<i>Travel in Victorian Periodicals, 1850–1900: Media Logic and Cultural Work</i> by Barbara Korte

In Travel in Victorian Periodicals, 1850–1900, Barbara Korte argues that, because of their unique medial affordances, periodicals performed significant cultural work to promote the democratization of travel in the second half of the nineteenth century. Books were expensive enough to be out of reach of working-class and even most middle-class readers, whereas periodicals, which might cost anywhere from a penny to a shilling, catered to a wide range of audiences. And while books tended to focus on grand journeys undertaken by the elite, the short-form periodical article could highlight “more modest forms of travel,” including day trips and walking tours (5). More interestingly, Korte demonstrates that periodicals not only taught readers how to travel but normalized travel as part of the Victorian lifeworld. Periodicals were embedded in everyday life, so readers who turned to them for entertainment or edification, fashion tips or household advice, would have encountered discussions of travel in every weekly or monthly issue. Of course, this also means that travel was presented in a dense (and often tense) intertextual framework with topics of the day, including the woman question, labor, imperialism, and missionary projects. Focusing on a selection of general-interest periodicals, Korte deftly teases out this “ideological baggage” that the Victorians brought on vacation (248).Chapter 2 concisely explains the media logic of periodicals, describing how features such as frequency, miscellaneity, interactivity, intertextuality, and paratextuality shaped the representation of travel. Though focused on how elements like repetition and periodicity influence travel writing, this clearly articulated chapter serves as a useful primer for periodicals theory. Chapters 3 to 7 offer case studies of particular magazines to explore the significance of format, illustration, and audience, especially in terms of class, gender, and age. While the periodicals assume a white traveler, Korte thoughtfully makes those assumptions visible and draws attention to the religious, imperialist, and racist biases within discussions of travel. Her analysis of race and religious bias is most robust in chapter 4, which closely examines a travelogue about the Holy Land, and chapter 6, which discusses imperialism in boys’ periodicals.The case study approach will attract readers who want to know more about a single title or genre, but this monograph builds some of its most fascinating claims across chapters through comparisons and a range of analytical approaches. Korte employs a combination of distant and close reading to give a nuanced picture of how travel was represented in her sample texts—for example, quantifying the number of travel pieces in a given periodical over time, counting the number and types of illustrations accompanying travelogues, or analyzing narratorial voice in relation to the target audience. These techniques vary across the book, so insights from distant reading in one case study help illuminate close readings in later chapters.Among the periodicals Korte discusses, chapter 3’s the Leisure Hour addressed the widest audience, included the most travel writing, and spanned the entire period under study, running from 1852 to 1905. Published by the Religious Tract Society, this family magazine targeted both aspirational working-class and established middle-class readers, and it offered something for everyone—men, women, and children—in its effort to entertain and educate. As such, the Leisure Hour’s expansive treatment of travel not only allows Korte to establish key ideas but also serves as a recurring point of comparison in subsequent case studies. For example, this chapter introduces the wide range of periodical genres in which travel appeared. Beyond the travelogue, discussion of travel included instructional articles, essays on the history and progress of modern travel, reports on missionary work and emigration, adventure fiction, readers’ correspondence, and, of course, advertisements for travel services, accessories, and fashions. The Leisure Hour also helps Korte situate travel writing within the culture of reprinting. Periodicals sometimes excerpted travel writing from other publications, but they also found ways to give their original content a second life. The Leisure Hour, which for many years was published in both a cheap weekly format and a more expensive monthly volume, carefully scheduled travel pieces during the summer so that middle-class readers would have a complete serial in a single monthly issue. Advertisements also suggest that remainder issues were later sold as stand-alone travel guides.Throughout the book, Korte reminds us that the democratization of travel was by no means a story of unmitigated progress. She carefully notes the tensions between a periodical’s overt politics and its assumptions about travelers. For example, the Leisure Hour maintained a paternalistic attitude despite its promise to address “the thoughtful of every class” (58). Although it was one of the few magazines to offer practical advice for inexperienced travelers, such as how to purchase train tickets or obtain a passport, it assumed that working people were limited to armchair travel and ignored the possibility of a woman traveler outside of the family unit. These tensions and hypocrisies become even more apparent in the chapters devoted to women’s and children’s periodicals.While chapter 3 favors a wide scope to lay the study’s foundation, chapter 4 focuses on several middle-class illustrated periodicals—Good Words, Cornhill Magazine, and Once a Week—within the narrower time frame of the 1860s. These periodicals all aimed more upmarket than the Leisure Hour, but there are subtle differences in their target audiences, particularly in terms of religious affiliation and cultural aspirations. Korte’s analysis expertly demonstrates how to assess those nuances through price, format, layout, and contents. This chapter also examines the “text-image interplay” in two travelogues by Norman Macleod, who was editor of Good Words (97). Readers who are familiar with this evangelical family magazine are unlikely to be surprised by the ideological influence of imperial and missionary projects on its travel writing. But Korte’s analysis raises intriguing questions about the role of illustration and reprinting in travel writing. Although illustration was a prominent feature of family magazines in the 1860s, her research reveals that “travel writing