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Writer's pictureKirsten

Isabella Bird - nineteenth century adventurer

Updated: May 18, 2021


Tobermory Lighthouse on Mull, close to the home Isabella shared with her sister Hennie

This story relates to one of Britain’s most celebrated Victorian travel writers.


Isabella in 1891, now Mrs Bishop. Image in public domain

She was the pious, staid and respectable, middle class Vicar’s daughter who corralled wild cattle in Wild West Colorado alongside a quick-on-the-draw fur trapper, outlaw and potential love interest known as ‘Rocky Mountain Jim’. At home she suffered from physical and mental ill health, including spinal issues and depression, but once across the sea she could ride thousands of miles alone over the most challenging terrain and climb some of the world’s highest and most dangerous mountains, whilst delighting, at times, in the most squalid or harsh of conditions.





Image of Isabella from the frontispiece of 1879 edition of A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains. Image courtesay of Hathi Trust Digital Library

Like some of the best Scottish protagonists she seems to have been almost Jekyll and Hyde like in the duality of her character. Although, as her own physician suggested, perhaps it was less a duality in herself, and more a single character’s reactions to such vastly contrasting environments.

Either way, Isabella Bird was an extraordinary woman who was fortunate enough to gain a freedom many at the time had no access to; skilled enough to recount her experiences in a wonderfully engaging way; and kind enough to use the recognition she thus gained to help others in need.



3 Castle Terrace, the family's first home in Edinburgh, and the view from it towards Edinburgh Castle

Isabella was born in Cheshire, in England in 1831 and spent her childhood moving with her father’s job from one English parish vicarage to the next. On her father’s death Isabella, now aged 27, her sister Henrietta and her mother, Dora, came to live at 3 Castle Terrace in Dora’s childhood city: Edinburgh.

This was a move from a series of countryside houses with enough outside space that Isabella had kept and ridden a beloved horse, to a rented upstairs city flat. This change in circumstance, alongside the bereavement must have been at least partially to blame for the resurgence of Isabella’s mental and physical health problems.


Four years earlier, these problems had been, at least temporarily eased, when the family doctor – perhaps having run out of other ideas – prescribed a change of air and her father had given her £100 to go on a solo expedition ‘until the money ran out’ to America and Canada. The book of her many months of travel ‘The Englishwoman in America’ was published anonymously two years later. Alongside vivid descriptions of 1850s Prince Edward Island, Boston, New York, the Great Lakes and her journeys by road, rail and ship, Isabella tells of meetings with long established and new arrivals to the ‘New World’. She speaks fluent Scottish Gaelic with those recently come from the Highlands. Although she did not live in Scotland at this time, the family had spent every summer in the North West Highlands and Gaelic was just one of multiple languages she knew. She compares the American scenery with places such as Gairloch on the far North West Scottish coast and the Cuchullin Mountains (as she calls the Cullins) on Skye.

Skye's Cullin Mountains - Isabella had visited in her childhood and found the American scenery comparable

This book also contains passages denouncing the slavery that still existed in southern States. Her father was a close relative of William Wilberforce and her extended family had always been strongly part of the abolitionist movement. It must also be acknowledged that in the book Isabella recounts meetings with African Americans using terms that are shocking and completely unacceptable today. Judging her by the standards of her day, she would most likely have been viewed as quite progressive, as she claims to be actively trying to get rid of the vile ideas that have been instilled in her from birth, and on one particular boat trip, when a young servant woman is being badly treated by her mistress, Bird steps in to help whilst others do not. On the other hand, I am sorry to say that Bird’s unpleasant writing relating to indigenous Americans, in this and future volumes, does not have any redemption.


Isabella was to go on to make her name travelling and writing in Hawaii (known then as the Sandwich Islands) and the Rocky Mountains of Colorado (which was at the time the most recent state to join the Union and a stereotype of the idea of the Wild West). But before she did all this, she spent time and effort on projects here in Scotland. In terms of her health, the first few years of the family's life in Edinburgh was something of a low point, however she worked to make the lives of others better through her good deeds. At times her mental health was so bad she couldn’t get out of bed or even receive visitors at home. She needed an operation that was carried out as one of the first under general anaesthesia, and by none other than Joseph Lister.


When she was able, she and Henrietta worked on projects to aid West Highlanders who had been left destitute and starving due to a combination of the Highland Clearances and potato famine. She wrote highlighting their plight and gathering public support.


Harris, Outer Hebrides

A popular bi-weekly magazine The Leisure Hour published her account on her travels to the Outer Hebrides in 1866. This four part series shows she did not find the islands the spaces of beauty and peace as we think of them today. Rather, to her they appeared challenging and desolate places to live. Particularly revealing is her comparison of the life of a lighthouse keeper and that of a sailor – preferring the harsh conditions, and danger of the sailor's lot, as at least it came with a dose of comradeship and fearful excitement.

Lewis, Outer Hebrides

Of the monotony and solitude of the lighthouse keeper’s work, she comments that it must cause stultification. This seems a projection of her own situation, where as a Victorian woman of fierce intellect, the limitations in what is expected of her are clearly a factor in her fragile mental health. Whilst it is of course by no means always the case with depression, it seems that for Isabella hers was environmentally induced and when she was given the freedom to explore and experience the world, her mental health was abundantly restored. Similarly many of her physical issues (spinal problems excluded) may have been linked to her mental state, as most of them seem to be vastly improved or even disappear, when she was in her element, which was always travelling.

