Articles with the theme: Travel writers on the Bents

Lear, Bent & Tozer

 

H. F. Tozer (Wikipedia)

Neither a firm of county-town solicitors,  nor nonsense to soon find a link between Theodore Bent and Edward Lear (1812-1888). The Oxford academic and traveller to the Eastern Med, Henry Fanshawe Tozer (1829-1916) – himself somewhat Learesque – visited the artist, a lover of Greece, but by then too infirm to travel, in his San Remo villa in 1885, and sent him a copy of Bent’s newly published and seminal work: The Cyclades or Life Among the Insular Greeks (London, 1885).

In the 9 May 1885 issue (no. 679, pp 322-3) of The Academy, Tozer submitted a full and waspish review of Bent’s now-famous book. The review is a great read, something of a series of fierce island landscapes of its own, in all seasons. He lets rip, but ends charitably, in a manner fitting for a man of the cloth: “But this does not much detract from the usefulness of the book as a unique description of the life and ideas of a people, which renders it a very storehouse of facts for the student of customs and myths. And in this respect its value will be permanent. Other travellers may follow in Mr. Bent’s footsteps [millions in fact], and fill up what is wanting in his archaeological information; but in a few years’ time, if any traveller be found so enduring as to attempt once more the task which he has so well performed, it is highly probable that a great part of these interesting customs and ideas will have disappeared.” Very true, and now the islands are an ordeal in summer for any but teenagers – some of the blame can be lain at Bent’s door perhaps.  Incidentally, Tozer’s 1890 book The Islands of the Aegean has been long forgotten.

Edward Lear (Wikipedia)

Lear is soon writing to his friend Chichester Fortescue: ‘Tozer of Oxford sends me a charming book…by Theodore Bent…all about the Cyclades. (Dearly beloved child let me announce to you that this word is pronounced ‘Sick Ladies,’ – howsomdever certain Britishers call it ‘Sigh-claides.’)…’ (Lear to Chichester Fortescue, Lord Carlingford [30 April 1885, San Remo]).

Lear, like Bent, struggled with the tug between sunshine and showers:

 

Edward Lear ‘Corfu from Ascension’ (1856-62) (Wikipedia).

“It seems to me that I have to choose between two extremes of affection for nature – towards outward nature that is – English or southern – the former, oak, ash and beech, downs and cliffs, old associations, friends near at hand, and many comforts not to be got elsewhere. The latter olive – vine – flowers, the ancient life of Greece, warmth and light, better health, greater novelty, and less expense in life. On the other side are in England cold, damp and illness, constant hurry and bustle, cessation from all topographic interest, extreme expenses…” [Edward Lear, c. 1860, taken from a letter, in Edward Lear: A Biography by Peter Levi (1995, p. 192)]

Mabel Bent and Gertrude Bell – two B’s in a pod

Gertrude Bell – a still from the BBC’s publicity.
[Gertrude Bell’s diary, Tuesday, 6 February 1900]: “Rained a little in the morning but cleared after lunch and I went out shopping, and through the town to the Valley of Hinnom. Met Mrs Th. Bent, horrid woman…”

A fascinating profile of Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) in Baghdad the other night (December 2019)* on BBC 4 (a re-showing of a progamme from 2017) –unquestionably an important and extraordinary figure – Arabist, archaeologist, diplomat, agent provocatrice: and no match for Mabel Bent (1847-1929), the latter, it seems, giving her short shrift the few occasions they met in the early 1900s, in Palestine and around. Bell, in the bully spectrum, of course took an instant dislike to Mrs Theodore Bent – as much no-nonsense as she was herself.

Mabel Bent and Manthaios Simos, the Bents’ dragoman, on their camels near Mohammad Gul in the Sudan in 1896 (a detail from a rare lantern slide in the RGS, London).

Bell writes to her stepmother Dame Florence Bell, 6 February 1900: ‘I met Mrs. Theodore Bent, but having thrown the Salaam, as we say in my tongue, I rapidly fled, for I do not like her. She is the sort of woman the refrain of whose conversation is: “You see, I have seen things so much more interesting” or “I have seen so many of these, only bigger and older”… I wonder if Theodore Bent liked her.’ He did; very much.

* Randomly repeated it seems; a VPN may help outside the UK.

“DWELLERS IN TENTS – Every man, says a philosopher, is a wanderer at heart. Alas! I fear the axiom would be truer if he had confined himself to stating that every man loves to fancy himself a wanderer, for when it comes to the point there is not one in a thousand who can throw off the ties of civilized existence – the ties and the comforts of habits which have become easy to him by long use, of the life whose security is ample compensation for its monotony. Yet there are moments when the cabined spirit longs for liberty.” (Gertrude Bell, Safar Nameh. Persian Pictures – A Book of Travel, London, 1894, p. 83)

Bell on Bent: The online ‘Bell Archive’ produces some other fascinating insights:

“[Thursday, 25 January 1900]: Fine morning and wet afternoon. Shopped after lunch. Still slack and miserable. Called on Mrs Dickson and met Mrs Theodore Bent…”

“[Tuesday, 6 February 1900]: Rained a little in the morning but cleared after lunch and I went out shopping, and through the town to the Valley of Hinnom. Met Mrs Th. Bent, horrid woman. Found the last of the starch hyacinths, cyclamen, anemones, and a blue and a yellow flower in the ‘adas fields. Also branches of almond. Met my friend who greeted me kindly and asked me what I was going to do with all that grass.”

“[Friday, 13 April 1900]: Went down to Christ Church at 11 and found the service not nearly over, so I went in and waited. Then Mrs Dickson, Mr Dunn, Baby, Mr Green and I set out to Gethsemane to see the Nebi Musa pilgrims. (I saw Mrs Th. Bent outside the church, she has only been to Mashetta and Bozrah.)”

“[Wednesday, 1 February 1905]: Mr Dunn dined and we talked all the evening. Mrs Bent seems to be making mischief.”

Mabel Bent’s travel Chronicles are available from Archaeopress, Oxford.

Incidentally, the American historian, archaeologist and scholar. Charles Cutler Torrey (1863–1956) also remembers sitting next to Mabel one night at a dinner-party in Jerusalem (Mabel visited Palestine almost annually in the first two decades of the 20th century) – he records finding her “a terror” (B.R. Foster, From New Haven to Nineveh and Beyond; Lockwoood Press, Columbus, GA, 2023, p.151).