Tour Of France Research Articles

The unsettled Atlantic World of James Pinnock: The dynamics of race and class on the physical, social, and occupation mobilities of an eighteenth-century Jamaican houseful

ABSTRACT Using the 1758–1794 diary of James Pinnock, an Anglo-Jamaican lawyer, we can examine the Pinnock houseful: himself, his wife and daughters, enslaved domestic servants, and enslaved plantation laborers. I argue that the Atlantic World offered unique opportunities for physical, social, and occupational mobility of both white AND black members of the colonial houseful. James had privileged mobility via his race and profession, evidenced in his movements between the colony and metropole, and eventually his Grand Tour of France and Italy. For some of Pinnock’s slaves, skilled occupations granted some physical mobility, and they deployed that mobility into opportunities for escape. But for domestic slaves, physical mobility was a curse as they were repeatedly forced by James and his family on voyages around the Atlantic World. Yet even in this forced movement escape was possible, and Europe offered at least one man a unique chance at freedom.

Drawing Blood : The Visual Patronage of Robert Stuart d’Aubigny, Maréchal of France, in Relation to James V’s French Sojourn of 1536

Robert Stuart was an important Franco-Scottish commander active during the French invasions of Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century. In French military service he rose to the exalted position of marechal of France. This paper examines Robert’s patronage of architectural and visual material in relation to the documentary evidence of his career c.1508-1544. Of particular interest is the campaign of architectural and decorative work he commissioned for the aggrandizement of his two principal residences: the château at Aubigny-sur-Nere and La Verrerie. This paper investigates whether these campaigns of work may have been undertaken in relation to a royal visit by James V during the Scottish king’s tour of France in 1536-7. It is hypothesised that the extensive campaign of work undertaken at La Verrerie, particularly the painted architectural work, was executed in preparation for this event. It is further proposed that the strong iconographic stress of royal Stuart lineage was commissioned with a royal Scottish audience in mind. “Drawing blood” thus refers to the visual stress placed on royal lineage and hereditary claims. The study stresses not only the importance of Robert’s patronage in terms of his self-fashioning in a French courtly context, but also explores the weight he placed on ensuring the preservation of close ties with the royal House of Scotland. Suggestions are made, furthermore, as to how James V may have perceived such a reception at La Verrerie, and how it may have influenced his own building and decorative campaigns back in Scotland. Furthermore, the importance of Robert as a conduit for the transmission of Italian Renaissance aesthetics into France is explored here for the first time.

Henry James, the “Maison Buglese,” and Dirty Hands

Henry James’s description of the appearance and behavior of traveling businessmen in the Hôtel de France section of “En Province” in A Little Tour in France is unusual, and appears to call attention to a recurrent and haunting anxiety on the part of the author that he might resemble these businessmen more than he liked to admit. The article explores James’s apparent identification with the itinerant businessman and the strategies he devised for distancing himself from them.

International Journal of Risk and Recovery, beginning of an exciting journey

Sébastien Prat is an Assistant Professor at McMaster University and a Staff Psychiatrist at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton. His medical training and residency in Psychiatry took place at the University François Rabelais of Tours in France. He underwent a subspecialty training in Forensic Psychiatry at McMaster University. He is the Executive Editor of the International Journal of Risk and Recovery.

