BY:Alice Meynell

Reported by:Angel Joy Novilla

Lorenz Priam Cordova
• Name: Alice Christiana Gertrude Meynell
• Birth: October 11,1847 in Barnes London,United
Kingdom
• Father: Thomas James Thompson
• Mother: Christiana Weller Thompson
• Husband: Wilfred Meynell
• Children: Everard Meynell
Madeline Lucas
• Sibling: Elizabeth Thompson
• School: Homeschooled
• Died: November 27, 1922 in London United Kingdom
• Some of her early love poems was inspired by Father Augustus
Dignam which is “After a Partying” and “Renouncement”.
• In 1875, Meynell published her first poetry
collection, Preludes (Henry S. King & Co.), which was received
with great success. English poet and novelist Walter de la Mare
called her one of the few poets “who actually think in verse.”
• In 1877, she married Wilfred Meynell who soon become a
successful editor of the monthly magazine MERRY ENGLAND
and Alice joined her husband in MERRY ENGLAND as a co-
editor.
• She worked to improve slum conditions and prevent cruelty to
animals, but she was best known for her work for women’s rights.
Meynell worked with the Women’s Suffrage Movement and
fought for workers’ rights for women.
• Her second book, Poems (Elkin Matthews & John Lane, 1893),
was published nearly two decades after the release of her
debut.
• Meynell published several more poetry collections in her
lifetime: Ten Poems (Romney Street Press, 1915), Collected
Poems of Alice Meynell (Burns and Oates, 1913), Later
Poems (John Lane, 1901), and Other Poems, which was self-
published in 1896. Restrained, subtle, and conventional in form,
Meynell’s poems are reflections on religious spirit and belief,
love, nature, and war.
• Meynell continued writing until her death. After a series of
illnesses, she died on November 27, 1922. A final
collection, Last Poems (Burns and Oates), was published
posthumously a year later.
• BLASPHEMOUS- impiously irrelevant: Profane-to treat
something sacred with abuse.
• CLAMOR- loud continuous voice; to utter or proclaim insistently
and noisily.
• ELOCUTION- a style of speaking specially in public; art of
effctive public speaking.
• COUNTERFEIT- made in imitation of something else with intent to
deceive: Forged
• BOURGEOIS-

• ENTREATY- Plea (way of excuse or justification)

