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Britain and the narration of
travel in the nineteenth Century
Britain and the narration of
travel in the nineteenth Century
texts, images, objects
edited by
Kate hill
University of Lincoln, UK
First published 2016 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 2016 Kate hill and the contributors
Kate hill has asserted her right under the Copyright, designs and Patents act, 1988, to be
identified as the editor of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice..
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only
for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Britain and the narration of travel in the nineteenth century: texts, images, objects / edited
by Kate hill.
pages cm
includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-5835-3 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. Travelers’ writings, British—19th century—History and criticism. 2. English prose
literature—19th century—History and criticism. 3. British—Foreign countries—History—
19th century. 4. Literature and society—Great Britain—History—19th century. 5. Great
Britain—Civilization—19th century. 6. Travel writing—History—19th century. 7. Travel
in literature. i. hill, Kate, 1969– editor, author.
Pr778.t72B75 2015
820.9’3209034—dc23
2015011130
ISBN 9781472458353 (hbk)
Contents
List of Figures vii

Notes on Contributors xi
introduction: narratives of travel, narratives that travel 1

Kate Hill
Section I Spaces and Places in Motion
1 arctic and european in-Betweens: the Production of tourist Spaces

in late nineteenth-Century northern norway 13
Ulrike Spring
2 ‘The Formation of a Surface’: European Travel in Charles Dickens’s
Little Dorrit 37
Charlotte Mathieson
3 female Space, feminine Grace: ladies and the Mid-victorian
railway 53
Kara Tennant
Section 2 Narratives on the Move
4 Victorians in the Alps: A Case Study of Zermatt’s Hotel Guest Books

and registers 75
Katarzyna Michalkiewicz and Patrick Vincent
5 ‘nerves of the empire’: Submarine telegraph technological travel
narratives as imperial adventure 91
Susan Shelangoskie
6 thrills and Quills: Masculinity and location in three South african
Travel Narratives (1834–1900) 109
Mathilda Slabbert
7 tourism in the age of Mechanical reproduction: aesthetics and
advertisement in travel Posters and luggage labels 129
Lori Brister
Section III Cultural Flows
8 the travelling other: A Māori Narrative of a Visit to Australia in

1874 153
Conal McCarthy
vi Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century
9 Souvenirs: narrating overseas violence in the late nineteenth

Century 175
Kate Hill
10 British Travels in China during the Opium Wars (1839–1860):
Shifting images and Perceptions 191
Louise Tythacott
11 ‘the untrammelled fancy of the scenic artist’: imagining and
Encountering Zanzibar in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Centuries 209
Sarah Longair
Index 225
list of figures
1.1 ‘Fishing boats in Tromsø harbour’. (Cohn 1895, 46–7). This

was a popular photograph, as the still existing reproductions in
Norwegian museums today indicate. According to Norsk
Teknisk Museum (2014), the photographer was Swedish Axel
Lindahl (1841–1906). Source: Lokalhistorisk samling, Tromsø
bibliotek. 21
1.2 ‘Tromsø beach with Tromsø sound’. (Krauß 1888, 760).
Digitized by the University Library, UiT The Arctic University
of norway. 26
1.3 ‘The huts of the Lapps’. (Vogt 1863, 163). Digitized by the
university library, uit the arctic university of norway. 27
1.4 ‘Lapps’ heads’. (Vogt 1863, 166). Digitized by the University
library, uit the arctic university of norway. 29
3.1 J.G. [Gordon] thompson, illustration for ‘an expensive
Journey’ (detail). London Society, January 1867, n.p. 60
3.2 J.G. [Gordon] thom[p]son, illustration for ‘Caught at last’.
London Society, July 1866, n.p. 64
4.1 a guide and his client. from nest und Bietschhorn hotel guest
book, Ried, 1868–1898. Reproduction courtesy of Mrs Helene
and Mr erwin Bellwald-Grob. 76
4.2 a caravan ascending the Gornergrat on mules. from riffelberg
Hotel guest book, Zermatt, 10 September 1869. Reproduction
courtesy of Matterhorn Museum, Zermatt. 83
4.3 a quarrel concerning the ascent of the Bietschhorn. from nest
und Bietschhorn Hotel guest book, Ried, 14 August 1877.
reproduction courtesy of Mrs helene and Mr erwin
Bellwald-Grob. 87
7.1 Left: Thomas Cook advertisement for Transportation to the
Great Exhibition, 1851. Courtesy of Thomas Cook Company
archive. right: Cover of Guide to Cook’s Tours in France,
Switzerland, and Italy, 1865. Courtesy of Thomas Cook
Company archive. 135
7.2 Brochure art for ‘Cook’s Tours Round the Globe,’ 1891.
Courtesy of Thomas Cook Company Archive. 136
7.3 Travel poster of ‘Cook’s Tours to the Riviera Italy, etc.,’ 1904. 137
viii Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century
7.4 Grand hôtel d’angleterre, Chamonix, france, c. 1880s–1890s.

Courtesy of Joao-Manuel Mimoso. 139
7.5 Station hotel, oban, Scotland, c. 1880s. Courtesy of
Joao-Manuel Mimoso. 140
7.6 Bertolini’s Palace, naples, italy. designed by richter & Co,
naples. c. 1890s. Courtesy of Joao-Manuel Mimoso. 141
7.7 hôtel europe, Milan, italy. c. 1900. Courtesy of Joao-Manuel
Mimoso. 142
7.8 left: national hotel, Cairo, egypt; Centre: Bristol hotel, Cairo,
egypt; right: Shepheard’s hotel, Cairo, egypt, c. 1900–1910.
Courtesy of Joao-Manuel Mimoso. 143
7.9 Left: Pera Palace, Constantinople, Turkey, c. 1910; Centre: Pera
Palace, Constantinople, Turkey, c. 1910; Right: Pera Palace,
Istanbul, Turkey, c. 1925. Courtesy of Joao-Manuel Mimoso. 144
8.1 The Whanganui chief Hoani Wiremu Hīpango (right) on his trip
to England in 1855 with missionary Richard Taylor (centre) and
his son Basil (left). Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.
roijaards, W.M. van erpers negative. ref: PaColl–5185. 160
8.2 Major Ropata Wahawaha, chief of Ngāti Porou, photographed in
napier by Samuel Carnell in 1871. alexander turnbull
library, Wellington. ref: 1/4–022027–G. 162
8.3 Sir donald Mclean, photographed in the 1860s when he was
native Minister in the new Zealand government. alexander
turnbull library, Wellington. ref: Pa2–2604. 168
8.4 The ‘Maori house’ (Hau-te-ana-nui-a-Tangaroa) in the
Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, new Zealand, 1875. The
Illustrated New Zealand Herald, november 1875, p. 6.
alexander turnbull library, Wellington. ref: C21551. 170
10.1 ‘rally of the tartars at Chin-Keang-foo’. from ochterlony’s
The China War, 1844. 193
10.2 reproduction of the Signing of the treaty of nanjing, Jinghai
Temple, Nanjing. Photograph taken by the author, 2007. 195
10.3 Illustration of the Buddha, Lama Temple, Beijing. Taken by
Garnet Wolseley in 1860. Courtesy of the Council of the
national army Museum, london. 200
10.4 Ruins of Yuanmingyuan, Beijing. Photograph taken by the
author, 2014. 205
List of Figures ix
11.1 View of Shangani, Zanzibar Town. Illustrated London News,

21 april 1866. © illustrated london news/Mary evans Picture
library. 214
11.2 Sultan Barghash visiting factories in Manchester. Illustrated
London News, 17 July 1875. © illustrated london news/Mary
evans Picture library. 216
11.3 Zanzibar street-scene postcard, c. 1900–1950. Private
collection. 218
notes on Contributors
Lori Brister recently completed her Phd in english at the George Washington
university in Washington, dC. her dissertation examines the interstices of travel
literature, tourism, and visual culture, particularly the relationship between the
picturesque and the evolution of sightseeing.
Kate Hill is a Principal lecturer at the university of lincoln. She has published
on the history of museums in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in
books such as Culture and Class in English Public Museums (Ashgate, 2005), and
Museums and Biographies (Boydell and Brewer, 2012). She is currently working
on a book on women and museums, 1850–1914.
Sarah Longair works at the British Museum and was awarded her PhD from the
university of london in 2012, recently published as Cracks in the Dome: Fractured
Histories of Empire in the Zanzibar Museum, 1897–1964 (Ashgate, 2015). She has
also co-edited Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience
with John Mcaleer for Manchester university Press. her current project examines
material culture and collecting in the western indian ocean, 1850–1930.
Charlotte Mathieson is a research fellow in the institute of advanced Study

at the University of Warwick, where she obtained her PhD in the Department of
english and Comparative literary Studies in 2011. her research focuses on the
intersections of mobility, national space, and gender in the mid-nineteenth-century
novel. Publications include Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2015),
Conal McCarthy is associate Professor and director of the Museum & heritage
Studies programme at victoria university of Wellington, new Zealand. Conal has
published widely on Māori art, museum display, and current museum practice. His
latest book is Museum Practice, vol. 2, The International Handbooks of Museum
Studies, General editors Sharon Macdonald and helen rees leahy (Wiley-
Blackwell 2014).
Katarzyna Michalkiewicz completed her Phd in 2014 at the Jagiellonian

university in Cracow, Poland. Between 2010 and 2012 she obtained a research
scholarship from the Swiss Scientific Exchange Programme to work on her
doctoral thesis at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Her dissertation,
entitled ‘the alps and the tatras: Mountain representations in 19th and 20th
Century literature’, is currently being prepared for publication.
xii Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century
Susan Shelangoskie is an associate Professor of english at lourdes university.

Her work focuses on the interface between Victorian literature, technology, and
culture and has appeared in publications such as The Journal of Victorian Culture,
LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts.
Mathilda Slabbert lectures in the department of english Studies at Stellenbosch

university, South africa. her research interests are life writing, ecocriticism,
and gender studies. She is co-author with dawid de villiers of David Kramer:
A Biography (Tafelberg, 2011). Her publications include essays in Fairy Tales
Reimagined: Essays on New Retellings (McFarland, 2009) and Locating Life
Stories: Beyond East-West Binaries in (Auto)Biographical Studies (university of
Hawai’i Press, 2012).
Ulrike Spring is associate Professor of history at Sogn og fjordane university

College (Norway). She also has experience as an exhibition curator. Her research
focuses on nineteenth-century european history, in particular travelling/tourism,
cultural heritage, polar history, and the history of science. Her latest book is
Passagiere des Eises: Polarhelden und arktische Diskurse 1874, with Johan
Schimanski (Böhlau, 2015).
Kara Tennant currently teaches fashion theory at the university of South Wales.
her research focuses upon fashionable representations of women in the nineteenth
century within both domestic life and consumer culture; she is especially fascinated
by the figure of the Victorian dressmaker as depicted in fiction and the visual arts.
Louise Tythacott is Senior lecturer in Curating and Museology of asian

art at SoaS, university of london. her research focuses on the collection,
representation, and display of non-Western, especially Chinese, objects in
museums. Publications include Surrealism and the Exotic (Routledge, 2003), The
Lives of Chinese Objects: Buddhism, Imperialism and Display (Berghahn, 2011),
and Museums and Restitution: New Practices, New Approaches, co-edited with
Kostas Arvanitis (Ashgate, 2014).
Patrick Vincent is a professor of english and american literature at the university

of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. He works mainly on Romantic-period culture in
Great Britain and on the Continent. Recent travel-related books include La Suisse
vue par les écrivains de langue anglaise (Presses polytechnique et universitaires
romandes, 2009), Chillon: A Literary Guide (fondation du Château de Chillon,
2010), Helen Maria Williams, A Tour of Switzerland, edited with florence
Widmer-Schnyder (Slatkine, 2011), and Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland:
New Prospects, edited with angela esterhammer and diane Piccitto (Palgrave
2015).
introduction:
narratives of travel, narratives that travel
Kate hill
this collection of essays investigates travel as a dynamic mode of experiencing

and ordering the world in the nineteenth century, through the ways in which it was
narrated across media and genres and across and between spaces, places, cultures,
and people. not only is travel itself a form of movement, but the cultures, narrative
forms, subjectivities, and spaces which it brings into contact are themselves fluid,
shifting, and continually interacting in complex ways. While this may itself be a
constant, the twin forces of modernity and colonialism in the nineteenth century
bore on these processes of hybridization in new ways, which are explored within
this volume.1 If Mary Baine Campbell can write of the twenty-first century, ‘the
old motifs of the journey – home, departure, destination, the liminal space between
– have lost their reference in the lived experience of most people who are not
tourists’ (Campbell 2002, 263), then, this collection argues, this hyper-mobility
and loss of fixed points has its roots in the nineteenth century.2
Such a confluence of shifting, fluid, and dynamic forces brought into play by
travel also created an opposite force – a determination to impose fixity and clear
boundaries, to separate ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘us’ and ‘them’. an emphasis on creating
fixed and mapped terrains, not only geographical, but cultural and emotional,
has been a focus of work on travel writing, as Maria Frawley indicates: ‘For the
victorians, travel was all about the boundaries … that structured their experiences’
(Frawley 2005, 27). As Clifford suggests, ‘stasis and purity are asserted … against
historical forces of movement and contamination’ (Clifford 1997, 7). But we
should not let these assertions fool us – cultures, people, narratives are always
already relational, though the relations in which they are enmeshed and by which
they are constituted may change.
the modernity of nineteenth-century travel resides in the enormous
development of travel technology, from trains to steamships to telegraphy, which
was widely felt to be actively remaking the world, space, and time (Youngs 2004,
174). The literary concept of the chronotope is of use here, both for literary texts
and more widely: while used in literature to explore the way time and space fuse in
a novel as an instantiation of the imaginary world being created, the same concept
can be used to indicate the imagined world, consisting of interrelated time and
1
On the association between travel and modernity, see Thomas 1994, 5.
2
See also Youngs 2004, 174: ‘A historical perspective should help us to qualify some
of the claims that we make about modern travel’.
2 Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century
space elements, which individuals carry inside their heads, responsive to a number
of cultural forms. Such a world is also highly responsive to technological change;
the effect of modern travel technologies, for example, was to allow Jules verne
to imagine that the entire world might be eighty days long or wide, and in fact
for Nellie Bly, a journalist, to prove it had shrunk to seventy-two days long by
1890 (Carr 2002, 70).3 travels such as those examined in this volume by Spring,
McCarthy, Michalkiewicz and Vincent, and Tennant were only possible in the
form taken here because of trains and steamships. Understandings of travel were
also deeply affected by technologies of communication; this is directly covered
in this volume in Shelangoskie’s chapter on narratives surrounding the laying of
submarine telegraphic cables, but is also a feature shaping the forms which the
narratives covered by, for example, Spring and McCarthy, take in newspapers and
guidebooks.
Colonialism, meanwhile, was both a product and a driver of these new
technologies. The intensification of colonial and imperial conflicts and the
changing nature of ideas about race and governance meant that europeans were
both more likely to encounter the world beyond Europe themselves and much
more likely to consume representations of that world (Bridges 2002, 66–67;
Potter 2005, 212–18). Colonies became sources of knowledge and of new ways
of knowing, sites for thrilling adventures, places to live – either to escape or to
recreate home settings, aesthetic schema which could be incorporated into life and
art, and, above all, places where europeans could encounter, virtually or in person,
people who were colonial.4 in this volume, colonialism is shown to have had a
wide impact on travel; Europeans who were in other countries to fight and rule
(see chapters by Hill, Longair, Tythacott) and for leisure travel between colonies
and metropole (Slabbert, McCarthy) produced narratives which fed into and drew
on other narratives to weave colonialism into the fabric of culture in complex
ways.
Much work on travel in the nineteenth century (and later) is concerned with
both the self and the encounter with the other. as thomas suggests, travel is a
form of self-fashioning, a set of practices which ‘discompose and recompose
the traveller’ (Thomas 1994). And yet Edward Said argued forcefully that travel
narratives were primarily about creating, and othering, the people and cultures
which the traveller encounters; ‘we’ shaped ‘them’, but ‘they’ could not shape
‘us’, or even themselves (Said 1977). For Said, this was both a product of, and
constituted, the power inequality which opened up between western europe and
much of the rest of the world from the early modern period onwards. however,
3
The chronotope has been used to explore the interrelationship of time and space
in museums: see Gielen 2004. this idea is also resonant of the french cultural historical
idea of the mentalité; Braudel (1995) explores how the logistics of travelling around the
Mediterranean affected the perception of time and space.
4
See Richards 1993; Bennett 2004 and 2013; MacKenzie 1986; Lawrence 2012;
livne 2013.
Introduction 3
Said’s reading seemed to be overly reductive in its understanding of the discursive

