seems not only to me but to almost all the people I hear speak of such things, by far the finest work

1 George Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, The Century Travellers, Century Hutchinson, London, 1986 [1901]. 2 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 21. 3 There are many instances of referrals by critics and commentators to Gissing’s “ambivalence”. An early example, which puts it in a nutshell is the comment made by Karen Chase, The Literal Heroine: A Study of Gissing's “The Odd Women”,’ Criticism, vol. 26, no. 3, 1984, pp. 231-244. Chase notes that “George Gissing has ... has been rediscovered both as a protofeminist and a misogynist, and since compelling evidence can be found on both sides, no point would be served by trying to fix Gissing's attitude with precision. Indeed, it is clear that Gissing possessed nothing so determinate as a precise attitude. His statements on the Woman Question were as awkward and confused as his relations with women.’

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195 4 you have done – in conception and quality alike.

Wells shared his copy of the Fortnightly Review with his neighbour and with Joseph Conrad who also lived nearby. He also sent a copy to a mutual friend, Edmund Gosse who responded:

This is indeed a new phase of George Gissing. It is as though a Salvador [sic] Rosa should suddenly produce a very delicate and perfect Watteau, all in pink and silver. I have always been a sincere admirer of Gissing, but this is quite a different thing, another Gissing evidently, and – I will not say better, but more to 5 my personal taste.

It is interesting that Gosse should make this comparison. As mentioned elsewhere in this work, many art commentators locate the origins of Gothic sensibility in the seventeenth- century Neapolitan artist Salvator Rosa. Watteau on the other hand is regarded as one of the outstanding artists of the rococo period and a forerunner of nineteenth-century impressionism with his feeling for light and colour and the dream-like quality of his work. Watteau was known for his depictions of fêtes galantes, fashionable outdoor gatherings of elegant court ladies and gentlemen among trees and shrubbery.

Are we to assume that in making this comparison Gosse sees Gissing turning from the dark and savage world of London to the lyric beauty of an Italian pastoral? If this were so, it would be a strange inversion of the usual depiction of Calabria as a space permeated with the Gothic sublime. But it would seem that Gosse is more likely to be referring to the rendering of the travel book as being a much lighter, impressionistic and less ponderous, easily digested piece of writing. This is exactly what it is, despite (or maybe because of) Gissing’s pretensions, described by Wells (in an interesting echo of Gosse’s Watteau metaphor) as a 6 ‘halting effort to pose as a cultivated leisurely eighteenth century intelligence.’

Reading the final sentence of By the Ionian Sea alone would incline one to agree with Wells’ judgement, so affected, contrived and trite is its sentiment and construction. This ending is almost in the category of “As the sun sinks quietly in the West” and is an interesting example of Gissing’s romanticisation of the classical world which he characterises as a world

4 Royal A Gettmann (ed.), George Gissing and H G Wells: Their Friendship and Correspondence, University Of Illinois Press, Urbana IN, 1961, p. 146. 5 Gettmann, George Gissing and H G Wells, p. 205. 6 H G Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866), Faber and Faber, London, 1934, p. 575.

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196 of “silence”. He writes, ‘Alone and quiet, I heard the washing of the waves; I saw the evening fall on cloud-wreathed Etna, the twinkling lights come forth on Scylla and Charybdis; and I wished it were mine to wander endlessly amid the silence of the ancient world, to-day and all 7 its sounds forgotten.’

But despite this critique, Wells claimed to have been genuinely fond of the book. A later commentator, Gissing biographer Gillian Tindall, is far more scathing. She writes:

His traveller’s attitude seems to me so selective, and so permeated with a nineteenth-century concept of the pre-Christian Mediterranean world, that I feel what he says has little interest or relevance for the present-day reader – whether the reader is interested in the Mediterranean or in the essential quality of Gissing’s life and work…it is as if he “used” his foreign travel, mainly if not 8 exclusively, as a journey into a past that was more subjective than genuine.

At the time of its writing, however, By the Ionian Sea was almost universally acclaimed. The Guardian described it as ‘the finest poetic feeling, the truest sympathy and the clearest analysis that have ever been combined by the scholarly student with the description of travel.’9 This hyperbole is somewhat baffling – who on the staff of The Guardian had the knowledge of Calabria to describe Gissing’s book as being the ‘clearest analysis’? What indeed did the English know of Italians, particularly Southern Italians at the time of By the Ionian Sea’s publication?

In 1901, there were 24,000 Italians in the United Kingdom and they were overwhelmingly employed as street sellers and in the food trade.10 Many of them had arrived as political refugees following revolution and unrest during the nineteenth century. Some of these returned home but others remained in a relatively accepting England, in which, however, they were always viewed as the foreign Other, outside the boundary of English identity. In 1902 prominent journalist George R. Sims edited a three-volume work entitled Living London within which there is a chapter entitled “Italy in London” by Count E. Armfelt.11 The interesting thing about this folksy portrait of Italians in London is that by far

7 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 156. 8 Gillian Tindall, The Born Exile: George Gissing, Temple Smith, London, 1974, p. 261. 9 ‘By the Ionian Sea, review,’ The Guardian, July 1901, cited in John Halperin, Gissing: A Life in Books, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1982, p. 325. 10 Lucio Sponza, ‘The 1880s: A Turning Point,’ A Century of Italian Emigration to Britain 1880–1980s: Five Essays, edited by Lucio Sponza and Arturo Tosi, Biddles, Guildford, Surrey, 1993, pp. 10–24. 11 Count E Armfelt, ‘Italy in London,’ Living London: Its Work and its Play its Humour and its Pathos its Sights and its Scenes, edited by George R Sims, vol. I, Cassell and Company, London, 1902, pp. 183–189.

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197 most of the characters described are from the south: Naples, Calabria, Sicily and Apulia. Rome, Florence and Venice are only mentioned once and that is in relation to mosaic designers working in stone and wood. Venetian girls are also singled out in relation to point lace-making. The rest are a rabble of “child-like joy”; some of the men ‘sitting on the doorsteps or along the walls, their knees closely bent against their stomachs in Oriental fashion’ including ‘the gaol deliveries of Naples and other great Italian cities’ who ‘find a congenial refuge in Italian London’. Armfelt specifically mentions ‘the Camorra, the Mafia and the Mala Vita’ but he concludes that ‘these misguided men are victims of heredity. Centuries of oppression, superstition, cruelty and ignorance, and a code of morals which sanctified the unwashed and vermin-eaten and which looked upon loathsome diseases as 12 special dispensations of providence, have made them what they are.’

One of the long-term consequences of Darwin’s The Descent of Man, published in 1859 could be described as a fear of atavism - of the throwback to some deeper and darker age. Professor Carroll Clayton Savant, of the University of Texas notes that late late-nineteenth century degeneration and devolution theorists and writers that civilization had reached its pinnacle and risked devolving back into its more “primitive” state. Savant notes that Gissing’s friend H G Wells, was one of the people who believed that ‘the threat of devolution and degeneration is clear: one species can only progress so far before it begins to regress on its evolutionary path of progress. And for Gissing’s late-Victorian world, this is seen in the overreliance on technology and industry in order to “survive” in the overpopulated and 13 congested city.’

In Victorian writing, this emerged as common post-Darwinian fantasies of recidivism and regression to bestial states – Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde being a case in point.14 Armfelt’s description of an Italian organ-grinder is particularly revealing:

Here, for instance, is a broad-grinning, shock-haired brigand-looking Sicilian mountaineer, who can neither read nor write, who has tramped all over Italy and France. He has an organ and two monkeys which climb up balconies, dance and beg for coppers, and salute and thank just as their master does; and who shall say

12 Armfelt, ‘Italy in London,’ pp. 183–189. 13 Carroll Clayton Savant, ‘And the women shall inherit the earth: Late Victorian over-population and the condition of England on the threshold in George Gissing’s The Odd Women,’ Portals: A Journal in Comparative Literature, vol. 11, November 2014,< http://portalsjournal.com/2014/women-shall-inherit-earth-late-victorian- population-condition-england-threshold-george-gissings-odd-women/>. 14 Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, Routledge, London, 1991, p. 116.

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198 15 that they are not almost equally intelligent?

Even Gissing, for all his professed love of Italy and sympathy for the poor of Calabria declared that ‘These lower-class Italians are Oriental in their savagery.’16 The issue of race was a key theme of British scholarship in the final decades of the nineteenth century with the rise of interest in social Darwinisim, the growth of the new sciences of anthropology and ethnology and the increasing credence given to the claims of the proponents of eugenics that there existed objective and scientific criteria for racial difference. A few years after the publication of By the Ionian Sea, in October 1904, Pearson's Magazine announced a “striking” new series of articles to commence in its pages, entitled ‘The Heart of Things’. It introduced the author of the series as Miss Olive Christian Malvery ‘known throughout Europe and America as a brilliant lecturer and reciter.’17 For several weeks, Miss Malvery had gone undercover and investigated the lives and conditions of the poor working women of London. In this series and in an article for the Daily Express, ‘The Alien Question,’ Miss Malvery repudiates the Jews as the predominant “foreign” element in Edwardian England and identifies with another group of immigrants, the Italians. According to her, unlike Italians, Jews cannot be integrated; they remain a parasitic class of foreigners, with no real homeland.

However, on the Continent, Malvery tends to link Jews and Italians - the ‘condition’ of ‘Russian Jews in their own homes,’ she assures her readers, ‘is quite on a par with the lowest type of Italian emigrant.’ But she emphatically distinguishes between these two immigrant groups when they appear on English soil. Italians may be degraded in their native country, but, once in England, they readily assimilate themselves to local conditions. Malvery expresses ‘warm feelings’ toward the ‘children of the sunny south,’ who, as organ grinders and street entertainers in London, bring music to the poor and pose no economic threat to “native” English workers. These “warm feelings” even take the form of impersonation. In her article on street music, Malvery is shown impersonating an Italian organ grinder, complete with picturesque headscarf and apron. In other writings, she also acknowledges that she was mistaken for an Italian (and sometimes for a gypsy) when she went around London.

Malvery's writings signal other dimensions besides Empire to the discourse of Britishness. She sets up a relationship of the Eastender with the Indian, the Italian, and the

15 Armfelt, ‘Italy in London,’ p. 187. 16 Gettmann, George Gissing and H. G. Wells, p. 83. 17 Judith R Walkowitz, ‘The Indian Woman, the Flower Girl, and the Jew: Photojournalism in Edwardian London,’ Victorian Studies, vol. 42, no. 1, 1998-1999, pp. 3-46.

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199 Jew which highlights overlapping and competing elements in a discussion of Nation and Other. Within this framework her affinity with Italians accords with current popular thinking on race. As Mediterraneans, Italians occupied an intermediary position in the “racial” hierarchy akin to Eurasians like herself, an Indian woman. In Italy, northern commentators were trying to distinguish the North from the South by stressing their identification as Europeans, not Mediterraneans, claiming for themselves a higher place on this hierarchy.

Early on in his trip, Gissing meets a northern commercial traveller who must make an annual journey to the South which he loathes, ‘finding no compensation whatever for the miseries of travel below Naples; the inhabitants he reviled with exceeding animosity.’18 However, later on in By the Ionian Sea, Gissing makes his own relational comparison to the east end of London, stating that ‘the native of Crotone has advantages over the native of the 19 city slum; and it is better to die in a hovel by the Ionian Sea than in a cellar at Shoreditch.’

The England that novelist George Gissing travelled from on his trip to Calabria in 1897 had just celebrated the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. It has often been noted that during the time of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee the British Empire reached its highest point, and that the celebration was not only for the milestone of the monarch’s 60 years on the throne monarch but also an empire upon which “the sun did not set.” This period has also been claimed as ‘a Roman moment’, with ‘the analogy of the Roman Empire endlessly invoked in discussions of the British Empire.’20 Certainly the Queen was celebrated as the triumphant head of a global empire every bit as glorious, if not more so, as that of the Romans and her people basked as never before in this short golden period of imperial pride before the frantic European scramble for colonies in Africa lead to a series of bloody confrontations on both continents.

This Jubilee occurred in June, the same month as the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, described by Rosemary Jackson as ‘one of the most extreme inversions of Christian myth and subversions of Victorian morality.’21 Stoker identifies ‘the protean shadow of the “other” as evil…the shadow on the edges of bourgeois culture is variously identified as black, mad, primitive, criminal, socially deprived, deviant, crippled, or (when sexually assertive)

18 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 40. 19 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 92. 20 The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Norton Topics Online, W W Norton and Company, 2003–2007, , viewed on 22 August 2011. 21 Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, p. 119.

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200 female’22. Dracula also encodes fear of the Other both as a continental national – from a little-known corner of Europe - and as an immigrant, able to infiltrate “normal” society by masquerading as a gentleman. This reading of the European Other locates the epicentre of foreign evil in an unfamiliar, mountainous, feudal backwater, populated by superstitious Catholic peasants and malevolent aristocrats. A place which embodied all the things that were anathema to, yet which fascinated the civilised, civilising British. This was, in fact, Transylvania but could easily have been Calabria, another similarly populated feudal backwater.

Horrifyingly compelling as Dracula undoubtedly was to middle-class Victorians with its thrilling depiction of the transgressive Other, real life events in Whitechapel of the previous decade had already revealed the anti-Semitism, xenophobia and distrust of the poorer classes simmering under the surface of the genteel middle classes. The reactions of London to the Jack the Ripper murders present a snapshot of the kind of suspicions that existed between classes, segments of the population, and areas of London at the time. The types of people who were suspected by the police and the press – it was commonly assumed that Jack was a Jew or a foreigner of some sort - accurately reflected many of the tensions and prejudices of Victorian London.

Interestingly, Richard Whittington-Egan's A Casebook on Jack the Ripper 23 claims that George Gissing could have been Jack the Ripper, or had some connection with the Whitechapel murders. This work has become the authority cited by other authors who make the claim. Unfortunately for this theory Gissing was not even in England when the murders occurred, so how did the story arise in the first place? As one commentator puts it:

Ludicrous though the idea is, it does have a certain historical interest. The story must have come from somewhere, and it does raise the possibility that Gissing was perhaps questioned by police after he returned from Italy. If this really happened, it may of course only have been because the authorities knew about his professional interest in low-life London, especially as this was presumably around the time of the publication of The Nether World…There is sort of mad coincidence in the Ripper assertion, though. Nell dies in misery in Lambeth in February of ‘88, and gives rise to the famous agonised diary entry. Gissing writes The Nether World between then and July. As Halperin says, he was in a state of ‘savage moodiness and misanthropy’ and probably at this time was using

22 Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, p. 121. 23 Richard Whittington-Egan, A Casebook on Jack the Ripper, Wiley, London, 1975, p. 12.

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201 24 the services of prostitutes.

Gissing had left England for Italy on 16 September and was there during the Ripper murders in October and November. This particular trip represented an escape from the urban jungle of London and the horrors of its dirt, smog and human misery. It was also an escape from the ruins of his failed marriage, finally put to rest by the death of his wife Nell. Gissing had been offered £150 for his novel The Nether World – a sum that he felt would enable him to survive for another year and also allow him to make this first trip to Italy. Three years before he had written to his sister, Ellen, ‘For me Rome is the centre of the Universe…I dare not read a book about Rome, it gives me a sort of angina pectoris, a physical pain, so extreme 25 is my desire to go there.’

In search of the classical world Gissing also “longed” to travel to another part of Italy, one less known and much less accessible than Rome. But the long-awaited pilgrimage to the Ionian shore didn’t happen until 1897. One not inconsiderable problem with the choice of Calabria for a man bent on soaking himself in the remnants of classical antiquity is that the region was almost totally bare of classical remains. In terms of southern Italy, Sicily would have offered Gissing much more. Earthquakes, mudslides and environmental degradation caused by deforestation, shifting coastlines, malaria and human intervention over many centuries had left few classical remains south of Paestum. Perhaps it was because Calabria was a lesser known region that Gissing chose it – Sicily having, to some degree, already become emblematic of the far south and a much wider known part of Italy. It was a choice that “paid off” – one highly favourable review of his account of the journey, By the Ionian Sea, took special note of ‘Gissing’s choice

26 of a little-travelled region of Italy.’

Gissing himself, faced with less evidence of an idealised classical world than he might have liked, solved this problem by creating a virtual version. In the grip of la febbre [the fever] in Cotrone, he conjured hallucinatory visions of antiquity which became a famous chapter of By the Ionian Sea. According to Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang, ‘We read

24 Peter Morton, ‘Jack the Ripper: Was Gissing questioned?’ Peter Morton’s website George Gissing pages, , accessed 4 November 2010. 25 John Halperin, Gissing: A Life in Books, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1982, p. 113. 26 Gettman, George Gissing and H. G. Well, p. 180.

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202 novels, guidebooks, watch programmes of greater or lesser solemnity, all of which produce for us a phantom landscape which guides our understanding of the one we eventually see.’27 They quote Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett who wrote, ‘The production of hereness in the absence of actualities depends increasingly on virtualities.’28 In the England of Gissing’s time, a proliferating popular press churning out magazines and novels was creating the kinds of “phantom landscapes” Franklin and Crang refer to, and which Gissing himself produced in By the Ionian Sea.

So great was Gissing’s desire for the ancient world that he created a whole populated world of ‘thronged streets, processions triumphal or religious, halls of feasting, fields of battles’29 – all in the kind of detail he claimed not to have ever seen in books, details of costumes and architecture his imagination could not have contrived. He even “saw” the hordes led by Hannibal slaughtering a contingent of Italian mercenaries in a scene straight from history. The account given in By the Ionian Sea is, however, far more detailed than that which appears in Gissing’s diary for the period. In particular, the Hannibal “scene” seems not to have been documented in the diary at all. Was this a later embellishment? A dream from another time? Was it a total fabrication for greater effect or a sudden blinding recollection of the hallucinations – which had been brought on by a double dose of quinine according to Gissing’s diary?30 If not entirely reliable, the chapter of By the Ionian Sea which is built around these hallucinations is a compelling alternative to a dry account of a visit to view some scant ruins.

Gissing’s book, in the end, is not really about Calabrians or indeed Calabria - Gissing was a classicist and his journey was about uncovering traces of a silent world long past. There have been many periods of classical revival in England including during Gissing’s time in the late nineteenth century. A deeply conservative man, at odds with his own times, Gissing was totally enraptured by the remote past of the classical world and the art and literature of Greece and Rome. This was probably a product of his education - the classics had long been taught in public schools in England and were considered prerequisites to a full education. With the expansion of the education system and the proliferation in public schools in the nineteenth

27 Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang, ‘The trouble with tourism and travel theory?’ Tourist Studies, vol. 1 no. 1, 2001, p. 16. 28 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourisms, Museums, and Heritage, University of California Press, Berkely CA, 1998, p. 169, cited in Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang, ‘The trouble with tourism and travel theory?’ Tourist Studies, vol. 1 no. 1, 2001, p. 16. 29 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, pp. 82-84. 30 George Gissing, London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England: The Diary of George Gissing, Novelist, edited by Pierre Coustillas, Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg, PA, 1978, pp. 463–4.

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203 century, anyone without a prestigious public-school degree, was socially handicapped. The curriculum of public schools like Eton, Harrow, and Westminster was steeped in the classics, and the teaching of ancient Greek and Latin. Martin J Wiener has described this period as ‘the containment of capitalism within a patrician hegemony’ – that is that ‘the end result of the nineteenth-century transformation of Britain was…one that entrenched premodern elements within the new society and gave legitimacy to antimodern sentiments.’31 Bourgeois culture was “gentrified”, preserving as part of its modus operandi aristocratic values and styles of life. H G Wells was not enamoured of this educational system claiming that Gissing was distorted by ‘the insanity of our educational organization [that] had planted down in that Yorkshire town a grammar school dominated by the idea of classical scholarship. The head was an enthusiastic pedant who poured into that fresh and vigorous young brain nothing but 32 classics and a "scorn" for non-classical things.”

Wells had obviously had this conversation with Gissing and knew the traveller’s attitude to the classical past as opposed to the modern world very well. The following extract from Wells’ autobiography reveals not only Gissing’s contempt of the present but also his elitist attitude towards those who would never be in a position to study the classics:

At the back of my mind I thought him horribly miseducated and he hardly troubled to hide from me his opinion that I was absolutely illiterate … He thought that a classical scholar need only turn over a few books to master all that scientific work and modern philosophy had made of the world, and it did not disillusion him in the least that he had no mastery of himself or any living fact in existence. He was entirely enclosed in a defensive phraseology and a conscious “scorn” of the 33 “baser” orders and “ignoble” types.

Certainly, for Gissing, he regarded his attachment to the classics as an antidote to what he characterised as an arid, destructive modern age. It was also formed part of his own “self story” of a natural aristocrat “unclassed” by his exile into a base and uneducated world. Gissing biographer John Halperin suggests that, given Gissing’s background of ‘an impoverished conservative intellectual who twice married culturally deprived women’, it is not surprising to discover that Gissing considered himself “a natural aristocrat – in a spiritual, intellectual sense, of course – and that the circumstances of his life forced him always to live

31 Martin J Wiener, ‘The failure of the bourgeoisie,’ in Class, edited by Patrick Joyce, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995, p. 299. 32 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, p. 570. Wells is referring to Back Lane School in Wakefield, where Gissing was born and raised. 33 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, 1984, p. 571.

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204 outside and below his natural class, in ‘exile’”.34 Halperin goes on to say that:

Gissing’s distrust of science and of the masses grew out of his love of the classics, from which ‘came his notion of the one only salvation through the aristocratic idea, the essential idea of Greek literature.’ Nor can we ignore the role played by the novelist’s hatred of the contemporary, or his chronic 35 pessimism.

By the Ionian Sea is replete with classical references, stories and Gissing’s declaration of love for the world of the classics as the following passage illustrates:

I shall look upon the Ionian Sea, not merely from a train or a steamboat as before, but at long leisure: I shall see the shores where once were Tarentum and Sybaris, Croton and Locri. Every man has his intellectual desire; mine is to escape life as I know it and dream myself into that old world which was the imaginative delight of my boyhood. The names of Greece and Italy draw me as no others; they make me young again, and restore the keen impressions of that time when every new page of Greek or Latin was a new perception of things beautiful. The world of the Greeks and Romans is my land of romance; a quotation in either language thrills me strangely, and there are passages of Greek and Latin verse which I cannot read without a dimming of the eyes, which I cannot repeat aloud because my voice 36 fails me.

This emotional reaction to classical works and representations is one that Gissing referred to again and again in his letters and diaries. It reveals him as a dreamer and a man out of step with his modern world of a bustling overpopulated London. Gissing biographer Jacob Korg, refers to the writer’s preparation for his trip to Italy which included reading Goethe's Ita1ienische Reise. Korg informs us that ‘In Goethe's longing for Italy, so intense that he found reference to Roman culture unbearable, Gissing detected feelings exactly like his 37 own.’

Classicism also enjoyed several periods of resurgence amongst artists and in the late Victorian period the development of artistic interest in classical themes was probably a reaction to the new urbanism but was also informed by events such as Schlieman’s excavation of the site of Troy in the 1870s. It was, in fact, a highly romantic movement that followed from increased travel to the Europe of ancient ruins and exotic cultures which also fuelled

34 Halperin, Gissing: A Life in Books, p. 5. 35 Halperin, Gissing: A Life in Books, p. 62. 36 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 20. 37 Jacob Korg, George Gissing A Critical Biography, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1963, p. 122.

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205 Orientalism. Art historian Julian Treuherz points out that Lawrence Alma Tadema, one of the foremost artists of the period, ‘became obsessed with classical antiquity after visiting Rome, 38 Naples and Pompeii on his honeymoon in 1863.’

Artists like Tadema and Frederick Leighton employed large numbers of models to satisfy their requirements for exotic faces to people their canvases. Many of these models were Italians, both male and female, who were preferred by the artists for their classical looks and because economic need ensured that they took the job seriously. One of these models was Gaetano Meo, who was used by a number of artists including Rossetti, Ford Maddox Brown and Burne-Jones as well as Leighton. Meo, according to William Gaunt, was ‘presumed from his Greek features, to be descended from ancient Greek colonists in Southern Italy, who had travelled across Europe from Calabria with his brother’39, becoming, in effect, an embodiment of the romantic myth of Calabria which influenced classicists like George Gissing in their choice of travel destination. Meo himself must have been somewhat of a pragmatist, deciding that England offered more opportunity for financial reward, remaining in London where he became an artist himself.

South to Calabria Gissing’s departure point for Calabria was Naples where he detected a change from his first visit ten years before. He makes note of all the street theatre but, strangely for such a private man who claims to avoid the throngs in his own city and detests noise, he seems nostalgic for a more vivid time. ‘It would not be surprising,’ he writes, ‘if the modernization of the city, together with the state of things throughout Italy, had a subduing effect upon Neapolitan manners.’40 Perhaps Gissing is channelling his own reaction to the world of modernization which has certainly had a subduing effect on him. But perhaps it is his memory that is unreliable – a first visit to a city so different from London would have had a great initial impact, one that could not be repeated on subsequent visits. In his diary entry for his first trip to Italy in 1888, Gissing notes that ‘there are no street organs in Rome and, bye the bye there were none in Paris. In Naples the monotony of the tunes was astonishing, but I preferred that 41 to none.’

38 Julian Treuherz, Victorian Painting, Thames and Hudson, London, 1993, p. 170. 39 William Gaunt, Victorian Olympus, Jonathan Cape, London, 1975, p. 109. 40 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 20. 41 Gissing, London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England, pp. 463–464.

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206 This is faint praise indeed and particularly so since Gissing makes a great fuss about the disappearance of street organs in Naples in By the Ionian Sea. Nonetheless, Gissing’s Naples of 1897 is still a place teeming with street theatre which would have been familiar to German critic Walter Benjamin, author of a seminal 1920s essay on the city. Benjamin wrote of 'porosity' - a loss of a clear distinction between the public and the private where privacy is permeated by public-ness as the stage of a passionately cast social play of roles and constant improvisation.

Straight away, in Naples, Gissing introduces the reader to Italian prejudices against Calabria. There is a hierarchy even within the South. His Neapolitan hosts, people ‘of the better class,’ are astonished at [Gissing’s] eccentricity and hardiness in undertaking a solitary journey through the wild South. ‘Their geographical notions are vague; they have barely heard of Cosenza or Cotrone, and of Paola not at all; it would as soon occur to them to set out 42 for Morocco as for Calabria.’

There seems little doubt that, in undertaking his solitary journey to a still isolated south - even some forty years after unification – Gissing also sees himself as imbued with the “eccentric” and “hardy” spirit of the English. However, Gissing’s circumstances do not allow him to travel in the same style as those he considers worthier of note. Again, his poverty and position place him in a lower social stratum than he believes himself to be by virtue of intelligence and culture. In an earlier trip to Rome, he notes his exclusion from the ranks of those English in Italy who are not mere “tourists”, making the distinction clear:

In one respect, an Englishman like myself is badly off in Italy. Everywhere I meet swarms of Germans…but never one of my own countrymen…The fact is, the English who stay here for a longer time are rich, and of course live in good quarters; the poorer English here are mere tourists. Yet there must be a few 43 decent fellows abiding in Rome, if only one could find them.

