Arctic Mysteries and Imperial Ambitions: The Hunt for Sir John Franklin and the Victorian Culture of Survival

In the year 1855, Francis Galton, the Victorian polymath best remembered today as the founder of eugenics, published a small volume of suggestions for travelers called The Art of Travel. Sized to fit into a pocket, the book was a vade mecum for adventurers, a Manual for all who have to rough it, whether they be explorers, emigrants, missionaries, or soldiers. Guidebooks for Europeans traveling to foreign countries had a long history, stretching back at least to the origins of the Grand Tour in the seventeenth century. The field expanded rapidly in the mid-nineteenth century, as publishers scrambled to accommodate the tourism boom that followed the advent of railway and steamship travel. If, as literary scholars, geographers, and historians have argued, travel literature is a powerful vehicle for the construction and delimitation of knowledge about the world and of particular national or racial groups within it, The Art of Travel represented the arrival of a new vision of the modern, globe-trotting Briton.