‘Going out and doing something’: Victorian tourists in Egypt and the ‘tourist ethic’

Abstract

Through a reading of writings of three British travelers to Egypt in the late nineteenth century – Lucy Duff Gordon, Amelia Edwards, and Talbot Kelly – this article offers insights into the ongoing transformations within the practices of travel and tourism. These writers left behind a record of the difficulties imposed on travelers by the expansion of tourism. The ‘anti-tourism’ evident in Duff-Gordon and Edwards contrasts with Kelly who regarded tourists with pity. While there is a large body of scholarship written in the twentieth century that identifies travel and the rise of tourism with the formation of a ‘leisure class’, Kelly's narrative reminds readers that the experience of tourists could be challenging. In exploring the ‘tourist ethic’, Kelly reveals that when men and women journeyed down the Nile as tourists, they still brought with them the pressures of the industrial society. In seeking to ‘go out and do something’ they came to Egypt and brought with them the need for leisure. Scholars seeking to understand the emergence of tourism as an industry have often portrayed its expansion as unproblematic and nearly inevitable; these Victorians, however, reveal that there was much more ambivalence about these developments than has generally been recognized.

Keywords:

• Egypt
• tourism
• British
• travelers
• monuments
• nineteenth century