The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford English Monographs)

OX F OR D EN G L I S H M ON O G RA PH S General Editors

christopher butler katherine duncan-jones malcolm godden hermione lee a. d. nuttall fiona stafford paul strohm

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The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination

CARL THOMPSON

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Carl Thompson 2007

The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–925998–4 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

a wild dedication of yourselves To unpath’d waters, undream’d shores; most certain To miseries enough … William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, iv. iv. 567–9

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Acknowledgements This book began life as an Oxford D.Phil. thesis, and my thanks must firstly go to my principal supervisor, Craig Raine, who oversaw my research with great enthusiasm and much wise guidance, and to Kathryn Sutherland, who provided a useful fresh perspective on the project at a late stage of proceedings. Some of the research for the D.Phil. was conducted whilst I held the Robert Browning Studentship at Pembroke College, Oxford, for which I would like to thank the Master and Fellows of the College; the process of transforming thesis into book, meanwhile, was begun whilst I held a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Oxford, and again thanks are due to the President and Fellows of Trinity, and especially to Dinah Birch, Kantik Ghosh, and Clive Griffin. My D.Phil. examiners, Marilyn Butler and Nigel Leask, offered useful suggestions for how to develop this project, as did the two anonymous readers at Oxford University Press. The thesis version of this study was scrupulously proof-read by Andrew Tarrant; Alison Waller did the same for parts of the book. Jonathan Hope, meanwhile, heroically took on what was pretty much a full-time, unpaid editorial role, bringing a perceptive eye to bear on both style and content whilst generally proving a great mate through the more painful stages of this book’s evolution. Tim Fulford, Tim Youngs, and Carol Bolton read draft chapters, and made many excellent suggestions: any errors which remain are of course my own. At Oxford University Press, meanwhile, Sophie Goldsworthy and Tom Perridge steered me sympathetically through the publication process. Thanks are also due to: Jeremy Burke, Gregory Le Stage, Sarah Mitchell, Kitty Hauser, Dido Fisher, Stuart Fisher, John Goodridge, David Worrall, John Eade, Isobel McCall, and Gail McEachron; Christine Riding and Tate Britain; Nigel Rigby and the National Maritime Museum; Jonathan Fortier, Luisa Calé, and all participants in the Romantic Realignments seminar series; Sarah Moss and all participants in the Travellers and Texts seminars; Bernard Beatty, Peter Cochran, Maureen Crisp, and all at the International Byron Society;

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Deborah Manley and the Association for the Study of Travellers to Egypt and the Near East. Special thanks are due to Ceri Thompson and Angus Macrae, who were always there to pick me up whenever I got too disillusioned with the revision process. My greatest thanks, however, must go to my parents, Michael and Valma Thompson, whose unstinting generosity and love, expressed in many different ways, made this book possible.

Contents Abbreviations Introduction

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1. Tourists: Diversification and Disdain, 1760–1830

31

2. Misadventurers I: Existential Themes

59

3. Misadventurers II: Political Themes

107

4. Explorers: Rhetorics of Science and Sacrifice

146

5. Romantic Travel I: Wordsworthian Scripts

186

6. Romantic Travel II: Byronic Scripts

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Conclusion Bibliography Index

272 276 293

Abbreviations BCMP

Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

BCPW

Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, 7 vols., ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93).

BLJ

Byron: Letters and Journals, 13 vols., ed. Leslie A. Marchand (London: John Murray, 1973–94).

CCP

Coleridge: The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997).

C Letters

Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols., ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71).

C Works

The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 17 vols., ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971–2000).

Hazlitt CW

The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 21 vols., ed. P. P. Howe (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1930–4).

KCP

Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987).

K Letters

The Letters of John Keats, 2 vols., ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., and Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958).

SCPW

The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press), 1952.

SPP

Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York and London: Norton, 1977).

WB

William Wordsworth, The Borderers, ed. Robert Osborn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982).

W Letters

The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 7 vols., ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd edn. ed. Chester L. Shaver, Mary Moorman, and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967–88).

WP

Wordsworth: The Prelude: The Four Texts, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995).

Abbreviations

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WPrW

The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols., ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).

WPW

Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

WSP

The Salisbury Plain Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975).

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Introduction In Italy, Englishmen are called ‘the mad English’ from the hazards they run. They like to astonish the natives by a little superfluous peril. Leigh Hunt¹

A traveller I am, And all my tale is of myself. William Wordsworth²

Leigh Hunt’s observation about British travellers in Italy in the 1820s, in the first epigraph to this chapter, was by no means unique. In 1824, William Hazlitt made a tour of France and Italy that took him almost as far south as Naples. Originally he planned to visit Naples itself, but rumours of bandits operating in the region deterred him from making the final leg of the journey. To others, however, the reports of robbery and kidnapping seemed less a deterrent, and more an enticement to travel further. As Hazlitt subsequently recorded in his Notes of a Journey through France and Italy (1826): A friend of mine said that he thought it the only romantic thing going, this of being carried off by the banditti; that life was become too tame and insipid without such accidents, and that it would not be amiss to put one’s-self ¹ Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries; With Recollections of the Author’s Life, 2 vols. (London, 1828), i. 102. ² The Prelude (1805), Book 3, ll.196–7, in WP. Hereafter all book and line numbers for The Prelude will be included in parentheses in the main body of the text: unless otherwise indicated, the reference is to the 1805 Prelude.

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in the way of such an adventure, like putting in for a grand prize in the lottery.³

Shortly afterwards, this taste for the ‘romantic’ was carried over into real life. Despite warnings as to their safety, two Englishmen insisted on travelling not only to Naples, but also beyond Naples (traditionally the ne plus ultra of the Grand Tour) into the even more dangerous province of Calabria. As Hazlitt puts it: They were told by the Commandant … [at Paestum], that this was running into the lion’s mouth, that there were no patrols to protect them farther, and that they were sure to be intercepted; but an Englishman’s will is his law—they went forward—and succeeded in getting themselves into the only remaining romantic situation.

To this amusing anecdote, Hazlitt provides a sardonic if not entirely reassuring conclusion. His fellow-travellers may well have found the ‘romantic situation’ they were looking for; unfortunately, however, it is not known ‘whether they have yet got out of it’.⁴ What impelled Hazlitt’s companions to take such risks? More strangely still, what led them to understand these risks, and the distresses and discomforts that would be attendant on travelling further, as being in themselves somehow ‘romantic’? For that surely is the implication here, and the strange quirk in contemporary sensibility that Hazlitt means to highlight by italicizing those two key phrases: ‘the only romantic thing going’, ‘the only remaining romantic situation’. The dangers and hardships that travel can throw in their way are not only not daunting to these two travellers; more curiously, and not a little paradoxically, they seem actually to be part of the pleasure and purpose of travel. Here and elsewhere in his narrative, Hazlitt depicts the English traveller—or at least, the best and properly ‘English’ sort of English traveller—as someone who courts adversity, who seeks out suffering and discomfort. His friend talks of ‘put[ting] one’s-self in the way of … an adventure’, but it is clearly misadventures that are sought as much as adventures. It is the prospect of ‘accidents’ that excites him, the thought of travel as a risky, arduous business, entailing scrapes and narrow escapes. Hazlitt’s fellow tourists journey beyond Naples in a similar spirit, whilst yet other travellers, Hazlitt reflects, ³ Hazlitt CW, x. 253. In this and the next quotation, the emphasis is Hazlitt’s. ⁴ Hazlitt CW, x. 255.

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have pushed still further afield in their efforts to encounter difficulties and disasters. He cites the example of ‘poor Bowdich’—the ill-fated African explorer Thomas Edward Bowdich—who ‘gave up the ghost in a second attempt to penetrate to the source of the Niger, the encouragement to persevere being in proportion to the impossibility of success!’⁵ Sharing a ‘propensity to contend with difficulty and to resist obstacles’, all such travellers undertake their journeys, Hazlitt suggests, because of, not in spite of, the pains, perils, and (in Bowdich’s case, at least) early graves that can be the consequence of travel. From one perspective, this seems a perverse rationale for travel: more of an ‘irrationale’, perhaps. From another perspective, of course, it is an attitude that most of us have some familiarity with. In our own day, as in the 1820s, there is undoubtedly a romantic glamour, possibly even a kudos or subtle cultural prestige, that attaches to the idea of taking risks and pains in one’s travelling. And accordingly, there are still travellers who not only accept such risks and pains when they occur, but go some way towards inflicting them on themselves (albeit to widely differing degrees of personal endangerment). Indeed, a readiness to countenance danger, distress, and discomfort has become one of the criteria by which many commentators distinguish a superior ‘traveller’ from a mere ‘tourist’, according to a subtly felt but pervasive cultural typology that came into being in Hazlitt’s lifetime and that still operates in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.⁶ Thus Lawrence Durrell declares: ‘Let the tourist be cushioned against misadventure; your true traveller will not feel that he has had his money’s worth unless he brings back a few scars.’⁷ Taking his cue from Durrell, Paul Fussell informs us that he has been both ‘traveller’ and ‘tourist’, but that it was ‘as a traveller, not a tourist, that I once watched my wallet and passport slither down a Turkish toilet at Bodrum, and it was the arm of a traveller that reached deep, ⁵ Hazlitt CW, x. 255. ⁶ ‘Why be a tourist when you can be a traveller?’ So ran the advertising campaign for Condé Nast Traveller magazine in the late 1990s. For a statement of the hierarchies that supposedly pertain amongst travellers, see Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (Oxford, 1980), 39–41. For a history of the evolution of these hierarchies, see James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to ‘Culture’, 1800–1918 (Oxford, 1993), 1–17; and for a critique of the supposed differences between ‘travellers’ and ‘tourists’, Jonathan Culler, ‘The Semiotics of Tourism’, in Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions (Oxford, 1988). ⁷ Quoted in Fussell, Abroad, 40.

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deep into that cloaca to retrieve them’.⁸ Shortly afterwards, whilst bemoaning the impossibility in modern times of real travel, Fussell offers us a revealing insight into what ‘real’ travel is supposed to entail. Planning a voyage in the South Pacific, Fussell anticipated ‘lolling at the rail unshaven in a dirty white linen suit as the crummy little ship approached Bora Bora or Fiji in a damp heat which made one wonder whether death by yaws or dengue fever might be an attractive alternative’.⁹ Unfortunately, however, it was ‘too late for such daydreams’. As passenger ships no longer ran to the South Pacific, this fantasy of extreme discomfort in a tropical climate was impossible to realize. This book is an enquiry into the curious logic, and the diverse cultural influences, underpinning Fussell’s ‘daydream’ of discomfort in the South Pacific, the yearning for a ‘romantic’ travel experience expressed by Hazlitt’s friend, and the seeking out of such ‘romantic situations’ by Hazlitt’s fellow-travellers in Italy. Its subject is the romantic tendency to construct travel as an enterprise that ought ideally (or properly) to involve travails and misadventures—a tendency in which the desire to ‘romanticize’ (a new verb in Hazlitt’s day, freshly coined by Coleridge) seems closely bound up with a valorization of the unpleasant, as opposed to pleasant, travel experience.¹⁰ The present study explores how this romantic understanding of travel came about, and the broader implications of this attitude. In particular, it asks why it is specifically the suffering traveller who is so esteemed by many romantically minded travellers, travel writers, and commentators on travel. From what sources and circumstances does this interest in misadventure spring, and what is it, precisely, that the sufferings incurred in the course of travel signify? What does it mean—both to the travellers themselves, and to contemporary and subsequent observers—to suffer, and to be seen to suffer, in one’s travelling? In addressing these questions, my concern is not only with the romanticizing of suffering in travel, but also with the Romanticism of suffering in travel. By this last phrase, I mean two slightly different things. Most straightforwardly, I am simply posting notice of ⁸ Fussell, Abroad, 40. ⁹ Ibid. 41. ¹⁰ The OED’s first citation for ‘romanticize’ is from a letter of Coleridge’s, dating from 1818.

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the historical scope of the present study. This volume will explore ideas and expectations pertaining to dangerous, awkward, or uncomfortable travel in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—that is to say, in what is customarily dubbed the Romantic period, which is here deemed to run roughly from 1780 to 1830. Although there had of course been British travellers who suffered conspicuously before this period, and there had likewise been an interest taken in the fate of unlucky travellers and in accounts of their ordeals, it is nevertheless in the Romantic era that a fascination with such misadventures becomes especially prominent in British culture. Diverse historical factors bring about this emerging taste for ‘romantic situations’ in travel, and in due course this study will address both a geopolitical context which saw Britain vigorously expanding its influence around the globe, and in the process dispatching many Britons to gruelling ordeals and grisly ends overseas; and also a domestic context which saw a boom in tourism, and correspondingly a growing desire amongst some recreational travellers to distinguish their activities from those of other tourists. But amongst these stimuli to the seeking out of ‘romantic situations’, one must also include the shift in sensibility and taste that retrospectively we label ‘Romanticism’—that is to say, the new aesthetic and cultural attitudes that we associate with figures such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. This is the secondary, more specialized sense in which this study addresses the Romanticism of misadventure and suffering in travel. Not surprisingly, perhaps, we find a taste for the ‘romantic situation’ in travel especially evident in the writings and careers of the so-called ‘Romantics’. At the same time, it is arguably the influence of these Romantic figures—most notably Wordsworth and Byron—that does much to inculcate in other travellers an ethos of misadventure, and to confer a cultural and existential prestige upon seemingly disagreeable and undesirable travel experiences. Accordingly, it is the attraction of misadventure to the Romantic writer and the Romantic traveller, and the meanings that these Romantic writers and travellers attach to misadventure, that this study especially seeks to explore. ‘Romanticism’ and ‘Romantic’, of course, are much contested terms, that admit of various understandings and applications. I should say at once that throughout this study I use both words

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in a somewhat narrow sense, that roughly corresponds with the Romantic canon as traditionally conceived, and that is intended to denote what is sometimes labelled ‘High Romanticism’ or (more suspiciously) the ‘Romantic ideology’. Construed thus, ‘Romanticism’ is not some presiding or immanent spirit embraced or articulated by everyone in the so-called Romantic era, but one specific—and highly partial—aesthetic and cultural agenda adopted by some parties in the period. Further to this, I follow Marlon Ross, Anne Mellor, and others in understanding ‘Romanticism’, in this more limited and more critical sense of the term, as very much a masculine agenda, a set of creative, interpretative, and representational strategies taken up for the most part by male writers and readers.¹¹ Accordingly, it is a set of attitudes, practices, and representational strategies adopted for the most part by male travellers that I am chiefly concerned with in this study. As a consequence, I shall generally use the masculine pronoun when referring to the ‘Romantic traveller’. My reasons for thus gendering this figure will be clarified shortly. It has often been remarked that the traditionally canonical Romantic poets exhibit a pronounced fascination with the idea and theme of travel.¹² Less frequently remarked is the extent to which this is often more specifically a fascination with travellers who are suffering, and with modes of travel that entail misadventures or what Hazlitt’s friend would call ‘romantic situations’. This interest in figures whom we might dub ‘misadventurers’ (or alternatively, in what we might term the rhetorical figure or topos of misadventure) manifests itself in diverse ways. On the one hand, there is the contemplation, and/or invention, of other travellers who are undergoing some sort of hardship or distress: Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, Wordsworth’s footsore vagrants, and so forth. On the other hand, there is a tendency ¹¹ See Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (Oxford, 1989); Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington, Ind., 1988). ¹² For different elucidations of the travel theme in Romantic poetry, see M. H. Abrams’s reading of Romanticism according to the motif of the ‘circuitous journey’ in Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, 1973); Harold Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest Romance’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism (New York, 1970); Bernard Blackstone, The Lost Travellers: A Romantic Theme With Variations (London, 1962); and W. H. Auden, The Enchafed Flood: Or, The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (London, 1985).

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in much Romantic poetry to suggest that the poet himself is, or has been, some sort of suffering traveller. Romantic poetry is frequently presented as in some way arising from and recording the poet’s own journey: consider, in this regard, Wordsworth’s pronouncement in The Prelude, in the second epigraph to this section. Often, moreover, the authority and authenticity of that poetry is predicated on the claim that the travelling that produced it was arduous, even dangerous. Witness Shelley’s melodramatic assertion of his fitness to write The Revolt of Islam. He is equipped to take on such an epic theme, he suggests, because ‘dangers which sport upon the brink of precipices have been my playmate; I have trodden the glaciers of the Alps and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc’.¹³ The credibility or otherwise of such a claim need not concern us, for the time being at least. For now, it is the aspiration evident here that matters most: the desire to be, or to be regarded as, a traveller who has been through some sort of ‘romantic situation’—in this case, not a kidnapping/captivity scenario of the sort described by Hazlitt, but rather a perilous and sublime mountain ascent. And in due course, if at a terrible cost, Shelley does indeed become fixed in the popular imagination as a traveller who ran great risks. In 1822, sailing his boat Ariel along the coast of Italy, Shelley found himself plunged for real into another highly romantic predicament. A storm blew up at sea, and the Ariel foundered—but from this real-life romantic situation, neither Shelley nor his two crew mates emerged alive. Shelley’s death by shipwreck, and Byron’s death in Greece in 1824, give us iconic images of the Romantic traveller. Arguably, both fatalities seal an image, and a persona, that the traveller was already assiduously cultivating. Only a year before his death, for example, Shelley had depicted himself in Adonais as one whose ‘spirit’s bark is driven, | Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng | Whose sails were never to the tempest given’.¹⁴ The events of 1822, it seems, only literalized a trope, a scenario, and possibly even a death, by which Shelley was already much possessed. This is not to say that either Shelley or Byron actually planned to die in the course of their travelling escapades. But both were clearly committed to an ideal of travel, and of themselves as travellers, that made their deaths more than merely a coincidental or ironic ¹³ SCPW ii. 103.

¹⁴ Adonais, ll. 488–90, in SPP.

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outcome of their journeys. (It is worth noting here that Leigh Hunt’s comment in the first epigraph above, about the ‘superfluous peril’ sought by British travellers, is a reference to voyages he made with Shelley and Byron in Italy.) In both cases, I would suggest, we are dealing with a distinctively Romantic self-fashioning that takes place both in words and in action. Similar impulses underwrite not only the written accounts of travel, and the prospective and retrospective imaginings of the poet as traveller, but also the actual travelling undertaken by the poet. As Judith Adler has emphasized, much travel can be usefully understood as a ‘performed art’.¹⁵ It has an ‘aesthetic’ dimension in so far as it constitutes a deliberate attempt to shape both the experience and the self so that they fit a desired paradigm or template—typically a template according to which the traveller will acquire (or demonstrate) some attribute he or she aspires to, be it taste, courage, spiritual enlightenment, wealth, or the like. Thus we travel not only for the travel experience per se, but also for the image we are accordingly able to present of ourselves as travellers. Obviously, this is not the case for every traveller. For refugees displaced by war or famine, or for any traveller compelled through exigency to travel, more pressing concerns will override any preoccupation with the image they present. But where travel is undertaken willingly (and certainly where travel is undertaken recreationally, as a leisure activity), it will frequently have a performative or rhetorical aspect, our journey becoming the means by which we seek to cut a distinctive figure, and the medium in which we work to fashion some ideal version of ourselves. It is the premiss of this study, then, that one of the distinctive self-fashionings sought by the Romantic traveller, in both words and action, is that of the misadventurer. Alternatively, we might regard Romantic aspirations of this sort as a mode of self-dramatization—a more useful term, perhaps, in so far as it keeps more clearly in view the notion of a template or paradigm to which the traveller, or travel writer, is shaping his or her experience. Dramatization of any sort presumably needs some sort of script, however loose and improvisatory (and as we shall see, the scripts by which Romantic travel typically proceeds place great emphasis on improvisatory resourcefulness). And to ¹⁵ See Judith Adler, ‘Travel as Performed Art’, The American Journal of Sociology, 94: 6 (May 1989).

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see this scripting process at work in Romantic travel, and also the sort of script that underwrites one key variant of Romantic travel, we can turn to a fascinating account of the Shelley circle in the early months of 1822. From one member of the group, Edward John Trelawny, we get a glimpse of the excitement and anticipation generated as construction began on the Ariel, and on Byron’s yacht the Bolivar. Awaiting the completion of their boats, the friends began to plan the voyages they would undertake in them. As Trelawny was later to recall: With a real chart of the Mediterranean spread out before them, and with faces as grave and anxious as those of Columbus and his companions, they held councils as to the islands to be visited, coasts explored, courses steered, the amount of armament, stores, water and provisions which would be necessary. Then we would narrate instances of the daring of the old navigators, as when Diaz discovered the Cape of Good Hope in 1446, with two vessels each of fifty tons burthen; or when Drake went round the world, one of his craft being only thirty tons; and of the extraordinary runs and enterprises accomplished in open boats of equal or less tonnage than the one we were building; from the earliest times to those of Commodore Bligh.¹⁶

Here the self-dramatizing impulse underpinning the voyages of Shelley, Byron, and their friends is highly evident. Clearly, what these would-be sailors have in mind is not just messing about on the water. It is the example of ‘old navigators’ like Columbus, Diaz, and Drake that these sailors aim to emulate, and from more recent maritime history William Bligh and his companions, who in 1789, in the aftermath of the Bounty mutiny, survived a harrowing open boat voyage of some 3,600 miles. These, then, are the roles that these travellers wish to enact, whilst those constantly repeated ‘instances of the daring of the old navigators … and of the extraordinary runs and enterprises accomplished in open boats … from the earliest times to those of Commodore Bligh’ constitute the travel scripts that they yearn to play out for real. Or alternatively, we may consider the latter the source material from which this particular Romantic travel script is fashioned. Either way, the script is one which invests the activities of Shelley and his friends with a considerable seriousness of purpose, as evinced by those ‘grave and anxious’ faces. And whilst there is clearly an element of fantasy and role-play, it is a fantasy that will find ¹⁶ Edward John Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, ed. David Wright (Harmondsworth, 1973), 135.

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some sort of realization as the group put their plans into action and undertake actual voyages—with fatal consequences, as we have seen, for Shelley himself. Rehearsing repeatedly a corpus of prior voyage narratives, the members of the Shelley circle were in a sense training themselves to read their travel experiences, and their journeys, in a very specific fashion. They were familiarizing themselves with certain stock scenarios (or as I shall often refer to them, topoi) in these narratives, with the various outcomes and results of these scenarios, and with the diverse gains and losses, victories and defeats, that might follow. And they were training themselves to comprehend their own travel experiences in terms of these scenarios, not only prospectively and retrospectively but also in the actual course of their travelling. This is not to say that those conventions, and the travel script assembled from them by Shelley and his friends, would have determined their real travel experiences absolutely. As we all know, the actualities of travel may well invalidate the script that one anticipated acting out. We may set out as adventurers, but subsequently have to acknowledge en route that we are no more than tourists. In all but the most extreme situations, however, we retain a sense of playing some sort of role: we simply switch between the different personae available to us. (Even in the case of the most extreme situations, moreover, some degree of self-dramatization will probably come into play the minute we are rescued from exigency, finding ourselves in a position to reconstruct and recount what happened to us.) Thus some sort of script, born of an array of prior expectations and associations pertaining to the type of travel we are engaged in, will always be at work in our travelling, shaping our experience significantly if not absolutely, and forming an important part of how we perceive ourselves and portray ourselves to others. Such scripts necessarily look back to earlier accounts of travel, and to diverse stories, heard and read, that touch upon the journey the traveller has in mind. If before and during our travelling we inevitably have expectations, aspirations, and anxieties attendant on the travel experience—relating to the places we will visit, the routes and terrains we will traverse, the modes of transport we adopt, the situations we expect to arise, and even what we understand by the very term ‘travel’—these expectations must have a source. It was ‘Otway,

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Radcliffe, Schiller, Shakspeare’s art’, for example, that established the image of Venice for Byron before he even arrived at the city.¹⁷ It was probably also the influence of one of these figures, Ann Radcliffe, that led Hazlitt’s friend to label kidnapping by banditti a ‘romantic situation’. Such kidnappings—and more specifically the scenario of being kidnapped in a Catholic, southern European country such as Italy—occur frequently in Radcliffe’s fiction, in works like The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). As the former title indicates, these were hugely popular fictions that the author and her readers alike tended to class as ‘romances’ rather than as realist novels, containing as they did not only the suggestion of supernatural forces but also extreme situations and abrupt peripeties or reversals of fortune. It is to Radcliffe’s fiction, accordingly, that one might turn to identify the script that a traveller might hope to play out in connection with a distressing event like kidnapping, and thereby to understand the curious glamour or romance seeming to attach to this particular misadventure. This is how this study will proceed. My intention is to explore the contemporary expectations that pertained to a range of misadventures or ‘romantic situations’ that seem to have been especially attractive to the Romantic traveller, and that he accordingly either sought out in his actual travelling, or at least laid claim to in his self-fashioning qua traveller. To do this, I shall survey some of the source material that effectively scripted these ‘romantic situations’ for the Romantic traveller and his audience: those prior texts and influences that shaped the expectations, and aspirations, surrounding these misadventurous scenarios. Of course, it is ultimately a vast matrix of prior texts, anecdotes, and images that thus underpins and informs Romantic ideas, practices, and representations of travel. In acknowledging Radcliffe’s influence, for example, one has also to acknowledge the influence of all those larger literary genres that are successfully distilled in Radcliffe’s fiction: most notably, romance, sentimentalism, and Gothic. The first of these, romance, is arguably the genre that does most to underwrite the assumption, or aspiration, that apparent disasters can resolve ¹⁷ Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 4, ll. 158–9, in BCPW ii. Hereafter all canto and line numbers for Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage will be included in parentheses in the main body of the text.

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themselves into triumphs, and that defeats and distresses can be the route to profound discoveries and rewards (the revelation of our proper identity, the restoration of lost fortunes, and so forth). And it is a genre that the Romantic traveller and writer absorbed not only through Radcliffe, but also through Shakespeare, Spenser, and a great many other authors besides, stretching back into medieval and classical literature. The legacy of romance fuses in Radcliffe’s fiction, moreover, with the newer mode of sentimental literature derived from Richardson and Sterne, with its emphasis on heroes and heroines who are placed in positions of distress and vulnerability; and also with the Gothic, with its incorporation of still more overt or extravagant elements of danger, abjection, and suffering. Thus the influence of romance, sentimentalism, and Gothic all have some part to play in the Romantic interest in travel as misadventure. Other key cultural developments of the eighteenth century must also be taken into account. The growing taste for sublime landscapes was another factor in the perilous predicaments Romantic travellers sometimes found themselves in, as was the primitivism inspired by Rousseau. It was in emulation of an episode in Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), for example, that Shelley and Byron undertook in 1816 a voyage across Lake Geneva, from Meillerie to St Gingo (a voyage that, not untypically for these two travellers, almost ended in disaster).¹⁸ If it was in this way Rousseau’s influence that helped to give sailing a newfound vogue and cachet in the Romantic period, so too was it Rousseau who helped to bring into fashion another mode of travel highly important to Romantic travellers—namely, walking. His Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782) did much to stimulate the ‘pedestrianism’ that became popular, amongst a particular subset of British travellers, in the 1780s and 1790s. And as we shall see in due course, part of the attraction of both walking and sailing, for some contemporary travellers at least, was that both modes of travel might involve conspicuous elements of discomfort and danger. This brisk survey of some of the sources scripting Romantic travel, and specifically a Romantic taste for misadventure, is intended partly to sketch the general contours of that hinterland of material that informs the Romantic imagination on these matters, and partly to signal the impossibility of mapping this terrain in comprehensive ¹⁸ See BLJ vi. 126.

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detail. I should stress from the outset, therefore, that I do not propose to explore in detail all the antecedent texts that one might legitimately consider as scripting Romantic misadventure.¹⁹ Instead, I shall address the line of influence suggested by Trelawny’s reminiscence of the Shelley circle, and focus principally on the ways in which this Romantic style or taste in travel was fostered specifically by the travel writing that was known to them—by texts that related, or at least purported to relate, facts rather than fictions, the actual experiences of real, historical travellers. This was the genre known to Romantic-era readers as Voyages and Travels, a huge and highly heterogeneous branch of the eighteenth-century literary scene, and a form that had in this period a popularity that is hard now to appreciate.²⁰ The age witnessed a dramatic upsurge in the number of accounts of tours being published and consumed; an upsurge equally in the number of exploration narratives appearing in the wake of Captain Cook’s seminal expeditions; and lastly, but by no means least, the appearance of many multi-volume anthologies and collections that made widely available accounts of voyages and travels from earlier eras.²¹ Among the many avid readers of these publications in the Romantic era were most of those figures whom we now label Romantic. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and De Quincey all evince a great enthusiasm for Voyages and Travels; it was a genre that often formed an important part of their childhood reading (along with fictions that drew significantly from contemporary travel writing, such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe), and in most cases it was a genre that continued to fascinate in adulthood.²² ¹⁹ For a classic and exhaustive account of all the sources that inform the thinking of just one Romantic writer, Coleridge, on these issues, see John Livingstone Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, 2nd edn. (London, 1951). ²⁰ See Katherine Turner, British Travel Writers in Europe 1750–1800: Authorship, Gender and National Identity (Aldershot, 2001), 1; Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840: ‘From An Antique Land’ (Oxford, 2002), 11–13; G. R. Crone and R. A. Skelton, ‘English Collections of Voyages and Travels, 1625–1846’, in Edward Lynam (ed.), Richard Hakluyt and His Successors (London, 1946), 78. ²¹ For a (partial) survey of the many collections of Voyages and Travels material, see Crone and Skelton, ‘English Collections of Voyages and Travels’. ²² For travel writing as part of Romantic childhood reading, see, inter alia, Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford, 1989), 28; Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: The Early Years (Oxford, 1957), 9; Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A

14

Introduction

Thus it is notions pertaining to misadventure that the Romantics absorbed through the Voyages and Travels genre, through the travel writing of their own and earlier eras, that I intend to examine here. Where appropriate, reference will be made to the fictional and more obviously ‘literary’ stimuli to the Romantic taste for misadventure, as outlined above. But I emphasize factual over fictional reference points for the Romantic travel script for two main reasons. One is relatively pragmatic; it delimits the field of enquiry, and as we shall see brings to light material that is comparatively little known today, even to scholars of the Romantic period. Yet I am also concerned to stress the facticity, as it were, of these influences on the Romantic imagination. Most of the narratives under consideration here purport to represent real experience. They show what it was actually like to undergo journeys that were uncomfortable, dangerous, and, in the most extreme cases, disastrous. And as they deal with actual sufferings, the insights they seem to offer—touching, as we shall see, on issues as diverse as the potentialities, both remarkable and dreadful, of the self, the organization of human society, and the nature of the cosmos—are vouchsafed with a degree of existential authority and authenticity. To Romantic readers, writers, and travellers, these texts accordingly offered more than merely fantastical literary imaginings: they conveyed a knowledge, and sometimes a curious glamour, that might be realizable in actuality. To turn to Voyages and Travels with an eye attuned to this spectrum of interests—the scenes and images of suffering in travel that it supplied to the Romantic imagination, and the models it offered of conspicuously suffering travellers—is to discover that this hugely heterogeneous genre does indeed contain a great many highly powerful accounts of the ordeals endured by travellers. Furthermore, it is also to discover that there are many travel narratives, if not whole subgenres of Romantic-era travel writing, in which the travails of travellers are clearly a prominent, and in some cases even the pre-eminent, point of interest for both writers and readers. In some cases, this is simply a matter of voyeuristic sensationalism: it was in this spirit, for example, that the Terrific Register (a decidedly low-brow, trashy magazine of the 1820s) offered numerous pieces Biography, 3 vols. (London, 1957), i. 38; BCMP 220; Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (London, 1963), 25.

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culled from contemporary travel writing, that ran under titles such as ‘The Skeleton of the Wreck’ and ‘Sucked to Death by a Bear’ (the latter from an account of a journey to India’s North-West Frontier).²³ At the same time, however, a desire to read about the suffering of travellers was also born, in the Romantic period, from far more respectable motives, and from a spectrum of utilitarian, sentimental, and even theological and philosophical concerns. Arising from these concerns, as we shall see, were recognizable modes of writing about suffering in travel, stylistic and interpretative conventions that were evidently shared by writers and readers alike. Within the crosssection of Voyages and Travels that one might dub the literature of misadventure, there are recurrent topoi, recurrent narrative patterns, and recurrent strategies of explication—and as many Romantic travellers were avid readers of (and borrowers from) this material, we may assume that their understanding of what it meant to suffer in travel derived to some extent from these sources, and was shaped by these conventions. Further to this, the present study will suggest that what is characteristically ‘Romantic’ in this period, at least as regards travel, is a replaying of these conventions and topoi in the construction of one’s own travel persona, and in the planning and prosecution of one’s own journeys. The Romantic traveller is defined to a great extent by his desire to shape both his image qua traveller, and to some extent also his actual travelling, according to paradigms drawn from the misadventurous strands of contemporary travel writing. I suggested earlier that there were whole subgenres of the larger Voyages and Travels expressly organized around the sufferings of travellers. Two such subgenres are the shipwreck narrative (a loose term describing any sort of account of horrendous suffering at sea, or in the aftermath of maritime disaster) and the captivity narrative (which told of the traveller’s ordeal at the hands of some barbarous tribe or alien power). Not infrequently, as we shall see over the course of this study, it is as the protagonist in a narrative of shipwreck or captivity that the Romantic traveller wishes to present himself—sometimes metaphorically, as in Shelley’s somewhat grandiloquent account of himself in Adonais, and sometimes more literally, as when Hazlitt’s ²³ The Terrific Register, 2 vols. (London, 1825), i. 324.

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Introduction

fellow-travellers push beyond Naples in the full knowledge that they are likely to get kidnapped. Alongside shipwreck and captivity narratives, there were other branches of Romantic-era travel writing that threw up striking images of suffering travellers, and that consequently feature prominently in the scripting of the Romantic travel persona. The most significant of these is perhaps the exploration narrative, a subgenre of Voyages and Travels not intrinsically dedicated to the figure of the suffering traveller in the way that shipwreck and captivity narratives were, but which nevertheless produced a great many accounts of harrowing ordeals. The Romantic fascination with these branches of the Voyages and Travels genre, and with such role-models for their own travel, derives partly from a positive attraction to these figures, and partly from a reaction against, and a rejection of, other contemporary paradigms of travel. This is a topic that will be addressed more fully in Chapter 1, but one key aspect of it is worth broaching here, since it clarifies why I routinely gender the ‘Romantic traveller’ as male in this period. As noted earlier, scholars such as Marlon Ross and Anne Mellor have taught us to see ‘Romanticism’ as being, in part at least, a set of aesthetic strategies designed to make true literary achievement the preserve of the dedicated male poet. They suggest, moreover, that this is an agenda subtly bound up with anxieties about masculine authority and authorship arising from the growing number of female writers in the period. Something analogous to this masculinization of literary endeavour, I shall suggest, takes place in the sphere of travel and travel writing, and underpins the Romantic taste for misadventure and suffering in travel. In the sphere of travel as more generally in the sphere of letters, the Romantic takes up his style of travel, with its conspicuous elements of danger and discomfort, in part because of a challenge from women, who were increasingly able to take up the safer modes of contemporary travel (the picturesque tour and so forth) and who were also increasingly prominent in the literary market-place as writers of tour narratives.²⁴ The misadventurous, ‘romantic’ situations that the Romantic traveller seeks out are culturally impossible for most women at this date ²⁴ See Turner, British Travel Writers, 127–80; and also Elizabeth Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 (Cambridge, 1995).

Introduction

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(although in time it will become acceptable for women to seek them out, and to present themselves as more reckless travellers). And so, although the desire to rough it and risk it is seldom explicated by the travellers themselves in quite these terms, it seems plausible to see this desire as being in some way connected with a need to assert and demonstrate masculinity in the sphere of travel. It should be apparent already that the Romantic taste for misadventure and suffering in travel flows from multiple sources, and has a complex logic. Before addressing further the diverse reasons why Romantic writers and travellers are drawn to the figure of the suffering traveller, however, a few qualifications and clarifications are perhaps in order. Firstly, it may seem strange and counter-intuitive to talk of the ‘scripting’ of Romantic travel when there is clearly a commitment to accidents and misadventures in much Romantic travel. The rest of this introduction will accordingly offer a more nuanced account of the ways in which travel scripts, and an element of self-dramatization, are implicit even in journeys that seem to proceed haphazardly. In addition, I should stress from the outset that I am not especially concerned here to judge the various Romantic travellers that I shall discuss. By this I mean that I shall not necessarily pass comment on how genuinely arduous and dangerous a Romantic traveller’s journey was, and how justified he is in talking himself up as a misadventurer of some sort. In other contexts, these are highly pertinent questions. Here, however, what interests me are the aspirations, and the assumptions, common both to genuinely indefatigable travellers, and to those who merely style themselves as such—or in the terminology adopted here, those travel scripts, and beyond those scripts the larger generic influences, that underpin the self-dramatizations of both genuine and soi-disant misadventurers. I should also add that whilst I see the Romantic espousal of misadventure as crucially bound up with issues of social and cultural distinction, I do not wish to suggest that it is just a form of one-upmanship and self-promotion. There can be a tendency among more sociologically inclined analysts of travel and travel writing to see all the pronouncements and activities of Romantic travellers (or their modern descendent, the self-styled ‘traveller’) as subtle expressions of snobbery and of class or gender prejudice. There is obviously much truth to this view, yet it is also equally obviously the case that the particular style or mode of travel one commits oneself

18

Introduction

to can affect significantly the sort of travel experience one has, and the sort of benefit or value that one ultimately derives from one’s travelling. Some acts of travel rest and restore us; others challenge or extend us, demanding and enabling a deeper knowledge of place, of foreign culture, possibly even of ourselves. Some of the Romantic travel I shall describe in this study was indeed productive of such deeper, more compelling insights, even as it was also underwritten by a desire to distinguish the Romantic traveller from supposedly less worthy travellers. Finally, a last point about my use of the terms ‘Romanticism’ and the ‘Romantics’. As noted already, I give these terms, for the purposes of this study, a fairly narrow interpretation, applying them chiefly to a group of traditionally canonical male poets. However, I do not intend to suggest that ‘Romanticism’ even in this narrower definition was a wholly coherent, unified outlook or ideology. Among the six canonical ‘Romantics’ there were significant political, aesthetic, and temperamental differences, and the final two chapters of this study will accordingly be devoted to teasing out the very different agenda and cultural meanings pertaining to Wordsworth and Byron’s dramatization of themselves as suffering travellers—Wordsworth and Byron being chosen for close consideration because they are especially influential in terms of establishing new personae, and new patterns of travel, for subsequent generations of British travellers.²⁵ Yet even as the two men inflect the figure of the suffering traveller in different ways, and to different ends, they share an interest in playing themselves this way, in cutting this sort of figure qua traveller. In so doing, they look as travellers/writers to play a part that derives from very similar sources and shares many characteristics. A taste for what Hazlitt terms ‘romantic situations’ in travel does seem to unite many of those figures we today classify as ‘Romantic’, and was probably one of the few ways in which they would have thought of themselves as being ‘romantic’. This was otherwise a collective identity that none of them would have recognized; as is often pointed out, the general designation ‘Romantic’ was only applied retrospectively to writers such as Wordsworth and Byron by critics from the 1830s onwards. It is accordingly to cast, however obliquely, a new light on the very ²⁵ For the influence of Wordsworth and Byron on the attitudes and itineraries of Victorian travellers, see Buzard, The Beaten Track, 19–30, and 113–30.

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nature of so-called ‘Romanticism’, as well as on the (ir)rationale for suffering in travel, that this study is undertaken.

RO M A N T I C T RAV E L : S E L F- D RA M AT I ZAT I ON A N D T H E R H E TO R I C O F AU T H E N T I C I T Y I purpose within a Month to put my knapsack at my back and make a pedestrian tour through the North of England and part of Scotland—to make a sort of Prologue to the Life I intend to pursue—that is to write, to study and to see all Europe at the lowest expence. I will clamber through the Clouds and exist. John Keats²⁶

At first glance, it might seem strange to consider Romantic travel a mode of self-dramatization, and to suggest that it is informed in key regards by scripts or prior narratives. Recalling the anecdote with which I began this study, isn’t William Hazlitt’s friend saying he wants to have accidents as he travels, and to face random, unforeseen events? The very point of an accident is surely that it is unscripted—an unplanned, unexpected occurrence that brings in its wake further unforeseen circumstances, until the journey becomes, as Hazlitt’s friend also suggests, something of a lottery. In a similar spirit, Coleridge in 1802 devised for himself a new (and dangerous) method of walking in mountains. In his descent from a summit, Coleridge declared, he would no longer look for a ‘track or other symptom of safety’ to get him down the mountain; rather, he would set off wherever it was ‘first possible to descend’, without knowing or caring whether this was a route that led anywhere. Once committed to this route, he would then ‘rely upon fortune for how far down this possibility [of descent] will continue’—even if trusting to his luck should get him into a highly perilous predicament.²⁷ Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Coleridge did end up in some very tricky situations as a consequence of his new walking strategy. Indeed, immediately after outlining this novel approach in a letter, Coleridge goes on to relate, ²⁶ K Letters, i. 264.

²⁷ See C Letters, ii. 841–3.

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not a little proudly, how following this plan in a descent of Scafell Pike almost killed him. This emphasis on chance, and on travel experiences that are supposedly unscripted, seemingly makes Romantic travel the antithesis of a more cautious mode of travel that for convenience we can label ‘touristic’, or more simply, ‘tourism’ (although these are terms that in due course will have to be refined, as regards both their usage in the Romantic era and their usage today). This is travel that is perceived to be excessively planned out in advance, excessively pre-scripted and so unduly narrow and prescriptive in terms of the experiences and insights it allows the traveller. Such, implicitly, is the complaint or accusation levelled by Byron against many of the other British travellers he encountered in Italy, when in 1823 he lambastes his compatriots as a second-hand Society of half-pay economists—no pay dandies—separated wives, unseparated not wives—the Starke—or Invalid—or Forsyth—or Eustace or Hobhouse travellers—as they are called according to their Manual.²⁸

In the second half of this attack, Byron alludes to a range of travel narratives and tour guides aimed at the British traveller: respectively, Mariana Starke’s Letters from Italy (1800) and Travels on the Continent (1820), Henry Mathews’s The Diary of an Invalid; being the Journal of a Tour in Pursuit of Health (1820), Joseph Forsyth’s Remarks on Antiquities, Art and Letters during an Excursion in Italy (1813), John Eustace’s A Classical Tour through Italy (1813), and John Cam Hobhouse’s Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold (1818). Some of these publications will be discussed in more detail over the course of this study: for now, however, it is the implied relationship between text and traveller that concerns me. Each of these texts, according to Byron, constitutes a ‘Manual’ for certain sorts of traveller. By adopting this term Byron clearly means to ridicule these travellers: implicitly, this is no way to travel. A manual suggests the precise following of a set of instructions: it conjures up a travel experience that is well mapped out before it even happens, and a timid traveller who refuses to think or feel for him or herself. An encounter with a real place and real people—in this case, Italy and ²⁸ BCMP 191.

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the Italians—is thus excessively mediated by a text, as the ‘Manual’ shapes the itinerary, the agenda, and possibly even the responses of the tourist. As a consequence, the ‘real’ or ‘proper’ point of travel is seemingly missed. The traveller acquires neither a genuine knowledge of the people and places being visited (since the manual has to some extent predetermined what the traveller is to discover, and what he or she is to think and feel about these discoveries) nor a genuine knowledge of him or herself (since the traveller has been insulated from real encounters with the foreign and unfamiliar, from real surprises and real shocks). Byron does not spell all this out explicitly, but in a sense he does not need to; as we shall see, the preceding litany of complaints against the tourist and his or her activities was as familiar in Byron’s day as it is in our own, and the mere reference to a ‘Manual’ is enough to activate them. Inherent in such complaints, both then and now, is a corresponding set of assumptions as to what travel should properly be, and as to how it should ideally proceed. According to this way of thinking, it is—or ought to be—the point of travel that it is in some fundamental regard unstructured and unprogrammatic, an activity in which anything and everything can happen. Jettisoning any ‘Manual’, conducting journeys that seem to follow no prior script, the traveller must confront and apprehend what is foreign and unfamiliar directly, without prior textual mediation. Only in this way, it is sometimes suggested, does travel have true existential and epistemological validity. That is to say—adopting the curious rhetoric of authenticity that is often involved in discussions about travel—real travel should introduce the traveller to ‘real life’ and ‘real experience’. And from such real experiences, there derives the sort of knowledge that cannot be obtained by travelling within the closed circuit of the touristic journey, in which the tourist merely discovers, or rather confirms, exactly what the ‘Manual’ advised him or her to discover. This brief sketch, necessarily somewhat impressionistic, hopefully gives the gist of a mentalité, and a value system as regards travel and travellers, that still has considerable currency today. Superior travellers are defined in contradistinction to less worthy tourists, and an important part of the distinction being drawn here rests on the idea that the traveller exposes him or herself to chance and

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Introduction

to unscripted eventualities. Indeed, those nebulous but indubitably potent expressions ‘real travel’ and ‘real life’ often seem to gesture towards an ideal of travel, and of life, in which all predetermining influences have been thrown off. ‘Real travel’ should be the expression of a free spirit, one that in slipping free of conventionality and the apparatus of the tourist industry escapes also an antecedent textuality and a corresponding anxiety of influence. Travel construed thus is somehow a route to, or a mode of, ‘pure’ existence—life in some sort of true or quintessential form, undiluted, unfalsified, unconstrained. It is in this spirit that Keats issues the mini-manifesto that stands as the epigraph to this section. Keats is writing in 1818, just prior to beginning a walking tour of the Lake District and Scotland. On the eve of what he regards as the first significant travelling he has ever undertaken, he conceptualizes his imminent journey as far more than just an exciting jaunt. It is evidently an event of great seriousness and moment, an undertaking that should prove the starting-point and ‘Prologue’ to a whole new life. Keats will ‘clamber through the Clouds and exist’. The final verb takes on an absolute quality, proclaiming a future state that will somehow be pure, authentic being—and there is a fruitful ambiguity in the passage which allows us to understand this authentic, original, and creative selfhood (Keats also sees his trip as the Prologue to a life of writing, we should note) as being achieved both in the process of travel, and as a consequence of travel. Keats will exist as he literally clambers through clouds on his journey; and that journey as a whole will also allow him to climb above metaphorical clouds, stepping into a new life that is born from his travel experiences. There are ways of thinking about travel, then, in which much is invested in the idea that travel properly or ideally follows no scripts, and that it enjoins on the traveller a constantly improvisatory, spontaneous mode of existence. This is an attitude that the Romantics do much to foster, and in a sense one could think of it as the official story about Romantic travel, the version of events that many Romantic writers no doubt told themselves both as they were travelling and as they were recounting their travels. Yet there is clearly something disingenuous, if not (self-)deceptive, about such pronouncements and such travelling agendas. Even as he rejects any and all travel manuals, the Romantic traveller is making in diverse ways subtle idealizations, projections, and anticipations, all of which work to some degree to

Introduction

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script in advance the journey and the experience. There is in the first place the fact that Hazlitt’s fellow-travellers, and Coleridge on Scafell Pike, so actively seek out unexpected events and sudden reversals of fortune. We might say, somewhat paradoxically, that the Romantic traveller scripts his travel so that it will throw up unscripted events and experiences. And to thus plan for the unplanned, to engineer situations which will be out of the traveller’s control, bespeaks a degree of idealization both as regards the transformative and educative potential of these situations, and as regards the traveller’s response to them. There is generally an understanding, or an aspiration, that the self will come through these twists of fate, and that in coming through adversity it will be enriched and enlarged, rendered more heroic and authoritative. But how does this come to be? How is it that Keats in 1818, for example, sets off on a journey already assured that it is going to constitute a crucial rite of passage? Clearly some sort of model or template exists in his mind—and in the minds also of Coleridge, and of Hazlitt’s fellow-travellers—for what travel ought to be, for the sort of events it ought to involve, and for the changes that can be worked in the self through opening oneself to such experiences. Notwithstanding his claims to reject all scripts and manuals, then, the Romantic traveller’s journey must to some degree be informed by prior associations, images, and expectations pertaining to travel. And the extent to which the Romantic traveller is simply following a different sort of script from the so-called tourist, rather than no script at all, becomes further apparent when one registers that it is a very particular spectrum of travel experiences that is usually held up as being ‘real life’ and ‘real travel’. It is, for example, seldom moments of banality and boredom that are anticipated eagerly, or trumpeted retrospectively, by the Romantic traveller and his descendants. Such experiences are as much part of life, and of travel, as anything else—yet they are not usually what travellers of a Romantic sensibility have in mind when they talk of ‘real life’. Travel may be supposed to throw up random, unexpected events, but there is usually the expectation of extremity in these events, and of circumstances that will induce agonies and ecstasies in the traveller, as opposed to slight disappointment or mild satisfaction. It is especially the agonies of the traveller that seem to provide the insight into real life, and that equip him to proclaim himself a real traveller. In this regard, witness

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Byron’s self-image in a letter of 1814. Reporting to Tom Moore that Walter Scott has supposedly had a rough time in a boat crossing to the Orkney Islands, Byron is moved to exclaim: Lord, Lord, if these home-keeping minstrels had crossed your Atlantic or my Mediterranean, and tasted a little open boating in a white squall—or a gale in ‘the Gut’—or the ‘Bay of Biscay’, with no gale at all—how it would enliven them and introduce them to a few of the sensations!²⁹

The passage casts Scott as a mere pleasure-boater, and Byron and Moore as genuine travellers, the real voyagers who have a proper insight into what the sea is all about. The criterion by which Byron asserts his greater authority and authenticity in this regard, and so his superiority over mere ‘home-keeping minstrels’, is not just the extent of his travelling, but also the greater danger and discomfort attendant on his travel experiences. It is being caught in a ‘white squall’ and a ‘gale’ that Byron wishes to advertise, and the gut-wrenching, possibly life-threatening, experience of sailing in high seas. Here and elsewhere in the activities of Romantic travellers, and in their pronouncements, one senses that the bad or difficult experience somehow has more worth, and greater existential validity, than the pleasant or easy experience. Accordingly the ‘unscripted’ events that ideally occur in the course of Romantic travel—the accidents that are paradoxically part of the characteristically Romantic travel script—are those that tip the traveller into dramatically adverse circumstances, that inflict pain, danger, and discomfort upon him. The logic here is not hard to gauge. These are the events that really challenge the traveller, that require him to be physically and mentally resourceful, to reveal his true self or alternatively, to train and transform that self. This spectrum of experiences also argues more forcefully the traveller’s claim to be travelling as a free spirit, eschewing manuals and other predetermining influences. They can be more easily labelled as ‘authentic’ in so far as they seem unwilled. Who would choose such experiences? Seemingly, we have not made these things happen: they have been inflicted upon us. Supposedly unadulterated by intentionality, desire or self-interest, they can be more easily celebrated as real experience. ²⁹ BLJ iv. 152.

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Misadventures, then, can seem one criterion by which we measure the real, the authentic. Philosophically speaking, there is much that is problematic in this attitude. Can any experience be intrinsically more authentic than another? This might be true when one thinks of experiences in a transitive sense, as being experiences of a foreign people or place, but many travellers and commentators in this Romantic tradition often seem to talk of ‘experience’ and ‘existence’ in some absolute, intransitive sense, understanding them as it were in the abstract, without reference to any particular object. What validity there is to such intransitive usages of these terms is debatable. There is a tautology inherent in notions of real life and real experience: all experiences are experiences, willed or unwilled, comfortable or uncomfortable. Thought of in this way, the Romantic traveller is clearly offering a particular construction of real life, a selection and valorization of some experiences over others. And when one considers more closely many Romantic pronouncements on travel—and equally, as we shall see, many Romantic practices of travel—it is also clear that there is often a rhetorical function being served by the Romantic versions of real life and real travel. Frequently, there is a strategy of distinction at work in many such pronouncements and practices, a subtle or not-so-subtle intention to mark one’s difference to, and superiority over, other travellers. Thus Byron emphasizes dangers and discomforts to elevate himself above Scott and other ‘home-keeping minstrels’. Noting this tendency, one is prompted to a more critical reading of the Romantic espousal of misadventure in the travelling experience. Discomforts and dangers, arguably, are not so much authentic in themselves, as they are the markers of an authenticity, and flowing from that authenticity an authority and cultural capital, to which the Romantic traveller wishes to lay claim. As Erik Cohen has written, ‘authenticity’ is frequently ‘a socially constructed concept … its social (as against philosophical) connotation [being] not given but ‘‘negotiable’’ ’.³⁰ Groups and cultures define for themselves what constitutes the authentic experience and the authentic act of travel. And for that subset of British travellers in the period 1780 to 1830 denoted by the term ‘the Romantic traveller’, I ³⁰ Erik Cohen, ‘Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research, 15: 3 (1988), 374.

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would suggest, it is misadventure that is chosen as one key sign of authenticity in travel. Yet why should misadventures signal authenticity in travel and the traveller, as opposed to stupidity, recklessness, lack of planning, and so forth? As noted, there is partly an intrinsic logic to this reading and evaluation of misadventure: discomforts, dangers, and disasters can seem more obviously unwanted, unwilled events. But there are simultaneously broader cultural influences at work here—and more specifically, the influence of antecedent texts and of diverse literary traditions that can be understood as scripting this Romantic fascination with unscripted journeys. To return to the point made earlier in connection with Keats’s declaration just prior to his 1818 walking tour, the understanding that arduous journeys, and clambering through clouds, can be the route to a fuller, more achieved selfhood has presumably to be acquired from somewhere. In his own mind, Keats has done no significant travelling yet—that is the very point of issuing this ambitious mini-manifesto—so it is not on the basis of empirical experience that he thus valorizes the rigours of travel. But already, it seems, he is somehow trained to read his future misadventures in a particular way, and to place a premium on their educative and transformative potential. In broad terms, the general influences on Keats as he looks ahead to his imminent expedition—the generic underpinnings, so to speak, to the Keatsian travel script—are obvious enough. One key influence, as noted already, is the genre of romance, in which setbacks in the course of voyages and travels are usually the route to greater triumphs, and where sudden reversals of fortune habitually lead to climactic recognition-scenes that yield important insights into the self.³¹ Further to this, one can plausibly suggest that notions of pilgrimage are probably somewhere in Keats’s mind as he prepares for his walking tour. Again, these are notions that invest the possible travails inherent in travel with a greater spiritual and existential significance, and that create a sense that such travails can be the means to a profound transformation in the self. And once again, it is also worth adding, these are notions that must inevitably derive ³¹ In this regard, note Keats’s implicit comment on his own original impulses and aspirations, when at the end of his tour he talks self-mockingly of having been ‘werry romantic indeed, among [the] Mountains & Lakes’ of Scotland. K Letters, i. 360.

Introduction

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from a matrix of prior texts, from a range of fictional and factual accounts that collectively delineate for Keats both the generic figure of the pilgrim and a generic narrative of pilgrimage. The literature of pilgrimage, in other words, subtly informs Keats’s tour of 1818—and it certainly informs the persona, practices, and accounts of many other Romantic travellers, as we shall see later in this study. Romance and pilgrimage, then, are two important stimuli to a Romantic interest in misadventure, and two filters through which Romantic travellers and writers read and comprehend such misadventures. Both traditions/genres will accordingly be much referenced in what follows. That said, it is the way that such larger traditions or genres are mediated to the Romantics by the Voyages and Travels genre, by (supposedly) factual travel accounts, that is my particular concern here. For often it is as a very specific version of the romance-hero or pilgrim that the Romantic traveller seems to conceptualize and image himself; and it is equally from a few specific strands of contemporary Voyages and Travels that the Romantic traveller derives the most valorized scenarios or topoi pertaining to misadventure—those scenarios, that is to say, that Hazlitt’s friend would label ‘romantic situations’. To put this another way, there are more immediate models than romance-hero and pilgrim on which the Romantic traveller bases his self-dramatization qua traveller, even if those models are in turn heavily invested with notions drawn from romance and pilgrimage traditions. What are these models? And what are the most characteristically romantic (and Romantic) situations associated with them? Some of the most important personae and topoi in Romantic travel, and in the Romantic traveller’s self-dramatization, should already be evident. There is, for example, the captive or kidnap victim (this being the situation sought by Hazlitt’s fellow-travellers in Italy). There is equally the shipwreck victim, or at least, the intrepid voyager who has come very close to shipwreck (a persona seemingly sought and found by Shelley, and claimed also by Byron as he brags to Tom Moore about his maritime experience). One might add to these two roles the figure of the explorer, about whom more will be said later in this study. And one might also propose the hardy mountaineer as another key Romantic topos or self-dramatization. This is a persona that clearly

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appeals to Shelley in the preface to The Revolt of Islam, as discussed earlier; to Coleridge, if we are to judge from his experiences on Scafell Pike; and also, of course, to Wordsworth. Keats’s walking tour of 1818, equally, was very much a seeking out of mountain experience (and implicitly of arduous, if not dangerous, mountain experience): hence an itinerary that took him to the Lake District and the Highlands. By the conclusion of his tour, Keats felt able to pronounce ‘By this time I am comparitively [sic] a … mountaineer’.³² Yet one should also note, in the present context, that Keats clearly had this persona in view, and notions of mountain climbing were subtly shaping his travel plans and persona, even before he began his tour. ‘I will clamber through the Clouds and exist.’ The trope here images the whole tour as some sort of virtual or metaphoric mountain ascent. The suggestion is of a climb through mist-shrouded slopes, so as to reach the clear skies and vast vistas of some lofty summit. On that peak, we sense, Keats sees himself standing alone, as in that iconic contemporary painting, David Caspar Friedrich’s The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818). Subtly projected even before Keats begins his tour is an epical, Romantic self-fashioning, in which the traveller will cut a figure of courage, self-control, and independence, of authority and originality—and mountain climbing, with its attendant risks and discomforts, will clearly be the medium by which this self-fashioning is achieved. Before he begins his tour, then, there is clearly some sort of prospective script unfolding in Keats’s mind, notwithstanding the suggestions also made, here and elsewhere, that the tour is somehow a route to pure existence, unscripted and unconstrained by prior influences. I reiterate this point in connection with Keats’s persona of mountaineer, because this persona is also a particularly good example of why we need to see such Romantic self-dramatizations as emerging to some extent from prior sources, and as having a larger generic context. For as Robert MacFarlane has shown, the ascent of mountains has not always been imaged and understood in this grand Romantic fashion.³³ In the Bible, there is a powerful association between mountains and prophets, that understands the ³² K Letters, i. 342. ³³ See Robert MacFarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (London, 2003).

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former as places where an exceptional (if frequently terrifying) access to God could be achieved. Notwithstanding this biblical context, however, mountains were generally imagined in a very different way in the medieval and early modern periods. They were perceived as hideous, hostile places best avoided by all sane, God-fearing men. Those foolhardy enough to try to scale them were guilty of a monstrous hubris—such, for example, is Petrarch’s verdict on his own ascent of Mount Ventoux.³⁴ In the eighteenth century, however, the associations pertaining to mountains significantly altered, and the figure of the mountaineer gained a new topicality. A growing interest in the Sublime made mountains objects of aesthetic pleasure, whilst simultaneously they became fascinating to those working in various branches of Enlightenment science. Inspired by these new agendas, Michel Paccard made the first ascent of Mont Blanc in 1786 (according to one historian, the ‘event from which modern mountaineering dates’), to be followed within the year by Horace Benedict de Saussure.³⁵ Saussure produced a hugely popular account of his ascent, translated into English as A Short Account of an Expedition to the Summit of Mont Blanc and published as an appendix to Thomas Martyn’s Sketch of a Tour Through Swisserland (1788). Texts such as these, and travellers and explorers such as Paccard and Saussure, effectively rewrote the script surrounding mountaineering. The climbing of mountains no longer signified a dangerous egotism and hubris, but rather a sublime and heroic seeking after knowledge, without regard for one’s personal safety—a rescripting that underpins the interest taken in mountaineering by many Romantic figures. The Romantic traveller’s frequent desire to seem an intrepid mountaineer, then, does not appear out of nowhere, but is informed and shaped by a large hinterland of contemporary travel accounts. The same can be said of those other travel personae that seem especially to fascinate Romantic travellers: the roles of imperilled voyager or shipwreck victim, of captive, and of explorer. It is from the (sub)genres of contemporary travel writing relating to these figures ³⁴ See Petrarch, The Ascent of Mount Ventoux, trans. James Harvey Robinson (New York, 1989); also Wes Williams, Pilgrimage and Narrative in the French Renaissance: ‘The Undiscovered Country’ (Oxford, 1998), 28–37. ³⁵ Sir Gavin de Beer, Early Travellers in the Alps (New York, 1967), 181.

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that Romantic travellers took a cluster of stock scenarios and images, of ideas and associations, that inform significantly the Romantic espousal of misadventure. And it is to these source materials and these models, accordingly, that I shall look in this study to understand something of the logic underpinning the Romantic interest in the figure of the suffering traveller.

1 Tourists: Diversification and Disdain, 1760–1830 Trips and Tours and Excursions, and Sentimental Journeys, are become so much the ton, that every rambler, who can write (tolerably or intolerably), assumes the pen, and gives the Public a journal of the occurrences and remarks to which his peregrinations have given birth. Monthly Review (1779)¹

The tourist is the other fellow. Evelyn Waugh²

Before examining, in the main part of this study, those travellers and travel texts that exercised the most conspicuous influence on Romantic travellers, it is necessary to know something of those other travellers and texts whose example was not being followed by the Romantic traveller. For Romantic scriptings of travel and the travellerpersona are also partly driven by an antithetical, oppositional logic: by the desire, that is, to demonstrate one’s difference from certain sorts of contemporary traveller. The antithetical figure especially provoking the Romantic traveller’s animus one might broadly characterize as the ‘tourist’. Yet this is a term needing much contextualization ¹ Monthly Review, 60 (1779), 191. ² Evelyn Waugh, Labels: A Mediterranean Journal (London, 1930), 44.

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if one is firstly to use it without anachronism, and secondly, to recognize the full complexity of the Romantic traveller’s relationship to contemporary tourists and tour narratives. The first section of this chapter will accordingly trace the key developments in tourism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The subsequent section will discuss in broad terms the Romantic traveller’s relationship with these developments, focusing in particular on the Romantic rejection of some modes of tourism, if not of tourism per se. Thereafter, the final section will look more closely at three contemporary styles or types of tourist who seem especially to rile the Romantic imagination, and who thus constitute the main antithetical figures against whom the Romantic traveller seeks to define himself—these are the Grand Tourist, the picturesque tourist, and the female tourist. The chapter as a whole will hopefully do much to illuminate that Byronic jibe discussed in my introduction: it will give some sense of just who, precisely, those ‘Eustace’, ‘Starke’, and other travellers are, and of what they and their ‘Manuals’ stood for in the Romantic imagination.

RO M A N T I C - E RA TO U R I S M : A N OV E RV I EW ‘Tourist’ and ‘tourism’ are words coined in the Romantic period: the OED dates the former from the 1780s and the latter from the 1810s. They appeared in response to a cultural phenomenon that struck some contemporaries as praiseworthy, others as regrettable, but which to all seemed highly remarkable—namely, the dramatic upsurge, from the late eighteenth century onwards, in the number of Britons undertaking travel as a leisure pursuit, as something which they engaged in willingly as a source of diversion, personal self-edification, and, possibly, social one-upmanship (not the least important motive, in the present context). ‘A course of summer travelling is now looked upon to be as essential as ever a course of spring physic’, Robert Southey wrote in 1807, dating the emergence of the vogue for ‘summer travelling’ back to the 1770s.³ Britons had of course travelled in something approaching a touristic spirit prior to this date, but they had done so almost exclusively in connection with the Grand Tour. ³ Robert Southey, Letters from England, ed. Jack Simmons (Oxford, 1951), 165.

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This was an elite activity, the preserve of the aristocracy and gentry who alone could afford the luxury of sending their sons to the continent for protracted periods. From the 1760s, however, this situation began to change. As the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions enriched portions of British society outside the traditional landowning elite; as the so-called Consumer Revolution bred new tastes and aspirations amongst those newly enriched; and as the Transport Revolution worked (slowly) to make travel a less arduous and expensive business: so the notion of recreational travelling was taken up by the middle classes, in ever increasing numbers. A touring class, one might say, gave way to the touring classes, and this shift in the demographics of recreational travel is reflected in a significant diversification of British tourism; that is to say, in a proliferation of different itineraries, objects of interest, and styles of travel amongst British tourists. From the 1760s, then, Grand Tourists of the traditional sort, young, aristocratic, and male, found themselves rubbing shoulders with (or trying not to rub shoulders with) tourists from differing social backgrounds, of differing ages and even of different gender, as it became increasingly possible for women to travel to the continent. These new tourists typically adopted the itineraries, and many of the key agenda, of the traditional Grand Tour, but adapted them in line with their own tastes and budgets. In so doing, they often consciously defined themselves in opposition to the figure of the aristocratic Grand Tourist. From the 1760s and 1770s, in tour narratives such as Smollett’s Travels Through France and Italy (1766) and Samuel Sharp’s Letters From Italy (1766), we find narrators concerned to present themselves as more sturdy, patriotic, and commonsensical travellers than the effete aristocrat abroad (the latter typically being deemed to manifest an unpatriotic cosmopolitanism, along with a profligacy that was a drain on the nation, and an immorality that was an embarrassment to it). Indeed, the published tour narrative, as opposed to letters and journals never intended for publication, becomes in this period predominantly a middle-class form: the aristocratic tourist increasingly disdained to venture into the literary market-place.⁴ Women also began to publish tour accounts. Only two travel narratives by women appear before 1770—the most notable of these being Mary ⁴ See Katherine Turner, British Travel Writers in Europe 1750–1800: Authorship, Gender and National Identity (Aldershot, 2001), 13.

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Wortley Montagu’s Embassy Letters (1763)—but between 1770 and 1800 some twenty female-authored travelogues appear. One of the most influential of these, and a key handbook for British travellers touring Italy after the Napoleonic Wars, was Mariana Starke’s Travels in Italy (1800)—hence Byron’s jibe at ‘Starke travellers’. If the tourism boom of the late eighteenth century thus adjusted the social make-up of the British touring class, it also adjusted the destinations to which British tourists travelled. France and Italy, key destinations of the Grand Tour, remained the principal itinerary in continental tourism, but new destinations were also beginning to emerge. Some tourists, for reasons to be discussed in the final section of this chapter, pushed beyond the confines of the traditional Tour: Patrick Brydone, for example, whose Tour through Sicily and Malta (1774) was one of the most popular tour narratives of the period.⁵ From the 1770s, moreover, the British Isles themselves became a popular site for tours. This domestic tourism was largely generated by the growing middle-class taste for travel (although the aristocracy and gentry quickly followed the trend): tours to regions such as the Scottish Highlands or North Wales were cheaper than travel to the continent. They could also be more easily constructed as a patriotic exercise, in keeping with a self-image that identified the middle classes as the moral and economic heart of the nation. This patriotic ethos was especially inculcated by those ‘Manuals’—in Byron’s idiom—that did most to encourage the vogue for what one commentator calls ‘home travels’.⁶ Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Scotland (1774) and Tour in Wales (1778) were written princi pally in an antiquarian and natural-historical vein, and encouraged the ‘Pennant traveller’ (as Byron might have dubbed him) to act as amateur naturalist and local historian. Contemporaneously, Arthur Young’s ‘Farmer’s Tours’, beginning with his Six Weeks Tour Through the Southern Counties of England and Wales (1768), taught the gospel of ‘improvement’, a buzzword of the age.⁷ Young encouraged a concern with rural, and by extension national, productivity. Good ⁵ Turner, British Travel Writers, 127. ⁶ William Mavor, The British Tourists; or Traveller’s Pocket Companion through England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, 6 vols. (London, 1798), i. 1. ⁷ For more on notions of ‘improvement’, see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London, 1983), 160–1; Alistair M. Duckworth, The

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35

agricultural practice was to be discovered and disseminated, and the rural economy rationalized and systematized. Tourists were accordingly expected, as Edward Topham observed, to play ‘the part of the farmer … [enquiring] after the crops, [turning] over the soil, and [tasting] the manure, for the benefit of his countrymen’.⁸ Such utilitarian, ‘improving’ activities may seem untouristic today, but they were highly fashionable in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and a key part of the rationale for tourism in the face of hostile contemporary commentators. Even less overtly useful forms of tourism, such as country house visiting, could be championed as part of a process by which British society, and the British isles, were being more closely integrated, unified into a single, harmonious nation-state.⁹ As William Mavor put it, in his introduction to a sixvolume anthology of domestic tour narratives, through the journeys and publications of tourists ‘the natives of the three kingdoms have been linked more closely in the social tie’.¹⁰ That said, not all of the new forms of tourism were so easily integrated into a rhetoric of ‘improvement’ and national benefit. One touristic fashion that was both immensely popular, and especially prone to provoke adverse comment from contemporary observers, was the vogue for ‘sentimental journeys’, as remarked by the Monthly Review in the first epigraph to this chapter. The ‘Manual’ guiding tourists here was of course Sterne’s novel, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), a fiction which inspired innumerable real-life travellers. Some of these produced genuine travelogues with titles such as Another Traveller! Or Cursory Remarks and Tritical Observations Made Upon a Journey Through Part of the Netherlands (1768–9) and Travels for the Heart. Written in France (1777). These travellers made a point of being playful and whimsical rather than Improvement of the Estate: A Study of the Novels of Jane Austen (Oxford, 1975); Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (London, 2000). ⁸ Edward Topham, Letters from Edinburgh (London, 1776), 368. ⁹ See Carole Fabricant, ‘The Literature of Domestic Tourism and the Public Consumption of Private Property’, in Laura Brown and Felicity Nussbaum (eds.), The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics and English Literature (New York, 1987), 254–75; Robert J. Mayhew, Enlightenment Geography: The Political Languages of British Geography, 1650–1850 (Basingstoke, 2000). ¹⁰ Mavor, British Tourists, i, pp. vi–vii.

