I sate down upon the delicious dry grass and among dry fallen leaves beneath another row of poplars. How pleasant it was! The air was filled with an aromatic scent of leaves […] and all was so calm. There was a certain sadness, but a peace in every thing; there was not a sound, scarcely a living creature to be seen, only an old peasant woman leading a goat by a cord as it fed along the grass. I went onward into the pleasant little village, past small cottages, and farms, and quiet undulating orchards, with here and there a seat placed under some fine old apple or plum-tree, passed gardens gay with huge sunflowers, and stopped to admire a lovely little bit of colour at the entrance of a gentleman’s villa. […] A desire now possessed me to walk on still further to the second church of this same village, the tall, strange looking, pea-green [italics in original] spire of which had long attracted my curiosity. (Howitt 1853, 77–78, emphases added)
Exploring Munich in the early 1850s, the English art-student Anna Mary Howitt spent many hours (apparently) doing nothing—she sat idly on the grass or on a bench and observed the city, its churches and nature. She did not rely solely on her Baedeker or Murray but on her own instincts where to go, walking and stopping where her fancy, or sometimes an inexplicable desire, took her. Being idle for her meant being open to spontaneous impressions, no matter how incoherent they were. Through her idling, she could take in the foreign city for herself and gather inspirations for her creative art; yet through it, she could also learn to accept solitariness and sadness.
Experiences of gratifying idleness are not the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of the Victorian age; more obvious topics are processes connected to industrialization, imperialism and the birth of tourism. The corpus of travel texts from the time is indeed extensive; it is precisely among these texts that one finds accounts that differ very much from those written by tourists or those travelling “efficiently.” There are writing travellers, both women and men, who go abroad to experience idleness, a state of mind or mode of life for which there does not seem to have been sufficient space and time at home in England. At the same time, their idling endeavours are embedded in the context of discourses that occupied central positions in nineteenth-century thinking, namely the study of art, natural history, boating and the experience of the South.
This book seeks to contextualize the status of idleness and travel in the Victorian age and then connect the two topics by reading five exemplary travel texts and teasing out the different gradations and articulations of idleness and idling. The phrase “There is no joy but calm” (Tennyson 1843, 179) from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters (1843) gets a new—and positive—value in the context of the book: the selected travel texts suggest the need for a reassessment of the dimensions of idleness and present idling as a distinct mode of travel and a spatial practice.
Since this study is both interested in the sociocultural context of the travel texts and the texts themselves, it combines several divergent strands. It emerges out of the context of recent developments that bemoan the accelerated lifestyle in the realm of media and cultural production and trends like downshifting 1 but find their origin in the nineteenth century. Different groups and people have recently formulated the need to “slow down” in diverse spheres of life, for instance the Italian publicist Carlo Petrini, who is the founder of the “slow food” movement (Petrini 2013), the journalist Tom Hodgkinson who relaunched Samuel Johnson’s The Idler and founded the Idler Academy in London 2 or the Berlin-based Haus Bartleby (“centre for those who refuse to pursue a career”). This need to slow down can be attributed to an ever-increasing optimization of people’s work and daily lives, the pressure to be successful and a productive member of society. At the University of Freiburg, Germany, otium/leisure/idleness is the focus of an interdisciplinary research cluster funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) since 2013. The agenda of the research cluster was influenced by the “spatial turn ,” which emanated in the late 1970s and in which not only the processes of urbanization and globalization were assessed in spatial terms, but also all kinds of aspects concerning “space.” 3 At that time, there occurred a “re-emergence of spatiality in critical thought” (Tally 2013, 17). Wolfgang Schivelbusch has written a comprehensive account of the changing perceptions of space and time from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries (1977; English translation: 1986). 4
One of the key assumptions of the research centre during its first four years, which examined the different functions, dimensions and implications of idleness and leisure throughout history and from the point of view of various disciplines, was that the experience of idleness is characterized by a perceived spatialization of time. This means that in moments of enjoyable, positively understood idleness, the entity of time recedes into the background and a more immediate experience of the entity of space becomes possible. 5 By building on this understanding of the concept, I presuppose a slightly different, self-contained understanding of the term than, for instance, the examples (ranging from Wordsworth to Schiller) chosen by Richard Adelman in his study Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic, 1750–1830 (2011) which contend “that intellectual activity can be work-like in many important ways” (8); the notion of “work” does not have to be that which makes an activity valuable, idleness itself can be conceived of as rewarding.
My interest lies in showing the crisis or precariousness that idle travel in particular was facing when being practised during a time of progressing modernization. I will primarily regard idleness and idling as cultural concepts which I want to identify and define in the context of the Victorian period in England—an age and a nation that were particularly concerned with a new awareness and perhaps even self-consciousness with regard to the entities of time and (imperial) space. Research from the field of travel and travel literature, tourism and leisure studies has acquired quite an extensive body in the last 25 years and only key studies and major trends can be mentioned here by way of introduction. Studies on leisure in Great Britain mostly focus on the present; there are several studies, however, that open up historical dimensions. 6
Dean MacCannell (1976) and John Urry (2002) make a specific link between tourism as leisure and the touristic experience and perception of space: In The Tourist, MacCannell refers to the tourist persona as a model to describe the processes of alienation that many people experience in modernity —in the same way in which work and leisure cannot be that clearly distinguished from each other any more (which is alienating), the individual does not see him- or herself clearly and neither does the tourist understand foreign cultures “correctly.” MacCannell also names travel discourse itself as a product of this process of alienation; a medium that tries to bring coherence to the fragmentation of Western experience (see MacCannell [1976] 2013, 2). Urry coins the concept of the “tourist gaze” which he describes as being culture and time specific: the crucial question is with what it is being contrasted. The tourist gaze can also appear in a romantic form which allows for a “personal, semi-spiritual relationship with the object of the gaze” (Urry 2002, 43)—this comes close to an experience of pleasurable idleness. Yet neither MacCannell nor Urry identify a counter-concept of an explicitly idle kind of travel. An outspoken voice from the corpus of critical studies arguing for the emergence of an exaggerated perception of what constituted “genuine” cultural experience of travel is James Buzard’s work from 1993; however, he does not link his argument to the concepts of idleness or leisure and mainly analyses texts written by male authors.
The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850–1901 is a contribution to the existing body of research on travel culture and literature which became popular in English studies in the 1990s and early 2000s 7 and also to the field of mobility studies. In the existing literature, recurring themes are experiences of the “other”, interculturality, post-colonial aspects and questions of gender and specifically “female” perceptions of space and foreign countries, especially in feminist criticism. 8 The phenomenon of idle travel in the context of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is largely missing from that list. 9 Since one can observe similarities between idle Victorian travel and Romantic travel, studies describing travel in the eighteenth century and a subjectification of travel experience and its importance for identity construction are useful sources that establish a historical contextualization of this book. Topics from this field centre on the popularity of educational trips and “Romantic” travel that already was a reaction to some extent to early forms of emerging tourism. It brought about a rediscovery of traditional and “simple” forms of travel (especially on foot), foregrounded an aesthetic experience of landscapes and nature and valorized self-discovery. 10 Willard Spiegelman (1995) and Richard Adelman (2011) have established illuminating connections between idleness (alternatively named as “indolence ”) and aesthetic and creative productivity and receptivity for the Romantic age. Billie Melman (1992) adds a further nuance to the discussion by showing how travelling contributed to destabilizing conceptions about gender and raising the question whether some spaces have a “male” or “female” connotation .
With regard to aesthetic receptivity in th...