practices and effects of travel writing.5 Many of the chapters in this volume draw
instead on Mary Louise Pratt’s concept, the ‘contact zone’. Understanding travel
narratives as forming a contact zone is productive in a number of ways. Pratt
explicates the concept thus:
By using the term ‘contact’, i aim to foreground the interactive, improvisational

dimensions of colonial encounters … a ‘contact’ perspective emphasises how
subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other. it treats the
relations among … travellers and ‘travellees’ not in terms of separateness and
apartheid, but in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings
and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power. (Pratt
1992, 7)
thus, such a perspective brings the self and the other equally into question, and
does not see either as the fixed point exerting influence on the malleable other.
agency is distributed between ‘traveller’ and ‘travellee’, though not necessarily
equally, and there is scope for any party in the encounter either to follow a script
for that encounter or to depart from it. So the chapters in this book focus variously
on the way narrating travel shaped those doing the narrating, those narrated, and
the interactions between the two, seeing everyone, and indeed some non-people
such as objects, technologies, and spaces, as actors in the drama. McCarthy, for
example, shows how the colonized Other, in the form of Maori travellers, could
create narratives which both Othered and identified with white European culture
in complex ways, while in Slabbert’s chapter alliances work to bring genders
together across racial lines. the essential role played by the non-human world in
mediating self and other is explored in very different ways by hill, Brister, and
Shelangoskie.
The tension between creating fixed identities and exploring the fluidity brought
into play by travel has been particularly explored in work on gender and travel.
the central paradox here is that travel writing was used both to secure and to
undermine specific gender identities. On the one hand, travel writing as heroic
adventurous or scientific narrative is marked as masculine, with women either
disappearing from the story or featuring as non-mobile, domestic characters. on
the other hand, women’s writing about travel, of which there was much in the
nineteenth century, sought in complex ways to contest and work around existing
gender identities; women were at pains not to claim male authority for their
narratives, but at the same time they appropriated scientific and adventurous tropes
which suggested that travel writing enabled change in gender identities as much
as it pinned those identities down. Moreover, it is clear that gendering in travel
narratives was closely entwined with other relational identities such as race, class,
and nationality, so that attempting to extract an isolated masculine or feminine
identity from such narratives is futile.
5
See essays in Williams and Chrisman (1993), especially Porter.
one of the things which has become clear from the study of gendering in travel
writing is that gender identities are unstable here partly because the form itself
is so hybrid and unstable (Hooper and Youngs 2004, 2). Both men and women
not only selected among the range of forms such as adventure, moralizing tale,
self-development [bildung] account, or scientific treatise; they also blended these
forms in new ways. it is important for the purposes of this volume that narration
is understood to occur not just through textual forms, but also through visual and
material culture, which similarly shapes experience by extracting, arranging, and
emplotting features of travel, though the ways in which both images and things
carry meaning are different from words. Mieke Bal has explored the possibilities
of both visual and material narration, and while she suggests that visual narration is
sometimes called on to perform different functions to textual narration, ‘showing’
rather than ‘telling’, she also maintains that both forms of narration work ‘between
information and persuasion’ (Bal 1992, 556–94). For Bal and Susan Stewart,
narrating through the collection of objects is centrally concerned with the attempt
to collapse the subject/object duality while simultaneously maintaining it; trying
to reintegrate the self with the world while keeping the self distinct; and thus
tending towards an infinite series of things (Bal 1994; Stewart 1993). Material
narration thus has a more protean and inconclusive nature than textual narration
but, as i discuss below, frequently occurs in tandem with other forms of narration.
the scholarship on visual narration of travel, while less voluminous than that
on travel writing, also produces themes which resonate in this volume. art equally
tended to enmesh home and away, and to undermine as much as it reinforced
cultural norms; indeed, Barringer, Quilley, and fordham suggest that artists had
particular licence to subvert ideas of identity and alterity (Barringer, Quilley,
and Fordham 2007, 14). Geoff Quilley’s exploration of the imagery of maritime
travel in the early nineteenth century concludes that the discourse produced
was ‘fluid, contested and conflicted, much like the oceans’, which themselves
functioned simultaneously as barriers and linking factors, enabling movement and
enforcing stasis (Quilley 2011, 3). Meanwhile, a mere decade after the point where
Quilley’s work ends, photographic technologies started to make visual records of
travel, ‘holiday snaps’, serious rivals to travel writing as a way of mediating the
experience back home. Osborne stresses the way in which photography formed
a continuum with previous (and ongoing6) ways of recording a graphic image
of travel; yet it is clear that photography came to have a special status within
different forms of travel, producing both subjectivities and objectivities which
interacted in myriad ways: ‘a mobile visual system whose realism met the demand
for what was considered to be scientific objectivity, and whose ability to fascinate
produced visual objects of reverie, fantasy and idealisation’ (Osborne 2000, 9).
Meanwhile, technological innovation also brought spectacular views of travel to
6
The impact of technological change on non-photographic images was also
substantial in the course of the nineteenth century, especially in terms of their incorporation
into printed matter (Koivunen 2011, 3).
Introduction 5
popular audiences through panoramas, dioramas, and peep shows (Altick 1978;
Ziter 2003).
Meanwhile, objects were moving around the world for increasingly long
distances and in increasing numbers. While much of this was caused by the
capitalistic commodity flows of the global economy, some objects’ journeys were
specifically undertaken to help their owners understand the world and represent
their travel around the world to themselves, their friends and families, and other
constituencies, such as museum audiences and scientific institutions. Objects have
been particularly studied as a means of producing a scientific, anthropological
narrative about the world during the nineteenth century, but it is important to
remember that they could carry other sorts of narratives as well, simultaneously
producing affect and knowledge in the same way as photographs, and indeed as
travel writing.7
however, this volume does not aim to cover each mode of narrating travel
separately, looking at images, texts, and object-based accounts. Rather, accounts
are followed through whichever medium by which they travel, in some cases
bringing texts together with images (Tennant, Longair, Spring); in some cases
objects and texts (Hill, Tythacott), and in some cases accounts can be considered
to form text, image, and object (Michalkiewicz and Vincent; Brister); while
other chapters focus on a single format (Mathieson, Slabbert, Shelangoskie). The
benefits of studying the intersections of texts, images, and objects are becoming
clearer through works which highlight the common imaginaries underlying such
representations, but also show the ways in which discursive translation between
media altered the discourse.8
This book does not seek, either, to provide a chronologically or spatially
focused account of travel narratives within the nineteenth century, or even to
focus on a theme such as gender or colonialism or technology. rather, it brings
together chapters focusing on different places and times, with different types of
traveller figures and different types of narrative, in order to show how pervasive
the movement, dissolution, and recomposition of ideas about travel were. it also
aims to show what some of the effects of this fluidity were, not least that it led
to counter-attempts to pin down and fix narratives, so that the world could be
understood in ways which were solid, and which created stable identities and clear
scripts for encounters between people and cultures.
The first section, Spaces and Places in Motion, aims to show how travel
narratives acted on places to render them malleable by bringing them into being.
One of the main effects of narrative is to create specific places and chronologies
7
See Barringer and Flynn 1998; Thomas 1991; Gosden and Larson 2007; Owen
2006; longair and Mcaleer 2012; longair and Mcaleer 2013.
8
An important book which considers newspaper narratives, shows of various kinds,
and material representations of africa is annie Coombes’s Reinventing Africa: Museums,
Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England
(1997). See also the essays in Christ and Jordan (eds.) 1995); Flint 2000; Mills 2008.
– chronotopes. travel narratives are especially focused on the particularity of

time and space, yet tend to create chronotopes which are in some tension between
reality effects and imaginative, subjective effects. Moreover, they tend to affect
the experiencing of the actual physical place in question, shaping people’s
engagement with and perception of particular places. the essays in this section
demonstrate this clearly, and show in particular how the changing technologies of
the nineteenth century had a profound impact upon travel narratives’ production of
place and time. thus Charlotte Mathieson’s essay on travel in europe as described
in Dickens’s Little Dorrit shows how the rest of europe seemed to become
impossible to keep separate from England and particularly London; Dickens
seems able only to document and accentuate the permeability of boundaries and
the collapsing of distance, developments about which he is at best ambivalent.
Meanwhile, Kara tennant’s chapter, in focusing primarily on a technical
development of the transport revolution, the railway, shows how an actual moving
space affected understandings of identity – primarily by removing the markers
which made other places easy to read and to formulate behavioural rules for. Both
time, as shown by the encounters which take place over unusual time frames,
such as overnight, and space, both unusually cramped and expansive in that one
can cross continents, are unfamiliar in the railway carriage, and trying to fix new
rules to stabilize such a chronotope is a key preoccupation of writers and artists.
Ulrike Spring, meanwhile, focuses on one place and one time, but shows how
changing technologies and practices of travel, in particular the growth of touristic
travel, produced the Norwegian town of Tromsø anew, making it a place both on
the edge of and part of europe, a place both modern and archaic. the role of travel
narratives in bringing the spaces and chronologies of different places into motion,
for both actual and armchair travellers, is thus clear.
The second section, Narratives on the Move, asks whether and how narratives
themselves travelled and what effects this might have had. again, the nineteenth
century is significant for the new technologies, modes, and practices of narrating
travel that emerged during this period, from hotel registers to narratives about
telegraphy (also by telegraphy, though that is beyond the remit of this volume),
and in new, hybrid ways of blending adventure with reportage. Katarzyna
Michalkiewicz and Patrick Vincent’s chapter examining hotel guest books and
registers from Zermatt shows how these texts and sketches produced a narrative
of travel in the area through the movement of people and ideas from one hotel to
another; ideas, practices, and identities, such as the distinction between tourist
and climber, moved between registers and were enacted in overlapping but
dynamic ways in their reinscription in new registers. For Susan Shelangoskie,
who examines narratives written about the laying of submarine telegraph cables,
it is the narrative itself which is most unstable, travelling between genres as it
attempts to blend authority and adventure. a similar movement in narrative
type is discussed by Mathilda Slabbert, who shows how the hunting adventure
moved to South Africa and became a flexible part of colonialism in that it was
used both to express nostalgia and to produce a sense of a universal masculinity
Introduction 7
which transcended race. lori Brister’s chapter on travel posters and luggage labels
deals with what are extremely ephemeral and unreliable traces of travel to start
with; she suggests that the narration of travel, and the narration of the traveller’s
identity, floated freer than ever of actual travel and functioned primarily to signify
the cosmopolitan identity of the modern traveller. In this section, then, the fluidity
and mobility of narratives themselves is highlighted; new narrative media as well
as new settings for pre-existing narratives meant that the meanings, identities, and
morals emerging from those narratives were subject to change.
the third section, Cultural flows, concentrates on narratives where cultural
meeting and exchange take place. It would be wrong to characterize this as the
meeting of two cultures; as several of the chapters show, such ‘cultures’ are
already hybrid and permeable. Examining specific narratives is a way of pinning
down how different people, settings, media, and registers alter meanings, rather
than allocating meanings to cultural blocs. the movement of the narratives
shows us how cultures flow into each other or resist and transform each other.
thus Conal McCarthy’s discussion of Maori travel narratives indicates both
the range of views on white culture within Maori writing, and the instrumental,
comparative approach to appropriating or rejecting white travel narratives which
one particular Maori traveller deployed. Kate hill examines souvenirs, material
narrations of travel which inevitably spoke of their original contexts as well as
their new contexts in British domestic or museum spaces. despite the fact that
their acquisition often took place in circumstances of violence, such objects had
the capacity to undermine or reinforce narratives of power. louise tythacott also
looks at cultural contact through violence, but in the case of China, British violence
was unleashed in circumstances where the British cultural imaginary had been
formed through ambivalent feelings of mystery and desire. the ways in which the
allure of beautiful material was disciplined through textual narratives of treachery,
brutality, and lack of civilization to resist any cultural flows and maintain cultural
boundaries is an important part of the section. finally, Sarah longair’s chapter
on Zanzibar in governmental and popular narratives again shows the assertion
of cultural boundaries between colonial ruler (at least de facto) and ruled, yet
under the surface the cultural encounter narrated in texts about Zanzibar is far
more complex. Partly this is because of already existing generalized Orientalist
ideas about what an Arab city should look like, and therefore Zanzibar’s failure to
be mysterious and romantic enough, but also it is because of the powerful effect
of popular culture narratives about Zanzibar on governmental narratives. So the
cultural flows in this case are not just between travellers and travellees; they are
also between the popular and the governmental, and the imaginative and the
scientific.
the collection aims to show that home and away were themselves travelling
concepts; while of course the relational nature of these terms has been recognized,
the extent to which they almost dissolved in the nineteenth century has not.
although youngs is correct to restate that not everyone travelled willingly, in a
leisured way, or could easily escape the positioning effects of discourse – not
everyone found travel liberatory – it is also true to say that voluntary travel was
more widespread than hitherto, reaching, as McCarthy shows, into colonized
groups, and that under the influence of technological and colonial change, spaces,
narratives themselves, and cultural encounters all took on a greater measure of
flux as the nineteenth century progressed. The provisional nature of the modern
categories of home and away were forged in the nineteenth century.
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Chapter 10
British Travels in China during the Opium
Wars (1839–1860):
Shifting Images and Perceptions
Louise Tythacott
Introduction: Travels to China
For over two thousand years, European travellers and traders have found their way
to the country now known as China. The Romans, for example, referred to this
territory as Seres, the land of silk (Hughes 1937, 4). The Travels of Marco Polo,
published in the late thirteenth century, created in Europe strong images of China
as an advanced and sophisticated culture.1 Yet, over the centuries, travellers have
been alternately welcomed and expelled by the Chinese ruling elite, as the country
opened and then closed its doors to the outside world. Notably, in 1435 China
severed contact with foreigners and commenced a long period of isolation; for the
remainder of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) only the occasional outsider managed
to obtain access beyond the coastal regions. The Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–
1610) perhaps came closest, for he was one of the few foreigners to reside in the
capital, Beijing (Spence, 1985). The establishment of the Canton system by the
Qing (1644–1911) rulers in 1756 at last permitted foreign merchants to trade at the
port of Canton (Guangzhou),2 but they were strictly confined to their compounds,
the Chinese city being off limits (Levien 1982, 13). Despite the lack of contact with
everyday culture, the idea of ‘China’ gripped the European imagination during the
eighteenth century, with various waves of chinoiserie permeating the decorative
arts (Porter 2010). From the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the
reports of the British expeditions and the Macartney (1792–1794) and Amherst
(1816–1817) trade embassies served to create hitherto unseen representations of
this land – fanciful images of pagodas, mandarins, canals, and the courtly life in
Beijing (Peyrefitte 1993). Confined and carefully monitored, however, Europeans
1
Published c.1298, this important book gave Europeans their first idea of the
geography and history of Asia. Collis refers to it as ‘the greatest educational work of the
age’ (1959, 184) ‘ … the greatest work of 13th century Europe’ (1959, 185). Wood regards
Polo as the ‘first Westerner to write about China, apparently from his own experience’
(1995, 137). The Travels also inspired Christopher Columbus, who set off to find China by
sea nearly two hundred years later, taking a copy of the book with him, with handwritten
annotations (Hughes 1937, 8).
2
Historical Chinese names will include their contemporary Pinyin romanization.
were never able to see everyday Chinese life. It was the Opium Wars in the mid-
nineteenth century that most dramatically transformed the image of the country
in the West. During this time, soldiers travelled to regions previously closed to
the outside world. This chapter takes as its focus the periods of the First and
Second Opium Wars (1839–1842; 1856–1860), documenting the perceptions of
China constructed by British travellers at this time. It argues that the idea of China
shifted dramatically from romantic and idealized images to an ambivalent but
largely negative position at the conclusion of the Second Opium War in 1860,
which resulted in the looting and destruction of the magnificent imperial ‘Summer
Palace’ in Beijing.
The First Opium War (1839–1842): The Accounts of Cree and Ouchterlony
The First Opium War had its roots in the tea trade in the eighteenth century. As the
beverage became more popular in Britain, so the cost of purchasing and importing
it increased. However, the Chinese accepted payment only in silver, which, as the
century unfolded, became an unsustainable burden. British merchants initially
attempted to export silk and cotton cloth to China to offset the trade deficit, but
the Chinese were interested in neither. Instead, from the 1760s, opium grown
in British India was traded for silver, which was then used to buy tea. By the
1830s the opium trade was producing profits of over twenty million silver dollars
per year and, until their charter was removed in 1834, the British East India
Company monopolized the entire business (Fortesque 1927, 302). The trade in
opiates, however, had been deemed illegal by the Chinese authorities, and while
they consistently tried to ban it, smugglers and corrupt local officials enabled it
to thrive. The drug was, of course, having a devastating impact on the Chinese
population itself. In the late 1830s, the Chinese court appointed Commissioner
Lin Zexu (1785–1850), then Governor of Canton, to put an end to this contraband
trade. He blockaded the British and American bases in Canton in June 1839,
and destroyed 20,000 chests of opium (Massey 1992, 27). Furious at the loss of
revenue, and indignant at the audacity of the Chinese officials, in late 1839 Britain
declared war on China.
In May 1840 an expeditionary force was assembled in Singapore, arriving in
Canton in June 1840 (Levien 1982, 14; Ouchterlony 1844, 39–41). The war was
then fought in three phases (Massey 1992, 27): firstly, a blockade of the Canton
delta in the south and the capture of Zhoushan, the strategic archipelago in central
China near the mouth of the Yangzi River; secondly, an attack on the key port of
Ningbo in 1841; thirdly, the British movement along the Yangzi River and the
decisive battle of ‘Ching Kiang Foo’ (Zhenjiang) in July 1842, which resulted in
British victory in the war (Figure 10.1).
This was the first time that Britain had embarked on a military campaign in
China. Few Europeans spoke Chinese at the time, and the landscape itself was
uncharted by outsiders. China and Britain existed, as Hayes notes, in ‘a state of
mutual ignorance’:
British Travels in China during the Opium Wars (1839–1860) 193
Fig. 10.1 ‘Rally of the Tartars at Chin-Keang-Foo’. From Ochterlony’s The

