Viatica [En Ligne], N°3, Mis À Jour Le : 24/08/2020, URL

Pour citer cet article : Benjamin COLBERT, «‘Our observations should not be disunited’», Viatica [En ligne], n°3, mis à jour le : 24/08/2020, URL : http://revues-msh.uca.fr/viatica/index.php?id=553. Voir l’article en ligne. Les articles de la revueViatica sont protégés par les dispositions générales du Code de la propriété intellectuelle. Conditions d’utilisation : respect du droit d’auteur et de la propriété intellectuelle. Licence CC BY : attribution. L’Université Clermont Auvergne est l’éditeur de la revue en ligneViatica. ‘Our observations should not be disunited’ Collaborative Women’s Travel Writing, 1780-1840 Benjamin COLBERT University of Wolverhampton Before 1780, only ten books of travel by women had been published in Britain and Ireland, all by single authors if we discount the role of translators (two of the ten were translations from the French)1. After 1780, as the Database of Women’s Travel Writing (2014) demonstrates with statistical accuracy, women for the first time established themselves as a continuous presence in the travel writing market, increasing their output from 5 titles in the 1780s to 74 in the 1830s2. These figures include diverse travel genres, principally narratives, guidebooks, and letterpress plate books, but also travel-based storybooks for young audiences, digests, and collections. For the first time, we begin to see female travel writers experimenting with authorial roles such as co- author, contributor, editor, translator, abridger, compiler, letterpress writer, and illustrator. In other instances, women’s travel writing finds its way into print, sometime posthumously, only through the intervention of others, editors who overlay their own language, perspectives, and agendas, a form of collaboration to be sure, but not one that embodies the joint production some might associate with the term. Of the 204 titles covered by the Database, 47 (or 23 %) involve multiple authorial relationships, though only seven of these are jointly written works where authors have coordinated their writings with the aim of publication. This article and the taxonomic checklist that follows it explore in more detail the nature of and motivations behind authorial partnerships in the light of particular instances of them, addressing fundamental questions: What types of collaboration are there, and what are the conditions of co-writing? How is joint production presented textually and paratextually? How do men and women collaborators negotiate the gendered spaces and expectations of travel and travel writing? When treated in the most inclusive sense, partnership in travel writing can include the relationship between author and publisher, who might employ expert readers to comment on, annotate, and even revise manuscript submissions, as Innes M. Keighren, Charles W. J. Withers, and Bill Bell have discussed in relation to books of exploration published by John Murray in the first half of the nineteenth century3. This ‘regime of regulatory practices’ might well change the form and content 1 See Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, The Ingenious and Diverting Letters of the Lady – Travels into Spain, trans. fr. French (1691); Elizabeth Justice, A Voyage to Russia (1739); Lady Margaret Pennyman, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, by the Honourable Lady Margaret Pennyman. Containing, I. Her Late Journey to Paris […] (1740); Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e: Written, during her Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, 3 vols. (1763); Marie Anne (LePage) Fiquet Du Boccage, Letters Concerning England, Holland and Italy […] Written during Her Travels in Those Countries, trans. fr. French, 2 vols. (1770); Elizabeth Percy, Duchess of Northumberland, A Short Tour Made in the Year One Thousand Seven Hundred and Seventy One ([1775]); Lady Anna Riggs Miller, Letters from Italy […] in the Years MDCCLXX and MDCCLXXI, 3 vols. (1776); Jane Vigor, Letters from a Lady, Who Resided Some Years in Russia, to Her Friend at Ballyshannon (1776); Mary Ann Hanway, A Journey to the Highlands of Scotland […] By a Lady ([1776?]); Jemima Kindersley, Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and the East Indies (1777). 2 Benjamin Colbert, A Database of Women’s Travel Writing, 1780-1840, designer Movable Type Ltd. [www.wlv.ac.uk/btw, accessed 12 Feb. 2016]. 3 Innes M. Keighren, Charles W. J. Withers, and Bill Bell, Travels into Print: Exploration, Writing, and Publishing with John Murray, 1773-1859, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2015. 