Travels to Turkey, with Observations on Inoculation
MONTAGU, Lady Mary Wortley. Letters Of the Right Honourable Lady M--y W---y M----e: Written, during her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, to Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters, &c. in different Parts of Europe. Which contain, Among other curious Relations, Accounts of the Policy and Manners of the Turks; Drawn from Sources that have been inaccessible to other Travellers. Second Edition. In three Volumes. London: Printed for T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt, in the Strand. 1763. [bound with:] —. An Additional Volume to the Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M--y W---y M----e. London: Printed for T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt, in the Strand. 1767.
Four volumes in two, small 8vo. Contemporary English sprinkled calf, raised bands, gilt red lettering -pieces to spines, spines numbered directly in gilt; I: pp. xii, [4 (editor’s note)], 165, [3 (blank)]; II: pp. [iv], 167, [1 (blank)]; III: pp. [iv], 134; IV: pp. 142; minimal rubbing to extremities; sporadic light foxing and toning, short closed tear to inner margin of vol. I, f. G1 not touching text, one or two marginal ink spots, light offset from endpapers; late nineteenth-century ownership inscription and ink stamp of Arthur Osburn to front pastedown, earlier cancelled ownership inscription. ‘A. Osburn’ to front pastedown; a rather attractive set.
Second edition of these letters sent home from her travels in the Ottoman Empire by the poet and essayist Lady Wortley Montagu – ‘one of the most generous and accurate chroniclers of life in Constantinople since Busbecq’ – with the first edition of An Additional Volume to the Letters, her observations on Turkish inoculation practices against smallpox influencing her popularisation of the technique upon her return to England.
Edited and prefaced in a proto-feminist vein by Mary Astell, who comments on the superiority of female travel writers, these are the Embassy Letters of Lady Montagu, who left London in August 1716 to accompany her husband on an embassy to Constantinople.
They arrived in Turkey in spring 1717 after a ‘fearsome journey […] across the battlefield of Peterwardein (where bodies of men, horses, and camels still lay deep-frozen in the snow). Lady Mary sent home long letters describing her travels, and she kept copies for future reworking as a travel book. She laid a foundation of expertise in Turkish culture in three weeks billeted in Belgrade with an efendi, or Islamic scholar, with whom she had wide-ranging conversations on oriental languages, literature, religions, and social customs. She was delighted with the civility of women at a public bath building in Sofia, socially poised and graciously welcoming although stark naked’ (ODNB).
Her letters – written to interlocutors such as Pope and the Princess of Wales – ‘established the genre of European women’s travel writing. Opinionated, energetic and flamboyant, they present a seductive, sophisticated and challenging vision of the European encounter with the Orient and they set a standard to which many subsequent writers aspired but few ever achieved’ (Tuson, p. 31).
Montagu’s brother had died of smallpox in 1713, and she had recovered from a bout herself two years later.
She was instrumental in bringing techniques of inoculation to England after observing elderly Turkish women engaging in what she refers to as engrafting: ‘the old woman comes with a nut-shell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what veins you please to have open’d. She immediately rips open that [which] you offer to her, with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch)’ (vol. II, p. 60).
Montagu expresses her trust in the ‘safety of the experiment’ and expresses her desire to ‘try it out’ on her ‘little son’, Edward, who would become the first English person to receive inoculation against smallpox; Charles Maitland, the Scottish surgeon then employed by the embassy, oversaw Edward’s inoculation in Turkey, and upon the family’s return inoculated Montagu’s daughter, Mary, in the presence of three physicians from the Royal College of Physicians, the first professional inoculation to take place in England.
ESTC T153470 and T79461; O’Neill, Ömer Koç Collection 138. See Tuson, Western Women Travelling East (p. 31).
SKU: 2123234