The dream of building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land has long been a quintessential part of English identity and culture: but how did this vision shape the Victorian encounter with the actual Jerusalem in the Middle East?
The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917 offers a new cultural history of the English fascination with Palestine in the long nineteenth century, from Napoleon's failed Mediterranean campaign of 1799, which marked a new era in the British involvement in the land, to Allenby's conquest of Jerusalem in 1917. Bar-Yosef argues that the Protestant tradition...