1.

INTRODUCTION:
FILLING THE BLANK SPACES

Tim Youngs

Blank spaces
In his narrative of Central African exploration, Through the Dark Continent
(1878), Henry Morton Stanley tells his companion Frank Pocock, who was
soon to drown on their adventure:

‘Now look at this, the latest chart which Europeans have drawn of
this region. It is a blank, perfectly white. …
I assure you, Frank, this enormous void is about to be filled up.
Blank as it is, it has a singular fascination for me. Never has white paper
possessed such a charm for me as this has, and I have already mentally
peopled it, filled it with most wonderful pictures of towns, villages,
rivers, countries and tribes — all in the imagination — and I am
burning to see whether I am correct or not.’ (Stanley 1890, p. 449)

A couple of decades later, Marlow, the protagonist of Joseph Conrad’s tale,

Heart of Darkness, set mainly in the unnamed but identifiable Congo, would
declare:

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 2 TRAVEL WRITING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

‘Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would
look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself
in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank
spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly
inviting on a map (but they all look like that) I would put my finger on
it and say, When I grow up I will go there.’ (Conrad 1973, p. 11)

He has since been to some of the blank spaces:

‘But there was one yet — the biggest, the most blank, so to speak —
that I had a hankering after.
‘True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got
filled … with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank
space of delightful mystery — a white patch for a boy to dream
gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness.’ (Conrad 1973, pp.
11–12)

In that place of darkness there is a mighty serpentine river (recognizable to

readers from other clues as the Congo). Marlow looks at a map of it in a
shop-window on Fleet Street, and ‘it fascinated me as a snake would a bird’
(1973, p. 12). He remembers that a trading company has an interest there,
putting in his mind the idea of indulging his fascination for the river by
plying a steamboat on it, just as Conrad himself had in 1890.
The passages from Stanley and Conrad illustrate a number of important
characteristics of nineteenth-century travel writing. First, that there were
still, in the last quarter of the century, large uncharted parts of the world.
Second, that a motivation of travel was to fill those blanks (though they
were not, of course, blanks to those who lived there). Third, that once
‘discovered’, many of those places would be exploited for their commercial
potential. Fourth, that ideologies of race impacted on the representation of
those places, as well as on dealings with those who inhabited them — here,
Africa as a place of darkness exercising a fatal obsession.
Besides these historical factors, the quotations above suggest more
enduring themes of the relationship between imagination and experience,
and between travel and its record. As Edward Said (1985) has demonstrated,
the way we imagine places is not simply a private, individual affair and our
responses to them when we visit them are not independent but are
mediated by the culturally constructed representations we have previously
encountered. Even ‘new’ worlds have existing ideas projected onto them,
though each world might modify the other.
Travel writing is not a literal and objective record of journeys undertaken.
It carries preconceptions that, even if challenged, provide a reference point.
It is influenced, if not determined, by its authors’ gender, class, age,
nationality, cultural background and education. It is ideological. And it is a

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 INTRODUCTION 3

literary form that draws on the conventions of other literary genres.

Narrators, characters, plots and dialogue are all shaped accordingly. Just
three pages before the part quoted above from Through the Dark Continent,
Stanley, after presenting a stirring speech to his expedition members on the
prospects facing them, adds a note in which he claims that: ‘A poetical
friend on hearing this address brought to my notice a remarkable
coincidence.’ He then includes lines from Tennyson’s Ulysses in which the
hero addresses his mariners (1890, pp. 446–7), ending with:

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Stanley’s own reading included Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Fenimore

Cooper, Gibbon and the Bible (Youngs 1994, p. 210). It affected the way he
wrote, as did his experience in writing for US newspapers. Indeed, one of
Stanley’s biographers remarks that: ‘This was the new feature about the
man: that the explorer and empire-builder was, first, last, and all the time, a
reporter and a journalist’ (Wassermann 1933, p. xv). It is an exaggerated
claim and risks overlooking the terrible effects of Stanley’s actions, but
millions in Europe and the US had their image of Africa formed by Stanley’s
writing, which still casts a shadow. It is as important, then, to attend to the
vehicle of travel literature as it is to the material it carries.
The passages from Stanley’s travel book and Conrad’s novella make the
connection between physical travel and its imaginative account. Stanley
may mentally populate the blank page but his journeys also filled European
blank charts in actuality, while for Conrad the filling in of the blanks crowds
out the imagination. Conrad would complain in an essay first published in
1923 that ‘the time for such books of travel’ as the outstanding Marco Polo’s
is ‘past on this earth girt about with cables, with an atmosphere made
restless by the waves of ether’ (1926b, p. 88). ‘Nothing obviously strange
remains for our eyes now’ (1926b, p. 90); ‘the days of heroic travel are gone’
(1926b, p. 89). Before appearing to reconcile himself to a modern-day
account of impressionistic travel in an age of transition, he finds that it is
now travellers, not places, that are blank, and their blankness is not an
alluring one:

