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‘Going out and doing something’:Victorian tourists in Egypt and the‘tourist ethic’Stephen L. Keck aa Department of International Studies , American University ofSharjah , Sharjah, United Arab EmiratesPublished online: 15 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Stephen L. Keck (2010) ‘Going out and doing something’: Victorian touristsin Egypt and the ‘tourist ethic’, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, 8:4, 293-304, DOI:10.1080/14766825.2010.521249

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

Stephen L. Keck∗

Department of International Studies, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United ArabEmirates

(Received 1 September 2010; final version received 1 September 2010)

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

Keywords: Egypt; tourism; British; travelers; monuments; nineteenth century

The development of Egypt as a travel destination in the late nineteenth century willprobably always interest those who study tourism. This article charts its development byexploring the writings of three British travelers: Lucy Duff Gordon (1821–1869) whoencountered Egypt near mid-century; Amelia Edwards (1831–1892), whose journey andits legacy are well known to students to modern Egyptian history; and R. Talbot Kelly(1861–1934) – a forgotten figure – albeit one who might well represent the world viewof the late Victorian/Edwardian travelers who were beginning to descend upon Egypt inincreasing numbers. These figures lived through the transition which Boorstin (1961)defined as the ‘decline of the traveler and the rise of the tourist’. Their experiences illustratethe development of tourism as an industry and the problems encountered by tourists inEgypt. By the mid-century, Egypt had become a subject of widespread fascination in theWestern world. Quite aside from the vast archaeological discoveries which opened‘ancient Egypt’ and produced ‘Egyptomania’, lay a dramatic series of events which

ISSN 1476-6825 print/ISSN 1747-7654 online

# 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14766825.2010.521249

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∗Email: skeck@aus.edu

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ultimately culminated in British colonial rule. Yet, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869,the British intervention in the country in 1882, the death of General Gordon at Khartoum in1885 and Lord Kitchener’s defeat of the Mahdist forces in 1898 collectively ensured thatthe development of ‘modern Egypt’ could hardly be considered inevitable or easy.

Nonetheless, the attractions of antiquity proved to be more powerful than apprehensionsof political instability because as the nineteenth century began to draw to a close, it wasevident that Egypt was an increasingly popular ‘destination’ for tens of thousands of tour-ists – most of whom arrived with the expectations of the adventures associated withencountering a foreign culture. Scholars interested in tracing the expansion of Europeancolonialism have regarded Egypt during the last decades of the nineteenth century as sig-nificant. The political ramifications of British presence in Egypt have been tied to the sub-sequent development of nation states in the Middle East. Late nineteenth century Egypt wasalso important because it was becoming a significant tourist destination. Hazbun (2006) hasrecognized that Egypt was the ‘first major region outside of Europe’ to become a placewhere ‘travel to a distant exotic territory’ was increasingly both convenient and affordable(p. 3). Egypt, as such, was a place where some of the rituals and routines, which would laterbecome associated with the metropolitan ‘leisure class’, were purchased. Since it is possibleto argue that sightseeing – a major feature of tourism – is a universally and ‘essentiallymodern’ activity (MacCannell, 1999), there is sufficient warrant for locating its develop-ment as one of the most significant historical trajectories of the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies. Tracing the emergence of Egypt as a tourist destination, then, amounts to reco-vering a major event in the evolution of the global networks which would do much toshape many of the leisure cultures of the twentieth century.

Despite the fact that nineteenth century Egypt was frequently represented as ‘other’ and‘exotic’, it remains the case that British travel writing helped to ensure that it was a placethat became broadly familiar in England. Those who read travel accounts and studied theguidebooks certainly knew that they were venturing to places far from home and mind;but they were, nevertheless, made increasingly confident that they would be able to dothese things within a familiar – if now mobile – world because these texts encouraged pro-spective travelers to believe that they could make these journeys in comfort, with goodcompany and, above all, in safety. In fact, it is clear from studying this large body of litera-ture – which has been invoked to document ‘orientalism’ or ‘the tourist gaze’ – that theEgyptians were hardly passive in the face of foreign tourists. Rather, they encouraged,anticipated and capitalized on these tourists by finding ways to make their country as man-ageable for them as possible. In other words, the realities behind the tourist gaze were com-plicated and diverse: they involved not only the strands of ‘orientalist’ discourses whichmight make Egypt vivid first in ‘daydreaming and fantasy’ (Urry, 1996) and then as adestination, but also the many sectors of commercial activity that had a direct stake inmanufacturing tourist experiences. If Egypt was an exotic other – more importantly,it was domesticated as a safe exotic other. In Belated travelers, Behdad (1994, p. 13)noted that a number of Americans and Europeans visited the Middle East and alreadysensed that ‘the orient’ might well disappear in the wake of a burgeoning travel industry.These travelers undertook an ‘exoticist project . . . of coming after what had comebefore’. As such, these ‘belated travelers’ came to the region with a strong drive to encoun-ter, experience and represent its places and peoples as Other and exotic.

