The People of Gibraltar

 1874 – John L. Stoddard - Gibraltar

John Lawson Stoddard (1850-1931), was an American writer - among other things. After graduating from Williams College in Massachusetts he became a teacher at Boston Latin School where he taught French and Latin. In 1874 he took an extended break from teaching and satisfied a lifelong ambition to travel the world. During the next couple of years or so he visited most of Europe – including Gibraltar - as well as Asia minor, Palestine and Egypt. 


When he returned to America he shared his experiences with his students as well as giving lectures to adult audiences. In 1884 he published a series of essays which he called Red Letter Days Abroad which were based on his travels. He also gave a series of lectures which he delivered to audiences throughout the USA. These proved surprisingly popular – so much so that he found it far more lucrative to lecture than to teach in his old school in Boston.

The fact that he used lantern slides to illustrate his lectures undoubtedly had a lot to do with their popularity. Not being a photographer he lacked the ability  to produce these himself and relied on others such as the French photographer J. Levy, to produce appropriate images and hand-tinted slide transparencies. His use of these converted his lectures into a more or less unique visual experiences. 

Between 1897 and 1898 Stoddard published his lectures in ten volumes - with five later supplements. He gave these the descriptive if unimaginative title of John Stoddard's Lectures. All of them were heavily illustrated with what I presume were the photographs used in his lectures.


Unfortunately the quality of these – in so far as the digital copies available are concerned -  leave much to be desired. The ones included in the sections on Gibraltar – there are more than 30 of them - are no exception. I have therefore taken the liberty of replacing some of them with better quality copies from elsewhere rather than those that appear in the book. Captions, whether for the original or the replacement,  are those that are given in the book.


Top - “Rock from La Linea” as it appear in the book -  Bottom - photograph taken by Theodor Benzinger (c1870)


The chapters identified below as links, review Stoddard’s six part section on Gibraltar.