Defoe’s Tour: The Changing ‘Face of Things’

KATHERINE TURNER

It was not until the seventh edition of A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain in 1769 that Daniel Defoe’s name appeared on the title page. Far from celebrating Defoe as the original genius of the Tour, however, the title page describes how the work was ‘Originally begun by the celebrated Daniel De Foe, continued by the late Mr. Richardson, Author of Clarissa, and brought down to the present Time by a Gentleman of Eminence in the Literary World’. In all previous editions, the work had simply been subtitled ‘By a Gentleman’: and in 1778, the eighth and final edition of the Tour in the eighteenth century, this becomes a collective of editorial ‘Gentlemen’. They and their predecessors were no doubt responding not only to the continuing and lucrative demand for the Tour, but also to Defoe’s own hints in ‘The Author’s Preface, to the First Volume’ (1724):

A compleat Account of Great Britain will be the Work of many Years, I might say Ages, and may employ many Hands: Whoever has travell’d Great Britain before us, and whatever they have written, tho‘ they may have had a Harvest, yet they have always, either by Necessity, Ignorance or Negligence pass’d over so much, that others may come and Glean after them by large Handfuls.

[...I for the Face of Things so often alters, and the Situation of Affairs in this Great British Empire gives such new Turns, even to Nature it self, that there is Matter of new Observation every Day presented to the Traveller’s Eye.

[...I In a Word, New Matter offers to new Observations, and they who write next, may perhaps find as much room for enlarging upon us, as we do upon those that have gone before’

Twentieth-century literary critics have denigrated or ignored the successive editorial accretions to which Defoe’s Tour was subjected between 1727 and 1778. Pat Rogers, in his ‘Introduction’ to the 1971 Penguin abridgement of the Tour - the most accessible modern edition for the general reader and undergraduate - briefly describes some of Richardson’s later editorial additions and then laments the way in which ‘Defoe’s “journeys” have been overlaid by the banal function of an official handbook [...I as time went on the concoction of Defoe and editorial water grew more and more diluted’.’ More recently, Betty A. Schellenberg has deprecated the way in which the Tour came to provide a literary focus for readers’ growing sense of ‘a national community’, thereby becoming ‘a politically reactionary, ostensibly static collection of country houses and antiq~ities’.~ She cites, as a conceptual paradigm for this negative account of the Tour’s later history,

British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 (ZOOI), p.189-206 BSECS 0141-867X

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Carole Fabricant’s diagnosis of ‘the paradoxical situation in which the accumulation of more and more land in the hands of fewer and fewer was accompanied by the dispersion of ownership, as psychological and aesthetic (or more precisely tourist) experience, throughout widening areas of ~oc ie ty’ .~ In thus applying Fabricant’s observation to Defoe’s Tour, however, Schellenberg seems to be missing the point. For, as Fabricant suggests, and as successive editions of the Tour graphically illustrate, the growing familiarity of the British landscape to readers, editors and travellers alike becomes a source of increasing national self-consciousness and pride, beneath which the question of literal ownership (of text and copyright as well as land) becomes subsumed.j Moreover, to describe later editions of the Tour as a mere ‘collection of country houses and antiquities’ is a curious under- estimation of a dynamic and complex publishing phenomenon.

I propose in this essay to describe some of the most significant changes made to later editions of Defoe’s Tour during the eighteenth century, and suggest that these changes constitute not so much acts of literary violation, as a dynamic, natural and sociable process of growth wholly in keeping with Defoe’s own enterprise, which has been described as the celebration and encouragement of ‘Britain’s wealth, prosperity and “increase”’.‘ The complicated and industrious process of accretion which unfolds with successive editions not only provides valuable insights into the changing face of the British landscape, it also crystallises significant cultural changes during the fifty or so years with which we are concerned. Finally, the publishing history of the Tour opens up new ways of reading eighteenth- century texts which refuse to sit quietly within established literary categories.

Before turning to the Tour itself, however, a brief survey of twentieth- century approaches to the work will help clarify some of the issues at stake. Historical and bibliographical critics have explored Defoe’s use of sources, sometimes acknowledged, sometimes shamelessly uncredited. J. H. Andrews, representatively, highlighted in 1959 a silent plagiarism from the 1695 edition (by Edmund Gibson) of Camden’s Britannia which ‘provides fresh evidence of the carelessness and haste with which Defoe’s masterpiece was ~ r i t t e n ’ . ~ In 1960 Andrews also demonstrated the extent of Defoe’s considerable debt to John Macky’s Journey through England in Familiar Letters (1714-1723), concluding that, except in his sections on London and East Anglia, ‘Defoe was using his rival’s work to conceal the fact that his own researches were more than ten years out of date’.8 The journeys Defoe describes in the Tour were indeed made at various different times: the 1690s the period between 1703 and 1714, and the two years (1722-1724) immediately preceding the text’s publication. The historian F. Bastian observed in 1967 that the long time-scales of Defoe’s journeys, and his extensive borrowings from previous authors, make the Tour unreliable as a ‘historical source’, and indeed a ‘montage of details drawn from the previous fifty years’.y In fact, some of the details were over IOO years old.

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Pre-eminent among literary scholars of Defoe, Pat Rogers has catalogued the Tour’s extensive, often unacknowledged, ‘pilfering’ from Camden’s Britannia: conceding that ‘Britannia forms a base around which Defoe introduces embellishments, personal glosses, and general updating’, and observing that there are least at eighty unacknowledged borrowings from Camden, on top of the eighty or so which are acknowledged, Rogers nevertheless maintains that ‘Defoe has made the blood of Britannia circulate rudely through his own Tour, and amazingly the body displays every sign of rude health’.’’ In several other articles on the Tour, Rogers plays down the plagiarism which he has himself highlighted, focusing instead on Defoe’s artistry. The discrediting of the Tour as a historical document necessitates from the literary establishment an increased emphasis on the ‘zest and enthusiasm’ of the author.” Rogers claims that the Tour ’embodies all Defoe’s accumulated skills as chronicler, polemicist and creative writer. It is, in short, a deeply imaginative book’.’”

