Travel in Victorian Women’s Periodicals

The 1850s saw the first periodicals targeted at middle-class women, starting with the launch of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in 1852. This chapter discusses the presentation of travel in such periodicals, which let us observe how female travel was negotiated in a complex web of domestic duties, nondomestic desires and feminist demands. The chapter first sketches the travel profile of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, which created a sustained presence for travel in its regular departments for fashion, gossip and correspondence. The Ladies’ Treasury (1857–1895) was less openly domestic and presented travel with a wider generic and geographical range. The chapter ends with a look at the travel profiles of important non-commercial feminist periodicals, the English Woman’s Journal (1858–1864) and The Englishwoman’s Review (1866–1910). These publications tended to emphasise the liberating and transgressive elements of female travel but did not entirely evade cultural constraints on female mobility that existed until the end of Queen Victoria’s reign.