Shelley's Eye

Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision

Benjamin Colbert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351900409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Percy Bysshe Shelley joined the deluge of sightseers that poured onto the Continent after Napoleon's defeat in 1814, and over the next eight years Shelley followed major travelling trends, visiting Switzerland in 1816 and Italy from 1818. Shelley's Eye is the first study to address Shelley's participation in the travel culture of Post-Napoleonic Europe, and the first to consider Shelley as an important travel writer in his own right. This book is informed by original research on a wide range of period travel writings, including Mary Shelley and Shelley's neglected collaboration, History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817), in which 'Mont Blanc' first appeared. Fully responsive to the culture of travel, Shelley's travel prose and poetry form fascinating conversations with major Romantic travellers like Byron, Wollstonecraft, and Wordsworth, as well as lesser-known but widely read travel writers of the day, including Morris Birkbeck, Charlotte Eaton, and John Chetwode Eustace. In this provocative study, Benjamin Colbert demonstrates how the Grand Tour remains a vital cultural metaphor for Shelley and his contemporaries, under pressure from mass travel and popular culture. Shelley's travel prose and 'visionary' poetry explore motives of perception underlying travel discourse and posit an authentic 'aesthetic vision' that reconfigures social, historical, and political meanings of 'sights' from the perspective of an ideal tourist-observer. Shelley's Eye offers a new perspective on Shelley's intellectual history. It is also a timely and important contribution to recent interdisciplinary scholarship that aims to re-evaluate Romantic idealism in the context of physical, experiential, or material cultural practices.

Chapter 1

‘The Sun Rises over France’: Post-Napoleonic Travellers’ Europe

The morning broke, the lightning died away, the violence of the wind abated. We arrived at Calais whilst Mary still slept. We drove upon the sands. Suddenly the broad sun rose over France.

France Tuesday Friday. 29

I said — Mary look. the sun rises over France.

(Shelley’s entry, 28–29 July 1814, MWSJ, p. 7)

The French Revolution may have interrupted Continental travel, but it also increased readers’ appetites for the latest accounts of itineraries already covered by eighteenth-century Grand Tourists. In the early 1790s, Edmund Burke’s and Thomas Paine’s theoretical debate on the effects of the Revolution was balanced against numerous ‘on the spot’ travel journals covering events in Paris, the French provinces, and beyond. During and immediately after the Peace of Amiens, the presses groaned with travellers’ assessments of the changes between pre- and post-revolutionary manners throughout the theatre of war, and the exercise was repeated in 1814 and 1815 after Napoleon’s defeats.¹ In the decade after the Revolution, travel literature maps out the new Europe and bears witness to rising nationalist movements in Spain, Italy, Greece, and Germany.

During the years of hostilities, travellers who could not penetrate France or French-occupied countries reported on Sweden, Denmark, and Russia in the North, or Spain, Sicily, and Greece in the South. Translations of French and German travel books were published almost simultaneously with the originals.² Reprints of eighteenth-century travel classics, or pre-war journals newly worked up into editions appeared, as well as multi-volume collections with generous sections on Europe, such as John Pinkerton’s General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in All Parts of the World (1808–14).³ The displacement of the Grand Tour breathed life and variety into travel literature, even as new modes of travel gained popularity: the pedestrian tour, the agricultural tour, the picturesque tour, the scientific tour. Domestic travel benefited too, as the discovery of picturesque spots and curiosities within the borders of Great Britain became a kind of national passion among the leisured classes.

This unlikely renaissance of travel writing fostered a new wave of tourists. Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, Lady Morgan, and Mary Shelley are perhaps the best-known women Romantic travellers, but they were succeeded throughout the century by increasing numbers of women reporting from the continent and throughout the world.⁴ Improvements in transportation and tourist infrastructures helped increase the numbers of English tourists exponentially, and they went armed with increasingly reliable guidebooks such as Murray’s and later Baedeker’s.⁵ With this spate of tourism came a greater diversity in class: the working men’s tour dates from 1841 when Thomas Cook organised the first railway junket under the auspices of the Temperance Society, and by the 1850s Cook had instituted a network that extended the Grand Tourist ‘experience’ to the professional classes.⁶ Though the vast majority of accounts published during Shelley’s lifetime were still by those who could afford comforts and privileges, there was a new perspective abroad that the heyday of the gentlemanly Grand Tour was over; witness the Shelleys’ History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, which valorises thrifty pedestrianism. As the Monthly Review summed up, The dashing milords of the last age are now succeeded by a host of roturiers, who expatriate themselves for the sake of economy; or by a migratory tribe who are accused of never being satisfied with the spot on which they happen to reside’.⁷

