4

Twin Passions: ‘Women and Work’, 1882–1885

POLITICS WERE GEORGE CURZON’S only full-time professional ambition. There is no evidence that he ever considered some other career, no trace of schoolboy fantasies that he might become an engine-driver or a policeman or a great general. Even if Brodrick’s description of Curzon’s post-Eton period as a ‘brief interval’ before the Cabinet was a jocular exaggeration, the Oxford years were planned as a preparation for government and their successors as an advance to the House of Commons and high office. His reputation as the outstanding Conservative at the university was such that he was already wanted on the Opposition backbenches. ‘We are a very motley lot,’ wrote Brodrick, who had been elected for West Surrey in 1880, dismissing his colleagues as ‘far too many eldest sons and dunderheads’. And a few months later, in Curzon’s final year at Balliol, he told him it was ‘a wonderful feat to achieve – to be wished for in the House before you have left Oxford’.1

As a youth Curzon often visited the House of Commons to listen to debates from the gallery. Although he disagreed with Gladstone on almost every issue, in later life he regarded him as the greatest statesman of the age and ‘the foremost orator of the last half-century’. Disraeli, whom he heard in the House of Lords as well as in the Commons, was also a compelling speaker, but a rhetorician and an actor rather than an orator. After their deaths, Curzon later remarked, the traditions of parliamentary speaking had been maintained by Lord Salisbury, Lord Rosebery and Lord Hugh Cecil, but the art of oratory had declined. Various factors, such as the pressure of legislation and the increase in party discipline, had circumscribed the field of the orator. ‘We see this decline of oratorical furniture in the rapid diminution of quotation and literary allusion in the speeches of the day’: during his years in the House of Commons he heard only two Greek quotations – both from Balliol men. He lamented also that the use of imagery and alliteration was disappearing along with ‘phrase-making’ and ‘the faculty of repartee’.2 If Curzon felt nostalgia for the parliamentary eloquence of mid-Victorian Britain, it was not surprising, for his own brand of oratory belonged to it.

The student of Parliament was also an assiduous cultivator of influential contacts and from Oxford visited several of the great political country houses of England. Just before taking the All Souls examination he went to Knowsley, the home of Lord Derby, Disraeli’s former Foreign Secretary who had changed sides and was about to serve as Gladstone’s Secretary of State for the Colonies. He was several times at Hatfield as a guest of Lord Cranborne, whose father, the Marquess of Salisbury, led the Conservatives in the House of Lords. And if he did not, as the rhyme suggests, dine at Blenheim every week, he went there quite often to see Lord Randolph Churchill, the mordant and unpredictable MP for Woodstock. Curzon admired Churchill, in spite of his rudeness and inconsistency, and spoke on his behalf at a political meeting. When Lord Randolph first contemplated leaving Woodstock to fight a Birmingham constituency, he advised the local committee to invite Curzon to stand in his place.3

George Curzon’s progress to Parliament, however, was not a single-minded advance in which he devoted all his time to politics. He realized that if he wanted to become an expert on foreign affairs he needed to travel, and that both as a traveller and as a Member of Parliament he would have to earn some money. MPs were still unpaid – he believed they should remain so – and Lord Scarsdale’s allowance of £1,000 a year was inadequate to fund either his journeys abroad or a life at Westminster. Journalism was the most obvious profession that could be combined with travel and politics, and was more suited to Curzon’s talents than any form of business would have been. As early as 1881 he was writing articles in the Oxford vacations on the topography of Derbyshire for the Derby Mercury. A few years later he graduated to the national quarterlies, and for his travels in Asia he arranged to write articles for The Times and other newspapers.

