Ion Codru Dragusanu – ‘The Transylvanian Pilgrim’

Ion Codru Dragusanu (1818-1884) is a Romanian writer from Transylvania, and is also a journalist and politician. His book, ‘The Transylvanian Pilgrim’, published in 1865, relates his travels throughout Europe, and in addition, his visit to London, which marks him out as one of the truly rare Romanians to have visited Britain up until the very end of the 19th century.

Ion Codru Dragusanu travelled to London in 1840. A continental amazed (to the full extent of the word) by this land appearing from the fogs of Victorian times, he has left us his impressions of the English, England, and the English way of life. From the following one can see that some things do not change much with the passing of time and some other things are still as inexplicable to the continental mind as then.

Fate ordained that one of his great-grandsons, Ion Ratiu, would build his life in London and become a prominent British-Romanian, inspiring others in the quest to penetrate the mysteries of life in the land of the Albion. What Ion Codru would have made of this we cannot possibly know, but here are his opinions about how life was for him on the banks of the Thames.

[...] London, September 1840
Throughout Europe there are only two great peoples: the French and the English. Writers compare the former with the ancient Greeks, and the latter with the Romans, but this is true only in view of the main characteristics of the nation, because I deem that the reverse would not be false either.

The French have a frivolous insolence and a convulsive tendency to rebel, but they have a tasteful and attractive luxury, and their writings are full of spirit – thus they resemble the Grecians, while their great deeds and their influence on the general culture of other peoples make them the true Romans of modern times. On the other hand, the English are thoroughly endowed with constancy, the chief virtue of Rome, but they have the speculative spirit and egotistical habits that focus on their own interest, which are nothing more that Grecian attributes.

In alliance with each other, these two nations are destined to rule the world and decide the fate of nations.

This was my own theory about the country and its inhabitants. Let us proceed to show what we know from our own experience and to prove these in accordance with my speculations.

We are told that England, being surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, is heavily subject to powerful drizzles, and that London, being close to the sea, towards the mouth of the Thames, suffers greatly because of these all year around. The exception being September, when the weather is bearable. So we took advantage of this propitious time of the year to see this city, the most gigantic in Europe, in its whole splendour.

On the 10th of September, we departed from Paris with the post coach and, travelling throughout the night, reached the French port of Havre de Grace, at the mouth of the Seine. [...] With the evening tide of [the next] day we boarded the steamship “Great Britain” which sailed the Channel – the wet road to London.

[...] [Due to sea sickness] The next morning I woke up a bit more worn than usual, and I went on the deck of the steamship to see the place. One could only see the clear blue skies and the green waters, mirroring each other. The skipper spoke French, so I approached him and asked him several questions. Very affably, which I did not expect from an Englishman, he explained to me the virtues of the maritime compass and the use of the chart of the 39 winds, known well only by the professional seaman; later on he showed me the white chalk coast of England, which gave the country its old name of Albion, to which the French have added the epithet ‘perfidious’.

Completely different from the French, the English are serious and taciturn. They speak gladly only when they have the occasion to praise the institutions of their own country. The same with this Englishman: he told me England is the land of political freedom and, in order to preserve it, she has more warships than France has commercial ships, and then he gave me various other kinds of stories. All hyperbole even according to my humble reason.

Towards evening we approached the mouth of the Thames and began to feel the proximity of London, where ships of all species come and go in numbers so great that one hardly finds one’s place to pass among them. We entered the Thames itself with great care, as if entering a forest of masts and smoking chimneys.

Finally we got to the Custom house. The possessions of all passengers flew like balls from the ship to boats and from here to the halls of the Custom house, and I was close to believing we should never see them again. But here people are so much into order and consequent practice that if you trust them with a needle, it will never get lost or taken by others.
The luggage was open and inspected in a blink of the eyes and we found ourselves put in a ‘cab’ (a sort of one-horse chariot), and after a quite long distance we reached Saint Martin’s Lane and the ‘Fricour’ Inn, where we were brought in by an Italian guide who was prowling for customers in the valley of the river. He got four Crowns as a reward from us.

I was most surprised we are not asked for passports. Our guide told us that such an enterprise is unknown in England and is a continental luxury.

[...] First of all, London surprises you by the great number of people and the great quiet all around. Then there is the exemplary cleanness of the streets, the simplicity of the buildings and the uniform clothing of men, which is generally grey or a stern ashen grey.

All streets are large and straight, especially the main ones, which are also paved with wood or covered in macadam. The houses do not have such exquisite architecture as in Paris, nor are they as solid, because this city is a whole world of almost two million inhabitants. London has stretched each year passing by, and has engulfed private properties that would sum up a surface as big as the county of river Olt (Tara Oltului) in our country. Many neighbourhoods have the name of Such-and-such Garden. These lands are freehold or leasehold for 20-30 years, and the builders calculate the expenses according to the lease and they build lightly.

