The Idea of Europe in British Travel Narratives, 1789-1914

Katarina Gephardt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317028116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

The nineteenth century was the heyday of travel, with Britons continually reassessing their own culture in relation to not only the colonized but also other Europeans, especially the ones that they encountered on the southern and eastern peripheries of the continent. Offering illustrative case studies, Katarina Gephardt shows how specific rhetorical strategies used in contemporary travel writing produced popular fictional representations of continental Europe in the works of Ann Radcliffe, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, and Bram Stoker. She examines a wide range of autobiographical and fictional travel narratives to demonstrate that the imaginative geographies underpinning British ideas of Europe emerged from the spaces between fact and fiction. Adding texture to her study are her analyses of the visual dimensions of cross-cultural representation and of the role of evolving technologies in defining a shared set of rhetorical strategies. Gephardt argues that British writers envisioned their country simultaneously as distinct from the Continent and as a part of Europe, anticipating the contradictory British discourse around European integration that involves both fear that the European super-state will violate British sovereignty and a desire to play a more central role in the European Union.

Chapter 1
Hybrid Gardens:
Nationalization of Taste, Travel Writing, and Ann Radcliffe’s Continental Landscapes

When Ann Radcliffe, the writer of Gothic romances, and her husband, William Radcliffe, attempted to enter Switzerland on a quest for the continental sublime, they were turned away by an official who misread their national identity. Radcliffe’s brief account of the border-crossing episode points to the dangers of blurring national identities in the aftermath of the French Revolution. “This man, an illiterate Piedmontese in the Austrian service,” Radcliffe complains, “either believed, or affected to do so, that our name was not Radcliffe, but something like it, with a German termination, and that we were not English, but Germans” (A Journey 275). The incident encapsulates two important aspects of continental travel that altered the British idea of Europe in the 1790s: itineraries circumscribed by the Revolutionary Wars and an awareness of unstable national identities.

After they were turned away from the Swiss border, the Radcliffes complemented their alternative Grand Tour with a domestic tour that included the more modest sublime of the Lake District. Ann Radcliffe’s published account of A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany with a Return down the Rhine thus also includes Observations during a Tour of the Lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland (1795). This pairing of the domestic and the foreign spaces, firmly separated by a dividing line in the text, allowed Radcliffe to use landscape aesthetics to assess cultural differences between the British Isles and the Continent. The typographical boundary in the travelogue mirrors Radcliffe’s increased differentiation of home and abroad in fiction. It is ironic that the official in the border-crossing episode was Italian and that Radcliffe identified him so specifically, since, in her Gothic novels published before the continental tour, Ann Radcliffe tended to blur national distinctions and project English traits onto southern Europeans. In The Italian, which was published after the tour, Radcliffe fashioned a more culturally specific setting that reflected the shifts in the British perspectives on Europe in general and Italy in particular in the course of the 1790s. Therefore, Radcliffe’s revised continental setting provides a useful focal point for examining the changing perceptions of Britain’s position vis-à-vis the Continent in the decade following the French Revolution.

The localized European setting of The Italian is apparent in the contrast with the vaguely picturesque Southern Europe of her earlier novels. Contemporary readers of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), the novel that established her popularity as an author of Gothic romances, were generally enthusiastic about the novel’s extensive landscape descriptions, but some early reviewers criticized the artificiality of the author’s continental landscapes. For example, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s even-handed assessment of the novel in the Critical Review approved of Radcliffe’s “elegant description and picturesque scenery,” but also pointed out the interchangeability of the novel’s settings resulting from “too much of sameness” (356–7). Irritated by the repetition of stock landscape imagery, he noted that “the pine and larch tree wave, and the full moon pours its lustre through almost every chapter” (357). As Coleridge recognized in his critique, Radcliffe’s settings in Udolpho are derived from the discourse of landscape aesthetics rather than inspired by specific locations. In the context of the Revolutionary Wars of the late 1790s, such abstract renditions of foreign landscapes appeared subversive because they erased the boundaries between Britain and the Continent.

