To do full justice to travel and adventure fiction in the nineteenth century would require a tome of many hundreds of pages. Within the limited physical scope provided by this series, all that an author can hope for is to plot a course. What follows is not a survey, but an interpretative essay in which I have attempted to outline a few approaches to the Victorian quest writing, and to test my ideas against a select group of texts, well known for the most part, by writers who are still widely read.

I have tried to situate such writing in the context of the marked acceleration in the human and physical sciences that characterized the late nineteenth century. To what extent, I ask, are the more interesting quest romances of the time responses to these developments? Adventure literature is sometimes construed as a means of escape, or of indulgence in compensatory fantasy. Certain recent accounts have portrayed it as acting, in the period in question, as a tacit expression of power. These chapters are concerned with the alternative possibility that for the late Victorians such stories were modes of understanding, even of knowledge.

Manifestly, such an angle is relevant to writers, and to cultural forms, other than those chosen. For the inquisitive, some indication of the broader scene may be found in the Chronology. In the main text, it seemed wisest to restrict discussion to texts that commonly engage us. This book is not a map, but a compass.