Nowadays many people encompass the globe. That kind of victory

became to a certain extent fashionable for some years after the piercing
of the Isthmus of Suez. Multitudes rushed through that short cut with
blank minds and, alas, also blank notebooks where the megalomania,
from which we all more or less suffer, got recorded in the shape of
‘Impressions.’ The inanity of the mass of travel books the Suez Canal is
responsible for took the proportions of an enormous and melancholy

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 4 TRAVEL WRITING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

joke. (Conrad 1926b, pp. 85–86)

Although Conrad comments that this ‘category of travellers with their

parrot-like remarks, their strange attempts at being funny, and their
lamentable essays in seriousness has apparently passed away’ (1926b, p. 86),
the depth of his scorn for these new globetrotters makes it hard to believe
that he really thinks they have vanished and will not re-emerge.
What a juxtaposition of the passages from Through the Dark Continent and
Heart of Darkness also shows is that there is no neat division between
autobiographical and fictional narratives of travel. Anna Johnston, in her
contribution to the present volume, refers to the historian Glyndwr
Williams’s suggestion that it was difficult for readers to tell whether
accounts of voyages to the South Seas were real or fictitious; while a single
text might itself be subject to re-classification, as initial and subsequent
receptions of Herman Melville’s Typee (1846), discussed by Sarah Johnson,
also in this volume, reveal. It is not simply that both types of text may
address similar themes or that fictional narratives might be based on real-
life adventures, but rather that, as theorists have begun to recognize of
autobiography and travel writing, similar literary techniques are employed
across the genres (Borm 2004).

Girdling the Earth

According to historian Roy Bridges, travel writing in the nineteenth century
reached ‘a position of influence greater than had ever previously been the
case and certainly greater than was to be the case after 1914’. The principal
reason for this is that ‘the developments of the previous 200 years had
effectively created one world’ and so ‘[a]n understanding of this
momentous historical development needs to embrace the study of the travel
writing of the period’ (Bridges 2002, p. 67).
Bridges’s examination is of ‘Exploration and travel outside Europe (1720–
1914)’, a time in which ‘travel writing became increasingly identified with
the interests and preoccupations of those in European societies who wished
to bring the non-European world into a position where it could be
influenced, exploited or, in some cases, directly controlled’ (Bridges 2002, p.
53). This was especially true of Britain. Bridges sees the period from the
middle and later eighteenth century as one in which ‘the beginning of the
end of the old mercantilist empire of plantations, slavery and Atlantic trade
is apparent’ and a movement towards the East and Africa may be discerned;
the period from about 1830 to 1880 as one ‘of Victorian non-annexationist
global expansion characterised by considerable confidence about Britain and
its place in the world’; and the period 1880–1914 as one ‘of severe

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 INTRODUCTION 5

international competition and territorial annexations accompanied by

considerable anxiety’ (Bridges 2002, p. 54).
After the naval victory at Trafalgar in 1805 and (in Bridges’s opinion, less
crucially) the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, ‘Britain emerged as a
truly global power’ (2002, pp. 54–55):

Vast areas in Canada and Australasia with considerable bodies of

settlers as well as the West Indian islands were under direct rule, while
large parts of India had come under the control of a handful of East
India Company officials. Just as significant was the opportunity
Britain’s merchants and investors now had to operate in former Spanish
and Portuguese territories of the New World and that they were poised
to gain access to 500 million possible consumers in China. In addition,
West Africa had come to be seen as offering a potentially valuable
market; the British government and other agencies were beginning to
decide for Africans with whom they should trade and whether they
should be permitted to sell slaves. (Bridges 2002, p. 55)

