Education Quote by Edward Burnett Tylor

“Very kindly received” reads like travel-diary politeness, but it’s doing heavier work: it tells you exactly whose doors were open, and therefore whose version of “the real state of things” was easiest to access. Tylor, a Victorian scientist and early anthropologist, is staging his authority in a few quiet moves. First, he anchors his entry into Mexico through English merchants and letters of introduction. Knowledge, here, is routed through empire’s informal infrastructure: commerce, expatriate networks, and the credibility that circulates among Britons abroad.

Then comes the key phrase: “we set ourselves to learn what was the real state of things in Mexico.” The wording presumes that Mexico’s reality is something obscured, misreported, or badly managed, and that an outside observer - armed with connections and a self-consciously empirical posture - can clarify it. “Real” is not neutral; it’s a claim to interpretive supremacy. It also hints at a familiar Victorian tension: curiosity framed as investigation, and investigation framed as improvement.

The subtext isn’t necessarily malicious, but it’s structurally biased. When your first informants are merchants, you’re primed to read a country through trade conditions, stability, and governance as they affect foreign capital. “State of things” subtly compresses complex social life into a diagnostic snapshot: Is it safe? Is it profitable? Is it legible to European categories?

In a single sentence, Tylor reveals a method and a worldview: the scientific traveler as credentialed outsider, collecting “reality” from the most convenient English-speaking vantage point.