Radcliffe seems to have taken reviewers’ criticism as well as her own travel experience to heart when she avoided the same mistake in her next novel, The Italian, or The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797), which, as its title suggests, firmly established the differences between Britain and Italy. The concluding scene of The Italian provides a focal example of Radcliffe’s adaptation of continental settings. Unlike the landscape descriptions in Udolpho, the setting is topographically and culturally specific. The protagonists Vincentio di Vivaldi and Ellena Rosalba settle on an estate that superimposes an English pattern onto Italian scenery:¹

It was, in truth, a scene of fairy-land. The pleasure-grounds extended over a valley, which opened to the bay, and the house stood at the entrance of this valley, upon a gentle slope that margined the water, and commanded the whole extent of its luxuriant shores, from the lofty cape of Miseno to the bold mountains of the south, which, stretching across the distance, appeared to rise out of the sea, and divided the gulf of Naples from that of Salerno. … The style of the gardens, where lawns and groves and woods, varied the undulating surface, was that of England, and of the present day, rather than of Italy, except “Where a long alley peeping on the main,” exhibited such gigantic loftiness of shade, and grandeur of perspective, as characterize the Italian taste. (412)

The insertion of a reference to the English garden into a description of an Italian prospect reverses the direction of cultural transmission during the era of the Grand Tour, when travelers’ admiration and painters’ imitation of Italian models imposed Italianate features on British scenery.² Furthermore, the references to specific locations in the Bay of Naples and to the “present day” distinguish the setting from the artificial, painterly landscapes of The Mysteries of Udolpho. The implicit distinction between English and Italian standards of taste in the passage suggests an influence of the travel experience described in A Journey, in which Radcliffe contrasts English and Continental landscapes. Even though Radcliffe could not reach the Southern European locations of her favorite settings, her travel experience and the shifts in contemporary travel writing inform the cultural and topographical specificity of Neapolitan setting in The Italian.

Radcliffe’s revised continental setting in The Italian indicates that the writer’s European tour inspired a complex negotiation between cosmopolitan and nationalist standards of taste, which corresponds with the trends in contemporary autobiographical travel narratives. In the wake of the French Revolution, travel writers present Italy, which had been perceived as the culminating destination of the Grand Tour and a former center of civilization, as a peripheral European nation in the making. This change in the imaginative mapping of Italy moves Britain closer to the perceived center of Europe and engenders the conflicted attitudes that produced Radcliffe’s image of the hybrid garden. In this chapter, Radcliffe’s revised continental setting serves as a case study that illustrates these changes in the British idea of Europe. After establishing the contexts for the changing idea of Europe and the emerging national standard of taste in the 1790s, I examine Radcliffe’s A Journey alongside two other contemporary travel narratives, Adam Walker’s Ideas Suggested on the Spot in a Late Excursion through Flanders, Germany, France, and Italy (1790) and Joshua Lucock Wilkinson’s The Wanderer; or Anecdotes and Incidents, the Result and Occurrences of a Ramble on Foot, through France, Germany, and Italy, in 1791–93 (1798). Walker and Wilkinson, respectively, represent nationalist and cosmopolitan perspectives on the Continent and Italy. The common patterns of representation—especially the tendency to interpret landscapes in terms of national characteristics—in Radcliffe’s The Italian and the three travelogues point to a broader cultural trend toward a nationalization of taste that transcends political affiliations. The redefinition of Englishness in relation to both the Celtic peripheries of the British Isles and in relation to continental peripheries shaped discourses that promote national standards, particularly in the area of taste, which had been formerly dominated by continental influences.

