The Workmans began travelling and writing about their adventures in 1889, when ill health forced William to retire from the practice of medicine. Their career as travel writers, which yielded eight books that were very popular with late Victorian readers, falls into two parts: their first travels were to various parts of Europe and Asia, while their later years as adventurers focused on their mountaineering expeditions in the Himalayas. My paper will focus on how their impressions of the places they visited are shaped both by their purposes for writing and their assumptions about the multiple audiences, both scientific and popular, they address. Their ost original and effective strategy involves their experiments with writing collaboratively. In their earlier volumes they employ a unified voice, while in several late volumes they divide the prose between them and write individually. In general, Fanny seems much more comfortable than her husband is with writing in first person. When she is left to write in her own voice her work is more narrative, intimate, personal, and humorous than the constraints of the collaborative, collective Workman voice. The contrast between singular and collaborative voices in their work raises interesting questions about gender, audience, and purpose for their travel writing.
For the seven years between 1889 and 1905, the Workmans travelled to India, Ceylon, Java, Sumatra, southern Europe, Africa, Egypt, and Greece. They were considered pioneers in art because they logged most of the thousands of miles using bicycles, which were still novelties in the 1890's. The books which recount these travels through Europe and Asia focus on entertaining a popular audience that craved details of travel adventures by describing the people, art, and architecture of each place or region. In these volumes, then, they contribute their own insights and observations to a well-established tradition of travel writing in which tourists report their impressions of famous or well-known sights. Their collaborative prose in these volumes is most often written in the first person plural or third person singular, a practice which usually makes it impossible to determine precisely which words or ideas might have originated with William and which with Fanny. Despite what often seems to be the objectivity and uniformity of this unified voice, however, there are many passages where it is possible to detect what might be called a female sensibility or sensitivity that may well be Fanny Bullock Workman's contribution. In any case, the Workmans regularly interrupt their descriptions of people and places to focus on the experiences of Fanny as a pioneering female traveler. They also include a number of anecdotes in each of the travel volumes that highlight native women's experiences and often offer an implicit feminist criticism of women's hardships and inferior social status in many societies.
Beginning in 1907, when they undertook the adventures described in Ice-Bound Heights of the Mustagh (1908), the Workmans began a series of mountaineering expeditions that allowed them to test their expertise as scientists--geographers, surveyors, and geologists--as well as satisfy their thirst for the unusual travel experience. In contrast to the earlier focus on people, places, and their cultures, the trips described in their last four travel books were to largely uninhabited and rarely explored places--the peaks and glaciers of the high Himalayan mountain range. Their sense of audience seems to differ, too, for they sought in these later travel books to write for both a popular and a scientific audience--to write interestingly for the general reader yet establish and maintain their credibility in the scientific community as serious and accomplished mountaineers and geologists. Most interestingly, in two instances late in their writing careers, the Workmans broke with their practice of writing in a unified, professional and often dry reportorial or scientific voice that characterizes most of their travel prose. In In the Ice World of Himalaya (1900), for example, they divide a chapter devoted to exploring the effects of altitude on climbers between them. Fanny and William each write a section in their own voice, despite William's explicit discomfort with writing in the first person singular, which begins his section of the chapter: "Although averse, as a rule, to the mention of subjective phenomena, as savouring too much of autobiography, since the effects of high altitude can only be determined by the collation of individual experiences, I give mine here." This division of the writing into pieces attributable to a single author is expanded in the couple's last book, Two Summers in the Ice-Wilds of Eastern Karakoram. As William explains in the book's "Preface," they wanted to find a way to write freshly after three previous books about Himalayan mountaineering. Each writer develops two distinct voices: that of scientists who must convince other professionals that they know what they are doing, and the more informal, chatty voice which writes entertainingly of the perils and pleasures of travel aimed at the general reader and armchair traveller. Although later mountaineers and surveyors have questioned some of Fanny and William Workman's methods, measurements, and conclusions, there is no disputing their collaborative place in the record books as travellers, adventurers, and writers.
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and
employer.
© Regents of the University of Minnesota, 1997.