The pursuit of politics did not entail the neglect of his social and private lives. No one, recalled Margot Asquith many years later, ‘could turn with more elasticity from work to play than George Curzon’. Some of those who saw him at play found it difficult to believe he did any work at all. One of four Tennant sisters romantically attracted to Curzon in the 1880s, Margot told him he was ‘born to be bright and gay and make others the same’ – a view distinctly at odds with the traditional image of its subject.4 Her elder sister Charty, the wife of Lord Ribblesdale, had an even more extraordinary picture of her friend. Writing to him in February 1883, when Curzon was labouring over his Justinian essay on a steamer in the Nile, she confessed that with an effort she could imagine him reading a book. Nevertheless, it was ‘of course difficult to realise that the gilded butterfly one sees fluttering about London’ could in any way be serious.5

The man they described was a popular guest at house parties. He talked brilliantly, wrote playful limericks about the other guests, and excelled at after-dinner word games; afterwards he sent poems or parodies as thank-you letters. His summers in London were crowded with social engagements. ‘A tolerably full evening’ in June 1883 consisted of dinner with Lord and Lady Wimborne, a play at Drury Lane, a visit to the Salisburys’ house in Arlington Street, and a supper party at the Bachelors’ Club afterwards. Next day, in spite of his dislike of racing, he accompanied the Salisburys to Ascot. A glance at his engagement book a couple of years later reveals that he went to a dinner party almost every day of the week except Sunday and received three or four other invitations each evening which he had to refuse.6 His ability to endure such a programme and still work during the day owed much to his self-control. He was ‘never self-indulgent’, Margot Asquith recalled. ‘He neither ate, drank nor smoked too much.’7 Curzon was indeed fortunate in his relationship with alcohol. He did not need it as a stimulant, it did not affect him when he drank it, and he did not suffer from hangovers afterwards.

Social life was not, however, all flirtation and parties. He dined also at his clubs, White’s and the Beefsteak, and, although he rated acting ‘low among the artistic faculties’, he enjoyed the best plays. He saw Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in their principal roles and declared that Sarah Bernhardt was ‘by far the most gifted actress’ he ever saw.8 Despite his own mediocre skills at cricket, the game was a passion for him. He became a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club in 1879 and claimed there was no greater pleasure in the sphere of recreation than watching a good match from the Lord’s pavilion on a summer’s afternoon: it was vital, he asserted, to watch from behind the bowler’s arm, where he could ‘follow every turn or thrust of the ball’ rather than to sit at right angles where it was impossible ‘to see anything of the science of the game’.9 Until he became Viceroy of India, he accompanied Brodrick almost every year to the Eton and Harrow match, and he also made an effort to go to Lord’s when W.G. Grace was playing there. Writing to the Daily Telegraph in 1895, he admitted that for twenty years he had invariably turned to the cricket columns of the papers before reading any other news, and that the first item that interested him was the score Dr Grace had made on the previous day.10

Curzon’s closest friend and confidant during these years was St John Brodrick, who preceded him by three years to Eton and Balliol and by six to the House of Commons. It is difficult now to understand how the solid and heavy-featured Brodrick, in many ways a prototype of Anthony Powell’s Widmerpool, managed to be such a friend not only of Curzon but also of Arthur Balfour, the Tennant sisters and many of those who later made up the group known as the Souls. He was sometimes boorish, often tactless, and the possessor of a coarse and plodding sense of humour – characteristics quite alien to the other members of the group. Perhaps he was valued for his loyalty to friends which sometimes took the form of self-abasement before them: in a typical letter to Curzon in 1898 he claimed that it had been ‘one of the brightest elements in my life, to work with you and see you gaily flying the fences which I have laboriously climbed’.11 But even that loyalty was not always welcome because it tended to exhibit itself in frank analyses of his friends’ defects. As Balfour once remarked, ‘St John pursues us with his malignant fidelity’.12 Alfred Lyttelton, a close friend who referred to him as ‘the Brodder’, noticed that this trait became more pronounced as he grew older: his ‘sense of the infirmities of character of his friends’, he once told Curzon, ‘their want of judgment, wisdom – morals – deepens, though his loyalty and kindness of heart repairs some (not all) of the breaches which he makes in our reputations’.13 As Curzon himself discovered in 1905, the Brodder’s loyalty and kindness of heart did not always win through.

