MUMMIES AND MOSLEMS

Warner, Charles Dudley (1829–1900)

My Winter on the Nile

Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company;, 1888. Tenth Edition.

THE NILE THROUGH AMERICAN EYES — EGYPT, ANTIQUITY, AND TRAVEL IN THE 1870s.
Charles Dudley Warner's My Winter on the Nile records an American traveler's journey through Egypt during the great nineteenth-century expansion of Western travel to the region. Moving from Cairo and the pyramids into the Nile landscape, Warner combines descriptions of ancient monuments with observations of towns, religious practices, landscapes, and everyday Egyptian life.

Rather than functioning simply as an archaeological guide, Warner writes in the conversational style that made his travel books popular with American readers. Ancient Egypt repeatedly meets the Egypt he encountered firsthand: mosques and markets, Nile boats, travelers, local customs, archaeological sites, and the practical experiences of moving through the country.

EGYPT BEFORE MASS TOURISM.
First published in 1876, the book found a substantial readership and remained in print through numerous editions; this 1888 printing identifies itself as the Tenth Edition. Contemporary Houghton, Mifflin advertising listed My Winter on the Nile among Warner's principal works and priced the crown octavo edition at $2.00, evidence of its continuing place in the publisher's trade list.

Warner's account captures Egypt at an important moment, when steam travel and organized tourism were making Nile journeys increasingly accessible while travel literature continued to present Egypt to American readers as a meeting place of antiquity and contemporary life.

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS: Publisher's dark green cloth over beveled boards, approximately 7.75 inches tall. 496 pages, including index. The front board is decorated with a striking gilt and colored vignette of a Nile dahabiya or similar river vessel, its hull, rigging, oars, passengers, and water picked out against the green cloth. Spine lettered in gilt with title, author, and publisher. Illustrated with a tissue-guarded photographic frontispiece depicting an Egyptian antiquity. Decorative chapter headings, ornaments, and initial letters appear throughout. The 496-page format corresponds with other bibliographically recorded editions of the work, which also identify an index and frontispiece plate.

CONDITION: The bindings are tight and square. Text is clean; light, even age-toning. Moderate shelf handling wear.

CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE: THE AMERICAN TRAVELER DISCOVERS EGYPT—THE NILE AS DESTINATION.
My Winter on the Nile belongs to the flourishing nineteenth-century literature of Egyptian and Middle Eastern travel, when improved transportation brought the Nile journey within reach of increasing numbers of affluent European and American travelers. Warner helped translate that experience for an American readership through a combination of history, humor, personal observation, and commentary.

The work proved durable. Editions appeared repeatedly through the 1880s and 1890s and into the twentieth century; bibliographic records document Houghton, Mifflin printings in 1881, 1884, 1887, 1888, 1890, 1892, 1896 and later.

AN AMERICAN LITERARY CONNECTION.
Warner was a prominent nineteenth-century American essayist, editor, and travel writer, and is also remembered as Mark Twain's collaborator on The Gilded Age. Here his significance is less exploration in the heroic sense than cultural observation: My Winter on the Nile documents how Egypt and its antiquities were encountered, interpreted, and presented to American readers during the formative decades of modern Nile tourism.

SUBJECTS: Egypt, Nile River, Charles Dudley Warner, Cairo, Pyramids, Egyptian Antiquities, Nile Travel, Egypt Description and Travel, Middle East, Nineteenth-Century Tourism, American Travelers, Victorian Travel,Travel Literature, Egyptology, Middle Eastern Travel, Nile Travel, Victorian Travel Writing, American Travel Writing, Nineteenth-Century Travel.

Item #22370

Price: $30.00