Tim Youngs
Department of English, Linguistics and Philosophy, Nottingham Trent University
This essay outlines some of the features and shifts in British travel writing from 1770–1914. It considers the impact of social and technological change on travel and on writing about travel. The essay addresses innovations in transport, overseas expansion, domestic travel, the growth of tourism and of the literature promoting or resulting from it, the increase in readership and of publications catering for new readers, as well as the proliferation and diversity of forms of travel writing that accompanied or responded to these developments. In Romantic-period writings that focus on individuals’ inner responses to landscape, and in later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing that reacts against or embraces the mechanical, the essay discerns traits that characterise much present-day travel writing. The discussion concludes with the caution that overviews of a literary period are as subjective and partial as onlookers’ perceptions of a landscape.
Contexts
In common with the society that produced it, British travel writing underwent significant changes between the late eighteenth and early twentieth century. This correlation is hardly surprising: literature reflects and feeds back into the social contexts that produce it, and travel writing in particular is uniquely equipped to record social movements and dynamics as well as the individual mobility it often presents on the surface.
The period covered by this discussion, 1770–1914, encompasses several developments pertinent to the act and writing of travel. These include Romanticism, the industrial revolution, innovations in transport and communication technologies, urbanisation, internal migration, substantial emigration (particularly to North America, Australia, and New Zealand), imperial expansion and colonial settlement, an intensification of trade and commerce, the rise of leisure tourism, the professionalisation of science, the ‘new imperialism’ of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and major military conflicts including the Napoleonic, Crimean and Boer Wars, as well as the outbreak of the 1914–18 war.
Towards the end of our period, looking back at and forward beyond it, Beckles Willson writes in The Story of Rapid Transit (1903):
The characteristic material problem of the nineteenth century was Rapid Transit, and it promises to be one of the most prominent sciences of the twentieth. … Whether it be in the form of the railway—steam or electric—the steamship, the telegraph, with or without wires, the telephone, the electric tram, the automobile, ever great and still greater velocity of locomotion or communication is the goal in view. And what victories have been won over the sluggish forces of nature!—what obstacles overcome!
To this list Willson adds aerial navigation, though he notes that ‘as a reliable means of rapid transit [it] has advanced scarcely more than a single step since the invention of balloons more than a century ago’ (Willson 1903, 111).
The effects of this breathless speed of change and of the proclaimed triumph over nature are evident in travel writing of the time, some of it approving and some reacting against their impact. For Willson there is no ambivalence. New means of communication combine with speedier transport to quell the various threats posed by Nature. Thus the introduction of the ‘Marconi system of wireless telegraphy’ on to steamships of the Cunard line means that ‘The lonely sea has lost another of its terrors’ (Willson 1903, 111). Willson also hails the potential of rapid transit to benefit relations between countries:
Despatch is not only the soul of business, but international understanding and good-will largely depend upon facile intercommunication … When it was a two days’ journey from London to Calais, a comprehension of France, such as is enjoyed to-day by many thousands, was impossible to Englishmen.
Travel writing, in all its diverse forms, accompanies, comments on, and is shaped, even generated, by these activities, events, and developments. The perspectives it offers and the attitudes it displays make it far from a homogeneous body of work. Although the travel writing of the period has components in common with that of earlier and later times, some elements of travel writing were impossible before the nineteenth century. The most obvious of these are accounts of journeys made by modes of transport that did not exist previously. Travels by steamship, train, bicycle, motorcycle, automobile, and aeroplane may have been imagined earlier but only became a reality after the advent of the industrial revolution.
Recurring characteristics in writings produced while the new forms of land transport, at least, were still a novelty, are speed, freedom, and one’s relationship to nature. Velocities that would nowadays seem slow to many people put nineteenth-century passengers in fear of their lives. As Betty Hagglund observes:
The changes that the railways brought to travel – in speed, in the development of a mass market and in their effect on the face of the landscape – were profound. Perhaps the most significant difference in post-railway travel was a change in perception.
(Hagglund 2010, 3)
Nowadays, Britons look back nostalgically on the era of steam but in the nineteenth century trains were commonly complained about for being dirty, noisy, and dangerous. They were also seen as restricting freedom by confining travellers to fixed routes and times. Although motor cars attracted criticism for their loud intrusion into the countryside and for the invasive infrastructure that grew to serve them, they were celebrated for liberating drivers and passengers from the inflexible itineraries of trains and for facilitating access to parts of the country that might otherwise have remained out of reach.
