Travel Writing, Visual Culture, and Form, 1760-1900

Brian H. Murray, Mary Henes, Brian H. Murray, Mary Henes, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137543394
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection reveals the variety of literary forms and visual media through which travel records were conveyed in the long nineteenth century, bringing together a group of leading researchers from a range of disciplines to explore the relationship between travel writing, visual representation and formal innovation.

1

Introduction: Forms of Travel, Modes of Transport

Brian H. Murray^*

New spaces, new forms

In her 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, Virginia Woolf wanders into a second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road. A disorganised stack of volumes piled on the floor offers a panoramic view of the print culture of the previous century. Although scholars of the nineteenth century have long thought of the novel as the dominant literary form of the period, Woolf suggests that it is another category – the travel book – that overwhelms all others.

There are travellers ... row upon row of them, still testifying, indomitable spinsters that they were, to the discomforts that they endured and the sunsets they admired in Greece when Queen Victoria was a girl. A tour in Cornwall with a visit to the tin mines was then worthy of voluminous record. People went slowly up the Rhine and did portraits of each other in Indian ink, sitting reading on deck beside a coil of rope; they measured the pyramids; were lost to civilization for years; converted negroes in pestilential swamps. This packing up and going off, exploring deserts and catching fevers, settling in India for a lifetime, penetrating even to China and then returning to lead a parochial life in Edmonton, tumbles and tosses upon the dusty floor like an uneasy sea, so restless the English are, with the waves at their very door.¹

Alongside Woolf’s affectionate dismissal of the ambitions and achievements of her Victorian forebears, the passage also testifies powerfully to the ubiquity of the traveller’s tale in ‘a period in which it is estimated that travel books came close second in popularity to the novel’.² Despite Woolf’s ironic distance, she astutely highlights the range of travel writers and readers (explorers, tourists, spinsters and missionaries) whose voluminous output and voracious consumption ensured that, in the nineteenth century, travel writing reached ‘a position of influence greater than had ever previously been the case and certainly greater than was to be the case after 1914’.³ As John Pemble has pointed out in his comprehensive survey of British leisure travel to the Mediterranean in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, travel books ‘were one of the mainstays of Victorian publishing. The presses plied the reading public with Sketches, Notes, Diaries, Gleanings, Glimpses, Impressions, Pictures, Narratives, and Leaves from Journals about Tours, Visits, Wanderings, Residences, Rambles, and Travels’.⁴ Importantly, Pemble enumerates not only titles here but forms, all of which point to subtle distinctions between categories of traveller. The titles of some travel books carried demonstrable significance and authority. Records, Reports or Intelligence implied professionalism and the rigorous documentation of place. Seasoned expats could allude to their Residence in a foreign country, rather than their Travels through it, staking a claim of authoritative intimacy with an exotic locale. At the other end of the scale, the excursionist could offer a humble Peep at the other in its natural habitat.⁵ The abundant variety of these sub-genres demonstrates how a subtle differentiation in mode of address could anticipate the reactions of a sceptical reader, while also helping authors to position themselves on the finely graded scale from explorer to tourist. As Franco Moretti has suggested, the European encounter with ‘new space’ often gave rise to new forms, and the period 1760–1900 saw the rise of both new technologies of movement and new categories of traveller.⁶ This volume investigates how the new perspectives, networks and markets enabled by these developments impacted upon literary and pictorial form and how these new media in turn affected the ways in which people travelled.

Over the last three decades, the ideological content of travel narratives has been the focus of extensive analysis, with particular attention being paid to the discursive power play between the traveller-author and the objectified native subject or ‘travelee’.⁷ Several pioneering critical studies in this area attest to the emergence of travel writing studies from the related fields of postcolonial theory and imperial history.⁸ This close relationship between the critical study of travel writing and postcolonial theory should not surprise us; as Hulme and Youngs have pointed out, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) was one of the first works of literary criticism to take travel writing seriously.⁹ More recently, scholars have attempted to move beyond the narrow focus on ‘discourse’, and have approached the rich corpus of European travel writing from a wider variety of aesthetic and historical perspectives. The most successful recent studies have provided nuanced historical readings of travel texts, utilising postcolonial hermeneutic strategies without being methodologically or ideologically bound to them. As a result, scholars have increasingly come to acknowledge that if we are to determine the significance of representations of travel to nineteenth-century culture, it is just as important ‘to attend to the vehicle of travel literature as it is to the material it carries’.¹⁰

Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form is designed to represent the range of innovative approaches to nineteenth-century travel writing currently undertaken by scholars of empire, tourism, religion, literature and visual culture. While a sensitivity to ideological inflection is essential to any informed reading of travel and tourism in the nineteenth century, such interpretative approaches can only be considered robust if proper attention is paid to questions of form, genre and the material text. In part, we see this collection as a response to Caroline Levine’s recent call for a cultural criticism that addresses social and ideological formations and literary forms as mutually constitutive. As Levine suggests, ‘social forms and literary forms are always potentially embedded within one another’ and ‘it is in the strange encounters among forms – even those forms that are deliberate outcomes of dominant ideologies – that unexpected, politically significant possibilities emerge’.¹¹ In his treatment of the ideological implications of form in travel writing, Paul Smethurst has noted ‘the tension between the order of imperial form and the disorder of mobility implicit in travel’. The traveller’s act of representation, he suggests, replicates the operation and administration of imperial power: as ‘mobility is spatialised and synchronised, so the travel writer is able to present reality as an orderly representation’.¹² The essays in the current volume, however, complicate the notion that the form of travel writing invariably channels ‘imperial ideology’ and ‘systems of binaries’ characterised by ‘well-fenced, absolute, and universal self-other ... oppositions’.¹³ Instead, the following chapters explore narratives of travel conveyed in playful and parodic forms, forms which could potentially undercut (as well as endorse) imperial or patriarchal myths. Engaging with Levine, we have aimed to demonstrate how literary forms can ‘participate in a destabilising relation to social formations, often colliding with social hierarchies rather than reflecting or foreshadowing them’.¹⁴

