Elizabeth Sinkler Coxe's Tales from the Grand Tour, 1890-1910

Description

The international adventures of a southern widow turned patron of historical discovery

Elizabeth Sinkler Coxe's Tales from the Grand Tour, 1890-1910 is a travelogue of captivating episodes in exotic lands as experienced by an intrepid American aristocrat and her son at the dawn of the twentieth century. A member of the prominent Sinkler family of Charleston and Philadelphia, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Sinkler married into Philadelphia's wealthy Coxe family in 1870. Widowed just three years later, she dedicated herself to a lifelong pursuit of philanthropy, intellectual endeavor, and extensive travel. Heeding the call of their dauntless adventuresome spirits, Lizzie and her son, Eckley, set sail in 1890 on a series of odysseys that took them from the United States to Cairo, Luxor, Khartoum, Algiers, Istanbul, Naples, Vichy, and Athens. The Coxes not only visited the sites and monuments of ancient civilizations but also participated in digs, funded entire expeditions, and ultimately subsidized the creation of the Coxe Wing of Ancient History at the University of Pennsylvania Museum.

A prolific correspondent, Lizzie conscientiously recorded her adventures abroad in lively prose that captures the surreal exhilarations and harsh realities of traversing the known and barely known worlds of Africa and the Middle East. She journeyed through foreign lands with various nieces in tow to expose them to the educational and social benefits of the Grand Tour. Her letters and recollections are complemented by numerous photographs and several original watercolor paintings.

Sujets

• Travelogues
• Essays
• Amenofis II
• RMS Titanic
• Shepheard's Hotel
• Navigazione Generale Italiana
• On the Way Home
• Uncle Henry (The Oz Books)
• Travel writing
• Auguste Mariette
• Victorian architecture
• Flinders Petrie
• Travel
• Sister Carrie
• Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener
• Victorian era
• Emancipation Proclamation
• Gilded Age
• Charles Dickens
• William Matthew Flinders Petrie
• Maiden voyage
• Amenhotep II
• Horatio Herbert Kitchener
• Ferdinand de Lesseps
• Titanic
• Giuseppe Verdi
• François Auguste Ferdinand Mariette

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 26 novembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611172102
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Elizabeth Sinkler Coxe s
Tales from the Grand Tour
1890-1910
Women s Diaries and Letters of the South Carol Bleser, Series Editor
Elizabeth Sinkler Coxe s
Tales
from the
Grand Tour
1890-1910