British writers frequently refer to the English garden, which serves as not only an ideal landscape that strikes a balance between the beautiful and the sublime, but also as a metaphor for ideal government that superimposes constitutional order on revolutionary chaos. In this chapter, I argue that Radcliffe’s superimposition of the English garden onto an Italian landscape draws on a broadly used mode of representation that assesses continental landscapes, and by extension cultures and government, according to British models while simultaneously recognizing their native or “natural” properties. In both Radcliffe’s novels and the travel writing of the 1790s, superimposition functions as both a defensive and an aggressive rhetorical strategy, reflecting the tension between the nationalist and cosmopolitan ideas of Europe that was most influentially formulated in Edmund Burke’s response to the French Revolution and its aftermath.

National and European Identities in the Wake of the French Revolution

The changing patterns of representation in British narratives of European travel were associated with a new idea of Europe that emerged in the revolutionary decade. The eighteenth-century idea of Europe as the republic of letters had been anchored in the practice of the Grand Tour, which reinforced the sense of shared civilization by leading the Western European elites to examine the classical origins of their heritage. The French Revolutionary Wars (1793–1802) and later Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) disrupted the traditional itinerary of the Grand Tour and Napoleon’s attempts to impose uniformity on conquered European territories undermined the inherited ideas of Europe residual in the eighteenth-century ideal of a shared civilization. British responses to Continental travel during this period were shaped by the conflicted reactions to the French Revolution and its aftermath. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and the Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795–1797) were particularly influential because they dramatized the distinctions between the Old Europe associated with the Grand Tour and the New Europe that highlighted the differences among European nations.³

The period between the publication of Burke’s Reflections and the last of his Letters on a Regicide Peace made comparisons between Britain and the Continent particularly urgent. As Asa Briggs points out, by 1790 Pitt’s government had consolidated the British position in Europe that was disrupted following the loss of American colonies.⁴ Although Pitt’s primary objective was to “perpetuate European Peace” in the interest of British commerce (Briggs 110), the sequence of events in France, starting from the September massacres and culminating with the French declaration of war on England and Holland, forced him to declare that the Directory pursued as “their object the destruction of England, of Europe, and of the world” (qtd Briggs 120). The same defensive identification of England with the Continent shaped Edmund Burke’s rhetorical strategies.

The central tenets of Burke’s view of Britain’s position in Europe are the superiority of the British Constitution as a model for the rest of Europe and the idea of a Commonwealth of nations—European civilization based on the interdependence of Britain and the Continent. Britain, in Burke’s view, stands apart from the Continent as a model on the one hand and functions as its integral part on the other. In Reflections, Burke, provoked by English radicals such as Reverend Richard Price who upheld revolutionary France as an example for England, extols the “organic” qualities of the British constitution, or the “conformity of nature in our artificial institutions” (34). In order to highlight this superior blend of the natural and the artificial, he employs terminology associated with cultivation and gardening, asserting that British institutions thus do not require imports “wholly alien to our soil” and therefore “[Britons] have taken care not to inoculate any cyon alien to the nature of the original plant” (31). Burke suggests that the British constitution, which is rooted in the tradition of “ancient chivalry,” can serve as an alternative foundation for European civilization. Metaphors of gardening prove useful in contrasting the organic yet pruned growth of the British Constitution with the work of the revolutionaries who operate like French “ornamental gardeners, forming every thing into an exact level” (173). British institutions are thus associated with more “natural” gardens, or, by extension, political systems.

