Envisioned companions: British travel writers in China. Writing home to a British public, 1890--1914

This dissertation is a study of British travel writers who chronicled their journeys through China primarily from 1890–1914. It is principally about travel and the travel experience. The study engages those themes within the context of existing post-colonial and post-modern debates that critique the writings of Western travelers journeying in non-Western locales. The travel writers surveyed rarely traveled alone but they characteristically promoted a travel persona of the idealized solitary traveler derived from deeply engrained traditions in Western travel literature. Such solitary projections were mitigated by a narrative device that “envisioned”, as it were, traveling companions in the form of an imaginary British readership, an intimate consort of fellow countrymen that inhabited the spirit of their writings, where in the words of Benedict Anderson, “in the minds of each lived the image of their communion”1 as they journeyed through China in envisioned camaraderie. Many of these British travel writers understood themselves as well to be more than mere travelers but rather the last representatives of an enduring but fading age of European explorers. They sought to bring to their readers parts and elements of China not yet visited or profiled by Western writers. And as “solitary” travelers seeking “unexplored” regions of China, they sought to distance themselves from expatriate cocoons to venture “far from the madding crowd” of Western settlements and comforts. In producing their travel descriptions many developed a persona of self-projected progressivism often submitted as anti-discourse, a device critical to their identity as travel savants, who not only brought new vistas and experiences of China, but articulated as well new ways of seeing and describing the Chinese people. Another critical component of the dissertation engages travel encounters, namely the crowds, servants, officials, transportation forms, inns, foods, dangers, and hardships of the road. Such encounters invoked fascination and wonder, but they also engendered fear, aversion, and irritation—responses central to the norms of travel writing and the travel savant's identity that invariably colored the representational process, reinforcing, even if unintentionally, existent stereotypes about China and the Chinese.; 1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (New York: Verso, 1983), p. 6.