Anahuac : or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern — Key Ideas to Explore

Travelers and Tall Tales

Tylor's narrative is punctuated by encounters with memorable characters, none more vivid than the Italian fellow-passenger who claimed to have shot several robbers and won the hearts of noblewomen across continents. Tylor presents the man's boasts with deadpan detail—"he handed him his cigar stuck in the muzzle of a pistol"—before revealing the anticlimax: the apothecary's laughter and the truth that the hero had hidden in a ditch. This episode, spanning several paragraphs, reveals Tylor's method: he reports stories with apparent seriousness, then undercuts them with evidence from other sources. The reader is left to weigh the reliability of any traveler's account, including Tylor's own. Elsewhere, he describes a guard of "twenty wild-looking fellows" whose ragged uniforms made them resemble deserters, noting that "there are no worse robbers than they." Such passages suggest that Tylor is as interested in the gap between appearance and reality as in the landscape itself.

Landscape Through a Victorian Lens

The excerpts show Tylor observing Mexican geography with a comparative eye. He notes that pines on the southern slope of the Sierra are "as grand as in the Scandinavian forests, with all the beauty of the pine-trees on the Italian hills." This habit of measuring the unfamiliar against European benchmarks recurs throughout. The pass at 12,000 feet is described not in isolation but in relation to clouds that "seemed as high as ever above us." Tylor also records practical details: the "chipi-chipi" (drizzle), the use of aloe huts, the making of pulque. Yet the catalog subject "Mexico—Antiquities" is only intermittently addressed in the excerpts. When Tylor does mention Aztec remains—such as the temple-pyramids of Teotihuacán or obsidian implements—he often moves quickly to other topics. The imbalance suggests that the book's subtitle "Ancient and Modern" may promise more systematic archaeology than the text delivers.

The Catalog's Promise vs. the Text's Reality

Project Gutenberg catalogs Anahuac under "Mexico—Description and travel" and "Mexico—Antiquities." The excerpts, however, devote far more space to the former than the latter. Tylor's chapter titles list "Players and Political Adventurers," "Robber-priest," "Burning Judas," and "Fried flies'-eggs" alongside "Aztec remains" and "Obsidian implements." The antiquities that do appear are often treated as curiosities rather than subjects of sustained analysis. For instance, the "Hill of Knives" and obsidian mines are mentioned in a list alongside silver-works and the volcano of Jorullo. Readers expecting a focused archaeological treatise may be surprised by the digressive, anecdotal style. Tylor's background as a future anthropologist is evident in his attention to customs and material culture, but the excerpts suggest that Anahuac is primarily a travel narrative, not a scholarly survey.

Readers approaching Anahuac for its treatment of Mexican antiquities should temper expectations: the book offers more about Victorian travel, local characters, and Tylor's own observational habits than about pre-Columbian civilization. The catalog subjects are accurate as broad categories but misleading in emphasis. Those interested in nineteenth-century travel writing, however, will find a lively, skeptical narrator whose anecdotes often reveal more about the traveler than the traveled.