Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850–1901

Heidi Liedke is Assistant Professor of English literature at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany, and Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, UK with a new project on theatre livecasts. She obtained her PhD in English philology at the University of Freiburg, Germany, in 2016. She is co-editor of the collection Muße und Moderne (Idleness and Modernity; Mohr Siebeck, to be published in 2018). Her work has appeared in Textus and Recherches et Travaux.

“Heidi Liedke’s study, The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850–1901, takes a deep dive into the fascinating phenomenon of writers in the latter half of the century … .” (Maria Frawley, Victorian Studies, Vol. 63 (4), 2021)“This is a thought-provoking monograph of interest to Victorianists studying travel writing, as well as those studying the relationships between work, toil, rest, leisure and idling.” (H-F Dessain, BAVS Newsletter, Vol. 19 (3), 2019)

• 1. Introduction.- 2. A Brief Intellectual and Semantic History of 'Idleness'.- 3. Sensibilities of Seeing.- 4. The Dangers of Idle Time.- 5. Genre and Gender.- 6. The Victorian Idler's Late-Romantic Mentality.- 7. Idleness and Idling in Anna Mary Howitt's An Art Student in Munich (1853).- 8. W. H. Hudson, his Thinking Machine, and Idle Days in Patagonia (1893).- 9. Jerome K. Jerome's Humoristic Idleness in Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!) (1889): Lightness and Longing.- 10. Margaret Fountaine's Diary Accounts of her Restless Idling and Butterflying.- 11. George Gissing's By The Ionian Sea (1901) as a Paradise of Idleness.- 12. Coda.