Tramping Ambiguities: On the Road with Harry A. Franck, Hilaire Belloc and James Greenwood

Seaber, Luke

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-50962-4_4

Tramping Ambiguities: On the Road with Harry A. Franck, Hilaire Belloc and James Greenwood

Luke Seaber⁴

Chapter
First Online: 29 March 2017

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing ((PSLW))

Abstract

Beginning with H.G. Wells’s The History of Mr Polly, we explore the cultural importance that tramping had in the Edwardian period. We then analyse the remarkable life of the American travel writer Harry A. Franck, and how incognito social investigation can be intertwined with walking and tourism, using the theories of Ian Hacking about cultural polarity. We also look at Hilaire Belloc’s The Path to Rome (1902), and the ambiguities over social status inherent in walking in the early twentieth century. Finally, we return to James Greenwood, and his 1883 book On Tramp, to explore how incognito social investigators are sometimes able to produce texts that are more respectful of the agency of the poor than their own authors are aware.

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Notes

1.
For discussion of the concept of ‘interstitiality’, see Chapter 7.
2.
Wells, H.G. 2005 [1910]. The History of Mr Polly. London: Penguin, p. 123.
3.
Ibid., p. 122.
4.
Ibid., p. 160.
5.
Ibid.
6.
Ibid., p. 162.
7.
The best introductions to the Edwardian tramping phenomenon are Tickner, Lisa. 2000. Modern Life & Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, pp. 54–65 and Southworth, Helen. 2009. ‘Douglas Goldring’s The Tramp: An Open Air Magazine (1910–11) and Modernist Geographies’. Literature & History 18:1, pp. 35–53.
8.
Tickner, Modern Life & Modern Subjects, p. 54. Tickner is in fact talking about Augustus John’s ‘obsession with gypsies and “tramping”’, but the observation holds just as true regarding The History of Mr Polly.
9.
Jebb, Miles. 1986. Walkers. London: Constable, pp. 130–68, especially p. 153.
10.
A good example of this can be seen if one notes the relative prevalence in the essays of one of the great public literary figures of the Edwardian age, G.K. Chesterton, of scene-setting that shows the authorial voice on a country walk (for example, Chesterton, G.K., 1910. ‘The Telegraph Poles’. In his Alarms and Discussions. London: Methuen & Co., pp. 21–7, p. 21); this despite what we know of Chesterton’s deep distaste for going on recreational walks (see Ker, Ian. 2011. G.K. Chesterton: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 201).
11.
See for instance Clifford, Nicholas. 2007. ‘With Harry Franck in China’. In Kerr, Douglas and Julia Kuehn (eds.), A Century of Travels in China: Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 133–45. A recent exception to the lack of critical interest in Franck’s writing itself as opposed to interest in the things that he describes is Driever, Steven L. 2011. ‘Geographic Narratives in the South American Travelogues of Harry A. Franck: 1917–1943’. Journal of Latin American Geography 10:1, pp. 53–69.
12.
Driever makes the excellent point that the 1930s saw Franck’s books moving away from travel literature ‘more suited to the armchair by the fireplace’ to books for tourists to take with them, and this was accompanied by a falling-off in sales. Driever, ‘Geographic Narratives’, p. 62.
13.
Moretti, Franco. 2000. ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’. Modern Language Quarterly 61:1, pp. 207–27.
14.
‘to understand the true customs of a country you have to descend into other classes, as those of the rich are the same almost everywhere’: my translation. This is in fact a slight misquotation: the original begins ‘il faut descendre dans d’autres états pour connaître les véritables mœurs d’un pays’. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1967 [1761]. Julie; ou, La Nouvelle Héloïse. Paris: GF Flammarion, p. 166.
15.
Franck, Harry A. 1910. A Vagabond Journey around the World: A Narrative of Personal Experience. New York: The Century Co., p. xiv.
16.
Ibid., pp. xiii-xiv.
17.
Ibid., p. xiv.
18.
I take here Franck’s version of his travels as given in Vagabond Journey to be a reliable account of his rather incredible experiences. This faith is based upon the fact that all of the scrapbooks housed in the Special Collections Library of the University of Michigan confirm what he writes. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library), Franck, Box 30.
19.
Khartoum does not in fact have a Patriarch; one presumes the exact Orthodox title was lost in translation at some point.
20.
Franck, Vagabond Journey, p. 232.
21.
Ibid., p. 310.
22.
Orwell, George. 2000 [1940]. ‘Inside the Whale’. In A Patriot After All: 1940–1941 [The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison, vol. 12]. London: Secker & Warburg, pp. 86–115, p. 88.
23.
Franck, Vagabond Journey, p. 282.
24.
All non-English terms are spelt as Franck spells them.
25.
Ibid., p. 197.
26.
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library), Franck, Box 5, Tales of a Vagabond/Making of a Vagabond.
27.
Franck, Harry A. 1932. Foot-Loose in the British Isles: Being a Desultory and Not Too Serious Account of Sixteen Months of Living and Peregrinating Hither and Yon throughout Great Britain. New York and London: The Century Co., p. 316.
28.
Ibid., p. 331.
29.
Ibid., p. 333.
30.
Ibid., p. 341.
31.
Ibid., p. viii.
32.
Ibid., p. 332.
33.
Ibid., p. 334.
34.
Ibid.
35.
Ibid., p. 335.
36.
Ibid., p. 334.
37.
Ibid., p. 334.
38.
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library), Franck, Box 8, folder 1930–1932, 1934–1936.
39.
In the published version (see Franck, Foot-Loose, pp. 358–359) he spells the contracted form ‘Bark’, presumably to indicate a pronunciation with /ɑː/ rather than /ɜː/.
40.
