Thackeray’s Geographical Blunders
The novelist, in “The Virginians,” makes Madam Esmond, of Castlewood, in Westmoreland county, a neighbor of Washington at Mt. Vernon, on the Potomac, fifty miles distant, and a regular attendant at public worship at Williamsburg, half-way between the York and James rivers, fully one hundred and twenty-five miles from Mt. Vernon; and so “immensely affected” are the colored hearers of a young preacher at Williamsburg “that there was such a negro chorus about the house as might be heard across the Potomac,” the nearest bank of which is fifty-seven miles away.
He makes General Braddock ride out from Williamsburg (he never was there) in “his own coach, a ponderous, emblazoned vehicle,” with Dr. Franklin, “the little postmaster of Philadelphia” (Franklin’s average weight was 160 pounds), over a muddy road, in March, through a half-wilderness country of more than one hundred miles, to dine with Madam Esmond, in Westmoreland county, near Mt. Vernon.