Others have worked on this ‘deeply imaginative’ premise. Alistair Duckworth has argued that the Tour is a highly literary embodiment of ‘Augustan Compromise, uniting aesthetic pleasure with the ethic of “use”’; while Jo Ann T. Hackos has analyzed the metaphor of the garden in Defoe’s text, arguing that Defoe’s ‘creation becomes a verbal equivalent of the visual creation of the gardener’.’’ Making the highest claim of all for the literary status of the Tour, Rogers redefines it as the patriotic epic which none of Defoe’s poetic contemporaries succeeded in creating for their country as it emerged into ‘a consciousness of its own power and nati~nhood’.’~ All such readings, however, depend upon a highly selective reading of the ‘original’ Tour, the literary canonisation of which not only obscures the way in which the text was written, read and used during the eighteenth century, but also flies in the face of Defoe’s own sanctioning of future editorial additions so that the Tour’s ‘vision of nationhood’ might continue to be relevant.

The issue of editorial abridgement in the twentieth century is also pertinent here. The editorial policy of the Yale illustrated version is to retain the ‘Letter’ structure, but to

make substantial cuts where Defoe quotes from other authors, or copies out documents, at length: where he supplies standard detailed historical or archeological information readily available elsewhere: where he repeats himself [...I and [...I where he digresses from his journey to give an extended discussion of some general topic - for example, his lengthy and valuable appendix on the British road system at the end of letter vii.15

Thus excluded are numerous ‘undigested items of a documentary nature’, to use Bastian’s phrase: for example, a Royalist account of the siege of Colchester, 1648; a description of Southwell Minster, ‘from a reverend and learned friend’; and Defoe’s own detailed plans for rebuilding the Palace of Whitehall, burned down in 1698.’~ All such items are also excluded from Rogers’ Penguin abridgement, which operates on similar principles, so that

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Defoe can lead his reader elegantly through the countryside, ‘contrasting scenes following one another in smooth s ~ c c e s s i o n ’ . ~ ~ Rogers’ endnotes give brief notice of excised passages, but his ‘Introduction’ nowhere hints that the Tour contains significant liftings from other texts. The experience of reading the text in both these recent editions is far more seamless and organic than that which a reader of Defoe’s original text would have enjoyed. The abridgements may present a ‘purer’ Defoe, but this means that our Tour is not that of 1724-1727.

Not only does Rogers remove text which Defoe had silently lifted from other sources, but he also excises passages such as the ‘Appendix’ to letter i in 1724, in which Defoe corrected an earlier observation on the extent of the Port of London, and gave details of Walpole’s new ‘Palace’ at Houghton in Norfolk, which had ‘arisen out of the Ruins of the ancient Seat of the Family’ since ‘these Sheets were in the Press’ (later editions dutifully give updates on progress at Houghton). Perhaps most suggestive are the opening lines of the ‘Appendix’, in which Defoe explains (i.92) that

Whoever travels, as I do, over England, and writes the Account of his Observations, will, as I noted before, always leave something, altering or undertaking, by such a growing, improving Nation as this; or something to discover in a Nation, where so much is hid, sufficient to employ the Pens of those that come after him, or to add, by way of Appendix to what he has already observ’d.’’

Thus, in contrast to the seamless and permanent artefact described by recent literary critics (and somewhat disingenously marketed to the purchasers of modern abridgements), Defoe himself envisaged ‘Posterity [.. .] continually adding’ to the face of the nation and to its textual record (i.4). In the ‘Preface’ to volume iii (1726), he points out that ‘Since our last Volume, we have to add to the Description of the Parts in and about London, a large Variety both of Publick and Private Buildings’. He lists these at length, then asks rhetorically (ii.536):

If all these Additions are to be found in the small Interval between the publishing the second Volume and this of the third, and that in so narrow a Compass, what may not every subsequent Year produce? and what Encouragement is here for new and more accurate Surveys of this Country? which, whoever travels over it, will always furnish new Materials, and a Variety both profitable and delightful.

SamuelRichardson, who printed the editions of1738,1742,1748,1753 and 1761, and probably had a substantial editorial hand in all of these, responded enthusiastically, as did the growing army of fellow contributors, to Defoe’s emphasis on revision and a~cretion.’~ The ‘Preface’ to the 1738 edition testifies to the editorial energies of the text’s new proprietors: quoting Defoe’s own remarks on the ever-improving state of Britain, the writer then declares that ‘the very great Improvements we have been able to make to [the first edition], are a sufficient Verification of what he observes, on the Alterations to

Defoe’s ‘Tour’: The Changirg ‘Face of Things’ 193

which such a Subject must be always liable’ (1738, i.ix). We are also informed that the present editors have taken care to preserve the Tour’s epistolary structure and style, in order to avoid displeasing the reader with disruptive apparatus. There is one exception to this general rule, however: the ‘Preface’ writer explains that in volume i, new additions to the text will be square- bracketed (though excisions cannot be signified), but in volumes ii and iii. the square brackets will be abandoned, since they are designed ‘only [...I to give the Reader an Idea of the Pains we have taken’ (1738, i.x). This is revealing: identifying the additions serves not to highlight original authorship, but rather to demonstrate editorial diligence. The ‘Preface’ writer claims a respectable precedent for the square-bracketing, however, noting that this is ‘the Method which the Right Reverend Continuator of Camden has pursu’d’ (1738, i.x).‘” The effect of this square-bracketing can be confusing. There is a particularly complex section on the River Mole in Leatherhead: Camden, Gibson (the ‘Right Reverend Continuator’), Defoe and the 1738 editor all have different opinions concerning the source of this river, and these opinions are slotted into each other within a series of square brackets, like Chinese boxes of authority. The 1738 continuator lifts verbatim Defoe’s own claim that ‘As I liv’d some time myself in the Neighbourhood, I will now give the Observations I made upon this Subject, and which may be depended upon’ (1738, i.221), following this claim with new information which contradicts Defoe’s original account. The ’I’ who lived in the area is a purely rhetorical device; yet if, as is claimed, the most recent information is the most correct, such narrative duplicity is justified in terms of empirical authority. Indeed, the 1738 ‘Preface’ claims that a mere replication of the first edition would be at best incomplete, at worst dishonest, ‘the Face of Things in many Places being greatly chang’d, that tho’ this Work has been for some Time past very scarce, yet it would have been inexcusable to have republish’d it as it stood’ (1738, i.i-ii).

This is not the place to perform a comprehensive collation of every edition of the Tour, the shortest version of which amounts to over 400000 words: that would be, in Defoe’s own words, ‘the Work of many Years’, or at least of a sophisticated scanner and software package. However, some general points, illustrated by examples from particular editions, may serve usefully to demonstrate the significant tendencies of later editions.

