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Originally published in the Historic Nantucket, Vol 51, no. 1 (Winter 2002), p. 22-26
"Helen Marshall's Adventures Abroad"
by Margaret Moore Booker
THE ADVENT OF TRANSATLANTIC STEAMERS in the early nineteenth century made leisure travel feasible, and the years after the Civil War witnessed an exodus of American female tourists, traveling with their families or female companions. A "Grand Tour" of Europe became almost a standard excursion for well-to-do New England women; in some ways touring was considered one of the accomplishments, like needlework or drawing, that young American women aspired to. Many of these women wrote about their sojourns, and among them was Nantucketer Helen Marshall (1851-1939), who steamed across the Atlantic in 1876 in search of adventure and edification in foreign lands. During her seven months abroad she wrote detailed letters to her parents, Joseph Marshall (1811-79) and Malvina Pinkham Marshall (1820-85), which serve as a fascinating journal of Helen's remarkable experiences.
European vacations caused a stir on the island; the newspapers recorded the names of the lucky travelers, many of them women. Some islanders expressed great envy about their friends' transatlantic trips. Elizabeth Pinkham Crosby wrote to her brother, Seth Pinkham Jr., in the early 1850s: "Our neighborhood is now in commotion at the startling intelligence of Mr. -Hadwen & Lady, Matthew Starbuck & Lady, G.H. Wright & lady, M.C. and Miss Sarah Barney, sailing for Europe in the steamer Arctic on Wednesday next. They leave here on Monday for New York - How I want to go!" Among the intrepid Nantucket females who traveled abroad were astronomer and educator Maria Mitchell, who toured Europe in 1858-59 and 1873, and her sister Phebe Mitchell Kendall, a Nantucket-born painter and art instructor who went on a Grand Tour in 1873 and 1882.
Helen Marshall's wanderlust can be traced to her childhood. The daughter of a Nantucket whaling captain and his seafaring wife, Helen was born in a small village in the Azores and spent the first eight years of her life sailing with her parents around the Pacific on the whaleship Sea Queen. Her travels eventually brought her to Nantucket where she spent the remainder of her childhood, but she was off again in 1872-73 to attend Vassar College in Poughkeep-sie, New York. After further study she became a teacher on Nantucket, and later in Norwich, Connecticut.
Marshall's journey began in London in late October of jj 1876. With the unbridled enthusiasm of a first-time traveler to Europe, she wrote to her parents that even the first few days of her Grand Tour were "well worth a week and a half on the Atlantic." Shortly after arriving she discovered that her lodgings in London had "dark walled rooms - [that] reminds me of the old life at sea." Over the next six months she visited Heidelberg, Cologne, Antwerp, Florence, Rome, and Paris. As convention dictated that females traveling abroad in the nineteenth century must be accompanied by suitable companions, Marshall was chaperoned by fellow islanders Ann Mitchell Macy, a former teacher and sister of Maria Mitchell, and Ann's daughter Fanny.
Like many of her female contemporaries, Helen Marshall's Grand Tour was more than just a leisure trip; it also provided the twenty-five-year-old with an opportunity for an informal cultural education. Her letters include many descriptions of the historic art and architecture she saw. From Heidelberg, for instance, she described visiting a castle that was "entirely in ruins except one or two rooms - that are kept in repair and have some relics of its former grandeur. It is the most enchanting spot imaginable, towers and battlements crumbling now but built of huge red stones ..." During her visit to Florence she wrote that the Pitti Palace had rooms "magnificent enough for royalty" and floors of "different colored marbles," and in Rome she characterized St. Peter's Cathedral as "magnificence itself frozen in marble."
The letters are also filled with Marshall's impressions of the art she studied in galleries, museums, and churches. Shortly after arriving in London in October of 1876 she wrote:
The first day Ffanny] and I visited the Dore Gallery where there are only his [Gustave Dore] pictures exhibited. We remained til noon, unable to turn away from these wonderful paintings. The figures are so real and life like, they look as if they were only pausing, and would speak in a few moments. Two are perfectly immense, thirty feet by twenty; in one there are two hundred figures life size.
