Witness to the Peninsular war: Sophia Barnard's travels in Andalusia

Abstract

Drawing on several critical studies on travel writing, this article analyses the sections that Sophia Barnard devoted to Andalusia in her Travels in Algeirs [sic], Spain, &c., published in London in the mid-1820s. Married to a merchant, Barnard spent over three years of her life abroad. She did not travel extensively in Andalusia, but her narrative is nevertheless a valuable testimony of the situation of the area during the Peninsular War. She visited Cádiz when it was under bombardment by the French in 1811, and a few months later she was in Algeciras on one of her husband’s business trips. During her stay in Gibraltar she also recorded her impressions of the refugees in the British colony, being of particular interest her account of the epidemic that took many lives across the area in late 1812. Barnard uses the conventions of travel writing and the discourses of femininity and imperialism to portray Andalusia not as a Byronic Romantic land saturated with pleasurable experiences, but rather as a scenario full of perils and hardships where the Protestant female traveller may test her virtue as mother and wife, demonstrate her unwavering Christian faith, and also assert the supremacy of Great Britain. The same conventions enable her to justify her long residence in wartime Andalusia by fashioning herself before her readers not as a hedonistic female tourist in search of the picturesque but rather as a suffering traveller who has derived a spiritual benefit from her journeys in the area.