Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The nineteenth century, in particular the age of Queen Victoria, was a period of intensification of travel which could be seen to emerge at the end of the previous century in the increased popularity of travel on the Continent and the fashion of scenic tourism. Travel was becoming open to more and more sectors of society. In his Travelling Sketches (1866),¹ Anthony Trollope — himself a well-travelled writer — portrays typical globetrotters of his time, such as The Family that Goes Abroad because It’s the Thing to Do’, The Man who Travels Alone’, The Unprotected Female Tourist’, The United Englishmen Who Travel for Fun’ and even Tourists who Don’t Like their Travels’. The most favoured destinations, whether at home or on the Continent, were often overcrowded. As early as 1820, when Maria Edgeworth arrived in Lausanne during her trip through Switzerland and France, the town was teeming with tourists and Edgeworth had great difficulty in finding a place to stay for her party.² Eighteenth-century travellers to the Continent had enjoyed the Alps in relative solitude. The Victorian John Ruskin, by contrast, found the summits littered with the leftovers of numerous tourists who held picnics while viewing the breathtaking panorama. As he complained in his chapter ‘Of Modern Landscape’ in Modern Painters (1856): ‘Our modern society in general goes to the mountains, not to fast, but to feast, and leaves their glaciers covered with chicken-bones and egg-shells’ (p. 320).

[1] Nothing, in sooth, could be more picturesque than this first view of the Tanganyika Lake, as it lay in the lap of the mountains, basking in the gorgeous tropical sunshine. Below and beyond a short foreground of rugged and precipitous hill-fold, down which the footpath zigzags painfully, a narrow strip of emerald green, never sere and marvelously fertile, shelves toward a ribbon of glistening yellow sand … Farther in front stretch the waters, an expanse of the lightest and softest blue,… and sprinkled by the crisp east wind with tiny crescents of snowy foam. The background in front is a high and broken wall of steel-colored mountain, here flecked and capped with pearly mist, there standing sharply penciled against the azure air; its yawning chasms, marked by a deeper plum-color, fall toward dwarf hills of mound-like proportions, which apparently dip their feet in the wave. To the south, and opposite the long low point behind which the Malagarazi River discharges the red loam suspended in its violent stream, lie the bluff headlands and capes of Uguhha, and, as the eye dilates, it falls upon a cluster of outlying islets, speckling a sea-horizon. Villages, cultivated lands, the frequent canoes of the fishermen on the waters, and on a nearer approach the murmurs of the waves breaking upon the shore, give a something of variety, of movement, of life to the landscape, which, like all the fairest prospects in these regions, wants but a little of the neatness and finish of art — mosques and kiosks, palaces and villas, gardens and orchards — contrasting with the profuse lavishness and magnificence of nature, and diversifying the unbroken coup d’oeil of excessive vegetation, to rival, if not to excel, the most admired scenery of the classic regions.

(Richard F. Burton, The Lake Regions of Central Africa, 1860, pp. 307–8)

[2] In New York there are street omnibuses as we have … The omnibuses, though clean and excellent, were to me very unintelligible. They have no conductor to them. To know their different lines and usages a man should have made a scientific study of the city …. The money has to be paid through a little hole behind the driver’s back, and should, as I learned at last, be paid immediately on entrance. But in getting up to do this I always stumbled about, and it would happen that when with considerable difficulty I had settled my own account, two or three ladies would enter, and would hand me, without a word, some coins with which I had no life-long familiarity in order that I might go through the same ceremony on their account. The change I would usually drop into the straw, and then there would arise trouble and unhappiness. Before I became aware of that law as to instant payment, bells used to be rung at me which made me uneasy. I knew I was not behaving as a citizen should behave, but could not compass the exact points of my delinquency. And then when I desired to escape, the door being strapped up tight, I would halloo vainly at the driver through the little hole; whereas, had I known my duty, I should have rung a bell, or pulled a strap, according to the nature of the omnibus in question. In a month or two all these things may possibly be learned; — but the visitor requires his facilities for locomotion at the first moment of his entrance into the city.

(Anthony Trollope, North America, 1862, vol. 1, pp. 292–3)

[3] At last, Patagonia! How often had I pictured in imagination, wishing with an intense longing to visit this solitary wilderness, resting far off in its primitive and desolate peace, untouched by man, remote from civilization! There it lay full in sight before me — the unmarred desert that wakes strange feelings in us; the ancient habitation of giants, whose footprints seen on the seashore amazed Magellan and his men, and won for it the name of Patagonia….

It was not, however, the fascination of old legends that drew me, nor the desire of the desert, for not until I had seen it, and had tasted its flavour, then, and on many subsequent occasions, did I know how much its solitude and desolation would be to me, what strange knowledge it would teach, and how enduring its effect would be on my spirit. Not these things, but the passion of the ornithologist took me.

(W.H. Hudson, Idle Days in Patagonia, 1893, pp. 4–5)