Introduction

In the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the idea of the “Voyage en Orient” progressively replaced the Grand Tour in the minds of some European travelers, writers, and artists. "Voyage en Orient" was famously used by the French writer and poet Gérard de Nerval as the title of the book he published in 1851 about his 1842 trip to Cairo and Beirut (among other destinations), which also included Oriental tales such as the Queen of Sheba. Those who would have traveled through Western Europe and especially Italy in earlier periods now turned their gaze toward the East, creating both textual and visual narratives of their voyages and experiences. The letters and travelogues of British travelers such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, James Justinian Morier (his travel books are studied by Mo Zhang in “Illustrations in James Justinian Morier's Travelogues: Turning Sketches into Prints” and by Amanda Morrow in “Constructing Reality: Mapping James Justinian Morier's Journeys to the East”), William Makepeace Thackeray, and Alexander William Kinglake have played an important role in shaping Europeans' relationship with the “Orient” -- a term which, in this context, refers to the geographical region now known as the Middle East. The Orientalist discourse, i.e., the Western elites' perceptions and conceptualizations of the non-Western world founded on the division of the world into a superior Occident and an inferior Orient, is pervasive in these texts. However, it is also important to note that different narratives of the Orient emerge from these writings, depending on when they were published and who authored them. For example, in the case of Morier, his 1812 and 1818 travelogues dutifully chronicle the geography and ancient remains he encountered in Persia (present-day Iran), in addition to more familiar descriptions of the people and customs to which he was exposed. While Morier's accounts certainly retain traces of the mystical construction of the East that was so conventional at the time and, as such, perpetuated the notion of this region as "Other" and inferior in various ways, he also adopted a more rigorous scientific approach in comparison to some of his predecessors. This paper examines such shifts that occurred in narratives of the East, as written by the West. 

Letters from Constantinople

First among the aforementioned writers comes Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762). A British aristocrat and poet, she is mainly remembered for her letters, particularly those from her travels to the Ottoman Empire as wife of the British ambassador. In Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918, the historian Billie Melman described Montagu’s correspondence with friends and family members as “the very first example of a secular work by a woman about the Muslim Orient.”1
 After their marriage in 1712, Lady Mary's husband, Edward Wortley Montagu, was appointed ambassador to Constantinople in 1716. In August 1716, Lady Mary accompanied him to Vienna, and from there to Adrianople (present-day Edirne), Belgrade, and Constantinople (present-day Istanbul). While he was eventually recalled from duty in 1717, they remained in Constantinople until 1718, making their return trip through Tunis, Genoa, and Paris. The story of this trip and Lady Mary's observations on life in the Near East are recounted in The Turkish Embassy Letters, which has not only served as an inspiration for subsequent generations of female travelers and writers, but has also stimulated much Orientalist art. Her experiences are told through her lively and entertaining letters full of detailed descriptions, her gender and status providing her with rare access to female spaces. Lady Mary was able to illuminate certain misconceptions that earlier male travelers had recorded about the religion, traditions, and treatment of women in the Ottoman Empire, and at times her accounts read more as a critique of the Occident than a praise of the Orient.2
 As a result of her personal interactions with Ottoman women, her writing provides important insight into the European experience, as well as into the types of stories which would have been relayed between Western family members and friends regarding the Orient. The most famous example of Lady Mary’s accounts of daily life is her experience in the Turkish women’s hammam (bathhouse), also making reference to an artist thought to be Gervase Spencer, a British miniaturist who painted her portrait several years later. She writes:

To tell you the truth, I had wickedness enough to wish secretly that Mr. Gervase could have been there invisible. I fancy it would have very much improved his art to see so many fine women naked, in different postures, some in conversation, some working, others drinking coffee or sherbet, and many negligently lying on their cushions while their slaves (generally pretty girls of seventeen or eighteen) were employed in braiding their hair in several pretty manners. In short, ‘tis the women’s coffee house, where all the news of the town is told, scandal invented, etc.3

