🪶 Reading list
When Madeira was the fashionable winter cure, travellers and invalids wrote it down. The 19th-century classics — now reprinted and collectable.
A classic Victorian guide and personal account of touring Madeira — how to see the island, letters from a year’s residence, and lists of its trees, flowers, ferns and seaweeds. Available as a facsimile reprint.
W. H. Koebel’s engaging Edwardian portrait of Madeira, weaving the island’s history with contemporary life and travel, illustrated with photographs by Mildred Cossart.
The famous “Brown’s” practical guide for tourists and invalids, with coloured maps and diagrams, that ran through many editions and shaped early Madeira tourism.
Anthony Drexel Biddle’s turn-of-the-century account of the Madeira Islands — history, scenery, vine-culture and society — with full-page illustrations and maps.
Dr Michael Grabham, the long-resident Madeira physician, analyses the island’s climate and its suitability for consumptive invalids — a key text in Madeira’s rise as a health resort.
The genteel 1909 garden memoir that inspired Tony Powell’s modern homage — Sir Charles Thomas-Stanford’s observations of Madeira’s flora, climate and society from the vantage of his garden.
A classic early 19th-century account of Madeira and Porto Santo by the explorer T. E. Bowdich, with zoological and botanical material added by his wife Sarah Bowdich Lee. Available as a modern facsimile reprint.
A facsimile of Robert White’s 1857 handbook describing the island’s climate, scenery, flora, geology and meteorology, written for the Victorian travellers and “invalids” who made Madeira a fashionable health resort.