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practical and empirical, and explored—often in a highly digressive prose—not so much the scenes around them as their reactions to those scenes. They were especially concerned to identify, in themselves and others, a ‘natural’ tendency to benevolence and sympathy, and this aspiration often took them to less developed regions—the Scottish Highlands, for example—where it was felt that human nature could be observed in a less corrupted form, untainted by luxury and modernity. If the figure we might dub the ‘Sterne traveller’ is thus a conspicuous part of the travel scene from the 1770s, equally conspicuous—and equally notorious, in some quarters—is the ‘Gilpin traveller’: that is to say, the devotee of the picturesque. The purpose of the picturesque tour was the aesthetic appreciation of landscape, an agenda which seems to have been followed by few tourists before mid-century, but which begins to find expression in the tours and tour narratives of Thomas Gray and Joseph Cradock in the 1760s and 1770s. It was subsequently William Gilpin who did most to popularize and formalize this new taste. In his Observations on the Wye Valley, &c., Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (1782), Gilpin issued the following manifesto: We travel for various purposes; to explore the culture of soils; to view the curiosities of art; to survey the beauties of nature; to search for her productions; and to learn the manners of men; their different politics and modes of life … The following little work proposes a new object of pursuit; that of not barely examining the face of a country; but of examining it by the rules of picturesque beauty.¹¹

This ‘new object of pursuit’ proved hugely popular, and Gilpin followed Observations on the Wye Valley with further accounts of tours to the Lake District and Scotland (1786 and 1789 respectively), and with a theoretical treatise entitled Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape (1792). Yet this very popularity was also to have detrimental consequences: as we shall see, the picturesque tourist was also to become one of the most ridiculed and despised figures of the age. ¹¹ William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, and the Several Parts of South Wales, &c., Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (London, 1782), 1–2.

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The passage by Gilpin just cited also conveys the somewhat heterogeneous interests and agenda being pursued by many tourists, and many tour narratives, in this period. Although there were significant tensions between some modes or subcultures of tourism, it is worth noting that many tourists and tour narratives happily combine the diverse agenda acknowledged by Gilpin. Thus Thomas De Quincey’s father published A Short Tour in the Midland Counties of England (1775) that embraced, according to his son, a ‘tolerably miscellaneous’ set of interests, being equally concerned with both the ‘Fine Arts’ and the ‘Mechanic Arts’.¹² This eclecticism seems to have become more fraught during the period of the French Revolution and the wars with France. In the sphere of tourism as in so much else, the pressures of the Revolutionary era seem to have polarized opinions and sharpened antagonisms, amongst both tourists and commentators on tourism. It is in keeping with this new mood that Gilpin issues in 1792 not another picturesque tour, but rather a theoretical justification of the picturesque project that is highly defensive in tone. Gilpin is clearly aware that the picturesque, and picturesque tourism especially, is much attacked: as he rather plaintively puts it at one point, ‘in what then do we offend?’¹³ He might have been answered by Henry Redhead Yorke, a tourist more in the ‘improving’ style, who declared that he had ‘but little regard to the narratives of those who travel for personal gratification merely, and not with a view for national benefit’.¹⁴ Yorke is confident that the reader of his account of a French tour made in 1802 ‘would rather see a rich corn field than muse over the ruins of churches and chapels’.¹⁵ Also reflecting the political climate of the time is the vogue for pedestrian tours that emerges in the 1780s and 1790s.¹⁶ Such walking tours gave rise to publications such as The Observant Pedestrian; Or, Traits of the Heart (Anon., 1795), and Joshua Lucock Wilkinson’s ¹² Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, together with Selections from the Autobiography of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Edward Sackville-West (London, 1950), 6–7. ¹³ William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape (London, 1792), p. iii. ¹⁴ Henry Redhead Yorke, Letters from France in 1802 (London, 1804), 122. ¹⁵ Ibid. 98. ¹⁶ On pedestrianism, see Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (Basingstoke, 1997); Nicholas Roe, The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries (Basingstoke, 2002), 171–2.

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The Wanderer; or Anecdotes and Incidents, the Results and Occurrences of a Ramble on Foot, Through France, Germany and Italy (1798). To travel on foot, of course, cheapened the cost of tourism still further, and made it even more accessible; for this reason, one guesses, it was a mode of tourism especially favoured by students at the Universities. Yet for many of these pedestrians, financial exigencies dovetailed with ideological commitment. As will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, pedestrian tourism often carried radical, or at least liberal, overtones, its implicit message seemingly that the tourist has eschewed the luxury of a coach and put himself on a level with the common man. As this will suggest, it is often an oppositional as much as a radical or sympathetic agenda that motivates the pedestrian—the desire not only to identify with the common people, but also to distinguish him or herself from other, more despised forms of tourist. This combination of motives is of particular relevance in the present context. The Romantic traveller, both in practice and on the page, is very frequently a walker. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, who came to maturity in the early 1790s, were all keen pedestrians, and the statements they make in connection with their walking tours in this decade confirms the radical tenor of much Romantic-era pedestrianism. Walking tours also feature as important, formative events—key rites of passage, even—in the lives of De Quincey, Shelley, and Keats. One further consequence of the wars with France was the closing of the continent to the majority of British tourists. Periods of peace, as in 1802 after the signing of the Treaty of Amiens, and in 1814 after Napoleon’s first defeat, consequently produced a flood of British travellers across the channel. Two such travellers in 1802 were John Eustace and Joseph Forsyth, who took advantage of the peace to tour Italy, and subsequently produced accounts of their tours in the form of A Classical Tour through Italy (1813) and Remarks on Antiquities, Arts and Letters during an Excursion in Italy (1813). (Forsyth’s narrative, interestingly, was written in captivity: he was in France en route back to Britain when hostilities broke out again, and subsequently spent ten years in a French gaol.) Eustace and Forsyth’s accounts were two of the most influential guidebooks for post-war tourists to Italy, inspiring those ‘Eustace’ and ‘Forsyth travellers’ mocked by Byron.

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It was this post-war generation of travellers who really conveyed to contemporaries the extent to which tourism had become a pursuit conducted at almost every level of British society. Tourism for the lower classes was still a few decades off, awaiting Thomas Cook’s invention of the package holiday in the 1840s, yet to contemporaries it felt as if a threshold had been crossed. The Westminster Review in 1824 suggested that the British tourists in Rome comprised ‘all classes, ages, sexes, and conditions’.¹⁷ Tourism was increasingly held up as one of the defining features of modern culture, and of the industrialized, commercialized society taking shape in Britain: everyone, it seemed, was obeying the injunction issued satirically by Coleridge in 1824, in his poem ‘The Delinquent Travellers’: Keep moving! Steam or Gas or Stage, Hold, cabin, steerage, hencoop’s cage— Tour, Journey, Voyage, Lounge, Ride, Walk, Skim, Sketch, Excursion, Travel-talk— For move you must! ’Tis now the rage, The law and fashion of the Age.¹⁸

RO M A N T I C A N T I - TO U R I S M ‘These tourists, heaven preserve us!’ William Wordsworth¹⁹

The preceding section is necessarily only a brief sketch of the different denominations of Romantic-era tourism. Throughout, I have intended the terms ‘tourist’ and ‘tourism’ to be understood in a neutral, non-judgemental way, as suggestive simply of travel undertaken willingly and recreationally (the latter term is not without its own problems of definition, but in the present context it should ¹⁷ Quoted in James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to ‘Culture’, 1800–1898 (Oxford, 1993), 83. ¹⁸ ‘The Delinquent Travellers’, ll. 16–21, in CCP. ¹⁹ ‘The Brothers’, l. 1, in Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London, 1991).

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suffice). Today, of course, we are accustomed to hear both words employed in a more derogatory, pejorative manner; and also to register a subtle semantic difference between the words ‘traveller’ and ‘tourist’, as discussed in my introduction. This semantic difference was not yet recognized in the Romantic period. ‘Traveller’ and ‘tourist’ were interchangeable terms, as evidenced by the OED’s second citation for the latter, Samuel Pegge’s observation in 1800 that ‘a Traveller is now-a-days called a Tour-ist’. ‘Tour’ and ‘tourist’ could also still be used with reference to professional travellers whose activities were not in any way recreational: the surveyors sent out by the Agricultural Board, for example. Yet for all this, the conditions that were to bring about the denigration of the term ‘tourist’ were clearly in place. Although the OED gives a citation from 1849 as the first evidence of a distinction between ‘traveller’ and ‘tourist’, James Buzard has found several earlier instances of ‘tourist’ being used disparagingly.²⁰ One of these stands as the epigraph to this section: the opening line from Wordsworth’s ‘The Brothers’ (1799), in which a village priest expresses his exasperation at the dillydallying of someone he takes (mistakenly, as it turns out) to be a mere tourist. The shifting semantic field of the word ‘tourist’ alerts us not only to the tourist boom of the late eighteenth century, but also to an important corollary to that boom, an upsurge of anti-touristic attitudes and discourses. The traditional Grand Tour had always provoked a range of hostile commentaries, and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed an extensive anti-tour literature that focused on the dangers, rather than the benefits, of sending young aristocrats abroad.²¹ An education in profligacy, affectation, effeminacy, debauchery, and (worst of all) Catholicism: these were some of the charges levelled against a practice that was also often denounced as simply an unnecessary, extravagant luxury. These accusations continued to be applied to those persisting in the Grand Tour tradition in the late eighteenth century (being invoked in many ²⁰ See Buzard, The Beaten Track, 1. ²¹ For traditional anti-Tour accusations, see Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud, 1992), 287–303; Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1996), 60; Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (Manchester, 1999), 27–32.

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cases by middle-class tourists who wished to distinguish themselves from their aristocratic compatriots); and some of them, mutatis mutandis, could also be applied more generally to the new, and significantly altered, tourist scene of the period. In addition, tourism as a whole began to attract a new range of hostile commentary. To the more conservative observer, it seemed to mark a dangerous destabilization of social boundaries, and an unwelcome mixing of the classes; to the more radically minded commentator, it seemed to show a middle class acquiring the affected, luxurious tastes of the aristocracy. To others again, it simply seemed a frivolous fad, lacking the seriousness of purpose that ought to be attendant on travel. ‘Cure them of tours, Hussar and Highland dresses’ (10. 682), is Byron’s prayer for his compatriots in Don Juan, whilst Keats in a poem penned during his Scottish walking tour of 1818 laments that Fingal’s Cave is now accessible ‘to cutters and to fashion boats | To cravats and to Petticoats’.²² Interwoven with many of these critiques, from whatever political position they were made, was a distinctly new element in the rhetoric of anti-tourism that has particular relevance for the Romantic response to the tourist boom. From the late eighteenth century, the figure of the ‘tourist’ becomes entangled with debates about modernity, and with anxieties about the apparently deleterious effects of the modernizing forces at work in British society (and subsequently, in the world). The new tourism, born from the Industrial, Consumer, and Transport Revolutions, was very much a product of these modernizing forces—and so, perhaps not altogether surprisingly, the ‘tourist’ became as much an emblem of the ‘modern’, in Romantic-era discourse, as the enclosed field, the turnpike road, or the macadamized road surface. The tourist still retains this symbolic function: in our own time, Dean MacCannell has claimed that ‘ ‘‘the tourist’’ is one of the best models available for modern-man-in-general’.²³ Then as now, moreover, many commentators were keenly aware that the tourist was not just a product of modernizing forces: rather, he or she was also an active agent in the modernizing process. This was clearly the case with tourists in the Arthur Young mould, who spread the gospel ²² K Letters, i. 350. ²³ Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976; reprinted Berkeley and London, 1999), 1.

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of improvement, but it was also indirectly the case with those tourists who simply wanted to enjoy themselves, or to satisfy less obviously utilitarian tastes. It was increasingly recognized that tourists seeking to escape modernity by travelling to regions of the British isles which still seemed primitive were often destroying the very thing they sought. They spread metropolitan tastes and manners, corrupting the rustic virtue of these supposedly pristine communities. Equally irritatingly, they spread metropolitan prices. The inflation brought about by the injection of cash into the local economy is a common theme amongst travellers of this period: De Quincey, making a walking tour of North Wales in 1802, found that the price of dinner rose from sixpence to three shillings in just two months.²⁴ En route to Scotland in 1818, meanwhile, Keats complained of the ‘disfigurement’ worked on the Lake District by ‘the miasma of London’. From London, he suggested, there had come ‘bucks and soldiers, and women of fashion’ until ‘the border inhabitants [were] quite out of keeping with the romance about them, from a continual intercourse with London rank and fashion’.²⁵ Keats’s peculiar position here, of lamenting the effects of tourism whilst being simultaneously himself some sort of tourist, alerts us to another new and significant element in the anti-touristic pronouncements of the late eighteenth century. What one finds as tourism diversifies along the lines traced earlier is that attacks are increasingly made on one style or subculture of tourism by proponents of another style or subculture. Anti-tourism, indeed, arguably becomes an integral part of the modern touristic experience. Jonathan Culler has observed of twentieth-century tourism that ‘to be a tourist is in part to dislike tourists (both other tourists and the fact that one is oneself a tourist)’—and I would suggest that this is an attitude that is already coming into being in the Romantic era.²⁶ Its logic is not hard to comprehend. As tours are taken up by a widening spectrum of British society, recreational travel becomes an area of cultural activity admitting of—indeed, requiring—strategies of distinction and ²⁴ See Grevel Lindop, The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (Oxford, 1985), 75. ²⁵ K Letters, i. 299. ²⁶ Jonathan Culler, ‘The Semiotics of Tourism’, in Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Oxford, 1988), 157.

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social differentiation of the sort adumbrated by Pierre Bourdieu.²⁷ And a key rhetorical tactic in this larger strategy of distinction is to lament and lampoon rival modes of tourism, and to identify other travellers whose woeful activities and pernicious influence counterpoint usefully one’s own more worthy attitudes and practices. Thus the middle-class tourist targets the aristocratic ‘English milord’, and vice versa; thus the sentimental tourist mocks the ‘splenetic’ persona developed by Smollett and Sharpe (who find themselves transformed into Smelfungus and Mundungus respectively in Sterne’s Sentimental Journey); thus the ‘improving tourist’ scorns the frivolity of the picturesque project. If there is an expansion in tourism in the late eighteenth century, then, there is also an escalation in anti-touristic sentiment, and it is in this dual context that we need to locate the Romantic traveller’s typical acts of self-fashioning, and especially his frequent espousal of discomfort and danger. The major Romantic figures were clearly very much inheritors of, and participants in, the tourist boom. Most of the travelling undertaken by the leading Romantics, and subsequently celebrated in their writing, must be classed as touristic, in the neutral, sociological sense of travel undertaken because the traveller wants to make the journey and has the time and cash to do so. ( The possible exception here would be Byron and Shelley’s sojourn on the continent, from 1816 and 1818 respectively. Both men to some extent felt themselves to be living, rather than merely travelling, abroad; to differing degrees, both also felt themselves to have been driven abroad, and thus to be exiles rather than tourists. The validity of these self-perceptions, however, and the extent to which Byron and Shelley actually only construct themselves as exiles so as to distance themselves from other tourists, is debatable—a topic I shall return to, with regard to Byron at least.) At the same time, however, many of the Romantic travellers to be discussed here are concerned, as we shall see, not to be regarded as mere tourists. Or rather—to put it less anachronistically, since ‘tourist’ per se is not yet a term of abuse—they are anxious to differentiate themselves from certain sorts of fellow tourist. The final section of this chapter will accordingly discuss three types of contemporary tourist who seem especially to incur ²⁷ See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London, 1984).

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Romantic antagonism, and who in this way encourage indirectly, or antithetically, the Romantic traveller’s determination to make his travel a matter of misadventures, dangers, and discomforts. Before turning to these figures so antithetical to the Romantic imagination, however, there is a further important point to make about the Romantic relationship with the overall touristic context. This regards the position of the tour narrative in Romantic-era print culture, and the relationship of Romantic publications with those narratives. It is important to note that tourism in this period represents not just a burgeoning activity but also a burgeoning textuality: tour narratives constitute an increasingly voluminous sector in the Romantic-era literary market. As both Katherine Turner and Nigel Leask have recently emphasized, the prose travelogue stood at the heart of the late eighteenth-century canon.²⁸ It was not only hugely popular, but also eminently respectable, proclaimed as a literary form that could be read with profit and pleasure by every section of the reading public. And it was also, not insignificantly, a comparatively easy genre in which to get oneself published, welcoming contributions from a broad range of decidedly ‘amateur’ writers (amongst them, as we have seen, an increasing number of women). Much Romantic writing—with its frequent presentation of the narrator as some sort of traveller, with its utilization of scenes and situations drawn from travel and travel writing, and of course, with titles like The Excursion—seems well calculated to tap this lucrative contemporary market for travel narratives in a wide range of different forms. At the same time, the Romantic texts stand subtly apart from many of these other narratives, being distinguished from them principally, of course, by the fact that they are written as poetry, not prose. Of the major (male) Romantic figures, only Wordsworth publishes a prose travel text, his Guide to the Lakes (1810). (It should be remembered, at this juncture, that I am following Ross, Mellor, and others in seeing ‘Romanticism’ as very much the product of masculine anxieties and aspirations in the period.) With this exception, however, Romantic writers seemingly disdain to participate in a genre that admits all and sundry, and which ²⁸ Turner, British Travel Writers, 131; Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840: ‘From An Antique Land’ (Oxford, 2002), 11–14.

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seems the province of the dilettante, and especially, the female writer. As Byron pronounces wearily in Don Juan: ‘We’ve had so many tours of late’ (9. 334)—meaning, it should be noted, so many tour narratives. The writing of these travelogues accordingly falls, as Katherine Turner notes, to the Romantic traveller’s companions: to Dorothy Wordsworth, who published prose accounts of tours undertaken in Scotland and Europe to accompany her brother’s poetic accounts of those journeys; to John Cam Hobhouse, who provided a prose account of the journeys described in Byron’s Childe Harold in A Journey through Albania (1813) and Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold (1818); and to Mary Shelley, in her History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817), a text which concludes with the first publication of Percy Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’.²⁹ The Romantics themselves write poetic travelogues—as Turner notes, a form or subject matter for poetry that had fallen somewhat into abeyance since Goldsmith’s The Traveller (although the popularity of topographical poetry in the late eighteenth century had perhaps, pace Turner, kept the connection between poetry and domestic travelling alive). One effect of this Romantic attitude to the travel narrative, as both Turner and Leask have noted, is to bring about a striking reorganization of genres in the early nineteenth century.³⁰ Voyages and Travels in all their diverse forms—including accounts of tours—were prominent in the eighteenth-century literary marketplace and in eighteenth-century literary taste. By the early nineteenth century, however, this vast continent of texts has in a sense been balkanized, and as a consequence downgraded. Where Voyages and Travels texts had been regarded as combining useful knowledge and literary pleasure in a satisfactory fashion, mere ‘travel writing’, as the genre now becomes, is now considered a minor mode, somehow not quite respectable enough on either intellectual or aesthetic grounds. The growth of disciplinarity and professionalism in the sciences is one key factor in this development, but another is the shift in literary taste, and consequently the downplaying of certain supposedly feminized modes of writing, brought about by Romanticism. ²⁹ Turner, British Travel Writers, 226. ³⁰ See ibid. 224, and Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 6–14.

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I R R I TA N T S A N D A N TAG O N I S T S : G RA N D, PI C T U R E S QU E , A N D F E M A L E TO U R I S T S Travelling in a stagecoach … is not a way to meet with adventures. Robert Southey³¹

Not only in his travel practice, then, but also in his travel writing, the Romantic traveller seeks to define himself in contradistinction to other contemporary tourists. Three of these touristic ‘others’, and the Romantic traveller’s animus against them, will be considered in this section. In considering the Romantic response to the activities of the Grand Tourist, the picturesque tourist, and the female tourist, however, there is an important point always to be kept in mind: namely, that the Romantic traveller’s activities and interests are in many ways very similar to the activities of these denigrated ‘other’ travellers. The aperc¸u of Jonathan Culler’s cited in the last section is thus pertinent here. Fundamental to much anti-touristic rhetoric is an embarrassment, or annoyance, or even disgust, that one is oneself, deep down, a tourist—and one might even speculate that this self-incrimination is one reason for the punishing modes of travel often adopted by the Romantic traveller. Be this as it may, the first contemporary figure against whom the Romantic traveller clearly positions himself is the Grand Tourist. As noted, this was the traditional, and elite, form of recreational travel in late eighteenth-century British society; and although its heyday is generally accepted as running from about 1700 to the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756, the Grand Tour in its traditional form maintained some currency until the 1820s.³² The key ‘Manual’ for the traditional Grand Tour was Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), a text which combined polite, classical, and empirical agendas. At one level, it was the Tourist’s business to mix ³¹ New Letters of Robert Southey, 2 vols., ed. Kenneth Curry (London, 1965), i. 27. ³² For useful accounts of the Grand Tour, see Christopher Hibbert, The Grand Tour (London, 1987), and Black, The British Abroad.

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with the best society on the continent, to polish both his languages and his poise, and to establish useful contacts at foreign courts. Herein lay the origins of the Tour, back in the sixteenth century, although an exercise that had once been couched in terms of ‘courtliness’ was increasingly defined in the post-1688 Whig idiom of ‘politeness’ and ‘civility’.³³ Addison took the Tour still further in this direction by introducing a more pronounced concern with Italy’s classical past. The Addisonian Grand Tourist moved not only between courts, but also between the sites and landmarks made famous by the writers of antiquity. At each site, he juxtaposed the scene in front of him with the appropriate passage of classical verse. Thus Boswell in 1765 visited Terni and the celebrated falls of Velino, and noted: ‘Prodigious wild. Read Virgil’s description thrice; was quite in Aeneid.’³⁴ Such comparisons firstly demonstrated that one had the ‘liberal education’ (in the contemporary phrase) that at this period was the preserve of the male elite. At another level, however, they also demonstrated in more subtle fashion the Tourist’s candidature for membership of the British ruling caste. As Addison’s narrative moves from site to site, and from classical description to classical description, what is generally recognized in each case is the close correspondence between the landscape and the poetry. Thus when Addison visits Terni, some sixty years before Boswell, he too reads (and quotes) Virgil, and goes on to observe that the Roman poet ‘makes the sound of the Fury’s trumpet run up the Nera to the very sources of Velino, which agrees extremely well with the situations of these rivers’.³⁵ Such ‘agreements’ build up cumulatively over the course of Addison’s narrative, working ultimately to endorse both the ongoing validity of the wisdom gained from classical literature—a body of texts to which, as noted, only the elite had access at this period—and also the ability of the elite to see in nature not what is transitory, but what is permanent and enduring. And as John Barrell has shown, the ability to make such readings of landscape, and to demonstrate a ‘correct’ taste in connection with landscape, was a far from neutral activity in a culture whose political ³³ See Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994). ³⁴ Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle (eds.), Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France, 1765–1766 (London, 1955), 52. ³⁵ Joseph Addison, Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, in Miscellaneous Works II: Prose, ed. A. C. Guthkelch (London, 1914), 83–4.

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structures and discourses were overwhelmingly predicated on the ownership of land.³⁶ Alongside these courtly and classical agendas, the Addisonian Grand Tour retained—nominally, at least—an empirical agenda that had its origins in the New Science of the late seventeenth century. In keeping with various directives issued by the Royal Society shortly after its inception, Grand Tourists also saw it as their business to collect information and data that were both practically and intellectually useful to experts back home. Thus Addison, for example, takes care always to record the fortifications of the towns he visits. At the same time, this information-gathering agenda increasingly became somewhat ritualized, a mere form or pose rather than a real concern with experimental knowledge. Already in Addison, and certainly by the time of Boswell, the emphasis seems to fall very much on what are merely curiosities of natural phenomena—the length of time it takes a dog to suffocate in the poisonous fumes of the Grotto del Cani near Naples, for example—as opposed to data or observations that are of more genuine scientific interest. In this way, many Grand Tourists merely played at the business of empirical enquiry, conducting experiments in the dilettante spirit of the so-called ‘virtuoso’.³⁷ Combining these different agendas, the Grand Tour as a whole served as a rite of passage into the patriarchal elite of eighteenthcentury Britain. As Dr Johnson remarked, ‘a man who has never been to Italy is always conscious of an inferiority from not having seen what it is supposed a man should see’.³⁸ To make the Grand Tour was a conspicuous mark of privilege—yet at the same time, to comprehend the full range of Romantic responses to the Tour, one needs to recognize the extent to which it also involved powerful elements of subordination. As Dennis Porter puts it, the Tour functioned as ‘an instrument of social reproduction’: sons were trained to follow ³⁶ See John Barrell, ‘The Public Prospect and the Private View: The Politics of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Simon Pugh (ed.), Reading Landscape: country—city—capital (Manchester, 1990); Tim Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge, 1996). ³⁷ For an account of the figure of the ‘virtuoso’ scientific enquirer, see John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge, 1994), 58–61. ³⁸ James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford, 1980), 742.

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their fathers by being exposed to a ‘monumental patriarchal order’ embodied most emphatically in the remains of classical Rome.³⁹ In keeping with this agenda, the Grand Tour was a hugely prescriptive exercise. The Tourist followed a highly standardized route, a circuit of Europe that typically took in Paris, the major Italian cities as far south as Naples (with Rome of course the key destination), and the German principalities of the Rhine valley. Along this route, an equally standardized list of key sites was visited—and at each site, a highly conventionalized response was expected of the Tourist. Especially at those landmarks made famous by the classical authors, not only is the Addisonian Grand Tourist inspecting the landscape, but the Tourist himself is being inspected for the propriety of his response. He needs to know the appropriate Latin passages to cite (thereby demonstrating that ‘liberal education’); he needs to know, equally, how to show an appropriately ‘masculine’ restraint and decorum in registering his interest and pleasure.⁴⁰ In print, at least, the Grand Tourist’s persona is hugely self-effacing, his gentlemanly disdain for dwelling too much on the self thereby demonstrating again his ability to adopt the larger, less partial viewpoint—and so, by extension, further demonstrating his fitness to govern. John Chetwode Eustace’s Classical Tour through Italy is in many ways a bid to keep alive these Addisonian traditions in the Grand Tour, yet it has a fossilized feel about it. Eustace stands at many of the same sites as Addison and recites precisely the same Latin passages; he shows nature to be unchanging and the classical authors to have captured its essence; and he writes throughout in a style that largely eschews the first person and keeps the overt narratorial presence down to a minimum. Yet in the changed political circumstances of the 1800s—and also after the evolution in tour writing brought about by authors such as Smollett and Sterne—the project seems anachronistic and reactionary. A passage such as the following takes classicism and narratorial self-restraint to absurd lengths: O quis me gelidis sub vallibus Haemi Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra ³⁹ Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton, 1991), 35 and 140. ⁴⁰ On the importance of restraint in the Grand Tourist’s narratorial persona, see Batten, Pleasurable Instruction; Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity, 32; Chard, Pleasure and Guilt, 36.

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is a wish which often bursts from the lips of a traveller panting up the acclivities of the Apennines under the beams of the meridian sun.⁴¹

Eustace’s insistence on the immutability of the Italian landscape, meanwhile, is harnessed to a virulent attack on the French Revolution, and indeed, on pretty much all things French. This element in Eustace’s narrative seems to have especially rankled with Byron and Hobhouse when they toured Italy. In his Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold and in the footnotes he supplied for Childe Harold, Canto 4, itself, Hobhouse (and implicitly Byron) is disparaging of Eustace, lamenting his ‘Antigallican philippics’ and saying that he ‘appears never to have seen anything as it is’.⁴² Byron’s and Hobhouse’s reactions to Eustace bring us to the topic of Romantic responses to the Grand Tour more generally. For Wordsworth, it is perhaps the element of privilege that is most worthy of critique in the Grand Tour. His walking tour of 1790, which took him through France and across the Alps into Italy, traverses part of the route taken by the traditional Grand Tourist, but his mode of travel, pedestrianism, clearly distinguishes him from his fellow-travellers. As Wordsworth was to write in the prefatory letter to Descriptive Sketches (1793), the first poetic product of this formative Wordsworthian journey: how great is the difference between two companions lolling in a post-chaise, and two travellers plodding slowly along the road, side by side, each with his little knapsack of necessaries upon his shoulders. How much more of heart between the two latter!⁴³

In connection with this study’s main theme, moreover, we should note that it is the arduousness of the pedestrian journey, as conveyed by the verb ‘plodding’, that seems especially to rebuke those travelling in a post-chaise—with the word ‘lolling’ suggesting that the latter are pampered tourists, and hinting faintly, perhaps, at an aristocratic hauteur. Here and elsewhere, the Grand Tourist is often depicted as an enervated, somewhat effeminate traveller, rendered weak and lazy by excessive luxury: thus he (or increasingly, she) becomes a figure ⁴¹ J. C. Eustace, A Classical Tour through Italy, 2 vols. (London, 1813), ii. 12. ⁴² John Cam Hobhouse, BCPW ii. 263; Hobhouse, Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold (London, 1818), 240. ⁴³ Prefatory Letter to Descriptive Sketches, in WPW 8.

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who usefully counterpoints the manliness and vigour of the Romantic traveller’s activities. The traditional Grand Tour similarly provides both context and contrast to Byron’s first period of travelling, the tour of 1809 to 1811 which took the poet to the Iberian peninsula and the eastern Mediterranean—a journey as hugely formative for Byron’s poetic career as the 1790 tour was for Wordsworth. At the same time, Byron—unlike Wordsworth, an aristocratic rather than a middleclass traveller—plays against the Grand Tour in a very different way. His itinerary, which as one critic has it must be regarded not as a ‘Grand Tour’ but a ‘Grander Tour’, was dictated partly by circumstances: France and much of Italy were closed to Britons because of the war.⁴⁴ But it was also partly impelled by the desire to do something different from the norm. Thus Byron anticipated in 1807 that ‘I shall travel not over France & Italy the common Turnpike of coxcombs and virtuosos, but into Greece & Turkey in Europe, Russia & at which parts of our Globe, I have a singular propensity to investigate.’⁴⁵ Byron’s decision here seems to reflect a tendency amongst the more adventurous members of the traditional touring class, in the decades after 1760, to abandon the conventional Grand Tour route and to push further afield.⁴⁶ Motivating these travellers was a desire both to stay true to the empirical, exploratory dimension of the traditional Grand Tour—France and Italy by this date having been exhaustively described—and also to escape an activity that to the eyes of aristocrats and gentry was becoming increasingly déclassé. Thus the 1760s witnesses James Bruce seeking out classical remains not in Italy but in North Africa, and Boswell travelling to Corsica because he wishes ‘for something more than just the common course of what is called the tour of Europe’.⁴⁷ Joseph Banks, meanwhile, rejected the standard Tour: ‘every blockhead does that’, he wrote to

⁴⁴ Rosemary Bechler, ‘Lord Byron’s Grander Tour’, in Chloe Chard and Helen Langdon (eds.), Transports: Travel, Pleasure and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1800 (London, 1996). ⁴⁵ BLJ, Supplementary Volume, 4. ⁴⁶ See also Richard Hurd’s Dialogues on the Uses of Foreign Travel (London, 1764), which argues for the utility of travel but which also seems to regard ‘sauntring in the circle of grand Tour’ (25) as an exhausted exercise. ⁴⁷ Boswell, Italy, 156.

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friends.⁴⁸ Instead, he participated in Captain Cook’s first voyage: as he put it, ‘my Grand Tour shall be one round the whole globe’. From this period, also, British travellers began to visit Greece and the Near East in greater numbers. The extent of the tourism to this region was still limited, however: it was not without some justification that Byron talked of joining a select band of ‘Levant lunatics’.⁴⁹ The key formative journeys of both Wordsworth and Byron, then, must to some extent be considered in the context of the Grand Tour—even if only to measure the difference between the Wordsworthian and Byronic journeys and the more orthodox mode of tourism. Later in their careers, Wordsworth and Byron will make journeys still more closely entwined with the Grand Tour: Byron’s travelling on the continent in his ‘exile’ after 1816, and Wordsworth’s continental tour of 1820. But here too, as we shall see, efforts will be made by the Romantic traveller to cut a very different figure from the other tourists around him. And whilst Wordsworth and Byron react against the Grand Tour in significantly different ways that reflect their differing social backgrounds, in both cases an espousal of danger, discomfort, and difficulty in the travelling process is a crucial part of their attempt to be seen as different from the Grand Tourist. Wordsworth walks across the Alps, rather than travel by coach, whilst Byron travels firstly to a war zone (Spain and Portugal, where the Peninsular War was being waged), and ultimately to a country, Albania, that was all but unexplored by Western Europeans.⁵⁰ Not surprisingly, Byron was able to announce proudly at the end of his tour that ‘two years travel has tolerably seasoned me to privations’.⁵¹ Partly a rejection of a mode of travel that seems too easy and luxurious, the Romantic traveller’s antipathy to the Grand Tour was also, of course, a rejection of the muted responsiveness, and the excessively prescribed nature of the responses, enjoined on the Grand Tourist. Dissatisfaction with a certain rigidity of response also underpins the Romantic disdain for the picturesque tourist. Like ⁴⁸ Quoted in Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment, 61. ⁴⁹ BLJ i. 23. For the expansion, yet still distinctly limited nature, of travel to Greece, see David Constantine, Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal (Cambridge, 1984), especially 204; Hugh Tregaskis, Beyond the Grand Tour: The Levant Lunatics (London, 1979). ⁵⁰ For Byron’s sense of Albania as undiscovered territory, see BCPW ii. 192. ⁵¹ BLJ ii. 57.

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the Addisonian Grand Tour, the picturesque tourism popularized by figures such as William Gilpin is a highly prescriptive exercise, that similarly provides tourists with a set of templates to which they must fit their experience.⁵² If the Grand Tourist must learn to recognize, in the landscape of Italy, the poetic landscapes of Virgil and Horace, picturesque tourists were taught to seek, in actual landscapes, the ideal visual representation of that scene, according to a standard set by artists such as Claude and Poussin. Scenes which failed to live up to such models were to be adjusted on the sketch pad, or in the mind’s eye. Thus there was an aesthetic and expressive prescriptivism at the core of the picturesque project, and this prescriptivism was further accentuated by the infrastructure and gadgetry surrounding the picturesque boom. The guidebooks established the ‘stations’ on each picturesque route: these were the fixed stopping-points generally held to provide the best view of a landmark. To some antagonistic commentators (and possibly in actuality) all the tourist did was whizz between these ‘stations’, disregarding the actual process of travel and eschewing a more continuous engagement with the surrounding countryside (two points on which Romantic commentators picked issue with the picturesque tourist).⁵³ Once at these stations, moreover, the tourist might not actually face the prospect in question, but might somewhat paradoxically turn his back on it as he viewed it through a ‘Claude glass’, a convex mirror used to compose the natural scene more correctly. The picturesque tour has thus, in the eyes of some contemporaries, a programmatic aspect which both stopped the tourist from seeing nature as it really is, and protected him or her from the effects of a proper encounter. This ‘strong infection of the age’, as Wordsworth dubs it in The Prelude (11. 156), taught its practitioners to apply ‘rules of mimic art’ to ‘things above all art’ (11. 154–5). The stereotypical picturesque tourist deployed in formulaic fashion a vocabulary of ‘front-screens’ and ‘side-screens’, with little regard for the scene that was actually in front of him or her, to the chagrin of that fictional ⁵² The best account of picturesque tourism is Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape, Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Stanford, Calif., 1989). ⁵³ See, for example, Joseph Palmer, A Fortnight’s Ramble to the Lakes (London, 1792), pp. xii–xiii.

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Romantic, Marianne Dashwood, who laments in Sense and Sensibility that ‘admiration of landscape scenery is become a mere jargon’.⁵⁴ And by thus failing or refusing to register what is really there, the tourist arguably insulates him or herself from a truly rousing and challenging experience. In particular, Gilpin’s definitions of ‘correct’ taste in landscape, and of the rules which should properly govern the (re)composition of prospects, seem for the most part to resist the sublime as a source of legitimate pleasure. Although there are moments when Gilpin does seem to admire the sublime in nature, there is often simultaneously an ambivalence expressed by Gilpin about this source of aesthetic pleasure: he generally describes the sublime scene as being in contravention of the ‘correct’ rules of landscape composition.⁵⁵ In the practice of picturesque tourism more generally, meanwhile, the paraphernalia and the prescribed, programmatic aspects of the stereotypical tour were deemed to preclude a genuinely sublime encounter. These aesthetic and philosophical considerations are at the core of the Romantic discontent with the picturesque project (especially for Wordsworth and Coleridge), but there is also a socio-political dimension to Romantic and other contemporary complaints against the picturesque. Here it is worth noting the peculiarly precarious position of picturesque tourism, in relation to other practices connected with the picturesque, such as the landscape gardening one associates with Uvedale Price, Richard Payne Knight, and Humphrey Repton. To reshape one’s estate according to picturesque criteria requires, of course, that one has an estate: it is necessarily a taste, and a fashion, for the landowning class. To tour and pass picturesque judgements on other people’s estates, however, is a much cheaper activity, available to a much larger segment of society. Gilpin is in a sense trying to widen the cultural franchise in late eighteenth-century British society, establishing in picturesque tourism a means by which the middle classes can both acquire and demonstrate taste in connection with landscape (as noted already, a taste that is of immense cultural significance in this era, and that subtly makes a case for the tourist’s full membership of ⁵⁴ Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811; Harmondsworth, 1988), 122. ⁵⁵ See, for example, Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty … On Several Parts of England, Particularly the Mountains, and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland, 2 vols. (London, 1786), i. 122.

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the governing caste). But this aspect of picturesque tourism brought it under attack from a number of different directions. Aristocrats and landed gentry, ideologues of agricultural improvement, and young radicals such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, could all equally bemoan the fact that picturesque tourism seemingly encouraged an attitude to the countryside that was excessively aestheticized, and well-nigh consumerist.⁵⁶ Their critiques were also often subtly gendered: an emphasis wholly on aesthetic considerations in evaluating landscape, and in travelling more generally, could seem, in some quarters, a rather unmanly, even effeminate, exercise, lacking in an appropriate masculine seriousness.⁵⁷ As is the case with the Grand Tour, then, the Romantic rejection of picturesque tourism has several dimensions. At issue at different times from different Romantic commentators are the superficiality and prescriptiveness of the picturesque response; its evasion or adulteration of the truly sublime; its commodification of landscape; and its myopia as regards the larger moral and political contexts to rural life. Also running through the Romantic traveller’s antipicturesque agenda, of course, is the simple need to distinguish his own practices from those of other contemporary travellers. For the Romantic traveller is typically just as interested in the aesthetic appreciation of landscape as the picturesque tourist: in styling himself in opposition to the dominant mode of viewing the countryside, however, he implicitly proclaims the superiority of his own interaction with, and understanding of, nature. Prominent amongst these picturesque tourists, it must also be noted, was another class of tourist who provoked much contemporary comment: the female traveller. As I suggested at the close of the last section, the upsurge in female tourism, and in the writing of tour narratives by women, is another context in which we must place many of the Romantic self-dramatizations that will figure in the course of this study. Many of the personae and styles of travel adopted by the Romantic traveller seem designed to establish a distance between himself and the growing number of female tourists. Unlike the Romantic rejection of Grand and picturesque tourism, this Romantic antagonism or anxiety is not manifest in any specific or precisely ⁵⁶ See Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority, 141–3. ⁵⁷ See Jarvis, Romantic Writing, 60–1.

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focused critique of the figure of the female tourist: for one thing, contemporary codes of chivalric gallantry did not allow the targeting of individual female travellers and travel writers in the way that Gilpin and Eustace could be targeted. But in the pronouncements of male Romantic figures on female travellers, there is often a tone that is faintly—and sometimes not so faintly—dismissive. Thus Byron lambastes the female traveller who was able to fall asleep in her carriage whilst being driven through the Alps (‘fast asleep in the most anti-narcotic spot in the world—excellent’), and goes on to recall how at Chamounix, ‘in the very eyes of Mont Blanc’, he heard Another woman—English also—exclaim to her party—‘did you ever see anything more rural’—as if it was Highgate or Hampstead.—‘Rural’ quotha!—Rocks—pines—torrents—Glaciers—Clouds—and Summits of eternal snow far above them—and ‘Rural!’⁵⁸

More subtly, Wordsworth describes in his letters an episode during a tour of North Wales in 1825, during which both he and his daughter sought to record the mountainous terrain around them. The result of Wordsworth’s labours was a Sonnet, which I poured out in the chasm there, during a heavy storm, while Dora was at my side endeavouring to sketch the body of the place, leaving, poor Girl! the soul of it to her Father.⁵⁹

It is principally a superiority of medium or genre—poetry conveys the ‘soul’ of a place whilst a sketch can only deal in superficialities—that is expressed in the latter passage. Yet one may also legitimately infer, I think, a hierarchy in Wordsworth’s mind as to different sorts of traveller and travel response. Putting Byron’s and Wordsworth’s comments together, moreover, one detects an implicit equation, in the minds of some male Romantic travellers, between picturesque tourism, with its superficial responsiveness, and the figure of the female tourist. To the male traveller, meanwhile, is ascribed a more penetrating gaze, and more profound response. Possibly this is reading too much into the last incident. But it is undoubtedly the case that the Romantic traveller frequently espoused travel ventures, and travel personae, that were culturally impossible for almost all women at this period. An exception here, of course, is ⁵⁸ BLJ v. 97.

⁵⁹ W Letters, III. ii. 297.

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Dorothy Wordsworth, who was almost as vigorous a pedestrian as her brother and who was rightly proud of her reputation, amongst her social circle, for being ‘one of the best travellers of my Sex’.⁶⁰ Yet Dorothy was very aware that she was unusual for her sex, and had to counter charges from friends that her activities were inappropriate for a woman.⁶¹ And as she constructs herself—and is constructed—as a traveller within the Wordsworth circle there is clearly a deference towards William’s superiority as traveller, both physically and responsively. Take, for example, an incident that occurs during the ‘most grand ascent’ of a peak in the Lake District in 1812. As Dorothy recalled events: when we had clamb to a considerable height, just above Dove Crag, I unfortunately turned my head round; became giddy and trembled; and if anything had happened to my Brother so as to disable him from assisting me by following close to me and taking hold of me, I must have perished—at least so I believe. At the top of the Mountain we had the noblest prospect I ever beheld, and when the fear was passed, I felt very glad that we gone by the road; though I should not be willing to take it again.⁶²

Similar moments of giddiness—and related to them the frequent assertion of William’s greater fitness and courage as a traveller—can be found elsewhere in Dorothy’s correspondence, along with other moments of panic and anxiety in relation to travel: fear at the possibility of having to spend the night outside, for example.⁶³ Clearly, there were pressures and anxieties attendant on being a female traveller that were not faced by male travellers; equally clearly, however, there seems to have been a conviction in Dorothy’s mind that the female traveller was limited not just by cultural conventions, but also by the intrinsic limitations of her gender. The very boast just cited, it should be noted, carries a qualification: ‘of my Sex’. The male Romantic traveller recognized no such limitations, and typically ⁶⁰ W Letters, III. i. 32. ⁶¹ See, for example, a letter to Lady Beaumont defending her walking, in W Letters, I. 117. On the difficulties women faced in travelling as freely as men, see Stephen Hunt, ‘Wandering Lonely: Women’s Access to the English Romantic Countryside’, in John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington (eds.), Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism (Salt Lake City, 2000). ⁶² W Letters, II. ii. 36. ⁶³ See W Letters, I. 447–8; II. ii. 36.

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espoused adventures, and misadventures, not feasible for the female traveller. The Romantic traveller, then, seeks to travel, and to present himself in travel writing, in a fashion that clearly distinguishes him from such antithetical figures as the Grand, the picturesque, and the female tourist. He typically claims an independence in his travelling, and an ability to get off the ‘beaten track’ pursued by other tourists; discomfort, suffering, and danger are often the necessary cost of this independence; and as we shall see, an intensity of experience, a profundity and originality of insight, are usually deemed to be its reward. Tightly interwoven with this rhetoric of Romantic travel is the belief that the true traveller travels in a way that is unscripted, that his itinerary, attitudes, and responses are not previously mapped out by a ‘Manual’ such as that adopted by Byron’s Starke travellers and Eustace travellers, and that he thus escapes the net of predetermining influences to achieve authenticity and originality. It is the contention of this study, however, that in many ways the Romantic traveller is best understood as substituting for more obviously touristic manuals an alternative set of manuals or travel scripts. And it is to these alternative travel scripts, and the models after which the Romantic traveller typically seeks to style himself, that I now turn.

2 Misadventurers I: Existential Themes My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown. Such visions and desires—for they amounted to desires— … I regarded … as prophetic glimpses of a destiny which I felt myself in a measure bound to fulfill. Edgar Allan Poe¹

Among the passengers of the Townshend packet, en voyage from Gibraltar to Malta in 1809, the young Lord Byron cut a distinctive, solitary figure. As one fellow passenger, John Galt, later recalled: Byron held himself aloof, and sat on the rail, leaning on the mizzen shrouds, inhaling, as it were, poetical sympathy from the gloomy rock, then dark and stern in the twilight. There was all about him that evening, much waywardness … Sitting amid the shrouds and rattlings, in the tranquillity of the moonlight, churning an inarticulate melody, he seemed almost apparitional, suggesting dim reminiscences of him who shot the albatross.²

For Galt, it seems, one famous Romantic traveller morphs eerily into another, as the real, flesh-and-blood Lord Byron takes on the persona of that fictive voyager, the Ancient Mariner. A fanciful comparison, perhaps, but it would probably have delighted Byron himself. Quite possibly, indeed, it was the very impression that this most actorly of poets was hoping to create as he struck his brooding poses on the ¹ Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838; Harmondsworth, 1975), 57. ² Quoted in Bernard Blackstone, Byron: A Survey (London, 1975), 81.

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deck of the Townshend. For in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the poetic travelogue born from these travel experiences—and written during these travels—Coleridge’s ill-fated voyager is quickly established as an important informing presence for ‘Harold’, the fictive Byronic persona who both is and is not Byron himself. As he quits his homeland, and sets sail across the English Channel, Byron has Harold sing (mournfully? or rather proudly?): ‘And now I’m in the world alone, | Upon the wide, wide sea.’³ This repeats the situation, and syntax, of the Mariner, who at the nadir of his ordeal found himself ‘Alone, alone, all all alone, | Alone on a wide, wide Sea’.⁴ Harold begins his journey, it seems, in a situation or condition somehow analogous to the bleakest stage of the Mariner’s voyage. And if Harold thus launches himself on the world as a traveller in the mould of the Ancient Mariner, so too, to some extent, does Byron, Childe Harold being a highly autobiographical poem in which we are frequently invited to see the protagonist as just a mask or persona adopted by the poet. Byron’s identification with the Ancient Mariner offers us a revealing insight into the spirit in which Byron undertook his first great period of voyaging and travelling, and more precisely, into the selfdramatization Byron sought to effect through travel, and the role he saw for himself qua traveller. Clearly, Byron had no desire to play the part merely of a tourist. Instead, he cast himself in a role that resonated powerfully in the Romantic imagination: that of the hapless voyager profoundly marked, transformed even, by a terrifying ordeal at sea. This was a figure that fascinated a great many writers of the age. And like Byron, many of these writers—especially those whom we now class as ‘Romantic’—were not interested simply in recounting tales of such unfortunates, they also felt a more profound identification with them. Some applied the persona metaphorically to themselves, and imaged themselves in their writing as suffering seafarers, shipwreck victims, and the like: Shelley in Adonais, for example. And some sought to translate these tropes into actuality, and to enact for real (or at least, to risk enacting) a variety of maritime misadventures. As we have seen, such interests led Shelley eventually to his death, and for Byron too the maritime experiences he so eagerly ³ Canto 1, ll. 182–3, in BCPW ii. ⁴ ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798 version), ll. 232–3, in CCP.

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sought out encompassed their share of dangers and discomforts (near shipwreck off the coast of Greece, for example).⁵ In time, accordingly, Byron could adopt with some credibility the role he projects for himself at the start of Childe Harold. His sufferings may not have been as extreme as those of the Ancient Mariner, but by the end of his travelling between 1809 and 1811 he could fairly claim to have tasted something of the risks and pains that could befall Romantic-era voyagers. But why cast oneself voluntarily in this role? What precisely was the fascination, and the appeal, of the suffering mariner whose voyage was chiefly a matter of cruel misadventures and horrifying torments? In the parlance of this study, what script underwrote such Romantic selfdramatizations? To gauge the associations and expectations pertaining in the Romantic period to the figure of the suffering mariner, and accordingly the script that might play out in a Romantic traveller’s mind as he contemplated a dangerous or uncomfortable voyage, this chapter will survey some of the very many accounts of suffering at sea that were known to Romantic readers. This was an extensive literature indeed. Seafaring in an age of sail being intrinsically a dangerous undertaking, the voyage narratives that were so eagerly consumed in this era often had to report a range of misadventures and travails, some relatively inconsequential, others disastrous. Whether they were browsing the early modern voyage narratives assembled by Hakluyt and Purchas, or one of the many early eighteenth-century privateering narratives, or from later in the century a narrative of circumnavigation and maritime exploration, Romantic readers would have absorbed many descriptions of shipwreck, famine, disease, fire, and the other misfortunes that could befall a ship and its crew. So frequent were such maritime disasters, indeed, that they had given rise to a distinct subgenre within the larger genre of Voyages and Travels, in the form of the shipwreck narrative (a loose term that in fact embraces a range of predicaments at sea, although shipwreck was by far the most common disaster reported). This was a hugely popular branch of travel writing in the Romantic era, one indication of its widespread appeal being the appearance, from the first decades of the nineteenth century, of several multi-volume anthologies of ⁵ See BLJ i. 229.

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this material. Thus there appeared between 1804 and 1808 Archibald Duncan’s The Mariner’s Chronicle, Being a Collection of Narratives of Shipwrecks, Fires, Famines, and Other Calamities Incident to a Life of Maritime Enterprise (6 vols.), to be followed in 1805 by J. S. Clarke’s Naufragia: or Historical Memoirs of Shipwrecks and of the Providential Deliverance of Vessels (2 vols., although 4 were originally intended), in 1812 by J. G. Dalyell’s Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea (3 vols.), and thereafter by a succession of similar publications. Some possible explanations for the appearance of these compilations in the 1800s and 1810s will be offered in due course; for now, however, we need note only that there were evidently many Romanticera readers steeped in accounts of shipwreck, and well versed in the various situations and scenarios that these disasters could involve. Most Romantic writers and travellers are to be included amongst these well-versed—or as one might put it, ‘generically aware’—readers of accounts of maritime misadventure. Coleridge’s familiarity with this material is of course attested by The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a remarkable distillation not simply of Coleridge’s vast reading in voyage narratives, but more specifically of his knowledge of the horrors that could occur in the course of such voyages.⁶ There is no shipwreck as such in The Ancient Mariner, although wrecks figure prominently in two of the poem’s most important sources, George Shelvocke’s Voyage Round the World by Way of the South Sea (1726) and John Newton’s Authentic Narrative (1764).⁷ But the poem’s harrowing images of hunger and thirst, and of a crew reduced to little more than skeletons, are clearly indebted to the huge contemporary literature of maritime misadventure and disaster: they reprise scenes and situations that are staple elements in almost all variants of ‘shipwreck’ narrative. Byron, meanwhile, was well acquainted not only with The Ancient Mariner, but also with the source material from which Coleridge assembled his poem. He had a family connection with this subgenre of travel writing: his grandfather John Byron survived one of the most notorious naval disasters of the ⁶ For an exhaustive account of Coleridge’s reading in this genre, see John Livingstone Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, 2nd edn. (London, 1951). ⁷ For the connection between John Newton and the Mariner, see Bernard Martin, The Ancient Mariner and the Authentic Narrative (London, 1949).

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eighteenth century, the wreck of the Wager in 1741, and later in life published an account of his ordeal. This ‘inheritance of storms’ from his grandfather engendered a childhood passion for accounts of shipwreck that survived into adulthood, finding its most notorious expression in the shipwreck episode in Don Juan, Canto 2.⁸ Here Byron inflicts upon his protagonist sufferings ‘comparative | To those related in my grand-dad’s narrative’ (Don Juan, 2. 1095–6), whilst also drawing extensively on his wider reading in shipwreck literature, in collections such as Dalyell’s Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea. Ranging through this literature, readers such as Coleridge and Byron would have found that there are predicaments that recur frequently in the course of disastrous voyages, and that accordingly give rise to various stock situations in this literature—situations that effectively become, for the reader of these accounts, commonplaces or topoi of the genre. Alongside these recurring topoi in shipwreck accounts, moreover, Romantic-era readers also encountered a degree of consistency and coherence in the way these situations are rendered, in the stylistic and moral formulae applied to them, and in the way they are discussed and explicated by writers. There are, in short, certain rhetorical and interpretative conventions apparent in the accounts of maritime misadventure available in the Romantic period. These conventions, we can assume, informed significantly the way that Romantic-era readers conceptualized and understood what it meant to undergo a disastrous voyage, and to take up the role of suffering mariner. The present chapter will accordingly explore the associations, born of these conventions, that Romantic writers and travellers brought to bear on the figure of the suffering traveller, especially as these relate to theological and philosophical concerns circulating around this figure in this period. The next chapter, meanwhile, will explore how the travails of suffering voyagers could also have a highly politicized aspect in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and so will suggest that there were also political stimuli to the Romantic re-enactment of these sufferings. Many of the rhetorical and interpretative conventions attendant on accounts of maritime misadventure are also to be found, mutatis mutandis, in any form of Romantic-era travel writing that relates ⁸ ‘Epistle to Augusta’, l. 17, in BCPW.

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the ordeal of some unfortunate traveller. For example, it was still very common, in all accounts of misadventure in this period, for writers to try to find some means of explicating all such sufferings Providentially: that is to say, to find evidence of the guiding hand of God in the midst of the traveller’s travails, and thus to offer a consoling sense of there being some larger purpose or justice inherent in the disaster. And this explicatory framework, which typically entailed the use of a well-established repertoire of stylistic features (such as repeated Scriptural allusion) and narrative forms (such as spiritual autobiography), was just as frequently put around the disasters, mishaps, and discomforts endured by travellers in terrestrial settings, as around maritime misadventures. So whilst it is on the specific figure of the maritime misadventurer, the distressed mariner, that I focus in this chapter, I also intend my discussion to shed light on some of the expectations and associations that Romantic travellers more generally brought to bear on notions of misadventure and suffering in travel.

T H E L I T E RAT U R E O F S H I P W R E C K A N D M A R I T I M E M I S A DV E N T U R E : A N OV E RV I EW Romantic readers, then, were highly familiar with accounts of disaster and extreme suffering at sea. Their images and expectations of such maritime misadventures would have been formed both by fictional, literary works—Shakespeare’s Tempest, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Falconer’s The Shipwreck (1762), Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788), and so forth—and also by the very many factual accounts circulating in Romantic-era culture (and for the reasons discussed in my introduction, it is the influence of the latter that I am especially concerned to trace in this study). The shipwreck narrative, it must be stressed, was a publisher’s and bookseller’s staple across the long eighteenth century, being hugely popular at all levels of print culture. It was a subgenre of contemporary Voyages and Travels that encompassed a great variety of different forms and publications. At one end of the spectrum there were innumerable cheap pamphlets, pocket-books, and broadsides, some just giving the bare facts of a recent wreck, others far more sensationalistic in tone. Dating from the mid-1820s, for example, is

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a broadside entitled ‘The Dreadful Shipwreck of the Francis Mary’; priced at twopence, and illustrated with a crude woodcut, it recounts with relish how the survivors of this wreck, among them several women, had to resort to cannibalism to stay alive.⁹ As this will suggest, this was a genre that at one level, or in some forms, seems to have functioned as a sort of horror literature of the day. Yet it was also a genre taken up by many writers and readers for a variety of much more respectable or worthy reasons: to present/discover the facts of a recent major disaster, to gain a sentimental and moral education as one was moved by the sufferings of others, and even, in some cases, to gain a spiritual or religious education as one sought to trace the workings of divine Providence in the midst of human tragedy. Accounts of shipwreck were accordingly produced in less ephemeral forms than the broadside or pamphlet: those interested in this topic could also purchase well-produced, comparatively expensive booklength accounts such as George Carter’s Narrative of the Wreck of the Grosvenor East India-Man (1791), not to mention the multi-volume, mini-libraries of shipwreck literature produced by Duncan, Dalyell, and others. Compilations such as Duncan’s and Dalyell’s were replicated at a lower level of print culture by publications such as Thomas Tegg’s much cheaper 27-part pamphlet series. This came out between 1805 and 1810; each pamphlet recounted, and illustrated with an aquatint, a major shipwreck of the day, and if there was space the main narrative was supplemented with shorter anecdotes about other distressing maritime events. The scale of these collections give some suggestion of the wealth of shipwreck-related material available to readers in this period: Dalyell’s three-volume compilation, for example, contains some 100 accounts of maritime suffering. And such large-scale collections, it should be noted, only include a fraction of the shipwreck literature circulating in Romantic-era culture: typically they do not claim to be exhaustive surveys of the field, but just selections of the most interesting accounts. They also usually give only one account of each wreck, when in fact it was frequently the case that a major maritime disaster gave rise to a plethora of different ⁹ This is just one of a number of shipwreck-related broadsides preserved at the St Bride Printing Library in London. My thanks to Tim Fulford for bringing this archive to my attention.

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narratives. Thus when the Halsewell was lost off the coast of Dorset in 1786, with the loss of 160 lives, there appeared within the year A Circumstantial Account of the Loss of the Halsewell (East-Indiaman), A True and Particular Account of the Loss of the Halsewell (EastIndiaman), and An Interesting and Authentic Account of the Loss of the Halsewell, to be followed in due course by the more condensed accounts of the disaster that are to be found in Duncan, Dalyell, Tegg, and most of the other contemporary collections of shipwreck literature. The mishaps, misadventures, and ordeals recorded in this voluminous literature were many and various, and took place on well-nigh every sea and ocean of the world. If some of the most famous (or notorious) disasters occurred in locations that seemed to British eyes remote and dangerous—the wreck of the Wager in the South Pacific in 1740, for example, or the wreck of the Grosvenor off the coast of East Africa in 1782—so too were there equally disastrous shipwrecks much closer to home: the Halsewell, as we have seen, and twenty years later, in 1805, the Abergavenny, wrecked only a few miles from the scene of the Halsewell disaster, and with the loss of some 250 men, amongst them Wordsworth’s brother John. Yet if the literature of shipwreck thus depicted a great many different sorts of disaster, occurring in many different locations, there is nevertheless a remarkable consistency to these accounts. Surveying the narratives contained in collections like Dalyell’s and Duncan’s, one finds again and again broadly similar dramas unfolding, and more or less the same sequence of horrifying scenarios. What is more, one also comes away with a sense that the writers and readers of shipwreck narratives—and to some extent, presumably, also the participants in a wreck—carried in their heads a very clear story as to how such disasters were likely to unfold, or how at least events might unfold, if everything turned out for the worst. As George Landow has noticed, it often seems as if some sort of ‘hypothetical master narrative’ underpins each individual eighteenth-century shipwreck narrative.¹⁰ This master narrative was not just empirically derived; it was also a product of some of the rhetorical and interpretative conventions traditionally associated with shipwreck literature, and to this extent it can be considered as ¹⁰ George P. Landow, Images of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present (London, 1982), 38.

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much a potent myth of the age as an accurate account of what was actually likely to happen in a wreck. It is a master narrative, moreover, that also significantly informs the accounts of many voyages that do not end disastrously, but that only run briefly into danger or mishap: one may consider it a set of conventions and associations that is activated in this period whenever misadventures occur at sea. And so one may consider it a key part of the script that most Romantic travellers would have had in mind when they envisaged themselves, with varying degrees of literality, playing out the role of maritime misadventurer. An approximation of the Romantic-era master narrative of shipwreck (and equally, a summary of many key scenarios that did undoubtedly take place in the aftermath of a wreck) might run as follows. Firstly, we have the disaster itself. As noted earlier, this is not necessarily a shipwreck—fire, famine, and mutiny are all variant forms of maritime mishap found in the accounts assembled by Duncan, Clarke, and Dalyell—but shipwreck is by far the most common disaster described, in passages that usually convey powerfully a scene of frenzied action and unleashed energy, an adrenalin-rush of natural and also, not infrequently, human violence. Typically they relate the storm, the desperate attempts to save the vessel, and more often than not, scenes of panic, delirium, and despair that erupt when disaster seems unavoidable. One commonplace is for a group of sailors to break open the stores and start drinking themselves into oblivion; another is for some of the crew to go mad and for riot to erupt on the ship. Yet such nightmarish scenes are usually just the beginning of the ordeal endured by the unlucky protagonists of these narratives. In most shipwreck narratives, what one might label the disaster-phase gives way to an aftermath-phase that is often more horrifying than the wreck itself. The survivors may find themselves drifting on the ruined hulk of the ship, on a raft, or in an open boat; they may find themselves on a desert island or remote coast; not infrequently, they find themselves attacked, even enslaved, by locals (and in this way the shipwreck narrative often blurs into that other subgenre of Voyages and Travels that specialized in recounting the sufferings of travellers, the captivity narrative). Thus it is not unusual for the greater part of a shipwreck narrative to have a terrestrial rather than maritime setting. But whatever the precise context, we typically find in this

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aftermath-phase harrowing scenes of hunger, thirst, and physical deterioration. The self-control exercised by mind over body begins to give way, as the survivors start to wolf down anything even vaguely edible: seal blubber, lichen, even boot leather. Bodies become emaciated and skeletal, and as the survivors begin to decline physically, so too do the less tangible structures that make us human start to fall apart. Acts of insubordination and sometimes outright mutiny occur, in some cases the crew splinters into different factions, and in the most extreme cases there are eruptions of anarchic violence and murder. The ne plus ultra of horror, in this literature, is cannibalism. In this last, desperate act of survival, the two processes described above, the collapse of the fully human self and the collapse of group loyalties and social cohesiveness, seem to come together. Sometimes survivors are driven to consume the bodies of dead crewmates. On other occasions, and more horrifyingly, they draw lots so as to select one of their number to be killed to provide the others with sustenance. And just occasionally in these narratives, there are allegations of individuals or groups simply murdering some unfortunate victim so as to eat him, without going through the legitimizing ritual of lot-drawing. That said, it would appear from the material gathered in collections like Dalyell’s and Duncan’s that cannibalism in any form was a very rare event in the aftermath of shipwreck, and there are only a few narratives in which it actually occurs. What these compendia also illustrate, however, is that well-nigh all shipwreck victims, and all writers and readers of shipwreck narratives, were haunted by the possibility that acts of cannibalism might be required for survival. Again and again, it is a topic broached in these narratives, as the survivors contemplate the fact that at some stage they might be driven to this last extreme. For John Newton, for example, it was a potential horror that loomed as his wrecked ship drifted in the seas north of Ireland. As supplies dwindled, the hunger pangs of Newton and his shipmates became severe, yet as Newton recalls, ‘our sufferings were light in comparison of our just fears; we could not afford this bare allowance much longer, but had a terrible prospect of being either starved to death, or reduced to feed upon one another.’¹¹ ¹¹ [John Newton], An Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of ∗∗∗∗∗ (London, 1764), 102.

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Here and elsewhere in accounts of shipwreck, this ‘terrible prospect’ bespeaks what is almost a generic self-awareness on the part of the misadventurers, a panic-stricken recognition of the sort of travel narrative that is taking shape around them. It is at such moments that the ‘hypothetical master narrative’ identified by Landow informs the actual experience of shipwreck victims, even if all their efforts are then spent trying to resist following this archetypal template. Knowledge of this template also informed the writing and reading of these accounts, as both writers and readers measured the actual events that followed each disaster against the more mythic course of events. William Mackay, for example, feels he has to put in a few words to explain why the famine-stricken survivors of the wreck of the Juno in 1795 did not resort to gnawing leather, a customary stage in the descent into abjection in this literature.¹² And when John Hawkesworth produced his account of Cook’s first voyage from the journals of the leading members of the expedition, he expanded a detail in one of these journals in a revealing fashion. Recounting a moment of danger on board the Endeavour, Joseph Banks had written that all involved ‘well knew that our boats were not capable of carrying us all ashore, so that some, probably most of us, must be drowned’.¹³ Hawkesworth’s version, however, ran as follows: We well knew that our boats were not capable of carrying us all on shore, and that when the dreadful crisis should arrive, as all command and subordination would be at an end, a contest for the preference would probably ensue, that would increase the horrors even of shipwreck, and terminate in the destruction of us all by the hands of each other.¹⁴

This lurid expansion of Banks’s journal entry reveals the train of associations easily triggered in the Romantic era by the suggestion of maritime misadventure and disaster—associations and expectations that were bred by a general familiarity with that matrix of broadsides, pamphlets, books, and anthologies outlined above. ¹² William Mackay, Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno (London, 1798), 17. ¹³ Joseph Banks, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768–71, 2 vols., ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Sydney, 1962), ii. 79. ¹⁴ John Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages Undertaken … by Commodore Byron, Captain Wallis, Captain Carteret, and Captain Cook, 3 vols. (London, 1773), iii. 144.

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It will be clear that this matrix of texts—the literature of maritime misadventure, as I am labelling it—for the most part depicted shipwreck in a manner markedly different from the treatments of this theme customarily found in high literary forms such as romance. If romances typically drew a discreet veil over the more dreadful scenes that could occur at sea, the tone in most of the material assembled in collections like Duncan’s and Dalyell’s is very much one of grim realism, bordering on an outright relish for the more macabre details. As noted already, shipwreck literature—or a significant proportion of it at least—seems to have served at one level in this period as a popular form of horror literature, notwithstanding the claims of some writers of these accounts to be providing their readers with important information and edification. Given this context, it is perhaps not surprising that shipwreck and maritime disaster often seems to function at this date as a signifier of the utmost in human suffering. Adam Smith uses it as a reference point in this way at several junctures in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), whilst when Shelley in Prometheus Unbound wants his hero threatened with the cruellest sort of torment, his imagination lights upon those Furies who ‘close upon Shipwreck and Famine’s track | Sit chattering with joy on the foodless wreck’.¹⁵ Such associations and expectations also go some way in explaining the resonance of the role of maritime misadventurer or shipwreck victim to the Romantic traveller, and the script unfolding in his mind as he projected himself, literally or metaphorically, in this persona. To a greater extent than we might realize today, to cut this figure as a traveller was to claim to have been through some of the most harrowing experiences imaginable in the Romantic period. It was to suggest that one had undergone, or was prepared to risk, what many contemporaries regarded as the most extreme test of character and courage, self-discipline and resolve—a test from which one implicitly emerged with a more profound (although possibly more dreadful) knowledge both of one’s own conduct under pressure, and also of the conduct of one’s fellow human beings. At issue here was not just a claim, or aspiration, as to one’s personal courage and endurance, although we can assume that for many who played out this role ¹⁵ See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonsson (Cambridge, 2002), 33, 39, 332; Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, Act I, ll. 501–2, in SPP.

