English Travel Narratives in the Eighteenth Century

Exploring Genres

Jean Viviès

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351940009
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour la littérature comparée

The eighteenth century, commonly described as the age of the novel, is also the golden age of travel narratives. In this English edition of Le Récit de voyage en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle, the genre of the travel narrative receives a treatment based on its development in close relationship with fiction. The book provides a survey of famous travel narratives: James Boswell's journal of a tour to Corsica and account of his trip to Scotland with Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne's enigmatic Sentimental Journey, Tobias Smollett's Travels through France and Italy. Negotiating between inventory and invention, these texts invite a reconsideration of conventional generic distinctions. They open up a literary space in which the full significance of the real and fictional journey motif can be explored.

Part I

Prefatory Essay
From A(ddison) to W(ordsworth) by way of S(terne): Variations on Continental Travel in the Eighteenth Century

Professor Alain Bony
Universite Lumiere
(University of Lyons 2)

The following comments are in no way intended to provide a conceptual or chronological framework, much less to set limits to the study by Jean Viviés. Whether by anticipation or echo, they aim instead to suggest some variations on a subject which was familiar to the authors he examines and to their contemporaries: the Grand Tour. A cultural phenomenon and a theme of guidebooks, narratives and commentaries, the Grand Tour was itself constantly reworked and subjected to endless variations. It so happens that Joseph Addison, whose Spectator held sway over the eighteenth century, was also the author of a travel narrative which marked an epoch as soon as it was published in 1705. Novices would long carry his Remarks on Italy with them in their discovery of Italy, and the book lastingly inspired the narratives which other travellers wrote of their own experiences. If there is such a thing as a 'genre' of travel literature in the eighteenth century - and Jean Viviès rightly remarks that it would be protean in the extreme - then Addison would have to be the source of many of its recurrent features. At the other end of the century, Wordsworth provides evidence of a veritable mutation in the philosophy of continental travel and the aesthetics of travel literature. But if these two highly different authors are here associated, with Addison to launch and Wordsworth to close the century (or rather to open a new one), it is not just for the sake of an emblem. In the Sterne of A Sentimental Journey, who argues for 'mutual toleration' as the best means of attaining 'mutual love', we may be able to find a spokesman, a guide, to lead us from Addison to Wordsworth. With Sterne's help, a sort of paradoxical dialogue between the two authors may be imagined, in which they move beyond their differences to respond to and complete each other, and thus sail us over the horizon of a century which was truly the great period in travel literature.

Jean-Didier Urbain has remarked that until the 'shift into romanticism and tourist hedonism' which characterizes the first decades of the nineteenth century, 'no-one travelled for pleasure'. Urbain cites Stendhal's 'I do not travel to learn about Italy but for my own pleasure.'¹ Nevertheless, it is difficult not to think that the prototype of the person who travels for his pleasure was the Sentimental Traveller described by Yorick, and that in the next century Stendhal is simply his most celebrated romantic incarnation in a lineage which for the time being, says Yorick, begins and ends with himself.² But the austere travellers whom Yorick names in his whimsical fashion may not have been all that unconscious of the pleasures of being elsewhere, of exotic strangeness, of 'foreign knowledge or foreign improvements'.³ They took to the highroads leading south because of constitutional weakness or cultural infirmity, curiosity, pride, vanity or spleen. These travellers were concerned to mitigate or cheerfully accompany their imperious reasons for crossing the boundaries of the familiar and the everyday, boundaries (here Yorick cites the 'peripatetic philosophers') that in her wisdom Nature has set both for our joys and for our pains.⁴ This is probably the case for Yorick's 'travellers of Necessity': not for those who were sentenced to transportation to America, but for the ones Yorick does not hesitate to classify in their dubious company, the young men of good families who were sent to finish their education on the continent and who were perhaps all too happy to leave home and set off under the guidance of a tutor who was likewise ready to find his pleasure in necessity and make the best of a venerable practice, the Grand Tour.

