Álvarez Rixo y Elizabeth MurrayRectificaciones y notas sobre un manuscrito

Abstract

English travel literature on the Canaries published in the first half of the 19th century shows a representation of the Islands which is nothing but an unfinished outline, full of mistakes and clichés, and which also reveals an undeniable debt with previous sources on the matter. But an evident change took place in the second half of the century, thanks to a group of books in which the Canaries are no longer a simple link in a changing chain of countries and lands, to become the only aim of the voyagers. These facts can be very well seen in Elizabeth Murray’s Sixteen years of an artist’s life in Morocco, Spain an the Canary Islands, a work which paved the way to the great spring of travel books in the last two decades of the century. However, Murray’s book was widely rejected, but some local writers, as it was José Agustín Álvarez Rixo, expressed a more balanced opinion, underlining the mistakes, but also stressing the positive things it contained.