Except for the description of how his hosts in Naples feel about a journey to Calabria and despite his obvious awareness of the issues, Gissing avoids the North/South debate altogether in his book. He chooses, instead, to situate his discourse along the line between Calabria and another “north” altogether – that of his home in England. For him, Calabria resonates with a glorious attic past whilst England signifies a drab and depressing present. Of the common people in both places, he resorts to cliché and sentimentality.

42 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, pp. 17-18. 43 Gissing, London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England, p. 85.

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207

On the steamer to Paola – his first stop in Calabria – Gissing describes a silent space, heavy with the signification of the ancient world. ‘The silence of the magic sea,’ he tells us, ‘the stillness of a dead world which laid its spell on all who lived. To-day seemed an unreality, an idle impertinence; the real was that long-buried past which gave all its meaning to all about me, touching the night with infinite pathos. Best of all, one’s own being became lost to consciousness; the mind knew only the phantasmal forms it shaped, and was at peace in vision.’44 This last comment foreshadows the hallucinations he experiences as a consequence of his fever in Crotone. For Gissing silence is a trope for classical past opposed to noisy present – and it is clear that Gissing, like Lear before him, hated noise. His arrival is a rude return to the present - Gissing is confronted by the clamour of a large group of locals struggling for his custom. For the people of Paola are more concerned with their current survival than with ancient history.

Gissing does not have much patience with the world he comes from and he seems to be not as hard on Calabrese peasants as on his own countrymen, but in the final analysis he is not one to display much sympathy for the poorer classes. Gissing is perhaps the most complex of British travellers to Calabria and his account the most perplexing. Time and again he adopts the position of the superior English commentator, only to back down into some criticism of his own culture. For example, at one stage he writes ‘in the end such talk would eventually tell severely on civilized nerves’45, yet later he abhors what he calls ‘the [English] pretentious modernism, civilization.’46 He castigates the Calabrians for their obsession with money, asserting that ‘money is the one subject of [Southern Italian] men’s thoughts, intellectual life does not exist’47, only to suggest at another time that ‘these people have an innate respect for things of the mind, which is totally lacking in Englishmen.’48 He makes pronouncements on some of the poorer people he meets using the harshest terms, for example, ‘In England their mere appearance would revolt decent folk’49 yet claims that ‘among the simple on Italian soil a wandering stranger has no right to nurse national 50 superiorities, to indulge a contemptuous impatience. It is the touch of tourist vulgarity.’

44 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 22. 45 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 27. 46 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 151. 47 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 66. 48 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, pp. 118-119. 49 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 87. 50 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 94.

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208 Gissing never goes so far, however, in his desire to avoid “tourist vulgarity”, as to eschew the word “picturesque”, which appears again and again in the book. It seems that “picturesque” had well and truly become part of the British lexicon and survived as a descriptor of landscape, exotic people and cultural practice and artifacts for well over a century. It is interesting to note the prevalence of the representation of a picturesque south with a poor but happy or noble peasantry contrasted with a corrupted bourgeois north within Italy itself. In his book, The View from Vesuvius, Nelson Moe traces these kinds of tropes through an examination of northern Italians writing about the South.51 He makes reference to Igino Ugo Tarchetti, the northern Italian editor of the Emporio pittoresco which was the major Milanese illustrated magazine of the mid to late nineteenth century. Moe informs us that in the late 1860s Tarchetti published three stories set in Calabria, a region with which he was apparently fascinated. Predictably, he represents a picturesque romantic Calabria, full of ‘drama, wildness, excitement, enchantment, magic, irregularity.’52 Although he also refers to the grinding poverty of the region, he presents this in terms very similar to those adopted by the English traveller, Gissing, some three decades later. At one point Tarchetti writes:

To think how people view life in those villages, how happy beneath their rags, how wisely they endure their misery – it’s enough to make us blush, we who belong to the northern race, a sick race, a serious and melancholy people who 53 live with perpetual disgust and rancour.

It is particularly interesting to compare Tarchetti’s sentiments above with Gissing’s pronouncements on the same subject, because in both instances the seemingly positive view of the Calabrian peasants is really an occasion in which to critique one’s own culture. For Gissing, there is a confusion evident in the way in which his negative “gut reactions” to the peasants and their lives is revised time and again in order to make a point about what he feels is lacking in his own world. A world he characterises elsewhere as ‘the striking juxtaposition 54 of barbarism and civilization in our strange time.’

There is a similar confusion evident in Gissing’s other works, which is reflected in his own life. He sometimes wrote with compassion about the poor but always invested virtue in the upper classes. In five of his novels set in the slums, Gissing observes the poor

51 Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question, University of California Press, Berkeley CA, 2002. 52 Moe, The View from Vesuvius, p. 197. 53 Moe, The View from Vesuvius, p. 197. 54 Allan Massie, ‘In George Gissing’s strange time,’ review of Pierre Coustillas, The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part I 1857–1888 and Part II 1888–1897,’ Pickering and Chatto, London, 2011-12, Times Literary Supplement, July 16, 2012, , accessed 15 March 2013.

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209 unsentimentally, coldly, and without the reformer’s zeal of an “English Zola” which has been a common characterisation of his work. His novels could be interpreted as being concerned with modern themes and yet he detested the modern age and longed for some idealised classical antiquity. It is not unusual during the any period to be questioning the givens of earlier ages. The late Victorian period was characterised by great cultural change - rapid industrialisation, extensive poverty, growing tensions, struggles and clashes over class, the newly mandated educational system, the place of women in society and feminist rights, 55 anxiety about moral conviction, and a sense of a world in upheaval.

Within this context, Gissing’s contradictory sentiments are entirely logical. However, these sentiments are above all about England, and, even where Gissing seems to be commenting on the locals, his comments are not really about the Calabrian people. Gissing is a reactionary - he considers himself a man not in harmony with his times and misunderstood by his own people. In his preface to the Gissing diaries, Pierre Coustillas makes the point that Gissing ‘regarded his journal as an object which would testify in his favour, and against his time of which he was by his own estimation a victim.’56 He is described by George Orwell as ‘not much interested in what we should now call social justice. He did not admire the working class as such, and he did not believe in democracy. He wanted not to speak for 57 the multitude, but for the exceptional man, the sensitive man, isolated among barbarians.’

One of his companions in Italy immediately before and after the trip to Calabria, Brian Ború Dunne, recounts Gissing’s constant harping on cultural differences and his assertions on the superiority of the English. The editors of Dunne’s memoirs dismiss this as Gissing “playing” to “his young and naïve American friend.” They make the extraordinary claim that ‘Gissing saw the weaknesses of all nations, and England was no exception.’58 No doubt there was some element of irony in Gissing’s racial comments, nonetheless they are too frequent to be dismissed as mere play. As for the idea of Gissing’s understanding of the flaws of all nations, including those of England, there is too much contrariness in Gissing’s attitudes even

55 Virginia Zimmerman, ‘Victorian studies,’ A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, edited by Michael Payne and Jessica Rae Barbera, Blackwell, Oxford, 2010, p. 712. 56 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 13. 57 George Orwell, ‘George Gissing,’ 1948, , accessed 1 April 2010. This review-essay was written in 1948 for a magazine but did not appear in Orwell's lifetime. It was published in London Magazine on June 1960. ‘Not Enough Money: A Sketch of George Gissing’, Orwell's first essay on Gissing, appeared in Tribune, 2 April 1943. 58 Brian Ború Dunne, With Gissing in Italy: The Memoirs of Brian Ború Dunne, Ohio University Press, Athens OH, 1999, p. 81.

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210 within Dunne’s reportage of this short span of the writer’s life to indicate that Gissing had any particular understanding at all.

Many of his biographers and other critics have commented on the contradictions in Gissing’s life and work. David Grylls has argued that Gissing’s ‘tendency to emotional and intellectual division…is the hallmark of his individual works, making them either confused or complex.’59 This, and the tendency to make himself the – barely veiled – protagonist of all his works makes him the least reliable of travel commentators. And although Gissing is keen to distance himself from the “vulgar tourist”, he does not come any closer to the people of Calabria than had the British travellers who went before him.

Construction of a travel book By the Ionian Sea reads more like a novel than the published journals of those of his compatriots who preceded him, seeming to owe much more to artifice than memory and there’s no mistaking Gissing’s romanticisation of himself as the main character. It is poetically written and details a coherent journey in a narrative style, even opening like a novel:

This is the third day of the sirocco, heavy-clouded, sunless. All the colour has gone out of Naples; the streets are dusty and stifling. I long for the mountains 60 and the sea.

The book has been described as being in the tone of belles-lettres, ‘for although,’ Gissing biographer Mabel Collins Donnelly explains, ‘Gissing travels from place to place, and lists itinerary and names of persons in the usual manner of travel books, he is less interested in catalogues than in nostalgic impressions.’61 At times it seems he is less interested in anything other than classical references.

Written from diary entries after the event, there are indications in the account of Brian Ború Dunne, who was with Gissing in Rome after the Calabrian trip, that Gissing editorialised his memories. According to Dunne in his book With Gissing in Italy: The Memoirs of Brian Ború Dunne, Gissing referred to Dr. Sculco - the doctor who treated him

59 David Grylls, The Paradox of Gissing, Allen & Unwin, London, 1986, p. xiii. 60 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 17. 61 Mabel Collins Donnelly, George Gissing: Grave Comedian, Harvard University Press, Cambridge CT, 1954, p. 209.

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211 while he was in the grip of his hallucinatory fever - as “that idiot” and “that numbskull”.62 In both By the Ionian Sea and his diary, however, Gissing writes fondly of the “good” doctor.

There is an inescapable feeling when reading Gissing’s diary and comparing his travelling notes to By the Ionian Sea that a great deal of what he writes is gloss. He glides over the surface of things and seems mostly concerned with what is in his head. His allusive style can be confusing to someone without a background in the classics and the places he visits are often described in a manner that obscures rather than illuminates them. Gissing mostly elaborates on topics which engage him like the story of Cassiodorus of whom we learn more than of the people and history of Calabria. The reader is allowed glimpses of Gissing’s personal preoccupations with food, climate, health and ancient history but gains little insight into anything remotely real.

But even these glimpses are unsatisfying, particularly compared to the diary entries of the time. The diaries include details of the small purchases he made, the souvenirs and presents which he sent off by post – in Taranto for example where he wrote:

First went to the pottery shop, where I had yesterday bought 3 little pots for 4½; found them well packed in a hamper, for which I paid 3d. Sent it off by pacco 63 postale.

In the same diary entry, for Monday, November 22 – his birthday – Gissing mentions the English Consul, Wilfred Thesiger, of whose existence he was ignorant. It does seem so extraordinary to find such a personage in such a place that it is strange that Gissing does not mention it in his book. The Consul who is ‘very pleased to meet an Englishman as none come here’64, invites Gissing to dine with him and even lends the author a book. What the diary entries demonstrate is that, in many cases Gissing left out the kind of “snapshot”, anecdote or story that a modern travel writer would include to set the scene. They also reveal that, as in the descriptions of his hallucinations, in some cases the book is much more detailed and this is can only be due to memory or poetic license or both.

As for his own opinions regarding northern and southern Italians, despite all his patronisingly sentimental references to the southern peasants, there is a telling story in his

62 John Keahey, A Sweet and Glorious Land: Revisiting the Ionian Sea, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2000, pp. 145–146. 63 Gissing, London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England, p. 459. 64 Gissing, London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England, pp. 459–460.

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212 diary that does not make it into By the Ionian Sea. Gissing meets a northern commercial traveller during the trip who, he writes, “tells me a good saying: “there are the Italians of the North and the Itals. of the South – the Nordici and the Sudici.” [pun on ‘Southerners’ and ‘dirty people’]”65 Why does Gissing describe this as a “good” story – does he think it is witty or truthful or both? What is surprising is that when he does have a telling anecdote he does not include it in the travel book. In a diary entry made while in Cosenza he notes that a shop in the main street has a display case full of pistols. ‘Attached to this case, hanging from it, is a placard: Variato assortimento in corone mortuarie. [Varied assortment of funeral wreaths].’66 This is the kind of detail that a modern travel writer would almost certainly include in his/her account to provide “local colour”. It could be that Gissing did not want to reinforce the negative stereotype of southern Italians, but I suspect that he did not want to deviate too far from his central preoccupation with the classical world. Particularly as he saves the display case for an article published in the New York Times. In this article, he prefaces the anecdote with the comment, ‘I am inclined to think the people have a vein of 67 humour.’

Another passage in the diary describes the Albergo Centrale in Catanzaro as ‘not very comfortable, cold and sunless, eating very poor.’68 Also in Catanzaro, Gissing describes the notice on the door of his room which reads:

Proprietor has found, with sommo rammàrico (with extreme regret), that some of his clients go elsewhere to eat, and not to the restaurant below. This tocca il morale (hurts his personal feelings) ../ as well as damages the prestigio della ditta (prestige of the establishment). He will do his best to keep up the quality of food, etc, si onora pregare i suoi rispettabili clienti perchè vogliano benignarsi il ristorante etc (begs his honourable clients that they would bestow their kind favours on the restaurant of the house). Name of Proprietor, Coroliano 69 Paparazzo.

Perhaps Gissing’s most lasting monument to Calabria is his immortalisation of Coriolano Paparazzi, the man who ran a hotel Gissing stayed at in Catanzaro. At the time when he was scripting a film which became La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini was reading an Italian translation of By the Ionian Sea. The name Paparazzo took Fellini’s fancy and he

65 Gissing, London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England, p. 458. 66 Gissing, London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England, p. 457. 67 George Gissing, ‘Alaric’s Grave: George Gissing’s quest of the spot where the river was turned aside to provide a Burial Place, from the London Daily Chronicle,’ New York Times, June 18, 1898. 68 London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England, p. 467. 69 London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England, p. 467.

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213 borrowed it for the name of his photographer in the film. Paparazzi entered the English language through the Italian in this way to signify the kind of intrusive photographers who will go to any lengths to intrude on the lives of famous people to get a “candid” or “scandalous” shot. Gissing, who at one time was greatly offended by a magazine article, “Mr. George Gissing at home” would probably have appreciated the irony.

Not only does Gissing omit some of the more amusing stories from his diary in By the Ionian Sea, he also elaborates on his diary entries when it enhances his writing to do so. As noted above, the account of his hallucinations under the influence of the fever given in By the Ionian Sea is more detailed than that which appears in Gissing’s diary for the period.

According to some sources, there is another more compelling reason why the published work, By the Ionian Sea, is significantly different to the diary entries that Gissing made during his trip. This is reputedly the state of mind of the author at the two different times these accounts were written. It is probably true that for Gissing, his journey was in the nature of what Malcolm Crick characterises as ‘a sacred quest, somewhat like a pilgrimage, for making meaning of our modern, secularised world.’70 Gissing makes much of his weariness of the modern world and if his journey through Calabria is somewhat of a “sacred quest”, it is also escapism.

In their overview of travel theory, Franklin and Crang refer to the phenomenon of the ‘solitary male wanderer - freed from domestic responsibilities…in flight from a feminized realm’71 - this was literally true of Gissing. When he left for Italy in 1897 Gissing was not just taking a trip, he was forsaking his second marriage and his two young sons. Most Gissing biographers have characterised his relationships with his two wives as disastrous affairs that prevented him from leading the kind of life he deserved. Mostly, we have Gissing’s versions of his relationships with these women, as he kept them away from “polite society”.

If Gissing was indeed, as Halperin (among others) suggests, ‘a notorious poseur, a self- dramatizer, a man who revelled in personal disasters, only some of which were genuine’72, then we can assume that there may be some exaggeration in his accounts of his marriages.

70 Malcolm Crick, ‘Tourists, locals and anthropologists: quizzical reflections on “Otherness” in tourist encounters and in tourism research,’ Australian Cultural History, no. 10, 1991, p. 7. 71 Franklin and Crang, ‘The trouble with tourism and travel theory?’ p. 11. 72 Halperin, Gissing: A Life in Books, p. 7.

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214 Anthony West, son Gissing’s friend, the science fiction writer H G Wells and Rebecca West, is very harsh in his assessment of Gissing’s relationships with these women. He has described Gissing as ‘a man who could only deal with a woman who was at a disadvantage, and who was compelled, even then, to teach her, by the most brutal possible means, that he 73 was not to be counted upon for anything.’

H G Wells described Gissing just before the latter’s trip to Calabria as ‘no longer the glorious, indefatigable, impractical youth of the London flat, but a damaged and ailing man, full of ill-advised precautions against the imaginary illnesses that were his interpretations of a general malaise.’ 74 So the damaged, disheartened man, unable to cope with his domestic situation, at odds with the world around him and what he characterises as ‘our destroying age’75 travels to Calabria to escape from a difficult reality in search of a dead world.

Eighteen months later at the end of June 1899, Gissing began to write up his travels. At this stage, it appeared that his life was transformed - he had started a new life with Gabrielle Fleury in France. She was a younger Frenchwoman he had met when she had asked his permission to translate one of his novels. By the Ionian Sea was begun in the Paris apartment of Gabrielle’s mother and completed during an August holiday in the Alps. Writing to his friend Bertz from Normandy in May of 1899, Gissing declared “for first time in my life, I am at ease.”76 This feeling did not last, apparently as John Sloan posits - before long, the old restlessness overcame him once again:

In accounts of his life, the tendency has been to present this period as one of relative prosperity, in which Gissing at last found a congenial woman companion in Gabrielle Fleury. But the final impression one gets from his diary and 77 correspondence is a life of restless wanderings, homesickness and lonely exile.

One might reach another, less romantic conclusion for the difference between the published work and the diary entries. Could it be simply that Gissing, ever more conscious of the need to turn a profit, was attempting to forge the best possible finished product from his raw diary material? H. V. Morton describes the Gissing of this period as “already showing

73 Anthony West, H G Wells: Aspect of a Life, Hutchinson, London, 1984, p. 274. 74 Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie, The Time Traveller: The Life of H G Wells, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1973, p. 132. 75 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 26. 76 Arthur C Young (ed.), The Letters of George Gissing to Eduard Bertz: 1887 – 1903, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1961, p. 260. 77 John Sloan, George Gissing: The Cultural Challenge, Macmillan, London, 1989, p. 146.

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215 the signs of that commercial acumen which he deplored in others.”78 And, in fact, Gissing’s collected letters show that he was much more commercially-minded than the popular picture of him allows.

The writing and the life Gissing was not a popular writer during his lifetime - H G Wells, who became a good friend after a meeting at the Omar Khayyam Club in 1896, made more money writing in one year than Gissing had done in the previous twelve. In The Time Traveller: The Life of H G Wells, Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie note that ‘by 1896 Wells had earned over a thousand pounds: Gissing, with many more books published, had received less than three hundred.’79 However Gissing was prolific and he started his career at a time which saw a prodigious expansion in the number of novels published as noted by Peter Morton, ‘When Gissing's first novel Workers in the Dawn appeared in 1880, it competed for attention with 379 others published in Britain that year. Ten years later, nine hundred new novels were appearing each year; five 80 years later still, thirteen hundred.’

The same period saw the creation of a new commodity in the popular monthly, a formulaic publication which, during the 1880s and 1890s, revolutionised the reading habits of millions. One which led the field was the Strand Magazine which published Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories as well as work by Kipling and H G Wells whose First Men in the Moon was serialised by the journal. George Gissing was not as interested in taking full advantage of these new publishing opportunities as was his friend Wells whose work was represented in several titles, although Gissing did from time to time contribute stories to them. Peter Morton notes that:

In 1884, before he had any reputation at all, Gissing earned six guineas for a flimsy short story. That was double what a minor clerk could expect for a long and tedious week's work. Of a feeble lyric which he had published in a magazine in 1883, Gissing boasted: “the thing brought me a guinea. Time spent in composition - seven minutes.” From his charwoman he expected eight hours of 81 scrubbing for that guinea.

From the start Gissing took a typically pessimistic and rather self-defeating view of this

78 H V Morton, A Traveller in Southern Italy, Methuen, London, 1969, p. 383. 79 MacKenzie and MacKenzie, The Time Traveller, p. 132. 80 Peter Morton, ‘Review of The Collected Letters of George Gissing, Volume one (1863-1880); Volume two (1881-1885),’ edited by Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre Coustillas, Ohio University Press, Athens OH, 1990-1991, , accessed 29 March 2010. 81 Morton, ‘Review of The Collected Letters of George Gissing,’ no page numbers.

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216 new fecundity. Referring to the number of novels advertised at the time he wrote to his brother in 1885, ‘The publishers’ new lists terrify one. Such mountains of literature. Yet how little of it is of substantive value.’ The irony of Gissing’s distrust of popular literature is that with By the Ionian Sea he hit upon a winning formula for travel literature which is not too far removed from the works of modern travel writers like Jonathan Raban and Eric Newby.

In a recent work examining British national identity and travel during the Victorian period, Marjorie Morgan describes the shift from travel writing which sought to include as much factual information as possible to impressionistic travel journals, comparing it to a similar shift in painting. The advent of photography liberated the artist from producing “realistic” works, and in a similar way the travel writer no longer needed to provide a detailed list of facts and information as this was now provided by commercial travel guides such as those published by Murray and Baedeker. The new genre of travel journals successfully captured the imagination of the reading public, as noted earlier in this work. According to Marjorie Morgan ‘the popularity of books on travel was second only to novels in nineteenth- century Britain.’82 The Dictionary of Literary Biography volume on British travel writers during the Victorian period makes it clear that during that time travel and travel literature was extremely popular and that magazines like Bentley’s Miscellany also frequently published 83 travel essays.

As for his popularity as a novelist, until fairly recently Gissing was relatively unknown. Interest in Gissing has grown in more recent times, spurred on by the work of scholars such as Pierre Coustillas, Jacob Korg, and Gillian Tindall. From at least the early 1980s there have been several biographies as well as critical works, countless essays, and at least two websites dedicated to him and his work, one of which includes digitised versions of almost the entire oeuvre of novels and By the Ionian Sea. In an article reviewing Pierre Coustillas’s biography of Gissing for the Times Literary Supplement Allan Massie has stated that Coustillas who has devoted himself to the study of Gissing for over half a century has had a great impact on ‘the huge increase in academic interest in Gissing. Sadly, however, academic interest does not invariably translate into popular interest, and therefore into readership. Perhaps the publication of this thorough and very detailed biography – the third and final volume has just

82 Marjorie Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain, Palgrave, London, 2001, p. 22. 83 Barbara Brothers and Julia Gergits (eds), ‘British travel writers, 1837-1875,’ in Dictionary of literary biography volume 166, Bruccoli Clark Layman, Detroit Washington DC, 1996, p. xvii.

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217 appeared – will at last secure for its subject the wide readership his biographer is certain he 84 deserves.’

Many modern readers have, like Virginia Woolf, responded to him as a writer with whom ‘we establish a personal rather than an artistic relationship,’ describing his relationship to his characters:

At the same time the sympathy which identifies the author with his hero is a passion of great intensity; it makes the pages fly; it lends what has perhaps little merit artistically another and momentarily perhaps a keener edge. Biffen and Reardon had, we say to ourselves, bread and butter and sardines for supper; so had Gissing; Biffen’s overcoat had been pawned, and so had Gissing’s; Reardon could not write on Sunday; no more could Gissing … both Reardon and Gissing bought their copies of Gibbon at a second-hand bookstall, and lugged the volumes home one by one through the fog. So we go on capping these resemblances … We know Gissing thus as we do not know Hardy or George Eliot. Where the great novelist flows in and out of his characters and bathes them in an element which seems to 85 be common to us all, Gissing remains solitary, self-centred, apart.

There is something about Gissing that attracts the modern reader and perhaps it has something to do with this personal sense of isolation and the psychological territory Gissing covers. This is the territory of novels like The Unclassed, an ambiguous boundary where the shabby-genteel, floating free or on their way down the social ladder, melt into the ambitious working class on their way up. These novels are peopled with characters representing a new subclass whose existence was particular to the mega city of the late nineteenth century. Gissing himself defined the occupants of this amorphous realm, ‘the most important part of my work is that which deals with a class distinctive of our time and well educated, fairly bred, but without money.’86 Gissing does not mean destitution when he stipulates “without money”, rather, he means characters who lack the income to meet the requirements of their ingenuity. People like himself, in fact.

The highly distinctive flavour of Gissing’s novels arises from the complete disjunction between his own values - essentially those of a liberal, middle-class scholar-gentleman - and

84 Allan Massie, ‘In George Gissing’s strange time’, review of Pierre Coustillas, The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part I 1857–1888 and Part II 1888–1897, Pickering and Chatto, London, 2011-12, Times Literary Supplement, July 16, 2012,< http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1082644.ece>, viewed on 22 September 2012. 85 Virginia Woolf, ‘George Gissing,’ The Common Reader, Second Series, eBooks@Adelaide, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, 2014, no page numbers, , accessed 10 September 2011. 86 Massie, ‘In George Gissing’s strange time.’

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218 the embarrassing life-in-exile that he was forced to live. It could be that with the increasing polarisation of wealth in the modern western world and the creation of new sub-classes, Gissing touches on fears that are present in society today. On more than one occasion in By the Ionian Sea Gissing affirms his knowledge of poverty. In the town of Squillace he writes, ‘I had seen poverty enough, and squalid conditions of life, but the most ugly and repulsive 87 collection of houses I ever came upon was the town of Squillace.’

Throughout his life Gissing kept diaries, notebooks and wrote volumes of letters, giving an unusually comprehensive view of the personal life of a struggling writer at the end of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless it is reasonable to assume that his recorded memories were subject to some level of editorial shaping. More than one person who knew him commented on his “selective” memory when it came to presenting an acceptable image of himself. H G Wells, in particular and probably because he was of a similar temperament, made note of obfuscations and self-deceptions in Gissing’s stories of his life. ‘The transformation of the 88 truth was the name of the game where the self-image of Gissing was concerned.”

Affairs of the heart, in particular, were totally omitted or vaguely hinted at, even though the diaries do reveal, according to its editor, Gissing’s “chronic amorousness”, and his “strong sexual instinct.”89 Given the circumstance that prevented him from fulfilling his early promise, it is not surprising that Gissing was inclined to be creative with the truth of his personal life.

A scholarship boy at Owen College, in 1876 at the age of eighteen he ruined his own chances of an academic career by stealing to support an alcoholic prostitute with whom he had become infatuated. It was not unusual for students living away from home, at college or university, to frequent musical halls, the races or to visit brothels. It would have been tacitly acceptable for young men to “sow their wild oats” during this period of their lives and as Mike J Huggins notes ‘such behaviour in youth did not debar young men from entering the professions.’90 But Gissing put his own future at jeopardy by first stealing for his Nell and then marrying her. These two events and a subsequent disastrous second marriage were to taint Gissing’s life and flavour his writing, so much so that biographer John Halperin has

87 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 129. 88 Mackenzie and Mackenzie, The Time Traveller, p. 362. 89 Gissing, London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England, p. 10. 90 Mike J Huggins, ‘More sinful pleasures? Leisure, respectability and the male middle classes in Victorian England,’ Journal of Social History, vol. 33, issue 3, 2000, p. 590.

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219 stated:

My interest in George Robert Gissing … lies primarily in the connections between the man’s life and his art, and in the fascinating ways in which the highly charged impulses travelled between the two – in both directions. More than any other body of work with which I am familiar, Gissing’s demands of the 91 reader an awareness of biographical matters for fullest understanding.

