The Improving Eye: Eighteenth-Century Picturesque Travel and Agricultural Change in the Scottish Highlands

The Improving Eye: Eighteenth-Century Picturesque Travel and Agricultural Change in the Scottish Highlands JULIERAK Eighteenth-century English tourists on the Scottish Highlands tour who made use of picturesque guidelines used a series of strategies to mediate their responses to nature within political and economic frames. ' In ways which have not been acknowledged in criticism of the picturesque, the commodification of landscape for travellers not only depended on the language of the picturesque used by tourists to construct an aesthetic response to landscape, it also depended on a similar set of practices which landowners used to "improve"2 the market value of land as part of new, pan-British economic practices. These practices depended on the same ideology of national progress through improvement, and were reflected back into aesthetic considerations of supposedly "wild" picturesque sites. On the picturesque tour of the Highlands, travel discourse helped to bring the Highlands as an object of knowledge into the British empire, a practice which paralleled the bringing of Highland mral economy into a British industrial economy and the end of local Highland culture based on a feudal system. Picturesque discourse comes into play at specific sites in the Highlands which landowners constructed to access the land the way they thought that it was meant to be viewed, as improved because it too is a commodity. Improved land will not only produce economically: it will produce visual improvements as a result of these other anangements. 343 344 / R A K English travellers saw, celebrated and recorded this set of relations between economic and moral improvement as the necessary preconditions for landscape improvement as aesthetic, and aesthetic as a "co-condition" for capitalist ideas about empire. The arrival of picturesque tourists from 1774 onwards to an area where a war had been fought against English forces thirty years before signalled that Scotland, and the Highlands in particular, had become a set of sites for English tourists where the painful movements towards new economies could function as a framing of land as productive, and productivity as beautiful and good—for the new Britain. Improved access to wilderness in this discourse became emblematic of a national spirit where the wilderness itself becomes Scotland, a commodity available for English consumption in the picturesque image trade. As the picturesque tourists well knew, the experience of wilderness took place on private property. The invisible hand which created access to natural wonders was also Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of capitalist development tied to market forces and competition for resources. Viewing Apparatus: Inveraray as a Tour Site Clearly, the discourses of improvement changed the economics, society and geography of the Highlands in profound ways. In addition, English travel discourses which used picturesque conventions described the effects of improvement without making the these changes visible. Therefore, in order to bring these economic and geographic consequences of improvement into view, I will construct a "spatial genealogy" of the area of Inveraray in Argyllshire, a popular picturesque tour site in the Highlands where the changing use of land, the "benevolent" actions of the landowner, and the construction of natural aesthetics come together. I will do this because the nanatives of the picturesque , as Alan Liu has pointed out, operate on the premise that there is no narrative: there is no history in landscape.3 There is no real sense of place in these nanatives either because place becomes a passive field on which aesthetic and economic improvements can be enacted. Since picturesque discourse leaves out the changes which indicate how old ideas of place were changing, I propose an alternative to a close reading of those texts. Referring to the site of Inveraray as much as possible, I will attempt to reconstruct the web of power relations—economic, historical, geographic—operating widiin it, relations which contributed, finally, to the viewing of land as landscape in popular travel nanatives using picturesque interpretive frames. I use the word "attempt" deliberately, since the construction of such a nanative will mean that I will never invoke a "real," "whole" Inveraray. But at least, Inveraray will be one possible lens and field which will indicate how the land of the The Improving Eye: Eighteenth-Century Picturesque Travel / 345 Highlands...