The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850–1901 by Heidi Liedke (review)

In "An Apology for Idlers" (1877) Robert Louis Stevenson makes the appealing case that personal worth might be measured by one's comfort level with being idle: "Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality," Stevenson writes, "and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity" (Cornhill Magazine 36, 83). Still, despite the seeming confidence of this pitch for idleness, Stevenson often experienced deep discomfort when forced to be still, to take to a bed for required rest, or to lounge in the sun (or frigid air) with his fellow consumptives: a man wants to be "up and doing" was how he put it in "Health and Mountains" (1881) (The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Vailima edition, vol. 24 [1912], 458). The tension between these two stances is everywhere in Victorian literature, as Tennyson's works especially remind us. The poet who wrote in "The Lotos Eaters" (1832) that "there is no joy but calm," depicted "Ulysses" (1833) as deeply discontent when idle; unwilling to "rest from travel," Tennyson's hero embraces instead a life of unrelenting movement and striving pursuit (Alfred Tennyson: The Major Works, edited by Adam Roberts [Oxford University Press, 2009], l.68, 6).

Heidi Liedke's study, The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850–1901, takes a deep dive into the fascinating phenomenon of writers in the latter half of the century exploring what it meant to be idle—for example, what sorts of experiences, spatial and temporal, enabled one, if so disposed, to be idle, and what sorts of responses were engendered by that state. The intellectual history and semantic survey that Liedke develops for the concept of idleness advances her claim that travel writing of the period is a "quintessentially late-Romantic" genre (8–9). This context informs her understanding of idleness, which she sees as "a problem of history": "In Victorian England, idleness was anachronistic," Liedke writes, "happening 'against' other, dominant, concepts and their respective value for society. These other concepts were leisure and work in particular" (25).

Although Liedke's readers may wish she had arrived at her destination—five substantial case studies—a tad sooner, her self-declared "itinerary" necessitates that she first chart a prehistory of idleness and examine the concept's semantic fields, the fund of rhetoric that later Victorian writers drew on for their understanding and representation of the experience (8). Along the way she posits and explores three esoteric but generative dimensions to the experience of idleness: readiness, which she claims as the "default state" of Victorian idlers, "thereness," and "dynamic perception" (9). Moreover, she makes a claim for idleness as essential to the ways the writers she studies experienced and represented space. I found her on more convincing ground when tackling the tangible facets of a culture whose commitments seemed to mitigate against and even to condemn the experience of being idle. Chapter 4, for example, studies the "Dangers of Idle Time" via an analysis of The Railway Traveller's Handy Book (1862) that examines the manual's deployment of a rhetoric of "musing" and "whiling away" to tackle the supposed dangers of idleness (70). Chapter 5, on gender and genre, traverses somewhat more predictable ground, showing how "to be idle (and enjoy it) would have been more acceptable for men than for women" (90).

Whatever the benefits of the careful scaffolding supplied by these opening chapters, the book picks up the pace when it pivots to its case studies. These start with Anna Mary Howitt's study of Munich in the 1850s. Liedke moves from here to the relatively little-known but fascinating travel text of W. H. Hudson's Idle Days in Patagonia (1893) and from there to Jerome K. Jerome's semi-fictional Three Men in a Boat (1889). She then turns to parts of Margaret...