MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School Certificate for Approving the Dissertation We hereby approve the Dissertation of Joshua Grasso Candidate for the Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Laura C. Mandell, Ph.D. Director Susan J. Morgan, Ph.D. Reader Alison E. Hurley, Ph.D. Reader P. Renee Baernstein, Ph.D. Graduate School Representative ABSTRACT STRANGE ADVENTURES, PROFITABLE OBSERVATIONS: TRAVEL WRITING AND THE CITIZEN-TRAVELER, 1680-1760 by Joshua Grasso My dissertation, Strange Adventures, Profitable Observations: Travel Writing and the Citizen-Traveler, 1680-1780, explores the role of the traveler as it developed in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century travel writing. Prior to this period, the traveler remained an anonymous figure of convention, reporting on worlds rarely seen with either empirical authority or utopian embellishment. Beginning approximately with William Dampier’s A New Voyage Round the World (1697), travel writing became less about what was seen as how it was seen, capturing the composite experience of a nation of travelers. By authenticating their travels through a reliable witness, the writers were able to use the outside world to “see” England and explore its social, moral and economic boundaries. The four chapters of my study chart the tempestuous course of contemporary travel, as well as the tenuous divide between experience and embellishment. From Dampier’s prototypical buccaneer/adventurer to Fielding’s ailing misanthrope, each traveler meditates on English identity while divorced from the customs and conventions of home. While some, such as Defoe, find a national mission of travel and empire, others, such as Fielding, see the possible breakdown of English society. Yet, read as a complete narrative, these works illustrate how travel writing became a truly national enterprise, contributing to the cultural mythology that fueled the age of empire. STRANGE ADVENTURES, PROFITABLE OBSERVATIONS: TRAVEL WRITING AND THE CITIZEN-TRAVELER, 1690-1760 A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English By Joshua Grasso Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2006 Laura C. Mandell, Dissertation Director Table of Contents Page Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Portrait of a Buccaneer as an Englishman: 11 The New Voyage of William Dampier Chapter Two: “What a Vast and Charming World He Had 37 Been Master Of”: Travel Writing and Colonial Innocence in Behn’s Oroonoko Chapter Three: “I Thought Myself Very Rich In Subjects”: 60 The Englishman Adrift in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe Chapter Four: “To Wheel in Among Them Worse Manners Than 94 Their Own”: Domestic Travel in Fielding’s The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon Epilogue 122 Bibliography 127 ii Acknowledgments This dissertation is dedicated first and foremost to the three people who were most central in supporting and inspiring it: my wife Elizabeth, and my two young sons, Eli and Charlie. Though the latter will probably never read this work, I vividly imagined them uncovering it among my posthumous papers and materials and thinking “they gave him a Ph.D. for this bunk! What a crock!” On the off-chance this occurs, I wanted it to be as interesting and coherent as possible, exhibiting my love for literature and storytelling. My wife, on the other hand, lived with this work intimately from the first, sketchy ideas to the final, nail- biting revisions. She was incredibly supportive and interested throughout, though she wasn’t afraid to tell me when something didn’t make sense or sounded inflated. But even more importantly, she gave me time to write every day, and long into the evening, even taking the kids out when I needed time to summon— or plead with—the muse. My family means the world to me, and though this dissertation is a sorry tribute, I hope they understand that they, alone, made it possible (though they are no means responsible for its lack of coherence). I also need to thank my dissertation committee: Laura Mandell, Alison Hurley, and Susan Morgan. I first tinkered with ideas of travel writing in Laura’s Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory course, writing a half-baked paper on Marco Polo. She subsequently encouraged my writing with supportive, yet challenging mentorship, cumulating in the Prospectus for this dissertation, which was the most coherent—if still problematic—work I had ever produced. Alison Hurley not only expanded my knowledge of the issues and concerns of the eighteenth century, but asked the crucial question that got me thinking about the current dissertation: “are you sure travel writing is really a genre?” I’m still trying to answer this question. And finally, Susan Morgan’s encyclopedic knowledge of travel writing and the British empire inspired me to attempt something vast and exciting—even if my feeble skills only reveal hers in greater relief. In short, this was a tough but brilliant committee, and I only regret I couldn’t produce the work that I continually glimpsed in their comments, but was sadly unable to evoke. And one final word of thanks to the music of J.S. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Liszt, Brahms, Sibelius, Bax, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Shostakovich, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, and others. I spent countless hours listening to their music as I hammered away at the keys, thinking I was creating something far more glorious and noble than I actually was. But I appreciate the illusion. iii Introduction It is a curious fact that one of England’s most famous explorers never found any new lands, never traded with any mysterious natives, and indeed, never left the pages of his celebrated book. His voyage, instead, took him to very peripheries of nonsense, discovering satirical islands and archipelagos that bore a cunning resemblance to the more familiar landmarks of home. Lemuel Gulliver, immortalized in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, was a traveler in an age of travel, where the map was constantly expanding, changing, and becoming obsolete. Swift includes several such maps in his book, carefully documenting the discovery of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, among others (which, he notes, were discovered in A.D. 1699 and 1703 respectively). Indeed, there is little obvious difference in the exhaustive travels of Gulliver than in the travels of his contemporaries; all attempt to record the travails, experiences, data, and profit that result from a seemingly endless voyage at sea. And yet, modern readers approach Gulliver’s Travels not as a work of travel writing, but as a work of satire as well as a precursor to the English novel. The “realistic” details of travel are read as amusing—and occasionally, tiresome—conventions of eighteenth century literature; that is, when they are not ignored entirely. However, this was certainly not the case during its publication, where its true purpose (and author) was much less certain. While many contemporaries identified the work as a product of the author’s imagination, some remained mystified by the consistent tone of the work. As Swift writes to Alexander Pope in a letter dated Nov. 27, 1726: “A Bishop here said, that [Gulliver’s Travels] was full of improbable lies, and for his part, he hardly believed a word of it; and so much for Gulliver” (Williams, 245). Other critics, such as the much satirized Dr. Richard Bentley, defended the existence of the Houyhnhnms by an encyclopedic reading of classical sources, thus proving that “the whole History is a Fact, and not a Fiction” 1 (ECCO, 24). Clearly, then, the artifice of contemporary travel writing (aped so remarkably by Swift) offered a different perspective for an eighteenth- century audience. This becomes apparent from the way Gulliver positions himself as a specifically English traveler throughout the course of his narrative. In the opening letter that begins the work, “A Letter from Captain Gulliver, To His Cousin Sympson,” Gulliver links himself to a much more famous traveler of the previous generation, William Dampier: “by your great and frequent urgency, you prevailed on me to publish a very loose and uncorrect [sic] account of my travels; with the direction to hire some young gentleman of either university to put them in order, and correct the style, as my Cousin Dampier did by my advice, in his book called, A Voyage round the World” (i). In a single passage Swift toys with the tenuous distinctions between real and fictional travels by claiming kinship with William Dampier (whose work is discussed in Chapter One). More interesting, however, is the advice Gulliver offered his “cousin,” which is the 1 Bentley’s unusual analysis of the fourth part of Gulliver’s Travels appears in his work, Critical remarks upon Gulliver’s travels; particularly his voyage to the Houyhnhms country. Part I (1735). (ECCO, 24). 1 same that he, himself, is offered by his cousin Sympson: namely, to hire someone to clean up the rough version of his travels, making them read like a more polished narrative of travel. This is a somewhat audacious claim, as Dampier took great pains (as did many travel writers of the period) to establish his credentials as an unlettered traveler: “As to my Stile [sic], it cannot be expected, that a Seaman should affect Politeness; for were I able to do it, yet I think I should be little solicitous about it, in a work of this Nature…[and] if what I say be intelligible, it matters not greatly in what words it is express’d” (Dampier, 4). What Swift cheekily suggests is that no traveler publishes his work as is: the style, events, and narrative are carefully re-written by someone learned in the arts of literary—as opposed to experienced—travel. Of course, Swift could have chosen any number of travel writers as a dummy to support this claim; Dampier was unique in role as a transitional travel writer, who married exploration with a palpable sense of economic and national identity.