Universitatea din Craiova/Facultatea de Litere

Master anul 2/Literatură

Vîlceanu Ionela-Cosmina

The Grand Tour

“The picturesque” and “the sublime”

We can define travel writing as all those literary expressions that describe a
writer’s experience during a visit, for pleasure, work, or any other purposes, in a city, country,
or continent other than where he/she resides. This type of writing has always existed in all
cultures since the birth of literary expression: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey,
Marco Polo’s Million, various explorers’ diaries, and the reportages of the Modern era, these
are all examples of the desire to tell and describe one’s experiences of encounters with
different cultures and people. These narratives/accounts have become a literary genre with its
well defined features.
The primary value of the Grand Tour, it was believed, lay in its exposure to the
cultural legacy of classical antiquity and Renaissance, and to the aristrocratic and fashionably
polite society of the European continent.
Paul Fussell speculates that travel's pervasive appeal may have owed
something to the high degree of acceptance which philosophical empiricism had gained in
Britain by the end of the seventeenth century.
John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) became a sort
of bible for those who espoused a „blank slate” conception of human consciousness and held
that all knowledge is produced from the „impressions” drawn in through our five senses. If
knowledge is rooted in experience and nowhere else, travel instantly gains in importance and
desirability.
Following the great Renaissance age of colonial exploration and expansion, an
articulated, systematic empiricism made travelling about the world and seeing the new and
different „something like an obligation for the person conscientious about developing the
mind and accumulating knowledge”. Merely reading about conditions elsewhere was not
enough. Those who could travel, should – though of course precious few actually could.
Travel is everywhere in eighteenth-century British literature.
Britain, an early influence on The Grand Tour was Thomas Coryat’s travel
book „Coryat’s Crudities”(1611).
Francis Bacon’s essay, „On Travel”(1625) sets aut the guidelines for European
travel as a political,economic and cultural experience, and the first reference to the Grand
Tour is Richard Lassels „An Italian Voyage(1679).
The most famous in this regard is the essay „Of travel” by Francis Bacon, in
which he offered a list of things and activities most worthy of a traveller’s attention:
„the courts of princes, especially when they give audience to ambassadors; the courts
of justice, while they sit and hear causes; and so of consistories ecclesiastic; the churches and
monasteries, with the monuments which are therein extant; the walls and fortifications of
cities, and towns, and so the heavens and harbors; antiquities and ruins; libraries; colleges,
disputations, and lectures, where any are; shipping and navies; houses and gardens of state
and pleasure, near great cities; armories; arsenals; magazines; exchanges; burses;
warehouses; exercises of horsemanship, fencing, training of soldiers, and the like; comedies,
suchwhereunto the better sort of persons do resort; treasuries of jewels and robes; cabinets
and rarities; and, to conclude, whatsoever is memorable, in the places where they go.”
(Bacon, 1625)
The fictional literature of the age 'is full of travelling heroes enmeshed in
journey-plots', and 'almost every author of consequence' - among them Daniel Defoe, Joseph
Addison, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Laurence Sterne,
Mary Wollstonecraft - 'produced one overt travel book'. To these must be added the
'numerous essayistic and philosophic performances' that were cast in the form of imaginary
travelogues, such as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels(1726), Johnson's Rasselas (1759), and
Oliver Goldsmith's Citizen of the World (1762). Writers seemed to be travelling, in reality or
in their imaginations, just about everywhere.(Buzard,p. 1)
We can define travel writing as all those literary expressions that describe a
writer’s experience during a visit, for pleasure, work, or any other purposes, in a city, country,
or continent other than where he/she resides. This type of writing has always existed in all
cultures since the birth of literary expression: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey,
Marco Polo’s Million, various explorers’ diaries, and the reportages of the Modern era, these
are all examples of the desire to tell and describe one’s experiences of encounters with
different cultures and people. These narratives/accounts have become a literary genre with its
well defined features.
As James Buzard states about English grand tourists:
„The Grand Tour was, from start to finish,an ideological exercise. Its leading
purpose was to round out the education of young men of the ruling classes by exposing them
to the treasured artifacts and ennobling society of the Continent. [...] The Tour was a social
