Paul Smethurst

Travel writing and the natural world, 1768-1840

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction The Scientific Gaze and Museum Order Natural History in the Contact Zone Natural Order: Metaphor and Structure Romantic Technique and Humboldtian Vision Landscape and Nation-Building The English Picturesque as Social Order Natural Sublime and Feminine Sublime Prescribing Nature: Wordsworths Guide To The Lakes Textual Landscapes and Disappearing Nature Conclusion and Coda Bibliography Index

Travel Writing and the City

In ‘Walking the City’, Michel de Certeau describes New York as a city that ‘has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour [as] the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess’ (de Certeau 1988: 91). This insistent reinvention means that New York, in common with other modern cities, is not so well suited to travel writers seeking connections between place, history and the present. As de Certeau observes, New York arises out of a grand concept of the City, which takes as its representational form the panorama that used to be seen from the top of the World Trade Centre. So far above the real city, the panorama has little connection with the practice of everyday daily life. De Certeau even suggests that it provides a panoptic illusion as a strategic distraction from everyday life, from the alienation and disconnection experienced on the crowded city streets.

Peripheral Vision, Landscape, and Nation-Building in Thomas Pennant’s Tours of Scotland, 1769–72

While it might have had a strong sense of external identity and an increasing global presence, domestically, Great Britain in the early eighteenth century was less a geographical or political unity, than an ‘imagined community’.1 Like Defoe’s Englishman, it remained a most ‘het’rogenous thing’, although home tours were gradually bringing the disparate identities and ancient histories of England, Wales, and Scotland into a common imaginative frame. In his A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–26), Defoe explicitly calls for economic and political union, claiming that Scotland’s future prosperity must depend on closer ties with England and integration with the British Empire in the aftermath of the Act of Union (1707). This essay examines how Defoe, and later Thomas Pennant, used the home tour in the eighteenth century to incorporate Scotland, politically, economically, and imaginatively into the ‘island of Great Britain’. Some fifty years after Defoe, Pennant continued the theme of integration, by which time the history of Scotland and its relations with England had reached a particularly interesting juncture. In the wake of the Battle of Culloden (1746) and with the dismantling of the ancient clan system, land reform was now of paramount importance to the country’s future. Furthermore, Celtic culture was in danger of receding (and being disingenuously revived in the ‘works of Ossian’).

Landscape and Nation-Building

While it might have had a strong sense of external identity and an increasing global presence, domestically, Great Britain in the early eighteenth century had a limited sense of geographical or political unity. Like Defoe’s Englishman, domestically, the island of Great Britain remained a most ‘het’rogenous thing’. In A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–26), Defoe explicitly calls for economic and political union between England and Scotland, claiming that Scotland’s future prosperity would depend on closer ties with England and the British Empire in the aftermath of the Act of Union (1707). Yet much of Scotland was still largely undeveloped in the 1770s, and the Western Isles would appear as remote and exotic as Patagonia to southern visitors such as Samuel Johnson and Thomas Pennant. This chapter examines Pennant’s home tours between 1769 and 1772 as conscious attempts to bring disparate identities and topographies into a common imaginative frame. Some 50 years after Defoe, Pennant drew on strategic representations of the topography of Scotland to incorporate the country politically, economically and imaginatively into the ‘island of Great Britain’.1 This adds to the main thesis of the book that travel writing in the eighteenth century reproduced the natural world as an abstract spatiality,infused with patterns of order that corresponded with the ideologies of territorialism, imperialism and mercantilism.

The Scientific Gaze and Museum Order

The organised study of the natural world in the eighteenth century, which included the practices of collecting and travel writing, had as its goal the unlocking of nature’s mysteries. But Bruno Latour describes the outcome as a failure: ‘We expected a final answer by using Nature’s voice. What we got was a new fight over the composition, content, expression and meaning of that voice. That is, we get more technical literature and larger Natural History Museums.’1 The study of nature led to its scientification, the production of nature as an abstract spatiality, and to the organisation and institutionalisation of nature-as-construct in museums and literature. This chapter examines how the practices of naturalists in Europe were central to all of this as they developed new theories about nature which were dependent on systematic practices of collecting and classifying in the field. Two-way traffic developed between the centres of calculation in Europe and the traveller-scientists; the collectors, whose techniques (including their travel writing) were directed by the centres.2 The circularity implicit in these practices led to a conundrum facing naturalists: there was an assumption that natural history would ultimately reveal immutable truths, yet ‘truths’ were mediated by the study of nature itself. Where naturalists appealed to nature both as subject (field of study), and ally (arbiter of truth-claims), the knowledge gained was, as Latour has shown, abstract and limited.3