Liberty in Wordsworth's Sonnets

Wordsworth once declared that for an hour thought given to poetry, he had given twelve to the state of society. However true this declaration might be, it helps to remind us that some of Wordsworth’s noblest verse and prose was inspired by political passion. The most prominent fact about Wordsworth’s politics is that he was a trueborn Englishman, and his roots struck deep into English soil. He was country-born and country-bred. Besides, he belonged by birth to the middle class. Thanks to this middle class, upbringing. A sense of moderation governed his course in life and kept him away from committing himself to any definite party throughout his life. Wordsworth reached maturity without meeting anyone who claimed priority on the account of rank. It is because of this moderate temper coupled with impatience of restrictions that Wordsworth’s mind seemed to be a productive soil for the revolutionary notions of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. His interest in public affairs was motivated by the consequence of the American War as well as by the French Revolution. He had been too young, thoughtfully to consider the American War while it was going on. Therefore, when it ended, disbanded men began to return to the lakes. There he met some of these men and heard about others; and from what he saw and heard, he could conceive a horrible sense of war with all the suffering and evils it inflicts on the poor. On the other hand, in summer 1790, Wordsworth, accompanied by his friend Jones, set off for a walking tour in France and Switzerland – a tour that had significant consequences. Wordsworth landed at Calais on July 13th , 1790 – the eve of the day on which the king was to swear fidelity to the new constitution, and over-whelm people by a great tide of joy. In November 1791, Wordsworth went off again to France where he visited Paris, Orleans, and Blois in the main. In Blois, he made friendship with Michel Beaupy, a Republican officer in a mess of Royalists. The misery Beaupy witnessed among the extremely poor peasantry converted him not only to a Revolutionary citizen, but also to a patriot of the world. His heart was very much devoted to the cause of the common people and the poor. No other man, says Coleridge, had as great an influence upon Wordsworth as this benevolent and magnanimous patriot did.

La Carte et le territoire: Mapping, Photography and the Visualization of Contemporary France

Drawing on recent work by novelist Michel Houellebecq and photographer Raymond Depardon, this article examines the relationship between visual culture, spatial change and modernization in contemporary France. Investigating how Houellebecq foregrounds the visual representation of space in his novel La Carte et le territoire (2010), the article goes on to align the questions it raises with the six-year photographic tour of France undertaken by Raymond Depardon during the first decade of the twenty-first century. It considers Depardon's portrait of contemporary France in the context of his previous engagement with spatial change and state-led planning as part of the Mission photographique de la DATAR of the 1980s. It explores the vision of spatial layering and heterogeneity which emerges from the project, and discusses how it reasserts the importance of photography for capturing and articulating territorial identity and spatial change.

Remembering Roger F. C. Brown: A Personal Note on the Development of Pyrolysis as a Synthetic and Mechanistic Technique in Organic Chemistry

Remembering Roger F. C. Brown: A Personal Note on the Development of Pyrolysis as a Synthetic and Mechanistic Technique in Organic Chemistry

Remembering the Martyrdom of Saint Francis of Paola: <em>History, Memory and Minim Identity in Seventeenth-Century France</em>

On April 7, 1562, Protestant forces sacked the Minim monastery on the grounds of the royal chateau at Plessis outside Tours in France. During the looting iconoclasts forced open the tomb of the order’s founder, Saint Francis of Paola, and burnt his remains. This study examines the processes through which oral accounts within the Minim community concerning the “martyrdom” of Saint Francis were committed to writing during the first quarter of the seventeenth century. It sheds new light on the relationship between individual, collective and historical memory in the formation of Minim identity and how the iconoclastic violence of the French religious wars was remembered by religious communities.

Remembering the Catholic Middle Ages: The Franciscans, English National Identity, and William Hogarth’s The Roast Beef of Old England