Some of Edinburgh's Old Town closes. Isabella visited and reported on the awful conditions

Isabella was also acutely aware of the horrific slum conditions of Edinburgh’s Old Town in the 1860s. In 1869 she went into closes and up the stairwells to experience the conditions in which some of her fellow citizens were living. She published her findings in a short book ‘Notes on Old Edinburgh’ as part of an attempt to draw attention to the horrors of life for some in the Jekyll and Hyde city. Their grim circumstances are especially stark when compared to the elegant nature of the neighbouring New Town where most of the city’s officials lived. She writes of the city law-makers walking within yards of the homes of the suffering poor, in order to get to their offices, whilst fully ignoring their misery. She blames, too, the landlords, charging vastly inflated prices for the smallest, windowless, rat-infested dark and dank rooms.


When their mother, Dora died in 1866, Henrietta leased a cottage by the pier in Tobermory on the island of Mull, which became her sanctuary. Both sisters lived there during the summers, but Isabella needed the bustle of the city – so they continued to winter in Edinburgh. In 1872, with their mother now gone six years, Isabella was prescribed by a doctor to take another trip for her health. She was told Australia was the best place to go, so she left for the Antipodes, which turned into a much more extended trip, and the first of many. During the breaks from her travels over the next 8 or so years, home for Isabella was always with Henny in Tobermory and her writing took the form of letters to her dearly beloved sister.


Isabella Bird in Wonderland - Vol 1, one of a series of manga comics featuring Isabella. Image from Rob Jackson's Comics Blog

As she found the climate in Australia intolerable, Isabella soon left and ended up, serendipitously in Hawaii, which she adored, before travelling back through California and the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. After a spell back in Scotland she took another important journey – this time to Japan. Her trip was not just for pleasure, but semi-official, partially organised and funded by the British Minister in Japan, as a way of gaining insight into a country that had been largely closed to foreigners for centuries. Interestingly it is in Japan that she is perhaps best remembered today. There is even a series of manga comics with Isabella as the central character.







Tobermory, Mull - the clock tower is infront of the gap between the white and burgundy buildings to the left

Tobermory Clock Tower dedicated to Hennie by Isabella Picture by Reading Tom from Reading, UK

Isabella’s most highly rated travel journals were written as letters to her sister, who she always called Hennie. Hennie seems to have been the most significant person in Isabella’s life, and her death in 1880 the most keenly felt loss. The prominent clock tower on Tobermory Harbour was erected by Isabella in her sister’s memory. Her writing after this is far more serious and she wrote that whilst the interest of travel remained, the enjoyment of it was lost. Perhaps due to the emotionally low time in her life, Isabella sought out a new companionship, marrying the following year, at the age of 50, an Edinburgh surgeon and long-time admirer of hers Dr John Bishop. Bishop had worked under Joseph Lister at Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary and had been both sisters’ personal physician. He had proposed to Isabella at least twice before. She had refused, thinking that a husband and potential children would curtail her true passion – her adventures. They based themselves in Walker Street, in Edinburgh’s West End, but Isabella would take herself to Mull in order to write, leaving her husband in the city. Isabella had been planning to travel to New Guinea but on her marriage she felt unable to go as, apparently she claimed it was not a place to take a man!


Bishop’s own health, as it turned out, was frail and although 11 years younger than Isabella, he was the one for whom they travelled to Southern Europe, looking for a better climate. Lister even travelled to Cannes to meet them and carry out a blood transfusion. Sadly it did not work and in 1886, only 5 years into their marriage Isabella was widowed – John dying aged just 44.


After these tragedies, Isabella decided that whilst she would not give up travelling, she would no longer do so purely for fun and her own health. She trained in medicine in London and then started travelling as a medical missionary. She left for India where she used the money left to her by her husband to set up two hospitals, one each named for him and for Henrietta.


The 1890s saw Isabella’s reputation cemented. With travels to Persia, Kurdistan and Turkey; to Korea; back to Japan; and to China, where she took an early camera to create a photographic record, gathering some wonderful and important images. She was invited to dine with and advise Prime Minister William Gladstone, and was presented to Queen Victoria. In Tobermory, she was asked to give the local Christmas lecture.

The National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, was home to the Scottish Geographical Society in 1890 when Isabella was granted fellowship

Isabella was granted fellowship of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society followed by the Royal Geographical Society. Of the latter, she was one of the first group of women to be admitted as fellows, and by the following year the Society had regressed and stopped allowing in any further women until 1913! The women who were already fellows were permitted to remain and few years later, Isabella was invited to present a lecture to the Society. Soon she was also a member of the Royal Photographic Society, with her new found skill with a Kodak.


As a new century dawned Isabella, now nearly 70, was still going strong. Her travels in later life had seen her taking journeys and risks that were just as dangerous and adventurous as ever, if not more so. What was to be her final trip took her through the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, riding a stallion so tall she had to use a ladder to mount it!


Detail of Melville Street candle snuffer; inset: no 16 - Isabella's final home

Sadly, her life came to a peaceful end back home at 16 Melville Street, Edinburgh in 1904. Her bags were packed, ready for her next excursion to China.

She is buried alongside her family in Edinburgh's Dean Cemetry.


Despite her fame and recognition during her lifetime, Isabella Bird has sadly become a more obscure figure today – especially in her own native land. Her restless spirit and unquenchable thirst for experiencing new and different places took her to countries most British Victorian women would never have dreamed of going. They, however, were her target audience, and they delighted in her vivid descriptions, which must have provided some escape from the confines of the expected existence of a nineteenth century middle-class lady. In doing so, she captured with her pen, and later her camera, many places at a very specific time in their history – albeit from a very British perspective. And her books still have the ability to engage the reader over a century later.


Bibliography


Images are my own other than:

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