The 1738 edition includes much new material on London, thereby providing, the ‘Preface’ writer hopes, ‘the best Account of that glorious Capital, that has hitherto been given in so small a Compass’ (1738, i.xi), and describing the ‘prodigious Increase’ of churches, hospitals, prisons, and ‘other most noted Edifices, Structures and Squares’ (1738, ii.85). Later editions ensure that the London panorama is up to date, 1778, for example, boasting of the Pantheon as ‘superior to any thing of the kind in Europe’ (1778, ii.92). The growth of other cities (pre-eminently Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol) is well documented in later editions, mirroring the gradual challenge posed to the capital by provincial centres of trade,

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institutionalised welfare, culture, and conspicuous consumption. ‘Very great Improvements have been made to the City of Bristol’ (1738, i.xi), we are informed in a conflation of city and text characteristic of the Tour.

1738 adds a substantial account of Winchester, devoting some twenty-two pages (ii.261-83) to a description of the new charitable ‘Infirmary’ there. The account is presented both as a tribute to the founders of the Infirmary (especially ‘his Majesty King George II’), and as a ‘laudable Example’ for ‘every great Town thro’ the whole Kingdom’ to follow (1738, i.282). Defoe’s original Tour had had a similar prescriptive, exemplary aim in its accounts of local manufacturing. He had encouraged towns to produce specific items and trade them for specialist items produced by other areas. This hoped-for cycle of description, prescription and imitation, in matters of trade as well as charity, is described, fulfilled and encouraged in the Tour’s successive editions.

Elaborate accounts of Oxford and Cambridge, in which Defoe as a Dissenter had shown little interest, are inserted into 1738. There is also a description of the amusements at Bath, with enthusiasm for ‘its present great Improvements’ (I 738, i.xi). Several of Defoe’s rather dour condemnations of ‘Assemblies’, ‘those Seminaries of Crime’ (i.87), are excised. Such changes not only reflect physical changes in the face of the country and shifts in editorial opinion, they also function as an index to the shifting tastes and interests of the envisaged readership, and the Tour thus becomes a barometer of cultural change, embodying the preoccupations and growing cultural self- consciousness of the ‘middling sort’ in both provincial and metropolitan contexts.

In the editions of 1742, 1748, 1753 and 1761 (this last published after Richardson’s own death), Richardson’s editorial influence is significant. His twentieth-century bibliographer, William Merritt Sale, notes that much of the information Richardson gained from his years as printer of government bills and reports found its way into the Tour’s revisions.’I The 1742 edition presents much new information on improved road and river transportation, increased trading activity, and public buildings, particularly charitable institutions. These latter, indeed, gather increasing weight with successive editions: in 1761, for example, there are accounts of ‘this truly national Charity’ the Foundling Hospital, whose Charter Richardson had printed in 1739; of the Magdalen House, of which he was a governor; and of the Marine Society, which simultaneously reduces the numbers of ‘idle and disso- lute Poor’ and ‘procures a speedy Supply of stout Mariners’ no doubt indispensable to the ongoing war effort.z2 1761 (edited during the Seven Years’ War) also makes reference to various societies for the relief of the war- wounded and widows, which later editions then remove.

As early as 1742, the Tour had swollen from three into four volumes, since it had become ‘impossible to comprize the Whole in Three Volumes, as before’.23 Richardson notes that ‘the materials which the Editor was supplied with for Scotland, he found would swell that Part of the United Kingdom to

Defoe’s ‘Tour’: The Chai@g ‘Face of Things’ 195

one intire Volume: which before made not half a one’ (1742, i.iv). This expansion of volume is represented as a tribute to the editors and to Great Britain alike. Moreover, it redresses an imbalance in the ‘original’ Tour which (as even Pat Rogers acknowledges) owes more to contingency than literary art: Defoe, for all his enthusiasm for Scotland’s full integration into the Union, had somewhat brusquely pronounced that ‘Scotland is here describ’d with Brevity, but with Justice; and the present State of Things there, plac’d in as clear a Light as the Sheets, I am confin’d to, will admit; if this pleases, more particulars may be adventured on hereafter’ ( i i .690) .~~ Rogers cites this passage as evidence that Defoe ‘is anxious to get things completed. He may even have been under some pressure from the bookseller Strahan to cut down on space’.25

The I742 edition is likewise sensitive to the material pressures of bookselling: effectively apologisiiig for the text’s growth, the ‘Preface’ expresses the hope that although ‘the Nature of this Work is such, that there must be always Room for Additions [...I yet, that all such necessary Alterations and Additions shall, for the future, be printed by themselves that the Reader may not be under the Necessity of repurchasing the whole Work’ (1742, i.vii). This projected Appendix never in fact emerged, probably because the growing number of printers and booksellers who held a share in the Tour sensed sufficient, and more lucrative, demand for updated editions of the work entire.2h Indeed, by the time of the next edition, in 1748, the commercial power of the Tour is exploited in the marketing of Geographia Magnae Britunniae, a collection of engraved maps of the counties of England, at the end of which appears the note ‘N.B. These maps are design’d as a proper addition to The Tour through Great-Britain, in Four Volumes’; complementing this, the ‘Preface’ to the 1748 Tour advertises the volume of maps, which have been compiled by ‘several eminent Geographers and Engravers’ (1748, i . ~ i ) . ’ ~

As well as the extensive material on Scotland (including the islands), the I742 edition supplies many new sections which describe areas of Britain inadequately covered by Defoe, and changes wrought to those areas which he had described. Also appended are lists of seats of the gentry, of the ‘Cities and Boroughs which return Members to the Parliament of Greut Britain’, and of British peers, this last being compiled ‘in such a manner [omitting Christian names] as will not be subject to any other Variations than that of the total Extinction of Families; for our Intention was to carry this Piece, as much as the Nature of the Work would admit, beyond the Reach of temporary Fluctuations and Change’ (1742, i.vi). A survey of Richardson’s editorial and publishing activities reveal a network of in-house information sources for the 1742 edition, such as Mary Chandler’s poem, ‘A Description of Bath’ (1734); an account of the waters at Bath, Cheltenham, Bristol and Tonbridge supplied by Dr George Cheyne; and works such as Stukeley’s Itinerariurn Curiosurn (I 724), which provided antiquarian observations (including seventeen pages on Stonehenge).” Reference to ‘antiquities’