Remembering the Catholic Middle AgesThe Franciscans, English National Identity, and William Hogarth’s The Roast Beef of Old England David Salter (bio) Introduction: An Eighteenth-Century Ecumenical Encounter At the very beginning of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), we are presented with a highly emblematic encounter between the novel’s fictional protagonist, the Anglican clergyman, Parson Yorick, and a Franciscan friar, who we subsequently discover is called Father Lorenzo. By the time of the novel’s publication, Parson Yorick was already well known to the reading public through his earlier appearances as the affable provincial Minister in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67), and in A Sentimental Journey the author was able to exploit Yorick’s existing popularity, along with the contemporary vogue for both travel writing and “sentimental” fiction, with an account of the parson’s tour of France. (Although it would appear that he had originally intended to include a description of Yorick’s subsequent journey to Italy, Sterne’s chronic illness at the time of writing, and his subsequent death a mere month after the novel’s publication, prevented him from completing his original plan.) As we might expect from the author of [End Page 99] Click for larger view View full resolution William Hogarth, O The Roast Beef of Old England (The Gate of Calais), 1748. Photo credit: Art Resource, NY. [End Page 100] the experimental Tristram Shandy, Sterne offers an extremely unconventional travel narrative that is almost entirely lacking in those elements normally to be found in the genre, such as descriptions of historical sites, artistic treasures, landscape and topography, and so on. Rather, the narrative consists of a set of introspective reflections recounted by Yorick of how he is emotionally and morally affected by the experience of foreign travel, and in particular by foreigners and their unfamiliar habits and customs. It is as a commentary on the English experience of traveling abroad—of confronting the unfamiliar “otherness” of foreigners—that we are invited to read the encounter with the Franciscan, which comes at the very start of Yorick’s journey, on the day of his arrival in Calais. Father Lorenzo, whom the narrative first identifies as “a poor monk of the order of St. Francis” approaches Yorick in his Calais lodgings soliciting alms “for his convent.”1 Yorick evidently finds the situation deeply disconcerting: like many eighteenth-century English Protestants, he is affronted by the Franciscan practice of mendicancy—of begging—and is determined not to give the friar “a single sous.”2 However, on dismissing Father Lorenzo in a rather haughty and peremptory manner, saying that there are many people much more deserving of his charity, Yorick immediately regrets his actions. Observing how the friar accepts the rejection with equanimity and good grace, Yorick reproaches himself not so much for his lack of charity, as for the high-handed way in which he acted, and the want of empathy and fellow feeling it reveals. At the outset of his journey, then, in what is almost his very first encounter with a foreigner, Yorick acknowledges his own inability to make the imaginative leap necessary to understand and sympathetically enter into the world of the Franciscan friar. In the language of the novel, he has failed the test of the “Sentimental Traveller,”3 but, recognizing his own shortcomings, he endeavors to do better in the future: “I have behaved very ill; said I within myself; but I have only just set out upon my travels; and shall learn better manners as I get along.”4 And he is almost immediately offered the opportunity to put his good intentions into [End Page 101] effect when he once again meets up with the Franciscan, this time in the street, and their second encounter ends much more happily with an exchange of gifts, which cements their newly acquired friendship and mutual respect. What we see in this brief vignette is something both highly conventional and deeply idiosyncratic. In his initial display of unkindness to Father Lorenzo, Yorick gives expression to the distrust and hostility that was so characteristic of eighteenth-century English attitudes toward continental Catholicism (sentiments that Yorick had...

Does acclamation equal agreement? Rethinking collective effervescence through the case of the presidential “tour de France” during the twentieth century

This article discusses the integrative function frequently assigned to festive events by scholars. This function can be summed up in a proposition: experiencing similar emotions during collective gatherings is a powerful element of socialization. The article rejects this oft-developed idea according to which popular fervor could be an efficient tool to measure civic engagement. It raises the following question: what makes enthusiasm “civic”, “patriotic”, “republican” or simply “political”? Based on a study of French presidential tours in France from 1888 to 2007, this article casts a different light on the topic. The enthusiasm of the crowds interacting with the successive French presidents is not civic because an inquiry may find “patriotism” into participants’ minds. It can be called civic simply because the forms and meaning of the festive jubilation, which may be summarized into the formula: “if spectators applaud, it means they support,” necessarily preexist its multiple manifestations.

Incubation and Fertility Research Group: {WPSA Working Group 6 (Reproduction)} 2010 Meeting - Tours, France, 23 August 2010

The IFRG meeting 2010 was held in the beautiful city of Tours in France. The topics now reported included the storage and early embryo development; new developments in incubation temperature; and the influence of glucose application to poultry embryos. Two aspects of cryopreservation were considered: primordial germ cells, and in vivo cryopreserved cock semen. The latter was tested to assess its feasibility for use in commercial production or preservation of genetic stocks. With regard to commercial poultry production, the data recorded in one study supported the hypothesis that fertility would be higher and would persist for longer in pens where the birds were able to find a physical refuge from other birds. Other factors affecting the production of turkeys, ducks, pheasants, ostriches, chickens and ducks were discussed, thus fulfilling the meeting's objective of reporting research into the incubation and fertility of all avian species.

