Traveling Sketches
Traveling Sketches
Trollope turns his novelist's eye on the road itself, dissecting the species of travelers who plagued Victorian railways and continental tours with the same precision he brought to cathedral close and rural parish. Here are the tourists who see nothing but their guidebooks, the invalids chasing climate like medicine, the insufferable antiquarians who measure every ruin, the young couples on their honeymoon too absorbed in each other to notice the Alps. Trollope's satire is never cruel, but it is unflinching: he recognizes the absurdity in himself and his compatriots, the way travel reveals character even as it obscures perception. Originally published in 1866, these sketches feel startlingly contemporary. We recognize these travelers still, whether on airplanes or tour buses, their vanities and blind spots unchanged by a century and a half. Trollope's prose moves with the light, rapid stroke of a man writing for periodicals, each piece a small gem of observation. For readers who love Victorian wit, for anyone who has ever been trapped beside an irritating tourist, this is portraiture at its finest.
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Winnifred Assmann, Rita Boutros, docdlmartin, pearleyes +2 more
