Mary Mackenzie Goodwin’s Unpublished Victorian Travel Diary: Four Women in the Middle East: Camels, Harems, Pyramids, and the Beauty of Palestine (1880)

Filiz Barin Akman, Social Sciences University of Ankara

“If all’s well, tomorrow we shall be in Africa” (Goodwin, 2 Mar. 1880). Thus wrote a curious yet seasick Englishwoman of twenty-five in her travel diary after a formidable five-day Mediterranean voyage. Having departed from Naples, Italy aboard the Said, a vessel operating under the famous Thomas Cook tourism company,¹ she arrived at the port of Alexandria in March 1880, marking the beginning of her overland journey into Cairo and Jerusalem. Traveling in the company of three fellow Victorian women, Miss Fox, Miss MacInnes, and Grace, she had left behind a grey, windy, rain-soaked February London, passed through France and Italy by train, and lingered in admiration over the artistic grandeur of Roman ecclesiastical architecture—most notably St. Peter’s Cathedral, which she described as inspiring “feelings of awe and admiration” (24 Feb. 1880).

Mary Mackenzie Goodwin (1855–1926), a late nineteenth-century English missionary and traveler, daughter of Harvey Goodwin,² a renowned Anglican Bishop of Carlisle, finally reached her destination in the “most frightfully hot” North African city of Alexandria, where she recorded her initial wonder at the exotic novelty as well as the simultaneous strangeness of the sights and sounds. As their ship, Said, docked at the Alexandrian harbor, she wrote: “We came into the great harbour splendidly… Crowds of picturesque brown-sailed boats [filled] with Cook’s boatmen… conspicuous by their red jerseys… came swarming over the sides of the vessel, coming up just like monkeys, and the most peculiar and awful chattering ensued” (Goodwin, 3 Mar. 1880). This moment and Goodwin’s description of the harbor’s sights and people not only foreshadow but also actively perform the ambivalence that would characterize Goodwin’s later encounters with “Oriental” culture, an ambivalence that, as Homi Bhabha argues, structures colonial discourse about that culture through a simultaneous movement of attraction and repulsion, fascination and disavowal (The Location of Culture 85–95, 107).³

Despite underlying Orientalist assumptions evident in this early entry, which could be interpreted as mimicking the period’s dominant rhetoric about the Oriental Other through its animal imagery (Said Orientalism 1–3, 31–41), Goodwin’s handwritten diary, which records her observations and experiences in the then-Ottoman provinces of Alexandria, Egypt, and Palestine, can and should be read, too, as reflecting the largely lighthearted, curiously observational gaze of a woman traveler (Pratt Imperial Eyes 8-9, 100-105). Rather than driven primarily or essentially by missionary zeal, ideological indoctrination, and imperialist agendas, Goodwin’s perspective is also the complex perspective of a young woman primarily interested in artistic wonders, the picturesque, and the sensory appeal of travel in foreign settings, a tendency frequently associated with nineteenth-century women’s travel writing (Mills Discourses of Difference 3–6, 18–21; Lewis Gendering Orientalism 1–9, 15–22; Melman Women’s Orients 1–2, 4–14, 62–63).

A case in point would be Goodwin’s habitual fascination with local dress, which offers a nuanced insight into the aesthetic lenses through which she often filtered cultural difference: “The dresses of the people are magnificent and the swinging stride with which the Arabs advance on their way is quite imposing. One dress we saw this afternoon on a fine tall man was clean gold silk waistcoat and loose trousers – in one long fawn coloured coat over it, and a splendid India shawl pattern girdle and turban. Everyone dresses differently, and all in such perfect taste” (4 March 1880). The exotic charm recorded in her careful visual details highlights her aesthetic appreciation of Oriental difference. In a similar vein, she makes the following observations: “The young boys’ dresses were extremely simple consisting of one garment generally of blue or white cotton, the red, black tasseled fez being the only other thing worn. Gentlemen’s sons are more like this. Brilliant dresses with pointed red leather shoes. The women in their long blue veils carry their babies astride on their shoulders balancing themselves with perfect ease and they sit for hours without moving in a position that would give us cramps in five minutes” (3 March 1880). In this entry, Goodwin’s aesthetic admiration of the refinement of traditional dress as an ethnographic curiosity is combined with an acknowledgement of bodily endurance and poise despite its comparative markings of cultural distance and difference. Together, these passages illustrate how Goodwin’s gaze oscillates between comparison, admiration, and subtle cultural distancing—an ambivalent mode of observation in which aesthetic delight coexists with the quiet reaffirmation of Western difference.

Goodwin’s travel diary, which records her brief missionary journey from England to the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces⁴—most notably Egypt and Palestine—and is tentatively titled Four Women in the Middle East: Camels, Harems, Pyramids, and the Beauty of Palestine (1880), has survived in manuscript form since its composition in the late nineteenth century. The sixty-five-page handwritten manuscript, enriched with Goodwin’s own ink sketches, remained virtually unknown for 144 years and is now housed in the Special Collections of Milner Library at Illinois State University after its purchase at an auction. Never published, the diary offers a detailed, near-daily account of her five-month journey—though her entries abruptly end on March 17 in Palestine— from London to Cairo and Jerusalem via Italy, providing a compelling perspective on a young educated Western woman’s engagement with the cultural, religious, and political landscapes of the Middle East at a moment marked by imperial transition and the expanding entanglements of the British Empire.

In the critical backgrounds and thematic highlights that follow, I seek to introduce a previously unknown text to the academic field by bringing to light a formerly unpublished Victorian-era travel diary penned by a woman. This introduction is the outcome of my archival research, transcription,⁵ and analysis of the handwritten manuscript, a project I was fortunate to complete with the financial support of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) at Illinois State University.