When Dorothy Middleton published her great book, Victorian Lady Travellers, she started a train of inquiry which, some twenty20 years on, continues to gather momentum - for there is no doubt that while women as a research subject are hot, women travellers are hottest of all.
It used to be said that if women wanted to read about other women, then they themselves would have to do the writing. That tide has turned, and male authors have been admitted to the holy ground as publishers realise there is a market for books not only by women travelers travellers but also about them. Academia too has reached this conclusion and universities now run seminars on travel literature, lecturers publish papers on the subject and postgraduate students offer doctoral theses on it.
Brian Dolan is a lecturer at the University of East Anglia and has already published one book entitled British Travellers in the Age of Enlightenment. His current offering, Ladies of the Grand Tour, grew out of the file on women he amassed while writing the earlier book.
Dolan has themed his book, setting his chosen women in context. Those who embarked on the tour (and some tours were far less grand than others) tended to be well-read and middle-class. Such was the admirable Mary Berry - traveller, writer and blue-stocking - who, following the death of her mother and hell-bent on self-improvement, led her father and sister on a gruelling tour of the continent. There was Lady Spencer, who travelled to relieve her depression, and Mary Wollstonecraft, who wanted to be part of get involved in revolutionary France. And Then there were those who travelled to improve their delicate health, bringing with them a sea-chest of essentials including a rhubarb grater, a set of instruments for cleaning and filing teeth, liquid laudanum and three sets of drawers (enough for a two-year tour).
Brian Dolan has served his readers well with his 18 pages of bibliography, but his book is dense with information and cross-_ _references as if, as a lecturer, he's trying to cram as much as he can into his allotted time. In one sentence alone, he lists seven women who travelled to the continent. So nervous was I that I might forget their names and fail the exam that I reread the sentence four times.
Heroines and Harlots traces the story of women at sea, during the age of the sail. The author, David Cordingly, is hesitant about his gender but quotes Antonia Fraser: "To write about women it is not necessary to be a woman, merely to have a sense of justice and sympathy." Cordingly brings both to his book and more - he is an authority on maritime _history, having worked for 12 years in _London's National Maritime Museum. What we get, therefore, comes straight from the horse's mouth.
Cordingly, too has dealt , deals with themes such as female pirates, whaling wives, lighthouse women, women left behind and women smuggled on board - leading to much frigging in the rigging, an activity often ending in the arrival of a baby. If male and A male born on a warship was known as a son of a gun.
One of Cordingly's most amazing stories concerns the clipper ship Neptune's Car, which in 1837 sailed out of New York, bound for San Francisco. When the master fell ill, his 19-year-old wife, Mary, took over the navigation and successfully brought the huge cargo ship and its crew round the Horn and safely into San Francisco. She was four months' pregnant at the time.
There are plenty of roistering stories here of fourteen14-year-old female sailors, of the carry-on of dastardly female pirates and of the amorous lives of women such as Emma Hamilton, _Nelson's mistress. The over-arching theme of this book, however, relates to the social conditions surrounding life at sea in the eighteen18th and nineteen19th centuries: the sadness of the wives left behind, the loneliness of their husbands while at sea, the homesickness of young boy sailors and the harshness of life on board ship, especially on board British warships.
This was a time of great naval expansion in England and mutiny was something the Admiralty could ill afford. At the close of the 18th century, however, seamen were still being paid wages that had not changed since 1653. At Spithead in 1797, they submitted a petition demanding shore leave, better food, payment for those injured at sea - and improved wages. Their demands were hastily agreed to, but the more militant among the seamen suspected the Admiralty would not pay up, and a mutiny developed. The ringleaders were subsequently hanged from the yardarm, watched by 3,000 spectators standing on specially erected scaffolding. The wife of the main ringleader was refused permission to take her husband's body home for burial, so she stole it from its temporary grave and had it brought to London on a cart, where it lay in state at the Hoop and Horseshoe down pub by the London docks.
The navy had a great need for men, especially in times of war when press-gangs operated openly in ports in both Britain and Ireland. They also worked at sea, intercepting merchant ships coming into dock. Among the people who suffered greatly at the hands of the press-gangs were the women whose men were snatched from them without warning. so that they These women were left without support and their children without fathers.
Such enforced separations were not confined to the lower deck either. Nelson's second-in-command, Capt Collingwood, wrote in a letter that, of the last previous nine years, he had spent only one of them at home.
David Cordingly's love of the sea is evident on every page and at the end of the book he gives us, as a special treat, three naval ballads as well as a glossary of seafaring terms.