China War, 1844.
… there was no one with experience of conducting operations there on land or
sea. More-over the society to which the British officer corps mostly belonged –
the aristocracy, the landed gentry and the professions – had little or no knowledge
of China. Save for a small number of persons whose families had been associated
with the China Trade, and others who derived their knowledge indirectly from
their service in British India, very few individuals in the government in London
possessed direct knowledge of the country, its officials and its peoples (2007, 2).
Dominant perceptions of China may be gleaned from the accounts of those

participating in the war. Naval surgeon Dr Edward Cree, for example, while
preoccupied with the health of the soldiers, commented in his diary on the beauty
of Chinese landscapes and the well-cultivated terrain.3 He wrote of ‘fanciful’
places with ‘a pagoda and distorted trees … a sacred lotus, grottoes and fantastic
rocks’, displaying the residual trope of chinoiserie (Levien 1982, 84). Cree praised
the Chinese people he encountered, describing a mandarin as ‘an intelligent sort
of fellow’ (Levien 1982, 67). He lamented, ‘it seems a shame to carry war into
such a peaceful country’ (Levien 1982, 55). Yet the doctor was horrified by the
perceived cruelty of the Chinese towards prisoners, and by the norms of crime and
punishment in general – judgements that would recur in the writings of travellers in
3
See, for example, Levien 1982, 97, 110, 140.
late nineteenth-century China (Levien 1982, 70). Cree remarked on the ‘horror’ of
the murder of families when invaders approached: he was shocked to see beggars
and dead bodies on the streets of Chinese cities (Levien 1982, 102–5, 137–39).
Lieutenant John Ouchterlony’s lengthy book, The Chinese War: an account
of all the operations of the British forces from the commencement to the Treaty of
Nanking (1844), documents the events leading up to and during the First Opium
War. Like Cree, Ouchterlony mentions the ‘shrewd and intelligent’ mandarins
(1844, 58), but laments their ‘savage laws’ (1844, 32, 33). The incarceration
of three Britons – Major Anstruther, Lieutenant Douglas, and Mrs Noble – in
Ningbo in 1842 incensed the Western press: the plight of Mrs Noble, who was
captured and placed in a cage, caused particular outrage in the columns of the
Illustrated London News.4 Ouchterlony devotes a page to the ‘unmanly barbarity’
meted out to Mrs Noble (1844, 71). He characterizes the mandarins as ‘violent’
(1844, 91), ‘treacherous and cowardly’ (1844, 116), ‘unscrupulous and deceived
people’ (1844, 122). In particular, he dwells on the Chinese practice of suicide
in the face of an approaching enemy, lingering over the horrible circumstances
of the massacres of whole families in Zhenjiang (1844, 93, 96–98, 286–88).
But, like Cree, his response to China was ambivalent: in his discussions of the
negotiations for the Treaty of Nanjing at the end of the war, he remarked upon
the ‘spirit of fairness … exhibited by the Chinese very much at variance with that
which characterizes all their previous proceedings towards us’ (1844, 442).5 He
was in pursuit of ‘the curious and picturesque’ (1844, 53). He praised architecture
(1844, 456–58): ancestor halls were glazed with ‘a peculiar brilliancy’ (1844, 462)
and there were ‘many handsome and curious temples’ (1844, 354). Like others,
however, he stressed the ‘degeneration’ of Chinese culture in the nineteenth
century, describing the Ming tombs in Nanjing as being from ‘a period when the
national ideas of architecture and notions of the picturesque were less barbarous
than those displayed in the works we have seen elsewhere during the progress of
the war’ (1844, 463).
The First Opium War ended with the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing on 29
August 1842, in which Hong Kong was ceded as a British colony and five Chinese
ports were thrown open to British trade – Amoy (Xiamen), Canton (Guangzhou),
Foo-chow (Fuzhou), Ningpo (Ningbo), and Shang-hae (Shanghai) (see Figure
10.2). Consular officers were allowed to reside in the Treaty Ports and British
nationals were granted ‘extraterritoriality’, enabling them to exist outside Chinese
law. The merchants, with their own courts and customs arrangements, of course
continued to trade in opium. As part of this treaty, China was also forced to pay a
crippling indemnity of over twenty-one million dollars (Ouchterlony 1844, 451).
The long isolation of the Celestial Empire as a result of this military incursion
was clearly at an end: the forcible opening up of China to foreign trade on a
dramatically increased scale was about to begin.
4
13 August 1842, 220.
5
One of the headings for Chapter xix, for example, was ‘Friendly disposition of the
inhabitants of Ningpo’ (1844, 209).
Fig. 10.2 Reproduction of the Signing of the Treaty of Nanjing, Jinghai

Temple, Nanjing. Photograph taken by the author, 2007.
Between the Wars (1842–1856): Fortune’s China
The First Opium War galvanized British popular interest in China. As Langdon
wrote in 1843, ‘At no period in the history of the world, has the attention of
civilized nations been so fully directed towards China … as at the present
moment’ (cited in Pagani 1998, 34). Nathan Dunn’s London exhibition, ‘Chinese
World in Miniature’, typifies the fascination. Dunn, formerly a Quaker, had
made a fortune in the tea trade and earlier displayed his collection of some 1,300
objects in Philadelphia. His exhibition was relocated to Hyde Park Corner in
1842, and promoted typical and not unfavourable images of China. The exhibition
was housed in a two-story pagoda with green and red roofs and pillars; visitors
entered underneath an inscription in gilded Chinese characters proclaiming ‘Ten
Thousand Chinese Things’, then ascended a flight of stairs opening onto the main
exhibition hall. It was described in The Times as a sort of Brighton Pavilion (Altick
1978, 292–93). The exhibition remained in London until 1846, when it toured the
provinces, arriving back in the capital in 1851 (Haddad 2009, 149–50).
Stimulated by the increase in exhibitions and publications soon after the end
of the First Opium War, a number of travellers set off for the East – the Scottish
botanist, Robert Fortune (1812–1880), was perhaps the most renowned. Initially
sent to China by the Royal Horticultural Society as their ‘Botanical Collector’,

he arrived in Hong Kong in 1843 (Fortune 1847, B). Fortune admitted having
constructed romantic notions of ‘Cathay’ before his travels: ‘This celebrated
country has long been looked upon as a fairy-land by the nations of the Western
world’ (1847, 2). After years of living in the country, he lamented, ‘we find, after
all, that China is just like other countries’ (1847, 4).
In Three Years’ Wanderings in China (1847), Fortune provides a rich portrait
of Chinese life – commenting on everything from street scenes to entertainments,
from opium smoking to cormorant fishing, from feng shui practices to attacks by
thieves and pirates.6 He travelled, above all, with the motivations of a botanist,
describing the climate, landscapes, agriculture, and farming practices, as well
as the manufacture of opium and the growing of cotton and mulberry trees and,
of course, that precious commodity, tea. Collections of botanical specimens are
frequently referred to, and Fortune often reports on the cases of plants and seeds
sent back to the Royal Horticultural Society gardens in London. He disguised
himself in Chinese costume, shaving his head and wearing a wig and pigtail, and
embarked on secret missions to Suzhou, ‘the most fashionable city of the Celestial
Empire, where no Englishman, as far as I know, had ever been before’ (1847, 258).
The botanist felt qualified to distinguish the northern Chinese from those in
the south, looking unfavourably upon the latter: ‘the natives of the Southern towns
deserve their bad character’ (1847, 10). The northern Chinese, by contrast, were
‘entirely different’:
‘ … They are quiet, civil and obliging. And although they are not entitled to
the credit of being equal to, much less in advance of the nations of the West in
science, in the arts, in government, or in laws; yet they are certainly considerably
in advance of the Hindoos, Malays, and other nations who inhabit the central
and western portions of Asia’ (1847, 10–11).
Fortune thus exhibits a typical mid-nineteenth century desire to rank non-Western

peoples in terms of race and development, and to position the Chinese always
below Europeans yet above other, supposedly more ‘primitive’ peoples. In his
first book, he condemns the ‘degeneration’ of Chinese culture: ‘There can be no
doubt that the Chinese empire arrived at its highest state of perfection many years
ago; and since then it has rather been retrograding than advancing’ (1847, 9). As
a Scottish Protestant, he was scathing of Buddhist and Daoist beliefs, describing
the ‘heathen temples’ (1847, 9) and the ‘poor deluded natives’ (1847, 91) who
practice ’heathen idol worship’ (1847, 119). Buddhist monks, he wrote, were not
6
Fortune arrived in Hong Kong in July 1843 and sailed in August to Amoy, and then
on to Ningpo in the autumn (1847, 30, 82). A few months later he was in the Zhoushan
archipelago, and by the end of 1843 had made it to Shanghai. The following year he was
back in Hong Kong (1847, 116), and from there sailed north to Shanghai again in April
(1847, 242) and on to Chusan (1847, 314). During the summer of 1844 and parts of 1845,
he even managed to visit parts of the country ‘sealed’ to Europeans (1847, 166). Finally,
on 10 October 1845, he sailed to Hong Kong and from there back to England (1847, 405).
only ‘dreadfully ignorant and superstitious’, but ‘an imbecile race’ (1847, 174,
187). Fortune railed, too, against the ‘absurd laws’ which prevented Westerners
from travelling inland. The Treaty of Nanjing had stipulated that foreigners were
to remain in the Treaty Ports, and only allowed a day’s journey from the coast
(Fortune 1847, 251). Flouting this, Fortune made an extended trip to the interior
areas, where he encountered ancient towns and beautiful landscapes (1847, 125,
255), proclaiming: ‘I fully believe, that in no country in the world is there less
real misery and want than in China’ (1847, 121). Fortune was in favour of opium
being legalized even though he commented with pity on the terrible lives of opium
addicts (1847, 234–41).
In 1848 Fortune was sent to China again, this time by the East India Company
on a mission to discover the secrets of the tea industry and transport botanical
samples to government plantations in northern India. His account, A journey to
the tea countries of China (1852), describes how he travelled inland, disguised
in Chinese costume, in search of tea plants. Here, his writings are marked by a
recurrent theme of admiration for the landscape, yet he disdained many elements
of Chinese culture, especially religious practice. Fortune, after all, was there as a
spy, sent to locate the tea plantations and obtain botanical samples. He transferred
tea specimens, along with specialist Chinese growers, to northern (British) India
in order to undercut the Chinese monopoly. He thus participated in no small way
in the British imperialist project of appropriation of the wealth and knowledge of
far-off lands.
Perceptions of China during the Second Opium War (1856–1860): Tulloch,

