What’s the right way to voyage?

My husband has ordered a copy of Craig Brown’s new book, out this month, a bit late for my birthday. I know he’ll grab it while I’m doing the washing up and later read out bits, which would be nice if he were any good at it.

I wonder if the book explains the title: A Voyage Around the Queen. I see the idea, glimpses of the late Queen from many points of view, a specialty in which the author excels. The title reminded me of John Mortimer’s play A Voyage Round My Father, on which…

My husband has ordered a copy of Craig Brown’s new book, out this month, a bit late for my birthday. I know he’ll grab it while I’m doing the washing up and later read out bits, which would be nice if he were any good at it.

I wonder if the book explains the title: A Voyage Around the Queen. I see the idea, glimpses of the late Queen from many points of view, a specialty in which the author excels. The title reminded me of John Mortimer’s play A Voyage Round My Father, on which Rupert Everett toured last fall. One British theater site announced it as A Voyage Around My Father, but it is Round.

Mortimer’s title echoed Xavier de Maistre’s book Voyage autour de ma chambre, published in 1794 as by “M. Le Chev X.” The author explains that after a duel he wrote it while on parole not to leave his room for forty-two days.

Wilkie Collins referred to it in his story “A Terribly Strange Bed,” published in 1852, when he was twenty-eight, in Dickens’s periodical Household Words. There he calls the author Le Maistre. In 1871 as A Journey Round My Room it was translated by H.A. — Henry Attwell. The translation of 2016 by Stephen Sartarelli, in good time for the pandemic, was called A Voyage Around My Room.

The clincher for around must have been the film Around the World in Eighty Days (released in England in 1957, when Craig Brown was forty-one days old). Jules Verne had published it in 1872 as Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours. George M. Towle’s translation in 1873 in America and Britain was Around the World in Eighty Days. A Boston edition in 1873 was called Tour of the World in Eighty Days and a translation by Henry Frith came out in London in 1879 as Round the World in Eighty Days. In 1873 too, Lippincott had published Verne’s Les Enfants du capitaine Grant as Voyage Round the World in Search of the Castaways. Americans think that round is aphaeresis or clipping of around (hence their spelling of Thelonious Monk’s ’Round Midnight). They should feel easy about A Voyage Around the Queen.