2 of the author’s original manuscript, amounting at times to the creative selection process more usually associated with the work of an editor4. Editors, too, can become collaborative partners even when working at removes from authors, who might be unwilling or unable to bestow further work on manuscript material (posthumous editions are a special subset of this kind of relationship). Maria Graham’s editing of Voyage of H.M.S. Blonde to the Sandwich Islands, in the Years 1824- 1825 (1826 [i.e. 1827]) (no. 16), for example, goes well beyond her immediate source materials, the manuscript journals of the ship’s chaplain, Richard Bloxam, and his brother, the ship’s naturalist, Andrew Bloxam. According to Carl Thompson, who reconstructs the commission and its importance for our understanding of women’s contribution to scientific writing, Graham reconciled differences in the two journals, supplied missing details, and supplemented the science with reference to additional material from the voyage and from her own research, as well as corroborating interviews with other scientists and explorers. ‘Rather than simply facilitating the transfer of scientific knowledge’, concludes Thompson, ‘[female editors like Graham] might to some extent be collaborators and co-authors in the production of that knowledge5’. Alison E. Martin makes a similar case for translators, whose mediation of the originals is not only linguistic, but cultural, and quite often critical, when translators assume the additional role of editor, commenting on the veracity of the source texts in prefaces and footnotes, at times interpolating new material6. The boundaries of collaborative partnerships are therefore by no means well-defined, and are often porous, but for the purposes of the checklist that follows this discussion, seven categories have been identified: 1) Jointly written works; 2) Author/Contributor combinations; 3) Edited works (contemporaneous); 4) Edited works (posthumous); 5) Author/Artist combinations; 6) Compilations; and 7) Corporate publications. Notwithstanding Martin’s argument, no separate category has been accorded ‘Translated works’, even though two of the entries listed under ‘edited works’ – Edgar Garston’s translation of Louise Demont’s Journal of the Visit of Her Majesty the Queen, to Tunis, Greece, and Palestine (no. 15) and Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck’s of Claude Lancelot’s Narrative of a Tour Taken in the Year 1667, to La Grande Chartreuse and Alet (no. 22)7 – well illustrate translators’ complex production of meaning though editorial selection and omission, as well as through paratextual interventions in introductions, footnotes, and appendices. However, as translations are not yet generally included in the Database, a pragmatic decision has been made to exclude them here too8. Though included and worthy of further research, the final two categories must also be mentioned only briefly. The first of these, Compilations, comprises seven titles (nos. 40-46), all of which are adaptations for children of single or multiple source texts (in the case of Sarah Akins’s Fruits of Enterprize, a simplified retelling of Giovanni Belzoni’s 4 Ibid., p. 177. 5 Carl Thompson, ‘“Only the Amblyrhynchus”: Maria Graham’s Scientific Editing of Voyage of HMS Blonde (1826/27)’, Journal of Literature and Science, 8.1 (2015), p. 48-68; p. 65. 6 Alison E. Martin, ‘Performing Scientific Knowledge Transfer: Anne Plumptre and the Translation of Martin Heinrich Lichtenstein’s Reisen im südlichen Afrika (1811)’, Journal of Literature and Science, 8.1, 2015, p. 9-26. 7 Garston, the translator for the Queen’s consul during the Queen Caroline divorce crisis of 1820-21, published a translation of the travel journal of the Queen’s servant and the prosecution’s chief witness, Louise Demont, obtained without her permission. Garston’s preface, supplements, and footnotes establish a political frame through which the journal was read, reviewed, and imitated. For Demont, see Monique Droin-Bridel, Servir ou trahir: Notables genevois et serviteurs vaudois autour de Caroline de Brunswick, princesse de Galles, entre 1814 et 1821, Genève, Editions Suzanne Hurter, 2000; for Schimmelpenninck, see my discussion below. 8 Travel works translated by women will be included in the Database in the next phase of its development. Identified women translators include: Sarah Austin, Sara Coleridge, Susanna Dixon, Elizabeth Helme, Anne Plumptre, Mary Robinson, and Helen Maria Williams. 3 Narrative [see no. 9], with the author’s permission). The second, Corporate publications, comprises but a single title, Catherine Kearsley’s Stranger’s Guide (no. 47). As a publisher-author, Kearsley may have presided over the guidebook, but the extent to which she had sole or even majority authorship is debatable (her son, George Kearsley, co-proprietor of the publishing firm, may equally have taken authorial responsibility). Though limited to a single edition, the Stranger’s Guide belongs to a wider subgenre of in-house publisher guidebooks

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