In spite of his censorious nature and undoubted respectability, Brodrick was Curzon’s curious choice as the man to whom he confided the details of his erratic love life. From his first problems as an undergraduate in 1879 to his marriage in 1895, Curzon requested and received advice about the complications of love from a man who had married very young and appeared to have no similar experiences himself. The women in the correspondence are usually anonymous and not always identifiable, but they probably include most of the upper-class women he was involved with at least until 1887. Perhaps Curzon was aware of the limits of Brodrick’s sympathy, for neither his escapades with women from less privileged backgrounds nor his problems with mistresses in the four years before his marriage feature in the letters.

Since his years at Oxford Curzon had been passionate and often reckless in his advances to women. Brodrick told him he realized ‘Wilde’s ideal of a man bound by many anchors and every shred of them a woman’s hair’, but also cautioned him for the way in which he subjected women to his fascination.14 Rapidly becoming a focus for gossip, Curzon was warned by other friends that he was too obviously familiar with women in public. Charty Ribblesdale once playfully accused him of trifling with women’s affections, but she was eager to know about his affairs, asking him to write her ‘a slight sketch of [his] conquests and repulses with loss’ before remembering that he had once told her he had had no experience of rebuffs.15

Although he remained a bachelor until the age of 36, Curzon very nearly married while he was still at Oxford. A letter from Brodrick in November 1879 expressed relief that George, who was still only 20, had decided against an engagement which would have fettered his life and caused pain to his father.16 Whether the girl was the same one he tried to marry the following year is uncertain. In any event, during the Christmas holidays of 1880 he went to stay with Harriet Vernon-Wentworth at her parents’ house in Yorkshire and asked her to marry him. The engagement lasted only so long as the information took to reach her parents, who considered the couple far too young and persuaded Harriet to break it off. The girl then seems to have disappeared from Curzon’s life, leaving little trace in his papers apart from a long and serious letter, written a few weeks before the engagement, in which she criticized his interpretation of the Passion Play he had seen with Oscar Browning at Oberammergau.17 An even more shadowy figure of this period was a girl called Selina Beresford, who died in November 1880 at the age of 19. The extent of Curzon’s attachment to her is unknown, the only evidence for it contained in a poem he wrote somewhat in the manner of ‘Heraclitus’, which ended with the lines,

I weep because, till you were dead I feel I did not know,

Sweet girl that though I loved you, I ever loved you so.18

By the time he left Balliol, Curzon had transferred his attentions to married ladies. The woman who consoled him after his exertions in ‘Greats’ was Alma, daughter of the Duke of Montrose and wife of the Earl of Breadalbane. During July 1882 Curzon was lunching or dining at her house at least twice a week and causing suspicion among his friends about the nature of their relationship. Alma confessed to Brodrick that she preferred Curzon’s company to that of anyone in the world. But the confidant was not impressed by his friend’s taste. Meeting her at a country-house party, she struck him as very odd, walking and dressing like a man and flirting outrageously with one of the other guests. Chaffing Curzon for being ‘an Endymion in real life’, Brodrick regarded Lady Breadalbane as ‘fresh proof of [his] extraordinary Catholicism in the matter of friends’. In the opinion of a rival, Lady Ribblesdale, Alma was a ‘siren’ and an ‘enchantress’ who had stolen his heart.19

