Studies of nineteenth-century poetry and the novel tend to focus either on Romanticism or on the Victorian period. The same is true of travel writing criticism. Yet while the changes that occurred in society and culture over the course of the 1800s make coherent commentaries on the literature of the entire 100 years difficult to construct, there are benefits in considering the century as a whole. Across the shifts in literary form, style and conventions over the decades, there are clear continuities as well as breaks. The factors to consider in assessing these include the revolution in transport and communications, emigration to the colonies, imperial activity, scientific thought and practice and intellectual currents.

Much travel writing of the 1800s owes its existence to new forms of transport: the steamship, the railway, the bicycle and, at the century’s end, the motor car. The first regular cross-Channel steamer service began in 1820 and in the decades that followed, rail networks spread across Europe. ‘Within thirty years Continental travel had become dramatically quicker, cheaper and more widely available’. Meanwhile, huge increases in literacy rates and book production facilitated the circulation of travel narratives. These developments affected how people travelled and how the accounts of their journeys were written, distributed and read.