Victorian Travel Writing

Introduction

Fueled by transport improvements and expanding British global influence, Victorian travel writing emerged in the period as a commercially popular and successful genre, which became a predominantly middle-class preserve. Journeys of missionaries and merchants fostered colonial expansion, while as the British Empire grew in scope, so too did the travels of its administrators and soldiers. Increasing popular interest in scientific, geographical, and anthropological research meant that travelogues could serve as accounts of individual experience, instructions for future travelers, advice on imperial administration, religious admonition, reports on scientific discoveries, or a combination of all these possibilities. Many prominent Victorian novelists also wrote travel accounts (as well as incorporating elements of their travels in their fiction): the best-known of these include Charles Dickens (b. 1812–d. 1870), Anthony Trollope (b. 1815–d. 1882), and William Thackeray (b. 1811–d. 1863). The late Victorian period of imperial expansion saw a particularly close relationship between travel writing and the successful colonial adventure stories of writers such as Henry Rider Haggard (b. 1856–d. 1925), Rudyard Kipling (b. 1865–d. 1936), and Robert Louis Stevenson (b. 1850–d. 1894). Individual travelers such as the adventurer and scholar Richard Burton (b. 1821–d. 1890), the missionary David Livingstone (b. 1813–d. 1873), and the explorer Henry Morton Stanley (b. 1841–d. 1904), became near-legendary figures. Widening opportunities for travel extended also to women such as Isabella Bird (b. 1831–d. 1904) and Mary Kingsley (b. 1862–d. 1900). Until recent decades, Victorian travel writing received relatively little critical attention, possibly due to the ambiguity of its generic status. Increased interest from the 1970s onward in literature’s involvement in cultural and political constructions enabled more attention to be paid to travel writing as a genre. This was particularly the case for postcolonial studies: ironically, enhanced critical awareness of the implication of travel and travel writing in colonial power structures gave it new life as a serious object of academic study. Initially positive “recoveries” of travelers who were comparatively marginalized figures in Victorian society, such as women, gave way to more wary considerations of the rhetorical work performed by their texts. Whereas earlier criticism considered travel writing in the context of the politics of representation, particularly in relation to the depiction of intercultural contact, more recent work has emphasized the fluidity of its genre positioning and the implications of the act of travel for individual, national, and spatial concepts of identity. There has also been greater critical concern with countering the metropolis-periphery model of British Victorian travel writing by investigating the works of travelers from different locations within the empire, and their accounts of journeys to other colonies and to England itself.

General Overviews

This section is intended to offer a selection of texts that would make good starting points for undergraduate students approaching the scholarly analysis of travel writing as a genre, although the texts listed are also valuable sources for academics engaged in ongoing research. Hulme and Youngs 2002 opens up a wide-ranging understanding of travel writing’s history and its critical contexts. Blanton 2002 is a useful introduction, although students are directed if possible toward the more up-to-date Thompson 2011, which gives an assured foundation for critical analysis of the genre. The introduction and essays in Clark 1999 provide a readable and accessible consideration of the ideological relationships between travel writing and empire. The essays in Hooper and Youngs 2004 coalesce the formal features that characterize the genre while highlighting the ongoing debates about such categorization, or whether travel writing even exists as a genre (see also Genre). Leask 2005 is a concise overview of travel writing’s changing critical fortunes that would benefit an undergraduate commencing study in the field.

Blanton, Casey. Travel Writing: The Self and the World. 1995. London: Routledge, 2002.
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Introductory overview from classical times to the 20th century. Offers a useful critical survey (pp. 1–29), considering historical development, influence on other genres, and cultural studies, together with detailed chapters on individual travel writers, including Mary Kingsley (pp. 44–58). Also offers an annotated bibliography and detailed suggestions for further primary and secondary reading.
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Clark, Steve, ed. Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit. London: Zed, 1999.
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A good introduction for students and scholars wishing to understand the relationship between travel writing and empire. The essays place travel writing from the early modern period up to the late 20th century in relation to modern models of analysis, emphasizing the genre’s complicity with violent acts of incursion.
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Hooper, Glenn, and Tim Youngs, ed. Perspectives on Travel Writing: Studies in European Cultural Transition. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004.
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Essay collection engaging with the fluidity of travel writing as a formal genre, as well as its varying contexts, from the early modern period to the late 20th century. The editors’ introduction (pp. 1–12), and the chapters by Borm (pp. 13–26) and Youngs (pp. 167–180) provide useful commentaries on the state of the field.
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Hulme, Peter, and Tim Youngs, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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Crucial introductory text divided into “Surveys” (pp. 17–104), historical contexts 1500 to 2000; “Sites” (pp. 103–222), geographical locations; and “Topics” (pp. 225–278), gender, ethnography and theories. Hulme and Youngs’s “Introduction” (pp. 1–16) establishes critical contexts; for Victorian writing see Roy Bridges on “Exploration and Travel Outside Europe, 1720–1914” (pp. 53–69) and Helen Carr on “Modernism and Travel” (pp. 70–86).
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Leask, Nigel. Introduction. “Journeys of Discovery.” eSharp 4 (Spring 2005): 1–4.
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Short piece encapsulating the development of scholarship on travel writing.
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Thompson, Carl. Travel Writing. The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2011.
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Introductory guide that both new students of the genre and scholars doing ongoing research are recommended to consult, particularly with regard to questions of definition and formal qualities. Outlines key definitions and debates, gives a broad historical overview, and considers canonical and marginal texts.
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Reference Works

The most valuable general reference sources for scholars at all levels are Speake 2003 and Howgego 2004, Howgego 2006, and Howgego 2008, all extensively researched and remarkably comprehensive reference works, although their prices make them more likely to be accessible via university libraries. The Victorian-related entries in Speake are excellent introductions to the topics, as well as guides for further research, while Howgego’s magisterial encyclopedias give immensely detailed information on Victorian travelers. In other sources, Brothers and Gergits 1996 and Brothers and Gergits 1997 provide thorough biographical and bibliographical entries and open up directions for additional reading. Brown 2000 is engaging and well presented, if not wholly comprehensive. Jafari 2000 is a convenient reference guide for studies of tourism. For guides to women travelers, see also Biographical and Literary-Biographical Accounts.

Brothers, Barbara, and Julia Gergits, eds. British Travel Writers, 1837–1875: Victorian Period. Dictionary of Literary Biography Series 166. Detroit: Gale, 1996.
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Informative biographical entries on British early- and mid-Victorian travel writers, together with brief bibliographies of primary and secondary texts. Includes lists of travelers and guides to further reading.
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Brothers, Barbara, and Julia Gergits, eds. British Travel Writers, 1876–1909. Dictionary of Literary Biography Series 174. Detroit: Gale, 1997.
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Biographical entries on British Victorian and Edwardian travel writers, as well as brief bibliographies of primary and secondary texts. Includes lists of travelers and guides to further reading.
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Brown, Christopher K., ed. Encyclopedia of Travel Literature. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2000.
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Entries on prominent travelers from 1450 onward, limited to writers from western Europe and the United States. Individualistic rather than comprehensive references. For 19th-century figures, consult the index under “Great Britain: 19th C.,” or specific writers.
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Howgego, Raymond John. Encyclopedia of Exploration, 1800–1850: A Comprehensive Reference Guide to the History and Literature of Exploration, Travel, and Colonization between the Years 1800 and 1850. Sydney: Hordern House, 2004.
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Over 10,000 bibliographic entries covering travels to Asia, Australasia and the Pacific, the Americas, Africa, and the polar regions. Entries organized alphabetically by author, giving basic biographical and bibliographical information, as well as areas of travel, and usefully cross-indexed. Includes some survey articles. The series has a dedicated website with the major articles, persons, and ships listed.
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Howgego, Raymond John. Encyclopedia of Exploration, 1850 to 1940: The Oceans, Islands & Polar Regions. Sydney: Hordern House, 2006.
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Discusses almost three thousand explorers, entries mainly organized by leaders of expeditions. Provides basic biographical and bibliographical information, usefully cross-indexed, and includes some survey articles. The series has a dedicated website with lists of the major articles, persons, and ships.
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Howgego, Raymond John. Encyclopedia of Exploration, 1850 to 1940: Continental Exploration. Sydney: Hordern House, 2008.
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Provides basic biographical and bibliographical information, as well as survey articles, concentrating on continental mainland travel, with information on nearly four thousand explorers. The series has a dedicated website with the major articles, persons, and ships listed.
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Jafari, Jafar, ed. Encyclopedia of Tourism. New York: Routledge, 2000.
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Comprehensive reference work on the key concepts, definitions, practices, methods, institutions, etc. involved in tourism.
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Speake, Jennifer, ed. The Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia. 3 vols. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003.
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Comprehensive reference guide to travel writing. Over six hundred alphabetically ordered entries on topics, individuals, tropes, locations, etc., together with substantial bibliographies as well as a well-structured index. “England, Nineteenth Century” and “Women Travelers, Nineteenth Century” are useful starting points. Annotations to the articles are available online.
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Anthologies

This selection focuses on anthologies predominantly drawn from Victorian travel writing. Pettinger 1998 offers illuminating insights into African diasporic writing. Boehmer 2009 is an excellent teaching anthology for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on imperial literature, as well as giving a vivid overview of the writing of the period for the more casual reader. Pickering and Chatto has published several high-quality scholarly collections related to travel writing resources, although their prices will make them largely accessible only via libraries. Kitson 2003–2004 is an impressive resource for scholars in the field.

Boehmer, Elleke. Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature, 1870–1918. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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Excerpts from a number of late Victorian and early-20th-century texts relating to empire, with several excerpts from travel writers. Encompasses an impressive range of viewpoints, nationalities, and genres. Includes illuminating notes, biographical summaries, and cross-references. Highly recommended for teaching purposes as well as for general interest. First published in 1998.
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Kitson, Peter, ed. Nineteenth-Century Travels, Explorations and Empires: Writings from the Era of Imperial Consolidation, 1835–1910. 8 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003–2004.
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Collection arranged according to geographical region. Volumes 1–4 cover North America, the Far East, the North and South Poles, and the Middle East, while Volumes 4–8 cover Africa, India, South America, and the Caribbean, and the South Seas and Australasia.
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Pettinger, Alasdair, ed. Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic. New York and London: Cassell, 1998.
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Fifty excerpts from African American, Caribbean, and African intercontinental travelers over the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Thematically organized, with biographies and useful bibliographies.
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Women Travelers

This section should be consulted in conjunction with the section Women’s Travel Writing. There are a large number of general anthologies of women’s travel writing available; Morris 1993 and Robinson 1994 are interesting and enjoyable selections for those seeking an introduction to the area. The best overall anthology from a scholarly point of view is Foster and Mills 2002, whose introduction usefully problematizes the assumptions of gender-specific writing upon which such anthologies are based. Ghose 1998 is a stimulatingly diverse selection of 19th-century women travelers’ views of India, while Romero 1992 assembles women’s perspectives on Africa from 1850. The women’s letters in Stierstorfer, et al. 2006 highlight epistolary modes of travel writing.

Foster, Shirley, and Sara Mills, eds. An Anthology of Women’s Travel Writing. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002.
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Recommended introductory anthology thematically organized into four sections: “Women Writing about Women,” “Women and Knowledge,” “Women and Space,” “Adventure and Gender.” Covers from the end of the 17th century to the late 20th century. Good bibliography, with a knowledgeable introduction (pp. 1–12) and introductions to the individual selections providing helpful commentaries.
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Ghose, Indira, ed. Memsahibs Abroad: Writings by Women Travellers in Nineteenth-Century India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.
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Thematically organized selection of writings by twenty-three Englishwomen in India between 1806 and 1909, incorporating both familiar and neglected texts. Enjoyable anthology that introduces scholars of all levels to a productive range of writers and opinions. Includes biographical notes, glossary, and bibliography.
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Morris, Mary, ed. The Virago Book of Women Travellers. London: Virago, 1993.
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Forty-six extracts from the early 18th century to the late 20th century, mainly from English and American women. The extracts are arranged chronologically and come from a variety of genres.
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Robinson, Jane, ed. Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
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Wide-ranging selection arranged geographically (with useful maps). Includes excerpts from several prominent Victorian women travelers. Introduction emphasizes subjectivity and inward focus as characteristics of women’s travel writing.
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Romero, Patricia W., ed. Women’s Voices on Africa: A Century of Travel Writings. Princeton, NJ, and New York: Marcus Wiener, 1992.
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An interesting selection of primary texts from white women writers’ perspectives on Africa between the period 1850 to 1950, but the commentaries and introductions provide insufficiently rigorous analysis of the cultural and historical contexts involved in women’s status and experiences.
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Stierstorfer, Klaus, ed. Women Writing Home, 1700–1920: Female Correspondence across the British Empire. 6 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006.
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The volumes are organized by geographical region: Africa, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, and the United States. They offer a range of experiences from British women writing from different parts of the empire.
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Regions

This section notes some particularly useful anthologies of writing about specific geographical territories. MacShane 1963 collects literary travel accounts of Latin America; the selections in Hahner 1998 highlight the growing number of women travelers to the region in the 19th century. Pfister 1996 is a postcolonial analysis of the imaginative construction of Italy within British travel writing and is a valuable source even for researchers on other regions. Lamb, et al. 2000 provides an overview of European encounters in the Pacific, while Wevers 2002 is a useful source of travel accounts on New Zealand for scholars seeking primary materials. There are a large number of Victorian travelogues on Ireland, a selection of which can be consulted in Hooper 2001. Marriott and Mukhopadhyay 2006 focuses on India and allows travel writing to be seen in a context of imperial ideologies and administration. Chang 2009 notes the relative scarcity of sources on 19th-century China for modern critics and seeks to remedy this with a collection of primary material.

