Dr Grainne Goodwin

John Murray pioneered the modern travel guidebook. This article draws on quantitative and qualitative sources from the Murray archive and Victorian print media to examine the commercial and critical fortunes of the world's first guidebook series. In addition to highlighting the role of competition, attitudes towards wealth making, the working culture of a family firm and the relationship between commercial and critical performance, this study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the changing routines of travel, consumption and commerciality in the nineteenth century.

The popular writer Flora Annie Steel (1847–1929) is most frequently remembered as the author of the “mutiny” novel On the Face of the Waters (1896). Scholarship has tended to focus on her fiction and autobiographical writing and has taken little, if any, cognizance of her journalism. This article rectifies that lack of critical attention by offering an analysis of some of Steel's periodical articles for the Lady's Realm in 1897 and the Saturday Review between 1903 and 1904, which engaged with a number of contentious elements of the Woman Question. Steel's self-professed “oracular” pronouncements on gendered controversies relating to marriage and mother–daughter relations are situated within contemporary debates. Her use of accepted notions of femininity in a number of unconventional ways and the deployment of colonial cultural capital in gender debates are explored as she sought to take up complex progressive-conservative postures on turn-of-the-century womanhood.

This article focuses on the ‘outsider’ status of late-nineteenth-century women writers by exploring the experiences of Anglo-Indian novelist Flora Annie Steel and her responses to authorial sociability in fin-de-siècle London. Androcentric literary societies are viewed as influential sites which marginalised women writers, containing their incursion into masculine clubland and denying them access to some of the symbolic and practical benefits of professional authorship. Through the lens of Steel's experience, the discussion considers how women writers attempted to transcend exclusion through the establishment of female, literary counterpublics. Such counterpublics fostered a gendered literary consciousness that empowered women and matured in Steel's case into a political prospectus in the service of women's suffrage.

This interdisciplinary study applies insights from the ‘new materialisms’ and related ideas from assemblage theory, Actor-Network Theory, Entanglement theory, ecological and cognitive psychology, and anthropology, with the ‘material turn’ in religious studies, to the study of British travel writing in the long nineteenth century. Religion and theories of the object offer a fertile but underdeveloped field for scholarship of travel literature. Religion structured the lifeworlds of travellers and the people they met, complicating the hegemony of colonial and tourist gazes, yet has not had the scholarly prominence it warrants. This thesis shows the embodied and interpersonal operation of religious gazes, and the agency of religious objects in events of travel. A ‘flat ontology’, placing the human and nonhuman, the material and discursive, on the same plane of agency, shows agency in events of travel to be emergent, distributed and intersubjective. While considering a range of accounts of travel, the thesis gives extended analyses of six British travellers’ published accounts of travel to Abyssinia, Persia and Japan, countries free from formal European imperial control. The thesis deconstructs ‘the traveller’, as a social being, into an ‘assemblage’ of co-opted human and nonhuman agents. The traveller is ‘porous’ to the travel environment and ‘extended’ into it. The travel account, as a networked textual object, mediates the traveller and other agents in the event of travel. Building on these foundations, the thesis examines the traveller’s religious gaze, constituted both by the traveller’s disposition to see and their visual behaviour as they encountered religious spaces, events, declarations, rituals, objects, and persons (human and supernatural) in different bodily, affective, social and cognitive configurations. ‘Religious’ entities – now including amuletic scrolls, the Bible, Providence and sorcery – exercised agency in events of travel, and left their traces in accounts of it, through complex entanglements with the traveller’s subjectivity.