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the fantasy was one in which they resisted heroically the slide into ill-discipline, abjection, and cannibalism. Just as important was the existential authority seemingly conferred by the scenarios generally associated with shipwreck and maritime misadventure, the sense that the hapless victim had seen something of life in its most elemental and brutal form, and in the process laid bare the most essential core of his own selfhood. And as we shall now see, this sense of acquiring through shipwreck and misadventure at sea a profound insight into the fundamental nature of existence, and into the true workings of the world and the self, was further reinforced by the representational conventions, and the explicatory frameworks, often found in shipwreck literature in this period.

G O D’ S P LOTS : T H E P ROV I D E N T I A L M I S A DV E N T U R E R They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep. Psalm 107: 23–4

The right way to goe unto heaven, is to saile by hell. William Perkins¹⁶

If there is a preoccupation with the sufferings of travellers in much travel writing of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, this preoccupation is not just a consequence of the fact that travel in early modern times was generally an uncomfortable and dangerous business. It also reflects an agenda in the reading and writing of travel writing, and a set of assumptions about the genre, very different from our own. In medieval and early modern times, Voyages and Travels was not just a genre that one went to for facts about foreign regions, or for exciting tales of adventure or misadventure: it also had a strongly religious dimension. This was especially the case ¹⁶ Quoted in John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford, 1991), 457.

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with those travelogues that made the misadventures of the traveller a prominent, even pre-eminent, point of focus. It was customary in all such misadventurous narratives to invoke Providence at some point, and to thank God for one’s ‘remarkable deliverance’ or ‘Providential escape’ from some greater or lesser degree of disaster. In a great many narratives of this sort, moreover, it is clear that the account is produced expressly so that the writer can demonstrate the complex workings of Providence, as revealed in the events of his or her own life. The emergence of both the shipwreck narrative and the captivity narrative as distinct subgenres within Voyages and Travels is very much bound up with this religious or theological agenda in travel writing: as we shall shortly see, in relation to shipwreck narrative at least, these were two literary forms that appealed powerfully to the Puritan and Dissenting imagination in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the assumption that travel writing, and especially disastrous or misadventurous travel writing, could be a source of spiritual instruction, providing evidences of Providence, moments of apparent salvation, redemption, and the like, was not limited to readers of a Puritan or Dissenting disposition. Readers of all denominations often expected to find some sort of reference to Providence in these accounts—partly, in the case of major disasters at least, to help them make sense of how such tragedies could take place at all, in a world that was supposedly Providentially ordered by God. And conversely, there was for all readers in this period a strong association between the narrative of misadventure and Providentialist frameworks of commentary and explication. These Providentialist frameworks of explication came in a variety of forms, some more sophisticated than others, and gave rise to a variety of conventions and commonplaces in the rendering of these accounts. Like the standard topoi of the ur-narrative of shipwreck discussed in the last section, these conventions and commonplaces would have been well known to Romantic readers, and so must be considered a further element in the web of expectations and associations that in effect scripted misadventure for the Romantic traveller. The present section will accordingly survey the diverse forms and conventions of Providentialism as they appear in accounts specifically of maritime misadventure, before considering the influence they may have had on Romantic attitudes and practices vis-à-vis travel.

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At its simplest, the Providential narrative of maritime misadventure is well exemplified by a collection that stands as the generic precursor to the collections of shipwreck narrative produced by Duncan, Clarke, and Dalyell. In the late seventeenth century, James Janeway assembled twenty-seven accounts of shipwreck, which were published after his death as Mr James Janeway’s Legacy to His Friends: Containing Twenty-Seven Instances of God’s Providence, in and about Sea Dangers and Deliverances (1675)—apparently the first collection of maritime disaster material to appear in Britain, and seemingly the only such collection before Duncan’s Mariner’s Chronicle in 1804.¹⁷ As Janeway’s title suggests, all the incidents related are made to serve a homiletic function, and the volume also contains a sermon on the theme of shipwreck, by John Ryther, that is as long as all the stories combined. The accounts themselves are short, simple, and quite naïve in style. They show repeatedly a ship, or crew, or individual, being saved from disaster in ways that are supposedly explicable in terms of God’s direct intervention on their behalf. Each thus purports to demonstrate an act of Special Providence, in which God temporarily lays aside the usual laws of his creation (laws framed according to his General Providence) in order to rescue a favoured few. The Providential logic underpinning who gets to be saved is sometimes obscure, but the general impression conveyed is that the good and the Godly—for example, the man who clutched the New Testament to his breast all through his ordeal—survive, whilst the less pious perish. A key stylistic feature of Janeway’s accounts—and something that will be found in a great many other Providential shipwreck narratives, especially of the cruder sort—is an abundance of Scriptural allusions. And if Janeway looks so frequently to Scripture, it is not just because he assumes that the Bible is always a useful source of commentary on the dreadful events that can befall men and women; it is also because he is possessed, and assumes his readers are possessed, of a highly typological outlook, and a typological practice of interpretation (typology here being understood in the biblical as opposed to biological sense). He expects of his readers an understanding that the ¹⁷ See Keith Huntress, A Checklist of Narratives of Shipwrecks and Disasters (Ames, Ia., 1974), 222. Also Michael Harris, ‘Shipwrecks in Print; Representations of Maritime Disaster in the late Seventeenth Century’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), Journeys Through the Market Place: Travel, Travellers and the Book Trade (Folkestone, 1999).

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experiences described at some level recapitulate key biblical events, and ultimately the divine plan that God has written for the cosmos. To adopt Leopold Damrosch’s terminology, ‘God’s plot’ underpins everywhere ‘man’s story’, and the experience of real-life, historical men and women.¹⁸ This consonance between the human and divine narratives reveals itself in structural affinities between the historical events of a given disaster and the key events in Christian cosmology—for instance, deliverances will often occur on the third day, echoing Christ’s resurrection. More generally, dangerous or disastrous voyages will seem to re-enact a variety of biblical analogues: Noah’s survival of the Flood (Genesis 7–9), the disciples’ sea-crossing ( John 6), St Paul’s voyage to Rome (Acts 27–8), and the like. Such biblical episodes act as templates to some Providentially minded writers of shipwreck narratives. They are models to which actual lived experience should conform—or to which actual experience should be made to conform, with varying degrees of ruthlessness, according to the temperament of the writer and of the audience being written for. Janeway’s brief, third-person, highly parablistic accounts are a good example of the crudest form of Providentialism in shipwreck literature, and the simplest form of Providential misadventurer, that Romantic readers would have been familiar with. This was an interpretative logic, and a set of narrative conventions, still regularly invoked in the Romantic era, especially in more popular and ephemeral media such as chapbooks and pamphlets. At the same time, however, Romantic readers (and travellers) would also have absorbed a great many travel texts that are far more subtle in the ways they explicate misadventure and shipwreck Providentially. These accounts often complicate considerably Janeway’s simple message that God works to save the godly—this may be the ultimate faith of other writers in the Providential tradition, but many of them understand God as moving towards this end in ways that are not only mysterious but also decidedly discomforting. Consider in this regard another account of shipwreck that made a powerful impression on at least one Romantic reader, Edward Haye’s Voyage of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, which appears in Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1589). Haye’s account describes an expedition undertaken in 1583 to explore and settle ¹⁸ See Leopold Damrosch Jr., God’s Plot and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago and London, 1985), 2.

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the region around Newfoundland. A fleet of five ships, under the command of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, was dispatched from England to America, with Haye sailing in one of them, the Golden Hind. In the rough waters of the North Atlantic, however, several ships were lost, including Gilbert’s vessel, the Squirrel; Gilbert himself did not survive the wreck. Yet from what is clearly a great tragedy, and a setback to English maritime ambitions, Haye is able to conjure some sort of spiritual victory. In a powerful closing vignette that greatly impressed Wordsworth (a reworking of this scene featured prominently in the original ending of The Prelude), Haye recounts the last glimpse the crew of the Golden Hind had of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, just moments before the Squirrel was overwhelmed. Although both ships are labouring in tempestuous seas, Gilbert is unperturbed. ‘Giving forth signs of joy,’ Haye writes, ‘the general, sitting abaft with a book in his hand, cried out unto us in the Hind (so oft as we did approach within hearing) we are as near to heaven by sea as by land.’¹⁹ This is the last they see of Gilbert, for shortly afterwards ‘our watch cried, the general was cast away, which was too true. For in that moment, [the Squirrel] was devoured and swallowed up of the sea.’²⁰ Haye’s narrative thus closes with a striking image that might be considered iconic in the strict religious sense of the term. Gilbert’s death as presented by Haye is almost a devotional artefact. Gilbert goes calmly to his fate secure in his faith, engrossed in a book that one assumes is the Bible. As Haye interprets these events, moreover, they are made to bear witness to a beneficent Providence that presented Gilbert with an opportunity to prove and redeem himself. We learn that ‘the crosses, turmoils, and afflictions, both in the preparation and execution of this voyage, did correct the intemperate humours, which before we noted to be in this gentleman, and made unsavoury, and less delightful his other manifold virtues’. Gilbert thus stands in imitatio Christi. As Christ was made ‘perfect through sufferings’ (1 Hebrews 2: 10), so Gilbert has been perfected by his disaster. Death, or near-death, by water, it seems, can save us: as John Ryther puts it,

¹⁹ Jack Beeching (ed.), Hakluyt: Voyages and Discoveries (Harmondsworth, 1972), 241. ²⁰ Ibid. 241–2.

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in the sermon appended to Janeway’s collection, ‘some have escaped shipwreck of Soul by shipwreck of Body’.²¹ The more alarming twist to Providentialist thought apparent here, then, is that God may not simply save the godly from hardship: rather, he may save them by inflicting hardship and tribulation upon them. Extending the christomimetic logic implicit in Haye’s narrative, the godly should expect to suffer as much as to be preserved, ‘for whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth’ (1 Hebrews 12: 6). In some accounts, indeed, it can almost seem as if suffering is itself evidence of election. Such is the impression often gained from one of the most common variants of shipwreck narrative from the late seventeenth century onwards, that which takes shape as a species of spiritual autobiography, driven by the Puritan (and later, Dissenting) imperative of scrutinizing one’s past, and of searching that past for evidences of Providence and election. It is this cross-fertilization of genres—shipwreck narrative and spiritual autobiography—that Daniel Defoe cannily mimics and exploits in Robinson Crusoe (1719). But to illustrate this spiritualautobiographical variant of Providential misadventure, I shall discuss a slightly later (and non-fictional) text in this tradition, John Newton’s Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of ∗∗∗∗∗ (published anonymously in 1764), since this is again a factual account of shipwreck that can be shown to have had a direct influence on several Romantic writers (notably Coleridge and Wordsworth). In later life, John Newton was an Anglican minister, a hymn writer (he is the author of ‘Amazing Grace’), an energetic Abolitionist, and a friend of the poet Cowper.²² Yet his faith, and his respectability, were hard won, and the process by which this was achieved is the subject of his narrative. The Authentic Narrative describes, in a sequence of fourteen letters, how Newton lost his religion and then regained it. The youthful Newton’s career as mariner seemed at first to lead him away from God, breeding dissolute habits and a ²¹ James Janeway, Mr James Janeway’s Legacy to His Friends: Containing TwentySeven Instances of God’s Providence, in and about Sea Dangers and Deliverances (London, 1764), 106. ²² For more on Newton’s life and career, see Douglas Hindmarsh, John Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition: Between the Conversions of Wesley and Wilberforce (Oxford, 1996).

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freethinking mind. He became fractious, and always resentful of the authority of his superior officers. Moving from one ship to another, he stirred up insubordination in others. At the same time—and according to Newton’s retrospective analysis, as a consequence of this behaviour—he suffered a sequence of mishaps and disasters at sea, and also a period of virtual enslavement in West Africa. Yet the result of all these travails is that Newton rediscovers his faith. His conversion is brought about by the fear Newton feels when the ship in which he is sailing is swamped by high seas, and seems on the brink of going down. Amid the hectic efforts to save the ship, Newton finds himself involuntarily calling upon God, and then—as the implications of this plea strike him—reflecting on his past conduct. At first he can only imagine that God will damn him for his actions, a sense of spiritual despair that mirrors the apparently hopeless situation of the ship at this point. But the internal and external crises proceed along parallel lines: just as it becomes apparent that the ship will not sink, so Newton recognizes that there is hope for his soul. He is not yet redeemed or justified, but he does feel that he has been granted time to re-educate himself spiritually: I thought I saw the hand of God displayed in our favour; I began to pray—I could not utter the prayer of faith; I could not draw near to a reconciled God and call him father. My prayer was like the cry of the ravens, which yet the Lord does not disdain to hear.²³

‘If you would teach a man to pray, send him to sea’: John Ryther quotes this proverb, and Newton, and after him Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, learn the force of it.²⁴ Newton draws from these events a confidence as to his own election, and writes that ‘I thought it very probable that all that had befallen us was on my account. I was at last found out by the powerful hand of God, and condemned in my own breast.’²⁵ In Newton’s account, then, shipwreck effects the (re)conversion of the misadventurer back to righteousness and Godliness. This was a narrative pattern, or rhetorical convention, that Romantic-era readers would have been highly familiar with (it also underpins Crusoe, for example), and that they would have associated especially with writers ²³ [Newton], Authentic Narrative, 96. ²⁵ [Newton], Authentic Narrative, 103.

²⁴ Janeway, Legacy to His Friends, 104.

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of a Puritan or Dissenting persuasion. As a consequence, they would also have associated it with a somewhat bleak theology that often emphasizes both the innate sinfulness of humanity and the more vengeful aspects of God. Those shipwreck victims who like Newton and Crusoe invoke typological comparison with figures such as the Prodigal Son, Paul on the road to Damascus, and especially (because of the shared maritime setting) Jonah, are not simply undergoing the usual difficult progress of any Christian in a hostile world: rather, they are being more actively punished. In the words of a biblical text often cited by writers in this tradition, they are being taught to ‘hear … the rod, and who hath appointed it’ (Micah 6: 9). A persecutory God orchestrates the victim’s disasters, seeking to demonstrate both his own irresistible power and the hapless voyager’s elective status (as evidenced by his survival of the catastrophe). At the same time, the severity of the suffering and terror inflicted on the misadventurer is an index of his guilty, fallen nature prior to his conversion experience. Our natural tendency (according to this Calvinistic outlook) being always to harden our hearts against God, so an escalating scale of violence is necessary to remind us of God’s shaping presence in our lives. Luther’s term for the condition to which a sinner must be reduced before he or she will recognize God is Anfechtung, glossed by John Stachniewski as a ‘state of abject terror’.²⁶ Only when the traveller has been broken down utterly, experiencing this state of Anfechtung, will he receive God’s grace. As Ryther notes: ‘Salvations and Deliverances many times are not sent, until persons be left hopeless in themselves.’²⁷ The convergence of shipwreck narrative and Puritan spiritual autobiography is due in no small part to the fact that maritime disasters, as we have seen, frequently inflicted such abjection and terror on the participants. At the same time, however, it is also perhaps the Puritan and Dissenting mentality that does much to shape the expectations pertaining to shipwreck in this era, and to create that generic template or ur-narrative of shipwreck discussed in the last section. As just noted, the symbolic economy, so to speak, of this variant of maritime misadventure requires that the misadventurer plumb the depths of despair and horror before he ²⁶ Stachniewski, Persecutory Imagination, 18. ²⁷ Janeway, Legacy to His Friends, 93.

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admits God into his life: hence the need to dwell on some of the more dreadful events in the aftermath of shipwreck. Also informing such scenes of horror, one senses, are Calvinist notions of double predestination, and the doctrine that the reprobate are likely to experience in life some foretaste of the suffering they will endure in Hell. Counterpointing the figure of the Providential misadventurer, in many of these narratives, is a rendering of the protagonist’s fellow sailors and sufferers as a reprobate mass incapable of learning any spiritual lessons from their torments. Instead, this rump of benighted, irredeemable humanity often seems simply to degenerate, as they give way to their baser instincts and appetites, to excess, violence, and even, in a grotesque version of the sacrament, the eating of human flesh. Such is human nature, and human existence, when it is divorced from God’s saving grace, or so the authors of some of these accounts would have us believe. This, then, is the structural logic, or symbolic economy, inherent in many Puritan and Dissenting accounts of Providential misadventure, and it can give rise to significant rhetorical difficulties in the form. John Stachniewski (writing generally of Puritan spiritual autobiographies, and not specifically of those involving shipwreck) notes that these texts aimed ‘to construct a narrative governed by a teleology of election, love, acceptance which could convincingly subordinate, while accounting for, all of the evidence of experience that seemed to document a narrative governed by a teleology of reprobation, hatred, rejection’.²⁸Mishandled, however, this dual agenda in the spiritual-autobiographical variant of shipwreck narrative could generate readings very different from those intended by the author. For the more sceptical, rationalistic reader, of course, the Providentialist explicatory framework put around the events described is always likely to seem unsatisfactory and fallacious, a distorted view of the way the world operates. To such readers, narratives of this type can seem to exhibit a pronounced tendency to egotism and to paranoia. Egotism, because huge, cataclysmic events in the natural world (often involving the deaths of many other individuals) take place solely to provide the narrator with a spiritual education; paranoia, because the cosmos as presented in these narratives is not just centred on, ²⁸ Stachniewski, Persecutory Imagination, 104.

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but actively and violently in pursuit of, the narrator. Equally paranoiac, moreover, are the obsessive efforts of some narrators in this tradition to read all phenomena as signs and omens, or to discern Scriptural analogies and typological patterns in all the events that have befallen them. Yet even for readers more disposed to believe, or at least to hope, that a Providential logic did underpin natural and historical events, these narratives could easily prove more unsettling than reassuring. Here one should consider that at some level all such attempts to explain suffering and misadventure Providentially are a form of theodicy. Explaining the suffering of one traveller, or group of travellers, the Providentialist travel account implicitly suggests that behind all suffering there may be a similar rationale. Thus it justifies God, and the way God has organized the world, to man. But conversely, narratives in which an apparent ‘teleology of reprobation, hatred, rejection’—that is to say, all the horrors and torments endured by the misadventurer—is not convincingly contained by and subordinated to ‘a teleology of election, love, acceptance’ call not only the justification and election of the traveller into question. They can also prompt anxiety as to whether there is any such benevolent teleology at work in the universe. God can seem on the basis of these accounts a decidedly hostile, malevolent figure; or alternatively, one can conclude that it is only the naïve or superstitious faith of the narrator that perceives such a Providential logic. Such moments of rhetorical failure in Providentialist accounts of misadventure were more unsettling in the Romantic era than they are today. As we have seen, writers and readers in the Romantic period often brought to bear on travel texts the understanding that travel writing was as much about spiritual and theological guidance as it was about factual information and/or adventure. They turned to such texts expressly to find evidences of Providential intervention in the affairs of men, or at least reflections on how the disasters that can befall mankind have their place in the Providential scheme of things. Travel narratives that neglected this agenda were liable to cause consternation and to be rebuked: thus the correspondent ‘A.B.’ writes to the Public Advertiser in 1773 to express his real concern, that in the Publications of two Accounts of Voyages round the World, Lord Anson’s and that published by Dr Hawkesworth, the Providence

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of our God and Saviour should have been so insolently insulted, in the first by an utter silence, and in the later by an impudent Denial of it.²⁹

And it was in connection with the travails, dangers, and disasters attendant on travel that readers like A.B. especially expected to find evidence of Providence. Thus a major complaint against John Hawkesworth’s account of Cook’s first voyage, not only from A.B. but from many other readers and reviewers, was that it failed to acknowledge Providence properly when describing how Cook’s ship the Endeavour was freed from the rocks of the Great Barrier Reef. Yet as well as suggesting the widespread assumption that travel writing was a place where one expected to find illustrations of Providence, A.B.’s complaint also makes it clear that not all contemporary travel writing provided or yielded the desired religious lessons. Hawkesworth’s account of Cook’s first voyage, of course, ushered in an important new mode of travel writing in the late eighteenth century, the narrative of exploration, in which spiritual considerations were subordinated to an empirical imperative to gather information about natural phenomena. The Enlightenment sensibility that brought about the exploration narrative, moreover, often tended towards rationalism, and was less inclined to credit supernatural interventions in worldly events. Hawkesworth, for example, suggests in his preface that those who claim it was Providence that got the Endeavour off the Great Barrier Reef would do well to ask why Providence had put the ship there in the first place.³⁰ There were accounts of maritime misadventure available in the Romantic era, then, that frustrated or problematized the still widespread expectation that such accounts would at least acknowledge Providence, and at best reveal some sort of Providential logic or justice to disasters and misadventures. Viewed as a whole, indeed, the literature of shipwreck and maritime misadventure arguably exhibited to the determinedly Providentialist reader a disturbingly heteroglossic aspect. Herein, perhaps, resided something of the fascination exercised by the figure of the suffering voyager in the Romantic era, and the purchase that such figures had on the Romantic imagination. For the explication of this suffering was in a sense a key site of uncertainty in the age, and of contestation between competing philosophies ²⁹ Public Advertiser, No. 11928, 6 July 1773. ³⁰ See Hawkesworth, An Account of The Voyages Undertaken, i, pp. xix–xxi.

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(and theologies) as to how the world was organized, and the role God played in human affairs. In this context, rhetorical inadequacies in narratives that do profess Providentialist beliefs become all the more significant. They can be treated sceptically by those who no longer accept the Providentialist paradigm, or who accept it only in some more sophisticated, subtle form; they may even, paradoxically, provide more hostile readers with ammunition for the case against excessive Providentialism. Even for those who expect or hope to find some evidence of Providential guidance and protection in the travails of suffering travellers, such inept accounts may still cause doubt and dismay, and provoke a need to rebut or rewrite the account so that its Providential claims are more persuasive. It is such failures of Providentialist rhetoric in Romantic-era travel writing—and even, in some cases, the explicit rebuttal of Providentialism—that I shall examine in the next section. To conclude the present section, however, I should reiterate that the figure of the misadventurer, and the notion of what it might mean to suffer in the course of one’s travelling, to a very great extent comes down to Romantic readers trailing clouds of Providentialism. Whatever their own religious and philosophical convictions, readers well versed in the voluminous voyage and shipwreck literature of the eighteenth century would have absorbed in diverse ways the lesson that hardships and dangers might be the means by which a traveller was impelled on a spiritual journey far more important than the physical journey being undertaken. They would have been familiar with a body of travel literature that habituated them to think that suffering in travel might be a mark of elective status. And in so far as the Providentialist reading of misadventure functions subtly as theodicy, as discussed above, they would have been familiar with many travellers whose sufferings are supposed ultimately to illustrate, to themselves and to others, a fundamental coherence and design in the cosmos—an underlying pattern in events, and a divine logic or justice underpinning both the apparent randomness of nature and the more distressing aspects of human existence. All of these associations heightened that sense, discussed in the last section, that somehow through suffering in travel, and through ordeals such as the Ancient Mariner’s, travellers might arrive at a greater insight into the workings of the world, and into their own true natures.

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D E S TA B I L I Z I N G P ROV I D E N T I A L I S M : E M PI R I C I S M , SCIENCE, AND SENTIMENT We had the experience but missed the meaning … T. S. Eliot³¹

The tensions and interpretative problems increasingly attendant on the figure of the suffering mariner are evident even in the narrative that is generally regarded as having launched the eighteenth-century enthusiasm for voyages and voyage literature: William Dampier’s New Voyage Round the World (1697). At the same time, however, this is also a text that illustrates usefully the point just made—namely, that we should remember that for many writers and readers of Voyages and Travels in the eighteenth century, the genre had a religious dimension that today is often overlooked. Modern discussions of Dampier’s New Voyage usually emphasize its status as a work of proto-exploration. This hugely popular, hugely influential voyage narrative is quite rightly understood as launching a new paradigm in British travel writing, a paradigm shaped by the newly established Royal Society, with its Baconian project of knowledge through induction. Dampier follows in exemplary fashion the Royal Society’s ‘Directions for Seamen Bound on Long Voyages’, issued between 1665 and 1666, which stressed the need for detailed and disciplined observation, the accumulation of empirical data, and a plain, impersonal style. His account of a twelveyear period of travelling and voyaging accordingly interpolates into its narrative a mass of detailed information on plants, foodstuffs, animal species, local tribespeople, climatic conditions, and the like. Such notes were ground-breaking in their observational rigour, and paved the way for the more systematic exploratory enterprise of the latter half of the eighteenth century. Whilst acknowledging the importance, and novelty, of Dampier’s assiduous note-taking and data-collection, however, we need also to note that these wholly descriptive passages are interpolations. Written up at the instigation of the President of the ³¹ ‘The Dry Salvages’, l. 93, in T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London, 1985).

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Royal Society after the main body of the narrative had been completed, they were then inserted, often rather crudely, into the larger narrative. And this larger narrative clearly asks to be understood as a travel account that charts not only a physical but also a spiritual journey, in the manner discussed in the previous section in relation to Newton’s Authentic Narrative. To understand this aspect of Dampier’s narrative, it is necessary to appreciate why it was that Dampier came to be voyaging around the world. The New Voyage describes a twelve-year period during which Dampier lived what he terms a ‘loose, roving way of life’.³² This life began in 1679, when Dampier joined a group of ‘privateers’ at Negril Bay, Jamaica. Privateering was in many ways little more than semi-legalized piracy. Financed by speculators back in Britain, and operating under ‘commissions’ which gave some sort of legitimacy to their actions, British privateers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries earned a precarious living harrying Spanish shipping in the Caribbean and South Seas, and raiding Spanish settlements in the New World. As described by Dampier, it is evidently a morally dubious business, something he feels embarrassed and guilty about participating in. It is evident from the outset of the New Voyage that Dampier’s desire is to dissociate himself from his earlier career, and from his privateering comrades. And in articulating his disdain for the privateers, Dampier utilizes many of the formulae and topoi customarily applied to benighted misadventurers, as discussed in the last section. ‘More wilful and less under command’ than ordinary seamen, privateers as depicted by Dampier are a drunken, anarchic, and wholly self-interested bunch.³³ They tend naturally to insubordination and mutiny. A stream of captains are manoeuvered in and out of command by fractious crews, whilst Dampier himself jumps ship on more than one occasion, taking up with other commanders when their plans suit him better. There is moreover an undercurrent of violence throughout the narrative. One captain whom Dampier helped to supplant was subsequently murdered by his next crew, and settlements are destroyed in seemingly gratuitous acts of destruction: as Dampier notes on one occasion, with chilling casualness, ‘while we lay here at Tabago some of our men burnt the Town on the Island’.³⁴ ³² William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (London, 1697), 349. ³³ Ibid. 80. ³⁴ Ibid. 205.

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A miserable, painful existence, in which human beings become merely the playthings of larger, elemental forces, seems to be the result of such brutality and anarchic individualism, in the New Voyage as in many more explicitly Providential narratives of maritime misadventure. Dampier’s descriptive passages may attempt to establish an intellectual control over the external world, but the main body of his narrative depicts a world in which everything is treacherous. Men deceive each other, often with tragic consequences, whilst the weather often seems similarly untrustworthy: storms seem to blow up whenever the privateers launch their flimsy canoes on the open sea. Death is common, caused by disease or the elements or the Spaniards. For all that they are often violent and destructive, the privateers themselves are powerless in the larger scheme of things. Their plans go repeatedly awry, events continually turn out for the worst, and at one point they find themselves, like so many maritime misadventurers, facing the prospect of cannibalism. Sailing in the seas below South East Asia, they make land just before they run completely out of supplies—a lucky circumstance, Dampier tells us, ‘for as I was afterwards informed, the men had contrived first to kill Captain Swan and eat him when the victuals was gone, and after him all of us who were accessory in promoting the undertaking of this Voyage’.³⁵ The privateers, then, like the benighted misadventurers discussed earlier, seem stuck in a Hobbesian world from which God has removed his Grace. For Dampier himself, however, matters are rather different. The narrative of the New Voyage moves towards a climactic moment of deliverance and repentance, whereby Dampier implicitly becomes a misadventurer in the Providential rather than the benighted mode. Towards the close of the narrative, Dampier fashions what is in effect a conversion scene. On the Nicobar Islands, in the Indian Ocean, conduct amongst the privateers reaches its nadir, and Dampier at last makes his break from them, setting out with a few companions in an open canoe. Within a few days, the sailors find themselves in a perilous situation, confronted by ‘the Sea … roaring in a white fome about us; a dark night coming on, and no Land in sight to shelter us, and our little Ark in danger to be swallowed by every Wave; and what was worst of all, none of us thought ourselves prepared for another World.’³⁶ The situation produces in Dampier an internal struggle, a ³⁵ Ibid. 283.

³⁶ Ibid. 496.

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‘great conflict of Mind’, to accompany that external conflict between the elements: I made very sad reflections on my former Life, and lookt back with horror and detestation, on actions which before I disliked, but now I troubled at the remembrance of. I had long repented me of that roving course of life, but never, with such concern as now. I did also call to mind the many miraculous acts of God’s Providence towards me, in the whole course of my life, of which kind, I believe, few men have met with the like. For all these I returned thanks in a peculiar manner, and this once more desired God’s assistance, and composed my mind, as well as I could, in the hopes of it, and, as the event shew’d, I was not disappointed of my hopes.³⁷

Philip Edwards has shown that this episode is to some extent fabricated by Dampier, bringing together several different incidents so as to heighten the congruence of internal and external crises.³⁸ In fashioning the scene, Dampier’s intention is clearly to impose a teleology on both his travelling and his text. Both his original voyaging and his subsequent account of that voyaging now move towards a conclusive moment of personal reformation and conversion by which Dampier disavows his disreputable past as privateer. The passage intends a justification of the traveller both in a worldly sense—he has learnt the error of his ways and renounced privateering—and also, more subtly, in a spiritual sense: although Dampier does not subsequently emphasize the religious dimension of his change of heart, implicit here is an understanding that this prodigal son has at last returned to righteousness and to God. Dampier’s overall narrative, then, is from one perspective shaped like the spiritual-autobiographical strand of voyage literature. And for some readers, we can assume, it was this spiritual-autobiographical shape to the narrative that was as important as the accumulation of scientific data elsewhere in the text. It is to Dampier’s ‘conversion’ scene, for example, that Wordsworth was drawn when composing the original ending of The Prelude (a borrowing that I shall discuss later in this study). Yet it is hard not to feel that the Providential, spiritualautobiographical template to which Dampier sometimes seems to be working sits awkwardly alongside the empirical agenda pursued ³⁷ Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World, 497. ³⁸ Philip Edwards, The Story of the Voyage: Sea-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994), 28–30.

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elsewhere in the New Voyage, with its highly detailed record of the natural world, and of events as they befall the privateers. Attentive throughout to the accumulation of data and to a myriad different ‘facts’, encompassing a highly heterogeneous mix of information, Dampier’s narrative is not so neatly moulded or pruned into a Providential pattern as the narratives of Janeway, Haye, and Newton. Accordingly, the supposedly conclusive conversion scene seems much more of a convention imposed upon the larger narrative, and a simplification of far more complex events and phenomena. To this extent it is unpersuasive, to some extent coming across simply as an exonerating device, an easy route by which the writer can repudiate his shady past. Its rhetorical failure can also be articulated in John Stachniewski’s terminology as a failure on the part of the projected Providential narrative to ‘subordinate’ other, rival narratives in the New Voyage. Reading with Dampier, as it were, we acknowledge a ‘teleology of election, love, acceptance’ (as Stachniewski has it) not only to Dampier’s life and narrative, but also to the cosmos: vicissitudes are seen to have had a purpose, in leading to the traveller’s reformation, and the universe shows reassuring evidence of a divine design that has mankind very much as its focus. The evidence presented in much of the text (and the spirit of empirical enquiry that produces that evidence), however, arguably encourages us to read the New Voyage against the grain of the conclusive scene, and to reach some very different conclusions. Read thus, Dampier’s journey and his travails yield an early intuition of a far more random, impersonal universe, and of a complex, bewildering natural world to which there is no obvious teleology—or at least, no teleology attuned to human hopes and anxieties. Dampier’s New Voyage, then, is a text that adopts in some regards Providentialist conventions and topoi, yet which also ultimately seems to problematize these conventions, for a variety of reasons. This equivocal or unsettling handling of the conventions of Providentialist misadventure is still more pronounced in other voyage narratives. For example, in George Shelvocke’s A Voyage Round the World by Way of the Great South Sea (1726) and John Byron’s Narrative of the Honourable John Byron (1768)—as noted already, two texts which hold an important place in the literary history of Romanticism—Romantic readers would have encountered further instances

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of conspicuous suffering incurred in the course of voyages. But with Shelvocke and Byron as with Dampier, the account given of maritime disaster and misadventure is hardly conducive to a settled faith in the Providential organization of the world. Once again, the evidence one garners from the text as a whole seems to undermine rather than support the sporadic allusions these writers make to Providence—and in so doing these narratives implicitly problematize not only their own Providential claims, but also those made elsewhere in the Voyages and Travels genre. Here, it seems, is competing evidence for what happens when human beings voyage out into the world, for why they suffer in the course of such voyages and travels, and ultimately, for how the universe is organized. Since the peculiarly disturbing quality of both these texts arises to a great extent from the remorseless accumulation of misfortunes heaped upon the protagonists, and the speed with which they seem to be inflicted, I shall summarize Shelvocke’s and Byron’s narratives in some detail. George Shelvocke, like Dampier, was a privateer, engaged in the dubious business of raiding Spanish merchant ships in the seas west of the South American continent. He sailed from Gravesend on 13 February 1719, commanding his own ship, the Speedwell, and accompanied by another vessel, the Success, commanded by Captain Clipperton. Two days (and in the narrative, a mere one page) later, there is disagreement between the two captains; on the 19th there is a storm which separates the two ships; on the 20th, on page 4 of the narrative, there are the first rumblings of mutiny from the crew. This discontent is quelled but on the 24th, Simon Hatley, the second captain, disputes Shelvocke’s command in public. Shortly afterwards, another subordinate questions Shelvocke’s authority: Turner Stevens (my Gunner) very gravely made a proposal to me, in company with all the Officers (as we were drinking together) of cruising in the RedSea; for, said he, there can be no harm in robbing these Mahometans but (continued he) the poor Spaniards, they are good Christians, and it would, doubtless, be a sin to injure them. Upon which I immediately ordered him under confinement: after which he, in a very outragious manner, threatened often times to blow up the ship.³⁹ ³⁹ George Shelvocke, A Voyage Round the World by the Way of the Great Sea (London, 1726), 12.

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Stevens is discharged when the Speedwell reaches the Canary Islands, the first of many men who quit the ship. Some desert, others ask to leave: amongst the latter group is the boatswain, whose presence in the crew can hardly have been conducive to camaraderie. ‘He [was] a very odd sort of fellow,’ Shelvocke notes, ‘always incensing the people against the number of Officers, whom he term’d Blood-Suckers.’⁴⁰ On 31 July, the most serious insubordination takes place. The crew, supported by most of the officers, refuse to go on until Shelvocke has renegotiated the Articles governing the distribution of plunder. The Articles are duly signed, after much railing and self-justification by Shelvocke, but the voyage continues in much the same spirit as before. Shortly afterwards, the Speedwell sails through the Straits of Magellan, passing from the South Atlantic to the South Pacific: it is here that the morose Hatley shoots an albatross, in a passage that Wordsworth recounted to Coleridge and that proved a key stimulus to The Ancient Mariner.⁴¹ The Speedwell is not long in the Pacific, however, before it is wrecked on the island of Juan Fernandez. Now the insubordination in Shelvocke’s crew grows even worse. Falling ‘prey to confusion and outragious disorder’, the crew splinters into different factions.⁴² Eventually, Shelvocke finds himself well-nigh abandoned: I one afternoon miss’d all the people, and could see nobody but Mr Adams, our Surgeon, Mr Henry, the Agent, and my Son, and Mr Dodd, Lieutenant of Marines, who, for some reasons, best known to himself, had feigned lunacy, and had a mind to act the mad-man.⁴³

This sense of disunity, and the breakdown of authority and community within the crew, is constant throughout most of the subsequent narrative. As with Dampier, the overwhelming impression is of men who can control neither the elements nor their own selfish appetites: once again, intense suffering is the result. On the desolate island of Juan Fernandez, Shelvocke and his men are soon reduced to a wretched, painful existence, eating whatever they can find to survive. Without fresh water, for example, Shelvocke and his men make do with a poor substitute: ‘we constantly drank our urine, which, ⁴⁰ Ibid. 27. ⁴¹ It is not known whether Coleridge himself ever actually read Shelvocke’s account. John Livingstone Lowes, however, judged it unlikely that such a ‘library cormorant’, as Coleridge termed himself, would not have followed up Wordsworth’s suggestion with his own perusal of the narrative. See Lowes, Road to Xanadu, 530–2.

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though it moisten’d our mouths for a time, excited our thirst the more.’⁴⁴ ( This is a situation that occurs in several other shipwreck narratives: for ‘generically aware’ readers, the drinking of urine is another standard topos of the form.) Such events, and the harrowing portrayal of the physical deterioration of the crew, form the centrepiece of Shelvocke’s narrative. In time, matters improve: the closing chapters depict a relatively idyllic few months cruising off the coast of California. Yet the narrative’s emphasis is very much on the shipwreck, and the suffering that occurred in its aftermath. The emphasis is the same in John Byron’s narrative. Byron sailed as a midshipman on the Wager, a Naval store-ship attached to a small fleet sent to attack Spanish shipping in the Pacific during the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1740. But for all that one might expect matters to be organized rather differently on a Naval vessel, Byron portrays a world almost identical to that evoked by Shelvocke, in which madmen and mutiny feature equally prominently. The voyage begins ominously. The captain prophesies ‘ill success’ as the Wager sets out: the very next paragraph announces his death, and the succession of Captain Cheap to the command. Within a few more pages, which take the Wager briskly from England to the South Pacific via the Straits of Magellan, the ship is separated from the rest of the squadron, damaged in a storm, and then caught on rocks and wrecked. This scene bristles with moments of horror. Many of the men go mad when the ship is first upon the rocks, and ‘particularly one, in the ravings despair brought upon him, was seen stalking about the deck, flourishing a cutlass over his head, and calling himself king of the country, striking every body he came near’.⁴⁵ The mate displays conspicuous heroism, but most other crew members break open the liquor and get drunk. One man is murdered, and no culprit is found. Eventually the bulk of the crew reaches the island—though a mutinous element remains drinking on the doomed ship—and events unfold in much the same way as described by Shelvocke. Factions appear, and another man is murdered, being ‘discovered among some bushes … stabbed in several places, and shockingly mangled’.⁴⁶ It is ⁴² Shelvocke, Voyage Round the World, 217. ⁴³ Ibid. 218. ⁴⁴ Ibid. 351. ⁴⁵ John Byron, The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron (London, 1768), 11. ⁴⁶ Ibid. 38.

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not long, moreover, before the lack of food starts to take effect. There are desperate attempts to find sustenance: A boy, when no other eatables could be found, having picked up the liver of one of the drowned men (whose carcase had been torn to pieces by the force with which the sea drove it among the rocks) was with difficulty withheld from making a meal of it.⁴⁷

In time, Byron has to eat his dog: later, when the crew is surviving on no more than ‘wild sellery’, ‘that dreadful and last resource of men, in not much worse circumstances than ours, of consigning one man to death for the support of the rest, began to be mentioned in whispers’.⁴⁸ Eventually the crew splinters into different groups, and each sets off according to their own plan of escape. Byron and his companions are captured by local tribespeople, who subject them to further indignities and suffering: once again, a shipwreck narrative modulates into a captivity narrative. The precise nature of Byron’s travails at the hands of his captors need not concern us. The summaries above should suffice to convey the way in which both Shelvocke and Byron take their readers immediately into a nightmarish world, and then develop that sense of nightmare with a brisk remorselessness. The nightmare is in many regards the same as that which haunts the Providential narrative of misadventure—once again we encounter the topoi and the moral formulae that define the world of the benighted misadventurer—but with one key qualification: in these texts there seem to be no Providential travellers, only benighted misadventurers. Byron and Shelvocke’s accounts contain the same basic ingredients as are found in Newton’s Authentic Narrative and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, but the overall effect they work on the reader is significantly different. In particular, there is a sense of woeful inadequacy about those few moments when these writers do invoke a Providential frame of reference. Byron, beginning his narrative, declares that it offers ‘a relation of the extraordinary difficulties and hardships through which, by the assistance of Divine Providence, a small part of [the Wager’s] crew escaped to their native land’.⁴⁹ Yet one has not travelled far into Byron’s narrative before one realizes that this conventional nod to Providence is precisely that, conventional and lacking in conviction. It bears little relation to the ⁴⁷ Ibid. 30.

⁴⁸ Ibid. 102.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. ii.

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evidence that Byron immediately begins to assemble, and indeed, after this opening reference Providence is seldom invoked again. As a result, there is little sense of any Providential narrative unfolding in Byron’s text, and no teleology of election and justification to offset all the apparent evidence of human reprobation. Dampier, as we have seen, attempts to impose this pattern on his text, albeit not altogether successfully. No such attempt is made by Shelvocke and Byron, and as a result their narratives presented, to the many contemporary readers still attuned to Providentialist accounts of misadventure, a much more disturbing vision of the world. As with Dampier’s New Voyage, the problematic nature of these texts is partly a matter of their form, which in turn is generated by the empirical agenda rigorously pursued by many eighteenth-century voyagers. Like the New Voyage, Byron and Shelvocke’s accounts clearly derive both style and structure from those Royal Society directives to record events precisely (Shelvocke’s narrative, for example, is evidently based on the log of the voyage). This has some interesting consequences in terms of style and structure, consequences which are crucial to the curious experience of reading these texts. For there is little sense of shape or teleology to the narratives, or to the journeys they describe. In both cases, they proceed by a sort of narrative parataxis that grows out of the simple paratactic syntax that these writers are most comfortable with. As clause follows clause, with the minimum of connectives or of logical subordination, so too do events follow quickly one after the other, generally without explanation or reflection on the part of the narrator. There is constantly a sense of ellipsis, and the reader is left to ponder the many gaps in the text. The causal relationships between events, and equally the narrator’s reaction to events, what he thought and how he felt about things: over all these matters there is often a disconcerting silence. Take, for example, the following small disaster (for William Camell, at least) in Shelvocke’s narrative: At 7 in the evening, as they were furling the main-sail, one William Camell cry’d out, that his hands and fingers were so benumb’d that he could not hold himself, but before those that were next to him could come to his assistance, he fell down and was drown’d.⁵⁰ ⁵⁰ Shelvocke, Voyage Round the World, 72.

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Thereafter, both the ship and narrative sail smoothly on, as if Camell had never been. The writer does not intend the death to register emotionally on the reader, in the manner of more sentimental or sensational writers (to be discussed later in this section). Yet if he is not sentimental or sensational, neither is Shelvocke religious and Providential, in the manner of writers like Newton and Defoe. With more Providential writers, events like this are typically subjected to immediate interpretation, and an appropriate lesson drawn. Reference is made back to Scripture, so that the event takes on a typological significance, or else it might be made to serve as some sort of moral or spiritual exemplum. One can regard this tendency in Defoe and Newton as merely a stylistic tic, a habit of their age, yet it is a habit which has some profound consequences. Every event is filtered through the Providential framework: all experience is discreetly shaped and controlled, made to fit, even if only in a small way, the Providential pattern. In Shelvocke and Byron’s texts, experience reads very differently. Things simply happen: we are never entirely sure why they happen, or what we are meant to think about them. Thus Shelvocke and Byron admit us into a world which seems to operate in random and inexplicable ways, and introduce us to human protagonists whose actions seem similarly arbitrary and unmotivated. The discrete nature of events, and the sense of the ellipses in the text, as the narrator fails to offer connections and explanations, works a curiously disintegrative effect on both the narrative and the narrator. Newton and Crusoe, looking back, impose an order upon events, making them bear a certain shape. Shelvocke and Byron convey little sense of such a unifying, retrospective consciousness. Their own motives are often inadequately explained and their actions, as a consequence, remain mysterious.⁵¹ The world of these misadventurers thus starts to seem doubly untrustworthy. Not only does the narrative evoke the experience of moving through a strange, indecipherable environment, but it becomes itself such an environment, full of indeterminacies: the reader too can feel at sea in these texts. ⁵¹ Shelvocke’s sudden and short-lived reconciliation with Clipperton towards the end of his account, after having excoriated him for much of the narrative, is a notable example of such disorienting inconsistencies in the narrator. See ibid. 320–4.

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A degree of resistance to meaning is thus fundamental to the unsettling effect produced by these narratives. And just as meanings seem unstable in these texts, so everything solid in the world they depict seems doomed to fragment. It is worth reiterating here that the wrecked ships themselves are only the most obvious victims of the disintegrative energies at work. Human bodies are torn apart with equal gusto: Byron recalls ‘the bodies of our drowned people thrown among the rocks, some of which were hideous spectacles, from the mangled condition they were in by the violent surf that drove in upon the coast’.⁵² The living are not much more in control of their bodies, which (in another commonplace of the genre) seem to swell and shrink in alarming ways. Thus Captain Cheap’s legs, in Byron’s narrative, become ‘as big as mill-posts, though his body appeared to be nothing but skin and bone’.⁵³ This is just the beginning of Cheap’s ordeal. Later he is so afflicted with lice that Byron can compare his body ‘to nothing but an ant-hill, with thousands of those insects crawling over it’. Cheap makes no resistance to this onslaught, ‘for he was now past attempting to rid himself in the least from this torment, as he had quite lost himself, not recollecting our names that were about him or even his own’.⁵⁴ Even identity, and those psychic structures by which we maintain our sense of who we are, seem in danger of disintegration in these narratives. The correspondence between the events recounted in these narratives, and their form, as the narratives themselves exhibit a struggle between fragmentation and coherence, make these peculiarly haunting documents. They seem to speak of strange, unstable, and usually hostile environments, and of a world that is random and unknowable. Through this world move protagonists who seem themselves curiously unstable and inconsistent, their motives murky, their actions ineffectual. The fate of these hapless voyagers accordingly presents a considerable challenge to any complacent understanding that the world is ordered Providentially. Yet as we have seen, it was still a widespread assumption among many British readers that there was such a logic to the world, and that accounts of dangerous sea voyages were texts in which one might find evidence of Providence. Accordingly, the proliferation of disastrous voyage literature in this ⁵² Byron, Narrative, 26.

⁵³ Ibid. 166.

⁵⁴ Ibid.

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period—the many different accounts of each wreck that circulated in Romantic-era culture, the new impulse to anthologize these accounts, and the various other phenomena discussed earlier—possibly reflects not just the popularity of these texts, but also a compulsive need to make sense of them, and the dreadful events they describe. Inherent in this compulsion, arguably, is a nagging anxiety that no such sense is ever forthcoming, and that these narratives and the events they describe constantly exceed or resist any Providential interpretations imposed upon them. In this regard, they resemble another account of conspicuous suffering, albeit not in a travel context, that seems to have fascinated and unsettled the age: the biblical book of Job. As Jonathan Lamb has shown, this was a text that in the eighteenth century seemed almost to compel interpretation. Yet all such interpretations, including those made within the text itself by friends who seek to console Job, seem uncomfortably incommensurate with the extremity and immediacy of Job’s sufferings—a discomfort registered, Lamb suggests, in the frequency with which writers addressing the story give up the awkward business of explaining why Job suffered, to concentrate instead simply on retelling the torments he endured. Job’s story becomes as a consequence ‘a story that provokes imitations of itself by resisting what interpreting readers want it to say, and by inviting the less prescriptive to inhabit its strange indiscipline. It is as impossible to define as it is to get quit of it.’⁵⁵ I would suggest that the same claim could be made of the narrative of maritime misadventure, both at the individual and the generic level—with one of the imitations provoked by disastrous voyage narratives in the awkward Shelvocke and Byron mould being of course Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, an account of misadventures at sea that itself seems to exhibit a ‘strange indiscipline’, as both poet and protagonist struggle to define the import of the Mariner’s dreadful experiences. Not everyone, of course, felt so urgently the need to explicate shipwreck and maritime misadventure Providentially. Some in the period followed John Hawkesworth in making a more rationalistic, and naturalistic, interpretation of such disasters, and of any deliverance from them. For readers of this stamp, there were often glaring contradictions between on the one hand the actual facts of a given shipwreck, ⁵⁵ Jonathan Lamb, The Rhetoric of Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1995), 3.

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and on the other hand the over-crude imposition of Providential sentiments, and a Providentialist template, in the account of that wreck. Indeed, such contradictions, and some of the philosophical and moral absurdities that a naïve Providentialism could give rise to, seem to have made shipwreck a key topos not only for Providentially minded writers, but also for those of a more sceptical disposition. Benjamin Stout, as Jane Donahue has noted, at several points seems to satirize a naïve Providentialism in his Narrative of the Loss of the Ship Hercules (1789), and it is in a still sharper spirit that Voltaire fashions a fictional shipwreck in Candide (1759).⁵⁶ In an episode designed to undercut the optimism implicit in the Providential view of things, and to parody the complacency with which such views are sometimes advanced, it is the most virtuous character, an Anabaptist who has previously saved the lives of Candide and Pangloss, who ends up drowned in the débâcle. When Candide grieves for his benefactor, moreover, Pangloss offers the spurious consolation that the scene of the disaster, Lisbon harbour, ‘had been created expressly so that the Anabaptist would be drowned in it’.⁵⁷ A sceptical, anti-Providentialist position on disastrous journeys and voyages was strengthened by the fact that sailors were, in Marcus Rediker’s words, ‘one of the most notoriously irreligious groups of the early modern period’.⁵⁸ If those who went down to the sea in ships were supposed to witness the works and wonders of the Lord, surely sailors should have been one of the most devout groups in society? As matters stood, however, the Reverend James Clarke, lecturing the men of the HMS Impetueux on their duties to both God and the crown, had to profess himself deeply surprised that mariners were so much less religiously minded than they should have been.⁵⁹ Other observers felt no such surprise. For Shelley, the sailor’s failure to acknowledge God and a Providentially organized universe derived from an empirically acquired knowledge that the world was in fact organized otherwise. A footnote to the poem ‘The Voyage’ claims that ⁵⁶ Jane Donahue, ‘Colonial Shipwreck Narratives: A Theological Study’, Books at Brown, 23 (1969), 115–17. ⁵⁷ Voltaire, Candide and Other Stories, ed. Roger Pearson (Oxford, 1990), 12. ⁵⁸ Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge, 1989), 169. ⁵⁹ James Stanier Clarke, Naval Sermons Preached on Board His Majesty’s Ship The Impetueux (London, 1798), 36.

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‘few are more experimentally convinced of the doctrine of Necessity than old sailors, who have much and various service’.⁶⁰ Shelley, it seems, agrees with more Providentially minded commentators that the rigours of a sea voyage can give one a profound insight into the organization of the world—but what is revealed, for Shelley, is a materialistic universe, bound by natural rather than supernatural laws of cause and effect. The theological and philosophical ambiguities circulating around the figure of the misadventurer are further compounded by the sentimentalism of the latter half of the eighteenth century. Consider, in this regard, the ‘Wreck of the Grosvenor East Indiaman’, an account included in J. G. Dalyell’s collection of maritime disaster narratives. Recounting the fate of the Grosvenor, which left Ceylon in June 1782 only to strike rocks off southern Africa a few months later, this narrative includes many of the standard topoi of maritime misadventure, as discussed over the course of this chapter: disunity and factionalism, famine, thirst, the drinking of urine, the contemplation of cannibalism (or at least, in this variant, the drinking of blood). Yet there is also a new scenario which receives considerable attention in this account of disastrous events. A significant focal point in the narrative is provided by Master Low, a boy of about seven or eight years in age. The other survivors pay particular attention to looking after Low: the narrator in turn draws attention to their attentiveness. It falls to the carpenter and when the carpenter dies, to the steward to look after him. Of the latter’s efforts, we are told: He strove to alleviate his fatigues, he heard his complainings with pity, he fed him when he could obtain wherewithal to do it, and lulled his weary soul to rest. How much praise is due to such worth and generous humanity!⁶¹

This emphasis on the compassion shown by one human being to another less capable than himself constitutes a new situation, or topos, in maritime misadventure, and the final exclamatory sentence here reveals a new style in which to recount sufferings. The narrator of the ‘Wreck of the Grosvenor’ assumes that neither suffering nor the compassion shown towards suffering should pass without comment. ⁶⁰ SCPW 128. ⁶¹ J. G. Dalyell, Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1812), iii. 20.

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Thus when Master Low himself dies, the death must be properly registered by both writer and reader: ‘Poor innocent, he was summoned before his time!’⁶² In this way we are prompted to feel correctly, and to make an emotional response to the text which is in stark contrast to the indifference shown by Shelvocke as William Camell falls off the rigging and out of the narrative. A similar ‘affecting situation’ occurs in the ‘Shipwreck of the Juno’, as two fathers watch their sons die; the fate of these boys, and of Master Low, are evidence of the increasingly sentimental outlook that writers and readers brought to bear on the writing of disasters and misadventure.⁶³ Such sentimentalism is not incompatible with Providentialism (as we shall see in Chapter 4, Mungo Park combines both attitudes with great success), but it does complicate it. It would be hard to argue that Master Low’s fate was deserved, and any attempt to make a theological point out of his death would have to be handled with great delicacy. The sentimentalist is interested in pain, but not in pain as a punishment (the etymological root of the word, from the Latin poena) that reveals guilt and God’s chastising influence. Rather, pain is valued because of the compassion it occasions in the spectator or reader, because of its capacity to sensitize us morally, and to strengthen the bonds of fellow feeling that exist between us. Within this framework of interpretive practice, emphasis falls more upon the suffering individual than upon the divine plan supposedly manifest through his or her suffering. Rather than the larger patterns that can be deduced from painful experience, it is the particularity of that experience that matters; we implicitly side more with the individual who suffers than with the creator who puts his creatures through such sufferings. There is accordingly a growing discomfort with the idea of a God who actively punishes his creatures, or who uses extreme violence to bring them around to his way of thinking.⁶⁴ In their different ways, then, rationalism, scepticism, and sentimentalism rendered the depiction of the suffering mariners and shipwreck victims, and the explication of maritime disasters and misadventures, ⁶² Dalyell, Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea, iii. 27. ⁶³ See ibid. iii. 273–4. ⁶⁴ On this issue, see Karen Haltunnen, ‘Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture’, American Historical Review, 100: 1 (1995).

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somewhat fraught issues in the Romantic period, topics apt to court controversy and to generate unease in readers. If there were still writers and readers strongly attuned to Providential forms and conventions in this context, so too were there increasingly writers and readers for whom these forms and conventions, especially in their more extreme Puritan and Dissenting variants, were intellectually or morally dubious. Some writers, such as John Hawkesworth, cease to acknowledge Providence as a force significantly involved in events at sea, or else express only a Deistical faith that there must be some Divinely ordained scheme at work, even if its logic is utterly imperceptible to human beings. It is in this spirit, for example, that William Falconer concludes his hugely popular poetic account of maritime misadventure, The Shipwreck, with the following reflection from the sole survivor: Can sacred justice these events ordain? But O my soul! avoid that wonderous maze Where Reason, lost in endless error strays! As thro’ this thorny vale of life we run, Great cause of all effects, Thy will be done!⁶⁵

Yet such lukewarm—and in some cases, openly sceptical—invocations of Providence took their place in a branch of travel writing that was still very much associated with, and shaped by, Providentialist traditions and expectations.⁶⁶ Indeed, after a wave of more rationalistic accounts in the late eighteenth century, there seems to have been a resurgence of Providentialist attitudes and forms in the early nineteenth century—a development attributable partly to the fact that Britain was a nation at war until 1815, and partly to the spread of Evangelical attitudes.⁶⁷ But these more overtly Providential accounts, ⁶⁵ William Falconer, The Shipwreck Text C (i.e. the third edition of 1769), ll. 903–7, in William R. Jones (ed.), A Critical Edition of the Poetical Works of William Falconer (Lewiston, NY, and Lampeter, 2003), 295. ⁶⁶ See Donahue, ‘Colonial Shipwreck Narratives’, 117. ⁶⁷ For early nineteenth-century shipwreck accounts in which a Providential agenda is once again to the fore, see, inter alia, James Stanier Clarke’s Naufragia, with its subtitle, Historical Memoirs of Shipwreck and of the Providential Deliverance of Vessels (London, 1805: 6), and also Narratives of Shipwrecks: Loss of the Lady Hobart Packet, of the Hon. East India Company’s Ship Cabalva, and of the Centaur and Litchfield Men-of-War (London, 1824), one of several accounts of shipwreck sponsored by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge.

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in turn, were not to every reader’s taste. In this way, the topic of maritime misadventure brought into focus significant divergences of philosophical and religious outlook in Romantic-era culture, and it was for this reason, I would suggest, that Romantic writers were so drawn to the topic. And if many Romantic travellers felt an urge to play the part of maritime misadventurer, it was perhaps because such a role offered the chance (or sanctioned the claim) to speak more authoritatively on these larger philosophical and religious issues, since one had plausibly discovered for oneself what underlying principles operated in the unfolding of such disasters.

T H E RO M A N C E O F M I S A DV E N T U R E : A N X I E T I E S , R I S K S , R EWA R D S I well remember the mysterious awe with which I used to listen to anything said about storms and shipwrecks … William Wordsworth⁶⁸

To read widely in the literature of shipwreck and maritime misadventure, then, is to encounter on the one hand not only certain stock situations—those recurring scenes and images I have been calling commonplaces or topoi of the literature—but also a fairly standardized set of Providential conventions and formulae for explicating and moralizing these scenarios. On the other hand, however, it is also to become aware of the problems inherent in these conventions and formulae, not only in the form of explicit statements of alternative points of view, but also, more insidiously, in the form of Providentialist claims that were not entirely borne out by the accompanying narrative. It was in part this tension, I have suggested, that gave the disastrous voyage—as event, as topos, and as subgenre of travel literature—its peculiar potency in the Romantic era. And it is a tension inherited and rearticulated by the most famous Romantic treatment of the theme of maritime misadventure, Coleridge’s Ancient ⁶⁸ Jared Curtis (ed.), The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth (Bristol, 1993), 74.

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Mariner —although it is a moot point whether the poem deliberately recreates the ambiguities attendant on the figure of the misadventurer, or is simply unable to suppress such ambiguities. The repeated revision of the poem perhaps suggests the latter, with the addition in 1817 of marginal glosses especially indicative, it could be said, of the poet’s effort to control the meaning the reader should extract from the text. Yet even in its 1817 incarnation, the Ancient Mariner remains remarkably—and from some points of view, alarmingly—open to highly contradictory interpretations. From one perspective, of course, the poem seems to tell the story of a Prodigal Son’s return to Godliness. In accordance with John Ryther’s precepts and John Newton’s experience, the Mariner recovers through purgatorial suffering at sea the ability to pray, and simultaneously comes to recognize the true principles that order the universe. His misadventures teach him that all elements of creation are interconnected, and also, implicitly, that all events have purpose and are conducive to our spiritual education. The former lesson especially is neatly summed up in a couplet that is repeated twice, in almost identical form, towards the conclusion of the poem. Here perhaps is the conclusion in the sense of inference, the moral, that one is meant to draw from the Ancient Mariner: namely, ‘He prayeth best who loveth best, | All things both great and small.’⁶⁹ Read in this fashion, the Ancient Mariner might be understood as a response to the disturbing possibilities suggested generally by an increasingly empiricist travel literature, and more specifically by voyage narratives as profoundly gloomy as Shelvocke’s and Byron’s texts. It is an assertion—although from the tone of the poem we might fairly judge it an assertion made hopefully, even desperately, rather than confidently—that there is Providential design, and an intrinsic logic and justice, underpinning nature and man’s dealings with nature. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the poem harks back in various ways to an era significantly earlier than Coleridge’s own. Whilst innumerable details and images are drawn from (near-)contemporary travel accounts, as John Livingstone Lowes demonstrated, the journalizing, log-keeping format of those accounts—which has the tendency to ⁶⁹ ll. 647–8. For the most famous statement of this optimistic reading of the poem, see Robert Penn Warren, ‘A Poem of Pure Imagination: An Experiment in Reading’, in Selected Essays (New York, 1958; London, 1964), 222–61.

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throw up awkward evidence at odds with Providentialism—is held at bay by the seemingly medieval setting, by the adoption of the ballad form as the means of narrating the voyage, and, from 1817 at least, by the marginal glosses, which make the poem visually reminiscent of pre-modern editions of travel literature such as the highly religious Purchas His Pilgrimes.⁷⁰ There is much in the poem, however, that problematizes such a straightforwardly Providentialist reading. Like many accounts of disastrous voyages and travels, the Ancient Mariner seems to be straining to impose conclusions that cannot entirely be supported by the evidence assembled elsewhere in the narrative. From accounts such as Shelvocke’s and Byron’s, Coleridge seems to have taken not just details like the shooting of an albatross, but also an abruptness in the narrative, a recurrent sense of disjunction and disconnection as it proceeds in highly paratactic fashion. This is an abruptness evoked not only by but also within the narrative, as the Mariner’s crewmates condemn the killing of the albatross one stanza, and praise it the next; as later they all drop down dead instantaneously; and finally, as the ship suddenly goes down like lead. More generally, incidents and imagery accumulate in the poem, to an extent that seems to obscure the Providential plotting of the story. As Seamus Perry has pointed out, the Mariner’s blessing of the water snakes, when encountered in the context of the whole narrative, hardly seems the pivotal moment that some readers would make it.⁷¹ Rendered still more problematic is any sense that the neat concluding couplet—‘he liveth best’, etc.—can properly contain and sum up all that has gone before in the poem. Hence, perhaps, Coleridge’s comment that the poem has not too little, but too much moral, by which he presumably meant an educative and justificatory conclusion somewhat arbitrarily imposed.⁷² Leslie Stephen, of course, famously drew from the Ancient Mariner an alternative conclusion, when he quipped that ‘the moral, which would be that people who sympathise with a man who shoots an albatross will die in prolonged torture of thirst, is open to obvious ⁷⁰ Nigel Leask has similarly suggested that a counter-Enlightenment tendency is at work in Coleridge’s preference for early modern travel sources in ‘Kubla Khan and Orientalism: The Road to Xanadu Revisited’, in Romanticism, 4: 1 (1998). ⁷¹ Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford, 1999), 284. ⁷² Coleridge, C Works, xiv. I. 272–3.

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objections’.⁷³ Implicitly registering the unsatisfactoriness of what many readers take to be the poem’s intended message, Stephen’s irony draws attention to the arbitrariness, or outright injustice, of the poem’s moral scheme. The apparent randomness of many events in the poem, and the excessive retribution heaped upon the Mariner’s crewmates, similarly forms the focus of Edward Bostetter’s famous reading of the poem: he especially draws our attention to the diceplaying of Life-in-Death.⁷⁴ Understood this way, the poem has more in common with Shelvocke’s and Byron’s bleak narratives than with John Newton’s and Robinson Crusoe’s: the world of the poem comes to seem a Godless place, lacking Providential design—or if there is a God, he is an unduly vengeful and tyrannical figure barely worthy of our respect. Alternatively again, the poem can be understood as less a statement of Providentialist belief, than an exploration, or dramatization, of the Providentialist mentalit´e in action. We can see the Providential conclusions the poem at one level clearly strives after as conclusions sought, and/or imposed, by the Mariner rather than Coleridge. The poem’s subject becomes the Mariner’s desperate efforts to make sense of the trauma he has endured, and to find meaning and significance in the events of this disastrous, disorientating voyage. Psychologized in this way, the Ancient Mariner becomes more distinctly a lyrical ballad, and a companion piece in Lyrical Ballads to Wordsworth’s ‘The Thorn’, also narrated by an ex-mariner with an arguably overlurid imagination. As with ‘The Thorn’, what the Ancient Mariner accordingly foregrounds are the methods by which the human mind supplies and creates meaning, and the rhetorical devices by which it incorporates random phenomena into coherent conceptual schema and conventional narrative patterns. A crucial tool in this regard, as Susan Wolfson has shown, is simile, the figure whereby much of the Christian, Providential frame of reference enters the poem: the albatross is initially hailed, for example, ‘As if it had been a Christian soul’ (1. 65; my emphasis). Yet as Wolfson’s deft analysis shows, there is often something oddly problematic about the poem’s ⁷³ Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library, 3 vols. (London, 1892), iii. 359. ⁷⁴ Edward E. Bostetter, ‘The Nightmare World of the Ancient Mariner’, in Alun R. Jones and William Tydeman (eds.), Coleridge: The Ancient Mariner and Other Poems: A Casebook (London, 1973), 184–99.

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similes, so that they come to signal not so much a correspondence indubitably existing between the things compared, as the narrator’s yearning to establish such correspondences and analogies. As a result, Wolfson suggests, simile functions in the poem not so much as a means of illustration and clarification, but rather ‘as a rhetoric of uncertainty … repeatedly underwriting the process by which a chance event gets read into significance’.⁷⁵ Understood this way, the Ancient Mariner seems to demonstrate how a significance can be read into chance events in ways that not only constitute an inaccurate account of the world, but that are also deeply damaging, and imprisoning, for the individual concerned. Trapped in inherited or prescribed patterns of thought and perception, the Mariner makes sense of his ordeal in ways that reflect the culture that shaped him, and his position in that society. Like his crewmates, who are all too ready to take the killing of the albatross as first a bad and then a good omen, he is superstitious; reared in the repressive regime of the Catholic Church—as Perry has noted, here is a very different way of understanding the choice of a medieval setting for the poem—his superstition takes the form of an excessive and crude Providentialism.⁷⁶ This Providentialism invites the Mariner to take responsibility for events wholly upon himself, so that he casts himself simultaneously both as sinner and pariah, and also, more egotistically, as the central protagonist of all that has unfolded, the sole intended recipient of God’s corrective anger. The latter selfconception arguably traps the Mariner in a perpetual repetition of the offence that first initiated his sufferings, for the shooting of the albatross similarly demonstrated an egotistical blindness to the independence and autonomy of other creatures. The Mariner may claim to have learnt the error of his ways in this regard—yet there is perhaps a comparable, ongoing egotism at work in the storyteller who repeatedly turns his former crewmates into mere bit-players in the drama of his own spiritual re-education. Narrating his cure, the Mariner rearticulates his sickness—and so the Mariner remains caught in a perpetual loop of retellings, required periodically to rehearse yet again his trauma. ⁷⁵ Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, Calif., 1997), 74. ⁷⁶ Perry, Coleridge, 286.

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It is not only the Mariner, of course, who is caught in this narrative loop. As noted earlier, Coleridge himself returned to and reworked the Ancient Mariner on several occasions. His refusal to let the poem go, and the problematic status that it evidently had for him, suggests an investment in the figure of the Mariner that goes beyond mere parody or critique of a delusional belief-system. Certainly the poem seems from one perspective designed to demonstrate the conceptual and perceptual limitations of misadventurers in the Janeway and John Newton mould. At the same time, however, Coleridge himself proclaimed the theory of the One Life, and yearned to find evidence of harmonious interconnection and Providential design in the universe—his extensive reading of Voyages and Travels being partly driven by the search for such evidences. The Mariner is thus simultaneously a figure that Coleridge is critiquing, yet also a projection, albeit an exaggerated one, of intellectual and emotional tendencies in himself. As a consequence, a profound ambivalence haunts the poem. Like so many of the narratives on which Coleridge drew—and like the genre that those narratives collectively constitute—the Ancient Mariner is poised precariously between two very different visions of the world and of man’s place in the world. Refusing (or failing) to iron out the problematic wrinkles in its source material, the Ancient Mariner like its sources is invested with a radical undecipherability, or hermeneutic sublimity, that caused not only its author to return compulsively to the story it tells of a conspicuously suffering traveller, but also many of its readers. And so the Ancient Mariner takes his place among all the factual voyagers and maritime misadventurers—Newton, Shelvocke, John Byron, and so forth—who haunted the Romantic imagination, to become, as we have seen, a potent model for Romantic travellers such as Byron. What led Byron to identify with the Ancient Mariner, even to the extent that he wished to experience something of the ordeal that the Mariner had undergone? How could the Mariner’s story and the literary tradition distilled in it, the accounts of figures such as John Newton, George Shelvocke, and John Byron and the like, have taught a Romantically minded young traveller like Byron to seek out misadventures at sea rather than to avoid them? Put another way, what sorts of travel script might feasibly be assembled from the literature surveyed in this chapter, and what were the aims of such

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self-dramatizations? In the first place, of course, we must note that the great majority of these narratives offer their readers an account and emblem of the enduring self, the self imperilled, challenged but ultimately surviving all vicissitudes. The narrator is usually a figure who has survived the disasters and misadventures described; the reader shares vicariously in this survival, and becomes habituated to the notion that his or her own self will likewise pull through, and will overcome all setbacks and obstacles. Moreover, the narrating self in these accounts usually does more than just endure and survive: it also gains from its trauma. The gains may not be the riches or estates or restored kingdoms that can follow on from shipwreck in overtly fictional literary accounts—in romances, for example—but even in the supposedly factual accounts discussed in this chapter there are benefits and rewards of other kinds. Suffering in travel, one might plausibly deduce from the texts and the literary conventions explored in this chapter, is often a route to certain sorts of profound insight and knowledge. On the one hand, it leads to an empirically proven knowledge of the self, its limitations and its powers of endurance. On the other hand, the Providentialist paradigms and frameworks of explication frequently found in the literature of maritime misadventure established associations that made the disastrous voyage seem a means of arriving at the fundamental principles by which the world was organized. This was a scripting of maritime misadventure inherited not only by those of a Providentialist disposition, but also by many who were sceptical about Providentialism, for whom dangers and distresses at sea ultimately taught the misadventurer that there was no guiding force orchestrating events, and no divine plan for either the individual or the world. Whatever logic one detected in the world, however, and whatever one’s response to it (consolation, exhilaration, or despair, the sense variously of being protected, liberated, persecuted, or abandoned), knowledge of this logic was seemingly acquired through the via negativa of suffering in travel—and thus the figure of the misadventurer was invested with considerable authority, and no little glamour.

