Katarina Gephardt defines her project in undertaking this book by asking, “How can we account for the paradox that the proverbial ‘nation of travelers,’ historically prone to ‘migratory manias,’ finds it so difficult to accept an overarching European identity?” (3–4). The question might startle the many Britons who take it for granted that they are European: a fitting epigraph to The Idea of Europe in British Travel Narratives, 1789–1914 would be the old joke that summons up a real or imagined newspaper headline: “Fog in the Channel: Continent cut off.”

Just before this discussion, Gephardt offers a brief autobiographical narrative: having grown up in Slovakia during the Cold War, she first visits England in 1996 and is treated with suspicion by a British immigration officer. Ten years later she returns; since Slovakia has by then joined the European Union (in 2004), she has no such difficulties.

Such an allusion to the author's Slovakian origins at the outset encourages the reader to speculate that the chapter “British Travel Writing and Bram Stoker's Eastern Europe” might be one in which Gephardt feels an especially close personal interest. And indeed, this is in fact the most exciting bit of the book to read. Gephardt throws some energy into her account of Count Dracula's resistance to pictorial representation: Stoker's notes for Dracula (1897) mention not only that the count has no reflection in mirrors but also that it is impossible to paint or photograph him. In considering the travel narratives that Stoker consulted in the British Museum—he never visited Eastern Europe himself—Gephardt draws a parallel between this resistance to representation and a story in Major E. C. Johnson's On the Track of the Crescent (1885), in which an artist, during the Russo-Turkish War, asks a “ferocious-looking, picturesque and dirty Bashi-Bazouk soldier” to pose for him. To the artist's chagrin, the man turns up the next day “clean-shaven and washed,” wearing “a complete set of English clothes, including a tall hat” (148).

The other main concern of this chapter is the strategy of “transposition,” which Gephardt defines as an adaptation of colonial discourse to “the construction of European peripheries,” entailing the perception of similarity amid difference. Dracula, for example, in his conversations with the English solicitor Jonathan Harker, “mimics the nationalist sentiments and imperial ambitions of British travelers” (170).

In her initial chapter, Gephardt defines another approach, which she terms “superimposition”: “a defensive strategy that projects British characteristics onto Continental landscapes and peoples” (15). Such a projection “was particularly prevalent in responses to the French Revolution” (15). The chapter examines the concluding scene of Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797), in which the two central characters settle down in an estate in which they “superimpose” an informal English garden upon sublime and luxuriant Italian scenery. Oddly, although Gephardt acknowledges that the aesthetics of the English garden were “paradoxically inspired by classical Italian painting and travel” (31), she seems disinclined to explore the possibility that “superimposition” might sometimes unleash complex cultural ironies. Equally oddly, since Radcliffe resembled Stoker in drawing on travel books to describe places she had never visited, Gephardt never mentions the main source for the many descriptions of non-hybrid southern Italian landscape in the novel (some of which she quotes): Henry Swinburne's Travels in the Two Sicilies (1783–85). An analysis of borrowings from Swinburne might have generated some useful aperçus.

In other chapters Gephardt formulates concepts of “apposition” and “juxtaposition.” The former “compares the center and the periphery and tends to highlight the relativity of European civilization” (15). Gephardt sees this as “a reaction to Napoleonic expansion and to the Congress of Vienna” (15); it leads her to an analysis of the closing cantos of Byron's Don Juan (1819–24), in which England is seen through the eyes of the eponymous Spaniard. “Juxtaposition” seeks out parallels between Britain and continental Europe and reflects both complacencies and anxieties about Britain's “progress and modernization” (15). Gephardt compares the works of Charles Dickens with Doctor Antonio (1855) by Giovanni Ruffini (an exiled follower of Mazzini), a story of English travelers who are trapped in Bordighera by a road accident and led into frequent discussions of Italian politics.

The four concepts of how the British approach continental Europe sound promising but remain surprisingly hazy. Gephardt mentions some of their ramifications in passing and notes some contradictions and ambiguities in the material to which she applies them, but she does not set out to chart the range of arguments and assumptions that the different strategies open up or the limits that they impose on what it is possible to say. She says little, moreover, about how they might relate to each other (historically, rhetorically, in terms of their theoretical implications).

At times, then, the reader wishes that Gephardt had explored her four strategies further and paid less attention to secondary works, which she quotes and summarizes so often that they produce an unwelcome level of distraction and “noise.” A reference to a scholar who sees “revolutionary discontent” in the joyful cries of a servant in The Italian, for example, adds nothing to Gephardt's own analysis.

Like many studies of travel writing, this book can sound as though it is patronizing the past when it pronounces judgement on those whose accounts of the foreign fail to chime with twenty-first-century values and sensibilities. In an account of Little Dorrit (1855–57), for example, we are told sternly that the treatment of the Italian Cavaletto “ultimately cannot transcend English norms to the extent of allowing reciprocal dialogue between English and Italian characters” (131). Such slaps on the wrist are, however, revealed in her postscript to be intrinsic to Gephardt's project: this is where she explicitly declares her interest in how travel writings help to determine communication between cultures. Unsurprisingly, the effect of these writings is judged to have been generally deleterious. Gephardt muses on whether things can possibly improve. E. M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes (1911) induce some sense of hope: the two authors “posit an idea of European cosmopolitanism conceived as a mode of self-consciousness that considers the vantage point of the other” (194).