Gifford Palgrave's Narrative of a Year's Journey was published in two volumes in 1865. This edition was reprinted in 1866 and in 1969. It was published in French translation in 1866 and reprinted in 1869, 1873, and 1992. The one-volume, somewhat abridged Personal Narrative of a Year's Journey was first published in 1868, and reprinted in 1869, 1871 (6th edition), 1873, 1883, and 1908. The American pirate publisher Thomas Nelson brought out extracts as Among the Arabs in 1874. (This information for the most part drived from the OCLC and British Library catalogs, not hands-on examination of the various editions.)

Preface to the "Personal Narrative" of 1868

A journey undertaken through Central and Eastern Arabia, with the purpose of observing rather than of publishing, put me in possession of certain details upon those parts of the great Peninsula, which may be worth recording. It is true that the circumstances of my visit, and the restraints inseparable from native disguise, abridged antiquarian research, impeded botanical or geological inquiry, and deprived me of the means for exact and scientific investigation; for instance, of the customary requisites for verifying longitudes and latitudes, or determining the degrees of heat and cold, of moisture and aridity. Worse yet! I was at times unable to take down a single note, much less could I display a sketching book or photographic apparatus, however fair the landscape and tempting the sun; and hence my pen must unaided do the work of the pencil as well as its own, while my reader's imagination may help to supply the rest. Why this was so, a few pages of the narrative will make clear. On the other hand long years, the best part of my life indeed, passed in the East, familiarity with the Arabic language till it became almost to me a mother tongue, and experience in the ways and manners of "Semitic" nations, to give them their general or symbolic name, supplied me with advantages counterbalancing in some degree the drawbacks enumerated above.

Besides, the men of the land, rather than the land of the men, were my main object of research and principle study. My attention was directed to the moral, intellectual, and political conditions of living Arabia, rather than to the physical phenomena of the country,--of great indeed, but, to me, of inferior interest. Meanwhile whatever observations on antiquity and science, on plants and stones, geography and meteorology I was able to make, I shall give, regretting only their inevitable imprefection.

In the hard attempt to render Arab orthography by English letters, I have for the most part followed the system adopted by Lane in his delightful "Modern Egyptians," as the nearest approximation intelligible to English readers. However, in representing the initial "Jeem" by "Dj" rather than by "j" (as in the middle or at the end of a word), I have quitted our countryman for the universal foreign method; nor have I generally thought it necessary to accent vowels, contenting myself with an occasional mark (-) of length, where uniformity of pronunciation appeared to require it. The few maps annexed, though without pretension to that exact nicety which sextants and measuring-lines can alone afford, may serve in some measure to illustrate the leading features and divisions of the principal provinces, towns, and country in general.

In the present volume, my aim has been to offer the reader the personal narration of my adventures in Arabia. For fuller details on the religion, politics, and customs of the inhabitants, he is referred to the original work.

TREBIZOND: April 29, 1867.

From the preface to the third edition of Richard Burton's Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Mecca (1879):

The second attack proceeds from a place whence no man would reasonably have expected it. The author [Gifford Palgrave] of the "Narrative of a Year's Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia" (vol. i., pp. 258-59) thus expresses his opinions:--

"Passing oneself off for a wandering Darweesh, as some European explorers have attempted to do in the East, is for more reasons than one a very bad plan. It is unnecessary to dilate on that moral aspect of the proceeding which will always first strike unsophisticated minds. To feign a religion which the adventurer himself does not believe, to perform with scrupulous exactitude, as of the highest and holiest import, practices which he inwardly ridicules, and which he intends on his return to hold up to the ridicule of others, to turn for weeks and months together the most sacred and awful bearings of man towards his Creator into a deliberate and truthless mummery, not to mention other and yet darker touches,--all this seems hardly compatible with the character of a European gentleman, let alone that of a Christian."

This comes admirably a propos from a traveller who, born a Protestant, of Jewish descent, placed himself "in connection with," in plain words took the vows of, "the order of the Jesuits," an order "well-known in the annals of philanthropic daring"; a popular preacher who declaimed openly at Bayrut and elsewhere against his own nation, till the proceedings of a certain Father Michael Cohen were made the subject of an official report by Mr. Consul-General Moore (Bayrut, November 11, 1857); an Englishman by birth who accepted French protection, a secret mission, and the "liberality of the present Emperor of the French"; a military officer travelling in the garb of what he calls a native (Syrian) "quack" with a comrade who "by a slight but necessary fiction passed for his brother-in-law"; a gentleman who by return to Protestantism violated his vows, and a traveller who was proved by the experiment of Colonel (now Sir Lewis) Pelly to have brought upon himself all the perils and adventures that have caused his charming work to be considered so little worthy of trust. Truly such an attack argues a sublime daring. It is the principle of "vielle coquette, nouvelle dévote"; it is Satan preaching against Sin. Both writers [of attacks on Burton's disguise] certainly lack the "giftie" to see themselves as others see them.