John MacGregor (1825–1892)
Autor(a) de The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy"
John MacGregor é John Macgregor (1). Para outros autores com o nome John Macgregor, veja a página de desambiguação.
Obras de John MacGregor
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Outros nomes
- Roy, Rob
- Data de nascimento
- 1825-24-01
- Data de falecimento
- 1892-07-16
- Sexo
- male
- Nacionalidade
- UK
- Local de nascimento
- Gravesend, Kent, UK
- Local de falecimento
- Boscombe, Hampshire, UK
- Educação
- Trinity College, Cambridge
- Ocupação
- artist
barrister
boat designer
explorer
philanthropist
travel writer - Organizações
- Royal Canoe Club (1866)
Membros
Resenhas
Listas
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Associated Authors
Estatísticas
- Obras
- 4
- Membros
- 58
- Popularidade
- #284,346
- Avaliação
- 4.3
- Resenhas
- 3
- ISBNs
- 27
- Idiomas
- 1
MacGregor is a genuine Victorian eccentric. His writing isn't as smooth and professional as Stevenson's, but he writes with tremendous passion, energy and self-confidence. He is a fierce advocate of the pleasures of canoe travel (one of which, as with so many outdoor activities, is clearly the pleasure of boasting about the discomforts you have endured). He is utterly unembarrassed at all times—if he gets stuck somewhere, or arrives in a strange town after everyone has gone to bed, he simply sings at the top of his voice until some curious person comes to see what's going on. Where Stevenson goes on for about three chapters about the indignity of being mistaken for a commercial traveller, MacGregor just doesn't care. He loves impressing journalists and small boys with the oddity of his means of transport, and he is pleased when people come to gawp at him because they've read about his journey in the papers.
Unlike Stevenson, he makes practically no attempt to give us standard tourist descriptions of places and sights: the book is all about the practical business of travelling by canoe and how he and the people he meets react to that. Where we get scenery, it is there to show us how different the world looks from the water, not because travel books are supposed to have scenery.
MacGregor was clearly a competent draughtsman as well as a writer: his illustrations, worked up from the pencil sketches he made during his tour, and done in a droll Victorian style rather reminiscent of Thackeray, give the book a lot of its charm. When we see the way he caricatures himself in the illustrations, it's hard to take offence at the occasional brashness of the text.
He's a bit less aggressive in his Evangelicalism than in his later sailing book, but he's still pretty confrontational about it. His minimal luggage for a three-month trip still includes a bundle of tracts to be handed out to all and sundry, and it gives him something to be proud of when foreigners are puzzled that he doesn't travel on Sundays: if he's somewhere without a protestant church, that gives him the opportunity to pen a satirical account of whatever antics the ludicrous Roman Catholics are getting up to. The spirit of George Borrow was plainly alive and well in mid-Victorian Britain.… (mais)