Nomadic Criticism

Nomadic Criticism Margaret R. Higonnet (bio) Mondialisation et littérature de jeunesse, by Jean Perrot. Paris: Editions du Cercle de la Librairie, 2008. Honored by the IRSCL Book Award in 2009, Jean Perrot's Mondialisation et littérature de jeunesse ("Globalization and Youth Literature") extends a well-known French tradition of the literary grand tour. One of the first such tours was Xavier de Maistre's satiric Voyage autour de ma chambre ("A Journey Round My Room" [1794]), in which the chamber serves as an imaginatively resistant reading space: as the author travels through his room, he writes; he rarely follows a straight line. He describes the cost of such peregrinations as low; in fact, he wrote while in prison, and he recommends the benefit of an imagination liberated through texts to rich and poor, old and young—the entire family of men. Half a century later, following a spate of individualist French robinsonnades, G. Bruno (Augustine Fouillée, née Tuillerie) applied the concept of the tour for children to the national horizon. Her Tour de la France par deux enfants ("Tour of France by Two Children" [1877]) mapped a republican space through the travels of two Alsatian boys on the road, who were searching for their family; it became a school classic that sold seven million copies by 1914. Following the French territorial losses in 1871, this adventure story imagined a reconstituted French whole, in which children would become citizens of the future. Now, in Mondialisation, Perrot offers us a richly comparative exploration of a globalized literary marketplace with international publishers, multicultural themes encouraged by educational institutions, and a potential new readership of polyglot and creolized children. Moving beyond a national children's literature, he has progressed to international and transnational literatures that must wrestle with the commodification of children themselves. While big topics such as the expansion of social or cultural horizons and the rights of the child draw Perrot's attention, the book also wanders around the globe gathering and analyzing diverse recent publications from Mongolia, India, Japan, Alaska, and New Zealand. Part of the cultural work Perrot's book performs is to call attention to important translation series within the French marketplace, such as the rich list of Japanese books published by Ecole des loisirs or Seuil; such internationalist publishers bring a [End Page 270] lively array of fiction and picturebooks home for French consumption. At the same time, he singles out recent French books that focus realistically on immigrants or other groups marginalized in France, such as the homeless, as well as those that borrow their aesthetic from cultures of the Third World. Like one of Sendak's jolly Wild Things, Perrot insatiably devours new texts and new media, and encourages us to embrace a similar cannibalism of readerly love. From the start, he emphasizes the problem that the banquet Western children encounter at the bookstore or in the media is a product of a consumer society. Children must therefore learn to transform texts into vehicles of exploration instead of merely fast-food fun to be gobbled by intellectual couch potatoes. They must become smart consumers, "writerly" and actively open readers rather than merely "readerly" decoders with short attention spans, trained by quick responses to games played with only the thumbs, not the whole hand or the brain. Citing Zygmunt Bauman's analysis of modern mobility, accompanied by a dissolution of values and thirst for immediate satisfaction, Perrot brings a particular passion to the discovery of texts that celebrate respect for the individual and that portray traditional cultures such as those of the Pacific Island Kanak or Indian Dalit tribals, whose survival is at risk. While France often has been accused of racism in its failure to integrate the children of immigrants, Perrot here responds by reading with care works about minority cultures not only in France but around the world. Some of the French authors whose pages he opens up for us encourage readers to become interested in homelessness, the diseases such as AIDS endemic in ghettos and orphanages, girls' desire for an education, or the disappearance of the languages of a group's elders. It is no surprise that one of the...

Fossil Fish: Preserving Samuel Johnson within Hester Lynch Piozzi's British Synonymy

