As the Crow Flies: From Corsica to Charing Cross — Key Ideas to Explore

A Taste for the Particular

Dodge's prose is most alive when he seizes on a single, telling detail. In Bournemouth, he observes that pines are the town's fetishes: visitors breathe pine balsam, bathe in pine juice, sleep on pine pillows, and are finally laid under pine shade. The repetition builds a comic monotony that perfectly captures the place. Similarly, at Oxford, he notes the rule that students must wear caps and gowns after dark, and the fine for being caught "in mufti"—a small, concrete rule that opens a window onto the university's social code. Dodge does not generalize about national character; he reports what he sees and hears, letting the oddity speak for itself.

The Art of the Aside

Dodge's digressions are often his sharpest observations. In describing Bournemouth's lack of a theatre—the Lord of the Manor objects to worldly amusements—he notes that residents have circumvented the ban by fitting up the town hall as an amateur playhouse, where "occasional third-rate companies perform." The aside is both a factual report and a quiet judgment. Similarly, his remark that consumptives have lately hurried off to Berlin for Dr. Koch's clinic undercuts the claim that Bournemouth's climate is beneficial. These asides give the travelogue a conversational rhythm, as if Dodge is sharing gossip over that glass of lemonade.

Comparisons and Contradictions

Dodge frequently measures England against the Mediterranean, but his comparisons are never simple. The Hampshire coast, he writes, is beginning to be called the British Riviera, though the sea is less blue and the sky duller. The climate of Bournemouth, he claims, differs little from Geneva's except for more snow in Geneva and less relaxing air. These comparisons serve not to elevate one place over another but to sharpen the reader's sense of each location's particular character. Dodge is aware that his readers may know Nice or San Remo; he uses that knowledge to make Bournemouth strange again.

The Observer Observed

Dodge's own position as an American traveler in late-Victorian Europe is never far from the surface. He notes prices, social hierarchies, and the quirks of local governance with the eye of an outsider who is not easily impressed. His acknowledgment to the editors of the Hartford Post and Hartford Courant reminds us that these letters were written for a Connecticut audience, one that might appreciate a wry take on English snobbery or Corsican remoteness. Dodge does not pretend to be a native; his value lies in his detachment. He is the crow flying from Corsica to Charing Cross, seeing the landscape from a height that is neither wholly inside nor wholly out.

Dodge's travelogue rewards the reader who enjoys a companionable, slightly skeptical guide. The book's structure as a series of letters means each chapter can be read independently, but together they build a cumulative portrait of a traveler who is more interested in the particular than the picturesque. Readers should approach As the Crow Flies not as a comprehensive guide but as a collection of dispatches from a sharp-eyed observer, one who knows that a glass of lemonade can be more revealing than a bumper of burgundy.

There’s something almost conspiratorial about Dodge’s preference for lemonade in a land of burgundy—that quiet refusal to perform travel the expected way. It reminds me of another, stranger pilgrimage, the elegiac drift through a falling city in The Last Days of Pekin — Inside the Classic. Both books feel less like journeys than like slow exhales, observations held gently before they vanish.