Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century

Interrogating the multiple ways in which travel was narrated and mediated, by and in response to, nineteenth-century British travelers, this interdisciplinary collection examines to what extent these accounts drew on and developed existing tropes of travel. The three sections take up personal and intimate narratives that were not necessarily designed for public consumption, tales intended for a popular audience, and accounts that were more clearly linked with discourses and institutions of power, such as imperial processes of conquest and governance. Some narratives focus on the things the travelers carried, such as souvenirs from the battlefields of Britain's imperial wars, while others show the complexity of Victorian dreams of the exotic. Still others offer a disapproving glimpse of Victorian mores through the eyes of indigenous peoples in contrast to the imperialist vision of British explorers. Swiss hotel registers, guest books, and guidebooks offer insights into the history of tourism, while new photographic technologies, the development of the telegraph system, and train travel transformed the visual, audial, and even the conjugal experience of travel. The contributors attend to issues of gender and ethnicity in essays on women travelers, South African travel narratives, and accounts of China during the Opium Wars, and analyze the influence of fictional travel narratives. Taken together, these essays show how these multiple narratives circulated, cross-fertilised, and reacted to one another to produce new narratives, new objects, and new modes of travel.

Kate Hill is Principal Lecturer in History at the University of Lincoln, UK.

Introduction: Narratives of Travel, Narratives that Travel; 1: Spaces and Places in Motion; 1: Arctic and European In-Betweens: The Production of Tourist Spaces in Late Nineteenth-Century Northern Norway; 2: 'The Formation of a Surface': European Travel in Charles Dickens's; 3: Female Space, Feminine Grace: Ladies and the Mid-Victorian Railway 1; 2: Narratives on the Move; 4: Victorians in the Alps: A Case Study of Zermatt's Hotel Guest Books and Registers 1; 5: 'Nerves of the Empire': Submarine Telegraph Technological Travel Narratives as Imperial Adventure 1; 6: Thrills and Quills: Masculinity and Location in Three South African Travel Narratives (1834-1900); 7: Tourism in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Aesthetics and Advertisement in Travel Posters and Luggage Labels; 3: Cultural Flows; 8: The Travelling Other: A M?ori Narrative of a Visit to Australia in 1874; 9: Souvenirs: Narrating Overseas Violence in the Late Nineteenth Century; 10: British Travels in China during the Opium Wars (1839-1860): Shifting Images and Perceptions; 11: 'The untrammelled fancy of the scenic artist': Imagining and Encountering Zanzibar in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries