POLLINGTON, Viscount, i.e. John Charles George Savile, 4th Earl of Mexborough. Half Round the Old World. Being some account of a tour in Russia, the Caucasus, Persia, and Turkey, 1865-66. London, Edward Moxon & Co., 1867.
8vo. Original terracotta cloth, lettered and ornamented in gilt; pp. [iv], 403; with a folding map; light rubbing to extremities; cloth a little marked, very light spotting to map and a little offsetting to title-page, a few gathering spotted due to paperr stock; otherwise a very good copy of a great rarity.
First edition, very rare. With a folding map with the author's route in red. This text, of Pollington's travels, is an 'almost exact transcription of a diary, kept during the interval between August 1865 and April 1866' (Preface). Presented here is the author's own voice in its entirety, with 'no after thoughts; no descriptions of the origins of peoples, or the former state of places,' with nothing extracted from encyclopaedias, it is purely Pollington's own account. The author also adds, 'the names of places and persons are in almost every sense spelt phonetically' (Preface). Viscount Pollington had been the travelling companion with Kinglake in the Ottoman Empire in the 1830s and some of Kinglake's style of writing seems to have rubbed off. Kinglake's novel Eothen includes a character called Methley who is based on Pollington. Methley is a knowledgeable classical scholar with 'the practical sagacity of a Yorkshireman'. - This journey from London leads Pollington through Russia and the Caucasus to Anatolia, Iraq and Persia. Iraq, which he had visited before features a lot in the well-written first-hand travelogue, and in an appendix he gives the exact distances between various places in the Ottoman province.
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