However, while Duff-Gordon, Edwards and Kelly would travel with their own anxietiesabout Egypt and the difficulties inherent in seeing it, they understood nonetheless that theirjourneys (and narratives) and experiences were unique and worth recording. Not surpris-ingly, they also shared a profound disinclination to see themselves as representative in

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any way of the growing numbers of tourists who were coming to Egypt in the second half ofthe nineteenth century. In fact, one of the main goals of this article is to recover preciselytheir protests of difference. For Duff-Gordon, Edwards and Kelly, the key differentiationwas not so much between themselves and the peoples of Egypt – which they neverdenied – but from the ‘tourists’ who also came to Egypt, and did so as a collectivemass. In The beaten track: European tourism, literature and the ways to culture, 1800–1918, Buzard (1993, p. 4) noted that ‘antitourism’ was itself inseparable from the experi-ence of tourism itself because the concept ‘touristic’ connoted a ‘region in which all experi-ence is predictable and repetitive, all cultures and objects mere “touristy self-parodies”’(Buzard, 1993). Consequently, an essential part of being a tourist was to find ways toensure the opposite; an individual’s experience should instead be authentic, spontaneous,possibly exotic and unrepetitive – making every tourist implicitly (and often explicitly)‘antitouristic’. This discussion will situate the works of Duff-Gordon, Edwards and Kelly‘against the grain’ capturing their complaints about tourism in order to exhibit the differentstrains of their ‘antitourism’ because their complaints can be understood to be symptomaticof a burgeoning industry. Their apprehensions about the phenomenon looked ahead tomany of the later criticisms of tourists and tourism. Duff-Gordon, writing the earliest, sep-arated herself from the canon of travel writing about the region; her opposition to it in favorof her own authentic experience would find numerous echoes in the anti-touristic writingsof many in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who protested no matter how muchthey might travel, see and be entertained, that they were in no way to be confused with sim-pleminded tourists. Edwards, witnessing the advent of Thomas Cook’s tours, lookedaskance to these new travelers, but also lamented the impact that tourist practices werebeginning to have upon Egypt’s ancient monuments; in so doing, her writings lookedahead to twentieth century complaints tourism was destructive for local environments, ecol-ogies and societies. Last, Kelly, who had lived in Egypt in 1882, returned nearly twodecades later, complaining that conditions for travel and sightseeing had become far lessfavorable, leaving him to pity those tourists who were now encountering the land and itspeoples. Just as students of tourism would later argue that tourists saw and understoodlittle, Kelly sensed that while growing numbers of tourists were arriving in Egypt, theywere doing so on increasingly restrictive and unpleasant terms. Taken together, these nar-ratives reveal that tourists increasingly labored against the many organized structures oftravel which ensured that they journeyed with an extensive range of preconceptionsabout their destination. Accordingly, if these figures came to Egypt with any kind of‘tourist gaze’ they soon learned that travelers to the land encountered something possiblyopposite: the inability to journey to and experience the country apart from the mediatingpressures connected with the local tourist industry. For our purposes, then, these threeBritons are interesting because their narratives provide us with vivid – if incomplete –picture of the growth of an indigenous hospitality industry which by the end of the nine-teenth century had arrived as part of the now packaged Egyptian antiquities. In very differ-ent ways, then, Duff-Gordon, Edwards and Kelly were complaining about the commercialand cultural practices which were in the process of making Egypt into a commodity whichmight be easily consumed (Hazbun, 2006).

Lucie Duff Gordon: overcoming the legacies of travel writing

In 1862, Lucie Duff Gordon journeyed to Egypt; concerns with her health motivated hertravels. She had already been to South Africa (which led to a book called Letters fromthe Cape [1864]), but decided to go next to Egypt where her daughter Janet lived.

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Unlike the vast numbers of tourists who followed, Lucie Duff Gordon was not seeking thechance to explore ruins, but a favorable climate which would enable her to battle tubercu-losis. Duff Gordon spent much of the 1860s in Egypt, dying in Luxor in 1869. Her Lettersfrom Egypt (1865) form a travel narrative based upon her experiences between 1862 and1865 and depict a deeply intimate encounter with the country and its inhabitants.

