Palestine in the Victorian Age

'Holy Land on the brain' was how one Victorian traveller in Palestine described her contemporaries. In the last decades of the Ottoman Empire, thousands of Victorians flocked from Britain and America to see Palestine and the biblical sites which they already thought they knew. When their mental image did not precisely resemble the reality they found, many were convinced that it was the reality itself which had to be altered, an attitude which would have - and continues to have - profound implications for the Middle East. This book, the product of the author's historical research among almost forgotten travelogues, guidebooks, archives and newspaper clippings, tells the story of this fascinating period, a previously unwritten chapter in the story of Britain's pursuit of empire in the nineteenth century. Responding not only to the ever-present interest in the Middle East, the work is also in dialogue with contemporary concerns around Britain's colonial past. From the American Bible scholar who started a craze, travellers trying to overturn Jerusalem's holiest sites, to an English farm outside the city's walls, to an uprising sparked by a church bell and a contested tragedy, to one Palestinian's eventful visit to the heart of the British Empire, to the colonies founded by a bizarre eccentric, Holy Land on the Brain: Palestine and the Victorians reveals an often surprising story of Britain's growing entanglement with Palestine years before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and Britain's occupation of the region .