Abstract
British travellers visited Greece in increasing numbers after its formation as an independent state in 1832 and many of them published accounts of their wanderings. The conclusive evidence of early-Victorian travellers attested to the lack of infrastructure and domestic comfort, civil rights and free institutions. The tracing of discursive consistency in British travellers’ opinions on Greece, of recurring arguments, assumptions and associations, constitutes one of the aims of this article. It is also argued that comments on the modern Greeks should be examined in the context of a wider public debate, which involved general and universally applicable notions of “national progress”.
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Notes
- 1.
Crowe to Palmerston, 17 February 1838, FO32/81, ff. 30–31.
- 2.
Lyons to Aberdeen, 20 May 1845, Aberdeen Papers, AddMS 43137, f. 149.
- 3.
See for example: Hobhouse, John Cam (Baron Broughton). Travels in Albania and Others Provinces of Turkey in 1809 & 1810. London, 1855 [First edition: 1813].
- 4.
See for example: Inglis to Lyons, 7 December 1840, Lyons Papers, LE74 (I, J, K).
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Hionidis, P. (2015). Civilized Observers in a Backward Land: British Travellers in Greece, 1832–1862. In: Katsoni, V. (eds) Cultural Tourism in a Digital Era. Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15859-4_25
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