Vol. 2 · No. 2 · pp. 50-78 (28)

Lily Ford

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Abstract

The land had a worn aspect and there was no freshness in it. England had always been walked over. The footprints of the Romans might still be traced on its fields and woods. There had never been the extraordinary charm of the unknown about it. And beyond England, France, Germany and Italy were all trodden upon and even Africa would soon be covered with cycling roads. The round world and all that dwells therein was being mapped and tabulated and soon there would be no land left to the imagination…

(Phillimore 1912:13)

Thus responded Lion Phillimore to the English landscape, on a train to Folkstone in the summer of 1912. Phillimore was headed for Cracow, and a tour of the Carpathians, a mountain range that encompassed what was then Austrian Poland (including the regions of Galicia, Ruthenia and Moravia) and parts of Hungary and Romania. Her and her husband's insistence on sleeping rough and travelling with only a horse and cart and a teenage guide may have perplexed the locals, much to the Phillimores' delight, but the novelty would have been far less to the British public who would read her account of the tour. In the Carpathians has many of the hallmarks of the twentieth-century genre of travel writing identified by Paul Fussell (1981: 209–211) and Mark Cocker (1992: 157–9). Phillimore journeys eastwards on European rails to escape encroaching modernity, to shake off the 'industrialism' that plagues her vision every time she looks out of the train window right through Germany into Poland; her destination 'the last capital in Europe untouched by civilisation and in which the glamour of the Middle Ages still lingered' (Phillimore 1912: 12). What makes her book remarkable is not only its overwhelmingly escapist sentiment, but the implications for an established convention, and the accompanying snobbery, of leisure travelling that she refers to. Apparently the Phillimores read travel literature to lose their wanderlust, not to nurture it. 'Three guidebooks and two works of travel written by maiden ladies travelling post in the '60s are enough to cure one of the desire to visit any country' (Phillimore 1912: 12). But that on Cracow and the Carpathians could not but inspire them (after discarding the Balearics, Andorra, Russia, Corsica and north west Africa). Phillimore cites some verses from Grenville Cole's (1894) The Gypsy Road, and later makes mention of previous travellers that can be identified as Ménie Muriel Dowie and the ubiquitous 'maiden ladies', Adelina Irby and Georgina Mackenzie, though she mentions no names. However, the mere acknowledgement of precedent in her journey marks this book out from almost all British travel literature on the Carpathian area of the previous fifty years.