There can be no mistake about the connotation of this reviewer’s French. ‘Roturiers’, the common or humble people, are deemed un-English insofar as they travel out of dissatisfaction rather than to test the foreign against their own established virtues (one ostensible value of the Grand Tour). The French word gestures at those influences of the French Revolution that the battlefield victories of the allies could not suppress, those recrudescences of republicanism in the habits of the middle and lower classes, the reification of Jacobin tendencies among the new ‘citizens of the world’.⁸ Lord Castlereagh offered a counter weight to roturier culture when he proposed the Travellers’ Club in 1814, an institution akin to the well-established Society of Dilettanti, although less concerned with antiquarianism as reinforcing taste in contemporary Europe through genteel tourism.⁹ In the event, the club was not founded until 1819, the year ironically enough of great social unrest at home. Even as Shelley, in The Mask of Anarchy’, wrote of the voice from over the sea that awakens him to his encounter with Castlereagh’s likeness in the public way (‘I met Murder on the way– / He had a mask like Castlereagh’; SPP, 11. 5–6), Castlereagh’s brainchild, the Travellers’ Club was receiving its first envoys from the continent.

The Travellers’ Club and Monthly Review may have been nostalgic for a golden age when continental travel had clear patriotic overtones, but the French Revolution had disrupted the Grand Tour and its conventions. Jeremy Black writes that with the outbreak of war in 1793, ‘Europe became less accessible, less comprehensive, and hostile, and the old-fashioned Grand Tour was a victim of that change. Tourism continued, but it followed a different course’.¹⁰ For a while, travellers literally changed course, steering clear of established itineraries that would have led through military zones. Between 1795 and the Peace of Amiens, very few British accounts of travels in France were published. In 1804, after the Peace, Napoleon ordered the detention of all British subjects, thus ending even the pretence of an open-borders policy. One thinks of Coleridge’s difficulties in finding an overland route back from Malta in 1806.¹¹ After fleeing from Rome and the ever-widening circle of French power in Italy, Coleridge posed as a neutral American for the sea passage out of Leghorn. He later claimed that subterfuge was necessitated because of Napoleon’s blacklisting him for anti-Jacobin articles published in The Morning Post. Whether this be mere bravado or not, the precedent of travellers detained at Verdun in 1804–5 would have been enough to dissuade any Englishman from risking discovery on French-held territory, particularly a civil servant.¹²

After Napoleon’s first abdication and, more decisively, after Waterloo, travellers flocked to the continent, some like Byron and Southey to reflect on famous battlefields, most to follow beaten tracks. It was in some respects natural that large numbers of tourists should traverse routes that offered them accommodation, and which had even been improved, as in the Alpine passes, by Napoleon’s road-building efforts.¹³ But travellers were also drawn to routes that would offer comparisons between pre- and post-revolutionary Europe. It was for some a salvage effort to determine how much of the Grand Tour could be reclaimed, but the fact remained that the events begun in 1793 influenced not only itineraries but also responses. Travel writing had been affected as much as travelling itself.

Travel writing, as Charles L. Batten argues, was already showing signs of change as the eighteenth century drew to a close. The genre which almost ‘uniformly aimed at blending pleasure with useful instruction’ increasingly emphasised the pleasures of travel: after decades of exhaustive Grand Tourism, writers had ransacked Europe for useful information regarding over-described itineraries and their cultural ‘stations’.¹⁴ This trend included, first, a movement away from objective reporting towards more subjective accounts, with the observer as a character at the centre of his or her own narrative. Second, more travel writings focused on ‘ornamental subjects that demanded increasingly more difficult descriptive techniques’.¹⁵ Most notably, William Gilpin’s picturesque tours of the 1780s and 1790s helped popularise a mode of tourism, and what is more, literary landscape description, which had become standard fare for readers of travel books by Shelley’s time. By debating the application of aesthetic terminology to the description of landscape, Gilpin and his followers developed a seemingly limitless source of novelty and variation for travel writers and readers alike. Increasingly, useful information for travellers was relegated to specialised guidebooks, the progenitors of the Murrays and the Baedekers.