Chang, Elizabeth H., ed. British Travel Writing from China, 1798–1901. 5 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009.
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Collection of scarce primary sources dating up to the Boxer Rebellion. Chang’s introduction discusses the conceptual significance of China for 19th-century European conception of national and international identities. Most of the travelogues are republished in full.
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Hahner, June E., ed. Women Through Women’s Eyes: Latin American Women in Nineteenth-Century Travel Accounts. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1998.
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Anthology of ten travelogues by 19th-century women from a variety of social and national backgrounds visiting Latin America. Includes suggested further reading on women in 19th-century Latin America.
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Hooper, Glenn, ed. The Tourist’s Gaze: Travellers to Ireland, 1800–2000. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2001.
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Selection of extracts from travelogues about Ireland, including substantial sections on Victorian travel writers. Provides useful contextual information.
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Lamb, Jonathan, Vanessa Smith, and Nicholas Thomas, eds. Exploration and Exchange: A South Seas Anthology, 1680–1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
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Divided into three parts: “Adventures and Explorers,” “Beachcombers and Missionaries,” and “Literary Travelers” (including Robert Louis Stevenson). Incorporates useful commentaries and bibliographical material.
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MacShane, Frank, ed. Impressions of Latin America: Five Centuries of Travel and Adventure by English and North American Writers. New York: William Morrow, 1963.
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Anthology prioritizing accounts by well-known authors, including Charles Darwin and Rudyard Kipling. Includes list of further reading.
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Marriott, John, and Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, eds. Britain in India, 1765–1905. 6 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006.
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Collection of primary sources offering detailed contextual information, with reference to legal, commercial, educational, cultural, governmental, and public documents. While much of the material is administrative, the descriptive trend of Volume 4: Cultural and Social Interventions makes it especially relevant to travel writing.
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Pfister, Manfred, ed. The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of British Travellers: An Annotated Anthology. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996.
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Accounts of British travelers to Italy over five centuries. Includes perceptive introduction and notes: Pfister invokes Edward Said concept of Orientalism to emphasize the perception of Italy by travelers.
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Wevers, Lydia, ed. Travelling to New Zealand: An Oxford Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
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Anthology with a comprehensive selection of accounts of travel to New Zealand.
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Bibliographies

There is a large body of primary material for Victorian travel writing. Bridges and Hair 1996 lists the Hakluyt Society’s valuable publications of travel texts (see Research Societies). Shattock 1999 provides the most comprehensive general source and a judicious starting point for research. Van Vuuren and Courtney 2006 is one of the most up-to-date bibliographies available in print. Regarding secondary academic sources, Salzani and Tötösy de Zepetnek 2009 places recent criticism in a broad European context. Pettinger’s ongoing Studies in Travel Writing website is an important resource for students and academics alike. Regarding specific regions, Pine-Coffin 1974 assembles a thorough list of travelogues relating to Italy. McVeagh 1996 is a useful source for travel writing about Ireland. Bethell 2003 offers a helpfully annotated bibliography of travel writing on Brazil (over which Britain was seen to exercise a particularly dominant level of informal influence).

Bethell, Leslie. Brazil by British and Irish Authors. Oxford: Centre for Brazilian Studies, University of Oxford, 2003.
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Annotated guide to British and Irish travel writing on Brazil. It consists of three sections, covering 1500–1800, 1808–1945, and 1945–c. 2000; the middle section gives information on several Victorian travelers (including some resident in Brazil). Author and place indexes also included.
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Bridges, R. C., and P. E. H. Hair, eds. Compassing the Vaste Globe of the Earth: Studies in the History of the Hakluyt Society, 1846–1996. London: Hakluyt Society, 1996.
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Listing of the travel publications of the Hakluyt Society, further updated by R. C. Bridges and R. J. Howgego online.
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McVeagh, John, ed. Irish Travel Writing: A Bibliography. Dublin: Wolfhound, 1996.
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Addresses travel within Ireland and by Irish writers from the 12th century, including tourist guides. Establishes traditions and contexts for travel writing about Ireland.
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Pine-Coffin, R. S. Bibliography of British and American Travel in Italy to 1860. Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1974.
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Chronological bibliography (divided into British and American authors) of travel accounts to Italy until 1860.
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Salzani, Carlo, and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. Bibliography for Work in Travel Studies. 2009.
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A companion to Carmen Maria Andras, ed. New Directions in Travel Writing and Travel Studies (Aachen, Germany: Shaker, 2009). Includes scholarship in several languages over the 20th and 21st centuries.
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Shattock, Joanne, ed. The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. Vol. 3, 1800–1900. 3d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
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The standard general bibliography of English literature, widely available in university libraries. Section on travel is divided into the following subsections: General, Africa, America, Asia, Australasia and the Pacific, and Europe.
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Studies in Travel Writing.
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Bibliographic website as complement to the journal of the same name, largely centered on scholarly material from 1997 onward. Limited selection of primary sources but a more substantial section on secondary material. Site maintained by Alastair Pettinger.
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Van Vuuren, Melissa S., and Angela Courtney, eds. Global Odyssey: A Bibliography of Travel Literature before 1940. Bloomington: Center for the Study of Global Change, Indiana University, 2006.
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Intensive bibliography of travel narratives in England up to 1940, ordered according to geographical territory.
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Journals

The first part of this section, Travel and General, focuses on journals primarily devoted to the study of travel writing, as well as some relevant journals on more general topics in which useful material is likely to be found. The second part lists some journal Special Issues of particular interest to scholars. (Journals cited as special issues are not replicated in the general entries, but scholars are also encouraged to search these titles for additional material.)

Travel and General

This selection omits the many travel- or tourism-centered journals whose primary focus on sociological factors or the modern-day travel industry means they tend to have relatively limited 19th-century relevance, although more specialized scholars of tourism may wish to purse these further. Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing and Studies in Travel Writing are the two travel-centered journals that students of Victorian travel writing will find most valuable, while Journal of African Travel-Writing sometimes addresses Victorian travel in Africa. The International Society for Travel Writing (ISTW) newsletter Snapshot Traveller is a convenient way for postgraduate students and academics specializing in travel writing to keep up with events in the field. Among a number of journals dedicated to the study of tourism, the Journal of Heritage Tourism connects to an aspect that was developing rapidly in the 19th century. The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History is a good source for historical analyses, while the Geographical Journal has a long-standing involvement with exploration and scientific travel. Wasafiri showcases international contemporary literature with a particular focus on migration and cultural travel.

Geographical Journal. 1831–.
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Journal of the Royal Geographical Society from 1831 to the 21st century. Often a good source for reviews of travel-related material.
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Journal of African Travel-Writing. 1996–.
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Biannual journal aiming to present and analyze accounts of African travel, past and present. Publishes fiction, poetry, etc. in addition to academic articles.
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Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. 2000–.
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Historical journal addressing issues relating to imperialism and colonialism from the 10th century to modernity.
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Journal of Heritage Tourism. 2006–.
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Transdisciplinary quarterly journal seeking to provide a critical examination of heritage tourism (travels to sites of historical and/or cultural significance).
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Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing. 2000–
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Wide-ranging biannual interdisciplinary journal examining travel and travel writing in terms of social and cultural practices.
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Snapshot Traveller. 1998–.
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Free online newsletter of the International Society for Travel Writing (ISTW). Information on conferences, publications, etc. in the field of travel research.
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Studies in Travel Writing. 1997–.
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Valuable quarterly journal dedicated to research on travel and travel literature. Includes interviews in addition to scholarly articles. Affiliated with The International Society for Travel Writing (ISTW). Archive of journal articles available online (by subscription, but with some free material) online.
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Wasafiri. 1984–.
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Quarterly journal that publishes international contemporary writing, with particular emphasis on diasporic and migrant writing worldwide. Envisages writing as a form of “cultural travelling.” Often includes reviews of travel-related criticism as well as discussions that encompass historical perspectives on multiculturalism and cross-cultural exchanges.
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Special Issues

This section singles out some journal special issues with relevance to Victorian travel writing. Brettell 1986 and Buzard and Childers 1998 situate the development of travel writing scholarship in relation to ethnography. Bradbury 2004 and Colbert and Hambrook 2007 offer perspectives on cultural and national identity formation in travel writing, while Kuehn and Wagner 2009 places travel writing in relation to fiction in examining the aesthetic construction of the “Victorian East.” Clarke 2009 addresses celebrity culture.

Bradbury, Nicola, ed. Special Issue: Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing. Yearbook of English Studies 34 (2004).
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Discusses Romantic and Victorian travel writing (including North American writers) as formulating a series of “culturally inflected strategies.” The introduction (pp. 1–5) by David Seed situates the discipline with particular reference to tourism discourses. Articles available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Brettell, Caroline B., ed. Special Issue: Travel Literature, Ethnography and Ethnohistory. Ethnohistory 33.2 (Spring 1986).
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Consideration of the merits of travelogues as sources for ethnohistorical research. Articles of direct 19th-century relevance discuss travelogues on Vienna, Mediterranean peasants, Australia, and Argentina. Articles available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Buzard, James, and Joseph Childers, eds. Special Issue: Victorian Ethnographies. Victorian Studies 41.3 (Spring 1998).
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Revisionist discussions of Victorian understandings of culture(s). Major journal in its field. Articles available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Clarke, Robert, ed. Special Issue: Travel and Celebrity Culture. Postcolonial Studies 12.2 (2009).
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Articles on several travelers who became celebrities through their travels and/or writings. Major journal in its field. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Colbert, Benjamin, and Glyn Hambrook, eds. Special Issue: Literature Travels. Comparative Critical Studies 4.2 (2007).
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Editors’ introduction (pp. 165–175) raises interesting issues regarding nationhood and national identities. Articles available online by subscription.
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Kuehn, Julia, and Tamara S. Wagner, eds. Special Issue: Beyond Orientalism; Texting the Victorian East. Critical Survey 21.1 (Spring 2009).
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Examines travel writing and fiction from the 1830s to the 1920s, considering the “Victorian East” in terms of genre, aesthetics, and metaphors. Articles available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Research Societies

A number of societies specialize in particular aspects of travel writing and offer membership for annual subscriptions to both academics and laypeople. These include the Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East (ASTNE), the Society for the History of Discoveries, and the Hakluyt Society, which is an important publisher of primary texts. The International Society for Travel Writing (see Travel and General for its associated publications) is closely involved with the critical field; the archived reviews on its website are primarily of 20th-century material but offer some interesting insights. Nottingham’s Centre for Travel Writing Studies is a scholarly unit that potential graduate students as well as academics in the field are welcome to make contact with.

Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East (ASTNE).
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Organization founded for the study of travel in Egypt and the Sudan, the Arabian Peninsula, and northward through Iraq to Turkey, Greece, and the Ottoman Balkans. Publishes a quarterly bulletin as well as volumes of conference papers.
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Centre for Travel Writing Studies.
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Research center at Nottingham Trent University that produces and facilitates scholarly research and collaboration on travel writing across periods.
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Hakluyt Society.
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Publishes valuable scholarly editions of travelogues and other geographical materials, in addition to organizing conferences, symposia, etc. Annual subscription entitles members to the society’s main publications issued during the membership period, usually two volumes a year. Founded in 1846.
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International Society for Travel Writing.
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Published an online travel writing review journal (no longer publishing new material) whose archives are available online. The ISTW itself encourages work on travel writing via a number of opportunities, including conferences, etc. Membership requires a small subscription that also gives a discount for Studies in Travel Writing.
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Society for the History of Discoveries.
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Dedicated to the study of the history of geographical exploration and mapping from earliest recorded times to the present day. Annual meetings and archives as well as an annual research journal Terrae Incognitae and the University of Chicago Press’s scholarly series Studies in the History of Discoveries, with the Newberry Library.
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Genre

Travel writing is a particularly hybrid and multidisciplinary genre, sharing many elements in common with life writing and the novel, as well as sociological, geographical, scientific, and/or religious accounts. This section addresses texts that will further a general understanding of travel writing’s generic and historical contexts, though with particular attention to those works relevant to Victorian travel. Butor 1974 posits a typology of travel (an “iterology”) that emphasizes writing itself as a mode of travel. Dodd 1982 defends the value of the genre, while Buford 1984 highlights (and celebrates) travel writing’s then-problematic hybridity and the importance of personal narrative. Borm 2004 challenges divisions between fictional and nonfictional travelogues, arguing that similar literary techniques apply across the genres. With regard to historical contexts, Elsner and Rubiés 1999 puts forward a history of travel in terms of dominant cultural paradigms. Korte 2000 gives an illuminating overview of some of the key texts and tropes of the genre, with chapters devoted specifically to Victorian travel writing and to women travelers. Glage 2000 gives a range of effective insights into the state of the critical field at the turn of this century. The essays in Roberson 2001 are a useful resource: the collection brings together a number of leading commentators on travel writing.

Borm, Jan. “Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and Terminology.” In Perspectives on Travel Writing. Edited by Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs, 13–26. Studies in European Cultural Transition 19. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004.
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Discussion of the fluid generic boundaries between travel writing and life writing.
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Buford, Bill. “Editorial.” Granta 10 (1984): 5–7.
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Introduction to highly influential special issue of the literary magazine. Discusses the relationship between travel writing (low in critical status at the time) in relation to the memoir, journalism, and especially the novel, with which it overlapped, and the importance of travel writing as a subjective narrative of lived experience.
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Butor, Michael. “Travel and Writing.” Mosaic 8 (1974): 1–16.
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Offers a typology or “iterology” of travel (i.e., a science of journeys), combining anthropology and narratology. Pilgrimage and exploration are positioned as antithetical modes of travel, centered on known and unknown destinations respectively. Expanded version in Defining Travel: Diverse Versions (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001, 69–87). First published in French as “Le Voyage et l’écriture,” Romantisme 4 (1972): 4–19.
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Dodd, Philip, ed. The Art of Travel: Essays on Travel Writing. Totowa, NJ: Frank Cass, 1982.
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Early collection of critical essays on British travel writing. Includes chapters on Victorian middle-class travelers’ exploration of working-class London, by F. S. Schwarzbach (pp. 61–84), and a review of research on Victorian and Modern travel writing, by Joanne Shattock (pp. 151–164).
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Elsner, Jas, and Joan Pau Rubiés, eds. Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel. London: Reaktion, 1999.
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Volume as a whole seeks to give a historical account of travel writing in terms of a crisis of Western modernity, rather than a linear narrative of development. Instead it positions travel as “a dialectic of dominant paradigms” (p. 5) between the fulfillment of the pilgrimage and the open-endedness of modern travel.
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Glage, Liselotte, ed. Being/s in Transit: Travelling, Migration, Dislocation. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000.
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Essays on dislocation in travel and migration. Includes chapters on travel writing in relation to Mary Kingsley and the fiction of Joseph Conrad and Rider Haggard; nature in relation to 19th and early-20th-century women travelers (Ulrike Stamm, pp. 155–172); and a provocative meditation by Graham Huggan (pp. 37–60) on the status of modern travel writing in relation to postcoloniality.
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Korte, Barbara. English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations. Translated by Catherine Matthias. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000.
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Covers travel writing from the Middle Ages up to the 20th century. Chapter 5, “Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century” (pp. 82–105), delineates two main modes—accounts of exploration and of tourist travel—linked by strategic deployment of aesthetic traditions of the picturesque, as well as by the attempted combining of instruction, information and personal experiences.
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Roberson, Susan L., ed. Defining Travel: Diverse Versions. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
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Several leading critics discuss “Travel and Tourism” (pp. 1–60); “Reading and Writing Travel” (pp. 61–152); “The New Internationalism (pp. 153–210); “The Politics of Relocation” (pp. 211–280). Contributors include Butor, Clifford, Fussell, MacCannell, and Pratt. Roberson’s “Defining Travel: An Introduction” (pp. xi–xxvi) analyzes the wider thematic strands and identity issues highlighted by defining the act of travel.
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Victorian Travel Writing and Postcolonial Theory