Although Charty believed he was still worshipping at ‘the shrine’ of Lady Breadalbane as late as August 1884, by then Curzon had been for some time deeply in love with the recently widowed Lady Grosvenor. Gentle, kind and beautiful, Sibell Grosvenor had appeared in his life towards the end of 1882. Brodrick was informed that they had had a tête-à-tête, had then gone to the theatre and had later begun an affair with the permission of her husband, a fragile epileptic whose chief passion was steam engines. By December a number of people had become suspicious. Curzon was anxious and pleaded with Brodrick never to mention Sibell’s name in connection with his own, to ‘throw cold water on the idea if anyone else suggests it’, and ‘to do the part of a true friend in checking (even at the cost of perfect accuracy) any rumours which gossip may chance to circulate …’20 A few days later Curzon set off on his trip to Greece with Welldon and Edward Lyttelton and did not see her again until the following summer. As Brodrick predicted, the rumours appear not to have circulated. Visiting the Grosvenors’ house at Saighton in Cheshire, Alfred Lyttelton noticed a photograph of Curzon on Sibell’s table and wrote to tell him about it with the air of someone imparting unexpected information.21 In spite of his Egyptian dalliance with the Baroness de Malortie, whose existence was kept from Brodrick, Sibell remained constantly in his thoughts. ‘That sweet creature’, he informed his confidant from Constantinople, ‘has written to me since I left England more regularly than anyone else, home letters included. The fidelity of women is something touching, something amazing.’22 For Curzon, whose own capacity for fidelity was rather limited, it must have seemed strange indeed.

When he retired to Kedleston in August 1883, the Grosvenors were the only friends permitted to disturb his work for All Souls. ‘Our trio met again for a short but delicious spell’ at Saighton, he reported, ‘one husband being discarded pro tem, the other making himself particularly agreeable’. After bringing them back to stay at Kedleston, he informed Brodrick that bigamy was ‘quite an honourable vocation’ which had been ‘undeservedly looked down upon by the world!’23 In October he told Sibell he was ‘altogether taken up with love of’ her,24 and the following week ‘the trio’ were together again in London, happily consuming time Curzon had allotted for his final burst of research in the British Museum. Brodrick was by now worried that his friend’s whole life was being absorbed by ‘the trio’ and suggested they had a talk.25 But Curzon was in too romantic a mood to listen to advice. He gave Sibell a volume of Rossetti’s poems inscribed with his personal touch – a parody of the poet’s style – and told her he liked to recite ‘our Blessed Damozel’ while thinking of her. The following year he presented her with a book of Browning’s poems and in 1886 a work of Pater’s, each complete with a parody of its author.26

By the end of 1883 Curzon was more intensely in love than at any other time in his life. His letters to Sibell are more anguished, gushing, passionate and poetical than those he wrote later to his future wives. He longed for a glance from her, ‘a look with those eyes of deepest violet with their pupils dilating like a young fawn – and one touch of that soft cheek, that soft delicious flushing cheek’.27 Even short separations were unbearable. ‘All this week’, he told her three days before Christmas, ‘I have done nothing but dream of you the whole night long and then when I wake up so great is the disappointment that my morning is one of unhappiness.’ His despair was increased by the suspicion that she did not love him as much as he loved her.

Angel love me in a letter do. You can make me happy by loving me and you would not surely make a human creature, a fellow creature, unhappy. You take all I have, you know you do: you must give me a little in return. Other people ask me to love them and I cannot because you have taken it.

On Christmas Eve he was more cheerful after receiving a present and a letter which seemed to bring her before him in all her ‘surpassing charm and loveliness’. But his reflections on her goodness and his love still depressed him.

Sweet woman I pray for you this night that no thorns or briars may hinder your path through this thorny world but that your simple pure and Godlike nature may fill all that it meets or touches with its own sweetness and purity – as it does me – aye and fills me too with a longing that grows weary and that is beyond the power of words.

As Curzon’s passion became more intense, Lord Grosvenor’s health rapidly deteriorated. Sibell wrote daily reports from Saighton, and Curzon replied with violets and letters of love and sympathy.

I think of him lying there by the fireside in the very bed I was. I cannot bear to fancy that room a room of death. No Sibell, he shall live. He shall laugh and play with us again as before …28

But all of them, including the patient, knew that he would not live, and by late January he was dead.