Although he was an intensely private man, who was adept at covering his tracks (he is known to have destroyed his early diary, so that there are no entries for the period of his disgrace) the documented facts reveal the “guilty secret” which dogged Gissing's life. Only five letters dated between the middle of 1874 and 1878 remain and these do not mention the wrecking of his academic prospects, his month in gaol, and his exile of eight months in America. However, Peter Morton has referred to four existing letters from Gissing’s friend Jeremy Black found in Gissing’s pocket when he was caught and which remain in the archives of Manchester University. These letters reveal something of the nature of the sexual conduct of young men of the period. Morton notes that from these letters we know that Black had also had sexual relations with Nell Harrison. He goes on to state:

It is not clear whether she was a professional prostitute or the kind of amateur that the Victorians called “dollymops” or simply a teenager who enjoyed having sex with young men she liked. What is clear is that Gissing was in love with her. We know nothing else of his mental and emotional state; but on a sensitive, proud, socially insecure youth the shock of being caught picking the pockets of his fellows - of committing what Tindall perceptively called an unallowable 92 because a working-class crime - the effects could only have been devastating.

This catastrophic event induced in Gissing the conviction that he was a social pariah, and “the guilty secret” may be found as a motif in many of his novels. Gissing returned to London from America in 1878, making a precarious living as a tutor, while he struggled with his first sprawling novel, Workers in the Dawn, published at his own expense in 1880. This work brought Gissing some minor patronage but in the meantime his wife Nell took to drink and went back to prostitution to fund her habit. Gissing made several attempts to free himself of her, finally paying her to live apart from him. By this time, he was making four or five pounds a week, although together with the pound a week he paid Nell and his doctors’ bills his finances were very tight.

91 Halperin, Gissing: A Life in Books, p.vii. 92 Peter Morton, ‘Review: The Collected Letters of George Gissing.’

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220 One of the major results of the direct link between Gissing’s private life and his novels, is that most of them deal almost exclusively with the theme of exogamy in the form of marriage outside one’s class. ‘Under this single umbrella,’ Halperin asserts, ‘may be gathered those [Gissing’s] three obsessive concerns with money, sex, and class.’93 These novels, written at the end of the Victorian period and on the cusp of a new era probably seemed dated not long after they were written. In a 1948 essay unpublished in his lifetime, George Orwell describes the setting of Gissing’s novels as ‘the fog-bound, gas-lit London of the ‘eighties, a city of drunken puritans, where clothes, architecture and furniture had reached their rock- bottom of ugliness, and where it was almost normal for a working-class family of ten persons to inhabit a single room.’94 This was not very different from the world of poverty he found in Calabria where in Squillace he noted that:

Open doors everywhere allowed me a glimpse of the domestic arrangements, and I saw that my albergo had some reason to pride itself on superiority; life in a country called civilized cannot easily be more primitive than under these crazy 95 roofs.

By the Ionian Sea, although written in a style that bears similarities to a novel, is a travel narrative and in many ways, represents freedom from Gissing’s usual concerns as a writer and from a private life which was complex and unhappy. However, there are many traces in the book of Gissing’s regular themes. There are references to the two worlds he himself straddled – what Peter Morton describes as ‘an ambiguous boundary where the shabby-genteel, floating free or on their way down, melt into the ambitious working class on their way up.’96 Gissing lived in a world bordering on that of the poorest class of Londoners, but his values and intellect were those of the middle-class scholar. The following passage in By the Ionian Sea hints at regret about his exclusion:

It was unfortunate that I brought no letter of introduction to Cotrone; I should much have liked to visit one of the better houses. Well-to-do people live here, and I was told that, in fine weather, “at least half a dozen” private carriages might be seen making the fashionable drive on the Strada Regina Margherita. But it is not 97 easy to imagine luxury or refinement in these dreary, close-packed streets.

93 Halperin, Gissing: A Life in Books, p. 4. 94 Orwell, ‘George Gissing,’ 1948. 95 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, pp. 129-30. 96 Morton, ‘Review: The Collected Letters of George Gissing.’ 97 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, pp. 73-74.

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221 Sharon Ouditt, who has written extensively on nineteenth-century travellers in Southern Italy, characterises Gissing’s vision as ‘self-consciously romantic and nostalgic.’ She suggests that his fantasies of the classical world help him escape his difficult life. In Calabria, he faces a series of challenges– slovenly accommodation, ugly sights and bad smells, very little evidence of the classical world bar that that exists in his mind – but overall he seems most comfortable in his ruminations as he walks the ground that ancients like Cassiodorus travelled 98 before him.

The Gaze Of women, demonstrating his usual contrary stance, Gissing was both driven to promote a positive concept of female emancipation and to demonstrate an allegiance to the traditional woman. He decried the lack of education for women but also questioned their ability to learn.99 In Calabria he is able to view and comment on women in their most basic traditional roles:

The river Esaro is all but useless for any purpose, and as no other stream flows in the neighbourhood, Cotrone's washerwomen take their work down to the beach; even during the gale I saw them washing there in pools which they had made to hold the sea water; now and then one of them ventured into the surf, wading with 100 legs of limitless nudity and plunging linen as the waves broke about her.

This passage demonstrates an intersection of the exotic and the erotic. To wash clothes is indeed a traditional occupation for women of the lower classes, to wash them in the sea would be something quite foreign to the majority of English people, especially while displaying ‘legs of limitless nudity’. His gaze is both objectifying and stereotypical of the women he encounters even when he writes in positive terms of their demeanour and physical bearing, as he does of a woman he observes selling ornamented fabrics in:

I shall always remember that tall, hard-visaged woman, as she passed with firm step and nobly balanced figure about the streets of Catanzaro. To pity her would have been an insult. The glimpse I caught of her laborious life revealed to me something worthy of admiration; never had I seen a harassing form of 101 discouragement so silently and strongly borne.

98 Sharon Ouditt, ‘“Elemental and permanent things”’: George Gissing and Norman Douglas in Southern Italy, Studies in Travel Writing, vol. 10, no. 2, 2006, p. 128. 99 Alice Markow, ‘George Gissing: Advocate or provocateur of the women's movement?’ English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, vol. 25, no. 2, 1982, pp. 58-73. 100 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 73. 101 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 111. Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

222 Gissing, like other travellers before him, adopted would could be described as the standard colonial male gaze which describes the people he encounters in a way which emphasises their difference. Peasants are reduced to ethnic types, documented in terms of the different communities including the “Greci”, ‘whose appearance was so striking’, Gissing tells us, ‘that I sought information about them’102. In Catanzaro, he reinforces his position as a privileged observer, noting that he ‘could not have had a better opportunity than was afforded me on this day of observing the peasantry of the Catanzaro district.’103 The costumes and ornaments of these people are a focal point of interest and they are portrayed as bearers of specific cultural traits:

… the country women, of course, adorned themselves, and their garb was that which had so much interested me when I first saw it in the public garden at Cosenza. Brilliant blue and scarlet were the prevailing tones; a good deal of fine embroidery caught the eye. In a few instances I noticed men wearing the true Calabrian hat -peaked, brigandesque - which is rapidly falling out of use. These people were, in general, good-looking; frequently I observed a very handsome 104 face, and occasionally a countenance, male or female, of really heroic beauty.

The “true Calabrian hat” is one that most travellers previous to this period commented on – usually in terms of its absence. It seems that this hat was metonymic of the brigand and a visual “trophy” for the British traveller in the South. By the time Gissing travelled through Calabria, the phenomenon of brigandage, as Italy had known it following national unification, was finished. However, as written about by Norman Douglas and discussed in the following chapter, perhaps the last of the “true” brigands, the infamous Calabrian Giuseppe Musolino, was tried at beginning of the twentieth century.

Like Lear before him Gissing also makes much of physical appearance as the passage above and those following attest:

After living amid a malaria-stricken population, I rejoiced in the healthy aspect of the mountain folk. Even a deformed beggar, who dragged himself painfully along the pavement, had so ruddy a face that it was hard to feel compassion for him. And the wayside children - it was a pleasure to watch them at their games. Such children in Italy do not, as a rule, seem happy; too often they look ill, cheerless, burdened before their time; at Catanzaro they are as robust and lively as heart 105 could wish, and their voices ring delightfully upon the ear.

102 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 109. 103 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 109. 104 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 111. 105 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 114.

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223

The common type of face at Cotrone is coarse and bumpkinish; ruder, it seemed to me, than faces seen at any point of my journey hitherto. A photographer had hung out a lot of portraits, and it was a hideous exhibition; some of the visages attained 106 an incredible degree of vulgar ugliness.

At times Gissing is quite harsh, equating the people of the lowest echelon to beasts in a way that clearly demonstrates his own sense of superiority. He affects an interest in the story of a peasant woman because it may be “sordidly picturesque”, that is, perhaps adding more texture to his tale, especially in contrast to the “romantic landscape”:

When she went on to say that she was alone in the world, that all her kith and kin were freddi morti (stone dead), a pathos in her aspect and her words took hold upon me; it was much as if some heavy-laden beast of burden had suddenly found tongue, and protested in the rude beginnings of articulate utterance against its hard lot. If only one could have learnt, in intimate detail, the life of this domestic serf! How interesting, and how sordidly picturesque against the background of romantic landscape, of scenic history! I looked long into her sallow, wrinkled 107 face, trying to imagine the thoughts that ruled its expression.

It is not unusual in the narratives of travellers to Calabria to hint at darker depths, mysterious practices or potential dangers to heighten the sense of Gothic sublime and Gissing does not disappoint.

In Gissing’s footsteps In an interesting echo of Gissing’s, ‘In Magna Graecia the waters of two fountains mingle and flow together’108, latter day traveller, Lawrence Durrell wrote, ‘Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu the blue really begins.’109 Since Gissing’s time it has become more common to travel to the more remote corners of the Mediterranean. Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea, despite the insubstantial nature of the work, has become a point of reference for most of those who choose to travel to Calabria.

For the last century or so, literary travellers to Calabria have been following in the footsteps of people like Gissing. Travelling through the region in the winter of 1897, Gissing carried a copy of La Grande-Grèce in his baggage, consciously following in the track of French archaeologist François Lenormant who had made the trip a decade earlier. Gissing

106 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 73. 107 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 89. 108 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 21. 109 Lawrence Durrell, ‘Prospero’s Cell,’ Abroad: a book of travels, Gollancz, London, 1968, p. 152.

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224 saw the French scholar’s signature in a visitors’ book at Reggio and wrote in his diary, ‘It touched me profoundly.’110 This deep feeling became ‘a thrill of pleasure’111 in By the Ionian Sea. A few years after its publication, before the First World War, Norman Douglas pursued Gissing into and out of the hotels he had immortalised - if that is the right word for it – finding much improvement. The evergreen H V Morton, well-aware of his illustrious predecessors and others even earlier, joined the convoy in the 1960s, writing up his account as A Traveller in Southern Italy. In the summer of 1965, the Coustillases followed the Gissing trail returning in October 1998, followed by the work Revisiting the Shores of the Ionian Sea, which appeared as a supplement to the Gissing Journal.

John Keahey, a Salt Lake City journalist, read By the Ionian Sea in 1997, found it engaging and proclaimed, ‘I discovered I was reading one of the most enchanting travel narratives I had come across in years of seeking out such books.’112 Keahey knew little or nothing about its author but nonetheless realised that he was reading the book at an auspicious moment because the centenary of Gissing’s trip was approaching. He decided to retrace the course of Gissing’s journey through Magna Graecia, the area of Greek colonial settlements of antiquity. Like Gissing he started from Naples, passing through Paola, Cosenza, Taranto, Metaponto, Crotone, Catanzaro, Squillace and Reggio, attempting to experience what Gissing saw, and comparing his own impressions with those of the late- Victorian English writer. At his last stop, Reggio, Keahy observes:

Gissing talked about seeing a plaque on a sidewalk honouring a war hero, a common soldier … Gissing scholars, who delve into such minutiae, have found a street in Reggio named for the soldier – perhaps they got the name “Emilio Cuzzocrea” from Gissing’s diary – although it would appear that the 113 plaque Gissing saw no longer exists.

For those who followed Gissing, it seems, the destination is secondary to uncovering the trail left by him. In a recent travel book, Heel to Toe, Charles Lister describes the Concordia Hotel – where Gissing stayed during his illness in Crotone - as it is today. He relates an amusing anecdote about an encounter in Trebisacce where a local asks if Lister is a tourist. ‘Traveller’, the Englishman corrects him, ‘emphatically’. The local replies: “‘Ah, like Jissing, he beamed, ‘Jissing and Dooglas.’” Later the same man tells Lister that Gissing was

110 Gissing, London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England, p. 472. 111 Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, p. 155. 112 John Keahey, A Sweet and Glorious Land: Revisiting the Ionian Sea, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2000, p. 2. 113 Keahey, Sweet and Glorious Land: Revisiting the Ionian Sea, p. 185.

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225 a homosexual. “‘Had a friend in Paola…there are letters.’”114 The man may have confused Gissing with Norman Douglas who was homosexual, nonetheless it is interesting that in Calabria, too, myths evolve about erstwhile British travellers.

Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea is strongly imbued with the character of the writer and his preoccupations – a writer out of sympathy with his time, seeking the silent world of the classical past. In Calabria Gissing creates a virtual world of ancient drama and beauty, a world that frees him from the cumbersome vexations of the present world. In this work Gissing seeks to recall the beauty of an ancient age far different from the drab urban world reflected in his novels.

114 Lister, Charles. Heel to Toe: Encounters in the South of Italy. Secker & Warburg, London, 2002, pp. 143, 147.

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226 Chapter 8: Norman Douglas and the (re)Orientalisation of Calabria

In 1907, 130 years after Henry Swinburne, the first traveller to Calabria examined in this study, made his journey through the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Norman Douglas made the first of three journeys to Calabria. The result of the first two journeys is Old Calabria, perhaps the most renowned travel book on the region, which was published in 1915.1 Douglas was mostly Scots abut also one quarter German, born in Thuringen in the Vorarlberg in Austria, the place his grandfather had founded cotton mills. An article in the Douglas Archives describes him as ‘a child of the 19th century and a European … [because] he was almost entirely devoid of national feeling.’ The same article refers to his description of his branch of the Douglases as ‘old-fashioned, to the point of imbecility, and sometimes beyond’ and informs us that his family ‘had been lairds of Tilquhillie on Deeside for centuries; his maternal grandmother, a godchild of Queen Victoria, was the daughter of Lord Forbes, premier baron of Scotland.’2 Douglas himself was an iconoclast and a libertarian, abhorring any orthodoxy, especially Christianity.

Douglas was also a wanderer, living by far the greater part of his life in various places away from both the land of his birth and the land of his legal citizenship and his ancestry. In 1894 he began work in the diplomatic service and was based in St. Petersburg from then until 1896 when he was placed on leave following a sexual scandal. In 1897, he bought a villa in Posillipo, Naples. Following his divorce, he moved to Capri, spending time there at the Villa Daphne and in London from 1912 to 1914 he worked for The English Review. In late 1916, he jumped bail in London on a charge of indecent assault on a sixteen-year-old boy and effectively living in exile from that time on. He himself wrote of this incident, ‘Norman Douglas of Capri, and of Naples and Florence, was formerly of England, which he fled during the war to avoid persecution for kissing a boy and giving him some cakes and a shilling’.3 After more scandals Douglas left Italy for the south of France in 1937. When France collapsed in 1940 Douglas left the Riviera, making his way back circuitously to London and living there from 1942 to 1946. He returned to Capri in 1946, was made a citizen of the island, and remained there for the rest of his life.

1 Norman Douglas, Old Calabria, Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1962. 2 ‘Norman Douglas,’ The Douglas Archives, , accessed 25 November 2012. 3 ‘Norman Douglas,’ The English Literary Canon,< https://sites.google.com/site/theenglishliterarycanon/the- canon-portal/the-major-canon-by-period/the-modern-20th-c/norman-douglas>, accessed 25 November 2012.

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227 Douglas was educated at Uppingham School in England, subsequently attending the Karlsruhe Gymnasium in the Grand Duchy of Baden. Interestingly, in her work on British identities of travellers in the Victorian period, Marjorie Morgan refers to I A R Wyatt, an Englishman who lived in Germany in the opening years of the twentieth century and who ‘wrote at length about German schools, comparing them to public schools at home.’ Wyatt found that German schoolmasters, unlike the British teachers, ‘did not attempt to mould character by means of moral influence’ which turned out students with no individuality whereas, he argued, in Germany, although boys were ‘schooled to possess the same sense of discipline...their opinions, character and attitudes towards life were left free to develop along 4 independent lines.’

This chapter will examine Norman Douglas’s much lauded “individuality”, particularly as it translated into the writing of Old Calabria of which Jonathan Keates, in his introduction to the Phoenix Press 1994 edition, asserts ‘it is this Calabrian journey that rings truest to its writer’s quirky individualism.’5 British ideas of eccentricity and individuality, attributes accorded to travellers to Calabria (if only, in some cases by virtue of their “eccentric” choice of travel), served to promote an independent, liberal view of the Englishman as opposed to the undifferentiated mass of the Calabrian peasantry.

Old Calabria is more like a compendium of essays on aspects of Calabria than it is a conventional travel book. It is unique for its time in that it does not resemble modern personal travel narratives at all, for example in the way that George Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea does with its clear sense of movement through the country and its personal point of view which positions the author as a traveller. Douglas takes us back to a time when a display of knowledge was the chief requisite for a travel book as was the case for eighteenth-century writers including Swinburne.

In what Douglas’s biographer Mark Holloway calls an ‘omnium-gatherum of everything more or less relevant to the subject, displayed with characteristic pride and prodigality by the collector’6 Douglas brings us back to land and beast, costume, custom and genesis in a pastiche of Orientalism and paganism. Although there was never any significant view of Calabria from Swinburne’s time to that of Douglas other than that of a pre-European

4 Marjorie Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain, Palgrave, London, 2001, p. 171. 5 Jonathan Keates, ‘Introduction,’ Old Calabria, Phoenix Press, London, 1994, p. 9. 6 Mark Holloway, Norman Douglas: A Biography, Secker & Warburg, London, 1976, p. 217.

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228 land of savage, backward humanity, I contend that Douglas reinforces the Orientalist reading of the region in a way that other travellers of the nineteenth century, Lear, Lowe, Gissing and others did not for all their references to “orientals”.

Unlike the travel writing of the preceding century, which was primarily conducted in search of knowledge, during the nineteenth century travel writing became increasingly about the interaction of self with the outside world. The travel narratives of Lear, et al are strongly imbued with the characters of the writers and their preoccupations – a landscaper painter whose view is blinkered by his artist’s gaze; a transgressive woman traveller who travels without assistance or protection; a writer out of sympathy with his time, seeking the silent world of the classical past. With Douglas, the first of the writers in this work to travel and write about Calabria within the twentieth century, one might expect a more modern perspective. Instead, while Douglas is a strong character within the text of Old Calabria, he creates a confusion of viewpoints which includes a fussy, nineteenth century amateur pedantry. In a work that was already an anachronism when it was published, Douglas attempts to create a kind of master narrative of Calabria - there is nothing, it seems, of which he has no knowledge. He positions himself as a well-read dilettante, explaining a world “lost in time” to his readers “back home”. To make his account interesting, he stresses, as those travellers mentioned above only touch upon lightly by comparison, the exotic, oriental aspects of his subject. For a twentieth-century writer he has nonetheless retained a nineteenth-century sensibility, looking backwards to layered pasts. What is particularly interesting in Old Calabria is precisely that - Douglas reflects an age rapidly receding into the past at the same time that he is reflecting on even more distant (Calabrian) pasts.

This style must be effective because Old Calabria remains one of the most lauded books of travel to the region and Douglas himself, infamous in his lifetime, is still a subject of interest to scholars and readers today. Countless endorsements beg the question, what is it about Old Calabria that evokes such a reaction? This chapter will endeavour to unpack this question as well as examining Douglas’s position on his subject. In short, how did he “reveal” Calabria to his readers, and what is it about his book that has attracted such widespread approbation even up to the present time? What is it about Douglas and this work that attract such a following?

It is evident that Douglas himself is very confident in his approach to the topic and has a high sense of his own level of knowledge of the subject. In her biography of Elizabeth David,

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229 Lisa Chaney describes David introducing Norman to her husband Charles as recorded by Charles:

Norman was his inimitable self: gracious, his fine manners concealing a well- developed arrogance; witty, pragmatic, learned, following his gruff habit of ex cathedra utterances with: “It stands to reason”, a favourite justification, then 7 forestalling further argument with, “Take it or leave it.”

Douglas’s self-belief is echoed by a stream of critics, readers and commentators who have described Old Calabria as exceptional. It is almost invariably referred to as a classic – including by Italians - in books, commentaries, university courses, web pages, tourist sites, almost everywhere where there is discussion of Calabria and its history. I will limit myself to three representative examples – Douglas’ friend John Davenport makes the claim that the position of Old Calabria as ‘the best book in any language on the region is pretty generally agreed; it needs no critical brush.’8 Writer and poet, Richard Aldington, listing a number of books on the region, concludes with ‘and best of all, Norman Douglas’s Old Calabria.’9 Jonathan Keates asserts that ‘It has been left to our century to produce the classic portrait of 10 the region, its moods, crotchets, colours and airs, in Old Calabria.’

It is important, however, to note that admiration for Old Calabria has been by no means universal. Antonio Micocci compares the Scotsman’s book unfavourably to Carlo Levi’s Cristo Si è Fermato a Eboli claiming that ‘Unlike Norman Douglas’ Old Calabria this book is completely free of bookishness, quotations from ancient authors, bibliographical impedimenta, and footnotes. Like Douglas’, this is a book written by an outsider but without condescension.’11 In a more recent critique, blogger Pino Laricio observes:

Aside from the literary ability of the author, the book's subsequent success has depended more from the paucity of other accounts on Calabria in English than for any other intrinsic merit. Indeed, the book is much more interesting as an account of how Calabria has been represented by foreigners. There are a number of other accounts by English speakers on Calabria that are more nuanced and therefore more interesting. “Old Calabria” reveals more about the common prejudices held by educated English speakers on Calabria than the region itself. In this book Norman Douglas perpetuates a number of mythologies regarding the South of Italy

7 Lisa Chaney, Elizabeth David: A Biography, Pan, London, 1998, p. 108. 8 John Davenport, ‘Introduction,’ Old Calabria, Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1962, p. 7. 9 Richard Aldington, Pinorman: Personal Recollections of Douglas, Pino Orioli & Charles Prentice, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1954, p. 93. 10 Keates, ‘Introduction,’ Old Calabria, p. 9. 11 Antonio A Micocci, ‘Review: Cristo Si è Fermato a Eboli by Carlo Levi,’ Italica, vol. 23, no. 4, 1946, p. 373.

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230 that are still current today as exoticising motifs, both in the negative and the positive: the “wildness” and “impenetrability” of the Englishman's Calabria, its deployment as a borderland between the great constructs called “Orient” and the 12 “West” and so forth.

Calabria, difficult to access well into the twentieth century, was not the subject of a proliferation of representations like Naples or Sicily. Laricio’s argument is that Old Calabria came to be treated as an authority on those topics largely by virtue of being one of a few books about Calabria and Calabrian identity. There is no doubt that it has been taken on board by the Italians themselves – in their own country as a tourism promotion tool and by Italian descendants in English-speaking countries seeking to find out more about their cultural background – and has, by default it would appear, become an influential, respected work on the region.

Nietzschean Norman As for some of the earlier travellers, Italy represented for Douglas an escape from a socially repressive homeland. Douglas had made his first trip to Italy in 1888 and by 1897 he settled in Naples, where he purchased and refurbished a villa. He married his cousin Elizabeth FitzGibbon in 1898, and within two years found himself the father of two sons. In 1903, after he and Elizabeth divorced, Douglas relocated to nearby Capri, where he researched and wrote a series of pamphlets on various aspects of the island's geography and history. As his financial situation worsened, he also began selling travel articles to English periodicals.

Travel to the south had since the days of the Grand Tour presented the opportunity for sensual adventures of a kind that might be more problematic at home. So it proved for Douglas who began to live an openly decadent life by the time Old Calabria was published, the Mediterranean symbolising freedom from pious morality and all the restraints of English domestic life, as Littlewood indicates:

It was an article of faith for Douglas, intimately related to the fact of his exile, that the conventional pieties of English domestic life - pieties about sexual morality, family values, childhood innocence, etc. - were a denial of life, joy and colour. English values needed to be replaced by Mediterranean ones, and the sexual

12 Pino Laricio, Old Calabria Revisited, 2009,< http://www.amazon.com/Calabria-Marlboro-Travel-Norman- Douglas/product-reviews/0810160226/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1>, accessed 12 August 2011.

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231 freedom he could enjoy abroad was both a personal motive for his travels and a 13 weapon of offence against these values.

Douglas, as with Gissing, was ostensibly what Franklin and Crang describe as a ‘solitary male wanderer - freed from domestic responsibilities…in flight from a feminized realm.’14 Douglas, however, was in flight into a masculine world, together with a young boy – in his 1907 trip to Calabria it was 12-year-old Eric Wolton - for company and pleasure. Paul Fussell refers to a diary that Eric himself made of this trip.15 The main theme of South Wind and most of Norman Douglas's works is amorality. Allan Massie informs us that it was at this stage in his life, ‘after the breakdown of his marriage [that] his sexual orientation changed from women to boys. There were a lot of them. Some of his attachments were enduring. Whatever form the physical connection took, it is quite clear that Douglas also enjoyed their company and they his. There was Eric, the East End boy he took, with parental approval, to Calabria in 1911. There is a photograph of him, nude, in this book; also one of him grown-up and inscribed, ‘To N. D., the best pal I ever had. To our past and future.'’16 In his autobiographical work Looking Back,17 Douglas prefaces the book with a letter to Eric, which he signs -in what today would be a parody of this kind of relationship - “Uncle Norman”.

Contrasting Hellenic ideals with what he finds among the modern Calabrians, Douglas writes of ‘that queer disrespect of the body which is taught by the metaphysical ascetics of the East’ which he calls ‘Oriental fakirism.’18These Hellenic ideals form the basis of his philosophy and it is in the south that he is liberated to live as he chooses. He contrasts the “evil” tone of ascetic Christianity, which he spurns, to the ‘contrary tendency still apparently at work in the South: ‘the Ionic spirit, heritage of the past’19 and it is this spirit that results in ‘monkish ideals of chastity and pruriency’ having “never appealed to the hearts of people, priests, or prelates of the south...their notions have ever been akin to those of the sage Xenocrates, who held that “happiness consists not only in the possession of human virtues, but in the accomplishment of natural acts.” Among the later they include the acquisition of 20 wealth and the satisfaction of carnal needs.’

13 Littlewood, Sultry Climates, p. 132. 14 Franklin and Crang, ‘The trouble with tourism and travel theory? p. 11. 15 Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1982, p. 124. 16 Allan Massie, ‘A hedonist of the old school’, no page numbers. 17 Norman Douglas, Looking Back: An Autobiographical Excursion, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1933. 18 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 280. 19 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 265. 20 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 265.