Edited by Anne Sinkler Whaley LeClercq
2006 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2006
Paperback edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2010
Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2013
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Elizabeth Sinkler Coxe s tales from the grand tour, 1890-1910 / edited by Anne Sinkler Whaley LeClercq.
p. cm. - (Women s diaries and letters of the South)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-57003-633-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-57003-633-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Europe-Description and travel. 2. Africa, North-Description and travel. 3. Coxe, Elizabeth Sinkler, 1843-1919-Travel-Europe. 4. Coxe, Elizabeth Sinkler, 1843-1919-Travel-Africa, North. I. Coxe, Elizabeth Sinkler, 1843-1919. II. LeClercq, Anne Sinkler Whaley, 1942- III. Series.
D919.E44 2006
910.4092-dc22
2006006855
ISBN 978-1-57003-957-7 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-61117-210-2 (ebook)
Contents
List of Illustrations
Series Editor s Preface
Preface
Editorial Note
Identification of People
Genealogical Charts
CHAPTER ONE
Living between North and South
CHAPTER TWO
A Stop in Algiers, 1893
CHAPTER THREE
Egypt, Greece, and Italy, 1895
CHAPTER FOUR
France, In Our Own Car, 1902
CHAPTER FIVE
Trekking to Khartum, 1905
CHAPTER SIX
Underwriting Excavations in Nubia, 1909
CHAPTER SEVEN
From Paris to Istanbul on the Orient Express, 1910
Postscript
Suggested Readings
Index
Illustrations
Following page 40
The garden at Windy Hill
A scene from Algiers, 1893
Naples and Vesuvius, 1895
Scenes from Egypt, 1899
The theater at Vichy, 1902
The Bay of Naples, 1905
Scenes from Istanbul, 1906
Venice, 1910
Following page 72
Elizabeth Sinkler Coxe
Charles Brinton Coxe, Sr.
Eckley Brinton Coxe, Jr.
Eckley Brinton Coxe, Jr., and Elizabeth Sinkler Coxe at Windy Hill
Elizabeth Sinkler Coxe on the porch at Windy Hill
The house at Windy Hill and the workmen who built it, 1895
Wharton Sinkler, Sr.
The garden at Windy Hill, 1900
Emily Wharton Sinkler Roosevelt
Laura Ann Stevens Manning and Anne Wickham Sinkler Fishburne
Belvidere Plantation, 1900
Plantation life at Belvidere, 1900
The Battery at Charleston, 1900
Lizzie at the Belvidere back gate
Stationery, Pagnon s Luxor Hotel and Shepheard s Hotel, Cairo, 1895
Following page 96
There s Nothing Calm but Heaven, drawing by E. A. Coxe
Stationery, Grand Hotel Khartoum, Sudan, and SS Rameses the Great , Luxor, 1905
A felucca on the Nile, 1905
Anne Sinkler and Emily Sinkler at the train station in Luxor, 1905
Lizzie s nieces in Cairo, 1905
Anne and Emily Sinkler at the Sphinx and the pyramids, 1905
Arriving in Alexandria, 1909
The camp at Buhen, Nubia, 1909
Travelers at Buhen, 1909
Tent and soldier at Buhen, 1909
Women and children with baskets, Nubia, 1909
Eckley B. Coxe, Jr., with statuette of Merer, Buhen, 1909
Statue of the scribe Ahmose, Buhen, 1909
Constantinople, 1910
The Acropolis at Athens and the harbor at Smyrna, 1910
Lizzie and her niece Emily Sinkler
Lizzie s nieces
Series Editor s Preface
Elizabeth Sinkler Coxe s Tales from the Grand Tour, 1890-1910 , expertly edited by Anne Sinkler Whaley LeClercq, is the twenty-third volume in what had been the Women s Diaries and Letters of the Nineteenth-Century South series. This series has been redefined and is now titled Women s Diaries and Letters of the South, enabling us to include some remarkably fine works from the twentieth century. This series includes a number of never-before-published diaries, some collections of unpublished correspondence, and a few reprints of published diaries-a potpourri of nineteenth-century and, now, twentieth-century Southern women s writings.
The series enables women to speak for themselves, providing readers with a rarely opened window into Southern society before, during, and after the American Civil War and into the twentieth century. The significance of these letters and journals lies not only in the personal revelations and the writing talent of these women authors but also in the range and versatility of the documents contents. Taken together, these publications will tell us much about the heyday and the fall of the Cotton Kingdom, the mature years of the peculiar institution, the war years, the adjustment of the South to a new social order following the defeat of the Confederacy, and the New South of the twentieth century. Through these writings, the reader will also be presented with firsthand accounts of everyday life and social events, courtships and marriages, family life and travels, religion and education, and the life-and-death matters that made up the ordinary and extraordinary world of the American South.
Anne LeClercq has woven together materials from a number of sources to tell a story of a remarkable American woman at the turn of the twentieth century. Elizabeth Sinkler Coxe was born on a plantation in South Carolina, grew up during the Civil War, married a northerner, was left a very wealthy widow soon thereafter, and then devoted much of her time and wealth to enjoying the amenities that went with her position. More important, she also devoted much of her time and wealth to the exploration and recovery of ancient Egypt. It is a fascinating story, one well-told. The editor, the great-grandniece of Elizabeth Sinkler Coxe, has worked with family papers to give us an exotic tale redolent of both the last golden years before World War I and of the excitement of the early forays into the ruins of ancient Egypt. The family papers consist of letters from her travels, an unpublished diary kept by a niece who accompanied her on her trips, photographs, sketches, and a typed memoir (the journal) of her travels, which was written during her last years as World War I destroyed forever the world she had so enjoyed.
C AROL B LESER
Other Books in the Series
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The Letters of a Victorian Madwoman
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A Confederate Nurse: The Diary of Ada W. Bacot, 1860-1863
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Lucy Breckinridge of Grove Hill: The Journal of a Virginia Girl, 1862-1864
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A Northern Woman in the Plantation South: Letters of Tryphena Blanche Holder Fox, 1856-1876
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Best Companions: Letters of Eliza Middleton Fisher and Her Mother, Mary Hering Middleton, from Charleston, Philadelphia, and Newport, 1839-1846
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Preface
Elizabeth Allen Sinkler Coxe lived successfully between North and South during the post-Civil War period, when conflict and animosity still divided the nation. Lizzie, as she was called, was a hybrid, born in 1843 at Belvidere Plantation in Eutawville, South Carolina, but her mother, Emily Wharton Sinkler, and her mother s parents, the Whartons, were from Philadelphia. She overcame the emotional trauma of the Civil War. Despite growing up in antebellum South Carolina, she married a Union army major from Philadelphia and moved with him to coal-mining country in Drifton, Pennsylvania. Lizzie had been married only three years when her thirty-year-old husband, Charles Brinton Coxe, died in Egypt on January 3, 1873, leaving her a widow at the age of twenty-nine with a young son, Eckley Brinton Coxe Jr. Lizzie showed poise, determination, and courage in the face of this adversity. She moved vigorously into a new phase of her life, one centered on Drifton, Philadelphia, and the world. She and her son, Eckley Jr., built a magnificent house in Drifton and became active members