Touristic Representations of Cornwall in Victorian and Edwardian Popular Culture

The proposed project explores the touristic representation of Cornwall and South West Britain in the popular literature of the late Victorian and Edwardian period, focusing primarily on the work of Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle. It investigates the potential relationship of these authors to the late Victorian establishment of Cornish nationalism, their deployments of the Cornish language to construct Cornwall as an other, un-English place, their reinvention of tropes drawn from earlier nineteenth century travel writing on the south west, and the role of textual illustration in creating a touristic and romanticised Celtic fringe. The project considers Collins’ collaboration with the artist Henry Charles Brandling in the Cornish travelogue *Rambles Beyond Railways*, and expands the cultural geography of Doyle studies beyond the usual focus on London and Edinburgh, arguing for an imagined south west as a vital component of Doyle’s vision of British national identity.