‘Whirl’d through the World’

The Role of Travel in the Making of Dora Montefiore, 1851–1933

Abstract

New technologies of mobility which emerged in the wake of industrialisation helped to create a radical diaspora which in the first decades of the twentieth century began to create new transnationalist politics. This diaspora of socialists, feminists and anarchists consisted both of migrants (whose politics spurred migration or whose migration prompted political engagement) and travellers. Amongst the latter was Dora Montefiore, an English suffragist, socialist and later communist, who sought to make an internationalist politics in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. During her personal political journey through the changing landscape of progressive politics, travel was to be an important ingredient in her developing political practice.

This essay explores the ways in which travel affected how Montefiore ‘did’ her politics. It considers why travel was such an important feature of her life as well as the different kinds of political travel she engaged in and its function in her politics. Political tourism, networking and propagandist tours are all explored. For Montefiore, travel could enable unforeseen conversations, serendipitous encounters, new experiences and even friendships which could be put to work by her as a political activist. These experiences often had a lasting effect on her politics. Travel could also be transformative when it was about leisure, pleasure and recuperation. Many of Montefiore’s journeys contained all of these elements. However, increasingly the constraints on such travel, particularly the growth of police surveillance, changed the nature of how travel was experienced by political activists and thus what they could do with it within their politics. This essay is therefore about the possibilities of travel for a political activist, but also its limitations. How a radical activist ‘whirl’d through the world’ was always contingent, but the process of this kind of political travel necessarily affected the traveller herself as well as those she encountered along the way.