Wolseley, and Swinhoe
By the 1850s, the new influx of foreigners was frustrated by their confinement to
the five Treaty Ports, and the British began insisting on more rights and privileges
– in effect a revision of the Treaty of Nanjing (Hevia 2004, 32). The British
demanded the opening up of China in its entirety to Western commerce, thus
enabling foreigners (especially missionaries) to travel all over. They also called for
the legalization of the opium trade and the right to place a British ambassador in
Beijing. The Chinese court rejected their demands, and tensions increased (Wong
2001, 133). During the 1850s, the Qing government was greatly preoccupied by
an internal crisis, the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864), the largest revolt in Chinese
history, claimed as the world’s largest civil war: thirty to fifty million Chinese lives
were lost (Hookham 1972, 277; Levien 1982, 117). While this internal conflict was
raging, in October 1856, the Guangzhou officials impounded the Arrow, a vessel
flying British colours, which was believed to be illegally smuggling opium (Hevia
2004, 32). The British Consul, Harry Parkes,7 demanded that the local viceroy,
7
Sir Harry Smith Parkes (1828–1885) was a British diplomat and interpreter in
China. He arrived in China in 1841, and witnessed the signing of the Treaty of Nanking at
the end of the First Opium War in 1842. He then served as interpreter and consul at various
Treaty Ports. Parkes Street in Kowloon, Hong Kong, is named after him.
Ye Mingchen, release the vessel and crew. While Ye returned nine members, he
held back three. The situation escalated until the British bombarded Guangzhou,
stormed the city, and took Ye prisoner (Hevia 2004, 32–33). By March 1857 war
with China was being advocated in the British Parliament, and soon after, Lord
Elgin8 was appointed envoy, with a remit to open China to trade. British naval
and military units were despatched from India and Singapore, and the French,
incensed by the execution of one of their missionaries in China in 1856, decided
to join forces with the British (Hevia 2004, 34–35). The troops seized Guangzhou
in December 1857, and by June 1858 had forced the Treaty of Tianjin upon the
Chinese. The Westerners thus achieved extensions to the intrusive gains they had
made in the First Opium War (Hanes and Sanello 2002, 223).9 When the Chinese
refused to ratify the treaty, however, tensions escalated. Finally, in August 1860,
Elgin was placed in charge of an expeditionary force of 11,000 men, sent under the
command of General Hope Grant with the aim of making the Chinese acquiesce
(Wong 2001, 134).10 The Chinese capture and torture of the British consul, Harry
Parkes, and his party in September 1860 was the pretext for the British and French
troops to attack the capital, Beijing.
Here it is British officers’ diaries, some of which were later published as
narratives, which provide the sharpest accounts of the country. These consistently
vilify the Chinese government and the actions and character of its officials,
the ‘mandarins’. Alexander Bruce Tulloch11 of the Royal Regiment typically
characterized the ruling elite as ‘treacherous’ (1903, 31): ‘The governing class
in China is, from our point of view, corruption itself: and as for ignorance,
conceit, and general unfitness for a responsible position, few human beings can
come up to the ordinary Chinese mandarin … ’ (1903, 33). Tulloch, like Fortune,
8
James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin and 12th Earl of Kincardine (1811–1863), was High
Commissioner in charge of opening trade with China. He was also Governor General of the
Province of Canada (1848–1854) and Viceroy of India (1862–1863).
9
The treaty established diplomatic legates in Beijing and London, and provided for
diplomats and consuls to have freedom of movement around the country. More ports were
opened along the coast, merchants and visitors were permitted to travel to the interior, and
Christian missions could preach. As well as the legalization of the opium trade, China was
also made to pay eight million taels to Britain and France cover the cost of the war (Hevia
2004, 48).
10
General Sir James Hope Grant GCB (1808–1875) was appointed lieutenant-general
and Commander of British Troops in China and Hong Kong in 1859, and led the British
land forces in the united French and British expedition against China. He was included
in George MacDonald Fraser’s novel about the Second Opium War, Flashman and the
Dragon (1985), and is described as one of the most formidable soldiers of his day.
11
Major-General Tulloch CB (1838–1920) was born in Edinburgh, educated at Royal
Military College, Sandhurst, and entered the army as ensign in the 1st Foot in May 1855. He
became lieutenant of that regiment in 1857, moving up to colonel in the army in 1886, and
was placed on half-pay in 1888. He was also the Times’s war correspondent in Manchuria in
1904, and wrote several books, including Forty Years Service, The Highland Rising of the
’45, A Soldier’s Sailoring, and Possible Battlefields in the Next European War.
distinguished the ‘races’ in the north (the ‘Tartars’) from those in the south (the
‘Cantonese’) (1903, 44). He noted that ‘The inhabitants of Pekin, a much taller
and finer race in every way than those in the south, were very civil’ (1903, 57–58).
While voicing disdain for the emperor and the mandarins, he was careful to note
his response to the everyday people he encountered – merchants, peasants, and
coolies – which he affected to judge more favourably (1903, 58): ‘The mandarins
as a rule, and speaking generally, the Chinese Government officials everywhere,
were about as objectionable and untrustworthy as they well could be; but for the
Chinese merchant and the Chinese peasant I have then, and always shall have,
great regard’ (1903, 58).
In Colonel Garnet Wolseley’s Narrative of the War with China in 1860 (1862),
exceptionally negative stereotypes are articulated.12 Wolseley characterized the
Chinese as liars,13 cruel,14 and worse.15 The word ‘treachery’ is frequently applied.16
Wolseley, an avid participant in the invasion of a sovereign nation, complained
that the prisoners taken by the Chinese were ‘treacherously captured under the
most flagrant disregard to all international law’. ‘There is truly no term in our
language’, he asserts, ‘which so essentially describes the Chinese rulers as the
word barbarian, which they use so universally as an opprobrious epithet when
alluding to any people so happily fortunate as to be of any other nation than China’
(1862, 259).
Like almost every British commentator at this time, Wolseley disdained the
‘hideous idols’ (1862, 295) found in temples, especially those from Tibet: ‘In
design they are far more revolting in appearance than those worshipped by ordinary
Chinese Buddhists. Lust and sensuality is represented in its hideous naked-ness
and under its most disgusting aspect’, he remarked (1862, 220).17 So strong were
his interests in Buddhist imagery that, at the Lama Temple in Beijing, he even
appropriated a Tibetan style painting, now in the collections of the National Army
Museum in London (see Figure 10.3). This illustration thus became transformed
12
Field Marshal Garnet Joseph Wolseley (1833–1913) was an Anglo-Irish officer in
the British Army. He served in Burma, the Crimean War, India, China, Canada, and Africa.
From 1895 to 1900 he was Commander-in-Chief of the Forces.
13
He wrote of ‘a nation so notoriously deceitful as the Chinese’ (1862, 173), that
diplomatic papers had ‘no regard for the truth’ (1862, 243), that ‘all knew the Chinese to be
as cruel as they are false and treacherous’ (1862, 181) and of the ‘mendacious characters of
all Chinamen’ (1862, 363).
14
China was a ‘nation celebrated for cruelty’ (1862, 205) and ‘Chinese coolies were
… most lawless and cruel’ (1862, 196).
15
He commented on ‘childish endeavours’ (1862, 169–70), a ‘pusillanimous ruler’
(1862, 250), and ‘the imbecility and rottenness of the Imperialist Government’ (1862, 335).
16
For example, ‘treacherous intentions’ (1862, 289); the ‘treachery upon the part
of the Chinese’ (1862, 291); ‘barbarous treatment … treacherously taken … barbarously
murdered’ (1862, 276).
17
He also described temple images as ‘grotesque’ (1862, 220) and ‘hideous’ (1862,
295, 27, 153).
Fig. 10.3 Illustration of the Buddha, Lama Temple, Beijing. Taken by Garnet
Wolseley in 1860. Courtesy of the Council of the National Army
Museum, London.
from a sacred image of the Buddha into a trophy of war – a symbol of the supposed
superiority of the Christian invaders over the heathen Buddhist natives. Wolseley
asserts that only Christians can save ‘countries as uncivilised as China is at
present, where the character of the people is as barbarous, and their ideas of right
and wrong as confused and ill-defined as those of the English in the tenth century’
(1862, 333). While Fortune was concerned to rank the Chinese in terms of racial
development, here Wolseley is even more scathing in his comparison of China
with Medieval England.
The ornithologist and consul in China, Robert Swinhoe,18 worked closely with
Wolseley during the war, in the Topographical Department.19 A Chinese speaker,
he became General Hope Grant’s interpreter (2005 [1861], 1). Swinhoe’s complete
disdain for the Chinese permeates his book Narrative of the North China Campaign
of 1860, first published in 1861, where terms such as ‘wretched’ (2005 [1861],
18
Robert Swinhoe (1836–1877) joined the China consular corps in 1854, and by 1855
was stationed near Amoy, where he learnt Chinese. In 1860 he became the first European
consular representative on Taiwan (Formosa). He was also consul at Amoy, Ningpo, and
Chefoo.
19
His duty was to ‘follow in wake of the advancing columns and survey the roads’
(Swinhoe, 2005 [1861], 199).
63), ‘cowardly’ (2005 [1861], 138), ‘timid and mandarin-trodden’ (2005 [1861],
66), and ‘pig-headed’ (2005 [1861], 2) are commonplace. The Coolie Corps, in
particular, were seen as a ‘grotesque body’, criticized for their addiction to opium
(2005 [1861], 144–45, 27) – ironic, considering that the war was predicated upon
legalizing this drug.
Swinhoe was at pains to point out that the war was purely with the governing
party and not ‘with the governed’ (2005 [1861], 110). The idea of the Chinese
ruling elite as treacherous,20 liars,21 and cruel22 emerges consistently in his text.
Swinhoe described the characteristics of different Chinese ‘races’, in line with
increasingly racist, Social Darwinist beliefs:23 one group were, ‘ugly, with thick
yellow skins; all alike dirty and odoriferous’ (1861, 45). He objectified Chinese
people as ‘racial types’ to be studied: in a Chinese hospital he encountered ‘ …
a display of the various sub-divisions of the great Mongolian race well worthy
the contemplation of an ethnologist’ (1861, 144). So deep was his animosity to
the culture, he declared, ‘you can scarce refrain from thanking Heaven that you
have the privilege of claiming some other nationality than that of a Chinaman’
(1861, 30).
Swinhoe advocated both Western commerce and the introduction of Christianity:
‘while additional wealth is wafted thence to the shores of Great Britain, we trust, in
return, that Christianity, with her civilising influences may gradually flow in, and
taking firm hold on China’s millions’ (2005 [1861], 389). Reformation in terms of
religion was considered vital to the progress of the Chinese people, along with the
opening up of the country to trade. The Chinese Empire was, after all, the largest
‘idolatrous’ population on earth and the greatest challenge to Christians.
The Second Opium War culminated in October 1860 in the notorious looting
and destruction of the Yuanmingyuan24, or the original Qing ‘Summer Palace’, to
the northwest of Beijing, an act Wolseley declared to be ‘the strongest proof of
our superior strength’ (1862, 281). The Yuanmingyuan was not a single palace but
rather a group of hundreds of imperial buildings set in a large park. Arguably the
most important imperial garden in China, this was where the imperial household
resided and handled government affairs (Wong 2001, 1). Initiated by the Kangxi
emperor (r 1662–1722) around 1707–1709, the Yuanmingyuan was developed,
in particular, by his grandson, the great Qianlong emperor (r 1735–1795). It was
indeed an extraordinary architectural achievement on a massive scale, spread over
20
For example, ‘the treacherous character of Asiatic politics’ (2005 [1861], 187); the
treachery of the Chinese is noted on pages 342 and 388. The top of page 233 is even entitled
‘Tartar Treachery’.
21
‘ … the mendacity for which the Chinese are justly celebrated’ (2005 [1861],
219–20).
22
People were ‘barbarously murdered, as is too often the treatment dealt by the
Chinese to their captives in war’ (2005 [1861], 275).
23
See Hevia (2004, 174–79) for a discussion of how racial characteristics were
applied to the Chinese at this time.
24
The Chinese term, Yuanmingyuan, translates as ‘Garden of Perfect Brightness’.
3.4 square kilometres (Wong 2001, 5). Amongst artificial hills, waterways, and
lakes were hundreds of traditional timber-built pavilions and temples constructed
to the highest quality. There were also remarkable European-style stone palaces,
and a maze, designed by Italian Jesuits working in the imperial court. The
Yuanmingyuan held much of the great imperial collection, built up over at least
a millennium and a half and constituting perhaps the largest art ensemble ever
seen. Jades, textiles, paintings, calligraphy, bronzes, cloisonné, snuff bottles, and
porcelain were lavishly displayed in numerous lofty, pillared pavilions.
On the night of 6 October 1860, the French troops were the first to arrive at
the Yuanmingyuan, followed by the British (Wong 2001, 139), the imperial family
having fled. The accounts of the military men attest to the atmosphere of frenzy
that overcame the soldiers in the face of such a remarkable spectacle. Tulloch
described ‘Men off their heads with the excitement of looting a palace and for no
apparent reason tearing down grand embroideries’ (1903, 55). He witnessed one
man smashing a large mirror with the butt of his rifle (1903, 55). He wrote that
‘With the feelings of a boy suddenly told to take what he likes in a pastry-cooks
shop, I was puzzled where to begin’ (1903, 55). Swinhoe, too, noted: ‘Officers and
men, English and French, were rushing about in a most unbecoming manner, each
eager for the acquisition of valuables … Most of the Frenchmen were armed with
large clubs, and what they could not carry away, they smashed to atoms’ (2005
[1861], 305–6). Swinhoe talks of entering the emperor’s throne room, which
was ‘filled with crowds of foreign soldiers: and the throne floor covered with the
Celestial Emperor’s choicest curios, but destined as gifts for two far more worthy
monarchs’ (2005 [1861], 296) – Queen Victoria and the Emperor Napoleon III.
Wolseley wrote that the ‘indiscriminate plunder and wanton destruction of all
articles too heavy for removal commenced at once’ (1862, 224), and soldiers
became ‘nothing more than grown-up school boys’ (1862, 225). The French camps
were strewn with textiles and soldiers were running ‘hither and thither in search
of further plunder’ (1862, 226). Some of the soldiers, Wolseley remarked, even
dressed themselves up mockingly in the beautifully embroidered silk clothing
worn by Chinese women (1862, 227).
Wolseley was, as ever, dismissive of Chinese craftsmanship, comparing
Yuanmingyuan objects and buildings unfavourably with those of Europe: ‘In their
thirst after decoration, and in their inherent love for minute embellishment, the
artists and architects of China have failed to produce any great work capable of
inspiring those sensations of awe or admiration which strike everyone when first
gazing upon the magnificent creations of European architects’ (1862, 233).25
Twelve days after the looting began, on October 18, Elgin ordered the complete
destruction of the buildings in the Yuanmingyuan in retaliation for the torture and
execution of around twenty European and Indian men (Ringmar, 2013: 78). Over
4,400 British troops were needed to set the gardens ablaze, and the conflagration
25
However, many commentators were impressed with the beauty of the gardens and
palaces.
lasted two days (Hevia 2004, 74, 107; Ringmar 2013, 4). Charles George Gordon,
then a 27-year-old captain in the Royal Engineers, shed a few crocodile tears:
We went out, and, after pillaging it, burned the whole place, destroying in a
vandal-like manner most valuable property which [could] not be replaced for
four millions. … The [local] people are very civil, but I think the grandees hate
us, as they must after what we did to the Palace. You can scarcely imagine the
beauty and magnificence of the places we burnt. It made one’s heart sore to burn
them; in fact, these places were so large, and we were so pressed for time, that
we could not plunder them carefully. Quantities of gold ornaments were burnt,
considered as brass. It was wretchedly demoralising work for an army (cited in
Butler 1913, 44–45).
Today’s estimate is that around 1.5 million objects were either looted or
destroyed by British and French troops in October 1860; a proportion of the former
is now located in more than 2,000 museums in 47 countries around the world.26
Summer Palace loot was brought back to Britain and France by the soldiers soon
after the campaign was over, and sold at auctions in London from 1861 onwards.27
From the open market, artefacts made their way to dealers’ shops, private
collections, and museums. There were also major public displays of ‘Summer
Palace’ loot, most notably at the 1862 International Exhibition in London28 and
the exhibition of the Chinese curiosities given to the Emperor Napoleon III by the
expeditionary army staged at the Tuileries in Paris in early 1861 (Salmon 2011,
23).29 The French general Montauban30 presented several hundred pieces of loot
to the imperial couple, Napoleon III and Eugénie. Inspired by these gifts, Eugénie
created displays of ‘Oriental curiosities’ in a redesigned wing of the Palace of
Fontainebleau. Here, some of the best Yuanmingyuan treasures – porcelain, jades,
gold, lacquer, bronzes, and paintings – were put on display, by 1863, as the spoils
of war, functioning to demonstrate the status and power of France’s imperial
couple (McQueen 2011, 228–29). Even today, several hundred Chinese objects
are exhibited at the heart of the Palace of Fontainebleau, yet with no references at
all to their origins from the Summer Palace.31
Many Yuanmingyuan objects looted by the military, of course, ended up in
public museums in the United Kingdom. As we have seen, Wolseley’s Tibetan
26
According to the director of the Yuanmingyuan, Chen Mingjie. Cited in Macartney
2009.
27
There were 22 auctions at Christie’s and Phillips in London between April 1861
and February 1897 where approximately 1,330 objects were put up for sale as ‘looted from
the Summer Palace.’
28
This took place from 1 May to 15 November 1862. See Waring 1863.
29
The French were credited with looting much more than the British. For example,
Tullloch notes the ‘French were revelling in loot’ (1903, 54); Swinhoe talks of the French
camp as ‘revelling in silks and bijouterie’ (299).
30
Charles Guillaume Montauban (1796–1878) was in charge of the French forces
during the Second Opium War.
31
The author visited the Musée Chinois at the Palace of Fontainebleau in July 2013.
Buddhist painting remains in the inventory of the National Army Museum in