A logical consequence of Lord Grosvenor’s death would have been the marriage of his widow to her lover. It was undoubtedly what Curzon wished and Brodrick expected. But according to the custom of the times, it was easier to have an affair with a married woman whose husband was complaisant than with a wealthy widow who found herself suddenly surrounded by dozens of suitors. Sibell could inspire passion in others but seems to have experienced little of it herself. Placid by nature, she had accepted Curzon as a lover yet now hesitated about sharing her whole life with such a tempestuous and energetic figure. In the event she prevaricated for nearly three years after her husband’s death, alternately raising and dampening his hopes, before finally turning him down.

In 1885, at the nadir of the relationship with Sibell Grosvenor, a rather coded letter from Brodrick welcomed the arrival of something ‘so beautiful and elevating’ entering Curzon’s life just ‘when it was needed – and when it will worthily replace what is gone’.29 If there was a new passion at this time she has remained anonymous since, and in any case she cannot have been very serious because the following year Curzon made a final effort to change Sibell’s mind. Flirtation and consolation in this difficult period, however, were offered by the Tennant sisters, the bright, merry and attractive daughters of the Glaswegian industrialist Sir Charles Tennant.

Curzon’s early advances to Charty Ribblesdale were made almost simultaneously with those to Alma Breadalbane and Sibell Grosvenor, but received a cooler response. He sent her flattering letters to which she replied with unrequested advice and a prohibition on the use of Christian names between them. ‘You say you have two passions,’ she wrote to him in Egypt, ‘and I notice that with your usual gallantry you put “women” before “work”.’ But the priority was wrong, she declared, and she urged him to change it. After two rather unpromising years, however, she softened and confessed to feelings of jealousy when she heard he was visiting her sisters in Scotland while she was in South Africa. Eventually, in the summer of 1885, she succumbed for a single afternoon, and her husband found out. To Curzon she wrote,

Though I was miserable at the time at having vexed Tommy with my ‘clumsy indiscretion’, as he called it, I do not and cannot regret it now, for how should I ever have got to know you as I do now? I look upon them as three precious hours well spent in which I have gained a blessing, for what greater blessing can there be on this weary earth than a friend who loves one? … You love several but I feel proud to be amongst them.30

It seems unlikely that the three hours were added to. They remained close friends for many years, but within three months of her ‘clumsy indiscretion’ she felt ‘a horrid conviction’ that two women she referred to as ‘the white daisy and the fair goddess’ had supplanted her in his affections.31

Curzon obeyed the social convention that while discreet adultery was permissible, affairs with unmarried girls from the upper classes were not. With each of Charty’s unmarried sisters, Laura and Margot – and indeed with the unhappily married Lucy as well – his relationship took the form of une amitié amoureuse. In the autumn of 1884 he visited them at Glen, the enormous house Sir Charles had built in the Border hills a few miles from Peebles. Curzon was evidently at his most flirtatious and on the journey south he composed a poem, a parody of Edgar Allan Poe, to the two sisters. Laura lamented his departure. ‘Oh George! The sun smiles, the purple is triumphant and the whole glen calls for you, and you are wasting your wit and wisdom on ecclesiastics.’32 With the vivacious and unconventional Margot the relationship seems to have been uncomplicated: she told him he was much nicer to her than anyone else and often referred to him as the ‘dearest and best of friends’. But for the gentler and more charming Laura – whom he later compared to ‘one of those ethereal emanations that sometimes flash for a moment from the unseen and disappear again into it, leaving a sense of wonder and enchantment’33 – his feelings were stronger. Perhaps, following a rebuff from Sibell, he thought of marrying her: an enigmatic letter written after she had married Alfred Lyttelton expressed the hope that nothing she did in the future would ever hurt him again.34 Whatever she had done to him, Curzon’s reaction to her engagement was characteristically generous. He congratulated Alfred on having secured ‘the dearest little girl in the United Kingdom’, while to Laura he wrote of his sadness that she was lost to him and his joy that ‘one of my dearest men friends in the world marries without exception the dearest girl friend I have ever had’.35

