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Studies in Travel Writing

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Self-discovery from Byron to

Raban: The Long Afterlife of
Romantic Travel
Robin Jarvis
Published online: 11 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Robin Jarvis (2005): Self-discovery from Byron to Raban: The Long
Afterlife of Romantic Travel, Studies in Travel Writing, 9:2, 185-204

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 Self-discovery from Byron to Raban:
The Long Afterlife of Romantic Travel

Robin Jarvis
Despite the heterogeneity of Romantic-era travel writing, the idea of Romantic
travel has become all but identified with a ‘subjective turn’ in the late eighteenth
century, and with narratives of self-realisation or self-discovery, illustrated here
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chiefly with reference to the work of Byron, Goethe, and de Staël. Despite
the adoption in much modern travel writing of a rhetoric of belatedness and
self-mocking irony, such narratives can be shown to inhere in travel works by
authors as different as V. S. Naipaul, Edward Marriott, Jenny Diski, Bruce
Chatwin, and Roland Barthes. A rich instance of the enduring legacy of Romantic
travel is provided by the innovative work of Jonathan Raban, the most recent
of whose series of American travel books, Passage to Juneau (1999), sustains
a complex and healthy dialogue with the literature and culture of the Romantic
period. Despite the anti-Romantic cast of its intertextual relations with George
Vancouver’s 1794 survey of the Inside Passage, which provides the model for
Raban’s own expedition, in many respects – not least in its exploration of the
maritime culture of the Northwest Coast Indians – Raban’s book gives vigorous
new life to the exemplary Romantic trope of self-discovery.

This essay addresses the remarkably enduring influence on modern travel

writing of the literary and cultural discourses of European Romanticism
– a legacy that is perhaps more easily discerned in this genre than in most
other areas of literary production. I intend briefly to rehearse what I take
to be a critical consensus on the idea of Romantic travel, with reference
to three exemplary texts from different national traditions, then move to
consider how modern travel writing sustains key elements of the rhetoric
associated with such texts. Here I shall allude to a number of works that
represent different ways of negotiating modern problems of form, identity,
and ideology, while incorporating revised versions of structures and devices
conventionally regarded as Romantic in provenance. My particular focus
will be on the key trope of self-discovery, which I shall pursue through a

Studies in Travel Writing 9 (2005): 185–204

© 2005 The White Horse Press
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Robin Jarvis

more detailed commentary on the work of Jonathan Raban – specifically

his most recent travel book, Passage to Juneau, which provides a useful case
study in this context because it maintains a complex explicit and implicit
dialogue with the literature and culture of Romanticism throughout.
Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature of travel and
exploration has been attracting significantly more critical attention over
the last ten years or so. Much of this work – which has not, so far, translated
into a proportionally greater availability of texts – has been carried out
under the light of feminism, or postcolonialism, or a mixture of the two.1
There is, of course, no doubt, as Jaś Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés point
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out in their introduction to a recent essay collection, that a succession of

European imperial cultures has ‘substantially conditioned the production,
reception and ideological leanings of a great deal of travel writing’ over the
past five centuries,2 and not just those travel narratives directly embedded in
colonial experience. Romantic-period travel literature offers no exception
to this generalisation: indeed, the period coincides with the rapid expansion
and consolidation of British colonialism and of the newly-independent
American states, and travel writing was one discourse among others that
played a part in the process whereby dominant groups represented other
cultures to themselves and convinced themselves of their right to intervene
in countries they had ‘discovered’, explored or settled. However, colonial
and imperial influences are not unique to Romantic travel writing (though
perhaps something in the anxious transitionality of the way they are handled
is), and an overconcentration on this dimension of the subject risks eclips-
ing more traditional yet still frequently serviceable definitions of Romantic
travel – most importantly those emphasising the subjective turn in late
eighteenth-century travel literature and the re-figuration of the material
journey as interior voyage. This crucial development is in part a historically
gendered one, but cannot be sourced exclusively to those female-authored
Romantic travel books that scholars have rightly sought to rescue from
oblivion in recent years.3
The nature of this shift needs a little fuller elaboration. The most sweep-
ing cultural history of travel, Eric Leed’s The Mind of the Traveller, claims
that it is in the Romantic period that the idea of travel casts off its ancient
connotations of hardship, ordeal, and compulsion, celebrating instead with
unprecedented clarity ‘the pleasure of travel free from necessity’ and affirming
the notion that ‘travel signifies autonomy and is a means for demonstrating
what one “really” is independent of one context or set of defining associa-
tions’.4 Travel writing of the period reflects and encourages this transvaluation
through a reordering of its constituent parts: as Tzvetan Todorov points out
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Self-discovery from Byron to Raban

in his brief structural analysis of the genre, the exterior and interior journeys
are not mutually exclusive categories, but their proportions and hierarchies
vary through history, and the Romantic period witnesses a significant shift
in the balance between ‘observed object’ and ‘observing subject’ toward the
latter.5 In its weak form, this can mean no more than a shift from avowedly
objective description towards personal impressions of people and places; in
a stronger sense, it can denote the incorporation in more self-consciously
‘literary’ travel narratives of a key moment or moments of self-discovery.
In a period that coined the word ‘tourist’, and in which increasing numbers
of people were travelling for pleasure both within Britain and, especially
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post-Waterloo, on the Continent, this intensified inwardness could provide