London;32 Swinhoe’s collection of birds obtained from the grounds of the Summer
Palace are to be found at the Manchester Museum;33 and a gold ewer belonging
to Hope Grant rests in the stores of the National Museums Scotland.34 However,
Summer Palace objects are not always easy to identify in major museum exhibitions
today. Due to the increasingly problematic and political dimensions of the looting,
museums tend to remain silent on the detailed biographies of these objects: their
origins in the Summer Palace are often absent from labels and interpretative texts.
By contrast, Summer Palace material is easier to identify in military museums, for
here objects are seen unapologetically as ‘trophies of war’.35
The looting and destruction of the Summer Palace was the final act of the
Second Opium War. Several weeks later, on 24 October 1860, the Convention
of Peking was forced upon the Chinese, ratifying and extending the Treaty of
Tianjin (Hanes and Sanello 2002, 218). The Chinese had to pay eight million taels
to Britain and France to cover the cost of the war, cede Kowloon to the British,
legalize the opium trade, and grant Christians full civil rights and access to all
regions.36 Twenty-one years after the start of the First Opium War, the British had
finally achieved all their original objectives (Figure 10.4).
Conclusion
The period of the Opium Wars, from 1839 to 1860, created a dramatic shift in
British perceptions of China. The accounts of soldiers and travellers succeeded
in dispelling the mystique of ‘Cathay’ which had been constructed by European
philosophers and writers a century before. In her introduction to this volume, Kate
Hill argues that work on travel in the nineteenth century has been concerned with
both the ‘self’ and the encounter with the ‘other’, noting, too, a determination to
impose fixity and clear boundaries separating ‘us’ and ‘them’. Foster has discussed
how the West’s self-image is defined dialectically through the formulation of its
‘others’ (1985, 202), and Said (1978) famously analyzed the processes by which
the ‘Orient’ was constructed as a negative inversion, or antithesis, of the West. We
have seen how the travel accounts discussed in this chapter were clearly concerned
32
I am grateful to Dr Alastair Massie, Head of Academic Access at the National Army
Museum, for supplying information on this image.
33
Personal communication, Henry McGhie, Head of Collections at Manchester
Museum.
34
This was presented to Hope Grant by the Prize Committee in 1860, and his widow
gave it to the National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh, in 1884. I am grateful to Dr Kevin
McLoughlin, Principal Curator, East and Central Asia, at National Museums Scotland, for
providing this information.
35
The author has undertaken research in eleven military museums over the past few
years, as part of a wider research project on representations of Summer Palace loot.
36
See Wolseley (1862, 397–415) for the full transcript of this treaty.
Fig. 10.4 Ruins of Yuanmingyuan, Beijing. Photograph taken by the author,

2014.
to create a Chinese ‘other’ in opposition to the European ‘self’, and how a range
of prejudiced interpretations were projected onto Chinese people encountered at
this time. The travel narratives of British soldiers, in particular, betray the deepest
hostility towards the country: in order to justify their imperialistic aggression,
China had to be vilified, construed negatively as backward, inferior, uncivilized,
barbaric, and cruel. By the 1860s, there is an intellectual framework within which
to conceptualize such ‘exotic’ peoples – Social Darwinism and its concomitant
ranking of cultures around the world in terms of Western concepts of material,
spiritual, and moral ‘progress’.
But it should also be noted that more nuanced and ambiguous images of
‘China’ were current in Britain at this time. While Wolseley, as we have seen, was
disdainful of the art and architecture he encountered in the Yuanmingyuan, the
influx of high quality objects from China’s imperial palace from the 1860s on had
a more positive impact on Western perceptions of the country’s creations, laying
the foundations for the understanding of Chinese art in the twentieth century.
Responses to objects brought back from the First Opium War – such as a set of
remarkable Buddhist bronze statues from the pilgrimage island of Putuo – were,
at times, highly positive (see Tythacott 2011). Yet, as Pagani (1998, 28) points
out, while certain elements of Chinese art may have come to be admired in the
West, images of the country in general, and of the Chinese people especially, were
predominantly negative.
The aim of the wars, as we have seen, was to open China to trade, to make the
country conform to Western requirements, to convert the most populous nation
on earth to Christianity. The Chinese reluctance to comply with Western demands
– China’s attempts to maintain its sovereignty during an exceptionally unstable
period of governance – was characterized by Westerners as stubborn inflexibility.
The Opium Wars were only the start of European (and later Japanese) encroachment
on Chinese soil. Opium importation continued and addiction increased: by the
1850s the trade was double that of the 1830s (Fairbank and Reischauer 1986,
285).37 Although China was not officially colonized, as Africa was – apart, that is,
from Hong Kong – a relationship of power and economic imperialism was clearly
sustained. With the growing strength of China in the world today, the Opium Wars
and the subjugation at the hands of foreigners is still a painful memory. In recent
years the appearance of looted Summer Palace objects on the open market, for
example, has served to open old wounds. The controversial 2009 Paris auction by
Christie’s of two bronze zodiac heads – a rat and a rabbit – which once overlooked
the fountain of a rococo-style Jesuit-built palace (the Haiyantang) is indicative of
current nationalist sentiment. The fact that these heads were given back to China in
July 2013 by François-Henri Pinault (whose family owns Christie’s) affirms that
this subject is very much alive today (Arkell 2013, 2). Authors such as Hanes and
Sanello (2002, vi–xii) and Hevia (2004) argue that for Chinese people the Opium
Wars remain an embarrassing symbol of Western domination. The First Opium
War, after all, was the beginning of what the Chinese refer to as ‘the century of
humiliation’, from which the country is today only just beginning to recover.
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Chapter 11
‘The untrammelled fancy
of the scenic artist’:
Imagining and Encountering Zanzibar
in the Late Nineteenth and
Early Twentieth Centuries
Sarah Longair1
Zanzibar was synonymous with the exotic in the Western imagination in the
nineteenth century; the sound of the word itself seemed to epitomize mysterious
otherness.2 Its prominence in the Indian Ocean spice and slave trade perpetuated this
image. Writers such as Richard Burton told of Zanzibar Town’s labyrinthine streets,
grand stone palaces, Omani Arab sultans in ornately decorated outfits, and veiled
women of the harem (Burton 1872). Such images were closely associated with
an imaginary ‘Arabia’ derived from popular works, including The Arabian Nights
(Bissell 2010, 274). Elements specific to Zanzibar became fused with more generic
images of the orient present in Britain in the form of books, exhibitions, plays,
and musicals. Exotic and sumptuous, dangerous and sensuous: the conception of
Zanzibar in Britain was given authenticity by writers such as Burton and infiltrated
the minds of those setting out to visit what he described as ‘the Emerald isle’
(Deckard 2010, 79–103). In 1890, Zanzibar became a British Protectorate. As
part of the Empire, no longer was Zanzibar simply an exotic fantasy to explore
and describe in vivid detail in books, but one to be ruled and controlled by the
British imperial hand. This chapter will investigate how the image of Zanzibar
was mediated in the metropole and how it subsequently informed British imperial
policy and identity, and influenced the ‘performance’ of empire in the new
protectorate. It contributes to the wide-ranging literature produced in the wake of
Said’s Orientalism (1978), which explores the colonial encounter and production
of knowledge about ‘the other’, by examining how the impact of orientalist ideas
upon colonial officers could in fact threaten to undermine British hegemony.
Robert Nunez Lyne, Agricultural Officer for the Protectorate Government,
described the island in 1905 in his Zanzibar in Contemporary Times as ‘an obscure
1
My thanks to Kate Hill, Peter Yeandle and this volume’s readers for their invaluable
suggestions for this chapter.
2
Zanzibar is an archipelago consisting of several small islands and two larger ones:
the principal island Unguja (also known as Zanzibar Island and referred to simply as
Zanzibar by many writers in the colonial period) and Pemba.
part of the world’ – a true statement, in that relatively few people had personally
visited there (Lyne 1905, vii). Ethel Younghusband, on her departure for East
Africa in 1907–1908, similarly found a dearth of understanding about the region:
‘people seemed most vague about the part of the world to which we were going,
and what little they did know was a strange confusion of ideas, some even having
no ideas at all’ (Younghusband 1910, v). And yet, in spite of this hazy knowledge,
the island’s name was common parlance in Victorian and Edwardian London as a
substitute for the distant exotic. This imagined Zanzibar was reassuringly familiar
in its adherence to the tropes of oriental exoticism and remoteness. It fed into the
Romantic popularity of the exotic in nineteenth-century Europe – one forged in
both reality and the imagination. In the words of Timothy Mitchell in his analysis
of travellers to the Middle East, the orient was ‘the great external reality’, and yet
it was ‘raised in the imagination’ (Mitchell 1988, 21).
This ‘familiar unknown’, which I will discuss in relation to Zanzibar, informed
the preconceptions and expectations of Europeans in their actual encounters with
the islands. This concept draws particularly on phenomena identified by scholars
in their analyses of the representations of India and Egypt, locations which
represented two versions of exoticism in the Victorian imagination. It also echoes
what Kate Hill identifies in the introduction to this volume as the pervasiveness
of ‘the movement, dissolution and recomposition of ideas about travel’, and in
this instance, place [see p. 5]. For example, Carol Breckenridge demonstrates
how India became ‘familiar by allusion’, using the example of John Rivett-
Carnac, a naval officer and collector of Indian artefacts, who contextualized his
collections with a body of knowledge about India that ‘at once familiarizes and
distances’ (Breckenridge 1989, 209–10). With reference to Egypt, essays in Paul
and Janet Starkey’s edited volume question the extent to which travellers formed
a picture of the country as how they wanted it to be or how ready they were
to have their expectations confounded, and the subsequent implications of this
encounter (Starkey and Starkey 1998). Hossam M. Mahdy, for example, describes
the reported obsession with accuracy by travellers to Egypt in their recording of
a picture of medieval Cairo, yet shows how they patched this up when necessary
with images from their imaginations or other exotic places in Turkey, Persia, or
India (Mahdy 1998, 161–62). This flexible adherence to reality and preconception
is comparable to the Zanzibari context: it similarly held a space in the Western
imagination with which travellers felt simultaneously familiar and distant.
An important point to note is that this generalized perception of exoticism in
Zanzibar was one image associated with the islands in Britain, but others existed
concurrently. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Zanzibar was the setting for
the sensational ‘chasing’ of Arab slave dhows by the Royal Navy, as described
vividly and regularly in the Illustrated London News.3 It was also the departure
point for Livingstone, Stanley, and other renowned explorers in their journeys into
3
These exploits were made famous by George Lydiard Sulivan’s first-hand account
published in 1873. These have been analyzed by Lindsay Doulton (2010) in her study of
anti-slavery and the Royal Navy in the Indian Ocean.
‘The untrammelled fancy of the scenic artist’ 211
the much wilder and more terrifying unknown of the African continental interior,
about which there was another range of stereotypes.4 In this context, Zanzibar
was seen as the ‘launch-pad’ from whence the explorers began their epic and
heroic adventures and beneficent missionary work.5 Here, the image of the ‘dark
continent’ of Africa and Eastern exoticism coalesced. In her analysis of the history
of literary representations of Zanzibar, Sharae Deckard argues that ‘The split
between the island’s desirability and its “devilish” African inhabitants is an age-
old polarity in representations of Zanzibar’ (Deckard 2010, 88).6 British officers
going to Zanzibar described themselves as going ‘to the East’, while adventures
into the interior were a different prospect entirely. Many tensions therefore existed
within enduring and essentialized perceptions associated with the islands.
The local population, too, was varied and defied categorisation, even though
travellers attempted to define ethnic groups by race and cultural characteristics. The
Swahili islanders formed the majority of the population; their culture, distinctive
from communities further into the African mainland, had emerged on the East
African coast since the spread of Islam late in the first millennium CE. Jeremy
Prestholdt draws our attention to the ways in which mid-nineteenth-century
travellers described the Swahili as a hybrid and degenerate race, who appeared
to exhibit the most negative traits associated with black and Arab populations
(Prestholdt 2008, 151). The Swahili had been ruled since the late eighteenth
century by Omani Arabs, whose ruler, Seyyid Said bin Sultan el-Busaid, moved his
capital to Zanzibar Town in the 1830s, leading to an influx of Omani Arab families
establishing themselves on the islands. Even so, by the late-nineteenth century,
distinctions between Arab and Swahili were more blurred than at first appeared.
For example, Tippu Tib, the most famous slave merchant of the period and a key
figure of elite society in Zanzibar, was of mixed Arab and Swahili heritage (Eliot
1907, iv). The British termed all inhabitants who were neither obviously Arab
nor Asian as ‘African’ – whether local Swahili, former slaves or recent migrants
from the African continent. Another significant minority group were South
Asians, who installed themselves to provide financial services as Zanzibar grew
in importance as an entrepôt. European residents and travellers intermingled with
the elite Arab and South Asian groups, many of whom were immensely wealthy
4
Mudimbe traces the origins of the ‘idea’ of Africa in the West, starting in the classical
era (Mudimbe 1995). See also Youngs 1994; Brantlinger 1985; Richards 1993, 140. Annie
Coombes’s landmark study (1994) examines how different perceptions of Africa were
exhibited in late nineteenth-century London.
5
Numerous texts were published in the mid- to late nineteenth century describing
daring and adventurous exploits in East Africa and Zanzibar specifically, as well as
beneficent works. Some were published as travel writing; others, such as Rider Haggard’s,
drew on the author’s experiences of travel to inform his fictional works. See for example
Stanley 1872; Livingstone 1865; Haggard 1886. Clare Pettitt (2007) and Felix Driver
(1991), amongst others, have analyzed the myths about the explorers.
6
Deckard relates these to two of the derivations of the island’s name: the Persian
zangh-bar, or black coast; and the Arabic zany za’l barr, ‘fair is the land’.
and cosmopolitan. I will focus upon the elements of ‘the exotic orient’ in this
essay, although it is vital to recall that Zanzibar’s geographical location and mixed
population allowed multiple images to exist simultaneously.
My focus in this chapter is to investigate not the ancient origins of these
perceptions, which have been usefully traced by Deckard, but their influence upon
the government of Zanzibar in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.7 Not only
were Europeans visiting Zanzibar in greater numbers by this time, but, following
the establishment of the British Protectorate in 1890, the British ruled the islands
alongside the Sultan. In this first incarnation of the Protectorate Government (until
administrative reorganization in 1913), the Sultan’s Government was dominated
by a British First Minister with a court of British and Arab officials. The separate
British Agency and Consulate was responsible for foreign affairs, though it
increasingly intervened in domestic matters. The tensions between these two
centres of power heightened significantly over the period in question.
To understand this transformation from travellers’ subject to imperial territory,
I will use examples of the image of Zanzibar in popular culture in Britain, the
accounts of a number of travellers to the islands, and later official reports on the
Protectorate. Travellers and administrators measured Zanzibar Town against a
model of ‘an Eastern city’, with the result that certain British officers later adopted
and enhanced these tropes in their behaviour and cultural constructions. The final
section will show how Zanzibar’s exotic representation on the London stage was
mirrored in the actions of the islands’ British administrators. Critiques of such
behaviour reveal anxieties over the imperial mission, which was threatened by this
exaggerated – and even caricatured – performance of British power.
The Enduring Importance of Mid-Nineteenth Travellers’ Texts
British travellers and explorers, including notable writers such as Livingstone,

