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Hispanic American Historical Review 84.1 (2004) 160-161



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A Pocket Eden: Guatemalan Journals, 1873-1874. By Caroline Salvin. Edited by Fiona Mackenzie King. South Woodstock, Vt.: Plumsock Mesoamerican Studies, 2000. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Index. xiv, 354 pp. Paper, $40.00.

In 1853 British entrepreneur Osbert Salvin made his first journey to Guatemala. Traveling ostensibly to explore the "commercial viability of [Guatemala's] palm-nut industry," Osbert returned several times during the next two decades to further survey business options and to indulge his passion for exploring and studying tropical flora and fauna. In 1873 Caroline Salvin accompanied her husband to Guatemala to chronicle the region's biological cycle for one full year. Caroline, an accomplished amateur artist, spent the year sketching what she saw while recording her thoughts and observations.

A Pocket Eden is an edited compilation of Caroline's writings and drawings. Preceding the distinguished English photographer Eadweard Muybridge by one full year, Caroline provides some of the earliest known representations of flora, fauna, and indigenous customs in Guatemala and Central America generally. APocket Eden "paints a remarkably fresh, perhaps classic, picture of a Victorian lady's confrontation with colonial culture," providing in the process a telling firsthand account of the reach of Britain's "informal empire" (p. 13).

The editors propose to allow Caroline's diary to speak for itself, "as if Caroline Salvin herself had brought them in for publication" (p. 25). Seen through her own words, Caroline emerges as an informed observer who "nevertheless shared the perspective and prejudices of the time she lived in" (p. 23). Her description of cocoa, howler monkeys, and the vivid colors of indigenous clothing capture the essence of daily life in the tropics. She depicts Guatemala as a beautiful, exotic place where life is frequently difficult and sometimes boring but where adventurous foreigners may experience the magnificence of nature rarely experienced by the timid.

Her perceptions of the people she encountered are similarly striking, and editor Fiona Mackenzie King is to be commended for leaving her narrative intact. Caroline describes the old Guatemalan women she met, calling one "so very ugly" (p. 103) and another a "devout, brown old hag" (p. 107). Her observations regarding other foreigners in Central America are similarly lively. She describes the Americans and Germans she came across in Central America as "wearingly vulgar" and "slow" (p. 137), while denouncing the "Spanish butchery of the virgins of Cuba" (p. 227). [End Page 160]

A Pocket Eden does indeed provide readers a "rare glimpse of life in nineteenth-century Guatemala" (p. 25). The decision to publish this as a bilingual text, with the Spanish and English texts on opposing pages, insures that Spanish speakers will also benefit from Caroline's diary and art. However, the text would have benefited from more helpful explanatory introduction and notes. The book's 20-some pages of introductory narrative and comprehensive notes do little to place Caroline's observations in any context. For example, the Salvins passed through Panama at a time that liberalism was beginning to collapse in Colombia, yet the editor writes only that "the local insurrection . . . worried them at the time they crossed Panama" (p. 19). When Caroline writes of "Panama during the revolution" (p. 61), the reader is left wondering about the context of her comments. Elsewhere, when Caroline writes her impressions of Justo Rufino Barrios, the editor describes him in a note as "the most powerful Liberal dictator in 19th-century Central America" (p. 101). Earlier Mackenzie King had explained the relationship between liberalism and modernity (p. 15), but the connection between the two is not intuitive in Caroline's words. What relationship existed between Barrios's regime and the Germans, French, and Americans Caroline interacted with?

A fine editorial line exists between treating these journals as if "Caroline Salvin herself had brought them in for publication" and using footnotes "to provide background information and help today's reader understand the context in which the entries are made" (p. 23, 25); A Pocket Eden occasionally strays too far in one direction. Despite this minor...

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