a means of differentiating oneself as a ‘true traveller’ from the unimaginative
herd of visitors pursuing similar itineraries and consuming the same pre-
packaged sights and spectacles. James Buzard assesses Byron’s importance
to nineteenth-century tourism in just such a manner: Byron’s trick was to
manufacture the persona of ‘a grand subjectivity’ that turned travel into ‘an
opportunity for self-staging’, encouraging his readers to strike a correspond-
ing range of ‘poetical attitudes’ that paradoxically would become the shared
mark of their individual uniqueness as travellers.6
Putting a premium on the singularity, authenticity and transformative
potential of travel experience, Romantic literature is nevertheless not wed-
ded to any simplistic ideal of unmediated response to place: on the contrary,
the boundaries between physical and mental topographies are constantly
being blurred. In another brief but suggestive meditation on the genre,
Michel Butor says that all Romantic voyages are ‘bookish’, in a variety of
senses: books play a part in originating the journey; travellers read books
during their travels; they write them, usually keeping a diary or journal;
they produce a book after their return. ‘They travel in order to write,’ Butor
argues, ‘they travel while writing, because, for them, travel is writing.’7 This
keen self-reflexivity with regard to the relation between the journey and
the book is another defining characteristic of Romantic travel. It is a fitting
irony, therefore, that the books produced by Romantic travellers may then
go on to provide themselves a further layer in the deeply overdetermined
responses of later visitors to particular places and peoples.
To glance at three classic literary expressions of the transnational phe-
nomenon of Romantic travel, one might begin with Goethe’s account of his
tour of Italy in the 1780s. Goethe’s whole relation to German Romanticism
is a complex and chronologically uneven one, but there are unmistakable
Romantic facets to the trip that, paradoxically, brought him to a closer
understanding of classical art and civilisation – not least its originating
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Robin Jarvis

impulse to escape the restrictions of the Weimar court. For Goethe, as for
other travellers in this period, the journey to Rome meant more than the
fulfilment of a formulaic Grand Tour – a personal confrontation with what
one eighteenth-century traveller called ‘the famousest place in the world’; it
was a passionately anticipated and intensely subjective experience of what
was (in Timothy Webb’s words) ‘a city of the imagination and an idea’ as
well as a topographical reality.8 Early on in his journey Goethe writes that his
main aim is ‘to discover myself in the objects I see’, and when he eventually
reaches Rome it feels as though a new life is beginning as he sees with his
own eyes ‘the whole which one had hitherto only known in fragments and
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chaotically’. As he takes personal possession of objects previously known

only through a multiplicity of representations, he finds that ‘everything
is just as I imagined it; yet everything is new’, and he acquires ‘a sense of
strength hitherto unknown’. Ultimately, the difficulties of interpreting the
fragmented and contradictory appearances of Rome prove overwhelming,
but Goethe is no less convinced of the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic
‘rebirth’ he has undergone since entering Rome.9
Rome is also at the heart of Germaine de Staël’s novel, Corinne, or Italy
(1807). (As my choice of this text, and of Byron’s Childe Harold below,
reveals, I am using the term ‘travel writing’ in a very broad sense in this essay
to encompass diverse forms of writing that incorporate themes of travel.
The well-attested blurring of fact and fiction in more conventional travel
narratives makes it arbitrarily pedantic to disqualify from consideration
novels that depend so heavily on material also found in more literal accounts
of ‘actual’ travels.) Corinne, the beautiful, talented improvisatrice, stands
metonymically for Italy, while the Scottish nobleman, Lord Nelvil, with
whom she conducts an ill-fated liaison, is complementarily representative
of Britain. The attraction-through-difference of these two characters reflects
and is reinforced by the broad opposition between North and South which
structures the narrative, and which, as Chloe Chard has demonstrated,
was fundamental to the imaginative geography of the Grand Tour.10 In the
regular traffic of one or both of the protagonists from one side of this divide
to the other, across the natural and symbolic boundaries of the Channel
and, more especially, the Alps, travel is figured as a source of instability in
the self, of the desertion of true character, of a hazarding of personal fortune
or happiness, of self-discovery or self-denial. Within Italy itself, dramatic
use is made of the journey from Rome to Naples, and of the sight of the
erupting Vesuvius, to impress a feeling of emotional adventure and danger;
ultimately, the physical and aesthetic challenges of the journey are derogated
in comparison with the awesome task of self-discovery:
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Self-discovery from Byron to Raban

Man has become familiar with nature everywhere ... and the roads he
has opened up climb mountains and go down into ravines. No longer is
anything inaccessible to him except the great mystery of himself.11
Perhaps the best-known British work of Romantic travel, indeed a virtual
compendium of most of what one might say about the phenomenon, is
Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), which rapidly achieved the
status not only of a poetic guidebook to the parts of Europe that Harold
passes through, but also a manual of appropriately soulful attitudes to strike
in relation to the monuments and spectacles observed. Woven through
the episodic framework of the poem’s four cantos are the following themes
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which, though doubtless present in writing of other periods, seem especially

distinctive, as unironised features, of Romantic literature: travel as the com-
pulsive antidote to personal sorrow (‘o’er him many changing scenes must
roll / Ere toil his thirst for travel can assuage, / Or he shall calm his breast,
or learn experience sage’);12 the pleasure in pure motion and activity, as in
the exuberant description of passing through the Straits of Gibraltar (‘Blow!
swiftly blow, thou keel-compelling gale! / Till the broad sun withdraws his
lessening ray’ [II, 145–80]); the metaphorical use of landscape and weather,
and the persistent elision of external reality and psychic states (‘Clear, placid
Leman! thy contrasted lake, / With the wild world I dwelt in, is a thing /
Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake / Earth’s troubled waters for
a purer spring’ [III, 797–800]); even the sense of travel as a condition of
being (‘there are wanderers o’er Eternity / Whose bark drives on and on,
and anchored ne’er shall be’ [III, 669–70]). The radical interiorisation of
the experience of travel that Byron carries out is nowhere better illustrated
than in the Italian canto: as in Venice, where the narrator summons his
wandering soul ‘To meditate amongst decay, and stand / A ruin amidst ruins’
(IV, 218–9), or as at the Colosseum in Rome, where Time, the beautifier
of the ‘wondrous monument’, is called upon to bestow on Byron’s enemies
the curse of his forgiveness, and where a curious identification takes place
between Byron and those numberless gladiators ‘Butcher’d to make a Roman
holiday’ (IV, 1144–1278).
There is little doubt that the features I have described with reference
to Goethe, de Staël and Byron encapsulate, for good or ill, much of what
has traditionally been understood by Romantic travel. In saying this, I ac-
knowledge that Romantic-era travel writing is an impure genre that typically
combines a number of different discourses (for example, the sentimental
journey, social reportage, antiquarianism, natural history), but contend that
its legacy has become identified with just one of its many vocabularies or
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Robin Jarvis

rhetorics – a rhetoric, perhaps, more at home in ‘literary’ (including poetic)

representations of travel experience than in the travel accounts of scientific
explorers or colonial administrators. Barbara Korte’s survey of English Travel
Writing, in tracing the ‘breakthrough of subjectivity’ in the genre and its
foregrounding of ‘scenic travel’ as ‘an essentially individual and subjective
experience’ to the ‘intensification of Romantic influences’, confirms the
truth of this generalisation.13 In the remainder of this essay I shall consider
the extent to which modern travel writing sustains the tradition so defined,
and hope to show not only that recent travel literature does bear clear and
multiple signs of its roots in Romanticism, but that this is a healthy and
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enabling factor in its ongoing development as a genre.