In the later 20th century, the rise of postcolonial studies and its emphasis on the complicity of Western literary texts in perpetrating sociopolitical and cultural models of colonial dominance was a boon for the scholarly position of travel writing. While it became subject to considerably more critical scrutiny than had previously been the case, such scrutiny also allowed a reevaluation of the literary and political significance of the genre. This section is not intended to serve as an introduction to postcolonial theory but rather to some key critical texts on travel writing that productively incorporate postcolonial analysis, especially given travel writing’s close connections with genres such as the late-19th-century imperial adventure novel. Pratt 2008 is an indispensable critical text for the study of travel writing, given its analysis of imperial “contact zones” and the ways in which the gaze of the (Western) traveler engages with yet remolds the cultural and physical spaces it encounters. Brantlinger 1988 highlights and historicizes the relationship between culture and imperialist ideologies. Spurr 1993 offers an illuminating taxonomy of colonial discourses with particular reference to nonfictional modes of writing. Behdad 1994 and Thomas 1994 would be of particular interest to further scholars of travel and postcolonial theory: both pose complications to Edward Said’s seminal 1979 work Orientalism, which discusses the ways in which Western cultural assumptions and representations perpetuated uneven power relationships by constructing the East as “Other.” Behdad 1994 posits cultural relations as fluid (if still unequal) processes of circular exchange; his use of psychoanalytic theory, and his emphasis on ellipsis and discontinuity, is symptomatic of a heightened critical interest in the ways in which travel writing figures desire. (See also Porter 1991, cited under Europe). Thomas 1994 addresses the nature and representation of ideas of difference in terms of colonialism as a cultural project; his book is especially relevant to anthroplogy. Gikandi 1996 is an examination of Englishness as an identity in crisis and is accessible to students at several levels as well as to scholars of cultural politics and colonialism. Leask 2002 significantly reenvisions the relationship between travel writing and epistemology by highlighting the shifting meanings of the term “curiosity” in the early Victorian period. The essays in Youngs 2006 trace the interaction between the physical act of travel and its narrative representation, in relation to the imaginative function of “blank spaces.”

Behdad, Ali. Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.
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Important study of English and French travelers during the second half of the 19th century—including Flaubert and Kipling—in terms of a discourse of belatedness.
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Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness—British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.
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Traces Victorian cultural constructions of imperialist ideologies. Explores early Victorian pro-imperial discourses, thus shifting critical focus from the idea of major late-century changes in attitudes. Travel accounts feature particularly in chapter 5 (pp. 135–172) on British travelers to the East and chapter 6 (pp. 173–196) on the evolution of Africa into the Victorians’ “Dark Continent.”
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Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
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Identifies Englishness as “a cultural and literary phenomenon” (p. xii) produced in the ambivalent interconnected spaces between metropole and colony. Includes discussion of Mary Kingsley, Mary Seacole, Anthony Trollope, and Charles Kingsley.
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Leask, Nigel. Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
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Leask’s persuasive discussion of curiosity in travel writing posits two senses of the term: wonder at distant lands which generates a desire for acquisition and possession, and a more positive inclination toward the gathering of knowledge that opens textual spaces for articulating the specificities of foreign experience.
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Pratt, Mary. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. 2d ed. London: Routledge, 2008.
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Seminal text examining European travel writing on Africa from 1750 and South America from the early 19th century. Central concepts have become key to critical discourse: “transculturation,” mutual but imbalanced influence from colonial interactions; “contact zone,” “the space of colonial encounters,” and “anticonquest,” whereby European subjects inscribe innocence even as they establish power. Initially published in 1992.
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Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
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A thorough “rhetorical taxonomy” of eleven central tropes in Western colonial nonfiction writings: surveillance, appropriation, aestheticization, classification, debasement, negation, affirmation, idealization, insubstantialization, naturalization, and eroticization. Includes discussion of Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley.
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Thomas, Nicholas. Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
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Considers travel, anthropology, and ethnography as vehicles through which the cultures of colonized peoples were (and continue to be) represented to Europeans—in ways that effectively legitimized colonial domination. Challenges Edward Said’s theories of Orientalism by emphasizing the diversity of colonial experiences and discourses.
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Youngs, Tim, ed. Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century: Filling the Blank Spaces. London: Anthem, 2006.
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Essay collection on the engagement of autobiographical and fictional travelogues with imaginative spaces. Arranged in geographical sections—the Balkans, the Congo and the Middle East, India, America, and Australasia—and gives students a convenient overview of the key locations of imperial travel writing.
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Tourism

A significant factor in travel writing of the Victorian period was the dramatic expansion of tourism: travel undertaken for leisure purposes, usually to established popular sites. Although the concept of tourism is predominantly associated with later 20th-century travel, criticism has traced its origins back considerably further, and it is now widely seen as an important aspect of Victorian travel narrative, especially of the second half of the century. Urry 2002 formulates the influential concept of the “tourist gaze,” and Towner 1996 is a pioneering work on tourism in terms of historical geography. Ousby 1990 challenges the view in Fussell 1980 of tourism as a post–World War II phenomenon by arguing for tourism as a product of later 18th-century England, emerging from middle-class desire for self-improvement and centered on key English sites. Buzard 1993 offers a highly influential consideration of the development of value-laden distinctions between traveler and tourist, and the emergence of concepts of “authentic” culture over the 19th century. Seaton 1999 explores the development of Victorian “thanatourism”: leisure travel to sites of war and death. Thomas Cook (b. 1808–d. 1892), who set up the world’s first travel agency in 1845, is seen as a crucial figure in the “packaging” of travel as an integrated leisure commodity for the middle classes; Withey 1997 gives an overview of the Cook agency in relation to the development of leisure travel. Schaff 2009 discusses the Victorian publishing boom in travel guides, particularly from 1836 and Murray’s Handbooks. Watson 2006 highlights the development of so-called literary tourism whereby the lives and works of prominent authors shaped travel routes.

Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to “Culture,” 1800–1918. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
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Important account of European tourism as a cultural category in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including discussion of Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Henry James. Considers travel as appropriation, assigning greater value to immersion in cultural past than present-day lives of inhabitants, and generating rhetorical modes of antitourism, which defines “traveler” in opposition to “tourist.”
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Fussell, Paul. Abroad: British Literary Travelling between the Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
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A valuable early categorization of travel writing as a significant and distinct literary genre. Fussell posits three historical stages: exploration (including 19th-century figures), travel (mainly centered on this early-20th-century period), and then tourism, which he perceives as heralding the death of travel writing as an art. This historical progression is often challenged by examinations of Victorian tourism.
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Ousby, Ian. The Englishman’s England: Travel, Taste and the Rise of Tourism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
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Examines the development of large-scale tourism within England as dating back to the later 18th century at least. Traces a transition from taste to travel to tourism into the mid-19th century, via literary shrines, country houses, picturesque architectural ruins, and natural landscape. Primarily emphasizes material culture of tourism with detailed discussions of maps, guidebooks, illustrations, etc.
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Schaff, Barbara. “John Murray’s Handbooks to Italy: Making Tourism Literary.” In Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture. Edited by Nicola J. Watson, 106–118. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230234109Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Traces the role of references from English poets in shaping John Murray’s guidebooks to Continental Europe.
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Seaton, A. V. “War and Thanatourism: Waterloo 1815–1914.” Annuals of Tourism Research 26.1 (1999): 130–158.
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Case study of travel to Waterloo between 1815 and 1914 as thanatourism, travel motivated by the desire to encounter death in literal or symbolic form. Considers the changing meanings of the site for British travelers.
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Towner, John. An Historical Geography of Recreation and Tourism in the Western World, 1540–1940. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 1996.
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Innovative construction of a historical geography of tourism. Considers systems of supply and demand and the integration of leisure and work in regional travel patterns within Europe.
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Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. 2d ed. London: SAGE, 2002.
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Groundbreaking analysis of the visual dynamics of the tourist experience and the systematic ways in which the “tourist gaze” can operate. See especially his discussion of the growth and decline of British seaside resorts (pp. 15–37), which explores the development of mass tourism in the second half of the 19th century. First edition published in 1990.
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Watson, Nicola J. The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
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Reception history analysis of the rise of literary tourism, considering questions of national identity and realism in relation to travel in pursuit of places connected with writers and their works.
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Withey, Lynne. Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750–1915. London: William Morrow, 1997.
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Enjoyable narrative account of the development of leisure travel from the mid-18th to the early 20th century, though more useful for background information than for scholarly critique.
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Women’s Travel Writing

Women’s travel writing became a distinct literary and commercial trend in Victorian travel writing and has emerged as an ongoing topic of critical analysis in travel scholarship. It has therefore been allocated a specific section, but this should be understood and consulted in conjunction with associated sections in the rest of this bibliography, many of which feature texts discussing women travel writers in different contexts. This section should also be understood in relation to a growing body of scholarship on the position of Western women in relation to colonialism. With the expansion of empire and the greater ease and safety of travel, women began to travel in large numbers from around the mid-19th century. Victorian women travelers’ accounts of their journeys could offer distinctive experiences to a literary marketplace in which travel writing was growing commonplace. In their prefaces and introductions, many women travelers strategically proffered apologies for their writing and disclaimers of scientific or political expertise, yet emphasized the epistemological value of their personal witness. Other women more explicitly engaged in major scientific and ethnographic study, but often found themselves disregarded by professional bodies and institutions at home. Conduct, manners, and the maintenance (or breach) of codes of femininity became a recurring topic of discussion in and about women’s travelogues, including issues regarding clothing, in particular the wearing of trousers or of non-English dress. Twentieth-century scholarship on travel writing and colonialism initially tended to disregard women travel writers, an imbalance which early biographical and academic texts in the 1970s and 1980s sought to correct. Many of these performed valuable work in raising critical awareness of Victorian women as travelers, but—as with early postcolonial criticism on the position of women in empire more generally—took an overly celebratory approach to their subjects as inevitably radical or subversive by virtue of their gender. Later scholarly texts have more rigorously addressed the implication of British women in the structures and rhetorical strategies of imperialism.

Biographical and Literary-Biographical Accounts

Prominent Victorian women travelers (at the time and as featured in recent criticism) include Isabella Bird (Bishop) (b. 1831–d. 1904), an determined and idiosyncratic traveler whose journeys encompassed America, China, Japan, Korea, and the Middle East; Emily Eden (b. 1797–d. 1869), whose letters give sardonic accounts of her Indian travels with her brother Lord Auckland, the governor-general of India; Fanny Parkes (b. 1794–d. 1875), who traveled around India intensively between 1822 and 1845, becoming an enthusiastic scholar of Hindu and Muslim culture and theology; Mary Seacole (b. 1805–d. 1881), a Jamaican Creole whose narrative of her Crimean experiences became a best seller; Lucie Duff-Gordon (b. 1821–d. 1869), driven by illness to the Cape of Good Hope and then Egypt, where she became immersed in Arab culture; and Mary Kingsley (b. 1862–d. 1900), whose wryly humorous account of her travels in West Africa made her one of the most prominent travelers of her day. Of these, Kingsley’s ironic voice, ambivalent constructions of gender identity, and interrogation of the cultural and racial dynamics of West Africa, has attracted probably the most sustained postcolonial analysis. Women travelers are recurring subjects of popular biographies and collections: this selection identifies some accounts that give useful biographical introductions to individual figures, although students should be cautioned to read them in relation to further academic scholarship. Middleton 1965 is a pioneering study on women travelers. Barr 1976 gives an insight into women’s lives and familial relationships in British India. Birkett 1989 is a very readable, if still generalized, study that combines biographical information with some theoretical analysis. Stevenson 1982 is an account of women travelers in Africa that gives a good introductory overview. Netzley 2001 is a useful overview, while Robinson 2001 is an excellent and entertaining resource for literary-biographical information.

Barr, Pat. The Memsahibs: the Women of Victorian India. London: Secker and Warburg, 1976.
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Account of the experiences of seven women who accompanied male family members to India, mainly aimed at challenging the ongoing stereotype of the narrow-minded memsahib.
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Birkett, Dea. Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
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Discussion of around fifty women travelers, positioning them in relation to colonialism and to feminist and postcolonial theory. Notes the ambivalence with which many of these women experienced their positioning as white women in colonial territories.
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Middleton, Dorothy. Victorian Lady Travellers. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965.
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Early and influential examination of Victorian women travelers.
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Netzley, Patricia D. The Encyclopedia of Women’s Travel and Exploration. Westport, CT: Oryx, 2001.
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Alphabetically organized biographical, geographical, and topical entries on women travelers (real-life and fictional).
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Robinson, Jane. Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travellers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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Thematically organized guide to around four hundred women travelers through history with geographical and authorial indexes and maps. Pithy biographical summaries with useful bibliographic information.
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Stevenson, Catherine Barnes. Victorian Women Travel Writers in Africa. Boston: Twayne, 1982.
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Introductory discussion of women travelers in Africa, dividing them into the categories of wives, missionaries, and vacationers.
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Central Critical Debates

An important strand in scholarship on women’s travel writing is whether or not women’s travelogues possess qualities that makes them identifiable as distinctive parts of a “women’s tradition” and/or as displaying female modes of writing. This issue in turn generates debates on the extent to which Victorian women’s subordination within British society is manifested through their travelogues into subversion, reconsideration, or reinforcement of racial hierarchies and colonial power structures. Analytical models distinguishing women’s travel writing as a subgenre in itself have been challenged, modified, and in some cases rejected altogether, but the problematic positioning of women travel writers in relation to literary traditions rooted in male experience and colonial power relations continues to be a central topic for scholarly debate. Kröller 1990 is a thoughtful early consideration of the rhetorical strategies produced by the ambivalence of Victorian women travelers’ positioning in British imperial society, and this would be a good starting point for consideration of the issue. Mills 1991 is one of the most influential studies in the field, characterizing women’s travel writing as possessing distinctive rhetorical characteristics in reaction to women’s marginalization within their own societies but complicit in colonial power structures. Foster 1990 is a comparative approach that identifies common stylistic features, while Melman 1992 is an informative work that also views women’s travel writing as possessing distinctive qualities, arguing for it as an alternative and gender-specific discourse. Lawrence 1994 uses psychoanalytical approaches to identify distinctively male and female journey plots. These ideas have been disputed by other critics arguing for nonessentialist understandings of women’s travel writing in relation to a range of cultural, geographical, and material factors. Korte 2000 (cited under Genre) queries the specificity of women’s travel writing, although she does view women’s travelogues as possessing some distinctively gendered qualities. Frawley 1994 considers women’s use of the genre to attain personal and professional goals. The important essays in Blunt and Rose 1994 (cited under Space and Motion)—including ones by Sara Mills and Cheryl McEwan—position women in relation to the gendering of colonial and postcolonial spaces. Morgan 1996 challenges tendencies in postcolonial theory to homogenize imperial experiences across regions, arguing that women’s travelogues produce multiple rhetorical possibilities but not necessarily a distinct female rhetoric. Youngs 1997 warns against ahistorical gendered constructions of travel writing, underlining the importance of material items as markers of travel origins. Ghose 1998 insightfully queries monolithic gendered conceptions of women’s travel writing and of the female gaze, instead emphasizing the ambivalence of colonial identities.

