It was a rare book in the Victorian age that considered British bodies in the tropics without alluding to the perils posed by disease. Historians of empire and of medicine have analyzed British attitudes well, noting that illness and the problems of acclimatization continued to trouble any simple sense of colonial triumphalism, even given the military successes of the Opium Wars and the assumption of imperial control in the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion. Drawing upon such historical studies, in Exploring Victorian Travel Literature Jessica Howell aims to examine the literary expression of responses to fears of potentially fatal disease and of “native” resistance to afflictions that seemed to fell otherwise conquering colonists. At the same time, and in many ways more interestingly, Howell is concerned with the ways in which medical knowledge and expertise, as well as personal experiences with sickness, could be used as a form of authorial self-fashioning, producing an authoritative standpoint for those in otherwise seemingly subordinate positions.

The book consists of five main chapters, each principally concerned with a single author. The first, on Mary Seacole, is particularly strong, challenging readings that have seen Seacole as a colonial apologist and arguing instead that Seacole's invocations of her own hybrid hardiness—and the contrast her health offered to that of sickly and endangered white colonists—provided the basis of her autobiographical authority. At the same time, Howell argues, “Seacole cannily borrows, subverts, and appropriates discourses of racial hybridity and constitutional medicine to suit her own goals . . . [proving] her legitimacy as a hybrid Briton, while undermining scientifically justified racism, and by implication, Imperial ideology” (29). Mary Kingsley's robust good health functions in somewhat similar ways in chapter 4. Both women tend to stress the dangers of life in the tropics while simultaneously vaunting their own capacities to overcome such dangers. For Seacole, strength was founded in a mixed-race constitution; for Kingsley, strength seemed to come from a vital and ironic kind of nihilism. Only those, she would write in 1897, “who have not got a wife and family, and whose friends feel prepared to bear their loss with resignation” (125) should travel to the West African Coast. For those willing to stare death down, however, an African existence offered (as Mary Louise Pratt phrases it) “a rousing jolly good time” (133).

In these two chapters, then, a focus on illness and acclimatization leads Howell to innovative and, one suspects, further productive avenues of analysis. Chapter 3, which examines Africanus Horton's early medico-geographical texts, rather than his more commonly read later political writings, seems to provide more methodological promise, as Howell finds “room for subversion and protest within the genres of the medical guide and geographical survey” (94). Chapters on Richard Burton (chapter 2) and Joseph Conrad (chapter 5) are less productive of novel readings. As a European figure plagued with illness but still advocating for colonial expansion, Burton is rather familiar. His attempts to “depict and then delimit dangers to the white body” (55) are not—either in their logics or their details—particularly surprising. Reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness—a novel pervaded by (physical and mental) sickness talk—as a “pathography” does not add terribly much to extant analyses. After all, Conrad's text was already intentionally critical and subversive of imperial self-imaginings and is hardly subtle in its use of susceptibility to disease as a weapon in puncturing visions of white supremacy.

Exploring Victorian Travel Literature is at its best when offering close readings of less-studied authors. Its larger claims tend to be less rigorously evidenced. Engagement with the history of medicine might, for example, have been more nuanced. Among Howell's central questions is why her authors should have held on to an environmentalist understanding of disease causation “long after these factors were no longer widely considered scientifically conclusive.” She suggests that they did so in service of their own “writerly authority” (164). Yet the premise of this question seems debatable. It presupposes that in the 1890s, writers should have seen a stark difference between two competing etiologies and chosen the older, now superseded one. Yet germ theory was still novel in this period, and many historians have pointed to clear continuities between what were once presented as incommensurable paradigms. In any case, germ theory could not explain everything (why did some people get sick when drinking contaminated water and not others?), and it offered few, if any, new therapeutic measures. An equally good question, surely, would be why the small handful of authors who did take on germ theory (Robert Potter in The Germ Growers or H. G. Wells in The War of the Worlds, for example) decided to do so. Miasmatic theory was clearly put to writerly ends in the works considered here, but it is not obvious that such ends were as anachronistic or out of date as the analysis here might suggest.

More problematic still is that, while interested in Victorian race science, Howell engages with almost none of the relevant literature, making no use of either classic or more recent monographs on nineteenth-century British race theory. None of George Stocking's work (not even the fairly obvious Victorian Anthropology) is mentioned, nor is Nancy Stepan's The Idea of Race in Science. Howell focuses on Africa and the Caribbean, thus turning her attention away from India. This is unproblematic for her choice of authors, but it is hard to understand Victorian race theory without paying attention to theories about India and (especially) the ways these changed after the Sepoy Rebellion. Several of the authors discussed in this book offer complex articulations of the meaning and significance of race, and Howell does a fine job of drawing these complexities out. Yet judging the subversiveness (real or potential) of such articulations requires that one understand Victorian race theory as considerably more variegated and complicated than might be gleaned from reading the smattering of race theorists considered here.