Curious Travellers are delighted to announce a major new publication. Here, Nigel Leask explains what this book sets out to do.
“Stepping Westward grew out of the wider research on Pennant’s Welsh and Scottish tours central to Curious Travellers: that’s why the chapter on Pennant’s Scottish tours is really the keystone of the book. It’s the first study of its kind dedicated to the literature of the Scottish Highland tour 1720-1830, which attracted writers and artists like Pennant, Johnson and Boswell, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Hogg, Keats, Daniell, and Turner, as well as numerous less celebrated travellers and tourists. Addressing more than a century’s worth of literary and visual accounts of the Highlands, the book casts new light on how the tour developed a modern literature of place, acting as a catalyst for thinking about improvement, landscape, and the shaping of British, Scottish and Gaelic identities. Special attention is paid to the relationship between travellers and the native Gaels, whose world was plunged into crisis by rapid and forced social change in the wake of Culloden. The best-selling tours of Pennant and Dr Johnson, alongside the Ossian craze and Gilpin’s picturesque, stimulated a wave of ‘home tours’ from the 1770s through the romantic period, including writing by women like Sarah Murray and Dorothy Wordsworth. The incidence of published Highland Tours (many lavishly illustrated), peaked around 1800, but as the genre reached exhaustion, the ‘romantic Highlands’ were reinvented in Scott’s poems and novels, coinciding with steam boats and mass tourism, but also rack-renting, sheep clearance and emigration.”