Interaction between the Novel and Travelling

Table of Content

1 Introduction

2 Historical background information
2.1 The rise of the novel
2.2 The development of travel

3 Interaction between travel and the novel in the 18th century Britain
3.1 Influence of travel on the novel
3.2 Influence of the novel on travel

4 Depiction of travel in Oroonoko and A Sentimental Journey

5 Conclusion

Bibliography

1 Introduction

Standing at an international airport or a huge train station, we can observe two ways in which travellers spend their leisure time while waiting for their plane or train. Either, they are buying food or souvenirs, or they are reading. Some read their daily newspapers, others their favourite comics and some are hidden behind big books. Presumably, the majority of the people who are holding the big books are reading novels containing love stories, thrillers or something similar. While reading these stories, they are probably on a journey together with the protagonist of the plot, experiencing perhaps unknown or, to them, unfamiliar, but interesting and exciting situations. These people are travelling in their minds to far distant places while they are actually travelling, for example, to their working place, their home or to their holiday resort.

What is true now, has been true then. Some people in the 18th century, who had the possibility to travel, took some travel accounts with them on their journey and read them while actually travelling themselves. Others who had to stay at home travelled, as well, by reading books. Although they were in different positions, they shared their love for reading and travelling.

This term paper will analyse the connection between the two popular leisure time activities in 18th century Britain, i.e. travelling and reading novels.

Before analysing their interaction, we will have a look at some background information about both activities, to get a basis for the analysis.

2 Historical background information

In this section, we will have a brief look at the reasons for the novel to become so popular during the 18th century and further, we will go back to the roots of travelling and analyse the different reasons for people to travel.

2.1 The rise of the novel

It is difficult to give an exact date when the first novel was written. Further, it is also complicated to name the century when this new literary form appeared for the first time. Scholars are not of one mind on this point. The reason for them having different opinions probably derives from their focussing on different countries and different literary works. While Ian Watt claims that the novel’s roots are situated in 18th century Britain, other scholars, like Catherine Ingrassia say that “the idea of ‘the novel’ was not located in British culture, but was consistently European and often global in its scope and influences” (Backscheider, Ingrassia, 2005: 1). In addition, William Warner points out that it is “problematic to assume that what happened in one country can be taken as the norm for others” (Hadfield, 2007: 27). As opposed to Watt, who claims that the first novel was Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, published in 1719, other scholars consider the first novel to be William Baldwin’s Beware the cat (published around 1550) or Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (published in 1688). Probably, the truth is to be found somewhere in between and as there is no exact dating of the appearance of the first novel, in this term paper we stick to Ian Watt’s definition and put it at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century.

Watt suggests that the first novelists were Defoe, Richardson and Fielding and furthermore, that “the appearance of our first three novelists within a single generation was probably not sheer accident” (Watt, 2000: 9), so there must have been favourable conditions allowing the new literary form to develop, such as – according to Watt only focusing on Britain – social changes during the Enlightenment (as cause of Locke’s and Rousseau’s texts), the increase of literacy in wider parts of the British society and the rise of the middle class.

In more detail, Watt claims ‘formal realism’ to be one of the main reasons for the success of novels in the 18th century. In contrast to classical and renaissance literature, the new form did not take its plot “from mythology, history, legend or previous literature” (Watt, 2000: 14), but used non-traditional plots, which were “either wholly invented or based in part on a contemporary incident” (Watt, 2000: 15). According to Watt, after the Renaissance, individual experience started to replace collective tradition, breaking with the universal opinion of writers from ancient Greece or Rome and also writers of the Elizabethan age like Chaucer and Shakespeare that Nature is complete and human experience consists of a definitive repertoire (Watt, 2000: 14). The basic characteristics of the novel’s style have been the individualisation of its characters, e.g. by giving proper names; further, the detailed presentation of their surroundings; as well as giving the reader “a sense of actual participation in the action” (Watt, 2000: 25) by adopting a detailed time-scheme which influences the speed of the narrative so as to create a description very near to actual experience. Further, prose style has been used more than in earlier literature, where it has often been mixed with poetry. For the reading public, who often did not have a good education, the prose style made understanding easier, which is another reason for the novel to be often chosen as a form of entertainment. On the whole, novels were adapted to fit the needs of the middle class population, with plots that were true-to-life in the 18th century, portraying the lives and fates of protagonists who were of the same class as their reader i.e. lower or middle class. According to Watt, these features lead to the effect that “the majority of readers in the last two hundred years have found in the novel the literary form which most closely satisfies their wishes for a close correspondence between life and art” (Watt, 2000: 33).

