Narrative of a journey round the Dead Sea and in the Bible Lands in 1850 and 1851 by Louis Felicien de Saulcy (1853)

Michael Arditti recalls how the Topography shelves yielded up a lively account of a trip to the Holy Land by a French orientalist, who inspired a character in his forthcoming novel

Louis Felicien de Saulcy was a French amateur orientalist who visited the Holy Land in the mid-nineteenth century. While excavating in Jerusalem, he believed that he had unearthed King David’s tomb; while circumnavigating the Dead Sea, he believed that he had discovered the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah. In both cases he was mistaken, but his account of his travels, rich in local detail, arcane scholarship and derring-do, has proved invaluable in formulating my new novel. The divine vengeance wreaked on Sodom is one of the most influential and enduring myths of all time. My work in progress, Of Men and Angels, is a fictional account of the creation of the myth and its application and promulgation in four pivotal historical eras. It opens in Babylon, where many scholars believe that much of the Old Testament was codified, and where I posit that the ancient Hebrews’ revulsion from local religious rites and sexual practices led to the homophobic tone of the Sodom story.

The second episode centres on the performance of a mystery play of Lot’s Wife in thirteenth-century York, setting the myth against the full panoply of medieval Christianity (that such a play was performed, albeit not in York but in Sherborne, is another discovery I made in The London Library). The third episode takes place in Renaissance Florence, where a specially designated court, the Office of the Night, was established to hear cases of sodomy, and focuses on my one real-life protagonist, Sandro Botticelli. The fifth and final episode features a Hollywood actor filming a biblical epic about the destruction of Sodom in the late 1980s, when many religious commentators viewed the advent of AIDS as a further instance of divine judgment.

The fourth episode has always been the most problematic. I knew that it had to be set in the mid-nineteenth century, a time when Western religious certainties were coming under threat. Having fictionalised Jewish, Christian and humanist attitudes to the Sodom myth, I was eager to provide an Islamic perspective, not least because Lot is a far more prominent figure in the Qur’an than in the Bible. I initially researched Sir Richard Burton, whose trip to the Dead Sea, pilgrimage to Mecca and penning of the first extensive account of homosexuality in English in a long essay at the end of his translation of One Thousand and One Nights (1885), all served my purposes. But whereas Botticelli fitted neatly into my scheme, Burton stubbornly refused to do so. In frustration, I scoured the

Topography stacks in The London Library for other nineteenth-century travellers to the Dead Sea and hit upon de Saulcy. Until the Ottoman Sultan opened up Palestine to the West, largely in gratitude for British and French support during the Crimean War in the late 1850s, only a handful of Europeans had visited the Dead Sea since the Crusades. De Saulcy, taking the trip to recover from the death of his wife, was one of the first and, undoubtedly, one of the richest of the new influx. Later travellers complained bitterly that the Frenchman’s largesse had prompted the Bedouin guides to inflate their prices.

Amid lengthy reports of the hazards of the journey, the splendour of the scenery and the corruption of the Bedouin comes de Saulcy’s startling claim that, by relating the Genesis story to traditional Arab place names, he has discovered the ruins of Sodom (Kharbet-Esdoum). The publication of his account, followed by a triumphant tour of Britain, offered muchneeded solace to Victorians experiencing the familiar ‘crisis of faith’ . The triumph was, however, short-lived, for his claims were swiftly demolished, not least by the Revd Albert Augustus Isaacs in The Dead Sea: or, Notes and Observations Made During a Journey to Palestine in 1856–7 on M. De Saulcy’s Supposed Discovery of the Cities of the Plain (1857).

Nevertheless, for all his spurious reasoning, casual racism and grandiloquent style, I owe de Saulcy a huge debt of gratitude for inspiring the creation of my missing protagonist, a Victorian evangelical clergyman seeking to affirm his faith in the biblical landscape, and thereby rescuing my book.

Louis Felicien de Saulcy.