This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Late eighteenth-century home tours and travel narratives : genre, culture and space Stenton, Alison Mary The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 10. Oct. 2021 Late Eighteenth-Century Home Tours and Travel Narratives: Genre, Culture and Space Alison Mary Stenton Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy King's College, University of London, 2003 2 Abstract This thesis is a study of travel narratives, and in particular a selection of travel journals, which were produced by British people travelling in Britain between 1750 and 1810. Arguing that these texts have for a long time been overlookçd as travel writirg because they do not describe the foreign or unfamiliar, my study suggests that it is possible to engage with critical and theoretical thinking about genre which firstly enables us to consider them as travel writing, and secondly, finds a way to read them which draws on both eighteenth-century and contemporary discourses of travel writing. In the first chapter of the thesis I propose a way of reading home tours and travel narratives which engages with work done in the critical field of cultural geography where travel is redefmed as 'movement through space', and travel writing as the representation of that movement through space in writing. Considering the philosophical and eighteenth- century meanings of 'space', this chapter then proposes that the eighteenth-century culture in which home tours and travel narratives were produced makes sense of the more abstract definition of travel writing which is proposed by cultural geography. As the journals and narratives which home travellers produced engaged not only with descriptions of the places through which they travelled but all aspects of movement through space, including being in motion and stopping to rest; the journals also directly engage with the act of writing travel itself, in particular the relationship between looking, movement and writing, and the experience of representing a period of time spent travelling in text. The remaining four chapters of the thesis consider these four discourses of travelling and writing travel in turn by reading texts by a number of writers which include Samuel Johnson, Hester Thrale, and James Boswell amongst other lesser-known eighteenth-century home travellers. 3 Contents Abstract pane 2 Acknowledgments 4 Introduction 5 Chapter One Critical and Theoretical Context: Eighteenth-Century Home Tours and Travel Narratives, 1750-1810: Vogue, Genre, Space and Culture 13 Chapter Two Bodies, Health and Motion: Discourses of Movement in Samuel Johnson's 'Journey into North Wales in the Year 1774' and Hester Thrale's 'Journal of a Tour in Wales with Dr. Johnson' 71 Chapter Three Stopping and Putting Up: 'Long Tags' and 'Inn Pleasures' in John Byng's Tours, 178 1-1794 and Dorothy Wordsworth's Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland 104 Chapter Four Ways of Going and Seeing: Looking and Writing at the Country House in the Journals of Caroline Powys and Horace Walpole 140 Chapter Five Picturesque Moments and Picture-esque Time: Representing Travelling Time in Joseph Budworth's A Fortnight's Ramble to the Lakes and James Boswell's 'London Journal 1762-1763' 177 Conclusions 209 Bibliography 213 4 Acknowledgements The writing of this study has been helped by a number of individuals during my four years of doctoral research. My greatest debt is to my supervisor, Clare Brnt, whose always inspiring supervision has been invaluable. Her breadth of knowledge, criticisms and advice have prevented more errors than I know it would be sensible to reveal here. I am also very grateful to others who have read this thesis at various stages, including Lucy Munro, David Nokes, Ralph Parfect and Christine Rees; to those who have enabled me to present papers, especially Padraig Kirwan and Stephen O'Neill; and those who I have met at various conferences with shared interests, especially Zoe Kinsely and Lydia Syson, who are good travel writing allies, and now even better friends. At King's, students on the 'eighteenth-centuiy travel writing' course 2001-2002, and teaching colleagues were supportive, helpful and inspiring during my first experience of lecturing. Moreover, King's Postgraduate Reading Group (formerly the Critical Theory Reading Group or, to my non-academic friends, the 'Geek Meet') has provided stimulation, support and, perhaps more importantly, society of the kind I didn't believe was possible in academia. Enormous thanks therefore go to Devorah Baum, Andrew Eastham, Max Fincher, Malt Merlino, Lucy Munro, Selina Packard, Ralph Parfect, Lucie Sutherland and Angus Wrenn: I definitely would not have stuck this out without them. In the long time it has taken me to complete this study, friends and family have been both encouraging and usefully distracting. Clare Langston and Abi Yates (especially) helped me keep the thesis in focus by constantly reminding me tat there's more to life than work, and by insisting that I continue to make time for Ladies' Night. Similarly, my parents David Stenton and Maureen Stenton - though baffled by quite what it is I've been doing all this time - have been unfalteringly supportive and forever patient: this thesis is for them. Lastly, Ross Hansen has been a wonderful sounding board, ally and counsellor throughout. He of all people knows the loneliness of this long-distance researcher, and he has facilitated the writing of my thesis in many ways. Finally, this thesis was funded for three years by an AHRB award, and for the remaining time by flexible working hours provided by Kim Lund at Books Etc., and John Stokes, Ann Thompson and Dot Pearce at King's. Thanks of the most necessary kind therefore go to them all. 5 Introduction In a recent article by Jean-Didier Urbain for Studies in Travel Writing, an appeal is launched for critics to recognise 'dwarf-like explorers who stay at home' as legitimate travellers and, potentially, travel writers.' Suggesting that such people are usually overlooked or branded as 'slipper-wearing stay-at-homes', who 'with their wings clipped, [...] are no more than semi-travellers, authors of unassuming trips to the centre of the everyday', Urbain proposes that their journeys and their stories should not be ignored in the elaboration of 'an open anthropology of travel'.2 As Urbain's appeal came mid-way through my research into late eighteenth-century British home tours and travel narratives, this thesis is not a response to his plea, but all the same, accords with his concern that these kinds of journeys, and their representation in text, must be included as part of literary studies' ever expanding interest in the subject and nature of travel writing. For British people in the late eighteenth century, travel within the borders of the British Isles, or as this study will term it, 'at home', was a popular activity that often resulted in the production of a text which represented an individual's experience of touring around, journeying to, or visiting parts of his or her own country. For many of these travellers, going no further than the next county, touring from town to town, or simply moving from their home to another town or city for a short period of time, was enough to stimulate them to write about their experiences of being on the move. That travelling at home at this time was a pursuit which travelling subjects deemed worthy of representation - as worthy, in fact, as any further flung journeys they undertook - suggests that these texts testif' that whether their journeys were 'dwarf-like' or not, travellers took home touring and travelling seriously enough to write about it. As a 'species of writing', however, late eighteenth-century home tours have received little attention as a subject of literary enquiry; 3 the fact that they exist - as books, journals, 'Jean-Didier Urbain, 'I Travel Therefore I Am. The "Nomad Mind" and the Spirit of Travel', Studies in Travel Writing, 4 (2000), 141-164 (146). 2 lbid, 148, 147 and 146. Exceptions include Doris Feldmann, 'Economic and/as Aesthetic Constructions of Britishness in Eighteenth-Century Domestic Travel Writing', Journal for the Study of English Cultures, 4 (1997), 31- 45; Barbara Korte's short chapter on 'Home Tours' in English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Posicolonial Explorations, trans. by Catherine Matthias (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 66-81; Robert Mayhew, 'The Denominational Politics of Travel Writing: The Case of Tory Anglicans in the 1 770s', Studies in Travel Writing, 3 (1999), 47-81; and studies which make travelling in Scotland their focus, for example Elizabeth Hagglund's PhD.