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Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing: An Introduction Author(s): David Seed Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 34, Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing (2004), pp.

1-5Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3509479Accessed: 28-09-2015 15:31 UTC

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Nineteenth-Century Travel 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 increasingly irrelevant with the advent of photography -and with going on a pilgrimage. The 'sketch book' in the hand of Dickens and Thackeray offered a means of catching social types and holding them up for ironic scru-

tiny, 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 Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations, trans. by Catherine Matthias (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 84, 88.

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JNineteenth-Centugy Travel Writing: An Introduction

the Graphic Revolution was getting under way, the character of foreign travel -first by Europeans, and then by Americans -began to change [...]. Formerly travel required long planning, large expense, and great 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 tour- ism increased the self-consciousness of travellers' accounts andJames Buzard has demonstrated in his excellent study The Beaten Track (I993) that the travel- ler/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 poten- tially 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 Innocents Abroad (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 Image; or, What Became of the American Dream (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 93. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to 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 beautiful- to 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 associa- tions. 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 accom-

panied 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

4 Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad and Roughing 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, Tent Life in the Holy Land(I857). ' Thomas Pynchon, V. (London: Pan, 1978), p. 70.

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Jineteenth-Centugy Travel Writing: An Introduction

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 Guide to the Lakes with 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 emi-

grants 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 summa- rized 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

6 Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. by Nina Auerbach and DavidJ. Skal (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 9-10. 7 Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes, ed. by Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970),

p. I. 8 The Prairie Traveller: The Classic Handbookfor America's Pioneers (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 'charac- ter' which are bandied about by travellers, and also a habit of seeing pro- jected 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 Henry James's The American. Emerson saw travel as a sign of moral weakness 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 civilization progresses. 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 dwell- ing and immediate New England neighbourhood, Thoreau actually wanders 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 culturally inflected strategies that 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 Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions (Oxford: Blackwell, I988), p. I55-

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