Abroad with the Jimmies — Themes and Context

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In Category - Geography

Authors: Bell, Lilian, 1867-1929 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2004 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Europe -- Description and travel Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 57,747

Reading time 252 min

Text sections 7

The catalog record for Abroad with the Jimmies — Themes and Context provides practical reading context through 57,747 words, 4 hr 12 min estimated reading time, and 7 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 19.4 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Europe -- Description and travel,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #12184

Lilian Bell's travelogue follows the narrator, her sister Bee, and the Jimmies across Europe, blending sharp observations of landscapes and customs with playful family dynamics. The excerpts reveal a voice that is wry, self-deprecating, and attuned to the absurdities of tourism, from Henley to Salzburg.

Editorial Edition Score 4.7/5

★★★★★ ★★★★★

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Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg12184

Read the Text

I. Our House-boat at Henley

III. Strasburg and Baden-Baden

IV. Stuttgart, Nuremberg, and Bayreuth

VI. Munich to the Achensee

VII. Dancing in the Austrian Tyrol

XI. My First Interview with Tolstoy

XII. At one of the Tolstoy Receptions

XIII. Shopping Experiences

OUR HOUSE-BOAT AT HENLEY

It speaks volumes for an amiability I have always claimed for myself through sundry fierce disputes on the subject with my sister, that, even after two years of travel in Europe with her and Mr. and Mrs. Jimmie, they should still wish for my company for a journey across France and Germany to Russia. Bee says it speaks volumes for the tempers of the Jimmies, but then Bee is my sister, or to put it more properly, I am Bee's sister, and what woman is a heroine to her own sister?

In any event I am not. Bee thinks I am a creature of feeble intelligence who must be "managed." Bee loves to "manage" people, and I, who love to watch her circuitous, diplomatic, velvety, crooked way to a straight end, allow myself to be so "managed;" and so after safely disposing of Billy in the grandmotherly care of Mamma for another six months, Bee and I gaily took ship and landed safely at the door of the Cecil, having been escorted up from Southampton by Jimmie.

While repeated journeys to Europe lose the thrill of expectant uncertainty which one's first held, yet there is something very pleasing about "_going back_." And so we were particularly glad again to join forces with our friends the Jimmies and travel with them, for they, like Bee and me, travel aimlessly and are never hampered with plans.

Everybody seems to know that we do not mean business, and nobody has ever dared to ask whether our intentions were serious or not.

In this frame of mind we floated over to England and had a fortnight of "the season" in London. But this soon palled on us, and we fell into the idle mood of waiting for something to turn up.

One Sunday morning Bee and Mrs. Jimmie and I were sitting at a little table near the entrance to the Cecil Hotel, when Jimmie came out of a side door and sat down in front of us, leaning his elbows on the table and grinning at us in a suspicious silence. We all waited for him to begin, but he simply sat and smoked and grinned.

"Well! Well!" I said, impatiently, "What now?"

You would know that Jimmie was an American by the way he smokes. He simply eats up cigars, inhales them, chews them. The end of his cigar blazes like a danger signal and breathes like an engine. He can hold his hands and feet still, but his nervousness crops out in his smoking. Finally, exasperated by his continued silence, Bee said, severely:

"Jimmie, have you anything up your sleeve? If so, speak out!"

"Well!" said Jimmie, brushing the cigar ashes off his wife's skirt, "I thought I'd take you all out to Henley this morning to look at the house-boat."

"House-boat!" shrieked Bee and I in a whisper, clutching Jimmie by the sleeve and lapel of his coat and giving him an ecstatic shake.

"Are we going to have a house-boat?" asked Bee.

"We!" said Jimmie. "_I_ am going to have a house-boat, and I am going to take my wife. If you are good perhaps she will ask you out to tea one afternoon."

"How many staterooms are there, Jimmie? Can we invite people to stay with us over night?" demanded Bee.

"You cannot," said Jimmie, firmly. "I said a house-boat, not a house party."

"I shall ask the duke," said Bee, clearing her throat in a pleased way. "Can't I, Mrs. Jimmie?"

"Certainly, dear. Ask any one you like."