Following the French conquest of large sections of the Continent, including the Austrian Netherlands, northern Italy, Savoy, and Nice, Burke’s Letters on a Regicide Peace suggested that the artificiality and barbarity of the French experiment made it un-European, thus associating European civilization with Britain. In reaction to fellow politicians prepared to negotiate peace with revolutionary France as an equal European partner, Burke repeatedly compares the tendencies of the French “sect” that had “secured the centre of Europe” to Asian forms of tyranny, citing “Persia bleeding under the ferocious sword of Taehmas Kouli Khan” and “the anarchic despotism of Turkey” as representative examples (127). This association of revolutionary France with Asia calls for a “new crusade” to reconquer Europe from the “successful empire of barbarism” (“Second Letter” 267; “Fourth Letter” 61). Opposed to any prospect of a bi-lateral peace treaty between Britain and France, Burke insists on Britain’s obligation to Europe, to which it is tied by a “correspondence of laws, customs, manners, and habits of life” and designates “this aggregate of nations a Commonwealth,” and “the grand vicinage” of interdependent neighboring nations (“First Letter” 248). Burke constructs a new concept of European identity that informs the travel and fiction writers of the 1790s who also realize that Britain is no longer completely insulated from Europe but potentially interdependent with continental nations.

While Burke’s notion of an interdependent Commonwealth suggests a degree of equality among European nations, Britain nevertheless plays a leading role in his vision of Europe. Burke’s arguments thus run parallel with the ideas of fiction and travel writers who also strive to reimagine Britain’s place in Europe in the post-revolutionary decade. Reflecting Europe’s history of religious strife, Burke envisions England (standing for Great Britain) as the preserver of European civilization and rejects the idea of Britishness as a commercial enterprise actuated by the pursuit of self-interest:

But the great resource of Europe was in England: Not in a sort of England detached from the rest of the world, and amusing herself with the puppet shew of a naval power, (it can be no better, whilst all the sources of that power, and of every sort of power, are precarious) but in that sort of England, who considered herself embodied with Europe; but in that sort of England, who, sympathetick with the adversity or the happiness of mankind, felt that nothing in human affairs was foreign to her. We may consider it as a sure axiom that, as on the one hand no confederacy of the least effect or duration can exist against France, of which England is not only a part, but the head, so neither can England pretend to cope with France but as connected with the body of Christendom” [my emphasis]. (First Letter 196)

These two competing yet complementary notions of Britain as “a part” and as “the head” of Europe, as geographically “detached” yet “embodied” with the rest of the continent also shape the European landscapes in both the fictional and autobiographical travel narratives of the 1790s. Burke’s use of cultural parallels and contrasts corresponds with the instances of superimposition found in travel writing and Radcliffe’s The Italian. This recurrent rhetorical strategy reflects the paradoxical ambition to graft the features of the British Constitution onto foreign landscapes, and by extension nations, while maintaining their distinctive “natural” features. In Burke’s more practical political terms, this translates into having the inherent “capacities [of inadequate European governments] … improved into a British constitution” rather than razed to the ground and redesigned according to the French republican model (Reflections 131). As this statement illustrates, gardening, which combines artificial intervention and natural preservation, supplies pervasive metaphors for discussing political systems and cross-cultural relations in a decade that highlighted the importance of distinctive national identities. This trend is evident in the formulation of a new homegrown and uniquely British taste, which made it possible to redefine Italy, a former source of cultural influence, as a southern periphery of Europe.

The English Garden and the Formulation of National Taste

The political and nationalist undercurrents in contemporary debates about landscape aesthetics and improvement can help explain the origin as well as the function of the hybrid garden and of the culturally specific landscapes in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian. Travelers’ insistence on the uniqueness of British landscapes was instrumental in differentiating between Britain and the Continent in a climate that destabilized national identities during the turbulent 1790s. Travel writers could draw inspiration from patriotic calls for the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Imagining the Continent
• 1 Hybrid Gardens: Nationalization of Taste, Travel Writing, and Ann Radcliffe’s Continental Landscapes
• 2 The Occidentalist Costume: Lord Byron and Travelers’ Perspectives on Eastern Europe
• 3 From the Prison of the Nation: Tourism, Anglo-Italian Dialogue, and Mid-Victorian Remapping of Italy
• 4 The Mirror Image: British Travel Writing and Bram Stoker’s Eastern Europe
• Postscript: “Dense Westerners” and Persistent Peripheries: Edwardian Fictions of Europe and Beyond
• Bibliography
• Index