Exploring Victorian Travel Literature

Jessica Howell is Wellcome Research Fellow at the Centre for the Humanities and Health, King’s College London, where she researches health and the literature of empire. Her work bridges the fields of Victorian studies and the Medical Humanities by examining colonial illness narratives. She also serves on the board of editors for the University of California Medical Humanities book series with Rodopi.

• Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Prescribing hybridity: climate and the Victorian mixed-race subject; 2. ‘It was too dangerous a place to show fear’: mapping disease and the body; 3. To ‘pay most dearly for their folly’: the climate of African nationalism; 4. ‘Climate proof’: women travellers and survival; 5. ‘Self rather seedy’: colonial pathography; Afterword; Bibliography.

By linking illness to the African environment, the five British writers Howell discusses wrote illness into the framework of Victorian once-popular disease theories. By adeptly exploring how and why her authors clung to anachronistic ideas, Jessica Howell makes a significant contribution to the histories of both science and literature.