Duff Gordon’s experience in Egypt could hardly be considered typical of the many whocame to view its ancient sites. To begin with, Duff Gordon came from an intellectuallydistinguished family, which provided her with an outstanding number of contacts. Moreinteresting, by the time Lucie Duff Gordon went to Egypt, she was also the well-knownfriend of Azimullah Khan who, in the 1850s, had come to Britain and would be implicatedin the massacre of British civilians at Cawnpore during the Indian Mutiny in 1857. DuffGordon refused to concede that he had played any role in the massacre and wrote to afriend that we shall ‘never know . . . the native side of the question’ (cited in Frank,192). With a deep friendship with someone who came from India and possessed an alterna-tive outlook from her own, Duff Gordon was already different from the vast numbers ofmen and women who would leave metropolitan locations for the first time to venture tothe growing number of ‘exotic’ destinations – many of which were now within seeminglysafe parts of European empires.

Nevertheless, there are reasons for regarding Duff Gordon as an author in the same genea-logical tradition of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) and Sophia Lane Poole(1804–1891). Montagu, who a century earlier, had written letters from Constantinopledepicting harems and other parts of a world unknown and unseen to her British readers.Poole was the brother of William Edward Lane (1801–1876) who traveled to Egypt andeventually produced Description of Egypt and the better known Manners and customs ofthe modern Egyptians (1837). With encouragement from her brother, Poole published TheEnglishwoman in Egypt which was written partly to describe things which her siblingcould not see (Poole, 2003 cited in Kararah, 2003). Meyda Yegenoglu has argued thatMontagu and Poole’s writings reflected the condition of ‘supplementarity’ wherebyfemale authors supplement the dominant orientalist male subject. Yengenoglu asserts thatat the core of this orientalist vision is a desire to see beneath the veil and into the harem –things which are forbidden to males. Therefore, female writers such as Poole and Montaguare critical because they supplement (but never actually challenge) the male perspectiveby confirming its vision of the Eastern – especially Islamic – cultures. Yegenoglu empha-sizes Poole’s ability to supplement what was missing from her brother’s account: ‘all thathe has written respecting the manners and customs of the women of this country, I havefound to be not only minutely accurate, but of utmost value to me in preparing me for thelife which I am now leading’ (Poole cited in Yegenoglu, 1998). Poole noted that his ‘infor-mation . . . being derived from other men, is of course imperfect; and he has anxiously desiredthat I should supply its deficiencies’, which she was to accomplish by ‘my own personalobservation, and by learning as much as possible of the state, and morals of the women,and the manner in which they are treated, from their own mouths’ (Yegenoglu, 1998).

Duff Gordon, may well have been inspired by both Poole and Montagu, but she hardlyserves as a ‘supplemental’ figure. Instead, of making a journey to Egypt because of herhusband or brother’s interests, she went alone and wrote long letters to her husband.More important, Duff Gordon started with a different stance: she was suspicious at leastof British policies and open to engaging Islam and local cultures. To be sure, she wouldget to see things which males could not and she certainly understood that her ‘supple-mental’ qualities would enable her to write about Egypt in a way which would appeal toreaders at home, but her travel experience had an integrity (and authenticity) of its own.

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Her experiences were hardly ordinary – she befriended a wide number of persons in Egypt,managed slaves, and stayed in the country long enough to appreciate its different seasons,and visited places not seen by most Europeans. Letters from Egypt (1865) proved to be agreat success: it was reprinted three times that year. (Frank, 2007) British readers wouldhave recognized that Duff Gordon was not a tourist in the ordinary sense of the term;Letters from Egypt reveal a journey which was highly unusual because in this case the tra-veler ventured to Egypt and developed a remarkable degree of intimacy with the people thatshe met. However, even these experiences were to some extent prefabricated by the trave-ler’s previous reading. That is, it is evident from her letters that a number of her most sig-nificant encounters come from experiences which defied the preconceptions and stereotypeswhich she had of Egyptian life.

Duff Gordon presents a view of travelers before the travel boom – but she is clearlyaware that the trends are changing. Yet, in starting with an intertextual vantage point –she was, in fact, typical of many travelers – especially those who traveled before therise of mass tourism – in that she began with a relatively well-defined sense of expectationsabout her destination. Her criticisms of Harriet Martineau, whose journey to the USA hadresulted in some impressive publications which established her as a major travel writer,were based upon a rejection of both what she understood to be the growing prejudices oftravel writing and an awareness that nature and conditions of travel were themselves intransition. Duff Gordon’s treatment of Martineau’s Eastern life, present and past (1848)acknowledged that the book’s