There have been claims that travel writing is in a state of terminal decline,
because of the progressive homogenisation of the world under capitalism
and what one recent essay has called our ‘collective fall into the condition
of tourists’.14 For a genre conventionally premised upon alterity – the con-
frontation between self and other, domestic and foreign, the familiar and the
extraordinary – is there any longer anywhere ‘different’ to go, or anything
different to write about? Those unwilling to accept this counsel of despair can
point to many aspects of contemporary travel writing that demonstrate its
variety and creative adaptability. These include new strategies for handling
ethnically diverse human encounters and relationships, to avoid the kinds
of ‘othering’ – the crude national or racial stereotyping, the dehumanising
caricatures – that are now so embarrassing or offensive to readers of earlier
travel books; more abundant or more varied use of fictional techniques to
deal with character, action, and plot; intermarriage with other genres or
discourses such as autobiography, history, and anthropology; increasingly
sophisticated forms of literary travel, in the sense of one writer follow-
ing self-consciously in the footsteps of earlier travellers, interlacing their
personal impressions with the traces of prior texts and sometimes blurring
the distinction between them; ironic acknowledgment that the writer is a
tourist, not a traveller, or a post-touristic play of attraction and repulsion
towards that condition; greater formal experimentation, expressing increased
scepticism regarding the role of the observer in representation and an inter-
est in how the world is constructed through language; and exploration of
the metaphorical uses of travel to encode philosophical insights into the
nature of (post)modernity.15
It should already be apparent that I regard many of these features of
contemporary travel writing as amplifications or revisions of Romantic
traits rather than wholly new developments. Conversely, Romantic ideas
and ideals are easily traced in our own cultures and literature of travel. In a
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Self-discovery from Byron to Raban

practical context, Roger Cardinal makes the point that ‘Even today, travel
companies wrestle with the basic script of Romanticism in their attempt
to reconcile an illusion of elite connoisseurship with popular pricing’;16 the
adventure travel companies in particular minister to Romantic impulses,
persuading their customers that there are still realms of exoticism to be freshly
‘discovered’ by the Western tourist, that the journey into the unknown is
still possible.
In the realm of modern travel literature, the afterlife of Romanticism is
plainly read in the degree to which many of the best travel books of the last
thirty to forty years incorporate narratives of self-realisation or self-discovery.
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It is worth glancing at a few notable examples of this tendency. Among

the classics of modern travel literature, V. S. Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness
(1964) stands out. This is an account of the author’s first, year-long, visit to
India, a country previously known only through books and his grandfather’s
memories. His identity complexly influenced from the first by his Trinidadian
home, his Indian ancestry, and his British education, Naipaul’s encounters
with Indian places, people and culture and the often grim and controversial
analysis that accompanies them are coordinated throughout with a nega-
tive and anticlimactic process of self-understanding, in which he discovers
Indian elements in his thought and sensibility of which he was previously
unaware, but finally recognises his ‘separateness from India’, a homeless
traveller ‘content to be a colonial, without a past, without ancestors’.17
Much more recently, another notable, but again controversially received,
piece of travel writing is Edward Marriott’s The Lost Tribe, the story of the
author’s arduously achieved, and tragically terminated, contact with a tribe
allegedly recently ‘discovered’ in Papua New Guinea. The climax of the
book comes when five members of the tribe are killed during a storm, and
Marriott is correctly advised by one of his native guides that the tribe will
hold him, the interloper, responsible for their deaths; this engineers a painful
moment of self-discovery as Marriott ‘suddenly saw [his] time here for what
it was’, that the tribe were right to blame him for the tragedy, that whereas
he had ‘wanted to be the observer, watching coolly from the side’, he ‘had
been dragged unwillingly on stage’; in short, he was just ‘another white man,
only more guilt-ridden’.18 In a very different mode, Jenny Diski’s unusual
memoir, Skating to Antarctica, is remarkable for its sustained coordination
of travel narrative with autobiographical exploration, the latter centring
on the author’s attempts to come to terms with her memories of abusive
parents. Again, the narrative comes to a head with Diski’s realisation that
whether she sees penguins and icebergs and other conventional accoutre-
ments of such a trip is irrelevant, that the interior voyage has rendered the
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Robin Jarvis

exterior voyage shallow and absurd: ‘The truth or otherwise of a book about
Antarctica and my mother,’ she says, ‘I saw from my swaying bunk in Cabin
532, didn’t depend on arriving at a destination’. Yet the exterior voyage was
somehow necessary for the interior to take place: ‘Cabin 532’, she says, ‘was
something really new to take back to London and play with’.19
In a rather different category would be the book often credited with
revolutionising modern travel writing, Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1977).
This is often read, not unfairly, as representative of the studied impersonality
of Chatwin’s writing: the author, who succeeded in making his own death
the subject of multiple conflicting theories, seems habitually on leave from
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his narrative, ever reluctant to psychologise (about either himself or others),