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232 Capri, which Douglas had first visited in 1901, returning there many times and finally dying there in 1952, had become, during the Edwardian period, a kind of spiritual home for a number of European and British homosexuals. Littlewood informs us that:

Further west, Capri, which first acquired a homosexual following in the 1870s, had been serving as a post-Wilde refuge since the end of the nineteenth century and continued to do so between the wars and beyond. In its heyday, Capri was home to a colourful band of male and female homosexuals that included Douglas himself and the notorious Count Fersen, whose record of pederasty persuaded even the tolerant Capresi to exile him from the island for a few months, as well as Somerset Maugham, E.F. Benson, the Wolcott-Perrys, Mimi Franchetti and Romaine Brooks. As Mrs Ambrogio says in Compton Mackenzie's Vestal Fire (1927), “Everyone's immoral in Capri. It's the air. Dogs. People. All immoral. 21 Can't help it, poor dears.”

The South then, in Douglas’s philosophy, is very much linked to the ‘satisfaction of carnal needs’ and this is perhaps the most significant reason for travelling there and indeed, living there, and with Old Calabria and Siren Land Douglas promotes this perception of a decadent South. Fussell notes that ‘His improper limericks suggest an Edward Lear who has cast off all restraints except verse-form, just as his pleasure in little boys resembles Dodgson’s in little girls.’22 Dodgson was, of course the real name of Lewis Carroll, who was known for his love of little girls although there is no evidence of improper relations with them.

In 1895, the trials of Oscar Wilde became a turning point confirming current apprehensions about moral decadence among the elite. Julie Anne Taddeo describes how this impacted on Plato’s Apostles, a group of young Cambridge scholars, led by Lytton Strachey and the economist John Maynard Keynes in reaction to Victorian standards. Taddeo refers to this as, ‘a moment of cultural discontinuity after which Hellenism could no longer serve as a legitimating discourse for male love. Those who now engaged in the cult of boy worship and wrote Uranian poetry were regarded as “unnatural” and Wilde's trials [influenced] the formation of the public image of the homosexual, not only as deviant, but as the exemplar of 23 transgressive behavior - a violator of legal, social, and moral norms.’

21 Littlewood, Sultry climates, pp. 139-140. 22 Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars, p. 120. 23 Julie Anne Taddeo, ‘Plato's Apostles: Edwardian Cambridge and the “New Style of Love”,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 8, no. 2, 1997, p. 200.

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233 Incidentally, Lytton Strachey met with Douglas in Paris after an intermittent exchange of correspondence. According to Taddeo, ‘Lytton Strachey...primarily saw in the Greek View of Life a larger social identity he hoped to emulate. He was not a deviant or a criminal, as his own society told him, but part of a small class of morally, physically, and intellectually unique men.’24 There are many indications in Douglas’s works, not least Old Calabria that Douglas saw himself the same way. Of Douglas, Strachey wrote, ‘One would like to surround him with every kind of comfort and admiration and innumerable boys of 14½.’25 This was no doubt an outcome that Douglas himself desired. Littlewood quotes a letter Douglas wrote to Edward Hutton in 1920 where he described the pleasure of being in the Mediterranean with its warm hospitality and ‘where all the boys look like angels.’26 There are many examples in Old Calabria of Douglas’s partiality. Time and again he refers to the attractiveness of boys he encounters on his journey, as the following exemplify:

But the personal graces of my companion made me take small heed of the landscape...Understanding at a glance that he belonged to a type which is rather rare in Calabria, that he was a classic (of a kind), I made every effort to be pleasant to him. This radiantly vicious child was the embodiment of the joy of life, the perfect immoralist. There was no cynicism in his nature, no cruelty, no obliquity, no remorse; nothing but sunshine with a few clouds sailing across the fathomless 27 blue spaces – the sky of Hellas.

On the summit lies a lonely alp, Campo di Bova, where a herd of cattle were pasturing under the care of a golden-haired youth who lay supine on the grass, 28 gazing at the clouds...

...a youthful native volunteered to guide me by short cuts to the remote railway station. We stepped blithely into the twilight, and during the long descent I 29 discoursed with him, in fluent Byzantine Greek, of the affairs of his village.

These extracts remind us of the work of André Gide who travelled in North Africa in 1893 and 1894. While there he took a sexual interest in a number of young boys, and began an affair with a fourteen-year-old Arab boy called Athman. Gide mirrors his own experience of discovering his homosexuality while travelling as a young man in his novel The Immoralist. The Immoralist is narrated by Michel who describes a journey of self-discovery by which a young man becomes increasingly aware of his attraction to boys. Writers like

24 Taddeo, ‘Plato's Apostles,’ p. 226. 25Mark Holloway, Norman Douglas: A Biography, Secker & Warburg, London, 1976, p. 364. 26 Littlewood, Sultry Climates, p. 132. 27 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 257. 28 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 284. 29 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 285.

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234 Douglas in Southern Italy and Gide in North Africa call to mind the sex tourism of today with travel to underdeveloped areas where first-world tourists can pursue their sexual interests without fear of reprisal.

It has been argued by historian Robert Aldrich that the image of a homoerotic South, comprised of the Mediterranean basin, ‘is the major motif in the writings and art of homosexual European men from the time of the Enlightenment to the 1950s.’30 As far as Douglas the man is concerned, a fascinating legend has developed around him. An early commentary by Elizabeth Wheatley describes Douglas in the most exaggerated terms – she writes, ‘His philosophy seems to be a mingling of Epicureanism, Nietzscheanism, and fortitude; and fortitude is the greater part. He is assuredly one of the immortals.’31 While Wheatley’s comments represent the most extreme description of Douglas, there are nonetheless numerous portrayals of him as larger than life. Bruce Allen’s is one such, 32 referring to ‘the appeal of that outrageous iconoclast Norman Douglas.’

For all his colourful detail and breadth of scope, Norman Douglas remains of interest as much for the singularity of his personal life, and its departures from social and moral convention than for his writing. He himself was unrepentantly open about his lifestyle which he, more often than not, referred to as “Mediterranean”. In an article reviewing a book on Douglas, Allan Massie refers to Douglas’s popularity between the wars and, indeed up to the time of his death, claiming that:

There were admittedly extra-literary reasons for this. Admiring Douglas marked you out as a free spirit who had broken the bonds of Anglo-Saxon Puritan conformity. Douglas was a rebel, a scoffer, a hedonist, a pagan in the antique Mediterranean style. “Why prolong life save to prolong pleasure?” he wrote. Our northern Puritanism is now dead, or in abeyance, Douglas's message therefore superfluous. At the same time his own style of paganism looks decidedly old hat: “Many of us would do well to Mediterraneanise ourselves for a season, to quicken those eth[n]ic roots from which has sprung so much of what it best in our 33 natures.” Douglas's Mediterranean was not that of mass tourism.

30 Robert Aldrich, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy, Routledge, London, 1993, p. x. 31 Elizabeth D Wheatley, ‘Norman Douglas,’ The Sewanee Review, vol. 40, no. 1, 1932, p. 67. 32 Bruce Allen, ‘Review: British Literary Travelers between the Wars,’ The Sewanee Review, vol. 90, no. 2, 1982, p. lvi. 33 Allan Massie, ‘A hedonist of the old school,’ review of Norman Douglas: A Portrait, edited by Wilhelm Meusberger, Michael Allan and Helmut Swozilek Edizione La Conchigli Capri, 2005, The Spectator, December 10, 2005, , viewed on 36 November 2010.

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235

Earlier travellers, including Douglas’s much admired Craufurd Tait Ramage, referred to the decidedly pagan nature of the South in a way that was not complimentary. They pointed out a religion which barely covered pagan origins – for example Ramage’s reference to a priest ‘who seemed to be well acquainted with the legend of St. Michael, [and] talked of a stream which, as usual, claimed to heal all kinds of diseases, and this, no doubt, as in many other parts of Italy, is a mere continuation of a pagan superstition’34. For these earlier puritan travellers, this southern pagan ethos was a sign of a poverty of spirit and of the Catholic religion. For Douglas, avowed pagan and hedonist, the fault of superstition was one he related to Oriental influence, Greek paganism, on the other hand, was to be embraced. At the Festival of the Madonna of the Pollino, Douglas asserts, ‘Festivals like this are relics of paganism, and have my cordial approval. We English ought to have learnt by this time that the repression of 35 pleasure is a dangerous error.’

More than any of the travellers to Calabria, Douglas reinforces the image of a depraved south. In the body of biographical material about Douglas two main ideas evolve – the pagan, Nietzschean Douglas and the lack of morals of southern Italians. Many of his admirers stress his masculinity and the quality of “hardness” in his character which seems to be a way of circumventing the portrayal of him as homosexual or in any way effeminate. Nonetheless many of these descriptions are suggestive and sensual. According to Elizabeth D Wheatley:

In the introduction to Wyndham Lewis' Francois Villon, Hilaire Belloc speaks of a quality of "hardness" in Villon, which assures him deathless literary value. It is by this same kind of hardness that Douglas also will survive the erosions of time. And by that other quality named by Nietzsche in speaking of himself, fragrance. Douglas works not in butter, nor yet in oak, but in veined marble and crystal; and his work gives forth a myriad of living scents, as if it had the warmth of flesh. In years to come, some one taking down Old Calabria from a dusty shelf of antiquities, will find in it that timeless summer odor, that resilient 36 unsubmissiveness.

In the introduction to the 1962 Penguin edition of Old Calabria, John Davenport asserts 37 that ‘Norman Douglas early came to feel himself to be that unusual animal, a European’

34 Crauford Tait Ramage, Ramage in South Italy: The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy: Wanderings in Search of Its Ancient Remains and Its Modern Superstitions, Longmans, London, 1965, p. 193. 35 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 166. 36 Wheatley, ‘Norman Douglas,’ p. 67. 37 John Davenport, ‘Introduction,’ Old Calabria, Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1962, p. 8.

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236 claiming that ‘the most important factor in the making of the European came in the spring of 1888, when he paid his first visit to Italy, and saw Capri, as yet unspoilt. He returned bronzed from the south not only physically but mentally, nor did he ever lose that first Mediterranean glow.’38 Being European is a vexed issue – the British did not identify as European and certainly northern Italians did not portray the South as European but with his German background and education one might assume that Douglas, of all the travellers under discussion here, was indeed European. One can only conclude that Davenport is conflating European with Mediterranean which is almost an entirely different matter. For Douglas, it is clear he does differentiate between the cold north (Europe) and the warm south (Mediterranean).

The theme of hard masculinity honed in the glow of the Mediterranean sun is one that Douglas himself employs in his description of a Hellenic southern ethos mixed with harder Eastern characteristics, despite the south having figured in the imagination of the British as a “soft” feminised space. Ian Littlewood reminds us of a common English perception, “‘Tis the hard grey weather / Breeds hard English men.’”39In contrast to English perceptions of themselves and southern Europeans, Douglas attributes the Arab influence to having ‘infused fiercer strains’ in the Calabrian character40 and the Hellenic influence – ‘wherever the mocking Ionic spirit has penetrated’ - to a ‘glorification of masculinity.’41 Davenport goes on to suggest that to understand Old Calabria fully, one must know its author whom he describes 42 as ‘a child of the nineteenth century; an aristocrat; and immensely masculine.’

Elizabeth Wheatley identifies this philosophy as Nietzschean and claims that Douglas ‘has been, so it seems, a follower in one case only. He has absorbed Nietzschean principles, perhaps unconsciously, and has made of himself a super-man.’ She describes him, interestingly, as ‘hardening into a grinning garden god, a battered Priapus.’43 Again this trope of hard masculinity is associated with Douglas. John Davenport also employs it in his introduction to the 1962 Penguin edition of Old Calabria, referring to Douglas’s ‘splendid physique,’44 his ‘intense masculinity,’45 the appeal to him of the ‘fundamental hardness’ of

38 Davenport, ‘Introduction’, Old Calabria, p. 9. 39 Littlewood, Sultry Climates, p. 59. 40 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 224. 41 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 222. 42 Davenport, ‘Introduction’, Old Calabria, p .7. 43 Wheatley, ‘Norman Douglas,’ p.57. 44 Davenport, ‘Introduction,’ Old Calabria, p. 9. 45 Davenport, ‘Introduction,’ Old Calabria, p. 11.

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237 Greece; describing Douglas, in similar terms to Wheatley, as ‘toughened’ by the Mediterranean sun, elaborating that ‘the snows of northern Puritanism melted, indeed, but only to reveal the granite beneath. It was the granite of which saints and sensualists are 46 47 made.’ Finally, Davenport celebrates ‘the muscular grace of Old Calabria.’

Douglas lived in the Capri community of sexual miscreants, openly flouting the conventions of polite British society. However, he was not so open in his books, perhaps because he did not wish to jeopardise their marketability. René Mari was a fourteen-year-old Italian boy, who, with the consent of his parents, was Douglas’s companion on his walking tours in Italy recalled in Alone, published in 1921.Fussell points out Douglas’s footnote at the end of Alone which acknowledges that, since he did not travel unaccompanied, the title of the book is “rather an inapt one.” Douglas decides to ‘Let it stand!’ Fussell remarks that this ‘has the merit of some ironic concealment, as well as implying the author’s aloneness as the last honest man with aristocratic tastes and scorn for the modern world.’48 René, featuring in the book as “Mr R”, also accompanied him on the walking tour which resulted in the travel book Together, published in 1923

Earlier, during his second trip to Calabria in 1911 - the one that formed the basis of Old Calabria - he was similarly accompanied. What the book conspicuously omits is the presence of a companion, a twelve-year-old boy he had picked up in London on fireworks night in 1910, the aforementioned Eric. Roger Williams's Lunch with Elizabeth David (Little, Brown, 1999) 49is a novel about Douglas's relationship with Eric Wolton, the boy he took to Calabria. Ironically, for Douglas’s much proclaimed preference for the Hellenic over the eastern way of life, one commentator states that, ‘Though it is difficult to approve of his Babylonian behavior, his gusto and vitality provide a potent contrast to the wretched and guilt-ridden 50 homosexuality of contemporaries like Proust, Forster, and T E Lawrence.’

Orientalism Old Calabria perpetuates the same old mythologies which are evident in the writings of the earliest travellers to Calabria, from Swinburne on. Foremost amongst these is the opposition of the Hellenic world to the Orient which positions the former as an idealised pre-Europe and

46 Davenport, ‘Introduction,’ Old Calabria, p. 12. 47 Davenport, ‘Introduction,’ Old Calabria, p. 16. 48 Fussell, Abroad, p. 125. 49 Roger Williams, Lunch with Elizabeth David: A Novel, Carroll & Graf, New York, 1999. 50 Jeffrey Meyers, ‘Babylonian Behavior,’: review of Norman Douglas: A Biography by Mark Holloway, Seeker & Warburg, London, 1978, The Sewanee Review, vol. 86, no. 1, p. xxvi.

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238 makes of the latter an abject space of dirt, neglect, inefficiency, fatalism and criminal savagery. Old Calabria is peppered with references which explicitly link African and Eastern racial stereotypes to Calabria which, with its crime rates, incidences of violence and social degradation, could not be remotely imagined as European.

Douglas comments on his perception of a Calabrian insensitivity to dirt and foul odours as being similar to that of the people of the Orient. At one stage he informs us, ‘Of course the inns are often dirty, and not only in their sleeping accommodation. The reason is that, like Jews and Turks, their owners do not see dirt (there is no word for dirt in the Hebrew language); they think it odd when you draw their attention to it.’51 In San Giovanni Douglas notes the squalor of the village, asserting that ‘San Giovanni is as dirty as can well be; it has the accumulated filth of an Eastern town, while lacking all its glowing tints or harmonious outlines … No wonder North Italians, judging by such external indications, regard all 52 Calabrians as savages.’

At another stage, he asserts that ‘Like the Arab, the uncultivated Italian is insensitive to certain smells that revolt us; while he cannot endure, on the other hand, the scent of some flowers.’53On occasion his descriptions of villages go beyond the degradation of the East – they are not merely like the East but something far worse and therefore far removed from the orderliness of the English landscape as the following passage suggests:

Like all too many villages in South Italy, this one is depopulated of its male inhabitants, and otherwise dirty and neglected. The impression one gains on first seeing one of these places is more than that of Oriental decay; they are not merely ragged at the edges. It is a deliberate and sinister chaos, a note of downright anarchy—a contempt for those simple forms of refinement which even the poorest can afford. Such persons, one thinks, cannot have much sense of home and its hallowed associations; they seem to be everlastingly ready to break with the existing state of things. How different from England, where the humblest cottages, the roadways, the very stones testify to immemorial love of order, to neighbourly 54 feelings and usages sanctioned by time!

Here Douglas is suggesting a level of degradation that is beyond description, it is “more” than Oriental, and the Orient is presented throughout the work as the benchmark of barbarity and squalor. In Old Calabria Douglas sets up a dichotomy between the liberating

51 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 120. 52 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 220. 53 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 330. 54 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 193.

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239 Hellenic pagan sensibility and the sinister and deceitful Arab. The following is one example of the latter:

The magic of south Italy deserves to be well studied, for the country is a cauldron of demonology wherein Oriental beliefs—imported direct from Egypt, the classic home of witchcraft—commingled with those of the West. A foreigner is at an unfortunate disadvantage; if he asks questions, he will only get answers dictated 55 by suspicion or a deliberate desire to mislead…

Nonetheless, comparing “Arabs” to the people of Crotone, Douglas does concede that the former are unfairly maligned. The inhabitants of Crotone, he informs us:

…are not a handsome race. Gissing says, a propos of the products of a local photographer, that it was “a hideous exhibition; some of the visages attained an incredible degree of vulgar ugliness.” That is quite true… Of the girls and boys one notices only those who possess a peculiar trait: the eyebrows pencilled in a dead straight line, which gives them an almost hieratic aspect. I cannot guess from what race is derived this marked feature which fades away with age as the brows wax thicker and irregular in contour. We may call it Hellenic on the old-fashioned principle that everything attractive comes from the Greeks, while its opposite is ascribed to those unfortunate “Arabs” who, as a matter of fact, are a sufficiently 56 fine-looking breed.

Compliments such as this, even if given in a condescendingly eugenical style, are rare. Elsewhere Douglas describes the cold thanklessness with which ‘all save the most cultured’ Calabrians receive gifts which they regard as ‘a happy hit in the lottery of life’; and the giver as ‘the blind instrument of Fortune.’ He goes on to assert that ‘This chill attitude repels us’ (us being the civilised English-speaking readers) and that ‘our effusive expressions of 57 thankfulness astonish these people and the Orientals.’

In an early chapter Douglas sets the scene for his many excursions into building a picture of an “Oriental” land by informing us of the period of the Muslim settlement of Lucera in the Province of Foggia, Region of Apulia (which was then part of “old Calabria”). It was Frederick II of Hohenstaufen who decided to move 20,000 Sicilian Muslims and settlement thrived for about 75 years until, in 1300, it was sacked by the Christian forces of Charles II of Naples and its Muslim inhabitants were exiled or sold into slavery.

55 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 72. 56 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 311. 57 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 136.

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240 Reinforcing the Oriental history of the south, Douglas makes much of the Saracen past and Frederick’s eastern leanings:

One cannot be at Lucera without thinking of that colony of twenty thousand Saracens, the escort of Frederick and his son, who lived here for nearly eighty 58 59 years, and sheltered Manfred in his hour of danger.

For he took his Orientalism seriously; he had a harem, with eunuchs, etc., all 60 proper, and was pleased to give an Eastern colour to his entertainments.

Yet this Frederick is no dim figure; he looms grandly through the intervening haze. How well one understands that craving for the East, nowadays; how modern they were, he and his son the “Sultan of Lucera," and their friends and 61 counsellors, who planted this garden of exotic culture!

Ultimately Douglas constructs the Oriental in terms of biological generalisations, cultural constructions including greed and secretiveness, and racial and religious prejudices. He refers more than once to ‘a degrading, Oriental love of dirt and tattered garments’62, compares Christian belief and practice to ‘Oriental fakirism’63 and claims that, ‘the 64 recollection of these intruders is very much alive to this day. They have left a deep scar.’

This Orient that Douglas constructs is juxtaposed to an ideal “Hellenic” type which he promotes throughout Old Calabria: a ritualistic, despotic and ultimately life-negating culture (the Orient) opposed to one that is earthy, pragmatic and life-affirming (the Hellenic). In a recent article, Anne Summer refers to Lombroso's Crime: Its Causes and Remedies quoting this work which seems to echo the position Douglas takes – ‘Lombroso writes: It is … to the African and oriental elements (the Greeks excepted) that Italy owes the frequency of homicide in Calabria, Sicily, and Sardinia ...”’65 In a passage that might have come straight out of the work of positivist thinkers like Lombroso, Giuseppe Sergi or Alfredo Niceforo, Douglas refers to the Arab world of the Saracens - whom he calls the “African Intruders” in one chapter of the book – in a biologically determinist discourse as the following passage attests:

58 Manfred was the King of Sicily from 1258 to 1266. He was son of the Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen. 59 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 19. 60 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 22. 61 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 23. 62 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 270. 63 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 280. 64 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 147. 65 Anne Finger Summer, ‘Antonio 's South ... or ... some aspects of the disability question,’ New Politics, vol. XIV, no. 1, 2012, , accessed 3 May 2013.

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241 There is a type of physiognomy here which is undeniably Semitic–with curly hair, dusky skin and hooked nose. We may take it to be of Saracenic origin, since a Phoenician descent is out of the question, while mediaeval Jews never intermarried with Christians. It is the same class of face which one sees so abundantly at Palermo, the former metropolis of these Africans. The accompanying likeness is that of a native of Cosenza, a town that was frequently in their possession. Eastern traits of character, too, have lingered among the populace. So the humour of the peddling Semite who will allow himself to be called by the most offensive epithets rather than lose a chance of gaining a sou; who, eternally professing poverty, cannot bear to be twitted on his notorious riches; their ceaseless talk of hidden treasures, their secretiveness and so many other little Orientalisms that whoever has lived in the East will be inclined to echo the observation of Edward Lear’s Greek servant: “These men are Arabs, but they 66 have more clothes on.”

On a previous occasion he speaks of Calabrians as a ‘muddled brood, and considerably given to cheating when there is any prospect of success.’ He goes on to state that Calabrian peasants have ‘an indescribable mark of race.’ It is indescribable, perhaps, because it is an idea that makes little sense and yet he does describe it as ‘different in features and character from the Italians; it is an ascetic, a Spanish type,’ which appears to include being ‘whiskered, short and wiry, and of dark complexion.’ The ascetic Spanish nature of the Calabrian, he informs us, is only lightened by ‘Greek and other strains’.67 Douglas weaves this kind of discourse into his general discussion of history, landscape, ecology and folklore creating a kind of tapestry of verisimilitude. The general reader is subject to a barrage of information with the effect that these kinds of racial generalisations and stereotyping are easily viewed as correct, or even, at times, “common sense”.

Maurizio Albahari demonstrates how this kind of logic can work, using the example of the post-unification essentialist arguments regarding the south:

The ordinary man from Northern Italy thought rather that if the Mezzogiorno made no progress after having been liberated from the fetters which the Bourbon regime placed in the way of modern development, this meant that the causes of the poverty were not external, but internal, innate in the population of the South. There only remained one explanation – the organic incapacity of the inhabitants, their barbarity, their biological inferiority. In the North there persisted the belief 68 that the Mezzogiorno was a “ball and chain” for Italy.

66 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 147. 67 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 122. 68Maurizio Albahari, ‘Between Mediterranean centrality and European periphery: Migration and heritage in Southern Italy,’ International Journal of Euro-Mediterranean Studies, vol. 1 no. 2, 2009, p. 145.

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242

With regards to women, in Old Calabria, Douglas attributes differences in the way they are perceived and treated according to the ethnic or tribal influence on Calabrians of different areas. Thus, he claims that the inhabitants of the Sila are Brutiians which ‘can be inferred by from the superior position occupied by their women-folk.’69 Of the “grave” Latins or Samnites he claims that they are ‘generally speaking, honest, dignified, and incurious; they are bigoted, not to say fanatical; and their women are not exclusively beasts of burden, being better dressed, better looking, and often as intelligent as the men. They are the fruits of a female selection.’70 As for the women of the Albanian villages, they are ‘the veriest beasts of burden; unlike the Italians, they carry everything (babies, and wood, and water) on their backs. Their crudely tinted costumes would be called more strange than beautiful under any 71 but a bright sunshiny sky.’

In the village of San Giovanni, Douglas claims that ‘it would be difficult to find anywhere an equal number of handsome women on such a restricted space. In olden days it was dangerous to approach these attractive and mirthful creatures; they were jealously guarded by brothers and husbands… Even the great-grandmothers have a certain austere dignity–sinewy, indestructible old witches, with tawny hide and eyes that glow like lamps.’72 As for ‘old authors [who] praise the beauty of the women of Cotrone, Bagnara, and other southern towns; for my part, I have seldom found good-looking women in the coastlands of Calabria; the matrons, especially, seem to favour that ideal of the Hottentot Venus…they are 73 decidedly centripetal.’

As the passages quoted above illustrate and in common with the male travellers who went before him, Douglas finds it all too easy to objectify the women he encounters. He comments on their appearance in the most derogatory terms, referring to their ‘tawny hides’, designating them ‘beasts of burden’, casting doubt on their intelligence and stressing their superstitious nature. Also like the travellers before him, Douglas makes much of female costumes being more rigorous than other writers in detailing different costumes and making specific cultural allusions which demonstrate the breadth of his knowledge as following extracts demonstrate:

69 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 222. 70 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 222. 71 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 191. 72 Douglas, Old Calabria, pp. 219-220. 73 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 311.

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243 Quite a feature in the landscape of Morano is the costume of the women, with their home-dyed red skirts and ribbons of the same hue plaited into their hair. It is a beautiful and reposeful shade of red, between Pompeian and brick-colour, and the tint very closely resembles that of the cloth worn by the beduin (married) 74 women of Tunisia.

One is struck with the feast of costumes here, by far the brightest being those of the women who have come up from the seven or eight Albanian villages that surround these hills. In their variegated array of chocolate-brown and white, of emerald-green and gold and flashing violet, these dames move about the sward 75 like animated tropical flowers.

It is almost as if these women in their colourful costumes are on display for the delight of the English traveller much as the flora and fauna of the region might be, especially with references to ‘feature in the landscape’ and ‘animated tropical flowers’. Nonetheless Douglas is not always unreservedly positive in his description. At one stage, he refers to the proprietress of a shop in Spezzano as ‘clothed in gaudily picturesque costume’ - not only does this read like a backhanded compliment but he also refers to the way she smiles at him with, ‘the easy familiarity which I have since discovered to be natural to all these women.’76 There is a touch of Ramage’s Puritan judgement here, that positioning of the observer as an “expert” on the people he encounters, able to attribute motive and morality.

Criminal culture Like the other travellers to Calabria before him Douglas also makes much of the criminality of Calabrian culture, again connecting this to Arab influence as, for example, when he states that ‘given to cheating’ is not the worst crime of which the Calabrian can be accused and this may be due to ‘the Arab domination of much of his territory’ which ‘may have infused into his character the fiercer strains …’77 He mentions that signifier of dark and savage forces, the Aspromonte, which, he tells us, ‘has a bad reputation for crime.’78 He refers back to a dark past when the Calabrians were fighting the French, again demonstrating the conflation, where convenient, of brigands with heroes as described in the chapter on Emily Lowe:

In a single year (1809) thirty-three thousand crimes were recorded against the brigands of the Kingdom of Naples; in a single month they are said to have

74 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 143. 75 Douglas, Old Calabria, pp. 165-166. 76 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 187. 77 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 120. 78 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 246.

