This thesis is concerned with the pleasure travels of British middle class men and women during the 1860s to World War One. I have considered pleasure travel as any type of travel primarily motivated by the desire to entertain and amuse oneself in a place other than home. It had become a popular leisure activity during this time period for a wide range of people, partly due to improved methods of transportation, increased monetary capabilities and the availability of free time. / Paying special attention to the highly visited Italy and Switzerland, I have examined travel writings from this period to gain insight into both the individual perceptions of pleasure travel and the pleasure traveller and the general current of thoughts of the time. Travel writings include guidebooks and handbooks, personal memoirs and journals. Having become an integral part of middle class life during this period, pleasure travel also became the subject of many novels and articles which provide additional insight, mostly through criticism and mockery of the traveller.

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This thesis analyzes Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Details of the Alhambra (1836-1842) by British Architect Owen Jones in relation to British conceptions of Spain in the nineteenth century. Although modern scholars often view Jones’s work as an accurate visual account of the Alhambra, I argue that his work is not only interested in accuracy, but it is also a re-presentation of the fourteen-century monument based on Jones’s ideologies and creative faculties. Instead of viewing the Alhambra through a culturally sensitive, historical lens, Jones treated it as an Imaginary Geography, as Edward Said called it, through which he could promote his interests and perspectives. Although there were many British views of Spain in nineteenth-century, this thesis will focus on two sets of seemingly contradictory conceptions of Spain that were especially important to Jones’s visual and ideological program in Alhambra: Spain’s status as both the Catholic and Islamic Other, and its frequent interpretations through both romantic and reform-oriented lenses. Through a closer look at Arabian Antiquities of Spain by James Cavanah Murphy and the illustrations from The Tourist in Spain: Granada by David Roberts, I show the prevalence of these mindsets in nineteenth-century reconstructions of the Alhambra. Then, I compare portions of these works to plates from Jones’s Alhambra to illustrate Jones’s similar adaptation of these perspectives despite the visual peculiarity of his work as a whole.

This thesis examines and compares two travel accounts in the regions of Phocis and Boeotia in Greece, as they appear in the book of Sir William Gell “The Itinerary of Greece: With a Commentary on Pausanias and Strabo and an Account of the Monuments of Antiquity at Present Existing in that Country (1819) and on the two volumed book of Edward Dodwell A Classical and Topographical Tour Through Greece: During the Years 1801, 1805, and 1806, Volume 1 & 11 (1819). More specifically, the thesis explores the extent of the area that these travelers managed to cover during their routes, the places with historical and archaeological interest that they mentioned at least, their moves among the various chronotopes, and the use of their predecessors’ texts for on their routes. With the use of digital platforms such as Recogito, their travel accounts have been annotated, tagged, aligned with ToposText gazetteer and Wikidata, exported as .csv files, and further processed using OpenRefine. By having as a ground theory approach the social construction of space, as Lefebvre has defined it, the thesis, with the assistance of ArcGIS and Python and the necessary manual steps, explored the topics as mentioned above. The analysis of these topics provided interesting results to the thesis. It showed the differences in the area coverage of the two travelers in Phocis and Boeotia. It also highlighted their accuracy in the discovering of ancient places and buildings. Moreover, it delineated their moves through the different chronotopes and the vital role of the physical environment as a bridge for these moves. Ultimately, this thesis revealed the crucial role of their predecessors’ travel accounts for their navigation on the respecting. Mainly, it made clear the vitality of the travel accounts of Strabo and Pausanias. These results were clearly connected with the social construction of space and time from the two British travelers based on their cultural background.

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