The chapters in this volume explore the interaction of social and literary forms not by ignoring but by interrogating issues of gender, race and class in a diverse range of travel texts. As Renate Dohmen demonstrates in Chapter 3, for example, while women increasingly travelled and recorded their journeys through text and image, their itineraries were often determined by their male companions. Yet this restriction of personal agency arguably led female travellers to make greater efforts to personalise their narratives and imprint their personalities upon the archive through formal innovation and invention. If male travellers could choose the road less travelled, women had to individuate their accounts through the careful selection of what was and what was not worthy of recollection and representation.

The evolution of gender roles was paralleled by a gradual shift in the perceived social status of the leisure traveller. As A.V. Seaton explains in Chapter 6, from the mid-century ‘the entitlement of the relatively small elite groups which had monopolised the Grand Tour, was being trespassed upon by a broader middle class’. Yet, as Victoria Mills demonstrates in Chapter 4, there was still a sharp division between the perception of the cultured traveller and ‘mere tourist’, and the elitist shadow of the Grand Tour was never fully dissipated in the light of egalitarian excursions. Thus travel and travel writing continued to operate as powerful forms of cultural capital. As Hulme and Youngs point out, in its initial use by Charles Baudelaire in his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), the term ‘modernité’ was closely tied to ‘notions of movement and individuality which, in the aristocratic figure of the flâneur … stand out against the democratisation of travel marked by the appearance of Thomas Cook’s first tour in 1841’.¹⁵ The increasing mobility of the middle classes was spurred on by the availability of cheap travel literature. Steam printing enabled the production of affordable guidebooks, excursion flyers and railway timetables. At the same time, views of exotic foreign sites were widely reproduced as engravings, lithographs and (later) photographs in sixpenny weeklies like the Illustrated London News (from 1842) and the Graphic (from 1869).

The self-conscious rhetoric of the ‘annihilation of time and space’ evolved in response to these social, scientific and cultural developments. Technologies like the electric telegraph – with its literal promise of ‘writing at a distance’ – undermined the embodied reality of traditional forms of transportation and communication. But alongside these new possibilities, there emerged a powerful nostalgia for earlier forms of travel and transport: subversive rural rides, camel treks across the Sinai, and the pedestrian feats of heroic Alpinists. Whether travellers chose to embrace the possibilities of the steam age, or react against them, the realities of an expanding transport and communications network both enabled and delimited literary expression.

The gradual democratisation of travel also encouraged the proliferation of anti-tourist rhetoric. Keen to dissociate themselves from allegations of tourism, many travel writers responded through formal innovation. The systematising tour itineraries of Murray and Baedeker, as well as the sheer quantity of travellers’ texts which had paved the way, helped to ‘drive the English-language travel writer towards impressionism and diegesis’.¹⁶ The travel writer’s ubiquitous feeling of ‘belatedness’ was born out of the highly self-conscious ways in which nineteenth-century travellers positioned themselves as both writers and readers. As James Buzard explains, Victorian travellers ‘often began with the acknowledgement that other texts had covered their chosen fields, but they then proceeded, by way of various manoeuvres, to assert originality in spite of their belatedness’.¹⁷ Yet while the idiosyncratic ‘personal impression’ was a reliable formula for travel writers with an established reputation and market (such as Charles Dickens or Frances Trollope), many lesser lights were forced to tack their experiences on to the reputations of earlier literary travellers. By offering a glimpse at Lord Byron’s Greece, St Paul’s Asia Minor, or Charles Dickens’s London, ‘literary tourists’ capitalised on their own belatedness by fetishising and commodifying the impressions of their predecessors.

If many modes of transport and forms of travel writing were new to the nineteenth century, the continuities with earlier practices of mobility and traditions of representation should not be overlooked. The chapters in this volume by Simon Goldhill, Michael Ledger-Lomas and Alison Chapman remind us that the ancient tradition of pilgrimage can still help us to understand the practices of nineteenth-century travellers. And much like its Christian antecedent, the ‘literary pilgrimage’ relied upon a heavily formalised itinerary and standardised performative response to given sites.¹⁸ The persistence of pilgrimage as one of the key structuring principles of nineteenth-century tourism reminds us that Romantic and Victorian travellers rarely sought an unmediated encounter with foreign space.¹⁹ As Peter Garratt reminds us in Chapter 10, we need to consider ‘the entwined practices of reading and travelling’ in a period wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Forms of Travel, Modes of Transport
• Part I Material Collections, Visual Interventions
• Part II Locating Literary Form
• Bibliography
• Index