Charlotte Goodge
“I mixed with the mob”: Women’s Travel Writing & Ecologies of the Labouring Class (c.1750—1850)
This project aims to expand the scholarly understanding of eighteenth and nineteenth-century women travellers’ engagement with numerous epistemological fields – from the scientific to the historical – through examining and spotlighting women’s manuscript travelogues especially.
Secondly, to identify and foreground ecologies (understood as systems of relationships) of the localised labouring class in narratives where these persons are simultaneously ubiquitous but often fleetingly mentioned, while remaining attuned to the biases of the typically non-labouring class woman who records or imagines them. In particular, this project seeks to show how the interfaces between higher-ranking women travellers and labouring-class persons demonstrate (tacit and explicit) bilateral exchanges of knowledge, not just reductive, aestheticized observations.
Charlotte’s project concurrently broadens the generic classification of “travel writing” to include imagined travel by women (particularly in novels), and also scrutinises labouring-class-authored, life-writing and fiction which features the higher-class traveller as its subject.