The Idea of Europe in British Travel Narratives, 1789–1914 by Katarina Gephardt, and: Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Disease, Race and Climate by Jessica Howell (review)

What makes a European? What connects or divides the millions of people who inhabit the geographical area designated “Europe”? What ideas or ideals are projected onto that geographical space, and can they be made to stick?

The urgency of these questions in the present political context gives Katarina Gephardt’s monograph the virtue of timeliness, in addition to its value as good scholarship. The Idea of Europe in British Travel Narratives, 1789–1914 shows that questions about the fate of Greece, the future of Turkey, the intentions of Russia, and the leadership of Britain were as concerning to the Romantics and Victorians as they are to us today. The off-balance geopolitical logic, which has determined that the idea of Europe should be defined by centers of influence in the north and west and destabilized by peripheries in the south and east, assumed many of its current rhetorical contours in the fiction and travel writing of the long nineteenth century, as this detailed study demonstrates.

Gephardt begins with a consideration of contemporary British ambivalence toward the European Union and states: “The aim of this book is to trace the sources of such attitudes to nineteenth-century imaginative geographies found in fictional and autobiographical narratives of European travel” (4). But the scope of the work is actually much greater, as it delves into the discursive history of the general stress under which the concept of Europe now finds itself, and not only in Britain. The medieval concept of Christendom, the Enlightenment value of civilization, and the post-French Revolution ideal of political liberty contended for rhetorical space in nineteenth-century writings that sought to pin down the ideological range of Europe and on that basis to defend or extend its borders (actual or perceived). The same ideas of religion, civilization, and freedom are invoked in today’s debates on refugees, territorial aggression, and fiscal responsibility within the realms of NATO and the EU. Gephardt notes that as early as the first two decades of the nineteenth century, we find texts that “respond to a shift from the idea of Europe as based on a stable core set of values to the idea of Europe as an ever-evolving commonwealth of distinct nations” (65). Yet today the citizens of Europe and their leaders still strive to identify the “stable core” that will justify the travails of their “ever-evolving commonwealth.”

Each of the four main chapters of the book deals with a different period, from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century. Each addresses a cluster of autobiographical travel narratives and fictional works that are linked by their shared geographical focus and rhetorical characteristics. The discussion of each of these clusters of texts revolves around a central image—garden, costume, prison, and mirror—that is explored in both literal and figurative manifestations. Each chapter also introduces a different way of positioning Englishness in relation to the European subject matter of the texts analyzed. The four-part conceptual structure of superimposition, apposition, juxtaposition, and transposition sometimes seems a little strained in its chapter-by-chapter application, but provides some useful alternatives to the simpler patterns of opposition on which interpretations of this discursive terrain so often rely.

One of Gephardt’s key themes is Britain’s ambivalence throughout the period about whether to claim kinship with, or dissociate from, its European neighbors. Would Britain seek to lead, or to except itself from, what has variously been termed “the concert of Europe” and “the European project”? This is, of course, an enduring question, which was answered most recently, and emphatically, by the majority “Leave” vote in the Brexit referendum, an event for which this study provides a fascinating cultural history...