2.2 The development of travel

Travelling is not a phenomenon of recent times. In all ages of mankind, people have travelled for different reasons. The earliest must be the Stone Age men, who travelled the country in search of food and to find secure places in which to settle down. Afterwards, people basically made the effort of travelling for economical reasons and as a result several trade routes were established. According to Sethi, trade and commerce was one of the strongest forces, which made people travel to distant countries (Sethi, 1999: 1). Explorations of people like Alexander the Great and Marco Polo paved the way for modern travel and trade.

“The concept of pleasure travel as it existed in the west can be associated with the Roman Empire” (Sethi, 1999: 5). Probably, this was made possible by the network of roads which the Romans build wherever they went. “They journeyed primarily to see famous temples in the Mediterranean areas particularly the monuments and the famous pyramids of Egypt.[…] Medicinal baths and seaside resorts […] were very popular with the Romans” (Sethi, 1999: 5). However, after the fall of the Roman Empire, travel again was very difficult and often dangerous, because the road networks decayed during the dark ages.

During the Middle Ages another reason for travelling became famous: travel for religious purposes. Going on pilgrimages “became a well established custom in many parts of the world” and “it provided the impetus for a ‘stay-at-home’ agrarian society to break out of its narrow geographical confines” (Sethi, 1999: 6/7). While visiting famous European shrines, such as St James of Compostella, people now had the opportunity to experience new customs in far away countries. Furthermore “the adoption and spread of Christianity subsequently led to numerous pilgrims making their way to the Holy Land” (Sethi, 1999: 6).

After the Renaissance, tourism reappeared in Europe, which was also due to the development of a larger network of roads. During the rise of Protestantism pilgrimages ceased to be sanctioned, which set the stage for the Grand Tour as the new accepted travelling form. In the beginning, only “young English gentlemen were sent on their travels to gather information which could be turned to the nation’s advantage and to train them as representatives of England’s prestige at foreign courts” (Hibbert, 1987: 14/15). On their educational journey through European countries like France, Italy, Germany and sometimes Spain or Greece, which often took several years, the aristocratic men, aged between sixteen and twenty-two, were accompanied by a tutor, who had to take care of them. During the Napoleonic wars, British people basically travelled on the island and discovered their own country. Following the example of the Roman Empire towns at the seaside like Bath became famous and travelling for health was en vogue. After the Napoleonic wars, “with the new wealth of the English bourgeoisie the number of tourists had multiplied” (Sethi, 1999: 8). The Grand Tour was no longer an aristocratic preserve, but the travellers now “deviated from the pattern in terms of age, social status, financial resources, or the duration of their journey” (Dekker, 2005: 11). This development paved the way for the popular tourism of the 19th and 20th century, which was catalysed by the Industrial Revolution and of course, to name only one example, the introduction of railways throughout Europe.

Talking about transport and accommodation, we can’t compare it to recent standards. “Like all transport of the pre-railway age it was wasteful of time, equipment and manpower” (Miller, 1987: 191). While the poorer travellers had to walk, the rich could afford to ride on horseback or to take coaches. In towns, like London, so called sedan chairs were used, which consisted of a box mounted on rails. “The passenger sat inside while two men, one in front and one behind, carried the chair by holding the horizontal rails” (Olsen, 1999: 175). However, this kind of transport system wasn’t very practical for long distances, so that the use of carriages became necessary. This was very expensive, since the owning or hiring of carriages was taxed during the 18th century. The cheapest option for taking a carriage was the stagecoach, because it was very slow (about four miles per hour). “Four to six passengers sat inside; additional riders sat on top of the carriage” (Olsen, 1999: 177). More privacy and comfort was provided by post chaises, which only contained seats for two people and therefore were very expensive – but they were also faster than the stagecoaches. Very rich people could afford to buy their own coaches, which could have cost up to £ 200 including two horses. Other people rented coaches for a fixed period of time which was less expensive. With regard to accommodation, there was a wide range of possibilities for travellers to stay overnight – of course even in the more expensive categories not comparable to our standards today. “There were no networks of inns or hotels to match the post roads of Europe, and accommodation outside the major towns was only provided on any scale on a few of the major routes” (Black, 1985: 60). Due to travel accounts, sleeping in barns was as good as sleeping in an inn, because the beds were dirty, windows were often broken and fleas and rats were not unusual. Some of the richer travellers therefore carried a bed along or sometimes had the possibility to take their lodging at an acquaintance’s house.

[...]