It is in this world context, as well as the domestic European one described

by James Buzard (1993), that nineteenth-century travel writing should be
seen. Of course, Britain’s expanding role in the world ‘meant that larger and
larger numbers of travellers and explorers made journeys to report upon it’
(Bridges 2002, p. 55); a point also made by Peter Kitson, who notes in
addition the ‘advent of a different breed of traveller: the “globetrotter”, akin
to our modern conception of the tourist’ (Kitson 2003, p. xi). The present
volume considers some of these many different kinds of traveller and invites
reflection on their relative positions in this international network.
Narratives of empire have dominated many critical studies of nineteenth-
century travel, and of course they occupied a prominent role at the time.
Although Bridges cautions against the common error of failing to
understand ‘how reluctant governments always were to take
“administrative control” of large areas’ (p. 57), he recognizes that this does
not mean that contemporary travel texts did not contribute to an ideology
that helped promote ideas of Western, and specifically British, superiority (a
legacy some might detect in pronouncements on international affairs today).
In many of those texts the attitudes that accompanied expansion — some
have said enabled it — are blatant. Sir Charles Dilke explains in the preface
to his Greater Britain:

In 1866 and 1867, I followed England round the world: everywhere I

was in English-speaking, or in English-governed lands. …
The idea which in all the length of my travels has been at once my
fellow and my guide … is a conception, however imperfect, of the
grandeur of our race, already girdling the earth, which it is destined,

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 6 TRAVEL WRITING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

perhaps, eventually to overspread. (Dilke 1880, p.vii)

The belief in racial superiority stains many contemporary texts, including

some of those discussed in this volume, though we shall see reactions
against it too. Nor should it be dismissed with a wave from the distance of a
century: the prejudices and (mis)perceptions of nineteenth-century travel
writers and their audiences are deployed in print and the broadcast media
still. Corinne Fowler (2005) has shown how journalists in the twenty-first
century recruited nineteenth-century representations of Afghanistan during
‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, the US-led attack on that country; and
Vesna Goldsworthy, in chapter two of this volume, traces the intermittent
resurrection of nineteenth-century stereotypes of the Balkans at times that
suit the purposes of outsiders. Yet, as Bridges admits, travel writing can,
‘albeit through a distorting mirror’, provide ‘information about the non-
Europeans who were the recipients of imperial visitors and conquerors and,
rather too often, their victims’ (2002, p. 67). Alasdair Pettinger and Anna
Johnston, in chapters nine and twelve of the present volume, make similar
points, Pettinger arguing that detailed accounts by racists can be more
useful to the cultural historian and anthropologist than superficial accounts
by progressives.

Tourism
Besides the movements of colonialism and imperialism (and sometimes
alongside them) the nineteenth century also witnessed the decline (or at
least the mutation) of the Grand Tour and the birth of mass tourism, a
phenomenon enabled by developments in transport and by increased
leisure time (brief though that still was for most). Consensus has it that the
rise of modern tourism began with the opening up of Europe to British
travellers after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815.
James Buzard (1993) tracks a route towards the greater organization of
transport and leisure. The development of Thomas Cook’s tours epitomizes
this and the growing use of guidebooks led to uniformity and control, with
tourists’ itineraries and attractions being set out for them. Against this,
Buzard notes a tendency for travellers (those who wished to distinguish
themselves from tourists) to emphasize their individuality; to proclaim their
superiority of knowledge and sentiment (pp. 121–22).
A related feature noted by Buzard also applies more widely. Post-
Napoleonic visitors to continental Europe were confronted by a mass of
travel writings. The need to differentiate oneself in one’s own accounts
(Buzard 1993, p. 156), even while one has inevitably to operate within the
constraints of convention, characterizes subsequent travel writing also. To

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 INTRODUCTION 7

challenge those constraints is to acknowledge their power. The works

Buzard goes on to examine ‘often began with the acknowledgement that
other texts had covered their chosen fields, but they then proceeded, by way
of various manoeuvres, to assert originality in spite of their belatedness’
(Buzard 1993, p. 161). The movement accompanies the drift towards a
separation of what Buzard calls the prosaic and poetic functions of travel
writing. As guidebooks such as Murray’s became more comprehensive, the
informational purpose of the travel narrative could become more detached
from its literary and individualistic elements. Buzard paints a picture of
increasing generic separation as the century wore on.
It may be tempting to infer from the history of European tourism offered
by Buzard and others a shift from Romantic, individual travel to the more
th
commoditized form symbolized in the title of W Fraser Rae’s 50
anniversary story of Thomas Cook’s, The Business of Travel (1891), yet travel
of other kinds had long been business too. So, often, was the science of
exploration. Conrad lauded James Cook’s voyages, like ‘the single-minded
explorers of the nineteenth century’, for being purely scientific and free
from the taint of acquisitiveness (1926a, p. 10), but Bridges reminds us that
those same three voyages of Cook ‘set the pattern of government
demanding scientific investigation as part of a search for precise and
accurate information whether or not this pointed to economic opportunities’
(Bridges 2002, p. 55). Indeed, ‘A vital feature’ of the expansion of European
industrial and commercial capitalism around the world after 1830 is ‘the
capture of science for the purposes of overseas expansion’ (2002, p. 61).

