Barbara Korte : Travel in Victorian Periodicals, 1850–1900. Media Logic and Cultural Work. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.

• Fritz Lange

Victorian Periodicals reached a large number of people from a wide spectrum of society and appealed to men and women from all socio-economic strata, adults and adolescents alike. Many periodicals, despite targeting different demographics, published accounts of travel to different places in Britain, Europe, and the wider world. This, Barbara Korte argues, helped democratize travel, which had previously been the privilege of the affluent few, and bring it closer to the masses through a process aided by, and intertwined with, British imperialism, political activism, and capitalist enterprise. Thus, an understanding of travel as a universally available good was created – for the poor, available second-hand through travel accounts – that became part of British national culture. Korte’s monograph demonstrates this thesis by analysing travel writing published in diverse periodicals aimed at different audiences and exploring these publications’ socio-political contexts vis-à-vis their contents.