A Traveller's Year: 365 Days of Travel Writing in Diaries, Journals and Letters

A Traveller’ s Year is an anthology of extracts from diaries, journals and letters, two or three for each day of the year, on the subject of travel and exploration. The extracts convey men and women’ s experiences of travel and discovery from the sixteenth to the early twenty-first centuries, with an emphasis on the period 1750– 1950, the classic era of both European exploration and diary-writing. The authors of the pieces range from famous explorers such as Captains Cook and Scott to modern travel writers journeying through the contemporary world, from people who pushed back the boundaries of geographical knowledge to people who wrote about what they did on their summer holidays.  The book includes an introduction, explanatory notes and mini-biographies of all the contributors.     Contributors include: Gertrude Bell (woman traveller in the Middle East) James Boswell (travels in Scotland and the Hebrides) William Cobbett (Rural Rides through England) Christopher Columbus (journals of his voyages to America) Charles Darwin (Voyage of the Beagle) Captain James Cook (voyages in the Pacific) Washington Irving (American writer travelled in Europe in first decades of nineteenth century) Edward Lear (landscape painter and nonsense writer produced journals of his travels in Greece, Corsica, Near East etc) Lewis & Clark (journals of famous journey of American exploration) William Morris (wrote a journal of a trip to Iceland in 1870s) Michael Palin (a Python abroad) Mungo Park (African explorer in early nineteenth century) Captain Robert Falcon Scott (doomed journey to South Pole) Evelyn Waugh (diaries of 1930s travels in Mediterranean and beyond) William John Wills (explorer of Australia)

Table of Contents:
Themes include: Journeys westward in America - diaries of people who travelled as emigrants to the West Eighteenth and nineteenth-century travellers' encounters with the remains of earlier cultures eg. Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, pre-Columbian Americas What you might call 'anthropological' traveling eg. Darwin on Tierra del Fuegians and a nineteenth century Italian who was one of the first to travel into New Guinea Travellers in first phase of imperial expansion eg. 17th century diaries of East India Company merchants travelling to India and Japan Travellers discovering part of their own country is as foreign to them as abroad eg Orwell going north Entries which reflect classic eras of travel writing eg. the Thirties with Waugh, Robert Byron, Graham Greene etc or Eighties with Bruce Chatwin Religious sightseeing - nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans travelling to Holy Land Travellers who hate travelling and fill their diaries with complaints about how bloody awful abroad is and how dreadful the ways of foreigners are People travelling to Britain from elsewhere and finding it a foreign country Heroic deaths in the sun and on the ice Scientific investigation Aristocratic and artistic self-improvement (especially to Paris, Venice, and Rome) 18th century women travellers and wives of East India Company staff Luxury leisure, package tours and backpacking.

About the Author :
Travis Elborough is an author and social commentator. His books include the four titles in the Unexpected Atlases series - Atlas of Improbable Places, Atlas of the Unexpected, Atlas of Vanishing Places and Atlas of Forgotten Places, together with A Traveller’s Year, A London Year, The Long-Player Goodbye, Being A Writer and A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution. Travis is a regular contributor to Radio 4 and the Guardian, and has penned articles on all aspects of travel and culture, from pirates in the Caribbean to donkeys at the British seaside. He has written for the Times, Sunday Times, New Statesman, BBC History Magazine and Kinfolk among others. Travis was the winner of the Edward Stanford Travel Book Award in 2020. NICK RENNISON has worked as a writer, editor and bookseller for more than twenty years. His London Blue Plaque Guide has been through three editions in the last decade and he has also published The Book of London Lists, described by the London Evening Standard as a book that 'can teach even the most die-hard Londoner something they didn't know'. He lives in Stockport.