In spite of the lack of a French lustre in London, there is a luxury of commodity which is not to be found anywhere else; all stairs are carpeted to the level of the street, not to speak of the rooms in the house. Of course, the great humidity requires such luxury. Also, in front of the houses with a street front there are small flower beds. Yet again, in order to fight humidity and mildew, kitchens are to be found at the base of the houses, akin to cellars.

No other city has so many piazzas as London and almost all of them are quadrangular, therefore the name of ‘squares’. They all have some monument, of course not all grand, and generally they have flower gardens, lawns and trees in the middle. These gardens are generally circular and they are closed with iron railings and serve as places of enjoyment for the neighbouring houses.

There are in London public gardens – or should I say whole plains, so wide they are – where there are only green lawns, tall trees, bushes, and rivulets or crystal-clear lakes. One will find, but only seldom, beds of flowers. Such public places for the enjoyment of everybody are Regents Green, Hyde and St James’s Park, their name being ‘parks’. On Sundays and holidays you have the entire urban crowd there, otherwise just foreigners and aristocrats.

The divine service in the church lasts until eleven antemeridian. During this whole time, no-one is allowed to open windows or doors of the stores, not even to private houses, and the whole city seems to be deep in devout reflection. If one enters the temple, until the end of the service one will not get out of there because the church warden stands at the door and does not allow it. This contrasts greatly with our customs, and especially with those of the Catholics who have made a theatre out of churches and the impious enter and go as their hearts desire, often accompanied by dogs.

In general, the Protestants and the English in particular are more rigid in those matters around religion than the Orthodox. They believe less, but do more for the dignity of religion, which is devoid of all kind of hocus-pocus. In London, nobody works on Sundays, as I saw them do in Paris, not even for the enterprises owned by the State.

The other day I attended the nearby St Martin’s [in the Fields] in order to see the ceremony of the Anglican rite. They are very simple, as those of our Lutherans are. I have noticed something; they read long prayers, as we do in the Eastern Church, then hymns accompanied by organ, followed by a badly declaimed and sleep inducing sermon – well, it is true I did not grasp much besides the occasional ‘Lord God’.

So it seems to me that the English language does not have pleasant sounds, with which we are accustomed in the continental languages, or maybe it’s just the novelty of English that makes it seem like this to us. With these, Lord have mercy! I occupied two and a half hours counting the number of bald heads and I found only in the hall – me being at the gallery – some 455 of them. Naturally, in the hall one finds the men that have reached a certain age, and at the gallery you have the younger ones, but there were enough bald ones even here.

English men are tall and handsome, but only a few of them will keep a full head of hair due to the dampness of their climate. I really wonder how it is that the ladies have such beautiful manes of hair. [...]

[...] We went to see the British Museum. Here you find a treasure of bodies of statues from Egypt, Greece, Italia and both Indies, many rarities, all ordered nicely by their country of origin and their times. If they are not taken by force, so I was told, they are bought with the gold of their wealthy lords and with the intention of offering them to the national museum.

I found extraordinary the petrified skeletons of the antediluvian animals: mastodons, mammoths, and ichthyosaurus, then in the court the skeleton of a real whale, as long as a huge ship, whose bones look like aged fir tree beams. I also went to see the cathedral of St Paul’s, an architectonic monument, similar to St Peter’s in Vatican, albeit much smaller, and besides some secular monuments inside, it is scarcely decorated.

From here we rode to the Zoological Garden, where is situated the enclosure for beasts of all creation; the richest in Europe. They have here four elephants and six giraffes, very beautiful. It was very funny though when I was shown a buffalo as a curious beast, and funnier still it was when I told the guide there that my father back home has a grange full of such beasts, and I was raised with buffalo’s milk.

Leaving that place, we went to the Royal Polytechnic Institution, a place where they conduct physics-chemical experimentation in front of an audience, in which real lightning was produced. A young man, elegantly dressed, stepped into an insulated fabric contraption with a long breathing tube, and he threw himself into a basin 10ft deep, full of water from where he collected in ten minutes the coins thrown in by the audience. He then came out with the money in a receptacle, applauded by the crowd, stepped out of the fabric contraption and he was as brand new.

The following day we went to see another place, called ‘Box hall’, where a species of English gladiators fight with their fists face-to-face, raining blows on each other’s nose and stomach. I saw one oozing blood from his nose and mouth like a slaughtered animal, and some other two who had passed out, lying on the ground. This filled me with nausea so I left that place. The English like this kind of barbarous fight and clap their hands and even place bets on their preferred fighters.