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had been specifically excluded from Defoe’s account, since he was concerned with ’the present Time, not the Time past’ (i.3). This disclaimer notwithstanding, Defoe later in the Tour pens the following reflections (ii.663):

I cannot but say. that since I entred upon the View of these Northern Counties, I have many times repented that I so early resolved to decline the delightful View of Antiquity, here being so great and so surprizing a Variety, and every Day more and more discovered: and abundance since the Tour which the learned Mr. Cambden made this Way, nay since his Learned Continuator: for as the Trophies, the Buildings, the religious, as well as military Remains. as well of the Britains. as of the Romans, Saxons, and Normans, are but, as we may say, like Wounds hastily healed up, the Calous spread over them being remov’d. they appear presently: and though the Earth, which naturally eats into the strongest Stones, Metals, or whatever Substance, simple or compound, is or can be by Art or Nature prepared to endure it, has defaced the Surface, the Figures and Inscriptions upon most of these Things, yet they are beautiful, even in their decay, and the venerable Face of Antiquity has something so pleasing, so surprizing, so satisfactory in it, especially to those who have with any Attention read the Histories of pass’d Ages, that I know nothing renders Travelling more pleasant and more agreeable.

Pat Rogers has written eloquently of this rather remarkable passage: it crystallises the faintly elegiac strand which runs through the Tour in tension with the Whiggish interest in growth and modernity. Rogers argues, I think convincingly, that the ‘main rhetorical ploy’ of the Tour involves setting an ‘idiom of growth - “rising” towns or “flourishing” country - against counter- images of exhaustion - “barren” land or “broken” remains’.Ly This ‘marvellously acute sense of process’ becomes if anything more potent with the editorial accretions of 1742 onwards, which constitute textual ‘process’ while documenting national ‘progress’. New descriptions of the ruins of antiquity (which, the 1742 ‘Preface’ argues, ‘may be considered as a Part of the Present State of the Counties and Places where, at this Day, they continue visible’, 1742, i.iv), and the history of remoter regions rub shoulders with outbursts of modernity and civic pride such as the following passage from 1761 (ii.103):

Piccadilly, the Houses of which overlook the beautiful Green Park, as well as that of St. lames’s. bids fair to be in time a Street of Palaces: several fine Houses of Persons of Condition being built and building there, instead of many very mean ones pulled down to give room for them: and the good Taste for so happy a Situation still increasing.

This discourse of the developing ‘urban beautiful’ finds a counterpart in the increasingly visible landscape of Northern industry, articulated in the vocabulary of beautiful utility which Defoe had established. Stockport, for example, is mentioned only in passing until 1761, when the following description is inserted (ii.383):

Defoe’s ‘Tour’: The Changiriy ‘Face of Things’ 197

Stockport is situate on the River Mersey, and is a very large and handsome Town, inhabited by a great Number of Gentry, and well filled with Warehouse- men, who carry on the Check, Mohair, Button, and Hat Manufactories. ‘Tis here the raw Silk is chiefly thrown and prepared for the Spitalfelds-Weavers, by Engines, the Buildings of which are of a prodigious Bulk. one of them containing above 4 5,000 Movements, which fill the spacious Rooms up to the fifth Story, and are all put in motion by one Wheel, which goes by Water.

By 1778, the enthusiasm and energy of the 1761 description is supplemented with a passage of what might be termed ‘industrial picturesque’ (1778, ii.343):

we arrived at Stockport, which is situate on the river Mrrsey, and is a very large and handsome town, occupying three hills, and the same number of valleys, which are so serpentine as to form many pleasing prospects of churches, pieces of water, GC. with the large silk-mills, belonging to the chief tradesmen of the place.

This interconnection of nature and industry, of beauty and trade, captures a moment in the early stages of industrialism when it was still possible thus to idealise a system which (the 1761 edition cheerfully notes) found employ- ment for children as young as six.

If the industrial and picturesque North of England receives increasing attention with successive editions, the case of Scotland is particularly remarkable in this respect. As we have seen, 1742 devoted an entire volume to Scotland. Much of this material, reduplicated in later editions, was culled from published sources such as Toland’s History of the Druids (1726) and Martin Martin’s Description of the Western islands of Scotland (1703). More than compensating for Defoe’s earlier neglect of the region, later editions assiduously describe areas such as the highlands and islands which were entirely absent from 1724-1727, and provide updates on political and industrial developments. I 748 concludes with a ‘curious Relation’ of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, and its ‘happy Extinction, by the glorious Victory obtained by his Royal Highness the Duke, at CufZoden’ (1748, ii.vi). This chapter is retained in all subsequent editions. Also in 1748, a passage inserted in 1742 proclaiming the usefulness of establishing a National Fishery in Scotland is augmented with the hope that, in response to the ‘45, the authorities will be all the more anxious to implement this plan, since ‘such a Scheme, vigorously and effectually pursued, must employ Multitudes of idle Hands, and bind the whole Scotish [sic] Nation by the strongest Tye among Men, their Interest, to promote the Welfare and Prosperity of a Government so intent to employ their useless Hands, enrich the poorest Part of the Island, and benefit the Whole’ (1748, iv.320). In 1761, it is reported that this scheme (the subject of several pamphlet publications during the intervening decades) has met with only limited success, ‘though still it is to be hoped, that the Discouragements are not so great, but that they may be overcome by Patriotism and Perseverance’ (1761, iv.333).

The untapped resources of Scotland, and methods whereby her

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agricultural and economic potential can be fully realised, become almost an obsession of later editions. As early as 1742, but reiterated in most later editions, we find praise for ‘the Society in Scotland for propagating Christian knowledge in the Highlands, it being one of the worthiest Designs of the present Age’ (1742, iv.236). This missionary zeal, as well as the intense interest in Scotland’s natural resources, constitutes an almost colonial approach to the region. The projected development of Scotland and her potential contribution to British prosperity functions as a paradigm for (or an alternative to) Britain’s colonial possessions overseas, which at this time were being both consolidated and contested in India and the Americas.

