The Discovery of Britain (Routledge Revivals)

The English Tourists 1540-1840

Esther Moir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136767876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Développement personnel
• Subtopic: Voyage

First published in 1964, this book examines the Tour of Britain. It focuses, neither on foreign tourists coming to Britain, nor on British tourists travelling abroad, but on British people exploring their native land in the three centuries from 1540 to 1840. During this period, it became a popular pastime amongst gentlemen of leisure to travel for weeks, even months, in discovery of their own country and this book describes both the pleasure taken by tourists of Britain and the hardships they endured. Tracking these journeys over three centuries, the book presents a changing English landscape, a changing economy, and a change in people's tastes as the interests and concerns of the tourists evolve over the timeframe covered.

ARS PEREGRINANDI

The Art of Travel

T seems natural to travellers to write of their travels. They mostly wish, as John Caprove put it, to add their own ‘smal pyping of swech straunge sites as I have seyn’.¹ The tourists of Britain are no exception. Long winter evenings were spent in transcribing the notes taken in the previous summer's tour, and they produced their accounts, sometimes for publication, often for circulation in manuscript form amongst friends and neighbours. The simplicity and spontaneity of their writings stand in refreshing contrast to much other tourist literature, and when other travellers’ tales grow tedious it is good to turn again to these eye-witness accounts of the English countryside which they knew and loved.

‘Ars peregrinandi’ might almost be called a European cult of the sixteenth century. ‘All nations espying this realm to be so commodious and pleasant have a confluence to it more than to any other region’,² wrote Andrew Boorde, and indeed England was always popular with the foreign visitor. But whether he came as a member of an embassy or as a private individual, his sight-seeing was centred mainly on London, Oxford and Cambridge, and the inevitable tour of royal palaces: Greenwich, Richmond, Hampton Court, Windsor. This almost mechanical round produced stereotyped writings, and the interest of such accounts lies less in their topographical descriptions than in their comments on those English racial characteristics and idiosyncrasies which have always intrigued and bewildered the foreigner, a fascination which was none the less great for being coupled with the general idea, which persisted practically down to the time of Victoria, that they were really beyond the pale of civilization. It was therefore with scarcely concealed satisfaction that visitor after visitor discovered that the English loved sport and were oblivious to art; that they lived in cold, damp houses; that they were heavy smokers; had ‘little mode for gallantry’ and disliked foreigners— generalizations which appear with such monotonous regularity that they seem like the plagiaristic borrowings of successively baffled tourists turning to see what foreign visitors before them had made of the English race.¹

In return the English travelled in Europe. The Grand Tour held an important place in English life, and was backed by a formidable literature which demonstrated that travel alone could bring that experience necessary to crown a liberal education. Innumerable essays appeared on the subject in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some justifying travel with moral and rational arguments, others giving practical advice and guidance, all determined to mould both the route and the impressions of the young tourist. They tended to follow much the same pattern. The goal was Italy, the aim a veneer of culture. Typical of the Elizabethan traveller making the Grand Tour is Sir Philip Sidney, who spent two years abroad, passing through France and Germany to Italy, accompanied by three servants, and attaching himself to some official or diplomatic mission whenever possible. During the next three centuries this changed little. The raw English youth spent two or three years moving about Europe in the company of an experienced tutor who was expected to shield him from its moral and religious hazards. He followed the well-worn paths through Paris, Florence and Venice to Rome, read the stereotyped guides, and returned with his collection of artistic trophies and conventional views to impress his contemporaries who had been doing exactly the same thing.

‘The tour of Europe is a paltry thing, a tame, uniform, unvaried prospect which affords nothing but the same polished manners and artificial policies.’¹ There had, however, been considerable debate upon its merits, acrimonious attacks and optimistic defences, before Bishop Hurd summed up the views of those in opposition so defiantly in his supposed dialogue between John Locke and Lord Shaftesbury. Even those who advocated it most strongly had been aware of the dangerous lengths to which a young man might be tempted, and had counselled moderation. Thomas Nashe had been one of the first to pour his scathing wit on the idea that ‘he is nobody that hath not traveled’ and he painted only too mercilessly his picture of the assiduous tourist: ‘He that is a traveller must have the back of an asset to beare all, a tongue like the tail of a dog to flatter all, the mouth of a hogge to eat what is set before him, the area of a merchant to hear all and say nothing; and if this be not the highest step of thraldom, there is no liberty or freedom.’² The question was discussed with increasing heat throughout the eighteenth century. But by then the fashion was at its height and unlikely to be influenced either by the commendations of Josiah Tucker, whose Instructions for Travellers set out the system of travel he considered most profitable, or by such satires as Cowper's Progress of Error. Inglese Italiano, diavolo incarnato was a favorite tag, and Adam Smith's picture of the tourist returning more conceited, more unprincipled, more dissipated and more incapable of any serious application represented a widely held view.

