Travels, Explorations and Empires, 1770-1835, Part I Vol 4 by Tim Fulford Peter J Kitson Tim Youngs

Author:Tim Fulford, Peter J Kitson, Tim Youngs [Tim Fulford, Peter J Kitson, Tim Youngs]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781000559897
Google: TU1SEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-12-24T02:49:08+00:00

Hobhouse: Journey through Albania

DOI: 10.4324/9781003113348-7

John Cam Hobhouse, A Journey through Albania, and Other Provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia, to Constantinople, During the Years 1809 and 1810, 2 vols (second edn London: James Cawthorn, 1813), vol. I, pp. 142-58, vol. II, pp. 912-34.

During his life, John Cam Hobhouse (1786-1869), Baron Broughton de Gyfford, published three travel narratives: A Journey through Albania and Other Provinces of Turkey (1813); Historical Illustrations to the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold (1818); and Italy: Remarks Made in Several Visits, from the Years 1816-1854 (1859). In one way or another, each account recorded details of his friendship with Lord Byron, whose own travel journal in verse, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, was unquestionably the period's most prominent exploration account of the Ottoman Morea. Meanwhile, Hobhouse's descriptions in A Journey through Albania provide valuable insights into Romantic representations of the Islamic East.

Hobhouse and Byron met at Cambridge, and in 1809 and 1810 they travelled the East on a wartime version of the gentleman's Grand Tour, primarily visiting Greece, Albania and Constantinople. While the tour certainly had a sexual dimension, these various explorations may also have been accompanied by some diplomatic service in Albania, where Hobhouse and Byron visited the renegade governor Ali Pasha. Dubbed by Byron the 'Muslim Bonaparte', Ali Pasha Tepelene in many respects symbolised European stereotypes of the Islamic oriental and, as K. E. Fleming has recently argued, his 'prominent role in the cultivation of European romanticist, philhellene, and Orientalist sensibilities of the eighteenth century has long been overlooked' (see Fleming, The Muslim Bonaparte: Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali Pasha's Greece (Princeton, 1999), p. 5). Certainly, both Byron's poem and Hobhouse's narrative descriptions contributed to popular perceptions of Ali Pasha as an embodiment of Eastern 'character' - licentious, brutal and perverse.

One of the rhetorical objectives of Hobhouse's tour was to create public personae for himself and for Byron. Indeed, Hobhouse's correspondence with Byron indicates the degree to which this work, like Historical Illustrations later, was imagined as a collaborative effort and was focused on public reputation. In 1811, he wrote to Byron:

The Travels are going on swimmingly, plain prose is to be my fate. You shall be immortalised you rogue you shall. Your arrival will give me a great push forward. I promise myself that you will let me have all your drawings engraved for the work, which shall, as you are come, be a splendid thing. Clarke's Greece will not be out for 9 months - if I can but cut in before him!! (quoted in Michael Joyce, My Friend H: John Cam Hobhouse, Baron Broughon de Gyfford (London, 1948), p. 28).

Hobhouse suggests here that/I Journey through Albania was more about Byron, literary prominence and their rakish public images than about Albania or Greece. Indeed, when it appeared, Hobhouse's travel account did help to immortalise Byron, seeming to confirm through historical documentation elements of the poet's own exaggerated and roguish self-representation. And while Hobhouse's own public reputation would be in politics and not prose, the

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