Women, travel and identity: Journeys by rail and sea, 1870–1940 9781526112477

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etween 1870 and 1940, a period of dramatic social, cultural and technological change, millions of British women journeyed abroad on steamships and trains, motivated by economic need, a desire to start a new life, faith, health, love, curiosity or sheer necessity. Women, travel and identity explores their experiences as journey consumers – experiences that have remained largely hidden until now, despite the journey being the most universal female travel experience of the period. Drawing upon diaries and letters, art, advertising, fiction and etiquette guides, it examines the journey’s impact upon women’s identities and definitions of femininity, modernity, glamour, class, travel, tourism, leisure and sexual opportunity and threat. The book explores women’s relationship with train and ship technology, as well as cultural understandings and public expectations of the journey. Robinson-Tomsett also explores how women journeyed in practice, examining their use of journey space, their sociability with both Western and ‘Other’ non-Western journeyers, and their experience of love, sex and danger during the journey. She highlights the ways in which women fashioned a journeyer identity which fused their existing domestic identities with new identities such as the journey chronicler. It will appeal to academics, postgraduates and undergraduates studying women’s and gender history; travel, transport and mobility studies; Victorian, cultural and leisure history; and postcolonial and feminist studies, as well as enthusiasts of what is considered a ‘golden age’ of travel featuring some of the greatest transport ever built, including the Orient Express and the Titanic.

Emma Robinson-Tomsett is a freelance academic and History researcher and writer who completed her doctorate at Royal Holloway, University of London front cover ‘Cunard USA-Canada’ (circa 1920), © Cunard Line Ltd

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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JOURNEYS BY RAIL AND SEA, 1870 –1940

•• Robinson-Tomsett

••

WOMEN, TRAVEL AND IDENTITY

gender in history

WOMEN, TRAVEL AND IDENTITY

• Emma Robinson-Tomsett •

14/05/2013 09:56:22

GENDER

in

HISTORY

Series editors: Lynn Abrams, Cordelia Beattie, Pam Sharpe and Penny Summerfield

 The expansion of research into the history of women and gender since the 1970s has changed the face of history. Using the insights of feminist theory and of historians of women, gender historians have explored the configuration in the past of gender identities and relations between the sexes. They have also investigated the history of sexuality and family relations, and analysed ideas and ideals of masculinity and femininity. Yet gender history has not abandoned the original, inspirational project of women’s history: to recover and reveal the lived experience of women in the past and the present. The series Gender in History provides a forum for these developments. Its historical coverage extends from the medieval to the modern periods, and its geographical scope encompasses not only Europe and North America but all corners of the globe. The series aims to investigate the social and cultural constructions of gender in historical sources, as well as the gendering of historical discourse itself. It embraces both detailed case studies of specific regions or periods, and broader treatments of major themes. Gender in History titles are designed to meet the needs of both scholars and students working in this dynamic area of historical research.

Women, travel and identity

this ser ies also includes

 Myth and materiality in a woman’s world: Shetland 1800–2000 Lynn Abrams Destined for a life of service: defining African-Jamaican womanhood, 1865–1938 Henrice Altink Love, intimacy and power: marital relationships in Scotland, 1650–1850 Katie Barclay Artisans of the body in early modern Italy: identities, families and masculinities Sandra Cavallo Modern motherhood: women and family in England, c. 1945–2000 Angela Davis Jewish women in Europe in the Middle Ages: a quiet revolution Simha Goldin The military leadership of Matilda of Canossa, 1046–1115 David J. Hay The shadow of marriage: singleness in England, 1914–60 Katherine Holden Infidel feminism: Secularism, religion and women’s emancipation, England 1830–1914 Laura Schwartz The feminine public sphere: middle-class women and civic life in Scotland, c. 1870–1914 Megan Smitley Being boys: working-class masculinities and leisure Melanie Tebbutt

WOMEN, TRAVEL AND IDENTITY: journeys by rail and sea, 1870–1940 j Emma Robinson-Tomsett J

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © Emma Robinson-Tomsett 2013 The right of Emma Robinson-Tomsett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for isbn  978 0 7190 8715 8  hardback First published 2013 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Minion with Scala Sans display by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong

Contents list of figures list of tables acknowledgements list of abbreviations introduction

page vi vii viii x 1

1 The big luggage went a fortnight ago: making the journey abroad

18

2 Fashion plate heroines: imagining the female journeyer

43

3 No nice girl swears: advice, etiquette and expectation

73

4 Ordering the berth: the spaces of journeying

94

5 Busy practising games: scrutiny and sociability

120

6 Full of wickedness: romantic opportunity and sexual hazard?

146

7 Where her story begins: fashioning a journeyer identity

169

conclusion appendix: women journeyers bibliography index

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193 206 222 239

List of figures 1 The Gallery of the H.M.S. Calcutta by J. Tissot (1877) © Tate, London, 2011 page 45 2 The Last Evening by J. Tissot (1873), Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London 46 3 Portsmouth Dockyard, or, How I Could Be Happy with Either by J. Tissot (1877) © Tate, London, 2011 46 4 The Ball on Shipboard by J. Tissot (circa 1874) © Tate, London, 2011 48 5 Waiting for the Train (Willesden Junction) by J. Tissot (circa 1871–73), oil on panel, Collection of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery 49 6 Female passengers in a L.N.W.R. dining carriage (circa 1905) © National Railway Museum/Science and Society Picture Library 51 7 ‘The Queen of Scots Pullman’ (circa 1930) © National Railway Museum/Science and Society Picture Library 53 8 ‘Illustration of woman in cloche hat and dress waving handkerchief at ocean liner’, cover of the 15 October, 1927 issue of Vogue; illustration by Eduardo Garcia Benito. Benito/Vogue/Condé Nast Archive. Copyright © Condé Nast 55 9 ‘Dine Well by L.N.E.R.’ (1935) © National Railway Museum/Science and Society Picture Library 56 10 ‘Express Ease’ (1923–30) © National Railway Museum/Scence and Society Picture Library 57 11 Passengers in a smoking carriage, Great Western Railway (1936) © National Railway Museum/Science and Society Picture Library 58 12 ‘Cunard USA-Canada’ (circa 1920), © Cunard Line Ltd 58 13 ‘America this year by R.M.S. “Queen Mary ” ’ (circa 1936), © Cunard Line Ltd 59 14 Chesterfields Cigarettes advertisement (1928) White Star Magazine (November 1928), Cunard Archive, University of Liverpool 59 15 Woman in second-class outside stateroom on the S.S. Aquitania (1928), Cunard Archive, University of Liverpool 60 16 Cabin drawing room, S.S. Britannic (July 1930) White Star Magazine (July 1930), Cunard Archive, University of Liverpool 97 17 First-class dining car on the Great Western Railway (1938) © National Railway Museum/Science and Society Picture Library 98 18 Woman being served breakfast by maid in a second-class cabin, S.S. Aquitania (1914), Cunard Archive, University of Liverpool 99 19 Cabin dining room, S.S. Britannic (July 1930) White Star Magazine (July 1930), Cunard Archive, University of Liverpool 100

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List of tables 1 Number of adult female emigrants per 1,000 male emigrants 1877–80 and 1891–1900 2 Female ocean journeyers departing from Liverpool, 1890, 1910 and 1930 3 Destination of women journeyers from Liverpool, 1890, 1910 and 1930 4 Distribution of discourses according to type of journey 5 Distribution of discourses in published and unpublished journey accounts 6 Distribution of discourses in male and female journey accounts

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page 19 23 25 183 185 186

Acknowledgements This project began many years ago when Professor Amanda Vickery suggested I contact Dr Alex Windscheffel at Royal Holloway, University of London about the possibility of supervising my Ph.D. I am extremely grateful for her recommendation. Over coffee at Starbucks on London’s Euston Road, Alex and I thrashed out my Ph.D. topic. I was fortunate to get funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council that enabled the completion of this project as a thesis. I am supremely grateful to Alex and to all of the academics I worked with during that time for their robust comments on my work, insights and support, but particularly Professor Penelope Corfield, Dr Emma Jones and Dr Nicola Phillips. I am now also extremely grateful to all of the staff at Manchester University Press who have helped produce this book. I wish to thank all the archivists and librarians who helped me find the many remarkable women I encountered on my own journey to this point. I would particularly like to thank Sir William Gladstone, Bt, K.G., Anthony Spender and Sophy Thomas for allowing me to reproduce extracts from the diaries of their relatives, Mary Gladstone, Eira du Breil and Margaret Roberts. I thank staff at the British Library; Teesside Archives; Anna Buruma at Liberty Archives; Bromley Archives, London; Hull History Centre as custodian of the records; the London Borough of Lambeth, Archives Department; Maritime Archives & Library, Merseyside Maritime Museum; and Surrey History Centre for allowing publication here of passages from various unpublished manuscripts and records. I am also grateful to Toronto University Press for allowing reproduction in this book of part of Chapter 4, which previously appeared in The Domestic Space Reader (eds K. Mezei and S. Brighanti, 2012). I am indebted to The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf for permission to reproduce extracts from The Voyage Out (1915), and The Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, and The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of E.M. Forster for permission to reproduce extracts from Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and A Passage to India (1924). I thank the Estates, representatives and publishers of Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Vita Sackville-West for permission to reproduce extracts from Stamboul Train (1932), ‘Cruise (Letters from a Young Lady of Leisure)’ (1943) and Passenger to Teheran (1926). Extracts from The Diary of a Provincial Lady and The Provincial Lady in America by E.M. Delafield are reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.pfd.co.uk) on behalf of the Estate of E.M. Delafield. I am grateful to be able to reproduce extracts from Murder on the Orient Express, reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © 1934 Agatha Christie, and Death on the Nile, reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © 1937 Agatha Christie. I am grateful to Royal Holloway, University of London Archives for allowing the publication

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acknowledgements of extracts from several editions of Bedford College, University of London’s student magazine. Finally, I am much obliged to the following organizations for allowing reproduction of the images seen here: Tate, London; Condé Nast; the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand; the National Railway Museum, York and the Science and Society Picture Library; Cunard Line Ltd; Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London; and the Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool Library, Cunard Archive. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright owners and anyone claiming copyright should contact the author via Manchester University Press. I am happy to include any missing acknowledgements in future editions. I thank my parents, Andrew and Helen, for all of their support over the years, emotional and (when the funding ran out) financial. I could not have completed this without their belief in me. I must also thank all the friends who coped with the challenges that come with arts research, but especially Helen Williams and Dr Marie Sandell. Coffee, cake and conversation solve everything. Most of all, however, I must thank Ben, my husband. This project was already under way when we met, but without his patience, understanding, support and love, it would never have reached this point. His remarkably good timing in getting a job that took us to Oslo some months before my submission date meant I had the luxury of time without the usual work responsibilities to finish this book. I dedicate it to him.

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List of abbreviations

BA

Bromley Archives, London

BL India and Oriental Collection British Library, India and Oriental Collection

BL Manuscripts Collection British Library, Manuscripts Collection CM

Cunard Magazine

CWAC City of Westminster Archives Centre, London



HHC



ILN

Illustrated London News



JTH

Journal of Transport History





LA London Borough of Lambeth Archives MAL, MMM

Maritime Archives & Library, Merseyside Maritime Museum

NRM/SSPL National Railway Musuem/ Science and Society Picture Library PMG

Pall Mall Gazette

RHUL Archives Archives, Royal Holloway, University of London

RN

Hull History Centre

Railway News

SCA, ULL Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool Library



SHC

Surrey History Centre



TNA

The National Archives, Kew



TSA

Teesside Archives



WSM

White Star Magazine

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Introduction A foghorn sounds; a train whistle blows. Smoke billows from funnels and engines. An anxious mother thrusts sandwiches to her son through a carriage window. A woman searches for a free compartment, another finds her cabin. Porters struggle with trunks. Umbrellas are stowed in luggage racks; going-away gifts examined. Latecomers desperately search for their carriages. Doors slam and gangways are removed. People scurry on deck or lean out of windows to wave a last farewell to loved ones and friends. Finally, the train chugs out of the station; the ship leaves its moorings. ‘Everything begins to recede: home, friends  .  .  .  How exhilar­ ating it is, to be thus self-contained; to depend for happiness on no material comfort; to be rid of such sentimentality as attaches to the dear familiar; to be open, vulnerable, receptive!’, rhapsodized Vita SackvilleWest (1892–1962) at the beginning of her 1926 account of her journey to Persia, Passenger to Teheran.1 Marion Ferguson Bridie was equally delighted to be on board the S.S. Empress of Britain for a round-the-world journey in 1931: ‘here I am settled, unpacked, and feeling just as thrilled and excited as if I were still looking forward to coming’.2 Between 1870 and 1940, millions of Britons embarked on journeys abroad by train and ship, leaving their homes to participate in one of the great ages of journeying. They journeyed to multiple destinations in the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Australasia and Asia, including New York, Bombay (now Mumbai), Madras (now Chennai), Singapore, Hong Kong, Algiers, Rangoon (now Yangon), Yokohama and Cairo. Women were increasingly visible and important participants in this new era of mass mobility. Many were emigrating. Some journeyed as part of their work duties or to support spouses who were taking up work overseas. Others journeyed for their health or out of religious conviction. As shipping companies began to provide a greater level of hotel-style service for non-émigré passengers, ocean cruising became the shipping industry’s main business3 and train companies provided new luxury services, women also increasingly journeyed for pleasure. The decades between 1870 and 1940 were exhilarating ones in which to be passing beyond Britain’s borders. In an age of journey transformation, technological and engineering developments such as the openings of the Suez and Panama Canals in 1869 and 1914 respectively and the building of ocean liners that accommodated hundreds or even thousands made journeys more accessible, faster and ever more varied in their

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women, travel and identity routes and destinations. Extensive international and transcontinental transport networks developed, enabling women to journey ever further abroad with ease. Novels and films such as King Kong (1933), The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) showcased these journeys as spaces of romance, excitement and danger while the Marx brothers explored their comic possibilities in Monkey Business (1931).4 Advertisements and magazines depicted the journey and journeyer as sites of glamour, elegance and sophistication. For those who could afford the most expensive tickets, journeys became extremely lavish experiences. Ship companies competed to launch ever more luxurious ships such as the Oceanic (1870), Lucania (1893), Mauretania and Lusitania (launched in 1906 and 1907), Normandie (1935) and the Queen Mary (1936). George Pullman and Georges Nagelmackers pioneered a new level of comfort in rail carriages and companies inaugurated the sumptuous Train Bleu from Calais to the French Riviera and the Orient Express between Paris and Istanbul, amongst others. Those who could not afford the opulence of first class shared the thrill of boarding some of the greatest transport ever built. The act of travel consists of several stages: departing from home; the journey to the destination; arrival; the time spent in that destination; the moment of departure; the return journey; and, finally, arriving back home. The journey stage had certain distinctive characteristics in this period. Trains and ships enclosed journeyers within self-contained environments. Journeying was usually confined to a fixed period of time, from a seven-day ocean journey from Liverpool to New York to the 118day world cruise made by Marion Bridie.5 The journey route was usually determined before departure. For those travelling to or from another city or country in which they stayed, or intended to stay, for weeks, months or years, the journey was an incidental stage in getting to and returning from these places. For those whose travel experience was the journey – those taking rail journeys or cruises around a country or countries, continent(s) or ocean(s), visiting multiple places with no intention of staying anywhere for long – it was the only, and most important, stage; in these cases, the journey became the entire act of travel. The journey also had several substages. First was the moment of leaving home. Next was embarkation on the ship or train in which the journey was being undertaken; then came departure from the home port or station. The central part of the journey followed: days or weeks spent in almost continual motion within the selected mode of transport, with occasional stoppages at various stations or ports en route. These stoppages sometimes offered a brief opportunity to leave the train or ship to explore the place reached. For those who made multiple, sequential

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introduction journeys on several trains and/or ships, this central stage was repeated many times. The final parts of the journey were arrival at the journeyer’s destination and disembarkation. With the exception of the stoppages, the central stage is the focus of this work. The revolution in women’s journeying ran parallel with dramatic changes in their status in Britain, as they fought to achieve equal political, educational, professional and material status with men. Leading figures such as Virginia Woolf, Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby argued that women needed financial independence, improved employment and domestic parity with men.6 Women slowly entered universities’ hallowed halls. The Women’s Social and Political Union and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies campaigned fiercely for the vote. Gaining the franchise after 1918 increasingly allowed women to assert their status as citizens rather than the second, invisible sex. Women also entered new ‘white-blouse’ professions: teaching, nursing, retailing and office work.7 By 1940 women’s lives had been transformed in numerous ways: their expectations and belief in what they could achieve and experience would have been unrecognizable to many women in 1870.8 Millions of women unhesitatingly seized their opportunity to journey abroad; yet these journeys have remained largely invisible. Although they usefully highlight the diversity of women’s professional roles in the maritime trade as stewardesses, laundresses, matrons, nurses, shop attendants, beauticians, hairdressers and pool attendants, previous histories of female ocean journeying have privileged the experiences of journey staff over that of paying consumers.9 Others focus on the women left behind when men went to sea, or the most unusual of female ocean journeyers: pirates and cross-dressing sailors.10 Within railway history, a minute number of studies highlight women’s work as matrons in railway lodging hostels, waiting room attendants, sewing machinists, upholsterers, telegraphists, company secretaries, ticket sales personnel, telephonists and clerks as well as their wartime work as track-workers, ticket collectors, guards and ‘signalmen’.11 But the paying woman journeyer remains a hidden figure. This book aims to redress this imbalance through a close examination of forty women’s journeys abroad. Thirty of these were undertaken for leisure and pleasure to and around Europe, the Middle East and Asia. One was undertaken to improve the woman’s health, but was also a journey of leisure. Two were emigration voyages by women who sought new lives in New Zealand. One was what can be termed a family-andduty journey on a troopship by a woman accompanying her husband to an army posting in India. ‘Duty’ is not intended to suggest that she

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women, travel and identity did not want to make this journey but to reflect that many women journeyed abroad because they had no choice but to accompany their husbands and families. Five women journeyed as a requirement of their work as nurses, teachers and domestic servants. Finally, one journey was undertaken both out of religious conviction and to support a family member: one woman accompanied her husband to a missionary station in Zululand, South Africa. This book has, however, purposely excluded First World War journeys such as those made by Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses, the most famous of whom is probably Vera Brittain, to military field hospitals overseas. Leaving Britain for purposes other than war work was difficult and these journeys offer a distorted impression of the female journey in what were exceptional years for the period. Three of the women studied here made their journeys by train; twenty-four made them by ship; and thirteen used a combination of ships and trains. There were notable differences between journeying by rail and sea. Ocean journeys were often longer: it took days to cross the Atlantic, while a train journey from, for example, Paris to Marseilles could take only hours. The spaces of the train and ship were dramatically different in size and variety: ships could contain ballrooms, libraries and leisure facilities such as swimming pools that could not be replicated within the narrower dimensions of the train. Rail journeyers were largely confined to the carriage in which their seat was located, and had little opportunity to explore other spaces such as the engine. By contrast, some ocean journeyers were able to visit ships’ engine-rooms and stores. This lack of mobility within trains meant that the diversity of women’s encounters with other journeyers could be more limited as they could socialize easily only with the others in their compartment, of whom there were a limited number. There was also a far greater variety of organized leisure activities available on ocean journeys than on rail. There were, of course, two other modes of transport in which women could journey after 1900: the motorcar and the aeroplane. Women were involved with these two new technologies from their earliest stages: American upper-class and middle-class women began to drive cars themselves in the early 1900s rather than using chauffeurs.12 Amy Johnson and Amelia Earhart became renowned pilots. However, aeroplanes and automobiles became mass forms of transport only after the Second World War.13 This book therefore focuses upon rail and marine journeys as the most significant and representative female journey experience prior to 1940. Leisured and working women of all ages could journey abroad. Of the fifteen journeyers featured here for whom definite biographical information

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introduction exists, the ages of fourteen are known: one was aged sixteen, five were in their mid-to-late twenties, three were in their thirties, two in their forties, one was fifty-six and two journeyed throughout their fifties, sixties, seventies and early eighties. Five of the forty women were in paid employment; two sought work upon arrival in their new homelands as immigrants. Eleven were students at the women-only Bedford College, University of London.14 Two were too young to work. Two supported their husbands’ work while the remaining eighteen were apparently leisured women, as they made no mention of jobs in their journey accounts. Social status was no barrier to women’s journeying, although it could entail significantly different qualities of experience. Four of the women studied here were upper-class and wealthy; they could afford and enjoyed extremely comfortable journeys. The wife of the founder of London’s Liberty department store, Lady Emma Lasenby Liberty (born circa 1845) journeyed first class with her husband Sir Arthur Lasenby Liberty (1843– 1917) around Europe, Turkey and Greece on the Orient Express and various ships in 1884. Three of the women were working-class, including lady’s maid Janet Smith, who journeyed with her employer to and from New York in September and October 1896. Journeys were far more arduous for women who journeyed with their employers, as they had to continue their work duties. Lower-class journeyers were usually poorer and so usually endured far less comfortable and private accommodation, as this was all they could afford. The remaining thirty-three women were of middle- to upper-middle middle-class status, such as sisters Emily (1819  –1901) and Ellen Hall (1822–1911) from West Wickham, Kent, daughters of an army captain, who made multiple journeys to and from Algeria between December 1873 and 1900 and 1901 respectively. The journey abroad was also accessible regardless of women’s marital status. Eleven of the women featured here were married at the time of their journeys, and their husbands accompanied ten of them. These women sometimes had additional companions: Annie Brassey (1839  –  87), author and wife of the Liberal politician and future peer Thomas Brassey, travelled with her children as well as her husband on her sea and rail journeys to and from, and within, Canada in 1872. The remaining twentynine women were apparently unmarried and their companions varied. Londoner Emily May Jones was accompanied by a friend or companion, Pauline, during her cruise along the Rhine in the summer of 1889. Teacher and missionary Margaret Hunt (born 1907) made several journeys with various colleagues to and from India in order to teach at a women’s Christian college in Madras between June 1932 and June 1938. The very youngest women journeyers were usually accompanied by family members

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women, travel and identity rather than journeying alone. Eleven women mentioned no companions in their accounts so apparently journeyed alone, although it is possible that they simply, or deliberately, did not mention them, as Vita SackvilleWest did not in Passenger to Teheran.15 Journeying abroad was a private, personal and public act that blurred the boundaries between the private and the public. Most women personally determined which routes they took, selected the ships or trains in which they journeyed as well as the type of accommodation they booked within them, decided the degree to which they socialised with their fellow journeyers and chose whether or not to leave their trains or ships to visit stoppage places. Yet trains and ships were communal public spaces designed to carry hundreds or thousands of people; inevitably, women encountered them in virtually all journey spaces. Many other journeyers used the carriages and cabins in which women journeyed before, during and after the latter’s journeys; these were not necessarily wholly private. The journey by rail and sea was also a period of leisure for many women, removing them as it did from some of the daily commitments that prevented them from participating in leisure activities at home. By framing the journey abroad as a leisure opportunity, this book adds a new dimension to the history of women’s leisure. It moves beyond previous studies’ focus on women’s late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury local and home-based activities, such as visits to music and dance halls, the cinema and women’s clubs, and music making, knitting and gossiping with friends at home. The ship in particular was a leisure space filled with organized and spontaneous, communal and individual activities, including fancy-dress dances, quoits and skittles. The determining and limiting impact of women’s life cycles on their leisure experiences during this period has been a key argument in previous analyses. Youth has customarily been regarded as the pre-eminent female leisure period because unmarried working women had surplus income and time outside their fixed hours of work that enabled them to pursue their own interests; after marriage it is argued that women’s leisure activities were determined almost exclusively by their duties towards their families and households.16 What made the journey unique as a leisure experience was that women’s age and life cycles did not always so powerfully determine what activities were accessible to them: journey sports, competitions, dances and fancy-dress competitions were accessible to young, old, married, unmarried and widowed women. Gender history has dominated much recent scholarly activity. This book is not a work of pure gender analysis, as it does not compare male and

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introduction female journey experiences, or seek to examine how the meanings of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are discursively established.17 Gender is, however, a vital and underpinning concept. Some consider gender to mean ‘the social organization of relations between the sexes’.18 Joan W. Scott termed gender ‘the social organisation of sexual difference’.19 Feminist analysis traditionally defined gender as the cultural or social constructions of sex.20 Judith Butler viewed gender in performative terms, arguing that there is no pre-existing gender identity, but that it is constituted by repeated social performance, the daily ‘acting out’ of male or female identity.21 This book focuses upon gender as ideas in public circulation about the appropriate qualities and roles for men and women, as well as sets of behaviours that are agreed to codify an individual as male or female, partly adhering to a concept of gender ‘as a social category imposed on a [biologically] sexed body’.22 Clear gendered qualities and behavioural expectations were attached to the female journeyer abroad and publicly articulated in contemporary imagery and etiquette books. This book also reaches back to work by Ann Oakley, who saw gender as the sociocultural aspects of being a man or a woman – how society sets the rules for masculinity and femininity – and explored processes of gender socialization: how, for instance, literature and media taught girls and boys the appropriate behaviour for their gender.23 Etiquette books and imagery clearly expressed what constituted, and instructed women how to be, the properly feminine journeyer, a figure that was also reflected in some contemporary fiction; women were expected to conform to this figure. Finally, this study also explores gendered identities and experiences, as it seeks to understand the journeyer identity women constructed. By focusing upon women’s journeys, this book further challenges the traditional assumption, which some date back to the age of Gilgamesh, that journeying is a masculine endeavour.24 Women enthusiastically and actively constructed, defined and consumed their journeys and asserted their identities as journeyers throughout this period. Consequently, the term ‘passenger’ has been purposely rejected in this study in favour of ‘journeyer’. ‘Passenger’ implies passivity and sessility even while being in motion: that women were simply taken on their journeys without agency over, control of, engagement with or reflection upon them. Labelling these women journeyers reflects the dynamism of, and the control they had over, their experiences. Several characteristics which distinguish the journey from other forms of travel – its often shorter duration, being situated primarily in self-contained environments and featuring visits to many places for short periods of time – have also determined the decision to refer to journeyers rather than travellers.

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women, travel and identity This book also further contests the argument that the machine ensemble, to adopt Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s seminal phrase, of trains and ships constituted bastions of masculinity.25 The focus of many previous works, often written by men – reflecting how they have largely determined the field of journey history so far – on the technologies that facilitated journeys, particularly the size, design and engineering of trains and ships, which might be deemed primarily masculine areas of interest, has created a one-dimensional understanding of the journey in purely mechanical terms.26 While recent studies such as Amy Richter’s admirable examination of American women’s railroad experiences have begun to reposition women within this field,27 this has not yet been done sufficiently for British women consumers. Studying women working at sea and on trains reveals only one aspect of the female journey experience. Female em­ ployees were incorporated into the masculine structure of these modes of transportation: their employers were male and they were expected to enforce rules and regulations usually written by men. Their experiences were also shaped to a significant degree by the duties they were expected to perform – they did not have the power to determine their journeys personally. This book illuminates the experiences of women who had far more agency within the journey environment as paying customers. Women’s and feminist historians’ interest in female experiences of travel has produced a rich and varied field of analysis. Multiple modes of travel have been examined: imperial or colonial, luxury, leisure, tourism, business and forced travel, migration, slavery and exile as well as various types of female traveller, ranging from the colonial travellerexplorer to modern aviatrixes. Understandings of women’s travel have been distorted, however, by historians’ focus upon ‘feminist heroines’. Women such as Gertrude Bell, Mary Kingsley and Isabella Bird Bishop, who travelled around countries in Africa and the Middle East deemed unusual or unsuitable for women by their contemporaries, and in the process challenged understandings of women’s place, have been celeb­ rated, central as they are to the dominant historical premise that travel liberated women.28 They are hailed for their conscious rejection of the suffocating cage of the Victorian home and domesticity and their escape from the restrictive gender expectations operating there.29 Yet, by focusing upon these exceptional women, historians have marginalized the majority of women who chose more commercial and apparently less exotic forms of travel. Travelling in far-flung locations for a prolonged period was difficult if not impossible for most women: it required time and money that many did not have as well as a lack of other commitments, such as a household to run. Such travelling could

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introduction only ever be a minority experience. A fixed-time journey by rail or sea was accessible to many more women because it required less organizational effort and time away from home. This focus upon the exceptional has unfortunately also been seen in journey histories, such as a recent study of the fifteen-day journey into exile of surviving members of the Romanov family in 1919 aboard the H.M.S. Marlborough;30 likewise, only a small number of women were ever able to journey as pirates or cross-dressing sailors. It is challenging to claim that a woman is ‘normal’ or ‘average’ for her time, for what defines ‘normal’, without perhaps seeming to belittle her and the value of her experiences. Nonetheless, this book focuses on women who lived relatively everyday, ordinary lives well away from the public eye, such as lady’s maid Anne Burns and army wife Alice Bosanquet, who are far more representative of women travelling between 1870 and 1940 than Kingsley, Bell and others, as well as more privileged or well-known women. These women have remained hidden behind historians’ obsession with those who purportedly broke the mould; this book brings light to their stories. While this is a study of journeying, the concepts of travel and tourism remain extremely significant to it. A key understanding of travel in this period was that it provided an original and authentic experience. Travelling was considered bold, involving a route that rejected ‘obvious’ sights such as Niagara Falls or the Pyramids in favour of unusual locations that the majority did not visit. For Victorians and Edwardians, ‘the authentic “culture” of places  .  .  .  was represented as lurking in secret precincts “off the beaten track” where it could be discovered only by the sensitive “traveller”’.31 Travellers were motivated by curiosity and a desire for adventure and knowledge, and retained complete agency over their experience. Inherent to this belief in the traveller’s independence was the assumption that they were wealthy, giving them ‘the security and privilege to move about in relatively unconstrained ways’.32 Travel was thus undertaken by the few: those who had the means and intelligence to truly appreciate what they saw without reference to the views of others. Finally, the traveller was independent in his arrangements, for travel was also seen as a masculine endeavour.33 Travel was understood to define and validate masculine values: ‘travellers affirm[ed] their masculinity through purposes, activities, behaviors [sic], dispositions, perspectives, and bodily movements displayed on the road, and through the narratives of travel that they return[ed] home to the sending culture’.34 Tourism, in contrast, was understood as the following of established routes and the visiting of only predictable, customary places such as New

j9J

women, travel and identity York and Paris. Tourists were believed to traverse these routes as their guides and guidebooks instructed with little independent thought about what they observed. The roots of this perceived polarity between travel and tourism, and accompanying anxiety about the latter, have been traced back to the surge of Britons who travelled to Europe after the Napoleonic Wars. This new movement abroad sparked anti-tourism and the accompanying distinction between the ‘authentic’, original traveller, and the ‘mere tourist’ who relied unquestioningly on convention to determine their wanderings.35 The tourist was ‘the dupe of fashion, following blindly where authentic travellers have gone with open eyes and free spirits’.36 This polarization between travel and tourism lingers today and further explains the critical neglect of women’s journeys in favour of women travelling within countries. Despite some attempts to defend the tourist,37 critics such as Daniel Boorstin have continued to reject tourism as a meaningful experience. The places and sights visited by, and experiences of, tourists are viewed as ‘pseudo-places’ and ‘pseudo-events’, lacking authenticity, validity and originality, created for the specific purpose of being constantly reproduced. Tourists are still often regarded as passive pleasure seekers who expect interesting things to happen to them without having to make any great personal effort, and that everything will be done for them while they are away from home. They are seen as isolated from the environments through which they pass, prevented by the nature of guided tours from interacting with local peoples.38 Most critically for the female journey abroad, it is argued that these changes began with the emergence of the railway, the ocean liner – the very means so many women used to leave Britain – and the guided tour.39 Commentators are particularly scathing about cruising in luxury liners, claiming that this amounted merely to residence in a floating resort hotel.40 It does initially appear that women journeying abroad can be dismissed simply as tourists. They undeniably often followed fixed routes and went upon excursions, sometimes pre-planned, into popular, frequently visited towns and ports such as Port Said, Vienna and Aden. Depending upon which passenger class they could afford to book on a ship or train, their transport was comfortable, even opulent. They did not necessarily forge tracks through unknown wildernesses. Their experi­ ences could be deemed to lack the supposed realness, legitimacy and cultural and epistemological value of travel, so have remained in the shadows of historical endeavour. Yet to categorize women journeyers as mere tourists is to fail to understand the full significance of their experi­ ences. These were social, class-bound and gendered experiences that

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introduction again challenge the assumption that travel and tourism are dichotomous. Women’s identities as journeyers contained elements attributed to both the traveller and the tourist; the female journeyer abroad does not fit neatly into either box: she was a tourist-traveller. Identity is the final concept central to this book. The traditional humanist view of identity and the self – that human beings were unified, rational and self-interested agents – has long been challenged by work that rightly emphasizes the fragmented, multi-faceted nature of identity. Post-structuralist theory presents the self as fragmented and the product of concepts and categories that precede it: the self continuously struggles to maintain itself within and through the discourses and social practices at its disposal.41 The self, and by extension identity, is fluid and dependent on existing contexts. Social psychological identity theory also defines identity as multi-layered: there are the set of meanings that define a person when they hold a particular role in society (role identity, such as a teacher); when they are a member of a particular group (social identity); or when they claim particular characteristics that identify them as unique, e.g. as a moral or outgoing person (person identity).42 Women’s journeyer identity was similarly diverse, varying according to their social, spatial and discursive setting. Previous histories of women’s travel have often solely focused on published travel writing: one study of Victorian women’s travel explicitly excluded unpublished letters and diaries from its source material on the grounds that women published travel accounts in order to establish cultural authority.43 This book uses twenty-five sources that were made public – published journey accounts in book, letter and diary form – but also fifteen that remained private: unpublished diaries, letters and memoirs. These accounts demonstrate once again the great diversity of women’s travel writing. Of the fifteen unpublished texts, one takes epistolary form and thirteen are traditional, chronological diaries; the other consists of a memoir of the woman’s journeys as well as her original letters and diaries. Eleven of the published accounts are vignettes and longer articles from Bedford College’s student magazine. Four were published as prose books, including Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran, which strikingly combines travel-writing, autobiography and lyrical streamof-consciousness passages.44 One account is embedded within a biography of the woman’s deceased husband. Finally, seven are published diaries, one of which the woman jointly kept with her husband, and two are collections of letters. It has been usefully argued that the very act of writing about real events, for instance in a diary, alters those events, that diarists can become

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women, travel and identity mythmakers.45 This reworking of events and accounts can be unintentional, but sometimes it is deliberate.46 There is no evidence that the women studied here dramatically or purposely (re)fabricated their journey accounts to include false events, conversations and people that did not exist or altered, exaggerated, understated or omitted real events. Yet it is perfectly possible that the twenty-five published accounts underwent some editing by their writers to make their contents more appealing or suitable to their intended audience, be that the general public or close friends and family in the case of the three accounts which were printed for private circulation only. Published diaries can also be altered, distorted and censored by professional editors.47 With the exception of one, the diary of emigrants Isabel (1890/1891–1962) and Samuel Haigh (1894  –1983), none of the published accounts studied here has a named editor, but it is possible that they were read by editors who encouraged their authors to further alter or cut certain passages. The textual authenticity of these accounts cannot be assumed. The questions of how a writer intends a text to be used and who is its intended audience are also important when considering textual integrity. Previous critics have divided diaries into those that are ‘truly private’, which only the diarist intends to read, and those that are ‘public private’: deliberately written for, or, through a process of editing and revision become documents for, a public audience.48 Women who always intended to let others read their journey accounts or who sent letters home may have chosen from the outset only to write about subject matter that they felt their readers would deem suitable, consciously omitting anything that might have seemed scandalous or threatened their status as respectable women. The accounts utilized here do not necessarily straightforwardly and completely reveal their author’s ‘true’ subjectivities either. Diverse discourses intertwine within them, and previous analyses of women’s travel writing have powerfully argued that the discourses they feature are not simple expressions of an author’s feelings or opinions, but a configuration of diverse structures with which the author negotiates.49 Texts such as diaries are considered part of the genre of life writing, which, it is argued, virtually invites authors to create textual personas that do not reflect their actual personalities. The diarist constructs a fictional persona on the page, however unconsciously.50 Women journeyers’ consciousness that their accounts might have audiences, either at the time of writing or if they adapted them for publication later, may have led them to create a persona that they felt would be acceptable to those readers rather than rendering a full or accurate portrait of their psyche.

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introduction Nonetheless, the examination of multiple texts rich in thematic depth that often include the same tropes and motifs provides extremely valuable insight into the female journey abroad and the nature of women’s journeyer identity. The diversity of these women in age and mari­ tal, socio-economic and employment status means that these sources are broadly representative of the experiences of many of the legions of women who journeyed abroad by rail and sea in these years. Those journey accounts written as entirely private, personal records may also come as close to being ‘true’ accounts of journeys as possible because their authors may not have felt as pressured when writing to conform to public discourse and expectations of how women presented themselves in the public domain. Additionally, there is value in the argument that while ‘discourses actively constitute us as subjects[,] individuals have some part to play in this process, both challenging and rewriting some of the positions within discourse’.51 This symbiotic relationship between the sub­ ject and discourse(s) suggests that discourse(s) may deny some authorial agency, but that writers, even those who write for an audience, be it fam­ ily, friends or general readers, can also contribute to and re-shape them, partly by revealing and reflecting upon their own experiences, beliefs and feelings. Textual discourses can thus reveal authorial subjectivity. In illuminating the female journey abroad, this book takes a trip­ artite approach to reflect three distinct yet intertwining areas of the experience: how journeys were undertaken at the organizational level and how they, and women journeyers, were understood publicly; how women then actually performed their journeys; and the impact of those journeys upon female identity. Continuities and changes in the nature of the journey are traced, and personal, experiential, cultural and institu­ tional perspectives offered on it. Chapters 1–3 examine the organiza­ tional, commercial context and wider culture of women’s journeying. Chapter 1 charts the growth of mass international travel and journeying; considers the dramatic technological revolution that fuelled these journeys; and offers a new statistical analysis of how many women made jour­ neys between 1870 and 1940 by examining British ship passenger lists. Chapter 2 explores the multiple, often contradictory, meanings attributed to the journey and the figure of the female journeyer in Victorian art, post-1900 transport company advertising and fiction ranging from the crime thriller and the Mills & Boon romance to modern classics such as E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). Chapter 3 explores the behavioural expectations that surrounded women journeyers through a close reading of journey etiquette guides, which contained some of the most gendered elements of the journey abroad. These chapters introduce

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women, travel and identity some of this book’s key themes: the appearance of an international, interconnected, inter-modal transport network, the glamour that came to be a key note in popular imaginings of the woman journeyer and the centrality of socio-economic class to the female journey. Chapters 4  –  6 examine how women journeyed in practice through a focus upon their writings. Chapter 4 explores women’s use of jour­ ney space, both public and private; Chapter 5 their socializing with other journeyers, European or Western and non-Western or European; and Chapter 6 interrogates the popular beliefs that ships and trains were sites of romantic opportunity and sexual peril by focusing upon women’s interaction with male journeyers and crew. This section reveals some of the other key motifs of the female journey experience between 1870 and 1940: its connection to home, which was maintained in myriad ways, and particularly through the replication and reinforcement of Britain’s socio-economic hierarchy; the conflict between popular expectations of women journeyers and their sense of personal agency; the power of other journeyers’ gazing and scrutiny to shape women’s beha­ viour; and the continued power of domestic social mores in journey sociability. Finally, Chapter 7, synthesizes many of the earlier themes in its analysis of women’s journeyer identity, which was multi-faceted and reflected both the continued influence of home and the impact of this new experience. Women’s established domestic identities as wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, friends or workers remained meaningful throughout their journeys, but they also explored and combined them with new identities as journey chroniclers, tourist-travellers and modern women. These identities were expressed through a diverse journey discourse that included discourses of journey routine and functionality; landscape, coastline, scenery, townscape and the sea; nature; geography; navigation; technology; danger; missing home; and history. This chapter also examines male journey accounts to demonstrate that while journey discourse was not absolutely gender-differentiated, as both women and men utilized the same discourses, gender played a significant role in determining the extent to which women journeyers could deploy some discourses publicly. The journey abroad was a highly memorable and meaningful experi­ ence for women. One Bedford College student wrote in 1936 that when her ship sailed into Genoa, ‘I watched until the first thrown rope connected us with Italy, when an intolerable feeling of sorrow rushed through me at the thought of leaving the ship, so that I longed to stay on board’.52 Marion Bridie’s round-the-world journey was the fulfilment of a longharboured dream, which had begun ‘very long ago with a little girl of

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introduction about ten years of age’.53 These were full, rewarding experiences that yet also contained paradoxes and ambiguity. Journeying abroad entailed far more than going from A to B. Notes 1 V. Sackville-West, Passenger to Teheran (London, 1926), p. 26. 2 M.F. Bridie, Round the World Without a Pinprick: Being the Diary of M.F. Bridie, Passenger on the first World Cruise of the R.M.S. Empress of Britain 1931–1932 (Birmingham, 1932), p. 1. 3 J. Stanley, ‘Finding a brief flowering of typists at sea: evidence from a new Cunard deposit’, Business Archives Sources and History, 76 (November 1998), 29. 4 King Kong (dir. M.C. Cooper & E.B. Schoedsack, R.K.O., 1933); The 39 Steps (dir. A. Hitchcock, Gaumont-British Picture Corporation Ltd, 1935); The Lady Vanishes (dir. A. Hitchcock, Gaumont-British Picture Corporation Ltd, 1938); Monkey Business (dir. N.Z. McLeod, Paramount Pictures, 1931). 5 Bridie, Round the World, Introduction (no page number given in text). 6 M. Humm, ‘Introduction’, in M. Humm (ed.), Feminisms: A Reader (New York, 1992), p. 12. 7 J. Lewis, Women in England 1870  –1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change (Brighton, 1984), p. 158. 8 Histories of the changes in women’s lives in this period include H. Jones, Women in British Public Life, 1914  –1950: Gender, Power and Social Policy (Harlow, 2000); S.K. Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 1640  –1990 (London, 1999), pp. 191–201, 266  –71, 287–305; and L. Davidoff & B. Westover, ‘ “From Queen Victoria to the Jazz Age”: women’s world in England, 1880  –1939’, in L. Davidoff and B. Westover (eds), Our Work, Our Lives, Our Words (Totowa, 1986), pp. 1–35. 9 Stanley, ‘Brief flowering’, 29. Other such histories include S. Maenpaa, ‘Women below deck: gender and employment on British passenger liners, 1860  –1938’, JTH, 25:2 (September 2004), 57–74; J. Gothard, Blue China: Single Female Migration to Colonial Australia (Carlton South, Vic., 2001), and J. Stanley, ‘Wanted: adventurous girls: ships’ stewardesses, 1919  –1939’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Lancaster, 2005). 10 These include D. Cordingly, Heroines & Harlots: Women at Sea in the Great Age of Sail (London, 2002); M.S. Creighton and L. Norling (eds), Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700  –1920 (Baltimore and London, 1996); and J. Durett, Hen Frigates: Passion and Peril, Nineteenth-Century Women at Sea (New York, 1998). 11 M. Walsh, ‘Gender and travel: mobilizing new perspectives on the past’, in G. Letherby and G. Reynolds (eds), Gendered Journeys, Mobile Emotions (Farnham, 2009), p. 9; H. Wojtczak, ‘The railwaywoman’s journey’, in ibid., p. 54; and H. Wojtczak, Railwaywomen: Exploitation, Betrayal and Triumph in the Workplace (Hastings, 2005), pp. 5, 6, 19, 31, 107. 12 S. Smith, Moving Lives: Twentieth-Century Women’s Travel Writing (Minneapolis and London, 2001), p. 172. 13 D.H. Aldcroft, ‘A new chapter in transport history: the twentieth-century revolution’, JTH, 3:3 (February 1976), 218.

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women, travel and identity 14 Nine of these students published their accounts under their initials only or used pseudonyms so it has not been possible to establish definite biographical information about them. 15 A. Peat, Travel and Modernist Literature: Sacred and Ethical Journeys (London, 2011), p. 30. 16 C. Langhamer, Women’s Leisure in England, 1920  –1960 (Manchester, 2000), pp. 25, 50  –1, 56, 132–3; A. Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-Class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900  –1939 (Buckingham, 1992), p. 61. 17 J.W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (revised edn, New York, 1999), p. xii. 18 C. Hall, ‘Politics, post-structuralism and feminist history’, Gender & History, 3:2 (Summer 1991), 209; J.W. Scott, ‘Gender: a useful category of historical analysis’, American Historical Review, 91:5 (December 1986), 1053. 19 Scott, Gender, p. 2. 20 A. Cranny-Francis, W. Waring, P. Stavropoulos and J. Kirkby, Gender Studies: Terms and Debates (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 3. 21 J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London, 2006 edn), p. 34; H. Bradley, Gender (Cambridge, 2007), p. 19. 22 Scott, ‘Gender’, 1056; L.L. Downs, Writing Gender History (London, 2004), p. 3. 23 Bradley, Gender, pp. 15, 17. 24 See Smith, Moving Lives, pp. ix–x, for a useful synopsis of how journeying has been associated with masculinity. 25 I. Carter, ‘The lady in the trunk: railways, gender and crime fiction’, JTH, 23:1 (March 2002), 53; J. Stanley, ‘Women at sea: an other category’, Gender & History, 15:1 (April 2003), 135; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the 19th Century, trans. A. Hollo (Oxford, 1979), pp. 19  –  41. 26 See amongst others H. Johnson, The Cunard Story (London, 1987); W.H. Miller, Famous Ocean Liners: The Story of Passenger Shipping from the Turn of the Century to the Present Day (Wellingborough, 1987); R. McAuley, The Liners: A Voyage of Discovery (London, 1997); N. McCart, Atlantic Liners of the Cunard Line from 1884 to the Present Day (Wellingborough, 1990); and T. Coleman, The Liners: A History of the North Atlantic Crossing (London, 1976). For academic treatments of the technology of journeys see Schivelbusch’s seminal Railway Journey, but also M. Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven and London, 1999), and N. Faith, The World the Railways Made (London, 1990). A particularly important contribution to this field from the female perspective is Sidonie Smith’s Moving Lives. 27 A. Richter, Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity (Chapel Hill and London, 2005). 28 D. Birkett, Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers (Oxford, 1989), offers one such interpretation of women’s travel. 29 L. Hamalian, ‘Introduction’, in L. Hamalian (ed.), Ladies on the Loose: Women Travellers of the 18th and 19th Centuries (South Yarmouth, MA, 1981), p. xiii; M. Aitken, A Girdle Round the Earth (London, 1987), p. 9; C. McEwan, Gender, Geography and Empire: Victorian Women Travellers in West Africa (Aldershot, 2000), p. 25. 30 F. Welch, The Russian Court at Sea: The Voyage of HMS Marlborough, April 1919 (London, 2011). 31 J. Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to Culture, 1800  –1918 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 2, 6.

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introduction 32 J. Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1997), p. 34. 33 P. Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (New York, 1980), p. 41; see also Buzard, Beaten Track, p. 2. 34 R. Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (London, 1997), p. 45. 35 Buzard, Beaten Track, pp. 1, 19, 27–  9. 36 Ibid., p. 1. 37 D. MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (revised edn, Berkeley, 1999), and I. Ousby, The Englishman’s England: Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism (Cambridge, 1990). 38 D. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (25th anniversary edn, New York, 1987), pp. 11, 85, 91, 103. 39 Ibid., p. 86. 40 Ibid., p. 91. 41 T.E. Lorraine, Gender, Identity, and the Production of Meaning (Boulder, 1990), pp. 2, 22. 42 P.J. Burke and J.E. Stets, Identity Theory (Oxford, 2009), p. 3. 43 M.H. Frawley, A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England (London, 1994), p. 36. 44 Peat, Modernist Literature, p. 28. 45 S.E. Kogle and L. Gramegria, ‘Rewriting her life: fictionalization and the use of fictional models in early American women’s diaries’, in S.L. Bunker and C.A. Huff (eds), Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries (Amherst, 1996), pp. 38, 42. 46 An extreme example of a woman refabricating her diary is explored in J. Nolte Temple, ‘“They shut me up in prose”: a cautionary tale of two Emilys’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 22:1 (2001), 150  –73. 47 H. Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen’s Private Diaries (Gloucester, 1989), p. 17. Editors’ wishes to protect the diarist or their family, who may have commissioned the publication of the work, can lead them to omit passages that they believe risk offending readers or reviewers and damaging the diarist’s reputation (ibid., p. 17). 48 L.Z. Bloom, ‘“I write for myself and strangers”: private diaries as public documents’, in Bunker and Huff (eds), Inscribing the Daily, pp. 23, 25  –  6. 49 S. Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London, 1991), p. 9. 50 J. Simmons, Diaries and Journals of Literary Women from Fanny Burney to Virginia Woolf (Basingstoke, 1990), p. 12. 51 Mills, Discourses, p. 68. 52 Archives, Royal Holloway, University of London (hereafter RHUL Archives), A.K.B., ‘From Genoa to the Apennines’, Bedford College (University of London) Union Magazine, No. 44 (March 1936), p. 18. 53 Bridie, Round the World, Introduction (no page number given in text).

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1 The big luggage went a fortnight ago: making the journey abroad

T

he years between 1870 and 1940 were years of mass mobility, migration and journeying. Over these decades, the journey abroad emerged as the most universal and popular female travel experience of the period. This explosion in journeying was fuelled by a long technical and organizational revolution as the world of travel, along with the world itself, moved into a new age of modernity. Women journeyers embraced this new age, admiring and also fully engaging with journey technology as they declared themselves modern women. Multiple estimates have been made of how many Britons emigrated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with totals ranging from a few to tens of millions.1 Recent calculations have suggested that between twelve and almost nineteen million Britons emigrated between 1815 and 1930.2 Few of these studies offer any significant commentary upon female migration, however.3 The estimates that have been made of female migration vary. One study of nineteenth-century emigration suggests that women made up 39 per cent of all emigrants from England and Wales in 1841, and that this proportion did not vary greatly during the remainder of the century.4 A recent study produced figures for the number of women emigrating to Australasia, North America and South Africa per 1,000 men between 1877 and 1880 and between 1891 and 1900 (Table 1). Another study states that 22,482 women emigrated to imperial destinations under the auspices of two women’s emigration societies, the British Women’s Emigration Association and the South African Colonisation Society, between 1884 and 1916.5 Another has calculated that nearly 90,000 single British women immigrated to the Australian colonies between 1860 and 1900.6 Yet another calculates that 156,606 Englishwomen were sent to the colonies between 1899 and 1911.7 Figures for the interwar period suggest that the number of female emigrants declined somewhat: various assessments of assisted single female emigration suggest that

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the big luggage went a fortnight ago Table 1  Number of adult female emigrants per 1,000 male emigrants 1877–  80 and 1891–1900 Decade

1877–1880

1891–1900

Country of origin

Destination Australasia

British North America

British South Africa

England & Wales

555

421

386

Scotland

602

436

352

Ireland

892

588

276

England & Wales

661

518

403

Scotland

667

656

365

Ireland

683

698

339

(M. Harper and S. Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 213)

80,000 women emigrated from Britain to Canada to work as domestic servants in the 1920s; 6,000 to Australia for the same purpose between 1925 and 1930; and 4,500 to New Zealand in the 1920s.8 The numbers are likely to be still greater if those who emigrated with others, such as their families, are included. Yet this literature paints the scale of female mobility in this era in only disjointed brushstrokes. Women fully participated in the explosion of global movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but focusing on emigrants offers only a partial picture of their involvement. By offering a new calculation of how many women journeyed abroad in total between 1870 and 1940 for all reasons, following an examination of British ship passenger lists, this book presents something of the full scale of women’s mobility in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Many existing studies also focus on the organizational and experiential aspects of female emigration: the workings of emigration societies and the backgrounds of emigrants, as well as their experiences after arriving in their new homelands. By examining women’s reactions to their journeys and the technology that took them abroad, be it permanently or temporarily, another dimension of women’s experiences of both mobility

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women, travel and identity and migration is revealed, in which women’s confidence and personal engagement come to the fore. It is, unfortunately, extremely difficult to calculate the number of women who journeyed abroad by rail in this period. While train companies were occasionally required to report to the government the number of passengers who used their services or reported how many used their international services, these figures usually did not distinguish between men and women.9 Railway News reported that in 1890 262,169 Britons had journeyed to Calais; 91,540 to Boulogne; 97,070 to Dieppe; and 75,868 to Ostend using the Dover–Calais, Folkestone–Boulogne, Newhaven–Dieppe and Dover–Ostend cross-Channel routes.10 Similarly, the London and South Western Railway company recorded that in the first half of 1910 it carried 23,702 Britons to Le Havre on its steamer services; 2,550 to Cherbourg; and seventy-two to Roscoff.11 Railway News reported that 1,153,606 Britons journeyed to Continental Europe in total in the same year, but likewise made no division between men and women.12 Figures for British women using foreign train services are even harder to ascertain. Figures for ship journeys abroad are happily somewhat easier to access. Passenger lists for incoming ships are usually held in the countries which were their final destination.13 The publication of American lists, however, has been ongoing since the 1990s: details of British emigrants arriving in the United States in the 1870s and 1880s are now available for re­searchers regardless of whether they are able to view the original lists.14 Examination of these lists from 20 to 30 April 1872 alone, for instance, reveals that 3,251 British women arrived in New York in this ten-day period.15 If we were to assume that every ten days in 1872 approximately 3,000 women arrived in New York, this would mean that 9,000 women arrived in the United States via New York alone each month, with a potential total of 108,000 women arriving in total over the year. This rough calculation emphasizes just how large the potential scale of female journeying was in this era. However, such assumptions are dangerous, and do not account for seasonal variations in the number of women journeying; these lists also once again focus primarily on just one contingent of women journeyers: those intending to begin a new life overseas. Those journeying for pleasure and for temporary visits abroad are still missing. These lists’ focus on just one destination again also gives a limited picture of female mobility in this period. Surviving British passenger lists, however, offer new insights into the volume of women travelling abroad for multiple reasons besides emigration. For this book, the manifests of ships leaving Liverpool in

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the big luggage went a fortnight ago 1890, 1910 and 1930 have been examined and the number of women recorded as passengers on each ship counted.16 Liverpool, along with Southampton, was the busiest passenger port of the period, catering to famous lines such as Cunard, White Star and the Allan Line; these lists are thus most likely to reveal the true extent of female mobility in this era. There are undeni­ably some difficulties with them, meaning that they must be used with a degree of caution. The lists survive only from 1890 onwards so it is difficult to assess the number of female ocean journeyers in the earliest decades of the period. Prior to 1890, British ship passenger figures were available only when they were sporadically reported in newspapers. Lists survive only for those ships whose destinations were outside Europe and the Mediterranean Sea, meaning the totals calculated are too low. It is also unclear if the manifests for every passenger ship between 1890 and 1940 have survived. Some lists, particularly those from 1890, are damaged and incomplete so it has not been possible to calculate the total number of women journeying on those ships. Nevertheless, they are an invaluable resource. The format of the lists varies. All record the names of female journeyers. However, lists for larger ships in 1890 and 1910 distinguished between women who were married or accompanied by their husbands, and those who were unmarried or not accompanied by their husbands; lists from 1930 categorized them as simply married or single. The lists also have different categories of nationality: lists from 1890 recorded English, Scottish and Irish women journeyers – it is assumed here that Welsh women were included within the English category – while the 1910 lists distinguished between English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish women. The lists from 1930, however, classified all women as British regardless of from whereabouts within the United Kingdom they hailed. In the sole case of 1890, lists for smaller ships gave no indication of female passengers’ nationalities. These women have been assumed to be British here, but have been displayed as a separate category in Table 2. This creates the possibility of a small margin of error within the figures given here as some of these women may have been foreign rather than British, but it is important not to overlook the possibility that British women made journeys on these ships as well as on larger liners. The degree of personal detail recorded within these lists also varied. In the 1890 and 1910 lists women journeyers were classified as adults if they were aged over twelve; it is unclear what proportion of the women classified by ship companies as adults in these years were actually children and young adolescents, meaning that the figures given here are again somewhat distorted. The lists from these years also gave no indication

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women, travel and identity of why these women were journeying or from where within England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland they hailed. However, lists from 1930 contained far more information about each journeyer: their last British address, age and profession; if they were emigrating, their country of future residence was noted. These are the only lists from which two concrete reasons for women’s journeying – to emigrate or as a tourist – can be gleaned. However, while Liverpool was the largest emigration port in the world for much of this period, the companies that used Liverpool did not cater exclusively to emigrants and tourists. It was perfectly possible for a women journeying, for example, out of religious belief to book a passage on a Cunard or White Star liner if she choose. These lists thus do give an indication of the complete scale of women’s journeying, not just one element of it. Table 2 reveals that 37,534 English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish and British women, both married or accompanied by their husbands and unmarried or unaccompanied by their husbands, journeyed abroad from Liverpool in 1890; 57,047 in 1910; and 29,058 in 1930. The average number of women journeyers in these years was 41,213.17 Multiplying this figure by the total number of years studied reveals that a minimum of 2,884,910 women journeyed abroad from Liverpool alone between 1870 and 1940. Limitations on travel abroad by British civilians during the First World War, however, means this figure must be slightly reduced. Calculating the average number of women who might have journeyed if the years between 1914 and 1918 had been peaceful necessitates a reduction of the total number of women journeyers by 164,852. The final total is 2,720,058. This enormous figure is derived from a three-year sample of passenger lists from just one port. If the lists for every year of the period were counted along with the lists from every other British port that offered passenger services the number of women journeying abroad would be even greater. If the number of women who journeyed from Southampton was similar to the number who journeyed from Liverpool, it yields a potential minimum of approximately 5.4 million women journeying from two ports alone between 1870 and 1940. If the number of female rail journeyers could also be calculated, the number of women journeying abroad would increase still further, with the final figure likely to be several million or quite possibly tens of millions. The number of women who could afford to spend prolonged periods travelling around countries was in contrast far lower. A study of women travelling in West Africa between 1840 and 1915 considers only seven women’s published accounts of their travels, out of a total of just nine found to have travelled to West Africa and published accounts of

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Table 2  Female ocean journeyers departing from Liverpool, 1890, 1910 and 1930 1890

M

S

M

British (small ships) S

M

S

English

M

S

Scottish

M

S

Welsh

M

S

January–March 1757 1562 32 65 61 179 84 83 3823 2078 4198 171 404 60 130 April–June 3949 4910 35 42 226 2046 57 31 11296 4540 11523 269 776 168 226 July–September 6027 6815 25 54 205 747 247 229 14349 3834 12896 334 894 86 249 October–December 3305 3752 20 24 111 430 202 222 8066 1995 8487 40 276 181 596 Totals (Yearly) 15038 17039 112 185 603 3402 590 565 37534 12447 37104 814 2350 495 1201 (Source: Ship passenger lists BT27/5–24, BT27/649  –  671 and BT27/1271–1280, The National Archives, Kew) Key: M = Married or accompanied by husband; S = Single or unaccompanied by husband.