• SOMBRENESS- Crowded or pressed together; Compact;
Serrate(notched or toothed to the edge).
• TWANGING- to throb or twitch with pain or tension.
• CANOROUS- pleasant sounding; melodious
• HAMLET- small village
• FEIGNED- Fictituous(); not genuine or real
• BLASPHEMIES- act of insulting or showing contempt or lack of
reverance for God.
• ENACTING- to establish by legal authoritative act specially to
make into law; Act out.
• SOOTHE- to please by or as if by attention or concern; to bring
comfort, solace or reassurance to.
 My train drew near to the Via Reggio platform on a
day between two of the harvests of a hot September; the
sea was burning blue, and there were a sombreness and a
gravity in the very excesses of the sun as his fires brooded
deeply over the serried, hardy, shabby, seaside ilex-
woods. I had come out of Tuscany and was on my way to
the Genovesato: the steep country with its profiles, bay by
bay, of successive mountains grey with olive-trees, between
the flashes of the Mediterranean and the sky; the country
through the which there sounds the twanging Genoese
language, a thin Italian mingled with a little Arabic, more
Portuguese, and much French.
I was regretful at leaving the elastic Tuscan speech, canorous
in its vowels set in emphatic L's and m's and the vigorous
soft spring of the double consonants. But as the train
arrived its noises were drowned by a voice declaiming in
the tongue I was not to hear again for months--good
Italian. The voice was so loud that one looked for
the audience: Whose ears was it seeking to reach by the
violence done to every syllable, and whose feelings would
it touch by its insincerity?
 The tones were insincere, but there was passion behind
them; and most often passion acts its own true character
poorly, and consciously enough to make good judges think
it a mere counterfeit. Hamlet, being a little mad, feigned
madness. It is when I am angry that I pretend to be angry,
so as to present the truth in an obvious and intelligible
form. Thus even before the words were distinguishable it
was manifest that they were spoken by a man in serious
trouble who had false ideas as to what is convincing
in elocution.
When the voice became audibly articulate, it proved to be
shouting blasphemies from the broad chest of a middle-
aged man--an Italian of the type that grows stout and
wears whiskers. The man was in bourgeois dress, and he
stood with his hat off in front of the small station building,
shaking his thick fist at the sky. No one was on the platform
with him except the railway officials, who seemed in doubt
as to their duties in the matter, and two women. Of one of
these there was nothing to remark except her distress. She
wept as she stood at the door of the waiting-room.
Like the second woman, she wore the dress of the
shopkeeping class throughout Europe, with the local black
lace veil in place of a bonnet over her hair. It is of the
second woman--O unfortunate creature!--that this record is
made--a record without sequel, without consequence; but
there is nothing to be done in her regard except so to
remember her. And thus much I think I owe after having
looked, from the midst of the negative happiness that is
given to so many for a space of years, at some minutes of
her despair.
 She was hanging on the man's arm in her entreaties
that he would stop the drama he was enacting. She had
wept so hard that her face was disfigured. Across her nose
was the dark purple that comes with overpowering fear.
Haydon saw it on the face of a woman whose child had
just been run over in a London street. I remembered the
note in his journal as the woman at Via Reggio, in her
intolerable hour, turned her head my way, her sobs lifting
it. She was afraid that the man would throw himself under
the train. She was afraid that he would be damned for his
blasphemies; and as to this her fear was mortal fear. It
was horrible, too, that she was humpbacked and a dwarf.
 Not until the train drew away from the station did we
lose the clamour. No one had tried to silence the man or to
soothe the woman's horror. But has any one who saw it
forgotten her face? To me for the rest of the day it was a
sensible rather than a merely mental image. Constantly a
red blur rose before my eyes for a background, and
against it appeared the dwarf's head, lifted with sobs,
under the provincial black lace veil. And at night what
emphasis it gained on the boundaries of sleep! Close to my
hotel there was a roofless theatre crammed with people,
where they were giving Offenbach.
The operas of Offenbach still exist in Italy, and the little town
was placarded with announcements of La Bella Elena. The
peculiar vulgar rhythm of the music jigged audibly through
half the hot night, and the clapping of the town's-folk filled
all its pauses. But the persistent noise did but accompany,
for me, the persistent vision of those three figures at the
Via Reggio station in the profound sunshine of the day.
• In “By the Railway Side,” from 1893, Alice Meynell uses
techniques such as strong descriptive words, strong imagery,
and the five senses to evoke the reader’s imagination. The
main idea of the writing is that the speaker is in a railway
station in Italy and admires the language around her, the
reader talks about the beautiful delivery in the vowels and
consonants of the tuscan language. This all takes place in the
grand hot september setting of Tuscany. These techniques plus
using the senses to portrait a clear foreign setting allows for a
very descriptive and typical travel writing piece. The piece
only deviates from typical travel writing a small amount when
it comes to the level of diction sophistication. This may deter
readers with a simple vocabulary and low grammatical
understanding. However, I do not believe this was enough of a
deviation, rather more of a writing style for the author.
• Meynell uses a strong description of the senses of sound to
vividly describe her environment. She described the vowels in
the tuscan language as a nice melodious and canorous sound.
This was a description of the language that she was surrounded
by in this part of Italy. Then suddenly the loud train comes into
the picture, disturbing the sound of the tuscan language. She
describes this sound as loud and violent through every syllable.
• The author uses strong descriptions and imagery to make the
setting come alive, which is a common aspect of typical travel
blogs. The first sentence of this piece reads, “My train drew
near to the Via Reggio platform on a day between two of the
harvests of a hot September; the sea was burning blue, and
there were a sombreness and a gravity in the very excesses of
the sun as his fires brooded deeply over the serried, hardy,
shabby, seaside ilex-woods.” There is an extremely large
amount of description in this first sentence.
• It also goes a very long time without any full stops. Within
this sentence you can see a description of temperature,
sight, and environment. An element of imagery that can be
seen elsewhere in the writing is personification. “But as the
train arrived its noises were drowned by a voice
declaiming in the tongue.” The personification in this quote
is saying that the noises are drowning. All descriptions and
literary techniques are commonly used in travel writing that
is meant for readers to make the read pleasurable.
However, her use of these things is very sophisticated and
very high level.
• Another very typical aspect of travel writing is having an
introduction that is directly diving into the story. In general
travel writers like to jump into a situation that is travelling.
One person that successfully utilized this was Michael
Paling in his travel journey where day 7 begins with a
horse carriage ride. In this example she uses a train scene
where she is just about to arrive to her location.

• In conclusion, “By the Railway Side,” was a typical travel

writing because it used various imagery techniques to
support setting, the 5 senses to support the atmosphere,
and a beginning sentence that immerses the reader into the
travel story immediately