"What is there that women cannot do?": Ambiguities of Gender, Genre, and Representation in "Our Tour in Norway," a Travelogue in the Girl's Own Paper

In Across New Worlds, Shirley Foster notes that "women travellers were already a familiar phenomenon before Victoria had come to the throne."¹ By 1889, Lillias Campbell Davidson would declare that women travelling on the Continent were "too common to excite remark."² Even though it was common for ladies to travel in the 1880s, this was not immediately reflected in the pages of the Girl's Own Paper (1880–1956). This is surprising considering that "articles and essays about foreign experience appeared regularly in nearly all of the most widely read magazines," as Maria Frawley has noted.³ The Girl's Own Paper would certainly seem to be situated among these "widely read" titles. Launched by the Religious Tract Society in 1880, it quickly became more popular than its older brother, the Boy's Own Paper (1879–1967). According to Hilary Skelding, by "the end of its first year, the G.O.P. had a readership of two hundred and sixty thousand, almost double that of its brother publication."⁴ Both magazines were intended "to combat the 'pernicious' influence of penny papers"⁵ and achieved wide popularity by offering "information and entertainment without evangelical rigor."⁶

Despite the popular appeal of travel and travel accounts, the Girl's Own Paper published very few travelogues or practical advice for traveling in the first years of its publication history. The only travel account that did appear in the first volume was Dora Hope's two-part recollection, "A Girls' Walking Tour," which recounts a venture undertaken by six young women (the oldest was twenty-four years of age) in southern England. The trip was fairly challenging: the women covered roughly ninety-six miles in six days, an average of sixteen miles per day, carrying their clothes and some utensils in knapsacks. Interestingly, Hope provided explicit advice to "inexperienced walking-tourists," thus showing readers how they might imitate her.⁷ Hope's travelogue did inspire some of her readers, albeit on a smaller scale. A few months after her narrative appeared, the Girl's Own Paper published "A Girl's Summer Afternoon Walk," which notes that the idea for the outing had been "suggested by those two delightful articles."⁸ As Beth Rodgers points out, magazines like the Girl's Own Paper or the Girl's Realm aimed to foster a "dedicated readership amidst an increasingly crowded literary marketplace," and the creation of a community wherein readers could share their experiences was one of their chief strategies.⁹ The fact that Hope's walking tour inspired imitators could be seen as a successful instance of reader engagement and interaction. Nonetheless, the editors did not otherwise encourage female readers to travel.

This reluctance may well have been due to conservative views that discouraged women from travelling for pleasure. For example, in 1858 Edmund Spender had declared, "When a woman's motive in breaking through ordinary restraint [against leaving the private sphere] is the good of others, we either approve or excuse; but where it is clear that there is no self-sacrifice in the case, where we believe her to be prompted by a love of pleasure, or a desire for notoriety, we neither praise nor pardon: we condemn."¹⁰ Arguably, in its first volumes the Girl's Own Paper took a similar approach and was rather sceptical of girls travelling for purely recreational purposes. Thus, articles that afforded opportunities for armchair travelling often emphasized the necessity or utility of a journey, as in the article "Girls' Work in the Mission Field" or in the series "The Colonies and Dependencies of Great Britain."¹¹ Neither of these series of essays encouraged readers to actually travel abroad; in fact, they clearly downplayed the idea of travelling as a leisure activity by presenting foreign countries in the framework of missionary or colonial activities. The few fictional pieces published in the first volumes of Girl's Own Paper that focussed on women travelling abroad did so in the context of emigration.¹² And in...