Irish

M

S

British

M

S

Totals (Quarterly)

S

Irish

1930 Totals (Quarterly)

M

Scottish

Totals (Quarterly)

English

1910

150 249 7440 1538 3669 5207 144 629 18275 1701 5199 6900 126 753 19172 2763 8595 11358 57 528 12160 1342 4251 5593 477 2159 57047 7344 21714 29058

women, travel and identity their experiences in these years.18 Similarly, an examination of women’s travels around the Middle East compiled the biographies of just eightyfour women between 1718 and 1918.19 This is not to deny the importance of these women’s experiences or that more women travelled to and within West Africa, as Table 3 below reveals, or the Middle East for extensive periods without publishing travel accounts, but even after accounting for these women the total number who did so is likely to remain comparatively small. The journey abroad was the most common, accessible and universal form of travel experience outside Britain for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The lists also reveal which destinations outside Europe were most popular with women. Table 3 details the destinations of women journeying from Liverpool in 1890, 1910 and 1930 (no distinctions have been made between Welsh, Scottish, English and Irish women or between married and single women on this occasion). Ships called at multiple ports and the lists do not specify at which of those each woman dis­ embarked, but they still provide great insight into the popularity of different destinations. The most common destinations have been listed individually; those that appeared least frequently have been listed as ‘others’. The most popular destinations throughout the period were New York, although there was a drastic decline in the number of women journeying there in 1930, and Quebec and Montreal in Canada. This is unsurprising given the appeal of North America to emigrants during these years, as is that the next most popular destinations were also in the USA and Canada: Boston, Massachusetts; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Halifax, Nova Scotia; St John’s, Newfoundland and St John, New Brunswick. The sudden decline in the number of women bound for New York in 1930 can be accounted for by immigration restrictions imposed by the United States after 1917 and the impact of the Great Depression.20 More women may have journeyed to New York for pleasure by 1930, but only a smaller number of women could afford to make such journeys. Destinations also varied in popularity, sometimes dramatically: only three women sailed to Brazil in 1890 from Liverpool, but 504 did in 1910; the number then declined again to just one in 1930. Variations in the popularity of some destinations may partly have been due to practicality. Shipping companies may have suspended routes at certain times of year: no ships sailed to Quebec and Montreal in the first quarters of 1890, 1910 or 1930, suggesting that weather conditions perhaps restricted ships’ access to ports if they became ice-bound, as this was the peak of winter in Canada, or that these journeys became too hard to make owing to rough or dangerous conditions at sea. Consumer demand probably

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the big luggage went a fortnight ago Table 3  Destination of women journeyers from Liverpool, 1890, 1910 and 1930 Destination Africa (west coast) Australia & South Africa Australia & New Zealand Brazil Bombay & Karachi Boston Boston & New York Buenos Aires Calcutta Callao Canaries, Lisbon & Madeira Chile Halifax & New York Halifax & Portland Halifax & Philadelphia New York City Philadelphia Quebec & Montreal Rangoon River Plate Shanghai St John’s N.F., Halifax, Baltimore St John’s N.F., Halifax St John N.B. St John N.B., Halifax St John N.B., Halifax, Boston Valparaiso West Indies Yokohama Others Unspecified Total

1890

1910

1930

Totals

203 5 0 3 276 4457 0 4 165 0 0 18 0 728 0 23,608 2207 3935 36 2 53 442 22 5 0 0 240 50 17 189 869 37534

595 2552 376 504 747 4559 0 41 86 602 320 0 0 1381 18 11,301 2125 23,824 674 191 0 0 3252 896 2018 0 0 27 3 699 256 57047

1289 1512 8 1 1646 0 3710 399 9 0 1445 0 1329 0 0 2685 0 9604 362 10 0 0 0 1331 0 439 996 162 0 2121 0 29058

2087 4069 384 508 2669 9016 3710 444 260 602 1765 18 1329 2109 18 37594 4332 37363 1072 203 53 442 3274 2232 2018 439 1236 239 20 3009 1125 123639

(Source: Ship passenger lists BT27/5–24, BT27/649  –  671 and BT27/1271–1280, The National Archives, Kew)

also dictated the variety of routes shipping companies operated as journeyers may not have wanted to make these journeys at times when they would experience colder or rougher conditions. Table 2 reveals that the third quarter of the year (July to September), when the weather at sea

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women, travel and identity was most temperate, making journeying much more pleasant, was the most popular with women journeyers. What these lists reveal most im­ portantly, however, is the sheer variety of places and countries women journeyed to in these years. They journeyed to Africa, South America, Australasia and the Far East as well as North America. They did not journey just to the obvious or ‘easiest’ destinations such as New York; they journeyed to Rangoon in Burma, Valparaiso in Chile, Buenos Aires in Argentina, Yokohama in Japan and Callao in Peru. Women truly crisscrossed the globe between 1870 and 1940. Transforming technology: the age of journeying Women’s journeys were fuelled by an extensive technical revolution, much of which had its roots earlier in the nineteenth century and has become a familiar story. In September 1830, the first passenger railway between Liverpool and Manchester opened.21 Two decades later the main body of Britain’s railway network was in place: in 1852 some 6,600 miles of railway line traversed the country.22 Crucially, for those planning ocean or ocean and rail journeys abroad, most of the Channel ports could be reached directly via London’s main stations.23 Railway mania spread worldwide, albeit at different speeds. By the mid-1800s the Germanic Länder, Denmark and Holland had 4,542 miles of railway, while France had 1,722 miles.24 In 1869, the Central Pacific and Union Pacific rail lines met at Promontory Point in Utah, connecting both sides of the United States.25 A British government report on Indian railways in the early 1890s revealed that forty-one railways had already been built, and a further fifty-three were being planned.26 By contrast, Belgium had only 457 miles of railway line by the mid-1800s and in Greece as late as the 1880s the only train service was from Athens to Piraeus.27 The emergence of steam technology was also crucial in transforming maritime journeys abroad. The first cross-Channel steam passenger service sailed from Brighton to Le Havre in 1816.28 A Dover to Calais steamer service was launched in 1821.29 The first transatlantic crossing using steam power rather than sail was made in 1838 and took eighteen days.30 By 1840 journeyers could choose from at least six routes if they left London for Europe, the quickest being the Brighton to Dieppe service.31 The first enduring steamship service between England and America began in 1840 when the Cunard wooden paddle wheeler Britannia left Liverpool for Halifax, Nova Scotia and Boston, Massachusetts.32 Many of the most famous and popular shipping companies of the period were founded in the mid-1800s. The Peninsular Steam Navigation

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the big luggage went a fortnight ago Company, which became P&O, was founded in 1837 (‘and Oriental’ was added to the company’s title later in the century).33 Samuel Cunard signed a contract for the Atlantic mail service between London and Canada in 1839, founding the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, which subsequently became the Cunard Steam­ ship Company.34 The number of companies increased throughout the century. The Hamburg-Amerika Line was founded in 1847.35 The Inman Line was launched in 1850.36 Other companies that appeared in the midto late-1800s included the Guion, National and White Star Lines.37 One recent study has disputed the importance of steam in the emergence of mass travel, arguing instead that Napoleon’s Continental Blockade and alliances with the Baltic powers were the pivotal developments. In this argument, Britain was forced to turn to North America for timber, leading to a massive increase in British ship tonnage in the American timber trade, which in turn led to a tripling of the number of potential passenger berths to America. It asserts that it was this that suddenly made unforced mass transatlantic migration a possibility.38 It is also undeniable that the ages of steam and sail co-existed in the late 1800s: the new journey power did not sweep away the traditional power overnight. Sailing ships dominated middle-distance journeys until the 1860s and long-distance journeys until the 1880s.39 One woman studied here, Sarah Stephens, emigrated from south Wales to New Zealand on the sailing ship Cardigan Castle rather than on a steam service, on a journey that began on 30 September 1876 and ended on 23 January 1877.40 It was not until 1889 that shipping lines felt confident enough to launch the first transatlantic liner without any sails.41 During these transitional years, ships were equipped with both sails and engines, used either separ­ ately or in combination depending upon weather conditions.42 Nevertheless, although early steam ships were not much faster than square-rigged sailing ships, no longer having to rely on wind power was revolutionary. Steam tugs were able to pull sailing ships out of harbours where unfavourable winds would previously have kept them trapped.43 Sailing schedules and journey times could be fixed and standardized, as ships were no longer so subject to daily weather conditions.44 The increasing use of steam power led to a steady and continual decline in journey length. The steamship Niagara took just thirteen days to cross the Atlantic in May 1861, in contrast to twenty-six days by sailing ship in 1844.45 The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 was another pivotal factor in the reduction of the length of sea journeys. Many scheduled passenger services to India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia and New Zealand opted to use it.46 Ships bound for India and Ceylon (now Sri

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women, travel and identity Lanka) reduced the distance they had to cover by 4,400 nautical miles.47 These journeys consequently became more efficient and economical as ships could avoid the Cape of Good Hope: the journey from London to Bombay was reduced to fifteen days (the first ever steam voyage to India had taken 113 days).48 The introduction of steam power, the appearance of an entirely new mode of transport in the passenger train and the increase in the number of shipping companies operating meant that by 1870 women journeying abroad had more choices about the company they used and the route they took than ever before. Technology and commercial enterprise transformed travelling and journeying: the expanding network of railways and shipping lines eliminated many of its frustrations and uncertainties.49 This period is regarded as the age in which travel was democratized: the railways are celebrated as a democratizing force because the poor could now ride in the same conveyance, albeit usually in different carriages, at the same time and speed as the rich.50 Changes after 1870 further altered the nature of the journey. Journeyers’ choices of transport company, route, which port or station they departed from and their final destination continued to expand, particularly in shipping. By the turn of the twentieth century Canadian Pacific ran liners from Liverpool to Canada and on to the Far East, giving them an almost worldwide operation from Vancouver and Victoria to Japan, Hong Kong and China; the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, commonly known as the French Line, ran a service from Le Havre to New York; the Red Star Line operated between Antwerp and America; the Union Steam Collier line offered journeys to South Africa from Britain; and P&O ran lines to India and Australia.51 ‘Colonial’ services particularly prospered: ‘blue-water’ liners took four, six or eight weeks to journey to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, Lagos in Nigeria, Calcutta, Penang in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Sydney.52 Several companies offered these services, including the British India Steam Navigation Company Ltd., the Union-Castle Mail Line, the Orient Line, the New Zealand Shipping Company, the Messageries Maritimes, Rotterdam Lloyd and Lloyd Triestino.53 The global rail network also continued to grow. By the end of the 1870s railways linked most of the major towns and cities of Europe as far east as Vienna and Warsaw.54 The final section of the Trans-Siberian Railway was completed in 1900; the 4,607-mile track enabled rail journeys across Russia.55 Women journeyers could use more than one mode of transport as this worldwide transport network was increasingly interconnected: they could catch a boat-train to a port and then embark on a ship to

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the big luggage went a fortnight ago their final destination or take another train on arrival at a terminus port to reach it. Leisure, pleasure and luxury The most significant change to the journey abroad after 1870, however, was in the nature of the journey as an experience. Transport companies offered increasingly lavish experiences for those who wanted or could afford them. New luxury trains appeared offering a previously unknown level of comfort. American entrepreneur George Pullman was a pioneer of such transportation, building richly opulent sleeping cars in the 1850s in America. His reputation spread rapidly across the Atlantic: the Midland Railway Company granted him a fifteen-year contract in 1872 to run sleeper carriages on its trains and within a decade he dominated the British market.56 Belgian Georges Nagelmackers founded the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (CIWL) in 1872 also to produce luxury carriages. They became increasingly popular: by the early 1880s demand for them on the Paris to Vienna railway was so great that companies began running trains exclusively composed of his sleeping and dining carriages, which had the concomitant benefit of reducing journey times because trains did not need to stop to allow journeyers to purchase refreshments. In 1882, a train comprised of only CIWL carriages made the journey from Paris to Vienna in twenty-eight hours, almost four hours shorter than the usual journey. This was a forerunner to a more ambitious journey: an opulent train service from Paris to Constantinople (Istanbul), which became famous as the Express d’Orient or Orient Express. The Orient Express made its maiden journey in October 1883; its amenities included gold-embossed leather seats, teak and mahoganypanelled walls, velvet curtains, Gobelins tapestries, engraved silverware, crystal goblets, silk sheets, steam heat, gas lighting and running water. By the 1890s CIWL was operating at least a dozen trains de luxe across Europe, including services from Calais to Brindisi, which connected with British mail steamers to India, and from St Petersburg to Nice and Cannes.57 Changes in ship design created a similarly magnificent maritime journey experience. Prior to 1870, ship living spaces were cramped and engines noisy.58 However, in 1870 the White Star Line launched the Oceanic, which has been called the first modern ocean liner, marking the beginning of a new era.59 The Oceanic placed its cabins and public rooms at the centre of the ship, where noise and vibration was lowest, and featured skylights, bathrooms with running water, a smoking room

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women, travel and identity for men and a carpeted lounge for women.60 The appearance thereafter of increasingly sumptuous ships reflected the new conceptualization of the ocean steam liner as a ‘floating palace’ or ‘luxury hotel’.61 Ships were regarded no longer as merely functional modes of transport but as consumer and leisure experiences. This again had an enormous impact on journey comfort levels. Ships were now lit by electricity and extra passenger decks were incorporated into liners, creating additional suites, single cabins, dining salons and ornate lounges.62 The wealthiest journeyers could hire suites of staterooms that included a sitting room and a private bath. The Lusitania and Mauretania, launched by Cunard in 1906 and 1907 had orchestras, à la carte restaurants, electric lifts and telephones, and printed a daily newspaper.63 The 1920s featured what has been labelled the most formidable fleet of international liners, each more luxurious than the last, ever launched on the Atlantic including Cunard’s Berengaria and the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique’s Ile de France.64 By 1940 the wealthiest consumers could journey in a level of sumptuousness that was unimaginable to those who journeyed before 1870. The journey experience for the most affluent also became increasingly homogenized as train and ship companies competed to offer the greatest luxury. Ships continued to become larger and faster. When fully booked some ocean liners could carry up to 2,300 journeyers.65 By 1891 the voyage from New York to Liverpool could take just seven days.66 Ships were not all equally fast, and conditions at sea, as well as the number of stoppages at ports, could affect journey times, but nevertheless the latter continued to decline. Sailing from Liverpool in February 1890, it took the Umbria thirty-six days to reach New York; in February 1910, it took the same ship just twenty-one days.67 (These figures may include the return journey rather than being one-way.) In February 1930, it took the Antonia fourteen days to reach New York from Liverpool.68 The journey from Britain to Australia also gradually declined in length from eighty-five days in the 1870s to seventy-seven in the 1880s, to between forty-five and fifty-two days in the 1890s, and after 1900 to forty days.69 In 1914, the Panama Canal opened, directly linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It reduced the length of journeys such as that between New York and San Francisco from circa 14,000 to just 6,000 miles, again reducing the time it took to make these journeys.70 The growth in luxury journeying had an important consequence for the journey abroad: a division developed between journeyers who could afford the most expensive and lavish modes of transport, which were usually the fastest, and those who could afford only cheaper and slower options. Journey experiences were also increasingly divided

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the big luggage went a fortnight ago according to the passenger class journeyers could afford. Throughout these years, ships and trains offered a range of accommodation: increasing luxury in first class; comfort in second; and the far more basic third or, on ships during the earliest decades after 1870, steerage class for those who could manage only the cheapest tickets. P&O’s services demonstrated these divisions particularly succinctly. In 1910, it took over the Blue Anchor Line which ran between Britain and Australia via the Cape of Good Hope; thereafter it catered to both extremes of the passenger trade with its first-class service via the Suez Canal and the cheapest possible service via the Cape – the longer journey – on which ships had no first class but could carry up to 1,100 third-class passengers.71 The journey experience for poorer journeyers was nowhere near as comfortable, particularly for those who travelled in steerage. While transatlantic steerage conditions were just about tolerable between the 1870s and roughly 1884, conditions declined over the following three decades.72 A 1908 US Immigration Commission investigation found the only cleaning done in steerage accommodation was floor sweeping; there were no large receptacles for water; the iron floors were always damp while the wooden floors stank because they were not washed; and the sleeping quarters were overcrowded and dirty.73 This decline has been partly attributed to the sudden surge in emigration to America after 1900, which exceeded the capacity of the major lines, forcing many emigrants into older, less regulated vessels.74 Yet, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, changes were made to steer­ age accommodation that attempted to improve the experience. These changes were often driven by public and governmental pressure, but also suggest that shipping companies did try to offer a higher standard of comfort for journeyers regardless of their level of personal wealth. Allegations of overcrowding, unsanitary conditions and poor food had led the British government to pass an act in the 1860s which stated that no more than one person could be booked per berth, apart from husbands and wives and women and children, and ventilation in all passenger quarters had to be of a standard satisfactory to emigration authorities.75 The former provision particularly protected women who were journeying on their own as they could no longer potentially be booked into a berth with a stranger. A sensational letter decrying steerage conditions published in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1881 (explored later in this book) sparked a moral panic that led to a Board of Trade investigation and further reforms: within a year all ships were berthing single women away from other steerage journeyers and major lines also began to provide steerage stewardesses.76

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women, travel and identity The 1920s saw two further changes in the nature of the maritime journey abroad. Steerage class disappeared altogether with the decline of the migratory trade; it was renamed tourist class, as ship companies targeted the middle-class and professionals as potential new customers.77 The advent of tourist class led to, and was also partly fuelled by, the emergence of a new type of ocean journey: the cruise. Cruises have usefully been defined as ‘leisure voyages, where the ports of call are less important and thought of more as exotic diversions and part of shipboard recreation’.78 The experience on the ship was as much the focus of these journeys as the places visited. P&O was regularly using the term ‘cruise’ to promote this form of voyage by 1904,79 but it was in the interwar years that the cruise became a truly popular form of journeying. Until the Great Depression the cruise was usually limited to the rich and super-rich: in the 1920s, cruises had as few as 200 passengers.80 By the end of the 1930s, however, European and American lines offered cruises from New York, San Francisco, Southampton and Cherbourg to the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands for a far greater number and socio-economic range of passengers.81 Organizing the journey: travel agents and assisted emigration Technological innovation and railway and shipping companies, however, were not solely responsible for the journey’s evolution. Journeying was also transformed by the rationalizations introduced by travel agents. In the earliest days of European railways, it was impossible to buy a ticket before the day of departure. Journeyers had to wait until just fifteen minutes before a train’s scheduled departure time before they could buy a ticket and if they missed it their tickets would not be valid on the next train.82 Travel agencies such as Thomas Cook & Son, which began trading in the 1840s, resolved many of these problems, and particularly helped women journeyers. Cook’s innovations included special allencompassing tickets, circular routes and handbooks, creating a feeling of unity out of the diversity of transport companies and available conveyances.83 Cook agents and couriers met trains at all major European rail stations to respond to any client needs, and arranged accommodation, local transport and guides.84 In the 1870s, the company pioneered railway coupons: paper tickets bound together in a long string that enabled passengers to book their entire train journey in advance and pay for it in their country’s own currency.85 This system spread rapidly as it enabled journeyers to explore the worldwide rail network without becoming trapped in its bureaucracy.86 Cook & Son also arranged tours

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the big luggage went a fortnight ago to countries across the world and, in the twentieth century, round-theworld cruises.87 Thomas Cook particularly encouraged women to journey. He insisted that it was entirely proper for single, unaccompanied women to go on his tours, describing himself as a ‘travelling chaperon’.88 The firm actively targeted women as consumers of travel: a 1903 poster advertising Cook’s tours featured a woman, walking cane in hand, striding across the earth.89 This strategy seems to have been successful as more women than men appear to have gone on Cook’s tours.90 In addition to Cook & Son, travel agency Dean and Dawson was founded in 1871; John Frame’s tours in 1881; Quintin Hogg’s Polytechnic tours in 1886; and Sir Henry Lunn’s company in 1893. The greatest competition to Cook, however, was from Henry Gaze & Son, founded in the 1850s, who also issued hotel coupons, published a travel gazette and had uniformed interpreters at the prin­ cipal Continental railway stations.91 Travel agencies did not always simplify journey arrangements. Euphemia Stokes, who journeyed from England in June 1937 in order to teach at St Christopher’s College in Madras, India, complained in a letter to her parents during her voyage that ‘O yes, you may hear from Vardon and Co. I had to write a severe letter to them about several minor mistakes about Berth number etc. and one major one about the money  .  .  .  They seem a most haphazard firm. I had to wire about our tickets on the day before leaving Cambridge because they hadn’t yet arrived. They sent them by express post.’92 Travel agents could clearly sometimes be frustrating, but their ability to book everything for a journey at the outset potentially eliminated much of the complexity of arranging journeys. Emigration organizations also facilitated female journeys abroad to Empire destinations, albeit on a one-way basis. The Female Middle Class Emigration Society, the first such society, operated between 1862 and 1886.93 It was followed by the Women’s Emigration Society (1880); the British Women’s Emigration Association (1884); the Colonial Emigration Society (1884); the South African Colonisation Society (1902) and the Colonial Intelligence League (1911).94 They helped women to arrange their journeys, for instance by providing loans to help with the costs of emigrating.95 These societies initially favoured middle-class women, but from the late 1800s also began to assist those from working-class backgrounds.96 Governments also offered schemes for assisted emigration to which women could apply. From 1860 onwards most assisted emigrants travelled under a nomination or remittance scheme: friends and relatives already

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women, travel and identity in Australia, for instance, could, on payment of a small deposit, nominate individuals or families for emigration.97 After the Boer War, South African governments were particularly keen to encourage female immigration. In 1902, the colonial Transvaal administration agreed to allocate £15,000 per annum towards British women’s immigration to South Africa: female domestic servants were to be brought from London to Johannesburg at a total cost of £12 to themselves, with the administration meeting all other charges.98 In 1927, the British and South Rhodesian governments agreed to offer a free grant of £35 towards their journey fare to women who had been approved for emigration in order to take up positions as domestic helps.99 After the First World War there was a renewed British commitment to state-assisted emigration. In 1919, the Oversea Settlement Committee (OSC), subsequently replaced by the Oversea Settlement Board, was founded; its secretariat and administrative staff formed the Oversea Settlement Office (later Department) of the Colonial Office, which then became the Dominions Office.100 It included a women’s branch, the Society for the Oversea Settlement of British Women.101 It authorized prominent publicity campaigns encouraging Empire settlement, and developed close links with philanthropic bodies, shipping companies and other interest groups in Britain and the Empire to facilitate emigration.102 Under the 1922 Empire Settlement Act, the Australian, New Zealand and Canadian governments agreed to offer journey assistance to single female British domestic servants, and the OSC established training institutions in the United Kingdom to prepare inexperienced women for domestic service.103 Women of modernity Technological innovations such as the ocean liner coincided with a contemporary sense that this was a new and distinctly ‘modern’ age.104 The steamship became a ‘signifier of modernity’ that ‘both contained and disseminated economic power, political ambition, ideas, and symbolic meanings’.105 Defining modernity has proved contentious. Some propose that modernity fundamentally relates to power, ‘the capacity to change the structure of systems’: a society can be defined as ‘modern’ when its power-complex is dominant over all.106 It has also been defined as ‘a project, that is as a political nation which is realized in the nation-state’.107 Others argue that the history of education illuminates the history of modernity, citing the example of Eilhu Yale, who viewed education as a prime vehicle for the spread of knowledge and the removal of superstition

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the big luggage went a fortnight ago and endowed Yale University in the eighteenth century.108 This suggests, although the assumption is fraught with difficulty, that modernity was partly a move towards rationalization, be it in politics, religion or economics.109 However, modernity can also be understood as a personal experience, a technological event and an experience of mobility. Women did not shy away from it. Organizations such as the Electrical Association for Women (founded in 1924) encouraged them to embrace new laboursaving electrical technologies in the home in order to show their personal association with modernity.110 Equally, women journeyers celebrated, admired and fully engaged with journey technology, which also enabled them to assert and express their identities as modern women. Annie Brassey, prolific journeyer, writer, mother and wife, became a household name with the publication of the first of several books in 1886, A Voyage in the ‘Sunbeam’: Our Home on the Ocean for Eleven Months, her account of her family’s round-the-world voyage on their private steam yacht. She became Lady Brassey when her husband was elevated to the peerage in 1886.111 Before finding fame, however, she journeyed with her family to and from Canada in August 1872 and described in detail the engine-room of the outgoing ship, the S.S. Hibernian: ‘The chief engineer took us through the engine-room, which is in beautiful order; the engines are 400 nominal, working to 1,600 horse-power; and there is a small watertight tunnel over the shaft of the screw, where two men are constantly oiling and seeing that everything is right.’112 She was awed by humankind’s technical conquest of nature: ‘Steaming along in a raging sea, never less than twelve knots on this passage, and sometimes up to fifteen, gives one a high sense of human power and skill.’113 Vita Sackville-West enthused: ‘To one ignorant of the principles of navigation it seems miraculous that after four days of steaming across apparently unidentifiable wastes of ocean the ship could hit off with such exactitude the correct but narrow harbour-bar’ upon her ship’s arrival at Bombay during her journey to Persia in the 1920s.114 Lady Theodora Guest praised American express trains for being ‘so smooth, punctual and fast’ during a seven-week rail journey across the United States in 1894.115 On her return journey to England via Russia, Vita noted that Russian railways ‘are quite as comfortable as European trains; in fact, rather more comfortable, for they go very slowly and run on a wider gauge’.116 While women journeyers were not necessarily engineering experts, they did not drift through their journeys without any reflection on how it was being enabled technologically. Some engaged with journey technology in intensely practical ways, expressing opinions about the most suitable transportation for particular

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women, travel and identity journeys. Novelist, poet and pioneer of Egyptology Amelia B. Edward’s (1831–  92) account of her journey along the Nile in 1873 and 1874 contains a detailed account of her struggle to select the best dahabeeyah. She complained ‘most persons know something of the miseries of househunting; but only those who have experienced them know how much keener are the miseries of dahabeeyah-hunting. It is more bewildering and more fatiguing, and is beset by its own special and peculiar difficulties.’117 She and her companions spent hours viewing different vessels.118 She eventually concluded that ‘It certainly seemed to us that the oldfashioned wooden dahabeeyah – flat-bottomed, drawing little water, light in hand, and easily poled off when stuck – was the one vessel best constructed for the navigation of the Nile.’119 Bertha Mason Broadwood (1846  –1935), daughter of Henry Fowler Broadwood of the Surrey piano-making firm and who later in life founded the Cottage Benefits Nursing Association, journeyed from Surrey to the West Indies on the S.S. Argonaut in 1902 and showed considerable understanding of the significance of a ship’s structure when selecting a berth. She chose a ‘tiny deck cabin’ when she ‘visited the vessel  .  .  .  in the bay in the London Docks’ one week before her journey began because ‘It is the most foreward one on the leeside & will almost certainly be very cold until we get south & again refreshing. But the alternative was a 3 berth cabin right near the screw on the main deck, with a port hole I should never be able to open in rough weather’.120 Some female ocean journeyers appropriated the nautical language of professional sailing, recording the ship’s log, position, how many miles had been covered in a day and wind direction. Lady’s maid Janet Smith’s account of her sea journeys with her employer, Mrs M—, to and from Britain and America in 1896 consisted of eighteen entries; in eight of these she wrote statements such as ‘We went 470 miles yesterday’ and ‘We went 480 miles yesterday’.121 Mrs Rosa Carnegie-Williams, who journeyed to South America in August 1881, noted the longitudinal and latitudinal position of her ship, the Royal Mail steamer Don, throughout the journey in comments such as ‘At night we were in lat. 49.13 N., and long. 7.00 W.’ and ‘We did 279 miles to-day, and reached in the evening lat. 47.17 N., and long. 13. IC’.122 Dora Pennyman (circa 1863  –1938), the wife of a member of a locally eminent family from Ormesby Hall in Teesside, cruised the Nile with her husband, sister-in-law and family friends from January to March 1905. She noted the Nile’s wind conditions in her diary: on 24 January 1905, for instance, they ‘Had a light following breeze (N.W.)’.123 Such comments demonstrate how many women desired to appear as authentic, expert journeyers who could engage with the

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the big luggage went a fortnight ago professional journeying of ship captains and crew. These women were not lost at sea in any sense. Recording the ship’s progress gave them a sense of control over their experience as well as demonstrating their superiority over other women who might not comprehend the ocean journey abroad in navigational and nautical terms. Women’s involvement with journey technologies matched a general public fascination with these technologies: admiration, wonder and awe characterized accounts of them in the British media. New techno­ logies including passenger liners, airships and aeroplanes were hailed by the media, and in transport companies’ publicity material, as ‘modern wonders’. Factual reports ‘poeticized and aestheticized innovative objects’ and elevated technology ‘beyond the realm of everyday life’: ‘press reports  .  .  .  invested boats with an aura of the fairy tale’.124 Experiencing this technology first hand, women were directly aware and conscious of the extraordinary new technology by which they journeyed. The sheer volume of women who used ships and trains in this period and the praise many gave them reveals that they were undaunted both by the technology and by this modern age; instead they embraced it to declare emphatically that they were women of modernity. Notes 1 Rob McAuley writes that over twenty-six million people arrived in the United States alone from Britain, Ireland and Europe between 1880 and 1924 (R. McAuley, The Liners: A Voyage of Discovery (London, 1997), pp. 36  –7). Walter Nugent suggests that 7,720,000 Britons emigrated to North America and Australasia between 1871 and 1914 (W. Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870  – 1914 (Bloomington, 1992), p. 46). Robin Haines believes almost 1.5 million Britons emigrated to Australia in the nineteenth century (R. Haines, Life and Death in the Age of Sail: The Passage to Australia (London, 2006), p. 23). Stephen Constantine also estimates that there were a minimum of 19,962,638 British emigrants between 1815 and 1938 (S. Constantine, ‘Introduction: empire migration and imperial harmony’, in S. Constantine (ed.), Emigrants and Empire: British Settlement in the Dominions between the Wars (Manchester, 1990), p. 1). 2 J. Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783  –1939 (Oxford, 2009), p. 58; M. Harper and S. Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford and New York, 2010), p. 2. 3 T.J. Hatton and J.G. Williamson’s exhaustive study of migration from 1850 to 1914, for instance, has just five pages that briefly discuss female emigrants, but solely as part of an investigation of Irish emigration (T.J. Hatton and J.G. Williamson, The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact (Oxford and New York, 1998) pp. 83  –7). 4 C. Erickson, Leaving England: Essays on British Emigration in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1994), p. 241.

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women, travel and identity 5 L. Chilton, Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860  –1930 (Toronto, 2007), p. 10. 6 Gothard, Blue China, p. 2. 7 R.S. Krandis, The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: Contested Subjects (New York, 1999), p. 21. 8 J. Gothard, ‘“The healthy, wholesome British domestic girl”: single female migration and the Empire Settlement Act, 1922  –1930’, in Constantine (ed.), Emigrants and Empire, p. 92, fn. 4. 9 D. Drummond, ‘The impact of the railway on the lives of women in the nineteenthcentury city’, in R. Roth and M.-N. Polino (eds), The City and the Railway in Europe (Aldershot, 2003), p. 239. For information on internal British passenger totals see amongst others: Parliamentary Papers, Vol. 76, Part 1, 937, Returns of the Number of Workmen’s Trains by the Railways of Great Britain (London, 1900); 19th Century House of Commons Sessional Papers, Paper Series: COMMAND PAPERS; ACCOUNTS AND PAPERS, Vol. LXXXIX.97 [C. 5283], Circular by Board of Trade to Railway Companies of United Kingdom on Advisability of providing Separate Compartments for Female Passengers (Replies) (London, 1888); The National Archives (hereafter TNA), RAIL 266/19, Great Western Railway, General Statistics (Waddington, October 1930); TNA, RAIL 398/47, Four Group Railway Companies: Comparative Summary of Financial Accounts And Statistical Returns, Year Ended 31st December, 1930, compared with Year Ended 31st December, 1929 (Stratford, March 1931); TNA, RAIL 1021/33, Ten Years’ Statistics of British Railways, 1902  –1911 (Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1912); and TNA, RAIL 393/909, ‘Summary of Statistics of Railways in the United Kingdom, 1859  –1912’. These sources offer information on passenger figures both for individual rail companies and for Britain in totality. They distinguish between passenger classes and individual train services. 10 Railway News, 24 February 1900. These figures gave no indication of how many people made repeat journeys so these figures may be exaggerated because passengers have been counted more than once. 11 TNA, RAIL 411/655, London & South Western Railway, Tables of Statistics for Steamer Services to the following Ports: Channel Islands, Havre, Cherbourg, Caen, Honfleur, Roscoff, Calais, Boulogne and Dieppe, 1880  –1927 (London, 1928). 12 RN, 9 November 1912. 13 Erickson, Leaving England, p. 94. The author has unfortunately been unable to view the incoming passenger lists held in the countries for which British ships were bound. 14 At least sixteen volumes, edited by Ira Glazier, are now available in a series titled Emigration from the United Kingdom to America, published by Scarecrow Press. 15 I.A. Glazier, Emigration from the United Kingdom to America: Lists of Passengers Arriving at U.S. Ports, Volume 5: April 1872–July 1872 (Lanham, MD, 2008), pp. 1–72. 16 These are held at The National Archives, Kew as series BT27/5–24, BT27/649  –  671 and BT27/1271–1280. 17 This figure was reached by totalling the three yearly totals (123,639) and dividing by three. 18 McEwan, Gender, Geography and Empire, pp. 16  –17. 19 B. Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718  –1918: Sexuality, Religion and Work (Basingstoke, 1992), p. 33. 20 American legislative actions to restrict immigration included the introduction of a literacy test in February 1917, the Dillingham quota plan in 1921 and the 1924

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Immigration Act, which extended the quotas imposed on European immigrants by nationality. For further information on American immigration law in this period see R. Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York, 1990), pp. 265–  96. 21 C. Hamilton-Ellis, British Railway History: An Outline from the Ascension of William IV to the Nationalisation of the Railways, Volume I: 1830  –1876 (London, 1954), p. 17. 22 Freeman, Railways, p. 1. 23 Ibid., p. 1. 24 M. Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke, 2001), p. 36. 25 Richter, Home on the Rails, p. 13. 26 TNA, RAIL 1057/3391, Lieutenant-Colonel R.A. Sargeaunt, R.E., Director General of Railways, Administration Report on the Railway in India for 1892  –  93 (London, 1893). 27 Morgan, National Identities, p. 36. 28 G. Hindley, Tourists, Travellers and Pilgrims (London, 1983), p. 195. 29 B. Schmucki, ‘The English passenger: the journey to the continent in the first half of the 20th century’, Third International Conference on the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility: Tourism and the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility, 8 October 2005. 30 Hindley, Tourists, p. 197. 31 Morgan, National Identities, p. 28. Other cross-Channel routes included Folkestone– Boulogne, Newhaven–Dieppe, Newhaven–Caen and Southampton–Havre (Schmucki, ‘The English passenger’). 32 S. Fox, The Ocean Railway: Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Samuel Cunard, and the Revolutionary World of the Great Atlantic Steamships (London, 2003), p. xii. 33 D. and S. Howarth, The Story of P&O: The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (London, 1986), pp. 9, 13. 34 H. Johnson, The Cunard Story (London, 1987), pp. 18, 21. 35 McAuley, Liners, p. 36. 36 Johnson, Cunard Story, p. 51. 37 Ibid., p. 51. 38 Balrich, Replenishing the Earth, pp. 109  –11. 39 Ibid., p. 111. 40 Maritime Archives & Library, Merseyside Maritime Museum (hereafter MAL, MMM), DX 1071/R, Diary of S. Stephens, ‘Transcript of an emigrant voyage diary on the S.S. Cardigan Castle, 30 September 1876  –23 January 1877’. 41 B. Rieger, ‘Floating palaces: ocean liners as icons of modern splendour’, History Today, 55:2 (February 2005), 38. 42 Haines, Life and Death, p. 266. 43 Balrich, Replenishing the Earth, p. 110. 44 Hindley, Tourists, p. 202. 45 Ibid., pp. 52, 195. 46 McAuley, Liners, pp. 33  –  4. 47 Haines, Life and Death, p. 269. 48 McAuley, Liners, p. 35. 49 L. Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750 to 1915 (London, 1998), p. 167.

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women, travel and identity 50 Faith, World the Railways Made, p. 59. 51 H. Miller, Famous Ocean Liners: The Story of Passenger Shipping from the Turn of the Century to the Present Day (Wellingborough, 1987), pp. 22  –  6. 52 McAuley, Liners, p. 69. 53 Ibid., pp. 69  –70. 54 Withey, Grand Tours, p. 169. 55 P.E. Garbutt, ‘The Trans-Siberian railway’, JTH, 1:4 (November 1954), 238  –  9. 56 Withey, Grand Tours, pp. 176  –  8. 57 Ibid., pp. 179  –  82. 58 Ibid., p. 173. 59 Fox, Ocean Railway, pp. 229, 240. 60 Withey, Grand Tours, p. 174. 61 Rieger, ‘Floating palaces’, 40. 62 Johnson, Cunard Story, p. 54. 63 Ibid., p. 63. 64 Ibid., p. 97. 65 Ibid., p. 70. 66 Fox, Ocean Railway, p. 282. 67 TNA, BT27/5 Part 2, Manifest for S.S. Umbria (February 1890) and BT27/651, Manifest for S.S. Umbria (February 1910). Whether these figures are for return journeys is unclear. 68 TNA, BT27/1272, Manifest for S.S. Antonia (February 1930). 69 Haines, Life and Death, p. 270. 70 D. Cadbury, Seven Wonders of the Industrial World (London, 1996), pp. 247–  9, 287. 71 Howarth, Story of P&O, pp. 111–12. 72 Fox, Ocean Railway, p. 329. 73 Ibid., p. 333. 74 Ibid. 75 Johnson, Cunard Story, p. 47. 76 Fox, Ocean Railway, pp. 328  –  9. 77 McAuley, Liners, p. 66. 78 Miller, Famous Ocean Liners, p. 72. 79 McAuley, Liners, p. 131. 80 Miller, Famous Ocean Liners, p. 72. 81 McAuley, Liners, p. 133. 82 Hindley, Tourists, p. 210. 83 P. Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London, 1991), p. 46. 84 Hindley, Tourists, p. 210. 85 Brendon, Thomas Cook, pp. 168  –  9. 86 Ibid., p. 169. 87 Ibid., p. 264. 88 Ibid., p. 52. 89 The Travel Archive, Thomas Cook Ltd., shown in Withey, Grand Tours, p. 115. 90 Brendon, Thomas Cook, p. 52. 91 Ibid., p. 185. 92 British Library, India and Oriental Collection (hereafter BL India and Oriental Collection), Mss Eur F304/3, Letters of E.M. Stokes, ‘Letters from E.M. “Peggy” Stokes, teacher at St Christopher’s College, Madras’, 28 June 1937.

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the big luggage went a fortnight ago 93 A.J. Hammerton, ‘Feminism and female emigration, 1861–1886’, in M. Vicinus (ed.), A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (Bloomington and London, 1980), p. 53. 94 J. Bush, ‘“The right sort of woman”: female emigrators and emigration to the British Empire, 1890  –1910’, Women’s History Review, 3:3 (1994), 389. 95 Hammerton, ‘Feminism and female emigration’, p. 62. 96 Bush, ‘The right sort’, 389. 97 Haines, Life and Death, p. 44. 98 J.J. Van-Helten and K. Williams, ‘ “The crying need of South Africa”: the emigration of single British women to the Transvaal, 1901–1910’, Journal of South African Studies, 10:1 (October 1983), 28. 99 Godard, ‘“The healthy, wholesome British domestic girl” ’, p. 80. 100 Constantine, ‘Introduction’, p. 3. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid. 103 Godard, ‘“The healthy wholesome British domestic girl” ’, p. 72. 104 B. Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890  –1945 (Cambridge, 2005), p. 2. 105 A. Wollacott, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity (Oxford, 2001), p. 23; F. Steel, ‘ “Suva under steam”: mobile men and a colonial port capital, 1880s–1910s’ in T. Ballantyne and A. Burton (eds), Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana and Chicago, 2009), p. 114. 106 M. Elvin, ‘A working definition of “modernity”?’, Past and Present, 113 (1986), 211–12. 107 P. van der Veer, ‘The global history of “modernity” ’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 41:3 (1998), 285. 108 Ibid., 290. 109 Elvin, ‘A working definition’, 209. 110 C. Pursell, ‘Domesticating modernity: the Electrical Association for Women, 1924  –1986’, British Journal for the History of Science, 32:1 (March 1999), 47–  8. 111 J.R. Ryan, ‘“Our home on the ocean”: Lady Brassey and the voyages of the Sunbeam, 1874  –1887’, Journal of Historical Geography, 32 (2006), 580, 583. 112 A. Brassey, A Cruise in the ‘Eothen’, 1872 (London: printed for private circulation, 1873), 6 September 1872, p. 8. 113 Ibid., 25 November 1872, p. 145. 114 Sackville-West, Passenger, pp. 48  –  9. 115 Lady T. Guest, A Round Trip in North America (London, 1895), p. 27. She also noted the tonnage of the ship, the S.S. Paris, which carried her across the Atlantic from Southampton to New York (ibid., p. 3). 116 Sackville-West, Passenger, pp. 169  –70. 117 A.B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, facsimile of the 1888 edn (London, 1993), p. 11. This account became a bestseller and thereafter she devoted herself to establishing the Egypt Exploration Fund to investigate the country’s ancient history (D. Birkett, Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers (London, 2004), pp. 72  –3). 118 Edwards, Thousand Miles, p. 12. 119 Ibid., p. ix.

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women, travel and identity 120 Surrey History Centre (hereafter SHC), 2185/BMB/5/17/1, Diary of B.M. Broadwood, ‘Voyage Diary to West Indies’, 27 November 1902. 121 MAL, MMM, DX/1093, Diary of J. Smith, ‘Transcript of voyage diary on S.S. Umbria and S.S. Campania, 1896’, 9 and 10 September 1896. The other entries that contain such statements are 6, 7, 8, and 11 September and 11 and 12 October 1896. See similar comments in Guest, Round Trip, pp. 3  –  4. 122 R. Carnegie-Williams, A Year in the Andes; Or, A Lady’s Adventures in Bogotá (London, 1884), 3 August 1881, p. 2, and 4 August 1881, p. 2. See also 5 August 1881, p. 3. 123 Teesside Archives (hereafter TA), U/PEN 7/86, Diary of D. Pennyman, ‘Diary’, 24 January 1905, p. 2. 124 Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity, pp. 22  –3.

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2 Fashion plate heroines: imagining the female journeyer

I

n 1928, ‘Joanna’, a writer for the White Star passenger magazine, labelled women who took their cruise journeys ‘fashion plate heroines’.1 She was at pains to point out that I don’t want to give the impression that I use the term ‘fashion plate heroines’ critically. Far from it. I have a great deal of admiration and liking for these ladies who help to brighten up a boat tremendously. If they derive pleasure from dressing smartly – and what woman does not? – my blessings go with them. They certainly impart happiness and gaiety with the pretty colours and clothes they wear with such aptitude.2

Image was extremely important to transport companies when pro­ moting their businesses. White Star Magazine regularly featured many pictures of their prominent and prestigious customers, including film actresses Mary Pickford, along with her husband Douglas Fairbanks, Lilian Gish, Gertrude Lawrence, Marion Davies and Maureen O’Sullivan; in addition they also published photographs of their sophisticated, fashionably dressed non-famous journeyers.3 Cunard Magazine, the passenger magazine of the Cunard company, also published photographs of the eminent journeyers who travelled on its line, including the Duchess of Devonshire and her two daughters; novelist Elinor Glyn; the Earl and Countess of Haddington; and actress, socialite and ambassador’s wife Lady Diana Duff-Cooper.4 These images illustrate a key way in which women journeyers were represented and the values with which transport companies wanted their journeys to be associated: elegance, fashionability and modernity. These values in turn reveal some of what were agreed in public discourse to be the qualities that made a female journeyer appropriately womanly. Myriad images and representations of the journey abroad and women journeyers appeared in fiction, film, art and advertising between

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women, travel and identity 1870 and 1940, but there was a dramatic change in their nature over the course of these years. Visual representations of women journeyers were extremely rare in the earliest decades of the period. Late nineteenthcentury transport company advertising posters and placards were dominated by text: they printed details of sailing schedules and fares, but little in the way of images.5 Those images that did appear were limited to outlines or miniature portraits of ships and destinations.6 Similarly, rail companies did little advertising apart from producing plain handbills and inserting written notices in the press concerning new or improved facilities in the early nineteenth century.7 Although this began to change after 1870, with images of destinations becoming far more common,8 visual images of women journeyers remained elusive. Survival of sources may also be a problem here: it is difficult to ascertain how many representations of women may have been lost. The Victorian journeyer in art French artist Jacques-Joseph, or James, Tissot (1836 –1902) produced many of the earliest images of women journeyers. Tissot delighted in painting the places and occasions during which people dressed up.9 He depicted the ship as a social rather than a nautical space: instead of heading out to sea, his ships remained in the harbour or on a local river as spaces for social events and conversation.10 Works such as Boarding the Yacht (1873), The Last Evening (1873), The Ball on Shipboard (circa 1874), The Gallery of the H.M.S. Calcutta (1877) and Portsmouth Dockyard (1877) present an apparently pleasant construction of the journey as a place of leisure, relaxation and gaiety.11 His female journeyers were all young, clean, attractive and elegantly dressed. In The Gallery of the H.M.S. Calcutta [Figure 1], two women gaze out at the harbour in their modish and elaborately trimmed gowns. They appear free from the strains of everyday life, apparently unburdened by raising a family or running a household. The journey is also presented as a refined experience. Tissot’s journeyers are usually apparently middle-class and respectable; there is no hint of dirt or coarseness that might be associated in a spectator’s mind with the Victorian working-class. Tissot set much of his work in this middle-class milieu partly because it was the wealthy middle class who bought art in the late nineteenth century.12 This is also, however, a striking continuity in visual representations of women journeyers through the years between 1870 and 1940: they were usually represented as belonging to the higher echelons of society. Working-class women were almost

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fashion plate heroines

Figure 1  The Gallery of the H.M.S. Calcutta (1877)

entirely absent. The journey was visually constructed as something undertaken by only the most socially reputable and sophisticated. Yet Tissot’s representations of the journey and women journeyers contain more ambivalent elements, indicating how contemporaries under­ stood the journey in multiple complex ways. Many Victorian critics attacked Tissot for glorifying the vulgar and improper in his work,13 and there are hints of more scandalous behaviour in these canvases. The women in The Gallery of the H.M.S. Calcutta, Boarding the Yacht and The Last Evening [Figure 2] are all shown with ship crew. Although a small minority of women journeyers did sometimes find the crew to be sources of flirtation or even romance, as suggested by the crewman seated next to and staring so intensely at the woman in The Last Evening, Victorian Britain did not regard journey staff as suitable companions for decent women journeyers. The concerned faces of the two men seated behind the couple seem to reflect this disapproval (or perhaps they are jealous). These women also appear to have no chaperones, which, even though some of them are journeying together, was also considered unsuitable for proper young women in the late-Victorian period. Tissot’s journeyers are also sometimes somewhat flirtatious, which again was frowned upon. In Portsmouth Dockyard [Figure 3] two women

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women, travel and identity

Figure 2  The Last Evening (1873)

Figure 3  Portsmouth Dockyard, or, How I Could Be Happy with Either (1877)

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fashion plate heroines are being rowed out to their ship. One of the women appears to be flirting with the Highland soldier embarking with them: she stares confidently and knowingly into his eyes, her tilted head suggesting that she is both aware of his interest in her and happy to reciprocate his attention. Her confident posture suggests she may even have initiated the flirtation. By contrast, her companion appears bored and resigned to being ignored. The subversive nature of this representation of women journeyers is further revealed by the painting’s alternative title, How I Could Be Happy with Either: the women are objects of desire for the Highlander to choose between, but one of them colludes in this process by reciprocating and encouraging his interest. These hints of flirtation and romance occasionally become more explicit. Boarding the Yacht has been acclaimed as a comic masterpiece in which the stout elderly captain helping two young women aboard faces the dilemma of which woman he should chose to pursue.14 In The Ball on Shipboard [Figure 4], an older man stares across the deck towards a seated young woman in a green striped dress in the bottom-left corner of the picture. The intensity of his gaze and hint of lasciviousness on his face and in his stance intimate that this woman is an object of desire to him and that he hopes for a closer encounter. In the background, a man leans in to talk, and perhaps flirt, with a group of younger women. These details suggest that more salacious values could circulate in journey spaces: men could regard women as erotic objects. Tissot’s work has additional complexity beyond simply hinting at scandal, however. Many of the women in Tissot’s works seem unhappy: they may attract men, but they seem bored with this role.15 In The Ball on Shipboard the woman in the striped dress gazes out of the picture as if trying to escape. The journey is a prison – the woman next to her seems equally listless.16 Indeed, there is a notable absence of pleasure in this work.17 No one is actually dancing and few people appear to be interacting with each other. The superficial frivolity of the scene masks a sense of emptiness. Tissot’s depiction of the emerging middle classes outraged his critics: they believed he glamorized the social-climbing nouveaux riches and their attempts to mimic their social superiors.18 However, he also examined other facets of the journey experience. The painting Emigrants (circa early 1870s), the original of which is now lost, depicts a female emigrant journeyer and her young child.19 The woman in this work is dressed far more plainly and drably than those in the paintings explored above. Her clothes are dark and unembellished, the only colour coming from her red wrap, her red bag and the red-and-black tartan blanket

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Figure 4  The Ball on Shipboard (circa 1874)

fashion plate heroines wrapped around her child. Her simple clothing indicates that her journey is not a frivolous leisure or social experience and source of pleasure; it is a necessary experience to be endured in order to start a new life abroad. Neither her husband nor any other members of her family are visible, giving her a sense of vulnerability as she has no obvious protector from any ill-intentioned journeyers or crew. Tissot hints that the journey has a darker and more threatening aspect for women in this work. Tissot did not only represent ocean journeyers; he occasionally depicted female rail journeyers. In Waiting for the Train (Willesden Junction) [Figure 5], painted between 1871 and 1873, a young woman stands on a station platform.20 She is again elegantly and smartly dressed, in a cream coat a black scarf and a striped hat. She gazes out at the

Figure 5  Waiting for the Train (Willesden Junction) (circa 1871–73)

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women, travel and identity viewer with an open, direct and appealing gaze, confident and selfpossessed. She appears to be journeying alone, however, which again gives the journey a potentially more subversive dimension: Victorian opinion disapproved of women travelling on trains without a male protector or female chaperone.21 Interestingly, she seems to be less leisured than many of the ocean journeyers Tissot depicted, as she is responsible for a substantial amount of luggage – two trunks, a large bag and a hat box. The maritime women journeyers do not have any luggage in his works, suggesting that they could command ship crew or their own servants to assist them with the more laborious elements of the journey. Tissot presented the rail journey as a more mundane experience. Advertising the journeyer abroad: glamour, youth and respectability From the turn of the twentieth century images of women journeyers began to appear far more frequently in transport company advertising. This corresponds with the shift within the advertising industry away from advertisements that focused upon factual content, such as price, utility and quality, after 1880 towards associational images. Images became more important than providing information. Soap advertisements commonly featured beautiful women in various stages of undress from the late Victorian era onwards.22 Advertisements for an object or service reflect how its producers wish it to be perceived. They contain messages about the values and lifestyles they wish to promote.23 These images do not necessarily correspond to how the product or service was actually understood by consumers: adverts could be said to better represent their creators than their audiences.24 However, while they reveal how transport companies wanted their services to be perceived, transport advertising posters, particularly from the interwar decades, were also a definitive factor in the creation of romantic, glamorous understandings of the journey in the popular imagination. Representations of both rail and ocean journeyers evolved to include a dramatically greater degree of glamour after 1900. A poster advertising an exhibition of motorboats in Monaco by French artist Jules-Alexandre Grün (1868 –circa 1934/38), entitled ‘Course de canots à moteur à Monaco’ (circa 1900), shows a woman sailing into Monaco harbour.25 She is fashionable, brightly and exotically dressed à la mode in an orange dress, with an hourglass figure, bell-shaped skirt and hair elaborately styled. Her dress is far simpler than the dresses in Tissot’s works, with no elaborate ruffles, flouncing or frills, reflecting the emergence of a new

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fashion plate heroines slimmed-down female fashion, characterized by the ‘health corset’ and the s-curve silhouette, in the early twentieth century. This poster promotes an event in a destination that became synonymous with glamour and excitement; it is not surprising that the woman journeyer herself was imbued with similar qualities. She both gains from and adds to the image of Monaco as a place of pleasure, leisure and style. This shift towards glamour was gradual, however. A 1905 photograph of two women dining on a London & North Western Railway train [Figure 6] shows two formally, properly and conventionally dressed Edwardian ladies.26 The emphasis here is on decorum and respectability; there is no hint of the exotic. Different representations of the female journeyer co-existed between 1900 and 1920, but the transition to glamour was unstoppable. It was the most important change in how women journeyers were constructed visually during the period.

Figure 6  Female passengers in a L.N.W.R. dining carriage (circa 1905)

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women, travel and identity Transport companies’ desire to associate both rail and ship journeys and journeyers with excitement, glamour and luxury in the public imagination reached its zenith in the 1920s and 1930s. Women’s lives and expectations had changed immeasurably by these decades, as new educational and work opportunities gave them a renewed sense of confidence, ambition and independence. They had become increasingly powerful agents of their own lives. Companies needed to reflect this change in their promotional materials in order to attract female custom. The advertisements used here are a mixture of advertisements for British rail journeys and for journeys overseas by ship, but they all usefully illustrate how women journeyers were constructed and understood in the British imagination at this time. The glamour associated with the female rail and maritime journeyer in these images was not gaudy; it was understated and chic. It was derived from a number of factors. Firstly, there was a preference for youth and beauty. Young women featured in, amongst others, the poster ‘Express Ease’, which was produced for the London and North Eastern Railway in the 1920s to advertise its service between King’s Cross and Newcastle [Figure 10];27 the 1920s and 1930s posters advertising the services of the Cunard and Cunard-White Star Lines to America and Canada [Figures 12 and 13];28 ‘The Queen of Scots Pullman’ (circa 1930), used by the Pullman Company to advertise its service from King’s Cross to Edinburgh and Glasgow [Figure 7];29 and ‘Dine Well by L.N.E.R.’, designed in 1935 to advertise the London and North Eastern Railway’s restaurant cars [Figure 9].30 Photographs of a woman posed in a secondclass outside stateroom on the S.S. Aquitania in 1928 [Figure 15] and of journeyers in a smoking carriage on the Great Western Railway in 1936 [Figure 11] also feature young women.31 An advertisement for Chesterfield Cigarettes, published in the November 1928 edition of White Star Magazine, features a young female journeyer having her luggage inspected by a customs officer [Figure 14].32 Like the women portrayed by Tissot, these train and ship journeyers were fashionably dressed, a key theme in interwar journey advertising and another striking continuity in visual representations of women journeyers across the period. The women in the Chesterfield Cigarettes advert, ‘Dine Well by L.N.E.R’, ‘The Queen of Scots Pullman’, ‘Express Ease’, the Cunard-White Star poster for the R.M.S. Queen Mary and in a cabin on the Aquitania are all wearing cloche hats. Transport companies did not depict women journeyers as dowdy; they were indeed fashion plate heroines. They wore colour co-ordinated outfits and per­ fectly complementary accessories to emphasize their innate elegance and

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fashion plate heroines

Figure 7  ‘The Queen of Scots Pullman’ (circa 1930)

stylishness: in ‘The Queen of Scots Pullman’ the woman wears a simple red tartan dress toned with a creamy beige knee-length coat and matching gloves, emphasizing her sure sense of style and poise, as well as echoing the colours of the train she is about to board. These women’s hairstyles also follow the fashion of the late 1920s and 1930s: they are short, and in the cases of the women in the Chesterfield Cigarettes advertisement, ‘Dine Well by L.N.E.R.’ and ‘The Queen of Scots Pullman’

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women, travel and identity bobbed. Their style also reflects their socio-economic position: as was largely the case between 1870 and 1900, these women again belong to the middle and upper classes. Working-class women did not feature in transport companies’ vision of their journeys. This reflects companies’ desire to represent the journey as a luxurious and refined experience and to underscore that there was nothing poor or uncomfortable about journeying. Rail and ship companies also wanted to emphasize that their customers were modern women. These women’s silhouettes conform to the ideal of the Flapper, a figure who heavily influenced journey advertising in the final two decades of the period despite the controversy that surrounded her as a new archetype of femininity.33 Their clothes have loosely shaped bodices without corsets, which flattened their breasts, de-emphasized waistlines and knee-length hemlines that reveal their legs and ankles.34 The years between 1870 and 1940 were understood as a new age of modernity, as the previous chapter outlined, in which women were encouraged to participate. By depicting women being mobile via steam trains and ships, transport companies also communicated that they could and should be part of this age. This association between women journeyers and modernity is also reinforced by the woman smoking in ‘Dine Well by L.N.E.R’ and by the appearance of a female journeyer in the 1928 Chesterfield Cigarettes advertisement. Smoking was a particularly bold and modern activity for women in this period: as recently as the early 1900s it had been possible for women to be arrested for smoking in public in the United States of America.35 This connection between fashionable women, modernity and journeying reached a visual peak in the October 1927 cover of Vogue magazine [Figure 8] in which an ultra-fashionable woman is framed within the funnels of a steamship.36 The woman is virtually fused with the ship: the grey of her dress echoes the smoke billowing from the funnels and the colour of the ship’s body below its deck rails. Her white and orange handkerchief melds with the smoke from the ship’s funnel as it flutters in the same direction. Her red lipstick mirrors the paint on the funnels. Finally, her pale skin echoes the white paint on the rails and at the bottom of the funnels. This image suggests an almost reciprocal relationship between steamship technology, modernity and women. By depicting such a glamorous modern woman in front of a ship, it reinforces the message that these ships were one of the most notable manifestations of the modern age; by featuring a woman dressed so closely in alignment with the design of the ship, the image emphasizes that this woman is modern.

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fashion plate heroines

Figure 8 ‘Illustration of woman in cloche hat and dress waving handkerchief at ocean liner’, cover of the 15 October, 1927 issue of Vogue

Young women were again depicted journeying alone in the 1920s and 1930s. Instead of the ambiguous message this conveyed in Tissot’s work, however, these solo journeyers are celebrated as strong, competent women who are absolutely confident in navigating their journeys, which is another part of their glamorous appeal. These women’s solitary state again also emphasizes that they have been released from the cares of

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women, travel and identity daily life: none are accompanied by husbands or children. They are not harassed, busy or stressed. No indication is given of what their professional status might be; these women are women of leisure, as they were in Tissot’s work. The journey was consistently visually represented as a leisured experience between 1870 and 1940. However, while these women were modern, they also remained feminine, respectable and conventional. Their hairstyles are fashionably short, but not boyish: the ‘Eton crop’ does not appear. Ship and train companies emphasized the contemporary modern nature of women journeyers, and by association their journeys, but they did not wish to suggest that there was anything scandalous or unfeminine about these women, as this risked deterring journeyers from using their services. For the same reason, transport companies did not represent rail or ocean journeyers as openly sexual. It could be argued that ‘Dine Well by L.N.E.R.’ [Figure 9] potentially contains an erotic undertone, particularly for men, because the woman at the table is looking directly into the eyes of the viewer, as if inviting that viewer to join her, which might suggest that more than dinner was available. Yet the overall tone of this image is warm, friendly, relaxed, confident and comfortable rather than sensual.