Fossil Fish: Preserving SamuelJohnson within Hester Lynch Piozzi's British Synonymy Il Lisa Berglund Buffalo State College "t is Hester Lynch Piozzi's fortune and misfortune ever to be .linked in the public mind with her most famous friend. Their intimacy assured the tremendous success of her first book, Anecdotes of the Late SamuelJohnson (1786), and that triumph paved the way for the positive reception of her edition ofJohnson's correspondence (1788) and for her travel book, Observations and Reflections Made during a Tour ofFrance, Italy and Germany (1789). When she decided to compose "a two-Volume Book of Synonymes in English, like what the Abbé Girard has done in French, for the use of Foreigners, and other Children of six feet high," however, Piozzi formally rejected "help from Dr. Johnson ," as she says in a 1793 letter to her daughter Hester Maria "Queeney" Thrale (Thraliana 1951, 2, 837; Piozzi Letters 22 August 1793, 2, 140). For a writer who had hitched her literary wagon to the star of Johnson's fame, refusing to followJohnson's model seems peculiar; for a lexicographer, perverse. Published in two octavo volumes in 1794, British Synonymy discriminates 1 180 words in 315 entries, which range in length from a single paragraph to a half-dozen pages. This format, "brief essays in which synonyms [are] discriminated," is, as Sidney I. Landau explains, typical ofsynonymies that predate Roget's Thesaurus ofEnglish Words and Phrases (1852) (Landau 2001, 135). Some entries concentrate on discriminating shades of meaning; into others Piozzi incorporates personal anecdotes or reflections on the political scene, particularly the revolutionary conflict in France. To help her intended audience of non-native speakDictionaries :Journal ofthe Dictionary Society ofNorth America 30 (2009) , 96-1 07 Fossil Fish97 ers to connect their reading of English literature to their forays into polite English conversation, Piozzi often uses quotations to discriminate shades of meaning, and her book becomes a repository of her favorite passages from Shakespeare, Milton, Johnson, Otway, Prior, Pope, and Dryden, among others. She also includes quotations from Italian and French authors, references to Scripture, and some original translations from French and Italian poetry. The book achieved a modest success, and a second edition was published the same year in Dublin. An abridged version, to which the publishers Parsons and Galignani added numerous illustrations of usage from English literature, appeared in Paris in 1804. Grammar and diction had long interested Piozzi, a fact that doubtless contributed to her earnestness in 1 765 to cultivate the friendship of Samuel Johnson. Before her marriage, she studied the work of James Harris after her mentor Dr. Arthur Collier presented her with the philologist's Hermes: A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Language and Universal Grammar. Young Hester Salusbury's specially-bound copy was interleaved with blank pages, which the then 19-year-old enthusiast filled with marginal comments, observing in one note that grammar is "an interesting Science, & ofgeneral Utility" (Salusbury MS note in Hermes, interleaf facing 6). As a mother, Mrs. Thrale prided herself on teaching her children the correct use of the English language; Thraliana and her other diaries are replete with discussions of words. After her marriage to Gabriel Piozzi in 1 784, she found herself witnessing the particular kind of errors into which the complexity of English idiom betrayed her Italian husband and his compatriots. For example, in Observations and Reflections, Piozzi reports: It is the genius of the German language to degrade all our English words somehow: they call a coach a waggon, and ask a lady if she will buy pomatum to smear her hair with. Such is however the resemblance between their tongue and ours, that the Italians protest they cannot separate either the ideas or the words (Piozzi 1789, 368). Piozzi's decision in 1792 to compile a synonymy, then, responded to the recent stimulation of a lifelong interest. While it is true that Piozzi owed the beginning of her public literary career to her friendship with Johnson, even had she never met the lexicographer, a synonymy might have occupied her pen. As she wrote to Queeney on 19 December 1794: 98Lisa Berglund You may perhaps recollect YourFather's partiality for Abbé Girard's Work...

The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898 (review)

The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898 (review)

Robert Boyle's First Encomium: Two Latin Poems by Samuel Collins (1647)

