Abstract
Acclimatization—adaptation to non-native habitats—both fascinated and frightened the Victorians, because it suggested that personal identity was not essential, but rather could be moulded by physical environment. A specific focus of acclimatization-anxiety for Victorian writers was the notion that English men and women might acquire, under enervating atmospheric influences, attributes of individual sloth and social stagnation commonly associated with the populations of warm-climate Southern Europe. This essay analyses expressions of, and attempts to manage, such anxiety about acclimatization in two English travel narratives of the 1840s—Frances Trollope’s A Visit to Italy (1842) and Charles Dickens’ Pictures from Italy (1846)—and compares these with the ideas about self and environment manifested in Alfred Tennyson’s paired poems “Mariana” (1830) and “Mariana in the South” (1832, 1842).
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Notes
- 1.
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- 2.
Jessica Howell, Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Disease, Race and Climate (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 53.
- 3.
Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 215.
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James Copland, A Dictionary of Practical Medicine, vol. 1 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1858), 343.
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Copland , A Dictionary of Practical Medicine, 342.
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Thomas Burgess, “Commentary on the Inutility of Resorting to the Italian Climate for the Cure of Pulmonary Consumption,” The Lancet 1 (1850): 592–93.
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Burgess , “Commentary on the Inutility of Resorting to the Italian Climate for the Cure of Pulmonary Consumption,” 593.
- 8.
Burgess , “Commentary on the Inutility of Resorting to the Italian Climate for the Cure of Pulmonary Consumption,” 593.
- 9.
Anderson, “Climates of Opinion,” 152.
- 10.
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- 11.
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Johnson, Change of Air, 266.
- 14.
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- 15.
Irving , Tales of the Alhambra, 46.
- 16.
Irving , Tales of the Alhambra, 122.
- 17.
Irving , Tales of the Alhambra, 25; Shelley, Rambles in Germany and Italy, 1: xvi.
- 18.
Lytton , Last Days of Pompeii, 2: 22; Irving, Tales of the Alhambra, 46.
- 19.
Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy, ed. Kate Flint (London: Penguin Books, [1846] 1998), 65.
- 20.
Richard Ford, A Hand-Book for Travellers in Spain, and Readers at Home; Describing the Country and Cities, the Natives and Their Manners; the Antiquities, Religion, Legends, Fine Arts, Literature, Sports, and Gastronomy: with Notices on Spanish History, ed. Ian Robertson (London: Centaur Press, [1845] 1966), 470.
- 21.
Dickens, Pictures from Italy, 65.
- 22.
Alfred Tennyson , “The Lotos-Eaters,” in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 429–38 (London: Longmans, 1969), lines 57–59.
- 23.
Tennyson , “The Lotos-Eaters,” lines 96–97.
- 24.
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- 25.
Frances Trollope, A Visit to Italy, vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1842), 57.
- 26.
Trollope , A Visit to Italy, vol. 1, 46–47.
- 27.
Trollope , A Visit to Italy, vol. 1, 47.
- 28.
Trollope , A Visit to Italy, vol. 1, 47.
- 29.
Trollope , A Visit to Italy, vol. 1, 46.
- 30.
Trollope , A Visit to Italy, vol. 1, 310 (emphasis in original).
- 31.
Charlotte A. Eaton, Rome, in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Constable, 1820), 58.
- 32.
Trollope , A Visit to Italy, vol. 1, 60–61.
- 33.
Trollope , A Visit to Italy, vol. 1, 57.
- 34.
Frances Trollope, A Visit to Italy, vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1842), 287.
- 35.
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- 36.
Dickens, Pictures from Italy, 167.
- 37.
George Orwell , The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin Books, [1937] 1989), 103.
- 38.
“Memoirs,” 448; slightly misquoted in Orwell, Road to Wigan Pier, 103.
- 39.
H. M. McLuhan, “Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry,” in Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, ed. John Killham, 67–85 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960), 70.
- 40.
Quoted in Christopher Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson (London: Longmans, 1969), 362.
- 41.
F. B. Pinkon, A Tennyson Companion: Life and Works (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1984), 74.
- 42.
Quoted in Ricks, Poems of Tennyson, 362.
- 43.
Alfred Tennyson, “Mariana,” in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 187–90 (London: Longmans, 1969), lines 44, 42.
- 44.
Alfred Tennyson, “Mariana in the South,” in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 361–17 (London: Longmans, 1969), line 55.
- 45.
Tennyson, “Mariana,” lines 20, 38, 1.
- 46.
Carol T. Christ, The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 18, 21.
- 47.
Christ , Finer Optic, 21.
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- 49.
Herbert F. Tucker , Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 139.
- 50.
Lionel Stevenson, “The ‘High-Born Maiden’ Symbol in Tennyson,” PMLA 63, no. 1 (1948): 236; Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism, 138.
- 51.
Tucker , Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism, 72.
- 52.
Tennyson, “Mariana,” lines 5, 40.
- 53.
A. H. Hallam , “Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (review),” in Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, ed. John D. Jump, 34–69 (London: Routledge, 1967), 42 (emphasis in original).
- 54.
Gerhard J. Joseph, “Poe and Tennyson,” PMLA 88, no. 3 (1973): 421.
- 55.
Tennyson, “Mariana in the South,” lines 39–44.
- 56.
Tennyson, “Mariana in the South,” lines 37–38.
- 57.
Tennyson, “Mariana in the South,” lines 49–56.
- 58.
Tennyson, “Mariana in the South,” lines 47, 59.
- 59.
Tennyson, “Mariana in the South,” lines 59–60.
- 60.
Trollope , A Visit to Italy, 1: 47.
- 61.
Tennyson, “Mariana in the South,” line 31.
- 62.
Tennyson, “Mariana in the South,” line 44.
- 63.
Tennyson, “Mariana in the South,” line 32.
- 64.
Trollope , A Visit to Italy, 1: 46.
- 65.
Copland, Dictionary of Practical Medicine, 1: 342.
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Jolly, R. (2018). The Environmentally Modified Self: Acclimatization and Identity in Early Victorian Literature. In: Moore, G., Smith, M. (eds) Victorian Environments. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_2
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