descriptions are excellent, and it is true as far as it goes; but there is the usual defect; to her, as tomost Europeans, the people are not real people, only part of the scenery. She evidently knewand cared nothing about them and had the feeling of most English travellers that differences ofmanners are a sort of impassable gulf; the truth being that their feelings and passions are justlike our own. It is curious that all the old books of travels that I have read mention the natives ofstrange countries in a far more natural tone, and with far more attempt to discriminate character,than modern ones, e.g. Carsten Niebuhr’s Travels here and in Arabia, Cooks Voyages and manyothers. Have we grown so very civilized since a hundred years, that outlandish people seem tous like mere puppets, and not like real human beings? Miss Martineau’s bigotry against Coptsand Greeks is droll enough, compared to her very proper reverence for ‘Him who sleeps inPhilae’, and her attack upon the harems is outrageous. She implies that they are scenes ofdebauchery. I must admit that I have not seen a Turkish harem, and she apparently saw noother, and yet she fancies the morals of Turkey to be superior to those of Egypt. Very oftena man marries a second wife, out of a sense of duty, to provide for a brother’s widow andchildren, or the like . . . modern travellers show strange ignorance in talking of foreignnations in the lump, as they nearly all do. (Duff-Gordon, 2001, p. 180)

Victorian readers might have enjoyed the irony that Duff Gordon’s criticism of Martineauwas based upon her inability to engage Egypt’s people, because they may well have remem-bered that in Society in America (1837) and in Retrospect on Western travel (1838), Marti-neau demonstrated both interest and insight into the people that she had met in the USA.Duff Gordon’s critique of Martineau looked ahead to the era of global travel because shewas aware that the conditions in which people ventured were changing – movingtowards a set of experiences which had the effect of depersonalizing the journey.

Her attitude towards Egypt is also at variance from many subsequent travel writers. DuffGordon is impressed by Islam – deftly engaging it by looking not only at beliefs, but theways in which the religion shaped everyday life. She observed that social equality existed inEgyptian society: one must ‘come to the East to understand absolute social equality. . . as allMuslims are ipso facto brothers, money and rank are looked on as mere accidents’.

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She added that in Alexandria ‘all of this changed; the European ideas and customs havenearly extinguished the Arab, and those which remain are not improved by the contact’(Duff-Gordon, 2001).

Given these interests, Duff-Gordon’s relative indifference to antiquities is almostpredictable. She complained about the graffiti left at Abu Simbel (Frank, 2007), but thedegradation of Egypt’s monuments was not a major concern for her. She was aware thatthey are endangered – but it hardly worried her. In fact, Duff-Gordon acted as many didduring the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century in that she was not beyond takingsmall artifacts and giving them to friends. (Frank, 2007) More important to Duff-Gordonwere Egypt’s peoples – and their beliefs, values and daily practices.

For these reasons, Duff Gordon serves as an example which runs contrary to the tropesassociated with ‘Egyptomania’. For this woman – writing in the 1860s when Ismail Pasha’smodernization drive was everywhere around her – it would have probably been impossibleto foresee that Britain would make Egypt (which was partially under Ottoman dominion)part of the British empire – the country and its people became progressively less ‘other’.The chief differentiation seems to occur between the narrator and those who might bedescribed as ‘proto-tourists’; that is, in Letters from Egypt it is the traveling Europeans(and to a lesser extent the Americans) who increasingly come to be regarded and rep-resented as the ‘other’ in this context.

Ameila Edwards: rescuing antiquity

With the publication of A thousand miles up the Nile (1877), Edwards joined Martineau andIsabella Bird as one of the century’s most significant female travel writers. This workprovided a detailed account of her journey from 1873 to 1874; it reveals, as such, thatEdwards was as determined to know as to see: she was conversant not only with the vastliterature about Egypt, but she had also studied hieroglyphics. Her knowledge of Egyptreflected sustained reading and she was aware that many were coming to the countrywith less intellectual rigor. By adopting the conventions of travel writing, she was ableto show Egypt as she herself had witnessed it – ensuring that her readers would have asense of discovery about the country’s ancient monuments. However, in Thebes,Edwards (2004, pp. 415–416) confessed that she was hardly coming to her subjectwithout preconceptions:

As a child, ‘The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians’ had shared my affections with‘The Arabian Nights’. I had read every line of the old six-volume edition over and over again.I knew every one of the six hundred illustrations by heart. Now I suddenly found myself in themidst of old and half-forgotten friends. Every subject on these wonderful walls was alreadyfamiliar to me. Only the framework, only the colouring, only the under-foot, only the mountainslope outside, were new and strange. It seemed to me that I had met all these kindly brownpeople years and years ago – perhaps in some previous stage of existence; that I hadwalked with them in their gardens; listened to the music of their lutes and tambourines;pledged them at their feasts. Here is the funeral procession that I know so well; the trialscene after death, where the mummy stands upright in the presence of Osiris, and sees hisheart weighed in the balance . . .. It seems to me that the world has been standing still inhere for these five and thirty years.