The third class includes the whole army of peregrine martyrs; more especially those travellers who set out upon their travels with the benefit of the clergy, either as delinquents travelling under the direction of governors recommended by the magistrate - or young gentlemen transported by the cruelty of parents and guardians, and travelling under the direction of governors recommended by Oxford, Aberdeen and Glasgow.⁵

It was probably not the 'peregrine martyrs', who were sent off under paternal injunction, but rather their tutors who packed in their bags the most famous guidebook to Italy, Addison's Remarks on Several Parts of Italy &c. In the Years 1701, 1702, 1703. Even if Yorick never mentions this classic, there is no doubt that he knew it well. Sterne owned a copy and, as Jean Viviés points out, Tristram mentions 'the great Addison' in volume VII of Tristram Shandy, which is a kind of Ur-Sentimental Journey, as one of his precursors who 'wrote and gallop'd - or who have gallop'd and wrote' on the roads of France and Italy.⁶ In fact all guides and travel narratives, especially those which cover roads as frequented as those of the Grand Tour, feel compelled to enlarge upon and even replace prior narratives. Yorick is no exception when he invokes Smelfungus and Mundungus - to cast them as anti-models. Addison himself cites Richard Lassels's Voyage of Italy (1670), which was long the most complete guide available, the most often consulted, and in addition the one that popularized the expression 'Grand Tour'. Addison also refers to 'Mr Ray', likewise to the English translation of a very popular work by Misson and to 'Monsieur Amelot' as well.⁷ Travel literature has a dense, complex genealogy and its own set of command performances, which includes paying homage to the most venerable of the 'peripatetic philosophers', Montaigne and Bacon. Indeed, travel literature comprises an entire meta-library, a text-palimpsest, a chain of echoes, rewritings and textual paths not taken. Whether one thinks of Tristram and Yorick or of Boswell, Smollett and others, the travel narratives of the eighteenth century have no use for that stumbling block which Parson Adams endlessly encounters in Joseph Andrews. As Jean Viviés shows, they travel as naturally through the world of books as they do through the book of the world.

However, if Sterne has a copy of Addison's very academic remarks on his shelf, and even slips it into Tristram's and Yorick's bags, it may be that there is a secret, paradoxical affinity between the narratives of these very different travellers. The '&c' in Addison's title leads one to expect that the Italian section would be followed by a treatment of those countries which traditionally follow in a proper Grand Tour: after papist Italy come the Germanic countries and the Rhineland, where the religious and political principles were closer to those of most British travellers. Instead, Addison treats of Geneva, the Swiss cantons and several cities in the Austrian Tyrol in a rather hasty appendix, as if he meant to begin but then leave virtual the second section leading on to the Netherlands and his native shores. Addison's Remarks thus appear suspended between two unwritten narratives, much as the itinerary of the Grand Tour sets Italy between France and the Germanic countries. These are three distinct stages, and three moments as well in a kind of dive into the south followed by a resurfacing turn to the north, an exploration leading the traveller of necessity or pleasure into a Latin, Mediterranean and solar foreignness, which could grow increasingly perilous (and fascinating) until he emerged from it via contact with the reassuring, temperate familiarity of German Protestantism. Every travel narrative sets out a plot; not just 'the plotting of the world'⁸ but as Jean Viviés says, the plotting of the traveller himself. And few journeys lend themselves more easily to a harmonious plot, with a beginning, middle and end, than the Grand Tour undertaken by British travellers in the eighteenth century, with its three destinations which read like three acts in an adventure with a happy end. Nevertheless, though he had performed the entire itinerary, Addison omits the first and third of the three acts.⁹

