Vignettes of England, Scotland, and Wales

By Glynn Baugher

Views of England, Scotland, and Wales garnered in a focused six-week tour in 1992. The book concentrates on literary Britain, especially on the Romantics, including Shelley, and on Samuel Johnson; on the two great universities of Cambridge and Oxford; on illustrious British gardens; on food and B and Bs; on British eccentricities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781663220875

Glynn Baugher

Glynn Baugher grew up in rural Virginia; graduated from William Monroe High School; earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Emory and Henry College; earned his Master of Arts degree and Ph. D. from Tulane University. While teaching at the college level for thirty-four years, Glynn married and fathered three children. Today he is retired and lives in Emory, Virginia.

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Copyright © 2021 Glynn Baugher.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-2086-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-2087-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021908214

iUniverse rev. date: 04/19/2021

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PREFACE

This book is essentially my journal of a tour of literary Britain in the summer of 1992. A few small alterations or clarifications have been made for my readers. All of the photos in the book I took as slides and had converted much later to digital.

My traveling companion was Jeffrey Snodgrass, a recent graduate, an English major, of Frostburg State University, where I taught. He would soon be going off to graduate school in Minnesota, so we took the opportunity of a literary tour of Britain, my second, his first, before the inevitable separation and attenuation of the closest student friendship I’ve ever had. I took pains to plan a trip that featured sites relevant to the life of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, for that was Jeffrey’s dearest literary interest, but it is a tour full of other literary and college-related sites. All of the sites chosen and the routine planning were my responsibility, catering to the interests of both of us, since I knew his interests nearly as well as my own, having taught him in many courses and talked with him for hours on end.

The trip had its rough spots, inevitable, I suppose, when two people, no matter how dear or close to each other, are together pretty much 24/7, often in the confines of a car, pressing on. Still, it was an experience not to be traded, not to be regretted, always valuable and valued.

The photo on the front cover is of a lovely public garden in Coxwold, North Yorkshire, where Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, lived, ministered, and wrote for a number of years.

DEDICATION

I dedicate this book to Jeffrey Snodgrass, my former student, protégé, and dear friend, remembering, remembering.

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Jeffrey standing in front of the Shelley exhibition at the Old Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

Thursday, 2 July 1992

We were to fly out of Dulles on United Airlines at 10:15 p.m. July 2. Fortunately, Jeffrey called to confirm the time and discovered that a different plane, or a complete systems check of our scheduled plane, was required. That meant that our flight was due to leave at 8:00 a.m. the next day, July 3, so we had already lost ten hours of our literary tour.

Friday, 3 July

I got up at 3 a.m., to leave at 4:00 for the airport. Mae and Dawn, my wife and younger daughter, both due to work in the early morning, went with me, going via Winchester in my new Saturn. We listened to CDs most of the way, mostly staying awake, ran through some English-style spritzing of rain, and made it into the terminal around 6:30. Jeffrey had gotten there around 6:00 from much closer to Dulles. We were checked in fairly quickly and got off the ground at 8:15 in our Boeing 747. We had seats at the rear of the plane, the second row from the tail, comfortable enough because we had the only two seats to the left of the center section, with leg room on the left and in the aisle on the right. The flight was somewhat noisy because we were behind the engines, and perhaps there was rather more waggle than elsewhere, but we climbed fast, the takeoff not bothering me at all. I had taken a mild tranquilizer.

We flew a very northerly route, seeing, as the clouds cleared, barren waste lands of northeast Canada, a maze of water and isolated land, and later of bits of snow and partially frozen water expanses. We flew over parts of Greenland and Iceland and an unseen Ireland. An overcast England, five time zones ahead of the Eastern U. S. zone, came spectacularly into sight at dusk, glowing strips of yellowish lights all around London as the monstrously large wings tilted first left and then right. We had a smooth, quick landing and were off the plane around 9:45 p.m. London time. Our first day to be abroad was now a tedious night.

The customs check-through here at Heathrow was quite unlike Gatwick’s in 1986, where we sailed through. Far too few checkers were there to handle the snaking line of four-abreast travelers sent through a rat’s maze of roped-off entry. My passport checker was quick and friendly, asking only a few pertinent questions, but Jeffrey’s was rude, asking him very silly questions as though he were patently a terrorist.

We phoned Europcar to send a little shuttle bus to Heathrow so that we could go to pick up our rental car. It was well past 11 p.m. when we got our car. The only advantageous part of our delay was that they had run out of our reserved-size car, a manual Ford Fiesta size, the second smallest, for economy, reserved at a guaranteed price of under $800 for 30 days. (We were staying for six weeks but would give up the car for our time in London.) My gold Visa card would cover the collision damage waiver. So we lucked out, getting an automatic Volvo 460, probably not generally available in the U. S., but a goodish-powered car with cassette deck (though of course we have no tapes), power windows, a sunroof, and a trunk big enough to store all of our gear.

The man at Europcar tried valiantly to get us a B & B in