When she was in Florence the following month she found that the gallery at the Pitti Palace "is very beautiful and has the paintings of the best artists who have ever lived." And in Paris in January of 1877, Marshall reported that "Last Wednesday Fanny and I went to the Louvre, a royal picture gallery that is truly magnificent and immense. We staid [sic] several hours and did not begin to see all the rooms. We can go often ..." Later that spring she enjoyed the more than 3,000 paintings on view at a grand exhibition in the Palace of Industry in Paris.
Marshall was also entranced to see some of the historic places she had read about in college. For example, when she was in London she explored the narrow streets of the city, "the old parts made famous by Dickens, who is constantly in my mind," and "buildings made familiar by [other] writers." In Florence, she wrote to her parents, "There are the same bridges across the Arno that were there in twelve and thirteen hundred, and the same narrow streets that Dante and Petrarch and Michael Angelo [sic] trod."
Music was as much a part of Marshall's cultural edification as the art and architecture. She enjoyed choral music in the churches of London, where the singing "was glorious" and "the little boys in the choir are young cherubs." In Florence and Paris, Marshall and Mrs. Macy attended magical performances of opera. When she heard Faust performed at the Paris Opera, Marshall reported that "the orchestra was very fine and the singing also," but she seemed even more awestruck by the fact that she heard the music in a gorgeous interior with "a grand staircase of the finest marble" and the auditorium with "gilding that resembles gold."
It appears that it was important for Marshall to impart to her parents, who paid for her trip, that her journey abroad was not purely for entertainment. Perhaps to impress this point upon them she reported that in Paris she hired a tutor to teach her French, and she explained: "I do not feel that the past two months have been idle, exactly, for in each place I have read up on the various spots of interest and gained a little knowledge of their history."
As her letters clearly express, the European sojourn offered Marshall a change from the ordinary and familiar existence of life on Nantucket and brought her in contact with the new, the strange, and the romantic. Going for an exhilarating walk in the Heidelberg mountains during a driving snow storm, followed by cups of "hot Jamaica Ginger"; observing the large numbers of "real genuine monks" dressed in brown serge cloaks traversing the streets of Florence; discovering "Carnival" in Paris, which was celebrated with "lootings and horn blowings"; watching porcelain being handcrafted in Sevres; and enjoying the "Highlanders . . . dressed in their Scotch costume, bagpipes and all" in London, are just some of the many wonderful experiences enjoyed by Marshall and her companions.
Paris, where Marshall and the Macys stayed the longest, appears to have been Helen's favorite city on the tour. In Paris she splurged on the purchase of yards of black silk to have dresses made once she returned home, and she described the glorious flowers in the city's parks and the porcelain at the Sevres factory as being so wonderful as to "make your mouth water." After her trip to the grand palace of Versailles, she exclaimed, "of all the days thoroughly delightful this was the chief." In particular she loved their springtime "delightful" rambles and rides in the expansive parks and gardens. In May of 1877 she wrote, "One evening Mrs. Macy and I took a walk in the Champs Elysees, to see the gardens by gas light; for the cafes and pavilions are all illuminated every evening. A more fairy like scene you cannot imagine."
Life abroad was a little more luxurious, too. In London, Marshall was pleasantly surprised that the "housemaid sets the table in the parlor in the morning thus far with rolls (funny ones) & steak, butter & coffee." At their hotel in Heidelberg they were "waited upon like royal ladies" and enjoyed the extravagance of a room decorated "in the true German style" and slept in great comfort between two feather beds. The meals they ate in Heidelberg were also a special treat. Marshall explained to her parents that they typically ate:
Breakfast - delicious rolls, either coffee, chocolate or milk; beefsteak or cold meats. Dinner - first course soup; 2nd fish, 3rd veal cutlets; 4th roast meat; 5th chicken; 6th pudding, 7th and last nuts, grapes, apples, and confectionery. No 'sour crout' [sic] has yet made its appearance....
Marshall met many fascinating people during her travels. For instance, in Rome she met "some very agreeable English people" as well as a Spanish gentleman ith whom she spoke French, and she was particularly enamored with a German baroness who had rooms next to hers. Marshall explained to her parents that the baroness had a "masculine head and features" and "had a cigar in her hand and continued to smoke during the evening. I don't know when I have been so pleased with anyone. . . . She was a queer looking person in her dress, however, ... it consisted of a plaid skirt and a brown sack."
