Nineteenth-Century British Travel Research Articles

A “Fanatic in Morality”: The “Native” Question, Revisions, and Emotional Intensity in Anthony Trollope’s South Africa (1878)

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.

The Baron von Münchhausen of British Travel Writers: Edmund Spencer and his Travels in Circassia

Abstract The article is devoted to a critical analysis of the legacy of Edmund Spencer – a nineteenth century British travel writer and author of numerous books and articles on Circassia and the Caucasus. The widespread use of Spencer’s work by historians notwithstanding, until now there has been no published biography of the author, which led to a proliferation of claims about his background and the timing and circumstances of his visit to Circassia. This article contributes to the correction of this omission by presenting the results of the latest biographical research on Edmund Spencer, based on manuscript and printed primary sources. Despite doubts expressed by some historians about the existence of such a person, the article conclusively proves that Edmund Spencer was indeed a real historical personage. Furthermore, since until now no attempt has been made to evaluate the reliability of Spencer’s works on Circassia as historical sources, the article examines references to Spencer in contemporaneous manuscript sources, such as the British, French and Russian diplomatic, military and intelligence correspondence and reports, finding that available documentary evidence refutes the author’s claim of a visit to the interior of Circassia. The attitudes of Western scholars of the period and of foreign visitors to Circassia raise further serious doubts about the authenticity of Spencer’s travelogues. The article calls into question Spencer’s account of his travels in Circassia as a source of geographic, ethnographic and sociological knowledge, concluding that it was a nothing more than a fabrication.

Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Accounts, by Leila Koivunen * Representing Africa: Landscape, Exploration and Empire in Southern Africa, 1780-1870, by John McAleer

Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Accounts, by Leila Koivunen * Representing Africa: Landscape, Exploration and Empire in Southern Africa, 1780-1870, by John McAleer

<em>Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Accounts</em>, by Leila Koivunen

<em>Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Accounts</em>, by Leila Koivunen

Review: Mountains So Sublime: Nineteenth-Century British Travellers and the Lure of the Rocky Mountain West, by Terry Abraham

Review: <i>Mountains So Sublime: Nineteenth-Century British Travellers and the Lure of the Rocky Mountain West</i>, by Terry Abraham

Mountains So Sublime: Nineteenth-Century British Travellers and the Lure of the Rocky Mountain West (review)

Mountains So Sublime: Nineteenth-Century British Travellers and the Lure of the Rocky Mountain West (review)

"The Enchanted Garden" or "The Red Flag": Eastern Europe in Late Nineteenth-Century British Travel Writing

At the turn of the twentieth century, parts of Eastern were yet to be explored by Western travelers, while others had opened to tourist travel. British travel writing of the fin-de-siecle reflected this shift, representing the region alternately as civilized and savage, familiar and alien. Dracula (1897), novel that continues to influence Western perceptions of Eastern Europe, appears to parody the ambivalence of British travel writers on whose observations Bram Stoker based his opening chapters. When Jonathan Harker, Stoker's protagonist, crosses the river Danube in BudaPest in search of Dracula, he finds himself in the Orient: The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East, he writes in shorthand, and he reminds himself to record paprika dish recipe (1). Harker's initial reaction is to categorize and, thus, to contain his experience of traveling into one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe (1). Harker's strategies of viewing, writing, and mapping, which keep safe distance between the traveling subject and the native objects, fail him when he encounters Dracula, an accomplished Occidentalist who has already mapped his invasion of London with the aid of a vast number of English books (19).1 Dracula's affinity with Harker, which is reflected in famous mirror scene, presents nightmarish reversal of the conventional subject and object positions found in British travel writing, for

Meals in Foreign Parts: Food in Writing by Nineteenth-Century British Travellers to the Balkans

The interest in the narrative and ideological parameters of travel writing,1 which has been an important feature of the Western European and North American academic contexts over the last fifteen years or so, is undoubtedly a reflection of the unique position of the genre as an area thematising and problematising cultural difference and otherness and as a meeting point of varying discourses of gender, race/ethnicity, class, power, domination and counter-domination. Travel narratives have played a key role in current theoretical debates in postcolonial studies, feminism, cultural studies and comparative literature. To my mind, a considerable number of the critical texts that they have engendered in those fields, appear to privilege a particular analytical strategy focusing on the interpretation of what Laura E. Ciolkowski has termed ‘gender-coded visual power’ (1998: 343). This power operates through the travelling subject’s gaze, which is intent upon the construction of the relatively stationary object(s) of his/her observation. By persistently privileging the analysis of the gaze critics have tended to ignore and even erase other aspects of the complex processes of mediation and negotiation in which travellers and ‘travellees’ are involved.

Gender, nature, empire: women naturalists in nineteenth century British travel literature

Among the many British women abroad in the late nineteenth century were a number of travellers who toured the American West with a naturalist’s pen and sketchbook. California, with its giant sequoias and redwoods, scenic Yosemite Valley and Sierra Nevada, and the Mediterranean flora of the southern coasts, especially attracted travellers with a naturalist orientation. We examine the botanical and naturalist writings and art of two well‐known (and well‐heeled) world travellers – Constance Gordon Cumming and Marianne North – and another more obscure British aristocrat, Theodora Guest, sister of the Duke of Westminster, who travelled in California in the late nineteenth century. We examine relationships among these elite women’s association with the Romantic aesthetic and naturalist traditions, natural sciences, class‐based associations between women and flowers, and emergent environmentalism. The works of these women indicate the process by which natural history rhetorics and styles became embedded within gender, class, and imperial relations; and how the division of natural history into professional and amateur domains relegated women to discursive margins.