A Mad Tour.

London: Richard Bentley and Son. 1891.

Presentation copy. First edition. 8vo. 202x135mm. pp. [viii], 388. Publisher's red cloth lettered in gilt and blind to upper cover and spine and with some decoration in blind. Rubbing to edges, corners bumped and worn. Bumping and some slight nicks and chips to head and foot of spine which is a little sunned. Slightly foxed and toned with some creasing to the foot of the last ten leaves. Overall a very good copy. Rare in commerce: three copies were sold at auction between 1896 and 1907 but nothing has appeared in the auction records since then.
Something of the spirit of this bizarre book can be gauged from the cover design. The title appears to have been scrawled in a moment of derangement and snaking out from the ends of the letters are jagged lines indicating the haphazard nature of the mad tour. This was no straight progress.
It is slightly unclear how much of this work is true. By 1891, Charlotte was nearly sixty and not in good health (she was diagnosed with cancer in 1892) but she was living with a younger man - the Arthur Hamilton Norway to whom A Mad Tour is dedicated. It seems that he persuaded her to embark on this journey but she was an unwilling partner describing herself as having been sold into "slavery when I agreed to be led by Bobby (the name she gives Norway in the book), and to become the victim of his whims". Among Charlotte Riddell's talents as a writer was, it is said, an ability to conjure up the atmosphere of places of which she had no first-hand knowledge. This talent may be on display here but in the end, whether she and Bobby/Arthur did roam as widely as this book suggests is perhaps not the point. For what we have here is an early form of psycho-geography. The journey is as much through Riddell's mind as through Central Europe. It was a mind and a journey affected by the laudanum she was taking to ease the pain of her illness. The madness of the tour reflected her growing mental turmoil. "A land of enchantments! a dream-country, where the real so constantly mingles with the unreal that one can scarcely tell where the waking ends and the dream begins!"