The Tour of Britain, however, aroused no such passions, called forth no fierce controversy and created no particular philosophy to justify itself. Its devotees were content to travel, to describe what they saw and encourage others to follow them. And while the foreign visitor wrote of the peculiarities of the English people as he found them, while the voyager to the East returned with his gloriously embellished romantic tales, and while the young nobleman brought back his careful impressions of the riches of Europe's cultural heritage, the British traveller does not fit into any easy category. He was essentially an individualist: he was not a member of a caravan trekking east, nor did he move perpetually surrounded by a miniature court of English secretaries, chaplains and servants, as though he, ‘like the king's ambassador was leading a tiny mission to the continent’.¹ Travelling alone, or at most accompanied by a servant, he was unlikely, at least before the end of the eighteenth century and the cult of the Picturesque, to have had his outlook and taste fashioned by treatises which set out the ideals of touring. Nor did he leave a common society of Whitehall or the university and return to report the fruit of his journeyings to contemporaries of the same background and ideas as himself. A royal librarian, a Cheshire landowner, a spirited young woman, an army lieutenant, a hack journalist, a philanthropic cleric—it was an extraordinarily mixed company which set out to discover their native land, with motives and interests as varied as themselves.

Celia Fiennes, standing equidistant in time from the Tudor topographers and the mid-Victorian travellers, well symbolizes the English tourist, and is untypical only in being a woman. Her curiosity was unbounded, her writing vivid and spontaneous, her interests ranged over all that she came upon in her travels, and she would describe with equal enthusiasm natural wonders or the most recent developments in mining. And probably no one ever held firmer views upon the value of making the Tour of Britain.

If all persons, both Ladies, much more Gentlemen, would spend some of their tyme in Journeys to visit their native Land, and be curious to inform themselves and make observations of each place, with the variety of sports and recreations they are adapt to, would be a souveraign remedy to cure or preserve from these epidemick diseases of vapours, should I add Laziness? It would also form such an Idea of England, add much to its Glory and Esteem in our minds and cure the itch of over-valueing foreign parts.²

The wise tourist did not set out upon his travels without careful preparation beforehand to ensure at least a minimum of physical comfort in the face of hazardous roads and squalid inns. The Rev. James Plumptre had reduced this to such a fine art that by 1794 he was actually designing a special form of dress for himself and his companion, which was intended to be at once handsome, neat and light. They wore nankeen breeches with garters, short blue coats with large lapels which could be buttoned over in case of rain or cold, and Scotch plaids, and they carried knapsacks covered with goatskin. These latter had to be of very considerable size, for not only did Plumptre equip himself with such necessities as seven shirts and three pairs of well-seasoned shoes but he would never venture forth without what he was pleased to call his knick-knacks: a small telescope; a pocket compass; a pocket knife and fork; drawing and memorandum books; a silver pen and pencil; a drinking horn; a pocket pistol; magnifiers for botany; a sixteen-inch tape-measure and, finally, Cowper's poems, ‘a book which breathes the finest poetry with the truest religion and morality—a book I shall never think I have read sufficiently till I can retain it all in my Memory’.¹

