Romanian Travellers to England in the Nineteenth Century. National Specificity in Ion Codru-Drăgușanu Travel Accounts

Abstract

The complexity of the travelling experience cannot be understood outside the scope of culture (see, for instance, Schulz-Forberg 2005) and travelling is thus often discussed in relation to the human being‟s thirst for knowledge, intellectual or spiritual enlightenment, aesthetic refinement, often as a result of cultural contact, interaction, transfer or exchange. The travelling experiences of Romanian travellers to England through the centuries have been inspired by many of these goals. This paper focuses on the travel accounts of a little known Romanian traveller to England in the nineteenth century, namely, writer, teacher, journalist and politician Ion Codru-Drăgușanu (1818–1884). His travel accounts reveal that travelling was perceived as a source of intellectual improvement, maturation, cultural development, interaction and exchange, as a process of gaining knowledge, an experience also counterbalanced by a tourist‟s adventure dominated by curiosity, pleasure and amusement. In order to reveal how this shift takes place and the multi-fold significance of the travelling experience as such, the paper‟s structure combines theoretical data with textual study and seeks to rediscover forgotten personalities of the Romanian culture who made English-Romanian encounters more numerous and productive. Firstly, the paper presents the conceptual distinctions between the term traveller and other related words, such as voyager, tourist, pilgrim, explorer, or migrant. Secondly, it makes a brief overview of travelling in history and of travel writing with the purpose of contextualizing Codru-Drăgușanu‟s travels. Thirdly, the synoptic presentation of the literary background related to travels to and from Romania in the nineteenth century as well as the brief review of the historical and cultural context specific to England in that period assist us in our exploration of the written accounts of travels recorded by CodruDrăgușanu in his Peregrinul transilvan. 1835–1848 (The Transylvanian Traveller. 1835– 1848).