Julia Pardoe’s The City of the Sultan; and Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1836, which sold over 30,000 copies in four editions between 1837 and the start of the Crimean War. Pardoe set out to correct what she saw as the prejudices of earlier accounts by travellers to the Ottoman Empire. On the surface Turkey seemed to conform to all the European stereotypes – exotic, indolent, sensual, superstitious, obscurantist and religiously fanatical – but on closer inspection it was seen to possess ‘noble qualities’ that made it fertile soil for liberal reform.
