Abstract
The term tourist appears first in the 1770s: not in relation to the Grand Tour, but to talk about the domestic tours performed, predominantly by the leisured classes, within the British Isles. Mary-Ann Constantine's book reviews one of the components of this touring phenomenon, that of the Welsh Tour, emerging shortly after the rise in popularity of Scotland as a destination. The popularity of domestic tours grew when travelling on the continent became difficult due to the political events in France, but this period also witnessed the rise of the Industrial Revolution. Throughout this period, Wales inspires and challenges travellers, as a land between past and present, and is going through accelerated change in some areas.
Writing the history of the Welsh Tour comes with many difficulties. Based on earlier works of Freeman, Constantine reminds us that there are over 600 written accounts of such tours (over 150 of them printed); it is such an established practice and genre that it has even been the object of parody. These texts interact in multiple ways: authors copy their forerunners with veneration or challenge them with vehemence. And we are not talking about texts only: a large number of these tours are illustrated, and in some cases (such as the well-known A Voyage round Great Britain by Daniell and Ayton), text and illustrations do not align, and indeed provide what could be called competing narratives.
This is a history of Anglophone tours – the foreign visitors are not included here (covered recently by the European Travellers to Wales project, and the resulting book by Jones, Tully and Williams, Hidden Texts, Hidden Nation, 2020), nor Welsh visitors. The access to Welsh – the ability to converse with Welsh-speaking locals, and to Welsh texts relating to the visited places – remains nevertheless an important aspect explored here. Thomas Pennant thus takes pride of place: not only because of this double access to the English- and Welsh-speaking words, but also because of the multiple interests of his tours of Wales (natural history and antiquarianism; texts and lavish illustrations; science and engaging anecdotes). Most travellers coming to Wales after Pennant are defined by him in one way or another. These many travellers are considered both as a collective, but also as individuals, with each their gender, religion, political interests and personal circumstances.
With such an extensive corpus, a comprehensive approach was impossible. Constantine chose to organise the book (after an introductory chapter on the historiography of travel to Wales) as a “tour of Wales” itself, starting and ending at Pennant's estates. Some of the chapters focus on narrower themes: Chapter 7 tackles the difficulties the writers and artists experience in describing the Hafod estate in the otherwise little-visited mid-Wales, a landscape park which welcomes visitors only begrudgingly. Other chapters tackle types of territories: border rivers, coastlines and industrial landscapes.
Welsh tours abound in pictures – illustrations, but also evocative descriptions. Chapter 4, on the “Wye Valley connections”, analyses the very idea of the picturesque and the accounts of William Gilpin, who popularised the concept. Using previous scholarship on tours of Wales and Ireland (by O’Kane in particular), Constantine reminds us that the “disinterestedness” of the picturesque is very much a political statement, an “aestheticizing erasure of the unpleasant”. Travellers following in Gilpin's footsteps often challenge his tendency to remove the human from the landscape – one of them goes as far as declaring himself explicitly to be a counterpoint or antidote to Gilpin's narrow and commodified vision.
Chapters 5 (“Consumer Landscapes: Coal, Fire and Water”) and 10 (“In this state of darkness and illusion. Cotton, copper and commerce”) discuss related themes. The first focusses on the transformation of the landscape through industrial activity; the second, on the integration of these activities within the system of global trade networks and capitalism. In both cases, depending on the orientation of the traveller, enchanted accounts of progress clash with moments of anxiety about the rate and direction of the so-called progress, which can take on an apocalyptic dimension.
This is a rich and complex book, and it is not easy to do it full justice in a short review: there is no scope to discuss here, for example, the relevant and fine-grained discussions of gender and religion that shape the book. Although primarily focused on tours in Wales, the book weaves a wider understanding of space in its argument: Welsh communities in London, gatherings focussing on the picturesque in Oxford, and competing religious communities in Birmingham all help give perspective. Texts are introduced and discussed in quick succession, with an emphasis on echoes, responses and intertextuality (at times at a rate that can be a minor challenge to the reader); excessive emphasis on the established cannon is avoided.
This reviewer also greatly appreciated the book's methodological precision. Constantine highlights that travel writing is always a result of happenstance, but also emphasises that in reading travelogues, we should focus not only on what we see (what the traveller “chose to record”) but also on what appears to be missing (what they “chose not to record”). The introduction, the end of the last chapter and the conclusion, where these considerations feature, are recommended reading to all scholars of travel and tourism.