almost a man without qualities. Yet elements of self-recognition emerge
almost subliminally in the course of the narrative, for instance in the way
the narrator’s own experiences and fragmentary past become entangled with
the stories of the historical or legendary figures – themselves identity-shifters
of one sort or another, like the real-life Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid – he discusses. When to this are added the many implied identifications
with the marginal characters Chatwin meets on his journey, one gets the
impression that it is precisely through the sort of disencumbered textual
existence the book represents that Chatwin discovers new possibilities of
self-invention. This development – not so much ‘finding oneself’ as finding
that one is nowhere, definitively, to be found – is superficially anti-Romantic
but in fact is foreshadowed in Romanticism, for example in Coleridge’s
descriptions of his passion for solitary travel, which gives him the feeling
of having ‘annihilated the present Tense’, and of being carried on ‘a sort of
bottom-wind, that blows to no point of the compass, & comes from I know
not whence, but agitates the whole of me’; or Hazlitt’s celebration of the
opportunity, on the road, to ‘shake off the trammels of the world and of
public opinion – to lose our importunate, tormenting, everlasting personal
identity in the elements of nature, and become the creature of the moment,
clear of all ties’; or Dorothy Wordsworth’s frequent, ambivalent identifica-
tions with the vagrant women she encounters on her travels, embodying
an exhilaratingly ‘free and careless life’ that nonetheless projects, in Anita
McCormick’s view, her ‘worst anxieties: of losing her home, her role and
her sense of self’.20 This is really just to acknowledge that there is more
than one model of Romantic selfhood, and that alongside the familiar
expressions of assertive egotism are alternative representations in which
being and identity are far from centred and secure, and that travel and the
writing of travel repeatedly provide the medium in which the self’s mobility
is made apparent.
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Self-discovery from Byron to Raban

If Chatwin’s teasing self-dissolution into multiple personae has anteced-

ents of a kind in Romantic writing, so too does my final example, Roland
Barthes’s Empire of Signs (1970) – a text at the furthest remove from conven-
tional notions of travel writing, yet still manifestly a travel book of a sort. It
is composed of fragmentary reflections of up to four or five pages in length
interspersed with photographs, maps and other images; the complete lack
of chronology, itinerary, narrative incident, characters and dialogue seems
to preclude the construction of a travelling ego enriched and altered by his
experiences. But here too there is self-discovery or self-transformation of
a different order: Barthes himself says elsewhere that he saw travel as ‘an
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adventure or series of possible adventures of great intensity ... related to the

heightened receptivity of love’,21 and the adventure that Empire of Signs
narrates is one in which Barthes constructs a linguistic and cultural system
he calls ‘Japan’ and then explores his own jubilant responses to its workings
as an alternative to the Western semiocracy his work as a whole dissects and
deplores. It is a book in which, as Dennis Porter puts it, travel is practised
as a ‘mode of displacement’ that allows Barthes ‘to explore the nature of
his own desire by means of a detour through otherness’.22 What Barthes
‘discovers’ is a loss of fixed subjectivity: within the open but discontinuous
landscapes he associates with Japan, he experiences ‘no craving to swell the
lungs, to puff up the chest to make sure of my ego, to constitute myself as
the assimilating center of the infinite’; but this definitively anti-Romantic
gesture is paradoxically Romantic still in its cultivation of liminality, of a
different kind of going beyond, of a ‘limitless[ness] without … grandeur’.23
Indeed, the paradox displayed by Barthes’s text, of the intensely personal
significance of feelings of indefinite expansion and vanishing meaning,
can be compared with the contradictory situation in which ‘the absolute,
ungrounded agency of the self is seen to derive from the dissolution of the
self into a larger whole’, discerned by Gerald Izenberg ‘at the heart of the
Romantic enterprise’.24
From these brief examples of renascent, revised, or disguised romanticism
in modern travel writing, in the last part of this essay I shall look in more
detail at the author and the travel text that, as I indicated earlier, present an
explicit, sustained and invigorating dialogue with the Romantic tradition.
Jonathan Raban has himself likened the effort to upgrade the literary status
of travel writing to the elevation of landscape painting from ‘a mere record
or report’ to a genre valued for its ‘imaginative vision’ in the hands of Turner
and other Romantic artists. (This occurs in a review of Paul Fussell’s critical
study, Abroad, the best-known attempt to sound the death-knell of travel
literature.) In parallel fashion, Raban defends the travel writer’s freedom to
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Robin Jarvis

depart from observed fact and exact chronology and pursue truth by means
of ‘the winding stair’: ‘The relationship between then and now, between the
journey and the book, is tricky and paradoxical; and as he negotiates it the
writer discovers, often to his embarrassment, that he is a fabulist who only
masquerades as a reporter.’25
Raban’s own impressive line of travel books, notably the series of American
journeys beginning with Old Glory (1981), and running through Hunting
Mister Heartbreak (1990) and Bad Land (1996) to Passage to Juneau (1999),
certainly bears out this Romantic aesthetic of fabulous truth, just as it
demonstrates the persistence of the myth of self-discovery through travel.
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These books are very different one from the other, partially reflecting the
different phases of Raban’s own life and acquaintance with America, from
tourist to temporary resident to full-blown settler. In Old Glory, his journey
down the Mississippi in the literary shadow of Mark Twain, he self-con-
sciously embarks on a voyage ‘on a river which existed only in my head’,
flirts with the existential risk of becoming ‘a piece of human driftwood’,
and warns of ‘the dangerous morality of an existence of temporary pick-ups
and friendships, of people dropped almost as soon as met, of the indifferent,
deep egoism of moving for moving’s sake’.26 The narrator of Hunting Mister
Heartbreak sails from Liverpool to New York, where he stays for a while before
travelling on to Alabama, Florida, and, in between, Seattle, where Raban
himself was eventually to settle. The psychology of the emigrant, rather
than the literary tourist, is therefore more to the fore in this book, as the
titular reference to John Berryman’s poem on Hector St John de Crèvecoeur
suggests. Raban writes of the unnerving prospect of self-transformation that
lay before emigrants of Crèvecoeur’s era – ‘You would not be you, at least
not as you had known yourself to be up to this extraordinary moment’ – as a
prelude to his own passage through successive ‘rented’ new lives. This latter
journey is partly conveyed through a series of name changes (‘Rayburn’ in
Alabama, ‘Rainbird’ in Seattle) and shifts in point of view – aptly described
by Michael Cronin as ‘a playful exploration of multiple identities’, but an
exploration made possible by the ‘dizzy sense of social weightlessness’ his
narrator shares with immigrants past on his arrival in New York.27 Money
is nevertheless a crucial variable in the ‘thousand different ways of being
an American’, and for Steve Clark this helps undermine the process of
rebirth Raban documents, along with similar posturings by other British
travel writers on the United States. Such transformation as takes place,
Clark argues, is into a new stereotype rather than a new individuality, one
characterised by material wealth, pursuit of novelty, force of personality,
and so on, all seen from a uniquely British post-imperial standpoint of
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Self-discovery from Byron to Raban