Natural History in the Contact Zone

The emerging discipline of natural history sought order in nature, and this desire for order manifested itself in the organisation of museums at the European centres and in the schemata and protocols used by collectors. This chapter examines the practices of gathering and recording information about the natural world in the contact zones of the South Seas, as presented in the journals of prominent traveller-scientists. The argument is that the journal or factual travel account had a crucial role, both in the development of the science of natural history, and in shaping public perceptions of a wider natural world. The journal form used by traveller-scientists was highly organised, with a linear narrative whose authority was based on presence (and presencing) and the visual scrutiny of the eyewitness. Despite highly objective and rational intent, the content could be uncertain and even ambiguous, suggesting that observation and the identification of natural phenomena in unfamiliar territory was not straight-forward. In fact, due to difficult conditions of travel, the process of recording nature was often serendipitous and arbitrary. Furthermore, although scientific protocols demanded detachment and a disinterested eye, the observer/narrator’s objectivity was often compromised as he was forced into the role of actor in tense dramas within alien environments.

Romantic Technique and Humboldtian Vision

It was Alexander von Humboldt’s global vision of nature that distinguished him from other traveller-scientists.1 His voluminous texts stand out from other exploration travelogues of the period in their depth and scientific range, and from the journals of most individual travellers, who typically limited themselves to local studies of natural history and culture.2 Humboldt regarded nature as an all-embracing planet-wide system, focusing more than other naturalists at the time on the interactions between plants, animals and the physical environment. He makes this intention clear in a letter to Karl-Marie von Moll: ‘My attention will never lose sight of the harmony of concurrent forces, the influence of the inanimate world on the animal and vegetable kingdom.’3 Finding the means to visualise these complex forces would be his greatest representational challenge, however, and reviewers past and present have found a conflict between scientific and aesthetic modes in his work. My argument is that Humboldt’s use of romanticism and the picturesque are essentially technical, and quite consistent with his strategy to visualise systems of nature. Presenting nature as a dynamic abstract spatiality in the mind’s eye is his aim, not reproducing pictures of nature. Humboldt’s vision is characterised by magisterial planetary sweeps in which Richard Groves finds an ecological perspective: ‘[Humboldt] strove, in successive books, to promulgate a new ecological concept of relations between man and the natural world which was drawn almost entirely from the characteristically holist and unitary thinking of Hindu philosophers.’4

Natural Order: Metaphor and Structure

In the late eighteenth century, theoretical understanding of the natural world advanced as accumulated empirical knowledge was used to develop taxonomies and models, and the microscopic analysis of natural phenomena revealed forms, structures and processes invisible to the naked eye. Greater theoretical knowledge led to further experimentation in such practices as cross-pollination, acclimatisation and soil husbandry. These led to economic advantages and progress in agriculture, but also to unintended consequences for the environment. Of these, the most disastrous was that the ‘scientification’ of nature shifted relations between nature and society; as nature became more detached from society, it was regarded in a more mechanical, deterministic and utilitarian light. Displacing traditional approaches, eighteenth-century science reinvented nature as a planet-wide resource for exploitation by humans. As a result, relations with nature as an organic unity embracing and sustaining human lifeworlds were diminished.

Natural Sublime and Feminine Sublime

In romantic travel writing, topographical description is extended into subjective relations between landscape and the mind. This brings the space of nature into the realm of psychic space, where it is connected with the traveller’s mental fabrication of the natural world. The emphasis on interiority, especially in encounters with the natural sublime, contrasts with the empiricism of museum order and the distancing and framing of the picturesque. As the dominant mode of framing gives way to one of thresholds and infinitudes, a sense of the liminal opens the space of nature to the possibility of subjective disordering. The outward trajectory of romantic travel follows that of exploration and scenic tourism, but it is now paired with an inward journey which brings symbolism back into nature. A subjective and highly metaphorical nature is certainly a turn away from empiricism, yet it is more anthropocentric in the sense that nature becomes the mirror of the human mind. Romantic vision produces a space of nature primed for transcendental experience, a space for exploring the psychic boundaries between self and world. To further this, romantic travel seeks out landscapes suggestive of infinitudes, fluidity and sudden immensity as potential triggers for communication between the mind and nature. As the role of the persona changes from that of eyewitness to I-witness, travellers take on agency and narrative authority as they become writer-producers of ‘nature’ rather than tourist-consumers.

Textual Landscapes and Disappearing Nature

For an expanding urban population in the late eighteenth century, the idea of nature became detached both from ancient mythologies of nature and actual rural experience. The natural world was becoming increasingly mediated through an abstract spatiality, nature-as-construct. In previous chapters, evidence is found for this shift across different forms of travel writing, which, as a function of detachment, share patterns of structure and order conducive to nationalist and progressive worldviews. Finding and instilling forms of order in the natural world is an explicit aim in exploration narratives, as it is in the picturesque. In seeking the natural sublime in scenic tourism, the impulse to find order in the landscape is also present, as clearly demonstrated in Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes (see Chapter 9).