“The City of the Magyar:” On Julia Pardoe’s Travel Writing
“The City of the Magyar:” On Julia Pardoe’s Travel Writing

Summary/Abstract: Julia Pardoe, an English poet and historian, was among the first travel writers who described Hungary’s institutions and contributed to the shaping up of the nineteenth-century British image of Hungary. In her book The City of the Magyar or Hungary and Her Institutions (1840), she thoroughly reported her experiences and observations regarding a country that, although being part of East-Central Europe, had not stirred the interest of the British public. Pardoe’s narrative contravenes the patriarchal ideology of travel writing as well as the act of travelling per se as masculine preoccupations, while, in my view, it seeks to negotiate the gender norms of her age by adopting an equally acceptable colonialist perspective as well as a conventionally feminine, a gentlewoman’s narrative perspective on the page. By making use of Andrew Hammond’s theory of “imagined colonialism,” I shall demonstrate that Pardoe’s text can be interpreted as a negotiation between the conflicting demands of the discourse of female travel writing and of colonialism. In discussing Pardoe’s travel account, I am also interested in the (rhetoric) ways in which the female traveller formulates her observations on Hungarian landscapes, people, and culture as civilized or less civilized – according to her own British national ideals and class norms. Pardoe’s portrayal of Hungarian otherness served to raise the curiosity as well as the sympathy of the British towards a nation that was in need of and ready for progress/reform in the years before the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.

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