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  • 3 - Emigration with a Vengeance

  • Stephen Donovan, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden, Matthew Rubery, Queen Mary University of London
  • Book:
    Undercover
    Published online:
    13 March 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025, pp 97-130

  • Summary

    Chapter 3 examines the exposure of conditions in emigrant steerage travel to the United States and other countries. Despite the efforts of campaigners and several commissions of inquiry, the public long remained unaware of the sufferings of transatlantic emigrants. In exposing the brutal realities behind the assurances of emigration firms, undercover journalists gave a voice to the countless thousands of emigrants who endured overcrowding, inadequate food, and sexual harassment while crossing the Atlantic. Yet their harrowing accounts of squalor and danger also offered newspaper readers a vicarious experience of the exotic. Drawing on this investigative archive, we establish how Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Amateur Emigrant (1895) began life as an incognito investigation destined for a newspaper. By turns idealizing and disillusioning, Stevenson’s narrative illustrates the social insights and unanticipated personal transformations that are hallmarks of undercover journalistic experience and whose influence extends to his best-known fictional work, Treasure Island (1883).