Burton, and Stanley, were drawn to East Africa primarily by two related impulses:
exploration of the African interior and the anti-slavery campaigns. In particular,
Burton, who wrote the two-volume Zanzibar: City, Island and Coast, revealed in
his writing both the expectations he held about the region and his actual encounter.
Burton’s work was written and published more than ten years after his expedition
of 1856–1860 and gave a detailed and lyrical description of his exploration.
Through his reputation as a keen observer and knowledge of the Islamic world,
Burton’s writings distilled many images of Zanzibar, which profoundly influenced
how British colonial officers would subsequently view the islands. Mythological
references evoked the lethargic pace of life in the tropical climate:
7
See also Myers 1994; Myers 2002; Bissell 2005; Sheriff 2010. This perception has
endured in Zanzibar and continues to underlie marketing campaigns by hotels and tourist
agencies. In discussion with Julia Bishop, chair of the Zanzibar Association of Tourism
Investors, May 2010.
Truly prepossessing was our first view of the then mysterious island of Zanzibar,
set off by the dome of the distant hills, like solidified air, that form the swelling
line of the Zanzibar coast. Earth, sea and sky all seem wrapped in a soft and
sensuous repose, in the tranquil life of the Lotus Eaters, in the swoon-like
slumbers of the Seven Sleepers, in the dreams of the Caste of Indolence. (Burton
1872, 28)
The overarching image was one of mysteriousness and with reference to the
‘sensuousness’ regularly expressed in images of the East, accompanied by a
‘heavy spice perfume’ emanating from the clove trees.
In amongst his vivid descriptions of the culture and people, Burton
also expressed disappointment with elements which did not chime with his
preconceptions. Visually, Zanzibar Town, for example, did not live up to his
expectations of an Islamic city:
A Puritanical plainness characterized the scene – cathedrals without the graceful

minarets of Jeddah, mosques without the cloisters of Cairo, turrets without the
domes and monuments of Syria; and the straight sky-line was unrelieved except
by a few straggling palms. (Burton 1872, 32)
The cities to which Zanzibar’s nineteenth-century town is compared in these

citations – Jeddah, Cairo, and Damascus – were in fact considerably older. Evelyn
Waugh noted in the late 1920s that the city was ‘as good an example of Arabic
eighteenth century architecture as survives intact anywhere’ but that European liner
passengers visiting the island were apt to ‘attribute greater antiquity to it. I met at
least one lady who associated it with biblical time’ (Waugh 1931, 168). In the eyes
of the British traveller, a ‘typical’ Islamic city was medieval, or older, and should be
suitably adorned with minarets and domes as befitted the Near Eastern examples.
This dissatisfaction with Zanzibar Town’s skyline was paraphrased by several
British colonial officers writing decades after Burton, suggesting that his volume
ostensibly became a textbook for administrators. Major Frederick B. Pearce,
writing towards the end of his tenure as British Resident in the late 1910s,
rephrased Burton’s reading of the cityscape in his Zanzibar: The Island Metropolis
of Eastern Africa, published in 1920:
At a distance its appearance is somewhat imposing, and indeed if the religious

tenets and artistic perceptions of its inhabitants permitted, it might be one of the
most beautiful cities in the world. [ … ] Built as it is on a low promontory, jutting
out into the bluest of seas, it has every advantage of site. But alas! One looks in
vain for the domes and minarets and clustered pinnacles which an eastern city
should possess. (Pearce 1920, 146)
These displays of ‘knowledge’ by travellers and administrators demonstrate that

an immutable vision existed of how an Eastern city ought to look. A timeless
characterization of the East was imposed upon the city, a perception which did not
allow Zanzibar to diverge from the established model. The so-called ‘puritanical
plainness’ was in fact due to the building style of the Ibathi sect of Islam of which
Fig. 11.1 View of Shangani, Zanzibar Town. Illustrated London News,

21 April 1866. © Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture
Library.
the majority of Zanzibar’s Muslim population were a part. Their mosques were
externally plain and deliberately unostentatious.
The non-conformity of Zanzibar’s cityscape with the British conception of an
Islamic city, based upon Near and Middle Eastern cities such as Istanbul, Cairo,
and Damascus, had an enduring influence. Henry Vaughan Lanchester, the urban
planning expert from India commissioned by the Zanzibar Government in the 1920s
to create a future design for the city, directly quoted Pearce in the introduction to
Zanzibar: A Study in Tropical Planning. Burton’s literary perception of the city
therefore had directly informed policymakers and how they planned to shape the
city. William Bissell has shown how, in fact, the British failed in these endeavours
to alter the city fundamentally or impose their urban planning ideas (Bissell 2010).
They prevaricated and debated more than they achieved any fundamental changes.
However, the preoccupation with the ‘Eastern city’ was at its most explicitly
realized in the architecture of the British Protectorate. John Sinclair, central figure
in the administration for over twenty years from 1898 and unofficial architect of
the Protectorate, constructed various buildings with turrets, domes, and cupolas in
an eclectic style he described as ‘Saracenic’. His most dramatic construction was
the Peace Memorial Museum, completed in 1924, a vast domed structure that was
to be visible from the sea – a direct ‘improvement’ of the cityscape.8
Burton also brought attention to the poor hygienic conditions in the city in
the mid-nineteenth century, which Livingstone would echo in his notorious
description of the island as ‘Stinkibar’ (Livingstone 1874, 6–7). Burton viewed
the uniform buildings on the front as a facade hiding the unclean and unhygienic
town (see Figure 11.1).
8
The building of the Museum is discussed in detail in Chapter 2 of Longair 2015,
69–110.
[ … ] the Imam’s palace, the various Consulates, and the large parallelogrammic
buildings of the great, a tabular line of flat roofs, glaring and dazzling like
freshly white-washed sepulchres, detached themselves from the mass, and did
their best to conceal the dingy matter hovels of the inner town. Zanzibar city, to
become either picturesque or pleasing, must be viewed, like Stambul, from afar
(Burton 1872, 32–33).
A priority for the British Protectorate Government after 1890 was to improve
living and health conditions. Through the various measures introduced by medical
officers, such as systematic rat-catching, conditions gradually improved. The
British took pride in describing how they transformed Zanzibar Town from the
‘city of dreadful night’, in the era under the sultans of urban disorder, uncleanliness,
and oriental despotism, to the ‘city perfect’ (Pearce quoted in Bissell 2010, 149).
Imagining Zanzibar in Late Victorian Britain
In the later nineteenth century, the Victorian public became more directly familiar
with Zanzibar through Sultan Barghash’s visit to London in 1875. He was received
by the Royal Family, went to Ascot, the opera, and the theatre, and travelled
to towns across England where, according to Lyne, he became ‘not merely
fashionable but popular’ (Lyne 1905, 94).9 He visited factories in Birmingham,
Liverpool, and Manchester, being shown examples of new technology, such as
lifts (see Figure 11.2), which he incorporated into his new palace, the Beit el Ajaib
(House of Wonders), itself a striking addition to Zanzibar’s skyline, constructed in
the 1870s. Visible in Figure 11.2 and others printed in the Illustrated London News,
the Sultan and his entourage were dressed in traditional Omani Arab clothing with
turbans, long cloaks, and khanjars (daggers), embedding this image of Eastern
splendour, elegance, and exoticism in the public mind. Such images also served
to set up a contrast between British modernity and the immutable East, which is
misleading to a point, as Barghash was an early adopter of technology.
Around this time, the figure of the Sultan and Zanzibar began to feature in
music-hall performances. In the 1880s, ‘The Sultan of Zanzibar’ played in New
York and other cities, reportedly ‘the worst comic opera on earth’ (Downer 2010,
49).10 Even a writer in the small town of Niles, Michigan, created an operetta farce,
Zanzibar, in which the hero, Shylock, is mistaken for the Sultan of Zanzibar; it
was later performed by a troupe of minstrels in London in the early 1900s.11 A
playbill for the Drury Lane pantomime of the Dick Whittington story relocated
the setting for the scene where Whittington leaves London to make his fortune
9
See also the Illustrated London News of 19 June, 10 July, and 17 July 1875.
10
Examples of such performances include ‘The Sultan of Zanzibar’ as reported in
‘Notes of the Week’, New York Times, 18 April 1886, 9.
11
A summary of the plot of this musical can be found here: http://www.
printersrowbooks.com/Zanzibar-A-Comic-Opera-in-Two-Acts.aspx (accessed 26
November 2010).
Fig. 11.2 Sultan Barghash visiting factories in Manchester. Illustrated

London News, 17 July 1875. © Illustrated London News/Mary
Evans Picture Library.
(which in earlier versions of the story was Morocco or ‘Barbary’) to the coast of
Zanzibar.12 Zanzibar became a fashionable choice for the episode of the story set
in distant climes.
Ragtime songs of the period included Charles Ancliffe’s ‘Down in Zanzibar’ and
Joseph Lamb’s ‘My Queen of Zanzibar’. These pieces use particular rhythms, tonal
systems, and rapidly ascending and descending scales to allude to quintessential
Near Eastern music. John Philip Sousa’s long-running operetta El Capitan was
based in a Spanish court, but included a widely circulated song, ‘A Typical Tune of
Zanzibar’, first performed in London in 1899.13 These varied examples hint at the
different contexts in which ‘Zanzibar’ appeared as a construction in Europe and
America. The impact upon audiences of depictions of empire upon the British stage
has been a subject of much recent historiographical debate, for example in Marty
12
Oxford, Bodleian Library, John Johnson collection, London Playbills Drury Lane
Box 2 (11).
13
‘El Capitan’ in the Guide to Light Opera and Operetta, http://www.
musicaltheatreguide.com/composers/sousa/elcapitain.htm (accessed 3 January 2011).
Gould’s examination of the breadth and reach of imperial themes within theatre
(Gould 2011). While we cannot be certain of the extent of a departing officer’s
pre-existing knowledge of Zanzibar, the pervasiveness of its exotic representation
throughout travel literature and newspapers, and an exaggerated version upon the
stage, may have shaped their preconceptions and subsequent encounter.
Encountering Zanzibar as a British Protectorate
Zanzibar Town became a regularly visited destination for travellers as tourists

and visitors, rather than the preserve of ‘explorers’, from the late 1890s. Less
prominent in their accounts is the dissatisfaction with the hygienic state of the
town discussed earlier. For many, Zanzibar lived up to and even exceeded their
expectations. Writing her early guidebook to the city in 1901, Linda Leigh found
the inhabitants suitably attired and behaving according to the characteristics she
anticipated:
The indolent Arab in his quaint turban is a picturesque feature of East African
Life and is as much an Arab in Zanzibar as in Muscat or Bagdad. Wherever
he goes he carries with him his harem, his religion, his long robe, his shirt, his
slipper, and his dagger. (Leigh 1901, 9)
In this citation Leigh reassured visitors that they would encounter the quintessential
Arab in Zanzibar, displaying a professed knowledge of the Arab world. She
distilled the essential features of the European image of the ‘Arab’ to tropes of
difference: clothing, religion, and domestic organization. Leigh wrote one of
the first guidebooks for the island aimed at tourists, and through it she fixed a
perception for her readers and their encounter with the islands.
The American journalist and author Richard Harding Davis referred to
Zanzibar several times in his work following his visit in the mid-1900s. His
writing offers a self-conscious interpretation of Zanzibar as a ‘familiar unknown’.
In his account of his travels to the Congo, published in 1907, he initially stated that
Zanzibar ‘is familiar through comic operas and rag-time’ (Harding Davis 1908, 4).
Nonetheless, he was enraptured:
[ … ] all the colors of the Orient, gorgeous, unshaded, and violent; [ … ] It is

all movement, noise, and glitter. [ … ] Were it not for its narrow streets and its
towering walls it would be a place of perpetual sunshine. Everyone is telling
everyone else to make way before him; the Indian merchants beseech you from
the open bazaars; their children, swathed in gorgeous silks and hung with jewels
and bangles, stumble under your feet, the Sultan’s troops assail you with fife and
drum, and the black women, wrapped below their bare shoulders in the colors of
the butterfly, and with teeth and brows dyed purple, crowd you to the wall. [ … ]
Outside the city there are long and wonderful roads between groves of the bulky
mango-tree of richest darkest green and the bending palm, shading deserted
palaces of former Sultans, temples of the Indian worshippers, native huts, and
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of
Buddenbrooks, volume 2 of 2
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laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.
Title: Buddenbrooks, volume 2 of 2
Author: Thomas Mann
Translator: H. T. Lowe-Porter
Release date: February 15, 2024 [eBook #72962]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924
Credits: Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file
was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BUDDENBROOKS,

VOLUME 2 OF 2 ***
BUDDENBROOKS
·II·
Other Books by
THOMAS MANN
DEATH IN VENICE
ROYAL HIGHNESS
MAGIC MOUNTAIN
THOMAS MANN
BUDDENBROOKS
VOLUME TWO
Translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter
ALFRED·A·KNOPF·NEW YORK
1927
COPYRIGHT 1924, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Published, February, 1924

