Continental Cucumbers
[BELGIUM and NETHERLANDS.]
‘Journal of a trip to Holland July 1825’.
The Netherlands and Belgium, 1825.
Manuscript on paper, in English, 8vo (19.5 x 12 cm), pp. 70; neatly written in black ink in a single hand, c. 24 lines per page, occasional corrections; a few light marks; very good, loose in original marbled boards, title inked to upper cover; some wear to extremities and rubbing to covers; two leaves from a rose folded in paper with explanatory note loosely inserted.
An entertaining and informative diary of a holiday in the Netherlands and Belgium by an anonymous Englishman, recording his adventures in Rotterdam, Delft, The Hague, Leiden, Haarlem, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, Waterloo, Ghent, and Bruges.
A resident of Coltishall in Norfolk, our protagonist steams off to the continent aboard the overcrowded Lowther on 2 July 1825, in the company of his friends Mr and Mrs Copeman, being crammed in ‘like convicts going to Bottany [sic] Bay’. Overall he has a good time, greatly admiring Dutch and Belgian art and architecture, and even enjoying the food, especially continental cucumbers. ‘The sallads [sic] were large, much cabbag’d & most beautiful, cucumber like vegetable thread … a variety of sweetmeats & marmalades enough to tempt a saint’, he writes in Rotterdam.
There are numerous notable passages along the way, not least a wonderful description of the famous organ at Haarlem: ‘[We] were first delighted, & then astonished at the wonderful body of sound produc’d by this noble organ, from the brilliant touch of a very good performer; the effect of violent hail, & distantly rolling thunder, which gradually approach’d, till it burst in a tremendous crash, was awfully sublime … impossible to describe, & the excited feelings were glad to be relieved by a beautiful piece from the Creation, where the Vox humana stop was soft & sweet as the voice of inspiration & hardly seem’d to belong to this world’. Our writer even has a play himself, noting that the depth of the keys ‘requir’d fingers of iron’.
At Amsterdam he marvels at the calmness of the residents of its tottering houses, noting ‘it is calculated the city cannot stand another century’. In Antwerp, he is moved by a depiction of purgatory in the Dominican church, ‘with figures large as life, some with uplifted arms, & others writhing in agony, surrounded & engulfed with flames, filling the mind with horrors, & causing a chill, even a heretic cannot resist’. He has a close shave during festivities in Brussels in honour of Prince Frederick and Princess Louise when ‘one little Cupid’ in a procession ‘let fly an arrow & broke a shop window close by us’.
At Waterloo, our writer records his experiences visiting La Belle Alliance, the battlefield and its monuments, receiving a rose from his guide at the end. The leaves of this are preserved in the journal, folded in paper labelled as follows: ‘This rose was given me by our guide, pluck’d from a bush that adorns the monument and grave of the immortal leg of the Marquis of Anglesea, at Waterloo … A precious relic of enthusiasm, during an innocent lapse of reason’. The diary ends with a visit to London, our writer panning a production of Der Freischütz at Drury Lane but greatly admiring the recently opened Diorama at Regent’s Park.