Rolling-stock
It has been said that ‘the modern world began’ with the railway; that ‘the
first conquest of physical distance by mechanical power was the revolution
in communications from which all the rest have stemmed’ (Perkin 1971, p.
12). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the historian of Thomas
Cook’s could remind his readers that in the pre-railway days, ‘A journey of
a hundred miles was … looked upon with greater apprehension than a
journey round the globe is at present’ (Rae 1891, p. 5).
It was not simply a question of mobility. Not only did the railway
facilitate travel — and the expansion of capitalism and empire — but it
changed people’s relationship with and perceptions of the world. The
cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1980, ch. 4) has recounted how
the development of rail travel led many to feel a disassociation from the
landscape through which they were carried at record speeds. The landscape
comes to be experienced as discontinuous. The train is often described as a
projectile and ‘The traveler who sits inside that projectile ceases to be a

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traveler and becomes, as noted in a popular metaphor of the century, a mere

parcel’ (1980, pp. 58–59). The travellers’ perceptions are mechanized (p. 59)
and passengers perceive a loss of control. Those who were used to pre-
industrial modes of travel, and were ‘thus not able to develop modes of
perception appropriate to the new form of transportation’ (p. 61), had their
view represented by Ruskin’s statement that ‘travelling becomes dull in
exact proportion to its rapidity’ (quoted in Schivelbusch, p. 60).
Schivelbusch, drawing on Dolf Sternberger’s ideas, has written how the
velocity of railway travel means that the foreground is blurred; it
disappears, with the result that ‘the depth perception of preindustrial
consciousness is literally lost’ (1980, p. 65; Buzard 1993, p. 36). In the
panoramic perception afforded by the railway,

The traveler sees the objects, landscapes, etc. through the apparatus
which moves him through the world. That machine and the motion it
creates become integrated into his visual perception: thus he can only
see things in motion. (Schivelbusch 1980, p. 66)

Ken Gelder has noticed this in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) as Jonathan
Harker takes the train to Transylvania. Gelder concludes that: ‘Railway
travel thus enables certain conventions for travel writing to cohere: what
one sees is panoramic, spectacular, distanced and soon left behind’ (Gelder
1994, p. 3).
Less often noted by those who draw on Schivelbusch’s work is his
attention to those who did adapt to the new conditions of travel and who
were not discomfited by the effect of the new speeds. In this emergent
perception,

… all the things that the old consciousness experiences as losses

become sources of enrichment. The velocity and linearity with which
the train traverses the landscape no longer destroys it … only now is it
possible to fully appreciate that landscape. (Schivelbusch 1980, p. 62)

In this view, the velocity that Ruskin and others decried became ‘a stimulus
for the new perception’ (1980, p. 62). One of those who embraced this new
perception was the former slave William Wells Brown (discussed further in
chapter ten of the present volume) who several times mentions with
approval the speed with which he travels by train through Britain. And in
France, travelling by train from Boulogne to Amiens, he enthuses that:

The eye cannot but be gratified at viewing the entire country from the
coast to the metropolis. Sparkling hamlets spring up, as the steam-horse
speeds his way, at almost every point, showing the progress of civilisation,
and the refinement of the nineteenth century. (Brown 1969, p. 56)

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 INTRODUCTION 9

It may not surprise us too much that the runaway slave welcomes this
spectacular movement; this sign of modernity that brings with it a new
perspective. At least he does so in France, where no one laughs at him for
being black, and in Britain where he finds freedom from the racism that in
the US sees the same people who rode with him in England refusing to
allow him to ride with them on the omnibus (p. 312).
So, in reminding us of ‘how differently velocity and evanescence can be
experienced during the same period of time’ (1980, p. 63), Schivelbusch
guides us to a point that applies more generally and that underlies the
present book: we should not assume a uniformity of mode or perception of
travel in the nineteenth century. Innovations, tendencies and reactions can
be observed but the general picture is a varied one. That, too, is one of the
aims of this volume: similarities between the various travellers do exist but
there are distinctions between them also and these ought not to be lost in the
temptation to generalize.
Travel may be different for men and women as well as for those of
different class and ‘race’ backgrounds. Sidonie Smith, reminding us that
‘[p]rominent in the repertoire of meanings identified with journeying in the
West have been the meanings attached to itinerant masculinity’ (Smith 2001,
p. ix), states that:

