'Palestine is Thus Brought Home to England': The Representation of Palestine in British Travel Literature, 1840-1914

Abstract

The Wednesday, 20^th April 1887 edition of the London Morning Post featured a review of a new book of travel in Palestine. It was evidently not the first such work encountered by the reviewer, who made this clear in no uncertain terms. ‘The Holy Land is in no small danger of becoming the best (or worst) described country in the world’, the reviewer launched into a tirade. ‘What with explorers and tourists’, they claimed, ‘scientific disputants of traditional topography, and “personally conducted” excursionists, there is no want of authors ready and anxious to give the public the perhaps questionable benefit of their ideas upon the past, present, and future history of the most interesting locality of the universe’.²

These sentences reached the heart of attitudes towards Palestine in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain – attitudes which, this thesis argues, would have a profoundly important influence on the course of history. The most interesting locality of the universe was how Palestine was conceptualised by Protestants swept up in the Evangelical movement; its outlook transformed the idea of Palestine as a distant Holy Land of purely spiritual significance, into a region with much more immediate physicality. Palestine’s past was its glorious history, the sacred Biblical era of heroic Israelites and Christ’s sacrifice; its present was its “occupation” by Islam, the Ottoman rule (which had begun in 1517) under which the country supposedly languished, threatened by multiple European empires seeking to provide an answer to the “Eastern Question”; its future was the prophesied “restoration” or “return” of the Jewish people to Palestine, initiating the fulfilment of all the Bible’s promises. Explorers, such as those of the Palestine Exploration Fund founded in London in 1865, arrived to survey what they believed were Biblical remains; the tourists and excursionists, wishing to see the sacred locales familiar to them through Scripture, sermons and Sunday schools since childhood, could travel in “personally conducted” groups with local guides (fig. 1.2), or, for the less intrepid, on organised tours such as those led by the Derbyshire-born Baptist preacher Thomas Cook (1808- 1892) beginning in 1869. Biblical scholars were the disputants of traditional topography, feeding on the reports of the ‘explorers’ to challenge the veracity of the established and previously accepted sacred sites around Palestine. These were the integral ingredients of what Western travellers named the “Peaceful Crusade”, behind which lay a complex of attitudes, beliefs and ideas which one traveller-writer, Isabel Burton, summarised as ‘Holy Land on the brain’.³.