"If you do," growled Jimmie, who hates the duke because he wears gloves in hot weather, "I'll invite the chambermaid and the head-waiter of this hotel."

"We ought to be starting," said Mrs. Jimmie, pacifically, and we started and went and arrived.

As we were driving to the station I noticed all the way along, and I had noticed them ever since we had been in London, large capital H's on a white background, posted on stone walls, street corners, lampposts, and occasionally on the sidewalks.

"What are those H's for, Jimmie?" I asked. To which he replied with this record-breaking joke:

"Those are the H's that Englishmen have been dropping for generations, and being characteristic of this solid nation, they thus ossified them."

I forgave Jimmie a good deal for that joke.

At the pier at Henley a man met us with a little boat and rowed us up the river, past dozens of house-boats moored along the bank.

Continue Reading →

The narrator of Abroad with the Jimmies introduces herself through a quarrel: she claims amiability, her sister Bee disagrees, and the reader is dropped into a running family joke about who needs “managing.” This opening establishes a voice that is wry, self-aware, and fond of undercutting its own assertions. The party—the narrator, Bee, Mr. and Mrs. Jimmie—travels “aimlessly,” unhampered by plans, and the book’s structure follows that looseness, moving from Henley to Paris, Baden-Baden, Salzburg, and beyond. What emerges is less a guidebook than a chronicle of how a small, opinionated group negotiates foreign places and each other.

A Voice That Argues with Itself

The narrator’s tone is the book’s most consistent feature: she is quick to claim virtues (“amiability”) and just as quick to let Bee contradict her. She describes Bee’s “circuitous, diplomatic, velvety, crooked way to a straight end” with evident admiration, and presents herself as a willing subject of that management. This self-deprecating dynamic extends to the Jimmies. Mr. Jimmie is called “a frightful liar” who would “sacrifice his hope of heaven to torture us successfully for half a day” over the pansymphonicon—a claim the narrator both dismisses and admits she would give anything to verify. The humor depends on the reader’s willingness to enjoy a narrator who is unreliable about her own reliability.

Salzburg as a Test Case for Group Taste

When the party reaches Salzburg, the narrator notes that it “satisfied the entire emotional gamut of our diversified and centrifugal party.” She itemizes: mountains for Jimmie, the river for herself, the Residenz-Schloss for Mrs. Jimmie and Bee, and views for all. This catalog is a microcosm of the book’s method—each place is filtered through the group’s competing preferences. The description of the restaurant reached by “an enormous elevator” and the singers who perform “quite abominably out of key, but with great vigour” shows the narrator’s eye for the slightly off. She is more interested in the failed performance than a polished one, and in the fact that the cloisters of the Nonnberg are closed to visitors: “I thanked God and took courage.”

Romance and Its Absence

On the Gaisberg, watching Salzburg twinkle below, Mr. and Mrs. Jimmie “sat very close together, and renewed the days of their courting,” while the narrator and Bee “held each other’s hands and felt lonely.” The scene is typical of the book’s emotional structure: the married couple provides a foil for the single sisters, and the narrator responds by turning to poetry—which Bee tolerates only briefly. The narrator knows “how far to trespass on my sister’s patience,” and this awareness of limits, both social and emotional, gives the travelogue a quiet tension. The romance of the situation is real, but it is observed from outside, and the narrator’s loneliness is stated plainly, without self-pity.

Readers will find that Abroad with the Jimmies rewards attention to its small, recurring patterns: the way the narrator claims and then undermines her own virtues, the way each location is assessed by how it pleases or frustrates the party, and the way romance is always happening to someone else. The book does not offer a systematic tour of Europe; it offers a portrait of a group in motion, held together by affection and irritation in equal measure.

There’s something about the Jimmies’ squabbles and the way Lilian Bell catches the weary humor of travel that stays with you, long after the train has moved on. I found myself thinking of that same quiet ache for understanding when I picked up In the forbidden land — Key Ideas to Explore, another kind of journey, less sunny, more searching. In the forbidden land — Key Ideas to Explore holds a similar feeling—not the scenery, but what you carry home.