Working Lunch feat. Emma Liggins ‘Amelia Edwards and Egyptian Dark Tourism in the 1870s’

Join us for lunch, chat, and a research paper by Dr Emma Liggins. Emma’s paper focuses on the place writing of the late-Victorian traveller and ghost story writer Amelia Edwards. In her best-selling travel narrative A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877), Edwards reflected on the atmosphere of the Egyptian death-place, aestheticising ancient and medieval tombs, as sites of dark tourism. The useful new term ‘Graveyard Gothic’, coined by Eric Parisot and others in 2024, signals that memorial sites generate unease, horror and silence. As in the place writing of Edwards’ contemporary Vernon Lee, which lingers on the half-erased memorials on Italian tombs and churches, forgotten stories of violent and/or oppressed women are activated and excavated by the tourist gaze.   The dark tourist may be both horrified and thrilled by this encounter with the past.

Advancing debates within death studies about dark tourism’s connections with ritual, ambiguity and darkness (Toussaint and Decrop, 2013; Darvay, 2016; Stone, 2006; Seaton, 2002), I argue that Edwards seeks to reimagine lost cities of the dead. The late nineteenth century saw the popularity of Egyptian Gothic marketed to British audiences (Borwein, 2021; Sullivan, 2025).  As a pioneering female traveller and one of the first Egyptologists, Edwards wrote about Egyptian tombs, funerals and ‘sepulchral excavations’ at a time when most tourists viewed Egyptian artefacts in British museums rather than visiting in person. This paper offers a new reading of Edwards’ accounts of visiting ancient tombs in Cairo and the necropolis of Sakkara. It asks how late-Victorian dark tourism renders the death space a sacred space and reflects on the ways in which A Thousand Miles up the Nile memorialises the lost women of Egypt.

Dr Emma Liggins is Reader in English and Co-Director of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her publications include The British Short Story (with Andrew Maunder & Ruth Robbins) (Palgrave, 2011) and The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories, 1850-1945: Gender, Space and Modernity (Palgrave, 2020). She has edited a special issue of VPR on the Strand Magazine (2021) and has chapters in The Edinburgh Companion to the Victorian Ghost Story (2025) and Ghosts and the Gothic (2025). She is currently working on a monograph Victorian and Edwardian Death Spaces: Gender and Memorialisation for Manchester University Press.              e.liggins@mmu.ac.uk