Even more so than cars, which were larger, heavier, and more prone to breakdown, motorcycles offered riders a more direct experience of nature and the ability to traverse terrain that cars could not manage. Since their first appearance, motorcycles were acclaimed by users for their merging of machine and rider into one.
Bicycles were notable for their perceived health benefits as well as for their popularity among women. Willson proclaims the bicycle to be an ‘extraordinary means of rapid transit’ (Willson 1903, 146). As an ‘instrument of sport and exercise … the benefit it confers upon mankind is enormous’ but it is ‘everywhere, in nearly all civilised countries, an important convenience, offering facilities for transit far superior to the horse, and hardly inferior to the road motor, besides doing without the latter’s cost, complexity and disadvantages’ (Willson 1903, 146).
The establishment of scientific and cultural societies provided new forums for the production and reception of travel writing. The Linnean Society was founded in 1788, the same year as the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa (less formally known as the African Association), whose sponsorship of Mungo Park led to hisinfluential narrative Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799). The Geological Society of London was founded in 1807. The Geographical Society was founded in 1830 and received its royal charter in 1849. The Hakluyt Society was founded in 1846 and began publishing its editions of historical travel texts the following year. The Ethnological Society of London, created in 1843, and the Anthropological Society of London, co-founded by Richard Francis Burton in 1863, evolved in 1871 into the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, which was granted royal status in 1907. The Royal Scottish Geographical Society was founded in 1884. Most of these bodies supported the despatch of exploratory or scientific journeys and published reports and findings.
Forms, comparisons, and anxieties
If one employs a widely but not universally accepted definition of travel writing as consisting of guides to travel and of accounts of actual travel authored by the person who undertakes the journey, then the innovations and activities mentioned above contributed to the evolution of its many guises. Among these are diaries, journals and memoirs, letters, scientific reports from the field, essays, book-length narratives, anthologies, newspaper articles, guidebooks, and postcards. Only the last-named item on this list was introduced in the nineteenth century, but all were stimulated by and responded to the dramatic changes of that period. The personal and the scientific approaches, the expansionist, exploitative impetus, the adjustment to new modes of transport, the increasing number of women’s voices, and the touristic, all characterise important strands of nineteenth-century travel writing.
Developments in the nineteenth century influence readers’ views of the world, both at the time and subsequently. A feature commonly associated with travel writing of the nineteenth century is its racial descriptions. Even those later travellers who aim to counter derogatory representations risk reinforcing them, an often cited example being the Congo as a heart of darkness, the phrase used by Joseph Conrad for the title of his 1899–1902 novella and which echoes Henry Morton Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent (1878) and In Darkest Africa (1890). Late twentieth- and twenty-first century writers who visit the region intent on overturning such stereotypes unwittingly testify to their hold by repeating the language of darkness even in challenging it.
While Stanley’s book title looks outward, negative imagery flowed both ways. Conrad’s work, which focuses on the mental disintegration of Kurtz, and the journey of Marlow, who feels on his journey to investigate Kurtz that he himself is becoming ‘scientifically interesting’ (Conrad 1902/1973, 29), suggests the darkness is located externally and within. William Booth’s boldly titled In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890) explored the conditions of the poor in the home country and offered proposals for their salvation.
H.G. Wells’s (1895/1975) imaginative tale of travel, The Time Machine, encouraged readers to contemplate their own environment through the author’s projection of contemporary social and economic conditions into the future. Wells’s narrator explains that ‘proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed as clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer was the key to the whole position’ (Wells 1895/1975, 47). The text makes explicit the ways in which travellers’ views are moulded by current intellectual and social theories. The time travelling protagonist shifts between and blends socialist and social Darwinist explanations for what he sees. Drawing on contemporary racial discourses in his contemplation of the Morlocks, the subterranean descendants of the nineteenth-century workers who toiled underground and whom he believes now prey cannibalistically on the effete Eloi, the narrator remarks:
gradually, the truth dawned on me: that Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful children of the Upper-world were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages.
