Emigration with a Vengeance: Undercover Investigative Journalism and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Amateur Emigrant

This essay examines the vogue for undercover exposés of transatlantic emigration during the late nineteenth century. Styling themselves “amateur emigrants,” investigators disguised their identities and adopted the methods of full participant observation in order to provide newspaper readers with a vicarious experience of the degradations of shipboard steerage travel. Recovery of this journalistic subgenre illuminates the true nature of its most famous exemplar, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Amateur Emigrant (1895), a literary classic that originated as an undercover investigation for the press.