The influential natural philosopher, Robert Boyle (1627-91), was the recipient of many encomia during his life and after his death. Congratulatory poems addressed to him appeared in the Latin editions of such of his works as The Origin of Forms and Qualities (1666; Latin edn, 1669) and A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (1686; Latin edn, 1687), the latter a Latin translation by Boyle's protege, David Abercromby, of a poem by 'S. R, an English noblewoman', whose identity has not been established.1 Then, after his death, a series of printed elegies appeared, in both English and Latin, with such titles as Lachrymce Philosopbice or Natura Lugens.2 In addition, Boyle was the recipient of a number of verse encomia in Latin (and, in one case, in Greek) which have recently been published as part of his Correspondence: these include poems by the Latin translator, Robert Codrington, dating from 1660; another by the virtuoso, John Beale, dating from 1663; and a curious poem by the learned lady, Bathsua Makin, probably dating from 1681.3All of these, not surprisingly, date from Boyle's mature years, after he embarked on the profuse publishing career that began with his Some Motives and Incentives to the Love of God (1659), better known as Seraphic Love, and New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air, and its Effects (1660), reaching a climax in the early 166Os, when he published an average of nearly 150,000 words a year. This continued, albeit at a reduced rate, for the rest of his life, so that by the time of his death he had published over forty books. This flow of publications, combined with the promotion that Boyle received from such protagonists as Henry Oldenburg, first secretary of the Royal Society, in his Philosophical Transactions, or Joseph Glanvill in his promotional work on behalf of the Society, Plus Ultra (1668), meant that Boyle quickly became established as one of the best-known intellectuals of his age - 'the English Philosopher', as it was said that he was known on the continent in the 1680s.4In this paper, by contrast, we offer an annotated text and translation of two Latin poems addressed to Boyle at a far earlier stage in his career, in January 1647 - in other words eight years before his very first publication in 1655, and over a decade before his main career as a published author began.5 At this point, Boyle was just twenty years old, and, aside from the fact that he was the youngest son of one of the most powerful men in early Stuart Britain, the 'Great' Earl of Cork, who had died in 1643, there was on the face of it little to distinguish him from other youthful aristocrats, and certainly no premonition of the area of interest - in natural philosophy - that was later to make him famous.By this time, Boyle had spent three years at Eton College, from 1635 to 1638, resulting from his father's friendship with the Provost of Eton, Sir Henry Wotton. During the time that he was at the school, Boyle distinguished himself for his studiousness, while probably also making certain of the contacts which form the background to the poems studied here.6 In 1638, Cork removed Boyle and his brother, Francis, from Eton, and in 1639 they embarked on a tour of France, Switzerland and Italy under the tutelage of the French Protestant scholar, Isaac Marcombes. From 1639 to 1641, before they set out for Italy, and from 1642 to 1644, after their return, Boyle spent time in Geneva studying under Marcombes's supervision, and it was apparently at this point that he acquired the bulk of his education: though this period of his life, and particularly the second Genevan stay, is poorly documented, a notebook survives that Boyle kept at this point, which indicates the range of studies in which he engaged, including metaphysics, mathematics, geography and fortification. In addition, in later autobiographical remarks he offered some clues to episodes in this period of his life that he saw as formative ones, particularly the conversion experience that he had at Geneva during his first stay there, and his discovery of ancient Stoicism while in Italy. …

'While I waggled my small feet': Henry James's Return to Paris

ABSTRACT Paris is crucial to the sense of place, response, and record spanning Henry James's career over America, England, and 'Europe'. The early essays Parisian Sketches and A Little Tour in France reach towards The American Scene and A Small Boy and Others in exploring 'the personal history [] of an imagination' like Strether's in The Ambassadors: the 'inside-out' experience achieved through return, which goes beyond the personal. ********** Place, response, and record span and short-circuit Henry James's writing career, from infancy to autobiographical maturity. Crucial to this triangulation, linking America, England, and 'Europe', is Paris. In A Small Boy and Others James notes through a double return how from the perspective of his boyhood in Albany and New York he recalled an even earlier awareness. (1) He knew already that he 'had somehow waked early to a perception of Paris' (p. 57): the old man's recollection of the child's consciousness formed by remembered experience: 'Conveyed along the Rue St-Honore while I waggled my small feet, as I definitely remember doing, under my flowing robe, I had crossed the Rue de Castiglione and taken in, for all my time, the admirable aspect of the Place and the Colonne Vendome' (p. 58). This vigorous 'backward reach' of memory is informed by a positively physical resonance: 'a vibration of my very most infantine sensibility', trailing long clothes and waggling toes amidst the glories of the great city. The immediacy of sensation is both contained and fast-tracked to the present by its encasing pluperfect tense. Knowledge is always already found. James recovers a fresh awareness of this as he returns to Paris repeatedly, both in person and writing, by proxy in fiction or in pedestrian fact, from the moment of this 'infantine' visit to the time he recorded it, over pretty much the length of his conscious existence. The congruence between travel writing and the explorations, whether autobiographical, critical, or novelistic, of consciousness inscribed in record, in recall, in memory, constitutes for him both an intimate affair and a public communication. Parisian Sketches: Letters to the New York Tribune 1875-76 (2) and A Little Tour in France (3) provide a nineteenth-century travel writing focus for this essay. But for James experience is 'never limited and it is never complete.' (4) These early French essays take their place in a corpus including the novels and tales, and reaching forwards (or back) to The American Scene of 1904 which falls outside our period but is rooted there, and A Small Boy and Others (1913) which complements it. Sketching 'the personal history, as it were, of an imagination', James uses travel writing, like autobiography, with increasing intensity, abstraction, metaphorical vigour, and sensual exactitude, as a field of operation rather than an objective, since, in order to find his centre of interest, 'I had in a word to draw him forth from within rather than meet him in the world before me, the more convenient sphere of the objective, and to make him objective, in short, had to turn nothing less than myself inside out.' (5) Exploring the Sketches and A Little Tour is a route towards James himself as much as Paris or France; but the personal self stands equally for a cultural, historical, even a philosophical construct. The interest is in the nature of his experience. Sir Thomas Browne claimed, 'We carry with us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us'. (6) Under the professional byline of 'A Regular Correspondent of the Tribune', though only in his second dispatch, James wrote from Paris that for the sculptor Barye, 'The Jardin des Plantes was his Africa and his Asia. Though he spent half his life in modeling wild beasts, he was a Parisian of Parisians, and he never had the curiosity or the energy to take a look at the veritable East' (Parisian Sketches, pp. 15-16). Yet for the young writer, the hobbled observer can figure as a culturally grounded example, actually enabled by the apparent limitations of the centred self: 'He perhaps felt the force of that truth (which is by no means the paradox it seems) that for artistic purposes there is such a thing as knowing too much about your subject. …