Not surprisingly, Edwards insisted on the difference between herself and the less-studiedtravelers. Thomas Cook had brought his first tour group to Egypt in 1869 (Tyldesley,2005); Edwards, with her hard won knowledge of the country’s past, had nothing butscorn for these travelers noting that the ‘people in dahabeeyahs despise Cook’s tourists’

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(Edwards, 2004). It should be pointed out that Cook and his clients received scorn fromother Britons traveling on the Nile. For example, William Howard Russell, the internationalcorrespondent for the Times, looked askance at the whole enterprise. Russell was part of theentourage of the Prince of Wales, who was also on the Nile and regarded Cook’s party as outof place. His description of Cook: ‘the energetic gentleman who has incurred so muchopprobrium for his organizing tendencies to lead tourists all over the world’ (cited inBrendon, 1991, p. 126) reflected the discontent about the expansion of tourism whichEdwards shared. The antipathy towards Cook was echoed by who derisively labeled his tra-velers as ‘Cookies’ or ‘Cookites’ (Gregory, 2001). These invectives hardly seemed to haveimpacted the perceptions of tourism in Egypt: by the early 1880s, some 5,000-6,000 touristspassed through Cook’s Cairo’s office (Withey, 1997).

Edwards’ most important concern went beyond organized commercial vulgarity as hernarrative ponders the loss of decline and loss of Egypt’s ancient buildings and temples. Forexample, she scolded Auguste Mariette for carrying away many artifacts from Serapeum toParis. Edwards took a broad view of Egypt’s past, noting that destruction of ancient build-ings was not only the product of the nineteenth century, but part of a longer process. Writingwith respect to Thebes, she observed that Memphis had once been a great city, but ‘all thatremains of Memphis, eldest of cities – a few huge rubbish heaps, a dozen or so brokenstatues, and a name!’ (Edwards, 2004). Edwards explained that this massive city – wellknown to her from Herodotus – provided the building material for ‘modern Cairo’(Edwards, 2004). Furthermore, Edwards and her party discovered a tomb at Abu Simbeland placed their names near the door. However, she noted that in a very brief period, thesite had already suffered from human contact:

I was told that our names are partially effaced, and that the wall paintings which we had thehappiness of admiring in all their beauty and freshness, are already injured. Such is the fateof every Egyptian monument, great or small. The tourist carves it all over with names anddates, and in some instances with caricatures. The student of Egyptology, by taking wetpaper ‘squeezes’, sponges away every vestige of the original colour. The ‘collector’ buys andcarries off everything of value that he can get; and the Arab steals for him. The work of destruc-tion, meanwhile, goes on apace. There is no one to prevent it; there is no one to discourage it.Every day, more inscriptions are mutilated – more tombs are rifled – more paintings and sculp-tures are defaced. The Lourve contains a full-length portrait of Seti I, cut out bodily from thewalls of his sepulchre in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings. The Museums of Berlin, ofTurin, of Florence, are rich in spoils which tells their own lamentable tale, when scienceleads the way, is it wonderful that ignorance should follow? (Edwards, 2004, p. 136)

Edwards’s trip resulted in more than a splendid work of travel literature. In 1882, Edwards(along with Dr Reginald Poole, an Egyptologist who was the son of Sophia Poole, and thesurgeon Sir Erasmus Wilson) established the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF). This fundwhich had the support of Mariette and Gaston Maspero was designed to conduct properexcavations with the consent of the Egyptian authorities. The EEF was important foranother reason: it helped to establish that the fate of Egyptian antiquities was too importantto be left to local authorities.

Rather, the labors of Edwards and others was to make Egypt not only an exotic place,but an international cause. This development paralleled others in the history of heritagesuch as John Ruskin’s work in the late 1870s with St Mark’s cathedral in Venice. The pro-spect of both the industrialization of Venice and the restoration of St Marks (which Ruskinbelieved to be destructive) motivated Ruskin and a number of British and Venetian patronsto raise funds for the protection of the cathedral, thereby establishing the fate of Venice’s

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buildings, an international cause. Yet, in making these sites important global conservationprojects, Edwards was probably coming much closer to Thomas Cook than she realized.In both cases, the Egypt (and Venice’s) monuments and old buildings were gaining attentionof the education classes in Europe and North America, making them at once in need ofpreservation and attractive to the ever larger numbers of tourists who might now ventureabroad to see these sites while they still could. The work of the EEF proved to be part ofthe much larger advocacy of causes related to both excavation and preservation inEgypt. These efforts, of course, also had the unintended consequence of making Egypt(like Venice) an even more attractive tourist destination.