3 Misadventurers II: Political Themes A Ship … is a just emblem of the Social State; or in other words, of a political government. Here everyone has his appointed station. The various gradations of command and obedience are clearly marked … James Stanier Clarke¹

Even something of the grandeur which invests The mariner who sails the roaring sea Through storm and darkness, early in my mind Surrounded too the wanderers of the earth. William Wordsworth²

The last chapter explored the religious, or quasi-religious, scripts that often underpinned misadventure in the Romantic era—scripts born of the strong association in this period between the dangers and discomforts that can occur in the course of travel, and traditional Providentialist frameworks of representation and interpretation. In the present chapter, I shall argue that this religious and quasireligious scripting of misadventure frequently coexists, both in the Romantic era and our own, with a more politicized travel script. For Wordsworth, Byron, and many contemporaries, the topos of ¹ James Stanier Clarke, Naval Sermons Preached on Board His Majesty’s Ship The Impetueux (London, 1798), 70–1. ² WP 12. 153–6.

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suffering in travel, whether articulated in writing or in practice, could be expressive of social concern, and sometimes of outright social protest. It could speak not only of a heroic quest to see the universe as it really is, but also of a sympathetic identification with those hapless travellers who had no choice but to travel uncomfortably or dangerously. Construed thus, the misadventurer is a figure who brings into focus concerns regarding not only the organization of the universe, but also the organization of society, and especially perceived injustices and inequalities in society. This is a further stimulus that frequently underpins the Romantic desire to write about various sorts of suffering traveller—Wordsworth’s vagrants, Byron’s exiles and renegades, and so forth. And it sometimes also underpins a Romantic desire to be, or at least to seem, someone who has themselves suffered in the course of travel, since one can pronounce more authoritatively on social ills and injustices, and on legitimate and illegitimate ways of responding to those predicaments, when one has experienced them for oneself. As in the last chapter, then, travel, and especially misadventurous travel, is understood to bring an empirically proven and therefore less easily refutable knowledge—but here the nature of the knowledge sought through misadventure is subtly different. It is in connection with figures like the vagrant and the exile that one perceives most clearly this political dimension to the Romantic interest in misadventure. Here, however, I wish to approach this topic from a less familiar angle, and to explore what is perhaps a more surprising identification or self-dramatization made by some Romantic travellers. Specifically, I shall focus here on the figure introduced in the last chapter, that of the maritime misadventurer. That such unfortunate voyagers fascinated the Romantic imagination should by now be evident; what I wish further to suggest, however, is that such figures could possess a powerful socio-political valency for many Romantic readers, writers, and travellers. As they ranged widely through the travel material discussed in the last chapter—those overlapping subgenres of Voyages and Travels, voyage narratives, privateering narratives, shipwreck narratives, and so forth, that collectively I labelled the literature of maritime misadventure—Romantic readers were not just absorbing, and being drawn into, a debate about the presence or absence of Providential design in the universe. They were

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also immersing themselves in a genre that foregrounded far more worldly issues. In many voyage narratives, and especially (for reasons that will be discussed shortly) many of the narratives that recount disastrous voyages, the troubled transactions between a captain and his crew are a prominent theme. Readers of these accounts were typically required to reflect on the nature of the authority invested in a sea captain, and on the uses and abuses of the power that came with this position. More often than not, they were simultaneously required to evaluate the ordinary seaman’s response to his captain’s authority, to reflect on the nature of duty and discipline, and to consider when, if ever, it might be legitimate to resist, subvert, or even overturn one’s superior officers. Pondering these issues, readers of the Romantic era generally had an eye on more than just the events occurring on any one specific ship. In an age of Revolutionary upheaval—in an age, equally, accustomed to hearing from political commentators tropes that imaged society as a ship, or the ship as a microcosm of society—narratives of voyaging, privateering, shipwreck, and so forth could easily become suggestive of larger and more urgent political debates. And it was partly in this spirit, I shall argue, that they were read and subsequently reworked by many Romantic readers, writers, and travellers. I say ‘and travellers’ here, because for many Romantic figures the reworking of these themes, and of this source material, encompassed more than just a tendency to take as a poetic theme the situations described in the literature of maritime misadventure, or to derive poetic imagery from this literature. It also often included a desire to re-enact these situations in their own travelling, either literally or metaphorically; a desire, that is to say, to dramatize themselves as some sort of maritime misadventurer. This is most obviously the case with Shelley and Byron, of course, as they establish a reputation for intrepid sailing (and as noted earlier, in the present context it is not really important how justified this reputation is: it is the image, and the script underwriting the image, that is more significant). But the scripting influence of the literature of maritime misadventure also operates on Romantic journeys far removed from the sea, journeys that do not involve any actual voyaging. In the second epigraph above, Wordsworth perceives an equivalence between ‘the wanderers of the earth’ and the mariners who sail ‘the roaring sea’. As we shall see, this is

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a correspondence or mirroring very often established in Wordsworth’s poetry, and it is also, perhaps more surprisingly, a correspondence that seems often to have underpinned Wordsworth’s own sense of himself as a walker. His pedestrian endeavours seem sometimes to have been plotted in his own mind as analogues to epic, arduous ocean voyages, with himself in the role of hard-pressed mariner or shipwreck victim, and in this way the persona of maritime misadventurer could inform Romantic travel in a metaphorical fashion (as opposed to the more literal re-enactments of Shelley and Byron). To understand the political anxieties and aspirations being expressed as the Romantic traveller dramatizes himself as a maritime misadventurer—and equally, to understand the political signals being sent out to those who witness this self-dramatization—it is necessary to know something of the political debates attendant on disastrous voyage literature, and circulating around figures such as the shipwreck victim and the hard-pressed sailor. The first section of this chapter will accordingly survey these debates, exploring the political suggestiveness of the topoi of shipwreck and the dangerous voyage. All in the Romantic period found in the literature of maritime misadventure a microcosm of larger political conflicts, and accordingly drew from this literature an imagery that could serve as a potent vehicle for their own political concerns—yet at the same time, the heteroglossic nature of this genre meant the same images and situations could easily be inflected in very different ways, to become expressive of opposing viewpoints. To illustrate this, the second section of the chapter considers two works by Wordsworth—Adventures on Salisbury Plain and The Borderers—that utilize similar maritime imagery and topoi, yet which do so to articulate two very different ideological positions, as Wordsworth begins in the late 1790s to reassess his earlier radicalism. And if Adventures on Salisbury Plain and The Borderers are works significantly informed by imagery and topoi of distant seafarers, they are also both works that apply such imagery and topoi to walkers within Britain. In so far as they are thus suggestive of the structures of thought and feeling impelling Wordsworth’s own walking in the 1790s, they suggest that a perceived or proposed identity with the figure of the suffering, and possibly oppressed, sailor was one stimulus to (some) acts of Romantic pedestrianism—a topic I shall expand upon in the final section of the chapter.

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P RO PAG A N DA A N D P ROT E S T: T H E P O L I T I C A L I M P L I C AT I O N S O F T H E D I S A S T RO U S VOYAG E NA R RAT I V E There is no justice or injustice on board ship, my lad. There are only two things: duty and mutiny—mind that. All that you are ordered to do is duty. All that you refuse to do is mutiny. Anonymous Eighteenth-Century Sailor³

If theodicy in its metaphysical sense may be the submission to an inscrutable providence, there is also the social theodicy in which men submit to evil and suffering as it is inflicted by society. The two theodicies are not unrelated. It is in the name of the metaphysical judge that the empirical executioner brings down his sword. Peter Berger⁴

To recognize the extent to which maritime misadventurers, suffering sailors, shipwreck victims, and the like were politically charged figures in Romantic-era culture, one must first appreciate the intense contemporary preoccupation with the sea. Britain in the so-called ‘imperial meridian’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was one of the world’s great maritime powers, hugely dependent on the sea for both its prosperity and security.⁵ The merchant fleet maintained the global trade networks in which so many Britons were involved, either directly or indirectly; the Navy, meanwhile, policed the seas, and was for long periods of the Napoleonic Wars the only defence standing between Britain and French invasion. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the sea was not only ³ Quoted in Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge, 1989), 211. ⁴ Peter L. Berger, The Precarious Vision: A Sociologist Looks at Social Fictions and Christian Faith (Westport, Conn., 1961), 148. ⁵ C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989).

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of immense material importance to the British, but also held great symbolic significance. ‘Rule Britannia, rule the waves! | Britons never will be slaves’, James Thomson had written in 1740, and across the eighteenth century as a whole a ‘burgeoning maritime mythology’, in David Armitage’s phrase, had become an increasingly important part of the British self-image, and of nationalist and imperialist ideology.⁶ For many commentators, the British possessed special qualities, and even a divine dispensation, by virtue of their being an island race who necessarily had to take to the sea. For in so doing, they exposed themselves to danger, and put themselves to the many tests—physical, moral, even spiritual—that such seafaring inevitably involved. Such tests not only toughened the British, making them hardier and more skilful sailors; in a culture that still invested greatly in Providential interpretations of events at sea, they could also be understood—when successfully overcome, at least—as demonstrating God’s continuing approval of the British nation and its global aspirations. It is against this background that one must locate the equally intense preoccupation in this era with shipwreck and the image of the endangered ship. As was noted in the last chapter, the shipwreck narrative was a prolific and highly popular genre in the Romantic period, appearing at all levels of print culture and appealing to a broad readership. And it was not just through the medium of print that knowledge of the most celebrated, and/or notorious, maritime disas ters circulated in Romantic-era culture. In painting, it seems to have become a subject that increasingly fascinated artists, including most famously Turner, who produced The Shipwreck (1805), Shipwreck off Hastings (1825), and other paintings on this theme. Scenes from famous shipwrecks even seem to have become a favoured subject in the decorative arts, or so one may deduce from an attack by one writer on the ‘strange perversion of taste, and lapse of humanity’ that led to ‘the distresses of the ill-fated Captain and … passengers’ of the Halsewell, wrecked in 1786, being ‘portrayed on the teatray, and emblazoning the screen’.⁷ Across the Romantic period, moreover, shipwreck seems to have become a situation or plot device ⁶ David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), 119. ⁷ W.D., An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the Earl of Abergavenny (London, 1805), 3–4.

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increasingly used in popular melodramas, in works such as James Cartwright Cross’s The False Friend, or, Assassin of the Rocks (1809), William Moncrieff’s The Shipwreck of the Medusa: Or, The Fatal Raft (1820), and others.⁸ This mass market for images and accounts of shipwreck speaks not only of a cultural fascination, but also of a profound cultural anxiety. The more literary or artistic renderings of shipwreck may have been at one level fashionable exercises in the sublime, but they also touched a deeper nerve. In an era when so many Britons had dealings with the sea, a great many lives, and livelihoods, were touched by these tragic events. According to one contemporary estimate, some 5,000 Britons a year died at sea, amongst which number we must include Shelley, and Wordsworth’s brother John, lost in the wreck of the Abergavenny in 1805.⁹ The many pamphlets and cheap pocket-book editions giving the details of wrecks—the source material, so to speak, on which more literary and artistic accounts of shipwreck drew—accordingly functioned in part as reportage, meeting the needs of the public simply for more information as to what had happened to friends, relatives, or perhaps just investments, caught up in these disasters. But it was not just because of a concern about specific material losses, commercial, strategic, and human, that shipwreck literature impinged so powerfully on the collective psyche in this period. As Josiah Blackmore has observed, for a great maritime empire that wants to believe itself Providentially favoured, shipwrecks are deeply problematic events at an ideological level, disasters that bring into question key aspects of the nation’s self-image.¹⁰ Blackmore is writing of the upsurge of shipwreck narratives in fifteenth-century Portugal, but his observations hold true for Britain in the Romantic era. In this later period, moreover, there is also for the British another level of symbolic significance to maritime disasters that further helps to explain the Romantic-era fascination with them. The ‘ship of ⁸ My thanks to David Worrall for this information. See also Christine Riding, ‘The Raft of the Medusa in Britain: Audience and Context’, in David Blayney Brown and Christine Riding (eds.), Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics (London, 2003). ⁹ J. G. Dalyell (ed.), Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1812), i, p. xiii. ¹⁰ Josiah Blackmore, Manifest Perdition: Shipwreck Narrative and the Disruption of Empire (Minneapolis, 2002).

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state’ is a well-established topos or trope in political discourse, and it had become especially favoured in British political debate and commentary over the course of the eighteenth century, as Britain’s maritime power developed. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in a period that witnessed political ferment, Revolution, and war, it was a topos frequently inflected so as to emphasize the ship in danger, threatened with disaster. Coleridge, for example, begins his political lectures of 1795 by imaging the British state as a ‘crazy Bark’ caught ‘in a Tempest’, in which situation every crew member and passenger ‘must contribute their Quota of Exertion’.¹¹ Within this discursive framework, actual maritime disasters became freighted with a symbolic weight; each individual case could easily seem resonant of pressures and perils facing the nation more generally. In this context, the upsurge of interest in shipwreck narratives in the Romantic era would seem to reflect not only a concern with the details of each specific wreck, but also a more pervasive sense of political crisis and upheaval. It is not surprising, therefore, that renderings of shipwreck in this period, in print and other media, often seem informed by larger ideological agendas. A nationalistic ethos, for example, is often apparent, as writers, editors, and commentators seek to emphasize those aspects of a given wreck that seem to corroborate the contemporary mythology of British maritime prowess and Providential favour. It was in this spirit, for example, that a publication of 1822 brought together accounts of two separate wrecks of 1816, that of the French ship Meduse and the British ship Alceste. Both vessels were struck by broadly similar disasters, but the outcomes were very different, with the British crew avoiding the scenes of horror, anarchy, and cannibalism that occurred in the aftermath of the Meduse wreck, supposedly because of their superior discipline. Such, at least, was the message of these two accounts according to the editors of the volume, and according to many other British commentators on these wrecks. Here and elsewhere, the writers and editors of shipwreck narratives usually took care to foreground any incidents that demonstrated the virtues supposedly inherent in the British sailor, those sterling qualities of courage, resourcefulness, and especially self-discipline upon ¹¹ C Works, i. 5.

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which, it was claimed, British maritime power was predicated. Thus in accounts of the wreck of the Abergavenny, John Wordsworth’s ill-fated ship, much is made of the midshipman who stood guard over the ship’s liquor store with a pair of pistols, thereby preventing the scenes of drunken anarchy that all too frequently occurred in the aftermath of a wreck.¹² In such ways, then, many shipwreck narratives exhibit a distinctly patriotic and nationalistic tendency. Closely bound up with this nationalistic agenda, moreover, was a subtly authoritarian agenda. As noted above, it was especially discipline, and self-discipline, that were celebrated as the hallmarks of the British seaman. Thus in the principal account of the wreck of the Abergavenny, Captain Wordsworth and his officers were eulogized for dying ‘in the cause of their King and Country’, and for knowing even when faced with death ‘the value of discipline’.¹³ Here and elsewhere, officers are often presented both as models that lower-rank sailors should seek to emulate, and also as authority figures whose judgement and courage can be trusted by the lower ranks. Simultaneously, many of these accounts stress the dangers of insubordination in any form. From the general survey of shipwreck narratives given in the last chapter, it will be recalled that mutiny and anarchy are two of the key topoi in what I dubbed the ur-narrative of shipwreck that seems to underpin many accounts of actual wrecks. Disobedience and riot as the disaster actually unfolds and the crew despair of their lives; subsequently, in the aftermath phase of the disaster, more considered insubordination and factionalism, as some of the crew decide that their best course of action is to strike out for themselves—these were scenes and situations familiar to all who had read widely in the literature of maritime misadventure. Many writers and editors accordingly took care to stress the necessity of maintaining discipline at all times, singling out for praise those who helped to forestall such Hobbesian scenes—the midshipman on the Abergavenny, for example—whilst simultaneously reminding the reader that where such scenes did occur, the chances of survival usually diminished dramatically. If many shipwreck narratives thus sought to present positive, heroic images of the self-disciplined British sailor, the counterpart to ¹² W.D., Authentic Narrative, 16.

¹³ Ibid. 17.

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this rhetorical tendency in the form was the highly negative images presented of those figures who relinquished their posts, or who refused, for whatever reason, to follow the advice of their officers. As a result, many of these accounts serve to reinforce powerfully the starkly binary characterization that Geoff Quilley sees as typical of eighteenthcentury representations of sailors, an opposition that casts them either as loyal, well-disciplined Jack Tars with ‘hearts of oak’, or else as hard-drinking, foulmouthed, and irreligious malcontents, prone to violence, insubordination, and mutiny.¹⁴ Evident in many shipwreck narratives, moreover, is the authorial or editorial assumption that the common sailor is somehow inherently fractious, predisposed always to anarchy and violence if a firm authority is not maintained over him. John Byron, for example, deploys a terminology that is commonplace in the genre when he labels the ‘licentious crew’ of the Wager an ‘ungovernable herd’ who refused to acknowledge ‘the solidity of their captain’s advice’, and who thereby greatly aggravated the situation they were in.¹⁵ In so far as it follows these representational conventions, the shipwreck narrative is a genre seemingly intended to inculcate a habit of obedience and deference to authority—and to do so not only in sailors, or would-be sailors, but also in the population at home, who so avidly consumed accounts of these disasters. This is especially the case in many of the narratives—and also, many of the compilations of shipwreck narratives—that appear in the first decades of the nineteenth century. During the long war with France, the loyalty and obedience of the sailors in both Britain’s merchant fleet and its Navy were crucial. Yet the great Naval mutinies of 1797, at Spithead and the Nore, had shown that this loyalty could not be complacently assumed. If the sailor’s life was tough enough in peacetime in this period, the exigencies of war had added new causes of discontent in the maritime workforce, notably in the form of greater levels of impressment, by which sailors in the merchant fleet were forcibly recruited into the Navy. In this context, it seemed more important than ever that sailors be educated in the necessity ¹⁴ See Geoff Quilley, ‘Duty and Mutiny: The Aesthetics of Loyalty and the Representation of the British Sailor c. 1789–1800’, in Philip Shaw (ed.), Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793–1822 (Aldershot, 2000). ¹⁵ John Byron, The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron (London, 1768), p. vii.

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of obedience, and about the horrors that might follow from acts of insubordination. Thus it is to an anxiety about the loyalty of the British sailor, as well as to a fascination for all things nautical and an adulation of Naval heroes such as Nelson (arguably the supreme example of the self-sacrificing sailor), that we should probably ascribe the proliferation of collections of shipwreck literature in the 1800s and 1810s. The editor of one such collection, revealingly, was a former sea chaplain who in the immediate aftermath of the 1797 mutinies had preached sermons to one of the most notoriously mutinous ships in the Navy, the Impetueux. In his sermons, subsequently published, James Stanier Clarke stresses ‘the virtue of obedience’ and ‘the necessity of subordination’.¹⁶ Illustrating his theme with a range of historical and biblical precedents—for example, St Paul’s injunction to his companions during his voyage to Rome, ‘except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved!’ (Acts 27: 31)—Clarke exhorts his audience thus: You must prove yourselves the disciples of Christ, by patiently continuing in your station; by being attentive to your appointed duties, and shewing a constant submission to the powers that are.¹⁷

Clarke’s subsequent publication, Naufragia: Or, Historical Memoirs of Shipwrecks and of the Providential Deliverance of Vessels, repeatedly shows the benefits of maintaining such discipline and obedience, and the horrors that ensue when these Christian virtues are abandoned. As this will suggest, Providence was frequently invoked to bolster not only the patriotic message of these texts—the claim that Britain is a nation especially favoured by God, and charged with some sort of manifest destiny in the world—but also their authoritarianism. In these texts, disobedience and mistrust of one’s social superiors is often made to seem well-nigh indistinguishable from disobedience and mistrust of God, lending a more profound stigma to insubordination. And Providential justice, it is frequently implied, works to reward the obedient and dutiful (even if it is sometimes a reward that comes not in this world but the next), and to punish the ill-disciplined and mutinous. One of Thomas Tegg’s pamphlets, for example, includes as a shorter piece an account of six British soldiers who deserted from St Helena, largely at the instigation of one man, McKinnon. They set ¹⁶ Clarke, Naval Sermons, 74 and 83.

¹⁷ Ibid. 93.

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off from the island in a longboat, and in due course ran out of food and found themselves faced with famine. At McKinnon’s suggestion, they planned to eat one of their number—and when the lots were drawn, the man selected was the ringleader of both the desertion and the cannibalism, McKinnon himself. This produces the following comment from the narrator: In attending to the above narrative, as simple as it is affecting, we cannot help noticing the justice of Providence, so strikingly exemplified in the melancholy fate of McKinnon, the deluder of these unhappy men, and the victim of his own illegal and disgraceful scheme. May his fate prove a momento to soldiers and sailors, and a useful though awful lesson to the encouragers and abettors of desertion.¹⁸

The role that religion was thus made to perform in subtly enforcing an authoritarian ideology was not lost on the more freethinking strands of radicalism in the era—a subject to which I shall return in Chapter 6, in my discussion of Byron’s representation of shipwreck in Don Juan. In so far as they seemed to promote patriotism, self-discipline, and faith in divine Providence, shipwreck narratives were generally felt to be a highly educational genre, that could be profitably read by the young. Thus the editor of the volume containing the Meduse and Alceste accounts wrote that ‘a very strong recommendation of such works’ is that ‘they not only amuse but their moral instructs’, since in these disasters, we always find despair (which implies a mistrust of Providence, and a neglect of the means still in our power), insubordination, and misconduct of every description, more strikingly productive of their never-failing consequences—their punishment is immediate, and in truth, treads, if we may so express it, upon the very heels of guilt. In other cases, we are often unable to trace the necessary connexion between the conduct and the consequence; in shipwrecks, we see it clearly, and if we draw from it, a rule to guide our own conduct, the lesson will be usefully given.¹⁹

Such prefatory assertions as to the educative value of shipwreck narratives are quite common in a genre in which editors and publishers are clearly sensitive that they might be seen as trading voyeuristically ¹⁸ Thomas Tegg, The Loss of His Majesty’s Frigate Anson Etc (London, n.d.), 24. ¹⁹ Anon, The Shipwreck of the Alceste, an English Frigate, … [&] the Shipwreck of the Medusa, a French Frigate (Dublin, 1822), pp. i–ii.

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on the sufferings of others. Notwithstanding such assertions, however, one wonders to what extent the readers of these accounts were always principally concerned with the moral lessons they could draw from them—or to what extent, alternatively, they were always able to see the ‘necessary connexion’ between the events described in a narrative and the didactic conclusions some commentators drew from those events. Whilst a significant proportion of Romantic-era shipwreck narratives were undoubtedly intended to teach their readership subtle and not-so-subtle lessons in patriotism, discipline, and duty, they were probably not always received in this spirit. The central event of most maritime disaster narratives, after all, is one in which a highly regimented mode of existence—life on board a ship—is smashed apart, both literally and metaphorically. In many cases, these narratives then trace a slide back into a pre-socialized, almost infantile existence in which the only thing that matters is finding something to eat—or if this dreadful descent does not take place, the possibility of it nevertheless haunts the narrative and is a considerable source of grisly fascination for the reader, as discussed in the last chapter. What I earlier termed the ur-narrative of shipwreck accordingly enables for the reader a vicarious throwing off of social constraints, and at its most extreme an imagined violation of some of the most fundamental cultural taboos. Thus the shipwreck topos can easily take on a transgressive aspect, serving to activate fantasies not so much of heroism and self-discipline as of an escape from normality, a social order turned upside down, and even a sort of primal selfishness. Hence a need, perhaps, to ‘police’ the form by offering prefatory comments such as that cited above, that seek to guide the reader’s response to the text and establish the meaning that should be drawn from it. Although such statements, it is also worth noting, can often seem somewhat disingenuous. Not only in sensationalistic magazines like the Terrific Register, that in the 1820s made ‘Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea’ a regular feature, but also in supposedly more respectable and morally improving publications in this field, there can be an awkward air of prurience attendant on these accounts of extreme suffering. It is hard not to detect a note of salacious relish, for example, when J. G. Dalyell introduces the wreck of the Grosvenor as one in which ‘delicate females of the higher

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ranks, accustomed to all the comforts of life, … [were] left destitute and exposed to insult and indignity from savages’.²⁰ The more transgressive or subversive potentialities of shipwreck literature, and of the shipwreck topos, were further extended by the presence in the literature of maritime misadventure of many texts that do not wholly subscribe to the attitudes and representations outlined above. Voyages and Travels in the long eighteenth century was a genre in which it was not always easy to distinguish between wholly factual accounts of journeys undertaken, and more fictive (and in some cases, deliberately fraudulent) accounts.²¹ And at the more fictive end of the spectrum of travel literature known to Romantic readers were narratives that stood in the tradition of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), in which shipwreck or some similar maritime disaster is the starting-point of idealistic political fantasy. In this more romantic or utopian strand of the genre, the lower ranks were not always an inherently fractious ‘herd’ tending inevitably to anarchy and violence: instead, they were perfectly capable, once they had discarded the hierarchies of rank and class that pertained on board ship, of establishing peaceful, egalitarian communities, either amongst themselves or in conjunction with the natives amongst which they found themselves. Such alternative imaginings of the common sailor, and of the structure of the maritime community, were to some extent corroborated by evidence in more clearly factual voyage narratives. Thus George Keate’s Account of the Pelew Islands (1788) famously offered an idyllic, and highly Rousseauistic, account of the experience of the crew of the Antelope after it was wrecked in the western Caroline Islands in 1783: it is a text that allegedly influenced Coleridge and Southey’s utopian plans to establish a ‘Pantisocracy’ in America.²² Many pirate and privateering narratives, meanwhile, depicted sailors debating key issues, making decisions collectively, sometimes even voting captains out of office—scenes that are often denounced by the authors of these accounts, but that can equally seem, to readers of a certain sensibility, to be evidence of egalitarian, democratic tendencies that a tyrannous captain wishes to thwart. ²⁰ Dalyell, Shipwrecks and Disasters, iii. 3. ²¹ See Percy G. Adams, Travellers and Travel Liars (New York, 1980). ²² See James McKusick, ‘ ‘‘That Silent Sea’’: Coleridge, Lee Boo, and the Exploration of the Pacific’, The Wordsworth Circle, 24 (1993).

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Not every writer, moreover, denounced such scenes. Where George Shelvocke, for example, sought to portray the insubordinate elements in his crew as an unruly, anarchic ‘Gang of Levellers’, William Betagh—purser on the voyage of the Speedwell —sought to describe them in a more positive light, as comparatively principled figures bent on creating an ‘establishment [that] was more like a Commonwealth than an absolute monarchy’.²³ Betagh was writing to challenge Shelvocke’s account of the unhappy voyage of the Speedwell, and his counter-narrative illustrates another way in which the literature of maritime misadventure, viewed en masse, had a heteroglossic aspect that subtly challenged the authori tarian logic frequently advanced in the genre. Readers well read in this material would have been keenly aware that voyages that ended disas trously, or even just voyages dogged by misfortune, often gave rise to a slew of recriminatory and/or self-justificatory accounts of the voyage. John Byron’s narrative, for example, was one of seven accounts reporting the events that followed the wreck of the Wager, the most notable rival narrative being John Bulkeley and John Cummins’s Voyage to the South Seas (1743).²⁴ Equally, Bligh’s version of events in his Narrative of the Mutiny on Board His Majesty’s Ship the Bounty (1790) was similarly contested by Edward Christian, brother to Fletcher (and lawyer to the Wordsworths), and again a flurry of publications ensued as the two camps responded to each other’s accusations and counter-accusations.²⁵ As this will suggest, there were usually several different perspectives available on any given disaster, amongst them, quite often, the perspectives of lower-rank sailors. Although dominated by captains and men of the officer class, the literature of maritime misadventure was thus an area of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century print culture where one could, somewhat unusually, encounter the voices of the lower classes, as ordinary seamen ²³ George Shelvocke, A Voyage Round the World by the Way of the Great Sea (London, 1726), 157; William Betagh, A Voyage Round the World (London, 1728), 186–7. ²⁴ For a fuller account of the Wager controversy, and the various publications it gave rise to, see Philip Edwards, The Story of the Voyage: Sea-Narratives is EighteenthCentury England (Cambridge, 1994), ch. 4. The accounts by Bulkeley and Cummins, and by Byron, are both available in Alan Gurney (ed.), The Loss of the Wager: The Narratives of John Bulkeley and the Hon. John Byron (Woodbridge, 2004). ²⁵ See R. D. Madison (ed.), William Bligh and Fletcher Christian: The Bounty Mutiny (Harmondsworth, 2001), for the main texts in this dispute.

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gave their version of disastrous events either to make a profit or else, more urgently, to justify their conduct and defend themselves against accusations of mutiny. As they did so, they often presented a picture of authority very different from that generally presented in narratives of shipwreck, privateering, and so forth.²⁶ Thus Christopher Langman published A True Account of the Voyage of the Nottingham Galley (1711) to contest the version of events previously given by his captain, John Dean, and ‘to give others Warning not to trust their Lives or Estates in the Hands of so wicked and brutish a Man’.²⁷ Even narratives that sought generally to endorse authoritarian attitudes could throw up awkward evidence that seemed rather to support more liberal readings. Again, there are ambiguities inherent in many accounts of maritime misadventure that derive in part from the characteristic style and structure of many of these texts. Where the narrative is written up directly from a logbook or journal, as is frequently the case, we again encounter the disconcerting jolts, silences and ellipses discussed in the last chapter. Maintaining a brisk forward momentum, the narrative often does not pause to explain adequately the motivation for behaviour, or to justify the actions of captains and officers. This gives rise to many passages that seem to record sudden, and seemingly disproportionate, assertions of authority. Witness the following incident in Shelvocke’s Voyage. Giving an order to his carpenter, Shelvocke meets with the following response: Suddenly turning short upon me, as I stood by him, he swore an oath and said he would not strike another stroke … , that he truly would be nobody’s ²⁶ Even the wreck of Abergavenny, in which John Wordsworth died, was not without its element of controversy arising from the multiple publications that typically followed maritime disasters. An early account of the Abergavenny disaster seemed to imply that John Wordsworth was not so much a stoical figure accepting of his fate, as described above, but rather a depressive who took little care to save himself. It was an allegation that dismayed the Wordsworth family, who arranged through Charles Lamb at the East India Office to have this account revised so as to present a more positive image of John. See the various accounts of the Abergavenny disaster, all available online at http://www.weymouthdiving.co.uk/reference.htm (last accessed 23 July 2005); and for further background, Alethea Hayter, The Wreck of the Abergavenny: One of Britain’s Greatest Maritime Disasters and its Links to Literary Genius (Basingstoke, 2002). ²⁷ Quoted in Jane Donahue, ‘Colonial Shipwreck Narratives: A Theological Study’, Books at Brown, 23 (1969), 112.

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slave and thought himself now on a footing with myself ; this unreasonable exclamation provoked me to use him somewhat roughly with my cane. [Emphasis in the original]²⁸

It is an episode that bears a striking resemblance to an exchange that was to take place some sixty years later, and that was to be recorded in William Bligh’s Narrative. Here Bligh, the victim already of one mutiny, forestalls another. In the open boat to which Bligh and the loyal members of the Bounty crew were consigned, conditions had progressively deteriorated. Morale had plummeted, and with it the discipline of the party, until Fatigue and weakness so far got the better of [the men’s] sense of duty, that some of them began to mutter who had done most, and declared that they would rather be without their dinner than go in search of [provisions]. One person, in particular, went so far as to tell me, with a mutinous look, he was as good a man as myself. It was not possible for me to judge where this might have an end, if not stopped in time; I therefore determined to strike a final blow at it, and either to preserve my command or die in the attempt: and seizing a cutlass, I ordered him take hold of another and defend himself; on which he called out I was going to kill him, and began to make concessions.²⁹

The structural conditions that make such confrontations a commonplace of the literature of maritime misadventure are easy enough to understand. The hierarchical chain of command customarily operating on board a ship obviously becomes highly problematic once that ship has ceased to exist, or has been abandoned. In these situations, at what point does a captain no longer have authority over his crew, and at what point do the men who comprise the crew become a body of individuals no longer bound to obey anyone but themselves? Not surprisingly, the captain often took one view on this question, and the ordinary seaman another. As a consequence the literature of these disasters is full of incidents in which, as Marcus Rediker puts it, ‘the captain’s preference for hierarchy and deference [meets] the seaman’s challenges of equality and autonomy’.³⁰ At the same time, the captain’s resort to what can seem a somewhat abrupt and arbitrary ²⁸ Shelvocke, Voyage Round the World, 214. ²⁹ William Bligh, A Narrative of the Mutiny on Board His Majesty’s Ship Bounty (London, 1790), 55. ³⁰ Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 200–1.

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violence, as in the two instances above, also occurs often enough to be regarded as another commonplace of the genre.³¹ It is worth considering what one makes of these episodes, and reflecting on the questions that each in a sense asks of the reader. Do they constitute a brutal and excessive response on the part of Bligh and Shelvocke, or the necessary imposition of discipline, for the good of all, in a time of crisis? Conversely, do the passages show a dangerous independence, and the first steps on the slippery slope to mutiny, on the part of the lower-rank sailors? Or a perfectly legitimate desire for self-preservation, or possibly for competent leadership, in a highly perilous situation? The literature of maritime disaster is full of flashpoints in which one is prompted—required, even—to ask these questions. And for all that writers and editors may seek in their prefaces to guide the reader’s response, the situation as presented in the main narrative is seldom as black and white as presented in the preface. Because of the narratorial ineptitude of many of these writers, and the formal, logbook properties of many of the narratives, it is rarely the case that such acts of official violence are adequately accounted for. The characteristic style of these texts—unreflective and simply asserting what happened—makes little attempt to explain and legitimate these events. The violence, it sometimes seems, comes out of nowhere. And so events we are clearly meant to understand as the necessary, if unfortunate, restoration of discipline are all too easily read in a very different way, as examples of the arbitrary, brutal, and excessive means by which those in authority maintain and exercise their power. Thus if there is on the one hand a pronounced tendency in the literature of maritime misadventure to present sailors as figures only ever faced with a stark choice between right and wrong, obedience and mutiny, the genre also throws up ample material to contest, or at least complicate, this simple authoritarian message. Readers and commentators of all ideological persuasions acknowledged that the sailor’s life could be hard and dangerous. The ‘crippled Mendicant[s] ³¹ It is worth noting that these sudden acts of official violence could take more extreme forms than in the examples cited. John Byron, for example, records how Captain Cheap somewhat arbitrarily shot a man dead—an act that Byron, notwithstanding his desire to present a favourable account of Cheap, is unable to condone. See Byron, Narrative, 40.

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in Sailor’s garb’ who pass Margaret’s door in Wordsworth’s ‘The Ruined Cottage’ had a basis in fact.³² William Spavens, for example, lost a leg at sea: his 1796 narrative of his life closes with the poignant image of him leaving Hazlar hospital ‘lame and swinging on a pair of crutches, in a dress that likewise bespoke me an invalided seaman’.³³ But for more liberally and radically minded commentators, the hardships borne by the sailor were not just the inevitable consequence of the maritime environment, they were also the result of a disciplinary regime that was unduly severe, and a structure of command that all too easily became despotic. The conditions endured by British sailors were the focus of much liberal and radical protest in the Romantic period, especially in relation to the practice of Naval impressment. As Nicholas Roe has shown, this was an issue of particular concern to Wordsworth in the 1790s: his brother-in-law Henry Hutchinson was pressed into the Navy, eventually obtaining his discharge and returning home to tell horror stories about the cruelties of maritime life.³⁴ A decade later, impressment was still a topic that vexed the radical imagination: Shelley’s poem ‘The Voyage’ (1812) closes with the image of a sailor returning home after many years absence only to be seized by the press gang just as he puts his hand to the latch of his door. For opponents of the practice, the legality of impressment was debatable: some saw it as tantamount to enslavement or imprisonment. It was also claimed to work a dangerous, brutalizing effect on the victim, whose sensibilities were supposedly coarsened both by his exposure to the horrors of war and by his subjection to harsh discipline. Readers of a radical or liberal disposition were accordingly inclined to respond more sympathetically to moments of apparent insubordination, even mutiny, in the literature of shipwreck and maritime misadventure. For such readers, there were sometimes circumstances that justified the resistance of authority, and the shipwreck narrative was a genre to which one could turn to find evidence of such legitimate acts of resistance, notwithstanding the pronounced authoritarianism generally espoused in these accounts. But for readers of all political ³² ‘The Ruined Cottage’, MS B, l. 500, in William Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar, ed. James Butler (Ithaca, NY, 1979). ³³ William Spavens, Memoirs of a Seafaring Life; The Narrative of William Spavens, ed. N. A. M. Rodger (London, 2000), 222. ³⁴ See Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford, 1988), 130; and for Hutchinson’s stories, W Letters, I. i. 231–2.

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persuasions, it should be reiterated, it was not just the rights and wrongs of individual cases that were at issue as one reached a verdict on the many moments of insubordination and/or official retribution found in these texts. Larger ideological principles were also at stake. All were aware that these accounts often seemed to present microcosmic versions of the greater confrontation taking place across Europe in this Revolutionary era, between on the one hand established authority and a hierarchical social organization, and on the other, ‘the people’ (a term frequently used for the lower ranks of the crew in this period) and more democratic or egalitarian impulses. It was in this context that these narratives were often read and interpreted, and as a consequence the lessons supposedly learnt from the behaviour of groups and individuals on disastrous voyages were not infrequently invoked in political discussion. Thus the necessity of having some degree of hierarchy in society was best illustrated, for the anonymous author of The AntiGallican; or Strictures on the Present Form of Government Established in France (1793), by the example of Bounty mutineers, amongst whom ‘dissention arose from want of that subordination to which they had been accustomed’, with the result that ‘the society was dissolved’.³⁵ In such ways the literature of maritime misadventure brought into focus some of the most pressing political concerns and anxieties of the Romantic era. And because it is haunted in this way by spectres of insubordination, mutiny, and Revolution, the topos of shipwreck and/or the ship threatened with wreck becomes an even more pertinent, and potent, vehicle for expressing a sense of profound social and political crisis. At a symbolic level suggestive of some great crisis in the ship of state, it also brought to mind the ordeals that sailors went through, and the very different responses that could be made to these ordeals and crises. This was not always the case, of course, but as we shall shortly see there are certainly some instances in which it is the range of socio-political concerns just sketched that impel the Romantic usage of images, scenes, and situations drawn from accounts of shipwreck and similar maritime misadventures. Equally, there are maritime episodes in some Romantic texts that seem more ³⁵ The AntiGallican; or Strictures on the Present Form of Government Established in France (London, 1793), 74. The author’s counter-example, supposedly demonstrating the benefits that follow from maintaining hierarchies in such situations, is (a little lamely) the relationship between the fictional Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday.

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resonant when we locate them in the contexts established above. For example, both Southey, in the unpublished version of Madoc (1797–9), and Mary Shelley, in Frankenstein (1818), depict voyages in which captains respond with differing degrees of sympathy to the complaints of their crews.³⁶ Discontented sailors are not always to be treated as inherently fractious reprobates, these episodes seem to suggest, and wise leadership does not cling too rigidly, or too punitively, to its authority. Today, one might easily overlook the radical, or at least liberal, force of these scenarios; in Romantic-era culture, however, they worked subtly to contest alternative images of authority and mutiny in the maritime context.

M A R I T I M E M I S A DV E N T U R E R S O N T H E PAG E : WO R D S WO RT H ’ S ADVENTURES ON SALISBURY PLAIN A N D THE BORDERERS Men in various vessels roam the deep Of social life, and turns of chance prevail Various and sad. William Wordsworth³⁷

Around the figure of the suffering mariner, then, there glowed in the Romantic period a penumbra of political anxiety and crisis. For evidence that Romantic writers sometimes attached a sociopolitical significance to maritime misadventures we can turn to two early works by William Wordsworth: Adventures on Salisbury Plain (written 1795–9) and The Borderers (written 1797–9). David Collings has suggested that there is a consistent ‘underlying figural structure’, a recurrent ‘tropological dynamic’, shaping much of Wordsworth’s early poetry—a structure he sees as embracing lost travellers, ‘the ³⁶ On Madoc, see Lynda Pratt, ‘Naval Contemplation: Poetry, Patriotism and the Navy, 1797–1799’, Journal for Maritime Research (Dec. 2000), . Last accessed, 10 July 2006. ³⁷ ‘Salisbury Plain’, ll. 33–5, in William Wordsworth, The Salisbury Plain Poems, ed. Stephen Gill (Ithaca, NY, 1975).

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turn on to the wrong path, unreadable or disfiguring violence, the crossroads, the uninhabitable shelter’.³⁸ On the basis of Adventures on Salisbury Plain and The Borderers, one might incorporate into this list the topoi of shipwreck, mutiny, and other stock situations of maritime misadventure. A ‘tropological dynamic’ derived from the texts discussed in the last section frequently seems to underpin Wordsworth’s poetry, and particularly his representations of travel. And the same source material, it can plausibly be suggested, at some level informed not only Wordsworth’s writing but also his actual walking, and the pedestrianism undertaken by others in this period—a topic that will be explored in the next section. Wordsworth had from childhood a fascination not just with the sea, but specifically with its dangers, its destructive capacity, and the disasters that could unfold in the maritime environment. An interest in the communal, political dramas that could unfold in long, ocean-going voyages, moreover, can be assumed from the fact that Wordsworth had a close personal connection to the Bounty débâcle. Fletcher Christian, ringleader of the mutineers, hailed from Cockermouth in Cumberland. He attended the same school as Wordsworth; his elder brother Edward had taught the poet there, and was later to act as solicitor to the Wordsworths. Given this connection, it is not surprising that Wordworth got involved in the campaign to clear Fletcher Christian’s name, writing to the Weekly Entertainer in 1796 to expose inconsistencies and errors in the fraudulent Letters from Fletcher Christian (1796), a work that cast Christian in the worst possible light. But what is more surprising, as Geoffrey Sanborn has noted, is that this contribution to the pro-Christian campaign seems to have prompted Wordsworth to reappraise his attitude to mutiny and mutineers. The day after writing to the Entertainer, Wordsworth began work on the verse drama The Borderers, in which the figure of the mutineer is inflected in a far less sympathetic fashion. The Borderers accordingly stands, Sanborn suggests, as Wordsworth’s ‘repudiation of his alliance with the Christian family’s version of the Bounty incident’.³⁹ Or alternatively, in terms of the present discussion, ³⁸ David Collings, Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural Dismemberment (Baltimore, 1994), 1–2. ³⁹ Geoffrey Sanborn, ‘The Madness of Mutiny: Wordsworth, the Bounty and The Borderers’, The Wordsworth Circle, 23 (Winter 1992), 35.

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it marks a moment when Wordsworth switches from one possible reading of the archetypal mutiny narrative to another, abandoning a more sympathetic and liberal interpretation for a more authoritarian version. Before considering the representation of mutiny and the mutineer in The Borderers, however, I wish to consider an earlier poem in which the influence of the Bounty affair, and of the literature of maritime misadventure, is also perceptible, albeit more subtly. Adventures on Salisbury Plain (1795–9) is a revision, and expansion, of the earlier poem Salisbury Plain (written 1793–4), a work born of Wordsworth’s own experience of traversing this desolate region in July 1793.⁴⁰ Wordsworth made this journey at a time of profound personal crisis: he had just broken with Annette Vallon, whilst simultaneously he found himself required to question his political allegiances as the Terror began in France, and as the antagonism between France and Britain escalated. This inner turmoil, the bleak landscape of the Plain, and the spectacular violence of a storm that broke as Wordsworth made his crossing, all combined to produce—as he recalled at the age of seventy-three—‘imaginative impressions, the force of which I have felt to this day’.⁴¹ These impressions gave the first version of the poem, Salisbury Plain, a lurid and phantasmagoric aspect. As Wordsworth renders it, the plain becomes a place of nightmare where the traveller hears ominous voices and sees terrifying visions of druidic human sacrifice. The traveller meets a female vagrant, who tells how she has been reduced to vagrancy by economic hardship, the upheavals of war, and the death of her husband and children. Now she too wanders Salisbury Plain alone: implicitly, the traveller’s and the female vagrant’s situations mirror each other, and the poem ends with the narrator furiously denouncing the society that has abandoned this ‘friendless hope-forsaken pair’ (l. 415). Adventures on Salisbury Plain retains the female vagrant’s story as the core of the poem, but it greatly expands the frame narrative placed around this tale. In Adventures, it is quickly established that the traveller is a sailor, and also a murderer: fearing to rejoin his wife and children after committing his crime, he became a vagrant. ⁴⁰ For a powerful account of the bleakness of the Salisbury Plain landscape, see Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth (London, 1998), 252–3. ⁴¹ Quoted in WSP 221.

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Thereafter, incidents and characters accumulate, the latter mostly a cast of broken, displaced individuals. Salisbury Plain becomes a place of random, harrowing encounters, as the Sailor meets with, inter alia, a discharged soldier, a body swinging in a gibbet, the Female Vagrant (with whom he subsequently travels), a family headed by a brutal father, and another impoverished woman at the point of death. This last turns out to be the wife abandoned by the Sailor. Only a brief reunion is possible before she dies, and shortly afterwards the Sailor is apprehended for his earlier crime. In an abrupt conclusion to the poem, he is handed over to the authorities and executed, and the last lines of the poem depict his body hanging in the very gibbet at which he had previously paused: And now some kindred sufferer driven, perchance, That way when into storm the sky is wrought, Upon his swinging corpse his eye may glance And drop, as he once dropped, in miserable trance. (11. 825–8)

As this will suggest, Adventures on Salisbury Plain manifests at one level a dreadful circularity in its narrative structure. Very early on, we witness the Sailor’s dismayed reaction to the body in the gibbet, which causes him to faint into a trance; by the poem’s conclusion, the Sailor has become that body, and is himself hung up as a monitory spectacle to others. This circularity in the plotting of the poem complements and points up a deeper circularity in the Sailor’s tragic story. Ultimately, he is executed and exhibited by the state. Yet whilst the Sailor is clearly guilty of the crime for which he is executed—and whilst from one perspective the legal system quite rightly condemns him—the poem also implies that it was to some extent the state that drove him to commit his crime. Returning from a voyage, and from ‘two full years of labour hard’ (1. 77), the Sailor was seized by ‘the ruffian press gang’ (l. 80) before he had even made it home to his wife. The carnage of war, and its inevitable desensitizing effects, followed, as ‘Death’s worst aspect daily he survey’d | Death’s minister’ (ll. 83–4). Yet after using, and brutalizing, the Sailor in this way, the state turned him adrift. ‘The slaves of Office’ (l. 91) spurned his application for the prize money customarily awarded after Naval victories and sent him

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home penniless, and it was in this downcast, hopeless frame of mind that he robbed and killed another traveller. From this perspective, then, Adventures on Salisbury Plain seems to show the state condemning a criminal and a crime that it has itself created. In this regard, it is a text deeply influenced by William Godwin’s Political Justice and Caleb Williams—which Wordsworth was reading in 1794 and 1795—and by the critique of the penal system, and of the social causes of crime, that Godwin offers in those works.⁴² In the present context, however, one might remark that Wordsworth’s social protest here is simultaneously informed by the literature of maritime misadventure. It is of course a sailor whom Wordsworth takes as the focus for his Godwinian critique of social injustice and iniquity, rehearsing and reinforcing radical protests over the cruelty of impressment. And the poem’s imagery at several points serves to suggest that the other hapless individuals criss-crossing the plain (including, perhaps, Wordsworth himself?) are also all, metaphorically at least, in the position of distressed and suffering mariners. Salisbury Plain becomes a place as ‘dark and void as ocean’s watry realm | Roaring with storms beneath night’s starless gloom’ (ll. 174–5), and across this ocean all the characters are implicitly making their own voyages (a comparison made explicitly in the earlier version of the poem, in the lines that provide the epigraph to this section). Later in the poem, meanwhile, the Female Vagrant talks of herself being ‘turned adrift | Helpless as a sailor cast on desart rock’ (ll. 469–70). Fashioning a Godwinian critique of contemporary society, then, Wordsworth’s imagination reaches at several points for figures, settings, and images drawn from disastrous voyage literature. That he does so suggests implicitly that this literature is a key reference point, for Wordsworth and his readers, for notions of extreme, harrowing suffering. And one might also infer, on the basis of Wordsworth’s interweaving of this imagery in such a poem of social protest and critique, that to the radical imagination sailors and their travails can stand as a particularly potent symbol for all those in society who are downtrodden and suffering under an iniquitous and often brutal regime. The disciplinary measures enacted in the maritime context by ⁴² See Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, 132.

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that regime would have been familiar to Wordsworth not only from his reading of maritime misadventures generally (it was at this time, we should note, that Wordsworth was reading Shelvocke, passing on the detail of the albatross to launch Coleridge’s poem about a distressed mariner) but also from his more personal interest in the Bounty mutiny. From the pro-Christian point of view, the Bounty mutiny was a ‘crime’ that had its origins in the tyrannical behaviour of Bligh, who as captain of a Naval ship was invested with the authority of the crown and the state. Here, moreover, was a crime that the state, after first having incited it, then punished with extreme and somewhat arbitrary severity. Fourteen of the men who had remained on the Bounty were picked up in Tahiti in 1790 by HMS Pandora. Of those, several came aboard the ship voluntarily, claiming to have been mere bystanders during the mutiny, in some cases innocently involved in activities elsewhere on the ship and unaware that the mutiny was taking place.⁴³ But all were treated as mutineers, manacled, and locked in a special cabin built on deck. When subsequently the Pandora was wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef, the captain seems to have made little effort to save them: four drowned. Back in Britain, three of the remaining ten were found guilty of mutiny, and on 18 September 1792, in Portsmouth harbour, the bodies of Thomas Ellison, Thomas Burkitt, and John Millward swung from the yardarm of HMS Brunswick. Did Wordsworth have Ellison, Burkitt, and Millward in mind, consciously or unconsciously, when he concluded Adventures on Salisbury Plain with a sailor’s body swinging in a gibbet? It is a hypothesis impossible to prove, but it may explain why Wordsworth reaches for maritime imagery at various points in the poem. And it is a hypothesis that becomes more plausible when one turns to a subsequent work that in many ways stands as a riposte to the radicalism of Adventures. For in The Borderers, Wordsworth was certainly thinking at several points of the Bounty mutiny—only here, as noted earlier, his reading of that disastrous voyage, and his sympathies, seem to have been significantly realigned. Like Adventures, The Borderers establishes an equivalence between events occurring on dry land within the British Isles, and events ⁴³ See Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge, 1992), 35–112 and 189–251, for a good account of the mutiny and subsequent events.

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occurring during voyages over distant seas. Set in the disputed border territory of Cumberland and Westmorland during the reign of Henry III, the verse drama’s action is driven by a tragedy that took place years earlier during a sea voyage in the Mediterranean. The two central characters are Mortimer, leader of a band of outlaws, and Rivers, his lieutenant. Mortimer is honourable and virtuous; Rivers, although undoubtedly charismatic, is more dangerous, an Iago-like figure who scorns moral scruples and conventional pieties.⁴⁴ For Rivers, moral codes and emotional ties are inhibiting forces, subtle but insidious modes of social control; he believes himself liberated into a purely rational, intellectual mode of being. This came about because of the aforementioned voyage, which is recounted in Act IV, Scene ii, of the play. There Rivers describes how his life took a fateful course when he embarked on a ship bound for Syria. In the course of that voyage, Rivers became convinced that there was a conspiracy against him, orchestrated by the captain. Matters came to a head when the ship was becalmed in the Mediterranean. Searching for water, a party including Rivers and the captain landed on ‘a bare rock, narrow and white and bare’ (iv. ii. 23), where the two men quarrelled. As Rivers recounts events, the captain’s ‘temper was imperious, and he struck me— | A blow!’ (iv. ii. 32–3). Enraged, Rivers was barely restrained from killing his adversary immediately; he insisted, however, that the crew abandon the captain on the island. This was effectively murder, since it consigned the captain to certain death. This is a miniature voyage narrative that draws generally upon accounts of mutiny and other maritime misadventures. Geoffrey Sanborn has quite rightly noted the various parallels with the Bounty affair, but perhaps pins Rivers’s account too rigidly to this single source. The key elements are staple features in disastrous voyage narratives, and there are also some discrepancies between what happened on the Bounty and what happened to Rivers. The captain here, for example, is abandoned alone on an island, whilst Bligh was consigned to an open boat with several companions—but there are plenty of instances of men marooned alone elsewhere in voyage literature (the fate of Alexander Selkirk, abandoned during one of ⁴⁴ For a detailed elucidation of the character of Rivers, and the philosophical traditions he represents, see Thomas McFarland, William Wordsworth: Intensity and Achievement (Oxford, 1992).

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Dampier’s voyages, being just the most famous example). Equally, all eyewitnesses agree that Bligh never actually struck Fletcher Christian. As noted earlier, however, the seemingly abrupt act of violence on the part of an officer was a fairly commonplace scene in these accounts. For all that the captain seems to strike Rivers an arbitrary, unjustified blow, however, it is ultimately the captain who is the real victim of the confrontation in this narrative of mutiny and maritime disaffection. Unlike Adventures on Salisbury Plain, which closed with the established authorities killing a lower-rank sailor, here it is the figure of authority who is killed. And unjustifiably killed, it soon emerges. Rivers recounts how he went on to discover that in fact the captain had had no animus against him; it was the crew who contrived to incite him to murder a captain whom they hated. However, when the ship reached Syria it was Rivers who was blamed for the crime, and whose reputation was ruined. Crushed, he fell into depression and took to making solitary journeys through the remote regions of the Middle East—in the course of which he fashions the new, freethinking self-image outlined above. Rivers’s rebellion against his captain’s authority leads ultimately to a dangerous, transcendental self-image: I seemed a being who had passed alone Beyond the visible barriers of the world And traveled into things to come. (iv. ii. 133–5)

His crime, and his subsequent contemplation of that crime, have supposedly released him from the ‘fools of feeling’ (ii. i. 5), from qualms, enfeebling emotions, and superfluous social and natural bonds. He proclaims himself an ‘independent intellect’ (iii. v. 33), courageously taking on tasks that others baulk at through mere squeamishness. In this way, commentators have noted, Rivers is something of a parody of Godwinian attitudes, with which Wordsworth had become increasingly disillusioned. The Godwinian emphasis on reason alone as the touchstone for conduct and for social reform is shown to lack a moral dimension, and to be dangerously devoid of sympathy and compassion. Rivers pronounces himself willing, if necessary, to exercise ‘the wholesome ministry of pain and evil’ (ii. i. 73), and

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the action of the play revolves around Rivers’s attempt to make Mortimer exercise a similar retributive violence. Through a series of machinations and allegations, Rivers brings it about that Mortimer murders Herbert, the father of the woman Mortimer loves. In a re-enactment of Rivers’s original crime, the old man—blind, and so helpless without a guide—is led to a desolate moor and abandoned there; like the sea captain, he is consigned to what seems a certain death. In so far as the tragic events of a Mediterranean voyage are reenacted on a bleak English moor, The Borderers like Adventures on Salisbury Plain describes a fearful cycle of violence and murder. Unlike the earlier poem, however, responsibility for this cycle cannot be laid at the door of the authorities and the established social order. Wordsworth’s view of the social order in Adventures is succinctly condensed in a scene in which a father strikes his infant child a blow for no reason; in The Borderers, in contrast, father-figures such as Herbert and the sea captain are more sinned against than sinning. Like the sea captain, Herbert is guilty of none of the crimes and vicious intentions alleged against him—it is Rivers who fabricates all the allegations, so as to lead Mortimer into a crime that is his moral downfall. His precise motive for orchestrating Mortimer’s downfall is unclear, and seems curiously overdetermined, but what is certain is the duplicity—and the self-deception—of his Godwinian rhetoric. Rivers may claim to take a stance of intellectual independence, and to take reason rather than sentiment or conventional morality as the guide to his actions, but his need to reduce Mortimer to his own level shows him to be in the grip of a powerful, irrational compulsion. If The Borderers in this way reassesses the Godwinianism of Adventures on Salisbury Plain, it also reassesses the more sympathetic view of mutiny that seems implicit in both the earlier poem and Wordsworth’s championship of Fletcher Christian. The mutineer here has mistaken grounds for his disaffection, and he goes on to work a baleful influence on others. That initial throwing off of a sea captain’s authority results in a guilt and a madness—notwithstanding Rivers’s claim to be supremely rational—that spreads like a stain beyond the initial perpetrator. And as he inflects the topos of maritime mutiny in this way, Wordsworth is offering a commentary on much more than just

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the tragedies and the crimes that can occur on ships. Maritime mutiny stands as a useful metaphor for the French Revolution, which had increasingly lost the support of many British radicals as it launched itself upon the Terror. The connection was made more explicit in the 1842 revision of The Borderers; here the name of Rivers is changed to Oswald, after John Oswald, a notorious fellow-traveller in the French Revolutionary cause whom Wordsworth may have met in Paris in the early 1790s. Like his namesake in Wordsworth’s play, the historical Oswald was also a traveller in a more literal sense: he had made journeys and voyages to exotic regions such as India, and these were widely regarded (back home in Britain at least) as having turned his head and making him susceptible to dangerous foreign influences.⁴⁵ Like the fictional Rivers/Oswald, moreover, the historical Oswald was soon mired in the further violence that emanated from an initial throwing off of established authority, meeting his end suppressing counter-revolutionary uprisings in France in 1792. The subtly different political inflection that Wordsworth gives to maritime misadventure as he moves from his youthful radicalism to the conservatism of his later years is a topic I shall pick up again in Chapter 5. Here, however, I wish to conclude my discussion of Adventures on Salisbury Plain and The Borderers by noting another key element, or ingredient, that in both poems seems to be held in some sort of imaginative combination with their socio-political concerns, and with their utilization of maritime settings and images to articulate those concerns. This further element is walking. Robin Jarvis has noted that the entire action of The Borderers ‘consists of assorted destitutes and outlaws criss-crossing a blasted heath on foot’, and one can say exactly the same about Adventures.⁴⁶ Both poems, I would suggest, accordingly offer us some insight into the political concerns, and the political context, that impelled many in the Romantic period to take up walking as a mode of recreational travel; and so into the self-dramatizations frequently being enacted in the course of the pedestrian tour. It is to these topics that I now turn. ⁴⁵ For details of John Oswald, see David V. Erdmann, Commerce Des Lumières: John Oswald and the British in Paris (Columbia, Mo., 1986). ⁴⁶ Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (Basingstoke, 1997), 108.

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M I S A DV E N T U R E I N AC T I O N : PE D E S T R I A N I S M A S S O C I A L P ROT E S T One may take one’s choice of all characters in this romantic state of uncertainty as to one’s real pretensions … William Hazlitt⁴⁷ I took the idea of grinning for joy, in [the Ancient Mariner] from my companion’s remark to me, when we had climbed to the top of Plinlimmon and were nearly dead with thirst. We could not speak from the constriction, till we had found a little puddle under a stone. He said to me, ‘You grinned like an idiot!’ He had done the same. Samuel Taylor Coleridge⁴⁸

In the summer of 1801, John Bristed and Andrew Cowan set out from Edinburgh on a walking tour of Scotland. The two young men were both at the Inner Temple, but it was not as trainee lawyers that they presented themselves on this journey. Instead, both adopted the costume of American sailors—in Bristed’s case, a blue jacket, checked shirt, and white trousers with a blue stripe, accessorized with a cat-skin hat, knapsack, and green spectacles to protect his eyes from the sun. This was a disguise adopted for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, it was supposedly necessary for the mission of social enquiry they had set themselves. They wished ‘to see and to investigate the manners of the great body of the people, and to obtain a knowledge of their situation’, and to this end it was felt desirable to merge in with ‘the people’, and more than this, to appear as figures right at the bottom of the social scale.⁴⁹ On the other hand, however, one might suggest ⁴⁷ William Hazlitt, ‘On Going a Journey’, in Selected Writings, ed. Ronald Blythe (Harmondsworth, 1970), 142. ⁴⁸ Quoted (from Coleridge’s Table Talk of 31 May 1830) in Joseph Hucks, A Pedestrian Tour Through North Wales, ed. Alun R. Jones and William Tydeman (Cardiff, 1979), pp. lxiv–1xv. Note that Coleridge writes ‘Plinlimmon’ but actually means ‘Penmaenmawr’. ⁴⁹ John Bristed, Anthroplanomenos; Or, A Pedestrian Tour Through Part of the Highlands of Scotland, 2 vols (London, 1803), i, p. i.

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that this worthy empirical agenda was not all that drew the two young men to the personae of sailors. At one point in Bristed’s account of the journey, the two men meet a female vagrant, and delight in regaling her ‘with a long story of our being American sailors, who had gone through many a peril both by sea and land; and many a marvellous adventure did we recount’.⁵⁰ It seems that there is also a more romantic agenda underpinning Bristed’s self-dramatization, both as he travels and as he subsequently writes up that journey in his published narrative. He wants to be seen as someone who has undergone not only adventures but also misadventures—someone who has suffered, yet endured, at sea, and who is now persevering through a further series of dangers and discomforts as he journeys on foot. To this end, the narrative loses no opportunity to play up the perils and hardships endured by these two walkers dressed as sailors. Bristed’s overblown, indeed somewhat farcical, account of his pedestrian ordeal need not detain us too long. Instead, I wish to draw attention to the way in which four key elements meet in this journey, and in this text: pedestrianism, conspicuous suffering, an air of social concern and political protest, and finally—perhaps a little incongruously—the travails of mariners. Here is an ensemble of activities, ideas, and images that seem to have come together in the minds of some travellers in the Romantic period, and to have had a powerful resonance for them. In this final section, accordingly, I shall explore the convergence of these diverse ideas and activities in the Romantic imagination. The vogue of the walking tour, and the emergence in the 1780s and 1790s of a pedestrian subculture amongst the British touring classes, has been touched upon already in this study. In Chapter 1, it was noted that pedestrianism is interpretable from one perspective as a strategy of anti-touristic distinction, the means by which one group of tourists define themselves in contradistinction to other, supposedly less worthy travellers. Moreover, it is often specifically the rigours and perils involved in their walking—the long distances covered, for example, or the dangerous environments, such as mountains, traversed—that many pedestrian travellers use as a key criterion for their alleged superiority over other travellers. It is as a traveller ⁵⁰ Bristed, Anthroplanomenos, ii. 456.

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‘plodding’ on foot, not ‘lolling’ in the comfort of a carriage, that Wordsworth depicts himself when recalling his French walking tour of 1790.⁵¹ Coleridge similarly makes the physical discomforts of travelling on foot the mark of his implicit superiority over more privileged travellers during a walking tour in the summer of 1794. In one letter from this tour, he pens a few lines of verse that begin: ‘The Dust flies smothering, as on clatt’ring Wheels | Loath’d Aristocracy careers along’.⁵² The poet, implicitly on foot, is choked by the dust thrown up by the coach; as the poem continues it becomes apparent that he is also oppressed by the dreadful heat—but all these sufferings, we are meant to infer, make him morally superior to the lazy, loathed aristocrats in their fancy coach. In many pedestrian tour narratives, and in many letters written in the course of pedestrian tours, we find similar passages that play up the arduousness, discomfort, and even the danger of the travel experience. These passages are probably more rhetorical than reflective of the actual experience of the walker. We should not assume that walking was always more uncomfortable or dangerous than riding in a carriage, as many pedestrians insist. The suspension systems on coaches at this time were poor, as were road surfaces, and it has been suggested that in almost all weather conditions walking was more pleasant than being thrown about in a cramped, stuffy space that was probably either far too hot or far too cold.⁵³ Some pedestrians even acknowledge this fact at some moments in their narrative, often thereby contradicting other passages in which they accentuate the misadventures attendant on walking. But as so often in tourism, then as now, image seems to have been more important than actuality. One of the attractions of walking was that it enabled the pedestrian to present himself as a sturdy individual who was prepared to suffer in pursuit of a greater independence of travel and a more continuous contact with nature—these last being two of the customary rationales advanced for why one should take such troubles in one’s travelling. And whilst the pedestrian tourist’s interests and intellectual agenda could often overlap with the interests of other sorts of tourists, the mode of travel espoused by the pedestrian signalled a manly vigour ⁵¹ WPW 8. ⁵² C Letters, i. 84. ⁵³ See Jarvis, Romantic Writing, 20–2; also Philip S. Bagwell, The Transport Revolution from 1770 (London, 1974), 48.

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and self-reliance that implicitly refuted the accusations of effeminacy that were often applied to both the Grand and the picturesque tour. Closely entwined with these rationales for walking is a further motive for Romantic-era pedestrianism. As Bristed trumpets loudly at the start of his narrative, walking put one in touch with the ‘great body of the people’; indeed, it put one in the position of some of the lowest members of the general populace. For most of the Romantic period, walking any significant distance was a very unusual leisure activity. Although its respectability grew as the period wore on, in most people’s eyes it smacked at the very least of poverty, and quite possibly of criminality. Bristed and Cowan are arrested as vagrants at one point in their tour, and only narrowly escape gaol: a certificate from the magistrate who investigates their case is proudly displayed at the start of their narrative. Coleridge and Southey had a similar experience during a walking tour undertaken in the autumn of 1794. Having spent a night in a tavern—as Southey relates the story—‘in the morning [Coleridge and I] rose—and lo—we were fastened in! They certainly took us for footpads and had bolted the door on the outside for fear we should rob the house.’⁵⁴ Such scrapes are from one perspective just part of the exciting, sympathy-inducing misadventures that pedestrianism was supposed to entail. Yet there is also a more serious aspect to them. As Robin Jarvis has demonstrated in exemplary fashion, the pedestrianism of this period was more often than not a politicized activity, and its politics were usually radical, or at least liberal, in nature.⁵⁵ Notable pedestrians included William Frend, the Cambridge don who became a focus of radical protest when he was dismissed because of his Unitarianism; John Thelwell, best known as a radical politician and sometime prisoner of the state, but also the author of The Peripatetic; or, Sketches of the Heart, of Nature and Society (1793); and John ‘Walking’ Stewart, who had walked in regions as far afield as India, and returned to write idealistic philosophical and political tracts that bore titles such as Opus Maximus: or, the Great Essay to Reduce the Moral World from Contingency to System (1803) and Roll of a Tennis Ball, Through the Moral World, A Series of Contemplations, ⁵⁴ New Letters of Robert Southey, 2 vols., ed. Kenneth Curry (New York and London, 1965), i. 68–9. ⁵⁵ See Jarvis, Romantic Writing, 33–9.