Foster, Shirley. Across New Worlds: Nineteenth-Century Women Travellers and Their Writings. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990.
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Comparative study of 19th-century English and American women’s travel writing, identifying key stylistic features in women’s travel accounts, particularly the emphasis on senses of excitement and escape.
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Frawley, Maria H. A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994.
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Discusses Victorian women’s travel writing as a means through which to acquire greater personal and professional development, usefully emphasizing the extent to which the popular appeal of travelogues could allow women to earn a living.
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Ghose, Indira. Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.
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Organized around gender, race, location, and time, with particular attention to female gazes as plural and ambivalent, and to how this plurality highlights the ambivalence of colonial power relations. Considers Orientalism, the picturesque, the zenana, the 1857–1858 Indian Uprising, and late Victorian travel modes such as hunting expeditions. Includes discussions of Mary Carpenter, Emily Eden, and Fanny Parkes.
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Kröller, Eva-Marie. “First Impressions: Rhetorical Strategies in Travel Writing by Victorian Women.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 21.4 (October 1990): 87–99.
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Examination of the role-playing strategies and persona adopted in Victorian women’s travel writing, enabling them to be “accomplice in, yet critic of, the business of imperialism” (p. 87). Centers on Isabella Bird and Mary Kingsley.
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Lawrence, Karen R. Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
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Examines travel writing by British women from the mid-17th to the 20th centuries, identifying male and female journey plots while emphasizing their interconnectedness. Sees women’s travel writing as distinctly wary of conquest and agency, and as formulating models of selfhood connected with lessened individual control and subconscious impetuses. Includes discussion of Mary Kingsley and Sarah Lee.
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Melman, Billie. Women’s Orients: Englishwomen in the Middle East, 1718–1918; Sexuality, Religion and Work. London: Macmillan, 1992.
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Examines British women travelers to the Middle East in terms of an alternative, gender-specific mode of discourse. Discusses Mary Wortley Montagu, Florence Nightingale, Harriet Martineau, and Amelia Edwards among others. Melman’s apolitical, distinctively gendered model of women’s travel writing has been critiqued, but her work is an informative example of this scholarly approach.
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Mills, Sara. Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism. New York: Routledge, 1991.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203379882Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Groundbreaking exploration of the Foucaultian nexuses through which the subjectivity of women travelers was constituted. Argues for “women’s texts” as being consciously produced, while considering the instability of these rhetorical positions and the extent to which women travelers engaged in the production of colonial knowledge. Detailed studies of Alexandra David-Neel, Mary Kingsley, and Nina Mazuchelli.
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Morgan, Susan. Place Matters: Gendered Geography in Victorian Women’s Travel Books about Southeast Asia. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996.
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Challenges monolithic representations of colonial spaces, arguing for specifically gendered rhetorics associated with particular places. Analyzes the ways in which women travel writers in areas of Southeast Asia engaged with these (often masculine) rhetorics, focused on expanding opportunities for trade and scientific exploration rather than on formal seizure and control.
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Youngs, Tim. “Buttons and Souls: Some Thoughts on Commodities and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing.” Studies in Travel Writing 1 (Spring 1997): 117–140.
DOI: 10.1080/13645145.1997.9634864Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Addresses the dangers of disregarding material realities in constructing an ahistorical, essentialist view of women’s travel. Considers consumer items in travelogues as markers of threatened identities.
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Recent Scholarship

Recent critical attention has been turning to issues such as the relationship between text and the female body and the role of performativity and sexuality; the relationship of women to scientific writing and to material culture; and the nuances of specific political, religious, and cultural identifications in shaping women’s travel accounts. Whitlock 2000 foregrounds the experiences of peripheral and/or colonial women travelers in reconsidering the relationship between travel writing and life writing as genres. McEwan 2000 addresses the ways in which geography as a discipline has excluded or marginalized women’s voices. The essays in Siegel 2004 emphasize the diversity of women’s travel experiences. Anderson 2006 examines late Victorian women’s travel writing in terms of discourses of performativity.

Anderson, Monica. Women and the Politics of Travel, 1870–1914. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2006.
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Considers late Victorian travel writing as producing moments of negotiation, which allow the possibility of feminine performativity in relation to Victorian domesticity. Argues that responses to women travelers in the late-19th and early-20th centuries became more critical as they became perceived as more of a threat. Focuses on Isabella Bird, Florence Dixie, and Kate Marsden.
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McEwan, Cheryl. Gender, Geography, and Empire: Victorian Women Travellers in West Africa. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000.
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Of most immediate value to geographers, given its emphasis on positioning women’s voices more prominently and critically in the discipline, but of importance for scholars in other disciplines. Topically organized discussion of West Africa through the writings of seven women traveling there between 1840 and 1907 (including Mary Kingsley).
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Siegel, Kristi, ed. Gender, Genre and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing. New York: Peter Lang, 2004.
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Essay collection that considers a notably diverse range of women travelers in fact and in fiction from the Victorian period to the late 20th century. Includes chapters on spectacle and the relationship between travel and domesticity in Victorian women’s travel writing.
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Whitlock, Gillian. The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography. London and New York: Cassell, 2000.
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Relationship between empire and life writing, including settler autobiographies. Chapter 3, “Travelling in Memory of Slavery” (pp. 75–111) argues that discourses of travel authorized women’s autobiographical writing. Considers travelogues by women on the peripheries of empire to foreground the importance of regional identities, and imperial femininity as a negotiable identity.
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Women and Space

Following in the 18th-century path of Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), Eastern women’s spaces such as the harem or zenana (a term more specific to India and Pakistan, especially for Muslim households) gave British Victorian women travelers a distinct epistemological and/or commercial advantage over their male contemporaries: these female spaces were inaccessible to male travelers and an ongoing source of fascination to European readerships. The “harem experience” in travel writing has become an important aspect of research on Victorian women’s travel writing, in particular the ways in which Western female travelers used their encounters with Eastern women to consider, defend, and/or critique domestic models at home. This section highlights scholarly texts specifically discussing the representation of the harem in travel writing, but some of the texts listed in Central Critical Debates and Recent Scholarship also address this in a wider context. So, Melman 1992 (cited under Central Critical Debates) considers harem literature as distinct from female travelogues and in terms of sexuality; Ghose 1998 (cited under Women Travelers) considers the greater realism available to women travelers describing Indian zenanas; and McEwan 2000 (cited under Recent Scholarship) discusses harems in reference to West African women. More specifically, Nair 1990 is an early examination of the relationship between Englishwomen’s positioning within their own society and their representations of the zenana, an important theme elaborated in Grewal 1996, which positions the harem as crucial to Victorian conceptualizations of bourgeois domesticity. Lewis 2004 opens up the harem as a site for alternative dialogues between Ottoman and Western women. Roberts 2002 explores visual culture in relation to the harem as a site of feminine fantasy, but at the same time, a site of Eastern women’s control over their own representations. Del Plato 2002 relates visual and literary culture to contemporary concerns. Robinson-Dunn 2006 underlines the positioning of the harem in the context of debates about female slavery and Anglo-Muslim relations.

Del Plato, Joan. Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem, 1800–1875. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002.
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Analysis of 19th-century British and French art and writing about the harem, and the extent to which these representations were connected both to national psychosexualities and to the major political issues of the era.
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Grewal, Inderpal. Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel. London: Leicester University Press, 1996.
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Representations of the harem in the 19th-century writings of both English women in the East and Indian women traveling in the West. Argues that gendered bodies become the means through which colonial concepts of home/away, nation/empire are imaginatively constructed in imperial spaces, so that the Victorian middle-class home is constructed in contradistinction to the Eastern harem.
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Lewis, Reina. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem. London: I. B. Tauris, 2004.
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Examines English-language accounts of gender-segregated life in Istanbul by women who self-identified as Oriental in relation to Western discourses regarding Muslim women. Includes considerations of space, painting, clothing, and the transition of harem discourse into the 20th century.
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Nair, Janaki. “Uncovering the Zenana: Visions of Indian Womanhood in Englishwomen’s Writings, 1813–1940.” Journal of Women’s History 2.1 (Spring 1990): 8–34.
DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2010.0263Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Depicts the representation of the zenana in Englishwomen’s writings as a timeless, unchanging space, offering possibilities for Westernization or for a “separate spheres” modes of female influence—and as such offering distractions from Western women’s own sense of powerlessness. Notes the heightened visibility of Indian households in late-19th-century writings. Includes discussion of Emily Eden and Fanny Parks.
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Roberts, Mary. “Contested Terrains: Women Orientalists and the Colonial Harem.” In Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography. Edited by Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts, 179–204. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
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Roberts’s exploration of British women’s travel diaries considers harem spaces as productive of feminine fantasy, while incorporating the part played by Eastern women in the harem in controlling and producing their own representations.
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Robinson-Dunn, Diane. The Harem, Slavery and British Imperial Culture: Anglo-Muslim Relations in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2006.
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Considers Anglo-Muslim relations in the Middle East and the extent to which Britain saw itself as, in effect, a Muslim power, while defining British culture against a gendered Muslim Other. The book’s main focus is narrower than the subtitle suggests, mainly discussing antislavery campaigns, with chapter 4 (pp. 115–153) on polemical representations of harems and female slavery in travelers’ accounts.
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Space and Motion

Victorian conceptions and experiences of space and motion changed dramatically over the 19th century, especially with the development of steam, and these changes were reflected in Victorian travelogues. Some travelers wrote nostalgically of older methods of travel, others celebrated the speed and efficiency of new methods. The development of railways in Britain and abroad had a particularly striking effect. As journeys became faster, types of transport and processes of travel began to get less narrative priority than travelers’ individual subjective experiences. Large areas of imperial exploration continued, however, to be beyond the bounds of railways and even roads: especially parts of Africa; travelogues from such areas often featured (or elided) transactions between European explorers and the indigenous peoples hired (or coerced) to assist with their travels. Postcolonial theory has placed increasing emphasis on the imaginative construction of space as integral to representations of identity and authority. One significant aspect of this in relation to travel writing is in the connections between some of the central tenets of geography as a discipline, and of geographical practices—in particular those relating to categorization of environments, cartography, and exploration—and colonial practices (see also Scientific Travel Writing). Schivelbusch 1986 offers a groundbreaking meditation on the ways in which the advent of rail travel in the 19th century reconfigured perceived dynamics of space and time. For literary scholars, Wallace 1993 considers the changing cultural and spatial values associated with walking. Blunt and Rose 1994 is a seminal collection on feminist geography and rethinks concepts of Orientalist space by figuring colonial identities as formulated through imaginative gendered interpretations of particular places, while Duncan and Gregory 1999 offers geographers’ perspectives on the spatial dynamics of travel writing. Driver 2001 argues for an understanding of popular “cultures of exploration” as produced by networks of religious, political, scientific, and cartographic interests. The essays in Michie and Thomas 2002 collate a number of approaches to the cultural significance of space in travel writing. Recent scholarship foregrounding visuality in Victorian society has highlighted the popular appeal of panoramas in Britain, which offered visual counterparts to travel writing: Byerly 2007 discusses Victorian virtual travel.

Blunt, Alison, and Gillian Rose, eds. Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. New York: Guilford, 1994.
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Important collection that positions gendered space as imagined, essentialist geographies constructed in relation to specific colonial and postcolonial contexts. Essays cover several geographical locations over the 19th and 20th centuries, including West Africa and colonial Australia. Includes discussion of Mary Kingsley and Fanny Parkes.
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Byerly, Alison. “‘A Prodigious Map beneath His Feet’: Virtual Travel and The Panoramic Perspective.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 29.2 (2007): 151–168. .
DOI: 10.1080/08905490701584643Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Exploration of the concept of “virtual travel” in the 19th century.
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Driver, Felix. Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001.
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Accessible exploration of the Victorian cultures of exploration that grew up around African travel and the part played by public reception and networks of interests in shaping geographical adventure. Includes discussion of the Royal Geographical Society, Livingstone, Stanley, and “General” William Booth’s Salvation Army.
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Duncan, James, and Derek Gregory. Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing. London: Routledge, 1999.
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Geographers’ essay collection considering the spatial imaginaries of travel writing, as well as its modes of representation, including the physicality of texts. Discusses American and English travelers to Africa, South Asia, and Europe from the 18th to the 20th centuries, including several chapters on Victorian travelers.
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Michie, Helena, and Ronald R. Thomas, eds. Nineteenth-Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
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Chapters of most relevance to Victorian travel writing include Julie Fromer on tea drinking and tourism (pp. 99–108); Jules Law on Mary Kingsley and cultural ecology (pp. 109–122); and Joseph Litvak on Anthony Trollope (pp. 123–136); Michie, Rome, and Honeymoon Tourism (pp. 137–148); Jon Hegglund on America in Stanley and Livingstone (pp. 265–278).
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Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
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Positions the railroad as central to 19th-century discourses of modernity. Considers European railroads as annihilators of space and time, enforcing panoramic views and making journeys transitions between points of departure and arrival. An important and imaginative work for scholars in the fields of travel and space, as well as for academics and students at all levels.
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Wallace, Anne D. Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.
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Considers the changing cultural significance and practices of walking over the course of the 19th century, noting the mid-Victorian concept of walking as an educational tool but also a growing sense of literary disillusionment with walking as a means through which to connect to a rural past.
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Scientific Travel Writing

Some of the most prominent Victorian scientific texts are travelogues—or emerged as the eventual product of travel journals—particularly those from the early to mid-19th century, the era of the European explorer-naturalist. The most famous of these is Charles Darwin (b. 1809–d. 1882), whose The Voyage of the Beagle (published in 1839 as his Journal and Remarks, 1832–1835; revised in 1845) shaped his seminal scientific texts. Recounting his travels around South America, Tahiti, and Australia between December 1831 and October 1836, Darwin kept records of his observations and specimens of animals, plants, and fossils. The text also features elements common to several Victorian travelogues, including a criticism of slavery (in Brazil), an account of the “reversion” of indigenous peoples to savage/primitive states (Fuegian missionaries being returned to Tierra del Fuego), and an underlying conviction of the need for a civilizing mission. Recent decades have seen a renewed scholarly interest in scientific travel writing. Critical attention has also increasingly turned to the mutually aggrandizing relationship between Victorian colonial expansion and the impressive scope of Victorian scientific development in fields such as natural history, geography, botany, ethnography, anthropology, and (especially toward the end of the century, as the British Empire reached its apex) biological sciences. The opportunities that travel opened up for observation, experimentation, and the gathering of specimens meant that many travel accounts claimed significant ethnographic value, for general readers and elite scientific institutions alike. Rubiés 2002 notes that as disciplines such as ethnography became professionalized, however, academic accounts were valued over the more pragmatic observations of commercial and leisure travelers. Many travel writers joined prominent institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society, founded in 1830 as the Geographical Society of London to promote geographical science. The RGS admitted its first women members from 1892 to 1893, only then to close this possibility off until 1913. Raby 1997 is a well-written analysis that would be a good introduction for an undergraduate student, as well as being of interest to other scholars. Brockway 2002 draws innovative connections between British botanical science and the colonial networks of travel and supply it created. Stafford 1984 develops central connections between science, visual culture, and perception. Beer 1996 is a discussion of science and cultural encounters by one of the most prominent scholars of Victorian scientific writing. Gates 1998 provides a valuable scholarly resource in her wide-ranging analysis of the ways in which women (including many scientific travelers) laid claim to modes of epistemological authority and/or popular influence through their nature writings; Harper 2001 furthers this theme with a more explicit focus on travel writing.

