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ABSTRACT
Guidebooks are by now an integral feature within travel writing studies. This article presents a detailed contextual reading of George Carey’s The Balnea (1799–1801): the first general guidebook to English leisure resorts. Although the work is occasionally cited by scholars, little attention has been paid to The Balnea’s status as a text, to the changes that were made across its three editions, or to its nineteenth-century afterlife. My discussion elaborates both the pioneering aspects of Carey’s text and the clash it stages between two distinct forms of travel writing: the systematic guidebook and the first-person travelogue. A digressive and uneven work, The Balnea struggles to match Carey’s ambitions for either comprehensiveness or impartiality. At the same time, I argue, Carey’s incorporation of a series of sentimental anecdotes and ballads engenders misgivings about his reliability as an author and the factual grounding of the text-as-travelogue.
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Notes
1 On the ‘home tour’ during this period, see for instance Ousby (Citation1990); Korte (Citation2000), chapter 4; Kinsley (Citation2008).
2 Apologising for the delay to their publication, Granville noted that his second and third volumes alone covered “between seventy and eighty places, whether Cities, Towns, Spas, or Sea-Bathing Stations” (1840, 2:i). The title-pages to each edition of The Balnea list 18 resorts, omitting two further resorts covered in all editions and three further resorts covered in the third edition. Drawing on contemporary maps and medical writings, Sophie Vasset has identified 346 active spas (including sea-side resorts) during this period (Citation2022, 3). While this figure runs up to 1815, covers the whole of Britain and Ireland and includes some highly localised springs, it does illustrate the small proportion of possible sites that are covered in Carey’s text.
3 Among the various additions to the third edition are three pages of anapaestic verse on “the pleasures and charms of old Brighton” (Citation1801, 63), which had mostly appeared previously in Carey’s Rural Ramble (Citation1777), and extra detail on Tunbridge and its environs, included in place of some previously offensive matter (most notably a versified hymn that satirised pecuniary Methodist ministers).
4 Buzard nicely elucidates the dilemmas that Murray would face on this front (Citation1993, 72–3).
5 The original in Sterne reads: “WHEN states and empires have their periods of declension, and feel in their turns what distress and poverty is—I stop not to tell the causes which gradually brought the house d’E**** in Britany into decay” (Citation2002, 107).
6 It is worth noting here that the apparent contrast between Sternean sentimentalism and Smollettian spleen can itself be misleading, as various scholars have argued. As Katherine Turner puts it, drawing on the work of John Mullan, “spleen” can “denote heightened sensibility rather than its obverse. Splenetic short-temper … should not be seen as diametrically opposed to sensibility, but as another of its manifestations” (Citation2001, 62).
7 I allude here to contemporary attempts to envision a comprehensive, disinterested viewpoint, as discussed in Barrell (Citation1983).
8 These figures include reprintings of the same work.
9 Smollett to William Huggins, 2 July 1758 (Citation1970, 69). Hume would later make a similar claim in “My Own Life” ([Citation1985] Citation1987, xxxvii). On the varying bases of historians’ claims to impartiality during this period, see also Smitten (Citation1985).
10 In their discussion of the concept and the scholarly literature, Klein, Matson and Doran contend that “The expression ‘the impartial spectator’ is not only polysemous, but its range of meanings is quite elastic” (Citation2018, 1161).
11 The Theory was revised across successive editions; this specific phrasing first appeared in the second edition, published in 1761.
12 On the comic exploration of this principle in Sterne’s novel, see Regan (Citation2017).
13 Intriguingly, John Vaughan commends Carey’s observations on Margate as an “example of the type of frank comment that is now missing from general guides” (Citation1974, 76). On anxieties about social mixing at Margate and the particular perils of the hoys, see also Guest (Citation2017).
14 This poem is actually a reprise of Carey’s “Poetical Tagg” on Brighton, first published with his Rural Ramble (Citation1777).
15 Here, Carey might possibly have been gesturing, satirically, to the French term “intéressé.” The word “interesed” would though be altered to “interested” in the second edition (Citation1799b, 217).
16 See, for comparison, Mavor (Citation1781, 28–9).
17 Like most modern discussions of impartiality, Young’s is a contribution to moral (and political) theory. For an overview of the field, see Jollimore (Citation2020).
18 Van Netten Blimke demonstrates particularly how the “convergence of sentimental discourse and the travelogue” in A Sentimental Journey “assisted women’s gradual inclusion into the male-dominated genre of the travelogue” (Citation2022, 2). On sentimental travel narratives and the influence of Sterne, see also Newbould (Citation2013), chapter 2; Turner (Citation2001), chapter 3.
19 In this respect, sentimental travel-writing accords with sentimental fiction as described by John Mullan, in which “special experiences of sympathy” are disconnected from “dominant patterns of social relationship” (Citation1988, 34). ‘Sentimental’ and ‘Romantic’ works are not, of course, entirely distinct, as is demonstrated by a travelogue such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796).
20 Cf. Sterne (Citation2002), 152.
21 Another ballad included in the work, “The Affectionate Soldier,” relates to an anecdote Carey hears about during his travels; Carey assumes this involves the same person as the subject of “The Furloughed Soldier” but is not entirely certain (Citation1799a, 156). One further song included from the first edition, “The Sailor’s Allegory,” was separately commissioned and does not emerge from any narrated interaction.
22 The poem appeared under Carey’s name in the Morning Herald for 6 August 1796.
23 More recently, the Bodleian Library’s Broadside Ballads Online (http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk) also includes, under Carey’s name, “The Disconsolate Sailor,” “Allen Brooke of Windermere,” “The Affectionate Soldier,” “Spring Water Cresses” and “The Sailor’s Allegory.”
24 The attribution to “EMMA” appears in the English Chronicle for 9-11 September 1790 and the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser for 11 Sept 1790. The ballad is printed without attribution in Lloyd’s Evening Post for 16-19 October 1795. I have not found any evidence of its ascription to Charles Dibdin, the precise focus of Carey’s complaint regarding “Allen Brooke, of Wyndermere.”
25 On Dibdin’s proprietary difficulties, see Kennerley (Citation2018).
26 Carey’s own interest in Tristram Shandy (1759-67) as well as A Sentimental Journey is demonstrated by his public oratory. An advertisement for a subscription concert at Free-Masons Hall in the Morning Chronicle for 7 December 1786, for instance, refers to Carey’s “Readings from Sterne.” As a further advert for the same concert in the following day’s Morning Post indicates, Carey would be performing “Corporal Trim’s Eloquence,” from Tristram Shandy.
27 Precise dating is often difficult given the uncertain publication dates of printed collections and single-sheet songs, which were usually undated. A number of such works containing songs by Carey (such as “The Disconsolate Sailor”) are given earlier dates by the English Short Title Catalogue, ranging from 1770 into the 1780s, but these are conjectural only.
28 On Defoe’s composite travelogue, see also Batten (Citation1978, 26).
29 Prichard had planned a multi-volume work; the sole published volume covers only Radnorshire.
30 The presentation of subsequent resort-surveys as brochures is epitomised by Where Shall We Go?, a guidebook published by A. & C. Black from the 1860s.
31 Feltham’s Guide covers 33 resorts across its 434 pages, along with the Lakes plus North and South Wales. Although the 200-page Companion keeps close to Carey’s own selection of resorts and also includes essays on mineral waters and sea-bathing, its entries on the resorts are generally more detailed than Carey’s, and lack the kinds of digressions and personal agendas that characterise The Balnea.