Travel in the Nineteenth Century: Narratives, Histories and Collections (14-15 July 2011)
In the nineteenth century, railways made distant locations ever more accessible, the Grand Tour became more and more a pastime of the middle classes and British imperial expansion brought exotic locales and non-Western cultures ever closer to home. New ways of thinking about and communicating experiences of travel and of interactions with other cultures held a significant influence in various areas of nineteenth-century culture. This period saw an enormous expansion in museums and popular exhibition culture, technological innovations such as photography and film, as well as the vast growth of a popular press that served to deliver these experiences, images and objects to an increasingly literate public.