Beer, Gillian. Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.
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Places 19th-century readers’ cultural encounters in relation to scientific discourses, including Darwin’s voyages. Addresses relevant aspects of return, anthropology, linguistic theories, etc.; see especially chapter 3, “Travelling the Other Way: Travel Narratives and Truth Claims” (pp. 55–70), on truth, authenticity, and familiarity in the travel encounter.
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Brockway, Lucile H. Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
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Valuable exploration of the role of 19th-century economic botany in furthering the structures and growth of empire. First published in 1979.
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Gates, Barbara T. Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
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Addresses the ways in which a diverse range of women’s writings about the natural world constructed distinctively gendered responses to Darwinism and thus laid claim to cultural authority in altering popular perceptions. Traces the professionalization of science over the 19th century. Extensive illustrations and a detailed bibliography augment its considerable scholarly value.
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Harper, Lila Marz. Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Narratives and the Scientific Vocation. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001.
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Biographically structured analysis of the travel writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, Isabella Bird Bishop, and Mary Kingsley, in terms of the relationship between gendered rhetorical strategies and areas of scientific research such as natural history.
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Raby, Peter. Bright Paradise: Victorian Scientific Travellers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
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Accessible survey and analysis of a number of Victorian scientific travelers, including Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace, and Thomas Henry Huxley. Centers on Africa, South America, and the Far East. One chapter considers female scientific travelers, mainly Mary Kingsley and the botanical artist Marianne North. Includes a brief discussion of the scientific traveler in fiction.
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Rubiés, Joan Pau. “Travel Writing and Ethnography.” In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, 242–260. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL052178140XSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Account of the relationship between travel collections from the 16th to the 19th centuries and the emerging science of ethnography. Useful analysis and summary for students.
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Stafford, Barbara. Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984.
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Relates illustration in travel narratives and atlases to broader cultural debates regarding nature and perception. Links these with the development of realism as a literary mode. Includes 270 plates.
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Colonial Anthropology

The emerging scientific discipline of anthropology, with its emphasis on the observation and analysis of little-known peoples and customs by participant-observers, became especially influential in the development of travel writing as a genre. Nineteenth-century idealizations of primitive humanity and/or the “noble savage” facilitated connections between narratives of cultural encounter and narratives of exploration. Colonial ethnography’s comparative examination of cultures often emphasized the importance of local understanding to facilitating modes of colonial rule, while commentators’ representations of colonized peoples as essentially uncivilized in various ways supplied data that could be made into the basis of paternalist Western authority. Stocking 1987 is a seminal analysis of Victorian anthropology with emphasis on cultural evolutionary models of understanding. James Clifford’s work has been highly influential; Clifford and Marcus 1986 highlights the politicized connotations of traditionally understood ethnography. Bennett 1998 gives an illuminating overview of the changing critical perceptions of and debates concerning the discipline. Several essays in Poddar and Johnson 2005 address 19th-century anthropology’s central preoccupation with concepts of “the Other.”

Bennett, John William, Leo A. Despres, and Michio Nagai. Classic Anthropology: Critical Essays, 1944–1996. Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998.
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Mainly focused on the early 20th century but traces the historical development of anthropology as a discipline and its changing conceptualizations of relativism, subjectivity, and the role of the observer.
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Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
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Seminal interrogation of central precepts of anthropological thought and of its influence on sociopolitical discourse.
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Poddar, Prem, and David Johnson, eds. A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Thought in English. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
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Over fifty essays, arranged by topic, on the major concerns shaping the postcolonial history of the Anglophone world. Several essays engage with Western anthropological depictions of “otherness,” especially those documenting the cultural histories of specific colonial locations.
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Stocking, George. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Macmillan, 1987.
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Examines the development of anthropology as a discipline in the period and its influence on scientific and sociopolitical thought. See especially chapter 3, “Travelers and Savages” (pp. 78–109).
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Religion

Protestant skepticism at Catholic rituals was a recurring feature of British travel writing on the Continent. Pfister 1996 (cited under Regions) devotes a whole section of his anthology on British travel to Italy to “Religious Difference” (pp. 197–224). Stabler 2003 considers the responses of British women travelers to Catholicism in Italy, while Teukolsky 2007 considers some of the religious and cultural anxieties aroused by the spectatorship of travelers to the Great Exhibition of 1851. (For further discussion of Catholicism and travel writing, see also Europe, especially the material on Italy and Ireland.) Scholarship on religion and Victorian travel writing has tended to give particular prominence to colonial missionary narratives, emphasizing the crucial role of missionaries in extending formal and informal modes of imperial control, though also their potential capacity to challenge or work against this control at local levels. The most famous missionary travel writer of the Victorian period was David Livingstone (b. 1813–d. 1873) (discussed further under Africa), whose travel writing carries with it an underlying assurance of the importance and value of his Christian mission. Johnson 2003 is one of the first systematic examinations of missionary writing as a genre. Theological and cultural developments led to the increasing popularity of “Bible tourism,” whereby travelers would visit Palestine in order to see the supposed locations of biblical events; the Palestinian Exploration Fund was founded in 1865 to increase knowledge of biblical lands. Melman 1992 (cited under Central Critical Debates) discusses the Holy Land and spiritual authority in relation to women’s travel writing. Pointon 1989 uses Said’s concepts of Orientalism to analyze the Eastern travel diaries and religious art of the Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt.

Johnson, Anna. Missionary Writing and Empire: 1800–1860. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511550324Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Detailed and important examination of missionary writing from 1800–1860, concentrating on the evangelical London Missionary Society’s activities in India, Polynesia, and Australia. Addresses several different types of accounts and considers the ambivalence of the missionary in relation to colonial power structures.
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Pointon, Martha. “The Artist as Ethnographer: Holman Hunt and the Holy Land.” In Pre-Raphaelites Re-viewed. By Martha Pointon, 22–44. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1989.
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Postcolonial analysis of the Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt’s unpublished travel diaries from the Holy Land from 1854–1856, and how these influenced his religious paintings. Reads Holman Hunt in terms of Orientalist discourse and the 19th-century travelogue as a genre, highlighting the racism of his responses and the editing of his diaries into a published memoir.
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Stabler, Jane. “Devotion and Diversion: Early Nineteenth-Century British Women Travelers in Italy and the Catholic Church.” In Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy. Edited by Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler, 15–34. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003.
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Considers the ways in which British women travelers in Italy encountered Catholicism between the 1780s and the 1840s, distinguishing between antipapal and anti-Catholic sentiment and considering Catholicism in relation to visuality, performativity, the sublime, and Italian liberation.
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Teukolsky, Rachel. “This Sublime Museum: Looking at Art at the Great Exhibition.” In Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace. Edited by James Buzard, Joseph W. Childers, and Eileen Gillooly, 84–100. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007.
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Examines art criticism and spectacle on the Great Exhibition of 1851, including the relationship between responses to gothic style and anti-Catholic discourse.
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Regions

Scholarship on travel writing has paid increasing attention to the particular regional conditions under which travelers operated, including geographical factors such as landscape and climate, cultural factors such as customs and expectations, and political factors such as differing degrees and forms of European control and influence. The annotations in this section highlight texts that would be of particular use for scholars wishing to concentrate on specific regions but are by no means intended to offer a comprehensive guide to scholarship on Victorian travel writing relating to these locations, since other sections involve considerable overlap. For primary texts, readers are directed toward the Regions and Bibliographies sections.

Africa

In the early 19th century, much of Africa (the so-called Dark Continent) was largely unknown to European travelers beyond its coastal regions. Travel accounts of Africa emphasized landscape, wild animals, and the possibilities for exploration and discovery. Victorian public and geographical interest was seized by controversies such as those from 1858 to 1875 involving the search for the source of the Nile, particularly between its eventual discoverer J. H. Speke (b. 1827–d. 1864) and the great Victorian explorer Richard Burton (b. 1821–d. 1860). The 1857 account of the missionary David Livingstone (b. 1813–d. 1873), and the journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley’s (b. 1841–d. 1904) best-selling 1872 account of his quest to find Livingstone, inflamed the Victorian popular imagination: Pettitt 2007 interrogates the iconic resonances of their meeting. Stanley was hero-worshipped for his exploits yet also heavily criticized for his brutal treatment of Africans; his narratives were highly influential on later travelogues as well as on fictional adventure novels such as those of Henry Rider Haggard. Probably the most famous Victorian travel account of Africa is a fictional one at the turn of the century: Joseph Conrad’s bleak vision of European disintegration: Heart of Darkness (1899/1902). (The wide range of literature on Heart of Darkness is beyond the scope of this bibliography, but see White 1993 for a discussion of the significance of imperial travel writing for Conrad’s work.) Youngs 2002 establishes contexts that would be illuminating for students new to travel writing about Africa. The essays in Rotberg 1970 are an early and groundbreaking attempt to address the controversies that characterized British explorers’ accounts, as well as the often-brutal interactions with local inhabitants. Youngs 1994 considers the representation of African cultural practices and material goods by British explorers; Koivunen 2008 foregrounds the visual dimensions of African exploration. Blunt 1994 uses the work of Mary Kingsley as a channel into the gendered and scientific contexts of European travel in West Africa. Mid-century Victorian travelogues guided European decisions about Africa: travel writing, and the commercial and religious private schemes it helped generate, thus paved the way for the speed and brutality of the late-19th-century “Scramble for Africa.” European powers sought to seize power, resources, and territories, despite Britain suffering initial humiliating defeats against the Zulus in 1879 and the white Dutch Boers in South Africa between 1899 and 1902. Franey 2003 places travel writing about in Africa in relation to these tropes (and realities) of violence.

Blunt, Alison. Travel, Gender, and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa. New York: Guilford, 1994.
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Examination of Kingsley in the context of British colonial structures, including those of geographical societies and professional bodies. Underlines the interconnectedness of space and gender in travel writing, and the relativity of concepts of home and away, in relation to the reformulation of Kingsley’s gendered subjectivity in different times and places.
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Franey, Laura E. Victorian Travel Writing and Imperial Violence: British Writing of Africa, 1855–1902. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2003.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230510036Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Exploration of the depiction of violence—physical, verbal and psychological—in exploration narratives and newspaper accounts. Includes discussion of Olive Schreiner’s and Joseph Conrad’s fictional travelogues.
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Koivunen, Leila. Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Accounts. London: Routledge, 2008.
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Analyzes the transitions between British explorers’ visualizations of Africa and the process whereby these were manifested as illustrations in popular travelogues. The focus on circumstances of production makes this a useful text for book history scholars as well as those interested in visual culture.
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Pettitt, Clare. Dr. Livingstone, I Presume? Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers and Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
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Takes the famous moment of David Livingstone’s and Henry Morton Stanley’s meeting in the depths of Africa, exploring its resonance in popular British and American culture. Discusses the development of transatlantic celebrity culture in the era.
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Rotberg, Robert I., ed. Africa and Its Explorers: Motives, Methods and Impacts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.
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Essays examining nine European explorers and the ways in which they interacted with Africa and the Africans. Includes Livingstone, Burton, Speke, and Stanley. Photographs, maps, and a comprehensive bibliography add to its usefulness for scholars.
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White, Andrea. Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511519277Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Analysis of the writing of Joseph Conrad, considering the importance to his earlier fiction of the genres of imperial travel writing—from Captain Cook to David Livingstone—and of the Victorian adventure novel, from Frederick Marryat to Henry Rider Haggard.
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Youngs, Tim. Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850–1900. Studies in Imperialism. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1994.
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Applies postcolonial theory to the images and contexts underlying the representation of East and Central Africa by British travelers in the second half of the 19th century. Seeks to ground colonial studies in material contexts of the day, such as ritual and food. Includes analysis of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a travel narrative.
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Youngs, Tim. “Africa/The Congo: The Politics of Darkness.” In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, 156–173. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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Considers the representation of the Congo region in travel writing from the 1850s, including the exploration narratives of Stanley. The chapter establishes a concise historical and literary context for European travel writing about Africa more generally.
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North America

As a flourishing former colony, the United States proved a popular territory for British Victorian travel writers (as well as supplying an extended readership for travel accounts). Canada, as a British settler colony gradually consolidating a sense of national identity, was sometimes treated as part of the same North American travel experience, but at other times positioned as distinct from the US Victorian travelogues tended to focus on differences between British and American speech and manners, as well as on questions of class and social hierarchy. Meanwhile America’s maintenance of slavery was a recurring theme—indeed, a subgenre emerged of visits to plantations. Such accounts were usually critical of slavery, although not invariably so, while travelers would occasionally draw parallels between the positions of American slaves and English working-class laborers. Frances Trollope’s (b. 1779–d. 1863) scathing 1832 account Domestic Manners of the Americans proved extremely popular; her son Anthony Trollope (b. 1815–d. 1882) also wrote an American travelogue, North America, in 1862. Charles Dickens’s American Notes (1842) recounted his travels on the East Coast and Great Lakes of America and Canada, placing particular emphasis on visiting institutions. Transatlantic studies has gained in importance as a critical field in recent years, and more scholarly attention is being paid not only to British travel writing about America and vice versa but also to the ways in which these travel narratives intersect. Mulvey 1983 contends that America was seen as engaged in an experiment with democracy and was thus depicted by British travel writers as either a shining future example or an ominous warning. Mulvey 1990 continues this analysis, querying the extent to which manners constituted a universal structure of cultural understanding. Roy 2005 is a significant contribution both to discourses on gender and travel and to the underexplored topic of Canadian travelogues. Flint 2008 consolidates important new critical directions in Anglo-American scholarship by positioning Native Americans as vital cultural figure in British understandings of America, and of nation more generally, while discussing the travels of Native Americans themselves.

