Geographical Texts

Chapter 1 explains the characteristics and significance of the book’s principal source material: late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British geography books. These works have been largely neglected by historians, but their popularity and summative nature means that they can reveal the formative, commonplace ideas circulating in British literate culture. However, due to their opaque authorships, plagiaristic contents, and complex publication histories, geographical texts pose specific methodological challenges. The chapter therefore argues that we need to adopt different conceptual and procedural priorities in order to discern popular mentalities from these works.