Minds in Motion: Imagining Empiricism in Eighteenth-Century British Travel Literature by Anne M. Thell (review)

In The Origins of the English Novel (1987), Michael McKeon argues that the procedures of empiricism took hold across fictional and nonfictional genres, from journalism and the rising novel to criminal biographies and travelogues. Since then a lot has been written on the relationship between empiricism and the novel, but there has been comparatively little work on how these other narrative genres registered the empirical turn. It is therefore a pleasure to find travel writing accorded such attention in Anne M. Thell’s Minds in Motion. The essential argument has much in common with empiricist readings of the novel. Most travel writers in the long eighteenth century, Thell argues, profess empirical commitments on the level of discourse but “struggle to make sense of and to implement practically the ideals of experimental science” (17). Caught in this dilemma, their narratives bring a unique degree of sharpness to the contestations between factual and fictional discourses in the long eighteenth century. While “often viewed as either numbingly documentary or non-literary and commercial” (3), eighteenth-century travel writing “constitutes an archive where the discursive formations that will eventually comprise the scientific and the literary emerge in close proximity” (5). Thell traces these developments in a series of chapters individually devoted to Margaret Cavendish, William Dampier, Daniel Defoe, John Hawkesworth, and Samuel Johnson.

This is an admittedly unlikely cast, but Thell brings them together by flexibly defining travelogues as “texts that chart an individual’s first-hand account of movement through space outside of the habitual—whether that movement is actual or imagined—and therefore document the dislocation of normative perception” (7). This definition encompasses both actual and imaginary travels, in order to “make visible the far-reaching narrative repercussions of empiricism and specifically the Royal Society’s experimental interest in travel writing” (6). Thell puts special emphasis on two empirical ideals: “impartiality and a type of rigorous sense perception that does not taint or distort its object” (12). The first half of the book shows how travel narratives dealt with the ideal of impartiality, which Cavendish undermines and Dampier struggles to pursue; the second half, on Hawkesworth and Johnson, traces how the input of the senses jostled against a competing source of knowledge: the imagination. A chapter on Defoe’s New Voyage around the World provides a hinge between the two halves, “as Defoe overtly critiques Dampier’s empirical exactitude . . . and plays a crucial role in exploring the more capacious mimetic functions of travel narratives” (7). Increasingly, the book shows, readers of travelogues demanded not just descriptive exactitude but “pleasure in the form of vicarious experience . . . which is enabled by the literary and imaginative strategies ostensibly disavowed by scientific authors” (9). Once brought into focus, these developments reveal an early chapter in the history of scientific objectivity and of the unstable divide between self and world.

The summary above may suggest that the empiricism against which Thell sets up her readings is overly unreceptive to the imagination. Indeed, in certain passages “empiricism” seems too narrowly modeled on the Royal Society’s strict directives to seamen or on Locke’s attack on the association of ideas. Thell argues, for example, that Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland provides “a powerful response to a genre [that is, Lockean epistemology] that apotheosizes sense perception” (217) by acknowledging “the epistemological value of alternate modes of knowing and perceiving (e.g. imagination, emotion, second sight)” (213–14). And yet to say all this in 1773 is not to go against empiricism, but to be up to date with its developments since Locke. When formulating the book’s central thesis, however, Thell takes all this into due account. She cogently claims that travel writers like Defoe and Hawkesworth, rather than break with empiricist standards, “widen the parameters for what might be described empirically and deploy openly imaginative means of cultivating perceptual experience” (10). Even more importantly, she...