‘depletion and fatigue’. Less critically, but in a similar vein, Andrew Dix
argues the importance of the backward-looking elements in Raban’s writing
to preserving the fiction of ‘an America of primal freedom’, allowing him
to maintain his heritage of ‘romantic individualism’ against a background
of ‘contemporary commodification, social conformity, state power’.28 In
Bad Land, by contrast, Raban’s narrative persona is spare and anonymously
functional, sacrificed in favour of a more complete absorption in the dreams
of pioneer homesteaders in Montana in the early twentieth century, people
looking for an America still worthy of ‘the quintessential American, the
free spirit, the horseman’.29
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The sharp turn towards family and social history in Bad Land is reversed
in Raban’s most recent travel book, the story of the author’s unaccompa-
nied boat journey from his home in Seattle via the Inside Passage on the
Northwest Coast of Canada and the United States to Juneau in Alaska. The
narrator’s trip is interrupted by a stay in England necessitated by his father’s
approaching death, and concluded by his partner’s dramatic announcement
in Juneau that she wants a separation. As this bare summary indicates, Passage
to Juneau is the most intimately personal of Raban’s American travel books,
although its autobiographical intensity is moderated by a range of strategies
and devices – some familiar, some not so familiar – that divide the reader’s
attention and decentre the persona of the traveller.
The element of literary travel is as strong in Passage to Juneau as it was
in Old Glory.30 Given this established predilection in Raban’s travel writing,
it comes as little surprise that the first section of Passage to Juneau, entitled
‘Fitting Out’, deals mainly with the composition and organisation of his
on-board library. The importance of Romantic-period travel to the ‘winding
stair’ of this book’s journey is highlighted by the fact that a key item in this
library is George Vancouver’s account of his surveying expedition on the
Northwest Coast in 1791–5 (in the ship Discovery), and Raban’s descrip-
tions of his own experiences are crosscut throughout with corresponding
entries in Vancouver’s journal. Repeatedly, he addresses the theme of how
the scenery of his voyage has been evaluated historically in terms borrowed
from Romantic landscape aesthetics, with the indigenous peoples sometimes
cast in the unlikely role of Wordsworthian solitaries. He demonstrates,
though, how Vancouver himself, in contrast with his junior officers and
with other contemporary visitors to the region, was out of sympathy with
a landscape easily assimilable to the eighteenth-century Sublime: with a
taste for more pastoral, ordered beauty (he was ‘disappointed by the scant,
dwarfish vegetation’), the professionally impassive Vancouver found these
coastal vistas ‘ugly, intimidating, inhospitable, and useless’, and if he could
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not escape using the word ‘sublime’, handled it ‘as though he were picking
it up, unwillingly, with a pair of tongs’.31 From his late twentieth-century
perspective, Raban aligns himself oddly with Vancouver, anaesthetised to
the sublimities of landscape through sheer overexposure:
Two centuries of romanticism, much of it routine and degenerate, has
blunted everyone’s ability to look at waterfalls and precipices in other
than dusty and second-hand terms ... I sailed through a logjam of dead
literary cliché: snow-capped peaks above, fathomless depths below, and,
in the middle of the picture, the usual gaunt cliffs, hoary crags, wild
woods, and crystal cascades. (p. 184)
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Situated at this point in an inlet called Desolation Sound, Raban compares

his surroundings to one of the classic loci of the Romantic Sublime, the
Gondo Gorge in Book 6 of Wordsworth’s Prelude – the ‘gloomy strait’
where, in Raban’s commentary, ‘meaning and order’ are perceived against
the odds ‘in a nature seen to be inherently unstable, whirling, contradictory’
(p.186). Despite acknowledging the ‘comprehensive seriousness’ (p. 186) of
Wordsworth’s religion of nature, his feeling towards it is comparable to the
‘awkward reverence’ of Philip Larkin’s ‘Church Going’ persona, finding
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in …32
(As if to cement the allusion, Raban notes that in reading modern
Northwest nature writers he feels himself ‘an agnostic in their church’ [p.
191].) Sensitive as he is to the visionary power of the natural Sublime, as
a self-styled ‘post-Romantic tourist’ Raban habitually keeps a protective,
ironic distance from it.
Yet perhaps this is ‘post-Romantic’ not in the simple sense of ‘later than
Romanticism’ but in the sense of standing in a vitally constitutive relation
to the Romantic: as Raban says, that Desolation Sound ‘had been a scene
of such heightened emotion in the past only made me feel more keenly
my own absence of feeling in it’ (p. 188). Moreover, the relationship can
assume many different modes – interrogative, sceptical, dialogic – between
pure affirmation and negation. In other respects Passage to Juneau is much
closer to recuperating the Romantic rhetoric of travel, especially in the
way interior and exterior voyages are made to converge in the wake of the
personal crises already mentioned and in the way the much-worked trope
of self-discovery is given bold new life. Raban’s father’s final illness and
death introduces a series of metaphorical crossovers between Raban’s boat
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Self-discovery from Byron to Raban

