Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence

Pinkney, lieutenant-colonel (Ninian), 1776-1825Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
389K words
Chapters
39

Tags

English Originals Travel Human GeographyTravelogueTravel WritingDocumentary NarrativeEighteenth CenturyExotic CultureProvenceFolk CustomsSouthern FranceLocal Customs

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of ProvenceAuthor: Pinkney, lieutenant-colonel (Ninian), 1776-1825,Language: English, Class: DC: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere: France, Andorra, Monaco, Release Date: Apr 30, 2007

Editor's review

This is Lieutenant Colonel Pinckney's first-person account of travels through the South of France and the interior of Provence. As a military man, the author observes in a practical, concrete manner: roads and post stations, the appearance of towns, rural produce, local customs, and encounters along the way all find their way into his pages, with little romantic lyricism and more the traveler's eye for actual conditions. For today's readers its value lies not in serving as a guidebook but in offering a nineteenth-century-early foreign observer's perspective on the South of France, one that can be set against modern travel writing to appreciate the differences of an era in transport conditions, local life, and landscape description. The text is in the form of an English diary, informationally dense yet plainly narrated; it suits both slow reading and skipping about. If you care about the historical geography of Provence, the tradition of travel literature, or how British officers of the period wrote about the Continent, this book is worth a read; if you are after attraction recommendations and light travelogue fare, you will find it dated and fussy. As a public-domain e-book, it also serves well as material for historical reading and comparative study.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read alongside a map, marking the towns and provinces the author passes through to build a sense of space.
  2. Combine skimming with close reading, focusing on town descriptions, custom records, and notes on produce.
  3. Read in comparison with other travelogues of the South of France to compare different travelers' angles of observation.
  4. Note old place names and units of measure, and look them up together after finishing to fill in the background.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39

FAQ

Can this book be used as a travel guide to the South of France? No. It is a record of travels in the early nineteenth century, and its transport, townscapes, and living conditions differ greatly from today's. You will be disappointed if you treat it as a guidebook, but it is valuable as comparative material for historical geography and travel literature.
How does the author's military identity affect the content? Pinckney travels as a lieutenant colonel, and his observations lean toward roads, post stations, town layouts, and local actualities, narrated in a practical, concrete manner with little lyricism. This makes the text closer to a record of observations than to a literary sentimental travelogue.
There is a lot of old-fashioned English expression; what if I find it hard going? Read through one chapter first to get used to the style, and mark old place names and unfamiliar expressions rather than pausing over every word. Use maps and place-name reference works, and look things up together after finishing, so as to keep your reading rhythm.

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About the author

Pinkney, lieutenant-colonel (Ninian), 1776-1825 Author · 1776–1825

Pinkney, lieutenant-colonel (Ninian), 1776–1825, that is, Lieutenant-Colonel Ninian Pinkney, was a travel writer active in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Public information about his life is limited, and his nationality, education and specific career are not reliably documented. The library holds only one work by him, Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence. Judging from the title and his military identity, the book belongs to the genre of travel writing, recording his observations in southern France and the interior of Provence, and likely touching on local customs, towns and regional society. Such travel accounts often combine geographical observation with cultural record, offering later readers a first-hand view of southern France at the time. Given the limited sources, his writing style and influence remain to be further examined.