In his book, The English Novel, Ford Madox Ford comments that over the preceding hundred years a growing ‘ease of locomotion’ had profoundly changed the English-speaking world. ‘The habit of flux’, he says, had been born; people moved around in an unprecedented way.1 Ford, a romantic
Tory, was in theory ambivalent about this change, but in practice he em- bodied it. A prefatory note to the book underlines his point. It was written, he tells us, ‘in New York, on the S. S. Patria, and in the port and neigh- bourhood of Marseilles during July and August, 1927’, though he ‘made certain alterations’ in Paris over the new year of 1930; appropriate creative circumstances for the editor of an avant-garde magazine called the transat-
lantic review, whose contributors were chiefly highly mobile cosmopolitan
expatriates based in Paris, London, and New York.
The English Novel appeared in 1930, towards the end of the period cov-
ered by this chapter. Ford dated the beginnings of this increased mobil- ity to the 1840s, a decade in which railway trains were already reaching thirty-five miles per hour, the first propeller-driven iron steamship, Brunel’s
Great Britain, crossed the Atlantic (it cautiously carried a full quota of sails),
Thomas Cook was already in business, and Karl Baedeker’s famous guide- books for travellers had been in circulation for over a decade. Stephen Kern reminds us that by 1880 the American Transcontinental Railway and the Trans-Indian Peninsular Railroad had been built, the Suez Canal opened, and that if Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days was a fantasy when published in 1873, by 1890 an American woman journalist, Nellie Bly, had been round the globe in a mere seventy-two.2Railroads criss-crossed Europe
and beyond and, as liners grew faster and more luxurious, steamship compa- nies produced a crop of shipping millionaires. Increasing ‘ease of locomotion’ was not, however, simply the product of disinterested technological advance, and those on the move not only bands of tourists. Improvements in transport were fanned by, and helped to fan, the empire building, trade expansion and mass migrations of the late nineteenth century. As Eric Hobsbawm points
out, in the four decades between 1876 and 1915 a quarter of the world’s land mass was acquired as additional colonies by the main imperial powers, Britain itself adding about four million square miles to its territory.3Much
of British travel writing in these decades emerged, in one way or another, out of the possibilities opened up by such colonial and trade development. Hilaire Belloc’s 1898 poem, The Modern Traveller, is not about a tourist set- ting off with Thomas Cook, but a returned colonial adventurer reporting on his exploits to the Daily Menace. Along with a fiery mercenary, Commander Sin, and the rapacious Captain Blood, he pursues the quest for gain, en route looking out in case ‘there was by chance a native tribe/ To cheat, cajole, cor- rupt, or bribe’. The native porters, thoroughly ill-treated, become restless, but
Blood understood the Native mind. He said ‘We must be firm but kind.’ A mutiny resulted.
Blood grimly mutters, ‘Whatever happens we have got/ The Maxim Gun, and they have not’, and the mutiny is put down. ‘We shot and hanged a few, and then/ The rest became devoted men.’4The expedition is a complete disaster
but reported as a great heroic achievement. The anti-imperialist Belloc clearly has in mind one of the most successful travel books of the period, Henry Mor- ton Stanley’s In Darkest Africa (1890), which sold 150,000 copies within a few weeks of publication and was immediately translated into five languages. Stanley’s book could not have been more directly a product of that colonial- ist expansion, for it recorded an expedition funded by King Leopold II of Belgium, who hoped thereby to acquire the Sudan, with additional money raised by Sir William Mackinnon, a man who had made his money in ships and now wanted to build up a trading company in East Africa. Belloc, it should be noted, represents an important strand of anti-colonialism of the period, one which was conservative and anti-modern, and which associated imperialism with vulgar middle-class commerce, Jewish bankers, and the mass press. Commerce and a jingoistic popular press were certainly central factors in late nineteenth-century imperialism, but opposition to them could be snobbish rather than idealistic. The complex imbrications of issues of race and class in this period need to be borne in mind in reading its travel writing. The period from 1880 to 1940 was the heyday of the British Empire, and much travel writing shows the complicity with imperialism – if not its out- right support – that Mary Louise Pratt identifies in her study Imperial Eyes.5
Yet, as Nicholas Thomas has argued, contrasting a colonialist past with a lib- eral present disguises many continuities. Colonialism, he suggests, needs un- doing as a ‘coherent object’; we must recognise that ‘colonial ideologies may
