A Tour in Switzerland
Or, a View of the Present State of the Governments and Manners of those Cantons: With Comparative Sketches of the Present State of Paris

Published in 1798, a two-volume political travelogue by the radical writer and poet Helen Maria Williams (1759–1827).

Helen Maria Williams (Author)

9781108065443, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 31 October 2013

366 pages
21.6 x 14 x 2.1 cm, 0.47 kg

The radical writer and poet Helen Maria Williams (1759–1827) is best remembered for her eight-volume Letters from France (1790–6), charting the progress of the French Revolution. Having published poetry and a novel, Julia (1790), she travelled to France, where her salon welcomed the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine and leading Girondists. Forced to flee the country in 1794, she went into exile in Switzerland for six months, travelling with the printer and political reformer John Hurford Stone (1763–1818). This two-volume account of the journeys she made during her time there, first published in 1798, documents what she sees as the failure of Swiss democracy. Highlighting the shortcomings of the Swiss government and the suffering of much of Swiss society through exploitation, Williams anticipates revolutionary activity in the cantons. In Volume 2, she describes her excursion in the Alps, presenting also observations on Zurich, Fribourg and Berne.

22[a]. Ascent to the glaciers
23. Source of the Rhone
24. Coire
25. Grison mode of negociating
26. Baths of Pffyffer
27. Glaris
28. Lake of Zurich
29. Return to Lucerne
30. Tell's chapel
31. Cabinets of natural history in Switzerland
32. Autumnal views on the Jura
33. Excursions round Neufchatel
34. Vevay
35. Fribourg
36. Arrival at Berne
37. Reclamations of the Pays de Vaud
38. State of the peasantry and manufactures in the canton of Berne
39. Trial of the members of the festival
40. Discontents of the popular party
Appendix.

Subject Areas: European history [HBJD]