Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

It is scarcely possible to discuss the eighteenth-century novel without speaking of travel. Its protagonists' journeys so often give impetus and form to their stories, from the “mobile adventuress” who narrates Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) at the beginning of the long eighteenth century to Ann Radcliffe's peripatetic heroines at its end. The travels of Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy and Yorick, Roderick Random and Matt Bramble come to mind. Even Pamela and Clarissa, so much indoors, move or are removed at key junctures, like the abducted heroines of so many sentimental and gothic novels later in the period. And prominent novelists wrote travel narratives as well: Defoe's Tour Round the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6), Fielding's Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1754), Smollett's Travels Through France and Italy (1766), Beckford's Continental journals (1787–8), and Radcliffe's Journey through Holland and Germany (1795). The affinities between these two prose genres, one enjoying sustained popularity during the century, the other expanding its readership while fighting disrepute, are extensive enough to have given rise to a magisterial study, Percy G. Adams's Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel.This essay obviously cannot cover a fraction of the material that Adams surveyed. Instead, I will visit (in the manner of a ... log in or subscribe to read full text