Occasionally Marshall showed her irrepressible spirit by flirting with danger and crossing the boundaries of convention. She told her parents that after listening to a choral service at Westminster Abbey in London, "It was nearly five when we started for home and I thought how you would feel if you knew we were alone in the streets of London at that time." In Rome, following her tour of the dark, cramped passages of the Catacombs, she wrote to her mother, "When Mrs. Macy and I were in the middle of them with only a slim wax taper in our hands and a stranger for a guide, I said to her, 'What do you think Malvina Fitzalan Marshall would say at this moment if she knew where her daughter was?'" In fact, Helen's mother would have probably been extremely proud of her adventurous and independent daughter. Malvina Marshall was a spirited and independent woman herself. She spent the early years of her marriage "keeping house" aboard a whaleship and traveling to exotic places in the Pacific, and later in life was chosen to represent Nantucket at the state convention of the "friends of Woman Suffrage" in Boston.
As was often customary for American women traveling abroad in the nineteenth century, Marshall received letters of introduction that gave her entree into an aspect of European society that she might not have experienced otherwise. In Paris she was invited to a private exhibition of paintings at an art club and in Rome she received an invitation to meet the Pope (Pius IX), arranged by the director of the American Catholic College in that city. Meeting the Pope was one of the highlights of Marshall's tour. "Such a dear, fatherly old man," Helen wrote to her parents, "we all felt more like putting our arms around his neck, than merely kissing his hand. He leaned on a cane and seemed quite infirm but spoke to each as he was introduced in a clear voice. The whole ceremony was very pretty and I would not have missed it for anything."
Like many tourists, Marshall and her companions were fascinated and challenged by the details of transport, setting up lodgings and the necessity of a budget. In London she wrote "Everything is cheap" and in Paris she noted "one could live for very little here compared with a city at home." Their lodgings, always arranged before they arrived at their next destination, were not always a success. In December of 1876 Marshall wrote, "Rome is delightful but the fleas are horrid. I am nearly eaten alive and my skin is a sight; covered with spots from head to foot." In general, Helen found the different currencies easy to learn and was surprised at how many people spoke English, but found knowing French extremely helpful.
It is interesting to note that during Marshall's adventures abroad, Nantucket was never far from her mind. From London she wrote, "The dear old home is before me in memory, as plainly as if in a picture," and from Florence, she reported, "The air is very clear and the clouds and sky beautiful, but no more so than we have at home." She looked forward to letters from home and "devoured" the Nantucket newspapers when they were occasionally sent over.
Marshall's letters to her parents indicate that she began to run out of funds when she was in Paris in March of 1877, and although it was "like pulling a molar," she wrote, to ask her parents for money, she had little other choice. She admitted that she had tried to earn a little extra money by teaching English, but few responded to her ads. Her parents seem to have agreed to send her more money, as she stayed in Paris through May and returned to America in early June on the steamer China. In May of 1877 she expressed mixed feelings about returning, but in the end the lure of Nantucket and her family won out. "I am very happy to be returning, but it is because you are at the other end of the route," she told Malvina and Joseph, "not because I have tired of sightseeing. Sometimes I feel as if I can hardly wait for the Island Home to blow her whistle, and creep up to the wharf."
Although Marshall had been away from home before, for long periods of time, she felt that her European tour was "the most valuable of all and I shall live it over for a long while after it has been counted a thing of the past." Her experiences abroad made the world seem like a much smaller place. "Do I seem very far away to you?" she asked her parents toward the end of her stay. "I do not feel so. ... Not that the wide Adantic has had a tuck taken, but that the unexplored and unknown always are rather vague and indefinite."
As her travel account reveals, the Grand Tour provided Helen Marshall with an opportunity for tremendous personal growth and an incomparable education, and she returned home wiser in the ways of the world.
Margaret Moore Booker is associate director and curator of the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies at the Coffin School. She is a past contributor to Historic Nantucket and is the author of The Admiral's Academy: Nantucket's Historic Coffin School and Nantucket Spirit: The Art and Life of Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin.
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