There are no doubt good reasons for this odd selection. The Remarks do not attempt to be a travel guide, but a continuation or complement to the guides already available to travellers and readers. Addison stays clear of all the practical problems, supposing them to have been solved, and of all the topographical and technical details that a traveller might find useful, supposing these to be known from other sources. He advances through fields of Latin citations, which provide an appropriate description from the best ancient authors for every place he goes. He travels 'through the poets, and not through Italy'.¹⁰ Being himself a Latin poet of some reputation, he produces his favourite authors from his satchel, as Tristram says, 'his satchel of school books hanging at his a— and galling his beast's crupper at every stroke'.¹¹ This approach, clearly announced in the Preface of the Remarks, is original and surely helped to make Addison's book a classic of the Grand Tour, a guide which could not be used to replace the others. Bent on mingling the useful and the agreeable, the 'governors recommended by Oxford, Aberdeen and Glasgow' would have found the book of service in a sometimes thankless task; for symmetrical reasons, the young 'peregrine martyrs' would have found 'the great Addison' a rather austere travelling companion.

Instead of a spatial, tripartite scheme of continental travel, Addison substitutes a plot of a different order. In his temporal and binary scheme, the substratum of Latinity which is ever present in the Italian landscape comes forth to assert an enduring universality. (Boswell, as we shall see later in this book, will in his own fashion and according to the specific requirements of his very Hellenic view of Corsica, achieve precisely this in discovering Sparta beneath Corte.) Addison thus sentimentalizes his account in a most unexpected way. Because it is best suited to the Italian part of the Grand Tour, the very principle of cultural correspondences between ancient descriptions and contemporary sites helps to explain the rather hurried end of the Remarks, that sense of interruption and non finito which one also finds in A Sentimental Journey, when the latter breaks off, in spite of its title, just as it reaches Italy. Each title promises more than it delivers. Addison's '&c.' is in this respect the same as Yorick's 'through France and Italy'. Even Yorick's famous opening line, by which he continues an ongoing conversation from outside the text, and shuttles the traveller from Dover to Calais in the course of a sentence, as if on a whim or a change in the wind, must have some (distant) relation to the opening of Addison's account, which sets out from Marseilles without ever saying how he got there. Most of all, Addison's perspective affords him an almost systematic capacity for digression. Here is a narrative which never overlooks a chance to associate ideas or interrupt itself, and which deliberately neglects the strict chronology of the journey's stages. Like Yorick and Tristram, Addison is concerned not to parrot information which already belongs to what might be called the public sphere of travel literature. (Jean Viviès will show how such neglect ends up becoming a rhetorical habit, which even Smollett acquires.) Refusing to repeat what others have already said, Addison is deliberately elliptical and anecdotic. Sometimes he does not even bother to name monuments or describe their architecture and history. In place of a systematic approach, he does not hesitate to put himself on stage, providing an account from personal experience, reporting opinions which he does not accept, or sharing conversations with his reader, whom he addresses in the most confiding tones, which shows that for him (as for Yorick later) the main pleasure of travelling lies in the 'commerce' with one's fellow men.¹² At the same time he suggests that the people he meets are a select group: the Addisonian traveller excels in name-dropping. Addison's 'remarks' are often Sternean 'opinions', and this sense is reinforced by occasional examples of discursive fragmentation which announce Sterne. Even the principle of citation contributes to this effect: the Remarks can be read in part as an anthology of Latin descriptive poetry, with a series of literary fragments interrupting the textual space much in the way ancient ruins would have dotted the Italian landscape. Just as Tristram will cite long, arcane passages in French and Latin, Addison has no qualms about inserting a passage in Italian which is over two pages long, or reporting historical anecdotes at such length that they turn into digressive tales. The chapter titles, with their rather approximate lists of place names ('Pavia, Milan, &c.'), may also remind us of Yorick. Nor does Addison hesitate, any more than Tristram will, to make a show of erudition and somewhat esoteric knowledge, although there is a sizeable difference here: beneath his affected lightness, Addison generally takes his erudition seriously, sometimes to the point of being heavy-handed. To be fair, it should be remembered that the Remarks are a youthful work, unlike Tristram's autobiography and Yorick's Journey.¹³ In fact, Addison's discourse in the Remarks in many ways anticipates that of the Spectator almost ten years later. Given the Spectator's unquestionable stylisti...