Esoteric exploration: commercial geography and occult secrets in the fiction of Verney Lovett Cameron

Verney Lovett Cameron has now lapsed into relative obscurity, but in the late-nineteenth century he was among the premier of British explorers, having established his credentials by completing a transcontinental African expedition (1872-76) from present-day Tanzania to Angola. This article, however, focuses on Cameron’s status as the most prolific of a range of explorers who turned to the affordances of prose fiction. Imaginative literature provided supplements or alternatives to the expeditionary narrative that operated outside the parameters of institutional science and were not regulated by the same protocols. Drawing on Gérard Genette’s narrative taxonomy of the “sequel” and the “serious transposition”, the article argues that Cameron’s fiction extended his preoccupations with “commercial geography” and private enterprise while also opening the way to surprising alternative conceptualisations of geographical travel. The Adventures of Herbert Massey uses fictional adventure to invite capitalist venture and specifically to advertise east Africa as amenable to administration by chartered company. The highly esoteric plot of The Queen’s Land, by contrast, offers a geographical allegory that at once celebrates the explorer’s expertise and casts expeditions as the source of secret knowledge.