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by a Solitary Traveller (1812). This connection between walking and political idealism, shading into radicalism, seems to have been generally recognized by contemporaries. One of the early uses of the word ‘pedestrian’ cited in the OED is that made by the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1802, which talks sniffily of ‘Pedestrians (under which name the moralizing travellers of the present day are well described)’. Bristed and Cowan were two such ‘moralizing travellers’, whose efforts to share the discomforts of the poor earned the following exasperated comment from Aiken’s Annual Review: They roam the country in forma pauperum, descant loudly on the luxuries of the great and the miseries of the poor, go from pot-house to pot-house for half of a bed, complain of the jealousy of the police because they are taken up as spies, and of the frequent inhospitality of the Scots, because they were not welcomed as gentlemen!⁵⁶

Similarly motivated, and similarly travelling in forma pauperum, was Coleridge in his walking tours of 1794. His companion on the summer tour, Joseph Hucks, described the two young men as being ‘so completely metamorphosed, that I much doubt whether you would recognize us through our disguise’. And he went on: ‘as for all ideas of appearance and gentility, they are entirely out of the question—our object is to see, not to be seen.’⁵⁷ Once again, this was a travel style that went hand in hand with radical political rhetoric, as Coleridge elaborated over the course of the tour his theories of pantisocracy and aspheterism (the ‘system of no property’), and proclaimed his solidarity even with oppressed animals. The symbolism and the imaginative associations that render walking a politicized activity in this period are not hard to grasp. The walker has dismounted from his horse, or got out of his coach—sometimes a symbol of modernity in this period, but more commonly a symbol of aristocratic luxury—and put himself on a level with the common man. In so far as his walking is gruelling, the pedestrian shares the pains and discomforts of the lower classes; in so far as he finds himself mistreated and viewed suspiciously by the authorities, he shares the indignities and injustices that are part of the daily experience of people at the bottom of the social pile. In this way, the walker is engaging in an act of solidarity, of sympathetic identification, with the ⁵⁶ Aiken’s Annual Review, 3 (1804), 4.

⁵⁷ Hucks, Pedestrian Tour, 5.

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poor, and he is also positioning himself to pronounce with empirical authority on their living conditions, their actions, and their moral state. Thus a repeated theme in Bristed’s narrative is the need to know something about the poor and the humble before passing judgement on them (either conversationally or legislatively). And finally, many of these Romantic-era walkers are also proselytizing among the lower classes, or at least, disseminating knowledge of more progressive political ideas and alternative social and political systems: in this spirit, Coleridge preaches radicalism in Wales in 1794, whilst Bristed and Cowan in Scotland sing repeatedly the praises of American democracy. In this way, as Robin Jarvis has noted, ‘the pedestrian tour offered liberal- or radically-minded young Romantics a particularly satisfying rite of passage’.⁵⁸ Developing this insight, Jarvis also notes the extent to which the activities of many of these pedestrians correspond with the model of the ritual process developed by the anthropologist Victor Turner. Central to the rite of passage, Turner argues, is a period of ‘liminality’, in which those undergoing the ritual stand apart from their usual social group.⁵⁹ Yet if in this way they are outside society, amongst themselves they form tighter social bonds, and a group identity that is often predicated on an ‘intense comradeship and egalitarianism’. Of particular relevance in the present context, moreover, is Turner’s observation that the espousal of pain and suffering can be a common means of generating and signalling this group identity. Uncomfortable and dangerous experiences bond the group together, and serve to differentiate them from the rest of society who usually seek to avoid such experiences. Viewed in this light, the Romantic pedestrian’s espousal of discomfort is somewhat overdetermined: it is not just an act of political commitment, social protest, and sympathy, but also serves more private ends by marking one’s entry into an important peer group. A key part of the ‘liminal’ state, Turner also suggests, is a certain fluidity of identity, a freedom from one’s normal social role that enables the donning and doffing of various disguises and personae. Clearly, this is an important part of the pedestrian experience, evident ⁵⁸ Jarvis, Romantic Writing, 38. ⁵⁹ See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London, 1969), 94–6, and also Jarvis, Romantic Writing, 37–9.

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in Southey and Coleridge’s delight when they are taken for footpads, Keats’s pleasure during his 1818 tour in appearing to be a pedlar, and De Quincey’s ‘periodic transmigrations’, during his Welsh tour of 1802, between the roles of seemingly vagrant pedestrian and gentleman.⁶⁰ It is in connection with this elaboration of various fantasy versions of the self (for Hazlitt in the first epigraph above, something that makes walking such a ‘romantic’ experience), that the figure of the maritime misadventurer, and the topoi of shipwreck and dangerous sea voyages, subtly inform the practice of Romantic pedestrianism. Bristed and Cowan, of course, make this persona especially explicit, but one may plausibly speculate on its attractiveness to other pedestrians as well. In playing up the pains and discomforts they have endured, for example, Bristed, Coleridge, and many other pedestrians foreground the hunger and thirst they have endured—and as we have seen, one of the primary contemporary reference points for dreadful extremes of hunger and thirst were harrowing accounts of ordeals at sea. With this in mind, one wonders how far Bristed as he walked—dressed as a sailor, and eager to fashion fantasies about hardships he has supposedly endured on the high seas—actually felt himself to be replicating the conditions suffered by mariners during disastrous voyages. The Salisbury Plain poems, it was suggested earlier, seem to show Wordsworth making similar imaginative connections between his own walking and more arduous voyages over distant seas, and for Coleridge too there seems to have been a tendency to fuse imaginatively these two very different modes of travel. As the second epigraph above shows, it was from his own experience of extreme thirst during a gruelling mountain ascent that Coleridge took some of the details of the Ancient Mariner’s ordeal. And even at the time, Coleridge had some sense of himself as playing a part, figuratively at least, in a narrative of maritime misadventure (and also, in very quick succession, a narrative of mountaineering). Pausing mid-tour to write to Southey, and urging his friend not to succumb to despondency, Coleridge exclaims: ‘I once shipwrecked my frail bark on that rock—a friendly plank was vouchsafed me. Be you wise by my experience—and receive unhurt the Flower, which I have climbed ⁶⁰ Quoted in Grevel Lindop, The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (Oxford, 1985), 76.

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Precipices to pluck.’⁶¹ This is only a lighthearted rhetorical flourish, of course, yet it is suggestive of the travel scripts, and the selfdramatizations, unfolding in Coleridge’s mind as he conducted his walking tour. In so far as the figure of the sailor, and specifically of the suffering sailor, does subtly inform Romantic pedestrianism, the appeal of this persona may be explained in several different ways. As was discussed in the last chapter, the suffering sailor can be understood as a figure who has garnered a special, visionary knowledge, who has travelled (not only geographically, but also physically or existentially, through the ordeal he has endured) to the limits of the known world, and there glimpsed what lies beyond these boundaries. Adopting an Ancient Mariner persona, accordingly, the Romantic traveller ascribes something of this visionary or prophetic power to himself. At the same time, however, there may also be a sympathetic agenda at work, an act of identification with a social group who at all times endured a gruelling existence but whose sufferings became, in the decades either side of 1800, a particular point of focus for social protest and anti-war agitation. And further to this, one can also recognize a more general air of political anxiety attendant on the figure of the suffering mariner, and especially on the shipwreck victim. Living as they were in turbulent times, and witnessing the dramatic transformation of the political landscape in Western Europe, writers and travellers of all political persuasions could find a resonance in the topoi of shipwreck and the endangered voyage. To cast themselves as shipwreck victims, or as sailors set on some perilous course, desperately trying to forestall shipwreck, answered to their sense of crisis, and suggested the scale of the dangers facing themselves and their compatriots. As noted earlier, David Collings perceives in Wordsworth’s early poetry a cluster of closely associated images and topoi—a sort of deep grammar of the imagination—that are returned to repeatedly. In this chapter, I have suggested that a similar ‘underlying figural structure’ or ‘tropological dynamic’ animates not only Wordsworth, but also British culture more generally in the Romantic period. It is a dynamic that embraces the sea, the dangerous voyage, the threat of shipwreck and/or its actual occurrence, sailors, mutineers, castaways, ⁶¹ C Letters, i. 85.

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and sea-captains. It was in an imagery comprised of some or all of these terms that many in the period articulated a sense of national crisis, and a variety of social and political anxieties—although as I demonstrated in the first section of this chapter, ambiguities in the source material from which these images derive enable them to be inflected in several different ways, expressive of some highly contrasting political positions. And this was an imagery that also informed significantly the self-dramatizations made, and the travel scripts pursued, by some British travellers in the period, even as they were engaged in activities and itineraries seemingly far removed from the sea. The second generation of Romantics, of course, take this preoccupation with the maritime, and this identification with the figure of the sailor, a stage further. Shelley and Byron did not merely imagine themselves sailors as they walked on dry land; they actually took to the sea themselves, becoming fixed in the public imagination—especially after Shelley’s drowning—as (mis)adventurous sailors. In their enthusiasm for boats and yachts, Shelley and Byron were in many ways typical of their class in this period. A further consequence of the British obsession with the sea in the Romantic era, and more specifically the cult of the Navy in the years after Trafalgar, is the emergence of yachting in its modern form. The Yacht Club was founded in 1815, to become the Royal Yacht Squadron in 1833; rules of competition were drawn up in the 1820s, and the first Cowes Regatta was held in 1826. The participants in this new craze for yachting were for the most part young aristocrats, and for the great majority of them their new hobby was in part a way of expressing patriotism and national pride. It gave them a chance to play at being Naval officers, as they designed uniforms for themselves and their crews, and kept guns and other armaments on board their vessels.⁶² Shelley and Byron were of their class in so far as they shared this enthusiasm for sailing—but as we shall see later, in connection with Byron at least, they also took up the role of sailor in ways significantly at odds with the attitudes of many of their contemporaries, and with the intent of projecting a very different political position. ⁶² See Ian Dear, The Royal Yacht Squadron, 1815–1985 (London, 1985), 28–9.

4 Explorers: Rhetorics of Science and Sacrifice

Explorers are to the ordinary traveller what the Saint is to the average church congregation. Hugh Massingham¹

Oddly enough it was the sufferings that Sir John [Franklin] and his men had to go through which attracted me most in his narrative. A strange urge made me wish that I too would go through the same thing. Roald Amundsen²

Distressed and suffering sailors were not the only travellers kept in mind by John Bristed and Andrew Cowan, as they set off on a journey that would require them to endure discomfort, hunger, and thirst. Early in Bristed’s account, another model for their misadventures is announced, albeit in a roundabout way. The walking tour has barely begun, when the reader is given a foretaste of the hardships that are to feature so prominently in the narrative. Travelling along a beach, Bristed and Cowan ‘began to be fatigued by the sinking of the sand, and incommoded by the heat of the sun’s rays’. At this point in the narrative, however, the acknowledgement ¹ Hugh and Pauline Massingham, The Englishman Abroad (London, 1962), p. xx. ² Quoted in Owen Beattie and John Geiger, Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition (London, 1993), 49.

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of such difficulties simply prompts the following exclamation from Bristed: But what are these petty inconveniencies, when compared with those serious ills, which the traveller experiences in the great desert of Zahara, as he toils with painful steps over the burning sands, or falls prostrate to avoid the fatal blast of the scorching simoom? See Bruce and Vaillant.³

The ‘Zahara’ is the Sahara, the ‘simoom’ is a ferociously hot North African wind, and ‘Bruce and Vaillant’ are James Bruce and Francois Le Vaillant, the authors, respectively, of Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1790) and Travels into the Interior Parts of Africa (1790). His own experience of ‘painful steps over … burning sands’, it seems, prompts Bristed to think of two of the most famous (and arguably, in Bruce’s case, notorious) explorers of the day. And whilst at one level the passage just cited seeks to disavow any similarity between the truly dreadful experience of these great explorers and the more trivial sufferings endured by Bristed, at another level it surely provides a revealing insight into the travel scripts underpinning Bristed and Cowan’s tour, and unfolding in their minds as they pursued their journey. Bristed may modestly disclaim any connection between himself and the great explorers, but the very invocation of their names suggests a desire to be seen as a traveller who in some small way simulates their more extreme experiences. There are subsequently occasions, moreover, when Bristed seeks to depict the heat, hunger, thirst, and other discomforts endured by himself and Cowan as much more than merely ‘petty inconveniencies’. Over the course of the whole narrative, accordingly, one senses that Bristed’s deference to Bruce and Vaillant coexists with an aspiration to emulate them, and to know something of the rigours they endured—even if his own ordeal must always be acknowledged as much lesser than that of the true explorer. This desire to play, in some small or not so small way, the part of the explorer, is common amongst Romantic travellers. It is a persona often implicitly adopted by Dorothy and William Wordsworth, as they too tour the Highlands in 1803 and record a variety of primitive or ‘savage’ scenes; and it is a role more explicitly claimed by Byron in ³ John Bristed, Anthroplanomenos; Or, A Pedestrian Tour Through Part of the Highlands of Scotland, 2 vols. (London, 1803), i. 42.

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the notes to Childe Harold, as he recalls how his journey to Albania in 1809 took him to regions unvisited by Englishmen (with the sole exception, Byron acknowledges, of a Major Leake).⁴ To this day, moreover, a mixture of deference and emulation vis-à-vis the explorer—and frequently a deference and an emulative zeal that respects especially the difficulties often attendant on exploration—underpins the attempts of many travellers to distinguish themselves from the touristic mass. It is in this spirit, for example, that Paul Fussell constructs a taxonomy of twentieth-century travellers, a three-tier hierarchy that has explorers at the top, tourists at the bottom, and the true or proper traveller poised somewhere between the two, rejecting the ease and superficiality of mere tourism and aspiring instead to the perceived authenticity, purity, and rigour of exploration.⁵ Or as Hugh Massingham puts it, in the first epigraph to this chapter (also quoted approvingly by Fussell), to real travellers the explorer should be a sort of saint, a figure to be both admired and imitated in lesser—but in their own way still heroic—acts of travel. Like much that sustains the traveller/tourist distinction, this veneration of the explorer, and the related tendency among some recreational travellers to style themselves after explorers, originates in the Romantic period. For if it was in the late eighteenth century that tourism began to expand, and to comprise diverse and subtly competitive subcultures of recreational travellers, it was also in this period that the distinctive figure of the explorer took shape and achieved celebrity. Like ‘tourist’, interestingly, the very word explorer only acquires its principal modern meaning over the course of the Romantic period, with the understanding we have today of an ‘explorer’ as someone who travels to make scientific discoveries in geography and related fields emerging in the 1810s.⁶ Prior to that, the term was mainly used in an older sense that denoted someone who made discoveries in any scientific discipline—physics, chemistry, and the like—whilst those who made discoveries through travel were customarily labelled ‘discoverers’ or (in the maritime context) ‘navigators’. Yet in this ⁴ See Dorothy Wordsworth, Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland (New Haven, 1997), 64, 88–9, 168, 186; BCPW ii. 130. ⁵ Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (Oxford, 1980), 39–41. ⁶ See the OED, and also John Keay (ed.), The Robinson Book of Exploration (London, 1993), p. xi.

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case, as in the case of the word ‘tourist’, the English language was lagging behind developments in British travel culture. It was obvious to contemporaries from the 1770s that a new type of discoverer or navigator had emerged. In the preface to Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, for example, James Bruce contrasts an old style of discovery, and a new style that he dates from the accession of George III. Previously, Bruce suggests, discoverers were motivated only by greed, and consequently all they brought to the regions they visited was violence. ‘To discover and to destroy seemed to mean the same thing; and what was still more extraordinary, the innocent sufferer was stiled the Barbarian; while the bloody, lawless invader, flattered himself with the name of Christian.’⁷ But with the new reign, Bruce claims, there began a ‘golden age’ of discovery, in which an ethos of ‘humanity and science’ replaced the earlier urge for conquest and acquisition.⁸ James Bruce, not untypically, suggests that he himself should be recognized and applauded as the first of this new breed of discoverers. To most of his contemporaries, however, this was an accolade that properly belonged to James Cook for his three great voyages of discovery (1768–71, 1772–75, and 1776–80). But as Bruce more correctly judges, it was the overwhelming emphasis placed on science that distinguished Cook’s voyages from comparable expeditions in earlier eras, and that brought into being a new sort of traveller. Cook travelled in pursuit of scientific objectives—the observation of the Transit of Venus from the island of Tahiti, the search for the fabled southern continent, the Terra Australis Incognita, and so forth—and his ships carried teams of scientific personnel whose role was the systematic accumulation of geographical and natural-historical data at every stage of the voyage. From one perspective, their presence on these voyages was the culmination of the Royal Society’s emphasis on precise empirical observation, as discussed earlier in relation to William Dampier—yet between Dampier’s scrupulous notes and the mountain of measurements and specimens gathered on the Cook voyages, there is also a significant intellectual gulf. A paradigm shift had taken place in European science, and especially in natural history, ⁷ James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 5 vols. (Edinburgh, 1790), i, p. b. ⁸ Ibid. i, p. d.

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through the influence of the great Swedish naturalist Linnaeus. His Systema Naturae (1735) had brought to a previously ill-defined area of study a new method and rationale, and not least, a new vocabulary. Linnaeus’s work seemed to provide a classificatory mechanism with which to order and catalogue the whole of creation, and it set in motion a global taxonomic project that was carried out with an almost evangelical zeal by Linnaeus’s disciples. Two such disciples travelled on Cook’s first voyage: Joseph Banks (subsequently Sir Joseph), who corresponded at length with the Swede, and Daniel Solander, who had been Linnaeus’s student. In Cook’s wake, British explorers pursued this intellectual agenda by both land and sea. In America, India, Australia, and many other regions besides, navigators, surveyors, and naturalists worked assiduously to map the world and catalogue its contents (an enterprise that also proceeded apace within the British Isles, as the Ordnance Survey mapping project began in 1791 and as writers like Thomas Pennant encouraged British tourists to gather natural historical data). In North Africa, as noted already, James Bruce made an epic solo journey (1768–74) to Abyssinia, whilst in West Africa Mungo Park’s two expeditions (1795–6 and 1805–6) began a long-running, often fatal, British fascination with Timbuktu and the Niger river. Another emerging national obsession was the North-West Passage and the Poles, as the British Navy sent several expeditions to the Arctic in the years after 1815, under the leadership of figures such as William Parry, John Ross, and John Franklin. The near-disaster of the latter’s overland expedition across the Canadian wilderness, related in A Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea (1823), enthralled the nation; it was also to prove curiously inspirational to the later explorer Roald Amundsen, as he recalls in the second epigraph to this chapter. Franklin was not the only one of the new breed of explorers to become a household name: Cook, Park, Parry, Ross, and many others were similarly celebrated and revered. An exploration ‘mania’, one might fairly suggest, gripped British culture in the Romantic period. The public flocked to museums (and also to many far more lowbrow, sensationalizing displays) to see the specimens and artefacts brought back from exploratory expeditions, and they visited eagerly plays, panoramas, and other entertainments that dramatized the

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achievements and discoveries of contemporary exploration.⁹ Above all, they consumed avidly the flood of new travel writing that flowed from these voyages and expeditions. As Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson note, ‘the period 1770–1835 was the age of the exploration narrative’.¹⁰ A distinctive new subgenre within the larger category of Voyages and Travels, exploration narratives were hugely popular, finding a broad and diverse readership. Collectively they enabled a survey of well-nigh the whole world, and allowed the British reading public to travel vicariously to the most remote, and the most exotic, peoples and places. In this context, it is hardly surprising that Romantic writers and travellers were much drawn to the figure of the explorer, and that they frequently assembled from exploration narratives travel scripts fundamental to their own self-dramatizations qua traveller.¹¹ It was a role that could appeal at many different levels, and that was thus possessed of a complex, even overdetermined symbolism. It signified most obviously originality, since the explorer’s business is inherently the making of discoveries, the finding out of new knowledge, and the surveying of previously unknown landscapes. At the same time, the persona of explorer often figured the writer’s (or traveller’s) sense of the importance and usefulness of their endeavours, since the explorer’s contribution to knowledge was widely assumed to be of universal benefit (although some Romantic writers, as we shall see, also recognized that there could be less innocent motives underpinning exploration). It is with all this range of implications that Romantic writers and travellers frequently troped themselves as explorers, or borrowed imagery from exploration narratives, both as they conducted actual journeys, and also as they conducted metaphorical journeys into the self and the obscure regions of the human mind (a self-fashioning fundamental to Wordsworth’s project in The Prelude), ⁹ For a good account of the diverse ways in which exploration was reported and presented to the public, see Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840: ‘From An Antique Land’ (Oxford, 2002). ¹⁰ Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, Travels, Explorations and Empires: Writings From The Age of Imperial Expansion, 1770–1835, 8 vols. (London, 2001), i. 1. ¹¹ For Romantic interest in the activities of explorers, see, inter alia, Alan Frost, ‘New Geographical Perspectives and the Emergence of the Romantic Imagination’, in Robin Fisher and Hugh Johnston (eds.), Captain James Cook and His Times (London, 1979); Tim Fulford, Peter Kitson, and Debbie Lee, Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge (Cambridge, 2004).

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or into the workings of their own society (an exploratory agenda that many pedestrian tourists felt themselves to be following). And in focusing especially, in these self-dramatizations, on the hardships and dangers that could so often confront real explorers, the Romantic writer and traveller plays up the heroism and fearlessness with which he pursues these ends, and associates himself with a sphere of masculine endeavour seemingly far removed from the more effete activities of the picturesque or Grand Tourist (exploration being in this era almost wholly a male preserve). At the same time, however, the Romantic attitude to the explorer was not wholly one of adulation and emulation. There were aspects of the new exploratory enterprise that provoked unease, or at least ambivalence, in some Romantic commentators; there were aspects of exploration, equally, on which Romantic commentators were divided, each responding differently according to his or her ideological outlook. The extent to which the explorer operated as an instrument of British imperialism and colonialism was one such potentially contentious issue. As noted earlier, a key element in both the public image of Romantic-era exploration, and in the self-conception of many individual explorers, was the understanding that exploration was not principally concerned with territorial acquisition or the promotion of British power. As the critic Mary Louise Pratt has pointed out, in most Romantic-era exploration narratives, and in most contemporary debate, exploration is generally represented as an ‘anti-conquest’ rather than a conquest.¹² Unlike the aggressive incursions into foreign regions by the discoverers of earlier eras, the new wave of exploratory activity, it was usually claimed, was an intrinsically selfless, disinterested engagement with the wider world, a wholly intellectual, scientific exercise that was only concerned with adding to the stock of human knowledge. At the same time, however, if most contemporary accounts of exploration subscribe to a rhetoric of anti-conquest, they also usually subscribe—generally without any sense of contradiction—to an equally strong belief that the knowledge garnered by exploration should ultimately be put to practical, and profitable, use, in ways that advanced British interests around the world. Most Romantic-era exploration was instigated ¹² Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992), 7.

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and co-ordinated by a fairly well-defined network of agencies and individuals: on the one hand, institutions like the Admiralty, the African Association, from 1830 the Geographical Society, and so forth, and on the other figures like Sir Joseph Banks, Sir John Barrow, and others, who were often prominent in many of the institutions just cited. This ‘exploration establishment’, as I have elsewhere labelled it, had always one eye on the commercial and strategic applications of the information gathered by explorers.¹³ If it was the business of the explorer just to observe the natural world, it was subsequently the duty of policy-makers equipped with the explorer’s findings to transform the world. The ideology here was one of ‘improvement’, a buzzword in the overseas as well as in the domestic context, and an agenda that could seem, in some manifestations, and/or to some Romantic commentators, unduly utilitarian and materialistic.¹⁴ It was largely taken for granted by those in the exploration establishment that it was right and proper to manage global resources as efficiently as possible, and if necessary to rationalize those resources and to redress or correct natural deficiencies where they occurred. Wildernesses and similarly unproductive regions were to be rendered useful in some way. If necessary, there were to be significant interventions into local ecosystems and economies, and the introduction of new industrial and agricultural techniques, new species of plants and animals, and so forth. Thus it was Sir Joseph Banks who sent the Bounty on its ill-fated voyage, setting Bligh the task of transporting breadfruit trees from Tahiti to the West Indies, so as to provide a cheap means of sustenance for the slaves there. In this way the information brought back by the explorer was never just a contribution to a growing body of purely scientific knowledge; it was also frequently a means to much more pragmatic ends. And if the policies and practices subsequently pursued on the basis of exploratory data were supposedly intended to effect the improvement of the whole globe, and to ameliorate the lot of all its inhabitants, it was also the case that this larger humanitarian mission often ¹³ See Carl Thompson, ‘The Double Voice of James Bruce, Abyssinian Traveller’, in Janet Starkey and Okasha El Daly (eds.), Desert Travellers: From Herodotus to T. E. Lawrence (London, 2000), 89. ¹⁴ On improvement in the global context, see Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (London, 2000).

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dovetailed conveniently with specifically British aims and objectives in the wider world. Many contemporaries saw no contradiction in this, possessing a strong conviction that it was Britain that was best placed economically, technologically, and morally to steward the world’s resources and so to improve the material circumstances of less advantaged peoples. To some extent, indeed, the presentation of exploration as an anti-conquest rather than a conquest served to bolster this self-belief. As Mary Pratt has argued, this rhetorical tendency in accounts of exploration often seems to suggest a moral superiority in the explorer and his culture, in so far as it shows them motivated not by self-interest but by a more enlightened spirit of scientific enquiry. This can in turn promote a sense that it is representatives of the exploratory culture, rather than the indigenous population, who are better suited to manage the region being explored. The Romantic-era explorer, then, had a complex relationship with the developments, and the forces, that were making the period 1780 to 1830 Britain’s ‘imperial meridian’.¹⁵ If, to us, the Romantic-era explorer is obviously at some level an agent and enabler of British imperialism in this period, to contemporaries he could sometimes seem otherwise. It was an important part of his mystique—or more cynically, his ideological usefulness—that he seemed to stand apart from such worldly agendas. This ambiguity about the explorer’s role enabled the explorer persona to be inflected in significantly different ways, both by explorers themselves and by those who sought to emulate them in some literal or metaphorical fashion. Some aligned themselves closely with imperialist and colonialist agendas, others kept their distance, preferring to emphasize (perhaps self-deceivingly) the purely scientific dimension of their activities. As we shall see, not every explorer supported unequivocally the rhetoric of improvement that generally prevailed in the exploration establishment, and not every explorer shared the sense of cultural superiority often implicit in this rhetoric. Even amongst the majority who did subscribe to these beliefs, they could be held in subtly different forms, with variations of emphasis and differing degrees of vehemence. In this regard, it should be noted that some commentators increasingly understood improvement to involve not just the scrupulous cataloguing and ¹⁵ See C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989).

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subsequent rationalization of the world’s resources, but also the moral and spiritual improvement of supposedly primitive or barbarous cultures. Three major missionary organizations were established in Britain in the 1790s, to be supplemented by a Methodist Missionary Society in 1813. The missionary is of course usually a very different sort of traveller from the explorer, but by the latter part of the Romantic period the new religiosity brought about by the Evangelical Revival had also suffused much exploratory activity—it is strongly evident, for example, in the Arctic expeditions of William Parry and John Ross in the 1810s and 1820s.¹⁶ Other explorers and commentators, meanwhile, were less well disposed towards the new missionary spirit; thus John Martin, introducing William Mariner’s Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands (1818), somewhat testily bemoans the fact that traditional tribal practices in the South Pacific have vanished, as a consequence of conversion to Christianity, before they could be recorded for posterity.¹⁷ As this will suggest, there could be significant variations in the agenda underpinning exploratory expeditions in the Romantic era, and as a consequence the image of the explorer could be inflected in subtly different ways. Such differences are apparent in the two explorers I wish to discuss in more detail in this chapter, James Bruce and Mungo Park, and the juxtaposition of these two figures will accordingly allow a clearer picture to emerge of the range of Romantic responses to contemporary exploration, and the variety of ways in which the figure of the explorer could be construed and constructed by the Romantic imagination. Before attending to the difference between Bruce and Park as explorers, however, it should be stressed that one thing that links them—and that is certainly a key part of their Romantic appeal—is that both men were famed for the suffering and hardship they endured in the course of their travels. Such misadventures feature prominently in the narratives produced by Bruce and Park, to an extent that makes these somewhat unusual accounts of exploration in this era. In the wake of Cook’s ¹⁶ See Carl Thompson, ‘The Heroic Age of the Tin Can: Technology and Ideology in British Arctic Exploration, 1818–1835’, in David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (eds.), Maritime Empires: British Imperial Trade in the Nineteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2004). ¹⁷ See William Mariner, An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, 2nd edn. (London, 1818), p. xvi.

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voyages, the exploration narrative had emerged as a distinct branch of the Voyages and Travels genre, but it was for the most part a subgenre of contemporary travel writing not intrinsically concerned with the presentation of the traveller as a suffering figure. James Cook in his journal reveals a businesslike, pragmatic cast of mind that is irritated by travellers and commentators who magnify ‘the most trifling accidents and Circumstances to the greatest hardships, and insurmou[n]table dangers without the imidiate [sic] interposition of Providence, as if the whole Merit of the Voyage consisted in the dangers and hardships they underwent’.¹⁸ Many explorers after Cook similarly dismissed the discomforts, pains, and dangers endured by the explorer as largely irrelevant to the business in hand, and likewise any discussion of spiritual development and/or Providential intervention. Instead, they regarded the principal aim of the exploration narrative as simply the dissemination of data in an orderly, efficient way. To this end, something like a house style soon emerged for the exploration narrative, a set of generic and stylistic norms that were insisted upon by the exploration establishment that oversaw the production of many of these accounts. According to this rubric, the exploration narrative typically combined a narrative of the journey undertaken with a series of more discursive or analytical essays, sometimes interpolated into the main narrative and sometimes included as appendices. These essays abstracted the information acquired during the journey and organized it according to various disciplinary fields: natural history, geography, ethnography, and so forth. It was here that one found the more overtly scientific content of these texts, the lists and the classificatory tables that itemized scrupulously the various ‘natural productions’ of a region. In the narrative proper, meanwhile, writers sought to preserve the air of naïve empiricism, of conscientious, on the spot note-taking, that Dampier had done so much to establish. The norm in exploration accounts was a firstperson perspective, usually following a simple journal or log format, and couched in a plain, descriptive, and by modern standards often very impersonal style. In places this was interspersed with a more specialized, technical vocabulary such as Linnaean nomenclature. Most explorers, however, sought to balance such scientific idioms with a ¹⁸ James Cook, Endeavour Journal, in The Journals of Captain Cook, ed Philip Edwards (Harmondsworth, 1999), 461.

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more everyday, empirical language that was readily comprehensible to all, so as to convince readers that they were reliable eyewitnesses who really had been to the places described, and whose observations could be trusted. In imposing this template upon the exploration narrative, figures like Banks sought to systematize and regulate the data gathered by the explorer, thereby rendering it more intellectually productive and useful. Just as importantly, they sought also to ensure that an appropriate image of the British explorer abroad was presented to the public. This house style for the Romantic-era exploration narrative to some extent answers to the contemporary desire to regard exploration as a form of anti-conquest. Its objectivism seems to render the explorer an all-seeing, transcendent eye. Striking a pose of scientific detachment as he surveys his surroundings, he seems both impervious to the dangers and discomforts attendant on his travels, and uninterested in exploiting the local environment or community. At the same time, as Pratt and others have suggested, this scientific objectivism also subtly encodes the further agenda behind much Romantic-era exploration. As Wayne D. Franklin has remarked, the long lists and tables of ‘natural productions’ can seem close in spirit to a sort of stock-taking.¹⁹ The indigenous population of a region, meanwhile, can seem subtly stripped of their full humanity, as they are presented principally as specimens for ethnographic analysis. Or in another strong rhetorical tendency of the genre, they can be elided from the landscapes on which the explorer gazes. It may be that only natural historical data are recorded of a scene, as if no one lived there.²⁰ The region thus seems a terra nullius to which a European power can legitimately lay claim—an impression also promoted, of course, by that classic topos of the exploration account, the act of naming a landmark or location previously unknown to European geography. A pronounced objectivism, then, is the generic norm in most Romantic-era exploration narratives. The fascination exercised by ¹⁹ See Wayne D. Franklin, Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America (Chicago, 1979). ²⁰ See Bruce Greenfield, Narrating Discovery: The Romantic Explorer in American Literature, 1790–1855 (New York, 1992), 1–10; also Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr Barrow saw in the Land of the Bushmen’, in Susan L. Roberson (ed.), Defining Travel: Diverse Visions ( Jackson, Miss., 2001).

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Bruce and Park on the Romantic imagination accordingly derives to a very great extent from their violation of the norms just outlined, as they offer their readers a much more vivid, and more personalized, account of the ordeals that they endured in the course of their expeditions. At the same time, however, Bruce and Park construct an image of the explorer as a conspicuously suffering figure in significantly different ways, and to very different rhetorical ends, as we shall now see.

T H E E X P LO R E R A S E X I L E : JA M E S B RU C E I N A B YS S I N I A We had just read thro’ Bruce’s Travels, with infinite delight where all is alive & novel & about kings & Queens & fabulous Heads of Rivers & Abyssinian wars & the Line of Solomon & he’s a dashing fellow & intrigues with Empresses & gets into Harems of Black Women & was himself descended from Kings of Scotland: rot farmers & mechanics & industry … Charles Lamb²¹

‘In the whole course of our reading, we remember nothing more deeply and lastingly impressive than the journey of Bruce across the desert.’²² So wrote Robert Southey in 1805. He is referring to the final section of Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, in which Bruce concludes his journey out of Abyssinia—where he has resided for over two years—with a harrowing trek across the Nubian desert. From the outset, Bruce and his companions are aware that they are entering a dangerous, alien environment. Towering pillars of sand appear in the distance and seem on occasions about to overwhelm the party, before retreating at the last moment. Many of the party are soon suffering from the conditions, and by the third day, morale is already plummeting. ‘Subordination … was fast on the decline,’ ²¹ The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, 3 vols., ed. Edwin W. Marrs (London, 1975–8), ii. 199. ²² Aikin’s Annual Review, 4 (1805), 10.

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we learn; ‘all was discontent, murmuring and fear.’²³ The next day, another striking natural phenomenon threatens the travellers: At eleven o’clock, while we contemplated with great pleasure the rugged top of Chiggre, to which we were fast approaching … Idris cried out, with a loud voice, Fall upon your faces, for here is the simoom. I saw from the S.E. a haze come, in colour like the purple part of the rainbow, but not so compressed or thick. It did not occupy twenty yards in breadth, and was about twelve feet high from the ground. It was a kind of blush upon the air, and it moved very rapidly, for I scarce could turn to fall upon the ground with my head to the northward, when I felt the heat of its current plainly upon my face. We all lay flat on the ground, as if dead, till Idris told us it was blown over.²⁴

This is the simoom to which John Bristed refers, in the passage cited at the start of this chapter. For Bruce and his companions, it exacerbates the ‘universal despondency’ that by now is gripping the party. Bruce himself is close to physical collapse, his face ‘so swelled as scarcely to permit to see’, his neck ‘covered with blisters’, and his feet ‘swelled and inflamed and bleeding with many wounds’.²⁵ However, he maintains the strength of will, and the eloquence, to keep the party together as their situation deteriorates further. There is thieving amongst the group, and harsh justice is doled out. Bruce’s feet are now ‘swelled to a monstrous size and everywhere inflamed and excoriated’.²⁶ With the camels dying, and all around them the bodies of earlier travellers, Bruce and his companions begin to resign themselves to their fate. Bruce, however, makes one last effort to stagger on, abandoning everything that is encumbering him, including the notes that he has painstakingly amassed over the previous years. His strength seems about to give out when suddenly he sees a flock of cow birds (a sort of heron). Recognizing that they are river birds, Bruce realizes that the Nile must be close at hand—and with immense relief the whole party rushes forward to find water. Bruce himself, having drunk, slumps under a tree: ‘a kind of stupor, or palsy of the mind, had overtaken me, almost to a deprivation of understanding.’²⁷ But he does not forget, when suitably recovered, to travel back into the desert to retrieve his notes. Such is Bruce’s desert crossing, a passage of writing pitched in a register very different from that usually attempted by the exploration ²³ Bruce, Travels, iv. 555. ²⁴ Ibid. 557. ²⁵ Ibid. 558. ²⁶ Ibid. 565. ²⁷ Ibid. 603.

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narrative in this period. In its details—the anguish of thirst, the swelling and laceration of body parts—and in its portrayal of a group disintegrating under pressure, it recalls many of the accounts of maritime misadventure that I discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. This may not be just the result of the experiences themselves being similar. Wanting to foreground the suffering he underwent whilst travelling, Bruce probably turned, consciously or unconsciously, to the most obvious model that existed for this theme, the model provided by earlier misadventurers. In pitching the closing section of his narrative at this level, moreover, Bruce knew well what he was about. It may have been the way in which Bruce’s experiences actually unfolded, but it also suits Bruce’s rhetorical purposes to conclude with these images of the traveller suffering yet heroically enduring. We are meant to feel for Bruce as victim and we are also meant, I think, to infer a certain symbolism. Bruce in the desert is like a prophet in the wilderness, a prophet dishonoured in his own country and driven into exile. Here and elsewhere in his narrative, Bruce’s brooding on his own sufferings, and the grandiloquent style in which he generally recounts those sufferings, bespeak a sense of alienation from his own culture, and more specifically from the exploration establishment outlined above. And it was because Bruce thus stood apart from this establishment, contravening not only its stylistic norms but also many of its ideological assumptions, that Bruce so fascinated the Romantic imagination—although as we shall see, he was also a deeply problematic character for many Romantic commentators, and the fascination felt for him is more complex than simple admiration. Why was it that Bruce stood outside the exploration establishment of his day? He had undoubtedly accomplished a prodigious feat of travelling. After assuming the post of British Consul in Algiers in 1763, he had travelled widely in North Africa—mostly in search of classical remains and ruins—before taking it upon himself to search for the source of the Nile. To this end, and self-funded, he set out for Abyssinia in 1768, accompanied only by an Italian draughtsman called Luigi Balugani. Bruce and Balugani then spent some two years in Abyssinia, an ancient civilization at that time little known to Europeans, and dangerously unstable due to civil war. During their stay, the two men succeeded in reaching the source of the Blue Nile (which had in truth already been visited by Europeans, by Jesuit priests

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in the sixteenth century, although Bruce always denounced accounts of earlier visits as fraudulent). Mission accomplished, a further two years were spent negotiating a way out of Abyssinia, during which time Balugani died from fever. Bruce himself did not finally return to London until July 1774.²⁸ In outline, this seems an expedition entirely in keeping with the exploratory zeal of the period, and bears comparison with the contemporaneous voyages of James Cook. Certainly Bruce himself, as we have seen, insisted that he, and not Cook, should be regarded as the first of the new breed of scientific explorers. In his narrative of the journey—published in 1790 some sixteen years after his return, for reasons to be discussed in due course—Bruce outlines in detail the various scientific projects advanced by the expedition. These include the location of the source of the Blue Nile, the observation of the 1769 Transit of Venus (also the principal agenda behind Cook’s first voyage), and the collection of a mass of data relating to the geology, zoology, and botany of the region. And to attest to the exactitude and utility of all these observations, Bruce treats the reader to a long and detailed itemization of the many scientific instruments taken on the expedition—quadrants, telescopes, timepieces, a camera obscura the size of a small summer house, and much else besides. Once again, this seems superficially to suggest a style of travel, and of travel writing, wholly consonant with the requirements of the exploration establishment. Yet it is hard not to feel that Bruce, as he dwells obsessively on his scientific motives and equipment in his Preface and Introduction, is protesting too much. He is clearly seeking to counter accusations that he had made no real contribution to contemporary scientific enquiry (and as we shall shortly see, they are accusations that are to some extent borne out by the subsequent narrative). This defensiveness on Bruce’s part, and his stridency of tone, may be traced back to the reception the traveller received when he returned to London in 1774. Initially, Bruce was lionized by the literary and scientific community; one of the talking points of ²⁸ For biographical information on Bruce, see Alexander Murray, Account of the Life and Writings of James Bruce (Edinburgh, 1808); Francis Head, The Life of Bruce, the African Traveller (London, 1830); J. M. Reid, Traveller Extraordinary: The Life of James Bruce of Kinnaird (London, 1968); Miles Bredin, The Pale Abyssinian: A Life of James Bruce, African Explorer and Adventurer (London, 2000).

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fashionable society, he was swiftly made a Fellow of the Royal Society. Yet fascination swiftly turned to scepticism, and then to ridicule. Contemporary arbiters of both taste and verisimilitude (Dr Johnson, the reviewers of the major periodicals, and such like) pronounced Bruce’s extravagant stories of Abyssinian life, and of his own exploits, to be preposterous—most notably, his claim that the Abyssinians held debauched feasts in which the diners feasted on raw flesh cut from still-living cows.²⁹ Incredulity at such stories was compounded by Bruce’s prickly, combative nature; he was an easy figure to bait and fashionable London society soon delighted in doing so. On stage, he was lampooned as ‘MacFable’, whilst Rudolph Raspe, creator of the archetypal travel liar Baron Munchausen, dedicated a volume of the Baron’s adventures to the hapless traveller.³⁰ In the face of these provocations, Bruce retired to Kinnaird, the family estate in Scotland. There he nursed his resentment, occasionally bullying sceptical dinner guests until they ate raw steak in the best Abyssinian manner.³¹ That resentment eventually found expression in Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, published sixteen years after Bruce’s return from Abyssinia. Travels is a gigantic and unwieldy text, running to five large volumes. In its gigantism, as well as in the stridency of tone adopted in the preface and introduction, the narrative is clearly meant as a massive assertion of the veracity of Bruce’s observations and the solidity of Bruce’s scientific achievement. At the same time, however, the text conveys just as powerfully why it was that contemporaries found Bruce so problematic as a scientific explorer. The problem, in essence, was Bruce’s independent, idiosyncratic personality, and his reluctance to regulate himself, both in his travel practice and subsequently in the writing of his travels, according to the disciplinary requirements of contemporary exploration. Bruce’s scientific interests and methods were those of the virtuoso amateur, rather than the more professionalized practitioners of science emerging through the influence of the exploration establishment. A Scottish laird who funded his expedition himself, and who would probably have regarded it as infra dig to be employed to explore, Bruce was not compelled, ²⁹ See Bruce, Travels, iii. 143–4; 303–4. ³⁰ For these and subsequent details of Bruce’s defamation at the hands of London society, see Percy G. Adams, Travellers and Travel Liars (New York, 1980), 210 f. ³¹ For the bullying incident, see Head, Life of Bruce, 531–2.

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and felt little need, to make his project and his data commensurable with the activities of others working in the field. For all the vaunting of his scientific achievements in the Preface and Introduction, the main narrative presents little in the way of hard, useful scientific data. It is true that the fifth volume is wholly given over to a catalogue of animals, plants, and minerals encountered in North Africa, but as Nigel Leask has noted, ‘this volume really confirms the ‘‘antiquarian’’ rather than naturalistic bias of the Travels as a whole’.³² Bruce separates his natural history off like this so as not to interrupt his narrative ‘by the appearance of a nettle or daffodil … curious and important in the eye of a botanist, but invisible and indifferent to an ordinary beholder’.³³ Even in volume v, moreover, Bruce strikes a pose that goes against the grain of the contemporary exploration account. He gruffly declares that he will classify the various specimens he has encountered as he sees fit, and not according to any abstract schema. Indeed, he seems to regard Linnaean taxonomy and the whole Linnaean school as some sort of vast Scandinavian conspiracy: he talks grumpily of Anders Sparrman ‘stealing’ discoveries for Sweden.³⁴ In the main narrative, meanwhile, it is (as Leask suggests) classical history and archaeology far more than natural history that is Bruce’s chief preoccupation. He assiduously records Roman and Greek remains when he finds them, and is thus able to boast that ‘there is not either in the territories of Algiers or Tunis, a fragment of good taste of which I have not brought a drawing to Britain’.³⁵ At such moments, one hears in Bruce the voice not of an explorer, but of a Grand Tourist, merely pursuing his customary enthusiasms beyond the usual European circuit. Like many such Grand Tourists, Bruce is interested in conducting some empirical enquiry into natural phenomena—but equally, like most Grand Tourists Bruce often conducts his experiments in the dilettante manner of the virtuoso. Like Addison and Boswell in Italy, moreover, Bruce in Abyssinia is principally interested in natural curiosities and wonders, in phenomena and features of the landscape that seem singular rather than typical—those pillars of sand in the desert, for example, or the simoom. More banal or commonplace features of the landscape and the climate are seemingly beneath him. It was data relating to such unremarkable phenomena ³² Leask, Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 69. ³³ Bruce, Travels, v, p. iii. ³⁴ Ibid. 129–30.

³⁵ Ibid. i, p. xxxvi.

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and organisms, however, that were increasingly demanded by the ever more professionalized sciences associated with exploration. And whilst not all of this data was incorporated into the exploration narrative, it nevertheless behoved the writer to demonstrate some attentiveness to such detail, and some degree of methodical, precise observation, so as to establish his credibility as a trustworthy traveller. Bruce, however, seems little concerned with such minutiae. Bruce’s fondness for curiosities and wonders, rather than data more obviously useful to contemporary science, extends also to the tale he tells of himself, and to the events that he reports from his time in Abyssinia. It was as a larger-than-life figure that Bruce presented himself on his return from his travels, telling anecdotes about his own intrepidity and ingenuity, and his remarkable success at the imperial court of Abyssinia. As Lamb notes in the epigraph to this section, there is much hobnobbing with kings and queens in Bruce’s story. Yet if this epic self-projection was arguably Bruce’s undoing in 1774, his narrative of 1790 reveals little inclination to moderate the image it presents of the traveller. If anything, Bruce seems to assert all the more vigorously the heroic nature of his endeavour. There is an ostentatiousness to many of his actions which suggests an element of theatre both in the original event and in the subsequent depiction of it. A typical example is the incident when Bruce, travelling with the Abyssinian army, rides out early one morning to impress his comrades with his horsemanship and marksmanship: There was then, as there always is, a vast number of kites following the camp, which are quite familiar and live upon the carrion; choosing two gliding near me, I shot first one on the right, then one on the left; they both fell dead on the ground; a great shout immediately followed from the spectators below, to which I seemingly paid no attention, pretending absolute indifference, as if nothing extraordinary had been done.³⁶

Here and elsewhere, Bruce may affect an aristocratic nonchalance, but the element of braggadocio underpinning all such scenes is obvious. It is a distinctly heroic self-fashioning that Bruce essays in Travels; furthermore, the figure he seeks to cut is that of a hero in a somewhat libertine style. Again, Bruce is much more an eighteenthcentury aristocrat than a scientifically rigorous, self-disciplined, and ³⁶ Bruce, Travels, iii. 519–20.

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self-effacing explorer, as he depicts himself drinking and duelling, and engaging in numerous gallantries (and some thinly veiled amours) with Abyssinian women. Whenever Bruce’s status as discoverer of the source of the Nile is in question, the narratorial persona in Travels becomes especially shrill and grandiloquent. Standing at the Nile’s source, for example, he elaborates at length on his triumph at reaching ‘that spot which had baffled the genius, industry and inquiry of both ancients and moderns, for the course of near three thousand years’.³⁷ Bruce being Bruce, several chapters are then devoted to an exhaustive listing of just who exactly has failed in this quest, and accordingly over whom it is that he has triumphed. The labouring of this point seems all the more astonishing given the fact that a European had in fact already reached the source of the Blue Nile, the Jesuit Pedro Paez, whose account of the source was included in the narrative of the Jesuit mission to Abyssinia written by Jerome Lobo.³⁸ Bruce was familiar with this account, and indeed seems to echo it, but from a combination of personal, nationalistic, and religious motives (Bruce was staunchly anti-Catholic), he always denied its authenticity. Also denied or obscured in Bruce’s account of his Nile triumph is the fact that he did not reach the source on his own—he was in fact accompanied by Balugani. Yet throughout Travels, the Italian is hardly ever mentioned. The main reference to him, indeed, records his death, which Bruce claims occurred before the source was reached. This alteration of the facts is explicable only with reference to Bruce’s prickly egotism: it could not be admitted that any other European had seen the source. Thus far one might be forgiven for thinking Bruce one of the least likeable of travellers, yet this would be unfair. The rejection he experienced in London arguably shapes not only the histrionic pitch just noted but also some more sympathetic aspects of Bruce’s character. For all that he vaunts his own achievements, his egotism seems with equal frequency to implode, and to send him plummeting into profound dejection. The egotistical sublime all too often yields to what is termed at one point ‘a temporary alienation of mind’.³⁹ ³⁷ Ibid. 597. ³⁸ Jerome Lobo, A Voyage to Abyssinia, trans. Samuel Johnson (London, 1735). ³⁹ Bruce, Travels, iii. 427.

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Traveller and text seem locked into a boom-and-bust economy. The passage of epic self-fashioning just cited, as Bruce stands at the source of the Nile, quickly modulates into something more sombre. Within minutes of reaching the source, Bruce claims, he ‘found a despondency gaining ground fast upon me’.⁴⁰ As if to offset this mood, there follows a bizarre scene of farcical banter, as Bruce and his servant trade humorous insults. Bruce comes over all mock-heroic, styling himself as Don Quixote. Such tomfoolery then gives way to homesickness. Bruce recalls ‘that magnificent scene in my own native country, where the Tweed, Clyde and Annan rise in one hill; three rivers, as I now thought, not inferior to the Nile in beauty, [and] preferable to it in the cultivation of those countries through which they flow’.⁴¹ Wondering why he did not simply visit this landscape, he begins to consider ‘the inquiry about the source of the Nile as a violent effort of a distempered fancy’, and with that ‘grief or despondency’ comes ‘rolling on [Bruce] like a torrent’. The psychological progression here is echoed elsewhere in Bruce’s Travels. In an earlier passage, for example, Bruce is initially overawed by the magnificence of the Great Cataract on the Blue Nile, but then finds his spirits ‘sunk almost to a degree of despondency, and yet nothing had happened … more than was expected before’.⁴² Such melancholia recurs throughout Travels, and the result is a narrative that is self-consciously epic, yet simultaneously shot through with a sense of the futility of the whole exercise. Aspiration is fulfilled, but fulfilment provides only disappointment. Repeatedly in Bruce one feels a poignant awareness of the discrepancy between the imagined moment of achievement and grandeur, and its actual realization. The traveller revealed to us in Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile thus oscillates unsettlingly between different moods, and different voices—not only the cycle of sublimity and bathos just outlined, but also a range of other styles. On occasions, for example, he deploys to great effect a heavily ironic style that is reminiscent of Swift, and rails amusingly at the insularity of domestic ‘experts’ who cannot tolerate or credit the very different norms of other cultures. As Bruce thus oscillates in tone and persona, he presents his reader not only with a distinctly unstable subjectivity that contravenes the ⁴⁰ Bruce, Travels, iii. 598.

⁴¹ Ibid. 640.

⁴² Ibid. 436.

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generic conventions of Romantic-era exploratory discourse, but also with an account of a foreign culture that is equally problematic. As noted earlier, one common consequence of the plain, impersonal style customarily adopted in the Romantic-era exploration narrative was the elision from the text not only of the explorer’s physicality, but also of the indigenous community, as the landscape is transformed into a virgin scene awaiting the (uncontested) attentions of European colonizers. Or alternatively, where an indigenous population is represented, the ‘native’ and his or her culture become themselves the objects of scientific scrutiny, specimens to be observed, categorized, and absorbed into the emergent disciplines of ethnography and anthropology. The depiction Bruce gives of the Abyssinians, however, cannot be adequately characterized in either of these ways. All 700 pages of volume ii are given over to the history of the region and its inhabitants; thereafter, Bruce’s account of the country is regularly informed by his detailed knowledge of the political machinations and military manoeuvres taking place during this period of civil war. As a consequence, the Abyssinians certainly do not appear as a ‘people without history’, in Eric Wolf’s famous phrase, and the region is in no way a ‘virgin scene’ awaiting the arrival of its first (European) Adam.⁴³ More than this, however, Bruce fashions a portrait of the Abyssinians that incorporates—just like the self-image that he fashions— many different contraries, and a corresponding oscillation of moods and styles. Bruce frequently professes himself disgusted by Abyssinian savagery, and includes plenty of evidence that would seem to contemporaries to support this understanding of the culture: not only the debauched feasts in which the eating of raw flesh was followed by public love-making, but also a series of gruesome punishments and executions—one unlucky general, for example, is flayed alive, his skin being used to create a giant leather bottle. Many other characteristics offensive to contemporary British sensibilities, however, are accepted by Bruce in a spirit of cultural relativism: on polygamy, for example, he writes that ‘it would be unworthy of the wisdom of God, and an unevenness in his ways, which we shall never see, to subject two nations, under such different circumstances, absolutely ⁴³ See Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, 1982).

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to the same observances’.⁴⁴ Elsewhere again, the picture emerges of a complex, sophisticated culture with a history stretching back as far as Solomon—a culture, indeed, that had been Christian for longer than Britain, possessing not only the second oldest national church in the world, but also key Christian texts that had been lost in Europe. One of Bruce’s undoubted achievements in this expedition, for example, was that he brought home copies of the apocryphal Book of Enoch. The Abyssinians are thus not as straightforwardly other, or as straightforwardly heathen and primitive, as the subjects of many other Romantic-era exploration narratives. And their problematic aspects, in the eyes of many contemporary readers, are arguably heightened rather than contained by Bruce’s account. Proud of his assimilation into the culture (an assimilation manifested by his frequent cultural cross-dressing into the appropriate local costume), Bruce evidently feels considerable fondness towards his hosts, and towards a society in which he was honoured and achieved success. He switches between studious, Orientalist accounts of Abyssinian life, and a more lively, anecdotal style, to produce a narrative rich in dialogue, and in witty, sophisticated exchanges between Bruce and his hosts. As a result, our perceptions of the Abyssinians, rather like our perceptions of Bruce, are pulled in various different directions. Sometimes they are savages, and sometimes they are titanic figures almost of the order of Shakespearean heroes and heroines. On other occasions again they seem just ordinary human beings much like ourselves, as Bruce’s Travels throws up all manner of unexpected, and often awkward, equivalences between Europe and Abyssinia: we are advised at one point, for example, that ‘the court of London and that of Abyssinia are, in their principles, one’.⁴⁵ As a consequence, the Abyssinians in Bruce’s account have a voice, a vivacity, and a complexity, that one does not usually associate with the objects of ethnographic study in this period. Bruce’s Travels is a text that does much to destabilize the hierarchy implicitly inscribed in most exploration narratives of this era, by which the explorer—and by extension his culture—comes to seem intellectually and morally superior to the indigenous population. That this destabilization, and the oscillations in Bruce’s portrayal of the Abyssinians, could ⁴⁴ Bruce, Travels, i. 288.

⁴⁵ Ibid. iv. 59.

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be unsettling for some contemporary readers, we can infer from some curious mathematics on the part of Southey, in his review for Aikins Annual Review. In conclusion, Southey pronounces the Abyssinians to be ‘half Jews, half Christians; half savage, half civilised; half black, half white, half cannibals’.⁴⁶ The awkward arithmetic of the final phrase seems to indicate Southey’s need ultimately to dismiss the discomforting ambiguity of the Abyssinians, and to place them categorically as other. It is worth noting that Southey was reviewing the second edition of Bruce’s Travels, published in 1804–5 under the editorship of Alexander Murray. (Bruce himself had died in 1794, falling down the stairs at Kinnaird.) Murray’s edition, which included an extensive critical apparatus and an account of Bruce’s life, did much to rehabilitate his reputation. In particular, Murray was able to publish a letter by Balugani that demonstrated that both men really had visited the Blue Nile’s source (and indeed, that both men had actually been to Abyssinia, since even that had been doubted in the initial furore over Bruce’s claims).⁴⁷ However, whilst Murray’s editorial work meant that it was now possible to construct Bruce as an unduly maligned figure whose true contribution to exploration had at last been recognized, there was also much that further problematized Bruce’s status both as hero and as explorer. The letter by Balugani that proved that the two travellers had visited the source also proved, more scandalously, that Bruce had subsequently written the Italian out of his account. Similarly, Murray’s inclusion of Pedro Paez’s account of the Nile’s source alerted readers to the fact that Bruce’s great quest was not the unprecedented and original achievement he trumpeted it to be, and that Bruce himself may well have known that it was in this way spurious and belated. And whatever apparatus Murray put around Bruce’s 1790 narrative, this could not eradicate the grandiloquent tone and the pronounced egotism of the original text. Nor could it change the fact that Bruce clearly had little interest in the more pragmatic and commercial agenda that was fundamental to the Romantic-era exploration establishment. The improvement of Abyssinia does not seem to have especially interested Bruce; he seems little concerned ⁴⁶ Aikins Annual Review, 4 (1805), 9. ⁴⁷ James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 8 vols., ed. Alexander Murray (Edinburgh, 1804–5), i, pp. ccci–ccciv.

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with establishing trade links with the region, and he does not supply his reader with those covetous lists of natural productions that so often seem, in other exploration narratives, akin to a stock-taking inventory. To those who endorsed the exploration establishment’s project of global improvement, then, Bruce remained an awkward, ambivalent figure. To others, however, the fact that Bruce pursued no obvious utilitarian and mercantile agenda could seem far more laudable. Witness, in this regard, the excited response of Charle Lamb in the epigraph to this section, and especially that closing jibe: ‘rot farmers & mechanics & industry … ’ A reference to Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), which Lamb has been reading alongside Bruce’s Travels, it seems also to suggest Lamb’s sense of Bruce’s difference from the improving mentality sketched earlier, and his delight in that difference. What Lamb clearly enjoys in Bruce is the sheer romance of his story, the fact that his exploration is as much about adventures as about a worthy, practical contribution to knowledge and commerce. Bruce is clearly a very ‘romantic’ figure—but as we shall see, this does not make him unequivocally an object of Romantic admiration. Coleridge and Southey seem like Lamb to have thrilled to his epic story, whilst at the same time expressing more profound reservations than Lamb as to Bruce’s waywardness and intellectual wrong-headedness.⁴⁸ And on Wordsworth and Byron too, as we shall see, the influence exercised by Bruce is complex, and not simply a matter of straightforward admiration.

T H E E X P LO R E R A S S A I N T: M U N G O PA R K I N W E S T AFRICA Howe’er he fell, yet glorious was his end, Of truth, of nature, and of man, the friend. ⁴⁸ On Coleridge’s fascination with Bruce, see John Livingstone Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, 2nd edn. (London, 1951), 133–4 and 370–9; and Leask, Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 99.

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Mary Russell Mitford, ‘Lines Suggested By the Uncertain Fate of Mungo Park, the African Traveller’⁴⁹

James Bruce was not the only Romantic-era explorer who conspicuously dramatized, in the writing up of his experiences, his own suffering. Such travails were also a prominent feature of another of the most famous exploration narratives of the age, a text that was something of a publishing phenomenon and that was well known to all the major Romantic figures. Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa appeared in 1799 to instant success, running through three editions within a year. The popularity of Park’s Travels was due in no small measure to the image it presents of the explorer as a hapless, long-suffering misadventurer, yet in the manner in which it presents such sufferings, and in its underlying ethos, Park’s narrative differs significantly from Bruce’s. As we shall see, Park gives the figure of the suffering explorer a sentimental and Providential inflection that is wholly consonant with the ideology of the prevailing exploration establishment, rather than antagonistic to it. In the process, he incorporates into British exploration a rhetoric of sacrifice and martyrdom that was to define the explorer for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Park’s Travels recounts an eighteen-month expedition in West Africa, through present-day Gambia, Senegal, and Mali, that commenced in May 1795. Accompanied by two African servants, Park (aged just twenty-three at the beginning of his journey) had ventured inland from the African coast in an effort to reach the Niger river. He did so at the behest of the African Association, who instructed Park to ascertain the direction in which the Niger flowed; if possible, to travel along the river as far as the city of Timbuktu, which was rumoured to be rich with gold; and more generally, to gather information on the region, on its ‘natural productions’ and human inhabitants. In the first and last of these goals, Park was eminently successful. He eventually reached ‘the long sought for, and majestic Niger’ and observed it ‘glittering to the morning sun, as broad as the ⁴⁹ ‘Lines Suggested By the Uncertain Fate of Mungo Park, the African Traveller’, ll. 53–4, from Poems (London, 1811).

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Thames at Westminster, and flowing slowly to the eastward’ (Park’s emphasis).⁵⁰ Along the way he amassed the many notes, relating to a broad range of topics, that were to form the basis of his subsequent narrative. Yet Park was not able to reach Timbuktu. His journey had rapidly run into difficulties, the most disastrous of which was the traveller’s imprisonment and ill-treatment at the hands of Ali, a local Fulani or (in Park’s usual terminology) Moorish chieftain. In time, Park escaped from ‘the Moors’, but from now on he travelled alone, and was almost entirely reliant for his survival on the charity of the local population. It was a precarious existence; Park was robbed on several occasions, and at one point left for dead. Ultimately, he had to abandon the attempt to reach Timbuktu, instead heading back for the coast, and thence to Britain, where he arrived in December 1797. As the preceding outline will suggest, Park’s expedition was not a solo undertaking to the extent that James Bruce’s was. Park may have actually travelled on his own, but the journey was planned, orchestrated, and financed by the African Association. Coming from a very different class from Bruce—his father was a tenant-farmer—Park was employed to explore, and thus reflects a new professionalism that was becoming the norm in the activities and intellectual disciplines associated with exploration.⁵¹ His narrative bears witness to this professionalism, and to Park’s position firmly within, rather than outside, the network of agencies and individuals that I earlier dubbed the exploration establishment. Sir Joseph Banks—who had first recommended Park to the African Association—ensured that another of the Association’s members, Bryan Edwards, collaborated with Park in the writing of the narrative. A prominent geographer, Major James Rennell, was also brought in to draw up maps for the region on the basis of Park’s information, and to write a seven-chapter appendix summarizing the new geographical knowledge arising from Park’s observations. After the manner of many exploration narratives of the era, this appendix contains the hard science, and is couched in a dry style that makes frequent resort to specialized technical idioms, ⁵⁰ Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (London, 1799), 194. ⁵¹ For biographical details on Park, see the introduction to Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, ed. Kate Ferguson Marsters (Durham, NC, 2000), 5–9.

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whilst the narrative proper adopts for the most part the plain, sober style, and the naïve empiricism, discussed in the first section of this chapter. Park’s scientifically trained eye is frequently apparent—he can inform the reader, for example, that the ‘small farinaceous berries’ known to the locals as tomberongs are ‘the fruit of the rhamnus lotus of Linnaeus’⁵²—but an overly technical, wholly impersonal style is generally avoided: compass bearings, degrees of longitude and latitude, and so forth, are mostly relegated to Rennell’s digest at the end of the volume. Also excluded, apparently, were some of the more curious items that Park encountered, and some of the stranger episodes in his journey; he later told Sir Walter Scott that he cut some passages for fear of straining his reader’s credulity.⁵³ Mindful of Bruce’s reception, perhaps, Park clearly took every care to present himself as the model of narratorial restraint and plausibility. In such ways Park’s narrative conforms to the generic requirements of the Romantic-era exploration account. As it does so, it reveals clearly how commercial as much as scientific imperatives underpinned the expedition. As Park lists assiduously the ‘chief productions’ of each locality—its native species, agricultural produce, manufactured goods, and so forth—it is all too evident that this explorer is travelling not simply to fill in the blank spaces on the European map of West Africa, but also to scout out opportunities for future trade in the region. In keeping with the ideology of the exploration establishment, moreover, Park’s narrative is suffused with the logic of improvement, which seeks not simply to observe the world but also to change it, and to redress the perceived deficiencies of nature. In this spirit, Park offers the following reflection on the region: All the rich and valuable productions, both of the East and West Indies, might easily be naturalised, and brought to the utmost perfection, in the tropical parts of this immense continent. Nothing is wanted to this end, but example, to enlighten the minds of the natives; and instruction, to enable them to direct their industry to proper objects. It was not possible for me to behold the wonderful fertility of the soil, the vast herds of cattle, proper both for labour and for food, and a variety of other circumstances favourable to colonization and agriculture; and reflect withal, on the means which presented themselves of a vast inland navigation, without lamenting that a ⁵² Park, Travels, 99.

⁵³ See Parke, Travels, ed. Marsters, 9.

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country, so abundantly gifted and favoured by nature, should remain in its present savage and neglected state.⁵⁴

Even as he conforms in such ways to both the style and the beliefs of the Romantic-era exploration establishment, however, Park incorporated into the prescribed objectivism of exploratory discourse a much more personal element, and it is this that made his narrative so immensely popular. As the brief outline given above will have suggested, Park’s journey from one perspective seems to trace a downward trajectory. Captured by the Moors, he is robbed and treated with indignity; escaping from the Moors, he becomes a solitary and highly vulnerable traveller, surviving on the food and hospitality he can beg from local tribespeople. The narrative does not seek to disguise or elide Park’s pitiful condition in the latter part of his expedition. Although his style is always restrained on such topics, it nevertheless incorporates a subjective register, and some reference to Park’s physical and emotional state. The disembodied explorer moving effortlessly across the landscape he is surveying is replaced in this account with a traveller who is impinged upon constantly, and distressingly, by his environment and his circumstances—an adjustment of the exploratory persona reflected, Mary Louise Pratt has suggested, even in Park’s syntax, which adopts a greater number of passive constructions than is the norm, and so works subtly to present the narrator as ‘a receptor, not an initiator’ of action.⁵⁵ Park recounts his travails not only to invite a sympathetic response from his readers. Just as important in his own mind, one senses, is the desire to record the many acts of charity and assistance that he received from local African tribespeople. Park is often wholly reliant on the generosity of the indigenous population—and not infrequently, on the generosity of some of the weakest, most impoverished members of that population, slaves, old women, and the like. The many vignettes relating such acts of selfless charity recall comparable scenes in fictions such as Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768) and Henry MacKenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), and Park’s discussion of his experiences makes it clear that a sentimentalist ethos is an important motivating factor for this traveller, and this travel text. Park is concerned to demonstrate the natural ⁵⁴ Park, Travels, 311.

⁵⁵ Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 78.

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benevolence that operates (or should operate) in all of us. In writing of the benevolence exhibited in a West African village, he is clearly intending to promote a similar affective response in English drawing-rooms, and to encourage feelings of sympathy and benevolence towards both himself as hapless traveller, and the Africans as selfless almsgivers. In deploying these sentimental tropes and topoi, Park creates a remarkably affectionate and admiring portrait of the peoples of West Africa. His narrative is devoid of the vitriolic racism that will characterize the accounts of some Victorian explorers of Africa, and it contests also some earlier accounts of the African interior that had depicted the region as well-nigh a barren desert inhabited by bloodthirsty, anarchic savages.⁵⁶ Sentimentalism’s stress on universal human attributes underwrites an egalitarianism in Park’s account that sees racial and cultural differences as not absolute. Or as Park puts it at one point, ‘whatever difference there is between the Negro and the European in the conformation of the nose and the colour of the skin, there is none in the genuine sympathies and characteristic feelings of our common nature’.⁵⁷ At the same time, Park is more than ready to profess himself surprised and impressed by the complexity and sophistication of the culture he encounters. At the town of Sego, for example, ‘the numerous canoes upon the river; the crowded population, and the cultivated state of the surrounding country, formed altogether a prospect of civilisation and magnificence, which I little expected to find in the bosom of Africa’.⁵⁸ Whilst acknowledging much that is generous and praiseworthy in Park’s Travels, however, one should not overlook the more subtle rhetorical effects of Park’s sentimental persona, and the covert agenda underpinning this depiction of African society. As Pratt has noticed, Park’s representation of himself in Travels is as potent an image of European exploration as anti-conquest as it is possible to find. Who could accuse a traveller this weak and enfeebled of complicity in any practice or apparatus of domination? What sort of threat could the destitute, solitary, and broken-down Mungo Park possibly pose anyone? At the same time, of course, Park is clearly scouting for commercial opportunities in the region, and his narrative is from ⁵⁶ On earlier images of the West African interior, see ibid. 70. ⁵⁷ Park, Travels, 82. ⁵⁸ Ibid. 196.