Flint, Kate. The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–1930. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
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Addresses the figure of the Native American as iconic in the British cultural imagination, while setting this in relation to the two-way travels between the British and Native Americans (also considering Canadian Indians and, briefly, South American peoples). Reinvigorates transatlantic conceptualizations of race and cultural hierarchies. Persuasively written resource for students and further scholars alike.
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Mulvey, Christopher. Anglo-American Landscapes: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
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Discusses the literary (but factual) travel accounts of around ninety English and American travelers. Considers the preconceptions each nationality brought to the landscapes and key tourist sites of the other, with Americans in search of Antiquity and British encountering nature. Highlights the British perception of America as an experiment in democracy.
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Mulvey, Christopher. Transatlantic Manners: Social Patterns in the Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
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Examination of themes addressed by English travelers to the United States and American travelers to England from 1815 to the 1890s, highlighting responses to British social hierarchies and to American slavery, merchants, and women. Considers manners and gentility as contested sites on which to assert cultural superiority.
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Roy, Wendy. Maps of Difference: Canada, Women, and Travel. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005.
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Analysis of women’s travel writing within Canada, including connections between gendered and racial oppression made by the 1830s travel writer and poet Anna Jameson, who travelled from England to Canada to reunite with an estranged husband. Integrates archival and First Nation accounts to problematize homogenous perspectives on travel experiences. Good bibliography.
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Latin America

Latin America became a fairly popular travel destination over the 19th century: travelers were encouraged by curiosity about countries’ freshly acquired political independence from Spanish and Portuguese rule, loosened restrictions on travel, and consequent commercial opportunities. Britain had very little official territory in the region, but this left these areas in some ways all the more open to the imaginative projections of travel writers. It was a crucially rich source of research materials and inspiration for early Victorian traveler-scientists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (see also Scientific Travel Writing). In secondary reading, students and academics should read Pratt 2008 (cited under Victorian Travel Writing and Postcolonial Theory) for a definitive analysis of the ways in which travel writing reimagined American landscapes. Burnett 2000 considers how European explorers turned “terra incognita” into “bounded colonial territory” with reference to the El Dorado myth and Guyana (then British Guiana); this discussion will also be of value to scholars in search of detailed information on 19th-century cartographical techniques. In an essay that gives a good introduction to both the historical and the scientific contexts associated with exploration in the region, Whitehead 2002 discusses the creation of the Amazon basin as an imaginary state by 19th-century European ethnographic travelogues. Schmitt 2009 positions South America as a central site of living memory in Victorian writing, in a magisterial work best suited to scholars already reasonably well versed in Victorian scientific thought. Aguirre 2005 makes an important argument for Mexico and Central America serving as sites of informal empire in the Victorian imagination.

Aguirre, Robert D. Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
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Important text for students and scholars to understand how Victorian Britain’s commercial networks could translate into forms of “informal empire.” Examines the constitution of Mexico and Central America in Victorian writing as locations ready for cultural appropriation, tracing the movement of artifacts to British museums and homes. Texts include several travelogues.
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Burnett, D. Graham. Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
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Examines exploration to Guyana, Britain’s unique South American colony, in terms of geography and cartography. Centers on the travels of the explorer and surveyor Robert Hermann Schomburgk between 1834 and 1844.
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Schmitt, Cannon. Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
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Complex, though rewarding, work that considers South America as the object of European travel narratives that position it as the site for an imaginary “human as natural.” Includes intensive discussion of “mnemotechnics,” the art or method of memory. Focuses on four Victorian writers: Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Kingsley, and W. H. Hudson.
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Whitehead, Neil. “South America/Amazonia: The Forest of Marvels.” In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, 122–138. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL052178140XSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines the imagining of South America, especially the Amazon region. Relates travel writing to the emergence of ethnography, geography, and zoology, noting the 19th-century sense of nostalgia for a pure, lost native world as infrastructure and commerce spread. Includes the scientific travels of Alexander von Humboldt (early 19th century), and of Alfred Russel Wallace.
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Asia

For Victorian travelers, Asia comprised a wide range of territories: some were frequently traveled colonial regions, and others remained largely impenetrable to Western travelers and therefore offered the allure of exploration and discovery. As a conceptual location, however, it remained “the Orient”: a space of exoticism, danger, and fascination, in which (unlike common Victorian perceptions of Africa) there existed many cultures, rulers, and religions. Cultural exoticism, then, tended to be a prevailing feature of Victorian travel writing on Asia, even as political and geographical specificities produced very different modes of travel experience and cultural encounter.

China, Japan, and Tibet

These countries were a source of particular mystery and fascination for Victorian travelers. There was great allure in the idea of exploring “the real China,” given the limited access for Westerners beyond the port cities—although the Anglo-Chinese “Opium Wars” of 1839–1842 and 1856–1860 enforced British imperial trade on the Chinese and enabled further territorial penetration. Nineteenth-century British travelers dwelt on China’s fusion of an ancient civilization with contemporary backwardness, compared to an industrialized West. The opening-up of Japan to Western travel from the 1850s onward fostered travel writing about a country that was viewed by many British Victorians as particularly arcane and unknown; the modernizing reforms undertaken by from the 1860s by the Meiji rulers became a topic of travelers’ commentary and debate. Victorian travelers to China and Japan were also interested in the possibilities of trade and of religious conversion, although there was also increasing Western scholarly and theological interest in Buddhism (which was seen by some as more compatible with evolutionary theory than Christianity). Isabella Bird (b. 1831–d. 1904) was one of the most noted Victorian travelers to these regions, writing about China, Japan, and Tibet. The range of topics covered in Clark and Smethurst 2008 make it a useful resource for academics wishing to study travel writing across these regions. Schoenbauer Thurin 1999 offers a nuanced analysis of the relationship between Victorian travel writing and ideas of China as a colonial territory: this would be especially valuable to postcolonial scholars. Clifford 2001 is of particular interest regarding the relationship between travel writing and authenticity. Finn 1995 traces the spatial and architectural changes in Japan, partially influenced by European travelers. Sterry 2009 is a relatively rare analysis of travel writing on Japan by 19th-century women travelers. Bishop 1989 considers the depiction of Tibet in Western culture, while McMillin 2001 postulates a recurring “myth of epiphany in Tibet” in British travel accounts.

Bishop, Peter. The Myth of Shangri-la: Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred Landscape. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
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Examination of the construction of Tibet in Western travel writing as a semi-mythical site of lost mystery and power. Covers late 18th to the early 20th century, suggesting that the late Victorian period saw a particular fascination with Tibet in the context of the “Great Game” conflicts between Russia and Britain.
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Clark, Steve, and Paul Smethurst, eds. Asian Crossings: Travel Writing on China, Japan and Southeast Asia. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008.
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Essays address travel writings on China, Japan, and Southeast Asia from a number of perspectives. Several chapters address Victorian travelogues, including ones by women.
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Clifford, Nicholas R. “A Truthful Impression of the Country”: British and American Travel Writing in China, 1880–1949. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.
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Clifford considers the changing responses to China in British and American travel writing, including discussion of the late Victorian period. Argues for travel accounts in the period as claiming a specific type of accuracy and veracity—a “truthful impression”—that occludes the effects of the traveler’s own sensibilities.
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Finn, Dallas. Meiji Revisited: The Sites of Victorian Japan. New York: Weatherhill, 1995.
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Examines the influence of Western architecture, technology, and design on 19th-century Japan.
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McMillin, Laurie Hovell. English in Tibet, Tibet in English: Self-Presentation in Tibet and the Diaspora. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
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Considers the self-presentation of British travelers to Tibet from 1774 to 1910, as well as those of modern Tibetans. Examines language and the “myth of epiphany” that dominated British accounts.
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Schoenbauer Thurin, Susan. Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842–1907. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1999.
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Explores the experiences of six Victorian travelers between 1842 and 1907 to emphasize the complexity of China’s positioning as quasi-colonial territory. Gives valuable historical context to travelers’ experiences, especially in relation to British colonial aggression.
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Sterry, Lorraine. Victorian Women Travellers in Meiji Japan: Discovering a “New” Land. Folkestone, UK: Global Oriental, 2009.
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Examines accounts of women travelers to Japan over fifty years from the mid-1850s. Divides the women into “travellers-by-intent” (including Isabella Bird) and women whose husbands’ occupations as diplomats meant they “travelled by default.”
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India and Afghanistan

India, a zone of British colonial control since 1757, and the late Victorian Empire’s “Jewel in the Crown,” was a familiar subject of European travelogues. Yet the cities and peoples of India often became sources for British travelers’ tales of mystery and exploration. Some travelers were big- game hunters, scholars, or enthusiasts; but given the harshness of the climate, European travel writers were more likely to be involved with commercial or religious organizations, or with the British imperial state. The Indian Uprising of 1857–1858 did not deter Europeans from experiencing India: on the contrary, a slew of travel-related narratives emerged about the events, while Brantlinger 1988 (cited under Victorian Travel Writing and Postcolonial Theory) notes the emergence of a thanatouristic mode of “Mutiny tourism,” particularly toward the end of the century. Rudyard Kipling’s (b. 1865–d. 1936) late Victorian stories about English life in India were highly popular and helped influence travelers’ expectations; the definitive fictional travelogue of Victorian India is Kipling’s Kim (1901), which features the young hero’s journeys along the Grand Trunk Road and into the Himalayas. Teltscher 2002 gives a concise basis for students to understand the historical contexts of Indian travelogues while noting the changing representations of urban space. Suleri 1992 is a major work in postcolonial studies that challenges the critical focus on “Otherness,” and consequent divisions between ruling and subject races: the author draws on the work of both Westerners and non-Westerners, including travel writers, in order to trace the rhetorical tropes associated with “English India.” Codell 2007 gives a fresh insight into the classic tropes of British travel writing by examining their appropriation by late Victorian Indian visitors to Britain, an aspect also developed by Gupta 2008 in relation to Bholanauth Chunder’s 1869 adaptation of the European “Grand Tour” to his travels within India. The expansion of British commercial enterprise in Asia meant more travel accounts of Afghanistan, with particular importance attached to political and cartographic information. British travel writing about Afghanistan owed more to explorer narratives than did accounts of colonial India, given the perceived wildness of the region and Britain’s relative lack of control, but such writing was often also explicitly political in intent: Afghanistan was seen as key to preventing Russian imperial expansion and a potential threat to India. Fowler 2007 gives an insightful analysis of Victorian ideas about Afghanistan, combining travelogues with journalism and literary fiction. The famous disasters of the First Afghan War (1839–1842) effectively produced an ongoing tradition of British travel writing about the region, which was fostered by later conflicts; O’Cinneide 2010 places travelogues in conjunction with more formal genres in considering the narratives associated with these disasters.

Codell, Julie F. “Reversing the Grand Tour: Guest Discourse in Indian Travel Narratives.” Huntington Library Quarterly 70.1 (March 2007): 173–189.
DOI: 10.1525/hlq.2007.70.1.173Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Considers the travel accounts of late-19th-century Indian travelers to Europe and the ways in which these appropriate and ironize the conventions of earlier British travel writing.
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Fowler, Corinne. Chasing Tales: Travel Writing, Journalism and the History of British Ideas about Afghanistan. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.
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Exploration of the history of British ideas about Afghanistan in travel writing and journalism, from the 19th century to the early 21st century. Includes an interrogation of the role of classical ethnography. Accessible account for students at all levels.
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Gupta, Jayati. “Modernity and the Global ‘Hindoo’: The Concept of the Grand Tour in Colonial India.” The Global South 2.1 (Spring 2008): 59–70.
DOI: 10.2979/GSO.2008.2.1.59Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Explores the reworking of British 18th-century Grand Tour tropes by the Western-educated Bengali travel writer Bholanauth Chunderin’s The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India (1869). Explores how his formalization of leisure travel becomes a means of critiquing European civilizing missions in Indian travelers’ journeys to Britain.
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O’Cinneide, Muireann. “Conflict and Imperial Communication: Narrating the First Afghan War.” In Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth Century Literature. Edited by Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn, 52–65. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2010.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230277212Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Traces the narrative tropes through which Victorian commentators conceptualized the First Afghan War of 1839–1842. Examines two women travel writers, Emily Eden (writing from India) and Florentia Sale (involved in the British retreat from Kabul) in conjunction with the letters and documents of two statesmen and the historian Sir John Kaye.
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Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
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Interrogation of English and Indian idioms and the ways in which they produce modes of Anglo-Indian narrative. Addresses fictional and nonfictional writings, including the travel narratives of Fanny Parkes and Harriet Tytler as well as Kipling’s fiction. An important resource for scholars of colonialism and postcolonial theory.
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Teltscher, Kate. “India/Calcutta: City of Palaces and Dreadful Night.” In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, 191–206. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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Useful contextualizing account that argues for the emergence of an identifiably British tradition of travel writing about India from the mid-18th century, one closely connected with the consolidation of British rule. Considers representations of Calcutta (Kolkata) as emblematic, initially of colonial triumph, then later in the century, of colonial fears.
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Australasia and the Pacific

These regions have often been under-discussed in critical accounts of travel writing, especially given the complex dynamics of settler colonialism and/or informal rule. Travelers’ accounts of Australia and New Zealand were more likely to emerge from emigrants who had departed for these settler colonies (although various British Victorian writers visited out of tourist-based interest or for other purposes). Travelogues on these areas therefore tended to center on structural and socioeconomic factors, whereas travelers to the less cultivated, more informally governed South Pacific Islands were often there for health or sightseeing, and were therefore more likely to construct visions of “Island Paradises.”

