Charles M. Doughty ranks as the most important British explorer of Arabia and one of the greatest travel writers of all time. His difficult solo journey in the northern Arabian peninsula from 10 November 1876 to 2 August 1878 is recorded in the classic Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888). This massive, encyclopedic work, some twelve hundred pages in length, remains not only the definitive Western account of Arabia in the nineteenth century but also a masterpiece of Victorian literary nonfiction, equal in quality to the writings of Thomas Carlyle, Walter Pater, and John Ruskin.

Travels in Arabia Deserta directly influenced another great book of Arabian travels, T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), and Lawrence has perhaps summed up Doughty's importance better than anyone else. In the introduction to the 1921 edition of Arabia Deserta (which Lawrence was instrumental in getting published) he wrote, "To have accomplished such a journey would have been achievement...