Amours de Voyage is a novel in verse and is arranged in five cantos, or chapters, as a sequence of letters. It is about a group of English travellers in Italy: Claude, and the Trevellyn family, are caught up in the 1849 political turmoil. The poem mixes the political (‘Sweet it may be, and decorous, perhaps, for the country to die; but,/On the whole, we conclude the Romans won’t do it, and I sha’n’t’) and the personal (‘After all, do I know that I really cared so about her?/Do whatever I will, I cannot call up her image’). The political is important but the personal dilemmas are the crucial ones. Claude, about to declare himself, retreats, regrets. It is this retreat, his scruples and fastidiousness, that, like a conventional novel, is the core of Amours de Voyage. The poem thus contributed something important to the modern sensibility; it is a portrait of an anti-hero; it is about love and marriage (the difficulties of); and it is about Italy.
Author
Arthur Hugh Clough was the son of a Liverpool cotton merchant who moved the family to South Carolina when he was four. He returned to England to attend Rugby School under Thomas Arnold and then Balliol College, Oxford. At Oxford the influence of W.G. Ward and Newman destroyed his Anglican faith without providing a substitute. He was elected to a Fellowship at Oriel College in 1842, but resigned his tutorship on religious grounds in 1849 and spent the subsequent year in Paris and then Rome. After two years as head of University Hall in London he visited the USA, returning to an examinership in the Education Office. He also worked for his relation Florence Nightingale. He died of a fever and is buried in Florence.
