3-017-064 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

English Excursionists at Calais, 1865. 'In these days, as well as in the age of Hogarth, Smollett, and Sterne the humorous situation of an ordinary party of English excursionists, upon their landing at Calais, a few hours after leaving London, might be made the theme of goodnatured satirical observation; but the Illustration, from a sketch by one of our own artists, which we have engraved...does not seem to require much comment, beyond that which the experience of many of our readers, who have witnessed similar scenes, will very readily supply. The honest tradesman who walks, accompanied by his wife, through the streets of a foreign town, and treads for the first time in his life the soil of Continental Europe, is evidently much impressed with the strange interest of his visit, and will doubtless return to his home in the Hackney-road a wiser, but not, let us hope, a sadder man than when he went; preserving unimpaired the serious virtues of English domestic life, and that solidity of demeanour which distinguishes him in Calais from the nimble Frenchmen around him'. From "Illustrated London News", 1865.