Second Printing, July, 1924
Third Printing, March, 1927
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PART SEVEN
CHAPTER I
A christening—a christening in Broad Street!
All, everything is there that was dreamed of by Madame Permaneder
in the days of her expectancy. In the dining-room, the maid-servant,
moving noiselessly so as not to disturb the services in the next
room, is filling the cups with steaming hot chocolate and whipped
cream. There are quantities of cups, crowded together on the great
round tray with the gilded shell-shaped handles. And Anton the
butler is cutting a towering layer-cake into slices, and Mamsell
Jungmann is arranging flowers and sweets in silver dessert-dishes,
with her head on one side, and both little fingers stuck out.
Soon the company will have seated themselves in the salon and
sitting-room, and all these delicacies will be handed round. It is to
be hoped they will hold out, since it is the whole family which has
gathered here, in the broader, if not quite in the broadest sense of
the word. For it is, through the Överdiecks, connected distantly with
the Kistenmakers, and through them with the Möllendorpfs—and so
on. One simply must draw the line somewhere! But the Överdiecks
are represented, and, indeed, by no less a personage than the head
of the family, the venerable Doctor Kaspar Överdieck, reigning
Burgomaster, more than eighty years old.
He came in a carriage, and mounted the steps leaning on his staff
and Thomas Buddenbrook’s arm. His presence enhances the dignity
of the occasion—and, beyond a question, this occasion is worthy of
every dignity!
For within, in the salon, there is a flower-decked small table, serving
as an altar, with a young priest in black vestments and a stiff snowy
ruff like a millstone round his neck, reciting the service; and there is
a great, strapping, particularly well-nourished person, richly arrayed
in red and gold, bearing upon her billowing arms a small something,
half smothered in laces and satin bows: an heir—a first-born son! A
Buddenbrook! Do we really grasp the meaning of the fact?
Can we realize the thrill of that first whisper, that first little hint that
travelled from Broad Street to Mengstrasse? Or Frau Permaneder’s
speechless ecstasy, as she embraced her mother, her brother, and—
very gently—her sister-in-law? And now, with the spring—the spring
of the year 1861—he has come: he, the heir of so many hopes,
whom they have expected for so many years, talked of him, longed
for him, prayed to God and tormented Dr. Grabow for him; at length
he has come—and looks most unimposing.
His tiny hands play among the gilt trimmings of his nurse’s waist; his
head, in a lace cap trimmed with pale blue ribbons, lies sidewise on
the pillow, turned heedlessly away from the preacher; he stares out
into the room, at all his relatives, with an old, knowing look. Those
eyes, under their long-lashed lids, blend the light blue of the Father’s
and the brown of the Mother’s iris into a pale, indefinite, changeful
golden-brown; but bluish shadows lie in the deep corners on both
sides of the nose, and these give the little face, which is hardly yet a
face at all, an aged look not suited to its four weeks of existence.
But, please God, they mean nothing—for has not his Mother the
same? And she is in perfectly good health. And anyhow, he lives—he
lives, and is a son; which was the cause, four weeks ago, for great
rejoicing.
He lives—and it might have been otherwise. The Consul will never
forget the grip of good Dr. Grabow’s hand, as he said to him, four
weeks ago, when he could leave the mother and child: “Give thanks
to God, my dear friend—there wasn’t much to spare.” The Consul
has not dared to ask his meaning. He put from him in horror the
thought that his son—this tiny creature, yearned for in vain so many
years—had slipped into the world without breath to cry out, almost—
almost—like Antonie’s second daughter. But he knows that that hour,
four weeks ago, was a desperate one for mother and child; and he
bends tenderly over Gerda, who reclines in an easy-chair in front of
him, next his Mother, her feet, in patent-leather shoes, crossed
before her on a velvet cushion.
How pale she still is! And how strangely lovely in her pallor, with that
heavy dark-red hair and those mysterious eyes that rest upon the
preacher in half-veiled mockery! Herr Andreas Pringsheim, pastor
marianus, succeeded thus young to the headship of St. Mary’s after
old Kölling’s sudden death. He holds his chin in the air and his hands
prayerfully folded beneath it. He has short, curly blond hair and a
smooth-shaven, bony face, with a somewhat theatrical range of
expression, from fanatical zeal to an exalted serenity. He comes from
Franconia, where he has been for some years, serving a small
Lutheran community among Catholics; and his effort after a clear
and moving delivery has resulted in exaggerated mannerisms; an r
rolled upon his front teeth and long, obscure, or crudely accented
vowel-sounds.
He gives thanks to God, in a voice now low and soft, now loud and
swelling—and the family listen: Frau Permaneder, clothed in a dignity
that hides her pride and her delight; Erica Grünlich, now almost
fifteen years old, a blooming young girl with a long braid and her
father’s rosy skin; and Christian, who has arrived that morning, and
sits letting his deep-set eyes rove from side to side all over the
room. Pastor Tiburtius and his wife have not shrunk from the long
journey, but have come from Riga to be present at the ceremony.
The ends of Sievert Tiburtius’ long, thin whiskers are parted over his
shoulders, and his small grey eyes now and then open wider and
wider, most unexpectedly, and grow larger and more prominent till
they almost jump out of his head. Clara’s gaze is dark and solemn
and severe, and she sometimes lifts her hand to a head that always
seems to ache. But they have brought a splendid present to the
Buddenbrooks: a huge brown bear stuffed in a standing position. A
relative of the Pastor’s shot him somewhere in the heart of Russia,
and now he stands below in the vestibule with a card-tray between
his paws.
The Krögers have their son Jürgen visiting them; he is a post-office
official in Rostock, a quiet, simply-dressed man. Where Jacob is,
nobody knows but his mother, who was an Överdieck. She, poor,
weak woman, secretly sells the household silver to send money to
the disinherited son. And the ladies Buddenbrook are there, deeply
rejoiced over the happy family event—which does not prevent Pfiffi
from remarking that the child looks rather unhealthy: a view which
the Frau Consul, born Stüwing, and likewise Friederike and
Henriette, feel bound to endorse. But poor Clothilde, lean, grey,
resigned, and hungry, is moved by the words of Pastor Pringsheim
and the prospect of layer-cake and chocolate. The guests not
belonging to the family are Herr Friedrich Wilhelm Marcus and
Sesemi Weichbrodt.
Now the Pastor turns to the god-parents and instructs them in their
duty. Justus Kröger is one. Consul Buddenbrook refused at first to
ask him. “Why invite the old man to commit a piece of folly?” he
says. “He has frightful scenes with his wife every day over Jacob;
their little property is slowly melting away—out of pure worry he is
even beginning to be careless in his dress! But you know what will
happen: if we ask him, he will send the child a heavy gold service
and refuse to be thanked for it!” But when Uncle Justus heard who
was to be asked in his place—Stephan Kistenmaker had been
mentioned—he was so enormously piqued that they had to ask him
after all. The gold mug he presented was, to Thomas’s great relief,
not exaggeratedly heavy.
And the second god-father? It is this dignified old gentleman with
the snow-white hair, high neck-band, and soft black broadcloth coat
with the red handkerchief sticking out of the back pocket, sitting
here bent over his stick, in the most comfortable arm-chair in the
house. It is, of course, Burgomaster Dr. Överdieck. It is a great
event—a triumph! Good heavens, how could it have come about? he
is hardly even a relative! The Buddenbrooks must have dragged the
old man in by the hair! In fact, it is rather a feat: a little intrigue
planned by the Consul and Madame Permaneder. At first it was
merely a joke, born of the great relief of knowing that mother and
child were safe. “A boy, Tony,” cried the Consul. “He ought to have
the Burgomaster for god-father!” But she took it up in earnest,
whereupon he considered the matter seriously and agreed to make a
trial. They hid behind Uncle Justus, and got him to send his wife to
her sister-in-law, the wife of Överdieck the lumber dealer. She
accepted the task of preparing the old father-in-law; then Thomas
Buddenbrook made a visit to the head of the state and paid his
respects—and the thing was done.
Now the nurse lifts up the child’s cap, and the Pastor cautiously
sprinkles two or three drops out of the gilt-lined silver basin in front
of him, upon the few hairs of little Buddenbrook, as he slowly and
impressively names the names with which he is baptizing him:
Justus, Johann, Kaspar. Follows a short prayer, and then the relatives
file by to bestow a kiss upon the brow of the unconcerned little
creature. Therese Weichbrodt comes last, to whom the nurse has to
stoop with her burden; in return for which Sesemi gives him two
kisses, that go off with small explosions, and says, between them:
“You good che-ild!”
Three minutes later, the guests have disposed themselves in salon
and living-room, and the sweets are passed. Even Pastor
Pringsheim, the toes of his broad, shiny boots showing under his
black vestments, sits and sips the cool whipped cream off his hot
chocolate, chatting easily the while, and wearing his serene
expression, which is most effective by way of contrast with his
sermon. His manner says, as plainly as words: “See how I can lay
aside the priest and become the jolly ordinary guest!” He is a
versatile, an accommodating sort of man. To the Frau Consul he
speaks rather unctuously, to Thomas and Gerda like a man of the
world, and with Frau Permaneder he is downright jocose, making
jokes and gesturing fluently. Now and then, whenever he thinks of it,
he folds his hands in his lap, tips back his head, glooms his brows,
and makes a long face. When he laughs he draws the air in through
his teeth in little jerks.
Suddenly there is a stir in the corridor, the servants are heard
laughing, and in the doorway appears a singular figure, come to
offer congratulations. It is Grobleben: Grobleben, from whose thin
nose, no matter what the time of year, there ever hangs a drop,
which never falls. Grobleben is a workman in one of the Consul’s
granaries, and he has an extra job, too, at the house, as boots.
Every morning early he appears in Broad Street, takes the boots
from before the door, and cleans them below in the court. At family
feasts he always appears in holiday attire, presents flowers, and
makes a speech, in a whining, unctuous voice, with the drop
pendent from his nose. For this, he always gets a piece of money—
but that is not why he does it!
He wears a black coat—an old one of the Consul’s—greased leather
top-boots, and a blue woollen scarf round his neck. In his wizened
red hand he holds a bunch of pale-coloured roses, which are a little
past their best, and slowly shed their petals on the carpet. He blinks
with his small red eyes, but apparently sees nothing. He stands still
in the doorway, with his flowers held out in front of him, and begins
straightway to speak. The old Frau Consul nods to him encouragingly
and makes soothing little noises, the Consul regards him with one
eyebrow lifted, and some of the family—Frau Permaneder, for
instance—put their handkerchiefs to their mouths.
“I be a poor man, yer honour ’n’ ladies ’n’ gentlemen, but I’ve a
feelin’ hairt; ’n’ the happiness of my master comes home to me, it
do, seein’s he’s allus been so good t’ me; ’n’ so I’ve come, yer
honour ’n’ ladies ’n’ gentlemen, to congratulate the Herr Consul ’n’
the Frau Consul, ’n’ the whole respected family, from a full hairt, ’n’
that the child may prosper, for that they desarve fr’m God ’n’ man,
for such a master as Consul Buddenbrook there aren’t so many, he’s
a noble gentleman, ’n’ our Lord will reward him for all....”
“Splendid, Grobleben! That was a beautiful speech. Thank you very
much, Grobleben. What are the roses for?”
But Grobleben has not nearly done. He strains his whining voice and
drowns the Consul out.
“... ’n’ I say th’ Lord will reward him, him and the whole respected
family; ’n’ when his time has come to stan’ before His throne, for
stan’ we all must, rich and poor, ’n’ one’ll have a fine polished hard-
wood coffin ’n’ ’tother ’n old box, yet all on us must come to mother
earth at th’ last, yes, we must all come to her at th’ last—to mother
earth—to mother—”
“Oh, come, come, Grobleben! This isn’t a funeral, it’s a christening.
Get along with your mother earth!”
“... ’n’ these be a few flowers,” concludes Grobleben.
“Thank you, Grobleben, thank you. This is too much—what did you
pay for them, man? But I haven’t heard such a speech as that for a
long time! Wait a minute—here, go out and give yourself a treat, in
honour of the day!” And the Consul puts his hand on the old man’s
shoulder and gives him a thaler.
“Here, my good man,” says the Frau Consul. “And I hope you love
our blessed Lord?”
“I be lovin’ him from my hairt, Frau Consul, thet’s the holy truth!”
And Grobleben gets another thaler from her, and a third from Frau
Permaneder, and retires with a bow and a scrape, taking the roses
with him by mistake, except for those already fallen on the carpet.
The Burgomaster takes his leave now, and the Consul accompanies
him down to his carriage. This is the signal for the party to break up
—for Gerda Buddenbrook must rest. The old Frau Consul, Tony,
Erica, and Mamsell Jungmann are the last to go.
“Well, Ida,” says the Consul, “I have been thinking it over: you took
care of us all, and when little Johann gets a bit older— He still has
the monthly nurse now, and after that he will still need a day-nurse,
I suppose—but will you be willing to move over to us when the time
comes?”
“Yes, indeed, Herr Consul, if your wife is satisfied.”
Gerda is content to have it so, and thus it is settled.
In the act of leaving, however, and already at the door, Frau
Permaneder turns. She comes back to her brother and kisses him on
both cheeks, and says: “It has been a lovely day, Tom. I am happier
than I have been for years. We Buddenbrooks aren’t quite at the last
gasp yet, thank God, and whoever thinks we are is mightily
mistaken. Now that we have little Johann—it is so beautiful that he
is christened Johann—it looks to me as if quite a new day will dawn
for us all!”
CHAPTER II
Christian Buddenbrook, proprietor of the firm of H. C. F. Purmeister
and Company of Hamburg, came into his brother’s living-room,
holding in his hand his modish grey hat and his walking-stick with
the nun’s bust. Tom and Gerda sat reading together. It was half-past
nine on the evening of the christening day.
“Good evening,” said Christian. “Oh, Thomas, I must speak with you
at once.—Please excuse me, Gerda.—It is urgent, Thomas.”
They went into the dark dining-room, where the Consul lighted a
gas-jet on the wall, and looked at his brother. He expected nothing
good. Except for the first greeting, he had had no opportunity to
speak with Christian, but he had looked at him, during the service,
and noted that he seemed unusually serious, and even more restless
than common: in the course of Pastor Pringsheim’s discourse he had
left the room for several minutes. Thomas had not written him since
the day in Hamburg when he had paid over into his brother’s hands
an advance of 10,000 marks current on his inheritance, to settle his
indebtedness. “Just go on as you are going,” he had said, “and you’ll
soon run through all your money. As far as I am concerned, I hope
you will cross my path very little in future. You have put my
friendship to too hard a test in these three years.” Why was he here
now? Something must be driving him.
“Well?” asked the Consul.
“I’m done,” Christian said. He let himself down sidewise on one of
the high-backed chairs around the dining-table, and held his hat and
stick between his thin knees.
“May I ask what it is you are done with, and what brings you to
me?” said the Consul. He remained standing.
“I’m done,” repeated Christian, shaking his head from side to side
with frightful earnestness and letting his little round eyes stray
restlessly back and forth. He was now thirty-three years old, but he
looked much older. His reddish-blond hair was grown so thin that
nearly all the cranium was bare. His cheeks were sunken, the cheek-
bones protruded sharply, and between them, naked, fleshless, and
gaunt, stood the huge hooked nose.
“If it were only this—!” he went on, and ran his hand down the
whole of his left side, very close, but not touching it. “It isn’t a pain,
you know—it is a misery, a continuous, indefinite ache. Dr.
Drögemuller in Hamburg tells me that my nerves on this side are all
too short. Imagine, on my whole left side, my nerves aren’t long
enough! Sometimes I think I shall surely have a stroke here, on this
side, a permanent paralysis. You have no idea. I never go to sleep
properly. My heart doesn’t beat, and I start up suddenly, in a
perfectly terrible fright. That happens not once but ten times before
I get to sleep. I don’t know if you know what it is. I’ll tell you about
it more precisely. It is—”
“Not now,” the Consul said coldly. “Am I to understand that you have
come here to tell me this? I suppose not.”
“No, Thomas. If it were only that—but it is not that—alone. It is the
business. I can’t go on with it.”
“Your affairs are in confusion again?” The Consul did not start, he
did not raise his voice. He asked the question quite calmly, and
looked sidewise at his brother, with a cold, weary glance.
“No, Thomas. For to tell you the truth—it is all the same now—I
never really was in order, even with the ten thousand, as you know
yourself. They only saved me from putting up the shutters at once.
The thing is—I had more losses at once, in coffee—and with the
failure in Antwerp— That’s the truth. So then I didn’t do any more
business; I just sat still. But one has to live—so now there are notes
and other debts—five thousand thaler. You don’t know the hole I’m
in. And on top of everything else, this agony—”
“Oh, so you just sat still, did you?” cried the Consul, beside himself.
His self-control was gone now. “You let the wagon stick in the mud
and went off to enjoy yourself! You think I don’t know the kind of
life you’ve been living—theatres and circus and clubs—and women
—”
“You mean Aline. Yes, Thomas, you have very little understanding
for that sort of thing, and it’s my misfortune, perhaps, that I have so
much. You are right when you say it has cost me too much; and it
will cost me a goodish bit more, for—I’ll tell you something, just here
between two brothers—the third child, the little girl, six months old,
she is my child.”
“You fool, you!”
“Don’t say that, Thomas. You should be just, even if you are angry,
to her and to—why shouldn’t it be my child? And as for Aline, she
isn’t in the least worthless, and you ought not to say she is. She is
not at all promiscuous; she broke with Consul Holm on my account,
and he has much more money than I have. That’s how decent she
is. No, Thomas, you simply can’t understand what a splendid
creature she is—and healthy—she is as healthy—!” He repeated the
word, and held up one hand before his face with the fingers
crooked, in the same gesture as when he used to tell about “Maria”
and the depravity of London. “You should see her teeth when she
laughs. I’ve never found any other teeth to compare with them, not
in Valparaiso, or London, or anywhere else in the world. I’ll never
forget the evening I first met her, in the oyster-room, at Uhlich’s.
She was living with Consul Holm then. Well, I told her a story or so,
and was a bit friendly; and when I went home with her afterwards—
well, Thomas, that’s a different sort of feeling from the one you have
when you do a good stroke of business! But you don’t like to hear
about such things—I can see that already—and anyhow, it’s over
with. I’m saying good-bye to her, though I shall keep in touch with
her on account of the child. I’ll pay up everything I owe in Hamburg,
and shut up shop. I can’t go on. I’ve talked with Mother, and she is
willing to give me the five thousand thaler to start with, so I can put
things in order; and I hope you will agree to it, for it is much better
to say quite simply that Christian Buddenbrook is winding up his
business and going abroad, than for me to make a failure. You think
so too, don’t you? I intend to go to London again, Thomas, and take
a position. It isn’t good for me to be independent—I can see that
more and more. The responsibility—whereas in a situation one just
goes home quite care-free, at the end of the day. And I liked living
in London. Do you object?”
During this exposition, the Consul had turned his back on his
brother, and stood with his hands in his pockets, describing figures
on the floor with his foot.
“Very good, go to London,” he said, shortly, and without turning
more than half-way toward his brother, he passed into the living-
room.
But Christian followed him. He went up to Gerda, who sat there
alone, reading, and put out his hand.
“Good night, Gerda. Well, Gerda, I’m off for London. Yes, it’s
remarkable how one gets tossed about hither and yon. Now it’s
again into the unknown, into a great city, you know, where one
meets an adventure at every third step, and sees so much of life.
Strange—do you know the feeling? One gets it here—sort of in the
pit of the stomach—it’s very odd.”
CHAPTER III
James Möllendorpf, the oldest of the merchant senators, died in a
grotesque and horrible way. The instinct of self-preservation became
very weak in this diabetic old man; and in the last years of his life he
fell a victim to a passion for cakes and pastries. Dr. Grabow, as the
Möllendorpf family physician, had protested energetically, and the
distressed relatives employed gentle constraint to keep the head of
the family from committing suicide with sweet bake-stuffs. But the
old Senator, mental wreck as he was, rented a room somewhere, in
some convenient street, like Little Groping Alley, or Angelswick, or
Behind-the-Wall—a little hole of a room, whither he would secretly
betake himself to consume sweets. And there they found his lifeless
body, the mouth still full of half-masticated cake, the crumbs upon
his coat and upon the wretched table. A mortal stroke had
supervened, and put a stop to slow dissolution.
The horrid details of the death were kept as much as possible from
the family, but they flew about the town, and were discussed at
length on the Bourse, in the club, and at the Harmony, in all the
business offices, in the Assembly of Burgesses—likewise at all the
balls, dinners, and evening parties, for the death occurred in
February of the year ’62, and the season was in full swing. Even the
Frau Consul’s friends talked about it, on the Jerusalem evenings, in
the pauses of Lea Gerhardt’s reading aloud; the little Sunday-school
children discussed it in awesome whispers as they crossed the
Buddenbrook entry; and Herr Stuht, in Bell-Founders’ Street, went
into ample detail over it with his wife, who moved in the highest
circles.
But interest could not long remain concentrated upon the past. And
even with the first rumour of the old man’s death, the great question
had at once sprung up: who was to succeed him?
What suspense, what subterranean activity! A stranger, intent on the
sights of the mediaeval town, would have noticed nothing; but
beneath the surface there was unimaginable bustle and commotion,
as one firm and unassailable honest conviction after another was
exploded; and slowly, slowly the while, divergent views approached
each other! Passions are stirred, Ambition and Vanity wrestle
together in silence. Dead and buried hopes spring once more to life
—and again are blasted. Old Kurz, the merchant, in Bakers’ Alley,
who gets three or four votes at every election, will sit quaking at
home on the fatal day, and listen to the shouting, but he will not be
elected this time either. He will continue to take his walks abroad,
displaying outwardly his usual mingling of civic pride and self-
satisfaction: but he will bear down with him into the grave the secret
chagrin of never having been elected Senator.
James Möllendorpf’s death was discussed at the Buddenbrook
Thursday dinner-table; and Frau Permaneder, after the proper
expressions of sympathy, began to let her tongue play upon her
upper lip and look across artfully at her brother. The Buddenbrook
ladies marked the look. They exchanged piercing glances, and with
one accord shut their eyes and their lips tightly together. The Consul
had, for a second, responded to the sly smile his sister gave him,
and then given the talk another turn. He knew that the thought
which Tony hugged to her breast in secret was being spoken in the
street.
Names were suggested and rejected, others came up and were
sifted out. Henning Kurz in Bakers’ Alley was too old. They needed
new blood. Consul Huneus, the lumber dealer, whose millions would
have weighted the scale heavily in his favour, was constitutionally
ineligible, as his brother already sat in the Senate. Consul Eduard
Kistenmaker, the wine dealer, and Consul Hermann Hagenström
were names that kept their places on the list. But from the very first
was heard the name of Thomas Buddenbrook; and as election-day
approached, it grew constantly plainer that he and Hermann
Hagenström were the favoured candidates.
Hermann Hagenström had his admirers and hangers-on—there was
no doubt of that. His zeal in public affairs, the spectacular rise of the
firm of Strunck and Hagenström, the showy house the Consul kept,
the luxurious life he led, the pâtés-de-foie-gras he ate for breakfast
—all these could not fail to make an impression. This large, rather
over-stout man with the short, full, reddish beard and the snub nose
coming down flat on his upper lip, this man whose grandfather
nobody knew, not even himself, and whose father had made himself
socially impossible by a rich but doubtful marriage; this man had
become a brother-in-law of the Huneus’ and the Möllendorpfs, had
ranged his name alongside those of the five or six reigning families
in the town, and was undeniably a remarkable and a respected
figure. The novel and therewith the attractive element in his
personality—that which singled him out for a leading position in the
eyes of many—was its liberal and tolerant strain. His light, large way
of making money and spending it again differed fundamentally from
the patient, persistent toil and the inherited principles of his fellow
merchants. This man stood on his own feet, free from the fetters of
tradition and ancestral piety; and all the old ways were foreign to
him. His house was not one of the ancient patrician mansions, built
with senseless waste of space, in tall white galleries mounting above
a stone-paved ground floor. His home on Sand Street, the southern
extension of Broad Street, was a modern dwelling, not conforming to
any set style of architecture, with a simple painted façade, but
furnished inside with every luxury and planned with the cleverest
economy of space. Recently, on the occasion of one of his large
evening parties, he had invited a prima donna from the government
theatre, to sing after dinner to his guests—among them his witty,
art-loving brother—and had paid her an enormous fee for her
services. Hermann Hagenström was not the man to vote in the
Assembly for the application of large sums of money to preserve and
restore the town’s mediaeval monuments. But it was a fact that he
was the first, absolutely the first man in town to light his house and
his offices with gas. Yes, if Consul Hagenström could be said to
represent any tradition whatever, it was the free, progressive,
tolerant, unprejudiced habit of thought which he had inherited from
his father, old Heinrich—and on this was based all the admiration
people undoubtedly felt for him.
Thomas Buddenbrook’s prestige was of a different kind. People
honoured in him not only his own personality, but the personalities
of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather as well: quite apart
from his own business and public achievement, he was the
representative of a hundred years of honourable tradition. And the
easy, charming way, indeed, with which he carried the family
standard made no small part of his success. What distinguished him,
even among his professional fellow-citizens, was an unusual degree
of formal culture, which, wherever he went, aroused both wonder
and respect in about equal degrees.
On Thursdays at the Buddenbrooks’, the coming election received
only brief and passing comment in the presence of the Consul.
Whenever it was mentioned, the old Frau Consul discreetly averted
her light eyes. But Frau Permaneder, now and then, could not refrain
from displaying her astonishing knowledge of the Constitution. She
had gone very thoroughly into the decrees touching the election of a
member of the Senate, precisely as once she thoroughly informed
herself on the laws governing divorce. She talked about voting
chambers, ballots, and electors, she weighed all the possible
eventualities, she could recite verbatim and glibly the oath taken by
the voters. She spoke of the “free and frank discussion” which the
Constitution ordains must be held over each name upon the list of
candidates, and vivaciously wished she might be present when
Hermann Hagenström’s character was being pulled to pieces! A
moment later she leaned over and began to count the prune-pits on
her brother’s dessert-plate: tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor—finishing
triumphantly with “senator” when she came to the last pit. But after
dinner she could not hold in any longer. She took her brother’s arm
and drew him into the bow-window.
“Oh, Tom! Tom! Suppose you are really elected—if our coat-of-arms
is put up in the Senate-chamber at the Town Hall I shall just die of
joy, I know I shall. I shall fall dead at the news—you’ll see!”
“Now, Tony dear! Have a little self-control, a little dignity, I beg of
you. You are not usually lacking in dignity. Am I going around like
Henning Kurz? We amount to something even without the ‘Senator.’
And I hope you won’t die, whichever way it turns out!”
And the agitations, the consultations, the struggles of opinion took
their course. Consul Peter Döhlmann, the rake with a business now
entirely ruined, which existed only in name, and the twenty-seven-
year-old daughter whose inheritance he was eating up, played his
part by attending two dinners, one given by Thomas Buddenbrook
and the other by Herman Hagenström, and both times addressing
his host, in his loud, resounding voice, as “Senator.” But Siegismund
Gosch, old Gosch the broker, went about like a raging lion, and
engaged to throttle anybody, out of hand, who wasn’t minded to
vote for Consul Buddenbrook.
“Consul Buddenbrook, gentlemen—ah, there’s a man for you! I stood
at his father’s side in the ’48, when, with a word, he tamed the
unleashed fury of the mob. His father, and his father’s father before
him, would have been Senator were there any justice on this earth!”
But at bottom it was not so much Consul Buddenbrook himself
whose personality fired Gosch’s soul to its innermost depths. It was
rather the young Frau Consul, Gerda Arnoldsen. Not that the broker
had ever exchanged a word with her. He did not belong to her circle
of wealthy merchant families, nor sit at their tables, nor pay visits to
them. But, as we have seen, Gerda Buddenbrook had but to arrive in
the town to be singled out by the roving fancy of the sinister broker,
ever on the look-out for the unusual. With unerring instinct he
divined that this figure was calculated to add content to his
unsatisfied existence, and he made himself the slave of one who had
scarcely ever heard his name. Since then he encompassed in his
reveries this nervous, exceedingly reserved lady, to whom he had
not even been presented: he lifted his Jesuit hat to her, on the
street, to her great surprise, and treated her to a pantomime of
cringing treachery, gloating over her the while in his thoughts as a
tiger might over his trainer. This dull existence would afford him no
chance of committing atrocities for this woman’s sake—ah, if it only
would, with what devilish indifference would he answer for them! Its
stupid conventions prevented him from raising her, by deeds of
blood and horror, to an imperial throne!—And thus, nothing was left
but for him to go to the Town Hall and cast his vote in favour of her
furiously respected husband—and, perhaps, one day, to dedicate to
her his forthcoming transition of Lope de Vega.
CHAPTER IV
Every vacant seat in the Senate must, according to the Constitution,
be filled within four weeks. Three of them have passed, and this is
election-day—a day of thaw, at the end of February.
It is about one o’clock, and people are thronging into Broad Street.
They are thronging before the Town Hall, with its ornamental glazed-
brick façade, its pointed towers and turrets mounting toward a
whitish grey sky, its covered steps supported on outstanding
columns, its pointed arcades, through which there is a glimpse of
the market-place and the fountain. The crowd stands steadfastly in
the dirty slush that melts beneath their feet; they look into each
other’s faces and then straight ahead again, and crane their necks.
For beyond that portal, in the Council Room, in fourteen arm-chairs
arranged in a semicircle sit the electors, who have been chosen from
the Senate and the Assembly and await the proposals of the voting
chambers.
The affair has spun itself out. It appears that the debate in the
chambers will not die down; the struggle is so bitter that up to now
not one single unanimous choice has been put before the Council—
otherwise the Burgomaster would at once announce an election.
Extraordinary! Rumours—nobody knows whence, nobody knows how
—come from within the building and circulate in the street. Perhaps
Herr Kaspersen, the elder of the two beadles, who always refers to
himself as a “servant of the State,” is standing inside there and
telling what he hears, out of the corner of his mouth, through his
shut teeth, with his eyes turned the other way! The story goes that
proposals have been laid before the sitting, but that each of the
three chambers has turned in a different name: namely Hagenström,
Kistenmaker, and Buddenbrook. A secret ballot must now be taken,
with ballot-papers—it is to be hoped that it will show a clear
plurality! For people without overshoes are suffering, and stamping
their feet to warm them.

