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tense ‘Protest’ scene with information about his ‘appetites’ (helpings of caviare at a typical table d’hôte are insufficient, he complains), his ‘impatiences’ (he cites the Belgian State Railway’s scandalous treatment of French trains), and other miscellaneous issues, seems nothing less than a goad to the reader, a deliberate holding back of the story. A little earlier, Dowell has shared with us his fondness for catching the 2.40 train from Nauheim to Marburg and the sights one can see on the journey, and earlier still he has told us the story of Peire Vidal. ‘Is all this digression or isn’t it digression?’ he muses in Part One, Chapter 2, and it is a question which hovers around in the reader’s mind, not least in Part Three, Chapter 4, when Dowell goes on at some length about his brief and uneventful business career in Philadelphia. ‘Perhaps all these reflections are a nuisance,’ Dowell acknowledges in Part Four, Chapter 2, ‘but they crowd on me. I will try to tell the story.’

If the narrator draws attention to his unfitness for his task throughout the novel, he also spotlights himself in more intriguing ways. Most obviously, though Dowell carries the ‘title deeds of [his] farm’ around in his pocket and expresses pride in his Quaker roots, ‘his account of his background’, in the words of the American critic Grover Smith, ‘does not hold up well: he calls his country the “United States of North America”… [and] boasts that he came of a family originally English, the first Dowell having “left Farnham in Surrey in company with [the Quaker leader] William Perm” (there are no Perm associations at Farnham…)’. Most curious of all, according to Smith, is Dowell’s assertion that he ‘learned “Pennsylvania Duitsch” (sic) in childhood. In general, American probabilities are so foreign to him that… we might suspect him to be bogus.’ Smith emphasizes that Ford (who was born in 1873 to an English mother and a German father and christened ‘Ford Hermann Hueffer’):

could not have been guilty of this howler, for he of all people would have known that Pennsylvania Deutsch is not Holland Dutch. Dowell is marked as ignorant and pretentious – and, in some sense which, even so, is not quite the literal one, as an imposter. He has touched up and tinted his own photograph.9

The bath attendants at Nauheim have an unfailing ‘air of authority’, but the narrator, emphatically, does not.

As with every aspect of this text, however, things are not quite so black and white as they seem. It is probable, for instance, that rather than drawing attention to his ignorance, pretentiousness and bogusness, Dowell’s use of ‘Duitsch’ is an orthographic detail intended by Ford to accentuate his genuineness. Duitsch is a variant of Deutsch in Plattdeutsch, the Low German dialect spoken by immigrants from rural north Germany, otherwise known as ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’: the Amish and other Pennsylvanian communities still speak it today. It is quite conceivable that Dowell would have picked up the spelling with the ‘Pennsylvania Duitsch’ he absorbed from his German immigrant school friends, or, more likely, the Dowell family’s German immigrant servants. It is not a ‘howler’ at all.

But if Dowell is not quite the ‘marked’ American some critics have made him out to be, his handling of detail on this side of the Atlantic is at times just as iffy. At one point, for example, Dowell says the castle at Marburg is ‘not a square castle like Windsor’, which would be helpful were it not for the fact that Windsor Castle is nothing like a square and never has been. More strikingly, ‘Bramshaw Teleragh’, the nearest settlement to Bramshaw Manor, the Ashburnham family home, sounds almost more Irish than Hampshirish, half real place, half trumped-up location, while Leonora’s maiden name, Powys, is a most singular and unaccountable Irish surname in that it is a well-known and longstanding Welsh place-name.10 The surname Maidan arouses similar misgivings in that maidan is an Urdu word meaning ‘an open space in or near a town; a parade-ground’.11 It is the kind of word an officer’s wife