Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo

On 20 August 1844, over a glass of claret, a London journalist who signs himself Titmarsh is talked into joining a cruise of the Peninsular and Oriental Company. He has thirty-six hours to pack his trunk. On 22 August he sails from Southampton aboard the Lady Mary Wood. This traveller, caught off guard, is William Makepeace Thackeray.

The steamer has just opened the East to tourists, and Thackeray sketches the first specimens, himself included. Lisbon and its "lions" that must be seen, Gibraltar, Malta, an Athens that bores him after ten years of Greek at boarding school, then the shock of Smyrna and eight days in Constantinople in the middle of Ramadan, between the haze of the Golden Horn and a Turkish bath for the anthologies. On 28 September, a white squall strikes the Iberia: the passengers pray and groan, while Captain Lewis calls for his grog.

Then come Beirut, the ride from Jaffa to Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulchre and the quarrels of its sects, Alexandria, the Nile, Cairo and its Pyramids. Beneath the irony a graver gaze shows through: death in the lazaretto, the violence of a country ruled by the whip, the prayer of all peoples.

Published in 1846, this is one of the first accounts of travel in the East in the age of steam, by an observer who mocks the tourists without ever sparing himself. What is left of made-to-order enthusiasm when at last one stands at the foot of the Pyramids?