The Ottoman Empire in The Spirit of the East and Eothen: Versions of Romantic Orientalism

Abstract

David Urquhart and Alexander Kinglake might seem at first to be radically different: Urquhart, the Turcophile Highland Scot versus Kinglake, the quintessential Englishman abroad. Yet their travelogues, The Spirit of the East and Eothen, reveal remarkable similarities, despite the differences in the texts and their authors. Both travelers use the tropes of the romance of horseback travel and the past, the East as offering an escape from Europe, and travel as an opportunity for adventure and even danger. Moreover, while their attitudes to Britain’s imperial role in the East are at times diametrically opposed, there are moments when they coincide because both men have complex and to some extent contradictory positions on the issue. For all their textual idiosyncrasies, both The Spirit of the East and Eothen can be seen as examples of the expression of “a public and national will over the Orient” (Said, Orientalism 194). Neither writer can free himself entirely from the Orientalist and imperialist modes of thinking of the 1830s and 1840s.