The sense of Scotland as a rich yet backward colony co-exists with a more idealising strain of primitivism which celebrates the native virtue of the Scots and their landscape: this latter preoccupation is especially evident in 1778, where the ‘wonders’ of Fingal’s Cave and other rugged manifestations of the sublime and picturesque are lyrically described, and where the Ossian controversy is rehearsed in footnotes. In this, as so often, the Tour presents in condensed form a body of contemporary reportage and opinion: the 1760s and 1770s in particular witnessed a veritable torrent of publications on Scotland, issued by the SPCK, the Board of Trustees for Fisheries, Manufactures and Improvements in Scotland, and by travellers interested in antiquities, tribal culture and Macpherson’s forgeries.

It is worth devoting some attention now to the last eighteenth-century edition of the Tour, that of 1778. The reviewers at least considered this to be significantly more important than earlier editions. Neither the Critical Review (established in 1753) nor the Monthly Review (established in 174g), the twin giants of the literary establishment during the second half of the eighteenth century, noted even the publication of the editions of 1753, 1761, or 1769; yet in 1778 both journals devoted considerable space to the new Tour. The Monthly hails it as a new edition of ‘a well known and much esteemed compilement’ and ‘the most complete and satisfactory work of the kind, that hath yet appeared in E~rope’ .~” The Critical more emphatically remarks that ‘it may be considered as almost a new work’, and notes that new information about Scotland and Wales, as well as England, has been provided by travellers, editors, and ‘literary and intelligent correspondents in various parts of the kingdom’: but the reviewer hastens also to assure his readers that ‘the improvements are generally so closely interwoven with the materials of the former editions, as not to be disjoined’.31 Both reviews index the text under ‘Tour’, not ‘Defoe’. The multiplicity of sources and contributors becomes a focus for national pride. In the ‘Preface’ to the 1778 Tour, gratitude is extended beyond even the community of ‘worthy Gentlemen’ who had ‘favoured’ earlier editors with informal ‘Corrections, Improve- ments, and Additions’ (1748, i.v), to writers of travel texts and geographical and political surveys, ‘Pennant, Johnson, Hutchins, Enfield, Campbell, Burn, and other modern writers of rep~tation’.~’ ‘Many of the first literary characters of the age, at the two universities’ have also contributed,

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although for some reason the editors are not ‘permitted to mention their names’ (1778, i.sig A3r-Vj.

Greater even than the sum of its erudite and socially varied authorial parts, the 1778 Tour has finally mutated from a loosely-structured travel narrative into a closely related genre: the ‘Preface’ writer describes it as ‘a modern geographical state of Great Britain’ (1778, i.sig A3‘). This phrase relates the 1778 Tour to a growing body of works in the eighteenth century describing ‘the Present State’ of countries in Europe, and, increasingly, of Britain and her expanding empire. Smollett’s vast compilation, The Present State of All Nations (1768-1769), is one of the more eccentrically ambitious of such projects, other examples of which would include John Lind’s Letters Concerning the Present State of Poland (1773), the anonymous Letters Concerning the Present State of the French Nation (1769), and The Present State of the British Empire (1774), by John Entick ‘and other Gentlemen’.

Perhaps the most significant of such texts in relation to the Tour is John Campbell’s Political Survey of Britain (I 774). Richardson had consulted this work in manuscript years earlier, to mine information for the 1761 Tour, and editors in 1761 and I 778 also acknowledge Campbell’s ‘public-spirited Work’ as a source).33 The full title of Campbell’s work is as follows:

A Political Survey of Britain; being a Series of Reflections on the Situation, Lands, Inhabitants, Revenues, Colonies, and Commerce of the Island. Intended to shew, that we have not as yet approached near the Summit of Improvement, but that it will afford Employment to many Generations, before they push to their utmost Extent the natural Advantages of Great Britain.

As one might therefore expect, the Surveg is enormous in its scope and erudition. Unlike the Tour, Campbell provides rigorous and copious footnote references to his sources. The extent of his scholarship is no doubt one reason why Campbell took almost twenty years to produce the Survey: as early as 1755 he had printed Proposalsfor Printing by Subscription, Britannia Elucidata. By 1774, as Campbell’s biographer, Francis Espinasse, in the Dictionary of National Biography, mournfully observes, ‘numbers of the original sub- scribers were dead’.34 The competing strengths and greater accessibility of the Tour may also have contributed to Campbell’s commercial failure (the Survey came in two enormous quartos and cost two guineas, as opposed to the Tour’s pocket-sized format at fourteen shillings for all four volumes in 1778). Boswell reports that Johnson ascribed Campbell’s demise in 1775 to his disappointment at the Survey’s reception (other factors may also have contributed: for example, Campbell told Boswell that he once drank thirteen bottles of port at a sitting).35 Johnson’s assessment of Campbell as a writer is oddly relevant to the notions of literary value and usefulness thrown up by the publishing history of the Tour. According to Boswell, Johnson described Campbell as ‘the richest author that ever grazed the common of l i terat~re’,~‘ and pronounced at greater length that

I think highly of Campbell. In the first place, he has very good parts. In the second place, he has very extensive reading: not, perhaps, what is properly

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called learning. but history, politiclts, and, in short, that popular knowledge which makes a man very useful. In the third place. he has learned much by what is called the vox viva. He tallts with a great many people.37

The cultural clubbability of Campbell’s information-gathering is akin to the collective spirit which, as we have seen, pervades the production and reception of the Tour. It intersects also, of course, with Johnson’s own practices as editor and lexicographer, in which the reification of the literary individual, battling against the odds to produce the definitive work, sits uneasily with a profound sense of submission to the inevitable changes wrought by time, cultural change, and the weight of public consensus.

Curiously, Johnson’s ‘invention’ of the ‘common reader’, and perhaps the most famous deployment in his own literary criticism of the concept, finds another intersection with the development and use of the Tour during the later decades of the eighteenth century. In his biography of Thomas Gray, Johnson praises the ‘Elegy written in a country church-yard’ because it ‘abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo’.3x In 1787 was published a pocket-sized work entitled A Supplement to the Tour through Great-Britain, sold for two shillings by Kearsley (publisher of several small guide and travel books, who by 1761 also had a share in the Tour). The title page announces that the work is ‘by the Late Mr. Gray: Author of the Elegy written in a Country Church-Yard, &c’, and the ‘Advertisement’ (p.iv-v) that

What Mr. Gray thought important enough to engage his attention, those for whose use it is intended will not receive with neglect. Scenes, Situations, Seats, and Antiquities, selected as worthy of notice by the elegant Author of the Church-Yard Elegy, will be visited with a degree of respect unfelt before. To his taste no person will venture to dissent, and to his judgement few but will readily subscribe.

The Supplement is a peculiar work. It had been issued originally in 1773, privately printed by William Mason (Gray’s literary executor), and entitled simply A Catalogue of the Antiquities, Houses, Parks, Plantations, Scenes and Situations i n England and Wales, Arranged According to the Alphabetical Order of the Several Counties.39 Gray’s name was not given: indeed, the ‘Advertise- ment’ rather coyly states that ‘This Catalogue was originally drawn up on the blank pages of Kitchen’s English Atlas, by a person of too much eminence to be mentioned on so slight an occasion’ (~. i i i ) .~’ The text consists simply of lists which Gray had drawn up, county by county, under the headings ‘Antiquities’, ‘Scenes and Situations’ and ‘Houses, Parks, Plantations’. For each county, the notable places within each category are named, with asterisks denoting sights of particular merit. The pages are interleaved with blanks, for travelling readers to pen their own comments and corrections. We are informed in the ‘Advertisement’ that ‘the excellent person who made this Catalogue’ did so on the basis of ’his own extensive researches’, ‘the summer tours which he made’ and ‘the information of such persons, on

Defoe’s ‘Tour’: The Changing ‘Face of Things‘ 207

whose taste and judgment he could best depend’ (~.iii-iv).~‘ As with the Tour (with which, in 1773, there is no connection made), we see here an interweaving of the personal and the collaborative, to the grand end of comprehending the nation. The 1787 Supplement, capitalising on the ‘present prevailing passion for viewing and examining the beautiful scenes which abound in our native country’, extends the communal nature of this work (and indeed of the Tour), as ’the Publisher’ invites from his public ‘any corrections which may render the Work more perfect, and by that means more useful’ (p.v). At least one reader responded to these hints: a letter to ‘Mr Urban’ in the Gentleman’s Magazine for June 1787 states that ‘I send you some corrections of Mr Kearsley’s Supplement to the “Tour through Great- Britain”, just published: in which I do but fulfil the wishes of the public- spirited editor, who exerts his utmost to give us as much information in as little compass as p~ssible’.~’ As with Defoe and his Tour, Gray has here disappeared from his own Catalogue (referred to simply as ‘Mr Kearsley’s Supplement’), beneath the weight of accruing information and the public interest.43 The Tour, with its textual spin-offs and its growing culture of participation, begins to display distinct web-site characteristics.

The emphasis in Gray’s lists on ‘Scenes and Situations’ parallels the 1778 Tour’s greatly extended treatment of British scenery, for which the editors acknowledge a debt to ‘many gentlemen’ or ‘modern travellers’, particularly those who have travelled to Wales (Gray’s Bard would have been gratified), and ‘critically noticed the towns, modes, manners, and customs, of that part of our island’ (1778, i.sig A3‘). In Defoe’s original, Wales was dismissed as a backward area virtually devoid of trade and industry, and therefore uninteresting. Now, its picturesque landscape warrants extensive descrip- tion, and this is true of numerous other areas of the British Isles in the 1778 edition, which happily culls passages from the growing number of British tours and travels published during the 1760s and 1 7 7 0 s . ~ ~ The reclamation of the northern wildernesses is a particular feature, swelling volume iii by some forty to fifty pages. The ‘Preface’ celebrates these additions (1778, i.sig A3‘):

Westmorlatid, and Curnbrrland [...I were formerly considered as little more than barren and inhospitable deserts, and, being so remote from the metropolis, were seldom visited as the objects of pleasure, till the amazing improvements lately made (and still making) in all the roads throughout the kingdom, gave a spur to travellers of independent fortunes, who have now made us almost as well acquainted with the northern, as we before were with the southern parts of our island.

Defoe had dismissed the northern and Welsh wilds as ‘horrid and frightful’ (ii.452), described Westmoreland as ‘a Country eminent only for being the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England, or even in Wales it self (ii.679), and observed that “tis of no Advantage to represent Horror, as the Character of a Country, in the middle of all the frightful Appearances to the right and left; yet here are some very pleasant,

202 KATHERINE TURNER

populous and manufacturing Towns, and consequently populous’ (ii.6 79).45 For Defoe, the advantages of improvements in the road system were bound up with increased possibilities for trade and distribution: in 1778, they are celebrated for facilitating tourism within Britain, and thus enabling the British landscape (and middling classes) to mount a serious challenge to the European itinerary which had hitherto dominated the aristocratic culture of travel and tourism. The discourses of the picturesque, the sublime and the beautiful owe little to classical literature or history and are readily available to ‘the common reader’ and writer. Their vocabulary is abundant in the northern sections of the 1778 Tour, in purple passages contributed by the editors as well as other published literary tourists. We meet numerous sublime phenomena: an ‘amazing cascade’, a ‘tremendous gulph’, an ‘old oak [which] suspended his romantic boughs over the precipice’, a ‘rough and craggy channel’ (I 778, iii.3060. Several passages are excerpted from William Hutchinson’s An Excursion to the Lakes in Westmoreland and Cumberland (I774), including a lively account of a boat trip during which the local echoes are tested out with cannons and french horns, which return a veritable symphony of echoes, including, rather improbably, ‘the languish- ing strains of enamoured nymphs’ (1778, iii.360). This erotic classicising of the British landscape, a trope at least as old as the Renaissance, finds a philosophic and more characteristically eighteenth-century counterpart in a series of ‘melancholy reflections’ (again, lifted from Hutchinson) on the fluctuating affairs of men, prompted by British ruins and vistas rather than the inspiring relics of ancient Rome (1778, iii.330). Britain’s landscape and her aesthetically responsive inhabitants are becoming culturally self- sufficient.

The capacity for aesthetic response to the native landscape becomes a sign of national belonging, and constitutes a claim to moral citizenship. The act of contributing to the Tour, whether as reader, travel-writer, editor or commissioned contributor, has a similar value. The gradual accretion of new information transforms the Tour and thus mirrors the transformation of the physical and social ’face’ of Great Britain. The changes described by successive Tours - industrial, commercial, architectural, agricultural: and changes in aesthetic sensibility and civic morality - weave together a number of discourses germane to the metaphoric possession of the British isles by the ‘middling sort’, and to their increasing claims to embody British national character and virtue.