Figure 9  ‘Dine Well by L.N.E.R.’ (1935)

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fashion plate heroines Unlike Tissot’s works, there is little ambivalence in these images. Both ship and rail companies’ representations of women journeyers are literally and figuratively one-dimensional; they are non-threatening. They do not offer a radical new interpretation of womanhood or femininity. The women’s clothes help to reinforce this message of respectability: although they are fashionably dressed, they are also formally dressed and do not display any flesh that would have been considered inappropriate. Their accessories are particularly important in creating this message, as they were frequently vital emblems of correctness and respectability.37 Almost all of the women in these advertisements are wearing hats, demonstrating that they know how to dress suitably. All of the women featured outside, in ‘The Queen of Scots Pullman’, the Cunard and Cunard-White Star posters, on the front cover of Vogue and in the Chesterfield Cigarettes advertisement, are wearing gloves, as was expected in these years.

Figure 10  ‘Express Ease’ (1923–30)

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women, travel and identity

Figure 11  Passengers in a smoking carriage, Great Western Railway (1936)

Figure 12  ‘Cunard USA-Canada’ (circa 1920)

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fashion plate heroines

Figure 13  ‘America this year by R.M.S. “Queen Mary” ’ (circa 1936)

Figure 14  Chesterfields Cigarettes advertisement (1928)

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women, travel and identity

Figure 15  Woman in second-class outside stateroom on the S.S. Aquitania (1928)

The importance to rail and ship companies of creating an at­­ mosphere of decency around their services also explains why these women are not elaborately made up. Make up was controversial in the interwar years: while a shiny nose was unacceptable, anything more than a matt-powdered face, such as obviously wearing rouge and lipstick, was deemed vulgar.38 There are hints of rouge and red lipstick in the posters for Cunard’s USA to Canada service, ‘The Queen of Scots Pullman’, ‘Dine Well by L.N.E.R’ and the Chesterfields Cigarettes advertisement, but this make up is not heavy. The attractiveness and glamour of these women also comes from their fresh-faced, natural look. Instead of sensuousness, these journeyers exude robust and wholesome healthiness. The woman in the poster promoting Cunard’s USA and Canada service is particularly vigorously healthy, with glowing skin and windswept auburn hair [Figure 12]. They are also all relaxed: the young woman in ‘Express Ease’ sits holding a rose, which additionally emphasizes the romantic nature of her journey, with no concerns, while the woman in ‘The Queen of Scots Pullman’ stands by while porters

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fashion plate heroines deal with her luggage. Transport companies consistently emphasized that women journeyers did not need to exert themselves. Everything is taken care of for them so they can concentrate on simply enjoying the journey. It is unsurprising that these journeyers exude a sense of prettiness, glamour and style rather than sensuality given the sexual morality of the decades between 1870 and 1940. Although these decades saw numerous vital changes to women’s position within society, women who gained a reputation for unconventional or inappropriate behaviour, sexual or otherwise, could still become the subject of damaging scandal, potentially causing them social disaster. The ostracism of Wallis Simpson after the revelation of her affair with Edward VIII in the 1930s was one of the more extreme and high-profile examples of the effect of breaking convention upon a woman’s reputation, as well as anti-American feeling, during these decades. Transport companies avoided any suggestion that there was any element of sexual licence on their trains and ships: an insalubrious aura around their services again might deter customers. The fictional female journeyer Visual images of women journeyers after 1900 featured a number of consistent elements: they were young, pretty, independent, healthy, middle-class and leisured, fashionably dressed and embraced modernity. Fiction, however, featured multiple, sometimes conflicting, constructions of the female journey abroad and journeyer. Train and ship journeys were represented as liberating women from oppressive and discomforting situations. Beginning with her train journey from Charing Cross, Lilia Charles’s journey to Italy in E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) gives her a (literal) escape route and the courage to break free from her deceased husband’s draconian family, which has dominated and deter­ mined her life since he died. When her brother-in-law confronts her about her subsequent engagement to an Italian, she cries out ‘For once in my life I’ll thank you to leave me alone. I’ll thank your mother too. For twelve years you’ve trained me and tortured me, and I’ll stand it no more.’39 Similarly, in A Passage to India (1924), Mrs Moore is relieved to board a liner back to England before the beginning of Aziz’s trial after Adela Quested accuses him of assaulting her at the Marabar Caves: she ‘had all she wished; she escaped the trial, the marriage, and the Hot Weather; she would return to England in comfort and distinction’.40 These journeys were again constructed as offering release from the mundanity and monotony of everyday life, suggesting that the journey

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women, travel and identity abroad was perceived to be a space of liberation. In Laurence Clarke’s 1916 Mills & Boon romance The Borrowed Liner, journeyer Agatha Pellet is bored of her life, in which she feels nothing has ever happened.41 When a mutiny occurs on her ship to South Africa, the S.S. Aruna, and the captain, crew and journeyers are forcibly disembarked, Agatha hides so that she can remain on board to experience adventure. She imagines the newspaper headlines once it is discovered she is missing: ‘SOCIETY BUD IN HANDS OF PIRATES! GIRL CAPTIVE ABOARD PIRATE CRAFT IN CHINA SEAS! PIRATE LOVES AGATHA PELLET?’42 After she is discovered by the mutineers, Agatha finally gets the excitement she sought: she is allowed to remain on board, the Aruna is subsequently renamed the Agatha Pellet and they sail to a remote island to help its inhabitants defend themselves against attacks from a rival warrior chief.43 Journeys were also constructed as a space for imagination; the journey offered women the opportunity to dream, to anticipate, often of what was to come at the end of the journey. In A Passage to India, Adela’s and Mrs Moore’s journey to India is ‘a romantic voyage across the Mediterranean and through the sands of Egypt to the harbour of Bombay’ during which Adela imagines what may await them upon their arrival and discusses some of her fears with Mrs Moore.44 Linked to this belief in the connection between the female journey and breaking with the commonplace or miserable, the journey was also constructed as an opportunity for women’s self-development, growth and emancipation. For younger women journeyers, it was used as an allegory or metaphor for the journey of life, and presented as a female Bildung. The Bildung has traditionally been seen as a male experience in which a youth moves, often through travelling abroad, towards clarity and stability of being, from being an apprentice to a more masterful level, and from youth to adulthood.45 It is a coming-of-age rite of passage. However, it has also usefully been argued that women’s travel was part of ‘the bourgeois Bildung’.46 This interpretation of the journey abroad particularly applies to those made by ship. When Rachel Vinrace leaves London to sail to South America in Virginia Woolf ’s The Voyage Out (1915) she is a naive, inexperienced and sheltered young girl.47 She lacks confidence and seems ‘more than normally incompetent’ for her age.48 She has ‘scarcely walked through a poor street, and always under the escort of father, maid, or aunts’.49 She is ignorant of basic sexual facts and unaware of her own sexuality. Her journey is a catalyst for change: she evolves further into adulthood, gaining a sense of herself as an individual, independent woman. She begins to question and challenge her entire way of thinking and how

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fashion plate heroines she has been taught to behave. She starts to conceive herself as a person: ‘The vision of her own personality, of herself as a real everlasting thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea or the wind, flashed into Rachel’s mind, and she became profoundly excited at the thought of living.’50 She also gains a sense of herself for the first time as a sexual being. The brief sojourn of Richard and Clarissa Dalloway on board her ship, the Euphrosyne, is a particular trigger for this development. Rachel is fascinated, and attracted, by Richard: she finds herself ‘curiously conscious of his presence and appearance’.51 She becomes obsessed by him and shortly before the Dalloways leave the ship they kiss, awakening in Rachel ‘a thousand feelings of which she had not been conscious before’.52 Her sexual awakening has begun, and her aunt, who accompanies her on this journey, subsequently explains to her the nature of adult heterosexual relationships for the first time. Women journeyers’ separation from everyday life was understood to sometimes profoundly alter them. The journey was also constructed as an experience that could provide clarity, self-realization and understanding at key moments in all women’s lives, regardless of their age. On her return journey to Britain from Chandrapore, after withdrawing her accusation of assault and the resultant ending of her engagement to Mrs Moore’s son Ronny, Adela Quested has a moment of revelation in A Passage to India when her ship reaches Egypt where she comes to understand what she must do next in her life: ‘the atmosphere altered. The clean sands, heaped on each side of the canal, seemed to wipe off everything that was difficult and equivocal’.53 She realizes she must get in touch with Mrs Moore’s other children and then pursue her professional ambitions. The journey was also used to symbolize the ending of one stage of a woman’s life and the beginning of another. In another Mills & Boon romance, The Good Ship Brompton Castle by Lady Bell (1915), the second journey of the S.S. Brompton Castle from Britain to South Africa ends with the marriage of heroine Hildred Lenox to hero Ralph Blantyre, marking for her the beginning of a new, exciting life. However, for Antonia, Blantyre’s cousin, that same journey marks the painful end of her long-cherished dream of marrying him.54 It is notable that the same journey is represented as having completely different meanings and importance for these women. Fictional accounts suggested that a journey had a multi­plicity of meanings for women, rather than a single, universal meaning. While the journey abroad could be constructed as an opportunity for escape, other works offered far darker understandings of it. The

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women, travel and identity journey was represented as extremely dangerous for women in such accounts. Any initial promise of escape via the journey was shown to be utterly false. Three women are murdered by other journeyers in Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (1937).55 Mrs Moore falls ill and dies on her journey back to England in A Passage to India.56 Rachel Vinrace contracts a fatal illness in South America in The Voyage Out.57 The journey could also be depicted as an experience of, or one that ended in, disappointment and misery. It was not always a space of freedom and liberation; it could also, like elements of Tissot’s works, be understood as a space of female oppression. In Mark Bennett’s A Sea-Change (1926), Alice, the lonely wife of the ship’s captain and only woman on board, is trapped in a loveless, unhappy marriage. Her husband bullies and isolates her: she tells one member of the crew ‘Oh, how he frightens me!’ she sobbed, clasping and unclasping her hands over her crumpled handkerchief. ‘He can be – oh, so kind; but when he is angry, he is terrible. And I have no one – no one to help me. Out here at sea, we are away from the world. And it’s like a prison’.58

The journey is to be escaped from in such representations, rather than providing escape.59 In Where Angels Fear to Tread, Lilia Charles’s journey of escape proves to be a false dawn: her new husband ignores her, humi­ liates her and is unfaithful to her. Finally, she dies in childbirth.60 The oppressive nature of the journey abroad, especially by sea, was also reflected in prose representations in which social mores were upheld to the detriment of women journeyers. Any hint of scandal or suggestion of impropriety surrounding a woman was depicted as highly damaging. At the beginning of her journey back to England in A Passage to India, Adela’s former servant, Antony, attempts to blackmail her by claiming that she was the lover of Fielding, a friend of Aziz. Adela has him removed from the ship but the incident creates such a scandal that ‘people did not speak to her much during the first part of the voyage’.61 The journey abroad was represented as a place in which it was extremely dangerous to become the subject of gossip. It was also constructed as psychologically challenging by some authors. By removing women from the familiar, everyday settings in which they felt comfortable, the journey was shown to create the potential for emotional upheaval and personal crisis as women found themselves detached from everything that customarily helped to sustain their sense of self. In The Voyage Out, Helen Ambrose, Rachel’s aunt, finds their second journey upriver from Santa Marina emotionally disturbing. The lush forest and vegetation along the riverbank is

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fashion plate heroines very beautiful, but also sultry and alarming. She did not like to feel herself the victim of unclassified emotions, and certainly as the launch slipped on and on, in the hot morning sun, she felt herself unreasonably moved. Whether the unfamiliarity of the forest was the cause of it, or something less definite, she could not determine.62

The journey evokes emotions and anxieties that Helen usually manages to control: she becomes preoccupied with worries about her family and the future.63 This journey removes some of her confidence and certainty about her life. The self-development and growth triggered by the journey was also represented as a difficult as well as beneficial experience, reflecting again the complexity of these representations. Rachel finds the journey upriver from Santa Marina so overwhelming that she almost loses her newfound sense of self. This journey seems unreal: she asks her new fiancé, Terence Hewet, whom she meets in Santa Marina, ‘ “Are we on the deck of a steamer on a river in South America? Am I Rachel, are you Terence?” ’64 It has been helpfully argued that this loss of self actually began during her first journey from England: the dreams Rachel has after she is kissed by Richard Dalloway on the Euphrosyne, including one in which men try to break into her cabin, are interpreted as evidence that Rachel has lost her sense of agency as men try to invade her.65 Throughout the novel there is a sense that Rachel’s self-development, ‘the adventure of consciousness’, is accompanied by a threat that the self will be overwhelmed by the stimuli of the journey and dissolve.66 This possibility comes closest to being realized on this second journey. Physically, women journeyers were again represented as young, attractive and pretty. Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train (1932), Bennett’s A Sea-Change and Forster’s A Passage to India all feature young, pretty journeyers as key characters. Linnet Ridgeway makes a dramatic entrance in Death on the Nile: a scarlet Rolls-Royce arrives in Maltonunder-Wode, from which ‘A girl [Linnet] jumped out, a girl without a hat and wearing a frock that looked (but only looked) simple. A girl with golden hair and straight autocratic features – a girl with a lovely shape.’67 Chorus girl Coral Musker is described as having ‘a kind of bright prettiness’ in Stamboul Train.68 The male protagonist of The Borrowed Liner also admires Agatha Pellet: ‘How well poised she was! How luxurious and tawny her hair!  .  .  .  a singularly attractive girl  .  .  .  She took the sunburn well – she neither freckled nor blistered. She was a bright girl – a girl burnished with sunshine.’69 As was the case with journey advertising, young women journeyers were also often presented

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women, travel and identity as fashionably dressed: Agatha Pellet ‘wore her Parisian clothes with  .  .  .   distinction’.70 However, in line with the multiple fictional constructions of the female journey outlined above, some representations created a more complex understanding of the younger female journeyer. They were also the (unfeminine) perpetrators, as well as the objects, of crime and deception on the journey. In Death on the Nile, Jacqueline de Bellefort plots Linnet Ridgeway’s murder and is also involved, along with her secret lover Simon Doyle, who tricked Linnet into marrying him, in the killing of the two other women. Similarly, in Murder on the Orient Express several journeyers conspire to murder the American Ratchett, including Mary Debenham and Mrs Hubbard.71 In Florence Riddell’s Floating Palace (1933), a charming elderly journeyer, Mrs Harrison, befriended by the novel’s heroine Christina, is revealed to be a disguised forty-five-year-old female jewellery thief.72 Within darker constructions of the journey, women were also represented as disempowered, reflecting once again that the journey was sometimes considered to be oppressive. Coral Musker shares her train compartment with a married couple in Stamboul Train, but, while the husband believes both his wife and Coral are asleep, he attempts to assault Coral: ‘The man who shared her seat put his hand cautiously on her ankle and moved it very slowly up towards her knee. All the time he watched his wife.’73 When Myatt, another journeyer on the train and Coral’s future lover, asks her why she does not challenge this behaviour, she replies ‘ “Before we’ve reached Cologne? I’m not making trouble. We’ve got to live together to Buda-Pesth.” ’ 74 Coral’s pragmatism about the fact that she cannot afford her own sleeper carriage and her poor social standing in the eyes of the other journeyers as a chorus dancer resign her to such behaviour rather than trying to challenge it. There was also a clear division in representations of women jour­ neyers according to their age. Elderly women journeyers were represented in a number of ways that contrasted poorly with young women. This division was neatly visually encapsulated by a cartoon in the December 1929 edition of the Bedford College (University of London) Magazine: a fussy old woman in Edwardian dress, carrying what appears to be a carpetbag, is booking an overseas passage at Victoria Station while a fashionably dressed young woman in a cloche hat and fur-trimmed knee-length coat waits impatiently behind her.75 This division was explored even more extensively in fiction. Some elder journeyers were portrayed as fussy and demanding, although kind and lovable. In The Good Ship Brompton Castle, Hildred

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fashion plate heroines Lenox’s aunt Lady Ainderby is fussy and frustrating: when she and Hildred are preparing to leave the Brompton Castle at Southampton after its first voyage she is ‘still in her cabin busy forgetting one or other of her things in succession and turning back with a start and an exclamation whenever she got to the door’.76 Hildred is exasperated by her, but she also ‘loved the fussy, managing, kind creature to whom she owed the wonderful experience of being taken round the world’.77 Before the revelation of her true identity in Floating Palace, elderly journeyer Mrs Harrison is portrayed as ‘a charming little creature  .  .  .  [with] blue eyes [which] seemed to hold a childlike trust  .  .  .  [and a] chubby pink face’ who convinces everyone she is ‘A sweet old thing’.78 Other such women journeyers, however, were described as physically repellent. In Murder on the Orient Express, the Russian Princess Dragomiroff is ‘one of the ugliest old ladies he [Hercule Poirot] had ever seen’, with a ‘yellow, toad-like face’.79 Unlike the journeys made by younger women, the journey was not constructed as an opportunity for self-development for elderly journeyers. Despite Lady Ainderby going on a round-the-world tour, ‘she did not, as her acquaintances and relations perhaps unreasonably expected, shed her prevalent characteristics in the places she visited’.80 This suggests that contemporaries believed that it was the point in women’s lives at which they embarked on their journeys that determined whether they found it a liberating or transformative experience: an elderly woman, whose sense of life and self was more clearly established, was considered less likely to find the journey self-revelatory than younger women journeyers. Other representations of elderly journeyers characterized them as dis­ contented with the journey, dragonish or Amazonian. In E.M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in America (1934), the Lady embarks on two ocean journeys.81 On the first journey, she meets an elderly American lady who complains that ‘her cabin is a perfectly terrible one, and she knew the moment she set foot on the ship that she was going to dislike everything on board’.82 She resents the Provincial Lady having other friends on board.83 Older women were also represented as lacking self-awareness: the same lady ‘works her way steadily through [an] eight-course dinner and tells me that she is on a very strict diet’.84 They were also depicted as extremely controlling. On her return journey, the Provincial Lady encounters a Mrs Smiley who, while the Lady is confined to her cabin by seasickness, acquires ‘complete domination’ over the others at their dining table and ‘monopolises conversation at meals’.85 She is ‘only moderately gratified’ when the Lady recovers

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women, travel and identity and boasts ‘that she herself has kept her feet throughout’.86 Princess Dragomiroff is similarly domineering: at one point in Murder on the Orient Express she addresses the dining-car staff ‘in a clear, courteous, but completely autocratic tone’ as she gives extremely precise instructions about the food and drink she requires.87 These women were also represented as rude and tactless. Mrs Smiley takes a leading role in organizing ship entertainments and attempts to force the Provincial Lady into giving a reading at a concert, but when the Lady refuses she responds, ‘No one will be critical, in fact as likely as not they won’t listen, but it will give pleasure’.88 She also has an exaggeratedly high opinion of herself, telling the Lady that ‘she never grudges a little trouble if it means happiness for others’.89 This again demonstrates her lack of self-awareness: she is actually motivated by a need both to dominate others and to be the centre of attention rather than to gratify them. Finally, elderly women journeying alone were represented as sad and tragic; they were objects of pity and melancholy. Age profoundly altered the significance of journeying alone: to be a young woman journeying solo was acceptable and even admirable; to be travelling alone in old age was desperate. These journeyers frantically search out companion­ ship or love: in Floating Palace, the older ladies are ‘a little tragic  .  .  .   wondering if this cruise would bring them that which all their other travels had refused  .  .  .  the chance of comradeship in the solitary years looming ahead  .  .  .  perhaps even of love’.90 They were also dull, reduced to the same repetitive activities and endless gossiping: they ‘played bridge, held parties in their cabins  .  .  .  quarrelled – and gossiped! Oh, how they gossiped!’91 They are also snobbish: they condemn one woman because her wealth has come from trade – the production of biscuits.92 A plethora of contradictory popular understandings of women’s journeys abroad and female journeyers co-existed in the period between 1870 and 1940, some straightforward, others more complex. Some of these understandings acknowledged the potential ambiguity of women’s journeys abroad: experiences that offered the new or a chance for personal development could also undermine them and create psychological crisis. Others, particularly those that were visual and those from the 1920s and 1930s, reveal many of the characteristics that were publically sanctioned as making a woman a successful journeyer who did not transgress social expectations of women: youth, glamour, fashionableness, respectability, healthiness, a middle-class background and being non-sexual. The theme of the perfect female journeyer was pursued further during this period in multiple works of etiquette, which are explored in the next chapter.

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fashion plate heroines Notes 1 Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool Library (hereafter SCA, ULL), Cunard Archive, PR6/19, Joanna, ‘Pleasure Cruising From a Fresh Angle: Conversations, Observations, and Ruminations’, White Star Magazine: The Organ of the White Star Line (hereafter WSM), XI:9 (May 1934), 227. 2 Ibid. 3 SCA, ULL, Cunard Archive, PR6/4, WSM, VI:1 (September 1928), 23; PR6/6, WSM, III:63 (November 1928), 7; PR6/15, WSM, VII:2 (October 1929), 39; PR6/2, WSM, VIII:2 (October 1930), 37; PR6/2, WSM, VIII:9 (May 1931), 255; & PR6/8, WSM, V:10 (January 1929), 143. 4 SCA, ULL, Cunard Archive, PR5/1, Cunard Magazine, I:12 (December 1918), 2; PR5/8, CM, XII:1 (January 1924), 16; and PR5/10, CM, XIV:1 (January 1925), 19. 5 L. Coons and A. Varias, Tourist Third Cabin: Steamship Travel in the Interwar Years (New York, 2003), p. 140. 6 Ibid. 7 J. Simmons, ‘Railways, hotels and tourism in Great Britain 1839 –1914’, Journal of Contemporary History, 19:2 (April 1984), 217. 8 Coons and Varias, Tourist Third Cabin, p. 140. 9 M. Warner, Tissot (London, 1982), p. 9. 10 Ibid. 11 Jacques-Joseph Tissot, Boarding the Yacht (1873), private collection; The Last Evening (1874), Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London; The Ball on Shipboard (circa 1874), Tate Britain; Portsmouth Dockyard, or, How I Could Be Happy with Either (1877), Tate Britain; and The Gallery of the H.M.S Calcutta (1877), Tate Britain. Tissot also produced, amongst others, Young Lady in a Boat (Jeune Femme en bateau) in 1870, On the River (A La Rivière) in 1871, On the Thames, a Heron (circa 1871–72), The Captain and the Mate (1873), The Emigrants (1873), The Return from the Boating Trip (1873), Waiting for the Ferry at the Falcon Tavern (circa 1874), Waiting for the Ferry (circa 1878), By Water (Waiting at Dockside) (circa 1881– 82) and On the Thames (circa 1882), all of which featured women. 12 M. Warner, ‘Comic and aesthetic: James Tissot in the context of British art and taste’, in K. Matyjarszkiewicz (ed.), James Tissot (Oxford, 1984), p. 36. 13 C. Wood, Tissot: The Life and Work of Jacques Joseph Tissot (London, 1998), p. 83. See also M. Wentworth, James Tissot (Oxford, 1984), p. 98. 14 Wood, Tissot, pp. 64, 66. 15 Sir M. Levey, ‘The ambiguous art of Tissot’, in Matyjarszkiewicz (ed.), Tissot, p. 8. 16 Ibid., p. 9. 17 Wentworth, Tissot, p. 4. 18 Wood, Tissot, pp. 67– 8. 19 Jacques-Joseph Tissot, Emigrants (circa early 1870s). The original is now lost, but a replica is in a private collection in New York. 20 Jacques-Joseph Tissot, Waiting for the Train (Willesden Junction) (circa 1871–73), oil on panel, Collection of Dunedin Art Gallery, New Zealand. 21 Drummond, ‘The impact of the railway’, p. 249. 22 R. Church, ‘Advertising consumer goods in nineteenth-century Britain: reinterpretations’, Economic History Review, 53:4 (2000), 640.

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women, travel and identity 23 P. Walker Laird, ‘The challenge of exhibiting historical advertisements’, American Quarterly, 43:3 (1991), 465. 24 Ibid. 25 Jules-Alexandre Grün, ‘Course de canots à moteur à Monaco’ (circa 1900). 26 National Railway Museum/Science and Society Picture Library (hereafter NRM/ SSPL), Image No. 10459944, London and North Western Railway, Female passengers in a L.N.W.R. dining carriage (circa 1905). 27 NRM/SSPL, Image No. 10170890, London and North Eastern Railway, ‘Express Ease’ (1923–30). 28 Cunard Line Ltd, Cunard-White Star, ‘America this Year by R.M.S. “Queen Mary” ’ (circa 1936) and Cunard Line Ltd, ‘Cunard USA-Canada’ (circa 1920). 29 NRM/SSPL, Image No. 10172834, The Pullman Company, ‘The Queen of Scots Pullman’ (circa 1930). 30 NRM/SSPL, Image No. 10173478, London and North Eastern Railway, ‘Dine Well by L.N.E.R.’ (1935). 31 NRM/SSPL, Image No. 10323266, Great Western Railway, Passengers in a smoking carriage (1936) and SCA, ULL, D42/PR2/1/17/D52, Woman in second-class outside stateroom on the S.S. Aquitania (1928). 32 SCA, ULL, Cunard Archive, PR6/6, Chesterfields Cigarettes advertisement, WSM, VI:3 (November 1928), xiii. 33 For further discussion of the Flapper see L. Moore, Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties (London, 2009), pp. 61–78. 34 D. Bond, Glamour in Fashion (Enfield, 1992), p. 12. 35 Moore, Anything Goes, p. 65. 36 Vogue, ‘Illustration of woman in cloche hat and dress waving handkerchief at ocean liner’, front cover designed by Benito, 15 October 1927. 37 C. Horwood, Keeping Up Appearances: Fashion and Class between the Wars (Stroud, 2005), p. 121. 38 Ibid., pp. 66 – 8. 39 E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), reprinted by Penguin (London, 2001), p. 44. 40 E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924), reprinted by Penguin (London, 2005), p. 195. 41 L. Clarke, The Borrowed Liner: Narrating the High Adventures of Miss Pellet of Philadelphia, Peter King, and the Lady in the Little Gold Trousers (London, 1916), p. 9. 42 Ibid., p. 94. 43 Ibid., pp. 68, 86, 243–54. 44 Forster, Passage to India, pp. 22, 30. 45 S. Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women and the Novel of Development (New York, 1993), pp. ix, 1, 2, 5 –7. 46 Melman, Women’s Orients, p. 27. 47 V. Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915), reprinted by Oxford University Press (Oxford, 2001). 48 Ibid., p. 15. 49 Ibid., p. 67. 50 Ibid., p. 90. 51 Ibid., p. 56.

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fashion plate heroines 52 Ibid., pp. 80, 84. 53 Forster, Passage to India, p. 250. The division of this journey into pre- and post-clarity stages is mirrored by its geographical division: Adela’s journey from India to Egypt is confused, complicated and unclear; the final stage from Egypt to Britain resolves these complications and provides clarity. 54 Lady Bell, The Good Ship Brompton Castle (London, 1915), pp. 327– 8, 356. 55 A. Christie, Death on the Nile (1937), reprinted by HarperCollins (London, 2001), pp. 187– 92, 306 –10, 328 – 9. 56 Forster, Passage to India, p. 231. 57 Woolf, Voyage Out, pp. 381– 412. 58 M. Bennett, A Sea-Change (London, 1926), p. 65. 59 Alice finds escape through her romance with the novel’s central protagonist, George Merriman. The journey experience was understood to sometimes change over its course, in this case from one of misery to one of joy and hope for the future. 60 Forster, Angels, pp. 60, 63– 4, 69. 61 Forster, Passage to India, p. 250. 62 Woolf, Voyage Out, pp. 323– 4. 63 Ibid., p. 324. 64 Ibid., pp. 336 –7. 65 K. Lawrence, Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (Ithaca, 1994), pp. 162–3. 66 Ibid., p. 168. 67 Christie, Death on the Nile, p. 9. 68 G. Greene, Stamboul Train (London, 1932), p. 24. 69 Clarke, Borrowed Liner, p. 54. 70 Ibid., p. 9. 71 A. Christie, Murder on the Orient Express (1934), reprinted by HarperCollins (London, 2001), pp. 343–5. 72 F. Riddell, Floating Palace (London, 1933), p. 253. 73 Greene, Stamboul Train, p. 24. 74 Ibid., pp. 25 – 6. 75 RHUL Archives, Untitled cartoon, Bedford College (University of London) Magazine, No. 25 (December 1929), p. 12. 76 Bell, Good Ship, p. 2. 77 Ibid., p. 3. 78 Riddell, Palace, pp. 70 –1. 79 Christie, Murder on the Orient Express, p. 39. 80 Bell, Good Ship, p. 6. 81 E.M. Delafield, The Provincial Lady in America (1934), reprinted in the omnibus The Diary of a Provincial Lady (London, 2001 edn), pp. 282– 6, 362–70. For another such representation of a dragonish woman journeyer, see Lady Rhonda Blantrye in Riddell’s Floating Palace. She is opinionated, prejudiced, overbearing and snobbish. 82 Delafield, Provincial Lady in America, p. 284. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., p. 367. 86 Ibid.

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women, travel and identity 87 Christie, Murder on the Orient Express, pp. 39 – 40. 88 Delafield, Provincial Lady, p. 368. 89 Ibid. 90 Riddell, Floating Palace, p. 29. 91 Ibid., p. 140. 92 Ibid., p. 141.

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3 No nice girl swears: advice, etiquette and expectation

T

o analyse the thrill of voyaging for anyone who has never been away is [a] tough  .  .  .  assignment,’ wrote William M. Strong in his 1938 advice book for budget travellers and journeyers.1 Strong emphasized the journey’s transformative effect: ‘No one can have one of life’s big experiences without being to some degree altered by it. The change that is visible in some people after their first trip abroad is little less than startling.’2 In her 1937 etiquette guide Can I Help You?, Viola Tree constructed a vision of the journey as liberating: as they ‘shake the dust of England off [their] shoes’ journeyers imagine that on the ships carrying them across the seas ‘will perhaps be freedom’.3 Many previous histories of women’s travel posit it as a liberating experience which freed them from the shackles of daily life. Strong’s and Tree’s comments suggest that the journey abroad between 1870 and 1940 could also be understood as a form of emancipating female travel. The relationship between the journey and liberation was more complex, however. Throughout the period etiquette writers also sought to frame these journeys in a complex behavioural code, potentially greatly restricting the extent to which both women journeyers could experience liberation and the journey could be considered freeing. Victorian society has been characterized as a product of discipline, codes of conducts and sets of rules: ‘rule-following provided the pattern for the Victorians’ processes of thinking about themselves, for their feelings about their circumstances, and for the environment which made possible many of their achievements’.4 Etiquette was one iteration of this discipline that became enormously influential: etiquette books achieved an immediate and lasting popularity upon their first appearance in the 1830s.5 It cannot be assumed, however, that journey etiquette reveals the truth of how women journeyed: there was no precise correlation between etiquette rules and actual behaviour.6 It is difficult to assess how much

‘

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women, travel and identity direct influence this etiquette had upon women as none of the women studied here indicated that they read any etiquette books before their journeys or took any with them. It is equally possible that they read these books before their journeys, but chose not to record this, or that they read them during their journeys, but again chose not to discuss them in their writings, or that they did not read them at all. Journey etiquette may have had no sway over women, hence the need to publish books about it, or it may have been an embedded discourse of which they were aware but did not comment upon. What journey etiquette does clearly illuminate, however, are the detailed expectations that surrounded women journeyers; the qualities that were again publicly considered to constitute the proper feminine journeyer. A close study of these books does much to reveal what was deemed suitable in women journeyers, and these expectations were some of the most gendered elements of the journey abroad. Eleven of the books examined in this chapter were published in London, but two were published in America: John Gould’s Outward Bound (New York, 1905 and 1913) and Vogue’s Book of Etiquette (New York, 1935).7 Two books were published in both countries, with revisions made to the British edition: Strong’s How to Travel without Being Rich, which was edited and revised for the British audience by Fletcher Allen in 1938, and Emily Post’s Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage (New York and London, 1937).8 Combining British and foreign publications reveals the universal expectations of female journeyers circulating in contemporary society. Etiquette matters: expertise, appropriateness and public space Most journey advice and etiquette was proffered for journeys undertaken for pleasure. Most writers offered far more advice about journeys abroad by ship than by rail. Ship journeys usually featured a greater variety of social occasions, including dinners, fancy-dress dances and balls. Journeying by sea, particularly on the largest ocean liners, also exposed women to scrutiny from far more of their fellow journeyers because they moved within spaces that held a much larger number of journeyers than a railway carriage could. Writers accordingly deemed it necessary to provide more detailed guidance for female maritime journeyers. However, there were a number of common themes within the etiquette of rail and ship journeys abroad, including politeness, modesty and restraint. Journey etiquette books functioned at one level as alternative, behaviourfocused versions of the Baedeker and Murray travel handbooks that were

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no nice girl swears also enormously popular in this period. While these books did not achieve the cultural resonance of the latter, they shared the aim of providing as much information as was necessary in this case to ensure that their readers’ journeys were efficient, rewarding and free of difficulty. In the preface to the 1889 guide Hints to Lady Travellers at Home and Abroad, Lillias Campbell-Davidson proclaimed ‘It is to offer a few suggestions as to the adoption of such means as may render our journeying, more pleasant, more comfortable, and more conducive to health, profit, and enjoyment, that this little book has been compiled’.9 Similarly, in the preface to Outward Bound (1913), John H. Gould explained that his ‘aim is to furnish such information as may be helpful in arranging an itinerary, and also to blaze the way for a tour around the world’.10 Baedeker and Murray handbooks attempted to assume a patriarchal persona as part of their authority over travel.11 Etiquette books sought a similar position of authority over how the journey should be performed, often based on the grounds that the author’s personal experience of journeying gave them an expertise that should, and could, not be ignored. Lillias Campbell-Davidson elaborated that ‘The advice which it [her guide] contains is entirely founded upon practical experience and observation, and the writer has endeavoured to make her suggestions useful to women of all means and condition’.12 John Gould also claimed that ‘From long experience in travelling the author feels eminently qualified to teach the “ropes”’.13 Gould insisted that following his instructions was paramount: ‘without a full knowledge of certain details the novice loses half the pleasures of the trip’.14 Etiquette writers proffered two other reasons why it was important to follow their advice. Firstly, they emphasized that ships and trains were public spaces.15 Emily Post instructed women in 1937 that ‘You behave as you would anywhere in public’ when at sea.16 Vogue’s Book of Etiquette outlined the complex nature of the ship’s environment: ‘There is an atmosphere on board ship not duplicated anywhere else in the world. It is a far less formal atmosphere than that of a hotel or even of a train; and yet shipboard traditions are as rigid as those of a state court.’17 They then explained that, as with other public spaces in this period, a code of manners operated within them. Lillias Campbell-Davidson advised that ‘There are certain unwritten laws which obtain in travelling, and which are as carefully observed by well-bred people as though they were the ordinary code of good society’.18 However, although ships and trains were considered public spaces, the physically enclosed, contained nature of ships and trains was the other basis upon which etiquette writers claimed women must follow

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women, travel and identity their instructions. The 1879 guide How to Travel explained ‘There are few places where the looks and manners of the company are more minutely scanned than on shipboard’.19 This scrutiny could be intense because passengers are brought so closely into contact with each other, and confined to so small a neighbourhood, or, rather, so many neighbours are crowded into so small a space, that all their sayings and doings are noticed with unusual attention by those who are well enough to regard anything but themselves.20

What wider society considered appropriate behaviour must therefore be observed at all times. Behaviour that was too informal was to be avoided. Alice Leone-Moat warned women in No Nice Girl Swears (1933) to ‘Consider a ship as you would a hotel and don’t appear in the public rooms in pyjamas or a negligee’.21 Decorum and respectability had to be maintained, echoing the elegant, proper, decent image of women journeyers promoted by transport companies. By adhering to their guidance on dress, demeanour and conversation, etiquette writers suggested women journeyers could avoid becoming the subject of damaging gossip that could lead to social ostracism. Such arguments, of course, also provided another justification for the publication of these books. Functionality The advice given to women journeyers was extensive and often extremely precise. It was partly practical and functional. Outward Bound advised on what items to take to maintain personal appearance and health and, on ocean journeys, to prevent seasickness; on what it considered to be essential items; and on what type of luggage to take.22 The list of required medicines included: vials of cholera medicine, mouth washes and healing lotions, medicine for coughs and colds, brandy, etc. Also seidlitz powders, quinine pills, cathartic pills, camphor, vaseline, etc. A hot water bag should not be omitted.23

Viola Tree provided a detailed list of the clothes needed both for the journey and for excursions: Dark blue coat and skirt. Dark blue jumpers, white jumpers, red jumpers. Thin tweed overcoat. Thick tweed overcoat. Grey flannel coat and skirt (for medium climate).

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no nice girl swears Drill coat and skirt, or crêpe de Chine if finances permit. Cyclamen or light blue scarves like the film stars. Dark blue trousers for cruises in small boats, bathing, or climbing expeditions (not becoming if the waist is over twenty-nine [inches]). Four pairs of good shoes (difficult to buy abroad). Two pairs of ‘plimsolls’ – such comfort. One pair of black satin evening shoes. One pair green, and one of red sandals  .  .  . Two washable dressing-gowns, one dark, one light. Four shirts for the elaborate ship or tropical or American laundress.24

Others provided information about how journey transport functioned on a daily basis. How to Travel explained in 1879 that women on ship journeys ‘have had half-an-hour allowed them to make their toilette (from 3.30 to 4 p.m.), and may, therefore, be expected to make their appearance punctually, and becomingly attired’ for dinner.25 It outlined the schedule of meals and what women could expect to be served during some of them: tea, toast and fruit or other light food at 6 a.m.; breakfast, including hot dishes, cold meats, jellies, fruit and wines, at 9 a.m.; lunch of cakes, fruit and wine at 12; dinner at 4 p.m.; and, finally, tea at 6 p.m.26 Outward Bound explained when dining tables were allotted and how to discover the times of meals, and advised booking a table the moment journeyers boarded their ships.27 Gould also described the layout of the ocean liner and the purpose of each room.28 Vogue’s Book of Etiquette advised women that on ships Luggage is brought to one’s stateroom, and usually with astonishing promptness. But it is of the greatest importance that each piece be clearly marked in advance with name and cabin number, on the tags provided by the steamship company for this purpose. Getting a lost piece of luggage out of the hold is a tedious business.29

The importance of being inconspicuous Yet even while it gave women helpful knowledge about the practicalities of journeying, this kind of information could be restrictive. How to Travel gave strict instructions about when women should be seen in ships’ most public spaces: ‘In the morning, they should not be seen on deck before 8 o’clock, or before the gentlemen who have been lounging about in undress have retired.’30 This was a key tension within journey etiquette: while it provided women with information that enabled them to journey successfully, it could also restrict their freedom to behave however they

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women, travel and identity personally wished, in this case seeking to restrict their freedom of movement on ships. Indeed, many writers suggested that the ultimate goal for women was to be virtually invisible. Any desire for self-expression that broke social convention was to be suppressed; any action that drew the attention of others should be avoided. Alice Leone-Moat argued that ‘The main object  .  .  .  is to remain inconspicuous at all times’.31 Vogue’s Book of Etiquette elaborated how to achieve this ideal: They [journeyers] never wear clothes that by cut or color draw attention to the wearer; even if they are traveling in a private [rail] car, people of good taste dress simply. They do not make unnecessary noise, nor do they talk so that strangers may overhear either details of their private lives or their opinions in general.32

Consideration for others was the greatest priority: inconspicuousness was achieved by putting the needs of other journeyers first. Journey etiquette thus expanded beyond practicality to emphasize the key principles that should shape journey behaviour. Politeness and courtesy: identifying oneself as a lady journeyer Commensurate with the belief that the needs of other journeyers should come before women’s own was etiquette writers’ emphasis throughout the period on the importance of maintaining the highest standards of courtesy and politeness. Lillias Campbell-Davidson advised in 1889 that ‘A little civility goes a long way’.33 She believed that ‘There is certainly something very agreeable in the Continental habit of exchanging bows with every stranger who enters or leaves one’s railway carriage’.34 Lady Troubridge wrote in the second volume of her 1926 Book of Etiquette that ‘Although the rule of social etiquette touching formal introduction is relaxed on board ship to the extent of permitting the passengers to talk to one another, there is no excuse for lack of courtesy’.35 This politeness again centred upon showing the utmost consideration for other journeyers. Emily Post wrote in the 1928 edition of Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage that ‘To do nothing that can either annoy or offend the sensibilities of others, sums up the principal rules for conduct under all circumstances’.36 The expectation that women would always be polite was codified into specific rules. Vogue’s Book of Etiquette emphasized the importance of acknowledging going-away gifts promptly: ‘Letters of thanks can be written on the steamer or the train; on a ship, anything important in

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no nice girl swears the way of a message can be sent back with the pilot.’37 Lady Troubridge instructed that on ships It is  .  .  .  very bad form to use some one else’s deck chair, their books, or their cushions, without having first requested permission to do so. It is also impolite to speak in loud tones, or to read aloud where it would disturb others who are taking a little nap or reading.38

On trains, The woman in a railway carriage should never sacrifice the comfort of the other people around her to her own. It is exceedingly discourteous to insist upon having a window open when you know that others object, even though they are all men.39

Vogue’s Book of Etiquette advised that ‘On short train journeys, everyone is entitled to complete privacy, and to try to draw one’s neighbor into conversation is inconsiderate’.40 Women were encouraged to make a conscious effort to ensure their behaviour accommodated the needs of others even if they were suffering themselves: How to Travel explained in 1879 that ‘It is advisable for every lady on shipboard to endeavour to make herself as agreeable as she can, and not to suppose that all her “whims and oddities” will be excused because she is suffering “the pains and penalties of the sea [seasickness]” ’.41 The standard of behaviour women journeyers were expected to observe was that of the highest orders of British society, reflecting the strong influence socio-economic class had on journey etiquette and expectations of journeyers. To Lady Troubridge, ‘It is good nature, courtesy, and an easy adaptation to unexpected circumstances that mark the lady and gentleman in travelling’.42 Through proper, polite behaviour, the female journeyer showed her superior status as a ‘lady’ journeyer, and distinguished herself from vulgar and, by implication, lower-order journeyers, as ‘An ill-bred person’ was known by their ‘selfishness and discourtesy’.43 This distinction between genteel and coarse journeyers was also another variation of contemporary concern to distinguish the authentic traveller from the inauthentic tourist. This emphasis on echoing the behaviour of the upper orders reflected etiquette’s roots as an enabler of social advancement.44 Some historians argue that leisure and travel also enabled social mobility during this period: from the early decades of the twentieth century, it is claimed, Britons ‘moved up a class’ on holiday, exchanging their everyday habits for the clothes, food, spending patterns, resorts and recreations of the

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women, travel and identity class above them.45 Journey etiquette attempted to help women to ‘move up’ the social order by showing them how to appropriate the behaviour of those journeyers of a higher social status. Women’s role as social arbiters was extremely important in British society during this period: mistresses of large households, for example, were responsible for organizing balls and dinner-parties and other social events.46 It was expected that women would continue this domestic function on train and ship journeys abroad: it was deemed a critical obligation for women to socialize willingly with their fellow journeyers, particularly on longer journeys. Alice Leone-Moat explained that women would have to interact with other journeyers even if it was not their personal preference: ‘As the rules which govern speaking to strangers on land don’t hold at sea, it makes life difficult for anyone wishing privacy. It is taken for granted that your neighbour on deck will speak to you.’47 Similarly, Vogue’s Book of Etiquette made it clear that women would ‘invariably’ end up talking to the people next to them on deck or at their dining table since ‘to sit coldly and regally aloof for anything from five days to five weeks or months is merely laughable’.48 Women were still expected to arrange social entertainments: How to Travel (1879) suggested that ‘a lady may propose or promote many pleasant little amusements and occupations, such as playing children’s games on deck or taking a part in chess and backgammon in the cabin’.49 There were some differences between the etiquette of politeness in everyday life and on the journey, however. Formal rules about visiting do not appear to have been replicated on ships and trains. None of the women studied here recorded paying formal calls or leaving and receiving cards. More importantly, the duties being social arbiters entailed on the journey abroad were considerably reduced compared to home. Women journeyers were not usually solely responsible for organizing large meals, dinners or balls, which in Britain entailed elaborate planning of whom to invite, the seating arrangement, the menu and decor.50 Journey etiquette was elaborate, but not always as elaborate as the etiquette of home. Interacting with male journeyers Within this etiquette of journey sociability, there was considerable focus on encounters between men and women. This reflected wider concerns about the morality of the journey: the fear that, away from the observation and proper influence of their fellow citizens at home, male and female journeyers might abandon the law of appropriateness in their relations, leading to an unsuitable flirtation or romance. John Gould

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no nice girl swears enthused about ‘those delightful promenades on a deck on a moonlight night! Was ever a conjunction more fatal for an innocent flirtation? Cupid marks the spot and the scene for his own.’51 For most etiquette writers, however, the relationship between male and female journeyers was constructed as one that should be polite and even friendly, but also distant, formal and correct. Although it was never written, it was clear that these encounters should never become sexual; extra-marital intercourse was the ultimate silent fear. It was expected that male journeyers would conform to an ideal of gentlemanliness. Alice Leone-Moat advised that a man who approached a woman on the promenade deck or in the smoking room ‘shows a certain lack of breeding’ and that women were not obliged to respond to such overtures enthusiastically.52 However, responsibility for maintaining propriety within male–female interaction was predominantly placed upon women jouneyers throughout the years between 1870 and 1940. How to Travel stated in 1879 that during ship journeys ‘To receive the attentions of strange gentlemen on board is only permissible to the extent of procuring you a camp stool, or assisting you from the deck to the saloon’.53 It sternly warned that ‘To take the arm of one [male journeyer] and promenade the deck, though by no means an uncommon practice, is reprehensible’.54 Alice Leone-Moat advised in 1933, ‘in the evening don’t sit alone in the ballroom unless you’re in the mood to be picked up by every stray man in the place’.55 Women were expected to be aware of the consequences of unsuitable behaviour towards and with men. While etiquette writers never explicitly depicted these consequences reaching a point where women were in serious physical or sexual danger, or where they might voluntarily succumb to a man’s advances, thereby endangering their reputation, because such concerns could not and would not be printed by publishers, they were shown to considerably mar the pleasure of their journeys and any subsequent travels. How to Travel stated that the consequence of prome­ nading with a strange man was that ‘It will encourage him to renew an acquaintance on shore, which you may not find agreeable’.56 Towards the end of the period, however, writers did begin to hint at the graver dangers other journeyers could pose. Alice Leone-Moat cautioned ‘On no account permit a person whom you have just met to go with you to your cabin, even with the ostensible purpose of leaving a package or even a book. And at night always lock your door, even if you’ve never done it before in your life.’57 Women were to avoid becoming too familiar with strange men, but the rules altered somewhat if women happened to journey with men

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women, travel and identity they had met before. In these cases, women could be more friendly and familiar. Leone-Moat explained that ‘A girl who happens to be traveling on the same ship with a man she knows need not hesitate to share a table with him or have his deck chair placed next to hers’.58 Similarly, Lady Troubridge wrote that ‘if a man and a woman who have met just once before, and who are therefore only slight acquaintances, find that they are travelling to the same place at the same time, they may for company’s sake elect to travel together’.59 It was even occasionally suggested that in this circumstance women could abandon their concern about the scrutiny of other journeyers: ‘The other passengers will probably die of curiosity wondering what their relationship is and will be certain they are traveling in sin, but we wouldn’t worry about that!’60 Taste, style and practicality In the May 1934 White Star Magazine, ‘Joanna’ claimed that ‘Even the fashion plate heroines become human beings on a cruise, for the simple reason that clothes matter so little’.61 Yet the detailed advice given in etiquette books as to what women should wear and their general personal appearance throughout the years between 1870 and 1940 indicates that her argument was far from accurate. Clothing and personal appearance were considered key ways in which women journeyers expressed their femininity, and etiquette writers accordingly put a particular emphasis on controlling them. Women journeying by ship received particularly precise instructions on how to dress. It varied according to both the occasion and the duration of the journey: How to Travel explained that ‘At dinner, on short voyages, you are not expected to make any elaborate toilette’, but more formal dress was required ‘On longer voyages [where] the dinner is more ceremonious, being after the fashion of that at a first-class hotel’.62 There was considerable continuity in the etiquette that surrounded dressing for dinner during the period. In 1889, Lillias Campbell-Davidson wrote that ‘on most sea-voyages a certain amount of change of costume is expected for the evening’.63 Four decades later, Alice Leone-Moat advised that ‘You always dress for dinner’ in No Nice Girl Swears.64 A sober, plain, sensible, restrained style that expressed taste, elegance and modesty was encouraged when dressing, revealing that the femininity idealized in journey etiquette was that which valued simplicity and restraint rather than showiness. Dressing too elaborately was vulgar, and women would again not be considered lady journeyers if they did. How to Travel warned that

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no nice girl swears If  .  .  .  you are perpetually changing your dress, appearing in new colours every day, and endeavouring to attract attention, you will be regarded as a vulgar woman who has seen nothing of the world, whom it is desirable to avoid, or the walking advertisement of some advertising dressmaker of the East-end of London.65

Lillias Campbell-Davidson advised in 1889 that ‘A gentlewoman’s dress will always be simple and inconspicuous out of doors, and more especially amid the hard usage and inevitable grime of travel will striking colours and noticeable styles of cut be out of place, and therefore to be avoided’.66 Alice Leone-Moat wrote that women should carry the same simplicity that marks your day-time clothes into the ones you wear for evening. Very décolleté creations of tulle or spangles look ridiculous and make one wonder whether the people [who] wear them haven’t any other place in which to show them off.67

Vogue’s Book of Etiquette reiterated that ‘For a woman to wear a conspicuous or elaborate gown’ at dinner ‘would be in poor taste’.68 Women’s simplicity and restraint were to be demonstrated firstly through the volume of clothing they took on their journeys. How to Travel complained that ‘One of the great plagues of travel is the preposterous quantity of luggage which ladies, as a rule, insist upon taking with them’.69 It insisted that ‘it is not at all necessary to take with you your whole wardrobe to persuade people that you are a respectable – nay, let us say, genteel – person’.70 William Miller also advised in his 1879 guide Wintering on the Riviera that ‘Ladies ought to travel with the least possible quantity of [clothing] changes’.71 The advice on how much clothing women took with them remained consistent through the remainder of the period. John Gould stated in 1913, What to wear becomes an important consideration when planning a tour, especially for a lady. She can, however, make the tour ‘Around the World’ with one or two travelling costumes, a black silk dress, and a few separate waists. These are enough for any contingency.72

To take a large amount of luggage containing numerous outfits and changes of clothing was yet again common and unladylike. These strictures illuminate how every aspect of their appearance was considered to reveal the nature of women journeyers’ femininity. This placed women in a potentially perilous position: if the nature of their femininity was expressed in every item they took on their journeys, it was potentially very easy for them to fail to meet the expectation of what journey femininity should be by an action as simple as carrying too much luggage. Journey

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women, travel and identity etiquette suggests that women had to proceed with great care if they wished to journey without incurring censure from others. The emphasis on dressing modestly was combined with practicality. Alice Leone-Moat advised that ‘A pair of low-heeled shoes should always be included in the luggage, as it is difficult, not to say dangerous, to walk the decks on high heels if the ship is rolling or pitching’.73 Despite the image transport companies attempted to create in their advertising, etiquette writers recognized that a journey abroad was not always an experience of unalloyed glamour. However, they insisted that the difficulty of changing environmental conditions could be overcome by the careful selection of clothes. Lady Troubridge recommended that A dark tailor-made skirt with a light blouse or jumper, or in hot weather a thin grey or dust-coloured dress, is in excellent taste, especially when worn with a small hat. Anything startling should be avoided. Every woman wishes to arrive at the end of a long journey looking neat and tidy. This is impossible if she wears delicate fabrics that get crushed, or, say a large hat with feathers which naturally get smothered with dust.74

In addition to being inconspicuous, the ideal woman journeyer was also she who, by appearing as freshly groomed and dressed at the end of her journey as she had done at the beginning, appeared as if she had not journeyed at all. Women were also expected to maintain a high standard of general personal grooming, similar to that they kept at home. John Gould’s list of items to be taken on the journey included some which enabled journeyers to maintain the refined appearance of their daily lives: ‘some face powder, glove and shoe buttons, button-hook, and other odds and ends’.75 Viola Tree argued that in general appearance, ‘My feeling is that the choice should be very neat and shipshape’.76 She advised ‘on landing  .  .  .  have your hair nicely done by the coiffeur whom you will find on every ship’.77 Alice Leone-Moat agreed ‘You must look neat’.78 Conflict and contradiction Yet for all its apparent certainties, journey etiquette was replete with contradictions and conflicts, particularly relating to dress and sociability. While women were expected to be sociable as this was polite, journey etiquette emphasized the necessity to maintain restraint when interacting with other journeyers. Certain conversational areas were taboo. The mode of transport itself sometimes dictated which topics were prohibited: Lady Troubridge wrote ‘It should be remembered that the railway train

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no nice girl swears is a public place, and therefore it is not correct to discuss family affairs or talk loudly about mutual friends or acquaintances’.79 Other topics were prohibited by the familiar stricture to be considerate and tactful towards fellow journeyers – another manifestation of the need to be polite: women should talk, but only about ‘safe’ topics. When at sea, How to Travel told women ‘Avoid such national allusions as may give offence to any foreigners who may be on board’.80 It was also important to refrain from argument, no matter the degree of provocation: If you find that any of them are in the habit of sneering at your own country, or speaking of it disrespectfully, repress your resentment, resort to no recrimination, but refrain from further conversation with the person, and leave him to the gentlemen.81

Female journeyers were expected to conform to a conservative, traditional ideal of genteel and pleasant womanhood. In conversations with their fellow journeyers, their role was not to be opinionated, argumentative or free speaking; instead they were expected to listen to what was said to them with deference and interest regardless of what they thought. Such instructions reveal how women journeyers’ behaviour, and femininity, were again largely expected not to be different from that of home, but conservative and conformist. Yet awareness and maintenance of decorum and politeness was not to be taken to extremes. Vogue’s Book of Etiquette warned that women should not be ‘overmodest’.82 Women ‘must behave as the etiquette of ship or train  .  .  .  demands that [they] behave; but people who are prim can never find pleasure in traveling, no matter how religiously they obey the rules of etiquette’.83 They should not ‘make too much of the difficulties of privacy in a public place’, such as the chance of running into a fellow journeyer in a state of undress, because it was ‘neither sensible nor dignified’.84 Women journeyers were expected to balance maintaining a suitable degree of decorum in their interaction with fellow journeyers with not shirking their social obligations. Some etiquette writers believed that by dressing plainly and sensibly women would appear to be more authentic journeyers. How to Travel advised: ‘If you appear plainly attired, attired so that no one thinks of observing your costume’ you would ‘be thought a sensible girl or woman, who, if she has never been abroad before, has something of a traveller’s instinct’.85 The belief that women journeyers could forge identities as competent journeyers through dressing modestly and simply was the antithesis of the argument that by wearing such clothing they would appear as if they had not journeyed at all.

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women, travel and identity Yet while women were expected to dress in a restrained, tasteful manner, it was emphasized that this should not be taken to the point where they seemed drab or frumpy. Viola Tree liked ‘to think of clothes for a cruise being like those of a princess in the fairy tale, whose three dresses [that] came out of the walnut shell were each one better than the last’.86 She acknowledged that ‘Of course on a long cruise who but a film star could wear a different frock every night’, but stressed that ‘Every experienced traveller dresses up the night before the end of the cruise and wears something fine in which to go ashore’.87 Women journeyers were expected to negotiate a path between restraint and modesty and embellishment and display. There was one final, ironic conflict within journey etiquette. While writers claimed that women must follow their advice and rules in order to become successful journeyers, they also advised that women’s own choices, tastes and preferences should shape their journeys. How to Travel claimed that ‘one of the pleasures of travelling is to be at one’s ease, and to be at ease it is necessary to consult one’s own tastes’ although this again included the caveat ‘so long as they provoke no remark from those with whom you may be travelling’.88 The consultation of one’s personal wishes was paramount: ‘For there are others who never reflect, who are fatally imitative, that is, they must do as some one else has done before without considering whether the act is worthy of imitation.’89 Etiquette sought to structure women’s journeys while simultaneously acknowledging women’s personal right to do this. Sociability was one area in which, although there were clear rules of interaction and obligation, women were acknowledged to have particular personal agency. This was especially evident in the books published in the final decades of the period, and it was one of the most significant changes in journey etiquette between 1870 and 1940. While How to Travel had advised women in 1879 that they should be as pleasant and agreeable as possible to all of their fellow journeyers and to avoid subjects that might cause offence, Vogue’s Book of Etiquette outlined in 1935 ‘You are not obliged  .  .  .  to do more than answer briefly and politely a remark made by a fellow passenger’ although it was noted that ‘the fellow passenger has every right to speak to you if he does it in a well-bred way’.90 The social expectations that surrounded women journeyers were fourfold and some of the most complex of all journey etiquette: they should contentedly accept the role of social arbiter; should not be argumentative or controversial in conversation; should maintain a suitable degree of propriety in their sociability; but still retained the power to decide to what degree they socialized while journeying abroad.