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library), Franck, Box 5, Tales of a Vagabond/Making of a Vagabond.
41.
A system existed whereby for a small fee employment agencies would pay labourers’ tickets to their place of work (very often in railroad construction or maintenance somewhere).
42.
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library), Franck, Box 5, Tales of a Vagabond/Making of a Vagabond.
43.
Ibid.
44.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2011 [2001]. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. New York: Picador, p. 9.
45.
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library), Franck, Box 5, ‘Wandering Unskilled Laborers on the Edge of Trampdom’.
46.
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library), Franck, Box 5, Tales of a Vagabond/Making of a Vagabond.
47.
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library), Franck, Box 8, 1905.
48.
‘The Tour of the World as a Worker – continued’. My translation. Ibid.
49.
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library), Franck, Box 5, Tales of a Vagabond/Making of a Vagabond fragments.
50.
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library), Franck, Box 1.
51.
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library), Franck, Box 6, Suggestions for Books, Articles, and Novels.
52.
Ibid.
53.
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library), Franck, Box 6, ‘The Day’s Events and their Background’.
54.
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library), Franck, Box 5, Proposed European Book.
55.
Ibid.
56.
Ibid.
57.
Harry A. Franck to William J. Latta, 8 January 1919. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library), Franck, Box 1, 1919.
58.
Hacking, Ian. 1998. Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia.
59.
Hacking gives a translation of this document, ibid., pp. 135–48.
60.
Although a term that Tissié used to refer to Dadas’s problem, ‘pathological tourism’ would be the perfect shorthand for Franck’s life. Quoted in ibid., p. 27.
61.
Ibid., p. 1.
62.
Ibid., p. 81.
63.
Jebb, Walkers, p. 22.
64.
Ibid., pp. 22–23.
65.
Ibid., p. 63.
66.
Quoted in ibid., p. 61.
67.
Ibid., p. 119.
68.
Ibid., p. 150.
69.
Chesterton, G.K. 1988 [1936]. The Autobiography. [The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, vol. XVI]. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, p. 210.
70.
Belloc, Hilaire. 1985 [1902]. The Path to Rome. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, p. 31.
71.
Ibid., p. 108.
72.
Ibid., p. 181.
73.
Ibid., pp. 45–46.
74.
Chesterton, Autobiography, p. 210.
75.
Belloc, The Path to Rome, p. 46.
76.
Page, Robin. 1973. Down among the Dossers. London: Davis-Poynter, pp. 145–6.
77.
Leigh Fermor, Patrick. 2004 [1977]. A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople, from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube. London: John Murray, pp. 12–3.
78.
Jebb, Walkers, pp. 169–170.
79.
Ibid., p. 171.
80.
Belloc, The Path to Rome, p. 19.
81.
An important exception to the near-total lack of tramping narratives after the Second World War is a remarkable book (Holzach, Michael. 1985 [1982]. Deutschland umsonst: Zu Fuß und ohne Geld durch ein Wohlstandsland; Mit einer Deutschlandskarte und dem eingezeichneten Wanderweg. Frankfurt am Main and Berlin: Ullstein Sachbuch) by a West German journalist who in 1982 published his account of how in 1980 he spent six months walking from Hamburg to Lake Constance and back again, picking up casual work but setting off with no money at all. Although a fascinating work, it is of limited relevance to the field of study here because Holzach tells nearly all those whom he meets exactly what he is doing: it is not incognito social investigation even in the ambiguous way that such accidental examples as Belloc’s are. A British equivalent is Carroll, Charlie. 2013. No Fixed Abode: A Journey through Homelessness from London to Cornwall. Chichester: Summersdale.
82.
Greenwood, James. 2008 [1883]. On Tramp. In Freeman, Mark and Gillian Nelson (eds.). Vicarious Vagrants: Incognito Social Explorers and the Homeless in England, 1860–1910. Lambertville: The True Bill Press, pp. 141–80, p. 142.
83.
Regarding Lucas, see Whitmore, Richard. 1983. Mad Lucas: The Strange Story of Victorian England’s Most Famous Hermit. Hitchin: North Hertfordshire District Council.
84.
Greenwood spells this without the e.
85.
Greenwood, On Tramp, p. 151.
86.
Ibid., p. 148.
87.
Whitmore gives 19 April as the date of Lucas’s death (Mad Lucas, p. 65); this discrepancy can be explained by the fact that the 17th, the date that Greenwood gives, quoting the Hertfordshire Express (On Tramp, p. 151), was the day on which the unconscious and dying Lucas was removed from the house in which he had immured himself (Whitmore, Mad Lucas, pp. 1–3).
88.
St Ippolyts is given simply as ‘Ippolits’.
89.
Greenwood, On Tramp, p. 169.
90.
Ibid., p. 147.
91.
Ibid.
92.
Ibid., p. 157.
93.
http://pubshistory.com/HertsPubs/Hatfield/WhiteSwan.shtml, accessed 28 January 2014.
94.
For completeness’ sake, Greenwood’s itinerary and the dates thereof must have been as follows (the places of departure and arrival in brackets):

18 June 1877 (London)–Hatfield

19 June 1877 Hatfield–Stevenage

20 June 1877 Stevenage–Hitchin

21 June 1877 Hitchin–Shefford

22 June 1877 Shefford–(Bedford)
95.
Ibid., p. 141.
96.
Ibid., p. 172.
97.
Ibid.
98.
Ibid., pp. 172–3.
99.
Ibid., p. 173.
100.
Ibid., p. 174.

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Seaber, L. (2017). Tramping Ambiguities: On the Road with Harry A. Franck, Hilaire Belloc and James Greenwood. In: Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50962-4_4

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50962-4_4
Published: 29 March 2017
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-319-50962-4
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