Making its appearance in St. Paul’s Bibliographies’ enterprising Publishing Pathways series, this slim volume contains seven papers presented at a conference held at the Royal Geographical Society on the general theme of how the book trade has presented an avid reading public with travellers’ tales and exploration narratives from the 16th century onwards. Even today, as a casual saunter round Waterstone’s will confirm, travel literature and travel guides have lost none of their appeal and occupy great swathes of shelving.
“Strange, remote and farre distant countreys: the travel books of Richard Hakluyt”, by Anthony Payne, director of Bernard Quaritch Ltd, and leading Hakluyt bibliographer, examines not only Divers Voyages (1582) and the Principal Navigations, Voiages … and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589 and 1598‐1600) but also all the other travel books he was associated with, either as adviser, translator, collector of original source material, or as a one‐man research institute networking internationally. Their literary provenenace and bibliographical background, their political context, their connection with similar works published in France and Germany, are investigated and clarified, and Hakluyt’s intention and purpose, his impact on the hard‐nosed commercial world, and his legacy to his successors, are all subjected to close scrutiny.
With equal erudition Michael Harris investigates “Shipwrecks in print: representation of maritime disaster in the late seventeenth century”, examining specifically the way in which information about shipwrecks, of keen inerest by virtue of the money invested in trading voyages, was disseminated through newspaper coverage, and how this information extended into one‐off publications in a variety of formats. By 1700 (Lloyd’s List first appeared in the 1690s) a sophisticated framework for the collection of news was already in place, although few clues exist as to its precise nature. However, three strong components appear to be reports from naval commanders at sea, material supplied by excise officers and postmasters in the coastal towns, and gossip and news from merchants on the Royal Exchange. This paper has all the signs of a personal interest expertly identified and comprehensively researched.
By the eighteenth century travel within Europe had become, for the scions of aristocratic families, a rite of passage and educational experience. Jeremy Black’s “The Grand Tour” scrutinises this social phenomenon and enlarges it into a study of the influences determining these travellers’ destinations, their conduct and attitudes towards foreign lands and peoples, and the impact of tourism on traditional British xenophobia, basing his conclusions on evidence drawn from contemporary letters, journals, and travel accounts. Other aspects that capture Black’s attention include views on foreign food and the widely held belief that foreigners were innately dishonest and not to be trusted.
In natural progression Giles Barber’s “The English‐language Guide Book to Europe up to 1870” identifies four distinct periods of travel, each represented by a particular type of guidebook: the age of Italy and the translation of foreign guides 1690‐1790; the development of the gentleman’s guide 1699‐1790, thus overlapping with Jeremy Black’s paper; the publication of new‐type systematic guides produced by specialist publishers for a growing market, 1815‐1840; and the evolution of cultural attraction‐type guides intended for the upper classes, notably those by Murray and Baedekker and, concurrently with these, the exploitation of a popular mass‐market, 1840‐1870.
If the general publishing trend through the nineteenth century was towards the popular end of the market, there was still ample room for expensively illustrated volumes aimed at collectors with deep pockets. Charles Newton deals with one such category in his “Illustrated Books of the Middle East 1800‐1850” in which he enquires into the reasons for the explosion of interest and activity in this field. Four crucial areas were history anthropology (with which we can subsume archaeology), romance and, most significant of all, religion. All these fused into a heady mix which publishers seized upon with alacrity. Newton also considers the illustration processes and techniques employed – etching, aquatinting, lithography and photography – continuing the general theme of these conference papers. Bill Bell’s “Bound for Australia: Shipboard Reading in the Nineteenth Century” delves into an even more specialised publishing market which flourished in the half century from 1830 onwards, when a million and a half emigrants embarked on the long voyage to the Antipodes, not to mention the convicts who continued to be transported to the penal settlements. In fact, Bell makes the interesting point that many of the convicts were more literate than the emigrants, remarking that the transporation lists included skilled workers, retailers, political dissenters, disgraced schoolmasters and defrocked clergymen. “It might, after all, be argued that the conception of felonies such as fraud, forgery, and embezzlement – even if unsuccessfully executed – required at least a certain level of respectability and intelligence.”
Andrew Tatham’s paper “The information resources of the Royal Geographical Society” brought the conference to a neat and apt conclusion. Among the Society’s substantial holdings, “unparalleled as a resource of geographical information”, is probably “the finest collection of guide books in the world”. From the 1850s specialist publishers, Baedekker, Hachette and John Murray, depositd their guidebooks in the Society’s library. Lonely Planet, for one, continues the tradition today. As for guide books, road books and maps published before this period, they arrived when Sir George Fordham donated his vast collection to the Society in 1923. A total of 223 references, divided between all seven papers, add immeasurably to their research value, but their best recommendation is their genuine appeal to an educated and professional readership.
