A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume 2 (1777) — Edition Insights

Whispers, White Suits, and the Unreliable Eye

Thicknesse's descriptive style relies on a deliberate withholding of information. In the Nismes lodging, he notes the lady's beauty and elegance, her whisper, her husband's absence—then adds, almost as an afterthought, that she was dressed en militaire in a white suit. The effect is comic and disorienting. He does not moralize; he simply records his own misapprehension. This technique recurs throughout the volume: the traveler presents himself as a fallible observer, one whose judgments are provisional. The whisper itself becomes a motif—a voice that forces intimacy, that demands the listener lean in. Thicknesse's prose often works the same way, drawing the reader close with confiding asides before springing a contradiction.

The Baron and the Baroness: A Study in Credulity

Letter XLVIII introduces the Baron Shortall and his wife, a pair whose claims collapse under scrutiny. The Baron arrives unannounced, in a russet-brown suit, claiming vast Irish estates and a wife related to the Prince of Monaco. Thicknesse is skeptical from the start: the Baron's story is a "flagrant fib," supported by certificates from Lord Mayor John Wilkes and Alderman Bull—names that, in context, seem more ironic than authoritative. Yet Thicknesse does not simply dismiss them. He feeds them, watches them eat "as if they had never eaten before," and notes the Baroness's letter to her "adorable Prince" signed with a name that fits neither maid, wife, nor widow. The episode is a miniature comedy of imposture, but Thicknesse's tone is more curious than censorious. He records the lies, the hunger, the absurdity, and his own reluctance to part with six livres.

Head-Dress and National Character

Thicknesse's observations often pivot on clothing and appearance as markers of character. In a passage on women's head-dress, he contrasts the "decent, modest appearance" of straw or chip hats tied under the chin with the "borrowed plumage, dead hair, black wool, lead, grease, and yellow powder" in vogue between Edinburgh and Paris. The critique is pointed: artifice, he argues, only makes plain women plainer. He invokes the Quaker Miss Fide as an exemplar of simplicity. This attention to fashion is not mere gossip; it is a way of reading national and moral character. The French and Spanish landscapes, inns, and roads receive similar treatment—Thicknesse is always alert to the gap between appearance and reality, whether in a person's dress or a country's reputation.

Readers approaching this volume should expect a travelogue that is less a systematic guide than a series of pointed, often skeptical vignettes. Thicknesse's voice is that of a man who has been fooled before and is determined not to be fooled again—yet who cannot resist the pleasure of a good story, even at his own expense. The letters reward attention to small details: a whisper, a suit of clothes, a mis-signed letter. These are the clues to the traveler's world, where nothing is quite as it first appears.