East by West, Vol. 1

In 1883, one of Victorian England's most celebrated humorists left London for five months and found a world in frantic transformation. Sir Henry W. Lucy, better known to Punch readers as "Toby M.P.," possessed exactly the gifts a great travel writer needs: eyes that missed nothing, a pen that could make you laugh, and the kind of easy access to power that opened doors everywhere. This volume captures his journey across America - still grappling with the aftermath of the Civil War and its own rapid, sometimes jarring modernization - and on to Japan, barely a decade after Commodore Perry forced open its ports. Lucy watches American railroads, journalists, and politicians with the amused detachment of an outsider who is also, somehow, oddly at home. In Japan, he approaches a civilization the West was still learning to see clearly, blending genuine fascination with the confident assumptions of his era. The steamship crossings themselves become vivid set pieces. This is travel writing as it once existed: opinionated, witty, unapologetically English, and utterly absorbing.