Bringing Travel Home to England: Tourism, Gender, and Imaginative Literature in the Eighteenth Century (review)

Ms. Lamb’s sprawling study yields rich insight into the importance of tourism to eighteenth-century British culture, which involved not just those who toured (in the British Isles or abroad), but also those at home—the audience for the performance of travel. Tourism is stylized, institutionalized, scripted travel; its conventions and expectations are familiar. As well as a valuable source of knowledge about the foreign—knowledge used to regulate and discipline the home culture—it could also be an important social credential. The success of elite educational tours, it was believed, served the interest of the home population at large by helping create ideal gentlemen like Richardson’s returned tourist, Sir Charles Grandison. Ms. Lamb pays special attention to gender: not women travelers (though these are present), but women as tourist attractions. Females embodied the sites in ways no longer readily accessible. Actual and fictional women, from Sterne’s Maria to Wordsworth’s Maid of Buttermere, and female communities, from Italian convents to the Ladies of Llangolen, became touchstones for British cultural preoccupations and anxieties.

The chapter on A Sentimental Journey, read in the context of contemporary anxieties about male tourists’ interactions with women on the Continent, has changed the way I read and teach this influential travel novel. Before it came out, tourists’ ability to write for publication about the women they met abroad was restricted. Everyone assumed male Grand Tourists interacted with women, but in ways not fit for print, and Sterne wrote “in response to contemporary sex tourism.” Ms. Lamb’s discussion untangles the ways in which the Maria episodes in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey revisit and rework longstanding satirical connections among sex tourism, madhouse tourism, and love madness. Transforming travel writing, Sterne’s deft, witty ambiguities offered “a polite and publishable alternative” to less decent tourist practices (which of course still went on).

Subsequent chapters treat actual women who achieved fame—or notoriety—as attractions. Emma Hamilton, wife of the British ambassador to Naples in the 1780s, became known for her “Attitudes”: poses imitating persons, paintings, and statues from classical and contemporary art. A former painters’ model and kept woman, who combined great beauty with a talent for expressive mimicry, she drew praise and controversy. Grand Tourists went out of their way to enjoy the risqué spectacle, which her husband promoted: “she could be publicly displayed as long as her distance from England and the fiction of privacy and sexual inaccessibility was maintained.”

A very different kind of tourist attraction, embodying the unspoiled pastoral charm of the Lake District, Mary of Buttermere waited tables at the Fish Inn. First noticed in print at age fourteen by the travel writer Joseph Budworth in 1792, Mary Robinson served as a patriotic icon, framed by quoting Thomson’s celebration of the rural landscape. “Happy BRITANNIA!” In Book 7 of the 1805 Prelude, Wordsworth describes a London spectacle, the Sadler’s Wells play about the Maid of Buttermere that the poet did not actually see, but heard about from his sister. The sentimental female tourist attraction protected Wordsworth “from shameful contact with London.” Even more intriguing, the Prelude follows the Maid with a very different female spectacle—the London prostitute, with “the same outward shape” as a virtuous woman, but lacking her human essence.

Sir Charles Grandison surmounts the moral hazards of the Tour, though his love for a Catholic Italian woman drives the novel’s plot. Astonishingly, critics had not tackled Grandison’s dependence on tourism “for theme, characterization, event, detail, and story line.” Lovelace is of course another Grand Tourist, driven abroad by his misdeeds (fleeing the relatives of a woman he had raped), and going abroad again at the end of the novel, only to encounter Clarissa’s most dangerous relation, Colonel Morden. But Ms. Lamb’s most interesting insights concern Pamela. Richardson, of course, did not himself travel. But the idea for Pamela came from...