ABSTRACT
A traveller’s conception of difference or otherness is dependent upon their location and also, crucially, upon where they perceive ‘home’ to be; foreignness is as much about the ideological and geographical position of the narrating subject, as of the people or place described. The travel texts under consideration here demonstrate the unstable and changeable nature of the way in which home tour travellers perceived home and abroad and the relationship between the two. In endeavouring to experience an inversion of their everyday activity, travellers effectively seek what is alien or remote to what in their own daily existence is usual and known: they seek the foreign.1 The figures and landscapes of Britain’s ancient past, and the industrial workers of its urban present, offer temporal and social alterity, and in the course of their journeys home tour travellers not only encounter difference, but sometimes embrace the opportunity to temporarily adopt an alternative self or persona themselves. It becomes clear that notions of foreignness and otherness are central to the way in which supposedly ‘domestic’ tourism functions. And this is further underscored by the way in which travellers’ narratives repeatedly emphasize the similarity of the sites they visit, not to familiar conceptions of Britishness or home, but to foreign locations and distant sites of cultural encounter.