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no nice girl swears Such conflicting advice highlights the ambiguity, as well as the complexity, inherent to journey etiquette. Writers sought to control women’s journeys, but also encouraged them to create their own journey, which potentially involved rejecting or ignoring the same writers’ advice. It indicates the limits of the authority of these writers: their influence did not necessarily extend beyond their books because they could not personally accompany women on their journeys to ensure that their advice was observed. Journey etiquette thus offered faint glimpses of space for self-expression even as it sought to shape women journeyers. Yet writers’ insistence on women taking their own desires into account also highlights again the complex position of women journeyers: they were expected to adhere to journey advice and behave in certain ways whilst simultaneously following their own wishes. Etiquette for the solo woman journeyer While all women journeying abroad faced a knotty framework of etiquette, women journeying alone faced an additional, sometimes even more elaborate, set of social mores and expectations. Different situations and different journeyers – single women as opposed to women journeying with their spouses, family or friends – required different behavioural codes. The emergence of etiquette for women journeying on their own was the most notable change in journey etiquette during these decades. The 1879 guide How to Travel contained no advice specifically for lone women, but instead gave advice to married women journeyers about how they should behave around their husbands.91 Just ten years later, however, Lillias Campbell-Davidson included some comments about women journeying alone in Hints to Lady Travellers at Home and Abroad. She rejected any suggestion that these women might be vulnerable, cheerfully asserting that ‘women travelling alone receive far more consideration and kindness from men of all classes than under any other circumstances whatever’.92 By the 1920s and 1930s many etiquette books contained sections for women journeying alone. The fact that writers still felt it was necessary to advise these women in the interwar years does suggest, however, that there was a lingering unease about such journeys, even while it was accepted that women could not be prevented from undertaking them. Vogue’s Book of Etiquette acknowledged at the beginning of its advice for lone journeyers that ‘Most young women and girls of today are quite capable of taking care of themselves’, but argued that ‘even sophisticated youth should be warned in certain directions’.93

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women, travel and identity The central concern of etiquette for women journeying alone was the nature of their encounters and acquaintanceships with men. Lady Troubridge warned ‘The young lady who is alone should be careful that she does not make haphazard acquaintances among the men on board [ship]’.94 Vogue’s Book of Etiquette also advised ‘It is not a good idea to enter into conversation with men on a long trip – even though the warning sounds mid-Victorian’.95 Restraint was again demanded during these encounters: when in conversation a solo woman journeyer should not allow a man ‘to know too much about one’; it was also considered unwise to allow any man ‘to spend too much time in one’s company’.96 Lone women were counselled that ‘It is much wiser  .  .  .  to find companions amongst the women passengers’ who would ‘undoubtedly introduce [them] to their gentlemen acquaintances’ rather than forging their own acquaintanceships.97 Lady Troubridge urged that ‘a young woman travelling alone should not appear eager to open a conversation, especially with a man’.98 Such advice was again driven by concern about the damage such behavi­ our could do to a woman’s reputation as well as to her physical wellbeing. Responsibility for countering the male threat again lay with women. Lilias Campbell-Davidson observed ‘Much has been said about the danger to women, especially young women, travelling alone, of annoyance from impertinent or obtrusive attentions from travellers of the other sex. I can only say, that in any such case which has ever come within my personal knowledge or observation, the women has only had herself to blame.’99 This placement of responsibility upon single women journeyers was again codified into detailed rules. They were not to allow men to pay any of their shipboard expenses and were not to sit out on deck late at night with a new male acquaintance.100 If even slight acquaintances decided to dine together on the train ‘the woman must by no means allow the man to pay her bill’ and if he did, she must pay him back her share.101 Women were to avoid any sense of indebtedness or obligation to male journeyers that might lead men to believe they could pursue more than just conversation. Yet again, however, it was advised that this caution around male journeyers should not be taken to an extreme. Politeness was again to be maintained. Lady Troubridge instructed women journeying alone that although they should be cautious in their acquaintanceships with other journeyers, they ‘should not accept courtesies from anyone without giving cordial thanks’.102 Similarly, Vogue’s Book of Etiquette counselled that ‘to act as though every stranger who made a casual advance were a dangerous character is stupid and unnecessary’ and that it was perfectly possible to have conversations with men in ‘complete safety’.103

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no nice girl swears Anxiety and enablement: creating the perfect female journeyer The existence of journey etiquette suggests there was some general anxiety about women journeying abroad during the period, be they journeying with others or alone. It has been argued that women’s travel seemed unfeminine and compromising to the ideal of female respectability in this period.104 Anxiety about female mobility partly triggered the appearance of the works studied in this chapter. The strictures of journey etiquette books, as we have seen, often sought to limit the extent to which women followed their own instincts, suggesting that writers were concerned about the impact of journeying on women’s respectability. Indeed, etiquette itself has been interpreted as an inherently restrictive genre because it details the rules that guide all polite people and how to follow them, rather than to follow one’s own instincts on how to behave.105 It also suggests that there was some continued anxiety about the impact of the democratization of travel and the appearance of the tourist. Lady Troubridge emphasized that ‘Now that almost everybody is something of a tourist, the etiquette of travel must not be neglected’.106 While her words indicate that it was generally accepted that mass mobility was a permanent, irreversible aspect of modern life by the early twentieth century, they also suggest some parts of society felt it necessary to limit its impact by attempting to control its every aspect, including the journey. Yet journey etiquette was also arguably an entirely pragmatic response to the unprecedented scale of women’s mobility after 1870: women could not be prevented from journeying, but they could be helped to journey in the right way. Importantly, the appearance of journey etiquette demonstrates that there was a conflicting, co-existing desire to enable women’s journeys by providing guidance and clear outlines of how to behave – the final conflict within journey etiquette – which may well also have fuelled the publication of these works. By instructing women how to journey in a way that they believed would be deemed appropriate and feminine, etiquette writers effectively countered fears about the damaging effects of journeying to femininity and female respectability. Etiquette potentially enabled women to journey without becoming victims of social dis­ approval even, or as much, as it sought to control journeyers’ behaviour. It is possible that this etiquette helped women feel more self-assured when journeying. Some or even many women may have welcomed its guidance: Lady Troubridge wrote that ‘A woman travelling alone on board ship need feel no hesitation or embarrassment in undertaking the trip if she knows and understands the little rules of good conduct that

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women, travel and identity govern railway [and] steamship  .  .  .  etiquette’.107 Historians also argue that etiquette and manners could sometimes empower women because they enabled them to make friends and connections through whom they could gain influence and recognition.108 Journey etiquette could similarly empower women because it told them how journeying was done and thereby gave them the confidence to embark on a journey which they might otherwise not have taken. Journey etiquette had one overriding purpose: the creation of the perfect female journeyer. Contemporaries defined her as ‘one whose digestion is perfect, whose disposition is cheerful, who can be enthusiastic under the most discouraging circumstances, to whom discomfort is of no moment, and who possesses at least a sense of the ridiculous, if not a real sense of humor!’109 The perfect journeyer could be summarized as the ‘nice girl’ of Alice Leone-Moat’s work: a figure replete with values of pleasantness, agreeability, modesty, propriety and respectability rather than unfettered self-expression. The ideal woman journeyer was methodical, rational and logical rather than instinctive and impulsive: ‘Coolness, efficiency, and a knack for taking difficulties for granted and losing no time in overcoming them will do as much towards getting you round the world as a well-lined purse’.110 Yet again journey etiquette reveals many of the qualities and behaviours that were understood within contemporary society to enable a woman to journey in a suitably feminine manner: she was to be polite, courteous, sociable, ladylike, self-effacing, non-confrontational and appropriately dressed without being too modest or retiring. If a woman could achieve all this, she was the proper female journeyer. What remains unclear, however, is how much the wider culture of female journeying and expectations of women journeyers explored up to now matched, if at all, real women’s experiences. The next chapters accordingly examine their journeys. Notes 1 W.M. Strong, How to Travel Without Being Rich, British edn, edited and revised by F. Allen (London, 1938), p. 24. 2 Ibid., p. 26. 3 V. Tree, Can I Help You?: Your Manners–Menus–Amusements–Friends–Charades–MakeUps–Travel–Calling–Children–Love Affairs (London, 1937), p. 170. 4 A. St George, The Descent of Manners: Etiquette, Rules & the Victorians (London, 1993), p. xi. 5 M. Morgan, Manners, Morals and Class in England, 1774  – 1858 (Basingstoke, 1994), p. 1. 6 St George, Descent of Manners, p. 2.

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no nice girl swears 7 J.H. Gould, Outward Bound: Twentieth Century Ocean Travel to Fascinating Far-away Lands; A Tour Round the World; A Special Cable Code and much Necessary Information for Travellers (New York, 1905 and 1913) and Vogue’s Book of Etiquette: Present-Day Customs of Social Intercourse with the Rules for Their Correct Observance by the Editors of Vogue (Garden City, NY, 1935). 8 Strong, How to Travel Without Being Rich; E. Post, Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage (New York and London, 1937). 9 L. Campbell-Davidson, Hints to Lady Travellers at Home and Abroad (London, 1889), p. 7. 10 Gould, Outward Bound, p. xiii. 11 Buzard, Beaten Track, p. 75. 12 Campbell-Davidson, Hints, p. 7. 13 Gould, Outward Bound, p. xiii. 14 Ibid. 15 Although trains and ships were agreed to be public spaces, there was occasional debate about the exact nature of their environment, particularly on ships. Lady Troubridge wrote in the second volume of her Book of Etiquette that ‘Life on [the] sea is more or less free from conventionality’, suggesting that virtually no rules needed to be followed (Lady Troubridge, The Book of Etiquette, Volume II (London, 1926), p. 118). 16 Post, Etiquette, 1937 edn, p. 841. 17 Vogue’s Book, p. 185. 18 Campbell-Davidson, Hints, p. 55. 19 How to Travel; or, Etiquette of Ship, Rail, Coach and Saddle (London, 1879), p. 11. 20 Ibid., pp. 11–12. 21 A. Leone-Moat, No Nice Girl Swears (London, 1933), p. 121. 22 Gould, Outward Bound, pp. iii–v. 23 Ibid., p. iii. For an even more elaborate list see Campbell-Davidson, Hints, p. 145. 24 Tree, Can I Help You?, p. 178. 25 How to Travel, p. 10. 26 Ibid., p. 11. 27 Gould, Outward Bound, p. 15. 28 Ibid., pp. 16  –18. 29 Vogue’s Book, pp. 184  –5. 30 How to Travel, pp. 10  –11. This is the only etiquette book, however, to give such precise times about when women could use certain areas of the journey environment, suggesting that over the course of the seventy years studied here some rules were abandoned. 31 Leone-Moat, No Nice Girl, p. 119. 32 Vogue’s Book, p. 183. 33 Campbell-Davidson, Hints, p. 64. 34 Ibid., p. 56. 35 Troubridge, Book of Etiquette, p. 118. 36 E. Post, Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage (New York, 1928), p. 652. 37 Vogue’s Book, p. 197. 38 Troubridge, Book of Etiquette, pp. 118  –19. 39 Ibid., p. 113.

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women, travel and identity 40 Vogue’s Book, pp. 187–  8. 41 How to Travel, pp. 12–13. 42 Troubridge, Book of Etiquette, p. 110. 43 Ibid. 44 Marjorie Morgan argues that the emergence of the etiquette book in the early nineteenth century was linked to the growth of a middle class that sought advancement to a social status commensurate with their economic success, which they believed was achievable by adopting polite, fashionable aristocratic manners (Morgan, Manners, p. 26). 45 J. Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain, 1870  –1914 (London, 1994), p. 10. 46 P. Horn, High Society: The English Social Elite, 1880  – 1914 (Stroud, 1992), p. 61. 47 Leone-Moat, No Nice Girl, p. 123. 48 Vogue’s Book, p. 185. 49 How to Travel, p. 13. 50 See Lady C.E.C. Howard, Etiquette: What to Do, And How to do It (London, 1885), pp. 3–  60, 91–122, 123–35, and L. Heaton Armstrong, Etiquette up to Date (London, circa 1908), pp. 85  –  94, for insights into hosting such events. 51 Gould, Outward Bound, p. 22. 52 Leone-Moat, No Nice Girl, p. 124. 53 How to Travel, p. 9. 54 Ibid. 55 Leone-Moat, No Nice Girl, p. 124. 56 How to Travel, pp. 9  –10. 57 Leone-Moat, No Nice Girl, pp. 124  –5. 58 Ibid., p. 123. 59 Troubridge, Book of Etiquette, p. 115. 60 Leone-Moat, No Nice Girl, p. 123. 61 SCA, ULL, Cunard Archive, PR6/19, Joanna, ‘Pleasure Cruising’, WSM, IX: 9 (May 1934), 227. 62 How to Travel, p. 10. 63 Campbell-Davidson, Hints, p. 248. 64 Leone-Moat, No Nice Girl, p. 121. 65 How to Travel, p. 18. 66 Campbell-Davidson, Hints, p. 44. 67 No Nice Girl, p. 121. 68 Vogue’s Book, p. 186. 69 How to Travel, p. 17. Eileen Terry agreed that journeyers must ‘travel light’ (E. Terry, Etiquette For All: Man, Woman or Child (London, 1925), p. 117). 70 How to Travel, pp. 17–18. 71 W. Miller, Wintering in the Riviera with Notes of Travel in Italy and France and Practical Hints to Travellers (London, 1879), p. 10. 72 Gould, Outward Bound, p. 10. 73 Leone-Moat, No Nice Girl, pp. 120  –1. 74 Troubridge, Book of Etiquette, p. 109. 75 Gould, Outward Bound, p. iii. 76 Tree, Can I Help You?, p. 177.

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no nice girl swears 77 Ibid., p. 175. 78 Leone-Moat, No Nice Girl, p. 120. 79 Troubridge, Book of Etiquette, p. 111. 80 How to Travel, p. 13. 81 Ibid., pp. 13–14. 82 Vogue’s Book, p. 183. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid., pp. 183–  4. 85 How to Travel, p. 18. 86 Tree, Can I Help You?, p. 174. 87 Ibid. 88 How to Travel, p. 8. 89 Ibid., pp. 7–  8. 90 Vogue’s Book, p. 185. 91 How to Travel, pp. 22–5. 92 Campbell-Davidson, Hints, p. 63. 93 Vogue’s Book, p. 188. 94 Troubridge, Book of Etiquette, p. 119. 95 Vogue’s Book, pp. 188  –  9. 96 Ibid., p. 189. 97 Troubridge, Book of Etiquette, p. 119. 98 Ibid., p. 113. 99 Campbell-Davidson, Hints, p. 63. 100 Troubridge, Book of Etiquette, pp. 119  –20. 101 Ibid., p. 115. 102 Ibid., p. 113. 103 Vogue’s Book, p. 189. 104 S. Foster and S. Mills, ‘Introduction’ in S. Foster and S. Mills (eds), An Anthology of Women’s Travel Writing (Manchester, 2002), p. 8. 105 M. Curtin, Propriety and Position: A Study of Victorian Manners (New York, 1987), p. iii. 106 Troubridge, Book of Etiquette, p. 107. 107 Ibid., p. 119. 108 M. Curtin, ‘A question of manners: status and gender in etiquette and courtesy’, Journal of Modern History, 57 (September 1985), 419. 109 Post, Etiquette, 1928 edn, p. 680. 110 Leone-Moat, No Nice Girl, p. 114.

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4 Ordering the berth: the spaces of journeying

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n may 1920, husband and wife Isabel and Samuel Haigh emigrated from Stockport to New Zealand after Samuel had failed to find employment following his discharge from the army in 1919.1 Of their accommodation on the S.S. Mahana, Isabel wrote, ‘The cabins are very private, boarded up to the ceiling, and a door with a catch lock like our bathroom door at home. Everything seems very clean and new and the lower deck seems much lighter with all the boards being painted white.’2 Her words suggest one way in which women viewed journey spaces: the cabin’s private nature, cleanliness and its lock’s similarity to that of their old bathroom reminded Isabel of a well-kept domestic space, of home. Yet women’s experiences and uses of journey space reveal much more of importance: that social status, fortune and power were three of the key factors that shaped women’s journeys abroad. Passenger classes: creating a hierarchy of spatial quality

Architectural space can be categorized in many ways. There are private and domestic spaces; spaces of bourgeois recreation, including parks and pleasure gardens; and spaces of display and social ritual, such as ballrooms.3 Journey space was similarly diverse. Three key factors shaped its division. Most importantly, train and ship space was divided according to passenger class. In the earliest decades of the railways entire trains were designated as one class only, a practice echoed across Europe.4 Within a few decades, however, passenger-class divisions began to be applied to carriages rather than the whole train. From the 1860s, companies began to re-divide their first- and second-class carriage stock to serve three classes (first, second and third). Further changes occurred in the 1870s: the Midland Railway Company, for instance, announced it would add third-class carriages to all of its trains in 1872. In 1874, the

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ordering the berth same company announced it was abolishing second class, leaving only a division between first and third.5 The division of trains and carriages into passenger classes was common worldwide, but the degree of division varied according to country. The United States, Norway and Switzerland did not divide their trains as elaborately: Norwegian trains, for instance, only ever had one class.6 By the turn of the nineteenth century ships were also typically divided into first, second and steerage classes, although by 1940 steerage had been replaced by tourist class.7 The division of train and ship space created a hierarchy of spatial quality. Those who could afford elite trains such as the Orient Express, or the most expensive first-class carriages, enjoyed leather seats, velvet curtains, gas lighting and running water. By contrast, the very earliest third-class carriages had no seats, and often no windows.8 There was also a clear difference in the quality of communal journey spaces. Nurse Hester Dawson observed that ‘The first-class deck is much larger and cooler, and nicer than ours [second class], which is right at the stern, and hardly [has] room for everyone’ during her ocean journey to India to work in a Bombay hospital following an outbreak of plague in 1897.9 This difference was often most obviously expressed by a space’s decor and furnishings. The first-class public rooms of Cunard’s R.M.S. Lusitania (launched in 1907) included a writing room and library decorated in eighteenth-century Adam style, with walls punctuated with carved pilasters and mouldings, grey-and-cream silk brocade panels and a rosecoloured carpet; a lounge and music room decorated in Georgian style; and a lower saloon decorated in the style of Louis XVI.10 Scottish lady’s maid Anne Burns was astounded by the private railway carriage her employers engaged for their journey from Boston to San Francisco in the early 1900s: ‘Nothing to compare with it had I ever seen; there were silk hangings, a piano, growing plants, and dressing rooms; even the pillow covers had lace trimmings.’11 The opulent Cabin-class dining room on White Star’s Britannic in 1930 [Figure 19] featured a domed, lavishly decorated embossed ceiling, walls of windows and a beautifully woven, patterned carpet.12 White Star Magazine trumpeted the renovation of the tourist third cabin accommodation on the S.S. Regina in March 1929, but as the lounge and smoking room were decorated in mahogany and oak, with brown the ‘predominating colour’, they were hardly spaces of brightness and vibrancy compared to most first-class rooms, no matter the expense gone to by the company.13 The most significant consequence of this spatial division, however, was that it created and expressed a clear correlation between journey space and a socio-economic journeyer hierarchy.14 The most expensive

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women, travel and identity and luxurious accommodation on trains and ships was associated with, and considered to be the domain of, journeyers from the wealthiest and most influential sections of society; the cheapest and least opulent with the poorest and least privileged. This hierarchy echoed Britain’s socioeconomic order: the richest at the top, the poorest at the bottom. Such divisions signal that, although the railways have been hailed as a democratic form of travel, journey spaces were not necessarily thoroughly democratic spaces in which journeyers from every level of society could intermingle regardless of their wealth, profession and family background. While they might subvert it, trains could also reinforce class structure,15 as could ships. Functional and gendered spaces Following their division into classes, journey spaces were further divided by functionality, although the variety of spatial functionality was higher on ships than on trains owing to the greater amount of space available on the former. These spaces were given meaning partly through the function and name assigned to them by ship and rail companies. Libraries, dining saloons and carriages, lounges and smoking rooms were some of the most common such spaces.16 The Inman Line’s City of New York and City of Paris, launched in 1888, had five decks containing cabins, public rooms, staterooms, a saloon 55 feet wide and 100 feet long, a ladies’ drawing room, a smoking room and a library.17 Over the course of the period maritime space functionality became even more elaborate as ships became larger. The Cunard-White Star’s R.M.S. Queen Mary, completed in 1936 after an interrupted building process which had begun in 1930, had ten passenger decks, which included a veranda grill on the sun deck; shops, a lounge, galleries, ballroom, smoking room, observation lounge, cocktail bar, library, drawing room, writing room and children’s playroom for tourist class journeyers; a third-class garden lounge and smoking room; and dining saloons for all classes.18 Each of these spaces had a specific purpose, be it to entertain, facilitate relaxation and rest or provide refreshment and sustenance. By naming spaces according to their intended purpose, shipping companies instructed journeyers how they should perceive, navigate and utilize them. Many were designed for leisure activities, reflecting again how the journey abroad was increasingly perceived as a leisure experience as well as an act of travel. White Star Magazine advised journeyers that the refitted S.S. Regina had ‘an extra Lounge where impromptu concerts and other jollifications will be held. It is a room admirably suited for a

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ordering the berth

Figure 16  Cabin drawing room, S.S. Britannic (July 1930)

“sing-song” .’19 The promotional images of a second-class cabin on Cunard’s S.S. Aquitania in 1914 [Figure 18], in which a maid serves a journeyer breakfast, and the Cabin-class drawing room on the S.S. Britannic [Figure 16] in 1930 demonstrate how companies constructed other spaces: these were domestic spaces in which journeyers could pursue the activities of daily life.20 The large, soft sofas in the drawing room were intended to encourage journeyers to relax, read, talk or even write letters and diaries; the cabin was to be a temporary home in which the strains of daily life were removed as ship staff catered to journeyers’ every need. This functional division of journey space also created a theoretical division between ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces. Cabins and state­ room suites were most obviously intended to be private spaces as these were journeyers’ living quarters. Others were communal spaces that anybody journeying within their designated passenger class could enter: ballrooms and dining saloons were spaces of public display and sociability. Areas such as the decks were public recreational and social spaces. Trains were also partitioned into functional spaces, often dining, sleeping and ordinary daytime or smoking carriages, resulting in a similar

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women, travel and identity division between ‘private’ and ‘public’. Spaces such as the restaurant carriage were again considered spaces of public sociability, as the photo­ graph of three journeyers dining together in a first-class dining carriage on the Great Western Railway in 1938 demonstrates [Figure 17].21 Other spaces were again private and homely: it has been noted that the Victorian railway compartment had distinctly domestic associations, most obviously in furnishings that duplicated those of the parlour or boudoir.22 For the wealthiest train journeyers equivalents of a set of private rooms or ship suite were available. Lady Emma Liberty enjoyed the ‘Wagon Lits’ on the Orient Express during her March 1884 journey: ‘two compartments in the centre of the carriage, communicating with each other by day, and forming a sitting room furnished with two couches and two tables; the beds open out in the most wonderful manner, one over the other, and are a good size and fairly comfortable’.23 Her description highlights how train space’s functionality was also particularly fluid. The spaces Lady Liberty used changed in purpose temporally and according to the need of the journeyer, be it to have somewhere to sit and socialize or to sleep. Railway crew assisted in changing these spaces’ functions: lady’s maid Janet Smith observed a member of the train’s crew come

Figure 17  First-class dining car on the Great Western Railway (1938)

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ordering the berth into her carriage during her journey from New York to Montreal in 1896 ‘to make down the beds’: ‘in less than no time he had a dozen beds ready’.24 However, the division of journey space into ‘public’ and ‘private’ was more complex. Many train spaces were simultaneously private and communal. Train carriages were enclosed and isolated, potentially creating a private space, particularly during the very earliest years of the period: trains consisting of a series of unconnected compartments were the European standard up to 1880.25 It has been argued that even when a more technically functional type of carriage emerged, the American car with open spatial arrangements, with a few exceptions it was not adopted by most European companies.26 Yet women also journeyed within these enclosed carriages as part of a community of journeyers, giving the carriage a public nature. Journey spaces sometimes lay in a borderland that was neither wholly public nor wholly private. Finally, rail and ship companies used gender in their formal construction of journey space. British train companies introduced womenonly carriages from 1845 and this provision continued for over a century.27

Figure 18  Woman being served breakfast by maid in a second-class cabin, S.S. Aquitania (1914)

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women, travel and identity The Hall sisters from Kent succeeded in securing a Dames Seules carriage on their rail journey between Paris and Marseilles in January 1875.28 Ships also included gendered spaces: the White Star’s S.S. Britannic and S.S. Oceanic, launched in 1874 and 1875 respectively, had smoking rooms for gentlemen and retiring rooms for women.29 Londoner Emily May Jones, who journeyed from London on a Rhine cruise in the summer of 1889, recorded how after rejoining her ship at Rotterdam following an excursion, ‘I staid [sic] on deck till I felt cold & directly I went down in the ladies cabin & laid down on my bed & went to sleep’.30 Steerage accommodation was particularly divided according to gender. On nineteenth-century emigrant vessels journeying to Australia, single women were berthed in their own compartment. Unaccompanied married women were also berthed with these women. Single male emigrants were quartered at the other end of the ship, with married couples in between.31 Sarah Stephens, who emigrated with her family from Wales to New Zealand on the Allan Line’s sailing ship Cardigan Castle in 1876, observed when she embarked that ‘the single women  .  .  .  have the high part of the deck called the poop to ourselves. It is over the

Figure 19  Cabin dining room, S.S. Britannic (July 1930)

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ordering the berth Saloon. The young men have the extreme end of the ship, forecastle I think and the married people have the main deck.’32 Private journey space: a home from home? Previous historians argue that writing about space could be extremely significant for journeyers. Andrew Hassan’s study of nineteenth-century Britons emigrating to Australia asserts that ‘Writing about space [in their diaries] helps the diarists to create [a] space in which they are comfortable, a space which they can know through narrating it’.33 Emigrants constructed order, he argues, on their ships after the confusion of embarkation through the successful investment of journey space with meaning, which for those journeying in Cabin class was a sense of home.34 He claims that travel abroad implied transgression and confusion to emigrants in contrast to the security of home, and that this could only be countered through their creation of recognizable domains.35 The idea of home contains many elements: ‘Homes promise security, retreat, rest, warmth, food and the basis for both a family life and for full participation in social life.’36 Emotionally, home is a place where people feel a sense of attachment and rootedness.37 Home also fulfils a need for refuge.38 Physically, the strongest sense of home has been seen as commonly coinciding with a geographical dwelling such as a house.39 The presence of specific people, most obviously family members, and treasured objects help to make these dwellings home. ‘Home’ can also be found in spaces outside one’s main abode, however. A study of women students’ rooms at Royal Holloway College, University of London, from 1896 to 1898 reveals how they utilized objects to decorate their rooms, make statements of self-definition and display the attachments they brought from home.40 Material objects enable people to construct spaces that are not their official, permanent homes according to their own wishes, and sometimes to create a space that, at the very least, reminds them of home. Some journey spaces, as we have seen, were designed and built to replicate domestic spaces. The architectural division of some ship space particularly echoed some of that of grander, gentrified British homes, which commonly contained smoking rooms, drawing rooms, ballrooms and libraries.41 The first-class public rooms on the Cunard’s Umbria and Etruria, both launched in 1884, contained elaborately carved furniture and velvet curtains that were intended to match the decor of the upperclass home.42 In addition, official, corporate practices within journey space, again notably on ships, have been cited by historians who argue

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women, travel and identity that these were homelike spaces, even if they reflected oppressive elements of women’s experiences of domestic space: A.J. Hammerton commented that ‘Shipboard protection practices [such as accommodating single women separately from men in steerage class] replicated and magnified the control of women and their incarceration at home under conditions of separate spheres’.43 On nineteenth-century emigrant ships bound for Australia, the matron was expected to prepare women for their new roles as domestic servants by teaching them key domestic skills such as cooking and sewing.44 It might be expected, then, that women journeyers, too, constructed their living spaces as ‘home’. Margaret Roberts, the future wife of agriculturalist and politician Sir Roger Thomas, certainly recognized the connection when she and her brother began their journey to India and Burma in 1930: ‘We went by the Bombay Express to Folkestone, 1st class, and travelled in luxury. It was more like being in a drawing room than a train for there was a carpet on the floor & each passenger had a separate armchair.’45 Similarly, Lady Theodora Guest felt that hiring a private car ‘means [being] at home’ during her rail journey across the United States in 1894.46 Some women took practical action to make their living spaces homely. Bertha Mason Broadwood extensively adapted her cabin for her journey to the West Indies in November 1902. She made it ‘fairly shipshape’ by erecting ‘3/11d. shelves’ which she had bought from an ironmonger, on which she placed ‘my books on the lower shelf, & writing case, & handbag on the top one, the intermediate one being occupied by my mending bag, camera, field glasses, [and] pot of marmalade’; ‘To prevent things rolling off I rigged up cowl & wires in front’. She hung her hatboxes, towels and a net bag for ‘odds and ends’ between the washstand and the bookcase. She also hung ‘my much travelled thermometer’ on one wall.47 Adapting, displaying and incorporating personal items into her berth helped her to feel more settled and secure by creating a sense of being at home, and enabled her to maintain a connection with her actual home. The amount of detail with which she records these changes in her diary suggests she took considerable pride in altering her space in such a personal, domestic manner. Amelia B. Edwards also adapted her cabin on her dahabeeyah, the Philae, for her journey on the Nile in 1873 and 1874 with the intention of creating a new home: ‘It is wonderful  .  .  .  what a few books and roses, an open piano, and a sketch or two, will do. In a few minutes the comfortless hired look has vanished  .  .  .  [and] the Philae wears an aspect as cosy and home-like as if she had been occupied for a month.’48

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ordering the berth The high upper deck was furnished ‘like a drawing-room’ with loungechairs, tables and rugs.49 Finally, Isabel and Samuel Haigh made con­ siderable adaptations to their living space on the S.S. Mahana to make it more domesticated. Isabel describes the alterations her husband, known as Ben, an abbreviation of his middle name Bennett, made to their cabin: he put the runners on the black box and the handles on the front and has done many other little things for our convenience in the cabin. He bought some little cups and hooks and things  .  .  .  , and we found two boards and Ben won a few nails from a joiners box that was left about and now we have a good shelf extra and a line to slip up at night so we can have dry towels in the morning.50

Although Isabel did not physically carry out these alterations, it is highly likely that she was actively involved in their planning. Yet despite these three women’s actions, one of the most striking aspects of most women’s use and understanding of their personal journey spaces throughout the decades between 1870 and 1940 is the scarcity of such constructions of journey spaces as home. The majority of the women studied here gave only cursory descriptions of journey space. Alice Bosanquet’s three-word description of the ‘good inner cabin’ she shared with her husband Major Bosanquet, a Sherwood Forester, on their journey to India on the T.S.S. Rewa in 1906 is typical of the comments women usually made; this was her only observation about journey space other than noting that the cabin had ‘a bad ventilator’.51 Similarly, Annie Brassey merely noted during her 1872 journey on the S.S. Hibernian to Canada that she and her family were in an ‘airy little cabin’ on deck.52 The limited, perfunctory nature of most women’s comments about journey spaces suggests that they were at best a secondary concern to most of them. Women undoubtedly used these spaces for many of the same activities that they performed in their real homes, including reading, diary writing and letter-writing and socializing with family and friends. Annie Brassey noted that one evening during her outward journey to Canada ‘we adjourned to the cabin to have some music’.53 One evening during her return voyage on the S.S. Russia, ‘as usual we finished up  .  .  .  with whist and supper in our cabin’.54 Women also used journey living spaces for rest, recovery from illness and seasickness, privacy, and refuge and shelter from bad weather and other journeyers. Sarah Stephens recorded that one day during her family’s emigration voyage to New Zealand in 1876 was ‘So cold that we sat in our bunks all day’.55 In the summer of

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women, travel and identity 1885, Sir Thomas Brassey invited Liberal Prime Minister Gladstone, his wife and daughter Mary (1847–1928), who served as her father’s secretary in the 1880s, to join his family on a cruise through the Norwegian fjords on the Brasseys’ steam yacht, the Sunbeam. On the first day, thirty-nineyear-old Mary retreated to her berth in order to ‘lie down for an hour’.56 Similarly, Isabel Haigh ‘had a day in bed’ towards the end of her journey in 1920.57 Liverpudlian Frances Davis (born circa 1850), known as Fanny, was in her early twenties when she journeyed from London to China in 1871 to try to improve her health, but was frequently confined to her cabin by illness: her diary is filled with statements such as ‘In bed all day’ and ‘Violent sickness added to fits of gasping for breath & other chronic ailments’; her illness reached a crisis one night when ‘the gasping & suffocation got so bad that [the doctor] thought I must have burst an artery of the heart  .  .  .  & might not live many hours’.58 Annie Brassey described, in a typical account of seasickness, how early in their journey on the S.S. Hibernian ‘The atmosphere  .  .  .  was anything but pleasant, and, with the motion of the vessel, was too much for some people to endure, myself included’ and eventually she found ‘bed was the best’.59 Mary Gladstone also retreated to her berth as ‘I am laid low’ during her 1885 journey: Annie Brassey ‘came many times a day to offer me things but I cd. only manage a few spoonfuls of beef tea’.60 But while women journeyers used their living spaces in the same ways as they used their homes, the emotional and psychological bond that they felt with their real homes was usually absent. For the majority of women journeying abroad, these spaces were not homes away from home. Women sought refuge from the conditions of the journey itself when, for instance, they used their living spaces to recover from seasickness or to escape cold weather rather than because they felt the need to retreat to (a temporary) home. Even those who adapted their cabins were motivated by pragmatism as much as a desire to create a home. Bertha Broadwood’s rigging of cowl and wires over her shelves showed she was aware of the possible effect of journey conditions on her berth: if there should be a storm the pitching of the ship could dislodge her belongings, which could become dangerous, potentially injurious, objects if they were falling around the cabin. The Haighs altered their cabin as much to make it more organized as to make it homely. Amongst several factors, the length of women’s journeys played a greater role in determining to what extent they adapted their living space rather than their desire to create a space that was home. Women making shorter journeys did not usually make extensive changes to their living

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ordering the berth space: none of the women studied here who journeyed for ten days or less made any alterations to their accommodation. Lady Emma Liberty made no changes to her compartment during her three-day journey on the Orient Express. Annie Brassey spent ten days on the S.S. Hibernian and made no attempt to adapt her living quarters. Women who spent a number of weeks in their journey living spaces, however, could feel differently: Bertha Broadwood explained to a stewardess who congratulated her on the changes she made to her cabin ‘that for a 2 months voyage it was worth doing’.61 Yet she was still one of only a minority of women on longer journeys who refashioned journey living spaces into home: Marion Bridie did not adapt her living space during her roundthe-world cruise in 1931 and 1932. Female journeyers’ professional and social position and their place within the journeyer hierarchy also dictated the extent to which they personalized their living spaces, above any desire to make a home for themselves. Journeyers in the lower echelons of the passenger hierarchy had the least power to alter their journey space. Janet Smith’s role as a working lady’s maid during her ocean journeys to and from, and train journeys within, the United States of America in 1896 meant she was not booked into her own private accommodation that, if she had been an independent journeyer, she might have had some right and ability to rearrange. Instead, at various points she shared a stateroom with two other girls, a communal sleeping car with eleven other men and women and a small cabin with two others, none of which she could alter.62 It has been rightly noted that ‘steerage space was far more uniform, more repetitious and less adaptable to an expression of individuality’ than other journey spaces.63 Sarah Stephens made no alterations to the steerage space in which she and her family journeyed in 1876 and 1877. Yet at the privileged end of this hierarchy, the wealthiest and most powerful women journeyers also did not adapt their living space into more homely spaces because the high levels of comfort created within them by rail and shipping companies meant it was unnecessary. Lady Liberty approved of the Orient Express’s spaces exactly as they were: ‘with some feelings of regret [we] say good-bye to the “Orient Express” (for we had been very comfortable)’.64 Similarly, Annie Brassey admired the rail accommodation she and her family enjoyed as they journeyed across Canada: ‘The beds are fixed in a double tier on each side of the carriage, and the greatest privacy possible under the circumstances is secured by curtains which draw round; so that the weary traveller may enjoy a night’s rest almost as comfortably as if sleeping in an ordinary bed.’65 Lady Theodora Guest was pleased both by the ‘delightful’ suite

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women, travel and identity of staterooms in which she sailed to America on the S.S. Paris, and the various private train compartments she inhabited while crossing the country, writing that she and her companions had ‘nothing to complain of, having every comfort’.66 Women’s non-ownership of the train or ship in which they journeyed also accounted for their lack of regard for them as homes: as has been usefully noted, ‘The scale of home  .  .  .  depends on the extent of actual or expressed power, control, or personal investment in [that] space’.67 Women did not customarily have the power that ship or train companies had to decide and control how journey spaces were constructed. The contrasts in journey space experienced by Annie Brassey over her lifetime neatly illustrate just how much impact ownership could have. One assessment of her voyages on the Sunbeam in the 1870s and 1880s usefully argues that she created a home on the ocean by ordering its interior according to her particular domestic concerns, for example creating a ‘Cozy Corner’ in the deckhouse.68 This yacht became a symbol of the Brasseys’ social status and mobility: it was a floating miniature stately home, complete with opulent fixtures and fittings, exotic possessions and a dedicated staff and crew.69 The study argues that the yacht’s domestic interior was not simply produced in response to external conditions and ideas of domesticity; it also reflected Lady Brassey’s personal and emotional investment in her floating home.70 However, the Brasseys personally owned the Sunbeam, meaning that Annie had the authority to fashion its interiors as she wished; Annie did not own the ships she utilized for her journeys to and from North America in 1872 so could not repeat this process of personal adaptation. Most women journeyers maintained strong, active connections to their real homes while they were away, sometimes being accompanied by family members, as were seventeen of the women studied here. Con­ sequently, they again did not feel the need to create a new home during their journeys. Writing letters to those back home or keeping diaries for them to read after the journey, as Lady Emma Liberty, Hester Mary Dawson, Margaret Hunt and Euphemia Stokes did, also helped women to maintain their sense of their existing homes. Embarking on short journeys at the end of which they returned home also meant that many women did not feel any need to create a new home because they did not feel they had fully or permanently left home. Importantly, the lack of a strong sense of home being inscribed in journey living spaces by woman suggests that most did not feel great anxiety or confusion about their journeys or that by making them they were transgressing the conservative belief that women’s ‘proper’ place was in the home.

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ordering the berth Using communal journey spaces Women’s uses of public journey space varied. Ocean journeyers used ship decks as viewing platforms from which to observe passing land­ scapes and seascapes. Annie Brassey found that one evening on the S.S. Hibernian, ‘It was delicious standing on deck; and looking over the taffrail, the track of the steamer appeared more like a stream of molten silver than anything else’.71 Similarly, Vita Sackville-West ‘saw portions of Europe still, from deck: the coast of Greece at dawn, the coast of Crete at sunset, a rainbow standing marvellously on end on the bare cliffs’ during her journey to Persia.72 Decks were also used as social, sports and leisure spaces. Eira Gwendoline Platt (1887–1979), the sixteen-year-old daughter of a middle-class Oldham industrial equipment manufacturer, journeyed with her father around Europe and the Middle East in 1903 and 1904, and played various sports on them including deck-tennis and quoits.73 Decks were also used as places of journey ritual and as sacred spaces. Annie Brassey observed the deck being used as an emotional space in which other journeyers said farewell to family and friends at the beginning of her journey to Canada: The first bell rang at five o’clock, and shortly afterwards the second and third, when the decks were cleared and the last farewells spoken, and nothing was to be seen but tear-stained faces and many pockethandkerchiefs; and thankful was I that we had no one near and dear to us, to whom to say good-bye.74

These spaces also had to be flexible in their functionality: decks that were used on a daily basis for promenading, games and socializing had to convert into religious spaces. Annie Brassey and Sarah Stephens attended religious services on ship decks; Sarah described how one Sunday ‘We had service on the poop  .  .  .  We had a very nice seat near the wheel. There was a bench which quite divided us from the others. The “Plas Pew” we called it. You should have seen the staring there was at our corner!’75 However, their descriptions of such public spaces were again perfunctory or semi-detailed at most. Women’s focus was on what could be seen or done in these spaces, not on the spaces themselves. Liminal and heterotopic journey space It is worth addressing at this point two of the concepts that have dominated much recent academic discussion of space: did women regard

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women, travel and identity journey spaces as liminal or heterotopic? David Sibley defines a liminal space as one of ambiguity, discontinuity and anxiety because it falls between binary categories of space such as public/private and home/ abroad.76 The ship has been characterized as such a space, in which its occupants experience a sense of anxiety and dislocation, because it does not fit into traditional spatial categories such as home–abroad or public–private, but lies in between. As we have seen, spaces in trains could also lie between the private and the public, giving them a potential liminal state as well. Michel Foucault conceptualized heterotopias as ‘real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’. Heterotopias are ‘absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about’. Foucault considered the ship to be the ‘heterotopia par excellence’: ‘a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and  .  .  .  [is] the greatest reserve of the imagination’.77 Other historians define the ship as a heterotopia ‘where social arrangements can be other than those that inhabitants might expect, given spatial arrangements’.78 Trains have been considered democratic because they potentially broke down class barriers: all levels of society could use them and journey together, possibly even in the same carriage depending on what class of ticket they could afford or were willing to purchase. This potentially inverted and subverted the social hierarchy of the society they reflected, arguably also giving trains a heterotopic nature. The majority of the women studied here, however, consistent with their lack of interest in it, gave no indication that they found journey space ambiguous or complex. Only two of the forty could be regarded as possibly being concerned about the fundamental nature of ship space; none expressed any anxiety about the nature of train space. On her voyage back to England from Madras in March 1934, teacher Margaret Hunt felt I  .  .  .  have no sense of reality at the moment. I say my prayers, especially for college people and for home, as a matter of routine  .  .  .  Yet Madras & college do not seem real, nor do home & Mother, Dad & Ethel [her sister]. Perhaps this is partly the effect of the sea – life on board ship seems so unlike life on land – time drifts by, in a dreamlike way, and there is no compulsion to do anything.79

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ordering the berth Her words seem to endorse theoretical interpretations of ships as heterotopias as she emphasizes how different life at sea seems from life at home. Yet being on a ship was not the cause of Margaret’s sense of unreality. Pre-journey emotional and work stress shaped her feeling of detachment: ‘I was working very hard last term, and not very serenely – often with a feeling of working against time & against tiredness.’80 She was especially depressed by the departure of a female colleague with whom she had formed a close friendship at the teaching college: ‘The last fortnight, too, I could not get control of my depression at the thought of Gene’s going.’81 The ship exacerbated her sense of alienation from life, but did not create it. Bertha Broadwood’s extensive adaptations to her cabin for her journey to the West Indies suggests that she might have felt some anxiety about the nature of journey space, which she controlled by creating a space that could be considered a temporary home. Yet her adaptations were motivated by a desire to show her journeying prowess rather than a need to suppress or soothe her anxiety. Her proud display of her thermometer, for example, indicated that she was an experienced journeyer. It enabled her to monitor the daily temperatures at sea; more importantly, possessing and displaying it demonstrated that she was a skilled journeyer who understood that weather conditions would alter as the ship sailed towards its destination, necessitating amongst other things changes in her dress. She had accordingly brought ‘clothes for all weather hot, & cold’.82 She was comfortable at sea, not uneasy. None of the remaining women studied here who journeyed by ship gave any indication that they were even slightly disturbed by its fundamental nature, suggesting most did not find it liminal or heterotopic. Ships’ replication of home’s social order, use of decor that resembled that in affluent homes and inclusion of spaces that could also be found in British homes meant that women found themselves in spaces that were far less unfamiliar than has been suggested, reducing the extent to which they can be seen as heterotopic. The division of train spaces by passenger class, and their replication of Britain’s social order too, as well as some carriages again featuring furnishings that resembled those of home, also reduced the extent to which trains can be considered heterotopic. Women encountered spaces in ships and trains that resembled rather than inverted the places they were familiar with. The continuation, as explored in Chapter 7, of women’s familiar domestic roles and identities within journey spaces, and, for some, their professional identities, also lessened their sense of being in an alien space. The company in which women journeyed additionally reduced any anxiety about the nature of

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women, travel and identity journey space: journeying with friends, family and pro­fessional colleagues reinforced the sense of the familiar. No disquiet about how to categorize or regard journey space prevented women from journeying abroad, or marred their subsequent pleasure in those journeys. These factors also mitigated any sense that they were displaced or transgressing their ‘appropriate’ place. This is not to suggest that women did not find journey spaces at all problematic, but their concerns related to the practicalities and realities of the space rather than its essential nature. Sarah Stephens worried about how many people would be sharing her journey to New Zealand, writing of the Cardigan Castle: ‘It is a very large vessel but I fear we shall be crowded for there are so many people going in it’.83 Her fears were vindicated: she complained later ‘Rainy and stormy. We have been kept in “durance vile” all day. Just imagine 68 in one place without a breath of air. Not a porthole open. Our only consolation is that we are sailing fast.’84 Lady Emma Liberty was concerned about precisely who shared her journey space during her cruise in the Mediterranean and Far East in 1884, disapprovingly describing the other first-class journeyers on the S.S. Galatea as a ‘very motley lot altogether’.85 The power of the female journeyer Women journeyers’ uses of ship and train spaces usually did not deviate from the official discourse created by ship and rail companies to any significant degree. They customarily did not subvert the intended function of journey spaces. Train dining carriages were used for pre­ cisely that as well as for socializing with other journeyers. Observation carriages were used to gaze upon the passing scenery. This conformity might suggest that women were powerless within these spaces. Previous historians have argued that the railway was a male domain in which women had no choice but to journey in gendered spaces such as ladiesonly carriages, and that male stereotypes of women as either virgins or whores meant that any unaccompanied women journeyers who did not use these risked being condemned as the latter.86 Such theories suggest that female journeyers’ respectability depended upon their use of ‘feminine’ journey space and that men held all the power in the journey sphere, suggesting that gender had an extremely significant influence on the journey abroad. However, gender-segregated spaces did not predominate in trains and women did not confine themselves to them. In 1888, the Great Western Railway found that despite their provision of 1,000 seats in

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ordering the berth women’s carriages on their trains, only 248 of them had been used.87 Just six of the women studied here journeyed in women-only carriages, and then only for parts of their journeys: Janet Smith, Ellen and Emily Hall, Margaret Hunt, Vita Sackville-West and Marion Bridie. The majority of female rail journeyers journeyed in mixed-sex carriages. During her train journey from Paris to Marseilles on her way to India in June 1938, Margaret Hunt spent an uncomfortable night in a train compartment shared with three others, including a Major Wall.88 This experience was not uncomfortable because there was a man in the compartment but because cramped conditions made sleeping difficult, which Major Wall tried to solve by suggesting ‘that we should put our luggage on the floor between us & lie down across it, he with his feet on my seat & I with mine on his’.89 Similarly, not every space on ships was gendersegregated; many spaces enabled the sexes to mix. Women did not accept their respectability was at risk if they did not confine themselves to gendered spaces, suggesting that the impact of gender on the journey abroad could be limited. One recent study of women working at sea compares the ship to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison/school/poorhouse/madhouse, with its central tower from which all inmates in the surrounding buildings could be monitored, arguing that ship staff felt themselves to be under constant surveillance by their captain and the superintendant at the shipping lines’ headquarters. Consequently, it argues, staff internalized ship discipline and followed their employers’ rules without question, meaning they lacked power and independence to make their own decisions.90 It could be argued that ship and rail staff created a similar sense of being continuously observed amongst journeyers, especially as they were there to prevent any dangerous or prohibited behaviour: in the late nineteenth century, shipping companies believed their third-class ship stewardesses had to be capable of acting as constant instructors who oversaw the chastity and segregation of women journeyers.91 This would suggest that journeyers were also powerless. Yet power within journey spaces was fluid and constantly shifting, and heavily contingent upon women’s position within the socio-economic and passenger-class journeyer hierarchy. The greatest difference in journeyer power was seen between women in first class and those in third class or steerage. Women in first class had the greatest power over rail and especially ship staff, whom they could treat virtually as their personal servants. They overtly wielded their authority to ensure that their needs, and those of their families or companions, were met. Annie Brassey complained about the ‘general discomfort’ of the S.S. Hibernian: ‘We

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women, travel and identity could hardly sleep [one] night for the cold  .  .  .  in spite of having a small steam stove turned on from the engine.’92 She also complained about the ‘very tipsy’ stewardess serving them.93 Asserting her authority as a wealthy member of the upper echelons of British society who was also at the pinnacle of the journeyer hierarchy, she spoke to the ship’s head steward and was much happier afterwards: ‘Since speaking to the head-steward we have been much more comfortable, and have had everything we wanted.’94 Even ‘The stewardess, too, has behaved better, but she cannot help being disagreeable and rough – “it is her nature to” ’.95 She had a much more satisfactory experience on her journey home on the S.S. Russia: Everything is arranged to make the passage as pleasant as anything so essentially disagreeable can be made. There are deck stewards to bring us our meals on deck, and bedroom stewardesses to bring them into our cabin, with hot dishes and covered plates, so as to make things as palatable as they can be on board ship.96

Bertha Mason Broadwood also took advantage of ship staff ’s role as virtual servants on her journey to the West Indies in 1902: she confirmed that she ‘shd. not object to having my hot water, & morning cup of tea brought me by the steward’.97 The wealthiest women also used their position as elite journeyers to access spaces which lower-fare-paying journeyers were denied. Annie Brassey toured the ships’ emigrant quarters, spirit stores, ice-rooms, engine-rooms and stoke holes.98 Lady Theodora Guest explored the S.S. Paris’s stores, kitchen, bakehouse, and second-class and emigrant quarters during her journey to America in 1894.99 Elite journeyers held power over the emigrants in these situations because they gazed at them regardless of whether they wished to be observed or not. Nor could emigrants reciprocate this scrutiny by entering first-class living spaces; being at the apex of the journeyer hierarchy allowed women to gain access to other journeyers’ spaces without any reciprocal agreement that the latter could enter their own, again reducing the latter’s power. Women in the lower echelons of the journeyer hierarchy had far less authority. On her rail journey from New York to Montreal in 1896, Janet Smith ‘was the only female passenger’ in a carriage sleeping twelve, while ‘Mrs. M— [her employer] had a state room all to herself ’.100 Despite her discomfort, she could not change her accommodation because she was journeying at the expense of her employer. She had to endure cramped conditions that worried her both practically and as a threat

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ordering the berth to her respectability and personal safety in being surrounded by male journeyers: ‘I  .  .  .  had no inclination of taking off my clothes. I would never have got them on in the morning. There was just a ½ a yard between my bed and Mr. Hugh’s and Mr. Hurmson.’101 Women at the base of the journeyer hierarchy also encountered staff who strongly asserted their authority over them in order to enforce the official power structure of journey space. The segregation of women journeyers from men in steerage, as has been usefully noted, could ‘be experienced as severe repression’ in which ‘the matron  .  .  .  was gaoler as well as supervisor’.102 The matron responsible for supervising the single women on Sarah Stephens’s journey to New Zealand in 1876 and 1877 took her duties and concomitant power extremely seriously: Some of the girls have been breaking the rules by writing notes to the sailors. The Matron came up unexpectedly and tried to take the letters from them. There was a scuffle in which the matron’s hat (a new one) fell overboard and some knitting that she had in her hand. She is very angry. I do not know what will be done to the girls.103

Sarah’s comment about the uncertainty of the girls’ fate indicates they may well have been officially punished. Attempts by lower-order journeyers to resist or subvert staff power and journey rules were problematic, if not futile. The matron remained supremely suspicious of the women during the remainder of Sarah’s journey, believing many of them were morally wayward and seeking inappropriate encounters with men. On another occasion, one of the girls was writing a few particulars of the voyage to her mother on note-paper. The Matron, passing by, thought she was writing to one of the crew and snatched it from her, read, crumpled up and threw it back. Was it not rude? She ought to have apologised when she found her mistake but what can you expect from a pig but a grunt?104

Stewardesses’ relationships with journeyers could be aggravated, even hostile, and a battle for mastery could rage between the two. The battle on this particular journey climaxed disturbingly when, on her birthday, the matron ‘dressed up some of the Irish girls as negroes and got them to dance for the amusement of herself and the others’.105 Not only did the matron abuse her authority by using journeyers as objects for her own entertainment, but the incident also reveals the racist discourses that could operate within journey space. However, on Christmas Day,

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women, travel and identity 1876, the matron seriously undermined her authority when she ‘got rather too merry  .  .  .  and had to go into her bunk. The sailors have all found out and are making fun of her.’106 Staff also controlled the access that women at the bottom of the journeyer hierarchy had to journey spaces, preventing them from entering areas for which they did not have a valid ticket. Conversely, a good relationship with a staff member could enable them to enter spaces from which they were normally excluded, although this was a very rare occurrence. Sarah Stephens’s family forged a good relationship, unusually on the grounds of family and geographical connections, with the Cardigan Castle’s captain, who it transpired came from Cardiganshire and knew their uncle in New Zealand.107 The captain ‘wishes us always to keep to the stern of the ship near the wheel and he will not let the others come beyond a certain space and I think they are very much annoyed’.108 Observing the captain’s wishes caused resentment amongst their fellow emigrants: ‘Some of the Messes are very angry because we keep aloof from them.’109 The Stephens’ good relationship with the Captain sub­ sequently enabled Sarah’s mother to visit the saloon for cake and wine with the captain’s wife.110 However, while the wealthiest women journeyers had the greatest personal authority, women in the lowest passenger classes could indirectly contend with the official power structure of ships and trains. Journey staff represented and enforced ship and rail companies’ corporate authority, but were simultaneously a medium through which women journeyers could engage with it. It has been usefully argued that the role of female ship staff altered considerably during the years between 1860 and 1938: in the earliest decades of this period, the role of female staff was to enforce the separation of the sexes, but by the end of the nineteenth century their role had changed to ensuring a relaxing crossing for women and children.111 Third-class stewardesses helped women to challenge the ship’s power structure: female journeyers would report their complaints or requests to them, the stewardesses would report them to a steward, and the steward to the officers or the captain if needed.112 These stewardesses could function as women’s representatives.113 Interwar ship stewardesses were often caring people who sought and welcomed ‘sympathetic ties’ with the journeyers they served, fostering a generally warm atmosphere within journey spaces.114 Matrons had considerable responsibility for protecting as well as disciplining single female emigrants, separating them not just from male journeyers and crew but also from older women trying to recruit them into prostitution.115 They physically nurtured and encouraged journeyers.116 While stewardesses often performed hard, lowly,

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ordering the berth maid-type work,117 they could move beyond the servant role by helping women to make their voices heard. Ship companies also invited women at the bottom of the ship’s hierarchy to participate more directly in the power structure. The steerage quarters on the S.S. Cardigan Castle were divided into messes for meals, and Sarah Stephens was able to select who was in hers. Along with her family members, ‘To make up our number to eight, we have a little lame girl from Cripple College, Marylebone and an Irish Protestant, a farmer’s daughter from Dublin. We chose them before we embarked.’118 Sarah’s sister Polly was ‘Captain of the Mess’ and made cakes and pies for them.119 It could be argued that, by inviting women journeyers to control these aspects of their emigration journey, ship companies incorporated women into their power structures and diminished their individual power to act as they chose. Yet these actions gave women some authority as they decided what they would eat during the journey, albeit with the limitation of what was in ships’ stores, and who would eat with them. It allowed them to personalize their journeys somewhat. Women’s experiences of journey space(s) emphasize the centrality of (social) status and fortune to the journey abroad. This status was commensurate with the degree of power a woman journeyer could hope to possess. Wealth bought women not just a first-class ticket but a standing at the top of the journeyer hierarchy; comfort, access and authority followed. Lower income, or outright poverty in the case of some emigrants, often bought considerable spatial confinement, movement and behavioural restrictions, lack of control and even oppression, as well as a cheap(er) journey. In this, the journey abroad echoed much of the impact of money and status in Britain. Status, both social and passenger class, as we shall see in the next chapter, had a similarly powerful impact upon women’s sociability. Notes 1 I. and S. Haigh, ‘Where do all the flies go  .  .  .  ?’: The Journal of Isabel and Samuel Haigh as They Emigrated to New Zealand in 1920, researched and published by S. and M. Shaw (Malton, 1996), pp. ix, 22–3. 2 Ibid., p. 29 (no date is given for this entry). 3 G. Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art (London and New York, 1988), p. 56. 4 Freeman, Railways, pp. 110  –11. 5 Ibid., pp. 110, 118. 6 N. Faith, The World the Railways Made (London, 1990), p. 235. 7 Miller, Famous Ocean Liners, p. 12.

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women, travel and identity 8 Freeman, Railways, p. 112. 9 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur B385, H.M.D. [Hester Mary Dawson], Bombay During the Plague 1897–1898: Extracts from the Letters of H.M.D. – Plague Hospital Nurse Under Government (printed for private circulation only, London, 1899), 1 December 1897, p. 1. 10 N. McCart, Atlantic Liners of the Cunard Line from 1884 to the Present Day (Wellingborough, 1990), pp. 58  –  9. 11 A.B. [Anne Burns], Travels of a Lady’s Maid (Boston, 1908), pp. 83–  4. Anne did not name her employers or give the specific dates of this journey. However, she refers to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim at one point, meaning that it must have occurred between 1901, when Kim was published, and 1908, when her account was published (ibid., p. 235). 12 SCA, ULL, Cunard Archive, PR 6/12, Cabin dining room on the S.S. Britannic, WSM, VII: 9 (July 1930), 389. 13 SCA, ULL, Cunard Archive, PR 6/10, ‘From A White Star Notebook’, WSM, VI:7 (March 1929), 206. 14 A. Hassan, Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries by Nineteenth-Century British Emigrants (Manchester, 1994), p. 112. 15 Faith, World the Railways Made, p. 235. 16 The type of ship could alter the division of space. The troopship Rewa in which officer’s wife Mrs Alice Bosanquet journeyed out to India with her husband in 1906 had a troop deck, which obviously would not be found on a standard passenger liner (BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur C620, Diary of Mrs A. E. Bosanquet, ‘Voyage diary to Bombay on T.S.S. Rewa, December 1906  –January 1907’). 17 Fox, Ocean Railway, pp. 299  –303. 18 McCart, Atlantic Liners, p. 172. 19 SCA, ULL, Cunard Archive, PR 6/10, ‘White Star Notebook’, WSM, VI:7 (March 1929), 206. 20 SCA, ULL, D42/PR2/1/17/DSO, Cabin drawing room on the S.S. Britannic, WSM, VII:9 (July 1930), 397; SCA, ULL, Cunard Archive, PR 6/12, Woman being served breakfast by maid in a second-class cabin on the S.S. Aquitania (1914). 21 NRM/SSPL, Image no. 10442363, Great Western Railway, First-class dining car (1938). 22 P. Bailey, ‘Adventures in space: Victorian railway erotics, or taking alienation for a ride’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 9:1 (spring 2004), 8. 23 City of Westminster Archives Centre, London (hereafter CWAC), 788/184, Lady E. Lasenby Liberty, The Levant and Back Within Twenty-Eight Days (Extracts from a Diary) (printed for private circulation, 1884), 27 March 1884, p. 6. Lady Liberty does not state in which year she made but this journey, but it was probably in early 1884 as the Orient Express made its maiden journey in October 1883 and the extracts were printed in 1884. 24 MAL, MMM, DX/1093, ‘Diary of J. Smith’, 12 September 1896. 25 Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, p. 89. 26 Ibid. 27 Carter, ‘The lady in the trunk’, 53. There is some disagreement about precisely when women’s carriages were introduced. Kim Stevenson cites the recommendation of the Board of Trade in 1888 to provide separate compartments for women, but states that this was not compulsory (K. Stevenson, ‘ “Women and young girls dare not travel alone”: the dangers of sexual encounters on Victorian railways’, in G. Letherby and G. Reynolds (eds), Gendered Journeys, Mobile Emotions (Farnham, 2000), p. 196).