Almost every tourist had hints and suggestions to offer to his fellows, based all too often on hardly won experience. But Dr. William Kitchinir said all that there really was to be said in his Traveller’s Oracle: or Maxims for Locomotion, containing Precepts for Promoting the Pleasures and Hints for Preserving the Health of Travellers, published in 1825. He covered every possible aspect of his subject, from advice on personal defence to hints for care of the feet, and he enlivened his pages with his own musical compositions, An English Grace, A Father's Advice to his Son, and a patriotic hymn, no doubt intended to cheer on the flagging traveller, All Hail, Britannia, Queen of Isles. His concern was to send the traveller forth equipped for any emergency, yet not festooned with cumbrous baggage, and to achieve this end he had designed, with very considerable ingenuity, a thermometer which was housed in a toothpick case; a barometer for measuring heights in a walking stick; a sword inside an umbrella; a knife, fork and spoon folded into one large pocket-knife; and a night-lamp placed in a little lantern which could carry on its top a tin cup that would hold half a pint of water. For personal comfort he advised the wearing of gaiters, or, better still, a pair of fisherman's worsted hose drawn over the shoes, and he advocated a Welsh wig as a cheap and comfortable travelling cap. To ensure against the worst evils of the inns he produced his pièce de résistance: a portable canteen which contained leather sheets as a precaution against damp beds, a kettle, knives and forks, and ‘Soldier's Comforters, consisting of two Saucepans, Lamp and Stand, Spice Box, all contained in one Saucepan’. He did not allow his tourist that dilettante plaything the Claude-glass, but instead recommended that he should take an ‘Invisible Opera Glass or Traveller's Vade Mecum’ of his own invention, so that on arrival at any place he might at once climb to the top of the highest building and gain a general idea of it.

Thus equipped, and carrying those stout notebooks which they were determined to fill, the optimistic tourists set out along roads whose appalling state called forth some of their most violent diatribes—though none was to jeer quite so heartlessly as the foreign traveller who said of the English that they had roads ‘as the lazy Italians had fruits, namely what God left them after the Flood’. On the borders of the country, in Devon and Cornwall, Wales and the Peak, such conditions might be expected, and it was hardly surprising to find that in the far west roads became mere narrow lanes through which a single horse might pass only with difficulty, and in the north they were little more than steep and stony tracks following the hillsides. Some of the very worst roads, however, were to be found near London. The liquid mud of Sussex, churned by the constant traffic, was the most famous of all, and it was said that respectable Sussex women went to church in ox-drawn coaches, and Sussex men and animals had grown long-legged through pulling their feet through the clay. ‘If you love good roads . . . be so kind as never to go into Sussex’, wrote Horace Walpole to George Montague. ‘The whole country has a Saxon air, and the inhabitants are savage. . . . Coaches grow there no more than balm and spices. . . . Sussex is a great damper of curiosities.’ In open or unenclosed country, roads were often not clearly defined, and any traveller felt himself at liberty to choose whatever way seemed best, even at the risk of traversing good agricultural land. In country where stone was scarce the local surveyor of the highways felt no compunction in regarding any prehistoric remain or ancient monument as a public quarry, and the traveller who congratulated himself that the way leading to some well-known antiquitity was in good repair generally failed to realize that this had been achieved only by the destruction of the goal of his journey. Each season brought its own particular dangers, and few travelled for pleasure except in the summer when they had nothing worse to face than clouds of dust, for in the spring and autumn they might expect ruts filled with water, and in the winter snow, which if followed quickly by a thaw made any journey extremely disagreeable and frequently dangerous.

All roads deteriorated seriously during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, owing largely to the great increase in wheeled vehicles. Medieval traffic had consisted mainly of riding horse, packhorse or litter, with agricultural carts or ploughs with some box attachment for short-distance travel, and the waggons used by royal and noble households. The mid-sixteenth century saw the introduction of the four-wheeled English wain; private coaches were becoming increasingly popular, and the stage coach first began to appear sometime between 1600 and 1650. Already by 1622 John Taylor was complaining ‘the world runs on wheels —this is a rattling, rowling, rumbling age’, a fact which encouraged him to make several journeys by water, notably those from London to York and Salisbury, which he described in A Merry Wherry-Ferry-Voyage and A Discovery by Sea. But he concluded that travel by river and sea was even more beset by travail and danger, and clearly there could be no serious alternative to road travel, with, as its corollary, a cons...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Ars Peregrinandi: The Art of Travel
• 2. A Looking-Glass of Britain: The Tudor Topographers
• 3. Ecclesiology and Science: The Seventeenth-century Tourists
• 4. A Planted Garden: Celia Fiennes and Daniel Defoe
• 5. Romans and Goths: William Stukeley and the Antiquarians
• 6. Stately Homes: The Round of Country Houses
• 7. The Pursuit of A Terrestrial Paradise: The Round of Gardens
• 8. Horrid and Sublime: Mills, Mines and Furnaces
• 9. Landscape With Figures: Arthur Young and William Gobbett
• 10. The Picturesque and The Romantic: The Wye and North Wales
• 11. The Playground of England: The Lakes
• Bibliography
• Index