[...] Finally, I went to see the tunnel under the Thames, one of the wonders of the world, which surpasses those of the most praised of the ancient world. After the city of London expanded greatly towards the mouth of the Thames, there was a lack of stable communication between the two sides of the river, and they could not build a bridge because it would have disturbed the entry of the ships in the port of London – the London Docks. Thus they have made a society to build a road under the water, and this was made by a Frenchman called Brunel. It has an entry with two arches.

Very strange was an English habit, which I found later on is something natural. We were hot after all our excursions, so [our guide] took us to a cafe, in order to cool down. On the spot, we were served with hot tea, while I was waiting, as is our custom, for lemonades, orangeade, or cold sorbet. The English are very practical homeopaths, fighting fire with fire; we’re not so experts in this field yet.

Last night I have been at Covent Garden theatre, a hall as resplendent as possible, and I attended an opera in the English language, but the song was not at all to my liking, screeching in my ears with such a great number of monosyllabic words. They say the shortness of English words is adapted to nautical command, and the English wonder how come other nations can evolve without the concision granted only to their language. Yet I believe that the English shan’t ever accommodate their tongue to singing, because harmony requires sonorous, clear vowels, not swallowed and sneezed sounds such as theirs.

Undoubtedly, Great Britain is the most civilised state in the world. I have observed this closely in London – you will not find soldiers here. Either there is not much of an army, or regular soldiers are allowed to don civil clothing when not on duty. But you can find on the streets the so-called ‘constables’, a sort of policemen armed only with short truncheons, filled with lead, and with the arms of the realm at one end. Everybody tries to respect them, even if one is arrogant, otherwise people will have the occasion to experiment on their own skin the specific weight of the lead helped by the constable.

The core of London, called The City, is formed especially by small shops, as small as shells, whose owners are all millionaires. They only keep here samples of merchandise, and they all own factories so big so they could equip twenty ships in any port of the world, for a whole week. These merchants with their money keep the whole rule of England and they put the pressure on the political barometer of the world, according to their own interests.

Besides the fact that the English have plenty of money, they are also men of their word, and solid as metal, and are unnervingly exact. The English are not speculative by need, as other nations, but by nature, so everything is possible for them. The English do not change their nature, and remain faithful to it until the day they die.

The originality of English clothing, way of life, and products, all show simplicity pared with solidity. This is how they say that all which is simple and elegant is ‘à l’anglaise’, meaning according to English tastes.

In the English urban society you cannot show your face without scandalising the others unless you wear a black suit with white tie. At the royal court and high lords, even nowadays one must wear tight trousers, silken socks and shoes. Otherwise, shoes are not important at all, because the English, far from excelling in this domain, will even wear riding boots.

There is plenty to be seen in this huge city, and I have described plenty. I only have to tell you something about English food.
It is simple, as everything English, but very rich – I mean, all their food is made of steaks, really not done at all, maybe only licked once by charcoal fire. The meat is wonderful, most tender, because they do not work their land with their horned beasts, and game is kept in parks, where it gets fat. But, as I say, from the steak heated-up blood is dripping, and they could eat it if they feel like it, otherwise they say it is ruined by continental tastes. Along with the roast beef comes, generally, the plum-pudding, a sort of Romanian ‘mamaliga’ made out of fine flour, which is very thick and has plums in it, hence the name. For the high houses, it is made with sweet sultanas. Then come potatoes, boiled, and served whole, with their skin on, then bread, fresh butter, and this is all. Soups, sauces, salads, and other thousands of delicacies are kept in contempt, not to mention sauerkraut and pork scratchings.

The national drink here is beer, which comes in two varieties: porter and ale, both excellent, although porter is inimitable, but a bit too strong; so normally people have ale. The wines are brought from foreign countries, and only fine wines, because of the import duty, so cheap wines would not bring profit; also, the English do not fake their drinks. The wines drunk here are generally Spanish or Portuguese, as Porto, Madera, Sherry, and Malaga.

Although simple, English cuisine is richer than anywhere else in Europe.

The English are the greediest people in the world when it comes to food. In the morning, as they wake up, they have tea or coffee, at ten in the morning they have a beefsteak and beer, the lunch is meagre, at two o’clock; they have tea again at five o’clock, and will have a hefty dinner at nine in the evening, often followed by some punch.

This way of eating was introduced on the continent, in the places where the English flock around, because they do travel a lot, having business everywhere in the world. When they are abroad, the English live better, having living costs reduced by half comparing to their own land, where everything costs.

The last words: the French call themselves Monsieur (wherefrom the Germans call some soldiers ‘mouser’, from the French-speaking Belgians); the English call themselves John Bull [...].