Travel and Transformation: Exploration, Tourism, and the Threat of Disease in Nineteenth-Century Travel

The implications and effects of the growing popularity of in nineteenth-century Britain are the subjects of books by Jessica Howell (Exploring Victorian Travel Literature), Michele Strong (Travel and the 'Civilisation' of the Victorian Working Classes), and Tim Youngs (Beastly Journeys: Travel and Transformation at the Fin de Siecle). The three studies offer novel approaches to telling the story of nineteenth-century travel: as mass educational experience for the working classes (Strong), as imperialist exploration of lands Europeans feared for reasons of health and wellbeing (Howell), and as a form of metamorphic writing that explored fears of human regression through contact with alien lands and cultures(Youngs). These studies expand notions of what constitutes travel and why should be seen in its double role as a disruptive harbinger of a troubling modernity in the late nineteenth-century and as an inviting experience of exciting confrontation with cultural novelty. Jessica Howell, Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Disease, Race and Climate (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014), 198 + ix pp., $120.00 cloth. Michele M. Strong, Travel and the Civilisation of the Victorian Working Classes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 243 + viii pp., $95.00 cloth. Tim Youngs, Beastly Journeys: Travel and Transformation at the Fin de Siecle (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2013), 225 + x pp., $111.00 cloth. The European discovery of the New World in the fifteenth century initiated a global movement of people--ordinary people as well as explorers--never seen before, although medieval Europe and the Islamic world, to be sure, saw countless religious pilgrimages in an era when, at least in Europe, serfs were bound for a lifetime to remain on the land where they were born. Voluntary by ordinary individuals for the purposes of education or pleasure, what we now call touristic travel, was, by contrast, largely a monopoly of the well off in Europe until the nineteenth century. The aristocratic Grand Tour was considered a necessity by those young men whose class position required them to acquire the proper cosmopolitan polish, but it required a great deal of money and time in an age when roads were primitive and railroads did not exist. The subgenre of narrative known as exploration literature goes back at least to Herodotus, but by the nineteenth century it grew increasingly popular with readers in Europe and the United States, and in Britain especially after the elimination of the 1860 paper tax, which made publication significantly cheaper than it had been. While eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travelers, adventurers, intellectuals, and missionaries, such as the scientists Alexander von Humboldt, Joseph Banks, and Charles Darwin, and the explorers Johann Burckhardt, Mungo Park, and Captain James Cook, were earnestly dedicated to advancing human knowledge (as well as colonization, in some cases) by investigating and reporting on the customs of non-European people, their travels were journeys of self-exploration as well, always justified as the necessary means of enlightening a growing readership while opening up areas of the world, however inadvertently, to eventual European penetration. The motives for by the nineteenth century were multiple. The mid-nineteenth century saw a dramatic change in the modes of travel. The development of railroads made across Europe and North America (and within Britain) cheaper and faster than it had ever been before and brought it within the reach of people of moderate means. While the British government still sponsored exploratory expeditions, Britain also saw the growth of private institutions taking responsibility for providing money to individual travelers and explorers to perform more systematic forms of exploration and mapping of the more remote areas of the globe (and these sometimes explicitly linked exploration with prospecting for colonization). …