ABSTRACT
This chapter will trace Sala’s movement away from his role as a London journalist and novelist to that of one of the world’s first ‘Special Correspondents’. Although Sala would be sent to many destinations across the globe I have selected his accounts from America (1863–1864, 1879, 1885), Algeria (1865), Italy (1866–1867), Australia and New Zealand (1885–1886), in order to create a cohesive picture of his personal pronouncements on the issues affecting travel and travel writing in the second half of the nineteenth century. These travel narratives span over 20 years of Sala’s professional life; they were all originally written as a series of letters for the Daily Telegraph, and all of the letters were subsequently published in book form, apart from those from Australasia. It was during these 20 years of foreign reportage that Sala climbed the ‘topmost rung’ of the journalistic ladder, as Ralph Straus termed it, and his name and initials became famous across the world. 1
