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1. Invariably in this journal, Maria Graham speaks of herself as ‘writing’, not dictating, these memoirs.

2. Most of Dickens’ heroes and heroines are motherless: David, Oliver, Little Nell, Little Dorrit, Frances; also Burney’s Evelina, Bronte’s Jane, Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Molly Gibson, or Ruth. When they still have their mothers, these are ineffectual or even noxious, as Edith Skewton’s mother in Dickens’ Dombey and Son; Bella Wilfer’s mother in Our Mutual Friend; or Mrs Tulliver in Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. In Maria Graham’s memoir, the only mother depicted, an aunt, is extremely cruel to her.

3. For this journey into the past, Maria Graham is using the same discursive (novelistic) form she used in ‘Brazil 3’.

4. Some of the names of Maria Graham’s characters seem to anticipate Dickens’ partiality to sonorous names as part of an individual’s makeup, like Barkis, the coachman, or Steerforth, the charming villain.

5. David relates that an old lady in the coach put a basket under his feet ‘on account of my legs being short’. He was uncomfortable and in pain during the ride but was afraid to move (82).

6. Another is the ‘unhappy’ Charlotte G., whose ‘story, as it terminated twenty years afterwards, was one of those sad romances in real life which go beyond all the distress of fiction’ (24); another is the uncanny resemblance of a practice in Maria Graham’s memoir to another passage from Jane Eyre. The same as Jane, she used to hide behind a curtain in a window seat reading books when she had been ‘kept out of the playground for a punishment’ (20).

7. This situation represents another link to Bronte’s Jane, who is shunned by her classmates upon her arrival at school, and another personal clue about Maria Graham’s habit of antagonising women.

8. Later these readings were of great use to her, especially in the composition of her travel journals.

9. Maria Graham may have had a closer relationship with her sister in real life than the one represented in her text. Some years after Maria’s death, her niece sought John Murray’s help to publish her first novel. She referred to the friendship between her aunt, ‘my mother’s sister’ and the Murray family. Later she became the successful novelist Anne Edwardes. One of her novels, Ought We to Visit Her?, was adapted by Gilbert and Sullivan for one of their musical comedies.