'We travellers are in very hard circumstances,' said Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 'If we tell anything new we are laughed at as fabulous.' This mistrust of the footloose is endorsed by the trenchant definition of 'traveller's tale' in Chambers' Dictionary: 'an astounding lie about what one professes to have seen abroad'. To be sure, this batch of 19th-century travellers' tales features some astounding liars, but there are also some reasonably honest witnesses. These include the stiff-backed statesman whom Max Beerbohm called 'Britannia's butler', two twin widows on a Gospel quest, a get-rich-quick bride in Amazonia, a caustic spinster in India, a writer of fairy-tales, a future poet laureate teamed with a leading delineator of bosoms and bums, and a respected novelist earning his crust in Ireland. 'No one expects literature in a work of travel,' said Mary Kingsley (she who was saved from the spikes of the leopard pit by her thick, sensible skirt), but many Victorian travellers had an eye on the popular magazines and lecture platforms. The sheer profusion of outlets, at the century's end, probably tempted fabulists.

LRB 6 February 1986 | PDF Download