An English Lady at the Court of Catherine the Great: The Journal of Baroness Elizabeth Dimsdale, 1781

viii, 108 pp. This is the first publication of a journal which records the memorable journey which Elizabeth Dimsdale made to Russia in the summer of 1781. Earlier that year forty-eight year old Elizabeth from Bishop's Stortford had married her second cousin, the twice widowed sixty-eight year old Dr. Thomas Dimsdale. In May they set off from Dover to travel across Europe to Russia, where Dimsdale had been once before to inoculate Catherine the Great and her son, the future Paul I, against smallpox and had been made a Baron of the Russian Empire for his success. He was now returning to inoculate the future Alexander I and his brother Constantine. His wife's journal provides a lively and often amusing account of their outward and homeward journeys and of the months they spent at St. Petersburg and at the Empress's summer palace at Tsarskoe Selo. It is a valuable addition to the travel literature of the period and unique in its picture of life at Tsarskoe Selo.