Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing: An Introduction

Author(s): David Seed

Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 34, Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing (2004), pp.
1-5
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
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Nineteenth-CenturyTravel Writing:
An Introduction
DAVID SEED
University
of Liverpool

The analysis of travel writing has now moved well beyond a 'transparent'
discussion that blurs the distinction between physical movement and its
written record. As Sara Mills has shown in her classic study Discourses of
Difference(i991), travel texts follow a number of discursive strategies that vary
according to gender. In her analysis of women's travel writing she identifies
a set of restrictions on expression more constrictive than any suffered by
male writers and also draws a distinction between two poles that these works
tend towards: 'factual' studies of manners where the traveller-author is
effaced and 'literary' accounts in the tradition of the 'sentimental traveller'.
Mills sheds helpful light on the strategies of 'othering' that these writers
follow, documenting ways in which the places visited are constructed as
alien. The essays in this collection document ways in which travel writing
can be seen to be inflected by questions of nationality, gender, and projected
cultural identity. To see, in this collective view, involves incorporating a
dialogical consciousness of how others have seen and also implicates the
traveller's gaze in the appropriations of imperialism. In her valuable survey
of this body of writing Barbara Korte has argued that nineteenth-century
travel writing was characterized by its self-consciousness and by its
promotion of values (expedition, heroism, and so on) central to empire.'
Travel writing thus has its own discursive practices, as witness the
repeated use throughout the century of the analogies with sketching
with going on
increasingly irrelevant with the advent of photography -and
in
and
the hand of Dickens
a pilgrimage. The 'sketch book'
Thackeray
offered a means of catching social types and holding them up for ironic scrutiny, but the travelling observer situates him/herself in a relation to those
observed which is charged with ideological implication. The very implication
of wealth and leisure time in the act of travelling, whether abroad or in the
cities of the traveller's own country, immediately sets up a distance from
those encountered which might be exacerbated by the kinds of discourse
used to describe them. The historian Daniel J. Boorstin, in The Image(1962),
saw the mid-century as a time of transition from travel to tourism which he
explains as follows: 'Some time after the middle of the nineteenth century, as
'English Travel Writingfrom Pilgrimagesto PostcolonialExplorations,trans. by Catherine Matthias
(Basingstoke:Macmillan, 2000), pp. 84, 88.

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TravelWriting:
An Introduction
JNineteenth-Centugy

the Graphic Revolution was getting under way, the character of foreign
to change
travel -first
by Europeans, and then by Americans -began
and
travel
[...]. Formerly
great
required long planning, large expense,
investments of time. It involved risks to health, even to life. The traveller was
active. Now he became passive. Instead of an athletic exercise, travel became
a spectator sport'.2 The stark antitheses between action and passivity spring
from a patrician distrust of tourism per se, which Boorstin describes as one of
the least desirable results of democracy. In fact, the reduction of danger did
not in itself sanitize what Boorstin mocks as the 'travel adventure'. It simply
gave the traveller more leisure to explore the places visited and therefore to
strike more complex relations to those cultures. If anything, the rise of tourism increased the self-consciousness of travellers' accounts andJames Buzard
has demonstrated in his excellent study The BeatenTrack(I993) that the traveller/tourist antithesis that Boorstin too easily relates to supposedly distinct
historical groups was actually a tension informing nineteenth-century travel
accounts. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, Buzard argues, the rise in
tourism 'helped to establish a view of acculturation as a double and potentially self-contradictory process, requiring gestures of both self-distinction (to
separate oneself from the crowd) and solidarity (to appeal to an imagined
small group of independent spirits)'. Thus, rather than suggesting a passive
acquiescence to a commercial imperative, for Buzard 'tourism has become
an exemplary cultural practice of modern liberal democracies' in appearing
to be at once accessible and exclusive.3
Similarly, the notion of a pilgrimage to holy places becomes increasingly
ironic as the tourist industry booms. Mark Twain's The InnocentsAbroad(1869)
subverts the trope by showing how the Holy Land and Rome had become
sites for the credulous tourist to be conned and swindled at every turn.
Twain, however, is too shrewd to slide into racist accusations here and
instead relates this confidence trickery to the whole business of tourism, and
specifically to the overblown discourse of the guidebooks supporting that
trade. Adopting the persona of a puzzled innocent (the 'pilgrim' as victim),
he quotes the following passage describing Mount Hermon:
On the east, the wild and desolate mountains contrast finely with the deep-blue
lake; and toward the north, sublime and majestic, Hermon looks down on the sea,
lifting his white crown to heaven with the pride of a hill that has seen the departing
footsteps of a hundred generations. On the northeast shore of the sea was a single
tree, and this is the only tree of any size visible from the water of the lake, except a
few lonely palms in the city of Tiberias, and by its solitary position attracts more
attention than would a forest. The whole appearance of the scene precisely what we