'While I waggled my small feet': Henry James's Return to Paris

Paris is crucial to the sense of place, response, and record spanning Henry James's career over America, England, and 'Europe'. The early essays "Parisian Sketches" and "A Little Tour in France" reach towards "The American Scene" and "A Small Boy and Others" in exploring 'the personal history [...] of an imagination' like Strether's in "The Ambassadors": the 'inside-out' experience achieved through return, which goes beyond the personal.

The anti-semitic moment: a tour of France in 1898

The anti-semitic moment: a tour of France in 1898

In Search of the Byzantine: George Gilbert Scott's Diary of an Architectural Tour in France in 1862

‘When you go abroad, begin with France’, George Gilbert Scott told his student audience at the Royal Academy. ‘It is the great centre of Mediaeval art.’ Scott himself was late in appreciating this. Apart from a day trip to Calais at the beginning of his career, the first visit he paid to France was in 1847, soon after securing his first cathedral appointment at Ely when he was 36 years old. ‘My eyes were at once opened,’ he later recalled: What I had always conceived to be German architecture I now found to be French. I thoroughly studied the details of Amiens, and those of the Sainte Chapelle, which bore most closely on my previous German studies, and I returned home with a wholly new set of ideas, and with many of my old ones dispelled. It seems curious that I should have been twelve years in practice, before I became acquainted with French architecture, yet I was first among English architects, as I believe, to study it in detail in any practical way, and with a practical intention.

Wordsworth, Pope and the Alps

It has become a commonplace of Romantic criticism that the passage in Book VI of The Prelude where Wordsworth describes his crossing of the Alps by the Simplon Pass in 1790 is one of the finest and most important in his work. The passage refers to a moment during Wordsworth’s and Robert Jones’s 1790 walking tour of France and Switzerland. Having visited Geneva and the Vale of Chamonix, they crossed the Alps by the Simplon Pass, descending by the Ravine of Gondo to Lake Maggiore on 19 August. It was on 17 August that Wordsworth and Jones set off to cross the Simplon Pass itself. Spending a little too long over their midday meal at an inn they were separated from other travellers heading in the same direction and took a wrong turning, heading further up into the mountains. Before long they were put right by a peasant, who told them that they must return to the main path and from there head downhill. Thus they learned to their dismay that they had already walked over the highest point of the pass and were now descending into Italy. The poet was disappointed, as we should have been in his place: naturally expecting something significant at the peak of the crossing, he had seen nothing, and had indeed not even noticed the summit of the pass. Romantic expectations of the sublime had been frustrated. It was not until the composition of this part of The Prelude in 1804 that the disappointment itself became the inspiration for a deeper revelation of the imagination’s power. Here is the passage as it appears in the 1805 Prelude, beginning from the point where Wordsworth mentions how his party, following some distance behind another group of travellers, rested at an inn before resuming their journey: