TRAVELLERS AND

TRAVELOGUES (1)

Henry Fielding
Travel Writings in the Eighteenth Century
• The late Renaissance: two types of narratives – the scientific and the
sentimental – which would eventually become the dominant models
for the travel genre.
• The eighteenth century: the rule - upon their return home, travellers
were bound to write down their observations and impressions that,
once published, could contribute to teaching the readership the lesson
of relativity of cultural and mental software. The awareness of
the separation of mind and matter, sustained by the theories of Locke
and Newton, had two consequences for travel writing: “the emotions,
thoughts, and personal quirks of the narrator become more accessible
and more dominant within the narrative and the world itself, its plants,
animals, and people also become a source of knowledge for their own
sake.” (Blanton, 2002: 11-2)
– confidence in knowing/naming the world by scientific means → the
representation of foreign peoples and places in largely Eurocentric travel
writings whose purpose is to objectively describe a foreign world;
– the attempt to sentimentalise and/or glorify the narrator’s experiences in
hostile environments → the inner world is stressed over the outer world.
H. Fielding, Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon
(1755)
• an interesting representation of the contrasting roles
Fielding played out in his final days: “his withdrawal, acutely
disillusioned with the literary and political cultures left
behind him, was very much that of the disregarded sage,
aloof in exile. […] Drained by the legal work to which he
then devoted his energies, and gravely ill, he left England in
June 1754 in hopes of surviving the milder winter of
Portugal.” (Keymer in Fielding, 1996: viii)
• Early reader response: Many readers “were struck above all
by the work’s generic confusion, its discordant mingling of
satire and jest with the solemnity of valediction”, as well as
by “the little reverence for the antique South and much
distaste for all things foreign”. (Keymer in Fielding, 1996:
viii)
 Journey as Therapy
• The journey to the Continent as THERAPY
↓
Fielding’s precarious health/humour
“the most amusing pages … were possibly the production of
the most disagreeable hours which ever haunted the
author”. Thus, Fielding puts himself in a tradition of
comedy which, far from hiding pain beneath jest, keeps
both in constant dialogue.
↓
an unblinking gaze on the body’s decay in a narrative
of approaching death in which diseases gather as
though in alliance or siege: “no fewer or less diseases
than a jaundice, a dropsy, and an asthma, altogether
uniting their forces in the destruction of a body so entirely
emaciated that it had lost all its muscular flesh.” (Fielding,
1996: 14)
 Imagery of Sickness: The Decay of the
Physical Body and of the Body Politic
• The Journal turns a cool scrutiny on the repulsiveness
of his body’s decay, the cure of which is hoped to be
provided by a journey to the warmer South:
– “Aix in Provence was the place first thought on; but the difficulties
of getting thither were insuperable. The Journey by land, beside
the expense of it, was infinitely too long and fatiguing; and I could
hear of no ship that was likely to set out from London, within any
reasonable time, for Marseilles, or any other port in that part of
the Mediterranean.
Lisbon was presently fixed on in its room. The air here, as it was
near four degrees to the south of Aix, must be more mild and
warm, and the winter shorter and less piercing.” (Fielding, 1996:
20)
• In a half serious, half comic tone, it presents its author’s
disease as merely part of some larger, and seemingly
inescapable, pattern of decay and pain in a hostile world.
Imagery of Sickness: The Decay of the
Physical Body and of the Body Politic
• Heavy seas make the voyage all the more difficult to
bear and leave Fielding’s companions “more inclined to
empty their stomachs than to fill them” and his own
bowels “almost twisted out of my belly.” (Fielding, 1996:
40-1)
• Like other eighteenth-century travel writers, Fielding
resorted to the allegorical/ metaphorical
development of the imagery of sickness with two
distinct consequences for his autobiographical discourse:
1. The reader can detect a parallel between Fielding’s body
and the ship, as they both escape their respective ailments of
excess water and adverse wind at the same time: “While the
surgeon was drawing away my water, the sailors were drawing
up the anchor; both were finished at the same time.” (Fielding,
1996: 93) → the wind-bound ship is Fielding’s presiding
symbol, in the Journal, for the sheer cussedness of life.
