Reading Rooms for Travelling Cultures: English-Language Reading Rooms in Late Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

This essay focuses on British and American reading rooms at the end of the nineteenth century in French travel centres such as Boulogne-sur-Mer, Cannes, and Paris. These reading rooms were sites of transit that reveal the travelling cultures of Britons and Americans. They set in motion certain travel sociabilities and practices, suggested various transit routes and itineraries, promoted different cultural and national affiliations and identities, and collected, represented, and displayed anglophone cultures. They operated as microcosms of British and American cultures, offering essentialized experiences and connections with people, behaviour, and things affiliated with home, but this essay shows how they were also social environments that not only reinforced, but also reshaped and interrogated anglophone cultures on the move in British, American, and French cultural territories.