was unevenly illustrated” and that there is little apparent explanation for the magazine’s choices (123). Furthermore, her limited sample from the 1860s and 1870s suggests that, rather than commission new artwork, periodicals were more likely to illustrate travel pieces with woodcuts “derived from existing photographs or drawings from books” (124). These surprising observations suggest avenues for further research about the perceived value of both travel writing and original illustration.The final three case studies consider how representations of travel shift for specific audiences: women, children, and working people. Chapter 5 considers how domestic ideology affects the representation of travel in women’s periodicals, including the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (EDM), a relatively conservative publication for middle-class women, the Ladies Treasury, which aimed more upper class, and the English Woman’s Journal (EWJ), a pioneering feminist periodical that advocated for women’s work, independence, and agency. Interestingly, the political leaning of these periodicals does not necessarily predict their stance on travel. For example, although the EDM included few travelogues describing first-person experiences of a journey, it frequently discussed travel in its fashion, gossip, and correspondence columns. The Ladies Treasury included many travelogues for an elite readership who expected to travel often and in style, but these pieces typically used a gender-neutral or masculine narratorial voice to avoid debates about women’s freedom of mobility. And we might expect the feminist EWJ to adopt a liberal attitude toward women’s travel—especially because the publication was funded by supporters and did not have to compete on the market—but Korte reveals how “even feminist publications negotiated travel with caution” (159). This chapter draws yet another compelling insight in comparison to the previous case studies. While magazines targeting women only might be compelled to balance representations of women’s mobility with more conservative ideals, family magazines such as the Leisure Hour and Good Words published works by women travelers without courting controversy. Korte’s hypothesis affirms other feminist analyses of such content, suggesting that “the representation of female travel in these magazines was less inhibited by gender-ideological constraints because much of their content was less obviously gendered than that of women’s magazines” (160).Chapter 6 expands on these findings, turning its attention to juvenile periodicals. While some children’s magazines had a gender-neutral address, the wildly popular Boy’s Own Paper (BOP) and Girl’s Own Paper (GOP) “offer themselves for an investigation of gender-specific aspects of young Victorian people’s initiation into travel” (175). This chapter further underlines the significance of first-person narration in travel writing, as the BOP’s travelogues and imperial adventure stories blurred the line between fact and fiction and encouraged male readers to see themselves as agents in a widening world. The view of travel for girls was constrained by the same gender ideals seen in women’s periodicals, but Korte details how girls’ periodicals encouraged greater mobility as the century wore on. For example, the GOP’s travelogues served as “testimonials that ordinary women could travel to many different countries and in many different modes” (192). Korte also shows how illustrations bolster this impression by depicting groups of women and girls enjoying themselves by the seaside, free from the usual restrictions of formal dress and decorum.The final case study examines how travel was presented to working-class readers—arguably, the group that matters most to Korte’s thesis about the democratization of travel. In a now much-quoted essay for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1859, the journalist E. S. Dallas cast a jaundiced eye on the cheap serials, essay contests, and correspondence columns that filled popular periodicals, observing with some dismay, “The people, in fact, are writing for themselves” (“Popular Literature—The Periodical Press,” Blackwood’s 85 [January 1859]: 188). Korte provocatively asks, “But did they write about their own travelling?” (212). The answer, of course, is complicated. As with periodicals for women or girls only, we see once again how narratorial voice matters and, more pointedly, how the tone becomes more paternalistic and limiting when periodicals address a marginalized audience. In addition to magazines aimed directly at working-class readers, such as the British Workman, the Family Economist, and the Working Man’s Friend and Family Instructor, Korte looks at a wider sample of periodicals read by working people between 1850 and 1870, including mass-market magazines that published fiction (such as Reynolds’s Miscellany, the London Journal, and the Family Herald) and magazines of popular progress (exemplified by Eliza Cook’s Journal). In her search for “working people’s self-descriptions of their travelling” (which occur more frequently as emigration narratives), Korte also uncovers “evidence of what they could read about travel in articles, book reviews and correspondence sections” and “discourse on working-class travel that unfolded in the magazines” (215). Although Korte frankly acknowledges that periodicals’ “engagement with working people’s travel, and especially their leisure travel, was more restrained,” this chapter presents itself as a first step into a field that demands further research (211). Korte’s incisive analysis points the way most vividly.Overall, Barbara Korte’s new book stands as an authoritative resource on travel and travel writing in Victorian periodicals. Its bibliographies, of both primary and secondary sources, are gold mines for future researchers. Her attention to periodical form will be instructive to many who are new to periodical studies, and readers looking to learn about a specific publication will be amply rewarded. Korte gives thorough information on each title’s profile (price, circulation, audience, editors and editorial agenda, and competitors), and she rigorously demonstrates how magazines designed for different markets embedded travel within larger discussions of gender, class, empire, and missionary efforts. While there is still room to tease out the cultural work of travel writing and its relevance for scholars and the broader public, Travel in Victorian Periodicals, 1850–1900 provides an excellent launching point for researchers looking to embark on such a journey.