ABSTRACT
The conclusion addresses Joseph Conrad’s 1924 essay “Geography and Explorers” that famously described three phases of the discipline’s history as geography fabulous, geography militant, and geography triumphant, while constructing and valorizing the geographer as European and male. The chapter notes that this celebrated text must, in light of the study, be recognized as a retrospective view of geographical activity, propounded by Conrad in old age, nearly a quarter of a century after the Victorian Age had passed. Actual geographical experience for the Victorians was far more complicated. In Victorian fictions of empire, spatial relations were intellectually complex, aesthetically sophisticated, and emotionally nuanced.
