British Literature – nonfiction – published 2010
I’m currently on my fourth trip to the country, this time for a few months, so was keen to read this, and Lurcock’s other two books.
This is a great anthology of writing from Lurcock, who brings together the writings of 20 intrepid British who travelled through Finland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The travellers came from very different backgrounds, a collection of scientists, anthropologists, poets, writers, army officers, and academics, one even to win a bet.
The style of their writing is therefore quite different, some quite academic, some more literary. They are of course informative, but the entertainment is greater nowadays than when they were first read, there is a good deal of humour. The travelling conditions are particularly of interest, as is the communication with locals and their customs. Many of the journeys are in winter as it was the snow and ice that was the main attraction, and mostly on horse and carriage or slow boat through the archipelago of the Åland Islands.
..the snow cast a strong light; and our sledges made a very picturesque appearance as they winded around the whitened hills , pierced into the thick forests, or extended in a straight line along the frozen surface of the lakes. During our course , the still silence of the night was relieved by the carols of our drivers, who frequently sang the most simple and pleasing airs. In this progress I beguiled the length of the journey, either by listening to their songs echoed by the surrounding forests, by admiring the unusual cast of the nocturnal scenery, or by slumbering in my travelling couch as comfortably as in a bed…
(William Coxe)
and..
He (the author) had not long been in the bed, where the mosquitos proved sufficiently troublesome, when he saw a dark moving spot upon the white curtain, which proved to be the most enormous species of bug (…) soon after he saw three more of a size hardly to be credited; when starting up, what words can express his astonishment and disgust, in beholding myriads, moving in all directions over his bed and body. Heaps of them adhered together, like bees about to swarm: and mingled with these nauseous insects, there were other vermin, of a description so filthy and abominable as to be nameless in every civilised society…
(Edward Daniel Coxe)
My GoodReads score 5 / 5
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