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244 committed 1200 murders in Calabria alone. These were the bands who were 79 described by British officers as “our chivalrous brigand-allies.”

Douglas does concede that the grinding poverty of the Calabrians is related to social and historical factors and in this vein, he makes reference to the publication of a book called La questione meridionale which ‘contains the views of twenty-seven of the most prominent men in the country as to how south Italian problems should be faced and solved.’80 He also makes the point that it is ‘no wonder they are distrustful. Ages of oppression and misrule have passed over their heads; sun and rain, with all their caprice, have been kinder friends to them than their earthly masters.’81 This does not, however, prevent him from exploiting the Orientalist mythology which exoticises and marginalizes Calabria and causes his readers no doubt to shudder at descriptions of a dangerous space at the edge of their own familiar world.

This danger associated with Calabria was exemplified by the figure of the brigand around which many bloodthirsty legends had grown. There are a great many articles and books on the topic of brigands dating from Swinburne’s time, and in time, brigandage became symbolic of a southern primitive violence, as alien to the north of Italy as it was to Britain, and an easy trope around which to build representations of the South. Douglas certainly does not eschew the subject himself, devoting two whole chapters to it, one of them on the brigand Musolino. In one of these chapters, he refers to the criminal justice system, again resorting to an eastern descriptor to indicate bad practice, calling it ‘the Baghdad system of delays [which] leads to corruption of underpaid officials and witnesses alike (not to speak of judges) – in a word, that the method pursued hereabouts is calculated to create rather than to repress 82 crime.’

Douglas, however, does demonstrate an understanding of the problem of brigandage. He recognises widespread support of the brigands and rebels as arising from the inevitable popular struggle firstly against foreign domination and later against the central government with the unfair system of justice which was established after unification. Nonetheless, he includes bloodthirsty anecdotes and savage descriptions of brigandage, as did Emily Lowe before him. These reinforce Calabria as a fierce and exotic land, which, although geographically close to the rest of Europe, seems nonetheless as far from the civilised world as countries of Africa and the East.

79 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 212. 80 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 38. 81 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 62. 82 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 288.

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245 Milking the theme of criminality in general, as do the travellers who precede him, adds a certain spice to his traveller’s tale. At one point, for instance, he refers to the Aspromonte as ‘the roughest corner of Italy’, claiming that it is ‘no place for misunderstandings, the knife decides promptly who is right and who is wrong, and only two weeks ago I was warned not to cross the district without a carbineer on either side of me.’83 He nonetheless makes his journey across the lawless Aspromonte with only a guide to assist him. Interestingly, his friend Edward Hutton who travelled through Calabria in 1915, downplays the danger, for although in Naples he had been warned that by travelling further south he risked being robbed or murdered, he found that:

The people of the South are as full of humanity as are other Italians. Every day you live you will be robbed in Naples and that with your eyes open, for you are helpless and they unashamed; but in the South it is not so. On the contrary, people are there rough-mannered but good-hearted, and as honesty goes in Italy, very honest. You will be fleeced in Milan but not in Cosenza, you will receive bad money in Naples but not in Catanzaro, and considering the poverty there is an extraordinary absence of begging. Not that I object to begging; God knows if a poor man may not demand an alms of his fellows, it is a hard and certainly not a Christian law which forbids him. Nevertheless, though the South is still poor and still Christian, the beggars are but few; they demand courteously in the name of 84 the Madonna, without the threats of the Neapolitans, and are content with little.

As described in previous chapters, lawlessness and brigandage was also associated with the struggle for unification. ‘Aspromonte, the wild region behind Reggio’, Douglas informs us, ‘was famous, not long ago, for Garibaldi’s battle85. But the exploits of this warrior have lately been eclipsed by those of the brigand Musolino, who infested the country up to a few years ago, defying the soldiery and police of all Italy.’86 Douglas makes this connection more than once - of the college of San Demetrio he notes that:

Its president, Bishop Bugliari, was murdered by the brigands in 1806; much of its lands and revenues have been dissipated by maladministration; it was persecuted for its Liberalism by the Bourbons, who called it a “workshop of the devil.” It distinguished itself during the anti-dynastic revolts of 1799 and 1848 and, in 1860, was presented with twelve thousand ducats by Garibaldi, “in consideration of the

83 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 258. 84 Edward Hutton, Southern Italy, Methuen, London, 1915, pp. 138-139. 85 The Battle of Aspromonte, (La Giornata dell'Aspromonte), took place on 29 August 1862 a few kilometres from Gambarie in the Aspromonte mountains. The Royal Italian Army defeated Giuseppe Garibaldi's army of volunteers that was marching from Sicily towards Rome with the intent of liberating the city and annexing it to the Kingdom of Italy. Garibaldi was wounded and taken prisoner. 86 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 253.

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246 signal services rendered to the national cause by the brave and generous 87 Albanians.”

He also refers to an infamous brigand mentioned by Emily Lowe and Elpis in their books, discussed in a previous chapter, the brigand Talarico:

One of the funniest episodes was a visit paid in 1865 by the disconsolate Mrs Moens to the ex-brigand Talarico, who was then living in grand style on a government pension. Her husband had been captured by the band of Manzi (another brigand), and expected to be murdered every day, and the lady succeeded in procuring from the chivalrous monster –“an extremely handsome man, very tall, with the smallest and most delicate hands”– an exquisite letter to his colleague, recommending him to be merciful to the Englishman and to emulate his own conduct in that respect. The letter had no effect, apparently; but Moens escaped at last, and wrote his memoirs, while Manzi was caught and executed in 1868 after a trial occupying nearly a month, during which the jury had to answer 88 311 questions.

Moens was captured during the post-unification period of intense activity by brigands in the South. After the seemingly failed promise of unification, local peasants found themselves in a poorer state than before with a new rural middle-class in charge, possibly more avaricious and hard-line than the old land-owners. It did not take long for the declining conditions for some peasants to turn to brigandage in a guerrilla war against the new patrons. In the regions of Calabria, Puglia, Campania and Basilicata, armed bands of brigands began a campaign of kidnapping, robbing and killing this new rich class. They hid in the mountains, often protected by poor peasants and also receiving support from the clergy and the old property owners who used the brigands in their attempts to reinstate Bourbon rule. John Dickie notes that ‘It is virtually a convention of histories of Italian brigandage in the 1860s to distinguish “a strictly historical point of view” from the myths perpetuated by the mass of unscholarly popular works.’89 Moens’ book being one of the latter.

Douglas also introduces the notion that the climate of the South can effect a change in the moral rectitude of the usually upright Englishman, causing him to more accepting of less than “correct” behaviour and even driving him to uncharacteristically disreputable acts – for example as James Boswell had claimed back in the period of the Classical Grand Tour – Douglas indicates that:

87 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 197. 88 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 228. 89 John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900, St Martins Press, NY, 1999, p. 22.

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247

… in Italy, the domesticated Englishman is amazed to find that he possesses a sense hitherto unrevealed, opening up a new horizon, a new zest in life–the sense of law-breaking. At first, being an honest man, he is shocked at the thought of such a thing; next, like a sensible person, reconciled to the inevitable; lastly, as befits his virile race, he learns to play the game so well that the horrified officials grudgingly admit (and it is their highest praise): Inglese italianizzato – Diavolo 90 incarnato.[Englishman Italianised – devil incarnate]

Douglas also claims that Calabrians ‘lack the sense of home as a fixed and old- established topographical point; as do the Arabs and Russians, neither of whom have a word expressing our “home” or “Heimat.” Here, the nearest equivalent is la famiglia.’ 91 Again, Douglas juxtaposes Calabrians as similar to Arabs (and Russians in this case, another marginal people of Europe) with the civilized English and Germans. This is particularly interesting coming from the peripatetic Douglas who never really knew home himself. Chronically restless, often on the run from sexual indiscretions, Douglas is a mixture of exile (from justice) and expatriate (eventually settling in Italy), constantly moving around, going from Capri to Florence to Mentone to Antibes and Venice, mingling with a cosmopolitan mix of people from high society and fellow writers. Douglas’s friends and acquaintances included D H Lawrence, Harold Acton, and Richard Aldington, Nancy Cunard, Oscar Wilde's friend Reggie Turner, Joseph Conrad, Compton Mackenzie and Elizabeth David. Ian Littlewood reminds us that ‘for most of his long life Douglas used travel as a way of staying beyond the reach of the law without abandoning his sexual preferences’.92 For, following the demise of his marriage, Douglas had increasingly sought the company of boys as sexual partners.

Pagan past and present The title of Old Calabria invokes not only the literal old Calabria of the Byzantine period which included the heel of Italy as well as the toe but also the notion of an origin which is conflated with the idea of the Mediterranean. This idea of the Mediterranean is one which has great symbolic power, evoking, as it does, associations of classical antiquity. In Calabria, however, evidence of the Hellenic past is not easy to locate. According to John Pemble in an afterword to his book The Mediterranean Passion, writers like Douglas and Gissing found Calabria’s ‘present desolation was made almost unbearable by the fragments, pathetically

90 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 50. 91 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 193. 92 Ian Littlewood, Sultry climates: travel and sex since the Grand Tour, John Murray, London, 2001, p. 131.

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248 broken and few, of a sunlit, Hellenic past.’93 This is so because, as literary travelers, Gissing and Douglas produced volumes describing a place where remnants of the past were few but whose spaces, nonetheless, were heavy with classical and historical signification. However, because detailed travel guides did not extend to this wild and largely unmodernised south, the books these men produced also served to fill in the gaps.

Douglas’s frequent conjectures on culture and race in Old Calabria are indicative of a preoccupation with origins and, by extension, with the south, and particularly Calabria, as a seminal space in the history of Europe. This was by no means an unusual theme for the time. According to D H Lawrence, southern Europe is ‘the nearest thing to the [origin] that is left to us’.94 Like Lawrence and his predecessor to Calabria, George Gissing, Douglas views encroaching modernity as a threat to an idealised past, remnants of which reside in the south of Italy. ‘It is useless to lament the inevitable,’ he tells us, ‘this modern obsession of 95 “industrialism” which has infected a country purely agricultural.’

As a general reaction to industrialisation the South had come to symbolise an “older” way of living, a kind of pre-European space, a space that modern industrial Europe had long since put behind it. According to Roberto Dainotto, Orientalism with its notion of a primordial East situated as a polar opposite to a civilized Europe, ‘prepares the discourse of European “Southernism” and almost fades into it. It anticipates the topoi of a torpid, sunny, and passionate south’ where northern countries found their own internal Other. 96 As far as Calabria is concerned, Jonathan Keates reminds us that it ‘has always been among the areas of Europe most resistant to the Europeanizing process.’97 A region neglected by tourists over a long period of travel to Italy, Calabria represented a parallel universe to civilized Europe – a savage land, a wild Europe which has nothing to do with the embodiment of a ‘certain fairly exalted level of culture and sophistication.’ It was a ‘feral world on their very footsteps,’98 a part of Italy which is “non-Italy”, and does not fit into the imaginary geography of the Italy created by decades of travellers, becoming instead a different kind of imaginary geography, that of an abject South – the Mezzogiorno.

93 John Pemble, ‘The Mediterranean passion: An afterword,’ 2009, , accessed 12 November 2011 94 David Herbert Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism, A Beal (ed.), Viking, New York, 1966, p.276. 95 Douglas, By the Ionian Sea, p. 161. 96 Roberto M Dainotto, ‘A South with a View: Europe and its Other,’ Nepantla: Views from South, vol. 1 no. 2, 2000, p. 379. 97 Keates, ‘Introduction,’ Old Calabria, p. 8. 98 Keates, ‘Introduction,’ Old Calabria, p. 7.

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249 Old Calabria locates vestiges of the pre-European Hellenic past within this “savage” Europe. Douglas lists characteristics that point to “Hellenic influences”, other than the ‘depreciation of the female sex’ already referred to, these include a ‘lack of commercial morality, of veracity, of seriousness in religious matters; a persistent, light-hearted inquisitiveness; a levity (or sprightliness, if you prefer it) of mind. The people are fetishistic, amulet-loving, rather than devout.’99 This is totally at odds with the Orientalist strains to which he attributes religious ignorance and fanaticism, Eastern superstition.

Douglas, like Gissing, regarded Christianity as a deplorable disaster for the proud gentilities of classicism. In his chapter on cave worship he is deeply disrespectful in his description of the pilgrims to a mountain shrine, referring to them as:

…unquestionably a repulsive crowd: travel-stained old women, under-studies for the Witch of Endor; dishevelled, anaemic and dazed-looking girls; boys, too weak to handle a spade at home, pathetically uncouth, with mouths agape and eyes expressing every grade of uncontrolled emotion–from wildest joy to downright idiocy. How one realizes, down in this cavern, the effect upon some cultured ancient like Rutilius Namatianus of the catacomb-worship among those early Christian converts, those men who shun the light, drawn as they were from the same social classes towards the same dark underground rites! One can neither love nor respect such people; and to affect pity for them would be more consonant 100 with their religion than with my own.

In Calabria, especially in the Aspromonte, there are many Marian shrines including the famous Polsi Sanctuary in the heart of the massif, which at the same time as being the roughest part of the region is also clearly one with an abundance of sacred sites. In his chapter on “Cave-worship”, Douglas claims that it is older than any god or devil. He describes the saints and Madonnas of various mountain grottoes as part of a cult of the feminine principle, 101 traceable in many cases back to the age of Magna Graecia and beyond.

Evident in these grotto pilgrimages of the Aspromonte is an age-old awe in the face of precipitous and hazardous landscapes, as historian Simon Schama puts it, ‘the crushing of the human ego beneath the rock of faith’.102To live in such a landscape is to be always aware of hardship, fear and death. However, the Catholicism of southern Italy has long been an area of contention for Protestants and Catholics from the north alike. One need only to refer to the

99 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 223. 100 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 41. 101 Douglas, Old Calabria, pp. 23–30. 102 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, Fontana Press, London, 1995, p. 449.

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250 work of the Catholic traveller Swinburne to find astonishment at the “pagan” quality of worship in Calabria. A critique by William Frederic Badè written at the period of Douglas’ travel to Calabria illustrates this stance:

These regional differences serve to explain the contrast between the many beautiful examples of religious life which one meets among cultivated Roman Catholics of the North, and the de-grading forms of superstition which religion has assumed in the South. One who has witnessed ritual functions connected with the pretended liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples, or has seen the loathsome spectacles afforded by some of the pilgrimages - that to Casalbordino, for instance - not to mention the numerous nodding saints and curtseying madonnas, can only wonder why the Roman hierarchy still maintains an attitude of acquiescence toward what Free Catholics and modernists are denouncing as 103 palpable imposture.

Douglas, however, applauds the thinly veiled paganism of the Calabrian people. The investment that Douglas places on the unsophisticated Calabrian extends to lamenting emigration to America, which although it may improve the situation of the émigré, renders him “useless” for Douglas’s purposes because ‘he has lost his savour – the virtue has gone out of him...these americani cast off their ancient animistic traits and patriarchal disposition with the ease of a serpent; a new creature emerges, of a wholly different character – sophisticated, extortionate at times, often practical and in so far useful; scorner of every tradition, infernally wide awake, and curiously deficient in what the Germans call ‘Gemüt’ (one of those words which we sadly need in our own language).’104 Gemüt is a word incorporating shades of soul, nature, disposition, feeling, innocence and warm-heartedness. Implicitly, everything that the modern has lost and simpler cultures have retained even in spite of what, elsewhere, Douglas describes in the harshest and most arrogant terms as exemplified in the following extract:

None but the grossest elements in a people can withstand enduring misrule; none but a mendacious and servile nature will survive its wear and tear. So it comes about that up to a few years ago the nobler qualities which we associate with those old Hellenic colonists - their intellectual curiosity, their candid outlook upon life, their passionate sense of beauty, their love of nature – all these things have been abraded, leaving, as a residue, nothing save what the Greeks shared with ruder 105 races.

103 William Frederic Badè, ‘Italian Modernism, social and religious,’ The Harvard Theological Review, vol. 4, no. 2, 2011, pp. 150. 104 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 159. 105 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 280. Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

251 It is interesting to note that this particular tirade comes after the returned emigrant owner of a mule which Douglas has rented will not discount the four francs a day fee. Like any traveler, Douglas can be petty and peevish and, while flagrantly transgressive and critical of the repressive north, his ideas of Calabria echoed those of his fellow British travellers to the region. But if this is so, what makes Old Calabria the celebrated classic that many people recognise it as?

Style / Pastiche The style of Old Calabria can be summed up as old-fashioned erudition, dilettantism, pastiche and a dose of imagination often wrapped up in tedious and tendentious language. Perhaps it is the breadth and depth of Douglas’s coverage, however unreliable in places, that confers upon it an authority that readers relate to, despite his style which Pemble describes:

On one page he’s a citizen of the world, taking everything in his stride and scorning insular prejudice. On the next he’s the Briton abroad, complaining about foreigners in a cantankerous, colonial voice. And in each of these caricatures there’s a fundamental truth. His book is a dishevelled jumble of genres; a bricolage of confession and self-parody; an incoherent dialogue between tragedy 106 and burlesque.

Douglas packs a lot of information into Old Calabria and covers similar ground to the travellers before him and more. Old Calabria includes a touch of Swinburne with descriptions and lists of crops and agricultural systems, nature and climate; of Ramage with comparisons to Scotland. Neglecting very little in the lexicon of the British traveller to Calabria Douglas includes the picturesque, Claude Lorraine and Salvator Rosa. He covers agriculture, emigration, pagan practices, other British travellers, nature, brigands, classical allusions, saints, festivals, historical figures, Albanian and Greek settlements, and women. Like Swinburne before him, he is keen on exhaustive lists of landscape features, flora and fauna as exemplified in the following extract:

It was exhilarating to traverse these middle heights with their aerial views over the Ionian and down olive covered hill-sides towards the wide valley of the Crati and the lofty Pollino range, now swimming in midsummer haze. The road winds in and out of gullies where rivulets descend from the mountains; they are clothed in cork-oak, ilex, and other trees; golden orioles, jays, hoopoes, and rollers flash among the foliage. In winter, these hills are swept by boreal blasts from the 107 Apennines, but at this season it is a delightful tract of land.

106 Pemble, ‘The Mediterranean passion: An afterword,’ no page numbers. 107 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 194.

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252

Norman Douglas was renowned for the breadth of his knowledge – many commentators have noted the scope of his interests and writings which include not only the travel books including Fountains in the Sand and Siren Land, but also the novel South Wind, monographs on herpetology (the study of amphibians and reptiles), a pamphlet on the pumice stone industry of the Lipari Islands, Birds and Beasts of the Greek Anthology, a book of aphrodisiac recipes called Venus in the Kitchen and a collection of ribald limericks. R W Flint classifies him as a professional dilettante noting that ‘Dilettantism was his true specialty, an attitude of the heart and manners as well as of the mind, stiffened by a scholarly conscience, a 108 professional dilettantism which made him shy of every other sort of professionalism.’

Douglas himself makes an implicit nod at the traveller as dilettante. In Taranto, with regards to Gissing’s assertion that he had found and tracked the Galaesus, purported by classical writers to be an inland sea, Douglas concludes that ‘There is something to be said for such an attitude, on the part of a dilettante traveller, towards these desperate antiquarian controversies.’109 He himself exhibits an abundance of attitude and is quick to give his opinion in areas where, while he may have some knowledge, he remains, nonetheless, an amateur. One of the often referred “problems” with Old Calabria is its lack of a logical and cohesive trajectory. According to Sharon Ouditt:

As Douglas’s biographer has said, the book has an end – and a good one – but no beginning and no middle. It is punctuated by set pieces that in fact had been written and published before – the chapter on Joseph of Copertino, for example, that on the earthquake of 1908, one on southern saints, one on brigandage, and one denouncing Milton as a plagiarist. Its tone is fractured and gossipy, erudite 110 and opinionated in comparison with the lyrical reverence offered by Gissing.

Another characteristic of Douglas’s style is his reworking of material. He reuses older material in Old Calabria, creating a pastiche of chapters that do not always flow easily and logically. In fact, as a sequel to Siren Land, Old Calabria almost certainly contains some of its rejected material. Mark Holloway informs us that Siren Land consisted of twenty chapters when submitted to the publisher, of these only thirteen were published. ‘Material rejected by the publisher from Siren Land,’ he tells us, ‘finds its way into Old Calabria which also deals

108 R W Flint, ‘Norman Douglas,’ The Kenyon Review, vol. 14, no. 4, 1952, p. 663. 109 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 93. 110 Sharon Ouditt, ‘“Elemental and permanent things”: George Gissing and Norman Douglas in Southern Italy,’ Studies in Travel Writing, vol. 10, no. 2, 2006, pp. 123-140.

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253 with the southern half of Italy.’111 With regards to his archaeological studies of Capri, (1904- 15), Elizabeth Wheatley tells us that ‘The Centaur Bibliography gives the information that ... “The archaeological studies of Capri,” (1904-15), may long continue to interest the leisured and scholarly traveler; but a great deal of the material from them has been incorporated in Siren Land, and Old Calabria...and that material on the "Saracens in Italy" became chapter eighteen of Old Calabria. Some of the Capri work was also rewritten for various magazines...He seems loath to part with anything which his brain has tested and moulded. He is constantly scrutinizing, perfecting, and giving new birth to those of his writings for which 112 he has most respect.’

This technique of reusing old material explains why there is no cohesive sense of narrative in Old Calabria and why is does not read like a logically organised text but as a series of largely disparate and discrete chapters. A review in The Classical Journal of 1916 is quite severe in its critique of Douglas’s style, asserting that:

A work of this kind may very well be excused from giving accurate references, but one of two things the reader has the right to expect: either an orderly treatment of the subject or a series of interesting essays. This book is neither, discursive it is. The author treats indiscriminately the Catholic church, dragons, railway stations, English lapdogs, ingratitude, the effects of diet on race stature, the octroi [local taxes], envy, socialism, and all without illumination. The eucalyptus tree is denounced violently and at length. I have no brief for eucalyptus trees, though there is a cordial made there from which maketh glad the heart of man; but who wants a page of vituperation on so harmless a subject? Chap. xv is ostensibly devoted to Byzantinism, but contains more information about bed bugs than about 113 the ostensible subject.

Douglas is also keen to display his erudition and he describes the people, places and history of Calabria with a tone of authority. At one stage, he describes the outward semblance of gravity of cultured Calabrians as ‘a Spanish gravity, due not so much to a strong graft of Spanish blood and customs during the Vice-regal period, as to actual affinities with the race of Spain.’114 Generally, in his works, Douglas displays a formidable knowledge and a lively curiosity. In a Henry Higgins moment in his book of memoirs, Alone, he describes an encounter with a local:

111 Holloway, Norman Douglas: A Biography, p. 215. 112 Wheatley, ‘Norman Douglas,’ p. 57. 113 ‘Old Calabria by Norman Douglas,’ The Classical Journal, vol. 11, no. 6, 1916, p. 382. 114 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 303.

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254 "You are a Sicilian, I take it. And from Catania." He was rather surprised. Sicilians, because they learn good Italian at their schools, think themselves indistinguishable from other men. “Yes”; he explained. He was from a certain place in the Catania part of the country, on the slopes of Etna. I happened to know a good deal of that place from an old she-cook of mine who was born there and never wearied of telling me about it. To his still greater surprise, therefore, I proceeded to discourse learnedly about that region, extolling its natural beauties and healthy climate, reminding him that it was the birthplace of a man celebrated in antiquity (was it Diodorus Siculus?) and hinting, none too 115 vaguely, that he would doubtless live up to the traditions of so celebrated a spot.

Despite the breadth of his knowledge Douglas is not averse to embellishing the facts. It has already been noted elsewhere in this study that travel literature is a literature of pastiche which incorporates a mixture of fact, fiction and genre – from historical or natural treatise to classical study to personal diary. In his book Alone Douglas admits that he has ‘only a diary of dates to go upon, out of which with the help of memory and imagination have been extracted these pages...Imagination? why not? Truth blends well with untruth, and phantasy has been so sternly banned of late from travelers' tales that I am growing tender hearted toward the poor old dame; quite chivalrous in fact, especially on those rather frequent occasions when I find myself unable to dispense with her services.’116 But Douglas did not only approve of imaginative embellishment, he also referred to the suppression of information in travel literature. Paul Fussell quotes Douglas's comment that ‘one suppresses much in 117 writing a travel book; why not add a little?’

Why should this surprise us? Travel writing is a popular genre and its primary goal is to entertain. The issue is how Douglas positions himself and indeed is positioned by others as some kind of authority on Calabria. In the end, like Gissing, Lear and others before him, Douglas wrote of his travels to sell books. In the end, however, Douglas did not recoup a great deal of money from sales of Old Calabria, in fact, his only popular success was his novel South Wind, published in 1917. It is not clear how popular Old Calabria remains today, although it is frequently quoted as the best book on the region and one of the best travel books of all time. There seems to have been a growth in interest in Douglas in recent years, particularly judging by activities on the internet. On a blog site related to his book, Lunch with Elizabeth David, Roger Williams notes that a Norman Douglas Centre has opened

115 Douglas, Alone, p.35. 116 Douglas, Alone, p. 205. 117 Fussell, Abroad, p. 175.

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255 in Thüringen, Austria, and a symposium is held here every two years. He also notes the Literary Park Old Calabria dedication in Calabria, and that Old Calabria has been used in the 118 school curriculum in Southern Italy.

It is clear that Italians also celebrate Douglas. The website for the Calabrian Literary Park Old Calabria: Norman Douglas and the Travelers of the Grand Tour describes why Douglas was chosen to represent the national park:

We have chosen Norman Douglas, the author of Old Calabria, one of the world’s most celebrated and widely known travel journals. Douglas was the modern-day representative par excellence of the large numbers of foreigners who travelled the length and breadth of Italy between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries while on the Grand Tour. At the very time that organized tourism was everywhere gaining ground, this indefatigable man was reviving in Calabria the spirit and ideals of the Grand Tour and the noble European cultural and social values which it embodied. This is why, alongside Norman Douglas, the Literary Park includes among its sources of inspiration much earlier travellers. Contrary to what one might suppose, large numbers of writers visited Calabria in the past and left memorable accounts – names such as Edward Lear and François Lenormant, George Gissing and Alexandre Dumas, Vivant Denon and Henry Swinburne come 119 to mind.

Douglas himself refers to other travellers to Calabria in a kind of southernist “Grand Tour” discourse - including Swinburne, Lear, frequently to the French archaeologist François Lenormant, and others, at one stage stating:

They tell me that within the memory of living man no Englishman has ever entered the town [San Demetrio]. This is quite possible; I have not yet encountered a single English traveller, during my frequent wanderings over South Italy. Gone are the days of Keppel Craven and Swinburne, of Eustace and 120 Brydone and Hoare!

He devotes a whole chapter to George Gissing in Crotone, “Memories of Gissing”, tracing his footsteps and speaking to those still living whom Gissing met including Dr Sculco whose only recollection of the erstwhile traveller was that he wore his hair long. Like many others up to recent times who have read By the Ionian Sea, Douglas refers to the Concordia

118 Roger Williams, ‘Very pleasurable...deft and original,’ Lunch with Elizabeth David blog, 2012, , accessed 29 December 2012. 119 ‘Parco Old Calabria: Norman Douglas e i viaggiatori del grand tour,’ , accessed 22 February 2010. 120 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 195.

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256 Hotel to which he informs us he remains faithful, having ‘twice already sheltered … within its walls.’ He goes on to assert that ‘the shade of George Gissing haunts these chambers and passages. It was in 1897 that he lodged here with that worthy trio: Gibbon, Lenormant and 121 Cassiodorus.’

It appears that Douglas approves of Gissing’s volume, referring at one point to ‘the civic museum, which all readers of Gissing’s “Ionian Sea” will remember as the closing note of those harmonious pages.’122 However, Gissing has made one cardinal mistake according to Douglas :

One might do worse than spend a quiet month or two at Crotone in the spring, for the place grows upon one: it is so reposeful and orderly. But not in winter. Gissing committed the common error of visiting south Italy at that season when, even if the weather will pass, the country and its inhabitants are not true to themselves. You 123 must not come to these parts in winter time.

As far as Douglas is concerned, the inhabitants of the south can only be true to themselves under a fierce sun. Douglas gives us a hint of what he may mean by this at one stage where he comments on the jesting of some monks:

I am not disguising from myself that an incident like the last-named may smack of childishness to a certain austere type of northern Puritan. Childishness! But to go into this question of the relative hilarity and moroseness of religions would take us far afield; for aught I know it may, at bottom, be a matter of climatic influences, and there we can leave it. Under the sunny sky of Italy, who would not 124 be disposed to see the bright side of things?

It is an old story, that of relating climate to character. Earlier Douglas had proclaimed, ‘This in spring. But what days of glistering summer heat, when the earth is burnt to cinders under a heavenly dome that glows like a brazier of molten copper! For this country is the Sahara of Italy.’125 It is perhaps Gissing, after all, who is being true to himself by choosing to travel during the cooler months. Of those earliest travellers to Calabria, Douglas reserves his highest praise for the work of fellow Scotsman, Craufurd Tait Ramage, but this endorsement features in the book Alone126 which was published in 1921. In it he informs us that he was

121 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 308. 122 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 249. 123 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 310. 124 Douglas, Old Calabria , p. 86. 125 Douglas, Old Calabria , pp. 21-22. 126 Norman Douglas, Alone, The Project Gutenberg EBook, 2005, no page numbers, , accessed 28 June 2010.

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257 introduced to Ramage’s book The Nooks and By-ways of Italy, by Dr. Dohrn of the Naples Aquarium who said:

“Going to the South? Whatever you do, don't forget to read that book by an old Scotch clergyman. He ran all over the country with a top-hat and an umbrella, 127 copying inscriptions. He was just your style: perfectly crazy.”

Douglas is ‘flattered at the notion of being likened to a Scottish divine’128 although he is fiercely anti-Christian himself, because, he implies, Ramage shares similar judgements and opinions on Calabria to his own. In fact, so in accord is Ramage with Douglas’s thinking that he is disappointed not to have known of Ramage’s work earlier when he could have used him as a source of quotes to validate his own work:

I wish I had encountered this book earlier. It would have been useful to me when writing my own pages on the country it describes. I am always finding myself in accord with the author's opinions, even in trivial matters such as the hopeless inadequacy of an Italian breakfast. He was personally acquainted with several men whose names I have mentioned - Capialbi, Zicari, Masci; he saw the Purple Codex at Rossano129; in fact, there are numberless points on which I could have quoted him with profit. And even at an earlier time; for I once claimed to have discovered the ruins of a Roman palace on the larger of the Siren islets (the Galli, opposite Positano) - now I find him forestalling me by nearly a century. It is often 130 thus, with archaeological discoveries.

Writers, journalists and travellers today continue to refer to the works of Douglas and his precursors when writing about Calabria. Far from reviving ‘the spirit and ideals of the Grand Tour and the noble European cultural and social values it embodied’ – a dubious statement at the very least – books like Old Calabria perpetuate a mythology that is far from ennobling but full of Gothic horror. Far from being an individual or original take on Calabria and its people, Old Calabria relies on stereotypes wrapped up in a demonstration of good old- fashioned upper-class British erudition. The main point of difference between Douglas and those British travellers who went to Calabria before him is that, where they may too have decried the superstitious and oppressive nature of southern Catholicism, for Douglas it was

127 Douglas, Alone, no page numbers. 128 Douglas, Alone, no page numbers. 129 The Rossano Gospels housed at the cathedral of Rossano in the province of Cosenza, Calabria is a 6th- century illuminated manuscript Gospel Book written following the reconquest of the Italian peninsula by the Byzantine Empire. Also known as Codex purpureus Rossanensis due to the reddish (purpureus in Latin) appearance of its pages, the codex is one of the oldest surviving illuminated manuscripts of the New Testament. 130 Douglas, Alone, no page numbers.

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258 much more personal. He was a self-styled “pagan” who found the strictures of religion an anathema to him. His was a Nietzschean sensibility – in her biography of Elizabeth David, Artemis Cooper notes that in the fly-leaf of a copy of Old Calabria which he gave to David he wrote, ‘Always do as you please, and send everybody to Hell, and take the consequences. 131 Damned good Rule of Life. N.’

Modern Italian tourism websites like that of the Literary Park, quoted above, often indicate a love of the Calabrian people that Douglas simply did not feel. The Literary Park website, for example, asserts that - amongst other things - Douglas loved ‘the proud nature of its inhabitants and the many superimposed layers of history.’132 It was not the modern Calabrian that drew Douglas’s admiration but the cultural and genetic remnants of ancient Greece in Magna Graecia. Like Gissing before him Douglas believed that humanity had reached its peak in ancient Greece. Early on in Old Calabria he displays stereotypical notions of the southerners, setting the stage for what is to follow:

As for myself, wandering among that crowd of unshaven creatures, that rustic population, fiercely gesticulating and dressed in slovenly hats and garments, I realized once again what the average Anglo-Saxon would ask himself: Are they all brigands, or only some of them? That music too –what is it that makes this stuff so utterly unpalatable to a civilized northerner? A soulless cult of rhythm, and then, when the simplest of melodies emerges, they cling to it with the passionate delight of a child who has discovered the moon. These men are still in the age of platitudes, so far as music is concerned; an infantile aria is to them what some 133 foolish rhymed proverb is to the Arabs: a thing of God, a portent, a joy forever.”

Douglas clearly positions himself as a civilized northerner, a superior type who can interpret the primitive people of the southernmost regions of Italy for the average Englishman. While he decried the puritanism of the English, Douglas was nonetheless an educated upper- class British citizen, clearly if unconsciously adopting a position of moral superiority over the people whose land he travelled through.

On one hand, he remained that curious creature, the eccentric Englishman, flouter of convention – an eminent individual, escaping to the Mediterranean to pursue a hedonistic lifestyle. On the other hand, Douglas was an outsider both because of his mixed heritage and

131Artemis Cooper, Writing At the Kitchen Table: The Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David, Penguin, London, 1999, p. 69. 132 ‘Parco Old Calabria’. 133 Douglas, Old Calabria, p. 21.

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259 education in Germany, his sexuality and his diminished funds. He is both an exile and an expatriate and his connection to the modern world of the northern countries he hailed from is tenuous. His primary motives in writing his travel books were to sell books and to give expression to his knowledge of the South he was so attracted to. But, amongst the detail of flora and fauna, custom and history that he covers, he resorts to the same old tales of squalor, crime and ludicrous religiosity with which to titillate his armchair traveller readership. In the final analysis, Old Calabria both reveals and conceals Calabria as it does its author. In terms of the other accounts of travel to Calabria, it is unique in its presentation and in its point of view. To some degree this may well be the secret of its continuing reputation - people read travel books because of the singular point of view they display. Old Calabria takes us back to an earlier period of commentary in its presentation of Calabria from an Orientalist perspective.

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260 Chapter 9: Epilogue

At the beginning of this work I posed a number of questions about the origin of negative perceptions of Calabria and how these ideas travelled to places far and wide, including Australia. I proposed that with the growing predilection for travel literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, early travel accounts of Calabria helped to reinforce and spread stereotypes already existing at the popular level.

My main contention is that travel to Italy during the Grand Tour periods of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created an imaginary geography of Italy which excluded the South. Indeed, Calabria has remained one the least known regions of Italy to this day. Originally, Italy as a whole was considered the South and there were perceptions of it as a feminised degraded space. Increasingly, these negative perceptions were relegated to the southern regions of Italy creating an abject and separate space which itself became an imaginative geography – the imaginative geography of the South, endowed with the poetics of the exotic.

In the words of Derek Gregory, ‘Europe was itself scripted by the Grand Tour and the modern guidebook. In each case the emphasis is on the ways in which the spaces of topography and text are folded into and out of one another and thus shape - literally “form” - spatial formations that are constellations of power, knowledge and geography.’1 In 1705, Thomas Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy became the vade mecum for English tourists, setting the scene for the shaping of standardised paths through that country and dictating sights which were a “must” in the travel itinerary. Addison’s work had a great influence on those who followed him and the pathways of these early eighteenth century travellers strengthened an itinerary that shaped what became recognised everywhere as Italy, a place that stopped at Naples and did not include the more southern regions of the peninsula.

Early travellers to Calabria, including Henry Swinburne, were focused on an Enlightenment view of the region which was about accumulation – lists of flora, fauna, illustrations and descriptions of unusual phenomena and traditions, government and law, an overview of industry, and farming techniques. This amounted to a general accumulation of knowledge which the reader could compare to the situation at home in the British Isles,

1 Derek Gregory, ‘Cultures of Travel and Spatial Formations of Knowledge’ (Kultur des Reisens und räumliche Formationen von Wissen), Erdkunde, vol. 54, no. 4, 2000, p. 297.

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261 leading to a view of the region as an amalgam of natural resources and human industry. More importantly, this exhaustive aggregation of information ultimately demonstrated the superiority of the British system and way of life.

This view of Calabria changed after the post-Napoleon resumption of travel to Italy in the nineteenth century, while the stress on its difference and the inferiority of its people remained. Calabria was now viewed within a romantic framework as a picturesque land of brigands. This perception began to spread throughout Europe after soldiers and others involved in the French occupation of the southern regions recounted tales of a land rife with savagery and barbarity and ferocious opposition to the new foreign rule. Works like the published letters of French soldiers were instrumental in popularizing an image of a land of captivating natural beauty inhabited by a backward, violent, treacherous people in thrall to savage brigands who took advantage of opposition to the French to carry out their barbarous deeds. One such book was Calabria During a Military Residence Three Years in A Series of 2 Letters, translated and published in England in 1832.

The anonymous translator of this work refers to Calabria in his preface as a place ‘hitherto regarded as the terra incognita of modern Europe.’3 He makes reference to the obstacles to travel in this area, obstacles that could not be overcome even with ‘that spirit of enterprise which has carried the adventurous traveller to the most remote and inhospitable parts of the globe.’ The main reason for this is that, according to him:

… local difficulties of the country, though most formidable, are still but as nothing compared with the savage and ferocious character of the inhabitants. The man whose resolution would disdain such impediments as raging torrents, trackless woods, and horrid mountains that seem to defy his intrepidity — the man who would cheerfully endure any privations however severe while exploring a country that presents to his view the most extraordinary objects of interest, both ancient and modern, would yet shrink in dismay on reflecting that at every step he took he inevitably exposed himself to the deadly rifle of the lurking brigand, whose pursuit 4 is plunder, whose sport is blood.

2 [Duret de Tavel], Calabria During a Military Residence Three Years in a Series of Letters: A General Officer Of The French Army from The Original Ms, Effingham Wilson, London, , 1832, accessed 5 June 2012. 3 [de Tavel], Calabria During a Military Residence, p. v. 4 [de Tavel], Calabria During a Military Residence, pp. v-vi.

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262 It is certainly difficult to believe that travellers who could happily journey to the most remote and “uncivilised” parts of the globe would be put off from travelling to Calabria because of its assumed difficulty and lawlessness. It is more likely that travellers were deterred by the country’s being at war and they did not go there because it did not meet the standards for adventure travellers looking for the more rugged and unknown corners of the world to explore. As for leisure tourists, it certainly was not part of the imaginary geography of Italy that they sought.

Nonetheless, there is no doubt that there were obstacles in travelling through Calabria – lack of roads, no decent hostelry for example – and real risks – rough terrain, brigands and corrupt officials – during this period. However, as noted, these letters refer to a land in the middle of war and revolt and to have the enemy describe the Calabrians as savage and lawless and accept it as the unvarnished truth could not be entirely reliable. The translator himself points out that:

At that period Napoleon was in the zenith of his lawless power, the whole of Italy from one end to the other was in the military occupation of the French … The author, while incidentally adverting to these events, speaks of Great Britain in the spirit of a hostile opponent; yet his details cannot fail to interest the English reader, particularly those respecting the battle of Maida, or the battle of St. Euphemia, as 5 he calls it.

Even so, the translator claims this is the ‘only accurate and authentic account of Calabria now extant’6 and there is little doubt that this book and others like it fed general stereotypes of the Calabrian character and traces of these stereotypes are easily found in the works of the British travellers whose works have been examined in this study. The underlying premise of these stereotypes is primarily that of a land with a glorious classical past which has fallen into degradation and obscurity due mainly to the barbarous nature of its inhabitants, described by de Tavel as a ‘a region which is the most beautifully romantic and wildly picturesque of any on the whole European Continent — a region which, in the emphatic 7 words of the author, “would be a perfect Paradise if it was not inhabited by demons.”’

The representation of Calabria that de Tavel and his English translator construct is similar to the one adopted by most of the travellers in this study well into the nineteenth

5 [de Tavel], Calabria During a Military Residence, pp. vi-vii. 6 [de Tavel], Calabria During a Military Residence, p. vi. 7 [de Tavel], Calabria During a Military Residence, p. vii.

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263 century. Travellers like Craufurd Tait Ramage constantly positioned themselves as brave adventurers hazarding a journey through the darkest space of the European continent. These kinds of descriptions served to make Calabria more attractive to certain types of travellers, particularly those, like Edward Lear, whose circumstances and health did not allow them to travel too far in search of the exotic. Places that represented difference exercised a particular fascination for travellers and their readers alike even if these places were found not too far from Britain. To travel to such places may not have been to travel great distances but meant, at the very least, to go beyond the limits of the ordinary, and often, as in the case of Emily Lowe, the performance of an act of transgression that could be as apparently dangerous as it was seductive.

One of the main themes of this work has been that of Orientalism and how it relates to the way in which Calabria has been represented, both within Italy itself and also by the British travellers who passed through. ‘It is within the discursive field of Orientalism’, Derek Gregory proposes, ‘that these cultures of travel invested most lavishly in those other cultures that resisted appropriation by seeking to “unveil” the mystery that was secreted at their centre: by mapping what I am calling their labyrinthine spaces in a process of othering-through- ordering. There are, of course, multiple Orientalisms and many different “Orients” … the topos of the labyrinth is not uniquely associated with its constructions: it appears in many other imaginative geographies too … within nineteenth-century Orientalism, … the labyrinth was one of the most common topological figures used to convey its alien form to European and American readers.’8 The idea of the labyrinth is one that is seen again and again in references to Calabria. Norman Douglas makes frequent use of the term, nowhere as redolently as in Morano where he tells us that:

Its situation, as you approach from Castrovillari, is striking. The white houses stream in a cataract down one side of a steep conical hill that dominates the landscape–on the summit sits the inevitable castle, blue sky peering through its battered windows. But the interior is not at all in keeping with this imposing aspect. Morano, so far as I was able to explore it, is a labyrinth of sombre, tortuous and fetid alleys, where black pigs wallow amid heaps of miscellaneous and malodorous filth–in short, the town exemplifies that particular idea of civic liberty which consists in everybody being free to throw their own private refuse into the 9 public street and leave it there, from generation to generation.

8 Gregory, ‘Cultures of Travel and Spatial Formations of Knowledge,’ p.307. 9 Douglas, Old Calabria, p.141

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264 In a 1957 travel book Guido Piovene writes that, ‘Travelling in Calabria means retracing one’s steps a great number of times, like following the unpredictable path of a labyrinth. Calabria is, at one and the same time, a mosaic and a jigsaw-puzzle.’10 In this century, freelance journalist Amanda Castleman writes ‘Gazing at the palm trees and crisp blue Strait of Messina soothed us, as did the labyrinthine streets of Scilla … Yet even this town, like a perfect cameo carved from jagged rock, has a bloodthirsty mythology.’ On her honeymoon in Calabria, ‘among the bloodthirsty bandits of Italy’, she refers to Old Calabria as the ‘the only guidebook available, written by gentleman-explorer Norman Douglas in 1915, which reveals that ‘in a single month they are said to have committed 1,200 murders in Calabria. These were the bands described by British officers as “our chivalrous brigand- 11 allies.”’

Firstly, it is noteworthy that Old Calabria is the only “guide book” Castleman can find because even today, there is very little available in the way of guidebooks to Calabria. It remains a little-known region of Italy. Secondly, Douglas’ book can hardly be described as a guide book even for the period in which it was written. Even if it were written in a logical and easy to follow manner, which it is not, what Douglas wrote almost one hundred years ago can hardly be expected to be the case in more recent times. Nonetheless, it makes a good story and more pertinently, reinforces the great scenery and wild people stereotype. Castleman begins her article with the disclosure that ‘Our Tuscan friend breaks into English to make his point unmistakably clear to the stupidi touristi: “No, no, you must not go to Calabria. The banditi sell people like you there, as slaves.”’12 It appears that this reaction -even from people of other southern regions – which is often described in the accounts of travellers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when they are told of the intention to travel to Calabria, is still happening today. Back in 1841 Arthur Strutt could say from the equally maligned Basilicata:

This is the frontier of Calabria, and consequently the last place in the Province of the Basilicate. Our hostess tells us that to-morrow we shall not be able to comprehend the language, so bad is the Calabrian dialect ‘Non parlano Italiano come noi,’[they don’t speak Italian like we do] says she, with much self complacency; although certainly her own Italian is not exactly the purest Tuscan. It is better after all to expect the worst, and she has prepared us for everything by

10 Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, Mondadori, Milano, 1957, p. 659. 11 Amanda Castleman, ‘The bones of dead men: A journey in Calabria,’ Oxford Mail, 2000, , accessed 19 February 2013. 12 Castleman, ‘The bones of dead men,’ no page numbers.

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265 telling us that we shall find [when] she refers to ‘brutta lingua e brutta gente.’ 13 [ugly language, ugly people]

Basilicata14 is the equally obscure region directly above Calabria and one would imagine an unlikely source of that kind of criticism, but the nature of Italian campanilismo with its “othering” of even neighbouring villages as described in the first chapter of this work, means that it is highly like that one region will demonise another. However, in Calabria itself, people of the northernmost province may blacken the name of those further south, particularly those from the province of Reggio Calabria, in order to distance themselves from the notion of Calabrian criminality. In his memoir of travelling to the town of his parents, Gimigliano in the province of Catanzaro, Mark Rotella notes how his relatives consign the most criminal elements of Calabria to the southern-most province. Reggio Calabria. Rotella builds some drama about the danger of travel in Calabria’s rugged Aspromonte. Even though he notes that ‘the last reported kidnapping had occurred a few years before my trip’15 he writes of a harrowing experience in a car hired to take him to a village in the Aspromonte and his fears of being kidnapped, because ‘who would help this foreigner, especially here where everyone 16 relied on the mafia.’

Again and again, other southerners warn the travellers about Calabria as a place beyond the pale – Calabria, it seems, is at the very bottom of the ladder, the most difficult, brutal, uncivilised and savage place in Italy and its southernmost province, Reggio Calabria the most lawless. By and large most travellers not only refer to these warnings at the outset but proceed to prove the warnings correct. However, there are other travellers who either have different experiences altogether or are not so invested in proving themselves to be heroic adventurers braving the “badlands” of Calabria. In 1915, English writer of books on travel and various Italian topics, Edward Hutton wrote:

… the great mountains of the Sila and the Aspromonte, together with their almost complete isolation from the modern world, seemed to offer us much for the small hardships and difficulties of the way. Curiously enough, it was only of these hardships and difficulties that we heard before setting out. Kindly and well- meaning people in Naples who had heard by chance of our intention, Italians every

13 Arthur John Strutt, A Pedestrian Tour in Calabria & Sicily, T C Newby, London, 1842, p. 80. 14 In 1945 Carlo Levi published Cristo si è fermato a Eboli [Christ Stopped at Eboli] a memoir of his exile from 1935-1936 to Grassano and Aliano, remote towns in the region of Lucania which is known today as Basilicata. The title of the book comes from an expression by the people of the area who say it of themselves, meaning that they feel they have been bypassed by Christianity, by morality, by history itself - that they forgotten people in a forgotten land. 15 Mark Rotella, Stolen Figs and Other Adventures in Calabria, North Point Press, New York, 2003. 16 Rotella, Stolen Figs, p. 255.

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266 one, would have saved us from they knew not what. Not one of them had ever been into the South—they assured us of that ; it was unsafe, uncivilized, a country of brigands, hopelessly lost to the modern world, reeking with malaria, and altogether as unattractive in every way as any place could well be. “What are you going for?” they constantly demanded. “There is nothing to see, nothing to eat, no inns, no beds, no roads even, and of course no railways; moreover, you will certainly be robbed and very likely murdered...... ” Let me hasten to say that what 17 we found was something very different from this.

The South / Mezzogiorno Over time, the idea of the South in Italy has changed, its boundaries have changed – at one stage Italy as a whole was the South – indeed, it is still the south of Europe. However, the South that was constructed in the post-unification period also fluctuated over time. The Abruzzo for example is not geographically in the south but situated in the central part of Italy and yet has been identified as such due to its mountainous, brigand-riven terrain, and historically its tradition, culture, dialect and economy are more related to southern Italy. Sardinia also identified as part of the Mezzogiorno18 but clearly not situated in the south and is formerly part of the Kingdom of Piemonte. Sicily is almost another country – poor, southern but with an undeniable richness of culture that is clearly and unashamedly not European. In more recent times Lazio (the region in which Rome is situated) has been considered part of the south by northern federalists. The South then could be an ethos rather than mere geography. According to Maurizio Albahari, ‘The “South” – whether global or Italian – is not a geographically given, bounded, and autonomously meaningful unit of analysis. Rather, it needs to be understood as the product of enduring socio-economic, scholarly, and 19 governmental relations and interventions.’

There was never any question that Calabria was part of the South in a way that was perceived from the early days of travel as part of a global south. It was identified consistently over the period of travel examined in this thesis as liminally situated between Europe and the Mediterranean, and having more in common with Africa or the Levant than with Europe, or, indeed the north of Italy. There was also never any doubt that Calabria fit the paradigm of the

17 Edward Hutton, Naples and Southern Italy, Methuen, London, 1915, pp. 137-138. 18 The term Mezzogiorno [midday] first came into use in the 18th century and is the traditional term for the southern regions of Italy, encompassing the southern section of the continental Italian Peninsula and the two major islands of Sicily and Sardinia. The term was later popularised by Giuseppe Garibaldi and it eventually came into vogue after the Italian unification. It was associated with notions of poverty, illiteracy and crime: stereotypes of the South that persist to this day. 19 Maurizio Albahari, ‘Between Mediterranean Centrality and European Periphery: Migration and Heritage in Southern Italy,’ International Journal of Euro-Mediterranean Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 2008. pp. 142-143.

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267 South as defined by Giorgia Alù, ‘a reality identified by specific economic and social problems,’20 which is encapsulated within the term Mezzogiorno, a concept which homogenises the southern part of the peninsula, and emphasises its difference as a space on the border of Africa and Europe. Alù also refers to the “constructed images of the 21 Mediterranean” against which northern Europeans identified themselves.

For northern Italians, an explanation for Italy’s backwardness has been the corrupting influence of an allegedly deviant or barbarian South. Anxieties about Italy’s international status certainly explain the tenacity of such interpretations, since by locating backwardness in the South they redeem northern Italy as a modern, European region. The discourse of backwardness, poverty, criminality and lack of development that is the discourse of the Mezzogiorno is traceable not only in the stereotypes of Calabria perpetuated by Italians in the pre-and post-unification periods but is also that propagated by the travellers in this study. In earlier, colonial times, as Peter Mason notes, ‘Jesuit missionaries spoke constantly of “these Indies” of Asturias, of Calabria and Sicily, of the Abruzzi, regions where, they claimed, the 22 country people lived like “savages”, polygynous and apparently polytheistic.’

In more recent times this has evolved into the rhetoric of the Lega Nord (Northern League)23 In an unprecedented level of legitimisation of this discourse Michel Huysseune points out that there are ‘parallels between the thinking of the Lega and that of mainstream social scientists and intellectuals [which] result from a shared imaginary geography, whereby countries and regions are classified according to their degree of modernity.’24 Furthermore,

20 Giorgia Alù, ‘Pan, the Saint and the Peasant: Southern Bodies Imag(in)ed at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,’ Mediterranean Studies, vol. 14, 2005, p. 205. 21 Alù, ‘Pan, the Saint and the Peasant,’ p. 205. 22 Peter Mason, ‘Seduction from afar: Europe's inner Indians,’ Anthropos, vol. 82, no. 4/6, 1987, p. 589. Mason also quotes Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1982, who writes: ‘The word ‘Indies’ soon became a term to describe any environment in which men lived in ignorance of the Christian faith and of the proper modes of human life.’ 23 Lega Nord (North League), whose complete name is Lega Nord per l'Indipendenza della Padania (Northern League for the Independence of Padania), is a federalist and regionalist political party in Italy. It was founded in 1991 as a federation of several regional parties of Northern and Central Italy. Its main position is that the national administration places a disproportionately high tax burden on the North to bolster a struggling, criminal South. In the past the Lega advocated secession of the North, but since 1999 the League de-emphasised demands for independence focusing instead on devolution. That is, remaining within the framework of Italy, and transforming it into an Italian federal republic, divided into three “macro-regions” (“Padania”, “Etruria” and the “South”). 24 Michel Huysseune, ‘Imagined geographies: Political and scientific discourses on Italy’s North-South divide,’ Secession, History and the Social Sciences, edited by Bruno Coppieters and Michel Huysseune, VUB Brussels University Press, Brussels, 2002, p. 222.

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268 This classification predetermines the observations made by scientists, and biases their judgement in favour of the more modern North – or, at an international level, with the United States and Western Europe. It enables them to downplay the complexity of the processes that have produced, and continue to reproduce, regional differences. The Italian debate thus reveals the importance of avoiding a stereotyped and biased representation of regions and nations, and the need for self- conscious reflection on the terms and methods used in inter-regional comparisons. It also shows, however, how an imaginary geography and the ideological value 25 attributed to it can shield social scientists from embarking on such a reflection.

The view of the South as a parasite on the body national and the North as “disadvantaged” for its productivity and being fiscally exploited by the Italian state in order to subsidize the South has become common even by social scientists and intellectuals.26 Thus the South has been officially created as an exotic, socially and morally ill, politically unstable and culturally backward imaginary geography, the Mezzogiorno. As for Calabria, it is often placed at the bottom of a southern hierarchy of difference and degradation by other Italians from the north and equally from other southern regions. Reggio Calabria, the southernmost province of the region, has been singled out by other Calabrians as the source of the worst kind of criminality and barbarity. This proliferation of imaginary geographies is based on the claim for modernity over “backwardness”, of a European present as opposed to a Mediterranean past.