Though this may be a faithful portrait of general trends, some qualifications should be noted. First, both entertainment and instruction continue to be expected by reviewers and offered by travel writers well into the nineteenth century, though the pleasures of travel writing were often implicated in ‘the picture which [travel books] exhibit of the traveller’s mind’.¹⁶ Second, ‘useful information’ such as exchange conversions, customs rules, or posting routes, may have increasingly become the domain of guidebooks, but this did not stop the travel writer from offering other kinds of instruction on, for example, the moral, political, and social state of a country, or where to stand in order to obtain a sublime or picturesque view. Third, and more to my present concerns, during the revolutionary years many travel writers, particularly on French-held territories, focused their attention on useful political or sociological information at the expense of ornamental or landscape description; even after the revolutionary years, travellers in France reported largely on Paris as the centre of cultural changes. But where trends towards subjectivity and aesthetic description may, as Batten asserts, break down or ‘blur’ the genre’s ‘distinction between “objective” observations and “subjective” reflections’,¹⁷ a space remains in the emerging narrative structures for ideological debate; there is no such thing as an innocent eye.

In this way, the French Revolution at once reopened the mine of materials for useful instruction, but also highlighted new ways that narrative could be influenced by political activity. For travel writers, political events challenged the travel book’s traditional role as ‘pleasurable instruction’ by preventing a naive recounting of well-annotated landscapes, famous artefacts, manners, and customs. More and more, landscapes were celebrated or mourned as scenes of martial power or in their relation to revolutionary figures, most notably Rousseau and Napoleon. Even potentially stock picturesque landscape descriptions after 1789 often have political resonances; feudal piles, the rural poor, and land use make up both the painterly subjects of the picturesque and the subjects of revolutionary political and economic debate. By 1802, Napoleon’s victorious forces had carted Europe’s most valued paintings and sculpture to the Louvre, and in an age of paternal regard for cultural riches, more than one traveller glorified this concentration, or at least played down the First Consul’s rapacity.¹⁸ Even those artefacts that remained in their historical locations might be said to be woven by travellers into larger narratives of cultural appropriation, the travel books themselves. Manners, meanwhile, the outgrowth of the Grand Tourists’ preoccupation with national character, became the key term in a wider political discussion as to the effects of revolutionary social policy on the labouring classes in particular and the economic health of nations as a whole. Though travel writers supplied a marketplace especially eager to trace these changes in France, they also turned to peripheral or neutral countries from Sweden to Switzerland in order to compare and contrast the revolutionary situation; the establishment of the Helvetian Republic in Switzerland after the French invasion of 1798, for example, provided a context for the radical Helen Maria Williams’s A Tour in Switzerland, in which she reports on the positive influence of French systems of governing outside France itself.¹⁹ Correspondingly, Swiss glaciers and Neapolitan volcanoes simultaneously served as sublime tableaux and metaphors for revolutionary change.

This new reportage on a Europe in which social, political, and cultural norms were under pressure often appears unruly, decentred, disorganised, partly in reflection of what Lady Morgan refers to as the ‘fermentation’ of the times, and partly again because of the travel genre. Travel writing, usually presented as a series of letters or journal entries, tends to follow the itinerary and eye of the observer and records a sometimes bewildering hodgepodge of detail: landscape description, personal anecdote, theatre and art criticism, festivals, agricultural notes, and much more.²⁰ Travellers themselves recognised their difficulties and some justified their method as a cumulative attempt to satisfy readers’ long-starved curiosity. Others attempted to organise their observations under headings, although any departure from the verisimilitude of the observer’s gaze could lead to that bugbear, charges of plagiarism or outright fabrication.²¹ Still others, like Arthur Young or the Shelleys, tried to have it both ways, deploying different narrative strategies in a single travel book.²² All, however, relied on and posited a reader capable of synthesising the materials, though not without some strong hints how to do so suggested by the experienced author’s own interpretations of key moments in the narrative. All, more or less self-consciously, wrote towards defining the Europeannes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 ‘The Sun Rises over France’: Post-Napoleonic Travellers’ Europe
• 2 ‘Citizens of the World’: Dislocated Vision in Alastor
• 3 ‘The Raptures of Travellers’: Writing Mont Blanc
• 4 ‘Relics of Antiquity’: Shelley’s Classical Tour through Italy
• 5 ‘The Emblem of Italy’: Two-Fold Vision in Prometheus Unbound
• 6 ‘Empire o’er the Unborn World’: Shelley’s Hellas
• Bibliography
• Index