Nearly forty years after his Russian excursion, Sala reminisced in his autobiography about his first extended assignment as a foreign correspondent;
I remained in St. Petersburg and its vicinity from mid-April until mid-September; and I can, without exaggeration, say that I have rarely in the whole course of my life passed five such months of unmingled happiness as I did in the metropolis of Tsarish Majesty Alexander Nicolaivitch II. I was still young; I was in first-rate health; I had a sufficiency of cash, and had bidden that which I hoped was to be a lasting farewell to Bohemia and its nightmares.1
Sala reflects on a time of unmitigated pleasure free from all sordid, bohemian indulgences. But his contemporary letters of 1856 and his actual account, A Journey Due North, belie most of his later claims. He didn‟t actually arrive in Russia until 22 May and the resulting row with Dickens over the rights to the letters was founded on Sala‟s belief that he had anything but a „sufficiency of cash‟ and he cited Dickens‟s lack of experience at employing foreign correspondents as a reason for this.2 The fare
11 G.A. Sala, The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala (London: Cassell & Company, 1895) p.
343-4
2
for more on Sala and Dickens‟s disagreement see Peter Blake, „George Augustus Sala, Charles Dickens and Household Words‟ in Dickens Quarterly 26 (March 2009)
to St. Petersburg had eaten away at his first week‟s salary and in a letter to W.H. Wills he was forced to ask for £5 before he had even arrived in St. Petersburg. Due to justifiably paranoid suspicions of covert letter-opening, Sala only wrote five letters back to England during his stay in Russia. A letter to W.H. Wills on 7 May berates the expense of foreign travel, Sala complains that he has found it impossible to live on less than four dollars or twelve shillings a day. Although he has not yet arrived in Russia at this point he proposes several possible titles for the work; „Due North in 30 chapters or so‟, „a pocket book in Russian leather‟, or „chez Russians at home.‟3
There is an irony in the final title chosen, „A Journey Due North‟, because, as Catherine Waters has noted, „the linear directness, exactitude and end-focus implied by a journey “due” north are continually subverted by Sala‟s typically excursive mode of travelling and of writing.‟4
Rejecting W.H. Wills‟s advice to travel by sea from Hull to the Russian port of Cronstadt, Sala chose instead to travel in an
„excursive‟ mode to Berlin and proceed to St. Petersburg from there. While in Berlin he received news on 27 April that ice had blocked the passage north through the Gulf of Finland and the „Prussian Eagle‟ would not leave Stettin until 17 May.5
With three weeks at his disposal, Sala set about imagining the lives of his fellow travellers and painting a portrait of them that may have inadvertently contributed to rumours that he had never visited Russia at all. There was the waspish Puritanical lady Miss Wapps who was convinced that Sala was a foreigner due to his ability to speak some Russian and his naturally dark pigmentation.6 There was the French lady, an actress, who is all „lithe movements, and silver laughter‟ and who could well be an early prototype of
3
Letter from Sala to W.H. Wills 7 May 1856 Beinecke Library Box 1
4 Catherine Waters, “Much of Sala, and but Little of Russia”: “A Journey Due North,” Household
Words, and the Birth of a Special Correspondent‟ Victorian Periodicals Review 42:4 Winter 2009 p. 307
5 ibid. p. 307 6
G.A. Sala, A Journey Due North (London: Richard Bentley, 1858) p. 38 All subsequent refernces from this edition
one of the diabolic French women from his novels. (40) There was even a bohemian Frenchman who was paid for his jests in „wine, spirits and cigars.‟ (41) Indeed the Saturday Review, picking up on this novelistic aspect of Sala‟s writing stated that „We don‟t believe that these comic descriptions in any way represent the originals. We don‟t believe there were any such originals to be described.‟7
Convinced that Sala had never actually visited Russia, and had merely imagined these characters, the Saturday Review was highlighting an important aspect of Sala‟s journalism, its ability to blur „the distinction between fact and fiction.‟8
Travel accounts of Russia before the Crimean War had „conveyed negative, occasionally hostile impressions of many aspects of Russian life.‟9
In 1810 E.D. Clarke‟s Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa was a „particularly striking and famous popular example,‟ while Robert Lyall‟s The Character of the Russians (1823) characterised this type of reportage, being a „damning catalogue of Russian moral turpitude.‟10
The Russian suppression of the Polish in the 1830s caused British writers to sharpen their pens and the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell, who had written his poem „The Pleasure of Hope‟ in praise of the Poles, wrote his damning Lines on Poland and The Power of Russia after the capture of Warsaw by Russian forces in 1831. While still an undergraduate at Cambridge, Alfred Tennyson had asked, „Lord, how long shall these things be?/How long this icy-hearted
Muscovite/Oppress the region?‟11
7 cited in, Catherine Waters, “Much of Sala, and but Little of Russia”: “A Journey Due North,”
Household Words, and the Birth of a Special Correspondent‟ Victorian Periodicals Review 42:4 Winter 2009 p. 318
8 ibid. p. 318
9 Anthony G. Cross, The Russian Theme in English Literature (Oxford: William A. Meeuws, 1985) p.
25
10
ibid. p. 25
The build up to the Crimean War had seen a burst of translations of Russian novels; Lermontov‟s Hero Of Our Times (1853) was published in England as Sketches of Russian Life in the Caucus by a Russe, Many Years Resident Amongst the Various Mountain Tribes, and during the war in 1855 the first translation of Turgenev‟s Sportsman Sketches was entitled Russian Life in the Interior. As their translated titles suggests these novels were seen as authentic accounts of the everyday lives of
Russians, a facet of Russian life of increasing interest to English readers. The kind of heroic war reportage recently made popular by William Howard Russell, whose description of the Battle of Balaclava and the Charge of the Light Brigade published in The Times on 14 November 1854, had caused a stir of passionate sympathy from its readership along with a determination to learn more about this wild and unknown country.12 There were three other anonymous reports of Russian life between 1855 and 1859. In 1855 there was The Englishwoman in Russia; Impressions of the Society and Manners of the Russians at Home, by a Lady Ten Years Resident in that Country, in 1856 Russian Chit-Chat; or Sketches of a Residence in Russia by a Lady (later acknowledged as Charlotte Bourne) and in 1859, Six Years Travel in Russia by an English Lady (Mary Smith). Bourne and Smith‟s works are light and undemanding and attempt to heal the rift between England and Russia by providing positive
portrayals of Russian life. But in the January 20 1855 edition of Household Words an article entitled „At Home With the Russians‟ reviewed the anonymous The
Englishwoman in Russia.
12
for full article see John Carey (ed.) The Faber Book of Reportage (London: Faber & Faber, 1987) pp. 333-344