Overview

This interdisciplinary study explores both the personal and political significance of climate in the Victorian imagination. It analyses foreboding imagery of miasma, sludge and rot across non-fictional and fictional travel narratives, speeches, private journals and medical advice tracts. Well-known authors such as Joseph Conrad are placed in dialogue with minority writers such as Mary Seacole and Africanus Horton in order to understand their different approaches to representing white illness abroad. The project also considers postcolonial texts such as Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock to demonstrate that authors continue to 'write back' to the legacy of colonialism by using images of illness from climate.

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Reviews

Exploring Victorian Travel Literature is a welcome addition to the literature on a range of themes congregating around the construction of tropicality, the politics of climatic discourse, medical-moral meteorology and the racial economy of health and disease. Howell expertly uncovers the diverse, and often contradictory, uses of climatic determinism in the age of high empire. It is to be hoped that its lingering echoes in our own day will not escape the notice of readers. -- David N Livingstone, Social History of Medicine, vol 28, no 4 Exploring Victorian Travel Literature is a welcome addition to the literature on a range of themes congregating around the construction of tropicality, the politics of climatic discourse, medical-moral meteorology and the racial economy of health and disease. Howell expertly uncovers the diverse, and often contradictory, uses of climatic determinism in the age of high empire. It is to be hoped that its lingering echoes in our own day will not escape the notice of readers. -- David N Livingstone, Social History of Medicine, vol 28, no 4

Exploring Victorian Travel Literature is a welcome addition to the literature on a range of themes congregating around the construction of tropicality, the politics of climatic discourse, medical-moral meteorology and the racial economy of health and disease. Howell expertly uncovers the diverse, and often contradictory, uses of climatic determinism in the age of high empire. It is to be hoped that its lingering echoes in our own day will not escape the notice of readers. -- David N Livingstone, Social History of Medicine, vol 28, no 4

Author Information

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.

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