Three Years in Europe: Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met — Reading Companion

The House as Historical Palimpsest

Brown's account of Newstead Abbey is less a tourist's itinerary than an archaeological dig through layered time. He notes the Monks' Parlour, Lord Byron's bedroom, the Haunted Chamber, the Tapestry Bedroom formed for Charles II, and the grand Drawing-Room with its portrait of Byron by Phillips. Each room carries a distinct era: monastic, aristocratic, Romantic. The climax is the chapel, where a stone coffin containing an abbot's skeleton was unearthed during excavation for Byron's own intended vault—for himself and his dog. The skull from that coffin became the cup Brown later handles. This chain of reuse—sacred vessel to drinking cup, monk's remains to poet's relic—exemplifies how Brown reads buildings as accumulations of contradictory meanings. He does not merely list sights; he traces how objects and spaces are repurposed by successive owners, each layer half-erasing the one before.

Monuments to Animals, Silences About People

At Newstead, Brown pauses at a marble monument he initially mistakes for a Byron family tomb. It marks the grave of Boatswain, Byron's dog, with an epitaph praising "beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity." Brown quotes the inscription in full, then notes Byron's will directing his own body to be buried near the dog—a wish the poet's family overrode. Brown's attention to this canine memorial is pointed. Throughout the excerpts, he records monuments to animals and aristocrats but rarely to enslaved people or laborers. The imbalance is structural: the grand houses he visits preserve the memory of lords and pets, while the human cost of that wealth—the slave trade that funded many British fortunes—remains unmarked. Brown's own presence as a Black American traveler makes this silence audible.

The Traveler as Interpreter of Ruins

Brown's prose moves between precise architectural description and reflective commentary. At Kirkstall Abbey, Tintern Abbey, and Chepstow Castle, he describes stonework and landscape but also imagines the lives of monks and medieval inhabitants. His method is forensic: he notes the "polished oak steps" into the West Corridor, the "cold crystal water" of a pond, the dead tree where Byron carved his name. Yet he never pretends to recover the past fully. Instead, he foregrounds the act of interpretation—what a housekeeper tells him, what a guidebook omits, what a monument conceals. This self-awareness distinguishes his travelogue from a simple gazetteer. Brown is always aware that he, too, is constructing a narrative, selecting details that serve his own purpose: to make visible the connections between European culture and the systems of bondage that helped build it.

Readers should approach Three Years in Europe as a travel narrative written by a man who knew that his own freedom was contingent and recent. Brown's eye for the material remains of the past—skulls, coffins, inscriptions, portraits—is also an eye for the gaps in official memory. As you follow him through drawing-rooms and ruins, notice what he notices, but also what he does not say: the enslaved people who built the wealth that built the abbeys. That silence is part of the story.

Reading William Wells Brown’s travels, I kept pausing over how a journey becomes a measure of one's freedom. His careful notes on Europe felt like quiet proof of a life reclaimed. That same unhurried wonder surfaced again in A Walk from London to John O'Groat's With Notes by the Way — Story, Setting & Ideas, though from a different sort of pilgrim. Both wanderers saw the land as a conversation, not a destination. I smiled at that shared tenderness.