Switzerland, The South Of France, And The Pyrenees

Switzerland, The South of France, and the Pyrenees is a travel book by Henry David Inglis, the Scottish travel writer who lived from 1795 to 1835 and who produced several substantial works of European travel writing during the brief but productive years of his literary career before his early death. Inglis was one of the more accomplished British travel writers of the 1820s and 1830s and his various books on European countries were widely read in their time.

The book records Inglis’s travels through three regions of southern Europe that were becoming increasingly accessible to British travelers in the years after the Napoleonic Wars. Switzerland had become one of the standard British travel destinations during the early nineteenth century, with the Alps providing the kind of sublime mountain landscape that Romantic taste demanded. The south of France and the Pyrenees were more recently fashionable destinations, attracting British travelers seeking warmer winters and the kind of unspoiled rural landscape that the more developed parts of France no longer offered.

Inglis travels through these regions with the systematic attention of a serious travel writer working in the tradition that British travel writing had developed across the previous generation. He visits the major cities, makes the standard mountain excursions, observes the local economy and society, and provides the kind of practical information that would be useful to other travelers following in his footsteps. The descriptions of mountain scenery in Switzerland and the Pyrenees are competent without being especially original, working within the conventions that Romantic travel writing had established for the description of sublime landscape.

The more interesting parts of the book are generally the social and economic observations rather than the landscape descriptions. Inglis was a careful observer of how ordinary people lived in the various regions he passed through, and his accounts of agricultural practice, of local industry, of the social organization of villages and market towns, and of the religious and political life of the various Catholic and Protestant communities are often the more lasting parts of his books.

The book runs to several hundred pages and is best read by selecting particular regions of interest. It pairs naturally with Inglis’s other travel books on Spain, Norway, and Ireland.