A Traveller's Life by Eric Newby

Author:Eric Newby [Eric Newby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007508167
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

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1 The engravings made from Bartlett’s drawings of Constantinople first appeared in The Beauties of the Bosphorus by Miss Julia Pardoe, published in 1839. Miss Pardoe was the daughter of a retired major who had fought in the Peninsula and at Waterloo. She was ‘a fairy-footed, fair-haired, laughing girl’ whose first work, a book of poems, was published when she was only fourteen. She first went abroad to avoid consumption and in 1835 accompanied her father to Constantinople. Two years later, at the age of thirty-two, she wrote a best seller, City of the Sultan, which was swiftly followed by The Romance of the Harem and The Beauties of the Bosphorus. The engravings made from Allom’s drawings of Constantinople were published in Constantinople and the Scenery of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor by the Rev. Robert Walsh, also published in 1839. Walsh, an Irish curate, was already over forty when he produced his History of the City of Dublin which appeared in two massive quarto volumes in 1815. Five years later he became chaplain to the British Embassy at Constantinople and this gave him the opportunity to travel in Turkey and other parts of Asia.

2 ‘The great manufactory of eunuchs visited by the explorer John Ludwig Burckhardt in 1813 was at Zawyet ed-deyr on the Nile near Assiut, ‘which,’ Burckhardt wrote, ‘supplied all European and the greater part of Asiatic Turkey with these guardians of female virtue.’ There, two Coptic Christian monks castrated about a hundred and fifty young Negro boys a year, post-operative treatment being to bury them up to their haunches in warm manure. Of sixty who were operated on in the autumn that Burckhardt was at Zawyet ed-deyr two died, which was regarded as an abnormally high mortality rate.

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