4. John Tenniel, ‘The Irrepressible Tourist’ (Punch, 5 August 1882, p. 141). Photograph courtesy of The Punch Library.
have been more variable, complex, and ambivalent than has been generally acknowledged’.6One needs to account for the anxieties, uncertainties, and
increasing dissent of those years, the fragmented, haphazard, contentious na- ture of imperialism, the profound doubts about the continuation of Western progress, indeed doubts about the possibility of progress at all. There is no simple homogeneity of attitudes within these texts. The years between 1880 and 1940 are perhaps best seen as the beginning of the era of globalisation in which we live today, a process set in motion by that vast expansion of territorial colonialism in the late nineteenth century, and one that continues today through neo-colonial economic imperialism. There are those who see globalisation simply as a deceptive synonym for Westernisation, but growth of worldwide trade and communications has transformed the West as well. Dependent though colonial expansion was on technological advance, also fundamental to it was the belief in the moral and intellectual superiority of the white races. The later eighteenth and the nineteenth century had seen the invention of distinct national identities, the establishment of firm racial hier- archies, the consolidation of narratives of progress, development, scientific advance, and white supremacy; those were the ideologies that made imperi- alism possible. Yet the very process of colonisation meant that these clear dis- tinctions began to dissolve: transculturation, miscegenation, the barbarism necessary to impose rule – all conspired to make the question of which was the savage and which the civilised a disturbing one to answer. Meanwhile, J. G. Frazer’s influential Golden Bough identified savagery close beneath the surface of British society, and put Christianity on a par with pagan or prim- itive myth. Psychoanalysis demonstrated the fragility of civilised rationality. Suspicion of the ‘masses’ undermined nationalist ideologies. Identities, ei- ther of self or other, were no longer stable. Homi Bhabha has influentially written of the colonists’ anxieties provoked by their colonial servants, so white in their ways, and yet not quite; these mimic men were, I would argue, just one of the disturbingly uncategorisable products of colonialism. Travel writing in this period becomes increasingly aware of globalisation – not a word used but a condition that was widely recognised – and the resulting mixtures of cultures and people it brought with it. At the same time, many writers became increasingly anxious about the condition and value of mod- ern Western civilisation: was it and the white race degenerating? Might there be an alternative elsewhere?
Such questions were, of course, also central to imaginative literature. Any account of travel writing in this period must take note of the fact that in these years a remarkable number of novelists and poets were travelling writers, whether or not they were in addition actually travel writers, as indeed a number were. Many of the contributors to Ford’s transatlantic
review – Hemingway, Pound, Jean Rhys, H. D., Djuna Barnes, Stein, Eliot
and Joyce, for example – had also acquired what he had dubbed ‘the habit of flux’. Many lived much of their lives as expatriates, and most of them moved their place of abode with some frequency. From Henry James on- wards, central to modernism is what Peter Nicholls has described as ‘the shock of “exile” and cultural contrast’.7 Modernism, it is widely agreed,
was predominantly an urban and metropolitan movement but, significantly, many writers and artists of the period worked in someone else’s metropolis; the modern metropolis was as much a contact zone, in Pratt’s phrase, as were the colonies. Other writers went further afield: in the period of that late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century imperial expansion, for example, Joseph Conrad, Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, R. L. Stevenson, Jack London, and Somerset Maugham, and in the interwar years, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh. Many incor- porated their travels in parallel in fiction and travel writing, as did, for ex- ample, Stevenson, London, Lawrence, Waugh, and Greene. Modernist texts register a new consciousness of cultural heterogeneity, the condition and mark of the modern world; in both imaginative and travel writing, moder- nity, the meeting of other cultures, and change are inseparable.8
