The exploration of Africa attracted enormous attention during the middle decades of the [19th] century and was in many ways the spur to the most classic forms of Victorian travel writing.

Even so, the Royal Geographic Society was an incredibly successful institution precisely because it linked the tradition of travel writing associated with the Grand Tour and the search for the exotic or picturesque with hard-nosed science and even harder-nosed diplomatic and economic concerns.

The Royal Geographical Society emerged in this period [1830-80] as the greatest promoter of travel and exploration and the key institution in what Felix Driver calls the ‘culture of exploration’.

With technological superiority came presumed intellectual superiority: Europeans could claim to be able to understand and interpret not only the terrain they entered but the inhabitants as well.