He proceeds to ask, ‘Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?’ (Wells 1895/1975, 47).
Wells’s The Time Machine demonstrates how travellers view their destinations through ideas circulating at home. Its narrator’s vacillations illustrate how what might otherwise be taken as matters of fact are inferences shaped by the beliefs travellers carry with them and that may be open to revision. The inadequacy and precariousness of the Time Traveller’s assumptions are an invitation by Wells to question others’ and one’s own interpretations. So, for example, the Traveller deduces that above ground are the Haves, ‘pursuing pleasure and comfort, and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour’ (Wells 1895/1975, 47). Yet despite still thinking his theory ‘the most plausible one’ (Wells 1895/1975, 48), he soon feels ‘pretty sure now that my second hypothesis was all wrong’ (Wells 1895/1975, 54). His struggle to account for what he finds should make his audience ponder on the basis of their own beliefs and on the reliability of those whose words they read.
Wells’s use of what we now term science fiction, but which he preferred to call his scientific romances, also facilitates reversals of perspective, positioning readers to view themselves as they would look to others. In The Time Machine Wells has his narrator invite his audience to
Conceive the tale of London which a negro, fresh from Central Africa, would take back to his tribe! What would he know of railway companies, of social movements, of telephone and telegraph wires, of the Parcels Delivery Company, and postal orders and the like? … And even of what he knew, how much could he make his untravelled friend either apprehend or believe? Then, think how narrow the gap between a negro and a white man of our own times, and how wide the interval between myself and these of the Golden Age!
In similar vein, in Wells’s (1898/1975) War of the Worlds, the narrator compares the invading Martians’ conduct with that of humans towards non-humans and of Europeans towards Indigenous peoples, though in so doing he upholds the language of racial hierarchy:
before we judge of them [the Martians] too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races.
Travel texts, then, whether fictional or non-fiction, do not only look outward at others. Very often they compare life abroad with that at home and find the latter wanting. Science fiction is well placed to make such comparisons, but non-fiction travel writing may do so, too, if not always in such a sustained manner.
The early part of the period covered by this essay saw some romantic, exoticised accounts of South Pacific islands, contrasting the inhabitants’ seeming harmony with nature, their apparently carefree freedom (including from sexual constraint), and their lack of inequality with conditions in Britain. Captain James Cook writes in his journal about the apparently more egalitarian life of Indigenous people in ways that invite reflection on his own social position as someone who was not born into the officer class and who had little formal schooling. The Admiralty even paid another man, John Hawkesworth, to edit for publication Cook’s journals of his first voyage.
In the second half of the period some attitudes hardened, due in part to apprehension that Britain’s empire was under threat. The so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857, or Indian Rebellion as it is now more commonly called, resulted in a marked increase in British hostility. As actual or perceived threats to Empire grew, Britons’ anxiety became more evident both in fiction of the time (notably in tales of overseas adventure and in the imperial Gothic) and in non-fiction travels. An 1893 edition of Cook’s journals offers a sharp illustration of this insecurity. In it, editor W.J.L. Wharton supplies a note desperately contradicting Cook’s claim that the ‘Natives of New Holland … are far more happier than we Europeans … They live in a Tranquility which is not disturbed by the Inequality of Condition.’ Wharton scorns them as ‘among the lowest of mankind. Confirmed cannibals, they lose no opportunity of gratifying their love of human flesh’ (Cook 1893).
But contradictions may also exist within a single author’s work. Cook’s journals cast some critical glances at inequality in England but they also relate acts of violence against Indigenous peoples committed by Cook himself or by those under his command.
In some cases inconsistencies in an individual’s attitudes are more easily explained. It has been said of Fanny Parkes’s journals of her nearly 20 years in India that a more sympathetic, tolerant outlook emerges in proportion to the length of her residence. Often cited is her account of suttee and of a painful ritual that she witnesses and describes not only without the denunciations of savagery and barbarism customarily applied by her compatriots, but non-judgementally. Length of stay does not necessarily bring greater understanding or empathy, but for some it does.
