Lectures

This chapter reclaims the travel lecture as one of the key modes of nineteenth-century travel writing. By offering a survey of the form and focusing on three largely forgotten performers – Briton Albert Smith (1816–1860) and two Americans, Bayard Taylor (1825–1878) and Esther Lyons (1864–1938) – the chapter shows how their travel talks helped create a culture of performed cosmopolitanism through which mass audiences confronted issues of empire. By excavating this nineteenth-century moment, the chapter argues for the travel lecture phenomenon as one of the more under-appreciated and idiosyncratic cultural practices in travel studies and a key influence on early motion pictures.