The Pacific Islands

The islands of the South Pacific tended to be described by European travelers in terms of exoticism and abundance; Britain’s lack of formal colonial presence across many of these territories made them all the more open to imaginative speculation. European rivalries and pressure from Australia and New Zealand produced greater direct state involvement with the region—as with the 1874 annexation of Fiji—toward the end of the 19th century. The Victorian novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (b. 1850–d. 1894) is particularly associated with the Pacific, where he traveled intensively from 1888; his travelogue In the South Seas (1896) recounts some of his experiences. Many of the texts listed here incorporate some discussion of Stevenson; Jolly 2009 directly considers Stevenson’s travel writing in conjunction with his professional development as an author. Academic criticism on travel writing has begun to give closer attention to these regions over the past decade, paying particular attention to the possibilities it presents for more complex models of colonial power, postcolonial analysis, and the consequent positioning of travelers’ gazes. Smith 1985 analyzes travelers’ images of the Pacific in terms of art history and cultural constructs. From a postcolonial perspective, Rennie 1995 is a wide-ranging discussion of representations of the Pacific in travel writing is a crucial scholarly text on the topic. Lamb 2001 considers early colonial encounters in terms of a discourse of ambivalence about truth claims. Edmond 2002 traces the history of writing about the region through a concise discussion of Tahiti (although he only touches briefly on Victorian representations); Edmond 1997 is a more sustained analysis of representation that critiques the passivity with which postcolonial theory addresses indigenous inhabitants and will therefore be of importance to postcolonial theorists as well as to scholars of the region. This text is productively complemented by the linguistic focus of Smith 1998, which sees Pacific islanders as engaged in their own textual acts of appropriation and self-creation. Liebersohn 2006 analyzes Pacific travelers in relation to knowledge networks and poses a stimulating challenge to colonial binaries, positing instead a model of cosmopolitanism.

Edmond, Rod. Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gaughin. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511581854Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Discusses the representation of the South Pacific across various genres from 1767 to 1914, commenting upon the inadequacies of colonial and postcolonial analysis to engage with indigenous experience. Includes discussion of missionary culture and of Robert Louis Stevenson.
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Edmond, Rod. “The Pacific/Tahiti: Queen of the South Sea Isles.” In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, 139–155. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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Explores British and French travel writing about Tahiti from the 1760s to 2000, arguing for the central significance of Tahiti as a cultural reference point against which other Pacific cultures were evaluated. Includes discussion of European responses to Tahitian sexuality with reference to late Victorian ideas about same-sex practices.
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Jolly, Roslyn. Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire and the Author’s Profession. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009.
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Places Stevenson’s travel writing and political commentaries about the Pacific in relation to his professional development and authorial experimentation.
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Lamb, Jonathan. Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
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Scrutinizes the writings and reception of explorers in the South Seas, noting uncertainty and alarm at the encounters they experience and the eagerness combined with skepticism of their readers. Primarily on the earlier periods of exploration but also deals with early Victorian writing.
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Liebersohn, Harry. The Travelers’ World: Europe to the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
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Argues that travel was crucial to developing global networks of knowledge between 1750 and 1850 and characterizes European travelers as adaptable to cosmopolitan possibilities of intercultural exchange. Ends with the large-scale arrival of missionaries to the region. Includes useful chronology, maps, and bibliography. Of interest to researchers in scientific and philosophical areas as well as in colonialism and travel.
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Rennie, Neil. Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995.
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Examines discourses of travel writing about the Pacific from classical literature to the 20th century, tracing the shifting Western vision of the South Sea as a paradise. Important text for scholars of the region’s culture, as well for of those considering the regional and historical specificities of travel writing.
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Smith, Bernard. European Vision and the South Pacific. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.
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Considers Pacific voyages of the 18th and early 19th centuries in terms of art and science, especially the different audiences the expeditions’ artists were responding to. Useful for art historians and scholars on visual culture, as well as for cultural historians more generally. First published in 1950 (London: E. Baylis).
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Smith, Vanessa. Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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Draws on a number of 19th-century accounts of the Pacific by European travelers, focusing on the possibilities of appropriation and interrogation but also of cultural transmission raised by the Pacific islanders. Scholars of reception studies will also find this useful.
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Australia and New Zealand

This section considers texts with specific relevance to Australia and New Zealand; readers should also consult the material in the Pacific Islands. The novelist Anthony Trollope (b. 1815–d. 1882) was among the better-known travelers in the region, publishing Australia and New Zealand (1873) on his return. Australia has a dual identity in Victorian factual and fictional travelogues: on the one hand, a settler colony offering emigrants fresh starts and opportunities for wealth, on the other, the bleak destination for transported convicts. By the 19th century, earlier exploration accounts had largely given way to descriptions of settler communities and of travels through the wilder territories, while the Gold Rushes from 1851 produced a surge in immigrants and consequently in travel narratives. Carter 2010 is a classic account of the spatial mythmaking that went into Australian colonialism and colonial place names. New Zealand was an increasingly popular destination for both leisure and scientific (especially botanical) travel as well as for settlement. Early-nineteenth-century travelogues saw New Zealand in terms of an unspoiled Arcadian landscape (albeit one at times populated by dangerously savage, possibly cannibalistic, indigenous peoples); the focus of travelogues shifted over the course of the century from narratives of wilderness exploration to tourist accounts. Wevers 2002 interrogates the expression of European cultural expansionism in New Zealand, positioning travel writing as a means through which distant and near cultures and enterprises can interact. Mahar 2005 considers the conjunction of 19th-century bourgeois social fields in the colonial “creation” of New Zealand.

Carter, Paul. The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
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Innovative work on travel and spatial history. Explores the poetic constitution of colonial society in relation to the formulation of national identity in late 18th- and 19th-century Australia. Analyzes the extent to which journeying, mapping, and naming construct meanings and identities for geographical spaces. Primarily draws on early explorers’ travelogues. First published in 1987.
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Mahar, Cheleen Ann-Catherine. “Landscape, Empire and the Creation of Modern New Zealand.” In Landscape and Empire, 1770–2000. Edited by Glenn Hooper, 65–78. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005.
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Analyses the 19th-century European “creation” of a colonial New Zealand from Maori land. Argues for an ideological and material landscape within the conjunction of the aesthetic gaze, economic and political structures, and intracolonial social relations.
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Wevers, Lydia. Country of Writing: Travel Writing and New Zealand, 1809–1900. Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press, 2002.
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A valuable scholarly study of the cultural effects of European expansionism, as well as an effective chronological initiation into the escalating breadth of 19th-century travel writing about New Zealand.
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The Caribbean and West Indies

Victorian travelers to the West Indies were frequently connected with trade and with the sugar plantations on islands such as Jamaica, where the slave laborers’ uprising of 1865 became an infamous Victorian cause célèbre. Interest in the islands’ indigenous populations helped foster a rapid growth in tourist travel after the 1860s. Noted Victorian travel writers on the West Indies include the novelists Anthony Trollope (b. 1815–d. 1882) with The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1859) and Charles Kingsley (b. 1819–d. 1875) with At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (1885). Gikandi 1996 (cited under Victorian Travel Writing and Postcolonial Theory) discusses travel to the West Indies in terms of the circularity of travelers’ discourses. Hulme 2000 traces the development of mass tourism in the Caribbean, in an important follow-up to the author’s influential work on the Caribbean in earlier periods. O’Callaghan 2005 considers the distinctiveness of women’s travel narratives to the region.

Hulme, Peter. Remnants of Conquest: The Island Caribs and Their Visitors, 1877–1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
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Examination of the 1877 encounter between an American ornithologist and a small indigenous group, the Caribs, in Dominica, and the escalating tourism produced. Primarily concerned with 20th-century responses but two chapters address late Victorian contexts, considering the Caribs in terms of postcolonialism and indigenous identity.
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O’Callaghan, Evelyn. “‘A Hot Place, Belonging to Us’: The West Indies in Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing by Women.” In Landscape and Empire 1770–2000. Edited by Glenn Hooper, 93–110. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005.
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Explores the constructions of the West Indies by a number of late 19th- and early-20th-century women travel writers from a variety of racial and cultural backgrounds.
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Europe

The Romantic popularity of Continental travel intensified in the Victorian period. Recent critical focus has, however, tended to privilege travel writing in relation to the British Empire and colonial locations, which has left European travel writing under-discussed over the past decade. Porter 1991 is a powerful psychoanalytical reading of European travel writing that is crucial reading for further researchers in travel as a genre, as well as those interested in psychology and travel motifs in European writing. Pemble 1987 and Buzard 1993 (cited under Tourism) are both central texts for an understanding of British Victorian travel writing on the Continent. Pemble 1987 positions the Mediterranean, not only as an increasingly popular object of Victorian middle-class travel but also as a site of enhanced imaginative importance. Buzard 1993 explores the evolution of a discourse of “antitourism” in 19th-century European travel writing, including the role played by guidebooks in structuring the travel experience. The Classical heritage of Italy and Greece made both countries popular travel destinations. Eisner 1993 sets travel writing on Greece in a long chronological context, noting the extent to which the country tended to polarize travelers’ views of it, while the essays in Kolocotroni and Mitsi 2008 analyze women’s accounts of Greek travel. British tourists in Italy concentrated on monuments and architecture, in particular the remnants of Classical Rome (accompanied by ruminations on potential parallels to the British Empire). Visiting key sites such as the Colosseum—often lamenting the Italians’ failure to preserve the picturesque nature of the scene—formed an important narrative structure for the travelogue. Among the many prominent Victorian writers who produced travelogues on Italy were Charles Dickens (b. 1812–d. 1870) with Pictures from Italy (1846)—Kate Flint’s introduction to Dickens 1998 contextualizes Dickens’s invocation of aesthetic and religious spectacle—and the American Henry James with Italian Hours (1909). Chapman and Stabler 2003 offers a distinctive selection of British women writers’ and artists’ responses to Italy. Regarding Alpine travel, there was intense enthusiasm around the mid-19th century for mountains and mountaineering. Victorian depictions of the Alps varied between seeing them as echoes of the Romantic sublime (sources of fear and awe) and as overrun tourist locations; Colley 2010 tracks this move away from the sublime, though the author’s work also usefully addresses technological aspects of mountaineering. Travel writing about Scandinavian countries, while not as prominent in critical discussion of the field, was nevertheless an important aspect of 19th-century European travel: a burgeoning tourist industry developed between Britain and Norway by sea. Fjagesund and Symes 2003 gathers a vivid selection of primary texts.

Chapman, Alison, and Jane Stabler, eds. Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003.
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Considers a series of British Victorian women’s literary and artistic responses to Italy in terms of religion, Italian nationalism, and aesthetics.
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Colley, Anne C. Victorians in the Mountains: Sinking the Sublime. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2010.
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Explores invocation and undermining of the sublime in travel accounts, as well as popular literature and spectacle, emerging from the Victorian reformulation of the Alps as a major tourist location. Includes discussion of female mountaineers, as well as a section on the major Victorian writers John Ruskin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
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Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy. Edited by Kate Flint. New York: Penguin, 1998.
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In her introduction (pp. vii–xxx), volume editor Flint contextualizes Dickens’s travelogue in terms of a discourse of spectacle.
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Eisner, Robert. Travelers to an Antique Land: The History and Literature of Travel to Greece. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
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Individualized analysis of the common ground linking travelers to Greece from Antiquity to the 20th century. Includes two chapters on “Travelers in Tweeds,” which trace the evolution of modern conceptions of travel from the 19th century.
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Fjagesund, Peter, and Ruth A. Symes. The Northern Utopia: British Perceptions of Norway in the Nineteenth Century. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003.
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Gathers a vivid selection of primary texts across a variety of genres. Considers the representation of Norway as an industry-free natural utopia.
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Kolocotroni, Vassiliki, and Efterpi Mitsi, eds. Women Writing Greece: Essays on Hellenism, Orientalism and Travel. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008.
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Essay collection on women’s accounts of modern Greece from the 18th century onward. Includes three chapters on Victorian women travelers.
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Pemble, John. The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
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Places Mediterranean travel as becoming integral to Victorian bourgeois life; middle-class travelers could pursue interest, leisure, or health via previously aristocratic routes. Comprehensive work for social historians and scholars of the Mediterranean as well as of travel writing. Also an entertaining and accessible read for undergraduates and those with more general interests.
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Porter, Dennis. Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
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Seminal, self-reflexive text on travel writing as structured by absence and desire, producing representations of identity transgressive in being predetermined and thus perpetually cyclical. Discussion of male European writers from 1760 to the 20th century whose texts contain elements of travel and particularly of ethnographic ambition.
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Britain

Localized “home tours” of areas of England, Scotland, and Wales became popular in the 18th- and early 19th centuries: although transport improvements opened up much more far-flung possibilities for Victorian travelers, they also facilitated leisure travel within the then United Kingdom. Morgan 2001 is an influential challenge to prevailing theories about the cultural construction of national identities: it uses travel writing to address the underexplored issues of different regions, cultures, and races within Britain itself, while comparing these travels to Victorian travel writing on the Continent. For scholars of tourism studies, Gold and Gold 1995 provides an analysis of the cultural marketing of Scotland since 1750, while Grenier 2005 takes a more literary studies approach in focusing upon the ways in which English (and Northern American) travelers to Scotland envisaged and re-imagined it as a foreign country. Late Victorian social reformers such as “General” William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, inspired by African travelogues, invoked the language of wilderness exploration and travels into unknown lands in order to rouse public awareness of the squalor and bleakness of lower-class urban cityscapes, especially in London; Driver 2001 (cited under Space and Motion) discusses Booth’s work.