R. Talbot Kelly: painting Egypt and watching tourists

In Egypt: Painted and described (1902) R. Talbot Kelly brought a unique perspective to thesubject because he aimed to present a ‘broadly pictorial representation of the life andscenery’ devoting particular attention to ‘those phases of each which lie off the beatentrack’. Kelly, who has been remembered as much for his writing about Burma (Keck,2004; Pollack, 1998), was different than most travel writers because as a painter hebegan with the problem of trying to represent what he saw. More important, his effort atstaying ‘off the beaten track’ meant that he assumed a degree of anti-tourism from thevery outset: he sought to paint and present Egypt differently than he would assume thata tourist would view it. Kelly, who would write Burma: Painted and described (1905),aimed to take the realities which might be associated with the ‘tourist gaze’ and challengethem. In addition, Kelly had lived in Egypt in 1883 and he could not help but chronicle thebig changes – including the transformation of tourism – which Egypt was experiencing.

Yet, he also traveled in the places frequented by tourists and chose to write for thosewho would follow him. Therefore, his narrative contains a fundamental ambivalence: hesought to follow the conventions of mass travel writing and describe what he had seenand understood; at the same time, he labored with the melancholic recognition that the tour-ists who would come later would be even less likely to view and comprehend; or evenworse, these subsequent tourists might be so shaped by their expectations and desensitizedby their routines that they might even be indifferent to what they would actually see.

Since the proliferation and increasingly specialization of guidebooks marks the evol-ution of tourism in the last decades of the nineteenth century, it is instructive to make a refer-ence to the Baedeker guide to Egypt (1898). The Baedeker provided a wealth of informationabout not only Egypt’s sites, but about the things which might shape a traveler’s itinerary.This included information about expenses, the best season to travel, traveling companions,passports, hotels, telegraph offices, mail and public safety. Specific sections were devoted toDragomans and Bakshish, as well as guidelines for cultural interaction tactfully labeled‘Intercourse with Orientals’. The Baedeker also provided detailed options for those whosigned up with Thomas Cook as the book listed the daily itinerary for the ‘Three-WeekSteamers’. These itineraries were well structured as the Baedeker warned: ‘In all these devi-ations from the usual terms, very strict adherence to the terms of the special arrangement isexacted’ (Baedeker, 1898). At the same time, the increasingly planned itineraries werematched by the larger goals of tourists; after all, Boorstin (1961) once observed these guide-books also ‘helped to raise tourist expectations’. For our purposes, Kelly was viewing tour-ists who were swelling in numbers, organization and ambitions.

Kelly looked to create pictures which might convey the reality of Egypt, all of whichwould culminate in a volume of writing. More familiar, he saw Egypt as almost infinitely‘picturesque’ as it was a place which could elicit many possible pictures. While the idea of

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the ‘picturesque’ need not detain us here, it should be pointed out that the aesthetic conven-tion behind connecting the attractiveness of a location to its capacity to furnish pleasingpictures had been in place in the western world for at least four generations before Kellyjourneyed to Egypt. A brief examination of his text reveals that he describes places inEgypt as ‘picturesque’ (a term Edwards also favored) at least 34 times. More direct,Kelly painted a large number of watercolors to illustrate the text. A few choice examplesdepict the manner in which Egypt could be understood as ‘picturesque’: Kelly offeredimages such as ‘A Desert Study at Tel el-Kebir’, ‘An Arab Cafe, Cairo’, ‘A Wady in theMokattam Hills’, ‘The Pyramids of Giza from the Desert’, a ‘Pastoral near Damietta’and many other scenes which he felt were at once representative and pleasing.

More to the point, however, is Kelly’s presentation of the remains of Egypt’s ancientpast. For unlike many tourists who made their leisure pilgrimages down the Nile, he wasfascinated with the land’s entire history. For Kelly, Egypt’s past was interesting as a totalitybecause he found the recent past nearly as arresting as antiquity. For instance, he took hisreaders to Tel El Kebir, where the British defeated Urabi’s army in 1882: the ‘battle-field iswell worth a visit’ as the ‘forts and trenches are still practically perfect, . . . twenty years ofwind and weather have done little to destroy these relics of the famous fight’ (Kelly, 1902).

Kelly found that Mameluke Cairo to be no less interesting as it furnished him with anearly inexhaustible source for arresting pictures. Kelly was obviously aware that many tra-veled to see the celebrated ruins of ancient Egypt. Yet, his treatment of the subject is deci-sively different than Edwards’. As we have seen, the latter worried profoundly that Egypt’streasures were being systematically despoiled. Kelly was nearly indifferent to the process –he noted particular successes of restoration and conservation, but more obvious was thepessimistic tone which he adopted when writing about encountering ancient sites. Forinstance, a visit to Giza to see the pyramids was not as easy, it might be frequently rep-resented in celebratory accounts of travelers. Instead, going to Giza could never mean anuninterrupted encounter with pyramids; unfortunately, Kelly (1902) believed that onlyrepeated visits to the site could develop any ‘real appreciation’ because the pyramids andthe sphinxes required significant familiarity on the part of the beholder. However, thereal issue for Kelly (1902) was the difficulties now inherent in visiting these places: a tra-veler must put up with the ‘regulation camel-ride’ and the ‘constant irritation of importunateguides and curio-sellers’ leaving the beholder ‘far too tired’ to properly appreciate themonument.