Britain’s expansionism in the nineteenth century produced many contrasts and comparisons between home and abroad, across several forms of travel writing. Texts that called for subjugation usually portrayed land and people in negative terms. Frequently, though, the literature that encouraged occupation (in both senses of the word) represented the destination positively as rich in resources and in want of intervention. The so-called three Cs of Christianity, Commerce, Civilisation that the missionary-explorer Dr David Livingstone promoted, connected activities in material and spiritual spheres. The content and proliferation of missionary writings make them an important constituent of nineteenth-century travel literature.
As Kevin James observes, ‘The history of travel writing’s growth is linked inextricably to the expansion of reading markets’ (James 2014, 15). Alongside the developments mentioned above, an enlarged readership, largely a consequence of education acts and printing technologies, stimulated travel writing in the nineteenth century, ensuring not only more readers but ones with different backgrounds and tastes. The effect of this is especially evident in the rise of popular periodicals and the proliferation of sensationalist adventure tales of travel. No one’s work testifies to this more than that of Henry Morton Stanley, the infamous Welsh-American reporter and explorer whose hugely popular writings on his exploits in East and Central Africa cast himself as a hero, aided by Providence in his surmounting of human and non-human obstacles. He compared himself with, among others, Xenophon and Ulysses.
Even if we extend the definition of travel writing to accommodate fictional tales of travel, as some do, the nineteenth century saw significant developments in those types, too. Prominent examples include children’s tales of adventure (often in colonial settings) by the likes of George Alfred Henty, R.M. Ballantyne, and H. Rider Haggard; science-fiction stories, and narratives in the tradition of the picaresque. Such works often drew on descriptions from non-fiction travel writing, though the influences were reciprocal. Several travellers and explorers best known for their journeys and for their non-fiction accounts of them also published at least one children’s adventure story. Such authors include Sir Samuel Baker, Joseph Thomson, Verney Lovett Cameron, and Stanley himself.
The Romantic period provided an enduring characteristic of modern British and European travel writing in its focus on the individual traveller’s response to journeys and landscapes. The attention it gave to the traveller’s subjectivity remains a key source of interest for readers. Scholars of travel writing remark that as travel became more affordable and far-away places more accessible, so writers needed to make themselves (or their personae) as much the subject of their writings as their destinations. Doing so would distinguish them from other travel writers and add something to the experiences and views of any readers who had themselves travelled to the sites described. Romantic-period travel writing’s emphasis on the personal and emotional engagement with landscape offers precedents for this feature.
Internal states
In keeping with theories of the picturesque and sublime, Romantic travel writing took an interest in sensations aroused in the onlooker, but it extended the relationship between internal and external states further. Its continuing influence is apparent in the individual ethos of much travel writing and in the interplay between the inner and outer. The so-called new nature writing of the late twentieth and twenty-first century reaches back to it. Romantic travel writing may seem to rest on the assumption of a white, male view of the world, but this perspective was countered at the time, for example by Mary Wollstonecraft in her Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796) and has been further challenged subsequently, with increased scholarly and general interest in the works of Dorothy Wordsworth and other contemporary female travellers.
A different kind of interiority concerns domestic travel, that is journeys within Britain. In Benjamin Colbert’s words, these were years in which ‘tourism and travel writing played a central role in imagining or re-imagining the nations jostling for position in the mental geographies of the British and Irish peoples’ (Colbert 2012, 3). The period saw the rise of tours to Scotland in particular, but also to Wales and Ireland. In part this was due to what Hagglund describes as ‘the impossibility of taking a conventional European Grand Tour through much of this period’, as a result of which ‘the Lake District, North Wales and the Highlands of Scotland all grew in popularity’ (Hagglund 2010, 20). Hagglund shows how, between the last 30 years of the eighteenth century and the first 30 of the nineteenth:
travel and tourism in Scotland changed radically from a time when there were very few travellers and no provision for those that did come, through to Scotland’s emergence as a fully organised tourist destination with the necessary physical and economic infrastructure. Simultaneous with these changes, came changes in writing.
(Hagglund 2010, 1)
By the early 1820s, ‘Scotland was well fixed on the tourist map and various types of professional apparatus had appeared to tell the traveller what to see and how to see it’ (Hagglund 2010, 132). The provision of guidebooks, Hagglund observes, was one of the factors that changed visitors’ travel writing (Hagglund 2010, 144). Some of the more prominent examples of writings on Britain outside England include George Borrow’s Wild Wales: Its People, Language And Scenery (1862) and titles by Thomas Pennant on his travels in Wales and Scotland.