journey, his movements in England and the emotional upheaval of the

bereavement, and his father’s journey towards death. In England, he finds
his surroundings ‘dissolving into the landscape I had left behind’ (p. 273),
and confronts death as ‘a wilderness in which everyone is lost for words’;
back in British Columbia, he suffers delusions because he has ‘bodies on the
brain’ (p. 340), and ‘Thinking of my father’s voyage made me forget my own’
(p. 385) with near-disastrous consequences. In a particularly rich sequence,
meditations on the death of Shelley (in a boating accident) and on Indian
canoe-burials coalesce with the memory of bearing his father’s coffin to focus
the personal meanings of discovery and exploration: ‘the coffin’, he says
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laconically, is ‘the ultimate single-hander’s vessel, solidly built for the long
and stormy passage to the hereafter’ (p. 293). Some of the most memorable
discoveries Raban makes on his journey have to do not with places or local
culture but with death, or with insights into his relationship with his father
that assume special prominence in the context of his death.
In terms of shock value, however, these discoveries are thrown into the
shade by his long-term partner’s announcement that she wants a separation
– somewhat ironically because, in terms reminiscent of Raban’s own creed
of self-reinvention through travel, she needs to ‘forge a new identity’ (p.
421). The geographical distance he has travelled looks insignificant beside
the emotional distance now separating him from her – ‘as remote as some
government functionary shuffling papers behind a teller’s window’ (p. 422).
Under pressure of the moment, it seems, Raban is incapable of mounting
much resistance: ‘She had her script, I had none’ (p. 422); but it is not long
before a script of sorts begins to take shape, in the form of textual reworkings
of the event that would, in time, be professionally arranged in Passage to
Juneau, where the shattering personal disclosure obtains aesthetic purpose.
Raban concludes the episode by citing the beginning of a letter to a friend:
‘Every successful voyage ought to culminate in a major discovery, and at
the end of this voyage I feel like Sir Walter Raleigh. Not far from Juneau,
I found my own private Guiana, though I wish to God I hadn’t’ (p. 424)
– a grimly self-dramatising simile that marks the completion of a decidedly
Romantic interior quest. Indeed, as Raban announces his desire ‘to slake my
heartbreak in motion for motion’s sake’ (p. 423) and consoles himself on the
return journey by reciting (from his own edition of the Oxford Book of the Sea)
lines from William Cowper’s suicidal poem, ‘The Castaway’, this erstwhile
critic of ‘routine and degenerate’ romanticism (p. 184) risks appearing as
Childe Harold himself. In the end, he is too intellectual, too knowing, for
that, but the double-voiced character of his discourse, a Romantically anti-
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Romantic stance of considerable subtlety, nicely demonstrates how travel

writing continues to thrive through revisionary relations with a cultural
history that it cannot put aside completely.
Raban’s invocation of the Gondo Gorge passage in The Prelude provides
a convenient transition from his reworkings of Romantic self-discovery
to a consideration of how he handles the difficult relations between self
and other in a postcolonial context. His commentary on Wordsworth’s
epiphany has similarities with one of the recurring messages he draws from
the Indian stories and art he analyses; indeed, Wordsworth’s ‘pantheistic
demiurge’ is explicitly compared to the ‘lord of oceanic misrule, Komogwa’
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(p. 185), one of the main characters in the stories of the Kwakiutl people.
It is worth dwelling on these connections, because they are representative
of the careful negotiations conducted in the literary contact zone between
European and indigenous cultures in this book, which itself is exemplary
of the way such encounters are handled in modern travel writing. Raban’s
endeavours to come to an understanding of the maritime art and culture
of the Northwest Coast Indians comprise an important subsidiary strand in
Passage to Juneau. (It might be argued that this respectful stance towards the
Indian ‘other’ contrasts sharply with his apparent failure to read the signs
of his partner’s growing disaffection and unhappiness.) He combines an
imaginative appreciation of stories and artefacts as expressions of lives focused
on the behaviour, resources and dangers of the coastal waters – discovering,
for example, in the doublings and dismemberings of Indian designs ‘an art
in thrall to ripples and reflections’ (p. 205) – with an informed awareness
of the difficulties involved in interpreting an oral culture whose ‘purity’ is
lost in irrecoverable pre-contact times, and is known largely through the
mediation of twentieth-century white anthropologists who could never be
entirely sure of the ground of their investigations:
It was bad luck for the anthropologists, and their comparatively recent
discipline, that the missionaries got to the Inside Passage first … In an
unchronicled society, without writing, things that happened yesterday
bleed into ancient history; and after a hundred years of rubbing up
against explorers, traders, missionaries, and colonial administrators,
the tribe members had ceased to be reliable authorities on their own
traditions. (p. 29)
Raban is unsparing of the early colonialists’ failure to make the necessary
mental adjustments to understand a way of life in which their own cultural
values were inverted – to see that, for the coastal Indians, water was place,
land ‘undifferentiated space’ (p. 103). This ancient marine society and
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Self-discovery from Byron to Raban

Wordsworth’s Gondo Gorge experience come into strange alignment because

of their shared rejection of any sentimental or idealising view of nature: for
the Indians, ‘the water’s surface was a broad public arena on which most
of daily life took place’, but it was perched over ‘dangerous and mercurial’
depths which could always punish complacency (p. 105). The practical
realism Raban discerns in Indian story after story pertains to a nature ever
ready to betray the heart foolish enough to love her:
Civilization – the canoe, the house, the village – exists as a tiny circle
perpetually threatened by a greedy and rapacious wilderness, and can
be destroyed by one careless move. (p. 215)
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It is ironic that Raban, as a seafaring literary tourist, is more fully attuned to

the Indian mindset in this respect than he is to the Romantic enthusiasm
for wild nature. Moreover, just as he makes certain discoveries, in his own
eyes at least, about the native culture of the Northwest Coast in his textual
revisiting of early contact, so he makes unexpected discoveries about himself.
In Romantic-period travel books, encounters with indigenous, ‘primitive’
peoples provide today’s readers with the most uncomfortable elements of their
reading experience, and it has become almost a cliché to speak of how the
travelling subject defines itself in assured contradistinction to the colonial
or non-Western other. In Passage to Juneau the intercultural dimension is
typically much more equivocal: in describing his bored and quizzical response
to what he takes to be an inauthentic winter dancing ritual to which he was
invited, Raban evidently finds common ground with one of its participants
who shows an objective appreciation of the self-esteem that comes from
getting in touch with ‘“olden-day” traditions’ (p. 76); and he undoubtedly
finds ‘personal resonance’ in many Indian stories as they lose their ‘tophamper
of exoticism and grotesquerie’ (p. 216), especially those that deal with the
loneliness of the outcast or exile. The travel writer may be just a temporary
and voluntary outcast, but Raban seems to find something he can relate to
in tales of solitary people who come into possession of ‘shamanistic powers’
and return to their villages ‘as persons of consequence’ (pp. 216–17).
The lengthy anthropological excursions in Passage to Juneau, along
with the Vancouver/Wordsworth parallel texts, confirm Raban’s definition
of travel writing as ‘a notoriously raffish open house where very different
genres are likely to end up in the same bed’,33 and where narrative and
discursive modes mix and interact. I have been arguing that the meditations
on Indian culture and art, the reading of Vancouver’s journal and its distaste
for contemporary aesthetic values, and the personal crises and recogni-
tions that punctuate the voyage, are all complexly interwoven; what brings
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Robin Jarvis

