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Urban culture, curiosity and the aesthetics of distance: the representation of picturesque carnivals in early Victorian travelogues to the Levant

The end of the Napoleonic wars ushered in the dawn of mass tourism in Britain. With the return of peace to the continent, British travellers could reach once more those established touristic destinations that had been barred to them for the previous two decades. They also began to venture further afield in greater numbers than ever before and the Levant became a particularly attractive destination – more exotic and more of a novelty than traditional Grand Tour localities, but within relatively easy reach. The motivations and perceptions of such large numbers of travellers were inevitably varied; so too were the accounts they left of their travel experiences. Yet there were patterns within this diversity. Not only did tourists flock in great numbers to iconic destinations such as the Egyptian pyramids or the Athenian acropolis. The lure of exotic lands, also, was such a common theme that it calls for an explanation. As Nigel Leask has suggested, it raises the problem of the particular aesthetics associated with travel writing: ‘the aesthetics of distance – the traveller’s desire for the distant’. Distance is crucial to Leask’s enquiry because, as he claims, the ‘concepts of wonder and curiosity survived longer in the discourse of distant travel than in many other fields’. Egypt and then Mexico were particularly associated with this survival of curiosity in the public imagination. My reading of early Victorian travelogues to the Levant validates this interpretation. However, it suggests that Egypt and the Levant – indeed much of the Mediterranean – continued to play an important part in the survival of curiosity throughout the 1840s. I will argue in particular that Levantine travelogues written for wide circulation testify to a greater role than found by Leask of vulgar curiosity which borrowed directly from ‘the popular culture of the fairground’ as opposed to