ABSTRACT
The travel account and the biography are well known as the surest routes to a bestselling book. In the case of the Honourable Robert Curzon's Visits to Monasteries in the Levant, the book was an instant bestseller as an autobiographical travel book. Apart from its accounts of the hazards of foreign travel, the book gave its Western readership an influential perception of the character of the Orthodox monastery and Byzantine art. It retrospectively described Curzon's travels and experiences in Egypt and Palestine, Meteora and Athos, and was published in the summer of 1849. He had first gone to Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Greece in 1833-34; returned to Egypt and Constantinople in 1837-38, and made the trip to Mount Athos. He was in Constantinople and Turkey during the years 1841 to 1843, but returned home after a severe illness struck him at Erzerum. It seems he never went back after this to the East.l
The publishers John Murray originally planned to print a thousand copies and to give Curzon half the profits, but they ultimately produced four editions in his lifetime and one posthumously before the text went on to other publishing houses. John Murray printed 7,250 copies in all, and the book was commended in its first reviews for 'its total absence of all conceits and affectations', and it was conspicuously 'on every table'. For Ruskin in the Stones of Venice, it was 'the most delightful book of travels that he ever opened'.2 Nevertheless as a literary achievement, it was always regarded as subordinate to Kinglake's Eothen of 1844 (a book which was still obligatory reading at my school over a hundred years
1 Ian H. C. Fraser, The Heir of Parham. Robert Curzon 14th Baron Zouche (Alburgh, Norfolk, 1986).
