Northern English travellers to Wales and Scotland 1790-1830: A study of manuscript travel accounts from Yorkshire and Lancashire
Name
Kirsty_Anne_McHugh_Travellers_to_Wales_and_Scotland_2022.pdf
Description
visibility:open
Size
3.8 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (CRC64NVME)
QHD2SCO6teM=
Resource type
Doctoral thesis
Creator (person)
McHugh, Kirsty Anne
Date published
September 2021
Abstract
This thesis explores manuscript travel accounts written by individuals resident in two northern counties of England, Yorkshire and Lancashire, who made tours of Scotland and Wales in the period 1790-1830. It contributes to the vibrant area of academic research that is travel writing studies, and builds specifically on recent interest in 'home tours' within Britain. This research, which takes an interdisciplinary approach, examines accounts of travel written in a variety of formats (travel journals, letters, and diaries) in relation to a traveller's personal circumstances and the broader historical context. The corpus of texts was selected to investigate the benefits of studying travel accounts which survive as part of larger archival collections. Records were also chosen to enable an investigation of travel within the middling ranks of society, and those who had risen in social status in the eighteenth century. This group of tourists has been identified by previous scholars as taking advantage of the opportunities of increased mobility and leisure in the romantic period, but often have been treated as 'typical' or 'generic' tourists without closer investigation. Drawing on resources from largely neglected archives, the records of travel chosen for study are discussed in the context of romantic-period traditions of manuscript culture, and the genres of travel writing and life writing. This piece of research brings a new range of voices out of the archive to explore how travel was recorded and experienced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, with a particular regional focus. Engaging with travel writing as texts and material objects, and exploring themes such authorial personas, intertextuality, sociability and social mobility, it addresses a number of research questions which investigate the nature of manuscript travel accounts, and their potential as sources for literary and historical studies.
Publisher
University of Wales
Rights statement
In Copyright