ritual intended to prepare these young men to assume the leadership positions preordained
for them at home. [...] Touring might also prepare the young Englishman for his future rôle
by offering him the opportunity not only to cultivate his historical consciousness and artistic
taste but actually to acquire works of art and antiquities that displayed at home, would testify
to the quality of his taste and surround him with objective confirmations of his self-worth”
(Buzard 2002: 38-40).
John Murray’s ubiquitous series Handbooks for Travellers in Northern
Italy(1842-60) is analysed to set John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice(1851-53) and Charles
Dickens’s Pictures of Italy(1846)in context. A textual and generic dialogue between Murray,
Ruskin, and Dickens is traced, showing how each writer used Venice as a site through which
to imagine and re-imagine the conditions of the domestic perception of a foreign place. In
different ways, Dickens and Ruskin react to the cultural authority held by the Murray
guidebooks. Domestic perception of a foreign place is regulated by texts that engaged with it.
Murray’s guidebooks imagined Venice for the Victorian armchair or actual tourist. Ruskin
and Dickens then re-imagined it in opposition to Murray and, in doing so, offered their own
way of seeing, writing, and knowing other cultures.
The grand tourist was a collector who used to bring home a cultural treasure of
immense value. These collector-travelers, driven by a great scientific, cultural and antiquarian
fervor, were the promoters of a specific type of writing related to the Grand Tour.
The picturesque was introduced into the English cultural vocabulary by
William Gilpin in the late eighteenth century as a mediating category between the categories
of the “beautiful” and the “sublime.”
The “beautiful” was traditionally understood as unthreatening; defined by
gentle curves and soft contours, it was associated with the female form and male sexual
desire. The “sublime” on the other hand addressed the “impulse towards self-preservation ...
[that afforded the viewer with] the frisson of contemplating terrifying things from a position
of safety” (Buzzard 45).
 Often incorporated as an element in the picturesque, the sublime was introduce
by Edmund Burke as a philosophical concept standing in opposition to „beauty” in the
landscape”.The sublime is found in chasms, cataracts and rugged mountains an refers as much
to the feeling invoked by such elements of nature- fear, shock, horror, Burke gendered
landscapes with the beautiful signifying the feminine (welcoming,passive) and sublime
masculine (rugged).
Goldsmith’s poem „The Traveller” (1764) capture this image:
„… these domes, where Caesars once bore sway,
Defac’d by time and tottering in decay,
There in the ruin, heedless of the dead,
The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed..”
Picturesque is an aesthetic ideal introduced into English cultural debate in 1782
by William Gilpin in Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc.
Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770, a practical
book which instructed England’s leisured travellers to examine “the face of a country by the
rules of picturesque beauty”. Picturesque, along with the aesthetic and cultural strands of
Gothic and Celticism, was a part of the emerging Romantic sensibility of the 18th century.
As for the sublime, Kant tells us that:
“in what we usually call sublime in nature there is … an utter lack of anything
leading to particular objective principles… the theory of the sublime [is thus] a mere
appendix to our aesthetic judging of the purposiveness of nature.” (Critique…, p.100)
The “sublime,” then, was a category invested with the capacity of generating
fear and awe in the viewer. Further, it was also characterized by a sense of ineffability and
indeterminacy that could not be described or represented and owed its power
to “its chaos ... [and] its wildest and most irregular disorder and desolation” (Kant 92).
The “picturesque” could, therefore, be understood as not simply a mediating
position between the beautiful and the sublime but, more crucially, as a mode that disciplines
the sublime by evacuating it of its inherent capacity to generate fear and awe in the viewer. It
draws the “sublime” into a normative affective region, in effect, pacifying it and making it
describable.
In conclusion picturesque reference mankind’s ability to control the natural
world and the sublime is a humbling reminder that humanity is not all-powerful.
 Bibliography:

1. Blanton, Casey (2002): „Travel Writing. The Self and the World, Routledge, New
York-London.
2. Buzard, James (2002): “The Grand Tour and after (1660-1840)”, in: The Cambridge
Companion to Travel Writing, Hulme, Peter & Youngs, Tim (Ed.),Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge
3. Pratt, Mary Louise(1992) Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. London
& New York: Routledge
4. Koshar, Rudy(2002),: „Seeing, Travelling, and Consuming: An Introduction:’ in
Histories of Leisure(Oxford: Berg Publications)