In an age in which the formation of the canon begins, and ‘original genius’ starts to dominate literary discourse, the Tour is a peculiar case. The text becomes canonised in its own time, and yet canonised as an ever-changing collection of information and opinion. An analogy might be made here with the Oxford English Dictionary in our own time, the ‘Preface’ to which still boasts that it presents ‘the words that have formed the English vocabulary from the time of the earliest records down to the present day [...I Its basis is a collection of several millions of excerpts from literature of every period

Defoe’s ‘Tour’: The Changing ‘Face of Things’ 203

amassed by an army of readers and the editorial staff [...I though it deals primarily with words, it is virtually an encyclopaedic treasury of information about thing^'.^' This accrual of information through the informal and independent co-operation of willing readers is presented (by both the Tour and the OED) as something peculiarly English, in implicit contrast to the more absolutist tendencies of foreign encyclopaedic endeavours, ranging from Diderot’s Encyclopedie, through the classification systems of Carl Linnk, to the Academie Franqaise in our own time.

Like the OED, the Tour during the eighteenth century becomes a national institution, as its printers and booksellers foster and capitalise on the notion that it is the common property of the ever-improving nation it describes. Although the motivation of editors was primarily commercial, the texts they produced throughout the eighteenth century have an imaginative and literary life of their own, which is produced rather than compromised by the multiplicity of sources and contributors. Their indefatigable cutting, pasting, writing and plagiarising, and their responsiveness to readers and self- appointed contributors, make of the Tour not only an ever-changing record of the nation and its preoccupations, but also a site where the mutually enriching discourses of landscape aesthetics, trade, agricultural improve- ment, civic pride, and institutionalised welfare, can freely and fruitfully circulate.

For these reasons - the textual energy of successive Tours, the insights they provide into the cultural identity of the ‘middling sort’ and into the changing face of the nation, and the questioning of literary categories which their construction and reception provoked - Defoe’s continuators should compel, rather than distract, our attention.

* I am grateful to Francis O’Gorman for commenting on an earlier draft of this paper.

NOTES

I. Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole lsland of Great Britain, ed. G. D. H. Cole, 2 vols (London 1927; bicentenary edition, and the first since the eighteenth century to reproduce the entire text). i.1-2. All citations from the first edition of the Tour are taken from Cole, and hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. The roll-call of eighteenth-century editions is as follows: (I) 3 vols, 1724, 1725. 1726 (but with 1727 on title page): (2) 3 vols, 1738; (3) 4 vols. 1742; (4) 4 vols, 1748; (5) 4 vols, 1753; (6) 4 vols. 1761 (but with 1762 on title pages of vols I and 3) : (7) 4 vols. 1769: (8) 4 vols, 1778; (9) a pirated Dublin edition in 4 vols, 1779. See Pat Rogers, ‘Later Editions of Defoe’s Tour’, Studies in Bibliography 28 (1975), p.390-91.

2. A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. Pat Rogers (Harmondsworth 1971). p.17 (hereafter cited as Tour 1971).

3. Betty A. Schellenberg, ‘Imagining the Nation in Defoe’s A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain’, English Literary History 62 (1995), p.295-311.

4. Carole Fabricant. ‘The Literature of Domestic Tourism and the Public Consumption of Private Property’. The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York 1987). p.254-75 (p.259).

5. Fabricant has elsewhere made this point more broadly, describing how the aesthetic discourse popularised by Addison’s ‘Pleasures of Imagination’ essays rhetorically appropriates for the ‘Man of a Polite Imagination’ the landscape formerly the sole property of its aristocratic

204 KATHERINE TIJRNER

owners: see ’The Aesthetics and Politics of Landscape in the Eighteenth Century’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century British Art and Aesthetics. ed. Ralph Cohen (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1985). p.49-81. More recently. Elizabeth Bohls in Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics 1716-1818 (Cambridge 1995) has anatomised the politics not only of class but also of gender which are implicated in eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse.

6. A Tour through the Whole lsland of Great Britain, ed. P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens (New Haven and London 1991; abr. and illus.) (hereafter cited as Tour 1991). p.ix. Godfrey Davies almost fifty years ago conducted a partial but suggestive survey of changes made to successive editions of the Tour (‘Daniel Defoe’s A Tour t h o ’ the Whole Island of Great Britain’, Modern Philology 48, 1950, p.21-36). The rationale for Davies’ article is unclear, and its survey is far from comprehensive: but its sense that additions to the Tour are significant is worth developing.

7. J. H. Andrews, ‘A Case of Plagiarism in Defoe’s Tour’, Notes and Queries, ns . 6 (1959). P.399.

8. J. H. Andrews, ‘Defoe’s Tour and Macky’s lourney’, Notes and Queries, n s . 7 (1960),

9. F. Bastian, ‘Defoe’s Tour and the Historian’, History Today 17 (1967), p.845-51. p.290-92.

10. Pat Rogers, ‘Defoe as Plagiarist: Camden’s Britannia and A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain’, Philological Quarterly 52 (1973), p.771-74 (p.774). See also the detailed and amusing account of Defoe’s substantial and largely unacknowledged borrowings from Charles Cotton’s The Wonders of the Peake (1681) in P. N. Hartle, ‘Defoe and The Wonders of the Peake: The Place of Cotton’s Poem in A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain’, English Studies 5 (1986), p.420-31. Rogers (Tour 1971, p.21) notes that the Tour was produced to compete with, among other works. Strype’s edition of John Stow’s Survey of London: and the vast compilation, edited by Thomas Cox, entitled Magna Britannia et Hibernia, Antiqua F7 Nova, 6 vols (1720-1731). the ‘Preface’ to which announces that Magna Britannia aims to present a complete ‘General History of Great Britain’, collected from ’our printed Histories’. which will serve its readership well ‘till Providence shall raise up such an extraordinary Person, such a NONE-SUCH, or such a Society of Men, who by their Herculean Labours and indefatigable Industry shall present the World with such a compleat Work’ (i.i).

11. ’Publisher’s note’ to A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain. 2 vols (London 1974). i.vii.

