Abstract
ABSTRACT This article compares the manuscript and two published editions of Anthony Trollope's understudied travelogue South Africa (1878), exploring the affective impetus driving the inconsistency and revisions in his articulations concerning the “native” question in South African colonies. It argues that Trollope's inability to fully legitimise Britain's colonisation of South Africa through conventional discourses stems from the profound impact of his immediate affective responses to the atrocity of colonialism. Trollope wrote with great haste as he travelled, in order to preserve his immediate emotions and thoughts experienced during his travels. In the travelogue, his scepticism of British colonialism ebbs and flows as he vacillates between moral scruples and conservatism during the writing and revision process. This article illuminates a neglected facet of nineteenth-century British travel writing: the travellers’ fluctuating emotions contributed to the subtle fluidity of their narratives of colonialism, complicating their complicity in perpetuating racial and colonial ideologies.
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