First published in 1964. This book is concerned with impressions of Arabic culture on the British before the First World War. More particularly, it is concerned with three Victorian travellers, all of whom knew Arabic culture first hand through their travels in the Middle and Near East, and especially in Arabia, Arabic North Africa, and the seaboard of the eastern Mediterranean. This title will be of interest to students of history.

This book is a companion volume to Dickens and Italy, edited by Michael Hollington and Francesca Orestano, which aimed to fill an important gap in our understanding of England’s paramount novelist by studying his personal, political and literary relation to the foreign country he loved best of all of those he visited. Its focus is wider and its scope more ambitious and speculative. Without in any way leaving Dickens or his writings about Italy behind, the attempt here is to approach the Victorian fascination with that country from a broader, more theoretical perspective in which several current debates about travel writing are taken up and critically redeployed. The book is articulated in three parts. Part One concerns what the writings of Dickens and other Victorians can tell us about the history and theory of travel and travel writing, and Part Two, what they can tell us about particular Victorian writers themselves and their work. In Part Three the focus shifts in order to compare writing and visual representations of the experience of ‘abroad’ in general and Italy in particular, in an era when what can be thought of as modern visual culture is gradually taking shape. The book aims to show that the study of how Victorians imagined Italy can lead to a deeper understanding of some of the stereotypes that continue to inform contemporary tourism.

The Victorians, perhaps more than any Britons before them, were diggers and sifters of the past. Though they were not the first to be fascinated by history, the intensity and range of their preoccupations with the past were unprecedented and of lasting importance. The Victorians paved the way for our modern disciplines, discovered the primeval monsters we now call the dinosaurs, and built many of Britain’s most important national museums and galleries. To a large degree, they created the perceptual frameworks through which we continue to understand the past. Out of their discoveries, new histories emerged, giving rise to fresh debates, while seemingly well-known histories were thrown into confusion by novel tools and methods of scrutiny. If in the eighteenth century the study of the past had been the province of a handful of elites, new technologies and economic development in the nineteenth century meant that the past, in all its brilliant detail, was for the first time the property of the many, not the few. Time Travelers is a book about the myriad ways in which Victorians approached the past, offering a vivid picture of the Victorian world and its historical obsessions.

An invaluable compendium of writing on the Middle East including extracts from canonical and less well known travellers’ works.

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1982. The Art of Travel is the first collection of critical essays to be devoted to British travel writing. It attempts to give a sense of the wealth of such writing, to map some of its forms and conventions and, implicitly, to claim a place for travel writing in any revised definition of literature. For this collection, travel includes sea voyages, European tours, commissioned enquiries into social conditions, and urban writing; travel writing ranges from works such as Sea and Sardinia by D.H. Lawrence whose status as a novelist guarantees his travel books some attention, through the essays and books of Victorian middle-class travellers into working-class London, to the work of V.S. Naipaul, a contemporary writer, who has increasingly preferred the travel book to the novel.