them together is a narrative persona which, for all its professed belatedness
vis-à-vis Romanticism, is manifestly committed to the Romantic ideal of
finding links between dissimilar things, and finding the principle of that
unity within itself. In places it almost seems that the ‘discoveries’ Raban
makes about the Indians have value, indeed are verifiable, only in relation
to his own private experience – perhaps recalling Wordsworth’s claim that
the ‘highest bliss’ of imaginative minds is to find ‘the consciousness / Of
whom they are habitually infused / Through every image, and through every
thought, / And all impressions’.34
A less negative assessment would be that Raban’s ‘egotistical sublime’,
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accentuated at times, is moderated by a genuine respect for indigenous

peoples and a genuine effort to separate the ‘melancholy’ truths embodied
in their art and literature (p. 216) from false anthropological back-projec-
tions. It is interesting to put his explorations of the region’s history alongside
those of a distinguished professional ethnologist – to arrive, in conclusion,
at some general observations on travel writing. James Clifford has writ-
ten a fascinating essay comparing the curatorial principles and strategies
adopted by four museums in British Columbia to the culture and artefacts
of the Northwest Coast Indians. The political context for this analysis
is the historical violence inflicted on the indigenes; the evisceration of
their cultures through such measures as suppression of the potlatch and
expropriation of tribal regalia; and the increasing articulacy and self-belief
of these communities (now officially recognised as ‘First Nations’), which
has resulted, among many other things, in the repatriation of many Indian
artefacts from national collections to local families or small tribal museums.
Although there are significant differences between all four of the museums
Clifford visits, the main fault line is between the two major metropolitan
museums, the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology
in Vancouver and the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, and
two much smaller community-run museums, the Kwagiulth Museum on
Quadra Island and the U’Mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay on Cormorant
Island. In the former, objects are displayed either as fine art or ethnographic
specimens, and historical contextualisation, where present, is carried out
in an objective, generalising way; in the latter, objects plainly belong to
particular families or communities rather than to some national heritage,
they are related clearly to their role in ongoing cultural practices, and
there is a ‘density of local meanings, memories, reinvented histories’ lost
in the grand narratives and aesthetic projects of the national museums.
The U’Mista Cultural Centre especially, according to Clifford, ‘strikes an
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Self-discovery from Byron to Raban

oppositional note’, implicating its audience in the stories of domination

and dispossession the objects have to tell:
Any purely contemplative stance is challenged by the unsettling mélange
of aesthetic, cultural, political, and historical messages. This history
forces a sense of location on those who engage with it, contributing to
the white person’s feeling of being looked at.
Clifford concludes with reflections on how the two tribal museums call into
question the legitimacy of their metropolitan counterparts, and not only
in terms of the proprietorship claimed by the latter over objects acquired
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in such controversial circumstances. The larger institutions, committed

to ‘telling inclusive stories’ about the art and culture of the nation, look
questionable in their fundamental principles once the ‘powerful cultures
and histories’ they represent are ‘contested and decentered by other cultures
and histories’.35
There are, I think, analogies between the crisis of national museology
sketched by Clifford and the postcolonial anxieties of modern travel writing.
Like the curator, the travel writer is frequently called on to ‘exhibit’ and
annotate indigenous peoples and cultures for a national or international
public, struggling as an outsider to place individual human encounters and
observations of objects, places and events into some meaningful larger context.
At no point in the relatively brief history of travel writing has this writerly
activity been more encumbered by political and historical conscience: the
very idea of ‘capturing the essence’ of a group of people or a way of life can
now seem impossibly compromised by the relations of power implicit in
constructing discourse around marginalised and exploited populations for
the entertainment of the economically and culturally empowered. Raban,
I think, steers a course through these difficult waters as careful as that
which he charts through the Inside Passage. Sceptical in some respects of
the revival of native culture and unafraid to satirise the popular notion
of Indians as ‘dedicated ecologists from time immemorial’ (p. 404), he is
eloquent in his admiration of alternative life-skills and a unique artistic
tradition, and impatient with the long legacy of misunderstanding that
comes from applying a terrestrial mindset to a maritime culture. The very
nature of his journey makes him the epitome of the free, mobile European
subject, but Raban employs the fluid mechanics of the voyage to test the
limits of his solid, agnostic Englishness, and uses the narrative of his self-
discovery – that exemplary Romantic conceit – as a means of opening up a
more generous conversation of minds and identities than was possible for
the pioneers whose progress he shadows.
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Robin Jarvis

