I have to come clean, Nellie Bly did not visit the North West of England. She did, however, circumnavigate the globe in seventy two days, visiting twenty two cities and towns. She travelled by train or on ocean going vessels in various states of sea-worthiness, carrying a single bag - her grip sack - containing essential items including a large glass jar of cold cream but not, as advised, a revolver. This was in 1889 when young women of 25 years of age were not expected to traverse their own neighbourhoods unchaperoned. How did Nellie find herself holed up in Hong Kong awaiting a ship delayed by engine failure or inspecting a mass execution ground in Canton? She was furious at being refused admission to a Hindu temple in Singapore. “Why should my sex exclude me from a temple as in America it confines me to the side entrances of hotels and other strange and incommodious things?”
She was born Elizabeth Jane Cochrane to working class parents in Pennsylvania. She moved to New York to pursue a career as a journalist. For her first big assignment with the New York World she feigned madness to get herself incarcerated in the New York City lunatic asylum. Her report of the inhumane treatment of inmates shocked the nation and led to sweeping reforms.
She pitched the idea of the round the world trip to her editor as a real life challenge to Jules Verne’s fictional hero, Phineas Fogg in Around the World in Eighty Days. The editor sat on the idea for a year and then gave her seventy two hours to pack and set off!
On her return, she embarked on a lecture tour and wrote an account of her adventures and reflections. We’re not told what attracted her to millionaire industrialist, Robert Livingstone Seaman, twice her age when they married. After his death until her own in 1922, she returned to journalism, campaigning for women’s suffrage and better conditions for abandoned children. During World War 1 she was the first woman reporting from the Eastern Front.
Rosemary Brown is a journalist and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society with a quest to put female travellers “back on the map”. This entertaining but thought provoking account compares and contrasts the original journey with Rosemary’s attempt to follow in Nellie’s footsteps 125 years later. Using all the advantages of modern forms of transport, Rosemary whizzes round in thirty three days. She’s a congenial, insightful travel companion and narrator, giving the reader great entertainment as we glimpse the world through the eyes of an extraordinary young woman.
Paula Moorhouse