The Uses of Travel: Science, Empire and Change in 18th‐Century Travel Writing

Abstract

This essay surveys recent critical approaches to 18th-century travel writing, with an emphasis on a seeming contradiction in the way the field treats the possibility that the traveller might be changed by the experience of travel. On the one hand, the traveller's vulnerability to external inf luence seems to represent a threat to British imperial authority, particularly in studies of scientific travel in the service of empire -but on the other hand, recent studies on the novel's debts to travel writing insist that the traveller's capacity to change is fundamental to any argument for travel's edifying potential or contribution to civic improvement. To resolve this divide, this article will argue that reading 18th-century travel writing for the moments in which the 'changeable' traveller appears in a positive light might help to open new avenues of research on the form and function of change in 18th-century records of scientific observation. Looking ahead, this essay proposes that future studies in scientific travel might draw inspiration from recent research on sympathetic travellers as agents of empire, and continue to investigate how the traveller's capacity for change could add nuance to our history of the scientific observer as -in Captain Cook's termsa 'disinterested' "eyewitness to a fact."Returning to an 18th-century moment in which British travels ranged eagerly "from China to Peru," any attempt to survey the field of writing about all the records kept must, as Samuel Johnson warns, require quite an "extensive view" (1-2). Rightly called an "age of peregrination" in a 1797 Critical Review article (361), the long 18th century produced thousands of pages of writing about travels both local and global -and so the field is as generically diverse as the regions it treats, encompassing forms as different as tourists' guidebooks and explorers' journals, letters on the Grand Tour and ostensibly true tales of fantastic travels to faraway places. Fortunately, thoughtful and detailed surveys of the individual worlds of writing on British encounters with China, with India and with North America have been recently published within these pages 1 -and so, to complement these studies, this essay will take as its subject the field of research about 18th-century travel and its records, or writing about travel writing. In particular, this essay will examine a seeming contradiction in the way this field treats the possibility that the traveller might be changed by the experience of travel. On the one hand, the traveller's vulnerability to external inf luence often seems to represent a real threat to British imperial authority, particularly in studies of scientific travel in the service of empire. On the other hand, recent studies of the 18th-century novel's debts to travel writing insist that the traveller's capacity to change is necessary, even fundamental, to defending the uses of travel for both personal edification and broader civic improvement. To resolve this divide, this article will argue that reading 18th-century tra...

New light on the role of instruments in exploration during the 1830s

“…43 It has been suggested that Alexander was working in the long-established literary tradition of travel writing. 44 In a communication from Alexander in 1831, 'Notes on West Indies and America in answer to queries of the Sec. of RGS', there was no indication of instrument use.…”