Romania Revisited: On the Trail of English Travellers, 1602-1941 [9781592111046]

Overview

Romania Revisited is the definitive story of the journeys made by English travellers to Romania between 1602 and 1941. The author, Alan Ogden, interweaves the impressions of previous generations into the witty account of his own journeys made in the summer and winter of 1998. Although the chapters are arranged to follow his own route, the author successfully integrates earlier writers into his narrative by linking them to towns and places. Starting with the Transylvanian adventures of Captain John Smith in 1602, the bibliography is the most detailed inventory yet published of English travel writing on Romania. Ogden, with his unerring sense of human nature, has selected those passages which throw light on the attitudes of earlier travellers and highlight some of their more amusing antics. He entertainingly arranges his sources into \u2018The Gentlemen\u2019 and \u2018The Ladies\u2019 and includes them in a useful general English-language bibliography. Both for those familiar with this subject and for the first time reader, the classification of writers is most helpful: The \u2018passers through\u2019 en route to and from Moscow, India, or Constantinople, like Lady Craven who was on extended holiday in the 1780s after being divorced by her husband; the \u2018adventurers,\u2019 like the swashbuckling Hungarian mercenary Captain John Smith, later of Pocahontas fame; the \u2018first tourists\u2019 — James Skene, Andrew Crosse, James Samuelson among them — and his personal favorite, the intrepid Mrs. Walker; first, from the 1890s, Ogden identifies the interest in Princess Marie at the court, who went on to become queen and played a leading role in the First World War; then, with the advent of the motorcar and aeroplane, came \u2018the motorists,\u2019 the most famous of which was Sacherverell Sitwell; he reserves a special category for the \u2018Romantics\u2019 like Patrick Leigh Fermor and Walter Starkie. The author\u2019s own journey is a comprehensive an

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