 Imagery of Sickness: The Decay of the
Physical Body and of the Body Politic
2. Another analogy at work in Fielding’s text relates the suffering of the
physical body to that of the body politic. “A double emphasis links
Fielding’s disease not only metaphorically with the sickness of the public realm
but also literally – indeed causally – with his own professional struggles, as
magistrate, to find and work the cure.” (Keymer, 1996: xiii) The idea of the
state as body politic is a commonplace often invoked by Fielding as an
image of civil ills. The state Fielding leaves is debased from top to toe: a state
in which ‘the common bands of humanity’ give way to ‘the language and
behaviour of savages’; a state in which ‘every man spunges and raps whatever
he can get.’ The petty extortions of watermen and innkeepers find inspiration in
a government that taxes light itself; […]. At every level community decays,
weakened above by an élite which neglects the traditional obligations of
patrician politics, and threatened below by a mob grown licentious and grasping
in imitation of their masters. The state needs healing, in short, and the language
of medicine is rarely far from Fielding’s mind. The Journal = a book ‘to propose
the remedies’ of the sickness, to point out ‘the facility of curing it’, and to
denounce in ruling powers ‘the shameful neglect of the cure.’ (Keymer, 1996:
xiv)
Assuming the position of a ‘Censor’ or a ‘monitor’ in the tradition of Addison and
Steele, Fielding satirises and castigates aspects of national life. […] the
Journal mediates between the functions of Fielding’s satirical journalism and the
debilitating struggles of his magistracy.” (Keymer, 1996: xvi)
 The Encounter with the Foreign Other
• Fielding’s travelogue differs significantly from those of
most of the English travellers to the Continent in that it
dwells almost exclusively on details of the voyage through
the English Channel and then further on the Atlantic Ocean
towards the Iberian Peninsula but suddenly stops as the
ship finally reaches the Portuguese shore. → a book less
about Portugal than about London, Ryde and Tor
Bay
• The final entries - the encounter with the Portuguese
other. The resulting hetero-images that pervade the text,
far from being flattering, seem to “show an Englishman’s
dislike to be ‘done’ and an Englishman’s determination to
be treated with proper respect”, in other words, to reveal
the xenophobic reaction of an ethnocentric
observer.
Hetero-images, Intertextuality and Parody
• From the very Preface, “even as he stakes his claims to didactic seriousness, he
undermines it by the mock pomposity with which he wishes to ‘fall at once to
the direct and positive praises of the work itself; of which indeed I could say a
thousand good things.’ He then justifies his aims with reference to Samuel
Richardson’s theories of instruction, only (and almost in the same breath) to
ridicule this very authority as a self-promoting humbug whose works are mere
waste-paper.” (Keymer, 1996: xviii)
• The Journal - as a parody of travel writing and its didactic pretensions
in which the voyaging narrator himself is the foremost target:
– the Preface, which mocks the tendency of travel writers to lapse into the fantastic
and the mundane,
– a subtle intertextual exercise reminiscent especially of Aphra Behn ridiculing vice in
a voyage-writer through her character from The Feign’d Curtezans, Timothy
Tickletext – a combination of ignorance, ethnocentrism and self-
importance. (Keymer, 1996: xxi) “Fielding declares himself keen (in a characteristic
image) ‘to steer clear’ of such faults [as Ticketext’s], yet he falls into them
suspiciously often. It is as though the mention of Behn’s play, overtly there to
illustrate what the Journal is not, serves instead as an implicit indication of what in
part the Journal is – a parody of inept travel writing, ironically written at the
expense of, and sending up, its own narrating voice.” (1996: xxi-xxii)
• A parodic dialogue with the most celebrated travel books of the time (e.g.
Anson’s Voyage round the World (1748) and, from among the existing accounts
of voyages to Lisbon, Udal ap Rhys’s Account of the Most Remarkable Places
and Curiosities in Spain and Portugal (printed by Richardson in 1749) and
William Bromley’s Several Years Travels through Portugal, Spain, etc. (1702))
 Irony and Classical Allusions
• As in his novels, in constructing his irony, Fielding relied, to a large
extent, on elements borrowed from the ancient tradition of travel
books best represented by The Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. → The
Journal = a work of mock epic, in which Fielding casts himself in
the mildly ludicrous role of some latter-day Ulysses or Aeneas.
Playing on the traditional association of Troy with London, and on
another tradition which attributes to Ulysses the foundation of Lisbon,
Fielding turns the mismatch between heroic forms and post-heroic
achievement to clever comic effect. Yet the underlying joke of these
epic analogies is in the end of a melancholy kind: he voyages in
sickness through adverse winds not to some Ithaca or New Troy but
instead to a kind of earthly hell, ‘the nastiest city in the world.’
• Like the circle of life, Fielding’s Journal opens and ends with the image
of the sun: the rise of “the most melancholy sun I had ever beheld”
(Fielding, 1996: 22) as the journey begins, and sunset at “a coffee-
house, which is very pleasantly situated on the brow of a hill” (Fielding,
1996: 107) as the travellers reach their destination. “The symmetry
alone implies a moment of symbolic force, as Fielding bids farewell to
this world of literary production and affairs of state – theatres and
courts – and watches the onset of night.” (Keymer in Fielding, 1996:
xxx)