This thesis recovers the practice of ‘armchair geography’ as an overlooked, yet significant aspect of the mid-nineteenth-century culture of exploration. These histories are popularly associated with such famed explorers as Dr David Livingstone and John Hanning Speke, who travelled across Africa. Yet, far from the field, there were other geographers, like William Desborough Cooley and James MacQueen, who spoke, wrote, theorised, and produced maps about the world based not on their own observations, but on the collation, interpretation, speculation, and synthesis of existing geographical sources. The dominant historical trope of geography through the nineteenth century is one of transition, shifting from an early modern textual practice of the ‘armchair’ to a modern science in the ‘field’. This thesis challenges such a limited view by demonstrating how critical practices continued to be a pervasive presence in the period 1830–1870, and how these two modes of geography co-existed and overlapped, and were combined and contested. It seeks to dismantle the static binarism that positions the critical geographer as both separate and in opposition to the field explorer. The chapters move to survey explorers that sit; explorers that read; critical geographers that move; books that travel; and libraries that lay out the world. In so doing, it identifies and attends to the unsettled physical and spatial boundaries between modes and methods of geography. It examines the role of the ‘armchair geographer’ in developing geographical thought and practice, and in negotiations concerning credible knowledge at the newly founded Royal Geographical Society. Crucially, this thesis expands the history of ‘armchair’ practices in geography beyond an entertaining tale of ‘conflict’ in exploration, and presents a critical examination of the many spatial manifestations of the ‘field’ and ‘fieldwork’ in geography’s disciplinary identity. This thesis contributes a spatially sensitive account of geographical knowledge making that interrupts and challenges current histories of the development of geography as a field of knowledge and set of practices in the nineteenth century.

This thesis is about the mobilities of geographical knowledge in the material form of lantern-slides and the forces exerted on these by technological and human factors. Owing to its concern with matter, human- and non-human, and its circulation, the thesis addresses the physics of geographical knowledge. The chapters below investigate the Royal Geographical Society’s (RGS) ongoing tradition of telling stories of science and exploration through words, objects and pictures in the final quarter of the nineteenth century and as geography professionalized and geographical science developed. These processes occurred within the context of a plethora of technological innovations, including the combination of the older medium of the magic lantern and photographic lantern-slides, integral to a wide range of entertainment, scientific and educational performances across Britain. In 1886 the RGS began to engage with the magic lantern. Via this technology and the interactive lecture performances in which it featured, I argue that the Society embraced the medium of photography, thereby engendering transformations in methods of knowledge making and to the RGS collections. I study how these transformations influenced the discipline of Geography as it was re-established at the University of Oxford in 1887. I demonstrate the evolution of the RGS’s Evening, Technical and Young Persons’ lectures, their contingent lantern-slide practices and, consequently, how these moulded, and were moulded by, the RGS Fellowship between c. 1885 and 1924. The chapters below explore how these innovations in visual technologies and practices arose, how they circulated knowledge and their effect on geographies of geographical knowledge making. By harnessing the lantern the RGS attracted an expanding and diversifying audience demographic. The thesis demonstrates the interactive nature of RGS lantern-slide lectures and audiences' important role in shaping the Society’s practices and geographical knowledge. The chapters below argue that it was via the use of the lantern that geography was disseminated to new places. The thesis therefore brings additional perspectives and dimensions to understandings of the circulation of geographical knowledge.