Yet, these hassles were actually improvements which came with the developing touristindustry. In 1883, even when Kelly had done ‘everything which is expected of the well-regulated tourist’ he had had a scary encounter when visiting the pyramids. Because theconflict with Urabi had temporarily undermined the tourist trade, Kelly and his friendencountered a ‘crowd of hungry-looking natives’, who began to clamor for ‘backsheesh’and when they did not receive it actually went so far as to attack their carriage. In contrast,surveillance and police presence are what tourists can now expect when they visit Egypt’skey sites; Kelly (1902) observed that today the ‘Arabs are quite well-behaved, and authorityis represented by several policemen who constantly patrol. . .the monuments as a protectionto travelers’.

Nonetheless, Kelly acknowledged that Egypt’s ancient sites were critical to any trip tothe country. However, these impressive monuments were put into a much deeper affectionfor the country and its people. Kelly sought to get his audience to understand that Egyptwould be interesting even without the pyramids, Luxor or Abu Simbel. Furthermore,Kelly believed that tourists might come to be disappointed by what they might find, asmany of the temples were not even attractive:

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with the single exception of Philas, none of the temples as they appear-to-day are intrinsicallybeautiful, and in most cases are so surrounded and smothered by squalid dwellings . . . . Karnakis sufficiently free from such obstruction and impresses by its vastness; . . . The real charmwhich draws people to the river is undoubtedly its own beauty, and the interest of life itsupports. (Kelly, 1902, p. 77)

If Edwards recognized key features of monuments when she beheld them for the first time,it occurred to Kelly that if tourists were not adequately prepared they might look andsee squalor rather than grandeur. Yet, Kelly’s knowledge of the monuments extended towatching the tourists who gathered to see them. In contrast to Edwards, who had clearlydrawn inspiration from the achievements of ancient Egyptian civilization or those whobelieved that tourists were excited by the prospects of spending some time in the shadowof Egyptian antiquity, Kelly observed that many men and women went to these sightsout of ‘moral compulsion’. That is, a kind of tourist ethic or perhaps a ‘tourist calling’had developed; in practice this meant that the mass of travelers who would go to placessuch as Venice or Egypt knew that these destinations had significant sights which hadacquired international fame. As such, these monuments were famous and once in Egypteducated travelers now felt compelled to go and see them. Kelly describes these types ofencounters:

the greatly improved facilities for traveling have enabled many thoughtful people to enjoy a trippreviously only within the reach of the well-to-do, and all modern ‘improvement’ not-with-standing, the journey up the Nile still is, and must always remain, one of the most beautifuland fascinating the world affords. The ostensible object of the journey is of course theinspection of the temples. Few passengers, however, are versed in hieroglyphics, and thefull enjoyment of the antiquities is only possible to the Egyptologist. I rather suspect thatwere the truth known, most of the Nile visitors are secretly bored, and only ‘do’ these sightsunder moral compulsion. (Kelly, 1902, p. 76–77)

The significance of these ruins lay in their ability to attract people to Egypt; nonetheless, inKelly’s estimation they were only some of what Egypt offered – the Nile, Cairo, Port Said,the delta and Alexandria were all valuable as sights.

However, his experience with Cairo was different in the new century. In 1883, Kelly hadbeen able to explore the city without being dominated by the burgeoning tourist industry.He looked back with nostalgia on the ‘old flannel-shirt’ and knickerbocker days of theearly ‘eighties’; it was a place where some knowledge of French and a ‘smattering ofArabic’ (Kelly, 1902) were necessary to understand the life of the peoples. In contrast,Kelly became a ‘belated’ but practical traveler: he could only observe that now touristsremained ‘at the mercy’ of their dragomans. Kelly advised travelers that if they wishedto see ‘orientalism’ in Cairo ‘the best plan is to pick up an intelligent donkey-boy and com-fortable animal, and explore for yourself without your Baedeker or dragoman’ (Kelly,1902). There was more than a melancholic note to his observation that seeing interestingthings in Cairo had actually become more difficult. In the Nile delta, Kelly was alsooffended by the callous exploitation of tourists, which included the trade in fake artifacts.He warned to those ‘in search of such mementoes’ that it is ‘surprising to what trouble andexpense the native will occasionally put himself in their manufacture’ (Kelly, 1902).

Kelly’s view of the tourist in Egypt was an ambivalent one: he drew inspiration frommany avenues of Egyptian life and he worked to make the country visible for his readers;yet he understood quite clearly that it was becoming progressively difficult to actually seeand experience what he had. The aggressive nature of the local Egyptian tourist industrymeant that men and women who journeyed to the country might find it difficult to explore

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places without being harried. Unlike Edwards, who worried that adventurers might remove,defile, or damage ancient artifacts, Kelly saw the danger arising from local entrepreneurs whowere coming to dominate a traveler’s encounter with Egypt.