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ordering the berth 28 Bromley Archives, London (hereafter BA), 855 F2/14, Diary of E. Hall, ‘Diary’, 14 January 1875. 29 Fox, Ocean Railway, pp. 279  –  81. 30 London Borough of Lambeth Archives (hereafter LA), IV/138/9, Diary of E.M. Jones, ‘Diary’, 18 June 1889. 31 Gothard, Blue China, p. 115. 32 MAL, MMM, DX/1071/R, ‘Diary of S. Stephens’, 28 September 1876. 33 Hassan, Sailing to Australia, p. 135. 34 Ibid., pp. 62–3. 35 Ibid., p. 67. 36 A. Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 2009), p. 2. 37 T. Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Oxford, 2004), p. 24. 38 T.S. Terkenli, ‘Home as a region’, Geographical Review, 85:3 (July 1995), 325. 39 Ibid., 324. 40 J. Hamlett, ‘‘‘Nicely feminine, yet learned”: student rooms at Royal Holloway and the Oxford and Cambridge colleges in late nineteenth-century Britain’, Women’s History Review, 15:1 (March 2006), 144  –5. 41 M. Girouard, The Victorian Country House, revised and enlarged edn (New Haven and London, 1979), pp. 31, 33; C. Dakers, Clouds: The Biography of a Country House (New Haven and London, 1993), pp. 89  –  96. 42 McCart, Atlantic Liners, p. 15. 43 A.J. Hammerton, ‘Gender and migration’, in P. Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2004), p. 163. 44 Gothard, Blue China, p. 119. 45 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur C546, Diary of M.E. Roberts, later Lady Thomas, ‘Diary of voyage to and from India and Burma, October 1930–April 1931’, 30 October 1930. 46 Guest, Round Trip, p. 210. 47 SHC, 2185/BMB/5/17, ‘Diary of B. Broadwood’, 27 November 1902. 48 Edwards, Thousand Miles, p. 36. 49 Ibid., p. 37. 50 Haigh, ‘Where do all the flies go?’, 31 May 1920, p. 30. 51 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur C620, ‘Diary of A. Bosanquet’, 20 December 1906. 52 Brassey, A Cruise, 5 September 1872, p. 6. 53 Ibid., 7 September 1872, p. 10. 54 Ibid., 28 November 1872, p. 149. 55 MAL, MMM, DX1071/R, ‘Diary of S. Stephens’, 27 November 1876. 56 British Library, Manuscripts Collection (hereafter BL Manuscripts Collection), Additional MS. 46267, Diary of M. Gladstone, ‘Diary’, 9 August 1885. 57 Haigh, ‘Where do all the flies go?’, 11 July 1920, p. 48. 58 Hull History Centre (hereafter HHC), U DP/195/1, Diary of F. Davis, ‘Journal of Incidents Connected with my Voyage to China, March 14, 1871 to September 26, 1871’, 23 and 24 March and 12 April 1871. See entries dated 29 March, 5, 13, and 21 April for more details about her illness. See A Lady’s Life and Travels in Zululand and the Transvaal during Cetewayo’s Reign: The African Letters and Journals of the late

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women, travel and identity

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76 77 78

79

80 81

Mrs Wilkinson (London, 1882), letters dated 13 July, 24 July and 29 August 1870, pp. 1, 3, 14 for further instances of women journeyers’ sufferings: Mrs Wilkinson suffered greatly with seasickness. Brassey, A Cruise, 1 September 1872, p. 4. BL Manuscripts Collection, Add. MS. 46267, ‘Diary of M. Gladstone’, 11 August 1885. SHC, 2185/BMB/5/17, ‘Diary of B. Broadwood’, 28 November 1902. MAL, MMM, DX/1093, ‘Diary of J. Smith’, 5 and 12 September and 9 October 1896. Hassan, Sailing to Australia, p. 136. CWAC, 788/184, Liberty, Levant and Back, 30 March 1884, p. 10. Brassey, A Cruise, 30 September 1872, p. 52. Guest, Round Trip, pp. 2, 165. Terkenli, ‘Home’, 325. J.R. Ryan, ‘‘‘Our home on the ocean”: Lady Brassey and the voyages of the Sunbeam, 1874  –1887’, Journal of Historical Geography, 32 (2006), 596. Ibid., 584. Ibid., 597. Brassey, A Cruise, 7 September 1872, p. 10. Sackville-West, Passenger, p. 27. BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur Photo Eur 362, Diary of E.G. du Breil (née Platt), ‘Typescript of The Diary of Eira Gwendoline du Breil (née Platt) (1887– 1979) describing her travels in 1903–1904’, October 1903–April 1904. Eira settled in Paris, where her husband Charles du Breil was a senior figure in horseracing (ibid.). She bought a racing stable outside Paris (telephone conversation between Anthony Spender, Eira’s great nephew, and the author, 17 July 2011). The Eira du Breil Stakes is still run in France today. Brassey, A Cruise, 29 August 1872, p. 2. MAL, MMM, DX1071/R, ‘Diary of S. Stephens’, 22 October 1876. D. Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (London, 1995), pp. 32–3. Michel Foucault, ‘Of other spaces’, trans. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16:1 (Spring 1986), 24, 27. J. Stanley, ‘ “Caring for the poor souls” ’: inter-war seafaring women and their pity for passengers’, in G. Letherby and G. Reynolds (eds), Gendered Journeys, Mobile Emotions (Farnham, 2009), p. 124. BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur F241/10, Letters and Diaries of M. Hunt, ‘Extracts from the letters and diaries of M. Hunt, in the English Department of the Women’s Christian College in Madras, from June 1932 until April 1943’, 18 March 1934. Margaret attended Bedford College and St Mary’s Training College in London and qualified as a teacher in 1930. Having taught in England for one year, she applied via the Lindsay Commission to teach in India and received a five-year appointment at the college (BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur F241/1, Letters and Diaries of M. Hunt, ‘Extracts from the letters and diaries of M. Hunt, in the English Department of the Women’s Christian College in Madras, from June 1932 until April 1943’, pp. 7, 9, 10, 13, 14). BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur F241/10, ‘Letters and diaries of M. Hunt’, 18 March 1934. Ibid.

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ordering the berth

82 83 84 85 86 87 88

89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119

SHC, 2185/BMB/5/17, ‘Diary of B. Broadwood’, 27 November 1902. MAL, MMM, DX/1071/R, ‘Diary of S. Stephens’, 28 September 1876. Ibid., 18 November 1876. CWAC, 788/184, Liberty, Levant and Back, 12 April 1884, p. 32. Carter, ‘The lady in the trunk’, 53–  4. Stevenson, ‘ “Women and young girls” ’, p. 196. BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur F241/16, Letters and Diaries of M. Hunt, ‘Extracts from the letters and diaries of M. Hunt, in the English Department of the Women’s Christian College in Madras, from June 1932 until April 1943’, letter dated 10 June 1938. Ibid. J. Stanley, ‘And after the cross-dressed cabin boys and whaling wives? Possible futures for women’s maritime historiography’, JTH, 23:1 (March 2002), 16. Maenpaa, ‘Women below deck’, 60. Brassey, A Cruise, 2 and 5 September 1872, pp. 4, 6. Ibid., 31 August 1872, p. 4. Ibid., 6 September 1872, p. 8. Ibid. Ibid., 25 November 1872, p. 146. SHC, 2185/BMB/5/17, ‘Diary of B. Broadwood’, 28 November 1902. Brassey, A Cruise, 2, 6 September and 27 November 1872, pp. 4, 7, 148. Guest, Round Trip, pp. 5  –  6. MAL, MMM, DX/1093, ‘Diary of J. Smith’, 12 September 1896. Ibid., 12 September 1896. Hammerton, ‘Gender and migration’, p. 163. MAL, MMM, DX/1071/R, ‘Diary of S. Stephens’, 16 October 1876. Ibid., 23 October 1876. Ibid., 30 November 1876. Ibid., 25 December 1876. Ibid., 6 October 1876. Ibid., 22 October 1876. Ibid. Ibid., 10 November 1876. Maenpaa, ‘Women below deck’, 60  –1. Ibid., 60. Ibid. Stanley, ‘ “Caring for the poor souls” ’, pp. 128  –  9. Gothard, Blue China, p. 129. Stanley, ‘ “Caring for the poor souls” ’, p. 129. Ibid., p. 124. MAL, MMM, DX/1071/R, ‘Diary of S. Stephens’, 15 October 1876. Ibid., 17 October 1876.

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5 Busy practising games: scrutiny and sociability

I

t was possible for the journey abroad to acquire a routine edge, particularly during longer journeys. On her journey to India in June 1937 on the S.S. Rajputana teacher Euphemia Stokes and her colleague Miss Sivcar developed a daily pattern of activities: rise, swim and exercises (not Miss Sivcar), fruit in cabin, breakfast, ‘constitutional’, sew or read, 1/2 an orange each (bought in Marseilles), continue to sew or read, lunch, ‘constitutional’, read in cabin, sleep, tea, ‘constitutional’, read, write or play games, bath or swim, down for dinner, dinner, ‘constitutional’, read or talk, bed.1

Some women did not enjoy such repetitiveness. During her voyage to South America in August 1881, Mrs Rosa Carnegie-Williams found that ‘Really one day passes so much like another, that there are few interesting items to note’.2 Given this, socializing became an integral part of the journey. It could be extremely rarefied, as one Bedford College student, ‘Civis’, found during her voyage across the Atlantic to the United States in 1894: it had been a lovely day and the dusk was come. Most of the passengers were below at a concert, and three of us sat on the deck gazing out at the infinity of waters, the mysterious distant clouds with the afterglow of sunset on them, and said what we could recollect of poetry to each other, till the cold and the darkness drove us reluctant below.3

Journey sociability re-emphasizes the centrality of socio-economic status to the journey, but also reveals the power of continued convention and understandings of order. Women welcomed, and even colluded in, the continuation of conventions and ideas from home as well as wider beliefs in the naturalness and importance of British hegemony, colonialism and imperialism. It also highlights the importance of sight and observation

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busy practising games to the journey abroad, and again how far the journey was conceptualized into an act of leisure. Journey leisure and sociability Echoing etiquette writers, transport companies emphasized that journeyers should be sociable. Memorabilia from the first voyage to Burma by Mrs J.D. Stuart, the wife of a member of the Indian Service of Engineers, in October 1913 on the Bibby Line’s S.S. Leicestershire includes a printed list of the 181 passengers on board provided by the company.4 Such lists made women’s fellow journeyers into concrete beings who could and should not be ignored. This emphasis on the need to be sociable could be even more explicit. ‘Joanna’ wrote in the May 1934 White Star Magazine, To my mind it is the unbounded enthusiasm of the cruisers which makes cruising such a delight. When people tell me they have been on a cruise and had a dull time, I know perfectly well that it was not the cruise which was a failure, but the people. If one is a good fellow, ready and willing to join in the spirit of things, with the intention of having a good time, it is impossible to have anything else.5

Communal leisure activities were organized to relieve monotony, to provide an outlet for journeyers’ energy and to facilitate sociability. The dramatic increase in the variety and sophistication of these activities, particularly on maritime journeys, was one of the greatest changes in the journey between 1870 and 1940. At the beginning of the period, social and leisure activities were limited and largely informal. Conversations with other journeyers during mealtimes, in their cabin, on deck and in ship saloons were the extent of sisters Emily and Ellen Hall’s activities during their journeys to Algeria in the 1870s and 1880s. There were no organized events such as the fancy-dress parties, quoits and deck tennis that appeared in later decades; if journeyers wished to extend their activities beyond conversation, reading, sketching or writing letters and diaries, they had to devise entertainments for themselves. Lady Liberty gave ‘an example of the frivolous way we pass the time on the Mediterranean’ during her 1884 cruise: Here is a riddle: – My first expresses numbers, my second magnifies numbers, my third increases numbers, and my whole ignores numbers and is the name of a dignitary of the Church of England, lately deceased? Here is another riddle: Two ducks before a duck, two ducks behind a duck, and one duck in the middle. How many ducks were there?6

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women, travel and identity This lack of any other organized form of activity meant mealtimes were key social events. Companies such as P&O gave journeyers a financial incentive to attend meals as they were included in their ticket prices,7 but it was the prospect of company that made women determined to attend. Fanny Davis bemoaned being confined to her cabin by illness during her March 1871 journey to China: ‘of all the aggravating things its [sic] the aggravatingest to have to lie in one’s berth & listen to the creatures in the saloon enjoying their meals!’8 Despite their chronic seasickness, the Hall sisters tried to attend meals whenever they could. On their journey out to Algiers in November 1880, Emily recounted of one evening: ‘Talked of Algiers = gossip and scandal  .  .  .  sat thru’ dinner: but cd. not leave my berth again.’9 Journey acquaintanceships were forged through such mealtime conversations. Having company during meals remained of great significance for the remainder of the period, especially for those at sea. Euphemia Stokes was disconcerted by her journey in first class on the S.S. Stratheden to Madras in September 1939, just as war broke out, as she usually journeyed in second class. Her discomfort was exacerbated by her solitude during the first meals: ‘I haven’t made friends with anybody on board yet. At meals, all the people at my table must be non-existent or ill, because so far I’ve been alone!’10 She was relieved when her fellow diners finally appeared: ‘A nice American woman joined me at table last night  .  .  .  A very cheerful Scottish bank manager was at my table this morning, and a military person’s wife. They didn’t see eye to eye, which was rather amusing. The 1st officer was there too.’11 For women journeying alone in particular, mealtimes were an easy, safe place in which to make acquaintances and avoid complete isolation. By 1940, however, a number of organized leisure and social activities had emerged on the maritime journey that supplemented mealtimes as opportunities to socialize, and demonstrated how far the journey had evolved into an act of leisure. During her journeys to India and back home from Rangoon in 1930 and 1931 on the S.S. Mantua and the S.S. Sagaing, Margaret Roberts participated in deck ‘dog-racing’. In this an oval course was marked out on deck; the players’ toy dogs (bought from the barber’s shop on board) were given numbers, and each player rolled a die to decide how far their dog moved round the track. She also participated in bucket and deck quoits (singles and mixed doubles); singles, doubles and mixed doubles deck tennis; skittles (mixed and ladies’ teams plus singles); singles and mixed doubles shuffleboard; and fancy-dress dances, concerts and spontaneous singing on deck.12 On her round-theworld-trip on the Empress of Britain in 1931 and 1932, Marion Bridie

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busy practising games frequently swam in the ship’s swimming pool, attended a fancy-dress dance and a ‘Book Contest’ in which people had to dress up as wellknown book titles, went to the cinema and played tennis (doubles and mixed doubles), shuffle board, bucket quoits, quoit tennis and table tennis.13 Train leisure, however, remained more limited since trains could not accommodate the facilities for such a range of leisure activities. This was one of the greatest differences between the ship and rail journey abroad. Sports were usually organized into rounds with semi-finals and finals from which one journeyer or team emerged as the overall winner. Many of these events successfully eased initial awkwardness between jour­ neyers. Margaret Roberts recorded on the second day of her journey from Rangoon to Britain in 1931 that ‘Games began, & we get to know some of the people’.14 These competitions were taken extremely seriously. By the fourth day of this voyage Margaret noted that ‘Everyone is busy practising games’.15 Ironically, however, these activities sometimes also created tension between journeyers. During this same journey, particular ‘unpleasantness’ raged over skittles: during one match a member of Margaret’s team had to withdraw owing to injury; her team felt another journeyer should be allowed to replace him, but in a similar incident in a previous match both teams had agreed that the team who was down a player would have an extra shot each instead.16 Their opponents insisted this be used as the precedent so the matter was ‘referred to the committee who decided that a man who had not played in the competition should take [the injured man’s] place’.17 The other team still objected and the matter was resolved only when it was agreed the prize money would be donated to charity.18 These activities were often organized by journeyers themselves, demon­ strating just how important they considered them. Margaret Roberts was on the games and dance committees on her journey from Rangoon.19 Journeyers strove to give these activities as formal a veneer as possible: printed programmes were produced for concerts.20 Some historians have dismissed these activities as ‘dull and  .  .  .  childish’.21 However, they have overlooked the significant similarity between journey leisure and leisure and social activities in Britain, and its importance. Late Victorian and Edwardian Britons, particularly the middle and upper classes, participated in activities including balls, dinners, concerts, walking in parks and sports such as tennis and croquet; major race-meetings such as Royal Ascot were also extremely popular.22 Journey dances, promenading on deck, deck tennis and ‘dog-racing’ echoed this domestic leisure.

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women, travel and identity As the journey abroad was the most universal form of women’s travel outside Britain between 1870 and 1940, journey leisure illuminates how female travel was predominantly genteel in nature and, unlike the experiences of Mary Kingsley or Gertrude Bell amongst others, often complemented women’s lives back home rather than acting as a complete contrast to them. It has been argued that women’s travel was primarily a way of going beyond the boundaries of home to a place where they could do more.23 The nature of leisure and social activities on the journey indicates, however, that most women did not seek escape from their domestic lives when travelling. As has been usefully noted, there were inherent risks in travelling for Britons: ‘Abandoning Britain meant abandoning home. It therefore threatened all the cherished values that Home implied – fidelity, obedience, connubial affection, and a stable and rooted existence.’24 Participating in journey leisure activities that echoed those of home reduced this risk; the fact that women often organized these activities themselves suggests they also actively wanted to maintain this connection to home. However, some changes in journey leisure also reflected the influence of the ‘roaring’ 1920s and the Americanization of the journey. Golf was a particular craze in 1920s America,25 so ship companies began to incorporate golfing facilities on their larger ships: the Empress of Britain had a putting green and driving net.26 Cinema also boomed,27 and was incorporated into the journey experience. The growth of nightclubs and speakeasies where the young danced and drank delicious, if sometimes illegal, cocktails also contributed to the inclusion of dances into the journey leisure programme, and encouraged the provision of cocktail bars on ships by the 1930s. These influences highlight one of the tensions inherent to the journey. While journeyers were keen to maintain links to home, transport companies had to ensure their leisure provision was modern and up-to-date to please their customers. The journey abroad can be seen as a simultaneously mobile and immobile space: it sought to maintain the existing yet it was also constantly evolving to incorporate the new; it both moved forward and remained fixed in the already established. Women’s embracing of newer elements of journey leisure shows that they too expected their journeys to be both traditional and homely and in alignment with modern life, reflecting once again that they considered themselves women of modernity. There were also some notable differences between journey leisure and leisure in Britain, reflecting that the journey was not an absolute mirror image of home. Many journey activities involved the simultaneous

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busy practising games participation of both sexes in a period where it is argued ‘women’s leisure [in Britain] was  .  .  .  an independent sphere’ to that of men.28 Journey leisure overturned this particular separation of spheres. In addition, many of these leisure activities were available to married and unmarried, younger and older, accompanied and unaccompanied women journeyers alike. Young, unchaperoned, unmarried Janet Smith attended a ‘concert in the dining saloon’ during her journey to New York on the S.S. Umbria in 1896 which ‘was very nice’ although ‘the heat was terrible, my very stays are wet through the saloon was crowded’.29 Life cycle, age and marital status did not play as powerful a role in determining women’s journey leisure activities as it could at home, where there could be a dramatic shift in their activities upon marriage. The relationship between the journey abroad and home was complex: women journeyers did not spatially create homes-from-homes, but many elements of the journey maintained crucial links to their real home lives; yet while the journey incorporated elements of the homely it did not absolutely recreate home. Scrutiny and the journey(er) gaze Women undoubtedly relied upon socializing with other journeyers to alleviate any sense of tedium. They were fully aware of the potentially dull, even lonely, nature of their experience if other journeyers did not prove like-minded, entertaining companions. Euphemia Stokes was disappointed by her fellow journeyers on P&O’s S.S. Narkunda during her journey to Madras in 1938: ‘Most of the people look quite half baked and uninteresting.’30 More importantly, by choosing or, despite public expectations of their sociability, refusing to interact with other journeyers, women demonstrated they did have power to shape their journey as a social experience, as etiquette writers suggested. But that experience was also determined by a factor that they could not control: anybody could purchase a ticket for the same journey. Women did not know who would be journeying with them, unless family members, friends or colleagues accompanied them. Women’s sociability accordingly began with a period of intense scrutiny rather than immediate interaction with other journeyers, indicating they felt some anxiety about them, unsurprisingly as they were often going to be enclosed with them for a prolonged period of time. The concept of ‘the [tourist] gaze’ has been central to much recent analysis of travel: ‘the way in which people perceive – “gaze at” – objects and places’ such as historical and cultural sites and features of landscapes and townscapes in the course of their travels.31 It is suggested that, with

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women, travel and identity the decline of the Grand Tour, travel was redefined in the nineteenth century as ‘eyewitness observation’ rather than as an opportunity for education.32 Historians have also used the gaze to demonstrate the oppressive nature of certain forms of travel: the gaze of Western explorers such as David Livingstone and Richard Burton in Africa and other countries has been considered an emblem of the unequal relations between Europe and the East.33 Material, cultural and historical objects, the quintessential objects of the tourist gaze, could be seen by gazing outwards at the passing landscape through railway-carriage windows or from ship decks as they sailed along countries’ coastlines, and during stop-offs at railway stations and harbour towns such as Port Said and Aden. Mrs F.D. Bridges, who journeyed around the world with her husband in 1878 and 1879, found the countryside on her rail journey between Calcutta and Darjeeling to be ‘a real garden of brilliant green rice-fields, great bananas, and graceful coco-palms, underneath which the tiny Hindoo huts nestled’.34 During her cruise down the Rhine in 1889, Emily May Jones found ‘it was curious to observe the flat country [in Holland]; the number of windmills, and the roofs of houses just appearing above the banks’.35 Lady Theodora Guest ‘watched the scenery, which was wooded and pretty  .  .  .  we frequently crossed large rivers’ while seated in the observation car of her train from Philadelphia to Baltimore during her journey in 1894.36 Margaret Roberts recorded the Mantua’s nocturnal arrival in Malta in November 1930: Our lamps were hung out from the Mantua, really to help the disembarking, but they helped to show up the busy scene. As soon as we stopped scores of boats came round; some were ordinary row-boats belonging to the [local] boatmen, others were steam & motor launches from the battleships which were to take off the naval & military passengers.37

Yet it is an oversimplification to automatically equate the journey(er) gaze to the tourist gaze. Many customary objects of this gaze were unavailable during the journey abroad. Ships reached open water, where all that could be observed were seascapes. The ability of rail journeyers to gaze upon these sights was also restricted by both the speed at which the train passed through the landscape and the limited time of journey stop-offs. Wolfgang Schivelbusch seminally argued that the speed and directness with which trains moved through land distanced rail journeyers from the landscape. They now saw a mediated landscape, created by the apparatus in which they journeyed: they were forced to try to observe only distant objects because the train’s velocity prevented them from seeing

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busy practising games those closest; yet their eyes kept trying to gaze at the latter, creating an increasingly stressful visual experience.38 Consequently, an alternative journey(er) gaze developed which was directed inwards at other journeyers. Women moved continuously amongst their fellow journeyers within a confined space – few activities did not involve meeting them – and the length of many journeys allowed prolonged, detailed observation of them. Gazing could be an almost continuous act. The journey’s conditions and environment thus redefined the gaze as primarily the perception of people instead of objects: as one study usefully highlights, the nineteenth-century British train compartment ‘was the site of intense if oblique mutual scrutiny. It produced a situation of anonymous promiscuity increasingly typical of modern life in which visual impressions were the prime means of reading others.’39 The same can be argued of train carriages outside Britain. On both trains and ships, people formed the majority of the ‘sights’ women ‘collected’. Much literature has focused upon the gaze of Westerners and white people upon indigenous local peoples. The journey(er) gaze, however, fell upon both Western and non-Western journeyers alike with equal intensity. In this intensity, women journeyers were non-discriminatory, although their comments upon their fellow journeyers revealed a far from total absence of prejudice. Previous commentators have suggested that gazing is a primarily masculine act: the male gaze projects a fantasy on to the female, who is, and remains, the object of the gaze.40 Yet they also suggest that the female spectator can adopt this masculine gaze, arguing that, while most popular narratives, whether film, folktale or myth, depict the female as the victim who is rescued by the male hero, the underlying ‘grammar’ of the story positions the spectator with the hero.41 These arguments suggest that women can gaze, but do not clarify what a specifically feminine gaze might be. This book argues that there was a clear female journey(er) gaze. It perceived, objectified and judged other journeyers in terms of their physical appearance and, in the case of other Western journeyers, the first character traits they displayed. Women gazed keenly at their fellow journeyers. Margaret Roberts described her first day on the Mantua as a day of observation: ‘The day was spent quietly, chiefly in scrutinising our fellow passengers.’42 With remarkably similar wording, she wrote that the first day of her journey home from Burma in April 1931 ‘we spent in unpacking & in scrutinizing our fellow passengers’.43 Fanny Davis found fellow journeyer Mrs Reade ‘not particularly pretty’, but could not ‘keep my eyes off her’ during her journey to China:

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women, travel and identity All her speeches are accompanied by a graceful flitting [?] of the hands which are small, well formed & very white. She has lovely teeth & shows them to advantage; her features are well cut [?] & her eyes beautiful, just like a cow’s. Generally she is pale & rather pasty but when excited she looks brilliant. I fancy that  .  .  .  balls are her forte but I feel sure I shall like her.44

Despite the unusual bovine comparison, such detailed comments demon­ strate just how closely and seriously women observed other journeyers. One Bedford College student was moved to poetry upon observing a nurse in a third-class Italian railway carriage in 1896: A shaft of sunlight pierced the grimy pane,   And touched, ’mid other figures, one in black –   A nursing Sister’s. Then, as it danced back, It left the sable form in gloom again. Sad was her face, and pale, as faces are   Of those whose life-work is for others weal,   Blanched as the faces at the chariot wheel Of God, when God Himself goes out to war. This poor, pale warrior with Suffering strove,   And measured swords with Want, and Shame, and Sin –   Fight on, sad soldier, thou shalt surely win The victor’s laurel from the Lord of Love. The Sister had been weeping for the dead,   And, thinking of the living, she was fain   To weep again more bitterly, but then The sunbeam kissed her, and she smiled instead.45

Women were often extremely confident in the judgements they made of fellow journeyers based upon their scrutiny: Fanny Davis boasted ‘almost invariably when I have particular notice of a person’s face I find my first impression correct’.46 Nationality, socio-economic status, or both, as much as skin colour and ethnic background determined how other journeyers were perceived. Emily and Ellen Hall were particularly severe in their observations of other Western journeyers. On the first of their journeys to Algeria, Ellen found the French people sharing their train carriage between Paris and Marseilles ‘such a lot of dirty vulgar brutes as I never in my life saw before’.47 Emily concurred that they were some of the ‘commonest, dirtiest, most uncommonly, smelling & offensive beings imaginable’.48 Nationality

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busy practising games particularly influenced the Halls’ views of other journeyers: anti-French comments appeared throughout their diaries and they made clear their preference for journeying with their compatriots. During one journey from Paris to Marseilles in November 1875, they found themselves in a ladies’ carriage with four other English women. When one of those ladies asked if the Halls would be more comfortable in their own carriage Emily replied ‘“Excuse me  .  .  .  I wd. rather travel with my own Country people, than the French.”’ 49 Understandings of social and passenger class order also shaped the journey(er) gaze. During her journey to India in September 1939, Euphemia Stokes felt one fellow journeyer from north-west England who ‘talks Oldham  .  .  .  would look much more appropriate as [a] charwoman than sitting about smoking and drinking’ in first class.50 The vulgar or uncouth, the classless, were not expected to be seen at the top of the journeyer hierarchy: despite her own discomfort at being berthed in first class, Euphemia clearly felt that a woman of this sort was inappropriate for this class. Her comment on the woman’s accent also suggests that the gaze could have an oral element to it as well as visual. Previous critics have distinguished between the romantic gaze of an individual, in which the emphasis is upon solitude, privacy and a personal, semi-spiritual relationship with the object of the gaze, and the collective gaze in which a large number of people give a place or an object meaning by gazing at it together.51 The journey(er) gaze amalgamated these gazes. Together, women gazed at each other and out of the windows of their train compartment or from the decks of their ship at the passing scenery and at places they visited during breaks in the journey. Yet at the same time they gazed as individuals at other journeyers and places. Romantic gazing was not dependent upon being physically alone, but was also a state of mind. Women could sit on deck and simply refrain from interacting with other journeyers, despite etiquette writers urging them to avoid such behaviour, achieving a psychological state of solitude even whilst other journeyers surrounded them, and those journeying in private staterooms on ships could retreat to them and gaze alone from their portholes if they chose. Rail journeyers could move towards achieving a similar state by ignoring other journeyers. The journey(er) gaze was also dynamic and reciprocal. Warnings in journey etiquette literature about the attention paid to women’s behavi­ our by other journeyers indicate that those upon whom women gazed so fiercely subjected them to similar scrutiny. This mutual scrutiny could again suggest that the ship had echoes of the Panopticon and that women had some power over each other because they watched each other, but

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women, travel and identity it also created a conflict between women journeyers’ desire for selfexpression and others’ expectations of their behaviour. Women had few opportunities to escape this scrutiny (except when sleeping), as they usually could not leave the journey environment for any extended length of time before they reached their final destination. Even as they assessed and judged others, they had to ensure that their own behaviour was irreproachable, that they could not be negatively judged and that their reputations remained undamaged; in this sense, the journey environment was oppressive. Women’s initial (visual) impressions of Western journeyers were not, however, fixed absolutes. Further socializing could lead to initial judgements being revised and the gaining of a less superficial understanding of other journeyers. Lady Liberty at first dismissed a woman who was sharing her cabin on the steamship Galatea during her journey around the Greek coast as no more than ‘“fat-as-fat”’, but subsequently recanted: ‘Our fat friend of last night was not so bad after all; she was a Greek, we fancy, and made us shriek with laughter in the night.’52 At the beginning of her journey, Fanny Davis wrote of Mrs Reade’s husband Dr Reade, ‘I wonder whether I shall like him’: ‘he seems very intelligent, pleasant & good-natured, but I don’t care for his face it looks too sensual, & the eyes lack bashfulness’.53 Yet when the Reades left the ship two months later at Singapore, she was ‘very sorry  .  .  .  Both she & her husband have been most kind & pleasant & their departure will be quite a loss’, incidentally unfortunately undermining her stated confidence in her ability to assess character from observation.54 The journeyer encounter Encounters between Western travellers and indigenous populations in Africa, the Middle and Far East, particularly within imperial and colonial contact zones and meeting-up places, have been a popular focus for previous historians.55 However, much like the neglect of the journey(er) gaze, this emphasis on meetings between Westerners and the ‘Other’ has led to the neglect of encounters between Westerners. The nature of these journey encounters was different to those back home because, whilst social relationships in Britain developed over many weeks or months and could endure for years, journeyers usually had only a fixed and limited time in which to form acquaintanceships. Class, both socio-economic and passenger, impacted greatly on women’s sociability. Passenger classes were physically separated from each other by the division of journey space. These divisions were occasionally

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busy practising games enforced against the wishes of women journeyers. Alice Bosanquet socialized only with the wives of fellow officers rather than with any of the 1,200 rank-and-file soldiers on board the T.S.S Rewa, whom she encountered only as a distant spectator of their drills and concerts.56 Senior officers, following contemporary social and sexual mores, expli­ citly enforced the segregation of both officers’ wives and journey space: Alice’s attempts to organize a concert during the voyage failed because the ‘C.O. [commanding officer] refuses to let Tommies on deck’, reflecting the continued power of the hierarchy of military rank as well as class.57 It could be equally difficult for women to ‘cross borders’ accidentally or deliberately in trains. Conductors checked tickets to make sure they were using only the class spaces they had paid to use. When Bedford College student A.K.B. found a seat on a train from Genoa to Soleza in 1936, ‘the ticket collector came round and explained that I was travelling in a second class carriage with a third class ticket. I therefore had to move my cases through corridors packed with standing people  .  .  .  I jammed my case and myself into what spare room there was and stood for two hours till we reached Soleza.’58 However, not all of the ‘borders’ between passenger-class areas were absolutely fixed and rigidly policed; they were sometimes porous and could be crossed, particularly on ships, creating the possibility of interaction between journeyers from different classes in every sense. Euphemia Stokes returned from Madras in second class on the Narkunda in April 1938, but discovered ‘There is a swimming pool in the First Class part. We can go there too.’59 Nevertheless, most women welcomed these divisions: Lady Guest noted with some pleasure during her journey to America in 1894 that there were 400 emigrants in the steerage quarters of the S.S. Paris ‘but the vessel is so enormous one is absolutely unaware that the latter are there at all’.60 During her journey around the Mediterranean and Far East in 1903 and 1904, sixteen-year-old Eira Platt and her father watched after one ship dinner as ‘some theatrical people (3rd class) gave an entertainment, we went for a bit, but it was rather vulgar so we didn’t stop long’.61 Her disapproving tone suggests that neither she nor her father expected anything more from these journeyers than ‘vulgar’ entertainment, and were relieved to get back to their cabins. Most women remained by choice within the spaces designated for the passenger class they had booked. On her journey to work in a Bombay hospital during a plague outbreak in 1897, nurse Hester Mary Dawson described in letters home how one male journeyer, ‘an old general, Sir [Henry] Havelock Allen’, who had been avarded the Victoria Cross

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women, travel and identity for his actions at Cawnpore during the 1857–59 Indian Mutiny, who sailed for India in 1897 to inspect British troops just weeks before his death in December 1897, seemed ‘half mad’ but clearly still enjoyed female company as he was ‘always coming over from the 1st saloon and sitting by any of us nurses and talking and giving us advice’.62 Hester also described how some of the male doctors journeyed first class, unlike the nurses, but came across into second class to see them.63 But she never ventured into the first-class section herself, and nor apparently did any of her fellow nurses; the most comfortable space for Hester was second class. Women journeyers thus rarely crossed the spatial boundaries that might have enabled them to meet journeyers of different social status and backgrounds. Alice Bosanquet’s thwarted attempts to organize a concert suggest that even when women journeyers wanted to challenge established hierarchies, and to cross barriers regarding male–female interaction, it usually remained a wish rather than a reality. The possibility for journeyers of different social classes to meet each other and form a friendship or relationship was limited, meaning that the socio-economic diversity of journey encounters could also be circumscribed. Elite women journeyers did occasionally cross into emigrant quarters on their ocean journeys, as we have seen, but as they usually simply gazed at the emigrants these visits did not amount to fully fledged encounters. Even when they asked emigrants questions about their backgrounds, it was closer to an interrogation than a two-way conversation as the emigrants could not reciprocate with their own questions. On the rare occasions that women did cross borders to move up a passenger/social class, it could be a difficult and uncomfortable experience, despite etiquette writers’ efforts to instruct all women in how to journey as the most privileged did. Euphemia Stokes stated of her first-class journey to Madras in September 1939, ‘I travelled 1st class due to a mistake and did not feel at home with some people’.64 Despite the restrictions that class and limited time could pose, some women did become very close to other journeyers, and these encounters could be extremely significant for them. Helen Scudder, a thirty-year-old employed at the same women’s college in Madras, accompanied twentyfive-year-old teacher Margaret Hunt for much of her first voyage to India in April 1932. Margaret’s journey experience was transformed when Helen boarded the ship at Marseilles: she ‘drew me into activities upon which I should not have ventured alone’, such as deck tennis and dancing.65 Helen proved to be something of a social mentor to Margaret, drawing her out of herself and exposing her to new encounters, most notably with men. They partnered them at tennis and dancing, although Margaret

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busy practising games still found herself inhibited around them: ‘I was too unaccustomed to the company of young men, and too shy of them.’66 This acquaintanceship, as well as her activities on this journey, helped Margaret to emerge further from the cocoon of her childhood and adolescence, and incidentally endorses some fictional representations of the journey as a Bildung. Margaret had attended Bedford College for women followed by teacher training college and had taught for a year in England, but she was unmarried, childless, had apparently had no romantic relationships and had never left England. This journey exposed her to new social encounters, a new environment, and forced her to participate in activities that broadened her personal horizons. Her experiences on this first journey endorse to a degree the assumption, again also seen in some contemporary fictional representations, that journeys enable ‘the emergence of selfhood’.67 Margaret’s experience also suggests that historians who depict only women’s travel within more unusual destinations, such as West Africa and the Middle East, as liberating have failed to recognize that all forms of travel, however short, and even if to less ‘adventurous’ destinations such as those within Europe, had the potential to liberate women or at the very least produce a measure of self-growth. It was the stage in her life at which a woman travelled that influenced the extent to which it was transformative, not just her destination. A young woman emerging into adulthood, whose sense of self might still be developing, might find that even a short journey had a greater impact on her than an older woman whose identity, for instance as a wife and mother, was already firmly established. Some encounters between women journeyers reached a degree of closeness that went well beyond most journey acquaintanceships and even many friendships back home. Margaret Hunt’s acquaintanceship with a Frenchwoman, Mademoiselle Suzanne de Courriere, with whom she shared a cabin during her journey home from Madras in April 1937, was particularly memorable: Her companionship has been very pleasant, she is so courteous and genial; and when we are sitting on deck, she reading or sewing and occasionally looking steadily ahead, so tranquil as to bring me to such a state of quiet and contentment as I rarely know in the companionship of others. This effect upon me puzzles me.68

When they disembarked at Marseilles, Mademoiselle de Courriere presented Margaret with a book of poetry titled Toi et Moi, suggesting that she had become equally attached to Margaret.69 The memory of

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women, travel and identity Mademoiselle de Courriere remained vivid long after this journey ended: Margaret ‘never saw her again, nor heard from her, yet her companionship had been the most satisfying of the many ephemeral relationships I remember experiencing on my voyages to and from India’.70 However, most journey encounters were not so significant or satisfying. None of the women studied here who journeyed by train experienced an encounter like that between Margaret and Mademoiselle de Courriere. As many rail journeys were shorter than ocean journeys, women often did not have the opportunity to spend the time together that might forge such a strong connection. Other journeyers’ presence in the carriage throughout most rail journeys, as was usually the case unless women were able to find an empty carriage, may also have inhibited conversations that could have led to such warm relationships. Women who hired private carriages, such as Lady Liberty and Lady Guest, also restricted the number of encounters they could have with other journeyers, further reducing the opportunity for closer encounters. Most encounters were instead simply warm and pleasant, and characterized by thoughtfulness, kindness, generosity and consideration. During their first voyage to Algeria in December 1873, the Hall sisters found themselves sharing a cabin with the Miss Cobdens, daughters of radical politician Richard Cobden. Their acquaintanceship proved so amicable that when the ship reached Algiers the Cobdens ‘amiably insisted on our sharing their boat [to the quay] & their carriage & drove us about until we got [hotel] rooms in the kindliest way’.71 Yet even the warmest of journey acquaintanceships usually ended with the ship’s, train’s or journeyer’s arrival at their final destination. Alice Bosanquet was bewildered at the end of her voyage to Bombay in 1907 when one lady with whom she felt she had established a genuine friendship, Mrs Nanton, ‘left early before breakfast with her husband – & never came to see one of us [to say goodbye]! Queer woman!’72 Margaret Hunt remembered that the departure of two women she befriended early in her first journey to India in 1932, the Miss Spencers, at Gibraltar was her ‘first experience of the sudden ending of the  .  .  .  ephemeral friendships formed on a long sea-voyage’.73 Such abrupt endings reveal again the distinctive nature of journey encounters: even when they seemed close, they usually did not continue beyond the boundaries of the ship or train. Women may have felt that they knew a fellow journeyer or journeyers well, but in these transient encounters they usually gained only a passing, temporary knowledge of each other. Women’s reaction to journey socializing could also be more ambiguous. Marion Bridie found sharing a railway compartment with

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busy practising games three other women on a journey on the Great Indian Peninsular Railway in 1932 difficult: ‘They are good-hearted and friendly souls, but, undoubtedly, it is a strain on a slight acquaintance to live for eight days together.’74 Some women relished more solitary journeys, rejecting outright the sociability that etiquette writers and transport companies suggested was so critical. Emily Hall was delighted during their jour­ ney to Algeria in January 1875 when ‘by a wonderful piece of good luck [she and Ellen] found a carriage “Dames seules” wh. no other lady wanted! so we travelled like princesses all by ourselves’ from Paris to Lyons.75 Women also found other journeyers foisted themselves upon them without their acquiescence. During her first journey to Madras, Margaret Hunt made another friend even before leaving Tilbury [where she had embarked], an elderly woman, Mrs. Thompson, who had entered into conversation with us before my parents and aunt left the Rajola. Friendly and voluble, and a seasoned traveller  .  .  .  She assured my parents that she would take care of me.76

In the event, Mrs Thompson made no impression on Margaret, apart from her tendency to drop her aitches.77 Other acquaintanceships began because one journeyer took pity on another rather than from a mutual desire to know each other. Margaret took ‘the initiation [sic] in befriending’ another elderly lady during this journey ‘for she was sad-looking, very large, and lame’.78 This acquaintanceship peaked during the ship’s passage across the Red Sea when Margaret ‘heard cries of distress’ coming from the lady’s cabin one day: ‘Going to her, I found her, bulky and handicapped as she was, unable to take off her dress  .  .  .  I extricated her from it, and then from her underclothes, which included armour-like stays which seemed to have stuck to her in the heat.’79 Encounters between Western journeyers were not always equal. Women’s reluctance, usually, to socialize outside their socio-economic or passenger class indicates again that most women did not just seek the new and convention-breaking when travelling. They wanted to maintain the familiar and known as well, and in the context of journey sociability this entailed the maintenance of the established order. The concept of social hierarchy, which operated so strongly in Britain in this period, was so deeply embedded in the psyche of most female journeyers that they could rarely challenge it. Women were complicit in the journeyer social hierarchy; ship and train companies did not impose it upon them wholly against their will.

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women, travel and identity Observing non-Western journeyers Although it maintained the established British social order, with the richest at the top and the poorest at the bottom, the journey abroad was also extremely cosmopolitan. Women met so-called ‘Other’ journeyers from Africa, North and South America, India, Egypt and China. There were four main ways in which such encounters occurred: when these people were part of a ship’s or train’s crew; when they were journeyers themselves; when women disembarked to explore ports during ships’ stops to re-fuel with coal, re-load with provisions or collect more journeyers; and when they left their trains at stations. Not all women were pleased to find so many nationalities sharing their journeys. Lady Liberty commented while on the S.S. Galatea, ‘I am glad it [their stay on board] is only for one night’: she was dismayed by the diversity of the journeyers on board: ‘even 1st. class, Greeks, Turks, Americans, Armenians, Germans, Italians, and what we take for a tribe of Cook’s people’.80 Her dismissal of those who were journeying with Thomas Cook’s company as a ‘tribe’, with all the connotations this term carried of a lack of Western civilization and sophistication, is also striking: she sought to strongly disassociate herself from this group because she regarded herself as a traveller rather than a tourist. There is considerable debate about the nature of British women’s relationships with the ‘Other’. Some studies have shown that not all women viewed indigenous peoples as inferior, but instead worked actively, often in conjunction with them, to improve their position.81 Occasional incidents suggest that women journeyers’ encounters with native peoples could also be positive. Amelia Edwards showed considerable interest in the local men who crewed her dahabeeyah during her Nile journey in 1873 and 1874: she knew their names, pay and diet, and observed their religious practices.82 The future Dame Henrietta Barnett, social reformer, novelist and founder of the Henrietta Barnett School and the Hampstead Garden Suburb, wrote that she and her husband, Canon Samuel Barnett, took ‘Every opportunity’ during their journey on the Nile in 1879 ‘for learning about the people, how the government affected them, and the influence of their religion, land-laws, and education’.83 The Barnetts felt ‘it is almost impossible to ascertain reliable information when there is no common language’, but did at least attempt to learn about local life, customs and practices.84 Their relationship with their crew seems to have been genuinely friendly: on New Year’s Day, 1880, they woke to find that the crew had decorated the ship’s deck and saloon with palm branches, apples and oranges, and that the cook had prepared a ‘cake of fanciful

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busy practising games structure and many sweetmeats’.85 The Barnetts and the crew celebrated the day together, and the latter put on a theatrical show.86 It has been argued that the ‘Other’ was equated with the lowestregarded elements of Western society, such as delinquents, the insane and the poor.87 Strikingly, however, Henrietta described how ‘After the experience of the degradation of our Whitechapel neighbours [Canon Barnett had accepted this parish in 1873 and would later found the first University Settlement, Toynbee Hall, there in 1884], it was delightful to live in daily relationship with twenty men so industrious, frugal, selfrespecting, and considerate’.88 This assertion that the Egyptian crew were superior to their poor British neighbours suggests she rejected the belief that native people were no better than the most inferior Westerners, and that women journeyers could sometimes subvert established racial discourses. Encounters and contact with ‘Others’ who were of a higher educational, professional and socio-economic status could also be satisfying. On her 1937 journey to Madras, Euphemia Stokes spent considerable time with an Indian ‘Professor [Hassan] in English at the University of Decce [sic]. We were talking about Oxford where he studied, and then about music. The wife is very nice, and there is a little girl.’89 Euphemia and the Hassans also played bridge and shared glasses of iced grapefruit.90 Encounters with non-Westerners could feature a higher degree of equality when the class and educational status of those peoples was closer to that of Western journeyers themselves.91 The women studied here also did not exhibit any anxiety that indigenous men, who were believed to be aroused by European women, posed a sexual threat, despite historians suggesting that this was one of the greatest dangers perceived to emanate from encounters with the ‘Other’ during this period.92 Margaret Roberts slept on deck with another female journeyer one night during her journey to India in November 1930; when the lascars – sailors or militiamen from South Asia or other countries east of the Cape of Good Hope – arrived the next morning to wash the decks neither she nor her companion moved.93 Clearly they felt secure in the presence of a group of foreign men within the journey environment and did not fear attack. This was partly because the ships in which most women travelled were European-controlled spaces: lascars were subject to Western rules and discipline, and even more potently the threat of losing their jobs if they should behave inappropriately towards women journeyers. It may simply never have crossed women’s minds that these men could be a threat. Many may have assumed that these men accepted their subordinate position compared to Britons and would

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women, travel and identity never dare to harm them, which also suggests that, as citizens of the then dominant British Empire, they did not question the contemporary belief in British, and Western, power over non-Western peoples. Some historians have highlighted cases of sexual intimacy between white men and native women, which the former sometimes discussed in memoirs.94 None of the women studied here wrote about such encounters with native men. It is extremely unlikely that many women had sexual encounters with indigenous men because they would have been extremely difficult to achieve or hide within the heavily scrutinized journey environment; many of them simply would not have conceived of such relationships; and they would have been highly reluctant to risk the scandal that would ensue if they were discovered to have broken contemporary sexual mores by having such a liaison. This latter fear in particular would also explain why if any of these women did have crosscultural sexual encounters they did not write about them, but their silence on this subject does not prove that they were sexually active with nonWestern men either. The female journey did not allow space for a sexual element in their encounters with local peoples, and women’s journey(er) gaze did not contain an erotic element. It has been argued that some women travellers actively sought out encounters with the ‘Other’ and longed to go into native societies because within them traditional gender barriers for white women collapsed.95 However, overall women journeyers’ reflections upon the ‘Other’ largely support existing negative interpretations of women’s relationships with them.96 Most women journeyers made no attempt to acquire a greater understanding of ‘Other’ customs and cultures. Scottish lady’s maid Anne Burns observed ‘a fine display of red and yellow papers, small squares, thrown from the ship’s stern’ one morning during her round-the-world journey with her employers in the early 1900s: ‘we were told that the many Chinese on board  .  .  .  were celebrating some sort of festival’.97 Yet despite appreciating the aesthetic attractiveness of this event, she did not enquire what festival was being celebrated or what releasing paper during it signified. A preoccupation with the aesthetic appearance of local people and their consequent objectification featured in many women’s journey writings. Lady Liberty wrote upon observing one Ethiopian woman on the S.S. Cambodge in 1884 that she was ‘as black as soot’.98 Lady Theodora Guest wrote of the Native Americans she observed ‘Why the latter live (or indeed why they should live) I cannot conceive. The hair of these Indians is horrible – excessively thick and coarse  .  .  .  and their expression absolutely animal’ and that the women were ‘extremely ugly, with wide

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busy practising games faces, and  .  .  .  horrid hair’.99 It has been argued that English women regularly portrayed Native Americans as stereotypical dirty ‘squaws’ or ‘princesses’ and as uncivilized or enslaved.100 These stereotypes are attri­ buted to the racism and the belief in the virtue of cleanliness, which in Britain was believed to signal Britons’ evolutionary superiority to the ‘Other’, that circulated among nineteenth-century bourgeois Europeans.101 Lady Guest’s emphasis on the dirty physical appearance of these people reflects these views. Both her comments and Lady Liberty’s suggestion of filth and uncleanliness through the use of ‘soot’ reveals that women were not usually enabled by their journeys to challenge contemporary beliefs about, and stereotypes of, indigenous populations. It has been noted that some women travellers’ initial opinions that local peoples were ‘savages’ improved with time.102 But most women journeyers’ poor first impressions of indigenous people did not change. Often their accounts echoed those of ‘first contacts’ between Western men and these peoples;103 they regarded them as dirty, dark, ugly, deceptive, venal – as savages, even if they did not use that exact term. Many women journeyers’ descriptions of the behaviour of local peoples reflected and reinforced both their own prejudices and those of wider British society. They particularly emphasized, and were irritated by, the venality and greed of local vendors. Amelia Edwards commented that her party’s arrival at Luxor in 1874 ‘brought all the dealers of Luxor to the surface. They waylaid and followed us wherever we went  .  .  .  polite, plausible, and mendacious.’104 Mrs Bridges lamented in 1878 that ‘It seems to be a settled conviction in the Eastern mind, that on leaving or arriving at any place, the Western traveller must be in need of everything and prepared to pay recklessly for it’ when their train was besieged at Calcutta station by local vendors, who opened their carriage’s windows and tried to sell them mirrors, carpets, window-blinds, fire-screens and dogs.105 When local people did demonstrate their abilities, women concentrated on the flaws in these activities rather than acknowledging that skill might have been involved. Lady Liberty recorded the frenetic activity amongst local men when their ship reached Constantinople in April 1884: ‘The scene on the water was most odd – boats of every shape, rowed by men of every colour and garb, apparently dashing into one another in the most furious and reckless manner, then quietly gliding off in the calmest and most unconcerned way.’106 She found the scene chaotic, and showed little apparent consideration for the skill of the local men in piloting their boats around such a busy port or that perhaps there was a system to it that was not immediately obvious to the Western eye. In this reluctance or inability to acknowledge the skills of local

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women, travel and identity peoples, women journeyers differed from some parts of Western society: the managers of the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand, for example, came to regard local Fijian men as skilled cargo handlers.107 Women tended to regard local people as part of their entertainment. On the East Indian Railway in 1878, Mrs Bridges found ‘It is amusing to watch the ways of the natives, who travel in crowds  .  .  .  Peeping into the carriages, one sees them perched in rows on the benches of the two-storied compartments solemnly hugging their bundles, long pipe and brass cooking-pot, their feet tucked up under them and their shoes left on the floor below.’108 Lady Liberty found a group of twenty ‘native women and children on board [the S.S. Cambodge], deck passengers  .  .  .   form a quaint group with their bedding, rugs and bright clothing’.109 Her use of ‘quaint’ indicates the tendency amongst women to regard such journeyers as childlike, amusing, backward and unsophisticated. They also likened them to animals: despite her interest in them, Amelia Edwards described how the crew of her dahabeeyah slept on ‘the lower deck like dogs’; they were ‘Simple and trustful as children’.110 Almost none of the indigenous people women journeyers encountered were named in the accounts studied here; they were perceived as a homogeneous mass. As Mary Louise Pratt notes, homogenizing local people into a collective, abstracted ‘they’ is ‘a familiar, widespread and stable from of “othering”’.111 In doing this, women journeyers refused to identify themselves with the ‘Other’ and again refuted any suggestion that they would challenge contemporary beliefs in their innate inferiority by, amongst other things, demonstrating that they deserved to be regarded as individuals. One exception to this is Henrietta Barnett’s naming of the leader of the Barnetts’ ship crew, Ali, in her biography of her husband. But even the Barnetts did not give Ali’s authority as crew leader any more formal recognition, such as designating him captain. The degree of respect and honour given to local peoples by women journeyers was limited where it existed at all; these were usually unequal encounters like many of those in landed colonial and imperial regimes, although they did not reach the same level of violent brutality. Parity did not feature. It is not known if any of the women studied here were members of organizations such as the International Council of Women or the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, but they did not express any particular belief in women’s solidarity or internationalism. They certainly did not identify with or seek to make common cause with local women. Margaret Roberts noted in 1930 that on the streets of Port Said ‘One sees Egyptian women in their black garments & veiled to the eyes side by side with others who show their faces’, but did not

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busy practising games investigate why there was such a dichotomy in their appearance.112 Local women’s voices were usually not heard in women journeyers’ accounts. Journey sociability was complex. On one level, it reflects the gradual and extensive reconceptualization of the journey as an act of leisure as much as an act of travel. Women enthusiastically participated in, and organized, the increasing variety of leisure and social activities that emerged on the journey between 1870 and 1940. Ships and trains also exposed women to a huge variety of people from multiple countries who could potentially have a transformative impact upon them. Vision was integral to journey sociability, but usually this sociability did not have any significant impact on women’s worldview. Women continued, and often preferred, to socialize with people from their own passenger class, who were often similar to them in socio-economic, professional or educational status, thereby continuing contemporary ideas of social order. In this area, perhaps more than any other, the journey abroad, and those who made it, echoed home while physically leaving it far behind. Nor did encounters with the ‘Other’ lead women journeyers to question contemporary assumptions of Western superiority or to criticize imperial and colonial ideologies. It is not entirely surprising that they did not significantly challenge dominant contemporary racial beliefs, pol­ icies and regimes, however. Their encounters with native peoples mostly occurred in contained Westernized environments in which non-Westerners sometimes performed subservient, subordinate functions as journey staff. Women were not encouraged to see them as equal individuals. They did not spend prolonged time in indigenous communities that exposed them to local manners, customs, activities, and beliefs, which might in turn have led them to question or resist their own society’s beliefs; their exposure was limited at best. Their own belief in British superiority or sense of themselves as British citizens may also have meant that as a matter of course they did not question British or Western hegemony. The journey abroad was not a space in which most women could gain a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of local people; a distance remained between them. Notes 1 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur F304/3, ‘Letters from E. Stokes’, 28 June 1937. For another example of journey routine see Edwards, Thousand Miles, pp. 90  –1. 2 Carnegie-Williams, Year in the Andes, 11 August 1881, p. 8. 3 RHUL Archives, ‘Civis’, ‘Chicago Once More’, Bedford College, London, Magazine, No. 23 (March 1894), 3.

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women, travel and identity 4 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur D1239/5, Memorabilia of Mrs J.D. Stuart, wife of J.D. Stuart, Indian Service of Engineers, S.S. Leicestershire passenger list (October 1913). 5 SCA, ULL, Cunard Archive, PR6/19, Joanna, ‘Pleasure Cruising’, WSM, XI:9 (May 1934), 227. 6 CWAC, 788/184, Liberty, Levant and Back, 16 April 1884, p. 40. 7 Howarth, Story of P&O, p. 60. 8 HHC, U DP/195/1, ‘Journal of F. Davis’, 26 March 1871. 9 BA, 855 F2/15, Diary of E. Hall, ‘Diary’, 19 November 1880. 10 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur F304/4, ‘Letters from E. Stokes’, 3 September 1939. 11 Ibid., 4 September 1939. 12 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur C546, ‘Diary of M. Roberts’, 1, 11 and 12 November 1930; 16, 20 April 1931; 4, 11 and 12 May 1931. 13 Bridie, Round the World, pp. 13, 48, 50, 52–3, 94, 96, 150, 243. 14 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur C546, ‘Diary of M. Roberts’, 15 April 1931. 15 Ibid., 17 April 1931. 16 Ibid., 3 May 1931. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 16 and 18 April 1931. 20 One such programme was inserted inside BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur C546, ‘Diary of M. Roberts’. 21 Howarth, Story of P&O, p. 65. 22 Horn, High Society, pp. 128, 139  –  40. 23 Frawley, Wider Range, p. 14. 24 J. Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford, 1987), p. 53. 25 L. Moore, Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties (London, 2009), p. 9. 26 Bridie, Round the World, p. 52. 27 Moore, Anything Goes, pp. 88  –  9. 28 Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty, p. 56. 29 MAL, MMM, DX/1093, ‘Diary of J. Smith’, 11 September 1896. 30 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur F304/3, ‘Letters from E. Stokes’, 24 April 1938. 31 C. Capshaw and J. Urry, ‘Tourism and the photographic eye’, in C. Rojek and J. Urry (eds), Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory (London, 1997), p. 176; J. Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London, 1990), p. 3. 32 I. Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (London, 1996), p. 1. 33 Melman, Women’s Orients, p. 1. 34 F.D. Bridges, Journal of a Lady’s Travels Round the World with Illustrations from Sketches by the Author (London, 1883), p. 201. 35 LA, IV/138/9, ‘Diary of E. Jones’, 24 May 1889. 36 Guest, Round Trip, p. 26. 37 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur C546, ‘Diary of M. Roberts’, 3 November 1930.

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busy practising games 38 Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, pp. 58  –  66. 39 Bailey, ‘Adventures in space’, 6  –7. 40 L. Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, in L. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke, 1989), p. 19. 41 L. Mulvey, ‘Afterthought on “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946)’, in Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, p. 32. 42 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur C546, ‘Diary of M. Roberts’, 1 November 1930. 43 Ibid., 14 April 1931. 44 HHC, U DP/195/1, ‘Journal of F. Davis’, 21 March 1871. 45 RHUL Archives, H. De B.D., ‘In an Italian Third-Class Railway Carriage’, Bedford College, London, Magazine, No. 31 (December 1896), 39. 46 HHC, U DP/195/1, ‘Journal of F. Davis’, 21 March 1871. 47 BA, 855 F3/12, Diary of E. Hall, ‘Diary’, 19 December 1873. 48 BA, 855 F2/13, Diary of E. Hall, ‘Diary’, 19 December 1873. 49 BA, 855 F2/14, ‘Diary of E. Hall’, 26 November 1875. Such animosity was partly a legacy of Britain’s longstanding hostility towards France, born out of events such as the Seven Years, Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. As Linda Colley argues, ‘Imagining the French as their vile opposites, as Hyde to their Jekyll, became a way for Britons  .  .  .  to contrive for themselves a converse and flattering identity’ (L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven and London, 1992), pp. 1, 5, 368). 50 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur F304/4, ‘Letters from E. Stokes’, 6 September 1939. 51 J. Urry, Consuming Places (London, 1995), pp. 137–  8. 52 CWAC, 788/184, Liberty, Levant and Back, 12 April 1884, p. 32; 13 April 1884, pp. 34  –5. 53 HHC, U DP/195/1, ‘Journal of F. Davis’, 21 March 1871. 54 Ibid., 3 May 1871. 55 Melman’s Women’s Orients; M. Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington, 1991); the essays in N. Chaudhuri and M. Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, 1992); A. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865  –1915 (Chapel Hill and London, 1994); and the essays in T. Ballantyne and A. Burton (eds), Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana and Chicago, 2009) are a selection of such works. 56 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur C620, ‘Diary of A. Bosanquet’, 22 and 31 December 1906. Separation of privates and officers’ wives was partly linked to military authorities’ disapproval of women and children accompanying troops, which was particularly strong during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and had only slowly faded by the early twentieth century (M. MacMillan, Women of the Raj (New York, 1988), p. 19). 57 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur C620, ‘Diary of A. Bosanquet’, 1 January 1907. 58 RHUL Archives, A.K.B., ‘Genoa’, Bedford College Magazine, 44, 18  –19. 59 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur F304/3, ‘Letters from E. Stokes’, 24 April 1938. 60 Guest, Round Trip, p. 3.