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one perspective a report seeking to alert the mercantile community (and also policy makers in the relevant government departments) to these opportunities. Park’s portrait of a busy, bustling West Africa, a place where large towns and a network of trading routes are already in existence, derives in part from this desire to promote trading links with the region. His adoption of sentimental conventions and attitudes, meanwhile, arguably serves to flatter and reassure his British audience with the sense that all such ventures are not merely a means of extracting a profit from the region; rather, they are also the means by which Britain can do good in the world, repaying the charity displayed towards Park with reciprocal acts of commercial and charitable assistance. Park’s depiction of the sympathy shown by many Africans is intended to stimulate a comparable sympathy in Britain for those Africans. For whilst Park acknowledges much complexity and sophistication in West African culture, he also makes it clear that there is much that is backward and primitive in the region. ‘The wonderful contagion of superstition’ is everywhere rife, resulting not only in cruel rituals such as that of the mythic Mumbo-Jumbo, but also in a refusal to countenance the economic improvement of the region. ‘A firm attachment to the customs of their ancestors’, we learn, ‘makes [the local population] view with an eye of prejudice everything that looks like innovation.’⁵⁹ As a result, many Africans are trapped in lives of squalor and brutality. They may possess an innate, natural tendency to benevolence and kindness, but that natural disposition is frequently thwarted, and corrupted, by their circumstances. British trade with the region, and possibly other forms of British intervention in the region such as colonization, is thus cast in an altruistic, humanitarian light. In this vein, the lament cited earlier, about the agricultural backwardness of the region, quickly shifts its emphasis: Much more did I lament, that a people of manners and dispositions so gentle and benevolent, should either be left as they now are, immersed in the gross and uncomfortable blindness of Pagan superstition, or permitted to become converts to a system of bigotry and fanaticism; which, without enlightening the mind, often debases the heart.⁶⁰ ⁵⁹ Park, Travels, 62.

⁶⁰ Ibid. 312.

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Material and moral considerations, it seems, are fused. The region will not be developed properly until the natives are better educated and liberated from crippling superstition; at the same time, to develop the region will assist in the project of moral reform and spiritual liberation. At such moments, Park’s Travels seems to inaugurate the concept that will become central to many nineteenth-century justifications of British imperialism: namely, the notion that Britain has a civilizing mission, a responsibility to liberate, enlighten, and improve, both materially and morally, supposedly more primitive peoples. A crucial ingredient in Park’s implicit call for a civilizing mission to West Africa is the image presented in Travels of the ‘Moors’. The Moors are not indigenous to the region; as the name suggests, they are a people of North African origin who have migrated south. As Park depicts them, they are ‘a subtle and treacherous race … [who] … take every opportunity of cheating and plundering the credulous and unsuspecting negroes’.⁶¹ But what is equally alarming about them, one senses, is the success they seem to have had in spreading their religion and culture in the region. It is Islam that Park is referring to in the passage above, when he talks of ‘a system of bigotry and fanaticism’, and he is dismayed to find a mosque and an Islamic school in almost every village he visits. Religion and education, of course, are two of the key means by which Britain should enlighten and improve the lives of the indigenous population—but in the battle for local hearts and minds, it seems the Muslim Moors have a headstart over the Christian British. Hence, perhaps, the vehemence with which Park depicts the Moors in Travels. This is an aspect of his narrative that has often been overlooked by modern critics (for example, by Pratt, in an otherwise excellent and seminal chapter on Park). When it comes to the Moors, Park’s sentimentalism is largely abandoned, and a very different set of literary conventions seem to come into play. The influence of sentimental fiction gives way to that of the captivity narrative, as the cruelties and indignities heaped upon the Christian Park by his Muslim captors are emphasized. Ali, the leader of the party of Moors that imprison Park, is painted very much as the Oriental despot, whilst Park is also often sweeping in his denunciations of the entire Moorish race. Labelling them ‘at once the ⁶¹ Ibid. 112.

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vainest and proudest, and, perhaps, the most bigoted, ferocious and intolerant of all the nations on the earth’, Park suggests that one can detect their moral condition in their physical appearance: I fancied that I discovered in the features of most of them, a disposition towards cruelty and cunning; and I could never contemplate their physiognomy without feeling sensible uneasiness. From the staring wildness of their eyes, a stranger would immediately set them down as a nation of lunatics.⁶²

Here, distressingly, Park seems to be feeling his way towards nineteenth-century theories of racial and criminal types, and towards the explicitly racist statements of many Victorian explorers. And whilst his animus against the Moors is born principally from the cruel treatment he personally received at their hands, one should not overlook the larger context sketched above. The Moors are very much Britain’s rivals for influence in the region, and depicting them in such demonic terms powerfully enhances the case for British intervention in the region: the honest, naturally benevolent, yet credulous West Africans should not be left to such cruel masters. What Park also takes from the captivity narrative are Providentialist conventions of the sort outlined in Chapter 2. Throughout, a biblical register and a religious frame of reference are subtly interwoven into Park’s account (although as with his sentimentalism, the generic requirements of the exploration narrative ensures that this element in the narrative is always subordinate to the business of data collection). As the Moors bait Park for his Christianity, however, and as the much-weakened Park wanders alone after his escape from the Moors, the invocation of Providence becomes particularly conspicuous. In this regard, two episodes especially came to sum up the endeavours and aspirations of Park in the popular imagination. The first occurs just after Park has escaped from the Moors. Travelling alone, in desperate need of food and water, Park climbs a tree to look for signs of human habitation in the landscape. There is none, and when Park descends from the tree the following scene ensues: I found my horse devouring the stubble and brushwood with great avidity; and as I was now too faint to attempt walking, and my horse too much fatigued to carry me, I thought it but an act of humanity, and perhaps the ⁶² Park, Travels, 158.

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last I should ever have it in my power to perform, to take off his bridle and let him shift for himself; in doing which I was suddenly affected with sickness and giddiness; and falling upon the sand, felt as if the hour of death was fast approaching. ‘Here then, thought I, after a short but ineffectual struggle, terminate all my hopes of being useful in my day and generation: here must the short span of my life come to an end.’ I cast (as I believed) a last look on the surrounding scene, and whilst I reflected on the awful change that was about to take place, this world with its enjoyments seemed to vanish from my recollection.⁶³

In what would have been an exemplary end for a sentimental hero, Park prepares for death with an altruistic act towards an animal, and with regret that he has not been able to do greater good. In due course, however, ‘Nature … resumed its functions’ and Park recovers his senses, coming to with the horse’s bridle still in his hands. Working through nature, it soon becomes apparent, is God. It rains, and Park at last can drink; stumbling upon a village, he is given food by an old woman. Overcome with gratitude, he returns thanks not only to the woman but to ‘that gracious and bountiful Being, whose power had supported me under so many dangers, and had now spread for me a table in the Wilderness’.⁶⁴ For this particular traveller, it seems, the question asked in Psalm 78: 19—‘yea, they spake against God; they said, Can God furnish a table in the wilderness?’—can be answered in the affirmative. The further implication, of course, is that Park is a traveller whose activities are sanctioned by God, and who is accordingly afforded Providential deliverances and relief. This harnessing of God to the cause of British exploration is even more powerfully effected in a subsequent vignette that is perhaps the most famous incident in the whole narrative. Towards the end of his narrative, after he has been robbed yet again and stripped of all his clothes, Park collapses in despair. The traveller finds hope and strength, however, when the extraordinary beauty of a moss, in fructification, irresistibly caught my eye. I mention this to shew from what trifling circumstances the mind will sometimes derive consolation; for though the whole plant was not larger than the top of one of my fingers, I could not contemplate the delicate conformation of its roots, leaves and capsula, without admiration. Can that Being (thought I), who planted, watered and brought to perfection, in this obscure part of the world, a thing which appears of so small importance, look with unconcern upon the situation and sufferings of creatures formed

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after his own image?—surely not! Reflections like these would not allow me to despair. I started up, and disregarding both hunger and fatigue, travelled forwards, assured that relief was at hand; and I was not disappointed.⁶⁵

Mary Louise Pratt curiously finds in this famous passage evidence of religion and science in opposition: she suggests that Park ‘looks through the language of science [her emphasis]’ to find ‘the alternative spiritual understanding of nature’.⁶⁶ It seems to me, however, that the passage in fact shows the scientific and spiritual impulses operating in tandem. It is the trained eye and precise vocabulary of the Linnaean botanist—recognizing a moss ‘in fructification’, picking out ‘roots, leaves and capsula’—that is able to perceive the care with which God orders even the most humble parts of Creation. In so far as it traces this divine order in the world, moreover, the discriminating gaze of European science is presumably divinely sanctioned and sustained (as, indeed, is demonstrated by Park’s well-nigh miraculous survival). The explorer, we are meant to infer, has a part to play in a larger Providential plan for the globe. Park’s sufferings, then, are crucial to the image he seeks to present of himself and of British exploration more generally. Foregrounding these aspects of his experience to a much greater extent than was usual in the exploration narrative, and incorporating into his account a range of sentimental and Providential topoi, Park heightens the reader’s sense of the explorer’s fundamental innocence and benevolence. With its protagonist seemingly suffering not only in the cause of science, but also in the closely entwined causes of Christianity and civilization, Park’s Travels constitutes a powerful argument for not only the economic but also the moral necessity of British expansionism. In creating so favourable an image of British exploration, moreover, Park’s Travels served well the larger needs of Sir Joseph Banks and the exploration establishment, confronted in the 1790s with what Pratt has termed a ‘legitimation crisis’—that is to say, a need to assert both the utility and propriety of British exploration in the face of anti-imperialist rhetoric emanating from Revolutionary France and from critics at home.⁶⁷ In this context—and notwithstanding the author’s evident sincerity—Park’s narrative constitutes a masterly ⁶³ Park, Travels, 177–8. ⁶⁶ Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 78.

⁶⁴ Ibid. 181. ⁶⁷ Ibid. 74.

⁶⁵ Ibid. 244.

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piece of public relations, well calculated to win over the hearts and minds of the British readership. In this regard, Park’s Travels was eminently successful. Park was swiftly lionized in Britain, his ordeal proving inspirational to numerous writers, amongst them Crabbe, Hemans, and Wordsworth.⁶⁸ Most emphasized Park’s status as sentimental victim and Providential pilgrim, deploying an imagery of martyrdom that was soon seemingly enacted for real, when in 1805 Park disappeared in the course of a second expedition to the region. It was a fate that merely augmented Park’s reputation in the eyes of many contemporaries. Had they chosen to recognize them, however, the details of this second expedition might also have demonstrated to contemporary observers the economic and strategic realities that lay beneath the explorer’s saintly persona. The mission that the African Association set Park this time was to find the gold deposits that were rumoured to exist in the higher reaches of the Niger river. In pursuit of this gold, Park travelled not alone but at the head of large expedition, the bulk of this party being soldiers carrying arms. The great proponent of exploration as anti-conquest, it seems, was now to proceed by more militaristic means.

E X P LO RAT I O N A N D RO M A N T I C I S M There can be no question that a study of the heroic deeds of explorers, and the contemplation of their high qualities … excite a feeling sympathy which is ennobling to those who are under its influence, and is an education in itself. Clements Markham⁶⁹

Our only riddle is the rise of the Niger, the interior of New Holland, our only terra incognita; and our sole mare incognitum, ⁶⁸ See George Crabbe, ‘Woman!’, in Poetical Works (London, 1835), and Felicia Hemans, ‘The Flower of the Desert’, in Works (Edinburgh, 1839). ⁶⁹ Quoted in Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford, 2001), 6.

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Mungo Park, then, inaugurates a hugely influential rhetorical tradition in British exploration, a tradition whereby defeats and setbacks in the field can be almost as triumphant as victories, and disasters the best demonstration of the qualities that make Britain a great imperial power, and the proper instrument of God’s Providential purposes. After Park, notions of heroic sacrifice, possibly even martyrdom, in the cause of science and empire become strongly associated with the explorer, finding their most famous expression, perhaps, in the careers of Livingstone and Franklin in the nineteenth century, Scott and Shackleton in the twentieth. Even before the appearance of a sensationalist tabloid press—a key mechanism, as Beau Riffenburgh has shown, by which the ‘myth of the explorer’ circulated in the latter part of the Victorian era—the exploration establishment had clearly learnt to harness to its own ideological ends the inevitable public fascination with the more misadventurous aspects of the exploratory project.⁷¹ The veneration of the explorer expressed in the first epigraph above by Clements Markham (in many ways a successor to Sir Joseph Banks in so far as he was a key middleman in the late nineteenth-century exploration establishment), and Markham’s keen awareness of the useful educational role that the explorer could play, was already taking shape in the Romantic era. Already, it seems, the explorer assisted the imperial and colonial project not only by his actual findings, but also by his example, which seemingly taught valuable lessons of stoical endurance, self-discipline, faith, and duty. ⁷⁰ Mary Shelley, ‘On Ghosts’, in Jennifer Breen (ed.), Women Romantics, 1785–1832: Writing in Prose (London, 1996), 220. ⁷¹ See Beau Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer: The Press, Sensationalism and Geographical Discovery (Oxford, 1993).

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At the same time, however, we must be careful not to project backwards on to the pre-Victorian era any assumption—born from our modern familiarity with the stories of Livingstone, Scott, and so forth—that exploration was always construed and constructed as a matter of heroic suffering and endurance. Romantic-era exploratory discourse followed a much more objectivist paradigm than the exploration narratives of later eras, frequently choosing not to develop the more sensationalistic or rousing aspects of an explorer’s story (and indeed, as Felix Driver has noted, a tension between the explorer’s persona as (mis)adventurer and his persona as scientist was to remain fundamental to exploration).⁷² Nor should we assume that suffering, where it did occur in exploration, was always rendered and understood in ways that sat comfortably with imperialist ideology. In cross-referencing Mungo Park’s travails with those of James Bruce, I have hoped to show that the suffering body of the explorer did not always signal noble service to the exploration establishment and its various agendas. Bruce’s legacy was an ambiguous one, that could be inflected in various ways by those who admired him and took him as a model. For those Romantic writers and travellers who claimed for themselves some sort of simulacrum of Bruce’s suffering—Bristed and Cowan, and arguably, as we shall see, Byron—it might be Bruce’s status as an outsider that they strove to emulate, and his rejection of certain aspects of contemporary exploration, such as its project of improvement. Bruce, I have suggested, was conspicuously a somewhat maverick figure, who troubled the Romantic imagination as much as he fascinated it. But even more orthodox explorers could prompt ambivalent feelings in Romantic observers, and this ambivalence is perhaps a factor in a Romantic tendency to romanticize the exploration as a matter of great suffering, heroic endurance, and self-sacrifice. The explorer was undoubtedly a hugely glamorous figure, someone who made exciting new discoveries and opened up new worlds for the metropolitan reading audience—a role that many Romantic writers yearned to perform in a more metaphorical sense, as they sought to awaken their readers to new perspectives on the self, on nature, and on society. Yet even as the explorer kindled the contemporary ⁷² Driver, Geography Militant, 1–2.

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imagination in so many regards, what he and the agencies working through him proposed to do to newly explored regions could prompt concern and unease in some quarters. For all his heroism, the explorer could also seem a figure who represented synecdochically (as the tourist also did) the modernizing processes at work in the world. Motivated by the dual agenda of science and improvement, and thus reflecting a drive towards rationalization, systematization, and order, he seemed to herald a mundane, thoroughly mappedout planet; he was an agent, in short, in what Max Weber was to term the ‘disenchantment of the world’.⁷³ The utilitarian, economically improving agenda that was coded into the style of many exploration narratives, meanwhile, could strike some observers as an excessively instrumental view of the world’s resources, an undue emphasis on profit and loss, ‘getting and spending’ (to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth), at the expense of moral, religious, and aesthetic concerns. An understanding of exploration that stressed too strongly these aspects of the exploratory enterprise could unsettle even those broadly sympathetic to the goals of the exploration establishment, and to the advance of the British empire. In these quarters (and I have in mind here figures such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey in their more conservative later years), there was accordingly a preference to inflect exploration as a moral and spiritual exercise, something more akin to pilgrimage than to data collection. Thus Wordsworth’s sonnet of 1802, ‘Where lies the Land’, seeks to express ‘the delight [Wordsworth] had felt on thinking of the first feelings of men before navigation had so completely made the world known, and while a ship exploring unknown regions was an object of high interest and sympathy’.⁷⁴ The poem describes the poet watching a ship as it embarks on a long voyage. He acknowledges the fact that, in the modern age, ‘let her travel where she may, | She finds familiar names, a beaten way | Ever before her’.⁷⁵ Despite this knowledge, however, the poet is not ⁷³ See H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays on Sociology (London, 1991), 139–56; 350–1. ⁷⁴ Henry Crabb Robinson, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, 3 vols., ed. E. J. Marley (London, 1938), i. 94. ⁷⁵ ‘Where lies the land’, ll. 6–8, in WPW.

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free of feelings more appropriate to an earlier age. The sestet runs thus: Yet still I ask, what haven is her mark? And, almost as it was when ships were rare (From time to time, like Pilgrims, here and there Crossing the waters) doubt, and something dark, Of the old Sea some reverential fear, Is with me at thy farewell, joyous Bark! (ll. 9–14)

Such anxiety and excitement may be unnecessary and outdated, yet it is clear the poet does not want to lose them. They preserve a religious significance in what has otherwise become mundane and ordinary: they preserve equally a reverence towards both God and nature which is born particularly out of a sense of their destructive potential. The sea’s capacity to inflict disasters and suffering on men thus rebukes any hubristic sense that the world is wholly at our disposal, merely a resource to be parcelled up and doled out. The second generation of Romantic writers could similarly associate exploration with the disenchantment rather than improvement of the world (or more precisely, with disenchantment through improvement)—witness Mary Shelley’s reflections in the second epigraph to this section. The Shelleys and Byron were also far more suspicious of the imperializing agenda implicit in much exploratory activity (as will be discussed later, in relation to Byron). Here too, accordingly, there could be a tendency to dwell on the undoubted acts of heroism thrown up by exploration, and to elide the more troubling aspects of the explorer’s enterprise. And so collectively the Romantics help to romanticize the explorer as a conspicuously suffering traveller. As I have suggested in this chapter, this was by no means an image, and a self-fashioning, intrinsic to Romantic-era exploration—but it was an image that the exploration establishment increasingly learned to deploy to its own ends, as in the case of Mungo Park, and to this extent Romanticism helped to shape nineteenth-century perceptions and expectations of exploration.

5 Romantic Travel I: Wordsworthian Scripts Walking, then, is a perpetual falling with a perpetual selfrecovery. Oliver Wendell Holmes¹

My wish [is] to teach the Touring World, which is become very numerous, to look thro’ the clear eye of the Understanding as well as thro’ the hazy one of vague sensibility. William Wordsworth²

Travelling in the Alps in 1820, Edward Trelawny encountered a group of tourists whose appearance amused him. As Trelawny later put it: I saw by their utilitarian garb, as well as by the blisters and blotches on their cheeks, lips and noses, that they were pedestrian tourists, fresh from the snow-covered mountains, the blazing sun and frosty air having acted on their unseasoned skins as boiling water does on the lobster, by dying his dark coat scarlet.³

These travellers, evidently somewhat ludicrous in Trelawny’s eyes, turned out to be William, Mary, and Dorothy Wordsworth, midway through their continental tour of 1820. The sketch is intended as a ¹ ‘The Physiology of Walking’, 1883. Quoted in Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge, 1995), 1. ² W Letters, III. i. 303. ³ Edward John Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, ed. David Wright (1878; Harmondsworth, 1973), 58.

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lampoon, but its animus does not obscure—if anything, indeed, it brings into sharper focus—the image projected by the Wordsworths as they travelled. The Wordsworths are walkers, proudly and almost ostentatiously so. More than that, they are conspicuously walkers who have suffered. By walking in this mountainous region, they commit themselves to a gruelling mode of travel which requires them to endure discomfort and extreme conditions: hence the ‘blisters and blotches’ on their faces. From one perspective, these are simply the consequence of the Wordsworths’ style of travel; from another perspective, however, one might almost consider them—along with the sunburn that will presumably lead in time to Dorothy’s much-remarked ‘Gypsy tan’—as badges that signal this style of travel, and this commitment, to others.⁴ These physical marks, one might suggest, have almost a rhetorical function, serving as they do both to record the arduous, challenging journeys performed by the Wordsworths, and to display the performance of such journeys to their fellow-travellers. Trelawny, we should note, can instantly ‘read’ the appearance of the Wordsworth party, placing them immediately as members of a distinctive subculture within Romantic-era tourism: namely, the ‘pedestrian’ fraternity that was discussed earlier in this study. Signalling their membership of this subculture, the Wordsworths signal their difference—and implicitly, their superiority—from more mainstream modes of contemporary tourism. And in so far as it is their ‘blisters and blotches’ that are a key part of their appearance, and most noteworthy to contemporary observers, the superiority claimed by the Wordsworths qua travellers is partly predicated on the discomforts they have experienced in their journeys, and the suffering they are prepared to countenance in their travel. In the Alps in 1820, then, the Wordsworths cut a figure as suffering travellers, or in the parlance of this study, as misadventurers. This was a role fundamental to William Wordsworth’s conception of himself, and to the image that the poet presented to his public. Contemporary readers may not have been familiar with the lines from the unpublished Prelude cited in my introduction—‘A Traveller I am | And all my Tale is of myself’—but it is an assessment with which ⁴ On Dorothy’s tan, see Elizabeth A. Fay, Becoming Wordsworthian: A Performative Aesthetics (Amherst, Mass., 1995), 49.

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many would have concurred. Much of Wordsworth’s verse either describes directly, or is signalled as springing from, Wordsworth’s own travelling, whether this be in the form of the rambles and local explorations he habitually made around any place in which he resided, or the more ambitious journeys he made to regions further afield (for example, the 1790 walking tour of France and the Alps, or the 1793 trek across Salisbury Plain and up the Wye Valley). And threaded through all such literal travels, and through many of the literary renderings of those travels, is an emphasis on travel as something that should properly require effort and endurance, fortitude and the overcoming of obstacles. As Trelawny’s anecdote attests, Wordsworthian travel is characteristically a matter of walking. But the walking engaged in by Wordsworth or by the imagined protagonists of his poems is often more than just a leisurely jaunt in the countryside. It was strenuous, hard walking that was most respected in the Wordsworth circle, the walking of long distances, preferably over rugged, even dangerous terrain. ‘Trudging’ was the word used by one observer when seeking to describe the physical action of Wordsworth’s walk; both the verb and the gait, I would suggest, reflect Wordsworth’s commitment to modes of walking that were as challenging as they were pleasurable.⁵ In particular—as Trelawny’s anecdote again conveys—it was mountainous terrain that Wordsworth sought out, and it was as a walker and climber of mountains that the poet was especially renowned. ‘A Mountaineer by habit’, he was to call himself in Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1837 —a title earned not only through Wordsworth’s journeys in the Alps, the Scottish Highlands, and North Wales, but also through his exploration of the landscape of his native Lake District.⁶ In such environments, the discomforts always possibly attendant on walking—physical fatigue, exposure to the elements, and so forth—were magnified, and were supplemented by further risks: slips, stumbles, falling rocks, and so forth. Negotiating these dangers set the walker a mental as well as a physical challenge. Giddiness, panic, fear, and despondency were all states of mind that might afflict the traveller; it is worth recalling here Dorothy’s anxieties as she climbed above Dove Crag in 1812, as discussed in Chapter 1, and in ⁵ Thomas Colley Grattan, Beaten Paths; And Those Who Trod Them, 2 vols. (London, 1862), ii. 107. ⁶ ‘Musings Near Aquapendente’, l. 4, in WPW.

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counterpoint to the giddiness of Dorothy in that passage, William’s steadfastness, that gave her the strength to go on in the climb. Such physical and psychological challenges were welcomed by Wordsworth and his circle, and they were to some extent enjoined upon anyone who wished to emulate Wordsworth as a traveller. Thus the hugely popular Complete Guide to the Lakes (1810)—Wordsworth’s own contribution to the burgeoning travel literature of the Romantic period and a work that has been provocatively described as ‘without question the most widely read work of the most admired English poet of the first half of the nineteenth century’—frequently directs its reader to routes through the Cumbrian landscape that require travellers to get off their horses, or out of their carriages, so as to proceed on foot.⁷ Wordsworth’s poetry often makes the same injunction: ‘If from the public way you turn your steps’, is the direction given at the beginning of ‘Michael’.⁸ The need to get off the beaten track, and to embrace the inconveniences, rigours, and potential misadventures attendant on doing this, is evidently another key lesson that Wordsworth wishes to teach what he dubs, in the second epigraph above, ‘the Touring World’. In part, this espousal of misadventure by both Wordsworth and subsequent Wordsworthians must be understood as a strategy of distinction, a means of setting oneself apart from, and above, other travellers. Although Wordsworth was a much-travelled man by the standards of his day, he was nevertheless someone who travelled for the most part as a tourist, in the neutral, non-pejorative sense of that term. In this context, one can read Wordsworthian misadventure as essentially a means of distinguishing oneself from the mass of fellow tourists, according to the logic outlined in the early chapters of this study. Yet Wordsworth himself, one can assume, would not have interpreted his espousal of dangers and discomforts in this somewhat cynical fashion, as wholly inspired by a negative stimulus not to be seen as a more conventional practitioner of the Grand or the picturesque tour. In his own mind, presumably, it was not simply as an exercise in social and cultural one-upmanship that he clambered laboriously up Helvellyn or Dove Crag. The purpose of this chapter, accordingly, is ⁷ Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London, 1991), 41. ⁸ ‘Michael’, l. 1, in WPW.

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to explore Wordsworth’s own understanding of what it might mean to suffer and endure in the course of one’s travelling—to explore, in short, the scripts that for Wordsworth informed such suffering in the course of travel, and that underpin the Wordsworthian inflection of the misadventurer persona. What models did he look to in relation to this aspect of his travelling, and what narratives did he have in mind as he projected and/or reflected upon his own travel ordeals? And to what extent is the Wordsworthian self-dramatization qua traveller and misadventurer informed by that matrix of misadventurous travel texts outlined in Chapters 2 to 4—the accounts of long-suffering mariners, shipwreck victims, ill-fated explorers, and the like? In answering these questions, the greater part of this chapter will consider how Wordsworth looked to this source material, and played out the persona of misadventurer, to express anxieties and aspirations that are broadly spiritual and creative in nature. The Prelude, that key articulation of the Wordsworthian self, will be the principal text addressed here. In the latter part of the chapter, meanwhile, consideration will be given to the public dimension of the misadventurer role, and specifically to the political implications of Wordsworthian misadventure: The Excursion (1814) will be the principal point of departure for this discussion.

‘ T H E D ROW N I N G WO R L D’ : S H I P W R E C K , P ROV I D E N C E , A N D P O E T I C E L E C T I O N Severer interventions, ministry More palpable … Wordsworth, The Prelude⁹

The Prelude is in many ways, and at many different levels, a poem about travel. First and foremost, of course, it is a poem recounting Wordsworth’s own life, that charts his growing conviction that he was destined to be a great poet—but both the life, and the progress ⁹ Book 1, ll. 370–1, in WP.

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towards this creative self-confidence, are largely presented in (and as) a sequence of journeys. The poem begins with the ‘careless steps’ (1. 70) of a journey on foot that takes the poet out of the city and into the countryside, and it concludes with an ascent of Mount Snowdon, again undertaken on foot. In between, a range of greater and lesser travels are recorded, from the trek across the Alps described in Book 6 to the innumerable walks or excursions through the British countryside that give rise to many of the poem’s incidents and reflections. Further to this, metaphors of travel are frequently invoked to describe the course of Wordsworth’s life, the course of the poem in both composition and narration, and much else besides. The poet of The Prelude is thus often engaged in either a literal or a symbolic journey, or indeed (and this is most frequently the case, perhaps) in a journey that we read as combining literal and symbolic aspects. Whatever the precise nature of the travelling, however, it is very much as a traveller that the poem presents, and constructs, its author. In order to grasp the sort of traveller that Wordsworth imagined himself to be, and to recognize the travel and travel-writing traditions that most influenced him, it is illuminating to begin at The Prelude’s end, with the ascent of Mount Snowdon that provides the conclusion to all versions of the poem after it was expanded from its original two-part form. Wordsworth had climbed Snowdon in the course of his 1791 walking tour of North Wales, when he and his companion Robert Jones made a night-time ascent of the mountain so as to watch dawn break from the summit. Subsequently, when Wordsworth began in early 1804 to extend his two-part autobiographical poem of 1799, he soon settled on the Snowdon climb as the climax to the projected longer poem. (An earlier rendering of aspects of the Snowdon experience, incidentally, appears in Descriptive Sketches (1793), although here the key features of the climb are transposed into an Alpine setting.) An account of the ascent was produced fairly early in the composition of The Prelude, and it remained more or less the same through all later versions of the poem. And as The Prelude grew to encompass thirteen, and eventually fourteen, books, the Snowdon episode retained its climactic position in the poem’s overall narrative structure, notwithstanding the distortions of chronology this sometimes required elsewhere in the narrative.

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From a very early stage in its composition, then, it was always intended that The Prelude would close with an imposing image of Wordsworth as traveller, and more specifically as ‘mountaineer’ or mountain walker. From the way Wordsworth renders the Snowdon climb, moreover, it is apparent that the latter role comes to Wordsworth strongly scripted by notions of sublimity, and by biblical traditions of prophecy and vision. Although Snowdon was already by 1791 a popular tourist destination, especially for devotees of the picturesque, it was not merely as a tourist hungry for a good view that Wordsworth understood himself, either as he made his original ascent of Snowdon or as he subsequently narrated that ascent in poetry. The original climb, we should remember, was made in the context of a pedestrian tour, and as we have seen earlier in this study, this mode of travel was felt by many practitioners to confer a greater degree of moral seriousness and rigour upon their travelling. These aspirations found further expression when Wordsworth and Jones chose not only to climb to the top of Snowdon (for a good many picturesque tourists, it was enough just to view mountains, rather than to actually climb them), but also to do so by one of the most difficult routes.¹⁰ This choice of route in turn translates into—or arguably, enables—a poetic rendering of the climb that is cast in a quietly heroic register. A note of menace is struck at the start of the account, as Wordsworth and Jones set out on a ‘wan, dull and glaring’ night, beset by a ‘dripping mist | Low-hung and thick’ that is ‘half threatening storm and rain’ (13. 11–13). There is a moment of bathos as their guide’s dog unearths a hedgehog, but subsequently the journey is strenuous. The travellers soon have to give up conversation in order to concentrate on their climb, and Wordsworth recalls how he ‘panted up’ the slope ‘with forehead bent | Earthward, as in opposition set | Against an enemy’ (13. 29–31). The simile suggests an agonistic dimension to Wordsworth’s journey, and the ‘enemy’ against which he is struggling, we sense, is both himself, as body and mind protest at the rigours of the mountain climb, and also nature, in the form of the rugged, challenging landscape he has to traverse. It is thus not a frivolous follower of picturesque fashion that climbs Mount Snowdon, but a far more earnest traveller. Wordsworth ¹⁰ See Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth (London, 1998), 198.

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depicts himself as someone prepared to take pains and embrace misadventures as he struggles to the mountain’s summit. In keeping with the epic traditions of mountain climbing that derive from the biblical prophets, Wordsworth’s reward for this struggle is a moment of great revelation and inspiration. In Wordsworth’s case, this amounts to a vision simultaneously of the physical and the metaphysical, the natural and the supernatural, as Wordsworth glimpses a ‘huge sea of mist’ (13. 43) lit magnificently by the moon, and comprehends that this sublime spectacle figures the power of ‘a mighty mind’ (13. 69) to transform and transcend its material surroundings. It is thus not so much God as personal creative power that is glimpsed here—a vision and a prophecy that adjusts the biblical accounts of mountain ascents in accordance with The Prelude’s project, which is to explore and demonstrate Wordsworth’s fitness to be a great poet. In this regard the biblical precedents scripting Wordsworth’s selfdramatization probably fuse with another stimulus and underlying narrative. From Thomas Pennant’s A Tour in Wales (1778)—a text that we can assume Wordsworth knew, since he made a point of visiting Pennant in the course of the 1791 Welsh tour—Wordsworth would have learnt of the local tradition that held that a night spent on this ‘Parnassus’ of the Ancient Britons conferred poetic genius.¹¹ This may well have been a factor in Wordsworth’s and Jones’s decision in 1791 to climb Snowdon at night; certainly, it makes a night-time ascent of Snowdon a fitting conclusion to a poetic travel narrative concerned to trace the author’s growth into his full creative powers. In thus proceeding to such a moment of visionary insight, the ascent of Snowdon resembles, and reprises on a grander scale, a great many of the journeys recounted elsewhere in The Prelude, and indeed in Wordsworth’s poetry more generally. Repeatedly, characteristically even, the Wordsworthian traveller moves towards an intimation of immortality or transcendence, and towards moments of vision and revelation that come to seem not only the most significant outcome of these various acts of travel but also, in a sense, their true destination. In this regard, Wordsworthian travel may be said to have a profoundly teleological aspect. Journeys may or may not have a specific geographical destination—the traveller may simply ¹¹ See Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Wales, 1770, 2 vols. (London, 1778), ii. 168.

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be ‘wandering’, a favourite verb of Wordsworth’s—but as they are rendered in poetry, at least, most seem to move towards this particular experiential goal. And in so far as they constitute a seeking out of this goal, many Wordsworthian journeys take on a sense of pilgrimage. The persona of pilgrim, indeed, is explicitly adopted by Wordsworth at an earlier point in the 1805 Prelude, when he describes himself and Jones, walking in the Alps, as ‘two brother pilgrims’. The two pedestrians (and many other Wordsworthian travellers) are pilgrims in so far as they trek, with some deliberation, towards a destination that should effect a renewal of faith and hope, and a restoration of the pilgrim’s most profound beliefs—although, as noted, the distinction must be made that this destination is not a particular location or shrine, as is more usually the case in pilgrimage, but instead a revelatory moment at which the imagination springs up anew, reenergized by a conjunction of external and internal stimuli. It can thus take place anywhere, although for Wordsworth, of course, it is especially likely to take place in a natural setting. It is also inherent to the structure of this experience, as we shall shortly see, that it should come as a surprise to the traveller, that he or she should be suddenly overwhelmed in some way. But if the pilgrim’s arrival at the desired destination cannot be precisely predicted, it can be prepared for, and the attainment of revelatory vision made more likely. It is in this regard, I would suggest, that the espousal of misadventure becomes an important—indeed crucial—feature of Wordsworthian travel. For as we shall now see, it is often precisely misadventures, in diverse forms and manifesting different degrees of inconvenience and risk, that give rise to the visionary moments that for Wordsworth are the proper end of travel. In this connection, it should be stressed again that Wordsworth’s vision on Mount Snowdon is achieved in the context of a journey on foot that requires much effort, and implicit danger. To some extent, indeed, it is surely only achieved through that journey, the achievement being integrally bound up with the process that led to it. Here and elsewhere in Wordsworth’s poetry, moments of vision seem to require for their attainment some sort of struggle, whether physical or mental (or both), and some sort of adversarial relationship with either nature or the self (or again, with both)—and equally characteristically, it is by means of a journey, of some literal or metaphorical act of

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travel, that this struggle is enacted and articulated. Thus, as Geoffrey Hartman has observed, a recurrent motif in Wordsworth’s poetry is that of the ‘halted traveller’.¹² And fundamental to the structure of this key Wordsworthian experience and/or topos, Hartman emphasizes, is a sense of the traveller being in some way overcome, confounded, disorientated, or surprised. In the blend of Pauline and Aristotelian terminology that Hartman adopts, moments of apocalypse or visionary insight arise only from moments of peripeteia (Englished by Hartman as peripeties): that is to say, reversals and sudden jolts in perspective and situation. The traveller halts because he is suddenly compelled to do so, as he is overwhelmed simultaneously by circumstances and stimuli external to him, and by his own response to that external situation. Hartman’s seminal account of the ‘halted traveller’ motif seems to me a profound insight into the structure of Wordsworth’s imagination, and into the fundamental narrative patterns by which he both construed much of his experience and (re)constructed it in writing. In the present context, however, there is one way in which I would want to adjust his account of the interplay—and the close integration—of peripeteia and apocalypse in Wordsworth’s thinking and writing. Hartman to a great extent intellectualizes the peripeties that lead the Wordsworthian traveller to apocalyptic vision; he understands them chiefly as a challenge to the consciousness of the traveller, or as an adjustment forced upon his perceptions and expectations. The traveller coming across a gravestone or epitaph, and halting as he remembers his own mortality, is thus for Hartman the locus classicus of this trope. Such reversals and discomfitures, however, are often not only psychological and intellectual in nature, events taking place solely in consciousness. They are this, of course, but they can also take a more material form. More literal, and physical, forms of discomfiture and endangerment occurring in the course of travel can precipitate the crisis in consciousness, or prepare the way for it. Jolts to the body, and the grinding rigours of an arduous walk; a sudden threat to one’s physical existence as one stumbles close to a precipice; the bewildering, even terrifying realization that one has wandered too far from the beaten track and may be lost—these misadventures too ¹² Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (New Haven, 1970), 1–30.

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can be a means by which a peripeteia, and potentially an apocaplytic insight, is effected. Wordsworthian travel in its most characteristic form—or at least, in the form this traveller is often concerned to emphasize—is designed to raise the potential for such literal peripeties, in the hope that sublime revelations will follow. Wordsworth, then, embraces in his travel peripeties of a more literal sort than those generally discussed by Hartman. Cynically, one might suggest that what such practices of travel actually enable is merely the performance of the supposed route to wisdom; that the weary footsteps have a rhetorical function, in so far as they are intended to project to observers and subsequently to readers the image of someone who has suffered en route to great inspiration and insight. But whether one is suspicious or accepting of Wordsworth’s visionary claims, the underlying script or plot structure, so to speak, is the same. Misadventure, in its diverse forms, is understood as the path to apocalyptic knowledge, sublimity, and authority. This is a fundamental travel script, of course, that Wordsworth and his audience inherit from a multitude of different sources—from the traditions of prophecy and pilgrimage sketched above, for example, and also, more precisely, from the many narratives in these traditions that more specifically relate conversion experiences, moments in which hapless individuals are forcibly reminded of the presence and power of God. Yet if there is this larger generic context to Wordsworth’s understanding of reversals and misadventures, there is also, I would suggest, one particular body of antecedent texts that especially influenced him in his valorization of elements of suffering, risk, and mishap in travel. For as we shall now see, it was not just as walker and mountaineer, pilgrim and prophet, that Wordsworth scripted himself as he climbed Snowdon: the self-dramatization he makes qua traveller—certainly as he recounts the climb, and quite possibly as he made the ascent in the first place—also embraces another, more surprising persona. The rigours of Wordsworth’s climb up Snowdon resolve themselves into apocalyptic vision when he emerges from the mirk that surrounded him on the lower reaches of the journey (and here one might think of Keats’s ‘I shall clamber through the Clouds and exist’). He suddenly finds himself standing in the bright light of the moon, and ‘on the shore | … of a huge sea of mist’. This metaphor of the

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mist as a sea may seem unremarkable, but in the present context it has an interesting, and revealing, history. Wordsworth had also troped the mist this way in his first poetic rendering of the Snowdon vision, in Descriptive Sketches. In this first account, Wordsworth’s mountain traveller (traversing the Alps rather than the mountains of North Wales) surveys ‘a mighty waste of mist’ that seems ‘A solemn sea!’ (ll. 493–4). From that phrase ‘a mighty waste’, and from the way the trope is subsequently developed, it is clear that Wordsworth is here thinking in terms and imagery drawn from one of his best-loved poems, James Beattie’s The Minstrel (1771). Beattie’s protagonist had liked to climb ‘the craggy cliff’ and stand at its peak When all in mist the world below was lost, What dreadful pleasure! there to stand sublime, Like shipwreck’d mariner on desert coast, And view th’enormous waste of vapour, tost In billows, lengthening to th’horizon round.¹³

Beattie’s ‘enormous waste of vapour’, then, is also implicitly troped as a sea. Significantly, however, it is not just as a spectator at the sea’s shore that Beattie images his mountain climber, but more specifically as a shipwreck victim cast up on a desolate shore. That this specific figure was in Wordsworth’s mind in his first recreation of his Snowdon experience is suggested by a further image in Descriptive Sketches. As Wordsworth develops the scene, we are told that ‘near the coast’ of the sea of mist, pine trees poke up out of the cloud; they appear to the traveller ‘like leaning masts of stranded ships’ (l. 500). Thus a sense of himself not just as walker and mountaineer, but also as some sort of shipwrecked figure, haunts Wordsworth’s first attempt to write up the vision on Mount Snowdon. Possibly this was a role, and an informing travel script, that shaped Wordsworth’s experience even as he climbed Snowdon in 1791; as we have seen, one can find instances in which Romantic pedestrians project themselves into the persona of hapless mariner, even as they made journeys safely located on dry land. What can be said with more certainty, however, is that the figure of the shipwreck victim, or endangered, terrified mariner, continued to haunt Wordsworth’s imagination as he first ¹³ Book 1, stanza xxi, in James Beattie, Poetical Works, ed. Roger J. Robinson (London, 1996).

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composed The Prelude’s account of the events on Snowdon. When first written in early 1804, the account modulated into a long sequence in which Wordsworth reflected on his experience.¹⁴ Here he sought to find further analogies for what had happened to him, for nature’s capacity to throw up such visions, and for the mind’s capacity to be inspired and enlarged by them. These analogies are presented as a series of ‘living pictures’, as Wordsworth puts it, each of which depicts comparable incidents occurring in the course of travel. Two of these incidents are taken from Wordsworth’s own travel experiences, as he recounts first a horse ride to Lake Coniston, and then a night-time walk along a ‘public way’ (AP, l. 57), and four of them are drawn from the experiences of other travellers, as related in famous travel narratives. In the present context, it is the latter ‘living pictures’ I am primarily concerned with, although I shall return in due course to the scenes drawn from Wordsworth’s own travels. The passage in question runs as follows: To these appearances which Nature thrusts Upon our notice—her own naked work, Self-wrought, unaided by the human mind— Add others more imperious, those I mean Which on our sight she forces, calling man To give new grandeur to her ministry, Man suffering or enjoying. Meanest minds Want not these monuments, though overlooked And little prized, and books are full of them. Such power—to pass at once from daily life, And our inevitable sympathy With passions mingled up before our eyes— Such presence is acknowledged when we trace The history of Columbus. Think of him And of his followers when, in unknown seas Far travelled, they first saw the needle take Another course and, faltering in its office, Turn from the Pole. Such object doth present ( To those who read the story at their ease) Sir Humphrey Gilbert, that bold voyager,

75

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¹⁴ The Analogy Passage (AP), as it has become known, has a complex textual history: I take as my text here the version published by Duncan Wu as Appendix 1 to his The Five-Book Prelude (Oxford, 1997), and I keep Wu’s line numbering.

Romantic Travel I: Wordsworthian Scripts When after one disastrous wreck he took His station in the pinnace, for the sake 95 Of honour and her crew’s encouragement, And they who followed in the second ship, The larger brigantine which he had left, Beheld him while amid the storm he sate Upon the open deck of his small bark 100 In calmness with a book upon his knee— To use the language of the Chronicle, A soldier of Christ Jesus, undismayed— The ship and he, a moment afterwards, Engulfed and seen no more. Like spectacle 105 Doth that traveller, living yet, appear To the mind’s eye, when, from the Moors escaped, Alone, and in the heart of Africa, And, having sunk to earth, worn out with pain And weariness that took at length away 110 The sense of life, he found when he awaked His horse in quiet, standing at his side, His arm within the bridle, and the sun Setting upon the desert. Kindred power Is with us, in the suffering of that time, 115 When, flying in his Nicobar canoe With three Malayan helpers, Dampier saw Well in those portents (the broken wheel Girding the sun, and afterwards the sea Roaring and whitening at the night’s approach), 120 And danger coming on—not in a shape Which, in the heat and mettle of the blood, He oft had welcomed, but considerate, With dread and leisurely solemnity. Bitter repentance for his roving life 125 Seized then upon the vent’rous mariner, Made calm at length by prayer and trust in God. Meanwhile the bark went forward like an arrow, Shot from a bow, the wind for many hours Her steersman, but a slackening of the storm 130 Encouraged them at length to cast a look Upon the compass, by a lighted match Made visible, which they in their distress

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Romantic Travel I: Wordsworthian Scripts Kept burning for the purpose. Thus they fared Sitting all night upon the lap of death 135 In wet and starveling plight, wishing for dawn, A dawn that came at length, with gloomy clouds Covering the horizon, the first glimpses Far from the horizon’s edge, high up in heaven— High dawn, prognosticating winds as high. 140

Although these lines, and the whole Analogy Passage, were eventually dropped when Wordsworth revised The Prelude into its thirteen-book form, they reveal some fascinating reference points for Wordsworth’s initial conceptualization of his Snowdon experience, and simultaneously for his imagined sense of himself as a traveller. In the latter regard, it will be immediately obvious that three of the four exemplars introduced here are yet again mariners confronting hostile seas and threatening circumstances. ( The exception is Mungo Park, the ‘traveller, living yet’ as Wordsworth wrote these lines in 1804, though shortly to die in the course of a further expedition.) From Ferdinand Columbus’s History of the Life and Actions of Admiral Christopher Columbus (1571)—read by Wordsworth in Awnsham and John Churchill’s Collection of Voyages and Travels (1704)—Wordsworth takes an incident in which the great discoverer and his crew are panic-stricken as their compass begins to behave erratically, whilst Sir Humphrey Gilbert is depicted going down in the wreck of the Squirrel, a scene recorded in Edward Haye’s Voyage of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, which Wordsworth had read in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589). From William Dampier’s New Voyage Round the World (1697), meanwhile, Wordsworth takes the final climactic episode in which Dampier, sailing from the Nicobar Islands, is beset by storm and only narrowly avoids being wrecked. The land-based traveller, Park, is depicted in a similar moment of disaster, or near-disaster, as Wordsworth adapts from Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799) one of the two key scenes in which the traveller comes close to almost total collapse. Evidently, what interests Wordsworth in each case—and what seems for Wordsworth to be figured with especial resonance by shipwreck—is the traveller beset by danger and difficulties. It is from the peripeties attendant on travel, we again see, that moments of great imaginative power arise, both for the travellers themselves and also (as seems to be the principal burden

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of Wordsworth’s argument here) for those who subsequently read of these events. In 1804 as in 1793, then, the figure of the mariner voyaging in hostile seas, suffering or anticipating shipwreck, plays an important part in articulating and organizing Wordsworth’s account of his Snowdon experience. (I shall come back to Park’s presence in the passage.) It is too simplistic, of course, to say that in the Analogy Passage Wordsworth is straightforwardly equating himself with these more celebrated voyagers and misadventurers. The explicit logic linking each of the ‘living pictures’ back to the Snowdon ascent is more complex than this, and in places somewhat convoluted (which may have been one reason why Wordsworth eventually chose to drop the passage). Yet Wordsworth implicitly understands and projects a congruence between his own travel experiences—the Snowdon climb, the horse ride to Lake Coniston, and the night-time walk—and those of Columbus, Gilbert, and Dampier. The element of analogy presupposes a common, underlying shape, so to speak, uniting the diverse experiences. We are dealing in each case with moments of vision arising from moments of adversity; in each case, moreover, we are dealing with adversities that arise from a confrontation with nature and the elements (as opposed, say, to adversities arising from confrontations with hostile strangers, banditti, or the like). The incidents in the voyages of Columbus, Gilbert, and Dampier give us these confrontations writ large, occurring in their most extreme forms; Wordsworth’s own travel experiences, meanwhile, have reprised these epic confrontations in a more modest form. The climb up Snowdon, as we have seen, is arduous and difficult. The horse ride to Lake Coniston, meanwhile, is a journey into a ferocious, terrifying storm, in which leaves were ‘rent in handfuls’ from the trees (AP 42), and ‘horse and rider staggered in the blast’ (AP 45). It is a small (mis)adventure, moreover, which is once again subtly suggestive of shipwreck: we are told that to gaze on the storm-tossed lake was to have ‘fear for boat and vessel where none was’ (AP 46–7). That is to say, it was a scene that made one imagine shipwreck, even if there were no actual boats on the lake running this risk. The night-time walk in the Lake District, the second ‘living picture’ drawn from Wordsworth’s own experience, is not overtly difficult or dangerous in this way, but it does show nature producing a distinctly

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disorientating, estranging effect. The Wordsworthian traveller halts in this case because he is arrested by the eerie, uncanny spectacle of a motionless horse, that in the moonlight seems ‘A borderer dwelling betwixt life and death, | A living statue, or a statued life’ (AP 72–3). Yet the inference one can legitimately draw from the Analogy Passage is that even such minor modes of peripety, involving merely a perceptual shift or reverse, are for Wordsworth of a piece with, even premissed on, the more extreme peripety that is shipwreck. Every peripety, it would seem, might be construed as some sort of minor or metaphorical shipwreck of the self. From this it follows that every Wordsworthian journey—or at least those most characteristically Wordsworthian journeys that exhibit the peripeteia/apocalypse structure identified by Hartman—might plausibly be plotted at some deep level in Wordsworth’s imagination as a narrative of shipwreck. That the ascent of Snowdon is implicitly scripted in this way is suggested by the imagery of maritime misadventure, and the implicit self-dramatization as shipwreck victim, that haunts the various accounts of this journey, as just outlined. But as we shall shortly see, this is far from being the only occasion, in The Prelude and elsewhere, that Wordsworth reaches for this imagery and makes this self-identification in recounting his travels. It is according to scenes, situations, and narrative patterns drawn from the literature of shipwreck and maritime misadventure that Wordsworth commonly seeks to script both his travels and his persona qua traveller. And this would in turn seem to imply that it was from this literature especially that Wordsworth derived a keen sense that travel was properly, or most importantly, a matter of peripeties leading to profound insights. Further to this, it is not only the Wordsworthian conviction that travel should unfold according to patterns of peripeteia and apocalypse, suffering and insight, that is profoundly informed by the literature of maritime misadventure. Also at issue here is the nature of the apocalyptic insight that one eventually attains, its meaning or interpretation. The figure of the hapless mariner struggling against overwhelming seas speaks so powerfully to Wordsworth, because this figure also enacts or emblematizes the most important lesson, in Wordsworth’s eyes, that the traveller can learn from his or her travails. In this regard, it is worth reflecting further on the episodes from Columbus’s, Gilbert’s, Park’s, and Dampier’s travels that Wordsworth

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chooses to rework in the Analogy Passage. In some ways, these are rather surprising scenes to focus on. The vision on Snowdon is after all a climactic and triumphant moment in The Prelude. Receiving intimations of transcendence, the poet has had confirmed the creative agency and immortality that he and potentially all mankind possess. As we have seen, however, when Wordsworth seeks analogies for this experience it is not the most obviously triumphant scenes in the careers of other travellers that resonate with him. From Columbus, for example, he might have chosen the moment when land is finally glimpsed after the harrowing Atlantic crossing, and a whole new continent is discovered: from Park, the glimpse of the Niger which in terms of worldly goals resolves his quest. Yet these are not the scenes that Wordsworth chooses: he seems more concerned with defeats and setbacks than triumphs—or more precisely, with the way a certain sort of triumph is intimately entwined with, and best expressed in, defeat. For what defeat can show more clearly than success is strength of mind, an inner capacity to endure through all vicissitudes and even, if necessary, to maintain one’s integrity as extinction looms. Gilbert, we should note, remains calm and undaunted as he goes to his death. In so doing, he presents an image of mental and spiritual triumph even in the midst of physical disaster that is wholly consonant with the key lesson Wordsworth claims to have learnt from his Snowdon vision. The whole tenor of that vision is that the mind is not of nature and the material world; it may exist in a reciprocal relationship with nature, but ultimately it stands apart from and above nature, possessed of supernatural faculties. Or as Wordsworth puts it in the 1805 Prelude, the mind ‘feeds upon infinity’, and is exalted by an underpresence, The sense of God, or whatsoe’er is dim Or vast in its own being. (13. 70–3)

It is in adverse rather than favourable circumstances that these resources are best demonstrated, and it is accordingly in their difficulties rather than their achievements that voyages and travels, for Wordsworth, have their most important educative role—both for those who undertake them, and for those who witness or subsequently read of them.

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Here, then, is a rationale for Wordsworth’s valorization of suffering in travel that is subtly different, though closely related to and compatible with, the reasoning advanced earlier. It is not just that suffering and struggle lead to visionary wisdom, and that peripeties precipitate apocalyptic moments; it is also that the very knowledge conferred by such visions—that the human mind is not of this world—is powerfully emblematized, indeed confirmed, by the figure of the traveller undergoing a violent or threatening confrontation with nature. And seemingly, the figure who both enacts and symbolizes this premiss with especial power for Wordsworth is the shipwrecked, or almost shipwrecked, mariner. Alongside the account given of Columbus, Gilbert, and Dampier in the Analogy Passage, for example, we might place the following extended simile, found in Book 6 of The Prelude: And as I have read of one by shipwreck thrown With fellow sufferers whom the waves had spared Upon a region uninhabited, An island of the deep, who having brought To land a single volume and no more— A treatise of geometry—was used, Although of food and clothing destitute, And beyond common wretchedness depressed, To part from company and take this book, Then first a self-taught pupil in those truths, To spots remote and corners of the isle By the seaside, and draw his diagrams With a long stick upon the sand, and thus Did oft beguile his sorrow, and almost Forget his feeling: even so … (6. 160–74)

Wordsworth here draws on an incident from John Newton’s Authentic Narrative (1768). Once again, he chooses an episode that shows the mind’s ability to transcend its material circumstances. In the aftermath of shipwreck, Newton is able to console himself through geometry, which allows him access to a realm of ideal forms far removed from the vicissitudes and fluctuations of this world. This is the realm to which the mind properly belongs—but as the argument of the Analogy Passage seemingly suggests, it can take disaster and the defeat of worldly hopes to make us realize this.

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This rendering and interpretation of the shipwreck topos seems to draw upon, and to be intimately shaped by, not simply the literature of maritime misadventure, but more specifically the Providentialist strand of this literature. One should note that all the accounts from which we have so far seen Wordsworth borrowing—or at least, all the episodes that we have so far seen Wordsworth adapting—stand very much in the Providentialist tradition. Newton’s and Gilbert’s relationship to this tradition has been explored earlier in this study, and many of the Providentialist conventions discussed then, it should be noted, are equally prominent in the account of Columbus’s voyage here used by Wordsworth. Dampier’s New Voyage, meanwhile, is a voyage narrative that in many ways articulates a very rationalistic, proto-scientific outlook—yet Wordsworth has taken from it precisely the one key scene in which the writer tries to fit his account into the Providentialist, spiritual-autobiographical paradigm. Finally, one connection between the land-based traveller Mungo Park and the three maritime voyagers cited in the Analogy Passage is that Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa is similarly an account that prominently deploys a Providentialist rhetoric, and does so to great effect. The Analogy Passage is in this regard a very revealing distillation of the eighteenth-century Voyages and Travels canon. It suggests a writer—and traveller—steeped in accounts which not only foreground the sufferings of travellers, but which also accustom their readers to think that some sort of supernatural deliverance will come to those who suffer in this way. For Providential misadventurers, suffering becomes a means by which one’s election is demonstrated, either as God rescues the traveller from disaster or alternatively—in the more gloomy variants of this tradition—through the very fact that the Lord has taken care to inflict such chastisement. Either way, there is an assumption that the traveller will in some form or another survive the ordeal he is undergoing—even if this survival, in the most extreme cases such as Gilbert’s, will not be in this world but the next. In The Prelude, Wordsworth adapts this script of Providential misadventure to his own ends. In the passage cited earlier, the suggestion that the mind is ‘exalted by an underpresence’ that derives either from God or from ‘whatsoe’er is dim | And vast in its own being’ maintains some distance between Wordsworth and orthodox Christian faith: it could be that the mind has its own supernatural faculties and is

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not dependent for its survival on a supreme being. It is not specifically to God that Wordsworth looks for imaginative, spiritual, and emotional sustenance, even as he draws on the conventions of Providentialist literature. Nor is it God, in Wordsworth’s reworking of this tradition, who seeks to educate the traveller through chastisement; it is rather Nature who lays adversities in our paths, for reasons that are ultimately benevolent as she seeks to demonstrate that we are more than just creatures of nature. Yet from the Providentialist literature Wordsworth seems at least to take inspiration, imagery, and an underlying narrative structure, for his profound conviction that some sort of immortality is possible, and that he himself is of the elect group who will achieve this immortality. He is accordingly drawn not only to key topoi in the Providentialist accounts, but also to the typological symbolism that is characteristic of this tradition. In the Analogy Passage account of the horse ride to stormed-tossed Lake Coniston, for example, it is a magnificent rainbow that provides the arresting spectacle and the moment of visionary awareness—the rainbow being of course the traditional symbol of God’s covenant with Noah after the Flood. The tenor of the Analogy Passage’s argument, however, subtly adjusts, and secularizes, such typologies. For Wordsworth, the rainbow over Lake Coniston need not be a symbol actually created by God, a sign of Providential design and a promise of deliverance that is hard-wired, so to speak, into the universe. It is rather an event that a ‘mighty mind’ such as Wordsworth’s own can fittingly and compellingly fashion, into a quasi-Providential symbol, something that other minds will recognize and be sustained by. Such typologically derived symbolism, and connected with it an imagery more generally derived from the literature of maritime misadventure, must be considered a key element in what David Collings has termed the ‘tropological dynamic’ underpinning much of Wordsworth’s writing—or as one might alternatively put it, this imagery forms part of the deep grammar of Wordsworth’s imagination.¹⁵ The poet who as a child invested tales of ‘storm and shipwreck’ with ‘mysterious awe’ seems to have had many scenes and situations from these tales deeply impressed upon him.¹⁶ As discussed ¹⁵ David Collings, Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural Dismemberment (Baltimore, 1994), 1–2. ¹⁶ Jared Curtis (ed.), The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth (Bristol, 1993), 74.

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earlier in relation to the ‘Salisbury Plain’ poems and The Borderers, the various terrestrial misadventures that for Collings are recurrent and characteristic motifs in Wordsworth’s work—the lost traveller, the wrong turn, the barren heath—are frequently supplemented by an imagery that transposes these misadventures into a maritime setting, thereby magnifying them, rendering the suffering more extreme, the endurance more heroic. This tendency clearly continues in The Prelude, especially in that crucial stage of composition when the poem grew from a comparatively simple two-part structure into a more complex five-book, and then thirteen-book, form. The Analogy Passage in particular seems to suggest that the poem to some extent took shape according to a structural logic akin to that found in many Providentialist accounts of maritime misadventure, according to which the protagonist should move to some climactic moment of vision and conversion. And even though the Analogy Passage, in which the imagistic and structural debt to these accounts is most apparent, was eventually cut, the figure of the hardy voyager, or endangered mariner, maintains a subtle informing presence in the 1805 and subsequent versions of the poem. Beginning the poem, in 1805 at least, Wordsworth quickly adopts the persona of a sailor recently returned from voyaging, someone who has ‘quit the tiresome sea’ to ‘dwell on shore’ (1. 35). This is a persona that Wordsworth will adopt at other points in the poem—for example, when he informs the reader that ‘my business was upon the barren sea, | My errand was to sail to other coasts’ (11. 55–6)—and there are also many occasions in which Wordsworth, whilst not explicitly identifying himself as some sort of metaphorical sailor, nevertheless invokes a maritime imagery that keeps this identification in mind. As discussed above, one extended simile alludes to the shipwrecked John Newton; his near-namesake Isaac Newton, meanwhile, is imaged (in the 1850 version) as ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought alone’ (a trope which also reflects Wordsworth’s sense of himself as a voyager, since we are clearly meant to perceive a correspondence between the great scientific discoverer and the poet). Even in episodes of the poem seemingly far removed from a maritime setting, and making no overt use of maritime imagery, one can still hear echoes of, or sense the imaginative associations with, an underlying narrative of maritime disaster. The drowned man of Esthwaite episode, arguably, taps in

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an oblique fashion this deep-seated nexus of images and associations, whilst the boat-stealing episode is more obviously in its own small way a voyage into terror, and thence into revelation and transformation (hence, as commentators have noticed, the echoes of the Ancient Mariner in this passage). One could trace this ‘tropological dynamic’ through other poems by Wordsworth: Peter Bell, for instance, is another conversion narrative featuring a drowned man and a metaphoric shipwreck (the ass that is the principal agent in Peter’s reformation rises from its initially comatose state ‘like a tempest-shattered bark’ suddenly lifted by ‘a foaming surge’).¹⁷ Some further examples will accordingly be given in what follows, especially as regards the greater poignancy and potency with which Wordsworth invests this imagery in the aftermath of his brother John’s death in the Abergavenny wreck. For now, however, I wish to turn from the figure of the maritime misadventurer to consider a different (but related) travel persona, and another underlying travel script, that also informs Wordsworth’s self-dramatization as traveller. This is his conception of himself as some sort of explorer. Once again, the Analogy Passage conveys powerfully the centrality of this role in Wordsworth’s thinking. Columbus and Park especially are clearly most famous as discoverers and explorers—with the first term here being more applicable to Columbus, and the latter to Park, if one observes the distinctions in practice and nomenclature discussed in the last chapter. Dampier too, although he conducted his voyages in the more sordid role of privateer, ultimately produced a narrative that was most famed for its many botanical, zoological, and ethnographic findings. And although the Analogy Passage was eventually cut, one can still see the shaping influence of this self-conception in the more familiar versions of The Prelude. Wordsworth was an avid reader of exploration narratives, and as Charles Coe has shown, imagery and reflections drawn from this reading are threaded through the poem.¹⁸ Not every borrowing casts Wordsworth himself as an explorer, but a good many of Wordsworth’s allusions to a wider—and frequently wilder—world beyond his immediate locale work subtly to create this effect. The highly familiar landscape of the Lake District is stalked, metaphorically at least, by ‘Greenland bears’ (in fact, sheep) ¹⁷ ‘Peter Bell’, ll. 556 and 559, in WPW. ¹⁸ See Charles Coe, Wordsworth and the Literature of Travel (New York, 1953).

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and wolves ‘howling round the Bothnic main’ (actually the sound of ice splitting on the Lakes).¹⁹ Abstracted thus, these images seem comic; whilst they are sometimes intended that way by Wordsworth, however, they more often, in situ, produce a somewhat uncanny effect. A local, familiar landscape is simultaneously somewhere exotic and strange, even dangerous, and through this curiously doubled setting Wordsworth moves both as recreational traveller and also, more heroically and worthily, as explorer. Wordsworth engages with the latter role in several ways. From one perspective, he simply makes a metaphoric identification with the figure of the explorer. Columbus’s discovery of America, or the exploration of interior regions and tracing of rivers back to their sources effected by Mungo Park, James Bruce, and the like, can be construed as analogous to Wordsworth’s exploration of an inner landscape, and the discoveries he has made as regards the nature of consciousness and the sources of creative power. He is himself the terrain he traverses, with The Prelude thus constituting an exploration narrative that ultimately offers a ‘vast prospect of the world which I had been | And was’ (13. 379–80). At the same time, this voyage of inner discovery opens up the possibility of another ‘new world’, which is the world as it appears when our quotidian reality is transfigured by the (re)discovered power of the imagination—a ‘new world’ waiting to be revealed ‘in life’s everyday appearances’ (12. 369–71). This sense of himself as someone opening up a new world is implicit in the references to Columbus and Park in the Analogy Passage (although Wordsworth’s principal emphasis, as noted above, falls very much on the explorer’s overcoming of difficulties, rather than the grandeur of his geographical achievement), and it is made more explicit in a later poem. In ‘Musings Near Aquapendente’, from Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837, Wordsworth describes a boat trip undertaken across the rough waters of the bay of Genoa (birthplace of Columbus), and offers the following reflection: Saints would not grieve nor guardian angels frown If one—while tossed, as was my lot to be, In a frail bark urged by two slender oars Over waves rough and deep, that, when they broke, ¹⁹ Book 8, ll. 402 and 570, in WP.

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That ‘Him’ refers to Columbus (though the capitalization seems to invest the discoverer with a Christ-like quality). It is a comparison advanced rather hesitantly (‘Saints would not grieve nor guardian angels frown’ if it was made, we are told), but once again the implication is that Wordsworth is someone who has travelled in the spirit of the great discoverer, and to a similar end. At the same time, however, Wordsworth also seems to understand his identification with the figure of the explorer as not simply a metaphoric, but also a metonymic relationship. Wordsworth’s exploration of his own inner landscape is intimately bound up with his travelling across exterior landscapes, and as he traverses the rugged terrain of the Lake District or the Scottish Highlands, he is to some extent exploring these places in their own right, as well as himself. These regions may be thoroughly mapped in a cartographic and scientific sense, but there are key aspects of the landscape that these forms of knowledge do not encompass, and that accordingly await discovery by the more discerning eye of the poet. Equally, the stories, customs, and values of many of the inhabitants of these regions need also to be preserved and transmitted to a wider audience; and as Alan Bewell has shown, Wordsworth in seeking to record such information (something which often entails, in the Lake District at least, taking up a stance both as indigene and explorer), stands deliberately and self-consciously in the Enlightenment ethnographic tradition that underpinned much contemporary exploration.²⁰ Even as Wordsworth thus presents himself as an explorer, however, he does so in ways that suggest an ambivalence about aspects ²⁰ See Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man and Society in the Experimental Poetry (New Haven, 1989), 29–41.

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of the contemporary exploratory agenda. One detects, for example, a caution, if not a scepticism, about some of the science involved in exploration. The classificatory zeal deriving from Linnaeus, for example, was presumably not without its limitations, and its blindnesses, for the poet who attacked in The Prelude: That false secondary power by which In weakness we create distinctions, then Deem that our puny boundaries are things Which we perceive, and not which we have made. (2. 221–4)

Here and elsewhere, Wordsworth champions the poet’s imaginative apprehension of the world over the scientist’s (and by implication, the scientific explorer’s) excessively analytical understanding. At issue, alongside the reductionism implicit in this epistemology, is the intellectual hubris or triumphalism it can also give rise to—the scientistic belief that everything can be catalogued and understood, and that from such intellectual mastery of the world there will flow a technological control. Hence, as discussed in the last chapter, Wordsworth’s prizing of the ‘reverential fear’ that the sea continues to inspire, notwithstanding the fact that it has been almost completely mapped. Hence also, perhaps, a tendency, in the Analogy Passage and elsewhere, to valorize exploration more for the conspicuous difficulties and dangers it often involves, than for its intellectual achievements per se. To focus on Columbus and Park refusing to yield to panic or despair is to inflect exploration as a test of character and self-discipline, and thus to invest the explorer with something of the quality of the pilgrim, whilst at the same time showing that nature retains a sublimely irreducible, uncontrollable aspect. One can also infer a Wordsworthian caution as regards the notions of global improvement that were so fundamental to Romantic-era exploration. One must assume that Wordsworth in broad terms endorsed such notions, given his evident interest in exploration narratives and his readiness to see himself as some sort of explorer. At the same time, however, improvement could take different forms, and be pushed forward with differing emphases and degrees of vehemence, and not every variant, one senses, sat comfortably with Wordsworth. The poem ‘When, to the attractions of the busy world’, from the sequence Poems on the Naming of Places, for example, is in some

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regards a clear endorsement of the improving influence of British voyagers overseas. The poem ultimately establishes an equivalence or correspondence between the narrating poet and his sailor brother (in actuality, William and John Wordsworth). It tells how the sailor, on a visit home to his family, visited daily a grove of fir trees, and in his constant walking to and fro within the grove created a path where previously there had only been obstruction and undergrowth. When the sailor once again quits his family for a long voyage overseas, the poet delights in walking up and down the short path thus opened up by the sailor, imagining as he does so that he moves in tandem with the sailor as he paces on the deck of his ship—‘for aught I know, | Timing my steps to thine’ (ll. 105–6). The correspondence thus established implicitly renders the poet some sort of voyager, and he is then further presented as some sort of explorer, when (in keeping with the key premiss of all the poems in this sequence) he goes on to enact that key topos of exploration and to name this favoured spot ‘John’s Grove’ in honour of his brother. If the pattern of correspondences and equivalences set up in this poem thus work to make the poet seem both voyager and explorer, they also serve to suggest that John Wordsworth’s voyages round the world are conducted in the same spirit of gentle improvement, and loving stewardship of nature, as his efforts in the fir grove. British voyagers and explorers, we infer, do indeed work a beneficial influence around the globe, and an influence that sometimes works to remedy the deficiencies of nature. At the same time, however, such improvement as takes place in ‘When, to the attractions of the busy world’ is very different in spirit and tone from the more ruthless, productivity-driven improvement espoused by some travellers both within the British isles and abroad. The path created by the sailor was not produced by slashing willy-nilly through the undergrowth, and it was not simply imposed arbitrarily on the landscape; following instead ‘an easy line | Along a natural opening’ (ll. 48–50), the path was created through a gradual process expressive of the sailor’s love of the grove, and his attentiveness to its potentialities. From one perspective, this rebukes and critiques the cruder forms of improvement embraced by some in the exploration establishment—although from another perspective, of course, it can also be suggested that precisely by ignoring or obscuring these aspects of the exploratory project, the

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poem in fact works to present a highly sympathetic, indeed well-nigh propagandist, image of British exploration as a force for good in the wider world. As will be apparent, there are some significant ambiguities attendant on Wordsworth’s adoption of the persona of explorer, both in the Poems on the Naming of Places sequence and in his poetry more generally.²¹ The next section will tease out some more of these nuances, especially as they relate to Wordsworth’s shifting orientation towards notions of improvement as he became more conservative and nationalistic in later life. To close this section, however, I shall look in a little more detail at Wordsworth’s imaginative response to one particular, and in many ways rather unusual, explorer of the era. That explorer is James Bruce, in many ways one of the most ‘romantic’ figures in Romantic-era exploration; as discussed in the last chapter, he cut much more of a dash than many other contemporary explorers, and was also somewhat at odds with the Banksian exploration establishment, with its emphasis on rigorous science and the development of commercial opportunities. These qualities seem to have made him deeply fascinating yet also subtly problematic to Wordsworth, a model to be simultaneously followed yet also repudiated in some regards. Although there is no direct evidence that Wordsworth ever read Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, there is no doubt that he was familiar at least in outline with Bruce’s troubled career and equivocal achievement. As we have seen already, both Southey and Coleridge read Bruce with considerable enthusiasm (albeit also with reservations), with Southey in nearby Keswick preparing his review of the Murray edition of Bruce’s Travels just as Wordsworth was expanding The Prelude from a five-book to a thirteen-book form. During the period of the 1805 Prelude’s composition, then, it seems likely that Bruce was very much a topic of conversation among the Wordsworth circle. As a consequence, it is not altogether surprising that there are at least two sections of The Prelude that seem significantly informed by Bruce’s story—the crossing of the ²¹ For a further discussion of Wordsworth’s adoption of this role, see Carol Bolton, ‘Taking Possession—Romantic Naming in Wordsworth and Coleridge’, in Fiona L. Price and Scott Masson (eds.), Silence, Sublimity and Suppression in the Romantic Period (Lampeter, 2002).

