MacMillan's Magazin, Volume 84

MacMillan's Magazin, Volume 84 | Anonymous

pick

Looking through a list of works by Algernon Blackwood on Wikisource, I saw the evocative title of an article published in 1901, and collected in Macmillan's Magazine Volume LXXXIV: "Down the Danube in a Canadian Canoe". Lo, and behold! The answer to my idle speculation as to whether his Cosmic Horror story, The Willows, was based on an actual journey he'd undertaken! Here it is, his account of the six week, 1000 mile journey he and his unnamed ⬇️

Bookwomble ... companion made from the Danube headwaters to Budapest. While his description of the specific area of marshland (now the Dunajské luhy Protected Landscape Area, Slovakia) is relatively brief, it is evocative and the scenery and its atmosphere clearly made a deep impression on him: many of the episodes in the journey are included in the later story.
The article is a wonderful travelogue, humorous at times, wistful at others, all in ⬇️ 3w

Bookwomble ... Blackwood's clear and eloquent prose. I'm so pleased I found this 😄 Here's a link to a scanned copy of the magazine:
https://archive.org/details/macmillansmagazi84macmuoft/page/350/mode/2up

NB: My 'Pick' rating is for the Blackwood article only. (edited) 3w

Bookwomble Another article that caught my eye in the Index was “A Southern View of the Negro Problem“ by H.E. Belin. Full-on white supremacist apologetics, “explaining“ why black people were better off under enslavement, and would have been better off at the time of writing it they hadn't achieved emancipation. It's rather stomach-churning, but interesting to see the deep roots of these arguments, still promoted in certain quarters. (edited) 3w

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The_Book_Ninja @Bookwomble That was a joy to read. I wonder if anyone has recreated that journey in modern times. The encounter with the foresters gave me Deliverance vibes. Good detective work btw 🔎 3w

Bookwomble @The_Book_Ninja I'm glad you enjoyed it, too. Their intention was to canoe the whole length of the Danube all the way to the Black Sea, and I'd have loved to hear about the rest of the journey, assuming they undertook it. I'm sure others must have made that journey, which I guess would be quite different now. 3w

The_Book_Ninja @Bookwomble I‘m sure in the index it says part 2 is in there somewhere. But I couldn‘t fathom navigation of the contents 3w

Bookwomble I'm not looking at the magazine now, but from memory, part one was in issue 503, starting at page 350, and the second party in issue 504, starting adding page 418. 3w

Bookwomble Apologies for predictive text nonsense! Hopefully it still makes sense 😆 3w

Bookwomble @The_Book_Ninja Also, tag! 3w

Bookwomble @The_Book_Ninja Now I'm back home and can check, I'm inordinately pleased to say I exactly remembered the page number for the second part: 418 it is! 😁 If only I could remember important things! 3w

The_Book_Ninja @Bookwomble Sherlock Tomes is on the case🎻 3w

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