Gold, John R., and Margaret M. Gold. Imagining Scotland: Tradition, Representation and Promotion in Scottish Tourism since 1750. Aldershot, UK: Scolar, 1995.
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Analyzes the depiction of Scotland in tourist promotional literature from the mid-18th century to the 20th, discussing the production of “Highland Scotland” and the marketing of urban Scotland, contrasting the post-1850 growth of tourism with the Highland Clearances.
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Grenier, Katherine Haldane. Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 1770–1914: Creating Caledonia. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005.
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Discusses shifting perceptions of Scotland in travelogues by English and North American travelers as a foreign country and, therefore, an imagined space. Considers Victorian constructions of Scotland and the Scottish landscape as a counter to industrialization and how the Scots themselves sought to produce versions of their identity.
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Morgan, Marjorie. National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230512153Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines internal travel within Britain in the light of regional identities, considering England, Scotland, and Wales, while placing these identities in the context of “Britishness” and Victorian travelers to the Continent. Emphasizes the importance of everyday life, rituals and surroundings to identity. Valuable for scholars of travel writing and of theories of nation formation.
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Ireland

The years 1775 to 1850 saw a high level of British tourist interest in Ireland. Well-known Victorian travelers there included the novelist W. M. Thackeray (b. 1811–d. 1863), whose The Irish Sketch Book of 1842 (1843) gives a jocular view of the Irish, and the towering cultural commentator Thomas Carlyle, whose posthumous Reminiscences of My Irish Journey in 1849 (1882) reveals his racially tinged disgust with the Irish as savage and corrupt. The Great Famine between the 1840s and 1850s became an incentive for additional observers from abroad, albeit with a more philanthropic or sociological intent, while many visitors after 1850 emphasized population loss and consequent opportunities for new settlers. Some Irish novelists (especially Anglo-Irish) employed fictional travelogues as a narrative device to educate English readers about Ireland. There was a resurgence of interest in Irish travel during the 1880s in the context of Irish Home Rule movements. Williams 2008 explores the defining of British national identity against Irishness, while Williams 2010 discusses the late 18th- and early 19th-century formulation of Ireland into a modern tourist destination: Hadfield and McVeagh 1994 traces paradoxical discourses in travelogues expounding on the natural beauty of the landscape while describing the Irish poor in terms of animalistic degradation, the latter exacerbated by observers around the famine years. Ryle 1999 considers scenic tourism in Ireland in the context of industrialization. Hooper 2002 gives an insightful introduction to the political contexts and central themes of 19th-century travel writing about Ireland that would be useful for beginning students in the field; for scholars doing further research in the field, Hooper 2005 is a solid basis for exploring genre shifts over the century.

Hadfield, Andrew, and John McVeagh, eds. Strangers to That Land: British Perceptions of Ireland from the Reformation to the Famine. Gerrard’s Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1994.
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Explores representations of Ireland by British travelers (defined here as English, Scottish, and Welsh) from the 16th to the 19th centuries.
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Hooper, Glenn. “The Isles/Ireland: the Wilder Shore.” In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, 174–190. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL052178140XSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Good introductory text that gives a brief overview of 18th-century travelogues about Britain as background for discussion of travel and politics in 19th- and 20th-century Ireland. Positions Ireland in the aftermath of the 1800 Act of Union as “both a spectacle and a domestic arena” (p. 179) for British writers.
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Hooper, Glenn. Travel Writing and Ireland, 1760–1860: Culture, History, Politics. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230510814Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines British travelers’ responses to Ireland, incorporating broader contexts of European and imperial travel writing. The chapter on “1820–1850” addresses greater focus on problems with the union, as well as on disasters such as the famine, which produced missionary and philanthropic travelogues; “1850–1860” addresses post-famine colonial views of Ireland as a settler destination.
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Ryle, Martin. Journeys in Ireland: Literary Travellers, Rural Landscapes, Cultural Relations. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999.
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Explores the development in travelogues by English and Irish writers of “a culture of scenic tourism” whereby Irish landscapes were set in relation to nostalgic discourses regarding tradition, rural depopulation, and the effects of industrial urban space. Covers writing from the 18th to the 20th century.
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Williams, William H. A. Tourism, Landscape and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-famine Ireland. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.
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Considers over one hundred travelogues on Ireland between 1750 and 1850. Traces British national identity being defined against Irishness as essentially peculiar, through religion, languages, mourning rituals, etc.
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Williams, William H. A. Creating Irish Tourism: The First Century, 1750–1850. London: Anthem, 2010.
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Invention of Ireland as a major European tourist resort between 1750 and 1850. Considers modern tourism in terms of self-organizing infrastructures.
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The Middle East and Arabia

The Arabia peninsula only became an object of sustained British exploration after the 1850s, but it swiftly took on considerable socioeconomic importance to British influence and commerce, as well as becoming an iconic site of exotic travel in the Victorian imagination. (“Middle East” is a more modern term for what would have been Arabia or “the Orient” to Victorian travelers.) Richard Burton (b. 1821–d. 1890), whose famous journey to Mecca disguised as an Arab thrilled Victorian readers, is probably the traveler most closely associated with the region, especially given the influence of his sexually explicit 1885–1888 translation of the “Arabian Nights” (The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night). Kennedy 2005 is a fine scholarly biography of Burton that will benefit undergraduates and academics alike. Melman 2002 is a good starting point for students seeking to understand the history of travel writing about the region and its imaginative positioning with regard to Orientalism, while her comments on the political implications of Islamic powers will be of value to studies of colonialism, religion, or politics. Tidrick 1981 offers an evocative analysis of the place held by Arabia in the English imagination, recommended for scholars at all levels. The sweep of material in Schiffer 1999 allows for an authoritative account of the changing nature of normative British perceptions of Turkey. Biblical tourism (also discussed under Religion) made the Holy Land a popular destination for religious travelers: Moscrop 2000 gives a detailed historical account of the theological, historical, and military objectives of the Palestinian Exploration Fund. Nash 2005 contextualizes Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism by identifying anti-imperialist, pro-Islamic discourses in the writings of some prominent late Victorian travelers to the Middle East.

Kennedy, Dane. The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
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Fine scholarly biography-cum-critical analysis that seeks “to demythologize and rehistoricize Burton’s life” (p. 6) by placing him within Victorian debates and cultural concerns. Redefines eccentricity and apparent alienation as means through which to acquire imperial power and approval.
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Melman, Billie. “The Middle East/Arabia: the ‘Cradle of Islam.” In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, 105–121. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL052178140XSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Discusses the representation of the Middle East in European travel writing as a border zone of comparative proximity to, yet alienation from, Europe. Posits two dominant models: the pilgrimage and the ethnographic account focused on domestic Muslim life.
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Moscrop, John James. Measuring Jerusalem: The Palestine Exploration Fund and British Interests in the Holy Land. Leicester, UK: Continuum, 2000.
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Traces the history of the Palestinian Exploration Fund, founded in 1865 to enhance knowledge of biblical territories but also engaged in surveying work with military objectives—and after 1886, largely doing archaeological work. Covers period from 1800 to 1914 (with early chapters establishing historical and cultural contexts).
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Nash, Geoffrey. From Empire to Orient: Travellers to the Middle East, 1830–1926. London: I. B. Tauris, 2005.
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Considers a number of male administrators and commentators traveling in the Middle East between 1830 to 1926, arguing for several of these as endorsing anti-imperialist and pro-Islamic discourses. Some of the texts fall more into the category of historical or cultural analysis than of travelogues but includes discussion of the travel writings of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.
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Schiffer, Reinhold. Oriental Panorama: British Travelers in 19th Century Turkey. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.
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Explores the impact of Turkey on Romantic and Victorian writers; surveys over 160 British travelogues on Ottoman Turkey, covering the late 18th to the late 19th centuries. Thematically ordered, with specific chapters devoted to questions of gender and genre, pursuing a more historicist than theoretical approach. Includes bibliography of primary sources.
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Tidrick, Kathryn. Heart-Beguiling Araby: The English Romance with Arabia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
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Engrossing analysis of Arabia’s hold over the English imagination. Includes discussion of Richard Burton and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.
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Egypt

Napoleon’s 1798 invasion raised subsequent European interest in Egypt; the country occupied a distinctive place in the imaginations of Victorian travelers and the Victorian reading public. During the 19th century, Britain exercised informal control over the region without formal annexation, and the development of overland and steamship routes made it an especially popular tourist destination from the 1840s. Egypt became an iconic imperial site during the 1880s, when the revolt of the Mahdi in the Sudan brought about the death of General Gordon in 1884 and the fall of the government of the day. Whereas many African regions were seen as uncivilized wastelands, either conveniently “empty” or merely populated with savages, Egypt was seen as possessing the ruins of a decayed but once-great civilization—one to which many travelers compared imperial Britain. Biblical tourism made ancient Egypt a popular destination, but toward the end of the 19th century more scientifically based archaeological studies created a popular fascination with Egyptology. Edward William Lane’s 1836 study of the cultural practices of modern Egypt set up a classically Orientalist pattern of the representation of non-Western familial structures as essentially corrupt. Other prominent travelers in Egypt included Harriet Martineau (b. 1802–d. 1876), Florence Nightingale (b. 1820–d. 1910), and Lucie Duff-Gordon (b. 1821–d. 1869). Amelia Edwards (b. 1831–d. 1892) had popular success with her 1872 travelogue of her voyage up the Nile; she became cofounder of the Egypt Exploration Fund (later the Egypt Exploration Society) for study into and preservation of ancient Egyptian monuments. The essays in James 1982 discuss the activities of the society. Barrell 2000 explores the discrepancy between admiration for ancient Egyptian culture and disdain for modern Egyptian civilization in early Victorian tourist literature, arguing persuasively for the genre as enabling the expression of violent “mid-nineteenth-century fear and loathing of the East” (p. 189). Starkey and Starkey 2001 gives a range of perspectives from travelers to Egypt.

Barrell, John. “Death on the Nile: Fantasy and the Literature of Tourism, 1840–60.” In Cultures of Empire—A Reader: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Edited by Catherine Hall, 187–206. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000.
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Considers the different criteria through which early Victorian tourist literature evaluated Ancient and modern Egypt: theological and racial liberalism versus ethnographically and anthropologically centered fear and repulsion. Focuses on Martineau’s Eastern Life (1848), Nightingale’s Letters from Egypt (1854), and the American William C. Prime’s Boat Life in Egypt and Nubia (1857). First published Essays in Criticism 41.2 (April 1991): 97–127.
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James, T. G. H., ed. Excavating in Egypt: The Egypt Exploration Society, 1882–1982. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
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Essays discussing the locations and purposes of the E.E.S.’s excavations.
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Starkey, Paul, and Janet Starkey, eds. Interpreting the Orient: Travellers in Egypt and the Near East. Reading, UK: Ithaca, 2001.
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Chronologically arranged essays discussing the motivations and experiences of Western travelers to Egypt and the Near East over the centuries. Includes essays on Anthony Trollope, female slavery, and the significance of Europeans adopting Arabian or Turkish dress.
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Polar Exploration

Polar exploration was regularly linked to questions of national pride and prestige in the Victorian period: between 1818 and 1860 the British Admiralty dispatched several expeditions to the Far North, narratives of which became popular with readers. Levere 1993 puts the scientific dimensions of these expeditions in the context of European national identities and emerging Canadian nationalism. Thompson 2004 admirably encapsulates the connections between technological advance and ideological aspiration in early-19th-century expeditions. For the influence of polar exploration on Victorian culture, Spufford 1996 is an accessible critique of ethical and gendered ideologies that would be of value both to a general readership and to an academic readership, but for a wide-ranging scholarly understanding, students, and further scholars are directed toward the extensive cultural research in David 2000. Riffenburgh 1993 is an informative analysis of the ways in which polar expedition became “produced” by the popular press over the second half the 19th century; this is of general scholarly interest but will be of particular significance to scholars of travel writing’s reception and role in popular culture. Loomis 1977 is a seminal article that considers the visual dimensions of Arctic exploration. Behrisch 2003 compares scientific narratives and poetry produced by Arctic travel (which is also helpful for thinking about poetry as a genre of travel writing). The doomed 1845 expedition of Sir John Franklin in search of the Northwest Passage (a sea route linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans via the Arctic Ocean) took on iconic qualities in the Victorian popular imagination. The mystery of Franklin’s eventual fate fueled much speculation (including heated debates on whether or not the expedition had resorted to cannibalism), as well as various search expeditions from 1847 up to around 1854. It also influenced a number of literary works, such as Wilkie Collins’s 1856 drama The Frozen Deep, revised and produced in collaboration with Charles Dickens. The Victorian Web includes a concise section giving information about the expedition and its aftermath.

Behrisch, Erika. “‘Far as the Eye Can Reach’: Scientific Exploration and Explorers’ Poetry in the Arctic, 1832–1852.” Victorian Poetry 41.1 (Spring 2003): 73–92.
DOI: 10.1353/vp.2003.0007Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Compares the scientific narratives of Arctic exploration, celebrating Victorian rationality and determination, with the poetry written by explorers about their travels. Argues that poetry constitutes a protest against the supposed objectivity of scientific narrative in favor of the subjective observer’s experience.
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David, Robert G. The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818–1914. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000.
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Examines the cultural influence exerted by Arctic exploration in Victorian society, considering a remarkable variety of media (through which the book is organized), including panoramas, exhibitions, and plays. Pays especially productive attention to the publication of Arctic narratives by explorers and the symbiotic relationship between polar travelogues and the illustrated press.
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The Franklin Expedition, 1845–1859. Victorian Web.
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A subcategory of the Victorian Web, managed by George Landow of Brown University. Assembles primary materials and commentaries relating to the Franklin expedition and its aftermath. Useful resource for undergraduates in particular.
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Levere, Trevor. Science and the Canadian Arctic: A Century of Exploration, 1818–1918. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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Discussion of the imperialist and nationalist underpinnings of scientific exploration in the Canadian Arctic, examining the British Royal Naval expeditions up to the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913–1918.
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Loomis, Chauncey C. “The Arctic Sublime.” In Nature and the Victorian Imagination. Edited by U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson, 95–112. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.
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Seminal article relating the visual aspects of Arctic exploration to the literary concept of the sublime: links the sketches and watercolors made by Arctic explorers to their travelogues. Includes illustrations.
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Riffenburgh, Beau. The Myth of the Explorer: The Press, Sensationalism, and Geographical Discovery. London and New York: Belhaven, 1993.
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Nuanced exploration of the relationship between polar exploration and its reception and reproduction in the British and American popular press. Primary focus is 1855 to 1910 and the creation of the heroic explorer as a cultural icon, replacing an earlier Romantic-inspired language of (European) landscape description with a celebration of conquered nature.
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Spufford, Francis. I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.
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Account of the literary and ethical representations of the polar regions in the English imagination, considering the 19th-century fascination with Arctic exploration as establishing the background for the early-20th-century Antarctic expeditions. More valuable for the ethical dimensions of Victorian thought on polar exploration (including its relation to gender roles and ideologies) than for its literary dimensions and effects.
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Thompson, Carl. “The Heroic Age of the Tin Can: Technology and Ideology in British Arctic Exploration, 1818–1835.” In Maritime Empires: British Imperial Trade in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby, 84–99. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2004.
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Offers productive insights into the alliance of technology and ideology. Considers the tin can as a distinctly modern technology, in itself of vital importance to early-19th-century British exploration but also standing as metonymic to the expeditions’ wider ideological frameworks of naturalized British ordering and improvement of Arctic “wastelands.”
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