Carl Thompson

Earthquakes and Petticoats: Maria Graham, Geology, and Early Nineteenth-Century ‘Polite’ Science

Re-visiting the controversy caused by the first female-authored report in the Transactions of the Geological Society, this article probes the gendered layers of the early nineteenth-century scientific community. Maria Grahams ‘Account of Some Effects of the Late Earthquakes in Chili [sic]’ (1824) had considerable influence, and was referred to by Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin. In 1834, however, George Greenough, President of the Geological Society, questioned the accuracy of Grahams observations. Graham in turn defended herself adroitly, in an acrimonious exchange which found an international audience. While this dispute has received some attention from historians of science, previous discussions assume that Graham was no geologist, but simply a traveller who witnessed events of great relevance to contemporary geology. Drawing on extensive archival research, this article demonstrates to the contrary that Graham had considerable interest and expertise in this branch of science. Using the dispute to sh...

Journeys to Authority: Reassessing Women's Early Travel Writing, 1763–1862

This article introduces a Special Issue of Womens Writing on the theme of womens travel writing. It maps the bibliography and broad trajectory of womens travel writing (principally in its published rather than unpublished form) across the period 1763 to 1862, and argues that the intellectual and literary achievement embodied in this material has been consistently under-estimated in recent scholarship. This is due in part to a modern dismissal of the travel writing form, a dismissal which is anachronistic when applied to a period when travelogues could be a major vehicle for debate and the dissemination of knowledge. And it is partly due to modern misunderstandings of the protocols of intellectual and scientific activity in the specified period. This introduction accordingly reconstructs these very different contexts for womens travel writing to show how the form enabled them to engage with and contribute to a range of contemporary debates and discourses such as science, political economy and art history; and it further demonstrates that these contributions were often more celebrated at the time than is now appreciated, with some women travel writers gaining widespread contemporary recognition for their literary and intellectual accomplishments.

Sentiment and Scholarship: Hybrid Historiography and Historical Authority in Maria Graham’s South American Journals

ABSTRACT As scholars have registered, many female-authored travel accounts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries need to be recognized simultaneously as exercises in historical commentary and debate. This article extends our knowledge of this intersection of genres through analysis of two striking examples of womens travel writing operating as a mode of historiography: Maria Grahams Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (1824) and Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824). In the often overlooked prefatory material used to frame the central journal sections of these books, Graham undertook a more ambitious and original historiographical exercise than is generally appreciated. The journal portions also spoke to contemporary historical enquiries in ways not always recognized by modern critics—for example, in their occasional use of sentimental idioms and motifs. Although in these and other passages, Grahams writing may seem today more “literary” than historiographical, this was not how they were received by many contemporary readers, who accepted Grahams account as a useful contribution to the history of South America. This reception demonstrates the importance of not reading nineteenth-century travel writing solely as “life writing”, but rather as a multidisciplinary and generically hybrid form which women might use to assert and display authority across a range of discourses.