More important, Kelly clearly understood the motivations of the tourists. His commentarywas sage enough to observe that many tourists at the First Cataract were happy because theyunwittingly managed to escape the obligations which came from their structured journey. AtAswan there is little do in the ‘tourist’ sense and without ‘feeling the necessity of “going outand doing something”, the visitor may live happily, perhaps lazily, all the time’. Consequently,Aswan was a ‘haven of rest’ from the ‘fatigue of dusty sightseeing’ and without the depen-dence upon the dragoman ‘you are emancipated, free, and once more restored to your lost indi-viduality and self-respect’ (Kelly, 1902). In other words, because of the requirementsnecessary to move large numbers of people to ancient sites, tourists on holiday found them-selves subjected to the strictures required by organization and therefore the liberation fromroutine was a great pleasure for them. The tourist experience – complete with its ethic andsense of ‘calling’ – had become demanding and now itself required some form of escape.

Kelly, then, was in the process of painting, thereby attempting to represent Egypt invisual terms; but in writing about tourists he was actually offering a very different kindof picture. In the picture which emerges from Egypt: Painted and described, the ancientmonuments are only a notable feature of a much larger and more interesting destination.As such, they might be understood as the key attractions which might motivate someoneto come to Egypt and engage in its culture. The attractiveness of the destination mightwell stem from its ‘exotic’ qualities – but the experience of navigating through a foreignculture was increasingly predicated on the activities of many Egyptians who might notcare wholly for the country’s monuments but clearly benefited from the economic opportu-nities afforded by the tourist trade. In short, the Egypt which Kelly painted and describedwas indeed interesting: he manage to document the ways in which tourism was changing –both for Egyptians and for the tourists.

Conclusion

Taken together, the three narratives reveal that the experience of travel in Egypt was bothdynamic and multifaceted. To begin with, the conditions under which travelers – laterincreasingly as ‘tourists’ – visited the country were clearly changing. As the newcentury dawned, those who journeyed to Egypt faced growing challenges. If Duff-Gordon had found the encounters with Egypt’s peoples to be pleasantly surprising, thenKelly’s experiences in the country enabled him to see that local tourist practices weremaking it less likely that travelers would ever really engage the land and make their owndiscoveries. Instead, even if they sought to chart their own way, they still ran up againstthe same obstacles as the benighted ‘Cookites’. Ironically, Kelly and Edwards – twowriters with vastly different interests and degrees of expertise – were united in worryingabout the things that they valued most in Egypt might also disappear.

At the same time, Duff-Gordon had recognized that travelers had to overcome the pre-conceptions furnished by travel writers; Edwards looked askance at ‘Cook’s travelers’, butit was Kelly – writing a generation later who grasped that the condition of the tourist wasitself undergoing decisive transformation. All of these writers sought to differentiate them-selves from organized travel and the preconceptions that went with it. Yet, if these figuresare in any way representative, the key trends ran against the thrust of their protests: eventhose who refused to see themselves as tourists expressed an increasing struggle toemancipate themselves from the situations common to tourists.

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Kelly had observed that Egypt had become a major packaged destination. While Kellycertainly would have understood the claims made about travel becoming a commodity,his focus upon the moral compulsion experienced by ambitious tourists reminds us thatVictorian writing about the subject of travel may have some underestimated nuanceswhich will yet surprise scholars. More important, perhaps, the ‘tourist ethic’ itself suggeststhat tourism itself may offer clues beyond the history of travel and commerce. It might notbe too much to recall that while Duff-Gordon, Edwards and Kelly traveled, social sciencebegan to emerge in Europe. Figures such as Max Weber and Emile Durkheim who exploredthe ‘Protestant ethic’ and alienation focused upon the internal motivations of men andwomen in modern society. Like Kelly’s tourists in Egypt, they understood that whilemodern industrial society furnished unprecedented consumer choices, it did by producinga sense of internal ethical obligation and subsequently psychological estrangement from it.As a destination, then, Egypt was another commodity to be purchased and it came withthings well known to Europeans: timetables, rules and restrictions, routines, and the needfor entertainment. Kelly reminds us that for many it probably also came with an ethicand the internal ‘moral compulsion’ which was here inverted: rather than feel compelledto develop habits which would make them more productive, in Egypt as tourists theynow experienced the pressures to go out and have fun. In feeling compelled to ‘do some-thing’ they may have even recognized that in coming to Egypt they were actually onfamiliar ground. After all, Egypt was now available as a destination and the age oftourism as an industry had arrived.

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