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Tact Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in

Britain s Chinese Eye Literature Empire and Aesthetics

The Making of Addiction The use and Abuse of Opium in

Esquisses e bauches projects and pre texts in

Visionary Journeys Travel Writings from Early Medieval

Travel Marketing and Popular Photography in Britain

Philosophy of Mind in the Nineteenth Century 1st

The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth Century America 1st

Published 2016 by Routledge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2016 Kate hill and the contributors

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

List of Figures vii

introduction: narratives of travel, narratives that travel 1

Section I Spaces and Places in Motion

1 arctic and european in-Betweens: the Production of tourist Spaces

Section 2 Narratives on the Move

4 Victorians in the Alps: A Case Study of Zermatt’s Hotel Guest Books

Section III Cultural Flows

8 the travelling other: A Māori Narrative of a Visit to Australia in

9 Souvenirs: narrating overseas violence in the late nineteenth

1.1 ‘Fishing boats in Tromsø harbour’. (Cohn 1895, 46–7). This

7.4 Grand hôtel d’angleterre, Chamonix, france, c. 1880s–1890s.

11.1 View of Shangani, Zanzibar Town. Illustrated London News,

Charlotte Mathieson is a research fellow in the institute of advanced Study

Katarzyna Michalkiewicz completed her Phd in 2014 at the Jagiellonian

Susan Shelangoskie is an associate Professor of english at lourdes university.

Mathilda Slabbert lectures in the department of english Studies at Stellenbosch

Ulrike Spring is associate Professor of history at Sogn og fjordane university

Louise Tythacott is Senior lecturer in Curating and Museology of asian

Patrick Vincent is a professor of english and american literature at the university

this collection of essays investigates travel as a dynamic mode of experiencing

Said’s reading seemed to be overly reductive in its understanding of the discursive

By using the term ‘contact’, i aim to foreground the interactive, improvisational

– chronotopes. travel narratives are especially focused on the particularity of

Altick, Richard. 1978. The Shows of London. Cambridge: Belknap Press.

Introduction: Travels to China

Fig. 10.1 ‘Rally of the Tartars at Chin-Keang-Foo’. From Ochterlony’s The

Dominant perceptions of China may be gleaned from the accounts of those

Fig. 10.2 Reproduction of the Signing of the Treaty of Nanjing, Jinghai

Between the Wars (1842–1856): Fortune’s China

sent to China by the Royal Horticultural Society as their ‘Botanical Collector’,

Fortune thus exhibits a typical mid-nineteenth century desire to rank non-Western

Perceptions of China during the Second Opium War (1856–1860): Tulloch,

Buddhist painting remains in the inventory of the National Army Museum in

Fig. 10.4 Ruins of Yuanmingyuan, Beijing. Photograph taken by the author,

Tulloch, Alexander. 1903 [2010]. Recollections of Forty Years’ Service. Edinburgh

The Enduring Importance of Mid-Nineteenth Travellers’ Texts

British travellers and explorers, including notable writers such as Livingstone,

A Puritanical plainness characterized the scene – cathedrals without the graceful

The cities to which Zanzibar’s nineteenth-century town is compared in these

At a distance its appearance is somewhat imposing, and indeed if the religious

These displays of ‘knowledge’ by travellers and administrators demonstrate that

Fig. 11.1 View of Shangani, Zanzibar Town. Illustrated London News,

Imagining Zanzibar in Late Victorian Britain