A Stiff Upper Lip, Without a Mustache
Mary Kingsley (1862-1900)
The “lady traveler” was something of a Victorian phenomenon. She shooed hippopotami with her parasol and bicycled across India in bloomers. A painter, collector, or just a wanderer, she cherished her tea after a camel ride. (Isabella Bird drank it from a beef tin with a one-eyed outlaw named Mountain Jim.)
Back home, if she were particularly famous, readers met her ship at the dock and crowded the lecture halls.
During the 40-odd years before the outbreak of the first World War, such genteel globetrotting reached almost epidemic proportions.
writes David Cannadine in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy.
You might expect these women to be the grandmothers of today’s bestsellers like Eat, Pray, Love and Under the Tuscan Sun, in which middle-aged women find renewal and self-fulfillment in foreign lands. Bird was pushing 40 when her doctor advised her to travel for her health. (Would that doctors would prescribe Paris over Paxil today!) Her “weakness” didn’t keep her from Korea, Japan, Hawaii, Australia and the American West. Alexandra David-Neel, the Belgian-French explorer, left for Tibet when she was 43. We get a hint of romance in Neel’s extended stay with a Siamese prince (or so Neel’s husband believed) and Bird’s with Mountain Jim in A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (he proposes).
Truth is, there’s very little self-reflection or personal response in their writing. They favor a chronicle of their adventures, peppered with anecdotes and curiosities, with themselves as an oasis of Englishness and femininity: a sort of stiff-upper lip without the mustache. Mary Kingsley, the intrepid student of cannibal tribes, falls into a hunter’s pit studded with spears and simply notes that if she weren’t wearing a dress, the spears would have gone clean through her. Bird knitted to pass the time in the Colorado wilderness and was best pleased when she came upon a polite British couple among the settlers. Her judgment of Coloradans rests chiefly on their treatment of women and children.
Isabella Bird (1831-1904)
These travelers skirted the male-dominated world of power. They played no part in the Great Game, like the translator-cum-spy Richard Burton, no part in local administration, like George Curzon, and no part in a literary critique of imperialism, like Orwell. They packed heat, yes, but if they shot an elephant, they were just shooting an elephant.
Readers looking for early feminists or colonial critics may find some surprises. Kingsley did not support women’s right to vote; the Workmans, an American couple, complain of poor “service” from the natives. They take as self-evident that their skin and sex — and a pistol — will protect them.
Bird (1831-1904) is perhaps the best known of the set, and the liveliest read; the main branch of my city library carries three or four of her books. In her admiration for natural beauty and sketches of familiar characters, she reminds me of her contemporary Lucy Maud Montgomery, the Canadian writer known for Anne of Green Gables. There are echoes too of the naturalist John Muir, who rhapsodized about much the same territory she covers in A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains.
Her early books are drawn mainly from her letters to her sister Harriet, the “dear pet” who was as domestic as her sister was restless. Bird could barely tolerate the cold and damp in Edinborough, where her family had moved; she set off again whenever she could. As with most people, perhaps, she was most “of her country” when she was abroad.