The expanding mobility of certain women in the middle to late

nineteenth century came as an effect of modernity — democratization,
literacy, education, increasing wealth, urbanization and
industrialization, and the colonial and imperial expansion that
produced wealth and the investment in ‘progress’. (Smith 2001, p. xi)

Thus the greater mobility of women was associated with ‘the new
technologies of motion that drove modernity’ (Smith 2001, p. xi):

New technologies of motion have also created new social relations

over the last century. Consequently, they have affected the conditions,
the rhythms, even the presentational styles of contact between the
traveler and other travelers, between the traveler and strangers. They
determine the specific dynamics of social encounters — their duration,
their form, their potential effects, and their modes of communication.
(2001, p. 23)

These found their expression in literature and would, in the period of

Smith’s study, affect the ‘stories women narrate about gender and bodies in
motion in the twentieth century’ (Smith 2001, p. xiii).
Scholars concerned to investigate or demonstrate differences between
men’s and women’s travel writing have found especially rich material in the
nineteenth century (Blunt 1994, McEwan 2000, Mills 1993). Among the

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reasons for this interest are that women’s travel texts have, like women’s
writing more generally, suffered relative neglect; that travel abroad
presented women (more than it did men) with an opportunity to shed the
constraints of fixed roles at home by ‘crossing new horizons into a fresh
mental and physical world’ (Birkett 1989, p. 74; also see pp. 40, 52); and that
the question of whether women travelled as subjects or as agents of imperial
power, or as both, is one that involves an often difficult dialogue between
feminist and postcolonial theories. McEwan’s bold assertion that ‘white
women travellers during the nineteenth century were, in many and varying
ways, complicit in imperialism; their own liberation was facilitated by the
oppression of others’ (2000, p. 11) is at one end of the spectrum of views on
this.

Photography
As well as the railways, another nineteenth-century invention, photography,
was to have a profound effect on the ways that people looked at things.
Apart from its other travel uses, which included racial classification
(Maxwell 2000), photography quickly became linked with tourism.
There are parallels between train travel and photography. In both, the
landscape is framed and the act of perception becomes a shared experience.
In both, there is a sense that the landscape or monument is presenting itself
to the eye.
There are further connections to be made between what cultural
historians and sociologists regard as this new mode of seeing and the new
modes of travel. Recent theory on the role of photography and on the way
tourists look at sights have stressed the idea of taking and possessing the
thing photographed: ‘To photograph is to appropriate the thing
photographed’, was Susan Sontag’s snappy formula (1979, p. 4), repeated
by Urry: ‘To photograph is in some way to appropriate the object being
photographed. It is a power/knowledge relationship’ (Urry 2002, p.127).
Sontag’s truism, though questionable, appeals to many and helps explain
the links that have been made between travel, imperialism, looking and
photography. Mary Louise Pratt’s influential book on travel writing,
Imperial Eyes (1993), underlines the link between imperialism, travel and
looking. (One of her sections is on the ‘monarch of all I survey’ trope.) Thus
when Osborne writes that ‘photography, and travel photography in
particular, formed part of the cultural armoury and of capitalism’s
expansion (2000, p. 53), he seems to have in mind both photography’s
record of that expansion, which was consumed by audiences in their homes,
making them, too, part of the global nexus (2000, pp. 53–55), and the idea
that by looking one possesses the object. Not only was one of travel

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 INTRODUCTION 11

photography’s most popular uses as ‘a form of imaginary travel’ (2000, p.

57); it ‘provided middle-class viewers with the means of identifying
themselves in and with the global system in which, as members of a
colonizing state, their lives and fortunes were already invested’ (2000, p. 56).
John Hutnyk, himself criticizing Sontag’s view that photography
democratized experiences by converting them into images, complains that:

the mechanisms of the camera spill over into tourism, cultural

difference, imperialism, politics and so on … The co-ordinates of
cultural identity and comparison are fixed in small, easy-to-carry
squares. It is as if a great reduction machine were at work turning life
into a billion miniatures. (Hutnyk 1996, p. 147)

Photographs, though not the focus of any of the essays in the present
volume, were an important feature of many travel books. As with the rise of
tourism, critical attention has been on their manipulation of group sights.
John Urry has claimed that what he calls the ‘tourist gaze’ is ‘as socially
organised and systematised as is the gaze of the medic’ (Urry 2002, p.1).
And Peter Osborne has opined that:

much tourist photography is a quotation — a reprising of the

contents of the brochures, or the reproduction of a view that as likely as
not came into existence as a consequence of photography. Tourist
photography is more a process of confirmation than of discovery.
(Osborne 2000, p. 79)

The process described by Osborne was already happening with those on the
Grand Tour (Smith 2001, p. 5), and with travellers who followed
guidebooks, but photography seemed to provide a more immediate capture
and response.