Thus, Lady Mary told the story of the intimate life of Turkish women for her friends and family in England, and the publication of these letters led to a widely accepted narrative, perpetuated through art and literature in the years to come.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters, written from Constantinople mostly in 1717 and revised throughout her life, were first published (posthumously) in 1763. As an earlier traveler than Morier and Thackeray, her encounter with Turkish culture was one that she herself described as a “radically decentering experience.”4
Her letters might be read as an ethnographic study of Turkish women’s culture that does not represent them as the “Other,” instead conveying a cultural fluidity. Lady Mary’s account moves away from replicating the Orientalist dichotomy of the colonizing subject and the objectified “Other,” as she portrays the European self in a moment of dislocation in the East. The strength of the Ottoman Empire in 1717 makes the stereotypical portrayal of the West as the imperial power and the East as the disempowered realm rather moot, as when Montagu went to Turkey the West did not clearly dominate the economic and political situation, rather depending on diplomacy to maintain open trade with the Ottomans.5
 Scholars have often pointed out how The Turkish Embassy Letters complicate the notion of a monolithic Orientalism; however, they usually do nothing more than point out Lady Mary’s occasional divergences from traditional British Orientalism. Others, like Mary Jo Kietzman, are more successful in illustrating how the letters neither reproduce nor complicate the eurocentrism and authoritarianism of Edward Said’s model of Orientalism, but rather replace it by demonstrating moments of cultural confrontation between self and Other that displace them from their polarized positions.6
 However, Lady Mary's accounts also remain largely romanticized, simultaneously offering a glimpse of private life, and rendering it all the more desirable, yet inaccessible to the European gaze.

Notes from a Familiar Land

Later in this chronology of travelers and authors comes William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), a British novelist best known for Vanity Fair, his satirical portrayal of English society. Born in Calcutta under British rule, his father and maternal grandfather were both secretaries to the British East India Company. When his father died in 1815, Thackeray was sent to England for an education. Dropping out of college, he indulged in several years of idleness punctuated with short bursts of productive activity, after which he turned to writing as a profession. Between 1841 and 1846, he worked in London as a freelance journalist, also the period during which he published his major travel writings. Out of the many voyages that Thackeray made during this time to France, Ireland, Belgium, and Holland, his most ambitious one was around the Mediterranean in the winter of 1844-45, culminating in Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846). On August 19, 1844, Thackeray attended a farewell dinner for James Emerson Tennent, who was setting out on “voyage to the East.” Tennent invited him to join the trip, and three days later, the latter found himself on board the Lady Mary Wood as a guest of the recently established Peninsular and Oriental Company.7
 Going ashore in Vigo, Lisbon, Cadiz, and Gibraltar, he arrived in Constantinople on the Tagus, and changed ships again to head to Jaffa. There, he disembarked and traveled on horseback to Jerusalem, then returned to sail to Alexandria and Cairo. Gordon Ray suggests that the main focus of Thackeray’s style of travel writing was not so much the place itself, but the place as it was reflected through the narrator.8

By the end of the nineteenth century, the topic of writings such as Thackeray’s Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Cairo was not entirely original or groundbreaking. Many authors, including Thackeray’s contemporary A.W. Kinglake, were traveling across the Ottoman Empire from the Danube to the Nile, seeking to expand the conventional range of the Grand Tour. The excitement and sense of discovery felt towards the Orient in literary narratives seems to have dulled by this point in time, as for instance Kinglake states the countries he had visited had already been “thoroughly and ably described, even artistically illustrated,” by others.9
As a result, a new type of narrative, farther from that of scholarly enterprise, was born. In the preface to his travel book Eothen: Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East (1844), Kinglake states:

I have endeavored to discard from it all valuable matter derived from the works of others […] I believe I may truly acknowledge, that from all details of geographical discovery, or antiquarian research—from all display of “sound learning, and religious knowledge”—from all historical and scientific illustrations—from all useful statistics—from all political disquisitions—and from all good moral reflections, this volume is thoroughly free.10

This suggests that the author rejected the premium placed on learned, scholarly compilation in prior travel writing; however, as does Thackeray, Kinglake also strays from the romanticized model of the eighteenth century.

