My proposed subject is two eminent British novelists who were also travelers (and travel writers), Charles Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. Specifically, I would like to look at a second trip each of them made to a country that he had visited earlier. Dickens visited America in 1842 and returned twenty-five years later; Waugh visited Abyssinia in 1930 and returned five years later. These two pairs of trips, despite their differences, suggest some of the circumstances that make travel imaginatively fertile for a novelist; but they also reveal some of the baggage that may depress the travel spirit.
Motivated by simple curiosity, Dickens's first American trip inspired not only a travel book but also a prominent satiric episode in his next novel, Martin Chuzzlewit. Contrary to his glowing expectations, Dickens took a strong dislike to America, but his antipathy provoked him to write about it. His second visit a quarter century later, undertaken for reasons of profit, was in this respect successful and, very likely as a consequence, mellowed his earlier hostility. Yet even though the America Dickens visited after the Civil War was greatly different from the country he had visited many years earlier, this later trip proved imaginatively barren. He observed the changes in America and professed to applaud them, but secretly yawned.
Though the lesser novelist, Waugh was the more adventurous traveler. He first journeyed to Addis Ababa in 1930 to observe the coronation of a new emperor. Abyssinia proved a perfect site for Waugh's peculiar genius. Fascinated by the colorful clash of European and native cultures he found there, he wrote both a fine travel book, Remote People, and his third novel, Black Mischief, about Abyssinia. His second visit several years later, to observe the Italian-Abyssinian War of 1935, proved disappointing, however; what had pleased and stimulated him earlier now repelled him. The resulting travel book, heavy with complaint and frustration, is a less interesting book than Remote People, and the novel based on this second visit to Abyssinia is essentially about foreign correspondents, not Abyssinia itself.
Is there a common factor in the disappointments of these later visits? The causes were more complex than simply a predictable sense of deja vu. In both cases, greater age played a part, especially with Dickens; adventurous travel--like soldiering--is for the young, or at least the young at heart. If a traveler should be tolerant of the uncomfortable and eager to meet the unexpected, then Dickens and Waugh were both less well prepared for their second visits. And there was yet another, more important problem: both made their return visits with well-defined agendas. Dickens's was money-making, Waugh's political advocacy. These agendas narrowed their curiosity and restricted their explorations, both geographical and imaginative.
There was one further reason, perhaps most compelling, for the comparative poverty of America and Abyssinia revisited. During their second visits, both travelers were deeply in love, and the women they loved were back in England. Dickens longed for his mistress, Ellen Ternan; Waugh for his young fiancè. And this shared circumstance suggests not only that a traveler is better off romantically unattached, but also that traveling and love don't mix because in some respects they demand similar kinds of emotional commitment. Like a lover, a traveler must yield himself, imaginatively, to the pleasures and risks of the unfamiliar and unpredictable. Whether a love affair ends well or badly, the experience itself will be exciting and memorable; and so also with travel. In returning to America and Abyssinia, respectively, Dickens and Waugh were constantly looking back over their shoulders, distracted from the scenes around them, impatient to return to the lovers they had left behind.
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