The shared concerns of imaginative literature and travel writing at this time, as well as the mobility of so many novelists and poets, perhaps ac- count for the emergence of travel writing in the latter part of this period as the more literary and autonomous genre that we understand it to be today. Earlier travel writing often came out of travel undertaken for reasons of work, as soldier, trader, scientist, or whatever, or perhaps for education or health; increasingly in the twentieth century it has come out of travel under- taken specifically for the sake of writing about it. As Michel Butor put it, ‘they travel in order to write, they travel while writing, because for them, travel is writing’.9If in the nineteenth century, travel writing might often be
produced by missionaries, explorers, scientists, or Orientalists (Livingstone, Darwin, and Burton, for example) in texts in which the purveying of privi- leged knowledge was a central concern, increasingly in the twentieth century it has become a more subjective form, more memoir than manual, and often an alternative form of writing for novelists. The period from 1880 to 1940 saw this change take place. There was a move – as in imaginative literature – from the detailed, realist text, often with an overtly didactic or at any rate moral purpose, to a more impressionistic style with the interest focused as much on the travellers’ responses or consciousness as their travels. In the twentieth century, the scientific or scholarly text is usually written for aca- demic fellow experts and, perhaps particularly in the case of ethnography, has striven to distance itself from what it sees as the ‘amateurism’ of travel
writing – even though travel writing can now be a profession in itself. Yet if the formal characteristics of travel writing changed over the period, many of the themes did not. Tim Youngs has argued of Victorian travelogues about Africa that their perception of that unknown land is suffused with ‘their growing, if sometimes subliminal, unease with the changes in the Britain they knew so well’.10That double sphere of reference becomes increasingly
apparent in travel writing in this period. Though doubts about the efficacy and morality of European civilisation took on a deeper resonance following the horrors of the First World War, they were already emerging in the late nineteenth century, and even the most jingoist of travellers’ tales could not always gloss over the conflicts at the heart of the white civilising mission.
It is possible to see three stages of travel writing within this period. From 1880 to 1900, the long, ‘realist’ (not of course synonymous with reliable), instructive tale of heroic adventure remained dominant. In the years from 1900 to the First World War, the ‘realist’ texts have not disappeared, but much travel writing becomes less didactic, more subjective, more literary. By the inter-war years, which saw a surge in the popularity of travel and travel writing, the literary travel book had become the dominant form: many of the best known examples of the genre were written by writers equally or better known for their fiction or poetry. I shall look at some of the well- known or significant travel books from each of these periods, identifying the central trends. By the time the first of these stages had begun, the era of ‘discovery’ by white explorers was growing to a close, at least in already peopled areas like Africa or the Far East. Richard Burton, in the last decade of his life, now confined himself to translations of erotic Arabic works. Stanley produced one more travelogue, In Darkest Africa, mentioned earlier, a long and defensive book, part geographical textbook, part pious jingoism, part adventure story. Like Belloc’s Modern Traveller, Stanley was attempting to tell as triumph what was near disaster, the story of a futile barbarous venture that had failed in almost every way except as the source for another bestseller. Stanley was an intriguing precursor of the modern professional travel writer, a journalist who went exploring specifically to produce copy, but he also represented the uglier face of nineteenth-century colonialism. His brutal racism and the readiness with which he flogged or hanged his troops or massacred villagers – always, he insisted, with justice on his side – was shocking to many even at the time. The controversies that followed the publication of his book contributed to the growing unease with the conduct of imperialists. The tales that circulated, encouraged by Stanley to conceal his own incompetence, of the excesses and abominations practised by the white leaders of his rear column were one of the likely sources for Conrad’s
