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Charles Montagu Doughty (1843–1926) followed his late father and his grandfather, clergymen and landowners, to 91ֱ�� in 1861. He pursued the interest in geology he had begun at school, though after two years he transferred amicably to Downing College, which did not enforce attendance at chapel (it had none) or lectures. As a graduate he began a private study of early English literature, in preparation for ‘a patriotic and religious work’ of his own.¹ But in the same period his inheritance dwindled, and he took up a cheaper life of travel.

While Doughty was staying near Petra in 1875, he heard of similar monuments at Medain Salih. He spent a year in Damascus studying Arabic, then set out from the city with the pilgrims of the Haj. Unlike earlier British travellers such as Richard Burton and William Palgrave, Doughty never concealed his identity, nor often his opinions. It took him three months to reach and study Medain Salih, ‘at the daily adventure [risk] of my life’.² Nevertheless when the returning pilgrims passed by, he did not join them, but a Bedouin tribe. Doughty would spend nearly two years wandering in Arabia, which he describes in his 1888 book Travels in Arabia Deserta.³

Doughty is more than once seriously ill; whether as an unbeliever (a Christian), a suspected spy against the declining Ottoman Empire, or a personal annoyance, he is threatened, beaten, expelled, and abandoned. Though he quotes without irony a proverb that ‘truth may walk through the world unarmed’,⁴ Doughty carries a hidden pistol, which he is forced to draw at the end of his travels: he bravely holds out the handle to his attackers. Behind the narrative, imperial politics operate from the start to frustrate, endanger, and finally protect Doughty. Whatever his purposes may be, the Englishman is easily recognized on all sides as a diplomatic liability.

Edward Said, in his study Orientalism, names Doughty among British writers whose ‘involvement with the East … did not prevent them from despising it thoroughly’.⁵ It is not clear that this is true of Doughty, whose book shows engagement in good faith (sometimes poor tact) with the people he meets, and generalizes negatively and positively to the point of contradiction.⁶ But Orientalism as Said teaches us to see it would not depend on authorial malice: this ‘Western style of dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’⁷ lies in a text’s surface, in its style.⁸

That of Arabia Deserta is like that of no other book, blending medieval and early modern literary English with the vocabulary, idioms, and even syntax of spoken Arabic.⁹ Perhaps it suggests timelessness as an Orientalist essence of Arabia;¹⁰ this would fit with what Richard Bevis analyses as Doughty’s motivating ‘ “primitivism”, the drive to get back to simplest beginnings’, and to return – even physically – to what he saw as religious, racial, and linguistic sources.¹¹

But if this is domination, it is at the cost of a ‘struggle, both physical and psychical’,¹² that is no less legible in the text; such that the novelist Henry Green finds there a very different kind of victory. For Green, the style of Arabia Deserta is one to which Doughty was ‘forced … by the impact of a life strange to [him] and by [his] honest acceptance of this’.¹³

Early desert explorations << Pilgrimage to sources >> A long range

1. Unpublished notes by Doughty, cited in Andrew Taylor, God’s Fugitive (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 257.
2. Unpublished letter from Doughty to Selim Meshaka, cited in Taylor, God’s Fugitive, 117.
3. C. M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1888).
4. Doughty, Arabia Deserta, vol. 2, 342.
5. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 2019), 238.
6. Janice Deledalle-Rhodes, ‘The True Nature of Doughty’s Relationship with the Arabs’, in Explorations in Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, ed. Stephen E. Tabachnick (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 117.
7. Said, Orientalism, 3.
8. Said, Orientalism, 20–21.
9. Edward A. Levenson, ‘The Style of Arabia Deserta: A Linguistic Analysis’, in Explorations, ed. Tabachnick, 90, 93.
10. Compare Thomas J. Assad, Three Victorian Travellers (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 129. Assad finds that Arabia Deserta’s combination of different literary period styles ‘enhances the effect of timelessness. Doughty’s style cannot be dated’.
11. Richard Bevis, ‘Spiritual Geology: C. M. Doughty and the Land of the Arabs’, Victorian Studies 16, no. 2 (1972): 176.
12. Assad, Victorian Travellers, 109.
13. Henry Green, ‘Apologia’, in Surviving (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), 96. The 1941 essay is a defence of Doughty and Arabia Deserta. Green hopes that wartime conditions might force his generation of writers ‘towards a style which, by the impact of a life strange to them and by their honest acceptance of this, will be as pure as Doughty’s was’.