« Tu n’as rien vu à Constantinople » : Thackeray au pays des harems

In his Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, Thackeray used once again the persona of Michael Angelo Titmarsh, which he had created for Punch. The volume published in 1846 had been preceded by a series of articles in that magazine, under the title « Wandering of our Fat Contributor ». Tha...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Laurent Bury
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2006-12-01
Series:Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens
Online Access:https://journals.openedition.org/cve/12483
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Summary:In his Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, Thackeray used once again the persona of Michael Angelo Titmarsh, which he had created for Punch. The volume published in 1846 had been preceded by a series of articles in that magazine, under the title « Wandering of our Fat Contributor ». Thackeray had a personal knowledge of colonial matters, but his text is presented as the trite reflections of a blasé tourist, who constantly asserts England’s superiority. In Notes..., the reader also finds the usual Thackerayan phenomenon of split personality, the narrator and the illustrator being one and the same person. Pictures play a central part in the book, hinting at the impossible immediacy of travel writing, a genre in which the traveller’s testimony is inevitably filtered by all kinds of obstacles, as opposed to the Victorian ideal of a direct transcription of reality.
ISSN:0220-5610
2271-6149