The essays
The essays that appear in the present volume have been commissioned to
show a variety of Anglophone travellers from, to and within both the so-
called imperial centre and its peripheries. The diversity of travel and text in
the nineteenth century, which this volume can only hint at, is often lost in
those discussions that, for good reason and with valuable results, have
tended to focus on single periods or types of travel. While connections
between many of the chapters may be made, some features may seem
specific to individual essays. The volume has been structured to encourage a
consideration of these commonalities and specificities.

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Our first main section consists of chapters on the Middle East, the Congo
and the Balkans: three regions whose primary association in many people’s
minds is probably with violent conflict. It was not always so. Western
intervention and representations have made this the predominant
perception. In exploring facets of nineteenth-century travellers’ accounts,
the three chapters trace some of the reasons for this but also remind us of
alternative visions. Some of these — the escape from urban industrialism,
for example — seem to be transferable across different terrains, as a
comparison of Geoffrey Nash’s chapter on the Middle East with Sarah
Johnson’s on the South Pacific in a later section may show. The chapters also
provide an opportunity to weigh these general projections against
assessments that seem geographically specific.
Vesna Goldsworthy’s contribution examines outsiders’ views of and
intermittent engagement with the Balkans, a term used from the early
nineteenth century for a region that for some marked the origins of Europe
and for others the beginning of the Orient. Goldsworthy demonstrates how
attention is turned to the area at times of conflict, reinforcing the impression
of it as a place of internecine antipathy. Stereotypes are formed and
subsequently recycled, saving the need for explanation beyond the appeal to
them. The travel writing considered by Goldsworthy consequently has
generic crossovers with journalism and war reportage, though Byron figures
large, too.
Thanks to the atrocities of Leopold’s Congo Free State (Hochschild 2000),
the legacies of European imperialism and the influence of Heart of Darkness
(see Youngs, 2002), the word ‘horror’ rarely becomes detached from the
word ‘Congo’. Continuing ‘tribal’ conflicts, warfare and the incidence of
AIDS mean that the region is still perceived as a centre of moral and
physical benightedness. It may come as a shock, therefore, to read of it as a
tourist destination and to realize that its origins as one were established at
the very time that Belgian misrule was being brought to the attention of the
rest of the world. Stephen Donovan’s contribution to the present volume
shows that while tourism really became established in the Congo from
about 1910, its foundations were laid during the years of Leopold’s formal
exploitation of the region, and had their roots in the efforts by Henry
Morton Stanley and others to make the Congo attractive to investors.
Donovan’s chapter serves as an uncomfortable reminder that tourism may
be complicit with imperial (and subsequently colonial and neo-colonial)
power.
Geoffrey Nash’s essay, which addresses various kinds of travel —
political, aesthetic and escape — reminds us of a time when the desert
spaces of the Middle East acted for some as a refuge in their flight from
modernity; from the urban and the industrial, just as it would continue to do
in the twentieth century, notably in the work of Wilfred Thesiger (1959),
though the size of the petroleum industry and the playing out of world

