Katherine Turner - British Travel Writers in Europe 1750–1800: Authorship, gender and national identity (Routledge Revivals)

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BRITISH TRAVEL WRITERS IN EUROPE 17501800

British Travel Writers in Europe 17501800

Authorship, gender and national identity

Katherine Turner

Studies in European Cultural Transition

Volume 10

General Editors: Martin Stannard and Greg Walker

First published 2001 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2018 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright Katherine Turner, 2001

The author has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer

The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.

A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 2001022831

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-70217-2 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-315-20980-7 (ebk)

Contents

The European dimension of research in the humanities has come into sharp focus over recent years, producing scholarship which ranges across disciplines and national boundaries. This new series provides a major channel for this work and unites the fields of cultural studies and traditional scholarship. It will publish in the areas of European history and literature, art history, archaeology, language and translation studies, political, cultural and gay studies, music, psychology, sociology and philosophy. The emphasis is explicitly European and interdisciplinary, concentrating attention on the relativity of cultural perspectives, with a particular interest in issues of cultural transition.

Martin Stannard
Greg Walker

University of Leicester

I would like to thank the staff of the Bodleian Library, Oxford (especially the long-suffering administrators of the Upper Reading Room) for efficient help over the past few years. Balliol and Wolfson Colleges, Oxford, sustained me during the research on which this book is based, and St Peters College, Oxford has provided a congenial and supportive atmosphere during the closing stages of writing.

A number of friends and colleagues have contributed in various ways to the emergence of this study. I am enormously grateful to Professor Roger Lonsdale for supervising with characteristic rigour and patience the doctoral dissertation which has gradually developed into the present book. Others to whom I owe thanks for their time, advice and encouragement are Marilyn Butler, Steve Clark, David Fairer, Julia Griffin, Nick Groom, Rohini Jayatilaka, Sian Lewis, Clare Morgan, Francis OGorman, David Omissi, Isabel Rivers, Corinne Saunders, Nicola Warrick, and Blair Worden. My anonymous reader for Ashgate made a number of extremely helpful suggestions at an important stage. All errors, of course, I acknowledge as my own. However, my family travellers all must share some of the blame for fostering an interest in eighteenth-century travel writing. Finally, Roland Kozlowski has made possible the writing of this book in countless ways.

A version of the section on Montagu and Craven in has previously appeared in Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit, ed. Steve Clark (1999). I am grateful to the editor for permission to reuse this material.

This book offers an archaeology of a genre which, although culturally preeminent in its day, has fallen victim to the vagaries of canon-building. While most people with a working knowledge of the eighteenth century are familiar with, say, Sternes A Sentimental Journey, Smolletts Travels through France and Italy, the Scottish tours of Johnson and Boswell, and (especially in recent years) Mary Wollstonecrafts Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, the hundreds of European travelogues produced by less famous, less literary British travellers between 1750 and 1800 remain out of sight in most libraries, and have generally been out of print since the eighteenth century. This neglect is due partly to the ambivalent status of the genre (is it really literature?), and partly to the occasional nature of much of the writing: many important travelogues from the period are by writers active on the fringes of literary culture, or indeed represent the authors only foray into print.

It is, however, puzzling that eighteenth-century travel writing and its lively critical reception is still underappreciated, given recent scholarly interest in issues such as the public/private sphere debate, the emergence of national identity, and the complicated relationship within the nation of divisive factors such as gender, class, and region. These are not only topics on which travel writers frequently pass direct comment: more pervasively, they represent areas of cultural and ideological controversy upon which the discourse of travel exercised a significant and widely felt influence, an influence further extended through the energetic reviewing arena of the day. Hence, the following study aims to recreate the world of eighteenth-century travel writing in order to illuminate its central role in shaping Britains emerging sense of national identity an identity, moreover, which proves to be more complex and less homogeneous than some recent cultural and historical studies would suggest.

The concept of authorship is important to my investigation: at a time when the practical and financial resources of the book trade were making it increasingly easy and rewarding for both amateur and professional writers to publish, the term author whether denoting a permanent occupation or an occasional alias conferred upon a diverse body of men and women the status of authoritative cultural and social commentator, even if only for one print run and a couple of reviews. Travel writing a genre peculiarly congenial to occasional writers thus provided a public voice for many otherwise silent citizens.

The lively proliferation of authors during this period relates to the increasing value attached to the notion of British individuality, character, or eccentricity. The reviewing arena in particular celebrates the populous variety of the authorial world throughout these years, even while it attempts to police and discipline its perceived excesses. The developing discourse of national character is inevitably bound up with questions of gender: national and authorial virtue are increasingly projected in terms of appropriately gendered behaviour, for male and female travel writers alike. In turn, gender frequently intersects with class, most obviously in the increasing tendency to denigrate aristocratic travellers as effeminate and celebrate the more manly activities of the middle-class traveller.

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