Curzon’s search for a parliamentary constituency began, with no great urgency, soon after he left Balliol. Within a year he had been approached by Conservative committees in several seats in London and the Midlands. He was handicapped, however, by inexperience and lack of money. As early as November 1882 Lord Salisbury recommended him to Preston as a candidate for a by-election, but the local committee, Curzon grumbled to Brodrick, was not interested in ‘unknown fledglings’.36 A greater obstacle was his relative poverty, for the constituency parties expected their candidates not only to pay their election expenses but also to make a large annual contribution to the associations. Still living on Lord Scarsdale’s allowance, Curzon was in no position to finance an election campaign.

A solution was eventually found in South Derbyshire, part of the county his ancestors had represented so ineffectually over the centuries. In March 1884 one of the sitting members, Sir Henry Wilmot, announced his retirement at the next election, and Curzon was selected to replace him. Wilmot generously agreed to pay the bulk of the election expenses, contributing £740 while his successor scraped together £305. But in spite of the family connection, which had been allowed to lapse over the previous hundred years, South Derbyshire was a far from ideal constituency. It had been a marginal since the First Reform Bill, and in 1859 the second seat had been won by a single vote. In subsequent years the winning, margins had been almost as narrow, and in 1880 the parties had come to an agreement, each providing an unopposed candidate for the two-member constituency. Assured of a contest at the next election, however, Curzon knew it would be a difficult one. The Third Reform Bill, passed after his selection, and the creation of single-member seats, made it more difficult still.

Curzon’s adoption took place just after he had completed the eight months of intensive labour required for his successes at All Souls and in the Arnold essay competition. For the first time in many years he had neither an examination to take nor a prize to compete for. So in March 1884 he set out on a long tour of Spain, staying with his Balliol contemporary, Arthur Hardinge, in Madrid, and travelling with him to Toledo and Seville. Continuing alone through Andalusia, he crossed over to Tangier from Gibraltar and returned in a steamer up the east coast of the peninsula to Barcelona. Later he recorded his impressions of Seville, where he saw Lagartijo, one of the greatest of Cordoban bullfighters, perform in Holy Week. Courage, cruelty and skill combined in a spectacle which filled him ‘with alternate admiration and disgust’. He was particularly struck by the behaviour of the crowd which heaped frenzied admiration and passionate abuse on both the bulls and the matadors. It all seemed ‘very foreign to British ideas of sport’. An English crowd, he reflected, might occasionally barrack a particularly defensive batsman, but it would never hiss a footballer for missing a goal or insult a racehorse for coming last in a race.37

In the course of the following twelve months, while he waited impatiently for the general election, Curzon turned to journalism. A perennial collector of heroes, he wrote eulogistic pieces for the Oxford Review on two whom he had actually met. He had come across General Gordon in 1883 and considered him to be one of England’s most heroic figures. Outraged by Gladstone’s subsequent failure to rescue him from Khartoum, Curzon wrote a panegyric comparing him to the Roman soldier-consul, Germanicus. A different type of hero was Tennyson, his favourite poet, from whose ‘Tears, idle tears’ he used to quote at melancholic or nostalgic moments; he could even do an impersonation of the poet himself reciting the verses. In the summer of 1884 he accompanied Laura Tennant on a visit to Tennyson and stayed the night at his house near Haslemere. Both of them were slightly disappointed by the laureate’s appearance. Laura thought him rather dirty and untidy, while Curzon found that his face, ‘though noble and striking, had not quite the majesty with which photographs endow it’. He was delighted, however, by Tennyson’s reading of his poems, ‘a guttural solemn chant in a rolling resonant monotone’.

Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro’ the lawn,

The moan of doves in immemorial elms,

And murmuring of innumerable bees.

After intoning these lines from ‘The Princess’, the poet said they were the most beautiful he had ever written and hoped that one day they would be accepted as some of the most beautiful in the language.38 Shortly afterwards Curzon described Tennyson in print as

the poet of modern Conservatism, the sweet singer who, with no uncertain sound, and with unrivalled felicity of diction, has proclaimed the articles of that faith, an ordered Progress, a regard for Tradition, a love for Constitutional Freedom, and a defence of the unity and prestige of the Empire.39

In the spring of 1885 Curzon embarked upon another European journey, this time to Italy and Tunis. He crossed the Channel with Laura, who was travelling with her mother to buy her wedding dress in Paris, and carried on to Venice where he happily indulged his love of pictures. He was delighted by the works of Carpaccio and Giovanni Bellini, felt an increased respect for Titian, and was struck by the originality and inventiveness of Tintoretto. An assiduous tourist in Padua and Ravenna, he decided he could be ‘conscientiously lazy’ in Bologna because there was not much to see. ‘A relentless tyrant’ lurked within him, he noted in his diary, forever forcing him out to climb towers, visit churches and tramp around innumerable galleries, but in Bologna, which he considered to be almost bereft of sights, he allowed himself to relax. On Easter Sunday he lunched in Florence with Ouida, the romantic novelist who later became a friend. While admitting that she was ‘courteous and affable to the last degree’, his first impression of her was uncharitable. She was ‘particularly ugly’, he noted, ‘the upper part of the head that of a well to do Padre, the lower that of a professional pugilist’. He continued with a priggish denunciation of her character, believing her to be blind to virtue and destitute of moral sense.40

From Tuscany he hurried south via Perugia, which he thought the most romantic town he had ever seen, to Rome and Naples, which he had visited two years earlier. Both cities continued to irritate him. He admired the Forum and the Colosseum as representatives of republican and imperial Rome, and he retained ‘a most permanent veneration’ for the works of Michelangelo. But he was tired of ‘all the tawdry fripperies of Papal pomp’ and convinced himself that St Peter’s was a very inferior building to St Paul’s in London. He did not linger in Naples, where he was sure he would be cajoled and swindled by its inhabitants, but crossed to eastern Sicily where he found Etna much more impressive than Vesuvius. He then enjoyed four days in Palermo, which he described with an optimism unshared by other travellers. ‘It seems so happy, everything and everyone appear to fare so well’, is a curious impression to have received from a city plagued by poverty, harrowed by violence and embittered by the failure of united Italy to address the problems of the south.41

Always eager to cross the Mediterranean when he found himself on its northern shore, Curzon sailed over to Tunis. He did not care much for the capital, which he thought had lost its character since the French occupation, but eagerly visited the religious city of Kairouan, where he stayed in a hotel so awful that his two nights there ‘might have been spent in one of the subordinate sections of the Ark’. The most interesting aspect of the visit to Tunis was his opinion of the French officials. Considering the contempt he later showed for French colonialism in Asia, it is worth recording his positive view of it in North Africa. ‘Coming as conquerors’, he noted in his diary, the French ‘posed as custodians and friends. They appear to have the knack … of conciliating and establishing friendly relations with the natives.’42

Some months after his return to England in May, Curzon was reminded of a Sicilian train journey in which he had spent several hours enthusiastically telling his fellow passengers about the history, geography and mythology of the landscape they were passing through. A few days before the general election in the autumn his agent received a telegram inquiring whether the Mr Curzon who was standing for South Derbyshire was the gentleman who had travelled in a first-class railway carriage from Catania to Girgenti on 1 May 1885; if so, the sender would come and vote for him. Canvassing among the Derbyshire miners, Curzon could recall little of that journey until, on entering his agent’s office on polling day, he recognized the traveller who had been inspired by his companionship to support him.43