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Alps episode in Book 6, in which Alan Liu has detected the subtle influence of the Abyssinian traveller, and the Arab dream episode in Book 5, where Graeme Stones and David Chandler both find echoes of Bruce.²² The crossing of the Alps episode is among the most famous and most powerful passages in The Prelude. It recounts yet another peripety or setback occurring in the course of travel, in this case the moment in the 1790 walking tour when Wordsworth and Robert Jones recognized that they had crossed the Alps without realizing it. The mood is initially one of deflation and anticlimax, since both men had eagerly anticipated a crowning moment of glory, when they would stand atop the mountain range, before beginning their descent into Italy. But from this disappointment, Wordsworth characteristically conjures a spiritual victory. With hindsight, the defeat of expectations has come to seem emblematic of the imagination’s capacity to pass beyond the natural world, and to imagine things that cannot be. This in turn signals the supernatural, transcendent aspect of human consciousness, and the Wordsworthian conviction that ‘our destiny, our nature, and our home | Is with infinitude, and only there’ (6. 538–42). Once again, then, Wordsworth the traveller journeys through defeat to some sort of visionary insight—albeit an insight that comes years after the original travel experience. And it is as he is describing in stirring terms the apocalyptic insight that has been achieved that Wordsworth makes a revealing reference that suggests that James Bruce is in his mind, and a subtle scripting influence on his self-representation, at this point in The Prelude. The rousing apostrophe to the Imagination closes with the following account of the power of the mind once it has recognized its own self-sufficing aspect: The mind beneath such banners militant Thinks not of spoils or trophies, nor of aught That may attest its own prowess, blest in thoughts That are their own perfection and reward— ²² See Alan Liu, ‘The History in ‘‘Imagination’’ ’, in Duncan Wu (ed.), Romanticism: A Critical Reader (Oxford, 1995), 84–119; Graeme Stones, ‘Upon a Dromedary Mounted High’, Charles Lamb Bulletin, ns 104 (Oct. 1998), 145–58; David Chandler, ‘Robert Southey and The Prelude’s ‘‘Arab Dream’’ ’, Review of English Studies, 54: 2 (May 2003), 203–19.

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Strong in itself, and in the access of joy Which hides it like the overflowing Nile. (6. 543–8)

In the 1850 Prelude, this reference is expanded, and linked more explicitly to the Nile’s source; we are told that the mind’s strength originates in a ‘beatitude’ that simultaneously obscures the sources of its strength, ‘like the mighty flood of Nile | Poured from his fount of Abyssinian clouds | To fertilise the whole Egyptian plain’ (6. 614–16). Of course, Wordsworth need not have been thinking about Bruce just because he mentions the Nile: the mythology around the river is extensive, and goes back well beyond Bruce. Given the topicality of the Bruce story at the time of the passage’s composition, however, and even more crucially given the intermingling—interdependence, even—of elements of anticlimax and climax, defeat and victory, in this episode, Liu’s suggestion that Wordsworth is here influenced by the Abyssinian traveller’s story seems plausible. Bruce similarly arrived at a long-anticipated destination—the Nile’s source—only to experience a profound sense of anticlimax and disappointment, and to ponder the possible pointlessness of the quest he had set himself. But if Wordsworth is thinking of Bruce in this episode, what is it, precisely, that he thinks about him? The simplest interpretation might be to understand Bruce as a heroic model for Wordsworth, and to see the Nile reference as conveying once again a sense that the poet is metaphorically a great explorer, discovering the sources of the mind’s power as Bruce discovered the source of the great river. The reference comes, after all, as the defeat of expectations resolves into triumph. The implication of such a reading would be that Wordsworth construes Bruce as someone who ultimately survived extreme adversities, both in the field and back home, and who finally had his true achievement recognized and his reputation vindicated. To some extent, of course, Murray’s edition of Travels had done this for Bruce, corroborating many of his claims and thus salvaging his reputation in some regards—a point made by Southey in his review of the new edition. At the same time, the Murray edition had rendered deeply problematic other aspects of the Bruce story. When one recalls what Murray also demonstrates—the fact that Bruce had travelled to the source with another European traveller, despite his claims to

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the contrary; the fact that the source had already been visited by European travellers, and that Bruce may have known this but again consistently made claims to the contrary—and when one looks more closely at how Wordsworth is actually using the Nile reference in The Prelude, it seems too simplistic to understand Bruce just as a model for the Wordsworthian travel persona. He also figures an anxiety for Wordsworth, standing as an example he wishes not to follow, as regards both his qualities as traveller and travel writer, and also as regards the outcome of one’s travelling and travel writing. Involved here, I would suggest, are questions of belatedness, of reception, and also of some sort of failure of resolve or self-discipline. If one reading of the Bruce story gives us a tale of intrepid travel ultimately vindicated, another equally valid interpretation renders it a spurious quest that in its main objective was at best deluded, at worst fraudulent. The Jesuit priest Pedro Paez had already visited the source of the Nile, and Bruce probably knew this. One wonders, therefore, to what extent such a traveller might have focused in Wordsworth’s mind anxieties as to the originality and purpose of his own great quest, and as to its potential egotism. To what extent was the self-styled explorer of his own—and, by extension, all mankind’s—inner landscape merely going over ground that was already well trodden? And what kind of reception from the reading public would await the narrative of that exploration? (An issue that Wordsworth was always to shy away from, of course, refusing to publish The Prelude in his lifetime.) Accordingly, one senses in Book 6 of The Prelude a subtle repudiation of Bruce as much as an espousal of him as a model for heroic travel. It is a repudiation made tonally as much as anything else. As was discussed earlier, Bruce’s Travels oscillates wildly in tone, slipping occasionally into sarcasm whilst fluctuating principally between a self-promoting grandiloquence and a self-abasing melancholia. Somewhat histrionic, it evinces a constantly changing mood, and a mood that is constantly prone to excess. Wordsworth’s poetic travel narrative, meanwhile, and the journey by which he reaches a moment of triumph standing metaphorically by the ‘overflowing Nile’, proceeds very differently. The poetry maintains a more equable and controlled poise through the whole episode, reflective of the fact that Wordsworth’s response to the defeat of great expectations is not to lurch into emotional extremes but to work through them

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imaginatively, to apply oneself doggedly to these setbacks until some legitimate vindication can be found even in moments of defeat. There is no need to lapse into extreme despondency, nor conversely any need to vaunt one’s achievement in the shrill tones often adopted by Bruce. As Wordsworth writes, the mind in a state of true exultation, and exaltation, should have no need ‘of spoils or trophies, nor of aught | That may attest its prowess’. Thus Wordsworth rebukes Bruce, whose description of reaching the Nile’s source is followed by an obsessive itemization of everything that does attest his prowess, and that confirms the importance of his achievement. A similar sense of ambivalence also emerges from the other key passage in The Prelude that seems haunted by the controversial Abyssinian traveller. As noted above, the Arab dream episode of Book 5 seems informed in various ways by Bruce’s story and persona, although once again it is hard to determine whether the connections amount to conscious allusions on Wordsworth’s part, or an unconscious influence. In this passage, Wordsworth recounts a dream—supposedly dreamt by a friend in the 1805 Prelude, but ascribed to himself in 1850—in which the dreamer encounters in a desert setting an Arab mounted on a camel. The Arab carries a stone and a shell, which in the fusion of symbols that is characteristic of dreams are also books, the former being Euclid’s Elements of Geometry and the latter a volume that contains all human poetry. The Arab is rushing to bury them because the world is apparently threatened with destruction by a great deluge. In the direction from which he has come, ‘a glittering light’ seems to signal ‘the waters of the deep | Gathering upon us’ (5. 129–31). And when he rides off, abandoning the dreamer, he is last glimpsed ‘riding o’er the desert sands | With the fleet waters of the drowning world | In chase of him’ (5. 135–7). It is of course integral to the passage’s dream logic that the man encountered by the dreamer is a composite figure, a product of the dreaming mind’s tendency to what Freud termed condensation: it would accordingly be simplistic to read the Arab as somehow meaning, or being inspired by, any one individual. Yet he is nevertheless a composite that recalls Bruce in several ways. Both figures share a not entirely reassuring resemblance to Don Quixote: this was how Bruce imaged himself when disillusioned after reaching the Nile’s source, while the Arab is

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As these lines will suggest, an ambiguity of aspect is fundamental to the depiction of the Arab, and Bruce shares this ambiguity. The figure who emerges from Travels is similarly someone who both is and is not Quixote—and indeed, someone who on occasions both is and is not an ‘Arab’, as Bruce repeatedly demonstrates his ability to adopt North African costumes and assimilate into very alien cultures. Bruce shares with the Arab, moreover, a mission to rescue from obscurity and preserve from destruction key testimonies of human achievement. When Bruce made his final great desert crossing, he carried with him not only all his own notes and journals, but also the apocryphal Book of Enoch, long lost in the West. At one point he has to abandon all these documents in the desert—but ultimately he is able to retrieve them, and to save them from oblivion, just as the Arab seeks to preserve the stone and the shell, geometry and poetry. The destruction the Arab fears is a great flood. Here we again find Wordsworth articulating an anxiety about survival as a threat of death by water; once again, it might plausibly be argued, we see the vestigial traces of the profound impression made on Wordsworth by images and narratives of maritime misadventure, and by scenes of shipwreck, drowning, and (for a favoured few) deliverance. ( There is an echo, perhaps, of John Newton consoling himself with geometrical drawings in the aftermath of his shipwreck in the fact that geometry is one of the two spheres of human intellectual activity to be preserved from the deluge.) As we have seen, Wordsworth frequently thought and imaged certain anxieties in these terms. Yet there are also reasons why their usage here might well derive in part from the Bruce story, for here too death by water, and deliverance from such a fate, figures prominently. Bruce himself survived a shipwreck in the Mediterranean, and gives a highly rousing account of the experience in the introduction to Travels.²³ The most important document Bruce ²³ James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (Edinburgh, 1790), i, pp. xliii–xliv.

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was eventually to bring out of the desert, meanwhile, was the Book of Enoch; this tells of Noah’s great grandfather and of a mighty race of beings, born of the union of men and angels, that were subsequently wiped out by the Flood. If one construes the Arab as at some level a reflection of, or a response to, James Bruce, one comes away with an even stronger sense that Bruce provokes profound uncertainties in Wordsworth. For it is the very point of the Arab dream passage that the dreamer—and equally the reader—is not sure what to make of the Arab’s supposed mission. Is he simply a deluded madman, or does a nobility and heroism attach to the Arab, notwithstanding his delusional state? In so far as the episode is a response to Bruce’s adventures, and to his whole career, does Wordsworth understand Bruce as a tragic figure, or is he making a more cynical and disapproving interpretation? If the commentary offered in The Prelude itself ultimately labels the Arab as mad, it seems that this is nevertheless a madness that the poet reverences, rather than ridicules or pities. And it is a madness he can to some extent identify with. Were he convinced that some ‘great overthrow’ (5. 158) like the Flood were imminent, he too might go mad like this, ‘could share that maniac’s anxiousness, could go | Upon like errand’ (5. 160–1). He too would seek to save monuments of art and intellect, even though he knew the pointlessness of the exercise. Understood thus, what stands behind the dream is possibly a romantic-ironic reading of Bruce’s career. Emblematized in Bruce’s career, perhaps, is on the one hand the delusory nature, and the inevitable failure, of great quests and other epic human projects, and on the other hand the heroic effort that can nevertheless be called forth in pursuit of such quests, regardless of their eventual outcome. Overall, however, the subtle echoes of Bruce in The Prelude would seem to suggest an ambivalence on Wordsworth’s part towards the controversial explorer. At issue, one guesses, are misgivings as to the larger relevance, and ultimate usefulness, of Bruce’s venture, given that it brought about no moral or spiritual transformation in the explorer himself, nor any moral and spiritual improvement in the society visited. It was these aspects of contemporary exploration that Wordsworth increasingly valued and embraced, from the early 1800s onwards, as increasingly his views became aligned with those of the more religiose and Evangelical elements in the exploration

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establishment. And it is to this phase of Wordsworth’s career that I shall now turn.

T H E P O L I T I C S O F WO R D S WO RT H I A N M I S A DV E N T U R E In my discussion of The Prelude, I have chiefly emphasized the ways in which Wordsworth’s espousal of the role of misadventurer had a bearing on a range of personal creative concerns, as misadventure comes to seem a route to glimpses of personal transcendence, and to intimations of poetic election. Yet there can also be a political statement being made in striking a pose, in writing or in actuality, as a suffering traveller. As we have seen earlier in this study, Wordsworth’s walking in the 1790s seems to have encompassed an element of social protest and radical intent, and an identification with such emblems of social injustice as the vagrant and the sailor. In the present section, I wish to extend my discussion of this aspect of Wordsworth’s interest in suffering in travel, focusing especially on associations and identifications implicit in Wordsworthian misadventure in the middle and latter parts of the poet’s career. As is well known, Wordsworth in middle age moved away from the radicalism of his youth, to embrace a more conservative political position (and the first steps in this process of political reassessment were discussed earlier in relation to The Borderers and its handling of the theme of mutiny). As he did so, Wordsworth refashioned himself into a spokesman for both nation and empire—and it is to the service of nationalist and imperialist agendas that the figure of the suffering traveller is sometimes put in Wordsworth’s later career. The key text in this regard is The Excursion (1814), an epic poem that like The Prelude is composed very much of a sequence of journeys, as its protagonists range the peaks and vales of the Cumbrian landscape in search of wisdom and insight. As so often in Wordsworth’s poetry, these are mostly journeys conducted on foot. And whilst walking is sometimes presented in The Excursion (for example, in lines 97–110 of Book 2) as a delightful freedom of movement, a practice that allows the traveller to pause and meditate in ways that are not possible

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when travelling in a carriage or on horseback, it is just as frequently understood as a strenuous and potentially dispiriting activity that requires the walker to display a degree of physical and mental strength. Both literally and metaphorically, the poem’s protagonists are travellers who must come through misadventures, and through the defeats, dangers, and discomforts that their journeys can throw up, so as to reach wisdom. To some extent, indeed, we sense that they must embrace such rigours, setting themselves squarely to face the tasks and perils ahead and so cultivating qualities of self-discipline, strength of will, and steadiness of purpose. The poem opens, for example, with an image of one fairly trivial sort of discomfort in travel: we see the poet travelling awkwardly, ‘toiling’ across ‘a bare wide Common’, and proceeding by ‘languid steps that by the slippery turf | Were baffled’ (1. 21–3). But the problem here, one comes to feel, are those ‘languid steps’. As the poem goes on, the poet is implicitly taught to walk in a more bracing style, and to face head-on the challenge of the landscape. His guide in these matters is the Wanderer, who has earned his living and learnt his wisdom through what seems superficially the ‘irksome drudgery’ of being a Pedlar, a trade which required him to plod on, Through hot and dusty ways, or pelting storm, A vagrant Merchant under a heavy load Bent as he moves; and needing frequent rest. (1. 322–5)

The poem insists, however, that such ‘hard service’ brings its rewards: we are told that ‘such travellers find their own delight’ (1. 325–6). The Poet is not the only figure in need of the Wanderer’s lessons of self-discipline and strength of purpose. Of all the characters in the poem, it is the Solitary who has been through the most gruelling journey(s), literal and metaphorical. And his travails have left him, as the poem opens, in a profound state of pessimism and despair. In youth, he had been a fellow-traveller in the French Revolutionary cause, but he had soon been sickened by the turn of events in France. Refusing, however, to give up his hopes for the betterment of mankind, and for a perfect social and political system, the Solitary then undertook a harrowing voyage to America, to visit the fledgling republic there. But again, disillusionment set in, and the Solitary made

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a further journey westwards, to live among Native Americans. Once again, the Solitary’s hopes and expectations were confounded. He had hoped to find the Native Americans living in a state of innocence, as ‘primeval Nature’s child’ (3. 919); what he actually found was mere savagery, and so the Solitary fled America. He returned to live in isolation in Cumbria, and in the process gave up his previously optimistic view of human nature and human perfectibility. Interestingly, this is a career, and a metaphorical journey from idealism to despair, that again seems subtly informed by a tropological dynamic drawn from accounts of shipwreck and maritime misadventure. In the draft version of the poem, the Solitary enters his cabin like ‘a lonely shipwrecked Man’, whilst in the poem as it stands, the cabin’s interior is such a scene of chaos and disorder that it prompts the Poet to exclaim ‘What a wreck | We had about us!’ (2. 660–1)—although of course the tone here is comic. The dell where the Solitary lives, meanwhile, is marked by A mass of rock, resembling, as it lay Right at the foot of that moist precipice A stranded ship, with keel upturned[.] (3. 52–4)

The metaphorical shipwreck that the Solitary has been through is principally a personal, psychological trauma, yet as so often in this period the topos has also a political suggestiveness: the shipwreck survived by the Solitary is also the turmoil unleashed in Europe during the Revolutionary era. In due course, however, the ‘Despondency’ that is the title of Book 3 will give way to ‘Despondency Corrected’, the title of Book 4. The Wanderer will demonstrate to both the Poet and the Solitary that depression and pessimism are inappropriate responses to the Solitary’s life story. Hopes for the amelioration of man’s lot can still be held, albeit in a chastened form. And the arduous, uncomfortable journeys that the Poet and the Solitary have been on, both literally and metaphorically, are properly understood not simply as disasters from which the travellers must recover, but rather as necessary stages in the progress to true wisdom and insight into the human condition. In many ways, of course, this is very similar to the implicitly Providential logic for misadventure advanced in The Prelude. What

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is very different in The Excursion, however, is the tone with which this Providentialism is advanced, and the destination to which these Providentially plotted journeys advance. In the first place, the poem espouses a much more orthodox Christianity. Where in The Prelude Wordsworth follows the template or script of the Providential journey, but adapts it to his own philosophical ends, here it is emphatically the Christian God who leads the traveller through vicissitudes and whose power must be acknowledged at those climactic moments when the journey’s pattern and logic become apparent. Greater emphasis also falls on faith, on trusting that there is a divine plan implicit in all diasters and travails, and on that key corollary to faith, duty. ‘Duty exists’, the Wanderer declares (4.73), glossing the term as ‘the measures and the forms, | Which an abstract intelligence supplies’ and which through all upheavals ‘immutably survive, | For our support’ (4. 73–5). In comparison with The Prelude, consequently, The Excursion seems to embrace, and propound, the role of misadventurer in a far more dour fashion. Here it is not so much that misadventures bring about startling transformations in consciousness, and sublime confirmations of our higher being; rather, they serve to shape our character and improve us morally. Or so, at least, we must assume, clinging to the conviction God permits such discomforts for some good reason. This more chastened mood, evident not only in The Excursion but in many other poems from the mid-1800s onwards (the ‘Ode to Duty’, for example), has several causes, these being for the most part beyond the scope of this study. But one factor in this change of tone should be mentioned here: namely, the grief occasioned by the death of Wordsworth’s brother John in 1805. As we have seen, John died in a shipwreck, as captain of the ill-fated Abergavenny, and so had the dubious distinction of featuring prominently in one of the many narratives of shipwreck that so fascinated the age. It was a tragedy that deeply disturbed Wordsworth’s earlier optimism that ‘nature never did betray | The heart that loved her’ (‘Tintern Abbey’, ll. 123–4), and that accordingly pushed him towards a more conventional religious faith.²⁴ It instilled also a more sombre outlook, whereby it is not so much the rewards that can follow human ²⁴ On this topic, see Alethea Hayter, The Wreck of the Abergavenny: One of Britain’s Greatest Maritime Disasters and its Links to Literary Genius (Basingstoke, 2002).

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suffering that must be emphasized, as simply the need to persevere in the hope, rather than the realization, that some reward will eventually be forthcoming. In the greatest of the elegies that Wordsworth wrote for John, contemplation of a scene of storm and imminent shipwreck (in a painting by Sir George Beaumont) ultimately leads the poet to the conclusion that it is ‘Not without hope we suffer and we mourn’ (‘Peele Castle’, l. 60). It is only a very minimal victory over adversity and loss that Wordsworth is able to credit here, this minimalism being underscored by the negative construction of the phrase ‘Not without hope … ’. And from John’s fate, Wordsworth also extracted a lesson as to the need to cling more strongly to notions of duty and discipline, even in the absence of any firm hope or conviction as to the purpose served by suffering and disaster. John’s friends and family consoled themselves with reports that the captain of the Abergavenny stuck to his post to the last, greeting his fate with stoic fortitude and with ‘all claims of duty satisfied’, as Wordsworth puts it in another of the elegies (‘To the Daisy’, l. 54). It was an example Wordsworth seems to have taken to heart: as he puts it in ‘Peele Castle’, ‘I have submitted to a new control’ (l. 34). In The Excursion, the elegies about John’s death by shipwreck, and other poems from the mid-1800s onwards, Wordsworth chiefly means by duty and (self-)discipline a faith in God and an obedience to the notion that all adversities have a divine purpose, no matter how inscrutable that purpose may seem. Yet this obedience to God is also frequently inflected, from this point on, as simultaneously a deference to the established authorities of the British state. To the British state, indeed, there arguably begins to be attached some of the notions of election and divine deliverance that had previously been applied, in The Prelude at least, to the creative, autonomous individual. This is a further way in which the misadventures related in The Excursion seem to carry implications significantly different from those conveyed by misadventure in The Prelude. If in the earlier poem travellers proceed through adversity to an apprehension of their own transcendent status, in The Excursion it is a vision of national rather than individual election and empowerment that is the ultimate end of the various journeys described. After correcting the despondency of the Solitary, and then offering (over several long books) advice on a variety of social and moral problems besetting contemporary

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Britain, the Wanderer/Wordsworth concludes with a prophecy as to the global destiny that awaits the nation: the wide waters, open to the power, The will, the instincts, and appointed needs Of Britain, do invite her to cast off Her swarms, and in succession send them forth; Bound to establish new communities On every shore whose aspect favours hope Or bold adventure. (9. 375–81)

In a manifesto for British imperialism and colonialism, Wordsworth mobilizes georgic convention—those ‘swarms’, which are of bees, are taken directly from Virgil—in order to stress the industriousness of the British people, and their improving, cultivating tendencies. Britain will civilize the world, making it productive and profitable. Improvements and reforms at home will ripple out Even till the smallest habitable rock, Beaten by lonely billows, hear the songs Of humanised society; and bloom With civil arts, that shall breathe forth their fragrance, A grateful tribute to all-ruling Heaven . . . . . . . . . —Vast the circumference of hope—and ye Are at its centre, British Lawgivers[.] (9. 386–91; 398–9)

This, then, is the Providential destiny that awaits the British people. It will not be achieved, however, until Britain has followed the Wanderer’s agenda for moral and social reform, as advanced over the course of The Excursion. In so far as it faces this daunting task ahead, the nation stands somewhat in the position of the walkers in the poem, who must gird themselves for challenges ahead. Conversely, the gruelling journeys undertaken by the Poet, the Wanderer, and the Solitary are not only analogous to the journey the nation must make, they are also a preparation for it, and a vital training in physical, moral, and mental strength. If the travels, and travails, of Poet, Wanderer, and Solitary are thus implicitly suggestive of a metaphorical journey that the British nation

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must make, they are more explicitly analogous to some of the actual journeys that Britons were contemporaneously making in the service of the emergent empire. Thus the Wanderer begins expounding his corrective lessons to the Solitary on a ‘plot of green-sward’ (4. 242) that is as ‘smooth and commodious’ as a stately deck Which to and fro the mariner is used To tread for pastime, talking with his mates, Or haply thinking of far distant friends, While the ship glides before a steady breeze. (4. 246–50)

At the culmination of the poem, meanwhile, the not inconsiderable party that has by now assembled around the three central figures temporarily disperses after hearing the Wanderer’s vision of Britain’s global destiny. As it does so, the group seemingly enacts in miniature a version of the Wanderer’s vision. At a nearby lake they board a ‘Pinnace’ and then, ‘coasting creek and bay, | Glades [they] behold, and into thickets peep’ (9. 561–2). When the ship has ‘pursued her voyage’, they land and wander separately over what is seemingly virgin territory, ‘each | Not seldom over anxious to make known | His own discoveries’ (9. 567; 583–5). Here and elsewhere in the poem, the imagery works to suggest a correspondence, and a similitude, between journeys made within the British Isles, and voyages made to more far-flung destinations. This tendency in Wordsworth’s poetry—and presumably in his understanding and scripting of his own travelling—has already been noted in connection with ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’ and The Borderers. In the earlier poetry, however, Wordsworth often connected hapless travellers at home with beleaguered voyagers beset by wild seas or lost in dreadful wildernesses, and he did so in part to register a protest over perceived social injustices. From the 1800s onwards, however, the similitudes often work to link the local traveller with a sailor or explorer who is more productively employed. Thus ‘When to the attractions of the busy world’, as we have seen, creates a similitude between the poet and his seafaring brother, who seems to be playing his own small part in the British project of global improvement. The Excursion makes a similar association between domestic travellers and overseas voyagers, but elevates the comparatively small-scale

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and gentle acts of improvement effected by John Wordsworth into a much grander national mission. Furthermore, it extends notions of improvement not only to alien landscapes, but also to alien peoples. It is very much a civilizing mission that Wordsworth is proposing, which in turn presupposes, or necessarily regards, that other cultures are backward and savage, in need of British guidance both practically and morally. In this spirit, it is a bleak account of Native Americans that the Solitary offers after his voyage to America. As he reports to the Wanderer and the Poet, he expected to find a Rousseauistic idyll, and living examples of the Noble Savage. But what he actually found, he claims, was A creature, squalid, vengeful, and impure Remorseless, and submissive to no law But superstitious fear, and abject sloth. (3. 953–5)

Wordsworth derived this extremely negative image of the Native American from Samuel Hearne’s Journey to The Northern Ocean (1795). In offering such a disdainful account of the savagery of an alien people, The Excursion stands alongside Robert Southey’s The Curse of Kehama (1810), in which the peoples of India are similarly depicted as barbarous and brutal. Both works reflect and contribute to a hardening of British attitudes to other races and cultures, and a shift in the tenor of improvement, that takes place in the 1810s and 1820s—the result, it has been suggested, of an upsurge of both Evangelical and utilitarian, reformist attitudes, and also a new bullishness in the aftermath of victory in the Napoleonic War.²⁵ If the connection between domestic pedestrians and overseas voyagers thus takes on a different connotation in Wordsworth’s later work, so too does the script underpinning that other key Wordsworthian travel topos, the mountain ascent. Mountain ascents in The Prelude seem principally a route to a sense of personal election and transcendence, although there is perhaps a subtly nationalistic agenda in the way The Prelude makes Mount Snowdon the site of its climactic ²⁵ See Marilyn Butler, ‘The Orientalism of Byron’s Giaour’, in Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (eds.), Byron and the Limits of Fiction (Liverpool, 1988), 81–5; Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge, 1992), 77.

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ascent rather than the Alps. But such nationalism becomes much more explicit in a later poem, ‘View from the Top of Black Comb’, written in 1813. Rather than a vision of personal poetic election, the poem culminates in a vision of national destiny, a ‘Display august of man’s inheritance, | Of Britain’s calm felicity and power!’ (ll. 33–4). This mountain top is labelled an ‘imperial station’ from which the climber can uniquely see parts of all the nations, England, Wales, Scotland, and since 1801 Ireland, that comprise Great Britain (a fact that had been remarked by Colonel William Mudge, when conducting the first Ordnance Survey of the region).²⁶ It should be noted, however, that Wordsworth’s national and imperial vision is usually one that emphasizes the more moralistic and religious tendencies in the contemporary rhetoric of improvement, as opposed to the more commercialistic and scientific inflections of that rhetoric. Although he climbs Black Comb in the footsteps of Colonel Mudge of the Ordnance Survey, Wordsworth was always somewhat sceptical about the science underpinning such cartographical surveys, and more specifically about any hubristic understanding of science as a means by which man might gain complete mastery or knowledge of the natural world. As Jonathan Bate points out, the imperious survey enacted in ‘View from the Top of Black Comb’ needs to be set alongside the scene fashioned in a companion poem, ‘Written with a Slate Pencil on a Stone, on the Side of the Mountain of Black Comb’.²⁷ Here a would-be surveyor, a ‘geographic Labourer … | With books supplied and instruments of art, | To measure height and distance’ (ll. 14–16), is unable to carry out his work because of a sudden darkness that falls upon the mountain. Secular processes alone, it seems, cannot guarantee the commanding view. Wordsworth’s imperialism, then, does not exclude a tendency to rebuke and to challenge some of the modernizing impulses that underpinned the contemporary British imperial agenda. In the local context, moreover, this resistance to aspects of modernity has particular bearing on Wordsworthian travel, and more specifically on the Wordsworthian tendency to incorporate elements of hardship and misadventure into his travelling. In Wordsworth’s later years, ²⁶ See Michael Wiley, Romantic Geography: Wordsworth and Anglo-European Spaces (Basingstoke, 1998). ²⁷ Bate, Romantic Ecology, 85.

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his advocacy of pedestrianism frequently seems to be linked with a desire to commemorate older patterns of living and travelling, and to maintain a connection with the past. The walker travels as man has always travelled, eschewing the improvements that increasingly made travel faster and more comfortable: better road surfaces, improved suspension systems in coaches, in the latter part of Wordsworth’s life the wholly new technology of rail transport, and so forth. What is more, the walker can travel routes that are otherwise vanishing in modern Britain—‘The footpath faintly marked, the horse-track wild, | And formidable length of plashy lane’, as The Excursion has it, that are currently being ‘swallowed up by stately roads | Easy and bold’ (8. 105–110). In this context, walking the old routes (and putting up with the discomforts this involves) becomes a commemorative ritual. A means of looking at one’s surroundings steadily and continuously, taking in the whole terrain along every step of the way, rather than receiving the fleeting glimpses that other modes of transport allow, walking thus seems to preserve an older, more organic cohesion between man and nature. Pedestrianism could accordingly still retain, in the local context at least, an echo of its earlier, more radical symbolism. If walking is increasingly celebrated as a commemorative ritual linking the present with vanishing ways of life, it sometimes seems to commemorate an older, organic cohesion not just between man and nature, but also between man and man. Wordsworth was well aware that the modernizing tendencies in the Lake District had changed not only the natural but also the social landscape. Traditional communities had been broken up, and traditional communal rights lost. And it is partly to maintain these rights that Wordsworth walked the footpaths of Cumbria. In 1836, for example, he took a walk with John Taylor Coleridge that seems to have disconcerted the younger man, a respectable Justice of the Peace: I remember well, asking him if we were not trespassing on private pleasuregrounds here. He said, no; the walks, had, indeed, been inclosed, but he remembered them open to the public, and he always went through them when he chose. At Lowther, we found among the visitors, the late Lord W ; and describing our walk, he made the same observation, that we had been trespassing; but Wordsworth maintained his point with somewhat more warmth than I either liked, or could well account for. But afterwards, when

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we were alone, he told me he had purposely answered Lord W stoutly and warmly, because he had done a similar thing with regard to some grounds in the neighbourhood of Penrith, and excluded the people of Penrith from walking where they had always enjoyed the right before. He had evidently a pleasure in vindicating these rights, and seemed to think it a duty.²⁸

To some extent, then, pedestrianism could still signal an identification with an underprivileged rural class, just as it had in the early 1790s. But overall, the symbolism and significance that attached to Wordsworthian walking, and to the various forms of misadventure that might occur whilst walking, had changed dramatically. Wordsworth as walker and misadventurer no longer cut a figure as an outcast or oppressed traveller, whose sufferings rebuked his society. Rather, he was emblematic of the strength, self-discipline, and moral worth of that society, and so worked subtly to endorse and promote nationalistic and imperialistic claims. ²⁸ The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 3 vols. (London, 1876), iii. 425, and note.

6 Romantic Travel II: Byronic Scripts [Lord Byron] was known among the sailors as a Traveller and not as a poet … a odd young man … who was of a resolute temper fond of bathing in the sea and going ashore to see ruins in a rough sea when it required 6 hands to manage the boat … John Clare¹

‘Lord Byron in a storm’—so ran the title of a short narrative circulating in the mid-1820s, that eventually found its way into a collection entitled The Mariner’s Chronicle; or Interesting Narratives of Shipwrecks (published in London c.1826). The narrative purports to be an account of a voyage undertaken by Byron and Shelley in 1821, to Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia, and is supposedly written by a Captain Benson, commander of ‘his Lordship’s yacht Mazeppa’. It describes how the Mazeppa almost came to grief off the Italian coast, as strong winds and high seas threatened to drive the yacht on to a lee-shore. As the crew work desperately to save the boat, Byron lends a hand, helping to throw overboard any heavy articles that make the ship top-heavy. Shelley, however, behaves very differently. This man ‘who heretofore made no secret of his infidelity, and whose spirits we thought no danger could ever appal’, suddenly loses all self-control: the horrors of approaching death made him weep like a child. Those names which he never before pronounced but in ridicule, he now called upon ¹ Eric Robinson (ed.), John Clare’s Autobiographical Writings (Oxford, 1986), 53–4. Thanks to John Goodridge for drawing my attention to this reference.

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in moving accents of serious prayer, and implored the protection of that Being whose existence he affected to disbelieve. Thus, ‘Conscience does make cowards of us all.’

As Shelley blubs, it becomes apparent that the crew’s efforts have been to no avail. Byron then pronounces calmly that it is ‘every man’s duty to endeavour to preserve the life God has given him’.² He advises everyone to strip off so as to be able to swim, although he acknowledges that swimming indeed, can be of little use in these billows; but as children when tired with crying sink placidly to repose; we, when exhausted with struggling, shall die the easier; and with God’s blessing we shall all be at rest.

Thereafter, Byron is composed enough to quip with fellow passengers and crewmates, although even he is roused to exclaim ‘Good God!’ when a freak wave suddenly sweeps ‘Doctor Peto’ to his death. For the remaining passengers and crew on the Mazeppa, however, this wave proves to be the means of their miraculous delivery, lifting the yacht over rocks it was just about to strike. At last the party are safe, and as ‘tumultuous joy’ erupts amongst the crew, Byron checks their high spirits and reminds them to ‘silently thank God for your miraculous preservation’. Shelley, meanwhile, is ‘removed in a state of stupor to his bed’, with his Lordship gleefully threatening ‘to compose an elegy on the death and resurrection of Percy S ’. This narrative is of course a fake, fabricated to cash in on the Byron myth in the aftermath of his death in 1824, and also to attack Shelley for his atheism. Leigh Hunt denounced it as ‘an impudent fiction’—and having his own animus against Byron, he further suggested that in a real situation of this sort, it would have been Shelley who showed courage, and Byron timidity.³ (He did concede, however, that Byron often ‘volunteered voyages by sea, when he might have avoided them’.) For all that it is a fake, however, ‘Lord Byron in a Storm’ says much about the way in which Byron was perceived by ² The Mariner’s Chronicle: Or Interesting Narratives of Shipwrecks (London, c.1826), 1–4. The pagination is not very helpful in this volume, however, as it is clearly made up of several pamphlets bound together. The Byron story occurs about two-thirds of the way through the volume. ³ Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries; With Recollections of the Author’s Life, 2 vols. (London, 1828), i. 102.

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the British public, and about the sort of stories popularly associated with him. Like Wordsworth, Byron had a reputation not only as a poet but also as a great traveller, and indeed, as someone whose poetry often flowed directly from his travelling. And as a traveller, Byron had a reputation as someone who ran risks, and who courted dangers and discomforts. Some, indeed, thought that Byron went too far in this direction. Recalling the voyage across the Bay of Genoa described in ‘Musings Near Aquapendente’ (discussed in the last chapter), Wordsworth told Isabella Fenwick that he had found the seas too rough, and that he felt that ‘the view of the city, splendid as it was’, did not justify ‘the danger apparently incurred’. He went on to suggest, however, that Shelley & Byron—one of whom at least seems to have courted agitation from every quarter—would probably have rejoiced in such a situation, more than once I believe were they both in extreme danger even on the Lake of Geneva.⁴

Wordsworth here seems to accuse Shelley and Byron of excessive recklessness and sensation-seeking—and as we shall see, there is some foundation to this charge, although not quite in the sense Wordsworth intended. It was the initial ‘Grander Tour’ of 1809 to 1811, and subsequently the poetic account of that tour offered in Childe Harold, Cantos 1 and 2, that first established Byron’s reputation as a hardy, (mis)adventurous traveller. It was to some extent a justified reputation: as discussed in Chapter 1, Byron’s travels in the Iberian peninsula, the eastern Mediterranean, and Albania had indeed taken him into dangerous regions and incurred significant risks and discomforts. At one point, for example, he was almost shipwrecked. As he recounted with some relish in a letter home: Two days ago I was nearly lost in a Turkish ship of war owing to the ignorance of the captain & crew though the storm was not violent.—Fletcher yelled after his wife, the Greeks called on all the Saints, the Mussulmen on Alla, the Captain burst into tears & ran below deck telling us to call on God, the sails were split, the mainyard shivered, the wind blowing fresh, the night setting in, & all our chance was to make Corfu which is in possession of the French, or (as Fletcher pathetically termed it) ‘a watery grave.’—I did what I could ⁴ Jared Curtis (ed.), The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth (London, 1993), 69.

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to console Fletcher but finding him incorrigible wrapped myself up in my Albanian capote (an immense cloak) & lay down on deck to await the worst, I have learnt to philosophise on my travels, & if I had not, complaint was useless.⁵

From 1816, meanwhile, Byron’s reputation as a great traveller was further consolidated when he went into ‘exile’ on the continent, fleeing the scandal of his separation from his wife. His subsequent peregrination around Europe threw up further scrapes and escapes, including the near-shipwreck on Lake Geneva to which Wordsworth alludes in his remarks to Isabella Fenwick. All such incidents usually made their way by some means into the public domain, thereby augmenting the myth of Byron the intrepid, if not reckless, traveller. This myth was sealed when in 1823 he set off for Greece, where in 1824 he died (albeit in rather less glamorous circumstances than he might have hoped for) whilst engaged in the struggle for Greek Independence. Thus Byron’s reputation as a misadventurous traveller had a basis in reality. It was also, of course, to a very great extent a myth, a persona assiduously cultivated and projected through a variety of media: in poetry and, just as importantly, the footnotes to his poetry; in letters, journals, conversations, and paintings such as the famous Thomas Philipp’s portrait of Byron in full Albanian dress (1814); and complementary travel accounts such as John Cam Hobhouse’s Journey Through Albania (1813). As with Wordsworth in the previous chapter, however, my concern here is not to measure the image against the reality, nor do I wish to explore the extent to which the Byronic travel persona is and is not a pose. Rather, I am concerned to trace the impulses that led Byron to this persona both in fantasy and to some extent in actuality—those travel scripts, as I am calling them, that are being played out as Byron constructs himself prospectively and retrospectively as traveller, and that must at some level have also informed the actual process and experience of travel for Byron. Especially I shall explore the formative role, in shaping the Byronic traveller and the Byronic travel script, of those elements in the Voyages and Travels genre that I have collectively labelled the literature of misadventure. Like Wordsworth, Byron from childhood was an avid ⁵ BLJ i. 229.

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reader of travel writing, and especially of accounts of shipwreck and other maritime misadventures. (As the grandson of John Byron, of course, the poet had a familial connection with this distinctive subgenre of Voyages and Travels.) As a consequence, the same underlying source material, so to speak, often informs the figures that both Wordsworth and Byron seek to cut as travellers, especially in so far as they wish to construct themselves as misadventurers rather than mere tourists. But as we shall now see, the travel scripts that each fashions from these sources, and so the role and resonance of the figure of the misadventurer for Wordsworth and Byron, are very different.

‘O N C E M O R E U P O N T H E WAT E R S ! ’ : T H E B Y RO N I C T RAV E L L E R I N CHILDE HAROLD You don’t like my ‘restless’ doctrines—I should be very sorry if you did—but I can’t stagnate nevertheless—if I must sail let it be on the ocean no matter how stormy—anything but a dull cruise on a level lake without ever losing sight of the same insipid shores by which it is surrounded. Byron⁶

‘Once more upon the waters! yet once more!’⁷ With this clarion call in stanza 2 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 3, Byron resumes the poem after an interval of four years. It is an opening intended as an immediate reminder that Childe Harold is very much a poem of travel, and more specifically—and this is a distinction that mattered greatly to Byron—that both the poem’s author and its protagonist are travellers who have voyaged, figures who have ventured out on the high seas. The persona of voyager or seafarer was one that Byron cultivated throughout his career, from the poem that first made his name, Childe Harold, Cantos 1 and 2 (with its accounts of voyages to Spain and the eastern Mediterranean), right up to his last major work, The Island (which takes up the story of the ⁶ BLJ iii. 119.

⁷ Canto 3, l. 10, in BCPW ii.

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Bounty mutineers). The last work, of course, is fictive, and does not purport to reflect Byron’s own experience of the sea. But it builds on, and to some extent consolidates and extends, the reputation for seafaring and for knowledge of maritime matters established in more directly autobiographical works such as Childe Harold. And in this way it continues an association between Byron and the sea that had also been developed by some of Byron’s most celebrated (and/or notorious) publications; notably, the hugely popular Corsair, the encomium to the ocean that closes Childe Harold, Canto 4, and the scandalous shipwreck episode of Canto 2 of Don Juan. Just what the role of seafarer meant to Byron, and the symbolism he attached to the sea, will emerge over the course of this section. But it is worth stressing at the outset that a key aspect or attraction of this persona for Byron is the contrast he is thereby able to establish between himself and Wordsworth. Although, as we have seen, maritime themes and imagery are threaded consistently through Wordsworth’s work, the older poet was of course associated most strongly with the Lake District, and was regarded as the leading light in the so-called ‘Lake School’ of poetry. To Byron, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge were accordingly the ‘Lakers’, or, more disparagingly, the ‘pond poets’.⁸ Such labels were intended to convey the limited outlook, as Byron saw it, of the older generation of poets. Wordsworth might like to present himself as a great traveller in his poetry, but for Byron he and similar ‘home-keeping minstrels’ (to recall the passage from Byron’s letters cited in my introduction) were in fact geographically circumscribed, and unduly cautious, in their travelling.⁹ They were familiar only with bounded horizons, not the truly vast expanse of the open sea, or so Byron liked to allege, and for Byron such limited horizons were both cause and emblem of an inability to throw off the narrow-mindedness, and the cultural and moral inflexibility, that prevailed in the ‘tight little island’ (a derogatory tag for Britain that Byron derived from a popular song by Thomas Dibdin). The result, Byron felt, was a censorious and repressive agenda. The Lakers might claim to be visionaries, but for Byron they were turncoat poets who had sold out on their earlier liberal principles, to become spokesmen instead both for conservatism and for British imperialism. ⁸ See BLJ v. 13; vi. 10; vii. 83.

⁹ BLJ iv. 152.

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An anti-Wordsworthian agenda, then, often underpins an imagery of lakes versus seas that runs throughout Byron’s oeuvre. Sometimes this agenda is explicit, as when Byron disputes in Don Juan the (alleged) claim by Wordsworth and his fellow Lakers that they are the only true poets of the age, riposting: ‘there is a narrowness in such a notion | Which makes me wish you’d change your lakes for ocean’ (‘Dedication’, ll. 39–40). On other occasions, such as the epigraph to this section, this dimension to the imagery remains implicit. Either way, the understanding that Wordsworth is merely a voyager across lakes is often in the background whenever Byron presents himself as a poet of the sea. Also inherent in the Byronic self-dramatization at such moments, more often than not, is some allusion to the dangers and discomforts involved in genuine seafaring, dangers and discomforts that implicitly Byron has faced, or is prepared to face, but that less courageous poets such as Wordsworth have insulated themselves from. Thus Byron’s imagery of seafaring is frequently also an imagery of storms, of shipwreck or near-shipwreck, and of suffering mariners. In the rousing opening of Childe Harold, Canto 3, for example, the poet seems to take to the sea only to project for himself almost immediately some sort of maritime disaster. If initially he regards the sea as ‘as a steed | That knows his rider’ (ll. 11–12), this equestrian imagery and the control it implies are soon abandoned: Though the strain’d mast should quiver as a reed, And the rent canvass fluttering strew the gale, Still must I on; for I am as a weed Flung from the rock, on Ocean’s foam, to sail Where’er the surge may sweep, the tempest’s breath prevail. (ll. 14–18)

This is just one of many occasions in which Byron takes shipwreck and maritime disaster either as his theme or as the source of his imagery. There are several lyrics written shortly after the break-up of his marriage, for example, in which Byron depicts himself as someone who has just come through a shipwreck: in the ‘Epistle to Augusta’, for example, the comparison is made between the poet and his grandfather, John Byron, with Byron claiming to have received from his ancestor an ‘inheritance of storms’ (l. 17). Here shipwreck is used as a metaphor for personal trauma; elsewhere in Byron’s

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poetry—as will emerge later in this chapter—the topos can take on the political suggestiveness it so often has in this period, and serve as a metaphor for the collective trauma endured by Britain, and Europe, during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War. One also finds Byron playing poetically with the theme of shipwreck in ways which suggest almost an element of fantasy about the scenario, and the desire to put himself in the way of a misadventure of this sort. There exists, for example, a haunting fragment entitled ‘Julian’, that was never finished by Byron. The larger story that Byron had in mind here is unknown; all we have are some sixty lines that tell briefly of a shipwreck, and then of a man washed up on a desolate shoreline, the sole survivor. In the manuscript version of the passage, however, the narrator’s voice seems to merge confusingly with that of the protagonist, as if Byron could not resist imagining himself into this situation.¹⁰ Of course, these are only fictive treatments of the themes of shipwreck and maritime misadventure, or metaphoric allusions to these ‘romantic situations’. Yet as with The Island, they worked (as Byron surely knew that they would) to create a stronger association between the poet and this subject-matter, and to mark maritime misadventure as a quintessentially Byronic topic. And to some extent, one presumes, Byron’s handling of these topics and this imagery gained in authority and authenticity, in so far as there was a strong contemporary perception that he was someone with a first-hand experience of the maritime world and its dangers and discomforts. Wordsworth was just as fascinated with shipwreck, and as we have seen an imagery drawn from the literature of maritime misadventure is consistently threaded through his poetry. But Wordsworth’s invocations of these topoi remain resolutely fictive or metaphorical: we are not tempted—or indeed, invited—to link them to the poet’s own experience as we are with Byron. The Byronic investment in the topoi of shipwreck and maritime misadventure also differs from Wordsworth’s in so far as he seems to offer a subtly different inflection of these themes, and of the source literature they rely on. As we have seen, Wordsworth often seems to turn to accounts of shipwreck to find illustrations of how the mind can survive even the greatest of disasters ¹⁰ See BCPW iii. 461.

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in this world. As a consequence, he typically chooses to rework or allude to those moments in shipwreck narratives that seemingly show individuals resisting vicissitudes, and strength of will triumphing over material circumstances. Byron’s emphasis, however, is very different. He more often looks to the moments of great horror, or of frenzied action, that one finds in the literature of shipwreck—scenes that Wordsworth generally draws a veil over and leaves implicit in his shipwreck imagery. Canto 2 of Don Juan, for example, is virtually a catalogue of the most horrifying situations that can occur in the aftermath of a wreck. Equally, when Harold is reintroduced in Canto 3 of Childe Harold, we find that he too, like the narrator, is figuratively in the position of shipwreck victim. However, this is not because he has come through a disaster in the manner of a Wordsworthian misadventurer: rather, it is because he is gripped by a despair akin to that one finds ‘on the plunder’d wreck | When mariners would madly meet their doom | With draughts intemperate on the sinking deck’ (3. 141–3). Byron is drawn to such scenes because to a far greater extent than Wordsworth his fascination with shipweck and maritime misadventure is a fascination with an intensity and extremity of experience. For Byron, it was only in moments of intensity and extremity—be they the highs of exhilaration or the lows of horror and despair—that one was truly alive, escaping the crippling ennui or melancholic introspection that was otherwise the human norm. As he wrote in 1813, ‘the great object of life is Sensation—to feel that we exist—even though in pain—it is this ‘‘craving void’’ which drives us to Gaming—to Battle—to Travel.’¹¹ Thus when Wordsworth implied to Isabella Fenwick that there was an element of wilful sensation-seeking and risk-taking in Shelley’s and Byron’s travelling, he was not entirely wrong—but both Shelley and Byron would have regarded these motives in a far more positive light than Wordsworth does. To cite another Byronic dictum: ‘a man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.’¹² And for Byron, such travels and turmoils had not only an existential but also an educative value. They were a means of expanding the self, and of coming to understand the full complexity and variety of human experience. When he berates Scott and other ¹¹ BLJ iii. 109.

¹² BLJ vii. 120.

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‘home-keeping minstrels’ for complaining about a rough crossing to the Orkneys, for example, Byron goes on to suggest that a truly rough voyage would have been beneficial because it would have introduced them to ‘a few of the sensations’. The implication of the passage is that travel—and especially, we should note, misadventurous travel, travel involving conspicuous dangers and discomforts—extends our emotional and psychological range. And because sea travel is intrinsically dangerous and uncomfortable, it becomes for Byron a mode of travel especially associated with this opening-up of the self. This is a further way in which the sea effects a liberation from the narrow-mindedness of ‘home-keeping minstrels’ and the ‘tight little island’. It is not just that the sea is the means of escaping Britain, and the intermediate zone that one must cross to encounter other, more liberal cultures; it is also that the sea itself, by throwing the voyager in the way of misadventures great and small, necessarily breeds a broad-mindedness in the voyager, and a greater flexibility or relativism of outlook. This sensationalistic or sensation-seeking agenda in travel and misadventure is evinced in various ways by Byron’s most important travel poem, Childe Harold. In particular, it dictates the form taken by the poem—or rather, a degree of formlessness that the poem arguably exhibits. Famously, many passages in Childe Harold were written as Byron was actually travelling, sometimes even as he stood in front of the site he was describing. Subsequently, as Byron shaped these passages into larger cantos, he put little in the way of a narrative or a structural framework around them. There is a refusal to step back from the immediacy of the traveller’s initial thoughts and moods, in keeping with Byron’s sensationalism, and with his credo that ‘poetry is in itself passion, and does not systematize’.¹³ The result is a somewhat hectic reading experience, and a sense of being constantly in media res. It is hard to detect any larger teleology or trajectory to the journey being conducted here. There is seldom a retrospective viewpoint adopted on either a place or an experience; emphasis falls overwhelmingly on the original sensations of the traveller, rather than on any lesson or moral that might subsequently have been extracted from them. As a consequence, each canto, and the poem as a whole, has a directionless quality; it seems to proceed merely by the ¹³ BLJ v. 582.

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accumulation of incident and experience, rather than being plotted towards any obvious climax or conclusion. Once again, there is arguably an anti-Wordsworthian agenda to this prioritizing of initial impressions and sensations over retrospection and a larger narrative framework. More specifically, it can be read as a resistance, or even a rebuke, to what one might term a Wordsworthian ‘conclusiveness’ in matters of travel and misadventure. As discussed earlier, Wordsworth’s journeys when rendered in poetry have generally a teleological aspect: they seem to move towards some climactic, concluding moment of insight and vision—occurring not infrequently on a mountain top—whereby the traveller achieves, and asserts, his great authority as a poet and a prophet. Byron, suspicious of such claims to visionary authority and of the purposes to which this vatic persona is put, plots neither his travel nor his travel poem in such an overtly teleological way. Instead, he drops us in the flux of the traveller’s immediate impressions, thereby emphasizing the provisionality, and the temporality, of all such apparent moments of transcendence and fulfilment. In the process, he problematizes significantly our understanding of the Byronic traveller as some kind of pilgrim. This is of course the travel role or persona seemingly announced or claimed by the poem’s full title, yet as we proceed in the poem it comes to seem a somewhat ironic identification. Byron/Harold is not travelling to any one specific shrine, but instead essays a series of destinations that all seem to offer some promise of insight, transcendence, or personal renovation: amongst them Greece, for the legacy of its classical past; Albania, ‘rugged nurse of savage men’ (2. 339), for the access it allows to a culture uncorrupted by modernity and luxury; the Alps, betokening the sublimity and grandeur of nature; and ultimately Rome, with all its weight of classical and Christian heritage. Yet all these key sites are somehow deficient as an object of pilgrimage. Something is always lacking; the ancient power they once had, or the power they now have to move and console Byron’s contemporaries, does not suffice for the Byronic traveller. The hunger for religious or quasi-religious experience—and it seems to me there is a real hunger in this regard, although this is sometimes overlooked by modern critics—is repeatedly thwarted. One might accordingly say that the aspiration behind Byron’s pilgrimage is to find an appropriate site to which to make a pilgrimage,

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and what emerges from his travel experience is a growing understanding that all such sites, and the systems of belief built around them, have only a provisional or partial usefulness. Sometimes this is explicitly the result of an inadequacy in the supposedly sacred site. Thus the very first stanza of the poem, for example, records a visit to Delphi that discovers in this classic locus of poetic inspiration only a ‘long deserted shrine’, animated solely by a ‘feeble fountain’ (1. 6–7). At other times, the sense of inadequacy is indirectly implied, as the traveller proclaims his enthusiasm for a place but then moves briskly on. The profusion and rapid succession of passages in which the traveller arrives at a new site with great enthusiasm works to relativize all such arrivals. We come to know that the rhapsodic mood will not last, but will give way to disappointment and dejection. And we come to realize that the Byronic journey, unlike its Wordsworthian counterpart, will never come to rest on some lofty mountain top; there will always be another place to visit, a further term in a potentially infinite series. As a consequence, Childe Harold is a poem that exhibits the curious problem, as Brian Nellist has put it, of containing ‘too much’, offering its reader any number of moments which seem about to provide a ‘centre … from which to read the whole poem’.¹⁴ The many apparent moments of apocalypse, when the narrative seems about to fall into a shape that authorizes some intimation of immortality, are all rendered provisional by their recurrence, and by the poet’s protean readiness to seek transcendence through a variety of routes. The rousing account of St Peter’s in Rome, for example, might seem an appropriate finale for the poem—were it not for the fact that, arriving at St Peter’s, the reader cannot but help feeling that he or she has been here before. We recall those earlier moments when the canto has seemed poised on the brink of a rousing finale: the clarion call to Freedom, with its banner ‘torn, but flying | … against the wind’ (4. 874–5); the epic shipwreck simile fashioned at Metella’s tomb, by which Byron figuratively begins a ceaseless battle with the elements (stanzas 104–6, to which I shall return); the Forgiveness-Curse of stanzas 133–8. And the poem does not then come to rest on the ‘fountain of sublimity’ (4. 1429) that is St Peter’s. As if St Peter’s ¹⁴ Brian Nellist, ‘Lyrical Presence in Byron from the Tales to Don Juan’, in Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (eds.), Byron and the Limits of Fiction (Liverpool, 1988), 39; 41.

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does not suffice, nor wholly corroborate his thesis, the poet/traveller invites us to move on: ‘Or, turning to the Vatican, go see | Laocoon’s torture dignifying pain …’ (4. 1432–3). Pilgrim and poem move on to other sites, to reach eventually another alternative conclusion in the form of the extended paean to the ocean that constitutes stanzas 179 to 184. Just prior to this ending, we get the declaration that ‘My Pilgrim’s shrine is won’ (4. 1567); it is far from clear, however, just what or where that shrine is. Thus the religious hunger in Childe Harold coexists with a profoundly sceptical spirit that is ultimately suspicious of fixed systems of religious or metaphysical thought. Accordingly, the poem culminates (rather, perhaps, than concludes) with its famous encomium to the ocean, because it is the sea that for Byron both generates and symbolizes this sceptical spirit. A place of constant flux, the sea is an unstable, fluid realm that undermines and dissolves limitations of viewpoint and id´ees fixes. Especially it undermines what Byron at one point terms ‘pretensions to Optimism’—systems of thought, and philosophical and religious positions, that seem unduly consolatory, and that can accordingly license human complacency or presumption.¹⁵ The Byronic sea rebukes such ‘pretensions’ in so far as it has a destructive, indeed well-nigh nihilistic aspect. In this regard it is to be identified with Time, generally seen in Childe Harold as a destroyer rather than a restorer of fortunes. As a sententia prompted by the sight of William Beckford’s old residence in Portugal puts it: ‘how | Vain are the pleasaunces on earth supplied, | Swept into wrecks anon by Time’s ungentle tide!’ (1. 285–7). Yet Byron’s is not a wholly bleak nihilism. The sea may be destructive, but its destruction is simultaneously liberatory and creative, a clearing away of the old so that the new may take shape (to be destroyed in its turn, of course). The closing stanzas of Childe Harold praise the ocean as a place where man’s ‘control’ stops, and where great empires accordingly find themselves powerless and chastised, their navies wrecked by elemental forces. The sea denotes the constant process of life and of history, whereby all is becoming rather than being, and for this reason it possesses a primal, illimitable energy, an energy which the voyager may share by risking himself on its waters. ¹⁵ BLJ v. 582.

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In various ways, then, Byron’s great poem of travel seems a riposte to a Wordsworthian ‘conclusiveness’ in travel. It acknowledges no sense of conclusion to the traveller’s journey, and is suspicious of the conclusions in the sense of inferences that are further drawn when the Wordsworthian traveller supposedly arrives at his climactic destination. In particular, Byron can find no Providential shape or logic underpinning either his own personal journey, or the larger journey of mankind. Like Wordsworth, he invokes at frequent points in Childe Harold a traditional religious and typological imagery—arks, floods, rainbows, and the like. But to a greater extent than in Wordsworth, one senses that such imagery is either merely conventional, or else made more as an appeal that there might be some Providential logic underpinning things, rather than in the conviction that there really is one. ‘Renew thy rainbow, God!’ (4. 828), is the plea issued in Canto 4. But in Byron’s eyes human history actually ‘hath but one page’ (4. 969), and that page tells simply of a perpetual cycle of rising and falling, growth and decay, repression and resistance. Byron is likewise suspicious of the conclusions Wordsworth seems to draw more specifically from misadventure, maritime or otherwise, and the script that he puts around travails and setbacks in travel. As we have seen, peripeties or reversals of fortune are essential to the progress of the Wordsworthian traveller. Equally important, however, is that the traveller work through and overcome such defeats, disappointments, and moments of bathos, and that the peripety resolve itself in some sort of victory, even if it is a victory that can only be recognized years after the event (as in the crossing of the Alps episode). With Byron, the traveller’s movement is repeatedly in the opposite direction. He essays his strength only to have to acknowledge his weakness, beginning confidently but ending up enfeebled. Repeatedly the Byronic traveller seeks to soar, but ends up slumping, ‘droop’d as a wild-born falcon with clipt wings’ (3. 129); suffering and abjection is what he arrives at, not something he works through to yield a moment of vision. In so far as it proceeds according to this pattern of rising and falling, aspiration and bathos, Childe Harold exhibits not only a remorselessly serial logic, a sense that travel is simply a process that goes on and on, but also an equally remorseless circularity, the traveller seemingly trapped forever in the same recurring moods and sensations. This

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repetitiousness is mirrored formally in Spenserian stanzas that seem constantly to return upon themselves, even as the poem seeks to take us briskly from place to place. This cycle of highs and lows on the part of the traveller in Childe Harold is arguably another way in which the poem stands as the antithesis to Wordsworthian notions of decorum not only in travel but also in poetry. There is, from the Wordsworthian perspective, a giddiness not only in the practices of the Byronic traveller, and the situations and misadventures he seeks out, but also in the representation of those practices and situations. Rejecting the more disciplined imaginative habits of Wordsworth, and his efforts always to look back and recuperate the ‘proper’ meaning of an event, prizing instead immediacy over retrospection, Byron eschews the quieter, more contemplative tone characteristic of the mature Wordsworth. The Byronic traveller is deliberately a somewhat histrionic figure, expressing the recurrent fluctuations in his thoughts and feelings in a less measured, more grandiloquent voice. In this regard, he recalls an earlier traveller who also troubled Wordsworthian conceptions of propriety in travel and travel writing: James Bruce. Until 1816 Byron owned the eight-volume 1804 edition of Bruce’s Travels, and an incident from Bruce’s narrative seems to script the experience of at least one Byronic alter ego and fellow-traveller.¹⁶ When Juan survives the wreck of the Trinidada, he washes up on an isolated beach. But he struggles to stay on that beach, until breathless, with his digging nails he clung Fast to the sand, lest the returning wave From whose reluctant roar his life he wrung, Should suck him back to her insatiate grave. (2. 857–60)

Juan’s ‘digging nails’ are a small detail, but a detail, significantly, which is not drawn from John Byron’s narrative, nor from any of the narratives in J. G. Dalyell’s Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea, Byron’s principal source in fashioning the events of the Trinidada wreck. Rather, they recall James Bruce’s survival of a shipwreck off the coast of North Africa, as recounted in the introduction to Travels. An ¹⁶ See BCMP 233.

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account thrilling in its immediacy and attention to physical detail ends with Bruce similarly struggling to resist being sucked back into the sea: ‘at last, finding my hands and knees upon the sands, I fixed my nails into it, and obstinately resisted being carried back at all, crawling a few feet when the sea had retired …’¹⁷ And if Bruce is thus subtly a model for Juan, he also perhaps informs the persona of an earlier Byronic traveller, the characteristic psychological structure of Childe Harold —its cycle of highs and lows, its oscillating and occasionally histrionic tone—being highly reminiscent of Bruce’s Travels. If Bruce is a model in Byron’s mind during Childe Harold, however, it is worth noting that for Byron as for Wordsworth, he is not necessarily a hero, a figure to be straightforwardly revered and emulated. A final point to be made about the psychological pattern evinced in Childe Harold is that it is far from clear whether Byron celebrates or laments this constant cycling between enthusiasm and despondency. Sometimes it is to be construed positively, as a constant, energetic throwing of oneself into new situations and new experiences; sometimes it is construed negatively, as a constant state of alienation and exile, as the traveller finds himself compelled to move on again. In its negative aspect, this restlessness constitutes a condition that Byron will later label ‘mobility’. As defined in a footnote to Don Juan, this is an ‘excessive susceptibility of immediate impressions—at the same time without losing the past’. Although ‘sometimes apparently useful to the possessor’, we are told that it is ‘a most painful and unhappy attribute’.¹⁸ The heightened responsiveness to people and places is seemingly unstoppable. The traveller cannot step out of the constant flow of sensory data so as to impose order on it: he cannot halt—the motif so characteristic of Wordsworth—so as to look back, sift, and compare. Furthermore, the fact that the victim of ‘mobility’ maintains an ‘excessive susceptibility of immediate impressions … without losing the past’ introduces a fatal relativistic taint. Memory acts to alienate rather than to stabilize and console, as every high is compromised by the knowledge that there have been such highs before, and that necessarily they have not lasted. ¹⁷ James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 5 vols. (Edinburgh, 1790), i, p. xliv. ¹⁸ BCPW v. 769.

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The Byronic traveller exhibiting ‘mobility’ is thus cursed with ironic self-consciousness, and as a consequence he is to be considered an exile not only in the sense that he makes perpetual departures from places where he might rest and settle. ‘Self-exiled Harold’ (3. 136), ‘the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind’ (3. 20), has seemingly internalized his alienation. In so far as Byron critiques his protagonist in this way, he opens up a fruitful ambiguity in the poem. It may well be that the various systems of belief and routes to transcendence essayed in the poem are not so much inadequate, as that they are visited by a traveller unable to see or accept their lessons—a traveller trapped in a mindset that always leads him inexorably to a jaded cynicism, this being the state of mind in which Harold is supposed to have begun his travels. Such a figure is perhaps a secularized, and psychologized, version of the reprobates one encounters so often in the literature of maritime misadventure—a variant of Dampier’s benighted privateers or the protagonists in Shelvocke’s and John Byron’s bleak narratives. In more mythic terms, Harold thus recalls the Wandering Jew, or the Ancient Mariner in the darker readings of that poem, whereby the Mariner seems either the victim of a malevolent God or else trapped in his own distorted view of the world—and hence, perhaps, the identification with the Mariner at the beginning of Childe Harold, Canto 1, as discussed earlier in this study. Adopting this perspective on the poem, it becomes far from clear whether we are to understand this traveller as Byron himself, or as a fictive construct he means to critique and rebuke. In this regard, as in several others, Childe Harold is a distinctly protean, Janus-faced poem, presenting a traveller who both is and is not Byron himself, a journey that proceeds according to a logic that is both serial and cyclical, and a response to this situation that is simultaneously exultant and despondent. But what stands out as a somewhat paradoxical constant in the poem—although it is not clear whether it is a curse or a benefit, a loss or a liberation—is a need to keep moving, and to keep seeking out new and intense sensations. It is in this spirit that Byron remains consistently fascinated with shipwreck. ‘A wreck must stir the blood’, he told Trelawny, and to be thus stirred was better than to stagnate.¹⁹ Whatever might come in the aftermath of a wreck, at least it always ¹⁹ Edward John Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, ed. David Wright (1878; Harmondsworth, 1973), 96.

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denoted a release of sorts, a breaking-up of the physical structure of the ship, of the more constraining social structure embodied by that ship, and, symbolically, of existential constraints. The world and the self are in this way made available for reinvention, although any new order created would itself inevitably become stultified, falsifying, and stagnating. And so life and travel should proceed by an endless series of such wrecks. Thus Julian, in the unpublished verse fragment of that name, awakes on a beach as the sole survivor of a wreck, but it is not long before he takes again to the sea in the company of a mysterious stranger. The voyage, it seems, is always ongoing. Or as Childe Harold has it, there are ‘wanderers o’er Eternity | Whose bark drives on and on, and anchor’d ne’er shall be’ (3. 669–70). The Byronic traveller aspires to be seen as one such wanderer, and to command respect and sympathy for an inherent restlessness that is in part a refusal to accept any one conclusive destination to his journey, or any one set of conclusions about life.

