Karel Čapek’s Letters from England published 100 years ago
This October marks 100 years since the publishing of Karel Čapek’s famous travelogue Letters from England. In the summer of 1924, Čapek took an invitation from the British PEN Club and spent two months exploring the country. During his travels, he sent regular columns to Lidové noviny. They were subsequently published as a complete collection and translated into English just a few months later.
Among his many other accomplishments, Karel Čapek is regarded as the founder of modern Czech travel writing. In the 1920s and 1930s, Čapek penned a series of “Letters from” books that chronicled his travels in Italy, Spain, Holland, and Scandinavia and, of course, the United Kingdom. Addressed to his fellow countrymen, Čapek aimed to share his often humorous observations, coupled with his own drawings, with Czech readers.
Here is his first, and rather critical impression of London:
“At last the train bores its way between houses of a curious sort; there are a hundred of them entirely alike; then a whole streetful alike; and again, and again. This produces the effect of a fashion craze. The train flies past a whole town which is beset by some terrible curse; inexorable Fate has decreed that each house shall have two pillars at the door. […]Then there is a whole quarter doing penance for some unknown wrong by placing five steps before every front door. I should be enormously relieved if even one house had only three; but for some reason that is not possible.”
The English version of Karel Čapek’s Letters from England first came out as a series in The Manchester Guardian in March 1925, just five months after the release of the Czech original and became an instant hit with British readers, says Thomas Lorman, lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London.
“There was a fascination with how people from central Europe saw Britain. In fact, there was a lot of interest in Czechoslovakia in the inter-war period. One of the great lies that Nevil Chamberlain said was that Czechoslovakia is a far away country of which we know nothing. It's not true.
“People were interested in Czechoslovakia they were interested in Czechoslovak culture and it was quite well known. Of course what he really meant was not that we don't know but that we don't care, but he didn't want to say that.”
According to Mr. Lorman, Letters from England are not really about Britain. Čapek went to the United Kingdom with the aim to find out what Europe’s oldest democracy was like and what its foundations were. Everything he says about Britain is really a discussion about Czechoslovakia and its future, says Mr. Lorman:
“And what's interesting is that he comes to the conclusion that British culture is completely distinct. It works in its own way that cannot be copied. Okay, the political system, yes, the democracy, yes. But too much of what he sees in Britain, even the things he likes a lot, he says, this is unique to Britain. You can't import it.”
“When he says this is different, he's trying to tell the readers, this is what we are like and we should be proud of it. What Čapek is saying is actually we should be proud of our distinctiveness in Czechoslovakia we don't need to copy every single bit of our British culture because we can't and we don’t need to.”
Between 1925 and 1943, Letters from England were reprinted many times, but after 1945, interest in Čapek and Czech culture slowly died out. An attempt was made to rehabilitate Čapek and bring Letters from England back to popularity with a new edition in 2001, but, like so much literature from other countries, it failed to make a major impression.
However, for Lorman himself, the book offers a fascinating insight into his own country. Many of the observations Čapek made a hundred years ago are still valid today, he says:
“Čapek fits actually surprisingly well in the way he writes with a particular English style of literature. He was inspired by Chesterton, and he was he was actually trying to write in a way that has this delicate English humour as well and it works very well in translation and it's a really enjoyable read. I read it in the 1990s for the first time and I loved it. It’s funny, full of jokes, very gentle humour and it reflects this period of the 1920s and 30s.”