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 INTRODUCTION 13

politics on the Middle Eastern stage have meant that it is blank spaces
elsewhere that are now sought. Like other destinations, the Middle East was
seen by these travellers and many of their readers as supplying something
lacking at home; filling a spiritual void, for example. Nash describes how
the search for purity of race and cultural authenticity abroad may be seen as
a reaction against what was happening in Britain at the time, including the
rise of middle-class democracy.
Nash’s discussion of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who exhibited a preference
for Islamic over European modernism, shows that positive images of
another place still serve an ulterior motive: that of criticizing one’s home.
This process is not unique to the Middle East, nor is another observed by
Nash: the opportunity to express, while away, aspects of one’s personality
that would be suppressed at home. Nash singles out Palgrave, Doughty and
Burton as figures for whom this is true.
The second main section of the volume deals with three different kinds of
movement — secular and religious, men’s and women’s, British and Indian
— to, from and within India. Indira Ghose takes as her subject the
experiences of Sir Richard Burton in Sindh in the second half of the 1840s, a
sojourn that resulted in two books. Ghose illustrates the ambivalent position
occupied by Burton in relation to colonialism: at once an agent of it but
poking fun at it too. Ghose shows that although condemned for
contaminating himself by slumming with the natives, Burton’s role-playing
is a sign not of empathy but of British cultural superiority. Ghose also points
to the serious side of Burton’s activities: his costumed entertainments are
not playful postmodern parodies but are directly, if eccentrically and
sometimes iconoclastically, connected with the exercise of power. When
Ghose quotes Burton from the mid-1850s writing that, ‘It requires not the
ken of a prophet to foresee a day when political necessity … will compel us
to occupy in force the fountain-head of Al-Islam’, it is difficult now not to
look forward a century and a half from his day and to see, as Edward Said
has outlined, the close relationship between travel, knowledge and
imperialism. To Said, mindful of, for example, Burton’s pilgrimage to Mecca
and Medina, Burton’s immersion in Oriental culture — his becoming an
Oriental — involves ‘assertion and domination over all the complexities of
Oriental life’ (Said 1985, p. 196). These are not innocent travelogues.
It would be wrong to think of nineteenth-century travel only in terms of
an outward movement away from Britain. The essays by Michael Fisher and
Siobhan Lambert-Hurley examine journeys by South Asians from India to
Britain and from India to Mecca. Fisher’s focus is on the two earliest
instructional travel guides written by Indians about Britain. Works such as
these, Fisher observes, reverse the gaze of Orientalism (Said 1985). Visiting
Indians had their impressions of Britain influenced by what they read of
their compatriots’ observations. Fisher notes that the expression and genre
of these books were shaped by British models but did not blindly replicate

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 14 TRAVEL WRITING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

them, a fact that underlines and articulates their authors’ agency and
invention of roles.
Lambert-Hurley’s focus is on Sikander Begam, ruler of the Muslim
princely state of Bhopal, whose account of a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1863–64
was published posthumously in 1870, having been translated from Urdu
into English by Mrs. Emma Laura Willoughby-Osborne, wife of a British
colonial officer. Lambert-Hurley introduces a consideration of travel writing
within other traditions (in this case the Islamic). Sikander’s account seems to
have helped inaugurate hajj narratives in the South Asian context — and
affords an alternative view of Orientalism. The idea of centre and periphery
applies within the Islamic world, too; it is not simply an opposition that
pertains to the British Empire. Lambert-Hurley shows the cross-cultural
influence on perceptions and accounts of travel and raises the question of
appropriation against imposition. In Lambert-Hurley’s words, her subject
illustrates ‘the factors that went into writing a Muslim journey in a colonial
environment, the process by which notions of the self were redefined
against a Muslim “Other”, and the way in which Arabia was constructed by
a colonial subject as part of a modernist discourse about “the Orient”‘.
Begum’s record shows the negotiations between the individual and the
colonial and traditional powers, and combines custom with modern
influences.
Our volume’s third main section is on travellers to, from and within
America. They include a churchman, a novelist and journalist, a former
slave turned man of letters, and an archaeologist.
Nigel Leask’s chapter focuses on the US archaeologist John Lloyd
Stephens, famous for his discovery and excavation of Mayan monuments.
Concentrating on Stephens’ two Latin American travel narratives, Leask
shows how he fashioned an ‘Americanist ideology’ that offered an
indigenous alternative to Eurocentric narratives of civilization in the
Americas. In presenting a native view of American culture, however,
Stephens reinforces a sense of US hegemony over the rest of the continent, in
keeping with the Monroe Doctrine, which saw the US ‘protecting’ Latin
America.
Alasdair Pettinger’s essay follows events subsequent to the 1843
Disruption of the Church of Scotland and the consequent fund-raising visit
of the Reverend George Lewis to the United States. Roughly half of Lewis’s
resultant Impressions of America and the American Churches (1845) records his
time in the Southern US. Pettinger describes how Lewis’s visit attracted
criticism on both sides of the Atlantic from abolitionists who objected to the
solicitation of funds from churches that supported slavery. Yet Pettinger,
following the historian John Blassingame, argues that empirical intensity
can make even the travel writing of racists useful for their detailed accounts.
For one of the travellers discussed in this volume, it was Britain itself
whose ‘laws, customs and history, were a blank to me’ (Brown 1969, p. 303).

