The Meaning and Mechanics of Travel in the Victorian Age

Abstract

In 1870, the writer and loyal Londoner Edmund Gosse travelled with a companion as far north in Scotland as Stornoway. Though critical of most lowland Scottish people he met, Gosse thought the people of Stornoway were very Norse in their looks and among the finest ‘race of men’. With their nicely chiselled features and burnt flesh tints reminiscent of Titian, the lounging Stornoway fishermen seemed like ‘handsome giants’. The women, too, appeared comely and taller even than ‘Scotch lassies’, who seemed more universally towering than English ones. In this extreme northwest area of Scotland, Gosse felt more remote from his beloved London than he would have if he had been in southern Italy or northern Turkey. Tourists were a rarity in Stornoway, and Gosse seemed as strange and unfamiliar to the locals as they did to him. The misunderstandings and lapses in communication between Gosse and the native population were so great as to be amusing. As he explained it, ‘[T]here was a general puzzlement as to what on earth we had come for.’ The puzzlement reached a climax when he asked at his inn for oatcakes, a sample of the local fare. The landlady expressed wonder and dismay. Knowing him to be a gentleman from the South, she had prepared a steamer-like meal — what one might have received in Glasgow. It was impossible for her to believe that he wanted to sample the everyday ‘productions’ of Stornoway. Her perplexed look seemed to say, ‘Could gentlefolk really prefer oatcake to the bread from the south!’¹