Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840: "From an Antique Land" (review)

This complicated book reads quite well cover-to-cover. Nigel Leask has woven several strands together to craft persuasive narratives of the histories of science and literary romanticism—the "curiosity" and "aesthetics" of the title. Leask also refers to (post)colonial theories and illustrates nicely how a multidimensional analysis of the context of travel writing can inform those generalizations.

The book is organized as a series of stories about travels to the "antique lands" of Abyssinia (Ethiopia), Egypt, India, and Mexico. The stories are told through the writings of Europeans, mostly English men and women, but also works in other languages that were available to the British audience. For those interested in the way those four countries were perceived from the late Enlightenment through the eclipse of romanticism, the road map is clear from the table of contents: a chapter on James Bruce's fantasized travels in Abyssinia and the upper Nile (1790), another on the French and then British efforts to capture Egypt and bring it home to London museums, two on Imperial India (through the 1840s), and an account of Alexander von Humboldt's struggles to capture Spanish America on paper. A brief coda shows how the museum entrepreneur William Bullock brought Mexican antiquities to London in the 1820s.

These accounts are valuable for contemporary historians of those regions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Travel writing gives an invaluable perspective, at times because it might be the only eyewitness account; Leask self-consciously is retrieving "lost" texts from rare book rooms. Of, course, these are heavily biased versions of history, but that is a caveat about all texts.

For the reader not familiar with the details of historical contexts, the chapter on "Egyptomania" is the most satisfactory. The events between Napoleon's occupation of Egypt (1798-1801) and the creation of museum displays of Egyptian antiquities in London in the 1820s are a tale of state-sanctioned institutional programs that involved national prestige, connoisseurship, and the gathering of scientific knowledge about archaeology. The process was begun with the savants who were sent by Napoleon to accumulate information for the multivolume Description de l'Égypte (1809-22).

During Muhammad Ali Pasha's control of Egypt (from 1805), John Burkhardt achieved fame as a scientific traveler and for his heroic account of his search for the source of the Nile (1820). The former stage performer Giovanni Battista Belzoni proudly described his role in expropriating antique objects and papyri back to England for eventual display at William Bullock's Egyptian Hall, but not at the prestigious British Museum. Leask places these rival accounts of the search for the Egyptian past as counterpoints to Constantin Volney's ethnographic interest in the lives of contemporary Egyptians and Vivant Denon's enthusiasm at the wonders he saw firsthand. Both men wrestled with the question of whether Egypt could be a rival to classical Greece and Rome as the source of Western civilization.

Leask uses travel writing as an example of changes in British-based social science. "Curiosity" as a concept becomes a fulcrum to tell the stories of European science and popular culture. His controlling image is of two kinds of travel books that were developed during the early nineteenth century—one for the parlor table, the other for the gentleman's library. The former focused on the traveler's human drama and adventures and his (or occasionally her) confrontation with the previously unrecorded, the "curiosity." Books for the scholar's library are increasingly "scientific" in the sense that we understand the term as applying to archaeology and ethnography—"curiosity" as what motivates the scientist.

The two chapters on travel to India are not as self-contained as the earlier ones, owing to the longevity and complexity of Anglo-Indian history. Instead we are placed in the middle of the "creole...