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women, travel and identity 61 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur Photo Eur 362, ‘Diary of E. G. du Breil (née Platt)’, 11 November 1903. 62 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur B385, H.M.D., Bombay During the Plague, 8 December 1897, p. 3. 63 Ibid. 64 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur F304/4, ‘Letters from E. Stokes’, cover note. 65 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur F241/1, ‘Letters and diaries of M. Hunt’, p. 28. 66 Ibid. 67 J.P. Stout, Through the Window, Out the Door: Women’s Narratives of Departure, from Austen and Cather to Tyler, Morrison, and Didion (Tuscaloosa, 1998), p. 16. 68 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur F241/6, Letters and Diaries of M. Hunt, ‘Extracts from the letters and diaries of M. Hunt, in the English Department of the Women’s Christian College in Madras, from June 1932 until April 1943’, p. 6. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 BA, 855 F2/13, ‘Diary of E. Hall’, 22 December 1873. 72 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur C620, ‘Diary of A. Bosanquet’, 9 January 1907. 73 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur F241/1, ‘Letters and diaries of M. Hunt’, p. 26. 74 Bridie, Round the World, p. 63. 75 BA, 855 F2/14, ‘Diary of E. Hall’, 14 January 1875. 76 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur F241/1, ‘Letters and diaries of M. Hunt’, p. 24. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., p. 25. 79 Ibid. 80 CWAC, 788/184, Liberty, Levant and Back, 12 April 1884, p. 32. 81 See B.N. Ramusack, ‘Cultural missionaries, maternal imperialists, feminist allies: British women activists in India, 1865  –1945’ in N. Chaudhuri and M. Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, 1992), pp. 119  –36, for a study of some women who had more positive encounters with local peoples. 82 Edwards, Thousand Miles, pp. 42–3. 83 H. Barnett, Canon Barnett: Warden of the first University Settlement Toynbee Hall, Whitechapel, London: His Life, Work, And Friends by His Wife, Volume I (Buxton and New York, 1919), p. 251. Henrietta published a number of other works in her lifetime including The Making of the Home (1885), Practicable Socialism (1888) and Matters that Matter (1930) (S. Koven, ‘Dame Henrietta Octavia Weston Barnett’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 3 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 1023–5). 84 Barnett, Canon Barnett, p. 251. 85 Ibid., p. 235. 86 Ibid. 87 E. Said, Orientalism (London, 2003 edn), p. 207. 88 Barnett, Canon Barnett, p. 233. 89 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur F304/3, ‘Letters of E. Stokes’, 27 June 1937.

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busy practising games 90 Ibid., 28 June and 1 July 1937. 91 Angela Wollacott also concluded from her investigations of Australian women journeyers’ encounters with local people in ports of call that ‘it is clear that class difference was one of the inextricably interwoven factors at work’ along with others such as race and gender in shaping encounters with the “Other” ’ (Wollacott, To Try Her Fortune, p. 26). 92 Strobel, European Women, p. 6. 93 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur C546, ‘Diary of M. Roberts’, 8 November 1930. 94 See, for example, D. Haines, ‘ “In search of the Whaheen” ’: Ngai Tahu women, shore whalers, and the meaning of sex in early New Zealand’ in T. Ballantyne and A. Burton (eds), Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana and Chicago, 2009), pp. 49  –  66. 95 Birkett, Spinsters Abroad, pp. 110, 114  –15. 96 For one of the bleakest assessments of the failure of European women to connect with local women see M. Hatem, ‘Through each other’s eyes: the impact on the colonial encounter of the images of Egyptian, Levantine-Egyptian, and European women, 1862–1920’, in N. Chaudhuri and M. Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, 1992), pp. 35  –58. 97 Burns, Lady’s Maid, p. 125. 98 CWAC, 788/184, Liberty, Levant and Back, 10 April 1884, p. 28. 99 Guest, Round Trip, pp. 89, 173. 100 K.M. Morin, ‘British women travellers and constructions of racial difference across the nineteenth-century American West’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 23:3 (1998), 317, 322. 101 Ibid., 317. 102 Steel, ‘“Suva under steam” ’, p. 110. 103 Ibid. 104 Edwards, Thousand Miles, pp. 409  –10. 105 Bridges, Journal of a Lady’s Travels, p. 226. 106 CWAC, 788/184, Liberty, Levant and Back, 31 March 1884, p. 12. 107 Steel, ‘“Suva under steam” ’, pp. 114, 119. 108 Bridges, Journal of a Lady’s Travels, 29 October 1878, p. 196. 109 CWAC, 788/184, Liberty, Levant and Back, 10 April 1884, p. 28. 110 Edwards, Thousand Miles, p. 41. 111 M.L. Pratt, ‘Scratches on the face of the country; or, what Mr. Barrow saw in the land of the bushmen’, Critical Inquiry, 12:1 (autumn 1985), 120. 112 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur C546, ‘Diary of M. Roberts’, 6 November 1930.

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6 Full of wickedness: romantic opportunity and sexual hazard?

I

n 1881, the Pall Mall Gazette published Irish novelist Charlotte G. O’Brien’s scandalized account of the conditions on board an emigrant ship sailing from Queenstown, Ireland, to America: Any man who comes with a woman who is or calls herself his wife sleeps by right in the midst of hundreds of young women, who are compelled to live in his presence day and night: if they remove their clothes it is under his eyes, if they lie down to rest it is beside him. It is a shame even to speak of these things; but to destroy such an evil it is necessary to face it.1

She was horrified to see an ‘innocent girl-child – lying among dissolute men and abandoned women – half stupefied with suffocation and sea-sickness, amid the curses and groans of hundreds’, asking ‘if she arise and flee to save her soul, whither shall she go?’2 Finally, she protested: A woman may well ask what right men have in their quarters at all; and women may well say if there is Government Inspection by men and they condone this we have a right to ask that a staff of women inspectors, who would not condone such things, should be appointed to protect their own weak ones.3

Her letter caused a sensation, triggering questions in Parliament and a Board of Trade inquiry.4 It underlines how the journey abroad was partly understood as an experience which could threaten women’s moral and sexual purity by placing them, potentially without protection, in a community of largely strangers – most threateningly, amongest strange men. However, there was a duality to popular beliefs about encounters between (Western) male and female journeyers. O’Brien’s letter also titillated its readers, hinting as it did of powerful erotic forces operating within these spaces; the journey abroad was simultaneously perceived as a space in which flirtation, illicit liaisons and romance flourished.

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full of wickedness E.M. Delafield wittily demonstrated how much this dichotomous conception of the journey had permeated the popular imagination in The Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930), when the Lady wryly notes during a train journey to France Vicissitudes of travel very strange, and am struck – as often – by enormous dissimilarity between journeys undertaken in real life, and as reported in fiction. Can remember very few novels in which train journey of any kind does not involve either (a) hectic encounter with member of opposite sex, leading to tense emotional issue; (b) discovery of murdered body in hideously battered condition, under circumstances which utterly defy detection; (c) elopement between two people each of whom is married to somebody else, culminating in severe disillusionment, or lofty renunciation. Nothing of all this enlivens my own peregrinations  .  .  .5

Perceptions of journey space, media reports, fiction and films, public fear and contemporary scandal combined to generate and sustain these contradictory beliefs. Yet it has not been sufficiently established if these beliefs in the journey as a site of romantic opportunity and sexual hazard were substantive or primarily myth. Undertaking a closer examination of this dichotomy reveals once again both the power of female journeyer agency and the continued power of British social convention and practices. The romantic and sexual journey abroad By the 1880s travel within foreign countries had become broadly connected in the popular imagination with love affairs: many novels and short stories featuring romance were set overseas.6 As the journey was an act of travel, it, too, was perceived as a site of romance. Authoress Lady Kitty Vincent, who journeyed from England to Canada by ship in the late 1920s, explained, ‘There is something about the sea that goes to people’s heads and makes them feel irresistible’ to both other journeyers and crew.7 Enclosed railway carriages and ship cabins were believed to free journeyers from the inhibiting gaze of others, giving them an opportunity to ignore everyday conventions by indulging in unobserved dalliances: one 1879 newspaper article described how first-class carriages were in demand with courting couples.8 Several contemporary authors reinforced the perception of the journey as a romantic space in their plots and subplots. In Murder on the Orient Express, Hercule Poirot reflects ‘The train, it is as dangerous as a sea voyage!’ when he observes the secret romance between Mary

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women, travel and identity Debenham and Colonel Arbuthnot.9 Indeed, this relationship began when Mary and Arbuthnot met on ‘the railway convoy car from Kirkuk [Iraq] to Nissibin [Turkey]’.10 In Death on the Nile, Rosalie Otterbourne and Tim Allerton fall in love during their Egyptian journey, as do Cornelia Ribron and Dr Bessner.11 In Florence Riddell’s Floating Palace, a French countess is attracted to the ship’s doctor, while a rich draper’s wife is pursued by a younger male journeyer.12 Riddell noted the particularly heightened amorous effect of the ocean journey abroad: A great business, this life at sea! It changed people in a most unexpected manner from the moment they stepped on board  .  .  .  The acid ‘schoolmarm,’ who had saved for years for the trip, would get engaged to the purser whom young and pretty women had tried in vain to catch. The quiet little wife who had never been kissed by anybody else but her plump husband would suddenly ‘go gay’.13

In Laurence Clarke’s The Borrowed Liner a romance develops between the two leading characters, Agatha Pellet and Peter King; likewise in Lady Bell’s The Good Ship Brompton Castle, two of the leading protagonists, Ralph Blantyre and Hildred Lenox, fall in love during their journey back to England.14 Journey romances were not just confined to the written word. In King Kong (1933), Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) finds love with a member of the ship’s crew, John Driscoll (Bruce Cabot), on the voyage to Skull Island.15 Transport companies were keen to capitalize on this perception of ships and trains: their advertising posters created a romantic image of the journey filled with bright, young, attractive women, giving their services some appeal to men as well as women. Company magazines promoted the journey as a consummate romantic environment even more explicitly. The short story ‘Carson’s Luck’, published in the December 1923 Cunard Magazine, narrates the growing attraction between Ruth Arnison and the protagonist, Jim Carson, on their train and ocean journeys back from Canada.16 ‘Angela’s Great Adventure’, also published in Cunard Magazine in December 1925, narrates how forty-four-year-old journeyer Angela finds romance with retired Colonel Templeton, climaxing with a marriage proposal on their ocean journey from America back to Britain.17 The belief that journey spaces offered liberation from convention led to some fictional romances occurring across socio-economic divisions. This was another part of the journey’s appeal as a site of passion: despite journeyers’ reluctance to socialize with journeyers of a different socioeconomic status, the perception remained that it offered a chance for

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full of wickedness love to defy class boundaries. In the short story ‘Collision’, published in the 1936 Christmas edition of the Illustrated London News, the hero, Johnny Sutton, second officer on the S.S. Coast of Colombo bound for Shanghai, falls in love with a wealthy American journeyer, Mary Howard. Sutton agonizes about declaring his feelings to her: ‘How, he wondered, could he ask a girl so sweet as Mary Howard to live in a small villa in Liverpool or Southampton? Did he dare ask her to be his wife?’18 Journeys were also presented as experiences that could further existing secret relationships. In June 1890, an anonymous short story entitled ‘A Desperate Chase’ appeared in the Bedford College, London, Magazine in which the reader is led to believe that a young Londoner, Laura, is eloping by train. It begins with Laura departing from her home in turmoil imagining ‘the confusion and panic that will shortly arise in the peaceful home from which [she is] flying’; at the station her ‘conscience is perhaps bidding [her to] return; but its small voice is drowned in the shrill whistle of the approaching train and the hoarse cry of the porter who is calling [her] to hasten’.19 The reader’s belief that this is an elopement is apparently confirmed when, just as the train is about to depart, a young man rushes into her carriage and ‘They pressed one another’s hands’.20 The narrative then switches focus to an older woman at Laura’s home. Entering Laura’s bedroom, she appears to share the reader’s suspicion: the bedroom is covered in clothing, suggesting a hurried departure much as a woman who was secretly eloping might make. ‘[A] small bright object that lay on the dressing-table’ particularly fixates the older woman, and the reader imagines this is an engagement ring somehow accidentally left behind.21 Apparently realizing what has occurred, the woman pursues Laura. However, the climax of the story shows the reader’s beliefs about the probable denouement to be completely wrong; this story is another satire of public perceptions of the journey: the woman in pursuit is revealed to be Laura’s aunt, and her purpose is not to prevent an elopement but to deliver her niece’s portmanteau key. The man is merely a friendly acquaintance.22 As ever, however, the course of true love did not run smoothly. The added affair between Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) and Pamela (Madeleine Carroll) in the 1935 film adaptation of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps begins when they meet on the train to Edinburgh as Hannay is fleeing from the police, who wrongly suspect him of murder.23 Before the couple’s relationship can begin his innocence has to be proved both to her and to the authorities: Pamela even identifies Hannay to the police on that train. Evelyn Waugh’s 1943 short story ‘Cruise (Letters from a Young

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women, travel and identity Lady of Leisure)’ is a scathing satire of the romantic confusions of an unnamed upper-class woman on an interwar journey to Egypt.24 She breathlessly describes a number of encounters with male journeyers: Well the first day it was rough and I got up and felt odd  .  .  .  came into breakfast  .  .  .  and there was a corking young man who said we are the only ones down may I sit here and it was going beautifully  .  .  .  but it was no good I had to go back to bed just when he was saying there was nothing he admired so much about a girl as her being a good sailor goodness how sad.25

She first gets engaged to a young man called Arthur, although he ‘is the one I thought was a pansy’, but she is really attracted to another journeyer called Robert, who himself gets engaged to another woman whom the lady jealously calls ‘lousy’.26 Waugh savages such rapid engagements as entirely shallow and superficial when the ship’s purser comments upon hearing of her engagement that ‘people always get engaged  .  .  .  on the Egyptian trip every cruise’ to which she indignantly replies that ‘I wasnt in the habit of getting engaged lightly thank you and he said I wasnt apparently in the habit of going to Egypt so I wont speak to him again nor will Arthur’.27 Unfortunately, her self-righteous indignation is destroyed in her very next letter: ‘So it is all off with Arthur I was right about him at the first but who I am engaged to is Robert which is much better for all concerned really particularly Arthur on account of what I said originally first impressions always right  .  .  .  Robert and I drove about all day in the Botanic gardens and Goodness he was Decent’.28 Yet this engagement also collapses: ‘I forget what I said in my last letter but if I mentioned a lousy man called Robert you can take it as unsaid.’29 But she is hardly heartbroken: her letter continues ‘This is still Algiers and Papa ate dubious oysters but is all right. Bertie went to a house full of tarts when he was plastered and is pretty unreticient about it.’30 Romances across class lines were also rarely depicted as lasting, suggesting that not all contemporaries subscribed to the belief that journeys offered liberation from contemporary demarcations. A relationship between Johnny and Mary is impossible in ‘Collision’ for several reasons. Mary is already involved with another man who joins the ship later in the journey, and gets engaged to him by the end of the story.31 Johnny cannot approach her without appearing as if he merely sought her wealth, as heiress Mary receives £20,000 per annum.32 Finally, it ultimately remains socially inconceivable that a rich young woman, even if American, could form a romantic relationship with a member of the ship’s crew.

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full of wickedness Mary’s aunt is clearly aware of the potential impropriety: she interrupts a private conversation between Mary and Johnny after dinner on the first day of the journey, saying that she wishes to go to bed and that it is too late for her niece to be awake. Mary subsequently explains that ‘“She thinks young men aren’t to be trusted”’ and is particularly worried about someone ‘“running away”’ with her.33 The journey was also depicted as a space for the negative con­ sequences of love. In The Good Ship Brompton Castle, Ralph Blantyre has to choose between two women, breaking the heart of one in the process: his cousin Antonia, whom he has known since he was a child, and Hildred Lenox, whom he first meets at sea.34 Hildred is extremely jealous of Antonia until she and Ralph acknowledge their feelings for each other.35 In Greene’s Stamboul Train, lesbian Mabel Warren is jealous of her companion Janet’s encounters with men. The understanding of journey spaces as enclosed, contained and private fuelled the belief that, in addition to love, sexual desire could be explored within them, which was again reinforced by some fiction. Romance and affection did not play a significant part in these constructions of the journey; erotic desire instead provided the momentum. In Stamboul Train, several sexual relationships are played out in a complex and bleak manner. Virgin Coral Musker, a chorus line dancer journeying on the Orient Express to Budapest, meets and has sexual intercourse with male journeyer Carleton Myatt, whom she has never met before, after he insists she shares his first-class sleeper carriage when she is harassed by a man in her own carriage.36 This relationship seems to be driven by lust rather than love, at least for Myatt: he had dreamt earlier that Coral was a prostitute, suggesting it was his physical rather than emotional desires he wanted her to satisfy.37 The dream perhaps also reflects his own fear at sexually ‘dirtying’ himself through this encounter as well as an internal conflict over his desires. This is not the only encounter within Stamboul Train that sub­ verts contemporary conservative definitions of relationships. Greene also depicted the journey as a space for homosexual desire. Janet Pardoe accompanies Mabel Warren, a stereotypical mannish lesbian, on this journey as her companion. However, Janet is interested only in the lifestyle that Mabel provides for her.38 Over the course of the journey she has a liaison first with another male journeyer and then with Myatt. Abandoned by Janet, Mabel’s desires also settle upon Coral: ‘Janet is a bitch. I’m thinking of getting a new companion. There’s a little actress on this train who would suit me. You should see her, the liveliest figure  .  .  .   You’d admire her as much as I do. Not very pretty, but with lovely legs.’39

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women, travel and identity Those few fictional women journeyers who were portrayed as sexu­ ally aware or active rarely achieved happiness or fulfilment, however; exploring and expressing their sexuality was depicted as extremely difficult. Coral Musker spends the night with Myatt in Stamboul Train but he ends the novel in a relationship with Janet Pardoe, and is seriously considering marrying her. Coral’s expression of her sexuality proves fruitless. Mabel Warren is frustrated because Janet does not reciprocate her feelings: she ‘had no means save her lips to express her love, [and] was faced always by the fact that she could give no enjoyment and gained herself no more than an embittered sense of insufficiency’.40 Contemporaries may have believed the journey could be an erotic space, but paradoxically they did not expect women journeyers to be overtly sexual or condone those who were. The dangerous journey: sexual threat and physical risk In absolute contrast to the belief that it was a space for either affairs of the heart or eroticism to flourish, the journey abroad, as already noted, was also often represented as an arena in which women were threatened with physical and sexual danger. Narratives of sexual violence against women journeyers could reach sadistic levels.41 In 1894, Charles Carrington printed Raped on the Railway: A True Story of a Lady Who was First Ravished and then Chastised on the Scotch Express under the imprint of the Cosmopolitan Bibliophile Society.42 This pornographic work depicts a brutal encounter between two journeyers on the Scotch Express from Euston, Mrs Sinclair and an artist named Robert Brandon. Brandon boards the Express at Euston and enters the compartment in which a veiled Mrs Sinclair sits alone.43 He attempts conversation with her, but Mrs Sinclair is reluctant and refuses to let Brandon see her face when he asks.44 Brandon lusts after her, although the narrator claims he has actually fallen in love with her.45 After failing to persuade her to have intercourse voluntarily, Brandon forces himself upon her. He assaults Mrs Sinclair when she faints while trying to deter his attempts to remove her veil: while she is unconscious he exposes her breasts and pulls up her skirts.46 Mrs Sinclair regains consciousness and resists him but he covers her mouth with his hand to muffle her screams; she continues to struggle, but is eventually overwhelmed by his strength.47 The narrator justifies this rape by suggesting that Mrs Sinclair brought it upon herself, claiming that if she had allowed him to see her face Brandon ‘would have limited himself to the exchange of a few polite words with her without seeking to push his gallantry any further’

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full of wickedness but her ‘indifference’ piqued his pride.48 It is further justified when Mrs Sinclair decides that what Brandon has done is not so heinous, that she had not been a virgin anyway, and that she had ‘rather encouraged Brandon’ and had been about to voluntarily submit to intercourse.49 She proceeds to forgive him.50 But Mrs Sinclair’s ordeal is not over. Her brother-in-law, who is also on the train, learns what has happened, but rather than attacking Brandon he whips and canes her as punishment for her transgression.51 The belief that the journey could be sexually and/or physically dangerous was again partly driven by the nature of journey space. In the 1870s, train carriages were self-contained without corridors or alarms; poor lighting and dark tunnels also made it easier for women to be attacked.52 Media reports also partly sustained this belief. The ‘railway outrage’ was a common newspaper feature following the first murder on a British railway in 1864.53 In September 1871, the Illustrated London News reported ‘A shocking tragedy’ on the Manchester and Liverpool Railway: two passengers, Mr and Mrs Wanless, were found shot dead in a train carriage.54 It was established that the couple had been unhappily married and had recently separated.55 Mr Wanless had been seeking a reconciliation, but it was surmised that the couple had quarrelled on the train and ‘after having killed his wife, Wanless must have reloaded the pistol and shot himself ’.56 The News of the World reported attacks on two women in January 1872.57 The Times reported the attempted indecent assault and murder of Catherine Scragg on the London and North-Western Railway in August 1887 and an ‘outrage’ perpetrated on an eighteen-year-old girl on a SouthEastern train in November 1897. The Times also reported various attacks on women journeying in first-, second- and third-class carriages in October 1883, June 1890, October 1891, January 1892, July and August 1896 and December 1903.58 Reports of violence against women were not confined to British railways. In March 1911, The Times reported that a British nurse was found at Nice station ‘lying in a pool of blood in the corridor of a third-class carriage’ on a midnight train from Cannes.59 The woman had been ‘attacked in the train by an unknown man, who stabbed her repeatedly with a knife’.60 The most notorious railway outrage of the period was Colonel Valentine Baker’s assault of a young woman, Kate Dickinson, in 1875. She had been journeying alone in a first-class carriage from Midhurst to Petersfield on 18 June 1875 when Baker entered her compartment.61 At the initial court hearing, she recalled how, after some brief conversation, Baker sat next to her and ‘put his arm round her waist, and kissed

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women, travel and identity her several times’.62 At a subsequent hearing, she recounted how he then pressed her against the corner of the carriage, ‘sank down close in front of me, and I felt his hand underneath my dress, on my stocking, above my boot. I got up instantly.’63 She was forced to escape on to the outside step of the carriage, where she was seen and helped by staff at the next station.64 Witnesses noticed that Colonel Baker’s dress was ‘disarranged’ and that his trousers were undone.65 He was eventually cleared of attempted rape but convicted of indecent assault, sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment and fined £500.66 The reporting of such cases fuelled fictional depictions of the journey both within Britain and abroad as a space for violence and the perpetration of crimes against women, in turn again reinforcing these understandings of the journey. The appeal of the train journey as a site for crime narratives was partly that the carriage was a public vehicle in which journeyers could not always choose their companions.67 This mixing of strangers created the possibility for tension, hostility, conflict and violence. In Agatha Christie’s The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928), American Ruth Kettering is murdered on board for her jewellery.68 Three female journeyers are murdered on the boat in Death on the Nile: beautiful and wealthy heiress Linnet Ridgeway is shot in her cabin; her maid Louise Bourget is stabbed to death; and Mrs Otterbourne, mother of Rosalie, is shot dead.69 Before her death, Linnet articulates another particular quality of the journey that was believed to endanger journeyers and again helped to make it an appealing setting for crime writers: ‘“We’re caught here [on the ship cruising down the Nile]. Trapped! There’s no way out.”’ 70 Trains and ships were sometimes regarded as prisons. Finally, fears about male sexual aggression and women’s vulnerability and possible moral corruption due to their entry into the public sphere also fuelled the perception of the journey as a dangerous space for them. Women faced sexual threats in many public spaces during the period. From the late 1800s onwards women began to shop in new department stores such as Liberty, but ‘male pests’ constantly harassed them.71 Women also faced the threat of sexual harassment at work: it was used against Victorian female mill workers as a form of discipline.72 Indeed, it is argued that harassment remained a feature of workplaces up to the interwar period.73 It has usefully been noted of British rail journeys that ‘Fears of both moral and physical danger brought  .  .  .  restrictions on  .  .  .  the means of travel that [the urban female] was prepared to take’.74 This belief in the threat of sexual and physical violence in the public spaces of everyday life led to a fear that women who used the public spaces of mobile technology to go abroad were similarly at risk.

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full of wickedness Some contemporary organizations played upon this concern most effectively. Between the 1840s and 1914, women’s emigration societies such as the Traveller’s Aid Society deployed a ‘safe passage’ discourse in their literature to emphasize the importance of using their services when making the emigration journey. In this narrative, young, naive, foolish or fool-hardy working-class women were preyed upon during the journey to their new homelands by a range of villainous men, including white slave traders, Mormons, rakes, and corrupt employment and hapless emigration agents, all of whom were motivated by lust. These women were saved by the educated, connected, civic-minded women of the societies and their paid female helpers.75 This discourse also exploited the sexualdanger scares that convulsed English society in the 1880s, such as the Jack the Ripper case.76 Encounters with male journeyers: myth and reality Male and female journeyers met in many different settings, including train carriages, dining saloons or carriages and ship decks, and during social and leisure events such as dances and sports. Some contemporaries suggested that the contradictory popular understandings of the (Western) male–female journey encounter as one of either romance or sexual danger were also supported, and partially created, by women journeyers’ behavi­ our. In 1879, Town Talk claimed that some accusations of sexual assaults on trains were fabricated by ‘female monsters’ who blackmailed the men they accused for money in exchange for a guarantee that their reputations would be unharmed.77 Etiquette writers’ strictures about how to behave with male journeyers suggest that there was genuine concern that women journeyers might be corrupted by unscrupulous men. Similarly, women’s emigration societies promoted a strict code of behaviour for young emigrants, including the familiar urgings to avoid drawing attention to themselves or talking about themselves or their plans with strangers.78 Some historians have also agreed that women’s behaviour sustained these beliefs, citing the presence of female journeyers ‘known as the fishing fleet, who were going to India with no other plan but to capture a husband  .  .  .   [and whose] flirtations entranced the young men and distressed the older ladies’ on P&O’s ships to India.79 Others suggest that male journeyers fuelled these beliefs, arguing that the Orient Express was indeed a site of rampant sexual activity, with conductors telegraphing journeyers’ requirements to the next stop, where girls would board the train.80 Yet women journeyers’ own views and experiences, and an assessment of these, are absent from these analyses. Some women may have

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women, travel and identity censored their accounts of their encounters with male journeyers because of the ruinous consequences for their reputations if their diaries or letters revealed that anything that could be deemed inappropriate had occurred. Women may also have exaggerated or diminished the nature of, and their role in, the encounters that they did record. But the encounters described in the accounts studied here still offer considerable insight into the true nature of the heterosexual journey encounter. Popular constructions of the rail journey as a romantic space were particularly awry. None of the rail journeyers studied here recorded flirtatious or romantic encounters. This was partly because there was less time for flirtation or romance to develop during these journeys as they were often shorter than those by ship. Being confined to one small train compartment also meant that women journeyers encountered fewer men to whom they might have formed a romantic attachment than women who could roam through several areas of a ship, which could contain hundreds of potential suitors. Most importantly, as we have seen, the railway carriage was a space characterized by intense mutual scrutiny which severely inhibited opportunities for romance; nor could it be guaranteed that a couple would find an empty carriage to escape this observation. Lady Kitty Vincent commented of ocean journeys that ‘there were [always] one or two professional “lady-killers” who made each voyage an excuse for a fresh affaire’.81 Yet only two of the thirty-seven women studied here who journeyed by sea recorded personal encounters with men that could be deemed in anyway flirtatious or romantic, and one of these was at best ambiguous in nature, suggesting that the popular perception of the ocean journey as a space for love was also greatly overblown. Margaret Roberts’s record of an encounter with a Captain Wilson during her journey to India in 1930 suggests that some men enjoyed teasing and attempting to flirt with female journeyers. Late in the voyage, Wilson teased Margaret because he had seen her standing on deck watching the moon after a fancy-dress dance. From his manner, ‘I think he thought I was crying or wanting to flirt. He wouldn’t tell me what he thought but only said he thought wrong. I had quite forgotten about looking at the moon, & insisted that I went straight to bed until he had told me I had done it, then I remembered.’82 Nothing of a romantic nature occurred between Margaret and Wilson, but such encounters, as well as demonstrating some reduction in the formality of conversation between men and women by the end of the period, indicate that far from being diffident or strictly formal in their interactions with women, some male journeyers were prepared to go beyond commonplace conversation.

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full of wickedness On the second morning of her journey to Algiers in December 1873, Emily Hall conversed with the ship’s doctor and a Scottish gentleman. The latter eventually ‘produced a bottle of Champagne & insisted upon our sharing it’.83 There is no suggestion in Emily’s diary that she experi­ enced any overt amorous activity from the Scotsman. However, while he invited the doctor as well as Emily to share the drink, the suggestion of champagne so early in the day and journey could indicate that he had more than purely friendly intentions towards her. Yet it is deeply questionable how plausible, or likely to succeed, it was that he planned to, perhaps, get Emily slightly inebriated as a prelude to romance given the prohibition on respectable women drinking alcohol or appearing drunk in public in late Victorian Britain. His offer of champagne may indicate nothing more than a desire to make acquaintances and celebrate the journey itself. Just three women observed other women who were flirtatious or receptive to male attention on ships. Mrs F.D. Bridges noted ‘if one were desirous of writing a chapter on flirtation, this life offers enormous advantages’ while on a P&O steamer in December 1878.84 Margaret Hunt recalled that ‘young men  .  .  .  were drawn’ to her companion, Helen Scudder, on her journey to Madras in April 1932.85 Helen deliberately sought the company of men in preference to that of women journeyers, but she also seems to have enjoyed manipulating them. There was an amused but level-headed detachment in her interactions with them: she dismissively said of one who paid her particular attention that ‘He has a mother-fixation’.86 Helen enjoyed this male attention, but she had no intention of forming a serious attachment to any of them. She remained self-possessed and in control of these encounters throughout; they were mere amusements to her. Women whose behaviour supposedly distressed their fellow journeyers – although none of the women studied here expressed any such distress upon observing such behaviour – had some power to control the nature of their heterosexual encounters. They were not entirely dictated by men or by social protocol. Ship crew did appeal to some women, and sometimes they, too, actively pursued women. The purser on Lady Vincent’s journey to Canada ‘liked every one of the women on board’ and one day asked them all in turn ‘whether he might come and smoke a cigarette in our cabins’ later in the evening.87 Lady Vincent laughed him off, saying ‘really I was more amusing on deck’.88 At midnight that night, however, the first officer appeared at her cabin door searching for the purser; it transpired that he had visited the cabin of another woman that night.89 The purser ‘flitted from sweet to sweet’ woman for the remainder of the journey.90

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women, travel and identity Lady Vincent also remembered how, during an earlier journey, one lady ‘with whom I shared a cabin sobbed out her steward’s name amongst her list of peccadillos, at a moment when we all thought we were going to the bottom’ during a storm.91 She noted the particular appeal of the ship captain: ‘Every woman who is passably good-looking and a good many who aren’t flatter themselves that the Captain takes a certain interest in them.’92 Transport companies’ desire to paint the journey abroad as a space for love reached its limits here: they were concerned about possible romances between journeyers and their employees. Lady Vincent recalled that ‘there was a certain [unnamed] line that forbade its officers to mingle with the passengers’ but this had the unintended result that ‘The only chic thing to do [became] to annex an officer and “mingle” with him by moonlight, however dull the officers might be, and however alluring the male passengers’.93 Eventually, ‘jealous husbands forbade their wives to travel by that line and sent them on other ships where the officers not being “forbidden fruit” were less prized’.94 There is some evidence, then, that flirtatious encounters between men and women occasionally occurred during the ship journey abroad. However, it was only a minority of the women studied here, five out of forty, who experienced or observed such encounters. None of them described deeply romantic encounters or anything that grew into a relationship or courtship. As was the case with non-Western male journeyers, none of them recorded sexual encounters with men, although this is unsurprising given the strong contemporary disapproval of, and embargo on, women openly expressing and discussing their sexuality. Yet, given again the fierce scrutiny women experienced from other journeyers and the potentially ruinous effect upon their reputation if a sexual encounter became public knowledge, it is highly unlikely that many women embarked on secret sexual relationships. Flirtatious, romantic and sexual encounters were at most a great exception rather than the norm on maritime journeys abroad. Public understandings of the ocean journey as a romantic or erotic space envisioned a reality that did not correspond with most women journeyers’. Lady Vincent commented that ‘It is the fashion with certain novelists to imagine that P.&O.’s [ships] were hot-beds of iniquity, but as a matter of fact it was nothing of the sort  .  .  .  a mild kiss or two in the bows was the extent of most of the indiscretions committed’.95 In this lack of romantic and sexual activity, women conformed with the public expectation that a ‘proper’ woman journeyer was restrained and sexually inactive and with the conservative ideal of the chaste woman.

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full of wickedness The extreme infrequency of romantic and sexual encounters between men and women on both the rail and ship journey abroad was partly due to the operation of journey chaperoning. Chaperoning in middleand upper-class Victorian Britain strove to ensure respectable relationships between the sexes: young women were chaperoned at balls and parties and their dancing partners chosen for them; and on shopping expeditions or charity excursions a governess or lady’s maid accompanied them.96 Social calls were made in the company of parents or other chaperones, and meetings with young men were usually restricted to girls’ own homes, again under careful supervision.97 Despite the relaxation of formal chaperoning in the later decades of the period studied here, beliefs about propriety continued to shape encounters between men and women. During the 1920s, etiquette still prescribed that a middle-class woman was not allowed to engage in a private conversation with a man unless she was dancing with him or sitting next to him at dinner.98 Unmarried working-class women also faced restrictions on their interaction with men at home. While the same degree of formal chaper­ oning was not imposed on these encounters, similar concerns about propriety and respectability manifested themselves. Fear of illicit sexual behaviour, which could again destroy a woman’s reputation and – the most damaging consequence of all – lead to the birth of an illegitimate child, also led to the regulation of their encounters with men in public spaces: girls were often accompanied home by a relative after public dances, for instance.99 Men and women could mix at such dances, but these were often strictly supervised and controlled, with a ban on dancing cheek-to-cheek.100 Even when a working-class couple progressed to formal courtship, a form of chaperoning continued: they often met in the parlour of the family home, enabling relatives to maintain surveillance of their behaviour.101 The replication of this established social practice demonstrates again how the journey abroad replicated elements of home. In something of an inversion of behaviour in Britain, however, formal chaperoning was most closely replicated on the journey abroad amongst the lowest passenger classes. Ship companies’ provision of matrons such as that encountered by Sarah Stephens indicates a clear concern to protect single women emigrants from immoral temptation and sexual threats, and to preserve proper relations between the sexes. An announcement in the Illustrated London News in January 1870 of the departure of a ship bearing thirty women to Vancouver to become domestic servants noted, ‘A matron and steward have been engaged to attend to their interests during the voyage’.102 Emigrant societies promoted ship matrons as maternal protectors of young women.103

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women, travel and identity Most of the women studied here who journeyed outside steerage did not record such formal incidences of chaperoning. Emily Hall was the only journeyer who explicitly claimed the role of chaperone on her journey to Algiers in 1873: ‘dinner was served & I chaperoned Miss M. [Mitchell]’.104 However, alternative forms of chaperoning operated for younger journeyers outside steerage. Siblings provided a natural form of chaperoning if required, as was the case for Emily and Ellen Hall. Margaret Roberts’s brother Roy escorted her on her journeys in 1930 and 1931. Women journeying with female friends and companions, as Emily May Jones and Bedford College students A.T.M., E.C.A. and R.M.S. did, could also chaperone each other if needed. Professional colleagues could also provide a form of chaperoning. Hester Dawson journeyed with other nurses to India in 1897: they could support and protect each other if required. Some women journeyers also practised what might be termed selfchaperoning: they were extremely aware of what constituted appropriate interaction with male journeyers, and policed their encounters themselves. Following a ‘sing song’ one evening on the Mantua during her journey to India in 1930, Margaret Roberts went on deck with a group of male journeyers including Captain Wilson and a Lieutenant Woods.105 Wilson announced he was thirsty and that he would give a half sovereign to the person who produced some beer as the ship’s bar had already closed.106 Margaret was aware that social convention deemed it unseemly for her to remain as the sole woman in the company of a group of men who were drinking: when ‘Lieut. Woods & some others appeared with about 1 /2 a dozen bottles of beer  .  .  .  I left them to guzzle’.107 However, Margaret also personally maintained her own beliefs and boundaries of acceptable and respectable behaviour during her encounters with male journeyers, and took action when she thought they were being infringed. On her return journey from Rangoon on the Sagaing in 1931 she recorded how two men, Pergilly and Ferguson, ‘had a drop too much’ to drink when the ship stopped at Port Sudan: ‘Pergilly was talkative. I hate seeing men like that, & Pergilly realised something was up for he asked later if I was offended. Hope he realised why.’108 She did not detail what Pergilly was ‘talkative’ about, but besides being slightly inebriated, perhaps he was also overfamiliar: her manner towards Pergilly clearly made him realize that he had transgressed. It was not merely fear of breaking social mores or of other journeyers condemning her for being too familiar with men that motivated Margaret to maintain a degree of distance in her encounters with men, but her personal beliefs about what was suitable as well as her sense of her own agency. Journey

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full of wickedness etiquette writers’ strictures that women should maintain a degree of distance in their interactions with men, and be aware of the damage these encounters could do to their reputations, did thus sometimes reflect elements of women’s behaviour. The risk for women was that their encounters with men might turn into a physical, psychological and sexual violation. Despite the presence of matrons, steerage ocean journeyers particularly sometimes faced such a threat from journeyers or crew. A middle-class London clerk’s 1872 account of a steerage journey on a White Star steamer from Liverpool to America described how the sailors would flirt roughly, or even obscenely, with the female journeyers and that many women remained below deck after dinner to avoid such encounters.109 A United States Immigration Commission investigation in 1908 found that many ship stewards would touch and fondle women in steerage, and watch while they changed their clothes.110 This suggests that the journeyer hierarchy on ships had a direct bearing on the degree of sexual danger women faced, with women at its bottom facing the greatest threat. However, an incident Lady Emma Liberty recorded during her Mediterranean and Orient cruise in 1884 suggests that sometimes women could face danger regardless of their passenger class: APRIL 13TH (EASTER DAY, 5 o’clock p.m.) – Athens. – We had rather a rough night; about 3 in the morning [we] were startled to find a man groping about the ladies’ cabin. Whether he came to look for the steward as he said, or our watches, etc., is best known to himself.111

This man’s intrusion, even if merely accidental, suggests that even what were meant to be secure feminine spaces were not always so. If he was a criminal, his intentions could have been far more serious than the theft of valuable goods alone: he might have intended to attack one of them. Lady Liberty did not mention the incident again in her diary and importantly gave no impression that she had feared that the man intended to physically or sexually harm her or any of the other women in the cabin; she presented it instead as a purely material threat. It is possible that she never conceived that there could have been a sexual threat against her or her fellow journeyers. However, women who intended to publish their journey accounts may have censored their fears of sexual attack out of concern about their readers’ reactions if they acknowledged or indicated that they were aware that such a menace existed. Extracts from Lady Liberty’s diary were printed for private circulation; to discuss, however obliquely, fears of sexual violation or physical violence in an account that would be read by family and friends would have been

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women, travel and identity inappropriate for her readership and unsuitable for a woman of her social standing. Yet there is no evidence from the accounts studied here that all women journeyers regularly feared or faced situations in which they were seriously sexually threatened, and no indication that any of them experienced any form of sexual assault. None of the women who journeyed by train recorded incidents involving men that they found intimidating. Many women journeying by ship felt so confident of their personal safety that they slept on deck when it was too hot. Margaret Roberts, Margaret Hunt and Eira Platt all spent nights on deck, an open space in which they were arguably less protected than in a cabin.112 Most women felt secure in the ship environment, as evidenced by the fact that Eira’s father allowed his sixteen-year-old daughter to sleep on deck, admittedly while he accompanied her. The perception of the journey abroad as a dangerous space was also overblown. In addition, while there could be a threat to women journeying in steerage, it was also arguably not as great as commentators such as Charlotte O’Brien suggested. A letter sent to the Pall Mall Gazette challenged her claims, suggesting that some of her contemporaries felt the threat was overstated. The writer, Cecil R. Rochie, stated that he had recently examined, in a non-professional capacity, the emigrant accommodation on Cunard’s Bothnia, which was sailing from Queenstown to New York, and had found that married and unmarried men and women were berthed separately.113 He wrote that ‘All I desire to do is to state truthfully what I have witnessed, and to bear my testimony to the wonderful cleanness, comfort, and good management to be found on an emigrant vessel’.114 The Board of Trade inquiry that resulted from O’Brien’s letter recommended that married and single passengers’ accommodation should have separate communication passages and reiterated that ‘every emigrant ship carrying a certain number of single women should have a woman of character and experience in the position of a matron’.115 However, it also concluded that ‘there are no such evils in the present state of emigrant ships as to call for urgent and exceptional remedies’ because ‘the conduct of the passengers is, as a general rule, respectable and decent, and  .  .  .  immorality is checked, not only by the [existing] precautions taken to prevent it, but by the feelings of the people themselves’.116 It recognized that journeyers were capable of self-control and policing their own behaviour to ensure that improprieties with, or attacks on, women did not often occur. The popular understandings of encounters between male and female journeyers as being primarily characterized by flirtation, romance and

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full of wickedness eroticism or sexual aggression were thus a grave distortion of these encounters. As with encounters between female journeyers, the majority of these encounters were proper and pleasant acquaintanceships, like most in British domestic society. Isa Foster Barham, a young girl who travelled with her uncle and aunt from Liverpool to Bombay in 1894 and 1895, described a number of encounters with male journeyers. Upon one occasion, she ‘had [a] very interesting talk with [a] Mr. Harding after dinner  .  .  .  He told me of the miserable conditions of a Brahman widow’.117 Women usually had the ability to determine the nature of these encounters because they were willing to socialize with them – men did not force themselves upon them in any sense. Marion Bridie took a train from Jerusalem to Cairo during her round-the-world journey; during lunch and dinner she ‘shared a table with an American  .  .  .  He is an enthusiastic photographer, so we soon chummed up. We got some snaps from the windows of camels loading up from European goods trains, very quaint.’118 There was nothing more to this encounter than friendliness and a shared interest in photography. Likewise, Euphemia Stokes spent a considerable degree of time with Professor Hassan and his family, but there is no suggestion that this was because she felt in any way attracted to him. This encounter was again about friendliness and enjoyment of each other’s company. Some women, such as Margaret Hunt, were extremely inhibited in their relations with men. Others, undeniably, sometimes found it impossible to forge any kind of positive relationship with a male journeyer. Renowned philosopher, biologist and sociologist Herbert Spencer accompanied Henrietta Barnett and her husband on their journey down the Nile in 1879. The encounter was beset with difficulties from the outset: ‘We were somewhat dismayed to have so celebrated a personage and one we had only met once, added to our trio, but it evidently never occurred to Mr. Spencer that he might not be welcome, and so there was nothing else to do but fall in with the plan.’119 Spencer proved to be irritating and mundane, with little, from Mrs Barnett’s perspective, appreciation for the land through which they were passing. At their first sight of the Nile ‘We stood silenced by its historic beauty, till Mr. Spencer broke the pause with: “The colour of the water hardly vouches for its hygienic properties”.’ 120 Out of sheer frustration, Mrs Barnett goaded Spencer: one of her husband’s letters described how ‘my wife is teasing him. He has strong views about the need of women’s subjection, so she has just “drawn him” by pulling me off my chair, ruffling my hair! calling me names, and drawing attention to the fact that for the first time in my life I have not given up my pen at her demand.’121

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women, travel and identity Yet even while she mocked him during their journey and later in print, Mrs Barnett remained sensitive to the standards of behaviour that her contemporaries expected of women journeyers. Anticipating or perhaps fearing criticism, she defended her behaviour by arguing that Spencer enjoyed it: ‘I annoyed him so much that he liked being with me.’122 This book is not suggesting that women journeyers sought to conform to the model of the ‘perfect lady’, which has rightly been challenged by women’s historians; they were far more complex.123 However, Mrs Barnett’s defensiveness highlights that some women journeyers felt pressured to conform to certain expectations about their behaviour, notably that they would be polite, friendly and welcoming. Henrietta’s comments also suggest again that journey etiquette’s emphasis on the importance of women interacting with other journeyers and being social arbiters, rather than making them feel uncomfortable, reflected some of the reality of the journey experience. The journey could reinforce received expectations of women’s behaviour rather than encourage women to challenge them, demonstrating again just how powerful those expectations could be. Henrietta’s defensiveness also suggests that historians’ arguments that travel was a liberating experience for most women needs modifying to some women.124 The journey was a complicated and ambiguous form of female travel, which some women sometimes found liberating, but which could also be restrictive or at the very least maintain the status quo in women’s roles and definitions of womanliness. It both recognized women’s agency and preserved existing conventions. Occasionally, acquaintanceships between male and female journeyers could reach a level of friendship that had the potential to continue beyond the journey. Margaret Roberts socialized with ‘a very nice youth’ called Tom Watson, who was journeying to India in order to study agriculture and do some seasonal work, during her 1930 voyage.125 They went on excursions in Port Said and Aden; she also noted approvingly that at the fancy-dress dance ‘Tom Watson was a pirate & looked the part’.126 At the end of the journey, he ‘gave me his address on a slip of paper as I was going to send him some photos I took on the ship’.127 It is not known whether this friendship continued beyond Watson’s receipt of the photographs, but the friendliness of their relationship is further indicated by the fact that when Watson gave Margaret his address she was talking with another woman, to whom he replied when the latter asked if it was his address, ‘“Oh no, nothing as important as that”’.128 He clearly did not like this other woman enough to risk the possibility of any more contact with her. Margaret’s recording of this reply indicates that she was flattered and pleased by it. During such moments, male

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full of wickedness and female journeyers moved beyond polite communication to achieve a genuine connection and parity based on mutual friendliness and respect. Sexual malice or emotional complications played no part in these encounters. Notes 1 C.G. O’Brien, ‘Horrors of an Emigrant Ship’, Pall Mall Gazette: an evening newspaper and review, 6 May 1881. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 PMG, second edn, 7 and 10 May 1881. 5 E.M. Delafield, The Diary of a Provincial Lady (London, 1930), reprinted in The Diary of a Provincial Lady omnibus (London, 2001 edn), p. 89. 6 J. Steward, ‘The “travel romance” and the emergence of the female tourist’, Studies in Travel Writing, 2 (spring 1998), 89. 7 Lady K. Vincent, Two on a Trip (London, 1930), p. 33. 8 Bailey, ‘Adventures in space’, 9. 9 Christie, Murder on the Orient Express, p. 19. 10 Ibid., p. 168. 11 Christie, Death on the Nile, pp. 376  –  8, 412–13. 12 Riddell, Floating Palace, pp. 142–3. 13 Ibid., p. 29. 14 Clarke, Borrowed Liner, p. 304; Bell, Good Ship, p. 3. 15 King Kong (dir. M.C. Cooper and E.B. Schoedsack). 16 SCA, ULL, Cunard Archive, PR5/7, H. Bindloss, ‘Carson’s Luck’, CM, XI:6 (December 1923), 198  –200. 17 SCA, ULL, Cunard Archive, PR5/12, R.S. Pitt-Kethey, ‘Angela’s Great Adventure’, CM, XVI:1 (December 1925), 48  –50, 57–  8, 68. 18 W. Townend, ‘Collision’, Illustrated London News (December 1936), 45. 19 RHUL Archives, ‘A Desperate Chase’, Bedford College, London, Magazine, No. 12 (June 1890), 13. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., pp. 14  –15. 23 The 39 Steps (dir. A. Hitchcock). 24 E. Waugh, ‘Cruise (Letters from a Young Lady of Leisure)’, in E. Waugh, Work Suspended and Other Stories (1943), reprinted by Penguin Books (London, 1976), p. 16. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., p. 20. 27 Ibid., p. 21. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Townend, ‘Collision’, p. 46. 32 Ibid.

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women, travel and identity 33 Ibid., p. 45. 34 Bell, Good Ship, pp. 327–  8, 345, 356. 35 Ibid., pp. 128, 146. 36 Greene, Stamboul Train, pp. 24  –30, 168  –72. 37 Ibid., pp. 35  –  6. 38 Ibid., p. 41. 39 Ibid., p. 100. 40 Ibid., pp. 55  –  6. 41 On occasion, men’s sexual fascination with women journeyers could rebound against them. In the 1907 Japanese short story ‘The Girl Fetish’ by Tayama Katai a male Tokyo commuter is obsessed with staring at schoolgirls and young women on his train, who become objects of his fantasies. As he stares at one particular girl, he loses his hold on the handrail in the crowded commuter carriage and falls on to the track below where he is killed by an oncoming train (A. Freedman, ‘Commuting gazes: schoolgirls, salarymen, and electric trains in Tokyo’, JTH, 23:1 (March 2002), 24). 42 Raped on the Railway: A True Story of a Lady Who was First Ravished and then Chastised on the Scotch Express (London: privately printed for subscribers to the Cosmopolitan Bibliophile Society, 1894). This contains a disturbing discourse justifying raping women: it claims in its introduction that ‘Nothing can be more shocking than to take a helpless child and endeavour to satisfy one’s lust upon its innocent body. Cases of rape on vigorous adult women come under quite a different category’ (ibid., p. 7). 43 Ibid., p. 43. 44 Ibid., p. 56. 45 Ibid., p. 60. 46 Ibid., pp. 61–  4, 69, 147, 149. 47 Ibid., pp. 150  –1. 48 Ibid., p. 56. 49 Ibid., p. 158. 50 Ibid., p. 160. 51 Ibid., pp. 184  –  6, 192–7. 52 Stevenson, ‘“Women and young girls” ’, p. 190. Women journeyers could also be victims of petty theft: the Illustrated London News reported that one William Duncan was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude in July 1870 following the theft of a purse and money from a woman at London’s Farringdon railway station – he had two previous convictions which were taken into account when he was sentenced (ILN, 9 July 1870). 53 J. Flanders, The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime (London, 2011), pp. 333–  6. 54 ILN, 30 September 1871. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. This was another occasion in which journey space could be considered an emotional extension of domestic space, albeit one in which tragedy and violence occurred. 57 Stevenson, ‘“Women and young girls” ’, p. 191. 58 The Times, 4 August 1887; 22 November 1897; 4 October 1883; 25 June 1890; 10 October 1891; 13 and 23 January 1892; 1 March 1892; 20 April 1892; 17 July 1896; 6 August 1896; 10 December 1903.



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full of wickedness Ibid., 13 March 1911. Ibid. Ibid., 19 June 1875. Ibid. Ibid., 25 June 1875. Ibid., 19 June 1875. Ibid., 25 June and 3 August 1875. Ibid., 3 August 1875. I. Carter, Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity (Manchester, 2001), pp. 169, 213. 68 A. Christie, The Mystery of the Blue Train (London, 1928), p. 84. 69 Christie, Death on the Nile, pp. 187–  92, 306  –10, 328  –  9. 70 Ibid., p. 121. 71 J.R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London, 1992), pp. 48, 50  –1. 72 S. D’Cruze, Crimes of Outrage: Sex, Violence and Victorian Working Women (London, 1998), p. 87. 73 S. Todd, Young Women, Work, and Family in England, 1918  –1950 (Oxford, 2005), p. 154. 74 Drummond, ‘The impact of the railway’, p. 239. 75 Chilton, Agents of Empire, pp. 40  –3, 46, 49  –50. 76 Ibid., pp. 63–  4. 77 Stevenson, ‘“Women and young girls” ’, p. 195. 78 Chilton, Agents of Empire, p. 46. 79 Howarth, Story of P&O, p. 66. 80 Faith, World the Railways Made, p. 255. 81 Vincent, Two on a Trip, p. 58. 82 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur C546, ‘Diary of M. Roberts’, 12 November 1930. 83 BA, 855 F2/13, ‘Diary of E. Hall’, 21 December 1873. 84 Bridges, Journal of a Lady’s Travels, 9 December 1878, p. 22. 85 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur F241/1, ‘Letters and diaries of M. Hunt’, p. 28. 86 Ibid. 87 Vincent, Two on a Trip, p. 46. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., pp. 46  –7. 90 Ibid., p. 48. 91 Ibid., p. 14. 92 Ibid., p. 33. 93 Ibid., p. 34. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid., p. 58. 96 P. Horn, Ladies of the Manor: Wives and Daughters in Country-House Society, 1830  –1918 (Stroud, 1991), p. 54. 97 P. Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics 1860  –1914 (Oxford, 1986), p. 24. 98 P. Horn, Women in the 1920s (Stroud, 1995), pp. 27–  8. 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

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women, travel and identity 99 E. Roberts, A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women 1890  –1940 (Oxford, 1984), p. 71. 100 Ibid., pp. 70  –1. 101 Ibid., p. 73. 102 ILN, 8 January 1870. 103 Chilton, Agents of Empire, pp. 56  –7, 60. 104 BA, 855 F2/13, ‘Diary of E. Hall’, 20 December 1873. 105 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur C546, ‘Diary of M. Roberts’, 12 November 1930. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid., 28 April 1931. 109 Fox, Ocean Railway, p. 327. 110 Ibid., pp. 333–  4. 111 CWAC, 788/184, Liberty, Levant and Back, 13 April 1884, p. 33. 112 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur C546, ‘Diary of M. Roberts’, 8 November 1930; BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur F241/2, Letters and Diaries of M. Hunt, ‘Extracts from the letters and diaries of M. Hunt, in the English Department of the Women’s Christian College in Madras, from June 1932 until April 1943’, p. 88; BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur Photo Eur 362, ‘Diary of E. G. du Breil (née Platt)’, 12 November 1903. 113 C.R. Rochie, ‘Irish Emigrants’, PMG, 9 May 1881. 114 Ibid. 115 19th Century House of Commons Sessional Papers, Paper Series: COMMAND PAPERS; ACCOUNTS AND PAPERS, Paper No. [C.2995], Vol. LXXXII.93, Session: 1881, Reports with regard to Accommodation and Treatment of Emigrants on Atlantic Steamships, p. 5. 116 Ibid., p. 4. 117 MAL, MMM, DX/652/1, Diary of I. Foster Barham, ‘Diary of passenger I. Foster Barham aboard the Clan MacIntosh’, 18 March 1895. 118 Bridie, Round the World, p. 27. 119 Barnett, Canon Barnett, p. 228. 120 Ibid., p. 232. 121 Ibid., p. 241. 122 Ibid., p. 243. 123 For detailed discussions of the concept of, and problems with, the ‘perfect lady’ see P. Branca, ‘Image and reality: the myth of the idle Victorian woman’, in M. Hartman and L. Banner (eds), Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women (New York, 1974), pp. 179  –  91, and J.M. Peterson, ‘No angels in the house: the Victorian myth and the Paget women’, American Historical Review, 89 (1984), 677–708. 124 McEwan, Gender, Geography and Empire, p. 26. 125 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur C546, ‘Diary of M. Roberts’, 3 November 1930. 126 Ibid., 6, 9 and 12 November 1930. 127 Ibid., 18 November 1930. 128 Ibid.

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7 Where her story begins: fashioning a journeyer identity

W

riting half a century later, Margaret Hunt reflected in her memoir of her first journey to India in April 1932, ‘I am taking much too long to get myself to India and the Women’s Christian College. [However, this] young missionary’s first voyage to India, a voyage taking three weeks, over fifty years ago, may be of historical interest’.1 In the introduction to her account of her journey on the Empress of Britain, Marion Bridie modestly explained, ‘Though not an adventure in any sense, it has been an extraordinarily interesting and delightful tour throughout  .  .  .  In publishing this diary my only aim is to recover for my friends in a small measure the glow of it all.’2 These apologetic yet subtly defiant passages indicate how much women valued telling the story, and leaving a record, of their journeys abroad for themselves, friends, family, sometimes the general public and posterity. Women journeyers created highly detailed visions of the journey experience in their accounts. Writing about their journeys offered them considerable agency over what they recorded and how they represented themselves: women constructed complex, multi-faceted identities as female jour­ neyers, which were expressed through multiple discourses. Journey discourse and identity Discourse is a concept that defies one all-encompassing meaning, instead producing a plurality of definitions within a range of disciplines, but it is Michel Foucault’s epistemological definition that has most influenced this book.3 He regarded discourses as specific bodies of knowledge: rather than being randomly distributed, he explored ‘what if empirical know­ ledge, at a given time and in a given culture, did possess a well-defined regularity?’4 He argued that knowledge(s) within or about different fields, subjects and domains were organized into ordered systems – discourses.

