"Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo" from William Makepeace Thackeray. English novelist of the 19th century (1811-1863).

In his study of the journalist George Augustus Sala, Peter Blake discusses the way Sala’s personal style, along with his innovations in form, influenced the New Journalism at the end of the nineteenth century. Blake places Sala at the centre of nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals and examines his prolific contributions to newspapers and periodicals in the context of contemporary debates and issues surrounding his work. Sala’s journalistic style, Blake argues, was a product of the very different mediums in which he worked, whether it was the visual arts, bohemian journalism, novels, pornographic plays, or travel writing. Harkening back to a time when journalism and fiction were closely connected, Blake’s book not only expands our understanding of one of the more prominent and interesting journalists and personalities of the nineteenth century, but also sheds light on prominent nineteenth-century writers and artists such as Charles Dickens, Mathew Arnold, William Powell Frith, Henry Vizetelly, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

The history of globalisation is usually told as a history of shortening distances and acceleration of the flows of people, goods and ideas. Channelling Mobilities refines this picture by looking at a wide variety of mobile people passing through the region of the Suez Canal, a global shortcut opened in 1869. As an empirical contribution to global history, the book asks how the passage between Europe and Asia and Africa was perceived, staged and controlled from the opening of the Canal to the First World War, arguing that this period was neither an era of unhampered acceleration, nor one of hardening borders and increasing controls. Instead, it was characterised by the channelling of mobilities through the differentiation, regulation and bureaucratisation of movement. Telling the stories of tourists, troops, workers, pilgrims, stowaways, caravans, dhow skippers and others, the book reveals the complicated entanglements of empires, internationalist initiatives and private companies.