‘A N I N F I D E L S N E E R’ ? : T H E DON JUAN S H I P W R E C K He said that Providence protected him— For my part, I say nothing, lest we clash In our opinions … Byron, Beppo²⁰

Byron’s most sustained treatment of the themes of shipwreck and maritime misadventure, and his most controversial handling of these topics, comes in Canto 2 of Don Juan. When the first instalment of Don Juan was published in 1819 it scandalized contemporary sensibilities—or at least, the sensibilities of many reviewers—for a variety of reasons, but one of the chief sources of critical outrage was undoubtedly Byron’s account of the disastrous voyage endured by his protagonist, the eponymous Juan. In this section, I shall argue that this outrage was from one perspective entirely justified: the rendering ²⁰ BCPW iv. 764–6; the emphasis is Byron’s.

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of shipwreck in Don Juan, I shall suggest, was always intended to disturb many readers and reviewers. From another perspective, however, the allegations of cynicism and callousness hurled at Byron over this episode are deeply misguided. When one situates the Don Juan shipwreck within the prevailing attitudes and assumptions about shipwreck in this period, as outlined earlier in this study, one can discern not only why it seemed so scandalous, but also the Byronic agenda behind the creation of this scandal. In Byron’s eyes at least, there is an aesthetic, philosophical, and moral validity to his version of a shipwreck narrative—and there is even, more subtly, a political point to the manner in which he renders this harrowing scenario. It is at the beginning of Canto 2 that Juan is launched on what Byron terms ‘our nautical existence’ (2. 96), being sent by his mother on a voyage from Spain to Italy to get him away from the scandal of his affair with Donna Julia. It is a voyage, however, that soon goes awry. In the Gulf of Lyons, there is a storm, and the ship, the Trinidada, is badly damaged. Some of the crew start trying to save the vessel; others, despairing of their situation, decide to get drunk and meet their end in an anaesthetized stupor. This classic scenario or topos of the shipwreck narrative is prevented, however, when Juan—reprising the role of the steadfast midshipman on John Wordsworth’s ship, the Earl of Abergavenny —stands guard over the liquor store with a pair of pistols. For several days thereafter, the ship limps on. There is occasionally a ‘flash of hope’ (2. 297) for the Trinidada, but each in turn comes to nothing, and eventually the ship begins to sink. Some take to the two boats with which the Trinidada is equipped, a longboat and a cutter, but that still leaves some two hundred individuals on the ship: all die when the Trinidada goes down. Juan, however, is safely in the longboat, along with Pedrillo, his tutor, and a spaniel that had belonged to his father. He is fortunate in his choice of boat: the cutter is soon overwhelmed by the high waves, with the loss of the nine sailors on board. For the thirty sailors left in the longboat, the situation deteriorates rapidly, and it is not long before they find themselves confronting all the archetypal horrors of the aftermath of shipwreck. In their hunger, they are driven to eat firstly the spaniel, and then Pedrillo, after drawing lots in the traditional manner. Juan refuses to take part in this act of cannibalism, and it soon appears that he was wise to do so: some of

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the sailors who have partaken of Pedrillo (although not all of them, only ‘they who were most ravenous in the act’ (2. 627)) go mad and die. For the rest, human flesh provides only a brief respite from their hunger. A shower of rain gives an equally brief respite from thirst, but generally the sufferings of the survivors continue, with events again seeming to follow a pattern according to which hopes are repeatedly raised, only to be dashed. Two fathers watch their sons die: one is fatalistic about it, the other is heartbroken and dies. Still the longboat drifts on, until at last land is sighted. By now there are only four survivors remaining—Juan being among them, obviously—and these last survivors try to run the boat through rocks to get to the shore. The boat overturns; Juan’s three remaining companions either drown or are carried off by sharks; Juan himself only makes it to shore with great difficulty, grabbing hold of an oar that he can use for buoyancy just before his strength gives way. Once on the shore, as we have seen, he has to cling with his fingernails just to stay on the beach; when finally he is out of the sea’s grasp, he collapses unconscious. Juan will eventually be awoken by the beautiful Haidee: for the one survivor from the Trinidada, it seems that shipwreck has performed its traditional romance function of dramatically changing the protagonist’s fortunes and inaugurating new adventures. The rest of the ship’s passengers and crew, however, have the misfortune of being caught up in a wreck that in some regards is rendered not in a romantic, but in a decidedly anti-romantic, realist spirit. For the various ordeals inflicted on Juan and his companions, Byron drew on his extensive, lifelong reading of narratives of actual shipwreck. From the Wreck of the Juno, read as a schoolboy, he took the scene in which two fathers watch their sons die; from his grandfather’s narrative, the eating of a favourite dog; from the reports of the wreck of the Medusa, still circulating in the British press as Byron composed this episode, the appearance of a white bird that is taken (wrongly) to signal imminent rescue and relief.²¹ Almost every other incident occurring in the wreck and its aftermath similarly has a precedent somewhere in the factual literature of shipwreck, with Byron’s principal source ²¹ See William Mackay, Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno (London, 1798), 20. For the Medusa details, see Frederick W. Shilstone, ‘A Grandfather, A Raft, A Tradition: The Shipwreck Scene in Byron’s Don Juan’, Tennessee Studies in Literature, 25 (1980).

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for this material being J. G. Dalyell’s three-volume Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea (1812). As a result, Byron was able to insist to his publisher John Murray ‘that [there] was not a single circumstance of [Juan’s shipwreck]—not taken from fact —not indeed from any single shipwreck—but all from actual facts of different wrecks’.²² Clearly it mattered to Byron that the sufferings of his shipwreck victims had a basis in reality. At issue, one senses, was ‘realism’ in a deeper sense than mere verisimilitude and authenticity in the writing style. Byron certainly does embrace a stylistic realism, producing an account replete with specificities and precise technical detail; we are told the exact time at which disaster first befell the Trinidada, and that it was the stern, stern-frame, and rudder that were initially damaged, and even (in a moment that in context is comic, conveying a sense of excessive or unnecessary detail) that it was pumps built by ‘Mr Mann, of London’ (2. 232) that were used to try to save the ship. At these and other moments, Byron’s style in Don Juan probably owes much to Falconer’s Shipwreck, a poem greatly admired by Byron and so full of technical information that it was considered a virtual training manual for the would-be sailor. At the same time, however, Byron’s shipwreck must be differentiated from Falconer’s in so far as it is also put together according to what one might term a realism of attitude, as well as of style—that is to say, a desire to show unflinchingly, and without false idealization, what can really happen in the aftermath of a wreck, and how human beings can really act when placed in such scenarios. Falconer, notwithstanding the realism of his style, eschews this sort of realism, drawing a discreet veil over the horrors that could follow a wreck, and in this regard he is representative of most of the literary authors discussed so far in this study. Whilst I would argue that the force of the many literary invocations of shipwreck in this period derives substantially from the reading public’s knowledge of a large body of factual narratives of wrecks, and of the extreme suffering related in those narratives, it is also the case that these literary invocations of the shipwreck topos for the most part only allude discreetly to these horrors. There are few literary works of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that foreground and dwell upon the horrors of shipwreck as conspicuously as Byron does in Don ²² BLJ viii. 186.

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Juan—even The Ancient Mariner does not touch on the cannibalism that sometimes occurred in the course of disastrous voyages (although there is perhaps an echo of it in the lines in which the Mariner has to moisten his mouth with his own blood in order to call out). From his statement to John Murray, we can see that one of Byron’s defences or rationales for rendering the human suffering involved in a wreck so explicitly in poetry is realism: this is what really happened in these situations. Yet Byron is also being a little disingenuous here. Don Juan is of course a highly comedic poem, and in so far as the shipwreck episode partakes of the poem’s comic exuberance, it seems to be not simply countering false or unduly delicate accounts of shipwreck, but also, more precisely, burlesquing conventional literary and romantic treatments of this theme. As with many burlesques, bad taste is part of the point here. Byron seems to revel in his contravention of contemporary notions of what is decorous in literature, and of what, indeed, is properly literary. With an unabashed zest, he inserts into a high-cultural product—an expensive, quarto edition published by the eminently respectable John Murray, Bookseller to the Admiralty and the Board of Longitude—material redolent of the far more vulgar sphere of cheap pamphlets and sensationalistic magazines such as the Terrific Register. In so doing, he not only violates the decorum of high or polite literature, he also implicitly asks awkward questions of those readers of his poetry who were also readers of shipwreck narratives. As we have seen, many editors of shipwreck narratives insisted to a greater or lesser degree on the moral and practical value of these texts, and on the lessons they supposedly taught. Not infrequently, however, one also senses that profit is in fact the real motive for publication, and prurience the lucrative readerly motivation being pandered to. The Don Juan shipwreck at one level targets such ‘cant’, as Byron would have labelled it, in connection with shipwreck narratives. Its bad taste asks awkward questions of readers who might claim to read shipwreck narrative solely for respectable, instructional reasons, as it trades all too obviously on the elements of entertainment that these narratives can undoubtedly provide (not only through their voyeurism but also, as Byron’s rendering seems designed to recall, through their frequent if inadvertent black humour). Further contributing to the discomfiture of the Romantic-era reader is the fact that Byron’s rendering of the shipwreck of the

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Trinidada, if read properly, cannot simply be dismissed as an exercise in bad taste. Although an element of deliberate bad taste is, I would argue, an important part of its overall comic effect, the episode also includes passages of great poignancy and delicacy. Many reviewers, even as they denounced Byron for supposedly laughing callously at human suffering, held up for praise stanzas such as the following, which describe the moment when the Trinidada finally sinks: Then rose from sea to sky the wild farewell, Then shrieked the timid and stood still the brave, Then some leaped overboard with dreadful yell, As eager to anticipate their grave. And the sea yawned around her like a hell, And down she sucked with her the whirling wave, Like one who grapples with his enemy And strives to strangle him before he die. And first one universal shriek there rushed, Louder than the loud ocean, like a crush Of echoing thunder, and then all was hushed, Save the wild wind and remorseless dash Of billows; but at intervals there gushed, Accompanied with a convulsive splash, A solitary shriek, the bubbling cry Of some strong swimmer in his agony. (2. 409–24)

As this will suggest, the poem’s register and tone oscillate constantly, being sometimes serious and sombre, sometimes comic, even ribald. There are occasions when the voice is philosophical, occasions when it is sentimental, and other occasions again when it is gleefully unsentimental and not a little sensational. The reader of the shipwreck in Don Juan is not allowed to settle into any single point of view as regards the disaster, or any one reading of it. Here and elsewhere in Byron’s poetry, events at sea serve to remind us of the Byronic premiss that complexity and contradiction are the very essence of human life and of reality. Highly contrary points of view are always possible on every event and every experience, and require a corresponding largeness of vision and plurality of styles in the artist. As Byron puts it later in Don Juan: ‘but if a writer should be quite consistent, | How could he possibly show things existent?’ (15. 695–6).

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Many of Byron’s original readers, of course, were not disposed to think of shipwreck in such a flexible, relativistic way. As this study has shown, there is in the early decades of the nineteenth century something approaching a cultural obsession with shipwreck, and correspondingly a pronounced ideological investment in the representation of shipwreck. With its lack of tonal consistency, and more generally its breach of generic decorum (as Byron makes poetry out of the most unsavoury details contained in the more lowly genre of shipwreck narrative), the shipwreck in Don Juan seems calculated to scramble many of the conventional pieties attendant on accounts of maritime disaster. For example, the contemporary tendency to polarize many of the participants in these events, and sailors more generally, into heroes and villains, stalwart Jack Tars and scheming, cowardly malcontents, is significantly problematized by Byron’s rendering of the wreck of the Trinidada. Byron’s realism, for example, is frequently deployed as part of a mock-heroic agenda that looks back to Augustan writers such as Fielding and Swift. In this spirit, over-idealistic assumptions as to how human beings can and should behave are repeatedly undercut by the material exigencies of human existence, and the physical appetites of the body. Thus Juan, at the beginning of the Trinidada’s voyage, rereads his last letter from Julia, strikes a romantic pose, and attempts to make vows of everlasting love—only to have to break them off because the lurching of the ship has induced seasickness and he is about to vomit. (A little later, moreover, Julia’s love-letter will be ripped up to provide the lots by which the survivors of the Trinidada select someone to eat.) And if this mock-heroic tendency serves in part just to poke fun at more conventional or stereotypical notions of the romantic hero, it also has a more serious side. The recognition given to the demands of the body to some extent exonerates those participants in the wreck who are driven to the most extreme acts. The resort to cannibalism is made to seem the last resort of desperate men. ‘None in particular had sought or planned it; | ’Twas nature gnawed them to this resolution’ (2. 597–8). There is no evil ringleader here, nor does the crew seem a reprobate mob always predisposed to bestial savagery—two characterizations that are not uncommon among other shipwreck narratives of the period. To stoop to cannibalism is inadvisable, certainly, as those ‘who were most ravenous in the act’ first go mad

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and then die horribly. But crucially, Byron passes no comment as to whether this outcome is some sort of Providential punishment, or a physical or psychological reaction to the consumption of human flesh. Thus Byron avoids the more simplistic sort of characterization, and indeed demonization, found in some shipwreck narratives of this era. Instead, Byron’s animus seems to be directed principally towards the ways in which such sufferings can be glossed and made sense of by commentators, and the interpretative structures and narrative frameworks that are often constructed around human suffering. In particular, he seems to target heavy-handed Providentialism of the sort that was historically strongly associated with the shipwreck narrative, and that was coming back into fashion in the 1810s. Thus numerous moments that seem to offer some promise of divine deliverance from this ordeal are couched in an idiom calculated to bring to mind the typological tendencies in many shipwreck narratives. Those survivors who make it to the open boat, for instance, find that a calm falls on the third day, as if echoing Christ’s resurrection: here, however, the hope of salvation is delusory, the brief lull merely having the disastrous result that the survivors wolf down the remaining rations. ‘The seventh day and no wind’ (2. 569), begins stanza 72, but this seventh day carries no echoes of Genesis and no suggestion of the Sabbath: rather, this is the day on which ‘the longings of the cannibal arise’ (2. 575). After the episode in which the two fathers lose their two sons, a rainbow appears. The men seize on this as a good omen, but again, this is no sign betokening deliverance and God’s covenant with man after the Flood. It is merely a natural phenomenon, inherently mutable and inconstant—a ‘heavenly cameleon’ (2. 729) and a ‘celestial kaleidoscope’ (2. 744), with the adjectives here surely being ironic. Shortly afterwards, a ‘beautiful white bird’ (2. 745) that passes the open boat is similarly seized upon as a Providential portent. Once again, however, Byron explicitly undercuts any religious reading of this incident: But in this case I also must remark, ’Twas well this bird of promise did not perch, Because the tackle of our shattered bark Was not so safe for roosting as a church, And had it been the dove from Noah’s ark, Returning there from her successful search,

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This is just one of several images and allusions in the canto that point us to the archetypal biblical story of deliverance from the sea. At the outset of the voyage, for example, Juan’s mother sees the Trinidada as a version of ‘Noah’s ark’ (2. 62) that will ‘wean [Juan] from the wickedness of earth | And send him like a dove of promise forth’ (2. 63–4). Invariably, however, these allusions to Noah and the ark are comically irreverent. For this narrator of a shipwreck narrative, it seems, the reader must be repeatedly alerted to the irrelevance of religion in making sense of this disaster. Whether Byron intends in this canto to disavow Providence entirely, or merely to ridicule excessively heavy-handed Providentialist renderings of shipwreck, is unclear. On the one hand, one might see evidence of a sceptical and irreligious agenda in the fact that the episode as a whole takes a ship called ‘the most holy Trinidada’ (2. 185) and wrecks it.²³ The Holy Trinity seemingly offers little protection to those who venture into the fluctuating, unstable realm of the Byronic sea. There is a sardonic irony, perhaps, in Byron’s announcement, at just about the moment that the Trinidada begins to sink in earnest, that ‘There was no light in heaven but a few stars’ (2. 405). Against this, it might be pointed out that the one participant in the shipwreck who consistently refuses to eat any part of Pedrillo—Juan—is the only person ultimately to survive the wreck, and that his survival is dependent on an oar which ‘providentially for him’ (2. 850) was washed into his grasp just as his strength was about to fail. But Byron’s withholding of any direct reference to Providence up until this point, in combination with the pronounced irreverence towards religious themes and figures expressed elsewhere in the episode, might lead one to detect an irony in Byron’s use of ‘providentially’ here. The subtle qualification implicit in Byron’s phrasing—‘providentially for him’—is also noteworthy. Throughout the account of the wreck of the Trinidada, Byron is strangely scrupulous in specifying just how many ²³ For a fuller discussion of Byron’s sceptical tendencies in this episode, see Andrew M. Cooper, ‘Shipwreck and Skepticism: Don Juan Canto II’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 31–2 (1982–3).

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people are involved at each stage of the disaster: ‘near two hundred souls’ (2. 433) when the Trinidada goes down; ‘nine souls more’ (2. 481) in the cutter; and in the longboat, since we are told twice that it contains thirty men (2. 431 and 497), a further twenty-nine. Where was Providence for all these other individuals, one wonders? It is accordingly with some justice that one reviewer claimed to detect an ‘infidel sneer’ in Don Juan, Canto 2.²⁴ The Byronic account of shipwreck seems designed to squash ruthlessly any readerly expectation that a Providential logic will be apparent in the disaster. A succession of seemingly Providential omens are all exposed as false and delusory, as Byron adopts a rationalistic and naturalistic perspective on the fate of the survivors of the Trinidada, and articulates through his comedy a profound scepticism as regards religion and supernaturalistic explanations of events and phenomena. This is a scepticism that has political as well as philosophical and moral implications, as it implicitly contests the authoritarian ends to which others in the period frequently deployed Providentialism in the shipwreck narrative. As we have seen, obedience and faith in God were often inextricably linked in these narratives to obedience and faith in one’s officers and social superiors, as Providential rewards and deliverances seem to come to the loyal, and Providential punishments to the mutinous. Targeting the fallaciousness of religious readings of shipwreck, Byron also implicitly undermines the use that is made in shipwreck narrative of religion as an ideological tool and a means of social control. In this regard—and several others—Don Juan clearly needs to be aligned with the re-emergence of freethinking, sceptical strands of British liberal and radical thought in the period immediately following the cessation of the Napoleonic War. As James Epstein has noted, there was an upsurge of sceptical rationalism, and of deistical, even atheistical attitudes, among reformists and radicals in the later 1810s.²⁵ Such attitudes had fallen out of favour among radicals during the 1790s and 1800s, but by 1817 it was being reported to the House of Lords that radical clubs in London frequently terminated ²⁴ The New Monthly Magazine, in Donald Reiman (ed.), The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers: Byron, 5 vols. (New York, 1972), v. 1907. ²⁵ See James A. Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford, 1994), 100.

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their meetings with ‘profane and seditious songs and parodies of parts of the liturgy’.²⁶ In late 1818, meanwhile, the radical publisher Richard Carlile reissued Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, which had been suppressed since 1797. It was once held that Byron became increasingly out of touch with the currents of political dissent after his ‘exile’ of 1816, but more recently several critics have contested this view; it has been suggested that Byron’s friendship with Hobhouse, Douglas Kinnaird, Sir Francis Burdett, and others who took up the radical cause in the years after 1815, and subsequently his dealings with the Hunts in the early 1820s, kept the ‘exiled’ poet well informed of developments back home.²⁷ This revised picture of Byron’s political awareness, and of his topicality, is further strengthened, I would suggest, when the Don Juan shipwreck episode is placed in the larger context sketched by this study as a whole.

T H E P O L I T I C S O F B Y RO N I C M I S A DV E N T U R E If the Byronic representation of shipwreck and maritime misadventure in Don Juan was thus politically charged, so too, in subtle ways, was Byron’s representation and performance of himself as a suffering traveller. Cutting a figure in both words and action as some sort of misadventurer, Byron frequently intended this persona as a direct or indirect intervention in some larger political debate, or at least as a persona that lends force and authority to Byron’s interventions in these debates. Consider in this regard, for example, the construction in Childe Harold of a Byronic traveller (either Harold or Byron himself) who suffers constant reverses in his quest to discover transcendental or Providential possibilities in the world. The religious scepticism evinced here necessarily undermines, or brings into question, the claims of those who saw Britain as a specially blessed and divinely sanctioned nation, and who thereby made religion a central plank in their patriotic rhetoric and nationalistic ideology. As this will suggest, Byron often develops his misadventurer persona, and puts it to use in ²⁶ Quoted in Epstein, Radical Expression, 106. ²⁷ See Jane Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History (Cambridge, 2002), 139–47; Caroline Franklin, Byron: A Literary Life (Basingstoke, 2000), 122–41.

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political debate, in a far more transgressive fashion than Wordsworth (or at least, than the mature Wordsworth). If Wordsworth sometimes seems to make strenuous walking and related misadventures in the Lake District a rehearsal for the tests of empire, and an emblem of the fitness of Britons to spread British influence and values around the world, Byron’s stance as traveller and misadventurer often seems calculated to disturb such national self-belief, and to rebuke the triumphalism and sense of moral superiority felt by many Britons in the aftermath of victory in the Napoleonic War. The oppositional or transgressive force of Byron’s travel and travelrelated writings are as much a matter of their form as their content. As Jane Stabler has observed—and as my discussion of the Don Juan shipwreck has also suggested—contemporaries often found Byron most unsettling or problematic for the way he seemed to disturb, or even flout, contemporary generic norms.²⁸ A case in point is Childe Harold, Cantos 1 and 2. Byron’s first successful publication was a travel poem that was packaged and marketed, as Jerome McGann has noted, very much as a travel book.²⁹ Published by John Murray, who produced many of the most notable exploration narratives of the day, such as William Parry’s Voyage for the Discovery of a North West Passage (1821), the first two cantos of Childe Harold came complete with footnotes and lengthy endnotes that supplemented the poetic narrative with more prosaic and often more explicitly political commentary on the regions Byron had visited. This was not an unfamiliar format in the period, but Byron’s notes often worked in ways that played against the conventions of this branch of contemporary travel writing. As both Nigel Leask and Jane Stabler have explored, it was more usually the case that the notes both in such travel poems, and in much prose travel writing generally, worked to confirm British cultural superiority, and were a means of ironing out potentially heterodox moments in a poem or narrative where this sense of superiority might be ruffled or problematized.³⁰ Byron’s notes, however, can work in more unsettling ways. Discussing the ²⁸ See Jane Stabler, ‘Byron’s Digressive Journey’, in Amanda Gilroy (ed.), Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel 1775–1844 (Manchester, 2000), 223–39. ²⁹ Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford, 1988), 258–9. ³⁰ Stabler, ‘Byron’s Digressive Journey’, 226–8; Nigel Leask, ‘ ‘‘Wandering Through Eblis’’; Absorption and Containment in Romantic Exoticism’, in Tim Fulford and

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situation of the Greeks under Ottoman rule, for example, Byron does not straightforwardly make the claim that Britain should be the power to lead the Greeks to independence, as was more customary in British travellers’ commentaries on Greece. He moots a British protectorate in one footnote, certainly, but elsewhere he turns his gaze back on Britain, and strikes a somewhat unsettling comparison (for complacent British readers at least), between the state of the Greeks and the state of the Catholic Irish. We are told that ‘The English have at last compassionated their Negroes, and under a less bigoted government may probably one day release their Catholic bretheren.’³¹ Clearly, Britain—or at least, the current regime in Britain—is in no position to be complacent about its right to moral leadership in world affairs. These comments on the state of the Greeks and the Catholic Irish dovetail with other moments either in the main poetic narrative or in the notes when Byron seems to look askance at the supposed achievements of his homeland. In the Iberian leg of his journey, for example, he discusses Cintra in Portugal, where a Convention was signed with the French in 1808 in what was widely regarded as a shameful and ill-advised episode in recent British history, but not Trafalgar, site of the crucial Naval victory of 1805. Trafalgar does get a mention retrospectively in Canto 2, in the context of describing Harold’s disdain for seeing ‘the scenes of vanish’d war’ (2. 355), but it is bundled together with Actium and Lepanto as just one among several famous naval battles. Byron’s footnote is equally dismissive, suggesting merely that ‘Trafalgar need[s] no further mention’ and discussing instead the fate of Cervantes at Lepanto. A similar tone is adopted in Canto 3, when Byron describes his visit to Waterloo just a year after the battle that had clinched the victory over Napoleon and France. By the time of Byron’s visit, the site was already a wellestablished tourist destination; as one contemporary travel guide put it, ‘Waterloo has become a kind of pilgrimage.’³² One such Peter J. Kitson (eds.), Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 1998). ³¹ BCPW ii. 202. ³² Charles Campbell, The Traveller’s Complete Guide Through Belgium and Holland (London, 1817). Quoted in Philip Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (Basingstoke, 2002), 75.

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pilgrim was Byron’s bête noire, Robert Southey, who produced his own poetical account of the journey in The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo (1816); another, of course, was Byron himself. But once again a Byronic ‘pilgrimage’ runs counter to the more conventional pilgrimages made by other travellers. In a footnote, he compares the battlefield favourably with the sites of great ancient battles, in so far it seems an appropriate location for an important historical event, but also makes the barbed comment that Waterloo appears to want little but a better cause, and that undefinable but impressive halo which the lapse of ages throws around a celebrated spot, to vie in interest with any or all of these … ³³

Waterloo, then, could have been fought for a ‘better cause’; once again, Byron refuses to engage in the triumphalism and self-righteousness of some British commentators and travellers. The comparison between the field of battle at Waterloo and the sites of great battles in the ancient world is just one of several moments in Childe Harold, Cantos 3 and 4, in which Byron takes care to remind his readers that he brings to many of the great destinations on the European tourist circuit an eye and a consciousness shaped by travels beyond Europe. Such moments are of course at one level a strategy of anti-touristic distinction on Byron’s part, a way of projecting an image of himself as a traveller above the ordinary run of British tourist. At the same time, however, there is also a slightly different, and more worthy, agenda at work in some of the pronouncements that draws the reader’s attention to Byron’s experience of regions and cultures beyond Western Europe. Scorning the mere tourist even as he stands alongside him—‘in the crowd | They could not deem me one of such; I stood | Among them but not of them’ (3. 1053–5)—the Byronic traveller claims at each site on the European tourist circuit to confound the tourist’s narrow insular gaze. Most British tourists can understand things only in terms of ‘home’, and must relate everything back to Britain, that ‘tight little island’. Byron, however, can recall sites that lie well beyond the conventional Grand Tour. He casts himself as a cosmopolitan figure, more a citizen of the world than of one particular nation. To some extent, indeed, he casts himself as an exile from his own nation, or even as a renegade who has turned ³³ BCPW ii. 303.

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his back on his homeland. These were roles he was arguably to live out for real in the years after 1816, when the disgrace surrounding the separation from his wife obliged Byron to take up permanent residence on the continent. Even before the exile of 1816, however, these were clearly roles that greatly fascinated Byron, and that were central to his self-dramatization both as poet and as traveller. The Harold of Cantos 1 and 2; the Giaour; Conrad in The Corsair —all have in one way or another rejected their home culture or been rejected by it. That their author has similarly stepped out of one culture and into another is the implication of what is perhaps the most famous portrait of Byron, Thomas Philipp’s 1814 rendering of the poet in full Albanian costume. Here, it seems, is a poet and traveller who has crossed cultural boundaries, who has shaken off the influence of his homeland and adopted an alien viewpoint, and who as a consequence is better equipped to talk more authoritatively not only about the foreign cultures he has visited but also about his own culture. For as de Monbron suggests in Le Cosmopolite, ou le Citoyen du Monde (1753), in a passage that Byron used as an epigraph for Childe Harold, Cantos 1 and 2, ‘the universe is a kind of book of which one has read only the first page when one has seen only one’s own country’.³⁴ Such, at least, is the image that Philipp’s 1814 portrait seeks to project, and the self-dramatization Byron wants to effect. To the more sceptical eye, of course, the picture appears differently. Here, arguably, is a fashionable young man simply participating in—or more cynically, trading on—the contemporary craze for all things Oriental. His adoption of Albanian costume, one might suggest, is done more in the spirit of dressing up than of making a real transition from one culture to another, or a real cross-cultural connection. One can make a similar allegation about Byron’s use of what he himself dubbed Oriental ‘costume’—that is, the Eastern Mediterranean setting and cultural detail—in Childe Harold, Cantos 1 and 2, and the Turkish Tales. Byron claimed to have read studiously and exhaustively in the histories and traditions of this region; he had also visited many of the countries he described, giving him a first-hand experience that many of the leading Orientalist authorities ³⁴ BCPW ii. 3.

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of the day lacked; and he claimed also a real affinity and bond with many of the peoples of the Middle East, suggesting later that whilst in Turkey he ‘was oftener tempted to turn Mussulman than poet & … often regretted that [he] did not’.³⁵ But ultimately, does Byron’s translation of these interests and affinities into poetry amount to anything more than canny positioning in the literary market-place? (Witness his advice to Moore to ‘stick to the East: the oracle, Stael, told me it was the only poetical policy’.³⁶) And more importantly, can Byron’s poetry be distinguished in any way from the many other texts of the day, in both poetry and prose, that clearly package the peoples of the ‘Orient’ in ways congenial to British sensibilities, and ultimately complicit with British national interests in the region? Similar contradictions and ambiguities are attendant on Byron’s larger persona as some sort of exile or renegade. For example, Byron may like to present Harold, and by extension himself, as a figure profoundly alienated from his homeland, and so better able to cast an acute eye on its shortcomings, but he had also taken great relish, in the course of his 1809–11 tour, in travelling in British army regimental costume (to which he was not entitled), and had conducted some of his voyaging as a passenger on a British man-of-war. The critiques he subsequently offered of Britain and British attitudes, meanwhile, were for the greater part of his career published by the Tory John Murray, to whose editorial caution Byron sometimes acceded. Yet to seize on such apparent contradictions in Byron’s practice and personae, and to extrapolate from them the argument that Byron’s apparently transgressive stance was simply a pose, and a literary marketing device, is to elide some of the complexities of Byron’s writing and of his public image. The Byron of Childe Harold, for example, was certainly felt by contemporary reviewers to be something of a renegade both to his nation and to his class. Jane Stabler has demonstrated how Cantos 1 and 2 failed to meet contemporary expectations as to how a British (male) aristocrat should comport himself abroad and reflect upon his experiences. Not only was Byron disinclined to promote British interests, in the manner discussed above, he also flouted many of the conventions of gallantry and chivalry associated with the aristocracy (conventions that were further anticipated because of the poem’s ³⁵ BCMP 50.

³⁶ BLJ iii. 101.

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classification, in its subtitle, as a ‘romaunt’). As a consequence, the reviewer in The Anti-Jacobin was moved to exclaim (somewhat excessively) that ‘the laugh at honour … as the deliberate reflection of a noble English mind … staggers credibility, for it resembles the rant of democracy in its wildest form’.³⁷ In the same way, Byron’s rendering of the regions and peoples of the eastern Mediterranean is not without a subversive, or at least oppositional force, when it is located properly in its cultural moment. Byron may not have had the comprehensive knowledge of the Orient that he sometimes claimed, and his portrayal of supposedly ‘Oriental’ peoples is not without its dubious aspects when viewed from the perspective of modern, post-Saidian critiques of Orientalism. But in its own day, it also had its worthy aspects.³⁸ As noted earlier, the early decades of the nineteenth century saw a shift in Britain towards a more intolerant, inflexible attitude regarding foreign cultures and races, as a growth in both Evangelical and utilitarian, reforming attitudes gave new impetus to calls for Christian Europeans (and more specifically, Protestant Britons) to convert, civilize, and improve the heathen races of the world. Poetically, as we have seen, such attitudes found expression in works like Southey’s The Curse of Kehama (1810), and Wordsworth’s Excursion, with its vision of ‘British Lawgivers’ (9. 399) spreading civilization around the world. Byron’s Turkish Tales, however, adopt a very different perspective on the so-called ‘Orient’, and seem designed to challenge the prevailing assumption that Christian morals and practices are necessarily superior to those of Islamic cultures. A curious mirroring is often found in the Tales between a Christian protagonist and a Muslim adversary, as if to establish a moral equivalence rather than a hierarchy between them. The Giaour, for example, tells how an Eastern potentate Hassan kills his concubine Leila after discovering her love affair with the eponymous hero, a Christian. The Giaour then kills Hassan in revenge, but any moral schema which seems to place chivalric Christian over brutal Oriental is then undercut by a closing confession from the Giaour in which he acknowledges that he too would have killed Leila, ³⁷ Quoted in Stabler, ‘Byron’s Digressive Journey’, 224. ³⁸ For a sympathetic reading of Byron’s poems as constituting a mode of ‘realistic’ Orientalism, see Mohammed Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters with the Orient (London, 1994).

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if she had betrayed him in the same way. Less dubious points of equivalence between Christendom and the Islamic world are also frequently pointed out by the footnotes to The Giaour and the other Turkish Tales. Thus the extent to which Islam and Christianity share a cultural heritage is stressed in a footnote to The Bride of Abydos, whilst in notes to The Giaour Byron variously refutes the fallacious belief that in Islam women were regarded as having no souls, and informs the reader ‘that Charity and Hospitality are the first duties enjoined by Mahomet; and to say truth, [they are] very generally practiced by his disciples’.³⁹ In such ways, Byron’s Orientalism in the Turkish Tales is arguably more of a piece with late eighteenth-century forms of Orientalism than with the more Anglicist forms coming into vogue in the early nineteenth century.⁴⁰ It evinces a greater degree of cultural and moral relativism, and is accordingly less chauvinistic and intolerant towards the cultures it surveys. And it is not only with regard to the Orient that Byron is sceptical about British self-righteousness and claims of moral superiority. The contemporary rhetoric of improvement when applied to other regions of the world also provokes satirical comment. In Don Juan, for example, it is remarked that Tombuctoo travels, voyages to the poles Are ways to benefit mankind, as true Perhaps as shooting them at Waterloo. (1. 1054–6)

‘Tombuctoo travels’ refers to the expeditions made to Timbuktu in West Africa, by Mungo Park and subsequent explorers—most recently, the ill-fated Joseph Ritchie, who dined with Wordsworth and Keats at the so-called Immortal Dinner of 1818, but who shortly afterwards died in the course of exploring the region around the Niger river. ‘Voyages to the poles’, meanwhile, is a reference to the recent voyages of John Ross and William Parry in search of a possible North-West Passage. Although Byron was clearly interested in such exploratory ventures with regard to the curious new phenomena they ³⁹ BCPW iii. 417–18. ⁴⁰ For the distinction between more Orientalist and Anglicist modes of colonial administration and interaction, see Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge, 1992), 77.

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revealed and the accounts of heroism they threw up—there are several remarks about Parry’s voyage elsewhere in Don Juan—it is also clear from the passage above that he is hesitant about the ideology of improvement that surrounded them. In what is also dubbed a ‘patent age of new inventions | For killing bodies, and for saving souls’ (1. 1049–50), it seems that there is much humbug and cant talked about high moral purposes and progress, but human suffering is not much lessened. In his resistance to the rhetoric of improvement, and also in his cultural relativism and apparently genuine affection for other cultures, Byron resembles James Bruce, whose story, as we have seen, he knew, and from which he seems to have borrowed at one point in Don Juan. Byron shares with Bruce, moreover, a libertine aspect, a willingness to explore both in writing and in practice, heterodox sexual practices. If Bruce is fairly unabashed about his amours with Abyssinian women, Byron similarly invests his version of the Orient with an air of sexual freedom and transgressiveness. The Turkish Tales paint the Middle East as a region where passions run deep, and are not stifled as they are in the ‘tight little island’: thus The Bride of Abydos touches on the theme of incest, Lara on that of homosexuality. In real life, too, greater sexual freedom seems to have been part of the attraction of the Middle East for Byron, and especially the tolerance with which the cultures of the region viewed same-sex relationships.⁴¹ This erotic investment in, and construction of, the Orient is something that quite rightly troubles post-Saidian scholarship, but, again, its subversive or oppositional aspect becomes more apparent when these poems are located in their original context, which is the growing primness and moralism in British culture, brought about by the Evangelical Revival. How much of a direct line of influence there is running from Bruce to Byron is debatable, but Byron stands in the same tradition as the Abyssinian traveller, striving to keep alive in the early nineteenth century a more eighteenth-century attitude of cosmopolitanism, cultural relativism, and sexual permissiveness. To express these values both in writing and in practice was for Byron to contest and resist the reactionary forces sweeping both Britain and Europe in the aftermath of the Napoleonic War. And once again, the sea seems to have been an ⁴¹ For Byron’s bisexuality, see Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in Nineteenth-Century England (Swaffham, 1998).

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important part of the symbolic economy with which Byron articulated this stance of resistance. When he and Shelley built their boats in 1822, he named his yacht the Bolivar, after Simon Bolivar who helped to liberate so much of South America from European imperialism. And when he surveyed post-war Europe in Childe Harold, Canto 4, an imagery of shipwreck seems to have held a key place in his imagination. Standing at Metella’s tomb in Rome, for example, he fashions the following extended simile: Yet could I seat me by this ivied stone Till I had bodied forth the heated mind Forms from the floating wreck which Ruin leaves behind; And from the planks, far shatter’d o’er the rocks, Built me a little bark of hope, once more To battle with the ocean and the shocks Of the loud breakers, and the ceaseless roar Which rushes on the solitary shore Where all lies foundered that was ever dear: But could I gather from the wave-worn store Enough for my rude boat, where should I steer? There woos no home, nor hope, nor life, save what is here. Then let the winds hurl on! their harmony Shall henceforth be my music … (4. 934–47)

Byron has principally in mind here the ruins of the classical world, and also the wreckage of his own life in the aftermath of his scandalous separation from his wife. Yet the topos of shipwreck is also once again subtly politicized, as so often in the Romantic period. It is also all Europe that is wrecked, and faced with a slow lingering decline and death akin to that described in many accounts of maritime misadventure, under the stagnating influence of the Holy Alliance. But Byron once again casts himself as a shipwreck survivor, someone resilient enough to fight the prevailing elements either on shore and on land. In the process, he keeps alive the liberal political values celebrated elsewhere in the poem, and continues to carry forward the banner of Freedom that was earlier depicted as ‘torn, but flying | … against the wind’ (4. 874–5). Priding himself on his realism (in contrast to Shelley’s idealism), Byron seems generally to have thought that one could do little but

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offer resistance to the contemporary reactionary tide, whilst reminding oneself that the principle of creative destruction inherent in the sea ensures that all empires must fall as well as rise. Viewed cynically, this very limited optimism perhaps reflects the political impasse Byron found himself in, as an aristocratic Whig out of his time, who proclaimed liberal values but disdained to associate himself with the lower-class figures and the democratic impulses increasingly driving the reform movement in Britain.⁴² Equally, one might suggest that Byron’s restlessness, and his need to locate himself outside Britain, derives in part from a need to escape this problematic, and contradictory, position in the British political landscape. Contemplating the possibility of revolution in his homeland in the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre, he wrote: There is nothing which I should dread more than trust to my own temper, or to have to act in such scenes as I think must soon ensue in England. It is this made me think of S[ou]th America, or the Cape, or Turkey, or anywhere, so that I can but preserve my independence of means to live withal.⁴³

The adventure overseas, it would seem, can sometimes serve as an escape from the complexities of home, and more specifically from political complexities. Here also, perhaps, is a further, more subtle rationale for Byron’s pronounced seeking out of elements of misadventure in his travelling: the traveller who yearns to make with his travelling some grand political gesture, yet who is also at some level aware that his travelling is an escape from real political engagement, might plausibly look to sensationalism and suffering as a means to blot out the self-knowledge of this evasion, or possibly even to punish himself for it. A political dimension to the figure and theme of maritime misadventure is also apparent in Byron’s last major work, The Island. The poem constitutes Byron’s intervention in the highly contentious debate surrounding the Bounty mutiny, and once again a Byronic text achieves a somewhat subversive effect by subtly playing against many contemporary generic and discursive conventions. Retelling the story of Bligh, Fletcher Christian, and the crew of the Bounty, Byron does not allow his poem to fall too neatly into either the pro-Bligh or pro-Christian reading of events, as outlined earlier in ⁴² See Malcolm Kelsall, Byron’s Politics (Brighton, 1987).

⁴³ BLJ vii. 15.

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this study. Instead, he balances viewpoints, whilst simultaneously switching between tragic and comic modes in the poem. Thus the first canto depicts Bligh as a worthy captain, wrongly treated by his crew—yet at the same time it takes care to paint the mutineers not as scheming malcontents but as hard-worked figures understandably attracted to the easy conditions of life on ‘Toobonai’ (Byron’s fictional South Sea island). A Rousseauistic paradise, where all property is held in common and where distinctions of rank and class barely exist, Toobonai ultimately works a benign and improving influence upon the mutineers. Returning to the island after the mutiny, they do not lapse into anarchy and violence, and they do not give way to their baser appetites, as in many more orthodox renderings of the mutineer figure. Instead, they settle down, take wives, and live peaceably and contentedly. Accordingly, the poem shifts in its second canto into a pastoral, even a comic, mode, as it recounts how the Toobonai Islanders have seemingly done ‘more than Europe’s discipline had done, | And civilised civilization’s son!’ (2. 271–2). Byron’s phrasing here prompts us to ponder which is the real locus of civilization, the class-bound, highly disciplined society that drove these men to mutiny or the supposedly primitive, heathen society in which they take refuge. In this way, Byron complicates not only the stereotypes and ideological norms in contemporary accounts of mutiny, but also some of the assumptions inherent in many contemporary accounts of exploration. As outlined earlier, the 1810s and 1820s were a period in which British exploratory endeavour was increasingly tinged with an Evangelical zeal, and with a sense of Britain’s civilizing mission. The Toobonai Islanders, however, are clearly in no need of such moral and spiritual improvement. They live at peace with themselves, and in harmony with nature, and one result of this is that they do not have the restlessness that characterizes the supposedly civilized world. As Byron puts it at one point, theirs is only an ‘unexploring navy’(1. 46, my emphasis) of canoes: they are not driven to make great voyages in search of new discoveries and new opportunities for trade. Britain, of course, is very much a culture with an exploring Navy, one that has a global reach and that soon returns to Toobonai to enact vengeance on those who threw off its authority. Balancing viewpoints again, Byron acknowledges that there is justice in the

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hunting down of these rebels. At the same time (and mindful perhaps of the treatment some of the captured mutineers received in real life on the Pandora), he imputes an element of brutality to the Navy’s actions. The vessel despatched to Toobonai is described as a ‘sullen ship’ and a ‘floating dungeon’ (4. 403–4), whilst the soldiers who eventually corner Fletcher Christian are described as ‘vultures’ (4. 240). Christian is shot and killed, but before dying acknowledges that it was his ‘madness’ that caused the mutiny and brought his comrades to grief. The poem as a whole, however, seems to suggest that such rebellions are not simply brought about by wicked ringleaders. Their causes are more complex, and if on the one hand we have the mad, reckless Christian so too, on the other hand, do we have an adversary—the vengeful and highly authoritarian British Navy—that does not seem much more worthy of respect. In a further complication of conventional representations of mutineers, one of Bounty’s sailors is allowed to escape British justice. The invented character Torquil is saved by being taken by a local woman, Neuha, to another nearby island in which is hidden a secret cave. This optimistic outcome to The Island is not utterly fantastical or utopian, but has some basis in reality: it is based on a story told in one of the poem’s two principal sources, William Mariner’s Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands (1817)—a text acknowledged, along with Bligh’s Voyage to the South Seas (1792) in a headnote to the poem. Mariner, who lived on Tonga for several years, tells the story of two Tongans who used a similar cave to escape persecution by a local potentate. As Mariner puts it, they found that in their hideaway ‘tyrannic power now no longer reached them’.⁴⁴ Byron elaborates and adjusts this story, however, in significant ways. The ‘tyrannic power’ from which Torquil and Neuha flee is not some local despot but the British state, challenging customary notions of British moral superiority. It is Neuha rather than Torquil who takes the lead in their escape, to some extent confounding contemporary expectations both of gender and of race. Finally, moreover, we leave the poem with the knowledge that ‘a new tradition gave | Their sanctuary the name of ‘‘Neuha’s Cave’’ ’ (4. 413–14). Here is Byron’s version of Wordsworth’s Poems on the Naming of Places, and his version of ⁴⁴ William Mariner, An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, 2nd edn. (London, 1818), 221.

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one of the most commonplace, if not defining, moments in the contemporary narrative of exploration. This act of naming, however, subverts the norms of exploratory discourse in so far as it is a name conferred by the local population, not by the explorer: it celebrates not the achievement of an exploring navy, but rather, a deliverance from it. In such ways, Byron contrived to ‘sprinkle some uncommon place here and there’, as he put it, into his last rendering of a maritime tale, once again developing the association between himself and the figure of the seafarer in ways that had a subtly transgressive aspect.⁴⁵ ⁴⁵ BLJ x. 90.

Conclusion I shall one day regret that I was not half drowned in Kirkudbright [sic] … [B]eing half drowned by falling from a precipice is a very romantic affair … being tumbled over a precipice into the sea—Oh it would make my fortune … John Keats¹

I began this study with Hazlitt’s anecdote about two fellow-travellers in Italy who seemed curiously determined to get themselves into what they dubbed a ‘romantic situation’: that is to say, a kidnapping and captivity scenario of the sort one finds in the romances of Ann Radcliffe. In the epigraph above, John Keats—writing towards the end of his 1818 walking tour—jokingly chides himself for not cutting an appropriately ‘romantic’ figure as a traveller, and more specifically for failing to see how he might have contrived, well-nigh simultaneously, not one but two highly romantic situations in the course of his travels. A rumour is circulating among his friends that a traveller matching Keats’s description has fallen from a cliff in Kirkcudbright, in Dumfries, and then almost drowned in the sea below. But sadly, that traveller is not Keats himself. It is an opportunity lost, Keats comically suggests: a misadventure of this sort, doubly romantic in so far as it partakes of the perils of both the mountain and the marine environments, would have been the making of him. It would have won him many female admirers, for as Keats goes on to fantasize: ‘How glorious to be introduced in a drawing room to a Lady who reads Novels, with—‘‘Mr so & so—Miss so & so—Miss so & so—this is Mr so & so, who fell off a precipice, & was ¹ K Letters, i. 359.

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half drowned[.’’]’ And it might even have been lucrative financially. An episode like this, Keats recognizes, would ‘make [his] fortune’: falling and drowning, it seems, might prove highly marketable in publishing terms. The persona of misadventurous traveller could be harnessed to literary reputation; it might help to sell romantic and sensationalistic novels to ‘Miss so & so’; and it might help sell the work of a young poet who in 1818 was relatively unknown but highly ambitious. Here and elsewhere in his letters, by the end of the 1818 tour at least, Keats seems to ironize the impulses that led some contemporary travellers to seek to cut a figure that is both misadventurous and romantic—or more precisely, romantic because misadventurous. Other leading literary figures of the age, as we have seen over the course of this study, were less reticent in this regard. Wordsworth and Byron especially, I have suggested, had literary reputations predicated to a very great extent on their status not merely as travellers, but more precisely as suffering travellers. I have sought in this study to convey the resonance of this persona, the symbolism and significance that could attach to it in the Romantic period, and above all the attraction of this role to many of the writers whom we now label Romantic. If it was good commercial nous in the literary market-place, as Keats suggests, to cut a figure as a suffering traveller or misadventurer, this was because this figure seemed to command a moral and existential authority that led in turn to a literary and cultural authority. It was a persona that could speak variously of an escape from, or a rejection of, the comforts and security of the modern world; of a closer encounter with nature in all its diverse aspects (including those that were dangerous and discomforting); of a closer encounter, equally, with some foreign culture or unfamiliar subculture. And if it thus suggested in various ways a broader, deeper knowledge of the world, it also suggested a broader and deeper self-knowledge, and a greater awareness of the extent (or the limitations) of one’s self-discipline and one’s physical and mental hardiness. To play the part of misadventurer was to play the part of someone who had been through a hugely revelatory, possibly even life-changing, test of character. It hinted even at a profound spiritual renovation or transformation, and an access to rare forms of visionary or prophetic wisdom—this being partly the legacy, I have suggested,

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of the frequent use, in many accounts of suffering travellers in this period, of tropes, narrative patterns, and frameworks of explication drawn ultimately from Christian conversion narratives and Protestant spiritual autobiographies. The Romantic espousal, or valorization, of elements of misadventure in the travel experience was at one level, of course, a strategy of (anti-)touristic distinction, a response to the burgeoning of contemporary tourism. And as tourism as activity and industry has continued to expand, so have Romantic strategies for playing oneself against the touristic mass retained an enduring currency. Wordsworth and Coleridge on their longer walking tours, and Byron on his ‘Grander Tour’ of 1809–11 arguably have their modern-day equivalents in travellers such as the backpackers neatly satirized by William Sutcliffe in his novel, Are You Experienced?: Everyone seemed to have big ideas about how they had to find themselves, whatever that meant, through some journey to a poverty-stricken flea-pit half-way up a malaria-infested mountain on the other side of the planet. There was a general belief that a long and unpleasant holiday was of crucial importance to one’s development as a human being.²

The gendering of such travel ambitions, and such travel personae, has changed since the Romantic period; women by and large are now just as able as men to cut a misadventurous figure in their travelling. The precise scripts that such travellers feel they are following may also differ in many of their details from those followed by the Romantic traveller—few today are drawn to the imagery of shipwreck, for example, in the way that Romantic writers and travellers were. But the underlying stimuli to these travel scripts remain broadly the same. As they endure, and quite possibly invite, misadventures great and small, many modern travellers are often implicitly styling themselves as pilgrims, who gain greater wisdom and insight through suffering; as explorers, who overcome suffering to make significant discoveries about both the world and themselves; and also perhaps as political martyrs or victims, disregarding danger and discomfort to investigate, or redress, some perceived injustice ² William Sutcliffe, Are You Experienced? (Harmondsworth, 1998), 32.

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in the world (for example, the conditions of life in the impoverished Third World). These are all personae and practices indebted to the Romantic traveller, and to the distinctive distillation that Romantic travellers made of earlier traditions in travel and travel literature.

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Index Abergavenny (ship) see Earl of Abergavenny Addison, Joseph 46–9, 163 Adler, Judith 8 African Association 153, 171, 172, 181 Aikin’s Annual Review 141, 169 Alceste (ship) 114, 118 Amundsen, Roald 146, 150 Antelope (ship) 120 Anti-Jacobin 264 The AntiGallican; or Strictures on the Present Form of Government Established in France 126 anti-tourism 20–2, 39–45, 46, 138, 274–5 in Byron’s travelling and writing 261–2 in Wordsworth’s travelling and writing 189–90 see also traveller/tourist distinction Armitage, David 112 authenticity (in travel) 19–30 Balugani, Luigi 160, 161, 165, 169 Banks, Joseph 51, 69, 150, 153, 157, 172, 180, 182 Barrell, John 47 Barrow, John 153 Bate, Jonathan 228 Beattie, James 197 Beckford, William 243 Berger, Peter L. 111 Betagh, William 121 Bewell, Alan 210 Blackmore, Josiah 113 Blake, William 5 Bligh, William 9, 121, 123–4, 134, 270 Bolivar, Simon 267 Bostetter, Edward 103 Boswell, James 47, 48, 51, 163 Bounty (ship) 121, 123, 126, 128–9, 132–4, 153, 236, 268–71 Bourdieu, Pierre 43

Bowdich, Thomas 3 Bristed, John 137–8, 140, 141–3, 146–7, 159, 183 Bruce, James 51, 147, 149, 150, 155, 158–170 passim, 171, 172, 173, 183 and Byron 245–6, 266 and Wordsworth 209, 213–20 Brydone, Patrick 34 Bulkeley, John 121 Burditt, Sir Francis 258 Burkitt, Thomas 132 Buzard, James 40 Byron, George Gordon, sixth baron 5, 13, 32, 34, 38, 43, 45, 50, 107, 108, 109, 110, 118, 145, 231–71 passim, 273, 274 anti-touristic stance 20–1, 41, 56, 260–1 anti-Wordsworthian agenda 236–7, 244, 259 ‘mobility’ 246–7 tour of 1809–1811 51–2, 233–4 and exploration 185, 265–6, 270–1 and scepticism 243–4, 255–8, 265 and sensationalism 233, 239–41 as explorer 147–8, 183 as misadventurer 7–8, 9, 12, 18, 24–5, 27, 59–63, 105–6, 231–2, 237–8, 247, 268 Works: Beppo 248 The Bride of Abydos 265 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 60, 61, 147, 235–48, 258, 259–63, 267 The Corsair 236, 262 Don Juan 45, 63, 118, 236, 237, 239, 248–58, 265, 266 ‘Epistle to Augusta’ 237 The Giaour 262, 264–5 The Island 235, 238, 268–71 ‘Julian’ 238, 248

294 Byron, George Gordon, sixth(cont.) Lara 266 Turkish Tales 264–6 Byron, John 87–8, 90–5, 102, 103, 105, 116, 235, 237, 247 cannibalism 68–9, 85, 91, 252, 254–5 captivity narratives 15–16, 177–8 Carlile, Richard 258 Carter, George 65 Cervantes 260 Chandler, David 214 Cheap, David (Captain of the Wager) 90, 94 Christian, Edward 121, 128 Christian, Fletcher 121, 128, 134–5, 268, 270 Churchill, Awnsham 200 Churchill, John 200 Clare, John 231 Clarke, Reverend James Stanier 62, 67, 73, 96, 107, 117 Claude see Lorrain, Claude Coe, Charles 208 Coleridge, John Taylor 229–30 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 4, 5, 6, 13, 23, 28, 39, 55, 62, 63, 76, 77, 89, 95, 114, 120, 132, 170, 184, 213, 236, 274 as mountaineer 19–20, 137, 143–4 as pedestrian 38, 139–44 Works: ‘The Delinquent Travellers’ 39 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 6, 59–62, 77, 82, 89, 95, 100–5, 143–4, 208, 252 Cohen, Erik 25 Collings, David 127, 144, 206, 207 Columbus, Christopher 200–5, 208, 209–10, 211 Columbus, Ferdinand 200 Cook, James 13, 52, 69, 81, 149, 150, 155–6, 161 Cook, Thomas 39 Cowan, Andrew 137–8, 140, 141–3, 146–7, 183 Cowper, William 76 Crabbe, George 181 Cradock, Joseph 36

Index Cr`evecoeur, J. Hector St John de 170 Cross, James Cartwright 113 Culler, Jonathan 42, 46 Cummins, John 121 Dalyell, J. G. 62, 63, 65–70, 73, 97, 119, 245, 251 Dampier, William 83–7, 88, 89, 92, 149, 156 and Wordsworth 200–5, 208 Damrosch, Leopold 74 Dean, John 122 Defoe, Daniel 13, 64, 76, 91, 93 Robinson Crusoe 13, 64, 76, 77, 78, 91, 93, 103 De Quincey, Thomas 13, 37, 38, 42, 143 Dibdin, Thomas 236 Donohue, Jane 96 Don Quixote 166, 217–18 Drake, Sir Francis 9 Driver, Felix 183 Duncan, Archibald 62, 65–70, 73 Durrell, Lawrence 3 Earl of Abergavenny (ship) 66, 113, 115, 208, 223–4, 249 Edwards, Bryan 172 Edwards, Philip 86 Eliot, T. S. 83 Ellison, Thomas 132 Enoch, Book of 168, 218–19 Epstein, James 257 Euclid 217 Eustace, John Chetwode 20, 32, 38, 49–50, 56 Evangelicalism 99, 155, 219–20, 227, 264, 266, 269 exploration 3, 13, 16, 27, 29, 52, 81, 83–4, 146–85 and Byron 148, 185, 259, 265–6, 269, 270–1 and Wordsworth 184–5, 205, 208–20, 226–7 exploration establishment 153, 160–1, 169–74, 184–5, 212, 219–20, 227, 265–6, 269, 271 exploration narratives 81, 151–2, 156–7, 160, 167, 172–3

Index Falconer, William 64, 99, 251 female travellers 16, 32, 33–4, 44–5, 55–8, 274 see also Wordsworth, Dorothy Fenwick, Isabella 233, 234, 239 Fielding, Henry 254 Forsyth, Joseph 20, 38 Francis Mary (ship) 65 Franklin, John 146, 150, 182 Franklin, Wayne D. 157 Frend, William 140 Freud, Sigmund 217 Friedrich, David Caspar 28 Fulford, Tim 151 Fussell, Paul 3–4, 148 Galt, John 59 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey 74–6, 200–5 Gilpin, William 36, 37, 53–5 Godwin, William 131, 134–5 Goldsmith, Oliver 45 Grand Tour 2, 32–4, 40, 46–52 Gray, Thomas 36 Grosvenor (ship) 65, 97–8, 119 Hakluyt, Richard 61, 74, 200 Halsewell (ship) 66, 112 Hartman, Geoffrey 195–6, 202 Hawkesworth, John 69, 81, 95, 99 Haye, Edward 74–6, 87, 200 Hazlitt, William 1–3, 4, 7, 15, 18, 19, 23, 27, 137, 143, 272 Hearne, Samuel 227 Hemans, Felicia 181 Hercules (ship) 96 Hobbes, Thomas 85, 115 Hobhouse, John Cam 20, 45, 50, 234, 258 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 186 Horace 53 Hucks, Joseph 141 Hunt, Leigh 1, 8, 232 Hutchinson, Henry 125 impressment 116, 125, 130–1 improvement 34–5, 37, 43, 153–5, 173–6, 184, 211–13 Byron’s attitude to 264–6, 269 Wordsworth’s attitude to 211–13, 225, 226–7

295 Janeway, James 73–4, 76, 87 Jarvis, Robin 136, 140, 142 Johnson, Samuel 48, 162 Jones, Robert 191, 193, 194, 214 Juno (ship) 69, 98, 250 Keate, George 120 Keats, John 5, 13, 19, 38, 41, 42, 143, 265, 272–3 walking tour of 1818 22–9, 143, 272–3 kidnapping 1–2, 7, 11, 27, 29 see also captivity narratives Kinnaird, Douglas 258 Kitson, Peter J. 151 Knight, Richard Payne 55 Lamb, Charles 158, 164, 170 Lamb, Jonathan 95 Landow, George 66, 69 Langman, Christopher 122 Leask, Nigel 44, 45, 163, 259 Letters from Fletcher Christian 128 Le Vaillant, Francois 147 libertinism 164–5, 266 Linnaeus, Carl 150, 156, 163, 173, 211 Liu, Alan 214, 215 Livingstone, David 182, 183 Lobo, Jerome 165 Lorrain, Claude 53 Lowes, John Livingstone 101 Luther, Martin 78 MacCannell, Dean 41 MacFarlane, Robert 28 Mackay, William 69 Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno 250 MacKenzie, Henry 174 Mariner, William 155, 270 Mariner’s Chronicle; Or, Interesting Narratives of Shipwreck (c.1826) 231 Markham, Clements 181, 182 Martin, John 155 Martyn, Thomas 29 Massingham, Hugh 146, 148 Mathews, Henry 20 Mavor, William 35

296 McGann, Jerome 259 Medusa/M´eduse (ship) 114, 118, 250 Mellor, Anne 6, 16, 44 Millward, John 132 misadventure 2–3, 6, 8, 11–17, 23–7, 59–145 passim, 155–6, 158, 160, 171, 182, 272–5 in Byron’s travelling and writing 9–10, 24, 233–4, 237–40, 247, 258–9 in Wordsworth’s travelling and writing 6, 50, 186–90, 192–6, 200–8, 220, 228–30 missionaries 155 missionary societies 155 Mitford, Mary Russell 171 Monbron, Louis Charles Fougeret de 262 Moncrieff, William 113 Montagu, Mary Wortley 33–4 Monthly Review 31 Moore, Thomas 24, 27, 263 More, Thomas 120 mountaineering 7, 27–9, 188–9, 191–7, 227–8, 272–3 Mudge, William 228 Murray, Alexander 169, 213, 215 Murray, John 251, 252, 259, 263 mutiny 67–8, 84, 88–91, 115–16, 122–7, 128, 135–6, 220 at Spithead and the Nore 116–17 see also Bounty Napoleon 260 Nellist, Brian 242 Nelson, Horatio 117 Newton, Isaac 207 Newton, John 62, 68, 76–8, 84, 87, 91, 93, 101, 103, 105, 204, 207, 218 The Authentic Narrative 62, 91 Nottingham Galley (ship) 122 orientalism 168, 262–6 Oswald, John 136 Otway, Thomas 10 Paccard, Michael 29 Paez, Pedro 165, 169, 216 Paine, Thomas 258

Index Pandora (ship) 132, 270 Park, Mungo 98, 150, 155, 158, 170–81, 182, 185 and Byron 265 and Wordsworth 200, 201, 203, 205, 208, 209, 211 Parry, William Edward 150, 155, 259, 265, 266 pedestrianism 12, 37–8, 50, 109–10, 137–45 as rite of passage 38, 142–3 as social protest 110, 137–8, 140–2, 229–30 and Wordsworth 50, 110, 136, 139, 143, 186–90, 192, 197, 220–1, 225–30 Pegge, Samuel 38 Pennnant, Thomas 34, 150, 193 Perkins, William 71 Perry, Seamus 102, 104 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 29 Philipp, Thomas 234, 262 picturesque tour 32, 36–7, 52–5, 56, 192 pilgrimage 26–7, 194, 241–3, 260–1, 274 Poe, Edgar Allan 59 Porter, Dennis 48 Poussin, Nicolas 53 Pratt, Mary Louise 152, 154, 157, 174, 175, 177, 180 Price, Uvedale 55 privateers 84–5, 88–90 providentialism 64, 274 in The Ancient Mariner 99–106 in exploration narratives 171, 178–80 in shipwreck narratives 71–82, 85–7, 91–3, 98–100, 117–18 in Byron’s writing 255–7, 258 in Wordsworth’s writing 205–6, 222–4 Public Advertiser 80 Purchas, Samuel 61, 102 Quilley, Geoff 116 Radcliffe, Ann 11–12, 272 Raspe, Rudolph 162 Rediker, Marcus 96, 123

Index Rennell, James 172, 173 Repton, Humphrey 55 Richardson, Samuel 12 Riffenburgh, Beau 182 Ritchie, Joseph 265 Roe, Nicholas 125 Romanticism 4–6, 18–19 and canon formation 44 and masculinism 6, 16–17, 44–5 Ross, John 150, 155, 265 Ross, Marlon D. 6, 16, 44 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 12, 227, 269 Royal Society 48, 83–4, 92, 149, 162 Royal Yacht Club 145 see also yachting Ryther, John 73, 75, 77, 78, 101 sailing (recreational) see yachting Said, Edward 264, 266 Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de 64 Sanborn, Geoffrey 128, 133 Saussure, Horace Benedict de 29 Schiller, Friedrich 11 science 29, 48 and exploration 149–50, 152–3, 156–7, 161, 162–4, 172–3, 180 and the Grand Tour 48 and Romantic unease 184–5, 211, 228, 265–6 see also exploration; Royal Society Scott, Robert Falcon 182, 183 Scott, Walter 24, 25, 173, 239 scripts see travel scripts Selkirk, Alexander 133 sentimentalism 11–12, 55–6, 43 in exploration narratives 174–81 in shipwreck narratives 97–8 Shackleton, Eric 182 Shakespeare, William v, 11, 12, 64 Sharp, Samuel 33, 43 Shelley, Mary 45, 127, 182, 185 Frankenstein 127 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 5, 7–8, 9–10, 13, 15, 27, 28, 38, 43, 45, 60, 70, 96–7, 109–10, 113, 125, 145, 185, 231–3, 239, 267 Works: Adonais 7, 15, 60

297 Prometheus Unbound 70 ‘Mont Blanc’ 45 The Revolt of Islam 7, 28 ‘The Voyage’ 96–7, 125 Shelvocke, George 62, 87–95, 98, 102, 103, 105, 121, 122–3, 124, 132, 247 shipwreck 15–16, 27, 29, 60–3, 64–71 passim, 73–100 passim, 110, 112–26, 143–4 in Byron’s writing and travelling 61, 62–3, 231–5, 237–40, 247–8, 248–58, 267 in Wordsworth’s writing and travelling 110, 197–208 passim, 218–19, 222–4 Individual wrecks: Abergavenny, see Earl of Abergavenny Alceste 114, 118 Antelope 120 Earl of Abergavenny 66, 113, 115, 208, 223–4, 249 Francis Mary 65 Grosvenor 65, 97–8, 119 Halsewell 66, 112 Hercules 96 Juno 69, 98, 250 Medusa/M´eduse 114, 118, 250 Nottingham Galley 122 Speedwell 87–90 Squirrel 74–6 Wager 63, 66, 90–5, 116 shipwreck narratives 15–16, 61–3, 64–100, 113–26, 223, 250–2, 254 Smith, Adam 70 Smollett, Tobias 33, 43, 49 Solander, Daniel 150 Southey, Robert 32, 38, 46, 120, 127, 140, 143, 158, 169, 170, 184, 213, 215, 227, 236, 261, 264 Works: Letters from England 32 Madoc 127 The Curse of Kehama 227, 264 The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo 261 Sparrman, Anders 163 Spavens, William 125 Speedwell (ship) 87–90

298 Spenser, Edmund 12, 245 Squirrel (ship) 74–6 Stabler, Jane 259, 263 Stachniewski, John 78, 79, 87 Starke, Mariana 20, 32, 34 Stephen, Leslie 102 Sterne, Laurence 12, 35, 36, 43, 49, 174 Stewart, John ‘Walking’ 140 Stones, Graeme 214 Stout, Benjamin 96 Sutcliffe, William 274 Swift, Jonathan 166, 254 Tegg, Thomas 65, 66, 117 Terrific Register 14, 119, 252 Thelwell, John 140 Thomson, James 112 Topham, Edward 35 traveller/tourist distinction 3, 17, 20–2, 31, 40, 148 travel scripts 8–13, 17, 19–30, 31, 58, 105–6, 147, 190, 234–5, 274 Trelawny, Edward John 9–10, 13, 186–8, 247 Turner, Katherine 44, 45 Turner, Victor 142–3 Turner, William 112 typology (Biblical) 73–4, 206–7, 244, 255–6 Vallon, Annette 129 Virgil 47, 53, 225 Voltaire 96 Wager (ship) 63, 66, 90–5, 116 walking tours see pedestrianism Waugh, Evelyn 31 Weber, Max 184 Weekly Entertainer 128 Westminster Review 39 Wilkinson, Joshua Lucock 37 Wolf, Eric 167 Wolfson, Susan 103–4 women travellers see female travellers Wordsworth, Dorothy 45, 57, 147, 186, 187, 188–9

Index Wordsworth, John 66, 113, 115, 208, 212, 223–4, 227, 249 Wordsworth, Mary 186 Wordsworth, William 1, 5, 6, 7, 13, 18, 56–8, 66, 75, 76, 86, 89, 100, 103, 107, 109–10, 113, 121, 125, 127–36 passim, 151, 186–230 passim, 233, 234, 236–9, 241, 244–6, 264, 265, 270, 273, 274 anti-touristic stance 39, 40, 50, 52–5, 189 and exploration 170, 181, 184, 208–20, 228 and providentialism 205–7, 223, 244 as explorer 147, 208–13 as misadventurer 108, 143, 187–90, 194–205, 207, 220, 259 as mountaineer 28, 57, 186–90, 191–7, 214–15, 227–8 as pedestrian 38, 50, 52, 110, 139, 143, 186–90, 192, 220–1, 226, 229–30 Works: ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’ 110, 127–36, 207, 226 ‘Analogy Passage’ 198–207, 208, 209 Complete Guide to the Lakes 44, 189 Descriptive Sketches 50, 191, 197 Lyrical Ballads 103 Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1837 188, 209 ‘Michael’ 189 ‘Musings near Aquapendente’ 209, 233 ‘Ode to Duty’ 223 ‘Peele Castle’ 224 Peter Bell 208 Poems on the Naming of Places 211, 213, 270 ‘Salisbury Plain’ 129, 207 The Borderers 110, 127–36, 220, 226 ‘The Brothers’ 39, 40 The Excursion 44, 190, 220–27, 264 The Prelude 7, 53, 75, 86, 107, 151, 187–8, 190–220, 222, 224, 227–8

Index ‘The Ruined Cottage’ 125 ‘The Thorn’ 103 ‘Tintern Abbey’ 223 ‘To the Daisy’ 224 ‘View from the Top of Black Comb’ 228 ‘When to the attractions of the busy world’ 211–13, 226

299 ‘Where Lies the Land’ 184–5 ‘Written with a Slate Pencil on a Stone, on the Side of the Mountain of Black Comb’ 228 yachting 12, 145, 267 Yorke, Henry Redhead 37 Young, Arthur 34–5, 41