Katie Gramich identifies as a motivation of the majority of English and European authors who journey to Wales the ‘seeking out [of] accessible Otherness’ (Gramich 2012, 147). Gramich also notes the phenomenon of Welsh people, such as Owen Morgan Edwards, setting out to ‘tour the precincts of their own land’ (Gramich 2012, 147). Edwards, who published a travel book on Wales, in Welsh, in 1896, Cartrefi Cymru and two more in 1907, was one of a number of Welsh and foreign travel writers who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, sought to counter the ‘devastatingly negative picture of Wales as a benighted and even barbaric country presented in the 1847 “Blue Books” government report’ (Gramich 2012, 148). Due to such efforts and to the ‘vogue for Celticity propagated by English writers such as Matthew Arnold and Alfred Lord Tennyson’, by the end of the century, ‘Wales was poised to become not just a tourist destination well-endowed with Gothic relics, but an autonomous country clamouring for a disestablished church and even home rule’ (Gramich 2012, 148). Gramich writes that Edwards views the land and its features as alive, with its own history and romance (Gramich 2012, 152) and the retreat of Welsh under the advance of English as a loss of independent thinking (Gramich 2012, 153). Gramich points out that Edwards’ position is a complicated one as he grew up in north-east Wales, won a scholarship to Oxford, where he became a History don, and was a prolific and influential literary figure. As both insider and outsider, his hybrid texts ‘create a new self-reflexive travel writing which is energized by an overt cultural nationalist and recuperative ideology’ (Gramich 2012, 155).
In Gramich’s words, ‘Often, in Edwards’s travel narratives, the journey becomes a temporal as well as a spatial one: the return to the Welsh mountains is a farewell to modernity and a re-immersion in an ancestral history which is in danger of being forgotten.’ Whereas in many writings of travel to Africa, journeys are presented as leading backwards through time to a primitive state beyond which Britain has advanced, in cases such as Edwards’s, the rediscovery of, or reengagement with a premodern condition, is revivifying. It contributes to Edwards’s ‘temporary rejection of an Anglicized education and an adopted class position, an opportunity to return to a monoglot Welsh childhood perceived as being classless’ (Gramich 2012, 155).
In addition to the scenic tours in Britain, were the urban investigations and exposés of conditions in London by the likes of Henry Mayhew, Charles Booth, William Booth and W.T. Stead. In many of both kinds of works – the scenic and the urban, but especially the latter – racial imagery is prominent. The Irish and the city-dwelling working classes were frequently represented in terms similar to Africans, as wild, savage, uncouth, and ape-like. The Welsh, and sometimes the Scots, on the other hand, possessed for some visitors the romance of lost or dying ways that took observers back to a semi-mythical past, just as in England writers also commonly invoked the physical or spectral legacy of the Roman presence. The detection of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Celtic, or Roman traces was fostered by and nurtured racial theories of origin and fitness or weakness.
Many of the domestic journeys were made with landscape rather than people in view, or with people harmoniously in the background. Sometimes travellers went in pursuit of the picturesque, the most notable example being the Wye Valley, which C.S. Matheson identifies as ‘the birthplace of British domestic tourism’ (Matheson 2012, 50–1), subject of Willam Gilpin’s influential Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, published in 1782. At other times, tourists sought a less prescriptive view of nature than that dictated by Gilpin’s aesthetic criteria. In either case, the extolling of Nature’s qualities constitutes a counterpoint to the urbanisation of our period.
Hagglund identifies literary tourism as another factor that drew tourists to Scotland, in particular to those places associated with Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Ossian, Robert Burns, and Walter Scott (Hagglund 2010, 22). Nicola Watson concentrates on Scott as pre-eminent in this regard, writing that his historical romances ‘transformed the way that Victorians read Scotland, and in so doing, transformed tourism to the country. Under Scott’s influence, established visual pleasures of landscape became newly saturated with traditionary and historic associations’ (Watson 2012, 134). Scott’s works ‘set out to digest Scottish history, Scottish landscape, and Scottish manners, and in so doing, remade Scotland for an emergent nineteenth-century tourist sensibility’ (Watson 2012, 134). Scott’s grave and his house came to be included in the sites of literary tourism associated with him. Among these literary tourists was Queen Victoria, who in summer 1867 ‘viewed Melrose, Abbotsford, and Smailholm Tower in the Border country, and … travelled up to the Trossachs and Loch Lomond to view sites associated with The Lady of the Lake and Rob Roy’ (Watson 2012, 140).