Mary Kingsley, whose Travels in West Africa (1897) was also a bestseller, appears enlightened by comparison with Stanley, with her frequent warm comments on the native West Africans. She is, however, in no doubt of African inferiority to the whites, though she believes they have their own virtues, especially if missionaries’ hands can be kept off them. Her lively, unorthodox, and self-mocking persona is very different from Stanley’s self- presentation as a dauntless, stern, and upright hero, but her book aims to instruct just as much as his, with an array of ethnographic information about West African groups and, in particular, about their beliefs in magic and fetishes. Another woman traveller was Isabella Bird, who published one of the earliest travel books about Japan, only opened to the West in the 1850s, and a source of fascination to many Westerners. Bird herself did not take at all to Japan, and in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), a long and de- tailed account of her journey to the north of the country, she expresses deeply ambivalent feelings about ‘this heathen land’ which she found ‘sunk in im- morality’, though she does make the interesting comment that the Japanese treat the aboriginal people, the Ainos, whom she met on the northern island of Yezo, rather better than the Americans treat the ‘Red Indians’.11 Bird,
unlike Kingsley, was a strong supporter of missionaries and their attempts to save these heathen others, but she combined piety with prodigious energy, and had earlier written of the American West and Hawaii, and would later write of Tibet, Korea, China, Persia, and Kurdistan. Bird was one of a number of Victorian women, including Florence Nightingale and the anthropologist Mathilda Stevenson, who at home suffered ill health that immediately van- ished when they got away. In the confines of Victorian domesticity they sunk despondently in invalidism; escaping to freedom and activity they flourished. One of the most eccentric travel books of the late nineteenth century was Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), with its strange mix- ture of archaic English and Arabisms, whose language appears designed to distance the Arabs in time as much as space, as nineteenth-century thought so often did. The book was not a success at the time, and lost money for its publishers (Cambridge University Press), but it later became something of a cult book for certain modernists. Ezra Pound read it with enthusiasm to W. B.Yeats, and James Longenbach argues that it significantly influenced Yeats’s writing of A Vision.12It was re-published in 1921, with a glowing
introduction by T. E. Lawrence.
Two travel writers of the period point significantly forward in different ways to twentieth-century modernism. One was the trenchant critic of impe- rialism, the aristocratic Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, married to the granddaughter of Lord Byron, on whom he based his energetic life as supporter of liberation movements, womaniser, and poet. Blunt’s aims are polemic, but he on several
occasions used the device of a travel narrative, drawing on his own extensive diaries to give the authority of first-hand knowledge to his arguments. Like the younger writers whom he was to influence, Blunt rejects the ideology of Western civilised superiority, already crumbling in the new globalising world of imperialism; he constructs an alternative to the hegemonic racial hierarchy of the West against the rest, in his case by a return to a feudal model. The modern British abroad, he believes, are destroying ordered and admirable societies, just as they have done at home. Blunt, like Ford, was a romantic Tory; he had a warm if condescending regard for the peasantry and a belief in aristocracy; the new middle classes at home or abroad are what he distrusts. He wrote of his visit to Algeria:
I found my sympathies in Algeria going out wholly to the Arabs . . . The contrast between their noble pastoral life on the one hand, with their camel herds and horses, a life of high tradition filled with the memory of heroic deeds, and on the other hand the ignoble squalor of the Frank settlers, with their wineshops and their swine, was one which could not escape us, or fail to rouse in us an angry sense of the incongruity which has made of these last the lords of the land and of those their servants.13
For Blunt, imposing Western modernity only brings degradation and misery. He argues that the policy of ‘developing’ India (his inverted commas) with money raised from taxation on the peasants means that ‘the inhabitants will have, sooner or later, to resort to cannibalism, for there will be nothing but each other left to eat’.14That Western civilisation will produce cannibalism
rather than stamp it out is a neat rhetorical turn in an era in which supposed cannibalism in the Congo was used as an excuse for imperialist plunder, but his sympathy for the peasantry goes along with his admiration of Indian intel-