Travel Writing and National Identity Rosemary Sweet reminds us that there are limitations to historical records and that many of the places travellers described in their diaries, correspondence and published accounts represented a brief stay. Impressions would have been formed as quickly as those of the modern-day package tourist and therefore comments are often superficial, glib and remarkably similar. One consequence of this is that the travellers often relied on either guide books (if there were any) or the works of other travellers or sources for added information to fill gaps.

Travellers were also susceptible to the preconceptions they carried with them. Sweet makes the point that ‘the ways in which these descriptions were framed, the choices made as

25 Huysseune, ‘Imagined geographies,’ p. 222. 26 Huysseune, ‘Imagined geographies,’ p. 211.

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269 to what observations to include and the commentary that was introduced were all reflective 27 both of shifting attitudes…and of an evolving sense of what it meant to be British.’ What did it mean to be British, indeed to be English? Despite a plethora of studies on the subject, there is no consistent response. As discussed in a previous chapter Linda Colley has argued that, to reconcile English and Scottish national feeling, a specific British Protestant national identity was forged. This identity contrasted with French ways and Catholicism in the long wars of the 18th century. In his book, The Making of English National Identity, Krishnan Kumar makes the point that, ‘The English saw themselves in the mirror of the larger enterprises in which they were engaged for most of their history. They found their identity as constructors of Great Britain, creators of the British Empire, pioneers of the world’s first industrial civilization.’28 The British saw themselves, furthermore, as the natural inheritors of the Roman Empire as opposed to the feminised, degraded Italians of modern times.

Often, reinforcement of English character traits occurred after an event on the continent. For example, in the wake of the1848 revolutions, it was evident to most English commentators that the English demonstrated the qualities that were critical to making representative government work, in contrast to the French and most other European peoples. As far as the travellers in this study are concerned, the English Catholic Swinburne may be Catholic but he is above all an Englishman and distances himself from the pagan practices that pass for Catholicism in Calabria. Ramage is a Scotsman but happy to be regarded as English. Gissing and Douglas, despite identifying as “outsiders” make frequent comparisons between England and Calabria which are not flattering to the latter. Douglas, due to his many indiscretions, was forced to “skip” a number of countries to evade the law. In this sense, he may be termed an exile but he does not see himself as such and certainly didn’t act like an exile. Rather, he seems more like the expatriate as defined by Mary McCarthy:

… a hedonist. He is usually an artist or a person who thinks he is artistic. He has no politics or, if he has any, like the Brownings he has acquired them from the country he has adopted. The average expatriate thinks about his own country rarely and with great unwillingness. He feels he has escaped from it. The expatriate is a by-product of industrialism. The Industrial Revolution sent him abroad, in headlong flight from ugliness. At the same time, of course, he owes his

27 Rosemary Sweet, ‘British perceptions of Italian cities in the long eighteenth century,’ Kazuhiko Kondo and Miles Taylor (eds), British History, 1600-2000: Expansion in Perspective, Institute of Historical Research, London, 2010, p. 154. 28 Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity, (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, viewed on Kindle Edition, Kindle locations 58-61.

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270 presence abroad to the prosperity induced by the factories and manufactures he is 29 fleeing from.

This certainly applies to Norman Douglas, moving from an industrial north - his grandfather was driven to mill cotton in Germany to fund his estate in Scotland - to a life of lotus-eating in the south.

Gissing considered himself an exile - exiled from his rightful place in society by a shameful act, incarceration and an attempt at a new life in a new country. Classically, exile was a punishment by a higher authority in the form of banishment. While Gissing was not officially banished he had the exile's characteristic restlessness and felt himself exiled from his true position in life. But for all Gissing’s and Douglas’s sense of alienation from their homeland, they made frequent references to superior English ways in comparison to those of the Calabrians.

As for Emily Lowe she is as convinced as are her male compatriots of British superiority, particularly, she informs us, in ‘the great test of character - truth - [where] the English stand pre-eminent: not but that in great matters, where their honour has been engaged, they may be trusted ; but in the little every-day passages of life, partly from volubility, and partly from a good- natured wish to say what is pleasing, they are liable to slips of the tongue which would degrade an English gentleman.’30 Truth, sincerity and honesty are commonly attributed to English – usually by the English themselves. Another common-place trait often referred to is eccentricity, and certainly with regards the travellers in this study, both for their personalities but mainly for their choice of travel destination. But although this attribution may seem to have been the case since time immemorial, Julia Saville argues that this is not the case and that the association of eccentricity with Englishness began with the rise of nationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when it became cultivated 31 consciously.

29 Mary McCarthy, ‘A guide to exiles, expatriates, and internal emigrés,’ New York Review of Books, 1972, < http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1972/mar/09/a-guide-to-exiles-expatriates-and-internal-emigres/? no page numbers=false>, accessed 23 July 2012. 30 [Emily Lowe], Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and on the Top of Mount Aetna, Routledge, Warnes and Routledge, London, 1859, pp. 247-248. 31 Julia F Saville, ‘Eccentricity as Englishness in David Copperfield,’ SEL Studies in English Literature 1500- 1900, vol. 42, no. 4, 2002, pp. 781-782.

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271 In fact eccentricity is very much linked to honesty and sincerity because as Saville points out, ‘From within English society it is the mask of oddity that unmasks hypocrisy, constituting earnestness and decency as the bedrock of a moral society [and] beyond the borders of England, within the broader empire, it takes the form of a rhetorical and affective excess that parades the Englishman’s cultural difference even as it helps to stabilize and disseminate English moral values.’32 Thus eccentricity is a positive trait for the English, although definitely not admired in foreigners who are never eccentric but strange, excessive, or irrational. As far as the Calabrians which feature in the books of the travellers studied, they are portrayed as excessive and nonsensical figures of fun – Lear’s over-reactive Calabrian gentry, Douglas’s irrational and superstitious participants in oriental-like religious practices, Lowe’s childlike and foolish sonnet-writing Calabrian dandies. On the whole, it seems that all travellers stereotype the Calabrians as unpredictable, criminal and deceitful.

This thesis does not attempt to suggest that British travellers to Calabria created the stereotypes of Calabrians that are still in circulation today, but that they were instrumental in perpetuating and reinforcing these stereotypes. As Margaret Hunt puts it,

The English did not “learn” their racism from travel narratives. What the narratives did was to compile and collect such beliefs in an easily accessible place, present them in such a way that they could readily cross-fertilize one another … and supply a powerful confirmation of received wisdom via eyewitness “evidence” from “typical” and therefore highly credible English travellers. They helped change racism from a rather unsystematic, if nonetheless widely held, medley of popular beliefs into an elaborately worked out taxonomy that embraced the entire globe; made claims to be scientific; and situated Europeans, and 33 especially the English, at the pinnacle of the racial hierarchy.

Silvana Patriarca demonstrates how the Italians themselves have been complicit in reproducing negative representations of their country, and in particular, the South, while at the same time denouncing these representations. She argues that southern Italy became increasingly constructed as Italy’s “internal Other”, which ‘the “modern” Italy of the patriotic imaginary could not contain and recognize fully as its own. But another major outcome of this unequal dialogue was a process of “self-Othering”, an absorption and redeployment of negative stereotypes relating to the Italian people as a whole (especially the indolent

32 Saville, ‘Eccentricity as Englishness in David Copperfield,’ p. 795. 33 Margaret Hunt, ‘Racism, Imperialism, and the Traveler's Gaze in Eighteenth-Century England,’ The Journal of British Studies, vol.32, no. 4, 1993, Making the English Middle Class, ca. 1700-1850, p.346.

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272 southerner stereotype) and coexisting with the patriotic denunciation of the foreigners’ 34 misrepresentations of Italy.’

As a place generally described as blighted by poverty, natural disasters and organised crime, Calabria is haunted by the old stereotypes of corrupted southerners. Patriarca reminds us that negative stereotypes of the Italians have been widely circulating in Europe at least since the late Middle Ages and that the vast literature of the Grand Tour also contributed to the consolidation of its own set of unflattering images of the Italians. ‘Notwithstanding the pleasures that travelers often found in some of these very characteristics,’ she writes, ‘they often described the inhabitants of the peninsula as indolent, morally and sexually lax, and easy to resort to fights and arms. Romanticism then added yet another layer to this complex edifice by insisting on the passionate nature of the Italian people.’35 It is clear that these stereotypes were taken on board and increasingly relegated to the far south of the peninsula by the Italians themselves. In his book Darkest Italy - The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860-1900, John Dickie wrote, ‘representations of the South from the centers of political and cultural power in Liberal Italy were informed by a repertoire of stock images…[and] stereotypes …[e.g.] illiteracy, superstition, corruption, brigandages, dirt, disease, idleness, ‘mafiosita.’36 These images and stereotypes are formed from existing assumptions and, again according to Dickie, ‘the perceptions of the traveler in strange territory, it need hardly be said, are never wholly spontaneous or immaculate. Travel is a culturally saturated experience, structured through powerful precedents.’37 It seems that these preconceptions have existed for a long time and continue, in fact, up to the present time.

Vorrei segnalare che il titolo «imprenditore calabrese» dell'articolo presente nella prima pagina sulla Gazzetta di Reggio mi disturba non poco. Non riesco a capire perché per indicare la provenienza di una persona non si usi il Comune o al massimo la Provincia. Nel caso di Reggio è frequente che molti reati, sono notoriamente commessi da persone che provengono da un solo comune della Calabria, ma al 99% dei casi sia la televisione che i giornali locali invece di comunicare appunto il Comune o al massimo la Provincia di appartenenza, indicano la Regione. Così si crea, nel caso della Calabria, che il termine «calabrese» diventi sempre di più sinonimo di delinquente, anche se varie aree del territorio calabrese sono esenti dal crimine organizzato e lottano per mantenerlo tale. [I would like to point out that the title “Calabrian entrepreneur” in the article on the first page of the

34 Silvana Patriarca, ‘Indolence and Regeneration: Tropes and Tensions of Risorgimento Patriotism,’ The American Historical Review, vol. 110, no. 2, 2005, p. 383. 35 Patriarca, ‘Indolence and Regeneration,’, pp. 386-387. 36 John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1999, p. 103. 37 Dickie, Darkest Italy, p. 7.

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273 Gazzetta di Reggio disturbs me greatly. I cannot understand why to indicate the origin of a person, the city or at most the province [they come from is not referred to. In the case of Reggio it is common that many crimes are committed by people known to come from this one community of Calabria, but in 99% of cases on both television and in local newspapers instead of communicating the precise municipality or at most the province, the region as a whole is referred to. This leads to, in the case of Calabria, the term “Calabrian” becoming more and more synonymous with delinquency, although several areas of Calabria are exempt from organized crime 38 and fight to keep it that way.]

As recently as 2005, a book by an Englishwoman married to an Italian and living in Liguria describes the continuing prejudice against Calabrians. A person from a Calabrian background living in the north of Italy, apparently, does not say where he or she is from, referring merely to ‘farther south’. Annie Hawes describes the process as described to her by her sister-in-law:

Can’t speak Ligurian? Then her parents, or her grandparents, are from somewhere else….if your interviewee is from Somewhere Else, but doesn’t name the place, it has to be Calabria. If she was from the Veneto, Bologna, Emilia Romagna, even Sicily, she would have said so. Only Calabria, apparently, is so shameful a place of origin that you don’t name it; everyone will guess anyway, by the mere fact of 39 your marriage.

Why would it be acceptable to say you are from Sicily and not from Calabria? A large part of the stereotype about the Calabrians is to do with their perceived criminality but there is a healthy Mafia in Sicily and other parts of the South. It is not difficult to find many derogatory statements against Calabrians on the internet, statements that recall the epithets of ages past. A quick browse reveals comments like the following:

i calabresi qui al nord…. nella zone in cui vivo sono visti abbastanza male...ma non perche noi siamo razzisti ecc...ma perche effetivamente i calabresi che abbiamo sono dei buoni da niente e sono solo capaci di fare risse e cose del genere. [Calabrians here in the north ... in the area I live in have shown themselves to be significantly bad..but not because we are racists etc...but because effectively, the Calabrians here are good for nothing and are only capable of 40 causing fights and things like that.]

38 Umberto Antonio Arnone, ‘I calabresi non sono tutti uguali,’ Gazzetta di Reggio, 25 novembre 2010, , accessed 13 February 2015. 39 Annie Hawes, Journey to the South: A Calabrian Homecoming, Penguin, London, 2005, p. 5. 40 Sono calabrese è vorrei sapere i calabresi come son visti al nord Italia? , accessed 15 February 2015.

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274

NON VOGLIO OFFENDERE, ma i calabresi secondo me sono cafoni e maleducati. In verità sono un pò antipatici e chiusi. [I don’t wish to offend but Calabrians according to me are uneducated hayseeds. In truth they are a bit 41 disagreeable and closed.]

Somehow, the criminality of the Calabrian is considered more savage, the people more backward. Some travel writers have equated criminal characteristics with the rocky landscape, describing the people of the Aspromonte, for example, as brutish, natural criminals, hard as the rocks which shelter them. Others, like the English traveller Bryn Gunnell, while still making the rock comparison, seem to equate this with non-conformity.

The people may not be complex, but they are all of a piece, growing from the inside like a rock. Their non-conformity is genuine because it is unconscious. Their realism may appear brash, but that is because, instead of worrying about 42 reality, they live it.

Earlier in his chronicle, Gunnell describes the Calabrian as a ‘coiled spring of energy that might be released by one touch or change of circumstance’43, as volatile and deceiving as the landscape, it seems. Gunnell is an Englishman who made the journey to Calabria with his wife in the early 1960s, on foot or hitchhiking, camping at night. Wandering the Calabrian forests and villages with rucksacks on their backs, the Gunnells were the vanguard for the walkers and backpackers who make the trek today.

Reclaiming Calabria There were famous English precursors to the above-mentioned Gunnells and one of these was traveller/landscape artist Edward Lear. Today, another track in the relatively new national park of the Aspromonte is the “English Man Trail” - named for Lear who covered the trail in the summer of 1847, afterwards publishing his journals covering the trip. Since its inception as a national park, the Aspromonte has offered many different walking itineraries that cross these old tracks including “The Brigand’s Path”. This path runs along the ridges from the southernmost point of the Aspromonte north to the Serre (the narrowest part of the Calabrian peninsula). It was the great route favoured by brigands, rebels and fugitives, crossing areas of

41 Cosa ne pensate dei calabresi? 2012, , accessed 15 February 2015. 42 Bryn Gunnell, Calabrian Summer, Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1965, p. 176. 43 Gunnell, Calabrian Summer, p. 95.

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275 44 low density of population and passing close by remote villages including Platì.

Calabria’s National Parks commemorate both Norman Douglas and Edward Lear. That these journeys are now inscribed into the Calabrian landscape by the Calabrians themselves – mainly for the purpose of promoting the region to tourists – indicates that some sort of cultural transformation has taken place. The Calabrians have, at the very least, recognised that there is something to be gained by adopting an Englishman’s representation of them and their region. Their reasoning may be more complex than that of the purely entrepreneurial, as noted previously in this study – creating an “The Englishman’s Trail” overturns the character of the encounters between the English travellers and Calabria as described in their writings, exoticizing English culture and repositioning it as part of Calabrian heritage.

Illus. 10: Stele Edward Lear, memorial to Edward Lear at Montebello Ionico Photo by Nicola e Pina - http://www.panoramio.com/photo/20058838

One travel theorist reminds us that ‘that cross-cultural contacts in travel generate a new kind of cultural self-consciousness, a species of collective self-awareness.’45 The irony of Lear's and Douglas’s commemoration by the people of the Aspromonte is that accounts, which in the past contributed to a general stereotype of the Calabrians as the Others of Europe

44 This village, together with San Luca and Natile, forms the triangle which became known as the kidnap capital of Italy. Travel writer Charles Richards, describing his visit to the area in the early 1990s, pointed out that in the coastal town of Bovalino (below Platì), the ‘locals proudly pointed out their own millionaires’ row, a street of large and inelegant buildings [on] the Via Borghetti, local pronunciation for Paul Getty’, whose grandson was seized and held for ransom for six months in 1973. 45 Eric J Leed, The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism, Harper Collins, New York, 1991, p. 20. Leed is making reference to a suggestion of anthropologist Frederick Barth.

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276 - of Italy in fact - are now the basis for a positive promotion of the region. The Calabrians who remain in the Aspromonte and their descendants elsewhere in Italy and throughout the world, may be glad that Lear's and Douglas’s journeys to their region over one century ago have contributed to the environmental preservation of the area. By including these journeys through their landscapes in official tourist discourse, the people of Calabria’s Aspromonte themselves have embraced a kind of romantic sublime reading of the land they call home.

Very few Calabrian websites, particularly those of cities and municipal areas do not refer to the British travellers of the past. One example is that from the Lamezian Plain. In its section on Ramage it gives a positive account of the region based on the words of the Scottish traveller:

The Scottish humanist Craufurd Tait Ramage undertook his voyage through the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1828. In his pages that describe the ruins of Terina at Nicastro, the traveler underscores the hospitality of the people, and above all that of Don Michele Procida, whose home was “surrounded by plants that where we come from grow only in greenhouses.” After describing the curiosity that was aroused by his presence among the people of S. Biagio, Ramage emphasizes that the hills were “covered by immense olive trees and the balmy fragrance of the citrus groves in this zone could have induced me to think that I had arrived in blessed Arabia.” Even Nicastro elicited his astonishment. It was a city of elegant buildings, of romantic aspect, surmounted by the castle with massive towers. “Nothing can be more beautiful than this valley that I have crossed: the fields covered with flowers, laurel hedges, blueberries and pomegranates, making it into a real paradise. . .In the evening I went out on the hill that dominates the city, from which one can enjoy an agreeable view. . .the sun that was about to set gilded with its rays the Gulf of S. Eufemia. The ‘Sinus Terinaeus’(Terinean coastline) offered one of the most beautiful spectacles imaginable, and it saddened me when the 46 shadows of the evening obliged me to go away.”

For many of the British travellers and for Calabrians themselves, the discourse of Magna Graecia is of a glorious classical past that locals use to promote their region and many foreign travellers sought in their travels, often using the landscape and its features to expound on their own knowledge of the classics and ancient history. For both travellers of the past and the Calabrians of today, Magna Graecia is a trope around which they can show off – for the former, their knowledge; for the latter, their land. There are countless websites today that use

46 Christopher Costanzo, ‘The Travelers: The Lamezian Plain as recounted by foreign travelers in the 1700s and 1800s,’ Lamezia Storica, 2000-2010, , accessed 24 June 2013.

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277 the words of the British travellers to promote villages and cities across Calabria as well as travel blogs that pass judgement on these same places, referring to the erstwhile travellers.

The Italian website Naturaliter, which is a Co-operative Tourism Society founded in 1998 and headquartered in the Area of the Greeks of Calabria in Aspromonte National Park lists a number of hikes in the Park including one they call “In the Englishman’s Footsteps”. As noted in the chapter on Edward Lear, the commemoration of his journey through the Aspromonte has been made primarily to attract tourism to a little-known part of Italy. The Lear section of the website states that:

In 1847 the famous English writer and painter Edward Lear (of The Owl and the Pussycat fame) travelled throughout Calabria on foot, accompanied by a guide and with a donkey to carry his luggage. In his travel diary, published as Diary of a Voyage on Foot in Calabria and the Kingdom of Naples, Edward Lear recounts his experiences as traveller in places that he describes as ‘exotic’, and whose rugged landscapes inspired numerous and precious prints. He was the guest of a number of families of the time who helped him to better understand the economic, cultural and social reality of the area. As testimony to his ground-breaking trip, town councils around the Province of Reggio Calabria have dedicated a number of 47 monuments and plaques to him.

There is very little evidence in Lear’s Journals of a Landscape Painter in Calabria and the Kingdom of Naples of any particular understanding of ‘the economic, cultural and social reality of the area.’ This is interesting because it re-writes history or at the very least puts a very different slant on it so that Lear’s commemoration is based on an ideal but hardly real version of his connection to the people he met in Calabria. Websites from a number of places within Calabria that quote British travellers usually adopt a more upbeat slant on their writings to represent their villages and towns in a positive light for potential tourists. There is a sense of re-appropriation in many of these websites, of constructing a more positive identity from that of the more conflicted travellers’ accounts. This re-appropriation consists of using what is positive in these accounts to re-define the Calabrians’ relationship with their own territory and constructing an idea of this territory that will appeal to future travellers.

A high school website in Reggio Calabria, describing the work of Swinburne, makes claims that are clearly those insisted upon by Swinburne himself, that he ‘is a clear reporter of the situations he sees and, as a good journalist, he describes everything without any sign of

47 Edward Lear, ‘Paesaggista/viaggiatore inglese da “Diari di un viaggio a piedi in Calabria e nel Regno di Napoli,”’ Editori Riuniti 1992, < www.naturaliterweb.it/english.htm>, accessed 3 December 2012.

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278 invention.’ Furthermore, the writers of this website have interpreted Travels in the two Sicilies as ‘a clear view of Calabria, a land of great potentialities but without any political guide, a land whose inhabitants are poor but perfect and nice guests, a land of wonderful and abandoned landscapes.’ They have taken on board the advice of a traveller from over a century ago and concluded that ‘reading his book should make us feel a great desire to exploit all our possibilities in order to use our glorious past as the right guide to build a new Calabria 48 based above all on the development of agriculture and tourism.’

There are many ways in which the Calabrians adopt the writings of the travellers studied in this work to promote their region. Real estate agents commonly refer to Gissing when selling a property in or near Cosenza, as in for example, the following extract from an advertisement for an apartment in Amendolara:

Having been conquered and invaded by Normans, Romans, Greeks and the Spanish it’s a wonder this historic city still presents some of the most beautiful baroque architecture, as English author George Gissing commented “to call it picturesque is to use an inadequate word”. Now, Cosenza has become the most important commercial and agricultural centres of Calabria with the seat of the 49 region’s newest university on the outskirts of the city.

The Travel Club A fascinating literature of British travel to Calabria developed with those travellers intrepid enough to make the journey, most of whom referred back to those who had preceded them, creating a dialogue across decades and passing on the baton of the Calabrian travellers’ club. Indeed, many of the travellers studied in this thesis are often more intent on referring to, contradicting or validating the accounts of those who went before them, than on the people and land of Calabria itself. In the years following, a number of other travellers, writers, and, today, bloggers, as noted above, make reference to the travellers examined in this work. The following extract is from the foreword to an American edition of By the Ionian Sea by the publisher Thomas Bird Mosher:

I must call attention to “A Letter of Gissing’s” contributed by Edgar J Goodspeed to The Nation (NY) August 17, 1916, as it bears directly on our book and has to do

48 Liceo Scientifico Statale ‘Leonardo da Vinci,’ Reggio Calabria, 2004, The English travellers - Henry Swinburne, , accessed 3 December 2012. 49 Damatt Property Sales and Rentals, Apartment, Amendolara, Calabria, Italy, 2009, , accessed 3 December 2012.

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279 with Gissing’s American experience at an earlier date. From this article, I quote the final paragraph: "Some American scholars, landing once at Paola, and looking up at the little yellowish town high above the shore, and then mounting to it and finding lodging at the ill-looking inn, the Leone, in a certain room that looked forth upon 'a wild leafy garden' and 'the broad pebbly beach, with its white foam edging the blue expanse of sea,' found it all strangely and unaccountably familiar; until of a sudden, as one of them has told me, they remembered that it was through Gissing's 50 eyes that they had seen it all before in By the Ionian Sea."

In a New York Times article, author Paul Hofman writes:

During my latest stay in Cosenza I reread chapters from Norman Douglas’s “Old Calabria”, published in 1915. This intrepid and quirky Scottish traveler who, among other feats, traversed the Sila on foot, tells of villages without male adults - they had all emigrated to America - and of grinding poverty, brigandage, 51 widespread malaria and even pockets of cholera.

On the website Samefacts52 Herschel blogs that he visited Squillace in Calabria ‘largely because [he] was following in the footsteps of George Gissing’s ramble narrated in his wonderful book “By the Ionian Sea”’. Many recent internet items about Calabria accept without question the versions of these erstwhile travellers and perpetuate the same stereotypes, and often, inaccuracies. Ian Thomson, writing a review of By the Ionian Sea for The Spectator informs us that:

Gissing was brave to venture into the remote mountain villages of this part of the Mezzogiorno. The Calabrian version of the Sicilian Mafia, the fearful ’Ndrangheta, had often sequestered kidnap victims there. When Edward Lear sketched the region’s fantastic rocks and waterfalls in 1847, he was robbed for his trouble. Like Lear before him, Gissing was fascinated by southern Italy’s legendary Magna Graecia. When the Greeks settled in Calabria in the second millennium BC, they left behind temples and theatres, and moreover introduced Italy to olives and vines. By the Ionian Sea is above all a hymn to the Hellenic culture and ancient civilities of Calabria, and an undisputed travel masterpiece. It has long been out of print, so it’s good to see this splendid new edition from the enterprising Signal 53 Books, based in Oxford.

50 Thomas Bird Mosher, ‘Foreword,’ George Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, Mosher, Portland ME, 1920, p.vii. 51 Paul Hofmann, ‘Calabria by the sea,’ New York Times, 1999, , accessed 3 December 2012. 52 Herschel, response to Keith Humphreys, ‘The world’s most boring museums,’ 2012, , accessed 12 June 2013. 53 Ian Thomson, ‘A hymn to Hellenic culture,’ review of By the Ionian Sea by George Gissing, 2004, , accessed 24 April 2010.

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280 Firstly it is important to note that the word ‘ndrangheta was not in use during Gissing’s time and that it was not Edward Lear who was robbed during a sketching trip in Calabria, but Arthur Strutt. Lear was not fascinated by Magna Graecia and whether or not By the Ionian Sea is a masterpiece is not undisputed but is, indeed, up for discussion. Travel bloggers who have discovered Calabria through the writings of those early travellers present, on the whole, a positive view of these and of Calabria. The following by blogger Waheeda Harris, is typical of this kind of writing:

Old Calabria engages the reader, offering a unique view of the mountain ranges, dense forests, and the remote countryside that had seen Greek settlers, Roman conquerors and the Ndrangheta crime family take advantage and leave their marks. Douglas wanders the area, sharing his descriptions of the people and towns, giving a reader a view into daily life, from how their work day is, to what they eat to the traditional celebrations of birth, death, and weddings. Old Calabria reads like a vivid photo album of the hard, challenging and joyful life of Calabrians at the 54 beginning of the 20th century.

Although the consensus view seems to be the one expressed above, there is by no means universal endorsement by modern bloggers of these old travel books. Vera Marie Badertscher on her blog, Good Old Travel Literature Revisited Blog: A Traveler's Library, does not share Waheeda Harris’s approval of Old Calabria, instead she informs us that:

Old Calabria tells us a great deal about Norman Douglas and the aristocratic tradition of European travel in late 19th and early 20th century. Unfortunately, Douglas’ book did little to persuade me to head to this remote land. Contrary to the worshipful preface and lush back cover notes, I found the book ponderous and unlovable. After attempting to join Douglas on his trip through Calabria, Italy, I have to agree that he is erudite. Almost more an encyclopedia than a travel book, Old Calabria makes me wonder at how large the original reading audience could have been. How many people in Europe in the early 20th century had an education that prepared them to pick up on threads of history at the mere mention of a name (without explanation)? How many could skim through the untranslated phrases in Italian, French and Latin scattered through the book? When Douglas travels, he carries books. As he goes, he reads what others from Greek or Renaissance travelers wrote and he folds their versions of Calabria into his own. Unfortunately, Douglas’ erudite spills over into the pedantic, and in my opinion loses its value for 55 the 21st century Internetized reader traveling to Italy.