As tourism increased, and in keeping with the character of the age, travel and its writing became ever more commoditised. The emergence and growth of the modern guidebook, most famously those published by the two houses Baedeker and Murray, occurred during these years. Some of the complexities and ambivalences of the guidebook are well described by Matheson, who observes that ‘for all of their authority and assertiveness, guidebooks are ephemeral productions’ (Matheson 2012, 50), their information and advice liable quickly to fall out of date.
Matheson remarks especially on the guidebook’s complex ‘negotiation with its audience’ (Matheson 2012, 51), stating that ‘Guidebooks attend to the mechanisms and institutions of travel (which they have a hand in constructing) even as they address and administer to the individual’ (Matheson 2012, 51). Matheson’s identification of this dual purpose nicely combines the Romantic sensibility with the functionality that many associate with the Victorian age. Matheson further reconciles the two characteristics by commenting that ‘Guidebooks stand at a crossroads between what is known or can be communicated about a place and what yet remains to be said’ (Matheson 2012, 51). Contrary to a widely held view of the guidebook as leaving little scope for personal freedom in viewing and interpretation, Matheson’s reading allows for personal responses: ‘A basic condition of any travel guide is that discovery and self-discovery are simultaneous possibilities’ (Matheson 2012, 59).
Guidebooks and other forms of tourist literature may be the most obvious manifestations of the growing commercialisation of travel, but new printing methods and the move towards a mass readership contributed to the increased sales and types of travel writing. A reaction against what some saw as the cheapening of the travel experience may be seen as the nineteenth century wore on. This response is evident in the scorn shown towards ‘tourists’ but it is also apparent in the broader movement against commoditisation and mechanisation, which, in the last years of our period and in the decade after, found powerful expression in D.H. Lawrence’s writings and their search for meaning in an age felt by some to be deadening to the individual human spirit and body. Conversely, others embraced the mechanical, the urban and the commercial. Both sides continue to coexist in tension.
Conclusion and caveats
To outline the literary features of a period typically involves identifying a chronological development of forms and characteristics and the tracing of a pattern. The perception of such designs may not be inaccurate, but the truth is usually less clear-cut. As with travellers gazing on a landscape, the view that one perceives is subjective. Different onlookers may notice or overlook elements that others do not; the arrangements they detect may be of their own making.
Nevertheless, characteristics of travel writing that emerged or became more pronounced in the nineteenth century may be identified with reasonable confidence: the individual, emotional responses to landscape; the lack of objectivity in exploration narratives and in several scientific reports; the interrelationship between travel fiction and non-fiction narratives; the rise of the guidebook and of other texts accompanying the massive increase in tourism; the effects of modes of mobility upon the experience and writing of travel; and the turn towards the inner voice. Towards the end of the period, the sense that there were no blank spaces left on the map, helped, in combination with the psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious propounded by Sigmund Freud and others, to drive interest in the inner exploration of travellers themselves. A prominent subsequent example, Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps, published in 1936, invokes Mungo Park, Henry Morton Stanley and Conrad himself.
It would be a mistake to assume from this essay’s focus that British travel writing was insular. Authors were influenced by foreign writers and works, whether those related episodes of actual, mythical or imagined travel. They included much older works such as the Bible, Homer’s Odyssey, Xenophon’s Anabasis (often invoked by Henry Morton Stanley), Herodotus’s Histories, and Dante’s Inferno, some transmitted through formal education and others through wider cultural knowledge, as well as books by contemporaries, such as Goethe’s influential Italienische Reise (Italian Journey) (1816–17).
Today’s travel writing is influenced by oral tales and literature from millennia ago, but the long nineteenth century helped shape the genre as we know it.
References
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Colbert, Benjamin (2012) ‘Introduction: Home Tourism’, in Benjamin Colbert (ed.) Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ireland, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–12.
Conrad, Joseph (1902/1973) Heart of Darkness, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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