Postcards from the Past #4: Tower of London & Westminster Abbey

C.M. Sedgwick Quote
(click on the square to see the video in a full screen)

Instagram Post of July 14, 2020:

Before websites, travelers relied on guidebooks to fine-tune their itineraries. In her letters, however, Catharine Maria Sedgwick first quotes from Murray’s “Hand-Book for Travellers” after she has left London to tour Continental Europe. There are other hints that Catharine’s traveling party might have decided to rely on word of mouth and wing things a bit when sightseeing in London.

For example, Catharine’s letters revealed that her traveling party had “failed to get a permission to see the private apartments [at Windsor Castle], though Lady B. and some other potent friends” had tried to help because their “application was too late….” Check out today’s Facebook post at https://www.facebook.com/awomanofthecentury to find out what happened when Catharine’s traveling party showed up at the Tower of London.

Quote on Tower of London and Westminster Abbey.png

C.M. Sedgwick Quote on Tower of London and Westminster Abbey--click on image for full resolution

Facebook Post of July 14, 2020:

Like many of us, Catharine was an enthusiastic traveler. According to her niece Kate, “[w]herever we went,… Aunt Kitty, then fifty years old, was the most eager, the most enthusiastic, the most untiring of the party, and put us young girls to shame by the zeal with which she would rush out before breakfast, at any place where we passed a single night, to see the most of it before leaving it.”

Although I only spent 3.5 days in London in 2019, compared to Catharine’s month in 1839, it is fun to see that her travelogue covered so many of the same sights. In the images, you can glimpse some of Catharine’s enthusiasm in her account of visiting the Tower of London and her “friends” in Westminster Abbey three times. You can also compare a 1900 picture of the Tower of London and what appears to be an 1839 engraving of Westminster Abbey with my photographs from 2019.

1900 Tower of London

2019 Tower of London

1839 Westminster Abbey, London, Side

2019 Westminster Abbey, London, Side

2019 Westminster Abbey, London, Front

Sources:

Dewey, Mary E. ed. Life and Letters of Catharine M. Sedgwick. New York: Harper & Brothers 1872.

Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. Letters From Abroad to Kindred at Home. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1841.