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 INTRODUCTION 15

That traveller was Williams Wells Brown, a fugitive slave from the US, who
spent five years in Europe from 1849–54. For Brown, tourism is an
education, exposing him to European high culture. His experiences — and
his writing about them — counter the emptiness of slavery and allow him to
construct an identity for himself and for his fellow African-Americans. Tim
Youngs’s chapter compares Brown’s narrative of his travels with Charles
Dickens’s American Notes. Brown and Dickens travel in opposite directions,
physically and metaphorically, but there are points of intersection (and it is
a measure of Brown’s ascent that he dined with Dickens). Both men rail
against slavery, each uses his experiences and observations abroad to
criticize aspects of his home country, and both use the form of the travel
narrative to fashion a persona. Important differences, though, are that
Brown is always writing as a representative of his ‘race’, serving a symbolic
role, whereas Dickens deploys stereotypes of African-Americans as part of
the process by which he proclaims his Englishness and individuality.
The relationship between science, knowledge and imperial power
underlies Sarah Johnson’s chapter. During and following the voyages of
Cook and others, Tahiti and other South Pacific islands were variously
perceived as paradises and as sites of corruption in need of cleansing.
Johnson shows that the same place can be subject to contradictory
representations. Drawing on a range of texts, including explorers’
narratives, missionaries’ writing, poetry and novels, Johnson underlines that
it was actually the same set of conditions — freedom from toil and from
sexual inhibition — that generated both extremes of reaction. The point
underscores the fact that travellers (and those who borrow from their
descriptions) throw onto their destinations philosophical, ideological and
cultural baggage that carries more of their departure than of their arrival.
Anna Johnston’s chapter looks at the same region of the world but
concentrates on the contribution of Protestant missionary writing to
nineteenth-century Britons’ understanding of the Pacific Islands and
Australian colonies. The missionaries sought to inscribe this tabula rasa as a
religious landscape, and their writings were often readers’ main source of
information on those parts. Making a similar point to Pettinger’s, Johnston
suggests that among racist missionary texts one may still find an
informative amount of ethnographic detail. Some of the missionaries’
writing demonstrates an interest in and concern for the condition of
Aborigines as well as settlers and convicts and draws attention to the
harmful effects upon indigenous people of whites’ presence and action.
Johnston’s chapter raises the open question of where the line between travel
writing and narratives of residence may be drawn: many of the missionaries
stayed for several years and their texts encouraged settlement. Johnston
concludes, then, that there is a spectrum of representations and they work to
destabilize white imperial authority.
Nineteenth-century travel writing does not end with the nineteenth

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 16 TRAVEL WRITING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

century. Anne Maxwell’s chapter on The Urewera Notebook, Katherine

Mansfield’s 1907 account of her journey as a nineteen year-old into the
interior of New Zealand, shows how Mansfield sees the landscape through
the lens of nineteenth-century literature — those who influenced her include
Wells, Whitman and Wilde — but uses her notebook to experiment with
writing styles. Mansfield’s text, which was not intended for publication,
thus looks backward to the eighteen hundreds and, in its experimentation
(for example, with an impressionistic style) and awareness of modernism, to
the twentieth century. Maxwell’s choice of Mansfield’s text illustrates the
arbitrariness of chronological boundaries but also suggests how literary
styles associated with various periods and movements may have their
impact on a travel narrative. Moreover, her discussion underlines how a
literary style may reflect an author’s situation: on her trip, Mansfield, who
had already spent three years at Queen’s College London, was trying to
reconcile nineteenth-century colonial values with a twentieth-century
sensibility. Her journey, Maxwell observes, was crucial to her sense of
cultural identity, which combined the ideas of romanticism and
imperialism. Mansfield was both (as a native New Zealander) at the colonial
margins and (as a white, in her encounter with the Tuhoe) colonizer.
Maxwell points to the fact that Mansfield’s camping trip and her
relationship with the Maori reveal how different people may have a
different sense of the same place.
Maxwell’s chapter closes the book but not, one hopes, the questions
raised by the texts and our discussions of them. Nineteenth-century travel
writing looks backward and forward. Its conventions are still utilized (Jarvis
2005) and its tracks still followed by travellers whose books advertise their
journeys ‘in the footsteps of’ their predecessors. Meanwhile, among the
many other kinds of travel, blank spaces are sought for journeys that are at
once interior and exterior (Greene 1936), or for psychological ease (Diski
1997), or for spiritual and cultural reflection (Wheeler 1997), or for
authenticity or for solitary recuperation. Planes and cars may have altered
again the way we travel and relate to the world but one thing does not
change: whether these quests take place in Africa, the Antarctic, the
Americas, Himalayas or elsewhere, travellers still carry their baggage with
them, and, where there are local populations to put it to use, may be asked
to reinspect it, either on-site or when they get back home.

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 INTRODUCTION 17

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