2 The
Dream(Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1963), p. 93.
Image;or, WhatBecameof theAmerican
The BeatenTrack:EuropeanTourism,Literature,
and the Waysto Culture,i80oo-I98 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1993), p. 6.

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DAVID SEED

would expect and desire the scenery of Gennesaret to be, grand beauty, but quiet
calm.4
Twain comments ironically on the 'paint and ribbons and flowers'
supporting this 'ingeniously written description' and then proceeds to
dismantle the account, leaving a comically bare skeleton: 'So stripped, there
remains a lake six miles wide and neutral in colour; with steep green banks,
unrelieved by shrubbery; at one end bare, unsightly rocks [...] in the north,
the mountain called Hermon, with snow on it; peculiarity of the picture,
"calmness"; its prominent feature, one tree'. Twain concludes: 'No ingenuity
could make such a picture beautifulto one's actual vision.' In refusing the
elaborate connotative language of the quoted passage Twain in effect refuses
to play the role of tourist which would involve acquiescing to a discourse
attempting to convey a sublimity appropriate to the region's biblical associations. Twain simply appeals to empirical observation in order to separate the
discourse from its unattractive referents, producing comic bathos as a result.
As tourism developed, the traveller became increasingly hemmed in by
what Thomas Pynchon was to call 'Baedeker land'; a wanderer could
become 'as much a feature of the topography as the other automata: waiters,
porters, cabmen, clerks'.5 The ubiquitous Murray's or Baedeker that accompanied the travellers of HenryJames's fiction prescribed routes, places to see,
warnings against unscrupulous local tradesmen; in short, directed the tourist
where to find the 'authentic' site s/he was intending to visit. As Pynchon
implies, the world of the guidebook suppressed the identities of the native
inhabitants, flattening them out into functions within the business of tourism.
A process of 'othering' thus repeats itself where entire populations become
framed as part of the picturesque attractions of a given place. The vogue
from the I85os onwards for travel in different parts of the Ottoman Empire
(Constantinople, the Holy Land, and so on) produced accounts of the exotic
Levant ripe for analysis in the light of Edward Said's Orientalism.Alexander
Kinglake begins his account of travelling round the Turkish Empire, Eothen
(I844), with a chapter called 'Over the Border'. The latter term implies far
more than crossing a frontier but suggests leaving behind the area of familiar
culture -in
short, Europe. A similar frisson was to be exploited at the end
of the century when Jonathan Harker opens his journal of visiting Count
Dracula by recording his sensation of 'leaving the West and entering the
East' as he crosses the Danube. However much he tries to naturalize the area
he visits by compiling information about the races and folklore of the region,
it is a symbolic detail that Dracula's castle lies in unmapped terrain: 'I was
not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle
4Mark Twain, Innocents
AbroadandRoughing
It (New York: Library of America, I984), pp. 403-04. The
quoted passage is attributed to 'William C. Grimes' but is taken from William C. Prime, TentLifein the
Holy Land(I857).
' Thomas
Pynchon, V. (London: Pan, 1978), p. 70.

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An Introduction
TravelWriting:
Jineteenth-Centugy

Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our
own Ordnance Survey maps'.6 Like H. G. Wells's island of Dr Moreau, the
fact that the castle is off the map implies that it lies beyond the terrain of
civilization. Mapping suggests knowability and a whole set of cultural
assumptions about behaviour and moral norms. If these locations lie outside
that cultural terrain, anything may happen.
A guidebook implies repeatability, laying down an itinerary that others
can follow. There is thus a pointed historical irony in Wordsworth's
opening his I8IO Guideto theLakeswith the following statement: 'In preparing
this Manual, it was the Author's principal wish to furnish a Guide or
Companion for the Minds of Persons of taste, and feeling for the Landscape,
who might be inclined to explore the District of the Lakes with that degree of
attention to which its beauty may fairly lay claim'.7 By I844 this appeal to
kindred spirits had changed into indignation over the plans to build the
Kendal and Windermere Railway and Wordsworth's horror peaked with the
report that the manufacturers of Lancashire and Yorkshire were planning to
send their mill-hands to the Lakes for holidays.
Fictions persisted in travel. The trope of pilgrimage implied an innocent,
spiritual purpose. Travellers were repeatedly invited to 'explore' as if they
were discovering new places and not following in the tracks of thousands.
One of the most blatant instances of such guides was The Prairie Traveller,
published by Captain Randolph B. Marcy in 1859 at the request of the US
War Department. This volume was intended as a manual for potential emigrants and was packed with useful information on recommended saddles,
how to deal with rattlesnake bites, and so on. Indian guides were particularly
recommended for their unique skills and the traveller is reassured that the
Prairie Indians are simple folk at heart: 'They are strangers to all cares,
creating for themselves no artificial wants, and are perfectly happy and
contented so long as buffalo is found within the limits of their wanderings.'8
The handbook invites travellers at once to cover terrain and witness the
Indians in their native habitat: playing the role of pioneer here involves an
implicit act of displacement. Commentators have been making a similar
argument with the notion of surveying in travel writing where the verb
suggests an unfettered gaze across a landscape and also the appropriation of
that landscape, if only by measuring and naming.
Travel writing comes to share a semiotic thatJonathan Culler has summarized in the following way: 'The tourist is interested in everything as a sign of
itself, an instance of a typical cultural practice: a Frenchman is an example of

Bram Stoker, Dracula,ed. by Nina Auerbach and DavidJ. Skal (New York: Norton, 1997),pp. 9-10.
7Wordsworth's
Guideto theLakes,ed. by Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970),
p.8 I.
ThePrairieTraveller:
The ClassicHandbookfor
America'sPioneers(New York: Perigee Books, 1994),p. 192.

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DAVID SEED

a Frenchman, a restaurant in the Latin Quarter is an example of a Latin

Quarter, signifying "Latin Quarter Restaurantness".All over the world the
unsung armies of semiotics, the tourists, are fanning out in search of signs of
Frenchness, typical Italian behaviour [and] persist in regarding these objects
and practices as cultural signs.9 Culler here identifies a persistent impulse
towards generalization that shows itself in references to the national 'character' which are bandied about by travellers, and also a habit of seeing projected on to the sights of a country with perverse disregard for its specific
cultural practices.
'Travelling is a fool's paradise', declared Emerson in his I841 essay
'Self-Reliance'. It constituted a futile effort to escape from the self for him
and, even worse, it reflected a cultural dis-ease that he did not hesitate to
diagnose: 'The intellect is vagabond, and the universal system of education
fosters restlessness.Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at
home. We imitate; and what is imitation but a travelling of the mind?'
Happily, Emerson did not heed his own injunctions and visited Europe a
number of times, being burlesqued as the comically anxious Mr Babcock in
Emerson saw travel as a sign of moral weakness
Henry James's TheAmerican.
and condemned the burgeoning business of tourism as a distraction from
self-cultivation.His friend and compatriot Thoreau took a more nationalistic
line in stating: 'I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And
that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from
east to west' ('Walking').Thoreau aligns himself with the perceived direction
of his nation expanded into a paradigm of how civilizationprogresses.East is
past; West is future. The contrast could hardly be clearer. But Thoreau, like
Washington Irving and others, identifies travel with the movement of the
mind so that, however much he seems to be bounded by his physical dwelling and immediate New England neighbourhood, Thoreau actuallywanders
across huge tracts of time in a kind of peripatetic meditation on civilization.
Such statements as the ones just quoted reveal the intensely political and
performatory dimension to travel in the nineteenth century. The works
discussed here project travel as an adopted role within which the protagonist
acts out a number of culturallyinflected strategiesthat carry implications for
the relation between genders, the imperial power and colonized cultures,
and even between different social or ethnic groups within the same broad
culture. The critical task of uncovering the nature of this role continues.

9 'The Semiotics of Tourism', in

(Oxford: Blackwell, I988),
FramingtheSign:Criticismand its Institutions
p. I55-

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