Interestingly, in the accounts from this later period, there is a simultaneous sense of breaking boundaries and of moments of recognition. Not only do the authors refer to the voyages as opportunities to go beyond “the very frontier of all accustomed respectabilities,”11
 but they also refer to pre-held expectations and prior knowledge, reflecting the very nature of these widely distributed narratives and the effect they had on their British audiences. For instance, when Kinglake reaches Cairo, he states that “they were just as I had always known them.”12
This indicates monuments and landscapes that were familiar from early childhood, from paintings, stories, and prints, thus coming to a point of recognition rather than discovery. The Islamic Orient is therefore continually represented as a kind of adventure playground that is increasingly well-known to the later travelers through texts and images.13
Said notes that what these travelers encounter is “the Englishman’s East,” and that the “moulding of character” that is referred to as the driving force behind these voyages to the Orient, is nothing more than a “solidifying of prejudices.”14
Fatma Moussa-Mahmoud reiterated this point, stating that “the Englishman who had come to test his mettle against the hardships of Eastern travel proves his superiority to things Arabic and Islamic at every turn.”15
 In other words, while the authors had no factual knowledge regarding life in the East, they continued to make sweeping generalizations about the Orient based on fictional and non-fictional accounts, as well as widely circulated illustrations. Said concludes that Kinglake (among others) is more concerned with “remaking himself and the Orient than in seeing what there is to be seen,” thus engaging in the performance of the English gentlemanly identity against the backdrop of Eastern travels.16
  These became the generic expectations of this form of travel-writing in the Orient.

The journey Thackeray undertakes is recognized from the beginning as a familiar one, and he refers on multiple occasions to the similar routes he is taking as previous travelers. Throughout his account, the places he visits are those that have been already widely documented, thus causing him to refer to “required reading,” along the way, such as the works of Lamartine and Chateaubriand. When he finally reaches the Pyramids in Egypt, he asks the question “What to say about those famous edifices, which has not been better said elsewhere?"17
 Thus, at multiple points throughout Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, Thackeray addresses the problem of writing about travel at a time when the specific journey is already familiar to audiences through books and illustrated media. However, he does fall into the recurrent tropes that clearly constructed both his preconceived notions and his own representation of the East. For instance, as many other authors, he emphasizes the dirtiness and the poverty in the region. He eroticizes the women, falling back on the classic motifs of dark eyes and veiled faces, or faces glimpsed behind latticed windows, as seen in John Frederick Lewis’s contemporary paintings.18
 He also highlights the unreal, mystical, strange world through which he is traveling, for instance referring to towns that “appeared like a dream” and by drawing comparisons to theater.19

Conclusion

Letters and travelogues written by those who traveled to the Middle East in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constructed a narrative of the region for audiences in Europe. This narrative could shift, depending on the period of the voyage and the author; however, certain tropes remain visible throughout. The Orient was romanticized, approached with scholarly discipline, and conquered in the minds of the Europeans who both wrote and read these accounts. Not only did they fuel further travels and support the notion that a trip to the Orient was necessary for “the molding of a man,” but they also inspired later writings and visual production on the subject. Thus, authors such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, James Justinian Morier, A.W. Kingslake and William Makepeace Thackeray constructed the mysterious, unknown Orient for European readers for several centuries, aided by the artistic production of their time. 

• 1Billie Melman, Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918. (Michigan: University of Michigan Press. 1992).
• 2Emily Bowles, Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley in The Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660-1789. Eds. Gary Day and Jack Lynch. (New York City: Blackwell Publishing, 2015).
• 3Mary Wortley Montagu. The Turkish Embassy Letters. Eds. Teresa Heffernan, and Daniel O'Quinn. (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2013).
• 4Mary Jo Kietzman, "Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters and Cultural Dislocation." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 38, no. 3 (1998): 537.
• 5Kietzman, "Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters and Cultural Dislocation.": 538.
• 6Kietzman, "Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters and Cultural Dislocation.": 538.
• 7Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811-1846. (New York: Octagon Books, 1972), 297.
• 8Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811-1846 , 310.
• 9Alexander William Kinglake, Eothen: Or, Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East. (London: Forgotten Books, 2014), 4.
• 10Kinglake, Eothen: Or, Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East, 3.
• 11Kinglake, Eothen: Or, Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East, 120.
• 12Kinglake, Eothen: Or, Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East, 213.
• 13Robert Hampson. "From Cornhill to Cairo: Thackeray as Travel-Writer." The Yearbook of English Studies 34 (2004): 219.
• 14Edward W. Said, Orientalism. (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 193.
• 15Fatma Moussa-Mahmoud, “English Travellers and the Arabian Nights,” in The Arabian Nights in English Literature, ed. Peter L. Caracciolo, (Basinstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 104.
• 16Said, Orientalism, 193.
• 17William Makepeace Thackeray, Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Cairo. (Heathfield: Cockbird, 1991), 703.
• 18Hampson, "From Cornhill to Cairo: Thackeray as Travel-Writer." : 221.
• 19Thackeray, Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Cairo, 567.