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women, travel and identity A discourse cannot be separated from its historical setting.5 Discourses are not fixed, continuous and unchanging in nature; they are historically contingent, shaped by real events, objects and subjects.6 The specific historical, socio-economic and spatial environment in which women journeyed undoubtedly played a significant role in determining journey discourse. Andrew Hassan’s analysis of nineteenth-century British emigrants’ diaries of their voyages to Australia argues that this journey generated several discourses. A rationalist navigational discourse relayed knowledge about the weather and the ship’s position. A ‘scientific’ discourse of natural history described marine creatures and sea birds observed from the ship, while a discourse of advice for future emigrants provided information on matters such as applying for assisted passages. ‘Experiential’ discourses portrayed the writer in heroic circumstances, such as when an emigrant captured a sea creature. The sailor’s yarn and gossip about fellow journeyers were also significant aspects of these diaries. Finally, a general discourse described the practicalities of daily life on ship in absolute detail. Hassan argues that, on balance, emigrant diarists were more preoccupied with what occurred within the ship than with what lay outside.7 However, few other historians have produced a detailed analysis of journey discourse. A greater understanding of this discourse and its range is required, including a comparison of discourse within different types of journeys, rather than a focus on just one. Even more importantly, the critical cyclical and reciprocal link between journey discourse and women journeyers’ identities must be understood. It has been usefully argued that discourse constitutes individuals: structuralists and post-structuralists assert that the subject is created by, derived from and essentially equivalent to discourse.8 Adherents of Jacques Lacan argue that the subject’s ‘interior’ discourse is formed from material taken from an ‘external’ field of discourse unique to the particular state of their personal history.9 Lacanians claim that no subject exists independently or separately from discourse: subjectivity is an illusory effect of discourse.10 Similarly, women journeyers absorbed several of the discourses operating within journey space and reflected them in the subjectivity manifested in their texts. However, this discourse–subject relationship is not passive. Lacan’s adherents also argue that, while the subject is loosely centred on certain self-defining discourse patterns, it can also resist those patterns that generate conflict within the self.11 Multiple discourses, rather than a single one, shape subjectivities, and the subject does not absorb every element of those discourses, but can reject some. The subject can also

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where her story begins alter the discourses it does absorb by combining and modifying the components of discourse that he or she internalizes, thus demonstrating that the subject has some power in its relationship with discourse.12 In essence, discourse operates upon the subject and the subject operates upon discourse.13 Discourse forms the self; the self forms discourse. Women journeyers undoubtedly had a degree of agency in their relationship with journey discourse: while it did shape some elements of their subjectivity, women also chose which elements of journey discourse they used to express it. When considering the nature of identity and subjectivity, scholarly work on the (de)construction of the self is also important. As poststructuralist, postmodernist and social psychological theory has established, the self and identity is not uniform or cohesive but fragmented and multi-faceted. The identities a woman manifests during her lifetime vary greatly according to context: she may present herself, and assert her identity, as a wife, mother, daughter, sister, artist or professional depending upon the environment in which she finds herself, the company she is in and the discourses operating within a given space. This identity diversity continued on the journey abroad. Continuing domestic identities The most striking divergence between constructions of women journeyers by others and their self-representations is that women maintained their established domestic identities, be they wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, friends or companions, during the journey abroad. The discourse of home sickness and loneliness in women’s letters and diaries demonstrates both the continuing validity of these identities and how important these remained to them, as well as how emotionally challenging some found the journey. Women thought of and missed loved ones left behind; some found it almost incomprehensible that they had left them. Hester Dawson wrote during her journey to Bombay in 1897, ‘I cannot at all realize that I am so many miles away from you all, and that each day takes me further. But they say we may be back in six months’.14 Women’s counting and recording of exactly how many letters they received also indicates how important communication with home was to them. Janet Smith was disappointed ‘at not getting any letters’ before she left the United States for her return journey to Britain in 1896, noting ‘I have only had 5 letters all the time’ she had been away.15 Dora Pennyman was saddened not to receive letters from her sons during her journey on the Nile in early 1905:

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women, travel and identity the express steamer ‘Nefertari’ passed us coming down stream at 7:15 a.m. & signalled for us to stop as they had something for us. I hoped for letters from my boys but there were only letters for the Pennimans [the friends with whom they were making this journey] & some Newspapers for us.16

This continuation of women’s domestic identities was partly driven by the fact that women wanted, and chose, to maintain them. If a woman was journeying with her husband, family or friends, or writing to friends and family back home, she would almost routinely maintain her prejourney identity. However, three elements of the journey environment also explain why these identities remained active. Firstly, women did not have the time or opportunity to extensively alter or abandon them. As we have already seen, the nature of the journey meant that women journeyers were unable to explore local cultures and ways of life in the places through which they passed or sailed by for the length of time or in the degree of detail women travellers did. Journey excursions outside the ship or train were brief: Lady Liberty recorded how her husband joked after they had passed through Vienna station during their journey on the Orient Express in 1884, that ‘he got out at the station, just to be able to say he had been to Vienna!’; unfortunately Lady Liberty herself was asleep.17 Even those who were away from home for months completing a long round-the-world journey did not have such exposure because these journeys did not involve spending weeks in any one place. Women journeyers lacked the prolonged exposure to different cultures that might have significantly challenged or modified their established identities. Secondly, being in motion and in-between destinations – at sea rather than home or abroad, on a moving train rather than at a point of departure or arrival – for the majority of their journeys also meant women did not need to abandon, marginalize or reject their established identities. As was substantially outlined in the previous chapters, women encountered a familiar social environment and order in trains and ships that encouraged and supported them in maintaining their domestic roles. They were not travelling independently through and living in, to them, alien lands that challenged conservative, established definitions of women’s place and womanhood, but journeying in protected, enclosed, socially recognizable and understandable environments. Journey spaces did not usually challenge women to adopt new identities in order to navigate successfully through the unknown and strange. In maintaining their existing identities, women maintained identities that fitted many traditional beliefs about women’s appropriate roles and places: that they should be home-based dutiful wives, mothers, household

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where her story begins managers, sisters and daughters. Previous studies of women travellers such as Marianne North and Isabella Bird Bishop argue that they were conflicted over their need for self-fulfilment through travel and their sense of duty towards their families and homes, which consequently created a sense of guilt.18 It is suggested that this guilt drove them to attempt to justify their travels by forging new roles when travelling, albeit ones which still carried traditional feminine attributes such as duty, sacrifice and caring: Isabella Bird Bishop adopted a philanthropic role by insisting on raising money for missionary hospitals.19 However, it was not concern that by journeying they had transgressed their ‘proper’ roles and places that drove women to maintain their prejourney identities. Instead, women also maintained their existing identities because they did not feel guilty about undertaking their journeys: most felt no internal conflict, uncertainty or any need to justify them. Instead, many revelled in the experience. At the end of her rail journey across the United States of America in 1894, Lady Guest rhapsodized about the past ‘Seven weeks of moving panoramas of wonder and beauty, which must be seen to be believed, and of which my descriptions are feeble and weak, all surveyed from armchairs, with no trouble, no fatigue, no responsibility, no anxiety of any kind!’20 Student A.T.M., with some help from As You Like It, lyrically described her ocean journey from Southampton to Cape Town as ‘a brief space of life when we “fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world” – when the beauty of night and day is flawless and friendship idyllic’ in the March 1934 Bedford College magazine.21 For her, this journey was a virtual paradise. The fact that many women, with the obvious exception of emigrants, returned to Britain after their journeys also meant they did not feel guilty because they had not abandoned their ‘proper places’ at home for a prolonged or permanent period. Women missed other elements of Britain. Bishop’s wife Mrs Wilkinson admitted during her journey to a missionary station in Zululand in 1870 that ‘What we miss most are the English singing-birds. Now and then we hear a bird piping  .  .  .  but there is no song.’22 Any aspect of the journey experience could make women’s links to home and their national identity resonate. Marion Bridie admitted that although she was not ‘patriotic enough to stay at home in this year of grace, 1932, I never­ theless feel a keen though shamefaced sense of satisfaction in looking out for British goods!’23 She was gratified to discover that the sleeping carriages she stayed in on the Great Indian Peninsular Railway had been built in Oldbury, Worcestershire.24 The journey abroad did not sub­ stantially challenge women’s identities as Britons.

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women, travel and identity The journey chronicler, tourist-traveller and modern woman The complexity of women journeyers’ identities, however, is clear in the fact that, while they maintained their pre-journey identities, they also explored elements of new identities: the journey chronicler, the touristtraveller and the modern woman. This is the other significant difference between women’s self-representations and other contemporaneous constructions: women explored identities during the journey that did not appear in other media. This fusion of new and existing subjectivities was part of the uniqueness of identity within the journey abroad. The journey chronicler was the new identity most frequently adopted by women. The chronicler evoked the journey abroad experientially, in varying degrees of detail, through a discourse of journey routine and functionality, a discourse that has been partly already explored in Chapters 4 and 5. Women’s adoption of this role re-emphasizes that they did not undertake their journeys passively: they actively consumed them and recorded the nature of their experience in full, both creating a permanent personal memorial to it and informing any readers of their accounts about the nature of the journey abroad. The discourse of journey routine and functionality included statements about encounters with other journeyers and staff, meals, the depositing or retrieval of luggage, seasickness, and social and leisure activities. It also included descriptions of key moments in the journey such as embarkation or departure. Student A.T.M. described the moment her ship sailed from Southampton in 1934 in detail: Grey sea, sky, and docks, and an atmosphere charged with grim cheerfulness – cheerful last messages, cheerful upturned faces. The liner sidles reluctantly out of dock, fussed about with tugs like children round their mother’s skirts. Her engines throb louder, and the grey water ripples at her sides. The thrill of the sea returns as we stand by the rail watching  .  .  .  until the last tug has fussed importantly home, and the Needles [off the coast of the Isle of Wight] have become one with an indistinguishable blur which is England.25

Departures on train journeys abroad could be more muted, but were still important moments. A number of people bade farewell to Janet Smith’s party as they began their journey to America in September 1896: ‘Maggie came to the station Father Blenio & Tina were also there’.26 A number of household staff had also said goodbye before she left for the station.27 It has been argued that for emigrants the discourse of daily journey life was a normalising discourse that helped to block out the uncertainty,

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where her story begins irregularity and instability of life at sea.28 However, most women used this discourse to accentuate and celebrate the positivity of their journey experiences rather than as a way to control anxiety about journeying. Bedford College journeyer ‘Civis’ wrote of her train journey from Washington, D.C., to Chicago in 1894, that ‘I shall never forget my journey in the train over the great plain’.29 Rather than aiming to normalize it, women communicated the pleasure of the journey through this discourse. Women sometimes recorded such a wealth of information that they adopted elements of an ethnographer or anthropologist identity, as Annie Brassey particularly did in her extended descriptions of the emigrants journeying on her ship to Canada in 1872. Her interest in them had begun before she even boarded the ship: the London and North Western Railway train that carried her family from London to Liverpool ‘was crowded with poor emigrants, bound for America, and when we arrived it was just the dawn of a cold grey morning, and very miserable the poor creatures looked sitting on their boxes, surrounded with children and bundles, till they were all carted away together to the docks’.30 She was fascinated by their life in steerage on the Hibernian, but she observed them with the cool detachment of a Victorian adventuress-ethnographer. Her language and tone echoed the style of scientific fieldwork observations: during a religious service she noted ‘some of the faces were interesting’.31 She visited the emigrants’ quarters several times and asked them about their personal histories.32 She was also keen to understand as much as possible about how they lived during the journey, again as if she was studying a foreign tribe: The emigrants are made to get up at seven o’clock, have a good breakfast at eight, consisting of coffee, bread and butter; dinner at half-past twelve, at which they have potatoes and meat pudding, – except on Wednesdays and Fridays, when, in consequence of their being mostly French and Irish Roman Catholics, they have pea soup, and salt fish, with melted butter and potatoes  .  .  .  They can have as much iced water as they care to drink, and they may buy as much beer as they like, though no spirits are allowed without an order from the doctor. They have coffee, bread, and butter again at five, and finish up with gruel at eight.33

A humanitarian concern about conditions partly motivated her interest: I was rather shocked to find, on going round, that the washing-troughs for the emigrants were all filled with hay, and most of them occupied by dogs belonging to passengers. The butcher said the emigrants never used them; but it seemed a pity they were not allowed the chance.34

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women, travel and identity Overall, however, she concluded ‘They seem happy, sitting about on deck, helping and waiting on one another, and amuse themselves capitally with getting up concerts, and dancing between decks’.35 Women journeyers also fused elements of the supposedly polar­ ized traveller and tourist identities. On first examination, as was noted in the Introduction, they appear to conform closely to the definition of the tourist. They usually visited only established sites such as Port Said, Aden, Paris and New York for short periods of time. Their frequent deployment of a discourse of landscape, scenery, townscape, coastline and the sea also placed women close to a tourist identity, as they merely described, although usually with great charm and immediacy, what they saw without any deeper reflection upon it. On a train crossing Italy from Brindisi to Turin at the end of her tour of Europe and the Mediterranean, Lady Liberty watched an idyllic sunrise over the Adriatic Sea: in the foreground, say, fifty yards of green grass flat, then deep dark blue sea as far as one could see, then almost black clouds joining the sea, with faint streaks of gold, seen as through a rent here and there, the clouds gradually paling till they opened on a large rift of gold shading off to palest blue, then a few light clouds, and then all blue.36

In her account of a cruise to Corsica in June 1925, Margaret J. Stuke, another student at Bedford College, described her first view of the island: it was comparatively still, and I was soon on deck. And there lay Corsica, with its deep blue, snow-capped hills set between the paler blue of the sky and sapphire of the curved sea line. Against the nearest hill rose Ajaccio, its white houses tinted by the early rays of the sun.37

This discourse also evoked the natural drama of the journey. Another Bedford College journeyer described the magnificence of steaming through a Norwegian fjord in the early 1910s, celebrating the sublimity of the journey in the process: the still water, hardly a ripple breaking its glassy surface, a vivid blue in the sunlight, darkest green beneath the cliffs, sometimes almost black; and strange patches of pale green milky water where some stream flows into it from a glacier. On either hand  .  .  .  rise great precipices of bare rock, absolutely vertical from the water to the summit, frequently capped with snow; the rock a wonderful purple in the shadow or nearly golden in the sun  .  .  .  Sometimes a glacier comes in sight; a patch of greenish ice emerges suddenly from a field of snow and stretches down a mountain gorge with great cracks of glorious blue.38

This discourse frequently offered a picturesque vision of the journey abroad, but occasionally included bleaker scenes. During a rail journey in

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where her story begins the Crimea in March 1899, another Bedford College student, H.E.M., described ‘the bleak steppes’ they could see from their carriage: ‘dreary stretches of black, sandy soil and patches of snow, lost to sight under the grey sky’.39 For those journeying abroad by ship, this discourse also focused on the condition of the sea. Mrs Rosa Carnegie-Williams observed a ‘large waterspout  .  .  .  distinctly visible high up amongst the gold of the clouds like a grey bar rising out of the sea’ one day during her journey with her husband from England to Bogotá in the then United States of Columbia in 1881.40 While crossing from Dieppe to Newhaven in December 1935, Bedford College student R.M.S. described the storminess of the sea, but she and her companions, having donned their mackintoshes, were determined to stay on deck to learn to know the sea in this, as well as its sparkling, seaside-holiday mood. Angry? Malicious? Did we really apply those adjectives to this splendid, powerful, beautiful monster, pulsating with eternal life and vigour that must sometimes break forth with youthful exuberance? It is thrilling, intoxicating, to watch these masses of water tirelessly leaping and falling, breaking into dazzling foam in their magnificent, dynamic energy.41

This discourse of landscape, scenery, townscape, coastline and the sea enabled the writer to evoke and remember, and, with those journey accounts that were made public to friends, family or general readers, the audience to imagine, the awe-inspiring, charming, dramatic, sublime or desolate scenes journeyers beheld. But it did not progress to consider what might have determined the nature of what they saw and experienced: like tourists they observed, but did not explain. On maritime journeys, a further observational discourse of nature also brought women close to the tourist identity. On her voyage to Canada in 1872, Annie Brassey recorded sightings of whales, jellyfish, seals and porpoises with their young.42 Of the whales she wrote, ‘In the afternoon we had another excitement, in the shape of a great many whales appearing all round the ship, blowing off water high into the air; so close were they, and so high did they send their jets’.43 Mrs Carnegie-Williams observed ‘Mother Carey’s chickens’ (storm petrels), flocks of boobies, turtles, flying fish and porpoises on her journey.44 Yet again, however, women did not study these creatures or attempt to learn about, for example, their diet or breeding patterns when they encountered them; they simply watched them. Yet even as they deployed discourses that seemed to conform to many aspects of tourism, women journeyers laid claim to the traveller

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women, travel and identity identity. In the opening to Passenger to Teheran, Vita Sackville-West wrote, ‘One January morning, then, I set out; not on a very adventurous journey, perhaps, but on one that should take me to an unexploited country whose very name, printed on my luggage labels, seemed to distil a faint, far aroma in the chill air of Victoria Station: PERSIA’.45 Although she stated that hers was not an adventurous journey, this passage still evokes the spirit of the adventurer-explorer travelling to far-flung lands: her description of Persia’s ‘faint, far aroma’ emphasized how remote and unusual her destination was. Vita considered herself and her journey to be intrepid and bold, not a familiar, predictable and controlled tourist’s journey. She knew her destination would appear daring and adventurous compared to many others, ensuring all her fellow train-journeyers could read her luggage label, ‘a little orange flag of ostentation’, which showed her exotic destination compared to their far more prosaic destinations, which included Cannes in France and Müssen in Germany.46 She was determined not to be dismissed as another tourist. While there is a sense in Passenger to Teheran that Vita was also lightly mocking herself and the figure of the adventurer-explorer even as she evoked it, other women expressed their affinity with the traveller identity without any such satirical undertone. A few did this by expressing discontent with the journey, thereby rejecting being categorized as tourists who, theoretically at least, preferred an ‘easy’ experience that was organized for them. Bedford College student E.C.A. wrote of her journey with friends to Italy in 1896, ‘Of the first two days on board [ship], perhaps the less said the better. They certainly were not my ideal of bliss  .  .  .  There was the same unreasoning excitement whenever another ship hove in sight; the same frenzied inquiries as to her name, which everyone promptly forgot the next minute.’47 In her account of a thirtysix-hour train journey through Italy in 1932, titled ‘An Unsentimental Journey’ to deliberately distance it from, and suggest the author’s dislike of, overly romanticized accounts of the journey, another student, D.R.L., evoked the misery of being trapped in an oppressively hot carriage: It was about 11 a.m.  .  .  .  and the sun was shining down pitilessly; my com­ panions shed more and more garments and sat with expressions of abject despair. Every time I peeped round the corners of the blind to catch a glimpse of the brilliant blue sea dashing its white foam against the rocks I heard a growl beside me to shut out the sun or we’d melt – incidentally, of course, shutting out every breath of air there might be.48

Student E.W. noted how ‘wearisome’ it was to be confined to a ship if you were ‘a physically energetic person’ during her journey to South

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where her story begins Africa in 1899.49 On sighting Table Mountain, she felt ‘what more nat­ ural than the determination, immediately taken, to scale its rocky heights, in spite of all personal and physical opposition?’50 Her dauntless resolution to undertake this climb again evoked the spirit of Victorian male explorers as well as male and female mountaineers, but was also not the behaviour of the stereotypical tourist content to look from a distance – she wanted to be much more closely and actively involved with what she saw.51 Despite the objection of her fellow journeyers, she successfully climbed the mountain.52 Women journeyers’ desire to identify themselves as travellers also influenced their utilization of a discourse of history. This dis­course went beyond the prose pictures created by descriptive discourses such as that of the landscape, scenery, townscape, coastline and the sea to consider factors that explained what they saw. Emily May Jones recorded the history of the many buildings, particularly churches, she saw on her Rhine journey in 1889, albeit sometimes only briefly. She noted passing ‘Rheinstein a castle restored by Prince Frederick of Prussia who was buried in the chapel he died in 1863’.53 Vita Sackville-West utilized discourses of medieval Jewish, Christian and Islamic history and legend to evoke a quasi-spiritual atmosphere around one event during her journey: ‘a school of porpoises followed the ship, turning over and over because they are still looking for Solomon’s ring, which he dropped off his finger in the Persian gulf ’.54 The effect of this discourse was both to capture the atmosphere of the journey by invoking the histories of the areas visited and to demonstrate the expertise and knowledge of women journeyers themselves, as well as informing and educating any others who read their accounts about the significance of what could be seen during a journey abroad. Women again demonstrated that they were not unreflective, docile tourists, but interested, alert travellers aware of the historical forces that had shaped the places they saw. A discourse of geography further enabled women journeyers to assert their expertise as travellers. This discourse listed the route of the journey in precise detail. Early in her journal of her 1871 journey to China, Fanny Davis recorded ‘Places passed Margate, N. Foreland, Broadstairs, Ramsgate, Sandwich Is., Deal, St Marys, S. Foreland, Dover, Folkestone, Dungeness, Hastings, Beachy Head, Brighton.’55 Likewise, Emily May Jones recorded in the first entry of her journey diary in May 1889 that From Fenchurch St station we went first class to Blackwall  .  .  .  the Maastroom [her ship] started at noon we saw Greenwich & passed Gravesend about 1–30 we saw the long pier at Southend & heard firing of guns at Shoebury mess saw Margate quite in the distance.56

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women, travel and identity This discourse enabled women to acknowledge through the recording of places passed that they had undeniably left the familiar geographies of home, but more importantly it demonstrated women journeyers’ authenticity and control over their journeys. By recording in exact detail the route they followed, women again stated that they were unfazed by the journey abroad – they knew, in the most literal sense, exactly where they were going. Women journeyers’ combination within their texts of discourses that seemed touristic and those that seemed closer to travel discourses demonstrates how they cannot be easily categorized as either tourists or travellers. They fused these identities to become tourist-travellers. Certain elements of journey discourse – discourses of technology, danger and navigation – were unlike many other discourses of travel. Many women engaged with, and expressed their admiration for, the technology of their journeys, as we saw in Chapter 1. Others were frustrated by it. Mrs Wilkinson complained that her ‘long, tedious voyage’ from St Helena to Cape Town took four days longer than it should have done in 1870 because the ship’s engines kept failing, necessitating ‘having to stop three or four hours at a time, and sometimes six, to repair them’.57 Nevertheless, even those who bemoaned it recognized the importance of journey technology to their experience. A discourse of technology appeared in almost all journey writings, although in far greater depth in accounts of sea rather than rail journeys because women had more access to key technical spaces such as the engine-rooms on ships – no women journeyers recorded climbing, or would have been able to go, aboard steam engines. Female ocean journeyers further demonstrated their engagement with journey technology by using, as again seen in Chapter 1, a discourse of navigation that recorded the nautical position of their ship and how many miles were sailed each day. Annie Brassey copied two of the Hibernian’s logs into her account of her family’s journey to Canada ‘as a matter of curiosity’, indicating the extreme degree of interest some women took in their ship’s progress.58 By deploying the language of professional sailing, women aligned themselves with the most capable, experienced and expert of male journeyers. Like the discourse of geo­ graphy, this discourse again enabled women to show they knew exactly where they were and where they were heading. However, women’s engagement with this technology occasionally contained some ambivalence: their use of a discourse of danger reflected their awareness of the risks that lurked within the journey. In deploying this discourse, women showed yet again that they were not unthinking passengers, but thoughtful, active journeyers. They recorded details of

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where her story begins sunken ships, facing the possibility that journeying could lead to their deaths. Before her first journey with her sister to Algiers in December 1883, Emily Hall recorded that ‘a French vessel tille du Hasse on her way to New York has been run down in the Channel by a sailing vessel & nearly all the passengers lost! – She went down in 12 minutes fm. the collision & at night! so that numbers were drowned in bed!’59 In the first entry of her journal of her voyage to Norway on the Brasseys’ Sunbeam in 1885, Mary Gladstone alluded to a ‘disappearing boat’.60 At sea, they recorded personal experiences of dangerous weather that threatened their safety. Sarah Stephens described being caught in a cyclone during her family’s journey to New Zealand in 1876: A night of nights. Waves washing down the main hatchway into our cabins. Water coming thro’ the roof into the bunks. People nearly wild and hurrying on with their clothes ready to rush up the ladder and one’s buckets and mops in constant use. One girl fell down and cut her lip open with her tooth  .  .  .  Two sails were carried away. This day has been a second edition of last night’s horrors.61

They feared being injured during such episodes. Isabel Haigh described how ‘Our bunks played shuttlecock with us all night’ during a storm on her and her husband’s emigration journey to New Zealand in 1920.62 Danger could come from factors other than weather conditions. Lady Emma Liberty drily described how shortly after they had finished their first dinner on the Orient Express ‘the telegraph bells began to go frantically; a man rushed through the room shouting “There is no water in the car,” and we were soon greeted with the pleasant intelligence that our own car was on fire’, although it was extinguished with relative ease without causing any serious damage.63 Women also recorded journey accidents. In the most serious incident of all the accounts studied here, Bedford College student D.R.L. described a sudden ‘awful lurch’ during her Italian train journey in 1932 and how ‘the train shook, groaned as if it were falling to bits, and then stopped with a mighty shudder’: We had run over a man at a level crossing, we were informed, the inquest must be held on the spot, and the authorities were being fetched from the nearest town  .  .  .  In the meantime, the rest of the train would have to pass on so as to be clear of the body! So very slowly we crawled on, and everyone hung out of the windows to see the miserable little bundle of rags that a few minutes before had been a man and still lay across the rails.64

Such events enabled women to indirectly articulate their fears and inform any readers of the risks of journeying. However, they also illuminated

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women, travel and identity the excitement and drama that could surround the journey abroad, allowed some women to show their personal delight in such drama and viscerally evoked the experience in its most extreme form, giving it a thrilling, or horrifying, impact for readers. This discourse, and women’s use of it, mirrored contemporary public awareness of the danger journey technologies could pose. Airship explosions, plane crashes and shipwrecks featured regularly in newspapers and, from the early twentieth century, newsreels.65 Reports emphasized the destructive viol­ence of accidents, their impact on the human body, the swiftness with which disasters such as shipwrecks occurred and that it was almost impossible to regain control of these technologies once an incident began.66 Women’s anxiety about journey dangers, however, was self-evidently not enough to prevent them journeying. Their desire to journey, courage and the sheer necessity of making some journeys, such as those in which they accompanied their employer, outweighed their concerns. Some women may have also censored their anxieties about their journeys to calm the fears of others who might read their accounts, especially if this should be their family. This suggests that women could potentially produce two narratives of their journey: one for a public or familial audience, and an unexpurgated version for themselves. More significantly, as we have seen, the deployment of these discourses of technology, navigation and danger allowed women journeyers to assert and express their identities as women of modernity, which was the final key part of women journeyers’ self-representations. Women were determined to show that they moved both literally and psychologically with their times and were in no sense old-fashioned or afraid to embrace the new. They did this by engaging with all aspects of journey technology, both celebrating it and admitting its perils. They were resolved to connect with the changes that surrounded them, with the new modern age, and the technologies that symbolized it. By using these ships and trains, they also embraced the modern identity that transport companies depicted in much of their interwar advertising well before the companies recognized how significant a part of the female journey experience this was. Journey discourse, journey type and publication Multiple discourses circulated within the spaces of the ship and train. The self-contained nature of these environments was critical to this diversity: decks and windows enabled and encouraged journeyers to look outwards, helping to produce the discourses of landscape, scenery, coastline, townscape,

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where her story begins and the sea; history; geography and nature. A significant purpose behind embarking on, and a key activity during, a journey such as a cruise or a luxurious trip on the Orient Express was precisely to observe passing landscapes, towns and cities as well as countries, islands and natural creatures which were not visible in everyday life. Looking outwards enabled women to forge identities as tourist-travellers. Yet the majority of the journey abroad was spent within these enclosed spaces: women inexorably looked inwards as well, generating and embracing the discourse of everyday journey life and the identity of journey chronicler. To what extent did the type of journey on which women embarked affect the nature of journey discourse? Table 4 outlines the distribution of each journey discourse according to the type of journey: leisure (and pleasure); emigration; to work abroad; accompanying employers; and accompanying family members abroad. The total number of texts for each category is shown in brackets. As can be seen, most of the discourses outlined Table 4  Distribution of discourses according to type of journey Discourse

Type of journey Leisure Emigration Working Accompanying Accompanying (31) (2) abroad (3) employer (2) family member (2)

Journey routine and functionality

28

2

3

2

1

Landscape, scenery, coastline, townscape, the sea

26

2

2

1

1

Nature

13

2

3

1

2

2

0

1

0

0

Geography Navigation

7

2

1

1

1

Technology

9

0

3

1

0

Danger

8

1

0

1

0

Missing home

5

0

2

1

1

History

9

0

0

0

0

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women, travel and identity above appeared in accounts of more than one type of journey, suggesting that many elements of journey discourse were universal and could be accessed by all women regardless of the type of journey being taken. However, it is notable that the discourse of history appeared only in accounts of leisure journeys, suggesting that certain discourses were inaccess­ ible on some types of journey. The account that featured the greatest variety of discourses was that describing the leisure journey; the account that featured the fewest was that recording a journey where a woman accompanied a family member abroad. This again suggests that the type of jour­ ney a woman made could be vital in determining access to a discourse. Yet it was women’s authorial agency that created this difference as much as the type of journey they made. Women journeying to accompany a family member abroad may have been less interested in recording their journey in as much detail as women who embarked upon leisure journeys. The journey accompanying a family member was a means to get to a specific place rather than necessarily a significant experience in itself; women may have been more sparing in what they recorded in their accounts of these journeys. Leisure journeys, however, were undertaken for the experience of the journey, as a holiday and as a period of recreation; women on these journeys may have been more interested in recording, and motivated to record, as much about that experience as they could, especially if it was, or might be, a once-in-a-lifetime event. It must also be considered whether publishing an account altered journey discourse. Table 5 displays the distribution of these discourses according to whether the journey accounts studied here were or were not published. It is notable that, with the exception of the discourse of geography, all discourses appeared in both the published and unpublished texts. Given that the discourse of geography was one of the least featured discourses overall, as it appeared in only three of the forty texts, this suggests that publishing a text made little significant difference to the nature of journey discourse. Yet there are some important differences in discourse distribution between the unpublished and published texts. The discourse of nature appeared in 80 per cent of the unpublished texts as opposed to merely 32 per cent of the published texts. The discourses of navigation and technology appeared in 46 per cent of the unpublished texts but in just 20 and 24 per cent respectively of the published texts. Some of the women who published the accounts featured may have not been as interested in these discourses compared to others so chose not to feature them so frequently, thereby again demonstrating their personal agency. But these topics possibly also appeared less frequently in these accounts because

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where her story begins Table 5  Distribution of discourses in published and unpublished journey accounts Discourse

Published texts (25)

Unpublished texts (15)

No. that featured discourse

Percentage (%)

No. that featured discourse

Percentage

Journey routine and functionality

23

92

14

93

Landscape, scenery, coastline, townscape, the sea

22

88

10

66

Nature

8

32

12

80

Geography

0

0

3

20

Navigation

5

20

7

46

Technology

6

24

7

46

Danger

7

28

3

20

Missing home

4

16

5

33

History

5

20

4

27

literary critics and readers did not deem them suitable subjects for women. They may consequently have removed some of the occurrences of these discourses from their published accounts to avoid being labelled unwomanly. In this, women journeyers shared the same predicament as women travellers: a study of Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa (1897) notes that Kingsley frequently foregrounded her femininity in order to avoid accusations of being mannish.67 While the risk of public disapproval did not completely prevent women journeyers from discussing technology, navigation and nature in their published works, concern that their readership would disapprove if they discussed these topics too much and think them unfeminine could restrict them from discussing these subjects as fully as they might have had their texts remained unpublished. Gender and journey discourse Comparing the frequency of the appearance of these discourses in male journey accounts to that in women’s provides further clarity on the above point. The relationship between gender and discourse operates on several

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women, travel and identity levels. Discourse analysis has shown that ‘varied discourses of gender’ itself circulate within a segment or segments of society.68 Discourse analysis has also uncovered various gendered discourses within specific institutional contexts, including a consciousness-raising discourse in the talk of teenage girls; discourses of fatherhood within parenting magazines; and feminist discourses within children’s literature.69 The existence of these varied discourses suggests that men and women have access to, and utilize, different discourses in daily life. Was this the case with journey discourse? Table 6 lists the discourses that appeared in ten men’s journey accounts compared to the discourses that appeared in women’s. These men journeyed for a variety of reasons. William Midgley of Keighley, West Yorkshire, whose father owned a woollen business, departed from Liverpool on a journey to Melbourne, Australia, in 1899 for health reasons.70 Robert Pendlebury, who is believed to have been a mining engin­ eer, apparently journeyed for work reasons from Liverpool to Albany, Australia, on the steamer S.S. Medic in 1910.71 Emigrants Arthur Moore and Samuel Haigh kept records of their journeys to America and New

Table 6  Distribution of discourses in male and female journey accounts Discourse

Male texts (10)

Female texts (40)

No. that featured discourse

Percentage (%)

No. that featured discourse

Percentage (%)

Journey routine and functionality

8

80

37

93

Landscape, coastline, scenery, townscape, the sea

6

60

32

80

Nature

9

90

20

50

Geography

2

20

3

8

Navigation

8

80

12

30

Technology

7

70

13

33

Danger

6

60

10

25

Missing home

2

20

6

15

History

1

10

9

23

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where her story begins Zealand respectively: Arthur sent a diary-letter to his family describing his transatlantic journey from Liverpool to New York on the Servia in 1892 and 1893, while Samuel kept a joint diary with his wife Isabel on their journey from Liverpool to New Zealand in May 1920.72 Gender does not initially appear to have been a highly significant factor in determining journey discourse as Table 6 shows: no new discourses appeared within the male accounts, suggesting that there were no absolutely gender-differentiated journey discourses. The six dominant discourses in these accounts were discourses of nature; the journey routine; technology; navigation; landscape, coastline, scenery, town­ scape and the sea; and danger. The three discourses of landscape, journey routine and nature were also some of the most common discourses within women’s accounts. The knowledge contained within these discourses was also remarkably similar to that within female accounts. Men described their seasickness, deck sports and encounters with journeyers; islands, landscapes and coastlines passed; and the condition of the sea; and those journeying at sea also made comments on how many miles their ships had covered and the knot speeds achieved. The future baronet Sir Stuart Mallinson (born 1888) described his daily routine during his leisure journey from Cherbourg to New York in circa October 1922 in letters to his wife Marjorie: Sunday Gym 7.45 to 8.30 Bath 8.30 to 9 o/c [o’clock] Shave -----Back to bed for breakfast to keep up the old tradition Divine Service 10.30 11.30 to 1 o/c [o’clock] sat on deck.73

Similarly, Robert Pendlebury kept a highly detailed account of the journey routine in his diary, particularly of social events, meals and his social encounters.74 Sir Arthur Lasenby Liberty recorded his leisure journey to Japan, Ceylon and Egypt, which was part of a round-the-world tour, in 1888 and 1889; he noted the state of the sea at various points, including a dramatic moment off the Spanish coast: a huge waterspout appeared twirling in the air like some monster dragon from the skies  .  .  .  where it touched the ocean the waters rose to meet it in an upright cascade of awful volume. The waters on the sea surface, indeed, formed a crater  .  .  .  it was stated on board here that our ship could not exist if such a down-pour chanced on her decks. That the mere weight of water would smash in her decks instantly.75

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women, travel and identity Percy Shaw Jeffrey’s Round the World with an Empress (1928) and Round the World with the ‘Empress of Britain’ (1933) are accounts of leisure journeys he undertook in 1926 and 1931 on Canadian Pacific’s Empress of Scotland and Empress of Britain and include many descriptions of the coastlines, harbours and townscapes that he witnessed, such as: The approach to Algiers from the sea, especially at dawn and sunset, is one of the beautiful sights of the world. The modern town, with its docks, colonnades and shops, lies on the flat between two hills. On the steep western hill is the kasbah, or native town, white and tottering, which falls helter-skelter down the steep slope like an avalanche of ivory building blocks for some giant child to play with.76

Men’s accounts upon occasion also featured the discourse of danger. George Grieg, Jnr, journeyed on the Meinwen from Liverpool to Melbourne in 1905 to try to improve his health and recorded one particularly vivid storm with ‘Hurricane Hail squalls’: The night of 16th–17th October is one that will be remembered for a long time by all who were on board. At midnight  .  .  .  [the ship] pooped several times, making it extremely dangerous for the crew  .  .  .  At 2 AM she shipped two very large seas at the same time, on either side  .  .  .  [one] carrying away the Gally [sic] funnel  .  .  .  The other sea struck the Starboard Forward boat & smashed in its starboard beam. The decks were full of water.77

On the basis of this similarity of knowledge, it would again appear that gender played no significant role in determining journey discourse. However, discourses of navigation and technology appeared in 80 and 70 per cent respectively of male accounts compared to just 30 and 33 per cent of female accounts. W.P.R., believed to be Walter Ryland, journeyed with a male friend around the world in 1881 and 1882 in an attempt to improve his health. He recorded the miles his ship covered, the distance to its next destination, daily temperatures and ship tonnages: comments such as ‘Log 292 miles. Temperature 60° F [Fahrenheit]’ and ‘Log 197 miles. To Port Said 644 miles’ litter his account.78 Percy Jeffrey crafted a fifteen-page paean to the S.S. Empress of Britain at the beginning of his account of his 1931 journey, remarking ‘It is no easy matter to keep one’s superlatives under control when describing this remarkable vessel’.79 He described the ship’s tonnage, its ‘wonderful wireless appliances’, its power and speed, which reached up to 24 knots, as well as every single public room on board, finding her ‘mechanical perfection’.80 George Grieg’s diary contained a daily log of the Meinwen’s position, distance

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where her story begins covered, its course and barometer reading, as well as details of its rigging and wind direction.81 The difference in the frequency of the appearance of these discourses in men’s and women’s accounts supports the conclusion that these discourses were perceived to be masculine and considered unsuitable topics for women. The discourse of nature also appeared in 90 per cent of men’s journey accounts compared to only 50 per cent of women’s, which suggests it too was considered a topic more suited to male authors than female. Men also utilized the discourse of danger more than twice as often as women, perhaps to demonstrate the manliness of their journeys abroad by emphasizing the risks within them: this discourse appeared in 60 per cent of their accounts compared to only 25 per cent of women’s accounts. Ideas of gender could thus significantly affect one aspect of journey discourse and accounts: while gender did not prevent women accessing any journey discourses altogether, it does appear to have determined the degree to which they could utilize some of them, particularly in the public printed sphere. Women’s journeyer identities and journey discourse remained remarkably stable between 1870 and 1940. No new discourses emerged and none disappeared. Women continued to fuse different identities, those of home – wife, mother, sister, friend or companion – and those that were new, the journey chronicler, the tourist-traveller and the modern woman, to create their journeyer identities. This identity expanded beyond the attributes and behaviours of the ideal woman journeyer depicted in contemporary imagery, fiction and journey etiquette. Many of the qualities shown in the latter, such as that she be ladylike, self-effacing and nonconfrontational, created an image of the woman journeyer that harked back to clichéd images of women such as the ‘angel in the house’; women themselves transcended such limited visions. These identities, and the discourses that expressed them, were generated and supported by the nature of journey space – enclosed, self-contained yet outward-bound – and the journey itself; by gendered expectations of what women could and should write about; but also by women’s own agency. Women chose to maintain their domestic identities as well as finding them supported by ships and trains, the degree to which they utilized different journey discourses and did not hesitate to explore the new identities available to them during the journey abroad. Women’s journeyer identity was not just created for them through external commentators and discourses, they fashioned this identity for themselves.

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women, travel and identity Notes 1 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur F241/1, ‘Letters and diaries of M. Hunt’, p. 25. 2 Bridie, Round the World, Introduction (no page number given in text). 3 See the variety of definitions offered in, amongst others, R. Wodak, ‘Introduction: some important issues in the research of gender and discourse’, in R. Wodak (ed.), Gender and Discourse (London, 1997), pp. 1–20; A. Simpson, ‘ “It’s a game!”: the construction of gendered subjectivity’, in ibid., pp. 197–224; and A. Jaworski and N. Coupland, ‘Introduction: perspectives on discourse analysis’, in A. Jaworski and N. Coupland (eds), The Discourse Reader (London, 1999), pp. 1–  44. 4 A. McHoul and W. Grace, A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject (London, 1993), pp. 35  –  6; M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London, 1970), p. ix. 5 M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (London and New York, 2002 edn), p. 28. 6 Roland Barthes also shares Foucault’s belief that discourses are historically contingent. See R. Barthes, ‘Writers, intellectuals, teachers’, in R. Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. R. Howard (Oxford, 1986), p. 317. 7 Hassan, Sailing to Australia, pp. 78  –  88, 99, 135, 185  –7. 8 M.W. Alcorn, Jr, ‘The subject of discourse: reading Lacan through (and beyond) poststructuralist contexts’, in M. Bracher, M.W. Alcorn, Jr, R.J. Carthell and F. Massardier-Kenney (eds), Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subjects, Structure and Society (New York, 1994), p. 19. 9 Ibid., p. 37. 10 Ibid., p. 19. 11 Ibid., p. 31. 12 Ibid., p. 37. 13 Ibid., p. 27. 14 BL India and Oriental Collection, Mss Eur B385, H.M.D., Bombay During the Plague, 1 December 1897, p. 2. 15 MAL, MMM, DX/1093, ‘Diary of J. Smith’, 12 October 1896. 16 TSA, U/PEN 7/86, ‘Diary of D. Pennyman’, 13 February 1905, p. 25. 17 CWAC, 788/184, Liberty, Levant and back, 29 March 1884, p. 8. 18 Birkett, Spinsters Abroad, p. 27. 19 Ibid., p. 31. 20 Guest, Round Trip, pp. 256  –7. 21 RHUL Archives, A.T.M., ‘Southampton to Cape Town’, Bedford College (University of London) Union Magazine, No. 38 (March 1934), 7. 22 [Wilkinson], A Lady’s Life, 23 August 1870, p. 10. 23 Bridie, Round the World, p. 62. 24 Ibid. 25 RHUL Archives, A.T.M., ‘Southampton’, 6. 26 MAL, MMM, DX/1093, ‘Diary of J. Smith’, 4 September 1896. 27 Ibid. 28 Hassan, Sailing to Australia, p. 140. 29 RHUL Archives, ‘Civis’, ‘Chicago’, 2. 30 Brassey, A Cruise, 28 August 1872, p. 1.

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where her story begins 31 Ibid., 1 September 1872, p. 4. 32 Ibid., 2 September 1872, p. 5. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 CWAC, 788/184, Liberty, Levant and Back, 19 April 1884, p. 43. 37 RHUL Archives, M.J. Stuke, ‘Corsica’, Bedford College (University of London) Union Magazine, No. 12 (June 1925), 6. For further such descriptions see Guest, Round Trip, pp. 42, 59, 68, 152, and Carnegie-Williams, Year in the Andes, 7, 16 and 19 August 1881, pp. 4  –5, 18  –19, 22. 38 RHUL Archives, Anonymous, ‘On the fjord’, Bedford College (University of London) Magazine, No. 86 (March 1915), 17. Given the wartime restrictions on travelling abroad it seems likely that this was an account of a journey made before August 1914. 39 RHUL Archives, H.E.M., ‘A Week in the Crimea’, Bedford College, London, Magazine, No. 38 (March 1899), 30. 40 Carnegie-Williams, Year in the Andes, 16 August 1881, p. 20. 41 RHUL Archives, R.M.S., ‘Channel Crossing’, Bedford College (University of London) Magazine, No. 43 (December 1935), 14. 42 Brassey, A Cruise, 6 and 8 September 1872, pp. 7–  8, 12. For another example of this see MAL, MMM, DX/1071/R, ‘Diary of S. Stephens’, 25 October 1876. 43 Brassey, A Cruise, 6 September 1872, p. 7. 44 Carnegie-Williams, Year in the Andes, 5 August, p. 2; 7 August, p. 4; 8 August, p. 6 and 16 August 1881, p. 20. 45 Sackville-West, Passenger, p. 22. 46 Ibid. 47 RHUL Archives, E.C.A., ‘A Peep of Italy in the Winter’, Bedford College, London, Magazine, No. 29 (March 1896), 21. 48 RHUL Archives, D.R.L., ‘An Unsentimental Journey’, Bedford College (University of London) Magazine, No. 32 (March 1932), 6. 49 RHUL Archives, E.W., ‘Imprudens quid femina possit’, Bedford College, London, Magazine, No. 38 (March 1899), 21. 50 Ibid. 51 For more information about women mountaineers see, amongst others, C. Williams, Women on the Rope: The Feminine Share in Mountain Adventure (London, 1973), B. Birkett and B. Peascod, Women Climbing: 200 Years of Achievement (London, 1989); D. Mazel (ed.), Mountaineering Women: Stories by Early Climbers (College Station, Tx, 1994). 52 RHUL Archives, E.W., ‘Imprudens’, Bedford College Magazine, 22. 53 LA, IV/138/9, ‘Diary of E. Jones’, 26 May 1889. 54 Sackville-West, Passenger, p. 54. 55 HHC, U DP/195/1, ‘Journal of F. Davis’, 21 March 1871. 56 LA, IV/138/9, ‘Diary of E. Jones’, 23 May 1889. 57 [Wilkinson], A Lady’s Life, 16 August 1870, p. 5. 58 Brassey, A Cruise, 6 September 1872, p. 9. 59 BA, 855 F2/13, ‘Diary of E. Hall’, 2 December 1873. 60 BL Manuscripts Collection, Add. MS. 46267, ‘Diary of M. Gladstone’, 9 August 1885. 61 MAL, MMM, DX/1071/R, ‘Diary of S. Stephens’, 8 December 1876.

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women, travel and identity 62 Haigh, ‘Where do all the flies go?’, 3 July 1920, p. 45. 63 CWAC, 788/184, Liberty, Levant and Back, 27 March 1884, pp. 6  –7. 64 RHUL Archives, D.R.L., ‘Unsentimental Journey’, Bedford College Magazine, pp. 6–7. 65 Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity, p. 51. 66 Ibid., pp. 53, 57. 67 Mills, Discourses, p. 168. 68 J. Sutherland, Gendered Discourses (Basingstoke, 2004), p. 21. 69 Ibid., pp. 52–5, 66  –  9, 101–21, 154  –  61. 70 MAL, MMM, DX/1097/2, Diary-letter of W. Midgley, Esq., ‘Transcript of diary-letter, 27 August to 17 October 1899’. 71 MAL, MMM, DX/1731, Diary of R. Pendlebury, ‘Transcript of diary of an ocean journey on the S.S. Medic, 30 July to 10 September 1910’. 72 MAL, MMM, DX/2245, Letter by A. Moore, ‘Transcript of letter describing a voyage from Liverpool to New York on board the Servia, 31 December 1892 to 9 January 1893’; Haigh, ‘Where do all the flies go?’. 73 Vestry House Museum, Local Library and Archives, The Mallinson Papers, Box 12, File 5, Letters of S. Mallinson, ‘Letters’, letter 3, undated. Accompanying material dates the trip to October 1922. 74 MAL, MMM, DX/1731, ‘Diary of R. Pendlebury’, 5, 14, 16, 17 and 23 August 1910. 75 CWAC, 788/179, Diary of Sir A. Lasenby Liberty, Round the World 1888  –1889: Egypt and Ceylon (typed copy, no date or publisher given), 17 December 1888, pp. 7–  8. 76 P. Shaw Jeffrey, Round the World with an Empress by Canadian Pacific: The Personal Log of an Innocent Abroad during the fourth World Cruise of the Empress of Scotland (London and Cheltenham, 1928), p. 10, and Round the World with the ‘Empress of Britain’ (London and Cheltenham, 1933). For other examples of this discourse see MAL, MMM, DX/1731, diary of R. Pendlebury, 5 and 20 August 1910; MAL, MMM, DX/2245, letter by Arthur Moore, 1 January 1893; and W.P.R. [Walter P. Ryland], My Diary During a Foreign Tour in Egypt, India, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, Fiji, China, Japan and North America in 1881–2 (Birmingham, 1886), 28 February 1881, p. 6. 77 MAL, MMM, DX/2001, Diary of G. Grieg, Jnr, ‘Transcript of a diary of a trip written aboard the Meinwen 24 August 1905  –15 November 1905’, 17 October 1905. For another use of the discourse of danger see MAL, MMM, DX 1097/2, ‘Diary-letter of W. Midgley’, 5 September 1899. 78 [Ryland], My Diary During a Foreign Tour, 2 March 1881, p. 7; 6 March 1881, p. 9. For further such entries see 23 February, p. 2; 3 March, p. 7; 7 March, p. 10; log of journey from 17–28 March 1881, p. 28; and log for 7–23 July 1881, pp. 98  –  9. A handwritten dedication on the first page of the copy of this work held at the British Library reads ‘P.L. Sceales Esque. with kindest regards from Walter P. Ryland’, leading the author to believe that he is ‘W.P.R.’. 79 Jeffrey, ‘Empress of Britain’, pp. 2–17. 80 Ibid., pp. 3, 5, 8  –16. 81 MAL, MMM, DX/2001, ‘Diary of G. Grieg, Jnr’. This diary uses these discourses to the greatest extent of all the male accounts studied here: it features in every entry until the ship reached Melbourne.

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Conclusion Journeying abroad was not always presented as an innate, natural female activity between 1870 and 1940. Some commentators constructed journeying in a prosaic, practical manner: as a pseudo-science with principles, rules and procedures that had to be learned. Etiquette writer Alice Leone-Moat asserted that ‘There is a science to travel which is perfected only with time and experience’.1 This ‘science’ was to be perfected through repeated journey ‘experiments’ so that it eventually became habit. She explained that ‘It’s when you reach the point of going through the routine automatically that you become  .  .  .  successful’.2 Journeying was presented as an undertaking in which women required educating: Leone-Moat believed that ‘Buying tickets, checking trunks, and all the other details of travel should form a part of every person’s education’.3 Despite such doubts about women’s abilities, the journey abroad was the most representative and universal female experience of travel outside Britain during the period. Millions of women of all ages and socio-economic, marital and employment status determinedly, elegantly and confidently navigated journeys abroad by ship and rail via a worldwide transport network that carried them from London, Liverpool and across Britain to San Francisco, Luxor, Hong Kong, Darjeeling and beyond. For the most privileged, such as Lady Emma Liberty and Lady Theodora Guest, the journey was a sumptuous experience. It has been written of emigrants that ‘reluctant travellers they might have been, but travellers of necessity they had to be’.4 Most women journeyers felt no such reluctance or hesitation: the bulk of them were consistently sure in their ability to journey. Women’s appreciation of journey technology demonstrates that it was not just men who ‘mastered’ the technical aspects of journey vehicles.5 They admired this evolving technology enormously; their engagement with it was part of a process that enabled them to assert their identities as women of modernity. Their deployment of navigational and geographic discourses that meant they retained full awareness of where they were also challenges historians’ arguments that journeyers suffered physical and mental disorientation, particularly for those on ships in open water with no visible landmarks.6 To the majority of women, journeying was a very natural, clear activity. Several key themes dominated the female journey abroad in this period. Journeys by both ship and train were an experience of sociability­

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women, travel and identity as much as they were of mobility. Etiquette writers emphasized the importance of women’s role as social arbiters. To be polite, self-effacing, non-confrontational and avoid conversational taboos when socializing were considered essential aspects of what was understood to constitute the ideal feminine journeyer. Women often willingly accepted such assertions, and their encounters with each other were usually pleasant, polite enhancers of the journey experience. Others could be even friendlier, while a small number, as Margaret Hunt found, were still closer, perhaps even hinting at emotions deeper than mere friendship, or formed part of a woman’s coming-of-age. Organized leisure activities facilitated journey sociability, particularly on ocean journeys. The evolution of these pastimes in variety and sophistication from informal, private activities for small groups in the late 1800s to cinema, deck tennis, quoits and fancy-dress dances, amongst others, in which multiple journeyers jointly participated by the 1930s was one of the greatest changes in the journey abroad during the period. These activities were available to both married and unmarried women of all ages and often involved the simultaneous participation of both sexes, subverting two of the biggest divisions in leisure in Britain during these decades. Contradictory yet largely inaccurate popular beliefs surrounded women’s sociability with male journeyers. Trains and ships were concurrently perceived to be sites of sexual danger, romantic opportunity and erotic encounters, and spaces that threatened women’s sexual and moral purity. These beliefs were partly witnessed and driven by crime and romance novels. Newspaper reports of attacks on women, particularly of the ‘railway outrage’ at home and abroad, also fuelled these understandings. However, women’s own accounts do not endorse these perceptions of the journey. Only a small minority of the women studied here recorded, more with amusement than disapproval, behaviour towards male journeyers and staff by other female journeyers that appeared to be flirtatious or observed men pursuing women. None detailed passionate love affairs involving either themselves or others. Instead, two other key themes of the journey abroad formed the leitmotifs of the preponderance of women’s encounters with men: respectability and reputation. Male–female encounters were usually only polite, friendly acquaintanceships. This was partly due to the strength of contemporary beliefs about what was acceptable, respectable behaviour between men and women, particularly those who were unmarried, and which within the journey context were elaborately detailed by etiquette writers, but also partly because of women’s powerful personal beliefs

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conclusion about what was appropriate and suitable in these encounters. Women would leave or rebuke, as Margaret Roberts did, men who they felt had transgressed the limits of decent, gentlemanly behaviour. Women were also acutely aware of the damaging and destructive effect an inappropriate involvement with a man would have on their standing amongst their fellow journeyers, which also explains why they were at pains to avoid any such liaisons. The continuation of the domestic social practice of chaperoning was an additional protection for women from men who might have threatened their chastity, while simultaneously sequestering them from those with whom they might have potentially fallen in love. The sexual threat women journeyers faced was also not as severe as some contemporaries believed. The women studied here did not record details of consensual sexual encounters with men, which is to be expected given women’s desire to appear and remain respectable and the damage that would again be done to their reputations should any such encounters have been publicly exposed, particularly if they were extramarital, but there is also little evidence that they feared or regularly faced the danger of sexual violation. This silence on love, romance and sex could be interpreted to suggest that women journeyers collectively kept their amorous journey activities secret. However, it is extremely unlikely that many of them even considered having a sexual relationship during the journey, or then actively defied contemporary sexual morality and found the privacy in such heavily scrutinized environments to indulge in clandestine amour. The journey abroad was restrained and proper in its heterosexuality, and women usually observed contemporary mores about female sexuality and chastity, as is to be expected given that the period investigated here is not one characterized as sexually revolutionary, particularly compared to the later twentieth century. In being chaste they again conformed to the behaviour that was expected of the ‘perfect’, respectable female journeyer. Class, both socio-economic and passenger – indeed these two were essentially the same – was another of the most consistently important motifs in the female journey abroad. A journeyer hierarchy, which corresponded both with the passenger-class hierarchy of ships and trains and with Britain’s socio-economic hierarchy, was consistently, voluntarily maintained by almost all women, as well as corporately by transport companies’ division of journey spaces into different passenger classes. Women’s position within this journeyer/socio-economic/passenger-class hierarchy had significant consequences for their journey experiences. It played a key part in journey sociability: most women preferred to remain within the designated spaces of their passenger class, which limited the

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women, travel and identity socio-economic diversity of their journeyer encounters. They preferred to socialize with those in their own passenger class, who were positioned at the same point in the journeyer hierarchy, rather than the classes above or below. Passenger and socio-economic class also dictated women’s access to journey spaces, particularly on ships: women journeying in first class, who were usually of the highest social and/or economic status in Britain as well as at the top of the journeyer hierarchy, could explore spaces such as the engines and ship stores that other journeyers could not. It also determined the quality of their journey space. A lady’s maid like Janet Smith slept in a basic rail carriage with multiple others, including men, while an upper-class woman could enjoy a sumptuous private sleeping compartment that converted into a sitting room by day. Power was a shifting, fluid entity on the journey abroad, but the extent to which women possessed it was also largely determined by their position in the journeyer hierarchy. Those at the highest level, journeying in first class, had the most power over journey spaces; those at its base, in third or steerage class, had the least. Women in first class could treat ship staff as if they were their personal servants; those in third class or steerage could encounter staff, as Sarah Stephens observed, who were overtly hostile towards them and who sought to restrict any activities they deemed inappropriate. Vision and observation were further keynotes in the journey abroad. Aware of the pitfalls of making a rash acquaintanceship which they would come to regret, women scrutinized other Western journeyers fiercely before they embarked on active socializing, with aesthetic appearance, socio-economic status and nationality combining to shape their opinions of other journeyers. Journey sociability was not unthinking. Women also spent considerable time observing passing landscapes, townscapes and seascapes and natural creatures. Peculiarities of the journey environment helped to define this female journey(er) gaze. Windows, observation carriages and ship decks encouraged women to look outwards, while the self-contained, enclosed nature of ships and trains, and the fact that landscapes, townscapes and seascapes were not always available to view if a ship was in open water or when a train was speeding through the land, encouraged women to turn their gaze inwards on to their fellow journeyers, who became the most observed ‘sights’ on the journey abroad. Vision also played a crucial role in women’s encounters with nonWestern ‘Other’ journeyers. Trains and ships were a form of mobile contact zone: ‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination, like colonialism [and] slavery’.7 Women’s

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conclusion relationships with these journeyers were occasionally positive, as they attempted to learn about their cultures and customs. Such encounters contained a greater degree of friendliness than was usual, as was the case for Henrietta Barnett and the crew that sailed her and her husband along the Nile in 1879. A sense of shared socio-economic or educational standing also facilitated more symmetrical encounters. However, this was not customary: women were usually distanced observers of these journeyers. They habitually objectified them rather than attempting to socialize with them, focusing upon their aesthetic appearance, skin colour and clothing; recorded their negative charac­ teristics and encounters; homogenized them; and did not attempt to gain a greater understanding of their cultures and customs. Most of these encounters were asymmetrical and unequal, and did not cause women to challenge or reject outright contemporary racial stereotypes or the period’s imperial and colonial ideologies. Instead, women reinforced contemporary racial discourses, as Lady Guest’s disgust at the American Indians she saw during her journey in 1894 graphically demonstrated. A final crucial theme of the journey abroad was its relationship with home. Women left their everyday lives behind them to explore the new and unseen, but their journeys were powerfully influenced by identities, ideas and activities from Britain and home. The rail and ship journey abroad was a nexus in which women maintained multiple identities, fusing those established at home – their domestic identities as wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, companions, colleagues or professionals – with those acquired during the journey: the journey chronicler, tourist-traveller and woman of modernity. It was achieved predominantly without any severe fracturing or collapse of the self, despite what authors such as Virginia Woolf envisaged. This complex journeyer subjectivity was expressed through, and partly determined by, a discursive polyphony featuring discourses of journey routine and functionality; technology; navigation; danger; geography; missing home; nature; landscape, scenery, coastline, townscape and the sea; and history. The argument that women’s travel involved a rejection of the domestic has thus greatly distorted the nature of much female mobility in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Journeying abroad did not polarize women’s subjectivity into that from home, which they abandoned, and the new which they adopted; it enabled the combination of all of these identities. Women wanted to retain the known – the familiarities of home and their home-based identities – as well as to experience the new when they left Britain’s shores; their continued correspondence

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women, travel and identity with family and friends back home indicates how important this connection remained on the female journey abroad. Leisure pursuits have been understood to have had liberating consequences for women in this period. One recent study of attitudes towards women’s bathing in the first half of the 1900s is underpinned by the assumption that ‘women were able to use a leisure activity such as swimming as a liberating experience’.8 Journey leisure activities, however, reflected and echoed those of Britain, highlighting another aspect of the journey abroad that maintained journeyers’ connection with home, rather than offering an opportunity to escape it. The majority of women’s movement in this period was refined and reflected their lives back home, rather than being the exotic, unfamiliar experience embarked upon by a minority such as Mary Kingsley et al. Journey spaces have been constructed by recent academics as liminal and heterotopic, but most women did not feel great anxiety or concern about the nature of journey space. It was the fact that journey spaces contained much that was familiar, much which was like home – the social hierarchy that echoed Britain’s; leisure activities that resembled those available back home; familiar journey companions such as family and friends, and the encouragement and opportunity to maintain their pre-journey identities and roles – which countered any feeling of being in a marginal space. Yet the relationship between the journey and home had its limits and complexity. Ship and train spaces were understood and used by women in the same ways in which they used the spaces of home: as social and leisure spaces, and as spaces for privacy, relaxation, shelter and refuge during illness. However, whilst women used journey spaces for the same activities that they performed at home – socializing with family and friends, writing letters and diaries, reading, making music, playing games, eating, sleeping – they did not feel the same emotional attachment to them. These were not homes-away-from home: women remained practical in their uses of, and regard for, these spaces. Despite the influence of home, it was not a place in which women felt they were absolutely at home. The overturning of domestic divisions in leisure also reflects how the journey did not completely mirror home. Existing literature has often focused upon travel or tourism as polarities of motility, but the journey abroad further demonstrates the difficulties of positing these modes of movement as dichotomous. Women journeyers usually followed predetermined, fixed routes that often included culturally accredited popular sites such as the Pyramids and the Sphinx, Niagara Falls and Athens, apparently signifying their status

