An Inland Voyage And Travels With A Donkey In The Cevennes

An Inland Voyage & Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1945)
By Robert Louis Stevenson | J. M. Dent
ISBN: none (long before ISBNs, but not before donkeys)
Condition: Good (adventurous, mildly scuffed, entirely game)
Offered by: Crappy Old Books

This handy green volume contains two of Robert Louis Stevenson’s best early experiments in “have notebook, will wander”:

1. An Inland Voyage – in which a young, under-employed Scot decides that the sensible thing to do is paddle a canoe down the canals and rivers of Belgium and France.

2. Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes – in which the same man decides that if a canoe was eccentric, a stubborn hired donkey named Modestine is surely the next logical step.

Before Treasure Island, before Jekyll and Hyde, Stevenson was out there mucking about in Europe, sleep-deprived, under-funded and writing it all up with far more charm than the situation deserves.

What’s inside (apart from one sulky donkey)

In An Inland Voyage you get:

• Slender canoes on sleepy waterways

• Innkeepers ranging from saintly to suspicious

• Provincial towns that receive two eccentric Scots in strange boats as if aliens have landed

• A running commentary on weather, maps, mishaps and the surprising difficulty of being a romantic voyager when your socks are wet.

In Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes you get:

• Modestine, the real star of the book:

  • tiny, stubborn, passive-aggressively slow

  • master of the “oh, did you want to go there today?” approach to locomotion

• Nights under the stars, with Stevenson testing out early solo camping like some 19th-century hipster

• French peasants, priests and oddballs, all encountered with wry affection

• Reflections on faith, solitude and the art of getting thoroughly lost while pretending it was on purpose.

Both journeys are:

• Short on grand achievement

• Long on beautiful sentences, small disasters and observational humour.

The tone: half holiday, half philosophy

Stevenson does that thing he’s annoyingly good at:

• One paragraph: a slapstick struggle with a boat, a donkey or an inn.

• Next paragraph: a sudden, luminous line about freedom, landscapes or the human soul.

He can’t help himself; even when he’s just trying to get from A to B, he starts inventing modern travel writing.

If you like:

• Vivid descriptions

• Dry understatement

• A narrator who is very aware of his own absurdity

…you’re in exactly the right place.

This particular copy

• Condition: Good – as the photo cheerfully confirms:

  • Solid green cloth boards, still presentable, with an embossed Dent device on the front for extra respectability.

  • Spine lettering a bit softened but legible—the bookish equivalent of a well-used walking stick.

  • Corners and edges lightly bumped from decades of honest shelving and the odd ill-advised stack.

  • Pages all present, readable, and likely gently tanned; no indication that either canoe or donkey has passed directly over them.

No dust jacket, but it carries itself like the kind of hardback that shrugs and says, “I’ve been around since 1945; I don’t need a coat.”

The 1945 factor

Printed in 1945, this is a wartime / just-post-wartime reissue:

• A time when the idea of wandering peacefully through France with only a canoe or a donkey probably felt like extremely comforting fantasy.

• It’s easy to imagine this book being read in blackout, barracks or boarding houses as an exercise in light, literary escapism.

So you’re getting not just Stevenson’s 1870s travel but also a faint echo of the 1940s readers who needed it.

Why you might actually want this

• You enjoy travel writing where very little goes right, but everything is charmingly described.

• You like Stevenson and want to see him in “essay / memoir” mode rather than just “pirates and potions”.

• You’re building a small, smug shelf of JM Dent classics in green cloth and need a volume with both a canoe and a donkey in it.

• You like the idea of a book you can dip into for a chapter at a time and come away feeling both amused and slightly more philosophical.

It’s also an excellent candidate for reading on your own modest adventures—train journeys, cheap holidays, or just the sofa with a blanket while you pretend you’re in the Cevennes.

Condition vs. Wanderlust

• Physically: Good – sturdy enough to travel again, whether that’s to a campsite, a canal boat, or just the far side of your bed.

• Literarily: first-rate; these two pieces pretty much invented the “slightly hapless but thoughtful traveller” genre everyone’s been ripping off ever since.

Offered by Crappy Old Books, where the boards are green, the bindings are Good, the donkeys are stubborn, and the inland voyages are all safely confined to the printed page.

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