Abstract
We have already seen in Chapter 2 that geographers distinguished their practice textually from travel writing, seeing the latter as raw material for geography. Travel writers agreed with this textual division of labour. Thus Daniel Defoe wrote in his Tour upon reaching Cambridgeshire: ‘As my Business is not to lay out the Geographical Situation of Places, I say nothing of the Buttings and Boundings of this County’.1 For Defoe, as for geographers, the traveller’s art was to respond to places visited, where the geographer was concerned with mathematically-determined location and with the collation of information provided by travellers. But in his disclaimer, as in the geographers’ careful delineation of the spheres of geography and travel, lay the recognition that the two forms of writing were closely related, travel acting as a form of geographical knowledge, even if it was not geography sensu stricto. One way in which geography and travel writing were related was that they both encoded political positions. As we shall discover, true to its different generic mode of operation, travel writing offered different sites for politicisation from those we have analysed for geography books, but unsurprisingly the key issues were the same.
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Notes
Daniel Defoe, A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, G.D.H. Cole, ed. (London: Frank Cass, 1968), p. 78; see also p. 587. For the relation of geography and travel writing,
see also Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: University Press Of Kentucky, 1983), p. 77;
and especially Charles Batten, Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 32.
See Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, Chapter 9 for Tucker; and Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1986) for the geographical angle on the constitutional issues at stake.
Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy, Frank Felsenstein, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 296.
For a good summary on these themes, see Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: the Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992), Chapters 10 and 11.
Pennant, Tour in Wales, I 225. See E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: the Origin of the Black Acts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).
Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides; MDCCLXXII (Chester, 1774) II 279–80. On this theme, see Nigel Everett, The Tory View of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
Thomas Pennant, Tour on the Continent, 1765, G.R. de Beer, ed. (London: Ray Society, 1948).
John Wesley, Letters, J. Telford, ed. (London: Epworth Press, 1931), VII 305.
John Wesley, Journal, Nehemiah Curnock, ed. (London: Epworth Press Reprint, 1938), VI 109. Hereafter cited in the text as Journal.
On the persistence of belief in witches and ghosts, see R.D. Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).
See Journal, VI 186–7 and VII 241 for Raynal; and John Wesley, Sermons, Volume II, Albert C. Outler, ed. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1985), pp. 486–7 for Wortley Montagu.
See also Wesley’s other comments: Journal, VII 464, VII 521–2 and VIII 29; and Wesley, Sermons, p. 486. See also Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 44.
Henry Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism, 2nd edn. (London: Epworth Press, 1992), p. 113.
For other examples, see: Journal II 425–6, III 486–7 and IV 113. This response to weather changes as the operation of particular providence was one Wesley shared with his fellow Evangelist, George Whitefield: see George Whitefield, Journals (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1960), pp. 263–5, 323 and 497–8.
James Boswell, Life of Johnson, G.B. Hill, ed., L.F. Powell, rev. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–50), I 431 and III 326. Hereafter cited in the text as Life.
As well as Boswell, see Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, Bertram Davis, ed. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), pp. 223–4;
and Hester Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, in Johnsonian Miscellanies, G.B. Hill, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), I 172.
See Donald Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson, 2nd edn. (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1990);
and J.C.D. Clark, Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): these two writers have very different definitions of ‘Tory’, but neither have any hesitation in labelling Johnson as one. The protracted debates in The Age of Johnson, volumes 7 and 8 (1996–7), and in English Literary History, 64.4, 1997 on Johnson’s Jacobitism have not questioned this ascription.
Piozzi, Anecdotes, I 210; and Samuel Johnson, Sermons, Jean Hagstrum and James Gray, eds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. xliv. On Johnson’s Anglicanism, see, inter alia:
Maurice Quinlan, Samuel Johnson: a Layman’s Religion (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1964);
Chester Chapin, The Religious Thought of Samuel Johnson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968);
James Gray, Johnson’s Sermons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972);
Charles Pierce, The Religious Life of Samuel Johnson (London: Athlone Press, 1983);
xand Michael Suarez, ‘Johnson’s Christian Thought’, in Greg Clingham, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 192–208.
Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, J.D. Fleeman, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985): this edition is referred to in the text as Journey.
Barbara Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), p. 1.
Johnson was recorded by Mrs Piozzi (in Thraliana: the Diary of Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale (later Mrs Piozzi), 1776–1809, Katharine C. Balderston, ed. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951]) as being sceptical of all exceptional natural events, Johnson himself admitting ‘I did not give Credit a long time to the Earthquake at Lisbon’ (p. 468).
See Robert Mayhew, ‘William Gilpin’s Latitudinarian Picturesque’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (2000), pp. 349–66.
I here use a similar method to develop a characterisation of Johnson’s politics as a traveller to that deployed for Johnson’s politics in general by J.C.D. Clark, ‘Religious Affiliation and Dynastic Allegiance in Eighteenth-Century England: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and Samuel Johnson’, English Literary History, 64 (1997), pp. 1029–67.
This argument is rehearsed in greater detail in Robert Mayhew, ‘Samuel Johnson’s Intellectual Character as a Traveler: A Reassessment’, The Age of Johnson, 10 (1999), pp. 35–67. For eighteenth-century High Churchmanship, see Cornwall, Visible and Apostolic, pp. 12, 86, 97 and p. 105ff on the concern for the visible church;
and Peter B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 146 and 153 on episcopal order, pp. 184 and 208–13 on the importance of external forms and pp. 203–4 on the limits of rational proofs of God.
See Albert Lyles, Methodism Mocked: the Satiric Reaction to Methodism in the Eighteenth Century (London: Epworth Press, 1960).
Clarence Tracy, A Portrait of Richard Graves (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1987), pp. 43–5.
Richard Graves, The Spiritual Quixote: Or the Summer’s Ramble of Mr Geoffry Wildgoose: a Comic Romance, Clarence Tracy, ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 19. Hereafter cited as Quixote in the text.
There was a more general unease with positive responses to Catholic ruins: see Ian Ousby, The Englishman’s England: Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 104 and 126. For joy at Catholicism being visibly in ruins as a traveller’s trope,
see Michael Charlesworth, ‘The Ruined Abbey: Picturesque and Gothic Values’, in Stephen Copley and Peter Garside, eds, The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 62–80.
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Mayhew, R.J. (2000). The Denominational Politics of Travel-Writing: the Case of Tory Anglicans in the 1770s. In: Enlightenment Geography. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595491_8
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