Notes
1
Key points of reference here are Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); Elizabeth Bohls, Women Travel
Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995); Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002); and many of the essays collected in Tim Fulford and Peter
J. Kitson, eds, Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Amanda Gilroy, ed., Romantic Geographies:
Discourses of Travel 1775–1844 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University
Press, 2000). As regards the availability of primary texts, the main need is for cheap
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editions of whole texts. Important works by authors such as John Barrow, James Bruce,
William Coxe, Maria Graham, Samuel Hearne, and Ann Radcliffe are, at the time of
writing, either unobtainable or prohibitively expensive (over seven hundred pounds, in
the case of Bruce!). Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson’s Travels, Explorations and Empires,
1770–1835, 2 sets of vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001) offers a valuable collection
of excerpts, but is well beyond the reach of the individual purchaser. The current list of
‘new editions’ on the STW website (which does not claim to be comprehensive) includes
just seven Romantic-period texts appearing between 1997 and 2004.
2
Jaś Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘Introduction’, in Elsner and Rubiés, eds, Voyages
and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), pp.
1–56 (p. 47).
3
The finest of these is Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in
Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796); others that have attracted notice include Anna
Maria Falconbridge’s Two Voyages to Sierra Leone (1794), Maria Graham’s Journal of a
Residence in India (1812), Hester Piozzi’s Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of
a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany (1789), Ann Radcliffe’s Journey Made in the
Summer of 1794 (1795), and Helen Maria Williams’s Letters from France (1790–96).
4
Eric J. Leed, The Mind of the Traveller: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism (New York:
Basic Books, 1991), p. 13.
5
Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Journey and Its Narratives’, trans. Alyson Waters, in Chloe
Chard and Helen Langdon, eds, Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography,
1600–1830 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 287–96 (pp.
289, 293).
6
James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’,
1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 128.
7
Michel Butor, ‘Travel and Writing’, in Michael Kowalewski, ed., Temperamental Journeys:
Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel (Athens and London: University of Georgia
Press, 1992), pp. 53–70 (p. 67).
8
Metcalfe Robinson, cited in Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the
Eighteenth Century (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992), p. 48; Timothy Webb, ‘“City of the
Soul”: English Romantic Travellers in Rome’, in Michael Liversidge and Catharine
Edwards, eds, Imagining Rome: British Artists and Rome in the Nineteenth Century (London:
Merrell Holberton, 1996), pp. 20–37 (p. 22).
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Self-discovery from Byron to Raban
9
J. W. Goethe, Italian Journey [1816–17], trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 57, 129, 137, 151.
10
Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative
Geography (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp.
14–17.
11
Madame de Staël, Corinne, or Italy, trans. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 377.
12
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, I, 330–2; text cited from Jerome J. McGann, ed., Byron,
Oxford Authors (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Subsequent
canto and line references will be inserted parenthetically in the text.
13
Barbara Korte, English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations
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(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 61, 80, 77.

14
Elsner and Rubiés, ‘Introduction’, p. 55. Paul Fussell was the first to pronounce the
‘end of travel’ in his study of the 1930s, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), concluding that ‘tourism is all
we have left’ (p. 41). His pessimism has been challenged by, for example, Patrick Holland
and Graham Huggan, who see ‘no reason … to announce an obituary on travel or … to
decree travel writing’s end’ (Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary
Travel Writing [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998], p. 217).
15
In addition to the works discussed below, texts as diverse as Jean Baudrillard’s America
(1988), Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (1987), William Dalrymple’s In Xanadu (1989),
Redmond O’Hanlon’s Congo Journey (1996), Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986), and
Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory (1997) and London Orbital (2002) illustrate
some of these possibilities.
16
Roger Cardinal, ‘Romantic Travel’, in Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from
the Renaissance to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 135–55
(p. 154).
17
V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness [1964] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p.
252.
18
Edward Marriott, The Lost Tribe: A Search through the Jungles of Papua New Guinea
(London: Picador, 1996), pp. 239, 265, 264.
19
Jenny Diski, Skating to Antarctica (London: Granta Books, 1997), pp. 229–30, 233.
20
Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1956–71), II, 918, 916; William Hazlitt, ‘On Going a Journey’, in Selected Writings,
ed. Ronald Blythe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 136–47 (pp. 141–2); Journals
of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1952), I, 314;
Anita McCormick, ‘“I shall be beloved – I want no more”: Dorothy Wordsworth’s
Rhetoric and the Appeal to Feeling in The Grasmere Journals’, Philological Quarterly, 69
(1990), 471–93 (p. 482).
21
Interview with Bernard-Henri Lévy, cited in Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire
and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1991), p. 292.
22
Porter, Haunted Journeys, p. 288.
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Robin Jarvis
23
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs [1970], trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1982), p. 107.
24
Gerald N. Izenberg, Impossible Individuality: Romanticism, Revolution, and the Origins of
Modern Selfhood, 1787–1802 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 8, 15.
25
Jonathan Raban, ‘The Journey and the Book’, in For Love and Money [1987] (London:
Picador, 1988), pp. 253–60 (pp. 258–9).
26
Jonathan Raban, Old Glory: An American Voyage (London: Picador, 1986), pp. 18, 183.
It is worth noting that, before becoming a full-time writer, Raban worked as a lecturer
in English and American literature at the universities of Aberystwyth and East Anglia;
and that, although he specialised in modern fiction, he also published a student guide
to Huckleberry Finn.
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27
Jonathan Raban, Hunting Mister Heartbreak (London: Picador, 1991), pp. 8, 56, 62;
Michael Cronin, Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation (Cork: Cork University
Press, 2000), p. 29.
28
Steve Clark, ‘Transatlantic Crossings: Recent British Travel Writing on the United
States’, in Clark, ed., Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit (London
and New York: Zed Books, 1999), pp. 212–31 (p. 223); Andrew Dix, ‘Leaving Huckleberry
Finn Behind: Belatedness and Authority in Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory’, Studies in Travel
Writing 5 (2001), 63–82 (pp. 76, 72).
29
Jonathan Raban, Bad Land: An American Romance (London: Picador, 1996), p. 36.
30
This facet of his writing is dealt with rather hostilely by Roger George, ‘A Boat Swamped
with Abstractions: Reading Raban’s River’, in Michael Kowalewski, ed., Temperamental
Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel (Athens and London: University of
Georgia Press, 1992), pp. 249–63.
31
Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings (London: Picador, 1999),
pp. 157, 161. Further references to this book will be inserted parenthetically in the
main text.
32
Philip Larkin, ‘Church Going’, ll. 61–3, in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite
(London: Faber, 2003), p. 59.
33
Raban, For Love and Money, p. 253.
34
William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth,
M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York and London: Norton, 1979), 1805 text,
XIII, 107–11.
35
James Clifford, ‘Four Northwest Coast Museums: Travel Reflections’, in Routes: Travel
and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge and London: Harvard University
Press, 1997), pp. 107–45 (pp. 129, 132, 137, 144).