54 Waheeda Harris, ‘Travel fave - Old Calabria by Norman Douglas,’ Welcome to Gone to Swan: stories and photos from my wanderings around our planet, 2010, , accessed 12 November 2012. 55 Vera Marie Badertscher, ‘Good old travel literature revisited blog: A traveler's library,’ 2010, , accessed 3 December 2012.

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281 Many travel articles on Calabria refer to the lawlessness as a major deterrent to travel there. Clare Longrigg, writing for the Guardian in 2004, notes that Calabria's lawless reputation has kept it well and truly off the tourist map,

The few writers who braved getting robbed or washed away by landslides, most notably Edward Lear and Norman Douglas, were inspired by a combination of landscape, history and terrifying folklore. On that score, little has changed. The ruins of Magna Graecia, Norman castles and Byzantine cathedrals are sited in panoramic positions, where the juxtaposition of mountain and coastal scenery is breathtaking. The recent history of the region, with hair-raising tales of kidnappings and blood feuds which have wiped out the male population of entire 56 towns, fuels the fevered imagination.

The sublime reading of the region notwithstanding, Longrigg’s article is designed to encourage travel to Calabria and perhaps she is not so far off track. Certainly, this kind of reading of Calabria, especially by the early travellers including Ramage, Strutt and Lowe, served to attract a readership and to “fuel fevered imaginations” across more than a century of travel to the region.

The power of the word Again and again, modern travel writers refer to the authentic travel experience, the authenticity of the ancient towns of Calabria, many of them abandoned like Pentedàttilo. The organisers of the Pentedàttilo Film Festival have certainly made this the centre of their promotion of the town, writing on their website:

It has been more than a century and a half since the Calabrian tour of the famous English writer and illustrator Edward Lear, and it is still undeniable the evocative power that Pentedàttilo arouses in the visitors who increasingly choose the majestic landscapes of Calabria as a destination for their journey. As Lear himself said, these landscapes are of great pictorial and poetic interest and the name Calabria is quite poetic itself. This is also the reason why we strongly insist, now more than ever, on the need to preserve these places in their landscape entirety, in their natural and historical peculiarity, activating innovative cultural activities so to enhance their inherent vocation. Today, the ancient village of Pentedàttilo is Calabria’s touristic and cultural icon, and in recent years it has become, for the intense restoration and cultural promotion activities, a "case study" which made it a privileged destination for a diversified touristic flow. Pentedàttilo Film Festival

56 Clare Longrigg, ‘The forgotten quarter,’ The Guardian, 2004, , accessed 3 December 2012.

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282 plays a part in giving back to these places its [sic] fascinating peculiarity, 57 promoting an active and sustainable artistic restoration.

This website also provides the gothically thrilling story, related by Lear in his journal of the massacre of the Alberti family on the night of Easter 1686 with the clichéd preface, ‘Some people say that among the ruins of the old castle at night, you can still feel the hooves of the horses silently approaching from Montebello towards Pentedàttilo. Someone else says that when the wind blows violently through the gorges of the rock you can still hear the screams of the Marquis Lorenzo Alberti. What is certain is that the story of the massacre of 58 Pentedàttilo is still a mystery who [sic] wants to be told.’

The legend of the travel writers to Calabria and their tales of a bloodthirsty, crime-riven South exercise a powerful pull on people even today. As demonstrated, much of what was written by these men and women has been adopted as historical and cultural truths, often by the Calabrians themselves. The writer, even the travel writer who most people would accept has a subjective point of view, is still regarded as the authority with his/her presumed knowledge, instructing and guiding the reader for simple information dissemination, for marketing, and for entertainment. John B Davis and Marc L Miller remind us that:

The oscillatory (at times, ambiguous) relationship between travel writers and readers - alternately offering egalitarianism and asymmetry - is essential for explaining the influence these writers hold. The egalitarianism's presumed consensus, suggesting a similar view of the world, fosters trust between reader and writer. This trust, in turn, fosters adherence or even obedience, allowing the writer to assume an authoritarian stance. The reader opens himself to the writer's 59 influence, absorbing and applying the writer's transferred knowledge.

Travel writers not only influence the way a consumer of their work plans a trip, but also how he/she views the locals and what preconceptions are carried with the travellers. On the other hand, how destinations and locals experience the reader’s travel is also affected. Travel writers have the ability to influence travel patterns and beliefs because they are imbued with local knowledge and expertise. Travel writers like Swinburne and Douglas are still being read and referred to because they are considered to some degree authoritative.

57 ‘The ghost town,’ Pentedàttilo Film Festival, , accessed 3 December 2012. 58 ‘The ghost town,’ Pentedàttilo Film Festival. 59 John B Davis and Marc L Miller, ‘Travel Writers as Power Brokers: Testimonies from the Front Lines of M.Tourism,’ paper presented at 1999 International Symposium on Coastal and Marine Tourism, Vancouver, BC Canada April 26-29, p. 252, , accessed 3 December 2012.

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283

Davis and Miller reinforce how the itineraries of the Grand Tour tourists were dictated by guidebooks, relying so heavily on these that ‘they rarely, if ever, strayed from the texts’ recommendations: A commonplace spot, no matter how tiny, could attract great attention if it had been ennobled by the gaze of one of the ancients. ... On the other hand, all visual perception was lost in the face of sites not mentioned in prestigious texts.’60 Travel writers have been proven to have an influence on travel choice and behaviour and their influence, according to Davis and Miller, makes them ‘(intentional or unintentional) policy-makers, determining how destinations — including their economy, culture, and people — will be impacted by the outside world. To overlook the integral role that travel writers play in the 61 tourism industry would be to ignore one of the largest drivers of touristic behavior.’

Constant references to a savage land within the boundaries of Europe must have been alluring to those who sought novelty and adventure. Derek Gregory notes that by the early decades of the nineteenth century ‘the quest for novelty - and its close companion exclusivity - had been sharpened by class distinction: those who followed the beaten track and made the conventional responses were mere “tourists”, whereas those who did not were exalted “travellers”’.62 The travellers examined in this work certainly did not wish to be seen as mere “tourists” even though as many commentators have noted, the distinction between the two is by no means black and white. This was particularly so as time went on and the number of people who had been to Calabria and written about their experience increased. Writers needed to find newer, more engaging ways to attract a readership. What might have been found novel and transgressive in the earlier accounts had lost its uniqueness and, as Marguerite Helmers and Tilar Mazzeo have observed, the search for novelty and difference to describe an experience that is compellingly unique becomes more and more difficult. At the same time, the desire for novel insights and ways of experiencing what had become familiar has not decreased. Helmers and Mazzeo remind us that:

The discourse of travelers from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries was based upon differences, oppositions between those who have and have not: urban/rural, Christian/pagan, literate/illiterate, civilized/savage. At the same time, as Mary Louise Pratt notes, there was a certain redundancy to the accounts. The repetitive nature of the encounter with the “savage,” for example,

60 Davis and Miller, ‘Travel Writers as Power Brokers,’ p. 262. 61 Davis and Miller, ‘Travel Writers as Power Brokers,’ p. 262. 62 Derek Gregory, ‘Cultures of travel and spatial formations of knowledge (Kultur des Reisens und räumliche Formationen von Wissen), ‘Erdkunde, vol. 54, no. 4, 2000, pp.297-319.

Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

284 crossed centuries. Likewise, the search for differences was often tempered by a comparative rhetoric, in which the unique culture or language was translated in terms of familiar practices, objects, or texts. These important critical investigations remind scholars of the importance of point of view, narratorial construction, and codes of representation used to describe and imagine another culture and another 63 set of experiences.

This desire for a “new angle” led Emily Lowe to adopt her “unprotected female” persona and Edward Lear to reinvent himself as a “topographical artist”. It gave travellers like Moens and Strutt the impetus to write about their experiences with the barbarous brigands of the south and others like Ramage and Gissing to deliver their classical tours of discovery. In the final analysis, there is very little difference about the way the Calabrians and their region are described in the works of these early travellers, and indeed, by more recent visitors to the deep south.

Leslie Gardiner, another Englishman who travelled through Calabria in the mid-1960s, describes the Aspromonte as a kind of land of entropy, everything torn away and stripped back to the bare bones in these “badlands” of the Italian peninsula:

Facing west, I looked upon...the folded ridges which mass on Aspromonte, gathering by leaps and bounds to over six thousand feet – Calabria’s last fling, the climax of the peninsula saddle, where limestone gives way to grit. Giustino Fortunato calls this afterthought of Italy a sfasciume geologico protesto sul mare – ‘a geological wreck sticking up out of the sea’… To the walker dragging his aching calves across Calabria it is indeed a wrecked land, a land not recovered from devastation. And devastation of one kind or another – by foreign invaders, civil war, goats, tree-felling, earthquake and fiumara 64 floods – is the whole history of it.

The fiumare mentioned by Gardiner are rivers without springs that dry out in summer when there is a shortage of fresh water. In the wet season, they become torrents that plunge down to the sea usually wreaking havoc as they go – causing mud slides, massive erosion and showering boulders on villages. It is also, as every commentator notes, earthquake country. Helmers and Mazzeo refer to ‘Rojek’s65 thesis is that these places of tragedy—what he calls Black Spots— attract tourists precisely because of their power to startle us with the possibility

63 Marguerite Helmers and Tilar Mazzeo, ‘Unraveling the traveling self,’ The Traveling and Writing Self, Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle UK, 2007, p. 2. 64 Lesley Gardiner, South to Calabria, Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1968, pp. 180-181. 65 Chris Rojek, Ways of Seeing - Modern Transformations in Leisure and Travel, Macmillan, London, 1993.Within the “Dark Tourism” or “Thanatourism” area of study, Chris Rojek developed the concept of “Black Spots” to describe areas where disasters or dark deeds occurred which attract tourists.

Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

285 of the disintegration of the familiar. What is new and unexpected seems real: “Crashes, natural disasters, assassinations, and bombings … vividly express the collapse of routine and the triumph of the unexpected or the unpredictable” …. Nineteenth-century travelers toured Pompeii and witnessed Italian villages more recently devastated by eruption and earthquakes 66 as part of their tourist itineraries for motivations that seem remarkably similar.’

Early travellers in Calabria discovered a world as mysterious and exotic as that of the Westernized notion of the Orient. They came for adventure, for the novelty of witnessing the savage pre-Europe within Europe - a land riven by earthquakes and home to active volcanoes which was inhabited by people as savage as the landscape. They came with their own personal baggage and stereotypes and left with their ideas intact – their entry and departure points one and the same no matter how much they felt that they were treading “new” ground. They frequently resorted to generalisations on national “character” which have been bandied about by travellers since the beginnings of travel, and adopted a gaze which they projected on to the sights of Calabria with disregard for its specific cultural practices. In fact, the experience probably reinforced their notions of themselves and their place in the world. But there are many entry points into Calabria, and many points of departure. The traditional idea of travel – and even of migration – cannot cover all these, cannot hope to incorporate all the lines of interaction and displacement in relation to real or imagined regions or spaces. The voices of the conventional travellers have been heard and, no matter where these travellers have been, the underlying stories they have packaged for us remain the same. Those ordinary people who dwell in the extraordinary spaces described by the travel writers are the ones whose lives are the merchandise on view. It is tempting to claim that the stories of the Calabrians themselves remain obscured by the shadows thrown by “civilised” men. Yet there are economic imperatives on their side too, that have led them to accept the representations of these erstwhile British travellers.

In fact, Calabria has commemorated these travellers with plaques and monuments, on their websites and within their stories. The issue for the people of Calabria is that, forgotten and sidelined on the Italian peninsula as Calabria was for centuries, these British travellers came and told their stories and illustrated their landscapes. However glib and often insulting these accounts may be, there is always something to be rescued from them that can be used to

66 Helmers and Mazzeo, ‘Unraveling the traveling self,’ p. 8.

Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

286 promote Calabria. In this way, Calabrians themselves have been complicit in the construction of an imaginative geography of their region.

Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.

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D’Andrea, Diletta, Travel Books and Urban Identity. British Travellers in Messina, 1770- 1815: A Preliminary Study, Mediterranean Review, Vol. 7, No. 1, June 2014, pp. 39-55 https://www.academia.edu/7604333/Travel_Books_and_Urban_Identity._British_Travellers_ i n_Messina_1770- 1815_a_Preliminary_Study_Mediterranean_Review_vol._7_n._1_June_2014_pp._39- 55?auto=download, accessed 15 March 2017

Davis, John B and Miller, Marc L. ‘Travel Writers as Power Brokers: Testimonies from the Front Lines of Marine Tourism.’ Paper presented at 1999 International Symposium on Coastal and Marine Tourism. Vancouver, BC Canada April 26-29, p. 252, , accessed 3 December 2012.

Duncan, Paul. Discovering the Hill Towns of Italy. Pavilion, London, 1990.

Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth Rigby. ‘Lady Travellers.’ Quarterly Review, vol. 76, 1845, pp. 98- 137.

Evans, Jon (ed). Abroad. Gollancz, London, 1968.

Feifer, Maxine. Tourism in History: From Imperial Rome to the Present. Stein and Day, New York, 1986.

FitzRoy, Charles. Italy: A Grand Tour for the Modern Traveller. Macmillan, London, 1991.

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298 Fjågesund Peter and Syme, Ruth A. The Northern Utopia: British Perceptions of Norway in the Nineteenth Century. Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2003.

Forsyth, Joseph. Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters, During an Excursion in Italy, in the Years 1802 and 1803. 2nd edn. J Murray, London, 1816.

Foster, Shirley and Mills, Sara (eds). An Anthology of Women’s Travel Writing. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2002.

François, Pieter. ‘If It’s 1815, this must be Belgium: The origins of the modern travel guide.’ Book History, vol. 15, 2012, pp. 71-92.

Franklin, Adrian and Crang, Mike. ‘The trouble with tourism and travel theory?’ Tourist Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2001, pp. 5-22.

Ghose, Indira. Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000.

Gregory, Derek. ‘Cultures of travel and spatial formations of knowledge (Kultur des Reisens und räumliche Formationen von Wissen).’ Erdkunde, vol. 54, no. 4, 2000, pp. 297-319.

Helmers, Marguerite and Mazzeo, Tilar. ‘Unraveling the traveling self.’ The Traveling and Writing Self. Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle, UK, 2007, pp. 1-18.

Helmers, Marguerite and Mazzeo, Tilar J. ‘Introduction: Travel and the body.’ JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 35, no. 3, 2005, pp.267-276.

Hibbert, Christopher. The Grand Tour. Thames Methuen, London, 1987.

Hodgson, Barbara. No Place for a Lady: Tales of Adventurous Women Travellers. Greystone Books, Vancouver, 2002.

Hornsby, Clare (ed.). The Impact of Italy: The Grand Tour and Beyond. British School at Rome, London, 2000.

Hunter, F Robert. ‘Tourism and Empire: The Thomas Cook &Son Enterprise on the Nile, 1868-1914.’ Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 40, no. 5, 2004, pp. 28-54.

Kelley, Joyce. ‘Increasingly “imaginative geographies”: excursions into otherness, fantasy, and modernism in early twentieth-century women’s travel writing.’ JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 35, no. 3, 2005, pp. 357-372.

Kelly, Christopher. ‘A Grand Tour: Reading Gibbon's “Decline and Fall.”’ Greece & Rome, Second Series, vol. 44, no. 1, 1997, pp. 39-58.

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299 Littlewood, Ian. Sultry Climes: Travel and Sex Since the Grand Tour. John Murray, London, 2001.

Liversidge, Michael. ‘“... .a few foreign graces and airs ... “: William Marlow’s Grand Tour landscapes.’ Clare Hornsby (ed), The Impact of Italy: The Grand Tour and Beyond. British School at Rome, London, 2000, pp. 83-100.

McFadden, Maggie. ‘Unprotected Females, Violence, and Survival in the New World.’ NWSA Journal, vol. 13, no. 1, 2001, pp. ix-xiii.

Malcolm, Noel. ‘The lost art of travel writing.’ Views from Abroad: The Spectator Book of Travel Writing. Grafton, London, 1988.

Massie, Allan. Byron’s Travels. Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1988.

Mills, Sara. Discourses of Differences: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialisation. Routledge, London, 1991.

Mullen, Richard. ‘The British invention of modern tourism.’ Contemporary Review, vol. 291, no. 1695, 2009, pp. 468-474. , viewed 31 March 2013.

Paul, Carole. ‘Exhibition Review: Naples and Vesuvius on the Grand Tour, and Rome on the Grand Tour, and Drawing Italy in the Age of the Grand Tour.’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 36, no. 1, 2002, pp. 86-92.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial eyes: Travel Writing and Subculturation. Routledge, London, 1992.

Raban, Jonathan. For Love or Money: Writing Reading Travelling 1968-1987. Pan, London, 1988.

Robinson, Jane. ‘The art of listening: Nineteenth- and twentieth-century women travelers and their work.’ Journal of Women’s History, vol. 16, no. 1, 2004, pp .165-172.

Robinson, Jane. Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travellers. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991.

Russell, Mary. The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt: Women Travellers and Their World. Collins, London, 1986.

Saglia, Diego. ‘Looking at the other: cultural difference and the traveller's gaze.’ The Italian, Studies in the Novel, vol. 28, no. 1, 1996, pp. 12-37.

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300 Schroeder, Janice. ‘Strangers in every port: stereotypes of Victorian Women travellers.’ Victorian Review, vol. 24, no. 2, 1998, pp. 118-129.

Stanley, Marni. ‘Skirting the issues: Addressing and dressing in Victorian women's travel narratives.’ Victorian Review, vol. 23, no. 2, 1997, pp. 147-167.

Strain, Ellen. ‘Exotic bodies, distant landscapes: touristic viewing and popularized anthropology in the nineteenth century.’ Wide Angle, vol. 18, no 2, 1996, pp. 70-100.

Sweet, Rosemary. ‘Cities of the Grand Tour: Changing perceptions of Italian Cities.’ The Long Eighteenth Century: British History 1600-2000, Expansion in Perspective: Proceedings of the sixth Anglo-Japanese Conference of Historians, University of Tokyo, 16-19 September 2009. Institute of Historical Research, London, 2010, pp.153-176.

Rosemary Sweet. ‘Cities of the Grand Tour: Changing perceptions of Italian cities in the long eighteenth century.’ The Grand Tour Digital Collection, Adam Matthew Digital Ltd, 2009. , accessed 23 March 2013.

Whitfield, Peter. Travel: A Literary History. Bodleian Library, Oxford, 2011.

Wilton-Ely, John. ‘Classic ground: Britain, Italy, and the Grand Tour.’ Eighteenth-Century Life, vol. 28, no. 1, 2004, pp .136-165.

Yeames, A H S. ‘The Grand Tour of an Elizabethan gentleman.’ Papers of the British School at Rome, vol. 7, no. 3, 1914, pp. 92-113.

Zold, Elizabeth. ‘Virtual travel in second life: Understanding eighteenth-century travelogues through experiential learning.’ Pedagogy, vol. 14, issue 2, Spring 2014, pp. 225-250.

4. Britain – National identities

Armfelt, Count E. ‘Italy in London.’ George R Sims (ed), Living London: Its Work and Its Play Its Humour and Its Pathos Its Sights and Its Scenes. Cassell and Company, London, 1902, pp. 183–189.

Bowers, Terence. ‘Reconstituting the national body in Smollett's Travels through France and Italy.’ Eighteenth-Century Life, vol. 21, no. 1, 1997, pp. 1-25.

Clark, J C D. ‘Protestantism, nationalism, and national identity, 1660-1832.’ Historical Journal, vol. 43, no. 1, 2000, pp. 249-276.

Colley, Linda. ‘Britishness and Otherness: An argument.’ Journal of British Studies, vol. 31, no. 4, 1992, pp. 309-329.

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301 Constantine, David. Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton. Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2001.

Donovan, Robert Kent. ‘The military origins of the Roman Catholic Relief Programme of 1778.’ Historical Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, 1985, pp. 79-102.

Dunnage, Jonathan. Twentieth-Century Italy: A Social History. Routledge, London, 2002.

Goodlad, Lauren E. ‘A middle class cut in two’: historiography and Victorian national character.’ ELH: English Literary History, vol. 67, no. 1, 2000, pp. 143-178.

Houston, Robert Allan. ‘British society in the Eighteenth Century.’ The Journal of British Studies, vol. 25, no. 4, Re-Viewing the Eighteenth Century, 1986, pp. 436-466.

Hunt, Margaret. ‘Racism, imperialism, and the traveler's gaze in eighteenth-century England.’ Journal of British Studies. vol. 32, no .4, 1993, pp.333-357.

Kumar, Krishan. The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge Cultural Social Studies. Kindle Edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003.

Langford, Paul. Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650-1850. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000.

Laver, James. Manners and Morals in the Age of Optimism: 1848-1914. Harper & Rowe, New York, 1966.

Lo Patin, Nancy. ‘Review: Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c. 1714-80: A political and social study by Colin Haydon.’ Journal of Modern History, vol. 68, no. 1, 1996, pp. 175-176.

Malchow, H L. ‘Frankenstein's monster and images of race in nineteenth-century Britain.’ Past and Present, no. 139, 1993, pp. 90-130.

Mandler, Peter. The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair. Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2006.

Mazurek, Monika. The Catholic as ‘The Other’: Forging British National Identity. Identity, Diversity and Intercultural Dialogue. Proceedings, 5th International Week of ESEC. Coimbra, Portugal: ESEC, 2008, pp. 27-33.

Morgan, Marjorie. National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain. Palgrave, London, 2001.

Norton, Richard. The Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press, London, 1999.

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302 ‘Papists in England and Wales.’ The Protestant Advocate: A Review of Publications Relating to the Roman Catholic and Repertory of Protestant Intelligence. Vol. II. J. J. Stockdale, London, 1813, pp. 525-529.

Pears, Iain. ‘The gentleman and the hero: Wellington and Napoleon in the nineteenth century.’ Roy Porter(ed), Myths of the English. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 216-236.

Saville, Julia F. ‘Eccentricity as Englishness in David Copperfield.’ SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, vol. 42, no. 4, 2002, pp. 781-797.

Schmitt, Cannon. ‘Techniques of terror, technologies of nationality: Ann Radcliffe's The Italian.’ ELH: English language History, vol. 61, no. 4, 1994, pp. 853-876.

Ulin, Donald. ‘Review: National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain.’ Victorian Studies, vol. 44, no. 2, 2002, pp. 307-309.

Wilson, Kathleen. The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century. Routledge, London, 2003.

5. Aesthetics

Auerbach, Jeffrey. ‘The picturesque and the homogenisation of Empire.’ The British Art Journal, vol. v, no. 1, 2004, pp.47-54.

Barryte, Bernard. ‘History and legend in T J Barker's The Studio of Salvator Rosa in the Mountains of the Abruzzi 1865.’ The Art Bulletin, vol. 71, no. 4, 1889, pp. 660-673.

Burke, Edmund. On the Sublime and Beautiful, Vol. XXIV, Part 2. The Harvard Classics, P F Collier & Son, New York 1909–14, Bartleby.com, 2001. , accessed, 16 August 2009.

Gilpin, William. Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty, on Picturesque Travel and on Sketching Landscape: To Which is Added a Poem, on Landscape Painting. Blamire, London, 1792, pp. 43-44. , accessed 12 August 2014.

Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1997.

6. Cultural Studies / Geography and Misc.

‘An Account of the late terrible Earthquake, with Reflections on that awful Phaenomenon [sic].’ Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, December 1755, pp.271-279.

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Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1995.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Granada, London, 1981.

Berberich, Christine, Campbell, Neil and Hudson, Robert. ‘Framing and reframing land and identity.’ Spatial Practices, no. 13, 2012, pp. 17-39.

Bowring, Jacky. The Legacy of the Seismic Sublime: Draft Conference Paper, 3rd Global Conference: Monstrous Geography, Places and Spaces of Monstrosity, Wednesday 14th May – Friday 16th May 2014. Lisbon, Portugal Inter-disciplinary.net 2014, p. 1,, accessed 15 January, 2015.

Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol. I. Collins, London, 1972.

Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. Routledge, London, 1994.

‘A circumstantial account of the late great Earthquake in Calabria, in the Kingdom of Naples.’ New London Magazine, issue 18, November 1786, pp. 563-566. http://search.proquest.com/docview/5991659?accountid=12694, accessed 15 January, 2015.

Foucault, M. Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, New York, 1995.

William Hamilton, ‘An account of an eruption of Mount Vesuvius which happened in August 1779 in a letter from Sir William Hamilton to Joseph Banks.’ The Westminster Magazine, September 1780, pp. 475-480. , accessed 16 May 2014.

Hansen, Thomas Blom. ‘Inside the Romanticist episteme.’ Thesis Eleven, no. 48, 1997, pp. 21-41.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989.

Kaplan, E Ann. Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze. Routledge, London, 1997.

Martin, Adrian. Phantasms: The Dreams and Desires at the Heart of our Popular Culture. McPhee Gribble, Ringwood, Victoria, 1994.

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304 Mason, Peter. ‘Seduction from Afar: Europe's Inner Indians.’ Anthropos, Bd 82, H 4./6, 1987, pp. 581-601,< http://www.jstor.org/stable/40463481>, accessed 27 February 2015.

McCarthy, Mary. ‘A guide to exiles, expatriates, and internal émigrés.’ New York Review of Books, 1972. , accessed 23 July 2012.

Miller, William Ian. The Anatomy of Disgust. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MT, 1997.

Moulakis, Athanasios. ‘The Mediterranean region: Reality, delusion, or Euro-Mediterranean project?’ Mediterranean Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 2, 2005, pp. 11-38.

Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. Fontana Press, London, 1996.

Toscano, Maria. ‘The figure of the naturalist – antiquary in Kingdom of Naples: Giuseppe Giovene (1753 – 1837) and his contemporaries.’ Journal of the History of Collections, vol. 19, no. 11, 2007, p. 227.

Warner, Marina. Alone of All her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary. Picador, London, 1976.

Withers, Charles W J. ‘Geography, natural and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment: Putting the world in place.’ History Workshop Journal, vol. 39, no. 1, 1995, pp. 137-164.

7. Postcolonial Studies

Boehme, Elleke. Colonial & Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995.

Dubino, Jeanne. ‘Literary criticism goes global: Postcolonial approaches to English modernism and English travel writing.’ MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 48, no. 1, 2002, pp. 216-226.

Little, Janine. ‘Nothing like the real thing: (post) colonialism and travelling.’ Hecate, vol. 24, no. 2, 1988, pp. 72-84.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Penguin, London, 1985

Taddeo, Julie Anne. ‘Plato's Apostles: Edwardian Cambridge and the “New Style of Love.”’ Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 8, no .2, 1997, pp. 196-228.

Wise, Benjamin E. ‘On naïve and sentimental poetry: Nostalgia, sex, and the souths of William Alexander Percy.’ Southern Cultures, vol. 14, no. 1, 2008, pp. 54-79.

Elida Meadows ‘Horrors and Magnificence Without End’.