12. Tour 1971, p.10. See also Rogers’ ingenious claim that ’Defoe is never more himself than when he is caught in the act of borrowing, tidying up, or varnishing over the cracks’ (‘The Making of Defoe’s A Tour thro’ Great Britain, Volumes I1 and III’, Prose Studies 3 , 1980, p.109- 37, p.134). On the chronology of the Tour’s construction. see also Pat Rogers, ‘Literary Art in Defoe’s Tour: The Rhetoric of Growth and Decay’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 6 (1972-1973). p.153-85: ‘Defoe at Work: The Making of A Tour thro’ Great Britain, Volume 1’. BNYPL 78

13. Alistair M. Duckworth. “‘Whig” Landscapes in Defoe’s Tour’, Philological Quarterly 61 (1982). p.453-65 (p.454): Jo Ann T. Hackos. ‘The Metaphor of the Garden in Defoe’s A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain’. Papers in Literature and Language 15 (1979), p.247-62 (P.248).

(1974-197s). P.431-50.

14. Tour 1971. p.19. 15. Tour 1991, p.xiii. 16. Bastian. ‘Defoe’s Tour’, p.850. 17. Rogers, ‘Literary Art’, p.155. 18. The editors in 1742 adopt the same use of an ‘Appendix’ to volume iii. which contains a

‘brief Description of the famous Gardens of the Right Hon. the Lord Viscount Cobham. at Stow in Buckinghamshire’, as well as brief accounts of building and landscaping at Chiswick. Gunnersbury and other more minor seats. The editors hope that ‘in future Editions of this Work’ these accounts ‘may be incorporated in their proper Places’ (I 742. iii.271).

19. See T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford 1971), p.72-73, on Richardson’s involvement in the printing of later editions of the Tour.

20. Eaves and Kimpel note that Richardson performed similarly square-bracketed revisions on the fourth edition of Defoe’s Complete English Tradesman in 1737 (Samuel Richardson, p.71).

21. William Merritt Sale, Jr, Samuel Richardson: Master Printer (Ithaca 1950). p.79-80. See also Sale, Samuel Richardson: A Bibliographical Record of his Literary Career with Historical Notes (New Haven 1936). and Eaves and Kimpel. Samuel Richardson, p.72-73.

22. 1761, ii.116-9: ii.124-6. See Sale, Samuel Richardson: Master Printer. p.1~0. 171.

Defue’s ‘Tour’: The Changing ‘Face of Things’ 205

23. ‘Preface’ to 1742. i.iii. 24. Defoe had published in 1706 A n Essay at Removing National Prejudices Against a Union

witb Scotland. 25. ‘Literary Art’, p.162; nothing daunted, Rogers maintains that ‘Nor does this sense of

compression impair the structural identity of the book - its cleanliness of outline and purposeful trajectory’ (p.163).

26. See Tour 1971, p.17-18 on the commercial success of the Tour throughout the century. The title pages of successive editions read like a roll-call of major eighteenth-century book traders, including Millar (in 1753 and 1761), Rivington (1753, 1761, 1769, 1778), Kearsley (1761). and Becket. Flexney and the Dillys in 1769 and 1778.

27. See Sale, Samuel Richardson: A Bibliographical Record, p.42. Sale states that the book of maps (priced at nine shillings) was intended from the outset to accompany the Tour.

28. See Sale. Samuel Richardson: A Bibliographical Kecord, p.40; Eaves and Kimpel. Samuel Richardson, p.72-76.

29. Rogers, ‘Literary Art’, p.174-75. 30. Monthly Review 59 (1778). p.396. 31. Critical Review 46 (1778). p.452,455. At least one reader disagreed: in 1783. ‘S’ writes to

Mr Urban of the Gentleman’s Magazine that the 1778 Tour presents an ‘unconnected hodge- podge’: he proposes instead that a ‘set of gentlemen’ chosen from each county should ‘undertake to describe the present face of the country’ and produce a more satisfactory record of ‘the present state of the country’ (Gentleman’s Magazine 53, 1783, p.409). He seems to have been a lone voice.

32. The editors also pay tribute to Arthur Young’s Sir Weeks Tour through the Southern Counties of England and Wales (1768), which they cite in a footnote to their account of Blenheim Palace (1778, ii.210-11).

33. 1761. i.v; 1778, iv.319; see Sale, Samuel Richardson: A Bibliographical Record, p.44. 34. Dictionary 01 National Biography, 22 vols (Oxford 1968). iii.827. 35. Life ofJoknson (1791), ed. G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell, 6 vols (Oxford 1934-1964). iii.243.

To be fair. Boswell relates this anecdote to Johnson as evidence that Campbell was ‘a very inaccurate man in his narrative’.

36. LiJe ofJohnson. i.418, n.1. 37. Life of Johnson, v.324. 38. ’Thomas Gray’, in Lives o f t h e English Poets (London, 1779-1781; repr. 2 vols, London

39. See Clark Sutherland Northup. A Bibliography qf Thomas Gray (New Haven and London 1917).

40. Thomas Kitchin’s Large English Atlas (1755) is of gigantic proportions, roughly akin to the Times Atlas in our own time. The Supplement or Catalogue would indeed have provided a more convenient notebook for the note-making traveller.

41. See William Ruddick, ‘Thomas Gray’s Travel Writing’ in Thomas Gray: Contemporary Essays, ed. W. B. Hutchings and William Ruddick (Liverpool 1993), p.126-45, esp. p.132-33 on Gray’s itineraries. Ruddick argues that Gray’s travel letters and the Journal of his visit to the Lakes, published in Mason’s Memoirs of Gray (1775). exerted a significant influence on later travellers and writers, including Wordsworth. Ruddick does not mention the Catalogue.

42. Gentleman’s Magazine 57 (1787), p.468-69. The correspondent has some thirty comments on the disappearance of some ruins, and the erection or rebuilding of other edifices.

43. Before laying the Catalogue to rest, it may be worth noting that it was re-issued in 1800. this time without any reference to ‘the’ Tour (no longer a hot property for booksellers), as The Traveller’s Companion, in a Tour through England and Wales, Containing a Catalogue of the Antiquities, Houses, Parks, Plantations, Scenes, and Situations.

44. For an excellent survey of such texts, see Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760-1800 (Aldershot 1989).

45. Eaves and Kimpel (Samuel Ricbardson. p.609) observe that Richardson never altered this passage: they deduce that ‘Richardson’s attitude towards wild scenery was the same as Defoe’s’.

1964-1965), ii.392.

46. The Oxford English Dictionary. 20 vols (Oxford 1989), i.vii.