A Tale of Two Journeys
| cover | hardback | |
| dimensions | 170x120mm, 152 pp, b&w sketches + 8 colour pages | |
| price | £14.95 (list) | £13.50 (website) |
| ISBN | 1 902173 201 | |
Two early 19th-century diaries by Joseph and Katharine Fry
The year 1814 — The incarceration of Napoleon Bonaparte on Elba meant there was a sudden window of opportunity for British tourists. After twenty years of having to make do with the Lake District or Scotland, they seized their chance and crossed to France in droves.
Among them was Joseph Fry, husband of the prison–reformer Elizabeth. He was a Quaker who enjoyed good living and incurred family disapproval by buying Old Masters. In October he chartered a sloop to take his carriage, daughters, nieces and himself to Calais. There, at Dessin’s Hotel, they had a brush with the Brussels–bound entourage of the Duchess of Richmond (famous for her ball on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo the following year). Joseph records the encounter with great good humour. [Click to read more]
There were other perils — rapacious landladies, corrupt customs officials, blocked roads, fleas — as they drove to Bruges, Ghent, Brussels and, finally, Paris. Here, Joseph’s niece sketched the fashions and he set about sightseeing in earnest. [Click to read more]
Thirteen years later, it was the turn of Joseph’s daughter Katharine to keep a travel diary. In the summer of 1827 she took her brother and sister, William and Richenda, to Normandy, crossing from Southampton to Le Havre. [Click to read more] Her journal is a mix of moods — enthusiastic descriptions of sightseeing alternate with accounts of visits to the orphanages, hospitals and prisons of Caen [Click to read more] and deep anxiety about her sister’s health. The hysterical nature of Richenda’s illnesses is carefully obscured, however: Katharine’s young sister is fatally attractive to men and has a tendency to fall unsuitably in love…
The two journals offer first–hand accounts of the English abroad. Joseph’s, written in the year that Mansfield Park was published, has something of the light–heartedness of the Regency period. By the time Katharine visited Normandy, Lord Byron was dead and the face of Britain was about to be changed by the arrival of the railways and the quickening pace of industrialisation. The era of romantic adventure would slowly be replaced by the Victorian ideals of enterprise and duty. Published for the first time in 2005, the Fry Diaries are a valuable resource for historians and an engaging read for anyone interested in travel and society in the early nineteenth century.