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conclusion as tourists. Their accounts frequently described what they saw in aesthetic terms without seeking to understand it in greater depth, for example in geological terms, as again might be expected of tourists. However, women were also active consumers of the journey. They asserted their identities as travellers, sometimes by expressing their dissatisfaction with the journey itself or by noting the history of what they saw, displaying in the process their alertness to and full awareness of what they saw around them rather than just passively observing it. To label women journeyers as either tourist or traveller is extremely limiting; they utilized elements of both of these identities to become tourist-travellers. The journey abroad by train and ship had much commonality during this period, despite the significant differences in the size, shape and division of their internal space, and the length of some of these journeys. Many continuities can also be traced in the journey abroad as a consumer experience: the strong connection with home whilst taking an opportun­ ity to explore the unfamiliar; the maintenance of a social order; largely unequal encounters with non-Western journeyers; the centrality of class, vision, observation, respectability, reputation and sociability to the experience; the rise of luxury, especially for the wealthiest journeyers; the fusion of pre-journey and journey identities; contradictory journey etiquette; and the continuation of existing sexual mores. Why was the journey abroad so consistent in its nature when women’s lives in Britain were changing so dramatically? Crucially, the journey abroad was not an arena in which strong legally supported sexual discrimination prevailed against women consumers. None of the women studied here complained of being discriminated against because they were women. Journeyers had different, and for some more unpleasant or disappointing, experiences not purely because they were women but because of the passenger class in which they journeyed; their fellow jour­ neyers were unsatisfactory; they suffered chronic seasickness or encountered disagreeable staff; or found life confined to a ship or train limited. However, most journeyers were content with the journey abroad and felt no burning urge to reform it radically. British first-wave feminism did not need to be fully replicated on ships and trains (female journey staff, of course, may have felt differently), and this lack of any strong or organized pressure to change the journey abroad enabled continuity. It is also import­ ant to remember that the journey abroad was normally only an interlude in women’s lives; the more compelling, urgent battles lay back home. The synchronicity between women’s journeys and their lives back home also facilitated continuity in the journey. Women comfortably

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women, travel and identity fused domestic and journey identities, met new people and discovered new places while continuing to think of and correspond with the old, and encountered spaces that were familiar and maintained domestic social practices while also offering the opportunity to enjoy themselves on these breaks from daily routines. This lack of conflict between journeying and home inhibited any strong impetus to transform the journey. Finally, revolutions in law and opportunity take time to permeate every aspect of life. Campaigners for changes in women’s lives did not reside permanently on ships and trains to drive a faster pace of change in the journey abroad. The changes in women’s lives in Britain did gradually, however, affect the journey abroad. This was seen particularly notably in women’s representations in transport-company advertisements. These evolved after 1900, and particularly after 1918, to depict journeyers as fashionable, independent, young, glamorous but respectable women. The ambiguity hinted at in some Victorian images disappeared, replaced by a strength and confidence that reflected women’s changed status and their new sense of what they could achieve. This gradual pace of change and the very fact that change did slowly come again allowed continuity in the journey experience. Yet the journey abroad also contained ambiguities and tensions. Etiquette revealed a fundamental conflict in this period between anxiety about women journeying and a desire to enable them to journey, which writers responded to both by trying to control how women journeyed and by showing them how they could perform those journeys respectably. Sociability, though central to the journey experience, was an area of particular ambiguity. Women did not always wish to interact with other journeyers, welcoming more solitary journeys if they found an empty, or could hire a private, train carriage or could afford ship staterooms. Journeyer encounters were also not always characterized by parity and mutual respect, as when women befriended other journeyers out of pity. Enforced sociability could be challenging if women were accommodated with people with whom they had little in common or did not know well, as Marion Bridie found. And no matter how close a woman may have felt to another journeyer, these acquaintanceships almost always ended as soon as the woman’s journey ended, sometimes even without a farewell. In spite of their confidence when journeying, women were in many ways also in a demanding and difficult position. They were expected to navigate a path between society’s wishes and expectations of them and beliefs in what constituted the becoming woman journeyer, and their own. They were required to be authoritative, independent shapers of their own journey without incurring the censure of fellow journeyers,

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conclusion which journey etiquette suggested could be done by an act as simple as bringing too much luggage. They were simultaneously urged to adhere to strict journey rules of behaviour and conservative definitions of womanhood, but also to follow their own personal interests, tastes and preferences and shape their journeys themselves. Women were to conform to a genteel, traditional femininity defined by restraint and propriety, but without becoming too compliant and obedient. Previous studies of women’s travel argue that it offered women the opportunity to escape the restrictions of their circumscribed domestic lives and redefine themselves away from the prescriptive norms of femininity promulgated in their homelands. They contend that Victorian women travellers were not only physically and emotionally released from the confines of the domestic interior, but also sensually and sexually liberated. Women travellers’ self-redefinition, in which it is posited they appropriated the role of the male explorer, has been interpreted as an explicitly feminist act: they were ‘claiming more than a mere explorer accolade. They were claiming a freedom from the gender restrictions of their home societies, found in the white male status they could assume [abroad].’ 9 In certain ways, the journey abroad can also be regarded as liberating, particularly for women who were removed from the cares of their daily lives and had a greater opportunity to participate in leisure activities. Women could explore elements of new identities and, for some, the journey could form part of their Bildung. Those of means could choose their journey route, the transport company they used and their accommodation, giving them significant agency over fundamental elements of the experience. Women could also decide the degree to which they socialized with other journeyers. Yet in other ways the journey abroad can be viewed as restrictive. Expectations of women journeyers echoed traditional, conservative expectations of women. The journeyer/socio-economic hierarchy was unchallenged. Women remained in their existing ‘proper places’: the journey was not a space of significant social mobility. The journeyers upon whom women turned their gaze also reciprocated this scrutiny just as strongly: women were not able to behave howsoever they wished, free from the threat of social disapproval and rejection by others. The journey did not necessarily provide an arena for unfettered self-expression. Women who were journeying in a professional capacity, especially servants, often had to continue some or all of the duties they performed back home, leaving them limited or no time for leisure, relaxation, self-expression or self-exploration. If employers paid for their tickets,

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women, travel and identity they determined their routes, choice of ship or train and accommodation rather than the women themselves. Emigrant journeyers often had little choice but to book the cheapest passage and accommodation or allow emigrant societies to make their journey arrangements for them. Women in the lowest echelons of the journeyer hierarchy also had limited power. However, the significance to women journeyers of liberation itself must also be examined. Arguments that travel in this period liberated women assume that women travellers always felt restricted by the values of home and pressure to conform. However, not all women felt shackled by their lives, which in the late Victorian era were often far more dynamic and fulfilling than merely being domestic angels. M. Jeanne Peterson’s seminal study of the women of the Paget family revealed how they were extensively educated both in and outside the home, even attending some lectures at Cambridge University in the 1870s; how some were able to earn money, for example by giving piano lessons to the children of family friends; and how they were actively involved in the financial administration of their households and in the general administration of family estates.10 Victorian women were not always motivated to travel and journey because they were unhappy in the ubiquitous gilded cage of repressive domesticity. Women had gained even more opportunities by 1940, particularly in their ability to work outside the home and to seek a higher education, so again were not always driven by repressive domesticity to journey abroad. Many were content with their lives. Women journeyers embraced change and new opportunities, as they demonstrated simply by undertaking journeys using the new technologies of steam power and the railway, but the majority of them did not feel the need for, or wanted or sought, liberation through journeying. This is, of course, not to suggest that women’s lives were completely free from limitations and discrimination by 1940 or to diminish the importance of the women’s movement in this period. It is instead an attempt to suggest that it would be a distortion to claim that a desire to escape home predominantly determined how women journeyed. The opportunity to see new places and meet new people, while leaving some of the more monotonous aspects of everyday life behind, was rewarding enough in itself and the motivation behind many women’s decisions to journey. Female mobility was not always about moving away from or towards something, about progress or liberation; it could also be an experience that was rooted in and around itself. Its locus could be in the immediate rather than what had gone before. Finally, we must assess to what extent the journey abroad was gendered. Clear gendered expectations and values surrounded women

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conclusion journeyers when interacting with others and in the roles assigned to them as social arbiters; the complex requirements of their appearance (to be modest but not dowdy, to be showy but not gaudy); and how they were required to behave in general. These values reflected long-established concepts of womanhood: that they would be ladylike, modest, pleasant and pleasing, chaste and unthreateningly feminine. Women could not risk appearing unwomanly by openly rejecting these precepts, as Henrietta Barnett’s defence of her behaviour towards Herbert Spencer reveals. There was no expectation that women would assume any (supposedly) masculine attributes, such as being overly learned or too interested in topics such as nature and technology: they were unable to employ these journey discourses as substantially as they might have wished when they published their accounts because they were not deemed fitting topics for women. The journey(er) gaze was also gendered in one particular aspect. In her essay on the spectator and the cinema, Laura Mulvey utilized Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic definition of gazing as socophilic. She argues that Freud associated socophilia (pleasure in looking) with regarding other people as erotic objects and subjecting them to a controlling gaze. The spe­ctator, who is in the first instance male, derives pleasure from using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight – gazing. (Male) gazing can be understood as a sexual act.11 Women’s journey gaze did not contain this erotic element. In these aspects, the journey abroad was gendered. Yet women were able to access discourses that were deemed more suitable for men, although they had to restrict their appearance if they published their journey accounts. In their subjectivities, women could also transcend the publicly constructed concept of the female journeyer, adapting elements of identities that were more usually associated with men, most notably that of the traveller. Wealthy women could enter journey spaces that were supposedly masculine spaces and assert their authority over male staff. The journey abroad was gendered, but gender combined with women’s socio-economic background, wealth and position in the passenger-class/journeyer hierarchy in determining the nature of their experience. The journey abroad between 1870 and 1940 is a site of great, arguably hackneyed, nostalgia today. Train companies run services in which journeyers ride in original, refurbished British Pullman carriages from the interwar years and aspire to recreate a perceived ‘Golden Age’. Vintage transport posters are sold in museums around the world and on num­ erous websites. Every year new calendars feature these iconic images,

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women, travel and identity remembering a world of Technicolor escape that today’s journeys abroad, with their cut-price airlines and often overcrowded trains, cannot seem to match. Television and film depict these journeys as part of an age of sophistication and elegance in adaptations of classic detective stories, most often by Agatha Christie, or in depicting the fatal journey of the Titanic, winning record-breaking audiences in the process. These modern manifestations of the late Victorian, Edwardian and interwar journey abroad demonstrate how successful and powerful remain the beliefs that this journey was a byword for prestige, gentility, taste, chic, splendour and refinement, as well as romance, excitement and danger. This book, however, has revealed that the journey abroad was a much more complex, dynamic experience. When their journeys ended, women returned to their normal lives, or forged new lives if they had emigrated. Some were relieved that the journey was over. Bishop’s wife Mrs Wilkinson wrote in a letter home ‘Here we are, I am very thankful to say, at the end of our voyage’ from Falmouth to South Africa in August 1870.12 Ethel B. Abrahams, a student at Bedford College, wrote of her tempestuous journey to Greece in 1906: After a stormy passage through the Ionian Sea and a rough and tumble landing after dark at the Piraeus, it was with no mixed feelings that I found myself at last safely installed in  .  .  .  Athens  .  .  .  although it was some days before the sensation of tossing on the sea left me!13

For a few it proved a time of strain, due to illness, homesickness or work responsibilities. Margaret Hunt endured an especially trying journey to India in 1934 when her colleague Miss Stevens fell ill with malaria: Margaret spent most of the journey caring for her and feeling ‘very frightened’ and ‘dreadfully sad’ that she was sick.14 But for the majority of women, the journey abroad was a period of wonder and great value. Most women, particularly those who journeyed abroad just once, found it was a pleasure they remembered for the rest of their lives. For Marion Bridie, it was an experience that ‘will remain for ever like a golden crimson sunset’.15 Women were never sessile and their journeys never formulaic or inconsequential. In the years afterwards, many a woman found that ‘scenes in my journey  .  .  .  are engraved indelibly on my memory, things of beauty and therefore joys for ever’.16 Notes 1 Leone-Moat, No Nice Girl, p. 114. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid.

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conclusion







4 Hassan, Sailing to Australia, p. 3. 5 Stanley, ‘“Caring for the poor souls”’, p. 123. 6 Ibid., p. 126. 7 M.L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992), p. 4; N. Chaudhuri and M. Strobel, ‘Introduction’, in N. Chaudhuri and M. Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism (Bloomington, 1992), p. 3. 8 C. Horwood, ‘“Girls who arouse dangerous passions”: women and bathing, 1900  –39’, Women’s History Review, 9:4 (2000), 654. See C.M. Parratt, More than Mere Amusement: Working-Class Women’s Leisure in England, 1750  –1914 (Boston, 2001) for another such interpretation of women’s leisure before the First World War. 9 Birkett, Spinsters Abroad, pp. 27, 48, 70, 126, 140. 10 Peterson, ‘No angels’, 683, 687–  8, 694  –5, 697. 11 Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure’, pp. 16  –18. 12 [Wilkinson], A Lady’s Life and Travels, letter dated 29 August 1870, p. 11. 13 RHUL Archives, E.B. Abrahams, ‘Athens – First Impressions’, Bedford College (University of London) Magazine, No. 60 (June 1906), 29. 14 BL India & Oriental Collection, Mss Eur F241/13, Letters and Diaries of M. Hunt, ‘Extracts from the letters and diaries of M. Hunt, in the English Department of the Women’s Christian College in Madras, from June 1932 until April 1943’, letters dated 14 and 17 June 1934. 15 Bridie, Round the World, p. 306. 16 RHUL Archives, ‘Civis’, ‘Chicago’, 3.

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Appendix: Women journeyers All place names follow the women’s own spellings.

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Age

Companions

Dates and type of journey(s)

Place(s) of departure

Destination(s) Route (including places sighted and stops)

Ethel B. Abrahams (Bedford College student)

?

None mentioned

Leisure journey. England – city Athens Account published in unknown college magazine in June 1906: ‘Athens – First Impressions’

A.K.B. (Bedford College student)

?

None mentioned

Leisure journey. Account published in College magazine in March 1936: ‘From Genoa to the Apennines’

Anonymous ? (Bedford College student)

None mentioned

Leisure journey. England – city Norway Account published unknown in College magazine in March 1915, but wartime restrictions on travel mean it was likely undertaken before August 1914: ‘On the fjord’

Not described

England – city Genoa & the Not described unknown Apennines

Route not mentioned – journey account covers a cruise along a Norwegian fjord

Ship/train

Unidentified ship

Unidentified ship and train

Unidentified steamer

appendix

j 207 J

Journeyer

Age

Companions

Dates and type of journey(s)

A.T.M. (Bedford College student)

?

None mentioned

Isa Foster Barham

?

Henrietta 28 Barnett (1851–1936)

Place(s) of departure

Destination(s) Route (including places sighted and stops)

Ship/train

Leisure journey. Southampton Account published in college magazine in March 1934: ‘From Southampton to Cape Town’

Cape Town

Not stated

Unidentified passenger liner

Aunt, uncle, Miss Cumming (governess?)

Leisure journey, 3 November 1894–22 April 1895

Liverpool

Bombay

Liverpool – Spain – Trafalgar – Gibraltar – Marseilles – Malta – Port Said – Ismaelia – Suez – Jebel – Tier Island – Socotra Islands – Aden – Bombay and return journey

S.S. Clan MacIntosh (this broke down during outward journey and they transferred on to the Pirulia)

Canon Barnett, Miss Kente, Margaret Potter & Herbert Spencer

Leisure journey, November– December 1879. Account included in her posthumous biography of her husband, published in 1919

Liverpool

Egypt

England – Port Said – Cairo – Philae On the Nile: – Nubia – Aboo Simrell – England the Hedwig, a privately hired dahabeeyah

appendix

j 208 J

Journeyer

Age

Companions

Dates and type of journey(s)

Place(s) of departure

Destination(s) Route (including places sighted and stops)

Ship/train

Alice Bosanquet

?

Major L.A. Bosanquet and their children, Cecily and Eveline

Accompanying husband out to an army posting, 20 December 1906– 9 January 1907

Southampton

Bombay

Southampton – Malta – Port Said – Bombay

T.S.S. Rewa

Annie Brassey (1839–87)

c. 33

Thomas Brassey and their children

London Leisure journey, 28 August– 30 November 1872. This included a cruise on a steam yacht not covered in this study. Account published as A Cruise in the ‘Eothen’, 1872 (1873)

Canada & United States of America

London – Liverpool – Moville Bay, Ireland – Quebec – Lachine – Montreal – Brockville – Toronto – Hamilton – Niagara – Toronto – Kingston – Hamilton – New York – Washington – Baltimore – Philadelphia – New York – Jersey City – Liverpool

Outward: S.S. Hibernian (Allan Line), S.S. Eothen (steam yacht). Return: S.S. Russia (Cunard)

Leisure journey, 21 October– 19 November 1903 & 28 January– 1 April 1904

India

London – Dover – Calais – Paris – Bale – Vienna – Milan – Foggia – Brindisi – Port Said – Cairo – Suez – Aden – Bombay

Outward: train, the S.S. Imperata. Return: S.S. Caledonian

Eira c. 16 Sydney Platt, Gwendoline her father du Breil (née Platt) (1887–1979)

London

appendix

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Journeyer

Age

Companions

Dates and type of journey(s)

Place(s) of departure

Mrs F.D. Bridges

?

Mr Bridges, her husband

Leisure journey, Greece August 1878–July 1879, part of a round-the-world trip. Account published as Journal of a Lady’s Travels Round the World with Illustrations by the Author (1883)

Destination(s) Route (including places sighted and stops)

Ship/train

Chicago

Variety of trains and steamers, not all named, but included the S.S. Principe Amadeo (a dahabeeyah), a P&O steamer, East Indian Railways, S.S. Comilla, S.S. Pemba, S.S. Konig Willem, S.S. City of Tokio, S.S. Hiroshima Maru, S.S. George Elder and S.S. Alida

Piraeus – Athens – Sparta – Kutzava – Rhodes – Cairo – Jeddah – Hyderabad – Ajanta-Bir-un-kerah – Bhopal – Sanchi – Allahabad – Delhi – Lahore – Jhelum – Peshawar – Kashmir (by horse) – Islamabad – Delhi – Benares – Calcutta – Darjeeling – Kursong – Calcutta – Akials – Rangoon – Penang – Malacca – Singapore – Batavia – Singapore – Hong Kong – Canton – Yokohama – Tokyo – Kobe – Nara – Kioto – Mailbara – Sanghara – Gifu – Magome – Shimo-No-Sewa – Wada – Otai – Onama – Nikko – San Francisco – Portland – Victoria, Vancouver’s Island – Yale – Boston – San Francisco – Yosemite Valley – Merced – Truckee – Lake Tahoe – Salt Lake City – Denver – Chicago

appendix

j 210 J

Journeyer

Age

Companions

Dates and type of journey(s)

Marion Ferguson Bridie

?

None mentioned

None mentioned

Bertha 56 Mason Broadwood (1846– 1935)

Place(s) of departure

Destination(s) Route (including places sighted and stops)

Ship/train

London Leisure journey, 17 December 1931– 14 April 1932. Account published as Round the World Without a Pinprick: Being the Diary of M.F. Bridie, Passenger on the First World Cruise of the R.M.S. Empress of Britain, 1931–1932 (1932)

Southampton London – Naples – Straits of Messina (round-the– Athens – Acre Bay – Haifa – world trip) Nazareth – Jerusalem – Bethlehem – Cairo – Luxor – Karnak – Cairo – Suez – Bombay – Delhi – Agra – Benares – Bombay – Colombo – Java – Singapore – Bangkok – Manila – Hong Kong – Canton – Hawaii – San Francisco – Berkeley – Sausalito – Los Angeles – Pasadena – Panama Canal – Cuba – New York – Southampton

R.M.S. Empress of Britain (Canadian Pacific Company), various trains, S.S. Britannia (when sailing down the Nile)

Leisure journey, departed 27 November 1902. Diary is incomplete, but it states that journey is for two months so it would have ended in January 1903

West Indies

S.S. Argonaut

London

Route is not described

appendix

j 211 J

Journeyer

Journeyer

Age

A.B. [Anne ? Burns], lady’s maid

Her employers, referred to as Countess and Earl, their daughter Lady Emily & Mr. Stubbs (the Earl’s valet)

Professional journey, Liverpool working as the Countess’s maid, exact dates unknown, but between 1901 and 1908. Account published as Travels of a Lady’s Maid (1908)

Mrs Rosa CarnegieWilliams

Her husband Leisure journey, Southampton and her maid, 2 August– Hills 11 September 1881. Account published as A Year in the Andes; Or, A Lady’s Adventures in Bogotá (1884)

?

Place(s) of departure

Destination(s) Route (including places sighted and stops)

Ship/train

London (round-theworld trip)

Liverpool – New York – New Haven – Boston – Buffalo – Niagara – Chicago – Denver – Leadville – Salt Lake City – Santa Barbara – Los Angeles – San Francisco – Monterey – San Francisco – Honolulu – Yokohama – Nikko – Kyoto – Kobe – Shanghai – Tien-Tsin – Peking – Hong Kong – Macon – Canton – Singapore – Ceylon – Calcutta – Darjeeling – Benares – Agra – Lucknow – Delhi – Amritsar – Lahore – Peshawar – Delhi – Alwar – Jeypore – Amber – Bombay – Aden – Suez – Cairo – Alexandria – Pireus – Athens – Corinth – Olympia – Patras – Corfu – Sorrento – Capri – Naples – Rome – Lausanne – Paris – London

Combination of steam ships and trains, all unidentified

Bogotá

Southampton – Isle of Wight – Corvo – St. Thomas – Porto Rico – St Juan – Santo Domingo – Port au Prince – Jamaica – Colon – Carthagena – Savanilla – Barranquilla – Bogotá (route not given in great detail)

R.M.S. Don, train to Barranquilla, and a steamer, the Victoria, to Bogotá

appendix

Dates and type of journey(s)

j 212 J

Companions

Age

Companions

Dates and type of journey(s)

‘Civis’ (Bedford College student)

?

None mentioned

Fanny Davis

?

D.R.L. (Bedford College student)

E.C.A. (Bedford College student)

Place(s) of departure

Destination(s) Route (including places sighted and stops)

Ship/train

Leisure journey. Britain Account published in College magazine in March 1894: ‘Chicago Once More’

USA

Not fully described, but places mentioned are Washington, D.C., Boston and Chicago

Unidentified train

Unnamed female companion

Health/leisure journey, 20 March– 26 September 1871

London

China

London – Bay of Biscay – Cape S.S. Glensannore Finisterre – Cape St Vincent – Gibraltar [?] – Algiers – Haifa – Cape Trafalgar – Malaga – Ahmelia – Andalusia – Port Said – Socotia – Mocha (?) – Aden – Bay of Bengal – Straits of Malacca – Sumatra – Singapore – Shanghai – Hong Kong – Canton

?

None mentioned

Leisure journey in summer 1931. Account published in College magazine in March 1932: ‘An Unsentimental Journey’

Britain – precise city unknown

Italy

Not described in detail, but rail journey began in Alpi Apuani and ended in Turin

?

None mentioned

Leisure journey. Southampton Account published in College magazine in March 1896: ‘A Peep of Italy in the Winter’

Italy

Not fully described, but places Unidentified visited included Pompeii, Naples and ship Rome

Unidentified train

appendix

j 213 J

Journeyer

Amelia B. Edwards (1831–92)

E.W. (Bedford College student)

Companions

Dates and type of journey(s)

Place(s) of departure

Destination(s) Route (including places sighted and stops)

Ship/train

c. 42 a female companion, a painter identified as Edward McCalum

Leisure journey, November 1873– April 1874. Account published as A Thousand Miles Up the Nile (1888 edition)

Cairo

Cairo (round trip along the Nile)

Cairo – Turra – Bedreshayn – Memphis – Beni Suef – Golosaneh – Minieh – Siut – Gow – Earshut – Kasr es Syad – Denderah – Luxor – Erment – Esneh – Assuan – Philae – Korosko – Derr – Ibrim – Abou Simbel – Wady Halfeh – Abou Simbel – Ibrim – Derr – Wady Sabooah – Maharrakeh – Dakkeh – Gerf Hossayn Dendoor – Kalabsheh – Gertassee – Dabod – Torrigur – Philae – Mahatta – Assuan – Kom Ombo – Silsilis – Edfu – Denderah – Luxor – Abydus – Girgeh – Ayserat – Cairo

Dahabeeyah, the Philae

?

None mentioned

Leisure journey. Account published in College magazine in March 1899: ‘Imprudens quid femina possit’

Britain – precise city unknown

Cape Town

Not described

Unidentified ship

Her parents and the Brasseys

Leisure journey, 8 August– 1 September 1885

Britain – precise city unknown

Norway

Route not described, but stops mentioned include Stevenage, Zenrike(?), Vickm(?), Odde

The Sunbeam (Brasseys’ private steam yacht)

Mary 38 Gladstone (1847–1928)

appendix

Age

j 214 J

Journeyer

Companions

Dates and type of journey(s)

Place(s) of departure

Destination(s) Route (including places sighted and stops)

Ship/train

Lady Theodora Guest

?

Her husband, Mr H. Neville and her maid, Byatt

Leisure journey, 14 April–27 June 1894. Account published as A Round Trip in North America (1895)

Southampton

USA & Canada

Outward: the S.S. Paris. Various private cars on American trains, including the Pennsylvanian Line, Missouri Pacific Railway, the Canadian Trunk Line, the Quebec & Lake St John Railway. Return: S.S. New York

Isabel Haigh (c. 1890/ 91–1962)

c. 29 Her husband Samuel ‘Ben’ Haigh

Emily Hall 55– (1819–1901) 82

Ellen Hall (sister)

Southampton – New York – Jersey City – Philadelphia – Baltimore – Washington, D.C. – Philadelphia – the Alleghanies – Pittsburgh – Columbus – St. Louis – Denver – the Rockies – Salt Lake City – San Francisco – Menlo Park – Monterey – Yosemite Valley – Oakland – San Francisco – Oakland – Soda Springs – the Siskiyou Mountains – Portland – Chicago – Buffalo – Toronto – Ottawa – Montreal – Quebec – Chicoutin & Ha! Ha! Bay – Quebec – Montreal – Albany – New York – Philadelphia – Luray – Washington, D.C. – Baltimore – Philadelphia – New York – Southampton

Emigration journey, Liverpool 27 May–19 July 1920

New Zealand Liverpool – Cape Henry – Norfolk S.S. Mahana (USA) – San Salvador – Cuba – Jamaica – Colon – Panama – Balboa – Wellington

Leisure journeys, winters December/ January–May/June 1873–1900

Algeria

Wickham, Kent

Wickham – Dover – Paris – Marseilles – Algiers

Multiple unidentified ships and trains

appendix

Age

j 215 J

Journeyer

Journeyer

Age

Dates and type of journey(s)

Place(s) of departure

Destination(s) Route (including places sighted and stops)

Ship/train

Ellen Hall 61– (1822–1911) 89

Emily Hall (sister)

Leisure journeys, winters December/ January–May/June 1873–1901

Wickham, Kent

Algeria

Wickham – Dover – Paris – Marseilles – Algiers

Multiple unidentified ships and trains

H.M.D. [Hester Mary Dawson]

?

Medical colleagues, one of the few named was Nurse McDougall

Professional journey Britain – precise city to nurse plague unknown victims in Bombay, November–December 1897. Account published as Bombay During the Plague, 1897–1898: Extracts from the Letters of H.M.D. – Plague Hospital Nurse under Government (1899)

India

Route not fully described, but included Port Said and Aden

S.S. Himalaya, S.S. Shannon

H.E.M. (Bedford College student)

?

None mentioned

Leisure journey. Account published in College magazine in March 1899: ‘A Week in the Crimea’

Route not fully described, but places visited included Simpheropol, Sevastopol, Yalta, Balaclava

Unidentified train

Britain Russia (the – specific city Crimea) not mentioned

appendix

j 216 J

Companions

Age

Margaret Hunt

Emily May Jones

Companions

Dates and type of journey(s)

Place(s) of departure

Destination(s) Route (including places sighted and stops)

Ship/train

From Occasionally age fellow 25 teachers, otherwise journeyed alone

Professional journeys: April 1932, March 1934, June 1934, April 1937 and June 1938

England

Women’s Christian College, Madras, India

Routes not precisely described but stops included London, Newhaven, Dieppe, Paris, Vallorbe, Venice, Brindisi, Naples, Genoa, Malta, Port Said and Bombay

Multiple ships and trains, including the Madras Express, the Bombay Mail, the S.S. Gange (June 1934) the S.S. Strathnavar (April 1937), the S.S. Ranpura (June 1938)

?

Leisure journey, 23 May–19 June 1889

Lambeth, London

Holland and Germany

London – Gravesend – Margate – S.S. Maastroem, Rotterdam – Dorlecht – Zalfbammel S.S. Rijnboot, – Tiel – Nijmegen – Emmerich – Rees S.S. Siegfried – Xanten – Wesel – Duisberg – Verdingen – Cologne – Linz – Neuwied – Coblenz – Wiesbaden – Heidelberg – Coblenz – Bonn – Cologne – The Hague – Rotterdam – London

Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece

London – Paris – Baden – Baden – Geisslingen – Munich – Vienna – Budapest – Felegyhaza – Szegedin – Porta – Orientalis – Budapest – Vercioroza – Guirgevo – Rustchuch – Varna – Constantinople – Istanbul – Pera – Cape Hellas – Smyrna – Athens – Brindisi – Turin – Macon – Paris – Dover – London

Pauline, female friend

Lady c. 29 Her husband Emma Sir Arthur Lasenby Lasenby Liberty Liberty (born 1845)

Leisure journey, London 26 March–22 April 1884. Account published as The Levant and Back Within Twenty-Eight Days (Extracts from a Diary) (1884)

Orient Express, S.S. Niobe, S.S. Cambodge, S.S. Galatea, S.S. Pelops

appendix

j 217 J

Journeyer

Journeyer

Age

Companions

Dates and type of journey(s)

Place(s) of departure

Destination(s) Route (including places sighted and stops)

Ship/train

York – London – Calais – Marseilles – Straits of Bonifacio – Messina – Crete – Port Said – Cairo – Collisini – Al-Rasiyeh – Assiat – Ahkuni – Beliamah – Abydos – Nag Hamoudie – Dendera – Ramak – Luxor – Thebes – Erneh – El Sabayeh – Romonto – Assouau – Philae – Ralabrheh – Rosorsko – Abou Simbel – Wad Haifa – Dekkah – Ralabrheh – Assouau – Romonto – El Sabayeh – Luxor – Reneh – Assuit – Miniet – Bedresheyn – Cairo – Ghizeh – Cairo – Port Said – Crete – Etna – Capri – Sorrento – Naples – Genoa – Milan – Vilznau – Basle – Bologne – Folkestone – London

Train, S.S. Marunda (P&O), the Cherps (dahabeeyah), S.S. Sachen (North German Lloyd)

R.M.S. (Bedford College student)

Dieppe

Dieppe – Newhaven

Unidentified cross-Channel steamer

?

A group of companions, but none named

Leisure journey. Account published in College magazine in December 1935: ‘Channel Crossing’

Newhaven, England

appendix

Ormesby Egypt, for a Hall, near cruise along Middlesbrough the Nile

j 218 J

Dora c. 42 Her husband, Leisure journey, Pennyman the Pennimans 24 January–2 April (c. (Americans 1905 1863–1938) who believed they were related, but proved not to be)

Age

Companions

Dates and type of journey(s)

Place(s) of departure

Destination(s) Route (including places sighted and stops)

Ship/train

Margaret Roberts

?

Her brother, Roy Roberts

Leisure journeys, 29 October– 18 October 1930 & 7 April–16 May 1931. Months between sea journeys spent touring India and Burma

Folkestone

India and Burma

Folkestone – Marseilles – Malta – Port Said – Aden – Bombay – Rangoon – Port Sudan – Suez – Port Said – Marseilles – Tilbury

Outward: S.S. Mantua. Return: S.S. Sagaing

Vita SackvilleWest (1892– 1962)

34

One unmentioned companion

Leisure journey, London dates unmentioned but Passenger to Teheran published in 1926

Persia (now Iran)

London – Dover – France – Italy – Unidentified Trieste – Greece – Crete – Luxor – ships and trains Karnak – Port Said – Aden – Bombay – Karachi – the Persian Gulf – Mohammerah – Shatt-el-Arab – Baghdad. Car journey into Persia to Teheran, Isfahan, Kurm and to Russia, train back from Baku – Moscow – Poland – England

Canada and United States of America

Balminet – Liverpool – New York – Montreal – Toronto – Niagara – Buffalo – Montreal – New York – Liverpool – Balminet

Janet ? Smith, lady’s maid

Accompanying Professional journey, Balminet, her employer, 4 September– Scotland Mrs M— 7 October 1896

Outward: S.S. Umbria. Return S.S. Campania (Cunard). Trains used for internal journeys in Canada and America

appendix

j 219 J

Journeyer

Age

Companions

Dates and type of journey(s)

Place(s) of departure

Destination(s) Route (including places sighted and stops)

Ship/train

Sarah Stephens

26

Her mother, sisters Polly, Charlotte, Dora and Annie, and brother Robert

Emigration journey, London 26 September 1876– 6 January 1877

Euphemia Margaret ‘Peggy’ Stokes

?

1937 journey: fellow teacher Miss Sivcar; on other journeys no specific companions mentioned

Professional journeys: 25 June–10 July 1937, 24 April – 6 May 1938, and 1–14 September 1939

Cambridge Madras and (1937, 1939) & England Madras (1938)

Cambridge – London – Dover – Calais – Marseilles – Malta – Port Said – Suez Canal – Aden – Bombay – Madras and return to England

1937: S.S. Rajputana; 1938: S.S. Narkunda; 1939: S.S. Stratheden

Margaret J. Stuke (Bedford College student)

?

None mentioned

Leisure journey. Account published in College magazine in June 1925: ‘Corsica’

Britain – precise city unknown

Route not described, but leg of journey described was from Marseilles to Corsica

Unidentified ship

Lyttleton, London – Gravesend – Bay of Biscay S.S. Cardigan New Zealand – the Tropics – Cape Verde – Castle Gough’s Island – Cape of Good (sailing ship) Hope – Prince Edward’s Isle – Melbourne – The Snares – Dunedin – Lyttleton

Corsica

appendix

j 220 J

Journeyer

Age

Companions

Dates and type of journey(s)

Place(s) of departure

Destination(s) Route (including places sighted and stops)

Ship/train

Mrs Wilkinson

?

Bishop Wilkinson, her husband

Religious journey, 6 July 1870– 29 August 1870. Account published as A Lady’s Life and Travels in Zululand and the Transvaal During Cetewayo’s Reign: The African Letters and Journals of the Late Mrs Wilkinson (1882)

Falmouth

Zululand

Falmouth – Madeira – St. Helena – Cape Town – Port Elizabeth – Durban (rest of journey into Zululand was made by wagon and horseback)

S.S. Good Hope

Lady Kitty Vincent

?

Eira, a friend (possibly given a fictional name)

Leisure journey. Account published as Two on a Trip (1930)

Britain – precise port unknown

Halifax, Nova Scotia

Route not described

S.S. Mary Anne (a fictional name)

appendix

j 221 J

Journeyer

Bibliography Manuscript and primary sources women’s journey accounts Unpublished manuscripts The British Library: India and Oriental Collection Mss Eur C620, Diary of Mrs A.E. Bosanquet, ‘Voyage diary to Bombay on T.S.S. Rewa, December 1906  –January 1907’ Mss Eur Photo Eur 362, Diary of E.G. du Breil (née Platt), ‘Typescript of The Diary of Eira Gwendoline du Breil (née Platt) (1887–1979) describing her travels in 1903 –1904’ Mss Eur F241/1, F241/2, F241/6, F241/10, F241/13 & F241/16, Letters and Diaries of M. Hunt, ‘Extracts from the Letters and Diaries of M. Hunt, in the English Department of the Women’s Christian College in Madras, June 1932–April 1943’ Mss Eur C546, Diary of M. E. Roberts, later Lady Thomas, ‘Diary of voyage to and from India and Burma, October 1930  –April 1931’ Mss Eur F304/3 & F304/4, Letters of E.M. Stokes, ‘Letters from E.M. “Peggy” Stokes, teacher at St Christopher’s College, Madras’, June–July 1937, April–May 1938 and September 1939 Mss Eur D1239/5, Mrs J.D. Stuart, wife of J.D. Stuart, Indian Service of Engineers, Memorabilia of voyage to Burma, October 1913

The British Library: Manuscripts Collection Additional MS. 46267, Diary of M. Gladstone, ‘Diary’, August 1885

Bromley Archives, London 855 F2/13, F2/14, F2/15 & F2/17, Diaries of E. Hall, ‘Diaries’, 1872–  86 855 F3/12, Diary of E. Hall, ‘Diary’, 1873–75

Hull History Centre U DP/195/1, Diary of F. Davis, ‘Journal of Incidents Connected with my Voyage to China, March 14, 1871 to September 26, 1871’

The London Borough of Lambeth Archives IV/138/9, Diary of E.M. Jones, ‘Diary’, May–June 1889

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bibliography Maritime Archives & Library, Merseyside Maritime Museum DX/1071/R, Diary of S. Stephens, ‘Transcript of emigrant voyage diary on the S.S. Cardigan Castle, 30 September 1876  –23 January 1877’ DX/652/1, Diary of I. Foster Barham, ‘Diary of passenger I. Foster Barham aboard the Clan MacIntosh’, 1894  –  95 DX/1093, Diary of J. Smith, ‘Transcript of voyage diary on S.S. Umbria and S.S. Campania, 1896’

The Surrey History Centre, Woking 2185/BMB/5/17/1, Diary of B.M. Broadwood, ‘Voyage Diary to West Indies’, November 1902

The Teesside Archives, Middlesbrough U/PEN 7/86, Diary of D. Pennyman, ‘Diary’, 1905

British Library: India and Oriental Collection Mss Eur B385, H.M.D [Hester Mary Dawson], Bombay During the Plague, 1897– 1898: Extracts from the Letters of H.M.D. – Plague Hospital Nurse Under Government (printed for private circulation only, London, 1899)

Archives, Royal Holloway, University of London Abrahams, E.B. ‘Athens – First Impressions’, Bedford College (University of London) Magazine, No. 60 (June 1906), 29  –31 A.K.B., ‘From Genoa to the Apennines’, Bedford College (University of London) Union Magazine, No. 44 (March 1936), 18  –20 Anonymous, ‘On the fjord’, Bedford College (University of London) Magazine, No. 86 (March 1915), 17–19 A.T.M., ‘Southampton to Cape Town’, Bedford College (University of London) Union Magazine, No. 38 (March 1934), 6  –7 ‘Civis’, ‘Chicago Once More’, Bedford College, London, Magazine, No. 23 (March 1894), 1–3 D.R.L., ‘An Unsentimental Journey’, Bedford College (University of London) Magazine, No. 32 (March 1932), 6  –7 E.C.A., ‘A Peep of Italy in the Winter’, Bedford College, London, Magazine, No. 29 (March 1896), 21–23 E.W., ‘Imprudens quid femina possit’, Bedford College, London, Magazine, No. 38 (March 1899), 21–27 H. De B.D., ‘In an Italian Third-Class Railway Carriage’, Bedford College, London, Magazine, No. 31 (December 1896), 39.

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bibliography H.E.M., ‘A Week in the Crimea’, Bedford College, London, Magazine, No. 38 (March 1899), 30  –3 R.M.S., ‘Channel Crossing’, Bedford College (University of London) Magazine, No. 43 (December 1935), 14 Stuke, M.J., ‘Corsica’, Bedford College (University of London) Union Magazine, No. 12 (June 1925), 6  –  8

City of Westminster Archives Centre, London 788/184, Lasenby Liberty, Lady E. The Levant and Back Within Twenty-Eight Days (Extracts from a Diary) (printed for private circulation, 1884)

Published Barnett, H. Canon Barnett: Warden of the first University Settlement Toynbee Hall, Whitechapel, London: His Life, Work, and Friends by His Wife, Volume I (Buxton and New York, 1919) Brassey, A. A Cruise in the ‘Eothen’, 1872 (printed for private circulation, 1873) Bridges, F.D. Journal of a Lady’s Travels Round the World with Illustrations from Sketches by the Author (London, 1883) Bridie, M.F. Round The World Without a Pinprick: Being the Diary of M.F. Bridie, Passenger on the first World Cruise of the R.M.S. Empress of Britain 1931–1932 (Birmingham, 1932) A.B. [Anne Burns], Travels of a Lady’s Maid (Boston, 1908) Carnegie-Williams, R. A Year in the Andes; Or, A Lady’s Adventures in Bogotá (London, 1884) Edwards, A.B. A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, facsimile of the 1888 edn (London, 1993) Guest, Lady T. A Round Trip in North America (London, 1895) Sackville-West, V. Passenger to Teheran (London, 1926) Vincent, Lady K. Two on a Trip (London, 1930) [Wilkinson, Mrs A.] A Lady’s Life and Travels in Zululand and the Transvaal During Cetewayo’s Reign: The African Letters and Journals of the late Mrs Wilkinson (London, 1882)

joint male–female journey accounts Haigh, I. and S. ‘Where do all the flies go  .  .  .  ?’: The Journal of Isabel and Samuel Haigh as they Emigrated to New Zealand in 1920, researched and published by S. and M. Shaw (Malton, 1996)

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bibliography male journey accounts Unpublished manuscripts Maritime Archives & Library, Merseyside Maritime Museum DX/2245, Letter by A. Moore, ‘Transcript of letter describing a voyage from Liverpool to New York on board the Servia, 31 December 1892 to 9 January 1893’ DX/1097/2, Diary-letter of W. Midgley Esq., ‘Transcript of diary-letter, 27 August to 17 October 1899’ DX/2001, Diary of G. Grieg, Jnr, ‘Transcript of a diary of a trip written aboard the Meinwen 24 August 1905  –15 November 1905’ DX/1731, Diary of R. Pendlebury, ‘Transcript of diary of an ocean journey on the S.S. Medic, 30 July to 10 September 1910’

Vestry House Museum, Local Library and Archives, London The Mallinson Papers, Box 12, File 5, Letters of S. Mallinson, ‘Letters’ (no date)

City of Westminster Archives Centre, London 788/179, Diary of Sir A. Lasenby Liberty, Round the World 1888  –1889: Egypt and Ceylon (no date)

Published Shaw Jeffrey, P. Round the World with an Empress by Canadian Pacific: The Personal Log of an Innocent Abroad during the fourth World Cruise of the Empress of Scotland (London and Cheltenham, 1928) ——  Round the World with the ‘Empress of Britain’ (London and Cheltenham, 1933) W.P.R. [Walter P. Ryland], My Diary During a Foreign Tour in Egypt, India, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, Fiji, China, Japan and North America in 1881–2 (Birmingham, 1886)

periodicals Cunard Magazine Illustrated London News Pall Mall Gazette Railway News The Times Vogue White Star Magazine

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bibliography etiquette and advice manuals Anon. How to Travel; Or, Etiquette of Ship, Rail, Coach and Saddle (London, 1879) Campbell-Davidson, L. Hints to Lady Travellers at Home and Abroad (London, 1889) Gould, J.H. Outward Bound: Twentieth Century Ocean Travel to Fascinating Far-Away Lands; A Tour Round the World; A Special Cable Code and much Necessary Information for Travellers (New York, 1905 and 1913) Heaton Armstrong, L. Etiquette up to Date (London, circa 1908) Howard, Lady C.E.C. Etiquette: What to Do, And How to Do It (London, 1885) Leone-Moat, A. No Nice Girl Swears (London, 1933) Miller, W. Wintering in the Riviera with Notes of Travel in Italy and France and Practical Hints to Travellers (London, 1879) Post, E. Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage (New York, 1928 edn) ——  Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage (London and New York, 1937 edn) Strong, W. M. How to Travel Without Being Rich edited and revised by F. Allen (British edn, London, 1938) Terry, E. Etiquette for All: Man, Woman or Child (London, 1925) Tree, V. Can I Help You?: Your Manners–Menus–Amusements–Friends–Charades– Make-Ups–Travel–Calling–Children–Love Affairs (London, 1937) Troubridge, Lady. The Book of Etiquette, Volume II (London, 1926) Vogue’s Book of Etiquette: Present-Day Customs of Social Intercourse with the Rules for Their Correct Observance by the Editors of Vogue (New York, 1935)

fiction Bell, Lady. The Good Ship Brompton Castle (London, 1915) Bennett, M. A Sea-Change (London, 1926) Christie, A. The Mystery of the Blue Train (London, 1928) ——  Murder on the Orient Express (1934), reprinted by HarperCollins (London, 2001) ——  Death on the Nile (1937), reprinted by HarperCollins (London, 2001) Clarke, L. The Borrowed Liner: Narrating the High Adventures of Miss Pellet of Philadelphia, Peter King, and the Lady in the Little Gold Trousers (London, 1916) Delafield, E.M. The Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930), reprinted in The Diary of a Provincial Lady omnibus (London, 2001 edn) ——  The Provincial Lady in America (1934), reprinted in The Diary of a Provincial Lady omnibus (London, 2001 edn) Forster, E.M. Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), reprinted by Penguin (London, 2001) ——  A Passage to India (1924), reprinted by Penguin (London, 2005) Greene, G. Stamboul Train (London, 1932) Raped on the Railway: A True Story of a Lady Who was First Ravished and then Chastised on the Scotch Express (privately printed, London, 1894)

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bibliography Riddell, F. Floating Palace (London, 1933) Townend, W. ‘Collision’, Illustrated London News (December 1936), pp. 44  –  6 Waugh, E. ‘Cruise (Letters from a Young Lady of Leisure)’, in Waugh, E. Work Suspended and Other Stories (1943), reprinted by Penguin Books (London, 1976), pp. 16  –22 Woolf, V. The Voyage Out (1915), reprinted by Oxford University Press (Oxford, 2001)

Archives, Royal Holloway College, University of London ‘A Desperate Chase’, Bedford College, London, Magazine, No. 12 (June 1890), 12–15

Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool Library, Cunard Archive PR5/7, Bindloss, H. ‘Carson’s Luck’, Cunard Magazine, XI:6 (December 1923), 198  –200 PR5/12, Pitt-Kethey, R.S. ‘Angela’s Great Adventure’, Cunard Magazine, XVI:1 (December 1925), 48  –50, 57–  8, 68

ship passenger lists The National Archives, Kew 1890: Series BT27/5  –24 1910: Series BT27/649  –  671 1930: Series BT27/1271–1280

rail passenger figures The National Archives, Kew RAIL 1021/33, Ten Years’ Statistics of British Railways, 1902–1911 (Newcastle-onTyne, 1912) RAIL 393/909, ‘Summary of Statistics of Railways in the United Kingdom, 1859  –1912’ RAIL 411/655, London & South Western Railway, Tables of Statistics for Steamer Services to the following Ports: Channel Islands, Havre, Cherbourg, Caen, Honfleur, Roscoff, Calais, Boulogne and Dieppe, 1880  –1927 (London, 1928) RAIL 266/19, Great Western Railway, General Statistics (Waddington, October 1930) RAIL 398/47, Four Group Railway Companies: Comparative Summary of Financial Accounts And Statistical Returns, Year Ended 31st December, 1930, compared with Year Ended 31st December, 1929 (Stratford, March 1931)

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The National Archives, Kew RAIL 1057/3391, Lieutenant-Colonel R.A. Sargeaunt, R.E., Director General of Rail­ ways, Administration Report on the Railway in India for 1892–  93 (London, 1893)

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Index

Note: literary and artistic works can be found under authors’ and artists’ names Abrahams, E.B. ‘Athens – First Impressions’ 204 advertising 44, 50 early twentieth-century 50–1 see also dress; glamour; transport posters aeroplane, the 4 age impact on journey 4–5 see also fiction A.K.B. ‘From Genoa to the Apennines’ 14, 131 ambiguity in the journey 68, 200–1 Americanization of the journey 124 assisted emigration government schemes 33–4 women’s societies 33 see also emigration; steerage A.T.M. ‘Southampton to Cape Town’ 173, 174 attacks upon women 153 Colonel Valentine Baker case 153–4 see also sex Barnett, Henrietta (Dame) 136–7, 140, 144n.83, 163–4 Bosanquet, Alice 131, 134 Brassey, Annie (Lady) 35, 106, 107, 111–12, 175–6

Bridie, Marion Ferguson 14–15, 122–3, 134–5, 163, 173 Bridges, F.D. 139, 157 Broadwood, Bertha Mason 36, 102, 104, 109 Burns, Anne 95, 138 Carnegie-Williams, Rosa 36, 120 changes to women’s status in Britain 3 chaperoning 45, 159–61 Christie, Agatha Death on the Nile 64, 65, 66, 148, 154 Murder on the Orient Express 65, 66, 67, 68, 147–8 The Mystery of the Blue Train 154 cinema 123, 124 ‘Civis’, ‘Chicago Once More’ 120, 175 class see also journey(er) gaze, the; journeyer hierarchy; passenger class; socio-economic class; steerage; tourist class colonialism and the journey 141 see also ‘Other’, the contact zones 196 continuity in the journey 199–200 and images 44–5 cruise, the 32 Cunard Magazine 43, 148

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index dances 122, 123, 124, 159 danger 2 discourse of 180–2, 187, 188, 189 see also attacks upon women; fiction; journey encounters; male journeyers; ‘Other’, the; sex Davis, Frances (Fanny) 104, 127–8, 130 Dawson, Hester Mary 131–2 deck tennis 122, 123 Delafield, E.M. The Diary of a Provincial Lady 147 The Provincial Lady in America 67–8 destinations 24–6, 28–9 impact upon women 133 as places of liberation 133 diarists as mythmakers 11–12 diary, the 12 and audience 12 and discourse 12–13 and editors 12, 17n.47 diary and letter writing on journey 121 discourse 169–70 and emigrant journeys 170 and gender 185–9 and publication 184–5 and type of journey 183–4 see also identity dress and advertising 52–3 accessories 52–3, 57 etiquette of 82–4, 85–6 D.R.L. ‘An Unsentimental Journey’ 178, 181 E.C.A. ‘A Peep of Italy in the Winter’ 178 Edwards, Amelia B. 36, 41n.117, 102–3, 136, 140 Electrical Association for Women 35 emigration 18, 37n.1 number of women emigrants 18–19 restrictions to immigration to USA 24, 38n.20 see also assisted emigration; steerage

etiquette anxiety about journeying 89 conflicts within 84–7 and domestic etiquette 80 enabling female journeying 89–90 expectations of women 74, 78–80, 84, 164 the ‘perfect journeyer’ 90 how to journey 76–7 influence 73–4 origins and purpose 73, 79–80, 92n.44 and self-expression 77–8, 84–5 and women’s agency 86–7 see also dress; femininity; journey encounters; politeness; scrutiny; sociability; solo women journeyers E.W. ‘Imprudens quid femina possit’ 178–9 fashion as part of journeyer glamour 52–4 see also dress femininity expectations of women 85, 200–1 see also etiquette; sociability Foucault, Michel 108, 169–70 fiction depictions of the journey 61–5 as dangerous 63–4, 154 as female Bildung 62–3 as liberating 61–2 as psychologically challenging 64–5 depictions of journeyers 65–8 and age 66–8 as criminals 66 as disempowered 66 see also romance; sex Flapper, the 54 Forster, E.M. A Passage to India 61, 62, 63, 64 Where Angels Fear to Tread 61, 64 gazing erotic gazing 203 and travel 125–6 see also journey(er) gaze, the; tourist gaze, the

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index gender 6–7 and journey 202–3 see also discourse geography discourse of 179–80, 184 Gladstone, Mary 103–4 glamour 50–2, 55–6, 61 see also fashion; make up Greene, Graham Stamboul Train 65, 66, 151–2 Grün, Jules-Alexander ‘Course de canots à moteur à Monaco’ 50–1 Guest, Theodora (Lady) 35, 102, 105–6, 138–9 H. DE.B.D. ‘In an Italian Third-Class Railway Carriage’ 128 Haigh, Isabel 94, 103 hairstyles 53, 56 Hall, Ellen 121, 128, 135 Hall, Emily 128–9, 135, 157, 160 H.E.M. ‘A Week in the Crimea’ 176–7 heterotopia 108 women’s understanding of 108–10 history discourse of 179, 184 home 101 and journey 102–6, 120, 123–4, 159, 171–3, 197–8 see also continuity in the journey; etiquette; femininity; identity; leisure; liberation; journey space homesickness discourse of 171–2 Hunt, Margaret 108–9, 111, 118n.79, 132–4, 135, 157 identity 11, 171 and discourse 170–1 continuation of domestic identities 171–3 the journey chronicler 174–6

the modern woman 35–7, 124, 180–2 the tourist-traveller 176–80 see also discourse; modernity Illustrated London News 149, 150–1, 153, 159, 166n.52 imperialism and journey 120, 141 see also ‘Other’, the Jones, Emily May 100, 126, 179 journey as a Bildung 132–3 see also fiction journey encounters with men 155–65 etiquette of 80–2, 88–9 journey staff 157–8 with women 130–5 impact of passenger class and journeyer hierarchy 130–2 see also sociability journey leisure 6, 121–5 differences from British leisure 124–5 see also leisure journey length 27–8 journey routine and functionality 76–7, 120 discourse of 174–5, 187 journey as a ‘science’ 193 journey space adaptation of 102–3 division of 94–5, 96–101, 110–11, 116n.27 hierarchy of spatial quality 95–6 and home 101–6 impact of journeyer hierarchy 105–6 public v. private space 97–9 as public spaces 75 use of 103–4, 107 women’s attitudes towards 103–6 see also heterotopia; liminal space; power; space journey staff 3 journey stages 2–3 women’s relations with 111–15 see also journey encounters journey times 28, 30

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index journey(er) gaze, the 125–30 and ethnicity 128 and nationality 128–9 and socio-economic status 129 see also gazing; scrutiny; tourist gaze, the journeyer hierarchy 95–6, 195–6 see also gender; home; journey encounters; journey space; journey(er) gaze, the; luxury; passenger class; power; sex journeying as masculine endeavour 7 trains and ships as bastions of masculinity 8, 110 landscape, scenery, townscape, coastline and the sea discourse of 176–7, 187–8 leisure in Britain 6, 123 similarity to journey leisure 123–4 see also journey leisure liberation 202 and the journey 73, 201–2 and travel 133, 201 see also destinations; fiction; women travellers Liberty, Emma Lasenby (Lady) 98, 161–2, 181 liminal space 108 and journey transport 108 and women 108–10 luxury emergence of 29–30 impact 30–1 see also Nagelmackers, Georges; Pullman, George; Orient Express; railways; ship design make up 60 male journeyers 186–9 marriage impact on journeying 5–6 see also journey leisure meals 122

modernity 34–5 and journey 34, 54, 124 see also identity motivations for journeying 3–4 motorcar, the 4 music making 96–7, 103 Nagelmackers, Georges 29 Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits 29 Napoleon Continental Blockade 27 nature discourse of 177, 184–5, 189 navigation discourse of 36–7, 180, 184–5, 188–9, 193 Orient Express 29, 155 ‘Other’, the 136, 137 encounters with 136–41 absence of solidarity with women 140–1 perceived as entertainment 140 perceived as sexual threat 137–8 reinforcement of stereotypes 139 impact of socio-economic, educational and professional background 137 Pall Mall Gazette 146, 162 Panama Canal, the 30 passenger class 94–5 impact of 95, 129, 130–2, 135 see also journeyer hierarchy passenger figures railways 20, 38n.9 ships 22–3 passenger lists 20–1 format of 21–2 problems with 21 Pennyman, Dora 36, 171–2 Platt, Eira Gwendoline 107, 131, 162 politeness emphasized by etiquette writers 78–9 of the upper class 79

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index power correlation with journeyer hierarchy 111–13 fluidity of 111–12 ships as Panopticons 111 women perceived as powerless 110, 111 women’s possession of 111–12, 114–15 Pullman, George 29 quoits 122, 123 Railway News 20 railways development 26, 28 train decor 29, 95 Raped on the Railway: A True Story of a Lady Who was First Ravished and then Chastised on the Scotch Express 152–3 reputation 61, 88, 129–30, 155–6, 158, 160–1, 194–5 respectability 76, 89, 110, 111, 194–5 and advertising 51, 56–7, 60 R.M.S. ‘Channel Crossing’ 177 Roberts, Margaret 122, 123, 137, 140–1, 156, 160–1, 164–5 romance flirting 156–7 journey seen as opportunity for 146–51 see also chaperoning; journey encounters Sackville-West, Vita 35, 178 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 126–7 scrutiny 75–6, 112, 125, 127–8, 156, 158 see also journey(er) gaze, the seasickness 79, 104 sex absence in advertising 56, 60–1 difficulties in expressing sexuality 152, 158 fear of male sexual aggression 153, 154–5, 161–2 journey perceived as sexual space 146, 151–2, 166n.41

see also journey encounters; Raped on the Railway: A True Story of a Lady Who was First Ravished and then Chastised on the Scotch Express ship companies 26–7, 28 ship design 29–30 decor 95 size 4, 30 skittles 122, 123 Smith, Janet 36, 98–9, 105, 112–13, 125 sociability 120–1, 125, 141 ambivalence towards 134–5 emphasis upon 121 etiquette of 84–5, 86–7 women to be social arbiters 80, 164 see also journey encounters; journey(er) gaze, the; leisure; ‘Other’, the socio-economic class 5 and advertising 53–4 see also etiquette; journey encounters; journeyer hierarchy; politeness; solo women journeyers and age 68 depiction of 49–50, 55–6 etiquette for 87–9 space 94 see also journey space steam power 26 co-existence with sail power 27 effect of 27 see also technology steerage 31 Board of Trade enquiry 31, 146, 162 conditions in 31, 100, 113, 146, 161, 162, 175–6 disappearance of 32, 95 see also assisted emigration; emigration; journey staff; power Stephens, Sarah 110, 113–14, 115, 181 Stokes, Euphemia 33, 120, 122, 129, 132, 137 Stuke, M.J. ‘Corsica’ 176 Suez Canal, the 27–8

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index technology ambivalence towards 180–2 celebration of 35, 37 discourse of 35, 180, 182, 184–5, 188–9 engagement with 35–7 see also railways; ship design; steam power Tissot, Jacques-Joseph, or James 44 ambiguity in depiction of the journey 45, 47, 49, 50 Boarding the Yacht 47 critics of 45, 47 Emigrants 47, 49 The Ball on Shipboard 47 The Gallery of the H.M.S. Calcutta 44, 45 journey as a refined experience 44–5 The Last Evening 45 Portsmouth Dockyard, or, How I Could Be Happy with Either 45, 47 ships as social spaces 44 Waiting for the Train (Willesden Junction) 49–50 tourism 9–10 anti-tourism 10, 89 see also identity; travel tourist class 32 tourist gaze, the 125–6

collective gaze, the 129 romantic gaze, the 129 transport posters 52–61 travel 9 dichotomy between travel and tourism 10 see also liberation; women travellers travel agents 32–3 Cook, Thomas 32–3 problems with 33 Vincent, Kitty (Lady) 157–8 Vogue 54 Waugh, Evelyn ‘Cruise (Letters from a Young Lady of Leisure)’ 149–50 White Star Magazine 43, 82, 95, 96–7, 121 women pirates 3, 9 women sailors 3, 9 women travellers 8, 22–4, 138, 139, 185 as feminist heroines 8, 201 guilt of 173 and identity 173 women’s agency 6, 7, 8, 86–7, 160, 164, 169, 171, 184, 189, 201 Woolf, Virginia 3, 197 The Voyage Out 62–3, 64–5

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